The blog-platform glitchiness continues, so please don't be alarmed if you don't hear from me: it will likely be because I can't get into the site. However, I seem to have won the battle today, and so here I am, on the last day of August, still hewing to my routine: rise at 5 a.m. let the cat out, put away the clean dishes, make the coffee, bring T a cup, sit down with mine, start writing to you, let the cat in, go back to writing to you.

Yesterday I shipped my little editing project, sat through a staff meeting, messed with a poem, fought with some job paperwork, underwent some housework. Today will be even less demanding. I've got a new editing project on the way, but it hasn't arrived yet, so I'll have to find other occupations. I'll probably freeze some kale, probably work on poems, probably check in on Rilke, probably talk to my sister, probably wrestle with more job paperwork. I'll take an early-morning walk and do some mushroom foraging. Tonight I'll go out to write. It won't exactly be a vacation day, but it will be mine to shape.

The days are getting notably shorter. It's dark at 5 a.m., and the scent of the air is changing. Outside, a breeze ruffles the aging leaves. Next week our firewood delivery will arrive: a cord of green wood, destined for the woodshed, which is presently packed with a cord of dry wood that now needs to go into the basement. A big chore lies ahead: our annual wood-moving days. There's the old adage: firewood warms you twice. And there's my private adage: firewood is the story of my marriage.

No firewood necessary today, though. On the last day of August, in the little northern city by the sea, a thick breeze swirls up from the bay, waltzes through the open windows. Walnuts clonk onto the roof of my neighbors' dead car. Jack the tuxedo cat trots officiously down the shadowy sidewalk. Tomatoes ripen and zinnias preen. And I run up the stairs, taking them two at a time, like a long-legged kid. 

I was fairly sure I wouldn't be writing to you today as this blog platform is having some major posting glitches. However, I somehow managed to slip through the Page Not Working / Page Does Not Exist frenzy and snag a working screen. I wonder if anyone is trying to fix this stuff or if the platform has become so old that only Luddites complain.

In any case, here we are, meeting in our accustomed rooms--you at your kitchen table, in your hairnet, with a steaming cup of Ovaltine and the usual stacks of $100 bills littering the counters; me in my couch corner, on a dark and humid morning, drinking black coffee from a white cup and saucer, listening to the crickets chirp and the clock tick.

Today I've got a 9 a.m. staff zoom meeting about the Monson Arts high school program, which will be getting started again in mid-September. And then I'll finish editing an academic article, and do the housework I didn't do yesterday, and check in on my Rilke syllabus, and fiddle with the poem draft I started yesterday, and figure out something or other for dinner: maybe chicken curry., maybe something I haven't thought of yet.

The air is thick, full of unshed rain. I froze green beans yesterday, picked a passel of chard, brought over a bag of lettuce to my neighbor. The cherry tomatoes are coming in strong; the cucumbers are tender and sweet. I bought some nectarines yesterday and am ripening them for a pie. Thank goodness for the garden-to-kitchen pipeline. Sometimes I think cooking is what keeps me from shattering into a thousand pieces.

I notice that with my sister as well. She calls late in the day: "What are you making for dinner?" "What are you making for dinner?" We kvetch, each clattering among her own pots and pans.

My sister, I wished upon you those delights

            time never buries,

            more precious than heroes.

            --from Muriel Rukeyser, "Four in a Family"

Despite expectations, yesterday turned out to be decently productive. I shipped an editing project, filled out a grant report, read my Donne homework, arduously drafted some job paperwork. None of this was exactly enjoyable, but all of it needed to be done, and I was glad to cross it off the list.

Today I'll undertake a small editing job, clean the upstairs rooms, and maybe let myself mess around with a poem draft. My notebook is packed with Thursday blurts that I haven't yet transcribed, and I'd like to dig into them for an hour or two. I've got green beans to freeze, I should force myself to go grocery shopping . . . but what gets done is what will get done.

Most of my family labor these days is spent propping up my sister, and at least there I feel useful. We text or talk multiple times a day, and I try to counsel and console. It's hard work, and I am ragged. But outside, the sunflowers are blooming. Inside, the kitchen counters are clean and white. Jane Eyre is a surprising comfort: that dogged little governess, always seesawing between restraint and explosion.

And so August draws to a close, and the books pile up around me like medicine bottles. Take one spoonful of Charlotte Bronte three times a day, or until you are ferocious. 

I spent much of yesterday morning outside--planting late-season spinach and arugula, harvesting carrots and kohlrabi, weeding the vegetable garden, fighting with the string trimmer--and then T and I went for a walk, I listened to baseball, I read Jane Eyre, I made a high-summer dinner of cherry-tomato cobbler, sautéed zucchini, and a salad of green beans and broccoli, and I went gratefully to bed.

Overall, it was as restful a weekend as I could have managed, under my messy circumstances, and I am more or less girded for whatever this week will bring. Today I'll ship out the editing project I've been working on. I've got another one to start tomorrow, but first I'll catch up on some teaching and correspondence matters and possibly work on some of my own poems and reading projects. I'll undergo my exercise regimen, and maybe grocery-shop, and certainly wash clothes . . . and none of this is fascinating to you. I know that. So I wonder why I feel the need to write it down. It's not a to-do list or a way to avoid procrastinating; I'm a steady and reliable self-employee and I'd do it anyway, whether or not I chronicled it. I expect my lists are more of a reminder that, indeed, all of this is work. There is no hierarchy among revising poems and hanging laundry, doing crunches and correcting typos, rereading a Bronte novel and scrubbing dirty carrots. You already know this, but I need to keep remembering.

