Saturday, 5:30 a.m. A porcelain moon, round-cheeked as a Hummel, nods over the neighbors' Edwardian roof. It shines down onto my modest Cold War roof, onto Weimar and Prohibition and Lost Generation roofs . . . a little jumble of history dozing under a blanket of sky.

Here, in the little northern city by the sea, in this leafy village enclave, with its steeple and corgis and late-blooming roses, I sit under my Eisenhower rafters, thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge thinking of his friend Charles Lamb, "my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom / No sound is dissonant which tells of Life."

I've been a little lonely for my old friends. I had hopes of seeing a few next week, but schedules collide and that won't happen. Still, before long I'll see others in Brooklyn, another in West Tremont . . . joy and sadness, aging and loss, these beloveds who have loved for so long. "Now, my friends emerge / Beneath the wide wide Heaven," as Sam T. sighs. It's a great poem and not too long: you should read it and sigh with him, and with me . . . "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," written in 1797, and still as fresh as a breeze.

Now, outside, first light is shimmering over economical vinyl siding and cracking asphalt driveways, over exhausted sunflowers and forgotten bicycles, over chubby cats slinking into garages, over a tired drunk shuffling slowly up a small hill.

I pour my second cup of coffee and gaze into the barely day, into the not-yet future. Time pauses. It is a moment of nothing much. And yet.

It's Friday, and that means drag-trash-to-the-curb day, and wash-sheets-and-towels day, and clean-the-downstairs-rooms day, and in the interstices of all of this: exercise and editing and class planning and talking to Teresa about Donne. I guess I'll manage to juggle everything, though I have no idea what we'll be eating for dinner. Something must be left to chance.

I finished Jiles's News of the World, and now I'm reading a V. S. Pritchett story collection, The Careless Widow. I hope I start writing well again, and soon, but in the meantime I'll just keep reading and reading and scribbling down blurts and hammering out these letters to you, and then maybe eventually my easy swing will return and the fates will take me out of the batting cage and put me back into the lineup.

I am almost 59 years old, and only in the past decade have I clearly recognized how vital it is to be obstinate--dogged, even mulish--about my vocation. I love those animal terms: they reinforce how unromantic art making can be; how much it depends on just crouching in front of the the chipmunk hole until the chipmunk finally slips out. And then? The claws and the teeth.

This letter has too many metaphors. But so be it. I'm trying to try to not put myself on trial. I'm writing into the black hole of not writing. It's hard to describe this sensation without metaphor. Maybe that's because the words themselves are struggling. I don't know. But I keep at them anyway.

Last night we had a lovely simple dinner of falafel topped with tahini yogurt, alongside a salad of tiny roasted eggplant, broccoli, red onion, arugula, and quinoa. I like to make falafel using black-eyed peas rather than chickpeas as the base for the paste. I think the flavor is mellower, but also the texture is much easier to handle. Given that I usually shallow-fry the patties (instead of deep-frying or baking), I prefer a more malleable mixture that drops easily into a pan. 

And now I have a bunch of leftover, ready-made paste to fry up for tonight's poetry salon, so that saves me a step.

I'll be editing all day, but first I plan to go out for a walk and maybe, possibly, spy another batch of maitakes, a word that spell-check keeps trying to change to "mistakes," the complete opposite of what those mushrooms are. I've been reading Jiles's News of the World, which I did not expect to like but which has turned out to be a gorgeous, spare Texas western. And I've slowly been examining my notebook of draft-blurts--not making progress on first drafts but hoping that will come.

I should mow grass, but I don't have much else to do in the garden, other than slowly begin to shut it down. The kale and chard are gorgeous, and soon they'll become our primary daily vegetables. Leaves are beginning to turn, and the yard is settling into autumn shabbiness. I should check the quinces on the shrub I share with my neighbor; we are looking forward to making an apple-quince dessert with our tiny crop. I should walk down to the farmers' market this afternoon and see what's available there to pad my harvest stores . . . maybe some potatoes, maybe some sweet peppers.

I'm not writing very well just now--or at least I'm writing uncomfortably, awkwardly. This doesn't frighten me; I recognize my boom-bust cycles. Still, it makes me itchy and unsettled. 

As I was making dinner last night, I learned that Brooks Robinson had died. Robinson was a career Baltimore Oriole and the greatest third baseman of all time. My son reminded me of his nickname--the "human vacuum cleaner." A ball rarely got past him.

I don't remember Robinson as a player. What I do remember is Robinson in family lore: the story told, of when my father, in his twenties, drove my grandpap, his new father-in-law, to Baltimore to see Brooks Robinson play. By the time I knew them, my dad hated to drive in cities and my grandfather barely left the confines of his farm. So the image of the two of them, road-tripping to Baltimore, is both sweet and mythical. I imagine them in my dad's old white Ford with the dark red seats. I imagine them, shy with each other, nursing their single beers, leaning forward in the bleachers, craning for a glimpse of the hero. And then the long drive home.

I suppose this is why I love baseball--these homely tales, so interwoven with the fabric of the game.

* * *

But my big news yesterday was this . . .

. . . close to ten pounds of hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, young and tender, tucked around the roots of an oak tree in Baxter Woods. I was beside myself with excitement: What a haul! a foraging miracle! the gods have smiled upon me! These mushrooms (also called maitake) are choice--a wild delicacy, tender and flavorful--and now I have bags and bags of them in the freezer, a winter's worth of delight. I feel like a million bucks.

* * *

But of course that will wear off, and I will go back to feeling like two bucks. Not that two bucks are anything to sneeze at. You can buy a teeny-tiny pumpkin for two bucks and have change left over. You can almost take a bus ride.

Today I'll hang out the wash, and I'll fix up someone else's manuscript, and I'll clean the upstairs rooms, and I'll endure my exercise regimen, and I'll read Paulette Jiles's News of the World, and it will be like almost having enough money for a bus ride . . . almost.

