It's snowing hard in Portland. Southern Maine schools are all closed, but up north there are no cancelations yet. The plan is that I'm going to zoom with the Monson kids today, as long as the schools are willing to drive them to class. We'll see. Driving in terrible weather is a sign of moral superiority in central Maine, so likely they'll show up.

If they do appear, we'll be looking at poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Joy Harjo, and Jane Kenyon, focusing on approaches to repetition and refrain, or the lack thereof. If they don't appear, I'll be editing chapter 14 of the giant editing project. And the snow will fall and fall.

Yesterday, in between batches of editing, I went for a long walk, trying to air out the mildew in brain and body. The sky was bright, icicles dripping from eaves, a neighbor scratching his head over his beat-up car, a dog trying to wriggle out of his plaid coat. In the cemetery, snow squeaked under my boots; flecks of quartz glinted cheerfully from the granite headstones. A man in a ski hat strode by, speaking prophetically into a phone.

When I wound my way back through the streets, up my own back stairs, the house greeted me warmly. Here I am, it said. Four walls and a roof. Everything you have ever wanted. The house's confidence is alarming and comforting. The house demands my love in return. It is like the cat. I am not sure I am up to the house's expectations.

But at least pale-pink hyacinths are opening in a vase on the kitchen counter. Their scent fills the little rooms, and that ought to make the house happy.

Outside, there's a thin layer of new fluff-snow, with more coming in tonight. I don't think we're going to get significant accumulation, but the timing will be bad for driving, so I suspect we'll be postponing the Monson class. 

I had a lazy weekend: not one single brisk walk, so much couch-sitting beside the fire. Still, I got things done: most importantly, I worked on a poem, whittling down "Russian Novel" from eight lines to four, and I'm quite happy with how it's evolved. Plus, in between actual writing and reading, I did a bunch of niggly writing-business things, the sort of stuff it's hard to find time for in regular work hours. Tom was out most of both days, making frames for the photos he'll be showing in March, so I had long chances to wallow and mull, and I took them.

Eventually I did manage to get off the couch and do the shopping, and for dinner I made a Portuguese seafood stew--one of our very favorite meals . . .  real Rhode Island linguica; homemade fish broth from the freezer; last summer's kale, also from the freezer; fat and beautiful Casco bay mussels; Gulf of Maine haddock. Such riches.

Today will not be a couch day, no matter what turn it takes. Either I'll be editing all morning and driving all afternoon, or I'll be editing all day and not driving. But at least I have my little poem and a lot of leftover seafood stew.

Another cold morning, another new fire crackling in the stove. Already the night sky is bluing. Cats are a-prowl; dogs are sniffing the scarred snow piles. Coffee steeps in the press, and slippers squeal across washed floors.

Yesterday I caught up on the housework I hadn't finished during the week, and then I fidgeted with some poems. One draft turned out to be tiny--only eight lines long--so I titled it "Russian Novel." I read Hammett and Tolstoy. I lay on the couch and listened to a Red Sox spring training game, the thwaps and chonks of summer wafting through wintry air.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to head north to teach, but I'm fairly sure we'll be postponed, as snow is forecast for Tuesday. The storms of March are beginning, as they always do in Maine. I just hope they don't interfere with my Saint Patrick's Day jaunt to Chicago. I will be sorely disappointed. However, I will not start fretting yet. 

On Friday, amid my other busyness, I brought Ruckus to the vet for his annual exam. He was pronounced healthy as a horse. (Why are horses particularly healthy?) He flirted and yowled and displayed his extreme good looks; and though he's about to turn 11 (on the ides of March, naturally), the vet removed him from the aging pet schedule. "This cat is too peppy to be treated like a senior!" 

But even as Mr. R rumpused, another woman in the waiting room was weeping into her cat carrier. Clearly, poor George was making his final visit to the vet, an ordeal I have undergone with so many of my own animals, and will undergo again, too soon, when the magnificent Ruckus succumbs to time.

As always, melancholy weaves its way. 

The temperature is one degree above zero in the little northern city by the sea, so in celebration I lit the wood stove. Now, in the murky dawn, the flames glow and dance, the cast iron ticks . . . just the cat and me, awake and purring in the luxury of firelight.

So many scenes in Dickens's novels take place around firelight. Bachelor lawyers grill chops and salute their friendship with hot gin punch. Pickpockets rub cracked hands over a scant few sticks. Old men in nightcaps prop their slippers on the fender and become greasy with buttered toast. Prostitutes stare into the flames, decoding a dire future.

Here, in late February in the year 2023, the frost is deep. Down by the cove, salt ice crackles in the tidal marshes, but the winter ducks--the eiders and the buffleheads--paddle serenely, indifferent to their cold feet. Houses climb the hill, a clutter of roofs. Smoke threads from the chimneys into a flat pink sky. Railroad tracks hum; a short passenger train coils by, then vanishes. A walker in a parka, as puffy as a manatee, butts his head into a brief wind, trudges around a snowy corner.

In the houses children tangle with sheets; lovers collide, half-asleep; a dog whines to go out. Meanwhile, my little wood fire mutters and laughs behind its window. The wood box is full. The hearth is swept. It is one degree above zero in the little northern city by the sea.

