I woke this morning to the sounds of spring: steady rain, punctuated by the Pew, pew pew of a cardinal clinging to the lilac outside the bedroom window.

For thus far undiscovered reasons, our thermostat has decided not to work, so we've got no furnace at the moment, not a big deal at this time of year. The little wood stove is perfectly capable of warming up an April house, so at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning I am sitting luxuriously beside a fire as rain patters at the windows and the cat demands that I improve the weather. Really, what could be more charming than hot fresh coffee and a wood fire? We should all have it. I feel like Mr. Wodehouse in Jane Austen's Emma, tucked up in his shawl next to his fireplace and mildly bossing his neighbors into eating gruel.

Yesterday afternoon's epistolary workshop was my last teaching gig till next Sunday afternoon, when I'll start another a three-week round of the chapbook class. It will be good to have a few days off, after this nutty week. I've got lots of editing to do, lots of Frost Place planning to work on, but a break from public performance will be restful. Shy people and teaching: why do we get into it, I ask you?

Yesterday, while I was mucking around with epistolary poems, Tom was building a ramp into the woodshed. This morning, as I gaze out into the dark rainy morning, the new ramp gleams like a funny little sign of affection: here, my love, let me make the wheelbarrow easier to manage . . . words never spoken, words embodied entirely by a small structure of scraps and screws. Our connection has been punctuated with so much unromantic romance. It's comic and it's poignant, and as he dozes upstairs, as the rain patters and the cup of coffee I made for him cools beside the bed, I think of a poem draft one of my friends wrote yesterday in the epistolary workshop: a poem that spoke to the jumble of silence and habit and comfort and irritation that defines a long intimate life together.

Last night we listened to the Sox squeak out a win in an up-and-down exciting game. I baked chicken thighs marinated in salt, fresh tarragon, and fresh garlic chives; roasted feta with peppers, red onion, and cherry tomatoes; made a mango and raspberry cobbler. We played cards and Yahtzee; I talked to our son on the phone; we read and fiddled with a crossword puzzle and dozed on the couch. Old person life is pretty fun.

And today I don't have plans, other than to read Donne beside the fire. Old person life continues.

Yesterday was such a good and restorative day. I wrote all morning, pulling together some drafts I'd scribbled during my Wednesday night "Body of Work" class, and ended up with a poem about ghosts that still needs work but is pleasing me.

Then I drove out to the nursery and bought a smokebush to replace a couple of dead clethras in the back yard, plus a few more wild nodding onions (quite excited about their hardy native qualities and their magnetic attraction for butterflies) and two rodgersias, a broad hovering plant that loves shady corners. I bought tuberose begonias for backyard planters, and for the vegetable garden I got marigolds and a flat of chard, so I can start pushing toward harvest a bit faster.  I spent a few hours digging all of these riches into the ground, and did some transplanting as well: moving bits of sweet woodruff so that it can spread throughout the backyard beds; transplanting and thinning spinach seedlings.

The backyard continues to look rough and accidental, but much of that is linked to its construction-site persona. Maybe someday I won't have sawhorses and boards and trampled dirt out there, but I do not complain about renovations. Tom foraged a stack of castoff lumber and will be using it to build storage shelves in the new shed this weekend, maybe even saving some of it for a new shed door. Every little change on this shabby homestead is a big step forward.

This afternoon I'll be back on the clock, leading that epistolary-poem workshop for the Maine Poet Laureate project. I'm a little nervous, as I think I'll have to do a bit more lecturing than I usually do, given the large size of the audience. (Ah, the magical draw of a free workshop!)  I'm hoping we can manage to have some conversation around the poems we'll be reading and writing, but teeny-tiny zoom boxes are hard on my bad eyes, and I worry I might have trouble seeing raised hands. Though of course I wouldn't be me if I didn't have something to worry about.

 Last night a dozen writers squeezed into my postcard house, chattered and ate pizza and amazed the cat, and then we all trooped down to Back Cove Books like a school field-trip outing, and there we wrote and talked with the twenty or thirty people who showed up. It was a great crowd, larger than we'd imagined: we were prepared just to be sitting around and writing with ourselves, so it felt wonderful to have such a turnout.

Everyone was kind of giddy--because this was our first public outing as a group, because we were excited by the audience response, but also because two of our number had just been announced that morning as finalists for this year's Maine Literary Award in Poetry: Maureen Thorson, who writes wonderful, hilarious, strange, elastic poems, often using them as a sort of still-life study of an object or a situation; and me, for Accidental Hymn. There are three finalists for the prize, and we were two of them: the oddity of that added to the group giddiness, I think.

Also, there's got some family giddiness: yes, I got named as finalist for the state's lit award, but also a mysterious stranger bought one of Tom's trash photos in his current show at Cove Street Arts, which is equally thrilling and more practically useful. So we're ending this work week on a bang.

