Family health has returned, I'm happy to say. I did bake my black cakes, which came out beautifully this year. Now they are refrigerating comfortably in their brandy bath, and I am turning my thoughts to the weekend. This morning I'll prep for the writing retreat, which mostly means doing yoga, rereading poems and my syllabus, digging the webcam out of the closet, and taking deep and calming breaths. In addition to all of its other pleasures, the last session helped me write two decent poems; I'm hoping for that again this weekend, so I want to be in an oxygen-rich state of mind.

I think we'll be getting some rain this afternoon. Certainly the weather has turned colder. I will bake bread and fill the wood box, and read Byron and Iris Murdoch, and tickle the cat, and laugh with my sons, my dear sons. What a gift they are, in these dark days. In any days. My older son, for instance, has invented a public persona for our incoming Second Gentleman, which involves a four-year-long junk-car restoration project taking place in the driveway of the V.P. mansion. Our patter about this project is greatly amusing us.

Everyone in this household has been sick with some kind of galloping intestinal bug. I was up half the night but am feeling more or less normal now. Paul was well enough to eat ice cream at midnight, and Tom is currently sipping coffee. So presumably we're all on the mend.

My plan was to make Emily Dickinson's black cake today, and I think I'll be healthy enough to face it. I'd been hemming and hawing about whether I should make cakes this year, but the fan base insisted. Given that I am otherwise completely unprepared for Christmas, baking is probably a good idea. At least I'll have one gift to send.

Otherwise, my time will scuttle along in its usual way: reading Byron, reading Murdoch, editing manuscripts, washing clothes, raking leaves. I'm pleased that my intestines are behaving themselves again. I'm admiring the pale grey sky glimmering through the neighbors' bare maple tree. I'm still hanging on to hope about our democracy.

Today will be our last unseasonably warm day: after a bit of rain, we're scheduled to drop back into real November temperatures. The weather has been so alluring, though--windows open, laundry drying on the lines, and all the while leaves falling, falling, falling . . . a faint constant shift and rustle, like the sound of carpenter ants eating a house.

I raked leaves for a while, and then I sat out in the Lane, sewing and squinting in the modest sunshine. Next door, the high school girl crouched on her front stoop and listened to her Zoom class while her old dog snored in the driveway. Little Ruckus sat across from me, perched tidily on his own chair, like we were having a tea party. Chickadees and nuthatches fluttered back and forth to the feeders. Everything was shadowed with gold.

I'll be reading Byron this morning, and working on some editing; later, braising a brisket for dinner; probably checking in with my Chicago son, who is in the throes of Covid/job anxiety. Life is not easy for either of my boys right now.

It will be a good weekend to have another writing retreat. And there are still a couple of spaces open, if you want to join us.

 In The Nice and the Good, Iris Murdoch writes:

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and whereabouts of these exhalations. Possibly a saint might be known by the utter absence of such gaseous tentacles, but the ordinary person is naturally endowed with them, just as he is endowed with the ghostly power of appearing in other people's dreams.

I read this passage immediately after waking from a dream in which I'd been assigned to write Joe Biden's inaugural poem. In the dream I was busily creating a long, drawn-out piece of galloping doggerel in which every stanza ended with some version of the line:

Roy Scheider's empanadas on Chesapeake Bay

When I woke up, I had a hard time remembering who the hell Roy Scheider was, and then it came to me: he played the shark-hunting police chief in Jaws. Well, I guess that explains the presence of Chesapeake Bay. Empanadas, I know, arises from a comical advertisement on the Cincinnati Reds baseball radio station, in which a very midwestern woman asks listeners if they would like "try something a little more advainturous"  (i.e., "empanaidas") at some local chain restaurant. After hearing this, Paul and I spent several days saying "advainturous" and "empanaidas" to each other every chance we got.

