Today may be the only non-rainy day of the long weekend, but we can't go canoeing because Tom's truck is out of commission. So we're going to grab an early breakfast at the Palace Diner in Biddeford and then drive down to Laudholm Farm to walk along the salt marsh and the beach. Bird life should be in full swing, and maybe we'll get lucky and glimpse some harbor seals as well. I am forever hopeful.

I worked on my long-poem draft for most of yesterday, coming up for air now and then and finally, by midafternoon, setting it aside entirely and trudging out to the garden to do a round of weeding. The draft is six pages long now, and the form is still holding strong: interwoven American sonnets, Shakespearean stanza breaks, the words pouring directly from fingers onto laptop. Almost always I write long poems directly onto the screen--the form demands immediate visual clarity, and I'm usually composing so intensely that my handwriting can't keep up with my thoughts.

I don't know when it will be done. When taking a rest, I've been breaking off in the midst of a stanza so that when I return, I can propel myself instantly back into the stream. But at some point the final couplet will make itself known, and then everything will come to a halt.

As I've been writing, my thoughts have wandered to Dante, to Joyce's The Dead. When I am in the throes of a long poem, everything seems to speak to it: the old cookie jar on the kitchen shelf, the pile of LPs beside the turntable, the ants bustling up and down the walkway. The windy strand, warblers fluttering among the beach roses . . . no doubt they will muscle in as well. All the world becomes an allusion to whatever it is I'm struggling to say.

Regular life: Eating eggs and home fries and listening to rockabilly at 7 a.m.  Driving past dinosaur-themed mini-golf. Peering out into the marsh at nesting geese. Forgetting I've got laundry to fold. Remembering what it felt like to bounce on that squeaky desk chair in Grandmom Potter's back room. Writing an unwieldy poem.

I told you it was about to happen, and it did: I wrote four pages of linked sonnets yesterday morning, and there are more to come today. The long poem has me in its clutches. Around the edges of writing, I watered and weeded and tidied the downstairs rooms and folded laundry and made macaroni-and-cheese for a crowd and hosted a party. But even when I seemed to be distracted, the sonnets were shifting and sighing in their basket.

Chuck had a fantastic time at the party, which was both our regular writing group meeting and a silly first-birthday celebration for the Big Kitten. He exhibited exemplary good-boy charm, welcoming all guests at the door, playing with every toy he received, and not walking in anyone's dinner plate. What a cozy, friendly dingbat: he would love to host a party every day.

On the downside, the brakes on Tom's truck gave out. Blah.

Now here we are at Friday, with a long holiday weekend ahead. There's no canoeing in our forecast because the truck isn't drivable, but maybe we'll take my car down to Laudholm Farm and walk along the salt marsh. The days have returned to coolness, and rain is likely on Sunday and Monday. Lilacs are in their fragrant glory. Lilies-of-the valley nod along the edge of Baxter Woods. The cemetery flutters with bluebirds and mockingbirds. Tall dandelion puffs adorn the grass.

I am writing a long poem, and it feels like the orbital center of this universe. Irises and dripping hoses and line-drying shirts and brooms and dishpans and dead pickups and cats and mops and reel mowers and dinner plates . . . they all swirl around the poem--maybe a clutter of space junk, maybe dancers performing an elegant gavotte. To quote Spinal Tap, "there's a fine line between clever and stupid." But when a poem has me in its clutches, I don't have time to care.

You know I'm not one to complain about weather, but ninety degrees in Maine in May is uncanny and I'm glad we've returned to spring. Temperatures are mid-50s this morning and aren't supposed to climb higher than the low 60s all day. That's a good change. I don't think I lost anything to the heat wave, but the cool-weather plants are stressed and they'll need water and a few plain days to relax and recover.

This evening I'm hosting my poetry group here, so I have a few this-and-thats to do to get ready for guests. But mostly I'll be focusing on the new long draft that has suddenly risen into my thoughts . . . a sonnet cycle about dead friends: though it's not so much a cycle as a series of enwrapped sonnets woven into a single poem.

Yesterday I finished those interview questions, read more of a friend's manuscript, and, suddenly, as I sat in my study staring idly into the hot back yard, I began to hear the sonnet draft take shape, words still unchosen but the cadence settling into place, emotional tremor building, names pulsing. So far there are only two woven sonnets on paper, with the third just begun, but momentum is trembling, a drop teetering at the edge of an overfull glass . . . there is a sensation of almost-writing that is not so different from the sensation of about-to-have-a-migraine.

I won't say "I hope I can write today" because I have to write today. Any delay for chores or obligations will just intensify the aura. The poem will happen because it must.

This is one of the best feelings in the world.

