I'm up, and it's drizzling outside, and the coffee is hot, and my hair is wet, and I am getting myself ready to heave myself out of the house for a day of teaching. But as teaching goes, this will be play. I'll be working with my pal Gretchen, the venue is two miles from my house, and half of our small participant group is composed of our friends. I fully expect a good day.

Yesterday morning I wrote two brand-new poem drafts and revised a third. It was such a release to have a morning to myself . . . and the sensation lingers, even though I have to work all day today. Being a freelancer equals constant money anxiety, but it does allow for these gaps in obligation. Without them I don't know how I'd keep myself sane, or how I would be a poet. 

Outside, in the gray darkness, the yellowing trees begin to glimmer. A brief rain hesitates, then falls. The house is quiet, quiet under lamplight. My thoughts reach out like fingers, trace the crevice between wall and roof, wall and floor, the boundaries that tame me.

When I'm writing, when I'm about to be writing, when a new undertaking swirls, I am fragile--eggshell and pollen, a water drop unrolling from a leaf. I am all new skin, like a young garter snake.

It is something to be nearly 60 years old and yet also be all new skin.