At daybreak this pair of whitetails was browsing outside my front door, but they've since vanished into the trees, and morning lake life has shifted to birds--red-winged blackbirds flitting from one alder to another, a loud vireo invisible in the trees, a crow stalking across the grass. And now a bullfrog burps.

The air has a chill in it again, and mist drifts across the lake ripples. It will warm up, though, like it did yesterday, when, just before dinner, I managed to find time to slip into the water. The shallows were a patchwork of warm and cool, late-day sunlight sliding toward the horizon. A party barge bristling with fishing rods chugged past.

The teaching day went well, I think. I started off by dictating Ruth Stone's "Don't Miss It" and immediately gave a writing prompt. Then we moved into a reading of Rilke's "Imaginary Career," followed by another prompt. Both of these prompts were framed around the structures of the example poems, which allowed us to then shift back into conversation about both the models and the participants' new drafts, focusing on transformations within formal choice. That took up the morning, and then the afternoon shifted to small groups who were creating a series of nested questions that led directly into a writing prompt. Teresa closed the day by introducing her afternoon writing projects, which will center around Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This morning I'm mostly off the hot seat as Gwynnie and Gretchen will take over with dance and theater exercises. But tonight is our first performance from Monson, Maine, USA, so the nerves will reignite. We'll be starting with "Slate," the section we presented during our residency in Sarasota, and the new sections will roll out tomorrow and Thursday.

It is 5:30 a.m., and I am sitting in an Adirondack chair on the deck of my cabin, looking at the tail end of sunrise over Lake Hebron. Now a duck swims into view, paddles confidently up to the shore, and behold: she's got two ducklings trailing behind.

The three of them putter around for a few minutes before setting sail again, and I sip from my gargantuan coffee mug and feel happy to be wearing a sweater, which is not something I've said to myself for many days.

It is an old-fashioned summer morning, dew-drenched and still, the perfect temperature for bare feet and long sleeves. Birds twitter among the reeds and scrub . . . vireo, waxwing, warbler, sparrow. Bullfrogs remark. A duck flies low over the glassy water, and up on the road a log truck growls past.

This morning the conference will begin, and I'll be on stage all day. It will be intense, but I didn't sleep too badly last night, the faculty got lots done work-wise yesterday, and our participant group has already started to bond. All signs point to good cheer, though now a mosquito has found me. Suffering is life, and she understands her role in the cosmos.

In other news: someone has left a paperback copy of Harriet the Spy in this cabin. I am very pleased.

Finally, the heat has broken, and birdsong pours through every open window.

Today is Monson day: by 9 a.m. I'll be picking up passengers; by noon we'll be pulling into town, and conference week will be underway. As usual, expect spotty contact from me. I may be able to post every day, but likely there will be distractions and interruptions.

The conference theme this year is transformation, and as the sessions unfold, I'll try to keep you apprised of what that entails as regards materials, conversations, prompts, and collaborations. The week has been exciting to map out. But there's always mystery. What will happen when a plan enters air?

Another thick and humid morning. I'm glad to be starting the day here in my familiar old couch corner, idling over coffee and a book after the flurry of the week. We got so much done at Bowdoin this week, but the focus was intense, and the conference itself is still to come. So I'm grateful for a slow hour, though soon the day will devolve into packing and housework and working on script details and diving into various other panicky-busy obligations.

Monson, Maine, USA is now a full, finished, three-part piece. Next week we'll be performing each part separately, on consecutive days: "Slate" on July 7, "Lake" on July 8, "Mountain" on July 9. All performances will begin at 5 p.m. at Tenney House, on the Monson Arts campus, and they are free and open to the public.

For me, this collaboration has been such an education. To work so closely with three brilliant but very different artists; to watch my private writing self morph into new space; to undertake the risk of publicly performing as an inexperienced beginner . . . I still can't believe I'm actually going to dance in front of other people: me, chunky and awkward and 60 years old! I still can't believe I'm actually inviting you to come witness this.

As a poet and a teacher of poetry, I've had no trouble jumping off cliffs and coaxing you to jump too. I am thrilled by recklessness, when it comes to writing. But my body is another story: I'm inclined to be timid, to not trust myself, to not pay close attention to where I am in space. In our Sarasota residency, and now over this past week at Bowdoin, I have begun to learn to jump off another sort of cliff. I have begun learning to dance, and to ask you, the viewer, to enter into bodily conversation with me. This has been hard work, and revelatory work.

***

I almost forgot to mention I've got a new poem out in the inaugural issue of the Colby Review--

The heat has been ridiculous--77 degrees with 80 percent humidity at 6 a.m. . . . All I can say is Blah. Teresa and I have still managed to get our morning walks in, but she's from Florida so this probably seems balmy. Walking in the "cool" of the morning is the outer limit of what I can accomplish outside. Even the thought of doing a yard chore makes me sweat.

Today is our last rehearsal day. Then tomorrow we have a much-needed day off, and on Sunday we head up to Monson. Meanwhile, Tom, bless his heart, is planning a big dinner for the rehearsal crowd tonight. I am leaving it all in his hands.

Here's a clip from the Denis Johnson poem "Heat" that more or less sums up how I'm feeling about this weather. Yes, I know he's talking about a different month, but climate change is real . . .

 

August,

              you're just an erotic hallucination,

just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

are you serious?

It is so hot already--air as thick as tissue paper and the temperature nearly 80 degrees at 5:30 in the morning. The house isn't too bad with the machine chugging away upstairs, but Tom doesn't have any A/C at his worksite, which worries me.

Rehearsals are going well at Bowdoin, but they are intense, and everyone is tired and we still have the conference ahead of us. So this evening may be quiet--a moment for everyone to loll around in the cool and return briefly to a private life.

Today I began my term as Maine poet laureate by going for a sunrise walk on Mackworth Island with my dear Teresa. We didn't talk much about poems. Instead, we looked at fog. We spoke of birds. We admired our friends.

Yesterday's rehearsal was hard but good. Whatever it is we are making is beginning to cohere, to become itself.

Here's a very old poem, about a time that Baron Wormser came to my house in Harmony for dinner. . . .

Dinner with the Poet Laureate

 

Dawn Potter

Dissatisfied with the conversation, the four-year-old

keeps poking the tip of a peacock feather into the faces

of the guests; later, slowly eats the rest of the seeded

rolls brushed with egg and baked till golden earlier in the day

by the less good poet, who was nervous both before

 

and after the guests arrived, thinking of Tennyson’s

glossy laureate beard, nails sticking out of the sheetrock,

not enough chairs, and the probability that the four-year-old

would find something along the lines of a peacock feather

with which to terrorize the guests: as when he informed her in-laws,

 

over cocktails, that he planned to be gay when he grew up.

The painter and the photographer begin some chat about galleries

that the poet laureate and the less good poet listen in on,

the less good poet squirming in her chair, self-conscious

about her restlessness.  In a Kate O’Brien novel, the mother

 

superior of an Irish girls’ school, well read in the poetry

of Henry Vaughan, subdues a sense of internal chaos by keeping

her hands quiet at all times. Is this an imposable task?

The physical self is so willful, shamelessly following its bad habits,

while the mind is like an anxious, second-guessing parent.

