Yesterday afternoon my publisher stopped by with ten copies of Accidental Hymn. As always, it was an exciting moment: to see the poems in their final form, to clutch the book to my heart. Given that the official pub date isn't till May, ordering info won't go up immediately. But if you happen to be interested in reviewing the collection, let me know and I'll make sure get you a copy.

The other event of yesterday was that, after all my natter about not writing, I suddenly drafted a poem. That was thanks to my friend David, who emailed me the following excerpt from Sylvia Plath's poem "Totem":

The world is blood-hot and personal
Dawn says.

This, of course, was not a prompt I could pass up, and I whipped out a draft at a speed that shocked me.

I was not exaggerating in yesterday's post when I said that writing poems has been turning on a faucet and watching them splash into the sink.

This morning I'll pull myself together for tomorrow's high school day at Monson Arts: gather up my materials, print out my syllabus, figure out what I'm going to wear. I might make a pie crust and put it into the freezer so that it's ready for my little dinner party on Saturday. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Tom, but I also don't want to disrupt his arty activities, so I won't leave here till mid-afternoon. My plan is to arrive for dinner, and then hole up in his bedroom and watch a Marlene Dietrich movie until he finishes up whatever he's doing. Then on Friday, after class, I'll zip back to Portland and leave him to his bachelorhood.

Right now, in the city, it's raining lightly. Naturally, in Monson, it's sleeting, but that's supposed to quit before long as temperatures rise. Driving should be easy enough. I'm looking forward to this dip back into the homeland, a full day with a handful of local kids, asking them to write into their relationship with the place and their place in it. Snow and mud and trees and lake. The roar of log trucks. And at night the vibrating stars.

 

The central Maine mud-season artist surrounded by his prints.

Interestingly, I have not written or revised a single poem since Tom left on Sunday. Even more interestingly, I have not had the urge to write or revise. What I've wanted to do is read and read and read and read. 

When it comes to writing, I am not a natural procrastinator. Moreover, for the past year or so, the poems have been pouring out of me. Open the faucet, and a poem splashes into the sink.  So right now I feel no anxiety about writing or not writing; I'm willing to roll with what's happening, which is that I am reading like crazy, and I'm tending my nest, and I'm readjusting my relationship with time. All of these occupations are very absorbing, though I don't know why. The house is as clean as a whistle. The books are stacked on the coffee table. And time has slowed down. I linger over everything I do. There is no hurry. There is no hurry at all.

Yesterday afternoon I went out to teach. Today I'll be home all day, working on some desk things and then trailing back into my reading obsession. I do wonder if all of this reading will lead to writing. It usually does, though I'm not yet sensing a portal. I feel like a child devouring any old printed matter, just for the joy of language. And the greed is so intensely sensual. Perhaps the magic is to be 57 years old and still fully able to tumble into the hole of words.

 

The central Maine mud-season artist at work.

It's 17 degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, the coldest it's been for quite a while. But the sun is supposed to shine, and temperatures are supposed to rise, and perhaps the plants will get less crabby. 

Yesterday I washed floors, packed up some stuff for Goodwill, cleaned out a couple of closets, read the Aeneid and James Baldwin and Wendell Berry, and went grocery shopping. I made a delicious dinner for myself of spaghetti squash, spinach, and chicken breast marinated in lemon and garlic. I drank tea and ate Icelandic yogurt for dessert and watched a pre-code movie called Hot Saturday starring a very young Cary Grant as an incorrigible roué.

This morning I'll do a bit more spring cleaning, a bit more reading, endure my exercise class, and such, and then in the afternoon I'll drive downtown and meet up with my high school poet and we will spend a couple of hours trying out different ways of ordering her book manuscript.

This new life as single-woman-with-long-distance-romance has a notably different pace from the life of married housewife. I am not used to simply pleasing myself. Cooking what I want for dinner. Eating that dinner when I want to eat it. Such a little thing, but it feels so self-indulgent after so many years as the family cook.

It's a funny thing: I am gleefully independent and self-indulgent as a reader and a writer, but in the household I am always thinking about what everyone else will thrive on: clean clothes, good food, a welcoming space. I like those things too, but my psyche addresses them as caretaking, as mothering, as doing chores. When I'm the only beneficiary of my caretaking, life feels strange.

Of course I can't help but compare my state of mind now with how I felt during my last year in Harmony, when I was alone and so incredibly sad. Tom and I have swapped places geographically: now he is back up north, and I am in the south. We are both focusing on our art. We are cheerful about the separation, and the separation has a distinct end point.  But I also think about the longer, inevitable, permanent separation. The final divide, that one of us will need to weather alone.

Yesterday morning was warm and glorious, yesterday evening was chill and dank, but hyacinths do not care about petty matters such as temperature swings, and here they are, opening their pale arms in the Library Bed.