Today, thank goodness, I have no gopher holes to pop through. I'll undergo my exercise slog, and probably check over my plans for tomorrow's epistolary workshop, but mostly I intend to write, read, and garden. Already the sun is coming out; it will be a beautiful day, and I did all of the housework and grocery shopping yesterday; I've paid my weekly dues to the employment gods, and today will be mine, and I cannot wait.

I finished yesterday's class at about 8 p.m., bundled away my zoom stuff, then came downstairs to slap the prepped cod-in-parchment into the oven and get a salad made; and as dinner heated and T and I stood around chit-chatting, I started laughing at the picture of my work week that had just leaped into my head. I told him that I was imagining every day as a new gopher hole . . . Tuesday I pop up into a high school class, Wednesday I pop up into a zoom workshop, Thursday I pop up as a panel emcee . . .  It was a comic view, but I have to say: it's a pretty accurate metaphor for the current ridiculousness of my schedule.

Tonight is the panel-emcee gopher hole, which means I'll spend my day honing discussion questions, vacuuming my house, hosting my salon group's pre-panel pizza party, and then moseying down to the bookstore for our event: "Writing in Community: An Evening of Prompts and Sharing with the May Street Writers." If you're in the Portland area, I hope you can stop by, as the store is lovely, my writer friends are lovely, and the communal prompt experience has been (for me) mind-blowing.

I think we'll have another cloudy day here in the little city by the sea. Far be it from me to complain about spring rain: I know we need every drop. But a touch of sunshine now and then would be a treat. Still, despite the murk, I might get outside into the garden today. I might have a chance to read Donne. It's barely possible I'll have a chance to transcribe a few poem blurts from my notebook, have the pleasure of figuring out if they've got any life in them. I have plenty of editing to do too, but that may need to wait until next week. There are only so many gopher holes I can pop up through without being eaten by the hawk.

Home again, and tired, after two long spates of driving in rain. But what a beautiful storm . . . slow and persistent and warmish, and now spring in Maine has turned the corner, really left winter behind. The early flowering trees are beginning to bloom, tulips are opening, catkins are swelling on the maples, and the lilac is covered with tiny miniature blossoms, looking as if they've been shrunk down Alice-style.

My class went well, and we parted with the kids teasing me in that charming way teenagers have, a skill my own boys perfected and one I miss so much: when teasing plays out as funny acerbic kind-hearted affection. We wrote and wrote, messing around with prompts that brought us into surprising intersections with characters, action, place. I think we all left feeling good about the year and what we'd been able to make.

Now, after a restorative night in my own bed, I'm trying to reconfigure my brain into Wednesday--exercise session, laundry, editing, maybe a touch of gardening, early dinner prep, and then teaching an evening class, the last of three sessions on writing a series of poems. 

I guess it's a good thing that freelancing, homesteading, and motherhood have all given me sharp lessons in (1) how to juggle a million things at once and (2) how to switch focus at lightning speed, because that's the story of this week.

I'm still reading Reynolds's Whitman bio, also pecking at a Le Carre novel, The Russia House, that I found in a free bin in Skowhegan last week. But I don't know when I'm going to get a chance to do any poem work. My notebook is packed with draft blurts that I haven't had a moment to transcribe, and my Donne homework awaits, and and and and and and and. 

Ah, well, someday.

Good morning from the north, where the snow has melted and the buds are reddening and rain patters into the ice-free lake and the sky is as grey as a boot.

Outside my bedroom window log trucks rumble past. Downstairs, store employees thump quietly, filling the coffee urns and frying the breakfast sandwiches.

Today's class will be our last real writing day. We'll read poems by Kate Barnes, Nikki Giovanni, Wislawa Szymborska, and Homer; we'll mess around with character, action, setting; we'll talk about what could happen next in our writing lives. I feel a little mournful as I imagine these young poets walking away into the world.

I rushed out to the nursery yesterday morning; bought parsley and mint seedlings, also a prunella as ground cover for the Parlor Bed and a few things for the backyard (a clump of Japanese forest grass, another black-lace elderberry, and an intriguing native plant called a wild nodding onion, which is supposed to grow in any old soil and have flowers that are wildly attractive to butterflies. It was a cold day, and I was swathed in a knit hat and a heavy Carhartt jacket as I dug holes and watered, but everything got planted; and then the rains arrived. All evening and all night the rain poured down--more than an inch in total--and this morning, even obscured by murky first light, I can see how much the buds have swelled on the trees and shrubs, how much the grass has greened.

I've been so glad to have an entire weekend in the garden, a little sad that I'll be separated from it this week. This afternoon I'm heading north, teaching kids tomorrow, and most of the rest of the days are also heavily booked with work, though I may steal a bit of garden time here and there.

Yesterday afternoon Tom and I curled up on the couch, in front of a fire, cups of tea, fat books, a baseball game on the radio. Today we tromp off to work. Meanwhile, rain keeps tapping and clicking at the windows, slower than it was, a sweet and gentle mutter, and the eager trees stretch their broad arms; underground, seeds split and wiggle toward the light. 