It's chilly this morning in the little northern city by the sea . . . 49 degrees, and I am wrapped in my bathrobe attempting to recall the sultry days of August, when windows gaped all night long and any clothing felt like too much clothing. Our bodies are so bad at remembering the past. Perhaps it's a way to balance out our brains, which spend so much time wallowing in what-happened-what-might-happen. Right now my body is claiming that it always huddles in a red fleece bathrobe, always wears socks first thing in the morning, always toys with whether or not it's too early in the season to flick on the heat.

Yesterday afternoon I picked the last of my peppers and eggplants and yanked out the plants. With 40-degree nights ahead, I knew it was time to give up on them. What a terrible year they had; these hot-season crops really hated the constant rain. The eggplants are as long as my thumb, and most of the peppers are similarly stunted . . . though I do have two handsome full-sized poblanos.

Now the garden is mostly kale, chard, arugula, and herbs, plus an up-and-coming crop of fennel and some dogged broccoli. The marigolds and zinnias still flower bravely, and in the house the last of the tomatoes are ripening. Summer isn't gone, but it's going.

T got home last night, tired and cheerful, and now I hear him chunking drawers open and shut, sighing into his work clothes, prepping himself to fall back into the world of the construction site. And I am sighing into my coffee cup, prepping myself to fall back into the world of copyediting, my inbox stacked with other people's files, other people's deadlines. What I want to do is dip into my own notebook, which is filled with a week's worth of new draft-blurts--from Monson, from the salon, from the Rilke sessions. But I doubt I'll have that chance today.

Oh, well. I will walk this morning. I will linger hopefully under oak trees in search of autumn mushroom gold. I will read E. M. Forster over breakfast and mutter at John Donne over lunch. I will stand in the shabby leaf-strewn grass and pin up laundry on the lines. Here at the Alcott House, here on my miniature homestead, my pocket-handkerchief demesne, I will sit on the front stoop, mid-morning, with a cup of hot tea in my cold hands and a cat under my knees. The earth will spin. The gulls will scream. Small will become vast, I will be dizzy with it. 

Another slow-waking 6 a.m. morning--my last one, as T will be home this evening and tomorrow we'll return to the usual 5 o'clock alarm.

Yesterday's class went well; it's funny how close people can get, after just two days in a virtual space. You'd think it would be impossible to create community that way, but it isn't. And then, in the evening my neighbor and I walked down to Woodford's Corner, and we sat outside in the cooling air and ate tacos and mused over our jobs and what books we were were reading. A different sort of community, and a pleasant ending to a sweet but brain-tiring weekend.

Today I'm still feeling an atmosphere of Rilke around me, a mysterious signpost looming out of the mist. But I also have a desk full of other people's manuscripts, grocery shopping to get done, a day filled with non-Rilkean rubble and weeds. The question is How can I live both lives?

Another solid night's sleep. Thank goodness, that beastly insomnia cycle has broken. And a great day in class too. The participants are wonderful . . . such wide-ranging conversationalists and writers, and all of them so eager to dive down the Rilke rabbit hole.

Today we'll be back at it, reading, talking, writing, sharing; then an afternoon next-steps workshop; and then me flat on my back on the couch recovering. And then out for dinner with my neighbor . . . an evening stroll, with tacos or maybe bangers and mash as the goal.

For the moment, though, I'm just sitting. The neighborhood unfolds under bleak first light, rough shapes of houses and trees, of sidewalks and basketball hoops, as forlorn as an abandoned sketch. The little cat yowls at the backdoor. The clock ticks.

Last night, after my teaching day was done, I sat curled in the living room under a blanket, with the first fire of the season hissing in the woodstove, reading and reading and reading. The book was Middlemarch; I could not read fast enough; I was greedy, greedy; I was myself at 15, gobbling words like Cheez-Its, unable to stop.

That greed. It is being alive.

Finally, a beautiful night's sleep! I slept hard from 9 till 5, then wallowed dozily in bed for an hour, and now here I am, brisk as a new broom, bustling around the kitchen, brewing my coffee, letting the cat out. I'm just like a real live human being.

Yesterday I cleaned the house, then mowed grass and tore out the cherry tomato plants--which was a slow process because they were loaded with green fruit. It took me a long time to strip the vines, but by the end of the chore I had two quarts of tomatoes to transform into faux-tomatillo sauce. They simmered all afternoon with a fresh ancho pepper, a slab of red onion, three big garlic cloves, and some cumin seed. Then I ground the vegetables through a food mill and voila: a quart of salsa verde to freeze for future enchiladas.

So that was satisfying; and though I didn't end up tearing out the sunflowers, I did prune them hard, then tidied up the zinnias, fussed over my spinach seedlings, moved a box of firewood up to the living room, imagined the future.

And in the midst of this flurry I received, believe it or not, a fan letter in the mail.

* * *

Today I'll pause the flurry. It's time to turn my thoughts to teaching, to Rilke, to notebooks, to conversation, to quiet. My goal with this weekend class is to create an atmosphere that will allow the participants to enter and linger in a Rilkean space . . . to tap into their own ecstatic silence. I hope we can do it.

So a good night's sleep was a huge boon. And now I'm going to take a hot shower, and eat a hot breakfast, and go for an amble around the neighborhood, and otherwise prep myself to concentrate and relax. I'll let you know how it goes.

I've been in a lousy-sleep cycle since Monday, and I eagerly await its end. This morning I flicked on the light at 4:30, after lying awake since 2:30 . . . but at least I wasn't keeping T up as I tossed and kicked. He left for Chicago yesterday afternoon, so I'm a bachelor for a few days, which means that I now have an entire pot of coffee to drink by myself. I hope I don't overdose.

It's cool in the outside darkness--only 50 degrees now and not forecast to get warmer than the low 60s. I should probably start tearing out the rest of the tomatoes, and the sunflowers too. I'll be teaching all weekend, so today is my "day off," which simply means housework and yardwork rather than editing. But maybe I'll also get a chance to look at the notebook blurts from last night's salon. At least one of them might be worth prodding.