And now, in these last few days of August, as summer ebbs, as days shorten, as the first red leaves glint and the tomatoes sweeten, the work beckons--word and hand, word and hand. I set down a clothes basket and pick up a pen. I close a book and peel a cucumber. I hang a shovel on a nail and lift a thought into the breeze sighing up from the bay.

Well, what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a rock-and-roll band?

                                --The Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man"

I was pretty tired yesterday, and mostly I gave into that. I read Jane Eyre, and I listened to baseball, and I puttered mildly among my tasks, and I went for a walk with my neighbor, but I also took a nap at 11:30 a.m. and got into bed at 8 p.m. without shame. This morning I'm feeling more like myself--not that I was sick before, just wrung out.

At first light, the air is still. In the garden my white cat glows phosphorescently among the dark leaves. Upstairs T is deeply asleep. And now, swirling up from the cove, a sudden clamor of seagulls, and the quiet shivers and cracks.

I should read Donne today. I should plant fall greens. I should freeze kale. I should mow and trim. I'll do some of these things, but I don't know which ones. Yesterday I cut zinnias and sunflowers, lined the mantle with blossoms. For some reason, that unnecessary task seemed of vital importance. This morning it still feels that way. Thank god my eyes have flowers--crisp, new, bright.

The small luxuries of the body, each sense drinking in its particular pleasure--air-dried sheets, baking bread, fresh flowers, lemony ice cream, a red cardinal singing in a maple tree . . . oh, this is why I am a homebody, a hausfrau: I am seduced by the small domesticities of earth.

It's been a sad week, a hard week, a week of helplessness and exasperation and elegy and insult. Also, a week of decision making, of moving forward, of doing the best with what I have to work with. Also, a week of shrugging shoulders, of letting things slide, of giving in to the inevitable. Also, a week of talk, of tears, of propping up and propping up and propping up.

But there are four vases of flowers on my mantle. A sparrow is chip-chipping in the lilacs. Gulls swoop and flaunt and quarrel. A beloved man sleeps in my bed.

Our couch is green;

            the beams of our house are cedar,

            our rafters are pine.

 

                                    --The Song of Solomon, 1:17

After yesterday's all-night-all-day-all-night rain, the neighborhood is sopped. The black walnut tree droops under the weight of its water load. Puddles line driveways. Grass glimmers and sags. Tomato plants bow to the ground.

It's Saturday, and it's still early, and I wish I'd been able to sleep longer, but my brain doesn't turn off easily these days. At least I can sit here quietly in my corner. I can savor my weekends-only second cup of coffee, and I can enjoy not hurling myself into chores and duties.

It's been a stressful week, to say the least. The Vermont situation is, of course, the major worry; the fact that I'm sitting here instead of being there is just one of many untenable scenes in a long convoluted tale of magical thinking. But I've had work stress as well, changes afoot that are necessary but painful. I'm not enjoying all of this unexplained hinting, but at the moment I can't put my family on the blog gridiron, nor can I delve into the job shift until things are formally settled.

What I can say is that I am sitting in my couch corner, listening to the quiet house, as the cogs of my life chunk stiffly into a new harder-to-pedal gear. Well, that is how it has to be. I'll pant more, and sweat more, and my legs will get stronger. Here's hoping that the top of the hill has a magnificent view.

It's raining again in the little northern city by the sea . . . a slow autumnal rain, tapping at windows and roofs, sighing down gutters.

I went out to write last night, alone, as all of my neighborhood carpoolers were otherwise engaged. Slowly I zigzagged among the leafy Deering streets, past the Congregational church, through the university, along the shadowy park and the lines of parked baseball-game cars, up the stop-and-go State Street hill, crossing downtown, then sliding into the tenement West End, glossed up these days, of course, but its cramped past is unmistakeable.

I was so tired--this week has been brutal--and I wasn't sure I wanted to socialize or even write, but I knew I had to get out of the house, away from my preoccupation, and I was right. Going out was the best thing I could have done, and after an evening of writing and talk, I motored alone, back through the neighborhoods and streets, back to my own flowery darkness, with the light left on for me beside the door and a single dog walker treading the sidewalk. To go out and come back. To depend on a beloved to turn on the light. To let friends hug me. To tumble into the surprise of words. All of it is a balm.

Today I'll drag recycling to the curb, wash sheets and towels, clean a bathroom, mop floors. Today I'll edit a manuscript and look over a syllabus and pant through my exercise regimen. Today I'll read a novel, I'll read poems, I'll talk to my sister and talk to my sister and talk to my sister. Today I'll braise chicken and wild mushrooms and pick tomatoes in the rain. Today I'll fall asleep in my own bed and wake in the night, groggy and anxious, till I feel my beloved's hand brushing my shoulder. Thank goodness for it all. Thank goodness.

Thursday. This week has seemed endless yet all of a sudden it's drawing toward an end. And the month, too, is counting down its days. Mornings are cool; noons are summery. September looms in the wings.

