image from: http://schmidling.com/maplesyrup.htm
It’s maple syrup season here in Central Minnesota. The monks at Saint John’s Abbey have a very large operation, and it’s been a good year. The first year I lived here, I participated actively in the operation, tapping trees, harvesting sap, hanging out at the evaporator and helping to bottle the syrup. Every year for the past decade I’ve made it out to the woods, and last year we had a great walk on Holy Saturday with my parents, who were visiting, in good weather. But this year I’ve just followed the progress in the e-mail updates, calling for volunteers to collect sap and reporting on the gallons made.
In my imagination, though, the maple operation has taken on a different tone. It’s made me think of other poems, part 1 of William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All” in particular. Williams was a doctor, but much has been made, in English classes and elsewhere, of the specificity of “by the road to the contagious hospital” as a setting for an uncertain spring poem, one that takes place before bloom– at the moment the very first spring comes out of the dead season of winter.
In that spirit, I’ve been working on a poem of my own. It will hopefully develop, and needs a different title, but here it is, a chemotherapy-tinged poem.
Freeze and Thaw
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
From “Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams
The maples are hung with IV bags.
Too many patients, two thousand,
marching the brown hills. The woods are ill.
At the clinic, 36 rooms for infusions,
each the same: a patient, a nurse, an IV.
We look metallic. We look poisoned.
I’m thinking of poetry—Williams
on his way to the contagious hospital,
Eliot’s sky etherized on a table.
Am I to become a Modernist now?
Eschewing nature, or feeling cold
instead of the stirrings of spring?
Maple syrup requires thaw by day
and freeze every night to make
the sap run. Usually it is enlivening,
but now, too much intrusion,
too much plastic and something stolen,
something scarred, despite custom-made stiles.
Gunmetal gray sky. Ironwood trees. Copper marsh.
I want to lift it up. I want to run clear.
I call a code. Code. Code. Uncertain how to go.
Beautiful poem to which I can relate. I, too, helped with the sapping – many years ago, until one spring when I didn’t have the energy to wade through the mud to check the buckets (pails were used way bck then). I believe I was preparing for chemo.
Your words mean much to me. Thank you, Susan.