Yesterday felt like a first step back into normality for me, at least insofar as doing productive work. I edited most of a chapter, finished judging a poetry contest, and spent an hour on the phone with my friend Teresa, conning over various translations of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." Teresa and I used to have a telephone-talk about poems once a month, but now we're tightening our schedule to every two weeks. We're both craving more intensity, not just for the sake of the poems we're studying together but for the sake of our own writing. Self-motivation is not something I've struggled with before. Since I first figured out I needed to be a poet, I've driven myself forward into my vocation. But this crisis has upended me: my worry spirals into anxious household management, and I need to find some way to rediscover my private voice.

This morning's aid: yoga at 9 a.m.. Last night my yoga teacher sent me a note saying that she is starting regular Tuesday-Thursday classes via Zoom. I have to say I hate the way life is shifting to video. But apparently that is going to be the only way to do lots of things for a long time, so I am trying to adjust. Tom has even figured out a small studio-ish arrangement for me so that I can take part without seizing up in horror at how terrible I look. That's the big problem: video triggers my vanity in the worst possible way. There's no way to avoid the fact that I'm 55 years old and look like it. When I can't see myself, then I don't care. When I can, all I can focus on is ugliness. 

Apparently this post is exuding stress. I apologize for that. What calm can I share instead? How about:

I looked out the window yesterday and saw a turkey in my back yard. I have never seen a turkey in Portland before. It was large and perplexed and seemed to enjoy pecking up something or other along our fence line.

Cafe Quarantine served split-pea soup last night, which is a most delightful comfort on a rainy evening. (Side dishes: toasted leftover cornbread, raw beet slaw.) Tonight: penne with shrimp, grapefruit salad.

My son is a trash-talking Scrabble player who loves to trounce me. The flip version of this: I raised a good speller who knows a lot of words. Success!

Tom and I have always been solid partners in bad times. He is the prince of my heart. I am grateful for his patience, his kindness, his wit, his resourcefulness, his stamina, in every hour of every day. 

Here's a poem from Chestnut Ridge, a small paean to everyone who manages to keep loving one another in these dark hours.

Saturday Night in Connellsville

Dawn Potter

Because, across a crowded table,

the man you have loved for twenty-five years

catches your eye and breaks into a smile

so bright it could light up the Yukon;

because, as you smile back through the candle flame,

your lanky fifteen-year-old leans all his wiry,

vibrating weight against your shoulder,

and your chair shudders and your neighbors laugh;

because when you put your arms around your boy

and press your cheek into his bristly hair,

he reaches for your hand and holds it against his own cheek

and doesn’t let you go;

because the man on the tiny stage dances

over the guitar strings as if his fat hands

are as fragile as the snowflakes

that sift slowly from the unseen sky; 

because the crowd breathes alongside you

in easy patience, in careful, quiet joy;

because even time has paused

to shift its flanks and listen,

you say to yourself:

I will remember this.

I will remember this forever. 

[from Chestnut Ridge (Deerbrook Editions, 2019)]

Today, the classic Monday-morning scenario that everyone hates: Tom forgets to set his alarm, we oversleep by an hour, the next 45 minutes are a flurry and a panic with lunch slapped together and breakfast wolfed and T rushing out the door . . .

But now it is quiet.

I fell asleep last night to the sounds of thunder and lightning and the rattle of sleet, a strange but strangely soothing combination. Now there's a steady drizzle, and in the gray first light I can see my cat digging a hole in my garden, a rain-coated neighbor stepping out for a double-dog walk, the sodden grass greening.

In a few minutes, I'll gather myself together: start a load of laundry, wash breakfast dishes, make the bed, take a shower, open a manuscript file, and begin the picky prissy rigamarole of copyediting. Paul's classes start this morning, so our daily schedules will change--I hope for the better. I've had such a hard time concentrating on my work, both paying and personal. That's in no way his fault. But maybe the knowledge that both of us have exterior obligations will help me use his class time constructively for myself.

The news is bad. The news is worse. But the wet air is full of bird song--cardinals, mockingbirds, robins, a white-throated sparrow--and yesterday, before the rain, I discovered that my peas are up.



Spring

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.


