New York City is now under a blizzard warning, and tomorrow's bus back to Portland has been canceled. Yesterday morning, as the weather situation became clear, I did make an early decision to buy a seat on the Wednesday bus, afraid that if I dithered too long I wouldn't be able to get out of town till even later in the week. So I'll be zoom-teaching from Brooklyn on Tuesday, and in the meantime I'll be hunkering down in Gowanus, making spaghetti and meatballs for Stephen and the kids and experiencing the amazement of New York City stopped dead in its tracks.

Yesterday's event for Baron went really well. The room was packed with so many poet friends and acquaintances. Baron's family was there too, and hearing his work in the air through so many different voices was sweet and also intense. Afterward P and I walked for a couple of miles along the Hudson River, basking in the strange mild air, watching dogs and joggers and babies and birds, watching the water ripple past. New York has been wry and beautiful in its gray February cloak.

We stopped in Chelsea to walk through the William Eggleston exhibit at a gallery, then headed back to Brooklyn to meet up with the family for pizza and ice cream. And now an unstructured day unrolls: any plans to be busy in Manhattan have dissolved because of the oncoming storm. Stephen and I will go out for groceries at some point, and then I will cook. And snow will fall and fall.

It rained most of the day yesterday, but I was out and about nonetheless. I met the kids for breakfast, and then P and I went to the Frick and afterward the Strand, where I managed to make my way through fiction shelves A-G before P was ready to leave. Next time maybe I'll reach H-M, but maybe not. Shopping at the Strand is a very slow job. I did find a beautiful early 1950s edition of Henry Green's novel Concluding, and since I suspect I am one of the few people alive who actually reads his writings, that felt like a secret message. It was skewed to one side, half-obscured on a bottom shelf, and I almost didn't bend down to look at it. But there the book sat, waiting for me.

 I've seen three musicals on Broadway: Pippin and Fun Home, both with Paul in high school, and now Ragtime. Pippin was a big fun spectacle, and Fun Home was small and gorgeous and heartrending, but Ragtime manages to combined elements of both and become a heartrending spectacle. It includes a huge ensemble cast, brings a Model T on stage, and includes a dozen disparate settings, including the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the emotions, though also large, remain complicated and ambiguous. Even though it's a musical, its language hews surprisingly close to Doctorow's, and the singers were top-notch.

It was a fun day altogether: for lunch I ate a fried oyster po' boy at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central; for dinner I had chicken in coconut sauce at a Cuban restaraurant near Lincoln Center. I visited with friends at the bar after the show, and then I slept hard till after 7 this morning.

In a little while I'll meet the kids for breakfast, and then I think P and I will go to the Frick. The Polish Rider is waiting for me.

 Good morning from the bus. It's already daylight, and I've already had a crisis: I left the whitefish bagel sandwich I'd bought especially for the trip in Tom's truck, so I had to text him frantically to turn around and bring it back to me. The thought of no breakfast, no comforting delicious special sandwich, was very sorrowful. However, he heroically reappeared with my breakfast, and the surrounding passengers very much enjoyed the dramatic handoff. And now I am hoping that a lost-and-found sandwich will be my only panic of the day.

A surprising thing happened yesterday: I put together a manuscript.

I think it's a tad too short in its current iteration. Nonetheless, it's complete, even down to the table of contents and an acknowledgments page. As sometimes happens, I had a burst of focus, when suddenly an arc became clear to me and the poems began to talk to one another and I began to talk back to them and, voila, a fluttering sheaf transformed into the possibility of a book.

I feel nervous and excited, like I always do at these moments. Yesterday evening I kept opening the file to fidget with it, and often my fidgeting was no more than making the pages larger or smaller on my screen so that I could absorb their visual effect. At this stage making a collection is so much more than just reading the poems for content. It requires simply looking at them . . . and then at other moments simply hearing the silences between them . . . for every poem is surrounded by a different silence, and how that quiet overlaps feels so important to me.

The most recent New Yorker includes Kathryn Schulz's review of Richard Holmes's biography of Tennyson. Schulz opens it by asking, "What was the formative sound of your childhood?" and then speculates on the sea's influence on Tennyson's ear:

No one alive can say if this is true, but I like to think the sound that most shaped [him] was the surf at Mablethorpe, a barren stretch of beach on the remote eastern coast of England. . . . Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation--a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him.

