It was 80 degrees in the homeland when I arrived here yesterday afternoon, and by dinnertime it was still warm enough to eat dinner on the screened porch. But despite the heat, spring is later here than in Portland--trees still mostly bare, daffodils at full blow but no tulips yet.

The mysterious spring still lay under a spell,

the transparent wind stalked over the mountains,

                            --Anna Akhmatova

And so all night I woke and slept beneath an open window, listening to raindrops and frog cries and now this sea-roar wind tearing through the forest. 

What a glorious spring day we had . . . shirt-sleeve weather; bright, bright sunshine after days of rain. The neighborhood cherry trees have burst into bloom, early tulips glow, tiny new leaves sprout on every sappy branch. 

Though I spent much of the day at my desk, windows were open all over the house, and birds and the city chipped and muttered to me as I worked. I was immersed in a new poem, a multipart piece that arose from the jottings I'd made in Natalie's workshop--a big messy surprising draft, my favorite sort, one of those new strange wondrous embryonic ballads that make me feel like a million bucks, as I wrote to a friend yesterday.

I woke up this morning with the memory of that new mysterious draft trembling under my hands. It is the second-best feeling . . . the first-best was yesterday's making, but second-best is still magnificent. All day long, as I pack my bags, as I drive north, I'll picture the poem breathing air, the poem unfolding its wet wings.

Spring and a big new poem. Heading north to the homeland. A final class with my young folks. The friendly gaze of my beloved. The returning vigor of my old cat. Even the pettier pleasures: homemade chocolate pudding with fresh whipped cream; a Yankees loss to the Orioles. They are the ballast to the terrible dream I had last night, when everywhere I went people were being assassinated, though I myself was not important enough to be killed. No need to explain the source of such nightmares: we are living inside them.

Still, we also live inside pickup softball games, little children with bubble wands, the flowering cherry exploding into blossom, dogs rolling in green grass, a wren skittering up a tree trunk. When the words on the page suddenly speak the words of the body, well, then, as the hymn asks, "How can I keep from singing?"

For narrative consistency, I ought to attach this photo to yesterday's post. However, several of those pots of flowers are now sitting wetly in my driveway waiting to be planted, so perhaps politically-metaphorically the photo is more appropriate here. Will the daffodils and tulips of poetry return next year? Or will squirrels dig them up and eat them? 

It's Monday morning again. It seems to be Monday morning so often. The weekend rainstorm has rolled off into the North Atlantic, the puddles are drying up in the streets, and already the sky is blue-white above the fluffy maples. I have no editing projects sitting on my desk--not a scrap, not a pin. I've already prepped for my high schoolers, I've already prepped for next weekend's zoom class. I do have some conference planning to do, but nothing pressing, nothing urgent. The day opens before me. I don't know what it will bring.

I'm even at loose ends reading-wise. I finished The Wings of the Dove yesterday and am now making my way through the introduction. After that: who knows? Today is a clean-slate day.

I'll get laundry onto the line. I'll go for a long walk. I'll drink a cup of tea while sitting outside on a damp chair. I'll open my notebook and discover what I scrawled in Natalie's workshop. I'll embark on some sort of gardening project--maybe digging weeds out of the front walk and planting creeping thyme in the empty spaces; maybe turning over sod along the driveway and transplanting lilies into a new bed. I'll mess around with some of last week's poem drafts. I'll open windows. I'll scrape ashes out of the stove. I'll stir-fry marinated tofu and broccoli raab. I'll stare into the sky.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again; Wednesday will be my final high school class of the season; Saturday I'll be in Zoom class all day; at any moment I expect another editing project to leap into my inbox. But today is a small bouquet of nothing-in-particular. I am so looking forward to it.

Well, yesterday was a day.

At 10 a.m. Betsy and I drove from Portland to Augusta in torrential rain. On the highway my tires felt and sounded like they were splashing through a river, but at least it was daylight, I kept reminding myself. Things are bound to get better.

However, no. At 10 p.m. we drove home from dinner in Brunswick in extraordinary fog, so dense that in places I could barely make out the white lines on the highway. Beside me Betsy kept sighing, Oh, my, oh my. 

So, driving-wise, it was white knuckles from beginning to end. But then there was Natalie Diaz. She was a marvel--thoughtful and intense in the classroom, a skilled and generous reader of her own work, friendly and funny over dinner. It was a privilege to spend the day in her company . . . and how I would love to bring her to Monson, though I'm sure we could never afford her.

And then there was Betsy, another marvel. It was equally a privilege to spend the day alongside her: as a student, on the stage, in the car, as a pal . . . watching and listening to her--so smart and funny and affectionate and vulnerable and sharp-eyed. Poets like these are humanity at their best. I know I'm always asking this question, but: How did I get so lucky?

***

That said, I am extremely glad to be home. While I will admit to a sense of accomplishment as a driver, my eyes feel, even now, as if they're ready to leap out of my head and roll around on the floor.

Here I sit, on my shabby old couch, blinking into the watery morning dawn. Though the fog has lifted, the sky is furred with cloud, and I can see that the rain-soaked maples have swelled into full blossom. Earth is sodden, plants and songbirds are jubilant. I fit right in. Even tired and squinty, I can sing about love.

5 a.m. A few raindrops spatter. Under the street lamps, black coins of wet dot paving stones, and a mineral scent wafts up from the shadows. [It has taken me ten minutes to carve out that sentence. By now, no doubt, the living scene is entirely different. That's the problem with words. They're always behind the times.]

This early morning is my small hiatus before the storm. Rain will settle in, I will get behind the wheel, the day will fill with talking and listening and talking and listening, and rain and driving, and talking and listening, and driving and rain, and by 9 p.m. or so I might be back home again, or I might still be talking and listening and driving in the rain. [I required much less time to make that sentence. Maybe it's easier to write about things that haven't happened yet.]

Betsy and I have spent many hours fidgeting over a talk that will be considerably shorter than our fidgets, but isn't that always the way? I foresee the need for a midafternoon cup of coffee. I foresee the need for a private corner, fortified by empty chairs and a paperback. Festivals, at least in foresight, elicit the anxious introvert within. I will pack Henry James for protection. [This paragraph is full of pompous language but so be it. I've reached the point of whatever-comes-out-is-whatever-comes-out. Resignation to fate is a typical stage in the writing process.]

A question: what does one wear for a day in the classroom, on stage, out for dinner, in the car, and slogging through rain? Another question: how do trees blossom so suddenly? As daylight creeps in, I see that the maples have been transformed. They are nothing like the bare silhouettes of nightfall. Something happened overnight--a switch thrown, a spell cast--and now each twig is fluffed in pale green or dark red. [I threw down two unrelated questions, and before I knew it they had somehow become linked. Is this my particular brain at work or just a really obvious dust cloud that everybody has seen coming from miles away? Who knows. (Note that my last question doesn't have a question mark. I put it in and took it out and put it in and took it out. That is how poets waste the guttering flame of their hours.)]

Now the cat is whapping down the stairs--bam, bam, bam . . . that Sandburgian "fog comes in on little cat feet" stuff is a joke in this household: yeah, sure, if fog were like heaving sandbags; and now I have finished my second little cup of coffee and that means I need to make the bed and gather the laundry and act like a person who's got chores and responsibilities and a schedule and stuff; and also now the cat is clawing at the couch to get my attention and climbing onto the coffee table to get my attention and loudly washing his feet to get my attention, so even though I have no idea how to gracefully finish this letter to you, I am going to finish it anyway . . . May the rain and the headlights be tender to my tired eyes. [Sorry. Clearly the punctuation situation is out of hand. Oh well. Too late now.]

 Two evenings in a row without a wood fire! Spring really must be here. A week ago I was fretting about the dwindling pile, and now I wonder how much will be left in the basement for next fall. Stove season certainly isn't over: I usually keep the woodbox filled into June, when we still get an occasional chill evening. But the nightly ritual of fire lighting has passed.

I did get my flowerpots filled yesterday, and this afternoon, if I can do some weeding in the tulip beds, I'll feel ready for the weekend rains. I might even have to drag the mower out today: the little front-yard grass patch is growing fast. But I do have desk work as well--a poetry collection to edit, more festival prep, and I need to turn my thoughts back to conference plans. By the way, if you're at all interested in attending the conference, you should register immediately because we are nearly at capacity. I am excited about the steady interest; I'm really excited about the summer's focus and faculty; I would so love to see you there, gazing with me into the waters of that heart-stopping lake.

As expected, I did not get to everything on yesterday's list, but I did manage to do a lot of it. I finished an editing project, I worked on a poem draft, I cleaned house, and, best of all, I shoveled the entire soil delivery into the garden boxes, set up my tomato stakes, and sowed spinach, arugula, and lettuce. Today I'll work on high school plans and prep for Saturday's festival, and then I'll slip out to the nursery to buy a flat of annuals for my flower pots. If I can get them planted this afternoon and do a bit of weeding in the front beds, the domain will be in good shape for the weekend rains.

