In Portland, the thermometer's hovering at zero. Up north in the homeland, it's -14, so I have no complaining leg to stand on. And in fact I'm not complaining. I like the excitement of cold, and I regret, now that I'm living the soft city life, that I'm not pulling on my insulated coveralls and trudging out to the barn and the woodshed as my skin stiffens and my tears gel in the treacherous air. The challenge of being flesh in a place where flesh ought not to be.

I've always had a soft spot for the stupidity of the polar explorers.

When we were young, Tom and I used to pore over the atlas and imagine ourselves traveling north, and north, and north. How did we end up retreating south, end up in this bayside burg, little princess of the provinces, with her boats and breweries, her snow-clotted streets, her strangers?

Saturday morning, in the Alcott House. A stone jar filled with bright orange gerbera daisies. A scatter of books, puzzles, games, pencils. Lamplight. A yellow chair. Glitter of a water glass. A white cat. Warmth stealing up from the registers. Steam coiling from a cup. Through the windows: a tangle of black branches pasted onto a blue-ink sky.

The present tense.

The present. Tense.

Despite my sleeplessness, I did manage to shoehorn myself through yesterday. Midday I took part in a conference call about the residency applications I've been sorting through, and that went well. The other judge and I had a fair amount of overlap in our choices, which was reassuring. Judging is always subjective: there's no way around it. I was glad to have been accidentally paired with a like-minded reader.

So that's one job off my desk. This morning I'm going to a yoga class; then I'll trundle home and edit for a while; then I'll spend some time with a couple of poetry manuscripts I'm mentoring. And then I'll cook dinner for my Valentine: lemon-marinated strip steaks, roasted Brussels sprouts, root-beer floats. My Valentine loves root-beer floats.

[Have you noticed I have a career in words? Isn't that the weirdest thing? Who knew it was possible? Who knew having a career was possible?]

Here's a small poem from the embryo manuscript. It appeared in Salamander a while ago.

Dooryard

Dawn Potter

Blue jay screams in the almost wilderness—

she Wants she Wants she Wants.

Nothing but flames will grow in this wind.

Back and forth the blind mice scuttle.

Their nation crumbles and thrives.

Lord, I am tired. I came home beat from Monson, then was awake half the night for no reason in particular, except maybe because I feel like I'm on call for half the population of the world. Later this morning I have a big meeting; in the meantime, I'm immersed in being a support person in multiple Suffering Young Person sagas. O the texts and emails . . . I'm going to start wearing a Hello My Name Is sticker that reads Expert: Young Angst.

Anyway, this good cup of coffee is helping.

And I did have a glorious day with my Monson kids. We spent the entire session prepping for an afternoon staged reading: moving from revising the raw script, to blocking and staging the event, to honing the presentation, to welcoming the audience and staging the performance. I was flying by the seat of my pants as I am not a theater person and don't have that language or skill base. But the kids did a truly magnificent job . . . especially during stage 1: revision. We sat with the script and line by line read it aloud repeatedly, discussing whether or not the voice was consistent, whether the wording was clear and easy to read, whether the descriptions were as vivid as they could be. The student author considered every suggestion, accepted many, rewrote others in her own way; the kids were focused and precise and detailed in the way in which they talked through the language issues. I have never seen such fine workshopping at the high school level. They were in love with the story and were determined to help it become the best it could be.

At the high school level, any lessons in revision really only scratch the surface. Revision is a lifetime challenge. It's more important to let them see that door open than to expect them to get their work into professional shape. I felt like preparing for this staged reading gave them a real-world, commonsense reason to revise: they understood concretely that language must sing in the mouth and resonate for the listener.

I'll be heading up north this afternoon for tomorrow's class and I've got 2,000 niggling chores to accomplish before I leave. I don't know how anyone manages to routinely travel for work. I am really not that good at it.

I spent much of yesterday prepping myself to deliver a complicated lesson on performance: trying to break down all of the steps in doing a grouped staged reading and then stacking them up in a way that might be useful and reasonable for high schoolers. This project was their idea, and I'm all fired up to support them in it, but I'm definitely making stuff up as I go along. Teaching as improv. C'est ma vie.

I'm soothing myself by staring at the fat bouquet of gerbera daisies my friend gave me last night--brilliant orange and green and quite unlike a Maine winter. I feel tempted to carry them along with me, a visual kiss for the middle of our writing table, but I would probably spill flower-water all over the backseat of my car.

