This weekend I started reading a book that my mother gave me for my birthday: Colm Toibin's Mothers and Sons, a collection of short stories. I'd never read anything by him before, and neither had my mother. But of course, given my circumstances, she found the title compelling.

So far I've read all but the final story in the book, and I have to say: I'm amazed. These are remarkable pieces, elegantly constructed, and tonally reserved, and also deeply distressing. Each story's mother-son bond is very different; sometimes nearly incidental, sometimes a key element of the plot--but always it vibrates into the story, rather like the plucking of a string into a room. This is the best collection I've read since Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock.

Today is the day I can the sauerkraut that's been fermenting on my counter, administer a second dose of brandy to the Dickinson black cake, and finally get around to watching Fitzcarraldo.

Or it's the day I decide that the sauerkraut needs to ferment for another week, forget to brandy up the black cake, and get dragged to Skowhegan to sit through Unstoppable, a movie whose trailer hints that I will be required to squirm through 2 hours of watching handsome leading men hang death-defyingly off the side of a speeding train as the soundtrack bellows, "Whumpf!" to accompany sudden dramatic camera action. Where is Buster Keaton when I need him?

from The Prelude

William Wordsworth

. . . But who shall parcel out

His intellect by geometric rules,

Split like a province into round and square?

Who knows the individual hour in which

His habits were first sown, even as a seed?

Lines like these are why copying out all of The Prelude, word for word, has not been a waste of time.

Quarter of seven: a blank morning, and the barn dog is barking, barking, barking. Now a car murmurs past on the road; a truck bustles behind; and then a fading into the east, and then silence. Even the dog collapses to stillness. There is no wind. The trees are mute against a dishwater sky.

Yesterday afternoon I could not write one useful word.

As Wordsworth reminds me, "Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind, / If each most obvious and particular thought, / . . . / Hath no beginning."

As you can see from this blog's suddenly expanding "Upcoming Appearances" section, I've gotten some invitations recently, and I've also had a few conversations with people who want to do a shared reading with me but don't yet have a place worked out. So if you have a venue--a church, or a school library, or a living room, or a street corner, or whatever--and are in need of a poet or two, just ask.

Lately I've been feeling as if my entire private life has been slotted into tiny gaps among driving boys to piano lessons, basketball practice, and tooth doctors, and washing boy clothes and cooking boy meals and sweeping boy dirt off the kitchen floor. Or maybe all this actually is my private life. Frequently it's hard to tell. In any case, should your venue require a poet, the event will be a nice change from peeling potatoes.

Here's a poem from Crimes that sums up how I'm feeling today. Chalk it up to the headache, or maybe being surrounded by people who eat all the baking chocolate and don't know how to clean hair out of a drain. Not that I don't adore them anyway. . . .

Aubade

Dawn Potter

And what about the small eye, Walter?--

the leaves of grass you overlooked, winter

lichen clutching fence posts, a draggled

dead squirrel in the snowbank, the red

letters of my name, serif by slant?

It was bliss you sighed, panted,

howled for: the View from Space--

big comet Walt chasing Madam Eos

across a streaky sky, old guilty dawn

tempting another kosmic shaman

to lurch word-drunk from the rafters . . .

oh, I grieve for every morning-after

groan rising from your sallow bed

as I fire your cookstove, bake your bread.

My friend Allison, who is also one of our Moby-Dick readers, was at the library renewing her copy of the novel when the librarian recommended this event: a 25-hour Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Personally I think it sounds distinctly unpleasant, though I have visited the museum before, and the half-sized whaling boat mentioned in the press release is undeniably charming. I had a hard time restraining my children from swarming up the mast.

I've heard about Paradise Lost marathons too, and I don't want to go to one of those either. I mean, I love hard books and all, but I like to take a few breaks now and then, to recover my senses and breathe the fresh air. However, maybe you feel differently about spending all day and all night listening to a cast of volunteers stumble through an apparently endless work of literature. So if you're planning to rush down to New Bedford, let me know how it goes.

Don't I sound like a philistine? Actually, it's sort of refreshing to sound like one. After all, I'm usually so shamelessly book-ridden.

I don't know what the weather's like at your house, but it's pouring rain here today: and I will spend it editing and then driving a kid to the orthodontist, where I'll languish in the waiting room, attempting to read Moby-Dick while being surrounded by teenagers with crooked teeth. Meanwhile, Ishmael will wander off into a tangent about artists who draw bad pictures of whales, and a confused housefly will bonk, bonk, bonk against the ceiling, and the slumping teenagers will mutter at their iPods. C'est la bluestocking vie.

