It's snowing hard in Portland. Southern Maine schools are all closed, but up north there are no cancelations yet. The plan is that I'm going to zoom with the Monson kids today, as long as the schools are willing to drive them to class. We'll see. Driving in terrible weather is a sign of moral superiority in central Maine, so likely they'll show up.

If they do appear, we'll be looking at poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Joy Harjo, and Jane Kenyon, focusing on approaches to repetition and refrain, or the lack thereof. If they don't appear, I'll be editing chapter 14 of the giant editing project. And the snow will fall and fall.

Yesterday, in between batches of editing, I went for a long walk, trying to air out the mildew in brain and body. The sky was bright, icicles dripping from eaves, a neighbor scratching his head over his beat-up car, a dog trying to wriggle out of his plaid coat. In the cemetery, snow squeaked under my boots; flecks of quartz glinted cheerfully from the granite headstones. A man in a ski hat strode by, speaking prophetically into a phone.

When I wound my way back through the streets, up my own back stairs, the house greeted me warmly. Here I am, it said. Four walls and a roof. Everything you have ever wanted. The house's confidence is alarming and comforting. The house demands my love in return. It is like the cat. I am not sure I am up to the house's expectations.

But at least pale-pink hyacinths are opening in a vase on the kitchen counter. Their scent fills the little rooms, and that ought to make the house happy.

Outside, there's a thin layer of new fluff-snow, with more coming in tonight. I don't think we're going to get significant accumulation, but the timing will be bad for driving, so I suspect we'll be postponing the Monson class. 

I had a lazy weekend: not one single brisk walk, so much couch-sitting beside the fire. Still, I got things done: most importantly, I worked on a poem, whittling down "Russian Novel" from eight lines to four, and I'm quite happy with how it's evolved. Plus, in between actual writing and reading, I did a bunch of niggly writing-business things, the sort of stuff it's hard to find time for in regular work hours. Tom was out most of both days, making frames for the photos he'll be showing in March, so I had long chances to wallow and mull, and I took them.

Eventually I did manage to get off the couch and do the shopping, and for dinner I made a Portuguese seafood stew--one of our very favorite meals . . .  real Rhode Island linguica; homemade fish broth from the freezer; last summer's kale, also from the freezer; fat and beautiful Casco bay mussels; Gulf of Maine haddock. Such riches.

Today will not be a couch day, no matter what turn it takes. Either I'll be editing all morning and driving all afternoon, or I'll be editing all day and not driving. But at least I have my little poem and a lot of leftover seafood stew.

Another cold morning, another new fire crackling in the stove. Already the night sky is bluing. Cats are a-prowl; dogs are sniffing the scarred snow piles. Coffee steeps in the press, and slippers squeal across washed floors.

Yesterday I caught up on the housework I hadn't finished during the week, and then I fidgeted with some poems. One draft turned out to be tiny--only eight lines long--so I titled it "Russian Novel." I read Hammett and Tolstoy. I lay on the couch and listened to a Red Sox spring training game, the thwaps and chonks of summer wafting through wintry air.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to head north to teach, but I'm fairly sure we'll be postponed, as snow is forecast for Tuesday. The storms of March are beginning, as they always do in Maine. I just hope they don't interfere with my Saint Patrick's Day jaunt to Chicago. I will be sorely disappointed. However, I will not start fretting yet. 

On Friday, amid my other busyness, I brought Ruckus to the vet for his annual exam. He was pronounced healthy as a horse. (Why are horses particularly healthy?) He flirted and yowled and displayed his extreme good looks; and though he's about to turn 11 (on the ides of March, naturally), the vet removed him from the aging pet schedule. "This cat is too peppy to be treated like a senior!" 

But even as Mr. R rumpused, another woman in the waiting room was weeping into her cat carrier. Clearly, poor George was making his final visit to the vet, an ordeal I have undergone with so many of my own animals, and will undergo again, too soon, when the magnificent Ruckus succumbs to time.

As always, melancholy weaves its way. 

The temperature is one degree above zero in the little northern city by the sea, so in celebration I lit the wood stove. Now, in the murky dawn, the flames glow and dance, the cast iron ticks . . . just the cat and me, awake and purring in the luxury of firelight.

So many scenes in Dickens's novels take place around firelight. Bachelor lawyers grill chops and salute their friendship with hot gin punch. Pickpockets rub cracked hands over a scant few sticks. Old men in nightcaps prop their slippers on the fender and become greasy with buttered toast. Prostitutes stare into the flames, decoding a dire future.

