Last night's dinner was casserole-roasted chicken with sage, mushroom gravy, farro, roasted brussels sprouts, and sliced tomatoes with dill and olive oil, followed by cribbage and a Cubs game. Meanwhile, the rain poured, the cat purred, the wood fire snapped. We were like a cognac advertisement without the cognac.

Today, more rain. I have finished the mediocre David Lodge novel I was reading, so here I am, on an aimless wet Sunday, with all of my books packed into boxes. I shall be driven to reading magazine articles and the telephone directory.

Or I could copy out more Rilke and try to find the missing word in my poem draft. That would be more sensible.

Don't you think using the word sensible in this context is a little bit funny?

By the way, I heard the worst--the worst-- interview question on NPR yesterday. As Tom and I were driving to the apple orchard, he turned on the radio, and one of those guys whose voice sounds like all the other guys' voices was asking the poet Anne Carson, "Do poets really find hope in hopelessness?" I immediately started making choking noises, and Tom immediately started laughing but also, thank God, turned off the radio so I didn't have to listen to poor Anne hang on to her good manners. Argh. That's the sort of question that drives a poet to laudanum.

Geoffrey Hill readers: Comments are coming in on the "Merlin" post, so join the conversation. I'll be adding my thoughts later today.

Last night I felt like I dropped ten pounds over the course of my band's three-hour show. No wonder Mick Jagger is still so skinny. By the end of the gig the fingers of my bow hand had gone numb, and the callouses on my left fingertips had blackened and split. Stringed instruments are cruel taskmasters. But the crowd was laughing and cheering and dancing and calling for encores, so the hand damage was all worthwhile. There's nothing like playing fast music for a happy crowd.

I drove home through thick fog, split by occasional flashes of lightning. And when I got here, Tom and Ruckus were asleep together on the couch. It was a good feeling to know that the house had a heartbeat.

Now, in this late October darkness, I am sitting in my kitchen with the window wide open. The air pours in, heavy and sweet with rain. Another gift.

To Brigit Pegeen Kelly, with Thanks

In "The Rain's Consort," the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly wrote:

So, the lion, so his stiff wings, so the black moss that stains
Both his mouth and his wings, moss the color of fruit blood,
Or of pity, pity for the self that labors and labors
And spins only the wind, bride of the wind, oh foolish one.

Yesterday I learned that she has died, and her loss is enormous. I do not know another contemporary poet who was so driven by imagination. Her poems are rich and patient and dense; they handle words like jewels; and always, they move narratively and emotionally in ways that only Kelly would have seen as inevitable. The same poem, reread, surprises me again and again and again. How did she get from one place to another? It was a kind of sleight of hand; it was a kind of magic.

"We love what we love for what they are," wrote Robert Frost in "Hyla Brook." And this morning, as I listen to rain tap at the windowpanes, I am feeling the melancholy of her loss. I never met Kelly, but her poems opened a secret garden, and that in itself was an experiment in grace. It hurts to know she's gone.

Well, the realtor contacted me yesterday and said she's scheduled a house showing for Saturday morning, so that's good news. And my band is performing tomorrow night at Pastimes in Dover-Foxcroft, so that's also good news . . . at least for me, since I love playing with those guys. And Trump is still torching himself in public, so I guess that's another sort of good news, though also terrifying.

I have been picking honey mushrooms in the woods, editing a book about the LA slam and spoken word poetry scene, trying to memorize the lyrics to the Pretenders' "Don't Get Me Wrong," listening to a podcast about Jean Harlow while doing sit-ups on the living room rug, reading a mediocre David Lodge novel, eating leftover stir-fry for breakfast, waking up at 2 in the morning, yanking frost-bitten dahlias out of the flowerbeds, trying to finish a poem, hand-washing wool sweaters, not watching the presidential debates, and driving down empty country roads in the dark. I have also been meaning to remind you Geoffrey Hill readers: Don't forget to respond to Carlene's post about "Merlin."

I worked on a new poem last night, and copied out Rilke's "Seventh Elegy," and listened to a baseball game, and stir-fried cabbage, and thought about my friend Donna, who had swept in mid-morning for a cup of tea and thus cheered me up hugely.

Then I went to bed and slept and slept and slept. I dreamed that the actor Parker Posy had bought a farmhouse down the road and was painting strange patterns on the floors. I dreamed that I told a mean old lady that I was a Democrat so she sneered at me and refused to eat any of the brownies I'd baked.

I woke up at 4 to let the cat out, and then I went back to bed and slept and slept and slept some more. Now I am groggy and mystified. Why did I need so much unconsciousness?

Leftover rain is dripping from the tree limbs, and the grass is covered with wet red leaves. I am drinking black coffee and trying to re-enter the world of the living.

The little poem I began is not too bad, but a word is evading me. I have the sensation that there's a hole in my brain where that word should be.

The new issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal includes my long commissioned review of Christina Hutchins's recent collection Tender the Maker. As I say in the review, I had never heard of this book before; I chose it because I liked the title. The book turned out to be wonderful--filled with rich, patient language and considerable historical and emotional depth; a pleasure to discover.

* * *

Last night, as I was making dinner for myself, I started leaking tears again, in the same sudden yet slow-faucet way I was crying during the spring and early summer. Nothing in particular is wrong . . . I'm think it's just a case of too many feelings. Work will probably dry them up.

* * *

I hear no one like him. All at once I am pierced
by his darkening voice, carried on the streaming air.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Sixth Elegy"

Tom has left for his work week, and in an hour or so I will drive the boy to Portland to meet his ride to college. And then I will turn around and make my way back north.

Yesterday we hiked up Borestone Mountain, clambering and panting among the rockfalls and boulders, and then we sat together on the bald granite and stared out at the mountains and lakes and trees. Except for a glimpse of a railroad bridge, there was no sign of habitation . . . no tumbledown farmhouses, no ancient trailers, no dump trucks or skidders or school buses. There were no "Crooked Hilary" or "Lock Her Up" signs. They had vanished into the unity of forest.

Last weekend Tom and I sat on a pebble beach and ate apples. This weekend we sat on a mountaintop and ate apples. Two different visions, linked by apples and stone and sky and trees and water.

Later in the afternoon, as Paul and I sat in the car, waiting for Tom to come out of the store, we stared out at the ugliness of our town: a line of parked pulp trucks, gas pumps, a metal roof patched with tar, doddering unshaven men carrying cigarettes or boxes of store-brand doughnuts. I said to Paul, "It's hard to love, which is why I love it." And he said, "I'm looking at it in case I never see it again."