Spring is like a perhaps hand
 (which comes carefully
 out of Nowhere)arranging
 a window,into which people look(while
 people stare
 arranging and changing placing
 carefully there a strange
 thing and a known thing here)and

 changing everything carefully

 spring is like a perhaps
 Hand in a window
 (carefully to
 and from moving New and
 Old things,while
 people stare carefully
 moving a perhaps
 fraction of flower here placing
 an inch of air there)and

 without breaking anything.

We have this neighbor who loves to garden. Her whole front yard is planted with bulbs and other herbaceous perennials but, for the most part, the plot is brown in winter. But starting in late February, as I drive past her house, I see her stooped over the earth from time to time.

This E. E. Cummings poem so reminds me of what takes place in her garden plot as I drive by her house each day when I leave the development. These are delicate changes in her little plot, none dramatic, but a plant is up one day, flowering the next without any dramatic fanfare; a bed is barren one day but covered with small green shoots the next. The neighbor’s hand, arranging and rearrranging the plants for the year, in small increments, mostly unseen (she works out of her home, is not in the garden most times I pass, but leaves evidence of her work - a peach basket here, gardening stool there, a pile of weeds… gone the next day) is captured precisely in this poem.

She moves new things and old in and out of garden spots. Not all at once, but you notice slight movements in plant blooming. Changes are slight but quick. “How did that clump get there?” I ask one day. The clump is in blossom the next!

‘a fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there) and without breaking anything.’

Cummings captures the joy of incremental, but inexorable growth that happens each Spring in this small poem. I like to think my neighbor Ruth is Spring’s hand in the window…

Enjoy!

Mike Andrews