Snow again. Yesterday's bare muddy ground has returned to white, mirror of the pale sky that hovers among the muffled trees.

For the past several days I have been working doggedly on a new poem . . . and copying out Carruth's collection Brothers, I Love You All, and shuttling between George Eliot's Adam Bede and Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant, and pondering a friend's novel, and listening to the Red Sox trounce the Phillies, and eating leftover hot-cross buns, and wondering, "Who reads Spenser's The Faerie Queene on an airplane and maybe I should be the first." I expect, in the end, I'll decide against it.

Once, several years ago, I sat in LaGuardia copying out Paradise Lost and feeling like the strangest person on the planet. Some of that reaction was vanity, and some was dismay, but most of it was prayer. Save me, oh, save me, muse of poetry.