You know I'm not one to complain about weather, but ninety degrees in Maine in May is uncanny and I'm glad we've returned to spring. Temperatures are mid-50s this morning and aren't supposed to climb higher than the low 60s all day. That's a good change. I don't think I lost anything to the heat wave, but the cool-weather plants are stressed and they'll need water and a few plain days to relax and recover.

This evening I'm hosting my poetry group here, so I have a few this-and-thats to do to get ready for guests. But mostly I'll be focusing on the new long draft that has suddenly risen into my thoughts . . . a sonnet cycle about dead friends: though it's not so much a cycle as a series of enwrapped sonnets woven into a single poem.

Yesterday I finished those interview questions, read more of a friend's manuscript, and, suddenly, as I sat in my study staring idly into the hot back yard, I began to hear the sonnet draft take shape, words still unchosen but the cadence settling into place, emotional tremor building, names pulsing. So far there are only two woven sonnets on paper, with the third just begun, but momentum is trembling, a drop teetering at the edge of an overfull glass . . . there is a sensation of almost-writing that is not so different from the sensation of about-to-have-a-migraine.

I won't say "I hope I can write today" because I have to write today. Any delay for chores or obligations will just intensify the aura. The poem will happen because it must.

This is one of the best feelings in the world.

 

At the end of a torrid day I wandered outside to feel the breeze in my hair. It was just before dark. The birds were reviving their songs. Children were playing kickball in the street. The gardens glowed, strangely, vividly.

I'd spent the day reading poems and novels, working on interview questions, catching up on paperwork. I made potato salad and a lemon pudding cake. On my walk I scavenged three metal planters, quite rusty but doesn't that add character?

When T came home from work, he brought the air conditioner up from the basement and installed it in my study window. I didn't ask him to do so and he doesn't generally like air conditioning. However, the upstairs gets muggy fast, and I think we were both happy to sleep.

Now, though, the windows are open again and Chuck is wandering from one to another, keeping a sharp lookout for robins and beetles. If only the temperature would stay exactly like this, balmy and sweet, but we are in for another round of hot before spring returns to normal.

I think I'll hang sheets on the line today. I'll figure out where to put my scavenged planters and decide what kind of plants to put into them. I'll read more manuscript, and scratch away at more interview questions, and mess around with a draft.

My body and thoughts have settled into a new rhythm. It's odd how different I feel when I don't have to be away overnight every other week. During the school year I am always shoehorning around the high school sessions. Now I am working, and working hard, and working steadily, and making progress, and learning, and reading, and thinking, and attending to the world, but I'm not dueling with time.

I've been rereading Sidney's sonnets, as I do now and then when I have a yearning for a near-perfect interlock of cadence and language. His words are jewels in the mouth, his music as inevitable as Mozart's. When I want a sonnet that overwhelms me with truth, I read George Herbert. Those other early emperors of the sonnet--Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser: each pursues his own avenues of thought. But when I'm seeking pure sensuousness, Sidney's "With how sad steps, O Moon," Wyatt's "Whoso lists to hunt" . . . these are the sonnets for swooning.

Yesterday was filled with housework, bill paying, piddly chores, necessary but uninspiring. Maybe that's why my thoughts turned to Sir Philip's luxurious verse. His poems have nothing in common with vacuuming and scrubbing toilets. They are silk and soft air. Their sorrows are tender hands unblotched by work. They do not tell my story. They are as remote as peonies.

T and I had such an enjoyable weekend--hanging out among the blooming gardens, riding our bikes, carting home loot from the library sale--but all good things come to an end, and now it's Monday and he has to go back to renovating someone else's house and I have to stay home and scrub toilets. 

Today will be another sweet spring day, but then we're supposed to drop into a weird mini-heat wave: two days in the high 80s, before things return to normal. I've got various errands to run: pick up my new glasses, mail stuff to my kid, buy cat food. I have a manuscript to read, and a class to start designing, and various conference things to prep.

As you can see from some of the tweaks I made on this blog over the weekend, I'm also trying to prepare for the PL changeover in July. Event scheduling is already becoming complex, not least trying to figure out how to manage a balance between paid and unpaid gigs. I need to earn a living. I need to support underserved communities. So I'm attempting to create a formal-ish way for Mainers to apply for free or low-cost visits to their schools, libraries, or other venues. The hope is that I can offer these gratis visits to institutions that really need them and have distinct ideas about how I can support their work, while also reining in my own habit of working without getting paid for it.

Yesterday was romance-novel spring: maples in young leaf, birds singing, grass thick and green. I planted zinnias, marigolds, bachelors' buttons, lobelia. I planted basil, a cherry tomato, a Serrano pepper, a pimento pepper. I mowed and trimmed, and then I changed out of my grub clothes and lolled barefoot in the lush shade of the backyard and read Willa Cather.

Between gardening and lolling, T and I filled up a bag with books and DVDs at the library sale, then stopped at a few yard sales on the way home. T went for a bike ride, and in the evening we lingered outside with a friend and savored our first al fresco meal of the season: teriyaki flank steak; grilled peppers, Vidalia onions, and queso de freir tossed with basmati rice and lettuce; stir-fried Asian greens.

We live in a city garden so there are no silences, even in the evenings. The air is dense with birdsong. Screen doors clack. Middle schoolers chatter as they lick ice-cream cones. An amiable band of twenty-somethings smokes a little dope in their driveway. A baby howls. Chuck chirps and presses his nose against a window screen. A freight train rumbles past.

I love the vibrating loneliness of the woods. I bask in it whenever I'm back in the homeland. But there's so much story in a city evening. Granted, this is a domestic neighborhood in a northern provincial town. It's not Manhattan. Still, we are surrounded, pressed upon, by humanity. Our neighbors live just feet away, their private complications bumping up against ours. Trains, planes, cars. Highways, an airport. Helicopters, ambulances, muscle cars. Dog walkers, babies in strollers. Guys shoving bottle-laden shopping carts up a hilly street. Teenagers setting off firecrackers. An unhappy person shrieking "Fuck!" A tall wild-haired girl singing into her phone.

Saturday morning at the Alcott House. Already, at 5 a.m., it's 50 degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and temperatures are supposed to rise into the low 70s. Such warmth on the heels of that magnificent rain! High spring is about to explode.

Yesterday afternoon, just after the downpours stopped, I drove to the nursery and bought flats of tender annuals, a cherry tomato, a couple of peppers, basil. I'm looking forward to planting them today. I'm looking forward to tonight's first outdoor meal of the season. I'm looking forward to the library's annual book sale. I'm happy to be doing none of this quite yet.

Outside, a Carolina wren sings. A male ruby-throated hummingbird whizzes around the corner of the shed and settles briefly at the feeder. Inside, Young Chuck hops down the stairs, pauses to stare at me through balusters, chirps a question.

