It's cold and windy and unspringlike in central Maine, which is pretty typical for early April but annually disheartening. Two and half hours down the road, in Portland, crocuses are blooming, daffodils are budding, but here the lake is still patchy with ice, road dirt spins in little tornadoes, and the gray breeze is raw and urgent. I haven't driven on any gravel roads yet this season, but most likely they're rutted and potholed and greasy with thaw. That's spring in this neck of the woods: raw wind plus mud. I have written a hundred poems about central Maine spring, and all of them are amazed by its pigheadedness.

As always before dawn, log trucks are roaring through town. A little snow is forecast. I am lying in bed thinking about words and the fact that I forgot my gloves at home. 

This is the poem my son wanted me to read at the statehouse:

Spring on the Ripley Road

 

Knick knack, paddywhack,

Ordering the sun, 

Learning planets sure is fun.

                        —Paul’s backseat song

 

Five o’clock, first week of daylight savings.

Sunshine doggedly pursues night.

Pencil-thin, the naked maples cling to winter.

 

James complains,

“It’s orbiting, not ordering.”

 

Everything is an argument.

The salt-scarred car rockets through potholes,

hurtles over frostbitten swells of asphalt.

 

James explains, “The planets orbit the sun.

Everything lives in the universe.”

 

Sky blunders into trees.

A fox, back-lit, slips across the road

and vanishes into an ice-clogged culvert.

 

Paul shouts, “Even Jupiter? Even foxes?

Even grass? Even underwear?”

 

Trailers squat by rusted plow trucks;

horses bow their searching, heavy heads.

The car dips and spins over the angry tar.

 

James complains, “I’m giving you facts.

Why are you so annoying?”

 

The town rises from its petty valley.

Crows, jeering, sail into the pines,

and the river tears at the dam.

 

Paul shouts, “Dirt lives in the universe!

I want to be annoying!”

 

Everywhere, mud.

Last autumn’s Marlboro packs,

faded and derelict, shimmer in the ditch.

 

James says,

“When you get an F in life

it’ll be your own fault.”

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

Monday has rolled around so quickly: I feel like I was packing for Vermont just moments ago, and now it's a week later and I need to pack for Monson.

Fortunately the weather looks decent for driving. Our class can't afford any more snow days: we're rushing to get work finished for the kids' gallery show, though I have to say the kids themselves have been incredibly responsible about submitting their chosen pieces, which is not always the case. Tomorrow we'll be considering titles for individual works, doing last-stage revisions, and meeting with the visual art students to discuss an overall title for the show. Then, during our off-weeks, I'll copyedit and format everything and we should be ready for the public.

The end of a school year is always poignant: I like being around young people, like getting to know them as writers and thinkers and bundles of emotion. Yet within a few weeks they'll scatter and I'll likely never see most of them again. That's the tale of teaching, but it still makes me a little sad.

This morning I'll finish the housework I didn't finish yesterday. I'll go for a walk, and I'll read my McMurtry novel and some Aurora Leigh. I'm briefly between editing projects, so I've been trying to stuff in a few other tasks while I've had the chance. One is to schedule a new Poetry Kitchen class for midsummer: "Syntax as Spark: Poets Learning from Prose." I posted it yesterday afternoon and it's already half full, so snag a spot soon if you're interested.

Once I get back from Monson, I'm hoping to have some plain open hours this week to write and to garden. I haven't had much opportunity to do either, and I'm in need of both.

Oh, and before I forget, I want to tell you about an event on Friday evening, when several members of my Thursday writing group will be reading at Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, Maine. I'll be in the audience, not performing, but all of us will be available to talk about our community writing practice and to offer tips for creating a circle of your own.

I woke to rain, and now I sit under lamplight listening to drops tick the panes, tap the vents--a steady unsteadiness, regular yet irregular, and this is one of the beauties of water, I think. Whether in torrent, in tides, in speckled rain, it is forever the same, forever different.

Today is Easter, but if you're not a churchgoer and you don't have kids at home or family nearby, the holiday is easy to elide. My son, who is a parishioner at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn (Whitman was there, Lincoln was there, Beecher was there!), likes to tell me about his Lent and Holy Week obligations during our phone calls. For him, Easter is the culmination of an annual drama: the slow rising action toward a pinnacle of sorrow; then the denouement of release. It is a good tale, well paced, emotionally rapt. I'm glad it has mattered to people for so long, very glad it matters so much to him.

Yet Easter as festivity has sloughed away from me. No colored eggs or baskets these days; no big hot cross bun breakfasts or ham dinners. I will roast a chicken tonight, but I often do that on a wet Sunday evening. Mostly, today, I'll just be happy to be home and not in the headlines.

Yesterday was a continuance of crazy, albeit in a different mode. People saw the laureate announcement on the local news, in the local papers, on social media. My house is filled with flowers from friends and neighbors. My phone has (metaphorically) swelled like a tick, gorged with texts and emails. Maine makes such a to-do about the laureateship: it's startling. But people's minds will be elsewhere today, and I will sink back into obscurity . . . return to being a poet who mops floors and cleans out garden beds and peels potatoes and now and again considers a word.

So. This is the news. I've been named the next poet laureate of Maine.

I went up to Augusta yesterday, where Governor Janet Mills formally introduced me at the state's annual poetry month celebration. I stood in the Hall of Flags in the Maine Capitol. I was hugged by the governor. There was a standing ovation. I had to give interviews to the press. I have never in my life been in such a situation. As you can see, the experience has made my sentences choppy. The afternoon was hallucinatory, and I kept thinking I was in the wrong dream.

What can I say? Of course I am so happy and excited, equally nervous and impostery, also sure that I've bitten off way more than I can chew. And there's sorrow too--that Baron isn't here to know, that Ray isn't here to know: those two beloveds who, in such different ways, needled me into my life.

My five-year term doesn't officially begin until July, but I'll be busy before then, confabbing with Julia, our outgoing laureate, trying to find my footing in this more public realm.

And I can't help but think of my first years here in Maine: when I was laden with babies and homestead, when the poems first began to announce themselves. The governor read one of my poems at the event, and of all of them she chose this: my Maine origin story. It was happenstance, yet I woke this morning feeling as if I'd received a message from myself.

Home

 

So wild it was when we first settled here.

Spruce roots invaded the cellar like thieves.

Skunks bred on the doorstep, cluster flies jeered.

Ice-melt dripped shingles and screws from the eaves.

We slept by the stove, we ate meals with our hands.

At dusk we heard gunshots, and wind and guitars.

We imagined a house with a faucet that ran

From a well that held water. We canvassed the stars.

If love is an island, what map was our hovel?

Dogs howled on the mainland, our cliff washed away.

We hunted for clues with a broken-backed shovel.

We drank all the wine, night dwindled to grey.

When we left, a flat sunrise was threatening snow,

But the frost heaves were deep. We had to drive slow.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

 

Today I'm driving up to Augusta for a big poetry celebration at the state house. I expect the day to be overwhelming, but maybe that's just the introvert talking. Certainly there will be lots of readers, lots of dignitaries, and of course I am fretting over my outfit.

April, National Poetry Month, is always unpredictable. Sometimes I have a packed schedule; sometimes nothing. This round is suddenly shaping up to be busy, but then again the entire winter has been a frenzy, so what's new?

I don't know how other states function, but Maine makes much of poetry . . . partly because our current governor is a poet, but that's not the only reason. Poetry--at least the idea of poetry--just seems to be part of the ritual zeitgeist. It's a big state with a small population, yet poets are a significant demographic in the arts. And as became clear a couple of weeks ago, when I was speaking to teachers at the MCELA conference in Bangor, poetry also symbolizes a yearning, an emotional longing. Whether or not a person regularly writes or reads poems, the notion of poetry can be powerful.

