And here we are again, back to Monday. But it will be an odd melded week . . . starting short, with a holiday on Friday; then immediately becoming long, with a Saturday-to-Saturday gig in Monson.

This week will be a flurry of get-ready-go tasks--not just paperwork, practice, packing, and readying house and garden for my absence but also my annual wash-and-vacuum-the-car-so-I-can-ferry-poets-without-embarrassment chore. Plus, yesterday evening, after a weekend of houseguests and bookless play, I suddenly fell straight down a reading/research rabbit hole involving the early poetry of Ted Hughes, Robert Graves's The White Goddess, D. H. Lawrence's novels, midcentury writers' (both male and female) absorption of the myth of the Muse, and how all of this linked to sexual, marital, and artistic imbalances among a swath of couples of the era, especially those who never became famous or even serious practitioners but were nonetheless bitten by notions that they couldn't recover from.

An unwieldy topic, involving heavy reading, family and literary history, and a totally unclear writing project, none of which I have leisure to pursue. And yet here it is in my lap. Goddamn that Muse.

Well, anyway, I scribbled a lot of notes last night, and maybe that will keep the pot at a low boil while I'm distracted by obligation. Or maybe I'll discover a pinhole leak in the kettle, and all of my excitement will drain away, and the fire will go out, and the Muse will go back to snorting in her tent.