the blood of spring
The early spring sun is beginning to pierce the crepuscular gloom of the coastal winter, caressing the sleeping forest awake into yet another iteration of its annual orgy of photosynthesis. The blood of mighty trees has started to course again, awakening their buds into a tentative, glistening turgidity. Torpid frogs, aroused from their frosty beds, begin to croak. Crocuses the colour of ear wax explode from the monochromatic detritus, doggedly tracking the ever strengthening scent of sun with relentless cybernetic petals. Days are now longer, the shadows are shorter and everything is besotted with the anticipation of the great growing that is to come.
Six days into The Year of the Rooster, a magnificent rough-legged hawk screamed out of the reddening canopy of alders, exploding my favourite cockerel into a snowy supernova of feathers. The rooster’s twisted, arrested corpse lay at the point of impact, a neat incision in the breast, where his living, bleeding heart had been plucked out and subsumed into the hawk’s great gullet -still beating, no doubt, with unmet aspirations.
As we arrived, in media res, the hunter grudgingly abandoned his kill, flapping languidly up to a snag. He glared down at us with piercing, nictitating eyes, full of disdain at the maudlin banality of our sentiment -yet keenly alert to our tiniest movements, eager for a chance to gorge again on the sweet, sweet meat. Reading, the unlooked-for entrails, it would be easy to lapse into the platitudes of the armchair soothsayer, bemoaning what would seem, on the face of it, to be a bad omen. Yes the cockerel, that hopeful harbinger of the coming year had been struck down. But how beautifully he was in his death -our reassurance that the wild and seething rain forest spring was here again.
In a vast hydrodynamic reciprocal to the melting of the snow, the sweet sap surges up through countless throbbing columns of xylem, preparing the crowns of the towering big-leaf maples for their upcoming eruption of verdure. Like a hungry snow leech drawn to the plump, blood-filled leg of a hapless bather, I drill small holes into the trees’ rough bark and bleed away some of the copious, yet highly diluted, nectar. As I boil it down relentlessly, the inside of my house becomes a steaming Carboniferous swamp and I slither through the kitchen dreaming of the great anvil-headed salamanders that spawned our forefathers, toasting all biology with a cup of its precious, brown sweetness. After all, sugar is energy and (to quote William Blake), “Energy is Eternal Delight.”
sucking the sap of the big-leaf maple
