Things I've been grateful for in 2021

The urge to write that would not stop but took a turn for the crazy

My mother survived her heart surgery and is thriving

Intense happiness in the presence of my sons; pleasure and pride in their independence

Being with Tom every day

My garden

My father's garden

Neighborliness

Reading books and books and books

My sister as co-pilot in thorny situations

My central Maine beloveds

Young people

Poets and novelists and students and listeners and arguers

Nina Simone

That stupid cat

Birds and salt marshes

An exercise regimen

Vaccinations

Planning and teaching new and challenging classes

Poems published, a manuscript accepted

Hardly driving at all

My magnificent mattress

New boots that don't hurt my feet

New glasses (finally) that don't hurt my face

A big noisy glorious family Christmas

A quiet room

Much to the cat's delight, I have finally returned to my accustomed crack-of-dawn schedule. I am not sure that I am delighted, but what must be must be.

I spent the bulk of yesterday cleaning floors, washing sheets and rugs, and restocking food supplies, with a pause in the afternoon for a long chattery walk with a friend. This morning, after a diner breakfast with another friend and yet another trip to the eyeglass guy (oy, these frames are torture), I'll get back to my editing desk. It is time for vacation to be over.

The new year is shaping up to be a busy one: editing, teaching, my mentorship project, the new book on the horizon. I hope to be on the road as well, though we'll see what Covid says about that. I want to visit my Vermont family, and I want to go to Macbeth on Broadway, but neither may be feasible any time soon.

It's been a hell of a year, yet also, strangely, a hugely productive one. I've been writing like a fiend, I've created an entirely new programming arm for the Frost Place, but I've also, at long last, settled into my city, finding a community of poets and local friends. When I recall myself on arrival, floating into town like a lost soul, leaking tears day and night, I can hardly believe the difference.

 . . . and this morning I'm only an hour late in getting this note out to you. One of these days my timeline will return to normal. It's been a long time since I've slept so late for so many days in a row. Usually, even on vacation, I'm wide awake by 5:30. I can't even blame the late rising on the magnificent new mattress, since it all began at Tom's parents' house. I guess my clock has decided to stop.

In any case, here I am, back in my accustomed couch corner, with my accustomed white cup and saucer, and my accustomed black coffee. The cat is cruising around the house, trying to distract me by being bad. He hates and despises vacation. In his view, I should be at his beck at every moment, not off gallivanting, and when I return from any trip he tries to impress this upon me via spontaneous biting, furniture clawing, counter jumping, and other lively activities.

Today will be a catch-up day: groceries, housework, exercise class, and such. Our neighbors kindly shoveled our driveway and sidewalk while we were in Massachusetts, and I want to do the same for another neighbor who's still away. This is such a friendly enclave, and I need to hold up my end.

Tomorrow, once I fill the shelves and vacuum up a week's worth of cat hair, I'll go back to editing. Probably I'll also go out to the Thursday evening writing salon. The drafts I've started in that circle have not only cohered quickly into finished poems but are also rapidly being accepted for publication. Something is clicking for me in that setting, and I should keep at it.

Today is departure day, though when exactly that will happen for the Maine contingent is unclear, as the roads are dicey after some overnight icing. Paul is bussing back to NYC at noon, James is flying back to Chicago in the early evening, and Tom and I ought to get going this morning, if we can. Laundry, cat, groceries, dealing with these still-problematic glasses, not to mention actual paying work: all are anxiously awaiting me. But detaching from the family will be hard.

Tom, though, is taking the rest of the week off, which makes me happy. He's got a bunch of photo things to deal with, plus our bed frame to begin working on. And he's got some end-of-year vacation days to use up and needs the rest. Just as well, really, as someone on his crew has tested positive. (Tom did manage to track down another home test yesterday and is still negative, thank goodness.)

Here is another little poem from the new collection--

Inviting the Muse to the North Country

Dawn Potter

 

For I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.

—Virgil, The Georgics

 

When I opened the door of my beat-up

plywood porch and welcomed her into my

patria, she didn’t say hello or thank you,

just stamped snow onto the yellowed kitchen

linoleum and kicked off her new boots. In stocking

feet she stalked among the melting ice puddles

and knelt down on the hearth to warm her cracked

hands at the fire. She’d never been to our part

of the world before. I thought she might have some

questions for me. But those new boots were thin,

and soon her chilblains began itching and throbbing

under the heat of the stove. They turned out to be

the only story we could tell.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

A quiet morning. Everyone else is still abed, and I am sitting here nursing a glass of water and looking out through the big windows into the wall of rhododendrons along the drive. They are dark and shriveled in the winter cold, and above them the crowned white pines and bare oaks stretch giant hands into the flat pale sky.

We have one more day here before the family disperses, and the boys have requisitioned my car for various outings--friends, errands, fetching their cousin, etc. My only plan is to go for another long walk. Yesterday three of us went up to the reservoir and slopped around the snow-skimmed edge paths, and today I'll probably head downhill to the pond and the dam. There are lots of trail spurs around here (all of them named "Robert Frost"; I cannot get away from that guy) but also a lot of mud, so I won't venture very far from the plowed roads.

Otherwise, the day will be fairly formless. Maybe I'll get some reading done while the boys are messing around on their own. Or maybe I'll take a nap. Regular life is looming.

My schedule has gone completely haywire. Staying up past midnight, getting up close to eight: I don't know what's come over me. Anyway, here I am, finally, enacting a facsimile of myself, curled in a couch corner, with a cup of coffee and a sliver of solitude.

It's been a lovely holiday . . . the boys so full of cheer, hanging out noisily with their high school cousin, playing games and washing dishes and telling jokes and being the light of my eyes. The weather was dreadful all around New England--freezing rain and garbagy snow and black ice and car accidents--but we were snug. So much good fortune, to be a crowd together, finally.

But I have barely read a sentence since I've been here. Too many sous-chef tasks in the kitchen, too busy learning to play the new board game or fiddling with the communal puzzle or trash-talking my foes during massive nine-person card games. It seems this is also a vacation from being a poet, which is fine. The poet has had her nose to the grindstone lately. It is nice just to sit back and bask in the glow of my best-of-all-possible sons.

[Though oddly I got a submission accepted yesterday. Apparently the journal editor was not taking the day off.]

* * *

Here's another small holiday gift . . . another poem from the new book--

Sonnet in Search of Poems I’ve Never Written

 

Dawn Potter

I’ve been meaning to write about a patch of mossy

frogs’ eggs in a vernal pool, about a single contrail

chalking a blue November sky, about the glossy

covers of biographies, about the tortuous tale

 

of an ant city under a scarred sidewalk, about two

lazy landscapers blowing leaves into a neighbor’s yard,

about falling in half-love with someone else’s youth,

about gobbling pie without a fork, about the barbs

 

of terrible hedges, about the anxiety of gifts, about my feet,

about the murmur of a radio, about leftovers congealing

in a pan, about oxen, about the loneliness of husking sweet

corn under the stars, about this sad white ceiling.

 

            But maybe I don’t need to bother inventing.

            Maybe you’ve already imagined this ending.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

 I am so late this morning! All that stuff I mentioned yesterday, about being the first person awake with lots of time to kill, turned out to be bunk. I overslept (because Tom and I were driving around all night picking up James in Hartford, Connecticut, and because this family currently has no fearsome little Christmas vampires forking everyone out of bed at ungodly hours), and then as soon as I got up James appeared (because he's on Chicago time and confused), so the morning quickly devolved into celebration, and I have only just now abstracted myself from the pack to take a shower and say hello to you.

It is so incredibly wonderful to have everyone here under the same roof. We are all giddy, I think. The boys keep hugging me, and I keep stopping to stare at them. Just listening to their banter-fights makes me all kinds of happy. The place is in an uproar, and it is magnificent.

