Today will be my sort-of day off, as I'll be zoom-teaching tomorrow. By sort-of day off I mean I won't be editing all day (though probably I'll put in a few hours) but will instead be prepping for tomorrow's class and trying to catch up on house obligations . . . all of which, you'll note, counts as work so I don't actually know why I'm pretending that today will be a holiday of any kind. But I will be off my usual weekday schedule, and I will have some breathing room around the edges, and I have been trained by society to denigrate my seven-days-a-week household labor, so no doubt all that feeds into my pretense.

Tomorrow Teresa and I will be leading a class for Monson and Frost Place alums that focuses on using visual prompts to generate new poem drafts. In a few ways it will be a sneak peak into our plans for this summer's poetry conference, which will center around notions of transformation. We've got a sizable group signed up, and temperatures in northern New England are supposed to drop below zero, so it should be a good day to curl up in a chair and talk and write.

I know I need to design and schedule another open Poetry Kitchen session for the spring, but I haven't had the headspace to create yet one more new thing. I've been working on a sonnet project with Teresa and Jeannie, working on a performance project with Teresa, Gretchen, and Gwynnie, writing new curriculum for the summer conference, tweaking my class plans for the high schoolers, plus reading stacks of books, both alone and in tandem. I've got plenty of poems I could start sorting through for a next collection, but I haven't made any headway there at all--I can't seem to find adequate open brain and body space. I guess this is why people go to artist residencies, but such luxuries are not in my future.

Well, everything will shake itself out in time, in some way or other. Either I'll put together a new collection or I won't. It's not the end of the world if I never publish another book.

 

This is the prettiest meal I've cooked so far in 2026: sautéed Micmac brook trout with lime and rosemary, pappardelle with garlic and Aleppo pepper flakes, butter lettuce with a simple balsamic dressing, and sliced blood oranges. The photo is a reassuring contrast to the terrible chapatis I made yesterday, which refused to puff and ended up in the compost bin (although the chicken curry they were supposed to accompany was tasty). I've been the primary household cook since I was a teenager, but one is never too old for spectacular kitchen failure.

Portland got yet another dusting of snow overnight, and we have an odd brief warmup forecast for this afternoon before temperatures dive below zero for the weekend. I should go out for a walk before the Arctic moves in; but with ICE terrorizing our town, yesterday's was nerve-wracking. Every time I caught sight of an SUV at an odd angle or a van idling along the street, my heart sank. At the grocery store I suspected all burly self-satisfied-looking white guys of harboring cruel intent. I longed to reach a hand out to my cheerful Latinx checkout boy and say, "Be careful," but what kid wants to be embarrassed by an unknown aging shopper in a loud hat?

Well, I will go out again, and I will keep my phone at the ready, and if I had a whistle I would use it. I hate this thuggery with all my heart.

Frigid weather is settling in over the little northern city by the sea. And so is ICE. Two schools in my neighborhood briefly locked down yesterday after administrators learned that agents had been sighted at a local gas station. Tribal governors, mayors, school and church leaders: everyone is anxious. Maine, it seems, is next on the punishment list.

Meanwhile, the temperature is 9 degrees, forecast to drop below zero by the weekend. The new furnace heaves and grumbles, and Chuck peers with interest into the registers, his whiskers trembling in a hot wind. I have finished rereading Pale Fire and have almost finished Idyls (what a heartbreaking ending; this is the saddest of poems). I'll start Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book today, find another novel to read, get back to the editing pile, prep for my high schoolers, get onto my mat. Take a walk. Which now also requires: Watch out for my neighbors. Keep my phone at the ready. Record evil.

For the first time in days, no snow fell overnight. Outside looks like a school day, a work day--clear streets and shoveled driveways and cars not disguised as hippos with wooly blankets. T will be back to work, and I will be back to solitude--also working, but I worked yesterday too, so there'll be no "back" about it.

I had a very unpleasant dream last night: about being in a house full of people and trying to find a bed to sleep in, but nobody wanted to share a room with me because everyone disliked me and took the opportunity to tell me so in detail. It was a very high school sort of situation, but that didn't make it any less painful in the dreaming.

It's odd how the malaise of dreams lingers, even as the specifics fade and vanish. I woke up a pariah, and now, even among my familiar everyday comforts, that dream-self resists erasure. I remain unlikeable, unbearable, unwelcome.

