Thirty-eight degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and smoke is rising from the neighborhood chimneys. Bed was exceptionally cozy, and socks and hot coffee are just the ticket. It's a great morning not to be camping.  But while we didn't get close to a frost here in Portland, inland gardeners must be gnashing their teeth over their tomato seedlings. Mainers mostly don't plant tender crops until Memorial Day, so standing tragically over frost damage on the weekend after Memorial Day does seem a little like one of those dour peasant scenes in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Yesterday's reading in Gardiner was fun. The poet lineup was a little different than advertised, but the bar was crowded with listeners, the local state senator volunteered to read a slam poem he'd composed for the Cantab, and afterward four poets laureate squished into a booth at the A1 Diner and ate sandwiches. [Yes, it does sound like the opening of a joke. Let me know if you think of a punch line.]

Today, once the temperatures rise, I've got to get outside and do storm cleanup: there are leaves and little branches down everywhere, and also I ought to mow. Rain is moving in again tonight, so the window for getting stuff done is small. I have perennials to plant, lettuce seed to sow for a second crop. If we're in the mood, my neighbor and I may drive over to the nursery to buy a few more things. Next weekend I'll be on the road, so I'm feeling a little pressed, despite the unseemly cold. And the weeds have all returned, of course. Weeds never let their foot off the gas pedal. [Oooh, there you are again, mixed metaphor, my old pal.]

For the moment, however, I'm glad to be warm and inside. Raw is the word for this cranky weather: a deep dank chill that makes the bones in my hands ache. [Personally I think it's fine to use cranky and dank in the same sentence, but I apologize if I made your ears ring.]

Maybe I'll take a look at the new manuscript iteration today, or maybe I'll let it sleep for a while before I reconsider what I've made. But now that June has arrived, my days of freedom are on the wane. Soon I will be all conference, all the time, so this new manuscript won't get more than a cat nap before I start poking it again. There's no time to waste.

A wild stormy night, and at first light the gale still whips through the maples. As far as I can tell, no big branches have come down in the yard, but the gardens and grass are littered with twigs and fat leaves, and the peonies look like they've been in a bar fight.

It's a cold storm, too--temperatures in the 40s and wind like a hunting knife. Snow was forecast for the mountains, but here on the coast we're all gust and groan . . . creaking trees, battering rain, the little houses cowering.

The storm is supposed to settle down by midday, so it shouldn't affect my drive to Gardiner for a late-day reading. But my neighbor and I were planning to go to a plant sale first thing this morning, and possibly that won't happen.

I'm glad it's Saturday and that Tom gets to doze in bed and delight in not going to work in this furore. The maples always make me nervous in a big storm--they're so massive and loom so threateningly over the houses--but I do bask in both the snugness and the wildness. It's sweet to be warm and dry, sipping my hot coffee, wrapped in my bathrobe, listening to the furnace growl. Meanwhile, the wind's sea-roar makes me feel like I'm perched on a rock, far out in the Atlantic.

This afternoon, as mentioned, I'm reading at the Gardiner Poetry Festival, downtown at the Table Bar, 4 p.m., with Betsy Sholl, Stu Kestenbaum, Julia Bouwsma, t. love smith, Samaa Abdurraquib, and Arisa White. My name isn't on any publicity, as I was invited late, but I'll definitely be there, so come by if you're in town.

I'm not tired this morning, but I am feeling a little wrung-out. I spent much of yesterday with my poetry manuscript--reordering, retitling, rethinking; stripping out poems, adding different ones, making small changes within poems so that they echo among themselves. Manuscript work is difficult. I second-guess myself in ways I do not with individual poems. I worry that I'm the only one who can sense the through-lines. I worry that the through-lines are dull and obvious. I don't want to be thinking about potential readers, but I am. I don't want to worry if this thing is publishable, but I am.

Ergo, the wrung-out feeling. On the bright side, however, the crown of sonnets is pretty much done. I made one more little tweak yesterday, and now, I think, it's found its final shape. 

Morning dawns heavy-lidded and gray. A small rain suddenly rattles against the panes, a passing shower before the real storm settles in this evening. When I lean out the back door, the scent of wet lilac weights the air.

Today I hope to turn my thoughts back to my poetry manuscript. I've been mulling changes but for various reasons have been frozen in place, unable to make a move. Perhaps last week's crown experience has cracked the ice because this week I've gradually been feeling more able to address the issues. Or perhaps all I needed was a break from the collection, a chance to forget about it and then relearn it. Or maybe I've just been procrastinating. Who knows. The mysteries of making are legion.

In any case, I have rain, I have a day, I have a manuscript. Yesterday I caught up on desk-chore obligations. The housework is under control. The garden is wet. Nobody needs me to do anything else, as far as I know. There's no avoiding the manuscript. It's the task du jour.

I'm still reading Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. I've read a few of his novels before and they always make me uneasy. The characters are impossible to love, or even forgive. His ability to create such uneasiness in a reader interests me. If I can't enjoy the novels, I can feel their compulsion--how we watch, fascinated, as wickedness creeps under our doors. I try to look at how he makes these characters, how he lures my gaze.

