Yesterday I harvested a bushel of chard, a half-bushel of parsley, a half-bushel of basil--amazing production from this tiny plot of mine--which tied me down to a morning spent cleaning and processing for the freezer. Then I figured I might as well keep going with the kitchen fun, so I simmered a batch of sauce (tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, baby leeks), baked a peach-blueberry crisp, and eventually dropped a batch of meatballs into the sauce and served it over penne.

If you like tender, velvety meatballs, you ought to try mine. They are outstanding in fresh summer sauce, and I brag with confidence, even with zero Italian blood in my veins.

Yesterday, between kitchen jobs, I messed around with my Sappho drafts, updated blog pages, answered emails, read the Byatt novel, went for a walk. There will probably be more such this-and-thats today, amid firewood hauling and lettuce sowing and grocery shopping, and a drive down to the fish market to buy salmon for dinner. Among other things, T and I are starting to match up our calendars so that we can figure out how our schedules will overlap this fall. He's decided to come with me on a few of my work jaunts, which I love, though we won't always be able travel together. Still, just knowing he's around, or on his way; that we can meet up somewhere on an evening: the thought does assuage my homebody yearnings.

***

You might remember, earlier this summer, my excitement about accidentally writing a crown of sonnets. Well, the sequence is out now, in the current issue of Hole in the Head Review, if you're interested in seeing how the project unfolded.

Last night's baseball game was just about perfect: balmy temperatures, a fun crowd, three homers for the Sea Dogs (after each of which a cheesy lighthouse rose portentously from behind the centerfield wall and shot off a few delightfully lame sparklers), a fantastic throw-on-a-dime-from-left-field out at second, and even a pitching position player! This game had everything: plus, a long sweet stroll to and fro, a beer and a steak sandwich, and a fireworks show afterward. It was likely the only time we'll get to the park this summer, and what a good night we chose.

To Chuck's chagrin, I wallowed in bed a little too long this morning, no doubt thanks to the fine sleeping weather (56 degrees this morning, the coolest it's been for weeks). But now Big Kitten breakfast has been served, coffee brewed and carried up to the dozy guy still in bed, and I am curled into my couch corner, happy to be wrapped in ye olde warm red bathrobe, looking forward to enjoying my Saturday morning second cup of coffee--pleasantly aimless, a weekend at home ahead.

I've got a few chores I could do--plant a fall crop of salad greens; start moving firewood into the basement. But I'm also completely willing to be sidetracked. Right at this moment I'm a cat with the dregs of a bowl of cream, a spider with a neatly packaged fly--which is another way of saying, I drafted six poems I like yesterday.

Six! All day I wrote and wrote, and wandered, and wrote, and read and reread, and fidgeted, and wandered and wrote, and lay on my back, and wandered again, and wrote, and tinkered, and wrote. Six poems, all of which contain the same eleven words--sometimes fractured, sometimes exact. The words are Sappho's Fragment 53 in Anne Carson's English translation. I can't write them out for you here because the translation is under copyright, so look it up yourself if you care to. All I can say is that the words gave me characters, and a family situation, and a setting; a completely unrelated photograph entered the fray; and then my imagination could not stop fizzing.

Yesterday's six poems are only half the story. Over the past week I'd already written six others. Together they are becoming a tale-in-verse, set in the 1940s, in an American city . . . and yet the Sappho source material remains alive.

A day like yesterday is heaven.

Unlikely as rain seemed in yesterday's forecast, chance came through like a champ: we not only enjoyed a decent steady rain for a couple of hours in the morning but had a late-afternoon thunderstorm that transformed the street into a riverbed. Other neighborhoods dealt with wind and hail and uprooted trees, but all I saw here was downpour and plenty of it. There's always a lot of runoff with that kind of storm, but some of it soaked into the gardens, and some rain is way, way better than the nothing we had before.

It was a good day all around. I saw a bluebird during my a walk in the cemetery. I baked a lemon-brown butter loaf cake that came out really well. I wrote three new poem drafts linked to my self-imposed Sappho prompt. I read a chunk of the Byatt novel, washed bed linens, talked to my kid on the phone, went out to write in the evening with my friends.

Today will be another home day, and then in the evening T and I will stroll over to Hadlock Stadium to watch our first (and only) Sea Dogs game of the season. Sometimes we get to the stadium a few times during the season, but this one has been so crowded. I feel lucky we managed to snag an evening . . . and now a balmy forecast, fireworks afterward. Baseball is a fine way to play-act the sweetness of summer.

Will it rain today? The forecast is for slight chance followed by chance, neither of which sounds promising. I did water the garden yesterday morning, so I guess I can postpone till the afternoon and see what's what then. For now we have another dim and humid birdsong morning, rumble of plane and train, the little city rubbing its eyes, reaching for its coffee.