I don't feel very glib-tongued this morning. My sentences keep asking to be short. Probably I'll go out to write tonight, and maybe my sentences will swell then. Or maybe short is all I'll get. It's possible that my two-day headache is influencing my fluency. It's not an excruciating headache, just a minor thud, but it won't go away. All of the Vermont distress is certainly behind it, and it is ibuprofen-proof.

Anyway, a new day! I'll wash clothes and do my exercises and edit footnotes. And text and talk on the phone endlessly. And maybe the headache will leak away and I'll find a few useful words buried under a rock.

Another alarmless morning: Tom is having an outbreak of forgetfulness. But here we are, awake but late, and I am finally sitting down with my coffee and pretending to be relaxed.

Last night's baseball game was perfect. The weather was balmy, the crowd was cheerful, the home team won. A pack of feral 8-year-old boys in stiff too-large baseball caps danced ineptly to YMCA in the aisles. An enormous puppy leaned its head on my shoulder. Turns out his owner is the wife of one of the Sea Dogs' pitchers, and her leviathan dog adores baseball games. What could be cozier than a calm, soft-hearted, baseball-loving Great Dane? I was entirely charmed. And then there was the sweetness of walking home in the gloaming.

Today I'll be back to the grind: editing and fretting. I have no idea when/if I'll be in Vermont; there's definitely a sword-of-Damocles shine to this whole affair. But I did finish the first rough draft of my Rilke syllabus--a big item to cross off the to-do list. If I can get this editing project finished too, I'll feel easier about whatever lies in wait for me, travel-wise. I won't get it done today, but maybe, just possibly, it will be off my desk by the end of the week.

In the meantime, I keep conscientiously attending to the present. Here I am, in my shabby couch corner. The cat rubs against my ankle as Tom eats his breakfast in the dining room. Morning chill wanders through an open window. In the ash tree, a chickadee repeats his name, chickadeedeedee. All of those Rilke poems I read yesterday buzz in my skull . . . "A gust inside the god. A wind."

Alarm didn't go off this morning, so we rolled out of bed in a flurry. But I'm settled down now, with my coffee and my couch corner, and letting T continue the flurry on his own. Yesterday was the day I expected, full of texts and phone calls and texts and phone calls, with work squeezed around the edges. But the surgery was routine, and now we wait to see what happens next. Nonetheless, I'm tired . . . ragged nights and days, and so much fret and doom. 

But this moment is sweet. Cool air flickers through the open windows. Blotches of sunlight dapple the neighbor's vinyl siding. Overhead, a gang of gulls swirls and screams. In a few minutes I'll hoist myself into the day--dishwashing, laundry-lugging, bed-making, kitchen-shining: the daily re-set, everything in its its place, soaped and tidied, before I take myself upstairs to my study. It's a bit of a prayer, this domestic trudge, a way to steady the lurch. Without it, I careen.

So the day will pass: desk work, reading Rilke, the inevitable clog of texts and phone calls. And in the evening T and I will walk over to the baseball field and spend a few hours with summer.

I hope I'll manage to post this note to you because the blog platform seems to be having some challenges this morning . . . nothing wants to load or update and "pages don't exist," etc. However, I seem to have sneaked in around the edge, so we'll see.

Sunday was a warm day, and today is supposed to be another one. I didn't do anything too remarkable: read books, cut herbs for drying, froze some chard, did laundry and the grocery shopping. I bought steamers for dinner, so that was a summery treat. Tonight, skate wings. I do love the surprises at the fish market. Plus, Tom and I went for an early evening walk and found a big patch of chanterelles in a new place.

Today, I'll be back to editing, undergoing my exercise regimen, working on a syllabus, waiting for news from Vermont. Maybe after today I'll have a better idea of what my upcoming weeks will look like. But I did take the risk of buying tickets for the Sea Dogs game tomorrow night. It will likely be our last chance to see baseball before the season ends, and I am grasping at fun.

Dreams are so melodramatic. Even if I can't remember the events or the characters or the situation, I usually recall a sense of high emotion, though not always which emotion. I keep a dream diary and every morning, before I write to you, I scrawl down whatever I remember. Many days I write "No memory"; other days I'm able to trace a version of a narrative. But this morning all I had was suspense. I wrote, "Something was about to be revealed about somebody's wife--"

Still, the drama in that scrap! What could "something" be? Who is this "somebody" with a wife? Why is the "wife" known only as a wife and not as a somebody in their own right? And "revealed about" . . . is the wife complicit in whatever might be revealed? or is something spurious about to be shared without the wife's consent? Passive voice construction obscures who will be doing the revealing, which adds to the suspense.

My brain invented these confusions yet structured them formally, established a purposeful literary frame for them. My dreams are not a mash of person/place/thing. They are arranged for transmission--as a sentence is arranged, as a story is. Dreams may not make sense, but the form of their telling makes sense.

* * *

I slept pretty well last night, better than the night before. My mom's in the hospital, awaiting hip surgery on Monday, and in many ways that's a relief for all of us . . . we don't have to obsess about another fall in the house. Yesterday, Tom called me a fretboard: both a worrier and the receiver of everyone else's worry--phone calls and texts, phone calls and texts, all morning long. Finally he said, "Let's go out for Chinese food," and so he drove us downtown to Empire, where we had a beautiful lunch of noodles and dumplings. Then we spent an hour or so ambling through the used-furniture store and the used bookstore. I came back with a stack: A. S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Irene Nemirovsky, Terrance Hayes . . . and also, for the first time ever, saw two of my own books in a "used poetry" section. I guess it was inevitable.

