There are few things more luxurious than waking up beside an open window on a Monday holiday in high spring and lingering drowsily in bed as the rain that has been falling all day and all night gently drips and patters. Even Chuck the breakfast enthusiast was willing to dawdle.

Such a lovely weekend: I don't know how it could have been better--lots of time with T on the beach, in town, around the house; the gardens in spectacular shape; a slow reread of Joyce's The Dead; and yesterday morning I may have reached the end of the long-poem draft . . . in any case, the time has come to step back and consider what it has become.

I write these words and I instantly imagine someone frowning: ready to point out that my private gladness ignores national terrors, heart-tearing Gaza, the unhoused woman in the rain, the porcupine crushed by a car, customs officers dragging away a young man, a child afraid of her father . . . oh, there is so much to write . . . the list drags on and on. 

Does joy equal callousness? As a child I learned: the cup is always half-empty; distrust pleasure; be more afraid. 

Recklessly I cannot help myself. I love to be alive.

I've spent most of a week writing a long-poem draft about death.