It's cold and windy and unspringlike in central Maine, which is pretty typical for early April but annually disheartening. Two and half hours down the road, in Portland, crocuses are blooming, daffodils are budding, but here the lake is still patchy with ice, road dirt spins in little tornadoes, and the gray breeze is raw and urgent. I haven't driven on any gravel roads yet this season, but most likely they're rutted and potholed and greasy with thaw. That's spring in this neck of the woods: raw wind plus mud. I have written a hundred poems about central Maine spring, and all of them are amazed by its pigheadedness.

As always before dawn, log trucks are roaring through town. A little snow is forecast. I am lying in bed thinking about words and the fact that I forgot my gloves at home. 

This is the poem my son wanted me to read at the statehouse:

Spring on the Ripley Road

 

Knick knack, paddywhack,

Ordering the sun, 

Learning planets sure is fun.

                        —Paul’s backseat song

 

Five o’clock, first week of daylight savings.

Sunshine doggedly pursues night.

Pencil-thin, the naked maples cling to winter.

 

James complains,

“It’s orbiting, not ordering.”

 

Everything is an argument.

The salt-scarred car rockets through potholes,

hurtles over frostbitten swells of asphalt.

 

James explains, “The planets orbit the sun.

Everything lives in the universe.”

 

Sky blunders into trees.

A fox, back-lit, slips across the road

and vanishes into an ice-clogged culvert.

 

Paul shouts, “Even Jupiter? Even foxes?

Even grass? Even underwear?”

 

Trailers squat by rusted plow trucks;

horses bow their searching, heavy heads.

The car dips and spins over the angry tar.

 

James complains, “I’m giving you facts.

Why are you so annoying?”

 

The town rises from its petty valley.

Crows, jeering, sail into the pines,

and the river tears at the dam.

 

Paul shouts, “Dirt lives in the universe!

I want to be annoying!”

 

Everywhere, mud.

Last autumn’s Marlboro packs,

faded and derelict, shimmer in the ditch.

 

James says,

“When you get an F in life

it’ll be your own fault.”

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

Monday has rolled around so quickly: I feel like I was packing for Vermont just moments ago, and now it's a week later and I need to pack for Monson.

Fortunately the weather looks decent for driving. Our class can't afford any more snow days: we're rushing to get work finished for the kids' gallery show, though I have to say the kids themselves have been incredibly responsible about submitting their chosen pieces, which is not always the case. Tomorrow we'll be considering titles for individual works, doing last-stage revisions, and meeting with the visual art students to discuss an overall title for the show. Then, during our off-weeks, I'll copyedit and format everything and we should be ready for the public.

The end of a school year is always poignant: I like being around young people, like getting to know them as writers and thinkers and bundles of emotion. Yet within a few weeks they'll scatter and I'll likely never see most of them again. That's the tale of teaching, but it still makes me a little sad.

This morning I'll finish the housework I didn't finish yesterday. I'll go for a walk, and I'll read my McMurtry novel and some Aurora Leigh. I'm briefly between editing projects, so I've been trying to stuff in a few other tasks while I've had the chance. One is to schedule a new Poetry Kitchen class for midsummer: "Syntax as Spark: Poets Learning from Prose." I posted it yesterday afternoon and it's already half full, so snag a spot soon if you're interested.

Once I get back from Monson, I'm hoping to have some plain open hours this week to write and to garden. I haven't had much opportunity to do either, and I'm in need of both.

Oh, and before I forget, I want to tell you about an event on Friday evening, when several members of my Thursday writing group will be reading at Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, Maine. I'll be in the audience, not performing, but all of us will be available to talk about our community writing practice and to offer tips for creating a circle of your own.

I woke to rain, and now I sit under lamplight listening to drops tick the panes, tap the vents--a steady unsteadiness, regular yet irregular, and this is one of the beauties of water, I think. Whether in torrent, in tides, in speckled rain, it is forever the same, forever different.

Today is Easter, but if you're not a churchgoer and you don't have kids at home or family nearby, the holiday is easy to elide. My son, who is a parishioner at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn (Whitman was there, Lincoln was there, Beecher was there!), likes to tell me about his Lent and Holy Week obligations during our phone calls. For him, Easter is the culmination of an annual drama: the slow rising action toward a pinnacle of sorrow; then the denouement of release. It is a good tale, well paced, emotionally rapt. I'm glad it has mattered to people for so long, very glad it matters so much to him.

Yet Easter as festivity has sloughed away from me. No colored eggs or baskets these days; no big hot cross bun breakfasts or ham dinners. I will roast a chicken tonight, but I often do that on a wet Sunday evening. Mostly, today, I'll just be happy to be home and not in the headlines.

