The weather was rainy and raw in New York, but I returned to Portland just in time for spring. In New York I went to the Morgan and I went to the Whitney and I walked on the High Line and I stayed up late in Brooklyn eating cuttlefish with kumquats and listening to REM outtakes. In Portland I went for a walk at Fort Williams (which is really down the road in Cape Elizabeth) and enjoyed the delightful combination of crashing waves and peculiar WWI-era fort ruins. Then I went back to the doll-house and washed the floors and listened to a baseball game and made a salad of farro and brussels sprouts and cherry tomatoes and smoked tuna and fell asleep at 8:45.

Tomorrow I'm on the road again . . . off to Vermont to fetch the boy home for spring break. I'm sure my correspondence will be spotty this week, given that he doesn't drive but wants to visit friends and relatives far and near. Ah, well. There are worse things in this world than driving around northern New England singing along to the radio with my big chatty son. Many worse things. Few better ones.

And here I am in Brooklyn, New York, eating a leftover burrito for breakfast and considering a walk up to the botanical garden.

Here I am, citizen of the nation that is bombing Syria.

Cars honk; a bus whirrs past.

My children are not being gassed or lying homeless on a wet street.

I cannot stop imagining.

What does a watcher do with the simultaneity of these statements?

You will not hear from me tomorrow morning as I'll need to leave the doll-house before dawn to catch my bus to NYC. But I hope to check in with you at some point during my wet and whirlwind trip.

Today I'll need to figure out how to fill a few spare hours tomorrow afternoon. More importantly, I'll need to decide what outfit to wear for a morning that will involve sandwich crumbs on a bus, followed by an afternoon spent walking around the city in torrential rain, followed by an evening presentation among people I've never met. What is the correct attire for such a variable occasion? I have no idea.

Yesterday I revisited an essay draft I started a couple of weeks ago, and I think maybe I've decided where to go with it. But we'll see if I have time to do anything about that idea: my new editing project has also arrived, and the next couple of weeks are going to involve a fair amount of travel. Still, even though the writing honeymoon is over, at least I got a big poem out of it.

I'm still waiting for a new editing assignment to arrive, so in the meantime I've been copying out Carruth's long poem "The Sleeping Beauty," reading a collection of Vietnam-era letters, finishing Komunyakaa's Warhorses, continuing to make my way through War and Peace, and tinkering with my poem draft, which has crept close to a final version. Yesterday afternoon I opened all of the windows, and swept the floors, and marinated two fat pork chops in lemon and fresh sage, and listened joyfully to the Red Sox win their opening-day game. But the rest of the week will be a different tale, one involving thick rain and a raw spring wind.

On Thursday morning I'll be taking the bus to NYC for a Frost Place event, and the forecast is intimating that I'll be jostling through rush-hour Manhattan in an umbrella forest instead of ambling along the High Line gazing at daffodils. Oh, well. At least I'll have the excitement of an easy commute. Getting from Harmony to Manhattan was an arduous all-day event: an hour's drive to the Augusta bus station, then a total of 10 hours or more spent getting to Boston, sitting around in South Station waiting for a connection, and then climbing onto another bus that might or might not take me directly to Port Authority. But now all I have to do is wake up at the crack of dawn, convince Tom to drive me 10 minutes to the bus station, and catch an express that goes directly to the city. Total travel time = 6 hours. Amazing.

If you're in the NYC area and interested in attending this Frost Place open house, let me know and I will send you the particulars.

Not long ago the editor-in-chief of a very well known small press contacted me to ask if I would be interested in being considered for a position at the press. Essentially that position was to be his heir apparent, and I'm going to tell you right now that I did not get hired for the job. The press ended up promoting someone from inside, at least in part, I am told, because of growing financial anxiety related to National Endowment for the Arts funding. But I was one of three finalists for a position that I never went out looking for, so that in itself was bracing. Yes, it was kind of like being an unpublished finalist in a poetry contest, but there was nonetheless a certain uplift to the experience, in a not-getting-paid sort of way.

