rejectomorph | Day Late

The sneezing bush is about to bloom. I see the clusters of tiny buds that will soon be clusters of tiny, bee-swarmed flowers spewing pollen. The daffodils and marigolds and irises already decorating the yard are placid things, few in number and inoffensive, but this large bush becomes such a trembling mass of oversexed flowers that I don't dare brush against it once it blooms, or pass nearby when even a slight a breeze excites it. It's one saving grace is that during the early stages of blooming it emits a pleasant, mildly sweet perfume. I find the compensation insufficient, though, especially since the smell soon takes on a slightly rotten tinge.

Not until the mulberry and pine and the field grasses begin spewing pollen will there be any plant to compare with this one for setting me to sneezing. With luck we'll get enough rain to dampen its plantly ardor for the next couple of weeks, until its dustiest phase has passed, but a couple of warm days will bring me nasal paroxysms, and that is the more likely event. Al this early blooming could make March this year's cruelest month, at least for me. I'd best lay in a supply of tissues.

Yesterday was a particularly exhausting shopping day. I ended up falling asleep fairly early in the evening, and thus wrote no entry. When I woke near midnight my brain was enveloped in cobwebs, and all I wanted to do was watch television. Too bad nothing interesting was on. I've completely forgotten what I watched.

Sunday Verse

The Deciduous Trees

by William Meredith

A tree is no more leaves than a person days.
Take color, take fire, take flight,
Shut of the clutter of leaves,
You see what tensions are rife
All year inside the trees,
All built, like bridges, of stress.

Autumned at heart, where no one is evergreen,
The gaunt reach of the man
Is, if not stress, yet known
Once for himself, at least once seen.
And before a filament of green
Makes seemly cover for that discovery,
there is all winter to clack through:
Twigs in the wind, splayed to a gray sky,
The shape of the man springs up
A wraith at a field's corner
To the swaddled passer-by.