Robert Frost at Bud's Shop 'n Save

So yesterday, after I'd finished working, I drove to Dexter to see if I could track down any citron for my Dickinson black cake. Dexter is a small town with a small grocery store, but it's been occasionally known to have unexpected items such as basmati rice, and I figured that citron wasn't as long a shot as weird rice from Pakistan.

At noon on a Monday, Bud's is a peaceful place to shop. All the scornful high school checkers are still in class, so the staff consists solely of fiftyish women who lean against their un-busy cash registers and gossip mildly about the weather, and deer hunting, and so-and-so who's up to Bangor to have that balloon thing done to his heart. Nonetheless, odd things do happen at Bud's. For instance, once I was standing in the checkout line behind a very young couple in Amish dress. They couldn't have been older than 20, at least if one judges by the husband's attempt at a manly beard, which was wispy and unprepossessing, to say the least. Anyway, they were buying two items: a dozen eggs and a package of Oscar Mayer baloney. I found this purchase obscurely shocking. Baloney! Shouldn't they be home collecting eggs and hanging hams in the attic? Why were they in Bud's buying cheap lunchmeat?

But yesterday, there were no junk-food-eating Amish couples to distract me. Having, quite unusually, remembered to bring along my reusable bags, I dropped them onto the conveyer belt and started unloading my cart (and, by the way, Bud's does have citron if you're looking for some). Along the way, I happened to glance up, and then I noticed that the bagger was reading one of my bags.

Now, this was a bag I had purchased at the Frost Place last year, merely because I hate the way I look in t-shirts yet felt I should make some donation to a place I love and that is kind enough employ me. It's a black canvas bag with Frost's signature printed on one side and a very short poem on the other. (I won't reprint it here because it's still under copyright, but it's called "The Secret Sits" and is easy to find.)

Anyway, here I was, in Dexter, Maine; here I was, unloading bananas and a gallon of milk onto a conveyer belt at noon on a drizzly November Monday; and not three feet away from me a sweet-faced, middle-aged woman was not bagging my groceries because she was busy reading a Frost poem.

Eventually the woman at the cash register asked her what she was reading on the bag, and the woman who was supposed to be bagging but wasn't said, "I'm reading Robert Frost." And then the woman at the cash register nodded peaceably, as if that were a perfectly understandable thing to be doing while one works a shift at Bud's Shop 'n Save.

So, for a moment or two, we all three shared some cozy smalltalk about Frost and New Hampshire, until I said good-bye and hauled my citron et al. out to the car and went home and made Dickinson black cake.

But think of it! a little conversation about Frost with two clerks at the grocery store! Sometimes this world is more wonderful than we think.

I'll be working on a copyediting project this morning; but this afternoon, if all goes according to plan, I'll be baking my annual batch of Emily Dickinson's black cake. For those who don't know the story, my mother-in-law used to be the curator of Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. While she was there, she reworked Dickinson's original recipe into modern proportions; and I have since fiddled with it myself. Baking, like language, is changeable in all seasons.

Em's black cake is an aged, brandy-fortified fruitcake that is composed primarily of currants held together with a butter-rich batter. Usually I also add some golden raisins and chopped citron, although this year I cannot seem to track down any citron in local grocery stores so I may need to leave it out. Anyway, here's the recipe again.

And meanwhile, I'll leave you with this tiny, two-line poem scrap, undated and aptly ambiguous.

Poem 1707

Emily Dickinson

Winter under cultivation

Is as arable as Spring.

Emily Dickinson’s Black Cake

2 cups all-purpose flour

½ tablespoon baking powder

¾ teaspoon ground nutmeg

1¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

1¼ teaspoon ground cloves

1¼ teaspoon ground mace

1 cup butter, softened

1¼ cups brown sugar (turbinado or demerara sugar is my preference)

5 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla

¼ cup brandy

¼ cup molasses

2½ cups golden raisins

3 cups currants

1½ cups chopped citron

extra brandy for brushing onto the cakes

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.

Grease 3 full-size loaf pans (or 1 full-size loaf pan and 4 mini-loaf pans) and line the bottoms and sides with parchment paper cut to fit. Grease and flour the paper-lined pans.

Sift together the flour, baking power, and spices.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until they are fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat in the vanilla.

With the mixer set on its lowest speed, beat in the flour mixture alternately with the brandy and molasses, beginning and ending with the flour.

With a wooden spoon (or, even better, using the dough hook of your electric mixer), beat in the dried fruit and the citron.

Divide the mixture among the prepared pans. Bake the full-size loaves for 1½ hours; check the mini-loaves after 1 hour. The tops should be firm to the touch, and the sides should have begun to pull away from the pan.

Leave the cakes in the pans to cool completely. Then remove and peel off the paper. Brush the cakes on all sides with brandy, and wrap them tightly in foil. Store the cakes in a cool place for at least 2 weeks, opening the packages after 1 week to brush them again with brandy.