Last night, for dinner, we ate lamb patties filled with red onion, garlic, parsley, and ginger; sautéed red and yellow peppers; mashed sweet potato with lime; roasted eggplant and spinach salad; a blueberry clafoutis for dessert. On a plate this looked miraculous, and I thought, as I have been thinking so often lately, of luck and happiness. How things shake out in this life, for better, for worse. How little control we have over fortune. How grateful I am for a meal, and candlelight, and a beloved face across a table. How, one day, things will go terribly wrong. But, for now, sweetness.

I think I was more jaded when I was young. I expected the worst. I was frustrated and dissatisfied. Those reactions haven't vanished. In the public forum they've increased; of course they have. Which may be why my private life sometimes feels like a soap-bubble Arcadia. In this cottage, with this partner, we light candles every night at dinner. We play card games and read aloud from Sherlock Holmes stories and talk to each other in the voice of the cat. It is spitting into the wind. It is singing into the wind.

On Influence: Remembering Karen Carpenter

 Sometimes influence arises from forgotten places. I realized this the other night, as I was cooking dinner and took a notion to re-listen to an album from my childhood.

I didn't have much access to pop music as a kid. I didn't possess my own radio, and my parents didn't like the ambient noise of the 70s, so I ended up knowing very little about my own time, other than what I could gather from public sound systems in grocery stores and such. I was greedy about what I could get.

One of the things I was allowed to listen to was to a Christmas gift from my cousins: a greatest hits LP, a Carpenters record. I played this record over and over. I listened to it constantly. I was so dumb that I didn't know that "Ticket to Ride" was a Beatles song. I thought it was a Carpenters song. I swallowed that album whole. I knew every weepy lyric, every swollen riff.

As I listen to it now, I recognize that 99 percent of those songs are garbage: ridiculous overproductions, sap-and-schlock songwriting, inconsequential covers. And yet there is Karen's voice. Rolling Stone has called her singing "impossibly lush and almost shockingly intimate. . .  Even the sappiest songs sound like she was staring directly into your eyes." I think this is an entirely accurate statement. Amid the pomposity of her brother's arrangements, that voice enters directly into my bloodstream, like a message I am writing to myself.

I think about the little girl I was, kneeling on the living room floor, busily coloring, and singing along with Karen . . . following the spirals of that sad contralto, enacting the cadence of her loneliness. I think about myself now, as a poet, and know that I have always wanted to write like I "was staring directly into your eyes." I was not reading poems then. I was listening to Karen Carpenter. And so she became my model for how to become a voice.

By the time she died, so young, so miserably, I had forgotten about her. I was in college; I was learning about all of the music I had missed: the blues, punk, the great rockers. Karen had become a sad, embarrassing side-note . . . or so I thought.

But influence is influence. I may love Jimi Hendrix and the Replacements more than the Carpenters, but Karen gave me something they did not. She gave my ear a pattern of sound that became the possibility of speech.

It was cold and clear. Above the dirty, semi-dark streets, above the black roofs, stood the dark, starry sky. Only looking at the sky did Pierre not feel the baseness of everything earthly compared with the height his soul had risen to. At the entrance to Arbat Square, the huge expanse of the dark, starry night opened out to Pierre's eyes. Almost in the middle of that sky, over Prechistensky Boulevard, stood the high, bright comet of the year 1812--surrounded, strewn with stars on all sides, but different from them in its closeness to the earth, its white light and long, raised tail--that same comet which presaged, as they said, all sorts of horrors and the end of the world. But for Pierre this bright star with its long, luminous tail did not arouse any frightening feeling. On the contrary, Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which, having flown with inexpressible speed through immeasurable space on its parabolic course, suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky and stopped, its tail raised energetically, its white light shining and playing among the countless other shimmering stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.

* * *

This is the passage that ends volume 2 of War and Peace. After this will come another clash with Napoleon, the violent death of many of the characters, the near-starvation of many others. But first Tolstoy offers me this moment of silence and wonder . . . a pause . . . a mystery . . . an observer's forthright joy in the face of a complex, unknowable universe.

This passage seems to me to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written--despite the repetitions, because of the repetitions, I don't even know. Entering it is like entering a house. I step into the hallways of its sentences, lean out the windows of its quiet. 

The writer is long dead, the characters will die, the comet will disappear, the frosts will melt, and I also will be gone. But as I sit here, rereading this passage, I cannot believe in death. 

Tonight another snowstorm is pushing in, and today will be a day of steel and grim skies as the clouds move closer. I've got a dentist appointment this afternoon, and I'll probably run over to the store afterward, to fetch in whatever needs to be fetched so that I can close down the hatches tomorrow.

I've been making good progress with the editing, and yesterday I had an excellent meeting with staff at the new neighborhood bookstore, where I've arranged an event for my writing salon in April. Then I spent the evening workshopping poems, and that was productive . . . everyone's draft was fascinating, and I felt relieved about my own too.

Outside there's a faint blue dawn--sky lightening, earth still hunkering in darkness. I love this lonely hour: one foot in morning, the other in night. In Harmony I would look out into the clearing, into the circle of spruce trees, sharp silhouettes against a bowl of heaven. Here the sky is a jagged clutter of chimneys, roofs, a steeple . . . a different sort of beauty, but just as lonely. It is the hour that makes the loneliness, the saturated blues and blacks, the deep and simple shadows, the foreknowledge that it will end at any moment, when ordinary day steps from behind the proscenium.