There is No Word

There is no word in the English language to describe that narrow band of time during which the newly opened leaves on the trees are a lighter green, and very small and far apart, which creates an atmosphere of diaphanous, heart-rending beauty—an effect that's compounded by the swells of the early morning air. Yesterday might have been that day, but it was gray and wet and the air never really caught fire.

Today was that day.

In another day or two, the leaves will have matured, grown bigger and darker, still lovely but never again quite so tender, atmospheric, and sweet ... until next year.

Lucky for us, we had no commitments, and we took a walk along Tornado Alley, a semi-wooded bike path following the east bank of Bassett Creek between Theodore Wirth Golf Course and the railroad tracks that head northwest out of downtown through Golden Valley, Robbinsdale, and Brooklyn Park towards Elk River, Monticello, St. Cloud, and Winnipeg.

I don't really know where those tracks go. But the morning was cool and bright; we passed women and men walking their dogs, riding their bikes. We saw three green herons high up in one tree; a broad-winged hawk flew by overhead, and we spotted a solitary sandpiper feeding in a marshy piece of land alongside the creek.  This species migrates alone—hence the name—and breeds in northern Canada. It has a huge eye-ring, which makes it easy to identify. But you don't see them very often.

But what about this heavenly haze in the trees, for which we have no word? (If you can think of one, let me know.) Robert Frost took a crack at it, without much success, I'm afraid.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

 

Wallace Stevens was perhaps considering the same issue more rigorously in this poem:

 

The Motive for Metaphor

 

You like it under the trees in autumn,

Because everything is half dead.

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

             In the same way, you were happy in spring,

With the half colors of quarter-things,

The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,

The single bird, the obscure moon—

 

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

Of things that would never be quite expressed,

Where you yourself were never quite yourself

And did not want nor have to be,

 

 Desiring the exhilarations of changes:

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

The weight of primary noon,

The A B C of being,

 

The ruddy temper, the hammer

Of red and blue, the hard sound—

Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

This poem had an effect on me in college, though I wasn't sure whether the "you" inline one referred to the poet himself, or to someone else, whom the poet was perhaps criticizing. Maybe he was criticizing himself?

In any case, neither poem quite captures the effect. They both refer to its character in abstract terms.

And what about this attempt by Mark Strand?

           The Night Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart

What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself

To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort

Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux

Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting

For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—

The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,

Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there

Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

I guess Strand is heading into unknown regions here, whereas the skein of delicate green leaves is right in front of our eyes. But also, I guess, in our chest. Our heart.

 Photographs can't capture the sensation, either. But I think you know what I'm talking about.