Now, on my first morning as a bachelor (clearly I am not a bachelorette), the forecast calls for bluster and snow squalls, with highs barely out of the 20s. Ruckus and I are hoping to make the best of it. Today I've got some desk work to do, and spinster grocery shopping, and a few spring cleaning projects--forking out closets, hand-washing woolens, and such. But mostly I have a day without obligation.

Tom called last night from Monson, where he was pinning up photos in his studio. He sounded like I feel: puzzled about how to fill his swaths of time, but simultaneously anxious about wasting even one moment. It's an interesting conundrum. I am not used to taking care of no one but myself. Tom is not used to taking care of no one, not even himself. And now he has two weeks to figure out how to do that.

Still, I enjoyed getting up on my own alarm-free schedule. I am enjoying this pot of coffee. I am enjoying not rushing to gather T's work clothes for the washing machine, not scrubbing his breakfast dishes. I don't have anything better to do, and I am enjoying the slowness. There's no hurry. The day is before me. I hope he is feeling the same.

It's not like I've done nothing since he left. I did zoom-teach all afternoon yesterday, and that went well, I think. Tomorrow afternoon I'll be working with my high school poet. On Thursday and Friday I'll be traveling up north to teach more high schoolers. On Saturday I'll host a small dinner party for some poets. On Sunday I'll be zoom-teaching again. Clearly I'm not on vacation. But the edges are free. And the edges feel significant.

Last night was our last evening in Portland together for a while, and so we spent it pleasantly--driving into town for sushi, then strolling around the West End, where we marveled at the giant mansions and the sun setting over the container ships and the strip malls and the river (the timber barons of old liked to build their houses to overlook their works, so the landscape remains a strange amalgam of remotely rich/rudely commercial), and Tom reminisced about which ones he'd renovated, and we ambled over to a jazz show at the Portland Conservatory of Music, where we sat for an hour and a half in a former church and watched two young men putter among cords and knobs and murmur into drums and wind instruments via loops and samples to create a shimmer of sound, and then we wandered back to our car, and then drove across town to home, to our final bit of wakefulness on the couch, with Peter Gunn and the cat. 

It was completely sweet, and the convolutions of the sentence are a nod to the perambulations of time and our feet, and I woke up this morning ready for two weeks of a new way of being friends. The last time we were separated for so long was when Tom moved to Portland for a job and to look for a house to buy, and I stayed in Harmony to deal with selling the house we had, and he was living in a horrible rooming situation, and I was so lonely and grieving that I did not know how I would survive. But this time he is going back north for two weeks as a celebrated artist, and I am not selling my trees and packing my books into boxes; instead, I am planting a garden, and writing in my room, and visiting with friends, and  doing my work, and all the while knowing that Tom is doing his and being so happy for him. 

Sports break:

How about those St. Peter's Peacocks, the little 15-seed from Jersey City?! They play like a swarm of bees! What a game that was last night: I was on the edge of my seat all the way through! It's so exciting to watch an unknown team take on the titans, and win! Go, Jersey boys!

Okay, sports break over. And I promise to stop ending every sentence with an exclamation point.

* * *

The sun has risen over the little northern city by the sea. I think it will be a pretty day, sunny and warmish. In the cold frame, my arugula and lettuce seeds have sprouted. Crocuses are beginning to bloom here and there around the yard. The tulips I planted last fall are spiking up through the soil. Buds are swelling on the blueberries. Grass is starting to green. 

I have some class-prep stuff to do today, but otherwise no big plans. Tom will be rushing around trying to get ready for his big adventure. He has so much equipment to tote . . . all of his cameras, his big computer, giant boots and other mud-season requirements . . . Meanwhile, I might clean house; I might work outside; I might read; I might just hang around with him.

Yesterday I did more leaf and stick cleanup, baked bread and shortbread, futzed around with Frost Place stuff, read a large chunk of the Aeneid. I also ate lunch outside, the first al fresco of the season: a slice of cold homemade pizza, a glass of water, and Wendell Berry's stories to read; perched outside at the little patio table, wearing my filthy garden sweater and baggy jeans, shivering a little but happy to be out in the sunshine, surrounded by my teeny plot of land, my miniature breadbasket, my dollhouse farm.

The Maine Woods

 

Dawn Potter

Don’t imagine I was Thoreau.

I had a driveway, though no one drove up it much,

and I had a car and gasoline, and a telephone

that rang now and again, and lamps

 

that often stayed lit, and a faucet that often

spouted water, and armloads of firewood

and a cook stove, and most evenings

I had baseball on the radio.

 

For a while I had a dog, but then

the dog died. On Friday nights

I even had a husband.

Oh, I was not Thoreau, not even close,

 

though I did have a vernal pool that was almost

a pond, and a footpath twisting

among ancient pines, and a creek

chattering and singing among the stones.

 

On the nights I had a husband

the kitchen hummed and the pillows sang

and a cat complained at the door.

But on most nights my shadow 

 

trembled in the gleam of a cloudy moon.

