It is Tom's idea that we should try to sell those discarded books piled in our dining room, though I am doubtful that this will come to anything and am all for just hauling them to the Goodwill, however I defer and T loads them into various crates and laundry baskets and we drive downtown to Yes Books, a dark narrow crowded shelves-are-going-to-tip-over-and-kill-you kind of delightful used bookstore, except that there is no parking anywhere close, so we have to hoick our heavy book baskets up a long hilly block from the car to the store, which is hard and tiring but I do it, thank you, exercise regimen, and when we get inside the book man begins sorting through our books and he has an unimpressed look on his face and I am resigned to hoicking them back downhill again and I am trying hard not to look at anything on the shelves in case I am tempted to buy it, and then suddenly the book man says I will pay you $140 for this stack, and I am shocked--Hey, we actually made money off books, I say later, though T says More like recouped a few losses, which okay he has a point, anyway back to the bookstore story, when the book man asks Who should I make the check out to? I say Dawn Potter, and he says Oh, you're Dawn Potter, I have seen your poems, they come through here sometimes, and I am flustered, and as we're walking back to the car with the rejects T says You got to be famous for 30 seconds

A cool and cloudy start to the day. From my seat in the couch corner I watch a breeze shiver through the fringes of the neighbor's black walnut tree; yet when I twist my head to look through the other window, I note that the ash tree remains perfectly still.

The mysteries of wind and leaf. After living for more than two decades in the forest, I find that even in the city I am always watching the trees. Our houses, our tiny boxes, are so vulnerable, tucked up beneath these fairy-tale giants. Every day I expect a door to creak open in a maple trunk, expect Rumpelstiltskin or a witch or a talking squirrel to step forth, demand three impossible tasks, then pull me inside, drag me down into the cavern of tree roots, down to a glass-walled chamber where a golden key glitters inside a vial of breath and sighs.

These are the sorts of trees that inhabit my back garden, so I need to keep an eye on their doings.

I don't have big plans for the weekend, other than figuring out how to get rid of the castoff books that are still lining our dining-room floor. Yesterday I coaxed myself into dealing with two jobs that I never feel like doing: vacuuming out my car so I can drive Teresa and her husband north next week without being embarrassed by the piles of garden soil in the trunk; and wrapping the blueberry bushes in bird netting, which is always a tangle and an aggravation. Otherwise, it was a typical Friday-housework day. I cleaned the downstairs rooms, hung out sheets and towels, mopped the floors, took out the trash. I harvested escarole and Thai basil and cilantro and red onion and stir-fried them with roasted tofu. I read Erdrich's short stories and went for a bike ride and listened to the Sox play a terrible baseball game and strenuously avoided the news.

Gradually I am gathering myself together for next week's odyssey. The space where we'll be working is comfortable and efficient, with clean modern bathrooms, a good kitchen, plenty of tables and open areas, comfortable chairs, screens against the insects, a lovely view of the lake. It is a sensible and utilitarian space, but it is not a bookish place, as the Frost Place barn was. So one of my goals is to give the room at least a temporary gloss--strew it with books and flowers, create a nest for our participants, invite in the poet-ghosts. 

I know I can't replicate the old shiver of Franconia, but Monson has its own shivers . . . Thoreau, for instance, who traveled through these hills on his way to Moosehead Lake.

As the conference approaches, I find my sense of elegy increases. It's not like this will be the first time I've ever been away from the Frost Place: we were on zoom for three years during the pandemic, so I know what it feels like to be separated from the landscape. But I haven't had to come to grips with the power of a different landscape . . . one that is very close to the landscape of my Harmony homeland, the place where I learned to be a poet, yet is also a place in which poetry is a stranger. The history of the Frost Place is steeped in mountain and poems. The history of Monson is steeped in river and forest and lake and slate quarries and paintings. Poetry is the newcomer who is stepping out of the stagecoach, stretching its cramped limbs, breathing in the lake wind, wondering what goes on in this place.

I woke to a crisp 58-degree breeze--a May-like chill, as if we've backslid from summer into spring. It's Friday: recycling day, sheets-and-towels day, grass-mowing day.

I've been busy. My study is stacked with the books and papers I'll need to haul up to Monson next week--my own books to sell, the books I'll be teaching and reading from. I've been emailing back and forth with my publisher to discuss cover samples for the next collection. I've been reading Erdrich's short stories, a new Tessa Hadley story in the New Yorker, thinking again about the vast influence that fiction has had on my writing and my worldview.

There are days, I know you know, when political anxiety makes me feel like a turtle pulling into my shell. I'm trying to define the parameters of my shell this morning.

Anyway: sunlight! I dreamed of crowded rooms, and now I am sitting in small spaciousness, alone and quiet under a ripple of wind. Things are looking up!

Lines written on the cusp of my 60th year: My older son is on the cusp of his 30th year. We talk about our cusps over the phone. And then we talk about cats and home repairs and what makes a happy household partnership and why are Indiana highways so boring.

The everyday things! The dear humans! Lines written on the cusp of fear: Do not look at my phone. Lift my face into the breeze. Do not be afraid of exclamation marks.

Yesterday was a long day. G picked me up at 6 a.m. dropped me off after 6 p.m. I had barely slept the night before, and when we weren't in the car, we were in class. Nonetheless, it was a good day. I love teaching with Gretchen; heck, I'd be happy not to teach at all and just be her student. She's so good at what she does. And it was exciting to create a class in which ideas about physical theater bumped up against ideas about form and structure in poems. The teachers who'd signed up for the class were eager and engaged, and I was excited about the possibility of a more expansive integration of our teaching styles and subject matter. Plus, just hanging out with G is very high on my list of fun things to do.

