seasons – The Coming of the Toads

Notes on the poem “Summer and Winter”

Yesterday’s poem, titled “Summer and Winter,” might have reminded readers of a couple of famous poems: Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Spring and Fall” (written in 1880 but not published until 1918), and William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” (the title of a book of poems published in 1923).

The first poem in “Spring and All” (the poems are numbered, not titled) begins: “By the road to the contagious hospital.” Williams was a doctor (Hopkins was a Jesuit priest). Williams’s poem seems so much more modern than the Hopkins. Note how he has copied his title from Hopkins but has dropped the F – Fall becomes All. For Williams, the fall of man is countered, or balanced, by his ability to visit the sick, while for Hopkins, fall is “the blight man was born for.” Hopkins, of course, concerned with spiritual fall, and Williams with physical fall.

Williams maintains the serious theme, but somehow manages to forge a more positive, if not hopeful outlook. On the contrary, “Sorrow’s springs are the same,” Hopkins says. That we can’t hold to a present (Hopkins wrote his poem “to a young child”) – it hides a seed of despair even as the happy feeling of spring stirs us to song. We can’t seem to completely enjoy something we know isn’t going to last. One reason the Williams poem might seem so modern is its reminder today of how contagious contagions remain. The Williams poem came from his experience doctoring those sick with the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920.

Weather is an outcome of the season (to put it in business plan terms). And we are today reminded of the weather and the season absurdly often, via weather apps, news breaks and warnings, prolific pics of the most recent storm catastrophe. It’s hard to take it easy, roll with the breezes, feel the cold as it feels good to remember just three or four months ago we were crazily cranking the AC units to high modes and the fans in the house sounded like jet airplane engines.

And the extreme weather conditions are often today attributed to the global warming crisis, about which some say we are now too late to do anything about reversing the trends. No wonder, like Hopkins, we feel the fall so hard and desperate, and, like Williams, we feel infected by the weather, sickened by it, rather than feeling invigorated or simply challenged to meet it head on:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thun-der,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Act 3, Scene 2.

Wouldn’t it be something to hear your nightly television news weather person to wax similarly throughout the forecast.

What we might often feel, whatever the season, happily warm or shaking cold, is the impermanence of it all. That feeling creates impatience, anxiety and worry, and even depression. Though to stop, to hold still, can mean only one thing. It’s the constant motion we might enjoy, knowing otherwise can only mean to be becalmed, rendered motionless, on the open sea – now that would be cause to feel misery.

And we do find resilience, hardiness, in every season, and within ourselves, the coping thermostat self-modulates. But we need to recognize the symptoms. Then we know how to dress, how to handle, the cold, the heat, the blowing winds. All around the world we see evidence of our ability to withstand, to make it through, to celebrate the season. The signs of depression, like the signs of impending doom of a gloomy weather forecast, can be met with Lear’s mad outcry – it’s ironic, isn’t it? In any event, if we can sense and identify, we can control and change the temperature of our close environment.

Out of Season

Barely visible
the cat acting
like a tourist
out of season.

Breeze so soft
blow & rain shifts
the other way
out of season.

In the grass melan
choly whose happy
sound the birds
squirrels

coyotes laired
late in the park
talk in their sleep
out of season.

This too out
all up to snuff
toffee nosed
pretension

a pretend friend
bends to expose
truth its own pretense
out of season.

Weather Report from Portland

I’ve been living baroquely lately, coming into the new year, the confused seasons out of control – fall to winter for now though here seemingly obvious. It’s cold and wet and dark out, the darkest days of the year, the longest nights, the hardest streets. The homeless are between a rock and a hard place. They are the meek inheriting the earth, for what that’s worth. A week ago, when it started to snow, we were exactly six months from the freak heat wave of late June when one day we reached an absurd 116 degrees. Where I came of age, the southwest side of Los Angeles County, near the beach at the north end of South Santa Monica Bay, South Bay, for short, the mostly small, originally factory lodging, houses, and our little corner house, were plotted between the oil refinery and sand dunes and ocean and the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant and the sprawling airport and the growing aerospace industrial parks, while there were on the east side of our small town still strawberry fields, a few horses in stalls, and a railroad track from the east running behind our backyards through a curving dusty chasm, what the kids called Devil’s Path (or Devil’s Pass), a short cut along the tracks into town, that ended at a small depot near Main Street and Grand Avenue. But in spite of all the brouhaha surrounding us, the ocean nearby was the weather.

