Through the darkness I can see we have about an inch of fresh snow out there . . . 26 degrees, and the temperature ready to plummet. Winter is digging in its claws. When I wake up tomorrow in the homeland, the mercury will be cowering below zero. I think I won't wear a dress to work.

For the moment I'm still sitting here in my warm corner pretending I have nothing to do, but really I need to hoist myself off the couch and get laundry into the machine, get breakfast dishes washed, get the bed made, get the editing started. I'm driving straight up to Monson this afternoon, as my Wellington friends are ill, so I'll spend the night in a room by the frozen lake, listening to log trucks roll down the Moosehead road, heading for the mills.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday afternoon, squeezing them in around the editing chore. Maybe tonight, when I'm on my own, I'll work a bit more on them. My stack of new work is getting tall, and I suppose I ought to start thinking more coherently about how to collect it. But I've been so focused on making each piece; my mind doesn't feel ready to switch into gather mode. And Accidental Hymn is still so new, not even a year old. This is the downside of writing all the time: there's no breath between collections. The fresh clutters the old.

Anyway. This week, a flurry of poems poems poems, talk talk talk, travel and zoom and phone, in person, through the aether, and meanwhile I chisel out sentences on someone else's massive academic manuscript. What an odd way to make a "living."

And yet, last night, when P called to tell me excitedly about a project he's working on--producing a staged reading of a friend's play, pulling together actors and a performance space, even figuring out how to pay the actors just a little bit of money . . . the deep engagement and pleasure of bringing words into the air. As I was listening to him talk, all I could do was beam.

Day 1 of Dawn's Ridiculously Busy Week is behind me, and this morning I am gearing myself for day 2: all editing, all of the time. Then tomorrow I head north, Wednesday I teach in Monson, Thursday and Friday I'm back on the editing train, and I teach all weekend.

I think the class went fairly well--though, as usual, I kick myself for not being a better teacher. I guess that's always the way. And then I half-watched some football, made fettuccine carbonara for dinner, and slept horribly. I did have a sweet dream about helping a very little boy clamber into his one-piece pajamas. Then we went for a ride together in a convertible.

All week the temperature will get colder and colder. Monson is forecast to be subzero on Wednesday, and Portland will be in the deep freeze by the weekend. On the bright side I have good boots and lots of firewood, Tom fixed the stuck latch on my car hood, and I am no longer struggling to get my gas cap to snap shut.

I worked on a decent poem draft on Saturday, and I wrote a notebook blurt yesterday in class that I'll take another look at, maybe later today, when my editing brain has turned to jelly. Or, given my bad night's sleep, I'll be asleep on the couch. One or the other.

The temperature is in the mid-20s this morning, forecast to rise into the 40s, but today and tomorrow are the last hurrah of moderation for a while. By next weekend we're supposed to be well below zero, and even midweek, when I'm heading north to Monson, highs won't get out of the 20s.

For some reason I woke up early this morning. But the coffee is good, and now I'm cuddled into my couch corner, tapping out this note to you and pondering the various chores I need to finish before I buckle down for my afternoon class.

I think it will be a good few hours: this group of six poets was my very first chapbook-class cohort, and since then they've asked to reconvene regularly for check-in sessions. So I've worked out a series of afternoon classes on a variety of manuscript-related topics, and this one, as I think I've told you, will swirl around notions of wildness: where do we embrace ecstasy in our manuscripts? where do we settle for tameness or timidity? how can we identify our self-silencing?

I sit here in my distinctly un-wild little house, pondering the conundrum of ecstasy. My daily life is tidy and routine. I drive myself forward into my work, like a good Puritan should. All this exterior neatness, so that I can make space for the magma hissing and bubbling at my core.

I was thinking, yesterday, about how relieved I am I never became a full-time English teacher and had to pretend I care about comma splices and run-on sentences and the three-part essay. Of course, as a manuscript editor, I have to know about that stuff, and I have to implement it too. But I don't want to have to grade kids on it; I don't want to have to pretend to anyone else that I believe in the Holy Grail of Correct Grammar. It's just another random educational canned good, like how to discern the three categories of ancient Greek columns or read Roman numerals or rattle off the names of the American presidents.

The point is: what's in your heart? and why isn't it on your page?

War and Peace and War

Zherkov touched his horse with his spurs; it shifted its footing three times excitedly, not knowing which leg to start with, worked it out, and galloped off, going ahead of the company [of soldiers] and catching up with the coach, also in time with the [soldiers'] song.

This single sentence, in so many ways, encapsulates the wonder that is War and Peace. In a novel that runs to more than 1,200 pages, a novel that swirls from Napoleon's inner thoughts to a baby's dirty diaper, from death in childbirth to death in battle, Tolstoy takes the time to carefully unpack exactly how a horse's legs sort themselves out before a canter. The horse belongs to a minor character. The scene is brief. But for Tolstoy, nothing is a throwaway. A horse's confused legs are as important as Waterloo.

There's an article in the most recent New Yorker titled "Novels of Empire." In it, the scholar and novelist Elif Batuman considers her beloved Russian novels in the age of Putin, when we now read them, and in the age of imperial Russia, when they were written--when future luminaries such as Tolstoy and Pushkin themselves served in the military in the Caucasus and were thus complicit in annexing present-day Georgia, Dagestan, and other Caucasus states into the empire. It's a compelling read, and reminds me also that I should read Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, which, among other things, addresses the imperial underbelly of novels such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Batuman writes:

Novels and empires grew symbiotically, defining and sustaining each other. "Robinson Crusoe," one of the first British novels, is about an English castaway who learns to exploit the natural and human resources of a non-European island. In an influential reading of "Mansfield Park," Said zooms in on a few references to a second, Antiguan property--implicitly, a sugar plantation--belonging to Mansfield's proprietor. The point isn't just that life in the English countryside is underwritten by slave labor, but that the novel's plot itself mirrors the colonial enterprise. Fanny Price, an outsider at Mansfield, undergoes a series of harrowing social trials, and marries the baronet's son. A rational subject comes to a scary new place--one already inhabited by other, unreasonable people--and becomes its rightful occupant. What does a story like that tell you about how the world works?

