Did Emily ever wheel a barrow?
Loading a spade full at a time
she explores her way past mulch and leaf mold.
Transferring each pile of dirt more slowly than the last,
she contemplates the growing pile, the deepening hole
to find, “…a Worm / Pink lank and warm…” 

Hefting the spade in her soft-boned fingers,
rotating her wrist slightly, the rising
falling earth creates a veil in which she glimpses mica,
then stars then the universe and herself rushing to meet it
until she finds her need for paper more pressing than flowers. 

Snatching phrases from her trowel,
eye turned inward, she stumbles over flagstone
to her desk where she revels in the space between pen and paper:
defying gravity, hovering over her garden--hanging
then surrendering.  Pinning the wings of her thought to page,
she is “Struck, was I, not yet by Lightning –
Lightning -- lets away” and looking out, finds
beside a ray of sun, the rain-glazed wheelbarrow,
dripping mud.  She squints into the bouncing and pooling light
and sees not light, but a white hen--
if only the barrow were red,
what a pretty picture the scene would make.