Yesterday was jam-packed with activity. We were on the road by 6:30, on our stools at Biddeford's Palace Diner by 7, and at the bird sanctuary before 8. It was a cold and quiet morning on the beach and along the salt marshes, the tide at its lowest ebb and the sand stretched before us like a plain. We were all deeply happy to be there. Then mid-morning we headed back to busy Portland--stopped at the grocery store, stopped at the cheese shop--then home again, to immerse ourselves in our ongoing massive Wingspan board game contest. By early afternoon P's college friend had stopped by, Tom was lighting the firepit, and I was prepping a midday grill feast of venison backstrap, halloumi, and hot cider; our neighbor had stopped in to say hello to the kids, and the six of us hung out for a few hours in our coats and hats, nibbling on grilled meat and cheese, warming up with cider, until our visitors dispersed and we four returned to our giant Wingspan game. And then a movie was proposed, so all plus Chuck piled onto the guest bed and were teary over Train Dreams. And then we closed the evening with pizza delivery and Yahtzee, and I, for one, slept like a bear.

This morning the young people will head out for breakfast with their friends, then probably propose yet more Wingspan until bus time. And by early afternoon they will be gone, and T and Chuck and I will feel a little dull for a few hours until we relapse into our regular patterns. It's been such a sweet visit. It could not have been sweeter.

Just a quick note this morning as we are on our way out for an early breakfast and a frosty bird-sanctuary hike. Here's hoping the diner coffee keeps us warm. . . .

7:15, full daylight, and I am only now sitting down to write to you. A Thanksgiving miracle: yes, I actually slept late and had dreams about the skulduggery of Shakespeare professors. But then I also had to scrape ashes and carry wood and light the fire and feed the cat and empty the holiday dishwasher and make coffee, so it took a while before I was at leisure to visit with you.

Still, other than Chuck, I am the only awake-one around here. I'm glad the others are having the pleasure of lolling. They all work so hard and L is still recovering from their illness, and I love knowing they're all dozily gathered under my roof.

Yesterday the kids gave everyone a bird name, and mine was the Dawn Warbler, who wakes before daylight and whose song is an exact replica of the coffee grinder.

Today will be far more aimless than yesterday. The only cooking will involve warming up plates of leftovers, the kids will head into town to hang out with one of P's college friends, and T and I will idle around in a pleasant Sunday-afternoon state of mind. I probably ought to do some planning for my high school class, but maybe not today. After the hard work of holidaying, it feels correct to loll.

Dishes that especially pleased me: The gorgeous jammy texture of the cranberry sauce. Pan gravy with foraged mushrooms--the king of foods. Simmered-all-day Granny-style collard greens, sweet and melting, even without bacon.

Thank you, oven, for your fine and dependable heat. And thank you, bathroom fan, who for some reason decided not to be on the blink. All praise to our plethora of incredible running water, hot and cold, and to working lights and toilets that flush. Thank you, colorful plates and glasses; thank you, loud striped cloth napkins and faded but cheerful tablecloth, everything mismatched but somehow exactly how I like to imagine an ideal world. Thank you, flickering candles and smiling faces; thank you, epic board game competitions punctuated by texts and phone calls from beloveds. Thank you, long walks through the cemetery, long walks by the sea. Thank you, little happy cat.

And so I sit here beside the crackling wood fire, with a Le Carre novel to read and a cup of black coffee to sip, as pale November sunlight slides through the windows, as a clock ticks and a seagull wails. The day awaits.

Our bustle of young people arrived around 9 last night: young Chuck was ecstatic, the kids were charmed, and Kitten World was a sparkly, happy land.

Now Thanksgiving has dawned, damp and mild, and the house is a palace of quiet breathing, except for a yowly, impatient little cat who is peering under doors and wishing everyone would get up and play with him right now this very second.

Yesterday's baking marathon went swimmingly. The two loaves of white bread baked beautifully. And my gingersnap recipe is so enormous that after stowing a third of the uncooked dough in the freezer I not only had enough cookies for a pie crust and casual eating but was also able to spontaneously snatch up a bagful to share with a pack of 15 or so neighbors who stopped by to see if I wanted to go for a walk with them.

To crown the day, my experimental cranberry mousse pie was a complete success, at least visually. My older son, who will be with his fiancée's family today, is kind of jealous that he didn't get to make this himself. 

Today the Alcott House kitchen will be devoted to savory, but without hurry or panic. I've never understood why so many people eat Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of the afternoon; I much prefer a regular evening meal, and that timing is also much easier on the cook. Our petite turkey won't take long to roast. I'll start the giblet stock this morning and get the collards simmering early, but otherwise we can putter. 

