Monday, March 18, 2024

And here's my old nemesis Monday again.

But, to be fair, she arrives on the heels of a quiet weekend. Nor do I have to drive north to teach this week. So I don't really have any complaints about her, other than the 5 a.m. alarm.

Today I'll start working on the first of two small manuscript jobs: one's a poetry chapbook ms I'm advising on; the other's an academic article that needs copyediting. I have to prep for tomorrow's reading in Lewiston, I hope to do some work in the garden, and I want to mix up a batch of honey-vanilla frozen yogurt. I need to do laundry and endure my exercise regimen. I need to make Portuguese kale soup and an asparagus salad. I want to read some George Herbert poems and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay." I'm hoping to pick up my new glasses this week, hoping to get a haircut, hoping that the clothes I've ordered actually fit me. Within the past week my best pair of jeans self-destructed, the knees went out in my only decent pair of dress pants, and I had to order new hiking shoes to replace the boots I'd worn down to skeletons. I'm a tattery mess.

On the other hand, I'm alive and cheerful, and I wore out the boots because I went on so many long walks in them, and those dress pants were at least 10 years old and they still looked okay on me. That's a small miracle right there.

* * *

I want

 

to skip up the street to buy bread I want to skip down to the DMV to read the eyechart I want to be the weirdo who skips up behind you in line at the movies and pokes you in the back and says What a beautiful hat I want to kiss wildly in public places I want to embrace trees and no-parking signs I want to swim far out into a deep lake and wear red lipstick and stomp in the mud I want to be loud and dizzy that big clumsy happy woman at the party oblivious to herself smiling a little and humming dancing her pigeon-wing shuffle alone in the corner and I want you to be there and I want you to be glad I came



(from Calendar by Dawn Potter [Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming])

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Yesterday was downright springlike--50 degrees, a warmish breeze--and I spent much of the morning raking garden beds, pruning stalks, tidying my new leaf-mulch pile, picking gravel out of soil, and suchlike early-spring tasks. I set up the little cafe table and chairs in the lane, and even sat there for 10 minutes, until idleness made me cold. And then later T and I went for a walk along the cove, and in the evening we drove into town for a good dinner out with our neighbor. It was altogether a brisk and desk-free day, a day for stretching out those gardening muscles in the backs of my legs, a day for dirty fingernails and muddy old sneakers.

The rain will be back today, but the temperature has stayed warmish, and the uncovered beds will drink in the the gift. Yellowy spikes will green, red spikes will unfold, buds will swell, wretched maple seedlings will erupt in the millions. I'm sure I'll be wandering around outside in my raincoat, drinking it all in.

Otherwise, the day will toddle on. I've got to deal with the grocery shopping I never managed to do on Friday. I've got contest reading to finish, and I need to tidy my study for the coming week--a couple of small manuscript jobs ahead, a reading on Tuesday to plan. T and I have been working out the details of our April getaway week--how to fit our biannual trip to the cottage on Mount Desert Island around my workday in Monson, which also just happens to bump up against eclipse day. The Monson folks have invited us both to spend an extra night up there so that we'll be in place for the event. Central and northern Maine are in a fever about being in the path of the eclipse, and there will be tons of hoohah. It will be fun to witness.

One thing I will not be doing today is paying attention to Saint Patrick's Day, which has always just seemed silly to me--an excuse for loud guys to get day-drunk, an excuse for cooks to boil foods that taste better when they're not boiled. Last year I was in Chicago on Saint Patrick's Day and got to witness the hideous tradition of dying the Chicago River green, which pretty much put the lid on the holiday for me. Blech. But if day-drinking, cabbage-boiling, and green rivers are your pleasures, I hope you have much fun today. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Saturday morning. The hands on the clock hover just before 6 a.m., and the gray hour is thick with fog. Yesterday was slow rain, chill and damp, and the weekend will likely be more of the same--if not actual rain at every moment, its imminence. Gradually the soil loosens, mud clots my shoes, yellow spikes green and become tulip leaves, daffodil leaves. Buds swell in the hearts of the hyacinths. The stems of the lenten roses rise from their winter sleep. The twigs of the Japanese maple glow red with life. My tiny homestead yawns and open its eyes under the drizzle.

On the ides of March, I bent over in the rain and harvested my first spring greens for dinner: a handful of tender infant kale, newly sprouted from wintered-over stalks; a slim bouquet of chives and green-onion stalks. Now, this morning, when I open the door to let the cat in, I hear cardinal song spilling into the blurry darkness . . . the notes are tart and sudden, unmusical, urgent. Early spring is a cut lemon, brisk and sharp and sour.

Yesterday I had a late-day zoom visit with Teresa, Jeannie, and Maudelle, and we talked about Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights; Delle mentioned Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay"; Teresa shared pages from Alice Oswald's "Tithonus"; we wandered into speculations . . . about teaching, about sentences, about cities, about measurement, about time . . . It is lovely to meet with this cohort, to spend two hours or more just letting our four inquisitive minds bump up against one another. I had meant to go out to listen to music with another poet friend, and it would have been equally lovely; but another time, another time. I can't explain, after so many years of intellectual solitude, what it means to have these overlapping circles of creators suddenly become such an intense element of my days. And yet my friends from the north country: we drowned in motherhood together; we clung together in the harsh world of mud and water troubles and too much snow and sleepless babies and hormones and blackflies and scorn. No one will ever replace them in my heart. And yet my friends from college: we roiled in a fire of sex and unruly intelligence, and even today that fire smolders when we look into one another's eyes. And yet my sister: the one who was there from the start, hopping on one foot over the dew-wet stones.


