Yesterday was our first soft air of the season . . . shirtsleeves, open windows, no fire in the stove. And then rain all evening, so this morning I expect a glory of green.

After babying my eyes all day, I felt much better by evening. So today, after a round of editing, I'll start pulling myself together for our travels downeast--shopping, meal planning, and the like. One good thing about a visit to the cottage is the complete ease about outfits: work clothes, garden shoes, walking shoes, with a clean pair of jeans for going to the movies . . . nothing could be easier. Food is always the big focus, as these visits are one dinner party after another, in a kitchen that is not exactly primitive but is certainly not luxe. We'll order pizza one night, because the gargantuan sizing at Gott's Store makes us laugh. Otherwise, I am the camp cook.

One thing I might do at the cottage is submit a few poems. I've had some requests for submission--a rare event so I should probably take advantage of it soon. I'd also like to make headway on Aurora Leigh and get a few draft blurts out of my notebook and onto the page. Because of how school vacation falls this year, we don't have to tag-team our cottage visit with my Monson job, which will make these days feel more fully vacation-like . . . until some sorrow invades, as happens so often when we're there. We've spent a lot of time being sad in that sweet place.

from Desk Work

9 a.m. West Tremont. Goose Cove.

Sixty degrees in early winter, with a brisk warm wind.

The tide is high, the sea laps the cliff,

the sky is whitish-blue, like an old eye.

On the horizon Swan’s Island is a long lump of shirt

rolled for ironing.

 

How will I be this world?

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

I got the housework done, did Monson prep and some editing, went to the grocery store, and finally, late afternoon, managed to fit in a walk. But all day long my eyes were bothering me: I probably need new glasses, and spring allergies aren't helping the matter. Between eyes and sinuses, my head is feeling a little fragile these days.

I'm trying to pace myself work-wise, though that's difficult, given how eye-dependent my jobs are. Still, gardening helps, walking helps, and once I get an eye exam things should improve.

The aging body is a tale of trickery and submission. How can we fool the body into functioning as it used to? When do we admit that it won't?

Canto

 

At the peak of my powers I felt a falling-off,

as if an internal organ had come loose from its moorings

and was bobbing gently against my pelvis like a pear.

 

The season was autumn. Threads of smoke

unwound from the chimneys. Every compass pointed

toward winter.

 

I walked out, in the dim afternoon, into the small streets,

through a modest wood, across a vast graveyard.

I read the headstones—

 

here, the woman recalled only as Mother,

here, Our Darling Ralph, his tiny stone tarnished with lichen.

My way was littered with parthenons and obelisks,

 

with strange marble tables and mossy

arks of the covenant, and among them

bulldogs rolled in wet pine needles, helmeted tots

 

wobbled on training wheels, and I,

no longer at the peak of my powers,

turned my ankle on a pebble and limped.

 

But when I came to the bottom of the hill,

into that clutter of merchant mausoleums

known as the Valley of the Kings,

 

I paused in my limping and looked up

into the watery leaf-light: pale gold, speckles of black,

thinned remnants of last night’s gale.

 

And I felt, for no reason at all, sweetened.

Around me, the stony edited lives—

born, married, fathered, earned, died—

 

seemed to swell into ballads.

Carved lions kneaded their claws,

and lost at sea was a cadence.

 

I was a poet, and I wanted to sing

of small Ralph, alive and perched on his father’s

broadcloth knee, in the November twilight, after the banks

 

had bolted their doors and the barges had docked.

Now a scatter of gulls sailed over the cove,

and Mother sat alone at her rosewood desk and wrote

 

Sky. Leaf.  Light. 

I wanted to sing that. And so I did.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

It's raining gently outside, which is exactly the weather I was hoping for. After a weekend of planting, rain is the perfect response. And it's supposed to get warm today too, our first leap into the 60s. Everything brown will green, green, green, and the Carolina wren will spill his song from the neighbor's budding crabapple.

Yesterday I brought in a bouquet of hyacinths, and this morning the house is drenched with scent. The new seeds are soaking up rainwater--radishes, dill, cilantro, lettuce, spinach, sweet peas. I sowed flower seeds in various beds--one a mix of old-fashioned cottage garden varieties, the other a mix of shade lovers. If the birds don't eat them and I don't accidentally weed them out, the bursts of color and shape should be glorious.

I'm always so hopeful, and yet things always go wrong--flood, drought, insects, fungus, groundhogs, birds, squirrels, rabbits . . . all of them lie in wait. Still, the hope persists. I think it's good to have a realm for unreasonable optimism.

Today I need to clean the house. I've got to make a final pass through my Monson kids' submitted work. There's a fat stack of editing on my desk. I'm meeting tomorrow with Teresa and Jeannie about some dream poems we've been drafting. I ought to run a few errands. It will be a short work week as T and I are heading up to Mount Desert Island on Thursday for our spring visit to the cottage. The forecast is rain and I do not care. If we spend all weekend drinking tea and staring into Goose Cove, that will be fine with me.

