These cool mornings have been sweet: old-fashioned New England summer weather, the kind you start and end in a sweater but midday you're jumping into a balmy lake. Not that I'll be jumping into any lakes this week. My calendar is crammed with zoom meetings, a dentist visit, a haircut, an arts commission lunch, plus I've got all kinds of desk work to deal with. So today, the slow day of the week, will be stuffed with housework, mowing, pruning, all of the homestead bits-n-pieces I need to get out of my hair before I light myself on fire with the rest of the obligations.

Outside, a Carolina wren is awake. Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, she sings. Otherwise things seem pretty quiet in the neighborhood. Nobody is broadcasting any Monday anxiety yet.

I feel good about how the weekend class went. The focus was nominally syntax, yet one big side result was a slow dip into the waters of character development. I tend to avoid the term persona poem. I think it encourages the idea of enactment rather than existence-within . . . as in "I'm going to write in the voice of Anne Bradstreet, or Spiro Agnew, or Pele," and then lassoing historical facts in a sort of show-off "I did some research and got an A on the paper" rodeo instead of crossing, with deliberate wonder, into the hallucinatory borderland between self and imagined other. It's hard to explain the difference, except to say that one sort of poem stays safely wrapped in the costumes and the other is shivering and naked.

A few of the poem drafts we heard over the weekend were new and shivering, and that, for a listener such as myself, was an intense gift.

It's a very cool morning here in the little northern city by the sea--temperature barely out of the 40s; whiff of autumn in July. I like this combination of open windows and shabby red bathrobe, hot coffee cup against my palms and shriek of gulls rising from a neighbor's roof.

Yesterday's class seemed to go well--lots of sharp first drafts and good conversation too. I was especially glad to bring people into contact with Henry Green's prose. All of his books are not equivalently good, but the two I excerpted--Party Going and Loving--are favorites, and for me his odd sentence style is an instant lesson in the flexible powers of word order, word choice, and comma placement.

In a few hours I'll be back in the saddle, but for the moment I am basking in Sunday morning. Last night T and I went out to see Red River, a 1948 western starring John Wayne and an incredibly sexy young Montgomery Clift. Ain't nobody wears a Hollywood gun belt better than MC. Oof.

And then driving home through the twilit city with my sweetheart . . . well, you know how it is: those little heart-swell moments when nothing much is happening, except that you're sitting at a red light watching cars swish past and suddenly you are seized by the present tense. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are.

I haven't talked about kitchen matters lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been cooking. And last night's salad was so extremely beautiful--red and yellow tomatoes, basil, seared halloumi--that I was impelled to document it. I served the tomatoes alongside rare steak marinated in lime and garlic, a chard tian, and a mix of rice (wild, white, red, brown). It was a lovely meal, and there are lots of leftovers, which likely means steak salad for dinner tonight.

It's good to have the supper problem solved because today and tomorrow I'll be in class, experimenting with some prompt-thoughts linked to syntax. The models will be a sheaf of prose and poetry excerpts, with the prose being mostly (though not exclusively) samples from high modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, and Elizabeth Bowen. I also extend beyond them, in both directions--back to George Eliot and Henry James, forward to Iris Murdoch and (I know this seems odd) John Le Carre.  The related poetry I won't discuss right now, as I'm keeping that a surprise for participants. My hope, though, is that class members will see how sentences themselves, in their positioning, in their subtle variety, can pull a poem draft onto a page.

These classes are always shots in the dark, though mostly they seem to work, if not always in the ways I'd predicted. Which is part of the fun, I guess . . . the not knowing, the veer into strange spaces.

It's quite cool this morning--only 54 degrees: lovely weather for sleeping and waking, and hot coffee tastes like nectar. Outside the crows are noisily waking up; a cardinal is singing. Through the kitchen window I see that a raccoon must have been galumphing around in my birdbath again because the dish is now upside in the garden bed.

I'll be teaching all weekend, so today will be a catchall: mowing grass, washing winter hats and scarves (finally), cutting herbs for drying (finally). I am very behind on some basic homestead tasks, but so it goes.

Every time I sit down with my fall calendar and realize how crowded it's becoming, I start to feel a little pale. I'm not sorry that August is fairly quiet. I've got one radio interview coming up as well as a trip to Vermont to see my family. Otherwise, the big bang will start with our son's wedding over Labor Day weekend, quickly followed by an onslaught of jobs, events, and obligations. New car, new car, I keep reminding myself. But the amount of travel remains daunting.

Last night I went out to write, and that was a good thing: two messy drafts that probably won't amount to much, yet they were a stab into real work--thought, feeling, sound coalescing into language that shocks me. I hope I'll be able to keep that sensation alive during the weekend class. I love poetry as a surrender of the mind: the sudden visceral drop into a kind of borderland, where I am both aware and unaware; focused, with the edges blurred; a dreamy, bubbling, reckless, ruthless state; ears tingling with unheard music. 

I arrived in Portland by early afternoon and was immediately bombarded by stacks of emails, texts, envelopes . . . good things, like paychecks and class signups and invitations to teach; also less good things, like learning that my sister has broken her ankle. Apparently Wednesday decided to arrive via dump truck while I was driving home.

Thus, today I'll be mucking around with record keeping, trying to figure out how to be helpful to my sister, and otherwise playing catch with the overload that's wallowing on my desk [ooh, mixed-metaphor alert!]. But it's Thursday, so I'll also get to go out to write tonight. And a gorgeous day is forecast, so I'll also get to hang sheets on the line. There's only so much desk-troll work I can take before I have to burst out of the house and weed something or stack a little firewood or at least flop in the hammock and stare up into the canopy.

 Last night's reading was so pleasant: 30 or so people crowding into the little library, a surprising number of book sales, lots of questions and conversation afterward. I guess this was my first official reading as poet laureate, unless you count the Monson, Maine, USA performances during the conference. But really the locals were there to see their friend Weslea, which is as it should be.

In a little while the two of us will drive into Southwest Harbor for breakfast, and then I'll head back to Portland. This has been Gloria the Mazda's longest roadtrip so far, and she did excellently, though as usual I had to deal with an unexpected electronic warning doodad . . . this car is loaded with them, and they drive me a little crazy. This time an alarming "Service Due Soon" sign appeared in the middle of my speedometer and wouldn't go away until I pulled over and figured out how to reset the "time for an oil change" reminder built into the control panel. One longs for the old days, when I had to remember myself when my car needed an oil change. Or perhaps one longs for a car that resets its own monitor, given that it actually had an oil change a month ago. But I should not be petty. Gloria is a lovely car, and I am grateful to own a vehicle whose transmission will not die on a highway any time soon.

Today, after lunch, I'll depart for Mount Desert Island, which no doubt will be clogged with traffic and overrun by visitors. I am so used to the place in the off-season, to puttering around the park during our peaceable April and November visits to the cottage, but now is the height of tourist frenzy and it will be a different place entirely. This time of year the cottage is filled with paying customers, so I'll be staying in Weslea's spare room instead . . . but at least I'll have the cove in my sights, dear horizon, dark scent of tide and brine.

If you're localish: we're reading at the Bass Harbor Library, in Bernard, at 5:30 tonight. Then tomorrow I'll head home and start girding myself for this weekend's class: two days centering on the influence of prose syntax on new poem drafts. These classes are work, of course, but they also allow me space to write, and I could use a weekend of new poem drafts right about now.