Some days my freelance life is a jumble--hours spent circling aimlessly, waiting for a reply to a query before I can move on with a project, and then suddenly the reply arrives, but late in the day, when my mind has already turned away from paying work and is focused on home obligations . . . so by evening I am wondering, What the hell did I get done?

And thus today, when I thought I would be mostly concentrating on housework and errands, I will instead be cramming in editing hours . . . which is fine: it's a typical freelance situation, one I am so accustomed to, but it's always a drag. What I want is less hysterical flurry in my life, not more.

Well, anyway. So be it. A fat morning of editing, and afterward I'll get done what I get done. At least the laundry can churn while I check files.

Last night, as I basted a pork roast, Tom installed another batch of finished cabinet doors. The sudden sleek quiet is startling. No more under-the-sink clutter staring out at us; instead, an expanse of polished fir, silken to the touch. These doors are heavy, elegant, magnificently plain. The kitchen, always beautifully functional, is becoming a showplace. It feels very strange to possess such a room. (Fortunately, hideously inept bathrooms and dog-eared vinyl siding keep us grounded in reality.)

I woke up to rain, a welcome sight. It's been such a dry autumn, no planting possible--a disappointment, as I'd been hoping to keep filling back-garden gaps--put in a tree or so, dig in an big astilbe bed, transplant an elderberry bush into a sunnier front corner. Alas, none of that will happen this fall.

But at least rain will soothe what already exists, including my listening ear: the slow clatter of drops melds sweetly into the click and growl of the wood fire. There can be a calming sonic friction between weather and warmth.

Yesterday I finished my plans for the revision workshop, and today I'll go back to editing, maybe also scratch up time to settle next week's high school plans. I need to have everything in place work-wise before we leave for the cottage, and starting tomorrow I'll also need to devote time to sorting out meal prep and packing coolers and such. As usual, my "vacation" isn't one. But I'm used that by now.

The cottage on Mount Desert Island is one of three places that has been a bright beacon and shelter for my small family for decades now. The other two are the apartment in Brooklyn and the little homestead in Wellington. My new poetry collection is dedicated to these friends and their homes . . . I feel such gratitude for their long embrace. But vacation is never the right word for what it means to visit them. They are woven too tightly into the fabric of work and care.

We got a solid frost last night; and when I woke this morning, I felt winter's breath creeping under doors and through the windowpanes. Already I've scraped out the ashes, lit a new blaze, let the cat out, ground coffee, stacked the clean dishes, let the cat in . . . the routines of 5 a.m., hour of no-light, hour of iron and spark.

I spent all of yesterday morning hammering out plans for my upcoming revision class, and my thoughts still reverberate with the clang of that internal conversation, the I wish and I wonder. My thoughts pace the walls: how will these imagined poems escape the imagined prisons they have made for themselves?

Today I'll be back at my desk, back at the task--trying to wrestle open a few skylights so I can boost someone else up to that square of sky. It's all such hard work . . . writing, teaching writing, talking about writing.

I'm fortunate to have a few days to do the work, days when I'm alone for hours at a stretch, when I can make this task my primary aim. Around the edges I'll get onto my mat, I'll rake leaves, I'll fold laundry. Sometimes dogged is the best I can do.

 

First frost this morning, so I'm happy to feast my eyes on the last of my summer blooms, saved yesterday as I was tearing out tender annuals and digging up dahlia roots. It was elegy day--flowerpots emptied and stacked in the shed, compost bins packed with weary nasturtiums and zinnias, outside chairs stowed in the basement, sticks bagged on the curb, outside table tarped and tucked behind the shed. Belatedly Tom even remembered to haul the air conditioner out of my study window and cart it into the basement. House and garden are beginning their trek into winter.

But the cold garden remains beautiful and busy. Kale ripples like a kelp forest; fennel dances along the front walkway. I'll be harvesting till snow.

Today is my younger son's 27th birthday, so the frost feels appropriate. I went into labor during the first ice storm of the season: his day has so often been the pivot to winter. I'm thinking of him now, tall and bearded and bright-eyed: as always, so heart-eager and loving; my once-dozy infant transformed into this man, this friend, this sparking mind.

Well, it's easy to be sentimental about such things, and bewildered, and mystified. Despite all the mistakes I made as their mother, my two boys turned out to be so good at being human. It's more than I deserve, but I'm grateful. And I love them so.

This will be a busy week, but also an unstructured one--lots of class planning, dealing with emails, probably setting up meetings for this and that; maybe an editing project will come back to me . . . I'll be trying to pull everything together so that on Friday I can embark on our biannual holiday to the cottage without feeling like I have too many swords dangling over my head. Of course, I'll have to work while I'm away: the next Monson class will be built into our travels. But I'm hoping that I won't have to do too much more than that.

November, as usual, will be crazy: a full weekend of teaching right after the election, then a reading in western Maine the following weekend, and then a trip south for Thanksgiving, not to mention another Monson trek in the midst of all of this . . . I ought to stop looking ahead. I just make myself anxious.

Instead, I'll focus on the walk I'm about to take . . . early morning chill, bright leaves falling. The comfort of breath and tread, mind waking up, watching, translating, inventing.

After my class yesterday morning, T needed to run over to his job site and pick up some tools for his cupboard-door project. So I came along, and we took a side trip to one of the walking trails that wind along the Cape Elizabeth salt marshes--flat blue ponds among golden sedge; egrets, dazzling in their white plumage, peering up from solitary meals; low-tide odors shimmering in the brackish creek beds.

How I love marshes and bogs . . . water, sky, land entwined.

*

Now it's 37 degrees outside, a sharp, dark Sunday morning, a small wind scented with leafmeal and salt. I got nothing done in the garden yesterday afternoon, other than harvesting for dinner. I made a risotto last night: garlic, fennel, and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms sautéed with chopped ruby-red chard; then arborio rice stirred in, and ladles of hot Cornish hen broth, and finally parmesan. The red stems of the chard stained the rice a pale pink, so it was beautiful on the plate beside a spoonful of cranberry relish and a few slices of crisp kohlrabi. I was thinking as I cooked that a vegan version would be equally good: vegetable broth and a fillip of sharp olive oil before serving, to replace the cheese.

