Here, in the south, we had cold rain all day yesterday, but Monson got four inches of snow, so my afternoon drive will be glittering. In the meantime the furnace grumbles and chants. It's 34 degrees in Portland--not quite a frost but close. Happy Halloween, happy winter. I won't be home to distribute the candy, but I've got T set up with a bowl of Junior Mints and peanut-butter cups, and he can do with them what he will.

I wrote yesterday that I wanted to tell you about the book I've recently finished: Scott Zesch's The Captured, a history of a series of kidnappings that took place in the Texas hill country during the 1860s and 1870s. The kidnapped were mostly the children of German immigrants who had settled into this area, roughly edged by San Antonio to the south, Austin to the east, and the Colorado River to the north--a wild scrubby region smack in the middle of Comanche and Apache hunting grounds. Many of these settlers did not speak English: they identified as Germans rather than Texans, and for a while they prided themselves on having worked out their own treaty with the Comanches . . . that is to say, the farmers were under the delusion that the tribe was willing to negate not only its own long history with the landscape but also its own long history of raiding and warfare, which was key to how it had survived for millennia. Be what you're not: it seems that white people are always suggesting this as a solution.

In any case, the treaty didn't stick, and the Comanche and Apache raids intensified. Horses were a primary target, but children were targeted too. It's not entirely clear why, but it seems to have been a longstanding practice between warring factions: likely to replace their own killed children, sometimes also as pawns for ransom. The children they took were generally between the ages of 7 and 12--beyond toddlerhood but not too old to assimilate into the tribe. Sometimes a raiding party would sweep up a child who was out tending sheep; he would just vanish. Sometimes they would launch a full-scale attack on a lonely cabin or settlement, killing the men; raping, scalping, and killing the women; murdering the smallest children; and then absconding with the older ones. In any case, the moment of capture was intensely traumatic.

But what happened next? The children became members of the tribe. They were adopted into families. They learned to ride and hunt and raid, if they were boys. The girls were absorbed into a protective community of women. Within a few months, many of the captives had completely forgotten how to speak German or English. Some had even forgotten where they used to live. They had become Comanches.

How did this happen so quickly? And so completely? For the most part, these children did not want to return to their white families. When they were "rescued," they resisted. Some wasted away and died. All were "odd" for the rest of their lives, unable to fully reenter the white world. They had seen horrors during their capture, but they did not hold that against the Comanches. For the rest of their lives they defended the Natives and Native ways.

Scott Zesch is both a good historian and a good storyteller, and I found this book almost impossible to put down. He probes the question of why but is willing to live in ambiguity, and I appreciate that. The pain of losing a child, for both the settlers and the Comanches, is visceral. The tale is a tragedy. But it is also a story of freedom for these children, these scions of nose-to-the-grindstone 19th-century Lutherans . . .  a sudden new world in which play and adventure and tangled hair in the wind replaced building fences and chopping wood and grubbing up stumps. There were things about their first lives that they were happy to forget. Why even hold on to its language?

I have led my final class for the Frost Place. But the weekend went well, if you discount the fact that I was sick through the whole thing. And perhaps being sick is what's protecting me (and you) from the wallows of elegy this morning.

After a weekend on the the job, I have one day at home before I head north to teach high schoolers. Then home on Wednesday, and on Saturday T and I will drive to Mount Desert Island for a few days. These have become twice-yearly visits, and usually they are pure delight, but our friend Curtis died over the summer, so this will be a different sort of weekend . . . one spent helping out with repairs and weeding and whatever other support his wife needs from us--and mourning the loneliness of a world without Curtis. Still, we'll be waking up by the sea, in the sweetest cottage I know. It will be a hard weekend but also a rich one.

I do hope that this cold will have released me from its grip by then. I hope it will release me by tomorrow so that I can get through my next round of teaching without mishap. This is not a serious illness, but it's relentless, and it's wearing me out.

And today I have to edit; I have to grocery-shop; I have to fork myself back into my exercise regimen. There's no space in this week for a sick day, and I'm not even really that sick. Last night T and I walked around the corner for dinner out with our neighbor, and that was a really nice ending to the day. Fun can happen! I need to remind this cold that it's not the boss of me.

I meant to write to you this morning about the book I just finished, Scott Zesch's The Captured. Maybe I'll save that note for tomorrow because my thoughts need some space, and I've already used up a lot already. It's a book I highly recommend, one that surprised and captivated me in a number of ways. It's also a terrible, painful story. I look forward to telling you about it.

My class went well, though I kept having to mute myself so I wouldn't cough through people's readings. I think I drank ten cups of tea yesterday, and possibly the participants could hear me slosh. However, they were nice enough not to say anything.

Homer always makes for good conversation, but he is particularly relevant in conversations about violence, perception, manipulation, and morality . . . all of which people needed to talk about yesterday. He was the right poet at the right time, as I guessed he might be.

So, today: more Homer--and with the new morning a new weather world, as yesterday's 80-degree Eden lurches into today's 40-degree Maine. I did nothing outside yesterday, other than take a short walk before class and sit in the grass with the cat afterward. I hope you took better advantage of our brief paradise.

