The weather yesterday was lovely: sunshine, warmth, daffodils budding, bees humming. Paul decided to have class on the front stoop. I opened a kitchen window and baked Sardinian sheet-music bread (an elaborate name for a  simple olive-oil cracker). Last night Cafe Quarantine served lentil soup with chopped sorrel and fried fennel seed, a cucumber and yogurt salad, and toast. Tonight, we'll have our first cookout: Tom will grill garlic hamburgers over charcoal; I'll make asparagus with fried ginger, a spinach and grapefruit salad.

I finished copying out the first series of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and today I hope to turn my attention back to Blake. I worked on a poem draft that I don't love, but something is better than nothing. I drew a zany birthday card for my nephew. I am nearing the end of an arduous editing project.

Late in the day Paul and I biked to Rosemont Market to pick up our grocery order. We loaded my basket with lettuce and asparagus and felt very French, cycling through the neighborhoods with our vegetables on display.

Over the phone James and I invented a new trivia method for allowing shoppers into stores. Monday: you must answer questions about 90s bands. Tuesday: you must have detailed knowledge about the geography of Africa. Wednesday: tell us about the 1967 New York Yankees . . .

Paul destroyed me at Scrabble again. The boy is a menace.

Now Tom is making his work lunch, and I am taking a break from writing to throw a load of towels into the washing machine, and our day is lurching onward like a Timex with a clunky second hand. I look back at what I've written in this post, and see that it, too, resembles a cheap watch--the hands clicking ahead, clicking ahead, but never quite matching the clock face. I wonder if narrative is forsaking me. I wonder if blurting out a daily jumble of lists and images is worth anything at all. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Though of course I won't stop. I can't run a mile but I can stack firewood all day long.