Springing Through Us

Spring

The pear blossoms are pure

White against the blue green willows.

The willow cotton blows in the wind.
The city is full of flying pear flowers.

The petals fallen on the balcony look like snow.

How many Spring Festivals are we born to see?

         -- Su Tung Po (from Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems               
                                                                               from the Chinese)

Outside my window the crab apple tree is in full bloom – a hot pink that curls back the eyelashes. It's as if the old gnarled tree lifted her dress to show the fine legs and frills of a dancing girl in one of Lautrec's paintings, and I can't stop staring. The contrast between rough, earth-dark, knot-holed branches going every which way in a mess of neglect and the delicate heaps of mauve and rouge petals spilling both skyward and into you is a strange inducement of love and sympathy and sorrow. The kind of feeling you get when you see a picture of your grandmother in her lovely youth.

The poignancy of Spring, the rush of beauty that reminds us in its rushing of its passing. It's hard to take sometimes. The first crocuses and daffodils and tulips trickling in, and then the buildup of golden rod and pear blossoms and plums before the surge of magnolia and cherry, dogwood and locust, the sycamores dumping seed pods into the streets, the trees faintly green and faintly greener each day as you strain not to miss a leaf of it. You almost want to duck your head and wait out the flurry until the somnolent heat of summer arrives. Almost.

I like how the Japanese make a national holiday of the blooming cherry trees. To think it's actually a national past time to go out picnicking under the white blossoms and drink wine and read poetry and gaze out at the elements as though a kind of prayer, a kind of religious act, were being experienced.

And of course it is. Through that prayer, up in those snowy flowers, in the pale spring sky, is the life of all of us, from chittering squirrels to the spirit of long-dead gramps in the clouds, from the kids goofing in the grass to the woman beside you with her bare shoulders in the sun. If you take a moment to look, that's what you see and that's what hurts most in seeing it: the beauty of us all with the goneness of us all, the petals holding in their perfection their passing, revealed in the turn of the seasons, as we ourselves are, our families are, our loves and hopes and downfalls are, as the longest prettiest afternoon spent drinking wine and watching up at the clouds is, fading only to come through us again. Though somehow it's always the gone feeling that sticks, deep as the apple blossoms are bright.