Vox Populi has already published my brand-new poem, "Concord Street Hymn." Maybe I should have let it sit before submitting, but I was excited about spring, and about writing, and so off it went. I've been reading about Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, which he wrote in an unedited burst . . . an impossible achievement that is also occasionally familiar to a non-godlike poet such as I am. Every once in a while the work leaps out, fully formed, bristling with serpents and spears. I don't dare touch it, for fear it would kill me. My manuscript A Month in Summer was that kind of birth.

"Concord Street Hymn" also came quickly, though it was a gentler arrival, one that permitted some tinkering. Still, beginning to end, it was what it was, and preferred to stay that way.

Yesterday I filled plant pots with soil and sowed them with nasturtium seeds. I spread cosmos seeds in the blank areas among the perennials.  I don't know how easy it will be to get bedding flowers this year: pansies and marigolds and such. But nasturtiums are flowing; cosmos are tall; both are dependable and easy to grow. In the back gardens I raked out thousands of pushy maple seedlings and noticed that the perennial slips my mother had given me last spring are coming up strong: lady's mantle, bloodroot, ferns. The vacant lot is beginning to vanish. In the meantime, Tom worked all day on the wooden forms for his concrete fire pit. Today, I think, he might be ready to start pouring concrete, if the rain holds off.

I haven't decided what to make for dinner. I've got some cod in the freezer; also pork chops and ground beef and bacon and tofu and a whole chicken. I'll figure out something. I need to bake bread today, and vacuum, and fetch home a small grocery order: cooking oil and vanilla extract, from a restaurant that's selling off its supplies.

I dreamed last night that I was hosting the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching at my own house, which was also a sheep farm, and a strange undecorated cavern that bore some resemblance to an abandoned basement pub, and participants were sitting around in various peculiar rooms looking exhausted and refusing to talk about poetry, and I kept wondering when I could leave them alone and go to bed . . . though of course in real life I was in bed and ostensibly asleep.

Administrator anxiety dream: "why won't people do anything?"