On Saturday Betsy Sholl and I will be talking together about two poems, one from each of our recent books. (We had to submit these poems early so that the University of Maine at Augusta students could read them in class, and copies will be floating around the festival, which for some reason I find slightly nerve-racking.) We've come up with a variety of questions to ask one another, but I still don't feel exactly ready transition-wise, so that's what I need to do this morning: actually plot out how we might move from thought to thought. At their best, staged conversations have a patina of ease, but without planning they can devolve into unbalanced glop, or a series of sidebars, or one long um. Performance is complex, even when it's not supposed to look like performance.

As an introvert who is also a performer, I've had to think a lot about exactly how to put on a show. My sort is pretty common, I've found, and not just among poets. Introversion and art making go together--all that alone time, all that obsessiveness. Lots of actors, teachers, musicians, writers, and dancers are happiest in an empty room. I daresay the same goes for athletes. But most of us need to put on a show now and again and thus we need to figure out how to conduct and construct ourselves on stage. Speaking: it's a whole other level of work, very different from the daily tasks of reading, writing, revising, or organizing a manuscript.

So that's today's job: plotting out an hour's staged conversation. You could call this stage blocking, I guess: figuring out what question goes where, whose response moves where, what thought leads to what other thought, how much time each segment will take, which poet steps up to the footlights, which steps back into the shadows . . .

Over the past few years I have learned to love these small tulips almost more than the the tall showy ones. Known as species tulips, they are among the oldest of the tulip varieties, and much hardier than than the hybrid ones. Year after year they return, thriving in poor soil or rich. Early in the morning the blooms are closed up tight, but by the middle of a sunny afternoon they have opened like stars. 

And this is bloodroot, finally beginning to naturalize. This year it is spreading throughout the bed, among the ramps that are also spreading, and the effect is so beautiful. Once, in a long-ago March, I saw a field, an actual field, of crocuses in bloom at Kew in London. Ever since, that has been my dream of beauty . . . a field of spring ephemerals trembling in the new air.

***

Today my weekly housework chores await, as does that endless editing, and I need to convince myself to deal with class plans for next week, and I need to prep for Saturday's festival presentation, and I'm itching to mess with some notebook scratchings, and also a cubic yard of garden soil will be dumped onto my driveway at some point today, and thus, as you might guess, this will be a day when something on that list will surely not get done. Already temperatures are in the mid-40s, destined to rise into the 60s. I expect I will have a hard time staying in the house, but I will try.

I'm still reading E. B. White's essays, still working my way through The Wings of the Dove. The cat is still snuffling with his cold, and I am still snuffling with spring allergies, and neither of us slept well last night, so we will both enjoy the sunshine. Now that he's an old fellow he doesn't stray far from my side. I'm sure we are a comical pair, strolling slowly together through our minuscule domain.

Ah, take your loves where you can find them . . . old cat, new blossoms, the tremble of unwritten poems, a cup of tea warming cold hands, the scratch of responsibility, a freshly washed floor, six workshirts fluttering on a clothesline, the unsaid, the murmur, the awkward song--

Steve from the garage called mid-morning and, as always, I gritted my teeth as I picked up the phone. My poor car has been under the knife a lot this year, and I assumed Steve was gearing up to share the bad news about yet another costly repair. But no! He was calling to say that he couldn't find anything wrong, and there would be no charge, and he was leaving the key in the visor.

So the auto gods nodded kindly on me yesterday, but the veterinary charms have been mixed. Poor Ruckus is healing well, abscess-wise, but now he's caught a cold and is snuffling and sneezing and behaving exactly like a human who wants to spend all day in bed watching bad television. Still, he keeps to his habits, following me outside when I do my chores, tucking himself into a leaf pile beside the clotheslines as I pin up shirts, lolling on a paving stone as I lug shrubs from one hole to another. He loves to watch me toil.

Yesterday I moved a rosebush to the backdoor bed, then planted a nannyberry viburnum in a dark backyard corner, a running serviceberry between the driveways, and a flowering almond by the street. Fingers crossed that they all survive, but it's been a good spring for transplanting: plenty of rain, not too much sudden heat. I also finally got my peas in, and tomorrow the new soil for the boxes arrives, so I'll be able to plant spring greens as well. For dinner last night I harvested a mess of ramps, very exciting as they are finally beginning to naturalize, and we ate them with lemon-marinated chicken, baked polenta, asparagus in ginger butter, and a green salad. 

Of course I was at my desk too: the day wasn't all wind and soil. I'm juggling a passel of editing projects at various levels of completion, but today I should pluck at least one out of my hair and toss it back to the press. And I'll get onto my mat too; maybe dig into some notebook scribbles and see if I want to play with any of them; maybe work on class planning or maybe procrastinate on that for a day or two . . . 

In the meantime the neighborhood glistens under a film of rain.

I spent nearly all of Easter outside in the windy garden--tearing out a sick rhododendron and then transplanting shrubs (two elderberries and a blueberry) and perennials (iris, yarrow, gladioli, a clematis). I rearranged trellises and the birdbath in the backyard, weeded out maple seedlings, did a lot of watering and hole digging. Above me stretched a bright blue sky, and the maples lashed in the wind.

And now it's Monday again. I won't be teaching in Monson this week because of school vacation, but the days still feel breathless. This morning I've got to get the car into the shop, and then I'll retreat to my desk and burrow into the stack of editing. If the car comes home in time, I'll grocery shop and maybe run out to the plant nursery to investigate shrubs. At some point I'll need to plan for my last day with the kids next week. I'll need to prep for the Plunkett Poetry Festival on Saturday, which will require me to don a weighty mix of student, presenter, and socializer hats: first, taking a workshop with Natalie Diaz; then doing a presentation with Betsy Sholl; then listening to Natalie's reading; then going out to dinner with Natalie, Betsy, and a few university staff. I'm a little overwhelmed just thinking about it.

Probably I've got a stack of other things to do between now and then, but I haven't opened my calendar yet, so for the moment I can pretend there's some airspace for digging, writing, dreaming.

Wind, warm as bathwater, whips at the house, roars through the trees. There's no rain, no storm, just this southwesterly gale, gusting, swirling, dancing, wailing. Above its moan I hear gulls, crows, songbirds hard at work. They croak, call, twitter, trill; they sail and buffet and flash, tossed by air, uncowed by it.

Today is Easter, a peculiar holiday for those of us who are not observant Christians and have no small children at home. When the boys were little I put together baskets and colored eggs and cooked hot-cross buns and made a big meal, but now I don't know what to do myself on Easter, except to embrace the pagan spring.

Last night T cleared the dead leaves out of the fire pit, lit a flame, and we had our first grill night of the season--lamb chops, halloumi, red onions, cherry tomatoes. I made rice with black pepper and lime, scattered freshly harvested chives and spinach, and we piled our plates high. As we ate, we listened to the Red Sox walk off a win in the tenth inning. The windows were wide open. The pagan spring poured in.

I taught all day yesterday, and today my only solid plans are not to teach all day. The weather won't be as freakishly warm as it was, but it will still be soft. I'll walk, I'll dig, I'll read. I might look at poem drafts. I'll cook something or other involving salmon and mangoes.

Yesterday's class went well, I think, but it was also deeply exhausting. People are so sad and afraid. People are struggling to trust their own imaginations. That is a soul-killing state of affairs, and my own soul took a battering because of it.

At least I have pagan spring for solace. Wind, carry me the scent of hyacinths. 

So I didn't plant peas yesterday. Turns out when I opened my shipment of seeds: no peas. Apparently the variety was out of stock, so I'll have to track down a packet elsewhere. But the day was in no way a bust. I planted leeks, red onions, and potatoes; dragged out the hoses and the backyard furniture; moved the cold frame off the spinach so it wouldn't overheat; and otherwise bustled around the place.

Now Howl, howl, says the cat at the door, and I step into the wet darkness. Already it's 50 degrees out there and the birds are shrieking in the trees and the baby spinach plants are trembling with joy. A warm night, a warm rain, a humid dawn, and sun on the way . . . Eden, after so many weeks of raw cold.

It's not even 6 a.m., but things are already busy around here. T is putting on his shoes, draining his coffee cup, getting himself ready to head out into the city to take pictures. The cat is washing. I am heating water for tea and considering laundry and brooms and stove ashes and bed making. Time swirls, a little eddy, splashing among stones.

Today's class will be about metaphor, about the clarities of joy and fear. I cannot teach a class about ranting or polemic. I can't abide them, no matter their political persuasion. I don't know what a poet's purpose is on this earth. But surely we owe attention to the particular, the stone and the leaf and the warm hand. If not the poets, then who?

I worked at my desk all morning, then met with Betsy about our festival prep, and then--with much happiness--I dragged my pea and bean trellises out of the shed and set them up in their garden places. It's far too early to plant beans, but I like to figure out the architecture of the garden early. Peas are another story: it's the perfect time to plant peas, and that is what I am going to do this afternoon.

