The obligations are beginning to pile up: lots of editing, a few workshops and readings on the horizon, my continuing slog into The Conversation. Today I hope to finish a chunk of editing as well as a chunk of my Donne chapter. But I also have band practice and soccer-match driving, a thicket of raspberries to wade through, lawn mowing, bread baking, and so on and so on and so on. You must be tired of rereading this repetitive list.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have nothing to do. But I cannot sit in my chair and write all day. Then I would get fat and ill. True, yanking a bad push mower over five acres of grass counteracts the fatness and the illness, but it wastes so much time. I could be writing.

Ay yi yi: the circular comedies of the underemployed anxious poet.

Meanwhile, Donne glowers from the cover of his biography. "Quit this fretfull Complaint," he remarks. Woolf snorts and lights another cigarette, while Homer ambles down the beach and vanishes among the rocks.