Currently, some sort of garbagy rain-sleet-snow-ice compound is coating every exterior surface with Monday-morning grievances. Ugh. The sidewalks were already as slick as pigs. This neighborhood is a concussion waiting to happen.

Today I've got to prep for my Wednesday Monson class, and work on an editing project, and try to get to the yoga session I couldn't attend on Friday because of a previous ice onslaught, and tend a dear one in trouble, and wash clothes, and stare at a poem draft, and copy out Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and empty the ashes out of the stove, and cook an early dinner, and go to the movies, and stare at a poem draft, and think.

Meanwhile, the cat paces and the furnace growls and Tom sighs in his bed.

Meanwhile, I read this sentence by Louise Bogan, an epigraph printed on the back of a letterpress copy of Kate Barnes's long poem The Rhetoric of Fiction, which I unearthed in a free pile outside the University of New England library--

No woman should be ashamed if, in her writing, she tries to give back to the world a portion of its lost heart.