#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

First Lady Slipper

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully. . .

Excerpt from E. E. Cummings, Spring Is Like a Perhaps Hand

After last week’s light sleeps this week’s deep sleeps and strange, cinematic dreams, and I wake later than usual, groggy. The house soon deserted. Everyone off to work or school. Me and the dogs loving the stillness. The day ahead, ours. We walk and it’s cloudy overheard, the river is also still and unenthusiastic. But the trees are brightly blossomed. Suzi, uncharacteristically, crosses the trestle bridge. She never chooses that on her own! I follow her, but Charlie won’t follow us, so I coax her from the other river bank to return with me. Charlie breathes a sign of relief. I am excited to look down and see the light green felt of the lady slipper hips in the leaf matter. First sighting of the season. I text my daughter––I have won this year. Perhaps she will be the one to see the first blossom. At home, I strike right in to a revision. I need a poem for tonight and my impulse is to open this one that I haven’t touched in a year. It was the right choice; it’s in very good shape. I see what to do and do it. Tonight it is well received. I’m almost there. It’s part of a new collection and there are a few more that I haven’t touched in a year that I think are ready for my return. The quiet of the house was quite nourishing to me and my process today, to getting things done that needed to be done. Not a single interruption: I could go my own way in my own time.