It's impossible to reconcile such soft sweetness with the harshness of the sorrow in Maine. Homer would not even try. There is no reconciliation. Both exist. They do not explain one another. But they spill into one another.

It can be hard to be a poet because a poet doesn't solve anything. Our talent is to see too much; our vocation is to transcribe what we see so that the reader sees it too. Even so, we constantly mis-see and misunderstand. Homer saw everything, but even his everything was opaque. The women, the slaves, the children, the animals are often blurred and blank. Still, his everything is so much, sometimes too much. The Iliad is one long poem of too much.

The manhunt is over, and that is a massive relief. My neighbor was comparing the atmosphere of the past few days to the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, when suburban Boston was frozen in place. My assumption all along was that this guy had killed himself, but of course no one could bank on that. So this morning it is a small sliver of relief to unlock the back door and let the cat out and in . . . and not be imagining.

Yesterday I speculated that I'd have some refracted knowledge of the people involved, and that's turned out to be true. A poet friend knows the killer's family. T works with electricians from Lewiston who have friends in the hospital. My neighbor knows the homicide team at the attorney general's office. Many of my friends know the governor.

I'm sure other connections will also unfold, but already you can see how tightly interwoven the Maine community is. The governor is a poet and a lawyer. My neighbor is a lawyer who used to work for the governor when she was the attorney general. I am a poet who has been published in anthologies with the governor. It's all so odd.

Anyway, the cops found the body. And that will uncrick the muscles in my neck ever so slightly as I fortify myself to teach today. I'm not feeling 100 percent well--this cold will not die, and all of the rest I snagged in Brooklyn has vanished into a new blanket of weariness . . . not just a result of the cold but triggered by the tension of the past few days.

But I did manage to get the house clean yesterday, to get the sheets and towels washed and dried and folded. I planted garlic and bagged up branches and did some raking and weeding. I made dinner and watched a couple innings of the World Series. I felt like crap all day but sitting around would have been worse.

And now I'll spend two days talking about Homer. I hope it will be the right place to be. I think it will.

Plus, it's my younger son's birthday. Twenty-six years with this dear one: what luck!

The atmosphere in southern Maine is grim. Schools were closed yesterday; so were many businesses and even the big local grocery store chain. I suspect many towns will close schools again today, given that the killer is still on the loose. Or he's dead, but of course nobody knows.

Maine is a tough place to implement a manhunt. Even close to the state's largest cities there's a lot of forest, a lot of water. There are abandoned mills and river islands and thousands of tiny coves folding in against the coast. The Coast Guard is patrolling up and down the Kennebec and Androscoggin, and I'm sure teams are spreading into the woods. But the territory is vast.

Meanwhile, the death toll has become clear: eighteen people killed, more than a dozen injured. It was cornhole night at the bar, youth night at the bowling alley. Wednesday's harmless pleasures.

Maine is such an odd state. It is massive in land area but also relatively unpopulated. Everyone who's lived here for a while knows someone who knows somebody else that I know . . . the links of connection are long and elastic. I don't know if I'll personally know anyone who was killed or injured in Lewiston, but I'll undoubtedly know people who know them or who know the first responders--for instance, the doctor son of a poet friend who spent all of Wednesday night triaging in the ER.

Maine is also a state that is packed with guns. In a way it's surprising that this level of bloodshed hasn't happened here earlier. But I wonder if that has to do with the kind of guns that are popular here. Deer and moose hunting is a primary activity, but for many people it's also a primary food source: there's a lot of poverty in Maine, and a deer in the freezer is no small benefit. But you can't hunt food with an assault rifle. If you're going to own a gun for hunting season, that's not the one you'd have.

This is rank speculation; I have no idea what the facts of the matter are. Still, I wonder.

I woke up this morning to an email from a friend: "I hope you are okay." I was bewildered; why wouldn't I be? And then I saw the news: at least 22 people shot dead in Lewiston, Maine, because they'd made the mistake of going bowling.

Lewiston is about 30 miles away from us: home of Bates College, home also of a hospital where I spent a week with a sick son in 2017. That hospital is now lined with bodies on stretchers.

I scanned the article about the shooting in today's Portland Press Herald. It is the deadliest shooting ever in Maine, but the reporter also made sure to mention other famous deadly shootings. On the list was Steven Lake's murder of his family in Dexter . . . the murders that ruined the lives of dear Harmony friends, that crucially scarred the life of my own child. But, hey, it's famous so let's keep the PTSD alive. Because mine is pinging now.

Another chilly morning. Outside, a train rumbles past. In the distance, a truck hoists itself into gear. Everyone is going somewhere.

My mind is still vacation-confused: I keep forgetting the day of the week, keep sliding around on the slick edges of routine, but I did get the laundry done, I did turn in an editing project, I did manage to plan and execute a meal. Today will be easier. Part of the problem is that I caught yet another minor cold, my second one this month. It's no big deal, as colds go, but it's adding just enough brain fuzz to make everything seem a little bit difficult.

Anyway, today: exercise, editing, class planning, emailing, housework, groceries, an afternoon walk with my neighbor. I'm juggling two books: Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds and Scott Zesch's The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier. I learned about the latter book in the afterword to Paulette Jiles's News of the World, and so far it's extremely interesting. I've always been intrigued by captivity narratives and the way in which children, especially, were absorbed so completely into an entirely different family and culture. Intrigued and terrified, of course.

