Signs, Spring
Liz Ahl
The deeds and strange prophecies must make a pattern yet to be understood.
— the Chorus, Oedipus Rex
Today in Intro to Lit, we reread the first scene
of Oedipus Rex, on the lookout now for the signs,
the references to blindness, sight, prophecy,
the irresistable glitter of impending wretchedness.
We find it all, grow fat on its foreboding.
Outside, a thick veil of snow whites out
our mountain view, coating the just-green late April grass.
Bare-skinned daffodils drowse beneath white
bonnets I want to gently knock off.
One week ago, record-breaking highs, ninety,
sweating in this room when we read for the first time
all the great king’s threats of exile and banishment,
his moody pronouncements, his paranoid interrogations.
Now we reach the end, the graceless entrances
and exits of messengers with their outrageous details:
eyeballs gouged out, blood on the beard, and the chorus
moaning to Apollo, to anyone who’ll listen. I can’t
help but think of this one week’s strange arc:
start with the heat wave, freakish and extreme; then
an earthquake rattles us awake from two states away;
then, unburying the garden in the strange sun,
and in a shovelful of dirt, up comes one stunned toad,
shaken from hibernation. Did I fail to mention
the rare planetary alignment, the visible aurora borealis,
the spring flood? So of course, today, it snows
and I wonder about signs and meanings, wonder if
next a plague of blackflies will descend, or if
the Pemigewassett will run red all the way down
to the Merrimack. I wonder about the lilies,
green and naked, getting snowed on; I wonder
about the toad, what he knew and when he knew it,
whom he might have told, or what he might have
done, what any of us are supposed to do about any of it.
I hope he found warm harbor again in the soil
we ravaged with our rakes and trowels,
stupidly dazzled by the sunshine, blind to what
the toad surely knew, little soothsayer,
squinting and pissed off when we unearthed him
in our premature greed to know again the whole story
of rich summer earth between our fingernails.
Liz Ahl has had work in The American Voice, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review and many other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire.