“You Must Believe In Spring”

space

Late summer of  ‘95: Two years into my
divorce, the hardest hammers of separation
and guilt for breaking up a family ebbed back
far enough to yearn again for what sustains.

En route I went crazy for a young small
redhead woman who worked on another floor
of the newspaper, she vowed to a boyfriend
who could only love her rough, me vowing

not to fall for someone so unavailable and
so much younger than I, who yearned
for me too but wouldn’t –- couldn’t — defer.
She owed him much, she said, for saving

her from some unnamed hell (drugs).
Seven years off the booze, I understood that
well enough, though didn’t see how much
of that old abyss I was falling back into

though the waylaid bottle was her body,
each forestalled kiss pure hootch. As it
turned out she became the proscenium
through which I met my second wife,

a forced distraction from obsession
that became the heart of life itself
though at first I did so much damage
to her in my bitter and devout refusal

to give up that old flame’s ghost. I
now wonder if I  began drinking again
to quaff the semblance of copper desire
in each shot of burning malt derange.

Somewhere in the midst of that
summer of hopeless thrall I found
my first CD of Bill Evans at the library -–
You Must Believe In Spring –- and

spun it endlessly, savoring the angle
of his jazz trio (piano bass & drums),
tinkling lyric ivories high while
moody low notes churn. The title cut

was delved from the mystery
of our shared yet distaff history,
this album released in ’77 many years
after the trio Bill Evans loved most

ended with the bass player’s death
in a car crash after the last Village
Vanguard session. Four years after
“Spring” came out Evans was dead

paying the final price of abuse
and gorgeousness, right at the time
I hit Central Florida from Spokane
arms wide for love at last, drunk

and drunker on love’s lush evernight.
Fifteen years after Evans died
I found his hope for love so in tune
with what that redhead was opening

in me in a gorgeous hopeless wound,
“You’ve Got To Believe In Spring”
the aural portal where my heart’s
longing found a cathedral nave.

I heard that music everywhere that
raw impossibly sweet hot season
where everything was tropic green
and neon blue as my sleepless balls,

its patina a rain that fell hard and then
expired, drawing back into late thunders
and high lighting arcing traceries
of desire across the city night.

After another night of looking for
someone other than her and striking out
I’d walk home from downtown bars
in the humid swash of mist that

smelled of lightning’s ions, still
hot after midnight, the sidewalk
still wet and gleaming with streetlights.
“You Must Believe In Spring” so in

my ears as concept mood and tone
that my steps were somehow forwards
and back at once, leaving the impossible life
behind hoping for something new and real,

always with that music over my shoulder
vanishing, like Eurydice, at song’s end,
the silence reminding me of the distance
between what we think love is

and what it can surprise two humans.
Sixteen years into this second marriage
and I have all the duration of the intimacy
I yearned so for in fleeting, surface things,

a settled satisfaction that needs no other’s
emptiness could ever override our rings.
I may just be singing in the dark; it’s cold
again and news of the world has that

distant reek of soon-greater wrong: my wife
had her mammogram a week ago and
worries our phone will ring with The Call,
that the bond that holds us here

can be dissolved by the world’s or life’s
or God’s will, a dark bruise on a x-rayed breast.
Today while she’s out and I’m home working
I’ll spin “You’ve Got To Believe In Spring”

along with my other Evans albums,
settling back in memory’s warm aural tub
while it rains and breezes colder outside,
remembering what I used to believe about love

and what I found over all these married years—
that home is not where heart and art almost is,
its music not what lasts by never quite beginning.
No: my footsteps on those long wet nights

I walked home with “You Must Believe In Spring”
still sing softly and so wistfully in my ears
because love begins inside yearning’s speech,
its piano softer, a jazz to tide the heart I reached.

February-March 2012

space

space

space

My brother Timm photographed himself in a park in Salem, Oregon, on a spring day not long before he died in 2008.

space

Note

Spring wouldn’t be spring without the bittersweetness. The morning I post this it rains, a hard front coming through after incredible heat. It’s a season of beginnings so tinged with loss, almost demanding that absence curl in the bloom-perfume of presence. I first fell in love in the spring of 1977, and lost that love in the same spring, almost the same downpour. Spring twisters have already done great damage across the midwest and southeast–more tornadoes in two days than is normal for the month of March.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my nephew Nicholas’ death, whose car crashed on a turnpike at 1 a.m. slick from a front like this one, killing he, his girlfriend and best friend. He was 23. The tabebouia trees here have already blossomed and faded; how I recall them almost obscenely in bloom the April morning in 2008 when I heard my brother had died at 44.

A gorgeous session so resonant with yearning and loss: who doesn’t reflect bittersweetly on love’s history, its promise and failings, its yearning impossibility and the tiny relics and remnants and moments we achieve of it? Given its difficulty, love is a miracle, and as fragile as springtime, all about beginning and somehow getting beyond beginning. Love ends, life ends, the heart gives up … 

Must we believe in spring?  But the music somehow returns, just as the poetry returns. We remember; lost love seems so present, everywhere in this day; present love can seem so absent, hauled off by whatever; it returns, sometimes in the same face, or in a cat’s, or in a brace of orange blossoms whipping on the wind, their bells soon enough torn from branches that weren’t there two years ago.

The phone did not ring with news of my wife’s mammogram. I’ll call my 84-year-old father today as I always do on Sundays, commiserating with the fact that he’s still here (that’s his joke). Later, I’ll call my sister tor remember her son. It’s so cool outside now it’s hard to remember that it hit 90 degrees yesterday.

A 4-year-old was pulled from his mother’s arms in one tornado; an infant is found alive and alone in a field after the passing of another. It’s all a love song, alternately shaded blue and green, or bittersweetly dappled with both. What other poetry is there, anyway?