I still don't know when I'll be going to Vermont, whether there will be a rehab stint after the surgery, whether I'll need to sub in for my sister, whose son is heading to college this week . . . all is blurry. But I'm grateful for your notes and calls. You've been through this too, and your advice and support are invaluable. Thank you.

Yesterday turned out to be hard day: my sister called to say that my mom had fallen, and then I immediately got an email telling me that a dear friend is going into hospice. So I spent the day between those two poles, trying to work etc. among texts and phone calls but also looping around the house, staring out of windows, grappling with helplessness.

So I'm on call now, possibly leaving for Vermont at any moment, though probably not till after the weekend.

Anyway, today I'll be home, and possibly there will even be sunshine, that rare visitor. Yesterday was one long downpour: I barely managed to pick vegetables for dinner, let alone do any work outside. Everything is sopped now, but maybe things will dry out. I need to mow, weed, deadhead blossoms, and spend hours on the phone with my sister, trying sort out what needs to be done. Send love.

It's August 18, my parents' 61st wedding anniversary. Also, it's the anniversary of the day Tom and I bought this little house in 2017, and it's the anniversary of the day I bought my little Subaru, Tina, in 2014. Funny how binding agreements keep happening on this day.

So, six years ago today, Tom strode into the hideous kitchen with a hammer, a pry bar, and a saw and ripped it down to the studs. Nine years ago today my sons and I cruised around the Bangor Mall parking lots test-driving cars we couldn't afford and blasting My Bloody Valentine songs on stereos that didn't belong to us.

Six years we've owned the Alcott House, spending all of the fall of 2017 madly rehabbing, finally moving in in December, even though we still had no running water in the kitchen . . . and now here we are, still unfinished, always unfinished, but more settled and content than I would ever have thought possible, me with that giant grief chip on my shoulder, who came to Portland with such terror and dismay.

Twenty-something years in the forest, and now this tame neighborhood: Flowers and a wood stove. Cluttered roofs, a steeple. Dog walkers and bike riders and children playing in the street. Trash pickup and a furnace and the grocery store 5 minutes away. Quiet walks to city woods, the cemetery, the cove. Restaurants, little markets. The familiar faces of friendly neighbors. A buoyant community of writers. Easy travel access to our distant children. I am still bewildered to be in this civilized world, after the wild loneliness of the north.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly is sick to death of my landscape emoting, but I can't help myself. I am like a weed, digging my roots into a crack in the pavement. I break my heart every time I leave a place I love. And I am learning to love here, this provincial seaside town: the oddly archaic niceness of this neighborhood, the flurried hipness of the downtown, the tent encampments and suffering faces in the parks and along the motorways, the snow and the sun and the chop of the bay. All of it, the painful and the sweet. When I have to leave, my heart will break again.

Yesterday was mostly taken up by prepping for and then recovering from a long work meeting. It's funny how such things co-opt entire days, but the gathering was useful and difficult and refreshing and encouraging and solved some problems, so onward.

Today I'll get back to editing, try to catch up with email, etc., and then I'll go out to write tonight. It looks like another damp cool day ahead, but I still hope to mow grass and pick cherry tomatoes and whatever blueberries I can. Only a few berries are left to ripen, and I took off the net to share these last ones with the birds. The poor things have been longing for them all season. So far the only things I've put into the freezer are blueberries, wild mushrooms, and a little kale. There will be more greens to come, I think, and maybe eventually I'll have enough cucumbers for pickles, but otherwise this is not a year for winter sustenance. Even the herbs have been slow. I've dried sage, thyme, tarragon, and catnip, but not in quantity. I doubt I'll have enough basil to freeze; I definitely won't have enough parsley or cilantro.

So I'm living in the moment . . . picking tiny harvests of beans and broccoli, cucumbers and tomatoes, and making daily salads with them; julienning tiny kohlrabi and carrots for two servings of slaw. We're eating well. Last night I made a polpettone--an Italian-style stuffed meat roll: ground beef rolled up around a filling of baby kale, walnuts, and parmesan. I step into to the garden at 3 p.m., put my hands on my hips, and ask, "Now, what can I do with this?" Summer kitchen-garden cooking is such fun.

Really, cooking and poem writing are so similar. The raw ingredients appear on the page or the vine. They may be a cornucopia or a few tiny misshapen fruits. Still, they require the same stance, the same question: Hands on hips: "Now, what can I do with this?"

I went out for a walk yesterday at about 7 a.m. It was raining, and I wandered through the small streets toward Baxter Woods, a copse of oaks and dog walkers. And there, on the root of an oak, I spotted this beauty: a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom, as big as a turkey platter, fresh and glowing, ugly and gnarled, the both-and of foraging at my feet. I felt like I'd won the World Series. Quickly I pried it off the root, quickly I unfolded a bag and slid it inside, but not quick enough to avoid the side-eye of two dog walkers, who asked in horror, "Are you going to eat that?" "I am indeed," I assured them. I even actually said indeed. That's how much I enjoyed their horror.

I kept going, trudging up the hill to Evergreen Cemetery, where I crouched in wet grass like a lunatic lover weeping over a grave and harvested chanterelles here and there in my secret spots. And then, soaked, I lugged my booty home, feeling magnificently self-satisfied.

