Yesterday afternoon, after I'd finished my dose of editing for the day, I changed into my ugly clothes, lugged the wheelbarrow and the spade from the shed, and started digging up the grass strip between sidewalk and street. A couple of years ago I'd planted a small bed of scavenged lilies in the center of the strip. Now that they've begun to multiply, my plan is to slowly spread them into the rest of the strip. I refuse to put any paid-for plants into this sidewalk garden because inevitably, at some point, the city will rip it up during roadwork and I don't want my heart to be broken. But a crowd of free lilies, cushion spurge, and sedum will be just the ticket.

It's been a while since I've done straight-up digging in the way I did every year in the Harmony garden. I don't have the ledge issues in Portland that I fought with up north. If I hadn't turned over the soil fully every year, it would have reverted to stones. But digging is a chore I sort of enjoy. Like carrying firewood, it's tedious but also meditative. I enjoy the strength of my shoulders and arms and back. I enjoy birdsong and wind and the kids who walk by and the hoot of the passing train. And for a gardener, turned-over soil is a visual pleasure, as sweet a sight as a clean notebook page is for a writer.

This evening we've got rain coming in. This afternoon I'm getting a haircut, and this morning I'll be at my desk. But I might find an hour somewhere to do a little more digging. I haven't been very focused on writing poems, but I'm not too concerned. My poet life has been peculiar lately: poetry has been my skin instead of my bloodbeat. That's an awkward metaphor, but maybe you know what I mean: everything has been so outward-facing. Retreating into private life has meant retreating into my homestead tasks: laundry and garden, firewood and mop and shovel. Partly that's just a matter of season. Spring is demanding, even on a postage-stamp homestead like this one. But also I need to figure out how to be two kinds of poet, and that will take time.

After a chilly weekend, Monday was balmy and sweet. I hung sheets and towels on the line, went for a long walk, cleaned the house, opened windows upstairs and down.

It was also Little Chuck's first birthday, and he celebrated by chasing a ladybug and rolling in a sun puddle on the front doormat. How lucky we were when this guy bounced into our lives--this bundle of cheer, this cozy dingbat. Losing Ruckus was such sorrow, but Chuckie has done his very best to remind us that it's good to keep finding someone to love.

On my walk yesterday I snagged a copy of Tessa Hadley's novel Free Love from a roadside library, so that was a score. My desk day was productive too: I returned two finished editing projects to the press, meaning that I am actually whittling down this crazy pile. This time of year is always a peculiar one for me, editing-wise. I am the press's copyeditor for a set of annual literary prizes, and they always arrive to me in a bundle: five books at once. So the work can feel like a carousel: I finish an edit, it goes to the author, it comes back from the author, it goes to the press . . . and five books are spinning on this merry-go-round at once.

Today I'll pluck another ms from its horse, but maybe I'll also have a chance to look at a poem or two, or even go back to my own manuscript and mull over some changes. I will do some weeding in the afternoon (the perpetual maple-seedling eradication continues) but I might also dig out some grass on the sidewalk strip and transplant lilies into it. I've almost finished reading Sebald, have just started the new Hadley. I am full of spring energy, but also not quite sure where it will burst out. All I know is that something will happen.

It is nice to have a few decent, recent photos of myself, and I really appreciate the arts commission photographer, who is good at his job.

You'd think, given that I've been living with a professional photographer for most of my life, I'd have an easy time acquiring acceptable pictures of myself. But in fact we have constantly struggled over headshots and other such paraphernalia. Neither of us is relaxed in pose mode, and my last tolerable portrait is a phone shot I took myself.

**

This morning I'll be back at my desk, sorting through various editing projects before turning my thoughts to housework and groceries. We did not end up canoeing yesterday: the weather was so raw that we realized we'd just be miserable. So instead I worked in the garden: did some planting and weeding, set up more animal fencing, mowed grass, washed down the yard chairs and table after their months in storage. Chuck trotted back and forth between the front door and the back door, keeping track of my progress. He is cozy company, even with a door between us. I also did a little front-yard foraging for dandelion buds, which, like nasturtium buds and new milkweed pods, can be pickled and substituted for capers in recipes.

Foraging for dandelions does scratch the spring itch a little, but I will never stop mourning my fiddlehead patch. Last week, when I was in Wellington, I felt a surge of sorrow when I remembered spring in Harmony. After dinner, at this time of year, I'd leave the boys in the house and go out with my shovel to turn over a few rows in the garden. Without leaves on the trees, the late-day light was blunt and stark. Evening chill was settling in, and often the newly thawed soil was speckled with ice crystals. The muscles of my arms and shoulders recalled their strength. I fought with the big stones that lurched up each year from the ledge below. In the circle of trees around the clearing a pileated woodpecker wailed his archaic song.

I'm 61 years old and I don't want to be arguing with giant stones anymore. I feel lonesome for the me who did.

Somewhere among the sodden maples, a  Carolina wren urges birdie, birdie, birdie. Yesterday's on-and-off rain is on pause, but the sky is still freighted with cloud. T and I are hoping to canoe Brownfield Bog today, but the weather looks unsure of itself. Still, I think we'll take the risk because getting rained on will be better than being consumed by blackflies, which is what will happen if we delay our visit.

Yesterday I had a communication with a friend that I've been mulling over ever since. It was probably the first time I've verbalized something I've been thinking about for quite a while now: the urge that so many people feel to be instructional, by which I mean a constant striving to bring other people into one's own lane. People do this in a lot of different ways: by straight-up traditional bossy talk, but also by posting inspirational memes and/or finger-pointing memes and/or warning memes and/or "joke" memes about bad grammar and the like; by urging others to "pray" for something or other; by, in some way, trying to leverage the power of the scold or the wheedle or the charismatic pronouncement to tell others what to do or how to think.

A few years ago, at a White Sox game, I listened to a man behind me explaining, in great detail, how to fill out a baseball scorecard--that is, how to keep track of every single thing that happens in a game. I glanced back to see who he was talking to, and it turned out that his audience was composed only of his preschool-aged son and his infant daughter. 

That guy was pretty deep into the instructional hallucination. But teachers, politicians, preachers, activists: they're all prone to it. I'm a career teacher myself, so you'd think I'd be right up there with the crowd. But I've never been that interested in making others, for instance, toe the English teacher line. I honestly do not care if you use an apostrophe wrong. I know how to follow the rules, and as a copyeditor I'm hired to impose them. I make deliberate choices about how to use punctuation in my own writing, and I encourage my students to also be deliberate. But I feel no desperation about the value of rules.

The instructional urge goes beyond the minutiae of rules. It's also a longing to bring others into line with one's own morality. I think for many people this is closely linked to panic about the state of the world. They are overflowing with dread, with helplessness. They feel responsible. If they instruct others how to behave, maybe they will assuage their own terrors.

I'm a committed teacher, but increasingly I find such a stance not only exhausting but pointless. As I told my friend, more and more often I feel that the best I can do is to open a space and then set up a trigger for a response to and within that space--to give other people the opportunity to frame their own, perhaps unexpected, clarities. I don't know if this is a cop-out. I don't know if it isn't. What I do know is that I don't like sitting on the judge's bench. And flailing in a maelstrom of dread muddies everything. 

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.