It's forecast to be an off-and-on showery weekend, but T and I are still hoping to take the canoe to Brownfield Bog tomorrow afternoon, and my neighbor and I are still hoping to get over to the plant nursery this afternoon. I ought to mow grass and undertake another round of maple-seedling eradication and prune the wilting hyacinths. I'd like to sow chard seeds and get the snow shovels into the basement and the outdoor chairs into the yard. I'd like to pump up my bike tires and take a practice ride around the neighborhood.

But I also hope it will rain. Despite the gift of a winter snow pack, Maine is still suffering from the aftereffects of last year's drought. We need regular rainfall, and in any case at this time of year I'm always happy to putter outside in drizzle. The scent of wet earth, the privacies of rain, the way the greening world intensifies . . . who wants to miss that?

Yesterday I had long phone conversations with both of my boys, and then in the afternoon a long phone conversation with the writer who was interviewing me for an article in the Haverford alumni magazine. So, with all of that talking, I didn't get much done at my desk--which was fine, as I'd already worked a lot of hours this week. I drove to the fish market and bought soft-shell crabs for dinner. I harvested garlic chives, and went for a walk under the cherry trees, and read Sebald.

What a hallucinatory book The Rings of Saturn is. It's supposedly about going for a long walking tour of the Sussex coast. But the narrator is constantly sidetracked by the thoughts sifting through his mind--the herring fishery, Chinese opium wars, Joseph Conrad--and these long perorations become a dreamlike journey in themselves. In a certain way the novel reminds me of Moby-Dick. The sidebars become the tale, and the tale becomes not a narrative but an unfolding.

Now first light opens over the little northern city by the sea. Cloud presses against roofs, tangles with branches, peers down chimneys. Gulls spin up from the cove. Dog and dog walker stride briskly down a sidewalk, wheel in tandem at the corner, vanish. On the stairs Young Chuck chirrups, hoping to distract me from writing to you. He is the only noisemaker. The songbirds are quiet so far. No tires hiss by, no trains rumble and hoot. The air is a held breath.

Last night's poets laureate jamboree in Freeport was . . . well, I don't know how to describe these things. Amazing to be on stage, to be welcomed as an equal, to receive a standing ovation, alongside the likes of Kate Barnes, Baron Wormser, Betsy Sholl, Wes McNair, Stu Kestenbaum, Julia Bouwsma. Amazing to do this in front of a packed crowd. Amazing to sell a bunch of books and talk to a bunch of people and receive so much confident affection and encouragement.

Yet it was also deeply unreal. I have spent my career working with small cohorts, often in out-of-the-way places, where my task, as I've said a thousand times, is to teach myself out of a job. I hate the cult-of-personality approach to teaching. I've tried so hard to keep my students at the center, to step back so they can step forward into their power. I am the pivot of the universe only when I'm writing alone--and even then I'm as likely as not imagining myself into some other character's mind and body.

I thought I knew what I was getting into when I turned in my application for poet laureate. But somehow I didn't envision the deep strangeness of becoming a public figure. It's not exactly imposter syndrome I'm feeling. I have confidence in myself as a poet, a performer, a teacher. The previous poets laureate are my friends because they are deeply humane, because they care so much about lives, because they are so curious about the world outside themselves. I have a direct and solid bond with them; they are my kind of poets.

More, what I feel, is that somehow, when I'm being feted on stage, I'm not actually doing my best work. My best work is quiet, underhand, almost invisible. My best work is sitting back and laughing when my high school kids create a noir cop drama out of a newspaper article in less than two hours; when the shy boy who almost dropped out of the program because he was afraid of poetry submits, as his final work, a batch of compressed, emotion-filled lyrics that knock everyone's socks off. These kids have become independent makers: they don't need me anymore because they have found themselves.

Despite insomnia, I had a fun day with the kids. It was the last regular day of the program, and they spent the morning creating performances and the afternoon curating their gallery show. I'll see them twice more: next Friday for the opening, and then the following week for a makeup day when we'll be teaming up with the visual artists to do some sort of sculpture project. But the year-long arc I launched them on in September has come to an end.

What do I see? A cohort of kids who love working together, are game for any surprise prompt, will write for long stretches with great concentration, have risked new forms and emotional depths, have learned to look closely at their own drafts and make useful, creative decisions about next steps, feel pride in what they have made but also pride in their ability to make it new. As a teacher, I am a pig in clover. There is nothing more satisfying.

But today I veer into another lane. This morning I've got an eye appointment; then I have to prep for tonight's reading; then I have to experience tonight's reading. I'm so grateful a friend has offered to do the driving as both the pouring rain and the expectation of dilated eyes have been making me nervous.

