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)]