I am just now attempting to recover from a horrendous night of insomnia bracketed by terrible dreams, which began when I woke in a panic about the hole under our front door (we really do have a hole but the panic was manufactured by my brain) and ended with dream-me helplessly watching a car careen around the downtown roads and then crash full speed into a tree in the park, at which moment the alarm went off.

Not surprisingly, I'm still stunned. The transition between dream and waking was so abrupt, the dreams themselves so vicious, that I can't quite believe I've returned to the world of the living.

But here's the Carolina wren singing. Here's the cup of hot black coffee. Here's Chuckie, clanking his breakfast dish. I must be home again. I hope so, I really do.

It's Thursday, as far as I can recall. The miasma must be beginning to lift  . . . Ahead, the usual tasks wave their small flags at me. Stripping the bed. Washing the sheets. Walking. Firewood. Editing.

It's always difficult to transfer dreams onto the page. Nightmares in particular look so thin, sometimes even comic. But these dreams had nothing comic about them. My panic about the hole under the door was panic only . . . it had no accompanying narrative, no beast tunneling into the house, no embodied force of evil. In contrast, the car crash dream was all too vivid. I sat helplessly on the curb, among many other people, watching the moment unfold. The car was a white 60s-era muscle car, red-trimmed, broad and low-slung. The unseen driver seemed to have no control of the steering wheel. The car clipped one sidewalk, bounced into another, spinning, airborne; then hit the ground, and purposefully sped straight into a giant oak.

There are things as a poet I don't want to write about but feel obliged to write about. Bad dreams are not in that category. I don't want to write about them. I just want them to go away. Nonetheless, they do creep into my poems, even as I try to keep them out. My long poem, "Mr. Kowalski," arose from a bad dream.

I hope this car-crash dream doesn't become a poem, but I don't have control over that, apparently. Already I've said too much about it.

Another humid half-dark dawn--crickets pumping out their repetitions, a wren's song ornamenting them. I like the way night begins to set its claim at this time of year, clinging to morning, encroaching on evening: a preview of sweaters and lamplight and wood fires, even when the air is still fully summer's.

So far the week has been a desk-and-firewood grind, as it's needed to be. I must get this editing project done and this firewood stacked before I leave for Chicago. But this afternoon I'll take a bit of a break and spend a couple of hours talking to Teresa and Jeannie about our Sappho prompts. I think I may have gone overboard with my responses, but what else is new.

In the meantime, an interesting thing has happened: I got an email from an administrator in the superintendent's office at the Portland Public Schools. Turns out she's a Haverford alum who read the article about me in the magazine, and she invited me to speak and read at a gathering of all 1,500 district employees at the big downtown auditorium next Tuesday. Naturally I said yes: the idea of reading my comic middle school basketball poem to a big crowd of school folks fills me with delight. I may squirm at photo ops, but hanging around with teachers is my bread and butter, and I am always ready to try to make them happy. What's more, I now have a contact in the superintendent's office who wants to meet with me about district professional development, etc., and I am already simmering thoughts about ways to use this as an opportunity to bring together not just city teachers but those in districts beyond Portland. I'm feeling hopeful and excited, which is a good change from feeling nervous and overwhelmed.

A little rain fell yesterday--not nearly as much as the garden needs, but enough to prevent me from hauling firewood after I'd finished up my desk chores for the day. There is nothing good about handling wet logs. But I did get the house cleaned, and I did work my way through a hundred pages of editing, so stuff was accomplished.

Today: another giant editing push, another round of firewood hauling. That's the kind of week this will be.

A wind-breath, thick and damp, fumbles at the open windows. In the semi-darkness a Carolina wren solos above a cricket-drone continuo. Chuckie crunches up some chow in the kitchen.

Yesterday evening I got notice that the Academy of American Poets has posted three of my poems on its website. All are from previously published books; if you're one of this blog's eight regular readers, you've probably seen them before. But the fact is: this is the first time that a major national poetry clearinghouse has ever taken notice of my work.

I know the state laureateship was the trigger for the invitation, a blip on the po-biz radar that suddenly made me visible. I'm pleased, of course, and also gratified--even this small bit of national recognition feels like candy. But at age 61, I'm also bemused. I've been writing intensely for 30 years, and over the decades the audience for my work has increased from nonexistent to small. It's easy, and obvious, to carp about invisibility, to yearn for fame. But invisibility is also extremely cozy. And I'm not, in retrospect, at all sorry to have spent so many years under a blanket, flashlight in hand, writing and writing and writing.

It was a good weekend for getting home stuff done. Yesterday I sowed arugula and spinach for the fall, lugged about a third of the firewood from the shed into the basement and stacked it there, caught up with groceries, and then T and I walked over to the University of New England's art gallery to look at a puzzling show of avant-garde musical notation--compelling in its way, but difficult to imagine into sound, though I am considering the potential of using one of the examples as a structural writing prompt. Still, the show was interesting if confounding, and we had a good walk together.