Here, in late February in the year 2023, the frost is deep. Down by the cove, salt ice crackles in the tidal marshes, but the winter ducks--the eiders and the buffleheads--paddle serenely, indifferent to their cold feet. Houses climb the hill, a clutter of roofs. Smoke threads from the chimneys into a flat pink sky. Railroad tracks hum; a short passenger train coils by, then vanishes. A walker in a parka, as puffy as a manatee, butts his head into a brief wind, trudges around a snowy corner.

In the houses children tangle with sheets; lovers collide, half-asleep; a dog whines to go out. Meanwhile, my little wood fire mutters and laughs behind its window. The wood box is full. The hearth is swept. It is one degree above zero in the little northern city by the sea.

Last night, for dinner, we ate lamb patties filled with red onion, garlic, parsley, and ginger; sautéed red and yellow peppers; mashed sweet potato with lime; roasted eggplant and spinach salad; a blueberry clafoutis for dessert. On a plate this looked miraculous, and I thought, as I have been thinking so often lately, of luck and happiness. How things shake out in this life, for better, for worse. How little control we have over fortune. How grateful I am for a meal, and candlelight, and a beloved face across a table. How, one day, things will go terribly wrong. But, for now, sweetness.

I think I was more jaded when I was young. I expected the worst. I was frustrated and dissatisfied. Those reactions haven't vanished. In the public forum they've increased; of course they have. Which may be why my private life sometimes feels like a soap-bubble Arcadia. In this cottage, with this partner, we light candles every night at dinner. We play card games and read aloud from Sherlock Holmes stories and talk to each other in the voice of the cat. It is spitting into the wind. It is singing into the wind.

On Influence: Remembering Karen Carpenter

 Sometimes influence arises from forgotten places. I realized this the other night, as I was cooking dinner and took a notion to re-listen to an album from my childhood.

I didn't have much access to pop music as a kid. I didn't possess my own radio, and my parents didn't like the ambient noise of the 70s, so I ended up knowing very little about my own time, other than what I could gather from public sound systems in grocery stores and such. I was greedy about what I could get.

One of the things I was allowed to listen to was to a Christmas gift from my cousins: a greatest hits LP, a Carpenters record. I played this record over and over. I listened to it constantly. I was so dumb that I didn't know that "Ticket to Ride" was a Beatles song. I thought it was a Carpenters song. I swallowed that album whole. I knew every weepy lyric, every swollen riff.

As I listen to it now, I recognize that 99 percent of those songs are garbage: ridiculous overproductions, sap-and-schlock songwriting, inconsequential covers. And yet there is Karen's voice. Rolling Stone has called her singing "impossibly lush and almost shockingly intimate. . .  Even the sappiest songs sound like she was staring directly into your eyes." I think this is an entirely accurate statement. Amid the pomposity of her brother's arrangements, that voice enters directly into my bloodstream, like a message I am writing to myself.

I think about the little girl I was, kneeling on the living room floor, busily coloring, and singing along with Karen . . . following the spirals of that sad contralto, enacting the cadence of her loneliness. I think about myself now, as a poet, and know that I have always wanted to write like I "was staring directly into your eyes." I was not reading poems then. I was listening to Karen Carpenter. And so she became my model for how to become a voice.

By the time she died, so young, so miserably, I had forgotten about her. I was in college; I was learning about all of the music I had missed: the blues, punk, the great rockers. Karen had become a sad, embarrassing side-note . . . or so I thought.

But influence is influence. I may love Jimi Hendrix and the Replacements more than the Carpenters, but Karen gave me something they did not. She gave my ear a pattern of sound that became the possibility of speech.

It was cold and clear. Above the dirty, semi-dark streets, above the black roofs, stood the dark, starry sky. Only looking at the sky did Pierre not feel the baseness of everything earthly compared with the height his soul had risen to. At the entrance to Arbat Square, the huge expanse of the dark, starry night opened out to Pierre's eyes. Almost in the middle of that sky, over Prechistensky Boulevard, stood the high, bright comet of the year 1812--surrounded, strewn with stars on all sides, but different from them in its closeness to the earth, its white light and long, raised tail--that same comet which presaged, as they said, all sorts of horrors and the end of the world. But for Pierre this bright star with its long, luminous tail did not arouse any frightening feeling. On the contrary, Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which, having flown with inexpressible speed through immeasurable space on its parabolic course, suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky and stopped, its tail raised energetically, its white light shining and playing among the countless other shimmering stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.

* * *

This is the passage that ends volume 2 of War and Peace. After this will come another clash with Napoleon, the violent death of many of the characters, the near-starvation of many others. But first Tolstoy offers me this moment of silence and wonder . . . a pause . . . a mystery . . . an observer's forthright joy in the face of a complex, unknowable universe.