Friday, March 15, 2024

I'm pleased to report that I have stepped back from the possibly-turning-into-a-zombie brink and am now just a regular woke-up-too-early human being. Thank goodness for yesterday, which gave me time to fall asleep on the couch at 9 a.m., subsequently take several more couch breaks, walk for a few slow miles, read and fold laundry and clean the upstairs rooms, play a couple of games with T, and make a slow satisfying evening meal.

I realized, as I was setting the table last night, that my cooking routine can be a big help in getting me back into a tolerable groove. I didn't make anything fancy last night--just black beans and rice, a beet salad with roasted pumpkin seeds, and a raspberry cobbler--but the process of putting each element together felt, for some reason, like a convalescence. I don't always have this reaction to making a meal; sometimes cooking is just a straight-up chore. But yesterday I needed it.

So here we are at Friday, a dark and rainy morning, the cat's 12th birthday, which he is celebrating by crunching up some chow in the dining room. The ides of March . . . "Et tu, Brute?" I coo at him, and he purrs, for backstabbing is his delight.

I spent all last night dreaming about teaching revision to kids, which shows you where my head has been these past few days. But the mundanity of today will blast that out of my skull. Today is recycling day, sheet-and-towel-washing day, downstairs-room-cleaning day. It's a day for grocery shopping and a zoom meeting and my exercise regimen. If the rain stops and the outdoors dries up a little, it will be a day for raking out another garden bed or two.

Yesterday I worked in the backyard beds and uncovered green everywhere . . . shoots, unfolding leaves, budding crocuses and scylla, nodding pale snowdrops. I'm not rushing; there's no hurry--a half-hour of raking, here and there; the slow revelations of thawing soil, and my body relearning its motions.



Waterloo

 

 

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most

intimate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Hölderlin” 

 

 

Dawn Potter


The lindens in the square tremble

in the wind like peasants kissing the feet

of Jesus. They lift their arms and wail,

and I have read of such kissing,

read of how bodies drown.

The sky grows. Agnès, who is busy and shy,

 

weeps to hear the peasants weeping,

weeps for the lindens buckling into the wind.

In the square, horses clatter and rear, their hooves

ring on the cobblestones. Drowning and wrath,

drowning and wrath, night and day, but Agnès

is kissing the wind, weeping,

 

as the lindens sway, as the lindens tremble.

I have read of such kissing. 



[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Thursday, March 14, 2024

And home.

It's been a heavyweight week, not least because I have been sleeping terribly. Even last night, in my own bed, sleep was fractured and uneasy; and after three nights of this, I'm beginning to droop. Thank goodness today I have some control of my own schedule. If I fall asleep at 10 a.m., so be it.

I've been thinking this week about authority in the classroom: what it means to construct a classroom environment within which liberty can exist. As in a poem, structure creates a frame for independence. They are a strange dichotomy, fences and freedom.

During lunch yesterday, one of my Monson students shared a poem she'd written in response to a school assignment, a typical honors-class sort--"write either a Petrarchan or a Shakespearean sonnet with strict scansion and rhyme and a precisely placed volta." She was irritated by the task, but also challenged by it, and the result was a solid traditional sonnet with a precisely place volta in which the speaker ranted about how much she hated writing it. The piece was concise and dramatic and one of the funniest poems I'd heard in a long time, and my entire class was rolling in the aisles.

This is an exaggerated example of form equals freedom--the poem version of flipping a teacher the bird while earning a solid A--and sticking it to the man is something most everyone longs to do . . . even when we find ourselves playing the role of the man. It's one of the many hard things about running a classroom.

Anyway, I've now got a few days off from wrestling with that conundrum. Today I'll catch up on housework, catch up on desk work, try to exercise myself into a better acquaintance with sleep. I may or may not go out to write tonight: I'm not feeling very coherent, but I suppose a nap could change that. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

After a long day of teaching, after a long drive back to my digs, what I needed was a walk and some silence. And so I trudged up Pleasant Street, along the lake, until I came to this slate quarry, one of several that dot the environs around Monson. The quarry walls climb up from the pond-hole below, and even the slag pile has a stern elegance under the dotted ice and the doughty trees that colonize it. And the sky was full of cloud-voice, wind tearing at twigs and old grasses.



It was a relief to be alone and out of doors, to listen to my boots trudging up the gritty road. A dog barked at me. A man in a pickup waved. And meanwhile the quarry--moonscape disguised as earth--delivered its sermon.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Waking up in the north country, readying myself for the long day. It's cold and windy here, with a crust of frozen wet snow. No spring yet, not like Portland, with its crocuses and budding quince.

I'm prepared for class--my stack of handouts, my plans--but also I'm not at all prepared. Anything could happen. Still, I'm feeling calm enough, and I slept passably, and in 45 minutes the store will open and I can drink a cup of coffee, which will make my prospects even brighter.

On another note: my upcoming Poetry Kitchen chapbook class is now full, and there are only two spaces left in the revision class. So if you're thinking about snagging a spot, you should move quickly.