Morning dawns heavy-lidded and gray. A small rain suddenly rattles against the panes, a passing shower before the real storm settles in this evening. When I lean out the back door, the scent of wet lilac weights the air.

Today I hope to turn my thoughts back to my poetry manuscript. I've been mulling changes but for various reasons have been frozen in place, unable to make a move. Perhaps last week's crown experience has cracked the ice because this week I've gradually been feeling more able to address the issues. Or perhaps all I needed was a break from the collection, a chance to forget about it and then relearn it. Or maybe I've just been procrastinating. Who knows. The mysteries of making are legion.

In any case, I have rain, I have a day, I have a manuscript. Yesterday I caught up on desk-chore obligations. The housework is under control. The garden is wet. Nobody needs me to do anything else, as far as I know. There's no avoiding the manuscript. It's the task du jour.

I'm still reading Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. I've read a few of his novels before and they always make me uneasy. The characters are impossible to love, or even forgive. His ability to create such uneasiness in a reader interests me. If I can't enjoy the novels, I can feel their compulsion--how we watch, fascinated, as wickedness creeps under our doors. I try to look at how he makes these characters, how he lures my gaze.

The novel is not a cozy read, to say the least. Not that I'm addicted to cozy reads, but the book does unsettle me, and I wonder how my discomfort will affect my work with my own manuscript today. It surely will affect it somehow; reading always does bleed into life.

And writing, too, bleeds into life, changes it, makes a liar out of me. Last week, in my crown, I wrote that Ray never comes back to me in dreams. But then, last night . . . there he was.

Yesterday was mostly this-n-that desk work, and today will be more of the same: an editing project to finalize, a few arts commission obligations to sort through, the Haverford magazine article to fact-check, more scheduling to figure out.  I finished rereading the Strout novel and have moved on to Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which is completely new to me. I wandered through my gardens. I folded clean sheets.

I'm still tinkering with the sonnets and even as I work I can feel my brain returning to its unpossessed state . . . which is good because late-stage revision is basically impossible when I'm in the throes. I can make big, sweeping, re-see-everything changes, but the niggly details require a steadier state of mind.

So these routine editing projects, the publicity stuff I'm whipping up for the arts commission, the fact-checking: all of this daily-grind stuff does have a link to the crazy-making side of my writing life. It gives me a structural bridge. It gives me a box of tools. I can walk away from the generative chaos, turn back to look at what I've made, begin to see it more dispassionately, then reach for a plane and some sandpaper and start honing.

The weather was lovely yesterday--sun after rain; sweet, soft air. I mowed and trimmed outside, opened every window, washed floors, cut fresh flowers for the mantel, went for a walk, baked, read a Liz Strout novel, tinkered with the sonnets. I'm glad I managed to get so many chores done because this morning I need to return to editing. It's just as well to have a desk distraction: I feel bereft, now that the crown is more or less finished.

That's always the question: how do I live with myself when a big poem is over? I don't usually suffer this sensation of loss after finishing a smaller piece, but the long poems are so massively emotional. It is hard to know what to do afterward. My usual tasks and habits seem inadequate, even stupid. Why bother, if I can't have the poem back?

I'm exaggerating a little--really, I am managing; I have plenty of ways to keep myself busy. But I do temporarily lose my purpose after finishing a giant poem, and that is not a good feeling. I suppose it's analogous to coming down after a high; probably the same brain chemicals are involved.

So thank goodness for kind weather, line-dried sheets, a bouquet of white spirea overflowing on the mantel. Outside, a bluejay squawks. I miss my poem. 

Yesterday morning, just after I posted my note to you, I opened my long-poem draft and suddenly understood what I was doing: I was writing a crown of sonnets. I'm not sure why it took me until the thirteenth sonnet to realize that this was what was happening. It's amazing that the form found itself because there was zero preplanning or self-awareness involved. The poem is truly an organic construction; it insisted on its shape.

Some of you probably already know this, but a crown is a set of fourteen sonnets linked by subject matter, rhetoric, syntax, style, rhyme, etc., ending with a coda sonnet composed of the first lines of all of the previous sonnets, making a total of fifteen. They were popular with the great 17th-century sonneteers (Donne, for instance), and contemporary poets still occasionally turn to them. My friend Meg Kearney, for instance, has published two impressive crowns constructed with traditional meter and rhyme: one about a bad marriage and bad weather, the other about heart ailments both medical and metaphorical.

