After collapsing into our room's exceedingly comfortable bed, we both woke up yesterday morning feeling much refreshed. Tom found us a place nearby for breakfast, where we ate eggs Benedict and pondered the oddness of living downtown. I've never before spent much time in this part of the city. I always think of Chicago as its neighborhoods--low-slung prewar brick, alleys and taco stands and old warehouses.  But here we are surrounded by steel and glass and Armani stores.

After breakfast we went swimming, and I have to say: this hotel has the fanciest pool ever. It's on the 12th floor, which in itself seems amazing to me--a massive vaulted tiled space, water and air the perfect temperature, and I plan to dawdle here every day. (Full disclosure: using the word swim for what I do in the water greatly exaggerates my abilities. I float, and sometimes wave my arms around and kick a little.)

The wedding rehearsal was at noon, and I am proud to say that I figured out how to get there by bus. I am pretty good at navigating subway systems but always a little daunted by city buses. For some reason Tom and I have been walking in the wrong direction constantly since we've been here. One of us is as bad as the other, so managing the bus felt particularly victorious.

The wedding venue is quite hilarious but also sweet. It's in an old furniture store, so the place is packed with oddities. Outside is a funky overgrown garden where the wedding proper will take place, and inside there's a huge open room, big enough for tables and dance floor, and the 200 vases of flowers that I, along with Hannah's mom and aunt, spent the afternoon filling. That was a massive job, but the room will be lovely with so many blossoms and I'm excited to see it in its overwrought glory.

The day ended back at the hotel, where I found Tom showering off his sweaty afternoon, which he'd spent at James's house prepping for today's welcome party. Once he was clean we walked down the street to a Peruvian place . . . ah, Friday night in downtown Chicago, the young women dressed to the nines and their dates wearing nothing special . . . thick midwest summer air clogging the evening like a blanket . . . 

 Yesterday was so long. Our train ended up being six and a half hours late . . . not just because of the tree damage I told you about yesterday but because there was someone on the track in Indiana, so we had to wait quite a long time for cops to remove him. Unclear if he was in a vehicle or tying himself to the tracks or what, but something was going on.

We finally stepped out of Union Station and into Chicago at 5 p.m., and began our long schlepp to the hotel in 90 degree heat. And then, after unpacking and a quick shower, we headed out for dinner with James. Turns out I was almost too tired to eat, though I hadn't had a real meal for 24 hours, and Tom and I had both stiffened up after the long train ride and were hobbling around like witches. So J kindly drove us back to the hotel, where we collapsed into an exquisitely comfortable bed in front of a Mariners-Athletics game and both slept like rocks.

And now here I am, feeling much refreshed. Tom is currently messing around with the in-room coffee maker, and my younger son Paul is texting me from LaGuardia, and I believe that I have returned to being the kind of person who can hike all around Chicago and stay on my feet all day doing helpful errands for anyone who needs me. I guess we'll find soon out if that's true or not. . . .

Yesterday I said I would greet you this morning from Ohio. That is not the case. At some point overnight the train came to a halt, and now here we are, stopped east of Erie, Pennsylvania, because apparently a big storm dropped trees on the track ahead. The automated text to Tom's phone offers no clue about how long any of this will take. But safe to say, we won't arrive in Chicago anywhere close to on time.

Otherwise, though, the trip has been enjoyable, if drowsy. I've been reading back and forth between the Whitehead and the Penny novels, but I haven't done a lick of writing. Some of the blame has to be chalked up to the Dramamine I took for the bus ride, which sometimes makes me sleepy. But the rattle and roll of a moving train is a soporific in itself--though, at the same time, there's no way to get a solid night's sleep when you're sitting upright in a seat surrounded by people who won't stop talking on their phones.

So I guess that's about it for an update. It's too dark to see out the window. The cafe car isn't open for coffee yet. Somewhere ahead of us people are supposedly chainsawing trees off the track. I believe I'll go back to reading.

It's 5 a.m. in the little northern city by the sea, and a single cricket squeaks in the darkness. The air sifting through the windows is cool and crisp, and for the moment I am happy to be drinking hot coffee and wearing my old red bathrobe. But I have packed for heat. Temperatures in Chicago are supposed to be in the high 80s and 90s all week, with thunderstorms possible most afternoons. I expect to be sweaty and wilting, but at least summer clothes pack tighter than winter clothes do; and without any space-hogging sweaters and boots, I have room to stuff in a few extra clean shirts.

In a couple of hours our friend will arrive to haul us to the bus station, and the wedding adventure will begin: an hour-and-a-half ride to Boston's South Station and then, just after midday, we'll board the Lakeshore Limited and embark on our 22-hour ride to the Windy City. Tom is going to take advantage of the hiatus between bus arrival and train departure to hustle over to Chinatown and pick up takeout for lunch and dinner. It's always good to have fun things to eat on a long train trip.

I did end up acquiring a copy of Whitehead's Crook Manifesto, thanks to the altruistic generosity of my local bookstore owner. She called yesterday morning to say her distributor couldn't get the book to her before I was leaving, so she had checked with other bookstores in town and had tracked down one that had the book on the shelf. This is above-and-beyond service, don't you think? Librarians and booksellers: they are the greatest.

So now I have my four carefully chosen books, a travel cribbage board and a pack of cards, two poem-writing projects, a little notebook for writing down overheard conversations, a few shows to watch on my computer, a late afternoon Red Sox game to listen to, a friendly guy to cuddle up against, some salty snacks, a chocolate bar, a bag of as-yet unchosen Asian takeout, the prospect of a late-day beer from the cafe car, a pillow, a blanket, my toothbrush, the rattle of the rails . . . 

Tomorrow morning I will write to you from Ohio.

Today is departure eve, otherwise known as Don't Forget to Charge the Headphones I Hardly Ever Use Day and Will the Book I Ordered Be In Day and (sob) Chuckie Has to Go to the Cat Kennel Day. I hate parting with my darling Big Kitten, but he doesn't have the moxie to stay alone in the house for a week. So T will work a short day and come home for lunch, and then I will load up the Chuckster and drive him away to his motel.

Fingers crossed: things seem to have settled down in Vermont, and as of last night my sister was still planning to come to the wedding, which is a great relief to me. Nothing is easy here: she's got to figure out how to best get through O'Hare with a broken ankle, but she's eager for the party, and I am eager to hug her.

It looks like we might get some rain this afternoon, which is a very good thing. So I'll go for my walk this morning and then turn my thoughts to laundry and a few desk tasks--which will include choosing which two Grimm tales I want to focus on in my November Poetry Kitchen class. Over the past couple of months I've been steadily making my way through the tome of stories, taking notes on possibilities but not coming to conclusions. The time has come for me to pin down a pair so that when I return from Chicago I can jump straight into designing the class.

Who knew sitting on the couch reading fairy tales could count as work?

Monday morning of wedding week also happens to be the first day of school in Portland, so I expect to witness scads of shiny new sneakers and backpacks this morning when I'm out on my walk. Stevens Avenue, the main drag in this neighborhood, is home to Longfellow Elementary, Lincoln Middle School, and Deering High, all sited within a quarter mile of one another. So kids throng thick and fast around here on a school day.

Tom and I spent much of yesterday communally packing, and we did eventually manage to fit everything into our luggage, though not always in the places we'd envisioned. Tom's dress shoes are now tucked into my suitcase, and my wedding gift is sandwiched in Tom's garment bag, but they're packed, and that's what matters. Meanwhile, all day long, we were also anxious: my dad had a sudden health crisis, and it seemed possible that my sister and her husband might not be able to leave my parents to come to the wedding. As of last night, things seem to have settled down, but life in Vermont is perpetually dicey.

Today I'll deal with my regular Monday chores: clean bathrooms, wash floors, water the garden, catch up on desk work. If I have time I might freeze a batch of chard or process some basil or parsley, but if I don't get to that stuff, fine. This is why I have a small garden this year: so I don't need to fret over any of it.

I've been working on some poem revisions, and I've also got a writing project reserved for the train--a Poetry Lab idea involving a written musical phrase that Teresa, Jeannie, and I have broken into three sections. Each of us will take one part and use it as a prompt in some way. Because my section resembles train tracks, I thought I would use the sounds and sights of the train trip as part of my material. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

Meanwhile, Tom will have the window seat and a gorgeous new-to-him camera to play with, so the two of us will be contentedly preoccupied.

You see that I am trying to stay happy and forward-thinking. But I am worried about my fragile parents, and about my sister who (if she's able to leave) will be traveling with a broken ankle. Optimism can be hard work.

Another cool morning, though if it's like yesterday temperatures will heat up quickly. Still, for the moment I'm enjoying the coziness of a bathrobe and hot coffee. Although my hair loves humidity, the rest of me is not too sorry that autumn is on the way.

Outside a catbird is squawking, a plane is taking off, but otherwise it is blessedly quiet, for a change. We've had a crew of wacko tree guys in the neighborhood for the past couple of days. They did not exude competence for all kinds of reasons--including the fact that they preferred to chainsaw in the dark and didn't really know how to back up their trailers. However, they must be dirt cheap because they kept moving from one yard to another, apparently with homeowner approval, though I don't think they knew a thing about trees other than Cut them down! and they exuded the ambience of bleary-eyed denizens of the VFW. Anyway, here's hoping they are finally gone.