I need to sign off quickly and go help my mother-in-law cook. But I'm sending love and joy to you. 

We're heading out this morning, driving down to Massachusetts to spend a few days with Tom's family and our boys. All of the presents are wrapped and bagged; Paul's "Can you bring me [that thing I left in the basement when I moved]?" stuff is at the ready; I have chosen my holiday reading (Kapka Kassapova's Border; Vievee Francis's Forest Primeval); and I have written myself a large note: "DO NOT FORGET THE BLACK CAKE." That would be a faux pas: Christmas in Amherst without the Belle of Amherst's dessert.

Last year, James was alone in his Chicago apartment, Paul and I were making pierogi to comfort ourselves, and we learned that playing card games over zoom is extremely boring. I am very happy we can be together this year. All four of us took Covid tests yesterday and joyfully texted "Negative!" back and forth to each other and to Tom's parents. We're doing our very best to be safe, and I hope that is enough.

I expect you'll hear from me over the holiday. I am always the first person awake in that household, and I generally have plenty of time to write in those early hours, before the bustle begins.

In the meantime, I send you love and good cheer. I hope the snow doesn't start falling till after you arrive at your destination, that your tea mug is warm in your hands, that a few notes of praise and gratitude rise to your lips, that someone laughs at the good jokes, that only the babies cry, that your beds reach out to greet you. Many happy returns of the season, friends.

Here's a little love poem from my forthcoming collection . . . a gift from me to you--

Love Poem from a Tiny Husband

Dawn Potter

 

Some mornings your giant cracks open

the roof latch of your Fisher-Price house

just to watch you dream. You gaze into her eyes

as you roll gently on your yellow plastic couch.

If you had arms, they would swing like a child’s.

 

You are an apple core, a thumb.

Carefully, your giant snaps off your fireman’s helmet,

snaps on your baseball cap. Next door,

the barn moos. White chickens tilt in the loft.

Your dog’s legs bend every which way.

 

Crowd them into the house, your giant croons.

Let every kitchen shelter a horse.

Soon she will rise into the sky and steam west.

Every day, it’s her job to visit a character in a book.

Yours is to sit backwards in the bowl of your tractor,

 

pondering the hillocks of carpet.

This is how you earn your keep.

For now, though, you bask among her strong fingers.

At her command, you sway on your invisible feet.

No one is luckier than you,

 

for you adore a woman who invents all of the stories.

And when those stories are done,

your dear giant kisses the top of your round head,

tucks you into bed at noon,

and invites you to sleep for the rest of her life.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

Today will be the usual sort of pre-Christmas rushing-around day, as tomorrow morning we head south to Tom's parents for the holiday . . . of course, with the dystopian caveat that it will also include Covid tests. We're testing, the boys are testing, we've gotten our boosters; all of us are doing our very best to be good to each other, but, still, there's nervousness in the air. 

I will do some editing this morning, and endure my exercise class, but then I'll shift to errands and laundry and bathrooms and packing and such. I hope we can get on the road fairly early on Friday, as both boys will be arriving later in the day, and we should be there to help fetch them from airport and bus stop.

I'm feeling sort of blank this morning, chat-wise. Nothing wrong, not gloomy or unduly stressed. Just a little tongue-tied, I guess. Last night Tom and I had a fun evening with our silly Christmas-present project: I made the mysterious labels; he made the mysterious packages; and then we sat by the fire and listened to Run DMC's "Christmas in Hollis," our traditional nod to holiday ambience.

I've started reading a book that my friend David gave me: Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by the Bulgarian-born poet Kapka Kassabova. David had seen it reviewed by a poet we both admire, Alicia Stallings, and thought I might like it, which I do. It is a compelling combination of reportage, memoir, and poetic reaction, focusing on the borderlands of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey--center of ancient Thrace, the Dionysian mysteries, the Ottoman Empire, and Soviet control. It will make peculiar Christmas reading, but so be it.

Terrible weather this morning: the outside stairs are so slick with freezing rain that the cat slid down them into a heap at the bottom. Already I'm trying to talk Tom into going to work late. These streets do not look drivable.

Yesterday was so beautiful, and now this! My neighbor and I went for a walk into the cemetery, under bright blue skies and mild temperatures, with the snow crunching underfoot, and at the ponds we were thrilled to catch sight of one of the river otters swimming and wriggling almost at our feet. Even my dumb cell phone photos were great--

Today's weather might be great for an otter, but it is terrible for humans: shattered hips and ankles just a-waitin' to happen, not to mention car crashes. If Tom decides to hurry off to work at the regular time, I shall make a scene.

I had my first meeting with my poetry apprentice yesterday afternoon, and that was extremely fun. She is a junior in high school, poised and excited. With some embarrassment she told me how much she loved Tennyson and the old stuff, and I said, "Oho, you have come to the right place!" and this morning I am going to send her a writing prompt and a passage from Dante.

Other exciting news: I diffidently asked a poet to write a blurb for my next collection, and he not only said yes but he also told me he liked it so much that he's nominating the collection as a whole for a Pushcart. Apparently he's one of the contributing editors on the Pushcart committee, and has that option. I am all of a tizzy about this.

In the realm of vision, a millimeter divides blur from clarity, and I spent the weekend on the wrong side of the chasm. But thanks to a first-thing-in-the-morning visit to the humming eye guy, I resolved my ongoing glasses problems and strode into my new editing project without tripping over every letter on the screen.

And so I spent most of yesterday elbowing my way into an academic essay, though I did take a long walk midday; and the evening was a zoom workshop with my poetry group. A busy workday, passed largely in my room. Today will be similarly room-bound: more editing, a walk-break with my neighbor, and then a zoom session with the Telling Room cohort. Originally I'd planned to take part in person, but that was starting to seem unwise, with the holidays on the horizon and the new variant stewing. Fortunately, the staff has figured out a hybrid model--some in person, some zooming--and I'm interested to see how smoothly that will work, and if we might be able to borrow it for Frost Place programs, if need be.

Tonight, Tom and I have a Christmas-present project to figure out together, one involving mysterious packaging (Tom's realm) and mysterious labeling (my realm). Already, I have been consulting The Golden Bough and Learn to Speak Esperanto, two excellent sources for obscure hints. Dinner will be hake meunière, Italian potato salad, fennel and carrot slaw, and holiday cookies. The wood stove will be cozy, the cat will be tangled up in ribbon, and that, my friends, is the Ghost of Christmas Present.

 My chapbook seminar ended yesterday, and I always feel bittersweet at these moments: just as everyone has really bonded, the class is over. But I, and I'm sure the participants, also need to move forward into this looming holiday week, which is always cluttered and chaotic. Today I'm starting a new editing job, and tonight I've got a zoom meeting with my poetry group, and then tomorrow I start a new sort-of-teaching project. I'll be working till spring in a Telling Room program called Young Emerging Authors, which matches promising high school writers with professional writers. Each young person is working on a manuscript, which the Telling Room will publish later this year, and the mentor serves as a coach throughout the process. I've worked with the Telling Room as a classroom presenter, but this will be the first time I've taken part in the mentoring program, and I'm very much looking forward to getting to know one young poet in this intense way.

Unfortunately, I'm still struggling with my glasses. Progressive trifocals are a challenge, always. Even though I kept the old lenses when I got new frames last week, the frames sit slightly differently on my face, so the effect is the same as getting new lenses: blur, headaches, weariness, until my eyes finally adjust to the positioning. 

This morning's dream-book entry, in entirety: "A skit involving Korny the Vaccinated Krone." Make of that what you will.

Outside, the fallen snow.

