They like to say during the summer that drinks are ice cold. I hope not, because that means that they would be impossible to drink. Because they would be solid.
~ Mitch Hedberg ~
Today I was doing the awkward and stubborn act of simultaneously taking the dog for a walk and reading poetry, holding Jack back from the gophers with one hand and Kay Ryan occupying the other. (I was actually dumb enough for a short time to have the leash and book in one hand and just the bookmark in the other.) I don’t recommend the combined practice, but today it was worth it.
A couple months ago, I shared a poem by Richard Wilbur:
April 5, 1974
The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream,
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
I love the poem, and I could not love the idea more. From the first line the contrast is felt: soft and softening air over still-cold ground. And the contrast is already mixing, the dull pasture inscrutably coming to life. Dead things, though not quite stirring, are showing signs of movement, of change. It’s unclear what’s happening, but what was once firm ground is now blessedly doubtfully so.
It doesn’t stay there, though. The observing mind, blessed by doubt, does begin to make sense of the scene. It relaxes into something more natural than either cold certainty or lukewarm confusion. And what results from the melting and the doubt is not just potential life, but the best symbols of life.
The analogies speak for themselves. And while uniquely and beautifully exploited by Wilbur, they are not exclusive to him.
Here’s Ryan’s poem “Spring,” which I read on the walk today:
Winter, like a set opinion,
is routed. What gets it out?
The imposition of some external season
or some internal doubt?
I see the yellow maculations spread
across bleak hills of what I said
I’d always think; a stippling of white
upon the grey; a pink the shade
of what I said I’d never say.
Life begins to flourish when nature thaws. Why not also with us?
What if the most important thing we impress upon people — ourselves, our kids, our friends — is the need and the wisdom and, frankly, the rationality of being open to the change of mind and the flaring of affection that will and should happen to us as we go, grow, age?
And I wonder if this says something special about the “middle ground” — that thawed and living place where more of us would find ourselves and each other over time if we’d leave our frozen certainty and embrace something a little more genuine and authentic, something with and for the soil, rootedly and entanglingly human.