Yesterday afternoon's reading turned out to be such fun: a car ride spent getting to know my fellow reader, and then a small but but very engaged audience who asked lots of questions and also bought books. It was very uplifting, really.

This was my only as-advertised National Poetry Month activity. I don't know if less fuss is being made about National Poetry Month than there used to be. Or maybe I'm just doing more poetry-related jobs year round so I no longer notice the dividing line. Certainly I'm busy, and my work balance between freelance editing and poetry-related gigs has shifted. I still need the editing jobs, but I earn more these days from poetry than I ever have before. You couldn't call it a living wage, but it is a palpable contribution to the coffers.

For me, my biggest changes in fortune were (1) the invitation, in 2019, to design a high school writing program at Monson Arts and (2), during the pandemic, the rise of zoom as an independent teaching platform . . . though of course both of these opportunities were direct consequences of my first big gift: the chance to direct the teaching conference at the Frost Place. It's interesting, in retrospect, to track the slow shifts. Because I don't have either an MFA or a teaching certificate, I could not make my way into classrooms via the usual routes. I was not hireable. The side path was slow and it was stony. And yet here I am, dusty and still trudging. My first Poetry Kitchen offerings are completely full. I'm finishing my third year with the high school program and feel as if I've found my groove there. In June I'll be team-teaching two teacher-training sessions for the arts education organization SidexSide. In July I'll be leading the inaugural Conference on Poetry and Learning in Monson. In August I hope I'll be doing nothing but my own work, though that is likely a pipe dream. And then, in September, back to a new batch of high schoolers. It's almost what you could call a career.

***

Yesterday evening, when I got back from my reading, T announced, "I made dinner reservations!" So arm in arm we walked around the corner to our local, Woodford's Food and Beverage, and we ate mussels and drank cold white wine, and then we strolled home and watched an old Peter Gunn episode, leaning into one another on the couch. Every day I miss living in the woods, but I am ready to admit that the delights of the city are intoxicating too. How pleasant it is to walk out to dinner, to sit idly in a restaurant and watch night roll in, to watch the car headlights assume a noir-movie glitter, to listen to voices, to the clatter of plates and clink of glasses, to smile at my dear one across a starched tablecloth.

. . . and, today, to have the good fortune to be home together. I'm going to work in the garden, maybe go out to buy soil and pansies, maybe hang clothes on the line, maybe listen to afternoon baseball, maybe fall asleep on the couch, maybe read a novel, maybe go for a walk . . . 

Concord Street Hymn

 

Dawn Potter

 

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]