Everything's at sixes-and-sevens this morning [which means what? why not "at fours-and-fives"?]: I'm feeding a houseguest, derailing the cat, puzzling over which pair of shoes won't hurt my feet, grinding coffee, answering messages . . . I can barely find a moment to sit on the couch and write this note to you . . . and then, all of a sudden, there will be nothing but time. The strange intersection of busyness and emptiness. How odd it is to be human.

Currently, some sort of garbagy rain-sleet-snow-ice compound is coating every exterior surface with Monday-morning grievances. Ugh. The sidewalks were already as slick as pigs. This neighborhood is a concussion waiting to happen.

Today I've got to prep for my Wednesday Monson class, and work on an editing project, and try to get to the yoga session I couldn't attend on Friday because of a previous ice onslaught, and tend a dear one in trouble, and wash clothes, and stare at a poem draft, and copy out Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and empty the ashes out of the stove, and cook an early dinner, and go to the movies, and stare at a poem draft, and think.

Meanwhile, the cat paces and the furnace growls and Tom sighs in his bed.

Meanwhile, I read this sentence by Louise Bogan, an epigraph printed on the back of a letterpress copy of Kate Barnes's long poem The Rhetoric of Fiction, which I unearthed in a free pile outside the University of New England library--

No woman should be ashamed if, in her writing, she tries to give back to the world a portion of its lost heart.

It's one degree above zero, outside in the icy dark. Here in the little house the furnace growls and clicks, and lamplight spreads a golden circle in the gloom. I'm in my accustomed place: the corner of the grey couch, with my white coffee cup, my black coffee, my red bathrobe. Upstairs Tom is still asleep. Beside me, the fair-haired cat squints and purrs.

I'm thinking about patience, and suddenly wondering how different it is from impatience. Sitting quietly, waiting for opportunity, slogging away at tedium: are they all a mask for desperation? a way to deceive the Watcher? Or is true patience simply indolence? or indifference?

I've been rereading Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices, which is set in an Irish convent school just before the First World War, and I'm sure that's why I've found myself circling around these questions of inner wildness, exterior self-control. Poems, of course, are a place to frame that conflict. A certain sort of nun might be able to construct other versions of that frame. Perhaps she would employ the word obedience, or vocation. A poet might as well.

A vocation does require obedience: a strict adherence to the rules of the game . . . a game that is demanding and particular and generalized and ancient and mutable and unfair and exhaustive and extremely unclear. Perhaps you see why I've found myself conflating patience with impatience.

Being a poet is a lesson in being no one. Yes, in the Keatsian sense of negative capability--a constant striving to thin the barriers separating self, language, and experience. Yes, in the sense of isolation. The essential work can only be done alone. Yes, in the sense of communal joy. Nearly everyone is indifferent to a poet's striving: even other poets are indifferent.

Invisibility is freedom. Freedom is dangerous. Danger heightens the senses. The senses are liars. Lying is power. Power is invisible.

This is the poster for the summer writing seminar I co-direct with my friend Ian Ramsey (see yesterday's post). If you click on the poster so that it's big enough to read, you'll note that the seminar is free and that all equipment and supplies are provided. If you know any New England teenagers who would benefit from thoughtful time in the wild with like-minded peers, please send them our way. I direct the writing program, and Ian manages the logistics. He's got long experience with taking young people into wilderness situations; you couldn't ask for a better leader when it comes to balancing adventure with safety.

* * *

Yesterday's weather was so bad--ice and freezing rain all day long--that Tom stayed home from work, something he rarely does. The neighborhood looks slick and nasty this morning, but eventually I've got to get the car out of the driveway as, horrors, we are almost out of coffee. I spent yesterday morning editing, yesterday afternoon baking a chocolate cake, and then, in the evening, we slipped-n-slid down the street and around the corner for a dinner of crab cakes and duck. City life has its delights . . . crunching down the sidewalks under the frosted streetlights as the ice-laden trees glitter . . . a walk, a companion, a warm room, a beer.

Today I've got to read page proofs for my Beloit pieces, and do some publicity chores for the Kauffmann program, plus de-ice my car and buy food and go to the bank and maybe try to shop for a new pair of glasses.

I finished reading Laxness's A Fish Can Sing and liked it a lot--so much so that I want to go back to his Independent People, which I read once years ago. At that time it didn't make much impression on me. But apparently I was young and foolish.