It was another brutally hot day driving yesterday, but the town cooled down a little over night, so this morning I turned off the A/C and opened the house windows, and now Chuck is happily ensconced beside the screen door. He survived his two bachelor days without problem: our neighbor dropped by to give him his breakfast and remind him that he was adored, and there are no signs that he reverted to his youthful gut problems while we were gone. But since our return, he has spent all of his time in our laps or in our bed or whirling around our ankles, so clearly he is relieved that the band is back together again.

And here comes Monday . . . housework, garden work, desk work, and an enthusiastic, still-a-little-bit-worried cat. Though we were only gone for two nights, I feel like I've slipped out of gear somehow. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing around here?

Now the big Chicago trip looms, and these remaining August days are scattered on the path like breadcrumbs.

The heat just keeps simmering, but yesterday after dinner T and I finally got out for a walk. This part of Vermont was settled as dairy country, orchard country--open rolling fields, orderly trees: a domesticated prettiness that is nothing at all like the scrabbled forests, compressed skies, and stony dooryards of central Maine. The residents of these places are equally different from one another. Still, both regions are labeled rural New England, as if merely not being city or suburb drops them into the same bucket.

I wonder if I would become a poet if I'd spent a quarter-century in the Champlain Valley instead of Somerset County, Maine. There's something so visually unchallenging about this landscape, whereas Harmony confounded me at every turn.

Of course there is struggle everywhere. I would have wrestled, no matter where I was. Something would have happened.

But what happened to me was the woods.

Dog in Winter

Dawn Potter 

 

Up the boggy headland, frozen now, where a stone fence

Submerged in snow and earth-sink hints at pasture

So long vanished that the woods are convinced

Grassland never existed, two bodies climb—one fast,

Black, doe-agile; one slogging and foot-bound

Like a superannuated tortoise.  Guess which is me.

Easy to badmouth my grace but oddly hard to expound

On the postcard beauties of our workaday scenery—

Giant pines draped with frosting, wisp of chimney cloud

Threading skyward, and behind the frosted window

A glorious wall of books, lamp-lit; a dear bowed head.

In tales, common enchantment always merits less than woe,

            And perhaps I should collapse on the stoop like a starved Jane Eyre,

            Pleading heat and mercy. But I earn my joy. I mean, I live here.

 

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

We arrived at my sister's place in Vermont just as night and a rainstorm were settling in. Gloria did beautifully on her longest adventure to date, and her fancy features--those blind-spot alerts, for instance--really do take some of the stress out of highway driving. I felt almost relaxed behind the wheel.

Things are unusually loosey-goosey here as my sister, who is her household's action-packed organizer, broke her ankle a couple of weeks ago and is more or less tied to the couch. So she won't be charging off into fast walks or rounding up everyone for Fun. And my parents certainly won't be. It will be a weekend of sitting, which is just as well because the weather is terrible--hot and drippingly humid. Yesterday, when we stopped at the rest area in New Hampshire around 6:30 p.m., temperatures were still in the 90s. I like all kinds of weather, but this stuff is a challenge.

I brought two books to read: Aurora Leigh and Dan Barry's history of the longest game in baseball history--the 33-inning game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that took place in Rhode Island on Easter weekend in 1981. I was a junior in high school at the time, only a few miles away from McCoy Stadium, so for me the book is an evocation of time and place as well as the tale of a game. The book is a bit sentimental, as sportswriting can be, but the whiff of early 1980s Rhode Island is hard for me to resist.

The humidity around here has become ridiculous, and the A/C, reluctantly turned on last night, has thus far barely made a dent.

We're both groggy this morning because we had our second bat incident of the summer, which was unfortunate as T has to work all day and then we'll be driving to Vermont--that is, I will be driving, as he has yet to sit behind Gloria's wheel and will be exhausted to boot.

At least I'm not too scheduled today, so I can grab a nap if needed. I'd planned to get the grass mowed this morning, but the humidity is so heavy that I can't stand even the thought of dragging that heavy trimmer around the yard. Things will have to stay as they are: it's not like we're the only house in town with wispy shaggy patchy August grass.

Despite the miserable air, I will go for my walk this morning. I was so rushed yesterday morning--meeting stacked upon meeting--that I didn't manage to get outside, and that's never a good thing. I have a few errands to run today, I need to pack and deal with cat stuff, but otherwise I can be stupid and under-slept without damaging much.

