Two days ago I was still harvesting bits of kale, parsley, and green onions from the garden. But finally, tonight, our first snowstorm of the season will blanket the beds. It's supposed to snow all day tomorrow, dropping about 10 inches, and I am longing for it. Winter Maine without snow is a sad sight.

Yesterday was busy: phone meetings morning and afternoon, swaths of housework, but I did get a chance to spend time with the poem draft, and I think it has arrived at an ending. What an odd beast: pastiche and memory, time leaps and invention . . . I loved making it, but don't know what to make of it.

All night it rested, in paper clothes, on my new desk, mulling over itself, ripening into something, or rotting away. I wonder what it will say to me when I turn on the light, when I sit down to read.

Shifting from first-writing to first-revision requires separation, a shift from living inside to living outside. Now I no longer inhabit the draft. Now the draft is its own small planet, whirling through space.

* * *

Today I'll run errands--go to the fish market, go to the Italian market, haul a load to the Goodwill--but at some point I'll find myself at my desk, looking down, considering, wondering what I've made and what it's become. For me, revision is both very obvious (certain sounds, certain words, certain images ring false, clutter, paraphrase, mislead) and very mysterious (this must be; this cannot be). I do not think in terms of craft. Maybe that's because I was never trained. I've never jumped through any MFA fires; I've never written an annotation or an analysis; I've never wriggled under a graduate professor's thumb. All I do is read and write, and talk a little, and call that talk teaching or friendship. It's not much of an artist's statement, but it's all I've got.