I cleared out some flowerbeds and did some weeding yesterday but, more importantly, I finally got my compost bins emptied and the big pile turned before the leaves begin to fall in earnest. It wasn't a huge job but it was heavy and hot and dirty, and I'm glad to have it out of my hair. Last weekend, firewood; this weekend, compost--all so I can focus on next weekend: wedding. To the dulcet strains of a Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader, I spent much of the rest of the day making a giant, complicated, cross-checked list of everything I need to bring to Chicago, which is way, way too much stuff. Fortunately, several years ago I decided to buy both a purse and a backpack that are slightly too small, and you'd be amazed at how much that's helped me manage what I pack. At least it amazes my kids. When I told Paul I was bringing only four books on this trip, he was shocked. He'd guessed at least six.

Today I'll haul out the trimmer and deal with the grass, such as it is, and I'll do the grocery shopping while I still have my car available. And I'll figure out something or other for dinner. Last night I made a beautiful ratatouille--summer squash, colorful peppers, heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, sweet onion, freshly cured garlic, fistfuls of basil. We ate it alongside steamed mixed grains; local cantalope tossed with agave nectar, rice vinegar, and fresh mint; and, of all things, Salisbury steak. If you think of Salisbury steak as TV dinner fodder, think again. The homemade version--tender meat patties simmered in mushroom gravy--is entirely delicious and, for two people who are juggling leftovers, it's a more manageable version of meatloaf. I happened to make these with ground beef, but they'd be good with ground chicken or turkey as well.

I'm enjoying a slow start today: a treat, given my usual early-morning extremes. It's already full daylight outside. Goldfinches are chirping among the bachelors' buttons, and an angry squirrel is sputtering why you oughta, no doubt a walnut-related tiff with another squirrel. That walnut tree does not promote neighborhood harmony. The local squirrels spend all day every day being furious with each other over who's eating a walnut, who took the other's walnut: gripe, gripe, gripe from dawn till dusk. They'll have a lot of fences to mend once the season is over.

I did manage to get to my haircut appointment yesterday, thanks to my neighbor's car, and I also messed around with poem revision and even, to my surprise, submitted a few pieces to a journal. I don't know what came over me: usually I'll scrub toilets rather than submit poems. But now I need to turn my thoughts to yard work and errand running, and no doubt I'll be juggling phone calls and emails about wedding stuff and wrestling with the impossibilities of packing and trying to remember to do dull things like get the mail held.

Anyway, for the moment, I'm not doing anything other than write to you, which is restful. One large issue about this long trip is the question of how many books do I bring? We've got two 20-hour train rides to fill, which I calculate as requiring at least four books. They need to be paperbacks, for reasons of weight and space, and they must be the sort of books one can enjoy in distracting circumstances: thus, no Henry James or Moby-Dick.

The idea is to pair two paperbacks for each leg of the trip. Plus, I've got a writing project I'll be working on, some shows to watch, probably some baseball games to listen to. Tom and I will play cards and eat snacks. Possibly we'll even sleep a little. But the book choice is central.

Thus, last week I ordered Colson Whitehead's Crook's Manifesto from the bookstore (though now  I'm starting to worry that it won't come in on time). I felt it would offer the correct level of enjoyment for a train trip: familiar likable characters in a situation I haven't yet read about, in a landscape I enjoy; some snappy prose and a little suspense along the way. But I needed three more books, so I went to the library yesterday morning to see what paperback novels might be available. My library branch is very small so I knew the choices would be limited. On the other hand, my criteria were simple: I haven't read it before; the quality of the prose won't drive me to drink; the book will immerse me in a place and a situation that I find interesting in some way. 

This is what I came home with:

Ruth Moore's Spoonhandle (1946): Moore grew up on Gotts Island, a fishing community off Southwest Harbor, Maine, and became a fine regional novelist. This is her second book, set in the Depression, and dealing with locals versus summer people. I know the landscape well because this is where T and I go twice a year when we stay on Mount Desert Island at our friend's cottage. Downside: slightly too fat for backpack comfort. Plus side: Moore is a good prose stylist, and knows how to dispense irony.

Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place (1983): Ernaux won the Nobel a couple of years ago, but thus far I've only read one of her books, which was about big-box stores in contemporary France. This one is older: a memoir about her father, born into a laboring family who, according to the back cover, made "a slow ascent toward material comfort" while remaining difficult and distant with his wife and children. Plus-and-minus: very thin, so ideal for a backpack but not for enduring entertainment. Also, I didn't adore the book of hers I read before, though I do think about it often, so I am willing to try again. And I like learning about France.

Louise Penny's The Cruelest Month (2007): You already know who Louise Penny is, but I've only read one of her mysteries before. However, I did read it on vacation, so I can attest that it held up very well during a week of cold wet weather in a drafty cottage, a week punctuated by three naps per day and too much red wine with dinner. Like most of her procedurals, this one is set in Quebec, and I recall enjoying the immersion in its landscape and its French-English cultural push-pull. Also, the characters were various and easy to tell apart and I didn't instantly figure out the ending, so that was entertaining. Downsides: Slightly cringy prose style that may force me to exclaim "Why aren't you John Le Carre?" Also this copy is kind of beat up. Can it endure an overstuffed backpack?

Another heavy, sticky morning, but as far as I can tell, no rain fell overnight. Our drought goes on and on. 

And this household is back in vehicle limbo for the foreseeable future. Tom can't get anyone to look at his truck's power steering till after we return from Chicago, so once again I am carless. I know I shouldn't be grouchy about this, but I am a little. I've already spent too much of this summer borrowing other people's cars and begging for rides, and I hate having to start all over again. But Tom needs to take my car to work, so I am stuck.

Thus, today I'll be driving my generous neighbor's car across town so I can get my hair cut. Under normal circumstances I might just cancel the appointment, but that's not really an option on wedding-countdown week.

Otherwise, the day is fairly open. I'm working on a poem draft as well as web copy for next summer's conference. I'm rereading Byatt's Whistling Woman. I may start sussing out my November Poetry Kitchen class or the workshop I'll be leading at the Belfast Poetry Festival in October. I've got a couple of smaller appearances to prep for: a morning at a Jersey City high school in September, a morning in a Bates College class in October. And my Monson Arts high school classes begin in late September.

Yesterday I met with my friend Gibson, who's the executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He wanted to talk about how the organization can support me--specifically, through grant writing and promotion and helping to set up programming around the state. It was a really helpful conversation. Of course I need all the aid I can get with that sort of administrative work. But it was also good just to talk to a knowledgeable friend about the odd discomforts of the position: its amorphous expectations, its political undertow. I have a fairly clear idea about who I am as a poet in private life. But the public role remains mysterious.

What he made clear was that I need to do what I already know how to do: work with kids and teachers, work with community members . . . but also read books and write poems and continue being a striving, active maker. I already knew this internally, but it was good to hear it from someone else. A lot of people have a lot of ideas about what I should be doing, and I haven't always been able to align them with my actual capacities. Imposter syndrome is incurable. But it is possible to stop paying attention to it.

Last night's dreams have left a blur of sadness. They weren't scary; more, poignant, elegiac. But suddenly what arises most vividly is a bright bowl of freshly harvested, high-bush cranberries sitting on a table in front of me, and my hands in them, cleaning out stalks and stems. The jewel red of the berries, the pallor of my hands. I wasn't the main character of these dreams, more like a Nick Carraway kind of observer. Other family members came and went, ages all mismatched, old ones young, young ones aging, and the place was the Pennsylvania farm, setting of my summer childhood, but I was only a watcher, cleaning cranberries at a kitchen table, though the fruit has no real-life association with that place. Dreams are so very odd.

Yesterday ended up being a mishmash of errands as I spent way too much time driving around mall land trying to track down a few small items for next week's adventure. But wasting hours in South Portland turned out to be the right choice because, as T was pulling out of our parking space after last night's movie outing, the power steering in his truck suddenly died. He did manage to get us home, but not easily, which means that Gloria the shiny Mazda is going to have to take over as construction vehicle for the next few days. The timing isn't terrible as I'm not on the road for work until after we get back from Chicago. But I do have to figure out how I'm going to get across town for my haircut tomorrow. I guess I'll think of something.

Today I have two afternoon meetings scheduled, but the morning will be quiet. Maybe I'll look at notebook blurts or start drafting web copy for next summer's conference. I could start putting together class plans, but I don't think I'll worry about that quite yet. Maybe I'll work in the garden, if the sun's not too hot.

I'm unsure, undecided, unmoored. I don't know what I want for the hours or what will happen. It's not a bad state to be in. Maybe the dreams are still dreaming. Outside, a flock of gulls spirals overhead, screeching, complaining. Inside, Young Chuck paddles a paw in his chow dish. Upstairs, T sighs. The bed creaks as he turns onto his side. The small sounds of home life, layering against dream life, the private, inscrutable country of ghosts.