As an ear poet myself, as a recent wallower in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, as a person in the midst of putting together a poetry collection in a rush of wonder (a collection that happens to include a long poem titled "In Memoriam" that refers throughout to Tennyson) . . . well, is it any surprise that I was gobsmacked by this description?

"Both perfect and unpredictable." The words alone make me feel a little faint.

After a weekend of lethargy, I did manage to get a lot of stuff done yesterday. Not only did I finish the housework, but I also prepped for my high schoolers, drafted prompts for the conference's writing intensive, and wrote the speech portion of my MCELA presentation.  Getting ready for that presentation is turning out to involve a ton of work. I'm supposed to fill 90 minutes, which is a crazy amount of time to be on stage. So I'm putting together a hybrid show--talk/experiential writing activity/reading. Creating each of those pieces of course requires a different sort of approach, plus I need to concoct the transitions between them . . . as you can probably guess, it's a beast of an assignment. However, thanks to this sudden unexpected editing drought, I am making progress. I wonder how I would have managed without it.

Today I'll keep chipping away at the presentation. I also need to do some mending, and I hope to get back to sorting through my pile of collection possibilities. I should order garden seeds. I should dust the dining room. I should read Aurora Leigh. I'll go for a walk. I'm presently revisiting David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America, but that book is too heavy to take on the bus so I'll need to come up with another travel volume. This is always my giant challenge: how to find a book that's light enough to carry around the city and long enough to last me through two six-hour bus trips. And it needs to be absorbing enough to hold my attention but not so complex that I can't also surf the disruptions of public transportation. What will it be?

I guess it's Washington's Birthday today, but neither T nor I gets the day as a holiday. Soon he will drive off as usual to the house he's renovating, and I'll need to turn my attention to my weekly housework chores and then deal with a pile of teaching prep: high school session, conference prompts, MCELA presentation. Fortunately, however, my head cold is beginning to dissipate. It's not gone by any means, but I am feeling somewhat better this morning. Though I didn't manage to be energetic yesterday, I did accomplish the grocery shopping and I even stopped at a clothing store and bought myself a new pair of jeans . . . not at all my favorite activity, so I was a little bit proud of myself. Also I haven't gotten fatter since the last time I bought jeans. Success!

New York is on the horizon, and I'm trying to pull together some activities for myself. I'd like to go to the Frick and see the Gainsborough exhibit and lay eyes on Rembrandt's Polish Rider. Like the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, that painting is one of my touchstones, and I need to visit it now and again. There are a couple of interesting photo exhibits in Chelsea (William Eggleston and Arthur Tress); the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is donation-only in the winter, so it would be cheap to wander among the orchids in the glass houses. I'd also like to wander among the used books in the Strand. Who knows what of any of this I'll accomplish, but it's good to have ideas.

And I've got poems on my mind. I printed out a stack of finished pieces and I've slowly been relearning them, slowly beginning to imagine them as a conversation among themselves. It's a tentative first step toward a new collection.

 Despite head cold and family chaos, Valentine's Day turned out to be very sweet. First, T and I walked out to the French bakery for croissants. Then we went to a 10 a.m. showing of Casablanca at what my friend Gretchen calls "the Lie-Down Theater"--it's got broad seats with footrests and reclining backs that are silly and also extremely restful. I'm not sure I've ever seen Casablanca on the big screen before, and it was definitely worth it. Usually I don't think of this as my favorite Bogart film: I so love him with Bacall in The Big Sleep and Key Largo that I have generally been content to slot Casablanca into the category of "everyone else's favorite." But really it's a great movie: tight construction, wonderful acting, a complex and interesting Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere situation. And watching it at 10 a.m. on a recliner was an excellent choice. To top off our good day, we went out to dinner at a friend's house, a long and comfortable evening of wine and chatter followed by an easy 3-minute drive home and an actual night's sleep.

With such relaxations as aid, I feel this morning that I might possibly be winning my argument with the head cold. A little less congestion. A little less groggy self-pitying resignation. Good riddance to both.

So far, all of my big weekend plans to accomplish a lot of complicated reading, etc., have devolved into spending my spare moments sitting under a couch blanket next to a cup of tea and a crossword puzzle. But so goes convalescence. Today I hope to run errands, do some housework, and feel less like a wet mop. Wish me luck.

I'm having a hard time shaking this cold. After starting off as a mere annoyance, it has settled into my sinuses, and now here I am a week later, snuffling and sneezing and feeling like my IQ has dropped 15 points.

