Continuing our household's eternal voyage into the bowels of machinery hell, Tom's pickup did not pass inspection yesterday and the dishwasher broke. T has some hopes that he's been able to glue together the thingummy bits of plastic controlling the dishwasher's start button so that it will function again, but given our season of household disasters, I expect we'll have to call a guy who won't be able to come for six weeks and when he does will charge us many hundreds of dollars to insert a small piece of new plastic into the slot. The truck I don't even need to guess about. Vehicles are always the worst-case scenario. 

Well, anyway, I did ship out one of my editing projects yesterday, so that's something. And I'm getting a haircut today. And it's Friday. And we're not out of coffee. And Chuck didn't bust up any more glassware in the night.

This morning I have to turn my attention to performance materials and then to a zoom meeting with Monson faculty. It will be a refreshing change from editing. And I was glad to get out last night to write, though the image of T taking apart the dishwasher as I left was sorrowful. First he came home from work to bad truck news. And then he had to deal with the dishwasher. Plus he had to wash all of the dirty dishes that were in said dishwasher. It was not a restful evening for him.

But I did have an excellent interaction at the meat market yesterday. I stopped in to buy a loaf of bread and decided to pick up a couple of pork chops as well. "17.83," said the butcher, ringing them up for me. And then: "Hey, that was an important year! Was that when the Constitution was signed?" I responded that I wasn't sure exactly what year it was, and then another butcher chimed in, "I think it was 1784 or 1785." And then I said, "I guess we can be sure that they were all thinking about the Constitution anyway." And the second butcher agreed and remarked, "I used to think the Revolution ended when they signed the Declaration of Independence." The first butcher added, "But really they were still at war for a while longer." And then I said, "And don't forget that practically as soon as they were done with the Revolution, they got started with the War of 1812." The three of us nodded thoughtfully and then I waved goodbye and walked my purchases back home.

It's another cold morning, per usual, but fortunately I have a Big Warm Chuck purring romantically into my ear. He looks like a full-sized cat now, but he won't be a year old till May and he maintains his youthful outlook, by which I mean he is obsessed with stealing little pieces of kindling from the basket and then chasing them under the furniture, he reaches his paws up for a hug many times each a day, and he is constantly amazed by the lumps of snow that come inside on our boots.

As predicted, I spent most of yesterday scraping away at the editing stack, with a morning break for a walk and an afternoon break to pull together next week's high school plans. These editing deadlines dangle like thousand-pound Acme anvils over my head. So today will be much the same, except that my morning break will be a hustle up to the coffee shop to meet a poet and then later I've got to bake something or other for my evening writing group, fetch my CSA vegetable delivery, and probably do something else I can't recall just now.

This week, around the edges of my work life, I've been immersed in Adam Bede and George Eliot's dear, wise patience with error. Her sympathy is vast, though her narratives are inexorable. The terrible mistakes cannot be avoided. Tragedy crests like a river.

I forget if I mentioned that I have a reading up at Bowdoin College on Sunday, part of the town of Brunswick's annual Longfellow Days. I'll be at the Moulton Union at 1 p.m., along with the excellent poets Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and Mike Bove. I wonder what I'll be reading. I guess I'll figure that out on Saturday.

I didn't set foot outside the house yesterday, other than to empty the kitchen recycling pail into the outdoor bin. Even in the dead of winter that is unusual behavior for me, but these editing projects have chained me to the desk. Today, though, I've got a walk date, so to hell with the stack, at least for an hour.

I don't feel like I have much interesting chat to share. For obvious reasons, I never talk on this blog about other people's manuscripts, but other people's manuscripts are presently absorbing the bulk of my days. Around the edges I am making chicken adobo, folding towels, reading George Eliot, doing sun salutations on my mat, admonishing Chuck about jumping on the kitchen counter, answering emails, lugging firewood up from the basement, brewing yet another cup of tea, texting my kid about baseball trades, and not sleeping quite as much as I wish I were.

The fact that I am not engaged in organizing a new poetry manuscript is beginning to weigh on me. 

It's always a relief when an insomnia cycle eases. I've been sleeping better for the past couple of nights, and the muscles I pulled in my lower back seem to be easing a bit as well, so I'm hoping to enjoy standing up and sitting down again too. I'll get onto my mat today and keep working at them. This aging stuff is annoying . . . an Alice sensation of running as fast as I can just to stay in one place. But so far I do keep running.

