"Let me check," Roz said. She got her copy of the Audubon guide to New England bugs and birds and miscellaneous other things-the one with the frightening picture of the star-nosed mole-a book that used to lie on a little rusty table on our porch and now she has it, because it's her book. She had the happy sound in her voice that I remember from when she looks things up, a sound of optimism and soon-to-be-satisfied curiosity.

"Yes, here it is," she said after a minute. "It's called a 'pigeon horntail.' Here's what it says. 'Female has long ovipositor.' "

"That's for sure," I said.

"It says the ovipositor 'deposits eggs deep into wood that larvae eat.' So you should probably take it out of the house because it wants to lay eggs that will eat the window-sill."

I thanked her and got a glass and a mailing envelope and scooted the soi-disant pigeon horntail into captivity. It buzzed, but it was tired from its struggle with the window dust. I walked with it down to the old lilac tree and let it go there. It could probably insert its ovipositor into one of the dead lilac branches. Roz once showed me something about old lilac wood: it has a streak of purple deep inside, as if it soaks some of the purpleness of the blossoms back into itself when they go.

I'M BACK from the reading in Cambridge. I "gave" the reading. Beforehand I took Smacko for a long walk, all the way to the salt pile and back, nodding and smiling at passersby, practicing being a public person. I washed out his water bowl very carefully so that all the invisible slime was gone, and I filled it with cold water while he panted, and I listened to him drink it. His collar clanked coolly against the brim. Then I drove to Cambridge.

As I drove I tried to do everything very gracefully. At the tollbooth I fished my wallet out of my pocket and turned it over and opened it very gracefully, and I used just my thumb to lift a twenty out of its pouchy slumber. And when the toll-taker gave me back my change, I slid it into the change nook with practiced smoothness. I tore open a bag of vinegar-flavored potato chips and fished out one of them and turned it and touched my tongue to it, and drew it in without a sound. I sipped some coffee, and I looked to my left with an easy swivel, to see what kind of car was passing me. It was a blue Dodge Magnum-I forgave it with the gentlest of nods for being a big, arrogant car. Then I folded up the receipt for the coffee and potato chips and put it in my pocket with an extreme fluidity of gesture. And when I pushed the turn signal, I didn't click it all the way, but just held it with two fingers so that the circuit completed and it went click click, and then I released it. I turned on the CD player and listened to Carl Sandburg read aloud two lines of one of his poems and then I turned it off, with the subtlest pressure on the off button. I had the touch. I was good at what I did. And what I did was drive to poetry readings.

I found a place to park, and I was on time, and the bookstore manager waited until there was a good crowd-twelve people, I think, maybe thirteen, including several bookstore employees, who were kind people who didn't dwell on the fact that their bookstore was going broke. I read some poems into the brightly lit corner of the store, including a new version of the one about Roz's white pants, and they didn't sound too bad as I read them. The cash register began printing its noisy nightly transaction summary just as I was finishing "How I Keep from Laughing," which kind of wrecked it, but that's all right.

A woman asked a question: did I agree or disagree with Philip Larkin when he wrote that it was better to read poems silently to yourself than hear them read aloud? I said, Well, Larkin was right that when you heard a poem read aloud you never knew how far you were away from the last line, and you didn't know what the shape of the stanzas were, but on the other hand if they didn't sound good when read aloud then forget it. I said I found Carl Sandburg unreadable on the page, but when I drove around listening to him read in his wildly mannered way-"in the coooool, of the tooooooombs, of Chicaaaahgo"-then I loved it. Sandburg gives every syllable a special extra squeeze. I told them that Sandburg was so incredibly popular at one point that he had a secretary to help him answer his fan mail, and he'd go through it and write "Send A" or "Send B" or "Send C" on it, meaning that the secretary should type boilerplate letter A or B or C as a reply. So there was something to reading poems aloud.

I sold one book-a copy of Worn. A man came up and said he'd bought all three of my books but he didn't have them anymore because when he got married he decided to clean out his shelves and he took a few hundred books to a book dealer and the dealer gave him a ridiculously low price but he took it. And now he was divorced and buying books again, and would I sign this one and this time he would keep it. So I did.

ON THE WAY back up Route 95 I sang along with Slaid Cleaves doing his song "Sinner's Prayer" until I couldn't stand it anymore and I called up Roz and left a message.

I said "Hello, I'm calling to give you a progress update. I've done the reading in Cambridge, check, and I'm almost done cleaning out my office, almost check, and my finger's healing up well-thank you for taking care of me that day- and the introduction is now progressing. So things are moving along. And I'm hoping you'll come back sometime and hang your tablecloths back on the line." And then I added: "And I just wonder if there's anyone who knows you like I do!" And then I couldn't talk any more, so I hung up.

One time when Roz was still with me I came home late from a reading in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was already asleep, and so was the dog. I kicked Smacko in the head by mistake in the dark, not too hard, but he made a little growly yelp, and I said I was sorry to him, and that woke Roz. I got in bed, and she smelled so smilingly sleepy that soon I had my hand on her hip and I said, "Baby, that is one big sexy hip."

She stirred and said, "Yikes, what's going on here?"

I said, "I don't know, what's going on with you?"

She turned and unbuttoned her pajama top over me, and I could see one of her breasts outlined in the orange light coming from the street. Her breasts didn't have to rhyme, but in fact they did rhyme.

THE MOUSE HAS COME OUT from the control panel of the stove, and he's making a lot of noise by scraping things off of the burners with his mouse teeth. He wasn't discouraged by the Boraxo I sprinkled around, or the spritzes of Windex. I set up a humane trap of a toilet-paper tube with a dab of peanut butter on the end, balanced tippily on the counter out over the trash can, but he wasn't fooled. He's scooting silently across the counter now, in search of the Lava soap, which he gnaws at. He eats the corners first. Imagine eating lava soap. His head is very long, like a weasel's head. He lives in fear. If I lift my arm he dashes back. But then he creeps out again. He's bolder than he used to be. He doesn't know whether it's okay to be a part of my life or not. And I would be quite happy for him to be out and about, and even gnawing at my soap, if he wasn't constantly taking little craps everywhere. What a foolish thing for him to do. I may have to buy a trap from a guy in Sandwich, Massachusetts. It runs on a maze principle and is supposedly not traumatic for the mouse. It's called the Mouse Depot. I can't have fifteen mouse droppings on the stove every single night, and that's sad because I'll miss him.

You know what? I could write forever. This is me. This is me you're getting. Nobody else but me.

You may not want me. I don't care. I want you to have me. That's the way it works. I'm here giving and you're there taking. If you are there. I can't know and you are probably falling asleep. You have many reasons for reading what you read. You want to, quote, "keep up." Good luck. You want to know what somebody who was rumored to be on the short list for poet laureate of the United States would write after it turned out that he wasn't in fact chosen. What does he write about then? Hass was chosen, and Pinsky was chosen, and Kooser was chosen, and Simic was chosen. And Kay Ryan was chosen. Goody.