Ever since I moved to this house 13 years ago, I envisioned a yard filled with native plants. I don’t mind the soft touch of bluegrass under my feet, but why do we need so much of it?

I started small, filling the small spaces with buffalograss, planting side-oats grama, mountain mahogany, but I wanted a native meadow. Out came the garden beds. Out came the turf. In went the butterfly garden, only to die in the drought that turned the century. I may put a vegetable garden in its place.

Scattering yarrow seeds years ago, I didn’t imagine the weeding I do now, the struggle with the invasive roots.

Five species of penstemon out of three hundred.

I’ve just started.

and the popcorn and the chocolate, we meant to head home, truly we did. But around the corner continuous lightning arrested us, like War of the Worlds in Denver’s northeastern suburbs. The sky vibrated with light but hardly any thunder. We took shelter in the truck, watching through the windshield.

Pedestrians and cyclists passed us going both directions, not looking up. If they noticed at all, they thought the light was made by humans, not storms.

Listening to police radio via the iPhone, we felt enchanted by the distant voices calling to “triage these cars” out of the flood. By a simple freak of nature and the human response.

Did it have something

to do with the Divine

chocolate we ate?

At last we had enough. But the city wasn’t quite ready to let us go. Driving toward the highway, we saw Cherry Creek had drowned the sidewalks that hem it in. “Class V rapids in Denver,” Todd joked, and stopped in a parking lot. I tripped down there to take a photo and surprised two men sitting on the wall. We eyed each other until I raised the camera, not in their direction.

On Facebook we note the storm.

Is nothing strictly interior now?

I guess the store name explains the spelling of “mosaic” and “elixir.” But does anybody care anymore that, if words were deeds, saying “I am nauseous” would immediately cause those within range to vomit profusely? Why do the ungrammatical wish to sicken the near, if not dear?

What if “Bite me!” summoned a pride of lions? Would they approach, one after another, and delicately nip away?

What exactly would “Fuck off!” mean?

with green wheels, on the bus to Denver.

I follow her to the bathroom, admire her sideways as I enter the marble stalls. Mentally rewrite the scene in which I ride down the driveway in Kansas City, fall on my ass after two seconds, never climb on top of a skateboard again.

She wore a studded belt low across her skinny hips. On the bus, I was just reading the summer 2008 issue of Ms., the article about body image. I was that skinny once and I wouldn’t mind being that skinny again.

I think of it as a matter of determination, not poor body image. A matter of how many huge salads I can eat before I have to splurge. Can I eat enough raw food to get down to 125 pounds again? Just for the thrill of being back there before I turn 50?

Deprivation is so last century—
it’s what we eat, not how much.

We sit behind a spiral staircase, in a room once a miner’s cabin, then a blacksmith’s shop. Nothing but stories now.

The inn next door has been put up for sale: too much for one man to cook and wait tables and check in guests and clean, 7 days a week. We slept there one night: Will it be the same when we return?

First night: Cradled by
the most comfortable bed in our travels.

In Antonito, a struggling town in the San Luis Valley, we board a bus for Chama. In Chama, we board a narrow-gauge train for Antonito. This small circle part of the larger loop of this trip. The train tracks almost circle back on themselves so the steel wheels can climb steel rails laid on a steep grade.

Leaning out of the open car,
my camera over the drop.

My feet barely sink into the sand dunes, hardened by the wind across the San Luis Valley. We pose at the first ridge, dunes unfolding beyond.

A father descends the dune on a pink snowboard.
His son spirals down.

This time of year, I could spend all my time in the yard, pulling weeds from the buffalograss.

I admit, my native meadow isn’t viable. It requires more work than the rest of the yard combined.

Intimacy:
the sap of salsify, hawkweed, thistle
marks my wrists

I feel burdened by things happening far away. My eighty-something father is piling up debt, and all I manage to do from here is worry while my brothers and sisters do all the work.

Pledges, taxes, loans, credit cards:
He’s generous, my sister says

In the garden at least, I can imagine progress by the end of the summer.