The novel is not a cozy read, to say the least. Not that I'm addicted to cozy reads, but the book does unsettle me, and I wonder how my discomfort will affect my work with my own manuscript today. It surely will affect it somehow; reading always does bleed into life.

And writing, too, bleeds into life, changes it, makes a liar out of me. Last week, in my crown, I wrote that Ray never comes back to me in dreams. But then, last night . . . there he was.

Yesterday was mostly this-n-that desk work, and today will be more of the same: an editing project to finalize, a few arts commission obligations to sort through, the Haverford magazine article to fact-check, more scheduling to figure out.  I finished rereading the Strout novel and have moved on to Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which is completely new to me. I wandered through my gardens. I folded clean sheets.

I'm still tinkering with the sonnets and even as I work I can feel my brain returning to its unpossessed state . . . which is good because late-stage revision is basically impossible when I'm in the throes. I can make big, sweeping, re-see-everything changes, but the niggly details require a steadier state of mind.

So these routine editing projects, the publicity stuff I'm whipping up for the arts commission, the fact-checking: all of this daily-grind stuff does have a link to the crazy-making side of my writing life. It gives me a structural bridge. It gives me a box of tools. I can walk away from the generative chaos, turn back to look at what I've made, begin to see it more dispassionately, then reach for a plane and some sandpaper and start honing.

The weather was lovely yesterday--sun after rain; sweet, soft air. I mowed and trimmed outside, opened every window, washed floors, cut fresh flowers for the mantel, went for a walk, baked, read a Liz Strout novel, tinkered with the sonnets. I'm glad I managed to get so many chores done because this morning I need to return to editing. It's just as well to have a desk distraction: I feel bereft, now that the crown is more or less finished.

That's always the question: how do I live with myself when a big poem is over? I don't usually suffer this sensation of loss after finishing a smaller piece, but the long poems are so massively emotional. It is hard to know what to do afterward. My usual tasks and habits seem inadequate, even stupid. Why bother, if I can't have the poem back?

I'm exaggerating a little--really, I am managing; I have plenty of ways to keep myself busy. But I do temporarily lose my purpose after finishing a giant poem, and that is not a good feeling. I suppose it's analogous to coming down after a high; probably the same brain chemicals are involved.

So thank goodness for kind weather, line-dried sheets, a bouquet of white spirea overflowing on the mantel. Outside, a bluejay squawks. I miss my poem. 

Yesterday morning, just after I posted my note to you, I opened my long-poem draft and suddenly understood what I was doing: I was writing a crown of sonnets. I'm not sure why it took me until the thirteenth sonnet to realize that this was what was happening. It's amazing that the form found itself because there was zero preplanning or self-awareness involved. The poem is truly an organic construction; it insisted on its shape.

Some of you probably already know this, but a crown is a set of fourteen sonnets linked by subject matter, rhetoric, syntax, style, rhyme, etc., ending with a coda sonnet composed of the first lines of all of the previous sonnets, making a total of fifteen. They were popular with the great 17th-century sonneteers (Donne, for instance), and contemporary poets still occasionally turn to them. My friend Meg Kearney, for instance, has published two impressive crowns constructed with traditional meter and rhyme: one about a bad marriage and bad weather, the other about heart ailments both medical and metaphorical.

Though I often write traditional rhymed and metered sonnets, my crown did not want to fall into those patterns. It desired Shakespearean quatrains and couplets, but otherwise it demanded independence. By the time I recognized what I was doing, I had only the fourteenth sonnet left to write and the coda sonnet to construct. Both came quickly, and I didn't need to do much tinkering to turn the first lines into a coherent final statement.

In the aftermath of this, I'm still dizzy. If I had planned ahead to write a crown, I would have been self-conscious and purposeful in a guess-what?-I'm-starting-a-cool-project kind of way. Instead, the crown kicked down my door and held me hostage for most of a week, and it didn't rip off its mask until just before tossing me into the streets.

And now I have this thing. And now I don't know what to do with it.

There are few things more luxurious than waking up beside an open window on a Monday holiday in high spring and lingering drowsily in bed as the rain that has been falling all day and all night gently drips and patters. Even Chuck the breakfast enthusiast was willing to dawdle.

Such a lovely weekend: I don't know how it could have been better--lots of time with T on the beach, in town, around the house; the gardens in spectacular shape; a slow reread of Joyce's The Dead; and yesterday morning I may have reached the end of the long-poem draft . . . in any case, the time has come to step back and consider what it has become.

I write these words and I instantly imagine someone frowning: ready to point out that my private gladness ignores national terrors, heart-tearing Gaza, the unhoused woman in the rain, the porcupine crushed by a car, customs officers dragging away a young man, a child afraid of her father . . . oh, there is so much to write . . . the list drags on and on. 

Does joy equal callousness? As a child I learned: the cup is always half-empty; distrust pleasure; be more afraid. 

Recklessly I cannot help myself. I love to be alive.

I've spent most of a week writing a long-poem draft about death.