Small predators yipped in the dark,

and I could not find my face in the mirrors.

Up and down the stairs I trudged, up and down

 

the narrow treads. At dawn I folded the shirts.

I baked the bread. I washed the floors

and hung out the sheets.

It was important to force time 

 

through a sieve. I avoided taking

strong measures with myself.

Tears were a practical solution,

and I called on them twenty times a day.

 

I was never joyful, not for a moment,

but sometimes I was happy.

I begged the windblown trees to sweep the sky.

I coaxed the jays to scream their love.

 

Loneliness was better

than never coming home,

and never coming home

is the tale I’m about to tell.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Pouring rain, pouring rain, and I, thankfully, am still at home, not slogging through ice and mud in the northcountry dark.

But it was an odd day, yesterday: I expected to be on the road, and instead I spent hours reading by the fire while rain and sleet rattled down. 

Today should be different, as the rain is supposed to transform into 50 degrees and full sun, a gardener's delight. No firesides and couch blankets required.

I've been immersed in Wendell Berry's fiction, and at some point I will write down what I'm noticing about his work. Suffice it to say: his stories are what I expected, and what I did not expect. Which is why I remain immersed.

In two days, Tom leaves for his residency. Things will sure be different around here without him.

The weather is every bad thing I feared it would be. Even here in balmy Portland, we've got sleet mixed with rain, and driving north will be a nightmare of ice and snow. I've got till midday to decide, but the answer seems clear.

So instead of jaunting up to the muddy homeland, I guess I'll be tucked up next to a wood fire in the cozy diaspora. A disappointment, but a comfortable one.

And I'll have an unexpected storm day to myself. So, more reading and writing, a bit of editing. Maybe I'll go out to the salon in the evening . . . anything could happen.

I've been thinking about the comment that Nancy left on yesterday's post, the one in which she expressed interest in seeing poem drafts. I don't customarily save drafts. My general habit has been to compose directly on the computer and then revise and experiment within the document rather than print out or file multiple versions. Other people are different in this regard: my friend Teresa says she keeps long trails of drafts. But I've got an aversion to clutter, even on my computer, and I revise best if I keep a clean page.

More recently, however, I've been composing first drafts in longhand. This shift has come about because I've been leading generative writing sessions and also writing in community at the salon, and the notebook has been a more useful tool in those situations. I don't call these blurts first drafts but pre-poems: they tend to have sloppy or nonexistent lineation, be filled with stutter-starts and off-ramps, and veer wildly into tragedy or farce. But they're interesting to me nonetheless, and all winter long I've been able to mine these notebook scrawls for material for true first drafts, which in my personal definition are early iterations of actual, coherent, beginning-to-end poems.

So yesterday, after I read Nancy's comment, I typed out the notebook entry verbatim, followed by the draft that I brought to my Monday workshop group, followed by the current version that I've worked on since receiving comments from those first readers. In my head, I'd felt that the latest version was very similar to the pre-poem; yet when I reread the three versions, I could see that my brain had been doing work: stripping down, synthesizing, choosing an imaginative trail.

I can't post the three drafts here because that would count as "publication" and I may want to submit the final version to a journal. But I would be happy to email them to you privately and then discuss your responses here, if you think that sort of conversation would be helpful.

I woke up with a splitting headache, but it seems to be fading into the dim light of coffee and 5 a.m. Downstairs the washer is churning. In the kitchen Tom is making his lunch and heating up leftovers for breakfast. I am staring at a vase of pussy willows and negotiating my headache into submission.

I spent much of yesterday working on a poem draft, with bits of editing and class planning sprinkled between. I endured my exercise class and took a long walk in the wind. I made chicken and potatoes and asparagus for dinner. It was a good quiet day, and I'm hoping for another one like it, before I have to deal with the ominous travel weather on Thursday and Friday. I think there's a good chance the Monson workshop will be postponed, but I won't know that till midday tomorrow. I'm trying not to fret.

So, today: Mulling over my poem draft. Submitting some poems. Editing a poetry collection. Reading the Aeneid. [Call this Theme 1.] Washing sheets. Baking. Getting down on my knees and trimming the winterkill out of the thyme between the stones on the front walk. [Theme 2.] Communicating via phone/air/Zoom/ESP/oracular aid with various people, animals, ghosts, trees, etc. [Theme 3.]

I'm pleased with the poem draft. It's climbing from pure imagination onto a slight rise of history . . . a shift that's been very enjoyable. I didn't start with a plan to write about Big Event. Rather, I invented a scene that, during revision, began bumping up against Big Event. As a result, I now have a sonnet titled "Waterloo" that doesn't mention Wellington, Napoleon, battlefields, or the dead . . . and yet they mill in the silent spaces.

The season's first crocus adorns the Library Bed, outside the south-facing dining room window. Today will be cool but sunny, and I am hoping that other blooms will grace the afternoon, here and there, in the grey-brown gardens.