On the coffee table: Cather's The Professor's House, Komunyakaa's Pleasure Dome, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. A reprint of a 1930s WPA guide that I found on the street. A book of Sunday crosswords. James Agee's film reviews. Some art books that I can't differentiate from where I'm sitting.

On the mantle: A vase of early iris, their velvet purple so dark it's almost black. A posy of pale candytuft, forget-me-nots, golden spurge. A handsome clock that doesn't run.

I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to sort out scheduling, and I need to do more of that this morning before I rush outside and forget my desk. I've got various reading invitations to respond to, and also it looks like Monson, Maine USA, the performance piece that Gretchen, Gwynnie, Teresa, and I were rehearsing in Sarasota, will be hitting the road: first, at the conference in Monson; then, in the fall, at a festival in Blue Hill; then with a show here in Portland. But juggling the schedules of four different people and three different venues has been challenging. Apparently this is why bands have managers.

Someone, I forget who, told me that the Vermont poet laureate has an assistant. What a concept.

Now the first streaks of sunshine dapple the neighbor's vinyl siding. An invisible muscle car revs and fades. The kettle I just filled begins to grumble on the burner.

Saturday hoists itself out of bed, clears its throat, sniffles a little, sighs, starts hunting for its slippers.

We haven't had a long, warm, heavy rain like this for ages, and it has been a joy. All night I woke and slept and woke and slept to downpour drumming on the shingles, spray clattering against the panes, the scent of water misting through the open window.

Now, even in this half-dark, I can see the gardens stretching and glowing. Rain clatters and drums; it shows no signs of stopping. I don't know how many inches have fallen so far, but the earth is drinking them in.

Yesterday I finished reading the Lahiri and Fowles stories and started Willa Cather's The Professor's House. I went for a walk before the rains began. I spent time with Hayden Carruth's poems; I read a friend's manuscript; I fiddled with some revisions and wrote marketing copy for the Monson programs and answered emails and chipped away at interview questions. I washed dishes as two hummingbirds visited the feeder and a pair of mockingbirds flirted on the back fence. I baked scones and went out to write with my friends. I came home to lamplight and Tom and Chuck.

My first days of summer vacation have been wordy and lonesome and spacious and friendly and rainy. It has not been difficult to revise my hours into a new sort of work. The house itself is a help--shabby and half-assed as it is, its tidy cottage sweetness coaxes me into unstructured concentration. I've talked to Teresa about this before: we're both very aware that we write best in our own rooms. Away, we flounder. At home, we make.

My summer vacation has begun like March break, at least weather-wise: damp, raw, and full of grievance. This morning's temperatures are a little warmer than yesterday's, but we've got inches of rain on the way, so I don't expect to be doing much outside other than rushing through an early walk before the storm rumbles in.

It will be a house day. I plan to start reading a friend's manuscript this morning, and I'd like to muck around with a couple of my own poem drafts. I've been slowly responding to a long set of interview questions that I'm told will be transformed into an article for the Millay House journal this summer. I'm finishing up the Lahiri story collection and rereading John Fowles's novella "The Ebony Tower." I'll drink numerous mugs of lemon-ginger tea. I'll fetch my CSA order, and play with some prompt ideas, and bake for this evening's writing group.

Except for a brief zoom meeting regarding a copyediting job, today belongs to me, and I feel like I usually feel in the early days of a hiatus: worried about whether I'll make good use of my time; not worried at all about whether I'll make good use of my time. I tend to be a productive idler, but usually I need a few days to work out what my idleness will entail. Sometimes it involves much staring out the window. Sometimes it involves arcane household projects such as reaming out the linen cupboard and slowly refolding every towel and pillowcase. Sometimes it involves a flurry of obsessive research about odd topics or disconnected subjects. Eventually the idleness will coalesce into new writing or a thought about manuscript organization or the germ of a new class. It might tug me into a reading adventure or force me to write yacky, excited emails to a friend.

But the first few days of idleness can feel uneasy. With the structure of obligation stripped away, the hours loom. What will I do if I do nothing? How soon will this freedom end?

There is nothing like the slow, easy yawn and stretch that is the first day of summer vacation. Of course in actuality I'll be working all summer; I just won't be teaching high schoolers. But that doesn't dim the delight of waking up this morning and humming,"Three months off!"

I feel as if all of my muscles have suddenly loosened, that I've sloughed off a fifty-pound backpack I didn't know I was wearing. I have plenty to do--I always have plenty to do--but for three months I won't need to fit myself into the cracks around [[[planning-driving-overnight-teaching-driving]]]. It's a demanding pattern for a person who is not extra-skilled at physical transitions. As much as I love the work I do as a teacher, I am very, very glad to have a respite from the travel schedule.

Today I'll go for a walk with a friend. I'll run errands. I'll wash sheets. I might keep working on the poems I've been revising. I might start looking at manuscripts. I might do some weeding.

Last night for dinner I cooked the freshest fiddleheads I've had my hands on since I was cutting my own in Harmony. What a feast they were, alongside roasted local potatoes and red onion, and a few deviled eggs made with yogurt, coarse mustard, and pickled dandelion buds (which were outstanding, even better than capers . . . I will definitely make a bigger batch next year). It was a meal that tasted like spring, like the woods and fields.

Here's an older, uncollected poem of mine that I just reread. It made me laugh. Maybe it will make you laugh too.

The Regret of the Poet after Sending Work to a Magazine

 

Dawn Potter

 

Countless smart people have ordered you to buck up.

This tottering world, they claim, requires you.

Thus you obediently cram everything you’ve written

into a virtual envelope and shoot it into the aether.

 

Meanwhile, two young guys have ripped out

the third-floor skylights of the house next door.

Now they are propped waist-high in the open holes,

and they are murmuring to one another—

 

maybe about measurements or lunch,

maybe about the baby-blue sky

dangling like a stage set behind their curly heads.

This opus you’ve invented is altogether fraudulent.

 

You, with your feet planted boringly on the ground,

cannot compete with an air-show.

A vortex of gulls circles overhead.

Fingers of loose shingles waver beneath a modest sunbeam.

 

How is it possible to buck up?

Every word you’ve written has already been lived better.

Publish a thousand poems and you won’t escape

the same old keening sorrow— 

 

you, there, weighed down with your concrete galoshes

and your armload of Danger signs,

squinting up at two young steeple-jacks and wondering

how anyone manages to end a poem with hope.

Patchy frost this morning in Monson, and the sun is a blurred orange behind the eastern trees. Branches are still mostly bare up here, though fields have greened, though daffodils nod and quiver in the dooryards. Spring is riotous in Portland, but here it is more like a thought.

This is my last morning in town until high summer and the conference, when I'll be living by the lake for a week, not alongside the main street, gritty with winter sand, log trucks coasting through at 3 a.m., dump truck roaring past by 4 . . .