This morning I'm feeling sad about Dolly Parton's death, yet what a good life . . . a model for how to nurture both the self and generosity of spirit. I was a child in 1970s Appalachia, so I have a fish-eye awareness of the details of the world she sang about, and dramatized, and embodied, and performed. How does one portray trashy with love, not with condescension or self-loathing? I use the term here because my own family wrestled with it directly, veering between comic embrace and shame. I remember, after first meeting my dear friend Ray, he asked me if my relatives were trashy. He himself was from Appalachian Kentucky: for him, the term was a secret handshake. We would know something precious and vulnerable about one another if we faced it.

Dolly figured this all out. And how to laugh and be deeply serious at the same time. How to celebrate but not sugarcoat a heritage. How to change her tune when change was necessary. I am honored to have shared the planet with her.

**

Yesterday's school thing at Merrill Auditorium seemed to go well enough . . . at least, the listeners laughed and sighed in the right places, so I'm hoping the poem got across okay. It was very odd to read to such a massive audience. I couldn't help but recall my own entree into the world of Maine education: as a long-term substitute music teacher for 90 kids in a K-8 school in rural Somerset County--a far cry from 1,500 staff members across multiple sites in the biggest city in the state. Of course, in the grand scheme of city schools, the Portland system is tiny, not a patch on New York City or Chicago. But I daresay my Monson high schoolers would have been flummoxed at the sight of so many faces. The difference between our rural schools and our urban schools is vast. 

After I got home, I did manage to finish and ship that editing project. So today I'll be catching up on some smaller desk tasks, running a few errands, maybe weeding a flowerbed, maybe working on a poem draft. Tonight T and I will go out to watch an old Robert Mitchum noir called Out of the Past. It's nice to have a looser day ahead, a clear-ish desk, an evening to anticipate.

It's a touch cooler and less humid this morning than it has been. A breath of autumn sifts through the screens, and the wren's tea kettle tea kettle tea kettle is a little more subdued. One ripe walnut, then another, clonks down from the neighbors' tree, a sign that as soon as night lifts the local squirrels will hurl themselves back into harvest hysteria.

This morning I've got my big school event to get through, and afterward maybe I'll manage to finish the editing project--if not today, then certainly tomorrow. Given that it's a 500-pager, I'm relieved I've been able to plow through it so steadily. But it needs to be off my desk, and soon.

Suddenly the neighborhood falls silent, the only sound the bare murmur of the highway in the distance. Even the wren is mute, even the crickets. But now a cardinal speaks--cheer, cheer, chip chip chip--a cricket responds, in the half-dark a squirrel scuttles toward the walnut tree, and the day resumes.

I'm thinking about today's big event but I'm not feeling too nervous. Schools don't tend to make me anxious, though government events apparently do. I more or less know where I am with teachers, even when they're crabby. And surely a tale about a hapless middle school basketball team will lift a few spirits. That's my intent, anyway. To tell a good story. To help them forget to be scared by poems.

Night-morning, soft, black, damp. All windows open; air waves dense with cicadas and crickets. Above their thick racket a single whistling cardinal: Cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer. 

But already the black is moderating to gray. The neighbors' pale house looms. Sky flickers among branches. The cardinal falls silent as the insects drone on.

This will be a packed week: the big Portland Public Schools event tomorrow; meetings on Thursday; and all the while cranking away at that editing project; catching up on harvest stuff; undertaking the frivolous chores of wedding prep, like making sure I get my hair cut.

And Monday, as usual, is housework day--wrestling with bathrooms and floors, then buckling down to desk work, though I am going to take a break for a midmorning walk with a friend.

Yesterday I dealt with grass and watering; harvested another bushel of chard; baked a plum cake. I've still got my herb crops to work on this week: I need to freeze basil and parsley, cut sage for air-drying, pack up the already-dry oregano and thyme. Thank goodness I didn't plant a real vegetable garden this year. I would be insane right now, and I'm already a little bit crazed as it is.

We got a spit of rain yesterday afternoon, but nothing that counts as real moisture. We might get a few more drops today but they won't be the deep, days-long rain we need. Drought is settling in, and it's disheartening.

Still, without rain I was able to finish the firewood job yesterday. I trundled the rest of the seasoned logs from shed to basement hatch, tossed them in, then stacked everything, organized kindling, swept the bark mess up from the floor, and now chilly nights can arrive whenever they feel like it. I will have another round of firewood chores: in a couple of weeks we'll get a delivery of green logs that will need to be stacked in the woodshed, where they will dry out for next winter's use. But the basement transfer always feels especially big. I love the sight of a swept floor, tidy stacks, everything neat and utilitarian and ready for winter.

Today I'll deal with grass, such as it is. The only thing green in the lawn is straggly crabgrass, but it sure does like to grow, even without water. Then Tom and I will work on wrapping wedding gifts, which is more complicated than it sounds because we also need to figure out how to carry them in our luggage. And our luggage situation will be extra complicated, not only because of the gifts but also because of wedding outfits and the two overnights we'll be spending on the train.

For the moment, though, I'm just happy to be enjoying Sunday morning--two cups of coffee instead of one, the pleasure of knowing that T is upstairs in bed instead of flying out the door to work, a comfortable idle alone in my couch corner . . . 

Firewood in the cellar, sauce in the freezer, poems in the notebook. Let the winds howl.

Yesterday was dominated by tomatoes. I started cutting up vegetables for the stock pots at 8 a.m., and we sat down for dinner just before 8 p.m. The job still isn't quite over--I need to ladle the finished sauce into freezer boxes--but the cooking/pureeing/cooking-again stages are done.

So that's one big late-summer chore completed. Now if I can finish moving firewood into the basement this weekend, I'll feel even better. I've do have one more week at home before we leave for Chicago, but it's speckled with meetings and events. In the meantime, T is shopping for a new front door. That has become his big pressing project. The casing is rotting away, and the sag and gaps have gotten extreme, but as usual with home repairs, side issues are complicating matters--in this case the rickety wooden front stoop that some previous terrible handyman built over an existing busted-up brick one. The whole thing is going to have to be removed before T can get the old door casing out and the new one in. Blah.

Anyway, that's the Alcott House update for Saturday, August 22, 2026. Tuesday marked our 9-year anniversary of owning this place, and it remains shabby and mostly unrenovated, but such is life with a carpenter who has to work full time for somebody else. Still, we are heading into winter with a brand-new furnace and a reliable car and a free foraged dishwasher, and plenty of firewood and tomato sauce and blueberries and wild mushrooms, and it looks like we might get a new front door as well. Plus, I cannot forget the fantastic daughter-in-law we're about to acquire. So do not think I am complaining.

No dreams and a solid sleep last night, thank goodness. And now it's Friday, and my thoughts are turning toward the kitchen. Yesterday I brought home twenty pounds of canning tomatoes, so today is sauce day: chopping up and cooking down piles of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and herbs; grinding the softened vegetables through the hand mill; then simmering the puree with a knob of butter and a pinch of sugar until it starts to thicken. It will be an all-day affair, though with plenty of space for me to work at my desk, toss firewood, even wander down to the bookstore and choose a couple of treats for my long train trip.

In Harmony I usually had to buy tomatoes in bulk if I wanted to preserve anything for the winter. My garden just didn't get enough late-summer sun, and the growing season was so short. Here, I could grow enough on my own, but I was still mostly ripening them in the house: sauce was always a late-September task.

Now that I've reduced my vegetable plots, I'm back to relying on bulk field crops, and that is just fine. These tomatoes are cheap, gorgeous, and organic; the peppers and herbs are from my own overflowing plants; and I'll have to break down and buy grocery-store onions, but oh well. For a non-Italian I'm a pretty good Italian cook. This evening I'll be packing the freezer with divine homemade sauce, and what could be better? Drop by for some ziti, why don't you?

I am just now attempting to recover from a horrendous night of insomnia bracketed by terrible dreams, which began when I woke in a panic about the hole under our front door (we really do have a hole but the panic was manufactured by my brain) and ended with dream-me helplessly watching a car careen around the downtown roads and then crash full speed into a tree in the park, at which moment the alarm went off.

Not surprisingly, I'm still stunned. The transition between dream and waking was so abrupt, the dreams themselves so vicious, that I can't quite believe I've returned to the world of the living.

But here's the Carolina wren singing. Here's the cup of hot black coffee. Here's Chuckie, clanking his breakfast dish. I must be home again. I hope so, I really do.

It's Thursday, as far as I can recall. The miasma must be beginning to lift  . . . Ahead, the usual tasks wave their small flags at me. Stripping the bed. Washing the sheets. Walking. Firewood. Editing.

It's always difficult to transfer dreams onto the page. Nightmares in particular look so thin, sometimes even comic. But these dreams had nothing comic about them. My panic about the hole under the door was panic only . . . it had no accompanying narrative, no beast tunneling into the house, no embodied force of evil. In contrast, the car crash dream was all too vivid. I sat helplessly on the curb, among many other people, watching the moment unfold. The car was a white 60s-era muscle car, red-trimmed, broad and low-slung. The unseen driver seemed to have no control of the steering wheel. The car clipped one sidewalk, bounced into another, spinning, airborne; then hit the ground, and purposefully sped straight into a giant oak.

There are things as a poet I don't want to write about but feel obliged to write about. Bad dreams are not in that category. I don't want to write about them. I just want them to go away. Nonetheless, they do creep into my poems, even as I try to keep them out. My long poem, "Mr. Kowalski," arose from a bad dream.

