Just a taste of what’s popping up. In case you were looking for a prompt.

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1. Time to start checking on the ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, courtesy of the NOAA buoys reported on the website. I no longer bother to venture into real surf until the readings hit 60 Fahrenheit. Below that it’s blue-toe water.
2. There’s an irony in performing sun-salutation postures but none, say, for the new moon or full moon. Om, my. Inhale and exhale, with incense.
3. On our apron by the back door, a small snake, whip motion, ever so slowly.
4. Here I’d been intending to write leaner, tighter, shorter, clearer – a lacework of Light. Wind up with dense blocks of prose-poems instead.
5. It’s hard to imagine my native Buckeye State was created, in essence, by eleven Connecticut veterans of the American Revolution who met at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston on March 1, 1786, to form the Ohio Company. The tavern was a gathering place for wealthy merchants sympathetic to the patriot cause. At least it wasn’t Manhattan. Who knows what we would have wound up with.
6. Sometimes you feel a new beginning – not just renewal but turning a corner.
7. My own pathway unfolds as its own guide.
8. Sometimes I read this place as CLOVER NH. Better, of course, than the unintentionally comic EFFINGHAM.
9. I’ve resolved to spend more time in the mountains to our north this summer. In recent years, even getting to the beaches nearby has been elusive.
10. So that’s it! Blah-blah-blah.

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Why wait for the dust to settle? Here are 10 bullets from my end.

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1. This matter of scale – and balance – in a life that has an appearance of randomness. All these items collected throughout the house and barn. Somehow, order reasserts itself, if you look.
2. Remembering the volcano 37 years ago. Just look at the skulls I collected in that country.
3. Four years later, the move to Baltimore for the one I thought embodied that moment full of promise to take my life upward into a fairy-tale existence of class and repose, a much different direction from where I’ve landed. Alas, she’d already bolted. And mine has become much more organic.
4. Common Meter, 8.6.8.6, as in “Amazing Grace,” is simply the syllable count. A great way to swap words and music.
5. Am not having profound or imaginative dreams. But at least the flow’s beginning again, like looking at a secret movie or computer screen.
6. When taking portraits outdoors, how often the eyeglasses turn into sunglasses in the bright light – and how often people in party mode turn wooden.
7. Looking at a book of glass houses reminds me how deeply that Bauhaus aesthetic is embedded in my sensibility. Not that I’d aspire to live in one now. Who washes all those windows, anyway? And what about fingerprints or noses? These days I’ve chosen a different style, one based in Yankee houses that just keep growing, as needed. As for curtains, she and I will argue.
8. To ease back into Hatha – Ha-ha!
9. “The things that are not seen are eternal” – II Corinthians 4:18.
10. Still feeling so tentative rather than forceful.

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I chanced upon this scultpture at 15 Beach Place while wandering from Chinatown to Faneuil Hall. It’s about a block from the old Boston Music Hall, where Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto got its world premiere. Maybe this site is where he stayed while visiting? Anyone got a clue?

The mind dances here and there, rarely in a linear fashion. So what’s on my mind these days? How about counting on these fingers?

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1. The return of warm weather allows more leisurely use of the top of the barn again, before high summer makes the space too oppressive. Eight years ago we made major renovations that made the loft more fully accessible and usable, gaining 500 square feet of storage and retreat space – my three-season retreat, as it were. The elbow room has been quite liberating. I love to sit at the hall door, reading and sipping a drink while overlooking my domain. How good, tranquil, it feels. How much I love listening to rain fall on its roof, too.
2. The rush of spring now brings on fresh lettuce and spinach in our garden. Turning the compost, I’m delighted to see so many red wigglers already active – my little buddies in restoring the earth where we live.
3. I’ve thought about The Daily Vulture as a title. Seeing them now reminds me of my bird watching on my daily commute, back when I was driving daily. Gee, would the name befit a newspaper?
4. Thinking, too, of all the near misses on those drives. A few seconds this way or that and I would have been road kill. A feast for the vultures. Far more times than I’d care to recount.
5. Nice poets are a dime a dozen and largely ignored. Makes me wonder about assuming a hidden identity as a Quaker Agitator, waiting to be claimed. As for amateur theologians? Time to emulate Swami?
6. There are far more writers than I could ever read. Even in any of my fields of interest. And far more advice.
7. After living here, in a richly pedestrian-friendly small city in New England, or on historic Bolton Hill in Baltimore, or even the inner city of Binghamton, how sterile I find so many other neighborhoods where I’ve lived or wandered.
8. How essential and uplifting that sense that says I’M HERE!
9. As he said of himself, “I go to extremes.” Still, there wasn’t a sweeter human. And he still had his beard in the end. As for our demons and passions?
10. Hebrew “to know” is yada. Another rich word.

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