At ten I dictate up the changes I’ve made on manuscript poems and prose, add a tape of letters I did during baseball the night before, and deliver to Lois the afternoon’s typing and word processing. Now I shave, if I didn’t shave earlier. I read a manuscript by a friend who wants advice—or praise; who wants mostly praise, but who will receive some blame, some praise, and some advice—and proofread the index of Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, the new prose book that comes out next August.
Eleven o’clock, and time for lunch. When you eat breakfast at five-thirty, you eat lunch at eleven: cheese, bread, V-8, and raisins. I eat raisins while I read in bed beside Jane, getting drowsy towards our twenty-minute naps. All morning Jane has done things parallel and different: breakfast, reading the Upanishads, dog-walk, desk work on poems, maybe some letters. We do not speak all morning, but her presence in her own study, working as I work, means everything to my work. When she is away doing a poetry reading I am lethargic, moony, and blue; I work a slow-down half-speed schedule: work-to-order, blue flu. I invent reasons to leave the house on errands; I fill out coupons for magazines and join book clubs.
On this best day Jane is home and I have no errands. We wake from our naps at the same time, and by earlier agreement know what we will do next. How nice to be old enough, living together and alone, to make love in daylight with no more precaution than taking the phone off the hook.
Buzzing with love’s drug I walk the dog, twenty minutes a day. Jane acquired Gus largely to force me to leave the house while moving my legs. Otherwise there were always good reasons why, today, I should read a book or go back to the desk instead of taking a walk. Walking Gus on the best day, the countryside is beautiful. If we climb the dirt New Canada Road early in October, I gaze open-mouthed into the deep mixed woods that do what they always do: birches slim and delicate with yellow leaves, stout black-green hemlock, ash and popple and the rare elm, over all the sugar maple’s violent red. As he runs Gus kicks up red and yellow leaves that mark the dirt underneath with their bright signatures.
We walk the same road most days all year, and the walk is different always. In dead winter the sky is densely blue, tree shadows sharp on the white earth, stone walls revealed in the absence of leaves, granite boulders and evergreens. In spring when New Canada is muddy we walk the paved but untraveled Walker Brook Road where the trout stream roars in continuous outrage. Or in high summer we walk the abandoned track of the railroad picking wild raspberries from bushes that tug at my trousers and shirt. Gus doesn’t care, summer or winter; rain or snow. He is cheerful, walking and sniffing, leaping with great bounds like a deer and stopping short when he encounters a seductive odor. It is not work, walking the dog; because I put it on my list it must be a chore, a beautiful chore. My only annoyance, walking, comes when my mind willy-nilly forms sentences. Larking as I look, I hear myself think: “leaves that mark the dirt underneath with their bright signatures.” I tell myself to shut up; stop the writing for a while.