I spent yesterday morning working on a poem draft that is making me feel as if something real and new is going on inside my head.

I spent yesterday afternoon with one of my favorite high school teachers: Ian Ramsey, founder of the Kauffmann Summer Writing Seminar, which I've co-directed with him for the past three years. Ian is a poet who teaches music, environmental writing, and wellness at North Yarmouth Academy, and has made an  extraordinary commitment to nurturing imagination, moral engagement, and self-awareness in young people. He teaches students about brain science, including strategies for managing anxiety and developing stamina and focus, all of which are crucial for artists. I get very excited when I hear him talk about his plans and curiosities, and I'm looking forward to hosting him up in Monson so that my students can try out some of his methods.

Ian gives me hope for the future. Amid all of the dreadful portents, this world is filled with young people overflowing with energy and intelligence and love. May their bright eyes carry us through.

At the moment it's snowing hard in Portland. The cat is disgusted, but I'm pleased. I just wish the downfall would stay snow and not turn to rain, as it's forecast to do. Slush is no one's favorite precipitation.

Today: I will gird my loins and deal with those grant applications. Ugh. And I've got a meeting scheduled in the afternoon with my co-director for the Kauffmann Summer Writing Seminar, though we'll see what the weather says.

Frost Place applications are rolling in; my Monson students are sending me stellar work; I'm trying to keep pushing forward with these daily challenges and satisfactions--yes, people of all ages are writing and thinking and feeling and caring; we are curious and vulnerable and funny and tragic; and the pigsty presidency and the senatorial disgrace can't stop us from digging for Truth and crowing from the housetops.

I've been enduring a migraine for a couple of days--not a debilitating one, just the lingering axe-in-the-head variety, the kind that ibuprofen dulls but doesn't erase.

This morning the headache axe is still solidly biting into my skull, a fitting backdrop for the nausea of the State of the Union address, the sloppy mess of Iowa, and (in minor news) the wince that the Red Sox have traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers.

But at least I'm home today, not dancing in front of a room full of tenth graders, and maybe with a little quiet the axe will dissolve.

I've got the eternal editing stack on my desk and some Frost Place stuff to attend to; and I should force myself to apply for some grants; I should lug in firewood and clean bathrooms and wash sheets; I should sit down with my newish long poem "Rules for the Direction of the Maid" and consider revisions; I ought to write up some thoughts about Chestnut Ridge for a Florida book group that's reading it; I need to I need to I need to . . .

I could use the laying-on-of-hands right about now.

This morning, I'll be teaching; then home again in the afternoon to edit or whatever. I feel like my letters to you have been dull, and I apologize. There's not much fascination in my life, and routines are dull on the page. Forgive my pedestrian notes. I hope to be exciting someday.

In the meantime: I'm glad I don't live in Iowa. This coffee I'm drinking is delicious. I've starting reading The Fish Can Sing, a short novel by the Icelandic writer Haldor Laxness. I dreamed that Brigitte Bardot was my stepmother, and that she climbed into a full bathtub of water while wearing a pink and white pantsuit. 

I spent yesterday combing through the seed catalog, bees-waxing my boots, making minestrone, and eventually falling asleep in front of football. Today I'll start a new editing project and go grocery shopping and otherwise prep myself for busyness. I'll be teaching for the Telling Room tomorrow, and the rest of the week is clogged with desk work and appointments. And then next week, Monson again.

I guess it's okay, all of this occupation. It's certainly a relief to get paid, and a relief to be treated like someone who knows a few things. But I still feel strange to be living a life that no longer revolves around taking care of my children. I wonder when that will wear off.

On my walk yesterday I saw snowdrops budding up in someone's front garden. Flowers in Maine on February 2. So strange.

Here's a poem from the embryo manuscript. It appears in the new anthology Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall.

Ancient History

Dawn Potter

Baby forgets the rain.

Forgets how the lamplight

spilled onto his page of homework.

He forgets the scent of dust,

that old wet dog in the chair,

that radio spitting its crackle of news.

Forgets the shouting in the kitchen,

the way her voice rose, the way

her plate slapped down on the counter.

He forgets the slam of the window,

the cigarette ash drifting,

the way her eyes tracked him

when he dropped his pencil on the floor

Forgets her skinny fingers,

their filthy sharp nails,

her stare like a chain

yanking him underwater.

Forgets how bad she smelled.

All he recollects

is how she crashed back and forth,

charging from burner to sink to burner—

scald slice boil scald slice boil scald slice boil—

her flailing arms bloody with tomatoes.

And Baby still sees those seven hot jars, 

mashed vegetable flesh straining against the glass:

            how they hissed

as she yanked each from the canner

and flung them screaming,

            one after one after one,

out the yawing front door.

Applications have been open for four days, and already this summer's Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching is half-full. I'm shocked, in a good way. So I guess if you're thinking about applying, you should do so pronto. And if you've already applied but your friends/colleagues are procrastinating, stick a pin in them.

Yesterday I tried to distract myself from Republican treachery by washing floors, folding clothes, reading Dickens, thinking about my manuscript, talking to my sons. Today I'll sit down with a seed catalog and start planning for spring. What else can we do but cling to our little hopes?

And I got a poem accepted yesterday . . . one that's been rejected over and over again for several years. It's a piece that speaks explicitly of aging bodies and aging desire. An unfashionable topic, clearly, and I'd pretty much given up on placing it. But from the ashes, a spark.

So, dear ones, this morning I've decided to throw my shoulders back, take a deep breath, lift my gaze toward clouds and sun. I can't do much. But I can still dig, and plant, and laugh, and shout, and sleep. And listen.

Yesterday was a terrible day for our country. It is impossible for me to fathom how an entire political party could have eroded into a scrum of weak and fawning bootlickers--and for such a man! . . .  a petty, lying, cruel, selfish, stupid mafioso. And yet here we are.

Now, on this new morning, I sit in my little house and wonder what safety means, or will mean. I have been editing a novel about dictatorship and repression in 1970s Brazil: about police raids and torture and exile, about the terrible daily secrecy among loved ones--don't tell what you know or suspect or feel; ignorance is safety--how the larger repression became, for these individuals, a viperish isolation.

I have lived my entire life in a country that, in good ways and in terrible ways, was nonetheless sure of itself. Now nothing feels sure.

And here we sit, or lie, stand, or crouch, or kneel. Americans at the end of the empire, striking our everyday poses.


A Litany for Survival

Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.