Greetings from Sunday-morning Portland, where I am yawning and lolling and drinking black coffee. It's been very, very nice to be sleeping late in a magnificent bed, and with its help I am starting to feel more like my usual energetic self.

Yesterday I worked on class planning and finished checking Accidental Hymn proofs (they're ready for the printer!) and went grocery shopping and lay around reading a John Le Carre novel. While it wasn't exactly a day off, it was a reduced day, so that was something. Today I'll do the housework, and maybe slip in some poem revisions around the edges . . . yet another not-quite-day off, but at least a change in activity. 

The sun is shining on the snow, and the news from Ukraine is hopeful.

Here's a poem. It's not spring yet, but my sap is starting run. The title is a play on Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn," and I also borrow some of his language.

Concord Street Hymn

 

Dawn Potter

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]