Today may be the only non-rainy day of the long weekend, but we can't go canoeing because Tom's truck is out of commission. So we're going to grab an early breakfast at the Palace Diner in Biddeford and then drive down to Laudholm Farm to walk along the salt marsh and the beach. Bird life should be in full swing, and maybe we'll get lucky and glimpse some harbor seals as well. I am forever hopeful.

I worked on my long-poem draft for most of yesterday, coming up for air now and then and finally, by midafternoon, setting it aside entirely and trudging out to the garden to do a round of weeding. The draft is six pages long now, and the form is still holding strong: interwoven American sonnets, Shakespearean stanza breaks, the words pouring directly from fingers onto laptop. Almost always I write long poems directly onto the screen--the form demands immediate visual clarity, and I'm usually composing so intensely that my handwriting can't keep up with my thoughts.

I don't know when it will be done. When taking a rest, I've been breaking off in the midst of a stanza so that when I return, I can propel myself instantly back into the stream. But at some point the final couplet will make itself known, and then everything will come to a halt.

As I've been writing, my thoughts have wandered to Dante, to Joyce's The Dead. When I am in the throes of a long poem, everything seems to speak to it: the old cookie jar on the kitchen shelf, the pile of LPs beside the turntable, the ants bustling up and down the walkway. The windy strand, warblers fluttering among the beach roses . . . no doubt they will muscle in as well. All the world becomes an allusion to whatever it is I'm struggling to say.

Regular life: Eating eggs and home fries and listening to rockabilly at 7 a.m.  Driving past dinosaur-themed mini-golf. Peering out into the marsh at nesting geese. Forgetting I've got laundry to fold. Remembering what it felt like to bounce on that squeaky desk chair in Grandmom Potter's back room. Writing an unwieldy poem.