The crocuses are gone,

I didn’t see them go. They were here, now they’re not. Instead

The forsythia ensnarls its flames, cool fire, pendent above the smoke   

Of its brown branches.

...

[ . . . ] A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there. Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
Hangs its seed balls out. The apples flower. The pear is past.
Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead. From the train
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower. Is it for miracles
We live? I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”

James Schuyler, "Hymn to Life"

whirlwind

We become more susceptible to, more partial to, the abstract as we get older. This is not because of increased understanding or any onset of wisdom, nor is it the result of diminished intensity. It’s often just the opposite. The particular is too much for us, because it is leaving us.

Is that right? Or is it that the particular is too much for us, because there is too much of it? Who could guess that all the fires and despairs of youth, all those almost intolerable nows, would eventually pile up in a mass of time too obdurate and undifferentiated to be called memory? Or, worse, that some present-day gale of pain or need might cause that mass of losses—for that’s what, at this point, they are—to disperse and go swirling around you with a force that no form, much less a mind, could contain. It can be a relief to release one’s hold on singularity for the sake of a binding truth, even if the truth is only that there can be no such thing. If we can’t salvage the bits of memory and matter that have made us what we are, let us at least acknowledge the whirlwind.

Christian Wiman, "The Drift of the World"