Meanwhile, Young Chuck leans against my shoulder and purrs into my ear. The Red Sox have won two straight series and are starting to look less hapless. Hungarians voted out Orban. Rain murmurs at the window. I'm glad to be awake and listening.

Yesterday was exactly the day I've been dreaming of: a full day outside--hanging laundry, setting up my garden architecture, shopping for plants and seeds, prepping beds, sowing seeds, filling pots with soil . . . so much puttering, and all day long a fresh wind that made me lift my nose like a hound.

Now that I'm reducing my vegetable footprint to the five garden boxes, I've opened up a lot of space for flowers. At the same time I've got things like pea fencing and a bean trellis to repurpose. So, with luck, there are going to be a lot of climbers among the flowers. I do love to watch peas grow, and this year I'm going to watch sweet peas instead of shell peas. Last year I foraged four iron plant posts off the street, and now I'm going to use them as supports for mid- and late-summer vines--scarlet runners, morning glories, canary-creepers.

I feel pretty happy about this change. I wasn't sure I would, but I do. It's going to take a lot of pressure off me in a lot of ways--cut down on my groundhog angst for one thing, reduce the harvest and processing frenzy for another, but still keep my basic kitchen garden fresh and accessible, still let me revel in earth-things.

Glorious Saturday, how glad I am to see you . . . though Pester Hour was annoyingly prompt this morning. Young Chuck knows all of the ways to get me out of bed: licking my eyelids might be the very worst, though trying to put his nose up my nose is also bad. In any case, both are impossible to sleep through.

But now he is happily filled with breakfast, and I am happily filling with coffee, so all is forgiven.

Last time I looked, temperatures were supposed to get into the 50s today, which means I am going to plant. I'll set up the cold frame and sow lettuce mix under it. I've also got radish and cilantro seeds to sow, though I'll need to acquire arugula and spinach. I'll get a load of laundry onto the outside lines. I'll buy a new hose and some groundhog fencing. If I have time I'll start weeding out the first round of maple seedlings; those little monsters always start invading early.

I am so eager for a day of fresh air and puttering. Yesterday I celebrated my first outdoor laundry of the season. All day long I would glance out the window just for the pleasure of watching towels kick and flutter in the spring breeze. And then late afternoon: burying my face in the stiff clean shirts and snuffing up the scent of wind . . . There is nothing sweeter.

Spring always makes my blood tingle. It is my favorite season, an amazement every year.

Yesterday I had a two-hour zoom meeting with Julia, Maine's outgoing poet laureate, which was incredibly helpful. I asked her every little niggling question I could think to ask, and she was generous and open and so supportive. I'm grateful have her as a guide into this strange new laureate world.

Already I'm getting a lot of requests and invitations, which means that already I'm trying to sort out priorities, read situations, figure out how to be fair to others and myself. Public-facing introvert is a peculiar role, and I'm lucky to have friends with experience in the matter who can advise me when I become foolish.

Today I'll be back to ye olde copyediting, with a break for a late-morning meeting regarding some Monson Arts stuff. Tonight I'll go out and listen to my friends read--Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, 6 p.m., if you want to meet me there. And then this weekend I hope to devote myself to Tom, Chuck, and the garden.

It was, as always, a refreshment to go out to write last night. One group member said that she tells her friends she "writes with luminaries" on Thursday nights, and I agree. I, too, write with luminaries . . . these bright lights, these bright voices; these explorers taking their first tentative steps into an unknown land. It is great good fortune to sit among them.

Taking yesterday as a personal day was a good idea. I managed to finish a couple of writing assignments for a project I'm working on with Teresa and Jeannie; I caught up with emails; I finished the McMurtry novel; and I cleared leaves out of all of the garden beds, plus raked, picked up sticks, and pruned the rose-of-sharons. I felt like normal, everyday me again, which was restful . . . though I would prefer that normal, everyday me didn't also have to deal with normal, everyday household debacles. This time it's the dishwasher, which refuses to drain and smells like burning motor when it runs. Presumably the pump is shot, and now we're trying to figure out if T can forage another dishwasher from his worksite or if we have to buy a whole new machine.

Today I'll be back on the clock. I have an early morning zoom meeting, and then I'll start sorting through piles of new editing. In between I've got to go to the grocery store; I've got to deal with laundry; I want to get out to write tonight. I need to bake for the poets, and maybe I'll also find a moment to work up the soil in my garden boxes and prep them for planting.

One thing I need to return to is my poetry manuscript. In the flurry of the past few weeks I've laid it aside and more or less put it out of my thoughts. Yet the poems in the collection are starting to trickle back into my awareness. I find myself idly repeating words and phrases; clusters of words rise up as visual memory. Clearly the book is begging for my attention, though I don't yet know what it wants from me.