Vermont gets exactly one mention, in the title, and then the poem leaves it behind. Everything after is set in Miami, where the speaker imagines the Muse has gone for the cold months. The joke has a sore spot inside it: if inspiration has dried up, it must be on holiday, and it hasn't left a forwarding address. Judging by that premise, the speaker is a writer in a dry spell, and the poem is what gets written anyway, a portrait of absence made from vivid invention.
The grammar tracks the fantasy. The first two stanzas hedge: "The Muse must be in Miami," "She must be spending afternoons walking." The speaker is guessing, like someone reading a postcard that never arrived. By the third stanza the "must" has vanished. "Evenings she goes to the Italian Restaurant," "They offer," "They promise." Speculation hardens into certainty, as daydreams do. The stanzas swell too, from four lines to five to ten, so the imagined scene grows more crowded and indulgent as it goes. The Muse's day also moves from coffee to afternoon to evening.
There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The rhythm comes from trailing -ing phrases ("drinking," "laughing," "listening," "watching," "dragging," "airing"), which let one sight slide into the next with an idle, drifting feel. This Muse is no marble goddess. She likes "sweet tough coffee," a phrase that puts two opposite qualities in one cup. She laughs at a rat instead of recoiling, and she listens to "brown-legged mothers scold," ordinary noise treated as music. The shoreline "where the água meets the blanca" arrives in borrowed words. Blanca is Spanish for "white," and the accented água looks Portuguese. The speaker, far from the scene, can only gesture at the sea in another language.
The list at the end of the second stanza is the poem's funniest move. The repeated "one" counts sights like a tourist ticking boxes: "one porpoise cruising, / one small airplane dragging its ad, / one plump woman airing her tits in the sun." The list slides from wildlife to advertising to a human body, and the blunt word "tits," paired with "airing" as if the woman were laundry, punctures any poetic pretension. The Muse here prefers what is unglamorous and alive.
The last stanza turns to seduction. Three waiters in "tight black pants" offer "soft ripe cheeses and red wine," and the sounds go soft with them: "soft ripe," "lightly brush." The tiramisu "was made just for her," and tiramisu means "pick me up" in Italian, which is exactly what a stalled writer in a Vermont March would like. The flattery arrives with the bill, so it may be a professional performance. Still, they touch her "sunburned hand," a souvenir of warmth the speaker's own March cannot offer, and they "sigh when she rises to go." Even the capital letters in "Italian Restaurant" feel slightly mock-formal, as though the speaker is announcing a grand destination.
The final line, "they'll count the moments till she comes again," belongs to the waiters, but it reads as the speaker's longing in disguise. The speaker is the one counting. The old tradition has the poet courting the Muse. Here the Muse is courted by strangers while the poet watches from a distance, with only imagination for a window. That reversal gives the poem its comic sting. Being without inspiration feels like being left behind by someone far more fun than you.
The poem is also quietly generous. It treats the Muse as a living woman with appetites, sunburn, and a taste for rats-and-café street life, not as a lofty ideal. And it undercuts its own complaint, because the details are so precise and so enjoyable that the poem proves some creative energy is still at work in Vermont. Writing about the Muse's absence turns out to be a way of summoning her a little.