Last night's baseball game was just about perfect: balmy temperatures, a fun crowd, three homers for the Sea Dogs (after each of which a cheesy lighthouse rose portentously from behind the centerfield wall and shot off a few delightfully lame sparklers), a fantastic throw-on-a-dime-from-left-field out at second, and even a pitching position player! This game had everything: plus, a long sweet stroll to and fro, a beer and a steak sandwich, and a fireworks show afterward. It was likely the only time we'll get to the park this summer, and what a good night we chose.

To Chuck's chagrin, I wallowed in bed a little too long this morning, no doubt thanks to the fine sleeping weather (56 degrees this morning, the coolest it's been for weeks). But now Big Kitten breakfast has been served, coffee brewed and carried up to the dozy guy still in bed, and I am curled into my couch corner, happy to be wrapped in ye olde warm red bathrobe, looking forward to enjoying my Saturday morning second cup of coffee--pleasantly aimless, a weekend at home ahead.

I've got a few chores I could do--plant a fall crop of salad greens; start moving firewood into the basement. But I'm also completely willing to be sidetracked. Right at this moment I'm a cat with the dregs of a bowl of cream, a spider with a neatly packaged fly--which is another way of saying, I drafted six poems I like yesterday.

Six! All day I wrote and wrote, and wandered, and wrote, and read and reread, and fidgeted, and wandered and wrote, and lay on my back, and wandered again, and wrote, and tinkered, and wrote. Six poems, all of which contain the same eleven words--sometimes fractured, sometimes exact. The words are Sappho's Fragment 53 in Anne Carson's English translation. I can't write them out for you here because the translation is under copyright, so look it up yourself if you care to. All I can say is that the words gave me characters, and a family situation, and a setting; a completely unrelated photograph entered the fray; and then my imagination could not stop fizzing.

Yesterday's six poems are only half the story. Over the past week I'd already written six others. Together they are becoming a tale-in-verse, set in the 1940s, in an American city . . . and yet the Sappho source material remains alive.

A day like yesterday is heaven.