I spent yesterday morning working on a friend's manuscript, the afternoon throwing firewood down the cellar hole, and I made good progress with both: not quite finished, but getting there. I thought I'd be stacking that wood in the basement today, but Tom did it last night after work, so now we have a beautiful winter-ready pile that I keep running downstairs to admire. I do love to look at a stack of warmth.

New wood is arriving on Thursday morning, and my plan was to clear the seasoned wood out of the way before it came, but Tom wants to move some stuff around the basement to make room for the next stack, so today I guess I'll vacuum instead of tossing firewood--a much less satisfying task. We're supposed to get some rain today, and the air does feel humid and unsettled. Maybe not a good day for hauling firewood in any case.

So, this morning: take my exercise class, write, work on the manuscript job, read the Iliad. In the afternoon: clean floors, fold laundry, read the Iliad, freeze peppers, take a walk, write some more, turn on the baseball game. In the evening: become frustrated by the baseball game, play cribbage, read Thackeray, make chicken and biscuits. Not a scintillating schedule, I suppose. But it keeps me occupied, and one of these days the paying work will show up again.

 I'm overwhelmed by the response to "Heat Wave," the poem I linked to in yesterday's post. I was a little uneasy about submitting it, not sure if I'd figured out the balance among comedy, complaint, and longing, but apparently lots of readers are liking it a lot, which is a joy but also makes me feel like I should put my head in a bag. O, the myriad ways in which we stab ourselves . . .

Life here at Alcott House and her environs has suddenly become unsettled and cranky. Last week our neighborhood received notice that we were about to undergo water-main replacement, and yesterday a pack of irrigation and excavating guys showed up to lay the temporary pipes that will be our water source till November. The noise was incredible: jackhammers, dump trucks, generators, plus the carpenters next door working on my neighbor's porch, plus a chainsaw on an adjoining street, plus a strange Monday-afternoon party involving loud electronic-piano versions of singalong Sinatra songs. You could package up yesterday and sell it as a weaponized headache. And this is supposed to last for two months.

On top of everything else, a neighbor overhead that the city is going to cut down sidewalk trees on our block--some or all, we're not sure, but everyone is horrified, and we've been hurrying out to gossip in the evening calm about it.

In other news: I saw an old '70s-era Corvette with the license plate "BALZC4." Feel free to leave your speculations in the comments.

 I woke up this morning to the news that my poem "Heat Wave" is up on Vox Populi. This is the poem I was describing a couple of weeks ago--the one that sucked me into the zone, the one that reminded me that writing can be a drug. Whether it's a decent poem or not, it sure was fun to make.

Yesterday's chapbook class went well, I think, I hope. Some of the participants are alums of previous Frost Place classes, some are completely new to our programs, but clearly all of them are serious, committed poets. My goal in this seminar is to give them some tools for experimenting with manuscript order, not to tell them exactly what to do with their sheafs of poems. As a teacher I am always about transferring power. So yesterday we began by thinking about a manuscript's frame--first poem, last poem--and then added in a discussion of middle, or apex, poem: the poem that creates an arc. We played organization games with some published poets' work, and then ended the session by spending time with a key poem from each participant's manuscript, imagining how a collection would differ depending on where the poem appeared in the book.

I'm still a little nervous about this class, but so far, so good.

* * *

This week I've got a bunch of house things to catch up on, after my poetry-distracted weekend. I need to make real headway in my Iliad reading so that Teresa and I can talk about it next week. I'll be working on a friend's manuscript, waiting for the next batch of editing to appear, getting my hair cut, going to a doctor's appointment, receiving a dump truck load of green firewood, and probably starting to tear out my tomato plants (sob).

The weather is sultry but the sunlight is autumnal, and the garden is shifting to elegy.

Yesterday's reading was sparsely attended. I think there were more poets than audience, but actually that was nice too . . . it was good to spend time with people I hadn't seen for more than a year. And it was a beautiful day to walk through the park, watch families tumble out of cars on their way to the baseball game, skirt the farmers' market vendors as they packed their trucks and wiped their brows.

