Cloud cover over the lake this morning . . . no signs of rain, but the tonal quality of the air has changed. Beyond the birches a song sparrow chatters; a bullfrog grunts. Far down the lake a loon wails. It's a work day, and we're all at work.

Like yesterday, the morning will mostly be dance. In the afternoon participants will do presentations, and Teresa will continue on with her Ovid project, and then the faculty will dive back into performance mode--part 2 of Monson, Maine, USA: "Lake." So it is sweet to be sitting here, alongside the real lake, with the imagined lake rippling in my thoughts.

Just thinking about last night's performance of "Slate" makes me want to cry a little, in a good way. Tenney House was full, with our conference audience swelled by a significant number of locals and visitors. When I stood up to welcome them, all I could think was homeland--the homeland of place, of art and community. Here we were, the people of Maine.

And the audience stayed with us--applauded, laughed, teared up, all of the things we could hope for; and they asked questions afterward: about how we'd put together the piece, about our varied relationships to this particular place, about how collaboration works. The evening was cathartic.

Tonight we present "Lake," and we're all a little nervous as it involves considerably more visual and sound tech than the other two pieces do, not to mention a group dance that is giving the three of us non-professionals the heebie-jeebies. But this is a performance that will always essentially be an open rehearsal--we are not polished, and we will never be polished. The point is something else.

At daybreak this pair of whitetails was browsing outside my front door, but they've since vanished into the trees, and morning lake life has shifted to birds--red-winged blackbirds flitting from one alder to another, a loud vireo invisible in the trees, a crow stalking across the grass. And now a bullfrog burps.

The air has a chill in it again, and mist drifts across the lake ripples. It will warm up, though, like it did yesterday, when, just before dinner, I managed to find time to slip into the water. The shallows were a patchwork of warm and cool, late-day sunlight sliding toward the horizon. A party barge bristling with fishing rods chugged past.

The teaching day went well, I think. I started off by dictating Ruth Stone's "Don't Miss It" and immediately gave a writing prompt. Then we moved into a reading of Rilke's "Imaginary Career," followed by another prompt. Both of these prompts were framed around the structures of the example poems, which allowed us to then shift back into conversation about both the models and the participants' new drafts, focusing on transformations within formal choice. That took up the morning, and then the afternoon shifted to small groups who were creating a series of nested questions that led directly into a writing prompt. Teresa closed the day by introducing her afternoon writing projects, which will center around Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This morning I'm mostly off the hot seat as Gwynnie and Gretchen will take over with dance and theater exercises. But tonight is our first performance from Monson, Maine, USA, so the nerves will reignite. We'll be starting with "Slate," the section we presented during our residency in Sarasota, and the new sections will roll out tomorrow and Thursday.

It is 5:30 a.m., and I am sitting in an Adirondack chair on the deck of my cabin, looking at the tail end of sunrise over Lake Hebron. Now a duck swims into view, paddles confidently up to the shore, and behold: she's got two ducklings trailing behind.

The three of them putter around for a few minutes before setting sail again, and I sip from my gargantuan coffee mug and feel happy to be wearing a sweater, which is not something I've said to myself for many days.

It is an old-fashioned summer morning, dew-drenched and still, the perfect temperature for bare feet and long sleeves. Birds twitter among the reeds and scrub . . . vireo, waxwing, warbler, sparrow. Bullfrogs remark. A duck flies low over the glassy water, and up on the road a log truck growls past.

This morning the conference will begin, and I'll be on stage all day. It will be intense, but I didn't sleep too badly last night, the faculty got lots done work-wise yesterday, and our participant group has already started to bond. All signs point to good cheer, though now a mosquito has found me. Suffering is life, and she understands her role in the cosmos.

In other news: someone has left a paperback copy of Harriet the Spy in this cabin. I am very pleased.

Finally, the heat has broken, and birdsong pours through every open window.

Today is Monson day: by 9 a.m. I'll be picking up passengers; by noon we'll be pulling into town, and conference week will be underway. As usual, expect spotty contact from me. I may be able to post every day, but likely there will be distractions and interruptions.

The conference theme this year is transformation, and as the sessions unfold, I'll try to keep you apprised of what that entails as regards materials, conversations, prompts, and collaborations. The week has been exciting to map out. But there's always mystery. What will happen when a plan enters air?

Another thick and humid morning. I'm glad to be starting the day here in my familiar old couch corner, idling over coffee and a book after the flurry of the week. We got so much done at Bowdoin this week, but the focus was intense, and the conference itself is still to come. So I'm grateful for a slow hour, though soon the day will devolve into packing and housework and working on script details and diving into various other panicky-busy obligations.

Monson, Maine, USA is now a full, finished, three-part piece. Next week we'll be performing each part separately, on consecutive days: "Slate" on July 7, "Lake" on July 8, "Mountain" on July 9. All performances will begin at 5 p.m. at Tenney House, on the Monson Arts campus, and they are free and open to the public.

For me, this collaboration has been such an education. To work so closely with three brilliant but very different artists; to watch my private writing self morph into new space; to undertake the risk of publicly performing as an inexperienced beginner . . . I still can't believe I'm actually going to dance in front of other people: me, chunky and awkward and 60 years old! I still can't believe I'm actually inviting you to come witness this.

As a poet and a teacher of poetry, I've had no trouble jumping off cliffs and coaxing you to jump too. I am thrilled by recklessness, when it comes to writing. But my body is another story: I'm inclined to be timid, to not trust myself, to not pay close attention to where I am in space. In our Sarasota residency, and now over this past week at Bowdoin, I have begun to learn to jump off another sort of cliff. I have begun learning to dance, and to ask you, the viewer, to enter into bodily conversation with me. This has been hard work, and revelatory work.

***

I almost forgot to mention I've got a new poem out in the inaugural issue of the Colby Review--

The heat has been ridiculous--77 degrees with 80 percent humidity at 6 a.m. . . . All I can say is Blah. Teresa and I have still managed to get our morning walks in, but she's from Florida so this probably seems balmy. Walking in the "cool" of the morning is the outer limit of what I can accomplish outside. Even the thought of doing a yard chore makes me sweat.

Today is our last rehearsal day. Then tomorrow we have a much-needed day off, and on Sunday we head up to Monson. Meanwhile, Tom, bless his heart, is planning a big dinner for the rehearsal crowd tonight. I am leaving it all in his hands.

Here's a clip from the Denis Johnson poem "Heat" that more or less sums up how I'm feeling about this weather. Yes, I know he's talking about a different month, but climate change is real . . .

 

August,

              you're just an erotic hallucination,

just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

are you serious?

It is so hot already--air as thick as tissue paper and the temperature nearly 80 degrees at 5:30 in the morning. The house isn't too bad with the machine chugging away upstairs, but Tom doesn't have any A/C at his worksite, which worries me.

Rehearsals are going well at Bowdoin, but they are intense, and everyone is tired and we still have the conference ahead of us. So this evening may be quiet--a moment for everyone to loll around in the cool and return briefly to a private life.