Finally, this cold is starting to fade. I got through an entire poetry reading last night without coughing: a miracle! I had a busy social afternoon and evening and didn't feel as if I needed to be wrapped in mummy gauze and propped up in a dusty corner. I stayed up late and did city stuff like eat dinner at a restaurant at 9 p.m. and yet I enjoyed myself.

I'm still not 100 percent well, but I am definitely getting better, and maybe a few days of ocean wind and no alarm clock will complete the task. Today will be the transition to getting there: desk work and housework and maybe yard work and definitely errands errands errands. And then another restorative night in my own bed, and then we'll head off to the lands of the east.

I'll be carrying along work with me. I've got stacks of reading to do--other people's manuscripts, an editing project. I've also got a notebook full of my own scrawls, which I've had almost no time to transcribe or ponder. I'll be working for my friend, probably mostly in her garden, and T and I will go on some hikes in Acadia together, and my friend wants to do some generative writing together, and of course we'll all be cooking and socializing and mourning Curtis. So our days will not be lounging and television. But they will be unstructured and quiet . . . wood stove and ocean, slow light and slow waking.

Yesterday was a bit of a prologue to that . . . time spent with Baron, my oldest friend in poetry, my first teacher, the person who looked me in the eye and said, "You could be a poet"; and Baron's wife Janet, beloved for nearly as long as I have known him; and Betsy, friend of all of us, a humble and scintillating seer, heart of the society of poets that has welcomed me to Portland. All of them older than I am: in their presence I still feel like a raw youth, and yet, still, the years have marked us all; we have a history that criss-crosses and tangles and straggles away into lint and thread.

Betsy was musing, after Baron's reading, about poets who write within history and poets who do not. These days, I don't know how not to write within history. Big or small . . . mostly small, I guess. The small stories. Love and despair. The consequences.