I started working on a new poem draft yesterday, kept reading Howards End, mopped floors, grocery-shopped, constructed class plans, and fretted about the forecast. I do hate driving in snow. But it looks like the weather will semi-cooperate after all, so I'll be heading north this afternoon for tomorrow's teaching gig. We'll concentrate on swelling out ideas: moving from a small trigger into a larger draft, combining drafts, choosing how and where to begin and end a piece. No doubt the kids will have much to say.

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The house still feels so quiet. I haven't yet gotten into the swing of being childless again. The small rooms seem vast. I wander from one to another, wondering why we need so many.

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Here's a poem. It came out in Vox Populi a while ago, and was reprinted in the Maine Arts Journal. It's the only pantoum I've ever written.

Epithalamion for Grendel  

Dawn Potter 

Cordgrass slashes rents into the wind,
but I am waiting for my lover at the river.
Close the floodgates: the tide is high
and the one I love is mud and reeds, 

yet I am waiting for my lover at the river.
He strides into storms, he wades into pools of silt,
for the one I love is mud and reeds
and my hands long to cup his jagged face. 

He strides into storms, he wades into pools of silt.
A scatter of fishes gathers in his wake.
My hands long to cup his jagged face
as herons bow to him in the saltmarsh, 

as a scatter of fishes gathers in his wake.
Close the floodgates. The tide is high.
Herons, bow to him in the saltmarsh.
Cordgrass, slash rents into the wind.