Today my first desk task is to sort through the poems of Wislawa Szymborska and choose three or four to read tomorrow morning at the Plunkett Poetry Festival. The festival's theme this year is "Poetry of Revolution," which complicates matters; for even though Szymborska's poetry suits this categorization, it slides into it both modestly and slyly. She is not a thundering demagogue, not by any means, which is one of the reasons I love her work. Not many poets can manage clarity, simplicity, erudition, politics, humor, and terror simultaneously.

The rest of my day = driving a carload of boys to baseball practice, buying coffee and new laundry baskets, listening to the Red Sox lose to the Rays, planting shallots, feeding dogs, suggesting to Tom that he set a mousetrap and get the lawn mower fixed, writing an introduction for a Garcia Lorca essay, typing an essay by Hayden Carruth, writing three sentences that belong to me, jumping rope, watching robins mate on the lawn (they do a lot of flapping and hopping), weeding the asparagus bed, browsing among the helped-wanted pages, drinking lemon-ginger tea, staring at the sky, and reading the poems of Andrew Marvell.

Here's a bit from one of those poems by Andrew Marvell--"The Garden," which is not at all like my garden. Not at all.

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarene, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

He seems to have been trapped in some sort of attack garden.