I hope this car-crash dream doesn't become a poem, but I don't have control over that, apparently. Already I've said too much about it.

Another humid half-dark dawn--crickets pumping out their repetitions, a wren's song ornamenting them. I like the way night begins to set its claim at this time of year, clinging to morning, encroaching on evening: a preview of sweaters and lamplight and wood fires, even when the air is still fully summer's.

So far the week has been a desk-and-firewood grind, as it's needed to be. I must get this editing project done and this firewood stacked before I leave for Chicago. But this afternoon I'll take a bit of a break and spend a couple of hours talking to Teresa and Jeannie about our Sappho prompts. I think I may have gone overboard with my responses, but what else is new.

In the meantime, an interesting thing has happened: I got an email from an administrator in the superintendent's office at the Portland Public Schools. Turns out she's a Haverford alum who read the article about me in the magazine, and she invited me to speak and read at a gathering of all 1,500 district employees at the big downtown auditorium next Tuesday. Naturally I said yes: the idea of reading my comic middle school basketball poem to a big crowd of school folks fills me with delight. I may squirm at photo ops, but hanging around with teachers is my bread and butter, and I am always ready to try to make them happy. What's more, I now have a contact in the superintendent's office who wants to meet with me about district professional development, etc., and I am already simmering thoughts about ways to use this as an opportunity to bring together not just city teachers but those in districts beyond Portland. I'm feeling hopeful and excited, which is a good change from feeling nervous and overwhelmed.

A little rain fell yesterday--not nearly as much as the garden needs, but enough to prevent me from hauling firewood after I'd finished up my desk chores for the day. There is nothing good about handling wet logs. But I did get the house cleaned, and I did work my way through a hundred pages of editing, so stuff was accomplished.

Today: another giant editing push, another round of firewood hauling. That's the kind of week this will be.

A wind-breath, thick and damp, fumbles at the open windows. In the semi-darkness a Carolina wren solos above a cricket-drone continuo. Chuckie crunches up some chow in the kitchen.

Yesterday evening I got notice that the Academy of American Poets has posted three of my poems on its website. All are from previously published books; if you're one of this blog's eight regular readers, you've probably seen them before. But the fact is: this is the first time that a major national poetry clearinghouse has ever taken notice of my work.

I know the state laureateship was the trigger for the invitation, a blip on the po-biz radar that suddenly made me visible. I'm pleased, of course, and also gratified--even this small bit of national recognition feels like candy. But at age 61, I'm also bemused. I've been writing intensely for 30 years, and over the decades the audience for my work has increased from nonexistent to small. It's easy, and obvious, to carp about invisibility, to yearn for fame. But invisibility is also extremely cozy. And I'm not, in retrospect, at all sorry to have spent so many years under a blanket, flashlight in hand, writing and writing and writing.

It was a good weekend for getting home stuff done. Yesterday I sowed arugula and spinach for the fall, lugged about a third of the firewood from the shed into the basement and stacked it there, caught up with groceries, and then T and I walked over to the University of New England's art gallery to look at a puzzling show of avant-garde musical notation--compelling in its way, but difficult to imagine into sound, though I am considering the potential of using one of the examples as a structural writing prompt. Still, the show was interesting if confounding, and we had a good walk together.

Today: housework, and then I'll start a new editing project, which I expect will consume much of my desk time this week. I need to finish dealing with firewood; I should turn my compost pile before the leaves start to fall. I'm expecting a delivery of twenty pounds of canning tomatoes later in the week, so Friday is already scheduled as sauce and freezer day. However, I also yanked my back yesterday afternoon (while sitting in a chair shucking corn: so stupid), and while it's feeling better this morning, I ought to remember not to be an idiot, and that is often hard for me.

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words about the crown of sonnets. I still can't quite believe I wrote it, but poems can be like that sometimes. A subject demands its form.

Yesterday I harvested a bushel of chard, a half-bushel of parsley, a half-bushel of basil--amazing production from this tiny plot of mine--which tied me down to a morning spent cleaning and processing for the freezer. Then I figured I might as well keep going with the kitchen fun, so I simmered a batch of sauce (tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, baby leeks), baked a peach-blueberry crisp, and eventually dropped a batch of meatballs into the sauce and served it over penne.

If you like tender, velvety meatballs, you ought to try mine. They are outstanding in fresh summer sauce, and I brag with confidence, even with zero Italian blood in my veins.

Yesterday, between kitchen jobs, I messed around with my Sappho drafts, updated blog pages, answered emails, read the Byatt novel, went for a walk. There will probably be more such this-and-thats today, amid firewood hauling and lettuce sowing and grocery shopping, and a drive down to the fish market to buy salmon for dinner. Among other things, T and I are starting to match up our calendars so that we can figure out how our schedules will overlap this fall. He's decided to come with me on a few of my work jaunts, which I love, though we won't always be able travel together. Still, just knowing he's around, or on his way; that we can meet up somewhere on an evening: the thought does assuage my homebody yearnings.

***

You might remember, earlier this summer, my excitement about accidentally writing a crown of sonnets. Well, the sequence is out now, in the current issue of Hole in the Head Review, if you're interested in seeing how the project unfolded.

Last night's baseball game was just about perfect: balmy temperatures, a fun crowd, three homers for the Sea Dogs (after each of which a cheesy lighthouse rose portentously from behind the centerfield wall and shot off a few delightfully lame sparklers), a fantastic throw-on-a-dime-from-left-field out at second, and even a pitching position player! This game had everything: plus, a long sweet stroll to and fro, a beer and a steak sandwich, and a fireworks show afterward. It was likely the only time we'll get to the park this summer, and what a good night we chose.

To Chuck's chagrin, I wallowed in bed a little too long this morning, no doubt thanks to the fine sleeping weather (56 degrees this morning, the coolest it's been for weeks). But now Big Kitten breakfast has been served, coffee brewed and carried up to the dozy guy still in bed, and I am curled into my couch corner, happy to be wrapped in ye olde warm red bathrobe, looking forward to enjoying my Saturday morning second cup of coffee--pleasantly aimless, a weekend at home ahead.

I've got a few chores I could do--plant a fall crop of salad greens; start moving firewood into the basement. But I'm also completely willing to be sidetracked. Right at this moment I'm a cat with the dregs of a bowl of cream, a spider with a neatly packaged fly--which is another way of saying, I drafted six poems I like yesterday.

Six! All day I wrote and wrote, and wandered, and wrote, and read and reread, and fidgeted, and wandered and wrote, and lay on my back, and wandered again, and wrote, and tinkered, and wrote. Six poems, all of which contain the same eleven words--sometimes fractured, sometimes exact. The words are Sappho's Fragment 53 in Anne Carson's English translation. I can't write them out for you here because the translation is under copyright, so look it up yourself if you care to. All I can say is that the words gave me characters, and a family situation, and a setting; a completely unrelated photograph entered the fray; and then my imagination could not stop fizzing.

Yesterday's six poems are only half the story. Over the past week I'd already written six others. Together they are becoming a tale-in-verse, set in the 1940s, in an American city . . . and yet the Sappho source material remains alive.

A day like yesterday is heaven.

Unlikely as rain seemed in yesterday's forecast, chance came through like a champ: we not only enjoyed a decent steady rain for a couple of hours in the morning but had a late-afternoon thunderstorm that transformed the street into a riverbed. Other neighborhoods dealt with wind and hail and uprooted trees, but all I saw here was downpour and plenty of it. There's always a lot of runoff with that kind of storm, but some of it soaked into the gardens, and some rain is way, way better than the nothing we had before.

It was a good day all around. I saw a bluebird during my a walk in the cemetery. I baked a lemon-brown butter loaf cake that came out really well. I wrote three new poem drafts linked to my self-imposed Sappho prompt. I read a chunk of the Byatt novel, washed bed linens, talked to my kid on the phone, went out to write in the evening with my friends.

Today will be another home day, and then in the evening T and I will stroll over to Hadlock Stadium to watch our first (and only) Sea Dogs game of the season. Sometimes we get to the stadium a few times during the season, but this one has been so crowded. I feel lucky we managed to snag an evening . . . and now a balmy forecast, fireworks afterward. Baseball is a fine way to play-act the sweetness of summer.

Will it rain today? The forecast is for slight chance followed by chance, neither of which sounds promising. I did water the garden yesterday morning, so I guess I can postpone till the afternoon and see what's what then. For now we have another dim and humid birdsong morning, rumble of plane and train, the little city rubbing its eyes, reaching for its coffee.

Yesterday's radio date went well enough, I think. It was fun to chatter into a mike, and I enjoyed the station's bustle of music and people. The show is called Passionate People and it's archived somewhere on the WMPG site, so you can listen if you feel like it.

As far as I can recall, I don't have any obligations written on the calendar for today, other than tonight's writing group. That means I can keep working on my Sappho poems, keep working on chapbook ideas, keep rereading A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, which I pulled off the shelf yesterday after finishing the baseball book. I'll wash sheets, maybe get to dealing with the basil crop or freezing chard. Or maybe I'll just mess around with words all day. That would be an unexpected luxury.

Whatever else transpires, I will go for a walk this morning. Walking rhythms are always a big help to me when I feel as if I'm on the edge of a burst of writing. Inhabiting that cadence both settles my fidgets and urges my wordlessness into the air. I won't call those fragments thoughts, because I'm not really a thinking poet, at least not at the earliest stages of a poem. But, for whatever reason, walking is sometimes a way to start saying.

