Robins are twittering hysterically in the wet darkness. If April equals 40 degrees and snowmelt, so be it. A Maine songbird does her best with what she has to work with.

Today I'm going to take a small hiatus from editing and turn my thoughts to student work--annotating my high schoolers' final projects and visiting my friend Gretchen's third-grade physical theater class. Then, in the afternoon, I'll turn my thoughts to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the weekend I finished rereading Roth's American Pastoral, then took a small breather with Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddie's, and now I have plunged into Henry James's The Wings of the Dove--though my old paperback turns out to be so dangerously fragile that I fear I may have to buy an emergency replacement.

I wrote four new poems over the weekend, along with those writers' essays I inflicted on you, and my brain is pinging with images and words. Meanwhile, I mop and vacuum and wander among the cemetery alleys and fold towels and stack dishes and play cribbage and stare out the window and talk to a son on the phone and listen to baseball and.

In the midst of life my friend Angela texts me, "Fucking shit, girlfriend, we haven’t shied away from the abyss." I text back, "No we haven’t! I call that success."