The bright, thin, new moon appears,
Tipped askew in the heavens.

--from "New Moon" by Tu Fu, trans. Kenneth Rexroth

**

Frost last night, and a fire in the woodstove this morning. Yesterday Tom cleaned the chimney and hauled firewood; I wire-brushed the stovepipe and dug up a bed for planting garlic. Then I came inside and made borscht and listened to the last Red Sox game of the season.

**

Flocks of birds go fluttering under the sun's rays,
not all are fraught with meaning.

--from The Odyssey by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles

**

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

--from Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games by A. Bartlett Giamatti