Plenty of desk chores await, but I'll be teaching all day tomorrow so I'm not going to press myself unduly. I need to do a final rereading of my Monson student work, I've got a stack of editing, and there are conference administration chores aplenty, but the garden calls, the garden calls. Seed potatoes and red-onion sets arrived in the mail yesterday, new soil for the new boxes will arrive next week, and I have several shrubs to transplant as well a few to dig out and give up on. The ramps are sprouting and spreading, garlic and chives are greening, and the air is scented with hyacinths. It's so hard to stay indoors.

Sheets flutter on the lines; the convalescent cat curls into a leaf pile to watch me work: the idyl of spring--dirt cakes my fingernails and a pair of cardinals flirts among the budding lilacs. I can hardly believe my luck: here I am, still alive, witnessing earth's scintillating, outrageous floorshow.

Yesterday, for the first time this spring, I hung laundry on the outside lines--always a banner day. All afternoon I caught glimpses of the towels whipping in the breeze. Tiny daffodils bobbed along the fence line, and the cardinals sang and sang. It wasn't an especially warm day, but it was bright, and after so many days of rain the plants rejoiced and the neighborhood cats rolled around luxuriously on the paving stones.

I have been reading the essays of E. B. White, always such a delight. Though he was writing in the 1950s, his talk of Maine small towns and weather and local people and livestock feels like my world too. And he takes such delight in his sentences. Revisiting his work is sheer joy, and I recommend it to all of you.

Do not think I've given up on Henry James. But he is a rich and heavy diet, best consumed moderately.

Today I'll get myself onto my mat, get sheets onto the line, and then spend the morning editing at my desk. In the afternoon Betsy will come over to talk about our presentation at the Plunkett Festival next Saturday. And then this evening I'll go out to write.

What I am longing to do is to plant peas. Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow.

We arrived back in Portland in the same weather we left: pouring rain. Still, everything is so much greener. Despite the matching downpours, it's clearly been warmer here than it was on the island. Eventually the rain calmed enough so that we could unload the car. Otherwise, it was an undramatic return. The cat readjusted to being home again, T and I went out for Sichuan food, and then the three of us sat around on the couch listening to baseball and getting sleepy until we faded off to bed.

Today, of course, I have a million chores to do, large and small--house, desk, phone, errands--but first I'm going to take a walk and inspect this new greening-up town. On the mantle is a big bouquet of forsythia from the island, trembling on the brink of blossom. In my yard a few bright daffodils nods and beam. I look forward to discovering what other gems the neighborhood yards are sporting.

It was an odd little vacation--overshadowed by cold rain and a sick cat--but restful in its own way . . . if you discount the twice-a-day purgatory of cat pills. I read Austen's Persuasion cover to cover, with the sort of zest generally reserved for eating potato chips while stoned. I copied out all of Coleridge's Lime-Tree Bower and half of his Frost at Midnight. I muscled through another large chunk of James's The Wings of the Dove. We did no mountain climbing whatsoever, but we did mosey through a bog and idle along a cove. We saw a lot of our friend, ate good cottage-made meals, drank too much wine, went on an outing to the town dump, and moved some old tires. Tom installed window trim, our friend and I talked about poems, and we all hated the government.

Friendship with this world, ever more perfect

(if not for the salty smell of blood).

                 --Adam Zagajewski

Yesterday began cold but ended warm enough for us to sit on the back porch and eat bread and cheese while Ruckus prowled the corners and bumped his nose against the screen. After dark, peepers shrilled from the hedgerows, and now this morning the sky is a rippled sheet over the glassy cove.

It's our last morning on the island; we'll head home after lunch and tomorrow we'll fall back into work with a bang. I've got stacks of editing awaiting, lots of housework to do, and then I'll be teaching all day Saturday. But at least the cat seems well on the way to recovery. We had our little respite; we even went for a modest hike yesterday among the bogs and boardwalks. The weather felt more like November than April, but the singing frogs are hopeful and a bouquet of forsythia is beginning to blossom.

 I am happy to report that it is not, at the moment, raining downeast. The sky is still grim, the sea is still the color of zinc, the breeze is still raw and chill, but no actual precipitation is falling. Yesterday afternoon T and I took a small airing along the boat launch in Seal Cove, an area the locals call the Algerine because  it's said to resemble the coast of Algeria . . . and perhaps it does, if Mediterranean Africa resembles Maine granite and saltwater on a wet and bone-chilling day, which I find difficult to believe but what do I know. Even the loon diving for fish looked cold. Even the gulls poised on a rock looked cold. I lamented not wearing long underwear, and my glasses were speckled with raindrops. Soon we got back into the car and returned to the cottage and threw some more logs on the fire and resumed reading our books.

This is not say that our vacation is disappointing. It is just not very outdoorsy, though we do have hopes of a hike today. Meanwhile, Ruckus continues to feel better and better and thus continues to make more trouble. His current dream is to figure out how to climb into the rafters, and he is spending much time pretending he's about to reach that goal. He is a cat who adores an audience, particularly at moments of wickedness. He is also a cat who is intensely sick of his medicine regimen. My forearms are carved with scratches; I look like I've been trying to slit my wrists.

Still, despite his assholery, he's been good company in his own self-satisfied way. He sleeps solidly between us at night, he winds sociably around our ankles, he pats his paws cutely on my leg when he wants to be picked up, and he purrs hard as I carry him around the cottage.

Now, outside, a flock of geese honks in for landing. The sea is settling into low tide, and a few tiny ducks paddle in the muddy shallows. Across the cove, Swan's Island is a long bulky shadow. The day is gray and gray and gray, but in all weathers and tints Acadia's coast is a glory.

Snow fell for most of the morning, but temperatures were rising and finally, around 11 a.m., we lurched out of Portland, laden with cat and construction tools and a pile of window trim that Tom had prepped to install in our friend's kitchen. Fortunately the weather was worse in the city than anywhere else: mostly we drove through drizzle, with occasional spats of heavier rain. The roadways were wet but not slick; and in the back seat, the cat, goopy with painkillers, yowled a little, without conviction.

Three hours later,  the medication had largely worn off, and by the time we arrived Ruckus was grumpy. But as soon as we opened his carrier in the cottage, he changed his tune. Like most everyone else who sees it, he fell in love with the place. He inspected every cranny, he climbed on the beds, he purred as I lit the wood stove, he sampled his chow, he tried out his new litterbox, he cuddled into the blanket, he peered through the screened porch at seagulls and crows, and he snuffed up the delicious scent of saltwater. He enjoyed visiting with company at dinner and squished cozily between Tom and me all night. In short, except for the twice-a-day pilling ordeal, he is having a terrific time on vacation. 

This morning, as Ruckus and Tom wallow in bed, I am staring out at low tide. Gulls are wailing, and rain will fall on and off all day. In a little while I'll walk up to my friend's house and do the Sunday crossword puzzle with her and her sister. My friend and I may go out and play music at the soup kitchen later in the morning: the car was too full for me to bring the violin, but I might re-set her uke to fiddle tuning and see what sounds I can pry out of it. In the afternoon T and I might go out for a walk somewhere in the rain. Or he might install our friend's window trim. Or we might read books and take naps. It's good to be here, in our little cottage by the sea, with our happy convalescing cat. And who knew that traveling with a cat could actually be fun? I would never have expected it.

Yesterday, late afternoon, I noticed that the cat was licking under his tail incessantly and seemed unhappy and uncomfortable. I took a peek and saw what looked like a hotspot, just to the left of his rectum, and immediately called the vet, who had no space on the schedule so pointed me toward urgent care . . . yet another perk of living in a city: services such as "urgent care vet" are in fact just around the corner. 

Off Ruckus and I went, both of us full of nerves. The vet immediately diagnosed him with an anal-gland abscess--basically a giant infected boil on his ass. So I sat for an hour and a half in the office as they sedated him, drained the abscess, did bloodwork, and finally returned him to me looking peaked and wan in an Elizabethan collar (which even in his sad state he had managed to remove inside the pet carrier by the time we got home).

So now we are facing 10 days of antibiotics (pilling this cat is the kind of punishment one might find in a circle of Dante's hell), plus the horrible collar, plus some pain meds, which at least keep him drowsy and not licking himself. He and I made it through the night together on the couch, and this morning the wound looks clean and he is purring, though still wan.

The question is: what about our vacation? Do we stay at home and tend the cat, or do we bring him along and tend him at the cottage?

After much discussion last night, we chose option 2. Except that when I woke up this morning I discovered that it's snowing hard.

So will we go anywhere? And if we do, will the cat yowl in the car for three hours straight? In either case, will I lose a finger while dosing him with antibiotics? Stay tuned tomorrow for another thrilling episode in Adventures with Fate.

Yesterday I finished an editing project, then hung out with various iterations of poets till bedtime. Now today, after I muscle through a few desk chores, I am on cottage time: shopping for the island, packing for the island. The shopping is the far bigger task: our trips to the cottage are essentially four days of dinner parties, cooked in a tiny, minimally equipped kitchen, plus breakfast, lunch, and hiking food. So planning is complex, and we travel heavy.

