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.