Yesterday was a continuance of crazy, albeit in a different mode. People saw the laureate announcement on the local news, in the local papers, on social media. My house is filled with flowers from friends and neighbors. My phone has (metaphorically) swelled like a tick, gorged with texts and emails. Maine makes such a to-do about the laureateship: it's startling. But people's minds will be elsewhere today, and I will sink back into obscurity . . . return to being a poet who mops floors and cleans out garden beds and peels potatoes and now and again considers a word.

So. This is the news. I've been named the next poet laureate of Maine.

I went up to Augusta yesterday, where Governor Janet Mills formally introduced me at the state's annual poetry month celebration. I stood in the Hall of Flags in the Maine Capitol. I was hugged by the governor. There was a standing ovation. I had to give interviews to the press. I have never in my life been in such a situation. As you can see, the experience has made my sentences choppy. The afternoon was hallucinatory, and I kept thinking I was in the wrong dream.

What can I say? Of course I am so happy and excited, equally nervous and impostery, also sure that I've bitten off way more than I can chew. And there's sorrow too--that Baron isn't here to know, that Ray isn't here to know: those two beloveds who, in such different ways, needled me into my life.

My five-year term doesn't officially begin until July, but I'll be busy before then, confabbing with Julia, our outgoing laureate, trying to find my footing in this more public realm.

And I can't help but think of my first years here in Maine: when I was laden with babies and homestead, when the poems first began to announce themselves. The governor read one of my poems at the event, and of all of them she chose this: my Maine origin story. It was happenstance, yet I woke this morning feeling as if I'd received a message from myself.

Home

 

So wild it was when we first settled here.

Spruce roots invaded the cellar like thieves.

Skunks bred on the doorstep, cluster flies jeered.

Ice-melt dripped shingles and screws from the eaves.

We slept by the stove, we ate meals with our hands.

At dusk we heard gunshots, and wind and guitars.

We imagined a house with a faucet that ran

From a well that held water. We canvassed the stars.

If love is an island, what map was our hovel?

Dogs howled on the mainland, our cliff washed away.

We hunted for clues with a broken-backed shovel.

We drank all the wine, night dwindled to grey.

When we left, a flat sunrise was threatening snow,

But the frost heaves were deep. We had to drive slow.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

 

Today I'm driving up to Augusta for a big poetry celebration at the state house. I expect the day to be overwhelming, but maybe that's just the introvert talking. Certainly there will be lots of readers, lots of dignitaries, and of course I am fretting over my outfit.

April, National Poetry Month, is always unpredictable. Sometimes I have a packed schedule; sometimes nothing. This round is suddenly shaping up to be busy, but then again the entire winter has been a frenzy, so what's new?

I don't know how other states function, but Maine makes much of poetry . . . partly because our current governor is a poet, but that's not the only reason. Poetry--at least the idea of poetry--just seems to be part of the ritual zeitgeist. It's a big state with a small population, yet poets are a significant demographic in the arts. And as became clear a couple of weeks ago, when I was speaking to teachers at the MCELA conference in Bangor, poetry also symbolizes a yearning, an emotional longing. Whether or not a person regularly writes or reads poems, the notion of poetry can be powerful.

Why, among all of the other literary genres, does poetry carry this particular aegis? We are a society of prose readers, if we read at all. Poetry is embarrassing and mysterious. It has no monetary value. Yet it continues to stand on its quiet hill.

Well, I'm home again, and glad to be here. Five nights at in my own bed, until Monday, when I head north again to Monson. At this point, such a long run of home nights feels like a miracle.

Today I'll be at my desk, working on class plans. I'll go for a walk, and wash sheets, and collect our CSA order, and bake a batch of brownies, and in the evening go out to write with my friends. Tomorrow afternoon I'll need to drive to Augusta for a poetry event at the statehouse. But this weekend, I hope, I'll be gardening.

Crocuses are up; scylla and primroses are beginning to bloom; last season's kale is unfolding new leaves. I cut a handful of chives for last night's dinner. I need to rake and pick up sticks and prep the garden boxes and figure out groundhog barriers and plant some seeds. I ought to take my mower to the hardware store to get the blades sharpened. I feel very behindhand with yard work, but one needs to be home and underemployed to make a head start, and that has not been my fate.

So it is pleasant to be sitting idly for these few minutes in my couch corner, alongside Big Chuck, who is happily filled with breakfast and curls sociably against my leg. I do have to work today, but at my own pace. Tomorrow will be chaotic. The weekend may be wet. All I can do is thread myself into whatever comes.

Just a quick note, as I've got to pull myself together for the roadtrip back to Portland. But it's never too late to be surprised by one's parents. Turns out my mom has a small crush on 1980s-era Cher and Nicolas Cage. She said, "Let's watch Moonstruck," so we sat around eating ice cream sandwiches and gazing at pretend Italian-Americans in pretend New York City fall in love to the soundtrack of La Boheme. 

It was a pretty good evening.