Spring Again

It’s still cold, and in the late afternoons, when I go running, I’m still in my parka. The air is clean and chill, and I can see my breath. The woods, on either side of the road, are still brown and grey. Nothing is green. Spring is keeping herself dar – though I know she’s around: the bare grey branches are full of birdsong. The red-winged blackbirs have arrived, with their lovely liquid purling trills, and last week I saw a flock of robins in the field.

Down the road there’s a small pond – just a widening of the stream, really – a sheet of dark water, with a bottom of dead leaves. The pair of mallards is back, and every afternoon I see them busy there, the trim patterns of their feathers rich against the smooth water. They duck their heads into it, paddling about, feeding on something. I can taste the water: cold and clear and woodsy.

There’s something else, though, further evidence. In the boggy parts along the road, where the hillside starts to fall away into the woods, the aliens have arrived. Rising slowly from the dead browns of last year’s foliage are motionless spirals of leaves, twisting up through the swampy ground like unearthly corkscrews.

Why are spotted things so strange, so sinister? These leaves are otherworldly and alarming. They’re mottled and striped; they’re rotten-brown, electric-green, birthmark-purple, bruise-yellow. The flecks and spots are everywhere, tiny and dark, myriad and ominous, like insects. The leaves are wide and fleshy and tortuous. They curl, writhing slowly around their own thick center, roiling upwards to a sharp pointed tip: it’s the lowly and fabulous skunk cabbage.

First plant of the season, spring’s handwritten anouncement. Everything surrounding it is old, dry, cast-off, dead, but this doesn’t matter. These strange, spotted, twisted leaves have appeared again – rising up from the wintry earth, potent, vivid, thick with life, reminding us that there’s a lot we don’t know, theat beauty is more varied and foreign than we remembered – and so has spring.

April 5, 2004

Bracey's Cove

It’s just after sundown, and cold. The sky is perfectly clear, the air crystalline.
The tide is running out, and below the pebble beach the waves come lapping in, darkening the long sloping granite ledges. Sutton’s Island is a dim outline in the dusk. Close offshore, half a dozen ducks are rafting together for the night. It doesn’t look very comfortable or warm out there – it’s just below freezing – but the ducks, silhouetted against the pale water, form a ragged, close line, and rock peacefully as the waves follow each other in.
On the western side of the cove it’s sunset, all reds and fiery hues. Out at the point, the water meets a line of firs, densely black against the rose-colored sky. The sky is fiere and brilliant along the treetops, fading upward to paler hues. The water below it is glimmering red, softening to pink toward the east. The sky and water here are awash with sunset. They’ve been taken over by it, flooded by the great roseate streams of light.
On the eastern side of the cove, it’s night. The water here is silky black, and the entire curtain of sky has turned a deep endless mauve-gray. Halfway up the sky is half a moon, brilliant and huge. It’s never been so huge. It’s enormous, and radiant with a cold white light. Sometimes half a moon looks like its own shape, a sickle, or a crescent, but this like a full moon cut in half, a demisphere. The absent, darkened side of it is mysteriously present, felt, though not visible. Half of it’s lit up as though with a spotlight. All the markings are visible, and bold: there are the craters and mountains that we’ve always known, the lakes and valleys, all the mysterious lunar runes that have been in our nighttime minds for a million years.
Below this bright presence, on the black water, lies its rippling reflection, brilliant points of light, incandescent. A blanket of gleaming scintillae, rocking like the ducks on the lowering tide.
Strange that all of it – the rose-colored streams of light on the waves, the flaming sky behind the firs, the shocking cold brilliance of the half-moon, the glittering net on the inky water below – all of this is radiance borrowed from the vanished sun, which has gone, which has sunk soundlessly below the horizon, which has disappeared beyond the edge of the known world.