Yesterday I stopped in at David Wolfe's printshop to pick up the broadside of my poem, the one I'll be giving to the kids as their wedding gift. It really is beautiful: I love letterpress printing, and I'm so pleased with how it turned out.

But hiring David for this job has had repercussions I didn't expect. He'd earlier mentioned that he'd like to find a way to keep working together, and yesterday he directly suggested that we plan on a  25-page chapbook that he would design, set, and handprint. It could be a poet laureate project of sorts, he said, and I immediately thought, oh, a Maine diary, a new-and-selected . . . what fun! I'm really excited about this idea, though I need another project like I need a hammer to the head.

I'd already spent the morning in a zoom meeting with the Monson staff, all of us bubbling over with too many ideas for stuff we could do with kids, teachers, other organizations . . . This is what I'm supposed to be up to as PL, I think: figuring out ways to make the quiet work visible to people who long for it. But it's overwhelming.

Teresa phoned out of the blue yesterday, to reassure me: I guess I must have seemed a little frayed during our Poetry Lab conversation on Wednesday. Performance isn't new to me: I'm an introvert with a public-facing job, and long before the PL honor I had to attend to my internal struggles with transitions, scheduling, private space. Eventually I'll work out a pattern I can live with, but it's a challenge, no question. On the other hand, the opportunities feel so interesting . . . this chapbook, for instance; maybe a gallery show in Monson; more time spent with teachers and poets and community members. It's the work I love to do.

Well, this morning I'll get back to the manuscript job, and then I'll head north for lunch with the arts commission folks. No doubt more ideas for projects will start bubbling up over the forks and water glasses.

We got all of the storm on the way signs but none of the storm--so disheartening because Maine is in need of steady rain. Not that I envy the Albany area's deluge, but a couple of inches would have been nice.

Well, at least things are damp, which is better than nothing. In the dark morning I glimpse a wet glimmer netting the plants, skeining the cars. A refreshment, though not a quenching.

Today will be another hectic day: a zoom meeting about Monson business, continuing the manuscript job, running out in the afternoon to fetch my poem from the printer, stopping at the drugstore, baking a plum cake for tonight's poetry group, scraping up a writing prompt from somewhere or other, washing sheets . . . probably there's more on the list but I can't remember.

A good thing: Gloria the Mazda! What a fine car she's been, amid this bustle and lurch. I feel fancy every time I get behind the wheel--a deeply unfamiliar sensation, but I admit that I'm enjoying it.

Another good thing: meeting with Teresa and Jeannie yesterday afternoon. It was restful to spend an afternoon with our own winding thoughts . . . talking about H.D.'s Trilogy, about The Pillow Book, about Sappho, about the other books we were reading. To linger at the nexus of making, yet not be planning a class or a performance or any other public conversation. A necessary privacy, but with friends.

For some reason I am writing a lot of fragments today. Why the urge to erode my verbs? Syntax as secret message: Vigor is not the only life. Start in the midst. End without finishing.

Since yesterday morning the air has been shouting storm on the way, yet we've had no rain in Portland, not a drop, just swirling humid gusts, thick skies, incursions of fog, and the tense watchfulness that precedes hurricanes and blizzards: our animal selves alert--skin prickling, hackles aloft.

The storm creeps closer and closer. But though my week is packed with obligation, most of it centers at or close to home, so I won't have to drive far in the encroaching downpours. This morning I'll work on a manuscript job, catch up on reading for Poetry Lab, scurry out for a haircut, and then in the afternoon meet with Jeannie and Teresa. I'm rushing too fast through H.D.'s Trilogy, but somehow I got confused about homework timing, so here I am. I've also been immersed in Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, the first novel I've read by her. And I'm still making my way through my fat Collected Grimm. The swirl of ominous words is intersecting with the swirl of ominous weather: I'm unsettled, my feathers all awry.

Today is my older son James's 32nd birthday. In my memory his birthdays were always sun-splashed, water-spraying, half-naked pagan-fests . . . high summer in the woods, the clearing dotted with capering cake-drunk children. He always did like a party.

In a little over a month, he's throwing his biggest one yet. The Wedding looms, but this morning I am thinking about my little roundhead, my firstborn: bent glasses, straw-colored hair, grubby-kneed, yackety-yack from morning till night. The most exhausting of toddlers, prying into every cupboard, climbing into every hole. But what a grin! . . . ear to ear, like a cartoon sun.

Ah, dear boy, dear boy. Here's the poem, written a couple of years ago, that I'm giving him for his wedding day.

Essay on Man

Dawn Potter

Today I found a crow feather, or it found me.
I was standing at the kitchen sink washing plates
when a flash caught my eye . . . a dark spin

through thick summer air, quill pointing down,
black crest held high, a slow-motion pirouette
from tree to earth. I ran outside to save it, as, above me,

crows jeered or cheered, and back in the kitchen
I cried out to my husband, “I found a feather!”
and he said, “Tell me the story.”

But what story?—for later, after he’d gone to work,
I realized, with shock, that the next day our older son would
turn twenty-nine. Yet we were twenty-nine when he was born,

so what is this anniversary? Our son’s birthday or ours?

