The alarm went off at 4 a.m., and 20 minutes later T was heading north.

Meanwhile, here I sit, a new fire of cedar logs crackling, coffee steaming in a cup that reads Ernie. Eventually I'll shower, eat, pack, tidy. At 7:45 I'll walk up to W's house to do the Sunday crossword with her and her sister. And then, before 9, I'll be on the road, back in Portland by noon, reconfiguring myself into home life. I hope I won't be driving through rain, but probably I will.

Outside it is still fully dark and the peepers are king. T heard a barred owl as he was packing his truck, and with luck it will return to haunt me. Yesterday I wrote a new poem draft, so I'm already being haunted. But I always have room for more.

It will be odd but not bad to be solitary for a few days. I do wish I could get Chuck out of the kennel this afternoon, but they're not open for transactions on Sundays so he and I must wait till tomorrow for our reunion. As always, I've got plenty to keep myself busy--house, garden, desk.

Under normal circumstances I'd be heading to Monson this week, but school vacation has disrupted the schedule. So I'll have a respite--from travel, at least. I do have a memoir, a story collection, and two poem collections to copyedit. I have a lot of laundry to wash, and a lot of dandelions to dig out of the gravel walkway. Plenty of windows to gaze through. Plenty of stairs to climb.

My house is a badger’s tunnel

 

twisting and turning among roots and ledge.

It is an empty osprey’s nest, it rattles in a high gale.

 

I wake in a heap of feathers and bone.

Hope puddles under the floor.

 

The days ebb. I sweep blizzards and sand

as neighbors prowl under moonlight, hunting for breakfast.

 

In the mornings some of us are missing,

never to be seen again.

 

My house is a cavern of echoes.

It is as vast as despair, as shiny as coins.

 

I cannot find a door, yet windows are everywhere.

Each one hawks a different tale—

 

sing this tree, eat that sky.

But when I pull the curtains, darkness slides out like an eel.

 

Then I hear, very faintly,

the slow, slow drip of my life.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

 

We hiked Great Head yesterday--a spit of granite jutting out alongside Sand Beach, with spectacular views of the open Atlantic as well as the Beehive and other famous climbs along the Ocean Drive region of Acadia. Great Head is not known as a highly challenging hike, but post-rain it did involve a lot of scrambling over and among wet rocks, so we had to watch our footing.

The day began with fog but brightened into streaky blue skies. Long twists of cloud roped across the horizon, and Frenchman's Bay gleamed like a vast glazed bowl. In the forest a kinglet sang. A pair of black-backed gulls skated the breeze. In the distance we could just glimpse squatty, square Egg Rock Light clinging whitely to its stony isle.

We often hike on the quieter side of the island, avoiding the Bar Harbor lobe and the Park Loop Road and the other famous attractions of Acadia. The quiet trails are closer to the cottage and generally less peopled. But the drama of the Ocean Drive views is real. And on an April school day during mud season, this side of Acadia was nearly as peaceful as the other.

Today will be a work day. We may get out for a small neighborhood walk, but first we'll help load the car for the dump, take down some branches, shore up a deer fence. T will replace an old outlet in the cottage. Last night we went out to movie night at the Bass Harbor Library--a screening of Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps, always a favorite, where I was introduced to the sparse crowd as the next poet laureate. I am beginning to think I should take etiquette lessons in order to learn how to deal with my new incarnation as a minor local celebrity. I still feel like a twelve-year-old peeking out from behind a door. 

 

I arrived in fog, and the fog deepened. By the time T walked into the cottage, 45 minutes later, the cove was a blur. As dark settled in, the screel of peepers began. All night long, and even now, they shrill. At some point in the night a thunderstorm burst over the island--long flashes tearing into my vague sleep.

Night is still murky. I cannot yet make out the shape of the day, but I suspect fog and fog. When I step out onto the screened porch to get water for coffee, I am enveloped by damp.

