More of this Feature • March 23,a reading of “Hope is the thing with feathers”

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APRIL 29
Yellow Spring and Sonnets

Here I am, a rainy day in Pennsylvania where I’ve been for ten days visiting my folks. Tomorrow I go back to New York and a lot of work and deadlines. What a chilly morning. I hope the sun does come out soon and it gets warm. But it won’t. It’s been so cold the lilacs have not yet peeked their purple buds out of the bark. My parents are sleeping and my cat, Cachito, who has come along for the ride is meowing in the hallway. I don’t know why. I just threw him in the air to make him happy; held him high up in my hands and kissed his nose, but to no avail. Like the baby in the cradle, sometimes when it’s wailing, you just don’t know. My mother, my father snore, side by side, each in their chair. They operate on their own hours -- my Mom stays up late watching murder mysteries and hospital surgeries. Last night for example some surgeons in Denver removed a two hundred pound tumor off a pale thin blonde woman, and my mother was riveted. My Dad wakes and sleeps intermittently over the twenty-four hours. Yesterday he was planting corn, four rows with a rake; then last night his hip hurt and he couldn’t sleep. Right now, as I said, my folks are together, asleep, snoring. Cachito is on the bed meowing, interrupting my thoughts. I think he wants to go out. Outside it’s raining cold, cold, cold. Although it’s spring the horizon looks like autumn but for the forsythia down there yellow on the green wet lawn.

I hear the geese above in the white sky, just their sounds, comforting honks, as long as they stay up there far off. The other day my brother Scott shot at one on the pond and it took off as he continued to fire at its behind taking flight. Canadian Geese are beautiful, but not when they congregate and shit up the place, browning the pond with scum and eating all the watercress. They think it all belongs to them, they hiss! and though my Republican brother is a supporter of George W. Bush, “Give a Canadian Goose an inch and you will live to regret it,” is a maxim we both appreciate.

With all the snow and rain the pond is the clearest I’ve ever seen it. The other night before my walk I saw where the pond runs off, among the bull rushes, a splashing, which turned out to be toads under the surface, holding on, the little males above, pressing their thighs against the fat bodies of their wives, submerged. The land-loving American Toad, Bufo Americanus, was fucking all over the place, among the white jelly clouds of frog’s eggs already laid. The toad’s eggs come out in a clear string where one black seed follows another in a delicate line that curls transparently among the drowned and jagged decaying leaves. It was so cold my hands were numb, yet these cold-blooded creatures really moved to the urge of love over oozing eggs in the smoky mud.

“You can really hear the frogs tonight,” my father said when I came into the warmth of his wood stove. “That’s because they’re having sex,” I said. My father with his dentures out, reading a book by Bernard Lewis that I’d brought about the history of Islam, laughed and laughed. It’s so good to hear my father laugh; there is nothing like it.

Here in the woods I’ve been writing some sonnets, which has just come into my mind to do. I’ve been writing prose, working on a book of essays, and haven’t been thinking too much about poems. I am reading a lot of Spanish poets now because I am interested in knowing the language and I do like the poets. Whether the days have been sunny or cold I’ve been reading Spanish poets and also a little Robert Browning. There have been some gray days, though Easter Sunday the yellow spring opened its lids for a little while and everything was warm again. I walked into the woods with my nephew Chris, who’s out of jail and really seems off heroin, to where a stream comes down the mountain over prehistoric rocks the size of dinosaur heads and eggs, splashing from its source. A black snake slithered suddenly over the forest floor and was gone among new white, blue, purple, yellow flowers covering the cold wet ground. Powerful spring with a lot of rain, bursting at the edges. I’d been reading a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez, which simply fit the day with dandelions. My translation comes nowhere near the Spanish; I add it only to assist in appreciating it.

PRIMAVERA AMARILLA

   Abril venía, lleno
todo de flores amarillas:
amarillo el arroyo,
amarillo el vallado, la colina,
el cementerio de los niños,
el huerto aquel donde el amor vivía.

   El sol unjía de amarillo el mundo,
con sus luces caídas;
¡ay, por los lirios áureos,
el agua de oro, tibia;
las amarillas mariposas
sobre las rosas amarillas!

   Guirnaldas amarillas escalaban
los árboles; el día
era una gracia perfumada de oro,
en un dorado despertar de vida.
Entre los huesos de los muertos,
abría Dios sus manos amarillas.

YELLOW SPRING

   April came, completely
full of yellow flowers:
yellow the brook,
yellow the fence, the hill,
the cemetery of children,
the garden where love used to live.

   The sun anointed the world
in yellow with its fallen light;
Ah! there by the gilded lilies,
the golden water, warm,
the yellow butterflies
over yellow roses.

   Yellow garlands were climbing
the trees; the day
was a perfumed blessing of gold
in a golden awakening of life.
Among the bones of the dead
God opened his yellow arms.

To really read poetry is as good as really writing it. I want to read a lot of English poets now. I want to read De Rerum Natura by Lucretius in the Latin. Hopefully somehow I will have July and August off and can do what I want. As I said, I’ve been having a hankering, an urge to write sonnets, be a little bound by rhyme and form, holding on and letting go at the same time. The two sonnets that follow are the first I’ve ever tried to write. So please keep that in mind.

ONE

Looking at the springs sitting in the sun
Something at my nape begins to tickle
Like the wind’s moving a hair there, fickle
on my bare neck between the scalp and trunk.
I’m reading the poet Bill Kushner -- Ah!
His April Poems are wonderful to hold.
It’s April and I’m here with Bill -- But no
Something’s crawling on my skin. Is it? What?
I scratch, and it vanishes like a thought
forgotten, but it’s not. It walks. I pick
From my neck a beautiful round red tick
With many tiny moving legs, enough
To turn my thoughts from Bill to blood and death.
It knows I’m here, where I wanted to rest.

TWO

Every time I come, it is the same
Running without end, down the mountain stairs
Of rocks, giant eggs and heads of dinosaurs.
Elegant woods, soft, expanding gently
Over everything like a promised dream
Of health, happiness, not bombed little kids
Without limbs and politicians getting rich
Off suffering -- Away! I want to be
Among unfolding ferns and skunk cabbage
Where the warm bright sun thaws the ground still cold
Like Christ raising Lazarus. As I grow
Old it still seems possible to really love
Even the startled snake scared in the leaves
But man -- Who threw this bottle in the stream?

Don Yorty

Back to first page > “Hope is the thing with feathers” > page 1, 2

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Don Yorty was born in Lebanon, PA in 1949. He has a novel published, What Night Forgets (Herodias, 2000), and two volumes of poetry, A Few Swimmers Appear and Poet Laundromat. He lives in NYC where he has successfully defended community gardens from development. He teaches literacy skills to adults and their children.

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