Thirty-eight degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and smoke is rising from the neighborhood chimneys. Bed was exceptionally cozy, and socks and hot coffee are just the ticket. It's a great morning not to be camping.  But while we didn't get close to a frost here in Portland, inland gardeners must be gnashing their teeth over their tomato seedlings. Mainers mostly don't plant tender crops until Memorial Day, so standing tragically over frost damage on the weekend after Memorial Day does seem a little like one of those dour peasant scenes in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Yesterday's reading in Gardiner was fun. The poet lineup was a little different than advertised, but the bar was crowded with listeners, the local state senator volunteered to read a slam poem he'd composed for the Cantab, and afterward four poets laureate squished into a booth at the A1 Diner and ate sandwiches. [Yes, it does sound like the opening of a joke. Let me know if you think of a punch line.]

Today, once the temperatures rise, I've got to get outside and do storm cleanup: there are leaves and little branches down everywhere, and also I ought to mow. Rain is moving in again tonight, so the window for getting stuff done is small. I have perennials to plant, lettuce seed to sow for a second crop. If we're in the mood, my neighbor and I may drive over to the nursery to buy a few more things. Next weekend I'll be on the road, so I'm feeling a little pressed, despite the unseemly cold. And the weeds have all returned, of course. Weeds never let their foot off the gas pedal. [Oooh, there you are again, mixed metaphor, my old pal.]

For the moment, however, I'm glad to be warm and inside. Raw is the word for this cranky weather: a deep dank chill that makes the bones in my hands ache. [Personally I think it's fine to use cranky and dank in the same sentence, but I apologize if I made your ears ring.]

Maybe I'll take a look at the new manuscript iteration today, or maybe I'll let it sleep for a while before I reconsider what I've made. But now that June has arrived, my days of freedom are on the wane. Soon I will be all conference, all the time, so this new manuscript won't get more than a cat nap before I start poking it again. There's no time to waste.

A wild stormy night, and at first light the gale still whips through the maples. As far as I can tell, no big branches have come down in the yard, but the gardens and grass are littered with twigs and fat leaves, and the peonies look like they've been in a bar fight.

It's a cold storm, too--temperatures in the 40s and wind like a hunting knife. Snow was forecast for the mountains, but here on the coast we're all gust and groan . . . creaking trees, battering rain, the little houses cowering.

The storm is supposed to settle down by midday, so it shouldn't affect my drive to Gardiner for a late-day reading. But my neighbor and I were planning to go to a plant sale first thing this morning, and possibly that won't happen.

I'm glad it's Saturday and that Tom gets to doze in bed and delight in not going to work in this furore. The maples always make me nervous in a big storm--they're so massive and loom so threateningly over the houses--but I do bask in both the snugness and the wildness. It's sweet to be warm and dry, sipping my hot coffee, wrapped in my bathrobe, listening to the furnace growl. Meanwhile, the wind's sea-roar makes me feel like I'm perched on a rock, far out in the Atlantic.

This afternoon, as mentioned, I'm reading at the Gardiner Poetry Festival, downtown at the Table Bar, 4 p.m., with Betsy Sholl, Stu Kestenbaum, Julia Bouwsma, t. love smith, Samaa Abdurraquib, and Arisa White. My name isn't on any publicity, as I was invited late, but I'll definitely be there, so come by if you're in town.

I'm not tired this morning, but I am feeling a little wrung-out. I spent much of yesterday with my poetry manuscript--reordering, retitling, rethinking; stripping out poems, adding different ones, making small changes within poems so that they echo among themselves. Manuscript work is difficult. I second-guess myself in ways I do not with individual poems. I worry that I'm the only one who can sense the through-lines. I worry that the through-lines are dull and obvious. I don't want to be thinking about potential readers, but I am. I don't want to worry if this thing is publishable, but I am.

Ergo, the wrung-out feeling. On the bright side, however, the crown of sonnets is pretty much done. I made one more little tweak yesterday, and now, I think, it's found its final shape. 

Morning dawns heavy-lidded and gray. A small rain suddenly rattles against the panes, a passing shower before the real storm settles in this evening. When I lean out the back door, the scent of wet lilac weights the air.

Today I hope to turn my thoughts back to my poetry manuscript. I've been mulling changes but for various reasons have been frozen in place, unable to make a move. Perhaps last week's crown experience has cracked the ice because this week I've gradually been feeling more able to address the issues. Or perhaps all I needed was a break from the collection, a chance to forget about it and then relearn it. Or maybe I've just been procrastinating. Who knows. The mysteries of making are legion.

In any case, I have rain, I have a day, I have a manuscript. Yesterday I caught up on desk-chore obligations. The housework is under control. The garden is wet. Nobody needs me to do anything else, as far as I know. There's no avoiding the manuscript. It's the task du jour.