Miraculously, I got every chore done outside that I kind of thought I maybe might have a chance to do: bagging sticks, weeding garden beds and flowerbeds, planting potatoes and onions, edging the front gardens, mowing grass. I hung up laundry and the hummingbird feeder, and I harvested spinach and chives. This morning I'm going to drive out to the nursery to buy a few plants. Then let the rains begin.

It feels so good to have everything tidy, with showers on the way and the tulips leaping into bloom. And it was lovely to spend so many hours outside. . . listening to birds, chatting with my neighbor, and meanwhile, everywhere: spring, spring, spring!

Of course I am trying to manage the regular old sadness too. On the phone with my Chicago son I am filled with longing: suddenly I would do anything to relive the comforting/alarming sound of his rattle around the house, messing around with hammers and drills and videocameras tied to toy trucks. My New York son sends a text, but what I want is his big spontaneous hug and his burst of excitement over the book he is reading or the play he has seen. Our distance is permeable; we stay close; but the physicality of their childhood is impossible to retrieve.

I'm not moping. Honestly, I'm not. I adore this cozy life with my beloved, and I am busy doing work I know how to do. But sometimes the longing for my dear ones sweeps over me.

My goal was to save all of today for the garden, so I spent yesterday morning on class planning, the afternoon on housework and groceries, and now Saturday stretches before me: potato planting, weeding, bagging sticks, mowing grass, plus laundry on the line. Tulips and lilacs are budding, peas are up; the weather will be cool but bright, and then rain will arrive tomorrow, right on schedule.

Tuesday will be my last writing day with my Monson class (we'll have one more session but will have a guest artist working with us all day), so I decided to focus on a fun time with the Big Three: character, action, and setting. I spent a chunk of the morning getting that arranged and then the rest of the morning designing next Saturday's free zoom epistolary workshop: five poem examples with simple prompts. Thus, for now, I am caught up with class prep, though I still need to figure out next Thursday's panel discussion at Back Cove Books.

Meanwhile, I am reading Reynolds's bio of Whitman and Idra Novey's novel Take What You Need, which is set in the Allegheny Appalachians, my old stomping grounds, and fills me with elegy. T and I have settled back into our cozy routine, though I miss those kids, I always miss those kids. This morning I watched a big raccoon trundle busily through the backyards, and the cardinals are singing like crazybirds, and the street is speckled with children playing some weird private version of whiffleball, and I haven't lit a fire in the wood stove for two nights in a row, and my windows are in dire need of washing, and my clean sheets smell like air.

Tomorrow, while it rains, I will read Donne and work on poems and maybe drive to the plant nursery and impulse-buy a few flats of this and that. This is my last non-working weekend for a month, and I want to hog it all to myself.

Yesterday I forked myself back into my exercise routine, designed a class, edited a memoir, cleaned bathrooms, hung laundry, and then in the afternoon gave myself the treat of working in the flowerbeds as the cat lounged in the sun and the Red Sox whooped the Minnesota Twins on the radio. Nothing is more springlike than day-game baseball, sheets on the line, and me on my knees hacking out maple seedlings.

Later I made chocolate-chip scones and trundled out to my writing salon, and now here I am, on the morning after, pondering a brand-new day of more of some of the same . . . classwork, housework, yardwork. Next week will be insanely busy: driving north on Monday, teaching on Tuesday, teaching on Wednesday, running a panel session on Thursday, teaching on Saturday . . . I hope I will survive in one piece.

And so I am trying to rest in these little moments, moments like now, when I'm sitting alone and asking words to slide from my fingers, though I have nothing thrilling to say, just a litany of duties, just anecdotes of cardinals in the dogwood tree and crows on the roof, the dull little round of a poet-housewife, and yet they are, they exist, they flicker through my eyes into my thoughts and, in turn, my thoughts flicker back into sunlight and air . . . microbes of mind and feeling, like dust motes; I think of my children, gone back into their worlds, I think of my beloved, sorting through photographs of our youth. We were beautiful, he says sadly, and I put my arms around him, and I lean my cheek against his shoulder, and outside a mourning dove coos, outside a UPS truck clanks past, O time and sorrow, O sweetness, here I am, at your mercy.

Daylight breaks earlier and earlier each day. Now, when I get up at 5:30, the sky is already transparent, and, twenty minutes later, a clear gray has unfolded behind the budding maples.

Yesterday was tiring: packed with departure, packed with work, including a night class I had to teach, but I muddled through, and then ate a fine late dinner of cod en papillote with my beloved. (Pro tip for people who teach at night and need to prep dinner ahead of time: parchment-wrapped fish fillets are the make-ahead way to go. For each serving: a square of parchment paper; on it some salt-n-peppered fish, a handful of sliced red onion, a handful of scallions, a dab of harissa or salsa or the like, a spoonful of cooked couscous/rice/quinoa/polenta or whatever; fold up each serving into a pouch and place on a baking pan; stick in the fridge till required; then bake at 425 for 15 minutes and you've got a speedy and delightful meal.)

