Welcome to spring, everybody; that time of year when the young poet’s mind admits of nature’s brighter hues: the fornication of the flowers. The dialectic intercourse of pollination. Of course, I’m not a young poet anymore. So my mind is more likely turned to thoughts of insurance. Smoke detectors. Tire inflation.

We have to get from here to there without incurring avoidable damages, don’t you agree? Although to be sure, no one here gets out alive.

Here in Carpinteria, we’re having an overcast and drippy day, not quite rainy. Only the very athletic and mildly stupid are out upon the thoroughfare on bikes. And at 9:45am, I’m still in my comfy sweats, in my warm and cozy study, sipping French Roast from an aging mug replete with contemplative standing geese. Meeting life head-on, but only on life’s most obsequious terms. There can be a certain passive aggression to Saturday mornings, a middling denial and avoidance of Monday’s inexorable strife.

… mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Here’s a poem for today, in honor of poor lost winter, but not really about that at all.

Bee in January

It’s a winter way of looking at things,
of celebrating half-light and fog.
For instance, a bee I saw, just
for an instant, fumbling among
the camellias and darting past
the dog’s head. You’d almost believe
it was spring, forgetting the windmills
droning all night to save the lemon
trees from frost. But the chiminea,
warming in compassionate sunlight,
is half full of rain. And in January,
I prefer fog. I would rather have
a morning with the houses gray
and almost lost in it. With Papa
standing by the pickup, asking
if I’ve got good tires, a full tank
of gas, a map, some cash.
They called him Bee. He liked
a Timex watch, a good pen
in his pocket. Ballpoint, blue.
I had everything I needed, checked
everything but the weather.
So he stood there by his house
in the long, cold January, foggy
San Joaquin, breathing gray exhaust
in the gray world. He stood there,
waving as I disappeared.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
January 15, 2005
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