But at least it's Saturday morning, and I have no reason to rush around--though the Vermont chaos continues, and I've already taken a 6 a.m. phone call about that. The guilt of distance. It's a particular sort of black cloud.

Nonetheless, despite chaos and sinusitis, it's Valentine's Day, and shortly I'll walk out to buy my Valentine a ham-and-cheese croissant from the French bakery down the street, and tonight we're going out to dinner with friends. The good things are still good.

Over the past couple of days I've been rereading A. S. Byatt's novel The Game, rereading stacks of my own poems, planning various classes and presentations, trying to think ahead, think ahead, think ahead. This time next week I'll be in New York, the Florida residency looms, and then the MCELA event, and in between all of this travel my Monson classes will continue apace. I am nervous about everything.

It's a miracle of sorts: last night I got an email from a press editor telling me that the editing project I was supposed to receive yesterday has been delayed, at least for a day or two and maybe longer. So I woke this morning to the surprise of a small unexpected vacation from hourly labor. I also woke to some distressing, if ongoing, Vermont drama, so miracle must be defined narrowly here. Still, one free breath is better than no free breaths at all.

I'd thought that yesterday would be my only rest day, so I'd crammed it, of course, with unrestful obligations . . . prepping for my MCELA presentation as well as undertaking a giant kitchen project: roasting and straining a big winter squash, then making two pie crusts, blind-baking them, and turning them into pumpkin pies--not an unfamiliar task but a very time consuming one, with lots of dirty dishes and fiddly frets (blind-baking a pie shell can be a little hair-raising). But all went well, and I took one pie to my writing group and left the other in the fridge for us, and I somehow managed to think about poems in the midst of flour and butter and eggs.

Today I do have an afternoon meeting about Monson stuff. But maybe this morning I can allow myself a little more freedom . . . write, cogitate over a collection, read. Or maybe the hours will be swallowed up by other people's chaos. It's hard to know.

In last night's dream, T and I seemed to have acquired a shabby travel-trailer, which was parked at some sort of leafy campground-ish place. We were sitting outside, and Young Chuck was watching us through the screen door, just like he does in real life, and nothing exciting was happening at all--just summertime and three pals hanging out. I'm still basking in the leftover aura . . . it feels so rare to have a purely pleasant dream: nobody worried or embarrassed, no impossible tasks, no dreadful discoveries, no surreal irony. It was kind of my brain to offer me such a restful episode. Among other things, I've been fighting an annoying little cold all week, an illness with extremely minor symptoms that is tailing into convalescent exhaustion because I had zero time to baby it. Yesterday, though, I did allow myself to sag, so I should be feeling better today. And now I have my sweet little dream to help me out.

As of this morning there is no work stacked on my desk. I expect the next editing project to arrive later today or tomorrow, but still that gives me one full day without a time sheet. I need to get started on the giant presentation/reading I'll be doing for the MCELA conference in March. (Unfortunately I've got to prep well ahead of time because I'll be in Florida until just before the event takes place.) But I'm also considering the possibility of starting to print out poems for ordering into a new collection. I'm planning to bake a pie. I'm hoping to do some reading. I want to take a walk. I'll go out to write tonight with the poets.

During that reading at Bowdoin I realized how happy I am about some of my new uncollected pieces. I guess I haven't really been thinking about how much I like the individual poems: I've been distracted by the looming struggle to organize them. So what I would like to do today is quietly remember they exist. 

An inch or so of new snow fell overnight, and I have a morning doctor's appointment so will be outside shoveling and clearing early. But that's fine: if I don't have to drive in it while it's falling, I am delighted to see fresh snow.

The Big Kitten is quite happy to have me home again. He leans against my shoulder and sticks his damp nose into my ear and purrs lustily. And the weather has warmed up a little: it's a balmy 27 out there this morning, a notable change from weeks of low single digits.

This morning, after I get back from my appointment, I'll ship the files of my big editing project to the author . . . and then, very briefly, I will be unemployed. I've got so much prep to do for so many other upcoming jobs that unemployment is more of an idea than a reality. Maybe a better description is I'll have a breather. But a new editing project will show up later this week, this one will be back after the author goes through the files, I've got classes and a presentation to plan, I need to keep working on materials for our Florida residency, plus Baron's memorial reading is on the horizon . . . 

So this afternoon's spare hours probably won't be spare at all. But they likely will involve poems instead of copyediting, which is a version of refreshment. 