Though the word meeting connotes tedium and wasted time, yesterday's were really useful. We made big progress in shaping next year's version of the conference, and that is a load off my mind. Actually much of what I got done this week is a load off my mind, including my beginning work on the chapbook. Going through my earlier collections, I began to see a particular thread I might follow, and I was unexpectedly pleased by some of those young poems. It's encouraging to note that I wasn't always a wordy self-involved yoinck (though sometimes I definitely was).

Anyway: today. Hot. Humid. A little blurred. But bat-free.

It sure is humid out there. My hair is curling like crazy, and so are the paperback covers. Through the open screens, late-summer cicadas scrape their thick sandy endless hum across the hours. Beyond the continuo, a gull screeches, a screen door slaps.

I'd like to hang sheets on the line, but will laundry dry today? It seems unlikely.

Despite the stickiness, the house has not felt ridiculously hot, and I spent most of the day beside the window in my little study, wandering between chair and standing desk: reading for the chapbook project, reading my kid's screenplay, reading Aurora Leigh, searching for a poem to read at the wedding; editing the Substack piece, drafting a fundraising letter, working on conference paperwork, recording poems for a class . . . so much to juggle, but I am making progress.

Tomorrow afternoon we leave for Vermont, and I'd like to imagine that my desk will be cleared off--not probable, but at least the lingering to-do list will be shorter. The manuscript I was editing has gone back to the author. The draft letter has gone out to its readers. The new Poetry Lab Notes post is now available on Substack. I'm glimpsing a couple of possible routes for the chapbook collection.

Today will start with a faculty meeting, but then I'm thinking I might work on some new poems. I'm feeling the swirl of the unsaid rising and shifting behind my eyes--an actual physical sensation, and one I should pay attention to, because it often presages writing. Something, I have no idea what, wants to become words.

I got a lot accomplished yesterday--finally finishing the week's endless housework, then diving straight into Poetry Lab Notes stuff. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been preparing a post about our readings and responses to Sei Shonagon, a tenth-century lady-in-waiting in the Japanese imperial court, who wrote a sheaf of gossipy, opinionated observations of court life that have been collected into what is known as The Pillow Book. The post will include short essays by each of us as well poems we wrote using The Pillow Book as a prompt. But as always, it takes some work to pull together the thoughts of three people in a way that makes those reactions coherent on the page. Plus, I'm still learning the Substack platform, so that slows me down.

Anyway, it's a big job that's almost done, and I also made a first stab at drafting a fundraising letter for a new conference scholarship. Today I'll turn my thoughts to prepping for a conference faculty meeting tomorrow. I've got a stack of reading to do, and a couple of poems I need to record for a class I'll be visiting at Bates College this fall. The chapbook project is beginning to weigh on me, and a new editing assignment will be arriving at some point this week.

I'd like to write. Sometimes that possibility seems very far away, but maybe a door will open today . . . a small door I can duck through, a small courtyard with sunlight blinking through the leaves.

Such a long slow rain we had yesterday, a relief for all growing things, but the humidity was thick. Though I decided that trying to mop floors would be stupid, I did get the bathrooms cleaned, and then I was able to turn my attention to desk work: finishing that manuscript job, piecing together a draft of the next Poetry Lab Substack post. In the afternoon I heard from our kid, the one who's been incommunicado in the Canadian forest. He's arrived in Attawapiskat, a Swampy Cree community on the edge of James Bay, and today he and his campers and their canoes will fly south to Timmins and then bus their way back to Temagami. An incredible trip, and I look forward to basking in the glow of his excited voice.

This morning I'll go for a walk and catch up on my floor-cleaning chores, and then I'll return to the desk: more Substack prep, sketching out a fundraising letter for a new conference scholarship. Maybe I'll start sorting through possibilities for that limited-edition chapbook. I need to catch up on my Aurora Leigh reading and keep ferreting a path through my big collected Grimm. I should start thinking about high school teaching plans, and I need to prep for a meeting about the 2027 conference.

So many bits and pieces to juggle, but thus far I'm not feeling too hair-on-fire about work. It helps that I managed to keep August mostly travel-free. Though T and I are driving to Vermont this weekend, I'll otherwise be home until we leave for Chicago in early September.

Now I'm listening to the remains of yesterday's rain slowly drip from the trees; listening to the floorboards creak upstairs as T gets dressed; thinking about patience and impatience, the lonely spaciousness of a quiet room; wondering what will unfold in this unfledged day.

                                             [S]ometimes

’Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,

That we may lift the soul, and contemplate

With lively joy the joys we cannot share.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"