*

I'd written a much longer note to you, but something went wrong with the platform and very little of it saved when I tried to publish it. So you'll just have to imagine my thoughts moseying among fiddleheads and last-day-of-school feelings, because I don't think I can resurrect exactly what I was saying.

Ah, well. But you already know all about last-day-of-school feelings. You can fill in the blank.

Another weekend of not going canoeing, but the rain has been wonderful for the gardens, so I am not complaining. Then last night, just before dark, fog moved in from the cove, and the yard became a green mystery, cloud twining among the chairs and shrubs, melting the birdbath to Grecian ruin, the grass to Arthurian sward. The little northern city by the sea became the fount of romance, Tennyson's imagination in miniature. I expected a white arm to manifest from the fire pit, a sword hilt clutched in its lily grip.

But this morning the fog has vanished, and the air looks exactly like Monday, gray and practical, a day for vacuuming and mopping and driving to work. Tomorrow is my last high school class of the season, and I've caught up with the editing carousel. So maybe the next few weeks will be a chance to do some writing and manuscript revision before the exigencies of the conference intrude. For now, though, I am on Monday alert. Make a list. Rush around. Get stuff done.

Still, there's this bubble of quiet . . . liable to burst as soon as Chuck races down the stairs or T creaks up from the bed.

Outside, a jay squawks: Ack ack. Ack ack.

The bubble trembles but does not break.

I got home yesterday before 9 a.m. so was able to hustle out to my digging project before the rains came in. And success!--I finished turning over the entire sidewalk strip; thinned out lilies, spurge, and candytuft from other beds; planted the thinnings in the strip; and, between each set of new plants dug in the dahlia tubers that have descended from the ones that Baron and Janet gave me so many years ago. So even though the new lilies et al. will be babyish this year, the dahlias will fill in the empty spaces with a riot of dark leaves and late-season blossoms.

The project was extremely satisfying: it cost zero dollars, it will be a 100 percent improvement over crabgrass and tedious weedwhacking, and it was excellent exercise. As I've said before, I'm no athlete, but I am a mule, and my body still loves this kind of challenge.

And then the rains arrived and I spent the afternoon by the fire reading Jhumpa Lahiri's stories. Now and again I got up to gaze out through various windows at my delighted gardens. I scribbled notes to myself about my new poetry manuscript. I hugged happy Chuck whenever he suggested I should. Upstairs T was working on his photo projects, and now and again one of us went looking for the other, for a quick word or a question or just to brush a kiss on the back of a neck.

Briefest of Edens. Rent-a-utopia. Pocket paradise. Carpe diem.

This will be a quick post as I'm up north and getting ready to make an early start home. The kids' gallery opening was fantastic: we had a huge crowd, and I was so, so happy for them. The work looks gorgeous on the walls, and so many people came to see it--parents, grandparents, neighbors, school staff. It's wonderful to see their commitment to art get so much respect.

. . . and now I'm off to hit the road . . .

Last night, as we were driving home from our writing group, a friend said, "You wrote some great drafts tonight." I'm glad she thought so, of course, but I'm also intrigued that these pieces arrived in the midst of a dry period: they are the first poem-like words I've written for weeks.

Dry periods can be distressing, and over the years I've moaned about them repeatedly on this blog: what if I never write again? what if this is it for me? weep weep, wail wail, etc. But as I noted to you yesterday, I've been unfazed by my current drought. In fact, it's almost been a relief, this absence of internal pressure to produce poems. Surely, much of that is linked to the sudden busyness of my public poet life. But  maybe I've suddenly (and probably temporarily) shed the fear that I need to prove myself. Maybe I've reached a landing on the stairs, one where I can pause and hum to myself I'm a poet. I write poems. Just not today.

Perhaps that seems like a small shift, but I've spent a lifetime talking to myself in the interrogative: am I a poet? do I write poems? why not today? I don't think this internal goad has been all bad. Probably it's been necessary. In family lore, I was the lazy child, the sloppy child, the child not living up to her potential, the child least likely to be able to take care of herself. I suppose most of us exist among such myths, and they become part of the way we learn to navigate ourselves: repudiating them, embracing them, wrestling with them, using them. As I interrogate my laziness, my sloppiness, I also interrogate my ambition. How much do I really want to do this thing I claim I want to do?

I daresay I'll return to such questionings soon enough. Yet even in my current plain state of mind, I don't feel any less ambitious about making better and better poems. I just don't feel urgent. I don't have a sense that the poems are running away from me if I don't write write write write. I wonder if they are simply slipping into my life via a different door.

A batch of quiet showers rolled in yesterday afternoon, soaked my laundry, lingered through the night. Now, in the dark morning, the leaves on the maples look twice as large as they did yesterday, and the grass is inches higher.

It's been a quiet week. I've stayed home alone every day, fidgeting peacefully among my obligations. I've thought a lot about shirts on the line, dinner on the stove. I've been digging in the dirt, polishing manuscripts, watching fat robins wallow in the birdbath. I've been reading without feeling any desperation about writing. I've been writing without feeling any desperation about art. It's been restful.

But tomorrow the flurry begins again. I'll hit the road, heading to Monson to celebrate the gallery show featuring my students' work. I'll drive home Saturday morning, then turn around and go back north on Monday to teach Tuesday's final high school class of the season. It will be tiring. And it will also be the end, at least for a few months.

Outside, two herring gulls sail past, squawking as they go. A train hoots. A car door slams. Sometimes I wonder why I still keep writing these notes each morning because so little changes--day in and out, year in and out. The world fractures, the government implodes, but every single day gulls wheel up from the cove, shouting. The news of earth is damp air and swelling buds. Young Charles admires a spider on the wall. The kitchen clock ticks.

I've been reading without feeling any desperation about writing. I've been writing without feeling any desperation about art. And yet my urge to document doesn't go away. It's just that I don't seem to document anything but the smallest of things.

Daylight. Two birds fly.

Yesterday afternoon, after I'd finished my dose of editing for the day, I changed into my ugly clothes, lugged the wheelbarrow and the spade from the shed, and started digging up the grass strip between sidewalk and street. A couple of years ago I'd planted a small bed of scavenged lilies in the center of the strip. Now that they've begun to multiply, my plan is to slowly spread them into the rest of the strip. I refuse to put any paid-for plants into this sidewalk garden because inevitably, at some point, the city will rip it up during roadwork and I don't want my heart to be broken. But a crowd of free lilies, cushion spurge, and sedum will be just the ticket.

It's been a while since I've done straight-up digging in the way I did every year in the Harmony garden. I don't have the ledge issues in Portland that I fought with up north. If I hadn't turned over the soil fully every year, it would have reverted to stones. But digging is a chore I sort of enjoy. Like carrying firewood, it's tedious but also meditative. I enjoy the strength of my shoulders and arms and back. I enjoy birdsong and wind and the kids who walk by and the hoot of the passing train. And for a gardener, turned-over soil is a visual pleasure, as sweet a sight as a clean notebook page is for a writer.

