It's Saturday, and I'm awake too early after a spate of ominous house-repair dreams, but oh well. The coffee is hot and fresh and we were planning an early outing anyway--a diner breakfast in Biddeford and then a walk among the salt marshes to check out the spring bird migration.

Even in near dark, the neighborhood tumbles with bird song: cardinals shrilling in the maples, a white-throated sparrow sam-peabodying, robins chortling on the ragged lawns, and somewhere a small woodpecker drilling out his breakfast.

Yesterday, as I paused between fights with my garden hose, I looked up into the trees and thought, Were those buds open five minutes ago? Spring is unfolding so quickly. The cherry blossoms tremble in a sandpaper breeze, and my heart cracks open at the sight of such pure beauty. 

I cleaned the house yesterday, even polished some furniture, opened a window, argued with some weeds. I hung out sheets and towels, and all day long they shimmied in the windy sunshine. I mixed up bread dough for pizza, I read about Patrick Bronte's peculiar rise from Irish farm boy to Cambridge-educated evangelical, I thought about poems, I received an email with a blurb for my new book that made me cry, "gorgeous echoes of Plath and Celan," it said, and I cried, and I wrote nothing, I ambled among the neighborhood streets, spotting the first spikes of lily-of-the-valley in other people's gardens, I found a milk-white narcissus in my own backyard, I sat on my ugly front stoop with my handsome cat and listened to the empty street, everyone else somewhere else, at work, at school, as I idled with the cat and my hiccupy sentimental tears, because someone had read my book and called it "stupendous," because my mind was a run-on sentence, because this is the springtime of my sixtieth year and, gosh, I've been around for a while, haven't I, so how is it that the world can still feel brand new?

This has been a week of endings: editing project finished, teaching year done, contest judging finalized. I feel as if I'm unpeeling. Today I have nothing--nothing!--written on my calendar. Of course, that doesn't mean I have nothing to do. There's always plenty of housework, yard work, desk work. But I don't have to fit anything around anyone. The day is an open field.

Friday is sheets-and-towels day, so hanging laundry outside is one thing I'll be doing. I'd like to take a look at the new book I've acquired: Juliet Barker's fat biography of the Brontes, which my friend Jeannie is also beginning to read. I've started Margaret Drabble's novel The Sea Lady, and I might start catching up on my George Herbert homework. I could transcribe blurts out of my notebook and see if any of them might be poems. There's much weeding and mowing to be done in the backyard. I might set bread to rise. I might spring-clean a room.

The key word is might. It feels good to shrug; to say, "Maybe. Or maybe not."

Always, my creative life spins up from this swirl of spaciousness and busyness. Even if I don't work on poems today, I'll be working on poems today . . . Household matters are a pedestrian muse, and yet there they are: lifting me into poetry, as they always have.

It's cold this morning--28 degrees--and everything damp from yesterday's rain-spatters has frozen up tight. I was glad to have a wood fire last night, and a warm bed. But today the sun will come out, the frost will melt, and brisk spring will return. I hope to take a long a walk. I hope to hang clothes on the line. I doubt I'll have time to scratch around in the garden, as I've got zoom meetings and housework to juggle, but one never knows.

I went up to Maine Med yesterday morning to visit my friend Jay, who was recovering from open-heart surgery. He looked better than I've seen him in a long time--bright-eyed, good color--and we sat in his room and we walked the halls and we drank the coffee I'd brought and he talked about poems and baseball and cardiologists and the Torah, only two of which I know much about. But I left feeling light-hearted, which is not a usual response to a hospital visit. Jay was so full of gratitude, so full of second-chance glow. And it rubbed off on me. I felt full of second-chance glow as I mulled the offerings of the grocery store, as I fell suddenly in love with two giant purple-and-green artichokes, each as big as a baby's head. Ah, I said to myself, and tucked them into my basket.

As sustenance, they were nonsensical. Tom and I needed 45 extra minutes at the table to finish them, but we did it, dipping each leathery leaf into yogurt sauce as the Red Sox managed to win a game in the background, as the fire ticked in the stove. Eventually we worked our way into the center, scraping out the prickly innards to reveal the massive heart beneath. All of this sounds like a metaphor, but sometimes metaphors are just what happens. I went to visit a friend with a mended heart, and then I fell in love with an artichoke and I ate it.

Well, I've closed (almost) one chapter of this year's schoolwork. Next Friday I'll go up to Monson for the kids' show opening, but I'm done with schoolteaching for the nonce. It was a good year. After what were essentially two pilot seasons (thanks to Covid), I feel as if I finally was able to construct a full, useful, year-long plan that, with tweaks, I'll be able to keep leaning on in the future. And my students were stellar, the Monson Arts administration was hugely supportive, and I managed to figure out some personal solutions to managing my perpetual road trips.

The kids were full of emotion about their last day. There were tears. A year spent with poetry does that people. I, too, felt sad all the way home--the good sort of sad; a welling up of pride in what the students had accomplished; worry, also, about their future struggles. And I was tired. It has been a long, focused year of work--not merely the act of teaching but also the massive project of curriculum creation. Future years will be easier in that regard because I now have a template. But creating the template was an undertaking.

Today will be a this-and-that day. I may do no desk work at all. There's nothing crucial to accomplish, schedule-wise. I finished an editing project on Monday, so I'm on hiatus till the next project shows up. I do have a friend's poetry manuscript to read, and teaching-conference prep to continue, and Poetry Kitchen arrangements to make, and of course my own poems to work on. But I might give myself a day off from thinking. I'll go to the grocery store. I'll visit a friend in the hospital. I'll fidget in the garden, if it doesn't rain. If it does rain, I'll fidget with housework. I'll take a walk.

It's April in Maine, and the tulips are budding, and the radishes and arugula have sprouted, and a rough breeze rides in from the sea. I want to be in this story.

It's my last morning in Monson for a while. The sun is shining, the sky is clear blue, the air is chilly with the promise of modest warmth. On my walk to the store for coffee I passed the big mail delivery truck, backing into the post office hatch. I passed a man motor-sweeping winter grit in a parking lot. I passed pickup trucks heading north and south toward their labors. Red-winged blackbirds trilled and swooped. The lake water, ice-free now, rippled like a flawed mirror, and a faraway speck that was a loon curved, dove, and disappeared.

Last night I ate dinner with a new batch of travel-weary artists who'd just arrived from far-flung homes around the country, slightly bewildered but game to spend four weeks in Monson trying to make art. Last night, when she saw me, the chef cried, "Dawn! When are you giving me a book of your poems?" And then, this morning, I walked into the store for coffee and was greeted by name. I am a regular up here now. That's one thing I lost when I left Harmony: the feeling of being a regular. Of course it's not 100 percent comfortable to be a regular. It's also a good chance to feel embarrassed and sheepish, to be forced to take sides, to know for sure that people are talking about you behind your back. Still, it's something to not be a stranger.

Every class morning I write a little remark on the whiteboard, to greet the kids as they come in off the bus. Today I'll be writing this:

Time’s up. You’re in the house. I’m through the door. 

It's the last line of a poem by Kim Addonizio; and in this out-of-context setting, I thought it encapsulated some of what it feels like to be a teacher on the last day of school. So many times I've directly said in class settings, "My task here is to teach myself out of a job." That's true whether I'm working with poets, with teachers, with young people, with my own kids. "My job," I say, "is to help you not need me."

It may be a righteous mission, but it's always a poignant one too. What is more sorrowful, more wondrous, than watching a bright-eyed searcher light out for the territories? 

I got so much work done outside yesterday . . . all of the front-yard and some of the side-yard beds cleaned out and weeded, grass mowed and edged, compost bought and spread. I sowed escarole, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. I planted six pots of pansies. I harvested ramps and chives and kale and sage. The backyard still needs attention, but this was a huge bite out of my chore list.