Before and after the reading I did home stuff: harvested thyme for drying, spread organic fertilizer around the blueberry bushes, picked tomatoes and peppers, made red sauce for the freezer and duck stock for soup. Occasionally I stopped to read a few more pages of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which I picked off the shelf the other day after reading a recent New Yorker article about the colonial legacies of Britain's massive country houses. Suddenly I had a memory of the way in which Vanity Fair, which opens just before the Napoleonic wars, excoriates/accepts without comment so many of the issues of British occupation and greed, both in India and the Caribbean. I was right, and I'm glad to be rereading it now. Of course it's not the only novel that traffics in the plunder of British colonialism, not by a long shot. Most (maybe all) Victorian and Edwardian novels do . . . the child transplanted from India in A Secret Garden; Sir Thomas's absence in the West Indies in Mansfield Park; tea and cashmere shawls in Cranford; the crazy, possibly mixed-race, rich Jamaican wife in Jane Eyre. One of the aspects I most love about novels is the way the "little things"--clothes, food, children, offstage disappearances--serve as the iceberg tips of a cultural behemoth. (Ooh, mixed metaphor!) The cozy tea parties of elderly spinsters are portals into the looting of India's wealth. The literary obsession with fair complexions and smooth hair is linked to the growing number of wealthy, mixed-race heirs of West Indian sugar fortunes, a class of young people who were both pariahs and marriage fodder. Not that the era's novelists were ever able to fully parse this out for themselves.

This morning I'll do a few more home things--probably freeze parsley, maybe peppers too--and then this afternoon I'm teaching my first Frost Place Studio Session class. New subject matter, new zoom setup, new students: Wish me luck, as I'm a little bit nervous.

Remember yesterday, when I wondered if I might find another mushroom on my walk? Well, it turned out to be a banner day for urban foraging, as I found three puffballs in my own garden and, in the cemetery, a handful of--believe it or not--chanterelles! I have never before found chants in Portland, though I had a modest patch of them in Harmony, so I know how wonderful they taste. For dinner, I roasted duck legs and served them with a mixture of my three wild mushrooms--the chicken-of-the-woods I'd saved in the freezer and today's batch . . . all of them picked in busy, well-traveled Deering Center, Portland. A little gift from the forest, right here in the city. No wonder people think of mushrooms as magical.

This afternoon I'm reading with several other Maine poets in Deering Oaks Park, at the bandstand, at 1 p.m., so stop by if you're in town. There are several other readers, including Richard Foerster, Betsy Sholl, and Linda Aldrich. I'll be reading two poems, a recent one and one from my first book, Boy Land, much of which was written in the 9/11 era. Though the poems don't directly address that tragedy, some of them do wrestle with the anxieties of the moment, when I was home with two small boys and overwhelmed by the knowledge that I could not protect them from disaster.

I just woke up from a dream in which I was trying to teach a class upstairs in my house, but the students kept asking for coffee, so I kept running downstairs to make it, and then some of them wanted tea, and then random people started showing up for the class, and then other random people just stood around and watched me rushing around trying to make drinks without offering to help, and meanwhile the clock was ticking away . . . Classic teacher anxiety dream right there. Blah.

But otherwise I slept well, cozy under my comforter as a light rain pattered on the roof. Today the showers will die away, and the sun will come out, and it will be a beautiful early fall Friday, tender and warm, with the scent of tea leaves rising from the damp soil. Maybe I'll even find another mushroom.

First, though, I have a bunch of niggly this-n-thats to do: class stuff, reading prep, and then I have got to deal with computer filing: my laptop is a mess of unfinished poems mixed in with unpublished mixed in with published mixed in with collected, and I need to sort that out.

Speaking of poems: my two newest ones were accepted for publication yesterday, which was cheering, and I did manage to float some others into various submission piles. I've gotten very bad at remembering to submit, but I made myself do it this week, and so far, so good with the responses.

The other thing I did yesterday was set up a new zoom studio situation in my study. For the past year and a half, after my study became Paul's bedroom, I've been zooming from the uncomfortable couch in the downstairs back room: using the TV as my zoom screen, borrowing Tom's tripod for the webcam, papers piled around me on the couch, wires everywhere, feet crushed under the furniture, struggling with bad lighting and awkward camera positioning. It's been adequate, but not good. Now I've worked out a new situation with a small webcam on the computer and a small microphone on the table (both of them offerings from my sons: I would never have thought to acquire either of them), simple wiring, access to my laptop and to a writing surface, and a more controllable lighting situation. It's still not perfect, but I think it will be a lot better.

The air is very humid this morning, with a vague drizzle starting to patter, which will eventually settle into steady rain. But despite the warmth, the ambience is autumnal--6 a.m. and only the bare bones of daylight framing the sky.

Yesterday I fiddled with a poem draft, read the Iliad, vacuumed and washed floors, planted radishes and lettuce, went on a walk with my neighbor, made chili. It's been a quiet week, without much editing to do. I struggle not to feel guilty about my unstructured days, but in fact I've finished two new poems, submitted several pieces to journals, made headway in my Homer reading. It's work. It's something. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

Today the electrician is supposed to show up midday, and Tom will come home to meet him and discuss the plethora of issues that need to be fixed: old wiring, badly installed new wiring, unfinished renovation wiring . . . Maybe, finally, we can get these problems solved.

Otherwise, I'll have another day to myself: reading and writing as the rain falls.