A POEM FOR SPRING

	April 24, 2002
	Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky recites a springtime verse.

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, former Poet Laureate and NewsHour regular Robert Pinsky considers the downside of spring. ROBERT PINSKY: In springtime, some people grow misty-eyed with allergies to pollen. The poet Lynne McMahon greets the season gladly, but with the recognition of the hay fever sufferer's fate at this coming time of year. Here is Lynne McMahon's poem "Spring." We begin now our interior life, the life of the mind, I'm tempted to say, but      really we're driven in      by the flowering plum, the lilac, the early April greens sending their brilliant toxins to flame and stagger over the delicate      sclera of the eye, to sheet      like tearing silk down the throat swanned in an arch to clear a breathing space, now that breathing's a conscious thing.      We swell and dwindle      on a histamine tide, the bone bowl around a sea that hesitates to finally overtake us, though it drives out      or subsumes nearly everything,      obligations and errands, the small spiny creatures of the day. Not that we're ungrateful      for these walled-in glooms and      filtering machines, the pharmacopeia of everyday life that allows us some measure of perception. We can see      in fact that our debility      is minor, perhaps even a privilege, a god's eye warding off tubercles and metastasis- a seasonal and temporary      strangulation whose recurrence      we can count on as on little else in the world, a little luck choking and stinging its way into our heads      where the welcome lies      disguised as tears.