Tom has been teasing me about my pile of mud. I retorted that I can spend my $100 on what I like: teach poetry, buy mud, what's unreasonable about that? And it's very fine mud, the best sort of mud. I bought 2 cubic yards of it--enough to fill three big garden boxes, with leftovers to spread around as pancake makeup in the yard desert. I'm quite pleased with my mud, though moving it is heavy work . . . say, the sort of work you might pay $100 to do in a gym.

Today, finally, we should get some sunshine. Most of the snow glop has melted, but barely. Plants, soil, air are dank and stiff, all in waiting for a bit of warmth, all of them ready to soften and unfold. Maybe I'll get a load of laundry on the lines this morning. Maybe, mid-morning, I'll step on to the front stoop and see a blur of green grass knitting into last year's dry thatch.

I dreamed last night that I was teaching a class of young men in a prison, and we were all laughing and happy about what we were writing, and I kept asking myself, How is it that this is going so well? What mistakes am I not making? What mistakes am I about to make? Somehow, in the same dream, I also knew that a press had accepted my current poetry manuscript. So there were these two things that were going really well: a difficult teaching situation and getting published. It was an anti-anxiety dream, I guess. But why would I have it? That kind of dream doesn't replicate facts any more than an anxiety dream does. Perhaps my sleep-brain was encouraging me . . . though mostly, like a cat, my sleep-brain doesn't feel the need to be nice. It tends to rely on scratching, biting, and ignoring me. I wonder what came over it. Maybe I changed its food or something.