Today will also be busy, but at least I got a lot of things crossed off my list yesterday. I finished the massive editing project, and I set up a website for an upcoming class, which means that today I can focus on class prep and cleaning bathrooms and probably grocery shopping and maybe gardening and likely going out to write. I am still overwhelmed by household stuff and desk stuff, and I need to restart my exercise regimen after most of a week away, and that shooting situation on the highway really jangled me, but a good night's sleep has helped a lot. And what would I rather be doing? I don't know.

We left Wellington in two vehicles at about 9:30 yesterday morning. I drove south and stopped briefly in Skowhegan, then made my way across country to Route 95 and took the straight shot toward home. Just past Waterville a cop flew by in the lefthand lane, easily going 100 mph. Twenty miles later two more cop cars flew by, also at light speed. Clearly something was going on--an accident, we thought--and that seemed to be corroborated by the flashing sign warning of a "Major Incident" on Route 295. Normally I would have taken that route, but instead I stayed on 95 and we got home by about 11:30.

An hour later I got a call from Tom. He'd gone on ahead, taken the 295 fork, and stopped in Freeport to run errands. By the time he finished, he couldn't get back on the highway: the exit was blocked and all traffic was gridlocked on Route 1. "What's going on?" he asked.

That's when we discovered that the "Major Incident" was a shooting at one of the Yarmouth exits--a chaotic scene that police still haven't totally explained but is apparently related to a four dead bodies in the town of Bowdoin, 25 miles to the north. Yarmouth is just outside of Portland, Bowdoin is rural, and this is how our vacation ended . . . we avoided being randomly targeted by a crazed gunman. Good morning, America.

 

The rain poured and clattered last night, and this morning the central Maine woods are sodden and foggy and filled with bird song. Even after the downpour, snow lingers in the shadows, but the daffodils are budding and the clearing is beginning to green, and this morning a red-breasted nuthatch is peep-peeping its nasal little call, like timer with a head cold.

Our vacation is winding to a close. We head back to Portland today, and tomorrow the kids will catch an early-morning bus back to the metropolis, T will trundle off to work, and I will return to my breathless schedule.

But it's been a respite, for sure.

Yesterday was mostly foggy and drizzly and thus a gorgeous day for clambering mysteriously among the stones of Great Head, a round granite peninsula that thrusts into the open Atlantic. The trees have not yet started to leaf out, so the deciduous groves are stark and bare. All color arises from the stumpy pines that cling to the wind-raked rock, from the lichen that stars the stone, from the variegated stone itself, and from the wrinkled sea, whose hue shifts from a Caribbean green, to slate, to gray, to almost white.

We saw eiders and buffleheads, loons and mergansers, bobbing and diving in the frigid waters. In the tide pools we saw snails and tiny shrimp-like swimmers and lurid algae the shade of antifreeze. Our ears were filled with the roar of water against rock, with the squeals of gulls, and with the poignant dripping chime of a bell-buoy in the shipping channel. 

Today, eventually, we'll head inland, away from the sea and into the forests of the homeland. For now I am sitting in front of a warming woodstove, drinking coffee from a cup labeled "Ernie," listening to a gull cry, watching the fog drift over the quiet tide-shifting cove. I've been reading a book about New York City, which feels very far away at the moment, perhaps an imaginary place, like Atlantis or Arden; perhaps it only exists in ancient poems, the Ed Koch Fragments, the Peter Stuyvesant Ballads, the Epic of Frank O'Hara.

 Island weather on the island.

Late yesterday afternoon the fog suddenly rolled in and we were enveloped in cotton wisps, trembling and curious as ghosts. No stars, no moon, just a sky like cloth, an invisible cove, the damp air vibrating with cries of spring peepers, those tiny frogs who are all sound, no body. The night was phantasmagoric.

Now the cove is visible, but in soft focus, every twig and blade coated in mist, the horizon as blue as slate. Yesterday's weather was decent enough for T and P to undertake their hard hike up the Beehive, but today everything is slick. We'll have a slow start.

So good to have our people here. So good to be sitting by a wood fire with coffee on the make and a pair of ducks upending themselves in the shallow waters. So good to be alive.

Saturday morning, first light. After yesterday's balmy 70s, the temperature has returned to what one should expect from April in Maine: highs in the 40s, maybe the 50s, and liable to be windy and/or damp.

I'm sitting here talking to you when I ought to be packing food into coolers, but so be it. Yesterday I grocery-shopped, prepped three meals, finished a batch of editing, did a lot of laundry, raked flowerbeds. What I cooked: a pan of lasagna (including fresh sauce and freshly roasted spinach), marinated chicken thighs (with lots of garden herbs and garlic), a pan of cream cheese brownies, a pan of rosemary shortbread; and then the actual dinner I served to the kids: pan-fried swordfish steaks (topped with yogurt-chive sauce), freshly made polenta, roasted vegetables . . . the day was a marathon. 