I woke up to find that the Bears lost their game, and now I too have lost every speck of interest I might have had in the football playoffs. I can't possibly root for the local team, which is allowing two players who have been criminally charged with violence against women to compete as if they're heroes. And none of the other teams from the west have piqued my interest in any way. So I guess I'll be watching the Super Bowl  (if I do) entirely for Bad Bunny.

But in good news it does look as if we'll be seeing an Orioles game in Sarasota! I'm quite excited. I've always wanted to go to a spring training game, and now I am getting my chance.

In other good news, Tom happened to casually mention yesterday that he had today off from work. As far as I can recall, he's never gotten this holiday before, so that was a welcome surprise. Though I myself cannot take the day off (or the whole day, anyway), I am enjoying another slow start before I take the ice-axe to the mountain of editing that is my fate. I slept till 5:30, without interference from the Big Kitten, and now I am comfortably drinking coffee and considering next steps. I ought to clean house (though that's awkward with another person in the way), and I ought to take a walk (though the roads and sidewalks are slick with new snow), and I ought to buckle down and deal with those manuscripts (no excuses there). Yesterday, as planned, I made a big Sunday dinner--roast chicken, mashed potatoes, pan gravy, cranberry relish, peach cobbler--so the refrigerator is packed with useful weekday leftovers. In short, the day feels like a regular Monday but also not like a regular Monday, and I'm not sure how it will end up shaking out. But I do love knowing that T is upstairs sleeping.

Young Charles perhaps thought today was my birthday because he allowed me to sleep till almost 7 a.m. But here I am, finally--comfortably groggy and ready to write to you on this snowy Sunday morning. I was under the impression that yesterday morning's flakes wouldn't add up to much of anything, but in actuality snow fell all day and into the evening, slopping up roads, filling up driveways, and this morning everything is encased in a dense ice-snow crust. We drove across town yesterday evening for a birthday party, and the conditions were dicy. Clearly the amount of accumulation surprised the road crews as much as it surprised me.

The Bills lost their playoff game to the Broncos last night, so my never-intense interest in the NFL has likely dwindled away for the season. I will have to return my thoughts to baseball. I've been excited to learn that the Orioles play spring training games in Sarasota: maybe I'll get a chance to see a game when I'm down there working in March. Or maybe nobody else will want to go. You can't depend on an artist to enjoy a game.

Today we're going out with our neighbor to see the new Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother. Otherwise, I'll just be puttering . . . watering plants, cleaning bathrooms, roasting a chicken. I'm in the mood for classic Sunday dinner: mashed potatoes, chicken gravy, cranberry relish, maybe a cobbler with the last of my frozen peaches. I finished Atwood's Penelopiad yesterday, started reading Antonio Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams and rereading Nabokov's Pale Fire. I'm still working my way through Tennyson's Idyls. I did a lot of snow shoveling and washed a lot of blankets and towels, but I did not write any new poems. Maybe that will happen today, but maybe not.

This coming week will be crammed with editing, and next Saturday I'll be teaching all day. The poems will have to worm their way through the cracks.

It's snowing quietly, pale dust on roofs and sidewalks, pale glimmer under streetlight. No passing cars mar the snow-sheened road. Windows are dark. Everyone seems to be asleep--except for me, except for Chuck, except, I'm sure, for the family two doors down with the brand-new baby.

Already on this dark morning I've been rereading poem drafts . . . two new ones over the past two days, one set in lake sunshine, the other on a midnight forest trail. My rereading is tender. It is weary. Brand-new babies demand everything.

The room is still. Two pots of rosemary cluster against a gray windowpane. A philodendron glints in a dusky corner. Last night's wood fire has burned down to ash.

In this silvery hour, my two poem drafts chirp and sigh. I run a finger down a margin, trace the thin space between stanzas, prick myself on a comma.

All around us, snowflakes drift slowly, slowly through taut air.

This week has bustled along. I'm surprised to see Friday arrive so soon, but here it is again, in all of its trash-day glory. Little Chuck is crunching his breakfast chow, I am drinking my modicum of black coffee, T is creaking around in the bed. Any moment now his feet will hit the floor and the morning show will begin.