In addition to food, I have another burning question: how many books should I bring along? My children have invented a joke equation in which days-on-vacation have an explosively exponential relationship to books-in-Dawn's-luggage. This time I'm working with the added twist of trapped-inside-on-rainy-days, so the resulting number could be staggering. Certainly I will pack Henry James (now in a nice new non-disintegrating paperback), probably also Jane Hamilton's novel The Book of Ruth, which I just plucked off a friend's giveaway pile and seems like an undemanding read that might balance the tortuous pathways of James. I will probably bring along my Coleridge volume so that I can copy out "Lime-Tree Bower" word for word. I have Terrance Hayes's newest collection. I might bring along something for writing prompts: maybe the new facsimile edition of a 19th-century guide, called (if I remember correctly) Madame La Marchand's Magic, which Teresa and Jeannie sent me from Florida and which includes a long and fascinating section titled "The Ladies' Love Oracle." But what if I run out of novels? I can't run out of novels. . . .

You see that things are already getting out of hand. Fortunately, however, I can wear the same three old slopping-around-the-house outfits the whole time I'm there. Clothes are no worry at all.

Tom tells me that the forecast has brightened: we might have one day without rain. That's cheering news, not that I need cheering about the cottage. Even in the pouring rain, it is the sweetest place I know. No matter how foul the weather or how sad my mood, Goose Cove shimmers outside the back door.

Still, it's a given that our moods will be sad because last time we were there we got the news that our friend Ray had died, and nothing has been right in the world since. 

Yesterday was not warm, but it was sunny, and I basked--first, going for a long walk with my neighbor, then spending time in the front beds ripping out a few thousand maple seedling nemeses. Talk about opportunistic: those seedlings sprout between every stone and stair. The maple empire is real. It's a wonder the houses in this town are still standing.

Today won't be any warmer, and it will likely be less sunny, but I don't think we'll get rain, so maybe I'll have a chance to decimate a few thousand more maple foot soldiers. Or maybe not, if my afternoon meeting with Teresa and Jeannie runs long, as it almost always does. We'll share our work on some common poetry prompts and we'll chatter about our reading, and somehow two or three hours will vanish in a blink. And then tonight my writing group will meet--another long busy session with poets.

So many words. I expect I'll be reeling to bed like a drunk. Meanwhile, the maple seedlings, unmoved by literature, will declare victory.

I've been writing a lot lately, not fretting about the quality of the drafts, not thinking at all about revision, let alone publication. I'm just allowing the stuff to pour out, just letting the soft shapeless thoughts harden into words. I do set myself exercises and constraints, but I don't judge the results as good or bad. As a result, my file of embryo poems is getting denser and denser; the poems are beginning to adhere to one another, no doubt, but I'm not looking at that right now. It's an interesting fugue state: this almost automatic production, this complete lack of judgment.

The older I get, the more I recognize how dangerous too-early revision is to my imaginative trajectory. Of course I do fiddle with new drafts as they appear; I do experiment with shaping and syntax and such, but I try to keep all such work generative rather than editorial: "Oooh, what if? what if?" rather than "Fix, fix, fix." I think the difference here is primarily state of mind: it feels important to encourage my brain to stay sloppy.

As the great baseball pitcher Satchell Paige advised, "Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move."

As he also said: "I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation."

Yesterday's zoom teaching went as well as could be expected, and then afterward I pounded out some editing and commented on student drafts, so altogether it was a dense work-from-home day. Meanwhile, the air swirled with snow, no accumulation, just tattered flakes gyroscoping in the wind.

Today I'll be back to editing, but also I've got to set aside time to unsnarl medical billing. I want to get onto my mat; I need to do the grocery shopping; I'd like to muck around outside, but I expect the weather will stay grim.

Still, I refuse to complain about rain and cold. I am not going to dissolve into gloom and dread and wishful thinking--not about the weather, not even about these stupid medical bills, though I admit I am tempted to wail over them.

But what's the point? Here I am, still alive and lively, with two hyacinths blooming on my mantlepiece and a sweet guy making a sandwich in the kitchen. How can I complain?

Here are some more good things. Yesterday, between various jobs, I finished the Annie Ernaux book and made progress on the Henry James book. I'm editing a manuscript of short stories, a refreshing change from my usual academic assignments. I set up an appointment with the poet/tree expert who is helping me protect my beautiful healthy ash tree from the ravages of the emerald ash borer. My daffodils are beginning to bud. I have no idea what I'll be cooking for dinner, but I look forward to finding out.

What is love, 'tis not hereafter,

Present mirth, hath present laughter:

      What's to come, is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:

      Youth's a stuff will not endure.

[from William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night]

It's raining in Portland this morning, but as far as I can tell the bad weather hasn't kicked into central Maine yet, so I'm assuming I'll be on Zoom all day with the kids. Well, that's okay: I've got plenty for us to do, and my usual classroom assistant will be able to greet them when they come in, and sit with them in the room, and be a real human voice.

I cleaned floors yesterday, I commented on a student manuscript, I started a new editing project, I laid the stone paths between the new garden boxes . . . it was a productive-enough day, though also a raw and damp and glowering one. Today won't be any better in that regard, and the forecast for our weekend on the island looks just as rainy and cold. I guess we won't be climbing any Acadian mountains this visit.

Well, in July I'll be begging for rain, so I refuse to complain about the weather. A wet spring is far better than a dry spring, and a cool spring keeps the crocuses in bloom.

On my walk yesterday I found a slim volume by Annie Ernaux in one of the little free libraries I patronize. Ernaux is a French writer who won the Nobel a couple of years ago, and this particular book, Look at the Lights, My Love, records the visits she made to a sprawling big-box store outside of Paris over the course of a year. It's quite fascinating and it's been refreshing to read alongside the fin-de-siecle densities of Henry James. (I wish this silly blog program would allow me to easily insert French accents where they belong but it remains rigidly Anglophone.)

Today I'll be working with the kids on finishing touches for their final work: prompts involving experiments with titles and punctuation and maybe some performance practice as well . . . kind of difficult over zoom, but I might give it a try anyway. I use a stack of sample poems and prompts to demonstrate the richness of titles, an exercise I've found can be really helpful at this stage of the process. Kids tend to just slap on any old thing as a title; it surprises them to recognize how intensely a title can interact with the body of a poem.

So here's hoping they show up in snowy messy Monson--

Sunday was a cheerful and busy day, until I ate something or other that disagreed with me and spent the evening throwing up. Fortunately Tom did not also get sick, and this morning I seem to have largely recovered, though my gut still feels delicate. It may be a good thing that I'd already decided not to drive to Monson this afternoon. Tomorrow's forecast looks bad--five to six inches of snow in central Maine--and the likelihood of school cancelations is large. If I've made the wrong call, I'll gird myself to teach on zoom.

Today I'll go for a walk, finish my weekly housework, work on a student manuscript, and then, if the weather and my stomach allow, get into the garden and start moving paving stones. Without an afternoon drive ahead of me, the day seems to stretch into a bright haze. For the sake of my bank account, for the sake of the students' gallery prep,  I hope class isn't canceled. But snow days have inimitable charm.

***

On another note, remember that TV interview I did in early February? Well, it's been running in a few Massachusetts markets this week. Here's a link to the show. I haven't watched it myself, as I wince too much at the sight of myself on a screen, but maybe you'd like to.

I slept till after 6 this morning, always a delight, always rare. I am so bad at sleeping in. But today I managed to do it, and I now am lounging with coffee, and T is out and about taking pictures, and the cat is prowling around the neighborhood, and we are all three of us pleased to be where we are.

The rain held off for long enough yesterday so that T and I could get the new garden boxes set and leveled in the front yard. Maybe this afternoon I can start re-laying the stone paths between them, or maybe the earth will still be too muddy and I will be limited to standing around and admiring them. I am glad to have these boxes to work with. Though they will give me less planting room than I had before, they will simplify weeding and harvesting and increase the visual pleasures of the garden. With just the two of us to feed, I don't need to preserve every square inch of arable soil. I've watched my father fall into the trap of overplanting, and that is no way to grow old with a garden.

And then I cleaned myself up, and met my friends, and went out to my afternoon reading. When we arrived at the library, I had doubts that anyone would show: the room seemed to exude empty. But it quickly filled; we must have had forty or so listeners, which was a wonderful surprise. Because I knew I couldn't attend the protests yesterday, I'd marked a handful of political poems from Calendar and planned to talk a bit about how I've been thinking about history and personal morality. There are poems that I've rarely presented in public, and I was pleased to feel them roll off my tongue as if they belonged there. One never knows.

