The hot spell broke last night

Today, light showers, not even enough

to damp down the sandy dust in the front yard
But just the sight of rain slanting earthwards

seen from under a café awning, lifts the spirits, germinates

resolutions: baking, planting, travelling
I bake pecan bread, cosset the rebel oven

the loaves look fine. Bougainvillea scales the front wall

making a saffron backdrop for birds, a shrill type – wattle?
We continue with Schuyler’s letters, having finished Padgett’s

Life of Joe Brainard. To Joe, Jimmy writes: ‘So in England

weight is still given in “stones” … So the English are much more
stoned than we … Some day Uncle Wiggily will tell you all about

rods and poods, though it may not be for a score of years.’

Smashing to get a letter from Wiggily – or any letter
one with a stamp, and someone’s witticisms, not gonna happen

a long-stay guest at Great Spruce Head Island, Schuyler

hung out for ‘the mailboat’ – more romantic still
a baroque concert this afternoon, very Jim, & home to French paperbacks

another of his loves, stacked in the kitchen, saved from Georgie’s toss-pile

Duras, Hugo, Georges Sand, from her French course, Newcastle, in the 80s
Les grands marées, the high tides; Un barrage contre le pacifique

two watery titles. On the Duras cover, a painting, tidal flats and grasses

grey low water. ‘L’année suivante, la petite partie des barrages
qui avait tenu s’était à son tour écroulée.’  Jim’s last year to the letter.

Odd one out in the stack is Herb Gardening, Clare Loewenfeld. ‘Sometimes

lemon balm shoots up very early in spring, if there is a warm spell’
There was! It did!