I can't tell from here how much we've gotten--four inches, five inches?--but it is weighty and beautiful on the broccoli and kale, the stoops and cars. In the misty morning darkness, the Congregational steeple rises over the white rooftops, the streetlights glow like fog lamps, the thin flakes sift down, down, slow and slow.

I sit here quietly, in the shadowed house. I've been reading the news this morning: about how Covid is ravaging my central Maine homeland; about the enormous disparity between where I live now and where I lived for so long--not just in cases and vaccination rates but in so many other areas: politics, wealth, education, geography . . . It is crushing, to be here, watching the disaster unfold.

This afternoon, I'll teach my final chapbook session. It's been a good class, with a lovely group of participants. We've reached the point where I'm almost immaterial. They're making the discoveries, doing most of the talking, figuring stuff out together. We've found that sweet spot, when a teacher sits back and watches her students run down the staircase they've built for themselves.

Outside, passing dogs bark and bustle in the new snow.

I am feeling simultaneously heavy and light, downhearted and hopeful. Nothing seems to be getting better. And yet artists are at work.

 Well, yesterday morning went all to haywire when, as I was washing dishes, my glasses suddenly snapped. I managed to stuff them onto my face and drive to the eyeglass shop, where I presented them to the friendly guy and said, "These are broken, but I don't know how broken, because I can't see anything." Humming Christmas carols, he examined them and informed me, "They are very broken." Maybe there was a flaw in the plastic or something; I was doing absolutely nothing other than wearing them when they snapped. The friendly guy was encouraging, however. He slowly moseyed around the store looking for frames that might fit my lenses, which he eventually found. Then he diddled with them for a long time, still humming carols. And now I have new frames of a sort that do not exactly soothe my vanity; but after sitting around in a blur for half the morning, I decided I loved them.

Things I'm grateful for: (1) This happened on Friday, not the weekend, when I would have had to deal with Tom enthusiastically epoxying the lenses to the busted frame and tying up the loose ends with duct tape. (2) This happened in Portland, not in Harmony, when I would have had to deal with Tom enthusiastically epoxying the lenses to the busted frame and tying up the loose ends with duct tape.

Today will be a pleasant day, as I am prepping for a small dinner party--just my neighbor, and a lasagna, and some Christmas cookies, but I have done zero holiday entertaining this year so I'm looking forward to getting out the nice napkins and such. It will be snowing by the time she arrives, and that will add to the fun. No one will have to drive; we can just enjoy the weather, maybe even go for an after-dinner walk in it to look at the lights, then reconvene for tea and cookies and a warm fire.

The new editing project arrived yesterday, and I'll be teaching my last chapbook session tomorrow, so things are busying up for me. That's fine: I did get a lot accomplished during my enforced writing retreat--among other things, a lesson in synthesizing bits and pieces into larger drafts . . . what works, and also what is just ugly hammering. You might call it the Cinderella-shoe method of bad poem construction. 

A good evening: writing, and visiting with writers; and then reconvening at home with Tom, who'd also been out, working at the photo co-op around the corner. These Thursday nights are fun--when we head out alone to mess around with our own stuff, then meet up afterward and chatter and are pleased for each other.

I just came in from putting out the trash and recycling, and the weather is strange: warm, and very windy, perfect for blowing bags all over the street. Supposedly we've got snow coming in tomorrow afternoon and evening, but things will need to change drastically, temperature-wise.

Today: groceries and vacuuming and such, but also several new rough scrawls to examine as potential drafts. I've got Frost Place work to do: I'm beginning to sketch out plans for my advanced chapbook class, which will start at the end of January, and I have some prep to finish for Sunday's Nina Simone session. I want to go for a walk, and I want to re-mulch my garlic beds before the snow falls.

Outside, the wind is roaring; I hate to think where the trash bags are ending up. Inside, the clock is ticking, and Tom is sighing his "time-to-heave-myself-out-of-this-magnificent-new-bed" sigh. On the kitchen counter, a bouquet of fresh sage spreads its small arms next to a jar of ripening sourdough. In the living room the trunk we use as a coffee table is spread with books: Lucille Clifton, Louise Rich, Harper Lee, Frazer's The Golden Bough. Shade-loving plants--coleus, philodendron--beam in their dim corners.  Christmas cards crowd the mantle. The little house is snug.

Last night's rain seems to have ended, and now the streetlights, reduced to a vague glow, are coiled with mist, and the neighbor's Christmas tree shines like a lighthouse in fog.

Yesterday I looked out through the kitchen door and saw Sassy, the irrepressible groundhog, calmly nibbling on a fern. Isn't she supposed to be hibernating? Will global warming bring us year-round woodchucks? As I watched, both Ruckus and his cat pal Jack showed up to hang around with her. They're quite friendly, the cats and the groundhog. I think they're going to start a band.

My pile of editing has not yet materialized, meaning that I have at least one more day off the clock. I'll work on poems, and I might make some Christmas cookies, and tonight I'll go out to write at the salon. I finished reading Drabble's The Gates of Ivory and was in need of some prose, so I plucked Louise Dickinson Rich's We Took to the Woods off the shelf. The latter is a Maine classic about homesteading in the Rangeley lakes region in the early 1940s, which I've always meant to read but never did, mostly because I've been repelled by its jaunty tone. In many ways, Rich's style is reminiscent of Erma Bombeck's: emphasis on the doughty comic anecdotes, no acknowledgment of deeper loneliness or frustration. I needed a comrade in my isolation, and Rich couldn't be that for me. I was better off with John Milton.

Now that I'm out of the situation, I find I'm able to let the wink-wink stuff roll off. I still don't like it, but I feel a world seething underneath. And Rich is actually very interesting about firewood and food, boots and snow, struggling machinery and distance--all issues that were of prime importance to me in Harmony. I may lose interest, if that coy tone gets any worse, but I do like to know how she got her wood in.

After much interruption and procrastination, I have finished my Christmas shopping (I think, I hope). Mid-morning I managed to convince myself to drive downtown and park and then walk to a used bookstore and a used clothing store--the two sorts of shops that I can actually tolerate . . . and success! So once I get the rest of the cards filled out, I'll be more or less caught up with the Christmas chore. The timing is good, as I'm expecting my next editing project to arrive at any moment. In the meantime, as I wait for those files, I'll take one more writing day: comb through the stack of drafts I wrote last week, spend some time with Dante and Sappho, maybe figure out how to trigger another new poem.

Last night I dreamed that I walked from one shadowy room to the next and discovered a late-night jazz club in my own house--quiet singer on a low stage, brown sepia light; no real memory of music, just hushed listeners, shapes in a room, attentiveness.

I'm going to read this dream as a message to myself.

Yesterday turned out to be a flurry, mostly centered around the arrival of the much-anticipated new mattress. I deep-washed bedding, heat-treated pillows in the dryer, massacred (I hope) those little dust mites that give me such terrible allergies: got everything ready for the stately installation of the new bed, which arrived late afternoon and which Tom and I lugged upstairs when he got home from work.

Ah, the magic of packaging! We unwound the shrink-wrap and watched the mattress swell before our eyes, like one of those flat lozenges that transforms into a fat sponge as soon as it gets wet. From a compressed roll it became a full-sized bed, twice as thick as our previous mattress. I know I'm unduly impressed by modern conveniences, but this was very exciting.

Now, after having spent my first night on the magical new mattress, I continue to ooh and aah. No hip pain in the wee hours! No hobbling stiffness in the morning! When Tom came to bed, I never noticed because the mattress didn't jounce and pop. Now all we need is a bed frame, and we will be like real Americans.

But enough of this mattress advertising. Let us move on to less ironic matters, such as yesterday's sunrise, a glory of purple and gold.  

I heard bad news yesterday about Covid and Harmony--people I like, who I've known for years, now critically ill and hospitalized; no vaccinations; foolishness and endangerment in public places; what I've dreaded and knew could come true in that town.