My work life is so busy right now--so much editing, and then I'll be zoom-teaching all weekend, then teaching up north next week. My visit to Brooklyn was a delight, but it was also entirely social. Writing a poem feels very far away.

I woke up this morning in my own bed, in my own chilly house, and now I'm sitting in my couch corner listening to my own furnace run, feeling the dusty warmth steal over my bare ankles, holding my small cup of coffee between my two cold hands. Outside it's 36 degrees, by far our chilliest morning of the season. Welcome home to Maine.

Today I've got to deal with laundry; I've got to figure out what food is in the house, what basic housework hasn't been done; and then I'll need to reinsert myself back into my work: editing, prepping for the weekend class, answering emails, etc. The usual breathless arrival, back into the world of obligation.

I did very little reading this past weekend. Mostly I walked and talked and walked and talked . . . miles of both. It will be good, and sad, to return to the land of quiet.

 Greetings from the couch of a third-floor walkup filled with shadows . . . silhouetted oak leaves blowing and rippling across the walls, headlights carving angles into the high ceiling. Down on the street a bus sighs heavily; a train rumbles below the pavement, rattling the house; truck brakes squeal; the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway whooshes in to fill any small silence. Constant noise and light--yet somehow also peaceful. This high apartment is like a bird's nest tucked among the street trees. Already I am quite fond of it.

This afternoon I'll head back north to Maine, after a weekend spent walking and talking and eating and sleeping . . . head back into my busy editing week, which will fold into a weekend filled with teaching, which will fold into another week of travel.

I'll be glad to be home, but I've also been so glad to be here with my dear ones--doing, on the whole, nothing much, though last night I made them dinner--steak with fried grapes, sautéed peppers and onions, roasted potatoes. The weather has been windy and autumnal; my hair has been sticking up like a cartoon crazy person's; for three days I've read hardly any books.

According to my phone, I walked 10 miles yesterday. Much of that happened at the Bronx Zoo, which turns out to be enormous. P and I were on our feet for more than four hours, and we still didn't see everything. Rhinos were our favorite, hands-down. They parade in a very dignified manner. Afterward we met our friend Steve in the East Village, then eventually made our way back to Brooklyn and Mexican food.

This morning I'm footsore but still ready to go. I'm hauling my suitcase over to P's place; then probably we'll head to Walt Whitman's favorite church and after that who knows what? I am bumping through the world, amoeba-like.

Yesterday I dozed on the bus, took a nap before dinner, was in bed by 10:30, then slept hard till 6:45. Apparently I am tired. Though I didn't intend to spend my weekend sleeping, my body says otherwise, and that is fine.

Yesterday and last night, I hung out at the bar in Brooklyn while Ray prepped for his shift. I drank my horchata and ate a snack, including a lovely beet and pear salad presented to me by Patrick, one of the bartenders. Eventually I went back to the apartment for the aforementioned nap, then came back to the bar to meet Steve and Paul and Lily, and the three of us went out to an Italian restaurant up the street.  (I hate squid-ink spaghetti with crabmeat.) And then there was another brief interlude at the bar before I went home to bed.

Lest you imagine that all I do in NYC is drink, understand that the bar is merely our version of Grand Central Station. All things pass through it in my Brooklyn life. Ray and Steve have owned it since 2004; the boys have been clambering up on the barstools since they were pipsqueaks. It's like everyone's living room away from home.

Today I'll spend a little more time awake. In a few minutes I'll clamber out of bed, shower, and then take the train out to Paul's new apartment. We'll have breakfast (apparently at a Slovakian place whose name translates as Snail), and then we'll take a very long train ride to the Bronx zoo, where I have never been. I am looking forward to seeing an ostrich. Eventually we'll meet up with the rest of the gang in Manhattan to visit a bagel shop made entirely of felt. (Yes, NYC has everything.) Then dinner, etc.

Wishing you a Saturday with plenty of naps, if that seems to be required.

Greetings from the bus. The sky over I-95 South is dense with cloud as dawn unrolls over this corridor of road, already bustling with headlights and taillights. This bus is extremely comfortable. I got into line early enough to snag a desirable single seat, and here I have established my little island of books and notebook and crossword puzzles and sandwich and water bottle. There is always a stupid movie running on the bus screens--at the moment, it's Bee Movie, which I do not watch as I cannot abide Pixar humor, but I do occasionally glance at it, anthropologically.

Rain is on the way: New York will be wet when we arrive, at about 1 p.m., and I will drag my stuff through downpour or drizzle to Grand Central Station and trundle down through the damp tunnels toward the Brooklyn lines. I've got my raincoat, my waterproof boots; I am ready to be soaked.

It's always a funny feeling to travel alone. I enjoy the sensation. It's pleasant to have to figure out everything myself, also pleasant to do exactly what I feel like doing: dawdle, waste time, not make the intellectual/cultural most out of every minute. My only goal today, other than getting to Brooklyn, is to buy an horchata at the Mexican restaurant next to my friend Ray's bar. An horchata, you might already know, is a lovely cold cinnamon and rice drink, and I always want one and hardly ever get one.