There were only two seasons in my childhood: summer, which was the school vacation season, and the school year, the months on either side of vacation. The weather had little to do with our sense of seasonality. The sky was close to blue, the water almost blue and hues of such, the yards and parks and baseball diamonds multi shades of green, the streets mostly clean. Of course there hung about our heads the gunbarrel-blue cake of atrocious smog, though not so much nearer the water, unless the Santa Ana winds were blowing, maybe for a week or so once or twice a year was all in those days. And June might have been the foggy season, but the breezes off the ocean usually pushed and cleaned as they blew east across the big basin, through the canyons up into the hills and up the long boulevards that ran east and west, and blew too through our house because there was always a window open (or broken) somewhere or a door might open or close any time of the day or night as we came and went to and fro through the blues and greens and sandy yellow days and well lit nights of Los Angeles and environs.

Why did humans leave Africa? If that’s what happened, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that our history, what little we can be sure of, might be a bit more compound-complex. In any case, I can’t answer that; I don’t even know why I left Los Angeles.

We live, it’s been suggested, but I don’t remember where I first saw or heard this, at the bottom of a sea of atmosphere (I googled the phrase just now and came up with about 30,000 results, so instead of quote marks, I’ve italicized it). But nothing like water, the rain, to wash out one’s punctuation marks.

Punctuated equilibrium suggests a paragraph whose flow of ideas is steady and stable, one thought logically following another in a gradual evolutionary movement that can be traced forward and backward and annotated. Sudden changes are more difficult to explain.

In Steve Martin’s movie “L. A. Story,” the main character is a television weatherman. But there is no weather in his Los Angeles, by which is meant change in weather. That is a paragraph without a main idea.

Locally, on the television news, consisting mostly of stable formatting, the studio news teams, that is, the players on camera, consist of an anchor, the sportscaster, and the weatherperson – the great American Triumphant (one pictures Benjamin Franklin flying his kite in a lightning storm, the on location camera crew shaking in their boots). The weatherpersons rarely seem to be given enough time to elaborate, as evidenced by their speed of speech. They sound like hawkers at an auction. The numbers and maps, highs and lows, radar of fronts, systems, and directions all whiz by, “put in motion,” and “hour by hour,” as they say, so quickly that as if to include the weather at all in the newscast seems to have been an afterthought. And the channels devoted to weather 24 by 7 are no different, everyone in a hurry to get out of the weather, whatever it is.

The newshour (or half hour, as our attention spans continue to wane) is not an essay, even though the principal parts may seem like paragraphs in some unified whole. The news relies on something new happening, but not even sudden changes in the fossil record can satisfy our quest to know, let alone understand, what’s going down.

Are we in the midst of a sudden change in the fossil record? Story at 11.

Of an Old Style

When you need to get close to each season,
to know which direction our vast Earth spins,
come sit under the apple tree and reason,
pink blossoms now against winter winning.
Life is not much of a competition;
most creatures make the best of and endure.
And then there’s this endless repetition
of flowers come-hither with alarming
allure. Such is the plan it would appear,
since the same thing happens every year.

Sitting in the City

Maple out spray maying ribbons of flowers twirl the girls round the pole boys pulling with bicycles festoons falling yards full of toys and fickle mud.	Sitting out warm summer evenings, distant wildfires raking up the dry brush, smoke seen by astronauts as far away as January, surf still rolling up the beaches all around the world, I think of those days and nights six months opposite and reflect on the perfection of earth time. We have “seen the travail”: “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away…That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been” (Ecclesiastes, 3:6-15, KJV). But from the time the alarm clocks call and coo across the great divide, and while some rush to it others delay with snooze, to the resetting of the alarms at night, all grow quickly and remain forever impatient with time. So time moves on: the commute doglegs left as the slow lane stops while drivers get out and pee behind the rail; cells go dead and news is lost forever; the lady in front of you in line at the coffee drive-thru is ordering lattes with lemon twists and chocolate sprinkles atop whipped cream delight – for her whole office; you stop for a jam filled doughnut, already late, and you don’t give a damn about the new diet. Walking to the front door from the parking lot you wonder if you’ve worn the right clothes for the day. You forgot your sack lunch. The café is serving mac and cheese. You promise a nice salad for dinner. Someone has tossed a cigarette butt in your path – how rude is that! By the time you leave the office, it’s dark out and you’ve forgotten the doughnut and the salad.
July table in the shade under the apple tree: pickles, potato salad, baked beans, deviled eggs, bottles of beer, water balloon toss, evening of pops, night of dust.
By the end of August, the sun slipping south at an alarming speed, the activists suggest a presidential decree: a declaration of a state of emergency, plan parades in glee.
Winter whistles restlessly, inflows of wet and dry cold, floods and long lines at the flu counter, impeccable timing, seasons on earth, neither hurried nor harried, quit nor balked.