Today I'm back in the saddle--heading north to Monson for my final high school session of the year. I'll see the kids next week too, when I go up for their gallery opening, but tomorrow is the last class. I've got a big collaborative, multi-genre, performance project planned out--a whole day of play. And then it will be over, and the kids will disappear into their own lives. It's always bittersweet, the last day of school.

Well, we're ready. We're all ready. It's been a long school year, and for me it's not over yet; I've got classes scheduled into July. But I'll be glad to take a hiatus from at least one batch of curriculum planning, to pause my constant travels north.

In two weeks I'll be curled up on a seat on a train, heading midwest into the setting sun. I hope to have the yard and garden in good springtime shape before I leave. I hope my editing pile will be thin. I hope to be ready to write. 

Yesterday afternoon's reading turned out to be such fun: a car ride spent getting to know my fellow reader, and then a small but but very engaged audience who asked lots of questions and also bought books. It was very uplifting, really.

This was my only as-advertised National Poetry Month activity. I don't know if less fuss is being made about National Poetry Month than there used to be. Or maybe I'm just doing more poetry-related jobs year round so I no longer notice the dividing line. Certainly I'm busy, and my work balance between freelance editing and poetry-related gigs has shifted. I still need the editing jobs, but I earn more these days from poetry than I ever have before. You couldn't call it a living wage, but it is a palpable contribution to the coffers.

For me, my biggest changes in fortune were (1) the invitation, in 2019, to design a high school writing program at Monson Arts and (2), during the pandemic, the rise of zoom as an independent teaching platform . . . though of course both of these opportunities were direct consequences of my first big gift: the chance to direct the teaching conference at the Frost Place. It's interesting, in retrospect, to track the slow shifts. Because I don't have either an MFA or a teaching certificate, I could not make my way into classrooms via the usual routes. I was not hireable. The side path was slow and it was stony. And yet here I am, dusty and still trudging. My first Poetry Kitchen offerings are completely full. I'm finishing my third year with the high school program and feel as if I've found my groove there. In June I'll be team-teaching two teacher-training sessions for the arts education organization SidexSide. In July I'll be leading the inaugural Conference on Poetry and Learning in Monson. In August I hope I'll be doing nothing but my own work, though that is likely a pipe dream. And then, in September, back to a new batch of high schoolers. It's almost what you could call a career.

***

Yesterday evening, when I got back from my reading, T announced, "I made dinner reservations!" So arm in arm we walked around the corner to our local, Woodford's Food and Beverage, and we ate mussels and drank cold white wine, and then we strolled home and watched an old Peter Gunn episode, leaning into one another on the couch. Every day I miss living in the woods, but I am ready to admit that the delights of the city are intoxicating too. How pleasant it is to walk out to dinner, to sit idly in a restaurant and watch night roll in, to watch the car headlights assume a noir-movie glitter, to listen to voices, to the clatter of plates and clink of glasses, to smile at my dear one across a starched tablecloth.

. . . and, today, to have the good fortune to be home together. I'm going to work in the garden, maybe go out to buy soil and pansies, maybe hang clothes on the line, maybe listen to afternoon baseball, maybe fall asleep on the couch, maybe read a novel, maybe go for a walk . . . 

Concord Street Hymn

 

Dawn Potter

 

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

Woke up to a mild rain, just what the newly planted seeds are longing for. And now I am sitting here quietly, enjoying my first weekend morning at home for a while. Midday I will need to head out for a reading, but for the moment I am unhurried and unperturbed.

Yesterday afternoon Delle, Teresa, Jeannie, and I ended up in a two-hour zoom confab that mostly centered around Anne Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay," which we'd all read beforehand and, unbeknownst to one another, all deeply disliked. So that was interesting: discovering, unexpectedly, that the four of us had meshed over a poem that is generally treated as exemplary. To me, it felt imaginatively untrustworthy, among other things. But of course I was worried about saying so, assuming that others had read it "better" than I had. It was surprisingly cathartic to discover that my admired friends also mistrusted the poem.

Otherwise, I had a plain day. I walked. I edited. I did laundry and mopped floors. I made chicken stock and then chicken and rice soup. I played cribbage and lit a fire and drank a beer and listened to a peppy baseball game. I read a history of the Comanches and I read a novel about the Maine coast. I felt sad about my neighbor, who died in his house two days ago so can no longer love the daffodils that bob brightly in his front-yard grass.

This afternoon I'll be reading at the Gibbs Memorial Library in Washington, Maine, at 3 p.m., alongside the poet and archivist Jefferson Navicky. He and I will also be carpooling together, and I'm looking forward to some conversation with him beforehand. The venue is a small library in a small town, and the reading will undoubtedly have a small audience, but what's new. Small is the story of poetry. 

I went out to write last night, for the first time in two weeks, and I guess it was the right thing to do because all three drafts poured out of me, a rush of words, a swirl of geography, bits and pieces of my reading, of my days, floating like jetsam in the torrent of lines.

It's possible that next week I might have a chance to work on some of the material in my notebook. There's a lot to comb through: I haven't had revision space for weeks, and I won't have it today. I need to finish the editing project; I need to prep for tomorrow's reading; I need to meet with my Poetry Lab compadres; I need to clean the downstairs rooms and wash sheets and towels; I need to make chicken stock and weed the gardens. There's not enough time in the day, some days, most days . . . especially in spring.

But there's happiness: the alarm didn't go off at 4:30 this morning, and I slept hard all night long. I've drunk my one small cup of coffee, and a dark blue sky is unfolding behind the silhouetted maples. This morning, before breakfast, I'll take a long walk; I'll amble toward my slate of obligations and keep watch for hawks and mockingbirds and woodpeckers and bobbing daffodils.

What a fancy world I live in, gilded with poems and clothespins and packets of seeds. 

Alarm went off at 4:30 this morning as we have to bring T's truck out of town to get a brake-line job, and then he has to bring me home and then borrow my car to go to work, and all of this driving around cuts into his get-ready-for-work time, so voila. 4:30. Blah.

At least I got the coffee made. And I have a couple of seconds to sit here on the couch with it, before I have to clump up the stairs to get dressed.

Yesterday I wrote up some class plans and did some editing. I went for a walk with my neighbor, and I worked outside, cleaning up the stick pile, weeding the vegetable-garden beds. And then I noticed that, two houses up, there were police cars parked outside, a crime-scene van, a firetruck. Something was going on at Ray's house. Turns out he was dead.

So that was an unsettling end to the day. Apparently he'd died in the house, and not very recently. He lived alone, and I saw him often, tinkering with his cars. But I didn't see him every day, certainly not since we'd been on vacation. He could have been in there a while.

Sign of spring on the Alcott House homestead: the lenten roses in full glory. I love these flowers (also known as hellebore). The buds begin to show in March and open alongside the crocuses, but they often last into the heat of the summer--sturdy and elegant and unperturbed.

You may or may not remember that, during the pandemic, my son gave names to all of the micro-sections of our micro-property. This is what he calls the Hill Country, the slope between our driveway and our neighbors', and right now it is a sea of sky-blue scylla. Note the new arch that I've just installed, to replace the one that blew over in a storm. Soon it will be covered with roses and clematis.

 And no photo gallery is complete without a portrait of Ruckus sleeping in a fire pit.

***

Yesterday afternoon's yard work was prosaic: breaking up sticks for kindling; retrieving the hose from the basement and setting it up outside. Today I hope to do some weeding and cultivating. Our plot is little, but there's still much to be done, and I only have an hour or so in the afternoons to devote to it. But gradually I'm making progress.

This morning I need to work on class planning; I need to put in some editing time; I need to deal with emails and hang laundry and do my exercises. I don't know when I'm going to find time to revise poems, or even to go back and look at the notes I made during the eclipse. And the spring air is glorious. It's hard to stay inside. 

I did get outside yesterday afternoon, and I did get many things planted: peas, potatoes, onions, arugula, radishes. It felt so good to be scratching around in the dirt and then afterward, from the house windows, to glimpse the black earth rows, fluffy and soft from the cultivator, so tidy and full of promise.