Yesterday I ran errands and cleaned floors. Today I'll be back at my desk: editing, prepping for my Friday class, prepping for my Sunday class, working on a poem draft. The weather looks bad for Thursday, and I am trying not to perseverate on the driving conditions. But of course this is Maine in March. What else should I expect?

But back to the poem draft. I brought it to my workshop group last night, and it garnered intriguing comments that I'm eager to muck around in. Right now the piece is fluttering in an imagined European city, in an imagined past, amid an imagined situation of strife and distress, with imagined trees and an imagined woman and an imagined speaker. Each of these elements feels like a portal into an as-yet unimagined something else. For me, as the writer-in-process, the draft is in a state of vibrating expectancy. And, very interestingly, that state also came across to the readers . . . a sense of humming possibility. I found this exciting: to know that even at an early stage a poem can throw out such tendrils.

Sunday was not as sunny as I'd hoped, but still it was dry, so I was outside in it, pruning roses and planting peas. Crocuses and scylla are ready to burst into bloom at the first touch of sunlight, and maybe that will be today. I am eager for flowers.

This morning I'll start by editing a new project and then switch to running errands because Tom will have my car tomorrow while his truck is in the shop. He's working on a job site near Biddeford this week, so we are on a new regimen of getting up at 5 a.m., which makes everything topsy-turvy. But after Sunday, when he leaves for his Monson residency, I'll have no alarm clock for two weeks. That will be very strange.

I'm supposed to be teaching up north myself on Friday, so will drive to Wellington on Thursday for an overnight with friends. Mud season, I hear, is terrible this year, and their gravel road is impassible for low-slung little vehicles such as my own. I'll have to be fetched from the top of the hill. But Tom's residency project is "mud season in central Maine," so he is extremely pleased.

This evening I'll be out with poets, workshopping poems. I've been out with poets so much lately. Who knew that writing hard could also be a social life? 

Oh, by the way: if you'd like to read a few poems from the new collection, here's a digital preview.

Yesterday's rain gave me just what I needed--an easy, unhurried, convalescent Saturday at home. Proofreading Accidental Hymn was the closest thing I did to work. I did not clean the house. I did not rush around fretting about anything. I read books and watched basketball and periodically put on my raincoat and walked around in the garden in the drizzle. I made cornbread and beef-vegetable soup for dinner. I slept like a stone. And I am happy to report that my eye twitch has finally subsided. Lord, what an annoyance that's been: it's been twitching so wildly for the past week that it's been strobing my vision. Something needed to change, and something finally did.

Currently, there's a heavy fog hanging over the neighborhood, but that's supposed to lift soon and then the day will turn sunny and warmish. I feel full of pep after my cozy, rainy, non-eye-twitching Saturday. Everything outside is sodden, but I'm eager to get into the wet. I'll prune roses, I'll set pea fence . . . I do love, love, love early spring.

I spent most of yesterday outside: raking, pruning, hauling leaves and detritus, for hours and hours. The yard may be small; but thanks to those enormous maples, it has piles of leaves. In late fall I rake them onto beds as mulch and insulation, and in early spring I rake them off, now semi-decayed by the snow, and cart them to my compost pile, where they'll continue to decompose into the rough layer I'll use as base material when I'm laying out new garden beds in late summer. The process is labor-intensive, but it's been an effective way to rapidly create quantities of usable compost. Plus, I don't have much else to do outside in November and March. Still, raking is a surprisingly demanding exercise; and I am achy this morning, even though I've been doing core workouts all winter long. Gardening is a demanding sport: so much stooping, lifting, crouching, lugging, digging. My leaf project is good pre-season practice.

Today we're supposed to have rain from morning till night, though it hasn't started yet. So I'm pleased that I got all of the garden beds opened up: now the water can penetrate down into the soil, thaw out the last of the ice, encourage the bulbs to sprout. Tomorrow, in the sunshine, I'll prune roses and set pea fence, pick up my sharpened reel mower at the hardware store. Today I'll retreat back into the coziness of the house: read contest manuscripts, check the bound proof of Accidental Hymn for typos, do a spot of housecleaning, watch some basketball, make beef-barley soup.

I love spring because my eye is so eager for the small things: scanning for crocus shoots, the first red peony spikes. Cardinals sing; a single hopeful bee buzzes around my head. Hanging laundry is a treat and a joy, after a winter of basement lines. The cat pals around, ostentatiously loafing wherever I work. In the street, the children shriek on their scooters. Dogs bark through fences at the frenemies they haven't seen since last fall. A few drivers swoop by in convertibles, displaying their stereos and bald spots. The sounds of city spring pulse into the soft air.

The temperature is supposed to climb to 61 degrees today, and I am excited. Yesterday afternoon I planted the season's inaugural crops: lettuce and arugula in the cold frame, spinach and radishes in the open boxes. Garlic has sprouted, and I spotted the first fiddleheads beginning to unfold in the rain garden.