Otherwise, I travel at the will of wind and rain and bus driver and, later today, at the will of my son and my friends, all of whom will have plenty of thoughts about how I should spend my weekend. I plan to go along with every good idea; I plan to be entirely docile and cheerful, as long as no one makes me stay up too late or drink too much beer.

Now day has actually arrived, and the bus is speeding smoothly through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the red and gold trees along the breakdown lanes are still thick with leaves, and the tractor-trailers sail past like arrows, and I am floating in a jitney bubble and not one person on this bus knows my name.

Thursday, and my last day at home for a while, which I will spend trying to get too much done in too few hours . . . desk work, house work, wrapping birthday presents, doing laundry, running errands, packing . . . gah. But I'm going to start the day with a walk--almost hoping I don't find any mushrooms along the way so that I don't have to add "deal with mushrooms" to my list. Almost hoping. 

I have zero plans for NYC, other than to spend as much time as possible with my son and our friends. So I don't have to pack books or dress clothes for readings, etc., which will make my hauling-heavy-stuff-up-and-down-subway-stairs life much easier--though it's supposed to rain this weekend, which slops up matters some.

Anyway, for the moment I'm doing nothing much. The house is still warm from last night's good fire. I made split-pea soup for dinner, with garlic bread and a salad of sautéed red peppers and kale. Apple pie for dessert. It was a fine autumn meal, filled with end-of-the-season herbs, my own kale and carrots, gift apples from the neighbors, a ham bone and a baguette from the shop around the corner. Afterward, T and I curled up under a couch blanket and played Yahtzee. The cat sprawled on the hearthrug. We were a cozy scene from a Dickens novel; all we needed was a sudden knock at the door, and who is this mysterious stranger stepping onto our humble stage, wrapped in a black cloak, coated in snow, hat pulled low to shade his face, bearing a weather-stained letter from foreign lands? . . .

And here I am, home again, after a fun overnight in the north  country with friends, then a busy energetic day in class, and a long drive home. I was so tired last night that I collapsed into bed at 8:15, yet my brain still kept ticking away: thinking about how the class had gone, what I might do with the kids next time. I find teaching so absorbing and all-consuming. I have no idea how anyone can do it full time; I am mush after every class.

The theme for the day was change, and we looked at two poems: the Inuit lyric I posted here a few days ago and Fady Joudah's "Mimesis." The kids are adept conversationalists about poems: they spent a great deal of time concentrating on the heavy lifting that the repetition of "and" does in the Inuit poem . . . and this was not something I needed to coax out of them. Likewise, in the Joudah poem, they immediately latched onto the the notion of cause and effect, the power of the "if-then" turn. Their responses to prompts were great too, and this time I had them do some group work as well: playing with "if-then" statements; pairing up with one another to read and comment on new drafts and then present their partner's draft to the rest of us. It was a lively day, and already they're starting to tease me, which is an excellent sign for the future.

Today I've got to cope with a pile of laundry and a pile of editing, plus do my exercises, plus clean the upstairs rooms, plus run errands: hunting down a ham bone for split pea soup, preordering a turkey for Thanksgiving, acquiring a few supplies for my NYC jaunt. The day will be busy busy . . . if I can hoist myself out of this couch corner.

If I can't: well, that will be another sort of story.

First light creeps into the clearing; it tangles among the tall trees.

And now an owl screams . . . again . . . and then again.

Some small warm animal will not see another day.

The warmth of yesterday's baking and last night's wood fire still lingers in the downstairs rooms. Outside, a little rain, and the cat, puffy-tailed and belligerent, swaggers back inside after spending five minutes in the damp.

My to-do list is starting to trickle through my thoughts. Ahead of me: a morning filled with get-stuff-done--batches of emails, batches of editing, laundry, packing, printing for class--before I hit the road for the north. This afternoon and tonight I'll be with homeland friends and then tomorrow, very early, I'll drive along the gravel roads to Kingsbury Pond, turn right onto an empty logging route, glowing with wet autumn color, then left onto the Moosehead road to climb the long, long slope to Monson.

The homeland is always so vivid in my mind . . . especially in autumn, in these late elegiac days.

Yesterday T and I had joyous and unexpected news: our boys have decided that they and their partners want to come to Maine for Thanksgiving. In recent years both have headed elsewhere for the holiday--to friends' or partners' houses--and mostly T and I have gone alone to one or the other set of parents. But magically, this year the kids have decided to descend onto the the little northern city by the sea, so I'll have the excitement and the pleasure of cooking a giant meal for them, of basking in their sweet and hilarious company. And I didn't even coax! They planned this all themselves.

I've got lots and lots of travel ahead this fall, but Thanksgiving, thank goodness, will be at home with a houseful.

I slept until 6:45 this morning--shockingly late for me--then woke up confused, thinking that Tom hadn't set his alarm for work, that we were terribly late, etc., etc. What a relief to discover that it was Sunday, the perfect day for oversleeping . . . but of course by that time I was wide awake and ready to get up.

Still, it's fun to celebrate the weekend by sleeping in. It's such a rare occurrence in my life. Who knows when it will happen again?