But tonight I'll be grateful I did it, when I'm idling beside sweet Goose Cove and not futzing with the exigencies of a toy vacation kitchen.

The question remains: what book shall I bring along to read? I'm leaning toward Walt Whitman's America, David S. Reynold's excellent biography/cultural immersion into nineteenth-century New York. With a houseful of young people (okay, only two young people, but the cottage is small), I'm not likely to have the quiet hours of last November, when T and I were dawdling there alone. So maybe a book that immerses me into the busyness of Civil War-era Brooklyn will be just the thing. Anyway, what I mostly want to do with my spare minutes is write: I've got a stack of draft blurts in my notebook and I am itching to dig into them.

Talk to you tomorrow--

Just outside the bedroom window, in the big lilac, a red-headed cardinal announced Bur-bee, bur-bee, bur-blatblatblatblatblatblat, loud as a sergeant, sweet as a baby giggle, and every bed lounger (cat especially) woke up instantly, all of us a-flutter over our avian alarm clock.

Spring! Season of overexcited birds and rampant maple seedlings! I spent two hours on my knees yesterday ripping them out of the back gardens, and, still, they sprout everywhere. But I am making progress, slowly: uncovering beds, cleaning up the lingering detritus from last fall's construction project, and maybe today I'll have a chance to haul out the chairs and the hammock and arrange the place for summer.

Maybe, but my primary task today is food--grocery shopping for our cottage weekend, and then prepping meals--a lasagna, marinated chicken, a couple of desserts--because the little kitchen on the island, as sweet as it is, isn't ideal for serious cooking, and I've got six people to feed. And then, on top of that, I'll need to make actual Friday-night dinner for the kids, who will be arriving off the bus, eager for seafood.

I'm definitely feeling some holiday-style pressure, but cooking is fun, and I've carved out the day for it. If I can fit in some gardening around the edges, that will be frosting on the knife.

I finished reading Kenneth Roberts's Northwest Passage, and now I'm starting a biography of Katherine Mansfield. Teresa and I gabbled about Donne yesterday, and now I've got a new batch of Donne poems to work through. I've been paging through various poetry collections to prep for my Wednesday-night classes. I went out to write last night and came home with some odd but possibly salvageable blurts. I'm hoping to find a bit of time on the island to mull over my essay . . . but if I don't, that's fine. The cottage always puts me into a good frame of mind, and whatever ensues will be just right. It is a place where I can step out of my routine while also stepping into myself, and I trust it implicitly.

Another sweet night with the window open . . . tick of dry leaves in a small wind, animal mutters, a scuffling among the twigs, a world breathing into my bedroom.

Yesterday I weeded and cultivated the entire vegetable garden and the sidewalk flower gardens; this afternoon, I'll move out back, finish raking, dispatch the maple seedlings, set out the chairs and maybe the hammock . . . though first I have to do all of the housework, and before that I have to work at my desk, and before that my exercise class and laundry, and, gracious, it is a wonder I ever get anything done.

Also, I'll be talking to Teresa today about Donne; also, I'll be going out to the salon to write.

Tomorrow night the kids will arrive; Saturday we'll embark for the cottage. It will be a lovely outing and we're all looking forward to it, but, man, am I overbooked.

Still, for the moment, life is quiet. I sit here, in my accustomed corner. The sound of traffic--an airplane, a car--filters through the panes. Beyond them, birdsong. Along the driveway, flowers glow brilliantly in the gray light--gold, cerulean, rose, cream. My eyes are so greedy for color and line.

I stepped out to the recycling bin a few moments ago and caught sight of the backyard possum scrubbling around in the leaves in the backyard. This is the second morning in a row I've sighted her: yesterday she was moseying along the edge of the neighbor's garage, under the suspicious eye of Ruckus. I expect he'll settle down and become friendly; at least, that's what he did with last year's possum.

It's these warm nights that are bringing her out. Already, at 5:30 a.m., the temperature is 51 degrees in the little northern city by the sea. We slept with the bedroom window open, first open-air night of the season, and the week is only going to get warmer.

Daffodils began opening yesterday; late crocuses began fading; the Hill Country patch along the driveway is filled with sky-blue scilla, with a few tiny red tulips blooming in their midst. Ramps are sprouting in the Shed Patch. 

In the afternoon I planted carrots, kohlrabi, lettuce, cilantro, and dill in the garden. This afternoon, after I finish at my desk, I'll weed and cultivate in the front beds, though I need to make sure I give myself some down time as I'm zoom-teaching tonight. If I can, I also want to tinker with some poems and maybe hack out a few more paragraphs of my essay . . . but this may be dreaming.