So here I am, still the same old seat-of-her-pants freelancer, tinkering with manuscripts and such. And the temperature is supposed to rise into the 50s, and in a few days I'll be heading to New York City for a Frost Place event, and my doll-house is clean and neat, and the cat is not currently biting me, and the dentist has assured me that I do not need a root canal, and it's opening day for the Red Sox. I'm feeling pretty cheerful. I hope you are too.

Tolstoy as Oracle

This morning, over coffee, I opened my copy of Garnett's translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which I have been slowly re-reading for the hundredth time, and immediately fell face-first into the following paragraph:

And not for that hour and day only were the mind and conscience darkened in that man, on whom the burden of all that was being done lay even more heavily than on all the others who took part in it. Never, down to the end of his life, had he the least comprehension of good, of beauty, of truth, of the significance of his own acts, which were too far opposed to truth and goodness, too remote from everything human for him to be able to grasp their significance. He could not disavow his own acts, that were lauded by half the world, and so he was forced to disavow truth and goodness and everything human.

Tolstoy does not include a proper noun in the paragraph, and thus he allows it to function as a generalization in which "that man" could be any number of men, any number of humans. If I substitute "Donald J. Trump" for "that man," the paragraph assumes an ominous topicality . . . ominous because, even in his delineation of evil, Tolstoy allows us to pity this person "on whom the burden of all that was being done lay even more heavily than on all the others who took part in it." And when we pity someone, we make allowances for his evil.

This paragraph disturbs me, in great part, because I naturally want to believe that pity is a humane reaction, an altruism. Yet it, too, is a blinder, and that is a painful truth to face.

If you're familiar with War and Peace, you've probably already guessed that Tolstoy's "that man" is Napoleon. That knowledge adds another level of distaste to my reading of the paragraph. If I can easily substitute the words "Donald J. Trump" for "Napoleon Bonaparte," what does that indicate about the way in which the passage of time and the constructions of history twist our conceptions of hero and leader and nobility and just cause and intelligence and bravery--not to mention our aptitude for pity? I have no love for Napoleon as a historical figure, but neither have I focused on the fact that his behavior was not so different from Trump's.

As advertisement, the label Napoleon bears some equivalence to the neon lights of Trump Tower. Both names continue to blare. And it's terrible to even begin to count the similarities in the urge toward empire.

The amazing part of all this angst and ambiguity is, of course, Tolstoy. How did he know? And how does he manage to keep telling us?

What a nasty first day of April. All night long we endured a variety show of snow rain slush rain snow wind slush wind rain snow, etcetera. You might call it a slopstorm. Now, thanks to the road salt, the sidewalks look like they've been spackled with half-melted shortening mixed with graham-cracker crumbs. The streets are a blackened mess of plow scrape and water. The ocean is hiding under a cloud, and Tom is hiding under the comforter.

Fortunately we have plenty of coffee and bagels, and we don't own a dog we have to walk. Fortunately this apartment is warm, even though the windows are drafty. Fortunately I cooked too many mussels for dinner last night, so we have a lot left over for mussel stew today. In other good news, I went to the dentist on Thursday and learned that I do not need a root canal. What news could be better?

Probably I ought to do some housework, but I don't mind that. I've got a stack of library books to study, and a crossword puzzle book for wasting time. I can play a few games of String with the cat. I can listen to records. If I can override my hatred for my kitchen, I can bake cookies. I can watch the Final Four and text about the games laconically with my son.

I've also got that new poem vibrating in its corner. I could look at it. Or I could leave it alone. Either way will feel like the right thing to do. If I choose to leave it alone, I can keep copying out Carruth's long poem "The Sleeping Beauty." I can keep considering the structure of Komunyakaa's "Autobiography of My Alter Ego."

I was thinking the other day about the difference between boredom and idleness. Idleness is a canoe floating down a placid stream, whereas boredom is a hideous sucking monster. Maybe the difference between the pair is analogous to the difference between melancholy and depression. They seem to be made of the same materials, yet one is a gift and the other is torment.