Viridity.

I know that the day should be over when I find myself welling up again, simply because there are so many things I'm keeping in the air right now.  Soon, I tell myself, soon we'll go home and sleep all night.   

One of the best compliments I ever received was from a former student who said to me during an online chat one night, "You know, you always ask, 'How are you?'  And I always know that you actually want an answer."  Today, to a one, every person I asked answered immediately, "I'm tired."  The accumulated tireds I heard today made me believe that if I were queen of the college, I would declare a sleep day.  It would be one random day in April, preferably a day when the rain pummels everything into soft submission, and the day would just be cancelled, far enough in advance that everyone could just keep sleeping and we could all have a break from one another. 

I bury myself in the fact that they light up like little candlesticks when they work hardest at ideas, and in the fact that every single night I go to bed knowing something I did not know when I got up in the morning.  I bury myself in the fact that our conversations get around to fine points of how and why to think and talk about books.  I bury myself in knowing that in fewer than forty-eight hours, a crucial member of my group of long-distance superstars will be here, just down the road from me, and that I'll see her for several days and nights in a row. And that she's bringing yoga. 

"You're not a computer," the last student with whom I conferenced today said to me at the end of the day.  True and necessary words.  Sometimes they are kinder to me than I am to myself, just as I am often kinder to them than they are to themselves. 

I plant myself in the lowering sun's glitter.

* * *

And, lo and behold, here comes Keri Smith (to whom I have referred before as a genius) with exactly what I need to read tonight: a reminder that everything is a choice, and (though she didn't intend it) a reminder that I have a word for this year, and I chose the word "power" for a reason.  I don't know whether I can do a mondo beyondo list here or whether I will just need to do one for myself but keep it private for now; I suspect that the things on it, and the ferocity of it, would put off people who know me in the world offline, and I don't much need that right now.

Mysterious twining.

Every year, I forget what this alien-looking plant is when it comes up out of the ground all over town.  If I'm not mistaken, these red stalks will turn into peonies.  But I think I might be mistaken. (I so want to imagine that it's rhubarb and that I could harvest and bake it, because it's just about that time of year again.)

These days, every afternoon is one conversation after another, each one an energizer because there is nothing in my life like watching students fall in love with a book they've never imagined they'll love, and every evening is a poetry reading followed by another day's work.  And each day I'm glad to have been carrying the camera, if only so that I don't forget to look at what I'm seeing.

Down.

And then, at the end of a day that I would least have predicted would end this way, I turned around from my desk before an evening poetry reading and discovered that the sun was making an appearance just so that it could go down.  And so I listened to the flame-haired poet read and did my best not to watch his flame-haired daughter watching him and watching us, and then I returned to my desk and my work, as I return now to my desk and my work, because in these days, just for now, the desk and the work are all, and plenty.

Blinking.

All morning and afternoon and evening I sat with my laptop and marked short essays I've been holding for some time now, and from time to time, as the sun came over the top of the apartment and started shining in on me at my red desk, a nuthatch came fluppering down onto the sill to select another seed and then whuffle off to a nearby tree to eat it.  But for some reason, on one pass late in the afternoon, he just sat on the sill, seed in beak, blinking and blinking and resting, calm enough that even when I slipped away from the desk to get my camera from the other room, and even when I slipped back toward the window, he kept pausing, kept blinking.  The weather having been warm enough this morning to prompt me to take the plastic film off of the living room window, I was able to use my macro lens to good effect before my small companion decided to resume his back-and-forth seeding.