It's peony season here in Maine--such beautiful flowers, such sloppy plants. No matter how carefully I tie them up, they always collapse and shatter.

This morning, the vases are full of peonies and the house is full of scent, usually a sign that spring is morphing into summer. Yet summer doesn't seem like a season to bank on. Thus far, cold rain has undermined every brief warm spell, and my vegetable garden has never looked worse. It's hard to picture a harvest.

But I'm not complaining, I'm not complaining. Today will be sunshiny, a good day for house and yard chores; a good day to eat my breakfast outside with a book; a good day to mull at my desk beside a wide-open window. I ought to go out to write tonight, but so far this week I've only spent one evening at home, and that feels wrong. Tomorrow night I'll be in Kittery for a reading, and then I'll be on the road for much of Saturday for my Winthrop reading. So I'm torn about tonight.

Anyway, I'll figure it out. In the meantime, I've got to write introductions for the faculty performances at Monson, I've got to plot out my three upcoming and very different readings, I've got to scrub bathrooms and weed the vegetable beds . . . The day unfolds.

A few years ago I opened an old Best American Short Stories volume that I'd found in a little free library and read my first Lori Ostlund short story. I loved it, so much so that I had the urge, as I sometimes do, to send her a note and tell her what I thought of it.

I like sending fan mail to writers I admire, though I know enough not to expect a response. Mostly people don't reply, and those who do tend to be appreciative but reserved--understandably, they don't want to get sucked into conversation with a potential weirdo. But Lori had none of that reserve. Not only did she write back instantly, but she immediately bought one of my books and read it with her wife, the novelist Anne Raeff, who in turn reached out to me to talk about the poems in the collection that had mattered to her.

So when I learned that the two would be in Portland during Lori's book tour, I of course made plans to go to the reading. What I didn't expect was an invitation to dinner the night before so that we could get to know each other in person. What I didn't expect was a book signed to "One of My Favorite Poets."

This country is such a shithole right now. Maybe that's why these little lights gleam so brightly in my thoughts. What generosity, to extend a hand . . . to invite a stranger to be a friend.

Apparently, we are trapped in a loop of endless April. My vegetable garden may be a loss this year, but on the bright side the songbirds seem to be enjoying the perpetual cold rain, the terrible backyard is finally turning into an arbor, and I'm not worrying too much about sunburns.

Yesterday I finished an editing project, then muscled through conference paperwork and went up to Bowdoin to rehearse with conference faculty before having a sweet evening out with the San Francisco writers. Today will be more conference planning: figuring out my reading plans, pulling together poems for sharing. I've also got to prep for readings this Friday and Saturday, and then there's Lori's reading to attend tonight . . . life is kind of head-spinning this week, but at least I've now got an editing gap so I can pull myself together without too much panic.

Planning for the conference has been complex, mostly because our theme is complex. Last fall Teresa and I decided to focus on varieties of collaboration--not only in terms of communal projects but also across disciplines and time. As a result, all of the faculty members have been pulling each other in as performance and teaching partners . . . which is delightful and deeply engaging and interesting while also making me feel like an eight-armed, wild-eyed, schedule monster. What will I forget? Something vital, no doubt.

The dawn air is thick with haze--Canadian wildfire smoke, I think, though I can't smell it. I've got a busy day ahead--a walk, and then editing, and then the violin and I are taking a jaunt to Bowdoin to rehearse with Gretchen and Gwynnie for their Monson performance. Then tonight I'm having dinner with a pair of San Francisco-based fiction writers I've never met before. But over the past couple years, we've gotten friendly about each others' work, and now they're in town for a reading tomorrow, so they reached out with a dinner invitation.

The entire week will vibrate at this level of busy. I've got a reading on Friday in Kittery, on Saturday in Winthrop. On Wednesday I'm talking with Teresa about Shelley. On Tuesday I'm going to Lori Ostlund's reading here in Portland. Usually I'd be going out to write on Thursday, but I'm not sure I'll be able to manage yet another night out this week.

And the conference is coming up fast. All of my big plans are set, but I've still got to print everything out, tweak details, figure out logistics, organize my reading, collect the books I'm bringing, reach out again to participants, and so on and so forth . . . Even though my responsibilities are more contained than they were at the Frost Place (no housecleaning or meal planning, thank goodness),  they are still myriad, and at this time of year I always feel as if my hair is flying off my head.

We've still got that one spot open . . . and it could be yours--

We must have had a big thunderstorm overnight because this morning the garden looks like it's been beaten up: peonies sagging, iris mashed. But the air is quiet now, and the sky is hazy but clearish, and soon I'll get myself outside to assess the day's chores.

Last night was my friend Marita O'Neill's book launch. It was such an uplifting affair--lots of friends and family and community camaraderie . . . exactly the right sort of reading and party. I don't love all parties, by any means, and I can get panicky and anxious in social settings. So it was sweet to be in a gathering that was the exact opposite of my fear. Last night, whichever way I turned, there was a person I was delighted to talk to.

As I write, the sky is brightening. Pale sun-glitter rims puddles and wet roofs. I'm looking forward to a day in the garden--weeding, mowing, pruning as the birds chatter and the neighborhood babies cackle and wail.

I spent much of yesterday reading Shelley's "Defense of Poetry," an essay I've read many times before. It's not an easy piece to get through: every time I start by thinking, "I have no idea what he's saying." And then suddenly the sentences begin to shine, suddenly I have slipped beyond, in his words, "the dull vapours of the little world of self":

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensively and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

Saturdays are always rainy in Maine, but for the moment no actual water is falling. This morning's air is thick with humidity. Fog curls through the open windows, and a robin trills relentlessly--repeat, repeat, repeat. Gulls swirl overhead, squawking and wailing. The sky has the dull glitter of a galvanized pail, and the gardens throb with green.

The day will be filled with this-and-thats. It's far too wet to work outside, but maybe I can walk. I've still got lots of Shelley homework to finish; my future daughter-in-law asked me to read the draft of an article she's working on; I'm one of the openers at my friend Marita's book launch tonight, which means I've got to choose a poem. No doubt there are other obligations that I've temporarily forgotten.

And now here comes the rain again, tapping and pattering.

On the mantle are two slim and velvety Siberian irises and the first milk-pale peony, unfolding. I am thinking of poems, though I am not thinking about either writing or reading them . . . more, thinking about how the feeling of poems twists and tugs around me like a scarf fluttering in the wind.

Connecticut traffic was terrible, so I didn't get home till almost 9 p.m. last night. But now here I sit, on a muggy, storm-ominous morning, as T moseys around the kitchen making his breakfast and the cat mildly yowls at the door.

