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.