I'll mostly be editing today, but I've also got some prep to do for next Saturday's Poetry Kitchen class, which will be a reunion session for Monson Arts and Frost Place alums. And with luck I'll find time to frame up another poem draft for the performance project. Those pieces are continuing to tumble into the world: I wrote a new poem yesterday, even in the midst of more pressing obligations. With each one, I feel like I'm opening a little window on an Advent calendar. "I wonder what I should say?" I ask myself as I peek behind the shutters, and suddenly an anecdote or an image shines in my thoughts, and a new draft asserts itself.

An interesting side-note is that the draft-blurts I'm writing with my Thursday night poets are awful and useless. In the past those blurts have been exciting starting points for new work, but right now they seem to have nothing to do with anything. My creative energy is coming from somewhere else, at least for the moment.

But so it goes. The Muse is a weirdo who shows up at the bar right before it's about to close and requests a complicated blender drink.

Sorry about the late post, but I had to get P to the bus station by 6 a.m., so the morning has been hectic. Finally, however, I'm getting my chance to slow down. The kitchen is clean, the floors are swept, the bins are empty, the clean laundry is folded, the first load of many loads of dirty laundry is churning, the bed is made, the kitten has breakfasted, my boys have been kissed goodbye, and I am at leisure to curl up in my couch corner with a cup of tea.

Our whirlwind trip to the north was excellent, on all fronts. The class went great, spending time with my kid is always the best, as is hanging out together with old friends in the homeland. The driving conditions were decent enough, and now I am home again for a spell--with a lot of obligations but also some quiet.

This morning I'll take a walk in wet fog, then dig into the big new editing project that showed up in my inbox while I was up north. I'll deal with the laundry mountain. I'll make a jelly roll with a friend's homemade marmalade, and I'll invent a poem prompt. Tonight I'll go out to write with my poets.

Hovering over me is a small raincloud of loneliness, the familiar small cloud that always thickens whenever I have to part from either of my children. Their company is such a delight to me, such a miracle.  But I'll be in New York next month; I hope to be in Chicago in May. Till then the small raincloud is a kind of comfort. A greening. A fragrance of soil and stone.

P wanted to do the driving yesterday, so I sat in the passenger seat and was mostly able to relax. I'm still not quite used to the idea that he can handle a car, though I know that in real life he regularly drives cargo vans all around NYC. He is 28 years old, and I should be used to the idea of him behind the wheel. But somehow I'm not.

Still, we made it safely, even easily, to the homeland and spent an excellent evening with our friends: venison for dinner, chat about canoes and snow and the people of our lives. P filled the woodbox. I unloaded a bag of treats from the city. The cookstove purred and clicked. The lamps glowed.

And now, in the dark outside the open window--silence. The north woods in January. The velvet of early morning. 

P arrived last night, and this afternoon we'll embark for the north country--first stop Wellington, to hang out with homeland dear ones; then tomorrow we'll teach together in Monson. I'm ready to get back into the classroom, though after yesterday's zoom meeting I'm also breathless about the prep that still needs to get done before that Florida residency. Yes, I wrote eight poems over the course of a week, but more must be written, and when will I have time to produce another rush of work?

There's no point in fretting about that today, however. I'm looking forward to hanging out with my kid this morning, looking forward to hanging out with our friends this evening, looking forward to class tomorrow. I know I've said it before, but team-teaching with my own son is extraordinarily gratifying. This will be our third iteration of the playwriting session; and though we (mostly he) tweak our plans and packet every year, we've honed a class that surprises the kids, engages them, and keeps them adventurous. P is a great natural teacher, and I hope he gets a chance to have his own classroom one of these days.

It's Monday morning, it's my back-to-work week, and I am starting it off right, with a pile of dirty sheets and towels and a washing machine that does not leak water all over the basement. Yesterday Tom discovered pinholes in the drain hose, made a quick trip to the hardware store, and voila: I am back in the laundry business. So today--a walk, a zoom meeting, housework, groceries, prepping for school, getting the guest room set up, and this evening P will arrive from Brooklyn, ready to trek north with me tomorrow.

I did end up watching the Bills-Jaguars game yesterday--a game so stressful that I had to keep walking out of the room. Midway through, P texted, "This is a rock fight," and he was right. I never like to watch anyone get hurt, but I especially hate to watch the Bills' quarterback get beat up. I think that's because I've been on his side since he was an awkward, full-of-talent, often-ridiculed, dingbat rookie, and that history has somehow triggered my motherliness. Even though he's now the reigning league MVP, seeing him get hit on the football field feels as upsetting as seeing my kids' friends get mashed during a high school soccer game.

