THE POLITICS OF SPRING

The Peoples Republic of Poetry was inspired during a short-lived love affair with a dipoemat's
beautiful daughter.
Delina, may your cheeks be trilliums and sanctioned by the Provincial
Government of Poetry. Where you touch me a wound bursts forth like a spring blossom. My body
is a filing cabinet of fanatic nerves. My eyes martyr themselves on your cheeks. My hands are the
heretics of distance. My arms are the legislation of love. You are the rose I am a thorn on. I am a
peasant in the dynasty of your eyes. You are a guest in my wilderness of love. What if I wrote --
"you and I, as simple as that, for what is more perfect than that which is truly simple?”
It was a
spring affair.
In spring the snow disperses like a mob of resentful rioters. In the fields there are
wounds in the snow where grass bleeds green, where grass is an opening eye. In spring the snow
goes a. w. o. l. In spring the sun loads a successful guerrilla movement or coup d'etat. In spring
there’s an insurrection of grass and love. All winter our flesh was ignorant of the sedition of
sunlight. No one ever votes spring into power. Is spring a totalitarian imperialist? Are robins
infiltrated foreign agents sabotaging snowmobile trails, encouraging Green Power? Spring is a
tolerant state because it permits equal opportunity to all colours. Winter is a one-colour regime.
Perhaps we all love spring because it allows civil rights to the tulips, to the lilacs, to the
exuberant blossoms committing a joyful suicide leap into fallen blossoms. The sun is prosecutor
and executioner of snow. The sun casts an unanimous verdict and ignores all appeals. April
showers are the mourner's tears after winter has been hung from the gallows of warmth. Summer
is the sun's gift of appeasement for the questionable use of coercive force to eliminate snow. (The
government recessed to attend a coroner's inquest involving the sunlight-poisoning of winter)
Fall is a word that speaks for itself.
The affair's ultimate romantic gesture was an embrace on the
broken line of a major highway. A moment's kiss diverted traffic and attracted attention. They
were a foreign substance unaccounted for on the flowcharts of traffic planners. They were the
TILT of pinball machines. They were loopholes in reality. They were ambassadors from Poetry
but they weren't very dipoematic. They fit into the puzzle of silence like a calamity -- a three-car
pileup in the Dead Sea. They were the bend-fold-spindle -mutilate late of systems progress. They
were disciples of their urges. This was the state of the affair which became the affairs of state of
mind in the imagination of the Peoples Republic of Poetry.
If a poet wore the premier of
something, what might that something be? Would it be a nation of obedient poetry lovers? Would
the national militia consist of mighty tulips armed with colour and sunshine? Would the national
anthem be a long joyful sigh after love? Would the Union of Pollen Producers go on strike
demanding higher rates of sunlight and more elaborate fringe benefits such as lighter showers
and heavier dew? Would this cause an image- national crisis? Would the Creative Intelligence
Agency report that the Insect Pollen Transportation Organization had been infiltrated by
dissident outside agitators such as breezes? Then what would our foreign policy be? Would we
accept only immigrants carrying passport dreams? Then what about the refugees from Grief and
defectors from Despair? Would we send out ambassadors to collect the neglected? Would we
establish dipoematic relations with Pain, negotiate for a ceasefire and settle for shorter
durations? Will we pick and chose our enemies (Banality, Mediocrity) at the drop of a poem and
come charging, singing the Battle Hymn of the Poetic?

Published in the Fiddlehead, No.96, Winter 1973