I arrived in Wellington at nightfall. The forest was creaking and snapping, the way cold trees do in a high breeze. I could hear the squeak of snow among the branches and the wind booming like the ocean's echo.

All night the wind blew, buffeting walls, twisting chimney smoke into knots. But now, just before daylight, a silence has settled over the little house in the woods.

Yesterday's reading was such a pleasure. People came! The room was full! It was very sweet to read with Gibson and Mike, very sweet to have the chance to try out new poems in the air in front of such an engaged audience. And when I got home Tom was busily making homemade ravioli, so all I had to do was lounge by the fire and wait to be fed a delicious meal. Such luxury.

I didn't watch football last night, but I did watch the halftime show, and Bad Bunny was excellent. I loved the working-class emphasis--people doing their jobs, people enjoying their pleasures. I loved the sugarcane field, the flags of all the Americas. I loved the sound of Spanish washing over me. Of course I was already a Bad Bunny fan: his music is often playing in this house. Yes, I like his music for its own sake, but also I like being in the position of not speaking a language; to hear and to wonder; to let cadence, not meaning, take control of the body. We monolinguists owe it to ourselves, and to everyone else, to swim in the seas of mystery.

This afternoon I'll be driving north, so this morning I'll be scrabbling to catch up on desk work. I'm almost but not quite done with the giant editing stack, but my teaching schedule is throwing a wrench into my editing schedule, meaning that I probably won't quite make the deadline. Ah, well.

Naturally the cold continues, and more snow is on the way, though I should get home tomorrow before it starts in earnest. Winter is still digging its claws into us.

I meant to devote yesterday to getting my weekly housework under control, and I did do that, but I also managed to write one of the best sonnets I've composed for a while--an unexpected boon in a prosaic day. And in other unexpected news, T's glue job did successfully repair the dishwasher--though he says he's still planning to bring home the foraged dishwasher, under the assumption that this one will probably go belly up soon anyhow. I find that expectation disheartening, given that we bought it new when we moved into this house and we haven't even been here ten years yet. But such is modern life.

It's seven degrees outside this morning--a heat wave compared to NYC, where I hear it's three. Still, temps are nippy here, and I've got to trek out to a reading up in Brunswick today. If you're interested in attending, it starts at 1 p.m. at the Moulton Union on the Bowdoin College campus. I'll be reading alongside two excellent poets: Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, the executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and Mike Bove, a professor at Southern Maine Community College. It's been a few months since I've read in public, and I'm looking forward to it. I've got a mountain of new work, which of course is pushing me to rethink themes in my older work, and I enjoyed sitting down in my blue chair and putting together a 15-minute mashup.

I finished rereading Adam Bede yesterday. I felt, as I always feel when I reexperience a George Eliot novel, that I've been cleansed. There is no writer so kind, so honest, so serious in her observations, so sympathetic with human frailty, so inexorable about the damage such frailty does to others. Her novels are dense and demanding and irresistible. They are the great heart of the English nineteenth century.

What would my life be without rereading? I can't imagine. I can't imagine. These books are my blood.

Watery first light glows blue against a skim of new snow. Coffee steams in a small white cup. Heat puffs from the registers.

It is Saturday morning and I am in no rush at all. I even stayed in bed till after 6--not quite asleep, not quite awake, though Chuckie valiantly did his alarm-clock duty: jumping on my head, licking my chin, sticking a paw in my ear.

Tomorrow I'll be reading at Bowdoin; Monday I'll head north so I can teach in Monson on Tuesday. So today has to be housework day. I am not thrilled to have to clog up my Saturday with vacuuming and toilet scrubbing, but so it goes.

Maybe we'll find out today if Tom's glue attempts have repaired the dishwasher. If not, though, he's got a plan B: a foraged dishwasher from his job site. And in cheerful news, our Sarasota gang has acquired tickets for an Orioles-Yankees spring-training game on the ides of March. That's Ruckus's birthday, and I can tell you right now that he and I would not have been rooting for the same team. Ruckus and I disagreed a lot about sports. Still, it will be good to celebrate his memory by arguing with him, as I did so often during his life.

