It's been a long time since I've been inside any building other than this house. It's been a long time since I've traveled further than Westbrook, to pick up a warehouse grocery order. It's been a long time since anyone other than our triumvirate has set foot inside my door. And yet I've been sociable. I've also managed to keep working . . . even, at the moment, to have too much work. I'm reading a lot, writing a little, planning a conference. I'm editing manuscripts, preparing to review applications for a writing residency, slowly making my way through a friend's new novel, agreeing to write a blurb for a poetry collection. Six weeks ago, I was scared: scared of illness, of losing all of our income, of struggling to keep my family fed. Now, though I don't feel exactly safe, I do feel steadier.

Of course my preexisting hausfrau tendencies have been a big help. But so has the behavior of the people around me, both those in real space and those in distant connections. Everyone has been resourceful. My younger son is figuring out how to stay focused and upright as a student. My older son is figuring out how to enjoy the chatter of his solitude. My friend Angela is inventing a safe pipeline to move garden plants and bulk supplies from her country outpost to my city homestead. My friend Maudelle has catalyzed our online experiment at the Frost Place. My friend Teresa makes me talk about Rilke. My neighbor Valerie leaves cookies on my front stoop. This list could go on and on.

Beyond any circle of sweetness looms a tar-pit thick with disease: of mind, heart, body. But it cannot negate the good. It cannot.

Creatures of stillness thronged out of the clear
disentangled forest, from nest and lair;
and it wasn’t cunning, wasn’t heed or fright
that put such softness in their step, 

but listening. 

[from Rainer Maria Rilke, "Sonnets to Orpheus," trans. Edward Snow]

Five o'clock in the morning. Portland, Maine. Early May. A ragged dawn is peering over the black roofs and chimneys. An invisible robin sings. A passing freight train judders and squeals and groans.

On the mantle, a green pot filled with quince branches. On the coffee table, an empty cup and saucer. A vase of tulips. A pencil. A half-done crossword puzzle. A fat paperback copy of Kristin Lavransdatter.

Manuscripts and laundry and meals and garden. Another day looms. It's impossible to know what to write in this diary-letter, what will matter to you. Do you care about sorrel leaves, pale and tender and ready for harvest? Or the squirrel that littered crushed nutshells on my front steps? Or the sight of a clean blue-striped kitchen towel whipping in the wind? Or a white cat asleep under a stand of crimson peony shoots? Or a 14th-century Norwegian heroine? Or the strange history of the Seattle Mariners? Or my son comically enacting the home life of L. L. Bean catalog models? Or the scent of minestrone?

I mistyped diary-letter as dairy-letter. The error reminds me that, as child, I loved the word cream. My father would talk about the family cemetery plot at Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and I would not picture corpses and ancestors but white fog lingering over a rocky hilltop, blond cows cropping new grass, milk bubbling into a tin pail . . .

In a dairy-letter, I could write about Wordsworth's home, Dove Cottage, in the English Lake District, with its cool, damp, stone-clad, low-ceiled dairy, a place for water to drip and cream to rise. I could write about the velvety flank of a Jersey heifer. I could write about Wallace Stevens.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. 

[from Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"]

I am not, in general, prone to adjusting my life to match the poems of Wallace Stevens. Still, I will promise to dawdle in such dress as I am used to wear. The boys can bring flowers or not, as they choose. But they can't have last month's newspapers. I burnt them all up in the stove.

I first started off this note this note to you with complaints about our hiccupy internet and the wad of clothes that my son left in the washing machine. Then I was immediately appalled at myself and erased everything. Such petty problems . . . not even problems at all. Even with hiccups, the internet is better than what we had in Harmony. The son who forgot his wet laundry also made a beautiful dinner for us last night.

Also, we have a washing machine.

What is this urge to complain in ways that only emphasize my ease and privilege? It's a particularly noxious American tic--one that's certainly evident in those obscene demonstrations against the greater good ("I want to go to a bar! Therefore, I will brandish this gun and taunt science!"). I find it easy to excoriate such withering examples of selfishness. I find it less easy to admit that, I too, rest comfortably in an American funhouse, whose mirrors render riches (e.g., safe drinking water, good sewage system, plentiful food, peace) invisible while exaggerating dissatisfactions, acquisitiveness, and jealousies.

Oh, this all sounds holier-than-thou, and God knows I am not that. I love clean sheets and candles at dinner and a pretty dress and putting dishes into a dishwasher and having people tell me I'm a good poet. I just don't want to forget that none of this is a given. None of this is my right.

Monday morning: and we're back to the 4:30 a.m. alarm that I will never get used to. But already the sky is lightening, and in the gloaming the tree silhouettes are soft with flowers and new leaves. Our weekend was so lovely--the mild, warm weather, but also our light hearts. We worked hard, as a trio, and enjoyed each other's company, and in the evening we sat on our new concrete block and drank a glass of wine together as Tom and Paul excitedly planned a canoe outing for next weekend. 

I did a big housecleaning yesterday--no windows yet, but dusting and spiderweb hunting and mopping and polishing and taking everything off the mantel and washing it, and getting rid of the vase of dried winter wheat and replacing it with fresh branches of flowering quince. I do love a tidy, airy house full of flowers.

So everything feels fresh this morning, as I prepare to sink into a week of editing/curriculum writing/manuscript reading/grocery foraging.

I am so fortunate to be happy at home.

Home

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Often I had gone this way before:
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else;
'Twas home; one nationality
We had, I and the birds that sang,
One memory.

They welcomed me. I had come back
That eve somehow from somewhere far:
The April mist, the chill, the calm,
Meant the same thing familiar
And pleasant to us, and strange too,
Yet with no bar.

