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.

Yesterday was exactly the day I've been dreaming of: a full day outside--hanging laundry, setting up my garden architecture, shopping for plants and seeds, prepping beds, sowing seeds, filling pots with soil . . . so much puttering, and all day long a fresh wind that made me lift my nose like a hound.

Now that I'm reducing my vegetable footprint to the five garden boxes, I've opened up a lot of space for flowers. At the same time I've got things like pea fencing and a bean trellis to repurpose. So, with luck, there are going to be a lot of climbers among the flowers. I do love to watch peas grow, and this year I'm going to watch sweet peas instead of shell peas. Last year I foraged four iron plant posts off the street, and now I'm going to use them as supports for mid- and late-summer vines--scarlet runners, morning glories, canary-creepers.

I feel pretty happy about this change. I wasn't sure I would, but I do. It's going to take a lot of pressure off me in a lot of ways--cut down on my groundhog angst for one thing, reduce the harvest and processing frenzy for another, but still keep my basic kitchen garden fresh and accessible, still let me revel in earth-things.

Glorious Saturday, how glad I am to see you . . . though Pester Hour was annoyingly prompt this morning. Young Chuck knows all of the ways to get me out of bed: licking my eyelids might be the very worst, though trying to put his nose up my nose is also bad. In any case, both are impossible to sleep through.

But now he is happily filled with breakfast, and I am happily filling with coffee, so all is forgiven.

Last time I looked, temperatures were supposed to get into the 50s today, which means I am going to plant. I'll set up the cold frame and sow lettuce mix under it. I've also got radish and cilantro seeds to sow, though I'll need to acquire arugula and spinach. I'll get a load of laundry onto the outside lines. I'll buy a new hose and some groundhog fencing. If I have time I'll start weeding out the first round of maple seedlings; those little monsters always start invading early.

I am so eager for a day of fresh air and puttering. Yesterday I celebrated my first outdoor laundry of the season. All day long I would glance out the window just for the pleasure of watching towels kick and flutter in the spring breeze. And then late afternoon: burying my face in the stiff clean shirts and snuffing up the scent of wind . . . There is nothing sweeter.

Spring always makes my blood tingle. It is my favorite season, an amazement every year.

Yesterday I had a two-hour zoom meeting with Julia, Maine's outgoing poet laureate, which was incredibly helpful. I asked her every little niggling question I could think to ask, and she was generous and open and so supportive. I'm grateful have her as a guide into this strange new laureate world.

Already I'm getting a lot of requests and invitations, which means that already I'm trying to sort out priorities, read situations, figure out how to be fair to others and myself. Public-facing introvert is a peculiar role, and I'm lucky to have friends with experience in the matter who can advise me when I become foolish.

Today I'll be back to ye olde copyediting, with a break for a late-morning meeting regarding some Monson Arts stuff. Tonight I'll go out and listen to my friends read--Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, 6 p.m., if you want to meet me there. And then this weekend I hope to devote myself to Tom, Chuck, and the garden.

It was, as always, a refreshment to go out to write last night. One group member said that she tells her friends she "writes with luminaries" on Thursday nights, and I agree. I, too, write with luminaries . . . these bright lights, these bright voices; these explorers taking their first tentative steps into an unknown land. It is great good fortune to sit among them.

Taking yesterday as a personal day was a good idea. I managed to finish a couple of writing assignments for a project I'm working on with Teresa and Jeannie; I caught up with emails; I finished the McMurtry novel; and I cleared leaves out of all of the garden beds, plus raked, picked up sticks, and pruned the rose-of-sharons. I felt like normal, everyday me again, which was restful . . . though I would prefer that normal, everyday me didn't also have to deal with normal, everyday household debacles. This time it's the dishwasher, which refuses to drain and smells like burning motor when it runs. Presumably the pump is shot, and now we're trying to figure out if T can forage another dishwasher from his worksite or if we have to buy a whole new machine.

