Today is our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. As always, I'm impressed to discover I've remembered it. The date, so close to our older son's birthday, sank into obscurity as soon as he leaped onto the scene. For years we barely thought about celebrating ourselves.
But thirty-five years is a long time to hang out with the same guy. Two of the friends who stood up with us are now dead. The birthday-partier who stole our thunder is getting married himself in a few weeks. This summer we've surprised ourselves by becoming uncharacteristically sentimental about the whole idea of weddings . . . making our presents for the kids, fussing happily about outfits, getting our rings resized.
It's Monday, it's a work day, and I've got to scrub toilets this morning. There's nothing remotely romantic about this anniversary moment. Except that here we are: still bumbling along together, tangling our harness straps, stepping on each other's hooves, bumping noses over the water trough.
O heart, are you great enough for love?
I have heard of thorns and briers.
Over the thorns and briers,
Over the meadows and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it
Flash of a million miles.
--from "Marriage Morning" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
We did get a rainstorm last night, but now the humidity is back, along with the wildfire smoke, and my sinuses are clogged and complaining.
But first things first: what about those Red Sox? This team has been wretched all year--until, suddenly, they're not. Yesterday's game was their twelfth win in a row, and as entertainment it was perfect . . . every at-bat packed with dramatic tension, and then the romance soaring when Wilyer Abreu, in a 3-2 count, with two outs already in the inning, laced his second home run of the game and put the Sox ahead for good. It was a schmaltzy-movie sort of game, for sure, but I'm sopping up all of the temporary baseball feel-good I can. They'll start losing again soon.
Meanwhile, I caught up on a chunk of yard work before the rain, and then, in the afternoon, I put together initial plans for my fall Poetry Kitchen class, "A Visit with the Brothers Grimm: Using Fairy Tales to Generate and Revise Poems." I love fairy tales, and I've been rereading them regularly since childhood--the Grimm versions, but also Andrew Lang's French-influenced tales, Italo Calvino's Italian collections, and the many other volumes that I've pulled off library shelves over the course of my life. I've long known that fairy-tale logic, structure, surreality, moral ambiguity, class warfare, and so on have affected my work imaginatively and thematically. But I think these elements have also played a role in how I move from raw first drafts into early-stage revisions, and that's what I hope we can play with in the upcoming class.
The dates are November 7 and 8, on Zoom. The cost is $150. There will be lots of off-screen writing time. Maybe I'll see you there.
A cool gray morning. Through open windows I hear gulls wail up from the cove, a jay squawk in a nearby bush.
It's Saturday, my first and last quiet weekend for a while. Tom's still asleep, Chuckie is crunching up breakfast, and I am considering the tasks ahead of me--mowing, weeding, groceries, laundry--while also not fussing about them. Rain and thunderstorms are forecast for afternoon and evening. Maybe I'll get nothing done. Maybe I won't care.
This week, in and among all of my catch-up chores, I finished Great Expectations and began reading the essays of Brian Doyle, which I picked up at the Goodwill the other day. His novel Chicago is one of the sweetest books I know, and his essays, too, overflow with sweetness--occasionally to a cloying degree, but mostly not. He came from a big Irish Catholic family; he remained a committed Catholic all his life; he loved and admired his parents and siblings; he was devoted to his wife and children . . . you'd think this would make for dull material, but even contentment can be charming in the hands of a skilled writer. Doyle is often funny about small things, and his best sentences are like old cars with squashy brakes careening down switchback gravel roads. All in all, his essays have been a decent addition to a convalescent week.
On Tuesday I'll be driving over to Mount Desert Island to read with my friend Weslea Sidon at the Bass Harbor Library, 5:30 p.m. I met Weslea at the first-ever poetry workshop I ever attended--when my boys were tiny, and I was terrified to leave them for a weekend, terrified to meet real poets and discover that I had no chance of standing alongside them. Weslea was the balm to all of that terror . . . a real poet, who wrote and spoke with great seriousness and humor, who calmed me and cared about me, who kept reaching out, year after year--not just to me but to Tom and the boys. She and her husband Curtis coaxed us to their cottage by the sea, offered us space and affection. This is where Tom and I still go, spring and fall--to the cottage, to Weslea, who is alone now that Curtis is gone. So it makes me very, very happy to be reading with her this week. It makes me very, very happy to know that I had some part in getting her new collection into print. The book is beautiful, and if you're in the area I hope you'll come hear her read.
