The young people left yesterday, and the cat was devastated. He sulked and sighed all day, despite my coaxing. Paul is his special person and he hates to see him go. But other than cat sadness, the day went okay. Tom was downstairs in his shop, working on our bed frame; I did laundry and baked bread and read books every chance I could get. Then we watched the Bills-Chiefs game, which for anyone vulnerable must have been a fine way to induce a heart attack. Though our team lost, I have to say it was one of the greatest games of football I have ever watched. A quarterback clinic, from two of the best ever.

And so we return to Monday morning, 18 degrees, a household of two. I'll be writing, and then futzing around with Frost Place stuff today; probably also catching up on the housecleaning one cannot do when a carpenter is at work. Over the weekend I've been rereading one of my old standbys, John Fowles's The Magus, and this week I'll return to the Aeneid and the bird-migration book. I've been fairly sloth-like for the past several days, so I'll restart my exercise regimen.

In other words, I am trying to get back into the swing of not being the mother. That is never an easy transition, but it is how my life will always go now.

Milk Gap

 

Dawn Potter

Their udders were so bloated

a thorn might have slayed them.

Sidestepping their own stiff

tits, the cows hustled & hurtled

 

through the doorway, a barge

of skull & shoulder ramming a road

to the feed trough.

They were Herefords, beef cattle,

 

meaning Grandpap didn’t milk them.

That was left to the calves,

pink & white & knock-kneed,

a muddle of nose and bone.

 

Undaunted, they squeezed

among red brawn & hot flank,

joyfully smashing their rock-a-block

heads into their mothers’ tender

 

rope-veined pokes.

Crush, kick, slam—

twice a day, this greed circus.

And I, stashed on the other side of the fence,

 

teetered against the bars with a grain scoop,

pouring rivers of mash, dangling

a frail wrist among the grinding

jaws, the brutal tongues.

 

I would do anything,

in those days,

to be touched.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]