TheBanyanTree: Mud Season in the Northeast

[LaLinda]

As the spring creeps in
the dusky light of clouds
charcoal at the bottoms
heavy with rain
I don't want to look at the earth
and its bare, frantic trees and swollen
creeks and brown ground like scorched earth
after a trauma, which in the northeast, we call winter.

Winter is deep and savage on the edge of the Great Lakes plain.
The city has the largest snowplow in the world, I've read and when
I mention it, people laugh, either bitterly or sardonically and now as I 
grow
older, I am beginning to understand why people move south when they grow
older. The snow, too heavy for aching shoulders, the ice, too 
treacherous for timid
feet, yes. I get it now. Snow goes from being made to roll in to being 
endured to being
fired.

But, back to spring, back to the present. Now that the trees begin to 
bud with
this year's lush of leaves, I can be sure, now, that spring really means 
it and if it snows
on Mother's Day, again, oh, well, that is life in the Northeast, but 
now, back to the trees, I can look down from the buds and almost stand 
what is left brown and smells like death or rotting something or other; 
a musty sore as the greening takes place and picks up speed from one day 
to the next, gobbling the ground, knitting the landscape back together 
like new skin on a wide wound.

LLdeMerle



    San Francisco Remembered

by Philip Schultz 
<http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/author.php?auth_id=1949>

In summer the polleny light bounces off the white buildings
& you can see their spines & nerves & where the joints knot.
You've never seen such polleny light. The whole city shining
& the women wearing dresses so thin you could see their wing-tipped hips
& their tall silvery legs alone can knock your eye out.
But this isn't about women. It's about the city of blue waters
& fog so thick it wraps round your legs & leaves glistening trails
along the dark winding streets. Once I followed such a trail
& wound up beside this redheaded woman who looked up & smiled
& let me tell you you don't see smiles like that in Jersey City.
She was wearing a black raincoat with two hundred pockets
& I wanted to put my hands in each one. But forget about her.
I was talking about the fog which steps up & taps your shoulder
like a panhandler who wants bus fare to a joint called The Paradise
& where else could this happen? On Sundays Golden Gate Park
is filled with young girls strolling the transplanted palms
& imported rhododendron beds. You should see the sunset
in their eyes & the sway, the proud sway of their young shoulders.
Believe me, it takes a day or two to recover. Or the trolleys clanking
down the steep hills—why you see legs flashing like mirrors!v Please, 
Lord, please let me talk about San Francisco. How
that gorilla of a bridge twists in the ocean wind & the earth
turns under your feet & at any moment the whole works can crack
& slip back into the sea like a giant being kicked off his raft
& now, if it's all right, I would like to talk about women…