What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

I slept late again this morning . . . not with the hammer-to-the-head effect of Friday night's coma, but still much better and longer than usual. Outside, the sky is drear. We're forecast to get rain and sleet by late morning, with the storm lasting all day and night and into tomorrow. It will be the sort of day for a troupe of high-spirited aristocrats to clatter into the yard of a snug inn, to the joy of the innkeeper's widow and the consternation of the local drinkers. who are all sitting around the roaring fire telling weak jokes like 19th-century versions of Midsummer's Rude Mechanicals. 

Unfortunately, with social distancing, the inn is closed. The local drinkers are dozing at home in front of their own fires, and the aristocrats have all been hospitalized after catching the virus at a society ball, and the innkeeper's widow, who thought she'd finally managed to wriggle out from under the load of crushing debt her husband had bequeathed her, is now crouching over her sputtering laptop and typing poorhouse.com into her web browser by the light of a single tallow candle.

Here, at the Alcott House, things are not so dire. In fact, I've been feeling pretty fortunate. Yesterday I went for a 6-feet-apart-at-all-times walk with an old friend, who, on top of everything else, is scheduled for cancer surgery later this week. What do I have to complain about? Nothing. We still have a little income. We still have food. Our house is rain-proof. Our tempers are easy.

Speaking of food, I think I forgot to update you on Cafe Quarantine's menu. Last night we had potato gratin (shredded potatoes, sautéed onions, sage, red pepper flakes, parmesan, eggs, milk), a tomato and cucumber salad, and angel cake with blueberry sauce and sweetened yogurt. I made the angel cake from my freezer stash of leftover egg whites, which I've been collecting over the course of the year. Usually I save our annual angel cake for strawberry season, but my boys needed a treat and I needed the freezer space.

Tonight: a small ham, cornbread, roasted Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes (yes, we're back to the root vegetable stash), another serving of angel cake.

Today, I suppose I'll do some maintenance housework: bathrooms at least, and some cat-fur vacuuming. I'm not going overboard. I want this weekend to feel like a break in the pattern. The three of us are planning to watch a movie together: maybe Pietro Germi's 1961 Divorce Italian-Style; maybe footage of the 1912 or 1964 Olympics (the Criterion Channel mysteriously features coverage of many old Olympic Games). The boy is in charge of choosing something that will entertain us all.

Here's a pantoum about weather and love. 

Epithalamion for Grendel

Dawn Potter

Cordgrass slashes rents into the wind, 

but I am waiting for my lover at the river. 

Close the floodgates: the tide is high 

and the one I love is mud and reeds, 

yet I am waiting for my lover at the river.

He strides into storms, he wades into pools of silt,

for the one I love is mud and reeds

and my hands long to cup his jagged face.

He strides into storms, he wades into pools of silt.

A scatter of fishes gathers in his wake. 

My hands long to cup his jagged face 

as herons bow to him in the saltmarsh,

as a scatter of fishes gathers in his wake.

Close the floodgates. The tide is high. 

Herons, bow to him in the saltmarsh.

Cordgrass, slash rents into the wind.

[first published in Vox Populi]

I fell asleep on the couch at 8:30 last night, woke up and dragged myself to bed, then woke up for real at quarter to 7, in full daylight. It seems that I was exhausted.

So much high-pitch managing: household, desk, emotions. Plus my longest bike ride yet: five miles, much of it gasping into a boisterous headwind. I guess it's no wonder I was tired.

But look at this challah my son made! It is bakery-level beautiful. And he coaxed me through our hard bike ride, and afterward we sat on the couch watching a hilarious documentary about the woes of the Seattle Mariners. He is a quarantine prince.

Tom is home today, thank goodness. Every workday glitters with anxiety, as much as we all try to pretend otherwise. Weekends loom as a kind of tree shadow, narrow respites from the glare.

The other day my friend, the novelist Tom Rayfiel, sent me a small essay of his that will appear in the Table Talk section of the forthcoming Threepenny Review. It's not yet available online, unfortunately, because I wish you could read the whole thing. And this is why:

[T]here is a world, not the quotidian series of negotiations and compromises that compose our day, but a sensationally other world we are more intimately in tune with than we are willing to admit. Lines of poems, perhaps for others sections of paintings, snatches of music (I can’t be alone in this, can I?), seem to provide jagged openings to this parallel, coincident state of being. They wink in and out of our spiritual perception, stars, not always visible, whole constellations, if we are lucky.