In the end, the Bills did pull off a victory, though I wonder why I was happy because now I have to go through all that stress again next Sunday.

Otherwise, what is new? Mostly an awareness of transition. This week I'll pivot away from my private life, back into the world. I haven't been exactly housebound over the past couple of weeks, but the house and my own mind have certainly been my frame. I'm looking forward to what's next.

Chuck has been unable to let me sleep late. Before 5 a.m., both yesterday and today, he was sitting on my chest, patting my face with his paw and trying to lick my eyelids. Who can stay asleep with a cat licking their eyelids? Ugh.

However, I otherwise got a good night's sleep, so I will refrain from grouching at the enthusiast. He means well.

T and I had an enjoyable playday yesterday. The weather was weirdly warm, more like March than January, and we walked around town with our hats off, held hands as we slid over the icy patches, embarrassed ourselves with dreadful bowling scores, and dolled up for dinner. It was an excellent birthday party.

Now today we will return to the land of chores. He will argue with the still-leaking washing machine. I will work on some editing questions with an author. I plan to watch the Bills game this afternoon, unless it becomes too depressing. I'll probably keep reading Toibin's The Magician, though I have to say I'm not liking it as much as I've liked his other fiction.

This week the work snowball will start rolling downhill. First thing tomorrow morning I've got a zoom meeting about the conference faculty performance. In the evening my younger son will arrive from New York, and on Tuesday he and I will head north so that we can teach the Monson high schoolers together on Wednesday. At some point during the week a new editing project will arrive. The days will speed up, and the responsibilities will stack up, and I will be breathless and spinning, wondering if I'll ever write again.

So my production over this holiday hiatus has been a great boon. During this break I wrote eight new poems . . . eight! I also drafted the bulk of my conference teaching plans: brand-new conversation starters and prompts designed to fill full-day sessions--a lot of material. I worked on marketing stuff, I worked on upcoming online teaching stuff, I worked on co-teaching stuff with my son, I read books like a fiend. I solved (I hope) some niggling medical issues. I celebrated a big elaborate Christmas. I hosted a New Year's Eve party. I was a good pal to Tom. I kept the house clean and got interesting meals onto the table. I look back at the past month and I am amazed. What the heck?

I'm not sure why I've been able to buckle down so effectively in my private life, given the bombardment of national horrors. There's been no compartmentalizing: the horrors seep like spilled ink into my worries, into my dreams. I am 61 years old and my brain is sparking with energy and my chest is tight with distress, but I keep waking up, I keep getting to work. I don't know why or how.

Yesterday I officially joined the ranks of the old: for the first time in my life I am now on daily medication--a very low-dose blood pressure pill. I'm actually feeling pretty good about it, in a resigned sort of way. I've had some weird evanescent symptoms for a while, which the nurse practitioner believes are related to the blood pressure spikes. Apparently women in particular can be sensitive to such shifts. In the old days I used to have low blood pressure. I don't know why this has changed. T and I have the same diet, and his blood pressure is fine. I exercise regularly and don't have a significant weight problem. But bodies are strange things, and mine has decided to go a little haywire. I'm glad the problem is so easy to solve.

Today is Tom's 61st birthday, and we are having a play day. Later this morning we'll walk to Norimoto--a James Beard Award-winning Japanese-influenced bakery that happens to be up the street--and buy a few little treats for breakfast. This afternoon we'll drive over to West-Port Lanes and go bowling. And this evening we'll eat dinner downtown at the Wayside Tavern.

Tom and I met when we were 19. We've been a pair since we were 21. We got married at 26. We lived in the woods together for more than 20 years. We raised two babies into men. The Dawn and Tom Show has been running for a long, long time. How can I sing his praises? He is full of contradiction: thorny yet easygoing, ironic yet sweet, shy yet sociable; a domesticated loner: reliable, handy, and mysterious; an artist, an intellectual, a carpenter, a comic, a fierce opponent at card games, a cuddler of kittens; a guy who is willing to lie on his stomach in a puddle of water and peer into the bowels of a broken washing machine; a guy who leans his shoulder into mine at the movies, whose face lights up when he sees me across a room, because mine lights up when I see his. He is my good fortune.