All of this has nothing to do, and everything to do, with Tyre Nichols's brutal beating by Memphis police officers--a video I have not watched because I know it will damage me . . . a privileged choice, in many ways a contemptible choice. A black man beaten to death for pleasure, by five other black men . . . five men who had stepped into roles of power that had been created for them by a state apparatus dedicated to "public safety."

Batuman writes of Tolstoy's late novel Hadji Murat, set in the Chechnya where he had served as a young man. The main character was a real historical figure, "a rebel commander who fell out with Imam Shahil [the Caucasus defender] and offered his services to Russia, but ended up getting decapitated."

His head was sent to the Kunstkamera museum, in St. Petersburg. . . . In the novel Tolstoy likens Hadji Murat's severed head to a beautiful Tartar thistle he uprooted one day from a ditch.

Lots of things got done yesterday: editing, Frost Place stuff, vacuuming, then writing in the evening. Plus, my strained back is almost normal again. 

Today I'm going to work my way through emails, then focus on Monson Arts planning and try to do some writing. I'll fit in my exercise class first, and probably I'll end up editing as well, but it won't be the feature of the day, as it has been for the rest of the week.

My brain is crammed. I feel like a giant walking list-of-things-to-do, dotted with worry about various suffering friends.

Plowing forward, plowing forward.

Last night I wrote a draft about a high-class Parisian whore, a captain of hussars, a wrought-iron balcony, jingling spurs. War and Peace is infiltrating my poems.

My back is feeling better, but my yard is feeling worse. What an ugly storm. Though it's still too dark to see exactly what's going on, I can tell our beautiful snowpack has taken a beating. Sleet has been falling all night. Watery slush coats the back stoop; melt is seeping into the basement. Under the streetlight the road looks like a decaying bobsled track. This is the sort of garbage weather that everyone hates, even me, and I'm a dedicated lover of weather.

I guess this will be an inside day, but at least I'm only slightly hobbled this morning. I've got a meeting today, and the endless editing pile awaits, and there are floors to clean and emails to answer, and if the roads are okay by this evening I'll go out to my writing salon.

Lately I've been considering undertaking a translation project--nothing extreme, just my own version of a section or so of The Canterbury Tales. For an upcoming class I was looking for decent translations of a section of "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and couldn't find anything I liked. So I did it myself, thinking hard about meter and rhyme, making decisions about the priorities of sound and sense. I worked hard on that translation, and the job was invigorating, and now I'm wondering what it would be like to do more of this kind of work.

Of course I don't have the space to start such a project now. Too much editing and teaching; not enough clean time for thinking my way into an undertaking of this scope. But maybe someday I'll have the chance to wrestle my way into Chaucer's mind.

I yanked something in my lower back yesterday. The primary trigger was either my exercise class or snow shoveling, but the push-it-over-the-edge trigger was picking up the cat . . .  a classic example of me. Whatever the root reason, I am hobbling a bit. I did manage to do round 2 of the shoveling, and I plan to try out my exercise class this morning so I can figure out what is good and bad for me. It's definitely one of those injuries that stiffens up and feels worse when I do nothing. After a night in bed I resemble a 95-year-old, but activity is helping already, and thus I wince and bumble up and down the stairs and slowly get my chores done.

Meanwhile, Tom had a dental procedure yesterday and was goofy and numb. We make an elegant couple.

Portland has another weather event on the way this evening, and it's supposed to be hideous: snow turning quickly to freezing rain and then to straight rain, ruinous for our sweet snowpack. I guess I should take an editing break and get to the grocery store before it begins.

I've started reading War and Peace in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. To this point, I've always read the old 1904 Constance Garnett translation, so I'm a little nervous as I hate change when it comes to my touchstone books. But so far, so good.

Otherwise this week: class planning looms, as does the perpetual housework. I bought three tickets to the Joffrey Ballet, something to look forward to when I visit my Chicago son in March. And here's a photo of yesterday's sunset from the top of the new World Trade Center, courtesy of my New York City son.

The world is an amazing place.

We got a lot of snow yesterday--10 inches? 12 inches? It instantly packed hard and wet, so the accumulation amount is hard to measure. Shoveling was a beast. I spent an hour and half clearing our driveway and walkways, but then a couple of more inches came down after I finished, so I'll be out there again this morning.

The neighborhood is cute as a button, all snowy and quaint, with the church steeple rising over the frosted trees. Harmony was never cute, so I am unaccustomed to such things. Our yard in Harmony was sometimes majestic, but the town itself was bleak and utilitarian. Things are different here in the little northern city by the sea. This is a place with charm.

I'm never sure I'm the right person for charm. Probably I ought to be living in Siberia where the temperature is minus 50 and no one ever takes off their boots. 

I'll get back to the editing project today, after the shoveling chore. It's big and complicated and it's going to take a very long time to finish. That's pretty much the only thing on my docket for the day, along with the regular household stuff. I've almost finished The Small House at Allington, and I'm really glad I finally decided to reread it. The novel is one of Trollope's best--a delicate portrait of disappointment and resilience--and I'm sorry I spent so many years wincing away from the sadness. I've been considering rereading War and Peace next. I think I'll have the stamina.

