Dinner tonight: chicken fricassee with lemon, marjoram, and vermouth; spatzle; fiddleheads with roasted red peppers . . . and the red peppers are already making my house smell like Italy.

In the middle of this rainy morning, I decided to stop editing and write instead; and while what I accomplished was merely the deletion of a single comma and the replacement of "said" with "saying," I still feel happy to be back inside my own head. Not to mention that I've just noticed that this paragraph is starting to rhyme--

In the midst of this rainy morning

I decided to write instead,

deleting a comma, adjusting a verb,

and mucking around in my head.

(There's some slapdash doggerel. . . . I should have left well enough alone.)

I'm continuing to read Krishnapur but have also started Donald Justice's collection Night Light, which, as you may recall, I recently bought at the Bangor Goodwill for 99 cents. The first piece in the collection, "Orpheus Opens His Morning Mail," is a prose poem, a form I generally mistrust. But Justice is, on the whole, such a skilled formalist that I can't accuse him of simply not knowing how to handle a line break. So I have to accept this prose poem as purposeful, though the form still makes me grumpy. In any case, it does have one line that I like:

"A note addressed to my wife, marked Please Forward."

I'll keep you posted on anything else notable in the collection as I make my way through it. Also, I'd be interested to hear your take on prose poems. Do they exist? Or are they really just plain old prose?

Good job, Maine, latest member of the anyone-can-get-married-here club! (though as I mention in my Milton memoir I myself am not sure I would ever go through such a grueling experience again). Off in a few minutes to a Little League baseball game in the drizzle, but first I thought I would share an epithalamion in honor of Maine's great legislative occasion.

from Epithalmion

Edmund Spenser

Ah! when will this long weary day have end,

And lend me leave to come unto my love?

How slowly do the hours their numbers spend!

How slowly does sad Time his feathers move!

Haste thee, O fairest planet, to thy home

Within the western foam;

Thy tired steeds long since have need of rest.

Long though it be, at last I see it gloom

And the bright evening star with golden crest

Appear out of the East.

Fair child of beauty! glorious lamp of love!

That all the host of heaven in ranks dost lead

And guidest lovers through the night's sad dread,

How cheerfully thou lookest from above

And seem'st to laugh atween thy twinkling light,

As joining in the sight

Of these glad many, which for joy do sing

That all the woods them answer, and their echo ring!

In between all this editing and yard work, I've been reading J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, a novel about the sepoy rebellion in British India in the mid-1850s. It's an odd book, partly because it's quite plausibly disguised as a straightforward historical novel with the cast of characters one is accustomed to finding in novels about colonial India. But everyone is strange, and their strangeness isn't only the result of the siege but is evident well beforehand. By strange, what I mean is that each person has his or her odd obsession, which collides with other people's odd obsessions; and meanwhile, they playact their Victorian proprieties. Add carnage and starvation in close quarters, and the novel rapidly becomes hallucinogenic. In short, it makes less than ideal bedtime reading, but I'm reading it in bed anyway.

Thinking of mussel chowder for dinner tonight. Baby mesclun, arugula, and spinach are ready to pick in the greenhouse. The rhubarb is coming along, and the dandelion greens are almost too big to harvest. Chives and scallions are beautiful; so is the lovage. Came home from Beloit yesterday to fiddleheads in olive oil and lemon. My cup runneth over, after a winter of carrots and storage onions.

I'm going to plant beets and cilantro this afternoon. My peas are up, and the hen has shown no interest in destroying the patch. With luck, I'll be done editing by the end of the week and can go back to writing. I would so like to write again.

Here's a bit from the forthcoming CavanKerry collection. It incorporates all twenty words from one of my son's second-grade spelling lists (or maybe it was third grade). Let's call it a farewell-to-winter poem.

Trouble

Dawn Potter

From the barren hills a battery of men

marched and stumbled onto the muddy plain,

but the wolves, impatient for spring, mistook them

for scrawny oxen and devoured them. Now the women,

no longer the wives of heroes, hoard turnips and spoiled loaves.

Mice gnaw the empty shelves, grind their yellow teeth

against the split handles of knives and hatchets.

Children launch greening potatoes at the anxious

cattle; they throttle the last angry geese. Pale sheep wander

the bleak forest like ragged deer, tearing twigs and blackened

leaves from the stunted oaks. A sallow pair of lambs huddles

by the half-thawed pool, where a single ancient fish lives out

his cloudy hours, calm, unfixed, a pitcher of silver and lead.

At dusk he drifts into the net.

Last night--

Dreamed I was a yellow transparent stone on a beach but also a French peasant in period costume.

Listened to the Rays pitch around Dustin Pedroia to get to Papi, which was a dreadful turn of events, and I hate to think of Papi tossing and turning in his bed, asking himself, "Am I washed up?"

Also dreamed of playing the violin, but that kind of dream is more akin to muscle-memory than imagination. I guess maybe I should get the instrument out of its case and do what my fingers are nagging me to do.

Today--

Another poetry round for Beloit. Listening so hard to poems is very, very tiring. And yet, the more we listen, the more we stay the the same, n'est-ce pas?

by Christine de Pisan, 14th century

[I don't know the translator, and I don't remember where I found this]

It is a month today

Since my lover went away.

My heart remains gloomy and silent;

It is a month today.

"Farewell," he said, "I am leaving."

Since then he speaks to me no more.

It is a month today.

It's barely light, just a sort of fragile shimmer, yet already the grass is glowing green. Yesterday's rain has worked a transformation: suddenly everything that was dead is growing and, in this dim foggy dawn, nearly vibrates with the tension being alive. Driving to Farmington yesterday I saw fiddleheads for sale beside the road. Ours, down by the shady stream, are usually on the late side; but I'm longing to run down into the woods and see. I love to eat fiddleheads, and I love to pick them. The spot where they grow is a damp patch alongside a small running brook, a place where I've startled wood ducks, where I often hear the long eerie singing of a thrush--that is, so long as the poodle doesn't bustle in officiously. I love my dog dearly, but she is such a tourist.

No fiddleheads for me today, however. I'm off to Farmington again for another poetry-reading round at Beloit. We are all sad because Marion Stocking, who has been the journal's mainstay since the 50s, is very, very ill. It will be hard to choose poems for the journal without the sight of her happy face.

But the good news is that my husband and I are all of a sudden madly in love. Isn't it funny how that happens: how the routine scales fall from your eyes, and there you are again?