On the kitchen shelf are the bouquets of herbs I harvested yesterday afternoon: thyme, sage, oregano, parsley, everything washed and ready for use. A bowl of local onions sits on the counter. Local potatoes, leeks, and collards lie close at hand. A loaf of fresh bread has been drying all night, in preparation for stuffing. Little Chuck has finally gone to sleep on the couch. Everything looks so beautiful to me. I am thankful.

Dear friends, I OWN A WORKING OVEN. Right on schedule, the repair guy appeared, agreed with my diagnosis, produced the part from his truck ("You're lucky! It's my last one!"), undid some screws, attached some wires, redid the screws, and wished me happy Thanksgiving.

True, the furnace guy who was supposed to give us another estimate never appeared (maybe he's hanging out with the bat guy?), but in the present tense I was indifferent. All my hopes were pinned on the oven guy, and he came through like a champ. May his turkey be tender and his football team emerge victorious.

Thus today, after sacrificing a goat or a grilled-cheese sandwich or whatever to the household gods, I will be baking: two loaves of white bread (one for stuffing, one for turkey sandwiches), a batch of gingersnaps, a gingersnap cookie crust, a diced roasted sweet potato (for tomorrow's apple-sweet potato salad), and baked macaroni and sauce (kept warm to feed our hungry late-arriving young people).

Yesterday morning, after getting the housework done, I slogged through the stores for what I hope is my final holiday shopping. Everywhere parking lots were stuffed to overflow, and the turkey line at Pat's Meat Market stretched out the door. But we were all cheerful, and the turkey I ordered is perfect: a petite 12-pounder that when roasted should be almost as moist as a chicken.

My son is eager to serve as my sous-chef, so I don't want to do too much ahead of time and spoil his fun. But I do plan to get the cranberry mousse pie put together today because it needs to set thoroughly before slicing. I am just so pleased to be cooking . . . in my own kitchen, with my own oven, with our dear ones en route. Stop by for a cup of tea, won't you? I'll be around.

I would be happy to be sleeping better than I am, but I seem to be caught in one of my insomniac cycles. Oh, well. At least I can keep the fire alive in the wood stove while I'm uselessly ticking off mental to-do lists at 3 a.m.

Yesterday Teresa and I discussed Herbert's Mr. Cogito and geared up for our next big reading project, Tennyson's Idyls of the King. I finished reading Gay Talese's 1964 history of the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which was more interesting than you might think. I read about a third of Lady Mary Wroth's seventeenth-century "A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love." I scribbled notes about the online class Teresa and I will be teaching in January. I worked on an editing project, and I tried to keep the house warm.

Today will be lumpier. This morning I need to clean for company. This afternoon, supposedly, the oven guy will save Thanksgiving, and a furnace guy will offer us yet another gruesome estimate. Or perhaps they will both be like the bat guy and never show up. I spent much time pondering these things while I was making my insomniac checklist. I also, for some reason, cared a lot about remembering to buy milk.

I cooked cranberries yesterday and simmered a big pot of vegetable stock, so that's two holiday tasks crossed off the list. While the turkey roasts, I'll make giblet broth for gravy, but the vegetable stock will go into the stuffing and the collards, and now I have plenty in store. Our dinner will be fairly traditional, as Paul likes it. The one big experiment is a cranberry mousse pie rather than traditional apple or pumpkin. If the oven really does get repaired on Tuesday, I'll bake plain white bread for stuffing and gingersnaps for the cookie crust. If not, store-bought will have to do. It's always my goal to use as few store-bought items as possible, but I'm not doctrinaire and can roll with whatever, as long as it doesn't involve cranberry sauce from a can or marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, both of which make me shudder.

Despite our household woes, I'm enjoying myself. I do like a feast.

Today I'll work at my desk, do some housework, talk to Teresa about Zbigniew Herbert, go for a walk, maybe go to the grocery store. Tomorrow will feature the big guests-are-coming cleaning event, plus a repair guy cameo. Wednesday ought to be baking all day.

What could go wrong?

Cold Sunday dawn, late November. Night sky softens above a tangle of bare maple limbs. In the living room the wood stove creaks as new flames lick at logs and kindling. Young Chuck, stuffed with bed and breakfast, purrs like a saw. He is delighted to be awake, delighted to feel the first warmth seep from the stove, delighted to lean against my shoulder and admire my ear.

Yesterday I pulled out the last of my salad greens and dill. I was still able to harvest a few bunches of late cilantro and parsley, but there won't be much more of either this season. The kale persists, as do the Thanksgiving herbs--sage, thyme, oregano. For the most part, though, the garden has faded into sleep.

