Thinking of mussel chowder for dinner tonight. Baby mesclun, arugula, and spinach are ready to pick in the greenhouse. The rhubarb is coming along, and the dandelion greens are almost too big to harvest. Chives and scallions are beautiful; so is the lovage. Came home from Beloit yesterday to fiddleheads in olive oil and lemon. My cup runneth over, after a winter of carrots and storage onions.

I'm going to plant beets and cilantro this afternoon. My peas are up, and the hen has shown no interest in destroying the patch. With luck, I'll be done editing by the end of the week and can go back to writing. I would so like to write again.

Here's a bit from the forthcoming CavanKerry collection. It incorporates all twenty words from one of my son's second-grade spelling lists (or maybe it was third grade). Let's call it a farewell-to-winter poem.

Trouble

Dawn Potter

From the barren hills a battery of men

marched and stumbled onto the muddy plain,

but the wolves, impatient for spring, mistook them

for scrawny oxen and devoured them. Now the women,

no longer the wives of heroes, hoard turnips and spoiled loaves.

Mice gnaw the empty shelves, grind their yellow teeth

against the split handles of knives and hatchets.

Children launch greening potatoes at the anxious

cattle; they throttle the last angry geese. Pale sheep wander

the bleak forest like ragged deer, tearing twigs and blackened

leaves from the stunted oaks. A sallow pair of lambs huddles

by the half-thawed pool, where a single ancient fish lives out

his cloudy hours, calm, unfixed, a pitcher of silver and lead.

At dusk he drifts into the net.