This morning I'm being interviewed on WMPG, the radio station of the University of Southern Maine, 10 a.m., if you're interested in listening in. It's been years since I've done a radio interview, so I forget how the whole rigmarole works, but I bet it will come back to me quickly--as long I don't start getting hyperaware of my small speech imperfections: how I pop p and blur s . . . things I never notice in daily speech but that sometimes leap into my awareness during readings and recordings and such.

The interview will be just a half-hour blip out of the morning, and then I'll walk home and get back to work on a Poetry Lab prompt that's turning out to be quite productive. Teresa, Jeannie, and I decided to play with Sappho fragments, and I've been reusing the same one over and over in different ways to create a series of linked character-sketch poems. In the afternoon Teresa and I will talk about Aurora Leigh, and at some point in the day I'll water the garden and harvest basil for pesto. Plus, I've got eggplant and peppers and tomatoes and fresh onions--a bounty waiting for me to invent something wonderful for dinner.

Yesterday I caught up on mowing, weeding, and a few other garden chores, meaning that for the moment my homestead demands are minimal--just the usual daily laundry and cooking. So I'm glad the Sappho prompt is making me excitable, just when I have a little time and space to play.

And both boys phoned yesterday, and I went for a lunchtime walk with another of my favorite young people, someone I've known since she was two years old . . . and nothing matches the lift in my heart when I hear any of those dear voices on the other end of the line. The wedding, of course, is a primary topic, but despite the annoyance of the expense and the fret over plans, what we talk about is our excitement about being together at this big and wonderful party, dressed up in our silly loud outfits, playing our roles, being giddy and joyous together. 

We might have gotten a few drops of rain overnight, but nothing useful. The garden is hot and tired, the grass is spindly and brown, yet the humidity is so high that I can't convince any laundry to dry on the outside lines. It's difficult to dredge up enthusiasm for yard work.

Still, this morning I'll water, and maybe do some trimming and pruning. I'm meeting a friend for a noon walk, and Chuck has his annual vet checkup midafternoon, but the early hours are mine. So once I muscle through the outdoor chores and today's emails and paperwork, I might be able sit down for an hour or so and think about new poems, or even the chapbook. I hope so.

Yesterday I caught up on my Aurora Leigh reading, and I'm still slowly making my way through Grimm as well as the Dan Barry book about that 33-inning Pawtucket Red Sox game. It's difficult to feel brisk during these dog days. But one bright spot is tomato season, and yesterday I used up some of our beauties in gazpacho. My favorite recipe is an old M.F.K. Fisher version from the 1940s that calls for crushing the herbs and vegetables with pestle and then adding "half a glass of olive oil" and "a few glasses of water." A juice glass? A water tumbler? I love having no idea.

***

If you're interested, that article about me is out in the current issue of Haverford. I'm not sure my path to being a poet was exactly "unlikely," but I guess the word made a good headline.

It was another brutally hot day driving yesterday, but the town cooled down a little over night, so this morning I turned off the A/C and opened the house windows, and now Chuck is happily ensconced beside the screen door. He survived his two bachelor days without problem: our neighbor dropped by to give him his breakfast and remind him that he was adored, and there are no signs that he reverted to his youthful gut problems while we were gone. But since our return, he has spent all of his time in our laps or in our bed or whirling around our ankles, so clearly he is relieved that the band is back together again.

And here comes Monday . . . housework, garden work, desk work, and an enthusiastic, still-a-little-bit-worried cat. Though we were only gone for two nights, I feel like I've slipped out of gear somehow. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing around here?

Now the big Chicago trip looms, and these remaining August days are scattered on the path like breadcrumbs.

The heat just keeps simmering, but yesterday after dinner T and I finally got out for a walk. This part of Vermont was settled as dairy country, orchard country--open rolling fields, orderly trees: a domesticated prettiness that is nothing at all like the scrabbled forests, compressed skies, and stony dooryards of central Maine. The residents of these places are equally different from one another. Still, both regions are labeled rural New England, as if merely not being city or suburb drops them into the same bucket.

I wonder if I would become a poet if I'd spent a quarter-century in the Champlain Valley instead of Somerset County, Maine. There's something so visually unchallenging about this landscape, whereas Harmony confounded me at every turn.

Of course there is struggle everywhere. I would have wrestled, no matter where I was. Something would have happened.

But what happened to me was the woods.

Dog in Winter

Dawn Potter 

 

Up the boggy headland, frozen now, where a stone fence

Submerged in snow and earth-sink hints at pasture

So long vanished that the woods are convinced

Grassland never existed, two bodies climb—one fast,

Black, doe-agile; one slogging and foot-bound

Like a superannuated tortoise.  Guess which is me.

Easy to badmouth my grace but oddly hard to expound

On the postcard beauties of our workaday scenery—

Giant pines draped with frosting, wisp of chimney cloud

Threading skyward, and behind the frosted window

A glorious wall of books, lamp-lit; a dear bowed head.

In tales, common enchantment always merits less than woe,

            And perhaps I should collapse on the stoop like a starved Jane Eyre,

            Pleading heat and mercy. But I earn my joy. I mean, I live here.

 

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

We arrived at my sister's place in Vermont just as night and a rainstorm were settling in. Gloria did beautifully on her longest adventure to date, and her fancy features--those blind-spot alerts, for instance--really do take some of the stress out of highway driving. I felt almost relaxed behind the wheel.

Things are unusually loosey-goosey here as my sister, who is her household's action-packed organizer, broke her ankle a couple of weeks ago and is more or less tied to the couch. So she won't be charging off into fast walks or rounding up everyone for Fun. And my parents certainly won't be. It will be a weekend of sitting, which is just as well because the weather is terrible--hot and drippingly humid. Yesterday, when we stopped at the rest area in New Hampshire around 6:30 p.m., temperatures were still in the 90s. I like all kinds of weather, but this stuff is a challenge.

I brought two books to read: Aurora Leigh and Dan Barry's history of the longest game in baseball history--the 33-inning game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that took place in Rhode Island on Easter weekend in 1981. I was a junior in high school at the time, only a few miles away from McCoy Stadium, so for me the book is an evocation of time and place as well as the tale of a game. The book is a bit sentimental, as sportswriting can be, but the whiff of early 1980s Rhode Island is hard for me to resist.

The humidity around here has become ridiculous, and the A/C, reluctantly turned on last night, has thus far barely made a dent.

We're both groggy this morning because we had our second bat incident of the summer, which was unfortunate as T has to work all day and then we'll be driving to Vermont--that is, I will be driving, as he has yet to sit behind Gloria's wheel and will be exhausted to boot.

At least I'm not too scheduled today, so I can grab a nap if needed. I'd planned to get the grass mowed this morning, but the humidity is so heavy that I can't stand even the thought of dragging that heavy trimmer around the yard. Things will have to stay as they are: it's not like we're the only house in town with wispy shaggy patchy August grass.

Despite the miserable air, I will go for my walk this morning. I was so rushed yesterday morning--meeting stacked upon meeting--that I didn't manage to get outside, and that's never a good thing. I have a few errands to run today, I need to pack and deal with cat stuff, but otherwise I can be stupid and under-slept without damaging much.

Though the word meeting connotes tedium and wasted time, yesterday's were really useful. We made big progress in shaping next year's version of the conference, and that is a load off my mind. Actually much of what I got done this week is a load off my mind, including my beginning work on the chapbook. Going through my earlier collections, I began to see a particular thread I might follow, and I was unexpectedly pleased by some of those young poems. It's encouraging to note that I wasn't always a wordy self-involved yoinck (though sometimes I definitely was).

Anyway: today. Hot. Humid. A little blurred. But bat-free.

It sure is humid out there. My hair is curling like crazy, and so are the paperback covers. Through the open screens, late-summer cicadas scrape their thick sandy endless hum across the hours. Beyond the continuo, a gull screeches, a screen door slaps.

I'd like to hang sheets on the line, but will laundry dry today? It seems unlikely.

Despite the stickiness, the house has not felt ridiculously hot, and I spent most of the day beside the window in my little study, wandering between chair and standing desk: reading for the chapbook project, reading my kid's screenplay, reading Aurora Leigh, searching for a poem to read at the wedding; editing the Substack piece, drafting a fundraising letter, working on conference paperwork, recording poems for a class . . . so much to juggle, but I am making progress.

Tomorrow afternoon we leave for Vermont, and I'd like to imagine that my desk will be cleared off--not probable, but at least the lingering to-do list will be shorter. The manuscript I was editing has gone back to the author. The draft letter has gone out to its readers. The new Poetry Lab Notes post is now available on Substack. I'm glimpsing a couple of possible routes for the chapbook collection.

Today will start with a faculty meeting, but then I'm thinking I might work on some new poems. I'm feeling the swirl of the unsaid rising and shifting behind my eyes--an actual physical sensation, and one I should pay attention to, because it often presages writing. Something, I have no idea what, wants to become words.