But, as I said, it was a long day. Rockland is two hours up the coast from Portland, I'd slept horribly the night before. By the time I walked through the kitchen door, I was dragging, and I hadn't even done the driving. But T had started dinner--sauteed mackerel, roasted potatoes, watermelon salad. He even washed the dishes afterward as I lolled on the couch. And I slept hard all night, which was a big relief.

We're forecast to get showers today, and already the air is dense with humidity. Now that the Rockland workshop is behind me, I can turn my entire teaching attention to the Monson conference. So today I'll go through my materials one more time, make sure I've got everything organized and printed out, make sure I've got all of my conversational cues more or less at the ready, check in with my faculty, check in with the Monson Arts staff, etc., etc. Directing a conference is a big job: one-third administration, two-thirds teaching, myriad unmathematical thirds listening, comforting, advising, performing, cheering on, improvising, and mopping up tears. I need all of my strength at the ready.

Now, outside the window, a cricket clicks among the draping lilies. The garden is beautiful . . . freshly weeded, well watered, lush with health. It doesn't need any work from me today. So I will wander through the rain. I will pick flowers and peas and hunt for mushrooms in the cemetery. I will put laundry into the dryer and I will clean the upstairs rooms. I will answer emails and read the stories of Louise Erdrich and make guacamole with cilantro and onion and hot peppers from the garden. I will listen to the gulls wail as they circle up from the cove. This is Maine, in the waning days of June, and the air is scented with salt and roses.

 On the road all day teaching . . . talk to you tomorrow.

I got a lot done outside yesterday--backyard mowing and trimming, and then a thorough weeding of all of the back garden beds; plus, I pruned and tied up tomatoes, pruned the privet looming over the sidewalk, transplanted sedum into a few bare spots in the back . . . probably I did other things too that I'm not remembering. And then dinner was risotto with wild mushrooms, escarole, garlic scapes, baby red onion, and basil; a big salad; and lemon custard and strawberries for dessert.

Today, some class prep; a trip to the fish market; maybe editing, if an author gets her manuscript back to me. I need to pick peas. I'd like to work on poems. I should weed the vegetable garden and stake some collapsing flowers. I finished the Oates novel and now I've started a collection of Louise Erdrich's short stories. I want to walk up to the library and pick up the book on hold for me: Percival Everett's James.

After days of rain, summer will flame up again today, and the gardens are lush with life, everything on the edge of wild--swelling, splayed, collapsing, overflowing. And yet it's not even July yet.

All evening the northern New England weather service was sparking with tornado watches, tornado warnings, thunderstorm watches, thunderstorm warnings, but the sky stayed quiet in Portland, though the foggy air was as thick as marmalade.

I'd spent the afternoon winnowing, cleaning, and reorganizing the dining-room bookshelves (fiction, memoir, essays, biography), a massive undertaking made easier by afternoon baseball on the radio and by frequent confabulations with T, who joined in to deal with the art book/natural history/science collections. Every book came off the shelves, every one was weighed on the keep-don't keep scale; then all of the keepers were vacuumed, all of the shelves and the walls behind them were vacuumed, and everything was reshelved according to a new and more sensible plan. (In his Covid whirlwind, my son had insisted on separating fiction and literary nonfiction, which meant, say, that half of Joan Didion was on one side of the room, half on the other--an irritating decision that I rectified. He'd also organized biographies by author instead of subject, an equally annoying approach. I love him but he is a bad librarian.) It was dusty and sweaty work, and it took hours to finish, but we are feeling much happier now . . . except for the giant giveaway pile that is our next annoying project.

The puzzle, of course, is how did all of those books ever fit into that room? After stripping out hundreds, there's still not all that much extra space left on the shelves. I guess I'd really been cramming them in there.

Naturally, you must be wondering which author wins the prize for most number of volumes that Dawn owns. Though I have not actually counted each individual collection, I'm pretty sure that Iris Murdoch is the winner, with Anthony Trollope a close second. In the matched-sets division, prizes go to Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys: Dickens for sheer numbers, Pepys for elegance. Meanwhile, T invented a fine organizational strategy in which pseudo-science (phrenology, crop circles) slowly transitions into real science (physics, natural history).

But enough of books. Now the sun is just beginning to peep through the mist. It will be a treat to have sunshine, after four days of rain. Today I'll get laundry out onto the line and, once things dry off, try to catch up on outside tasks. I'm still waiting for bits and pieces of editing to come back from authors, and I've got some prep to do for Wednesday's big all-day road trip to Rockland, where I'll be team-teaching a theater and poetry class. Mostly, though, the gardens are calling and I am eager to answer them.

Yesterday was off and on rain, and today looks to be the same, though temperatures will be slightly warmer than Saturday's chill. Between showers I did manage to mow the front grass and do a bit of weeding and deadheading, and maybe this afternoon I'll have a brief chance to work outside again. Or maybe not. Clearly this will not be a weekend for getting big jobs accomplished but for puttering from one occupation to another as weather and whim allow.

So I'll keep working on poem drafts, keep reading the Oates novel, keep weeding out the bookshelves in the dining room. Before we moved to Portland I radically reduced my book collection. Then, during Covid, my bored son did another deep cut. But here I am again, with too many books for the shelves.

So I am trying, on this go-round, to be honest with myself. Dawn, I said, do you even like eighteenth-century novels? Well, no, I do not. Old poetry: yes, I wallow in that. Proto-novels, not so much. I do not want to reread The Mysteries of Udolpho or Clarissa or Joseph Andrews or Tristram Shandy. I am bored by their bagginess; they are not what I love about fiction. Yet decade after decade I've clung to those volumes, I suppose because of some residual English-major guilt. No more. Goodbye, Fanny Burney. I'm sorry, but I cannot read your book.

