August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can't put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can't!

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.