I'm up early today, but I have been sleeping through the night, which has greatly improved my state of mind. Today I'll putter among the garden chores I didn't do yesterday. I might drive down to the waterfront and investigate the offerings at the fish market. I'll keep reading Best American Short Stories, and I'll enjoy opening and closing the kitchen-cupboard doors, with their freshly installed knobs. (For the past few weeks we've been opening them by way of temporary tabs made of painter's tape: utilitarian but unpleasant.)

For now, though, I'll linger in front of the new wood fire that snaps and leaps in the stove. I'm drinking a luxurious second cup of black coffee. T is still asleep, the cat has just stalked up the stairs to join him, and I am gratefully untethered from clocks and schedules. Sunday stretches before me--a long slow amble, a bright carpet unrolling.

*

All of this quiet contentment is endangered, of course. The presidential election is a thousand-pound weight dangling over our frail skulls. Maine will likely swing Democratic. Certainly my district will, so in that sense my vote hardly matters. Yet I rushed out to vote early; trembling with urgency and desperation, I thrust my ballot into the box: "Here it is!" my inner voice shouted. "Quick, count me, count me!"

What else can we do, except beg to be counted?

*

London, 1802

 

William Wordsworth

 

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life’s common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on itself did lay.

 This morning wood stove routine is so pleasant. Sure, it's got its downsides--scraping out ashes at 5 a.m., lugging bundles of logs up the cellar stairs before I've even tasted coffee--but the payoff is magnificent. Nothing is more heartening than a bright ticking wood fire in the dark of the morning. It is one of the greatest of rural luxuries.

Also, all this log lugging is doing wonders for my biceps. Firewood is a number-one reason why I never had to think about exercise when I lived in the country. (Also, I was cutting five acres of grass each summer week with an ancient push mower. Also, I was young.)

I have to teach this morning, but it's just a two-hour class and I'll be done by lunchtime. Then the afternoon will be my own, and I'll probably spend it in the garden, tearing out a few more weary zinnias, bagging up sticks, readying for the hard frost that's headed our way early in the week.

Yesterday I picked the last of the bounty from the mighty eggplant. In the house, the tomato supply is dwindling, the sweet taste of summer vanishing fast. I haven't bought a fresh vegetable from the store (other than local corn) since May, only the crops I can't produce in quantity on this tiny plot: storage crops like potatoes, onions, and squash. I can't produce fruit either, other than a gradually establishing blueberry crop. I dream of raspberries, but space is limited and raspberries sprawl. And there's no place to plant an apple tree that wouldn't shade out the vegetable garden.

Still, I've got my foraging gold--that basket of slowly softening pears in my living room. Maybe by tomorrow they'll be ready to work with. And I've got a freezer full of wild mushrooms. The bounty of the city continues to amaze me.

Reading Olivia Laing's book about gardening reminded me again of the close intersection (for some of us, anyway) between the work of the hands and the work of thought. My poems spring directly from physical action: digging, mopping, walking, hanging laundry, changing the sheets. Sometimes I think I would be no one if I didn't work. But of course eventually my body will say otherwise. I will have to be a different someone.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my friend Angela about what our purpose is becoming now that we're aging. We decided we need to be helpful. Useful. Ready to think out problems. Lend an ear, if that's all we have to lend. Doing the small community work: continuing to care, continuing to pay attention.

After a spate of balmy days, the temperature dropped back into the 40s last night. So this morning I happily lit the wood stove, and now, for a few minutes, I am sitting in my corner watching orange flame leap into the kindling, bright dancer in the dusky no-light of early morning.

The house is clean for another week--fresh sheets on the bed, fresh towels in the bathrooms, floors mopped and sinks scrubbed. I ran some errands, and made an apple pie, and went out to write last night. So today will be a sort of day off--a bit of prep for tomorrow's class, a trip to the post office, but mostly reading and writing and walking and gardening, in whatever order and at whatever pace seems right. Basking in front of this eager fire seems like the right way to begin such an airy day.

I finished reading Olivia Laing's memoir about gardening, and I've just started reading my friend Lori Ostlund's story in the new Best American Short Stories. I love Lori's work: in fact, we became friendly because I wrote her a fan letter about a story I'd accidentally run across in a little free library. Since then, we've kept in cordial touch, and she and her wife, also a fine writer, actually attended my zoom book launch last week. The internet is supremely aggravating but it also has its gifts, and one is this thread stretching from Maine poet to California story writers--people I would otherwise know only as unreachable names on a page.

I've written fan letters to various writers, most of whom never respond, but now and again they do. I've received a few fan letters myself--always a shock. I used to write with a painful hesitating modesty, framing myself as a minor acolyte, etcetera. These days I try to treat myself with more respect, to write as an admiring colleague rather than a groveling apprentice. It probably makes no difference to the receiver, but it makes me feel less dog-like.

I do know, from small experience, that receiving a fan letter can be disarming. Automatic hackles rise, a self-defensiveness: "Who is this stranger walking into my house? What will they demand from me?" Also, of course, there's the embarrassment, the wash of shame, as if I've fooled somebody into thinking that I'm a writer worth writing to. But when I can wrestle through those porcupine barriers, I'm always touched and amazed that an unknown person has thought enough of my words to tell me so.  And often these correspondents surprise me, say things about my writing that I hadn't noticed myself, opened my eyes to new ideas or sources. I hope the fan letters I send have the same tonic effect.

I haven't lit a fire in the stove since last weekend. Temperatures have been warm: still no frost here, though the leaves are coming down more quickly. Now light rain is pecking at the windows, clattering on the vents, and I am sitting in my couch corner with my small cup of black coffee, slightly dazed from having actually slept hard all night long. Breaking the insomnia chain is always a giddy relief.