The chicken-of-the-woods spent a few hours on the kitchen counter, drying off, and then I cleaned and sliced it up and sautéed it. Two quarts for the freezer, and a batch for dinner, which I oven-braised for an hour with actual chicken, sweet onion, a cubanelle pepper, and the juice of a Meyer lemon; then served it over mixed grains (quinoa, kasha, millet, chia, and such), alongside a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and yogurt. Those dog walkers don't know what they were missing.

* * *

You know how I get after a successful forage: all bloated up with the pride of the hunt. But I'm over that now . . . I'm back to my usual diffident, couch-sitting, gull-listening morning self. Today I'll keep scratching away at the editing project. I've got a zoom meeting late morning. I need to clean the upstairs rooms. I'll undergo my exercise regimen. The week is wandering by, and I am wandering along with it. I feel busy all the time, but also a bit outside of things . . . as if the regular world is a train, and I am standing beside the tracks, watching the windows flash past and imagining the lives of the sleepers and eaters and newspaper readers inside.

This has been a strange summer: an everyday challenge, what with the rain and the tree emergency and garden problems, but also a detachment. I've been alone so much. I go for days, weeks, without driving further than the grocery store. I have no company but Tom for six days out of seven, and he is out of the house for most of those hours. My writing salon is a bustle of activity on Thursday evenings, and then that brief social bubble floats away into the rain, and I am back again, myself with myself. I'm not complaining at all: I'm good at solitude, after all of those years in the woods. And when I don't have it, I crave it. Nonetheless, like the rain, it's been constant this summer. And I'm starting to feel the mildew.

Woke up to another indictment. I'm starting to lose count of them. But I will say, given the damage he's inflicted on this country, it's a cozy feeling to know that he'll spend the rest of his life tied into knots by the legal system. I remember saying, early on in this debacle, that only the law would save us. I'm not particularly prescient, as a rule; nor do I know much about the law. But it sure is heartening to watch justice at work.

And now, after a night not spent wildly defaming people on social media, I sit calmly with my cup of coffee, thinking about Rilke and Donne and my various to-do items: editing, foraging, blueberry picking, laundry, a bathroom scrubbing project, reading, making dinner. Even with that bathroom scrubbing project, my life is so, so so much happier than DJT's.

* * *

I think we're supposed to get some rain today, but I hope to get out for a mushroom walk early, before the steady downpours begin. The editing project is moving along quickly, so I'll probably slow down a bit and work on the Rilke syllabus, spend some time with a friend's poem-in-progress, and investigate a couple of my own drafts. Teresa's been busy organizing, and it looks like our new poem-group invitees are coming together eagerly. We've taken to calling the gathering a lab or a test kitchen, as a way to differentiate it from a workshop. I'm quite excited about it.

And what else is happening around here? I don't know . . . not much newsworthy, I guess. Cherry tomatoes are ripening quickly. Boys are confabbing about a possible family adventure in the Pacific Northwest next summer. I'm wearing a pretty summer dress every day because autumn is in the wings and soon I'll be in sweaters again. The Leopard is still an intensely sad and beautiful novel, even after a dozen rereadings. The little northern city by the sea is bustling and provincial and sunny and shady, and its wharfs are rich with freshly caught fish. Last night I made paupiettes: local flounder fillets rolled around a stuffing of breadcrumbs, butter, parsley, and kale, then steamed in soufflé molds in a bain-marie. The process was a bit French and fussy, but the result was sweet and delicate.

Here's hoping you have a chance to stand outside on your front stoop today, and watch a bird or two, a passerby, a flicker of light or rain. 

It was a quiet weekend. On Saturday, we walked a 5-mile loop from our house, around Back Cove, and back home, and we spotted all kinds of birds . . . egrets, terns, plovers, sandpipers, loons, and a fat pair of feral domestic geese. On Sunday, I wandered out to the grocery stores and the fish market, but otherwise we stayed home: I read and worked on a poem and picked blueberries and such; T wrestled with a computer problem and fell asleep on the couch. Baseball on the radio; cicadas in the trees: the summer soundtrack . . . and then the tastes of summer: swordfish with yogurt and dill sauce; a corn and tomato salad. 

And now the work week is upon us again, and we'll be back at it--T building cathedral ceilings in a big house; me editing a manuscript, compiling my Rilke syllabus, having zoom meetings, etc., etc.

But I've started rereading one of my beloveds--Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which E. M. Forster calls "one of the great lonely books."

Yesterday, in the car, Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book," came up on my playlist shuffle . . . and I thought, Well, of course. And every day I read the book too. How else would I survive?

On Friday, during our Donne chatter, Teresa suddenly asked about my writing groups: what do I like? what do I not like? I told her about my salon evenings--the communal writing to prompts and how that has opened new doors into my material, which I can then take home and refashion in solitude. But I also told her about my other writing group--a monthly, more traditional workshopping session that I have mixed feelings about. The participants are lovely, and several overlap with the salon group, but there's something about workshopping--essentially, judging: essentially, picking apart work--which I find both unsavory and unhelpful. This isn't to say I don't welcome aid with pieces I'm struggling with. But there's something about the standard workshop model that doesn't feel right to me.