The venue is apparently sold out, but I'm told there will be a livestream, if you're interested.

For some reason I slept horribly last night, despite the pleasure of peepers outside my window. Now I lie in bed listening to a woodpecker hammer and a grosbeak chirp, lulled by these familiar homeland spring sounds despite my insomniac school-day forebodings.

And at least there's coffee ahead, and a slowish drive up to Monson, and my fine students to greet me. 

And in Portland the cherry trees are in bloom--

What a gorgeous day we had yesterday! Soft air, birdsong, the flowering trees bursting into glory. I got sheets and towels onto the lines, the house cleaned, windows open upstairs and down. I worked at my desk; I baked pita for lamb sandwiches; I took a long a walk. Chuckie raced around the house with a breeze up his nose. Being alive felt like a sort of magic.

This afternoon I'll head north for an overnight in Wellington; then Monson all day tomorrow, the big PL event on Thursday, an interview on Friday . . . A fury of self-consciousness lies ahead, but this morning I'll walk with a friend, this evening I'll hang out with a friend, and a day with my high schoolers will be the perfect way to forget about myself.

I've been reading Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, dipping into Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Yesterday I plucked a Lahiri story collection out of a free library. Fischer's American Founders is still sitting on the coffee table, waiting for me to embark. Outside the gulls are wailing, and inside I am thinking about books, and upstairs Tom is reminding Chuck not to drink his coffee. Everything overlaps and intersects; each moment is thick with pollen. Chuck sneezes and Sebald's narrator lingers at a lonely train station in Sussex and Tom slices bread and Aurora Leigh says to herself:

Alas, I still see something to be done,
And what I do, falls short of what I see,
Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,
Worn bare of grass and sunshine--long calm nights,
From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,
Be witness for me, with no amateur's
Irreverent haste and busy idleness
I set myself to art! What then? what's done
What's done, at last?
                                  Behold, at last, a book.

That twingy, weird feeling I had yesterday got worse. I had no idea what was going on and was beginning to panic, until T looked at me and asked, "Are you having a migraine?"

He was exactly right. I have migraines so rarely that my body forgets what they're like, but every one of them has been associated with eye strain. Once T diagnosed my problem, I was able to relax and say, "Oh, fine," because there's nothing to be done with a migraine except lie on the couch with my eyes closed until it runs its course.

None of my migraines repeat themselves exactly. Sometimes I've had brief ocular ones: a half hour of color shards, a 10-minute splitting headache, and then they're over. This one had a bigger buildup (vertigo and shivers), but the headache itself was minor. I mostly experienced it as neurological hallucinations that were both interesting and unpleasant. Yesterday's color palette was deep magenta washing behind my closed eyes like thick rippled paint. At times my nose felt enormous; then the tips of my ears expanded like Spock's; then my teeth were too big for my mouth. I lay on the couch wondering if this might last forever, and for some sufferers it really does. But by early afternoon I was on the downside, and by late afternoon I was completely back to normal.

And now, this morning, I feel almost refreshed, probably from spending so many waking hours with my eyes closed. Fortunately, before the event, T and I had been in the process of problem-solving my eye strain/ergonomic issues. On Saturday, I'd driven to the mall to buy a keyboard and a mouse and then set up my workspace to improve my posture and eye-line. I wear trifocals, and that is much of the problem here: my eyes have to work hard to align themselves with whatever I'm looking at. So strain has been building, and "Voila," said my brain. "You have to lie on the couch and learn your lesson."

***

On another note: Jeannie, Teresa, and I have a new post up on Poetry Lab Notes. It's free for anyone to read, but if you subscribe, all of our new posts will come directly to you.

I'm feeling a little under the weather this morning--kind of shivery and twingy and sour-mouthed; no fever but something is going on. So it may be a quiet day, not that I had anything fancy planned. 

Yesterday I updated my computer operating system, and this morning, as I was beginning to write to you, I watched in horror as Apple's predictive text began taking over my meandering first words. I had a moment of imagining that my relationship with this blog had been destroyed before I figured out I could eliminate the evil tool in settings.

Why not give new users the option to turn on predictive text instead of making them turn it off? Why assume that what writers really want is to not write? Sure, there are plenty of people who are happy to let the computer do the thinking, but why can't they be the ones who have to go into settings and hunt down the button that answers their yearning?

Now daylight begins to arch over the roofs and trees. From my couch corner I crane up at ash tree branches that have suddenly, since yesterday, broken into bud. Spring shouts a new surprise every single hour.

Bet you wouldn't have come up with that sentence, predictive text.