Yesterday's harvest, left to right: garlic chives, chive blossoms, parsley, French breakfast radishes. Not seen: a pan of mixed arugula, lettuce, and spinach. Dinner was a new adventure: hot and sour Thai shrimp soup--delicious and flavorful, floating with herbs, and also extremely spicy. On the side, salad, French bread, and French breakfast radishes.

It's been a slower-than-usual weekday morning: T will be working at a different job site today so doesn't have to get up as early. And the cat, uncharacteristically, also decided to sleep in. So by the time I wandered downstairs to make coffee, pale daylight was already streaming through the windows, a small wind twitching the maples, the neighborhood's tame beauties on display . . . lilacs, the first irises, the old-fashioned square front porches, children's bikes and backyard fences, the trembling fat new leaves.

Yesterday I spent the morning editing, the afternoon running errands--grocery-shopping, getting the slow leak in a tire fixed--then did some weeding and mowing, took down the laundry, pottered in the garden. I finished my Trollope novel and returned to the Bronte biography. I scribbled notes about class planning; I talked on the phone to my mother and a son. I did my exercises in fresh air. I ate breakfast and then lunch outside at the new backyard table. I'm beginning to step into summer life, when the transition between inside and outside blurs, when every dinner arises from what I discover in my front yard at four o'clock in the afternoon, when the evening soundtrack is baseball on the radio and light lingers among the sea-gray clouds as I climb into my bed.

Am I making poems or not? I always seem to produce them less intensely in the summer, partly because I'm so distracted by the out-of-doors, but also partly because I am drinking in my own subject matter. This is the world of my writing: the body at work and at wonder . . . in the garden, under the clotheslines, beside the kitchen's open window. I am a household poet. In the summer I feel, so intensely, the intersection of my physical and creative lives. My eyes are overwhelmed with visions, my hands rough with soil and dishwater, and the cadences of Marvell and Herbert are a barely audible tuneless hum, ever-present, like breathing.