Yesterday I baked my first apple pie of the season and brought it along to poetry night. It was one of those rare pie-making expeditions in which the crust behaved exquisitely under my hands . . . no rips, no sticking to the counter, no crumbly dryness, no uncontrollable misshapen circles. From rolling pin to plate, it was perfect. I have been making shortcrust pastry since I was a kid, and I'm still never sure what I'm going to get. Pie crust is a moody beast. But the kitchen gods smiled on me yesterday, and there's even a slice left for breakfast. That is a nice thing for a bachelor to look forward to.

In this black hour before dawn, a freight train rattles over the tracks at the end of the street. But the house feels contained, expectant--framing circles of lamplight, the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of a clock. Last night, as I lay sleepless in bed, the house seemed to gather round me. I was a marble in a cup, a clean shirt in a drawer. The smallness made me smaller and the night felt vast and wild.

That's not a bad way to be awake, if one must be awake . . . becoming a dollhouse self, under an ink-blue sky roiling with stars.

After hinting for weeks, autumn finally seems to be settling in. Though only a few leaves have reddened, the air, even under noon sun, breathes an undercurrent of coolness. Grass and the garden are shabby and tired, and I am tired of tending to them. Autumn is a naturally untidy season, and that is a relief for its housekeeper.

Changes, changes . . . I've got some changes to tell you about.

After more than a decade at the Frost Place, I've made the painful decision to resign from my position as director of the Conference on Poetry & Teaching. Anyone who knows me understands how hard it is for me to leave a place I’ve loved for so long. There have been tears, and tears, and tears. But I’m confident that I’ve made the right decision.

 

A place is a place, but a community is much more. At the Frost Place we created a community of poets, teachers, students, and searchers who came together, and stayed together, despite all odds. I won’t be teaching next summer at the Frost Place, but that doesn’t mean I’ve left my community. I’m simply walking through a new door.

 

In the summer of 2024, I’ll be directing the Conference on Poetry & Learning at Monson Arts. The format will be familiar: a five-day conference (July 6–10) followed by an optional two-day writing retreat (July 10–11). Teresa Carson will serve alongside me as associate director, and Maudelle Driskell will be our visiting poet.

 

Registration for the conference will open this fall, and I’ll let you know as soon as that link is live. Be assured that prices will remain affordable, and we’ll still be offering professional development credits. For now, jot down the dates on your calendar, and start imagining a comfortable, collegial week in a gorgeous setting.

I talk a lot here about my work with the kids at Monson Arts, but I haven't talked much about the place itself. Monson Arts is a world-class artists’ residency and workshop center located on Lake Hebron in Monson, Maine, in the heart of the north woods. The town is situated just south of Moosehead Lake, the largest mountain lake in the eastern United States, and is the gateway to the Hundred Mile Wilderness, the final leg of the Appalachian Trail. Monson is also twenty-five miles north of the town of Harmony—where I lived for more than two decades, raised my children, and learned to be a poet. In other words, this is my homeland.

 

Monson has a long history as a destination for artists and wanderers. As early as the 1840s, Henry David Thoreau traveled to the region and wrote movingly about the landscape, and artists such as Berenice Abbott and Carl Sprinchorn later lived and worked here. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the town thrived as a center for slate quarrying and furniture making. But by the turn of the millennium, its industrial base had eroded, and the town was fading away.

 

Monson Arts was conceived as a way to reverse this course. It began as an initiative of the Libra Foundation, a Maine-based philanthropic organization. The idea was to construct a center for the arts that would also spur economic development in Piscataquis County, currently one of the state’s poorest. With foundation support, Monson Arts planners purchased and renovated much of the downtown and began programming in 2018.

 

The mission of Monson Arts is to provide time and space for creative work via residencies, workshops, community and school programs, and exhibitions. Its studios are state-of-the-art; lodging and meals are offered on site; the chef won a 2023 James Beard Hospitality Award. Travelers who don’t want to make the drive can fly or take a bus to Bangor, and staff will pick them up and bring them to town. Yet, despite these wonders, I will be able to keep the conference price affordable. That’s because the Monson Arts staff and board are committed to arts education and steadfast in their support of teachers, students, and makers. I have been leading their high school writing program since 2019, and I can affirm that they are welcoming in every way. 

 

Stuart Kestenbaum, a poet and arts administrator who has been instrumental in the design of Monson Arts, tells me, “We want this to be a happy home for you.” It will be a happy home. I’m thrilled to have found such a magnificent landing place. At the same time, I’ll continue to mourn that house in the White Mountains. It’s another of those both-and conundrums.

I know this change will be good for the program, assuring that it will not only survive but thrive. But of course I'm sad. Of course. Making this transition has been excruciating, and it's a relief to finally be able to tell you about it, after months of work and anxiety.

5:15 a.m. Full darkness still. At the bottom of the street a train rumbles through, the squeal of wheel and rail muffled behind the shut windows of the house. When I let the cat out, I could feel autumn chill rising up from the rain-soaked grass. It's a morning when a cup of coffee is a comfort to the hands.

Two nights in a row I've slept badly, so I'm bleary this morning, but also feeling good because we had an excellent start in Monson yesterday. Our new cohort of young artists is chattery, excited, starry-eyed. The whole group and staff spent the morning with Gretchen playing various performance games, then broke into our writing/art factions for the last hour of the day. Even with such a brief time alone, I managed to get them to write two new drafts, share, talk, and even start teasing each other. It was really lovely.

So one session down, a school year to go. Now I need to learn to relax into my new unrelaxing schedule. Today I've got to grocery-shop, clean the upstairs rooms, start a new big editing project, prep for my weekend Rilke class, etc., etc. I feel like I've opened a closet door and everything has fallen out on my head. 

But I'm not complaining. It will be good to start earning regular money again, good to be in the classroom again, good to be out of my house and into the world.

It's pouring in Monson, rain drumming against the metal porch roof beneath my window, rain drumming all night long. I did not sleep as well as I'd hoped, but better than I might have, so I guess that's something. And I did have a reasonably productive evening--writing two draft blurts based around musical prompts--which does make me feel better.