And now today, after that little public rush, I fall back into private life . . . washing sheets and towels, cleaning bathrooms, staring out the windows into the drizzle. I'm supposed to head to Monson tomorrow, but the weather forecast for Tuesday is terrible in the north, and I've got a sinking feeling that I may be teaching on zoom, or not at all. Spring in Maine is a cross between magical realism and getting hit in the head with a shovel.

The lenten rose, or hellebore, is one of my favorite flowers of early spring. Compared to the ephemerals, it is so lush, so dense, so long-lasting. The buds appear alongside the snowdrops, but the blooms linger until summer heat withers them, often into early July. Some lenten roses are a deep maroon; others a pale and mysterious green.

But of course nothing compares to the scylla, which runs rampant among the roots and stones. It spreads gloriously, a blanket of blue stars, and then, just as suddenly, vanishes.

And yet the crocuses . . . the white ones, especially, break my heart with beauty. That pure glimmer at dusk, and at noon the golden center of all things . . .

***

We've got rain coming in today, but not until late afternoon, so maybe T can get the new garden boxes installed after all. I spent an hour yesterday working in the vegetable beds, clearing leaves and weeds, cultivating, mixing in wood ash, pruning back the perennial herbs. Still, there will be no planting until the soil for the new boxes is delivered--not for a couple of weeks yet. It's just as well: I'm always trying to jump the gun, always trying to rush the season. But we're not bereft of harvest: the transplanted spinach seems to be hanging on, chives are ready for a first cutting, and I've filled vases with the first flowers of spring.

Today I'll be reading at the South Portland Library, but otherwise the weekend will be quiet. Then next weekend we're heading to the island, the following weekend I'll be teaching, the weekend after that I'll be embroiled in various Plunkett Festival activities. I've got a stack of looming editing projects, student work to wrangle, a week peppered with travel and meetings . . . so forgive me my flower portraits. The blossoms steady me, somehow. All they require is that I love them.

Last night for dinner I sautéed halibut steaks with lemon and green onions and served them alongside squares of polenta topped with a spoonful of fresh tomato sauce and a salad of sliced cucumbers and radishes in a light buttermilk dressing. It was a pretty meal on a plate, a pleasure to make and eat.

Gillian Welch sings, "Hard times ain't gonna rule my mind, sugar." The song is the saddest song.

Arcadia, 1939

Dawn Potter

Horse cropping grass under birch trees,
a canary-yellow tinker’s cart, rosy geraniums at the window,
shelf lined with the novels of Dickens—

warmth of bread baking, a cardinal alight in a branching
oak, white bed, linens floating in air, a table
laid in an arbor’s shade—

ironed napkins, bright forks, a flowered plate, a Victrola
scratching out a faded tune, tinny and bright,
a cow beyond the fence, pail foaming with milk—

summer dresses and straw hats and rubber boots
stained with pond mud, a cat washing on a stump,
and in the distance the voices of men, laughing, sweet and low—

scent of camp smoke, clank of pans, dishwater splashed
into a bed of sunflowers, a notebook, a pencil,
two fat candles and a sweater, for when the night draws close—

when two hands slip together beneath a blanket, when the stars rise
and the katydids hum and someone begins the story . . . slowly, slowly—
“Once, there was a woman who loved to be alive.”

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

Yesterday we had grim snow-rain, and tomorrow we're forecast to get more grim snow-rain, but today is supposed to be a sunny window between storms, and I am hoping to be outside in it. Already the air feels gentler, though everything is still sodden from the downpour. Maybe by the afternoon I'll be able to get my hands into the dirt and leaves again.

This morning, after a few more tweaks, I'll should be able to ship my editing project off to the author. Afterward I'll have a couple of other small desk jobs to do, and I'll need to make a run to the fish market, but then the day will be my own. I scribbled three new raw drafts at my writing group last night, and one of them might be worth looking at again. I'll keep beetling into the James novel, keep coiling among the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I'll listen to a bit of afternoon baseball. I'll prep for tomorrow's reading.

Last night's dream involved a forced exercise class proscribed by the government--just as distressing and dread-inducing as you'd expect. It is a relief to be awake. It is a relief to gather my small affairs, tuck them into my pockets, fidget with them as comfort.

We got another little burst of snow overnight, no more than a coating, but still it's hard to be enthusiastic.

Cold, grim, gray . . . this has been a classic Maine April. It's a good thing I love my wood stove so much, or I might be a little downhearted. But the crocuses are doughty, the scilla is blue, the songbirds insist. If they can hack the lousy weather, so can I.

Yesterday I finished annotating student poems, prepped teaching plans for next week, copyedited a chapter,  burrowed into The Wings of the Dove. Today, more editing, then errands to run, then my evening writing group. I feel and sound boring but such is quotidian life.

If you happen to be in southern Maine on Saturday, I'll be reading at the South Portland Library at 2 p.m. with Marita O'Neill and David Stankiewicz. If you happen not to be in southern Maine, I've still got a few spaces open in my May 3 zoom class: only $75 for a full day of writing and conversation, which I'm realizing is dirt cheap compared to what other venues are charging. I recently saw a class advertised at $200 for two hours, which honestly I find a little shocking. Who can afford that? And how can you possibly get $200's worth of writing done in two hours?

Apparently this is why I stay poor.

I've always struggled with the late novels of Henry James. His early and midcareer novels are old friends: What Maisie Knew, for instance, and especially Portrait of a Lady. But the three massive novels at the end of his career--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl--have always beaten me. I try one or the other of them, and within twenty pages I give up in bewilderment.

Until this week. This morning I am thrilled to report that finally, at the age of sixty, I appear to have learned how to read a late James novel. I have been working away at The Wings of the Dove for two days now, and I'm following the plot, I can tell all of the players apart, I'm impressed and moved by the depth of the characterization, and I am easily unwinding the circuitry of the sentences. All I can think is that my years of training on Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, Iris Murdoch, and Ivy Compton-Burnett has finally paid off.

Yesterday I got a big chunk of my student annotations done, and maybe I'll be able to finish the rest today, or maybe not. I've got to work on class plans, too, and copyedit, of course . . . the day spills over with obligation. But I'll go for a long walk first and try to clear my head of the Henry James wool. He is a great writer, but also an insinuating one. His sentences invade.

I think I might make a homemade Greek pizza for dinner tonight. I think I might do some dusting this afternoon. I think I might reread Coleridge's "Lime-Tree Bower" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" to try to figure out why they sort of sound like the same poem. I think I'll carry up some firewood from the basement, and fold laundry, and mutter over the poem drafts I wrote this weekend.

Descriptions of my days always sound like nothing and everything. I can never decide if I'm lazy or overzealous. 

Robins are twittering hysterically in the wet darkness. If April equals 40 degrees and snowmelt, so be it. A Maine songbird does her best with what she has to work with.

Today I'm going to take a small hiatus from editing and turn my thoughts to student work--annotating my high schoolers' final projects and visiting my friend Gretchen's third-grade physical theater class. Then, in the afternoon, I'll turn my thoughts to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the weekend I finished rereading Roth's American Pastoral, then took a small breather with Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddie's, and now I have plunged into Henry James's The Wings of the Dove--though my old paperback turns out to be so dangerously fragile that I fear I may have to buy an emergency replacement.

I wrote four new poems over the weekend, along with those writers' essays I inflicted on you, and my brain is pinging with images and words. Meanwhile, I mop and vacuum and wander among the cemetery alleys and fold towels and stack dishes and play cribbage and stare out the window and talk to a son on the phone and listen to baseball and.

In the midst of life my friend Angela texts me, "Fucking shit, girlfriend, we haven’t shied away from the abyss." I text back, "No we haven’t! I call that success."

Okay, one more writing post, and then I'll revert to telling you what I made for dinner and what the cat said about it.

In his conversation last week, Terrance Hayes talked about sonnet structure. As you know, formal sonnets are fourteen lines long and have standard rhyme schemes. Those rhyme schemes are broken into sections. For instance, a Petrarchan sonnet is constructed of two stacked rhyming patterns: the first eight lines follow one pattern; the last six lines follow another. A Shakespearean sonnet is constructed of twelve lines in one pattern, two in the other. The disruption in the rhyme scheme is called the volta, or turn, which Hayes refers to as "the place where the poem changes its mind." A Petrarchan sonnet changes its mind almost in the middle of the poem. A Shakespearean sonnet changes its mind suddenly at the end. Thus, if you're choosing one sonnet form over another, you've got to consider the amount of space you need for your change.

So what about the contemporary form known as the American sonnet? In the simplest definition, an American sonnet is an unrhymed, unmetered fourteen-line poem. Where does that leave the volta? When Hayes was writing his Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he decided to challenge himself to change his mind at least twice in each sonnet . . . because Americans are always changing our minds. Thus, the volta became more than a single veer; it was an electrical switch, careening the poem back and forth into new directions.

His description of this process made me reconsider the traditional sonnet forms. I've never liked the word turn as a descriptor. I've never actually known what it means: it's mealy-mouthed, secretive, a colorless teacher's manual definition. But if I think of volta as electricity, a jolt, a swerve, a shock--ah, now, that's a poem I want to write.