I began in a small space, a chocolatier fronting a spice shop. Everything packaged and behind glass, brought out one at a time for me, detailed, and rewrapped.

I interrupted him to photograph the chocolates on the counter—

—two free truffles—
I’ll email him about the website review

There’s construction on 15th Street, two lanes blocked off. I wait for 6 SUVs, don’t expect the Honda going the other direction.

More dangers await at Shoemaker Plaza: Canada geese suddenly ravenous for chocolate; sun melting artisan chocolates into featureless blobs; toddlers carelessly whacking them as they stumble by.

Pear hazelnut:
the Platte chills dogs and children
in the shallows

By mid-May, I make time to plant. I load up pots from the last 5 years and drop them off to be recycled, then head into the nursery to find more. I could spend $1,000 on plants in one afternoon, but I never budget: I wouldn’t stick to it.

Rice grass is my first indulgence: even a tulip has nothing on a cloud of seeds shivering in summer. Then Penstemon pinifolius with red flowers. I already have the yellow; I have 6 Penstemon species out of 300. The woman I ask for help tells me she has no native ground covers, but I find pussytoes and sedums.

Maybe I should work here.

Every summer I say:
I will finish the yard this year.

“That’s a good idea,” the woman from GAP Adventures said, startling me. She pointed at the notebook I wrote in with her pen.

“Thanks,” I said. “My pen has run out.”

Ballpoint pen at a green fair:
indispensable, unrecyclable.

I confessed I’d wandered from booth to booth, unable to take notes, looking for a likely pen to steal. But that just seemed so tacky, I told her, still writing.

She urged me to take hers.

Smooth: old pen lids cover thermometers
so they won’t break.

Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
—Susan B. Anthony

We started slow, we 20 women come to train. To raise our voices, 1 hour. To stop letting them get too close, 2 hours. I did the first role-play.

One woman brought her babysitter, a Marine with sculpted eyebrows. Was there no self-defense in the armed forces?

Two years of Krav Maga for me; two other women were current students. It didn’t matter. All of us grew equally aggressive, especially the one having a flashback at the end.

But will we remember?

Krav Maga

My friend’s son is learning to play the drums, and the drummers in the 4 bands were male.

Tattooed.

But it was the girls carrying sticks I noticed, skidding along the edges of the crowd, holding hands, dragging each other down to the floor to sit and discuss—whatever could be shouted over the wall of sound.

A girl catching what a man throws—
Is that love, or baseball?

The neighbor’s cat waits outside my back door at dusk, green eyes intent on the food bowl shaped like a cat.

The world outside is wet from snowmelt.

Downstairs, neither of us gets the fire roaring. The smell of office paper smoldering makes me sniff. We eat goat cheese and artichoke leaves while I poke newspaper between the logs. A knot on one of the logs smokes steadily. Then a small flame appears.

There are seven logs left.

It is snowing again.
I cover the one daffodil not frozen.

All Friday the snow two feet deep on the deck beckoned me.

After dark, I opened the garage door and cut the crust of snow. Thrusting it into the yard, I made my way north across the deck.

Drought keeps the grass
asleep too long.
Snowmelt awakens it.

Too warm for gloves or a hat. Water trickles through gutters hidden under snow.

Spring blooms: daffodils
under a bucket
just cresting the snowdrift.

I had no other plans.

Just outside the Native American Trading Company, they caught my eye. Miniature daffodils, not 6 inches tall. Squeezed into a slit of ground between building and sidewalk.

I’ve been editing all weekend. The world beyond my window is far away; my eyes want to close.

Somewhere in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion and Endymion series, the once-human creatures that fill the void of space declare themselves: “We will adapt. We will fill the universe with life from end to end.”

I have never found anything better than an alley to focus the mind.  They call to me the way a remnant patch of suburban woods called when I was a child.

What’s in there? What’s at the end?

Have you ever entered a room of beauty and forgotten what to do with it?

Have you ever encountered her and not wanted to explain?