Today: housework, and then I'll start a new editing project, which I expect will consume much of my desk time this week. I need to finish dealing with firewood; I should turn my compost pile before the leaves start to fall. I'm expecting a delivery of twenty pounds of canning tomatoes later in the week, so Friday is already scheduled as sauce and freezer day. However, I also yanked my back yesterday afternoon (while sitting in a chair shucking corn: so stupid), and while it's feeling better this morning, I ought to remember not to be an idiot, and that is often hard for me.

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words about the crown of sonnets. I still can't quite believe I wrote it, but poems can be like that sometimes. A subject demands its form.

Yesterday I harvested a bushel of chard, a half-bushel of parsley, a half-bushel of basil--amazing production from this tiny plot of mine--which tied me down to a morning spent cleaning and processing for the freezer. Then I figured I might as well keep going with the kitchen fun, so I simmered a batch of sauce (tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, baby leeks), baked a peach-blueberry crisp, and eventually dropped a batch of meatballs into the sauce and served it over penne.

If you like tender, velvety meatballs, you ought to try mine. They are outstanding in fresh summer sauce, and I brag with confidence, even with zero Italian blood in my veins.

Yesterday, between kitchen jobs, I messed around with my Sappho drafts, updated blog pages, answered emails, read the Byatt novel, went for a walk. There will probably be more such this-and-thats today, amid firewood hauling and lettuce sowing and grocery shopping, and a drive down to the fish market to buy salmon for dinner. Among other things, T and I are starting to match up our calendars so that we can figure out how our schedules will overlap this fall. He's decided to come with me on a few of my work jaunts, which I love, though we won't always be able travel together. Still, just knowing he's around, or on his way; that we can meet up somewhere on an evening: the thought does assuage my homebody yearnings.

***

You might remember, earlier this summer, my excitement about accidentally writing a crown of sonnets. Well, the sequence is out now, in the current issue of Hole in the Head Review, if you're interested in seeing how the project unfolded.

Last night's baseball game was just about perfect: balmy temperatures, a fun crowd, three homers for the Sea Dogs (after each of which a cheesy lighthouse rose portentously from behind the centerfield wall and shot off a few delightfully lame sparklers), a fantastic throw-on-a-dime-from-left-field out at second, and even a pitching position player! This game had everything: plus, a long sweet stroll to and fro, a beer and a steak sandwich, and a fireworks show afterward. It was likely the only time we'll get to the park this summer, and what a good night we chose.

To Chuck's chagrin, I wallowed in bed a little too long this morning, no doubt thanks to the fine sleeping weather (56 degrees this morning, the coolest it's been for weeks). But now Big Kitten breakfast has been served, coffee brewed and carried up to the dozy guy still in bed, and I am curled into my couch corner, happy to be wrapped in ye olde warm red bathrobe, looking forward to enjoying my Saturday morning second cup of coffee--pleasantly aimless, a weekend at home ahead.

I've got a few chores I could do--plant a fall crop of salad greens; start moving firewood into the basement. But I'm also completely willing to be sidetracked. Right at this moment I'm a cat with the dregs of a bowl of cream, a spider with a neatly packaged fly--which is another way of saying, I drafted six poems I like yesterday.

Six! All day I wrote and wrote, and wandered, and wrote, and read and reread, and fidgeted, and wandered and wrote, and lay on my back, and wandered again, and wrote, and tinkered, and wrote. Six poems, all of which contain the same eleven words--sometimes fractured, sometimes exact. The words are Sappho's Fragment 53 in Anne Carson's English translation. I can't write them out for you here because the translation is under copyright, so look it up yourself if you care to. All I can say is that the words gave me characters, and a family situation, and a setting; a completely unrelated photograph entered the fray; and then my imagination could not stop fizzing.

Yesterday's six poems are only half the story. Over the past week I'd already written six others. Together they are becoming a tale-in-verse, set in the 1940s, in an American city . . . and yet the Sappho source material remains alive.

A day like yesterday is heaven.

Unlikely as rain seemed in yesterday's forecast, chance came through like a champ: we not only enjoyed a decent steady rain for a couple of hours in the morning but had a late-afternoon thunderstorm that transformed the street into a riverbed. Other neighborhoods dealt with wind and hail and uprooted trees, but all I saw here was downpour and plenty of it. There's always a lot of runoff with that kind of storm, but some of it soaked into the gardens, and some rain is way, way better than the nothing we had before.

It was a good day all around. I saw a bluebird during my a walk in the cemetery. I baked a lemon-brown butter loaf cake that came out really well. I wrote three new poem drafts linked to my self-imposed Sappho prompt. I read a chunk of the Byatt novel, washed bed linens, talked to my kid on the phone, went out to write in the evening with my friends.

Today will be another home day, and then in the evening T and I will stroll over to Hadlock Stadium to watch our first (and only) Sea Dogs game of the season. Sometimes we get to the stadium a few times during the season, but this one has been so crowded. I feel lucky we managed to snag an evening . . . and now a balmy forecast, fireworks afterward. Baseball is a fine way to play-act the sweetness of summer.