Yesterday afternoon my publisher stopped by with ten copies of Accidental Hymn. As always, it was an exciting moment: to see the poems in their final form, to clutch the book to my heart. Given that the official pub date isn't till May, ordering info won't go up immediately. But if you happen to be interested in reviewing the collection, let me know and I'll make sure get you a copy.

The other event of yesterday was that, after all my natter about not writing, I suddenly drafted a poem. That was thanks to my friend David, who emailed me the following excerpt from Sylvia Plath's poem "Totem":

The world is blood-hot and personal
Dawn says.

This, of course, was not a prompt I could pass up, and I whipped out a draft at a speed that shocked me.

I was not exaggerating in yesterday's post when I said that writing poems has been turning on a faucet and watching them splash into the sink.

This morning I'll pull myself together for tomorrow's high school day at Monson Arts: gather up my materials, print out my syllabus, figure out what I'm going to wear. I might make a pie crust and put it into the freezer so that it's ready for my little dinner party on Saturday. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Tom, but I also don't want to disrupt his arty activities, so I won't leave here till mid-afternoon. My plan is to arrive for dinner, and then hole up in his bedroom and watch a Marlene Dietrich movie until he finishes up whatever he's doing. Then on Friday, after class, I'll zip back to Portland and leave him to his bachelorhood.

Right now, in the city, it's raining lightly. Naturally, in Monson, it's sleeting, but that's supposed to quit before long as temperatures rise. Driving should be easy enough. I'm looking forward to this dip back into the homeland, a full day with a handful of local kids, asking them to write into their relationship with the place and their place in it. Snow and mud and trees and lake. The roar of log trucks. And at night the vibrating stars.

 

The central Maine mud-season artist surrounded by his prints.

Interestingly, I have not written or revised a single poem since Tom left on Sunday. Even more interestingly, I have not had the urge to write or revise. What I've wanted to do is read and read and read and read. 

When it comes to writing, I am not a natural procrastinator. Moreover, for the past year or so, the poems have been pouring out of me. Open the faucet, and a poem splashes into the sink.  So right now I feel no anxiety about writing or not writing; I'm willing to roll with what's happening, which is that I am reading like crazy, and I'm tending my nest, and I'm readjusting my relationship with time. All of these occupations are very absorbing, though I don't know why. The house is as clean as a whistle. The books are stacked on the coffee table. And time has slowed down. I linger over everything I do. There is no hurry. There is no hurry at all.

Yesterday afternoon I went out to teach. Today I'll be home all day, working on some desk things and then trailing back into my reading obsession. I do wonder if all of this reading will lead to writing. It usually does, though I'm not yet sensing a portal. I feel like a child devouring any old printed matter, just for the joy of language. And the greed is so intensely sensual. Perhaps the magic is to be 57 years old and still fully able to tumble into the hole of words.

 

The central Maine mud-season artist at work.

It's 17 degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, the coldest it's been for quite a while. But the sun is supposed to shine, and temperatures are supposed to rise, and perhaps the plants will get less crabby. 

Yesterday I washed floors, packed up some stuff for Goodwill, cleaned out a couple of closets, read the Aeneid and James Baldwin and Wendell Berry, and went grocery shopping. I made a delicious dinner for myself of spaghetti squash, spinach, and chicken breast marinated in lemon and garlic. I drank tea and ate Icelandic yogurt for dessert and watched a pre-code movie called Hot Saturday starring a very young Cary Grant as an incorrigible roué.

This morning I'll do a bit more spring cleaning, a bit more reading, endure my exercise class, and such, and then in the afternoon I'll drive downtown and meet up with my high school poet and we will spend a couple of hours trying out different ways of ordering her book manuscript.

This new life as single-woman-with-long-distance-romance has a notably different pace from the life of married housewife. I am not used to simply pleasing myself. Cooking what I want for dinner. Eating that dinner when I want to eat it. Such a little thing, but it feels so self-indulgent after so many years as the family cook.

It's a funny thing: I am gleefully independent and self-indulgent as a reader and a writer, but in the household I am always thinking about what everyone else will thrive on: clean clothes, good food, a welcoming space. I like those things too, but my psyche addresses them as caretaking, as mothering, as doing chores. When I'm the only beneficiary of my caretaking, life feels strange.

Of course I can't help but compare my state of mind now with how I felt during my last year in Harmony, when I was alone and so incredibly sad. Tom and I have swapped places geographically: now he is back up north, and I am in the south. We are both focusing on our art. We are cheerful about the separation, and the separation has a distinct end point.  But I also think about the longer, inevitable, permanent separation. The final divide, that one of us will need to weather alone.

Yesterday morning was warm and glorious, yesterday evening was chill and dank, but hyacinths do not care about petty matters such as temperature swings, and here they are, opening their pale arms in the Library Bed.

Now, on my first morning as a bachelor (clearly I am not a bachelorette), the forecast calls for bluster and snow squalls, with highs barely out of the 20s. Ruckus and I are hoping to make the best of it. Today I've got some desk work to do, and spinster grocery shopping, and a few spring cleaning projects--forking out closets, hand-washing woolens, and such. But mostly I have a day without obligation.

Tom called last night from Monson, where he was pinning up photos in his studio. He sounded like I feel: puzzled about how to fill his swaths of time, but simultaneously anxious about wasting even one moment. It's an interesting conundrum. I am not used to taking care of no one but myself. Tom is not used to taking care of no one, not even himself. And now he has two weeks to figure out how to do that.