Today will be laundry and housework and undoubtedly groceries, once I figure out how empty the place has gotten. Meanwhile, thunder lashes the distance, and the pollen headache I've had for six days settles into its accustomed corner of my skull, and the air drapes and sags like a moth-eaten boa.

 I'll be heading back to Maine today, after a lovely, lovely visit. Yesterday's ferry ride to the Rockaways was a highlight, wandering around the Village in the summer evening was another . . . It was so good to spend intense time with my boy and with Stephen. As always, leaving this town is poignant. As always, it's like leaving a version of home.

Yesterday I saw this Hilma af Klint show at MOMA--a very odd and wonderful display of her precise botanical drawings, her peculiar diagrammatic visions of atoms and plant propagation, and the meanings that stood behind each plant she studied: oddly precise emotional or physical states such as "Belief in help during mountain climbing / Don't forget paradisiacal virginity." The show was a revelation of obsession, with something Dickinsonian about it, and Jeannie and I were mesmerized.

Today P and I are going to take the ferry to the Rockaways, a 45-minute ride through New York Harbor, then around Coney Island to Jamaica Bay: all for $4. I love boat rides and am looking forward to seeing the city from an entirely new angle.

And then tonight the reading at KGB . . . here's hoping I'm not too sleepy after all of that walking and air.

P and I walked around Green-Wood in the afternoon, where we saw an egret and waxwings and bullfrogs and the burying ground of Boss Tweed. It was a mild day, activity-wise, but for some reason I slept like a boulder. I'm not sure why I was so tired. With Ray gone, there is no more perpetual beer, no more ridiculous too-late dinners, no more listening to one album after another until 4 a.m. Instead, I ate tacos and drank an horchata and dropped into bed like I'd been felled. Life has become staid, and Brooklyn has become almost restful.

This will be a brief hello as typing is hard on the bus. Last time I rode this route, it was January and we were driving into iced-over darkness. Now, as I embark, it's full daylight--skies blue, trees in leaf, a different world. And in 6 hours I'll be in the fabled metropolis, where it's already summertime.

Yesterday T bought our tickets to Chicago . . . another train adventure to look forward to. I am thrilled about getting to see both of my boys this summer, each in his own domain. I'm happy to be setting off on today's solo outing, happy also that T and I will get to travel together in July. Today I'll wend my way to Brooklyn, meet my kid for lunch, go for a walk with him in June-beautiful Green-wood, along the scuffed and scatty streets of Sunset Park, chatter and sigh and laugh together, as we do, as we always do.

I hope your day is just as sunny.

Portland is enveloped in a haze of drizzle--thinner than rain, thicker than mist; more like quiet atmospheric tears than a definable weather event.

I spent much of my rainy Saturday in the kitchen--baking a cherry pie, making dough and then pizza--but I also worked upstairs on a poem draft, which this morning is pleasing me very much. Between showers I spread lettuce seed and transplanted nasturtiums. Last year's plants self-sowed plentifully, a big surprise: nasturtium seeds never wintered over in central Maine, but here in balmy seaside Portland they are regenerating like crazy. So I am moving dozens of seedlings to bare patches in other beds, and with luck they will take hold and bloom all summer.

Today I need to focus on packing for New York, always a challenge. I'll be dragging around my suitcase and backpack all day long on Monday--clumping up and down subway stairwells, trailing through crowds--so everything needs to be as compact as possible. Because I am not naturally good at traveling light, I have to find ways to force myself to be reasonable. For instance, last spring, before I took my big train trip to Chicago, I purposely bought a tiny purse and a too-small backpack. That approach worked pretty well, though nothing can make a suitcase easier to haul through the New York subway system.

If you happen to be in the city and are in the mood for poems, I'll be reading on Wednesday at the launch of the anthology Poetry Is Bread, at KGB on East 4th Street, 7-9 p.m. The book began as the poet Tina Cane's pandemic video project, She invited numerous poets to make videos for her during and after Covid, and then morphed those readings into a book. Lots of us will be in attendance on Wednesday, which at least guarantees a crowd of listeners.

Mostly, though, I am looking forward to hanging out with my kid, hanging out with my friends, bopping through museums and gardens, riding the ferry, trudging the streets, surprising myself.

Saturday dawn. I wake and doze and wake and doze to gentle rainfall. With the bedroom windows open, the patter is close and comforting. Half-conscious, I pretend I'm in a tent, on a screened sleeping porch, in the loft of a thin-roofed barn.

***

Now, an hour later, I sit wrapped in my red bathrobe in the unlit living room. A car swishes past. Raindrops tap and clatter and peck and chirp, a staid and steady concert in the windless air. Upstairs Tom and the cat curl and stretch among the clean sheets. Outside the gardens glow . . . lemony iris posed against white drifts of bridal veil spirea . . . a garlic chorus jazz-handing among red-onion spikes . . . 

***

Yesterday I shipped off my editing assignment and then spent most of the rest of the day outside, weeding, mowing, watering transplants, hacking grass and dandelions out of the gravel walkway. Sonja the poet-landscape designer arrived to treat the ash tree. I never thought I'd be happy about a pesticide, but that is the only way to save our beautiful specimen tree from the ravages of the emerald ash borer. All around the city ash trees are disappearing. But not this one. This one will grow old.

***

I will head to New York on Monday morning, and I am examining the odd and delightful sensation of being caught up on every chore before leaving home for most of a week. Paying work, housework, garden work. Clean sheets, clean bathrooms, clean floors, mowed grass, weeded gardens, edited files. Surely I've forgotten to do something vital?

The rain will fall all day long, and maybe I will putter among poem drafts, maybe do some grocery shopping, maybe bake something, maybe figure out our Chicago itinerary, maybe go for a walk in the rain, maybe read a little Shelley, maybe listen to baseball . . . maybe is such a restful word.

***

In gray rain-light the quiet rooms are almost strangers.

I went out to write last night, after missing last week when I was in Vermont, and my brain-hand-heart consortium was so glad to be back at work. I haven't reread anything yet; it may all be vapid scribbling; but I'm please to have a few busy pages waiting for me, when I can find space to greet them.

Today is recycling day, sheet-washing day, and, to my surprise, finishing up the editing project day. I did not think I'd get this manuscript off my desk before leaving for New York, but somehow I managed to pound out the hours, and by this afternoon I'll bid it farewell.

And it didn't rain yesterday, and possibly it might not rain today . . . what is this new world? Of course it will definitely rain all weekend, but still: four warmish days in a row without a smidgen of drizzle? What luxury.

