Fourteen degrees this morning--a warmup of sorts, at least as far as the cat was concerned. He actually asked to go outside and even spent a whole three minutes sitting on the stoop before he changed his mind.

But now he's burrowed back into bed, and I am downstairs alone with the furnace growl and the clock tick and my small cup of coffee and my scattered thoughts.

Yesterday was another all-work-all-the-time day, but slowly, slowly I am scraping away at my tasks. I realize I should start pondering seed orders and garden plans, but I can't quite wrap my mind around ideations of spring yet. In deep cold, even an imagined outdoors feels like the first line of an adventure poem.

Today and tomorrow will be more of the same. I'll get onto my mat, I'll stand at my desk, I'll curl into my couch corner--editing, reading applications, planning classes, prepping for a reading, working on poem drafts. These first few days of the regime are just what we knew they would be--posturing and cruelty. 

I know there is such anguish in you

that you cannot say a single word.

--Anna Akhmatova, from "[The mysterious spring still lay under a spell]" (1917)