Last night, at the ballgame, the temperature finally settled into something like sweetness, but this morning the air is sticky and dense and ominous. Let's hope it really does lead to thunderstorms. We need rain desperately.

Teresa and I talked yesterday afternoon about Whitman, and both of us were infatuated. Though I've read these poems many, many times before, somehow, on this go-round with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," I was gobsmacked. "Brooklyn Ferry" especially . . . I felt like I needed to find a way to bring the poem into my body . . .  like I wanted to eat it. What a poem. What a mind. How lucky are we, as humans, to have this artifact of ourselves?

Hey, you should read that poem again. You really should.

I've started pecking away at a small unsatisfactory draft of my own (but perhaps everything would have been unsatisfactory after living inside "Brooklyn Ferry"). And I've finished rereading Murdoch's The Green Knight (also a very good book) and have started rereading Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Today will be housework day, and evening poetry day, and go-pick-up-Chuck's-medicine day--he's been diagnosed with giardia, poor boy, probably picked up from contaminated water in his birthplace. Sounds like it should be a reasonably easy fix, thank goodness, but of course medicating a cat is always an ordeal.

And rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain. If you know any spells or incantations, please invoke them ASAP.