Today is housework day, writing-group evening. A week ago I was all nerves about my book launch. Now I am clutching shreds of sleep. My thoughts blink among laundry and mops. Maybe I am not a poet at all.

Still, yesterday I thought I was. Over zoom, Teresa, Jeannie, and I spent two afternoon hours wandering among the coils of T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." We shared poem drafts we'd written under one another's influence. Our ancestors shimmered in the electric air: we spoke of Shakespeare, Keats, Plath . . . the magic, a devastating Eden, the fearsome beloved lore of the art.

Well, I'm lucky. Lucky to be able to open my chest and tear out my heart and lay it on a platter for all to see. That's what having these kinds of friends feels like. If this description sounds ironic, it's not meant to be. I leave such meetings in a tremble. Thought and feeling explode into flame. There's a terror to this sort of connection, this sort of conversation. Especially because I know I will always walk straight into the fire.

It's funny how risk-averse I can be in daily life: I wrestle with driving fears, I don't like heights or cold lakes, I can't bear blood in movies . . . I'm a baby in so many ways. But poetry. All I want to do is rush at the dragon, drive off the cliff, dive straight into the whirlpool. I am a danger to myself, and maybe to you too.

As Teresa said yesterday, the three of us are different poets, different people: so different, really. But we are all desperate to write great poems. And we don't shy away from those words. Great poems. That's what we want. We likely will never succeed. But we will die trying.

I am the throes of a long insomnia cycle. Many days have passed since I've had a full night's sleep, and I'm starting to wear down, especially after a couple of days on the road. I wish I weren't writing you this note at 4:30 a.m., but such is life. Still, I had a good day with the kids--focusing on epistolary poems as a way to begin thinking about varieties of audience. They did a lot of writing and talking, getting more and more comfortable with one another, and at the end of the day we chalked our poem-letters outside in the balmy air.

So now here I sit, awake too early again but at least I'm at home. I've got yet another slow tire leak that I need to get fixed today. I'm meeting with my Poetry Lab companions this afternoon, and I'm behind on all of the reading I should do for that. I've got a stack of classes looming, and I need to figure out the schedule for our biannual visit to the cottage on Mount Desert Island. T and I are going out to a Dietrich movie tonight. I need to turn tomatoes into sauce and Cornish hen bones into soup--but I don't have to manage a classroom today or drive hundreds of miles or edit anyone's manuscript, so that's something.

Instead, I'll go for a walk through the cemetery before breakfast. I'll sit outside mid-morning with a cup of tea and a book and align my thoughts with the air. I'll putter among late blossoms and imagine next spring. Maybe I'll even get a few chores done before I sit down with the poets and listen to them sparkle about Eliot and Rothko. I'm not feeling extra smart today, but possibly I'll even say something myself.

Last night we got a bit of rain, and now under streetlights the starry pavement glitters. The cat slinks up the driveway, then pauses to prowl under Tom's truck. I wish I were asleep. But I'm glad raindrops are sliding from the yellowing leaves. I'm glad to feel the wind's damp breath.

Greetings from Monson. This will be my third class with the kids but my first overnight here this season. As in Portland, the weather is unseasonably warm: at 6:15 a.m. I was walking around outside in a light sweater. Nonetheless, it looks like late autumn up here: leaf color fading to leather and dark gold, leaf litter thickening fast, and the first bare branches reaching toward snow.

Yesterday afternoon I puttered among the thickets along the lake, searching for a few objects to bring into class--chips of slate, scrolls of birchbark, lichen. I like to decorate the tables with something visual, something tactile, so that if anyone is struggling for words I can ask, "What's that rock feel like in your hand?" or "How would you describe the color of that birchbark?" And then, like magic, their sensory present tense slips into whatever they're writing.

Pale blue darkness stretches across the sky, outlines the fringe of trees lining the lake. It's time to go fetch some coffee and yogurt, time to settle into the pattern of my day. Dear woods, dear water, dear log trucks rumbling south: write me a letter: write me a song.

Though mornings and evenings are cool, the days have become suddenly balmy. By mid-morning yesterday I was outside in shirtsleeves pruning the lilies and iris, weeding empty vegetable rows, preparing beds for winter. Yet the day felt like early September.

In the afternoon T and I went into town to do our version of shopping--e.g., idling through bookstores and vintage shops. I found a fabulous black mohair coat; he found a 1960s-era short-sleeved cotton plaid shirt of the sort he loves. We bought our kid a cookbook for his birthday. We ate dumplings at the Cantonese restaurant. We ambled the streets in the soft air, then drove back home to our allotted tasks: he went down into the basement and finished edge-binding the cabinet doors he's building; I spatchcocked two Cornish hens.

But the interlude is over. This afternoon I'll head north for an overnight in Monson, teach the kids tomorrow, hustle home, embroil myself in various obligations, teach teachers on Saturday . . . ah, autumn's breathless demands--though I do now have a really nice coat to wear, should it ever get cold again.

I'll be working this week with the notion of audience, via the epistolary poem--essentially the same lesson for both kids and teachers, though the teacher session will be compressed and will involve some standing back and asking, "Okay, what just happened? How could this work in your setting?" It will be interesting (for me) to do a classroom trial just before doing a teacher presentation. I'll let you know how it goes.

Otherwise: immersed in Olivia Laing's The Garden against Time--she's really, really good and I am thinking of writing her a fan letter; mourning, without surprise, the Mets' loss to the Dodgers; wondering what I'll do with all of those pears ripening in the bushel basket in my living room; recovering from book launches; scouring the kitchen sink; fidgeting with a poem draft; going for a long walk before breakfast . . . the usual life, words and soap and the solid thunk of feet on pavement, under the poignant sunshine, under the shedding leaves.

I spent much of yesterday outside--planting garlic, rolling up hoses, clearing out dead lily stems, emptying flowerpots, spreading compost, then riding my bike across the neighborhood to pick pears. Now a half bushel of hard brown pears sits in my living room, next to the dwindling harvest of green tomatoes, and later in the week, after I get back from Monson, the fruit should be soft enough to process--probably mostly as sauce, but maybe I'll get a pie out of them as well.

