Last night's reading was so pleasant: 30 or so people crowding into the little library, a surprising number of book sales, lots of questions and conversation afterward. I guess this was my first official reading as poet laureate, unless you count the Monson, Maine, USA performances during the conference. But really the locals were there to see their friend Weslea, which is as it should be.

In a little while the two of us will drive into Southwest Harbor for breakfast, and then I'll head back to Portland. This has been Gloria the Mazda's longest roadtrip so far, and she did excellently, though as usual I had to deal with an unexpected electronic warning doodad . . . this car is loaded with them, and they drive me a little crazy. This time an alarming "Service Due Soon" sign appeared in the middle of my speedometer and wouldn't go away until I pulled over and figured out how to reset the "time for an oil change" reminder built into the control panel. One longs for the old days, when I had to remember myself when my car needed an oil change. Or perhaps one longs for a car that resets its own monitor, given that it actually had an oil change a month ago. But I should not be petty. Gloria is a lovely car, and I am grateful to own a vehicle whose transmission will not die on a highway any time soon.

Today, after lunch, I'll depart for Mount Desert Island, which no doubt will be clogged with traffic and overrun by visitors. I am so used to the place in the off-season, to puttering around the park during our peaceable April and November visits to the cottage, but now is the height of tourist frenzy and it will be a different place entirely. This time of year the cottage is filled with paying customers, so I'll be staying in Weslea's spare room instead . . . but at least I'll have the cove in my sights, dear horizon, dark scent of tide and brine.

If you're localish: we're reading at the Bass Harbor Library, in Bernard, at 5:30 tonight. Then tomorrow I'll head home and start girding myself for this weekend's class: two days centering on the influence of prose syntax on new poem drafts. These classes are work, of course, but they also allow me space to write, and I could use a weekend of new poem drafts right about now.

Today is our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. As always, I'm impressed to discover I've remembered it. The date, so close to our older son's birthday, sank into obscurity as soon as he leaped onto the scene. For years we barely thought about celebrating ourselves.

But thirty-five years is a long time to hang out with the same guy. Two of the friends who stood up with us are now dead. The birthday-partier who stole our thunder is getting married himself in a few weeks. This summer we've surprised ourselves by becoming uncharacteristically sentimental about the whole idea of weddings . . . making our presents for the kids, fussing happily about outfits, getting our rings resized.

It's Monday, it's a work day, and I've got to scrub toilets this morning. There's nothing remotely romantic about this anniversary moment. Except that here we are: still bumbling along together, tangling our harness straps, stepping on each other's hooves, bumping noses over the water trough.

O heart, are you great enough for love?

   I have heard of thorns and briers.

Over the thorns and briers,

   Over the meadows and stiles,

Over the world to the end of it

   Flash of a million miles.

--from "Marriage Morning" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

We did get a rainstorm last night, but now the humidity is back, along with the wildfire smoke, and my sinuses are clogged and complaining.

But first things first: what about those Red Sox? This team has been wretched all year--until, suddenly, they're not. Yesterday's game was their twelfth win in a row, and as entertainment it was perfect . . . every at-bat packed with dramatic tension, and then the romance soaring when Wilyer Abreu, in a 3-2 count, with two outs already in the inning, laced his second home run of the game and put the Sox ahead for good. It was a schmaltzy-movie sort of game, for sure, but I'm sopping up all of the temporary baseball feel-good I can. They'll start losing again soon.

Meanwhile, I caught up on a chunk of yard work before the rain, and then, in the afternoon, I put together initial plans for my fall Poetry Kitchen class, "A Visit with the Brothers Grimm: Using Fairy Tales to Generate and Revise Poems." I love fairy tales, and I've been rereading them regularly since childhood--the Grimm versions, but also Andrew Lang's French-influenced tales, Italo Calvino's Italian collections, and the many other volumes that I've pulled off library shelves over the course of my life. I've long known that fairy-tale logic, structure, surreality, moral ambiguity, class warfare, and so on have affected my work imaginatively and thematically. But I think these elements have also played a role in how I move from raw first drafts into early-stage revisions, and that's what I hope we can play with in the upcoming class.

The dates are November 7 and 8, on Zoom. The cost is $150. There will be lots of off-screen writing time. Maybe I'll see you there.

A cool gray morning. Through open windows I hear gulls wail up from the cove, a jay squawk in a nearby bush.

It's Saturday, my first and last quiet weekend for a while. Tom's still asleep, Chuckie is crunching up breakfast, and I am considering the tasks ahead of me--mowing, weeding, groceries, laundry--while also not fussing about them. Rain and thunderstorms are forecast for afternoon and evening. Maybe I'll get nothing done. Maybe I won't care.