The occasional poem I mentioned yesterday, "Maine: July 2026," appears in today's Vox Populi. This may be the fastest creation-to-publication stream I've ever experienced. My friend Weslea Sidon and I also plan to perform it chorally next Tuesday evening at our reading at the Bass Harbor Library. It seems important to harp on the matter before people are distracted away from remembering.
***
My dry neighborhood finally received a couple of downpours yesterday, and I did manage to weed about third of the front garden beds before the rain started, so the garden is beginning to look a little better than it did. Meanwhile, I've still been immersed in post-conference business. Planning for next year always starts instantly; there's barely a beat between ending and beginning. But I did get out to write with my friends in the evening--two not-very-promising drafts; still, doing the work felt good.
Now I idle in the cool morning air, listening to the man with the shopping cart of cans trundle from one recycling bin to the next. A Carolina wren cries teeterteeterteeter; Chuck peers industriously under a rug; everyone is at work, and I suppose I, too, can call what I'm doing work . . . wandering between past and future, bumbling among details. Sorrow. Fury. Dread. Those fires are still ravenous.
For the moment the windows are open. This makes young Charles so happy: he loves to sit by the screen door admiring chipmunks and sparrows.
Overnight there were severe storm warnings for inland Maine, but I don't think the coast got much rain from the hoopla, though a thunderclap broke over Portland that was loud enough to wake the dead. That means I'll probably need to water the garden this morning, before today's squalid heat kicks in and I shut up the house and disappoint the cat.
The weather has kept me out of the garden, except for watering and quick harvesting. The beds are weedy, but there's not much I can do about that until the heat breaks. Instead, I've tried to focus on catching up on house chores--bathrooms, floors, laundry--and dealing with various errands. Yesterday I went to city hall and transferred my old license plates to the new car. I did a bunch of post-conference paperwork. I also encouraged myself to sit down and read--something I haven't been able to do much of for more than two weeks. I'm still working my way through Great Expectations, and I know that resurrecting my reading hours is the first step toward resurrecting my writing hours.
Recouping sleep is the second step. Last night, despite the thunder, I slept almost solidly from 8:45 till 5 a.m. This was after taking several little catnaps during the day. I know I'm behaving a bit like a convalescent, but so be it. Sleep is as important as poems.
And despite my doziness, I'm walking, I'm thinking, I'm getting stuff done. My wedding ring is back on my finger. Gloria sports her Maine plates. Pip is stupidly in love with cold-hearted Estella. I slice up cucumbers and toss a macaroni salad. A word slips in edgewise.
Parents and Children
Yesterday morning, I drove downtown to pick up my newly resized wedding ring, which hasn't fit me for years. My son is getting married this summer, and I want to wear my ring on the day he first wears his.
Yesterday morning, on a Maine street 20 minutes from my house, licensed thugs killed a young father in his car. He was working legally in this country, had a social security number, and was not the official target of their hunt. According to bystanders, as he was dying, he was still explaining, I tried to stop. The murder took place in front of the man's daughter, who was wearing Bluey pajamas.
Sunset, with bonfire and lake.
That's one of the fine things about this lake: sunrise and sunset are equivalently lovely. I will miss them.
Once the school year begins, my relationship with the water diminishes. I drive past it. I look at it through windows. But I'm not down on the dock, not paddling my feet in the water, not watching kingfishers chase and quarrel in the gloaming. And there's something about conversations by the lake . . . the comfort of dipping in and out of closeness, and then an eagle sails overhead and we all lift our faces to the sky.
I'll be home in my own bed tonight.
Yesterday afternoon we had a few off hours. I ate ice cream. I paddled in the lake. I took a nap. Then I celebrated the participants at their poetry reading, danced ridiculously at the afterparty, and slept like a stone. So this morning my body exudes that particular tingly, soft self-satisfaction that only an orgy of lake water, disco, and a bed under an open window can provide.
That's one thing about this job: directing the conference is, without doubt, hard, hard work. But the place insists on itself, and summer by the lake is play.
Half an hour ago a torrent was sluicing from the cabin's metal roof, downpour churning up the lake. But the rain has settled into drizzle, and a solitary loon floats among the drops. In the photo he is the black speck in the center; my phone couldn't zoom in any closer.
Probably this is the same loon we saw last night before dark as we sat on the dock and dangled our feet in the water. He was close to us then, yet unfazed by our presence, intent on diving and eating. He was a ship, solid and supple, sitting low in the water, sleek black mast curving up from the pale surface.
