Before any flower appears, there is weather. A gardener reads the western sky and sees mare’s tails—wisps of ice spreading like ghostly fingers—and keeps planting bulbs. Her chapped hands urge her indoors to the steaming kettle, but she answers, “Not yet.” In her mind’s eye, thousands of daffodils bloom where grass grew. That imagined future is not a daydream; it is the engine of the poem. To make the dream breathe, she must plant hundreds of bulbs in cold clay. The poem’s quiet but stubborn central idea is that transformation begins with small, uncomfortable acts, and beauty is built one buried bulb at a time.
The poem is written in free verse, without rhyme or a regular meter, and that looseness feels deliberate. Lines break unpredictably, as in “her / Ears feel the chill” and “will bloom / Where grass grew,” so the poem moves like someone pausing between tasks, listening to the sky, bending, straightening, working. The imagery binds weather, body, and earth into one experience. The sky becomes almost oceanic: altocumulus clouds appear “like schools of fish,” while the first mare’s tails spread from beyond the horizon as if the sky has fingers. Against that vastness, the gardener’s body is small and vulnerable. Cold clay is described as “milking moisture from gapped skin”—an unsettling reversal in which the earth draws from her even as she plants into it. Yet her hands still hold “round brown balls of life,” each one “destined for a hole along her fence.” The word destined lifts a humble bulb to the level of purpose. Rain arrives not as an enemy but as an investor: slanting through the trees, “investing her sleeves and hair with wet.” The verb suggests that the downpour is a gift, a cost willingly paid for what will come.
Sound and texture work closely together. Phrases like “wisps of ice” and “schools of fish” use sibilance to imitate the hush of cold air and cloud movement. The harder consonants in “chapped,” “clay,” “gapped,” and “shovel” ground the poem in physical effort. There is also a quiet personification of the landscape: wind lifts “skirts of / The cottonwoods and willows,” as if the trees are women stepping through the weather. The gardener becomes part of that community of bending, enduring things. She does not conquer the cold; she works inside it.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of grand heroism. The gardener’s triumph is not that she finishes everything, but that she keeps going until rain soaks her and then, “crutching on her / Shovel,” pivots toward tea with fire. The shovel becomes a crutch, a support, even a companion. The phrase “tea with fire” transforms an ordinary indoor pleasure into something almost ceremonial—warmth after cold, rest after labor. The title, “It Begins,” reminds us that bulbs planted in autumn are the invisible beginning of spring. The poem honors that hidden beginning: not the daffodils themselves, but the aching hands, the cold clay, the rain, and the stubborn vision that holds them all together.