Though I often write traditional rhymed and metered sonnets, my crown did not want to fall into those patterns. It desired Shakespearean quatrains and couplets, but otherwise it demanded independence. By the time I recognized what I was doing, I had only the fourteenth sonnet left to write and the coda sonnet to construct. Both came quickly, and I didn't need to do much tinkering to turn the first lines into a coherent final statement.

In the aftermath of this, I'm still dizzy. If I had planned ahead to write a crown, I would have been self-conscious and purposeful in a guess-what?-I'm-starting-a-cool-project kind of way. Instead, the crown kicked down my door and held me hostage for most of a week, and it didn't rip off its mask until just before tossing me into the streets.

And now I have this thing. And now I don't know what to do with it.

There are few things more luxurious than waking up beside an open window on a Monday holiday in high spring and lingering drowsily in bed as the rain that has been falling all day and all night gently drips and patters. Even Chuck the breakfast enthusiast was willing to dawdle.

Such a lovely weekend: I don't know how it could have been better--lots of time with T on the beach, in town, around the house; the gardens in spectacular shape; a slow reread of Joyce's The Dead; and yesterday morning I may have reached the end of the long-poem draft . . . in any case, the time has come to step back and consider what it has become.

I write these words and I instantly imagine someone frowning: ready to point out that my private gladness ignores national terrors, heart-tearing Gaza, the unhoused woman in the rain, the porcupine crushed by a car, customs officers dragging away a young man, a child afraid of her father . . . oh, there is so much to write . . . the list drags on and on. 

Does joy equal callousness? As a child I learned: the cup is always half-empty; distrust pleasure; be more afraid. 

Recklessly I cannot help myself. I love to be alive.

I've spent most of a week writing a long-poem draft about death.

The beach and marshes at Laudholm Farm never disappoint. Yesterday's bird du jour was the willet, but we also saw piping plovers and least terns along the shoreline, and the thickets were dense with warblers.

T and I have been in a hanging-out-together mood, so yesterday was mostly a play day. Sometimes a holiday is a chance to wander off into our own individual projects--also a pleasure and a need. But for whatever reason, we're arm in arm this weekend. I didn't write at all, or do much work of any kind, other than weed the backyard gardens and make dinner. He didn't work on photographs. We idled together, and walked, and visited the Goodwill, and played cards, and took communal naps, and listened to the Red Sox lose again, and petted the cat, and admired the cardinal in the birdbath. 

Today, rain is coming in, and we're thinking of going to the movies. I'll make chicken noodle soup for dinner. Chuck will coax me into lighting a fire in the stove. I'll reread Joyce's The Dead, and maybe weed the frontyard gardens before the drizzle begins.

Meanwhile, the long poem shimmers in my thoughts. Even when I'm not writing, I feel it shift and blink and shrug. I wonder when it will let me go.

Today may be the only non-rainy day of the long weekend, but we can't go canoeing because Tom's truck is out of commission. So we're going to grab an early breakfast at the Palace Diner in Biddeford and then drive down to Laudholm Farm to walk along the salt marsh and the beach. Bird life should be in full swing, and maybe we'll get lucky and glimpse some harbor seals as well. I am forever hopeful.

I worked on my long-poem draft for most of yesterday, coming up for air now and then and finally, by midafternoon, setting it aside entirely and trudging out to the garden to do a round of weeding. The draft is six pages long now, and the form is still holding strong: interwoven American sonnets, Shakespearean stanza breaks, the words pouring directly from fingers onto laptop. Almost always I write long poems directly onto the screen--the form demands immediate visual clarity, and I'm usually composing so intensely that my handwriting can't keep up with my thoughts.

I don't know when it will be done. When taking a rest, I've been breaking off in the midst of a stanza so that when I return, I can propel myself instantly back into the stream. But at some point the final couplet will make itself known, and then everything will come to a halt.

As I've been writing, my thoughts have wandered to Dante, to Joyce's The Dead. When I am in the throes of a long poem, everything seems to speak to it: the old cookie jar on the kitchen shelf, the pile of LPs beside the turntable, the ants bustling up and down the walkway. The windy strand, warblers fluttering among the beach roses . . . no doubt they will muscle in as well. All the world becomes an allusion to whatever it is I'm struggling to say.

Regular life: Eating eggs and home fries and listening to rockabilly at 7 a.m.  Driving past dinosaur-themed mini-golf. Peering out into the marsh at nesting geese. Forgetting I've got laundry to fold. Remembering what it felt like to bounce on that squeaky desk chair in Grandmom Potter's back room. Writing an unwieldy poem.