Wonder Woman bowls again.

Tonight--and how, she asks, has this blog become so occasional all of a sudden? perhaps it has to do with the fact that the more poetic musings have now spun off into, of all things (it is still so shocking), poetry--bowling with the summer students and the teaching staff. We four sequestered ourselves in a lane, which was not a particularly pedagogically sound move but which led, by the time we played the post-student game three, to high. jinks. As in: let's name ourselves after superheroes! No one can call Wonder Woman faster than I, not even Spidey, Thor, and (ahem) Tinkerbell. And I pulled down a 163 in that game; that's my best score ever. (The others were both 122. I have to give it up for my mother's bowling ball, The Pearl. That thing gets the job done.)

In some ways, this week (particularly its post-grading end) feels like my summer vacation, arrived at last: cartwheels on a dusk expanse of lawn, drives around town and country with windows down and music loud (though this afternoon I got lost on some Knox County backroads and started to wonder whether I'd ever make it home), bowling, baking (the first 2/3 of a Baked Alaska project is currently stashed in my freezer, preparing for its meringuing and baking and flaming tomorrow), feeding others, watching movies. I'm even, perhaps in a good way, taking a little break from voracious reading. That break will have to stop almost immediately, but I'm starting to think that I should follow my instincts on this one and let myself be reading-stopped for a little while.

One thing (or, in this case, person) I have resumed is thinking about Joseph Cornell, who is, in some ways, the inspiration for the way I conceived of this project from the beginning. For a new poem cycle I'm meditating upon, I'm paging through my Cornell volumes, searching out birds and birdlike things, thinking about what it means to box objects up and re-present them in variously immobilized forms, and about what it means to experience something beautiful only in that boxed-up format. I've been schlepping my Cornell books all over the house for the past couple of days; with me, such schlepping is always a precursor to some interesting thing rumbling along, so I'm eager to see what's going to come springing out next. You may recall my having said that my beloved Brooklynite seemed to me to be under her body's total control when she was first pregnant with her dear small one (who is less small now that he is two); in a way, I feel as though I'm under the control of whatever part of me it is that's generating these poems. And I have to say: I like it.

I liked bowling that 163, too.

Fireflies on the ground are a glory: they synchronize with the sounds of distant fireworks; they blur into horizontal lines across the countryside when one espies them from the backseat of one's friends' car on the ride home from dinner. But what I'm loving tonight are the fireflies blinking from the tops of the biggest trees in town, up in their darklingest branches, black against the moon-blue sky.