I have been sitting at my morning table for the entire first cup of coffee, having read the final pages of Long Life, one last, beautiful Mary Oliver essay, “Where I Live,” and two ending poems, and have not written a word here, until this, explaining to myself, not why I have not entered into this morning’s dialogue with the page, but just that I have not.
Out the north-facing window, I gaze into the alley with its fences, the draping brown fronds of the banana tree in the neighbor’s yard, the telephone pole with its nest of black wires I try to block with the spider plant hung in the window. Sometime during my morning reverie I expect to see a squirrel or two along the fence, but not yet on this sunny Thursday that promises another warm day to tempt us outside, donning our masks, keeping our distance.