Well, the forecast changed radically since I last talked to you. That rain event became a snow event, and we are forecast to get 9 to 14 inches of heavy paste.

It's been snowing for most of the night and will keep it up all day. I am glad I don't have to go anywhere and sorry that Tom does. I do have plenty of work, however: the giant new editing project and various smaller side-things to catch up on. Exercise class; snow shoveling; chicken and vegetable curry for dinner. That's the Monday plan.

I've been steadily reading The Small House at Allington, and I'm caught up with the Southwell poems I've been getting ready to discuss with Teresa. I haven't done any work on my own pieces for a few days, but that's okay. My stack of new poems is so huge right now. It's daunting to imagine sorting through them for a next collection. I don't feel ready to begin, more like I ought to begin, which is the wrong attitude to take. So I'm just letting them pile up, under the snowfall. At spring thaw, they'll reappear, greenish and soggy, and I'll trip over them in the driveway.

Yesterday morning T and I went for a long walk (4 miles? 5 miles?), from our house down to Back Cove and then all the way around the cove. This estuarial nook is tucked into the middle of the city, like a gorgeous tidal lake, and walking around it feels like existing in multiple worlds at once--at my left, the city, with its houses and grocery stores and highways and construction sites; at my right, a broad calm expanse of water, marsh grass, mud, and sea fowl. The winter can be a good time to glimpse coastal birds that, in the summer, breed further north or inland. This time we were lucky enough to see many buffleheads . . . small, lively, big-headed seabirds, which are even cuter than puffins, in my opinion. So that was a treat, and the walk was long and cold and vigorous, yet getting to the cove from our house is an easy half-mile jaunt. I still cannot get over how close I live to the sea.

Today is likely to be our last lovely snow scene as rain is forecast for tomorrow and everything will instantly become hideous. I think T and I are going walk around the cove this morning, to get in some last enjoyment of the view. The snow has been long-lastingly beautiful: two days after the storm it still clings to branches, so every street looks like an avenue into Narnia. We are sad to see it go.

So, a walk, then grocery shopping, then reminding T to fix the latch on my car hood . . . answering emails . . . maybe making cookies . . .  working on my garden-seed orders . . . watching the Bills game at three, which they will likely lose, but maybe not. Unfortunately Paul has to work today so we can't text back and forth during the game, which honestly is the number-one reason I've taken to caring about the Bills: it's an opportunity to hang out with my kid.

I had a vivid early-morning dream about hunting for a pink plastic laundry basket at the airport, and then woke up after 7, shocked at myself for sleeping so late. But at least I seem to have conquered my insomnia  problems. I suppose the airport dream must somehow be linked to the fact that I recently bought airline tickets to Chicago, for a weekend in mid-March. However, the pink plastic laundry basket is a puzzle.

Last night I made a full-on slow-cooked bolognese sauce with penne; tonight we'll probably have fish cakes with sweet potato and scallion. Tomorrow I need to belly-flop into the giant new editing project, but I refuse to think about that today. This is my last non-working weekend for a while, and I am going to wallow in it.

 Saturday morning after snow. The plows and shovels have done their work: the sleek Currier and Ives scene is now a lumpy moonscape scarred with salt. Still, the view is charming in its own way. Each house has its personal mouse trail--driveway, walkways--scratched out of the snow. Yesterday, even before daylight, the neighborhood children were trudging up and down the street, licking powder off their mittens. This pack is devoted to weather, and they spent the bulk of their free day shrieking and thumping and dragging around shovels for non-useful purposes. No doubt they'll be out there again today, burrowing into plow mountains and hollering arcane and cryptic orders at one another.

This is my last free weekend before I climb onto the teaching train again. I'm not full of plans, but I'll figure out something to keep myself busy. I've been thinking so hard about class prep lately that I'm eager to return to my messy private ways. The subject of my next teaching session is wildness: where does a new manuscript leap into wildness and risk? where does it revert to tameness or timidity? what part does desire play in a manuscript? does the poet embrace desire or repress it? what is the urgency in this manuscript? does that sense of urgency reach out to a potential reader? Last Wednesday I was talking to my Monson kids about embracing risk--about how scared I am when it comes to, say, driving over big highway bridges, yet in my writing I'm thrilled to throw myself recklessly off any cliff. Lots of people, even ones who are good writers, are not so easy about wild abandon. They button up their work, box it neatly, detour away from direct contact with ecstasy or deep pain. Facing wildness, embracing wildness, hunting down wildness . . . this is tremendously difficult for them.

I'm not being judgmental here, simply noting that what is easy for one person is nearly impossible for another person. But as a teacher of poetry--as an editor, an observer, a reader, a participant--I also recognize that wildness lies at the heart of the best work. Across centuries, across styles, across fads and fashions, poems that tap into the ecstatic are the poems that continue to flame. I guess this is why I distrust words like balance in discussions of manuscript organization. Balance is tame. Balance is safe. Balance is static. What happens to a poem or a collection if you radically un-balance? If you actually say what you want. Not what you should want. Not what a nice moral person wants for society. What you want. You.

I spent most of yesterday wondering if I might be coming down with an illness. I just could not shake the tiredness. I did manage to get the housework and the shopping done, but I also took a nap, skipped my writing group, and went to bed early, and that seems to have done the trick: this morning I'm feeling much livelier.

