T and I went out last night for an early movie and a late dinner, which is a date we should maybe have more often. As we were pleased to discover, it's easy to find a table in the Old Port at 8 p.m. on a weeknight, even in June. Mostly I tend to avoid the Old Port in the summer months, when it's the bastion of tourists and bar crawlers. But there are good restaurants in that neighborhood, and they are a pleasant stroll from the movie theater, through the briny night air, and a short drive home, along the lights of the cove. And it is nice to hold hands in public on a Tuesday.

Yesterday I got a chunk of work done on my Poetry Kitchen packet: all of the prose samples and most of the poems. I'll make a few more decisions today, and then I can start working on writing prompts. I also ordered a new printer. You may recall that a couple of years ago the roof leaked into our old one, and the machine has never recovered from the shock. For a while the left margins were still readable on the printouts (meaning that most poems were mostly legible), but last weekend, as I was printing out my manuscript draft, it gave up the ghost. Thus, I am spending yet more money on mechanized insentience. Blah.

Still, despite my luddite grumpiness, I am looking forward to a pretty day--sunny, mid-70s: an excellent day to hang sheets outside, listen to warblers in the woods, eat lunch in the garden; to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle and pull weeds in the shade; to sit by an open window in my blue chair, a book of poems in my lap, and watch robins splash in the birdbath. The Alcott House has its dreamy moments, and they are in bloom.

My dreams made me sad, though I can't remember details other than a room with two beds and the certainty that a task was looming.

Now, as I look out into the cool and cloudy morning, I can't shake the feeling that I am forgetting an obligation, letting someone down.

A cardinal whistles, pauses, whistles. Traffic growls in the distance. The air is very still.

In this darkened room, flowers shimmer . . . a jar of golden irises, a flagon of bridal veil and pale peonies.

Sunlight slashes through the heavy maples, streaking the neighbors' vinyl siding. A gray squirrel scuttles across their driveway, vanishes under the abandoned SUV whose tires are slowly sinking into the backyard earth.

Dream-sadness is nothing but loose ends. 

Except for eventually replacing my spring pansies with hot-weather flowers, I think I've finished my plant shopping for the year. I'll do some transplanting, and I'll keep sowing succession crops of salad greens, but I'm not buying any big-ticket shrubs or trees. I picked up a few last things as my neighbor and I wandered through nurseries and plant sales this weekend, and earlier last week I bought a raspberry plant . . . at the grocery store, of all places: a variety I've been looking for for years--compact, thornless, and non-spreading, perfect for a tiny homestead. Tom and I had a fantastic raspberry patch in Harmony, but there is no way to manage such a sprawling situation in this little garden. So finding the Glencoe berry bush was a score.

A thunderstorm came through yesterday evening, and rain must have kept falling through the night because everything is sopped again this morning. I've got my weekly housework to deal with today, and I'll go for a walk with a friend, and of course there's my manuscript to prod. For the moment I'm still mostly on employment hiatus, though I'm expecting an onslaught of new editing to show up soon, and the conference is rolling ever closer. Paperwork-wise, I'm prepped for Monson, but this week I'll start plotting out the syllabus details for my July Poetry Kitchen class.

Looking ahead at my calendar, I am already feeling a twinge of nerves about the amount of traveling I'll be doing in the fall. I know, as an introvert with a performance career, that I need to let myself keep soaking up this temporary peace. If I don't, I'll be a mess in the long run. But I've always found it hard to tamp down my guilt about my earning gaps.

So I scrub toilets and tell myself that I am contributing. Ah, the things we put ourselves through. No one else is griping at me. I can do all of the griping myself.

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.