I got a lot accomplished yesterday--finally finishing the week's endless housework, then diving straight into Poetry Lab Notes stuff. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been preparing a post about our readings and responses to Sei Shonagon, a tenth-century lady-in-waiting in the Japanese imperial court, who wrote a sheaf of gossipy, opinionated observations of court life that have been collected into what is known as The Pillow Book. The post will include short essays by each of us as well poems we wrote using The Pillow Book as a prompt. But as always, it takes some work to pull together the thoughts of three people in a way that makes those reactions coherent on the page. Plus, I'm still learning the Substack platform, so that slows me down.

Anyway, it's a big job that's almost done, and I also made a first stab at drafting a fundraising letter for a new conference scholarship. Today I'll turn my thoughts to prepping for a conference faculty meeting tomorrow. I've got a stack of reading to do, and a couple of poems I need to record for a class I'll be visiting at Bates College this fall. The chapbook project is beginning to weigh on me, and a new editing assignment will be arriving at some point this week.

I'd like to write. Sometimes that possibility seems very far away, but maybe a door will open today . . . a small door I can duck through, a small courtyard with sunlight blinking through the leaves.

Such a long slow rain we had yesterday, a relief for all growing things, but the humidity was thick. Though I decided that trying to mop floors would be stupid, I did get the bathrooms cleaned, and then I was able to turn my attention to desk work: finishing that manuscript job, piecing together a draft of the next Poetry Lab Substack post. In the afternoon I heard from our kid, the one who's been incommunicado in the Canadian forest. He's arrived in Attawapiskat, a Swampy Cree community on the edge of James Bay, and today he and his campers and their canoes will fly south to Timmins and then bus their way back to Temagami. An incredible trip, and I look forward to basking in the glow of his excited voice.

This morning I'll go for a walk and catch up on my floor-cleaning chores, and then I'll return to the desk: more Substack prep, sketching out a fundraising letter for a new conference scholarship. Maybe I'll start sorting through possibilities for that limited-edition chapbook. I need to catch up on my Aurora Leigh reading and keep ferreting a path through my big collected Grimm. I should start thinking about high school teaching plans, and I need to prep for a meeting about the 2027 conference.

So many bits and pieces to juggle, but thus far I'm not feeling too hair-on-fire about work. It helps that I managed to keep August mostly travel-free. Though T and I are driving to Vermont this weekend, I'll otherwise be home until we leave for Chicago in early September.

Now I'm listening to the remains of yesterday's rain slowly drip from the trees; listening to the floorboards creak upstairs as T gets dressed; thinking about patience and impatience, the lonely spaciousness of a quiet room; wondering what will unfold in this unfledged day.

                                             [S]ometimes

’Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,

That we may lift the soul, and contemplate

With lively joy the joys we cannot share.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"

I didn't do much of what I imagined I might do yesterday, other than process blueberries and go to the fish market. Instead, after I stuffed the freezer with berries, T and I drove to the Eastern Prom and then strolled along the water, into town and back. Our ostensible goal was the fish market, but mostly we were in it for the tern-watching: such mesmerizing birds, with their sharp triangular flight, sudden needle-drop to the water's surface, then rapid sweep back to sky, a silver fish wriggling.

At the market we bought a handful of scallops for ceviche, a sliver of bluefin for crudo. I baked a small custard cornbread as accompaniment and warmed blueberry cobbler for dessert. A summer feast. 

And now suddenly it is Monday again. Outside the neighborhood is cloaked in fog. Rain is forecast, but so far only a vague drizzle has seeped from the cloud weight.

Yet now, suddenly, a patter of drops, small burst of down-drop, the whisper settling in. Clack of drip on vent hood and air conditioner, steady shiver of water coursing through the broad dry maple leaves.

I've got my weekly housework to deal with today, manuscript job to finish up, stack of emails to answer, Substack post to draft, fundraising letter to write, poems to record, wedding stuff to do . . . so many other this-and-thats. The list for the week is long, but at least I'm not traveling till Friday.

And this rain is a song. I hope it hums all day long and deep into the night.

Every year's harvest is different, depending on the vagaries of what I grow, what I forage, what opportunities fall into my clutches. So far this season I've scored mushrooms--a big chicken-of-the-woods cluster that filled many freezer bags--and blueberries. Of course I picked too many yesterday. But I didn't pick as many as I was tempted to pick, so there's that.

Now the refrigerator is bloated with many pounds of fruit, which I'll need to wash and box up and freeze this morning. The cobbler I baked last night hardly made a dent in the supply. What two people are going to do with so many blueberries is a good question. I daresay I'll be bringing a lot of blueberry desserts to my poetry-group dinners.

Still, as always, I feel self-satisfied, as if I've achieved something marvelous. There's nothing like an August day in a field, air fragrant with hot grass, cicadas a-rattle, marsh hawk wailing. I spent so much of my summer childhood in hayfields, gardens, berry patches; so much of my adult life there too. Sweaty, scratchy, bug-ridden; hands purpled with berry juice; tender skin hay-scratched, thorn-scratched. But then parading home with the loot . . . a loaded hay truck, pans overflowing with fruit. A victory. Flags should fly.

***

Yesterday was all sun and shimmer, but clouds have moved in, with rain forecast to begin tonight and settle in for tomorrow. I'll believe it when I see it: we got almost nothing from the last forecast storm. On the bright side, there's no need to mow grass. Even the weeds are depressed.

Maybe I'll drive out to the fish market today and choose something interesting for dinner. Maybe I'll go for a bike ride. There's an exhibition of modernist musical scores at the University of New England's art museum that I wouldn't mind walking down the street to look at. Yes, I just waxed nostalgic about country life, but here I am in town now, and happy to partake in local delights. Maybe I'm just easy to please.

This morning I am being taken blueberry picking. The car will arrive at 9 and will whisk me off to some field somewhere in Maine, and then I will fill a few containers with berries until lunchtime and then I will fill a few more containers, and then my friends will whisk me home. The expedition is delightfully out of my control, except for the actual picking of berries.

I haven't been on a serious berry-picking run since I left Harmony. It was something I always did with my boys, the three of us wildly filling dishpans and baby bathtubs with blueberries and strawberries. Those two are berry-picking kings: even as little guys they knew how to fill a pail fast, and in our prime our trio could strip a row in minutes. 

I hope to be more desultory today. Without either a chest freezer or ravenous boys, there's no point in gloriously overdoing it. And I'm tired. It's been a long week of PLANS PLANS IDEAS HURRY on about ten different fronts, so I am going to conscientiously try not to relapse into my traditional furious berry-picking persona. It will be hard to behave like a hobby picker, but that's my goal.

Yesterday I stopped in at David Wolfe's printshop to pick up the broadside of my poem, the one I'll be giving to the kids as their wedding gift. It really is beautiful: I love letterpress printing, and I'm so pleased with how it turned out.

But hiring David for this job has had repercussions I didn't expect. He'd earlier mentioned that he'd like to find a way to keep working together, and yesterday he directly suggested that we plan on a  25-page chapbook that he would design, set, and handprint. It could be a poet laureate project of sorts, he said, and I immediately thought, oh, a Maine diary, a new-and-selected . . . what fun! I'm really excited about this idea, though I need another project like I need a hammer to the head.

I'd already spent the morning in a zoom meeting with the Monson staff, all of us bubbling over with too many ideas for stuff we could do with kids, teachers, other organizations . . . This is what I'm supposed to be up to as PL, I think: figuring out ways to make the quiet work visible to people who long for it. But it's overwhelming.

Teresa phoned out of the blue yesterday, to reassure me: I guess I must have seemed a little frayed during our Poetry Lab conversation on Wednesday. Performance isn't new to me: I'm an introvert with a public-facing job, and long before the PL honor I had to attend to my internal struggles with transitions, scheduling, private space. Eventually I'll work out a pattern I can live with, but it's a challenge, no question. On the other hand, the opportunities feel so interesting . . . this chapbook, for instance; maybe a gallery show in Monson; more time spent with teachers and poets and community members. It's the work I love to do.

Well, this morning I'll get back to the manuscript job, and then I'll head north for lunch with the arts commission folks. No doubt more ideas for projects will start bubbling up over the forks and water glasses.

We got all of the storm on the way signs but none of the storm--so disheartening because Maine is in need of steady rain. Not that I envy the Albany area's deluge, but a couple of inches would have been nice.

Well, at least things are damp, which is better than nothing. In the dark morning I glimpse a wet glimmer netting the plants, skeining the cars. A refreshment, though not a quenching.

Today will be another hectic day: a zoom meeting about Monson business, continuing the manuscript job, running out in the afternoon to fetch my poem from the printer, stopping at the drugstore, baking a plum cake for tonight's poetry group, scraping up a writing prompt from somewhere or other, washing sheets . . . probably there's more on the list but I can't remember.

A good thing: Gloria the Mazda! What a fine car she's been, amid this bustle and lurch. I feel fancy every time I get behind the wheel--a deeply unfamiliar sensation, but I admit that I'm enjoying it.

Another good thing: meeting with Teresa and Jeannie yesterday afternoon. It was restful to spend an afternoon with our own winding thoughts . . . talking about H.D.'s Trilogy, about The Pillow Book, about Sappho, about the other books we were reading. To linger at the nexus of making, yet not be planning a class or a performance or any other public conversation. A necessary privacy, but with friends.