This passage seems to me to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written--despite the repetitions, because of the repetitions, I don't even know. Entering it is like entering a house. I step into the hallways of its sentences, lean out the windows of its quiet. 

The writer is long dead, the characters will die, the comet will disappear, the frosts will melt, and I also will be gone. But as I sit here, rereading this passage, I cannot believe in death. 

Tonight another snowstorm is pushing in, and today will be a day of steel and grim skies as the clouds move closer. I've got a dentist appointment this afternoon, and I'll probably run over to the store afterward, to fetch in whatever needs to be fetched so that I can close down the hatches tomorrow.

I've been making good progress with the editing, and yesterday I had an excellent meeting with staff at the new neighborhood bookstore, where I've arranged an event for my writing salon in April. Then I spent the evening workshopping poems, and that was productive . . . everyone's draft was fascinating, and I felt relieved about my own too.

Outside there's a faint blue dawn--sky lightening, earth still hunkering in darkness. I love this lonely hour: one foot in morning, the other in night. In Harmony I would look out into the clearing, into the circle of spruce trees, sharp silhouettes against a bowl of heaven. Here the sky is a jagged clutter of chimneys, roofs, a steeple . . . a different sort of beauty, but just as lonely. It is the hour that makes the loneliness, the saturated blues and blacks, the deep and simple shadows, the foreknowledge that it will end at any moment, when ordinary day steps from behind the proscenium.

I was at my desk all day, except for a mid-afternoon walk with my neighbor, so I am feeling somewhat more caught up, editing-wise. This is a massive project, and I am only half done with stage 1, but at least I am now making noticeable headway. Editing can feel like paddling a fat river against the current. I spend many of my hours stuck on snags or eddying fruitlessly in the backwater.

Anyway, today, more of the same, except for a lunchtime meeting with the staff at the bookstore around the corner, where I'm hoping to set up a poetry event. Tonight I'll go out to my workshop group, so at some point today I've got to sort through poems and decide which draft I want to inflict on them. Otherwise, dishes and laundry and War and Peace, and Tuesday will muddle its way through the hours, dragging me along behind.

I'm feeling kind of lumpish this week, pacing obediently in my halter, getting-things-done-getting-things-done, but my pinging electric excitable poem mind isn't getting much of a workout. I miss it, though I know I need to lock it in the closet sometimes. But when it's there, I worry that it will wilt and die, and for the rest of my life all I will be is the person getting-things-done-getting-things-done.

When my friend Jilline was close to death, from metastasizing breast cancer, she wrote to me: "Don't let it take my precious brain."

How we are haunted by our minds. How we love them.

And here you are again, Monday morning . . . you're apparently a holiday this week, but not in my household as T and I will both be working. Yesterday was work too--groceries and laundry and dealing with my filthy floor problem, reorganizing the freezer to fit in the whole organic lamb that got delivered to me from Vermont via Wellington, ordering pea trellis and row covers for the garden, and then a walk with Tom, and then I made chocolate pudding and red-beans-and-rice and a roasted tomatillo salsa and salad with spinach and roasted grapes. Housekeeper's work, and now it's back to the other kind of work: the desk job.

I'll be in Portland all week, but my calendar is packed with annoying distractions such as a dentist appointment and a trip to the vet. Still, there's a vase of daffodils on the kitchen counter, which soothes me every time I look at it. And I'll be talking to Teresa about those glorious William Alabaster sonnets. That will be a pick-me-up, in the midst of appointment darkness.

T had a new printer delivered, and we had to get it into the house yesterday. You'd think this would be no big deal, but you would be wrong. It's a large-format photo printer weighing two hundred plus pounds, and in order to get it out of the driveway and up the stoop into the living room, he had to attach a come-along to the upstairs bathroom doorframe so we could winch it in. Now it is hulking in the living room until he can hire movers to get it up the stairs and into his study.

In short, remember those floors I cleaned on Friday? Um.

Into the midst of all this walked an old friend, down from Bangor for the weekend, who was supposed to be the enjoyer of my clean house but instead got an eyeful of monster printer, busted-up styrofoam, and plenty of fresh mud. Ah, well.

Anyway, we vamoosed pretty quick and spent the day downtown, wandering through the art museum, waiting endlessly for pizza, and talking talking talking; then met up with T for dinner and more chatter. It was a lovely day, despite my exasperation with the floors. And afterward T and I leaned together on the couch and semi-dozed through Sean Connery as James Bond, so, as you can see, I am not holding his filthy shoe prints against him.

Today: no particular tasks, other than grocery shopping, laundry, and probably dealing with another round of dirt as T gets ready to move the old printer out of his study. At least, as we laughed at dinner, he is not a sculptor, requiring five barns to house his mistakes.