Last night in the car Betsy was telling us about a time when she was wailing to her husband, "When I will I ever stop being unhappy?" And his response was to say, gently, "When you feel gratitude." On paper that exchange looks banal, like the most annoying sort of Encouraging Words™, yet in Betsy's voice I heard the simplicity of it. Misery is centered on the "I": "I don't have what I want," "I dread the future."  Gratitude is the "I" is looking up and away and beyond the "I." The exchange was not just smarmy self-help speak. It was a way of framing Keats's negative capability.

Clouds have moved in, but no rain yet, and maybe there won't be any after all. I have a few new seedlings and transplants to water, so I'm not actually against rain today. On the other hand, I'd like to dry towels on the line. Whatever happens will be perfect--I'll get to be happy and annoyed. Ah, the human condition: it's so silly.

This morning I'll take my walk and then steal an hour to read Shelley before getting serious about housework. And then back to my editing stack, and back to weeding and mowing, and then I'll go out to write tonight.

The days have been so full of work. I was glad to spend half an hour with a friend who dropped by for ice tea in the afternoon, but that was an anomaly. This editing project has been driving me hard, and unfortunately I don't think I'm going to get it done before I leave for New York on Monday. Oh, well.

I've been rereading a sad LeCarre novel. I woke in the middle of the night filled with anxiety about a rosebush. I've dreamed about leaving Harmony, again. Melancholy creeps along the small trails.

* * *

There's still ONE opening left at the Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts. Please consider joining us. It will be such a good gathering. Honestly, this year's participants and faculty are stellar. You will not be sorry. Nor do you have to be a poet. Or a teacher. Though if you are one or both, that's excellent too. The thing is: the labels don't matter. What you have to be is you.

 Sunshine and warmth! What is this strange world? Yesterday was storybook May, and today will be another such day, and, yes, it's supposed to rain for the rest of the week, but I'm taking joy where I can find it . . . I ate my breakfast outside, and my lunch outside, and I sat out on the stoop with the cat during every editing break, and opened all of the windows, and wore a summer dress with sandals, and brewed ice tea, and the birds sang like crazy and chipmunks dashed hither and yon, and toddlers shrieked excitedly at the cat, and the vegetable seedlings sprouted new leaves to celebrate.

I've been rereading LeCarre's A Perfect Spy, though I'm still procrastinating on Shelley and have to get myself moving on that project this afternoon. I've started to figure out next week's New York schedule--so far MOMA with Jeannie, the Rockaways with Paul, trivia night at the bar, a reading at KGB. I found some free primroses on the side of the road and planted them in a front garden bed. I got a haircut and drank a beer and made risotto with chicken and wild mushrooms in it and I lost a cribbage game.

Small patterns ripple the hours. Laundry flickers on the line. I'll write a poem.

Yesterday was a lovely day to be outside. We did end up driving down to the Laudholm Farm bird sanctuary, and then I spent most of the rest of the day working in the backyard--mowing, weeding, putting up the hammock, cleaning chairs and table, and otherwise getting the space into reasonably alluring condition.

Today will be even lovelier, though I'll be back at my desk for most of it. But at least the windows will be open all over the house, at least I'll get in my morning walk, at least I'll have clothes to hang on the line, at least I'll have poems bubbling in my thoughts. That's one good thing about responsible behavior: I can sneak away from it.

In his copy of the New Testament [Herman Melville] underlined a passage in Romans 14: "Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God."

The only kind of Faith--one's own, he wrote in the top margin.

                       --from Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

Hard to believe, but I think we're finally supposed to get a little bit of warmth and sun today. Already T is out and about with a camera, and when he gets back we may go out for breakfast and then for a walk at the bird sanctuary . . . or we may not. We did have a holiday-weekend meal last night--a fire in the fire pit, grilled bison medallions and marinated halloumi, twice-baked potatoes with the first red onion harvest, a salad with baby lettuce from the garden, a strawberry-cranberry-rhubarb pie--and only a little rain fell on us, so we felt lucky.

I devoted much of Saturday to obligations: groceries and laundry, weeding and mowing. I'll be home all of this week, but in New York with my younger son all of next week, so I've got a limited window for getting things into trim around here, if that's even possible after so much rain. And there's a ton of editing on my desk, too much Shelley homework to read, interlibrary-loan books for another reading project on the way, and T and I need to plan a trip to Chicago for late July so that we can hug our older boy and meet his fiancee's parents, which will be delightful . . . but ay yi yi: it's hard to picture myself with my head out of the chore bucket.

Well, I'm not complaining. I'm just a little overwhelmed, which is usual at this time of the year. The teaching conference is looming, and that is always a massive undertaking. I'm grateful to be employed, and immersed in poetry projects with friends, and hanging out with my sweetheart, and surrounded by flowers, and summoned affectionately by my children. Also my cat hasn't been re-kidnapped lately.

But spring is a breathless season, summer even more so. 

Home.

It's 5 a.m. In the cellar, laundry churns in the washing machine. Upstairs, early light peers through the panes. I've emptied the dishwasher, tidied counters, made coffee, let the cat out. Tom has been gone since 4:30--heading out to the docks to take photos at dawn--so I am alone, puttering quietly among my morning tasks. It's peaceful to be here, amid these little habits.

Oddly, there's no rain forecast for today. Eventually I'll get clothes onto the lines. I'll do the grocery shopping. I'll settle into garden work, I'll mull over meals. For now I am resting in the gray-shadowed living room, watching pale day wash into the sky, reacquainting my body with this little house, this little life . . . two chairs pulled up to the dining room table, two towels on the bathroom rack, a small bed for two tucked under the eaves.

"The man, the enigma" is how our son describes his father. But of course love is a mysterious stranger.

On the mantle, before I left for Vermont, I arranged a bouquet of tightly budded chives, salvia, yarrow. Now the buds have opened--purples and dusty yellows, leaves tangled and lacy, a miniature thicket.

Refrigerator hums. Clock ticks. Rinse water splashes into wet sheets. The house murmurs through its chores. For the moment I am unnecessary, except to open the front door and call the cat back in.

 I'm lying in a room that is like a memorial to 10th grade. The walls are covered with good-boy-at-school certificates, decorated paper plates, and Guardians of the Galaxy posters. Through the window I look over Lake Champlain farmland--long stretches of fields striped with hedgerows, though the mountains that are usually visible from both sides of the house (Adirondacks from the front windows, Greens from the back) have been erased by cloud. This is dairy-farm country, forest long ago subdued to grass, a realm of tame and pretty hills. Postcard Vermont. Not my homeland.

Good morning from damp and cloudy Vermont. Apparently it's been raining hard at home, but nothing much seems to be happening here so far.

