In the past, early autumn has been my writing time--boys back to school; garden and yard retreating into quietude. That has not been this case this year, however. Among the demands of travel, teaching, and editing, I've had almost no unstructured time to think about my own work. So this morning, after I ship the files I'm editing to the author (and pitchfork the associated detritus off my desk and solidify a few details concerning my next editing job), I'm going to return to poetry: which is to say, I'm going to resume my study of Levertov's work, tinker with some revisions, think about manuscript organization, possibly even submit a few poems to journals. I've also started rereading, for the third or fourth time, David Reynold's wonderful cultural biography, Walt Whitman's America, which is a dense, beautifully plotted clutter of details (in the best possible way) about the way in which Walt's relationship to the everyday stuff of nineteenth-century America was also his apprenticeship in poetry.

And when I look up from my desk, I will see the golden light of the maples, the overgrown grass, the new woodpiles, late lettuce billowing in the garden, Ruckus the White stalking among the lavender asters.