For dinner last night I made a salmon soufflé, a beautiful sight, leaping straight from the hallowed pages of Julia C's first cookbook. A fine, old-fashioned, French-for-American-housewives recipe, packed with postwar butter and eggs, breezily requesting canned salmon and Swiss cheese. As it happened, I did not follow that particular path of convenience: I had a leftover piece of fillet that had been sitting in the freezer for a couple of months and a hank of low-budget Gruyere. In fact my soufflé was highfalutin, in a middlebrow way.

Tom and I were excited to watch it rise, to crow over its brown puff, to spoon up its delightful texture of nothingness. Dinner as mild-mannered spectacle.

I don't have much planned for today, other than my usual winter weekend obligato: water plants carry firewood sweep floors clean bathrooms wash clothes read books walk into the cemetery stare out over saltwater.

But I am pleased to have a new poem draft. It's constructed around a series of online reviews of a seedy motel: borrowed, rewritten, molded, dramatized. I do love voices. And I love the work of spotlighting the strange intersections of comic and monstrous, glibness and deep feeling. The ambiguities of place and need and desire and desperation.