And now, very suddenly, a robin unrolls a tune--chirr, chirrup, chirra, chirra, chirr . . .  I look up from the fire I'm trying to start in the stove and I see the cove emerging from darkness. Meanwhile, a chickadee joins the robin, offering its high-low whistle, and then a white-throated sparrow interrupts--O sweet Canada, Canada, Canada . . . Abruptly, the peepers vanish from the stage and the pallid air pulses with birdsong.

There is not so much fog as I expected. I glimpse Swan's Island huddled across the cove, the familiar spruce-lined peninsulas rippling into the circle of water. I know this view like I know my own face in the mirror . . . which is to say, not as well as I think I do. The seascape is no-color, water and land and sky mere variations of dim, yet the creases, the wry glance . . . 

Traveling alone, and meeting T here, was in its way sweet. He and I love this cottage in a way that is private to ourselves. Even our children, who have been here many times, don't quite participate in the unarticulated dearness that he and I feel for this place that doesn't belong to us. We have confidence in one another when we're here . . . I don't mean that we do anything special or unusual; just that something wells up in us: here is the other person who knows. I can't be any clearer than that, because there's no more clarity in this feeling than there is in fog. We have been deeply unhappy during many of our stays in this cottage, but we have been a bonded pair in our sorrow. Maybe that's what I mean: this place is an emblem of our duality.

As artists, as daily workers, we are separate beings. We know how to leave each other alone when that is necessary. But the other part is also true: here is the other person who knows.

Spring has been in idiosyncratic fettle this week--one perfect day, the rest cool and moody, and now rain whispers against the dark windowpanes. Outside daffodils are opening, crocuses are fading, and forsythia bristles with fat yellow buds. The skies swirl with indecision.

Yesterday T came home from work with a scavenged dishwasher, a castoff from a client who is getting something better. I wonder what better entails because this one is way more chi-chi than any appliance we have ever owned. We wrangled the old one into the yard and shoved the new one into place in the kitchen, where it will sit uselessly until he has time to hook it up next weekend. Ah, foraging. How we both love it.

And now we have to turn our attention to travel. T has already packed all of his clothes and cameras and will leave for the island right after work. I've got to pull our supplies together, tidy up, get Chuck to the cat kennel, fetch our CSA order, and then hit the road by midafternoon. It will feel strange not to drive together, strange to part at the end of the weekend, when he will head north to the County and I'll head south to home.

I've written a couple of new drafts over the past week, and maybe I'll be able to keep that roll going this weekend. I worry that the distractions of the laureateship will hijack my writing focus, but maybe not--maybe the urge to make poems will be too strong. If babies didn't hijack my attention, possibly nothing will. Babies are the best hijackers I know.

Yesterday was our first soft air of the season . . . shirtsleeves, open windows, no fire in the stove. And then rain all evening, so this morning I expect a glory of green.

After babying my eyes all day, I felt much better by evening. So today, after a round of editing, I'll start pulling myself together for our travels downeast--shopping, meal planning, and the like. One good thing about a visit to the cottage is the complete ease about outfits: work clothes, garden shoes, walking shoes, with a clean pair of jeans for going to the movies . . . nothing could be easier. Food is always the big focus, as these visits are one dinner party after another, in a kitchen that is not exactly primitive but is certainly not luxe. We'll order pizza one night, because the gargantuan sizing at Gott's Store makes us laugh. Otherwise, I am the camp cook.

One thing I might do at the cottage is submit a few poems. I've had some requests for submission--a rare event so I should probably take advantage of it soon. I'd also like to make headway on Aurora Leigh and get a few draft blurts out of my notebook and onto the page. Because of how school vacation falls this year, we don't have to tag-team our cottage visit with my Monson job, which will make these days feel more fully vacation-like . . . until some sorrow invades, as happens so often when we're there. We've spent a lot of time being sad in that sweet place.

from Desk Work

9 a.m. West Tremont. Goose Cove.

Sixty degrees in early winter, with a brisk warm wind.

