What is it that they say about March? In like a lion, out like a lamb? This year, March in New York is more of a wolf in sheep's clothing: bright and cloudless, but harshly chilly. There are buds on the trees, though, and crocuses coming up in my backyard. Oh boy.

Whether it's a cliche or an archetype, springtime has quite a place in poetry. I have often wished it didn't. I love spring as much as the next guy (which is an awful lot), but I was sick to death of poems about it: change, growth, fertility, yadda yadda yadda. How overwrought. How exhausted. How... deliriously optimistic.

But it would, of course, be unfair of me to write off all springtime poetry. There is, after all, an awful lot of material to work with. A true wordsmith can braid in archetypes with new ideas, sidestep cliches, and harness our predisposed emotional relationship with season change.

I didn't write this one, sadly. Geoffrey Nutter did, and he did a dang good job of it. It's from his collection Christopher Sunset, published by Wave Books.

Electricity
by Geoffrey Nutter

Children picking through the rocks
beside the river on a spring day.
What are they looking for? Old green
net tangled on broken pilings; a couple
embracing on the tumbledown esplanade.
Some fishermen drinking beer from tall brown bottles.
Broken shells, tire treads, rusted aluminum pull-tabs—
downriver, near the sun, the great echoes
and the embers of the bridge; and upriver,
far away, the echoing spools and dynamos
of the dam, its forces crackling outward
like the giant snow crab's jointed legs,
like a web in sunlight, a net, a chorus
of embers, like a plan the river is planning,
abstract, afire and electric, glowing
in the levitating rubric, invisible,
visible to children, undiscovered:
Brace yourselves—electricity
is coming to us.


Why is this a good spring poem? First of all, it is grimy. Of course spring can be lovely, if you're in Ireland or Tuscany or something. But here in the South Bronx, all the melting snow reveals is the cigarette butts and leaf piles that have been stewing since November.  But it's still pretty, somehow. Because it's new. It's change. It's undiscovered, it's piles of potential. The kinetic energy in Nutter's poem is looming, but thrilling. Tense, coiled tight... almost.... like a spring....


Enough of that. On my part, I am much more hung up on stagnancy. Spring's evil twin. The thing about spring, see, is that it comes every year.

So here's one of my own poems, technically not about spring at all, but, I think, rather fitting:

Afternoon

Like your

curtains, the color of

tea, brittle

as a used dried teabag

in your

house all trim and

yellow and

low behind low

hedges and

you breathe out your

mouth, your

breath all thick and stale with

tannins, thick

like rancid honey and fills

your yellow

house like smoke, stains the air

sepia, a

picture upon which you have set your

tea, and

it has left a ring.

-Tessa Crosby