Now, as first light broadens, three little woodpeckers are skipping up the ash tree, and the possum has vanished. I'm thinking about the poem I brought to my workshop last night, a poem that everyone said was chock-full of vigor and sensory life, a poem that enacted the polka party that was its subject, and I'm feeling, as the Brits say, chuffed. Lately I've gotten so interested in the idea of a poem as a ball of energy, also so interested in not writing about myself but leaping into other worlds and acting out those stories. Though, of course, I can't stop me from bleeding in around the edges. 

In the past couple of days, I've had a couple of high-end rejections, both of which were extreme long shots. In each case I'd also made it past cuts earlier in the process, and thus I've been dangling with both of these august institutions for quite a while, all the while knowing that I had very little chance of making it to the end.

I guess, in a way, that's a success, though I've got nothing to show for it. Anyhow, there's a certain relief in crossing them off my submission list and forgetting about them. I'm no better or worse off than I was before. My ambition as a poet is unchanged. My feelings about my worth are unchanged. My financial precarity is unchanged. My place in the larger networking world is unchanged. And thus I muddle onward.

But I've also gotten some straight-up good news: two of the people who participated in my online chapbook classes have gotten their manuscripts accepted for publication. This is enormously satisfying, and for sure takes the edge off my own unproductive floundering.

"Unproductive floundering" is just sulky talk, however. I am not, in any way, floundering unproductively, and I know it. I am writing well, better than I ever have, and that, after all, is the heart of the matter. I have a routine, I have collegial support, I have familial support, and I have talent and skill and mulish determination. No money, no famous door-openers, no institutional network, but so what? I am what I am.

It's 29 degrees now, but the day is supposed to warm to 60 degrees, and by Friday we'll touch 80. So this will be a growing week, and I hope I can get outside and work in it.

We had a fun and busy weekend with T's parents, and on Friday P and a friend will be arriving from NYC, so this week between will be a frantic get-stuff-done window. At least I don't have to travel, which does make things easier. Still, I'll be editing and zoom-teaching and working on class prep, plus organizing for next weekend's complicated food situation up at the cottage. I'm already kind of frazzled, even before doing a thing.

Yesterday at the bird sanctuary we saw bluebirds, osprey, and what I think were scoters. The day was blue and crisp, a bracing wind blowing in from the ocean, the little salt-marsh canals dotted with snacking geese. It was a really nice day to idle outside, wrapped in our winter coats but basking in the young sunshine, meditatively eating T's picnic lunch as bluebirds flitted among a hedge of trees, dawdling along the flat lines of grass and sand and sea.

I do love a salt marsh.

It's been a pleasant, idle weekend with family. We spent much of yesterday in the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, which is a surprisingly absorbing place . . . all kinds of oddities in the stacks and generally a really interesting featured show, this time the insurance maps of 19th-century New England textile mills, a bird's-eye view of the factories, their landscape, even the layout of workers' tenements. Then we tooled down to Cove Street Arts to look at Tom's show, ate some oysters, listened to the Sox pound the Tigers, and ended with dinner at a tapas restaurant downtown.

Today we'll drive down to Laudholm Farm and stroll along the salt marsh in the bird sanctuary, probably eat picnic sandwiches since nothing will be open on Easter, and eventually make our way back to Portland for lamb chops at the Alcott House.

One of the things I got excited about at the map library was a book titled Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps. Booth was a 19th-century philanthropist and reformer who took it upon himself to organize a complex documentation of London's poor. Naturally there are problems with his findings and how he acquired his information. Nonetheless, the material is fascinating and moving, and I want to go back to the library and spend more time with it.

Among other items is a facsimile of a handwritten list, "Causes of Pauperization," which feels like a poem in embryo. Click on the photo and you should get a readable version:

"Misfortune (Ye Gods)." 

I woke up after daylight, with the cat cramping my knees and a robin cheering and chortling outside my window. I know it's 28 degrees out there, but birdsong and the cast of light cry Spring, spring, and this week's forecast is for ever-increasing warmth.

Now, as I sit here in my couch corner with my cup of coffee, I can still hear the robin burble into the chilly air, his exuberant song overflowing like a sink. The wind has died down, and the operatic tree branches, which yesterday had been whipping and groaning, now stiffly crayon the sky.

I'm happy to be sitting here idly. I got a bunch of stuff done this week, and I've got a bunch of stuff to do next week, and it's nice to be on recess, though I'm pleased I made progress with my giant to-do list. Importantly, I managed to conduct four exercise classes for myself (Wednesday was the exception, as I was in someone else's house), so that feels like a big success. Work and travel will sometimes interfere; but if I can create a challenging, varied weekday routine for myself, I won't have to go to a gym or watch online videos, neither of which interests me in any way.