Today, in and among my desk and grocery responsibilities, I'll get outside again. I want to do some weeding; I want to bag up sticks. I want to hang clothes on the line. The cat, who is loath to let me out of his sight, will be delighted. There's nothing he likes better than hanging around in his own yard with his own people.

I've been reading a history of the Comanches, S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon. I've been working with student poems, getting them ready for display. I've been making risotto with the last of my foraged maitake mushrooms. I've been editing a book about mothering during the pandemic. I've been discovering a leaky pipe in the basement.

Other stuff: On Saturday I've got a reading at the Gibbs Library in Washington, Maine. And DeLuge Journal has just published an issue featuring the members of my Thursday night writing group, the May Street Writers. All of our poems in the issue are responses to the same prompt, so reading them will give you an idea of how rich and varied this process can be.

Greetings from the old familiar couch corner. Greetings from little Alcott House on its little blooming plot. Greetings from the little neighborhood, quieted by school-vacation week but still rife with singing cardinals. Greetings from the cat, who is so, so happy we're home; who follows us up and down the stairs and in and out through the doors like a devoted little terrier.

We arrived home in the early afternoon, which gave me time to hang clean clothes on the outdoor lines, to open the windows, to pick up sticks from the most recent storms, to set up the new rose arch and the pea trellis, to fill a dishpan with baby kale. Last year's wintered-over crop has recovered spectacularly. It's a treat to have such bountiful early greens, enough to harvest in quantity for salad and for roasting.

The weather this week will be glorious--highs in the sixties and no significant rain in the forecast. I'm longing to rush out into the garden today, but I know I have to work: editing mostly, and I need to get my high schoolers' final pieces ready for the printer. I also need to return to some sense of routine: exercise, food, walking, etc. But probably I'll find a way to snag an hour this afternoon to plant my peas, and maybe sow some lettuce and radishes too, maybe even dig in potatoes and onion sets. I am so eager to get my hands into the dirt. 

And today we will wander back to Portland.

It's been a good week--the eclipse, the rain and wind, the peepers, the meals and wine and conversation, and yesterday, finally, the hike up Flying Mountain, picking our way up a stony trail that was, in places a running stream, looking out over hazy Somes Sound, hearing the loons wail, feeling earth and water stretch beneath our shoes.

Back at the cottage I cleaned out flowerbeds while T cut down a tree that was threatening our friend's house, and then the three of us lugged logs to the woodpile, and meanwhile the crows screeched and daffodils winked in the weeds and spring is here; at long last spring has arrived.

This week my thoughts will turn toward planting peas in my own garden. This week I'll open my own windows and let the stale winter air dissipate in the breeze. This week I'll hang a first load of laundry on the lines.

In a few weeks, we'll be back on the island, briefly, for Curtis's memorial service. Sorrow and a big party and a bright wind off the sea. That feels about right.

Two days of wind and rain, and now, this morning, a limpid cloudy blue, pale as an old shirt, stains sea and sky. Last night, even as the storm tore at the cottage, I could tell that the weather was spring-softening, gusts spinning from nor'easter to westerly, and the peepers and frogs knew it too.

Tom returned from his trip, brisk and cheerful. Our friend walked down from her house, and we ate macaroni and cheese and Brussels sprouts and talked about spy novels and car-chase movies.

I did manage to finish large chunks of various jobs yesterday, and today I intend to do no desk work at all. Maybe we'll be able to hike, but I have my doubts. There are puddles and ponds and mud holes everywhere. The earth is a leaking sponge.

But the birds are singing after rain, and the sea ripples outside my window.

Tomorrow we go home.

The weather on Mount Desert Island has been lousy, at least for anyone who is desperate to climb a mountain. Yesterday, it rained all day--sometimes drizzle, sometimes downpour--and this morning I woke to wind whipping rain spatters against the window. Outside, fog lingers over the mudflats; sea and sky are milky pale, horizon line invisible.

I worked yesterday morning; then my friend and I went to Northeast Harbor to look at an art show in the library and eat lunch. She drove us along the edge of Somes Sound, the broad fjord that cuts into the center of the island. Under rain the ocean rocked choppily against its granite walls, back and forth, back and forth, like a massive cradle.

And then afterward, back at the cottage, I fell asleep, hard, till after 5. If I can't hike on this vacation, at least I can sleep. The shush of rain, the shush of tides, gulls crying, wind swirling in the spruce trees, tick of wood stove and gas heater . . . all of it conspires toward sleep, and I am capitulating.

Now, after waking late, I sit in the big shabby chair, drinking coffee from a cup named Ernie, watching the stove wood catch flame, listening to the endless rattle of wind. In a few minutes I'll take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, buckle down to work. T will be back from his journey later today. My friend and I will do something or other together after lunch. Meanwhile, there is sea and there is rain.

 By 4 a.m. T was up and gone--away on his photo journey--and I, who thought I would not fall asleep again, fell asleep into a complex dream about a bus journey, a town meeting, and interchanged identities, and I woke up late and groggy and dream-hungover. So here I sit, watching the fire catch in the stove, acquainting myself with the pallid light of morning.

The moon has coaxed away the sea, and the mudflats, specked with boulders, draped with kelp, stretch along the foot of the bluff. Color has been washed away. There is no brilliance. Two Canada geese fly west.

In a little while I'll get dressed and walk up to my friend's house, and we'll have coffee and probably do a zoom exercise class together and then I will feel like a normal awake person. But for now I am liminal, still barely myself, breathing slowly into slow fog. I ask myself, What does bleak mean? and I do not have an explanation. 

 

First light through a window screen. Low tide, tipped-over chairs, frost on grass. On the horizon a long low island.

In the cottage coffee burbles. The wood stove heats. On the kitchen table a spray of forsythia, buds still tightly closed, parts the air. The sky and the sea are streaked with pink. Somewhere outside, in the tangles of raspberry canes and old apple trees, a goldfinch is chattering.

The sweetness of this cottage, this quiet cove . . . last night, as T and I walked down the driveway from our friend's house to our own, the cries of peepers and bullfrogs pulsed under a sky packed with stars.

I took detailed field notes about the events of yesterday, and I hope to find space this week to sit down and begin to untangle my experiences. I can't do that for you this morning as I'm getting ready for work and also trying to recover from a couple of nights of poor sleep. But the entire day was intense--first as a massive human influx . . . rural roads jammed with cars, town streets overrun with excited people, the air filled with anticipation--and then the eclipse itself, which, as the moon advanced over the sun, began to alter the human tone into a strange and poignant lonesomeness . . . and then totality, which was such a massive physical shock, like coming face to face with the gods. Both Tom and I spoke afterward of our reactions-- for him uneasy, like he'd just had an upsetting confrontation; for me, like being drawn into some terrifying ceremony. The moment was beautiful, like nothing else I'd ever seen, but it was also deeply unsettling.

And then, as the moon shifted, that brocaded world returned to simple strangeness, and then, soon, to its everyday self.

As we ate dinner last night--a gorgeous prix fixe meal featuring lamb and scallops and a pineapple sorbet palate cleanser and delicate pea soup and an egg and strawberry salad and a coconut creme brulee I had to bring home to eat later--T and I began to bat around the idea of making a common project of our eclipse experience. I wrote all day, he photographed all day, and we were both wound up by the situation. We don't generally attempt artistic collaborations with one another; we're very different in our work. But here something drew us into a parallel stream. Time will tell if we make anything of it.

An intense orange sunrise spreads over the dismantled gas station. Welcome to eclipse day in the Path of Totality. Tom loves that phrase and keeps muttering it to himself as he takes photos of giant dirty snow piles and pink brooms sticking out of dumpsters. He is on the prowl, and I am amused to watch him at work.

So far, Monson is fairly quiet--just a couple of RVs parked behind the post office--but I expect the place will start hopping soon.

