August 2, 2009

Watched the swallows in the sky last evening, riding the winds, too high for insects.

Watched Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I. I think it is the greatest prolonged performance by an actor that I have ever seen,

Poems poured out of me on the Starbuck’s terrace. I asked them to turn the canned music down and they did, ever so slightly.

Painted with J. When the torrent came, we discovered that our studio leaks like a sieve. Either the leaks are new or the rain seldom falls that hard. Came home and napped. It was a long, hard nap, and that was because I was making a chart in a dream. The chart was the way to prove that a child whose ghost haunted the dream had been raped and murdered. It was the only way he could be at rest, and I could not wake completely until the chart was done. I woke as I put the last pictures into place. The Y was closed by the time I woke, so I jogged along the perimeter of Beaver Lake, which I had not done in a long while. I saw a heron and an egret. The shallow water was lit golden with evening light, and fish floated in it like flaws in a jewel. Plants were stirred by turtles rooting around their stems. I stood and looked at the teeming waters, and I was happy.