Today, on the first of April, my yard is still covered with snow, though slivers of ground are beginning to appear around trees and foundations. I see no sign that anything is growing, but the sun is shining. Laundry dries on the glassed-in porch. Grocery-store daffodils bloom on my kitchen table. High schoolers run on the snow-packed track, crows flap past with nesting twigs in their beaks, and I've stopped automatically pulling on snow pants every time I step outside.

This morning I had to come up with a paragraph about my poem "Home," from Same Old Story, which will be reprinted later this year in the Portland Press-Herald. I said:

This poem is from a series of diary sonnets that I wrote after spending intense time with Shakespeare's sonnets. The subject is the worst house I ever lived in: a falling-down farmhouse where everything went wrong . . . no water, no insulation, a plague of flies. The situation was frustrating and miserable, but also comic and even romantic. There we were, two people, alone together in a dank and ugly hovel, trying to pretend that we were making a home. And we were.

It's spring. Two friends who think they don't write poems have each just written the first draft of one. Another friend who thinks he is terrified of poetry has started listening to Robert Frost poems while he boils down sap. I had nothing to do with any of this. Something new is in the air.

Spring. It may not be beautiful, or kind. But it's alive, and it's what I wrote about in "Home."

When we left, a flat sunrise was threatening snow.
But the frost heaves were deep. We had to drive slow.