Presentimental Spring

It's getting warmer and I tried to write a poem about it

May 02, 2024

Nameless feedback from a classmate on the rough draft

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T.S. Eliot famously opens his poem,“The Wasteland,” with the line: “April is the cruelest month,” a line I thought about on the first day of April – which coincided with the first day of spring quarter– after getting caught in a torrential downpour that I was woefully underdressed for. On the second to last day of April I had my first ever poetry workshop for the poem you (presumably…) just read. This marked the first time I’d finished a poem in years and was, horrifyingly, also the first time my poetry had ever been the subject of criticism from my peers. On the first day of May, yesterday, I got my first sunburn of the year and suddenly I’m thinking about life and death and whether I should refer to the house I grew up in as “my house” or “my parents’ house.” January marks the beginning of the year, but it’s still the middle of winter: time seems to collapse and the months dully bleed into one another. Spring makes me think of time differently– April, May, or whenever spring decides to come, feel like more of a notable change, like this is when the new year should begin because it feels different.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.1

It’s unfortunate that it’s cliche to say Spring inspires change and growth because it’s true— I’ve been trying to think of another way to put it that feels honest and uncontrived and I’ve been failing. The tree outside my window has started to grow back its leaves, my hands are out of my pockets and swaying at my side, the “land” doesn’t look as “dead” anymore, though the only pieces of “land” I really see are small parks bordered by sidewalks littered in garbage. I go to the lake, sit on cement steps, and revel in a view of the lake that might as well be an ocean and a view of the skyline that reminds me I live in the third largest city in the country. It sounds obvious, but the sun tends to make these things feel more visible, tends to make me feel like I should write a poem (remember when I said “I am not a poet” a few weeks ago?).

I’ve noticed that I always have the volume turned up in my headphones when I walk in the cold, probably to distract myself from the temperature that makes a ten minute walk feel like an hour. When it’s warmer, I turn the volume down or turn my music off completely, hence the “present” in “presentimental.” Chloe and I camped in rural Wisconsin in August, and after a few moments of sitting in silence listening to the rustling of leaves and the hum of cicadas, she sighed and half-jokingly said, “I feel like in the big city we don’t… take our sweet time enough.” This may be true in August, a month of peak-Midwestern mugginess and ample underboob sweat, but not as much in April, when we collectively take a moment to appreciate the fact that we can take the long way home (and that we can put our winter coat back into its box under our bed when we get there).

The poem “Presentimental Spring” came from a thought that popped into my head while I was waiting for the train on an unusually warm evening in March, namely the opening line: “it’s spring now and I don’t know what to do with my hands.” I was literally wearing a crewneck (no pockets) instead of my “wind stopper” extra-lined winter fleece (with pockets). I originally intended to use it in a Substack essay, but when it came time to write my first of three poems for class, it felt like an idea small enough to fully flesh-out in a poem: we change with the seasons? To an extent? Ok! I recently read Herman Melville’s novella “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” where Melville uses the word “presentiment” very liberally. “Presentiment” is defined as “a feeling that something will or is about to happen,” and it usually connotes foreboding or dread, rather than pure optimism for the future. I think it goes without saying that warm weather and sunlight don’t fix everything, and they don’t immediately make everything poetic.

There’s a lot you miss when you’re constantly looking at the ground, but there’s also always something to warrant looking down at the sidewalk, be it a puddle, a random divot, or a crack you’re avoiding because you don’t want bad luck. Maybe (for my purposes, not T.S. Eliot’s) April is the cruelest month because it forces us to both reflect and to look forward, because it prompts sentimentality in some capacity, to make something out of something small... Maybe that’s corny. Whatever April or May or spring means or does, all I can say is that I’m starting to pay more attention.