I slept in a bit, till 5:30, and woke up sprawled on my back among the sheets, with the fan whirring and the cat staring balefully into my face. 

No rain yet, but the gray air is thick and the skies are glowering.

Here I am, on a sticky Saturday morning, with a full pot of coffee and only me to drink it.

I am waiting for rain, but not waiting for anything else. I have no plans but I have many occupations.

I write poems and I garden. Two new drafts yesterday, four revisions, chard and fennel thinned and weeded, grass mowed, peas picked, vases filled with sweet peas and calendula.

In the garden, and in my poems, everything feels out of hand . . . growing too fast, exploding in too many directions.

After street construction tore up my sidewalk beds, I thought I should give up on on the calendula. But the calendula did not agree.

Just before dark moved in, I watched a female ruby-throat buzz among the bee balm. They look like circus clowns, these flowers, but the hummer adores them. I should invent an adage: "Three clowns in a garden are a hummingbird in love."

The path to the tomatoes; and a glimpse of my neighbor's house, which is much cuter than mine; but this is a lesson for poets and gardeners: You've got to use your stuff, even if your stuff is a questionably renovated 1940s cape plopped onto a vacant lot between the 1890s and the 1920s.

The famous sweet pea, which has appeared in poems all day, riots cozily over a stair railing. She is lurid yet homey, a cottage-garden regular wrapped in a burlesque dancer's boa. I have been trying to write poems like sweet peas all day long.