To know that humanity is out there, beyond my physical ken, creating work of this caliber; thinking so hard, so deeply, so sympathetically; wielding the tools of language with such delicacy and vigor; establishing the conversation between reader and writer; delighting in it . . . 

My hope for us thrives.

Good morning from early-spring Portland, Maine, where the breeze is sharp and the crocuses are beautiful. This is my third spring at Alcott House, and I've never seen them so bright and thick and crisp.

Here, in my inadequate rendering, you can see the spartan garden with its cheerful bouquets. Already, dog walkers and wagon-pulling young parents are stopping to admire the blooms and to inquire about my gardening state of mind. Everyone is so eager for simple sensory happiness. A crocus. A cardinal. My front-yard farm might be a community service this year.

Yesterday our college friend from Brooklyn called with an update on the NYC debacle. As he was talking, the distributor's truck was picking up unopened cases of beer from from his shuttered bar. My friend feels like it's inevitable that he'll get the virus, given his work environment. Plus, he's just put all of his savings toward paying his employees. Yet he didn't sound down and out. He spent much of the phone call telling me about the fun he and his husband were having, making one elaborate meal after another.

And it's true: there is pleasure in all of this, amid the fear and loathing. These bike rides I'm taking with my son: when would we ever do that otherwise? Yet when we shoot back up the driveway after a ride, both of us are beaming and red-cheeked, drunk on wind and sunshine.

It will be another sunny day today. I'll lug trash to the curb, hang clothes on the line, simmer a giant batch of chicken stock, edit a manuscript, mend a comforter. I've started rereading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, set along the Kennebec River in the years just after the American Revolution. I admire Ulrich as a historian of domestic life, and also as a prose stylist; and I know the Kennebec region well. It feels right to consider the past, at this moment when we're terrified about the future.

During our walk through the cemetery the other day, Paul was telling me about the Battle of Fredericksburg, a Union debacle, in which soldiers were stupidly deployed up a cliff face, where they were picked off by the Confederates. In Paul's telling, the surviving Union soldiers spent a cold December night clinging to those terrible heights. But strangely, miraculously, the Northern Lights were visible in Virginia. And so the soldiers spent their night of horror beneath that beautiful, unearthly glow.

I'm probably remembering this story all wrong. But the image clings, don't you think?

Well, Tom has received his work instructions. For now, the four-man crew will continue to frame at the renovation site, but all traveling subcontractors (plumbers, electricians, etc.) will be barred. According to T, the four are already dispersed around the house; they're not working on top of one another. The plan is that once they get to a point that requires subcontractors, they'll close down the job. Tom's not sure when that will be: a week, maybe more.

I'm trying not to focus on how nervous this makes me, both working and not working.

Still, yesterday was a banner day because I went for a walk with my neighbor. Yes, you read that correctly. We walked together for a couple of miles and carried on a pleasant conversation, all while easily staying at least six feet apart,  It can be done!

My older son tells me that Chicago smells like weed, which I guess is not surprising. People gotta pass the time.

Today will be sunny and 50 degrees. I'll hang laundry on the line and maybe sow some lettuce seeds. I'll finish editing a chapter. I'll go for a bike ride. I'll bake bread. Yesterday I picked up my meat order and broke most of it down into freezer packages. Thus, tonight at Cafe Quarantine: roast chicken, farro, a spinach salad.

Here's a poem that's not at all seasonal. But when I reread it this morning, I felt as if it might be enacting a version of our current moment: sitting alone, walking alone, thinking alone; and meanwhile the sounds of others, beating on the door. Both metaphor and not metaphor. Creation and disappointment. The inventions of loneliness. The world, inside.

A Listener Sends Six Letters to God, in Autumn

Dawn Potter

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

I am requesting your kind attention

to a perplexity, which is this:

that I believe I may be hearing

what otherwise cannot be heard,

and I am finding it necessary to become

a vessel for pouring this sound into the atmosphere,

if only I may have your assistance in the matter.

Dear Sir,

I pray you, accept this request

with all seriousness and haste.

Yours most truly,

and, with great care, he signed 

A Friend.

*

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

Today I trudged down the muddy lanes

that snake alongside the sluggish canal

or suddenly veer away, to writhe

among the narrow houses and shops

elbowing one another against the dingy

waterfront.

He paused. On his pen, a bubble of ink trembled.