Yesterday's radio date went well enough, I think. It was fun to chatter into a mike, and I enjoyed the station's bustle of music and people. The show is called Passionate People and it's archived somewhere on the WMPG site, so you can listen if you feel like it.

As far as I can recall, I don't have any obligations written on the calendar for today, other than tonight's writing group. That means I can keep working on my Sappho poems, keep working on chapbook ideas, keep rereading A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, which I pulled off the shelf yesterday after finishing the baseball book. I'll wash sheets, maybe get to dealing with the basil crop or freezing chard. Or maybe I'll just mess around with words all day. That would be an unexpected luxury.

Whatever else transpires, I will go for a walk this morning. Walking rhythms are always a big help to me when I feel as if I'm on the edge of a burst of writing. Inhabiting that cadence both settles my fidgets and urges my wordlessness into the air. I won't call those fragments thoughts, because I'm not really a thinking poet, at least not at the earliest stages of a poem. But, for whatever reason, walking is sometimes a way to start saying.

This morning I'm being interviewed on WMPG, the radio station of the University of Southern Maine, 10 a.m., if you're interested in listening in. It's been years since I've done a radio interview, so I forget how the whole rigmarole works, but I bet it will come back to me quickly--as long I don't start getting hyperaware of my small speech imperfections: how I pop p and blur s . . . things I never notice in daily speech but that sometimes leap into my awareness during readings and recordings and such.

The interview will be just a half-hour blip out of the morning, and then I'll walk home and get back to work on a Poetry Lab prompt that's turning out to be quite productive. Teresa, Jeannie, and I decided to play with Sappho fragments, and I've been reusing the same one over and over in different ways to create a series of linked character-sketch poems. In the afternoon Teresa and I will talk about Aurora Leigh, and at some point in the day I'll water the garden and harvest basil for pesto. Plus, I've got eggplant and peppers and tomatoes and fresh onions--a bounty waiting for me to invent something wonderful for dinner.

Yesterday I caught up on mowing, weeding, and a few other garden chores, meaning that for the moment my homestead demands are minimal--just the usual daily laundry and cooking. So I'm glad the Sappho prompt is making me excitable, just when I have a little time and space to play.

And both boys phoned yesterday, and I went for a lunchtime walk with another of my favorite young people, someone I've known since she was two years old . . . and nothing matches the lift in my heart when I hear any of those dear voices on the other end of the line. The wedding, of course, is a primary topic, but despite the annoyance of the expense and the fret over plans, what we talk about is our excitement about being together at this big and wonderful party, dressed up in our silly loud outfits, playing our roles, being giddy and joyous together. 

We might have gotten a few drops of rain overnight, but nothing useful. The garden is hot and tired, the grass is spindly and brown, yet the humidity is so high that I can't convince any laundry to dry on the outside lines. It's difficult to dredge up enthusiasm for yard work.

Still, this morning I'll water, and maybe do some trimming and pruning. I'm meeting a friend for a noon walk, and Chuck has his annual vet checkup midafternoon, but the early hours are mine. So once I muscle through the outdoor chores and today's emails and paperwork, I might be able sit down for an hour or so and think about new poems, or even the chapbook. I hope so.

Yesterday I caught up on my Aurora Leigh reading, and I'm still slowly making my way through Grimm as well as the Dan Barry book about that 33-inning Pawtucket Red Sox game. It's difficult to feel brisk during these dog days. But one bright spot is tomato season, and yesterday I used up some of our beauties in gazpacho. My favorite recipe is an old M.F.K. Fisher version from the 1940s that calls for crushing the herbs and vegetables with pestle and then adding "half a glass of olive oil" and "a few glasses of water." A juice glass? A water tumbler? I love having no idea.

***

If you're interested, that article about me is out in the current issue of Haverford. I'm not sure my path to being a poet was exactly "unlikely," but I guess the word made a good headline.

It was another brutally hot day driving yesterday, but the town cooled down a little over night, so this morning I turned off the A/C and opened the house windows, and now Chuck is happily ensconced beside the screen door. He survived his two bachelor days without problem: our neighbor dropped by to give him his breakfast and remind him that he was adored, and there are no signs that he reverted to his youthful gut problems while we were gone. But since our return, he has spent all of his time in our laps or in our bed or whirling around our ankles, so clearly he is relieved that the band is back together again.

And here comes Monday . . . housework, garden work, desk work, and an enthusiastic, still-a-little-bit-worried cat. Though we were only gone for two nights, I feel like I've slipped out of gear somehow. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing around here?

Now the big Chicago trip looms, and these remaining August days are scattered on the path like breadcrumbs.