We still have no oven, so I'm struggling to imagine baked turkey, rolls, stuffing, pie. Last night for dinner I steamed, then browned a skillet of diced potatoes and leeks. I stir-fried Chinese cabbage and tossed it with strips of leftover venison. I sliced a ripe pear. I'm trying to open my thoughts to similar Thanksgiving contingencies: sautéed squash, chocolate pudding, turkey fricassee, apple salad. Probably the oven really will be repaired on Tuesday, but recent history makes me wary. I am planning ahead for the road block.

Well, the only important thing is that our young people will be arriving on Wednesday night. With our dear ones in the house, the holiday will be a holiday, no matter what we eat and how many blankets we spread on the beds.

So today I hope to go for a long walk. I hope to cook down cranberries for sauce. I hope to fidget with drafts and read Herbert poems and finish a Drabble novel. I hope to clip Chuck's nails while he's sweetly asleep and put together a Portuguese-style kale soup for dinner. For some reason this post has taken me forever to write, though all of my comments are pedestrian. I know you're tired of hearing me talk about heat and food, but so go my days right now.

Today begins my first non-working/non-traveling weekend since October, and I am enormously pleased to be sitting by the fire with a cup of steaming coffee and not one damn thing on my schedule. I've got vague plans to do a final post-frost garden cleanup--pull out the drooping annual herbs and the dingy lettuce and such--and I need to brush brandy on the loaves of Emily Dickinson's black cake that I baked last week. I might walk to the library and the bookstore. I might buy a baguette. I might do some Thanksgiving-dinner planning. I might work on poem drafts or read Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito or convince Tom to play Wingspan. Or I might not do any of that. 

This year's November has felt particularly beautiful. I like the sudden starkness of sky and branch, the wild clouds, the way daylight tightens into a brief dizzying knot before twilight drops its curtain. And I love November meals. Last night's dinner was one of the best I've made in a long time: Venison round steak marinated with lime, salt, garden garlic, and garden thyme, seared briefly, than rolled in a white-wine reduction. Local spinach melted into butter and nutmeg. Julienned garden carrots with local red onion and garden dill. Mixed grains (quinoa, millet, buckwheat) steamed with olive oil. It was a magnificent feast--the venison a gift from Steve in Wellington, plus my own garden gleanings and those gorgeous local vegetables from our CSA. The only bit of grocery-store produce in this meal was the lime I used in the marinade.

Poems have been another happiness this week. My intense engagement with the long-poem class seems to have exploded me into the zone. In addition to messing around with that big draft, I have written two new shorter poems that have real potential, and I've got another in my notebook that I hope to fidget with this weekend. One of those new drafts appeared during my high school class on Wednesday--always a sign that something big is brewing for me because I can't often let myself drop into the zone when I'm trying to stay attentive to the kids.

I won't say that our household troubles have exactly helped me out. The money terror is real, and so are frets about pipes freezing and no oven for Thanksgiving. But there is something tonic about figuring out how to deal with adversity, and I happen to have a partner who will jump onto the roof of the train and do what needs to be done before the dynamite reaches the bridge as I lean out through an open window and toss the bag of priceless heirlooms into the culvert. Which is to say: right now we are in especially good moods about each other. And so even though my brain is on the alarm, it is also basking, and that is when the poems want to come alive.

It's a chilly morning outside but the fire is blazing cheerfully and already the house is beginning to warm. Tom has settled on a repair guy who can do our furnace work after Thanksgiving, so there's an end in view, though really we're doing more than okay. But the household gods still have us in their cranky gunsights: yesterday morning the heating element blew in my kitchen oven . . . yes, a dead oven right before the biggest cooking holiday of the year. I started calling appliance repair shops, and one told me they were scheduling into January, which made my stomach lurch. I did eventually find someone who can come on Tuesday to replace the element, so for the moment I don't foresee cutting up the turkey into parts and fricasseeing them on the stovetop. Still, given our black cloud, who knows?

But the quotidian trudges forward and it even whistles a little tune. Yesterday my next editing project arrived, meaning that today I'll be back at my desk beginning to sort through files and figure out my tasks. I got the house cleaned yesterday, so for the moment life feels fairly orderly, despite our ongoing domestic disasters. I went out to write last night and scribbled a draft I might like to look at again. This afternoon I'll zoom with Jeannie and Teresa. Tonight I'll play cribbage with my dear one and sear venison steaks for dinner. My big kitten will chirp and cuddle and chase pencils under the couch.