 

Because the poet laureate asserts that he doesn’t like the music

of Merle Haggard, the photographer has chosen Etta James,

who says she would rather be blind, boy, than see you

walk away from me, babe; sure true about more than one thing

the less good poet can think of: the whole reason the poet laureate

 

has wedged himself at her kitchen table (she hopes); though she worries

they have nothing to say to each other over the second kind of tomato

soup he’s had today, which the four-year-old is deliberately spooning

down the front of his pajamas. Nothing goes as planned;

think of a sonnet unleashing its skewed logic down the page,

 

careening around every turn.  The Burden of the Mystery,

Keats called this beetle-browed unease she feels, wishing

for pleasure, for confidence in a situation that seems close to tears,

with Etta vanished, the painter trying to explain the odd path

her career has taken, the photographer a father wiping soup

off the four-year-old with a dishcloth.

The less good poet pours out the last of the Riesling.

All the ways the mind works, folding in on itself—

John Berryman with those poems about Chris, falling-down

drunk in her capri pants on a ratty hearthrug; and here,

 

four people eating dinner with a child whom the photographer calls

the Boy Tyrant when he’s lying in bed with the less good poet

smoking a bowl and rehashing the evening; and she reminds

him of the poem in which she imagines having thrown

the four-year-old off a bridge, an exhilarating aspect of the art,

 

like being possessed by a kind of honest evil spirit,

a sort of longing for the truth of the matter, something analagous

to what she feels now, propped up beside the photographer,

his face shadowed under the dim lamp, broad-boned and mercurial:

the desire that overtakes her for vision—

 

to be able to take in everything and align it in some stately

Spenserian array, heavy as alabaster and ivory, remote as heaven,

in a poem that uses the word crimson in a way that really works.

The problem with being a less good poet is the triviality that arises,

like fog spreading over a window. Just when she thinks she’s run up against

 

something really important, her thoughts stage-dive into the crowd.

What does a real poet imagine over the dish pan?

Did T. S. Eliot idly vacuum the same section of carpet twenty times,

let the rhythm of a line circle around him like a fish,

hum a tune in the key of the motor while Vivienne

 

broke things in the next room?  The less good poet cannot

manage to put herself into anyone else’s shoes: the whole

world seems fixed on herself, the center of a tiny Aristotelean

universe plagued by the malignant orbit of the four-year-old,

paid employment, and laundry.  Asleep, the photographer

 

emits a small snore, emblematic of the calm order of his own

more Galilean universe, where steady hard work produces

superior results and nothing keeps him awake, not even

a less good poet looking for love, whose mind is a castle

honeycombed with a thousand passageways—

 

climbing and twisting, falling into endless loops and permutations;

and there is no way out, no way at all.  But she wants him

to know she’s here, as she wants to believe that the painter

has left this house in the country to sit in the dark passenger

seat of a reliable Subaru, mesmerized by the windshield wipers

 

sweeping back and forth in their dark mirror, a sweetness

like tires hissing down a wet street; that the poet laureate reads

Pope as woodchucks browse in his kale and cats do nothing

to stop them; that Snow White and Rose Red wander

through the forest hand in hand, but no beast dares touch

 

one hair of their heads—that there is a way to compose

these pieces into patterns of great beauty and precision,

as a clock ticks, as a falcon flies over a woodland edge,

crying its hunger in heroic couplets.  The world conflates into Milton’s

royal image, but didn’t Keats wrestle with exactly this pain?

 

When the four-year-old wakes in the morning and puts on his cowboy mask

with a smile, the less good poet will dish out yogurt and orange juice,

while Shakespeare brews more coffee and the diminution of space

points their love as sharp as a needle, the image rocking her back

on her heels as if it were her own. At another dinner, the painter

 

and the poet laureate, even the buzzing four-year-old, might hear

those words ringing off the countertops, off the bones of her skull;

the photographer, on his way to hunt out that Merle Haggard tune

about Roman sandals, stopping to listen—every sound a chime,

a thought, a heartbeat; each phrase a life lived over and over.

The morning air is beautifully cool, but this will be our last dreamy weather for a while. Fierce heat will kick in tomorrow, and Maine will morph into a roasting pan, and Chuck will have to learn to love an air conditioner.

For the moment, though, he can still goggle at robins through the open windows, and I can still curl up in my couch corner in my fuzzy bathrobe and listen to the gulls argue. But this is a brief reverie. In a few minutes I'll be on the work clock again, hustling through chores, packing a lunch, collecting scripts and pens and notebook, catching my ride, rehearsing all day. I'm excited about being back in the studio with my friends . . . also worried that we've bitten off more than we can chew, but that's just my nerves talking. It will be a fun week, and we'll do what we can do, which will have to be good enough.

It looks like our ideal Maine summer weather is about to explode into beastliness. By Wednesday temperatures will climb into the high 80s and 90s, and my sweet temperate flower garden will start to fry. Ugh.

Well, at least we have a couple of respite days before Hades arrives. For now the grass and garden are in good shape, and yesterday I even managed to talk myself into washing windows, a chore I particularly dislike. So today I'll get my weekly housework done, run errands, keep pulling materials together for Monson, and otherwise prepare for deserting my household post.

Last week I received a request from a poet wanting permission to reprint my poem "A History of Wash Day" in a column she writes for a midcoast newspaper. She asked if I could also add a few words about how the poem was made? Sure, I said, and without thinking overly hard about the matter scribbled down a couple of sentences about housework, which quickly became a couple of paragraphs, which quickly became way more text than the poet could possibly fit into a little newspaper column. Clearly I have a lot to blab about housework. That poem, in fact, was supposed to be an essay--at least that was my intention when I did the research behind it. I've never been clear, given my volubility on the subject, why the piece insisted on reducing itself to lines. But the mysteries of poems are never-ending.

A History of Wash Day

 

Dawn Potter

Sunday night you sort the clothes, whites from greens,

browns from red, and now by fabric—woolen or linen?

cotton or silk?—and were they smudged in the pew,

 

or fouled in the barn? Soak overnight (bucket after bucket

from the dooryard pump), each pile in its own

watery tub, then rest yourself (nurse a baby, darn a sock)

 

so that on Monday, at dawn (corset pinching your lungs),

you can turn your thoughts to draining your first tub: a heap

of pale church attire (lye soap glistens in an oily basin).

 

Pour in hot suds (stove ablaze with wood lugged

before daybreak), and scrub each foaming bodice

against the washboard (knuckles scraped raw).

 

Wring out the garments, rub fresh soap on stubborn filth,

heave the sodden mess into the cauldron on the stove, 

(kitchen pulsing with heat), add water (bucket after bucket

 

from the dooryard pump), and boil it up (steam thick as night).

Rest (nurse a baby, fry meat for men), then dip the clothes

out of the boiler (burn yourself), rub dirty spots again

 

(will soap supply last till butchering time?), rinse load in plain water

(bucket after bucket from the dooryard pump), wring out clothes,

rinse in a tub of bluing (store-bought bottle is running low), twist dry,

 

then mix up a tin pan of starch water, dip each item (nurse

the screaming baby), wring once more, hang clothes on the line

in the dooryard till they are perfectly dry

 

and repeat every step on every heap of garments, in this order:

darker, coarser, dirtier. Life could be harder.

You could live in the city, begin every work week of your life

 

lugging gallons of water through horseshit, across glare ice,

up five narrow flights of a tenement. Maybe you wash 

for eight sloppy sons, a pair of dying incontinent parents,

 

five or six live-in boarders, or an owner who whips you

when you overlook a cherry stain. On your knees by the tub,

you scrub out brick dust and urine; you line-dry your sheets

 

in a breeze thick with soot.  How much coal must a woman carry

(oh, the price of coal!) to keep her stove hot enough to boil a lake

of wash-water in a single day?  What of the baby (scooting

 

across the kitchen floor)? What of you

(weighted with baskets, blinded by steam)?