It also happens to be the birthday of Hannah, our daughter-in-law-to-be: another stroke of luck. What a delight to have her in our lives--this funny, dear, smart, charming young woman who thinks our son is the cat's meow, and he thinks she is the cat's meow, and may they someday celebrate her 61st birthday together as gratefully as I'm celebrating Tom's today.

I've gotten a lot of reading done this week: finished the McMurtry novel, finished the Kushner novel, started Toibin's The Magician, plus made progress on Tennyson. I've also gotten a lot of planning work done: drafts for segments of the conference--the opening day and what has traditionally been my revision day, though it is morphing into something more malleable than straight revision practice. (Sometimes I write "re-vision" because the hyphen does help to indicate a more open process, though I admit it's annoyingly precious.)

Among other gifts, my work with high schoolers has been a laboratory. I try out new ideas, take notice of what's working and what isn't. Each cohort has a different vibe, and I try to adjust around that aura while also maintaining a steady focus on producing, discussing, revising, finishing, and performing work.

While I won't give away details, this year's re-vision segment at the conference will center around the power of comedy in collaborating, extending, and re-seeing drafts. What happens when you frame writing strategies around the goal of "make us laugh"? This year's high schoolers love to be silly together, and I've found that giving them that opportunity has been a way to get them to practice their skills in new contexts. For certain kids, it's also allowed them to sidestep their fears about sharing uncomfortable personal material and just relax into the work.

Most of the fall I felt like I was thrashing in shallow water as I tried to keep up with my obligations. But this hiatus between semesters has been everything I'd hoped it would be, work-wise at least. I've caught up on writing projects, I've caught up on teaching projects, I've caught up on reading projects, I've seen my beloveds, and I've gotten some rest.

Next week the whirlwind will start up again. I hope I'm ready. I guess I am. Who can tell?

It took me hours to fall asleep last night. I couldn't get the image of that murdered young woman out of my head; I couldn't quench my fury at those ICE thugs masquerading as law, or my fear for my own young people, who in their cities are doing the work that she was doing in hers. 

So I'm tired this morning. And I'm downhearted, to say the least. 2026 has had a hell of a start. Nonetheless, the clock ticks. The kettle steams. Outside, a few crows shift among the branches, and the tide laps at the pale marsh grass.

This morning I'll run a load of laundry and learn if T has solved the leak problem. This morning I'll lie back in a dentist's chair and let a stranger's hands probe my teeth. This morning I'll scratch away at class plans, at poem drafts, at the books I'm reading. Tonight I'll go out to write with my friends.

The future feels very fragile, very small.

It's snowing again this morning, another glossy inch muffling cars and gardens, streaking sidewalks and roofs.

Here at the Alcott House, we are struggling with yet another appliance malfunction--this time the washing machine, which is mysteriously leaking. As appliance problems go, things could be worse: the leak is in the basement, not upstairs, and there is a laundromat conveniently around the corner. And maybe this morning T will pinpoint the problem he couldn't figure out last night and discover he can fix it himself. Still, these household debacles are tiring, and apparently endless.

Yesterday I started serious work on plans for the summer conference. My first task, every year, is to choose my opening poems. At the Frost Place I always used a Robert Frost poem, for obvious reasons. He was the looming figure. But one of the changes I've made in Monson is to start the morning with two poems by very different poets that set the stage for the conference theme--in this case, transformation--and to then move directly into writing and sharing before we undergo any sort of analytical discussion. It's been refreshing to step away from Frost. Much as I admire his work he's never been a touchstone for me, and over the years the conversations around his work became more and more predictable. With two new poets every season, I never know exactly how participants will respond, and that's exciting.

So I sat upstairs in my blue chair with a stack of poetry books beside me and idly browsed, until, suddenly, the poems I needed rose up from the pages and began jostling against one another. It is a very unscientific process, this poem-choosing task. I thumb through collections and the poems murmur and bustle and then a moment arrives when I recognize the poems, and I feel the writing prompts emerge, and I still don't know any answers to my questions, and that is how I can tell the job is done.

Snow fell overnight--not much, but enough to freshen the plow piles and shine the roofs. I've been reading Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake (an odd combination of spy novel and meditation on Neanderthals) as well as Tennyson's Arthurian idylls; and with that baggage swirling behind them, my eyes are imagining this new snow as mythic overlay--maybe even here, in the prosaic little northern city by the sea, the trees speak and caverns lurk beneath the drifts.

