I woke up in Wellington on Valentine's morning, after spending a chattery evening in the homeland with two of my best friends in the world. An inch of fresh snow had fallen, and the roads were dicey, and as I drove my phone kept dinging with love greetings from my family.

The kids, of course, were a delight--writing hilarious love poems based on a silly prompt involving conversation hearts. As encouragement I read them the text T had just sent me: "Sure sign of Valentine's Day: Hannaford [a grocery store], dude in flannel obviously on his way home from a manual labor job, glassy-eyed and clutching an orchid to his chest."

As I drove home, I could hear emails boinking into my phone and when I finally got off the road and read them I discovered that (1) a composer wants to put my sonnet "Confused Prayer" to music,  using it as lyrics for a song for mezzo-soprano and piano; and (2) the state poet laureate wants to hire me to teach a statewide online workshop as a pilot for a new project . . . "not just because you probably know more about poetry and teaching than anyone in the state, but also because you know both Maine's rural and urban experiences so intimately." As you might expect, I was floored by each of these offers, by the wording of them, by being seen . . . Do you know what I mean? about how odd that feels, after you've been trudging along, keeping your nose to the ground like a hound on a leash, doing the job you were meant to do, but not really thinking that anyone might be watching?

Anyway: so there was that, and then there was T again, who came home from work and said, "Let's go out to eat!" which is a silly thing to say on Valentine's Day when you don't have reservations anywhere, but we got lucky, and found a table in a Sichuan restaurant and ate dumplings and beef noodles and then strolled through downtown Portland arm in arm, admiring the lights and the faces.

What a good day. What a very good day.

The weekend was just what I'd hoped it would be--reading, walking, reading, walking: two spacious and fortifying days. As a result, I woke up early this morning, well rested and in shape for a busy week. Today I'll be editing, then driving north; tomorrow I'll be back in class, and then the long drive home. But I'm feeling pretty relaxed about all of it.

I got so much necessary reading done: a close study of William Alabaster's sonnets; a big chunk of War and Peace; three or four Hammett stories on the side. The Alabaster poems were new to me, and I found them very beautiful and moving. The Hammett stories are insane, and Tolstoy is a god, and after a weekend with this trio how could I want to be anything other than a writer?

Sonnet 15

 

William Alabaster (1568–1640)

 

My soule a world is by Contraccion,

the heavens therein is my internall sence,

moved by my will as an intelligence,

my hart the element, my love the sonne;

and as the sonne about the earth doth run

and with his beames doth drawe thin vapours thence

which after in the aire doe condence

and power downe raine upon the earth anon,

soe moves my love about the heavenlie spheare

and draweth thence with an attractive fire

the purest argument witt can desire,

whereby devotion after may arise,

and theis conceiptes, digest by thoughts retire,

are turned into aprill showers of teares.

"Princess Marya had two passions and therefore two joys."

Yesterday, when I came across this statement in War and Peace, it stopped me cold. Wait, I thought. Of course. Of course. But why is it that I hardly ever think of passion simply as joy?

It is so easy to look at someone else's preoccupations--a crazy obsession with cutting every tiny stick into firewood, or growing enough vegetables for twenty when there are only two people in the household, or shopping without needing anything--as wasteful and absurd. The self-righteous me grumbles, These people should care about something important/reasonable . . . which is to say: they should care about the things I care about. Yet "Princess Marya had two passions and therefore two joys." It is such a plain reminder. 

For here is the rest of the scene:

The health and character of Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky, during that last year after his son's departure, declined considerably. He became still more irritable than before, and all the outbursts of his groundless wrath fell mainly upon [his daughter] Princess Marya. He seemed to seek out all her sorest spots so as to torment her morally as cruelly as possible. Princess Marya had two passions and therefore two joys: her nephew Nikolushka and religion--and the two were the favorite topics of the prince's attacks and mockery. Whatever the talk was about, he always brought the conversation down to the superstitions of old maids or to the pampering and spoiling of children.

The prince is a complicated character, an intelligent, intolerable old man who adores his family but is unable to tell them so. Instead, he lashes into pettiness. His daughter is cowed and subservient to him, yet she has a secure inner life. She does not second-guess her passions. On one level, she is victimized by him. On the other, she is entirely free of him.

Perhaps this is what my passions allow me: a clarity within the muddle of my life. This is what I love. Perhaps joy is as simple as that.

Who am I to be self-righteous about yours?

I woke late this morning, late enough so that day was awake before me, blinking and wavering through the panes like a bleary young mother.

Now is the first hour of my first weekend off in what feels like a very long time. My plans are simple: Read. Go outside. Read more. Go outside more. Of course I'll need to stuff in cooking and laundry, firewood and floors, groceries and tidying, but the spacious hours will be mine.

I'm beginning this fine weekend by drinking two cups of coffee instead of one, and not thinking about to-do lists. Still, I'm also feeling uneasy and sad: a poet acquaintance has been diagnosed with colon cancer; and I know, via the experience of one of my dearest friends, that she has a world of suffering ahead. I don't know this poet well, but my thoughts keep radiating toward her, toward her children, as I sit here comfortably, with two days of contentment ahead of me. Fate is so unfair.

