It's Monday, and it's 45 degrees in Portland, Maine, and there's a skunk living under my shed. I dreamed that I met a professor of heckling and watched people fly dachshunds like kites and found a body lying in a snowy road. I woke up to learn that my poem "Now That I'm Old" is out today on Vox Populi and that the Ukrainians are still the bravest people on earth.

Yesterday I did a brief amount of raking in my front yard, which is when I learned about my skunk problem, but mostly I cleaned house and baked bread and such. Today I'll be back to desk work, and staring out the windows watching the snow dissolve in the garden beds, and pondering skunk options. I am really not excited about this.

Anyway, there's a new poem out! And I'm in the editing home stretch. And tulip and hyacinth shoots are poking through in my front beds.

It's raining lightly, and already almost 40 degrees. Compare that to 14 yesterday, and 7 the day before. March is a schizophrenic month. Still, I'm feeling the spring itch. Yesterday afternoon I dragged the toolbox outside and assembled my new cold frame, which is now set up along the west wall of the house, and filled with bags of frozen dirt. It's too early to plant but not too early to thaw soil.

The morning's thick mist smells like wet leaves, and I can feel my winter-flattened hair coiling into spitcurls in the new humidity. The day will be gloriously dreary: ground fog rising from the snowmelt, invisible sky, everything the color of marsh . . . . and the air alive and trembling.

Yesterday I finished my prep for next weekend's class, fiddled with some revisions, read and walked and played cribbage with Tom, sautéed pollock and bok choi for dinner, talked to a son, folded clothes, washed dishes, wrestled with my cold frame. Today will probably be mostly housework, plus some conversation with Donna about Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain, plus maybe an outing with Tom, if the mood strikes. 

In the distance a train bell clangs. 

Closer at hand, rain drips from the roof . . . tick tick tick, against the stove vent. Upstairs Tom is sleeping. Beside me the cat is sleeping. The quiet overtakes, a quiet that is not stillness, a quiet composed of sound.

Accident Sonnet 11

Dawn Potter

Saturday morning and it’s pouring rain

in Maine where it’s not supposed to rain

in January and I am sitting in a corner

of my couch squinching my mind away

from bad news trying to pretend that today

will be super-relaxing so calm and productive

and probably I’ll look younger also.

 

Meanwhile the clock ticks and the furnace

hums and the washing machine sloshes

and the twenty-first century slips and slides

along its dented rails and you: What are you

doing right now? Are you gazing through

a windowpane into the sodden dark? Are you

yearning over the strangeness of love?

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

 Fourteen degrees this morning, so twice as warm as yesterday. Hello, spring!

I'm glad it's Saturday. The week has felt endless, one crisis after another, world-level ones and heart-level ones, and meanwhile I've been trudging up and down mountains with rocks in my backpack. My son James called yesterday and was talking about how cranky he's been to people who don't deserve it, how he suddenly realized that the weight of the planet really was on his shoulders and that he'd better go off into his corner and give himself a hug. I know just how he feels.

But he and I did cheer ourselves up by spontaneously planning a summer adventure together: he's thinking of driving from Chicago to Toronto, and I'm thinking of flying to Toronto, and then we would hang out there for a few days before driving to New England together. Possibly we would meet Paul there too, when he finishes his canoe-camp job in northern Ontario. Possibly Tom could find some vacation days to spend with us. All of our ideas are soft-focus but they are making us feel better.

Today I've got to do some website prep for next week's Polish poets class. There are still a couple of spaces open, if you're interested. I will say that the poems we'll be reading and discussing are stunning in their aptness. Living with them in my head this week has been cathartic . . . not easy, but transformative. I'm anxious to talk with you about them. I'm anxious to write alongside you. Do remember that any level of experience with poetry is the right level of experience. This class is for people who need to dwell with their feelings and ponder among words. Those are the only criteria.

 Seven degrees this morning. Spring is arriving as two lions, both of them cranky.

