Last night, just before I headed out to my writing group, the news came in: guilty on all 34 counts. Oh, the poets were giddy! I'd made a pound cake for the gathering but immediately renamed it felony cake. My son texted, "What if they make him do community service?," and the poets burst into raucous laughter and launched into imaginary scenarios involving latrines. I know, I know . . . the apocalypse still hovers. But just for an evening, it felt really good to stick a fork into the most indecent man in America.

And now, Friday: sunshine and soft weather ahead. Given that I have to teach all day on Sunday, I'm taking the day off from paying work. I'll ride my bike, do some housework, get out into the garden, read about the Brontes, work on poems. I've started wandering through David Ferry's translations of the odes of Horace.

Yesterday, at the farmers' market around the corner, I bought some flower seedlings while I was waiting for the knife sharpener to restore the kitchen knives I'd brought him. Then I sat down in front of the retirees' ukulele band ("Wagon Wheel," "Love Potion #9," etc.; five songs later,"Wagon Wheel" starting up again) and read Roman poetry. The modest human comedy of the neighborhood: a cold spring breeze and city young people gamely eating ice cream and country young people tenderly hawking homemade vegan sausage and goat-milk soap and baby boomers strumming the simplest possible chords on their ukuleles.

What does the most indecent man in America know about the small ways in which we plain humans bump up against our neighbors? What does he know about sitting outside in cool sunshine, a book of poems open in his lap, as two gray-haired women lift their treble voices in sudden sharp harmony? The wry stab of elegy, the silly sweetness . . . Wallowing in his cesspool, what does he know of such things?