The Zones of Paradise

ETUDES, FOR UNACCOMPANIED VOICE

ETUDES, FOR UNACCOMPANIEDVOICE  Is it better to be the crocus, speaking up too soon, putting a purple foot in the snow’s white mouth, or to be the mum, mulling over its maroon, holding out for the last dark word on the subject of summer?  April, and every apple tree’s a diva, our little orchard smug with Dolly Partons and the chaste arias of La Bohème. The rest of the season they’ll eke out only a few whole notes for the yellow jackets, but nobody’s a no-show for this brief, white run. Look at them: bending and bowing, each one sure the tumult rolling in from the back row of the horizon is meant for only her.  The frost-tired ground’s in the mood for mud. And maples in strips of curb lawn, redbuds poised in side yards, dogwoods stalled  between the porch and the open gate— they’re all trying out their red and pink opinions after the large, gray, censorious season. And before green clouds gather in the branches to drown them out. 4 At first you think a bird’s gone berserk in the dark maple, that blotch of black against the sprinkled stars. Nobody around here ever goes out on a limb like that, this late or this loud. It’s a robin on steroids, a starling sweet-talking its way into the dreams of finches and cardinals.l.l.l. When you find yourself mocking the mockingbird, stumped by its southern riff, you know you’ve lived too long at the wrong latitude. What cynic misnamed that bird, anyway— that earnest DJ of spring?  Everything has its say. Small gray birds chip at the silence. Forsythia belts out bright arpeggios.  Even the magnolia, alone in the dark, corroborates the moon’s white lie. To all of which the frost takes cold exception, in a gloss of asterisks.  The body throws itself at the mind’s problem, shrugging out of desire or despair with a squall of tears. And so, for a while, each thought is solved, relieved of what it knows. All afternoon, a storm shook the pear tree at the edge of the orchard. Now it lingers in the mist, the way a woman lingers in the soft euphoria of the well-wept.  Bring in the loudmouth tulip, the white vow of the lilac, the iris in its velvet pleasures. What can fit in a vase, can fit in a voice. The wind hurries by in its scarf of birds  and spent petals, undoing both the naked magnolia and the bold proposals on top of skinny stems. Even out of the wind, nothing scarlet stays. But what would we be without bright slips of our tongue-tied hearts? Granite, with a grudge against the weather.  ...