Barely daylight: a cold, windy, rain-swept morning, and I'm out of kindling for the woodstove, but at least the coffee is excellent. I had a lovely weekend with my parents and my sister, in which we did wacky things like drink prosecco at 10 a.m. and plan extravagant vacations. It was all very amusing, and the lemon cake went over well.

And now I am back home again, with much bread baking ahead of me, and work to attend to, and the dog's nerves to assuage.

I admit that I left Moby-Dick on top of the piano for the entire weekend. I promise to return to him today.

Remember, a couple of posts ago, say, around November 1, when I was mentioning the Aurorean and its sweet-tempered editor Cynthia Brackett-Vincent?

Well, today, after I arrived at my parents' house and checked my email, I found out that she'd nominated my sonnet for a Pushcart Prize.

I'm pretty happy about this.

Stuff to do this morning, so I'll be brief. But I thought you might be amused by this poem I'd forgotten I'd written. The Poets Against War website featured it about eight years ago (with strange lineation), even before I brought out my first book. Otherwise, it's never been reprinted or collected, and probably doesn't deserve to be. But it has its funny moments (if you can pardon the strange box and the non-matching type: Blogger insists on them).

Buried Alive with George W. Bush Dawn Potter After we cry a little more, he passes his flask of scotch. I say, I've heard Dick Cheney is a hologram; and we chuckle a bit just to kill time. Probably the miners trapped in their cave felt like this when the other guys ran out of things to talk about and the only sound left was dripping water and strange echoes of ogres or the sea. What poems do I know that would cheer him up, poor man, with "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" the only tune he can recall? The acoustics of caves are almost worth the trip. He's as good as Pavarotti down here, and more generous with the drink than you'd expect, but who knows how much he's been sipping in-between times. I try out "The Owl and the Pussycat," which leads GW to make a well-known off-color joke under his breath. Chalk it up to his essential self; and even though I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, he's probably having similar thoughts about me, such as, What kind of person recites poems about pussycats in situations of grave national danger? If we're rescued, he'll no doubt throw his arm around my shoulders and do all the talking to the press about how we kept our spirits up. If we're not, then who knows how they'll find us: corpses embraced lovingly for warmth, or backs turned as we asphyxiate, composing a series of private lyrics, little cartoon samples of how to talk without listening?

This weekend my father turns 70, so I'll be baking a lemon cake today and then tomorrow leaving my three cake-deprived boys to their own devices while my mother, my sister, and I convene for a small surprise weekend. (Note to my father's friends: you know nothing.) Meanwhile, James will be attending a masquerade ball . . . dressed as a mustache. I cannot believe that I will be missing this and can only beg him to send pictures.

In between editing and election fretting, I've continued to work on my essay about poetry-writing states of mind, which is suddenly overflowing with famous men. So far I've introduced Thoreau, Auden, Graves, Fowles, and Coleridge, and I'm only on page 5. I'm not sure if this bodes well for my desk; already the book stack is tottering. Moreover, James has managed to get Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" stuck in my head, and who knows what effect that will have on any writing I get done? Not an effect that Thoreau, Auden, Graves, or Fowles would care for: I do know that. Coleridge, on the other hand. . . .

By the way, my mother, Janice Miller Potter, has a poem out in the new issue of Poet Lore. This is an excellent journal, and I'm really pleased for her.

Dinner tonight: oven-fried chicken and dumplings, kale, salad greens with roasted red onions, brownies (as a sop to complaining boys who won't get any of the lemon cake I'm making for my dad)

Once again, I'm posting the poem I wrote on the day after Bush won his second term. Hope it makes you feel at least slightly better about last night's results.

Exile

Dawn Potter

On the morning I left

my country, sunlight

thrust through the clouds

the way it does after a raw

autumn rain, sky stippled

with blue like a young mackerel,

leaf puddles blinking silver,

sweet western wind gusting

fresh as paint, and a flock

of giddy hens rushing pell-mell

into the mud; and I knelt

in the sodden grass and gathered

my acres close, like starched

skirts; I shook out the golden

tamaracks, and a scuffle of jays

tumbled into my spread apron;

I tucked a weary child into each coat

pocket, wrapped the quiet

garden neat as a shroud

round my lover’s warm heart,

cut the sun from its moorings

and hung it, burnished and fierce,

over my shield arm—a ponderous

weight to ferry so far across the waste—

though long nights ahead, I’ll bless

its brave and crazy fire.

[from How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]

My First-Ever Public Political Rant

Today is election day, and I am anxious. Maine looks to be poised to acquire an ignorant, short-sighted philistine as governor. Meanwhile, his Democratic and Independent rivals threaten to split the opposition vote. Practically nothing makes me angrier than knowing that big-business money is silently manipulating working-class and laboring citizens to vote against their own best interests, but that is what is happening, and it makes me sick.

I am a liberal voter, but I am not particularly political in any overt way. I don't put signs in my yard, and I live peaceably alongside my conservative Christian neighbors. They are the parents of my children's friends, the people who answer ambulance calls and plow out driveways and coach Farm League teams and fix chainsaws and let me visit their classrooms to read poems and sing songs with their kids. I care about them as human beings. And that's why I get so angry at the Tea Party's manipulations. How dare you lie to my neighbors about the Constitution and the nationality of our president? How dare you teach my neighbors to revoke their rights to health care and clean air?

I'll be voting for the Independent Eliot Cutler today. Usually I vote the straight Democratic ticket; but according to all the polls I've seen (not to mention the groundswell among my liberal acquaintances), Cutler clearly has a better chance to defeat Republican Paul LePage. I hate the idea of voting against rather than for, but that's the way it has to be this year.

So on this election day, when I am pessimistic and angry, I just want to say that I'm standing up for the oppressed--the people who are voting for a candidate I despise--these people who don't even know that they're oppressed. Their party of choice is teaching them to poison their own wells, and that's an appalling immorality.

1. I don't know why it got chosen, but How the Crimes Happened is a featured collection at the Poets at Work website.

2. I have a sonnet out in the new Aurorean--an example of those Shakespearean diary sonnets I was telling you about. This journal is edited by Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, one of the sweetest-tempered editors I've ever corresponded with. I bet even her rejection letters are sweet.

3. According to Lucy Snowe, the main character of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, "There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored. What honest man, on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake." A similar sensation ensues if one is making popcorn in the school kitchen during a Harmony Elementary basketball game and meanwhile silently reciting Chaucer.

4. My friend Anne Bowman, who writes under the name Anne Britting Oleson, has just released a chapbook. If you attended the 2010 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, you'll remember that Anne was the participant who camped in the rain for the entire week. She also teaches high school English and has been introducing a poem a day to her students. You can read about both her poem project and her new chapbook on her blog.

5. Time for me to stop writing this and run downstairs to let the dog in. Bark bark bark bark. Such desperation. And in 10 minutes she'll be pacing the floors, longing with equivalent desperation to go outside again. Why are dogs always on the wrong side of the door?