Saturday I had a book signing party for my chapbook, The Museum of Fresh Starts. Some people had ordered it directly from the publisher, and my first thought was to thank them with food and wine. My next thought was to invite people who might

book party centerpiece made from old dictionaries

like to see the book before committing themselves to buying it. Then I asked everyone to bring their spouses, so Doug wouldn’t be the only one. My next thought after that was, what have I done, all these people are not going to fit in my house! This thought determined that we were going to have a non-seated, cocktail party type event, but with wine instead of cocktails. And tea. I’m a big tea drinker.

So my menu was a combination of tea sandwiches and canapes. I made the food; Doug bought the wine.

The hard part was planning the reading. Most poetry readings I’ve been to start with forty minutes of reading, and if there’s a reception it comes after. Forty minutes of reading has always seemed long to me. Even when it’s from one specific book, people aren’t following along with the text – they are listening, and after a while it’s hard to keep it all in your head. Plus, this wasn’t primarily a reading, it was primarily a thank-you party. I wanted it to feel festive, celebratory.

I went out and weeded the garden while I thought about this. With a task like weeding you can assign complicated questions to the underbrain, while the upperbrain pays a more carefree type of attention to sorting out the chickweed from the lamium.

Okay, how about four poems? And how about embedding them right in the middle of the party, with food both before and after? I read three poems from book, the title poem, the cat pantoum, and the last poem, which you can find here.

I ended the reading with a poem not in the book, a poem about Doug, “The Professor’s Nap.” It’s here on my website.

And then we went back to eating and drinking, and a good time was had by all.

glory out front

It seems foolish to be proud of my front yard as June begins. Any idiot can have a beautiful yard in June. The real work is in the backyard, where I have weeded, dug up, and composted the raised beds, and installed my home-grown tomato seedlings. And that’s after Doug replaced a section of chicken wire in the fence, made new supports for the blueberry nets, and replaced the hinges on the cold frame.

I’m also behind getting seeds into the dirt for zinnias and cosmos. I’m told deer won’t eat them, so it must have been the woodchuck that ate mine. True, she didn’t eat the short  groundcover-style zinnias. Just the gorgeous tall ones I wanted for bouquets. The zinnias and cosmos go in behind the fence now.

meanwhile in back

I didn’t get the seeds in for the Jack Be Little pumpkins until today. It kept raining. In the garden store the other day I heard someone say, in the singsong of folk wisdom, “a wet and windy May/is good for corn and hay.” A midwestern mantra. There are plenty of corm and hay fields nearby; I plan to keep an eye on them, and see if that mantra is right.

Hello, I am a crabapple tree. I put on my best crinoline to dance with you, finally, now that we’re well into May. You didn’t know it would take all the way into May? I’m so sorry. I’d have been here sooner, but I was delayed by so many distractions. Playing with unicorns and rainbows. Tying the peonies’ shoelaces together. I wanted toeshoes for myself, but the daffodils ran ahead and bought them all. I got the best dress, though, didn’t I?

Not that winter didn’t have some good points. I loved that fluffy thing she did with the snow. But ice. That freeze-thaw-freeze ice was a bad idea. Sad to say, she’s likely to do that again. We tell her and tell her, and for a few years she behaves herself, but then she gets this glint of mischief in her eye and oh no, it’s ice again. I’m lucky half my branches didn’t break under the weight of it.

Well, she’s gone now, sulking in the stream beds. I’m back, and hope to make up to you for the long wait. Come out to the garden. Let’s dance.

Spring is a suitable time for commencement, beginning one thing and ending another. With four seasons and a university here, time marks itself well: colored leaves, snow, flowers, out-of-town drivers making sudden right turns from left lanes and people walking around with tasseled hats, corn ripening in fields. To everything there is a season.

Thus I have tulips in the garden now, where tomatoes were and will be. This was an inspired suggestion made to me, of course, by a bulb-seller’s catalog. Last fall after I pulled the frost-bitten tomato plants out of their raised beds, I put in tulip bulbs. My daffodils are safe in the open yard, but tulips need to be inside the garden fence or the deer will eat them. The bulbs liked it in there, and produced many huge, beautiful bouquets.

It was especially nice to deck the house with them to celebrate, because this spring our very dear great-niece concluded her time as an undergraduate and set out for her future. The two sides of commencement – we all want the children to launch, but it’s a sweet chapter that’s ending. The tulip chapter is ending, too.

The tomato plants are in the upstairs window, preparing themselves for the time when night frosts are over and they can root down into deep soil and stretch leafily up into fresh air. And then they blossom, and then they bear fruit.

the window tree

I was sitting in my studio working on projects and playing online spider solitaire, when I heard a bump, bump, bump behind me. Zerlina was asleep, no one else was home, and the wind wasn’t blowing. The bump sounded vaguely familiar, but before I could place it I turned around and discovered the source: a robin was attacking its reflection in the window.

I understand it from the robin’s point of view – there he was, flying peacefully toward a tree outside a window, a good spot to build a nest, when suddenly another robin appeared flying straight at him. Outrage! He attacked! And immediately, the other robin attacked him exactly the same way! Intolerable!

Fortunately, the noise woke Zerlina, who jumped up onto the table under the window. The robin, finding a cat apparently in the tree, backed off. But only as far as the next window. Thus began my spring ritual, carrying my cat around from window to window following the robin, holding up my pointy-eared would-be slaughterer to dissuade the bird from knocking itself out against my windowglass.

Zerlina doesn’t really like to be carried around, but she does like watching birds. She glanced back at me as if to say, just let me out there and that bird will never bother you again. An indoor cat now, she remembers her days on the street.

backing off

How many generations will it take for birds to understand windowglass? Surely there’s a survival advantage to not flying smack into them on purpose like this, beating your brains out and wasting energy on something that’s no threat at all instead of getting on with life, building a nest, or finding a mate, or singing. What kind of ridiculous species would do something like that?

