It's been raining for three days--a slow cold rain seeping from eaves and hat brims. I like to be outside in most weathers, but even I have a hard time enjoying the raw chill of this perpetual drizzle. I do walk in it, but I'm glad to get home again, to lamplight and hot tea and a wood fire.

Yesterday I cleaned up Christmas: put away ornaments, recycled cards, took out the tree, vacuumed and dusted and mopped. With the holiday clutter gone, the tiny living room feels plain and spacious. The air smells of soap and new bread. In the cupboard, sheets are stacked in crisp folds; towels align precisely, a steeple of green and gray. This is the ode of the housewife; this is a paean to a green crockery bowl filled with papery onions, to minestrone bubbling on the stove, to dough rising under a red cloth, to heaped woodboxes and a neat basket of freshly split kindling, to a white cat asleep in a yellow chair.

And yet I also worked on a poem yesterday, a slow unrolling meditation that seems to want to be a long poem, that seems to want to be a disquisition on thought and dream and memory; and it sits now on my laptop like a scrap of unfinished weaving, threads of many colors straggling into a pattern. Today, as the drizzle taps at my study window, I'll tangle a few more threads, tie a few more knots, then untangle, untie . . . the inefficiencies of making--sometimes slow, sometimes sudden, never the same move twice, or always the same move, repeated like history or prayer or housework.