Now I'm sitting at the apartment window, looking across at the general store's window, waiting for the open sign to turn on so that I can wander out into the rain and get some coffee. On Route 15, headlights fly past; they've been flying past all night. Always, people are going someplace, though up here it can be hard to imagine where.

On the drive yesterday, I felt a pang, again and again, as the road looped and the forest rose up, looming yet undramatic, a hundred shades of green with a pale haze of gold. Once this was my everyday vision. But those years are gone, and now I am a visitor, like anyone else.

Yesterday was a day of small chores--storm cleanup, laundry, chicken stock, tomato sauce, planting spinach--plus a Bills game in the afternoon, which always means a few hours of cozy text exchanges with my kid . . . this is the only reason I care about football, but a parent does whatever it takes to keep that coziness alive.

Today, however, I'll be back in the saddle--driving north to Monson, in the rain, of course, because the travel god wants me to get used to the real world right away. Fortunately I'll have company this time, as my friend Gretchen is coming along to do an opening-day performance project with the students. So I won't have to download ten podcast episodes to distract my mind from how much I hate long-distance driving.

This year I've decided to make a conscious effort to improve my quality of life on these trips. The housing situation up there is quite comfortable, but I nonetheless struggle to fill my evenings and to sleep well. It's not the fault of the place; it's the fault of habituated me, who has a hard time settling into new places, sleeping in a new bed, etc., especially without company around. Once I'm in a place for a day or so, then I'm fine: these single overnights are actually harder on me than an entire weekend or a full week, when my body and mind have a chance to adjust to my situation.

Tom suggested that I create a special project for myself, only to be done on evenings when I'm alone in Monson. So this weekend I've made a few writing and listening prompts for myself involving Beethoven and Dinah Washington. I'm going to pack some familiar home items that I don't usually travel with. I'm going to focus on creating a circle of comfortable lighting and sound, setting out home things on counters, drinking tea out of my own cup, etc. etc. It's silly, I know. But I really need to find a way to make this solitary time both constructive and restful, and it's so often neither.

As a teacher, I feel like I'm at the top of my game. I'm good at it, and energetic, and experienced, able to roll with whatever comes up. But as a body, I'm less resilient than I was. I'm healthy and in good shape, but I'm also easily stricken by sleeping problems, and they make everything I do as a teacher so much harder. And then there's all of the driving, on either end of the session. I get back to Portland feeling like a rag.

So I'm determined, this school year, to fix the machine, if I can. I love this job, and I want to keep loving it. So I'd better take care of the carapace.

The storm lasted for a long time, but in Portland the situation never got dire. This morning our backyard is full of twigs and small branches but nothing requiring a chainsaw and no concomitant damage. We were lucky because we got almost no rain, only wind, and thus no uprooted trees.

I spent the storm day baking bread, processing a bushel of kale for the freezer, and reading a Tessa Hadley novel. This will be a winter of greens: already I've got so much kale and chard in the freezer, with more to come. I'll have to become inventive: kale and sausage lasagna, chard and provolone stromboli, cream of kale soup, curried bluefish on chard . . . that's just off the top of my head; surely I can think of more.

Tomorrow I'll be hitting the road, heading to Monson for an overnight before my first high school class of the season. So today is the day for chores: yard cleanup, mushrooming, lettuce planting, chicken-stock and tomato-sauce simmering. Before the storm arrived, I yanked out my bean and cucumber plants and all of my sauce-tomato plants. It was no great loss: they were all on their last legs, and the wind would have flattened them. So now I have a half bushel of green tomatoes ripening in the dining room . . . a very small harvest compared to other years', but that's the story of this growing season. Too much rain. However, something is better than nothing.

On the bright side: mushrooms! We've had a summer of chanterelles, and this morning I have hopes of finding more maitakes under the oaks. If I can fill the freezer with choice wild mushrooms, that will compensate for other disappointments. And those maitakes are divine. I added them to chicken gravy for Friday-night's dinner, and then last night mixed the leftover gravy into risotto . . . maybe the best risotto I've ever made: wild mushrooms, fresh chicken stock, a Cubano pepper, baby red onion, chopped chicken breast, fresh parsley, parmesan. So good.

If I've done nothing else in my life, at least I've learned to cook, and learned to revel in what's at hand.

I woke up to the first swirl of wind. Lee is apparently a post-tropical cyclone now, but its long arms keep spinning, and the air is a roar of sound.

The heart of the storm is still to the south. We have a long day ahead of us, and the cat is whining and cranky. So I let him out, panicked about letting him out, and then he came back in. I hope that is the most panicking I do all day and that the three of us can now settle down into relative calm.

The power is still on, and we've got a pot of hot coffee. If the power fails, we've got a roast chicken to pick, lots of salad, half a raspberry pie, a cribbage board, candles, and many books to read. If a tree falls on the house, we have insurance.

I've been through so many storms, summer and winter, without power. I've lost water for weeks (with a newborn in the house). In Harmony, no water and refrigeration were always the issues. We had to fill buckets and pots and pans in preparation for every big storm. But we could still cook on the gas stove, and we had heat from our efficient wood stove. Here, in town, we've got city water so can flush the toilet in an outage, but we can't cook or refrigerate, and in a winter storm our little wood stove doesn't have the oomph to heat the entire house.

Somehow, in Harmony, we never broke down and bought a generator. In retrospect that seems dumb. But at the time the expense was monstrous. All expenses were monstrous. We were always so short of money.

And we still don't have one. So here we are, on a Saturday morning in September, in the little northern city by the sea, battened down for a sou'easter . . . twigs and green leaves flying . . . air a thick rumble of sound . . . Atlantic out of sight but surely white-whipped and crashing . . . sky a tight-lipped gray . . . no birds or squirrels in evidence . . . nary a desperate dog walker on the street. 

It's a beautiful day, in its own way.