Yesterday was a productive and enjoyable day. I emptied and rolled up the hoses for storage, did a bunch of autumn pruning, and mowed grass for the last time of the season. Tom put away the yard furniture and the air conditioner and restocked the shed with snow equipment. My next few weekends are packed with activity, and I'm relieved that winter won't sneak up on us while I'm otherwise engaged.

Then we went for a brisk walk and, in the evening, we dressed up nice and went out for my delayed birthday dinner--to Miyake, one of our very favorite restaurants in Portland, which has an incredible Japanese menu and is not all that easy to get into. It was a treat to sit side by side sharing mysteriously wonderful plates that we could never replicate at home. 

Afterward, we walked arm in arm through the busy Old Port, back to our car, and then we wove our way home, a ten-minute journey: up the hill to busy Congress Street and down the other side, past the big hotel, through the shadow dance of Bayside and the big oak-cradled park, curving into Deering (once its own town) and the traffic-light wilderness of Forest Avenue, around crazy Woodfords Corner, over the railroad track, and then a quick left turn from the blare into our dark and quiet hamlet.

How strange, how strange to live in the midst.

Tomorrow I'll hit the road, heading north; home on Tuesday evening, a couple of catchup days, and on Friday the bus south to the big city. So today I've got errands to run: groceries, and also birthday shopping for my New York City sweethearts. But I think I'll find time to finally work on that sonnet-blurt and possibly even start sketching out the new essay idea that's been percolating in my mind. The weather will be cool and sunny. The housework is under control. Dinner can be simple--maybe bucatini with leftover chicken and mushrooms; maybe a ginger-apple pie. Oh, October, you are dear to me.

I dreamed last night that T and I had bought another house--a shabby, old-style cottage beside a dammed pond, with the stream flowing nearly under the porch boards. Throughout the whole dream I kept muttering flood zone to myself. The cottage was painted dark red, and it was filled with old furniture and knickknacks that had belonged to some bygone elderly couple: floors layered in rugs over plywood over linoleum, every surface packed with somebody else's stuff. And outside, water flowing through a stony decaying dam. The dream was remarkably clear, and it remains clear in my waking mind: the way the house tucked up against the pond, the layout of the tiny rooms, my worries about flooding yet the inevitability of the move . . . we have to buy this place; there's no sense in trying to change fate.

Now, awake, I'm sad that I'll never actually glimpse that pond, that dam, that stream through the kitchen window of that little house. The cottage was not in itself charming, but the geography of the cottage, the relationship of window to exterior world, remains poignant in my mind. I don't know where we were--Scotland, perhaps; or maybe just Maine; or maybe a fairytale north: a land with a gray sky stretching high over gray water.

Now, awake, I sit in my own real-life shabby cottage, tucked into a curve of quiet city street, surrounded on four sides by sleeping neighbors, and above the houses a single early-bird gull carves the day's first flight pattern between estuary and shore.

My small cup of black coffee is hot and strong. The cat licks a paw, then paces upstairs and dives back into the bedroom. The cranky dehumidifier growls too loudly in the basement.

Yesterday, on our zoom call, Teresa and Jeannie and I talked about shadow boxes and sonnets and old poems that circle back to become the foundation of new work. We talked about the way our childhood landscapes are etched so sharply into our minds . . . we still count every stone in the walk; name every neighbor's mailbox; recall each storefront on the route to school. Teresa's land was urban, Jeannie's was suburban, mine was the Pennsylvania farm--but we all retain vivid awareness of our bodies in that place.

The past couple of days have cohered into a rich ripple of communal thought . . . writing with one group of poet friends on Thursday; talking with another set of poet friends on Friday afternoon. What humbling good fortune, to be able to listen to these generous minds at work.

Friday, 42 degrees, and too dark outside to see my hand in front of my face. Autumn creeps forward, a few steps closer to winter every day. Still, I haven't turned on the furnace yet; we haven't had a frost yet. The zinnias still wave cheerfully along the sidewalk, and the garden is flush with greens.

I may have produced a decent draft-blurt out of last night's writing salon. Anyway, I'm hoping to dig out a chance to look at it today. I have to prep for my Monson class this morning, and I need to clean the downstairs rooms, and I've got a zoom meeting this afternoon with my poetry test-kitchen gang, and of course the editing goes on and on and on. But I might find a way to steal an hour for a poem. I might.

These days all I do is work, and the weekend will be work too . . . battening the little homestead down for the winter. But on Saturday night T and I are going out for my delayed birthday dinner, and next weekend will be play: two full days in the city, slow travel on either end. I'm very much looking forward to the treat.

In the meantime I'll scrabble through my hours, remembering now and then that I'm lucky to have them. And lucky to have a quick step and a strong back and a this-n-that brain that can jump from task to task like a flea. Lucky to have a kid who's excited that I'm coming to visit him. Lucky to have a partner who's pleased that I'm getting the chance. Lucky to have enough work to pay for the bus ticket.

 5 a.m.

Coffee and quiet, except for the dehumidifier in the basement, which has recently started growling like a wolverine. Probably it's about to die, but so be it. I found it free on the street three or four years ago, and it's already outlived all expectations.