There's no doubt: I feel wicked, and also like a failure, when I admit my reading limitations. Also, I think I ought to want to treasure the early women writers. Somehow it was easier, on early go-rounds, to rip the Carlyle and Ruskin volumes off the shelf. Those high-toned Victorian guys: they had more than enough adulation in their lives; they can take a little flippancy after death. But I hate to disappoint the women.

Still, in this little house I don't have space for endless sentimental guilt. There's simply no room for more bookshelves. And so, with sorrow, adieu.

 

Yesterday I got a text from my neighbor inviting me to cut her roses, which were splaying over her front walkway and getting entirely out of hand. So now two pots on the mantle are filled with these old-fashioned cluster roses--nearly scentless but sturdy and gloriously prolific. It's a long-established bush, possibly planted when the house was built in the 1920s, and the roses have an antiquated quality, like the old-lady lipstick from my childhood. But they are beautiful also, and I feel rich in blossoms this morning, as the rattling rain blotches my weekend to-do list. I'd intended to mow grass this morning, to catch up on weeding, to rescue some of the plants that had been flattened by Thursday's thunderstorm. Instead, I am watching a steady downpour and readjusting my expectations.

Well, that's fine. Cool weather has returned to Maine, the weekend stretches before me . . . At some point, among the drops, I'll pick our first batch of peas. This is one good side-effect of moving the teaching conference into July: I won't miss the pea crop. Every year, for more than a decade, Tom would spend a week gorging on infant peas while I vicariously enjoyed them via midnight phone calls. (The exception was the Covid-era conferences, when I had to be on zoom all day and into the night while also picking and cooking peas. As a result, I barely remember what they tasted like. A travesty.)

When I was a kid, I hated peas passionately. Out at the western Pennsylvania farm my grandfather grew rows and rows of them, and my sister and I shelled bushels and bushels of them, and my mother canned quarts and quarts of them, and I despised them. The peas were always swollen and starchy--horrible fresh and worse canned--and I choked them down despairingly. Once I was finally in charge of my own meals, I avoided peas at all cost.

And then, in my 20s, I read M. F. K. Fisher's culinary writings as well as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, an eccentric and affectionate little treatise on what it was like to be Gertrude Stein's sidekick (written by Stein, which of course adds many layers of what?). The best parts of that book involve Alice's ramblings through kitchen gardens. For the first time I learned that gardens didn't have to be production machines. They could be late-afternoon saunters with a basket. What might we eat tonight? The cook affectionately caresses each pea pod, searching for the tiny swellings that promise the sweetest sugar. She finds a green onion, a bouquet of tender lettuce, a fistful of parsley. She sits on a shady chair under a spreading tree to shell the peas. In the kitchen she lays ribbons of lettuce in the bottom of a saucepan, then scissors in the green onion and the parsley. On top, she tips a mound of delicate peas--tiny, fragile, brilliantly green. A pat of butter, a splash of water, a pinch of coarse salt; then heat quickly to a simmer, just until the lettuce begins to wilt, and ladle onto plates. Petit pois à la française. The food of Eden. Impossible to replicate in a restaurant. Nearly impossible to replicate for more than four diners. It requires an afternoon stroll; it requires shelling the peas just before cooking so there is no opportunity for the starches to develop. Everything must fall into place: the saunter, the timing of the peas' ripening, a dining partner who shares the cook's pleasure in the simplicity of perfection.

These writers changed all of my ideas about kitchen gardening. They strolled among the vegetables like a lover, they prepared their meals like a lover, they presented them to their loves like a lover. That, I learned, is the garden I want to grow.

After a long day of 94-degree heat followed by torrential, garden-smashing thunderstorms, the temperature has "plummeted" to 71 degrees at daybreak. But I opened all of the windows anyway. Despite the deep humidity, it's not supposed to get out of the 70s today, and I am tired of artificial cold.

The thunderstorms were impressive--rivers of water roaring down our little street, branches crashing down onto our neighbors' jalopy (not a big deal since it's been parked in the same spot for seven years), my three-foot-tall potato plants crushed to the ground. Still, wet was a relief after two days of scorch.

And now a humid stillness fingers the window screens. A robin sings frantically in the maple grove. My susceptible hair is a pile of curls. Summer oozes from every atom.

Last night my writing group went out to listen to our friend Betsy read her poems in front of a jazz combo. This beatnik reverie had everything--a crabby interpretive dancer, a white-bearded old guy chanting "I read in front of an Iggy Stooge crowd in Detroit in 1967 and they hated me," a massive young guy in a remarkably too-tight t-shirt shouting "Rock the mic!" as he pranced, a Spanish tourist in a turtleneck and scarf (on a 90-degree night) translating his poem into English on the fly, and a few of my poet pals reading beautiful, surprising work. The scene was touching and ridiculous and moving, which I guess is what makes an evening a success.

And now here I am, back in my quiet. Maybe I'll finish up some editing today, if an author gets back to me with a few missing details. I'll clean the downstairs rooms. I'll wash sheets and towels, though there isn't much likelihood of outdoor drying today and I expect everything will have to go into the dryer. I'll work on poem revisions and read a book I don't like all that much but haven't convinced myself to ditch. I'll inspect storm damage in the yard and go for a walk, and maybe I'll mix up pizza dough for dinner.

The world is wet and sticky and dim. The sodden trees bow low. The wild lethargy of midsummer pulses up from the soil.

