Saturday with poetry in central Maine

Episode 1: While you are standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, the man you love wanders off to the pile of old books that some local charity is trying to palm off for 75 cents apiece. He sorts through the 1970s science textbooks and ratty Grisham paperbooks and spiritual-ish self-help manuals and discovers . . . a first edition of Gregory Corso's 1960 The Happy Birthday of Death. He sweetly hands you this volume as you trundle over to see what's what. Then the two of you drive off to the lumber yard to buy siding for the barn.

Episode 2: People are coming over with the realtor to look at your house, so you and the man you love decide to take a drive to Kingsbury Pond. He goes swimming and you sit beside the dam and kick your feet in the water and watch the little children who are trying to ride a giant inflatable orca but mostly tipping over onto their heads. Afterward you and the M.Y.L. discreetly sit under a tree in a cool breeze and drink a bottle of beer and count ducks and labrador retrievers and reminisce about your own old departed dog. Eventually you decide that the people looking at your house should be gone by now, so you drive home to make dinner. But the people are still there, and they seem amazed and enthralled by the property, which is very startling. They have many questions to ask, and then the young woman says, with awe and intensity, "I noticed that you had a book of Rilke's poems on one of your tables." As you say to the M.Y.L. afterward, if all goes well this would certainly be the first time in the history of Harmony, Maine, that Rilke has ever helped to sell a house.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind thoughts about dear Anna. She was a black standard poodle, smaller than most, with a big smile and enormous affection for everyone she ever met. We all love our pets, but usually that love is a family matter. Every once in a while, though, I've come across a dog whose love and goodwill combines with a kind of graciousness that extends out into the larger world. Anna was that sort of dog, and yesterday, after she died, I began getting notes from many people who were grateful for the sweetness she had extended to them. Most touching were the comments from the young adults who had grown up with my sons, who recalled her as a constant of their childhood--a dear face welcoming them into the house. It means so much to me to know that they have treasured her goodness and her open heart.

When we move to Portland, we will get another dog, and we will easily learn to love it. But Anna was a once-in-a-lifetime gift. We will not see her like again.

Just so you know, I did ask the vet to euthanize Anna yesterday morning. She and I agreed that Anna had become so frail and confused that the extra burden of these seizure-like episodes was just too much stress for her to handle.

Over the course of my life, I have made this decision for many animals, and it never does get easier. I did write about it, once, in a chapter that ended up in Tracing Paradise. In that essay I tell the tale of having to ask my friend Steve to shoot my sick goat. And coincidentally or not? . . . Last night Steve and his wife Angela swept me off to their house for dinner so that we could all raise a glass to dear Anna. It is a privilege to have friends who understand the duty and the pain, but who can also summon the necessary joys of a wake.

I was dealing with two sick animals overnight . . . an ancient dog having a episode of anxiety and confusion, a cat having his annual grumpy feverish reaction to a vaccine. As a result I slept on the couch so that the dog wouldn't fall down the stairs in the middle of the night, and grumpy cat had the entire bed to himself.

We're getting closer and closer to the moment when I'm going to need to make the god-decision about this dog; but as soon as I think, "Now's the time," she pulls herself out of her spiral and goes back to being graciously feeble. At midnight, she stood with her head in a corner, unable to bring herself to lie down, unable to figure out what to do with her legs or her worries, and I sat on the floor with my arms around her, crying a little, wondering how the two of us were going make it through the long night. But we did. I carried her outside and let her stand in the cool grass for a while, which seemed to revive her. And then she walked back inside, on her own volition, and I pretended to watch Netflix while she figured out how to sit down on the rug beside the couch and remembered how much she enjoyed hanging out together in the evenings. And gradually she lay down and fell asleep, and gradually I did too.

We'll see what today brings. Anything could happen.

from Rilke's "Third Elegy"

It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas,
to evoke that hidden, guilty river-god of the blood.

* * *

Red-headed finches whirr back and forth, back and forth, from the lilac tree to the feeder that hangs beside the open window. Last night my son called from Chicago, elated about his new apartment, his new neighborhood, his newfound skill at parallel-parking a panel truck on a city street. I sat next to the cat on the couch and ate a lovely Indian dessert made of thick yogurt and pistachios. I went to bed and tossed and turned all night, dreaming of melodrama. Somehow every incident felt connected.

Perhaps it's because I'm writing again. Over the course of ten days I have finished two poems and a long essay about poetry. I'm steadily copying out the Duino Elegies. I've found a pattern for my time; finally, the ability to work has returned to me.

Today I'll edit a manuscript, and deal with college-financial aid stuff, and tidy the house for the realtor, and take the howling cat to the vet, and go to band practice. But somewhere, in the interstices, I will still be a poet. I cannot tell you why this matters so much, but it does.

* * *

P.S. In case you were wondering, the Amazon review glitch on my Vagabond page has been fixed, which means I can now get teary-eyed over this lovely comment about the book. Such a reader is an amazing gift. Thank you.

I wanted to let you know that I'll be reading with my beloved friend Baron Wormser in Strafford, Vermont, on next Thursday evening, August 11, at 7 p.m. The event is a summer reading series called the Town House Forum, and organizers often book fairly famous writers, so my presence here will certainly be a curiosity. If you're local and like biography, you might also like to know that this Thursday, August 4, the series will feature Jay Parini, author of bios about Frost and Vidal, who will be reading with Wendy Moffat, author of a bio about E. M. Forster. I wish I could be around to listen to that one myself.

Let me see: what else is new? The real estate agent has set up two house showings this week, so apparently someone somewhere has gotten around to reading the advertisements. My green beans and raspberries are thriving despite the drought. I have still been copying out Rilke's Duino Elegies, but I am also rereading Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand, which is all about taking weird drugs that send the protagonist back into the machinations of medieval Cornwall. The novel is not much like Rilke's poems, but it does remind me, as I wrote in one of the chapters of The Vagabond's Bookshelf, that du Maurier is far more sympathetic to landscape than she is to people.

Poetry-group readers seem to have reached a consensus about the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, so let's take Tom's advice and acquire copies of the 1992 edition of the New and Collected, which still seems to be readily available. Then we can work out how we'll manage the conversations. I'm still hoping that we can work out a way to take turns leading the talk.

I suppose I should gather my robes about me and go off to edit a book. No summer holiday for me this year. Oh, well.

And here it is, Monday morning again.

Sitting on the stoop before dawn, I can smell autumn in the air--a vague and dissipating fragrance, but a presence nonetheless.

The earth is so dry here. We need five days of slow rain. Cicadas are scratching, scratching, and grasshoppers rattle in the weeds. The slant of sunrise is low against the horizon.

My garden is a riot of phlox and dahlias, hydrangeas and coneflowers, black-eyed susans and bee balm. The sunflowers are covered with enormous buds. The bean plants are laden. Raspberries glow like wine.

And now the old dog is shuffling into the kitchen, and the coffee pot is empty, and the singing thrush has fallen silent.

I open my copy of Rilke's "Fourth Elegy" and read, "Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart's curtain?"