Friday morning, big storm on the way, yet the air is chilly and much drier, not at all tropical. I presume this will change as Lee pulls closer, but for now Portland feels like autumn.

Yesterday I tucked away all of the chairs and loose items. Today, after a morning phone meeting, I'll strip the last of the string beans from the vines and take down the trellis. I do hope we make it through without much tree damage, but we're not in a flood zone, so that's one worry I don't need to have. If you don't hear from me, assume that the power's out and we're playing cards and reading books and otherwise doing fine.

Yesterday I found a variety of mushroom I've been hunting for years: maitake, also known as hen of the woods (different from chicken of the woods, which I also hunt). Maitake grows at the base of oak trees in clusters that resemble setting hens, and they are choice. Also, they're easy to identify, with no inedible lookalikes. So we'll be having top-of-the-line mushroom gravy with our roast chicken tonight. I can't wait.

And last night's writing salon was lovely, as it usually is. I am so attached to my Thursday nights. 

Reading-wise, I'm still immersed in Middlemarch, still working my way through the Inferno. Today will be big housework day: floors, bathroom, sheets and towels, and that chicken to roast for dinner. Otherwise, just battening and waiting. The eye of the storm looks like it will be pulling east, which is good for Portland and bad for Downeast and Nova Scotia. But we're still going to be socked.

Portland is now officially under a tropical storm warning, which means I really do need to start stowing away yard furniture, the cold frame, various trellises, etc. Today and tomorrow may be the last hurrah of my sunflowers and zinnias; they're already getting autumn-brittle, and I don't think they'll stand up to a hurricane. So I should cut some big bouquets for the house.

This afternoon I have a dentist appointment, and I'll go out to write in the evening. Otherwise, I'm still working away on my own projects. I read the recent James Wood article on George Eliot (in the New Yorker) and scribbled disagreements in my notebook. I read Said on Lampedusa's The Leopard and Visconti's film of The Leopard and was reminded, once again, about why I despise movies based on my favorite books. I read about Dante's tenth circle of hell, where venal popes are stuffed upside down into holes with their feet on fire. I read Middlemarch--about Lydgate and Rosamond's deluded courtship: two people destined to be totally miserable together, without any idea that this is the case. I started imagining a series of writing prompts based on Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or Emily Post's Etiquette.

As you can see, I got nothing useful done, but I got a lot done.

Outside, everything is soaked in rain and foggy blackness . . . but now we have hurricane trouble on the horizon. Lee looks to be taking direct aim at Maine; and given our already way-too-exciting tree troubles this year, I am anxious.

However, nothing can be done, except to pay attention and batten down. So I'm watching the forecast and looking at the garden. At the very least I'll need to tear out the beans and cucumbers: their trellises won't withstand any real wind. But I'll wait another day or two, until the forecast is solid.

In the meantime, I did have a good productive day to myself: all of the reading I'd hoped to accomplish--Dante, Said, Middlemarch--plus revision on five or six poems, two long walks, a bagful of foraged chanterelles, and even a few tasks accomplished . . . dates for my October NYC trip nailed down, vet appointment made, raspberry pie baked. I hope today will be as useful.

The revisions were especially satisfying. I'd mostly finished this stack of poems, but all of them had ragged edges . . . wrong words, obscurant grammar, useless line breaks, distracting cadences, obtrusive speakers, self-satisfied rhymes, plump endings, and such--not in large ways but tucked into small, easy-to-ignore pockets. So after spending an hour or so with Dante, I turned my attention to my own poems, briskly chipping away at the tartar, humming to myself. I might have been stacking wood or dusting a library, except that the chore was my own language. The task was absorbing but also plain, straightforward, unromantic. Afterward I felt as if I had spent the morning currying a horse.

Rain falls, gentle and steady, into this dark-as-night morning. The air is thick and humid, but a breath of coolness trails along my bare shoulders. There's a delicacy about this weather, a hesitance.

I finished my small editing project yesterday, prepped for next week's Monson class, worked on a poem, even submitted one. Today I'll turn my thoughts to reading . . . Dante, Edward Said, George Eliot. 

The next editing manuscript will arrive any day now, but apparently not on this day. So the shape of the hours is mine.

I'm trying to work out notions that may or may not become an essay. I'm trying to step further into some poem revisions. I'm trying not to second-guess my imagination but let it burrow and bumble its way forward into an unclear daylight. The only way to do this is to look as if I'm doing nothing.

What shall I tell myself? The freight of empty time is awkward to carry. I always feel alarmed, with an open day before me. Will I waste it on stupid things? What counts as waste and stupid things?

Anyway, an attempt . . . copying out some Dante, scribbling a few notes on Said, drinking in Middlemarch. Wandering from window to window, staring into the rain.

I sit here, on this rainy Monday morning, basking in the warm inner glow that comes from knowing that all of our firewood is under cover. By noon yesterday Tom and I had stowed the entire pile of green in the shed, and around the edges I'd mowed grass, cut a bushel of chard, and started a pot of tomato sauce. So in the afternoon, as the first bands of rain came through, I processed greens, finished the sauce, got everything into the freezer, and then spent a couple of hours flopped on the couch, listening to baseball and reading Middlemarch. Eventually, for dinner, I roasted mackerel with parsley and lemon, served it with zucchini pancakes and a Greek-style broccoli salad, and we ate in front of an old Star Trek episode . . . and thus went the tale of Sunday at the Alcott House.

This morning I'll be back to my small editing project. Rain is forecast off and on all week, and already the temperatures are much cooler, though still humid. I'm so engaged with Middlemarch this time around: I can barely put the book down, though I've read it a thousand times before. I hope I can manage to get something else done, but it's possible that George Eliot might win out.

And I should send some poems to journals. I've got a stack of finished pieces, but I so dislike submitting. That and washing windows: two chores I always find a reason to skip.

Next week my teaching season restarts. I'll be in Monson for the first high school session of the year and then spend the following weekend on zoom immersed in Rilke. I'm looking forward to it all, but also am feeling a little elegiac about summer and its shapeless days. Maybe I should just give in to George Eliot and let Middlemarch have this week.