Temperatures reached a high of 92 yesterday in the little northern city by the sea, and today is supposed to be worse. Early mornings are the only easy time to be outside, so that's when I've been taking my walks. And on yesterday's I found a scavenger's treasure on the curb: a heavy concrete birdbath with the patina of old sculpture . . . something that would cost a couple of hundred dollars new and be far less charmingly lichened. Obviously I could not carry the behemoth home without a car, so I hurried to my house and then hurried back in the Subaru, and was lucky enough to get there before the next person saw it. So now this lovely old monument rests in my torrid back garden.

I'll take another early walk this morning, though I don't expect the scavenging to be so good. Then, after hanging laundry and watering the potted plants, I'll hole up for the day. There's plenty of housework to do, and there are plenty of poems to work on. Yesterday I did final tweaks on a long one, then transcribed and revised two notebook drafts. Occasionally I'd step outside and amble through the hot shade, admire the slow drip of the birdbath, laugh at the cat splayed inside out under a bush. Then I'd return to the cave, to the words running wild amid the whir of the fans.

Thanks for the kind comments you left yesterday about the new poem. It was of course not an easy one to make . . . or, more exactly, it became itself despite the despair of making it.

Yesterday was a summer day--hot but still pleasant in the shade and in the house, a bit stuffy for sleeping but nothing a fan couldn't handle. Shortly the wretchedness is supposed to kick in--temperatures in the 90s today and tomorrow--yet for the moment the air through the open windows is cool on my bare shoulders, and a warm coffee cup is comforting in my hands.

Yesterday I took a long walk, without ankle consequences, and I hope to do that again today, before the heat invades. Mid-morning the arborist stopped by and had unexpectedly good things to say about our maple situation, which raised my spirits considerably. She admired their strong crowns, their position as a grove, their interwoven root systems, all of which gives them strength in storms. She showed me that the hole in a trunk was slowly healing itself, and she had a non-brutal solution to saving a potentially weakened fork. She admired my healthy ash tree, and I felt happy to be talking to such a calm and affectionate tree person.

Otherwise, it was a quiet day. I worked on a poem revision, and I worked on a friend's poetry manuscript, and I hand-washed a batch of hats and scarves and gloves, and I went to the grocery store, and I finished the Capote novel, and I started a Joyce Carol Oates novel that I don't much like so far, and I made chicken salad and summer rolls, and then T and I ate dinner outside in the gloaming, under our beautiful massive trees.

This morning I woke to find that I've got a poem out in Vox Populi . . . another in a series that borrows titles from famous works of literature and then uses them entirely differently. This one, "The Way We Live Now," is from a Trollope novel.

***

And godspeed, Willie Mays.

This morning I'm wrapped in my fleece bathrobe. All of the downstairs windows are still closed, and the air outside is chilly. This has been typical of the coastal Maine summer so far--warmish days, cool nights. But supposedly a heat wave is looming, and today will be the day of the big weather change. It's hard to imagine, but then temperature changes are always hard to imagine. Bodies are so present tense.

Well, I'm ready. The garden is watered. The air conditioner is in. The ice tea is made. The cold dinner is planned--chicken salad, summer rolls, homemade ice cream.

This morning an arborist is stopping by to consult about our tree situation, and then I'll have the day to myself. I'll work on my friend's collection, and I'll work on my own poems, and I'll do a bit more spring cleaning in the kitchen . . . such a slow boring job as I have to wash and wipe down every dish and box and bottle--the curse of living with open shelves. I hope to go for a walk this morning, before the heat kicks in and if my ankle agrees. I'll finish the Capote novel and I'll read about Queen Victoria's early life. Late in the day I'll water the garden again.

Such a pokey life I've been leading lately, such a change from the bustle of the school year. Next week the teaching hubbub will start again, but this temporary slowdown has been a refreshment. I haven't gotten a ton done on my own writing, but I have accomplished a few things. Mostly I've been reacquainting myself  with the boundaries of my territory. Marking fence lines. Traveling the space inside.

The mailboat travels among the islands several times a day, and last night we opted for the sunset run, which leaves Portland at  6 p.m. and returns at about 8:30. We packed a picnic dinner and a couple of beers, and spent our evening on the water, watching young osprey in their nests and a floating parade of baby cormorants, catching sight of a moored lobster boat named Ulysses, as the sun slowly sank behind the mainland.

And now here we are at Monday again. T will spend his day creating window trim for a mansion; I'll be dealing with editing cleanup and a friend's manuscript. And we're preparing for the onslaught of heat . . . 90 degrees along the coast by Wednesday.  The garden will be shocked.

Today will be a quiet workday, most likely spent entirely by myself. I've started reading Truman Capote's early novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. I've been fidgeting with a poem draft. June is flickering past. Red roses throb in the dusky morning light, and a tuxedo cat stalks up the sidewalk. I am tired, like a person in love is tired. So much. Too much. Never enough.

Yesterday was perfect Maine summer . . . dry, warm, breezy, and bright, cooling into a sitting-around-the-campfire evening and deep open-window sleep. I spent the day puttering among small household tasks, and then we invited our neighbor over for wood-grilled flank steak, garlic bread, and a salad. This was our first time entertaining at our new outside table, and it was so fun to hang out in the yard as evening rolled in, moving between table and fire, sharing the desserts she'd brought from our neighborhood baker (who just won best pastry chef at the James Beard Awards. I tell you, the quality of the food in Maine is ridiculous; there are so many great chefs and bakers).

Today, after a few hours of pleasant dawdling at home, T and I are going to ride the mailboat out into Casco Bay. He has no interest in Father's Day, so we always ignore it. Our day will just be a day together . . . watching people and birds and sky and water, and hoping for porpoises.

