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.