I couldn’t stop puzzling over the oddness and meanwhile
I hung the laundry and I stirred a batch of ice cream,

and far away our son was living his last day as
twenty-eight, until suddenly the phone rang and
there he was, ready to chatter about repainting

his apartment and feeding a stray cat and, ugh,
what about those Republicans, and I was so happy
I forgot to tell him about my perplexity.

It was exactly like what life always is—
I think there’s a great momentous formal
complication and suddenly it morphs into diapers

and wailing and getting no sleep forever, and this
goes on and on for infinity until it’s over and then,
when the phone rings, my heart expands like

an accordion because there he is again,
one of three, the loves of my life—
the others being his brother and his father,

and the brother is canoeing in the Canadian
wilderness so won’t call and the father is framing
some rich person’s house so won’t call, but

thank god, thank god, I’ve got one of them
in my grasp, just for a moment—
I’ll tell this story to you, my love, my firstborn.

Once upon a time I got lost in the woods,
when we lived in the woods, and you three were
back in the house mucking around with your stuff—

but did you imagine me, crashing through the underbrush:
imagine me, imagining myself, as the night drew in: digging
into leafmold, covering my ears against the coyotes?

Or did you assume I’d be back soon, as I was,
quickly unlost, as if I’d never been gone,
as if I would always be there?

Today, though, the separation—it feels hard.
You are nearly twenty-nine, your brother nearly
twenty-five, you live so far away from me,

and I know nothing about your sleeping breath.
Here’s a story I don’t remember anymore—
what I felt like without you three. Who was I

before you were? Not that I don’t recall childhood
or being a teenager—but there must have been
a hole, there must have been an abyss—

for what would my life be now,
without always, always, missing you?

These cool mornings have been sweet: old-fashioned New England summer weather, the kind you start and end in a sweater but midday you're jumping into a balmy lake. Not that I'll be jumping into any lakes this week. My calendar is crammed with zoom meetings, a dentist visit, a haircut, an arts commission lunch, plus I've got all kinds of desk work to deal with. So today, the slow day of the week, will be stuffed with housework, mowing, pruning, all of the homestead bits-n-pieces I need to get out of my hair before I light myself on fire with the rest of the obligations.

Outside, a Carolina wren is awake. Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, she sings. Otherwise things seem pretty quiet in the neighborhood. Nobody is broadcasting any Monday anxiety yet.

I feel good about how the weekend class went. The focus was nominally syntax, yet one big side result was a slow dip into the waters of character development. I tend to avoid the term persona poem. I think it encourages the idea of enactment rather than existence-within . . . as in "I'm going to write in the voice of Anne Bradstreet, or Spiro Agnew, or Pele," and then lassoing historical facts in a sort of show-off "I did some research and got an A on the paper" rodeo instead of crossing, with deliberate wonder, into the hallucinatory borderland between self and imagined other. It's hard to explain the difference, except to say that one sort of poem stays safely wrapped in the costumes and the other is shivering and naked.

A few of the poem drafts we heard over the weekend were new and shivering, and that, for a listener such as myself, was an intense gift.

It's a very cool morning here in the little northern city by the sea--temperature barely out of the 40s; whiff of autumn in July. I like this combination of open windows and shabby red bathrobe, hot coffee cup against my palms and shriek of gulls rising from a neighbor's roof.

Yesterday's class seemed to go well--lots of sharp first drafts and good conversation too. I was especially glad to bring people into contact with Henry Green's prose. All of his books are not equivalently good, but the two I excerpted--Party Going and Loving--are favorites, and for me his odd sentence style is an instant lesson in the flexible powers of word order, word choice, and comma placement.

In a few hours I'll be back in the saddle, but for the moment I am basking in Sunday morning. Last night T and I went out to see Red River, a 1948 western starring John Wayne and an incredibly sexy young Montgomery Clift. Ain't nobody wears a Hollywood gun belt better than MC. Oof.

And then driving home through the twilit city with my sweetheart . . . well, you know how it is: those little heart-swell moments when nothing much is happening, except that you're sitting at a red light watching cars swish past and suddenly you are seized by the present tense. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are.

I haven't talked about kitchen matters lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been cooking. And last night's salad was so extremely beautiful--red and yellow tomatoes, basil, seared halloumi--that I was impelled to document it. I served the tomatoes alongside rare steak marinated in lime and garlic, a chard tian, and a mix of rice (wild, white, red, brown). It was a lovely meal, and there are lots of leftovers, which likely means steak salad for dinner tonight.

It's good to have the supper problem solved because today and tomorrow I'll be in class, experimenting with some prompt-thoughts linked to syntax. The models will be a sheaf of prose and poetry excerpts, with the prose being mostly (though not exclusively) samples from high modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, and Elizabeth Bowen. I also extend beyond them, in both directions--back to George Eliot and Henry James, forward to Iris Murdoch and (I know this seems odd) John Le Carre.  The related poetry I won't discuss right now, as I'm keeping that a surprise for participants. My hope, though, is that class members will see how sentences themselves, in their positioning, in their subtle variety, can pull a poem draft onto a page.

These classes are always shots in the dark, though mostly they seem to work, if not always in the ways I'd predicted. Which is part of the fun, I guess . . . the not knowing, the veer into strange spaces.