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.

I told you it was about to happen, and it did: I wrote four pages of linked sonnets yesterday morning, and there are more to come today. The long poem has me in its clutches. Around the edges of writing, I watered and weeded and tidied the downstairs rooms and folded laundry and made macaroni-and-cheese for a crowd and hosted a party. But even when I seemed to be distracted, the sonnets were shifting and sighing in their basket.

Chuck had a fantastic time at the party, which was both our regular writing group meeting and a silly first-birthday celebration for the Big Kitten. He exhibited exemplary good-boy charm, welcoming all guests at the door, playing with every toy he received, and not walking in anyone's dinner plate. What a cozy, friendly dingbat: he would love to host a party every day.

On the downside, the brakes on Tom's truck gave out. Blah.

Now here we are at Friday, with a long holiday weekend ahead. There's no canoeing in our forecast because the truck isn't drivable, but maybe we'll take my car down to Laudholm Farm and walk along the salt marsh. The days have returned to coolness, and rain is likely on Sunday and Monday. Lilacs are in their fragrant glory. Lilies-of-the valley nod along the edge of Baxter Woods. The cemetery flutters with bluebirds and mockingbirds. Tall dandelion puffs adorn the grass.

I am writing a long poem, and it feels like the orbital center of this universe. Irises and dripping hoses and line-drying shirts and brooms and dishpans and dead pickups and cats and mops and reel mowers and dinner plates . . . they all swirl around the poem--maybe a clutter of space junk, maybe dancers performing an elegant gavotte. To quote Spinal Tap, "there's a fine line between clever and stupid." But when a poem has me in its clutches, I don't have time to care.

You know I'm not one to complain about weather, but ninety degrees in Maine in May is uncanny and I'm glad we've returned to spring. Temperatures are mid-50s this morning and aren't supposed to climb higher than the low 60s all day. That's a good change. I don't think I lost anything to the heat wave, but the cool-weather plants are stressed and they'll need water and a few plain days to relax and recover.

This evening I'm hosting my poetry group here, so I have a few this-and-thats to do to get ready for guests. But mostly I'll be focusing on the new long draft that has suddenly risen into my thoughts . . . a sonnet cycle about dead friends: though it's not so much a cycle as a series of enwrapped sonnets woven into a single poem.

Yesterday I finished those interview questions, read more of a friend's manuscript, and, suddenly, as I sat in my study staring idly into the hot back yard, I began to hear the sonnet draft take shape, words still unchosen but the cadence settling into place, emotional tremor building, names pulsing. So far there are only two woven sonnets on paper, with the third just begun, but momentum is trembling, a drop teetering at the edge of an overfull glass . . . there is a sensation of almost-writing that is not so different from the sensation of about-to-have-a-migraine.

I won't say "I hope I can write today" because I have to write today. Any delay for chores or obligations will just intensify the aura. The poem will happen because it must.

This is one of the best feelings in the world.

 

At the end of a torrid day I wandered outside to feel the breeze in my hair. It was just before dark. The birds were reviving their songs. Children were playing kickball in the street. The gardens glowed, strangely, vividly.

I'd spent the day reading poems and novels, working on interview questions, catching up on paperwork. I made potato salad and a lemon pudding cake. On my walk I scavenged three metal planters, quite rusty but doesn't that add character?

When T came home from work, he brought the air conditioner up from the basement and installed it in my study window. I didn't ask him to do so and he doesn't generally like air conditioning. However, the upstairs gets muggy fast, and I think we were both happy to sleep.

Now, though, the windows are open again and Chuck is wandering from one to another, keeping a sharp lookout for robins and beetles. If only the temperature would stay exactly like this, balmy and sweet, but we are in for another round of hot before spring returns to normal.

I think I'll hang sheets on the line today. I'll figure out where to put my scavenged planters and decide what kind of plants to put into them. I'll read more manuscript, and scratch away at more interview questions, and mess around with a draft.

My body and thoughts have settled into a new rhythm. It's odd how different I feel when I don't have to be away overnight every other week. During the school year I am always shoehorning around the high school sessions. Now I am working, and working hard, and working steadily, and making progress, and learning, and reading, and thinking, and attending to the world, but I'm not dueling with time.