Spring

Spring promulgates despair.  The dishonest garden blooms with luminous colors that we have imagined, in dreams.  These subtle perfumes--through the tenacious curiosity and genius of the netted system of roots--are communicated by the dead.  They rise like smoke out of the flowers, remembering the lavender, the gardenia, the lemon verbena that were the summation of ladies here long buried.  

You have a fascination for the fecundity of this moist landscape, this bog, this swamp.  You are from the desert.  You worship the worm for breaking sod; but on THIS sodden plain, life is not precious.  Here, in these green mansions the worms writhe in their orgy.  They devour tubers as easily as they do the tubercular lungs of that whole generation.  You feign surprise.  Your naked toes feel good.  The cold, cold ground.