Meanwhile, day has pulled herself together. Her bleariness has vanished and now strips of sun paint the side of the neighbor's big house, the indecisive sky is considering blue, and the squirrels are up 'n at 'em, racing along fences, leaping branch to branch, quarreling over last season's maple seeds.

In a few minutes I'll get dressed, I'll go outside, I'll breath sharp air, and look for the flower spikes I glimpsed yesterday--the first hyacinth spears, the first snowdrops. Spring peers from behind the winter veil. I hunt for her everywhere. I lift my nose into the wind like a hound.

I'm working on a poem draft that is overwhelming me. I don't think, objectively, that it's a great poem. But on Thursday night it sprang from my pen, nearly fully formed; and after I wrote it down, a tide of exhaustion instantly washed over me, as if I all of my energies had coalesced to make it and now my body was finished. It's strange how muscular a poem can be, how physical its creation. As if the words themselves are immaterial. As if the birth is all.

 Last night's poetry salon was a party. Usually five or six of us show up; last night we had twelve stuffed into Zanne's living room, plates filled with food, small constellations mingling and making jokes about how to dredge up small talk. It was quite funny and also fun, though I wondered how the actual writing and sharing would go. Turns out it went beautifully . . . so many good drafts, and I also managed to write a good one, a scrawl that seemed to leap almost fully formed onto the page and made me feel dizzy afterward. This writing salon has been such a rich part of my life for the past year or so, such an important part. It makes me feel excited and humble and embraced, but also it's been a deep relief to tell myself I am glad I moved to Portland because otherwise I would not have this. My grief for Harmony has been real, but also a considerable burden. Grief is a stranglehold. I crave not-grief and also feel guilty about not-grief. But this writing salon has given me a place to examine and celebrate it.

* * *

Today, the editing project gets to stay in bed, or at least sleep late. I've got to focus first on class planning, and then I need to work on last night's poem blurt, and then I need to vacuum and wash floors, and then, maybe, the editing project can crawl back onto the desk.

Outside, the dark air glistens with fog, the remnants of last night's rain coiling into strings of mist and cloud. In a moment I will heave myself off this couch and start gathering compost and recycling pails for the curb; I'll strip sheets and load the washing machine; I'll remake the bed, I'll wash breakfast dishes, I'll undergo the exercise class, I'll trudge forward into dutiful engagement with daylight.

Still, all last night I dreamed about my new poem . . . I needed to hurry up and write it, or it would fade, I'd never find it again, it would be gone, a nothing, a wisp; do it now, my brain prodded me, do it now. But when I woke I remembered that the poem was real. I had it. It was on paper, it was saved, I hadn't lost it, my brain had been wrong. Just waking up to think It exists made me so happy. 

 T's alarm went off at 5:30, and I woke up, turned on the light, then promptly fell back into a dream about whizzing around in jetpacks and stuffing a roast chicken with a whole potato. Thus, I'm running a little late this morning, and am still half-wandering a dream landscape of flying people and peculiar meal planning.

But I'm upright now, armed with the small cup of coffee that will recalibrate me into daylight Dawn. Already I can feel nighttime Dawn oozing away into the gutters.

This week has flown by. On Monday I thought I had all kinds of time to hunker down with that editing project. And now, already, it's Thursday, and I've got a Monson Arts class to plan for next week, and bathrooms to clean, and and and.

Still, I've made progress, hunkered down alone in the house, and I'm looking forward to seeing people again . . . going out to write at the salon tonight, driving up to the homeland on Monday. This seesaw between strict isolation and easy chatter: it's a fortifying mix, at least for my particular constitution.

For now, though, isolation still reigns. Once T leaves for work, Alcott House assumes its workaday cloak: laundry on the lines, dishes washed, counters strictly empty, gleaming. The kitchen floor is swept, the shades are lifted, the white-linened bed is crisp and neat. And then, and then, when the space is prepared, I retreat to the words.

First I have to make the egg. And then I have to crawl inside the egg. But housework has always been a kind of muse for me.

 We got a skim of snow last night, just enough to coat stairs and roofs and intensify the moonlight. This morning, as I swept the back stoop in the dark, I got the sudden sense of lurking spring--behind the snow, behind the cold, a change is readying. I've already been feeling this during the day. Bird song has shifted from its sharp winter notes to a sweeter, liquid questioning; daylight is softer, more expansive. Yesterday I spied the first points of snowdrops breaking through a neighbor's frozen garden soil. It's February in Maine: winter is by no means gone. But the transformation is beginning.

I've been working hard this week, keeping my head down, my nose to the whetstone. Still, I've managed to save a little time for other things . . . my useful exercise class, walks to the library, poem revision, reading.  I've got too much stuff in my reading stack right now. I can't seem to tear myself away from War and Peace, but I've still got to finish Watchmen and buckle down to those Alabaster poems, plus I just picked up Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism at the library, as well as a collection of Dashiell Hammett stories.

Sometimes this ridiculous reading obsession really gets out of hand. Currently, I am working on a comic poem about struggling with Joyce's Ulysses, in which the speaker mournfully describes herself as "the champion reader of her generation." I know how she feels.

Anyway, today. More editing. More laundry. Lemon-marinated pork chops and roasted cauliflower for dinner. And a pile of books begging to be opened.