My band is playing tonight at Pat's Pizza in Dover-Foxcroft, 8-11 p.m. Apparently it's an Oktoberfest party. Notice that the calendar still says September, but I guess Pat's wanted to get a jump on everyone else's Oktoberfest celebrations.

I feel exhausted from regular worries and jumpy uncomfortable dreams, which seem to have intermingled so that this morning I'm not sure which is which. When I woke up, Ruckus the cat was sitting on my chest, and all I could remember about the dreaming was that my son had become a Mormon missionary and I'd gotten stuck in a highway traffic jam composed of power-walking middle-aged women; and both of these dream memories felt bad . . . like fruit-fly bad: overripe and rotting.

Then I got up and read a poem that a college friend had emailed me, with these lines--

as when
they lay
against each other,
kittens in a box
of sunlight

 --and now it's as if my thoughts have been taken over by that image of the kittens and the sunlight, and though the poem itself is tragic, about a dead daughter, that picture lingers as if it is my own memory, not hers. And I think again: that this is what poetry does--without warning, at moments when one feels overcome by evil or dismay, or as if one is complicit in evil or dismay, or is snarled in briars, or is at the mercy of one's own subconscious brain.

It arrives, in its plain small lines. Kittens in a box / of sunlight.