Just a quick note this morning, as I'm swirling through my morning chores so I can get out of here soon after daylight. I'll give you the Vermont lowdown tomorrow.

We got a bit of rain last night, and this morning the neighborhood is damp and blustery and Novemberish. Now the furnace is grumbling, and the kitten is purring, and the coffee is steaming, and T is making his sandwich for work and I am listening to sheets churn in the washing machine, and we are chunking forward through our quotidian hours.

Tomorrow morning I'll be hitting the road for Vermont, so today will be housework, and laundry, and catching up with emails, and getting onto my mat, though I hope I'll also be going out to write tonight. I dug up Baron's dahlias yesterday, so they are now safely stored in the basement for the winter. Really that's my last big autumn chore. I may cut back a few more frost-bitten plants, rake a few more leaves, but for the most part the beds are ready for winter. We've still got a smidgen of chard in the garden and some late lettuce, and the kale is doing well, now that the groundhog has gone into hibernation. I'll likely be harvesting into December, unless we get a sudden snow or the temperatures plummet.

I like November, when the hats appear and the coats get buttoned. I like turning on lamps in the late afternoon and lighting the wood fire. I like hot cups of tea and my warm walking boots. I like the smell of baking and roasting and a bouquet of sage on the counter.

Yesterday Teresa and I finished our Whitman reading project, and now we are going to turn our attention to Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito.  I am still working my way through The Waves and Little Dorrit and The Descent of Alette. Chuck is excited about a piece of kindling. The chickadees are noisy in the maples. I love my long-poem draft. America feels a touch less gruesome. It's a cheerful morning around here.

What a good election night!

My son was at Ray's bar in Brooklyn when Mamdani's victory was proclaimed, and he said the bartenders immediately blasted "New York, New York," filling everyone with weepy joy. If only Ray himself had been there to run the stereo. Here in Maine we solidly voted down a proposal to prohibit absentee ballots and voted in a red-flag gun law--a very big deal in a state with a strong gun culture. Portland raised the city's minimum wage. Democrats won large and small victories around the country. It's been a long time since we've been able to feel a little political happiness.

After my marathon work streak, I made it home last night and then T and I walked out arm in arm to the neighborhood barbecue joint, a comfortable way to settle back into town life. Today I've got a phone meeting scheduled and house stuff and reading to catch up on, but there will be airiness too. I'll go for a walk. I'll figure out dinner. I'll dig up my dahlia tubers and store them in the basement. Probably I'll be on the horn with my kid, emoting about the NYC election.

I'm very much enjoying this year's high school cohort. They arrived at the first class ready to be serious and engaged, but now they are starting to let loose and be silly together, which adds to the fun. And my car was very well behaved, which is a relief, given my looming Vermont trip. Altogether it's been a good, if hectic, week, and I am full of sap.

And my long-poem draft awaits . . . 

In the homeland the hardwood trees are mostly bare now, and the tamaracks have entered into their golden glory. Soon they, too, will drop their needles, but for a brief span they are suns.

Their brilliance made the drive north beautiful. Altogether it was a good trip. Yesterday was my car's first long trip with her new rack-and-pinion, and the tight steering made me feel like I was handling a sports car on the curves--an unaccustomed sensation, for sure. Clearly the steering had been deteriorating for a while, but slowly enough to keep me unaware, until things got really flabby. I can almost imagine I'm driving a new car (which, considering the number of pieces I've replaced in the past two years, is more or less true).

I arrived in Wellington to celebration: it's hunting season, and Steve had just gotten a deer. The sorrows of death and life, so tangled. I've never been a hunter, but I understand the confusions of gratitude. How Steve thanked the doe. How winter looms.

Transcription of actual text correspondence between Teresa and Dawn, after this weekend's Whitman session

 T: 🔥

D: I cannot wait to spend time with your draft over the next couple of weeks. You are writing so well!

T: OMG I just was thinking about how you and I are going to have so much fun working together on what we’re writing!! I feel we’re figuring out the architecture of the next-poems that have been baffling us. Does that make sense? 

D: Yes!!!

T: It’s so fucking exciting!

D: I feel more energized about my work than I have for a long time 

T: Me, too.

I dearly hope this class is mattering to the actual participants. But it for sure has lit the burner under my own work--almost explosively so--and under Teresa's also. We've now got a two-week gap before the next zoom session takes place, and while the participants are sharing their work and responses among themselves, Teresa and I will be doing the same.

I am so deeply, massively relieved to be in the zone again. Of course I've been writing writing writing for the past month and a half, and of course that essay was real work. But it wasn't creation fire. And now the fire is back.

Today I'll drive up to Harmony to go for a walk with a friend, then slip over to Wellington to spend the night with other friends, then head to Monson on Tuesday for a day with my high schoolers, and then the long drive home, and voting, and catching up on home obligations. I'll be tired. But my heart feels so light now that I've got this big pot on the simmer. I don't mind being tired. I've got a poem.

I do love baseball, and I am always a little glum when the last game of the season ends and winter buckles on its galoshes. Though I was rooting hard for the Blue Jays and game 7 didn't end as I'd hoped, this World Series was nonetheless excellent: one thrilling game after another and so many stellar performances. It was a fine end-of-summer party.

Yesterday's class went well, I think, despite a couple of unnerving participant emergencies. The quality of the poets' drafts is really, really high, to my great delight. Whitman is unlocking something for these writers.

Now, if only I can prevent them from scrubbing the dirt off their messy starts and tying up their flapping loose ends and inventing neat logical transitions and shaping tidy conclusions and nailing their metaphors to the wall, etc. That is the big danger: the urge to reduce, fix, polish, when you're in the midst of a sloppy strange mystery. I know there are participants in the class who feel safest when they're in control. But this is primordial mud we're tracking all over the house. I hope, hope, hope they will try hard to keep their mops in the cupboard.

Three groups of trick-or-treaters knocked at our door last night, and Chuck was overcome with the excitement. At the end of the evening he flopped on the couch like he'd been chasing rabbits. Halloween! What a holiday!

This morning he seems to have recovered his equanimity and has resumed his usual purring spot against my left shoulder. The wind, which was whistling all day and all night, has died down to a steady breeze, and a coral sunrise is romantically staining my neighbors' white vinyl siding. It looks like the perfect day to talk about Whitman.

This morning before class I'll get out for a walk or a bike ride. I'll marinate chicken for dinner and deal with laundry and dishes. And then we'll begin the big Walt experiment. Can spending two weeks with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" really help us carve out a messy, surprising long poem draft? I guess we'll find out.

This class is among the most complex I've ever designed: lots of talk, lots of writing, plus lots of participant interaction, which can be tricky in a virtual setting. And it's long: two weekends on zoom, with a gap week between, when the poets will be working together without my interference. I'm excited. Rereading "Brooklyn Ferry" this summer blew a hole between my ears, and I can't wait to find out how I'm going to respond to our conversation about it as well as to my own prompts. With luck I'll dig a real draft out of this experience. With luck other people will too.

Nonetheless, the class will be a marathon. That's the long poem way, always chasing us up Heartbreak Hill.