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.