There is the pluck and gravel of acoustic guitar, the chanteuse cracking and breaking into my ear. Underneath it all is the low thrumming rumble of footsteps in this narrow tunnel. We are packed and surging forward to the trains but ahead I can see the crowd cleaved, one man moving against the onrush. His face floats by me round and flat like a dish. He is missing one eye, the lid sunken against the bone.

I find a place on the platform to wait out this song. I sit, raise my face to the weakened, limping light, feel it stagger against the bones in my face. I clutch a paper cone of flowers to my chest. I have nothing to write on but my paycheck.

This day started out with a red dress, the first impetuous bare legs of spring, swinging through midtown in good stomping boots.

Two hours stuffed in a cubicle in the fiscal department, low ceilings, humming flourescents, trying to track down roll-overs, early releases, split allocations, and this day is as grey and tired as your fourth grade school cafeteria Salisbury steak.

That pair of morning doves is bobbing on the wall outside my office, grackles are pecking for new nesting scraps, a gull is lording it over this concrete sea from his perch on a cobra head streetlight. It's time to do what I desperately want to do. It's time to go running.

Last night I turned out the lights, closed my eyes, and decided to fall asleep remembering the urgent lovely spring birdsong I had heard earlier in the day. I wake this morning having dreamt I was giving a man a gift of house slippers. Now I am looking at the sun making my red walls glow, I have my breakfast of bread, an egg, an apple.

Such simple things, they make me think about first times. The girl on the subway with her rough tossed hair and what it felt like for the first time against her lover’s chest. That man with the long tapered hands and what was the first time he discovered the velvet and value of his own hipbone. Love’s finger fishhooked through my own ribs.

There are first times, and what one would hope would be the last first time, the end of wandering and wondering, but here, now, look, here is the first robin of spring.

She has a violin strapped to her back and an oval face that shows the ancestry of Renaissance Madonna paintings. Her nose is long and elegant, the bones of her cheeks and chin fine, clean, feminine. Her loopy rush of hair is pulled back and browned out in the muzzy light of the subway. I wonder if, loosed on her pillow in the morning, I wonder, if it shines yellow or red.

There is some discontent on her face, and I see in the disappointed set of her mouth, the beginning of lines radiating, that discontent has dug in and found a home. We have ridden several stations together and now, even though she is ten or even fifteen years younger then me, I wave her through the high turnstile before me. She has the violin, a cup of coffee, two huge bags she is balancing, and I motion that I’ll push the toothed gate for her.

She accepts the offer of help by putting her head down and going forward. Now I see where her dissatisfaction comes from, a tiny flicker of ugly self-absorption. I walk up the stairs behind her and into the gorgeous streaming light of this morning. If she turned around then, if I existed for her at all, she would not have to wonder if my hair turns to fire or gold on my pillow. But I am not to be noticed, and now I will let myself be blessed by this wash of sun and I will walk perfectly alone at this start of my day.

The light in my bedroom this morning is the sweep of brushes over the head of the snare drum. I am up too early again, eyes open to vague grey. I spent a decent portion of last week running around like a fawn with its head stuck in a pail, running blind, quivering with fear. I had hoped it would be over with by now.

Fear has been on the back burner, then the front, then setting my dress on fire for several weeks. I have my usual sources, I know them, see them, but recently they have arrowed in from so many different directions I have no room to turn. I lose faith in myself, I shame myself with my flailings, I stop looking for something beautiful every day.

Well, and that would truly make the world look grey, right there. Inside my inky universe, where a spoon is my lover, the sidewalk is a palette, street lights are a ladder, I have neglected my precious collection, forgotten for a moment how to carefully curate for joy. So today, despite ashy heaps of tired snow, a heavy flat sky I will look for something charming or graceful or hotly alive. If I capture it, I will tell you.

"Are you listening to me?"
"Yes, absolutely!" I have taken out one of my earbuds so that I can. It is well past dark but I am just now getting home and starting to chop the results of the nor'easter off the front sidewalk. I am working my broad-bladed shovel on an intractable mix of snow, sleet, hail and rain, hard frozen and stomped down by the day's passersby.

When he had turned the corner I had flapped my hand at him in acknowledgement. I recognize him as one of the guys who hangs out in front of the apartment building down the block, one of a bunch of old-timers, rent-control allowing them to live off of SSI and small scale street hustles. The wave of my hand, the head bob, are not enough for him, though. Tonight he wants to talk.

"Are you listening to me?" he repeats, leaning in. The light has faded but I can see the space between his front teeth, smell his cheery drunkeness. I stop digging and grunting with my shovel, to give him the full attention he wants.

"I have been alive for 58 years, and this is what I know," he holds me with his eyes, and I meet him, let him, turn to him like heliotrophy. "You have to be prepared for the crazy. Because this is a crazy world."

I can only agree with him.

I keep thinking about calving season. I am thinking about the amazing appearance of life in the particular form of a red calf. What an event, your greeting to life being the earth rising up to hit you as you tumble out of your mother’s trembling hindquarters. Your imperative, which you know absolutely in your bones is to struggle to your feet. You will stretch yourself out after the months of curled confinement, slicked fur finding its way to nubs and swirls. You will lift your head, center your feet and let out the first blaring note of your existence, wondering, angry, insistant.

The train station I exit to get to work is a deep one, the first station after the tunnel under the East River. Which is not really a river, it’s a tidal estuary, but whatever. I am climbing the four flights of stairs to the street, the escalator is not working again today, and that means I am leaving the station a different way than usual.

