The poem
And now as the iron rinds over the ponds start dissolving, you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding, upon the brash turnip-hearted skunk cabbage slinging its bunches leaves up through the chilling mud. You kneel beside it. The smell is lurid and flows out in the most unabashed way, attracting into itself a continual spattering of protein. Appalling its rough green caves, and the thought of the thick root nested below, stubborn and powerful as instinct! But these are the woods you love, where the secret name of every death is life again - a miracle wrought surely not of mere turning but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn pull down the frozen waterfall, the past. Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle refinements, elegant and easeful, wait to rise and flourish. What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
I was transported back in time a half century and three thousand miles to a young girl tramping through the remnants of melting snow and slogs of mud in search of the precious first sign of Spring, life springing forth after the long dark winter, to be the first to reward my teacher with the gift of the coming warmth.