It's where I come from, it's sugaring season right now,
maple sugaring season.
That means there's still a lot of snow on the ground.
But at any rate, something's happening to the plant life.
And that's encouraging, as is the sight of flowers down here.
So I'll read a kind of optative spring poem.
This is called "Seed Leaves."
I was going to call it "Cotyledons,"
but then I thought I'd spare some people that dictionary
work.
This is about what happens when you've sown a row of beans,
let's say, or some other dicot.
And you're down on hands and knees
thinning them out after the seedlings have come up.
And as you know, a bean first produces
a couple of leaves, which are not
the true leaves of the plant.
They take the shape of the seed case.
And then after them, and at right angles to them,
come along the true leaves.
This poem is about that and some other matters.
I guess everybody knows that in Norse mythology
there was a great universal tree, tree of life
called Yggdrasil, which had the planets and stars
for its leaves and fruit.
"Seed Leaves."
A poem dedicated, by the way, to Robert Frost, from whom
it steals this and that.
"Here something stubborn comes, dislodging the Earth crumbs
and making crusty rubble.
It comes up bending double and looks like a green staple.
It could be seedling maple or artichoke or bean,
that remains to be seen.
Forced to make choice of ends, the stalk, in time,
unbends, shakes off the seed case,
heaves aloft, and spreads two leaves, which still display
no sure and special signature.
Toothless and fat, they keep the oval form of sleep.
This plant would like to grow, and yet be embryo, increase
and yet escape the doom of taking shape.
Be vaguely vast and climb to the tip end of time
with all of space to fill, like boundless Yggdrasil
that has the stars for fruit.
But something at the root, more urgent than that urge,
bids two true leaves emerge.
And now the plant, resigned to being self-defined
before it can commerce with the great universe,
takes aim at all the sky and starts to ramify."
As I said about the word depletion,
it's nice to rescue words from abuse or from numb use.
I suppose that word ramify is a committee man's word now,
isn't it?
And it vaguely means get complicated.
The whole sense of branching is gone from it,
as it's commonly used.
Every time I read this poem now, I
think of my more distressed students
who come to me to talk about the way they
feel on the threshold of what we used to call life.
You left college and you entered life.
A lot of them--
a lot of them feel this way.
This plant would like to grow and yet be embryo, increase
and yet escape the doom of taking shape.
I'm not making fun of anybody.
I'm quite sympathetic to that sort of distress.