The walk this way has my right side rimmed with housing projects. The left side has tenements squeezed up to the narrow sidewalk, a school, the public hospital. In front of the hospital is a shuttle bus and people are lined up for it. Lined is not quite the word. These people are having a hard time holding onto the earth, it’s clear. They are listing, leaning, carrying burdens of illness, age, fear of illness, fear of age. They should not have to wait outside here, so vulnerable, for assistance. My outrage starts but it doesn’t get very far. I am carrying my own burdens this morning.

My physical self and my emotional self may as well be walking down two separate sides of this street. One for the hospital, one for the human warehousing. They are gesturing to each other, no, one is gesturing, the other is trying to ignore. They have already been in a fight this morning and left me with bloody knees and tears. They will make up soon enough, but right now I am tired of both of them.

I am thinking about the word “together” and wishing for more if it. The advertisement at the bus kiosk says “You are here. You could be in Mexico.” In my bifurcated state, I find this ruefully hilarious, as I am already here and I am already in Mexico. I don't need the bus kiosk to tell me that.

I am working on a strange photo project, so pardon me while I cycle all kinds of not usual images through here on their way to some kind of transformation elsewhere. Although I am not un-fond of this.

Heading home from work at 2AM I would sigh into the back seat of this cab but the rain-fogged side windows keep my eyes focused front. The driver’s ID has an American sounding name but this is no American Dream story I want to hear. His eyes in the rear view mirror are tiny and sunken into swollen flesh. His has some kind of unfortunate black Hair Club for Men thing going on, paired with government-issued cheap plastic glasses from 1988. It’s raining harder now, but I can’t hear it over the vigorous rustling coming from his intense re-arranging of crinkly plastic bags from the bodega and I wish he would pay more attention to his job as I feel how bald the tires are, more than a bit of sideways sliding along late wet streets. When he finally stops with the bags and stops at the light, music shimmers from somewhere up front. “Hotel California” and I am more than half expecting the smell of sulphur, a puff of smoke, the appearance of horns.

Increased bird song in the back of the house wakes me. That, and a neighbor’s new dog who barks out an occasional gruff warning. The light on the front stoop makes me pause, it is so brilliant, and not just that, warm, too, finally. I can hear a verbal altercation happening around the corner, men’s voices deep and angry, bouncing off the warming bricks of the avenue. The pigeons are back to nesting in the pediment above the doorway. At least, I think that’s a pediment. Now I am realizing how much classical architecture has gone out of my head.

The train is crowded, and I am looking over the shoulder of this woman’s newspaper at the headline “Brooklyn Comic Kills Self” and I am thinking that is very funny and not funny at all. I am remembering a conversation with a friend about ways we would kill ourselves, if we would. His way was a horrible slashing arc, designed to traumatize any who saw or heard about it, a spiteful terrible act of self hatred. Comparatively, mine was easy to clean up, little impact, little pain. A quiet collapse for when I finally get tired of trying to expand, to reach out, when I finally get tired of being told I am too big, I want too much, when the power of what I see and a persistent inability to share it profoundly is no longer what I want.

For now, I am still dancing in thunderstorms, face upturned, asking for the sky to strike me.

In correspondence with a friend, I said: you can't keep lightning in a jar but you can stand in a rainstorm holding the broken wings of a blasted umbrella and ask the sky to strike you over and over.

Snow this morning. Not a lot, just so the salt turns the scrim on sidewalks into lace. Just so the low sky and bouncing light make it feel like walking in the inside of an egg. I'd take a picture, but of course I forgot my celcam today. Distracted I am.

I have been here before. On this patch of cold pavement, ebbing out of a 10-hour day, looking in, and feeling just like this: delighted. Because I have just finished class and I am standing outside the plastic windows of the streetcorner flower stand and there is a $20 bill in my pocket and I can have whatever I want.

But what do I want? Something that smells good. Those freesia look lovely, but they have fooled me before. Their scent only rises in the warmth, and I have taken them home only to be disappointed when they did not emit. The hyacinth are reliably fragrant, but these here look tired and spindly.

So let's go for gorgeous. The hydrangea are woozily alluring, but their big puffy heads need some kind of girding. Maybe stud them with white lillies? No, something else, something with lift, oh, do they have bells of Ireland? That rilled green thrust would be perfect. But there are none here.

Now my head is turned by the sign on this metal bucket "Daffodile." In the cluster of tightly furled buds I can see it, see them blossom and unwrap their long yellow jaws, blink their scaly yellow eyelids, show their predatory able teeth to the succulant tulips next door. This is making me think of yellow now, and yes, yes please, I have my answer.

Things that have woken me up this week:
A hard pounding rain that powered away the last of the snow in the back yard and signifies that spring is near to hand.
The lillies on my dresser finally dying, dropping their thick rubbery petals with quiet thumps in the night.
A dream where I was caught prevaricating, being disingenuous, willfully ignorant. When I take a sip of water something enters my mouth, and I am suddenly spitting out a scorpion. He scuttles away, but I am left with one rough leg stuck between my teeth.

Here is the nail I am biting. Tonight’s taxi finds me listening to Regina Spektor singing about fidelity. My mouth is open, and I am curious about how many teeth I have, try to get my tongue to count them, but my tongue is tired and can’t distinguish where one round dimpled sharp turns into another. My tongue was not made for counting, that is what it tells me. I am waiting for this night to pull through me, because really, all I want is the light.