Forgive my shallow mattress crush. I do know the real.

I loved the helpless people I loved. 

That's what a little boy will do, 

but a grown man will turn it all 

to sadness and let it soak his heart 

until he wrings it out and dreams 

about another kind of love, 

some afternoon beneath a tree. 

[from Maurice Manning, "Sad and Alone"]

 . . . and here we are at Monday at again.

Yesterday's class went well, I think, I hope, and now today I need to buckle down and deal with that shopping stuff I was supposed to do on Saturday but didn't. Blah. So: groceries, downtown, etc. While I'm at it, I might even brave Commercial Street and go to the fish market.

I also have a stack of cards to fill out and send; because while I was teaching, Tom was printing his annual Christmas card, always a photo of his own, usually of the sort to make my cousins go Huh? when they receive it. But huh? is the definition of festive in the Potter-Birtwistle stronghold. After all, a photo of Elvis cut out of the newspaper in 1987 always adorns the top of our full-sized trees. (He is, as little James once pointed out, a star.) This year, because our tree is tiny, we must be content with Tin-Foil Man and a small rubber King Kong. But a clay armadillo with a broken tail has joined the Nativity scene, so huh? continues to reign.

Such beastly weather yesterday--sleet, rain, fog, rain, sleet, wind. I disrupted all of my plans for walking around town and stayed home instead. In the morning I reorganized the bookshelves in my study, and in the afternoon I simmered chicken stock and baked chocolate-krinkle cookies and squash-and-black-pepper rolls. Then Tom and I ate chicken and miso soup for dinner and watched Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, a 1966 Cold War thriller starring a smoldering Paul Newman and a doughty Julie Andrews. Gosh, that Newman was something. Andrews was pretty, and her character was brave and stubborn, but all Newman needed to do was glance sideways and he blanked her every time.

This afternoon I'll be back in the zoom classroom (with tidy bookshelves behind me), so I'll probably spend the morning doing laundry and watering plants and such, and also trying to get in a long walk, before being sucked into a chair for three hours. I'm planning wild mushroom risotto for dinner--fruits of my harvest freezer--topped with fried sage, and with a kale and red cabbage slaw on the side. Yes, it's December 12 and I'm picking kale and sage from my Maine garden. Amazing to say, I still haven't purchased any store greens, yet we have a fresh salad every night. I admit that this makes me feel smug and self-righteous, and you can slap me if you like.

So: a busy teaching day; lots of listening and questioning; lots of standing back and letting the participants run with their thoughts and discoveries. This is the second iteration of my Nina Simone-based chapbook class, and so far it seems to be standing up as a template for working with many different personalities and writing styles. I plan to offer another round in the spring, so let me know if you're interested in taking part. 

Yesterday I did not write at all (other than my morning note to you and my dream-book transcription). I had too many other regular-life things to get done: mostly vacuuming and mopping and multiple loads of heavy laundry and present-wrapping and -shipping. But taking a day off from being a poet was fine because I was pretty tired. I did make four new drafts this week, and garble together some notions about sentences and fragments as impetus for thought, and begin to glimpse a thematic path forward among these very new poems, and adopt the word histoire as a narrative carapace, and read and read and read. That's a ton of work, in just four days.

My plan for today is to go into town and do a little Christmas shopping at used bookstores and junk shops and such, but the weather is supposed to be a mix of rain-sleet-snow, so the road conditions may defeat me. Otherwise, I've got chicken stock to simmer, and squash rolls to bake, and my study to clean, and a library book to pick up. I want to walk out into the gloaming and look at the Christmas lights. I want to cut a few more stalks of kale from my garden before winter closes it down for good.

Here's a list of goals . . . my goals. You have different ones, I know.

Obligation as generative flame. Pattern as vocation. Difficulty as a tower stair. The vibration of the present, muffling regret and envy and fear. Honesty and invention. Eyes on the world. 

Last night's reading was lovely, even cathartic. We had a dozen people in the audience, which felt like a crowd in the little gallery, and to sit and read with Gibson and Betsy, to play off each other's work, was a deep pleasure. We read in three acts--Desire, Grief, Giving--but didn't look at each other's choices beforehand, so any synchronicity or contrast was accidental and vibrating. Many of the audience members were poets, some of whom I knew very well, and that was lovely too--a true sense of community and careful attention. The night was a really, really good return to in-person poetry.

So, today. Trash day. Vacuuming day. Getting-Christmas-presents-into-the-mail day. Also, examine-the-drafts-I've-written-this-week day. Over the course of my little retreat, I've made four new pieces and done some serious thinking about what could be a small craft essay about sentence versus fragment. I don't know if that will get written, but I'm glad to have done the thinking, and I'm considering, too, how it might fit into a future generative writing class.

And the word histoire is now in my head . . . the French word for "story," which, for English speakers, also carries the connotation of "history." Truth merged with invention. I feel that is what I've been writing lately: histoires.

Tonight I'll be taking part in my first indoor poetry reading since the pandemic began. I'm feeling pretty calm about it: this will be a vaxxed crowd, and I've got my booster, and I did recently manage to fly to Chicago and back without incident. Still, the moment feels noteworthy.

I'll be reading with good poet friends Betsy Sholl and Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, at the gallery Zero Station here in Portland. Currently the gallery is featuring a show titled "Want/Need," so our poems will fit into that theme. We're going to read in three acts, "Grief," "Desire," and "Giving," each of us sharing two or three poems on that topic. I'm looking forward to hearing our multiple voices intertwining. Betsy and Gibson are such good poets, with such huge hearts.

In the meantime, I see another quiet day ahead. We got an inch or so of snow yesterday: not enough to shovel but enough to make things slick and ghostly. I'll prep for the reading, and mess around with my Dante and Sappho prompts, and fetch my neighbor back from her car mechanic, and do some housework. This week has been so interior: hour after hour with myself and my thoughts. That kind of inner attention is surprisingly tiring; I ended up taking a huge nap yesterday afternoon because I was so exhausted from what looks, on the outside, like nothing much. But it is work.

We're forecast to get our first actual snow this afternoon--by which I mean an accumulating inch rather than a vague, barely glimpsed flurry. An inch isn't much snow, but my new boots and I are looking forward to taking a walk among the cold and swirling flakes.

I spent much of yesterday reading Sappho's fragments (in Anne Carson's translation), then copying out certain ones and experimenting with drafts that both filled in around her pauses and created new ones. Writing via fragment is an interesting task, one that requires me to rethink, among other things, grammatical expectations. And rethinking grammar, of course, means rethinking intent . . . or, rather, allowing intent to blossom unexpectedly.

I'm trying to treat this week as a writing retreat, with some house/job responsibilities thrown in around the edges, and so far it's been productive: two days in, two keeper drafts; chunks of time spent with difficult books; plenty of spacious idleness. The alternation between Dante and Sappho has been particularly instructive. Dante is all about the long, logical sentence as route into his imagined world, whereas Sappho's fragments are like bits of glitter on a dark rug.

It rained off and on yesterday, mostly a cold-warm drizzle, shifting temperatures and eerie winds, the kind of weather when I expect a witch on a bicycle to drop from the clouds.

I baked bread and washed clothes, read Dante and Drabble, coaxed out a new poem draft from a prompt I invented, submitted a few finished pieces, ambled around the neighborhood, carried firewood, shoveled ashes, made chicken chili with cornmeal dumplings, strained a muscle in my arm during exercise class. It was a plain sort of day, no witches on bicycles, just self with self, trotting through our paces.

I'm sitting here now, in this darkened room, listening to the city rumble forward into Tuesday . . . cars, planes, trains, buses all muttering Go, as the houses rest lightly, small tents peaked under a mackerel sky.

