Four passages I read this morning. Meanwhile the snow fell.

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?

from A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.

from Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionecso (trans. by Derek Prouse)

Berenger (surfeited and pretty weary): How do I know, then? Perhaps [the rhinoceros has] been hiding under a stone? . . . Or maybe it's been nesting on some withered branch?

from Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy by Sun Ra

Proper evaluation of words and letters in their phonetic and associated sense can bring the peoples of the earth into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom.

For three days now, our trees have been coated with ice. Even yesterday's noon sunshine did no more than to lightly melt the surface so that now, on this cold morning, tiny icicles tremble on every twig and needle. It's as if some giant has sprinkled the forest with handful after handful of shiny porcupine quills.

The week moves along apace. I ought to be starting a few onion and leek seeds, but I haven't yet. I don't feel at all spring-like, though the sunlight does. I feel like a person who trudges up and down the icy paths, trying not to break her ankle in the frozen sinkholes, hoping that the hay and the firewood hold out for a few more weeks and that the chicken house won't fill up with sleety floodwater. March is the cruelest month.

Sorry about no letter yesterday. Our Internet was dead, which no doubt pissed off all the Harmony school kids who had intended to spend their snow day watching YouTube videos. But surprisingly, given the amount of sleet we received and the glum condition of the trees in my yard, we never lost power, so I was forced to edit all day instead of mooning around the house with a book while trying to avoid playing Monopoly.

One interesting thing did happen during the sleet storm: I received a rejection letter that informed me I'd been a finalist for a semester-long teaching-poet-in-residence position at a small college in the south. Now, as you know, I don't have any graduate degrees and never will, which means that most colleges automatically disqualify me for such positions. Still, it's my habit to apply for fellowships, etc., that don't require me to pay an application fee, which was the case here. I figure that applying for stuff is good practice, and it makes me feel like I'm trying to be financially intelligent, and, plus, you never know who has a soft spot for poetry collections with demolition-derby cars on their covers. Nonetheless, I was bemused to learn that I'd been a finalist for this job. Either the search committee members didn't read my resume very carefully, or this school has decided that an MFA doesn't necessarily equal a writer who can teach. An intriguing development, don't you think?

I am no longer driving through Route 95 construction sites in the rainy midnight black.

Soundtrack for rainy midnight driving: Pablo Casals, Ann Peebles, Yo La Tengo, and a surprisingly good late-night show on oldies radio about an R&B group called the Du-Droppers. (Best song: response tune to "Sixty-Minute Man" called "Can't Do Sixty No More." Ah, double entendre. You never grow old.)

I slept in my bed with the fervor of two logs and got up late and still haven't done chores.

The dog wanted to stay up kissing till dawn. But I said no.

This will be a short post because I'm tired and headachy, again, and am meanwhile girding my loins for a long drive to Massachusetts and back . . . though of course I'm excited to see Tom's show and the various friends and relations who will be there to enjoy him and it. Probably the headache will be gone by then, as will the residue of the hours I spent last night semi-asleep on the couch, where I dreamed the ominous and shadowy plot twists of an unmemorable drama. I seem to recall that I wore gray and was either filled with foreboding or calmly shrugging off disbelief at having to substitute a piece of string for my car's steering wheel. I did not care for the preponderance of menacing invisible people who were lurking in that underlit castle ballroom, nor did I understand why the homeowners had wallpapered over all their fireplaces and then sloppily painted the paper in various bright toddler colors. But at least I didn't have to go back to high school and retake the 1982 math test I'd forgotten to turn in. Nor did I recollect that I was married to my junior prom date. So I suppose I should be grateful.

Welcome to March. This morning it's 12 below zero, with rain forecast for tomorrow night. Don't even try to explain this to me.

On the docket today, teenage driving test. As a result, hardly any breakfast was consumed. Poor boy. He's already failed test number 1, so both his pessimism and his parallel-parking nerves are cranked up to high.

So I'm copying out this little poem for my boy, which he won't read. But that's fine. Poems are for the people who need them. The poet, John Clare (1793-1864), has long been fixed with the label Minor Romantic Poet, which would make an amusing t-shirt or bumper-sticker slogan but is depressing as a sticky monicker for the ages. He was poorly educated and also crazy but was a remarkable observer of the natural world and captured what he saw in odd, compelling, but unevenly crafted poems. The sonnet below is somewhat unusual among 19th-century poems for being written as a single sentence. That's a style you often see in contemporary poems--a breathy rush that works to meld emotion, drama, and observed detail. But it wasn't so common when Clare was writing.

Schoolboys in Winter

John Clare

The schoolboys still their morning rambles take

To neighbouring village school with playing speed,

Loitering with pastimes' leisure till they quake,

Oft looking up the wild geese droves to heed,

Watching the letters which their journeys make,

Or plucking 'awes on which the fieldfares feed,

And hips and sloes--and on each shallow lake

Making glib slides where they like shadows go

Till some fresh pastimes in their minds awake

And off they start anew and hasty blow

Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow,

Then races with their shadows wildly run

That stride, huge giants, o'er the shining snow

In the pale splendour of the winter sun.

In response to yesterday's Jersey post, I received two lovely gifts from readers: (1) a track from a Titus Andronicus album and (2) a Facebook comment from my baby cousin. Merely she wrote: "I remember those memories."

There were six of us in those days: my sister and me, who were the visitors; and my four cousins, who lived in New Jersey. We saw each other two or three times a year, almost always on their turf. I was the oldest, with the rest born rapidly thereafter, in a four-year knot. We loved each other, and played hard, and then grew up to be very different people who rarely see each other, except at weddings and funerals. But when we do see each other, we are still the same six-of-us we have always been.

When our grandmother died, we were in our late teens and twenties. We were the pall bearers for the funeral, all dressed up in uncomfortable shoes and embarrassing ties. After the funeral, without conversation, we trooped back to my aunt's house, went upstairs to one of my cousin's bedrooms, and sat around silently listening to Bruce Springsteen sing "Born in the U.S.A." Nobody bothered to figure out any explanation for this or divulged any pointless chattery opinionating. Talk is not part of our relationship.

When our grandfather died, we were in our thirties and parents ourselves. After the funeral, which we'd spent hushing children, driving cars, escorting elderly relatives, etc., we all trooped back to my aunt's house, took off our uncomfortable shoes, and climbed onto the backyard trampoline. Then we started jumping up and down together, up and down, up and down: six big grownups in funeral clothes, a couple of us starting to bald, bouncing on a trampoline, no doubt looking ridiculous. Who knows why? We certainly don't. And we never plan to talk about it, which is fine with me.

Some things in this world do not require words.