I started working on a new poem draft yesterday, kept reading Howards End, mopped floors, grocery-shopped, constructed class plans, and fretted about the forecast. I do hate driving in snow. But it looks like the weather will semi-cooperate after all, so I'll be heading north this afternoon for tomorrow's teaching gig. We'll concentrate on swelling out ideas: moving from a small trigger into a larger draft, combining drafts, choosing how and where to begin and end a piece. No doubt the kids will have much to say.

* * *

The house still feels so quiet. I haven't yet gotten into the swing of being childless again. The small rooms seem vast. I wander from one to another, wondering why we need so many.

* * *

Here's a poem. It came out in Vox Populi a while ago, and was reprinted in the Maine Arts Journal. It's the only pantoum I've ever written.

Epithalamion for Grendel  

Dawn Potter 

Cordgrass slashes rents into the wind,
but I am waiting for my lover at the river.
Close the floodgates: the tide is high
and the one I love is mud and reeds, 

yet I am waiting for my lover at the river.
He strides into storms, he wades into pools of silt,
for the one I love is mud and reeds
and my hands long to cup his jagged face. 

He strides into storms, he wades into pools of silt.
A scatter of fishes gathers in his wake.
My hands long to cup his jagged face
as herons bow to him in the saltmarsh, 

as a scatter of fishes gathers in his wake.
Close the floodgates. The tide is high.
Herons, bow to him in the saltmarsh.
Cordgrass, slash rents into the wind.

Today, on the first Monday of the new holiday year, I'll be prepping for Wednesday's class and worrying about whether or not the class will even happen. The forecast is unclear, but even the mildest scenarios predict snow during bus time. And given that my kids will be traveling to Monson from all over the north country, this does not sound like a good prognosis for us.

Anyhow, I'll be getting myself ready, along with running errands, and going to a yoga class, and cleaning floors, and working on a poem, and maybe tinkering some more with that manuscript.

Rereading Howards End is making me a little tearful, given that it's all about a love affair with a place. I don't think I could have managed to take it off the shelf even a year ago. But my Harmony wound is not so fresh as it was.

Here's another small poem from the embryo manuscript. It appeared not too long ago in Scoundrel Time.

Walking into Town

Dawn Potter 

this road is empty for most of the day but

when the log trucks whip over the ridge

jake-breaking belching diesel 

then watch out deer

the soot-stained sky glowers

snow is on the way snow

is always on the way

& the tar is always buckled with potholes &

frostheaves & in the ditch today

old mrs richards is hunting for budweiser cans

for mountain dew bottles to trade

down at the store for baloney to feed

her grandson he’s three & he’s smart

she tells me he’s three 

& his teeth are rotting out of his head

Thing that Tom and I never do: drive to a big-box store and purchase electronics. Thing that Tom and I did yesterday: drive to a big-box store and purchase electronics . . . all for the sake of a device that would allow T to watch the Criterion Channel on our out-of-date TV, and assuage my anxiety about having purchased him a Christmas gift that he could not actually use (a classic Dawn-error).

But success! Now he can watch brooding French movies to his heart's content.

And wait, there's more: at the aforementioned big-box store, I also purchased pillows to make the French-movie-watching couch actually comfortable enough for a person to sit on for the duration of a movie. My next mission: adequate lights in the living room so that the person who isn't interested in brooding French movies can sit on either end of the book-reading couch instead of huddling up under a single tepid spotlight. I tell you: big stuff is happening around here.

In other exciting news, Tom has starting working on the spice shelves for the kitchen. We had a beautiful spice cupboard in Harmony, built flush against the central chimney, and it was hard to give up that lovely and useful space. Here, at the Alcott House, all of our renovations have been stalled for close to a year, for reasons of money and time, but our little spice-blip forward will add considerably to the kitchen's storage efficiency. Two shallow cupboards will hold pesky little jars of spices, home-dried herbs and mushrooms, small baking supplies, etc. They will fit into a corner join between the existing cabinets, kind of like a secret compartment.