 

At the end of a torrid day I wandered outside to feel the breeze in my hair. It was just before dark. The birds were reviving their songs. Children were playing kickball in the street. The gardens glowed, strangely, vividly.

I'd spent the day reading poems and novels, working on interview questions, catching up on paperwork. I made potato salad and a lemon pudding cake. On my walk I scavenged three metal planters, quite rusty but doesn't that add character?

When T came home from work, he brought the air conditioner up from the basement and installed it in my study window. I didn't ask him to do so and he doesn't generally like air conditioning. However, the upstairs gets muggy fast, and I think we were both happy to sleep.

Now, though, the windows are open again and Chuck is wandering from one to another, keeping a sharp lookout for robins and beetles. If only the temperature would stay exactly like this, balmy and sweet, but we are in for another round of hot before spring returns to normal.

I think I'll hang sheets on the line today. I'll figure out where to put my scavenged planters and decide what kind of plants to put into them. I'll read more manuscript, and scratch away at more interview questions, and mess around with a draft.

My body and thoughts have settled into a new rhythm. It's odd how different I feel when I don't have to be away overnight every other week. During the school year I am always shoehorning around the high school sessions. Now I am working, and working hard, and working steadily, and making progress, and learning, and reading, and thinking, and attending to the world, but I'm not dueling with time.

I've been rereading Sidney's sonnets, as I do now and then when I have a yearning for a near-perfect interlock of cadence and language. His words are jewels in the mouth, his music as inevitable as Mozart's. When I want a sonnet that overwhelms me with truth, I read George Herbert. Those other early emperors of the sonnet--Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser: each pursues his own avenues of thought. But when I'm seeking pure sensuousness, Sidney's "With how sad steps, O Moon," Wyatt's "Whoso lists to hunt" . . . these are the sonnets for swooning.

Yesterday was filled with housework, bill paying, piddly chores, necessary but uninspiring. Maybe that's why my thoughts turned to Sir Philip's luxurious verse. His poems have nothing in common with vacuuming and scrubbing toilets. They are silk and soft air. Their sorrows are tender hands unblotched by work. They do not tell my story. They are as remote as peonies.

T and I had such an enjoyable weekend--hanging out among the blooming gardens, riding our bikes, carting home loot from the library sale--but all good things come to an end, and now it's Monday and he has to go back to renovating someone else's house and I have to stay home and scrub toilets. 

Today will be another sweet spring day, but then we're supposed to drop into a weird mini-heat wave: two days in the high 80s, before things return to normal. I've got various errands to run: pick up my new glasses, mail stuff to my kid, buy cat food. I have a manuscript to read, and a class to start designing, and various conference things to prep.

As you can see from some of the tweaks I made on this blog over the weekend, I'm also trying to prepare for the PL changeover in July. Event scheduling is already becoming complex, not least trying to figure out how to manage a balance between paid and unpaid gigs. I need to earn a living. I need to support underserved communities. So I'm attempting to create a formal-ish way for Mainers to apply for free or low-cost visits to their schools, libraries, or other venues. The hope is that I can offer these gratis visits to institutions that really need them and have distinct ideas about how I can support their work, while also reining in my own habit of working without getting paid for it.

Yesterday was romance-novel spring: maples in young leaf, birds singing, grass thick and green. I planted zinnias, marigolds, bachelors' buttons, lobelia. I planted basil, a cherry tomato, a Serrano pepper, a pimento pepper. I mowed and trimmed, and then I changed out of my grub clothes and lolled barefoot in the lush shade of the backyard and read Willa Cather.

Between gardening and lolling, T and I filled up a bag with books and DVDs at the library sale, then stopped at a few yard sales on the way home. T went for a bike ride, and in the evening we lingered outside with a friend and savored our first al fresco meal of the season: teriyaki flank steak; grilled peppers, Vidalia onions, and queso de freir tossed with basmati rice and lettuce; stir-fried Asian greens.

We live in a city garden so there are no silences, even in the evenings. The air is dense with birdsong. Screen doors clack. Middle schoolers chatter as they lick ice-cream cones. An amiable band of twenty-somethings smokes a little dope in their driveway. A baby howls. Chuck chirps and presses his nose against a window screen. A freight train rumbles past.

I love the vibrating loneliness of the woods. I bask in it whenever I'm back in the homeland. But there's so much story in a city evening. Granted, this is a domestic neighborhood in a northern provincial town. It's not Manhattan. Still, we are surrounded, pressed upon, by humanity. Our neighbors live just feet away, their private complications bumping up against ours. Trains, planes, cars. Highways, an airport. Helicopters, ambulances, muscle cars. Dog walkers, babies in strollers. Guys shoving bottle-laden shopping carts up a hilly street. Teenagers setting off firecrackers. An unhappy person shrieking "Fuck!" A tall wild-haired girl singing into her phone.