I dreamed last night that two well-known poets, a couple, did not recognize me as also being a poet. They were kind, they were generous, but they were aloof. My dream-self saw they were doing this, that they were separating themselves from me, but I wasn't disturbed by their manner, just aware, even amused.  The overarching emotion of this dream was, oddly, confidence.

Finally, after two bad sleeping nights, I managed to capture an entire one to myself. I am much refreshed, which is a good thing, because I was definitely crossing over into "limp and wilted" yesterday evening.

The class went well, I think: exciting poems, busy chat, everyone seems to be getting along, and what more could I ask?

I'm not sure what's on the docket for today. Exercise class and bread baking and house stuff and Christmas errands, maybe some Frost Place stuff too, but I'm on editing hiatus till next week, so the hours are mostly mine. That probably means copying out Dante, reading Margaret Drabble's The Radiant Way, fiddling with poems, going for walks, staring through windows. Writers do so much lazy puttering. No wonder we can't get paid.

Oy, look at what I'm doing. Here I am with a week to myself (mostly), and I can't even embrace it without belittling myself and my vocation. Don't be me. Snatch your hours and waste them gloriously. Wallow in solitude. Don't turn on the TV (unless it's part of your project). Don't agree to babysit your grandchild or distract yourself into baking food that no one needs to eat (unless they're part of your project). Lie on the couch with a stack of books, scribble lines, say them out loud in the same happy voice you use to read aloud a note from your best friend, fall into a doze and wake up again, fidget with lines, walk outside to look at how the sky's coming along, do not complain about the weather (unless that's part of your project), try the crazy experiment of bashing two drafts into one. Write a poem that's twice as long as what you usually write. Take out all of the punctuation. Put different punctuation back in. Rewrite the poem backward. Take another nap. Copy out a famous poem you have never liked. Do not post anything on Facebook (unless that's part of your project). Print out your poem draft and randomly cut it up with scissors. Spread the parts all over the table and play with sticking them together in peculiar order. Go outside and see how the sky is coming along. Etcetera.

We have ordered a Christmas present for ourselves: our first new mattress in 25 years! Since we moved from Harmony, we've been sleeping on the floor, without even a bed frame (because Tom had built our previous one into the room so we couldn't bring it with us), and I have been waking up stiff as a 90-year-old every morning, thanks to the lumps and bumps of what was always cheap junk. We're getting one of those it-comes-in-a-box-via-FedEx fancy foam sorts that thrifty yet comfort-driven James recommended to us, and Tom has promised to build a frame, and not procrastinate about it, and I am extremely excited. Imagine: I could sit on the edge of a bed to put on my shoes! Added bonus: I might not wake up at 2 a.m. groaning about my aching hips! It's all so thrilling.

A non-leaking shower and a real bed. Things are getting pretty fancy around here.

This afternoon my chapbook class begins, so this morning I'll putter around doing this and that to prepare for a long session in the zoom chair: double-checking my class plans, doing laundry, stretching my legs on a walk. According to my dream diary, I spent last night driving around "in an enormous van" and dealing with issues that were "Kind of about homeschooling. Kind of about car racing. And model airplanes." I hope I learned something.

Now, at first light, as I drink black coffee, and listen to the furnace grumble, and consider the branchy shadows silhouetted against the paling sky, I find myself agog, again, about our miracles of ease and swiftness. Soft beds. Hot water. Airline travel. Just a week ago I was ice skating in Chicago, and now I am home again, in a little house with window glass and a tight roof.

You must be sick of my constant amazement.

Sorry to be so late with this letter: I slept badly all night, and then in the predawn fell hard asleep till 7:30. Thank goodness for Saturday mornings.

Now I am showered and warm and waiting for coffee, and the sun is shining in through the spotted windows. In a little while I have to do the grocery shopping that I procrastinated on yesterday, but otherwise the day is mostly unstructured . . . a telephone chat with Donna, chicken and avocados for dinner . . .

I am very much enjoying this slight respite between editing jobs. I worked on revisions yesterday, did a bit more local, stroll-to-it Christmas shopping, boiled beets for borscht, went for a long walk with my neighbor, talked to Paul on the phone, and set out a few Christmas decorations. Great news: Tom has fixed the leaky shower and the unflushing toilet, and I have three active poem drafts. Plus, Paul wants to take me to see Daniel Craig in Macbeth in April, and James's best childhood friend from Harmony is visiting him in Chicago. Life at the Alcott House is pretty cozy, even though the furnace might be making a funny noise.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be back on the clock, starting the first of three chapbook sessions. So today I'm looking forward to spaciousness. And I'm really, really happy to be writing so well. I know this will end, that I'll plummet back into mess and confusion. But right now I don't have to believe in that.

While I was out writing last night, Tom strung the lights on our tiny lemon cypress. Today I'll dig out a few miniature ornaments to add to the display, but essentially this is our Christmas decorating for the year. . . . the first year since the boys' birth that neither will be home for the holidays (though we'll meet them in Massachusetts at Tom's parents' house). I have not seen Paul since July, an amazing gap, given his omnipresence during the lockdown. But at least we do talk and text constantly. I'm grateful for chatter, even at a distance.

Salon night was again productive--one, possibly two, rough scrawls with potential--and next Thursday we're changing it up, having a poets' night out at Zero Station Gallery, where two of us (Betsy and me) are reading with our friend Gibson. If you're in the area, you could come too--

WANT / NEED: Poetry of Desire, Grieving, and Giving

an evening with three Portland poets: Dawn Potter, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, and Betsy Sholl

Thursday, December 9, 2021, 6:00 PM

Zero Station, 222 Anderson Street, Portland, ME 04101

Today I'll be working on Frost Place stuff, and probably shopping, and cleaning bathrooms, and futzing around with my new drafts. For dinner: borscht, homemade sourdough bread, apple and kale salad. I did manage to buy a few local gift things yesterday, which was a relief. New editing projects are looming, so I need to snatch what moments I can . . . though it always seems a shame to waste them on shopping when I could be reading books. But I try to obey the trumpet of duty.

And, anyway, a little bit of enforced shopping can't keep me down. I am writing new poems like my hair is on fire.

A chilly, slightly icy morning out there, and the cat is disappointed in God. Meanwhile, my phone is filled with texts from my sons: baseball trade news from Paul; continuations of a silly people-watching game from James.

As he and I were sitting in the lobby of the Museum of Contemporary Art a few days ago, we found ourselves watching one particularly eye-catching couple: white, in their 30s, dressed to the nines, she in what I can only describe as business-casual dominatrix garb, he in sharp shoes and a fedora.

"What are their names?" I whispered to James.

He thought a moment and then whispered back: "They're both named Sloan. But only one has an 'e.' They trade off on who gets it."

Since then, Sloane and Sloan have become a part of our texting conversations. Last night, for instance, I wrote: "I wonder what Sloane and Sloan are having for dinner."

His response: "Hmmm. Cauliflower that tastes like steak and looks like gold spheres. At a two-table restaurant with no sign and an 8-month waiting list."

You can see why I love my children so.

* * *

Today I've got class prep to do, and I'd like to work on some revisions. I'll probably go to the writing salon tonight as Tom will also be out this evening, at a photo event. And, sigh, I have to Christmas-shop. I am so bad at it. And I dislike it so much. I get no pleasure from prodding through piles of stuff in stores, unless the piles are old and weird and/or are books.

Good morning from Portland, Maine, where I slept the deep sleep of a swamp monster and am now feeling refreshed and energetic, if somewhat confused about time.

We got out of bed at 4:30 a.m. CT and got home at 2:45 p.m. ET, and weirdly both the flight and the bus arrived at their destinations early, TSA (for a change) did not pull me aside and pat me down me suspiciously, and the cat only bit me slightly when I got home. I'd call that a good travel day.

