My class went well, though I kept having to mute myself so I wouldn't cough through people's readings. I think I drank ten cups of tea yesterday, and possibly the participants could hear me slosh. However, they were nice enough not to say anything.

Homer always makes for good conversation, but he is particularly relevant in conversations about violence, perception, manipulation, and morality . . . all of which people needed to talk about yesterday. He was the right poet at the right time, as I guessed he might be.

So, today: more Homer--and with the new morning a new weather world, as yesterday's 80-degree Eden lurches into today's 40-degree Maine. I did nothing outside yesterday, other than take a short walk before class and sit in the grass with the cat afterward. I hope you took better advantage of our brief paradise.

It's impossible to reconcile such soft sweetness with the harshness of the sorrow in Maine. Homer would not even try. There is no reconciliation. Both exist. They do not explain one another. But they spill into one another.

It can be hard to be a poet because a poet doesn't solve anything. Our talent is to see too much; our vocation is to transcribe what we see so that the reader sees it too. Even so, we constantly mis-see and misunderstand. Homer saw everything, but even his everything was opaque. The women, the slaves, the children, the animals are often blurred and blank. Still, his everything is so much, sometimes too much. The Iliad is one long poem of too much.