On a walk the other day, a poet friend was telling me about a writer (if I remember correctly he was also a Jesuit priest) whom she’d met recently at a residency. Like her, he was working on a book, so they talked a lot. His focus was exploring the concept of living from a place of abundance versus living from a place of scarcity—not as regards money or possessions but as a worldview . . . whether we see life as an overflow, as a messy, conflicting stew of influences, puzzlements, curiosities, or as an ascetic narrowing, in which we shave away alternative visions.

I’ve pondered this idea often since our conversation. It’s an interesting metaphor for states of mind, at the very least. As my friend described it, the notion is also a way to consider why some people struggle to allow themselves to admit joy. In the words of another friend: there are the people who say, "What a beautiful day!" and there are those who say, "We'll pay for this nice weather." There are the people who cannot stop perseverating about the news. And there are the people who forget to look at the headlines.

Abundance, says my poet friend, is what she felt when she spread a hundred uncollected poems out in her writing studio and groaned, What a mess! And then suddenly was really happy.

All day the air hinted at thunderstorms--a humid breathlessness, sudden swirls of breeze. By evening the local TV station was rolling "nickel-sized hail" banners above the Celtics game, and I was undergoing we-live-under-monstrous-maple-trees dread. But the premonitions were wrong: instead of hail and damaging winds, what we got was a long night of warm slow rain. This morning, the yards and gardens are glowing with early summer magnificence. The tomato plants may have grown a foot overnight.

My ankle seems to be mending. This morning it feels a hundred times better than it did yesterday at this time, though it's still puffy and red. And despite my limp I had a good day. My publisher and I chose three photos as cover possibilities for the next collection. I had a long and lovely phone conversation with my oldest poet friend. Outside I refreshed all of the flowerpots, replacing the tired spring pansies with gazania seedlings I'd bought at the farmers' market--a new flower to me, but apparently a common and lovely sight in California. My neighbor offered me two big glazed pots that a tenant had left behind--pots that would have cost me a fair amount of money to buy--so I set them up in the backyard and filled them with free leftover flower seedlings from another friend. In the garden I planted a flat of Thai basil . . . such a gorgeous scent: irresistible.

And now the rain has washed everything down, and the new seedlings are stretching their leaves into the wet air and their roots into the wet soil.

And I am sitting in my couch corner, having slept in till 6, with nothing particular on the schedule for the weekend, except for my small home chores and whatever T and I suddenly decide to do together. We have discussed taking a ferry ride to Peaks Island, if my gimpy ankle is up to walking. Or maybe we'll just ride the mailboat, which makes a circuit of four or five bay islands, skirting open ocean but motoring far enough out to guarantee sea spray in our faces and a chance of porpoises.

Last night, despite the ominous forecast, we managed to eat dinner outside under the dangerous maples. I am so enjoying these al fresco evenings. We linger much longer at the table than we do when we're inside, though our little library-dining room is a pleasant-enough place. But outside . . . the green, the evening bird calls, the small neighborly sounds. The back yard, once a desert of dirt and dog droppings, has taken on a Secret Garden sweetness, with its fence of shrubs and blossoms. We sat at our round table beside the clotheslines and we ate chicken braised in coconut milk and spices, ate roasted potatoes and baby spinach, our bowls freshened with cilantro and Thai basil and lime. We poured cold tea from a frosted mason jar. We wondered where the cat was. [Answer: stuck in the neighbors' garage.] Sometimes I tremble at the present tense. The abundance. The brief Eden.

Ugh. I seem to have re-sprained the ankle I injured a couple of months . . . this time [drum roll], by walking across the living room. The first time I hurt it, I stood up after watching a movie. [I live a dangerous life.] That version took weeks to heal, and now here I am again, right back at the beginning. It's very annoying and also puzzling. What's the deal with this stupid ankle?

Well, okay, fine. I won't go for a long walk today. Have it your way, tendons. 

This morning I've got a phone meeting with a friend about her manuscript. Then my publisher is stopping by to look at cover-photo options. Afterward I'll clean the downstairs rooms, and I'll dig the fading pansies out of their plant pots and replace them with summer flowers, and let's hope the ankle decides to calm its ire and return to normal functioning.

Yesterday I began reading William Trevor's novel The Story of Lucy Gault, which features a broken ankle. Do you think books are starting to affect my life too much?

I managed to work productively on a couple of poems yesterday, which I did not expect, and which pleased me greatly, particularly because I'd been wrestling with one of them for quite a while without making much useful progress. But suddenly, around noon, I figured a couple of things out, and the poem, though not completely polished, has assumed its final form--always a good feeling when I have been arguing with structure so intensely.

It hasn't yet gotten very hot in the little northern city by the sea. May and thus far June have been delightfully moderate: some rain, some sun, and cool nights for sleeping. But starting today temperatures are supposed to begin creeping upward, and by next week we're forecast to hit 90 degrees. I'd had the fond delusion that we might not need to haul the air conditioner out of the basement this year, but no such luck. I guess that will be a chore for the weekend.

Otherwise, what's new? G and I hammered out our class plans yesterday morning; I mowed grass and harvested escarole; I read and wrote and folded laundry. Tonight I'll likely go out to write. I'm meeting a friend for an afternoon walk. I need to clean the upstairs rooms and answer emails and look at my poem draft again. The days are quiet.

Yesterday turned out to be an olio of picky little chores . . . two small editing obligations to sweep from my desk, then compiling and printing handouts and teaching materials for the Monson conference, emailing back and forth with poets to schedule meetings and conversations, tracking down an arborist to come look at our backyard trees; plus walking and weeding and laundry and making frozen yogurt and chasing a groundhog out of the yard.

