OK, people. Yes, poetry is hard.

And bad poetry is hard on everyone.  (Just for the record, I did not mean to say in that last post, as some have suggested, that all poetry is for the birds.  Just my poetry.)

So anyway, enough of that. 

Of course, it's still Poetry Month for another three weeks (excessive?  Perhaps), and if the spirit moves me I can't say I won't blog any more of it.  But with your permission, I'll just say "hath" instead of "have" until May, and that'll be that.  Deal?   Deal.

Because I need to get something off my chest here, and I can't do it in verse.  I have — er, hath — been cheating on this blog.  I have — hath — a new blog, The Naked Gardener, which is pretty much a straight-up gardening blog, for those of you into that sort of thing.  It's kind of boring, but probably better than my poetry, so make of that what you will.  There's a link on the sidebar.

And don't worry, it's totally safe for work.

Speaking of which, that's pretty much all I do these days.  Although I will say that today I actually got to work in my own garden for the first time in yonks.  I even got a nice surprise from a fellow gardener down the path.  No, it wasn't the Mad Defecator!  It was a perfectly charming Korean gardener named Jung, who'd had quite a bit of tree damage in her garden from the hard winter.

Yesterday I coordinated a clean-up over there, and today she brought me a lovely lunch — japchae and some fresh melon.  And I didn't really even do any of the actual work.  I mean I just pointed the crew in the right direction and set 'em loose.

So that gave me fuel to burn, and I managed to clean up about, say, hath — er, half — my garden plot, taking ample breaks to rest and contemplate how desperately I need more space dedicated to taking breaks to rest and contemplate things. 

I've always been a sort of slow-and-steady-wins-the-race type of guy, but lately I have this sense I'm actually verging on geologic time.  It's a huge milestone for me.  It's like breaking the sound barrier.  Only the exact opposite.

But then a successful garden is all about wu-wei: creating a space for "effortless doing".  And I'll get there, I'll get there.  Right after this little break...