I fell asleep too early so I woke up too early, but sleep is sleep, I guess, even if the hours are weird. At about 3 a.m. the log trucks started roaring through, as they always do, and my bedroom fronts the main road, so rest was fitful after that. Still, the bed was comfortable, and I managed to linger dozily for a couple of hours until I finally had to admit that I was awake.

I suppose I should have tried to stay up longer last night, and I had every opportunity to do so as there was a big artists' dinner and hangout that was full of friendly, chatty people. But by 7:30 my introvert overload button started flashing red--time to leave, time to leave, time to leave. I haven't had much private time over the past several days, and I've got at least 10 days of public flurry ahead of me. My brain-body alert system clearly decided to take charge.

So here I am, restoratively alone, feet up on an apartment couch, wrapped in my familiar bathrobe, waiting for coffee to wind its way through the filter. Today the kids will be working with members of the Illustration Institute on an all-day project, so my teaching duties will be pretty light. Still, I'll need to be sociable, and that, apparently, is what my brain-body alert system was trying to reset yesterday evening. Let's hope it did.

The Illustration Institute residency is a good chance for our young visual artists and writers to come together to create work, so everyone on staff is pleased. I'm sure it will be an excellent day, as long as I can don this newly mended anti-hermit cloak. It'll need to stay intact for quite a while, what with visitors and rehearsals and travel and performances and and and.

Funny how a body just makes a decision sometimes. Quit. Enough. Go. 

 

It's 36 degrees outside, and a fire is catching in the wood stove. Chuckie is filled with breakfast, Tom is in bed nursing a cup of coffee, and I am deliberately celebrating these few minutes in front of the fire before I have to hoick myself forward into another travel day. This morning's docket: off to the Y for a class, and then home to make up the guest bed and tidy the back room so that it's ready for tomorrow evening, when one of my dear Harmony friends swoops briefly into town.

This month is crammed with event, but at least I've been able to make good use of the off days to resettle myself. Yesterday I did the housework and shopping and in the afternoon even made some progress on garden cleanup: tearing out frosted plants and, most importantly, digging up dahlia tubers for winter storage. Our yard is currently a construction site, stacked with materials and detritus, so clearing out the garden isn't helping anything aesthetically. Still, focusing on home stuff settles my mind. Somehow charging back out onto the road is easier when I know that the floors are mopped, the dahlias are safe for the winter, the woodboxes and kindling baskets are full and waiting.

I haven't forgotten the Sappho project, but it's had to take a backseat for a few days. I'm not exactly out of the zone, but I am out of time to be in the zone. During some quiet moments in Belfast I did add a couple of new drafts, but neither is finished yet. I'm beginning to feel that the poems are arcing toward an ending, though I don't know what that ending will be yet. Maybe I'll work on the project in Monson tonight, or maybe I won't. Usually I don't write well in the evenings. As this choppily written paragraph makes clear, I don't know what my brain will demand of me, or when. And there's no rush. The story simmers.

Home again, briefly, which means that today has to be rushing-around-with-chores day: weekly housework, groceries, catching up with emails; and if there's any time left over from all of that, I'll start tearing frosted plants out of the garden. Tomorrow I'll head north for an overnight in Monson, so I need to make the most of this drop-in visit to my own domain. I would love to also do a little bit of nothing much. It's hard to figure out how, though.

The Belfast jaunt went well: a packed reading on Saturday night and a full workshop the next morning. Apparently lots of people come to this festival from faraway places; I had poets from NYC and even Toronto in my workshop. I imagine that the midcoast's summer-house culture partly accounts for that, but still it seemed notable.

Meanwhile, Tom worked on his house project all weekend, and at the same time a huge roofing crew was replacing the neighbors' three roofs, so our corner of the world was saws and hammering and ropes and shouts and the roofers' kids playing with rakes in the grass and eating doughnuts in the back of the truck.

Now our front door sports fresh exterior trim and new wiring for lights and doorbell, and there's non-water-damaged plywood sheathing surrounding it, and before long we might even have siding and a storm door, and someday even a stoop. All hail the handyman.