We got into town by late afternoon, hauled our pile of food into the house, then went for a walk up to the quarry. Patty melts, caramelized onions, roasted potatoes, and a tomato salad for dinner, to the tune of Beyonce's first solo album. As we cooked, I read Wolf Hall, and Tom took photos of the gas pumps. Occasionally we interrupted each other to discuss Jay-Z or decide whether or not an item could go in the dishwasher. (Note: We have decided that in a vacation house all items can go in the dishwasher. We hope that Jay-Z and Beyonce's relationship is nothing like Ike and Tina Turner's.)

This morning we are going to drive to a yard sale we saw advertised on a poster stapled to a telephone pole. It is our only plan, beyond drinking coffee and eavesdropping among the eclipse crowd. The yard sale sign advertised many esoteric items, including what I read as "badger" and what Tom read as "badges." I hope I am right but I think I am not. In any case, our car is very full. We don't have room for a badger, unless we strap it to the roof.

I think I will plan to carry a Path of Totality notebook with me all day.  T will be too busy with his camera to enjoy my bons mots. We can share our notes while we are Fine Dining this evening.

First light spreads its grey cloak behind the etched trees. Everything is sodden with snowmelt, but already soil and grass are visible again, and the mud smells of rivers.

Today we embark, but not too early. There's no rush. Our plan is to stop in Waterville to see the Louise Nevelson show at the Colby College Museum before going on to Monson. We're hoping that the crazy traffic forecasts won't come true. But if they do, we'll finagle our way north via the backroad route.

This morning I'll wash a last load of laundry. I'll pack food into coolers and bags. I'll apologize to the already-suspicious cat. I'll go for a walk. I'll make a final decision on how many books to bring . . . undoubtedly too many, but winnowing them down is a struggle.

These transitions between home and away are always poignant. I feel a little sad to be leaving my garden on what will be the first warmish week of the season. But in truth the soil is far too wet to plant or even to prep. It is a fine week not to be gardening. And T is so glad to be heading into a week of photographing and free space.

I spent yesterday afternoon baking brownies and a orange-flavored loaf cake (advertised in the cookbook as "excellent for traveling"), simmering a béchamel sauce to be used in a spectacular macaroni-and-cheese later this week, mixing up gorp, packing my bags for work, packing dry goods into a picnic basket--potatoes, rice, onions, garlic, tea and coffee--packing olive oil and balsamic vinegar and wine and an apron. And already we have embarked on our Beyonce project: starting with a Destiny's Child album last night so we can follow her crossover to solo.

But now the sky has brightened . . . a sudden azure: glory. 

 Today is "figure out what the hell we're packing" day. We will be cooking for ourselves and/or our friend all week, except for one dinner out on Monday night, so we have to menu-plan and then fill coolers, bags, and baskets . . . and this includes bringing our own good knife and olive oil, etc., because we do not travel light when it comes to vacation meals. Nor do we travel light when it comes to books and cameras. I've got a laptop, a notebook, and a stack of volumes for teaching and class planning and reading. Tom's bringing five different cameras, including his giant view camera, which lives in a case the size of a small trunk. Let me not forget the rest: assorted tripods, suitcases, backpacks, snow boots, hiking boots, water bottles, speaker for listening to music and baseball, cribbage board, wine, possibly snowshoes, garden gloves, maybe some tools, and undoubtedly something else I've forgotten. All of this will be crammed, somehow, into my tiny Subaru hatchback. Wish us luck.

But we are in high spirits. Last night, as I was making dinner, I decided to play Beyonce's new album, Cowboy Carter (which is pretty good, by the way). Tom idled into the kitchen to find out what I was listening to, and before long he'd proposed a vacation project: should we listen to all of Beyonce's catalog in order? "Oh, yes!" I said, because this sort of thing is exactly what entertains us: a little invented undertaking, with sociable commentary.

So, a week with Beyonce, in the snowy north, along the muddy coast. A week with this guy I really like. A week of cooking good food in awkward kitchens, and teaching kids and editing books, and tramping around in the mud, and not waking up to an alarm, and reading and reading, and scribbling in my notebook, and wandering up to my friend's house, and trying to identify strange-looking seabirds, and stoking a big wood stove, and gathering with townspeople to see an eclipse, and forgetting to pack something important, like toothpaste. Our typical messy sort of holiday. Apron strings flying, laughing at each other, making a soundtrack, missing the cat.

It was an ugly storm--snow and rain and wind for more than 24 hours straight. The gale kept whipping clots of snow into the house--bam, bam. Tom said the noise was like hippos on the roof, and I said it was like hippos playing basketball on the roof. As you've gathered, T did not end up driving to work yesterday, and a good thing too, as there were trees in the roads and cars overturning on the highway and anyway no power at his worksite. So we stayed home together and listened to the hippos. I edited for most of the day, and he mucked around with his own desk stuff, and the power flickered but did not fizzle, and the wind howled in the chimney, and we were snug.

This morning the neighborhood is smeared in slush, though  I expect it will melt rapidly. People living just a little further inland got much higher snow totals, but ours was half rain. As far as I can tell, there's not significant local tree damage, just six inches of slithery muck. I've seen worse spring storms . . . or at least more depressing aftermaths. This one will be history soon.

Today, after I figure out how to drag the recycling bin through the slush, I'll be back at my desk, trying to finish at least one editing project before we embark on our holiday. I've got my plans set for the high schoolers, and now I need to pull together my various vacation obligations: reading through outlines for the teaching conference sessions, working on a new editing project, copyediting the Monson kids' finished pieces . . . What is the definition of vacation anyway? Maybe just "sleeping in a different bed and not waking up to an alarm."

Well, we will have fun. Our trips to the cottage are always sociable--sharing dinners every night with our friend, plenty of ocean air, bird watching and cloud watching and drinking slightly too much red wine. The eclipse scene in Monson will be entertaining, and we've got dinner reservations at the Quarry for afterward--our first time eating Lulu's food in its James Beard Award-winning glory. All of the hiking trails will be snow and slush and mud, but maybe the sun will shine, maybe the loons will wail. Something will beg for our attention.

I woke at 3 to hear the thump of snow clots on the roof, scrape of branches, clack of sleet. It was unsettling; it was hard to get back to sleep, and maybe I did or maybe I didn't. When alarm rang at 5, I got up and stood at the bedroom window. The air was filled with whipping snow; the windows were running with water. No plows have cut open our little street yet, and why should they? Why should anyone be going anywhere?

Tom is supposed to drive to work today, and already I am urging him to stay home. The weather is abysmal, and it's supposed to go on like this all day. I do not want to imagine him fishtailing down unplowed city hills or slithering into the winds that tear across the Casco Bay Bridge. And now our power is flickering . . . 

Well, at least I've already made coffee. For the moment the furnace is rumbling, and the refrigerator is growling. We've got plenty of firewood; and as far as I can tell, no big branches have fallen in the yard . . . yet.

But I'm tired of being so tense about the weather. I'm tired of these terrifying gales, one after another, all winter long.

***

Last night, before the storm kicked in, T and I went out to a showing of Hitchcock's Suspicion--the tale of an untrustworthy husband, or is he? The ending of the film is sort of happy and sort of gaslighty and mostly creepy and unnerving, and I am relieved to not be living that life. Better to have a tree fall on the house in an ugly spring storm. At least I share troubles with someone I trust.

***

Today, if the power stays on, I'll be editing, finishing class plans, cleaning the upstairs rooms, arguing with the cat, who is already blaming me for the weather. Usually I'd be planning to go out to write tonight, but I expect the gathering will be canceled.

If the power doesn't stay on, I'll be sitting by the fire reading and figuring out how to cook on a stove not designed for it.

Wherever you are, I hope you are warm and dry.

 A robin is singing and singing in the darkness.