It is a treat to have such good ingredients to work with, but now that I'm on the road so often, I have to be smarter in how I plan for meals--how I use the freezer, for instance. I've taken to stocking up on fish, which doesn't require a ton of space (all we we have is a basic old-style refrigerator) and thaws and cooks relatively quickly.  Last night's meal was an example of ease: salmon marinated in miso and maple syrup, then roasted on a sheet pan with green beans (mine, from the freezer), a side of mixed grains (mostly quinoa and millet), a salad of yellow and red tomatoes, and apple crisp for dessert. Lots of cilantro and mint were involved, and even a bit of late basil . . . it was one of those meals that tastes like the season. And if I hadn't dawdled, I could have made the entire meal in under an hour; the crisp was the only item that required significant cooking time.

Probably it's silly (also boring) to spend so much time reprising meals, but except for my four years in college housing and the handful of years when I was working full time, I have always been the cook-in-chief. As everyone who holds that position knows, it's an endless and complicated responsibility.

By the time I was in high school, I was regularly cooking family meals--not all that enjoyable a task as my father has food issues and it was impossible to experiment with anything outside his customary diet. Also, I had no control over grocery shopping or garden: what showed up on the counter was the material I had to work with.

Still, it was a start. And then, in our first apartments together, T and I undertook our apprenticeship to cookbooks: Julia Child's, Marcella Hazan's, John Thorne's, Richard Olney's. I learned a few skills. I made spectacular errors. By the time we moved to Maine, I had learned how to grocery-shop, and now I began to learn how to garden. Of course, Harmony was a terrible place to be a gardener--too much tree cover, stony acid soil, a short growing season--but the wild foraging was magnificent, and after a while I figured out what I could and could not grow there. It was hard, though. My arms were full of babies, my barn was full of goats, my hours were full of firewood.

So despite its raggedy edges, this tiny plot in Portland can sometimes feel like Eden. Without children at home, I have more time of course. But I also have full southern exposure, rich soil, and a seaside climate. I don't have the space to grow a lot of produce, but what I do grow is far more lush than it was up north. Finally I am learning what it means to make a kitchen garden: not a farmer's garden but a cook's garden . . . a very, very different thing.

Saturday morning: a small lie-in, a wood fire, hot coffee, my couch corner . . . the exact right way to start the weekend. Last night T and I had dinner out with old friends; we came home find the Mets managing to hang on for a big win; I went to bed early and fell straight to sleep and dreamed of my childhood house in Rhode Island. And now on this cold morning I am listening to kindling crackle, watching golden flame leap up from split maple, thinking without hurry about the various tasks of the day--rolling up garden hoses, planting garlic, spreading compost, emptying plant pots, maybe picking pears from a friend's tree . . . the puttery chores of autumn.

Yesterday I started reading Olivia Laing's memoir/essay The Garden against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, which tells the tale of resurrecting an old formal garden in Sussex, England, but also wanders into literature and history and geography. Laing is a very musical writer, thoughtful and elegant and new to me: this is a friend's library book, passed on, and its patient tone fits well into my own gardening state of mind, at least at this time of year, when the beds are rumpled and messy and my growing ambitions stretch no further than a thick covering of leaves and a long sheltered sleep.

The freezer is filled with sauce and greens and wild mushrooms. The window frames are draped with peppers. The basement is stacked with firewood. The mantle is lined with winter bouquets--dried grasses and flowers that must sate my eyes till daffodil season returns. The kitchen windowsill is gaudy with nosegays of late marigolds and sage. Half-dry basil and parsley and mint hang in bunches in the back room. Outside, kale and lettuce and fennel still flutter bravely. Riches spill from this dollhouse grove, this unlikely speck of earth.

First light peers through maple boughs, still thick with green-brown leaves. The cat settles himself onto the hearthrug. The refrigerator hums. Though I am not thinking about poems, the air is thick with them, floating like motes of yeast in a baker's kitchen.

Thank goodness there's nowhere I have to go this morning.  I was so keyed up post-reading that my brain wouldn't settle down and I got hardly any sleep. But even though I feel wretched in the present moment, I am very happy about how the evening went. It was purely lovely, not a hitch in sight . . . a full house for the little store (20 people, 25?), lots of affectionate community among my writing friends, and some surprise appearances by old Harmony friends, a few other interested listener-acquaintances, even a couple of complete strangers. It really couldn't have gone better: I felt embraced and energized, and I loved how the program started--with three good poets each reading one of my poems and one of theirs, and then a sweet, very personal intro from another good poet--all this before I even began. Throughout the evening, the atmosphere remained low-key, congenial, attentive. It was a really, really good night.

So that's behind me now: the week of book launching is over, and I have three days off before I hit the road for Monson on Monday. Clearly I am not cut out to run for president or be a touring musician. After a single week of minor publicity, I feel like I've been flattened by a panel truck. But I'm glad it happened, and that I got through it, and that people seem to like the collection, and that people I care about showed up and helped out . . . also, that I didn't disappoint the bookstore: they did sell some books.

And now back to regular life. It's trash day, it's garlic-planting day, it's try-to-catch-up-on-sleep day as T and I are going to meet friends for dinner and I should be awake for that.

Thank you all for suffering through the tales of my book-launch angst. You have been patient, and I promise to talk about something else tomorrow. 

Last night I dreamed that my house was so full of people that I couldn't prep for my reading. Also, my next-door neighbor's house had turned into a milk factory (whatever that is). It was pleasant to wake up to see the big moon rising over her non-milk-factory roof and be reassured that I'll have plenty of time alone today, before the bustle begins.

This morning, after my walk, I'll work on a reading list for tonight's book launch, and I'll take a stab at recording myself reading a poem for my friend Tina Cane's video project "Poetry Is Bread." And then I'm going to clean toilets. Classic.