I still have so much more raking to do, and that's what I'll focus on today, once I get through my desk chores. I'm hoping for laundry on the line, an open window or two . . . 

The Lane, with the new cold frame setup. In front is my pot of mint, waiting for the reviving sun.

Another view of the cold frame setup. You can see the uncovered edge of the box: that's where I planted radishes.

Green sprouts are garlic; spinach is underneath the strips of hardware cloth. I use them to deter squirrels and cats from digging up my rows.

Fiddleheads are starting to green up. I'm sure they're still dormant in the woods, but a touch of sun in the rain garden has brought them out here.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was crouched over a garden box, pouring in fresh soil and cogitating about what might go where, my publisher Jeff Haste appeared in the driveway holding the bound proof of Accidental Hymn . . . a lovely gift for a brisk March afternoon. So at last night's reading, I was able to hold it my hands, and that felt good. It will be a while before I've got books to sell, but I was very happy to have one in my hand.

Yesterday was an odd day: both busy and not busy. I talked to Teresa about the Aeneid, and I caught up with some books, and I worked outside raking and pruning and bringing out patio chairs, and then I walked down to my reading. Today will be even odder as I have three important items on my agenda: make a chocolate birthday cake, get my hair cut, go to a birthday party. A classic 1950s lady's day. I intend to enjoy it. Tomorrow I'll be back at my desk, working on Monson curriculum and catching up with Frost Place things. But today is all about cake.

In yesterday's can't-miss news: it was the ides of March and, more importantly, it was Ruckus's 10th birthday, which he celebrated with a trip to the vet and a rabies shot. He may be an older gentleman, but he is bracingly healthy: trim of figure, thick of fur, with a smart mouth and a zippy attitude. Long may he thrive.

Today: I've got a couple of meetings, and then a reading this evening, but I think I'll have time for some writing and for some yard work too. It feels good to be slightly less pressured, at least for a day or two. Portland got a little more rain last night, and thawing continues apace. Buds are swelling on the lilacs and the blueberries. Soon the grass will begin to green . . . and thank goodness I remembered to lug the lawnmower to the hardware store for sharpening. 

So I'll go to my exercise class, and then I'll get out my notebook and look at some of my pre-poem scrawls from last weekend's seminar. I'll sit down with the Aeneid. I'll open the back door and take a gulp of raw spring air. I'll figure out what I'll be reading tonight. I'll consider the possibility of hanging sheets on the line.

Accident Sonnet 12

Dawn Potter

I’ve been dreaming lately,

dreaming about birds,

about watching birds scatter

like spiders through

the rooms of my house;

dreaming that my older

son is younger than

my younger son;

dreaming that I

mistakenly married

my junior prom date;

and when I wake up

I am shocked and What

the hell, Time?

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

All week, the nights are forecast to be above freezing . . . not a lot above freezing, but these night shifts are the real bringers of garden change. The iron frost is loosening, the soil is softening and breaking up, and I expect to be planting radishes and arugula by the weekend.

Today, though, I doubt I'll even get a chance to rake. First thing, I've got to haul the lawnmower to the hardware store for sharpening. Then I've got to haul the cat to the vet for shots. Then I have to do some prep for my upcoming chapbook class. Then I've got to work with my high school poet. And then it will be 5 p.m. and time to shift to cooking duties.

I am feeling better, though my eyes are still quite tired and twitchy. It was good to spend an hour or so outside in the garden yesterday, raking and pruning and inspecting and not staring at any pages or screens.

By the way, tomorrow I'll be reading here in Portland, with my writing salon friends Maureen Thorson and Meghan Sterling: 6 p.m., Trinity Episcopal Church on Forest Avenue. It would be lovely to see you.

Monday morning. Dark but snowless. I think today will mostly be a catchup after my long weekend: exercise class, grocery shopping, laundry, and such. I have a busy week ahead: vet visit and teaching tomorrow; a reading on Wednesday; I can't even remember what the rest of the week holds, but something, no doubt. On the bright side, Paul will make me shoehorn in an hour so that he can instruct me on how to fill out my March Madness bracket. He likes to ensure I don't choose winners by cute mascot.

Overall I think the weekend seminar went well. The revision segment is always exhausting, even when I'm fully healthy, but I hope it was useful; I think it will be. And the conversation about the poems and the drafts the participants wrote were dense and moving.

This week I might see a bound proof of Accidental Hymn, which will be exciting. Last Friday, on my way to the library, I found Ross Gay's collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in a free pile on my street, also exciting. I've just finished reading Monica Wood's memoir When We Were the Kennedys, about growing up in the papermill town of Mexico, Maine, and I need to send her a note to tell her how much I liked it. Now I'm starting in on an anthology of Wendell Berry's stories and novels. I still need to finish my Aeneid homework.