Now, as I describe him, try to write his body onto this page, a mysterious wail arises. He is out there on the lake . . . body vanished; a mythic voice.
**
We finished our performance last night, and again the room was filled with audience. Some of the locals came to all three shows. It's hard to explain how meaningful this felt.
So today is a transition day: we work in the morning; then the afternoon is free, and participants will read in the evening, with a party afterward. Then, for the final day and a half, we move into a new writing project. It will be good to take a breath this afternoon, and then bring all of our attention into celebrating participant work.
Temperature-wise, it's a mild morning: heat is on the way, the air knows it, and I'm already imagining a swim.
Yesterday's performance of "Lake" was just as well attended as "Slate"--a few locals even came back: they said they wanted to know what would happen next, which is so gratifying.
Most moving to me personally, my friend Angela brought along one of my sons' teachers at the Harmony School. She taught a combined second- and third-grade classroom, so had each boy for two full school years. She knew them well. She knew me well because I was the school music teacher at that time. When I asked if I could bring poetry into her classroom, she welcomed me with open arms. My favorite memory is teaching the kids the sword-fight scene from Romeo and Juliet. I thinned speeches but I didn't change the language: the children had the real words in their mouth. I knew enough not to give 7 and 8 year olds actual prop swords; everything had to depend on physicality: entrances and exits and responses to verbal challenges. They loved it. I loved it. Their teacher loved it. That was a happy day for everyone.
And this summer my older son is getting married. The elementary school was so long ago. And his teacher came to listen to me read a poem about little boys playing baseball on the field outside the school. I feel a trembling. Of course I feel a trembling.
Just thinking about last night's performance of "Slate" makes me want to cry a little, in a good way. Tenney House was full, with our conference audience swelled by a significant number of locals and visitors. When I stood up to welcome them, all I could think was homeland--the homeland of place, of art and community. Here we were, the people of Maine.
And the audience stayed with us--applauded, laughed, teared up, all of the things we could hope for; and they asked questions afterward: about how we'd put together the piece, about our varied relationships to this particular place, about how collaboration works. The evening was cathartic.
Tonight we present "Lake," and we're all a little nervous as it involves considerably more visual and sound tech than the other two pieces do, not to mention a group dance that is giving the three of us non-professionals the heebie-jeebies. But this is a performance that will always essentially be an open rehearsal--we are not polished, and we will never be polished. The point is something else.
At daybreak this pair of whitetails was browsing outside my front door, but they've since vanished into the trees, and morning lake life has shifted to birds--red-winged blackbirds flitting from one alder to another, a loud vireo invisible in the trees, a crow stalking across the grass. And now a bullfrog burps.
The air has a chill in it again, and mist drifts across the lake ripples. It will warm up, though, like it did yesterday, when, just before dinner, I managed to find time to slip into the water. The shallows were a patchwork of warm and cool, late-day sunlight sliding toward the horizon. A party barge bristling with fishing rods chugged past.
The teaching day went well, I think. I started off by dictating Ruth Stone's "Don't Miss It" and immediately gave a writing prompt. Then we moved into a reading of Rilke's "Imaginary Career," followed by another prompt. Both of these prompts were framed around the structures of the example poems, which allowed us to then shift back into conversation about both the models and the participants' new drafts, focusing on transformations within formal choice. That took up the morning, and then the afternoon shifted to small groups who were creating a series of nested questions that led directly into a writing prompt. Teresa closed the day by introducing her afternoon writing projects, which will center around Ovid's Metamorphoses.
This morning I'm mostly off the hot seat as Gwynnie and Gretchen will take over with dance and theater exercises. But tonight is our first performance from Monson, Maine, USA, so the nerves will reignite. We'll be starting with "Slate," the section we presented during our residency in Sarasota, and the new sections will roll out tomorrow and Thursday.
The three of them putter around for a few minutes before setting sail again, and I sip from my gargantuan coffee mug and feel happy to be wearing a sweater, which is not something I've said to myself for many days.
It is an old-fashioned summer morning, dew-drenched and still, the perfect temperature for bare feet and long sleeves. Birds twitter among the reeds and scrub . . . vireo, waxwing, warbler, sparrow. Bullfrogs remark. A duck flies low over the glassy water, and up on the road a log truck growls past.
This morning the conference will begin, and I'll be on stage all day. It will be intense, but I didn't sleep too badly last night, the faculty got lots done work-wise yesterday, and our participant group has already started to bond. All signs point to good cheer, though now a mosquito has found me. Suffering is life, and she understands her role in the cosmos.