What of duty (monstrous, eternal)?

 

No time to pray. Tomorrow is ironing day.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]

Invisible in the fog, a chickadee sings DEE-dee, DEE-dee. Is there a word for this gray no-light air, this dusk before dawn? Through the screen door, snakes of fog twine into the kitchen--damp, cool, tinged with salt. This is summer Maine of the storybooks . . . dew-wet, shiver of breeze, windows flung open to the tender chill.

It's my last quiet morning for a while, and I am awake too early, but it's hard to regret sleep with such loveliness around me. Flowers, bowing under fog weight, glow like jewels--gold, rose, magenta, lemon, cream. In the quince a chickadee repeats, repeats. Behind her ostinato a robin bubbles, a sparrow chitters.  Speckles of milky sky prick the vast shadow canopy of the maples. This tiny plot, this miniature realm . . . I wander from window to window, amazed.

A few things will happen this week. The big one will be Teresa's arrival tomorrow afternoon, triggering our flurried plunge into rehearsal mode. Then, on Wednesday, I will officially become poet laureate of Maine. There's no ceremony planned, no formality I need to step up for. Still, I'll feel at least a mental shift. Publicly I've mostly laid low since the April announcement. Primarily, I haven't wanted to take the shine off Julia Bouwsma's last few months in the position. But also I've needed time to come to grips with the idea of the job. I am a different person from Julia, from all of the previous laureates. It's important to learn from them but not imitate them. The question has been "what will I bring to the task?" I don't just mean "what projects will I do?" but "what qualities of myself must I share?"

It's foggy this morning, and two cute exasperating brown bunnies are skipping and hopping around and under my neighbor's car. These bunnies are an invasive species that has suddenly exploded in Portland, and I am not delighted. I admit they are adorable. But so were the tribbles in that Star Trek episode.

However, I am delighted that I slept in till 6 a.m. on this Saturday morning. For some reason Chuck didn't work very hard to wake me, and my body, still convalescing from its long stretch of car-related insomnia, took advantage of his neglect.

For me, waking up at 6 is the equivalent of wallowing, so I feel quite smug this morning. Look at me, sleeping in on a Saturday: I'm like a regular guy.

This weekend I need to weed the front garden beds and mow grass. I'd also like to go for a bike ride as I've been out only once so far this summer. Meanwhile, Gloria can relax in the driveway and enjoy the bunnies. She'll get plenty of attention next week.

Now the gulls are screeching, and sun is grappling with the remains of the fog, and I'm remembering that there's most of a strawberry pie in the refrigerator, and I'm thinking about all of the work ahead in the next couple of weeks and getting excited about it. Rehearsing, teaching, playing, writing, performing, listening, celebrating, plus hanging out by the lake with some of my favorite people . . . wot larks, as sweet Joe muses to Pip in Great Expectations, a book I should reread soon. Maybe I'll bring it along to Monson.

Yesterday was an out-and about day--a trip up the coast (across the coast? down the coast? directions are confusing when one is winding among the spits and fingers of the midcoast) to have lunch with a friend, then errands, and then my writing group. I did all of the driving because that is the protocol: the person with the new car has to do all of the driving for the first few days and then everything can go back to normal. But I was glad to let Gloria stretch her legs on the highway and the back roads, and I have almost figured out how her buttons work. Gloria, by the way, is the Mazda's name. The Impreza was Tina--chosen because my boys suggested that I name her in honor of one Harmony's leading citizens. I see no reason to break that pattern.

This morning it's raining lightly. I need to drag the trash out to the curb, and get my walk in; I need to deal with a bunch of desk stuff; I've got to figure out something to make for dinner, and I have two quarts of strawberries to hull and transform into a pie. I also have a couple of draft blurts from last night's writing prompts to mess around with. If the rain slows to a mist, I'd like to weed the front gardens. I might run an errand or two.

These next couple of days will be my last hurrah with unemployment. On Monday evening Teresa will arrive from Florida and the conference faculty will leap back into rehearsal mode--a repeat of our Sarasota residency schedule, but this time we'll be working in the Bowdoin dance studio, a 40-minute drive north of Portland. Then, on Sunday, we'll head up to Monson and plunge into the joyous netherworld that is the conference. I'm excited about this year's participants--a mix of old friends and new . . . people who once attended the Frost Place iteration but whom I haven't seen for several years; people I've worked with online through Studio Session and Poetry Kitchen classes; local poets as well as people who are brand-new to me. We're fully subscribed, which makes the Monson Arts folks very happy, and it makes me happy as well. I'm so glad this conference remains vital and lively. I'm so glad participants love the new digs.

Every once in a while I read an elegiac Facebook post lamenting the Frost Place old days. This is, I will admit, painful for me. The truth is that the conference is more stable and more adventurous than it was able to be at the Frost Place. I loved that setting too, and I suffered, on many levels, when I made the decision to leave it. But the move turned out to be very good for both the creative growth of the conference and my own mental health. Having everyone together on the same campus makes both the classroom and the social sides more cohesive. Having an in-place staff that handles all non-program logistics means that I can focus entirely on my real job without exhausting myself into a smear of tears. Working in a place where poetry is just one of many endeavors to celebrate is uplifting and stimulating. Like the Frost Place, Monson Arts is beautiful, historic, arty, welcoming. It is also comfortable, which was not a prime feature of the FP. The only thing missing here is Robert Frost's ghost. But the truth is there are a lot of other fantastic ghosts floating around out there who are eager to be welcomed in.

I slept like a stunned ox last night, reeling in from our movie-and-late-dinner evening and immediately stumbling up to bed and into unconsciousness. I was not even slightly tipsy; I was just tired tired tired. Car worries have notably messed with my rest over the past few weeks, so a giant sleep was both vital and inevitable, and last night it arrived with a bang.

Now here I sit with my coffee, blinking and groggy. Sunlight fingers the neighbor's roof. Nearby a cardinal warns Jericho, Jericho, oh no, then flits to a distant shrub to repeat himself. A car sighs up the street and around the corner. An airplane grumbles into takeoff. The little northern city by the sea begins to phrase its daytime song.

I spent much of yesterday metaphorically tying up various strings and tatters: dealing with scheduling, paperwork, emails; sussing out project stuff, making lists, clearing now-unnecessary piles of this-and-that. Though nothing I did was especially creative, it felt good to be reentering the word world, even at its most pedestrian level. Holding a book is not the same as reading a book, but it's not nothing either. And arranging my physical, temporal, and thought spaces welcomes the work that will eventually happen there.

Which is a pompous way of saying I cleaned my desk.

Welcome home, shiny expensive machine. May you hold up your end of the bargain. Tom, no doubt light-headed from lack of cash, has already suggested street racing and decorating you with polka-dots. I, in more traditional fashion, am scrupulously wiping off every speck of dirt, a project I will keep up for maybe another 36 hours before I allow you to lapse into pollen and clutter. 

Now that the deed is done, I might as well turn off the dread faucet and try to enjoy myself. This is the sportiest car I've ever owned, so maybe I will learn to love driving, which would be convenient, given how much of it I have to do. She's peppy on the highway and swoops through curves and corners with aplomb--a surprise to me, who's spent more than a decade driving the car version of a couch cushion.

