March Poem

I am Charles Baudelaire.

There is a noticeable shift not strictly represented by ambient temperature, more in the light and air, how people look at you when you're walking around, a split second longer smile, and, on your part, a crawling exploratory randiness for legs and ass, not even necessarily revealed (it is still cold after all), that announces the possibility of Spring. This takes place at a unique and different time in every place over the entire surface of the Earth.

It's not at all possible, and then it shifts to being so; this is how it will always happen, though we dither on whether to leave the heaters on or wear another layer under our jacket for some time still. It's incomplete, but this joy of Spring, coming to you in your particular place and time, can arrive like a great terror.

Every bridge or ceiling could fall in on you, every car could run you down. To want to live again provokes fear of dying where once you may have worked to gain total peace with it. Now, at every temporarily intolerable situation, the voice that says, inside, "now death? maybe death?" is met with urgency rather than gently rebuked, again and again, like an impatient child. There are some springs so great you never recover from.