Oh. Wait.

April’s here, a month of many seasons. Yesterday we had snow, today we have brilliant sun, and tomorrow could be anything. No wonder it starts with a Fools’ Day.

future glory

Sometimes it hosts the wandering holidays of Easter and Passover, but it’s not committed to them.

April aspires to spring, and carries the mantle of expectation so far as to encompass both Earth Day and National Poetry Month. It is famous for rain. Chaucer begins his Canterbury Tales with it: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…” Children sing “April showers bring May flowers.” But daffodils bloom in April, so presumably Wordsworth wrote about those crowds of them in an April past. Forsythia delivers “spring’s yellow telegram” in April, and the hellebores that

hellebores blooming

nosed up in March are April openers.

But April flowers don’t always bring happiness. When Edna St.Vincent Millay lost a loved one in April she wrote, “April/ Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month. Its position as Child Abuse Prevention Month would seem to agree with that.

I spent parts of several Aprils in Chile, where they ushered in the autumn. Spring had to wait for October.

April also hosts International Pillow Fight Day. Imagine an international pillow fight: opposing border guards toe to toe with bolsters; or maybe two guys with huge pillows flinging them across an ocean. Or over a wall. That one seems quite independent of season, though, so it would work in any hemisphere. And in any hemisphere, a day dedicated to learning to fight softly seems like a good idea.

The tables come up from the basement and settle under the wide upstairs window. The cut-off milk cartons come out of the garage. The mailman has been delivering seed orders for some time now, bags of potting soil have appeared in the garage, and the clocks have been set forward to so-called daylight savings time, bringing dark mornings back to Michigan. It’s time to start seeds for the garden.

My all-time favorite tomatoes are Burpee’s enormous Supersteak and little Black Pearl. I start nearly a whole packet of each, and then a couple of new varieties and one of last year’s trial successes, to see if it will recreate its former glory. Since weather and pests vary every year, it takes time to sort out the champions.

My neighbor says she knows spring is coming when she looks up and sees the cartons in the window. I am happy to provide this sign of coming spring, and I look carefully for others. The robins, which have wintered in the woods and shrubs, emerging only rarely, are out on the hunt for worms. Worms! Can the ground be thawed enough yet for worms? And the squirrels – are they digging up buried treasures from the fall? And look at that, the buzzards are back. Must mean the roadkill doesn’t freeze solid any more.

The earliest signs of spring – buzzards and worms. I’m still waiting for the first flowers.

Speaking of metaphor, I’ve just been reviewing and correcting proofs for my chapbook that’s being published by Finishing Line Press. Pretty exciting! Here’s the link to it. They say they’re running late, so instead of coming out at the end of March it’s likely to be published in April.

April! National Poetry Month; and also famously, according to T.S. Eliot, “the cruelest month” Obviously he was never in Michigan in February. Though if he’s going to insist that flowers blooming out of  “dead land” is a bad thing, he might really love Michigan in February. I’m glad he had those cats to cheer him up from time to time.

Here’s how it starts: a lump of a bulb, some dirt, water, and a great big window keeping the cold midwestern winter out. Add time. That’s it, just time – the bulb is tightly packed with flowers, waiting to escape. If you cut off the first amaryllis stalk after it fades, another will come up and bloom. You do nothing to deserve this, but there it is.

In fact, the dirt is optional. The bulbs will bloom without it, but if you have an urge to feel necessary, give them potting soil along with the water and let the leaves grow for a few months when the flowers are gone, and the amaryllis will stock itself back up so it can do this again next year. But don’t let it go to your head. The narcissus may or may not go along with this.

For another connection to February, both these staples of reliable indoor beauty are named for characters in stories of obsessive love. In the case of Narcissus it ended badly, but Amaryllis got her shepherd. Whether their efforts were wise or misguided, they showed great determination, and released their inner natures. Metaphor is everywhere in the garden, indoors and out.

ice on the inside

Ice crept in under doorways and wind polished the sky: minus seventeen degrees on the thermometer, minus thirty six with windchill. Skin would be frostbitten in five or ten minutes depending on your source of information, which I decided not to test.

People in Michigan are hardy in the cold – it’s called winter; life goes on – so when I tell you everything’s been closed and cancelled for the last two days you know it’s serious. I put on my thick Chilean alpaca sweater and found I could stand on the porch for a few minutes wearing it. I had to find out what this kind of cold felt like.

The first thing I felt was a bold slap on my cheeks, the kind you usually get from wind. But at this particular moment there was no wind. Air this cold didn’t need to be moving to assault you.

didn’t see the deer but I see where they slept

The next thing I noticed was how quiet it was. Was this a feature of extreme cold, or was it due to lack of traffic, birds, dog walkers, or any form of life at all except me?

In a few moments a faint creep of chill rattled at my hands, feet, and legs in their ordinary wool and leather. That was when I realized all the parts of me covered by the sweater, wrists to neck to hips, were warm. This was not only how the alpacas of Chile withstood the climate of the Andes, it was how the Inca did. Strange as this cold is to me here now, there are places in the world where people have always dealt with it.

Doug built a fire in the fireplace. The state’s Department of Natural Resources stopped requiring a permit to collect downed firewood in state forests, for the duration of the Polar Vortex. We’re burning wood that came down in our own backyard in last year’s storms, relying on the squirrels to keep planting walnuts, acorns, and wild cherry pits for a perpetual new crop of trees. If the deer don’t eat all the saplings, the woods will continue to restore themselves.