There's no snow yet; no rain, no wind yet. But the storm is coming. Yesterday afternoon I cut a couple of wood hyacinths and a daffodil so I'd have a bit of spring to remember during the gale, and now the kitchen is filled with fragrance.

It's Wednesday, another day at my desk, another day of pinning up laundry and carrying firewood, another day of cooking dinner. Yesterday I made a batch of pita and we had Greek-style sandwiches: tzatziki, fresh tomato and lettuce, and leftover Easter lamb. Tonight will be baked haddock and a roasted vegetable salad. Every night is a new canvas. Cooking dinner is a life's work.

But so is everything else, I guess, and I am the queen of chores.

I've just finished reading John Le Carre's The Night Manager, and now I am back to Hilary Mantel: just starting to reread Bring Up the Bodies. This afternoon Teresa and I will have a phone confab about the poems of George Herbert, and I've been wandering through Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the poems of Julia de Burgos. I need to work out a plan for next week's Monson class, and I need to edit two fat academic manuscripts, and I need to sort through faculty outlines for the teaching conference, and I need to write some poems myself.

It's odd getting ready to go away for a week, with the knowledge that I won't actually be on vacation. I suppose I need to think of it as a work retreat, with fun around the edges. But at least Tom will be on vacation, and I'll have the pleasure of watching him muck around with his little projects and distractions. And we will have the ocean and the mountains and a dear friend at our doorstep. And the cottage is a shabby fairytale house.

A Maine spring is alluring and unsettling, and sometimes barely spring at all.

Yesterday afternoon I walked with poets through the neighborhood streets and the woods and the cemetery. A chickadee sang, and I half-unzipped my winter coat in the modest sunshine, and crocuses and scylla and hyacinths trembled brightly under the breeze. I imagined planting, but it was only imagination, for even in these daylit evenings I light a fire in the wood stove; I push back against the chill that creeps under the door. I wait for snow, and the first honeybees shake the strong little blossoms, and how can this be the same story, but in Maine it is.

This morning I'll go out to walk again. I'll work at my desk again, and in the afternoon I'll run errands again, and then I'll make dinner again and fall asleep again. The waning moon will be a thumbprint blur under the gathering clouds.

Somewhere, in the darkness of now, a robin carols . . . a long liquid song, repeating, repeating. I wish I had time today to write poems.

Today, tomorrow, and on and on . . . the guests arrive, the snowflakes and the mockingbirds, the sharp red spears of the peonies and cold rain etching trails along the windowpanes. All of them long to be here. All of them fight to stay.

***

On another note: I've got two spaces left in my upcoming zoom class, "From Draft to Dream." In this one-day session, you'll carry one of your previously existing poems through a series of revisions so that, by the end of the day, you'll have a set of unexpected versions to ponder. The class will take place on June 2, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. ET, which I've found to be a good window for drawing people from multiple time zones. And it's cheap--only $75. If you've been thinking about trying out one of my classes, this would be a great place to start. You can be working at any level, in any style, with any amount of experience. Everyone is welcome.

Happy April! . . . and here we are again, waiting for another snowstorm to arrive. Maine weather is so obstinate. It's not clear how much accumulation we'll get in Portland--I've seen claims of six inches; I've seen claims of a foot. Whatever happens will be midweek and sloppy; and, in the meantime, the crocuses will pretend they know nothing about it.

I'll be swamped with editing this week. Though I have hopes of getting one of those manuscript projects off my desk before we depart on our travels, I may end up lugging it along with me. Ah, well: I already knew this wouldn't be a vacation, merely work in a different setting. That's how my trip to Chicago will be in May too; I'll have to zoom-teach one afternoon from my kid's apartment, and I'll probably be working on the train as well. Such is the romantic life of the freelancer, dragging her snail-shell behind her.

In addition to all of the editing, I've got lots of teaching prep to juggle: for the high schoolers, for an upcoming zoom class, for the teaching conference. Sometimes I wonder how I keep anything straight in my head. It's like an ant nest in there.

But we had a calm weekend . . . a special meal, with lamb from our friend's Vermont farm and some remarkable lemon custards: very simple--just cream delicately thickened with lemon juice, topped with fresh raspberry sauce; in the morning, a brisk and muddy walk around Mackworth Island; in the afternoon, the springtime music of baseball on the radio.

So I will gird myself for my exercise regimen, my laundry pile, my stacks of computer files, my litany of poems and prompts. It's Monday, and it's April Fool's Day, and my Chicago kid will probably send me a joke, and the cat will claw at the furniture, and crows will quarrel in the maples, and a breeze will kick up road grit and the scent of sea salt, and here I am alive, and I'd better make the most of it.

It is a dim and blue Easter morning in the little northern city by the sea.

I am not a churchgoer, so during the hoohah of Holy Week I am always on the outside looking in. When we were younger, Easter was a child-centered holiday--colored eggs and baskets and meals. But without the boys at home, it feels a bit accidental . . . a religious holiday that I recognize intellectually but that has no personal resonance beyond nostalgia and the pagan riots of spring.

This year, for some reason, I have even been feeling a little resentful about the Christian overtones of Easter: a little twitchy about tales of prayer and ritual; a little impatient with people's needs to publicly exhort and expiate. I do get weary of the emotional trappings. I start to feel as if I'm fighting my way out of a bag of wool. This is unkind and unreasonable of me, a teenage-style grumpiness; and to those of you who are believers, I apologize for my cranky agnosticism. I am happy for you. But, for whatever reason, I cannot endure organized religion, neither its comforts nor its cruelties.

Still, I love many of the things that Christianity has nurtured: Bach and the mystery plays and the scent of Easter lilies in a cold room. And T and I are together, and it is spring, and that is a good-enough reason for a holiday. This morning I'll marinate a leg of lamb in yogurt, oregano, and cardamom. I'll make lemon custards and a raspberry coulis. This afternoon I'll listen to my first Red Sox game of the new season. In between, I'll sit in my study and read the poems of George Herbert, the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poems of Richard Wright. In between, T and I will walk out into the brisk spring day--a day of wind and crocuses, a day of whitecaps and gulls.

Finally, after days of rain and snow and ice and rain, we've got a sunny day in the forecast. I expect the ground will be too saturated for actual gardening, but at least I can get outside to pick up sticks and branches from the ice storm and soak in some spring air.

I'm behind on housework and groceries because I had to spend yesterday in the basement ballroom of the Holiday Inn hawking the wares of Monson Arts to members of the Maine Council on English Language Arts. But it turned out to be a pretty useful day: not just spreading the word about the conference among teachers but also confabulating with various teaching poets and writing organizations about how we can best work together with our resources to support literary education in the state. There's a notable lack of territorial defensiveness among the people doing this work. Partly that's because Maine is huge, so there's plenty of geographical need for all of us. Partly that's because our organizations have varied approaches to writing with young people, and that variety is useful and necessary. Probably next year I ought to do a presentation at this conference, not just sit behind a table. But that's a decision for another day.

I didn't expect to run into so many colleagues. I still tend to think of myself as a lone poet-wolf prowling around the edges of town. But that's not true. To be sure, Monson Arts isn't very well known among teachers around the state. This is the big reason we decided to set up a table at the conference: to promote ourselves as an educational resource. But all of the work I've done independently and through organizations such as the Telling Room, the Frost Place, and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance has accrued. Yesterday I kept surprising myself. Who knew that I would be the person who kept saying, "Hey, I'd like you to meet . . . "? Who knew that the state poet laureate would launch herself across the room to give me a hug and say, "Dawn, I need to talk to you about this idea I have for a teaching project. . . . "? I always think I hate these kinds of events. I always think I hate the word networking. But that, in fact, was what yesterday was about. And it was not only useful but joyful.

When you're committed to the moral righteousness of your mission, networking and marketing are a whole lot less terrible. This sounds like such a pompous thing to claim, but it's true. I believe wholeheartedly in the value of the work I do with young people and with teachers, so why not forthrightly say so? It's not like I'm a snake-oil salesman. Still, publicity is always a challenge for me. I constantly fight against my engrained instincts: "extinguish your light," "don't show off so much."