This evening we've got rain coming in. This afternoon I'm getting a haircut, and this morning I'll be at my desk. But I might find an hour somewhere to do a little more digging. I haven't been very focused on writing poems, but I'm not too concerned. My poet life has been peculiar lately: poetry has been my skin instead of my bloodbeat. That's an awkward metaphor, but maybe you know what I mean: everything has been so outward-facing. Retreating into private life has meant retreating into my homestead tasks: laundry and garden, firewood and mop and shovel. Partly that's just a matter of season. Spring is demanding, even on a postage-stamp homestead like this one. But also I need to figure out how to be two kinds of poet, and that will take time.

After a chilly weekend, Monday was balmy and sweet. I hung sheets and towels on the line, went for a long walk, cleaned the house, opened windows upstairs and down.

It was also Little Chuck's first birthday, and he celebrated by chasing a ladybug and rolling in a sun puddle on the front doormat. How lucky we were when this guy bounced into our lives--this bundle of cheer, this cozy dingbat. Losing Ruckus was such sorrow, but Chuckie has done his very best to remind us that it's good to keep finding someone to love.

On my walk yesterday I snagged a copy of Tessa Hadley's novel Free Love from a roadside library, so that was a score. My desk day was productive too: I returned two finished editing projects to the press, meaning that I am actually whittling down this crazy pile. This time of year is always a peculiar one for me, editing-wise. I am the press's copyeditor for a set of annual literary prizes, and they always arrive to me in a bundle: five books at once. So the work can feel like a carousel: I finish an edit, it goes to the author, it comes back from the author, it goes to the press . . . and five books are spinning on this merry-go-round at once.

Today I'll pluck another ms from its horse, but maybe I'll also have a chance to look at a poem or two, or even go back to my own manuscript and mull over some changes. I will do some weeding in the afternoon (the perpetual maple-seedling eradication continues) but I might also dig out some grass on the sidewalk strip and transplant lilies into it. I've almost finished reading Sebald, have just started the new Hadley. I am full of spring energy, but also not quite sure where it will burst out. All I know is that something will happen.

It is nice to have a few decent, recent photos of myself, and I really appreciate the arts commission photographer, who is good at his job.

You'd think, given that I've been living with a professional photographer for most of my life, I'd have an easy time acquiring acceptable pictures of myself. But in fact we have constantly struggled over headshots and other such paraphernalia. Neither of us is relaxed in pose mode, and my last tolerable portrait is a phone shot I took myself.

**

This morning I'll be back at my desk, sorting through various editing projects before turning my thoughts to housework and groceries. We did not end up canoeing yesterday: the weather was so raw that we realized we'd just be miserable. So instead I worked in the garden: did some planting and weeding, set up more animal fencing, mowed grass, washed down the yard chairs and table after their months in storage. Chuck trotted back and forth between the front door and the back door, keeping track of my progress. He is cozy company, even with a door between us. I also did a little front-yard foraging for dandelion buds, which, like nasturtium buds and new milkweed pods, can be pickled and substituted for capers in recipes.

Foraging for dandelions does scratch the spring itch a little, but I will never stop mourning my fiddlehead patch. Last week, when I was in Wellington, I felt a surge of sorrow when I remembered spring in Harmony. After dinner, at this time of year, I'd leave the boys in the house and go out with my shovel to turn over a few rows in the garden. Without leaves on the trees, the late-day light was blunt and stark. Evening chill was settling in, and often the newly thawed soil was speckled with ice crystals. The muscles of my arms and shoulders recalled their strength. I fought with the big stones that lurched up each year from the ledge below. In the circle of trees around the clearing a pileated woodpecker wailed his archaic song.

I'm 61 years old and I don't want to be arguing with giant stones anymore. I feel lonesome for the me who did.

Somewhere among the sodden maples, a  Carolina wren urges birdie, birdie, birdie. Yesterday's on-and-off rain is on pause, but the sky is still freighted with cloud. T and I are hoping to canoe Brownfield Bog today, but the weather looks unsure of itself. Still, I think we'll take the risk because getting rained on will be better than being consumed by blackflies, which is what will happen if we delay our visit.

Yesterday I had a communication with a friend that I've been mulling over ever since. It was probably the first time I've verbalized something I've been thinking about for quite a while now: the urge that so many people feel to be instructional, by which I mean a constant striving to bring other people into one's own lane. People do this in a lot of different ways: by straight-up traditional bossy talk, but also by posting inspirational memes and/or finger-pointing memes and/or warning memes and/or "joke" memes about bad grammar and the like; by urging others to "pray" for something or other; by, in some way, trying to leverage the power of the scold or the wheedle or the charismatic pronouncement to tell others what to do or how to think.

A few years ago, at a White Sox game, I listened to a man behind me explaining, in great detail, how to fill out a baseball scorecard--that is, how to keep track of every single thing that happens in a game. I glanced back to see who he was talking to, and it turned out that his audience was composed only of his preschool-aged son and his infant daughter. 

That guy was pretty deep into the instructional hallucination. But teachers, politicians, preachers, activists: they're all prone to it. I'm a career teacher myself, so you'd think I'd be right up there with the crowd. But I've never been that interested in making others, for instance, toe the English teacher line. I honestly do not care if you use an apostrophe wrong. I know how to follow the rules, and as a copyeditor I'm hired to impose them. I make deliberate choices about how to use punctuation in my own writing, and I encourage my students to also be deliberate. But I feel no desperation about the value of rules.

The instructional urge goes beyond the minutiae of rules. It's also a longing to bring others into line with one's own morality. I think for many people this is closely linked to panic about the state of the world. They are overflowing with dread, with helplessness. They feel responsible. If they instruct others how to behave, maybe they will assuage their own terrors.

I'm a committed teacher, but increasingly I find such a stance not only exhausting but pointless. As I told my friend, more and more often I feel that the best I can do is to open a space and then set up a trigger for a response to and within that space--to give other people the opportunity to frame their own, perhaps unexpected, clarities. I don't know if this is a cop-out. I don't know if it isn't. What I do know is that I don't like sitting on the judge's bench. And flailing in a maelstrom of dread muddies everything. 

It's forecast to be an off-and-on showery weekend, but T and I are still hoping to take the canoe to Brownfield Bog tomorrow afternoon, and my neighbor and I are still hoping to get over to the plant nursery this afternoon. I ought to mow grass and undertake another round of maple-seedling eradication and prune the wilting hyacinths. I'd like to sow chard seeds and get the snow shovels into the basement and the outdoor chairs into the yard. I'd like to pump up my bike tires and take a practice ride around the neighborhood.

