Today is a holiday on paper but a workday in our household. This morning Tom will trundle off to build cabinets for someone else's house, and I will clomp upstairs to coddle other people's manuscripts. In the afternoon, though, I'll be visiting with a teacher from Scotland, who, as I understand it, is researching American methods of teaching high school creative writing. I'm looking forward to that conversation. Then tonight, I have a poetry-group meeting, so it will be a varied, wordy, semi-social day.

I've started rereading one of my touchstone books, Henry Green's Loving, and yesterday I also began copying out Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Already I can see that he is doing something unique with the sonnet argument, and "I want to try that too" prickles are rising on the back of my neck . . . a good sign for a poet in a dry spell.

She slept the world. Singing god, how did you
so perfect her that she never once
had need to be awake?

           --from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, I.ii, trans. Edward Snow