A good thing, too, as I'm going to have a lot of snow to shovel. It's been snowing hard all night, and we must have close to five inches on the ground already, with more to come. This is our first real non-sleety-rainy snow event of the year, and I am excited to see it. In the pale first daylight, the neighborhood is draped with a Currier and Ives cuteness: every house enacts a New England vignette--snug and snowbound, lamp-lit windows casting a cozy glow onto the sweep of white. Really, the view is ridiculously sentimental . . . not that I don't appreciate it. Soon snowplows and road salt will scrape the picture into a regular old 21-first-century setpiece, so It's been pleasant to pretend that sleighs, not Ford F250s, will be jingling up the street. Of course, it's also easy to forget the filth created by a city of horses. Every era wallows in its quotidian ugliness, and ours does not involve trudging to school through steaming piles of horseshit.

In a minute I'll be out in the snow myself, dragging recycling bins and compost pails, and the romance will fade. Still, some version of beauty will last . . . if nothing else, the gorgeous shimmer of snow-light through the house windows.

Today I'll undertake my exercise class, I'll work on Frost Place stuff, I'll meet with a faculty member to confab about the teaching conference, I'll go through my notebook and think about some of the drafts I wrote with the kids on Wednesday, I'll ponder the poems of Robert Southwell, I'll text with my children, I'll bake bread, I'll wash sheets, and eventually I'll shovel the driveway and the sidewalk. For dinner, braised lamb, roasted potatoes, a tomato and fennel salad, vanilla pudding.

A fire in the wood stove. A book in my lap. 

 I sit here in my couch corner, attempting to become lucid. I slept well enough last night but hardly at all the night before, and then taught a full day and drove long distances and made dinner. As a consequence, I have slipped into that deep exhaustion that even better sleep doesn't instantly repair. I expect I'll shovel myself into a livelier state of mind, but right now I could easily climb back into bed.

Still, despite the insomnia, my trip north was lovely, though I could have done with less slush on the roads. The kids were all a bit end-of-the-semester shellshocked . . . one wrote of being "stained" with fatigue, a brilliant metaphor for deep tiredness. But despite that, they created six new drafts in one day, working their way through the revision prompts I gave them, and they seemed to be glad to be back together, back at their own work. And of course being with my homeland friends is always a treat, whether or not I manage to sleep at night. 

Yesterday Vox Populi published a new poem, "Sleeping with the Cat" . . . much in my life seems to be revolving around sleep or the the lack thereof. If I can pull myself together today, I'm hoping to go out and write at the salon tonight. But the bulk of the day will probably be housework--floors, bathrooms, laundry, groceries. I'm still waiting for the elusive editing project to arrive; the rest of the big tree came down yesterday while I was away; we've got another batch of sloppy weather on the way; I have a recipe for peanut noodles I want to try, a recipe for pimento cheese bread I want to try; I need to scrape ashes out of the stove and clear stacks of reading material off the coffee table and read the poems of Robert Southwell and attempt to rediscover my sparking mind.

But at the moment just making a cup of tea feels laborious.

 The sloppy storm finally whirled out to sea, and this morning we are left with a stiff frosting that will likely dissolve into slush as soon as the sun comes out. I'll be heading north this afternoon, and the driving should be fine, though I'll be taking the long routes. Once winter really kicks in up there, certain convenient roads are best avoided till May. Useful mantras: Always take the road-most-traveled. When in doubt, park at the mailbox and snowshoe in.

We ended up doing last night's poetry workshop via zoom, so this morning I think I'll experiment with some ideas I got from the poets about a weird draft I've been working on. I've been resistant about messing with this draft, but they may have a point.

Otherwise, I'll probably just catch up on housework this-n-thats, deal with some Frost Place stuff, etc. Last week I bought plane tickets to Chicago, for mid-March; and now that I've reserved that window for visiting my son, I can start filling in my work schedule around the edges. I've got hopes of seeing the Joffrey Ballet perform again, I'm excited to check out J's new home and new cat, and with a March visit maybe we'll avoid the worst of the winter weather.

My plan for Wednesday's class is to play a series of revision games with the Monson Arts kids. Teaching revision to high schoolers is a never-ending challenge, so I've concocted yet another approach. We'll see how it goes. I haven't worked with them for more than a month, and we'll all be rusty.

Last night I woke to the batter of sleet against the roof, but this morning the weather has retreated to silence and snow. That's how things are supposed to go all day--back and forth, back and forth, sleet, snow, freezing rain--and I'm glad neither of us needs to drive anywhere today. Tonight I'm supposed to go to a poetry-workshop meeting, but that's within walking distance, if it happens at all.

In this furnace-driven house I don't usually keep a wood fire going all day, but I lit one this morning, just for the pleasure of it . . . a day off, miserable weather, so why not have a fire and an extra cup of coffee? The glow in the still-dark house is comforting and nostalgic, a reminder of all those years of getting up early, scraping out the ashes, blowing on the coals, keeping the fire alive, day in, day out, month upon month. Always that first-thing-in-the-morning flare was a beacon, the hour's success, ah, we will not die of cold today.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road, heading north for a night in Wellington and then a teaching day in Monson. But today I'll read, fidget with poem drafts, copy out Dante, mess around with my stuff. And the sleet and the snow and the rain will fall, and the little wood stove will creak as it heats.

One of the beauties of winter is the way in which it encourages me to sit with myself. Summer is garden and grass and busyness, but winter is a hatch into patience, and patience is such a big part of being a writer--for me, anyway. Not necessarily logical, rational patience; more like crazy patience, tap-dancing patience . . . time to waltz around the dining room, time to moon over a mysterious phrase, time to blow up the basement with my metaphorical 1940s-era chemistry set.