There is much to be said for being a poet. One pencil. One notebook. A laptop is a helpful luxury. And voila.

Saturday again. The weeks rumble by so quickly; I can barely catch my breath before they're over.

This morning I woke to a slick crust of snow, a crow shouting, a tangerine sunrise over an invisible bay. Where does the day go from here?

Last night, Friday night, in my snug kitchen, I stirred polenta and T hung out and listened to me read aloud the melodramatic conclusion of Conan-Doyle's "Adventure of the Speckled Band." Somehow he has never heard these Strand stories before: they are a window into 1880s England, a window into an idea of brilliance and of a very unequal friendship, but they are also quite silly and filled with odd characters. He seems to be enjoying them so I will give him "The Red-Headed League" next.

Now he is upstairs, sighing in his sleep, and I am downstairs, sighing in my waking, sipping my little cup of coffee, thinking about storytellers, trying to stretch out my lunge-sore leg muscles, wondering, for the thousandth millionth time, how did I get here?

A vase of daffodils slowly opens into gold.

Time bunches up around me, like a badly pleated skirt.

Yesterday the temperature in Portland reached 55 degrees. Today we'll have cold rain and snow. Such is February in the little northern city by the sea. But I've got daffodils spiking out of the ground. Last fall's spinach wintered over. I've moved the cold frame to warm up a patch of soil for an early March sowing. Spring is trembling in the wings, and I am excited.

I went out to write last night . . . I didn't feel on top of my game, but maybe I can glean something from the notebook blurts. No matter what, it's good to watch the words pour out, even if the poem possibilities are dim. And earlier in the day I did get stuff done--editing, errands, bathrooms. Maybe today I'll be able to slip my own reading and writing into the olio of duty. Or maybe not. I can't quite predict what this day will hold, but I will undergo the exercise class; I will undertake the editing project; I will untangle the vacuum cleaner; I will understand that some days march obediently down the road and other days fall into the ditch and still others go AWOL and are discovered days later holed up with a stray dog and a six-pack in a shack by the river.

I've barely fallen back into a home pattern, and now here it is, practically the end of the week, and I have so much work left to do.

The editing project is slow slow slow. I am pushing forward, but in a lugubrious, snail-like manner that annoys me. I much prefer to be brisk. And though I feel as if I just cleaned those bathrooms and floors, that was actually a week ago, so my to-do list is packed with housework chores again.

Which is to say: I don't imagine I'll have a chance to play with poem drafts today, though I am hoping to go out to write tonight. And I'm really hoping to spend time outside, as the temperature is supposed to reach 50 degrees. I'm diddling about whether I ought to start watering my wintered-over spinach, or if it's too early to begin encouraging it. I still can't get used to the timetable of these southern Maine springs.

For the moment, I'm trying to keep my "get stuff done" frets in check. I'm drinking my little cup of coffee, and I'm wallowing in my couch corner, and I'm thinking about War and Peace, and I'm pretending that I don't have a calendar of duties unrolling before me: today, this week, next week, this month, next month . . . I just don't want to look at how many obligations I have ahead of me. Because I might faint.

But I should tell you about an upcoming class, which has just opened for registration--a three-week session for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance: "Body of Work: Creating a Series of Linked Poems." It will be in April, on three Wednesday evenings, and I would love to spend those evenings with you.

I woke up in Wellington on Valentine's morning, after spending a chattery evening in the homeland with two of my best friends in the world. An inch of fresh snow had fallen, and the roads were dicey, and as I drove my phone kept dinging with love greetings from my family.

The kids, of course, were a delight--writing hilarious love poems based on a silly prompt involving conversation hearts. As encouragement I read them the text T had just sent me: "Sure sign of Valentine's Day: Hannaford [a grocery store], dude in flannel obviously on his way home from a manual labor job, glassy-eyed and clutching an orchid to his chest."

As I drove home, I could hear emails boinking into my phone and when I finally got off the road and read them I discovered that (1) a composer wants to put my sonnet "Confused Prayer" to music,  using it as lyrics for a song for mezzo-soprano and piano; and (2) the state poet laureate wants to hire me to teach a statewide online workshop as a pilot for a new project . . . "not just because you probably know more about poetry and teaching than anyone in the state, but also because you know both Maine's rural and urban experiences so intimately." As you might expect, I was floored by each of these offers, by the wording of them, by being seen . . . Do you know what I mean? about how odd that feels, after you've been trudging along, keeping your nose to the ground like a hound on a leash, doing the job you were meant to do, but not really thinking that anyone might be watching?