Today I'll be back on the clock. I have an early morning zoom meeting, and then I'll start sorting through piles of new editing. In between I've got to go to the grocery store; I've got to deal with laundry; I want to get out to write tonight. I need to bake for the poets, and maybe I'll also find a moment to work up the soil in my garden boxes and prep them for planting.

One thing I need to return to is my poetry manuscript. In the flurry of the past few weeks I've laid it aside and more or less put it out of my thoughts. Yet the poems in the collection are starting to trickle back into my awareness. I find myself idly repeating words and phrases; clusters of words rise up as visual memory. Clearly the book is begging for my attention, though I don't yet know what it wants from me. 

I drove home through snow, rain, and sleet, but fortunately nothing seemed to be sticking to the road so mortal terror was held at bay. Still, I was relieved to return to the rapturous paws of Chuck, to kneel on the hearthrug and light a fire in the stove, to sink into the couch and watch the weather swirl tamely beyond the panes.

Today, finally, will be a personal day: I've got a few obligations to sew up, but mostly I'll be reading, writing, and gardening. There'll be laundry to deal with, as always, and dinner and dishes and firewood and emails. But I'm not going to look at the new editing projects until at least tomorrow. If I'm feeling wild, I might even postpone them till Monday. I need to catch my breath.

The poet laureate announcement has been, among other things, extremely emotional. I've spent 30 years working in what has felt, more or less, like obscurity. Rural public school students, small gatherings of K-12 teachers, poets striving out of the limelight: this has been the bulk of my cohort. I have little experience of the poetry business on a national level. I have no academic network. But suddenly I am awash with responses from people who seem to have noticed what I was doing. It's an awkward feeling to suddenly discover one isn't invisible. Gratifying, of course, and humbling. But also bewildering.

Thank goodness for my little shabby house; for Big Chuck breathing affectionately into my ear; for Tom in his worn Carhartts, smiling at me. Thank goodness for cups of tea and my tiny study and daffodils and a brisk spring wind.

It's cold and windy and unspringlike in central Maine, which is pretty typical for early April but annually disheartening. Two and half hours down the road, in Portland, crocuses are blooming, daffodils are budding, but here the lake is still patchy with ice, road dirt spins in little tornadoes, and the gray breeze is raw and urgent. I haven't driven on any gravel roads yet this season, but most likely they're rutted and potholed and greasy with thaw. That's spring in this neck of the woods: raw wind plus mud. I have written a hundred poems about central Maine spring, and all of them are amazed by its pigheadedness.

As always before dawn, log trucks are roaring through town. A little snow is forecast. I am lying in bed thinking about words and the fact that I forgot my gloves at home. 

This is the poem my son wanted me to read at the statehouse:

Spring on the Ripley Road

 

Knick knack, paddywhack,

Ordering the sun, 

Learning planets sure is fun.

                        —Paul’s backseat song

 

Five o’clock, first week of daylight savings.

Sunshine doggedly pursues night.

Pencil-thin, the naked maples cling to winter.

 

James complains,

“It’s orbiting, not ordering.”

 

Everything is an argument.

The salt-scarred car rockets through potholes,

hurtles over frostbitten swells of asphalt.

 

James explains, “The planets orbit the sun.

Everything lives in the universe.”

 

Sky blunders into trees.

A fox, back-lit, slips across the road

and vanishes into an ice-clogged culvert.

 

Paul shouts, “Even Jupiter? Even foxes?

Even grass? Even underwear?”

 

Trailers squat by rusted plow trucks;

horses bow their searching, heavy heads.

The car dips and spins over the angry tar.

 

James complains, “I’m giving you facts.

Why are you so annoying?”

 

The town rises from its petty valley.

Crows, jeering, sail into the pines,

and the river tears at the dam.

 

Paul shouts, “Dirt lives in the universe!

I want to be annoying!”

 

Everywhere, mud.