I hoped the heat might break yesterday, but no. So I hauled firewood and dragged brush, and T chainsawed and dragged brush, and we were sweaty and unenthusiastic, but we made progress. The broken branches were cleared out of the yards, some of the firewood got into the shed, and today--finally, maybe--the heat will break.

There's still a big hole in the back fence, which T will have to patch; and there's still a lot of firewood to get into the shed . . . plus, grass desperately in need of mowing, greens to freeze, tomatoes to cook down into sauce. But the stuff will get done, somehow--if not today, later in the week. And we'd like to walk over to Porchfest, the annual neighborhood music festival, which I haven't gone to in years (last year, Covid; the years before, teaching). The first time we went, we found ourselves standing next to our senator, Angus King, who was bopping to the blues. It was a typical Maine incident. You meet a governor at a poetry reading; you run into a senator at the grocery store. Happens all the time.

And last night's dinner party also felt quintessentially local, in a really sweet way. I'd bought three cooked lobsters at the fish market, and in the evening our next-door neighbor came by, and the three of us each picked a lobster, added mayonnaise, red onion, dill, and seasonings, cut a slab from a baguette, and made our own lobster rolls. We carried our plates over to her backyard table and sat in the slightly mosquitoey gloaming, drinking cold rose and eating magnificent lobster, and it was so extremely summery, so pleasant, so Maine.

I am still having a little love affair even with the idea of neighbors, after all those many years in the woods. Imagine!--people really do hang over the fences and talk. People really do sit in each other's backyards and eat dinner and chatter about this and that, and then, when the evening is over, they amble back to their own unlocked doors. It is so surprising to me. Somehow I thought that kind of thing only happened in Updike novels (and always ended badly).

It's been an emotional and distracting and mixed-up weekend . . . mourning for Curtis, dealing with tree mess, resting in neighborly comforts; and now today is my sister's birthday, which always feels almost like my own birthday. They're so close together on the calendar, and we've always been so aware of each other's turning moments. But these days, all of the moments feel like turning moments. Every one of them vibrates. Look, the trees are silhouetted against the darkening sky. Look, the crows are flying home.

Yesterday I learned that a dear family friend, Curtis Wells, had died overnight. Curtis was in his mid-80s and had been failing for years. He was in hospice so his death was not a surprise, but it was still a shock. Though he had been crippled and suffering for so long, he was always open-hearted, curious, affectionate; so interested in people of all ages; a hilarious storyteller; a collector of experiences and things; an adoring and beloved husband. Curtis was originally from Long Island, but moved to Mount Desert Island in the 1970s and built a house on a cove in West Tremont. Tom and I used to call him the Last of the Beatniks: sometimes it felt like he was barely making ends meet, barely keeping a roof over his head, yet he had an insouciance, a sweet naïveté, that made everyone love and trust him.

I met Curtis through his wife, Weslea. And I met Weslea in the very first poetry workshop I ever took, in 1999. My younger son was two years old, my older was five, and I had made the giant scary decision to leave the boys with Tom for the weekend and find out if I might possibly be a poet. Weslea was in my class, and we immediately bonded. She was older, more confident in herself; she took me seriously; and we began sending poems back and forth, began meeting at other workshops. A few years later she invited me to bring my family to the rental cottage she and Curtis owned on their property. And thus began our regular off-season trips to Mount Desert, to the sweetest cottage on the planet, which Curtis and Weslea offered to us for free, year after year, though god knows they needed the money and we didn't have any money to give them.

So we worked in their garden, stacked their wood, made them dinners, did a few little things to try to pay our way, and our families became entrenched in each other's lives. Now that the boys are grown, Tom and I continue to visit--these days, twice a year, in April and November--and this past spring Paul (the ex-two-year-old) and his partner came with us, to Curtis's delight.

During the summer, as I was putting together my newest poetry collection, I decided to dedicate it to three couples who have been huge parts of our family story, as thanks "for loving me, for loving Tom, for loving our children, for inviting us to park ourselves in your lives, for all these many years." Curtis and Weslea are one of those couples . . . friends who have shared their place on earth, shared their comedy, their intelligence, their elegy, who have loved all four of us so generously.

In November Tom and I will go back to the cottage, and Curtis will not be there to greet us, to sigh happily over the food we cook, to tell hilarious tales of delivering antique furniture to the capo of the Hell's Angels. This makes me so sad. But I'm thankful for all of the evenings we did spend together, so thankful to have seen him in the spring. Rest well, friend.

* * *

And then there's the other story of yesterday: the story of the severe thunderstorm that ripped a pair of giant branches off a backyard maple, tearing down the clotheslines and smashing a fence. Tom has his work cut out for him today, chainsaw-wise. Plus, we have a giant pile of green wood in the driveway and a friend coming over for dinner. Ah, life.

Such a good writing night last night! Three of us brought prompts, and all were exciting and odd and pushed us to enter into drafts through strange doors. I invented mine late in the afternoon, off the top of my head, and was extremely pleased by the dense drafts that erupted from it.  Here it is, printed as it appeared on the page I handed out:

* * *

Group 1: Stuff

 

reechy: smoky, squalid, dirty, rancid.

 

resinosis: in coniferous trees, an excessive flow of resin.

 

ruderate: pave with broken stone or rubble.

 

Sardoodledom: well-written but trivial or morally objectionable plays considered collectively; the milieu in which these are admired.

 

scabland: flat elevated land consisting of patchy poor thin soil with little vegetation over igneous rock.

 

Schreiklichkeit: literally, frightfulness; a deliberate military policy of terrorizing an enemy, especially a civilian population.

 

scrat:  wizard, goblin, monster, hermaphrodite.

 

quaff: a clever trick or stratagem.

 

quaesitum: that which is sought; the answer to a problem.

 

 

 

Group 2: Structure

 

We arrive as novices at every age of our life.

