This week has flown by, probably because I've felt so behind on everything. But yesterday I made a sizable dent in the obligations, so maybe today will feel more sedate. I'll be involved in two Frost Place classes this weekend, which is partly why my life has been breathless. I can't shunt off chores, and I can't shunt off work: it all has to be done now now now.

But at least my frenzy has helped me stock a small pond I can sit by today. I still have to work and grocery-shop et al., but I think I'll also be able to spend some time with the new drafts I scrawled in last night's salon, and sit down for an hour with the Aeneid, and go for a walk with my neighbor. I drove with my friend Betsy to the salon, and we had a really helpful conversation in the car about some teaching/mentoring questions I've been trying to unsnarl. So I'm feeling more pulled together about that . . . or at least more confident in what I'm noticing about manuscripts and habits. Teaching is wonderful but can also be isolating.

Here's a poem from the new collection that's stylistically different from much of the rest of the book. An outlier, one might say. A disembodied voice. A compilation of images without narrative, in which the white space is the reader's cue to "make sense" of those images in whatever way they choose.

Ashes are a way to die in action

Dawn Potter

 

1

A woman shovels ashes

into a coal scuttle.

 

2

Shrieking, the wind

blows ashes into her tangled hair.

 

3

Future ashes sigh

and twitch their boughs.

 

4

Beneath a bed of ashes

the live coals wink.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]