Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Loose Change

Thirty days hath...that Aprille with his shoures soote....in England now that April's... the cruelest month...come she will...and she did, and now she's leaving, the bard of months, Shakespeare's month, taking her poems with her? Maybe not.

It's a rainy night, even rained out the Red Sox, and I'm looking back at the calendar page like a five-story building, about to exit through the lobby door marked 30, with a polite doorman in a rabbit suit or maybe it's a white rabbit in a doorman's uniform, ready to let me out.

I should have chronicled the transformations of this blue-gray civil war of a month, but its spring cavalcade lacked momentum, seemed like a street magician running rapidly through her repertoire of tricks, the uprising of green happening accidentally through cold days, raw days, days of crocus, days of matzo, days of wind, rain, and sun, of brillig daffodils and mimsy florets in the maples and blossoms in the magnolia trees, and another night of cold and wet authored by the same April.

I've been saving the title phrase, loose change, for too long. It refers both to the dilatory timetable of spring and in particular to the bright proclamation of the song sparrow, melospiza melodia, delivered from a singing perch and resembling the dispensing of new-minted coins from one of those silver coin dispensers the Good Humor man wore on his waist, a unique piping cadenza: dime! dime! dime! centime, ha'penny, nickel nickel nickel nickel, centavo, franc.

I've missed the rest of the avril aviaty—the tail-wagging palm warblers, phoebes packing a species vocabulary into their repeated names, maybe a brown thrasher, no telling who else. Maybe May...she will stay, but I must away!