Yesterday morning I worked on plans for the Zoom class I'll be teaching for the Maine poet laureate's statewide epistolary-poetry project. On October 26 I'll be leading a two-hour session for educators on how to introduce the notion of epistolary poems to students. But yesterday evening, well after I'd finished my plans, I got an email from Julia (the poet laureate) telling me that the the education departments at the various state prisons, both juvenile and adult, had committed to sending at least one staff member each to my workshop. This was surprising news but also exciting as I've long been interested in working with prison-education programs . . . somehow it's just never happened. Now I need to go back and rethink the syllabus and make sure it feels suitable for this newly broad group of attendees.

But mostly today I've just got to keep my nerves in check, and housework will help, a walk will help, a fire in the wood stove and cups of ginger tea--the distractions of daily comfort and obligation. I've got a friend coming down from Bangor for the reading, so that's exciting. I got a call from my publisher last night saying that book orders had come in after Monday's virtual launch, so that's great too. And tomorrow morning I'll wake up feeling (I hope) exquisitely calm.

Another chilly morning in the little northern city by the sea. No frost in my garden yet, but on our walk yesterday morning my friend pointed out glints of ice in the cemetery grass. We ambled along the paths, marking our progress by which trees seemed most beautiful to us. She saw a big hawk but I did not. I found a handsome cluster of acorn caps. The sky was a most miraculous blue.

I worked on some class planning in the morning, then spent much of the afternoon on garden tasks. I tore out the last of the tomatoes and stripped the vines of green fruit. I picked what may be the last of the eggplant. I pulled out tired zinnias and scarlet runners. Autumn cleanup is daunting, and I have much more to do, but there's no rush. And there's still so much growing: a royal crop of kale, fennel frothing along the front path, still plenty of lettuce and arugula and a few obstinate spinach plants that survived the September drought, oregano and sage and cilantro and parsley and mint, even some weary basil, and then the red and gold marigolds, spilling over the terrace onto the sidewalk.

Today I'll cook down the green tomatoes for salsa verde, and maybe make a few fresh pickles as well. I made a batch of red tomato sauce yesterday, and most of that will go into the freezer, though I'll save out some for tonight's lasagna. I've got desk work to do this morning, but also a few errands to run, and I'll get onto my mat before breakfast and I'll get out into the garden after lunch, and it will be a household day, it will be a day to carry firewood and fold laundry and stir a vat of sauce on the stove, to read about the buildup to the French and Indian War and fiddle with a poem draft and dream up some writing prompts, and shuffle through the unraked leaves as a thread of woodsmoke rises from my chimney.

I want to thank everyone who listened in to last night's reading. We had a crowd--more than fifty people from all over the place, some strangers to me, many of them very dear . . . not bad, really, for two people who aren't great at hawking their wares. Maybe we sold a couple of books, and maybe we introduced a few people to each other's work, and without a doubt I am taking a deep breath and crossing Nerve-Wracking Event Number 1 off my list.

It's extraordinarily difficult to sit still and be praised. I think that is the hardest thing about these sorts of occasions. I am so glad that people care about my poems, that a poet of Jeannie's stature admires them, but I want to sink into the earth when anyone says so in public. It's so dumb.

I do like reading in public, though. It's an interesting conundrum, being an introvert who is also a performer. I get keyed up beforehand and am wrung out afterward, but the actual act is absorbing and exciting. I've talked to numerous other public performers who have a similar relationship to their shows, perhaps because off-stage preparation often requires deep solitude, hours and years of it.

Anyway, this morning I am tired and little headachy, but that's okay as I don't have any pressing obligations for the day. I'll go for an early walk, I'll work on some class plans, and in the afternoon I'll get into the garden: tear out tired plants, put in some tulip and daffodil bulbs, and maybe my garlic too, if the order arrives today.

Last night, after my reading, I was washing dishes and thinking, This is what it means to be successful. I write poems. I run water. It's as simple as that.

In the old days, in Harmony, I used to start a fire in the wood stove as soon as I got out of bed and then start the coffee on the kitchen range. But in town I've lost the fire-is-the-center-of-my-life habit. So this morning I fumbled around a bit, trying to do both tasks at once. I figured things out, though, and now I am drinking hot coffee and watching flames catch in the kindling, and outside rain is pattering against the windows, and this is exactly how a wet October morning in Maine ought to start.

This wood stove isn't big enough to combat real winter weather; I'll have to revert to the furnace soon enough. But in these transitional seasons, it's perfect, and we've got plenty of firewood, so at least on the days I'm working from home, a morning fire makes sense. Besides, it is so extremely pleasant. Why not wake up to beauty?

Yesterday was restorative: a slow waking, an unstructured day. In the afternoon T went out to visit with some acquaintances, and I thought of coming along too, but suddenly my introvert buzzer went off and I realized that I needed at least one day when I wasn't in a classroom or a reading or a writing group--a day to be comfortably unsociable, keeping myself to myself, storing up energy for this week's onslaught of publicity.

So, instead, I brought in fresh parsley and mint and hung them in the back room to dry. I took down the already dry basil and packed it into a mason jar. I baked a walnut cake. I sat by the fire and read about King Philip's War. I went for a walk and then, later, another walk. I roasted two small whole mackerel with preserved lemons and fresh oregano. I roasted kale and potatoes and made a tomato, feta, and mint salad. I tried to stay away from screens and rest my weary eyes. It was a quiet day, homebound, slowly busy, and I tried to make the most of it.

Because today I am back in the thick of things: first, prepping hard for tonight's book launch; then switching over to an editing project that has been languishing . . . a day of cranking out work, making sure I get onto my exercise mat, taming my nerves, babying my eyes--in short, putting myself together for a show.

Here's the link again, should you be interested--7 p.m. this evening. The event will run like a webinar, I'm told, so I won't be able to see your faces, though I will see a list of attendees. 

Talk to you tomorrow, on the other side.

I slept in till 6:30 this morning, a rare and welcome Sunday-morning loll. And today I have nowhere to go and nothing to do . . . well, actually, I have plenty to do, but none of it requires a schedule or a timesheet, so I will idle here in my couch corner and pretend I'm completely untethered.

