The rain is pouring, pouring down--clacking on panes, on vents; sluicing onto sills and stoops. It is forecast to rain like this all day, so I will spend it baking Emily Dickinson's black cake . . . for the first time in two years. What a joy it is, not to be moving house at Christmas! And to have a beautiful baking kitchen on a cold, dank day.

I've been reading Middlemarch, copying out poems by Frank O'Hara and George Herbert, and crazily writing my own. Now, after a week of work, I've got three close-to-finished drafts, plus the embryonic opening stanzas of a fourth. The poems keep pouring, like the rain.