Why, among all of the other literary genres, does poetry carry this particular aegis? We are a society of prose readers, if we read at all. Poetry is embarrassing and mysterious. It has no monetary value. Yet it continues to stand on its quiet hill.

Well, I'm home again, and glad to be here. Five nights at in my own bed, until Monday, when I head north again to Monson. At this point, such a long run of home nights feels like a miracle.

Today I'll be at my desk, working on class plans. I'll go for a walk, and wash sheets, and collect our CSA order, and bake a batch of brownies, and in the evening go out to write with my friends. Tomorrow afternoon I'll need to drive to Augusta for a poetry event at the statehouse. But this weekend, I hope, I'll be gardening.

Crocuses are up; scylla and primroses are beginning to bloom; last season's kale is unfolding new leaves. I cut a handful of chives for last night's dinner. I need to rake and pick up sticks and prep the garden boxes and figure out groundhog barriers and plant some seeds. I ought to take my mower to the hardware store to get the blades sharpened. I feel very behindhand with yard work, but one needs to be home and underemployed to make a head start, and that has not been my fate.

So it is pleasant to be sitting idly for these few minutes in my couch corner, alongside Big Chuck, who is happily filled with breakfast and curls sociably against my leg. I do have to work today, but at my own pace. Tomorrow will be chaotic. The weekend may be wet. All I can do is thread myself into whatever comes.

Just a quick note, as I've got to pull myself together for the roadtrip back to Portland. But it's never too late to be surprised by one's parents. Turns out my mom has a small crush on 1980s-era Cher and Nicolas Cage. She said, "Let's watch Moonstruck," so we sat around eating ice cream sandwiches and gazing at pretend Italian-Americans in pretend New York City fall in love to the soundtrack of La Boheme. 

It was a pretty good evening.

The forecast for Vermont today is 100 percent rain, but it's still too dark for me to glimpse the actual state of things outside. Yesterday, though, was quite warm, and on a brief walk I found a blooming hellebore and clusters of daffodils budding in the shelter of the house. A day of rain will surely start greening the fields.

The landscape of the Champlain Valley is not my personal ideal of beauty. I prefer forests to farmland, and this is a highly domesticated region. But watching a meadow transform from winter into spring is always a delight.

Today I'll be cooking, cleaning, carrying firewood, doing whatever needs to be done--or rather the edges of whatever needs to be done because there's no way to add anything more than a slight gloss to a situation that's never going to be under control.

Outside rain will fall, and the fields will become ponds that shimmer under a heavy sky.

And now here we are at Monday again, and I am girding myself for the long drive west.

In good news, I'm feeling much healthier: yesterday morning I dragged the vacuum cleaner around the house and in the afternoon pruned my roses, without ill effect from either. So while I'll probably stiffen up in the car, I don't think I'll be crawling out of it in agony the way I was last Wednesday.

The timing isn't bad for this trip to Vermont. The weather looks passable; and though crossing the mountains can always be dicey, I'll avoid the summer shortcut and stay on the big roads. Work is in a manageable state: all editing projects are off my desk, and nothing new has yet arrived.  I do have to prep for my high schoolers, but I can mess with that while my parents are resting. The big issue is "oh, do I have to leave home yet again?" but that is an old familiar plaint. I don't know if I'll ever get used to being on the road so much.

Maybe I'll expand my new Poetry Kitchen idea while my parents are napping. Maybe I'll work on a poem. Maybe I'll just stare out the window at eager birds crowding the feeder.

Here I am again, awake too early, but at least I'm getting up at 4:30 after a full night's sleep, not lying sleepless in bed at 1 a.m. Fortunately, my back injury or whatever this is seems to be gradually healing. I'm still quite stiff, but less so than I was, and the shooting pains have dissipated. Maybe I'll have a Tylenol-free day . . . that would be a treat.

Since I'll be hitting the road for Vermont tomorrow, I've got to get my housework done today, and run errands, and otherwise behave like a non-injured person. I'd like to do some inaugural yard work but I may not have the time or the bending capacity. Gardening is basically just a string of strange yoga poses wrapped around shrubs, and my flexibility is convalescent. But by next weekend I should be back to normal.

Even setting aside my injury issues, the last few days have been odd. As you know, I've been carrying around some news that I can't yet share, but it's rattled me a little, washed me into an evanescent past-present-future that is not so different from convalescence. I'm intermittently distracted, elegiac, prone to tears. Probably it's a good thing that I'm going to Vermont for a few days, where I'll be confronted by situations and obligations and won't have the luxury to waft around in a fugue state.

First, though, I need to find a novel to read. And by the way, I've had another thought about that possible Poetry Kitchen class: syntax as inspiration. Maybe one of these days I'll get a chance to work out the details.

It's cold this morning, which is too bad because today is the big No Kings protest so in a few hours we'll have to go downtown and stand around and freeze. Sigh. But when civic duty calls, you put on long underwear and two coats and trudge up the hill and speak your mind.

Fortunately my yanked back muscle or whatever this is seems to be healing, though I'm still very stiff and sore when I get out of bed. Yesterday I swallowed only one dose of Tylenol and managed to do my house chores and even walk my usual two-plus miles, so that was an improvement over the day before, when I was running entirely on acetaminophen and having a hard time putting on my socks. But I'm not sleeping well--body discomfort plus busy thoughts, always a winning combination--which accounts for why I'm writing to you so early on a Saturday morning. 

Still, it's nice to be quiet and untethered, even if I have to be awake. I like knowing that T is asleep, that Chuck is roaming the floors, that the lamps glow and the furnace groans and coffee steams in the pot. The weekend already feels so brief: on Monday I'm heading to Vermont to visit my parents for a couple of days, and then as soon as I return I'll drop into extreme busyness again: end-of-year teaching lunacy, conference prep, stacks of editing, gardening. But now is a little window of peace.

Speaking of the conference, we are completely full! Wait list only! And with a number of new participants signed up alongside some regulars! I'm so pleased, and relieved. Every year I doom-talk myself into imagining it won't run, no one will show up, the program's a bust, that's it, give up, etc. You know that conversation: who else can you trust to be your own worst enemy?

Now that I've quelled the doom-talker, what I ought to do is design another Poetry Kitchen class for later this summer. I've had so much else to do lately that I haven't had the wherewithal to keep inventing classes. But I'm considering a generative poetry session based around the influence of the novel--maybe selections from Woolf, James, Bowen, Henry Green; maybe some Victorians as well . . . I haven't even begun to suss out how this might work, but it feels like it could be rich.

So a thing happened to me yesterday afternoon that I cannot tell you about for a few days . . . which I understand is an annoying teaser and you have every right to be irritated, but my thoughts have been so occupied by the surprise, pleasure, nerves, and elegy linked to this news that I can't refrain from acknowledging my state of mind. Fortunately I'll be busy today: finishing an editing project (I hope), dashing out for a haircut, then talking to Teresa about Aurora Leigh. In Florida we agreed in passing that we were moved and excited by the poem, but we didn't have any chance to talk more intently about what we were seeing. I'm looking forward to finding out what brilliant thoughts she's uncovering.

Otherwise, I'm still kind of hobbled by my sore back, though it's better than it was, and my nose still won't stop running, and Chuck is trying to drink my coffee, and I've got to haul trash to the curb or get Tom to do it for me if that chore turns out to be a dumb idea for my injury. But maybe at some point today I'll also have a chance to look at the draft-blurt in my notebook--the first new poem draft I've written for weeks. It was so good to get back to work with the poets last night. How I love my writing group. That is a thing I never thought I'd say, back in the days when I was a proud solitary in the woods. But these poet-friends make Portland a sort of Eden.

