Winter's trailings into spring

Wednesday, hump day, catchmybreath day. It's March, but feels like February, with rain, wind, snow, hail, and the barest snatches of sun here and there. It is another week of pewter mornings, and not being spring yet, just like Margaret Atwood describes in her poem February:

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard.

and:

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Or maybe William Mathews' Spring Snow would be a better fit for this week's crazy weather, which starts:

Here comes the powdered milk I drank
as a child, and the money it saved.
Here come the papers I delivered,
the spotted dog in heat that followed me home

And ends...

If to die is to lose
all detail, then death is not
so distinguished, but a profusion
of detail, a last gossip, character
passed wholly into fate and fate
in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

Or Hyacinth by Louise Glück:

There is no other immortality:
in the cold spring, the purple violets open.
And yet, the heart is black,
there is its violence frankly exposed.
Or is it not the heart at the center
but some other word?
And now someone is bending over them,
meaning to gather them—

We could even pluck lyrics from one of today's playlist songs (Gentle On My Mind) and misfit them to this same longing-memory-of-spring purpose:

And it's knowing I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that have dried upon some line
That keeps you in the backroads
By the rivers of my mem'ry
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind

So many shades of evocation in winter's wearisome trailings into spring, or Wednesday's mid-week sigh, for that matter.

This morning's playlist was suitably boundary-crossing and filled with more than its fair share of duets:
- Lountang: Ablaye Cissoko & Volker Goetze
- Gentle On My Mind: Glen Campbell & Bobbie Gentry
- Babylon: David Gray
- Raga Doll: Gary McFarland & Gabor Szabo
- Cheyenne Eyes (Children Of The Great Father): Lewis & Clark Soundtrack
- Posted via Hermes.