Looking for "Spring and All"

The first day of spring this year it snowed, three inches of spitting snow that plunged me back into a wintry frame of mind. The day before had been a sunny 60 degrees making me believe in possibilities—bike rides and hyacinths, reading on the patio—what was I thinking? Haven’t I spent the majority of my life in the Midwest? So on Monday I decided to go looking for spring with my digital camera in hand, my gloves in my jacket pocket, and William Carlos Williams’ poem, Spring and All, as my guide.

Why Spring and All and not T.S. Eliot’s more famous springy poem, The Wasteland? Because I was on a mission of hope, not a mission of despair. My first stop was my suburban backyard. Purple headed crocus punching through the snow and brown dead leaves. Okay, I wasn’t “By the road to the contagion hospital,” where Williams’ poem begins, but I was “under the surge of the blue/mottled clouds driven from the/northeast—-a cold wind.”

For Williams, spring is about movement amid the winter waste, about “stuff” coming to life. So next I headed to Independence Grove Forest Preserve because the one sure indicator of spring where I live is the annul overflowing of the Des Plaines River, which closes all the low lying areas along the forest preserves’ trails, making biking and hiking next to impossible and canoeing dangerous.

As I walked the muddy trail toward the underpass to document the flooding, all along the way were “the reddish/purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy/stuff of bushes and small trees/with dead, brown leaves under them/lifeless vines—“ that Williams describes. But what’s not in his poem were the staccato clicking of spring frogs, the sewing machine calls of redwing blackbirds, and the tentative murmur of the river rippling sunlight.

There were also echoes of Frost’s spring poem in the budding willow trees whose first color is yellow not green. Chickadees peeked seeds from tall grasses sending fluffs like hair across the brown fields. When I reached the flooded underpass where the cars spun by overhead in their hum to be somewhere else, the river didn’t disappoint. Brown and sunlit it pushed itself everywhere with a pulsing that I envied in its passion and its intent.

Walking back I was caught by everything green that I’d missed earlier. ”Now the grass, tomorrow/ the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf.” I was so taken with green, I left the trail and wandered for a while trying to decide if the green leaves tight among the dead leaves were the start of wild geraniums or some other wild flower I’d yet to learn. And while I looked and thought about the green leaves, the redwings whirled their song, and the morning stayed cold, as “the profound change/ has come upon them; rooted, they/ grip down and begin to awaken.”

Where do you look for spring?