I woke late this morning, late enough so that day was awake before me, blinking and wavering through the panes like a bleary young mother.

Now is the first hour of my first weekend off in what feels like a very long time. My plans are simple: Read. Go outside. Read more. Go outside more. Of course I'll need to stuff in cooking and laundry, firewood and floors, groceries and tidying, but the spacious hours will be mine.

I'm beginning this fine weekend by drinking two cups of coffee instead of one, and not thinking about to-do lists. Still, I'm also feeling uneasy and sad: a poet acquaintance has been diagnosed with colon cancer; and I know, via the experience of one of my dearest friends, that she has a world of suffering ahead. I don't know this poet well, but my thoughts keep radiating toward her, toward her children, as I sit here comfortably, with two days of contentment ahead of me. Fate is so unfair.

Meanwhile, day has pulled herself together. Her bleariness has vanished and now strips of sun paint the side of the neighbor's big house, the indecisive sky is considering blue, and the squirrels are up 'n at 'em, racing along fences, leaping branch to branch, quarreling over last season's maple seeds.

In a few minutes I'll get dressed, I'll go outside, I'll breath sharp air, and look for the flower spikes I glimpsed yesterday--the first hyacinth spears, the first snowdrops. Spring peers from behind the winter veil. I hunt for her everywhere. I lift my nose into the wind like a hound.

I'm working on a poem draft that is overwhelming me. I don't think, objectively, that it's a great poem. But on Thursday night it sprang from my pen, nearly fully formed; and after I wrote it down, a tide of exhaustion instantly washed over me, as if I all of my energies had coalesced to make it and now my body was finished. It's strange how muscular a poem can be, how physical its creation. As if the words themselves are immaterial. As if the birth is all.