So this is where I am, on a dim Monday morning in mid-March: a poet with a four-day-old sinus headache, sitting on her cat-scratched couch, in a little shabby 1940s-built cape, in a quiet neighborhood near a cove, in a little northern city by the sea: sitting here with a pile of books and not enough groceries, after a long weekend of writing and guiding other people into writing. Thinking about raking leaves. Thinking about crocuses. Thinking about what to make for dinner. Thinking about getting my lawnmower sharpened. This poet has never been good at keeping her head in the clouds. She's potato, not soufflé. Fortunately, it's almost time to plant potatoes.

A thin layer of white crusts the streets and driveways: fresh snow for the spring time-change,  a minor pest that will probably be gone by the end of the day. The cat is horrified, but he's always up in arms about something.

Yesterday, from dawn till dusk, the neighborhood kids played outside in the pouring cold rain and sleet, shrieking and racing scooters down the little hill. By the end of the day they seemed to have used up most of their dry clothes and were sporting tight old coats and pajamas. From the outside it looked like classic kid life: private motives, invisible parents, and dead-serious hilarity. I'll be sad when this pack grows up.

Yesterday's class went well, I think. The conversations and new poem drafts were powerful, but, yes, there were tears, and, yes, thinking was painful. Plus, I'm still a bit under the weather, so I didn't feel as sharp and focused as usual, though I hope I was good enough. In the hours between the end of class and the evening reading, I lay on the couch and dozed and idled, and then I got into bed fairly quickly after the reading was over. And Tom took care of dinner and coddled me a little. So today I should be better.

Already the rain has begun pattering. Here in Portland it will rain all day, and then snow a bit, and the wind will begin to blow, and let us hope that the zoom connection does not fizzle during class.

Yesterday I cleaned bathrooms and vacuumed and mopped, then went outside and cleared a few more garden beds, trimmed last year's deadwood out of sage and thyme and chives and sorrel, prepped the garden boxes for planting, greeted various passersby, admired the new green shoots of garlic and daffodils. Now, today, I will sit back in my teaching chair and let the rain and the snow do their work.

I'm still a tad under the weather, but coping. I have plenty of energy, as long as I can keep my sinuses in check and manage my weary twitching eyes. But oddly, while I've been sick this week, the poetry faucet has been running full bore: invitation to teach two new high school sessions at Monson Arts; invitation to submit new work to an anthology; invitation to teach here in Portland . . . I feel a bit like a beetle on my back, feebly waving my legs in the air. Eh eh ok I guess I can.

I laid low yesterday (for me): just a bit of desk work, a long walk with my neighbor, laundry but no cooking, a dab of yard work, reading, a nap, and lots and lots of tea. So this morning I am feeling much better. I think the sinus infection has been circumvented: my glasses no longer hurt to sit on my face; my eyes no longer feel like canned shrimp. 

I'll try to take another quiet-ish day today, though I will have to clean house and cook and prep for the weekend seminar. The news from Ukraine is so painful, and I know the class will be hard.

But both of my boys called yesterday, so that was cheering. Paul had a great time at the Big East tournament; James was wandering around downtown Chicago, amusing himself as he was waiting for his car to get out of the shop. And here in Portland a cardinal was singing and singing on a neighbor's crabapple tree.

Yesterday's little snow is crusted onto the trees and roofs like Christmas decorations, but the temperature will soon rise, and I predict by 9 a.m. the tidy scene will be an explosion of runnels and drips. 

I finished my editing assignment yesterday, which was a great relief. Now I have two loosey-goosey days before my weekend class begins, and I'm going to try very hard to use them wisely . . . by which I mean baby myself a little, as I am beginning to worry that I might be heading toward a sinus infection. So today: plenty of tea, some fresh air, a nap, and puttering; tonight: no writing salon, a 1930s movie, and pizza delivery. Of course I'll do housework and desk work and read books, but I've got to make sure I don't get sick.

Today, in Manhattan, Paul will be attending the Big East basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden, watching number-1 Providence College play. He's pretty wound up about this, as you might imagine, and I expect to be bombarded with play-by-play texts, which I will enjoy reading as I lie around babying myself. I might walk up to the library and fetch the books I ordered. I might wander into the cemetery to see how raptor courtship season is coming along. Being slightly sick might be good for me.

Yesterday never got warmer than 39 degrees, and the wind was stiff, but nevertheless I got myself outside between meetings and raked out another garden bed, discovered crocus shoots, did some skunk battling, worked up a glow in the cold breeze. Of course today and tonight we're supposed to get a bit of snow, because it's March, and March is always an asshole. But spring will persevere.

Today will be more of the same: exercise class, desk chores, a meeting, possibly some yard work before the flurries move in, but probably not. I need to catch up on my Aeneid homework. I need to get rid of this sinus headache that's parked itself behind my left cheekbone. I also need to try to take a day off this week, as I'll be teaching all weekend. Though day off just means housework.