Today will be yet another desk day--two editing projects to juggle, class planning to start--but I'll take a walk before I buckle down, and I also hope to go out to the salon to write this evening. I'm overwhelmed with work: too much, too much, especially with that New York trip looming and all of my travel up north. But I'll get things under control somehow; and no doubt, in the not too distant future, I'll be complaining again about being underemployed. The freelance cycle always functions by extremes.

Anyway, for the moment things are peaceful. I'm sitting in my couch corner in a tidy tiny living room. The teakettle purrs, the clock ticks. I'm not yet reading the news and collapsing into the vicarious horrors of the humankind.

[And I think over again]

 

anonymous Inuit poet, translator unknown

 

And I think over again,
my small adventures,
when with a shore wind I drifted out
in my canoe,
and thought I was in danger--
my fears,
those I thought so big,
for all the vital things
I had to get to and reach.

And yet, there is only one thing,
one great thing--
to live to see in huts and on journeys
the great day that dawns,
and the light that fills the world.

Wood stove weather has arrived, and our tiny heater is at its best at this time of year--enough oomph to cut the evening chill and keep me from turning on the furnace just yet. Yesterday afternoon I lit a fire and then made an early dinner so that T and I could go out to a showing of The Bride of Frankenstein at the film archive, which is a funny little warehouse down by the docks stacked with cans of 16-millimeter film. They host a Tuesday-night series that T loves, and that I sometimes attend, and last night I was in the mood to see Elsa Lanchester's crazy hairdo and some mad science equipment, so off we went.

Two movies in one week: that's a lot of movie outings for me; but it's been fun. And when we got home, the house was still cozy from the dying embers, and the cat was feeling peppy again after spending all day recovering from his vaccines, so the three of us sat on the couch and played Yahtzee and visited. Well, the cat didn't play Yahtzee, but you get the idea.

Visited is my Harmony friend Linda's term. "Some church folks dropped by and we visited." When Linda and I visit, I ask how her grandchildren are doing and she asks me how my sons are doing. And then we talk about changes in the town, and health problems, and whether or not her husband is likely to get a deer into the freezer this fall, but we avoid poetry like the plague.

Even though I'm not on the road this week, I've been busy--meetings almost every day, plus lots of desk work. Today will be more of the same: exercise regimen, then editing all morning, then a meeting about teaching conference stuff, and then I ought to clean the upstairs rooms and figure out something or other for dinner . . . maybe an Italian-style stuffed meatloaf: greens, olives, almonds, breadcrumbs. Next Monday I'll drive north again, teach on Tuesday, and on Friday I'll head to NYC for four days in the city. This week is practically a nap compared to what's ahead, and it's good I got my sick days out of the way.

Yesterday was a mixed bag: a friend from the northlands stopped by to tell me about a bad diagnosis, the cat got sick from his annual shots, work stuff was aggravating. But on the other hand there were sunlight and late blossoms; a good baseball game on the radio; a dinner of panfried smelts, lemon and yogurt, buttery chard, wild rice with wild mushrooms, roasted eggplant and tomatoes, and apple crisp. There was a phone call from one son and a long text about books from the other. There were cardinals hopping on the fence and clean sheets on the bed and a fire in the wood stove and my head in the lap of my beloved.

That is how things go, I guess: we are whipped back and forth among sadness and terror, peace and silliness, desire and irritation . . . and meanwhile the headlines blare, and the innocents and the guilty die or crawl away, and the skies roil with clouds, they roil with stars.

It's Monday and I've more or less recovered from that ugly cold. Yesterday I caught up on the housework I couldn't face on Friday. Then T and I went for a walk at Wolfe's Neck State Park and then out to dinner for fried clams with our neighbor; after that, a solid night's sleep, and this morning, here I am, apparently a regular human being.

It's supposedly a state holiday today, but both T and I have to work. I'll be home all week (no trips up north till next Monday), but my calendar is dotted with phone meetings, a vet appointment today, and probably other stuff I'm not remembering, plus the usual desk obligations. I need to get back into the swing of my exercise regimen, which also had a head cold last week. I need to deal with some yard and garden stuff. It feels great not to be sick anymore. Now I'm merely frazzled.

Despite the stupid cold, I had a really nice birthday. In the morning T and I walked over to Norimoto, a fantastic Japanese-influenced bakery in our neighborhood, and acquired various tidbits, which we took home for breakfast. Then, after lunch, we went to a matinee showing of the Talking Heads's rereleased concert film, Stop Making Sense, which we'd first seen together at the Bryn Mawr Cinema in 1985. And then, back home, T made hash for dinner, and we watched an old Connery-era James Bond before bed. It was an excellent slow party for a celebrant with a head full of socks.

This morning I feel better, thanks to yesterday's coddling plus a decent night's sleep. For the moment it's still raining outside, but the day is supposed to brighten. I need to grocery-shop and finish the housework I was too sick to manage on Friday, and maybe I'll go for a forage walk . . . not that I need any more wild mushrooms in the freezer, but I can't resist the joy of the hunt. I wish you were here so I could present you with a bag.