Outside, a snow plow bangs and scrapes its way up my bendy little street. Inside, the fire has settled into easy flames. I like being the only one awake in the morning. I like knowing that T is upstairs asleep, with the cat tucked against his knees. I like knowing that a last cup of coffee awaits me in the pot, that the kitchen counters are clean and bare and ready for use, that yesterday's laundry is dry on the cellar lines, that the houseplants are watered and the woodbox is full. On the shelf we have a loaf of fresh whole-wheat bread and a pan of brownies; in the refrigerator we have beets and spinach and fennel and carrots and two sweet baby turnips. I hear wind squeal against the edges of the house. I think of the hilarious simile I copied out of the Inferno yesterday--

The way . . .

            the beaver plans against his prey among

The lands of the drunken Germans. . . .

--Stanley Plumly's unexpected translation of a passage in canto 17, which of course reminds me of the "fearful porpentine" in Hamlet and myriad strange natural history blunders in Paradise Lost. How wonderful it can be not to know things, to imagine predatory beavers among the drunken Germans or unicorns fenced into a tiny Arcadian barnyard, and think This is true! 

 Earlier this week, as I was reading the title story of William Trevor's collection After Rain, I suddenly came across a reference to The Small House at Allington. The protagonist, who had just been jilted, was reading it, half-heartedly, as she attempted to come to terms with her inability to hold  another person's love.

Though Trevor did not draw any sort of link between the plot of his story and the plot of Trollope's novel, The Small House at Allington is a supremely poor choice for anyone who has just ended a love affair, as jilting is its primary subject. For me (as perhaps Trevor had hoped), simply reading the title within the context of "After Rain" made me shiver. It also made me realize why I hadn't reread the book myself for thirty years.

The Small House at Allington is one of Trollope's best novels. It's part of his Barsetshire Chronicles, a series of books set in a fictional rural English county and concerning the doing of vicars and landowners, their daughters and mothers and curates and neighbors. This all sounds harmless enough, but Trollope is a sensitive prober of the Victorian heart, and he does this particularly well in The Small House. The central character is Lily Dale, who falls in love with, and gets engaged to, Mr. Crosbie, who then jilts her for the daughter of an earl. In the meantime, a local boy, Johnny Eames, who has always loved Lily, tries to convince her to marry him. But Lily, as much as she likes Johnny, can't get over Mr. Crosbie, and that's how the novel ends: Mr. Crosbie knows he's made a terrible mistake, Johnny can't get the woman he loves to love him, and Lily is too stubborn about her first love to take a venture on a second.

I can't usually date the exact time I first read a well-loved book, but The Small House is an exception. I bought a brand-new paperback in July 1991 and took it with me to read on my honeymoon. Hour after hour I sat curled into the red-sand dunes or perched on grassy knolls or swathed myself in the lumpy inn beds of Prince Edward Island and devoured the sad story of Lily and Johnny. It was a terrible choice for a honeymoon book; but, perhaps as Trevor's main character noticed, it's also a compulsive read. Page after page, it goes down like nectar, and meanwhile the reader becomes increasingly nonplussed . . . Here I was, on my honeymoon, immersed in a story in which everything goes wrong with love . . . and the novelist refuses to fix it! He could have easily fixed it! Johnny and Lily are clearly meant for one another; they are everything that is delightful. Crosbie is a bounder and deserves to see Lily happy with another lover. But Trollope wouldn't do it.

My honeymoon was not the last time I ever read The Small House. But I certainly haven't read it often since then. When I'm scanning the shelves looking for something to read, my mind tends to wince away from it. The pain of the characters lingers, not least because the novel is charming and rich. And now that I've been married for more than 30 years, Johnny and Lily's tale has become sad in a different way. In the novel they are young people who do not marry. But in other, later Bartsetshire novels their names occasionally come up, as distant mentions--always as people who never married, always as people who were disappointed in love. Trollope hints at their aging loneliness, though he does not deeply examine that in any subsequent novel. As a result they never quite disappear, they never resolve . . . always they remain sad shadows. It's hard not to take this to heart. It's hard not to feel that some message is being conveyed to me, some reminder.

And so I am reading The Small House again, and maybe I will find out.

Woke up to freezing rain pecking at the windows . . . it seems that we'll be having a slow and sleety Saturday morning.

This is an unexpected long weekend for both us: T's employer decided to add Martin Luther King, Jr., Day to its list of paid vacation days, and that editing project I was supposed to start on Friday hasn't shown up yet. So here we are, with three days off.

One of these mornings we'll go bowling, my activity gift for T's birthday. But given the weather, that might not be today. Tomorrow afternoon I'll watch the Bills-Dolphins game. Otherwise, my only plans for the weekend are to mess around with poem drafts, read books, and cook some stuff. I think I'll bake bread. I'm soaking kidney beans for chili. I'm working on a draft in progress, with two more notebook blurts to transcribe. I've got 15 pages of Robert Southwell poems to read and discuss with Teresa. I'm finishing up the Trevor stories and getting ready to start Trollope's The Small House at Allington. I'm halfway through Watchmen. If all else fails, I've got the Inferno to copy. And if the freezing rain stops, I can go for a walk.

You see the unthrilling life I lead. Yet, oddly enough, it's everything I want to do.

He ran through time, spending it as a spendthrift, wallowing in idleness. Perhaps poets always did, perhaps it was the way they had to live; I didn't know.

--William Trevor, "Marrying Damian," from After Rain (1996)

Yesterday snow turned to sleet turned to rain, and then hard rain all night long. Nonetheless, the Deering carpoolers ventured onto the peninsula to the poetry salon . . . so strange, still, to hear myself say this: yes, I live in a neighborhood where there are enough likeminded poets to carpool across the city once a week to write together. In Harmony I didn't live within 30 miles of even one like-minded poet. It might have been within 50 miles.