At the same time, our educational team at Monson Arts is in an enviable position. This winter we were awarded significant funding for our high school studio programming--enough to keep us going for up four more years, if we receive some matching grants. Not only can we maintain our current programs, but we will able to do outreach work in schools, hire guest artists to extend our network, bring in teams from other arts organizations . . . The possibilities are vast, and the question now is how do we make best use of these resources? how do we best serve students, teachers, schools, and teaching artists, in the short term and in the long run?

I've never had this luxury before. Even in organizations with established reputations, our big dreams constantly collided with no budget. Yet luxury is daunting in its own way. Monson Arts has resources. We have a mission. We are also faced with various coiling tangles: idealism about art versus local indifference to art; students who long for opportunities versus students who scoff at opportunities; teachers who value artists as partners versus teachers who are suspicious about our intentions; administrators who want to foster connections with our programs versus administrators who could care less about the arts. And then there's the giant geographical challenge.

Still, it's an enviable problem. And it's exciting to imagine the future. I'm almost sixty years old, and I have to be realistic about how long I'll be playing a part in this story. I hope, though, I can help figure out a few things for the next person who comes along.

 It's still pouring rain out there, and I'll be rushing out the door into the morning . . . first to haul the trash to the curb, then to drive across town to help staff the Monson Arts table at the Maine Council of English Language Arts convention. I used to staff book-fair tables for CavanKerry Press, so I know how this works, but I'm not naturally good at face-to-face sales chatter, and I fear the day will be long. However, I will grit my teeth and do my part for my program. At least I don't have to drive far.

Otherwise, what's new? Editing, housework, trying to get things arranged for our upcoming travels . . . cat sitting, eclipse glasses, meal plans. This will be a working trip for me--I'll be teaching in Monson and editing in West Tremont--but Tom will have a real week off and is arranging to spend some of it on a photo project, so he's figuring out his parallel itinerary.

Our twice-yearly travels to Mount Desert Island have been really good for Tom and me. We get to spend time with a dear friend and help her out with things in the house and garden. We get to live in a little cottage we love, beside a little cove we love. We don't have to spend money we don't have. But also, because everything is familiar and regular, our daily lives can slip into this world comfortably. I find it easy to work in the cottage: I don't feel the pressure to be on vacation, to manufacture fun. And yet my sleeping and waking schedules relax, even as I putter through my obligations. And when I can step away from that work, Acadia is waiting.

The snow was waist-high in Monson, but by the time I got home yesterday, the accumulation in Portland had mostly vanished--just plow leftovers and shady corners--and the crocuses were blooming brightly. Now we've got two days of rain ahead of us, and the grass will keep greening and the buds will keep swelling, and by Saturday the city will have returned to spring.

My high school season is nearly over: just two more classes in April, then students' gallery opening in May, and we'll be done till September. It's been a very good year. I've learned a lot about organizing a progression of writing experiences, and I feel as if if the kids have stepped confidently into their final projects. They've put so much work into their writing, but I also don't feel any panic from them, and that's a good thing.

Today I'll be back at my desk, back at my housework. Probably I'll go out to write tonight. Probably I'll go for a walk in the rain. My sprained ankle is still bothering me a little, but at this point walking actually seems to help it. I hope I can get it back into shape before we go to Acadia in two weeks. Otherwise, my hiking hopes will be shot.

***

Fledgling

Dawn Potter

 

Once I was a child

ashamed of my small delights,

picking my nose secretly under the rhododendrons

 

as the scent of spring earth and old cement

spread like the chill breath of the underworld.

Ghosts shimmered on the broken doorstep,

 

rising through dust to become my own new skin.

I did not imagine a world without ghosts—

nor the end of wonder, dust swept away.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Spent last night dreaming about teaching, and now I have woken up to a day of teaching, and it's annoying to have already done such a bad job of it in my sleep. My dream brain would like you to know that I am a terrible classroom manager, can't stay on topic, forget the names of my students, have no useful goals, and am constantly overwrought. Hire me, please. I guarantee uproar.

I'm staying in lodgings I've never stayed in before. This time, for some reason, the management gave me an entire house to myself, and I feel like a pea rattling around in a barrel. Outside, the passing cars hiss over the wet road. The drive north was sloppy and nerve-racking--drizzle, with temperatures hovering around freezing for two-thirds of the route. But I arrived without incident, into this land of three-foot snow drifts, and now I am staring across the street into the construction site where the gas station stood two weeks ago, wondering why it has vanished. Ah, the mysteries of life.

Today my class will be whittling away at their final projects, messing around with stanza breaks and line breaks, paragraph breaks and sentence lengths. Meanwhile, snowmelt will dribble from the eaves, and grumpy robins will peck in the plowed driveways.

Lots of people are still without power today. Schools have stayed closed, traffic lights are dead at major intersections . . . We're so lucky that our own outage was relatively brief, but the ice storm did a number on the city and its surrounds.

Today I'll leave the icy metropolis and head north into snow country. Monson got roughly two feet from the last pair of blizzards, a classic turn of events in a central Maine spring. But the temperatures will warm quickly and the melt will commence. Already, my doughty tulips are peeking out from under the ice crust. They will not be quenched.

This week I'll be on the road for only one night; and only teaching my usual kids, not making any school visits--a much easier schedule than my last trip up north. My school-year travels are winding down: just a couple of classes left in April, then the kids' gallery opening, and I am done for the season. I do have a busy spring and summer ahead--a trip to the cottage on Mount Desert Island, weekend Zoom classes, a trip to Chicago, a trip to Vermont, co-teaching some teacher-training sessions, and then directing the big teaching conference in July--but my bi-weekly treks will be over until September.

Sometimes it amazes me, how much time I spend on the road these days. I am not the traveling sort; I struggle with transitions; I cling to habits. And yet here I am, heading toward the horizon once again.

What an ice storm! The city was a glittering ice rink, and every tree looked like a crystal chandelier. But there were power lines down all over the place, trees in the road, traffic lights out . . . a mess.

We're lucky to have our little wood stove. It doesn't heat the whole house, but it keeps the living room cozy. And yesterday I learned that, in a pinch, I could do some basic cooking on it: heat water, make frying-pan toast. The other thing I learned is that our freezer is very well insulated. Even after close to twelve hours without power, the sorbet held its texture perfectly, and the frozen meat stayed rock-hard.

Long power outages were a fact of life in Harmony, but this was our longest outage in Portland, and I had no idea how our infrastructure would hold up. In Harmony, we had no water but we had ample heat and a gas range we could light with a match. Here the water still runs when the power's out, but we have limited heat and no cookstove. Hurdles to clamber over, either way.

Fortunately, this time we didn't have to do too much clambering. Early in the morning, Tom managed to dig out his truck, and we skated across town to a diner for coffee and a hot breakfast. By the time we got home, our electricity was back on, and the house was back to normal. But lots of people in the city are still out.

***

This is an on-the-road week for me. Tomorrow I'll head north, to teach on Wednesday; and on Friday I'll need to help staff the Monson Arts table at the annual Maine English teachers' convention. (Fortunately for me it's in Portland.) In between I'll start a new big editing project and work on conference planning. I'm also hoping I can get back to my walking schedule. My injured ankle has been a drag; and though it's definitely mending, I'm not sure if it's ready for three-mile hike, especially given the ice. I hate not walking, though. Walks are such a good way to figure things out: to talk to myself, mull over poems or problems, but also to get outside of my own head into the world of birds and road grit and fire engines and dogs and middle schoolers loudly confabbing as they scuttle off to school.

Giant ice storm, no power since 9 last night, tons of branches down. This is just a drop-in post as I am hot-spotting off my phone. Talk to you tomorrow morning, I hope.