Today will be filled with odds and ends: restarting my exercise regimen, prepping for Sunday's chapbook class, writing up a style sheet for the editing project I just finished, filling out paperwork for student mentoring at the Telling Room (I'll tell you more about this later), vacuuming up vacation cat hair, baking bread, restocking the fridge . . .

I say "restarting my exercise regimen," but Chicago was an exercise regimen in itself. James estimates that we walked 3 to 5 miles every day, plus we ice-skated and climbed many stairs. It was wonderful to be outside so much, to be hungry and red-faced and windblown, to sit down to sturdy spicy meals. I love eating neighborhood food, and Pilsen's neighborhood food is Michoacan-based--not heavy on the cheese and beans in that Tex-Mex way; more often, mole-sauced braised meats--pork, chicken, beef, goat: very simple to look at it, very wonderful to taste.

But vacation is over now, and I'm back to depending on my own cooking. Sadly, my garden largely faded away in my absence. There's still some kale to pick, and some sage, but the rest of the herbs and greens have folded their tents in the cold. So I'll have to start switching over to store produce, which always makes me gloomy. At least we came home with our suitcases full of corn tortillas and Mexican hot sauce.

 Yesterday was another walking-everywhere day . . . this time over the Chicago River and through the shopping district toward the lake and the Museum of Contemporary Art. They had a show by the Karachi artist Bani Abidi that included selections from letters sent by Indian soldiers fighting for the British in France during World War I, with passages such as "It is like this: my train never left our village station. I am still there saying goodbye; it is as if the whole village traveled with me across the seas." And meanwhile the darkened room was filled with the music of a Punjabi folk song.

Then, a train ride, and another long walk, and dinner at Honky Tonk Barbecue, with live music by a band that specialized in 1920s pop songs and all of the performers looked like dentists or accountants.

And, then, back to James's apartment to watch several episodes of Peter Gunn, one of the most stylish TV shows ever made, in which crime solving always takes second place to jazz.

Today will be our last day here; we leave tomorrow morning early, so you won't hear from me again till later in the week. We're thinking today of ice skating, of eating Mexican food, of looking at Mexican art . . .

I didn't get to bed till 1:30 last night, so I slept in till 7:30--an hour that is both ridiculously late and barely adequate. Good thing we've been having a lot of afternoon naps on this vacation.

Yesterday morning we took the train toward the loop and got off at an uppity meat and cheese shop, where we bought some charcuterie to try today, and then immediately returned to our usual ambience by spending an hour at the Goodwill. Then James said, "Let's take a bus and go back to Pilsen to eat tamales," which was an excellent idea except that the bus never came so we ended up walking back to Pilsen through Greektown and the U. of Illinois campus, which took a very long time. As a result, the tamales--chicken and green sauce in cornmeal, wrapped in banana leaves--tasted like heaven.

Our plan for the the evening was to go to Uptown and eat Ethiopian food and then listen to jazz at the Green Mill. We did eat the Ethiopian food, and then we started to listen to jazz, but then James started not feeling well, so we spent the rest of our evening trying to make our way back to his apartment via stalled trains and general pokiness. The good news is that his stomach cramps finally eased so he is fine. But it was a drag for him.

This morning he has to go to the studio and get his weekly Covid test, and then I think we're heading out to the Museum of Contemporary Art. In the meantime, I will be happy to sit on a couch and putter. I ended up bringing both the Fowles novel and the Cheever short stories, but haven't even touched the stories as I am somewhat enwrapped with one of the novel's characters, though the other main character is tremendously irritating and I hate him.

We spent yesterday walking--miles and miles of walking, all around Pilsen--combing through thrift stores and such, and eventually ended up at a bookstore that was giving away all of its books for free that day (!), and the Skylark Bar, where we drank cheap beer and listened to old school hiphop and Serge Gainsborough doing his Barry White-ish thing in French, and finally concluded the evening at a Vietnamese restaurant, where we ate a family-style meal of pork soup, green papaya salad, fish-sauce chicken wings, and whipped rice pudding.

I have no idea what we'll be up to today. Nobody seems too concerned about plans, or about getting anywhere at any particular time. Maybe we'll venture out of the neighborhood, or maybe not. At some point I hope to go across the street to the Museum of Mexican Art, and it might be pleasant to lay eyes on Lake Michigan. I expect whatever we do will again involve miles of walking, as we all enjoy that. This is a big flat town and the striding is easy.

In the meantime, I will sit around under a couch blanket reading my books as the boys sleep away in their beds and the sun rises over the FBI building and the basilica that is perpetually under repair and the museum and the garages and alleys and the pigeons and the baseball field and the garbage trucks and the delivery vans and the police cars and Shadow the Constantly Barking Doberman and the murals of sunflowers and Dominican priests and the diners and the bars and the mysterious offices for the sale of brass and bronze ingots and the produce warehouses and the fire stations and pest-control service and the place to buy religious statuary and the Costco and the helicopter port and the Santa Claus decorations and Dental Sunshine and Amigo Insurance and (my personal favorite) Discount Scaffolding.

Good morning from the central time zone, where I slept much later than usual so am now entirely confused, inner-clock-wise.

Our travels from Portland were smooth and unharried; and though our flight was full, it appeared to be the only one arriving in the Midway terminal. We landed at 7:30, but already the concourse was shut up tight, as if we were stumbling in at 3 a.m. And now here I am in this dark-shaded apartment, dominated by a roaring heater and two sleeping men. I may never figure out what time it is.

Anyway: Chicago! This is our first time in James's new apartment, and it's sweet and homey and high-ceilinged, a third-floor walkup with a view over the rooftops. He and I were laughing on the phone the other day, about what sloppy, sloppy kids we both were, and how we both turned into extremely tidy adults. Childhood is not always a predictor of the future. As a ten-year old, I could have cared less about clutter and hair washing, and he was just the same. But now we're both ridiculous neatniks.

I don't know what we'll do today. Tom and I are here till Tuesday morning, so we've got lots of hours to fill. But now everyone's getting up, and I must leave you and drink coffee. . . .

 Happy Thanksgiving, to those who celebrate. As both a non-cooker and non-eater this year, I do feel on the outside looking in. What will the airport be like, I wonder, with all of our kind wandering footloose through the terminals, none of us getting anywhere in time for dinner?

Still, there's a certain freedom in not taking part in the holiday. Yesterday, as everyone else in the grocery store was madly buying ingredients, I was dreamily puttering among toothbrushes and Dramamine, cat litter and laundry soap. I have made no pies, sweetened no cranberries, mashed no potatoes. For dinner I will eat something unsavory out of an airport carton.

But of course the end result of all of this non-celebrating will be celebrating: our long weekend with James, putzing around Chicago with red noses and winter boots, actually having a vacation with Tom.

This morning I will pack, and also deal with various household things like getting the trash out for tomorrow's pickup and organizing the cat's stuff for his across-the-street babysitter. The timing of this trip makes it feel stately and unrushed.  After lunch my neighbor will drive us to the bus station, 10 minutes away, and then we will float in the seas of public transportation . . . a coach ride to Boston, then a flight to Chicago, and then the bright face of our son waiting to fetch us back to his apartment. I am so un-nervous about this trip that I'm starting to think something's wrong with me.

The biggest struggle of the day, as always, will be deciding what books to bring. Do I bring the Fowles novel that I'm halfway through? Do I bring that collection of Cheever stories? Short stories are often nice on a trip, as they work well with my fractured attention--I'm always distracted by the curious behaviors of the people around me. Do I bring Dante to copy out in my spare moments? Or do I assume that my spare moments would be better served by actually behaving as if I'm on vacation and not mucking around with an epic? Still, I once passed a great deal of time at LaGuardia copying out Paradise Lost. So I know it can be done.

