It's snowing again this morning, another glossy inch muffling cars and gardens, streaking sidewalks and roofs.

Here at the Alcott House, we are struggling with yet another appliance malfunction--this time the washing machine, which is mysteriously leaking. As appliance problems go, things could be worse: the leak is in the basement, not upstairs, and there is a laundromat conveniently around the corner. And maybe this morning T will pinpoint the problem he couldn't figure out last night and discover he can fix it himself. Still, these household debacles are tiring, and apparently endless.

Yesterday I started serious work on plans for the summer conference. My first task, every year, is to choose my opening poems. At the Frost Place I always used a Robert Frost poem, for obvious reasons. He was the looming figure. But one of the changes I've made in Monson is to start the morning with two poems by very different poets that set the stage for the conference theme--in this case, transformation--and to then move directly into writing and sharing before we undergo any sort of analytical discussion. It's been refreshing to step away from Frost. Much as I admire his work he's never been a touchstone for me, and over the years the conversations around his work became more and more predictable. With two new poets every season, I never know exactly how participants will respond, and that's exciting.

So I sat upstairs in my blue chair with a stack of poetry books beside me and idly browsed, until, suddenly, the poems I needed rose up from the pages and began jostling against one another. It is a very unscientific process, this poem-choosing task. I thumb through collections and the poems murmur and bustle and then a moment arrives when I recognize the poems, and I feel the writing prompts emerge, and I still don't know any answers to my questions, and that is how I can tell the job is done.

Snow fell overnight--not much, but enough to freshen the plow piles and shine the roofs. I've been reading Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake (an odd combination of spy novel and meditation on Neanderthals) as well as Tennyson's Arthurian idylls; and with that baggage swirling behind them, my eyes are imagining this new snow as mythic overlay--maybe even here, in the prosaic little northern city by the sea, the trees speak and caverns lurk beneath the drifts.

I caught up on various chores yesterday, desk and household, so today, as I wait for the next editing projects to arrive, I'll go back to working on character-study poems for the Monson faculty performance. Our show doesn't have a name yet, and I think it will be easier to talk about once it does. But I am beginning to see a shape arise, beginning to hear voices.

I've also been writing sonnets this week, in collaboration with Teresa and Jeannie: a round-robin project in which we borrow each other's last lines as our own first lines to create a three-person sonnet weave. I've been surprised by the ways in which the form has exerted itself. Without thought I instantly adopted Shakespearean, and the poems are flowing. Yet the sonnets that the others are writing are Petrarchan or American, entirely different from mine. The end product is going to be very interesting, structurally at least.

I'm still feeling residually blue from the renewed onslaught of Baron mourning over the past few days. After publishing that essay in VP, I had the responsibility of writing notes to the sad people who responded to it, and that's been weighty and difficult. So these poem projects have been a good distraction. Whether or not I'm actually making good poems, I'm reaching into unfamiliar spaces. The air feels cold and crisp. My lungs fill, and my heart beats faster.

It's Monday, end-of-the-holiday Monday, back-to-the-grind Monday. I will miss my slow mornings. I was not overjoyed to hear the alarm shrill at 5 a.m., though Charles was pleased about his suddenly very prompt breakfast. But I imagine I'll get back into the swing quickly enough.

Today I've got errands to run, emails to answer, probably some editing consultations to do, housework to deal with, next week's high school syllabus to hone . . . I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but it will no doubt conk me over the head at some point.

It's not like I haven't been working at all: I spent a good portion of the New Year's holiday immersed in poem projects, catching up on publicity chores, advising my kid about his grad-school application essays, and the like. Still, the days were a breath, and the upcoming months will be demanding.

Upstairs T is opening and closing his dresser drawers. Downstairs Chuck leans against my shoulder and chirps into my ear. The coffee table is piled with books. Clean counters gleam in the kitchen. Heat pulses through the registers. Wheels turn, slowly, then faster and faster, chugging us forward.

I considered making a New Year's list of things I dislike (Facebook memes that pretend to quote from sources but are really AI pap that reposters haven't fact-checked, famous athletes who are under felony investigation for beating up women but still get to play in games, men who call their wives mom, presidents who kidnap other presidents for fun), but the big stories are so bad, the small stories are grit in the eye, and what is my purpose on the planet anyway? Chuck says it's to sit quietly on the couch so he can cuddle, and maybe he's not wrong. I'll go out for my walk, slip and slide among the ice patches, watch flocks of sparrows twitter in the bare-boned hedges. I'll come home again. I'll put the kettle on the stove. I'll open a book. Who knows where righteousness arises? I am the last person who should preach.

One excellent side-effect of this New Year's holiday has been sleeping. Under usual conditions I'm up at 5 a.m. day in and day out; but with these dark mornings and T off the clock, my body has been happy to burrow. Chuck, of course, can only put up with so much of this. By 6:15 he is patting my cheek with a paw, pouncing on my feet, chirping his breakfast song. Still, despite his pesty antics, I've snagged more than an hour of extra sleep for four days in a row, and that's felt great.

Already dawn is yawning over the maples and the air is pale enough to reveal the frost shards glittering on my neighbor's car. I don't know what the day has in store.