I'm trying to find an appropriate line of poetry to end this we're-hanging-in-there post, but all I can come up with is Tennyson's "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward." That line is entirely inappropriate to the situation and therefore I will leave you with it.

I got home late yesterday afternoon to a cool but nowhere-near-freezing house--good news, given that the stove hadn't been stoked since 6:30 a.m. and temperatures outside had fluctuated between the 20s and the 40s. Tom and I have both gotten so fond of this doughty little Jotul. How sturdily it saves us.

Still, we need to move forward, and T is close to formally hiring someone who says he'll be able to install a new furnace during the week after Thanksgiving. Now our decision to spend the holiday at home feels ever more prescient: we would not have been able to leave the house to itself so would have wrecked my sister's plans.

But fortunately this trip to Monson will be our only absence before the repair guy arrives, and for the next two weeks I can concentrate on keeping the place warm.

Today I've got to deal with a passel of housework chores, and I need to catch up on reading before I meet with Jeannie and Teresa tomorrow. I might mess around with a little poem I drafted during class yesterday. I need to read my son's grad school application essay. I'll do a bit of grocery shopping. I'll take my walk. I hope to go out to write tonight. It's good to be home.

By the way: Applications to the Conference on Poetry and Learning have been open for little more than a week, and we are already a third full . . . plus, I've had several more people express interest in registering. If you are hoping to attend, you should apply ASAP.

It's a cold morning here in Wellington. Since I was last here two weeks ago, winter has set in. There is a crust of snow in the woods and an icy layer on the gravel roads. The trees are bare and the clouds riot in the sky, and for dinner last night we ate fresh venison, as tender and sweet as filet mignon.

November in central Maine: so regal and stark and voluptuous.

The house is on the cool side this morning, but that's because we purposely let the fire go out overnight so I could scrape ashes this morning. With that chore done, the stove has returned to business, much to the satisfaction of Chuck, who is a big fan of the hearthrug.

The first estimates for furnace replacement are coming through, and they are just as shocking as I thought they'd be. But what choice do we have? None.

Thus, for the moment I am squinching my thoughts away from that bad story. Today will be sunny, and this afternoon I will drive north to the homeland to spend the night with the dearest of old friends. Tomorrow I'll be in the classroom with a pack of delightful kids. And then I'll drive home in the late-day sunshine to a tepid house and an ecstatic big kitten and a pretty great boyfriend. And then I will start turning my thoughts to Thanksgiving. Despite their hospital ordeal, our New York pair is determined to spend the holiday in Maine, though I've given them every opportunity to back out if that feels best for them. But, yes, they do appear to want to bask in our limping-along heating situation, and Tom says maybe we'll even have a furnace by then. Who knows what miracle an HVAC guy can pull off? If he doesn't, at least roasting a turkey will warm up the house and we can sit around the fire wrapped in blankets and drinking hot cider. Our boy grew up in the woods. He's used to it all.

You know what's worse than not having a furnace in November? Not having running water. That is my very least favorite household emergency, and I had way, way too much of that in Harmony. This no-furnace stuff is a comparative piece of cake.

This long-poem class turned out to be one of the most satisfying I have ever taught. Though it was complicated to both invent and execute, it brought everyone involved into startling new relationship with their material. The Whitman-based discussions and prompts built up the stamina of participants who had never undertaken such a big poem before while also encouraging the mess and ambiguity that is so necessary at the start of a long-poem adventure. And then we suddenly broke the Whitman container, which pushed us into entirely new conversations with our material.

I would love to offer this class again, so if any of you are interested, let me know and we'll figure out dates.

***

It is pleasant to wake up on a Monday morning with two big drafts of a curious big poem waiting for me. It is pleasant to find a bright bed of coals in the wood stove and to pad comfortably through a warm house when the outside temperature is 31 degrees and I have no furnace. It is pleasant to look forward to a walk in the cold morning air.

Tomorrow I'll head north for another Monson session, but today will mostly be mine. So I might rake leaves. I might fidget with my poem. I might finish reading some poetry collections. I might do some housework. At some point this week another big editing job will show up on my desk and I'll be back to hourly labor. But that long-poem class was hard work and I'm not sorry to have this brief chance to coast.

For more than twenty winters I rose in the dark, scraped ashes, coaxed the banked coals alight, fed the flames before feeding animals, making coffee, waking children for school. All day whoever was home would tend the fire. Then last thing before bed T would pack the firebox with logs and turn the draft down low so that the embers would be simmering for me in the morning. That stove was our constant care. Our love for it kept us alive.