So what else is going on? I finished Parker's Magical Negro and Guy's Queen of Scots and have started rereading E. M. Forster's Howards End. I am fretting about weather, which looks like it might derail my teaching schedule and/or make my drive north a nightmare. I shared my poetry ms with a friend. I sat on our somewhat more comfortable TV couch and watched Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn. I talked to a son on the phone, who told me he's been billeted during his internship in a hippie round house in which the walls seem to be constructed of cement and pieces of firewood. I worried about war.

Dining room with poetry manuscript. This was before things got messy. Eventually, however, I did pull together a paper order of sorts. Today I'll lug the poems into a digital file. Then I'll send it to a friend and he'll tell me what I've done wrong. Constructing a poetry manuscript is a great way to go blind.

Anyway, thank goodness I had a day to myself. I needed all of it . . . the time and the house.

I have no idea what I'll be up to this weekend besides sticking various forks into this pile of poems. The weather is supposed to be glum, and I expect I'll be staring out the window at it. Maybe I'll cook something to entertain myself. Maybe I'll go to a movie. Maybe I'll read about Mary Queen of Scots getting her head chopped off. Or I might skip that part. The tragic murk is getting pretty thick right now. I'm not sure I need any more of it. The morning news is providing plenty of tragic murk already.

Christmas has been dismantled, the sheets and comforters washed and folded away. Floors are swept, chicken stock simmered, firewood stacked, ashes shoveled. So this morning, after an early yoga class, I'll trudge home and address the embryo manuscript. As I work I'll try to remember these lines from the Inferno:

But look down now and pay attention.
The river of our blood draws near.

I've been reading Morgan Parker's collection Magical Negro, which my son gave me for Christmas. She ends her poem "Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School" with these lines:

Is this how I am supposed to feel?
Are you sure? How do you know?

The lines have been ringing in my head, clanking against the murky sinister plots of the Mary Queen of Scots bio I've also been reading, and with Dante, of course, and with my own stack of poems.

I hope I can figure something out.

This morning I'll drive my last two young-people visitors to the bus station. Then I'll return to our quiet house and slowly start stowing away Christmas decorations, folding up beds, washing linens,  realigning my thoughts. Next week I'll be back in class; editing projects will soon reappear on my desk; but today and tomorrow are mine. First thing is to tidy the nest. Second thing is to spread poems all over the couches and tables and chairs and seriously think about manuscript construction.

My last two collections (Chestnut Ridge and the unpublished A Month in Summer) were historically triggered, though they are very different in character. This one is more like my first three collections--an olio of memoir and invention. But the connecting thread is frayed and tangled. Every order feels like disorder. The individual poems are finished entities, but the larger pattern eludes me.

Well, I'll get there eventually, if I can convince Time to leave me alone for a little while.

New Year, at Dawn

Here, in my small city by the sea, the gardens are heaped with snow. Ice glitters on streets and stairs. Against a blue dawn, the the chimneys loom like monoliths. It is a lonely time of day. A lonely time of year.

My sick boy has recovered and flown away. His brother remains in the house, fast asleep, but tomorrow he will fly away as well.

I will stand in the middle of a quiet room and listen to snowmelt tick against the sill.

A new year, a new decade. I have made no resolutions. I read and write and clean and cook and teach and garden and walk and lift and carry and breathe and try to be decent. Vanities erode. Losses loom. I am. You are. We muddle, together and alone.

Here's a poem that no one seems interested in publishing. But I like it still, and so I will offer it to you as a new year's gift . . . a small love song to failure, I suppose you might call it. Or perhaps a reminder to keep opening the wrong door.

To a School Janitor, Fired for Drunkenness  

Dawn Potter 

I miss your grin your cigarettes your
bow-legged grunt up down up
down the stairwells your bucket clank-clanking
 against the charnel walls your mop
hoicked under a meaty arm
your nod your swallowed tears a smear
 of wet linoleum snail-trailing behind you
oh lord why do we shrink
such mountains