Here's a poem from the new collection that is not in any way autobiographical. It was triggered by my desire to use the word chifferobe in a poem . . . a word I first ran into in To Kill a Mockingbird and that for some reason stayed with me. Antimacassar is another such word: the sort that shows up in Edwardian novels, that no one now ever uses. I don't have a brother, or a high-toned drunken grandmother, or a father looking for a handout. I never sat on the floor in a room that resembled this one. Still, I do know something about family sadism, and about the sharp eyes of children.

How to Ask for Money

 Dawn Potter

Grandmother declared, after her third glass of rosé,

that vehement was a flavor.

Then she turned to stare at me. “A curtsey,”

she trumpeted, “is a stitch in time!”

She blinked sardonically

and returned her attention to the antimacassar she was tatting.

Her apartment was as bare as an automobile showroom:

which is to say,

the grand piano was dwarfed by the mahogany chifferobe,

but there were hardly any chairs.

My brother and I knelt on the threadbare kilim

and counted butterflies and birds.

Our father twitched on the piano stool and bit his nails.

There was no mention of lunch.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

There's still snow out there, but only in lumps and bumps along the curbs. In one day of rain, everything else has melted away. Now the gardens are hunching under their thin ratty winter coats; and between this afternoon's meetings, I hope to find time today to rake a bed or two, to welcome the spikes of garlic, hyacinth, tulip, crocus, scylla hiding in the leaf litter.

My sap is beginning to run.

It's Monday, and it's 45 degrees in Portland, Maine, and there's a skunk living under my shed. I dreamed that I met a professor of heckling and watched people fly dachshunds like kites and found a body lying in a snowy road. I woke up to learn that my poem "Now That I'm Old" is out today on Vox Populi and that the Ukrainians are still the bravest people on earth.

Yesterday I did a brief amount of raking in my front yard, which is when I learned about my skunk problem, but mostly I cleaned house and baked bread and such. Today I'll be back to desk work, and staring out the windows watching the snow dissolve in the garden beds, and pondering skunk options. I am really not excited about this.

Anyway, there's a new poem out! And I'm in the editing home stretch. And tulip and hyacinth shoots are poking through in my front beds.

It's raining lightly, and already almost 40 degrees. Compare that to 14 yesterday, and 7 the day before. March is a schizophrenic month. Still, I'm feeling the spring itch. Yesterday afternoon I dragged the toolbox outside and assembled my new cold frame, which is now set up along the west wall of the house, and filled with bags of frozen dirt. It's too early to plant but not too early to thaw soil.

The morning's thick mist smells like wet leaves, and I can feel my winter-flattened hair coiling into spitcurls in the new humidity. The day will be gloriously dreary: ground fog rising from the snowmelt, invisible sky, everything the color of marsh . . . . and the air alive and trembling.

Yesterday I finished my prep for next weekend's class, fiddled with some revisions, read and walked and played cribbage with Tom, sautéed pollock and bok choi for dinner, talked to a son, folded clothes, washed dishes, wrestled with my cold frame. Today will probably be mostly housework, plus some conversation with Donna about Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain, plus maybe an outing with Tom, if the mood strikes. 

In the distance a train bell clangs. 

Closer at hand, rain drips from the roof . . . tick tick tick, against the stove vent. Upstairs Tom is sleeping. Beside me the cat is sleeping. The quiet overtakes, a quiet that is not stillness, a quiet composed of sound.

Accident Sonnet 11

Dawn Potter

Saturday morning and it’s pouring rain

in Maine where it’s not supposed to rain

in January and I am sitting in a corner

of my couch squinching my mind away

from bad news trying to pretend that today

will be super-relaxing so calm and productive

and probably I’ll look younger also.

 

Meanwhile the clock ticks and the furnace

hums and the washing machine sloshes

and the twenty-first century slips and slides

along its dented rails and you: What are you

doing right now? Are you gazing through

a windowpane into the sodden dark? Are you

yearning over the strangeness of love?

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

 Fourteen degrees this morning, so twice as warm as yesterday. Hello, spring!

I'm glad it's Saturday. The week has felt endless, one crisis after another, world-level ones and heart-level ones, and meanwhile I've been trudging up and down mountains with rocks in my backpack. My son James called yesterday and was talking about how cranky he's been to people who don't deserve it, how he suddenly realized that the weight of the planet really was on his shoulders and that he'd better go off into his corner and give himself a hug. I know just how he feels.

But he and I did cheer ourselves up by spontaneously planning a summer adventure together: he's thinking of driving from Chicago to Toronto, and I'm thinking of flying to Toronto, and then we would hang out there for a few days before driving to New England together. Possibly we would meet Paul there too, when he finishes his canoe-camp job in northern Ontario. Possibly Tom could find some vacation days to spend with us. All of our ideas are soft-focus but they are making us feel better.