This morning I'll be out and about early, walking over to G's house so that we can suss out the details of our team-teaching day in Rockland later this month: a mishmash of poetry and improv-theater experiences for teachers and teaching artists, which will be fun and no doubt messy, and a bunch of people have already signed up, so G and I have to get on the stick and figure out just what we want to do with them.

The whole week has been crammed with these sorts of "figure out stuff for the future" tasks. I need to order firewood for the fall; I need to talk to my publisher about cover photos; I need to settle summer travel plans with my sons . . . It's a week of faculty meetings and future-work scheduling and consulting with poets about their revision projects and not yet doing any of the woolen washing and not yet finishing the spring cleaning and and and . . .

Last night I made fancy macaroni and cheese for dinner (gruyere and fontina rather than cheddar; so sloppy and good). Tonight, soup with arborio rice and homemade broth and parmesan, featuring escarole and onions freshly harvested from the garden. The roses are coming into bloom--already a big white rugosa and a glorious fragrant yellow tea rose are open, with pink and crimson varieties along the archway budded up and ready to burst.

Everything demands my attention.

We're still a few weeks out from the teaching conference, but I think the faculty plans are pretty much ready. At yesterday's meeting we all felt good about our arrangements, both as individual entities and as intersecting conversations. We were excited but also relaxed . . . it's just so strange  and peaceful not to be fretting about things like lunch orders or whether or not the toilets are working. And yet last night I had sad dreams, as if I were mourning the loss of the conference. In real life I'm not at all mournful: registration has been strong, with lots of new-to-the-program participants, and I am so glad not to be responsible for housekeeping and physical-plant disasters. Still, after more than a decade in New Hampshire, I do feel a surge of melancholy.

But the sunshine will shake that out of my head. Today I'll ride my bike, get a tiny editing project off my desk, compile handouts for the conference, email various people about various things, do some weeding, maybe spring-clean another kitchen cupboard or hand-wash winter woolens.

My thoughts are tired. I don't want to be in charge of anyone's words.

A cool Monday morning after rain, but the sun is forecast to return and the week is supposed to be bright and warm. Already the garden is looking pleased with itself: the rain brought out the first pea blossoms, the beans and the cucumber are beginning to climb, the garlic scapes are curling, and the backyard is a haven of green.

The first editing responses are trickling back to me from authors, so that's what I'll be working on this morning, after I do my exercises. In the afternoon I've got a faculty meeting with my teaching conference staff, and then I'll step out into the garden and re-sow the dill that never germinated and do a bit of weeding in the flowerbeds. The whole week will be like this: a tap dance between editorial cleanup and planning for various classes, with house and garden chores along the edges.

But the weekend was a good buffer, and yesterday's rain gave me the chance to bake bread, which I haven't done for ages, and go to the movies, which I also haven't done lately. And the fish chowder I made for dinner was a summer rainy-day special--warm and comforting and loaded with fresh herbs. I love kitchen-garden cooking.

I'm very much enjoying Lahiri's novel The Namesake, which is set in a time and region (1970s, 80s, and 90s Boston-Rhode Island-New York) that I knew well and focuses on Indian-American families of the sort that I knew peripherally, mostly through youth orchestra and violin lessons. But I have got to do something about getting rid of books. There's no more room on the shelves. Maybe that will be a project for the next rainy day.

Well, anyway: Monday. The week will be busy but with pockets of space. I am recovering my equilibrium. I don't have to teach or travel anywhere until the end of the month. This week I will take walks and wear summer dresses. I will fill bowls with fresh lettuce and vases with peonies. I will eat lunch outside and read a novel under the maple tree. I will breathe in the scent of line-dried shirts. Perhaps poems will come back to me.

It's a dim morning: low-slung clouds, a small wind. Yesterday was spattered with sudden showers and bright sun, but today, I think, rain will settle in, so I should get outside and take those towels off the line while I still have time.

After gleaning a few books out of the pile at the Episcopal church's yard sale (Le Carre, Oates, Trevor, a bio of Millay), I settled into house and yard work and managed to get a fair amount done pretty quickly: floors and bathrooms cleaned and mopped, winter firewood equipment stowed in the basement for the season, towels and sheets changed and washed; and then mowing, trimming, flower deadheading, peony triage, and rescuing the carrot seedlings that some wretched squirrel had uprooted. Eventually I baked brownies, finished the Bronte biography (an accomplishment!), made asparagus salad and parmesan-breaded lamb chops, played cribbage, listened to the Red Sox lose big to the lowly White Sox (though, having recently been a temporary White Sox fan in Chicago, I admit to enjoying the buoyant delight of a crowd that had no expectation of victory).

I don't really have plans for today. I suppose I'll go grocery shopping, and I might transplant some nasturtium seedlings and do a little weeding, if the weather allows, but really anything could happen. It's a pleasant feeling to have the big weekly jobs behind me. I've started reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. The vases are filled with peonies. I'm imagining fish chowder and herb bread for dinner.

Mostly I'm attempting to find a portal back into my brisk, productive, thoughtful existence. I knew this week's travels would disrupt and disable, and I tried to build in a weekend-at-home as a buffer and a convalescence, and I was right to do so. Still, nothing is easy. 

It's island weather again. Thick fog drapes the little northern city by the sea; and beneath its blanket, robins shrill, a mockingbird unrolls its patter song. The days were hot in Vermont, but Portland has remained inside a bubble of sea-damp. Even at midday yesterday, as I drove up 295 toward home, white mist was enveloping the town. In this place, the ocean is king.