You see I am avoiding

what I need to say.

Despite undue haste, I remain

The bubble fell, and blotted.

Your Servant.

*

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

For three days now I have been writing letters

to you. I trust you know that they are always

the same letters, though my words are different.

I am practicing my scales, and my hands are dirty,

and the piano keys stick in the humid air.

Nonetheless, I am

Here a fingerprint appeared.

*

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

Last evening, I walked, again,

along the canal and I felt

the crackle of my letter to you

as it lay inside my hat, I felt

the snag of the letter’s fold against

my hair, which, I admit,

is neither clean nor combed.

It was necessary to mail the missive.

The question was:

where were you most likely to receive it?

I chose to drop the paper into a farrier’s mossy well,

and perhaps you now hold it

in your dry, your supple hand.

Reveal to me a sign.

My landlady is importunate.

Impatient,

I am your humble

Here a small hole appeared.

*

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

In truth I am becoming weary of this chore.

I distrust myself.

Last night, while I was at the piano,

my landlady pounded the butt end of a rusty musket

against my chamber door.

To all appearances, she hates my sonata.

Perhaps you, with your finer ear,

will despise it also. I cannot pinpoint,

in these waning days, what, if anything,

I trust.

Yours, in difficulty,

and now the handwriting became a broad scrawl

One Who Attempts Clarity.

*

Dear Sir, he wrote at dawn,

Persistence is a reckless master.

This will not be my final missive, it will not.

Maintain your vigilance. Hunt for notes

tied to the highest twigs of trees.

I have torn the sonata into shreds

and floated them in the canal. They

are not the letter I meant to write.

I believe you understand.

A breeze blows across the piano strings

and the machine strums its private tunes.

They are not mine. Perhaps they are yours.

I do not hear my own in any gale.

[first published in Vox Populi]

Portland now has a shelter-in-place order, starting at 5 p.m. So Tom will be going to work today; after that, who knows? Construction is still listed as an essential service, but, clearly, renovating an empty vacation home is not one, though as today's definitions go it's also not particularly dangerous--not like bagging groceries. One friend's wife, a doctor, suits up every day in hazmat gear and runs coronavirus tests in a tent. Another friend works long hours in a group home, where social distancing is impossible. Tom's biggest danger is cutting off his hand with a table saw. Why should I worry?

That's one of the strangest elements of this crisis: the reconfiguration of risk. Today, logging is probably one of the "safest" jobs around. Out in the woods alone, just you and your chainsaw. Nothing to fear, except for dropping a tree on your head, or amputating a leg.

Yesterday I did manage, finally, to get some paying work accomplished. I finished up one editing project and shipped it to the press, then got a chunk done on another. I managed to start working my way through the stack of "read this, friend" items in my inbox . . . items I welcome, that I want to spend time with--poems, essays, family histories--but they all arrived at once, and I've been distracted by "survival," whatever that means. So many definitions are in flux.

Meanwhile, Paul has been watching online performances of Greek plays, trying to get through a week of "vacation" before his classes start again on Monday. Together we shoveled some snow and went for a walk and admired a toddler who was happily jumping up and down in slush. Alone in his Chicago apartment, James cooked a stew and went for an evening walk and cleaned both of his bikes thoroughly and mulled over new ways to attach his window blinds. Tom drove home from work and along the way stopped at five different grocery stores, none of which had even a single bag of flour. I did some mending. A mourning dove sang.

This afternoon I'll bake some bread, and tonight I'll make roasted butternut-squash soup (not sweet, but with garlic and sage), black-pepper croutons, and a big composed salad (canned tuna, hard-boiled eggs, capers, anchovy paste, greens, cherry tomatoes).

I'm thinking of you, in your own turmoil and tedium. Isolation is easy to achieve, nurturing solitude not so much. Yesterday, I shared the following poem with two friends who are struggling with deep fear and loss. Though I'm not a particularly religious person, I turn to George Herbert's poems--especially this one--as a stay and a solace in times of misery. It's a prayer, so maybe try saying it aloud. To me, Herbert's words in my mouth do feel like a gift from God. 

Prayer (I)

            George Herbert

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,

            Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

            The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinners towre,

            Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

            The six-daies world transposing in an houre,

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,

            Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,

            Heaven in ordinarie, Man well drest,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

            Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,

            The land of spices; something understood.