I realized, as Teresa was talking, that agency may be part of the issue. In the workshop model, the poet sits back silently as everyone else in the room talks about the piece. It's a kind of victim approach to one's own art. But what might happen if the poet triggered the discussion?

So now Teresa and I are thinking about a new experiment: What if a group of four committed poets, more or less peers in their sense of confidence in the art, gathers on zoom? Each brings a poem in progress, and each begins the conversation about the poem. We're calling this approach "Let's talk about ____." The blank could be a craft problem ("I'm struggling with the form of this sestina.") It could be a research issue ("I'm having trouble figuring out what historical material is actually useful in this poem.") It could be a moral question ("Do I have the right to speak for this speaker?") It could be an angst question ("Why won't anyone publish this poem?") It could be a mysterious joy question ("Why does this poem feel right, even though it's so different from my usual style?") Whatever the trigger, the rest of the group would use this opening to enter into a discussion about the poem.

It seemed to Teresa and me that this might be a way to avoid one of the big problems of the workshop model: the tendency to rewrite other people's work for them, a side-effect that I deeply dislike. But we could still have intense and useful discussions about the pieces; we could still help one another and learn from one another.

In any case, we're going to try it, if we can get our other invitees on board. Something to look forward to, in the dark of winter!

Saturday morning, and the neighborhood is quiet, the house is quiet, I sit in my couch corner and I am quiet.

Mid-August now, and the zinnias are at their zenith: crisp and thick and bright along the sidewalk. Cherry tomatoes are beginning to ripen; chard is a small forest. In this windless morning the garden is a portrait, a still-life, alive.

I'm nearly finished with Roth's Sabbath's Theater. I'm reading Rilke and Donne. I'm drinking black coffee and thinking about harvesting greens for the freezer, thinking about a poem draft, thinking about Aretha and Otis and Curtis, soul singers of my blood, thinking about the odd silence of the air. My mind trickles among its thoughts; my brain is a creek filled with stones.

Flat white daylight dapples the shadowed maples. The white cat stalks across the grass; he is the only movement in the landscape. Where are the jays, the gulls, the crows this morning, with their comforting raucous clatter?

Last night, for dinner, I sautéed lamb patties with fresh jalapeños and oregano; I warmed up homemade baguettes and made tzatziki with yogurt, cucumber, red onion, and dill. I made a salad of roasted zucchini and eggplant, cherry tomatoes, green beans, chanterelles, and lettuce. Nearly every ingredient was grown by me, or foraged, or the fruits of a neighbor's garden gift (squash on the doorstep: a summer tradition!). Even the lamb was homegrown by a friend. Only the yogurt, a few of the tomatoes, the bread flour and yeast, and the olive oil and vinegar and salt and pepper were store-bought. Such meals amaze me. The horn of plenty in a city lot, even after months of rain.

And yet:

Paris

February 17, 1903

Dear Sir:

. . . You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you—no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Last night's writing salon was lovely, as they usually are . . . Each week, everyone seems so relieved to be back at it, sliding into our few hours of intense and unexpected invention. It is a remarkable experience, this group.

So now I have my notebook blurts, and it is Friday: trash day, housework day, washing-sheets-and-towels day, talking-about-Donne-with-Teresa day, and editing, of course, and maybe beginning to play with one or two first drafts. 

The photographs of Maui are devastating. I look out at my wet neighborhood, placid and gray in first light, and shiver, again, at the tides of fortune. What could be, what will be, what is?

My what is washes up against me so steadily these days. Maybe it's my age, maybe just an overwhelming awareness of love. I know that sounds stupidly sentimental: but I am so aware, all of the time, of my steady household affections, of devotion to my work: the books, the writing, the coils of my mind; garden and kitchen and the tidy comforts of clean sheets and fresh flowers, of hands and smiles and voices . . . None of this is earthshaking, or vital, or lifesaving, none of it. But I am so aware of the deep pleasure of loving and of being loved. I suppose one could call it gratitude: more, it feels like Pay attention, pay attention. 

Yesterday was quieter than the day before: no ridiculous rainstorm or tree emergency, just laundry drying sweetly on the line and a bowlful of blueberries from my own bush. I caught up on editing and housework, had long phone conversations with both of my sons, and discovered that I've lost enough weight to fit into a shirt I really like. Hurray for the exercise regimen! Now that I'm dependent on myself instead of a teacher, I've more or less turned my sessions into a morning dance party, which has increased the fun quotient considerably. It's still hard and sweaty, but at least it's got punk and disco and soul.

Today should be fairly low-key. I've got a lot of desk work to do, but no tight deadline looming, no meetings planned, and I'm going out to the salon to write tonight, which means I get a day off from making dinner. I do love to cook, as you know, but a break is nice. Yet I've had a good run of meal inventions lately, my favorite being bluefish chowder, made with leftover steamed fillets, onion, bacon, potatoes, cream, and lots of parsley. A classic, with a bluefish twist. Nontraditional fish can be exciting in a chowder; there's a world of flavor out there.

But last night was simpler: just sausage, peppers, and onions on farro; a big green salad; blueberry-lemon scones. All desserts are blueberry these days. I listened to some baseball. T and I enjoyed an old Star Trek episode. And then a cool breezy open-window night for sleeping.