You can see the problems I face . . . not least the ridicule of my family. They are all breathlessly waiting to laugh when they see what I unpack. I should foil them and simply produce one paperback copy of Fifty Shades of Gray, or perhaps How to Win Friends and Influence People. But then I'd have nothing else to read, and that would be a drag.

. . . David says,

If you’re out

in public & you don’t want anyone

to talk to you, bring a book 

of poetry. 

--from Emilia Phillips's "Reading Ovid at the Plastic Surgeon's"

Tom forgot to set his alarm last night, so we overslept, and now everything is running late. But I did make the coffee, and if everything else in my morning gets pushed back an hour, so be it. Once he gets himself to work, there's nothing urgent on my end. My day will mostly be odds and ends of travel prep: shopping, mending, washing clothes, digging out the suitcases, and so on. We don't leave the house tomorrow till after lunch, so we can be pretty relaxed about packing.

I had a remarkably productive writing day yesterday, which doesn't always happen when I decide to take one. I transcribed a number of scrawled first drafts out of my notebook; and as I was humming over them, I realized that several of the scraps, written at different times and under different circumstances, might cohere into a larger, more surprising piece. Mucking around with that notion absorbed a few hours, and then I turned to Dante and began copying out Canto XIII, translated by Charles Wright, with passages like this: "We were men once, and now we are underbrush: / surely your hand would have been more merciful / even if we had been the souls of snakes." Golly.

I even managed to submit work to a couple of journals, and got an instant acceptance from one of them, sweet repayment for my wincing dislike of the process. I could not have asked for a better writing day: new work, old work, published work, punctuated by a long cold walk with my neighbor and homemade macaroni-and-cheese for dinner.

So, today: A bit of Frost Place stuff. A phone call with Donna about our Mouse and His Child reading project. And then cat-litter shopping and clothes folding and as much more writing time as I can steal. Yesterday's cobbled-together draft might actually be something very interesting, but it needs work.

I slept hard last night, to make up for the night before; and while my dreams did not reach the epic proportions of two days ago (mysteriously notated only as "Dogs with special powers"), they did involve both the actor Elliot Gould and the poet BJ Ward looking for secret stuff behind a ventilation system in a weird brick house that apparently belonged to my aunt.

Today, I've got some Frost Place stuff to do, but otherwise the hours are mine. My poetry group really liked the poem draft I shared last night, and I guess that's a sign that I need to get off my duff and use a few of these free hours to submit poems to journals.

So this morning, after exercise class et al., I'll try to buckle down to that chore. I did finish Teresa's copyediting yesterday, and washed a thousand pounds of laundry, and got my teeth cleaned, and reamed out the bathrooms, and vacuumed the floors, so I do not feel guilty about taking a day to mess around with poems and re-start my Dante copying project.

I often imagine how other writers manage their lives. They win fellowships and spend months at retreats and artist colonies. They scribble in the tiny cold hours before dawn. They jot down lines on their palm and smoke a cigarette beside the loading dock. I wonder what those lives are like.

In the small hours I woke to battering rain. The bedroom felt like a crate bobbing in rough seas, and I could never quite get back to sleep. I fear this is going to be one of those days when my coal box runs down to dust, and my steam peters out, and my engine halts pathetically in a siding and instantly starts to rust.

I did, mostly, manage to finish that giant kitchen job yesterday, though there are a few tag ends I need to finish. But we now have a clean refrigerator, clean shelves, clean closets, clean cupboards, clean dishes, top to bottom, inside and out; everything sorted and reorganized, a few things pitched out. I'm pretty good about not wasting food, but there are always a few icky jars of something-or-other hanging around in the dark corners of the fridge.

Anyway, that's over, and today I can turn my sleepy attention to the thrill of a dentist appointment. I also have Teresa's poetry collection to copyedit, and this evening a poetry workshop I need to stay awake for. Wish me luck with the coffee and such.

But the big editing job is done. The contest-manuscript-screening is done. I do feel as if I can relax a bit, as our midwestern holiday approaches. When we get back, all the crazy will start up again: another bout of weekend teaching, a new editing project, plus I've been invited to take part in a mentorship program with a high school poet. Plus, argh, Christmas shopping.

What I ought to do this week is send out some finished poems to journals, but likely I'll keep procrastinating on that chore. What I ought to do this week is stop telling myself what I ought to do.

What it is to be caught up in each day

Like a child fighting imaginary wars,

Converting work into this passionate play,

A rounded whole made up of different chores

Which one might name haphazard meditation.

And yet an unexpected call destroys

Or puts to rout my primitive elation:

Why be so serious about mere joys?

--from May Sarton's "A Country Incident"

Well, my giant kitchen project is taking longer than I'd hoped it would--so much dishwashing, and dish moving, and cabinet cleaning, and reorganizing. It isn't even a big kitchen, and I don't even have that much stuff. And I tidy and surface-clean it every day! Disorder is so insidious.

I've still got the pantry cupboard and the refrigerator to tackle today, but at least I finished all of the storage cupboards. I won't have to spend every waking moment in the dishpan.

But enough of this housework talk.

Outside, the last golden leaves are sifting down from the spike-armed maples. Inside, the lamplight shines on John Fowles's novel Daniel Martin, the collected stories of John Cheever, Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child, a book of New York Times crossword puzzles, and some fat photo books whose titles I can't see from where I'm sitting. Behind my head, the cat is humped up, slitty-eyed, on the back of the sofa. Upstairs, Tom clanks his coffee cup and sighs.

A week from now I will be standing at a third-floor window, staring out into the morning mists of the Chicago skyline.

In the meantime, I've got a dentist appointment, and a poetry-group meeting, and my friend Teresa's next poetry collection to copyedit. All in all, a quiet slide into the holiday. No cooking, no fussing. Just a lot of of public transportation and my children making their traditional jokes about how many books I packed.

Poetry life is humming along. Clustered on my computer desktop is a batch of new poems in various stages of construction. On Monday night I'll do some revision talk with my poetry group. I'm getting ready to return to my copying-out-the-Inferno project, which got body-slammed during the pandemic year, when I no longer had a desk to work at. My fifth collection, Accidental Hymn, is in production, and I'm happy to say that the cover will feature Kathy Wright's painting, which she created during our collaborative project for Art in Common Places. (You can see our original broadside at the link: it's gorgeous.) Right now, my poet brain feels supple and fluid, busy and attentive, and full of confidence. This may all be lies, but I'm enjoying them anyway.

Yesterday I finished the big, complicated editing project that's been swallowing me up for the past couple of months; and with that off my desk and the Homer class behind me, I'm entering this weekend feeling unbooked and unleashed and giddy and free . . . a foolish sensation that housework will quickly squelch. 

Tom is planning to ride the ferry to Peaks Island and spend the day there taking pictures. I am planning to deep-clean the kitchen (vacuum out cupboards, wash the pretty bowls and glassware that sit on the open shelves, scrub the refrigerator). Art versus chore. But the chore needs to be done. As does the art.

Between times I'll walk up to the library to fetch the volume of Cheever short stories I'm borrowing. I'll fiddle with my stack of new poem drafts. See? Art won't entirely be limited to Peaks Island. I can think about words and scour refrigerator shelves. It's one of my superpowers, along with being able to smell a gas leak.

I like to do a job: a kitchen, a poem, as the case may be. 

As the shadows fall, I'll start simmering minestrone. I'll light a fire in the wood stove, and curl up on the couch with my library book. Eventually Tom will thump in through the back door, red-nosed after a long day in the cold island wind. He will not notice the clean kitchen, and he will not read the poem, but he will smile at me. Every day he smiles at me.