Today I've got to do some website prep for next week's Polish poets class. There are still a couple of spaces open, if you're interested. I will say that the poems we'll be reading and discussing are stunning in their aptness. Living with them in my head this week has been cathartic . . . not easy, but transformative. I'm anxious to talk with you about them. I'm anxious to write alongside you. Do remember that any level of experience with poetry is the right level of experience. This class is for people who need to dwell with their feelings and ponder among words. Those are the only criteria.

 Seven degrees this morning. Spring is arriving as two lions, both of them cranky.

Yesterday turned out to be fairly productive, despite my Ukraine worries. I dealt with a bunch of paperwork, got through a chunk of editing, finished a poem and started revisions on another, went for a long walk, and then wrote down some interesting new blurts at the evening salon. So I'm now sitting here with my cup of coffee and a sense that I'm keeping my finger on some kind of pulse, even if that pulse is only my own jitters.

What to do, what to do . . . What can I do?

I can do my work, so I am doing it.

Poets are crisis workers. We've always been crisis workers. At moments of despair, it's our job to step up. We can't stanch the bleeding, but we can speak.

Dooryard

 

Dawn Potter

Blue jay screams in the almost wilderness—

she Wants she Wants she Wants.

 

Nothing but flames will grow in this wind.

 

Back and forth the blind mice scuttle.

Their nation crumbles and thrives.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Another night of small snow. What melted under yesterday's sunshine has returned to rime. Which is to say, March is beginning to feel like sugaring season.

Earlier this week I thought I'd be on the road to Vermont this morning, but plans changed, so instead I'll be home with my editing stack and my syllabus and my poem drafts. I'm going to try to carve out a few hours to spend with revisions and new transcriptions. Given that I didn't expect to have this day at all, I think I can spare a bit of it for my own writing.

Otherwise: laundry, shoveling, war-worrying. The usual.

Last night I made fish cakes for dinner: poached Arctic char, chopped boiled potatoes, panko crumbs, and egg, all pressed into rough patties, sautéed, and then topped with fried onions and capers, alongside a roasted tomato and spinach salad. Afterward, butterscotch pudding. It was a pretty good meal. I am a fan of fish cakes: they are surprisingly delicate in the mouth, and the char gives them a beautiful color.

Tonight is salon night, so I won't be cooking. That's one chore off my list. But I've got so much notebook writing to sort through, and a pile of reading to do (Aeneid, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain), plus various requests for photos and bios and poem samples and such for various readings and lectures and anthologies . . . I need one entire day that I can devote to catching up with poet business, but that is not in the cards.

Do not think I am grousing. I am very, very happy to be scheduling readings and talks and being invited to contribute to anthologies. This is just the freelance overload talking.

And Tom and I are planning ahead. He'll be leaving for his residency toward the end of the month, and I have made a pact with myself to treat my two bachelorette weeks as my own semi-residency. I won't be cooking and shopping and cleaning and socializing for two, so I will have a fair amount of unrestricted time to reconfigure into a writing nest. Then, in mid-April, I'm going to New York to see Macbeth with Paul. And then, after a Vermont trip, at the end of the month, Tom and I will spend a weekend together on Mount Desert Island, staying in our friends' cottage on Seal Cove. May will be all of the teaching all of the time, so April will be the restorative.

What I'm doing here is trying to talk the talk: stop obsessing about the terrible news, channel my fears into the vocation I care about, live in the now with this guy I like a lot, let myself laugh. If the Ukrainians can light up their skies with "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," what's my problem?

Thin new snow crusts sidewalks and roofs, a dull glitter under the bluing dawn.

I'm thinking about James Baldwin's words, from The Fire Next Time: "The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."

Last night for dinner I made chicken noodle soup, and herbed rye bread, and an apple salad. I sat in front of a warm fire and read a novel while my beloved washed the dishes. No bombs dropped on our house.

I'm thinking about Tu Fu's words, from "Dawn over the Mountains":

The city is silent,

Sound drains away,

Buildings vanish in the light of dawn

Yesterday I worked on poems with a sixteen-year-old girl. Yesterday my twenty-four-year old son called me excitedly about Macbeth. Yesterday my fifty-five-year-old sister wrote, "Barf," in a text message. Yesterday my cat tried to invite a possum into the house.

I'm thinking about Wisława Szymborska's poem "The End and the Beginning": 

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Tuesday morning. Blue-black light through silhouette branches. Rumble of furnace. Tick of clock.

Yesterday I worked and worried about the war. Editing, syllabus writing, then a meeting with a poet whose manuscript I've been evaluating; then dinner, then bed; and still, all the while, worrying about the war.

Fragrance rises from coffee, from a cluster of pink hyacinths. A clock ticks. A furnace rumbles.

Today: more editing, more syllabus writing, a mentor session with my high school poet. Chicken soup simmering on the stove. Bread swelling in the oven.

My sweet European homeland,

 

A butterfly lighting on your flowers stains its wings with blood

--from Czesław Miłosz's "Earth"