I'm still reading Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. I've read a few of his novels before and they always make me uneasy. The characters are impossible to love, or even forgive. His ability to create such uneasiness in a reader interests me. If I can't enjoy the novels, I can feel their compulsion--how we watch, fascinated, as wickedness creeps under our doors. I try to look at how he makes these characters, how he lures my gaze.

The novel is not a cozy read, to say the least. Not that I'm addicted to cozy reads, but the book does unsettle me, and I wonder how my discomfort will affect my work with my own manuscript today. It surely will affect it somehow; reading always does bleed into life.

And writing, too, bleeds into life, changes it, makes a liar out of me. Last week, in my crown, I wrote that Ray never comes back to me in dreams. But then, last night . . . there he was.

Yesterday was mostly this-n-that desk work, and today will be more of the same: an editing project to finalize, a few arts commission obligations to sort through, the Haverford magazine article to fact-check, more scheduling to figure out.  I finished rereading the Strout novel and have moved on to Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which is completely new to me. I wandered through my gardens. I folded clean sheets.

I'm still tinkering with the sonnets and even as I work I can feel my brain returning to its unpossessed state . . . which is good because late-stage revision is basically impossible when I'm in the throes. I can make big, sweeping, re-see-everything changes, but the niggly details require a steadier state of mind.

So these routine editing projects, the publicity stuff I'm whipping up for the arts commission, the fact-checking: all of this daily-grind stuff does have a link to the crazy-making side of my writing life. It gives me a structural bridge. It gives me a box of tools. I can walk away from the generative chaos, turn back to look at what I've made, begin to see it more dispassionately, then reach for a plane and some sandpaper and start honing.

The weather was lovely yesterday--sun after rain; sweet, soft air. I mowed and trimmed outside, opened every window, washed floors, cut fresh flowers for the mantel, went for a walk, baked, read a Liz Strout novel, tinkered with the sonnets. I'm glad I managed to get so many chores done because this morning I need to return to editing. It's just as well to have a desk distraction: I feel bereft, now that the crown is more or less finished.

That's always the question: how do I live with myself when a big poem is over? I don't usually suffer this sensation of loss after finishing a smaller piece, but the long poems are so massively emotional. It is hard to know what to do afterward. My usual tasks and habits seem inadequate, even stupid. Why bother, if I can't have the poem back?

I'm exaggerating a little--really, I am managing; I have plenty of ways to keep myself busy. But I do temporarily lose my purpose after finishing a giant poem, and that is not a good feeling. I suppose it's analogous to coming down after a high; probably the same brain chemicals are involved.

So thank goodness for kind weather, line-dried sheets, a bouquet of white spirea overflowing on the mantel. Outside, a bluejay squawks. I miss my poem. 

Yesterday morning, just after I posted my note to you, I opened my long-poem draft and suddenly understood what I was doing: I was writing a crown of sonnets. I'm not sure why it took me until the thirteenth sonnet to realize that this was what was happening. It's amazing that the form found itself because there was zero preplanning or self-awareness involved. The poem is truly an organic construction; it insisted on its shape.

Some of you probably already know this, but a crown is a set of fourteen sonnets linked by subject matter, rhetoric, syntax, style, rhyme, etc., ending with a coda sonnet composed of the first lines of all of the previous sonnets, making a total of fifteen. They were popular with the great 17th-century sonneteers (Donne, for instance), and contemporary poets still occasionally turn to them. My friend Meg Kearney, for instance, has published two impressive crowns constructed with traditional meter and rhyme: one about a bad marriage and bad weather, the other about heart ailments both medical and metaphorical.

Though I often write traditional rhymed and metered sonnets, my crown did not want to fall into those patterns. It desired Shakespearean quatrains and couplets, but otherwise it demanded independence. By the time I recognized what I was doing, I had only the fourteenth sonnet left to write and the coda sonnet to construct. Both came quickly, and I didn't need to do much tinkering to turn the first lines into a coherent final statement.

In the aftermath of this, I'm still dizzy. If I had planned ahead to write a crown, I would have been self-conscious and purposeful in a guess-what?-I'm-starting-a-cool-project kind of way. Instead, the crown kicked down my door and held me hostage for most of a week, and it didn't rip off its mask until just before tossing me into the streets.

And now I have this thing. And now I don't know what to do with it.

There are few things more luxurious than waking up beside an open window on a Monday holiday in high spring and lingering drowsily in bed as the rain that has been falling all day and all night gently drips and patters. Even Chuck the breakfast enthusiast was willing to dawdle.

Such a lovely weekend: I don't know how it could have been better--lots of time with T on the beach, in town, around the house; the gardens in spectacular shape; a slow reread of Joyce's The Dead; and yesterday morning I may have reached the end of the long-poem draft . . . in any case, the time has come to step back and consider what it has become.