Yesterday, while I was upstairs teaching, T was downstairs installing the first batch of finished cupboard doors. As you can see, they have radically changed the look of the kitchen. Instead of a clutter of busy-looking shelves and open closets, we suddenly have sleekness, quiet, elegance. We are both feeling the jolt: who are we, to possess such an uppity-looking room? Of course T is a master carpenter; he routinely builds this sort of beauty for his rich clients. But our own houses tend to stay half-done. We aren't used to gloss.

Outside, low clouds have settled in--rain in the forecast, a wet afternoon and night, a wet tomorrow, a long slow storm. I haven't yet turned on the furnace: the little wood stove is just right for banishing the small chill of a rainy autumn day, and in a minute I'll get up and light a fire, embrace this Sunday at home.

I think yesterday's class went well; I hope it did. Always, teaching is an improv dance. I jump into and out of the plans I've laboriously written up; conversations flash; lines suddenly undress themselves.

How I long to be a poet.

I did what I hoped to do yesterday: I finished the difficult editing project; I did the grocery shopping; I took a little time off from working; I went to bed early. So even though I'm back on the clock today, I'm feeling reasonably well rested, more or less ready to pitch forward into the waves.

Today's class will be a generative-writing session based around Keats's notion of negative capability. We'll be reading poems, talking about poems, writing poems, sharing poems. As workdays go, it should be a good one. My only worry is my eyes: they are not in top condition after that emergency editing intervention, and Zoom is always hard on them. I hope I can blink my way through.

[By the way, this class is full, but I've still got two openings in my November 9-10 "Revision Intensive" weekend. Maybe you'd like to be there too?]

This morning I want to ease myself into writing and talking space . . . these few words to you, a slow cup of coffee, a small undemanding walk, a shower, a bit of housework : filling firewood boxes, folding laundry, sweeping the kitchen floor : reading through the day's centerpiece poems, shaping thoughts, sharpening pencils, settling into the unknown . . . 

The coming days and weeks are a tumble of work--readings, classes, editing--but today I will try to stay in the now: just these hours, just these poems, just these people.

That in itself can be hard work. 

 

For each of my Monson classes, I find a poem or a line or a sentence that seems, in some way, to capture an element of what I want to share with the students that day. On Wednesday I shared this small poem by Hanshan, and I've been thinking of it often since then--the miracle of hearing a voice from so long ago speak so confidently, so poignantly, of his own mind and imagination.

Sometimes I worry that I am too immersed in the small things of the self, the body, the earth, yet Hanshan's words reassure me that this really is a path for a poet in the world. I find I cannot scream my ideological fears. But what of the red of these late roses? I cannot stop gazing into their velvet hearts.

Last night, I went out to write, and my friends there spent a half hour or more planning exactly how they were going to help out at my book launch next Thursday--who would do an introduction, who would read, who would bring cups and plates and wine and cheese . . . Betsy said to me, almost sternly, "We are a community, of course." I felt giddy, I felt held, I felt like crying. What a gift to receive, so late in my life: a crowd of poets.

Today, I'll be back at my desk, finishing (I hope) what has turned into a very problematic editing project. I'll go grocery shopping, I'll go for a walk, I'll try to take a bit of time off, given that I have to teach all day tomorrow. But I got the house cleaned yesterday; I washed and dried and folded piles of laundry, I took my car to the garage, I carried firewood and cleaned the stove and put clean sheets on the bed, and "My mind is like the autumn moon / clear and bright in a pool of jade / nothing can compare / what more can I say."

I walked into the house late yesterday afternoon and realized that I had to make sauce, pronto. The bowls on the counter were piled with too-ripe tomatoes, and the vines outside were dotted with too-ripe tomatoes. There was no time to waste so I dropped my bags and went to work. But eventually, once I got the ingredients into the pot, I lit a fire in the wood stove, emptied the dishwasher, swept the kitchen floor, turned on radio for the Mets game, and let myself relax into the idea of being home--which was not exactly rest but was better than rushing around with overflowing colanders of vegetables.

My teaching day went well, but it was tiring. These early sessions are hard because I have to focus so hard on making magic: that is, modeling a complete commitment to the exigencies of the art to a group of teenagers who are excited and intrigued but still shy and prickly. The magic only works if I throw myself to the winds . . . if I leap straight into writing drafts and talking about the work in ways that are actually self-revelatory and emotional. If the kids see me doing that, they start to do it too. But the transition is never easy. I am always jangled beforehand, always coaching myself through my reserve. And afterward I am exhausted.

No one has ever told these kids that art is an inner flame . . . though they have felt it themselves, and they haven't known what to do about it. So this is the magic spell I have to cast: to bring a group of teenagers into tender communion with their own fire.

When I watch their faces open into that recognition, I want to cry. It is so worth sacrificing my own shyness.

Back in the homeland. A deep evening chill. Ambling down the dirt roads, up the lanes of the empty camps, and the sky unfolding colors, the last sun rays glinting on the crowns of the oaks; happy to be wearing hat and gloves, to return to a warm house, crackle of kindling, soup on the stove. Then early to bed, line-dried sheets, dreams of babies, and now the slow wakeup, listening to a speckle of rain on the metal roof, wondering if we got a frost last night, wondering if I will remember how to do my job, how to heave myself out of bed and into a car and onto the road and into a poem, 

It rained all day yesterday, just as I hoped, and I spent it peacefully: first, walking out for breakfast with friends, then walking home to read and write beside the fire. The day was punctuated by phone calls from my children and notes from friends and family . . . nothing could have been better. I even scratched out a new poem draft.

But today I am back in the saddle--deskwork in the morning, driving north in the afternoon, teaching tomorrow. It's the start of my busiest stretch of the fall, including my first weekend class of the season and then two book launches next week. Here's hoping I can hold up, now that I'm old.