I ought to go for a walk today. Yesterday afternoon, when I had a bit of off time, all I did was fall asleep on my nephew's bed, but that was a side-effect from the cat excitement of the day before. At about 6:30 p.m. I'd let Ruckus outside, expecting him to be back yowling at the door within a few minutes, which is his usual pattern. But by 7, no cat. I stepped outside and called. No cat. I walked around the neighborhood, Tom walked around the neighborhood. No cat. With growing anxiety, I went further afield to look at busy Forest Avenue to see if he'd been hit by car. No cat. It was getting dark, pushing 9 p.m., far later than he was ever out. He's 13 years old, not prone to wander and a luxuriant who likes his household comforts. Something had gone wrong.

With desperation I went to my computer to look up the Next Door online message board, planning to put up his photo and ask neighbors to check their sheds and garages. But lo and behold: someone else had already posted a photo of Ruckus in their house, with the caption "Is this your cat?" Turns out they lived more than a mile from us, far too long a distance for him to walk. What could possibly have happened?

Well, what happened is that the daughter of the house, a middle schooler, had been walking through our neighborhood, saw Ruckus crossing the street, worried that he might be lost or get hit, and in some still undetermined way carried him back to her house. Apparently, this is the downside of having a very friendly cat: people kidnap him. We were fortunate she had good intentions and her mother could deal with the situation. But lord.

 I'm hitting the road early today so will talk tomorrow. Stay tuned for cat drama. Oy. 

Another cold gray day on the docket, and then three days of rain to follow . . . and naturally they are timed exactly for when I'm supposed to be driving back and forth to Vermont. Sigh.

Well, we'll see what transpires. It's possible my family would rather I didn't come when the weather's bad, but for now I'm assuming I'll be on the road tomorrow. So today will be housework day, and it ought to be weeding day as well, but the conditions have been poor for garden work. I did get the grass mowed yesterday, so that's one thing to cross off the list. But the laundry never dried, and the air was a refrigerator, and everyone I saw on my walk had their coats zipped up tight, except for teenagers.

Given the weather this week as well as my incipient travel plans, I've been more or less nailed to my editing desk, though I've been working on conference plans around the edges. I ought to be designing some more Poetry Kitchen classes, but right now all of my teaching energies are focused on the conference, and I can't seem to dredge up the get-up-n-go for a whole new round of invention. I think in some ways I haven't quite recovered from my glum period. Also, when I look back at this winter I think, Jeez. No wonder. Ray died. The United States took an axe to the head. I was sick enough to go to the emergency room. Also I worked really, really hard through all of it. I need to cut myself some slack. Those new Poetry Kitchen classes will appear eventually.

On the mantle is a fresh bouquet of half-opened chive flowers and budded-up salvia and yarrow. Outside lilacs are blooming, and the white azalea glows in the half-light. Bluebells and woodruff sweeten the shade.

I know I've got to tug on my boots and make myself drive to Vermont tomorrow. I know have to grind out a few more hours at my desk, and then scrub toilets and drag the vacuum cleaner around the house. Before enlightenment: chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood and carry water. Always the same old story.

But I will go for my walk this morning. I will breathe in the fragile, fleeting scent of crabapple blossoms. I will watch baby squirrels wrestle and chase in my backyard. I will keep reading this incredible Colson Whitehead novel I snagged at a yard sale on Sunday. One of these days that old sun will decide to show his face again. I look forward to seeing him.

The weather's suddenly gotten so cold again. Yesterday was raw and blustery; and even I, dedicated outdoorser, couldn't find the gumption to weed or mow in a damp wind. Then, of course, the rains erupted and I just barely snatched the laundry off the line in time. Last night I lit a fire in the stove, and this morning the furnace has kicked on. It's hard to believe that, calendar-wise, we're on the cusp of summer. The view looks like mid-May but the air feels like the first of April. We've had maybe four balmy days over the past two months. And yet everything is growing beautifully. Clearly spring knows what it's doing, so I will not complain.

Instead of working outside, I spent most of the day at my desk, plunging through a fat stack of editing, though I did take time out for a coffee party to talk with faculty about their conference plans. Today I'll be back at my desk, but maybe this time I'll also talk myself into doing some afternoon yardwork in the cold.

I've been reading Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle and very much enjoying it, though I ought to get back to my Shelley assignment instead of wallowing in novels, as is my wont. I enjoyed the recent New Yorker article about the New York Mets, and then last night enjoyed listening to Mets radio as the Red Sox beat them. (The Mets are my second-favorite team, and I could also be talked into rooting for the Tigers in the postseason. I fear that the Red Sox will not be an option in that regard.)

I do wish I could sleep better. Even when I've managed to doze off, I've been beset by peculiar linked dreams centering around various central Maine women of my acquaintance who've always made me feel nervous and awkward. Plus, I lost my glasses in a car that might have been a DeLorean.

Well, so it goes . . . dream life and waking life are both imperfect, but at least in the awake version I've got my glasses on.

Yesterday was the neighborhood's annual yard-sale extravaganza, and Tom loves yard sales, so we spent most of the morning trudging from one to the next. We ended the morning with takeout bagels and lox, which we ate in a small park under falling apple blossoms. And then in the afternoon we accomplished two yard chores that I've been longing to get done: repairing our water-damaged outside table and repairing the leaking birdbath.

You may recall that I rescued that birdbath last summer from the side of the road. It's always had a slow leak, but this year the leak increased so that it hasn't been holding water at all--a great disappointment for the local mockingbird, who keeps trying to bathe in it. So Tom mixed up some cement and patched the cracks, and I undertook the table repairs. Though I'd tarped the metal table over the winter, water had gotten in under the covering and damaged the finish. So, under Tom's tutelage, I scraped paint, sanded off the rust, and then spray-painted on a new coat, and now the table looks better than ever. I'm quite pleased with myself.

Thus, we had a busy outdoor day together, and in the evening, as the rains came on, we sagged companionably on the couch with the windows still open, and, you know, I just really like hanging out with that guy, even when we're half asleep.

***

And now Monday again. This will be a busy week for me as I have tons of editing to do, plus I've got to drive to Vermont on Thursday to see my family. In the meantime: an update about the Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts. I've got just one opening left; so if you or anyone you know might be interested, please reach out to me ASAP.

Most of you have been reading this blog for a long time, so you know the history of the conference. Its first iteration, the Conference on Poetry and Teaching, was founded by former Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser, who led it for a decade at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, before handing it off to me. I then directed it at the Frost Place for another decade before moving to Monson Arts last summer.

While I'll always miss the Frost Place, the move to Maine has been so good in so many ways. Instead of strictly running a teaching conference, I've been able to morph it into a conference for poets and teachers and to broaden the scope beyond poetry into collaborative interactions with other artistic disciplines. Also,  Monson Arts is a wonderful setting--a gorgeous lakeside campus, excellent facilities, top-notch food, and an extremely supportive and capable staff and administration.

