I worked all of yesterday morning on my essay, which continues to be unwieldy and disjointed but at least there is now more raw material to consider.

It's been so long since I've written willingly in this form. Outside of a few small review-essays, I've produced nothing but poems for more than a decade. So there's no sense of ease in pouring out my material. All I can do is acknowledge a need to write prose and trust that some version of synthesis will happen in its own time and manner.

I feel like Gretel in the witch's oven; I feel like a beat-up old mixtape that's been rattling around under the front seat of a car for time immemorial. I'm swamped in responsibilities I didn't know I had. Yet as my son said to me on the phone yesterday, isn't that an artist's response to grief--the urge to make? He is 27 years old and smarter than I am, which is such a comfort. I am the dumbest person in town when I am in the midst.

But I've got to plug the faucet and and turn my attention to actual paying work--an academic article to edit, an author to coax, Monson class plans to dredge up. I've got schedules to fix, materials to pull together for a teaching day with Teresa . . . and then there are the unpaid obligations: blurbs to write for two poetry collections, materials to gather for teachers in need, notes to send to friends in grief . . . the myriad tasks of community care--

We are huddled together in a small glass house. We are fenced in by malice. I am tired. But so what.