I've been undergoing that particular purgatory known as "applying for grants." Ugh. The worst part is having to ask other people for references. I'm always ashamed to have to beg for kind words. But c'est la philanthropic-foundation vie. I wish it weren't.

In brighter news, I did have a poem accepted yesterday, a sonnet that has been rejected many and many a time. And this morning two pileated woodpeckers were quarreling in my yard. They were extremely loud, in a Loony Tunes kind of way, and were, on the whole, not a bad comedy skit to wake up to.

So now I am off to fork the boys out of bed, and haul them to their doctors' appointments, and then we'll go pick some blueberries and, with luck, not be stung by wasps.

What would Wordsworth say? He would say:

We were a noisy crew; the sun in heaven

Beheld not vales more beautiful than ours.

I kid you not: I glanced down at The Prelude, and those were the first lines I read.

The Spooky Book Fates have me at their mercy.

Excerpt from a letter from Virginia Stephen to Saxon Sydney-Turner, 13 June 1910. The writer, later known as Virginia Woolf, was 28 years old at the time.

I write, more to mitigate my own lot than to please you. The rain falls, and the birds never give over singing, and hot sulphur fumes rise from the valleys, and the red cow roars for her calf. In these circumstances you would address yourself to Chaucer, and master his habits before tea. I have tried, but cant persist--I pick chocolates out of a box, and worry my sister.

Here, in Harmony, it is also raining, but there are no sulphur fumes to speak of, merely the distant drone of a tree skidder, a car or so hissing by on the wet road, a proprietary rooster admonishing his hens. Perhaps I should address myself to Chaucer, and master his habits before tea. I will, I hope, address myself to Wordsworth; certainly, I must address myself to the textbook editing. I would like to address myself to myself, and the rain offers the comfortable pretext for believing such an address might be possible.

But I do think this little passage from Virginia's letter is beautiful. So in a way it doesn't matter what I manage to do today, now that I've read it. If nothing else, I feel vindicated in my use of "and." It's my favorite word, you know.

A cool morning. The sun is low in the sky: the light is shifting, spiraling toward autumn. Everywhere the grass is patchy-dry. The raspberry briars collapse, exhausted, into the collapsing dandelion leaves.

So many of the growing things are tired, but not the cucumbers, not the chard. The chard is enormous, glowing, jewel-stemmed, with leaves like ruffled aprons. So today is the day I will freeze chard, a large and unwieldy washing-and-blanching operation, given my small sink. Too bad there is no baseball game to listen to this afternoon. Radio baseball and food preservation are ideal companions.

I copied out some Wordsworth yesterday. I felt my mind following his mind. That is a hard sensation to describe, and whatever I say seems to sound hubristic. I don't intend to sound that way. All I mean is that I felt his mind in my own, as I might feel my hand holding someone else's hand. Like and unlike. A curious sensation of knowledge--those strange familiar knuckles and nails and tiny ridged bones; those calluses, those baby-soft palms.

I note now that my descriptions are fading into fragments. And I think that's part of how I feel when I sense that my mind is following another's mind, when I curl my hand within another's hand.

As if the fragments intersect and disintegrate and intersect.

As if physical memory is like poetic comprehension.

Here's a Huffington Post article by Anis Shivani that I suspect will make thousands of readers very angry.

Though I can't say anything about the fiction writers on the list (since I haven't read any of their books), I do agree with Shivani's poetry choices. The work of every single one of these poets irritates me deeply. Also, note his distaste for Marilynne Robinson, whom he mentions briefly in the opening paragraphs. That makes two people in two days, and for entirely different reasons. Hmm.

Paul comes home from camp today, and I thought I would feed him something that is neither Spam nor Tang, which means I have to go grocery shopping, which means I can't stay home alone and write, even though I haven't been alone in the house since June 9. Oh well.

Anyway, here's the projected menu: oven-fried chicken, ricotta dumplings browned in chicken drippings, green beans (of course), sweet corn, angel cake, sugared blueberries.

If he's not asleep on the couch, he should be happy . . . except for the residual pangs arising from his sudden discovery of the myriad Red Sox injuries that have occurred since his departure.

Because I want to be writing poems instead of picking blueberries and whipping egg whites, I'll comfort myself now by posting a poem from How the Crimes Happened. As I reread it, I'm not sure how much I like this piece, so I'm not sure, after all, how much of a comfort posting it will be. Nonetheless, here it is.