But I also hope it will rain. Despite the gift of a winter snow pack, Maine is still suffering from the aftereffects of last year's drought. We need regular rainfall, and in any case at this time of year I'm always happy to putter outside in drizzle. The scent of wet earth, the privacies of rain, the way the greening world intensifies . . . who wants to miss that?

Yesterday I had long phone conversations with both of my boys, and then in the afternoon a long phone conversation with the writer who was interviewing me for an article in the Haverford alumni magazine. So, with all of that talking, I didn't get much done at my desk--which was fine, as I'd already worked a lot of hours this week. I drove to the fish market and bought soft-shell crabs for dinner. I harvested garlic chives, and went for a walk under the cherry trees, and read Sebald.

What a hallucinatory book The Rings of Saturn is. It's supposedly about going for a long walking tour of the Sussex coast. But the narrator is constantly sidetracked by the thoughts sifting through his mind--the herring fishery, Chinese opium wars, Joseph Conrad--and these long perorations become a dreamlike journey in themselves. In a certain way the novel reminds me of Moby-Dick. The sidebars become the tale, and the tale becomes not a narrative but an unfolding.

Now first light opens over the little northern city by the sea. Cloud presses against roofs, tangles with branches, peers down chimneys. Gulls spin up from the cove. Dog and dog walker stride briskly down a sidewalk, wheel in tandem at the corner, vanish. On the stairs Young Chuck chirrups, hoping to distract me from writing to you. He is the only noisemaker. The songbirds are quiet so far. No tires hiss by, no trains rumble and hoot. The air is a held breath.

Last night's poets laureate jamboree in Freeport was . . . well, I don't know how to describe these things. Amazing to be on stage, to be welcomed as an equal, to receive a standing ovation, alongside the likes of Kate Barnes, Baron Wormser, Betsy Sholl, Wes McNair, Stu Kestenbaum, Julia Bouwsma. Amazing to do this in front of a packed crowd. Amazing to sell a bunch of books and talk to a bunch of people and receive so much confident affection and encouragement.

Yet it was also deeply unreal. I have spent my career working with small cohorts, often in out-of-the-way places, where my task, as I've said a thousand times, is to teach myself out of a job. I hate the cult-of-personality approach to teaching. I've tried so hard to keep my students at the center, to step back so they can step forward into their power. I am the pivot of the universe only when I'm writing alone--and even then I'm as likely as not imagining myself into some other character's mind and body.

I thought I knew what I was getting into when I turned in my application for poet laureate. But somehow I didn't envision the deep strangeness of becoming a public figure. It's not exactly imposter syndrome I'm feeling. I have confidence in myself as a poet, a performer, a teacher. The previous poets laureate are my friends because they are deeply humane, because they care so much about lives, because they are so curious about the world outside themselves. I have a direct and solid bond with them; they are my kind of poets.

More, what I feel, is that somehow, when I'm being feted on stage, I'm not actually doing my best work. My best work is quiet, underhand, almost invisible. My best work is sitting back and laughing when my high school kids create a noir cop drama out of a newspaper article in less than two hours; when the shy boy who almost dropped out of the program because he was afraid of poetry submits, as his final work, a batch of compressed, emotion-filled lyrics that knock everyone's socks off. These kids have become independent makers: they don't need me anymore because they have found themselves.

Despite insomnia, I had a fun day with the kids. It was the last regular day of the program, and they spent the morning creating performances and the afternoon curating their gallery show. I'll see them twice more: next Friday for the opening, and then the following week for a makeup day when we'll be teaming up with the visual artists to do some sort of sculpture project. But the year-long arc I launched them on in September has come to an end.

What do I see? A cohort of kids who love working together, are game for any surprise prompt, will write for long stretches with great concentration, have risked new forms and emotional depths, have learned to look closely at their own drafts and make useful, creative decisions about next steps, feel pride in what they have made but also pride in their ability to make it new. As a teacher, I am a pig in clover. There is nothing more satisfying.

But today I veer into another lane. This morning I've got an eye appointment; then I have to prep for tonight's reading; then I have to experience tonight's reading. I'm so grateful a friend has offered to do the driving as both the pouring rain and the expectation of dilated eyes have been making me nervous.

The venue is apparently sold out, but I'm told there will be a livestream, if you're interested.

For some reason I slept horribly last night, despite the pleasure of peepers outside my window. Now I lie in bed listening to a woodpecker hammer and a grosbeak chirp, lulled by these familiar homeland spring sounds despite my insomniac school-day forebodings.

And at least there's coffee ahead, and a slowish drive up to Monson, and my fine students to greet me. 

And in Portland the cherry trees are in bloom--

What a gorgeous day we had yesterday! Soft air, birdsong, the flowering trees bursting into glory. I got sheets and towels onto the lines, the house cleaned, windows open upstairs and down. I worked at my desk; I baked pita for lamb sandwiches; I took a long a walk. Chuckie raced around the house with a breeze up his nose. Being alive felt like a sort of magic.

This afternoon I'll head north for an overnight in Wellington; then Monson all day tomorrow, the big PL event on Thursday, an interview on Friday . . . A fury of self-consciousness lies ahead, but this morning I'll walk with a friend, this evening I'll hang out with a friend, and a day with my high schoolers will be the perfect way to forget about myself.

I've been reading Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, dipping into Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Yesterday I plucked a Lahiri story collection out of a free library. Fischer's American Founders is still sitting on the coffee table, waiting for me to embark. Outside the gulls are wailing, and inside I am thinking about books, and upstairs Tom is reminding Chuck not to drink his coffee. Everything overlaps and intersects; each moment is thick with pollen. Chuck sneezes and Sebald's narrator lingers at a lonely train station in Sussex and Tom slices bread and Aurora Leigh says to herself:

Alas, I still see something to be done,
And what I do, falls short of what I see,
Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,
Worn bare of grass and sunshine--long calm nights,
From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,
Be witness for me, with no amateur's
Irreverent haste and busy idleness
I set myself to art! What then? what's done
What's done, at last?
                                  Behold, at last, a book.

That twingy, weird feeling I had yesterday got worse. I had no idea what was going on and was beginning to panic, until T looked at me and asked, "Are you having a migraine?"

He was exactly right. I have migraines so rarely that my body forgets what they're like, but every one of them has been associated with eye strain. Once T diagnosed my problem, I was able to relax and say, "Oh, fine," because there's nothing to be done with a migraine except lie on the couch with my eyes closed until it runs its course.

None of my migraines repeat themselves exactly. Sometimes I've had brief ocular ones: a half hour of color shards, a 10-minute splitting headache, and then they're over. This one had a bigger buildup (vertigo and shivers), but the headache itself was minor. I mostly experienced it as neurological hallucinations that were both interesting and unpleasant. Yesterday's color palette was deep magenta washing behind my closed eyes like thick rippled paint. At times my nose felt enormous; then the tips of my ears expanded like Spock's; then my teeth were too big for my mouth. I lay on the couch wondering if this might last forever, and for some sufferers it really does. But by early afternoon I was on the downside, and by late afternoon I was completely back to normal.

