A cool morning. The sun is low in the sky: the light is shifting, spiraling toward autumn. Everywhere the grass is patchy-dry. The raspberry briars collapse, exhausted, into the collapsing dandelion leaves.

So many of the growing things are tired, but not the cucumbers, not the chard. The chard is enormous, glowing, jewel-stemmed, with leaves like ruffled aprons. So today is the day I will freeze chard, a large and unwieldy washing-and-blanching operation, given my small sink. Too bad there is no baseball game to listen to this afternoon. Radio baseball and food preservation are ideal companions.

I copied out some Wordsworth yesterday. I felt my mind following his mind. That is a hard sensation to describe, and whatever I say seems to sound hubristic. I don't intend to sound that way. All I mean is that I felt his mind in my own, as I might feel my hand holding someone else's hand. Like and unlike. A curious sensation of knowledge--those strange familiar knuckles and nails and tiny ridged bones; those calluses, those baby-soft palms.

I note now that my descriptions are fading into fragments. And I think that's part of how I feel when I sense that my mind is following another's mind, when I curl my hand within another's hand.

As if the fragments intersect and disintegrate and intersect.

As if physical memory is like poetic comprehension.