I realize that poets aren't actually supposed to have nice cars, but every once in a while mistakes are made.

Today is forecast to be warm and at least partly sunny. So I'll get sheets onto the lines, take an early walk, maybe spot another cache of mushrooms. Yesterday I scored a tote bag full of chicken-of-the-woods: enough for dinner plus three quarts in the freezer. I haven't yet spotted any chanterelles in my usual haunts, but I'm keeping an eye peeled. 

People like to stop and talk to me when they see me cutting mushrooms or carrying around a batch in my hat or otherwise being peculiar. The other day a woman stopped me in Baxter Woods to exclaim over what I'd found. She herself was carrying a camera with a telephoto lens, the usual sign of a birder, so I asked what she was looking for. She responded, "Oh, I'm a raccoon nut."

The woods are full of us weirdos.

Rain poured all night, and it's still raining--more than an inch so far, soaking into gardens, sluicing into the bay. In the small hours I half-woke to the sound of it drumming the roof, clacking the panes. How I love crisp sheets, an open bedroom window, the fragrant beat of steady rain. No wind, no bluster; just sweet downpour, hour upon hour.

Yesterday I accomplished step 1: I signed all the paperwork for the car. Now I'm waiting for the credit union to jump through its hoops so I can accomplish step 2: pay for the car, pick it up, and bring it home. Of course I immediately had buyer's remorse and a giant stress headache, but that's to be expected. There's nothing like the soul-killing atmosphere of a car dealership to make a person believe in doom.

Well, the doom is (semi) done now, so I will attempt to spend my liminal hours accomplishing something revivifying and non-car-related, like going for a walk in the rain, dusting the living room, and working on conference plans. Yesterday I bought a quart of local strawberries, our first of the season, so that was an aid in learning to live with an excruciating car payment. There is no dessert better than local strawberries and cream served in a pretty bowl to the one I love. Shortcake is unnecessary bulk. Ripe berries, sliced, barely sugared, and topped with too much softly whipped cream: what more does a person need?

I'm still rereading Ford's The Sportswriter, and I hope to pick up Jarrell's novel Pictures from an Institution from the library today. This afternoon Teresa and I will meet to finalize our teaching plans for the conference . . . though finalize is a silly word for how we teach together. No matter how much prep we do (and we do a lot of prep), we always end up catching each other's eyes in the middle of a class, laughing, and then changing everything on the fly. 

Among other things, we spent this weekend on wedding prep--working on our gifts, figuring out our itinerary. At the moment Amtrak is a cheaper option than flying, so Tom bought roundtrip train tickets. This will add a day to either end of our travels, but the fun of the Lakeshore Limited is so worth it. We will be staying in a downtown hotel with a pool and a sauna. We'll be surrounded by our kids and their partners, by my family, Tom's family, old friends from Maine and Brooklyn, plus all of the new family and friends awaiting us. We'll be wearing silly outfits. How could this not be a fabulous time?

First, however, I have to buy a car. And unless there's yet another snag, that's what's happening today, though I have no hopes of bringing it home immediately as our credit union functions at a glacial pace. Meanwhile, I hope, the Impreza will disappear from the driveway and I'll somehow manage to do some editing and accomplish some conference tasks and get the house cleaned and go grocery shopping around the edges of Car Distraction.

Steady rain is supposed to move in this evening, but the day should stay clear so I'm going to risk hanging clothes on the line. I transplanted chard yesterday and sowed a second crop of cilantro, in anticipation of a wet few days. Now the garden will take care of itself for a little while, and I will try to remember that I write poems. 

Though the morning is dawning clear, showers and thunderstorms are supposed to move into Portland over the course of the day. So I'm glad I got the mowing done yesterday, as well as a big chunk of the weeding, because the forecast looks like it will be unsettled all week. This morning I'll do a bit more weeding, maybe prune, too, and cart some mulch, but if the rains come in earlier than expected I won't be hard on myself.

The gardens really do look lovely, even in their slightly imperfect state. A crescent of golden Stella D'Oro lilies beams along the sidewalk. White, red, and yellow roses overflow. The black-lace elderberry trembles beneath saucers of pink blossom. The grass is dotted with white clover heads. Bees hum in the flowering thyme. Cardinals flit among dogwood and viburnums.

I have decided that Dostoevsky and I are still incompatible. I just cannot get attached to The Brothers Karamazov, and as of this morning I have accepted my weakness and returned the volume to the shelf. I could blame my failure on car-shopping brain damage, but that would be disingenuous. I have never enjoyed Dostoevsky, even in less vehicular times. So now I am once again hovering between reading projects, though I am plugging the gap with a sugar-coated placebo in the form of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I wish I were a Karamazov and Ulysses reader, but at least I have the comfort of being a War and Peace and Middlemarch re-reader.

Tonight I may fry up latkes for dinner, serving them with yogurt and dill alongside baked new beets and freshly harvested lettuce. Even better, we still have a little bit of lemon pudding cake left over from last night's dinner party. In other good news Tom sold the Impreza for $600 to a guy who will tow it away tomorrow, and Chuck enjoyed an up-close chipmunk that was yelling at him through the storm door. It's been a fine weekend for everyone so far.

Yesterday's car stuff ended up being delayed because of the holiday, so everything will start up again on Monday, which is completely fine with me. I plan to enjoy this weekend by not looking up anything on Autotrader . . . ugh, those car sites: so much confusing bait-and-switch.

I've got yard work I should do this weekend--mowing and weeding and such--and I'm going to make dessert for dinner this evening with friends (lemon pudding cake, my current favorite sweet). At some point this summer I need to spend a day shopping for wedding jewelry, but I don't know when. My plan is to comb vintage stores for something bright, maybe in glass. The kids want "festive cocktail . . . embrace color," so we are doing our best to oblige. And I will say it's been fun to go all-out with semi-silly party clothes.

I'm still plowing through Dostoevsky, still pecking away at revisions. On Thursday I met with my arts commission handler and we started sussing out some early thoughts for poet laureate projects. On Friday Teresa and Jeannie and I came up with a plan for our next Substack post. The conference creeps ever closer, and my PL term formally begins on July 1. At that point I'll be in the throes of rehearsal: the conference faculty will be up at Bowdoin for most of the week before the conference, working in the dance studio on our Monson, Maine, USA performance. Thank goodness I'll have a car by then (fingers crossed, fingers crossed, please, nothing go wrong).

The past two weeks have been one long tension headache. I've been so distracted by car angst that I've barely been able to focus on the things I actually care about, and I'm always annoyed when I allow myself to get into such states. I dislike the pettiness: there are so many worse troubles in this world, yet there I was, standing in the kitchen crying over a car. It's stupid. It's a trap. It's so American.

All I can say in my favor is that I'm glad I invented a prompt about gas stations a couple of weeks ago, before this whole ordeal began. The prompt arose from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, "Filling Station," and my idea was "write your own poem about a gas station and repeat plain words throughout." Simple but effective, as it turned out.

I might be exasperated with myself over this car despair, but at least I know there are great poems about gas stations milling around in my friends' notebooks.

Today I will go to the dealership and sign papers for a 2022 Mazda CX-30--white exterior, black interior, 59,000 miles on it, full of safety features, all-wheel drive, handles beautifully, a clean accident history, and costing more than I spent for a year of college at a Little Ivy so, please, fates assure me I'm not making a terrible mistake. The credit union is closed for Juneteenth today, so we can't move forward with the financing till Monday. But at some point next week I'll be bringing home a car, and you will have the pleasure of never hearing me talk about car shopping again. (This is probably a lie, as T's elderly pickup is next in line for catastrophic failure.)

