For dinner last night I made a salmon soufflé, a beautiful sight, leaping straight from the hallowed pages of Julia C's first cookbook. A fine, old-fashioned, French-for-American-housewives recipe, packed with postwar butter and eggs, breezily requesting canned salmon and Swiss cheese. As it happened, I did not follow that particular path of convenience: I had a leftover piece of fillet that had been sitting in the freezer for a couple of months and a hank of low-budget Gruyere. In fact my soufflé was highfalutin, in a middlebrow way.

Tom and I were excited to watch it rise, to crow over its brown puff, to spoon up its delightful texture of nothingness. Dinner as mild-mannered spectacle.

I don't have much planned for today, other than my usual winter weekend obligato: water plants carry firewood sweep floors clean bathrooms wash clothes read books walk into the cemetery stare out over saltwater.

But I am pleased to have a new poem draft. It's constructed around a series of online reviews of a seedy motel: borrowed, rewritten, molded, dramatized. I do love voices. And I love the work of spotlighting the strange intersections of comic and monstrous, glibness and deep feeling. The ambiguities of place and need and desire and desperation.

I did write yesterday, productively, and as a result I am feeling both vigorous and honest this morning, two sensations that might also be a definition of poetry. In addition to constructing a new draft that I like, I also began to identify some compilation possibilities for a sheaf of pieces that have not been fitting into any other collection--poems that are harsher and more political than much of my other work. Right now I am calling this group American Anger, though that title will likely change. For the moment I'm just happy to have figured out that they, too, have a cohort.

Today: my hard yoga class (challenging postures, impossible balancing tasks . . . another definition of poetry?) and then editing an academic journal and reading other peoples' manuscripts. I'm still delighted with The Makioka Sisters, still reading Sonnets to Orpheus.

And dear ones: don't forget to send in your applications to the Frost Place. Poetry needs you.

Lately the Beloit Poetry Journal's social media posts have been featuring poems from its archive, and yesterday, much to my surprise, one of my poems popped up on Facebook, inside this charming frog.

I have never before been published inside a frog, and I like it.

This morning I am going to mess around with a new notion-for-a-poem and see if anything coheres. Eventually I'll switch over to doing other people's work, but I need to snatch an hour or two for myself. I've been busily preaching "Don't forget to fill your own well," to teachers and students, nephews and sisters, while not filling my own well, and that silliness needs to stop. I am ahead of schedule on editing, I don't teach again till next Wednesday, I have no company to entertain or feed, I don't need to go grocery shopping, I'm caught up on laundry.

Dear Dawn, 

Write, damn it. 

Love, Dawn

Yesterday's snowstorm devolved into a rainstorm and then froze, so things are looking pretty ugly out there. A few minutes ago I opened the back door to put out the reluctant cat, and it's a good thing he was reluctant because crunch crunch crunch around the edge of the shed strode a stocky black and white animal . . . surely Ruckus's friend Jack from across the street . . . but, wait a sec, no, cat, get back into the house immediately.

Public service announcement: Skunks in southern Maine are not hibernating.

My sister and nephew will head back to Vermont later today, and I'll wash a bunch of sheets and towels and reclaim my study. Still, amid visitor uproar, I did manage to finish that editing project and even to spend some time with my friend's poetry manuscript. And thanks to my son I've got a kernel of an idea for a new poem. Possibly I'll find a moment to experiment later this week.

I do feel less downhearted than I did yesterday morning. Life always looks much rosier after a close skunk call.

The black morning air is cold and thick. Snow is on the way.

Last night we escorted our visitors down Forest Avenue for their first-ever taste of Vietnamese pho, which they loved. We played cards, and kvetched about this and that, and in general behaved like regular cheerful relatives. We drank tea and went to bed early.

But now I'm tired, for no particular reason, and a little downhearted, also for no particular reason. I suppose it's just late-winter malaise . . . Spring is so close yet so far. I'd like to be immersed in a writing project, but I can't seem to fall down the rabbit hole. Not one single review of Chestnut Ridge has been published. I'm awaiting a passel of manuscript rejections . . .

Ugh. Enough! Let's talk about the tulips sitting on my living room table--they're lavender, with narrow white edging, still tightly furled, like short fat umbrellas. And The Makioka Sisters: this is a wonderful novel: ambling and slow, an idle walk among blossoms, with the sisters glowing like bright lamps at dusk.

Another Monday . . . dark, quiet, cold. My house is full of sleeping bodies that will shortly be a hectic rush of showers and breakfast. Then they'll suddenly dissolve into the world. And I will be alone again, rattling around the the doll-house, humming my private tune.