The rain is still clattering against the window, and I am girding myself to go out into it, lugging the recycling and the trash. Friday, and here I thought I'd be editing all day, but the files haven't arrived so, instead, I have a rainy day to transcribe last night's salon scribbles and discover if any might be poems. I'll copy out some of the Inferno. I might start planning another little handmade book. I'll read William Trevor stories, and dip into Watchmen, and wash sheets and fold towels, and think of something to make for dinner.

Tom was supposed to be up north tonight, for the opening of a gallery show, but it's been postponed because of weather. Yesterday, during the day, he texted me that update, in the form of a joke: "Tell your boyfriend the show got postponed so I'll be home." Immediately a Siri popup on my phone inquired: "Would you like to add 'tell your boyfriend' to Calendar?"

Who knew that Siri could be so helpful when organizing an adulterous schedule? Ah, the comedies of technology.

Both sets of class prep are done--packets, syllabus, web pages, participant outreach. Today I will "relax," do housework, get my hair cut, go out to my evening writing salon, so that tomorrow I can get started on the giant new editing project that's scheduled to arrive. I feel as if I eked out those class plans just in time: next week I'll be on the road again, and this editing project is rumored to be massive and complicated.

It's supposed to rain and snow today--no accumulation to speak of but sloppy and raw, a good day to light the wood stove early, a good day to bake banana bread and dust the mantlepiece.

I'm still working my way through Watchmen, still reading the William Trevor short stories in After Rain, still copying out the Inferno. I've spent so much time with poems this week: my study is stacked high with the books I've been poring through. It was hard to choose, but I had to. The afternoon class will get Rainer Maria Rilke, Kim Addonizio, and Pablo Neruda. The weekend class will get Gray Jacobik, Geoffrey Chaucer, Patricia Smith, Jean Toomer, BJ Ward, Cheryl Savageau, Margaret Atwood, and Ilya Kaminsky. As you can see, I've covered a lot of poetic ground these past few days. No wonder my brain is tired.

Good tired, of course. I'm lucky to have a job in which I invent the duty.

The morning began with comedy. I woke to find that I'd been sleeping all night on a narrow edge of the bed while T had been sprawled every which way, and thus I immediately cried out: "I'm in an Egyptian tomb!"

A laugh was had by all, but I tell you, I won't be shy with the elbow prodding if this keeps up . . .

We had a magnificent dinner at Miyake last night--a series of tiny, delicate, delicious dishes, not one of which I could have made at home . . . lots of seafood, both raw and grilled, but also some amazing kabocha squash dumplings. Then I drove home via a holiday-light-display route T hadn't yet seen, and we ended the evening on the couch watching a Peter Gunn episode set in some bizarre studio version of "Spain."

Today I'll be back in the class-planning saddle. I've made good progress with my narrative poetry class, but I've got lots more to do. Right now it looks like the class will be completely filled--actually overfilled--which is exciting but also means I need to fine-tune time management: there won't be much space for lollygagging and joke telling. But I'm excited about the poems we'll be discussing, and I'm also getting excited about the writing prompts I've worked out. It's a slow process--matching effective poems with discussion triggers and then creating linked prompts--but it's very satisfying when they come together.

Otherwise, what's new? The weekly housework chores are coming around on the gui-tar (in the words of Arlo Guthrie), meaning that I ought to deal with the bathrooms and the floors before long. The tree guys have not yet returned to finish removing the sad skeleton. I'll be taking T bowling for his birthday outing this weekend (not a great time of year for hikes, we went to the beach last week, ponds aren't frozen enough for skating, so bowling it is). I ought to start studying seed catalogs for my spring order, but I'm not in the mood yet. I've taken William Trevor's story collection After Rain off the shelf. I had a long talk with my kid about the books we're reading, which always makes me happy (granted, we also talked about football and the cat, but you know how these things go). Winter is going along swimmingly in the Alcott House: we have lots of dry firewood in the basement (with next year's batch curing in the new shed), nothing is leaking, the electrical system is well behaved, I have plenty to read, we are living the American dream, goddamn it.

Well, I got one class up and running yesterday, so that felt good. Today I'll start work on the second, more complicated class, with hopes that my brain will be as obliging as it was on Monday.

Today is also T's birthday, so tonight I'm taking him out to our favorite Japanese restaurant, which recently reopened after a long Covid-era closure.

Have I ever mentioned how glad I am he was born? He's a shy person who doesn't much care to be talked about, so I'll leave my emoting at that. But there are iceberg depths . . . 

For some reason, I'm feeling a little tongue-tied this morning. Sentences are not flying freely; I wonder why. I hear T opening and closing a dresser drawer; I hear the furnace groan. The house is warm and tidy, and I am reasonably awake, reasonably ready to charge into a day full of poem reading and syllabus composing. But at the moment I am not wordy.

And here we are at Monday again. I'm not too regretful, as yesterday was a quiet day. In the morning I made a birthday cake for Tom--Julia Child's Reine de Saba, a perennial favorite. And in the afternoon I watched the Bills game, which was much less traumatic than the last game I tried to watch. Those two activities about summed up the day, with a bit of laundry and reading and meal prep and fresh air and card playing mixed in.

Today I'll step back into harness . . . exercise class, and then diving into plans for upcoming Frost Place sessions--syllabi, readings, brainstorming, meetings, websites, applications, invoices, the whole giant mess of it. I'm glad I've got a finished poem draft to comfort me.

