from Another Country by James Baldwin

Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly, because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his talent. It had not really been written to make money--if only it had! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.

Tomorrow I'm reading in the Portland Public Library's Brown Bag Lecture Series, a lunchtime program that earlier this year featured novelist Richard Ford. I expect my audience to be much smaller than his was. But you could prove me wrong.

This morning's project is figuring out what to read, so if you have wishes, pass them along. It will cheer me to know you're thinking of me as I embark on this afternoon's project, which is taking a kid to the dentist, browsing among the flea-kill stock at Agway, and loading a cut-and-wrapped pig into the back of my car. A poet's life is so poetic.

But enough of this errand-moping; let's get back to the schedule. I'll be in NYC during the weekend of September 22 and 23, and if you are interested in setting up a reading, a workshop, or a Frost Place-related outreach program that might overlap those dates, let me know. I could read with you, for instance.

Somewhere, in the distance, a bittern is clanking. Last night's rain drips from the roof edge; the barn dog wuffs for breakfast; cicadas rattle among the maples. And now, to the barn dog's disgust, a pack of fox pups has begun yipping.

Early morning in early August in early 21st-century central Maine.

Now I am opening the copy of Rilke's selected letters, which I bought last Thursday for a dollar at a used-book sale outside a general store in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom." This is what Rilke has to say to me: "Looking into the interior of a house as into the flesh of a fruit is an experience I have had somewhere."

But I, too, have had that experience, mostly when walking through a city neighborhood in the winter dusk, when lamps are lit but blinds are still undrawn; when I, the wandering stranger, seem to step into the frame of these mysterious other lives. Reading Joyce's The Dead gives me the same sensation of detachment and participation.

Odd to be reading such a city-in-winter sentence when I am leading a country-in-summer life. And yet he does mention fruit. Perhaps that is the summer link.

Yesterday I picked a pail of blueberries and a pail of raspberries and a pail of blackberries, and I baked a fruit cobbler. Neither the picking nor the cooking nor the eating was at all like looking into the interior of a house. No doubt Rilke was thinking of peaches or apricots rather than berries. Who, after all, looks into the interior of a berry? Only someone with no interest in eating it, whereas the delights of a peach are enhanced by cutting, splitting, slicing, examination.

Therefore, I think I will go find a peach now and eat it. "Look, look, look all you can," says Rilke. The boys have eaten all the berries anyway.

A few things that I will remember about this summer--

Hummingbirds, dozens of them, speeding up to the feeder, chasing each other away from dinner, bossing me into mixing up more snacks, dancing in place, swinging back and forth on their giant U-shaped raceways.

Fleas on the poodle. Even chemicals can't conquer them. This week I broke down and vacuumed her. I have no idea if that helped, but she enjoyed it.

Road trips with James. He drank a lot of coffee and made personal comments about other people's cars and told me to stop worrying that he was going to get into an accident and was doted upon by his grandparents and ate everything he was served and played Scrabble with good cheer, even though he doesn't like Scrabble.

Heat and dryness. My yard is like your yard.

The line breaks on the sign in downtown Milo, Maine:

WELCOME TO
MILO A
FRIENDLY TOWN

If you read yesterday's post, then you know that the Frost Place has just announced some changes in its educational programs. Baron Wormser, who founded the Conference on Poetry and Teaching and has directed it for the past 13 years, will step into a newly created position: director of educational outreach. I will be taking over as director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching.

To say that I am excited is an understatement. For the past 5 years I have been associate director of the conference; and as I tell the participants every year, it's the best job I've ever had. Each summer I get to spend a week burrowing into poetry with a raft of brilliant, idealistic, pragmatic, eccentric people who are not know-it-alls jockeying for prestige but thinking, feeling, curious colleagues in search of intense conversation. Of course, Baron's leadership has been integral to the joy I've gained from this conference, and I will miss his presence. But in his new position he will still be closely involved in promoting the conference while being able to concentrate on extending the Frost Place influence into classrooms, libraries, and other venues around the United States. Thanks to the generosity of the Schafer Foundation, the Frost Place now has funding to support the kinds of educational outreach that Baron and I have been dreaming of for years.

In the coming weeks, as the summer frenzy winds down, I'll announce more details about the Frost Place's educational programs, staffing, scholarships, and partnerships. For now, I'll simply assure you that my goal as director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching is to maintain its spirit and rigor while continuing to respond to the changing needs of its participants. I dearly love our week in the White Mountains, and I hope to be sitting beside you in Robert Frost's barn next June.

Here's some news that I'll talk more about tomorrow, after you have time to digest it.

Elegy for a One-Night Stand

Dawn Potter

What I remember about you

is that you were too good for me;

so it’s easy to recall, these decades since,

that I never believed that you would love me—

you, with your rich-boy clothes,

and the way you knew exactly what you were up to

when you let your palm slip down the small of my back.

But I think I’m right in recollecting we were happy

for the hour or two we borrowed that night,

and I want to claim that it was raining

and that the streetlight outside our grimy window

filtered a shimmer edge along your shoulders,

that your fingers read the bones of my face

as if they really did long to imagine what I longed for.

Now, after twenty years spent forgetting

anything we’d once learned about the other,

I begin to summon up the urgency that lured us there,

to someone else’s street-lit bed, a room,

you claim, that glowed a baby-aspirin pink,

a shade I can’t recall, though I think

I may have memorized your shadow-tilted head,

cocked as if to warn me: don’t believe a word he says.

Don’t fret. I didn’t.

You never broke my heart; I grant you that achievement,

not easy to accomplish with a china heart like mine,

so liable to be chipped. You tell me now,

You throw yourself too much into your men.

Well, yes.

But what’s the point of love that doesn’t shatter?

It’s the vice I’ve clung to; I never do get over anyone—

even you, my not-heartbreaker,

with the softest lips I’ve ever kissed, and then

that quickened breath against my throat,

those tender hands,

as weighted and exact as birds, and how my eyes

forgot their blue and, startled, turned to yours.

[forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]