Still, I enjoyed getting up on my own alarm-free schedule. I am enjoying this pot of coffee. I am enjoying not rushing to gather T's work clothes for the washing machine, not scrubbing his breakfast dishes. I don't have anything better to do, and I am enjoying the slowness. There's no hurry. The day is before me. I hope he is feeling the same.

It's not like I've done nothing since he left. I did zoom-teach all afternoon yesterday, and that went well, I think. Tomorrow afternoon I'll be working with my high school poet. On Thursday and Friday I'll be traveling up north to teach more high schoolers. On Saturday I'll host a small dinner party for some poets. On Sunday I'll be zoom-teaching again. Clearly I'm not on vacation. But the edges are free. And the edges feel significant.

Last night was our last evening in Portland together for a while, and so we spent it pleasantly--driving into town for sushi, then strolling around the West End, where we marveled at the giant mansions and the sun setting over the container ships and the strip malls and the river (the timber barons of old liked to build their houses to overlook their works, so the landscape remains a strange amalgam of remotely rich/rudely commercial), and Tom reminisced about which ones he'd renovated, and we ambled over to a jazz show at the Portland Conservatory of Music, where we sat for an hour and a half in a former church and watched two young men putter among cords and knobs and murmur into drums and wind instruments via loops and samples to create a shimmer of sound, and then we wandered back to our car, and then drove across town to home, to our final bit of wakefulness on the couch, with Peter Gunn and the cat. 

It was completely sweet, and the convolutions of the sentence are a nod to the perambulations of time and our feet, and I woke up this morning ready for two weeks of a new way of being friends. The last time we were separated for so long was when Tom moved to Portland for a job and to look for a house to buy, and I stayed in Harmony to deal with selling the house we had, and he was living in a horrible rooming situation, and I was so lonely and grieving that I did not know how I would survive. But this time he is going back north for two weeks as a celebrated artist, and I am not selling my trees and packing my books into boxes; instead, I am planting a garden, and writing in my room, and visiting with friends, and  doing my work, and all the while knowing that Tom is doing his and being so happy for him. 

Sports break:

How about those St. Peter's Peacocks, the little 15-seed from Jersey City?! They play like a swarm of bees! What a game that was last night: I was on the edge of my seat all the way through! It's so exciting to watch an unknown team take on the titans, and win! Go, Jersey boys!

Okay, sports break over. And I promise to stop ending every sentence with an exclamation point.

* * *

The sun has risen over the little northern city by the sea. I think it will be a pretty day, sunny and warmish. In the cold frame, my arugula and lettuce seeds have sprouted. Crocuses are beginning to bloom here and there around the yard. The tulips I planted last fall are spiking up through the soil. Buds are swelling on the blueberries. Grass is starting to green. 

I have some class-prep stuff to do today, but otherwise no big plans. Tom will be rushing around trying to get ready for his big adventure. He has so much equipment to tote . . . all of his cameras, his big computer, giant boots and other mud-season requirements . . . Meanwhile, I might clean house; I might work outside; I might read; I might just hang around with him.

Yesterday I did more leaf and stick cleanup, baked bread and shortbread, futzed around with Frost Place stuff, read a large chunk of the Aeneid. I also ate lunch outside, the first al fresco of the season: a slice of cold homemade pizza, a glass of water, and Wendell Berry's stories to read; perched outside at the little patio table, wearing my filthy garden sweater and baggy jeans, shivering a little but happy to be out in the sunshine, surrounded by my teeny plot of land, my miniature breadbasket, my dollhouse farm.

The Maine Woods

 

Dawn Potter

Don’t imagine I was Thoreau.

I had a driveway, though no one drove up it much,

and I had a car and gasoline, and a telephone

that rang now and again, and lamps

 

that often stayed lit, and a faucet that often

spouted water, and armloads of firewood

and a cook stove, and most evenings

I had baseball on the radio.

 

For a while I had a dog, but then

the dog died. On Friday nights

I even had a husband.

Oh, I was not Thoreau, not even close,

 

though I did have a vernal pool that was almost

a pond, and a footpath twisting

among ancient pines, and a creek

chattering and singing among the stones.

 

On the nights I had a husband

the kitchen hummed and the pillows sang

and a cat complained at the door.

But on most nights my shadow 

 

trembled in the gleam of a cloudy moon.

Small predators yipped in the dark,

and I could not find my face in the mirrors.

Up and down the stairs I trudged, up and down

 

the narrow treads. At dawn I folded the shirts.

I baked the bread. I washed the floors

and hung out the sheets.

It was important to force time 

 

through a sieve. I avoided taking

strong measures with myself.

Tears were a practical solution,

and I called on them twenty times a day.

 

I was never joyful, not for a moment,

but sometimes I was happy.

I begged the windblown trees to sweep the sky.

I coaxed the jays to scream their love.

 

Loneliness was better

than never coming home,

and never coming home

is the tale I’m about to tell.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Pouring rain, pouring rain, and I, thankfully, am still at home, not slogging through ice and mud in the northcountry dark.

But it was an odd day, yesterday: I expected to be on the road, and instead I spent hours reading by the fire while rain and sleet rattled down. 

Today should be different, as the rain is supposed to transform into 50 degrees and full sun, a gardener's delight. No firesides and couch blankets required.

I've been immersed in Wendell Berry's fiction, and at some point I will write down what I'm noticing about his work. Suffice it to say: his stories are what I expected, and what I did not expect. Which is why I remain immersed.

In two days, Tom leaves for his residency. Things will sure be different around here without him.