When I studied music, back in university, back as I was starting to get into software engineering, I found the dichotomy surrounding repeatability between these two subjects self-evident. There is a special curse for software bugs that are not easily repeated: Heisenbugs[^heisenbugs]. On the other hand, though, there *is* no way to ever perform the same song twice, even for the same singers, the same instrumentalists, the same conductors. Even with the same audience, that time any time must perforce pass in so time-bound an art means that those who hear the song
[^heisenbugs]: From the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which, glibly, states that observation influences measurements. A bug that you cannot reproduce when you are watching simply must share some of these attributes, but they never do.
A day, a week, a month, they all spiral, for any one Sunday is like the previous and the next shall be much the same, but the you who experiences the differing Sundays is different. It is a spiral, proceeding steadfastly onward. A day is a spiral, with each morning much the same as the one before and the one after. A month, following the cycle of the moon
But a year, in particular, spirals up. It carries embedded within it a certain combination of pattern, count, and duration that delineates our lives better than any other cyclical unit of time. Yes, a day is divided into night and day, and those liminal dusks and dawns, but there are *so many of them*. There are so many days in a life, and there are so many in a year that to see the spiral within them does not come as easily.
Our years are delineated by the seasons, though, and the count of them is so few, and the duration long enough that we can run up against that first scent of snow late in the autumn and immediately be kicked down one level of the spiral in our memories. What were we doing the last time we smelled that non-scent? What about the time before?
The power of the cyclical nature of the year is of an importance that draws the heart onward, and that which moves the heart is fair game for poetry. The demarcations for this cycle are the two solstices, with secondary markers at the equinoxes. One finds oneself at the longest night of the year and knows that, from there onwards, it is downhill into summer.[^slopes] One finds oneself at the longest day of the year and before oneself lies cooler times.
Dwale (1979--2021; it/its) was a poet living in the Southern United States. Its work is described as focusing on "altered states of consciousness...poverty, addiction, subjectivity, and the transience of existence" \parencite{dwale}, though to reduce its body of work to any or all of those provides an inexact picture of its writing. This will be touched on in a future section on translation, but needless to say, this paper will focus on its work through the lens of seasonal progression.
The concept of seasons and seasonality is well known within poetry. Exploring that is beyond the scope of this paper.[^abilities] To rely on synecdoche is the best one can manage with a topic so large. To that end, it is worth exploring the poetry of Dwale in such a context.
Spring is commonly associated with newness and beginnings. New growth, new life, new warmth under a new sun. On of green things: of buds greening bare trees, of grass poking through late snows, or perhaps the greenery of gardening as one buys flats of flowers or sows vegetable seeds in the expectation of a harvest later on.
Spring is also associated with growth. It's the time when plants race toward the heavens, or leaves burst out from reanimated branches seemingly overnight. It's the time when you can almost feel your hair growing, or perhaps your dreams swelling in some sympathetic expansion of their own
And, importantly, spring is the season of expectations. The year may start on the first of January, a convenient fiction provided to us by the need to start it *somewhere*, but the expectations for the rest of the year lay dormant in the mind until spring. January first is the time to make the resolutions and the rest of winter is the time to try them out, whether tentatively or with great passion, but the setting of expectations for the year doesn't come until the trauma of the year before has settled into uneasy memory --- or, to use an outdated metaphor, expectations are not set until one stops writing the previous year on the date line of one's checks.
Although it often engaged with expectations in its work, Dwale tackles the subject of spring in the context of beginnings and growth infrequently. One small example of this comes from a short *renga* that took place on Twitter:
While we are verging into the territory of summer, here, as "six months 'til winter" implies, we do get a sense of those expectations settling into place, a feeling of "ah, so the year is going to be like *this*". We also get that sense of growth and greenness with the mention of kudzu, a plant known for its rampant growth, quickly covering all it can in green.
Blackbirds, while often showing up in the context of winter, do occasionally make their presence known in writings that take place during other seasons. Stevens, for example, has
'''
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
\parencite{blackbird}
'''
wherein the thought of a river moving again being of note implies a thaw after a long winter, a world in which this could not possibly be the case without the blackbird also flying. There is a movement thawed, here.
Some of the reason for this paucity of spring-themed poetry is doubtless selection bias: a chapbook titled *Face Down in the Leaves*, with its cover of frost-rimed leaf-litter, is unlikely to contain any paeans to new growth.
Instead, we are presented with works that focus on the fact that spring is also the time for harrowing. It's the time for tearing up that which was old, the earth that was compacted by time and snow, in order to make room for that growth which is going to come soon, whether we like it or not (the topic of unwanted growth is a topic for later in the year[^weeds])
This poem[^choices] in three stanzas is largely in an even meter (sometimes often iambic, sometimes trochaic), though we are presented with two instances in the first lines of the first two stanzas where that pattern is broken ("The seasonal storms": ˘ -- ˘ ˘ and "And here, wrapped in rain": ˘ -- -- ˘ --). When this is taken with the middle verse's assonance and rhymes, we pick up a sense of a stumble mid-gallop. Although the procession of time may be linear, the procession of the seasons may be interrupted by little stalls, little loops back into winter as spring presses on towards summer.
These variations in prosody combined with the third verse being "played straight", such as it were, add up to a sense of growth, of rushing forward when Winter (we assume the oldest soul to be) breathes his last. Here, we might picture that final snow, Spring nudging winter, and realizing that all she has left are her memories of him and her child, Summer, still unborn within her.
This, after all, would be her new beginning. She is no longer bound to winter as she might have been before; there are to be no more of those loops back into snow, she's on her own now, pacing into the grassy flat with its puddles of fish.
We are the seasons that comprise our lives. We are beholden to the passing of our days as they are, yes, but we are also unable to truly truly begin something anew. We are are also comprised of that which came before, and are bound to those around us.[^bound]
Spring is nothing without Winter. Even when it has its own snows, Spring is what it is specifically because it isn't winter. There's that vernal equinox and then suddenly the days are longer than the nights, the world begins anew, and
"As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different --- not merely another --- reading. The same poem cannot be read twice [...] the poem continues in a state of restless change." \parencite[46]{weinberger_paz_2016}
[^slopes]: I am not sold on this metaphor; uphill bears both positive and negative connotations, and it is difficult to say which to apply when. Ask a poet.
[^abilities]: Or perhaps my abilities as an author.
[^weeds]: Or perhaps later in life, when cancer may rear its ugly head. It is proving quite difficult to write about even seasons of new growth and beginnings without death-thoughts creeping in.
[^choices]: The choosing of these four poems to focus on was originally intended to be for a music project. Every now and then, I get it into my head that maybe I can go back to writing music instead of words, and am quickly disabused of the notion when I sit down to do so. These were to be the texts for four art songs in a collection also named "Seasons".
[^deathpoem1]: When its friends learned of its passing, many of us decided to memorialize it with poetry of our own. While I lack the feel, my attempt also incorporated the loss of breath: "Beneath that evening's breeze the sickly sweet / and brazen scent of countless flow'rs / awoke inside of you a darkened sleep [...] What hope have we who wait in life, who sit and pray and watch for your next breath? [...] For we exhaled when you breathed in that breeze / and flowers wreathe your sleeping form." Perhaps it is the cessation of the cyclical nature of breath that brings with it thoughts of death.
[^bound]: After all, I was bound to Dwale; that's why this essay exists. That's why what little poetry I have exists. I could appreciate the music within poetry, but it wasn't until I met Dwale, became bound to it in friendship, that was able to understand poetry better on its own terms.