For some reason I am writing a lot of fragments today. Why the urge to erode my verbs? Syntax as secret message: Vigor is not the only life. Start in the midst. End without finishing.

Since yesterday morning the air has been shouting storm on the way, yet we've had no rain in Portland, not a drop, just swirling humid gusts, thick skies, incursions of fog, and the tense watchfulness that precedes hurricanes and blizzards: our animal selves alert--skin prickling, hackles aloft.

The storm creeps closer and closer. But though my week is packed with obligation, most of it centers at or close to home, so I won't have to drive far in the encroaching downpours. This morning I'll work on a manuscript job, catch up on reading for Poetry Lab, scurry out for a haircut, and then in the afternoon meet with Jeannie and Teresa. I'm rushing too fast through H.D.'s Trilogy, but somehow I got confused about homework timing, so here I am. I've also been immersed in Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, the first novel I've read by her. And I'm still making my way through my fat Collected Grimm. The swirl of ominous words is intersecting with the swirl of ominous weather: I'm unsettled, my feathers all awry.

Today is my older son James's 32nd birthday. In my memory his birthdays were always sun-splashed, water-spraying, half-naked pagan-fests . . . high summer in the woods, the clearing dotted with capering cake-drunk children. He always did like a party.

In a little over a month, he's throwing his biggest one yet. The Wedding looms, but this morning I am thinking about my little roundhead, my firstborn: bent glasses, straw-colored hair, grubby-kneed, yackety-yack from morning till night. The most exhausting of toddlers, prying into every cupboard, climbing into every hole. But what a grin! . . . ear to ear, like a cartoon sun.

Ah, dear boy, dear boy. Here's the poem, written a couple of years ago, that I'm giving him for his wedding day.

Essay on Man

Dawn Potter

Today I found a crow feather, or it found me.
I was standing at the kitchen sink washing plates
when a flash caught my eye . . . a dark spin

through thick summer air, quill pointing down,
black crest held high, a slow-motion pirouette
from tree to earth. I ran outside to save it, as, above me,

crows jeered or cheered, and back in the kitchen
I cried out to my husband, “I found a feather!”
and he said, “Tell me the story.”

But what story?—for later, after he’d gone to work,
I realized, with shock, that the next day our older son would
turn twenty-nine. Yet we were twenty-nine when he was born,

so what is this anniversary? Our son’s birthday or ours?

I couldn’t stop puzzling over the oddness and meanwhile
I hung the laundry and I stirred a batch of ice cream,

and far away our son was living his last day as
twenty-eight, until suddenly the phone rang and
there he was, ready to chatter about repainting

his apartment and feeding a stray cat and, ugh,
what about those Republicans, and I was so happy
I forgot to tell him about my perplexity.

It was exactly like what life always is—
I think there’s a great momentous formal
complication and suddenly it morphs into diapers

and wailing and getting no sleep forever, and this
goes on and on for infinity until it’s over and then,
when the phone rings, my heart expands like

an accordion because there he is again,
one of three, the loves of my life—
the others being his brother and his father,

and the brother is canoeing in the Canadian
wilderness so won’t call and the father is framing
some rich person’s house so won’t call, but

thank god, thank god, I’ve got one of them
in my grasp, just for a moment—
I’ll tell this story to you, my love, my firstborn.

Once upon a time I got lost in the woods,
when we lived in the woods, and you three were
back in the house mucking around with your stuff—

but did you imagine me, crashing through the underbrush:
imagine me, imagining myself, as the night drew in: digging
into leafmold, covering my ears against the coyotes?

Or did you assume I’d be back soon, as I was,
quickly unlost, as if I’d never been gone,
as if I would always be there?

Today, though, the separation—it feels hard.
You are nearly twenty-nine, your brother nearly
twenty-five, you live so far away from me,

and I know nothing about your sleeping breath.
Here’s a story I don’t remember anymore—
what I felt like without you three. Who was I

before you were? Not that I don’t recall childhood
or being a teenager—but there must have been
a hole, there must have been an abyss—

for what would my life be now,
without always, always, missing you?

These cool mornings have been sweet: old-fashioned New England summer weather, the kind you start and end in a sweater but midday you're jumping into a balmy lake. Not that I'll be jumping into any lakes this week. My calendar is crammed with zoom meetings, a dentist visit, a haircut, an arts commission lunch, plus I've got all kinds of desk work to deal with. So today, the slow day of the week, will be stuffed with housework, mowing, pruning, all of the homestead bits-n-pieces I need to get out of my hair before I light myself on fire with the rest of the obligations.

Outside, a Carolina wren is awake. Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, she sings. Otherwise things seem pretty quiet in the neighborhood. Nobody is broadcasting any Monday anxiety yet.

I feel good about how the weekend class went. The focus was nominally syntax, yet one big side result was a slow dip into the waters of character development. I tend to avoid the term persona poem. I think it encourages the idea of enactment rather than existence-within . . . as in "I'm going to write in the voice of Anne Bradstreet, or Spiro Agnew, or Pele," and then lassoing historical facts in a sort of show-off "I did some research and got an A on the paper" rodeo instead of crossing, with deliberate wonder, into the hallucinatory borderland between self and imagined other. It's hard to explain the difference, except to say that one sort of poem stays safely wrapped in the costumes and the other is shivering and naked.

A few of the poem drafts we heard over the weekend were new and shivering, and that, for a listener such as myself, was an intense gift.

It's a very cool morning here in the little northern city by the sea--temperature barely out of the 40s; whiff of autumn in July. I like this combination of open windows and shabby red bathrobe, hot coffee cup against my palms and shriek of gulls rising from a neighbor's roof.

Yesterday's class seemed to go well--lots of sharp first drafts and good conversation too. I was especially glad to bring people into contact with Henry Green's prose. All of his books are not equivalently good, but the two I excerpted--Party Going and Loving--are favorites, and for me his odd sentence style is an instant lesson in the flexible powers of word order, word choice, and comma placement.

In a few hours I'll be back in the saddle, but for the moment I am basking in Sunday morning. Last night T and I went out to see Red River, a 1948 western starring John Wayne and an incredibly sexy young Montgomery Clift. Ain't nobody wears a Hollywood gun belt better than MC. Oof.

And then driving home through the twilit city with my sweetheart . . . well, you know how it is: those little heart-swell moments when nothing much is happening, except that you're sitting at a red light watching cars swish past and suddenly you are seized by the present tense. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are.

I haven't talked about kitchen matters lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been cooking. And last night's salad was so extremely beautiful--red and yellow tomatoes, basil, seared halloumi--that I was impelled to document it. I served the tomatoes alongside rare steak marinated in lime and garlic, a chard tian, and a mix of rice (wild, white, red, brown). It was a lovely meal, and there are lots of leftovers, which likely means steak salad for dinner tonight.

It's good to have the supper problem solved because today and tomorrow I'll be in class, experimenting with some prompt-thoughts linked to syntax. The models will be a sheaf of prose and poetry excerpts, with the prose being mostly (though not exclusively) samples from high modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, and Elizabeth Bowen. I also extend beyond them, in both directions--back to George Eliot and Henry James, forward to Iris Murdoch and (I know this seems odd) John Le Carre.  The related poetry I won't discuss right now, as I'm keeping that a surprise for participants. My hope, though, is that class members will see how sentences themselves, in their positioning, in their subtle variety, can pull a poem draft onto a page.

These classes are always shots in the dark, though mostly they seem to work, if not always in the ways I'd predicted. Which is part of the fun, I guess . . . the not knowing, the veer into strange spaces.

It's quite cool this morning--only 54 degrees: lovely weather for sleeping and waking, and hot coffee tastes like nectar. Outside the crows are noisily waking up; a cardinal is singing. Through the kitchen window I see that a raccoon must have been galumphing around in my birdbath again because the dish is now upside in the garden bed.

I'll be teaching all weekend, so today will be a catchall: mowing grass, washing winter hats and scarves (finally), cutting herbs for drying (finally). I am very behind on some basic homestead tasks, but so it goes.

Every time I sit down with my fall calendar and realize how crowded it's becoming, I start to feel a little pale. I'm not sorry that August is fairly quiet. I've got one radio interview coming up as well as a trip to Vermont to see my family. Otherwise, the big bang will start with our son's wedding over Labor Day weekend, quickly followed by an onslaught of jobs, events, and obligations. New car, new car, I keep reminding myself. But the amount of travel remains daunting.

Last night I went out to write, and that was a good thing: two messy drafts that probably won't amount to much, yet they were a stab into real work--thought, feeling, sound coalescing into language that shocks me. I hope I'll be able to keep that sensation alive during the weekend class. I love poetry as a surrender of the mind: the sudden visceral drop into a kind of borderland, where I am both aware and unaware; focused, with the edges blurred; a dreamy, bubbling, reckless, ruthless state; ears tingling with unheard music. 

I arrived in Portland by early afternoon and was immediately bombarded by stacks of emails, texts, envelopes . . . good things, like paychecks and class signups and invitations to teach; also less good things, like learning that my sister has broken her ankle. Apparently Wednesday decided to arrive via dump truck while I was driving home.