I feel the end of summer tightening around me. Since July my work schedule has been erratic, but that's about to change. I'll be on the road to Monson, filling weekends with teaching sessions, traveling to New York. So these late days of August have a kind of liquid slowness. I sit on the front stoop, mid-morning. I feel the air moving around me, listen to the gulls cry. The street is empty; only I am idling . . . not thinking of the future, only thinking of now.

Buckets of rain yesterday, and I drove in downpour, taught my class, and drove home in downpour . . . highway speeds reduced to 45, visibility nil, roads awash. The class site was only 25 minutes from my house but felt like 6 lightyears away.

And then, when I pulled into the driveway, I saw the tree. Remember the tree I mentioned a few days ago--the one in my backyard neighbor's yard? Remember I'd noticed it was starting to crack at the fork, and I'd alerted the various people whose property would be damaged? Well, my Cassandra-ing hadn't done much; the tenants and property owner didn't seem too concerned, although my next-door neighbors were correctly panicked about their cars and their garage.

But when I pulled into the driveway yesterday and saw the tree, I knew we'd reached crisis mode. In the four hours I'd been away from home, the tree had developed a split reaching almost to its roots. I don't know why it was still standing. So I started in again on my emergency alerts, and this time the tenants recognized the dire nature of the situation. It was hard to miss. So landlord was alerted, landlord called tree guy, tree guy showed up at 4 p.m. and said "Tree must come down immediately," and cranes and bucket trucks and chippers and a thousand workers appeared in my next-door neighbor's driveway--not the tree owner's, but this driveway was the only angle that allowed the tree guys to access the tree, which was jammed in tightly among four different houses (ah, city life). And then there was a scene: roaring engines, massive tree limbs and trunks dangling over roofs, brushing chimneys. It was terrifying and awe-inspiring, and strangely efficient, and by 8:30 the tree was gone, detritus cleared, and street quiet.

And now we have a hole in our landscape, where once lived a tree. You could say this was all my fault.

Rain and wind all night, and maybe that's why I slept so fitfully. This morning the storm continues, but I must gird on my sword and scabbard and quest out to Ocean Park, where I'll be teaching a storytelling-in-poetry class. My plan had been teach in the morning, go to the beach for lunch. But part 2 will not be happening. Clearly it is not a beach day.

There's a maple in a neighbor's yard that's splitting down the middle. When it falls--and it will fall soon--it won't hit our property, but others are in danger. Though I've been Cassandra-ing about it, the tenants and the property owner don't seem at all concerned. Maybe that's what kept me awake: imaging that massive tree coming down. Or maybe I was anxious about teaching. Or maybe it was that stupid cat, who kept biting my feet. Who knows.

Anyway, it's morning and I have to drive in the rain just like a regular commuter. Wish me luck.

Today Vox Populi is featuring my poem "Play Clothes," which I'm pretty sure I mentioned to you earlier this summer. It one of the many poems that have arisen over the past couple of years from prompts at my Thursday-night writers' salon. The salon has revolutionized my thinking about writing, my thinking about revision, my thinking about teaching, not to mention my thinking about community. I have changed from an isolate to a socializer, and yet my poems are still an essence of my private self. Many of the poems that began at the salon, including this one, appear in the new manuscript. And I think they are strong. Even if no one takes this ms, I'm convinced they are strong.

It's interesting to exist at a moment of self-confidence. Of course I could be a better poet, and I'm always striving. But I know I'm a pretty good poet. Family history presses me to hide my light under a barrel. To be dour. To be suspicious and disappointed. In the process I may also kick over the lantern and ignite the barrel and burn to death. But today, on this Monday in mid-August, I do not want to be dour, suspicious, or disappointed. I do not want to crouch in a smoldering barrel. I like this poem I shared with you. I'm proud I wrote the first draft, proud that I revised it to what you see. I plan to write many, many more poems that I am proud of.

At the end of the street, a train rumbles past, wheels squealing. Then silence for a moment, until the gulls start up. Their squeals are not so different from the train's, and now the squawking jays are rusty gates opening, and the sparrows beep their brassy chip chip chip. So much bird metal.

Sunday morning. Sunshine, and a clothesline sagging with sodden clothes caught in yesterday's not-forecast thunderstorm. But the rain was not a bad event for the garden. I tore out a patch of old lettuce, thinned baby chard and kale, cut kohlrabi, pulled carrots, then filled the newly empty spaces with spinach, cilantro, and lettuce seeds. So the rain was help, and now the sun will be a help. And the clothes will dry eventually, and the refrigerator is full of greens.

Today, I'll mow grass, do a bit more weeding, go for a mushroom walk, read more Donne, read more Roth.  Play darts with Tom. Work on a poem. Last night, for dinner, we had grilled lemon chicken, new potatoes with dill, a salad of cucumber, kohlrabi, carrot, and lettuce, cantaloupe balls with mint and vinegar, and the last of the blueberry pie. Tonight, bluefish en papillote with couscous and peppers, wilted baby greens with garlic, a tomato and feta salad, and who knows what for dessert but likely it will have blueberries in it. This time of year, every meal is a feast. I do so love to cook from a kitchen garden.

The poem I'm working on is set on a mountainside. I'm not sure it's a mountain I've ever been to. The setting is evening. The season is summer. The sky and land "are gods / vast and impatient." I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else but this poem.