Conference registration is strictly limited to 15 participants so that we can keep the sessions intimate and intense. This year my dear friend Gretchen Berg, a poet and physical theater specialist, and her partner, the dancer Gwyneth Jones, are serving as faculty. We've got participants coming from Texas, Florida, and New Jersey, as well as throughout New England. Many of these participants are top-notch poets in their own right.

If you are at all interested in close collegial work with teaching artists and serious poets, in exploring alternative approaches to revision in your own work and/or with students at all levels, and developing a larger network of friendship, I hope you will consider it. This conference is a labor of love for me, in a deep and essential way. I want to create the kind of place I never had when I was young. I want to open a space for community in all of its emotional and intellectual richness.

And if you can't attend yourself but have the ability to support another participant, please consider donating scholarship funds. I've got several interested educators who don't have any school funding, and my own sources have run dry. It would be wonderful to be able to bring one of them to Monson.

In July 2017, when we first laid eyes on this house, we knew instantly that it had a lot of problems, inside and out. But the asking price was relatively low, and we had skills. Tom thought he could deal with the inside issues, and I thought I could deal with the outside issues, so we took the plunge.

Most of the yards in this neighborhood are tiny, but this one was comparatively large, with a south-facing front and a shady back. But it was in dreadful condition, especially the backyard, which was a barren waste littered with dog droppings. Yesterday I went back to look at the real estate photos, and they were just as hideous as I remembered--bare dirt, weedy tufts, trash strewn along the fence line. It was an eyesore.

When I was outside in the drizzle yesterday, tucking transplanted bits of sweet woodruff, Japanese grass, and miniature iris among the maple roots before the heavier rains rolled in, I thought about the ugly yard I'd first seen eight years ago. There's stil so much to do on this place, inside and out, and of course the plantings aren't close to maturity yet. Yet instead of a grim wasteland, there's the promise of arbor. Pale woodruff blossoms shimmer against the grass. Viburnum and smoke bush and Japanese maple unfurl their tender leaves. A clematis climbs a trellis. Chairs gather. A clothesline drips with rain.

Once this place was charmless. Now it has a quirky, homemade, unfinished beauty. It is enthusiastic and imperfect, and it looks exactly like something made by me.

Another foggy morning, but the air is much cooler than it was yesterday. Clearly showers are on the way, and just in time: the gardens get thirsty so quickly. Between work and a zoom meeting I managed to mow grass--for the third time this week. In the damp weather it's been growing at fairy-tale speed, and the reel mower can barely hack through it. But at least it's a semblance of a lawn now. Then before dinner I thinned the new greens sprouting in the garden boxes, and we had our first homegrown salad of the season--miniature arugula and spinach tossed with violet leaves and blossoms . . . only a handful for each but so tender and fresh.

I'm ready enough for a showery weekend. Of course I always have a hard time staying inside, so I'm sure I'll be out in the mist, transplanting a little, weeding a little, walking in the rain. But the big jobs are done--grass managed, seeds sowed, mulch hauled--and I can putter and dream.

Yesterday's zoom confab with Teresa and Jeannie was particularly rich. We'd each brought in a draft we'd been working on; and as Teresa said, each poem was so extremely characteristic of its poet. Jeannie wrote about divination; Teresa wrote about Jersey City; I wrote about a brook. The poems were our mirrors.

The way the three of us talk about poems: I can hardly describe how it happens, because I don't understand how it happens. But we never workshop, we never boss. No "Fix this sentence" or "That line doesn't work." We just get excited about the poems and suddenly, as the two of them talk, a clarity comes over me . . . "what if?" . . . "I wonder" . . . "oh, oh, oh!"  Their conversation makes magic.

So this morning my thoughts are hugging my brook poem--stroking its stanzas and line breaks, tenderly tracing its surges and repetitions. I will make changes, I will keep re-seeing, but I love it so much more than I did yesterday morning. Now it is like a beloved small son, rubbing his eyes as he wakes up from a long sleep.

Those are the kind of poet friends I have. They offer me my own work as a gift.

The fog was creeping in from the bay as my friends and I drove home from our poetry evening, and this morning the neighborhood is shrouded in mist--maples, houses, lilacs, cars, and also my two lines of very damp laundry, which got caught in a rogue shower yesterday afternoon and are now drenched in cloud.

It's Friday, and I'm looking forward to spending the entire weekend with Tom. We had thought of going for another canoe jaunt, but the weather doesn't look promising. So I don't know what will transpire instead. I'm just happy I won't be away from him.

In the meantime, there's today.  I'll drag the recycling to the curb, I'll go for a walk, I'll wash the sheets, I'll work on my editing job, and later this afternoon Jeannie, Teresa, and I will talk about poem drafts and what we're reading and thinking about, and it will be a good ending to a wistful week.

Wistful, shrouded, cloud . . . rogue, caught, drenched. The words fill with air, they tug at their sentences, their frail strings snap and away they float, bobbing against fences, bumbling into branches and power lines, then suddenly reaching open sky, eddying into wind, riding the current, taking on speed, and with a swirl they vanish.

Once my Monson school year is over, my days get exponentially quieter. Some days I talk to no one other than Tom, and during the work week he is out of the house from dawn till dusk. That's not a problem: I've long known how to fill my own time and thoughts. Still, a break is tonic: and this morning a friend from the homeland will swoop down for a visit, this evening I'll go out to write, tomorrow I'll spend a zoom afternoon with Jeannie and Teresa, and solitude will enjoy a little ripple in its waters.

I dreamed last night of my older son as a toddler--his ear-to-ear grin, his chatter, his duck-fluff hair . . . such a happy dream, and I am still basking in the pleasure of his company.

Outside the air is mild and still. The upstairs windows are open, and I can hear an Amtrak train spin past, clanging its bell. I can hear a low highway rumble and a cardinal spilling song. In the kitchen T is slicing bread for a sandwich. The cat pads from room to room. The panes are squares of gray light.

Thursday means housework: bathrooms and floors to scrub, towels to pin to the line. I've almost finished rereading The Sea, the Sea. I've got lots of editing to do. I need to work on designing some new Poetry Kitchen classes. I'd like to figure out travel plans (T and I have decided to go to Chicago at some point this summer). I want to mess with a poem draft. But the day will take its own path.

Under this flat daylight, the garden murmurs . . . green and gold and white and rose, soil still dark with water. I have been struggling to find my way back into Keats's fold . . . to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."  I'm making progress, but the work is never done. 