So it has not been hard to get back into the wood fire routine, and thus far the house has been completely comfortable. I worried that I would be cold during my zoom class, upstairs with the door shut. But the chimney runs through the study wall, and that ambient warmth keeps the room cozy. We may get to the point of having to borrow some space heaters. For now we are more than fine.

Altogether yesterday was a good day. T confabbed about heat systems with our older son, who is renovating his Chicago house so has been thinking hard about options and costs. Our younger son sent a photo of his partner, happily out of the hospital and back home with their cats. My class seems to be going really well, and I am still excited about my draft. In the evening we went out to a cheerful dinner party with a passel of friends. We returned to a warm house and a fine slow-burning bed of coals. And there was no sign of a bat.

Now here I sit, on a chilly rainy mid-November morning, tucked into my couch corner, ensconced in my shabby red bathrobe, a cup-and-saucer of black coffee steaming on the table, a big kitten crunching up chow in the dining room, my beloved upstairs among the blankets, fire purring, clock ticking. Okay, yes, we have no furnace and T is joking about staging an art heist so that we can afford to replace it. Okay, yes, the goddamn bats. But I surprise myself by how sunny I feel. I grew up in what you might call a glass-mostly-empty household. By some freak of circumstance I turned out to be a glass-mostly-full kind of simpleton. I have no idea how that switch happened. Well, I do have an idea . . . Thank goodness for friends and laughter.

A few days ago I began occasionally smelling oil when the furnace would kick on. The odor always dissipated quickly but it didn't seem right, so yesterday I called the oil company and they immediately scheduled a service check. I wasn't overly worried--we'd had the furnace cleaned and checked in September--so I certainly wasn't prepared for what happened next. The service guy told me that there'd been a breach in the combustion chamber and now poisonous gases were leaking into the ductwork. The breach could not be repaired. We needed to stop using the furnace immediately and replace it.

This is not news one wants to receive, ever. It is November in Maine, and a new furnace will cost an obscene amount of money, and who knows how soon we can get one installed. And of course the disaster happened on a Friday, so we can't even start to get quotes on prices until next week.

I was shellshocked . . . dreading about sharing the news with Tom, wondering how I would coax our tiny wood stove into becoming our primary heat source . . . This fall has been a beast of misfortune: my terrible car repairs, Baron's death, ongoing bat trouble, our dear one in the hospital (though they've since been released, thank goodness), and now we've lost our furnace.

But here's the thing. When I told Tom, he did not rant or sulk. He did not stomp around the house or sigh heavily. He did not glower or woe-is-me. He made no mention of how-the-fuck-are-we-going-to-pay-for-this. Instead, he nodded. He sat down on the couch and ate some pretzels. He made a few jokes involving the furnace's brand name. ("Now that we aren't using it anymore, we can let it march in the Thermal Pride parade.") He waxed pretend-nostalgic about its long life of service. (It was installed in this house in the 70s.) He texted some co-workers for suggestions about HVAC guys to call. He did a little research on heat pumps. He was, in short, calm and sensible, as he has been about so many of the messes we've waded through in our life together.

And I, under the sweet balm of his temper, relaxed and did what I know how to do: make a wood stove work. This little Jotul stove was not designed to be anything more than an efficient fireplace. It does not have a catalytic converter or a built-in damper. It has the plainest of air controls and a very small firebox. But despite those limitations, it is sturdy and airtight and in excellent firing condition. And we have plenty of dry hardwood and a clean chimney. So last night I set myself to coaxing the baby stove into serious household service.

This morning, when I got up, there were still live coals in the firebox and the household thermostat hadn't dropped below 60 degrees, which is where I normally set the furnace temperature overnight. So that was an achievement, a sign that we'll be able to keep the house comfortable, at least for the moment. My travel to Monson will be a problem, as T leaves for work very early and the firebox is so small that it needs to be fed many times a day. But my neighbor has offered to stoke it, and I've only got one more class before Thanksgiving. So I think we can limp through.

This weekend I'll be back in class, which means I'll be excitedly working on my own draft as well as spending time with other excited people. T and I have been invited out to dinner with people we like a lot. Chuck is purring up a storm. My son's partner is home in their own bed and showing signs of feeling better. The coffee is hot and the little stove is singing. I am married to the best sort of friend. Things could be so much worse.

You are busy being born the whole first ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying. . . . "Being born" here is an open and existential category: the gaining of experience, a living intensely in the present, after which comes the long period of life when a person is finished with the new. This "dying" doesn't have to be negative. It too is an open and existential category of being: the age when the bulk of your experience, the succession of days lived in the present, are mostly over. You turn reflective, interior, to examine and sort and tally. You reach a point where so much is behind you, but its scenes continue to exist somewhere, as memory and absence at once, as images you'll never see again.