I've been reading Watchmen; also, an essay by Eudora Welty on Henry Green. Somehow I'm always shocked when someone else talks about Green. I love his novels so much, especially Living, but they are strange and difficult and feel like my own private adoration. Yet Welty stacks him up right against Austen. Though she admits that he's very, very odd, she calls him "the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time." (The essay was published in 1961.) Still, her prose in describing him is likewise odd, and delightful, as if in writing about Green she's been infected by him:

Only a man of reason, we feel, is likely to be so aware of and so fascinated by the irrational in human motive and behavior; only an artist could show the extraordinary aspects of behavior in ordinary people and suggest, without robbing them at all, where they keep the kernel of their singularity, which as in the fairy tales is well guarded but not too well guarded.

Except for the fact that T wasn't feeling well, yesterday turned out to be the rest day I needed. I sat in my blue chair beside my study window, where I finished reading and jotting notes about the intro to the 17th-century English poetry anthology that Teresa and I are undertaking. And I made big progress on a poem draft: if it's not done, it's close to done, and I'm pleased and puzzled by it.

Both of my sons checked in to say hello. T and I went for a walk. I made enchiladas with chicken sausage, sweet peppers, and fresh sauce. I read books and drank tea and sat by the fire and solaced T, who had reverted to a couch blanket and a football game.

Is it strange that writing is both exhausting and revivifying? I suppose I could make a comparison to, say, an exercise regimen: in the case of exercise class, I don't want to do it, but I feel much, much better about myself after I do. But I exercise under someone else's instruction and follow someone else's plan. Writing is different because it's my own bag of kittens, and I do want to do it, though I'm not always able to (for reasons of time, or state of mind, or bad decisions that drive an amorphous draft into the ground). Still, it's hard work: it requires my brain to concoct and then hover within an aura of craziness that is also an improvisational bandwagon of skill/experience/conscious experiment (lordy, look at these mixed metaphors go). "Be wild, but use tools," sez the old brain. Maybe it's the wild part that makes the work seem so exciting. There are so few opportunities for a 58-year-old nice American lady to go wild, yet ecstasy is at the root of poetry. Every time I enter into that state with my writing, I am renewed.

We got our first real snow of the season yesterday, and this is the view from my front window this morning. By "real" snow I don't mean deep, because it isn't, but it's beautifully clingy and soft, and it fell like feathers all day.

I slept late this morning and woke to an impatient cat and to the rich pale light of morning snowfall. The interior of the house has changed now: white shimmers against the blue remnants of night, and every window casts a new shadow.

I did my errands early yesterday, but still didn't beat the snow. By the time I pushed my cart out into the grocery-store parking lot, big flakes were sifting down; and as I threaded my way down to the wharf and the fish market, seagulls were dancing in the road, and a V of geese was flying overhead--the birds were excited and I was excited, and the guys behind the fish counter were murmuring reminiscences about the best lunches they'd ever eaten (a pizza with Asian flank steak and calamari; famous crab rolls), and I was glad to be out and about in this world . . . clutching my neat paper packages of salmon and pollock, fretting about the sufferings of the panhandlers at the intersections, glancing at the ugly buildings, the beautiful buildings, the flat estuarial cove scattered with eiders, a small father lugging a big handsome baby, the corgis mistreating their walkers, the man on his knees outside his house, mending his car in the snow . . .

Today my only plans are to read: read for my upcoming classes, read for my conversation with Teresa next week. I have a poem draft to work on, and we might go out to a party this evening. But I don't have to cook tonight; I don't have to clean house. I probably do have to shovel, but that will be no big deal. I will drink tea, and sit beside a stack of books, and let my brain trickle among the poems, and trust that something good will happen.

All day long I worked on conference planning, and I got a lot done . . . primarily sussing out the structure of this year's format, beginning to fill in my own lessons and sidebar readings, and preparing space for visiting faculty. It felt good to get a firm handle on that situation, and now today I'll be turning my attention to the classes coming up at the end of the month: sorting through readings, compiling prompts, etc., etc.

It's Friday--trash day, exercise-class day, wash-the-sheets day, deal-with-the-empty-refrigerator day--and the sidewalks and stairs are slick with ice. I did go out last night into the freezing rain, but the roads were still passable, and I was very, very glad to be writing with my salon. Now I've got a fat messy blurt to transcribe, and maybe I'll get a chance to do spend time doing that today. It felt really good to let my scribble-brain take over, and this morning my general holiday miasma seems to have lifted, maybe thanks to that session of crazy fast writing.

 Rain and sleet this morning: it's ugly out there, and I'm sorry T will have to drive in it. My guess is that the weather will keep the tree guys away. They didn't have time to finish the funeral yesterday, so a skeleton still stands between the driveways . . . crown vanished, just the harsh hacked trunk reaching into the sky. I'm not complaining about the tree people, though. They did a good, careful job of taking it down piece by piece in a very tight space. And I am always impressed by arborists--so strong and nimble. That is intensely hard work.

I finally finished my editing job yesterday, which means that today will be class planning. I've got the summer teaching conference to wrestle with, plus a chapbook session at the end of this month and a generative writing weekend in early February . . . the quantity is a bit overwhelming, actually, but at least I have some dedicated time to figure it out, this week and next, before another editing job drops onto my plate.

And I am hoping to go out to write tonight. Last week's salon didn't happen; too much busyness in people's lives; but my brain is so in need of a burst and a surprise. I'm counting on a session tonight.

