The title names the smell of rain falling on dry earth, and the poem as a whole waits for that exact sensory threshold. In a garden room—part shed, part greenhouse—off-season neglect has settled over everything: a herringbone floor of worn bricks buckles where rodents have made inroads, homemade flats lie heaped in corners, stacks of seed cells lean “sleepily together,” insulation dangles, and tools hang “festooned with webs and dust.” These are not just picturesque details. They describe a workspace in suspended animation: dormant rather than dead. The poem’s central concern is how the old woman inside that world recognizes the exact moment when waiting yields to beginning.
The opening six lines move in one long, catalogue-like sentence, unrhymed and unhurried. Its rhythm accumulates details through semicolons, so neglect feels both slow and strangely companionable. Personification does quiet work: the seed cells are sleepy, the insulation is slack, the tools are decorated by the very dust that has claimed them. The word “festooned” is almost festive, but the decorations are cobwebs, so the room seems to be celebrating its own rest. Because the line break sets “Sometimes” at the edge of the stanza, the towhee’s entrance in the next movement comes as a small interruption of stillness. The bird wanders into the opened room, becomes confused by light from so many windows, beats itself silly, rests, and must be found and “shown the way out.” It is a tiny episode of disorientation—an outdoor creature trapped inside by light—and it quietly mirrors the old woman’s waiting: she too is between seasons, needing a sign before she can move in the right direction.
The phrase “There’s not much / an old lady can do but wait” makes her power deliberately modest. Yet what she waits for is intensely physical: “earlier suns to rise,” petrichor, and “that sudden dislocation brought on / by stepping into sunshine by a southern wall.” The unusual word petrichor arrives late, after the poem has been full of dryness and dust, so it carries the whole missing world of rain and soil. The plural “suns” is also notable, suggesting not one daybreak but the slow accumulation of lengthening days. In this world renewal does not arrive as a dramatic event; it arrives as a bodily jolt—warmth reflected from a wall can knock the senses out of winter.
The turn is equally small. “Then, after one jonquil blooms by way of / affirmation, she’ll step in.” A single flower is enough to authorize her return. The line break lets “affirmation” hang alone for a beat, exactly as the one bloom stands in the still-drab garden. The poem does not require a whole spring or a guaranteed season; it asks attention to small evidence. From there the syntax quickens. The final sentence strings together plain, practical verbs—rearrange, dust, bring, open, grab, begin—and the last verb has no object. “Begin” remains open, as if the action matters more than its completion.
The significance of the poem lies in this unheroic, seasonal courage. It honors an old woman’s patient watchfulness without turning her into a sentimental figure. The dusty tools, the trapped bird, the single jonquil, and the smell of rain on earth belong to the same modest cycle of disuse and return. By ending on an unfinished verb, the poem suggests that renewal is not a single triumph but a repeated willingness to step back into the room.