I'm still reading Peter Taylor's short stories; I'm still procrastinating on sending out poems to journals; I'm still frowning over terrible news stories; I'm still blowing my raw nose and blinking my raw eyes. And rain is pattering onto the roof, and so far there's no sign of daybreak, and the clock ticks, and kitchen lamplight casts a glow onto a bouquet of late roses, red as polish.

what would the world be

were it not filled with

the incessant bustling of the poet

among the birds and stones

from "A Tale," by Zbigniew Herbert

I woke up this morning, too early, coughing and congested, and T murmured, "Want me to make you some coffee?" It is my 59th birthday and he is sad that I am sick for it. I thanked him and said, no, I'd be better off upright anyhow. So here I am, at 5 a.m., sitting on the couch with my cup of self-made coffee, feeling marginally better than yesterday, I think, so happy birthday to me.

Usually, on this holiday, I muse a bit about my year, about my state of mind, about getting older. Maybe I'll still end up doing that as this letter unrolls, but head colds aren't great triggers of elegy. Today I'm welcoming the last year of my 50s by noticing that I can now breathe out of one of my nostrils. Isn't that great?

Earlier in the week T and I had made plans to drive to the midcoast and check out an unfamiliar beach, to book reservations at a good restaurant for dinner. But today will be rainy and windy, and I'm so stuffed up that it's a question as to whether or not I'll be able to taste anything I eat. It's not looking like an ideal day for fun.

Nonetheless, I'll be hanging out with a guy who was willing to get out of bed at 5 a.m. to bring me coffee and a kiss, so I know it will be a good day anyhow, even if we do nothing but walk around the block in the rain.

In this, the final year of my 50s,  I am still trying to write poems, I am still not earning enough money, I am still beaming over my young people and fretting over my parents, I am still basking in thirty-odd years of a big romance. So what's different? I'm scrabbling into a new work venture at Monson Arts, so that's one new thing. And I'm in a new place with friends; that's another thing. Over the course of this past year, several of my friendships have deepened, become more complex and interesting, often with writing and reading as a center of that shift, but not always. It's been exciting, to be as old as I am and still discover that it's possible to enter into these kinds of soul-relationships with other people.

I've got dear friends from college, dear friends from my young-parent years, dear friends from Harmony, dear friends from the Frost Place, dear friends from Portland, dear friends from accidental meetings . . . the circle keeps widening, and all I can think is how fortunate I am; how fortunate.

So, yes, I've got a boring, annoying, ugly head cold. But I'm still so glad to be here.

In the distance a train hoots . . . and why are train horns such lonely sounds?

It's Friday, my last day of being 58, and I'm tired, and now I seem to be coming down with a cold (though not Covid, thank goodness; no more of that, please). I've got lots to do today--desk work, housework--but my body may have loafing in mind. We'll come to some sort of compromise.

For now, black coffee and a lonely train. Ahead, clean sheets and a pork roast slow-braised with aromatic vegetables and chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms. And tomorrow will be a rainy day.

Already the fogs have rolled in. Last night, as T drove back to Portland from my reading, mist shimmered over the coastal highway, over the cove, among the trees and the murky city streets.

I've had a couple of spaces open up in my next--and final--Frost Place Studio Session: "Revisiting Homer's Odyssey." I do plan to keep teaching zoom classes, but this will be the last one for the Frost Place. So if you're interested in taking part, before I go on hiatus for a few months as I work out the logistics for the next incarnation, now's your chance. October 28 and 29, $225; camaraderie, conversation, and at least four new drafts. I'd love to see you there.

And I'm very close to announcing the new Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts; we're just tweaking final details for registration. So stay tuned for that.

Oy, I'm tired. These past few months have been stressful and exhausting, and I have been pretending not to be stressed and exhausted, and apparently this incipient head cold is saying, "Hah."

Okay. I give in.

Language--what is it? This was the blue question of the day in Monson, and the orange words and phrases were the kids' responses. It was the our first full day together, and we had two additional participants who were brand new, yet the conversation thrived. Everyone spoke, two-thirds were willing to share new drafts, and nobody had dropped out after the first week--a really promising start.

Afterward I had a long meeting with the executive director to hammer out details regarding the summer conference, which should open for registration very soon. So I came home tired and late, but with the feeling I'd gotten good stuff done.

Today I'll be back at my desk, catching up on house things, etc., and then after work T and I will drive north for an evening reading in Winthrop . . . Absolem Cider Brewery, 6:30 p.m., with Robert Carr, Meghan Sterling, and Martin Farawell. If you're in central Maine, you could come!

It's been a busy week and the busyness isn't over, but I've enjoyed being a poet in the world, after a long few months under a copyeditor's mask. 

Last night I walked down to Lake Hebron and sat on the dock to look at the sunset--gaudy pinks, oranges, purples reflected in the almost motionless water; the circle of trees, some already silhouettes, some still visible in their bright finery.

And then I walked back to my digs and read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner before falling asleep for more or less the entire night--a big success, given my typical sleeping troubles.

So here I am now, awake, listening to the log trucks rumble past; here I am, tucked into a small bedroom with three open windows, for it is shockingly warm in the north country. In half an hour I'll walk down the road for coffee and yogurt, then trudge back to my classroom and start moving furniture, and then the kids will arrive and the day will unroll as it will.