Today, I hope I'll be finishing an academic editing project. Perhaps my optimism is misplaced. But if it isn't, and I do get it done, then I'll have a bit of space for Rilke and Dante and my own writing. Or perhaps the house party will reconvene earlier than expected, and I'll be back to my Aunt & Sister job: slicing bread, boiling eggs, pouring tea, shaking my head over the iniquities of school administrators.

Here's a poem I wrote for my sister. It came out in Green Mountains Review a few years ago.

Eight-Track Tape Player

Dawn Potter 

                        for Heather Potter

The sun slants his hapless rays

through spiderwebbed glass,

and amid the hills of newspaper

rumpling up from the tablecloth

our tight-lipped mama unpacks a miracle

fresh from the S & H Green Stamps Store—

a glory of chrome and veneer,

five fat knobs, two speakers, a slot like a mouth.

Pity the ravaged radio

hunched beside this marvel.

Blinking in the soiled daylight,

our grandpop makes small

kind noises, though in truth

every machine he loves, tractor or Frigidaire,

is broken down and rusted out.

Behind him, in a chipped chair,

our granny slits a new packet of Luckies

with her long thumbnail

and erects a wall of smoke.

Like always, like always,

there’s just the two of us dropped at the altar—

you and me—magicked, rapt, enchanters.

How many rhymes have we sung

to the frog in the well? how many idols

suborned?—a slick wet calf born under moonlight,

the musty sweet smell of a grain bin,

road wind in our mouths and in our hair.

But this—

this is different.

This is the modern world.

Hey, the cat let me sleep in till almost 7. What a shock! Now I am sitting here on the grey couch, pleasantly groggy, while actual daylight filters in through the window . . . a cloudy, dim daylight, the air surprisingly temperate.

It's school vacation week in Maine and Vermont, and later today my sister and her older son will be arriving, en route to College Tour Hell: Maine Edition. Five years ago, my younger son and I embarked on our Upstate New York-Vermont-Connecticut Edition . . . getting lost in the endless circling one-ways of Poughkeepsie, being horrified at the intense obnoxiousness of parents at Wesleyan, and finding ourselves charmed and comforted by the sweetness of a staff librarian at Bennington. Four years before that, Tom and our older son went on Art School Safari. Then and now, nerves were taut, fear was rampant, self-doubt flowered like dandelions in a cow pasture.

You can be sure I'll be making a good dinner for my nephew and plying him with root-beer floats for dessert. Poor child. He's in the thick of it.

So: vacuuming and bed making and grocery shopping today, and maybe a walk with my sister, if she gets here before dark. I've started reading Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. I'm still in the midst of mentoring a friend's poetry manuscript, still chipping away at Rilke and Dante. I doubt I'll get anything accomplished in those realms today. Mostly, I expect, I'll be on call as Understanding Aunt & Calming Sister.

So I'll say farewell to you in family mode, with this poem, which appeared in Vox Populi not long ago.

Canto

Dawn Potter

At the peak of my powers I felt a falling-off,

as if an internal organ had come loose from its moorings

and was bobbing gently against my pelvis like a pear.

The season was autumn. Threads of smoke

unwound from the chimneys. Every compass pointed

toward winter.

I walked out, in the dim afternoon, into the small streets,

through a modest wood, across a vast graveyard.

I read the headstones—

here, the woman recalled only as Mother,

here, Our Darling Ralph, his tiny stone tarnished with lichen.

My way was littered with parthenons and obelisks,

with strange marble tables and mossy

arks of the covenant, and among them

bulldogs rolled in wet pine needles, helmeted tots

wobbled on training wheels, and I,

no longer at the peak of my powers,

turned my ankle on a pebble and limped.

But when I came to the bottom of the hill,

into that clutter of merchant mausoleums

known as the Valley of the Kings,

I paused in my limping and looked up

into the watery leaf-light: pale gold, speckles of black,

thinned remnants of last night’s gale.

And I felt, for no reason at all, sweetened.

Around me, the stony edited lives—

born, married, fathered, earned, died—

seemed to swell into ballads.

Carved lions kneaded their claws,

and lost at sea was a cadence.

I was a poet, and I wanted to sing

of small Ralph, alive and perched on his father’s

broadcloth knee, in the November twilight, after the banks

had bolted their doors and the barges had docked.

Now a scatter of gulls sailed over the cove,

and Mother sat alone at her rosewood desk and wrote

Sky. Leaf.  Light. 

I wanted to sing that. And so I did.