Storms raced through yesterday, but today is dawning calm and bright. I'm not sure what's on my schedule, other than signing away our life's blood for a car at some point in the day and talking about poems with Teresa and Jeannie this afternoon. The beaten-up peonies are in dire need of rescue, so once the garden dries out a bit, maybe I'll find a chance to prune away the smashed blossoms. I'm plodding through The Brothers Karamazov, wishing that I was enjoying it more and hoping that once I get through this slow beginning I'll suddenly latch onto it. Part of my problem is that the print in this edition is really small. But also the characters aren't attractive in any way, at least not so far, so I'm having a hard time caring about what's about to happen to them. I've always loved Tolstoy much more than Dostoevsky, but I was hoping that finally, in my maturity, I might have learned to broaden my scope. Apparently not.

After packing another day with stupid car stuff, I was able to track down another option that we are close to buying . . . if all goes well with the loan. This time I was able to put a 24-hour hold on the vehicle so at least it won't sell out from under us. It's not as good a deal as the one we lost, but it's adequate, and it's more or less the same car. On my travels I did test-drive a new Corolla AWD hybrid, which I expected to love but I did not. The hybrid part was fine, but the car itself felt kind of tinny, like I was driving a toy. I guess it's some comfort to know I'm not pining over a car I can't afford anyway.

Well, everything could go south again, but I am hoping that maybe, please, finally, at last I can stop shriveling my soul with Carfax reports. Ay yi yi. 

One great thing that happened yesterday was getting a beautiful long friendly letter from someone I'm eager to get to know better. A hand extended is always a surprise and a delight, but it was especially comforting at a moment when my spirits are being crushed in the vehicular mills. So I'm feeling brighter this morning, a little more like myself, a little less like a cog in the vortex, and I'm actually remembering that I like to do things such as gardening and reading and writing and cooking and going for walks and hanging out with friends and hanging out by myself and playing cards with Tom and texting funny stories to my sons and entertaining the cat by poking him with a dust mop.

Not that I'm out of the doldrums. Ever more glop awaits--wincingly taking the plunge, haggling with a salesman, signing piles of paperwork, buying insurance, dealing with registration, getting the dead Subaru out of the driveway. But after that, in the hazy future, maybe I can relax and let myself enjoy owning a car that doesn't terrify me every day.

Today rain is forecast, so no sheets on the outside lines. I've got desk work to do, an afternoon zoom meeting, and I may end up hosting my writing group here tonight as our usual host has a conflict. I hope to tear my thoughts away from cars, at least for part of the day. And surely there's a writing prompt I could invent from a Carfax report. . . .

Someone else bought the car before I could get there, so we are back to the beginning of this ordeal. I'd spent all morning trying to pull together the various threads--trying to reach T who was on a construction site with bad cell service, trying to reach the loan officer, who was incommunicado at various times. The end result was crushing and I cried. I so hate this process. Every decision is wrong: be too careful and you lose the vehicle; be too rash and you end up with a lemon; do anything at all and you're saddled with a financial boulder.

My over-emotions were also linked to the fact that I'd been awake all night fretting. It's hard to be serene when I've had almost no sleep. Fortunately, I did manage to drop off last night, though I had to do some work to get myself there. And I do feel less tragic this morning.

Oy. This is not how I want to live out my days--combing through Blue Book and JD Power printouts, comparing the details of CarFax reports, researching complaints about reliability, watching T plot out the horrors of loan repayment for each possibility I track down. The fact is: I don't even like to drive. I would be delighted to never drive again. But my job--which I love--requires me to travel long distances in bad weather over bad roads. And thus I must have a car, and the car must have all wheel drive, and be in decent shape, and not have ridiculously high mileage, and cannot break down all the time. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask for, does it? However, such basic parameters mean that the car will cost more than $20,000. We're in a brutal situation, no matter how we look at it.

At least we like each other, so there's that.

I think I may have found my car yesterday, though we haven't yet had the final discussion about how I should move ahead. It's a 2022 Mazda CX-30 with 32,000 miles on the odometer, still under warranty for the big things (engine, transmission, and such) and with a fairly modest trim package, which is keeping the price sort of reasonable (not that reasonable is actually a word one can associate with car pricing). So I'll likely be spending my day in sales/credit union/insurance purgatory, and of course I got almost no sleep last night because of worrying about car stuff, meaning that I'm in prime shape for such a thrilling day.

But better to just get it done. I'll be relieved to have this over: to park the replacement car in the driveway, get the junker car towed to its final destination, and return the borrowed car with gratitude and a full tank of gas.

Otherwise, what's new? It's hard to recall, given that my brain and my hours have mostly been sucked up into the horrible car vortex. I met with Teresa yesterday afternoon to talk about Aurora Leigh and her lovely poetry manuscript, so that was a respite. I did some editing, and I did some housework. I dealt with an invasion of ants into Chuck's chow dish. (He was disappointed I got rid of them; he enjoyed the ants.) I've been working on poem drafts, though I don't much like where they're going. Still, better to be writing than not writing, even if the results are disappointing.

It's a dark morning, raining steadily. I've been sleeping hard lately, for some reason, and it was sweet to swim up from depths to a slow awareness of tap and clatter against the panes.

Monday has arrived: I'll be back to editing; I need to do my weekly housework; I've got a meeting this afternoon--but the rain is a silvery gate into the day.

I'm still finishing The Red Queen, but I decided yesterday that my next novel will be Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, which I haven't reread for years. I also ordered Randall Jarrell's novel Pictures at an Institution from the library, on the advice of a friend. I've been thinking about Jarrell's poems since I shared that review of Bishop with you the other day. Maybe the one poem contemporary readers might know is "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." But there are many other World War II-linked poems, many set beyond the war as well. His poems are lonely. His characters mostly don't know what to do in this world, other than what they have to do.

Jarrell's poems are emotional, compressed, accomplished. I don't want to forget them.

We did venture out to a dealership yesterday, where I drove a used Mazda CX-30 that is probably too expensive for us, but I did like the car and how it handled, so at least I learned something. It's not going to be easy to find a car with 50,000 miles or less that has all-wheel drive and a reputation for reliability. I've had to give up my hopes of a used hybrid AWD: they're completely out of our price range. But a Mazda seems like a possibility, if we can find one that's a little cheaper than the one I drove . . . or, I suppose, if we can dicker the price down, though that is not a talent that either one of us possesses. Here's where my older son would come in handy: he is the family fast-talker; the rest of us just stand back and marvel. But unfortunately he is too far away to muscle in as our agent.

Once we gritted our way through the dealership ordeal, the day returned to being a regular summer Saturday. I weeded the front gardens, mowed the front and back yards, listened to the Sox win, made pizza, texted with my boys, sat in the shade and read my Drabble novel. In the evening I watched some of the Knicks game while Tom checked out a garage-band show at the VFW.

Now the house is draped in Sunday-morning peace. Cool air floats through the open windows. Chuck, full of breakfast, crouches at the screen door listening to robin song. Upstairs, T clanks his coffee cup against his saucer. Sunlight streaks the walls. A passing crow complains.

I might spread mulch this morning. I might wash windows. I might go for a bike ride. It feels nice to not care too much, one way or the other. Anything could change my mind.

