April is
Poetry month. April Showers, pennies
from heaven, rain in Spain, hosts of golden daffodils, lilting shadows hiding
the lowly toad. Haiku poets, those
poetasters who cannot sustain a conceit for more than three lines of 17
syllables will predictably bore the crap out of us with their endless attempts
at defining the sunrise
Worthy
poets will debate the merits of classical (net up or net down) forms. Most poets will face another dreary season of
uncompensated labor, while watching professional baseball players earn huge
amounts of cash for playing games.
It is a
month of transitions: Thoughts of poetry
are overpowered and cast roughly to the ground in a headlock of temporal
concerns. This is the brief window of time when down-to-earth
preparations will determine the state of the garden in august. We have started seeds
in the basement under lights. Here in New England we have bravely (or is it
naively?) put away our orange plastic shovels and are busy syphoning the
gasoline from the snow blower tank into the lawn mower.
Sweaters
and long-sleeves are still at the ready, but shorts and Tee shirts have been
taken-out from winter storage. The screen porch is ready. It will soon be the favorite room in the
house -- for coffee and bacon sandwiches in the morning; then reading and frosty
beers in the late afternoon. We have
started letting Mocha – the 5 year old male Siamese out in the fenced-in yard
for short run-arounds. He’s been
confined to the inside world all winter and enjoys venturing outside, stalking chipmunks
and squirrels despite their ability to evade his grasp.
April is
the cruelest month, according to poet TS Elliot, probably because of the vagaries
of the weather – one day’s sunny promise gives rise to expectations of relief
from the chill of winter then a day later yanking us back to reality with arctic
blasts.
It is the last month when you can safely eat
oysters until September, according to the tales of old wives.
But life is
too short to pay attention to old crones.
The mouth waters at the very thought of a plate of a dozen chilled blue
points served on the half-shell on a summer night with a Tanqueray Martini
straight-up with olive.