I've still been thinking about some of the things Terrance Hayes said regarding practice versus exercise in the life of a professional writer. I use the word professional guardedly here. I'm not implying that, as a professional, one needs to be widely published, or even published at all. Of course Emily Dickinson was a professional writer. But to be a professional, rather than an apprentice or an amateur, I think one needs to be writing consistently (that is, writing regularly every day or almost every day) and with purposeful self-discipline (attending closely to one's own work, devising ways to change and grow, no longer depending primarily on exterior teachers to guide or inspire you).

In Hayes's terms, practice is the everyday writing habit and exercise is the specific task we set ourselves to push our work into the complex and the unexpected. What is my practice? Well, this blog is a big part of my practice: every single morning I write you a letter about whatever flies into my head. I also keep a daily dream diary, in which I record whatever scraps I can recall from my very colorful dreams--not to analyze them but because recording my dream imagination is a useful aid to stretching my poetic imagination. Also, I read a book during every interstice of my life. Thus, even if I don't actually work on a poem during a given day, I am steadily practicing poems.

So what am I doing for exercise? I have always set myself tasks, and some of them have been vast. Copying out all of Paradise Lost and simultaneously writing essays about the project was an exercise. So was writing hundreds of poems based on primary sources from the history of Appalachian Pennsylvania. But most of my self-imposed tasks are smaller: write a sonnet that exactly replicates the meter of my favorite George Herbert sonnet; start every stanza of a poem about ancient Greece using contemporary business-memo jargon. Sometimes these exercises lead me straight to the dump; sometimes they don't. The point is that they push me out of my cozy shoot-a-few-hoops relationship with my familiar style and voice. They challenge me; they make me uncomfortable; they make me solve problems; they make me tumble into the private unknown; and over time they make me better at my job.

My Thursday night writing group is a weekly collaborative exercise: we all write first drafts to unexpected prompts. But I continue to follow my own exercise regimen as well. Currently, I am immersed in a project that involves using adages, philosophical claims, lines from old poets, etc., as the skeleton frame for my own new drafts. For instance, I might choose Plato's statement "Everything that deceives may be said to enchant." On a page I arrange the statement like this:

Everything

that

deceives

may

be

said

to

enchant

Now I have to write a draft in which each line starts with the given word. Thus, the left margin is rigidly proscribed but the right margin is ragged and loose. I have been doing this exercise over and over again, with lines from Plato, Virgil, Shakespeare, and on and on. Each poem is constrained by the left margin; each poem is careening crazily on the right margin; but the results have been exciting and new and fascinating to me, and I am learning so much.

How does this exercise help me? I tend to be rigidly controlled by sound, and this exercise forces me to override my classically trained ear. I tend to gravitate to formal stanzas, and this exercise pushes me to create long lines and harsh line breaks. I have a tendency to carve out dramatic endings. This exercise requires me to make the best of where I end up.

This is the draft I came up with from that exercise. It is not a great poem, but it is an interesting poem to me, as the practitioner, as the exerciser. Maybe you can see how the exercise is making me step into mudholes I ordinarily avoid, how it's pushing me to recognize that those mudholes are portals into new experiences: awkwardness, chaos, clangor, emotional confusion. (I reduced the size of the font so that you can see how long the lines are.)

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant

Everything flies away in this cold wind—dead leaves, tattered flags, my amour propre,

that old liar, that old cheat, that greedy faker, who ten months out of the year

deceives me into thinking I have a purpose on this high-falutin planet (“why, you

may learn a thing or two”) until a March gale rolls me some side eye and sniggers,

“Be real.” Today I walked down the sidewalk at 8 a.m. and a mincing snowdrop

said, “Stop staring.” Now I don’t know where to put my sadness.

To live is to forget how. It’s not even lunchtime yet. Oh, toiling heart,

enchant me, enchant me . . . then do it again.

Tomorrow I might write a bit about the sonnet thoughts that Hayes shared. But I guess for now one thing I want to implore of you, dear fellow strivers, is to take a look at your practice and your exercise. If you write the same neat tiny poems day after day, if your habit is to edit yourself down into exquisiteness, invent a project that pushes you to fill long lines with mess, and see what you find, where you go. If every draft involves an "I" taking a brief trip into memory and then coming to a deft conclusion, challenge yourself to write ten third-person poems filled with lies.

Lord knows, I'm not trying to set myself up as a guru or an egomaniac. I am a chump at heart. But I'm a chump with a mulish streak, and I have to make the best of what I've got to work with. My point is: if we keep standing at the free throw line and shooting one tidy basket after another, we're missing a world of three-pointers and goofy spin shots. Yes, we reveal our weakness. But we also might get a lot better at our art.

It's snowing hard this morning, and it's supposed to snow and sleet and rain all day long. So because of the storm and because it's Saturday and because I am a comfort-loving hausfrau, I am lighting the wood stove for what may be our final all-day fire of the season. Truly, nothing takes the sting out of a March clipper like a beautiful log fire, though it is odd to be tucked up next to the flames and the warmth while also listening to robin song pour from the snow-decked maples. The weather may be nasty, but the birds stay focused on matters of spring.

The little house is at its best right now . . . the rooms are snug, the flames dance, a bouquet of bright Gerbera daisies on the mantle teases thoughts of summer. Upstairs my beloved sighs and sleeps as the cat tucks behind his knees. I cannot wish to be anywhere else.

This is my last quiet weekend before the onslaught of April. So today I'll do some baking. I'll work on poem drafts. I'll read. I'll watch a little basketball and listen to a little baseball. I'll doze. I'll play card games with Tom and banter with the cat. I wouldn't have requested a spring snowstorm, but now that it's here, I'll enjoy the benefits. A day of putter and space, a day of dreaminess. Vive la snow day.

I've started off the morning with a bang, by catching a toe on a riser and splattering an entire cup of coffee all over the stairs. Clumsy Dawn strikes again. And what a waste of good hot coffee.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to ponder the dream I just woke up from, in which my father appears at my door to inform me that he's driving to Ontario by himself to move into a cabin so he can get away from everything. (The man in waking life is already away from everything so hmm.) And I'm still a little buzzy from last night's reading: Terrance Hayes talked about sonnet structure in a way I've never considered, and I've thought about sonnets a lot, so that was a bit of amazing good fortune. Afterward a bunch of poets went out to dinner, and one of our waiters clearly wanted to horn in on the writer conversation, and the other waiter turned out to be an ex-student of one of our poets, and we talked and ate and gossiped and then I walked around the corner and I was home and Tom said, "I'm glad you had such a good evening."

Today I've got to get onto my mat, and then I've got to trundle out to the grocery store because we're forecast to get five inches of snow tomorrow. I guess T won't be installing my new garden boxes on Saturday. I've been making good progress with my editing project, so I'm considering taking a chunk of the day to write and read. I've also got student work to annotate and conference planning to work on, but what I really want to do is mess around with my own stuff.

Terrance Hayes was talking about various writing-related things yesterday, among them the notion of practice (the everyday commitment to writing) versus exercise (the specific tasks we put to ourselves to expand ourselves as writers). He also talked about writing without goals: just letting ourselves make things without any notion of what they will be when they're finished. These all seem like givens to me; that is exactly how I work. Yet I find them extremely difficult to teach. I'm constantly wrestling with how to guide students of all ages into regular, relaxed, everyday practice; into specific experiment within that practice; into comfort with an unknown trajectory. Along with intense reading and, especially, intense rereading, these behaviors feel essential to the lives of all of the best writers I know well. But I sometimes ask myself, Are they teachable? My students, of all ages, resist. They make excuses for their own habits--"I don't have time to write every day"; "I don't like to try new things"; "I hate not knowing where I'm going"; "I rarely reread a book." And all of that is fine, all of that is great . . . except that, if we're going to write better and better poems, changing those behaviors turns out to be necessary.

Home again, and glad to be here. But my class yesterday was so pleasant--kids working hard and with enthusiasm, choosing and typing up their final pieces for display. Though I always give everyone the option to focus on prose, this year's kids seem primarily to be writing poems, and they've got scads of drafts to sift through and think over. And they really do think: it is heartwarming to watch twelve kids studying their notebooks so intensely. We've got one more class to refine their final drafts--titles, punctuation, sound--and  then, essentially, our year is done--just one last session, which will probably be a create-your-own-script and-performance-from-start-to-finish whizbanger, a guaranteed day of silliness.

This morning I'll go out for a fast walk; then I'll work at my desk, eventually get a haircut, and this evening my poetry group will meet to see Terrance Hayes read at the University of Southern Maine. I'm happy to watch him, but I am sad we won't be writing tonight: I've missed the group for two weeks in a row, and I'm eager to get my habits back on track.

I've started rereading Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which is a difficult and dense and painful book that feels right to me just now. I may turn to Henry James next: apparently I am longing for complication.

Meanwhile, the weather shivers. Our snow has melted, but the air stays cold and there's more snow in the forecast for the weekend. Spring in Maine is a bouquet of dashed hopes. But I love it anyway.