Today I begin the crazy-busy part of my week, but at least it will be punctuated by walks with friends--first, an early-morning one with a Portland pal; then, mid-afternoon, another with a Harmony pal--before I trundle into Monson for the night.

The weather has been a delight--soft days and cooler nights; the sweet dreaminess of early October, landscape pocked with poets and lovers kicking up the first leaves underfoot as the blue skies sigh.

Here at the Alcott House, I hang clothes in a dark dawn. I eat my lunch outside in the sunshine. Late afternoons I harvest greens and herbs and watch the neighbors toss a football in the street. But in Monson I'll have no such pastimes . . . just the lake to moon over, just the reddened trees and a notebook of wanderings. And then, tomorrow, work.

I need to re-learn these sudden switches, how to sleep in strange beds and fill strange hours. This evening I plan to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner all the way through before I fall asleep. I wonder where it will lead me.

The first day of October was intensely beautiful--warm, gentle; a day to stroll through bad yard sales and alongside turtle ponds; an evening to sit out by the fire pit after dark, with  two candles and a small glass of brandy, after a dinner of seared tuna and grilled tomatoes and wild mushrooms; an evening to talk quietly, to stroked the surprised cat, to listen to the noises of the city circle around the flickering embers.

It was also a sad day for Red Sox devotees--last game of a lousy season, and then news of the death of Tim Wakefield, legendary knuckleball pitcher: such a huge part of the teams I cheered on with my little son. That little son, now 6'2" with a big beard, texted me in sorrow, recalling the playoff game he'd watched at Fenway, when Tim pitched, and, yes, lost--but the starstruck child was so thrilled to see him in person that the loss was secondary. Ah, baseball, "it is designed to break your heart."

And now it's Monday again. I'll be at my desk today, and tomorrow I'll hit the road to teach on Wednesday; then a meeting in Monson, before driving home that night; and then on the road again on Thursday for an evening reading. It will be a tiring week.

But the house is tidyish; the garden is tidyish. Groceries and laundry are under control. Today I'll concentrate on the desk work, try to some make headway on this editing project before the poet schedule disrupts it.

I'll be teaching poems by Evie Shockley and Camille Dungy, talking with the kids about the tools of the trade--words, images, figurative language, punctuation, white space; talking with the kids about emotion and physical detail, about attentiveness to their own sounds and subjects.

They'll talk back to me about these things, because they're that kind of kid. They'll talk and talk, and then they'll write and write. What a privilege to have a job like this. It's worth any amount of tired.

I dreamed last night that I watched my older son transform from the young man he is back to the little boy he was--small, sturdy, with duck-fluff hair, so busy and excited--and then he rushed away from me into his world. I woke up nearly in tears; it was so poignant and painful to watch my beloved son reprise his life and then vanish into it.

So I'm sitting here now, with my coffee and my quiet, trying to soothe myself: he is okay, I am okay, we are still attached to one another. But, still, the essence of some massive loss lingers in my chest.

Anyway, onward into daylight.

Yesterday T and I went to the public library's annual book sale, a delightful cram amid tables and boxes. While we were poring among the volumes, a pair of girls wandered by, probably early high school-aged. "Oh!" said one. "Little Women! I love Little Women!" and she caressed the cover. And then the other, in the same voice of love and awe, said, "Oh! Jane Austen!" How beautiful to listen to girls and their books travel on across the generations.

I spent the rest of the day messing around in the kitchen and the garden: baking baguettes; tearing out the sunflowers; cleaning dirt off the cured garlic and carrying it into the house; harvesting fennel; mowing grass; and then making my own version of chicken cacciatore--homegrown tomatoes, peppers, and herbs braised with foraged hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, an onion, red wine, and boneless chicken thighs, served over squares of fresh polenta, alongside a fennel and marigold slaw. A top-ten meal, for sure . . . and, as I cooked. listening to the Red Sox eke out their last few moments of the season because "baseball will break your heart; it is designed to break your heart."

Now it is Sunday, and I have a stack of library-sale books to paw through: William Trevor's Selected Stories, Peter Taylor's Complete Stories, Philip Roth's Everyman, a beautiful early 60s edition of John Le Carre's Call for the Dead, and a bizarre compendium called Curiosities of Literature, by Isaac Disraeli (the prime minister's father), complete with ornate Victorian cover and ridiculously tiny print.

Meanwhile, Tom acquired Colin Rowe's The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, a show catalog from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, Philip Conkling's From Cape Cod to the Bay of Fundy: An Environmental Atlas of the Gulf of Maine, Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, Andre Malraux's The Psychology of Art II, and Hammond's Nature Atlas of America, which he got for me, because he knows I love the ridiculously opinionated style of midcentury popular natural history-- to wit:

Wolverine: A Disagreeable Countryman--A despicably mean character is the outstanding trait of this northern savage. . . .

American Badger: Prospector of the Western Plains--If on a bright western morning we see on the grassy plain a line of tracks meandering from hole to hole, each one flanked by a little mound of fresh earth, we have before us the nocturnal labor of a badger. . . .

This list of our varied acquisitions fills me with love for him. Isn't this exactly the mystery I long for in a husband?--a man drawn to strange and compelling books, some that I don't understand, some that I will never read, some that we'll pore over together. Ah, the romance.