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.