Anyway: so there was that, and then there was T again, who came home from work and said, "Let's go out to eat!" which is a silly thing to say on Valentine's Day when you don't have reservations anywhere, but we got lucky, and found a table in a Sichuan restaurant and ate dumplings and beef noodles and then strolled through downtown Portland arm in arm, admiring the lights and the faces.

What a good day. What a very good day.

The weekend was just what I'd hoped it would be--reading, walking, reading, walking: two spacious and fortifying days. As a result, I woke up early this morning, well rested and in shape for a busy week. Today I'll be editing, then driving north; tomorrow I'll be back in class, and then the long drive home. But I'm feeling pretty relaxed about all of it.

I got so much necessary reading done: a close study of William Alabaster's sonnets; a big chunk of War and Peace; three or four Hammett stories on the side. The Alabaster poems were new to me, and I found them very beautiful and moving. The Hammett stories are insane, and Tolstoy is a god, and after a weekend with this trio how could I want to be anything other than a writer?

Sonnet 15

 

William Alabaster (1568–1640)

 

My soule a world is by Contraccion,

the heavens therein is my internall sence,

moved by my will as an intelligence,

my hart the element, my love the sonne;

and as the sonne about the earth doth run

and with his beames doth drawe thin vapours thence

which after in the aire doe condence

and power downe raine upon the earth anon,

soe moves my love about the heavenlie spheare

and draweth thence with an attractive fire

the purest argument witt can desire,

whereby devotion after may arise,

and theis conceiptes, digest by thoughts retire,

are turned into aprill showers of teares.

"Princess Marya had two passions and therefore two joys."

Yesterday, when I came across this statement in War and Peace, it stopped me cold. Wait, I thought. Of course. Of course. But why is it that I hardly ever think of passion simply as joy?

It is so easy to look at someone else's preoccupations--a crazy obsession with cutting every tiny stick into firewood, or growing enough vegetables for twenty when there are only two people in the household, or shopping without needing anything--as wasteful and absurd. The self-righteous me grumbles, These people should care about something important/reasonable . . . which is to say: they should care about the things I care about. Yet "Princess Marya had two passions and therefore two joys." It is such a plain reminder. 

For here is the rest of the scene:

The health and character of Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky, during that last year after his son's departure, declined considerably. He became still more irritable than before, and all the outbursts of his groundless wrath fell mainly upon [his daughter] Princess Marya. He seemed to seek out all her sorest spots so as to torment her morally as cruelly as possible. Princess Marya had two passions and therefore two joys: her nephew Nikolushka and religion--and the two were the favorite topics of the prince's attacks and mockery. Whatever the talk was about, he always brought the conversation down to the superstitions of old maids or to the pampering and spoiling of children.

The prince is a complicated character, an intelligent, intolerable old man who adores his family but is unable to tell them so. Instead, he lashes into pettiness. His daughter is cowed and subservient to him, yet she has a secure inner life. She does not second-guess her passions. On one level, she is victimized by him. On the other, she is entirely free of him.

Perhaps this is what my passions allow me: a clarity within the muddle of my life. This is what I love. Perhaps joy is as simple as that.

Who am I to be self-righteous about yours?

I woke late this morning, late enough so that day was awake before me, blinking and wavering through the panes like a bleary young mother.

Now is the first hour of my first weekend off in what feels like a very long time. My plans are simple: Read. Go outside. Read more. Go outside more. Of course I'll need to stuff in cooking and laundry, firewood and floors, groceries and tidying, but the spacious hours will be mine.

I'm beginning this fine weekend by drinking two cups of coffee instead of one, and not thinking about to-do lists. Still, I'm also feeling uneasy and sad: a poet acquaintance has been diagnosed with colon cancer; and I know, via the experience of one of my dearest friends, that she has a world of suffering ahead. I don't know this poet well, but my thoughts keep radiating toward her, toward her children, as I sit here comfortably, with two days of contentment ahead of me. Fate is so unfair.

Meanwhile, day has pulled herself together. Her bleariness has vanished and now strips of sun paint the side of the neighbor's big house, the indecisive sky is considering blue, and the squirrels are up 'n at 'em, racing along fences, leaping branch to branch, quarreling over last season's maple seeds.

In a few minutes I'll get dressed, I'll go outside, I'll breath sharp air, and look for the flower spikes I glimpsed yesterday--the first hyacinth spears, the first snowdrops. Spring peers from behind the winter veil. I hunt for her everywhere. I lift my nose into the wind like a hound.

I'm working on a poem draft that is overwhelming me. I don't think, objectively, that it's a great poem. But on Thursday night it sprang from my pen, nearly fully formed; and after I wrote it down, a tide of exhaustion instantly washed over me, as if I all of my energies had coalesced to make it and now my body was finished. It's strange how muscular a poem can be, how physical its creation. As if the words themselves are immaterial. As if the birth is all.