So today: Cleaning the house. Figuring out what I'll be reading tomorrow. Maybe scratching out a draft for one or the other of my various writing projects. Finding something to make for dinner. Yesterday's meal was a lovely midwinter feast: pork chops marinated in lime and garlic, then oven-braised Julia Child-style and served on a bed of buttered spinach, alongside roasted red and purple fingerling potatoes with onions, a salad of sliced golden beets, and a pinch of kale microgreens. It was a delight for the eyes, and I doubt I can come up with something as pretty as that for tonight. But maybe homemade pizza will be good enough.

Continuing our household's eternal voyage into the bowels of machinery hell, Tom's pickup did not pass inspection yesterday and the dishwasher broke. T has some hopes that he's been able to glue together the thingummy bits of plastic controlling the dishwasher's start button so that it will function again, but given our season of household disasters, I expect we'll have to call a guy who won't be able to come for six weeks and when he does will charge us many hundreds of dollars to insert a small piece of new plastic into the slot. The truck I don't even need to guess about. Vehicles are always the worst-case scenario. 

Well, anyway, I did ship out one of my editing projects yesterday, so that's something. And I'm getting a haircut today. And it's Friday. And we're not out of coffee. And Chuck didn't bust up any more glassware in the night.

This morning I have to turn my attention to performance materials and then to a zoom meeting with Monson faculty. It will be a refreshing change from editing. And I was glad to get out last night to write, though the image of T taking apart the dishwasher as I left was sorrowful. First he came home from work to bad truck news. And then he had to deal with the dishwasher. Plus he had to wash all of the dirty dishes that were in said dishwasher. It was not a restful evening for him.

But I did have an excellent interaction at the meat market yesterday. I stopped in to buy a loaf of bread and decided to pick up a couple of pork chops as well. "17.83," said the butcher, ringing them up for me. And then: "Hey, that was an important year! Was that when the Constitution was signed?" I responded that I wasn't sure exactly what year it was, and then another butcher chimed in, "I think it was 1784 or 1785." And then I said, "I guess we can be sure that they were all thinking about the Constitution anyway." And the second butcher agreed and remarked, "I used to think the Revolution ended when they signed the Declaration of Independence." The first butcher added, "But really they were still at war for a while longer." And then I said, "And don't forget that practically as soon as they were done with the Revolution, they got started with the War of 1812." The three of us nodded thoughtfully and then I waved goodbye and walked my purchases back home.

It's another cold morning, per usual, but fortunately I have a Big Warm Chuck purring romantically into my ear. He looks like a full-sized cat now, but he won't be a year old till May and he maintains his youthful outlook, by which I mean he is obsessed with stealing little pieces of kindling from the basket and then chasing them under the furniture, he reaches his paws up for a hug many times each a day, and he is constantly amazed by the lumps of snow that come inside on our boots.

As predicted, I spent most of yesterday scraping away at the editing stack, with a morning break for a walk and an afternoon break to pull together next week's high school plans. These editing deadlines dangle like thousand-pound Acme anvils over my head. So today will be much the same, except that my morning break will be a hustle up to the coffee shop to meet a poet and then later I've got to bake something or other for my evening writing group, fetch my CSA vegetable delivery, and probably do something else I can't recall just now.

This week, around the edges of my work life, I've been immersed in Adam Bede and George Eliot's dear, wise patience with error. Her sympathy is vast, though her narratives are inexorable. The terrible mistakes cannot be avoided. Tragedy crests like a river.

I forget if I mentioned that I have a reading up at Bowdoin College on Sunday, part of the town of Brunswick's annual Longfellow Days. I'll be at the Moulton Union at 1 p.m., along with the excellent poets Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and Mike Bove. I wonder what I'll be reading. I guess I'll figure that out on Saturday.

I didn't set foot outside the house yesterday, other than to empty the kitchen recycling pail into the outdoor bin. Even in the dead of winter that is unusual behavior for me, but these editing projects have chained me to the desk. Today, though, I've got a walk date, so to hell with the stack, at least for an hour.

I don't feel like I have much interesting chat to share. For obvious reasons, I never talk on this blog about other people's manuscripts, but other people's manuscripts are presently absorbing the bulk of my days. Around the edges I am making chicken adobo, folding towels, reading George Eliot, doing sun salutations on my mat, admonishing Chuck about jumping on the kitchen counter, answering emails, lugging firewood up from the basement, brewing yet another cup of tea, texting my kid about baseball trades, and not sleeping quite as much as I wish I were.

The fact that I am not engaged in organizing a new poetry manuscript is beginning to weigh on me. 

