7 Ways to Welcome Spring in Brooklyn
Revel in Weather-Appropriate Poetry
It’s all well and good to hole up in your bedroom with a bottle of red wine and the poetry of Wallace Stevens or Mayakovsky when it’s winter, but you can’t exactly do that in the spring. It just wouldn’t feel right. And drinking and reading poetry in bed are all about feeling right. But you know what? That’s fine. Because there’s other drinking/poet pairings that are just made for warmer weather. Springtime lends itself to sitting outside, in the sun that’s not too hot yet, and drinking something fizzy containing gin (incidentally, now’s not a bad time to switch from brown liquor to clear) and reading this Neruda poem. Spring is the time of being stuck between the equinox and the solstice, after all. It’s a terrible, terrible place to be, but at least there’s Pablo to help get you through.
Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it – our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal –
Over the sky’s hot rim,
The day’s last breath in our sails.
Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.
Pablo Neruda