Je fais ce que je peux.
Which is to say, midwinter
and poems are as difficult as flowers.

Nature must prick us with her courages also. —Vita Sackville-West

Mad March dreams
of crane flowers,
birds of paradise.
Strelitzia reginae a deft cut
of bird and flower.

Each day the light diminishes earlier. Colors at dusk are softer with an
opulence they lack under full sun. My eyes strain with the beautiful, painful
squint. My wax flowers, my painter’s palette—a floral encaustic! The papery
papavers are waxy in the frigid morning air, but by noon I can see my fingers
through them, fluttering, a swim of color, red under red.

The wide sweep of today.
Books, flowers, and poetry. Woolgathering and trees.
The wood garden is fervor, a blaze of primula and anemone.
The poplar is passion, viola-resonant, my vibrating footfall.

Busy Lizzie. Wink and blink. Touch-me-not. Impatiens, as ever, a virtue my
dear! Enough of this love your perennials and they will love you back threefold
and several seasons. If you don’t like it, pull it out!

Midges and tetchiness.
A constantly muddy mood.

In my impatience for mail it strikes me that the perianth is a floral envelope
—a cloak concealing the reproductive organs . . .

Peak gust and west of July.

The big-voice flashers.
Wings of metal and night.

“Work shall set you free:” a sensible sentiment:
Marx would agree: Freud would give his assent:
Yet take those words and put them on a sign

I walk into the men’s room at LaGuardia Airport
And the guy standing next to me zipping his fly
Has been dead for thirteen years. I know because
He was one of my professors in graduate school.