 Last night's poetry salon was a party. Usually five or six of us show up; last night we had twelve stuffed into Zanne's living room, plates filled with food, small constellations mingling and making jokes about how to dredge up small talk. It was quite funny and also fun, though I wondered how the actual writing and sharing would go. Turns out it went beautifully . . . so many good drafts, and I also managed to write a good one, a scrawl that seemed to leap almost fully formed onto the page and made me feel dizzy afterward. This writing salon has been such a rich part of my life for the past year or so, such an important part. It makes me feel excited and humble and embraced, but also it's been a deep relief to tell myself I am glad I moved to Portland because otherwise I would not have this. My grief for Harmony has been real, but also a considerable burden. Grief is a stranglehold. I crave not-grief and also feel guilty about not-grief. But this writing salon has given me a place to examine and celebrate it.

* * *

Today, the editing project gets to stay in bed, or at least sleep late. I've got to focus first on class planning, and then I need to work on last night's poem blurt, and then I need to vacuum and wash floors, and then, maybe, the editing project can crawl back onto the desk.

Outside, the dark air glistens with fog, the remnants of last night's rain coiling into strings of mist and cloud. In a moment I will heave myself off this couch and start gathering compost and recycling pails for the curb; I'll strip sheets and load the washing machine; I'll remake the bed, I'll wash breakfast dishes, I'll undergo the exercise class, I'll trudge forward into dutiful engagement with daylight.

Still, all last night I dreamed about my new poem . . . I needed to hurry up and write it, or it would fade, I'd never find it again, it would be gone, a nothing, a wisp; do it now, my brain prodded me, do it now. But when I woke I remembered that the poem was real. I had it. It was on paper, it was saved, I hadn't lost it, my brain had been wrong. Just waking up to think It exists made me so happy. 

 T's alarm went off at 5:30, and I woke up, turned on the light, then promptly fell back into a dream about whizzing around in jetpacks and stuffing a roast chicken with a whole potato. Thus, I'm running a little late this morning, and am still half-wandering a dream landscape of flying people and peculiar meal planning.

But I'm upright now, armed with the small cup of coffee that will recalibrate me into daylight Dawn. Already I can feel nighttime Dawn oozing away into the gutters.

This week has flown by. On Monday I thought I had all kinds of time to hunker down with that editing project. And now, already, it's Thursday, and I've got a Monson Arts class to plan for next week, and bathrooms to clean, and and and.

Still, I've made progress, hunkered down alone in the house, and I'm looking forward to seeing people again . . . going out to write at the salon tonight, driving up to the homeland on Monday. This seesaw between strict isolation and easy chatter: it's a fortifying mix, at least for my particular constitution.

For now, though, isolation still reigns. Once T leaves for work, Alcott House assumes its workaday cloak: laundry on the lines, dishes washed, counters strictly empty, gleaming. The kitchen floor is swept, the shades are lifted, the white-linened bed is crisp and neat. And then, and then, when the space is prepared, I retreat to the words.

First I have to make the egg. And then I have to crawl inside the egg. But housework has always been a kind of muse for me.

 We got a skim of snow last night, just enough to coat stairs and roofs and intensify the moonlight. This morning, as I swept the back stoop in the dark, I got the sudden sense of lurking spring--behind the snow, behind the cold, a change is readying. I've already been feeling this during the day. Bird song has shifted from its sharp winter notes to a sweeter, liquid questioning; daylight is softer, more expansive. Yesterday I spied the first points of snowdrops breaking through a neighbor's frozen garden soil. It's February in Maine: winter is by no means gone. But the transformation is beginning.

I've been working hard this week, keeping my head down, my nose to the whetstone. Still, I've managed to save a little time for other things . . . my useful exercise class, walks to the library, poem revision, reading.  I've got too much stuff in my reading stack right now. I can't seem to tear myself away from War and Peace, but I've still got to finish Watchmen and buckle down to those Alabaster poems, plus I just picked up Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism at the library, as well as a collection of Dashiell Hammett stories.

Sometimes this ridiculous reading obsession really gets out of hand. Currently, I am working on a comic poem about struggling with Joyce's Ulysses, in which the speaker mournfully describes herself as "the champion reader of her generation." I know how she feels.

Anyway, today. More editing. More laundry. Lemon-marinated pork chops and roasted cauliflower for dinner. And a pile of books begging to be opened.

The moon is so brilliant this morning, floodlighting my dark kitchen, overexciting the cat. Now, as I sit here with my coffee, the moon peers through the living room window, round-faced and nosy, like an astronomical version of my Polish great-aunts.