And now, this morning, I feel almost refreshed, probably from spending so many waking hours with my eyes closed. Fortunately, before the event, T and I had been in the process of problem-solving my eye strain/ergonomic issues. On Saturday, I'd driven to the mall to buy a keyboard and a mouse and then set up my workspace to improve my posture and eye-line. I wear trifocals, and that is much of the problem here: my eyes have to work hard to align themselves with whatever I'm looking at. So strain has been building, and "Voila," said my brain. "You have to lie on the couch and learn your lesson."

***

On another note: Jeannie, Teresa, and I have a new post up on Poetry Lab Notes. It's free for anyone to read, but if you subscribe, all of our new posts will come directly to you.

I'm feeling a little under the weather this morning--kind of shivery and twingy and sour-mouthed; no fever but something is going on. So it may be a quiet day, not that I had anything fancy planned. 

Yesterday I updated my computer operating system, and this morning, as I was beginning to write to you, I watched in horror as Apple's predictive text began taking over my meandering first words. I had a moment of imagining that my relationship with this blog had been destroyed before I figured out I could eliminate the evil tool in settings.

Why not give new users the option to turn on predictive text instead of making them turn it off? Why assume that what writers really want is to not write? Sure, there are plenty of people who are happy to let the computer do the thinking, but why can't they be the ones who have to go into settings and hunt down the button that answers their yearning?

Now daylight begins to arch over the roofs and trees. From my couch corner I crane up at ash tree branches that have suddenly, since yesterday, broken into bud. Spring shouts a new surprise every single hour.

Bet you wouldn't have come up with that sentence, predictive text.

Lenten roses are in their glory now, and species tulips and bloodroot are also lovely. The three ramps I planted without much hope during Covid are spreading beautifully among the bloodroot flowers, and I've even been able to selectively cut a few leaves for meals.

It's been so good to get outside, to relearn my gardening muscles, to idle by the wheelbarrow and watch robins splash in the birdbath. There is no such thing as catching up on garden chores: as soon as I finish, I have to start all over again. But overall the homestead is looking bright and neat and slightly crazy, which is how I like it best.

Yesterday Teresa talked to me about my new manuscript, a conversation that's left me nervous, gloomy, frozen, and overexcited, in about equal proportions. Ugh. Poetry. Why is it so hard? [You know I don't really mean that but, jeez, by this time you'd think I'd have figured something out.]

This poet laureate thing has already been a lesson in humility. I just don't know that much about poems, despite having spent the bulk of my life immersed in them. Who am I to be an ambassador for such a mysterious art . . . an art that is like water running through fingers, like air sifting through a screen.

Well, thank goodness for daffodils, and hot coffee, and Young Charles cheerfully pushing a sliver of kindling under the doormat. The poems settle into the cracks, rise like dust, barely visible but always present. Blink and you miss them. Blink and they're everywhere.

Yesterday I finished an editing project, hung out a big load of laundry, baked a batch of pumpkin bread, and got quite a bit done in the garden: weeded four beds and began on a fifth, trimmed grass, dug dandelions out of the gravel, even did some edging. It was satisfying to make so much progress; also satisfying to draft two decent poem-blurts at my writing group in the evening and then to sleep solidly all night long.

Those sorts of days are tonic. The work of my hands aligns with the work of my head; everything feeds into everything else. The poems exist because I dug dandelions out of the gravel, because I folded Tom's stiff, air-scented shirts, because the kitchen was fragrant with ginger and cinnamon. I don't know how to manufacture that synchronicity. More often than not, time is just chore slapped against chore, days as floating flotsam, obligations tangled together in awkward friction or unrolling in bland tedium. But when everything talks to everything else . . . when the work is the conversation: that is the sunshine.

It's been a windy, chilly week, but this morning the birds are singing lustily, and temperatures are already in the 40s, and I'm hoping it'll be an appealing day for gardening. I've had trouble dredging up enthusiasm for crawling around in cold wet dirt. I've done it, but it's felt like penance.

In other acts of penance: I finished rereading Byatt's The Children's Book yesterday and, as usual, have been cast into gloom by her evocation of the wretched waste of World War I. If I were smart I'd read a cheerful book next, but I just got W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn out of the library, so that will be my fate for the next few days. Still, I'm looking forward to it. Somehow I've never read Sebald before, though I've known about him forever.

And Tom's home, so that's a bright spot, even though he'll be trudging off to work shortly. With luck I'll finish an editing project this morning and then be able to idle with my own stuff for a few hours. I have to steal time when I can because another burst of obligation lies on the horizon. On Saturday I need to make an appearance at the Plunkett Poetry Festival in Augusta. On Tuesday I head north so I can teach my high schoolers on Wednesday. On Thursday I'll take part in a big poet laureate extravaganza in Freeport. On Friday I have a phone interview with a writer for the Haverford alumni magazine. I'm not sure how Haverford found out about the PL thing, but such mysteries are the story of my life lately.

Probably there's other stuff on the calendar, too, but for now it's a blur. Though, by the way, I forget if I mentioned that there's just one spot left in the next Poetry Kitchen class. Grab it fast if you've been thinking about it because I probably won't be offering another PK session until the fall.

My neighbor and I went into town yesterday around dinner time--first, to an open house at Mechanics Hall, a nineteenth-century workingman's lyceum that is now a library and performance space. I'd long been curious about the library, which was not exactly what I'd been imagining. I'd pictured dark volumes of 1880s blacksmithing and carriage-building tomes, and the collection is mostly contemporary. But there are some older books, and also some collections of 1950s-era Popular Mechanics and other such magazines. The articles are dull, but the ads are great. For instance, if you're looking to earn a few extra bucks, have you considered this possibility?

Afterward we went out for hotpot, which was also fun, and then I got a newsy email from Tom and talked on the phone to our kid, who is excited about a film project he's cogitating about with his brother. Nothing makes me happier than happy sons, especially when they're excited about making something together; and nothing makes Chuck happier than watching me take off my outside shoes and put on my pajamas, so he and I climbed into bed with light hearts.

This morning I've got to get my car to the garage for an oil change. And then I'll be back at my desk, and maybe I'll get outside eventually to do another batch of weeding. T will be home this afternoon, so I need to think of something nice to make for dinner. I've had a pleasant few days on my own, and I know he's had a good time too, but I suspect we'll both be glad to get back to our usual friendly ways.

I thought yesterday was going to be sunny, and sometimes it was, except when it was sleeting and hailing. The laundry did manage to dry on the lines, mostly thanks to the wind, but it wasn't a soft day in any way. Up in the Saint John Valley, on the Canadian border, Tom tells me it's raw and wet, a mix of snow and rain, and he wishes he hadn't forgotten his hat. But he sounds happy, says he's shooting a ton of film and is looking forward to another good day.