Last autumn’s Marlboro packs,

faded and derelict, shimmer in the ditch.

 

James says,

“When you get an F in life

it’ll be your own fault.”

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

Monday has rolled around so quickly: I feel like I was packing for Vermont just moments ago, and now it's a week later and I need to pack for Monson.

Fortunately the weather looks decent for driving. Our class can't afford any more snow days: we're rushing to get work finished for the kids' gallery show, though I have to say the kids themselves have been incredibly responsible about submitting their chosen pieces, which is not always the case. Tomorrow we'll be considering titles for individual works, doing last-stage revisions, and meeting with the visual art students to discuss an overall title for the show. Then, during our off-weeks, I'll copyedit and format everything and we should be ready for the public.

The end of a school year is always poignant: I like being around young people, like getting to know them as writers and thinkers and bundles of emotion. Yet within a few weeks they'll scatter and I'll likely never see most of them again. That's the tale of teaching, but it still makes me a little sad.

This morning I'll finish the housework I didn't finish yesterday. I'll go for a walk, and I'll read my McMurtry novel and some Aurora Leigh. I'm briefly between editing projects, so I've been trying to stuff in a few other tasks while I've had the chance. One is to schedule a new Poetry Kitchen class for midsummer: "Syntax as Spark: Poets Learning from Prose." I posted it yesterday afternoon and it's already half full, so snag a spot soon if you're interested.

Once I get back from Monson, I'm hoping to have some plain open hours this week to write and to garden. I haven't had much opportunity to do either, and I'm in need of both.

Oh, and before I forget, I want to tell you about an event on Friday evening, when several members of my Thursday writing group will be reading at Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, Maine. I'll be in the audience, not performing, but all of us will be available to talk about our community writing practice and to offer tips for creating a circle of your own.

I woke to rain, and now I sit under lamplight listening to drops tick the panes, tap the vents--a steady unsteadiness, regular yet irregular, and this is one of the beauties of water, I think. Whether in torrent, in tides, in speckled rain, it is forever the same, forever different.

Today is Easter, but if you're not a churchgoer and you don't have kids at home or family nearby, the holiday is easy to elide. My son, who is a parishioner at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn (Whitman was there, Lincoln was there, Beecher was there!), likes to tell me about his Lent and Holy Week obligations during our phone calls. For him, Easter is the culmination of an annual drama: the slow rising action toward a pinnacle of sorrow; then the denouement of release. It is a good tale, well paced, emotionally rapt. I'm glad it has mattered to people for so long, very glad it matters so much to him.

Yet Easter as festivity has sloughed away from me. No colored eggs or baskets these days; no big hot cross bun breakfasts or ham dinners. I will roast a chicken tonight, but I often do that on a wet Sunday evening. Mostly, today, I'll just be happy to be home and not in the headlines.

Yesterday was a continuance of crazy, albeit in a different mode. People saw the laureate announcement on the local news, in the local papers, on social media. My house is filled with flowers from friends and neighbors. My phone has (metaphorically) swelled like a tick, gorged with texts and emails. Maine makes such a to-do about the laureateship: it's startling. But people's minds will be elsewhere today, and I will sink back into obscurity . . . return to being a poet who mops floors and cleans out garden beds and peels potatoes and now and again considers a word.

So. This is the news. I've been named the next poet laureate of Maine.

I went up to Augusta yesterday, where Governor Janet Mills formally introduced me at the state's annual poetry month celebration. I stood in the Hall of Flags in the Maine Capitol. I was hugged by the governor. There was a standing ovation. I had to give interviews to the press. I have never in my life been in such a situation. As you can see, the experience has made my sentences choppy. The afternoon was hallucinatory, and I kept thinking I was in the wrong dream.

What can I say? Of course I am so happy and excited, equally nervous and impostery, also sure that I've bitten off way more than I can chew. And there's sorrow too--that Baron isn't here to know, that Ray isn't here to know: those two beloveds who, in such different ways, needled me into my life.