Spring snow. It's coming down hard for the moment but will eventually metamorphose into all sorts of mess. The coast is forecast to get sleet ice snow ice sleet rain rain rain rain sleet, plus heavy wind. So of course I lit a fire in the stove this morning. It's horrible-weather Saturday. I've got a recovering sprained ankle and no place to go. Why not spend the day on the couch watching the flames? Later I'll put a stew into the oven. I'll watch some college basketball and text about it with my kid. I'll read. The weather can do what it likes. I don't mind.

Yesterday I finished the second of my small editing jobs. I've caught up on my contest reading and prepped for Wednesday's class. I've answered emails and washed the floors and folded the sheets and stocked the pantry shelves with food. It is so pleasant to be sitting in my couch corner, on a dark and snowy morning, in front of this glowing wood fire, with my beloved upstairs asleep, with the cat curled up like a burger bun, with no anxious "I need to do . . . " doorbells ringing in my brain.

Last night, for dinner, I made a divine macaroni and cheese--a combination of gruyere, cheddar, and fontina in fresh bechamel sauce, with minced onion and lots of paprika. I'm still thinking about it this morning; it's funny how the memory of meals can stay so vivid. I often recall foods from the far past . . . my aunt's homemade ice cream, with fresh Jersey peaches pulled ripe from the tree; the plain but perfectly cooked green beans at the lonesome French restaurant on windswept Route One; the creamed spinach at the mobster steakhouse somewhere in Manhattan; the fried clams at a seaside shack that had five or ten sinks lined up around the edges of the dining room; a sun-warmed tomato eaten like an apple in my father's garden . . .

And now this coffee . . . black and bitter in its small white cup. I drink very little coffee these days. It messes with my sleep and my nerves. But I treasure my daily thimbleful . . . like my friend who smokes one cigarette a day, in the evening, outside on the porch. The ritual is all.

Somehow, I seem to have yanked something in my left ankle--a tendon, I guess. It was bothering me mildly all day yesterday, and this morning it is bothering me slightly less mildly, and I am annoyed. I do not like staying off my feet, and I doubt I will today. But maybe I'll at least try editing at my sit-down desk instead of my standing one.

Friday. Laundry, groceries, recycling, bottle returns. Cleaning the downstairs rooms. Editing an article and finishing a class plan. It's cold outside--23 degrees and windy: no working in the gardens. We've got another snowstorm on the way. I doubt the southern coast will see more than a couple of inches mixed with rain, but inland will get socked. If I were still living in Harmony, I would be blue. March is the cruelest month.

It was good to get out to write last night, to spend time with my poets. I don't think my drafts were worth much, but at least they exist. And I got a good haircut yesterday afternoon, quite short, so despite my wonky ankle I am feeling prettier than usual. It may be an illusion--at age 59 I should admit that it's certainly an illusion--but why not enjoy it anyway?

Friday. The end of a week at home, a week filled with busyness, stacks of desk work, house chores, my jaunt to Lewiston; poems everywhere, like dust motes or fleas. I'm rereading Wolf Hall, entranced again by Hilary Mantel's imaginative immersion into setting and voice. I'm washing dishes and pinning socks to the basement lines and folding towels and scrubbing out the shower and playing Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book" on repeat. Singing along. Thinking, How true it is.

Out a bit late at the movies last night, so into bed late, and now I am groggy and there is a lick of snow on the ground and the cat is horrified. "It is March," I tell the cat. "What else do you expect?" But he glowers and stomps up the stairs.

I finished one small editing project yesterday and started the other. I worked on marketing classes, and I corresponded with potential participants, and I emailed with my publisher about the production schedule for my next collection. He's aiming for early October, which will actually be a lovely time to bring out a book as I'll turn 60 on October 7. What better way to feel good about my age than to have a new book? Several people also reached out about scheduling readings, so that's good too. All in all it was a weirdly businesslike day, but I guess they have to happen once in a while.

Yesterday's primary editing project was a poetry collection. Today's is an academic article, so my brain will need to settle into new pathways. I also need to clean the upstairs rooms. I also need to prep for next week's Monson class. I also need to get a haircut. I'll probably go out to write tonight, which means I'll need to come up with a prompt and make something for our potluck--maybe Italian-style sweet and sour peppers. It will be a scatty sort of day.

I missed last week's writing session, for reasons of extreme tiredness. Still, despite the chore-like nature of my above description, I am looking forward to getting back into that routine. I haven't wrestled with a poem of my own for a couple of weeks, and that's a long gap for me. There's so much poetry in my work life these days . . . but my own poems wander in limbo.

***

Idyl

 

Dawn Potter

What we have is a leaky shower,

and Tom is lying in it, caulking the drain.

It takes guts to be handy—

guts, and a tolerance for misery.

 

Meanwhile, I sweep crumbs and boil spaghetti

and wash spinach and picture my high school

report card droning its dot-matrix platitude:

“ :: has :: flare :: for :: the :: subject :: ”

 

He does.

But if I had a bathtub instead of a leaky shower,

there’d be no need for flare. The wet book in my hands

would be Villette or maybe Faust,

 

and all of the water would go straight down the drain,

just like in the movies.

O, for a lightbulb, for hot and cold water and oil in the tank.

We live in a time of miracles,

 

when the food doesn’t rot, unless we ask it to.

Dear handyman, so carefully not letting the cat lick caulk,

I empty this sloshing pail in your honor.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

I had such a good day yesterday--first walking around Lewiston in a cold wind with my friend Dave, trudging along the river, gawking over the falls, winding through the square milltown streets, the sidewalks nearly empty, just an occasional man with dog, man on bench, man in doorway, but everywhere the cars driving away and away and away. And then we drove away ourselves, to the outskirts, where I read and chatted for an hour to residents at a retirement home. Maybe ten or twelve people showed up, more than I expected, really, and they listened and a few talked about their own memories, what it felt like to try to capture them, the longing to write something down, to make a mark. It was very moving, and I was glad to be there, glad to be talking to them, offering small suggestions or just listening as their own stories burst from them. The urge toward storytelling is so strong in our kind.

Today will be much quieter--back to my desk, to other people's manuscripts, to the murmur of my house, though tonight T and I will go out to a movie, an old Carol Reed flick whose title I can't remember. I haven't done much writing of my own lately, but I know it will come back to me . . . it always does. I never can quit this job: it demands my life.

Ways of being in the world: I've been thinking about that lately. How surprising it is to get old. How surprising it is to get a diagnosis. How surprising it is to suddenly glimpse oneself in the mirror of a watcher. The question: Is that what I've been the whole time? How terrible.

Or how funny. How brave. How curious. Our thousand thousand selves. Transparent and opaque. Invisible tap dancers in the upstairs apartment. Secret messages sent by imaginary carrier pigeons. Our own dear vulnerable skin.

 I woke up at 5:30 bewildered. No alarm, and somehow I'd managed to sleep straight through the night, which never happens, and I was dreaming I was changing a diaper, and I couldn't understand why Tom was up and getting dressed before me, which also never happens . . . the whole thing was a muddle, and I am still reeling from my long sleep, from my jolt awake, from the notable memory of that little warm baby in my arms, clean and sweet in his fresh pajamas.

Well, here I am, I guess. Awake and upright. Waiting (another strange thing) for Tom to bring me my coffee.

Now that I'm slightly less confused, I should focus on being pleased about this unusually solid sleep, but I am a little lonely for that dear vivid little baby, with his ginger crest and his goofball smile.

Ah well.

It's Tuesday, and I need to pull myself together before for my jaunt to Lewiston. I'm looking forward to the outing: a stroll around town with my friend Dave; then lunch and a reading. It will be a completely new sort of audience for me, and to prep I found myself pulling poems from each of my books--gleaning from the history of my own storytelling . . . an odd experience, but enjoyable.

Still, that little dream baby lingers. That dense heat of an infant tucked up against a shoulder. The wobble-neck; the newborn's ancient eyes, like a sea turtle's.

