I spent yesterday trying to edit poems while various forms of uproar rose and fell beneath my feet. Today, however, everyone has vanished, and I am home alone with a washing machine and a big fidgety poodle. On my desk rests a great deal of other people's poetry, alongside one small clumsy beginning of my own. I have hopes for the awkward little thing, although they may well be crushed. But I do have some loneliness, which is a useful ingredient for a poem; and a billowing awareness of the unsaid, which is another. And also a bit of stopped time, which is a third. So we'll see what happens when all my duties are done.

Here's a sonnet . . . the one that just got the Pushcart nomination. It reminds me of how I feel today.

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.

[first published as "Sonnet," in the Aurorean (fall/winter 2010-11)]

Dinner tonight: Rabbit pie. Coleslaw. Apple brown betty.