Already this morning I've driven 60 miles, rushing the boy up to the high school for his crack-of-dawn AP English test, then rushing back home to deal with the rest of my life. In a few hours I'll get back into my car and drive a couple of hundred miles west into the New Hampshire mountains. One undeniably wonderful thing about moving to Portland will be hacking a massive chunk of this wearisome driving out of my life.

I am looking forward to seeing New Hampshire, though . . . the first greening of the mountains; fog and damp light; the clean scent of brook water. And I'm also leaving home today with sense of having done a bit of work on my own grief about deserting this place. A poem arrived, not quite leaping fully formed from my head but nearly so . . . syllables tumbling in a predestined pattern down the page, images cohering, surprises synthesizing on cue. Writing it felt both inevitable and entirely strange . . . which is to say, it felt right.