Trojan Poetry 109: "Spring Comes to Chicago" by Campbell McGrath

Spring Comes to Chicago

by Campbell McGrath

All through those final, fitful weeks we walked off the restlessness of our daily

expectancy on the avenues of sun-hunger and recalcitrant slush.

When would that big fat beautiful baby

Blue first day of spring arrive?

So we strolled the backstreets and boulevards to consider the clouds and drink

some decaf and escape the press of solicitous voices, gingerly, leaving feathers

unruffled, like that first, fearless pair of mallards coasting the lake’s archipelagoes

of melting ice. We walked to the movies, again and again - Eddie Murphy at the

Biograph, Orson Welles amid the Moorish splendor of the Music Box - varying

our route until we knew every block in the neighborhood, every greystone and

three-flat, every Sensei bar and Michoaqueno flower stall.

We walked to Ho Wah Garden and the Ostoneria and over to Becky’s for deep-

dish pizza;

to Manny’s for waffles on mornings of aluminum rain;

the German butcher for bratwurst, the Greek bakery for elephant ears, the 7-Eleven

for cocktail onions to satisfy Elizabeth’s idiosyncratic cravings.

We walked until our fears resurfaced and then ate out fears.

We walked ourselves right out of winter into precincts we knew and those we

didn’t and some the city kept as private enclaves for itself, a certain statue, a

street of saris, an oasis of cobbled lanes amid the welter of industry where

suddenly the forsythia is in lightning-fierce flower, sudden as lilac, as bells, as

thunder rolling in from the plains, sky a bruised melon spawning ocean-green

hailstones to carry our rusted storm gutters away in an avalanche of kerneled ice

plastered with bankrolls of last year’s leaves.

Behold the daffodil, behold the crocus!

Behold the awakened, the reborn, the already onrushing furious and blooming;

violets overgrown in the lawn gone back to prairie,

some trumpet-flowered vine exuding sweet ichor upon the vacant house across

the street,

dandelions blown to seed

and the ancient Japanese widows who stoop to gather their vinegar-bitter stems.

That final morning we clear the cobwebs and crack the storm windows and let the

breeze take shelter in our closets and to bask all day in its muddy immutable

odor. Elizabeth naps in a chair by the window, attuned to the ring of a distant

carrillon, matins and lauds, while down the block an unnumbered hoard of

rollerblades and bicycles propel their messengers like locusts assembled at the toll

of some physiological clock, the ancient correlation of sap and sunlight,

equinoctial sugar and blood. The big elm has begun its slow adumbration of

fluted leaflets and buds on branch tips, percussive nubs and fine-veined tympani,

a many-fingered symphony tuning up.

Vespers: swallows and doves;

Elizabeth takes a final stitch in her tiny welcome blanket; yawns; done.

Bodies and hours, bodies and hours.

At midnight I close the book on final grades to find my desk alive with a host of

translucent, freshly-fledged spiders, a microscopic multitude borne in on the

breeze to take up residence among the computer keys, a vision that bears me

down the umbilicus of dreams toward a dim, persistent, unreasoning rhythm, a

music long promised, a visitation at last given up and unlooked for, ghostly silk

loomed from winter’s cocoon or the opening of one wind-shaken blossom -

Behold the sleepers! When they wake everything,

o everything

shall be transformed.