Yesterday we toted a load of giveaway stuff to the Goodwill and I came home with three new-to-me books: Colm Toibin's The Magician, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and Larry McMurtry's The Last Kind Words Saloon. And in the mailbox I found another book, one I'd ordered: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, the tenth-century jottings of a Japanese lady-in-waiting. It is the new year and my reading pile runneth over.

It is the new year and the government's disgusting antics escalate. How humiliating it is, to be an American.

***

Here's my essay about Baron in Vox Populi.

Outside in the frigid darkness a few holiday lights still gleam. They're hard to part with, I know. Though I stowed away the rest of our ornaments yesterday, I couldn't relinquish the string of fairy lights gracing the mantle. At midwinter every glimmer is precious.

For some reason, the Alcott House feels especially dollhouse-like this morning. Despite its seven rooms and two bathrooms, everything is in miniature: little kitchen, little living room, little dining room, little bedroom, little studies. A teeny-tiny wood stove. A kitten basket. I imagine a large child lifting off the roof and rearranging the furniture.

I spent some of yesterday catching up on publicity stuff--not my favorite task but here we are in a new year so I need to get on the stick. Probably most of you already received the newsletter, but among other things it announces--finally--the release of Poetry Lab Notes, the collaborative Substack journal that Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been fermenting for months. Our first post is a memorial to Baron Wormser, and tomorrow Vox Populi will publish my long essay about him and his work, so I am feeling a bit blue--missing his acerbity, missing his affection.

Well, so go the days--what's vanished splashing into what's here and what will come. Time is a sloppy mess. I slouch on my shabby couch as beads of light gleam among the stones on the mantle, as young Charles hums cheerfully into my ear, as my dear one sighs upstairs in his sleep. The air is thick with ghosts.

They swirl, dust motes in a draught. Dear Grandpap. Dear Jilline. Dear Ray. Dear Baron. Dear so many. A rosary of beloveds.

2026 has opened well, poem-wise. Yesterday, with relative ease, I wrote yet another of the character sketches I'm creating for our faculty performance in Monson. Suddenly these pieces are flowing out of me: brief examinations of various small-town people and situations, which eventually will be arranged against separate work that Teresa, Gretchen, and Gwynnie are producing. I've never written into this sort of project before, and I've been worried about freezing up, making nothing. But this week alone I've composed three new poems, a dialogue, and a list of possible subjects for group performance. Meanwhile, Teresa is writing landscape poems, Gwynnie is starting to conceptualize motion, Gretchen is researching historical figures . . . It's exciting, also daunting, to be involved in such a complicated undertaking. Three evenings of brand-new linked collaborative work: I admit that this was in fact my idea. Also I admit that I had/have no clear idea what such a collaboration would require or become. Fortunately Teresa is overflowing with organizational pizzazz. Otherwise we would have to hire a sheepdog to nip at our ankles.

Tom is taking today as vacation time, which means he and I will have a full four-day weekend together before work restarts on Monday. As far as I know there's nothing but puttering on our schedule. Among other tasks, I'll be putting away the handful of Christmas decorations I strewed around the house out of kitten reach. Already this morning I've dragged the trash to the curb, and I'll probably bake some bread, maybe run an errand or two, maybe do some more basement cleaning. Tom tells me that Boogie Nights, one of our favorite movies, is streaming, so we might spend an afternoon watching it together.

A little formlessness feels good because the next few months will be a snowball of poetry obligation. At the end of January Teresa and I are zoom-hosting a reunion class for Monson Arts/Frost Place alums. I have a reading in Brunswick, Maine, in early February. Later that month I'll be reading at Poets House in Manhattan as part of a memorial/book launch celebration of Baron Wormser's posthumous collection. In March Tom and Gretchen and Gwynnie and I will meet Teresa in Florida to work in person on our group performance. Then, as soon as I get back, I'll have to head to Bangor for a gig as the featured poet at the annual conference of the Maine Council of English Language Arts. In between all of this craziness I'll be driving back and forth to Monson, editing manuscripts at my desk, and gazing wild-eyed into the sky.

But for now I'm lazy and snug in my couch corner. Outside a squirrel bounces across the driveway, leaving a wake of tiny tracks in the fresh snow. Inside Chuck rattles a toy among the chair legs. Heat blasts enthusiastically out of the registers. Through the window I glimpse a blue, blue sky.

In the little northern city by the sea, the new year opens with a shimmer of new snow, pale skim on walkway and windshield. In the dark a distant highway mutters. Twining among the houses, wind fingers maple boughs, bumbles against chimneys, then untangles from human clutter and wheels over the black-tipped waves of the bay.

Now dawn unfolds. Suddenly, skeleton maples are inked against the faint gleam of future day. Blue presses against the windowpanes of the Alcott House, peering in at lamplight, at a fat kitten washing his face.

Last night's bustling little party was homey and sweet. The quiet room still basks in that leftover warmth.  I never have been the sort to make new year's resolutions.

Outside, a seagull wails. Inside, the kitten flits up the stairs. Bad times are coming. Also good times. Who knows how they will arrive?

Being a poet is awkward . . . Always trying to cram words into wordlessness. Constantly making the big mistake: pretending there's a moral to the story.

A kitten breathes into my ear. My hands fumble at sentences. Plain daylight has arrived, flat and sensible, no nonsense about it. Welcome to morning. Get to work.