Meanwhile, Chucky is thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to be home and can hardly bear to let me out of his sight. I'm glad to have him back too. This house is lonesome without a little guy racketing around in it. Now I am drinking my coffee and he is peering out at the dim morning. It's cold, only 23 degrees outside, and the furnace is roaring at full blast. Spring seems to have shriveled back into winter. Yet a robin is trilling and chortling with enthusiasm, just as if temperatures were sweet.

This morning I'll go for a walk with a friend before crawling back into the editing mines. I don't know if I'll get out into the garden: the weather isn't deal for scooting around on my knees, which is what I mostly need to do at the moment. Dandelions in the gravel, maple seedlings everywhere: spring weeding is a chore.

But I've had two nights of solid sleep, and I'm doing a lot of reading. My little cat is chirping, and the mantlepiece is thick with daffodils. The house is clean, and my thoughts are rivers. Poems wander in and out the doors. 

I climbed into my own bed at 8 p.m. and stayed there until 6 a.m. waking only once, briefly, around 3 a.m., to grab an extra blanket because I was cold. I've been caught in an insomnia cycle for a week now, so this was a welcome, welcome change. It won't happen again because Chuck is coming home from the kennel this afternoon. But it sure was fabulous.

Now here I sit, on a Monday morning, watching bright sunlight cast tree shadows across the houses and driveways. I am not rushing around to do chores because I cleaned house and washed clothes yesterday afternoon when I returned. I will work at my desk this morning but for now I am resting in the Edenic moment: no other tasks need to be done; no other body needs my care.

As expected, the drive home from the island was rainy and miserable. But a stormy day was just what the garden needed: the seeds I planted last weekend have sprouted, the grass is green, green, green, and today's sunshine will be a balm. I'll go for a walk. Maybe I'll hang sheets on the line. I might drag the reel mower out of the shed. At my desk I'll gaze at forsythia and daffodils.

Concord Street Hymn

 

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

The alarm went off at 4 a.m., and 20 minutes later T was heading north.

Meanwhile, here I sit, a new fire of cedar logs crackling, coffee steaming in a cup that reads Ernie. Eventually I'll shower, eat, pack, tidy. At 7:45 I'll walk up to W's house to do the Sunday crossword with her and her sister. And then, before 9, I'll be on the road, back in Portland by noon, reconfiguring myself into home life. I hope I won't be driving through rain, but probably I will.

Outside it is still fully dark and the peepers are king. T heard a barred owl as he was packing his truck, and with luck it will return to haunt me. Yesterday I wrote a new poem draft, so I'm already being haunted. But I always have room for more.

It will be odd but not bad to be solitary for a few days. I do wish I could get Chuck out of the kennel this afternoon, but they're not open for transactions on Sundays so he and I must wait till tomorrow for our reunion. As always, I've got plenty to keep myself busy--house, garden, desk.

Under normal circumstances I'd be heading to Monson this week, but school vacation has disrupted the schedule. So I'll have a respite--from travel, at least. I do have a memoir, a story collection, and two poem collections to copyedit. I have a lot of laundry to wash, and a lot of dandelions to dig out of the gravel walkway. Plenty of windows to gaze through. Plenty of stairs to climb.

My house is a badger’s tunnel

 

twisting and turning among roots and ledge.

It is an empty osprey’s nest, it rattles in a high gale.

 

I wake in a heap of feathers and bone.

Hope puddles under the floor.

 

The days ebb. I sweep blizzards and sand

as neighbors prowl under moonlight, hunting for breakfast.

 

In the mornings some of us are missing,

never to be seen again.

 

My house is a cavern of echoes.

It is as vast as despair, as shiny as coins.

 

I cannot find a door, yet windows are everywhere.

Each one hawks a different tale—

 

sing this tree, eat that sky.

But when I pull the curtains, darkness slides out like an eel.

 

Then I hear, very faintly,

the slow, slow drip of my life.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

 

We hiked Great Head yesterday--a spit of granite jutting out alongside Sand Beach, with spectacular views of the open Atlantic as well as the Beehive and other famous climbs along the Ocean Drive region of Acadia. Great Head is not known as a highly challenging hike, but post-rain it did involve a lot of scrambling over and among wet rocks, so we had to watch our footing.

The day began with fog but brightened into streaky blue skies. Long twists of cloud roped across the horizon, and Frenchman's Bay gleamed like a vast glazed bowl. In the forest a kinglet sang. A pair of black-backed gulls skated the breeze. In the distance we could just glimpse squatty, square Egg Rock Light clinging whitely to its stony isle.

We often hike on the quieter side of the island, avoiding the Bar Harbor lobe and the Park Loop Road and the other famous attractions of Acadia. The quiet trails are closer to the cottage and generally less peopled. But the drama of the Ocean Drive views is real. And on an April school day during mud season, this side of Acadia was nearly as peaceful as the other.

Today will be a work day. We may get out for a small neighborhood walk, but first we'll help load the car for the dump, take down some branches, shore up a deer fence. T will replace an old outlet in the cottage. Last night we went out to movie night at the Bass Harbor Library--a screening of Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps, always a favorite, where I was introduced to the sparse crowd as the next poet laureate. I am beginning to think I should take etiquette lessons in order to learn how to deal with my new incarnation as a minor local celebrity. I still feel like a twelve-year-old peeking out from behind a door. 

 

I arrived in fog, and the fog deepened. By the time T walked into the cottage, 45 minutes later, the cove was a blur. As dark settled in, the screel of peepers began. All night long, and even now, they shrill. At some point in the night a thunderstorm burst over the island--long flashes tearing into my vague sleep.

Night is still murky. I cannot yet make out the shape of the day, but I suspect fog and fog. When I step out onto the screened porch to get water for coffee, I am enveloped by damp.

And now, very suddenly, a robin unrolls a tune--chirr, chirrup, chirra, chirra, chirr . . .  I look up from the fire I'm trying to start in the stove and I see the cove emerging from darkness. Meanwhile, a chickadee joins the robin, offering its high-low whistle, and then a white-throated sparrow interrupts--O sweet Canada, Canada, Canada . . . Abruptly, the peepers vanish from the stage and the pallid air pulses with birdsong.

There is not so much fog as I expected. I glimpse Swan's Island huddled across the cove, the familiar spruce-lined peninsulas rippling into the circle of water. I know this view like I know my own face in the mirror . . . which is to say, not as well as I think I do. The seascape is no-color, water and land and sky mere variations of dim, yet the creases, the wry glance . . . 