None of it matters; it is gone. But it all matters; it lingers. The whole of youthful experience has slid away, the years and the people, the moments and feelings. In all that loss, a person continues to locate little tokes of joy from new and surprising places. Still learning, still becoming. Busy being born, and busy dying. You have a present, a now, even as you drag with you a snowballing bulk of what was. Sometimes you spike a new joy, you really do, and sometimes you hit an old one, and the more you've lived the more there are of the old ones.

                                         --Rachel Kushner, "The Hard Crowd"

**

Much of Kushner's essay "The Hard Crowd" circles around memories of growing up in San Francisco in the 80s and early 90s. She and I did not have the same childhood: Kushner is four years younger than I am, brought up by unconventional beatnik communist parents, immersed early in the grit of the city, intensely social, whereas I was brought up by isolated parents who seemed older than they actually were, who inhabited the mores and fears of an earlier generation, who were deeply nostalgic for an idealized rural past. Nonetheless, our worlds overlap, and not only in terms of pop culture and the historical moment (Also, oddly, we have the same birthday.) Among other things, both of us are the daughters of educated parents and both found ourselves, for chunks of our lives, immersed in worlds where people have no conception of books or art as mentorship or security. In those situations one can become, in Kushner's words, "the soft one" . . . or perhaps be revealed as such, for surely that is what we always were.

The excerpt I shared from "The Hard Crowd" both surprised me and did not. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been talking for months about the sensation of having reached a moment of reckoning in our work as poets. For the most part we have stopped envying the trappings of success. We no longer strive for attention in journals and contests. We've stopped castigating ourselves for not being famous. We've "turn[ed] reflective, interior"; we "examine and sort and tally." This wrestling has been a central element of our Poetry Lab conversations, a commonality among us, though I am younger than the other two by a decade. But as Kushner points out, dying is a "long period of life."

Still, I was surprised to see these thoughts framed so jauntily. That's not to discount the note of elegy in her words, but "little tokes of joy" felt so cheerful, and also accurate. This dying business is interesting, absorbing, comical, and at times almost subversive. It keeps me busy and entertained. It is like sorting through piles at a yard sale: junk mugs, junk baseball hats, junk record albums, junk chairs . . . and then, suddenly, a random postcard becomes a portal. O past. O whiff of rust and bones and pulsing life.

This will be a short note as I have been up all night dealing with yet another round of bat problems. I have reached the end of my tether. Clearly something must be done.

However, there is some comic relief: I have been receiving spam comments on this blog suggesting I click on a link to rent an industrial dock crane. Perhaps many poets long for good deals on dock cranes.

I've been reading a book of essays by Rachel Kushner and had plans to quote from one of them today. But I am too tired to copy out anything accurately, so that will have to wait.

Chuck thinks bats are cool.

I'm happy to announce that registration has opened for the 2026 Conference on Poetry & Learning at Monson Arts. And for the first time ever, we're going to reprise the entire faculty from the previous year's conference. Gretchen Berg and Gwyneth Jones were tremendous gifts to the program last year, and Teresa and I are can't wait to work with them again next summer.

Our theme will be transformation and, as we did last year, we will bring poetry into conversation with other art forms, both in our discussions and our generative work.

I hope to see you in Monson this summer, but if you can't attend and/or if you have the means, I beg you to consider supporting our scholarship fund. In this current political climate, fewer and fewer schools are allotting funds to teachers for professional development. Last year we saw a sharp rise in requests for scholarships, and we did not have enough in reserve to support everyone in need. The conference is an exercise in humanity, intellect, emotion, and collaboration. We are staunch in our belief in art and community as a power for good in this world. If you can, please help us continue to serve.

 The last sentence of Little Dorrit: 

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

A sentence late in The Waves:

It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.

I read both of these sentences yesterday, and both echoed in my chest. But now that I write them side by side I also see that they are the same. The streets, the people. Memory and love. The uproar. The strange. Separation and immersion.

And then the use of punctuation: so individual to each novelist, so perfectly placed.

I think about why I love books so much, why I reread with such stubborn dedication. These recognitions are part of it. The swift interlacing of craft with perception. The common humanity. I linger at the street corner, in sunshine and shade. Arm in arm, Charles and Virginia nod to me as they pass by.

