It rained again last night, of course, and will rain more this weekend, and, really, what is a day without rain? Is it even a day? The humidity is as thick as socks, but the temperature hasn't rebounded to scorch levels and open windows lure slippery breeze and birdsong. The paperbacks on the coffee table are curled at the corners, the upstairs fan batters at wet air, the salt is clumped in the salt dish, there are damp round paw prints on the chair cushions.

As usual, I planned to work in the garden; as usual, everything is soaked. I want to go birthday shopping for my son this weekend, but that is really my only plan. Maybe I'll end up at my desk again. Maybe I'll go mushrooming in the cemetery. Maybe I'll take myself out for lunch. I don't know.

I've got four new finished poems. I've sent the new manuscript to a few presses. I've been reading and reading. I've been sketching out teaching ideas. I've used this stretch of underemployment gainfully, but of course I'm also fretting about making no money. Presumably I'll be back to editing at some point next week, but for now my life is a slow river. I watch the squirrels chase each other, round and round, up the trunks of the maples. I watch the downpours fill the gutters.

These long pauses . . . they are rich but they are odd, and I have to be patient with myself as I navigate them. They are a kind of writer's retreat--long days alone with myself--yet they are interspersed with home duties--yet my attention to home duties also seems to feed the long days alone with my thoughts--yet the words and sentences rise like cream--

It is good not to be frantic. It is good to not be interrupted. Whatever I am doing, wherever this mishmash of chore and art takes me, the cadence of these solitary hours is a dense adagio.

Notes to self about being alone:

Don't drink too much coffee. Jitter is a distraction.

It is okay to keep lying down on the couch with a book.

When you don't know what to do, take a walk.

The book you are reading does not have to be a hard book or it can be a hard book or it can look like an easy book but really be a hard book and it can be a book you've read a hundred times before and the reading may not be for gain of knowledge or skill; it may be for gain of calm, or gain of sentence rhythm, or immersion in landscape, or absorption of history, or a wallowing in strange words, or a love affair with character.

Be a re-reader. Be a re-reader. Be a re-reader.

Notice your room.

Notice your body.

Forget your audience.