Snow fell overnight--not much, but enough to freshen the plow piles and shine the roofs. I've been reading Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake (an odd combination of spy novel and meditation on Neanderthals) as well as Tennyson's Arthurian idylls; and with that baggage swirling behind them, my eyes are imagining this new snow as mythic overlay--maybe even here, in the prosaic little northern city by the sea, the trees speak and caverns lurk beneath the drifts.

I caught up on various chores yesterday, desk and household, so today, as I wait for the next editing projects to arrive, I'll go back to working on character-study poems for the Monson faculty performance. Our show doesn't have a name yet, and I think it will be easier to talk about once it does. But I am beginning to see a shape arise, beginning to hear voices.

I've also been writing sonnets this week, in collaboration with Teresa and Jeannie: a round-robin project in which we borrow each other's last lines as our own first lines to create a three-person sonnet weave. I've been surprised by the ways in which the form has exerted itself. Without thought I instantly adopted Shakespearean, and the poems are flowing. Yet the sonnets that the others are writing are Petrarchan or American, entirely different from mine. The end product is going to be very interesting, structurally at least.

I'm still feeling residually blue from the renewed onslaught of Baron mourning over the past few days. After publishing that essay in VP, I had the responsibility of writing notes to the sad people who responded to it, and that's been weighty and difficult. So these poem projects have been a good distraction. Whether or not I'm actually making good poems, I'm reaching into unfamiliar spaces. The air feels cold and crisp. My lungs fill, and my heart beats faster.