A light rain is pattering down, and the air is thick with damp. I am hoping for a long day of showers. Southern Maine has had very little moisture lately, and my gardens are thirsty.

Yesterday was crammed with chores and obligations, but today will be quieter--exercising on my mat and then poem revision and poem study in the morning; probably running an errand or so in the afternoon. I'm still waiting for the next big editing project to arrive; when it does, my days will realign around it. But for the moment my time is my own, and my brain is full of poetry. 

It feels good to step into a writing day with the house scrubbed and tidy, towels and sheets freshly laundered, gardens thriving and bright, and a soft rain tapping at the windows. The house is my canvas, the house is my muse: this was true in the woods, and now it's true by the sea. All of my work as a maker arises from the small spaciousness of home.

Now the rain is falling harder. The kitchen clock ticks, and lamps glow in the weak daylight.

I am a poet and I write poems. That may sound like an obvious statement, but of course all of you writers know that such statements are fraught with fear and wistfulness, hope and procrastination, wrong-headed bumbling and self-destructive showmanship . . . to name merely a few of the abstractions lurking inside our Pandora's box.

I think my house helps me write because it soothes my senses. I love the yellow paint on the dining-room wall, the blue chairs in my study. I love the bindings of the books, the well-dusted corners of the wooden floors, the plumped-up cushions on the shabby couch. I love the bright glass window of the wood stove, the hum of the washing machine in the basement, the scent of sourdough rising in a red bowl, the single coral-colored blossom poised in a pale blue bottle. Nothing is grand. But my body reaches out to these small pleasures; they make me attend, they make me listen to the cadence of my thoughts. And the cadence is where the poems begin.