Had a good, productive class yesterday, then a staff meeting about how we'll organize the remaining Monson sessions, and eventually I made it home, late but still in daylight, which feels like such a treat. Really, the only thing that went wrong was that somehow, I have no idea how or when, I yanked a muscle on one side of my lower back, and now I feel like I'm 102, wincing and groaning as I creep through the house.

Well, I expect it will improve . . . not stiffening up in the car for two and half hours will surely help, and T massaged it out a couple of times yesterday evening, which also seemed to improve things. A slow walk and some Tylenol, and perhaps soon I will feel like I'm 95 or even 87.

Otherwise today I'll be back at my desk, with hopes of making big progress on the editing project. And unless I'm not ambulatory I hope to go out to write tonight. I haven't been to my writing group for weeks, and I've really missed it.

One thing I need to do is return my attention to my new manuscript. While the kids were working yesterday, I pulled up the file and spent some time staring at it--accomplishing nothing other than relearning what I'd made, but that in itself seemed important. A manuscript is a private life that tentatively reaches toward a public one. It is an odd transitional object--not a book yet, though it hopes and worries. Still, it has separated itself from me . . . it has stepped forward into a new space. I read it and wonder what these once-familiar words have become.

For a change, no bad weather was involved in my travels to Monson. Last time I saw these kids I was zooming from bed in a post-blizzard Brooklyn apartment. Two weeks later we were canceled entirely because of an ice storm.

Losing that day meant losing a full session of prep before our gallery show.  It was unfortunate: now I'm going to have to cram a whole lot of late-stage revision and final editing practice into only two classes. We'll manage, but we'll be pressed.

However, at least I got a ton of sleep last night, which with luck will tamp down the head cold. Since Christmas I've been sick more than I haven't been . . . nothing serious, just colds lining up one after another, but the procession has been wearying.

I have to say, it is odd to be back in actual Monson after being in Florida working on a project about Monson. 

I'm glad to report that Chuck's gut troubles are easing. The poor guy came home from the kennel with diarrhea--not at all the fault of the kennel owner, I'm sure, but more likely a flareup of his chronic intestinal issues. You may recall our battle with Giardia last fall, and how I was cleaning the litterbox ten times a day and chasing the kitten around the house with wet wipes. Young Charles has improved a lot since those days but has never been perfect. Now, with the relapse, I've been focusing on not letting him get dehydrated and trying to get his gut bacteria back on the job. And he's so much better! I'm feeling quite proud of myself, and also very happy we haven't had to rack up another vet bill.

This afternoon I'll head north for an overnight in Monson, so T will have to deal with the Chuck regimen. And this morning I'll be shipping an editing project, going for a walk with a friend, catching up on conference paperwork, and fidgeting around with various this-and-that tasks. I did get the housework done yesterday and am more or less caught up with travel laundry, etc. Funny how long it takes to settle back into the rhythm of household chores.

I'd like to settle back into a writing rhythm too, but that hasn't happened yet. Of course the trip to Florida was all about making new work as a collective, and the Bangor presentation was all about helping other, possibly reluctant people make new work, but neither was about the private me as a poet. I'd like to think that I can find some space next week, but who knows.

In the meantime, I'm rereading one of my very favorite books, Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. And possibly this head cold is improving. And this weekend I'm going to buy some garden seeds. 

We had a snowy day yesterday, a perfect scene for co-convalescing with Chuck, who is dealing with some gut problems while I snuffle with a head cold and the fallout from days of insomnia. As always, despite his litterbox woes, he remains peppy and enthusiastic, and I tried to emulate his good cheer. We enjoyed a wood fire and a blanket. I drank tea and Chuck drank canned-food gruel. I read a book and Chuck kept an eye out for squirrels. This morning, I hope, we will both feel refreshed.

I'll be back at my desk today, diving into the editing projects that were on hiatus while I was gallivanting last week. I'll get onto my mat, and finish the housework I didn't finish yesterday, and mix up dough for pizza.

Tom's been working all weekend on photos from Sarasota. Here are a few from Slate--

 

March continues her aggravating ways: I glimpsed these crocuses unfolding in my front flower garden yesterday afternoon, and today we've got snow/sleet/rain on the docket. Well, at least it's Sunday, and T and I don't need to drive anywhere. I've got a bit of a cold, and Chuck has a bit of a gut upset, and I'm hoping neither of us gets any worse. What I need to do is catch up on housework--scrub bathrooms and floors, wash sheets and towels--so I can settle directly into my editing projects tomorrow morning. I can't say I feel enthusiastic about those incipient chores, but that's the head cold talking.

Yesterday I spotted a big groundhog cruising around our backyard. Ugh. Garden season is going to be one big fight again. But even before sighting that pest, I'd made the decision to reduce my vegetable plantings this year. Not only do I have an impossible wildlife situation here, but my teaching schedule has always made it difficult to manage the midsummer harvest. And with our son getting married in early September, the late summer harvest will likely also be compromised this year. So I'm going to limit my vegetable crop to the garden boxes and devote the terrace garden to rhubarb, perennial herbs, and flowers. I may even sign us up for a summer CSA. It will be a change, and to a degree I feel sad about it. But flowers are just as satisfying to grow, and I am on the road so much these days. I know I need to adjust.

Well, here I am, finally: ensconced in ye olde couch corner, wrapped in my dopy red bathrobe, my cup-and-saucer of black coffee at the ready, cheerful Big Kitten peering out the window at sparrows, T upstairs clanking his cup down onto his saucer, then burrowing back under the covers. Home and its pedestrian delights . . . all three of us are very glad to be enjoying this Saturday morning love song.

The transition from Sarasota to this moment was a little rocky. We got home so late on Wednesday, then had to rip ourselves out of bed so early on Thursday, both of us rushing off to our individual versions of work. And then I barely slept in Bangor--too keyed up about too many things, but mainly the adrenaline of performance. I think the Poetry Night event went well: the teachers were very responsive to the prompts and conversation, and then I had the pleasure of dinner out with a pack of Monson Arts friends. But my body was jangled from travel and strange hours and on-stage nerves and missed meals. Also, I hadn't actually been alone for a week; and though I am sociable, I thrive best on regular doses of solitude. So I was kind of a mess.

But in retrospect, this was an unprecedented experience: to spend a week working so closely with such incredible friends and artists; to be with Tom the whole time, instead having to leave him; to then bring that energy with me back to my workaday world of Maine teachers and schools and young people and poems. I'm so grateful to the people of Sarasota who funded us, to Teresa for making it happen, and to the English teachers of Maine who welcomed me back into the fold.

I am also grateful for a weekend at home. I'll be grocery-shopping and doing housework and catching up on desk business and prepping for class and such. And I hope to walk and loll and finish the Elizabeth Bowen novel I've been trying to read for days. And Chuck will require plenty of Chuck time: he is overflowing with family joy.

 Good morning-- All's well, but I had a wacky sleeping schedule in Bangor: awake too late and then made up for it by sleeping too late. Heading back to Portland soon. Talk to you tomorrow--

Our flight was late leaving Sarasota yesterday evening, and by the time we finally arrived in Baltimore, our next flight was boarding, but eventually we got into Portland well after 11 p.m., then had to wait forever at baggage claim, and then thank god our neighbor generously picked us up and brought us home, where we quickly ate something (no dinner earlier other than airplane pretzels), then fell asleep hard, and by 6:30 a.m. T was out the door to work and here I am, befuddled and unable to end this sentence, trying to envision driving to Bangor in a couple of hours and putting on a performance . . . so, in other words, I'll talk to you tomorrow--

Yesterday we worked a half day, and after lunch we northerners were escorted to the Ringling Museum--really a complex of museums and performance venues that includes circus displays, art collections, a park, and John Ringling's Venetian-style palazzo jutting into Sarasota Bay.