We had a nice little rainstorm last night, setting up a perfect Saturday morning for transplanting kale and chard and sowing seeds for other fall crops: spinach, arugula, cilantro. And the rain made for a cozy evening in the house too. In the dim and breezy twilight I made kale soup, toasted leftover cheese biscuits, tossed a big salad of green beans and cucumbers, danced to Aretha's Gold . . . a cheerful evening: me alone downstairs, bouncing and warbling; T working upstairs; and then a reunion over the soup--which was outstanding. Listen, if you are a kale hater, think again. This is not one of those leathery stylish salads. This is an old-fashioned soup, with firm Iberian and Italian roots, and it is tender and delicate, with a sweet unaggressive flavor, very soothing on a cool summer night. It can be vegetarian or meat-based, and it is straight-up comfort food.

This weekend I'll need to carve out a few hours to read my Donne homework, and I'll need to prep a bit for Tuesday's workshop, but otherwise I'll be moseying around the garden, ready for distractions, should you feel like stopping by for a visit. I'm still reading that crazy Roth novel, Sabbath's Theater, which is like being immersed in a lighted firework. And I just heard from my son, back in civilization after a month on the river: a long text about Anna Karenina . . . he could not stop talking about it; he's completely absorbed in the characters and their situation. "It's a slog," he wrote, "but so worth it." Ah, I have done something right. I have raised a young person who thinks Tolstoy is "so worth it." I hope that makes up for all the dumb stuff I did.

A good writing and talking session last night, and this morning my notebook is thick with new blurts. Now, outside, rain is spitting, and a small wind twists and swirls in the maples. Inside, I am fighting a weather headache with coffee and Advil. A storm is coming in, and my head knows it.

Friday again. Trash day, exercise day, laundry day, editing day, housework day. But mid-morning I'll take a break and sit in on my friend Maudelle's sonnet presentation for the Frost Place Poetry Seminar. She's so smart about sonnets and I'm looking forward to learning. Last year I was the one zoom-teaching the Friday session at the seminar. It is restful to be the audience this year.

The wind still twists and swirls. My headache seems a little better, though. Tonight, for dinner, Portuguese kale soup, cucumber and green bean salad, blueberry pie . . . a garden meal.

Summer is elegy, even in its glory.

Another cool morning, with rain on the way tonight and tomorrow, which is fine, because we actually could use a little rain . . . not something I thought I'd be saying a few weeks ago.

I spent much of yesterday working on my new editing project, but I did take a break in the afternoon to make a blueberry pie--from my own front-yard, city-grown blueberries--which pleased me greatly. So, for dinner, we ate bowls of red beans and quinoa, big fresh salads, and slabs of warm pie.

Today will be much the same, work-wise, though I'm hoping to get out to write tonight. I'd like to take a walk or go for a bike ride; I'd like to fidget over some poem revisions. I need to pick blueberries, and probably I ought to go grocery shopping.

I've been sending my new poetry collection out to bigger presses. This is not a task I enjoy at all, but I'm trying to persevere. It feels hopeless but I suppose something could happen. Anyway, I'll do it for a little while, until I suddenly can't bear it anymore. I reread the collection over the weekend, and I still think it's a reasonable approach to ordering poems. Which is to say, I like my own work, and that, at least, is something. If I don't care about my book, who will?

Fifty-two degrees this morning! The breath of autumn sighs through the open windows, and my bare ankles are cold. I sit here in my couch corner, reading about the Asshole's current indictments, and think, "How nice it is not to have to spend the rest of my life in court." The Asshole may deride such as me, but I  am blissfully free of lawyers and felony counts. I think that makes up for not having a gold-plated toilet.

The new editing project has arrived, so today I'll go back to work in earnest. Meanwhile, autumn looms: Teaching schedule is filling. Car is, according to the nice garage guys, "all ready for big trips." Firewood delivery is arranged. Now I need to get the sweaters hand-washed and the coats dry-cleaned. August is a season of to-do lists.

Yesterday I picked the first two cherry tomatoes. Beans are coming in steadily, cucumbers are in full flower, and I've got enough blueberries to make a pie. I've started rereading Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater. Black walnuts are falling chunk clonk onto the roof of the neighbors' abandoned SUV.

I feel brisk and ambitious on a cool morning . . . ready to endure my exercise regimen, ready to dive into the murky editorial soup, ready to stack firewood and puzzle over Donne. Good thing I don't have to spend this beautiful day screaming at my Three Stooges lawyers and blanketing the internet with misspelled lying all-caps screeds. That stuff is such a chore.

If you're at all interested in taking part in my September class, "Rilke and Imagination," you should probably sign up soon because it's filling rapidly--only three spaces left as of 5 a.m. I'm not sure why people are jumping at it, but I'm very glad they are. I find Rilke thrilling, and I'm excited to center a writing weekend around his work.

Of course this means I need to restart my engines, teaching-wise. Since the Frost Place conference ended, I've taken a hiatus from classwork. Next Tuesday I'll be leading a short in-person workshop on storytelling in poetry, but it will be the first I've led since June. I need to scour off the summer rust.

Today I'll start another small editing project. I've got a morning phone meeting and my constant round of housework and gardening chores, and I'd like to take a bike ride in this cool air. I'm chipping away at revisions on two poem drafts, reading my friend Gretchen's poetry collection, picking blueberries, taking the car the garage to be inspected . . . Meanwhile, days shorten, and the cicadas hiss. August, welcome to the world.