A quick good morning from Belfast, Maine, because I don't have wifi here and I don't want to use too much phone data. But here are some Coast Guard boats and blue skies for you to enjoy until we meet again.

Coffee and a crackling fire and even a small sleep-in until Chuckie got fed up with that: it's nice to have a slow Saturday morning before the weekend busyness barges in.

This morning I've got various things to do, not least figuring out what poems to read tonight. And after lunch I'll drive up to the coast to the Belfast Poetry Festival, where I'll be appearing as the keynote poet (6:30 p.m. at the UU church) and then leading a generative workshop tomorrow morning (10 a.m. at the Rockweed Center). There may or may not be spaces left in the workshop; I'm not sure, but check that out if you're in the area and in the mood.

Yesterday turned out to be unexpectedly busy. The strength and balance class at the Y was good, and felt very useful, so now I need to figure out if I can afford to take it regularly. Then dance rehearsal was a reminder of rhythm and body attention. I spent hours away from words, after a week of word frenzy, and I think that may have been a good thing. I was still thinking about my poems; I talked about them with Gretchen; I wondered what they were and would become. But a little separation was tonic.

This morning I feel energetic and well rested, reasonably ready to cross the line from introverted obsessor to public poet. I'm still learning this new way of work, but I'm sort of getting there. I hope.

This morning I'll be up and out early--first, going over to the Y with some friends to try a strength and balance class, then driving up to Bowdoin to start rehearsing for the upcoming Monson, Maine, USA performances. Teresa won't fly in until the middle of next week, but the rest of us are going to try to get a head start on resurrecting the dances.

So it will be a busy-in-sweatpants kind of day and also a chance to wean myself from the Sappho project before I head up the coast for the poetry festival tomorrow. I've been lucky to have so many hours this week to devote to writing poems, but any further progress will have to leak in around the edges of obligation.

At last night's writing group I wrote a draft completely unrelated to the Sappho poems that nonetheless felt like it had potential. Apparently whatever is smoldering in my brain isn't limited to the one obsession but is branching into other themes and details as well. Maybe it will also filter through all of these upcoming performances and readings and workshops. It is nice to imagine that writing fluidly might lead to dancing fluidly, but I have my doubts.

Last night Tom stripped off the painters' tape and installed the door knob and the lock, a task that looks like it should take five minutes but actually takes much longer and requires considerable sighing and finagling. So (from inside the house) the door is now lovely, though in need of a good window washing. I look forward to today's sunshine.

So far it's a cool morning here in the little northern city by the sea, with temperatures forecast to hover in the 50s. A fire crackles in the stove. Chuckie blinks contentedly. The Dodgers are in danger of being swept by the Brewers. All in all, a good start to the day.

I've reached 32 pages in my Sappho project. I don't know where this story is coming from, but then I never know much when I'm in the midst. Writing hard makes me feel like the dumbest, happiest, most pig-headed person on the planet.

Today, hanging sheets on the line in the sun and wind. Baking a Turkish yogurt cake for my evening poetry' group. Maybe a noontime visit with a friend. A walk in the cemetery. And writing, and writing, and writing.

I promised you a sad photo, and here she is, poor little Alcott House, patched and scarred. Believe me, she looks a lot better than she did on Saturday afternoon, when she was a gaping maw. The new door kept out yesterday's wind and rain; and with floors mopped, windows washed, and wood stove alight, Chuck and I were snug.

After cleaning up construction dirt, I spent yesterday prepping for this weekend's workshop in Belfast, then running out midday to get my hair cut before capitulating again to the siren song of my Sappho project. Leek and potato soup for dinner, with anadama toast, a tomato and broccoli salad, and orange cake with blueberry sauce. Tom blessedly taking a night off and doing nothing much more than doze on the couch. Rain pattering in the darkness.

Meanwhile, the poems uncoil a universe.

