The moon is so brilliant this morning, floodlighting my dark kitchen, overexciting the cat. Now, as I sit here with my coffee, the moon peers through the living room window, round-faced and nosy, like an astronomical version of my Polish great-aunts.

It's a late-winter Tuesday in the little northern city by the sea. Crusty snow is retreating from the tree roots and foundations; the temperature is supposed to rise into the 40s. I wouldn't be surprised to see the first snowdrops unfolding in a few south-facing flowerbeds. And it's raptor courtship season: last year at this time daylight owls were swooping through the neighborhood grove known as Baxter Woods; noisy red-tailed hawks were spinning over the graves at Evergreen Cemetery. Now is the time when their sap begins to run.

My week stretches out before me. On the calendar it looks like an expanse of blankness, but that just means I don't have any scheduled responsibilities outside these walls. Desk work, desk work, desk work. Housework, housework, housework. I am itching to fiddle with a draft I wrote last week at the salon, and maybe that will be part of today. But mostly I have to keep my head down and chip away at the giant editing project.

I'm still rereading War and Peace; I'm moved and overwhelmed by it, as always. I'm still copying out Dante's Inferno, amazed by the coils of his imagination. I need to move forward into the next section of the 17th-century poetry anthology I'm reading with Teresa: the work of a poet I don't know at all, William Alabaster. Around the edges, I have been making chicken stock for the freezer, making minestrone, making pumpkin-buttermilk pudding, hanging laundry on the basement lines, filling the woodbox, sweeping the floors, making the bed . . . O, my realm, my mouse hole.

All day long, there is work, there are patterns--invention, intellect, habit, hands, the tug of muscle, the pant of breath. It is hard to find a hierarchy. Everything we do is everything we do.

Monday morning, and I feel like it should be Saturday morning. I need a day off, but I'm not getting one, for the tight schedule of a giant editing project waits for no one. So I will drink my small cup of coffee, and get the laundry underway, and trudge through my exercise class, and prop myself up at my desk, and undertake this day.

The weekend workshop was intense, as they always are. I love teaching and am exhausted by teaching. So much concentration: I'm sure the participants were equally tired. But after our afternoon session ended, I immediately went for a two-mile walk, and that helped me rest my eyes and my mind.

I am still amazed by the rigors of this art. Poetry is so demanding. As soon as I've climbed one hill, I discover an impassible swamp on the other side. I never find the answers, only one question after another. I love this about my vocation, but that doesn't make it easier.

Outside the window, a round moon is tangled in a silhouette of branches. The furnace mutters, the clock ticks, time slips by, slips by, slips by. Long ago, in 1948, Alcott House was a raw new cottage; long ago, in 2017, I wandered these rooms, at home and homeless; long ago, yesterday, I was a poet but, today, anything could happen. Anything.

It is February, and the days are lengthening, and my seed orders are arriving in the mail. In a month I will be outside in my chore coat, prodding the beds, opening the cold frame, hunting for snowdrops.

This was the scene yesterday morning, 7 a.m., 10 below zero, looking out at Fort Gorges in Casco Bay. I had never seen sea smoke before, so Tom drove us over to the Eastern Prom, where we used to live, so that we could experience it. Sea smoke is vapor that forms over the ocean in extreme cold, and what surprised me is how lively it was, strands coiling and dancing over the sluggish water. Behind these ghosts, the old 1812-era fort loomed like a dark memory.

This morning the temperature has risen to a balmy 14 above zero, and by tomorrow we're supposed to have highs in the low 40s. Our acquaintance with Siberia is over.

Yesterday's class was busy and talkative and engaged, so I think that's a good sign. This morning I'll be back at it: more writing, and then a revision session all afternoon, and then T wants to go out for Sicilian pizza, which sounds like a fine idea to me.

Tomorrow I'll slide back into the editing pond.

Fifteen below here this morning, actually a little milder than predicted. I'm pleased that the Alcott House can weather extreme cold so well, even with a less than ideal wood stove. I kept a fire going from noon till bedtime, set the thermostat's daytime temp at 65 degrees, and the house was very comfortable. Despite the cold, the sun shone hard all day, so the furnace didn't even have to do a ridiculous amount of work. If we'd had a real heating stove, with damper and catalytic converter and such, instead instead of this little doll's firebox, we wouldn't have needed a furnace at all.

This morning I got up in the dark, relit the stove, made coffee. I can feel the Arctic grip squeezing the house, probing windows and doors, tugging shingles and rafters. In the stove the new flames, licking up from the kindling, are tentative and frail.

I'm readying myself for an intense work weekend, two days on zoom, guiding a group through a series of narrative poems and writing prompts. As always, I doubt myself, at these moments before the work begins. Why do I always choose to teach what I don't fully understand?

