I wish I could figure out how to take photos that look like something, but I guess we all have our ineptitudes. (Also, don't ask me to do simple addition.) Anyway, here are a few hard-to-focus-on pictures of the current status of the front-yard farm. To the left, a row of sunflowers coming into bloom. Straight ahead, jungle-like tomato, cucumber on a trellis, and an artichoke, plus some bok choi and kohlrabi and marigolds.

 Another view of the jungle-like tomatoes and the cucumber trellis, fronted with a row of purple string beans.

Blurry herb garden, suitable for people without their glasses on. Mounds to the right are parsley. Fluffy stuff to the left: edible chrysanthemum and cilantro.

Finally, a clear photo. This is my herb-drying system. Note the handy antlers. They were on the wood shop in Harmony when we bought the place, and Tom decided to bring them with us to Portland.

Ruckus in Tom's toolbox, "helping." I did not take this photo, which is why it is good.

Finally, the heat has broken. What a relief. I mean, I love summer and all, but 90 degrees and dense humidity transform me into jelly. Thursday night's gig was an ordeal--we played a 2-hour outdoor show in that weather--so no wonder I came home feeling like a sea slug.

Today, though, I hope to begin to catch up on all the gardening I haven't been able to face. I've got fall greens to sow, exhausted plants to pull, compost to spread, compost piles to turn. Even a tiny, tiny vegetable farm has its perpetual chores.

Right now we are awash in chard and lettuce. I am drying sage and dill for winter use, and 30 heads of garlic are curing in the shed. Peavines are pulled, the last picking of peas is in the freezer, and tiny string beans are beginning to appear. Tomatoes and peppers are swelling, cucumbers and eggplant are in flower, everbearing strawberries are setting fruit, and my sunflower hedge is blossoming.

Last year, when I came back from the Frost Place, all I knew about this cottage was that it had just come up for sale. Tom and I went to the open house, breathed in the heady perfume of too many cats and dogs, examined the overstuffed rooms and barren yard and falling-apart kitchen, shrugged, and made a low offer. On July 4, we signed a contract.

In other words, a year ago we were just beginning to wonder if we'd made a mistake. As it turns out: no.

Now I am sitting in our small tidy living room and thinking about the poetry collection I tore apart yesterday. It had to be done, and I'd been stalling for months. But with a sudden influx of new poems, I began to recognize what was wrong with it. I took out some poems, added others, and completely changed the order and thus its dramatic thread. I gave it a new title: Dooryard.

This morning I'm feeling energetic about the changes. I like the simplicity of the current title. I like that it's both a common Maine idiom and a reach back into the poetic aether. I like that it can be a metaphor or not. I like that it's a single word. I like that, no matter if you live in the country or the city, you can have a dooryard . . . a dirt driveway, a stoop. Go out and sit there and breathe in the cool morning and pet your cat and watch a kid crouch down to examine a bug. Listen to the train go by. Shell your peans and snap your beans.

And the heat continues. It's supposed to be even worse inland, which is where I'm headed today: up north to Greenville for a gig. Last time I performed there, a giant wind was blowing off Moosehead Lake, and I made the mistake of wearing a short dress, and given that I play an instrument that requires me to keep two hands in motion at all times . . . well, all I can say is that today I'll be wearing a pair of linen pants.

Tom and I spent a peaceful Fourth at home and then walked down to Back Cove to watch the fireworks. Just as we were getting ready to leave the house, I received an email from a poet I admire very much. She had written to me, "Your work is freakin' awesome!" And "I came home talking about your poetry! Consider me an advocate for you going forward."

So, of course, I am feeling like a puddle, sloppy and soggy in the best possible way. Her words were completely unexpected, entirely unlooked for. I feel like I should hang her note on the wall, as magic for the dark days.

Yesterday was a scorcher; last night was a sweat box; today and tomorrow and the next day will be repeats. For a few days, the Alcott House, ensconced beneath its enormous maples, stayed relatively cool; but now it's just as hot here as it is everywhere else. Fans run continuously. I brew fresh ice tea several times a day. The cat flops underfoot. I find myself asking dumb questions such as "Will listening to cool jazz help me feel cooler?"

For dinner I put together spring rolls (filled with lettuce, cucumbers, and herbs) and sashimi (bluefin, Scottish salmon, local scallops). Then later in the evening we welcomed a surprise overnight guest--a Frost Place friend who was in town unexpectedly--and I felt embarrassed about our lack of air conditioning. It's hard to believe that this time last week she and I were shivering in a 40-degree barn.