Thus, today I'll be mucking around with record keeping, trying to figure out how to be helpful to my sister, and otherwise playing catch with the overload that's wallowing on my desk [ooh, mixed-metaphor alert!]. But it's Thursday, so I'll also get to go out to write tonight. And a gorgeous day is forecast, so I'll also get to hang sheets on the line. There's only so much desk-troll work I can take before I have to burst out of the house and weed something or stack a little firewood or at least flop in the hammock and stare up into the canopy.

 Last night's reading was so pleasant: 30 or so people crowding into the little library, a surprising number of book sales, lots of questions and conversation afterward. I guess this was my first official reading as poet laureate, unless you count the Monson, Maine, USA performances during the conference. But really the locals were there to see their friend Weslea, which is as it should be.

In a little while the two of us will drive into Southwest Harbor for breakfast, and then I'll head back to Portland. This has been Gloria the Mazda's longest roadtrip so far, and she did excellently, though as usual I had to deal with an unexpected electronic warning doodad . . . this car is loaded with them, and they drive me a little crazy. This time an alarming "Service Due Soon" sign appeared in the middle of my speedometer and wouldn't go away until I pulled over and figured out how to reset the "time for an oil change" reminder built into the control panel. One longs for the old days, when I had to remember myself when my car needed an oil change. Or perhaps one longs for a car that resets its own monitor, given that it actually had an oil change a month ago. But I should not be petty. Gloria is a lovely car, and I am grateful to own a vehicle whose transmission will not die on a highway any time soon.

Today, after lunch, I'll depart for Mount Desert Island, which no doubt will be clogged with traffic and overrun by visitors. I am so used to the place in the off-season, to puttering around the park during our peaceable April and November visits to the cottage, but now is the height of tourist frenzy and it will be a different place entirely. This time of year the cottage is filled with paying customers, so I'll be staying in Weslea's spare room instead . . . but at least I'll have the cove in my sights, dear horizon, dark scent of tide and brine.

If you're localish: we're reading at the Bass Harbor Library, in Bernard, at 5:30 tonight. Then tomorrow I'll head home and start girding myself for this weekend's class: two days centering on the influence of prose syntax on new poem drafts. These classes are work, of course, but they also allow me space to write, and I could use a weekend of new poem drafts right about now.

Today is our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. As always, I'm impressed to discover I've remembered it. The date, so close to our older son's birthday, sank into obscurity as soon as he leaped onto the scene. For years we barely thought about celebrating ourselves.

But thirty-five years is a long time to hang out with the same guy. Two of the friends who stood up with us are now dead. The birthday-partier who stole our thunder is getting married himself in a few weeks. This summer we've surprised ourselves by becoming uncharacteristically sentimental about the whole idea of weddings . . . making our presents for the kids, fussing happily about outfits, getting our rings resized.

It's Monday, it's a work day, and I've got to scrub toilets this morning. There's nothing remotely romantic about this anniversary moment. Except that here we are: still bumbling along together, tangling our harness straps, stepping on each other's hooves, bumping noses over the water trough.

O heart, are you great enough for love?

   I have heard of thorns and briers.

Over the thorns and briers,

   Over the meadows and stiles,

Over the world to the end of it

   Flash of a million miles.

--from "Marriage Morning" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

We did get a rainstorm last night, but now the humidity is back, along with the wildfire smoke, and my sinuses are clogged and complaining.

But first things first: what about those Red Sox? This team has been wretched all year--until, suddenly, they're not. Yesterday's game was their twelfth win in a row, and as entertainment it was perfect . . . every at-bat packed with dramatic tension, and then the romance soaring when Wilyer Abreu, in a 3-2 count, with two outs already in the inning, laced his second home run of the game and put the Sox ahead for good. It was a schmaltzy-movie sort of game, for sure, but I'm sopping up all of the temporary baseball feel-good I can. They'll start losing again soon.

Meanwhile, I caught up on a chunk of yard work before the rain, and then, in the afternoon, I put together initial plans for my fall Poetry Kitchen class, "A Visit with the Brothers Grimm: Using Fairy Tales to Generate and Revise Poems." I love fairy tales, and I've been rereading them regularly since childhood--the Grimm versions, but also Andrew Lang's French-influenced tales, Italo Calvino's Italian collections, and the many other volumes that I've pulled off library shelves over the course of my life. I've long known that fairy-tale logic, structure, surreality, moral ambiguity, class warfare, and so on have affected my work imaginatively and thematically. But I think these elements have also played a role in how I move from raw first drafts into early-stage revisions, and that's what I hope we can play with in the upcoming class.

The dates are November 7 and 8, on Zoom. The cost is $150. There will be lots of off-screen writing time. Maybe I'll see you there.

A cool gray morning. Through open windows I hear gulls wail up from the cove, a jay squawk in a nearby bush.

It's Saturday, my first and last quiet weekend for a while. Tom's still asleep, Chuckie is crunching up breakfast, and I am considering the tasks ahead of me--mowing, weeding, groceries, laundry--while also not fussing about them. Rain and thunderstorms are forecast for afternoon and evening. Maybe I'll get nothing done. Maybe I won't care.

This week, in and among all of my catch-up chores, I finished Great Expectations and began reading the essays of Brian Doyle, which I picked up at the Goodwill the other day. His novel Chicago is one of the sweetest books I know, and his essays, too, overflow with sweetness--occasionally to a cloying degree, but mostly not. He came from a big Irish Catholic family; he remained a committed Catholic all his life; he loved and admired his parents and siblings; he was devoted to his wife and children . . . you'd think this would make for dull material, but even contentment can be charming in the hands of a skilled writer. Doyle is often funny about small things, and his best sentences are like old cars with squashy brakes careening down switchback gravel roads. All in all, his essays have been a decent addition to a convalescent week.

On Tuesday I'll be driving over to Mount Desert Island to read with my friend Weslea Sidon at the Bass Harbor Library, 5:30 p.m. I met Weslea at the first-ever poetry workshop I ever attended--when my boys were tiny, and I was terrified to leave them for a weekend, terrified to meet real poets and discover that I had no chance of standing alongside them. Weslea was the balm to all of that terror . . . a real poet, who wrote and spoke with great seriousness and humor, who calmed me and cared about me, who kept reaching out, year after year--not just to me but to Tom and the boys. She and her husband Curtis coaxed us to their cottage by the sea, offered us space and affection. This is where Tom and I still go, spring and fall--to the cottage, to Weslea, who is alone now that Curtis is gone. So it makes me very, very happy to be reading with her this week. It makes me very, very happy to know that I had some part in getting her new collection into print. The book is beautiful, and if you're in the area I hope you'll come hear her read.

The occasional poem I mentioned yesterday, "Maine: July 2026," appears in today's Vox Populi. This may be the fastest creation-to-publication stream I've ever experienced. My friend Weslea Sidon and I also plan to perform it chorally next Tuesday evening at our reading at the Bass Harbor Library. It seems important to harp on the matter before people are distracted away from remembering.

***

My dry neighborhood finally received a couple of downpours yesterday, and I did manage to weed about third of the front garden beds before the rain started, so the garden is beginning to look a little better than it did. Meanwhile, I've still been immersed in post-conference business. Planning for next year always starts instantly; there's barely a beat between ending and beginning. But I did get out to write with my friends in the evening--two not-very-promising drafts; still, doing the work felt good.

Now I idle in the cool morning air, listening to the man with the shopping cart of cans trundle from one recycling bin to the next. A Carolina wren cries teeterteeterteeter; Chuck peers industriously under a rug; everyone is at work, and I suppose I, too, can call what I'm doing work . . . wandering between past and future, bumbling among details. Sorrow. Fury. Dread. Those fires are still ravenous.

Maine hasn't been at its best lately, given the humidity and the apocalyptic skies, the Biddeford murder and the Senate race debacle. Add in the fact that my younger son is leading a canoe trip in the fire-ridden northern Ontario wilderness, and you can imagine that I'm jumpy. Yesterday his partner and I decided we needed to make sure he was okay, so we reached out to the camp for updates, which were reassuring. He is north of the Albany River fire and is continuing to paddle out of reach of it. The provincial lookouts have him on their radar; he's got a satellite phone so can call for evacuation if needed; the camp is very experienced with Canadian fire season. We feel better, and also do not feel better, but so it goes.

Jumpy is a good word for how I feel in general. Yesterday I had an intense conversation with a friend about my role as poet laureate. Our back-and-forth was more subtle than this paraphrase, but basically the question was, Do I now have a duty to be loud in support of righteousness? He thinks I do, and I agree with him. For me, the big issue is where and how to be loud . . . and when does being loud damage my ability to instigate longer-term change? Social media is a dangerous realm. So are school boards.

But, as he pointed out, one thing I can do is write occasional poems--that is, poems that comment on specific events--and then find a way to publicize them. The point of an occasional poem is timeliness, which means I'll have to squinch my eyes shut perfection-wise. On the other hand, speed is not always a bad thing, as I learned when I was writing my "Accident Sonnets." So yesterday I wrote and submitted a poem about the Biddeford killing, which a journal immediately accepted and will publish within a few days. This journal has a big subscriber list, so the poem will be read. It also has an audience that is predisposed to support progressive causes. Is preaching to the choir the best way to be public? Again, I twitch and worry. Yes, I do the majority of my teaching in a conservative area of the state, and I have always seen this work as activism. But who among us truly believes in poems?