It's March but already the Florida rose gardens are in bloom, and big birds stand around dozily in the sunshine, indifferent to the people who bustle past.

This evening three of us fly back to Portland (Gretch is staying for a few more days of work on another project), and then tomorrow I'll be on the road to Bangor . . . a wholly different landscape and setting, but still the link of poems and performance. Yesterday's coolish temperatures were a reminder of that shift, yet the place somehow encourages forgetfulness.

We stood on the terrace behind Ringling's mansion, where yachts used to sail in for parties in the 1920s. A steady wind blew in from the gulf, and the sea shimmered romantically, though the steps down to the water were a wreck of rubble from Hurricane Milton.

"The sunsets are famous here." I've overheard more than one person make some version of this comment. And indeed they are beautiful. But maybe I am too attuned to elegy.

Yesterday was performance day, so we started off slowly, with a walk and then an hour in the pool, before heading to the studio midday so our dancer could start her warm-up process.

All four of us pallid northerners have become quite attached to the pool. This is most surprising in my case as I can barely swim. But an outdoor heated pool is such a pleasure--both restful and scintillating for the body; sociable yet, as soon as I lean back to float, deliciously alone.

This project will ultimately have three parts--Slate, Mountain, Lake. For yesterday's event we were only performing Slate, but Lake and Mountain have also been part of our workdays. Each has come together in an entirely individual form, moving urgently into place as we've read over the materials together. It's been such an intense experience to feel this happening as a unit of four artists.

Teresa had invited about twenty-five people to what she was calling an open rehearsal of Slate. So though we were not under pressure to have a burnished final product, we did feel we were putting on a real performance. It began with poetry, then a dance with music, then a step back to talk about how the dance had been made from the individual words of the first poem. Then we moved into found pieces from high school yearbooks, mixed with movement and more original poems, an erasure piece from an obituary, and finally a closing dance involving all four of us.

I will have photos to post soon as Tom has been documenting the project steadily, and Teresa's husband John made a full video of the performance which may also be available at some point.

But the audience reaction was hugely gratifying. They had not known what to expect, and they responded whole-heartedly to the piece. They talked a lot about their feelings and reactions afterward, even asked if we could come back to Sarasota so they could see all three sections in their final forms. Maybe that will happen, maybe it won't, but the point is that they were excited and they wanted more.

Not everything can go perfectly in Florida. We got through two innings of the Orioles-Yankees game, and then the heavens let loose and an extremely inept grounds crew rushed onto the field in bare feet and struggled to drag the tarp over the infield. But it got stuck on something, so eventually they gave up and left third base to its fate. Throughout the downpour they scurried onto the exposed base paths dumping bags of drying agent around the sodden base so the place looked like a sandbox covered in anthills. We, fortunately, were sitting under an overhang within direct sight of the shenanigans at third base, so a good time was had by all. These were not major league grounds people. Definitely they are vying for a spot on the roster and I daresay most will get cut.

Eventually it became that clear the game was not likely to continue, so we admitted defeat and went out for Indian food instead. And then back in the apartment we sat around for a while and watched lightning flash over the keys. Probably I will never see another spring training game but for two innings the Orioles were far superior to the lackluster Yankees, and you don't see grounds crew comedy every day. I'd call it a win.

Today is our performance day. For reasons involving our dancer's prep needs and timing, we aren't going to the studio till noon, and then we'll work all afternoon until people start arriving at 4. Our staged rehearsal will run for 25 minutes, and then there will be a talk-back and mingling, and sometime this evening I'll get back to the apartment and then will immediately have to phone my son so we can do our NCAA brackets together.

But this morning will be quiet. As usual, wherever I go, I'm the first person up. But soon Tom will head out to take photos, and G and G and I will go out for walk by the water, and maybe later I'll even get a chance to sit around and read a little. That would be a novelty.

Yesterday, after work, we drove to the beach on Lido Key, and here we are, standing in water the color of sea glass, being happy together.

This has been a lovely trip, and the exotic surroundings are only part of the fun. For both of us working and hanging out with four other really smart, inventive, collaborative people who are also sweet and entertaining and non-fussy and hardworking has been fantastic.

Yesterday morning, before work, some of us went to the farmers' market and bought fresh berries and vegetables. So after the beach the four northerners made dinner in the apartment for the six of us. How dinner got made was more or less how the entire work day has gone--nobody was in charge but somehow people wandered in and out of the kitchen and produced a meal together.

Collaboration is magical.

 I am not good at remembering to take photos of anything except birds, and I will try to rectify that this morning as Teresa is picking us up early to go over to the beach on Lido Key.

In the park ponds, these noisy black-bellied whistling ducks congregate like mallards do in our northern ponds. I haven't yet had a chance to look through the bird books and identify the others that I saw there.

I've had almost no sitting-around-with-a-book moments since I stepped off the plane on Thursday. The four faculty members spent six hours together in the studio yesterday and we got a surprising amount of work done: not only fully shaping the content of part 1 of our three-part performance, but also blocking it out spacially. Then afterward the three northerners (plus Tom, when he returned from his long day of walking around town with a camera) got into the pool, and then we all made our way to Teresa and John's place for a sociable pizza night. So you see: yes, fun! But not much time to do any bird research yet.

And now I must rush off and drink coffee. You see how hard my life is.

Believe it or not, this is the daylight view from my living room window . . . Sarasota Bay.

We arrived around noon, a fairly expeditious trip, though since we'd been up since 3:30 we felt like we'd been on the road forever. When I stepped through the doors of baggage claim, my skin was shocked by the temperature change: 80 degrees and humid. My lank winter hair instantly began curling, and in the apartment we demonstrated our heat-starved northernness by immediately opening the windows and turning off the air conditioning, apparently a thing that no Floridians ever do.

Yesterday was mostly business: getting everyone from the airport, dealing with car rental and grocery shopping. Today we'll go to work. Exactly what that will mean I don't know, except that I think we need to get poems into the air.

I feel like I'm in an alien world. Florida is not a place I can easily imagine myself, even when I'm here. I look across this bay, ringed with highways and high-rises, and wonder what such an expanse would have been before Europeans arrived.  This is where Cabeza de Vaca set foot on North American soil. There is no silence now.

Apparently I made the correct decision not to travel north because this morning I see that half of my schools have already canceled because of the impending ice storm. Well, I'm relieved that this wasn't just me being spleeny; also relieved that I don't have to spend another sad class on zoom; also extremely relieved that I will not be driving through ice, snow, and freezing rain for three hours.

Instead, I've had two unexpected days at home, which has not only been a huge help as regards my editing schedule but is also allowing me to enter into this Florida adventure in a more relaxed way. Originally I planned to be teaching a full day up north, then making the long drive home, then rushing Chuck to the cat kennel, then rushing home and dealing with cat litter, trash, packing, refrigerator emptying, etc. I'll still have to deal with all of that end-of-the-day flurry, but at least the rest of the day will be less stressful.

You won't hear from me tomorrow morning as we have to be out of the house by 4:30 a.m. But if all goes smoothly, I'll be back to posting on Friday.

Argh, March. After a few days of warmth and melt, tomorrow will drop us back into cooler temperatures and rain, which is no big deal here in Portland. But up north the forecast is for sleet and freezing rain all day, so now I'm back to the everlasting conundrum: do I take the risk and drive to central Maine this afternoon, or do I zoom yet again with my students? Will they even have school if the weather is as crappy as it's forecast to be? Blah. With a plane to catch on Thursday morning, I can't take the risk of being trapped up there tomorrow. But how I hate to zoom with my young people.

