About this time of year I bring Van Morrison back to the top. Avalon Sunset. “I look at the side of your face, the sunlight comes streaming through the window….” “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time” he says—he says, not singing—and then the music stops. It actually stops.
I think of a merry-go-round (brass ring or no). This is what happens next on the record: from “Have I Told You Lately” to “Coney Island” to “I’m Tired Joey Boy,” Van sweeps ages in a mere couple minutes.
Cue tin whistle and Union pipes——.
I’ve been thinking that seasonal affective disorder may as well, at this point, be seasonal effective resistance. Hear me: my southern Vermont live-alone grandmother probably had the og undiagnosed strain, costumed in flanneled “Yankee Hardy” (a relation to Darn Tough, we believe). So, as springtime’s softer arms muscle out of the plowy-gravel, I tell myself: this season has made you resistant to useless things; so, move on.
Merino wool was big around here, in the Upper Valley (reportedly imported by a Weathersfieldian, William Jarvis), starting in the early 1800’s; we can probably thank a Cantabrigian who stretched as far as Virginia a few years before the American Revolution for the name Weathersfield. To really get into the story you’d have to interrogate the actions of Napoleon in Spain (“seizing the estates and flocks of the nobles who did not side with him,” I can quote by grace of The Vermont Historical Society, available from 1965).
Listening to music, long walks, conversations with friends, also contributes to resilience—the earned shoulder pads of resistance (but not like the 80’s kind [although that music is a pick-me-up; “Save it for Later” by The Beat, or “Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs]). You might never know by looking at your fellow shopper—shopping locally of course, because, turns out, it’s actually cheaper in the short and the long run—that those invisible weights on their shoulders, like Justice’s scales, have been through the ringer.
The ringer. Now, there’s another buzzword.
It’s a new road, “this.” I feel some of the implied fortune: to be shouldered in wool, to count my chin and not my mask; to be free, still or rushing, to read—to read—a history of wool, to gather graces in my throat and stung eyes: that we, human beings, preserve such things (as ink).
In the Beat’s “Save it for Later” official video the band performs in a subterranean club, complete with Beatniks, a poster over the lead’s shoulder for It Started In Paradise, and a drummer playing on a tabletop skull.
Sooner or later we are to face the basics (and the happier the better). I’m on to The Healing Game now. Van’s saxophone lets it out. Unreal. I mean, really wailing. Here it is “Poetry Month,” a time when it’s o.k. to show our softer sides, and I’ve received word this past hour that a good poet friend from another near nation has ceased to exist at seventy-five.
If Spring is our season of birth then these lines ahead from Patricia Glinton-Meicholas—who is the poet referenced in the previous paragraph—bear renewal. Written for a former colonized country whose people since turned to their own arts and traditions, Patti’s words appeared in their first national literary journal (which she co-created). From the poem “2030”:
“No sooner had the child emerged…still covered in primal slime/ And she, weak and trembling from her labours/ fled the room engaging…”
Fled the room engaging, I repeated to myself and write it again now. This,/Poetry,/Spring.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin). His writing has appeared in The Irish Times*,* The Sun*,* American Poetry Review*, on T*he Writer’s Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland (“Loves: Silence and the Music of JS Bach”). Peter drums in the bard band Los Lorcas. His mentor was Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg.