Hey, the cat let me sleep in till almost 7. What a shock! Now I am sitting here on the grey couch, pleasantly groggy, while actual daylight filters in through the window . . . a cloudy, dim daylight, the air surprisingly temperate.

It's school vacation week in Maine and Vermont, and later today my sister and her older son will be arriving, en route to College Tour Hell: Maine Edition. Five years ago, my younger son and I embarked on our Upstate New York-Vermont-Connecticut Edition . . . getting lost in the endless circling one-ways of Poughkeepsie, being horrified at the intense obnoxiousness of parents at Wesleyan, and finding ourselves charmed and comforted by the sweetness of a staff librarian at Bennington. Four years before that, Tom and our older son went on Art School Safari. Then and now, nerves were taut, fear was rampant, self-doubt flowered like dandelions in a cow pasture.

You can be sure I'll be making a good dinner for my nephew and plying him with root-beer floats for dessert. Poor child. He's in the thick of it.

So: vacuuming and bed making and grocery shopping today, and maybe a walk with my sister, if she gets here before dark. I've started reading Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. I'm still in the midst of mentoring a friend's poetry manuscript, still chipping away at Rilke and Dante. I doubt I'll get anything accomplished in those realms today. Mostly, I expect, I'll be on call as Understanding Aunt & Calming Sister.

So I'll say farewell to you in family mode, with this poem, which appeared in Vox Populi not long ago.

Canto

Dawn Potter

At the peak of my powers I felt a falling-off,

as if an internal organ had come loose from its moorings

and was bobbing gently against my pelvis like a pear.

The season was autumn. Threads of smoke

unwound from the chimneys. Every compass pointed

toward winter.

I walked out, in the dim afternoon, into the small streets,

through a modest wood, across a vast graveyard.

I read the headstones—

here, the woman recalled only as Mother,

here, Our Darling Ralph, his tiny stone tarnished with lichen.

My way was littered with parthenons and obelisks,

with strange marble tables and mossy

arks of the covenant, and among them

bulldogs rolled in wet pine needles, helmeted tots

wobbled on training wheels, and I,

no longer at the peak of my powers,

turned my ankle on a pebble and limped.

But when I came to the bottom of the hill,

into that clutter of merchant mausoleums

known as the Valley of the Kings,

I paused in my limping and looked up

into the watery leaf-light: pale gold, speckles of black,

thinned remnants of last night’s gale.

And I felt, for no reason at all, sweetened.

Around me, the stony edited lives—

born, married, fathered, earned, died—

seemed to swell into ballads.

Carved lions kneaded their claws,

and lost at sea was a cadence.

I was a poet, and I wanted to sing

of small Ralph, alive and perched on his father’s

broadcloth knee, in the November twilight, after the banks

had bolted their doors and the barges had docked.

Now a scatter of gulls sailed over the cove,

and Mother sat alone at her rosewood desk and wrote

Sky. Leaf.  Light. 

I wanted to sing that. And so I did.