From New Mexico with its sheer light, I descend back to April Vermont, where miniature daffodils push their yellow faces through last year’s leaf mulch. How well I know Vermont spring — the sunny breezy days where the wind tosses the lake and the water is bluer than blue, the footpath sprinkled with the gold gems of coltsfoot.

After the desert’s sweeping beauty, Vermont is a mossy box, a jumble of the paint peeling from the back of my house, the bin of empty cat food cans in barn (quit kicking that dump run into the next week), the niggling college financial aid forms yet to be corrected, the working hours I string together, making some decent use of my time.

April is a month that goes on too long, lingers brown in northern Vermont, with its tease of green trout lily leaves, the flourish of wild ramps. Paradoxically, April has always seemed the most hopeful of seasons, too, the nesting songbirds sweeping out winter’s silence.

In the evening, my daughter and I walk her dogs across the cemetery to the ballfields. Off leash, the three of them run while I stand in the field’s center, listening to the robins’ chatter in the white pines. Back at my house, we stand by the woodpile, talking about little things — who will take the leftover garlic bread, did the butterfly bush survive the winter. The rising moon illuminates the clouding-up horizon with a glowing shaft. We linger, watching the full moon sail confidently, unstoppably, over the horizon. Later, I linger on the back porch, sipping tea. The moon has removed the lid of shoebox Vermont. The air’s sweet with wet soil.

Springtime, 1998

Our upstate April
        is cold and gray.
                 Nevertheless

yesterday I found
        up in our old
                 woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets
        standing around
                 and blooming

wisely. And by the edge
        of the Bo’s road at the far
                 side of the meadow

where the limestone ledge
        crops out our wild
                 cherry trees

were making a great fountain
        of white gossamer.
                 Joe-Anne went

and snipped a few small boughs
        and made a beautiful
                 arrangement

in the kitchen window
        where I sit now
                 surrounded.

— Hayden Carruth