A Deep River Year
February 26, 2014

When I woke up yesterday morning, the dream was still fresh.  I carried it with me into the day, and even now the memory of it lingers.   Perhaps it is the color of the irises, blue as a late spring morning, that filled my waking vision.    They were everywhere, in bunches and mounds, surrounding a friend who was suffering a grave illness.   The illness was there, too, in my dream, perhaps an illness unto death.   But those glorious blue flowers seem to be a sign of some hopefulness, some beatific presence in the midst of the doom.

Something like this happens every year, in late winter.   These frigid, colorless days, end on end, create a kind of sensory deprivation.   I begin dreaming in technicolor.  Even awake, I imagine the world in hues of May:   great clusters of purple lilacs filling the air with their heady scent;  huge peonies unfolding, glowing pink in morning light; golden sundrops waving in the breeze;  and the unmatchable blue of those Siberian irises.    I could swim in it.    Perhaps the thing I feel is the allure of life itself, poised and prepared to erupt someday, but for the moment invisible beneath the layers of granular ice and grit that still cover our landscape.

At the end of the day yesterday, I came home and smiled at the oil painting hanging in our front hall, an image of an old Midwestern farmer standing in a bed of irises, his house a faint dream of a thing behind him.   It was painted by a west coast artist, Marilyn Lowe, and entitled "Another Spring."  There is a sadness in the farmer's face,  and I wonder if it is because he is alone amid such beauty.   Or perhaps the house in the background is his dream--a yearning for home, for a place of belonging, an assurance that love is just as real as those blue irises. 

Blue Irises

Hungry for warmth, for life,
I dream color
into this barren season
which is bereft of it.
Here and there
the snow pulls back
from the edges of roads,
and something resembling green
hints at life.
I look hard, wait for a brave
green tip or bud to appear.
I lean toward Spring.
And at the edges of sorrow,
amid the dull weariness of pain
or regret,
I try to remember
a day of irises,
a glorious tapestry in blue,
bright as heaven,
and hope a little.

-Timothy Haut, February 26, 2014