It’s February, and not yet time for the birds and bees, perhaps (at least not in my neck of the woods here in Northern Vermont, where we just received another 2 feet of snow last night, and still snowing — enough to keep our bulbs and buzzing asleep for a good while longer still).
But no matter the inclement weather, in northern climes February is the beginning of mating season for the red fox (Scientific Name: Vulpes Vulpes – the foxiest of foxes). This seems like such a lovely harbinger of spring, long before the tree-songs or any hope of green — a flash of valentine across the white landscape.
“switch them to sleep now
the flying foxes swarm out
great it’s flurry time”(Anselm Hollo, from “5 & 7 & 5“)
While in warmer waters, a friend sends news of wilder loves — the squid are also mating.
“[For] the Southern California population of the market squid, [it is] that special time of year when giant underwater orgies are followed by immediate death.”
(Miriam Goldstein, “Motion in the Ocean,” Slate Magazine)
We might see this as another harbinger of spring — evoking the season’s more tentacled, multitudinous, and confusing proclivities. And tangled as it is with thoughts of imminent demise (for the squid, this love, this moment), their mating frenzy seems to urge us to action. To the Squids, to Make Much of Time:
“Gather ye squiddies while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same squid that swims to-day
To-morrow will be dying.”(Forgive me, Robert Herrick)
But one of my favorite poems of love and squid, science and spring is Katherine Larson’s “Love at Thirty-two Degrees.” Larson’s poem begins as the speaker, a scientist, is dissecting a squid as spring is in full bloom, “the late acacia tossing its pollen / across the black of the lab bench.” Throughout the poem there is a pleasurable tension between the distancing coolness of the observing mind and the heat of human passions – the lab and the Arizona desert – an astronomer’s telescope trained on “furious, fuming stars” and the astronomer’s wife asleep in their bed.
Yet it is the scientific eye that brings beauty to the poem’s images, such as when the speaker sees “textures of gills creased like satin,/ suction cups as planets in rows,” leading her to think “of fingertips on my lover’s neck / last June.” The images conflate in the reader’s mind, giving us the stunning strangeness of satiny planets and loving fingertip suctions. Or when we follow the astronomer back to his house after a long night in the observatory:
“So he walks to the house
inflamed by moonlight, & slips
into the bed with his wifeher hair & arms all
in disarraylike fish confused by waves.”
For those of us still in snow and ice this February, not quite ready to believe it’s almost spring — who have not yet seen a narrow-faced fox on the search for another, or a light-flooded ocean teaming with squid — maybe a little observation and cold wonder are enough to start.
“… Amazing, hearts.
This brachial heart. After class,
I stole one from the formaldehyde
& watched it bloom in my bathroom sink
between cubes of ice.”