Out

It was marvelous to see this still life in a private apartment near Harvard Square. Someone arranged it for the passerby, kept the shade up. I wonder what happens at night. I wonder whether the still life is lit then.

Duck, horse, church, red tassel, sage, shoebox, carrousel riders but no carrousel. What else is there? What can you see? Not the absent person. Do you make altar-like arrangements like this one?

On another day, this time at the pond: snarled, useless fishing line and fly caught the light.

Fretted leaves make shadows.

October days: I want to be out, in them.

Bumble

Writing is harder than breaking stones, Yeats wrote. Not first drafts but revising. I've been away, revising. Now it's bliss to walk to the pond and bumble around rocks. The dog pack thinned out. I didn't have to avoid the larger dog gang, people with their dogs, sometimes more than a dozen, chattering, beside themselves with cozy fellow feeling. J. calls them smug, entitled, while I say these suburbanites seem to know little about animals. They like to see dogs frolic in packs on play dates. They call it freedom.

Between rocks and dog gangs, I choose rocks--these from Ice Age glaciers.

In the woods a single chocolate lab ran at me hard, eager to play. I liked him, spoke to him, then went on bumbling toward the sun.