response poem for wide sargasso sea [it's really long]

It’s April, and the blossoms are being put out all around us like calves’ tongues. Who knows what kind of strangeness is in them? We shouldn’t forget that, in order to spread out and photosynthesize, the minute new leaves have to break open the waxy scales that shut them in all winter, like hands cupped tightly over a flame. The little blossoms, severed by winds, fragrant, even a little phosphorescent in the sodium lamps that burn down by the river all night, lap at the air and at our hands, desirous of something as strange and terrible and transitory as they. It’s April. I read Wide Sargasso Sea to remind me that sitting in the heart of a blossom like a pretty cat on a lap is a kernel of madness, and each stem is like a little bone plucked out of a defenseless animal. What am I? A woman in love? Where do I sit? By the river? What am I, hungry, dreaming of Caribbean seas, of merciless thunders? Here the year droops blackly through its months, sunk low in cold; it’s so prostrate it doesn’t believe in itself, its presence, just like the mad young woman didn’t believe she was in England. Being in love in spring it’s easy to remember how we bewitch each other, we tear into each other’s hearts like a new leaf into its hard containing scales. And what does it mean to love? What’s the difference between love and enchantment? Mr. Rochester never knew the difference, he sat in the rain-gutted house and when he spoke bronze coins fell from his lips, he didn’t know whether he loved her for her money, her hair, and what the blossoms, white as gold-ore, had to say in the matter. We can gut a chicken for obeah, scatter its blood, hope the drops turn to blossoms that nod in a code we can decipher, telling us what our love is, and where our twinned bodies begin and end.