An April bouquet

Is there a string that ties it together?

A collage built around a Warren Craghead postcard drawing

Hey y’all,

Suddenly it’s April. Let’s start with some Edna St. Vincent Millay:

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Phew!

A collage from 2001

In spring, I like to think about The Fool. In the tarot deck, The Fool represents the beginning of something. As Kim Addonizio puts it the poem “Onset,” 

it’s spring / and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

One thing I never noticed about The Fool in the Rider—Waite deck is that he has a little white dog by his side! This detail gives me the goosebumps, because we drove out to Bastrop this weekend to visit some friends who rescued two puppies from the same litter — one black, one white. Our friends are keeping the black one, we’re considering the white one.

It was a pleasant trip out to the country and back. I grew up in the country wanting to be a city kid. My boys are city kids. It was fun to see them out in the sticks, chucking rocks into a pond.

I made a little two-hour playlist full of our favorite music for us to listen to on the way out and back. You can listen to it on Spotify:

I made another mix last week, an actual cassette mixtape. It began when I read novelist Elizabeth McCracken’s latest dispatch from Barton Springs pool here in Austin. She titled it “One Rich Man in Ten,” which is a line from the country song, “A Satisfied Mind”:

How many times have you heard someone say
‘If I had his money I'd do things my way’
But little they know
It's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
with a satisfied mind. 

One of the song’s writers, Joe “Red” Hayes, explained its origin in an interview:

The song came from my mother. Everything in the song are things I heard her say over the years. I put a lot of thought into the song before I came up with the title. One day my father-in-law asked me who I thought the richest man in the world was, and I mentioned some names. He said, 'You're wrong; it is the man with a satisfied mind.

This reminded me of a recent missive from John Higgs:

When you become extremely rich, you become isolated. You will be surrounded by people, but they will not be equals or peers who will talk frankly and honestly with you. They will only be there because of the money and if the money vanishes, so will they. You will be, essentially, alone with your staff and the constant buzz of people attempting to get something from you. You will trust no-one, feel no loyalty, and avoid facing what you have lost. On paper billionaires are rich, but in practice they are some of the poorest people alive.

I got really into with Porter Wagoner’s version of the song, which has a spare backing track and a steel guitar, probably played by Don Warden. I’ve been listening to so much dub reggae recently that I wanted to hear the track dripping with reverb and delay, so I made my own dub version of the song to start the tape: