It is Tom's idea that we should try to sell those discarded books piled in our dining room, though I am doubtful that this will come to anything and am all for just hauling them to the Goodwill, however I defer and T loads them into various crates and laundry baskets and we drive downtown to Yes Books, a dark narrow crowded shelves-are-going-to-tip-over-and-kill-you kind of delightful used bookstore, except that there is no parking anywhere close, so we have to hoick our heavy book baskets up a long hilly block from the car to the store, which is hard and tiring but I do it, thank you, exercise regimen, and when we get inside the book man begins sorting through our books and he has an unimpressed look on his face and I am resigned to hoicking them back downhill again and I am trying hard not to look at anything on the shelves in case I am tempted to buy it, and then suddenly the book man says I will pay you $140 for this stack, and I am shocked--Hey, we actually made money off books, I say later, though T says More like recouped a few losses, which okay he has a point, anyway back to the bookstore story, when the book man asks Who should I make the check out to? I say Dawn Potter, and he says Oh, you're Dawn Potter, I have seen your poems, they come through here sometimes, and I am flustered, and as we're walking back to the car with the rejects T says You got to be famous for 30 seconds

A cool and cloudy start to the day. From my seat in the couch corner I watch a breeze shiver through the fringes of the neighbor's black walnut tree; yet when I twist my head to look through the other window, I note that the ash tree remains perfectly still.

The mysteries of wind and leaf. After living for more than two decades in the forest, I find that even in the city I am always watching the trees. Our houses, our tiny boxes, are so vulnerable, tucked up beneath these fairy-tale giants. Every day I expect a door to creak open in a maple trunk, expect Rumpelstiltskin or a witch or a talking squirrel to step forth, demand three impossible tasks, then pull me inside, drag me down into the cavern of tree roots, down to a glass-walled chamber where a golden key glitters inside a vial of breath and sighs.

These are the sorts of trees that inhabit my back garden, so I need to keep an eye on their doings.

I don't have big plans for the weekend, other than figuring out how to get rid of the castoff books that are still lining our dining-room floor. Yesterday I coaxed myself into dealing with two jobs that I never feel like doing: vacuuming out my car so I can drive Teresa and her husband north next week without being embarrassed by the piles of garden soil in the trunk; and wrapping the blueberry bushes in bird netting, which is always a tangle and an aggravation. Otherwise, it was a typical Friday-housework day. I cleaned the downstairs rooms, hung out sheets and towels, mopped the floors, took out the trash. I harvested escarole and Thai basil and cilantro and red onion and stir-fried them with roasted tofu. I read Erdrich's short stories and went for a bike ride and listened to the Sox play a terrible baseball game and strenuously avoided the news.

Gradually I am gathering myself together for next week's odyssey. The space where we'll be working is comfortable and efficient, with clean modern bathrooms, a good kitchen, plenty of tables and open areas, comfortable chairs, screens against the insects, a lovely view of the lake. It is a sensible and utilitarian space, but it is not a bookish place, as the Frost Place barn was. So one of my goals is to give the room at least a temporary gloss--strew it with books and flowers, create a nest for our participants, invite in the poet-ghosts. 

I know I can't replicate the old shiver of Franconia, but Monson has its own shivers . . . Thoreau, for instance, who traveled through these hills on his way to Moosehead Lake.

As the conference approaches, I find my sense of elegy increases. It's not like this will be the first time I've ever been away from the Frost Place: we were on zoom for three years during the pandemic, so I know what it feels like to be separated from the landscape. But I haven't had to come to grips with the power of a different landscape . . . one that is very close to the landscape of my Harmony homeland, the place where I learned to be a poet, yet is also a place in which poetry is a stranger. The history of the Frost Place is steeped in mountain and poems. The history of Monson is steeped in river and forest and lake and slate quarries and paintings. Poetry is the newcomer who is stepping out of the stagecoach, stretching its cramped limbs, breathing in the lake wind, wondering what goes on in this place.

I woke to a crisp 58-degree breeze--a May-like chill, as if we've backslid from summer into spring. It's Friday: recycling day, sheets-and-towels day, grass-mowing day.

I've been busy. My study is stacked with the books and papers I'll need to haul up to Monson next week--my own books to sell, the books I'll be teaching and reading from. I've been emailing back and forth with my publisher to discuss cover samples for the next collection. I've been reading Erdrich's short stories, a new Tessa Hadley story in the New Yorker, thinking again about the vast influence that fiction has had on my writing and my worldview.

There are days, I know you know, when political anxiety makes me feel like a turtle pulling into my shell. I'm trying to define the parameters of my shell this morning.

Anyway: sunlight! I dreamed of crowded rooms, and now I am sitting in small spaciousness, alone and quiet under a ripple of wind. Things are looking up!

Lines written on the cusp of my 60th year: My older son is on the cusp of his 30th year. We talk about our cusps over the phone. And then we talk about cats and home repairs and what makes a happy household partnership and why are Indiana highways so boring.

The everyday things! The dear humans! Lines written on the cusp of fear: Do not look at my phone. Lift my face into the breeze. Do not be afraid of exclamation marks.

Yesterday was a long day. G picked me up at 6 a.m. dropped me off after 6 p.m. I had barely slept the night before, and when we weren't in the car, we were in class. Nonetheless, it was a good day. I love teaching with Gretchen; heck, I'd be happy not to teach at all and just be her student. She's so good at what she does. And it was exciting to create a class in which ideas about physical theater bumped up against ideas about form and structure in poems. The teachers who'd signed up for the class were eager and engaged, and I was excited about the possibility of a more expansive integration of our teaching styles and subject matter. Plus, just hanging out with G is very high on my list of fun things to do.

But, as I said, it was a long day. Rockland is two hours up the coast from Portland, I'd slept horribly the night before. By the time I walked through the kitchen door, I was dragging, and I hadn't even done the driving. But T had started dinner--sauteed mackerel, roasted potatoes, watermelon salad. He even washed the dishes afterward as I lolled on the couch. And I slept hard all night, which was a big relief.

We're forecast to get showers today, and already the air is dense with humidity. Now that the Rockland workshop is behind me, I can turn my entire teaching attention to the Monson conference. So today I'll go through my materials one more time, make sure I've got everything organized and printed out, make sure I've got all of my conversational cues more or less at the ready, check in with my faculty, check in with the Monson Arts staff, etc., etc. Directing a conference is a big job: one-third administration, two-thirds teaching, myriad unmathematical thirds listening, comforting, advising, performing, cheering on, improvising, and mopping up tears. I need all of my strength at the ready.

Now, outside the window, a cricket clicks among the draping lilies. The garden is beautiful . . . freshly weeded, well watered, lush with health. It doesn't need any work from me today. So I will wander through the rain. I will pick flowers and peas and hunt for mushrooms in the cemetery. I will put laundry into the dryer and I will clean the upstairs rooms. I will answer emails and read the stories of Louise Erdrich and make guacamole with cilantro and onion and hot peppers from the garden. I will listen to the gulls wail as they circle up from the cove. This is Maine, in the waning days of June, and the air is scented with salt and roses.

 On the road all day teaching . . . talk to you tomorrow.

I got a lot done outside yesterday--backyard mowing and trimming, and then a thorough weeding of all of the back garden beds; plus, I pruned and tied up tomatoes, pruned the privet looming over the sidewalk, transplanted sedum into a few bare spots in the back . . . probably I did other things too that I'm not remembering. And then dinner was risotto with wild mushrooms, escarole, garlic scapes, baby red onion, and basil; a big salad; and lemon custard and strawberries for dessert.

Today, some class prep; a trip to the fish market; maybe editing, if an author gets her manuscript back to me. I need to pick peas. I'd like to work on poems. I should weed the vegetable garden and stake some collapsing flowers. I finished the Oates novel and now I've started a collection of Louise Erdrich's short stories. I want to walk up to the library and pick up the book on hold for me: Percival Everett's James.

After days of rain, summer will flame up again today, and the gardens are lush with life, everything on the edge of wild--swelling, splayed, collapsing, overflowing. And yet it's not even July yet.

All evening the northern New England weather service was sparking with tornado watches, tornado warnings, thunderstorm watches, thunderstorm warnings, but the sky stayed quiet in Portland, though the foggy air was as thick as marmalade.

I'd spent the afternoon winnowing, cleaning, and reorganizing the dining-room bookshelves (fiction, memoir, essays, biography), a massive undertaking made easier by afternoon baseball on the radio and by frequent confabulations with T, who joined in to deal with the art book/natural history/science collections. Every book came off the shelves, every one was weighed on the keep-don't keep scale; then all of the keepers were vacuumed, all of the shelves and the walls behind them were vacuumed, and everything was reshelved according to a new and more sensible plan. (In his Covid whirlwind, my son had insisted on separating fiction and literary nonfiction, which meant, say, that half of Joan Didion was on one side of the room, half on the other--an irritating decision that I rectified. He'd also organized biographies by author instead of subject, an equally annoying approach. I love him but he is a bad librarian.) It was dusty and sweaty work, and it took hours to finish, but we are feeling much happier now . . . except for the giant giveaway pile that is our next annoying project.

The puzzle, of course, is how did all of those books ever fit into that room? After stripping out hundreds, there's still not all that much extra space left on the shelves. I guess I'd really been cramming them in there.

Naturally, you must be wondering which author wins the prize for most number of volumes that Dawn owns. Though I have not actually counted each individual collection, I'm pretty sure that Iris Murdoch is the winner, with Anthony Trollope a close second. In the matched-sets division, prizes go to Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys: Dickens for sheer numbers, Pepys for elegance. Meanwhile, T invented a fine organizational strategy in which pseudo-science (phrenology, crop circles) slowly transitions into real science (physics, natural history).

But enough of books. Now the sun is just beginning to peep through the mist. It will be a treat to have sunshine, after four days of rain. Today I'll get laundry out onto the line and, once things dry off, try to catch up on outside tasks. I'm still waiting for bits and pieces of editing to come back from authors, and I've got some prep to do for Wednesday's big all-day road trip to Rockland, where I'll be team-teaching a theater and poetry class. Mostly, though, the gardens are calling and I am eager to answer them.