Spring Cleaning

Spring brings the ever-popular Spring Cleaning Activities. For example, it’s the one time a year the baseboards actually get wiped down, not just a quick dusting. But any sort of organizational or renovation/redecorating or cleaning project is also bound to bring up things from the past. Ideas, projects, memories either forgotten or, in some cases, that you would rather have not recalled. Today’s poem touches on those less-than-pleasant things that get brought up.

Spring Cleaning

tossing out, erasing, dusting off,
hopes shot, too gone to pretend,

plans awrack with premature
closure, and worst, admitting

what would now never be;
easier not to have planted those bulbs;

and time—thief haggard time—
was only good for settling motes

Awrack?

Okay, awrack is not a terribly common word. It is archaic. But it means exactly like what you probably think it means: something is wrecked, is in ruins, as you can see at this link. 

Is it just poets that want to put these out-of-work words into their creation? Maybe. But whether it is the newest slang or the oldest, most archaic saying, words are all we have to work with. Sometimes you find a good word, an interesting word, and just want to work it in somewhere. I imagine that mosaic artists feel the same way when they find just the right bit of glass or stone.

Whether the mosaic is ancient — like this fragment of a Roman floor:

 Or more modern, like this stained-glass Tiffany window:

Or whether it is a poem made of words, or a book made of poems, all these little things add up. Like the dust motes (unfortunately) also add up.

By the way, Cleveland Museum of Art, like many museums nowadays, has a lot of art available online under their open access policy, which is to say, Creative Commons Zero/CC0. When you download something that they have made available in the public domain, they also make the caption available to you–see the two art examples above. You can search their online collection at this link. It’s loads of fun.