And here's my old nemesis Monday again.

But, to be fair, she arrives on the heels of a quiet weekend. Nor do I have to drive north to teach this week. So I don't really have any complaints about her, other than the 5 a.m. alarm.

Today I'll start working on the first of two small manuscript jobs: one's a poetry chapbook ms I'm advising on; the other's an academic article that needs copyediting. I have to prep for tomorrow's reading in Lewiston, I hope to do some work in the garden, and I want to mix up a batch of honey-vanilla frozen yogurt. I need to do laundry and endure my exercise regimen. I need to make Portuguese kale soup and an asparagus salad. I want to read some George Herbert poems and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay." I'm hoping to pick up my new glasses this week, hoping to get a haircut, hoping that the clothes I've ordered actually fit me. Within the past week my best pair of jeans self-destructed, the knees went out in my only decent pair of dress pants, and I had to order new hiking shoes to replace the boots I'd worn down to skeletons. I'm a tattery mess.

On the other hand, I'm alive and cheerful, and I wore out the boots because I went on so many long walks in them, and those dress pants were at least 10 years old and they still looked okay on me. That's a small miracle right there.

* * *

I want

 

to skip up the street to buy bread I want to skip down to the DMV to read the eyechart I want to be the weirdo who skips up behind you in line at the movies and pokes you in the back and says What a beautiful hat I want to kiss wildly in public places I want to embrace trees and no-parking signs I want to swim far out into a deep lake and wear red lipstick and stomp in the mud I want to be loud and dizzy that big clumsy happy woman at the party oblivious to herself smiling a little and humming dancing her pigeon-wing shuffle alone in the corner and I want you to be there and I want you to be glad I came

(from Calendar by Dawn Potter [Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming])

Yesterday was downright springlike--50 degrees, a warmish breeze--and I spent much of the morning raking garden beds, pruning stalks, tidying my new leaf-mulch pile, picking gravel out of soil, and suchlike early-spring tasks. I set up the little cafe table and chairs in the lane, and even sat there for 10 minutes, until idleness made me cold. And then later T and I went for a walk along the cove, and in the evening we drove into town for a good dinner out with our neighbor. It was altogether a brisk and desk-free day, a day for stretching out those gardening muscles in the backs of my legs, a day for dirty fingernails and muddy old sneakers.

The rain will be back today, but the temperature has stayed warmish, and the uncovered beds will drink in the the gift. Yellowy spikes will green, red spikes will unfold, buds will swell, wretched maple seedlings will erupt in the millions. I'm sure I'll be wandering around outside in my raincoat, drinking it all in.

Otherwise, the day will toddle on. I've got to deal with the grocery shopping I never managed to do on Friday. I've got contest reading to finish, and I need to tidy my study for the coming week--a couple of small manuscript jobs ahead, a reading on Tuesday to plan. T and I have been working out the details of our April getaway week--how to fit our biannual trip to the cottage on Mount Desert Island around my workday in Monson, which also just happens to bump up against eclipse day. The Monson folks have invited us both to spend an extra night up there so that we'll be in place for the event. Central and northern Maine are in a fever about being in the path of the eclipse, and there will be tons of hoohah. It will be fun to witness.

One thing I will not be doing today is paying attention to Saint Patrick's Day, which has always just seemed silly to me--an excuse for loud guys to get day-drunk, an excuse for cooks to boil foods that taste better when they're not boiled. Last year I was in Chicago on Saint Patrick's Day and got to witness the hideous tradition of dying the Chicago River green, which pretty much put the lid on the holiday for me. Blech. But if day-drinking, cabbage-boiling, and green rivers are your pleasures, I hope you have much fun today. 

Saturday morning. The hands on the clock hover just before 6 a.m., and the gray hour is thick with fog. Yesterday was slow rain, chill and damp, and the weekend will likely be more of the same--if not actual rain at every moment, its imminence. Gradually the soil loosens, mud clots my shoes, yellow spikes green and become tulip leaves, daffodil leaves. Buds swell in the hearts of the hyacinths. The stems of the lenten roses rise from their winter sleep. The twigs of the Japanese maple glow red with life. My tiny homestead yawns and open its eyes under the drizzle.

On the ides of March, I bent over in the rain and harvested my first spring greens for dinner: a handful of tender infant kale, newly sprouted from wintered-over stalks; a slim bouquet of chives and green-onion stalks. Now, this morning, when I open the door to let the cat in, I hear cardinal song spilling into the blurry darkness . . . the notes are tart and sudden, unmusical, urgent. Early spring is a cut lemon, brisk and sharp and sour.

Yesterday I had a late-day zoom visit with Teresa, Jeannie, and Maudelle, and we talked about Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights; Delle mentioned Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay"; Teresa shared pages from Alice Oswald's "Tithonus"; we wandered into speculations . . . about teaching, about sentences, about cities, about measurement, about time . . . It is lovely to meet with this cohort, to spend two hours or more just letting our four inquisitive minds bump up against one another. I had meant to go out to listen to music with another poet friend, and it would have been equally lovely; but another time, another time. I can't explain, after so many years of intellectual solitude, what it means to have these overlapping circles of creators suddenly become such an intense element of my days. And yet my friends from the north country: we drowned in motherhood together; we clung together in the harsh world of mud and water troubles and too much snow and sleepless babies and hormones and blackflies and scorn. No one will ever replace them in my heart. And yet my friends from college: we roiled in a fire of sex and unruly intelligence, and even today that fire smolders when we look into one another's eyes. And yet my sister: the one who was there from the start, hopping on one foot over the dew-wet stones.

I'm pleased to report that I have stepped back from the possibly-turning-into-a-zombie brink and am now just a regular woke-up-too-early human being. Thank goodness for yesterday, which gave me time to fall asleep on the couch at 9 a.m., subsequently take several more couch breaks, walk for a few slow miles, read and fold laundry and clean the upstairs rooms, play a couple of games with T, and make a slow satisfying evening meal.

I realized, as I was setting the table last night, that my cooking routine can be a big help in getting me back into a tolerable groove. I didn't make anything fancy last night--just black beans and rice, a beet salad with roasted pumpkin seeds, and a raspberry cobbler--but the process of putting each element together felt, for some reason, like a convalescence. I don't always have this reaction to making a meal; sometimes cooking is just a straight-up chore. But yesterday I needed it.

So here we are at Friday, a dark and rainy morning, the cat's 12th birthday, which he is celebrating by crunching up some chow in the dining room. The ides of March . . . "Et tu, Brute?" I coo at him, and he purrs, for backstabbing is his delight.

I spent all last night dreaming about teaching revision to kids, which shows you where my head has been these past few days. But the mundanity of today will blast that out of my skull. Today is recycling day, sheet-and-towel-washing day, downstairs-room-cleaning day. It's a day for grocery shopping and a zoom meeting and my exercise regimen. If the rain stops and the outdoors dries up a little, it will be a day for raking out another garden bed or two.

Yesterday I worked in the backyard beds and uncovered green everywhere . . . shoots, unfolding leaves, budding crocuses and scylla, nodding pale snowdrops. I'm not rushing; there's no hurry--a half-hour of raking, here and there; the slow revelations of thawing soil, and my body relearning its motions.

Waterloo

 

 

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most

intimate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Hölderlin” 

 

 

Dawn Potter

The lindens in the square tremble

in the wind like peasants kissing the feet

of Jesus. They lift their arms and wail,

and I have read of such kissing,

read of how bodies drown.

The sky grows. Agnès, who is busy and shy,

 

weeps to hear the peasants weeping,

weeps for the lindens buckling into the wind.

In the square, horses clatter and rear, their hooves

ring on the cobblestones. Drowning and wrath,

drowning and wrath, night and day, but Agnès

is kissing the wind, weeping,

 

as the lindens sway, as the lindens tremble.

I have read of such kissing. 

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]