Currently the cat is wandering from door to door, meowing to be let in . . . except that he's meowing through a dead mouse clamped between his jaws. It's amazing how much noise he can make with a rodent in his mouth, and he's extremely annoyed with me for refusing to allow him to bring his mouse inside, so the meowing is high-pitched and vigorous. I imagine all of the neighbors are craning against their windows to see what's wrong with him. He can be a very embarrassing pet. But he is a very good mouser.

I spent yesterday morning working on Frost Place things, which also involved reorganizing computer files, a tedious job that I finally found time to do. In the midst of this I had a rush of inspiration about a problem with the long poem I've been working so hard on, and I radically rewrote an entire section. That was an unexpected flash; who anticipates that inspiration will strike while filing?

Later in the day I harvested a big dishpan full of basil and made pesto for the freezer, then cut a bouquet of sage for drying. I went for two walks, in hopes of finding mushrooms after yesterday's rain, but had no luck at all. Mushroom foraging is terrible this summer. The only thing I've found is a single tiny dried-up chanterelle, too dirty and insect-bitten to save. 

Around the edges I'm reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice with a friend who's never read it before, and I'm reading Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge, which I've read many times and which continues to be heartbreaking. I don't know of a better book about the insidiously sad and desperate world of midcentury American suburban housewives.

All night long the rain poured down onto the gardens and roofs and streets, and I woke and slept, woke and slept to its hiss and clatter. This morning everything smells of wet. The trees are dripping with water, the soil is sponged with water, the stones glint with water. 

T got home last night, cheerful and chattery, loaded down with a suitcase of Mexican hot sauces and a phone full of silly cat photos. I think he and J had a really good time together, ripping out bathroom walls, tearing down paneling, getting sweaty and filthy and cogitating about floor plans.

But he's glad to be home, and I am glad to have him home, and now we are sliding back into our usual ways. Suddenly the laundry basket is full again, suddenly the coffee pot is empty again, suddenly I am thinking about bread for his work sandwiches and do we have enough mustard and I need to remember to write such and such on the list and what's that weird smell . . . and so go the daily frets of the housekeeper. 

For a few days, though, I was a full-time poet. And I got a lot done. I got so much done. And now I hold my poem in my hands and it is alive and glowing.

 . . . and thus the haze of a happy weekend is dispelled by an automatic weapon in the hands of a cruel and stupid young white man. Of course it is. We live in America.

* * *

I spent yesterday slowly coming out from under my spell. I did write, but clearly the magic was dispersing and my brain was weary. I listened to baseball and played a few bars of the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I hand-washed winter hats and scarves and hung them on the line. I weeded among the shrubs in the back yard. I read a Margaret Drabble novel and finished a crossword puzzle. I made buckwheat pancakes for dinner.

* * *

At night I lay in my bed and listened to the city fireworks along the bay, the pop of firecrackers in the streets. Or perhaps I was listening to murder. I don't know how to tell the difference.

I planted calendula often in the Harmony garden, but this is the first year I've put it into the Portland one. Though the flowers are easy enough to grow by seed, I impulsively bought a flat of seedlings around the time when my father got sick and I was trying to quickly fill beds before I left for Vermont for untold weeks. Generally I grow calendula as a salad flower, but this time I was focused on the sidewalk bed, where I plant annuals to create a summer hedge, ones that stand up to sidewalk dirt and dogs. Of course, road construction upended my plans, and soon I had to dig up the little plants and heel them in elsewhere for weeks, and then replant them in the so-called loam that the guys used to fill the holes.

But the calendula has weathered magnificently. It is a plain little plant: fat buttons of color--orange, yellow, or cream--with thick bright foliage and a bustling eagerness to grow. I'm starting to think of it as my mascot flower: simple, happy, and sweet. Not that I am reliably any of those things myself, but I can dream.

Yesterday I did manage to get the housework done, so that task is comfortably behind me for a week. I am now surrounded by clean floors and clean bathrooms, and I have an unplanned day ahead. My new poem is six pages long, and I think it is mostly finished, though no doubt I'll be tinkering with it all day long, and tinkering with the garden all day long, weeding and staking and pruning one or the other.

This long weekend has been such a gift.

 The rain never materialized and we are dry, dry. I am watering twice a day now, fretting over the little shrubs whose roots compete against the sucking reach of the imperial maples.

Still, this is summer, this is classic July, this is the long weekend that pivots us into the heart of our brief northern flame.

Yesterday I made only the faintest dab at housework . . . laundry, meals, dishes. Mostly what I did was garden and write. Maybe today will be another such. The housework will get done eventually, but staying in this universe feels urgent. Garden and poems tangle into the same task. I am home, and surrounded by cares, but my mind is in a Coleridge state (minus the laudanum) . . . 

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?

 

I slept in a bit, till 5:30, and woke up sprawled on my back among the sheets, with the fan whirring and the cat staring balefully into my face. 

No rain yet, but the gray air is thick and the skies are glowering.

Here I am, on a sticky Saturday morning, with a full pot of coffee and only me to drink it.

I am waiting for rain, but not waiting for anything else. I have no plans but I have many occupations.

I write poems and I garden. Two new drafts yesterday, four revisions, chard and fennel thinned and weeded, grass mowed, peas picked, vases filled with sweet peas and calendula.

In the garden, and in my poems, everything feels out of hand . . . growing too fast, exploding in too many directions.

After street construction tore up my sidewalk beds, I thought I should give up on on the calendula. But the calendula did not agree.

Just before dark moved in, I watched a female ruby-throat buzz among the bee balm. They look like circus clowns, these flowers, but the hummer adores them. I should invent an adage: "Three clowns in a garden are a hummingbird in love."

The path to the tomatoes; and a glimpse of my neighbor's house, which is much cuter than mine; but this is a lesson for poets and gardeners: You've got to use your stuff, even if your stuff is a questionably renovated 1940s cape plopped onto a vacant lot between the 1890s and the 1920s.

The famous sweet pea, which has appeared in poems all day, riots cozily over a stair railing. She is lurid yet homey, a cottage-garden regular wrapped in a burlesque dancer's boa. I have been trying to write poems like sweet peas all day long.

 Day 6. We wrote and we thought and we listened and we read and we wrote. And then the day was over, and the laptop screens snapped shut, and I wandered outside into the afternoon, up the streets of the afternoon, I stepped into the quiet market, I picked up a box of eggs, I picked up a frozen pizza, I bought these things, I smiled at the man who sold me these things, and then I wandered back into the streets, down through blaze and shade, past young people and U-Haul vans, past old people and old dogs, past a stack of free books, where I chose Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay for myself, past fading roses and yellow lilies, past forgotten construction cones stacked like party hats, and I came around the corner into my own small corner, the shaggy grass, the calendula blooming bravely in the sun's heat, and I walked up my own stoop and unlocked the door and then there I stood, in my kitchen, blue and white and cool, in its north-facing quiet.