Last night during dinner the air suddenly filled with fat white flakes, like a blizzard of torn paper, dense and eloquent, the most beautiful of snows.

Oh, the grandeur of the north, even as mud season looms.

There we were, eating a Thanksgiving dinner in March, while the snow whirled and the cookstove clicked.

Do you see why I miss this place?

It snowed yesterday--the sort of garbagy, slush-from-the-sky, late March clipper that depresses all hopes. Thank goodness for a wood stove: without a fire to soothe my eyes, I would have been dismal indeed. Now this morning a hard crust coats every tulip leaf, every lilac bud. I know the ice will melt away under sunlight, but for the moment winter is strutting around the ring while spring sobs in the corner with a black eye.

This afternoon I'll be driving north into the homeland, where winter really is still king. But despite the weather, the school year is rolling toward the finish line. I've only got three classes left with my high schoolers, and we need to get cracking on our final projects. The days have whipped by: I feel like I've barely gotten to know these kids, and now they're flying away from me. That is always the story of teaching.

So this morning I'll pull myself together for travel. Yesterday I finished my weekly house chores, edited a couple of chapters, went for a fast walk in the pre-storm chill. I read about Paris and pored over the paintings of Sargent. I drank many cups of ginger tea and baked a chicken potpie. Two weeks ago I drove north feeling like I'd been drained by a vampire. I may not be writing good poems at the moment, but at least I've got blood in my veins again.

I think, possibly, maybe, that I'm almost feeling like myself again. I had a busy, physical weekend, but I didn't take one single nap, and I got a lot more accomplished than I thought I would. I cleared leaves, ripped up the stones in my garden paths, made bread, scrubbed bathrooms. I hung around admiring Tom as he built two new garden boxes, which he'll install next weekend. We watched Cooper Flagg, our central Maine basketball star, propel Duke to the Sweet Sixteen. We ate a giant meal of lamb burgers, fried onions and peppers, homemade buns, potato salad, roasted green beans, and feta, followed by blueberry flan. I slept all night. And now it is Monday morning, and I do not feel like a damp rag.

I'll be on the road tomorrow and teaching in Monson on Wednesday, but today I'll be home--editing, finishing up my weekly housework chores, catching up on reading projects, maybe transplanting shrubs, if the wind isn't too vicious.

I've been reading about the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune--not a heartening history at any time, certainly not in our current state of chaos. But I'm also realizing how many great artists found their metiers in the years surrounding these disasters--painters such as Sargent and Cassatt, for instance.

The work goes on. The work requires us.

 "Our life really is a haunted one. The simplest thing in it is a mystery, the invisible world always lies round us like a shadow."

                                                                               --Harriet Beecher Stowe

**

For the first time this season, I spent most of my day in the yard--clearing leaves, bagging sticks, pruning shrubs, transplanting spinach. Tom was outside, too, beginning work on the new garden boxes he's building from scavenged boards. This means disruption: I've got to pull up most of the slate paths I've laid so we can accommodate the new design. And then I'll have to buy a giant pile of fresh soil and toil for hours filling the vast new containers. But the end result will be both more beautiful and more utilitarian, so the fuss is worth it.

Every year I am amazed at how much work it takes to keep this tiny city plot in cultivation. How ever did we manage 40 acres, two babies, and a barnful of animals? "The simplest thing . . . is a mystery."

Thanks to a day spent crouching and stooping and lifting, I am embracing the satisfactory ache of my gardening muscles this morning. It's funny: I am active all winter--working on my mat, trudging through the neighborhood--but gardening requires a particular combination of leg and back and arm and shoulder muscles that my winter upkeep regimen doesn't seem to touch. Gardening isn't just puttering among the flowers; it's real physical work . . . lugging rocks, digging holes, shoving wheelbarrows. But I am always glad to feel my body rising to the challenge, especially this year, after having been sick for so long.

Today will be cooler than yesterday, and will warm up more slowly. And I've got house and grocery chores to deal with as well, so I may not get much done outside. But I will start prying up the paths, and I might transplant a couple of elderberry shrubs. I cannot resist the carillon of spring.

Yesterday's convention presentation went well. We had maybe 50 teachers in our session, far more than I expected, and they seemed excited by the dictation/writing prompt/revision prompt strategies that Marita and I were offering. Now we'll see if that leads to any new signups for the Monson conference. I have hopes: some of the participants were pretty excited about what it felt like to play around with revision in this way.

But now it's Saturday, which means I can temporarily stop thinking about such matters. The weather will be cool but clear, and when the air warms up a bit I will get myself outside into the gardens and continue my leaf-removal tasks. I'll transplant spinach, and Tom and I will plan our new garden boxes, and in the kitchen a vat of chicken stock will simmer on the stove, and in the maples the cardinals will whistle and chortle, and I am looking forward to this day.

March has been relatively quiet for me, but April is shaping up to be crazy town. On April 5, I'll be reading at the South Portland Library. Then T and I will steal the following weekend to head to Mount Desert Island for our biannual cottage retreat. On April 19 I'll be teaching a Poetry Kitchen class. On April 25 I'll be going out to dinner with the poet Natalie Diaz (!). On April 26 I'll be taking a workshop with Diaz, listening to her read, and participating in an onstage conversation with Betsy Sholl about our work. And of course I'll be teaching in Monson and working on an editing project and mentoring a student book manuscript in the midst of all this. . . .

So a quiet weekend at home feels especially sweet. 

A steady rain is rattling down, one of those long slow all-day rains that gardens love. So no outside work today, maybe not even a walk. Instead, it will be a tuck-into-my-shell morning, mostly spent at my desk editing a snarl of legal footnotes. And then after lunch I'll doll myself up in a new dress and head downtown to the MCELA convention, where I'll be giving a presentation on revision, and hanging around the Monson Arts table hawking my programs, and otherwise behaving like a poet who is not curled under a turtle shell.

I've started reading a book I found on the street, David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a study of nineteenth-century travels to the City of Light. I've never been to Paris myself (outside of the airport), but I've certainly read lots of Henry James, so I'm finding the book more interesting than I expected . . . poignant, too--the way in which Americans, in all our raw brashness, can be suddenly toppled by awe. Who knows if we will ever be that wide-eyed nation again?

There was a scattering of rain overnight: I see dampness glistening under the streetlights, hear roof drip ticking against the vents. The shower is surely lifting the spirits of the greening plants I've been releasing from last fall's matted leaves. I've still got much more to do in that regard, but there's no rush. A little rain, a little sun, a little more rain, a little more sun. My leaf chore is the least important task.

But it's been tonic to be outside, bending and stooping and lifting and carrying. It's been good to unfold my wintered-over muscles, to start living in my senses again. And I get such extreme pleasure from these early blooms: the crocuses, the snowdrops, so doughty and delicate, so tough and translucent.

The big new editing project did arrive yesterday, so today I'll be back to a regular desk schedule. I'll walk first, then slide myself into my work hours. I'll go out to write in the evening. I'll be a plain useful citizen  of the word.

Workwise, this has been a quieter week than I thought it would be, mostly because the new editing project that was supposed to arrive on Monday still hasn't made an appearance. I've filled the time with a smaller editing assignment and high school class planning, and yesterday I started two new poem drafts. I haven't written anything else in the weeks since I've started being sick, so that was a good sign: my brain is trying out a few dance steps again. Then, in the afternoon, I unearthed the wheelbarrow and began clearing leaves out of garden beds, another promising sign. Looks like maybe I won't be ill forever.

I expect the new editing project will arrive today, but till then I've got to make my own work. I'll mess with those poem drafts, read some Coleridge and Wordsworth, go for a walk. I'll clear leaves out of garden beds, hang laundry, roast a chicken. My connections to daily life still feel strangely air-brushed, but I'm drifting back into the blunt quotidian. I guess it's a good week to be underemployed. Still, I'd best be back to normal by Friday, when I've got to give a presentation in front of a pack of English teachers at the MCELA convention. Wish me luck.

What a wet day we had yesterday! It was a real spring rain, heavy and warm, and I am eager to hustle outside this morning to see what it has coaxed forth. Already I glimpse patches of purple and yellow crocuses budding up in the front gardens, a snowdrop lifting its head out back. With such a start, even a wobbly ray of sun will unfold wonders.

I am sick of being sick. Whatever ails me has been clinging like a burr, but slowly my energy is returning. I mopped and vacuumed and cleaned bathrooms yesterday, edited a 50-page academic article, behaved more or less like a person who can get things done. Today I'll work on class plans for my high schoolers, get the grocery shopping done, read Wordsworth and Coleridge, maybe start my next editing project if I receive it early enough in the day, maybe do some raking if the yard has dried out and I haven't gone limp. At least I'm not on the road this week and can collapse in the afternoons if I need to.