This week, in and among all of my catch-up chores, I finished Great Expectations and began reading the essays of Brian Doyle, which I picked up at the Goodwill the other day. His novel Chicago is one of the sweetest books I know, and his essays, too, overflow with sweetness--occasionally to a cloying degree, but mostly not. He came from a big Irish Catholic family; he remained a committed Catholic all his life; he loved and admired his parents and siblings; he was devoted to his wife and children . . . you'd think this would make for dull material, but even contentment can be charming in the hands of a skilled writer. Doyle is often funny about small things, and his best sentences are like old cars with squashy brakes careening down switchback gravel roads. All in all, his essays have been a decent addition to a convalescent week.

On Tuesday I'll be driving over to Mount Desert Island to read with my friend Weslea Sidon at the Bass Harbor Library, 5:30 p.m. I met Weslea at the first-ever poetry workshop I ever attended--when my boys were tiny, and I was terrified to leave them for a weekend, terrified to meet real poets and discover that I had no chance of standing alongside them. Weslea was the balm to all of that terror . . . a real poet, who wrote and spoke with great seriousness and humor, who calmed me and cared about me, who kept reaching out, year after year--not just to me but to Tom and the boys. She and her husband Curtis coaxed us to their cottage by the sea, offered us space and affection. This is where Tom and I still go, spring and fall--to the cottage, to Weslea, who is alone now that Curtis is gone. So it makes me very, very happy to be reading with her this week. It makes me very, very happy to know that I had some part in getting her new collection into print. The book is beautiful, and if you're in the area I hope you'll come hear her read.

The occasional poem I mentioned yesterday, "Maine: July 2026," appears in today's Vox Populi. This may be the fastest creation-to-publication stream I've ever experienced. My friend Weslea Sidon and I also plan to perform it chorally next Tuesday evening at our reading at the Bass Harbor Library. It seems important to harp on the matter before people are distracted away from remembering.

***

My dry neighborhood finally received a couple of downpours yesterday, and I did manage to weed about third of the front garden beds before the rain started, so the garden is beginning to look a little better than it did. Meanwhile, I've still been immersed in post-conference business. Planning for next year always starts instantly; there's barely a beat between ending and beginning. But I did get out to write with my friends in the evening--two not-very-promising drafts; still, doing the work felt good.

Now I idle in the cool morning air, listening to the man with the shopping cart of cans trundle from one recycling bin to the next. A Carolina wren cries teeterteeterteeter; Chuck peers industriously under a rug; everyone is at work, and I suppose I, too, can call what I'm doing work . . . wandering between past and future, bumbling among details. Sorrow. Fury. Dread. Those fires are still ravenous.

Maine hasn't been at its best lately, given the humidity and the apocalyptic skies, the Biddeford murder and the Senate race debacle. Add in the fact that my younger son is leading a canoe trip in the fire-ridden northern Ontario wilderness, and you can imagine that I'm jumpy. Yesterday his partner and I decided we needed to make sure he was okay, so we reached out to the camp for updates, which were reassuring. He is north of the Albany River fire and is continuing to paddle out of reach of it. The provincial lookouts have him on their radar; he's got a satellite phone so can call for evacuation if needed; the camp is very experienced with Canadian fire season. We feel better, and also do not feel better, but so it goes.

Jumpy is a good word for how I feel in general. Yesterday I had an intense conversation with a friend about my role as poet laureate. Our back-and-forth was more subtle than this paraphrase, but basically the question was, Do I now have a duty to be loud in support of righteousness? He thinks I do, and I agree with him. For me, the big issue is where and how to be loud . . . and when does being loud damage my ability to instigate longer-term change? Social media is a dangerous realm. So are school boards.

But, as he pointed out, one thing I can do is write occasional poems--that is, poems that comment on specific events--and then find a way to publicize them. The point of an occasional poem is timeliness, which means I'll have to squinch my eyes shut perfection-wise. On the other hand, speed is not always a bad thing, as I learned when I was writing my "Accident Sonnets." So yesterday I wrote and submitted a poem about the Biddeford killing, which a journal immediately accepted and will publish within a few days. This journal has a big subscriber list, so the poem will be read. It also has an audience that is predisposed to support progressive causes. Is preaching to the choir the best way to be public? Again, I twitch and worry. Yes, I do the majority of my teaching in a conservative area of the state, and I have always seen this work as activism. But who among us truly believes in poems?