It's been a strange week--a major rejection letter, combined with messages from unexpected new readers, combined with the elegiac sensations arising from my youngest child's final days in high school, combined with sweet gift-words to me from his friends, combined with hobbling around like Dickens's Aged Parent, combined with teaching and editing and washing and baking and sweeping, combined with the field of loneliness that spreads before me. . . .

On my kitchen table rest a vase of purple lupines, a dish of fat red-black cherries, an empty white cup, a yellow hardback copy of Halberstam's October 1964. A male red-breasted grosbeak flits onto the feeder at the window. Outside, the green morning vibrates under dusty bars of sunlight.

Halberstam writes:

[Stan Musial] had always been a generous teammate, and he was always willing to help teammates and opponents alike with batting tips--although he was so spectacular a hitter himself, with such great wrist and bat control and so great an eye, that his tips were not always helpful. Once the young Curt Flood asked him how to wait on the curveball. At the time Flood was having trouble learning how to adjust his own swing to wait that final millimeter of a second in order to time it properly. Musial duly considered Flood's request and then replied, "Well, you wait for a strike. Then you knock the shit out of it." (I might as well, Flood thought, have asked a nightingale how to trill.)

It's been a strange week. I have no idea what to do next with my Chestnut Ridge poetry manuscript, which no one wants to publish. I have just received news that my prose memoir, The Vagabond's Bookshelf, has gone to the printer and will be ready in a week or so. I am writing new poems at a glacial pace. I am not writing new prose at all, except for the reams of prose you see here.

Somewhere, beyond my line of sight, a robin is singing, singing, singing.