The novel I'm rereading, The Red Queen, is set in the Korean royal court in the late 1700s. It overflows with repression and protocol and madness and disaster. The book is a sorrowful companion, yet the voice of the Crown Princess, the central character, is so very sane in the midst of insanity. I won't say that her voice is helpful to me, here in our own insane historical moment. But it is clarifying.

I always enjoy plundering the local free library boxes during my morning walks, and yesterday I was pleased to find two nearly mint-condition copies of Life from 1969: one a special issue about the moon landing, the other titled "The Incredible Year '68." Both contain many cigarette and cheap liquor ads. One encourages me to buy a Toyota because it comes with "backup lights." Both, oddly, include long poems by James Dickey. But in my view, the piece-de-resistance is a poetry review by someone named Charles Elliott, which opens like this:

When Judgment Day arrives in the seminars of Elysium, Elizabeth Bishop stands a pretty fair chance of being put down as a minor poet.

It then touches on the superiorities of Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Marianne Moore before spending two columns grudgingly admitting that EB has something going for her, though it can't possibly be lasting.

It's the oddest review--one essentially saying "Here's a book I like but I refuse to believe that people in the future will care about such things," as if legacy should be the prime mover in any discussion of art, as if simple present-tense pleasure is a lesser experience.

Of course the comedy, nearly 60 years later, lies in the Judgment Day that's already arrived: in our own fashionable pantheon, Bishop's star floats higher than any of the other names that Elliott chose to taunt her with. Lowell has been reduced to "crazy guy," Moore to "technician," Jarrell to nothing at all . . . who remembers Jarrell? This is just as unfair as Elliott's original review was, but so go "the seminars of Elysium."

**

Sea fog rolled into the little northern city last night, and it lingers this morning. The neighborhood is green and misty and freighted with wet, and the air smells of brine. But the air, though humid, is pleasantly cool, and I am wrapped in my red bathrobe by the open window, happy to be drinking hot black coffee, happy to be listening to a robin who seems to be pretending to be a thrush--those long liquid sad remarks, the music of a forest evening suddenly reenacted on a city morning.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, finished the Erdrich novel, started rereading Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, made garlicky pappardelle with shrimp, scallions, and chard, listened to some of the Sox game, stared out into the fog. Next week I'll start the move back into work life . . . it's time, and I'm ready, but my little early summer hiatus has been sweet, and I'll miss it.

Meanwhile today I suppose we'll do something or other about car shopping. The credit union still hasn't decided how much money to lend us, and T has been working out various scenarios which he has yet to share with me, but Saturday is our only window to visit a dealership, so I expect we will gird on our swords and stride into the fray at some point today. (Though why aren't dealerships open on Sundays? That seems like a stupid decision for a capitalist to make.)

T doesn't like air conditioning, so I only turn it on when conditions have reached the brutal stage, which wasn't quite the case last night. Still, even with a fan running, the bedroom air was sticky and hot, and I did not expect to immediately tumble into the sleep of a satisfied boulder. But somehow I did, and this morning I'm blinky and groggy and squinty, as if I've just rolled out of a winter's hibernation. . . .

I break off this dozy commentary to report that my tiny street is suddenly full of firetrucks. Something seems to be happening on Saunders Street, the next block over, something that involves five trucks and ten or so men walking around casually in their gear and blocking all traffic, if there were any traffic. But now two of the trucks have driven away, leaving the rest of the guys to deal with whatever non-emergency this is, and now the remaining trucks are leaving as well, all of them choosing to drive the wrong way down our narrow one-way street . . . a brief and exciting (and apparently benign) interlude, suspenseful chiefly because firetrucks are the vehicle version of our giant maples, which is to say they are way too big for the situation and seem likely to roll over houses and cars without noticing, but magically never do.

Okay, well, that's over now. Back to whatever I was talking about before . . . I think I was maundering on about being dozy, but there's nothing like five firetrucks strobing their lights across the front yard to wake a person up.

It's Friday, and I'm expecting an editing project to reappear on my desk at some point today, and maybe we'll get news about the car loan, and I have to drive to the post office and I have to haul recycling to the curb and maybe mow grass in the backyard, and I think I'll make something with shrimp in it for dinner, and I'm worried that something bad is about to happen to one of the characters in the Erdrich novel I'm reading. As you can see from this sentence, my day could unfold in any number of ways, but at least I'm pretty sure that none of my neighbors is on fire.

I had a fun visit with the printer yesterday, who turns out to have one of T's photos hanging in his house, which certainly increases my happiness about hiring him to do this job. He showed me some other poetry broadsides he's done--one for Richard Blanco was especially beautiful--and now I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he'll do with my poem. T and I are getting excited about this wedding--both of us working on our gifts, both of us having fun planning our outfits. T acquired his suit and shirt this week; I've got a dress and shoes but need to figure out earrings and a necklace. "Dress up in favorite bright colors" is what the kids asked for, so that is what we will do.

Today I hope the credit union will finally have collected enough paperwork to make a decision about the car loan. Otherwise, I'm not too sure what the day will hold. Thunderstorms rolled through last night, and the weather will continue to be unsettled today. The air is foggy and humid, my hair has suddenly become curly, and the sodden peonies are a sloppy beautiful mess. I'm looking forward to a morning walk in this lush, wet world, but I doubt it will be a day for yardwork. So I'll focus on inside tasks: read Louise Erdrich's disturbing but extremely well written novel The Round House; continue to gather together conference materials; tinker with a poem draft; think about my manuscript; polish the dining room table; do some dusting; bake for my poetry group . . . Tomorrow I'm expecting an editing project to come back to me, and next week will be filled with meetings and obligations. The summer bubble is about to burst. But not quite yet.

It was a warm night, and today we've got thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, though daytime temperatures will be a bit cooler than they were yesterday. I might get out to mow the front yard, if the sun isn't glaring. I've never had much stamina for working in a full blaze, though I've frequently forced myself to do so. But I'm over that idiot habit now.

This morning I need to drive into town to meet with a letterpress printer who may be working on a project for me--a wedding present for my son and his fiancee. And I need to continue dealing with auto-loan application stuff. Being a freelancer means that applying for anything financial always involves a stupid amount of paperwork: there's no such thing as a simple weekly paystub in my life.

Otherwise the day will be quiet. Now that I've finished my Poetry Kitchen syllabus, I'm going through my conference plans: tweaking materials, discussions, prompts; creating packets for photocopying; double-checking the daily schedule. Today I'll start pulling together the materials I'll be traveling with: books for the display table, poems for share-a-poem night. I travel heavy, so let's hope I'll have a car to carry this stuff.

Yesterday was primary day in Maine, so that will be another distraction for the day. There are no clear winners in the governor's race, meaning that Democrats will need to be sorted out via ranked-choice voting. I will likely have to write an occasional poem for whichever candidate eventually gets inaugurated (likely to be a Democrat, but who knows), so I've got an odd sort of stake in the matter. What will I write, for whom, and how?

It will cost $6,000 to replace the transmission, so Tina the Subaru is now officially dead. Time to cancel the insurance and try to sell her for parts. Sigh. She was a pain in the ass, repair-wise, but she drove our kid back and forth to high school and then college, and she drove me back and forth to all of my various jobs and obligations, and she never left me stuck in the mud or the snow. I lift my cap to her.

Today I need to mess around with getting us preapproved for a car loan, and then T is going to plot out various financial trajectories as he decides what sort of car we should be trying to find. And then, I guess, we will start actively looking.