I started my drive home yesterday in rain and snow, but the weather softened by the time I reached southern New Hampshire traffic, which was a help.  I spent the bulk of my afternoon on the couch with a Dickens novel, which was restorative, after a weekend of hardly reading anything at all. But then I got a call to say that my son's partner is in the hospital, which ratcheted the worry back up. Unclear what is actually going on, but they've been sick for a few weeks and things seem to be snowballing. Today we should learn more.

It's been raining all night and will rain more later in the day, but I hope to squeeze in a walk. I'll get caught up on laundry and work on an editing project. I'll go out to the fish market. I'll hope for the best.

I'll be heading home at daylight, an attempt to avoid the steady rain coming in from the west. Happy to own four new tires, but the sight of snow in the mountains on Friday doesn't make me want to linger in the mountains today.

Talk to you tomorrow--

Without incident, Tina the elderly Subaru made her doughty way across rivers and mountains into the Champlain Valley and spent a comfortable overnight parked on a hillock of grass in the cold rain.

Now at very first light, the Greens are a rumple of dark blue through the kitchen window and the Adirondacks are a rumple of dark blue through the living room window, and the cat of the house sourly waits for me to notice that it's breakfast time.

I have been rereading Dickens's Little Dorrit and have reached the part of the book when the Dorrit family has magically transformed from impoverished debtors in the Marshalsea Prison into a rich and haughty entourage crossing the Alps on their way to a Venetian palazzo. Little Dorrit, the shy, hardworking backbone of the poor family, has suddenly become useless in the rich family. Now she has no one to take care of. All she can do is stare out the window in wonder and imagine what is happening among the people of the prison, now that she can no longer see them, or even admit their existence.

In many ways Little Dorrit is an irritating character--the epitome of Dickens's obstinate pipe dreams about sweet, self-effacing child-women. But she is curious. She imagines. And these characteristics, in her new life as the daughter of a rich man, become liabilities. They reveal too much. She is constantly being told to show less wonder.

I have been thinking this morning about that sad fate. To never show surprise. To never be surprised.

The daylight is strengthening. I can glimpse the shapes of cows in the field beyond the house, thick black and white torsos, heads hidden among the dry stems.

Just a quick note this morning, as I'm swirling through my morning chores so I can get out of here soon after daylight. I'll give you the Vermont lowdown tomorrow.

We got a bit of rain last night, and this morning the neighborhood is damp and blustery and Novemberish. Now the furnace is grumbling, and the kitten is purring, and the coffee is steaming, and T is making his sandwich for work and I am listening to sheets churn in the washing machine, and we are chunking forward through our quotidian hours.

Tomorrow morning I'll be hitting the road for Vermont, so today will be housework, and laundry, and catching up with emails, and getting onto my mat, though I hope I'll also be going out to write tonight. I dug up Baron's dahlias yesterday, so they are now safely stored in the basement for the winter. Really that's my last big autumn chore. I may cut back a few more frost-bitten plants, rake a few more leaves, but for the most part the beds are ready for winter. We've still got a smidgen of chard in the garden and some late lettuce, and the kale is doing well, now that the groundhog has gone into hibernation. I'll likely be harvesting into December, unless we get a sudden snow or the temperatures plummet.

I like November, when the hats appear and the coats get buttoned. I like turning on lamps in the late afternoon and lighting the wood fire. I like hot cups of tea and my warm walking boots. I like the smell of baking and roasting and a bouquet of sage on the counter.

Yesterday Teresa and I finished our Whitman reading project, and now we are going to turn our attention to Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito.  I am still working my way through The Waves and Little Dorrit and The Descent of Alette. Chuck is excited about a piece of kindling. The chickadees are noisy in the maples. I love my long-poem draft. America feels a touch less gruesome. It's a cheerful morning around here.

What a good election night!

My son was at Ray's bar in Brooklyn when Mamdani's victory was proclaimed, and he said the bartenders immediately blasted "New York, New York," filling everyone with weepy joy. If only Ray himself had been there to run the stereo. Here in Maine we solidly voted down a proposal to prohibit absentee ballots and voted in a red-flag gun law--a very big deal in a state with a strong gun culture. Portland raised the city's minimum wage. Democrats won large and small victories around the country. It's been a long time since we've been able to feel a little political happiness.

After my marathon work streak, I made it home last night and then T and I walked out arm in arm to the neighborhood barbecue joint, a comfortable way to settle back into town life. Today I've got a phone meeting scheduled and house stuff and reading to catch up on, but there will be airiness too. I'll go for a walk. I'll figure out dinner. I'll dig up my dahlia tubers and store them in the basement. Probably I'll be on the horn with my kid, emoting about the NYC election.