My five-year term doesn't officially begin until July, but I'll be busy before then, confabbing with Julia, our outgoing laureate, trying to find my footing in this more public realm.

And I can't help but think of my first years here in Maine: when I was laden with babies and homestead, when the poems first began to announce themselves. The governor read one of my poems at the event, and of all of them she chose this: my Maine origin story. It was happenstance, yet I woke this morning feeling as if I'd received a message from myself.

Home

 

So wild it was when we first settled here.

Spruce roots invaded the cellar like thieves.

Skunks bred on the doorstep, cluster flies jeered.

Ice-melt dripped shingles and screws from the eaves.

We slept by the stove, we ate meals with our hands.

At dusk we heard gunshots, and wind and guitars.

We imagined a house with a faucet that ran

From a well that held water. We canvassed the stars.

If love is an island, what map was our hovel?

Dogs howled on the mainland, our cliff washed away.

We hunted for clues with a broken-backed shovel.

We drank all the wine, night dwindled to grey.

When we left, a flat sunrise was threatening snow,

But the frost heaves were deep. We had to drive slow.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

 

Today I'm driving up to Augusta for a big poetry celebration at the state house. I expect the day to be overwhelming, but maybe that's just the introvert talking. Certainly there will be lots of readers, lots of dignitaries, and of course I am fretting over my outfit.

April, National Poetry Month, is always unpredictable. Sometimes I have a packed schedule; sometimes nothing. This round is suddenly shaping up to be busy, but then again the entire winter has been a frenzy, so what's new?

I don't know how other states function, but Maine makes much of poetry . . . partly because our current governor is a poet, but that's not the only reason. Poetry--at least the idea of poetry--just seems to be part of the ritual zeitgeist. It's a big state with a small population, yet poets are a significant demographic in the arts. And as became clear a couple of weeks ago, when I was speaking to teachers at the MCELA conference in Bangor, poetry also symbolizes a yearning, an emotional longing. Whether or not a person regularly writes or reads poems, the notion of poetry can be powerful.

Why, among all of the other literary genres, does poetry carry this particular aegis? We are a society of prose readers, if we read at all. Poetry is embarrassing and mysterious. It has no monetary value. Yet it continues to stand on its quiet hill.

Well, I'm home again, and glad to be here. Five nights at in my own bed, until Monday, when I head north again to Monson. At this point, such a long run of home nights feels like a miracle.

Today I'll be at my desk, working on class plans. I'll go for a walk, and wash sheets, and collect our CSA order, and bake a batch of brownies, and in the evening go out to write with my friends. Tomorrow afternoon I'll need to drive to Augusta for a poetry event at the statehouse. But this weekend, I hope, I'll be gardening.

Crocuses are up; scylla and primroses are beginning to bloom; last season's kale is unfolding new leaves. I cut a handful of chives for last night's dinner. I need to rake and pick up sticks and prep the garden boxes and figure out groundhog barriers and plant some seeds. I ought to take my mower to the hardware store to get the blades sharpened. I feel very behindhand with yard work, but one needs to be home and underemployed to make a head start, and that has not been my fate.

So it is pleasant to be sitting idly for these few minutes in my couch corner, alongside Big Chuck, who is happily filled with breakfast and curls sociably against my leg. I do have to work today, but at my own pace. Tomorrow will be chaotic. The weekend may be wet. All I can do is thread myself into whatever comes.

Just a quick note, as I've got to pull myself together for the roadtrip back to Portland. But it's never too late to be surprised by one's parents. Turns out my mom has a small crush on 1980s-era Cher and Nicolas Cage. She said, "Let's watch Moonstruck," so we sat around eating ice cream sandwiches and gazing at pretend Italian-Americans in pretend New York City fall in love to the soundtrack of La Boheme. 

It was a pretty good evening.