On Wednesday evening (April 12) I'll start teaching that three-session zoom workshop I told you about, on writing a series of poems. Apparently there are a couple of spaces left in it, so if you're interested, sign up here. On April 27, my writing salon, now known as the May Street Poets, will be holding a free session at Back Cove Books in Portland: "Writing in Community: An Evening of Prompts and Sharing." This is for anyone, in any genre, who wants to try out the notion of writing in a group setting. On April 29, I'll be leading a free epistolary-poetry workshop, on zoom, for the Maine poet laureate program. And, hey, don't forget that the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching is open for applications, and will be taking place in person, finally, after three long years on zoom.

In the midst of all this, I'll still be working with my Monson kids, editing manuscripts, planting my garden, and taking my young people on a jaunt to Acadia. Maybe you can see why my couch corner is so extremely pleasant just now . . . though I've got to fork myself off it shortly and launch into hanging-laundry action, emptying-dishwasher action, and so on and so forth, before T and I meet up with his parents for a day on the town.

I hope you have a sweet weekend, despite the national news. Hang on to what you love. It needs you.

Going to start with the obvious today: What the fuck, Tennessee and Kansas?

Both situations exhibit such extreme ugliness, such cruelty and shamelessness. I went to bed appalled, and I woke up appalled, and the only silver lining here is that those three Tennessee legislators have instantly become national shining lights.

Tell me again how Republicans are pro-child and pro-family? Seems to me they'd rather mow down an entire generation . . . maybe that's the way to keep young people from voting against them.

Ugh. I'll stop now. I know I'm preaching to the choir. But honestly: how can much more can our children take?

* * *

Despite my fury, I slept well last night, for the first time in days, so that was a plus. Today is mostly going to be housework and meal prep: my in-laws are arriving this evening, and I'm hoping to find soft-shell crabs for dinner, and I need to dust and vac and stow away stacks of books, and maybe along the edges I'll edit a little or work on my essay or dig another poem draft out of my notebook.

I went out to write last night, and on the way home I drove through streets full of people and realized that the Sea Dogs game had just ended, first minor-league baseball game of the season, featuring Red Sox star pitcher Garrett Whitlock, so that was a cozy summery feeling, even though everyone on the street was wrapped in winter coats. And apparently Whitlock did great, so yay, and tickets to see him only cost $4.90.

I'm not going to denigrate any little flicker of happiness. A baseball game. A poem draft. My radishes seeds have sprouted. I slept a full night. My furnace works and the lights turn on. My children vote Democratic and so do all of their friends. They've got a lot of work ahead if they want to save the world. But they seem pretty determined.

 Sorry for not writing yesterday morning, but there's not always wifi in Wellington in the early mornings . . . and, besides, I was listening to the loud robin outside my open window.

Tina the Subaru negotiated the muddy roads easily, a barred owl cried in the night, and I managed to drive home blithely unaware that I was being chased by a giant ice storm. Pretty much as soon as I left Monson, the north country got socked with ugliness, but my timing was perfect and I saw nary a drop.

So, home again. Today I'll turn my thoughts to desk work, probably go out to the salon to write tonight, start prepping the house for weekend guests, mule my way through my homemade exercise class, hang laundry in the 50-degree air, rake a few leaves, and so on and such. Outside the crows are shouting, a blue dawn is beginning to break, and I am a little bleary from not enough sleep, but such is life and I'll manage.

On Tuesday, before I hit the road, I made a sudden leap in progress on my essay, so that was a relief. Maybe I'll have a chance to look at it again today, or maybe not. My schedule is a bit blurry; many things could happen, and some of them will.

Yesterday my kids were speed-dating each other's drafts, focusing on revision questions, so the room was abuzz with chatter about themes, details, praise for language, curious "what if?" questions, and I walked around the edges and thought, My job is done. There is nothing like the thrill of hearing one's students take over their own education. My year with these kids is nearly ended: just two more classes, and then we celebrate at the gallery opening for their work. There have been challenges, for sure, mostly with oppressive school schedules and bad weather. Nonetheless, I've had a committed core of writers, and they are everything I treasure in young people: they are funny, sensitive, serious, caring, adventurous, and focused. They wonder about the world outside themselves, and they value the world they know. I bubble over with pride.

Well, I'm heading north this afternoon, so naturally that means the weather god has decided to throw a little sleet and freezing rain into tomorrow's forecast. Blah. Winter cannot be pried away from this state. Meanwhile, it's also mud season up there, so my car may or may not get stuck in my friend's gravel road. Central Maine is a thrilling mess in April.

Here in Portland it's been cold and windy. I spent a bit of time outside yesterday, spreading fresh soil in garden beds and filling low spots in our gravel lane, and the breeze was whipping the laundry into knots.  

With my workload lightening slightly, I've been making progress on an essay draft, but at a crawl. I'm not sure why the pace is so excruciating, but there's not much I can do other than keep showing up to tap out the next few words as they come. It's a good thing I don't have a deadline because I'd never make it. Otherwise, I'm editing and working on teaching stuff--the usual--but at a more sustainable clip. I took an hour to read Donne poems and write up notes on what I was seeing. I fidgeted with poem drafts. I suppose this is an odd and scrappy life, but it's hard to see how I could have managed any other kind.

