After yesterday's rain blessing, every plant has taken a deep breath. Now, in the dim cool of the morning, a mockingbird trills, warbles, squeaks, twitters. Lyric pours from her like water over stone.

I spent yesterday prepping for the seminar I'll be teaching next week, but today I'll mostly be writing and reading and gardening and, in the afternoon, canning a batch of dill beans. I woke up very early today, with the physical sense that my current poem draft was rattling around in my skull. No problems were being solved: just a crackle of image and structure, as if the poem were a bird in a birdcage.

Now I'm drinking black coffee from a white cup and listening to the distant hiss of the highway, the pedestrian chatter of sparrows, the cat picking obnoxiously at the screen door, a city bus sighing to a stop at the corner, the jingle of a dog leash, a car door closing, the murmur of the dehumidifier in the basement--and now here comes the mockingbird again, splashing her song into the lazy air, jaunty and irrepressible.