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.

Today is our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. As always, I'm impressed to discover I've remembered it. The date, so close to our older son's birthday, sank into obscurity as soon as he leaped onto the scene. For years we barely thought about celebrating ourselves.

But thirty-five years is a long time to hang out with the same guy. Two of the friends who stood up with us are now dead. The birthday-partier who stole our thunder is getting married himself in a few weeks. This summer we've surprised ourselves by becoming uncharacteristically sentimental about the whole idea of weddings . . . making our presents for the kids, fussing happily about outfits, getting our rings resized.

It's Monday, it's a work day, and I've got to scrub toilets this morning. There's nothing remotely romantic about this anniversary moment. Except that here we are: still bumbling along together, tangling our harness straps, stepping on each other's hooves, bumping noses over the water trough.

O heart, are you great enough for love?

   I have heard of thorns and briers.

Over the thorns and briers,

   Over the meadows and stiles,

Over the world to the end of it

   Flash of a million miles.

--from "Marriage Morning" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

We did get a rainstorm last night, but now the humidity is back, along with the wildfire smoke, and my sinuses are clogged and complaining.

But first things first: what about those Red Sox? This team has been wretched all year--until, suddenly, they're not. Yesterday's game was their twelfth win in a row, and as entertainment it was perfect . . . every at-bat packed with dramatic tension, and then the romance soaring when Wilyer Abreu, in a 3-2 count, with two outs already in the inning, laced his second home run of the game and put the Sox ahead for good. It was a schmaltzy-movie sort of game, for sure, but I'm sopping up all of the temporary baseball feel-good I can. They'll start losing again soon.

Meanwhile, I caught up on a chunk of yard work before the rain, and then, in the afternoon, I put together initial plans for my fall Poetry Kitchen class, "A Visit with the Brothers Grimm: Using Fairy Tales to Generate and Revise Poems." I love fairy tales, and I've been rereading them regularly since childhood--the Grimm versions, but also Andrew Lang's French-influenced tales, Italo Calvino's Italian collections, and the many other volumes that I've pulled off library shelves over the course of my life. I've long known that fairy-tale logic, structure, surreality, moral ambiguity, class warfare, and so on have affected my work imaginatively and thematically. But I think these elements have also played a role in how I move from raw first drafts into early-stage revisions, and that's what I hope we can play with in the upcoming class.

The dates are November 7 and 8, on Zoom. The cost is $150. There will be lots of off-screen writing time. Maybe I'll see you there.