It was a narrow green room, a mirror to my left, benches to my right, silk flowers that could fool you. She came out from the back and looked at me, waiting for me to ask her to make an arrangement. In search of the gallery her floral shop had replaced, I couldn’t switch gears. There was nothing I wanted there, not then.

Have you ever closed a door and wanted to go right back in?

Behind Cherokee Row:
a parking lot, bank letter on the sidewalk.

Last Thursday I thought I’d arrive at Monday’s desk, a clean page where I could fill in the week’s tasks. But unfinished chores still frown at me from the notebook, palimpsest of stress.

I blink at my Excel file of Action Steps. How to make it easier to read? Organization begets reorganization!

White tulips decurve
the vase: its green lining flakes
into the water

I can see downtown New Orleans across the lake. On Wednesday I’ll drive the causeway bridge, longest over water in the world, but now I’m on the boardwalk, while the approaching children vibrate the dock. They giggle behind me like bubbles. They turn the viewer down, to look at a trash pile in the marsh; up, at the clouds, the plane, the sun.

Doesn’t it burn your eyes?

Another tries it. Did it burn?

Let’s go, one says. The eldest keeps shushing them. The old woman is birding. The redheaded boy rides off.

I watch their bright T-shirts moving away.

Some fish keeps jumping
over and over. Common
moorhens behind reeds.

The couple seeks a brown pelican; I point it out to them. Their first visit here since Hurricane Katrina. The woman is still mourning. Live oaks survived, their branches drooping to the ground and rooting, but many others did not. Two years of cleanup: now time to replant.

A family
encircles an oak. Do their hands
all meet? I can’t tell.

Next to I-12 where trucks moan by, I peek at gabled trophy homes, willing the weak sunlight to come in and warm me. I can’t get warm, not even when I turn up the thermostat. Our handicapped suite, with kitchen, large bathroom, sitting area, and bedroom, needs only a deck from which I could fly away and find an ivory-billed woodpecker. Here I come, Pearl River Wildlife Management Area.

I spend all my days
working at home: why protest
this large hotel suite?

Across the highway, ungainly pines, half-needled, only at the top, march along, forever behind the cars and trucks. No pine beetle rust on them, unlike near Denver. There’s supposed to be a special ozone here, the rich air of Covington.

So close, unable
to see. Behind glass, mourning
the outside world.

After the highways raised above the swamp, after the ragged trees, after Lake Pontchartrain pulled away to our right, we’ve reached hotel strip land.

Joy: My hair is curly in Louisiana.

The rooms face an interior courtyard, partly occupied by a CPR class. Each student, ensconced on the floor, has a device to keep her as far away from Annie’s mouth germs as possible. Annie is inanimate, but who knows what she picked up along the way?

Tomorrow Todd will become an Annie of sorts, the Annie of balance tests.

The doctor’s advice:

Eat a light lunch.

No liquor, no medication.

One thing the shopkeeper told me: an outdoor cat survives one to four years in the mountains of Colorado.

I believed him, having lost Rufus last year to the fox trotting through the park, or the pair of coyotes casing my yard early one morning, or a pack of raccoons. My neighbor cleaned up his guts before she knew what they were. My husband and I took the bloody gravel and buried it with the disco green collar Rufus had lost in the yard.

Now I content myself with the neighbor’s cat who spends his days here and his nights elsewhere.

When I see him through my door on these winter evenings, I think of his front claws that Rufus lacked, the fences he could climb. I hope, when I don’t let him in, he returns to his owners and paws at their door.

Drifts so hard, I leave
no prints on the snow beneath
the bird feeders.

The hallway ends at Dikeou. There among the art exhibits, with an audience of six, two poets fed off each other. And those who came to hear them. And those they admired.

Two giant pink bunnies deflate,

puddling onto the floor.

She asked him to recite “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.”

He said he’d never been able to commit that one to memory. He said he could recite Yeats and Keats all night.

She said sometimes it’s too terrifying to have a full Emily Dickinson poem inside you.

Caught by one poet mopping up champagne,

the only one pouring it.