Yesterday we worked a half day, and after lunch we northerners were escorted to the Ringling Museum--really a complex of museums and performance venues that includes circus displays, art collections, a park, and John Ringling's Venetian-style palazzo jutting into Sarasota Bay.

It's March but already the Florida rose gardens are in bloom, and big birds stand around dozily in the sunshine, indifferent to the people who bustle past.

This evening three of us fly back to Portland (Gretch is staying for a few more days of work on another project), and then tomorrow I'll be on the road to Bangor . . . a wholly different landscape and setting, but still the link of poems and performance. Yesterday's coolish temperatures were a reminder of that shift, yet the place somehow encourages forgetfulness.

We stood on the terrace behind Ringling's mansion, where yachts used to sail in for parties in the 1920s. A steady wind blew in from the gulf, and the sea shimmered romantically, though the steps down to the water were a wreck of rubble from Hurricane Milton.

"The sunsets are famous here." I've overheard more than one person make some version of this comment. And indeed they are beautiful. But maybe I am too attuned to elegy.