I got home early enough to wash a pile of laundry, and then T took us out to dinner in South Portland, where we sat in a busy bar beside the misty river and drank Guinness and ate pizza and my travel tension slowly leached away.

And now, after a night in my own bed, I am sitting in my couch corner contemplating a weekend of catch-up chores and comfortable fidgeting and going nowhere.

The garden is sodden, the peonies smashed by rain, but that is always their fate. It's too wet to do much of anything out there, which is fine: I've got plenty of house things to keep me occupied. Meanwhile, in The Brontes, Charlotte has just expired from the complications of pregnancy, after nine months of happy marriage. While watching Peter Gunn episodes last night, Tom and I invented a genre we call Dr. Seuss noir, with sentences such as "Ed is dead. 'Ed is dead in bed,' Fred said." Ruckus and his best friend Jack are currently yowling at each other across a wet street. I am planning to pour a second cup of coffee.

Slow times around here, I am pleased to report. But, still, the sad rolls in like the fog.

 Play Clothes

Dawn Potter 

The old days of the old clothes—those summers

when we grew out of pants before they wore out,

barely noticing what was draped over our bodies

until our mother realized that the tight shorts

had morphed into booty shorts and they vanished

from the drawer. How many summers

did that red and white sundress last?

It was my mother’s before it was mine,

sewed from a feedsack in 1945

and tough as pig iron. Slipped over

underpants and nothing else, on a sultry

morning in August, bare feet

in dew grass, sneaking Fanta at 8 a.m.

out of sight of the disapprovers, my sister

in cutoffs scratching a tunnel among rosebushes,

the two of us acting out cowboys on a rotting wagon,

founding a nation of hay bales. And still

my thoughts are streaked with grass stains

and mud puddles and the prickers of blackberries

and poison ivy, acres of it, and cow shit, and at night

the wistful scent of Lucky Strikes and Miller

High Life floats across the firefly hill, among

the murmured conversations of the uncles,

reek of old dog, porkchop grease wiped

on a cherry-stained shirt—the indifferent

beauty of dirt, everything worn out, almost gone: gone.

[forthcoming in Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

I'm at my sister's house; and to my surprise, I slept late this morning, a rare thing at the best of times, and always welcome. Her house has a double mountain view: Adirondacks to the west, Greens to the east. No matter which way I look,  the poignant beauty of hills.

It's been hot here in Vermont, but I think today will be cooler and eventually rainy. I have no idea what I'll be doing. Not much, other than sitting around in my parents' living room, probably, but I can hope for at least a walk.

As comfort, though, I am finding out that readers are really liking my new poetry manuscript. In yesterday's email: "I'm especially impressed by, and in awe of, how this collection leaps in several new directions for you." That is the kind of comment that will help me manage a hard day.

Yesterday felt like summer. First, I finished (temporarily) my editing season, and then I spent the evening at the ballpark. Not only did the Sea Dogs trounced the Akrons, but the night's theme was "Royalty," so the entertainment staff were wandering around the stands in crowns and skimpy cloaks and the PA kept playing songs sort of linked to royalty . . . including the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," which I thought might make T fall out of his seat laughing. Crowd watching was excellent, especially the burly guy wearing a t-shirt that read, "I Put the Stud in Bible Studies." And then, as always, the sweet walk home in the gloaming.

This morning I'll be heading west to Vermont to spent a couple of days with my family. Home on Friday, followed by a weekend spent catching up on house things and bending my thoughts toward the next big teaching extravaganzas. Wish me luck as this drive is not an easy one. However, the Champlain Valley is beautiful in early summer, and I am keeping my thoughts on that.

 In 1851, Charlotte Bronte and her publisher went on "an expedition . . . to visit a phrenologist in the Strand who pursued the then fashionable vogue for reading character from the bumps and indentations in the cranium." Because Bronte was a literary lion by now, they used assumed names so that she could stay incognito. Nonetheless, she received an "uncannily accurate" description of herself, including this statement: "If not a poet her sentiments are poetical or are at least imbued with that enthusiastic glow which is characteristic of poetical feeling."

I read this description last night as I was standing over the stove frying latkes, and I was taken aback. "Enthusiastic glow"! What an exact description of the poetic urge . . . and from the mouth of a phrenologist, no less. Moreover, the phrenologist, a Dr. Browne, made a clear distinction between being a poet and being under the grip of "poetical feeling." One doesn't necessarily imply the other, though they share an "enthusiastic glow."

The question, then, is: How do I know if I'm a poet or simply in the grip of the "enthusiastic glow"? I feel a need to consult Dr. Browne on this matter. I wonder what the bumps on my head might tell him.

***

I'm down to one last manuscript to copyedit, and I hope to get it off my desk today. This means that essentially I'll be done with university-press editing until mid-July (though I will see all of these books again briefly after the authors go through my changes). Next week my friend Gretchen and I will hammer out the details of the class we'll be team-teaching at the end of the month. I'll get to work on another friend's poetry manuscript. But my primary focus will be prepping for the teaching conference and dealing with my own poems.

Tonight T and I will walk down to Hadlock Field to watch the Sea Dogs play. The top prospects in the Red Sox system are currently in Portland, and I'm eager to see them before they get called up to Triple A. It should be a sweet night for baseball, balmy and clear, and I'm looking forward to an evening in the stands.

And then tomorrow I will head west.

By the end of the afternoon I was dragging: not enough sleep the night before and then a long day on Zoom, which always wears out my bad eyes. But I had a lovely group of participants, who worked and talked hard and wrote exciting drafts. So despite my weariness, it was a good day.

