Another really deep sleep. Apparently I am exhausted. Thank goodness it's Saturday so I can wake up from nine hours of unconsciousness and then sit around groggily for as long as I like.

The new snow is glittering under the blue morning. I shoveled yesterday afternoon, but one of us will need to shovel again today. I don't know how much fell--6 inches? 7 inches?--but the temp has dropped from 15 to 4 degrees. No more pretending that spring has come.

I spent much of snowy yesterday choosing discussion poems for my upcoming class on Polish poetry. It was a painful task, which is no doubt why I'm so tired. I've been planning this class for more than a year, yet now, with the Ukraine situation, it feels horribly, horribly prescient. The poets of Eastern Europe have been truth-tellers for a very long time.

Maybe the class will help us hold each other up.

This weekend I'll keep working on class planning, and I need to recheck the page proofs of my collection, and I need to do housework and grocery-shop, and I'd like to work on revisions, etc., etc. But what I really ought to do is lounge around with a spy novel.

No one is shelling my street. My sons are not firing automatic weapons. The cold sunlight is beautiful. And the stillness. 

I never have the courage to speak of you

vast sky of my neighborhood

--from Zbigniew Herbert's "Never of You," 1957