A wild cloud-sky glimmers up from the cove, unravels over the sleeping neighborhood. As far as I can tell, only the cat and I are awake to watch this eerie marvel, and the cat is indifferent. He is far more interested in the smell of the air--cold, thick; the odor of thaw, and of storm to come.

Early morning in the little northern city by the sea. The first crocuses are opening, dabs of bright poking up from the dead leaves. The tides quiver beneath solitary loons dipping and diving along the island shores. Upland, in the maples, a nuthatch beeps. A cardinal cries, cheer cheer cheer. 

And now a scrum of gulls elbows up from the marshlands, shrieking and bobbing at one another, then spreading suddenly into elegant formation. Above the neighborhood they soar like angels shouting the news.

What story should I tell? What about the tiny boy in yellow rain boots, quivering with excitement as a train passes by? What about the old dog, nose buried in a tuft of weeds?

In my house, the kitchen clock ticks. The cat clumps up the stairs, eager to climb back into bed. The wild cloud-sky has metamorphosed into flat gray morning.

The weekend looms, unplanned, undemanding. I have to buy groceries, but that's my only real obligation. Maybe I'll rake out some garden beds. Maybe I'll work on a poem. Nobody needs me. I have to invent the need in myself.

* * *

Self

 

The world is blood-hot and personal

Dawn says, with its blood-flush.

 

—Sylvia Plath, “Totem”

 

Dawn Potter

Look at this early-morning flock

of scraggly titmice, five or six birdlets hen-flocked

 

along the bare branches, feathers blown

inside out in the March wind, even crests blown

 

sideways, but every dime-weight body as firm on its feet

as Ozymandias. Their world is two feet

 

clinging to a twig, blood

racing against cold, blood

 

skittering in pinprick veins. The world is personal,

dawn says. And what love-scalded person

 

would think otherwise, what battered bird

would choose any fate other than bird?

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]