Secret work is its own delight. Ink on a page, soap on a wineglass. Bubbles foam, then burst. Scent of lemons. And now a stanza demands a line. 

I spent a slow and pleasant evening at the salon--eating, talking, writing--and, again, a sort of draft swam up from the depths into the night air. It will need a lot of work to become a poem, but something is there. Clearly this group is good for me and my writing, though I struggle to gird myself to go out on a Thursday night. But I want to, so I will.

Then, in bed, I woke and slept, woke and slept, to the sound of rain on the roof and at the windows. And now, on this dark Friday morning, I am drinking my coffee, and thinking about dragging the recycling bin to the curb, and realizing that I might actually finish that enormous editing project today.

The world swirls around me, but just for this moment I have paused. I feel like a twig trembling in the crook of a running stream. I feel full of . . . something: I don't know what: perhaps just awareness of myself, waiting, but not desperately or greedily, not with resignation or gloom. Just quivering, as the water rushes by.

I dreamed last night that my in-laws' house was filled with swimming pools and fancy floating couches, and I was lying on a couch and floating slowly from one pool to the next, alongside big windows and enormous white pines . . . and then the dream morphed into driving into an ominous back alley with my sister and getting the car trapped in a veiled woman's "for sale" stand, which appeared to feature nothing but large, wet, semi-rotten clumps of coarse fabric. 

Such a bumptious transition, soothing and unhinged in equal proportion. I keep thinking that noting down this stuff is going to help my writing, but maybe it will just make my writing crazy.

I'm hoping to finish editing a chapter today, and I need to get started on setting up the class website for my next Studio Session class, which starts in early December. Our Chicago adventure is looming, and I want to get as much done as I can before Thanksgiving.

So work work work today, and maybe some afternoon leaf raking, and probably the writing salon in the evening. I've finished Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle, and now I'm beginning Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child and waiting for Cheever's short stories and Milosz's anthology Postwar Polish Poetry to show up at my library branch. This week I've been going for midday walks up into the cemetery,  with the purported purpose of breaking in my new boots before I go to Chicago. [Advertising sidebar: I love my new boots. They are cute and warm and waterproof and comfortable. You can tell how I feel because I am using italics.] But also I adore this late-autumn weather: chilly but not icy, the last golden leaves clinging to blue sky, the sturdy clomp of my feet on the pavement, my brain ticking and fluttering through its Rolodex . . . poems, lists, flashes of memory, crammed in against the now: the dogs and their babies, man mysteriously trying to throw a rope into a tree, skinny boy staring at a phone, old-lady running club, gossiping as they pant, aging punk rocker listening to an early-days-of-hiphop mix tape as he walks, then looking up at me and smiling and saying, "Sometimes you just have to spend time with the old stuff."

34 degrees yesterday, 24 this morning: no wonder I detected a hint of winter in yesterday's wind.

I spent my dream night wandering through hotel rooms and airports with the cat, who was sometimes in his carrier but sometimes slithering through heating vents, etc. Also I had to do a lot of dream vacuuming in these places. I was relieved to wake up at home.

Today's schedule will be kind of like yesterday's, lots of editing but with less bread baking and more pot-roast braising. I began transferring some of the weekend's poem drafts out of my notebook and onto the laptop, and it turns out that I'm going to be very happy with the most horrible of them all--a dreadful little piece about catching mice in traps as an exercise in unbridled power. The prompt was a fast-write, assigned after reading a passage in which Odysseus shares his plans for restocking his farms (basically, "steal sheep from other people"). All I told the writers was "Go on a raid." It was our final prompt, and everyone in the class wrote very startling pieces, including me.

But there's something cathartic in reaching down into the marrow of human violence. After spending so much of this past year with the Odyssey and the Iliad, I can't help but begin to recognize those archetypal traits within myself too, though they're thickly swaddled in niceness and self-control. But when I allow myself to exist within violence on the page, I do learn some stuff.

I've done so much new writing in the past week, between the class and the evening salon. It's exciting. I feel as if I've been writing well for the past couple of years, but my writing time has been so controlled and limited, just because of the circumstances of my living situation and my work obligations. I had to wait to turn on the faucet, though when I did, the work splashed out. Both the weekend and the salon have been dedicated to flushing out the plumbing, and now the sink is filling up with all kinds of floating debris. I am delighted.

34 degrees this morning: not nearly our coldest temperature of the season, but when I cracked the door to let the cat out, the gust that rattled in felt like the bones of winter.

I spent five minutes writing the above sentence, and it's still clumsy.

Yesterday was a mostly screen-free day: lots of laundry, groceries, a surprise visit with diaspora friends, an hour-and-a-half walk with my neighbor, leaf raking . . . altogether, a much needed face-to-face-with-the-living-world day. So now I am refreshed, and much less squinty, and ready to return to my desk and its exigencies.

I've been rereading Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicles, which for some reason made no impression on me the last time I read it. At this try I am bowled over,  in an amnesiac sort of way, by the gorgeousness of the prose. What a book! I've always thought of Updike and Cheever in the way I think of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: you fall into one camp or the other, and I've been Tolstoy and Updike all the way. But now I see I was wrong, which I guess means I'll have to try reading Fyodor D. again too . . .

In closing, here's a taste of the great and unregenerate Gregory Corso to make you laugh and sigh--

I reached heaven and it was syrupy.

It was oppressively sweet.

Croaking substances stuck to my knees.

Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest.

I grabbed him and pasted him on my head.   

I found God a gigantic fly paper.

I stayed out of his way.

--from "Transformation and Escape," 1960

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have no idea how full-time teachers are able to keep exuding such focus and energy every day of the week. Two days of it completely exhausts me . . . though in a very good way. The participants were marvelous, the quality of the drafts was stunning . . . really, the weekend couldn't have gone better, and I'm thrilled. But I am tired.

I tried to take last Friday off, but ended up having to edit and clean house and otherwise not rest from any labors at all. So today I'm going to try again; and though I'll still have to grocery-shop and wash clothes and such, maybe I can cobble together a partial rest day before returning to my desk tomorrow.

With the Homer class under my belt, I have to turn my teaching attention to another 3-session chapbook seminar, which is starting in the first weekend of December. And now I've got a stack of first drafts to deal with too--what I wrote during the Homer class, plus what I wrote during the Thursday salon. Maybe today I can start sorting through some of that.

And the yard is full of leaves . . . I can see already that this is not going to be a day off.

I'm feeling somewhat groggy and ditzy this morning--a heavy, late sleep after wakefulness, and the coffee hasn't yet begun its stabilizing work.

I think yesterday's class went well. We had 11 participants, most with more fervent knowledge of the Odyssey than I have, so that was great. They seemed to love talking with one another, burrowing into the tale and its implications, comparing translations; it was exciting to watch their excitement, and the writing they've generated from those conversations has been stellar. Today's we'll do a little more reading and writing, and then we'll spend the rest of the session thinking about possible directions for their first drafts. My biggest takeaway is, that this dense conversation about an ancient poem is leading directly into strong new writing, and that has been my hope and my goal.

After I finished the session, and finished lying on the couch letting my eyes recover from the Zoom screen,  I put together the quince tarte tatin and baked it . . . this involved making caramel in a cast-iron pan, then spreading cooled poached quinces over it, laying a circle of frozen pastry over that, and baking it for a half hour or so. Then Tom helped me flip the pan onto a plate, so that the crust was now on the bottom and the caramelized quinces were on top. I was pretty pleased with how it came out, and the quinces have a subtle and mysterious flavor, sort of pear-like, but more perfumed. This is not a good photo, and Tom didn't use the plate I would have chosen for display, but at least you have an idea of what it looks like. The small dark fruits are dried cranberries.