Yesterday was washing coats, washing sweaters, washing windows, plus running errands, scrawling packing lists, checking in with faculty and participants. Another thing I did was yank out the weary peavines, so this morning, before the heat kicks in, I'll be out in the garden sowing kale seed in the bare patch. Mid-morning: a haircut appointment, and then home to tackle more window washing and list scrawling.

Amid the flurry I tinkered with a poem revision and I finished reading Everett's James. Then, last night, I slipped Jackson Bate's biography of Keats off the shelf, so that's what I'm musing over at the moment, though I don't know if I'll make it all the way through the tome on this rereading. It is, without doubt, my favorite literary biography, but I'm not sure it's quite the thing for lakeside rest after the rigors of a poetry-teaching day. Yet it might be. Books are surprising.

Temperatures cooled off last night, so now balmy air wafts through the open windows, the birds sing furiously, and a first finger of sunlight cuts through the flat dawn sky. It's been a bad news week, and I continue to strenuously avoid the poisons of my phone. But venom leaks out all the same. 

I am trying hard to live in the present tense, to be aware of my body in the world, to attend to my mind and my responsibilities, to make room for idleness and vigor. Anything to keep worry, that incubus, at bay. Anxiety is my least productive habit: it consumes so much time and strength, and it is 100 percent useless.

And I will need all of my strength for the teaching conference, where everyone else's anxiety will be in top gear, where poems will start fires that cannot be quenched, where feelings will be pulsing and raw. Of course, box of tissues is one of the items scrawled on my list. Every year at the conference people cry and cry. But this year I might need two boxes.