I'm sure you're sick of listening to me talk about sleep or the lack thereof, but honestly it feels like insomnia is my body's central preoccupation these days . . . so when I tell you that last night I woke up only briefly at 3 a.m., then slept till 5:30 and lolled till 6, you should take this news as a major success story.

Now, on this cold morning, I am sitting in my warm couch corner in my warm house. I'm wrapped in my old red bathrobe and I'm drinking black coffee from a white cup and saucer and my beloved and our silly cat are upstairs in our cozy rumpled bed, and, sure, the nation is going to hell and all, but for the first time in days I don't feel like a zombie, so I will take my minor joys where I can find them.

Supposedly Nina MacLaughlin's review of Calendar is in today's Boston Globe, but I can't track it down online, and the Globe has impenetrable paywalls anyway, so I may never see it. If any of you are print subscribers, let me know if it's really there. I suspect it's embedded in a roundup of New England literary news, but I don't know.

However, I can share Ray's obituary with you, in case you didn't see it on social media and/or are intrigued by the obituaries of strangers, which I am, so I understand the impulse.

Day 1 of my class seemed to go well enough. With little sleep and much grief, I know I'm not at the top of my game, but so far that seems to be coming out via stupid kitchen mistakes (e.g., forgetting to do obvious things such as line a roasting pan with parchment paper and thus spending 45 minutes scouring scorch) rather than giant public teaching flubs.

Of course I still have plenty of time to screw up day 2. We'll see.

Yesterday, while class participants were working on their poem drafts, I was paging through the photos in Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and slowly beginning to tap out an essay about Ray and our swirl of friends and lovers. It's not a topic I've written about before, and it's a hard one to grapple with, but my brain says try and so I am. For the moment it seems to want to emerge in small bursts of prose. Maybe it will eventually be a long poem. I don't know anything about it yet, except that it seems to want to be written.

Meanwhile, I have been reading Olivia Laing's memoir-essay The Lonely City, I have been reading Lori Ostlund's story "Just Another Family," I have been ploughing through hard crossword puzzles, I have been raking leaves, I have been talking talking talking to sad people, and so go the days, as the nights wrestle among themselves.