The season's first crocus adorns the Library Bed, outside the south-facing dining room window. Today will be cool but sunny, and I am hoping that other blooms will grace the afternoon, here and there, in the grey-brown gardens.

Yesterday I ran errands and cleaned floors. Today I'll be back at my desk: editing, prepping for my Friday class, prepping for my Sunday class, working on a poem draft. The weather looks bad for Thursday, and I am trying not to perseverate on the driving conditions. But of course this is Maine in March. What else should I expect?

But back to the poem draft. I brought it to my workshop group last night, and it garnered intriguing comments that I'm eager to muck around in. Right now the piece is fluttering in an imagined European city, in an imagined past, amid an imagined situation of strife and distress, with imagined trees and an imagined woman and an imagined speaker. Each of these elements feels like a portal into an as-yet unimagined something else. For me, as the writer-in-process, the draft is in a state of vibrating expectancy. And, very interestingly, that state also came across to the readers . . . a sense of humming possibility. I found this exciting: to know that even at an early stage a poem can throw out such tendrils.