In other news: someone has left a paperback copy of Harriet the Spy in this cabin. I am very pleased.
Finally, the heat has broken, and birdsong pours through every open window.
Today is Monson day: by 9 a.m. I'll be picking up passengers; by noon we'll be pulling into town, and conference week will be underway. As usual, expect spotty contact from me. I may be able to post every day, but likely there will be distractions and interruptions.
The conference theme this year is transformation, and as the sessions unfold, I'll try to keep you apprised of what that entails as regards materials, conversations, prompts, and collaborations. The week has been exciting to map out. But there's always mystery. What will happen when a plan enters air?
Another thick and humid morning. I'm glad to be starting the day here in my familiar old couch corner, idling over coffee and a book after the flurry of the week. We got so much done at Bowdoin this week, but the focus was intense, and the conference itself is still to come. So I'm grateful for a slow hour, though soon the day will devolve into packing and housework and working on script details and diving into various other panicky-busy obligations.
Monson, Maine, USA is now a full, finished, three-part piece. Next week we'll be performing each part separately, on consecutive days: "Slate" on July 7, "Lake" on July 8, "Mountain" on July 9. All performances will begin at 5 p.m. at Tenney House, on the Monson Arts campus, and they are free and open to the public.
For me, this collaboration has been such an education. To work so closely with three brilliant but very different artists; to watch my private writing self morph into new space; to undertake the risk of publicly performing as an inexperienced beginner . . . I still can't believe I'm actually going to dance in front of other people: me, chunky and awkward and 60 years old! I still can't believe I'm actually inviting you to come witness this.
As a poet and a teacher of poetry, I've had no trouble jumping off cliffs and coaxing you to jump too. I am thrilled by recklessness, when it comes to writing. But my body is another story: I'm inclined to be timid, to not trust myself, to not pay close attention to where I am in space. In our Sarasota residency, and now over this past week at Bowdoin, I have begun to learn to jump off another sort of cliff. I have begun learning to dance, and to ask you, the viewer, to enter into bodily conversation with me. This has been hard work, and revelatory work.
***
I almost forgot to mention I've got a new poem out in the inaugural issue of the Colby Review--
The heat has been ridiculous--77 degrees with 80 percent humidity at 6 a.m. . . . All I can say is Blah. Teresa and I have still managed to get our morning walks in, but she's from Florida so this probably seems balmy. Walking in the "cool" of the morning is the outer limit of what I can accomplish outside. Even the thought of doing a yard chore makes me sweat.
Today is our last rehearsal day. Then tomorrow we have a much-needed day off, and on Sunday we head up to Monson. Meanwhile, Tom, bless his heart, is planning a big dinner for the rehearsal crowd tonight. I am leaving it all in his hands.
Here's a clip from the Denis Johnson poem "Heat" that more or less sums up how I'm feeling about this weather. Yes, I know he's talking about a different month, but climate change is real . . .
August,you're just an erotic hallucination,just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,are you serious?
It is so hot already--air as thick as tissue paper and the temperature nearly 80 degrees at 5:30 in the morning. The house isn't too bad with the machine chugging away upstairs, but Tom doesn't have any A/C at his worksite, which worries me.
Rehearsals are going well at Bowdoin, but they are intense, and everyone is tired and we still have the conference ahead of us. So this evening may be quiet--a moment for everyone to loll around in the cool and return briefly to a private life.
Today I began my term as Maine poet laureate by going for a sunrise walk on Mackworth Island with my dear Teresa. We didn't talk much about poems. Instead, we looked at fog. We spoke of birds. We admired our friends.
Yesterday's rehearsal was hard but good. Whatever it is we are making is beginning to cohere, to become itself.
Here's a very old poem, about a time that Baron Wormser came to my house in Harmony for dinner. . . .
Dinner with the Poet Laureate
Dawn Potter
Dissatisfied with the conversation, the four-year-old
keeps poking the tip of a peacock feather into the faces
of the guests; later, slowly eats the rest of the seeded
rolls brushed with egg and baked till golden earlier in the day
by the less good poet, who was nervous both before
and after the guests arrived, thinking of Tennyson’s
glossy laureate beard, nails sticking out of the sheetrock,
not enough chairs, and the probability that the four-year-old
would find something along the lines of a peacock feather
with which to terrorize the guests: as when he informed her in-laws,
over cocktails, that he planned to be gay when he grew up.