Town living has its luxuries--for instance, a bookstore around the corner, so we can walk out arm in arm to a poetry reading, then walk home under the flowering trees to fix an easy dinner. This neighborhood is domestic and sweet, and finally, after eight years, I know that I'm not a stranger anymore. The woods haven't faded, but that world isn't mine anymore. I live here, in this shabby midcentury cape, on this little arable plot, on a narrow curved street of staid old-fashioned houses, under these big maples, beyond the train tracks, a few steps away from the busy arteries of a small city, a few steps away from the North Atlantic tides.

Yesterday afternoon I finally caught up with my weeding (though, in spring, one never actually catches up with the weeding; it's an endless circle). So today, after work, I'll focus on re-sowing seeds that the squirrels dug up (sigh), setting up trellis strings for the scarlet runner beans, and other such fiddly tasks. The sunshine has been a treat: I've hung laundry on the outside lines every day; I've eaten my lunch in the garden and lingered on the stoop in the late afternoons. But the rains will be back later in the week . . . and they should be back: young gardens are so thirsty.

I'm nearly finished with Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea. Now I need to turn my attention to Shelley; and to Christian Barter's new collection, which I bought last night; and to Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's novel Dayswork, which I want to reread before the poetry conference.

Speaking of which: We've got just two spaces left at the conference. Please consider joining us. We've got a magnificent group of participants . . . including a nationally renowned poet, who, amazingly, is coming in not as faculty but as a colleague. I think the atmosphere will be particularly rich this year, and I would love to see you there.

I dreamed I went to a poetry reading and slept through the entire thing. Then I woke up and realized I'd actually slept solidly all night instead of blinking awake pointlessly at 3 a.m., which is my usual wont. A good result, really, but the catch is: this evening I'm going to a poetry reading by the same poet who was in my dream, and now I'm pre-embarrassed about sleeping through it.

Ah, serpentine shame--how it coils and tangles. No need to really do anything wrong. My brain will invent the appropriate scenario so I can feel guilty anyway.

This morning I'll be back at my desk, digging into a fat new editing project. Then in the afternoon I'll try to catch up on weeding and planting. Around the edges I'll go for a walk, hang laundry on the lines, deal with conference paperwork, and in the evening I'll go listen to Christian Barter read from his new collection. In print this sounds like a productive day and maybe it will be. But I am still wrestling with state of mind, trying to keep that day out in the canoe alive in my thoughts even as the glum wanders back in.

Glum is a precise word. It sounds exactly like what it is--a gluey cloud. 

Well, I am not generally a depressive. And I know I am not actually depressed now. I feel plenty of sunshine; I've got plenty of energy. I'm merely glum about a few things.

I am also not glum about a few things. Guess what? No more squirrels inside the bedroom wall! Guess what? An editor wrote to me about a submission and said, "This is one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read." How can I be glum in the face of such fortune? I am going to stop immediately.

After so many, many days of rain: this sky and this water. 

Brownfield Bog is just over an hour west of Portland, but even on a perfect day it is extremely quiet. The site not easy to access if you've got a car likely to bottom out on untended gravel roads; and though it's a state-managed wilderness area, it has no boat launch, no bathroom, no amenities or entertainments beyond itself. Yesterday we saw a couple of birders walking along the shore, a couple of kayakers out in the open water. For the bog, that's a crowd. Often we see no one at all.

What we do see, every time we go, is extraordinary animal life. We paddled down one of the marshy inlets and found a most magnificent beaver dam. Along the shore we saw an oriole, a veery. Geese couples gave us side-eye. A heron flew up from the grass. Swallows harassed a red-tailed hawk.

And we saw our first ever sandhill crane--a huge, red-headed bog stalker, with a wingspan of up to seven feet. I thought I might faint with happiness.

The day was so, so lovely. And to be outside, on the water, in the sunshine and the breeze . . . to be floating with Tom in the midst of such bustle and ripple--  Sometimes the world is very kind.

Yesterday's deluge was slow-moving, but finally, by late afternoon, the rainstorm lurched out to sea, and this morning the sky is vast and clear, a pale silver arch promising blue.

T and I have made plans to canoe today. Nothing surpasses a northern bog in spring . . . and just now is the ideal moment, when temperatures are still cool enough to keep the blackflies at bay, when the water is high and the birds are nesting and the muskrat families are dabbling among the reeds.

A canoe is so quiet in this world. It noses lightly into slow current, precise and delicate, not soundless but muted . . . hiss of bow, splash of paddle. To canoe a bog in spring is to enter into dream time.

This has been a strange and somewhat painful week. A week of recognition, of accepting sorrow. The sort of week we all have, often enough, often enough, the sort that each of us must flounder through in our own private, small-circle ways.

As perhaps you can tell from yesterday's post, I have been wrestling with the I of my own perceptions. I have been trying to inhabit a less self-aggrandizing self. Keats's mysterious negative capability . . . the yearning for an ever-deeper imaginative sympathy . . . this is the chime that tolls with such melancholy, such fervor. I will never become what I long to become, never write what I long to write, yet the work is all, the work is everything.

And so sorrow arises when the everything is wounded . . . scraped and slit and scabbed over, then the new tender scar scraped again. There is no protection from a cynic's bite. That is the way things are.

But today, in the chill of morning, my beloved and I will push off from a muddy bank and float slowly into sun-shadow, into ripple. An oriole may flash an orange wing as it flits from a cedar branch. A yellowlegs, lifting one foot from the silt, may cock an eye. Sky-road, water-road . . .  we linger on your brink in wonder.

Rain clatters on shingles, clinks on pipes, taps at windows, sighs a slow drip from the eaves. Rain news, various and plaintive, various and bossy, urges from every direction. There is no getting away from the headlines: RAIN. ALSO RAIN. RAIN CONTINUES. RAIN.

Vague first light unmasks the street gutter, a rain creek running downstream to the sea. Maples, laden with infant leaves, sag under rain. Grass shimmers and gloats--green and greedy, insatiable. "More rain, more rain!" screams the grass.

The house is a wooden box. Rain fingers rattle and shake and pry at the seams. Rain mutters, "How does this thing open?"

Meanwhile, lamplight. Growl of a furnace. Hot black coffee in a white cup. A Murdoch novel splayed on a table. Pale cat curled into a pale blanket.

Rain and rain. On the table a novel splayed. It is called The Sea, the Sea. All of the words demand their air today. Repeat, repeat. Say our name.

How to be a self and not a self . . . how to listen and wait and listen and wait. The hour is slow. Day opens her heavy eyes reluctantly. She was up all night on a rain bender. She hardly recognizes a self.

The Sea, the Sea remarks, "But supposing it should turn out in the end that such a love should lose its object, could it, whatever happened, lose its object?" Should lose its object, could lose its object, should lose its object, could lose its object . . . rain approves of sentences that are like rain. "Clatter and drip, clatter and drip," agrees the rain. "Why leave when you're already here?"