Outside the air smells of wet tea leaves, the comforting autumn fragrance of decay. Last night for dinner I picked out two big round fruits from the bushel baskets in my living room and made fried green tomatoes. The freezer is full of sauce and chicken stock and kale and wild mushrooms, and the firewood is stowed in the shed. I feel a little sad about driving away, but then again I always feel sad about driving away.

On Turning Sixty

 Last night, after dinner, Tom gave me a small wrapped box. Inside was a set of photos, mostly of me and my friend Jilline. We can't be older than twenty-two or twenty-three, and we're posing in silly Mae West-like outfits gleaned from J's massive costume collection, and we are shockingly beautiful. We're playing with clothes, and T, just as young as we are, is playing with his camera--two things that often happened when the three of us were together.  But I had completely forgotten this particular episode. Opening the box was like being confronted with a self I'd never met. I cried . . . for so many reasons--surprise, loss . . . mostly for Jilline, so vivid then, long dead now; but also for the girl I was, that lovely clueless body; but also for the invisible eye looking into the camera, my constant, my still-constant.

It was a confusing and emotional moment, emblematic, perhaps, of what it feels to be stepping into my next decade today. I am, as I always am on my birthday, so glad to be alive. I love life, and the earth, my people and animals, my books, the tomatoes on the vines, the fire on the hearth, the leaves spinning slowly from the maples, the hoot of a child, the shout of a gull . . . I love them all, I write about them all, constantly conning among these details, sifting among them, marveling.

But as I turn sixty, I also step formally into the next rituals of my life: the rituals of age, not old age yet, but the door into that corridor has opened. I am not afraid, though I am apprehensive. I am not yearning to be young again, yet those photos of my young self give me pain. Who is this milky-skinned girl, without sons, without poems?

She would be amazed to imagine growing up to be sixty years old. She read so many books in those days, she read books passionately, and she glowed at the idea of becoming a real writer but she had no stamina, she still thought being a writer meant being a novelist, she winced away from the idea of being a poet though she loved poems, she loved Keats and Hopkins with all her heart, and she also loved boys, she loved romance, the drama of romance, the rush of heat, the spinning loss of control, she would be amazed to know that, nearly forty years later, she would still be with this same guy, she would be thrilled, this must be true love like in the books, she was such a sentimental fool, and she loved her friend Jilline, she hadn't had many women friends in those days, she was such a sucker for boys, but Jilline saw through that, Jilline gave her some lessons in a new way of love, the love of hopes and dreams and talk and making art and longing to become, to become something beyond the body but also the body as canvas, she didn't dream that Jilline would be dead at forty, she didn't dream that Jilline would live on as a dream, she looked at herself in the camera lens, she was twenty-three years old and she did not  know what she saw.

That child, that self. She is a kernel inside the roughening shell, something green but also very fragile. I did grow up to be sixty years old. But I also stayed goofily in love. I also stayed starstruck with Keats and Hopkins. I learned to make friends with many women, women who keep teaching me, as Jilline had begun to, that the bonds of friendship are a rich and complicated version of devotion. I learned that sons are better than poems, but that nonetheless making poems is what I have to do.

I learned that there's no real ending to this sort of thinking--but that dailiness calls. I need to stop writing now, and get up and go do some living.

Because my birthday is on Monday, today is the day I'm celebrating with Tom. This morning we'll go out to breakfast at our favorite diner, then drive down to our favorite bird sanctuary and wander among the salt marshes and along the beach. Then home, and home stuff--for me, that will mean finishing the firewood stacking and maybe I'll doze in front of a football game--and eventually T will grill scallops for dinner. Low-key excitement, for sure, but speckled with the little things that have shaped our life together.

Here's a poem from the new book, which sums up how I've been feeling lately, at this point of ritual transition, at this hiccup in time--

in myself I am

 

not much to write

home about not much to remember

 

when you pass me on the road I

smile and drop my eyes it is easy

 

to be invisible I listen

for the sounds of love a passing 

 

train the dark autumn 

rain splashing in the gutters

 

squirrels and chickadees

flitting past my feet as if I were

 

a lamppost or a coffin

there is no world like one 

 

that does not know you live in it

no age not dipped

 

in shadow and I am a scant

weight a brevity you

 

would not hear me whisper

in the night would not recognize

 

my shoes in the hall I am

the bronze in the snow the steed

 

beneath the general the

spider who will not weave

 

in spring and all the while

the clamor of the city rises

 

like a broken waltz trucks

bang past on the freeway

 

gulls scream in the parking lots

and I unseen slip along the potholed

 

streets bare-headed humming

a small song only I can hear

[from Dawn Potter, Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

For some reason this work week seemed to drag out forever. I am very happy that Saturday has finally stepped through the door, and I intend to do it justice. No editing, no class planning, no thinking about book launches: just Saturday stuff . . . garden puttering, firewood stacking, grocery shopping, playoff-baseball listening, book reading, and a big absorbing cooking project to close out the day.

Last night I made macaroni and cheese, gussied up with wild mushrooms and home-grown red peppers and basil, on the side a sliced heirloom tomato dressed with olive oil and mint, a few spears of roasted eggplant, and an apple flan topped with maple yogurt for dessert. It wasn't a fancy meal, just a weekday one, but it looked so pretty--early autumn coziness on a plate. I do love the beauty of food.

A couple of weeks ago I acquired a red kabocha squash, and today I hope to slowly transform it into gnocchi with fried sage sauce--a slow process but gratifying, especially with the murmur of baseball to support me. I'll probably make a big Greek salad to go with it and warm up a couple of slices of apple flan for dessert. And I've got tiny garden beets to cook and peel, leftover roast lamb to slice and freeze for future meals, more herbs to harvest for drying, and maybe the time has come to pick the remaining peppers.

I know I talk too much about food in these posts, but cooking and contriving are easily the biggest daily events in the non-wordy regions of my life. The growing, the foraging, the acquiring, the making, the presenting, the cleaning, the storing: compared to everything else on that list, eating is a brevity, a flicker. I am fortunate to have a partner who notices and cares, but he would love me just as much if I were a regular slapdash meal maker. I am the only person who expects this level of commitment from myself. I wonder why.