Yesterday turned out to be fairly productive, despite my Ukraine worries. I dealt with a bunch of paperwork, got through a chunk of editing, finished a poem and started revisions on another, went for a long walk, and then wrote down some interesting new blurts at the evening salon. So I'm now sitting here with my cup of coffee and a sense that I'm keeping my finger on some kind of pulse, even if that pulse is only my own jitters.

What to do, what to do . . . What can I do?

I can do my work, so I am doing it.

Poets are crisis workers. We've always been crisis workers. At moments of despair, it's our job to step up. We can't stanch the bleeding, but we can speak.

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.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Another night of small snow. What melted under yesterday's sunshine has returned to rime. Which is to say, March is beginning to feel like sugaring season.

Earlier this week I thought I'd be on the road to Vermont this morning, but plans changed, so instead I'll be home with my editing stack and my syllabus and my poem drafts. I'm going to try to carve out a few hours to spend with revisions and new transcriptions. Given that I didn't expect to have this day at all, I think I can spare a bit of it for my own writing.

Otherwise: laundry, shoveling, war-worrying. The usual.

Last night I made fish cakes for dinner: poached Arctic char, chopped boiled potatoes, panko crumbs, and egg, all pressed into rough patties, sautéed, and then topped with fried onions and capers, alongside a roasted tomato and spinach salad. Afterward, butterscotch pudding. It was a pretty good meal. I am a fan of fish cakes: they are surprisingly delicate in the mouth, and the char gives them a beautiful color.

Tonight is salon night, so I won't be cooking. That's one chore off my list. But I've got so much notebook writing to sort through, and a pile of reading to do (Aeneid, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain), plus various requests for photos and bios and poem samples and such for various readings and lectures and anthologies . . . I need one entire day that I can devote to catching up with poet business, but that is not in the cards.

Do not think I am grousing. I am very, very happy to be scheduling readings and talks and being invited to contribute to anthologies. This is just the freelance overload talking.

And Tom and I are planning ahead. He'll be leaving for his residency toward the end of the month, and I have made a pact with myself to treat my two bachelorette weeks as my own semi-residency. I won't be cooking and shopping and cleaning and socializing for two, so I will have a fair amount of unrestricted time to reconfigure into a writing nest. Then, in mid-April, I'm going to New York to see Macbeth with Paul. And then, after a Vermont trip, at the end of the month, Tom and I will spend a weekend together on Mount Desert Island, staying in our friends' cottage on Seal Cove. May will be all of the teaching all of the time, so April will be the restorative.

What I'm doing here is trying to talk the talk: stop obsessing about the terrible news, channel my fears into the vocation I care about, live in the now with this guy I like a lot, let myself laugh. If the Ukrainians can light up their skies with "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," what's my problem?

Thin new snow crusts sidewalks and roofs, a dull glitter under the bluing dawn.

I'm thinking about James Baldwin's words, from The Fire Next Time: "The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."

Last night for dinner I made chicken noodle soup, and herbed rye bread, and an apple salad. I sat in front of a warm fire and read a novel while my beloved washed the dishes. No bombs dropped on our house.

I'm thinking about Tu Fu's words, from "Dawn over the Mountains":

The city is silent,

Sound drains away,

Buildings vanish in the light of dawn

Yesterday I worked on poems with a sixteen-year-old girl. Yesterday my twenty-four-year old son called me excitedly about Macbeth. Yesterday my fifty-five-year-old sister wrote, "Barf," in a text message. Yesterday my cat tried to invite a possum into the house.

I'm thinking about Wisława Szymborska's poem "The End and the Beginning": 

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Tuesday morning. Blue-black light through silhouette branches. Rumble of furnace. Tick of clock.

Yesterday I worked and worried about the war. Editing, syllabus writing, then a meeting with a poet whose manuscript I've been evaluating; then dinner, then bed; and still, all the while, worrying about the war.

Fragrance rises from coffee, from a cluster of pink hyacinths. A clock ticks. A furnace rumbles.

Today: more editing, more syllabus writing, a mentor session with my high school poet. Chicken soup simmering on the stove. Bread swelling in the oven.

My sweet European homeland,

 

A butterfly lighting on your flowers stains its wings with blood

--from Czesław Miłosz's "Earth"