I dreamed last night that I burned a hole through the dining-room table and was trying to figure out how to break the news to Tom. I was so glad to wake up and discover I hadn't really done that dumb thing.

Now I'm sitting in the living room with my coffee, thinking about sonnets and scheduling, listening to the closet door open and shut as Tom gets dressed for work, wondering when the snow will start falling tomorrow, considering the possibility of making borscht for dinner tonight. . . .

I did manage to work on a poem revision yesterday, though I'm not particularly happy with it. There's something wrong with the ending that I can't quite fix . . . a chime that rings false. And not I'm not sure the poem as a whole is worth the wrestling. Sometimes they just aren't.

Nonetheless, it felt good to sit with my own work for a few hours, especially with a Zoom weekend looming. I'm always a little antsy about these events--not nervous exactly, but keyed up: wondering if I've chosen the wrong poems to discuss; worrying about misreading someone's draft, or talking too much instead of drawing the participants into the conversation, or forgetting some important discussion point, or inventing a prompt that no one likes.

At the same time, I do enjoy the jump-off-the-deep-end aspect of teaching. I plan, but don't overplan. My favorite class are the ones that begin and end on time, but within that structure feel informal, wide-ranging, surprising; full of tangents and questions and interruptions . . . an infinite conversation, a complex communal act, that inexorably leads to a need to speak privately to oneself.