For April — Something… Different.

Yes. . . it is now. . . as of moments ago -- April. And so I offer a poem from long ago -- one that. . . resonates, even all these years on.

“Our April Letter”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is April again. Roller skates rain slowly
down the street
Your voice far away on the phone
Once I would have jumped like a clown
through a hoop—
but
“Then the area of infection
has increased? …oh …What can I expect
after all—I’ve had worse
shocks.
Anyhow, I know and that’s
something.” (Like hell it is, but
it’s what you say to an X-ray
doctor.)
Then the past whispering faint
now on another phone:
“Is there any change?”
“Little or no change”
“I see”
The roller skates rain down the
streets,
The black cars shine between the
leaves,
Your voice far away:
“I am going with my daughter to the
country.
My husband left today. . . No he knows
nothing.”
“Good”.

I have asked a lot of my
emotions—one hundred and
twenty stories, The price was
high, right up with Kipling,
because there was one little drop
of something not blood, not a
tear, not my seed, but me more
intimately than these, in every
story, it was the extra I had. Now
it has gone and I am just like you
now.
Once the phial was full—here is
the bottle it came in.
Hold on there’s a drop left there.
. . No, it was just the way the
light fell
But your voice on the telephone.
If I hadn’t abused words so what
you said might have meant
something.

But one hundred and twenty
stories
April evening spreads over
everything, the purple blur left
by a child who has used the
whole paint-box.

Excellent -- and perhaps not so stale, afterall.

नमस्ते