I'm very much enjoying this year's high school cohort. They arrived at the first class ready to be serious and engaged, but now they are starting to let loose and be silly together, which adds to the fun. And my car was very well behaved, which is a relief, given my looming Vermont trip. Altogether it's been a good, if hectic, week, and I am full of sap.

And my long-poem draft awaits . . . 

In the homeland the hardwood trees are mostly bare now, and the tamaracks have entered into their golden glory. Soon they, too, will drop their needles, but for a brief span they are suns.

Their brilliance made the drive north beautiful. Altogether it was a good trip. Yesterday was my car's first long trip with her new rack-and-pinion, and the tight steering made me feel like I was handling a sports car on the curves--an unaccustomed sensation, for sure. Clearly the steering had been deteriorating for a while, but slowly enough to keep me unaware, until things got really flabby. I can almost imagine I'm driving a new car (which, considering the number of pieces I've replaced in the past two years, is more or less true).

I arrived in Wellington to celebration: it's hunting season, and Steve had just gotten a deer. The sorrows of death and life, so tangled. I've never been a hunter, but I understand the confusions of gratitude. How Steve thanked the doe. How winter looms.

Transcription of actual text correspondence between Teresa and Dawn, after this weekend's Whitman session

 T: 🔥

D: I cannot wait to spend time with your draft over the next couple of weeks. You are writing so well!

T: OMG I just was thinking about how you and I are going to have so much fun working together on what we’re writing!! I feel we’re figuring out the architecture of the next-poems that have been baffling us. Does that make sense? 

D: Yes!!!

T: It’s so fucking exciting!

D: I feel more energized about my work than I have for a long time 

T: Me, too.

I dearly hope this class is mattering to the actual participants. But it for sure has lit the burner under my own work--almost explosively so--and under Teresa's also. We've now got a two-week gap before the next zoom session takes place, and while the participants are sharing their work and responses among themselves, Teresa and I will be doing the same.

I am so deeply, massively relieved to be in the zone again. Of course I've been writing writing writing for the past month and a half, and of course that essay was real work. But it wasn't creation fire. And now the fire is back.

Today I'll drive up to Harmony to go for a walk with a friend, then slip over to Wellington to spend the night with other friends, then head to Monson on Tuesday for a day with my high schoolers, and then the long drive home, and voting, and catching up on home obligations. I'll be tired. But my heart feels so light now that I've got this big pot on the simmer. I don't mind being tired. I've got a poem.

I do love baseball, and I am always a little glum when the last game of the season ends and winter buckles on its galoshes. Though I was rooting hard for the Blue Jays and game 7 didn't end as I'd hoped, this World Series was nonetheless excellent: one thrilling game after another and so many stellar performances. It was a fine end-of-summer party.

Yesterday's class went well, I think, despite a couple of unnerving participant emergencies. The quality of the poets' drafts is really, really high, to my great delight. Whitman is unlocking something for these writers.

Now, if only I can prevent them from scrubbing the dirt off their messy starts and tying up their flapping loose ends and inventing neat logical transitions and shaping tidy conclusions and nailing their metaphors to the wall, etc. That is the big danger: the urge to reduce, fix, polish, when you're in the midst of a sloppy strange mystery. I know there are participants in the class who feel safest when they're in control. But this is primordial mud we're tracking all over the house. I hope, hope, hope they will try hard to keep their mops in the cupboard.

Three groups of trick-or-treaters knocked at our door last night, and Chuck was overcome with the excitement. At the end of the evening he flopped on the couch like he'd been chasing rabbits. Halloween! What a holiday!

This morning he seems to have recovered his equanimity and has resumed his usual purring spot against my left shoulder. The wind, which was whistling all day and all night, has died down to a steady breeze, and a coral sunrise is romantically staining my neighbors' white vinyl siding. It looks like the perfect day to talk about Whitman.

This morning before class I'll get out for a walk or a bike ride. I'll marinate chicken for dinner and deal with laundry and dishes. And then we'll begin the big Walt experiment. Can spending two weeks with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" really help us carve out a messy, surprising long poem draft? I guess we'll find out.

This class is among the most complex I've ever designed: lots of talk, lots of writing, plus lots of participant interaction, which can be tricky in a virtual setting. And it's long: two weekends on zoom, with a gap week between, when the poets will be working together without my interference. I'm excited. Rereading "Brooklyn Ferry" this summer blew a hole between my ears, and I can't wait to find out how I'm going to respond to our conversation about it as well as to my own prompts. With luck I'll dig a real draft out of this experience. With luck other people will too.

Nonetheless, the class will be a marathon. That's the long poem way, always chasing us up Heartbreak Hill.