The thrush on the oaktop in the lane
Sang his last song, or last but one;
And as he ended, on the elm
Another had but just begun
His last; they knew no more than I
The day was done.

Then past his dark white cottage front
A labourer went along, his tread
Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;
And, through the silence, from his shed
The sound of sawing rounded all
That silence said.

And, indeed, yesterday was the day of dreams . . . not just for me but for everyone I could see. I spent nearly all of it outside, either planting in the garden, or digging dandelion greens, or hanging laundry, or just sitting at a table in the driveway, drinking tea and reading a novel. Meanwhile, the neighborhood kids worked out a quarantine-safe way to play together, which involved riding their bikes down the sidewalk over a series of plywood "jumps" (which is in quotation marks because the jumps were really just flat pieces of plywood that made a funny noise when ridden over). So all day long five elementary-age kids whirred back and forth--clomp, crackle, clomp--over the "jumps"; and meanwhile the rest of us worked in gardens, read books on porches, tore off siding, petted cats, poured concrete in back yards, strolled by with dogs and/or cigarettes, pushed strollers, hobbled along with canes, careened by on roller skates, or lay flat on our backs in the sunshine.

Tom and Paul will be sore today, after all of that concrete lugging, mixing, shoveling, smoothing. But now the job is done, and the block will sit untouched in the backyard for a couple of weeks until Tom decides the mix has cured enough to risk removing the wooden forms. We still won't be able to start a fire in it for at least another month. But maybe, just maybe, on the Fourth of July, we will sit outside by our own fire pit, listening to baseball. Maybe. I have more confidence in the fire pit than I do in the baseball.

Today will be another 60-degree day, but cloudier. I have a lot of housework to do, but the windows will be open, and that makes everything sweeter. For dinner: zucchini fritters and dandelion salad. Maybe an apple pie.

I did manage to apply for unemployment on Friday, after 6 hours of torture (website crashes, no info saved, stupid questions not designed for gig workers, and a broken benefits calculator that automatically told every self-employed person who made it through the site: "You qualify for $0 benefits"). It was awful, but I expected it to be awful. I suppose it's possible they'll send me a few dollars, though I'm not holding my breath.

And finally, the Saturday we've been longing for: sunshine, blue skies, 65 degrees, the soil basking in yesterday's humid rain. Already the trees are unfolding leaves, the tulips are shimmying in the faint breeze. I will open every window in the house. 

Yesterday Paul and I went for a late afternoon walk down Lawn Street, with its beautiful flowering cherries. The above photo is vague and dim, because the air was still storm-heavy. But maybe you can see a bit of glory in this cloudy beauty.

And then we wandered to the cemetery and admired our current favorite headstones:

If only I could have so perfect a memorial.

Tom and I are drinking our coffee, and soon we will get dressed and go for an early walk up to Lawn Street to admire the cherry trees in the morning sun, and then he will wake up Paul and they will turn their thoughts to mixing cement, and I will hang laundry, and then sow sunflowers and zinnias and scarlet runners. Paul is full of cheer because he got good news about an internship he applied for. (He made it through the first round and will be interviewed.) I am full of cheer because I adore spring. Tom is full of cheer because he likes me and also he got to sleep in.

Sonnet in Search of Poems I’ve Never Written

Dawn Potter

I’ve been meaning to write about a patch of mossy

frogs’ eggs in a vernal pool, about a single contrail

chalking a blue November sky, about the glossy

covers of biographies, about the tortuous tale

of an ant city under a scarred sidewalk, about two

lazy landscapers blowing leaves into a neighbor’s yard,

about falling in half-love with someone else’s youth,

about gobbling pie without a fork, about the barbs

of terrible hedges, about the anxiety of gifts, about my feet,

about the murmur of a radio, about leftovers congealing

in a pan, about oxen, about the loneliness of husking sweet

corn under the stars, about this sad white ceiling.

            But maybe I don’t need to bother inventing.

            Maybe you’ve already imagined this ending.

[first published in Vox Populi]

This is the marquee of the Center Theater in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. My younger son performed at this theater often, in high school plays and music events. I've performed here, when I was playing in my band. The marquee is a big sign in Piscataquis County, the least populated county in the state. Everyone keeps an eye on it.

So the director at Monson Arts had the pretty wonderful idea of  buying space on the marquee to feature some of my students' work. Here is a line composed by Eric Jacobs of Piscataquis Community High School, used as a refrain in a group poem we created. I hope he is thrilled. I know I am.

Poetry on Main Street, in central Maine. The times they are a-changin.

* * *

Yesterday was a stressful, pulled-in-all directions day. Lots of editing pressure; Frost Place planning deadlines; a very sick friend. Now, this morning, I need to apply for unemployment, as Maine has finally opened applications to the self-employed. The site opens at 8 a.m. Any guesses on how soon it will crash? Or how much time it will suck out of my day?

Anyway, I had a good night's sleep, and Eric's line on the marquee cheered me immensely. It's hard to explain how cathartic it's been, this opportunity to teach in my homeland . . . and to have the work treated as important, as vital, as worth public celebration. I spent so many years up there being scoffed at--not by students but by administrators, department heads, parents. So to see a student poet's words on the biggest sign in the county! That is a wonder and a joy.

Today, we'll have rain and wind and rain and wind. But something has turned in the weather. When I stepped outside this morning, I felt a new sort of breeze, softened air, denser humidity, though the temperature's not much warmer than it has been. Do you remember those moments in the Mary Poppins books when the world suddenly becomes odd, and everyone walking around in the park senses that a change is coming, and then suddenly Mary shows up on the end of a balloon string? That's the kind of morning this is.