So back to Murdoch's "gaseous tentacles." They don't always have to be ominous or soul-destroying, but they do tangle with our rational lives. How would I feel if I were invited to write an inaugural poem? Terrified. Honored. Unworthy. But also excited. In this silly dream, the idea of poetry became an exaggerated exercise in "Casey at the Bat" cadence and the weird nocturnal collisions of memory. It was driven by sound, and details fell into place around the sound. That's pretty much how I compose in real life, though with less obvious absurdity. I'm fascinated by the way in which my approach to poem writing remains consistent, even in dream logic.

This ridiculous dream, this "mysterious agenc[y] of the human mind," forces me into a sort of clarity: how can I speak? which words will find me?

To date, I have received no phone calls from Dr. Biden suggesting that I might like to write an inaugural poem. But if I do, what will I find myself writing?

One sign of my relief over this election? The fact that I let the housework slide this weekend. I did not dust or vacuum or mop. Instead, I worked outside on my dirt pile, took a long walk with Tom, watched a football game with my son, drank beer beside a campfire, read an Iris Murdoch novel . . .  

Of course, the tension is ramping up again, with the Monster's baseless-lies campaign, his cronies' refusal to cooperate or be gracious, the pettiness and the threats; and maybe my housework anxiety will ramp up alongside it. Clearly my brain sees housework as a way for me to exert agency at a time when the world otherwise feels out of my control. And I don't deny that allowing myself this sensation of control has helped to steady me, as annoying as it might be to my over-cleaned housemates.

We had a strangely warm weekend, and the warmth will continue into the first half of the week. I'd like to ride my bike, except that I've got a flat tire that Tom keeps forgetting to pump up. So I'll walk instead, and do some editing, and try to catch up on Byron, and watch the little birds discover the feeding station I've set up in the back garden. This weekend I'll be leading the second session of my "New England Bards" writing retreat, so I'll spend time reacquainting myself with its centerpiece Carruth and Kenyon poems. And I will finish the housework . . . ideally, in a low-key, easygoing way.

We did it we did it we did it we did it.

The rock that's sitting on my chest for four years has shifted. It's not gone--the pandemic is its own stone--but the weight has eased.

Portland, Maine, is celebrating hard: downtown is crammed with people waving signs and dancing and playing music and honking horns.

Here at the Alcott House, we lit a campfire and cooked hamburgers and sat outside in the dark under the shadow maples. When Paul got home from work, we lifted a glass of Prosecco.

The joyousness feels like the end of a war. Victory Day. I know the Monster has plenty of time left to inflict damage, and that he will inflict it. But we'll get through these last months. We have won.

I thought I would have so much to write to you this morning, but I don't.

I was close to tears, at the sight of Kamala Harris in her suffragette white.

And Joe Biden's favorite poet is Seamus Heaney. 

* * *

Compose in darkness.   

Expect aurora borealis   

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure   

your hands have known.

--from "North" by Seamus Heaney

As the election glacier continues its slow devouring crawl, I sit here in Portland, Maine, on a Saturday morning, recovering from an extra-long sleep and watching the sun-shadows quiver on my neighbor's leaf-strewn driveway.

I got most of that giant dirt pile moved yesterday: now I've got two brand-new garden beds waiting for spring, and I still have enough soil left to make one more small backyard patch. I also talked for a long time to both of my sons, and went for a walk in the cemetery with my neighbor, where we were delighted to spot this:

My election tension is ebbing, though I'm still anxious and longing for an official call. As distraction, I'm rereading Iris Murdoch's The Nice and the Good and nibbling away at Byron's Childe Harold. I even did a little revision on a poem. For dinner, I made calzones filled with bacon, kale, sun-dried tomatoes, and mozzarella. And I finally won a cribbage game.

Next weekend I'll be back in the teaching saddle, but this weekend is relatively formless. Maybe I'll sit outside and try to make real headway into my Byron homework. The weather is so mild and sweet. All of these sentences I'm writing seem plain and heavy, like thick slabs of whole-wheat toast. But being an American is exhausting.