Well, I guess I'll figure out something or other this morning. Rural Mainers love to shame those of us who don't like to drive in wretched weather, and after 20 years among them I still wrestle with my weak-mindedness in that regard. Also, I feel so guilty about zooming again. During our last class I was stuck in Brooklyn in a blizzard, and I said to the kids then: "This is it! No more zooming!" And now the weather gods are snickering and snorting gleefully among themselves. They always have the last word.

Enough about tomorrow. Today, at least, will be reliably gorgeous . . . another dose of sunshine and warmth, the scent of thawing earth, new green spikes among the muddy leaves. We've lost a lot of snow over the past few days. My back yard is almost visible again, and today I may mosey out there and investigate what's what under the mulch. March, your aggravations are legion, but every year you fool me again.

Yesterday's temperatures reached 60 degrees, and I glimpsed the first tulip and scylla leaves poking through the leafmold in the south-facing gardens along the foundation. We still have snow but it is soupy and thinning, and after another overnight in the 40s I can tell that even more has melted away.

T was working on taxes all day but took a break with me for a drive over to the Eastern Prom and a walk along the waterfront, where we watched happy wet dogs roll on the beach and strolled past about a thousand bleary-eyed young parents pushing strollers. Clearly it was "get the baby out of the house" day, and why not? The wind was warm, the puddles were deep, the gulls were skreeking . . . it was the kind of day when the sap is running in the maples and the hounds are lifting their noses into the breeze and the babies are kicking their feet and waving to strangers.

Otherwise, I got done what I needed to get done--mostly finishing my Aurora Leigh homework and magically not (yet) screwing up my part of the taxes. Today I'll be back at my desk cranking out another batch of editing before I hit the road for Wellington and Monson tomorrow afternoon. The press has kindly built the schedule for this project around my travels, but I'm still anxious about losing momentum as I will have zero time to do any manuscript work when I'm in Florida.

So today: edit edit edit, plus a walk, plus a few errands, plus the inevitable laundry and a few more hours of home time before the flurry begins.

Not only did the clocks change last night, but it's 44 degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea--a double upheaval to confuse and confound us in our winter stronghold. Under the streetlights the wet asphalt glitters, and the snow piles look like melting ice cream edged in mud. It's still dark: no birds are singing yet, but I daresay they will be out in force this morning. Last week, during a minor warmup,  a sudden chorus of titmice, house finches, cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, cedar waxwings, downy woodpeckers flash-mobbed the neighborhood. Today they're likely to give us a full orchestra production.

My new bathing suit arrived in the mail yesterday, and I love it, which is not a declaration one might expect from a 61-year-old very pale-skinned non-swimmer, but it's cute and comfortable and doesn't make me look terrible and has a decent amount of coverage for someone who gets sunburns just by thinking about them. I then spent a chunk of the day digging out summer clothes and trying on various things to see how I might manage my rehearsal clothes/street clothes challenge, given that I do not own even one pair of shorts but spend my northern summers in skirts and dresses. Young Chuck found this dressing-room project fascinating, and his participation means I will be traveling to Florida with a generous smear of black cat fur in my suitcase. But even with his help, I think I've mostly worked out a feasible wardrobe that won't take up much luggage space.

I expect this exposition on outfits is entirely uninteresting to you, but the trip is such a novelty in my life, and Tom is equivalently confounded. For two people who rarely talk about clothes, we are spending an awful lot of time talking about clothes.

Today, however, I plan to stop caring about them. What I want to do is to go for a long walk amid the snowmelt and listen to the bird symphony and snuff up the scents of wet earth. I want to finish reading Trollope's Doctor Thorne and find another fat but not too fat novel to pack for my travels. I want to cook chicken and wild mushroom risotto and read Aurora Leigh and not get into trouble with Tom for making mistakes on my taxes. All of that seems doable, except maybe for the tax part.

This morning, first thing, I had to drive our friends through ice and freezing rain to the bus station--the first leg of an extended journey that will eventually deposit them in Sarasota with us. Weather like this makes it hard to imagine that weather like Florida's really exists, yet in a week I will be sweaty.

For now, though, I am ensconced in my couch corner, nursing a belated cup of coffee and very glad not to be slithering through the glassy streets. Tom is asleep, Young Chuck is happily pencil-pushing a Dixon Ticonderoga into a tight corner behind the woodbox, and hazy first light is peering through bare and icy branches.

This weekend will mostly be devoted to pulling myself together for this ridiculous travel odyssey--north, then south, then north, then more north. So pharmacy, grocery store, laundry, suitcases, books to sell, books to read, presentation, lesson plans, manuscript . . . sun hat, winter hat, sunscreen, sandals, snow boots, reading outfit, work clothes . . . What a jumble.

We've spent months preparing for this Sarasota residency--researching, writing poems and scenarios, compiling possibilities, creating movement, all while trying to keep up with other important things, like our jobs. The project has been time- and thought-consuming, to say the least. Yet we haven't even begun to organize these materials into a coherent script. That's what will happen in Florida, and already the schedule feels tight, though we'll be in the studio full time every day. I know I'm carrying my load writing-wise, but I have little experience with performance design, and I worry about being a dead weight in that regard. I worry about a lot of things--such as dancing in public and remembering where my body is in space. But that's the point of this collaboration: four different artists are coming together to create something they wouldn't otherwise know how to make. I am trying to trust in that.

***

On another note: I've got two spaces left for this summer's Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts. If you want to hang out with the best colleagues possible, learn how multidisciplinary collaborations can enrich you as a poet and/or a teacher, eat delicious food, swim in a gorgeous lake, sleep in a comfortable bed, and also see whatever the hell we come up with in Sarasota, sign up now! And please do reach out with any questions . . . I would love to see you there.

We got a coating of new snow overnight--not enough to shovel, and no doubt it will melt as soon as the sun comes out, but sloppy for dragging around recycling bins and compost pails this morning. I'll get outside to do those things shortly, but for the moment I am recovering from a dream in which I was seething . . . I don't think I've ever been so angry within a dream before.

The scene was set in what may have been the Harmony house. Certainly the woodstove I remember is the Harmony stove, which two visiting young men decide to disassemble, hiding the parts around the house. When I discover this, I am very upset and tell them they have to put it back together. But of course parts are bent, and nothing will seal right, they are filling the rooms with ash and soot, and as they bumble I become increasingly livid until my anger is nuclear . . . I am transported with fury--

And then I wake up.

So now I am sitting here with my coffee, feeling fury drain from my veins and muscles as one feels hard labor drain away. Pure anger is so physical: the entire body clenches in sympathetic ire. Of course my anger over damage to the woodstove is entirely understandable, whether in dream or real life. In Harmony that stove was life or death. Our daily world revolved around it. So naturally it has entered my subconscious as a vital center. What surprises me more is my sheer hatred of those young men. Mostly my dreams adore young men--as one would expect, given my maternal history. But this pair . . . if looks could kill, I would have blasted them.

And that in itself is an unnerving residue: the lingering sensation of hate.

It's Thursday, my least favorite day of this week, because I have a mammogram scheduled for this morning and I hate mammograms. However, it too shall pass and then I can focus on the more enjoyable elements of the day: fetching my CSA order and going out to write with my friends. Thanks to the Brooklyn blizzard, I haven't attended my writing group for two weeks, and I'll be missing the following two as well when I'm in Florida and Bangor. So tonight's the night, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Young Charles will be sorry to learn that today is also housework day. His feelings about the vacuum cleaner are similar to my feelings about the mammogram machine. However, spring daylight is lifting everyone's spirits. In these lengthening afternoons he sits in a sun puddle at the open front door, snuffing up the drafts that leak through the crooked storm door and staring enthusiastically at gulls and dog walkers and delivery guys. His pleasure is my pleasure: a happy animal is a joyous sight, and the Big Kitten overflows with cheer. "Hi, Chuck!" shouts Max the mailman through the door; and when Chuck beams and presses his nose against the glass, for a moment I can pretend that the world is not going to hell.