I'm trying not to worry too much about this car situation, though in addition to the money anxieties I also fear I'm not going to have a vehicle by the time I need to start traveling again. But I'm striving to keep my thoughts away from fret and focused on the present: I need to vote today. I need to work on Monson plans. I might pick at some poem drafts. I've started reading Louise Erdrich's The Round House. I'd like to finish Notley's Mysteries of Small Houses. I'm waiting for an author to return an editing project. I could mess around more with my manuscript.

And the conference is getting ever closer. As usual, we've had some last-minute participant upheaval, but this year I've been able to fill all of the open spots quickly, which is a very, very good thing. Last year my beloved cat died suddenly while I was in Monson, and my beloved kid got really sick at the same time. This year I'm merely in automobile panic, and let's hope that's the worst of the emergencies I'll be dealing with.

Yesterday it rained, so I transplanted--moved a serviceberry into a sunnier bed beside the patio, cut handfuls of sweet woodruff from the thriving backyard beds and moved them into empty patches along the driveway. And then I walked around and took pictures of the front and side beds.

 

But of course I woke in the middle of the night fretting about what I need to do today: call the garage about the dead Subaru; call the bank about getting a car loan; begin to make decisions. Fortunately I do have a borrowed car I'm able to use for a couple of weeks, which does make daily life easier. I used it yesterday to drive to the fish market and buy a pair of softshell crabs for dinner. We love softshells, and they've had a long season in the market this year.

This is how I served them yesterday. First, soak them in buttermilk for a few hours. Then dredge with seasoned flour and fry in butter and olive oil, 4 minutes each side. Serve with garlic bread (a local baguette, broiled with butter, green garlic from the garden, parmesan, and za'atar); roasted peppers and red onion; yogurt with pickled dandelion buds, garden dill, red onion. Follow with homemade coffee ice cream.

One thing about an accidental weekend at home is that I have unexpectedly gotten a lot of yardwork done. Friday morning, before we left on our abortive mission, I'd frantically weeded and trimmed everything in the front yard. Then Saturday turned out to be cool and occasionally misty, so it was perfect for weeding (and thus for not perseverating about cars). I cultivated and tidied all of the backyard beds, refreshed the hummingbird feeder and the bird bath, watered seedlings and young transplants, and ran the trimmer. I even hacked weeds out of the gravel patio.

Today will be another cloudy, vaguely showery day,  Now that the front and back yards are (temporarily) lovely, all I have on my mind garden-wise is the long semi-naturalized strip between our driveway and the neighbors'. In gardener-speak, naturalized means a bed that's designed to mimic the natural spread of plant life. The plants don't necessarily occur in the wild, but they fill in as understory and spread in a casual-seeming manner. It's a useful strategy for difficult-to-cultivate areas such as this one, much of which is a tangle of tree roots.

But enough of this boring garden talk. Let's be overwhelmed by car decisions. Yikes.

I am not in Vermont. Yesterday evening, on route 93, just north of the Hooksett rest area in New Hampshire, my car suddenly lost power. I coasted to the shoulder, all of the engine's emergency lights flashing. The car would not move forward or backward. Traffic was flying past. It was scary, and there was nothing to do but call AAA and have the car towed back to Portland. So T and I spent the rest of our Friday evening in the cab of a tow truck. We got home a little after 8, and now Tina the Subaru is dead in my driveway, and I fear that this may really be the end for the old girl. I'll have her towed to the transmission shop on Monday, but I doubt we'll be able to face the cost of replacing it at her advanced age (and this is not her first transmission). Which leads me to the fearful situation of having to acquire another car. Which makes me want to put my head down and cry.

Obviously, things could have been much, much worse. Tina could have died in the middle of a lane. Our vehicle could have been clipped by a semi. As it happened, we failed just at the edge of the ramp from the rest area, so we were slightly protected from the onslaught of traffic. Still, it was an awful moment, and I never want to experience it again.

This morning will be all bustle-around-and-batten-the-hatches as T and I are heading to Vermont as soon as he gets home from work. Garden and yard stuff first; then packing and house stuff; then lug the Big Kitten to the cat kennel. Not a poem-filled day, but I've had a pack of them lately so that's probably just as well.

I've started rereading Austen's Persuasion, and it will be a good travel book: familiar but demanding--my favorite sort of comfort reading. I have little patience with milquetoast prose, even when I'm in need of rest. It's no relaxation to spend time with sloppily conceived characters, mechanized plots, and tone-deaf sentence style. When I read these kinds of books--and I do sometimes, for exploratory reasons--I'm at work: I'm paying attention to what I don't want to replicate in my writing or encourage in my teaching. I'm not resting.

For me, reading is often a joy, often a comfort, often a mystery, often a challenge. But it is never an escape.

Yesterday I lay in the hammock for a few minutes, in the late afternoon, staring up into the massive canopy of Norway maples whose roots and branches tangle the neighborhood's separate little backyards into a leviathans' grove. Their hugeness is startling, impressive, unnerving: the maples are a family of wooly mammoths peering down at a doll's picnic. But their intense green shade, watery sun-flicker as a breeze ripples among the broad leaves, their sky-reach . . . I know they are trouble, those trees. But they are also extraordinary.

I'm making good progress on my Poetry Kitchen plans. And by the way, there's still one open spot, so if you're at all interested in experimenting with prose-to-poem influence, do join us. It's been fun to choose passages and poems, to grapple with conversation possibilities and prompts for new drafts. I like creating these classes; I like the way the passages and poems fizz together in my thoughts, how the writing prompts become inevitable, like a chemical reaction.

Today I'll keep messing around with class plans. I'll try to fit in some gardening as I didn't end up accomplishing much outside yesterday. I'll keep reading Philip Roth's novel Indignation and finish Alice Notley's collection Mysteries of Small Houses. Maybe I'll take another look at my manuscript.  I'll listen to birdsong. I'll go out to write tonight.

Meanwhile. Trees.

T and I went out last night for an early movie and a late dinner, which is a date we should maybe have more often. As we were pleased to discover, it's easy to find a table in the Old Port at 8 p.m. on a weeknight, even in June. Mostly I tend to avoid the Old Port in the summer months, when it's the bastion of tourists and bar crawlers. But there are good restaurants in that neighborhood, and they are a pleasant stroll from the movie theater, through the briny night air, and a short drive home, along the lights of the cove. And it is nice to hold hands in public on a Tuesday.

Yesterday I got a chunk of work done on my Poetry Kitchen packet: all of the prose samples and most of the poems. I'll make a few more decisions today, and then I can start working on writing prompts. I also ordered a new printer. You may recall that a couple of years ago the roof leaked into our old one, and the machine has never recovered from the shock. For a while the left margins were still readable on the printouts (meaning that most poems were mostly legible), but last weekend, as I was printing out my manuscript draft, it gave up the ghost. Thus, I am spending yet more money on mechanized insentience. Blah.

Still, despite my luddite grumpiness, I am looking forward to a pretty day--sunny, mid-70s: an excellent day to hang sheets outside, listen to warblers in the woods, eat lunch in the garden; to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle and pull weeds in the shade; to sit by an open window in my blue chair, a book of poems in my lap, and watch robins splash in the birdbath. The Alcott House has its dreamy moments, and they are in bloom.

My dreams made me sad, though I can't remember details other than a room with two beds and the certainty that a task was looming.

Now, as I look out into the cool and cloudy morning, I can't shake the feeling that I am forgetting an obligation, letting someone down.