It's always a relief when an insomnia cycle eases. I've been sleeping better for the past couple of nights, and the muscles I pulled in my lower back seem to be easing a bit as well, so I'm hoping to enjoy standing up and sitting down again too. I'll get onto my mat today and keep working at them. This aging stuff is annoying . . . an Alice sensation of running as fast as I can just to stay in one place. But so far I do keep running.

I got the bathrooms and floors cleaned yesterday, so now I get to devote the bulk of the rest of the week to desk work--the endless editing, prepping for Monson, my stack of reading obligations. In addition to The Pillow Book and Dream of Dreams, I've started rereading George Eliot's Adam Bede and John Fowles's The Maggot. And my new copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh arrived in the mail yesterday, which will be my next reading project with Teresa.

T is upstairs opening and closing drawers. Young Chuck purrs into my ear. Dark peers through the cold windowpanes. The poems wander like wraiths, wordless in the bare morning.

It's Monday, it's cold, and I have a lot to get done today, both desk work and housework. Yesterday afternoon T and I went downtown to to see The Testament of Ann Lee, though both of us liked it less than we'd hoped to. Around the edges I finished rereading Murdoch's The Nice and the Good, made inroads into The Pillow Book and Dream of Dreams, sent off a sonnet draft to Jeannie for our round-robin project and a cover blurb to a friend with a forthcoming chapbook. It was a full day.

I'm starting to make plans for my trip to New York. The memorial reading for Baron will be at Poets House on the afternoon of Saturday, February 21. Tickets are free, but they do ask you to register, so you should, if you're thinking of attending. The Brooklyn kids have also bought tickets for us to see Ragtime at Lincoln Center. This was one of Paul's favorite musicals when he was in high school; it was on constant rotation in the car when I drove him back and forth, so we can sing all of the songs and of course I know the Doctorow novel very well too. Plus, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything at Lincoln Center before, so that will be a novelty. Probably I'll meet friends for meals or a drink. Probably I'll spend some time at the Frick or the Morgan or the Neue Galerie--unless I'm aiming for a particular exhibition, I like the smaller, house-based museums more than the cavernous ones. It's a bad time of year for botanical gardens, but if the weather's mild I might walk the High Line. I'm looking forward to everything. I haven't been to the city since early last summer, and I do love it.

In the meantime, here I am, at home all this week, ready to be assaulted by staggering piles of editing and a long list of house chores. I keep imagining that one of these days I'll get back to seriously putting together a next manuscript, but when?

The full moon is a silver blur among the bare branches of my neighbor's big black walnut tree. And the cold clings. It's presently three degrees in the little northern city by the sea, with a wind chill of minus ten, and we're not forecast to get a break anytime soon.

I'm back to sleeping badly, but so it goes, so it goes. There are worse things in this world than lying awake and staring at the moon. At least it's Sunday: no one rushing through chores or out the door. Though I can't sleep, Tom is having no trouble, and that is a comfort to me. Young Charles prowls upstairs and down. The kitchen clock ticks. Remnants of heat sift from the registers.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, read the books I needed to read. Midday T and I went for a cold walk through the cemetery. For dinner I breaded and sautéed pollock, steamed some mixed grains, made a sauce of yogurt, red onion, and capers, tossed julienned radishes and carrots in vinegar and salt and topped them with a pinch of the micro-lettuce I'd sprouted on the kitchen counter. Winter, winter, winter: how my eyes long for even a sprig of green.

I don't mean to complain. I love all seasons, I love the cold, I'm interested in it all . . . but at this time of year I do feel starved for color. Thank goodness for the vivid glow of carrots, pale lavender-rose of an Asian radish, flash of April in a lettuce sprout.

This is what downtown Portland looked like yesterday afternoon--more than a thousand people gathered in Monument Square, though the temperature was 15 degrees and plummeting. I was thrilled to see so many high school-age protesters, many of them sheepishly bumping up against their also-protesting teachers. I was impressed by the number of businesses that had chosen to close in solidarity. I was pleased by the excellent behavior of the police, who managed traffic and the march route efficiently but were otherwise low key in all ways. I was very glad to be there with my friends, our little bloc of poets.

But I was also very glad to walk back into my warm house and unthaw myself. Though I was wearing three layers on my legs, two pairs of socks, insulated boots, two coats, two scarves, two pairs of gloves, and a hat, I still came home numb with cold, especially my feet. It was exactly the right night for noodle bowls--udon, roasted tofu, a soy-marinated egg, and stir-fried cabbage in citrus-chicken broth. There's no better comfort than noodles and broth.

