on the spring equinox
planting the seeds of a poet
Today is the spring equinox, so of course it’s snowing here. Flurries have turned into thick flakes, and it’s sticking now—to the grass, driveway, sidewalk. The wind is whipping it around, though there are moments when the harsh gusts quiet; then, the snow seems suspended in the air, as if it may never touch the ground.
In the winter, I enjoy snowy days like these—when the wind has its fits and starts, when the snow collects but doesn’t exceed a few inches.
But it’s spring, damn it, and I want it to feel like spring!
In the span of days that stretches over the end of winter and the beginning of spring, I’m overtaken by restlessness. This is when I tend to take on the most projects—many of which remain unfinished—because I believe in reaping what you sow, and this is the sowing time, so I’d like to sow something nice.
Which means I’ve been writing in earnest, though not as often as I’d like. When I’m not writing, I spend the time thinking about how much I’d like to be writing. Mostly, I’ve been writing poetry.
Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I tend to think of myself as a writer, not a poet. In particular, I like to think of myself as a fiction writer, though that feels like a half-truth. Sure, I used to write quite a lot of fiction, and yes, I’m slowly but surely plodding through a new fiction project, one sentence at a time. Sometimes, I think of myself as an essayist; this feels slightly more true, although I think of my newsletter as exactly that: letters. Not so much essays, though there are some exceptions—times when I’ve written with a greater focus on the collective over the personal. And I enjoy that kind of writing, especially in the spring, when all the ideas I’ve been ruminating over during my winter hibernation take their first unsteady steps into the sun.
More than fiction or essays or letters, though, I write poetry. Not just in spring—always. For a few years now, the majority of my writing has been poetry. I’ve found it to be the most rewarding, joyful writing I do. And as I’ve dedicated myself to an artistic practice—and more than that, to being a working artist—I’ve found the most success (in both the capitalist and anti-capitalist meanings of the word) with my poetry. It’s only in my author bios for publications that I tend to call myself a poet. Certainly, I never say it aloud.
Oh, but it’s spring, it’s time for sowing, and the seeds I want to scatter are poems. So perhaps I really am a poet, or will be when the time comes to reap, anyway.
What seeds are you sowing this spring? What are you hoping to reap when the time comes? And it will come, I promise.
I leave you with a poem by the incomparable Mary Oliver, appropriately titled “Spring.”
SPRING by Mary Oliver And here is the serpent again, dragging himself out from his nest of darkness, his cave under the black rocks, his winter-death. He slides over the pine needles. He loops around the bunches of rising grass, looking for the sun. Well, who doesn't want the sun after the long winter? I step aside, he feels the air with his soft tongue, around the bones of his body he moves like oil, downhill he goes toward the black mirrors of the pond. Last night it was still so cold I woke and went out to stand in the yard, and there was no moon. So I just stood there, inside the jaw of nothing. An owl cried in the distance, I thought of Jesus, how he crouched in the dark for two nights, then floated back above the horizon. There are so many stories, more beautiful than answers. I follow the snake down to the pond, thick and musky he is as circular as hope.