Saturday morning. The hands on the clock hover just before 6 a.m., and the gray hour is thick with fog. Yesterday was slow rain, chill and damp, and the weekend will likely be more of the same--if not actual rain at every moment, its imminence. Gradually the soil loosens, mud clots my shoes, yellow spikes green and become tulip leaves, daffodil leaves. Buds swell in the hearts of the hyacinths. The stems of the lenten roses rise from their winter sleep. The twigs of the Japanese maple glow red with life. My tiny homestead yawns and open its eyes under the drizzle.

On the ides of March, I bent over in the rain and harvested my first spring greens for dinner: a handful of tender infant kale, newly sprouted from wintered-over stalks; a slim bouquet of chives and green-onion stalks. Now, this morning, when I open the door to let the cat in, I hear cardinal song spilling into the blurry darkness . . . the notes are tart and sudden, unmusical, urgent. Early spring is a cut lemon, brisk and sharp and sour.

Yesterday I had a late-day zoom visit with Teresa, Jeannie, and Maudelle, and we talked about Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights; Delle mentioned Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay"; Teresa shared pages from Alice Oswald's "Tithonus"; we wandered into speculations . . . about teaching, about sentences, about cities, about measurement, about time . . . It is lovely to meet with this cohort, to spend two hours or more just letting our four inquisitive minds bump up against one another. I had meant to go out to listen to music with another poet friend, and it would have been equally lovely; but another time, another time. I can't explain, after so many years of intellectual solitude, what it means to have these overlapping circles of creators suddenly become such an intense element of my days. And yet my friends from the north country: we drowned in motherhood together; we clung together in the harsh world of mud and water troubles and too much snow and sleepless babies and hormones and blackflies and scorn. No one will ever replace them in my heart. And yet my friends from college: we roiled in a fire of sex and unruly intelligence, and even today that fire smolders when we look into one another's eyes. And yet my sister: the one who was there from the start, hopping on one foot over the dew-wet stones.