A Poem by Brandon Brown

From The Four Seasons

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring” the first line is “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring.”

Today it’s so warm, I chat with Ben and say “this campus is barely dressed.”

I’ve started fermenting things in my house.  Cabbage with hibiscus, honey wine with hops and thymes, asparagus with mustard seeds.  Hemoglobin beet kvass that burps when I pull off its lid to check its sour.  It’s so spring in my apartment, the windows open, inviting wild spores to constant dinner.  Microscopic reapers wreak havoc on what I plan to lunch on.

Some say the human obsession with fermented food is that we long to savor something literally dead and rotten which still nourishes us and gives us life.  And so for those who love to be alive, no wonder we prefer Paradiso to the other poems in Dante’s insane trilogy.

I mean everybody is dead in Paradiso too.

I watch someone spit on a tree and think that person has just exhumed their innermost allies.

I hardly ever spit but once I spat on the sidewalk and a wizened hippie chastised me: “spit on the street, people sleep on the sidewalks.”

Nothing is so beautiful as the small intestine, miles of gross organ coiled into a nectarine.

I’m reading a book about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring because I am calling it springtime and writing a poem called “Spring.”  I haven’t listened to Rite of Spring for so long, like almost twenty years, and what I really remember about it, besides that it is a big avant garde modernist work whose debut in Paris started riots, is that it is noisy, dissonant, and not good to play when you’re trying to go to sleep for instance.

I didn’t remember ever knowing for instance that the “rite” in Rite of Spring is a collectively orchestrated torture of a young woman who is forced to dance herself to death.

The opening pipes, which are called dudki in Russian, apparently reference a common motif in Russian folk tales, where an Orpheus-like primitive person charms a circle of wild beasts with his great piping.  In Rite of Spring, the wild animals are bears, reflecting the Slavic tradition that bears were the real ancestors of modern humans.

Bad breath too is the funk of what’s feasting inside you so splendidly.

The best holidays in Spring are Easter and 4/20.  The worst holidays in...