Yesterday T stopped after work to talk to some long-time Harmony acquaintances who've since moved down to southern Maine. They wanted his advice about a carpentry project. Among other things, they hope to put in a second bathroom, which made me laugh because I remember the days when they didn't even have a refrigerator, let alone a bathroom, in the log cabin they'd built themselves from the trees on their land. Ah, the sins we commit, down here in the diaspora . . . Tom and I wallowing in furnace heat, our friends dissatisfied with a single flush toilet.

I was under the impression we were supposed to get an inch or so of snow last night, but from the window it looks as if considerably more fell. Our across-the-street neighbor is outside in shorts and a plaid coat shoveling his driveway in the dark, a vision that metaphorically sums up something or other: fill in the blank yourself. March in the north country can drive even the sanest of us into mad science and despair. So who knows?--wearing shorts while shoveling snow may be a first step toward playing recklessly with lightning and drinking smoky bubbly stuff out of beakers. I wonder if I should warn his family.

Yesterday I sent the poetry ms off to another publisher. Perhaps that was a good idea; perhaps it was a March-hare move; perhaps I should stop fretting and start studying world religions or take up knitting or maybe dabble a little in mad science. This is the season for blaming everything on the weather: the days are getting longer! the snowdrops are budding! the little birds are singing! eight fucking inches of snow fell overnight! [Cue thunderclap and evil laugh here.]

Ah, well. In less silly moments I get a lot of work done. Today I'll fidget with high school plans and the editing project, and possibly even deal with the stacks of books that are overtaking my study. I'm still reading The Pillow Book and Aurora Leigh, and now I've added Trollope's Doctor Thorne to the pile. This morning I'll get onto my mat, and eat oatmeal and fruit for breakfast, and enact the part of a wholesome and discreet citizen, and only Young Chuck will be fooled but he believes anything.

It was frigid yesterday, and this evening an inch or so of snow will fall. But by next week temperatures are supposed to rocket into the 60s--classic March weather hysteria in Maine.

Meanwhile, I'm making progress on my many pre-Florida obligations: turned in an editing sample to the press, printed out my MCELA presentation and gathered poem possibilities for the reading, dealt with conference registration questions. In the afternoon I went for a walk with Betsy, then made Manhattan clam chowder and finished rereading Little Drummer Girl, possibly my favorite Le Carre novel . . . not only one of the best depictions I've seen of 1980s-era western confusions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also an incredible foray into the way in which men, even supposedly good guys, manipulate vulnerable women into committing heinous acts.

Today I'll get back to editing, and in the afternoon I've got a zoom meeting with Teresa and Jeannie regarding a linked sonnet project we've been working on. Then I'll roast a chicken and probably somewhere in the interstices start prepping for next week's Monson class. And no doubt I'll fidget a bit more with the new manuscript. At the moment I'm calling it Traveler, and it is making me cry.

I'm awake too early this morning, but at least it's Monday's sleep I'm wasting, not the weekend's. Outside, the temperature has dropped back to single-digits: 8 degrees, according to my phone. I have a million things to do this week--editing, class planning, presentation planning, residency prep, zoom meetings, household chores, plus a mammogram--but at least I won't be on the road. And I'm starting things off with a queasy stomach, but that's likely just nerves and last night's overly rich dinner. (Tom made a very elaborate Shanghai pork belly dish that was tasty but extreme.)

Now dark presses against the window panes. I hear an Amtrak train hum through the crossing at the end of the street. On the back of the couch the Big Kitten chirps and purrs. Coffee steams in a white cup.

I'm still feeling a little fragile, poem-wise. Making the new collection has sapped me in some way. I don't know what or how to think of it.

Yesterday's peaceful vibe was shattered when water suddenly started pouring onto the kitchen counter via a screw hole in the wall. "Ice dam," Tom said, and was quickly up on a ladder scraping snowpack away from the dormer seam. He got the flow stopped almost immediately, but ugh. If it's not one problem, it's another around here. (The peaceful vibe was also shattered by war, but I am not going to talk about that just now. You/we are already overwhelmed.)

Well, nothing more can be done about the roof till spring, other than to make sure we keep that section raked. Limp into the future: that's my household motto.

Otherwise the day was easygoing (except for war). I caught up on a bunch of computer chores. We took a walk to the Asian grocery. I made potato pancakes for dinner. Young Chuck got his nails trimmed and later, with much effort and concentration, pushed a sliver of kindling under the rug.

This morning the little birds are singing loudly (despite war). They must be reacting to the longer days, and I wonder if they sense the tree sap rising as well. Today I'm going to walk up the street to see if our neighborhood snowdrops are visible yet. When I was in Brooklyn, I saw a few daffodil spikes poking up in front gardens, all ready to be squashed by the blizzard. Life is so obstinate. (As is death.)

I've been thinking about my manuscript . . . not fretting exactly; more just puzzling over my lifelong urge to make books that hardly anyone will read. If published, this would be my seventh full-length poetry collection, my eleventh book. The number is startling. How have I managed this? I still picture myself as the child with a scarlet "Sloppy and Lazy" sign pinned to her metaphorical chest.

There's a sadness in finishing a book, though of course there's pleasure too. Perhaps that's why I resist putting together manuscripts until all of a sudden I can't help myself and they fly together as if under enchantment. The emotional complications: why-bother intersecting with ambition . . . not ambition as in fame or any expectation of readership. Rather, as in climbing the impossible path. The book as the pause, as one acknowledges the ever harder task to come.

You know the painting I mean.

.

What a lovely, slow Saturday morning--waking to sunshine and no alarm. Now, freshly showered, I sit with my cup and saucer gazing into blue sky, bare branches, glinting snowpack. An invisible crow complains. Young Chuck peers at me through the balusters. The little house quietly breathes. I have nothing particular to do.

Yesterday we had our last zoom meeting before Sarasota. It seems this trip is really going to happen: soon a gang of pallid northern artists will be lurching among snowbirds and hungover college students and long-suffering year-rounders, the four of us gawking naively at tiki bars and roseate spoonbills and expecting alligators to slither out from behind every palm tree. Florida of the Imagination: sinkholes, Republicans, theme parks, hurricanes, poisonous snakes, sunburns, Florida Man, revisionist history, orange juice spurting from every water fountain. Who knows what's in store for us?

Well, for a few more days my life will remain safely refrigerated. Today temperatures are supposed to rise to a balmy 40 degrees, so maybe I can go for a walk without wearing a wooly hat. The chickadees are singing happy tunes, and I ought to figure out my seed order, and yesterday Chuck was amazed by the sight of a possum trundling up the neighbor's driveway. Signs of spring in the frozen north! Who needs manatees when you have a bedraggled possum eating snacks right outside your very own window?

I'm feeling somewhat more pulled together this morning, which is a good thing as I've got a new editing project to start today and a final pre-Sarasota faculty zoom meeting this afternoon, plus various house obligations in between. In two weeks I'll be in Florida, which is hard to fathom. Tom seems more focused on it than I am: he actually bought new sneakers for the occasion, and a new bathing suit. Acquiring new clothes never even occurred to me. But then again, as he somewhat smugly informed me, "You'll be working. I'll be on vacation."