But yesterday evening, as I was wandering from room to room, the sight of the Serrano peppers hanging along the window frames, reddening as they dry . . . the bundles of flowers and herbs and grasses lining the lintel . . . the firewood heaped in its box by the stove: all of this moved me deeply. I don't know why. It is inconsequential, so small. There are plenty of self-righteous homesteaders, people whose "I did it myself" is holier-than-thou braggadocio. I don't feel that way. I'm not trying to prove anything, or push you to imitate me, or live up to parental expectations, or demonstrate my obsessive thriftiness. I just make things. And then I look at what I made. Somehow food and poems have become part of the same project.

I went out to write last night, tired after a long week and not entirely sure I wanted to be social. But as always, it was the best thing to do. Thursdays, as my friend Gretchen says, are a bit like church.

Now there's just one more workday to get through: a morning of editing and class prep, then an afternoon meeting, then another round of firewood stacking as I slide from work into the weekend.

But the floors are washed, and the editing trudges on. I wrote a couple of messy drafts last night, and I slept in clean sheets. The class plans are starting to cohere; and though the book-launch prep is making me nervous, I persist. I'm struggling hard to get out from under the cloud of "who will bother to come," but I understand that this is my own stupid psyche talking, that it's just another manifestation of postpartum book-publishing gloom. I wish I didn't have it, but at least by now I recognize the enemy.

This has been such a crammed week: so much editing tangle, plus Poetry Kitchen/book launch prep, plus dealing with my car, dealing with firewood, squeezing in a moment to get vaccine boosters, plus whipping up meals and going out in the evenings--yesterday to a movie, tonight to write. But at least here in the little northern city by the sea, I can walk the mile to fetch my car from the body shop, walk the half-mile to get vaccinated. In backwoods Harmony such chores would swallow entire days.

But today is all about housework, so I'll step away from the desk, at least for a little while, and give my stressed eyes some relief. All that flickering screen work really takes a toll. It will be a vacation to wash some floors instead.

I hadn't expected these book launches to be so labor-intensive, but getting ready for them has been absorbing quite a bit of time--especially the zoom one, because Jeannie and I are planning to spend the final third of the hour in conversation about one another's books, which means I've been hammering out discussion questions and book descriptions in the midst of all of my other desk tasks. Have you ever tried to write a long paragraph about your own book? It's not so easy. And I haven't even begun to prep for next week's Monson class yet. Oy.

In a way, I was hoping these vaccines might make me comfortably ill so that I could loll on the couch without guilt. However, so far I feel perfectly fine. Kind of a disappointment, really.

Still, here I am, getting paid (sometimes) to do (mostly) interesting stuff. And I don't have to rush out of the house and catch a bus or anything. And my car should now pass inspection. And stacking firewood is more fun than boring exercises on my mat. And I get to go out write tonight with my friends. And I'm actually very happy about how my new book looks and reads. And it's October, and the the light in the maples is heart-soaring.

Thanks to an editing tangle, my deskwork responsibilities have swelled from manageable to hair-raising. I'm juggling two other projects, plus class planning, plus book-launch planning, plus this particular mess, and my eyes feel like they're popping out of my head.

So it was a relief to spend an afternoon hour stacking wood in the modest autumn sunshine, occasionally chatting with passersby, most of whom want to marvel over the magnificent, four-foot-high eggplant in the front bed. Talk about curb appeal! That plant has everything: a plethora of glossy little fruits, broad spreading leaves, stems as sturdy as a small tree's . . .  hands' down, the eggplant wins this year's garden Oscar.

But even though the eggplant is still going strong, the tomato vines are winding down, so I picked a bushel of greens and brought them into the house to redden here. The Romas and cherry tomatoes are small enough to keep ripening outside (at least for the moment), but the big boys are done. This weekend I'll cut down the vines and put away the stakes and say another small farewell to summer.

Today will be sort of like yesterday: a snarl of deskwork, followed by some therapeutic wood stacking, but then I'll walk over to the drugstore and get my flu and Covid shots, and later T and I will go out to a screening of Our Man in Havana. Maybe my car will be released from the hospital today. Maybe I'll listen to some playoff baseball. Maybe I'll do a little writing. It seems unlikely, but one can hope.

My first Poetry Kitchen class of the season is coming up on October 12, so I've been working hard on the syllabus and the reading packet: three pairs of poems, three linked discussions, three big writing prompts. This kind of planning requires so much work: it's not simple to construct an atmosphere that combines ease with concentration, especially on zoom. But the work is interesting and absorbing for its own sake. I read through poems, thinking about how they dovetail, imagining how conversations will open a window into sudden new writing. Teaching can be a kind of negative capability: how can I step aside as manipulator and let the poems themselves rise into power?

Today is the first day of October, my birthday month, the month of playoff baseball and bright blue skies and red maple leaves. This morning a truck will dump a load of firewood in the driveway, and I will spend the next few afternoons trundling the wheelbarrow back and forth to the woodshed, squirreling the logs away for next winter. I'm almost ready for winter. Almost.

But I've got too much to do at my desk. Just thinking about the editing stack makes me want to put my head down and go to sleep. I'd rather trundle firewood. I'd rather fill bushel baskets with green tomatoes. I'd rather rake leaves and roll out pie dough. Alas.

Yesterday, on my walk, I found another small clump of hen-of-woods mushrooms--just enough for dinner. I was already marinating a leg of lamb (in yogurt, mint, coriander, and tangerine zest), so I made a vegetable dish to accompany it: slices of potato layered in a pie dish with sautéed wild mushrooms and diced red peppers from the garden, then baked in milk and butter. On the side was a simple fresh tomato salad, and we had apple crisp for dessert. It was a magnificent meal: organic Vermont lamb grown by a friend, garden produce, local apples, foraging treasures . . . a meal to help me forget my deskwork grumpiness.

Thank goodness I'm a cook. It's a job that almost always makes me feel better.