A cardinal whistles, pauses, whistles. Traffic growls in the distance. The air is very still.

In this darkened room, flowers shimmer . . . a jar of golden irises, a flagon of bridal veil and pale peonies.

Sunlight slashes through the heavy maples, streaking the neighbors' vinyl siding. A gray squirrel scuttles across their driveway, vanishes under the abandoned SUV whose tires are slowly sinking into the backyard earth.

Dream-sadness is nothing but loose ends. 

Except for eventually replacing my spring pansies with hot-weather flowers, I think I've finished my plant shopping for the year. I'll do some transplanting, and I'll keep sowing succession crops of salad greens, but I'm not buying any big-ticket shrubs or trees. I picked up a few last things as my neighbor and I wandered through nurseries and plant sales this weekend, and earlier last week I bought a raspberry plant . . . at the grocery store, of all places: a variety I've been looking for for years--compact, thornless, and non-spreading, perfect for a tiny homestead. Tom and I had a fantastic raspberry patch in Harmony, but there is no way to manage such a sprawling situation in this little garden. So finding the Glencoe berry bush was a score.

A thunderstorm came through yesterday evening, and rain must have kept falling through the night because everything is sopped again this morning. I've got my weekly housework to deal with today, and I'll go for a walk with a friend, and of course there's my manuscript to prod. For the moment I'm still mostly on employment hiatus, though I'm expecting an onslaught of new editing to show up soon, and the conference is rolling ever closer. Paperwork-wise, I'm prepped for Monson, but this week I'll start plotting out the syllabus details for my July Poetry Kitchen class.

Looking ahead at my calendar, I am already feeling a twinge of nerves about the amount of traveling I'll be doing in the fall. I know, as an introvert with a performance career, that I need to let myself keep soaking up this temporary peace. If I don't, I'll be a mess in the long run. But I've always found it hard to tamp down my guilt about my earning gaps.

So I scrub toilets and tell myself that I am contributing. Ah, the things we put ourselves through. No one else is griping at me. I can do all of the griping myself.

Thirty-eight degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and smoke is rising from the neighborhood chimneys. Bed was exceptionally cozy, and socks and hot coffee are just the ticket. It's a great morning not to be camping.  But while we didn't get close to a frost here in Portland, inland gardeners must be gnashing their teeth over their tomato seedlings. Mainers mostly don't plant tender crops until Memorial Day, so standing tragically over frost damage on the weekend after Memorial Day does seem a little like one of those dour peasant scenes in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Yesterday's reading in Gardiner was fun. The poet lineup was a little different than advertised, but the bar was crowded with listeners, the local state senator volunteered to read a slam poem he'd composed for the Cantab, and afterward four poets laureate squished into a booth at the A1 Diner and ate sandwiches. [Yes, it does sound like the opening of a joke. Let me know if you think of a punch line.]

Today, once the temperatures rise, I've got to get outside and do storm cleanup: there are leaves and little branches down everywhere, and also I ought to mow. Rain is moving in again tonight, so the window for getting stuff done is small. I have perennials to plant, lettuce seed to sow for a second crop. If we're in the mood, my neighbor and I may drive over to the nursery to buy a few more things. Next weekend I'll be on the road, so I'm feeling a little pressed, despite the unseemly cold. And the weeds have all returned, of course. Weeds never let their foot off the gas pedal. [Oooh, there you are again, mixed metaphor, my old pal.]

For the moment, however, I'm glad to be warm and inside. Raw is the word for this cranky weather: a deep dank chill that makes the bones in my hands ache. [Personally I think it's fine to use cranky and dank in the same sentence, but I apologize if I made your ears ring.]

Maybe I'll take a look at the new manuscript iteration today, or maybe I'll let it sleep for a while before I reconsider what I've made. But now that June has arrived, my days of freedom are on the wane. Soon I will be all conference, all the time, so this new manuscript won't get more than a cat nap before I start poking it again. There's no time to waste.

A wild stormy night, and at first light the gale still whips through the maples. As far as I can tell, no big branches have come down in the yard, but the gardens and grass are littered with twigs and fat leaves, and the peonies look like they've been in a bar fight.

It's a cold storm, too--temperatures in the 40s and wind like a hunting knife. Snow was forecast for the mountains, but here on the coast we're all gust and groan . . . creaking trees, battering rain, the little houses cowering.

The storm is supposed to settle down by midday, so it shouldn't affect my drive to Gardiner for a late-day reading. But my neighbor and I were planning to go to a plant sale first thing this morning, and possibly that won't happen.

I'm glad it's Saturday and that Tom gets to doze in bed and delight in not going to work in this furore. The maples always make me nervous in a big storm--they're so massive and loom so threateningly over the houses--but I do bask in both the snugness and the wildness. It's sweet to be warm and dry, sipping my hot coffee, wrapped in my bathrobe, listening to the furnace growl. Meanwhile, the wind's sea-roar makes me feel like I'm perched on a rock, far out in the Atlantic.

This afternoon, as mentioned, I'm reading at the Gardiner Poetry Festival, downtown at the Table Bar, 4 p.m., with Betsy Sholl, Stu Kestenbaum, Julia Bouwsma, t. love smith, Samaa Abdurraquib, and Arisa White. My name isn't on any publicity, as I was invited late, but I'll definitely be there, so come by if you're in town.

I'm not tired this morning, but I am feeling a little wrung-out. I spent much of yesterday with my poetry manuscript--reordering, retitling, rethinking; stripping out poems, adding different ones, making small changes within poems so that they echo among themselves. Manuscript work is difficult. I second-guess myself in ways I do not with individual poems. I worry that I'm the only one who can sense the through-lines. I worry that the through-lines are dull and obvious. I don't want to be thinking about potential readers, but I am. I don't want to worry if this thing is publishable, but I am.

Ergo, the wrung-out feeling. On the bright side, however, the crown of sonnets is pretty much done. I made one more little tweak yesterday, and now, I think, it's found its final shape. 

Morning dawns heavy-lidded and gray. A small rain suddenly rattles against the panes, a passing shower before the real storm settles in this evening. When I lean out the back door, the scent of wet lilac weights the air.

Today I hope to turn my thoughts back to my poetry manuscript. I've been mulling changes but for various reasons have been frozen in place, unable to make a move. Perhaps last week's crown experience has cracked the ice because this week I've gradually been feeling more able to address the issues. Or perhaps all I needed was a break from the collection, a chance to forget about it and then relearn it. Or maybe I've just been procrastinating. Who knows. The mysteries of making are legion.

In any case, I have rain, I have a day, I have a manuscript. Yesterday I caught up on desk-chore obligations. The housework is under control. The garden is wet. Nobody needs me to do anything else, as far as I know. There's no avoiding the manuscript. It's the task du jour.

I'm still reading Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. I've read a few of his novels before and they always make me uneasy. The characters are impossible to love, or even forgive. His ability to create such uneasiness in a reader interests me. If I can't enjoy the novels, I can feel their compulsion--how we watch, fascinated, as wickedness creeps under our doors. I try to look at how he makes these characters, how he lures my gaze.

The novel is not a cozy read, to say the least. Not that I'm addicted to cozy reads, but the book does unsettle me, and I wonder how my discomfort will affect my work with my own manuscript today. It surely will affect it somehow; reading always does bleed into life.

And writing, too, bleeds into life, changes it, makes a liar out of me. Last week, in my crown, I wrote that Ray never comes back to me in dreams. But then, last night . . . there he was.