June 25, 2020

Long, productive day. Made progress revising The Nurseryman’s Wedding. The beginning of it is very good indeed. Off then to school, where I put another dent in the move-out. Despair of ever seeing it finished. Workers were installing sanitizer dispensers outside the classrooms. Wren says nobody knows exactly what will be happening at the university this fall. Had a drink at High Five along the river, where I sat in the shade and started a poem. As I wrote, a shaggy red dog cavorted in and along the river. He barked at a stick, trying, I suppose, to provoke it into action. His master came along and threw the stick into the river a couple of times for the dog to fetch. When his master was tired, the dog rolled in the grass and threw the stick into the air himself. One seldom sees such pure joy: a dog, a stick, and a river. Ordered from Pomodoro, and as I was eating it I saw a shape on the porch. At first I thought it was the biggest dog in the world, but it was a bear, lumbering calmly about. He moved to the pond and had a drink, nibbled at a waterlily, moseyed around the garden. He grabbed a peach from one of the peach trees, but it was green and probably nasty. I think he was familiar with the ground, for he exited from the tunnel in the lilacs that is hard to see unless you know it’s there. Maybe it was one of the babies who visited here with their mother two years ago. When he was drinking, his utter blackness at golden sunset plunged in the midst of the red waterlilies, he was vivid and beautiful.