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[with poetry by Mary Oliver and Tennyson]
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On Winter’s Margin
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On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.
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With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs;
By time snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing
Like children for their sire to walk aborad!
But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk
Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines;
And what I dream of are the patient deer
Who stand on legs like reeds and drink the wind; –
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They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.
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Mary Oliver
from Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press © 2017; originally collected in No Voyage and Other Poems, Houghton Mifflin © 1965
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In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of . . . phenological mismatch.
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Ah, Alfred Tennyson, better you had continued to tramp the heath and weald of old Locksley Hall and turned away from your infatuations with the inconstant and unreachable Amy. Look here! Amidst the brittle stems of last summer’s arboreal plumage and almost buried beneath autumn’s comforter, an eyelet of green! Gently peel aside the brown leavings of solemn beech and discover: seven pale lilac petals and their swarm of stamens. February 18 and Hepatica has begun to bloom!
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So I hope we’ll be greeted tomorrow, February 22, on our first naturalist walk of the season. Now and every three weeks through April we will tally the progression of blooming along the Elkin Creek Nature Trail. Native wildflowers, these spring ephemerals make their living here beneath the beech / oak canopy. Hepatica, Trout Lily, Bloodroot, Foamflower, they will quickly extend their leaves into the sun before its light can be obscured by budbreak among the overarching trees. Phenological escape – the urgent days of photosynthesis before the canopy closes. These low growing herbs must earn most of their entire year’s salary in just two or three weeks.
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How do they know? What triggers the perennials to leaf and bloom; what swells and opens the leaf buds overhead? What is the key to understanding their phenology (def. – the study of cyclical biological phenomena)? Warming. Soil temperature and air temperature. But some plants are more sensitive to temperature changes and the warming of planet earth than others. In North America, deciduous trees are the most sensitive to warming trends that determine when they will break bud and unfurl leaves. Beech, oak, maple they leaf out earlier as average temperatures increase; Hepatica may not, and so the window of sunlight opportunity shortens.
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This is just one example of phenological mismatch. Imagine how it might affect interconnected species that gradually diverge, out of synch. Will Hepatica have time to turn photons into the sugars it must store for the next long darkness? Will its pollinators and its seed dispersers still thrive in the altered forest? What will our spring walks look like in ten years? in twenty? Alfred Tennyson, I’m afraid there are days I share your melancholy.
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Wild Geese
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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
+++ love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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Mary Oliver
from Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press © 2017; originally collected in Dream Work, Grove/Atlantic Inc. © 1986.
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A week after our group walked the trail I am still happy for what the forest shared with us. Yes, one Trout Lily had stretched and curved its petals to open a small yellow flower. Yes, one Hepatica, among the many other slumbering liver-lobed leaves, presented the cold morning after freezing night with a single pale lilac bloom. We knelt closer for its even more remarkable surprise: beneath the blossom nodded two more, sepals already empty of petals and gone to seed. The spring ephemerals know their business and their name. They make more of themselves and fill the world whether we are watching or not.
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I have been watching these flowers but not nearly long enough nor often enough. Nevertheless one remembers – color and scent may spark a flicker of joy into a life that threatens to cloak each day with darkness. On our walk, beside a particular beech tree no different from the hundreds around us, I recall the first time I ever discovered Hepatica blooming in our woods. That year it was the only one I found and I returned to it day after day until it faded. Now here it is again, the very plant. Its leaves are pocked and burnt orange from their long winter’s work. If it has buds, they are still hiding. As yet no new spring foliage. But I will be back to share this brief season with it. Perhaps we will bloom together.
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Spring
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Somewhere
++ a black bear
++ ++ has just risen from sleep
++ ++ ++ and is staring
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down the mountain.
++ All night
++ ++ in the brisk and shallow restlessness
++ ++ ++ of early spring
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I think of her,
++ her four black fists
++ ++ flicking the gravel,
++ ++ ++ her tongue
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like a red fire
++ touching the grass,
++ ++ the cold water.
++ ++ There is only one question;
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how to love this world.
++ I think of her
++ ++ rising
++ ++ ++ like a black and leafy ledge
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to sharpen her claws against
++ the silence
++ ++ of the trees.
++ ++ ++ Whatever else
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my life is
++ with its poems
++ ++ and its music
++ ++ ++ and its glass cities,
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it is also this dazzling darkness
++ coming
++ ++ down the mountain,
++ ++ ++ breathing and tasting;
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all day I think of her –
++ her white teeth,
++ ++ her wordlessness,
++ ++ ++ her perfect love.
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Mary Oliver
from Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press © 2017; originally collected in House of Light, Beacon Press © 1990.
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Here in closing a few lush stanzas from the overpowering lyric Locksley Hall by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
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Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;
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When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:
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When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—
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In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
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In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
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Read Locksley Hall in its entirety at The Poetry Foundation
Purchase Mary Oliver’s Devotions at Penguin/Random House
Cutting edge phenological research at Nature.com
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