Finally, at 8 p.m. last night, Tom settled the new door into place--and just in time, as it's supposed to rain all day. Much work remains to be done (maybe for tomorrow's post I'll take a photo for you of the outside of the house, which still looks grim), but at least the indoor side is more or less finished, except for new trim, which will be the last stage of this complicated repair project. Yesterday evening neighbors kept stopping by to sympathetically tsk. The hideous vision has been hard to overlook. The hole in the house was stupendously ugly, and, yes, much of the structure seems to have been held together by expanding foam rather than solid wood. It did kind of look like the entrance to hell.

But back to the new door. That's the old door you see sitting next to it, a windowless block. So with these three new pebbled panes, the atmosphere of our living room has changed dramatically. I'm eager to see how the additional sunlight will affect, among other things, my houseplants. 

Today, I've got to do yet another round of housecleaning, but so it goes with construction projects . . . vacuuming, mopping, wiping down the new windows. Amid yesterday's cleanup, I managed to finish an editing task while still keeping my nose to the grindstone with the Sappho poems. I hauled cans to the returnable center and dropped off my absentee ballot and pondered the variable outcomes of romance in Greek myths.

This weekend I'll be away at the Belfast Poetry Festival; then, starting next week, Monson, a houseguest, rehearsals at Bowdoin, performing at the Word Festival in Blue Hill, more rehearsals, performing at Mechanics' Hall in Portland . . . These few days I've spent cleaning up after construction and trying to do what I can to take care of exhausted Tom have been comparatively restful, and though Sappho has chosen to interfere, her timing has been good.

Twenty-nine pages of poems so far. What is going on here?

We're still doorless, though Tom worked all day till dusk, hoping he'd be able to install it. I'm not surprised the job's taking so long: he's been replacing not only the rotted sill but also sections of rotted beams and joists. At one point he was jacking up the house. So many secrets lie beneath the skin of a building, all of them eager to disintegrate when you're not paying attention.

Unfortunately he doesn't have today off from work, so I'm not sure when he'll return to the task. Maybe in the evenings, he says, if he can come home a little early. Or maybe we'll be in limbo till next weekend. 

Meanwhile, the rains have moved in. Knowing they were imminent, I, too, tried to catch up on a few outside chores, among them repotting a couple of root-bound houseplants. But I was still distracted by the Sappho project. Though I wrote only two more poems, I spent quite a while poring over the rest of the manuscript, not with a revisionary eye, simply trying to attend to my burgeoning characters and situations. I don't know how to write a novel, but surely, as with poems, it must be important not to excise material too soon. Whatever-this-is-I'm-writing is some sort of poem-story mashup, and I don't want to slice up the fabric before I even know what it looks like.

Since Friday I have written nine new poems for my Sappho project (and started a tenth). Of course this overflow is thrilling me: I am always all-of-a-shiver when I'm in the zone. All day long yesterday, between planting garlic and tulips and lugging plywood for Tom, between hanging up laundry and taking it down again, between stripping the last peppers and tomatoes from the plants and simmering and straining green salsa for the freezer, I was crouched over my laptop, writing, writing, writing.

The draft is now 25 pages long . . . I can hardly believe how fast this story is pouring out of me. I don't know where it will end up, but something big is happening. I love my characters and their time and place, and my schtick of having to account for every single word of the Sappho fragment in every single poem has turned out to be compositional gold.

Now, on this chilly Sunday morning, I sit alone in my darkened living room, watching flames lick at the kindling in the stove. Various deconstruction issues, mostly involving rot, slowed Tom down yesterday, so instead of a new door, a sheet of plywood is plugging the hole. Today, he assures me, the door will be installed . . . not that I'm nagging. I know all about the unavoidable delays of repair.

Without a real door, this room is drafty, and I'm not too willing to turn on the furnace so that it can blast expensive hot air into the front yard. So thank goodness for this doughty wood stove, and for this hot cup of coffee, and for this thick red bathrobe. And for the warmth of my nine new poems.

