A cool and cloudy start to the day. From my seat in the couch corner I watch a breeze shiver through the fringes of the neighbor's black walnut tree; yet when I twist my head to look through the other window, I note that the ash tree remains perfectly still.

The mysteries of wind and leaf. After living for more than two decades in the forest, I find that even in the city I am always watching the trees. Our houses, our tiny boxes, are so vulnerable, tucked up beneath these fairy-tale giants. Every day I expect a door to creak open in a maple trunk, expect Rumpelstiltskin or a witch or a talking squirrel to step forth, demand three impossible tasks, then pull me inside, drag me down into the cavern of tree roots, down to a glass-walled chamber where a golden key glitters inside a vial of breath and sighs.

These are the sorts of trees that inhabit my back garden, so I need to keep an eye on their doings.

I don't have big plans for the weekend, other than figuring out how to get rid of the castoff books that are still lining our dining-room floor. Yesterday I coaxed myself into dealing with two jobs that I never feel like doing: vacuuming out my car so I can drive Teresa and her husband north next week without being embarrassed by the piles of garden soil in the trunk; and wrapping the blueberry bushes in bird netting, which is always a tangle and an aggravation. Otherwise, it was a typical Friday-housework day. I cleaned the downstairs rooms, hung out sheets and towels, mopped the floors, took out the trash. I harvested escarole and Thai basil and cilantro and red onion and stir-fried them with roasted tofu. I read Erdrich's short stories and went for a bike ride and listened to the Sox play a terrible baseball game and strenuously avoided the news.

Gradually I am gathering myself together for next week's odyssey. The space where we'll be working is comfortable and efficient, with clean modern bathrooms, a good kitchen, plenty of tables and open areas, comfortable chairs, screens against the insects, a lovely view of the lake. It is a sensible and utilitarian space, but it is not a bookish place, as the Frost Place barn was. So one of my goals is to give the room at least a temporary gloss--strew it with books and flowers, create a nest for our participants, invite in the poet-ghosts. 

I know I can't replicate the old shiver of Franconia, but Monson has its own shivers . . . Thoreau, for instance, who traveled through these hills on his way to Moosehead Lake.

As the conference approaches, I find my sense of elegy increases. It's not like this will be the first time I've ever been away from the Frost Place: we were on zoom for three years during the pandemic, so I know what it feels like to be separated from the landscape. But I haven't had to come to grips with the power of a different landscape . . . one that is very close to the landscape of my Harmony homeland, the place where I learned to be a poet, yet is also a place in which poetry is a stranger. The history of the Frost Place is steeped in mountain and poems. The history of Monson is steeped in river and forest and lake and slate quarries and paintings. Poetry is the newcomer who is stepping out of the stagecoach, stretching its cramped limbs, breathing in the lake wind, wondering what goes on in this place.