This morning I'm being interviewed on WMPG, the radio station of the University of Southern Maine, 10 a.m., if you're interested in listening in. It's been years since I've done a radio interview, so I forget how the whole rigmarole works, but I bet it will come back to me quickly--as long I don't start getting hyperaware of my small speech imperfections: how I pop p and blur s . . . things I never notice in daily speech but that sometimes leap into my awareness during readings and recordings and such.

The interview will be just a half-hour blip out of the morning, and then I'll walk home and get back to work on a Poetry Lab prompt that's turning out to be quite productive. Teresa, Jeannie, and I decided to play with Sappho fragments, and I've been reusing the same one over and over in different ways to create a series of linked character-sketch poems. In the afternoon Teresa and I will talk about Aurora Leigh, and at some point in the day I'll water the garden and harvest basil for pesto. Plus, I've got eggplant and peppers and tomatoes and fresh onions--a bounty waiting for me to invent something wonderful for dinner.

Yesterday I caught up on mowing, weeding, and a few other garden chores, meaning that for the moment my homestead demands are minimal--just the usual daily laundry and cooking. So I'm glad the Sappho prompt is making me excitable, just when I have a little time and space to play.

And both boys phoned yesterday, and I went for a lunchtime walk with another of my favorite young people, someone I've known since she was two years old . . . and nothing matches the lift in my heart when I hear any of those dear voices on the other end of the line. The wedding, of course, is a primary topic, but despite the annoyance of the expense and the fret over plans, what we talk about is our excitement about being together at this big and wonderful party, dressed up in our silly loud outfits, playing our roles, being giddy and joyous together. 

We might have gotten a few drops of rain overnight, but nothing useful. The garden is hot and tired, the grass is spindly and brown, yet the humidity is so high that I can't convince any laundry to dry on the outside lines. It's difficult to dredge up enthusiasm for yard work.

Still, this morning I'll water, and maybe do some trimming and pruning. I'm meeting a friend for a noon walk, and Chuck has his annual vet checkup midafternoon, but the early hours are mine. So once I muscle through the outdoor chores and today's emails and paperwork, I might be able sit down for an hour or so and think about new poems, or even the chapbook. I hope so.

Yesterday I caught up on my Aurora Leigh reading, and I'm still slowly making my way through Grimm as well as the Dan Barry book about that 33-inning Pawtucket Red Sox game. It's difficult to feel brisk during these dog days. But one bright spot is tomato season, and yesterday I used up some of our beauties in gazpacho. My favorite recipe is an old M.F.K. Fisher version from the 1940s that calls for crushing the herbs and vegetables with pestle and then adding "half a glass of olive oil" and "a few glasses of water." A juice glass? A water tumbler? I love having no idea.

***

If you're interested, that article about me is out in the current issue of Haverford. I'm not sure my path to being a poet was exactly "unlikely," but I guess the word made a good headline.

It was another brutally hot day driving yesterday, but the town cooled down a little over night, so this morning I turned off the A/C and opened the house windows, and now Chuck is happily ensconced beside the screen door. He survived his two bachelor days without problem: our neighbor dropped by to give him his breakfast and remind him that he was adored, and there are no signs that he reverted to his youthful gut problems while we were gone. But since our return, he has spent all of his time in our laps or in our bed or whirling around our ankles, so clearly he is relieved that the band is back together again.

And here comes Monday . . . housework, garden work, desk work, and an enthusiastic, still-a-little-bit-worried cat. Though we were only gone for two nights, I feel like I've slipped out of gear somehow. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing around here?

Now the big Chicago trip looms, and these remaining August days are scattered on the path like breadcrumbs.

The heat just keeps simmering, but yesterday after dinner T and I finally got out for a walk. This part of Vermont was settled as dairy country, orchard country--open rolling fields, orderly trees: a domesticated prettiness that is nothing at all like the scrabbled forests, compressed skies, and stony dooryards of central Maine. The residents of these places are equally different from one another. Still, both regions are labeled rural New England, as if merely not being city or suburb drops them into the same bucket.

I wonder if I would become a poet if I'd spent a quarter-century in the Champlain Valley instead of Somerset County, Maine. There's something so visually unchallenging about this landscape, whereas Harmony confounded me at every turn.

Of course there is struggle everywhere. I would have wrestled, no matter where I was. Something would have happened.

But what happened to me was the woods.

