Re-reading the World

Yesterday, I spent an hour reading the third volume of Always Now. And then I took a bike ride down a street lined with blossoming apple trees. In spring in Japan, the viewing of the cherry trees in bloom is an almost sacred event. The whole nation is primed for it with even the weather broadcasters showing maps of the country in graduated shades of pink indicating when the blossoms will be at their peak throughout the land. June is the month of blossoms in Winnipeg, I find, especially of crab apple and lilac. From a neighbor’s deck, I saw a faraway apple tree, rife with blossoms, like an explosion caught in mid-frame, wads of white fisted flowers punching the blue air.

A good poet makes a person re-read the world. So spoke a voice in my head as I biked along the trail by the river. Because I’d read Margaret’s poetry, every living thing I encountered hummed and buzzed with meaning – the burdock lining the banks of the river with the spindly grey shadows of their former selves rising ethereally above the riotously elephantine eared new growth, the roar of the jet plane overhead as my wheels crunch over the gravel below the underpass, the thrust of a branch studded with flowers into the stark lined symmetry of telephone wires against the blue sky, and then suddenly that lane full of blossoming trees so lovely it makes one stop and gape in awe.

I read the world I saw that day because I read Margaret read the world in her poems. Her ‘concrete and wild carrot,’ her ‘snowflakes in starlight/obliterated into weft and stippling,’ her ‘young medalioned trees’ her leaves ‘blossomy in frills and lace,’ her ‘still angora mist,’ her ‘rollicking orb’ – all these descriptors bespeak a gift with language for the well-observed. It’s as if these things named themselves to her. In “Knowing the New,” the poet declares “Suddenly utterance is everywhere.” and that is exactly right. In spring, utterance IS everywhere. I had half a mind to find all of Margaret’s spring poems – she has quite a few, for example, set in April which is a favorite month for poets – and put them in a home-made calendar. Of course, her linguistic acuity is not simply limited to observation of the natural world but to other things like the unseen and the invisible that have only the fingertips of words to probe them. There are her meditations on death, for example, and her many poems on scripture – words reading the Word, as it were, but today, because it is spring, I want to celebrate it the way Margaret did in her poems so often and so marvelously in those moments when her sheer gift with language truly lit up the terrain.