Eve’s Dream

Dawn Potter

Not of your sweet wandering hands, nor even

of yesterday’s seed or tomorrow’s green pear,

but of crime and trouble, yes, offenses that never

crossed my fancy before this wretched night:

for in my dreams a quiet voice at my ear

coaxed me awake; and I thought it was you

cajoling me into the pleasant shadows,

cool and silent, save when silence yields

to cricket scratch or throaty owl,

white moon-face waxing gibbous

and all the Heavens awake in their glory

though none else to revel in them but ourselves;

and I rose and walked out into the night,

but where were you? I called your name,

then ventured, restive, into the lunar

garden I knew so well by day, yet here

I lost myself in white light and black hole,

I staggered through puddles, over stones;

and I heard, in my heartbeat,

an invisible horror, I heard it tease me,

chase me, catch me; and I ran, I ran,

weeping I ran; until, under moonglow,

I saw my own pale hands stretch before me

toward the Tree that blocked my way;

I saw my hands embrace it, caress its satin skin.

And in return, the Tree kissed my captive lips

with its feathery leaves, as if a twist of wind

had leagued us suddenly together;

for it gleamed strange and terrible,

this great rooted flower,

plying me so gently with Knowledge:

though my lips, parched and ravenous,

begged, now, for a rougher, a crueler dram.

I was talking on the phone with a friend yesterday, and I asked him if he'd read Robinson's Gilead. His answer: "I despise that book." Naturally I asked why, and he responded with something about Protestant sentimentality and then, with a rush of anger, he said, "Maybe it's just because I'm a Jew and I basically think Christians are murderers." And then, in the next angry breath, he told me I should write an essay about Robinson and explain what I think about her because he really needs to read it. And then he sent me an email saying that again.

Maybe I should write him this essay, but I don't know. I really don't know. At the moment, the thought of undertaking another prose odyssey makes me tired; more than tired: it makes me bone-weary. Within the past three years, I've written two complete books of prose, plus a number of unconnected literary and personal essays.What I do think is that I should be writing poems again. I just have this feeling, this prickling behind my sinuses, that I need to retire from prose, at least for a while.

This could all be chalked up to late summer exhaustion. But to tell the truth, I do not feel smart enough, or coherent enough, to explain the power of sweetness in fiction, to worm my ways through the literary mysteries of the white Protestant mind, to track down the discontinuities between a character and the authorial presence who lurks behind him. I'm daunted, and I'm tired.

Anyway, I have to edit a textbook and mow grass. I shouldn't even be wasting time imagining I could write anything, even something so desirable as a poem. Please understand that I don't say this so that you will feel obliged to leave a comment encouraging me to make time for my writing. I make all too much time to write. I make not enough time to earn a living. This is an unfortunate state of affairs, when it comes to paying for a trip to Montreal and buying a freezer pig.

Yesterday was Shelley's birthday, and Obama's, and the day that Alex Rodriguez of the cursed New York Yankees hit his 600th home run; and also a crucial and repeated date in the plot of Ford Madox Ford's glorious 1915 novel The Good Soldier. Among other things, it's the date of the character Florence's birthday, marriage, and suicide. Not once but twice I have happened to find myself reading that book on August 4, a coincidence that is rather skin-crawly. If you've ever read The Good Soldier, you'll understand why I do not, in any way, want to imitate the trajectory of Florence; and now I make a point to avoid taking that novel off the shelf during the summer months.

You may be pleased to hear that I am actually at this moment reading a novel I have never read before: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. I've been meaning for quite some time to read a Robinson novel, and finally one leaped into my hands at the Goodwill, a sign that now was the time to undertake it. Which it certainly has been. This is a beautiful book--exquisitely, patiently composed; and though the narrator is an elderly midwestern Protestant preacher, he speaks, really, for anyone who puzzles over her place in this world, for anyone who loves it.

Here's a paragraph I read this morning:

[John] Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin's God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.

I think this is a wondrous paragraph, and it is only one of many. Already I feel a letter to the author burgeoning under my fingers.

And now off to circumvent the hot day. Gazpacho tonight, and more of the endless green beans, and possibly watermelon sorbet. Till tomorrow, then, dear reader.