I've got enough acquaintance with myself to know that I'll figure things out. But the disclarities are always unsettling, even as they are always useful, maybe always necessary.

This morning New England is bracing for a foray into the Arctic. At the moment the temperature in the little northern city by the sea is 19 degrees and windy. But this will quickly change: 7 degrees by 8 a.m., 3 degrees by noon, -4 by 4 p.m. Overnight we're supposed to reach toward -20, a picnic compared to the homeland, which will be angling toward -30.

This will be, by far, the coldest temperatures I've seen it in Portland, though in Harmony I once saw -40. As you know, I love weather, so I'm excited, though not sorry I won't have to carry firewood to the house or thaw out livestock water buckets five times a day. Instead, I'll get the wood stove going this morning, get a roast into the oven in the afternoon, and hope this isn't the kind of house where the pipes freeze.

I got the housework and groceries done yesterday; today I'll be washing sheets and editing, plus prepping for tomorrow's class, which keeps changing personnel but remains overfull: I had two new registrants yesterday. I have some hope of getting up early tomorrow and taking a drive to the ocean so that I can look at sea smoke in subzero temperatures, but I don't think I'll have time. Also, will my car start? In her youth Tina the Subaru could start in any old temperature, but she's out of practice.

I've got a couple of new poems up in the Hole in the Head Review, both of which arose from draft blurts written in my Thursday-night salon. As you can see, I've been wandering into strange new directions. It's been exciting to watch myself morph. I guess, to a degree, artists are narcissists, overly fascinated by themselves. But it is interesting to study one's own brain at work.

 It can be hard to predict what poem teenagers will fall in love with. So I've been very interested that my Monson kids, while liking most things I've brought in, have gotten most excited about the two oldest poets I've shared: Sappho and Cold Mountain (Hanshan).

I brought in Sappho early in the year, and I shared Cold Mountain with them yesterday. A ninth-century Buddhist monk, he traveled around China, begging, drinking, and carving his poems on trees and buildings. The kids were very moved by his work, and they loved imagining how Chinese characters would look in tree bark. We spent a long time talking about the beauty of alphabets. The poem I brought them (which I won't reprint here because the translation is under copyright) is a small song about busy people and a contented speaker . . . quite simple, clearly set long ago but also timeless, evoking the woods and a dusty road. I can't explain exactly why the students loved it so much, but they did.

I'm always very moved when a piece makes this mark on people. It seems to enter them like nourishment, like the food they've been waiting for all their lives.

* * *

I got home in the late afternoon, lit a fire in the stove, dealt with the offended cat. Eventually I made cream of tomato soup, with homemade chicken broth and the last of my frozen garden tomatoes. Tomato soup sounds like such a plain meal, but the real materials make it something grand yet very simple. It was a sweet and comforting dinner.

Today I'll be wading through piles of chores: laundry, grocery shopping, housework, editing, class prep for the weekend. But I think I'll go out to write tonight anyway. These Thursday-night salons have become so precious to me. Even when I'm overworked, they seem like the right thing to do.

Minus 7 this morning in the homeland. I woke, as one does, to the sound of heavy equipment . . . a solitary  front-end loader moving snow piles in the chill darkness. I'd been dreaming about playing in my old band, we were trapped in some sort of fraught situation, possibly in a castle; and now the covers were sliding off the bed, and a front-end loader was bleating, and cold was clawing at the doors.

Now that I'm awake and clean and dressed, life feels less melodramatic. The loader has finished its work, the lights in the general store have switched on, and in a few minutes I'll hat, boot, and glove myself and hustle across the street for coffee. A small sunrise gleams over the fire-station tower. Pale chimney smoke hovers like dragon's breath, and an empty log truck growls up Route 15 toward Moosehead Lake. Pickup trucks slide into the parking spaces in front of the store, and, look, the loader is parking there, too, headlights ablaze, as its shadowy driver slips from his cab and trudges inside, questing for small talk and breakfast sandwiches.

Yesterday evening I worked on some poem drafts, then wandered down to the Quarry Restaurant to pick up my dinner. The chef at the Quarry, Lulu Ranta, provides takeaway meals for the artists-in-residence at Monson Arts. She's also, amazingly, been shortlisted for a James Beard Award. "How did they find me up here in the boonies?" she marveled to me last night. But as I sat alone at my apartment table, reading War and Peace and eating some kind of incredible steak with wine and mushroom sauce, I thought that the James Beard scouts had made a pretty astute choice.

Then I watched about two-thirds of the musical Oklahoma, which is problematic, to say the least, but stars Shirley Jones, who grew up just outside of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in the same era that my mom lived there. Who knew that someone from Chestnut Ridge country could grow up to be the mom on The Partridge Family (and also the real-life mom of Shaun Cassidy, teen idol of my youth)? I felt I needed to spend some time with her.