Marie Gauthier

How is it possible that tomorrow is May? The days seem to have accelerated, the year nearly half gone!

Today is the last day of National Poetry Month, which means it’s the last day to enter the Great Poetry Giveaway, dreamed up by the ever-generous Kelli Russell Agodon. Visit her blog, Book of Kells, to see the master list of blogs participating (55!), but, before you do, don’t forget to leave a comment here to enter in my giveaway: 2 books & a subscription.  You only have until midnight tonight (world time — your time — midnight wherever you are). Tomorrow I’ll post the names of the winners.

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Thank you, yes, I spiffed up the place: new theme, new header, new font thanks to Typekit.  Strange to say after two and a half years, but at last this virtual space is beginning to feel less borrowed and more mine.

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Yesterday was a windy day. When I say “windy,” I don’t mean easy breezy. I would say it was about a 7 on the Beaufort Scale. On the Bridge of Flowers, an 8 — that place is a wind tunnel!

Naturally, the boys wanted to be out in it.  They wanted it with the sort of unrelenting, irrational insistence that grew in direct proportion to my efforts to talk them out of it.

I woke up with a cold, so I was already more inclined to be a lay-on-the-couch-and-moan Mama. Stepping out into those gales wasn’t going to be a good time for any of us.

Where did we go? The Bridge of Flowers, of course, because it’s spring, and the tulips and hyacinths have returned the parade of colors to the Bridge after the long gray-scale drought.

It was awful. And even frightening. The wind was cold, unceasing, walking against it like carrying two times my body weight uphill.

But it was worth it. Took the starch right out of the boys — Aidan went right down for a nap when we got home, and Vincent was subdued the rest of the afternoon, playing with his crayons and coloring books when he normally would be wreaking noisy destruction.

This morning, it was actually eerie, walking out into a windless day. The quiet, the ease. The neighbor’s flowering tree had lost all its petals. I could feel the sun, yesterday reduced to light, memory, warm on my skin.

So on this last day of NaPoMo, this perfect spring day, I give you this poem, which feels spring-like to me, and captures both its brilliance and its transcience, its frisson of forboding. It’s by none other than Carmine Starnino, from his book This Way Out. Look for a longer treatment from me about this marvelous Canadian poet soon-ish. Till then:

The Butterflies I Dreamt in Childhood are Here

Look at you, blown in from Christ knows where.
Shoulder to shoulder, silk kissing silk against the asters
in a bunting of open wing and stem, dozens strong,
seemingly self-xeroxed, an apricot spree of yellow
sprayed on green, and lopsidedly clinging as you feed,

afterward ascending on pillars of altitude, a still life.
You have a week at best, and soon the almanac
will catch up even with that good bloom and leave it
twisted shut, like a burr. There’s something else
to consider in the barn-red, hay-green fact of this place:

a sparrow split open near the willows, in full sun.
But no. It’s you I’d rather watch. Heavy enough
to flag a flower, you are large cups of colour set on such
small saucers, coins to keep a child’s eyes closed.

–Carmine Starnino