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?

For the moment the windows are open. This makes young Charles so happy: he loves to sit by the screen door admiring chipmunks and sparrows.

Overnight there were severe storm warnings for inland Maine, but I don't think the coast got much rain from the hoopla, though a thunderclap broke over Portland that was loud enough to wake the dead. That means I'll probably need to water the garden this morning, before today's squalid heat kicks in and I shut up the house and disappoint the cat.

The weather has kept me out of the garden, except for watering and quick harvesting. The beds are weedy, but there's not much I can do about that until the heat breaks. Instead, I've tried to focus on catching up on house chores--bathrooms, floors, laundry--and dealing with various errands. Yesterday I went to city hall and transferred my old license plates to the new car. I did a bunch of post-conference paperwork. I also encouraged myself to sit down and read--something I haven't been able to do much of for more than two weeks. I'm still working my way through Great Expectations, and I know that resurrecting my reading hours is the first step toward resurrecting my writing hours.

Recouping sleep is the second step. Last night, despite the thunder, I slept almost solidly from 8:45 till 5 a.m. This was after taking several little catnaps during the day. I know I'm behaving a bit like a convalescent, but so be it. Sleep is as important as poems.

And despite my doziness, I'm walking, I'm thinking, I'm getting stuff done. My wedding ring is back on my finger. Gloria sports her Maine plates. Pip is stupidly in love with cold-hearted Estella. I slice up cucumbers and toss a macaroni salad. A word slips in edgewise.

Parents and Children

Yesterday morning, I drove downtown to pick up my newly resized wedding ring, which hasn't fit me for years. My son is getting married this summer, and I want to wear my ring on the day he first wears his. 

Yesterday morning, on a Maine street 20 minutes from my house, licensed thugs killed a young father in his car. He was working legally in this country, had a social security number, and was not the official target of their hunt. According to bystanders, as he was dying, he was still explaining, I tried to stop. The murder took place in front of the man's daughter, who was wearing Bluey pajamas.

This morning I'm sitting in my old familiar couch corner, with my old familiar coffee cup, listening to Chuckie crunch up his chow, listening to a loud cardinal whistling in the maples, listening to the subdued hum of city traffic. I'm home, I'm home, I'm home, and very, very glad to be here.

The conference is always one of my favorite weeks of the year, but it's exhausting . . . so much work, so much focused attention, so much social immersion. This year was even more intense than usual: by the time the sessions began, the faculty had already been engaged in a week of hard rehearsal. So it's no surprise we're sapped.

And of course home doesn't imply rest. My to-do list is long: piles of laundry, conference-related chores,  hauling a box to the UPS store, going to city hall to get permanent license plates, picking up my repaired wedding ring, catching up on housework, dealing with my dry and weedy garden, figuring out meals, et cetera, ad infinitum, blah blah blah.

The slide from conference busyness into home busyness is kind of disheartening, but so go the days. I'm tired. I'm lucky. I'm tired and lucky. 

 Sunset, with bonfire and lake.

That's one of the fine things about this lake: sunrise and sunset are equivalently lovely. I will miss them.

Once the school year begins, my relationship with the water diminishes. I drive past it. I look at it through windows. But I'm not down on the dock, not paddling my feet in the water, not watching kingfishers chase and quarrel in the gloaming. And there's something about conversations by the lake . . . the comfort of dipping in and out of closeness, and then an eagle sails overhead and we all lift our faces to the sky.

I'll be home in my own bed tonight.

The sky is cloudless this morning, but a steady small breeze kicks through the trees, and mist feathers the lake. Even in a sweater, I'm a bit shivery out here on the deck.

Yesterday afternoon we had a few off hours. I ate ice cream. I paddled in the lake. I took a nap. Then I celebrated the participants at their poetry reading, danced ridiculously at the afterparty, and slept like a stone. So this morning my body exudes that particular tingly, soft self-satisfaction that only an orgy of lake water, disco, and a bed under an open window can provide.

That's one thing about this job: directing the conference is, without doubt, hard, hard work. But the place insists on itself, and summer by the lake is play.

Half an hour ago a torrent was sluicing from the cabin's metal roof, downpour churning up the lake. But the rain has settled into drizzle, and a solitary loon floats among the drops. In the photo he is the black speck in the center; my phone couldn't zoom in any closer.

Probably this is the same loon we saw last night before dark as we sat on the dock and dangled our feet in the water. He was close to us then, yet unfazed by our presence, intent on diving and eating. He was a ship, solid and supple, sitting low in the water, sleek black mast curving up from the pale surface.

Now, as I describe him, try to write his body onto this page, a mysterious wail arises. He is out there on the lake . . . body vanished; a mythic voice.

**

We finished our performance last night, and again the room was filled with audience. Some of the locals came to all three shows. It's hard to explain how meaningful this felt.

So today is a transition day: we work in the morning; then the afternoon is free, and participants will read in the evening, with a party afterward. Then, for the final day and a half, we move into a new writing project. It will be good to take a breath this afternoon, and then bring all of our attention into celebrating participant work.

There's something painterly about today's sky and water--perhaps the colors, perhaps the defined borders among the colors; I'm not sure.

Temperature-wise, it's a mild morning: heat is on the way, the air knows it, and I'm already imagining a swim.

Yesterday's performance of "Lake" was just as well attended as "Slate"--a few locals even came back: they said they wanted to know what would happen next, which is so gratifying.

Most moving to me personally, my friend Angela brought along one of my sons' teachers at the Harmony School. She taught a combined second- and third-grade classroom, so had each boy for two full school years. She knew them well. She knew me well because I was the school music teacher at that time. When I asked if I could bring poetry into her classroom, she welcomed me with open arms. My favorite memory is teaching the kids the sword-fight scene from Romeo and Juliet. I thinned speeches but I didn't change the language: the children had the real words in their mouth. I knew enough not to give 7 and 8 year olds actual prop swords; everything had to depend on physicality: entrances and exits and responses to verbal challenges. They loved it. I loved it. Their teacher loved it. That was a happy day for everyone.

And this summer my older son is getting married. The elementary school was so long ago. And his teacher came to listen to me read a poem about little boys playing baseball on the field outside the school. I feel a trembling. Of course I feel a trembling.

Cloud cover over the lake this morning . . . no signs of rain, but the tonal quality of the air has changed. Beyond the birches a song sparrow chatters; a bullfrog grunts. Far down the lake a loon wails. It's a work day, and we're all at work.

Like yesterday, the morning will mostly be dance. In the afternoon participants will do presentations, and Teresa will continue on with her Ovid project, and then the faculty will dive back into performance mode--part 2 of Monson, Maine, USA: "Lake." So it is sweet to be sitting here, alongside the real lake, with the imagined lake rippling in my thoughts.

Just thinking about last night's performance of "Slate" makes me want to cry a little, in a good way. Tenney House was full, with our conference audience swelled by a significant number of locals and visitors. When I stood up to welcome them, all I could think was homeland--the homeland of place, of art and community. Here we were, the people of Maine.

And the audience stayed with us--applauded, laughed, teared up, all of the things we could hope for; and they asked questions afterward: about how we'd put together the piece, about our varied relationships to this particular place, about how collaboration works. The evening was cathartic.

Tonight we present "Lake," and we're all a little nervous as it involves considerably more visual and sound tech than the other two pieces do, not to mention a group dance that is giving the three of us non-professionals the heebie-jeebies. But this is a performance that will always essentially be an open rehearsal--we are not polished, and we will never be polished. The point is something else.

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.