As you can see from this blog's suddenly expanding "Upcoming Appearances" section, I've gotten some invitations recently, and I've also had a few conversations with people who want to do a shared reading with me but don't yet have a place worked out. So if you have a venue--a church, or a school library, or a living room, or a street corner, or whatever--and are in need of a poet or two, just ask.

Lately I've been feeling as if my entire private life has been slotted into tiny gaps among driving boys to piano lessons, basketball practice, and tooth doctors, and washing boy clothes and cooking boy meals and sweeping boy dirt off the kitchen floor. Or maybe all this actually is my private life. Frequently it's hard to tell. In any case, should your venue require a poet, the event will be a nice change from peeling potatoes.

Here's a poem from Crimes that sums up how I'm feeling today. Chalk it up to the headache, or maybe being surrounded by people who eat all the baking chocolate and don't know how to clean hair out of a drain. Not that I don't adore them anyway. . . .

Aubade

Dawn Potter

And what about the small eye, Walter?--

the leaves of grass you overlooked, winter

lichen clutching fence posts, a draggled

dead squirrel in the snowbank, the red

letters of my name, serif by slant?

It was bliss you sighed, panted,

howled for: the View from Space--

big comet Walt chasing Madam Eos

across a streaky sky, old guilty dawn

tempting another kosmic shaman

to lurch word-drunk from the rafters . . .

oh, I grieve for every morning-after

groan rising from your sallow bed

as I fire your cookstove, bake your bread.