I caught up on various chores yesterday, desk and household, so today, as I wait for the next editing projects to arrive, I'll go back to working on character-study poems for the Monson faculty performance. Our show doesn't have a name yet, and I think it will be easier to talk about once it does. But I am beginning to see a shape arise, beginning to hear voices.

I've also been writing sonnets this week, in collaboration with Teresa and Jeannie: a round-robin project in which we borrow each other's last lines as our own first lines to create a three-person sonnet weave. I've been surprised by the ways in which the form has exerted itself. Without thought I instantly adopted Shakespearean, and the poems are flowing. Yet the sonnets that the others are writing are Petrarchan or American, entirely different from mine. The end product is going to be very interesting, structurally at least.

I'm still feeling residually blue from the renewed onslaught of Baron mourning over the past few days. After publishing that essay in VP, I had the responsibility of writing notes to the sad people who responded to it, and that's been weighty and difficult. So these poem projects have been a good distraction. Whether or not I'm actually making good poems, I'm reaching into unfamiliar spaces. The air feels cold and crisp. My lungs fill, and my heart beats faster.

It's Monday, end-of-the-holiday Monday, back-to-the-grind Monday. I will miss my slow mornings. I was not overjoyed to hear the alarm shrill at 5 a.m., though Charles was pleased about his suddenly very prompt breakfast. But I imagine I'll get back into the swing quickly enough.

Today I've got errands to run, emails to answer, probably some editing consultations to do, housework to deal with, next week's high school syllabus to hone . . . I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but it will no doubt conk me over the head at some point.

It's not like I haven't been working at all: I spent a good portion of the New Year's holiday immersed in poem projects, catching up on publicity chores, advising my kid about his grad-school application essays, and the like. Still, the days were a breath, and the upcoming months will be demanding.

Upstairs T is opening and closing his dresser drawers. Downstairs Chuck leans against my shoulder and chirps into my ear. The coffee table is piled with books. Clean counters gleam in the kitchen. Heat pulses through the registers. Wheels turn, slowly, then faster and faster, chugging us forward.

I considered making a New Year's list of things I dislike (Facebook memes that pretend to quote from sources but are really AI pap that reposters haven't fact-checked, famous athletes who are under felony investigation for beating up women but still get to play in games, men who call their wives mom, presidents who kidnap other presidents for fun), but the big stories are so bad, the small stories are grit in the eye, and what is my purpose on the planet anyway? Chuck says it's to sit quietly on the couch so he can cuddle, and maybe he's not wrong. I'll go out for my walk, slip and slide among the ice patches, watch flocks of sparrows twitter in the bare-boned hedges. I'll come home again. I'll put the kettle on the stove. I'll open a book. Who knows where righteousness arises? I am the last person who should preach.

One excellent side-effect of this New Year's holiday has been sleeping. Under usual conditions I'm up at 5 a.m. day in and day out; but with these dark mornings and T off the clock, my body has been happy to burrow. Chuck, of course, can only put up with so much of this. By 6:15 he is patting my cheek with a paw, pouncing on my feet, chirping his breakfast song. Still, despite his pesty antics, I've snagged more than an hour of extra sleep for four days in a row, and that's felt great.

Already dawn is yawning over the maples and the air is pale enough to reveal the frost shards glittering on my neighbor's car. I don't know what the day has in store.

Yesterday we toted a load of giveaway stuff to the Goodwill and I came home with three new-to-me books: Colm Toibin's The Magician, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and Larry McMurtry's The Last Kind Words Saloon. And in the mailbox I found another book, one I'd ordered: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, the tenth-century jottings of a Japanese lady-in-waiting. It is the new year and my reading pile runneth over.

It is the new year and the government's disgusting antics escalate. How humiliating it is, to be an American.

***

Here's my essay about Baron in Vox Populi.

Outside in the frigid darkness a few holiday lights still gleam. They're hard to part with, I know. Though I stowed away the rest of our ornaments yesterday, I couldn't relinquish the string of fairy lights gracing the mantle. At midwinter every glimmer is precious.

For some reason, the Alcott House feels especially dollhouse-like this morning. Despite its seven rooms and two bathrooms, everything is in miniature: little kitchen, little living room, little dining room, little bedroom, little studies. A teeny-tiny wood stove. A kitten basket. I imagine a large child lifting off the roof and rearranging the furniture.

