Despite insomnia, I had a fun day with the kids. It was the last regular day of the program, and they spent the morning creating performances and the afternoon curating their gallery show. I'll see them twice more: next Friday for the opening, and then the following week for a makeup day when we'll be teaming up with the visual artists to do some sort of sculpture project. But the year-long arc I launched them on in September has come to an end.

What do I see? A cohort of kids who love working together, are game for any surprise prompt, will write for long stretches with great concentration, have risked new forms and emotional depths, have learned to look closely at their own drafts and make useful, creative decisions about next steps, feel pride in what they have made but also pride in their ability to make it new. As a teacher, I am a pig in clover. There is nothing more satisfying.

But today I veer into another lane. This morning I've got an eye appointment; then I have to prep for tonight's reading; then I have to experience tonight's reading. I'm so grateful a friend has offered to do the driving as both the pouring rain and the expectation of dilated eyes have been making me nervous.

The venue is apparently sold out, but I'm told there will be a livestream, if you're interested.

For some reason I slept horribly last night, despite the pleasure of peepers outside my window. Now I lie in bed listening to a woodpecker hammer and a grosbeak chirp, lulled by these familiar homeland spring sounds despite my insomniac school-day forebodings.

And at least there's coffee ahead, and a slowish drive up to Monson, and my fine students to greet me. 

And in Portland the cherry trees are in bloom--

What a gorgeous day we had yesterday! Soft air, birdsong, the flowering trees bursting into glory. I got sheets and towels onto the lines, the house cleaned, windows open upstairs and down. I worked at my desk; I baked pita for lamb sandwiches; I took a long a walk. Chuckie raced around the house with a breeze up his nose. Being alive felt like a sort of magic.

This afternoon I'll head north for an overnight in Wellington; then Monson all day tomorrow, the big PL event on Thursday, an interview on Friday . . . A fury of self-consciousness lies ahead, but this morning I'll walk with a friend, this evening I'll hang out with a friend, and a day with my high schoolers will be the perfect way to forget about myself.

I've been reading Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, dipping into Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Yesterday I plucked a Lahiri story collection out of a free library. Fischer's American Founders is still sitting on the coffee table, waiting for me to embark. Outside the gulls are wailing, and inside I am thinking about books, and upstairs Tom is reminding Chuck not to drink his coffee. Everything overlaps and intersects; each moment is thick with pollen. Chuck sneezes and Sebald's narrator lingers at a lonely train station in Sussex and Tom slices bread and Aurora Leigh says to herself:

Alas, I still see something to be done,
And what I do, falls short of what I see,
Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,
Worn bare of grass and sunshine--long calm nights,
From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,
Be witness for me, with no amateur's
Irreverent haste and busy idleness
I set myself to art! What then? what's done
What's done, at last?
                                  Behold, at last, a book.

That twingy, weird feeling I had yesterday got worse. I had no idea what was going on and was beginning to panic, until T looked at me and asked, "Are you having a migraine?"

He was exactly right. I have migraines so rarely that my body forgets what they're like, but every one of them has been associated with eye strain. Once T diagnosed my problem, I was able to relax and say, "Oh, fine," because there's nothing to be done with a migraine except lie on the couch with my eyes closed until it runs its course.

None of my migraines repeat themselves exactly. Sometimes I've had brief ocular ones: a half hour of color shards, a 10-minute splitting headache, and then they're over. This one had a bigger buildup (vertigo and shivers), but the headache itself was minor. I mostly experienced it as neurological hallucinations that were both interesting and unpleasant. Yesterday's color palette was deep magenta washing behind my closed eyes like thick rippled paint. At times my nose felt enormous; then the tips of my ears expanded like Spock's; then my teeth were too big for my mouth. I lay on the couch wondering if this might last forever, and for some sufferers it really does. But by early afternoon I was on the downside, and by late afternoon I was completely back to normal.

And now, this morning, I feel almost refreshed, probably from spending so many waking hours with my eyes closed. Fortunately, before the event, T and I had been in the process of problem-solving my eye strain/ergonomic issues. On Saturday, I'd driven to the mall to buy a keyboard and a mouse and then set up my workspace to improve my posture and eye-line. I wear trifocals, and that is much of the problem here: my eyes have to work hard to align themselves with whatever I'm looking at. So strain has been building, and "Voila," said my brain. "You have to lie on the couch and learn your lesson."

***

On another note: Jeannie, Teresa, and I have a new post up on Poetry Lab Notes. It's free for anyone to read, but if you subscribe, all of our new posts will come directly to you.

I'm feeling a little under the weather this morning--kind of shivery and twingy and sour-mouthed; no fever but something is going on. So it may be a quiet day, not that I had anything fancy planned. 

Yesterday I updated my computer operating system, and this morning, as I was beginning to write to you, I watched in horror as Apple's predictive text began taking over my meandering first words. I had a moment of imagining that my relationship with this blog had been destroyed before I figured out I could eliminate the evil tool in settings.

Why not give new users the option to turn on predictive text instead of making them turn it off? Why assume that what writers really want is to not write? Sure, there are plenty of people who are happy to let the computer do the thinking, but why can't they be the ones who have to go into settings and hunt down the button that answers their yearning?

Now daylight begins to arch over the roofs and trees. From my couch corner I crane up at ash tree branches that have suddenly, since yesterday, broken into bud. Spring shouts a new surprise every single hour.

Bet you wouldn't have come up with that sentence, predictive text.

Lenten roses are in their glory now, and species tulips and bloodroot are also lovely. The three ramps I planted without much hope during Covid are spreading beautifully among the bloodroot flowers, and I've even been able to selectively cut a few leaves for meals.

It's been so good to get outside, to relearn my gardening muscles, to idle by the wheelbarrow and watch robins splash in the birdbath. There is no such thing as catching up on garden chores: as soon as I finish, I have to start all over again. But overall the homestead is looking bright and neat and slightly crazy, which is how I like it best.

Yesterday Teresa talked to me about my new manuscript, a conversation that's left me nervous, gloomy, frozen, and overexcited, in about equal proportions. Ugh. Poetry. Why is it so hard? [You know I don't really mean that but, jeez, by this time you'd think I'd have figured something out.]

This poet laureate thing has already been a lesson in humility. I just don't know that much about poems, despite having spent the bulk of my life immersed in them. Who am I to be an ambassador for such a mysterious art . . . an art that is like water running through fingers, like air sifting through a screen.

Well, thank goodness for daffodils, and hot coffee, and Young Charles cheerfully pushing a sliver of kindling under the doormat. The poems settle into the cracks, rise like dust, barely visible but always present. Blink and you miss them. Blink and they're everywhere.

Yesterday I finished an editing project, hung out a big load of laundry, baked a batch of pumpkin bread, and got quite a bit done in the garden: weeded four beds and began on a fifth, trimmed grass, dug dandelions out of the gravel, even did some edging. It was satisfying to make so much progress; also satisfying to draft two decent poem-blurts at my writing group in the evening and then to sleep solidly all night long.

Those sorts of days are tonic. The work of my hands aligns with the work of my head; everything feeds into everything else. The poems exist because I dug dandelions out of the gravel, because I folded Tom's stiff, air-scented shirts, because the kitchen was fragrant with ginger and cinnamon. I don't know how to manufacture that synchronicity. More often than not, time is just chore slapped against chore, days as floating flotsam, obligations tangled together in awkward friction or unrolling in bland tedium. But when everything talks to everything else . . . when the work is the conversation: that is the sunshine.