—Sébastien de Chamfort, 1778

 

A nonharmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against . . .

—Edward Said, c. 2003

 

[The] art had overgrown itself, risen out of the habitable regions of tradition, even before the startled gaze of human eyes, into spheres of the entirely and utterly and nothing—but personal.

           —Thomas Mann, 1947

 

Proper evaluation of words and letters

In their phonetic and associated sense

Can bring the peoples of earth

Into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom.

—Sun Ra, c. 1968

 

* * *

Group 1 is a set of definitions, lifted semi-randomly, from the N-Z volume of The Shorter OED. Group 2 is a set of quotations from things I've been reading lately.

The prompt went something like this:

Group 1 is a passel of material. Circle anything that attracts you for whatever reason. Group 2 is a variety of suggestions about structure, about arrangement, about how and/or why to put words together. Borrow whatever you like from the Stuff and Structure groups to create a first draft. You have 10 minutes to write.

This autumn clematis spills over the iron trellis that adorns the stone steps between our driveway and the neighbors' . . . a pathway that I call "Barry's Arch," in honor of our first mailman. All subsequent mail carriers have also used this route between the houses; it might have been made for their convenience because otherwise no one much uses it. When we moved into the house, the arch was empty, though someone without knowledge of rose habits had zip-tied dead branches to the iron. It was a depressing sight.

But now the clematis, which I planted two years ago, has exploded into glory. All day long it is vibrating with delighted bees, and it frames the mailman like a bride. He is a friendly guy, very enthusiastic about my cat, so I like to see him in such environs.

* * *

We've got another hot day in the offing. My hair, which yesterday was so sleekly cut and styled, has already returned to its wild ways. I have no control over it. My hair is beyond me. It is like a weird aunt: it does whatever it does, and I wince and hope it doesn't embarrass me too much in public.

Tonight, despite the hair, I'll go out and write. Today I'll lug a pile of winter coats to the dry cleaner, a job I ought to have undertaken months ago. And I'll probably make a batch of sauce for the freezer, and I'll do some reading and some planning for my high school classes, and I'll muck around with desk stuff--poems and paperwork. I expect to receive a small editing project later today, and I've got bigger ones waiting in the wings. But for the moment I'm still cruising among my own projects.

I don't feel as if I've been writing particularly well. Nonetheless, I'm keeping at it. If I'm not inspired, at least I'm mulish.

I am sitting here in my couch corner recovering from an extremely unpleasant dream about cleaning my parents' house, and am glad to be awake and listening to crickets and night sounds. The windows were closed all night and the machines roaring, but this morning I've turned everything off and opened the house to air, such as it is. The heat is going to kick back in, and I know I'll have to close the windows again within an hour or so. But for now I can listen to summer.

Yesterday our test kitchen/poetry lab/whatever-it's-called had our first meeting, and it was so good. Afterward my brain was pinging with excitement: I think this is going to be a thrilling experiment . . . once a month, four busy minds bouncing ideas off each other. Really, my poetry cup is overflowing now: Thursday-night generative sessions, reading projects with Teresa, now this discussion group . . . and none of it can be categorized as teaching or obligation. After so many lonesome writing decades, I seem to have stumbled into a happy ending.

Today I'll work at my desk, clean the upstairs rooms, get my hair cut. I'll go for a walk early, before the day heats up. Eventually I'll make ice tea and shrimp salad and maybe a batch of Thai summer rolls or a pitcher of gazpacho.

All the world's a stage.

 It's been such a good weekend--for my state of mind, certainly, and in other ways too. If Sunday was play-day, then Monday was big-job day: before noon I moved the entire wood pile from shed to cellar, and Tom stacked it all. This is why I do my exercises. Wood is heavy, repetitive work: all bending and lifting and throwing and wheelbarrow-shoving, hour upon hour, and I finished the morning feeling strong and capable and happy, all of my bones and muscles in order, my wind strong, my heart steady. Also I felt useful, which is not a thing that a poet often feels.

So that's part 1 of the big job done. Next weekend, we'll have part 2 to deal with: getting a pile of green wood into the shed. But for now, when I stump into the cellar with a laundry basket or a bag of potatoes, I can rest my eyes on the beautiful tight stacks, breathe in the perfume of forest and soil, imagine blizzards and cold rain . . . because, in the plain Harmony phrase that stands in for months of brute hard work--cutting, hauling, splitting, stacking--we got our wood in.

Today, however, I return to the life of a housewife-intellectual (read intellectual with as much irony as you'd like, though housewife is plain fact). I've got to grocery-shop and such this morning, and then this afternoon I'll be zoom-meeting with friends for our inaugural test kitchen/"let's talk about . . . " session. A month or so ago, I told you about this idea of Teresa's--to convene a group of four poets, all at about the same level of professional self-confidence, to talk about poems, poem-related things, goofy ideas, research struggles, whatever. Each of us will bring one issue to the table, and then we'll have at it. I'm so looking forward to this, so hoping that it can bring me out of my revision-workshop malaise. I'm excited to hear what the others will share. I myself plan to focus on "disconnect between speaker's voice and primary character's voice."

So, autumn! Welcome! I feel fizzy and fit, after weeks of anxious slog, and I'm in love, and I'm curious and excited, and I'm wearing summer dresses every chance I get. 

Yesterday turned out to be such a lovely day. At first light T and I went out for a bike ride together, just up to the cemetery, but it was so quiet and pleasant to be out on the streets on a temperate Sunday morning. Afterward we went our separate ways for the morning . . . he, upstairs to work on photo stuff; me, hanging laundry, reading, working in the flowerbeds, making a blueberry-nectarine pie. Then, around 2, we drove into town to our favorite oyster place and enjoyed a variety dozen; ambled up Washington Avenue to the cheese shop and bought a Chabichou, a slice of Devon blue, and some local sourdough rye; kept ambling until we got to the Frites Shack, where we ordered a bowl of duck-gravy poutine; then sat down at a table at Oxbow Brewery, drank beers, split our poutine, and played a game of cribbage. We came home ready for a nap, and later had a fine snack of toast and cheese and salad and pie.