I spent some of yesterday catching up on publicity stuff--not my favorite task but here we are in a new year so I need to get on the stick. Probably most of you already received the newsletter, but among other things it announces--finally--the release of Poetry Lab Notes, the collaborative Substack journal that Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been fermenting for months. Our first post is a memorial to Baron Wormser, and tomorrow Vox Populi will publish my long essay about him and his work, so I am feeling a bit blue--missing his acerbity, missing his affection.

Well, so go the days--what's vanished splashing into what's here and what will come. Time is a sloppy mess. I slouch on my shabby couch as beads of light gleam among the stones on the mantle, as young Charles hums cheerfully into my ear, as my dear one sighs upstairs in his sleep. The air is thick with ghosts.

They swirl, dust motes in a draught. Dear Grandpap. Dear Jilline. Dear Ray. Dear Baron. Dear so many. A rosary of beloveds.

2026 has opened well, poem-wise. Yesterday, with relative ease, I wrote yet another of the character sketches I'm creating for our faculty performance in Monson. Suddenly these pieces are flowing out of me: brief examinations of various small-town people and situations, which eventually will be arranged against separate work that Teresa, Gretchen, and Gwynnie are producing. I've never written into this sort of project before, and I've been worried about freezing up, making nothing. But this week alone I've composed three new poems, a dialogue, and a list of possible subjects for group performance. Meanwhile, Teresa is writing landscape poems, Gwynnie is starting to conceptualize motion, Gretchen is researching historical figures . . . It's exciting, also daunting, to be involved in such a complicated undertaking. Three evenings of brand-new linked collaborative work: I admit that this was in fact my idea. Also I admit that I had/have no clear idea what such a collaboration would require or become. Fortunately Teresa is overflowing with organizational pizzazz. Otherwise we would have to hire a sheepdog to nip at our ankles.

Tom is taking today as vacation time, which means he and I will have a full four-day weekend together before work restarts on Monday. As far as I know there's nothing but puttering on our schedule. Among other tasks, I'll be putting away the handful of Christmas decorations I strewed around the house out of kitten reach. Already this morning I've dragged the trash to the curb, and I'll probably bake some bread, maybe run an errand or two, maybe do some more basement cleaning. Tom tells me that Boogie Nights, one of our favorite movies, is streaming, so we might spend an afternoon watching it together.

A little formlessness feels good because the next few months will be a snowball of poetry obligation. At the end of January Teresa and I are zoom-hosting a reunion class for Monson Arts/Frost Place alums. I have a reading in Brunswick, Maine, in early February. Later that month I'll be reading at Poets House in Manhattan as part of a memorial/book launch celebration of Baron Wormser's posthumous collection. In March Tom and Gretchen and Gwynnie and I will meet Teresa in Florida to work in person on our group performance. Then, as soon as I get back, I'll have to head to Bangor for a gig as the featured poet at the annual conference of the Maine Council of English Language Arts. In between all of this craziness I'll be driving back and forth to Monson, editing manuscripts at my desk, and gazing wild-eyed into the sky.

But for now I'm lazy and snug in my couch corner. Outside a squirrel bounces across the driveway, leaving a wake of tiny tracks in the fresh snow. Inside Chuck rattles a toy among the chair legs. Heat blasts enthusiastically out of the registers. Through the window I glimpse a blue, blue sky.

In the little northern city by the sea, the new year opens with a shimmer of new snow, pale skim on walkway and windshield. In the dark a distant highway mutters. Twining among the houses, wind fingers maple boughs, bumbles against chimneys, then untangles from human clutter and wheels over the black-tipped waves of the bay.

Now dawn unfolds. Suddenly, skeleton maples are inked against the faint gleam of future day. Blue presses against the windowpanes of the Alcott House, peering in at lamplight, at a fat kitten washing his face.

Last night's bustling little party was homey and sweet. The quiet room still basks in that leftover warmth.  I never have been the sort to make new year's resolutions.

Outside, a seagull wails. Inside, the kitten flits up the stairs. Bad times are coming. Also good times. Who knows how they will arrive?

Being a poet is awkward . . . Always trying to cram words into wordlessness. Constantly making the big mistake: pretending there's a moral to the story.

A kitten breathes into my ear. My hands fumble at sentences. Plain daylight has arrived, flat and sensible, no nonsense about it. Welcome to morning. Get to work.