When I'm in the zone, I'm mostly dazed. I feel dumber than usual. The words arrive fast; I can barely keep up with them, but I'm not exactly thinking. Almost, my attention is shunted to one side. I see what's happening but I'm not quite part of what's happening. I suppose there's a dream analogy to be made, except that I'm not enmeshed in illogic. This is imagination at ferocious work, I guess. Story snatches the reins, and fingers humbly perform their secretarial role.

I have no idea how long this aura will last. Maybe the burst is over for the moment, or maybe I'll write nine more poems today. Whatever happens, I was lucky; I was showered with jewels . . . which isn't to say that what I made is precious. The glitter was the act of making.

It's 42 degrees outside on this Saturday morning, and a new fire crackles in the wood stove. Our furnace problem has been fixed, but why waste oil when my basement is crammed with construction scraps? Tom has lugged home so much pine-board slag from work that I've barely needed to touch the actual firewood yet. Though pine is not ideal for real winter cold, at this time of year it's just right for taking the edge off the chill.

And the house will be open to the elements today because T will be ripping out the front door frame. If all goes well, by the end of the day we will have a brand-new, freshly painted, not-ugly weathertight door and storm door in place, with a solid sill beneath them. Of course this does mean that the Big Kitten will have to spend a few hours locked in the basement so he can't escape through the gaping maw, but I think he'll survive, though he will have his doubts.

Yesterday I went back to a writing project I think I mentioned to you a while ago--a linked story-in-poems, with each poem containing every word from one particular Sappho fragment. I wrote four new pieces and then went back through the draft as a whole to tweak language and story elements. The poems are set in the wartime 1940s, in an unnamed, semi-mythical, American provincial city. And because they are constrained by Sappho's word choice, the characters, too, are semi-mythical: a pair of working-class adult sisters caring for, and being controlled by, difficult parents who are enmeshed in the machinations of the Greek pantheon.

This has been very enjoyable project, not least because I've been able to come and go with it--work on it for a few days, let it lie for a few weeks--without losing the narrative or emotional threads . . . which isn't to say that I know where the tale is going. The story unrolls like a ball of yarn, and I am following the string. It's 17 pages long so far, almost chapbook length, and maybe that's what it will end up becoming. Or maybe it will be even longer. I'll let the story figure that out for itself.

Otherwise: today I'll plant garlic and tulip bulbs, start tearing out garden detritus, hang sheets on the outside lines. This will be my last weekend at home for a while, so I'll try to make the most of it.

Yesterday's jaunt to Bates turned out to be so pleasant. I spent an hour or so with a first-year class, whose assignment was to bring questions to class to ask me. Clearly, as good students, they tried to choose questions that would make their teacher happy. They were, on the whole, quite reminiscent of the kids I spent time with last month in Jersey City: career overachievers who had honed their ability to ace school. I recognize them: I went to Haverford, which is the same sort of college as Bates . . . though I personally had some serious gaps in my ability to ace school.

But at one moment yesterday, a change rippled the atmosphere. I'd been talking about a poem of mine that the class had been assigned to read: "Play Clothes," from Calendar. And I said casually, "I bet you all have a piece of clothing you remember loving to wear when you were young." Slowly, one student after another began piping up: the Sponge Bob shirt, the shirt with pink ladybugs . . . and then what they'd been doing while wearing these clothes . . . hugging a chinchilla, shooting their brother with a water pistol . . . It was poetry in action, that moment: these students suddenly saw that the detritus of life, our physical memory, holds intense emotion . . . saw that leading with things rather than abstractions is a way to tap into the depths.

It was a beautiful slippage.

Just a quick note this morning as I am heading out very early for my Bates College class. But for a moment I am paused here on the couch, listening to vague rain pattering against the dark windows. I hear Chuckie lapping up his breakfast; I hear the halting drip of the bathroom shower head and the cooling teakettle clicking on the kitchen stove. So many small sounds overlapping--a sort of aural fidget, a peaceable friction. And upstairs Tom sighing in his bed.

