Well, the week goes on and on: teaching and editing all day yesterday, and today another afternoon of teaching. Last night Tom and I walked out into the gale to a restaurant around the corner--another strange luxury unknown to Harmony. There we drank beer and ate cod and mussels and puzzled over the identical haircuts of 35-year-old men. Why do they all want to look like Justin Timberlake?

So now I am gearing up for more teaching. Just in case you want to create your own private love-poem-writing party, I will share the titles of my study poems with you: Akhmatova's "We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift," Whitman's "A Glimpse," Kenyon's "The Shirt," Clifton's "blessing the boats." And here's the Whitman for your delight.

A Glimpse

Walt Whitman

A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.