I write these words and I instantly imagine someone frowning: ready to point out that my private gladness ignores national terrors, heart-tearing Gaza, the unhoused woman in the rain, the porcupine crushed by a car, customs officers dragging away a young man, a child afraid of her father . . . oh, there is so much to write . . . the list drags on and on. 

Does joy equal callousness? As a child I learned: the cup is always half-empty; distrust pleasure; be more afraid. 

Recklessly I cannot help myself. I love to be alive.

I've spent most of a week writing a long-poem draft about death.

The beach and marshes at Laudholm Farm never disappoint. Yesterday's bird du jour was the willet, but we also saw piping plovers and least terns along the shoreline, and the thickets were dense with warblers.

T and I have been in a hanging-out-together mood, so yesterday was mostly a play day. Sometimes a holiday is a chance to wander off into our own individual projects--also a pleasure and a need. But for whatever reason, we're arm in arm this weekend. I didn't write at all, or do much work of any kind, other than weed the backyard gardens and make dinner. He didn't work on photographs. We idled together, and walked, and visited the Goodwill, and played cards, and took communal naps, and listened to the Red Sox lose again, and petted the cat, and admired the cardinal in the birdbath. 

Today, rain is coming in, and we're thinking of going to the movies. I'll make chicken noodle soup for dinner. Chuck will coax me into lighting a fire in the stove. I'll reread Joyce's The Dead, and maybe weed the frontyard gardens before the drizzle begins.

Meanwhile, the long poem shimmers in my thoughts. Even when I'm not writing, I feel it shift and blink and shrug. I wonder when it will let me go.

Today may be the only non-rainy day of the long weekend, but we can't go canoeing because Tom's truck is out of commission. So we're going to grab an early breakfast at the Palace Diner in Biddeford and then drive down to Laudholm Farm to walk along the salt marsh and the beach. Bird life should be in full swing, and maybe we'll get lucky and glimpse some harbor seals as well. I am forever hopeful.

I worked on my long-poem draft for most of yesterday, coming up for air now and then and finally, by midafternoon, setting it aside entirely and trudging out to the garden to do a round of weeding. The draft is six pages long now, and the form is still holding strong: interwoven American sonnets, Shakespearean stanza breaks, the words pouring directly from fingers onto laptop. Almost always I write long poems directly onto the screen--the form demands immediate visual clarity, and I'm usually composing so intensely that my handwriting can't keep up with my thoughts.

I don't know when it will be done. When taking a rest, I've been breaking off in the midst of a stanza so that when I return, I can propel myself instantly back into the stream. But at some point the final couplet will make itself known, and then everything will come to a halt.

As I've been writing, my thoughts have wandered to Dante, to Joyce's The Dead. When I am in the throes of a long poem, everything seems to speak to it: the old cookie jar on the kitchen shelf, the pile of LPs beside the turntable, the ants bustling up and down the walkway. The windy strand, warblers fluttering among the beach roses . . . no doubt they will muscle in as well. All the world becomes an allusion to whatever it is I'm struggling to say.

Regular life: Eating eggs and home fries and listening to rockabilly at 7 a.m.  Driving past dinosaur-themed mini-golf. Peering out into the marsh at nesting geese. Forgetting I've got laundry to fold. Remembering what it felt like to bounce on that squeaky desk chair in Grandmom Potter's back room. Writing an unwieldy poem.

I told you it was about to happen, and it did: I wrote four pages of linked sonnets yesterday morning, and there are more to come today. The long poem has me in its clutches. Around the edges of writing, I watered and weeded and tidied the downstairs rooms and folded laundry and made macaroni-and-cheese for a crowd and hosted a party. But even when I seemed to be distracted, the sonnets were shifting and sighing in their basket.

Chuck had a fantastic time at the party, which was both our regular writing group meeting and a silly first-birthday celebration for the Big Kitten. He exhibited exemplary good-boy charm, welcoming all guests at the door, playing with every toy he received, and not walking in anyone's dinner plate. What a cozy, friendly dingbat: he would love to host a party every day.

On the downside, the brakes on Tom's truck gave out. Blah.

Now here we are at Friday, with a long holiday weekend ahead. There's no canoeing in our forecast because the truck isn't drivable, but maybe we'll take my car down to Laudholm Farm and walk along the salt marsh. The days have returned to coolness, and rain is likely on Sunday and Monday. Lilacs are in their fragrant glory. Lilies-of-the valley nod along the edge of Baxter Woods. The cemetery flutters with bluebirds and mockingbirds. Tall dandelion puffs adorn the grass.

I am writing a long poem, and it feels like the orbital center of this universe. Irises and dripping hoses and line-drying shirts and brooms and dishpans and dead pickups and cats and mops and reel mowers and dinner plates . . . they all swirl around the poem--maybe a clutter of space junk, maybe dancers performing an elegant gavotte. To quote Spinal Tap, "there's a fine line between clever and stupid." But when a poem has me in its clutches, I don't have time to care.

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.