Today is my birthday, and I am celebrating with a cup of coffee and a daybreak fire in the wood stove. Outside it's 38 degrees, our coldest morning since last spring, and our new furnace is on the blink (sigh: probably a sensor issue but it should be under warranty and the guy is coming to repair it tomorrow), so starting a fire is simple common sense. Still, even in the woods, our stove always felt like such rich luxury. Yes, it was hard work to keep it stoked. Yes, it demanded constant attention. But sitting in a dark room watching golden flames lick at the maple logs, the soothing crackle and pop of pine kindling, stretching my hands out to the sweet warmth . . . that routine never gets stale.

So I'm 62 years old today--waking up in this little shabby house, in this little city by the sea, on this cold October morning. The day is mine, except for an evening zoom reading. My plan is to get onto my exercise mat, which I haven't done all summer; to go for a walk and return a library book; to deal with laundry and emails; and then read and write for the rest of the day. Nothing spectacular: just a bumble around alone in my own dear space.

Yesterday after work, I walked into find a sweet homemade card from Tom and Chuckie. Then, when T got home from work, he took me out to a a tiny Japanese restaurant where we sat at the bar and ate one exquisite mouthful of seafood after another. Tonight I'll make my own dinner, but that's pleasure too.

Every year my birthday reminds me of how much I love this world, despite all. The clean blue of an October sky. Wind gusting through dry leaves. The hop-skip of a silly black cat. The smile of friends who are glad to see me. Tom's knee pressed against mine. It's all so simple. It's all so tangled. I'm so glad to be here.

When I arrived in the homeland yesterday afternoon, a chill wind was whipping through the trees, spinning bright leaves into gusts and eddies. All night long it roared. I woke and slept and woke and slept, soothed by its oceanic growl. Living in the woods is living among the noise of trees, and for more than two decades this creak and swirl was my soundscape. Even today nothing comforts my ear like wind in a forest.

In a few minutes I'll get up, get dressed, get coffee and toast. I'll lug my overnight stuff out into the new morning and head north to Monson and a day's work. Today will be my first full day with this year's high school cohort, and our focus will be language. What are these words? Where do they bring us? How can we follow them?

 

Sunday continued our all-consuming house-centered weekend. While Tom was hammering off the final vestiges of the brick stoop and scraping out the rotten sill under the door, I was mowing grass and picking cherry tomatoes and hanging clothes on the line and kneading anadama bread and slicing fruit for a pear and cranberry pie. Now the house is sporting the ugly plywood band-aid it will wear till next weekend, and the pantry is stocked with food for packed lunches, and we are both pulling ourselves together for our long work weeks.

This afternoon I'll head north to the homeland and spend the night in Wellington, then teach in Monson tomorrow and tumble back to Portland afterward so that T can escort me out for a birthday celebration a day early. Dinner isn't possible on my actual birthday because I'm taking part in a zoom reading that evening--a one-year celebration of Baron's passing. (I'm unclear if this reading is open to an audience; if it is, I'll share the link soon.) Then, at the crack of dawn on Thursday, I'll drive to Lewiston to visit a class at Bates, and probably I'll be doing something on Friday too; I just can't recall what.

The flurry of October has begun, but this morning I'm feeling energetic and focused, which is a good sign, I think. Plenty of sleep, plenty of physical activity, time with home things, visits with friends, and a poem draft on the burner: all of this is good medicine.

Well, the front stoop is gone, but what a job. Tom spent the entire day beating at bricks and concrete with hammers and pry bars. It was a beast of a chore, and now the driveway is stacked with rubble and the rotted sill glares out in full hideous evidence.

There wasn't much I could do to help, other than make lunch, tote rubble, and offer good cheer. So I caught up with herb processing: getting dried ones into jars, getting fresh ones into the freezer. I picked a final batch of Serrano peppers and strung them up to dry. I cleaned and prepped another batch of wild mushrooms. The freezer is pretty much at capacity now: I really ought to stop looking for mushrooms, but it's so hard to ignore the riches when I spot them.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be heading north for an overnight before my Tuesday high school class. So today I'll deal with groceries and get a start on the weekly housework, though there's no point in trying to clean floors during an active construction project. I want to bake a pear and cranberry pie. I want to work on a poem draft. I want to help Tom in whatever way I can, though mostly I can't do anything except be friendly.

