Outside, the misty darkness drips and drizzles. The temperature is mild--57 degrees--so no furnace grumble this morning, just the low echo of a train passing by. I woke up from a weird dream about making sausage in a nightclub (let's not even begin to Freudianize that one), and now I am sitting with my coffee and beginning to imagine my day. Eventually I'll head north to Harmony, meet a friend for a walk, mosey over to Wellington for the night, drive from there to Monson for Wednesday's class, but for the moment I'm still ensconced in my Alcott House nest, curled against the new couch pillows as the shadows of early morning slowly stretch and and thin into daylight.

I finished the Muriel Spark novel and have started reading Denis Johnson's Already Dead, which I may or may not have read before. It's set in northern California in 1990, and like most novels in that setting involves fast driving on curvy roads, illicit pot farms, exhausted hippies, unsavory surfers, ruthless landowners, fascistic police, addled iconoclasts, etc. I can't tell yet if I'm simply reliving the tropes of some other novel or if, in the faraway past, I actually experienced this one. In any case, Johnson's prose, as always, is poetic, and that lushness intersects oddly with the jagged hairpins of plot. I appreciate the strangeness of the collision.

I began another revision yesterday, so I am juggling two poems in process now. I hope to give the drafts some time this morning, before I have to pull myself together for travel. Now that I am in the midst of this crazy fall schedule, every little hole feels deep. It's funny how too-much and emptiness can co-exist.