Even though I worked for much of the weekend, and didn't get quite enough sleep, I feel as if I'm starting this week on more solid footing . . . less schedule panic, anyway. My class plans are under control (for the moment). I worked on poem and essay drafts, and T and I even managed to clean out the shed and start reorganizing it. During renovations it had devolved into a junk heap, but now all of my long garden tools are hanging up, my work pails are accessible, the bikes are stored reasonably, and all we need to do is figure out shelving for Tom's plank storage.

This morning I'll be back to editing . . . yes, I know, I was excited on Friday about finishing, but the files are now trickling back to me for cleanup, so I am in the saddle again. However, this stage should go far more quickly, and it won't require full days at my desk, which means, I hope, that I can also keep chipping away at everything else I need to do. Tomorrow I'll head north for a Monson class on Wednesday, so that will take a chunk out of the week. Otherwise, I am trying to avoid looking too far forward and making myself dizzy.

In sad news my exercise teacher has decided to stop teaching her online core class, so that is another thing I have to do: learn how to teach myself. I've made a list of all of our regular exercises, and I am hoping I can create a routine on my own. I'm pretty good at self-motivation, and though I dislike exercise regimens, I noticeably lost weight and gained muscle during the three years I'd committed to this one, so I do not want to backslide. I hope I can manage to keep myself going.

Sometimes I feel like the bulk of my life revolves around convincing myself to do stuff, but maybe that is just the definition of being a grown-up.

Sunday morning, and I am wide awake at 5:30: coffee made, clean dishes put away, clean kitchen towels hung, cat ejected into the wet darkness. Apparently this is not a sleeping-in weekend as yesterday morning was just the same. But at least I got a ton of things done on Saturday, and maybe today is destined to be productive too. I wrote the syllabus for session 1 of my upcoming MWPA class on creating a series of poems. I wrote the syllabus for Wednesday's Monson class. I worked on poem drafts and put away the stacks of books cluttering my study and cleaned up my computer's desktop, which was a giant rubble pile of new poems. I read a big chunk of Tim O'Brien's novel July, July, and in the afternoon T and I went down to the wharf and bought a seafood bonanza: soft-shell crabs and Winterport oysters and fresh sardines and fresh cod. We ate the oysters and crabs last night, the sardines will be for tonight, and the cod went into the freezer for later in the week.

This morning I'll read Donne and work a bit on my essay, and then, if it's dry enough outside, Tom and I may organize our stuff in the new shed. We got lots of rain yesterday, just as we should in spring, and today will be sunny and breezy and chilly, just as it should be in spring, and I expect a general greening-up this week. Already hyacinths and scilla and crocuses are in bloom; daffodils are budding; I've been harvesting winter spinach and chives and garlic greens. Maybe I'll get laundry onto the outside lines. The homestead itch is strong, this time of year.

This will be my last open weekend for a while: next week, house guests; the following week, Acadia with the kids; and then I'll be on the teaching wheel. There's no way around the fact that I'll have to work this weekend, but not for all of it, and much of what I'll need to do is sit around and read poems. That's not a bad rainy-day chore.

But T and I have plans to dawdle down to the fish market, and maybe we'll get a drizzly foggy walk in as well. The temperature is supposed to steadily rise today, despite the rain, and I could use a whiff of spring wind.

Yesterday I finished up some bits and pieces of editing, and wrote some emails, and dealt with housework, and otherwise swept myself into order. But I also worked on two poems that are swiftly coming together. I am writing well these days: confidently, without much dithering. Even as notebook blurts, the drafts have been odd yet coherent, leaping more or less fully formed from my head. I will go for days without writing poems; but as soon as I open that faucet, there they are again.

I think it's interesting that, as busy as I am with other matters, the poems aren't suffering. On Wednesday, when the kids and I were looking at some of the ancient Chinese poems, I gave them a quick running commentary on whatever background bios were available: "Look, this poet was bad at school and went off to slouch around in the countryside and borrow money from his friends. Look, this poet was great at school and supported his family honorably. Look, this poet had a weird side job: he was a tea master." We enjoyed discovering that poets can be anyone, no matter what century they lived in (unless they were women or slaves, of course).

Most of my seniors are going to community college. Many will be first-generation college students. No one plans to major in English or creative writing: they and their families are too anxious about job security. So I spend a lot of time reminding them that writers can be writers, no matter what their day jobs are.

Even me. Though my day jobs are word-based, teaching and editing do not necessarily feed my writing, at least not at this stage of my life. The poems are their own tap, and that tap bubbles and froths and leaks all over the bar.

The two poems I am currently working on are titled "Polka Party" and "Those Arithmetic Facts." They are very different, but both are set in 1974, and I like going back and forth between them. It is exciting to make things; it is so exciting.