Yesterday I lay in the hammock for a few minutes, in the late afternoon, staring up into the massive canopy of Norway maples whose roots and branches tangle the neighborhood's separate little backyards into a leviathans' grove. Their hugeness is startling, impressive, unnerving: the maples are a family of wooly mammoths peering down at a doll's picnic. But their intense green shade, watery sun-flicker as a breeze ripples among the broad leaves, their sky-reach . . . I know they are trouble, those trees. But they are also extraordinary.

I'm making good progress on my Poetry Kitchen plans. And by the way, there's still one open spot, so if you're at all interested in experimenting with prose-to-poem influence, do join us. It's been fun to choose passages and poems, to grapple with conversation possibilities and prompts for new drafts. I like creating these classes; I like the way the passages and poems fizz together in my thoughts, how the writing prompts become inevitable, like a chemical reaction.

Today I'll keep messing around with class plans. I'll try to fit in some gardening as I didn't end up accomplishing much outside yesterday. I'll keep reading Philip Roth's novel Indignation and finish Alice Notley's collection Mysteries of Small Houses. Maybe I'll take another look at my manuscript.  I'll listen to birdsong. I'll go out to write tonight.

Meanwhile. Trees.