I sit here in my couch corner, attempting to become lucid. I slept well enough last night but hardly at all the night before, and then taught a full day and drove long distances and made dinner. As a consequence, I have slipped into that deep exhaustion that even better sleep doesn't instantly repair. I expect I'll shovel myself into a livelier state of mind, but right now I could easily climb back into bed.

Still, despite the insomnia, my trip north was lovely, though I could have done with less slush on the roads. The kids were all a bit end-of-the-semester shellshocked . . . one wrote of being "stained" with fatigue, a brilliant metaphor for deep tiredness. But despite that, they created six new drafts in one day, working their way through the revision prompts I gave them, and they seemed to be glad to be back together, back at their own work. And of course being with my homeland friends is always a treat, whether or not I manage to sleep at night. 

Yesterday Vox Populi published a new poem, "Sleeping with the Cat" . . . much in my life seems to be revolving around sleep or the the lack thereof. If I can pull myself together today, I'm hoping to go out and write at the salon tonight. But the bulk of the day will probably be housework--floors, bathrooms, laundry, groceries. I'm still waiting for the elusive editing project to arrive; the rest of the big tree came down yesterday while I was away; we've got another batch of sloppy weather on the way; I have a recipe for peanut noodles I want to try, a recipe for pimento cheese bread I want to try; I need to scrape ashes out of the stove and clear stacks of reading material off the coffee table and read the poems of Robert Southwell and attempt to rediscover my sparking mind.

But at the moment just making a cup of tea feels laborious.