Outside, everything is soaked in rain and foggy blackness . . . but now we have hurricane trouble on the horizon. Lee looks to be taking direct aim at Maine; and given our already way-too-exciting tree troubles this year, I am anxious.

However, nothing can be done, except to pay attention and batten down. So I'm watching the forecast and looking at the garden. At the very least I'll need to tear out the beans and cucumbers: their trellises won't withstand any real wind. But I'll wait another day or two, until the forecast is solid.

In the meantime, I did have a good productive day to myself: all of the reading I'd hoped to accomplish--Dante, Said, Middlemarch--plus revision on five or six poems, two long walks, a bagful of foraged chanterelles, and even a few tasks accomplished . . . dates for my October NYC trip nailed down, vet appointment made, raspberry pie baked. I hope today will be as useful.

The revisions were especially satisfying. I'd mostly finished this stack of poems, but all of them had ragged edges . . . wrong words, obscurant grammar, useless line breaks, distracting cadences, obtrusive speakers, self-satisfied rhymes, plump endings, and such--not in large ways but tucked into small, easy-to-ignore pockets. So after spending an hour or so with Dante, I turned my attention to my own poems, briskly chipping away at the tartar, humming to myself. I might have been stacking wood or dusting a library, except that the chore was my own language. The task was absorbing but also plain, straightforward, unromantic. Afterward I felt as if I had spent the morning currying a horse.