In other news: yesterday I took the plunge and sent the new poetry manuscript off to a publisher. My hopes are not high; few people have high hopes when they send off a poetry manuscript. But it's a first try . . . a first trial, I almost wrote, which is maybe more accurate. Few things are more depressing than serial manuscript rejections.

In the meantime I'll undoubtedly keep fidgeting with it, though I probably won't make major changes, at least not in this iteration. The manuscript came together quickly, once I actually allowed myself to focus on it, and that is my usual pattern, both with individual poems and collections. Once I get going, I revise at white heat: most poems are finished within days; few go longer than a few weeks. The collections, too, declare themselves emphatically. I am bossed around by my work.

Greetings from the old familiar couch corner.

I walked into the house just before 8 p.m., very glad to be home. As predicted, Young Chuck had decided I was no longer in the picture so was highly confused to see me again. But after leaping at me from around corners a few times, he decided to go with the flow and pretend I'd never been away. So the three of us had a cozy evening, and I went to bed as soon as I could, and now I am blinkily trying to remember how to start my day at 5 in the morning. Brooklyn time is not like Maine time.

Today I need to figure out what must get done: laundry, housework, catching up on mail, returning a library book, dealing with work stuff . . . Regular life is a blur.

What an odd visit this has been, so unexpectedly long and packed with event. The evening at Ragtime might have happened 6 weeks ago instead of 6 days ago. But today, finally, I'll be dragging my suitcase through Manhattan slush piles, all hopes pinned on the doughty Maine bus that will take me home. Chuck has probably forgotten I exist. But I know Tom hasn't.

Yesterday's snow fell hard and fast till midafternoon and then suddenly began to melt. So, by evening, restaurants and a few storefronts were beginning to reopen, light traffic had picked up on the streets, and the city was returning to its accustomed hum. There's still a giant mess out there: corners and crossings thick with slush, cars buried in snow and plow crud. I expect the commute will be ugly today, what with transportation delays and sidewalk despair. I'm not sorry I'll be zoom-teaching from the apartment rather than traversing the snow piles, though my setup will certainly be awkward. There are not a lot of good choices: too many dark corners without outlets, too many odd little islands of wobbly internet. So the best solution seems to be propping myself up in bed with the laptop on my lap. Not exactly a professional look, but one must make do.

 NYC Blizzard Photo Gallery

5th Avenue in Brooklyn around 7:30 a.m. It's a major commercial thoroughfare but we were walking straight down the middle of the street. Hard to tell exact accumulation because of the wind, but definitely pushing 2 feet.

6th Avenue in Brooklyn, mostly residential. It's a great day to have no responsibility for shoveling out a car.

The back courtyard of the bar. First we shoveled this. Then we had to close the umbrella and shovel the whole thing again.

Steve's next-door neighbor, sculpting a polar bear.

This was 5th Avenue in Brooklyn at about 9 p.m. last night. Steve and I were walking back to the apartment after shoveling the sidewalk around the bar. At that point only a few inches had fallen and the wind, while brisk, was not gale-force.

This is the view from my bedroom window this morning. The wind is bizarrely loud. The gusts sound like a semi-trailer grinding up a steep gravel road. In a few minutes Steve and I will suit up again for shoveling, and I will update you on actual conditions. I think they're pretty bad, but I can't tell a thing about accumulation yet.

 

New York City is now under a blizzard warning, and tomorrow's bus back to Portland has been canceled. Yesterday morning, as the weather situation became clear, I did make an early decision to buy a seat on the Wednesday bus, afraid that if I dithered too long I wouldn't be able to get out of town till even later in the week. So I'll be zoom-teaching from Brooklyn on Tuesday, and in the meantime I'll be hunkering down in Gowanus, making spaghetti and meatballs for Stephen and the kids and experiencing the amazement of New York City stopped dead in its tracks.

Yesterday's event for Baron went really well. The room was packed with so many poet friends and acquaintances. Baron's family was there too, and hearing his work in the air through so many different voices was sweet and also intense. Afterward P and I walked for a couple of miles along the Hudson River, basking in the strange mild air, watching dogs and joggers and babies and birds, watching the water ripple past. New York has been wry and beautiful in its gray February cloak.

We stopped in Chelsea to walk through the William Eggleston exhibit at a gallery, then headed back to Brooklyn to meet up with the family for pizza and ice cream. And now an unstructured day unrolls: any plans to be busy in Manhattan have dissolved because of the oncoming storm. Stephen and I will go out for groceries at some point, and then I will cook. And snow will fall and fall.

It rained most of the day yesterday, but I was out and about nonetheless. I met the kids for breakfast, and then P and I went to the Frick and afterward the Strand, where I managed to make my way through fiction shelves A-G before P was ready to leave. Next time maybe I'll reach H-M, but maybe not. Shopping at the Strand is a very slow job. I did find a beautiful early 1950s edition of Henry Green's novel Concluding, and since I suspect I am one of the few people alive who actually reads his writings, that felt like a secret message. It was skewed to one side, half-obscured on a bottom shelf, and I almost didn't bend down to look at it. But there the book sat, waiting for me.

 I've seen three musicals on Broadway: Pippin and Fun Home, both with Paul in high school, and now Ragtime. Pippin was a big fun spectacle, and Fun Home was small and gorgeous and heartrending, but Ragtime manages to combined elements of both and become a heartrending spectacle. It includes a huge ensemble cast, brings a Model T on stage, and includes a dozen disparate settings, including the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the emotions, though also large, remain complicated and ambiguous. Even though it's a musical, its language hews surprisingly close to Doctorow's, and the singers were top-notch.

It was a fun day altogether: for lunch I ate a fried oyster po' boy at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central; for dinner I had chicken in coconut sauce at a Cuban restaraurant near Lincoln Center. I visited with friends at the bar after the show, and then I slept hard till after 7 this morning.

In a little while I'll meet the kids for breakfast, and then I think P and I will go to the Frick. The Polish Rider is waiting for me.

 Good morning from the bus. It's already daylight, and I've already had a crisis: I left the whitefish bagel sandwich I'd bought especially for the trip in Tom's truck, so I had to text him frantically to turn around and bring it back to me. The thought of no breakfast, no comforting delicious special sandwich, was very sorrowful. However, he heroically reappeared with my breakfast, and the surrounding passengers very much enjoyed the dramatic handoff. And now I am hoping that a lost-and-found sandwich will be my only panic of the day.

A surprising thing happened yesterday: I put together a manuscript.

I think it's a tad too short in its current iteration. Nonetheless, it's complete, even down to the table of contents and an acknowledgments page. As sometimes happens, I had a burst of focus, when suddenly an arc became clear to me and the poems began to talk to one another and I began to talk back to them and, voila, a fluttering sheaf transformed into the possibility of a book.

I feel nervous and excited, like I always do at these moments. Yesterday evening I kept opening the file to fidget with it, and often my fidgeting was no more than making the pages larger or smaller on my screen so that I could absorb their visual effect. At this stage making a collection is so much more than just reading the poems for content. It requires simply looking at them . . . and then at other moments simply hearing the silences between them . . . for every poem is surrounded by a different silence, and how that quiet overlaps feels so important to me.

The most recent New Yorker includes Kathryn Schulz's review of Richard Holmes's biography of Tennyson. Schulz opens it by asking, "What was the formative sound of your childhood?" and then speculates on the sea's influence on Tennyson's ear:

No one alive can say if this is true, but I like to think the sound that most shaped [him] was the surf at Mablethorpe, a barren stretch of beach on the remote eastern coast of England. . . . Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation--a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him.