Now, at first light, the temperature outside is minus four, but the house is snug and warm. Our new expensive furnace sure heats up the place better than the old one did. This weekend I need to read further into The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams; I need to write a blurb for a friend's chapbook; I need to work on some poem drafts and clean the bathrooms and do the grocery shopping. I am looking forward to taking a break from editing: I've been driving myself on that project this week, and it's not been easy work.

I think my favorite sign yesterday was the one I saw a high schooler carrying: Young People Are Fucking Sick of This. You and me both, honey.

 After his terrible glass-smashing night, Young Charles has returned to his usual wide-eyed coziness--snuggling, chirping, rolling around on the rugs, and otherwise behaving as if he would never, ever, ever consider jumping onto a shelf at midnight and pushing crystal onto the floor. Everyone slept well, and I am very much enjoying not vacuuming at 5 a.m.

It's another frigid morning out there, temperature hovering just above zero, snowpack stiff and squeaky under foot. Shortly I'll swathe myself in coat and scarf and start hauling bins to the curb, but for a few more minutes I can linger here in coffee warmth.

Today is the national strike, and many businesses in Portland are either closed or donating significant portions of their proceeds to immigrant aid organizations. High schoolers plan to walk out of school and march. There will be a big protest gathering downtown this afternoon, which I'll attend with some of my poets. Folks in this town are righteously pissed off.

In my Monson class on Wednesday, I used a passage and a series of writing prompts with the kids that turned out to be a very effective way to get young writers in a conservative district to think hard about current events without calling out anyone's politics by name. I am happy to share this lesson plan with other teachers. If you would like a copy, please send me a message.

I woke at some deep point of the night to the sound of shattering glass. Tom, who'd fallen asleep on the couch, roused himself and I heard him sweeping up something fragile. When he finally wandered up to bed, I asked what had happened, and he said Chuck had jumped onto the kitchen counter, and then onto a shelf of glassware above the counter, and pushed two crystal glasses that T had inherited from his grandfather onto the floor.

So Young Charles is in the doghouse this morning . . . theoretically, of course, because he has the brain of a goldfish and has no idea he's done anything wrong.

Well, it's only stuff, and we have more of that than we need. I ran the vacuum cleaner in the kitchen at 5 a.m., and for Chuck that counted as the most horrible of punishments, so I guess we're all eye-for-an-eye now.

The temperature's not much warmer here in the south than it was in the north: 6 degrees this morning, and forecast to drop to zero over the next couple of days. I do hope I'll get out into the Arctic for a few walks, but mostly I'll be back at my desk for the rest of the week, straining away at a giant editing project, trying to catch up on writing and reading. I'm glad to say that yesterday's class went really well: the kids jumped into revision in the way geese splash down onto a flooded golf course--much metaphorical honking and wing flapping and mud kicking. It was a pleasure to watch.

The temperature in Monson hovers at zero this morning, and it won't get a lot warmer than that today. The town, which is so cheerful and "stop here!" in the summertime, now hunkers under a blanket of dingy snow. It looks like the set of a sad film about aging on-the-lam bank robbers holed up in a village at the end of the world.

But my apartment is warm, and last night I got into bed at 7 and stayed there till 5:30 this morning. I don't often sleep so hard when I'm away from home, but my body was apparently in need.

Today I'll be beginning the first of three sessions on revision. This always feels like a giant shift, after months of focus on pulling new work out of thin air. But the kids are ready. They love to write; it's incredible--heartrending, really--how much they love it. And revision, at this stage, is really just a chance to look hard at what they've already made and then reimagine it as something else. We've played lots of "reimagine this as . . . " games all year (my big teaching discovery with this cohort has been the power of comedy in teaching craft skills), so I think the writers will slide easily into more serious concentration. At least that is my hope, and maybe the experiment will work, or maybe it won't, but something will happen to help me figure out what's next.

Snow kept falling yesterday, giving us maybe another 5 inches of accumulation . . . I'm peering through the window trying to guess, but it's hard to tell in the dark. T's pickup is still in the shop, but he is up early, rushing through his breakfast, getting himself ready to borrow my car and put in a few hours of work before returning it to me so I can drive up to Monson this afternoon.

