After a few cool days and a beautiful rainstorm, Portland is settling into a week of summer elegy--a last chance for tomatoes to ripen and peppers to redden; a last chance to embrace an armload of basil, whose leaves are already beginning to brown and fade; a last chance for too-many-eggplants-and-what-can-I-possibly-do-with-them? I hope to find an apple orchard today: another side-effect of moving is that I've lost my standby northcountry orchard, which I used visit almost weekly well into November.

Yesterday I finished my first-ever pantoum, a form I've been avoiding for my whole life. Yet it suddenly sprang into my thoughts as I was working my way into an amorphous embryonic shapeless draft about something or other that I couldn't identify. It needed shape in order to become whatever it was going to be. Beforehand, I think I was libeling the pantoum as another version of the villanelle, a form I've repeatedly tried and failed to master. Sonnets, I've done; sestinas, I've done; terza rima and quatrains and other rhyme patterns, yes. But all of my villanelles have been dreadful.

This pantoum, though, is okay. Plus, it turned out to be a love poem for Grendel, which was a cheerful surprise. I've always thought that some Beowulf character should have fallen in love with Grendel. Sure, he eats Danes, but so do polar bears, and they get plenty of good press anyway.