I spent much of yesterday morning outside--planting late-season spinach and arugula, harvesting carrots and kohlrabi, weeding the vegetable garden, fighting with the string trimmer--and then T and I went for a walk, I listened to baseball, I read Jane Eyre, I made a high-summer dinner of cherry-tomato cobbler, sautéed zucchini, and a salad of green beans and broccoli, and I went gratefully to bed.

Overall, it was as restful a weekend as I could have managed, under my messy circumstances, and I am more or less girded for whatever this week will bring. Today I'll ship out the editing project I've been working on. I've got another one to start tomorrow, but first I'll catch up on some teaching and correspondence matters and possibly work on some of my own poems and reading projects. I'll undergo my exercise regimen, and maybe grocery-shop, and certainly wash clothes . . . and none of this is fascinating to you. I know that. So I wonder why I feel the need to write it down. It's not a to-do list or a way to avoid procrastinating; I'm a steady and reliable self-employee and I'd do it anyway, whether or not I chronicled it. I expect my lists are more of a reminder that, indeed, all of this is work. There is no hierarchy among revising poems and hanging laundry, doing crunches and correcting typos, rereading a Bronte novel and scrubbing dirty carrots. You already know this, but I need to keep remembering.

And now, in these last few days of August, as summer ebbs, as days shorten, as the first red leaves glint and the tomatoes sweeten, the work beckons--word and hand, word and hand. I set down a clothes basket and pick up a pen. I close a book and peel a cucumber. I hang a shovel on a nail and lift a thought into the breeze sighing up from the bay.

Well, what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a rock-and-roll band?

                                --The Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man"