As an ear poet myself, as a recent wallower in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, as a person in the midst of putting together a poetry collection in a rush of wonder (a collection that happens to include a long poem titled "In Memoriam" that refers throughout to Tennyson) . . . well, is it any surprise that I was gobsmacked by this description?

"Both perfect and unpredictable." The words alone make me feel a little faint.

After a weekend of lethargy, I did manage to get a lot of stuff done yesterday. Not only did I finish the housework, but I also prepped for my high schoolers, drafted prompts for the conference's writing intensive, and wrote the speech portion of my MCELA presentation.  Getting ready for that presentation is turning out to involve a ton of work. I'm supposed to fill 90 minutes, which is a crazy amount of time to be on stage. So I'm putting together a hybrid show--talk/experiential writing activity/reading. Creating each of those pieces of course requires a different sort of approach, plus I need to concoct the transitions between them . . . as you can probably guess, it's a beast of an assignment. However, thanks to this sudden unexpected editing drought, I am making progress. I wonder how I would have managed without it.

Today I'll keep chipping away at the presentation. I also need to do some mending, and I hope to get back to sorting through my pile of collection possibilities. I should order garden seeds. I should dust the dining room. I should read Aurora Leigh. I'll go for a walk. I'm presently revisiting David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America, but that book is too heavy to take on the bus so I'll need to come up with another travel volume. This is always my giant challenge: how to find a book that's light enough to carry around the city and long enough to last me through two six-hour bus trips. And it needs to be absorbing enough to hold my attention but not so complex that I can't also surf the disruptions of public transportation. What will it be?

I guess it's Washington's Birthday today, but neither T nor I gets the day as a holiday. Soon he will drive off as usual to the house he's renovating, and I'll need to turn my attention to my weekly housework chores and then deal with a pile of teaching prep: high school session, conference prompts, MCELA presentation. Fortunately, however, my head cold is beginning to dissipate. It's not gone by any means, but I am feeling somewhat better this morning. Though I didn't manage to be energetic yesterday, I did accomplish the grocery shopping and I even stopped at a clothing store and bought myself a new pair of jeans . . . not at all my favorite activity, so I was a little bit proud of myself. Also I haven't gotten fatter since the last time I bought jeans. Success!

New York is on the horizon, and I'm trying to pull together some activities for myself. I'd like to go to the Frick and see the Gainsborough exhibit and lay eyes on Rembrandt's Polish Rider. Like the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, that painting is one of my touchstones, and I need to visit it now and again. There are a couple of interesting photo exhibits in Chelsea (William Eggleston and Arthur Tress); the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is donation-only in the winter, so it would be cheap to wander among the orchids in the glass houses. I'd also like to wander among the used books in the Strand. Who knows what of any of this I'll accomplish, but it's good to have ideas.

And I've got poems on my mind. I printed out a stack of finished pieces and I've slowly been relearning them, slowly beginning to imagine them as a conversation among themselves. It's a tentative first step toward a new collection.

 Despite head cold and family chaos, Valentine's Day turned out to be very sweet. First, T and I walked out to the French bakery for croissants. Then we went to a 10 a.m. showing of Casablanca at what my friend Gretchen calls "the Lie-Down Theater"--it's got broad seats with footrests and reclining backs that are silly and also extremely restful. I'm not sure I've ever seen Casablanca on the big screen before, and it was definitely worth it. Usually I don't think of this as my favorite Bogart film: I so love him with Bacall in The Big Sleep and Key Largo that I have generally been content to slot Casablanca into the category of "everyone else's favorite." But really it's a great movie: tight construction, wonderful acting, a complex and interesting Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere situation. And watching it at 10 a.m. on a recliner was an excellent choice. To top off our good day, we went out to dinner at a friend's house, a long and comfortable evening of wine and chatter followed by an easy 3-minute drive home and an actual night's sleep.

With such relaxations as aid, I feel this morning that I might possibly be winning my argument with the head cold. A little less congestion. A little less groggy self-pitying resignation. Good riddance to both.

So far, all of my big weekend plans to accomplish a lot of complicated reading, etc., have devolved into spending my spare moments sitting under a couch blanket next to a cup of tea and a crossword puzzle. But so goes convalescence. Today I hope to run errands, do some housework, and feel less like a wet mop. Wish me luck.

I'm having a hard time shaking this cold. After starting off as a mere annoyance, it has settled into my sinuses, and now here I am a week later, snuffling and sneezing and feeling like my IQ has dropped 15 points.

But at least it's Saturday morning, and I have no reason to rush around--though the Vermont chaos continues, and I've already taken a 6 a.m. phone call about that. The guilt of distance. It's a particular sort of black cloud.

Nonetheless, despite chaos and sinusitis, it's Valentine's Day, and shortly I'll walk out to buy my Valentine a ham-and-cheese croissant from the French bakery down the street, and tonight we're going out to dinner with friends. The good things are still good.

Over the past couple of days I've been rereading A. S. Byatt's novel The Game, rereading stacks of my own poems, planning various classes and presentations, trying to think ahead, think ahead, think ahead. This time next week I'll be in New York, the Florida residency looms, and then the MCELA event, and in between all of this travel my Monson classes will continue apace. I am nervous about everything.

It's a miracle of sorts: last night I got an email from a press editor telling me that the editing project I was supposed to receive yesterday has been delayed, at least for a day or two and maybe longer. So I woke this morning to the surprise of a small unexpected vacation from hourly labor. I also woke to some distressing, if ongoing, Vermont drama, so miracle must be defined narrowly here. Still, one free breath is better than no free breaths at all.

I'd thought that yesterday would be my only rest day, so I'd crammed it, of course, with unrestful obligations . . . prepping for my MCELA presentation as well as undertaking a giant kitchen project: roasting and straining a big winter squash, then making two pie crusts, blind-baking them, and turning them into pumpkin pies--not an unfamiliar task but a very time consuming one, with lots of dirty dishes and fiddly frets (blind-baking a pie shell can be a little hair-raising). But all went well, and I took one pie to my writing group and left the other in the fridge for us, and I somehow managed to think about poems in the midst of flour and butter and eggs.

Today I do have an afternoon meeting about Monson stuff. But maybe this morning I can allow myself a little more freedom . . . write, cogitate over a collection, read. Or maybe the hours will be swallowed up by other people's chaos. It's hard to know.

In last night's dream, T and I seemed to have acquired a shabby travel-trailer, which was parked at some sort of leafy campground-ish place. We were sitting outside, and Young Chuck was watching us through the screen door, just like he does in real life, and nothing exciting was happening at all--just summertime and three pals hanging out. I'm still basking in the leftover aura . . . it feels so rare to have a purely pleasant dream: nobody worried or embarrassed, no impossible tasks, no dreadful discoveries, no surreal irony. It was kind of my brain to offer me such a restful episode. Among other things, I've been fighting an annoying little cold all week, an illness with extremely minor symptoms that is tailing into convalescent exhaustion because I had zero time to baby it. Yesterday, though, I did allow myself to sag, so I should be feeling better today. And now I have my sweet little dream to help me out.

As of this morning there is no work stacked on my desk. I expect the next editing project to arrive later today or tomorrow, but still that gives me one full day without a time sheet. I need to get started on the giant presentation/reading I'll be doing for the MCELA conference in March. (Unfortunately I've got to prep well ahead of time because I'll be in Florida until just before the event takes place.) But I'm also considering the possibility of starting to print out poems for ordering into a new collection. I'm planning to bake a pie. I'm hoping to do some reading. I want to take a walk. I'll go out to write tonight with the poets.

During that reading at Bowdoin I realized how happy I am about some of my new uncollected pieces. I guess I haven't really been thinking about how much I like the individual poems: I've been distracted by the looming struggle to organize them. So what I would like to do today is quietly remember they exist.