This will be my last Zoom class till the fall. I've got in-person teaching gigs coming up at the end of the month and of course the teaching conference in July. Then I'll be taking a hiatus for six weeks . . . undoubtedly designing upcoming classes as well as prepping for my high schoolers, but no actual teaching till September. Though I'll still be working, of course--editing manuscripts and such--I'll have a small respite from performance, and I think it's necessary. I work so many weekends, and travel so much to teach. I just need a few weeks of solid time off from those responsibilities.

In the meantime, we're back to Monday. I've got two poetry collections to edit this week, plus all of my regular house and garden chores. And then on Wednesday I'll head to Vermont for a couple of days to visit my parents and my sister.

So today: my exercise regimen, grocery-shopping, desk work, garden work. Nothing unusual, just the regular round. The weather will be cooler than it has been, but still sunny. I have poem drafts to ponder and a stack of cover-photo possibilities to share with my publisher. I need to call the chimney sweep, and the tree guy, and the firewood people. The to-do list . . . I ended up writing a poem draft in class yesterday that perseverated over the distractions of the to-do list. I also dreamt that I forgot my cat in Vermont. So, as you can see, things are bit unsettled in the land of imagination.

Yesterday I slept late; today I woke up way too early. I guess that evens out to normal. But 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday: ugh. It just sounds bad.

Still, it's not, in truth, an unpleasant hour . . . a dim sky slowly brightening, birdsong crashing through the underbrush. And yesterday turned out to be an unexpected play day, so I can't complain about not having enough rest. At about 9 a.m. I asked T if he wanted to go to the fish market with me, and he said yes, but did I want to go for a stroll along the waterfront first?, and I said yes, so we donned our straw hats and drove to the Eastern Prom, parked the car, and walked down the hill to the trail. Already the city was buzzing: swimmers at the beach, bay full of sailboats, walkers and runners and cyclists and dog walkers thronging the walkway, which hugs the beach and the marina on one side, the narrow gauge sightseeing train on the other, and pours out onto Commercial Street, a hive of Saturday-morning tourists. We stopped for coffee and ice tea, then stepped down to Custom House Wharf to the fish market; bought scallops and mackerel for the grill (plus a pound of fiddleheads, plus cod for tonight) and ambled back to our car through the busy crowd. Drove to the Italian market; bought wine and pappardelle and good olive oil and pancetta and cannoli and slabs of Sicilian pizza for lunch. Came home and ate said pizza outside in our shady yard. Then, full of sunshine and pizza, fell asleep. Afterward, sorted through T's suggestions for cover photos for my next collection. Idled around with a few light chores--watering the garden, folding laundry. Turned on the radio for baseball, started the wood fire in the fire pit, played cribbage. Talked to our kid on the phone. Wrapped scallops in pancetta and skewered them with cherry tomatoes. Stuffed the mackerel with lemon rind and rosemary. Grilled the seafood. Steamed the fiddleheads and tossed them with olive oil, green onion, balsamic vinegar, and garden greens. Ate all of this outside with candlelight and glasses of rose. Then came inside and did the dishes and corralled the cat and watched The Thin Man and ate cannoli.

This silly overindulgence, entirely unplanned, happened merely because I'd asked T if he wanted to run an errand with me. What luck! But it was lovely to have a play day together, not least because there won't be much time for it in the foreseeable future. I'll be in class for most of today, then midweek I'll be heading to Vermont to see my family, meaning that next weekend will perforce be stuffed with catching-up chores. 

I am looking forward to this class, though. It's an entirely new one--I've never taught any version of it before, and I am eager to learn how it will unfold in this large gathering. One good thing is that I won't just be teaching; I'll be making new drafts along with everyone else, and I'm hoping for a notebook full of surprise. 

I slept late this morning, plowing through a series of vivid dreams about having no control over anything: "Are these my clothes?" "Did I forget my new green backpack on the train?" "Why are my children leaving for a college I've never heard of?" I woke up semi-bemused from these imposed worries. Why the college dream, for instance? An urge to manage other people's choices isn't one of my primary faults (though the clothes and backpack anxiety are right on target). Maybe my brain is taunting me: "Are you really as easygoing as you claim?" Or possibly: "You ought to be bossier, like I am."

It's Saturday, and already sunshine is pouring through the laden maples, striping the houses and streets, drying the dew, inflaming the songbirds. I have no particular plans, at least none that depend in any way on time. Just garden, house, words, Tom, in whatever pattern that pleases us. Idling by the front windows, I see that the Siberian iris have begun to open, the massive white peony is unfolding, the peavines are climbing fast.

Yesterday I chipped away at a difficult-to-shape poem, then transcribed another that seemed nearly finished as a first draft. It is interesting to be juggling both sorts at the same time, to note that the existence of one doesn't seem to help the other. The hard-to-fix poem remains hard to fix; the easy flow of its colleague makes no difference at all.

Afterward, as I knelt in the garden, filling a bowl with salad greens for dinner, I remembered how irritated I'd been that morning, after I'd crowed about the Trump conviction and then read or heard multiple Eeyores groan versions of "Things are still terrible, it's wrong to celebrate, the apocalypse is coming, America used to be a great place," et cetera. Gracious, let us take our small happiness where we can! And let us see that, now and again, things are black and white. We witnessed the battle between an evil man and the democratic rule of law. Whatever the future brings, his conviction was a magnificent victory worth celebrating. And let us also understand that America has always been a troubled nation. It never was an Eden. Our history of slavery makes that clear. What democracy gives us is possibility, a door that might lead us into a better version of our communal selves. It's not wrong to cheer for that hope.