The painter and the photographer begin some chat about galleries
that the poet laureate and the less good poet listen in on,
the less good poet squirming in her chair, self-conscious
about her restlessness. In a Kate O’Brien novel, the mother
superior of an Irish girls’ school, well read in the poetry
of Henry Vaughan, subdues a sense of internal chaos by keeping
her hands quiet at all times. Is this an imposable task?
The physical self is so willful, shamelessly following its bad habits,
while the mind is like an anxious, second-guessing parent.
Because the poet laureate asserts that he doesn’t like the music
of Merle Haggard, the photographer has chosen Etta James,
who says she would rather be blind, boy, than see you
walk away from me, babe; sure true about more than one thing
the less good poet can think of: the whole reason the poet laureate
has wedged himself at her kitchen table (she hopes); though she worries
they have nothing to say to each other over the second kind of tomato
soup he’s had today, which the four-year-old is deliberately spooning
down the front of his pajamas. Nothing goes as planned;
think of a sonnet unleashing its skewed logic down the page,
careening around every turn. The Burden of the Mystery,
Keats called this beetle-browed unease she feels, wishing
for pleasure, for confidence in a situation that seems close to tears,
with Etta vanished, the painter trying to explain the odd path
her career has taken, the photographer a father wiping soup
off the four-year-old with a dishcloth.
The less good poet pours out the last of the Riesling.
All the ways the mind works, folding in on itself—
John Berryman with those poems about Chris, falling-down
drunk in her capri pants on a ratty hearthrug; and here,
four people eating dinner with a child whom the photographer calls
the Boy Tyrant when he’s lying in bed with the less good poet
smoking a bowl and rehashing the evening; and she reminds
him of the poem in which she imagines having thrown
the four-year-old off a bridge, an exhilarating aspect of the art,
like being possessed by a kind of honest evil spirit,
a sort of longing for the truth of the matter, something analagous
to what she feels now, propped up beside the photographer,
his face shadowed under the dim lamp, broad-boned and mercurial:
the desire that overtakes her for vision—
to be able to take in everything and align it in some stately
Spenserian array, heavy as alabaster and ivory, remote as heaven,
in a poem that uses the word crimson in a way that really works.
The problem with being a less good poet is the triviality that arises,
like fog spreading over a window. Just when she thinks she’s run up against
something really important, her thoughts stage-dive into the crowd.
What does a real poet imagine over the dish pan?
Did T. S. Eliot idly vacuum the same section of carpet twenty times,
let the rhythm of a line circle around him like a fish,
hum a tune in the key of the motor while Vivienne
broke things in the next room? The less good poet cannot
manage to put herself into anyone else’s shoes: the whole
world seems fixed on herself, the center of a tiny Aristotelean
universe plagued by the malignant orbit of the four-year-old,
paid employment, and laundry. Asleep, the photographer
emits a small snore, emblematic of the calm order of his own
more Galilean universe, where steady hard work produces
superior results and nothing keeps him awake, not even
a less good poet looking for love, whose mind is a castle
honeycombed with a thousand passageways—
climbing and twisting, falling into endless loops and permutations;
and there is no way out, no way at all. But she wants him
to know she’s here, as she wants to believe that the painter
has left this house in the country to sit in the dark passenger
seat of a reliable Subaru, mesmerized by the windshield wipers
sweeping back and forth in their dark mirror, a sweetness
like tires hissing down a wet street; that the poet laureate reads
Pope as woodchucks browse in his kale and cats do nothing
to stop them; that Snow White and Rose Red wander
through the forest hand in hand, but no beast dares touch
one hair of their heads—that there is a way to compose
these pieces into patterns of great beauty and precision,
as a clock ticks, as a falcon flies over a woodland edge,
crying its hunger in heroic couplets. The world conflates into Milton’s
royal image, but didn’t Keats wrestle with exactly this pain?
When the four-year-old wakes in the morning and puts on his cowboy mask
with a smile, the less good poet will dish out yogurt and orange juice,
while Shakespeare brews more coffee and the diminution of space
points their love as sharp as a needle, the image rocking her back
on her heels as if it were her own. At another dinner, the painter
and the poet laureate, even the buzzing four-year-old, might hear
those words ringing off the countertops, off the bones of her skull;
the photographer, on his way to hunt out that Merle Haggard tune
about Roman sandals, stopping to listen—every sound a chime,
a thought, a heartbeat; each phrase a life lived over and over.