Sweetly he did all of yesterday's shoveling while I chewed away at my current editing project, but I expect I'll be out there this morning, cleaning up the new stuff. We did go for a trudge, late in the day, and the neighborhood roads were still pretty messy and challenging to navigate. It was a big storm. Even Maine had to take a deep breath and sit down for a little while.

I'll head straight to Monson this afternoon instead of stopping overnight with friends, which means I'll have an evening to myself in a campus apartment. I always struggle with these empty overnights: never quite able to work, never quite able to rest. Maybe this time I'll figure out some way to fill the hours usefully. Or maybe it will be another night of drinking tea and wandering from window to window, staring out into the snow-dark. Sleep and I have not been good friends lately.

For now the snow has paused . . . maybe we'll get a few more inches today, but certainly we have plenty to work with for now. My phone claims that 20 inches have fallen in Portland, but the total doesn't seem that high in my neighborhood, at least from my indoor vantage point. Still, whatever the details, the world looks exactly like Maine.

Tom will be home today, but I have to work, and I have a meeting in the afternoon, and I'll need to make bread at some point, and of course the two of us will be shoveling. I suspect the Good Samaritan neighborhood snowblower owners will be on duty, which will be a big help, but we've nonetheless got a lot of labor ahead of us.

I hustled through my grocery shopping and weekly housework chores yesterday morning so I wouldn't have to cram them in around shoveling and work today. I meant to spend the afternoon reading The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams and maybe wrestling with poem drafts, but all I did was lounge with a Le Carre novel, idly check football scores on my phone, and watch the snow fall. A fire crackled in the stove. Young Chuck flopped belly-up on the hearthrug. My beloved wandered upstairs and down.

But I didn't sleep well last night--maybe because of snow excitement, maybe because of American terror; who knows? Now I sit here alone in the shadowy living room, nursing my second tiny cup of coffee, listening to the far-off scrape of a city snowplow. The sound is soothing. I have always loved snowplow guys . . . All night long they rumble up and down the roads and lanes and highways, clearing, clearing, clearing. Snow swirls into their headlights, eddies against their windshield, yet on and on they go. Cloaked in the loneliness of 3 a.m. Muscling forward into the void. 

Two degrees below zero this morning, and the city waits for snow. It's forecast to start here mid-afternoon and will accumulate fast--maybe 18 inches by the time it winds down on Monday.

Tom's busted pickup got towed while I was teaching yesterday. The mechanics won't be able to look at it till Tuesday; so while technically he could drive my car to work tomorrow, he's already told the company he won't be traveling in the storm. So that is one item removed from my box of worries.

I think yesterday's class went well. Visual experimentation is challenging, and I know some participants struggled with it . . . I struggled with it myself, but also I get excited when I don't wholly understand what I'm doing or reading, and not everyone feels the same. In any case, It was good to see so many friends from Monson and the Frost Place, good to tag-team with my dear Teresa, good to play with mysterious materials.

And then hard to discover that while we'd been so absorbed in our work, the gestapo was executing yet another witness.

It's one degree above zero this morning in the little northern city by the sea--balmy compared to much of the rest of northern New England. Thank goodness for brand-new furnaces . . . though of course the curse of household disasters refuses to relinquish its grip. Last night, as we were driving back from dinner with friends, the clutch in Tom's truck suddenly gave out. Fortunately we were close enough to home so that he could more or less coast into the driveway. But while I'm teaching today, he's going to be figuring out where he can get his truck towed to on a Saturday morning and what the hell we're going to do about vehicles next week, given the giant snowstorm coming in tomorrow and Monday and the fact that I have to drive back and forth to Monson on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Yesterday afternoon a friend took me to see Hamnet. I did not love the novel--I felt, there, as if the character of Shakespeare was somehow too thin, compared to Agnes's. But the movie was far more convincing, in large part because Jessie Buckley, the actor who plays Agnes, has the most incredible of faces. The emotions she conveys through her expressions constantly also reveal the motivations and inner lives of those around her. It's really remarkable. Yes, the film is a shameless tear-jerker, and I cried much of the way through, but it also is incisive about how people misunderstand one another's grief and how an artist channels sorrow. I wasn't sure I wanted to see it, but I'm glad I changed my mind.

Otherwise, the atmosphere in southern Maine continues to be grim. We're under siege--by ICE, by cold. I'll spend today in class, curled up in my blue chair in my tiny sweet study, as thugs terrorize my neighbors and freezing mist coils over the bay.

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.