I dried clothes on the outside lines yesterday, my first chance in weeks, but no such luck today. It rained a bit overnight and another round of big downpours will start later this afternoon, just when I'm supposed to head north for the Monson kids' gallery opening. Right now I'm wondering if I should even go, which breaks my heart, but driving 300 miles in one evening in the pouring rain is starting to seem like a stupid idea. Well, I'll wait a few hours and see what's what before I decide. Blah.

On the other hand, yesterday I did plant tomatoes and peppers and eggplant, and transplanted lilies and iris into the front yard's patch-under-construction, and bought some some astilbe for the backyard, and weeded a flowerbed. And I was relieved to write with friends last night. And I was glad to come home to Tom. And today is Friday and I don't have to work either day this weekend, and on Sunday T and I will go canoeing in a bog.

I've got a small editing project on my desk, which is probably what I'll be focusing on this morning, but I would like to mess with some notebook scribbles. I suppose I ought to submit something somewhere, though I doubt I'll talk myself into that chore today. There are days when I say to myself, Never again. No more publishing. There are days when I say, Dawn, you're an idiot. They often overlap.

Fortunately Rilke keeps me on the path.

Paris, February 17, 1903

My Dear Sir,

. . . You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you [to] write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

May I always believe this--always, with my entire lurching heart.

Fog wraps the little northern city in an eiderdown. The fog is so dense that the neighbor's next-door roof is barely visible from my bedroom window. Something the color of fog is trotting up the sidewalk: it is my white cat, emerging from a prowl among the wet pink tulips.

Overnight, maple fluff has magicked into small leaves, a tender new canopy, fog-blurred. Fog smears every windshield on the street. Fog coils down the chimneys. Even inside the houses the air has a whiff of brine. The fog is the sea come a-calling.

I spent much of yesterday at my desk, but I did manage to finish that editing project, so today will be housework, poem work, and garden work before I go out tonight to write. I may even take a trip to the nursery for tomatoes, peppers, and basil seedlings. I think it's safe to plant the tender crops now. The weather is certainly not warm, but temperatures are steadily mild and the soil is full of welcome.

[Grievance sidebar: Gasoline-powered leaf blowers in triplicate, roaring and farting along the backyard fence in excruciating disharmony. I beg you: Do not own one. They are the worst.]

I'm still feeling a little blue, but oh well. The fog is also blue. We will be blue together.

For a change, it's not currently raining in the little northern city by the sea, though clearly it's recently been raining and most likely will be raining again soon. I like a wet cold spring and all, but a glimmer of sunshine would certainly be novel. Midafternoon yesterday I lit the wood stove just to cut the damp chill--dankness is creeping into the bones of the house.

Still, my new shrubs and transplants are delighted with the weather, and that's what matters. The rose, the elderberries, the flowering almond, the forsythia, the serviceberry, the viburnum--all are glowing. This may be wet weather for humans, but it is ideal weather for mitigating root shock.

Root shock is a metaphor waiting to be unrolled.

I dreamed last night that I was writing a poem called "Ambient Love." Awake, I can't decide if that's a ridiculous title or an interesting one.

This morning I'll go for my walk and then finish an editing project, and then I might run a few errands, and then maybe I'll get outside and do some muddy weeding in the backyard beds. Or maybe, if it's still raining, I'll try writing a poem titled "Ambient Love" that also features root shock.

I've had a few hard things happen this week, a few root shocks, the regular sort of painful things that every old child stumbles into. I could use some ambient love. I'll send some your way in case you could use it too.

Late in the day T arrived home from his long weekend in the north, truck-weary but very happy, and the cat and I were also very happy, and we all spent a cozy evening returning to our regular little habits and affections. I made a welcome-home steak dinner, T chattered about what he'd seen, the cat sat in the middle of our card game--everyone enjoyed the homecoming.

Now, this morning, we're lurching back into our workaday schedule. Outside it is, of course, raining, and the birds are singing wildly and tulips are glowing in the mist and the thick grass is as green as paint. I have some hopes of weeding flowerbeds this afternoon, but not very many hopes. This rain is perpetual. Still, I refuse to be dampened--at least my spirits refuse to be dampened. The rest of me has no choice. It's a walk in the rain or no walk at all. And for my particular body, no walk at all is always the wrong answer.

I've got editing to work on today, and a conference syllabus to tweak, but no more high school classes to prep until September. With that routine gone, my schedule feels airy, untethered. I do have to drive to Monson on Friday for the kids' gallery opening, but a friend and I are going to motor up and back in one day and trade off on the driving--tiring but that means we can have a full weekend at home. Given that I've worked three Saturdays in a row, I am highly relieved that she's helping me have this option.

Meanwhile, dishes, laundry. Meanwhile, sweeping the floors. A mockingbird splashes in the bird bath. An olive-yellow warbler flutters down into a flowerbed, alighting next to a scarlet cardinal. A pileated woodpecker wails in the trees. The first iris, deep purple velvet, unfolds beside the stone wall.

When it wasn't raining yesterday, it was drizzling, and when it wasn't drizzling, it was misting, but I had no choice: the day was my only chance to get some big garden jobs done. So I spent the day wet--wet sneakers, wet work gloves, jeans smeared with mud--and moved twenty or so wheelbarrow loads of semi-rotted maple leaves to a corner of the front yard that I'm working to reclaim to flowerbed. Once, many owners ago, someone planted that section, but subsequent owners neglected it and eventually someone feebly attempted to return the plot to grass. But there are so many tree roots in the area that I can't dig up the so-called sod or the long-embedded weeds. The only choice is to smother it with mulch. So I weeded, and deep-mulched, and transplanted some lilies and creeping phlox, and now the corner looks so much neater and, fingers crossed, I'll never have to mow that dumb thin patch of grass again.

The fatal flaw of gardener logic: "I don't like mowing so I'm going to turn the grass into garden and give myself exponentially more work."

After I finished the mulching project and took a tea break to talk on the phone to my sons, I dragged out the reel mower and hacked my way through the grass I am not turning into garden--a thick, green, sodden job, but rain is forecast for the rest of the week, so if not now, when? And then I did a bit of shrub pruning and weeded out another round of maple seedlings. There's still lots more weeding to do, but that's always the case in spring. At least the big jobs are done. The place is looking pretty good, and I'm not even a bit achy this morning. Thank you, winter exercise regimen. You may be dull but you keep me chugging.

Late in the day, after I'd cleaned myself up, I took part in a zoom meeting, an invitation from the poet Patricia Smith, who has proposed organizing a collective of older women writers. I got onto this invitation list because I worked with Patricia at the Frost Place, when she taught at one of our virtual conferences during the pandemic. It was interesting, sitting in on this first conversation among more than thirty aging women writers from around the country, most of them strangers to one another. Some names I recognized; others were new to me. Some were poets; many worked in other genres. Several spoke of extreme loneliness, the sense of marginalization, the need to find other women writers with whom they could share non-writing-centered conversations about their lives.