This is one of our favorite weekend-afternoon dissipations: oysters, cheese, poutine, and beer, all available on the same street, and a seven-minute drive from home. It's fun to be out and about among the other dissipators, everyone soaking up the last rays of summer. It's fun to be pals: taste-testing oysters, trying each other's beers, eyeing the crowd, bumping up against each other like friendly puppies.

But I'll need to buckle down today. I've got to get back to chore land because it's wood-moving time. I'll clear space in the basement and then start wheelbarrowing dry wood out of the shed, tossing it down the hatch, stacking it for winter burning. It's only a cord's worth, but moving it still takes more time than I think it should, and today will be warm.

Now, for a few more moments, I'm lingering over my coffee. The neighborhood jay is squawking. The cat reclines on the floorboards, washing his paws. Blotches of new sunlight pattern the dark-green maples. I let the first tasks of the day roll slowly through my mind . . . hang out the wash, broom-sweep the kitchen floor, refresh the cat water bowls, mow the backyard grass, slice up tomatoes, peppers, and onions, start simmering a pot of sauce . . .

Upstairs T clanks his coffee cup and sighs. The other day I told him that I've decided to never fight with him again. Not that we ever fight, much. "But why waste our time together?" I said. He didn't argue.

The morning is sticky and crickety, humid ambiance of late summer, though the darkness is pure autumn. The insect buzz is unrelenting, a kind of planetary tinnitus: is it nature or just the inside of my head? And now a jay squawks: pauses: squawks again. Despite the streetlights and the dusky shadows, the day birds have sailed into their kingdom.

Yesterday I filled a bushel-basket with kale, a real farm harvest from my tiny plot. I sat outside to clean it for washing and blanching--ripping away stems, tearing the leathery leaves into pieces. I sat under the shadow of the black-lace elderberry, with its feather leaves; I sat beside a riot of cosmos and zinnias . . . a nest, an arbor, tucked beside the plain unstylish house, with its worn vinyl siding and stupid vinyl shutters. Beauty and ugliness: they'd better learn to get along.

The basket of kale cooked down to three packed quart bags, enough for six winter meals. Otherwise, the freezer stash is pretty thin: just a couple of bags of blueberries, a couple of bags of foraged mushrooms, half a quart of tomato sauce, a bag of green beans. I do have plenty of freshly dried herbs and a decent garlic crop curing in the shed, and it's possible I'll collect enough cucumbers for refrigerator pickles. But I doubt I'll do any canning. The pepper crop is a bust. The tomatoes may give me a few quarts of future sauce but no more than that. Still, there's firewood on the way, and that's always a comfort. We will be warm, no matter what.

At this time of year, all of my nerves strain toward harvest and battening down . . . though of course there's no reason for me to act this way. I live in town; I am not in any way self-sufficient. This is all an illusion. Nonetheless, the season works upon me.

I finished rereading Jane Eyre yesterday and now I am at loose ends. I need to dig out another novel; I need to figure out what my brain longs for. The house is tidy, but my thoughts are not. They pile up in corners like old newspapers.

In a month I'll turn 59, last year of a pretend youth. I am feeling my age . . . the elegy of my long love affair with life. I have adored being on earth.

 A friend called from Deer Isle yesterday and cried, "It's fair weather!" He meant the Blue Hill Fair, but for me Labor Day weekend is always the Harmony Fair. Podunk little community obligation that it is, I loved being part of it, the way the entire town focuses on nothing else for three days, the way the kids run wild and the parents bump up against each other in strange venues--vegetable judging, demolition derby--and everyone is dusty and stringy-haired and overtired and surviving on a diet composed solely of French fries.

But no fair for me this year. Last year Tom, Paul, and I drove to the homeland for the occasion and judged in the exhibit hall and spent a few days in Wellington and wallowed in elegy and French fries. But this year, we're home--T and I in the little northern city, P in NYC--and I daresay we will not eat one single fry the whole weekend.

Instead, I will mow grass and freeze kale, both of which I meant to do yesterday, but I got caught up in phone meetings and the day bustled past me. Still, I did manage to make the first tomato sauce of the season--a rich and spicy mix: half poured over bucatini for dinner, half tucked into the freezer. And Teresa and I wrestled our way through a Donne session, and I hacked at a poem blurt that seems to want to be a formal sonnet, and I mopped the floors and cleaned a bathroom and refreshed all of the flowers in the vases, and I went to bed in crisp line-dried sheets . . .

Which is to say, I carved out a day that made me feel like myself. I am a sensualist, in the most PG-rated way. In dreams I stride down the aisles of train cars in fabulous swishy silk dresses a la Myrna Loy. In real life I linger over a spoonful of homemade chocolate pudding topped with freshly whipped cream. I bury my face in a stiff clean bath towel smelling of sky. I stare at vases of bright flowers, at spotless kitchen counters, at bowls of tomatoes, at wood fires, at cardinals on fences. I listen to the same song over and over and over. I can't get enough: always, I can't get enough. The greed of the skin, the greed of the ear. I have no idea if this is a sin or a blessing.

It's 51 degrees this morning, the coolest it's been for months. Downstairs windows are closed; bathrobe is snugged tight; coffee is hot and comforting. Autumn has stepped onto the stage.

I went out to write last night, and now, in the aftermath of that sociable hard work, I'm feeling both buoyed and strengthened. I don't know that either blurt will be a poem, but surprise and new thought are good-enough accomplishments.

So today, here in my small corner of the world, I'll try to recapture a little of last night's sweetness. Friendship and sympathy, embraced via words: To quote myself, "The driving force behind poems is a longing to communicate with our own kind."

It will be a quiet day . . . Undertaking my exercise regimen. Washing sheets and towels and floors. Freezing kale. Talking with Teresa about Donne. Fidgeting through job paperwork. Mooning over poem drafts.

What can I do to stay eager and loving? Whatever it is, I must do it all the time.