Comforts of the sun

Rushing headlong into spring, I exclaimed to myself — quite wrongly — because I saw pale yellow tiny flowers bursting out on a  blue-green bush I can’t name, perhaps indigenous or from a Mediterranean hillside. The scarlet bracts have fallen from the old poinsettia, locquat fruits are ripening from green to a beige-yellow, the turtle doves seem louder and more amorously insistent. All the same,, it is still icy cold and I began the morning  with hot coffee and learning a poem by memory as I  tore up chunks of  sourdough bread for panzanella, an Italian bread and tomato salad with red-wine vinegar and olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, ripe tomatoes. We get ripe-enough tomatoes all year round here — at their best though in February-March-April towards the end of our long long summers.

The  great black dog is lying sprawled in a panel of sunlight falling through the open front door Each time I walk past he wags his tail, happiness thumping on the wooden floor. The lines of a remembered poem by Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, run through the back of my mind like a narrow but deep river, fast-flowing, rich with silt, sun-warmed with shining surfaces:.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, 
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth, 
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

 

So it is still winter, the dry powdery snow  on granite peaks I can see from the front door, no wildflowers yet, the  branches of the apple trees still dark varnished brown, no blossom yet. All the same I  am looking up recipes for artichokes and thinking of friends coming around for asparagus and bringing armfuls of  spring flowers, red tulips like  expansive hearts, the scent of  white or golden freesias, that sweet thin  fragrance of another grateful spring. The sun fills up the rooms and  everything is floated on happiness, gratitude, possibility. And this too, bitter-sweet reading, a voice familiar but from a long time past,  the misery and heartbreak of  addiction — unending repetitive sadness — from Franz Wright

 

To Myself

You are riding the bus again

burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,   

the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.   

And I am with you.

I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance   

(in one of those rooms we are   

living) and I am the rain

and the others all

around you, and the loneliness you love,

and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,

the nicotine crawling on your skin—

and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,

and if you vomit this time I will hold you:   

everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.

It won’t always be like this.

I am going to buy you a sandwich.

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