I've been lucky in that regard. I have an existing cadre of women friends--from central Maine, from Portland, from my broader writing life--who regularly have these kinds of conversations. But the women on this zoom call were from all over the United States. A few are quite well known. And all are hyper-aware of the intersections between their creative longings, their aging bodies, and the ways in which they are perceived or overlooked in the world. I found the conversation extremely moving: the eagerness, the desperation to find solace in one another.

I'm not sure where this collective is headed, or whether I'll stay involved over the long term, but I'm interested in what might happen. I'll keep you posted.

Even as the cherry trees reach full blow, they are also visibly fading. Slowly, constantly, inexorably, petals drift down from the laden branches, collecting on sidewalks and road and grass--an etude framed in rose, time dressed in its church clothes. The fete is brief, just a day or two, and it is insanely beautiful.

Now, in morning's dim and watery light, I look up at the vase on my mantle--four blossoms: a creamy tulip, a coral tulip, two buttery narcissi. Perhaps I am uncommonly affected by flowers, but again and again they overwhelm me. Their exquisiteness is also a sharp and sensuous poignancy--so frail, so tough, so fleeting, so eloquent . . . the brevity of perfection--color and shape and drape and curl and scent. And I love them also because they are, for me, entirely voluptuous. I don't eat them; I don't transform them into salves and tinctures. All I do is look at them and smell them and stroke them and gather them. They offer me nothing but pleasure.

I was thinking about this in class yesterday . . . that acknowledging our deep and sensuous affections, whether for homeland or child or lover or book or flower, is exactly what gives us both the strength and the material to defy the machinations of evil. During my Thursday night writing group, a friend shared a memory of her now-grown son--a brief image of how the tiny child would grasp her thumb to stay upright--and somehow that solid, physical, sensory recollection sent a shiver over the entire gathering . . . yes, this, exactly this, this is what our bodies long to hear.

I woke to fog wafting in through the open bedroom window. This seaport town has the best fogs--briny and dense, a joy to nose and skin and eye (as long as I'm not trying to drive anywhere). To lounge warmly in bed, breathing in the salty dampness, air as blurry as thoughts: really, it's the nicest way to wake up. And then, stretching, standing up, pulling up the shade, gazing out into the foggy street--the white-blooming serviceberry coiled in mist, rosy tulips glistening in cloud, bright grass soaked in dew . . . My eyes are so happy all of the time. How I adore spring.

Now here I sit in my familiar old couch corner, listening to the cat patter upstairs to his chair by the open window. I've brewed a full pot of coffee all for myself, which may turn out to be a bad idea but feels delightfully reckless at the moment. Tom has sent me a comical photo of the purple linoleum in his motel room. Outside a bluejay is squawking. The coffee table is stacked with books. The couch blanket is tucked around my knees.

Yesterday I pulled out the wintered-over spinach--not a large crop but enough for a big fresh salad tonight--and planted cilantro and dill, carrots and fennel. Peas are up; spinach, lettuce, and arugula are up; the perennial herbs are sprouting--sage, oregano, lavender, mint. Parsley and lovage seedlings are glowing. The new serviceberry shrub has blossomed; the new flowering almond is bursting into pink. Things are pretty lively here at the Alcott House, what with so much coffee and flowering.

I'll be in class all day--another round of my political poetry session--and by the time I finish, rain will likely have moved in again. But tomorrow, rain or not, I've got a big digging project to continue. I've got poem drafts to work on. I've got books to read. I've got a wood stove to light when the evening chill comes on. This is my favorite sort of writer's retreat . . . the retreat into my own private delights.

But how hard it is. The sorrows tumble down, ice and wailing and sharp stones.

For more than a year T has been planning a photo trip into Aroostook County, and all spring he's been watching the weekend weather and sighing heavily as one rainstorm after another barreled across the state. But finally, this weekend, he's found his opportunity, and today, after work, he'll head north for a few days alone with his camera.

So Mr. Ruckus and I will hold down Fort Alcott. I'll be teaching tomorrow but otherwise have no particular plans, other than a couple of dinners out with friends. I've embarked on a big digging and mulching project in one corner of the yard, and I'll probably do some planting. I'll argue with the squirrels who've been carousing in my flowerpots and biting the heads off my tulips (though thank goodness they are no longer living inside our bedroom wall--a very unpleasant few weeks we had with that, until they decided it wasn't a good nesting site and T was able to board up the hole). I'll read and write and cook for myself and listen to baseball, and I hope I'll do a lot of sleeping, and I know I'll think happily about T being happy. Perhaps it's odd, but we are a pair that thrives on reunions. We like knowing that the other person is out doing something in the world. We like the sensation of being temporarily unyoked. We like sending each other little newsy updates. We like welcoming each other home. These days I'm mostly the one who's on the road and he's mostly the one who's staying home, so switching roles is also tonic. He's glad to be lighting out for the territories. I'm glad to be standing in the dooryard waving the dishtowel.

Yesterday went really well--just the right amount of happiness and elegy. It felt good to have ended so successfully; it felt sad to know that these kids, for whom I have so much affection, are walking out of my life and into their own. They, too, felt all of this mixed happiness and sadness--sadness also for losing this peer group they'd made together, these fellow writers who'd helped them discover themselves

We spent the morning with a make-your-own-show project. I broke the group into in three sections, gave each a newspaper article containing peculiar information, and then said, "Okay, you're inventing, writing, rehearsing, and performing a new piece that arises in some way from the information in your article." I broke down their tasks into timed segments, but I in no way told them what or how to create. My only constraint was that their performance could not mirror the article: they had to begin and end their stories in different ways, and they had to imagine their characters via monologues. The whole project took two hours, and the results were spectacular. The kids were completely engaged, excited, inventive, focused: I was thrilled. It was such a good way to end the year . . . with the young people in charge of their own minds, with the young people collaborating to make wonderful new things.

Afterward several of them spoke about how much they'd enjoyed learning to collaborate. This makes me so happy. I know that schools promote group work, but often it involves predictable results, and often the groups aren't truly collaborating but are depending on one or two students to drag the rest of the group along behind. Real collaboration is a different story, and it's not easy. But after a year of incremental training (lots of generative projects involving groups, pairs, and the whole class; lots of guided conversations about work-in-progress), these kids got very comfortable about sliding into creative situations together. Yesterday's crazy, spontaneous performances were a real joy--100 percent goofy smart teenager, just as they should have been.

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?