Believe it or not, I wrote yet another decent poem draft yesterday. And I'm starting to dream about my imaginary baby daughter again--always a sign that something is burgeoning in my poet life. For nearly two decades I have dreamed off and on about this little girl. She is dark eyed, with dark curly hair, and looks nothing like my sons. But she is clearly mine. From the beginning, my friend Jilline (my dear comrade, dead now for thirteen years) declared that this apparition was an art baby, not my hormones trying to convince me to have another child. And so now, whenever my imaginary daughter appears, I know that things are looking up, that I am writing and will be writing, and also that Jilline is somewhere crowing, "I told you so." I have not seen my art baby since I left Harmony, but last night she found me, she's figured out where I've been hiding, here she comes scooting across the floor in her little sage-green dress, and she's laughing.

Thanks to a sea breeze, Portland had a bit of a respite yesterday, weather-wise, but the heat will be back today. I took advantage of the relative coolness to chop weeds along the stone wall, run the vacuum, cook a hot meal. That means today I can save my energy for some desultory dusting, hand-washing winter woolens, and making spring rolls and sashimi for dinner. I will have to pick peas, but I'll save that for late in the afternoon.

Midday I'm hoping to find a bubble of time for writing. I still feel twingy and edgy about poems, and that's a good sign. And here's a note my friend Nate sent me this morning. It's something to ponder.

"The metallurgist, like the blacksmith and, before him, the potter, is a 'master of fire.' It is by means of fire that he brings about the passage of the material from one state to another."

It was your namesake that first caught my attention, however simple--I'd like to think of you, and poets in general, as "master[s] of fire" that transforms material. The metaphor is most likely not original, but it's cool, nonetheless.

And in continuing to read this (Mircea Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas) it discusses how most blacksmiths depicted as making divine weapons to defeat monstrous adversaries were also songsmiths and poets.

The Maine Arts Journal has published a sheaf of poems from my forthcoming collection Chestnut Ridge. I know you've seen some of these poems on this blog before, but Betsy Sholl (a wonderful poet, a former poet laureate of Maine, a dear supporter of her fellows) decided she'd like to reprint them together as a group. In fact, she invited me to submit them after I'd asked her, with itchy embarrassment, to write a blurb for the new book. That's the kind of sweet person she is.

My friend Christian Barter also has a sheaf of poems in this journal. They focus on Acadia National Park, where he has worked for years on trail maintenance. I guess Betsy was in the mood for poems about place, when she tapped us.

I've spent the entire weekend in a fog of intense physical laziness--sort of a reaction to the hot weather but mostly a convalescence from my Frost Place exertions. I came back from Franconia with my poet self bouncing and yodeling and my everything-else self feeling as if it had been crushed by a rockslide. I gave into the torpor for three days, but now I have to resurrect my enthusiasm for moving my arms and legs. I've got desk work to do, housework to do, yard work to do. On Thursday night I'll be back in the gig saddle, with a show up in Greenville. I need to figure out how to be peppy again.

At least I've managed to do some summer cooking: infant peas (from my patch!), gazpacho (my favorite M.F.K. Fisher recipe in which all liquids are measured in glasses, not cups), grilled marinated flank steak (okay, Tom cooked it), leftover grilled marinated flank steak turned into steak salad (with wild rice, tomatoes, scallions, garlic scapes, more wonderful peas, and a hedge's worth of chopped cilantro).

My garden has turned out to be a local conversation piece. I seem to be the only person in this neighborhood (no surprise) who has turned her front lawn into a vegetable farm, so I get a lot of chat from passersby. But they seem to like it. The plot is pretty, and meanwhile I sit on the front stoop in a faded summer dress and shell peas into a dishpan, just like a regular old-fashioned farmwife. It's a disguise I enjoy.

Yesterday I did what everyone--cat, squirrel, or human--should do on a hot day: I scampered around early and late and spent the middle hours flopped quietly in the shade. Ruckus the cat preferred to flop in the driveway in the shadow of my car. I preferred to flop on the living room couch in front of the fan, but it all came to the same thing.

I spent my quiet afternoon reading Margaret Atwood's novel The Robber Bridegroom and writing a new poem. Given that I'd had such good fortune with the word-trigger prompt that Vievee gave us earlier this week, I reconstituted the idea for myself: I opened Atwood's novel and randomly poked a thumb into four of her words. Then I typed them at the top of a blank page and let myself go.

In Vievee's workshop I ended up using all four of my words in the subsequent drafts. In this case, only one of the words remained in the version I'd concocted by the end of my siesta. Nonetheless, the process and sensation were parallel: by focusing on these unexpected (even unexciting words: one of them was something) rather than trying to dredge up material from my own predictable stream, I found myself writing a strange and surprising little fake-instructional poem, one that borrowed from adages and idioms, even famous lines of poetry, but replaced the expected nouns with near rhymes and in this way constructed a pastiche of imitation wisdom about how to be a coward.

I've never written such a poem before. I don't know if it's good or bad, but I'm interested in it . . . and this is the crux: poets can get bored with their own patterns, and for me Vievee's use-four-words-that-belong-to-someone-else trigger has quickly increased both the excitement and the curiosity that are necessary to my endeavor.