It's a late-winter Tuesday in the little northern city by the sea. Crusty snow is retreating from the tree roots and foundations; the temperature is supposed to rise into the 40s. I wouldn't be surprised to see the first snowdrops unfolding in a few south-facing flowerbeds. And it's raptor courtship season: last year at this time daylight owls were swooping through the neighborhood grove known as Baxter Woods; noisy red-tailed hawks were spinning over the graves at Evergreen Cemetery. Now is the time when their sap begins to run.

My week stretches out before me. On the calendar it looks like an expanse of blankness, but that just means I don't have any scheduled responsibilities outside these walls. Desk work, desk work, desk work. Housework, housework, housework. I am itching to fiddle with a draft I wrote last week at the salon, and maybe that will be part of today. But mostly I have to keep my head down and chip away at the giant editing project.

I'm still rereading War and Peace; I'm moved and overwhelmed by it, as always. I'm still copying out Dante's Inferno, amazed by the coils of his imagination. I need to move forward into the next section of the 17th-century poetry anthology I'm reading with Teresa: the work of a poet I don't know at all, William Alabaster. Around the edges, I have been making chicken stock for the freezer, making minestrone, making pumpkin-buttermilk pudding, hanging laundry on the basement lines, filling the woodbox, sweeping the floors, making the bed . . . O, my realm, my mouse hole.

All day long, there is work, there are patterns--invention, intellect, habit, hands, the tug of muscle, the pant of breath. It is hard to find a hierarchy. Everything we do is everything we do.

Monday morning, and I feel like it should be Saturday morning. I need a day off, but I'm not getting one, for the tight schedule of a giant editing project waits for no one. So I will drink my small cup of coffee, and get the laundry underway, and trudge through my exercise class, and prop myself up at my desk, and undertake this day.

The weekend workshop was intense, as they always are. I love teaching and am exhausted by teaching. So much concentration: I'm sure the participants were equally tired. But after our afternoon session ended, I immediately went for a two-mile walk, and that helped me rest my eyes and my mind.

I am still amazed by the rigors of this art. Poetry is so demanding. As soon as I've climbed one hill, I discover an impassible swamp on the other side. I never find the answers, only one question after another. I love this about my vocation, but that doesn't make it easier.

Outside the window, a round moon is tangled in a silhouette of branches. The furnace mutters, the clock ticks, time slips by, slips by, slips by. Long ago, in 1948, Alcott House was a raw new cottage; long ago, in 2017, I wandered these rooms, at home and homeless; long ago, yesterday, I was a poet but, today, anything could happen. Anything.

It is February, and the days are lengthening, and my seed orders are arriving in the mail. In a month I will be outside in my chore coat, prodding the beds, opening the cold frame, hunting for snowdrops.

This was the scene yesterday morning, 7 a.m., 10 below zero, looking out at Fort Gorges in Casco Bay. I had never seen sea smoke before, so Tom drove us over to the Eastern Prom, where we used to live, so that we could experience it. Sea smoke is vapor that forms over the ocean in extreme cold, and what surprised me is how lively it was, strands coiling and dancing over the sluggish water. Behind these ghosts, the old 1812-era fort loomed like a dark memory.

This morning the temperature has risen to a balmy 14 above zero, and by tomorrow we're supposed to have highs in the low 40s. Our acquaintance with Siberia is over.

Yesterday's class was busy and talkative and engaged, so I think that's a good sign. This morning I'll be back at it: more writing, and then a revision session all afternoon, and then T wants to go out for Sicilian pizza, which sounds like a fine idea to me.

Tomorrow I'll slide back into the editing pond.

Fifteen below here this morning, actually a little milder than predicted. I'm pleased that the Alcott House can weather extreme cold so well, even with a less than ideal wood stove. I kept a fire going from noon till bedtime, set the thermostat's daytime temp at 65 degrees, and the house was very comfortable. Despite the cold, the sun shone hard all day, so the furnace didn't even have to do a ridiculous amount of work. If we'd had a real heating stove, with damper and catalytic converter and such, instead instead of this little doll's firebox, we wouldn't have needed a furnace at all.

This morning I got up in the dark, relit the stove, made coffee. I can feel the Arctic grip squeezing the house, probing windows and doors, tugging shingles and rafters. In the stove the new flames, licking up from the kindling, are tentative and frail.

I'm readying myself for an intense work weekend, two days on zoom, guiding a group through a series of narrative poems and writing prompts. As always, I doubt myself, at these moments before the work begins. Why do I always choose to teach what I don't fully understand?

I've got enough acquaintance with myself to know that I'll figure things out. But the disclarities are always unsettling, even as they are always useful, maybe always necessary.