Dog in Winter

Dawn Potter 

 

Up the boggy headland, frozen now, where a stone fence

Submerged in snow and earth-sink hints at pasture

So long vanished that the woods are convinced

Grassland never existed, two bodies climb—one fast,

Black, doe-agile; one slogging and foot-bound

Like a superannuated tortoise.  Guess which is me.

Easy to badmouth my grace but oddly hard to expound

On the postcard beauties of our workaday scenery—

Giant pines draped with frosting, wisp of chimney cloud

Threading skyward, and behind the frosted window

A glorious wall of books, lamp-lit; a dear bowed head.

In tales, common enchantment always merits less than woe,

            And perhaps I should collapse on the stoop like a starved Jane Eyre,

            Pleading heat and mercy. But I earn my joy. I mean, I live here.

 

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

We arrived at my sister's place in Vermont just as night and a rainstorm were settling in. Gloria did beautifully on her longest adventure to date, and her fancy features--those blind-spot alerts, for instance--really do take some of the stress out of highway driving. I felt almost relaxed behind the wheel.

Things are unusually loosey-goosey here as my sister, who is her household's action-packed organizer, broke her ankle a couple of weeks ago and is more or less tied to the couch. So she won't be charging off into fast walks or rounding up everyone for Fun. And my parents certainly won't be. It will be a weekend of sitting, which is just as well because the weather is terrible--hot and drippingly humid. Yesterday, when we stopped at the rest area in New Hampshire around 6:30 p.m., temperatures were still in the 90s. I like all kinds of weather, but this stuff is a challenge.

I brought two books to read: Aurora Leigh and Dan Barry's history of the longest game in baseball history--the 33-inning game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that took place in Rhode Island on Easter weekend in 1981. I was a junior in high school at the time, only a few miles away from McCoy Stadium, so for me the book is an evocation of time and place as well as the tale of a game. The book is a bit sentimental, as sportswriting can be, but the whiff of early 1980s Rhode Island is hard for me to resist.

The humidity around here has become ridiculous, and the A/C, reluctantly turned on last night, has thus far barely made a dent.

We're both groggy this morning because we had our second bat incident of the summer, which was unfortunate as T has to work all day and then we'll be driving to Vermont--that is, I will be driving, as he has yet to sit behind Gloria's wheel and will be exhausted to boot.

At least I'm not too scheduled today, so I can grab a nap if needed. I'd planned to get the grass mowed this morning, but the humidity is so heavy that I can't stand even the thought of dragging that heavy trimmer around the yard. Things will have to stay as they are: it's not like we're the only house in town with wispy shaggy patchy August grass.

Despite the miserable air, I will go for my walk this morning. I was so rushed yesterday morning--meeting stacked upon meeting--that I didn't manage to get outside, and that's never a good thing. I have a few errands to run today, I need to pack and deal with cat stuff, but otherwise I can be stupid and under-slept without damaging much.

Though the word meeting connotes tedium and wasted time, yesterday's were really useful. We made big progress in shaping next year's version of the conference, and that is a load off my mind. Actually much of what I got done this week is a load off my mind, including my beginning work on the chapbook. Going through my earlier collections, I began to see a particular thread I might follow, and I was unexpectedly pleased by some of those young poems. It's encouraging to note that I wasn't always a wordy self-involved yoinck (though sometimes I definitely was).

Anyway: today. Hot. Humid. A little blurred. But bat-free.

It sure is humid out there. My hair is curling like crazy, and so are the paperback covers. Through the open screens, late-summer cicadas scrape their thick sandy endless hum across the hours. Beyond the continuo, a gull screeches, a screen door slaps.

I'd like to hang sheets on the line, but will laundry dry today? It seems unlikely.

Despite the stickiness, the house has not felt ridiculously hot, and I spent most of the day beside the window in my little study, wandering between chair and standing desk: reading for the chapbook project, reading my kid's screenplay, reading Aurora Leigh, searching for a poem to read at the wedding; editing the Substack piece, drafting a fundraising letter, working on conference paperwork, recording poems for a class . . . so much to juggle, but I am making progress.

Tomorrow afternoon we leave for Vermont, and I'd like to imagine that my desk will be cleared off--not probable, but at least the lingering to-do list will be shorter. The manuscript I was editing has gone back to the author. The draft letter has gone out to its readers. The new Poetry Lab Notes post is now available on Substack. I'm glimpsing a couple of possible routes for the chapbook collection.

Today will start with a faculty meeting, but then I'm thinking I might work on some new poems. I'm feeling the swirl of the unsaid rising and shifting behind my eyes--an actual physical sensation, and one I should pay attention to, because it often presages writing. Something, I have no idea what, wants to become words.