Still, when it comes to construction projects, good cheer and friendliness aren't nothing. The default is complain about the mess, complain about the noise, complain about boot dirt, not to mention complain about the cost. Carpenters take a lot of shit on the job. Meanwhile, what I am is thrilled that we're getting a new solid home improvement. Also, I really like this guy. I'll make a hot lunch for him anytime he wants one.

Our odd burst of summer has receded. This morning is chilly, and temperatures aren't forecast to get out of the low 60s. Good weather for working outside, which is exactly what Tom and I will be doing today. This morning he'll drive to the lumberyard pick up the new front door he ordered. And then he'll start tearing apart our front stoop, with me as his clumsy assistant. This will involve more than simply yanking apart old boards because the house's previous "handyman" made the idiot decision to cram a set of badly constructed plank stairs over a patched and crumbling set of brick ones. So T has two busted-up stoops to remove, and the condition of the brick one is as yet unknown. Will the bricks easily loosen and be salvageable? Or will he be beating at chunks of concrete with a big hammer? Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment of Stoop Wars.

Given these demolition issues, there's little chance of actually getting the new door installed this weekend, though T might find time to paint it. Still, I'm looking forward to the bustle. I love home repairs, despite the mess. Tom is such an extremely good carpenter: he is a pleasure to watch at work. And because he rarely has time to put his skills to use on our own place, every little project is very exciting. Our current front-door situation is terrible. The casing is warped and crooked and rotten. The storm door leaks rain. And the door itself is ugly and windowless. I can't wait for a fine tight new door that lets in daylight, not to mention having a stoop with evenly spaced steps and a functional railing. What luxury.

It's 65 degrees this morning, so strangely summery after a few evenings of wood fires and couch blankets. Out to dinner last night with a friend, we sat at a sidewalk table in the gloaming, marveling at the soft air. And now crickets are singing in the darkness and Chuckie perches happily beside the open screen door and I wonder if I might go back to wearing the sandals I thought I had put away for the season.

Yesterday I beetled among class plans and workshops plans, and then suddenly, after lunch, I had had enough. No more. My brain was done. I did a few house chores, I read my book, but desk work could take a hike. So it will be interesting to see what my brain decides to allow today. To be fair, it's gotten me quite far this week: all of that editing swept away, all of those classes prepped. Maybe it will soften and allow me to mess around with a few poems or my chapbook. Or maybe it will march me outside to work in the garden. Or maybe it will require me to drive to Mall Land and buy some sheets without holes in them. I await my orders.

I'm happy to report that yesterday I shoved the last of those three editing projects off my to-do list. I know another big job will show up shortly in my inbox, but that one will be far less time-sensitive: I can spoon it in around the edges of everything else, and there will be a lot of everything else in October. Two Monson, Maine, USA performances, long days of rehearsal at Bowdoin, the Belfast Poetry Festival, the Word Literary Festival, my Monson classes, a morning with Bates students . . . It's a packed month, and I feel squinty and overwhelmed just thinking about it.

But at least I am gradually getting my planning under control. The other big thing I accomplished yesterday was to finish the syllabus for the November Poetry Kitchen class on Grimms' fairy tales. So that is out of my hair, and today I can turn my thoughts to prepping for Tuesday's Monson session and pulling together the workshop I'll be leading in Belfast.

On top of everything else, I'm turning 62 next Wednesday, which also happens to be the first anniversary of Baron's death. I've always been emotional about my birthdays, those formal markers of waning time.  I love life, and I'm never gloomy about adding another year to my ticket. But loss does thicken, and autumn is always elegiac. It can't help itself. And so there's a poignancy to my looming birthday . . . a celebration and a sigh.