Traveling alone, and meeting T here, was in its way sweet. He and I love this cottage in a way that is private to ourselves. Even our children, who have been here many times, don't quite participate in the unarticulated dearness that he and I feel for this place that doesn't belong to us. We have confidence in one another when we're here . . . I don't mean that we do anything special or unusual; just that something wells up in us: here is the other person who knows. I can't be any clearer than that, because there's no more clarity in this feeling than there is in fog. We have been deeply unhappy during many of our stays in this cottage, but we have been a bonded pair in our sorrow. Maybe that's what I mean: this place is an emblem of our duality.

As artists, as daily workers, we are separate beings. We know how to leave each other alone when that is necessary. But the other part is also true: here is the other person who knows.

Spring has been in idiosyncratic fettle this week--one perfect day, the rest cool and moody, and now rain whispers against the dark windowpanes. Outside daffodils are opening, crocuses are fading, and forsythia bristles with fat yellow buds. The skies swirl with indecision.

Yesterday T came home from work with a scavenged dishwasher, a castoff from a client who is getting something better. I wonder what better entails because this one is way more chi-chi than any appliance we have ever owned. We wrangled the old one into the yard and shoved the new one into place in the kitchen, where it will sit uselessly until he has time to hook it up next weekend. Ah, foraging. How we both love it.

And now we have to turn our attention to travel. T has already packed all of his clothes and cameras and will leave for the island right after work. I've got to pull our supplies together, tidy up, get Chuck to the cat kennel, fetch our CSA order, and then hit the road by midafternoon. It will feel strange not to drive together, strange to part at the end of the weekend, when he will head north to the County and I'll head south to home.

I've written a couple of new drafts over the past week, and maybe I'll be able to keep that roll going this weekend. I worry that the distractions of the laureateship will hijack my writing focus, but maybe not--maybe the urge to make poems will be too strong. If babies didn't hijack my attention, possibly nothing will. Babies are the best hijackers I know.

Yesterday was our first soft air of the season . . . shirtsleeves, open windows, no fire in the stove. And then rain all evening, so this morning I expect a glory of green.

After babying my eyes all day, I felt much better by evening. So today, after a round of editing, I'll start pulling myself together for our travels downeast--shopping, meal planning, and the like. One good thing about a visit to the cottage is the complete ease about outfits: work clothes, garden shoes, walking shoes, with a clean pair of jeans for going to the movies . . . nothing could be easier. Food is always the big focus, as these visits are one dinner party after another, in a kitchen that is not exactly primitive but is certainly not luxe. We'll order pizza one night, because the gargantuan sizing at Gott's Store makes us laugh. Otherwise, I am the camp cook.

One thing I might do at the cottage is submit a few poems. I've had some requests for submission--a rare event so I should probably take advantage of it soon. I'd also like to make headway on Aurora Leigh and get a few draft blurts out of my notebook and onto the page. Because of how school vacation falls this year, we don't have to tag-team our cottage visit with my Monson job, which will make these days feel more fully vacation-like . . . until some sorrow invades, as happens so often when we're there. We've spent a lot of time being sad in that sweet place.

from Desk Work

9 a.m. West Tremont. Goose Cove.

Sixty degrees in early winter, with a brisk warm wind.

The tide is high, the sea laps the cliff,

the sky is whitish-blue, like an old eye.

On the horizon Swan’s Island is a long lump of shirt

rolled for ironing.

 

How will I be this world?

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

I got the housework done, did Monson prep and some editing, went to the grocery store, and finally, late afternoon, managed to fit in a walk. But all day long my eyes were bothering me: I probably need new glasses, and spring allergies aren't helping the matter. Between eyes and sinuses, my head is feeling a little fragile these days.

I'm trying to pace myself work-wise, though that's difficult, given how eye-dependent my jobs are. Still, gardening helps, walking helps, and once I get an eye exam things should improve.

The aging body is a tale of trickery and submission. How can we fool the body into functioning as it used to? When do we admit that it won't?

Canto

 

At the peak of my powers I felt a falling-off,

as if an internal organ had come loose from its moorings

and was bobbing gently against my pelvis like a pear.

 

The season was autumn. Threads of smoke

unwound from the chimneys. Every compass pointed

toward winter.

 

I walked out, in the dim afternoon, into the small streets,

through a modest wood, across a vast graveyard.

I read the headstones—

 

here, the woman recalled only as Mother,

here, Our Darling Ralph, his tiny stone tarnished with lichen.

My way was littered with parthenons and obelisks,

 

with strange marble tables and mossy

arks of the covenant, and among them

bulldogs rolled in wet pine needles, helmeted tots

 

wobbled on training wheels, and I,

no longer at the peak of my powers,

turned my ankle on a pebble and limped.

 

But when I came to the bottom of the hill,

into that clutter of merchant mausoleums

known as the Valley of the Kings,

 

I paused in my limping and looked up

into the watery leaf-light: pale gold, speckles of black,

thinned remnants of last night’s gale.

 

And I felt, for no reason at all, sweetened.

Around me, the stony edited lives—

born, married, fathered, earned, died—

 

seemed to swell into ballads.

Carved lions kneaded their claws,

and lost at sea was a cadence.

 

I was a poet, and I wanted to sing

of small Ralph, alive and perched on his father’s

broadcloth knee, in the November twilight, after the banks

 

had bolted their doors and the barges had docked.

Now a scatter of gulls sailed over the cove,

and Mother sat alone at her rosewood desk and wrote

 

Sky. Leaf.  Light. 

I wanted to sing that. And so I did.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

It's raining gently outside, which is exactly the weather I was hoping for. After a weekend of planting, rain is the perfect response. And it's supposed to get warm today too, our first leap into the 60s. Everything brown will green, green, green, and the Carolina wren will spill his song from the neighbor's budding crabapple.

Yesterday I brought in a bouquet of hyacinths, and this morning the house is drenched with scent. The new seeds are soaking up rainwater--radishes, dill, cilantro, lettuce, spinach, sweet peas. I sowed flower seeds in various beds--one a mix of old-fashioned cottage garden varieties, the other a mix of shade lovers. If the birds don't eat them and I don't accidentally weed them out, the bursts of color and shape should be glorious.

I'm always so hopeful, and yet things always go wrong--flood, drought, insects, fungus, groundhogs, birds, squirrels, rabbits . . . all of them lie in wait. Still, the hope persists. I think it's good to have a realm for unreasonable optimism.

Today I need to clean the house. I've got to make a final pass through my Monson kids' submitted work. There's a fat stack of editing on my desk. I'm meeting tomorrow with Teresa and Jeannie about some dream poems we've been drafting. I ought to run a few errands. It will be a short work week as T and I are heading up to Mount Desert Island on Thursday for our spring visit to the cottage. The forecast is rain and I do not care. If we spend all weekend drinking tea and staring into Goose Cove, that will be fine with me.

Meanwhile, Young Chuck leans against my shoulder and purrs into my ear. The Red Sox have won two straight series and are starting to look less hapless. Hungarians voted out Orban. Rain murmurs at the window. I'm glad to be awake and listening.