I got the bathrooms and floors cleaned yesterday, so now I get to devote the bulk of the rest of the week to desk work--the endless editing, prepping for Monson, my stack of reading obligations. In addition to The Pillow Book and Dream of Dreams, I've started rereading George Eliot's Adam Bede and John Fowles's The Maggot. And my new copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh arrived in the mail yesterday, which will be my next reading project with Teresa.

T is upstairs opening and closing drawers. Young Chuck purrs into my ear. Dark peers through the cold windowpanes. The poems wander like wraiths, wordless in the bare morning.

It's Monday, it's cold, and I have a lot to get done today, both desk work and housework. Yesterday afternoon T and I went downtown to to see The Testament of Ann Lee, though both of us liked it less than we'd hoped to. Around the edges I finished rereading Murdoch's The Nice and the Good, made inroads into The Pillow Book and Dream of Dreams, sent off a sonnet draft to Jeannie for our round-robin project and a cover blurb to a friend with a forthcoming chapbook. It was a full day.

I'm starting to make plans for my trip to New York. The memorial reading for Baron will be at Poets House on the afternoon of Saturday, February 21. Tickets are free, but they do ask you to register, so you should, if you're thinking of attending. The Brooklyn kids have also bought tickets for us to see Ragtime at Lincoln Center. This was one of Paul's favorite musicals when he was in high school; it was on constant rotation in the car when I drove him back and forth, so we can sing all of the songs and of course I know the Doctorow novel very well too. Plus, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything at Lincoln Center before, so that will be a novelty. Probably I'll meet friends for meals or a drink. Probably I'll spend some time at the Frick or the Morgan or the Neue Galerie--unless I'm aiming for a particular exhibition, I like the smaller, house-based museums more than the cavernous ones. It's a bad time of year for botanical gardens, but if the weather's mild I might walk the High Line. I'm looking forward to everything. I haven't been to the city since early last summer, and I do love it.

In the meantime, here I am, at home all this week, ready to be assaulted by staggering piles of editing and a long list of house chores. I keep imagining that one of these days I'll get back to seriously putting together a next manuscript, but when?

The full moon is a silver blur among the bare branches of my neighbor's big black walnut tree. And the cold clings. It's presently three degrees in the little northern city by the sea, with a wind chill of minus ten, and we're not forecast to get a break anytime soon.

I'm back to sleeping badly, but so it goes, so it goes. There are worse things in this world than lying awake and staring at the moon. At least it's Sunday: no one rushing through chores or out the door. Though I can't sleep, Tom is having no trouble, and that is a comfort to me. Young Charles prowls upstairs and down. The kitchen clock ticks. Remnants of heat sift from the registers.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, read the books I needed to read. Midday T and I went for a cold walk through the cemetery. For dinner I breaded and sautéed pollock, steamed some mixed grains, made a sauce of yogurt, red onion, and capers, tossed julienned radishes and carrots in vinegar and salt and topped them with a pinch of the micro-lettuce I'd sprouted on the kitchen counter. Winter, winter, winter: how my eyes long for even a sprig of green.

I don't mean to complain. I love all seasons, I love the cold, I'm interested in it all . . . but at this time of year I do feel starved for color. Thank goodness for the vivid glow of carrots, pale lavender-rose of an Asian radish, flash of April in a lettuce sprout.

This is what downtown Portland looked like yesterday afternoon--more than a thousand people gathered in Monument Square, though the temperature was 15 degrees and plummeting. I was thrilled to see so many high school-age protesters, many of them sheepishly bumping up against their also-protesting teachers. I was impressed by the number of businesses that had chosen to close in solidarity. I was pleased by the excellent behavior of the police, who managed traffic and the march route efficiently but were otherwise low key in all ways. I was very glad to be there with my friends, our little bloc of poets.

But I was also very glad to walk back into my warm house and unthaw myself. Though I was wearing three layers on my legs, two pairs of socks, insulated boots, two coats, two scarves, two pairs of gloves, and a hat, I still came home numb with cold, especially my feet. It was exactly the right night for noodle bowls--udon, roasted tofu, a soy-marinated egg, and stir-fried cabbage in citrus-chicken broth. There's no better comfort than noodles and broth.

Now, at first light, the temperature outside is minus four, but the house is snug and warm. Our new expensive furnace sure heats up the place better than the old one did. This weekend I need to read further into The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams; I need to write a blurb for a friend's chapbook; I need to work on some poem drafts and clean the bathrooms and do the grocery shopping. I am looking forward to taking a break from editing: I've been driving myself on that project this week, and it's not been easy work.

I think my favorite sign yesterday was the one I saw a high schooler carrying: Young People Are Fucking Sick of This. You and me both, honey.