Yesterday's post-downpour harvest was memorable: I pulled all of my first-crop carrots--a bundle of beautiful slim tapers, each about the length of my hand; and cut our first two eggplants (a narrow Japanese variety, not a plump Italian). Three golden cherry tomatoes were ripe, four Shishito peppers were big enough to pick, as were four okra. Along with the basil, the haul made a gorgeous dishpan display.

I did a lot of work in the garden yesterday morning. Now the garlic is drying in the shed and its bed resown with late broccoli, kale, salad greens. In the planters along the Lane, I pulled out the aforementioned carrots and sowed another batch of them, along with some beets, which were a crop failure the first time around. In mid-August I'll sow my last crops: spinach and radishes for fall eating. Already, at high summer, my thoughts are shifting to winter.

But there's plenty to keep me in the present-tense too. Soon I'll be picking beans and cucumbers, though both are late, thanks to the groundhog; and tonight we'll have another of the giant perfect broccoli heads that somehow survived Sassy's assault. (The cabbages were not so fortunate.)

Despite drought, insects, and rodents, things are looking pretty good out there.

* * *

Along the edges, I'm feeling like a writer, though my house is crowded and noisy, and I'm swimming in other people's manuscripts.

I'm feeling like a writer, though the best I can do right now is to look at poems I've already written, as a way to remind myself.

Along the edges I read bits and pieces from the biography of William Blake. I watch the birds.

Crowds and noise. But I'm swimming in a small cove, around the bend . . . in the shallows, in the shade of a granite cliff, and the tide ripples and sighs.