This morning New England is bracing for a foray into the Arctic. At the moment the temperature in the little northern city by the sea is 19 degrees and windy. But this will quickly change: 7 degrees by 8 a.m., 3 degrees by noon, -4 by 4 p.m. Overnight we're supposed to reach toward -20, a picnic compared to the homeland, which will be angling toward -30.

This will be, by far, the coldest temperatures I've seen it in Portland, though in Harmony I once saw -40. As you know, I love weather, so I'm excited, though not sorry I won't have to carry firewood to the house or thaw out livestock water buckets five times a day. Instead, I'll get the wood stove going this morning, get a roast into the oven in the afternoon, and hope this isn't the kind of house where the pipes freeze.

I got the housework and groceries done yesterday; today I'll be washing sheets and editing, plus prepping for tomorrow's class, which keeps changing personnel but remains overfull: I had two new registrants yesterday. I have some hope of getting up early tomorrow and taking a drive to the ocean so that I can look at sea smoke in subzero temperatures, but I don't think I'll have time. Also, will my car start? In her youth Tina the Subaru could start in any old temperature, but she's out of practice.

I've got a couple of new poems up in the Hole in the Head Review, both of which arose from draft blurts written in my Thursday-night salon. As you can see, I've been wandering into strange new directions. It's been exciting to watch myself morph. I guess, to a degree, artists are narcissists, overly fascinated by themselves. But it is interesting to study one's own brain at work.

 It can be hard to predict what poem teenagers will fall in love with. So I've been very interested that my Monson kids, while liking most things I've brought in, have gotten most excited about the two oldest poets I've shared: Sappho and Cold Mountain (Hanshan).

I brought in Sappho early in the year, and I shared Cold Mountain with them yesterday. A ninth-century Buddhist monk, he traveled around China, begging, drinking, and carving his poems on trees and buildings. The kids were very moved by his work, and they loved imagining how Chinese characters would look in tree bark. We spent a long time talking about the beauty of alphabets. The poem I brought them (which I won't reprint here because the translation is under copyright) is a small song about busy people and a contented speaker . . . quite simple, clearly set long ago but also timeless, evoking the woods and a dusty road. I can't explain exactly why the students loved it so much, but they did.

I'm always very moved when a piece makes this mark on people. It seems to enter them like nourishment, like the food they've been waiting for all their lives.

* * *

I got home in the late afternoon, lit a fire in the stove, dealt with the offended cat. Eventually I made cream of tomato soup, with homemade chicken broth and the last of my frozen garden tomatoes. Tomato soup sounds like such a plain meal, but the real materials make it something grand yet very simple. It was a sweet and comforting dinner.

Today I'll be wading through piles of chores: laundry, grocery shopping, housework, editing, class prep for the weekend. But I think I'll go out to write tonight anyway. These Thursday-night salons have become so precious to me. Even when I'm overworked, they seem like the right thing to do.

Minus 7 this morning in the homeland. I woke, as one does, to the sound of heavy equipment . . . a solitary  front-end loader moving snow piles in the chill darkness. I'd been dreaming about playing in my old band, we were trapped in some sort of fraught situation, possibly in a castle; and now the covers were sliding off the bed, and a front-end loader was bleating, and cold was clawing at the doors.

Now that I'm awake and clean and dressed, life feels less melodramatic. The loader has finished its work, the lights in the general store have switched on, and in a few minutes I'll hat, boot, and glove myself and hustle across the street for coffee. A small sunrise gleams over the fire-station tower. Pale chimney smoke hovers like dragon's breath, and an empty log truck growls up Route 15 toward Moosehead Lake. Pickup trucks slide into the parking spaces in front of the store, and, look, the loader is parking there, too, headlights ablaze, as its shadowy driver slips from his cab and trudges inside, questing for small talk and breakfast sandwiches.

Yesterday evening I worked on some poem drafts, then wandered down to the Quarry Restaurant to pick up my dinner. The chef at the Quarry, Lulu Ranta, provides takeaway meals for the artists-in-residence at Monson Arts. She's also, amazingly, been shortlisted for a James Beard Award. "How did they find me up here in the boonies?" she marveled to me last night. But as I sat alone at my apartment table, reading War and Peace and eating some kind of incredible steak with wine and mushroom sauce, I thought that the James Beard scouts had made a pretty astute choice.

Then I watched about two-thirds of the musical Oklahoma, which is problematic, to say the least, but stars Shirley Jones, who grew up just outside of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in the same era that my mom lived there. Who knew that someone from Chestnut Ridge country could grow up to be the mom on The Partridge Family (and also the real-life mom of Shaun Cassidy, teen idol of my youth)? I felt I needed to spend some time with her.