The tide is high, the sea laps the cliff,

the sky is whitish-blue, like an old eye.

On the horizon Swan’s Island is a long lump of shirt

rolled for ironing.

 

How will I be this world?

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

I got the housework done, did Monson prep and some editing, went to the grocery store, and finally, late afternoon, managed to fit in a walk. But all day long my eyes were bothering me: I probably need new glasses, and spring allergies aren't helping the matter. Between eyes and sinuses, my head is feeling a little fragile these days.

I'm trying to pace myself work-wise, though that's difficult, given how eye-dependent my jobs are. Still, gardening helps, walking helps, and once I get an eye exam things should improve.

The aging body is a tale of trickery and submission. How can we fool the body into functioning as it used to? When do we admit that it won't?

Canto

 

At the peak of my powers I felt a falling-off,

as if an internal organ had come loose from its moorings

and was bobbing gently against my pelvis like a pear.

 

The season was autumn. Threads of smoke

unwound from the chimneys. Every compass pointed

toward winter.

 

I walked out, in the dim afternoon, into the small streets,

through a modest wood, across a vast graveyard.

I read the headstones—

 

here, the woman recalled only as Mother,

here, Our Darling Ralph, his tiny stone tarnished with lichen.

My way was littered with parthenons and obelisks,

 

with strange marble tables and mossy

arks of the covenant, and among them

bulldogs rolled in wet pine needles, helmeted tots

 

wobbled on training wheels, and I,

no longer at the peak of my powers,

turned my ankle on a pebble and limped.

 

But when I came to the bottom of the hill,

into that clutter of merchant mausoleums

known as the Valley of the Kings,

 

I paused in my limping and looked up

into the watery leaf-light: pale gold, speckles of black,

thinned remnants of last night’s gale.

 

And I felt, for no reason at all, sweetened.

Around me, the stony edited lives—

born, married, fathered, earned, died—

 

seemed to swell into ballads.

Carved lions kneaded their claws,

and lost at sea was a cadence.

 

I was a poet, and I wanted to sing

of small Ralph, alive and perched on his father’s

broadcloth knee, in the November twilight, after the banks

 

had bolted their doors and the barges had docked.

Now a scatter of gulls sailed over the cove,

and Mother sat alone at her rosewood desk and wrote

 

Sky. Leaf.  Light. 

I wanted to sing that. And so I did.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

It's raining gently outside, which is exactly the weather I was hoping for. After a weekend of planting, rain is the perfect response. And it's supposed to get warm today too, our first leap into the 60s. Everything brown will green, green, green, and the Carolina wren will spill his song from the neighbor's budding crabapple.

Yesterday I brought in a bouquet of hyacinths, and this morning the house is drenched with scent. The new seeds are soaking up rainwater--radishes, dill, cilantro, lettuce, spinach, sweet peas. I sowed flower seeds in various beds--one a mix of old-fashioned cottage garden varieties, the other a mix of shade lovers. If the birds don't eat them and I don't accidentally weed them out, the bursts of color and shape should be glorious.

I'm always so hopeful, and yet things always go wrong--flood, drought, insects, fungus, groundhogs, birds, squirrels, rabbits . . . all of them lie in wait. Still, the hope persists. I think it's good to have a realm for unreasonable optimism.

Today I need to clean the house. I've got to make a final pass through my Monson kids' submitted work. There's a fat stack of editing on my desk. I'm meeting tomorrow with Teresa and Jeannie about some dream poems we've been drafting. I ought to run a few errands. It will be a short work week as T and I are heading up to Mount Desert Island on Thursday for our spring visit to the cottage. The forecast is rain and I do not care. If we spend all weekend drinking tea and staring into Goose Cove, that will be fine with me.

Meanwhile, Young Chuck leans against my shoulder and purrs into my ear. The Red Sox have won two straight series and are starting to look less hapless. Hungarians voted out Orban. Rain murmurs at the window. I'm glad to be awake and listening.