Monday morning, pouring rain, T is bustling off to work, P is bustling back to NYC, and an hour from now I will have dropped him off at the bus station, I will be stepping back into a quiet house, into my solitary hours, with the rain falling falling, gray daylight unfolding over the streets, my thoughts bumping up against themselves, the unsaid, velvet and thorns.

Yesterday was an annoying day as I ended up in the emergency room because of chest pain. Do not panic; I am fine. But when you're 60 years old and you're talking to medical personnel while trying to figure out ongoing weirdness, each symptom you mention sounds like incipient heart attack. And thus there we were: sent to the ER for tests. It's good and relieving news to know that every single one came back as normal, but I do not want to see the bill for this, and I'm still no clearer about what the hell with my ongoing floating rib-cage pain. All I can assume is some kind of virus. But at least everyone is now confident that I'm not about to drop dead.

Anyway, enough of that irritating subject. It's Sunday morning; I slept well last night and feel okay so far this morning. I've got plans to walk to a friend's house and prep for our conference presentation. And then I'll figure out how to cook corned beef. I rarely bother with Saint Patrick's Day, but Paul loves a holiday dinner and I can't resist a coaxing son.

Interview about "To the Republic"

A few week's ago Vox Populi published my poem "To the Republic," a poem I wrote in (sort of) response to Horace's ode of the same name. My friend David Dear was puzzled by my poem, also puzzled by how the two poems were interconnected, so I invited him to write up a few questions and said I would try to answer them. Yesterday I sat down with those questions, which (not surprisingly, if you know David) were cogent and curious and demanded considerable thought from me. So today, with his permission, I'm sharing this Q&A about the poems.

1. Given that the Horace seems a relatively straightforward allegory, while yours is much more allusive, why did you choose Horace’s as the reference point for yours?

My poem was born during a session of my Thursday-night writing group. Each week, between four and ten women meet for a meal and then write two or three new drafts triggered by prompts that one or the other of us brings along. This draft arose from a very simple prompt that I brought to the group. Merely, we read Horace’s poem, reacted to it briefly, and then I said, “Write a poem titled ‘To the Republic.’” Each of us then wrote for ten minutes and afterward shared our drafts. We never do any workshopping of these drafts; merely we react to what we’re hearing and then move on. But what struck me about this raw work was how different our drafts all were from Horace’s. Each was a metaphor-in-embryo, and all reflected very individual, very private engagements with the notion of republic. No one wrote a “ship of state” kind of piece as he did. One could speculate on the reasons for that: a modern tendency to center work around the personal rather than the polemical; a male-female divide. But what I think, too, is that this very simple prompt tapped into a particular feature of metaphorical search that I have since identified in many resistance poems: the use of metaphor as both cloak (that is, protection from attack) and dagger (a weapon for attack). In addition, the prompt allowed me to see that preplanning a metaphor (Horace’s, for instance, feels very preplanned; Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” is another) is different work from allowing a metaphor to take form organically . . . that is, letting a new poem discover, via the process of writing, the metaphor it will become. 

 2. Horace’s and yours are very different in form; yours in fact could be considered a sonnet. Was that a conscious choice and, if so, why that form?

I did not make any attempt to imitate Horace’s form, nor was I consciously framing my poem as a sonnet. Nonetheless, my thoughts are filled with sonnets, and I fairly often end up with fourteen-liners without trying to. The stanzas here are not traditional octaves and sestets but two sets of five followed by one set of four. So even though they add up to fourteen lines, I found myself playing with them as three five-line stanzas with the final line missing. So, no volta . . . rather, the absence of volta; something unresolved; something darkening.

 3. The light in your poem grows darker as the poem moves along, which seems clearly a metaphor, yet your description of nightfall evokes such quiet and peace. Why the apparent contrast?

The word republic evokes country. On that level of connotation, I love my country, and I fear for my country; ergo, the darkening. The word country itself has double meaning: the nation and the countryside. As a citizen, I am elegiac for my nation; and as a private person, I am elegiac for my forty acres of forest, now lost to me forever. So as I began to tease out new drafts of the poem, these metaphors entangled. Evening is a glorious moment in the Maine woods: the shifts of light, the day sounds becoming the night sounds, the animals alive in air and brush, the poignant singing thrush. But the woods at night are also full of danger. The predators emerge. And the small beings they hunt are not liable to see morning.

 4. Your poem features two animals of the night, an owl and a bat, and you’ve said the poem’s owl’s echoes of Minerva aren’t intentional. Why then did you choose those two, and what do you see them accomplishing in the poem?

I chose those two animals because they are exact for the situation. In the forest, on a summer night, at twilight, the owl and the bat take to the sky. They mark the transition between day and night. And of course they are both beautiful and deadly.

 5. In your last verse, what do you see the night not failing at?

I see the night as not failing to arrive. Twilight in summer is long and lingering, but night is still inevitable.

 6. Do you see the poem as optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

I don’t know that it’s either. I tried to write a poem that simply is. 

 7. It’s been said that a poem is never really finished, a poet eventually just walks away from it. Now that this one has been published, if you had the chance to go back to it, is there anything in it you’d change, and if so, what and why?

I wonder if the repetition of heavens (twice) and heavy so close to them is sonic overkill. I may tinker with that. 

Yesterday was pleasant and slow . . . mostly hanging around the house, but with an outing to the grocery store and then to a Japanese restaurant for a ramen-and-broth lunch. It's so nice to have a son around the house, to be aware of him as a presence, just another householder bumping around doing his own stuff, nobody entertaining anyone else but constantly overlapping in a casual friendly way. Another good thing is that a couple of his closest college friends have moved to Portland since graduation, so now he has a social life beyond his parents when he comes back to Maine. That loneliness was hard to witness when we first moved, especially as it intensified over the pandemic. It lifts my heart to watch him stride outside to greet a waiting friend.

Today he starts his wilderness first responder class, so I'll be back to my usual solitude. I've got a few things to do, emails and class prep and such, and I also want to work on answering a series of questions a friend wrote up about one of my newer poems. I missed my weekly Thursday-night writing group last night, so I'd like to give myself a prompt or two as solace. And next Friday's conference presentation is looming; I should probably run my eyes over those plans.

I'm still not 100 percent healthy, but every day is better. Whatever this illness is, it's clingy, though not debilitating. I want to go for a walk, I want to scratch around in garden soil, but the weather has been cold and windy and not so alluring for a semi-convalescent. I have been getting outside, but I haven't been luxuriating. I'm eager for the soft air.

I had a great day in the classroom with my son. The kids were attentive, chattery, busy, focused, and laughing . . . the session was a complete success. It's a joy to teach with P, a joy to watch his eagerness with the students, to see him think his way through those little intuitive adjustments that are part of every classroom improv.

What a relief not to be flat on my back, too, though I wouldn't say that I am 100 percent well yet . . . still a bit of fatigue and achiness, not quite full enthusiasm about my meals, but I am almost a replica of normal. 

Nonetheless, it is nice to have an unscheduled, unbusy, convalescent day ahead of me . . . idling with a book, going for a walk, running a few errands, playing a board game, taking a nap, doing a few unpressured household chores. I do not know what this illness is (negative Covid test, if you need reassurance), but it's clingy in a low-level way and I would like to erase it thoroughly.

I still felt kind of crappy yesterday morning, but we did drive north in the afternoon, and by the time we arrived my little virus had dissipated and I was feeling mostly back to normal. Thank goodness. I was having visions of sending P alone into the classroom while I lay in bed shivering . . . not what I was hoping for from this class or our visit.

We're staying in a cabin down by the lake, still ice-covered but glossed in water. Every once in a while a snowmobile tears across it at full speed, a spume of spray rising behind. I keep expecting the lake to split open and swallow them up, but the guy at the restaurant says the ice is still two feet thick beneath the skim of melt. Then he says he wouldn't ride across it. I nod, and let ambiguity have the win.

Well, my kid's here, hurray!, but I am unfortunately feeling slightly under the weather . . . not so much so that I can't drive north and do my job but enough to make life less than fun than it was. I did get a solid night's sleep, and here's hoping I continue to feel better this morning. I'll keep you posted.

On the first 40-degree Sunday afternoon of the season, we went to Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth and trudged under this landscape-painter sky, over this curve of wet sand, alongside these slow wrinkles of seawater. Afterward we stopped at a tap house and ate poutine and drank beer and played cards, and then we spent the rest of the evening reading on the couch in front of the fire. And that is why I did no housework, and why I'll be doing it all today.

Our son arrives tonight, so I'll be preparing for that too: turning my study into a bedroom for the week, figuring out a general idea for meals, pulling myself together for our travels up to Monson tomorrow. It will be sweet to have him for such a long stretch--the longest since the pandemic, when he lived with us for a year and a half.

And maybe I'll get to that rose pruning too. Or maybe I'll steal a nap instead. This time change is not easy on people who have to get up at 5 a.m. every weekday.

I've almost finished rereading Far from the Madding Crowd, and I don't have anything lined up to start next--always an uneasy feeling. But something will shout at me from the shelves.