Hay day today. It was supposed to be yesterday, but one thing led to another, or didn't, and I weeded and mowed grass and mulched herb-garden paths instead. In past years we would pick up 200 bales off the field; but now that I'm down to a single old goat, we buy 50 bales of last year's hay from the farmer's barn. The job is easier and quicker, but I have a certain nostalgia for the real job--the heat, the sweat, the drone of the tractor . . . the physical extremity of the task.

Now that the boys are older they are strong enough to help. That, too, is better, in most ways . . . except that haying used to be a two-person work romance. There was something lovely in the meter of the job, and the common demands of it. Read a Hayden Carruth poem, and he will explain what I mean.

By the way, I have written a review of Carruth's 2006 new-and-selected that should be appearing in a future Beloit Poetry Journal. I try to explain why I love his work so much and how it has turned out to be one of the bulwarks beneath my own. But I wonder how many young writers read him anymore. It seems likely that he doesn't matter much in other lives.