At 6 a.m. it's 74 degrees outside, with a small hot wind. I turned on the air machine last night, so the house is relatively cool at the moment, but we are in for a scorcher.

I am feeling unsettled and sad, having just woken up from a dream about my grandfather's farm, which was in deep decay . . . piles of rotting tires, turpentine pouring through broken floors, and the perimeter surrounded by new-built castles and harsh electronic gates . . . the shabby land in its prison. In the dream we'd forgotten the place had really been gone for more than 30 years. All I could think of in dream-time was the fact that no one had changed the sheets for three decades; no one had turned on the lamps. I had no flashlight. I was walking the land by the reflected light of a knife blade.

This place that survives only in memory and in poems. Every time I dream of it, I am so lonesome, all over again.