Otherwise, I'll be reading about 17th-century poetry, walking in the harsh rain, vacuuming up cat hair, checking in with my parents . . . a cold, wet Thursday in January, in the little northern city by the sea, where fat flocks of eiders bob in the cove, where gulls perch on the cluttered chimneys, where everything is damp and vaguely salty, where the gravestones mourn captains lost in ocean storms, and the ocean storms glower at the land, this place that for some reason has turned out to be where I live. 

It turns out that I am, indeed, still in Portland . . . glad not to be negotiating icy roads this morning, but the downside is that I'll be home all day for the tree-removal clamor.

Oh, well. If I survived the ledge pounding when the city tore up our street, I can survive an all-day chipper. But I'm not looking forward to it.

Though I won't be in the classroom today, I've got lots of work to do: editing to finish up, and then a bog of class and program planning to wade into. I should start this week's round of bathroom and floor cleaning. I'll get through my exercise class, and figure out something to do with shrimp for dinner. I'm reading the Inferno (copying it out) and an anthology of 17th-century English verse (with Teresa), and the graphic novel Watchmen, which my nephew gave me for Christmas, and in the interstices a comfortable Dorothy Sayers mystery.

But I'm still feeling unsettled . . . from Christmas, from that football game . . . whatever the cause, a lingering miasma of trouble, past, present, and future--the ghost of sadness that was, is, and will come.

By the way, my friend Angela left a gorgeous short essay about the football game in yesterday's comments. If you haven't read it, you should. 

So T and I sat down to look at the Bills game last night, and thus we, along with millions, watched in real time as Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed on the field. It was horrifying--both the event itself and the distress of the other players . . . a tight circle of weeping young men, each trembling with pain, fear, and bewilderment.

The moment was dreadful; I imagine everyone who saw it is still shaken.

Of course the game had to stop. None of the players would have been able to continue; that was clear. 

I was convinced last night that Damar had died on the field, but the medics restarted his heartbeat, and somehow he is still alive this morning.

And here I am, also alive, apparently, though why does the experience of watching someone almost die on TV feel so personal? Death with commercial breaks. Death with talking-head commentary. It was gruesome.

* * *

As you can see, I'm having a bit of trouble gearing myself for the day. I'm supposed to head north this afternoon, but there may be weather and/or scheduling issues, so it's possible the class will be postponed. I've got editing to do, a phone meeting, all kinds of teaching prep to undertake . . . the week will be packed, whether or not I'm in the classroom.

* * *

Send a little love to the boys on the field, if you can. It's easy to forget how young they are, until you see them in tears.

Back to the grind: exercise class, work call, editing, plus grocery shopping and whatever housework energy I can muster. Tomorrow I head north, for teaching on Wednesday, and then the rest of the week will also be work work work.

In the midst of this, we are losing one of our enormous maples. On Wednesday, the dying giant that graces the narrow split between our driveway and the neighbor's will be euthanized. There will be chainsaws, a chipper, a crane: the noise will be terrible, and I'm not sorry I'll be out of town for it. I am sad about the necessity, of course. It's been a friendly tree, though scary during storms, and I wish there was some way to rejuvenate it. But it's poised to split onto both of our houses, it constantly drops limbs, and there seems to be no alternative.

Here's that At Length poem link I was telling you about yesterday. The excerpt, "Three Weeks," encompasses the final three sections of A Month in Summer, my book-length diary narrative, which is still floating around looking for a publisher. It was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and I think it's possible someone might take it eventually; actually, one publisher has held it for most of year and assures me they're considering it seriously, so maybe maybe. (The first section previously appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, if you want to read them in order.)

I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to discover the new year squatting on my doorstep: a swirl of fog, a tumble of wind, a scrap of crumpled paper. Welcome, ghost: stumble in and sit a spell.

On this first day of January, it is 49 degrees in the little northern city by the sea. Yesterday Tom and I sang away the old year with a trudge on the beach at Kettle Cove. The tide was out, and seagulls squabbled over clam scraps, and a brackish creek tumbled and hissed among the dunes. Then a parade of rain, and now this Marchlike damp o'erspreads the Eos-dark.

Look at Time and his trickster sister, Weather, disguising themselves as a basket of kittens! I know better, but I fall for them every time.

The year yawns and stretches and puts on its glasses. I pour black coffee into a white cup. Why, it might as well be 2022 around here. T sleeps upstairs, the cat coils into his chair, I stare into the cold firebox and ponder my lists of chores . . . take down Christmas tree; copy out canto of Dante . . . It's a day like any other, but its outfit is cuter.  Welcome, metaphor: stumble in and sit a spell.

Things that happened in the household this week: Tom and I were both awarded American Rescue Plan grants for art projects. Plus, I got two poems accepted yesterday, and a large section of my diary manuscript is supposed to appear in At Length today. (It's not posted yet but I'll share the link if/when it is.) T has spent his time off working steadily on photo prep and printing. I have spent my not-time-off editing an academic journal and planning for classes.

Things that will happen in the household today: T will do more of the same. I will make chicken stock and roast a butternut squash and take down the tree and put away ornaments and vacuum up needles and copy out Dante and work on a poem and call my parents and who am I and why am I on this planet and how do you keep track of your rattly path and what can you teach me?

O Time, O Weather, squeaking in your willow basket, batting your little paws at the lamplight . . . 

On January 1, 2023, I will step outside and peek into my cold frame and hope that I'll find a handful of arugula worth harvesting. Welcome, chlorophyll! A January salad is a small Arcadia, though it will stop no one from starving. "Ay, there's the rub," as that sulky boy prince might say. What Hamlet needs is something to take his mind off himself. Maybe I'll get him to help me with a few of the chores on my list. What's the worst he can do? Stab me? Welcome, characters! Take your shoes off before you track sand all over my clean kitchen.