Lingering in Happiness

Forgive all the poetry, or hopefully love it and forgive it. I am only this week able to settle down and read, really read, in what seems like ages. I read a whole chapter of a novel yesterday. Felt like coming home again.

February has dazzled me. Bleak, cold, snow-filled February. It has been one of the happiest months of my life, and I feel as though I ought to pay some tribute to it before it slips away tomorrow. I keep thinking of these lines from Linda Pastan's poem, "Weather":

your life now seems

to you exceptional
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.


February is my spring this year. Borrowing Mary Oliver, here is my ode to it, happiest of months:

"Lingering in Happiness"

After rain, after many days without rain,
It stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear -- but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.