Today, on the last morning of 2023, I woke much earlier than I needed to. And so here I am, in my accustomed couch corner, in my accustomed red bathrobe, with my accustomed white cup and saucer, blinkily pondering time and its formalities.

I turned 59 in the year 2023. My mother broke her hip. My nation was in turmoil. Terrible wars raged around the globe. The seas warmed. Friends suffered. Humans hated each other. I received many rejection letters. I quit my job. Rain destroyed my crops. Trees threatened my home. The furnace broke twice.

On the other hand, strangers sent love letters to me about my work. I saved my poetry conference from death. I watched frozen sea fog hover over an icy bay, guillemots bob in surf, creamy waves crash on granite. I thought hard about poems with friends. I idled and sighed with friends. I ate meals with friends. I giggled and played competitive trash-talking card games and went for long walks alone and not alone. I made the home I wanted to live in. I lived in it with the person I adored. All year long our sons called us on the telephone and texted us goofy photos of their cats and fretted with us about their home repairs or their jobs or the books they were reading, and then they descended on us in a torrent for Thanksgiving.

I am an American, a white woman, an aging woman. I am both educated and working class. I am both rural and urban. I love my country and am perpetually angry at it. I am privileged in ways I recognize and in ways I do not. I know how lucky I am to live in Maine. I read old difficult books but I am not a scholar. I am precise about folding pillowcases and bad at earning money. I remember all of The Owl and the Pussycat and forget where I put the stamps. I am a caretaker of animals and people and plants. I love to be married. I love to be alone. I dislike parsnips and the smell of mice and all things related to Donald Trump. I do not pray, but sometimes I speak to the unknown.

A tender old year to you all.  Honesty is complicated.

Here's a newish poem. I send you much love.

Requiem

 

Dawn Potter

An old gravel road brushes the mountainside. The brush

is a finger, the hill the back of a cool thigh. A wood thrush

croons the narrow clouds, croons dusk over a slow river.

Under leaf and crown, air is the sheen of blue ink, a shiver

 

as sky unfolds. Land swallows mortal space. The gods 

are vast, impatient, but it is evening. Their lowered shields

flash bronze among the pines. Wind swirls; it kisses

curtains, hems, a candle flame. Glints of sun burnish 

 

stones and road. Rapt insects hum. Frogs dive or creak.

A headlight blinds, then fades. The new dark speaks—

a plaintive rustle, impermanent, unbound, yet still the ripe

grass shimmers . . . still the gods tighten their ancient grip.

It's been raining for three days--a slow cold rain seeping from eaves and hat brims. I like to be outside in most weathers, but even I have a hard time enjoying the raw chill of this perpetual drizzle. I do walk in it, but I'm glad to get home again, to lamplight and hot tea and a wood fire.

Yesterday I cleaned up Christmas: put away ornaments, recycled cards, took out the tree, vacuumed and dusted and mopped. With the holiday clutter gone, the tiny living room feels plain and spacious. The air smells of soap and new bread. In the cupboard, sheets are stacked in crisp folds; towels align precisely, a steeple of green and gray. This is the ode of the housewife; this is a paean to a green crockery bowl filled with papery onions, to minestrone bubbling on the stove, to dough rising under a red cloth, to heaped woodboxes and a neat basket of freshly split kindling, to a white cat asleep in a yellow chair.

And yet I also worked on a poem yesterday, a slow unrolling meditation that seems to want to be a long poem, that seems to want to be a disquisition on thought and dream and memory; and it sits now on my laptop like a scrap of unfinished weaving, threads of many colors straggling into a pattern. Today, as the drizzle taps at my study window, I'll tangle a few more threads, tie a few more knots, then untangle, untie . . . the inefficiencies of making--sometimes slow, sometimes sudden, never the same move twice, or always the same move, repeated like history or prayer or housework.

 Holy Sonnet 14

 

John Donne

 

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend

Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,

Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.

Yet dearly’I love you,’and would be loved faine,

But am betroth’d unto your enemie:

Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe,

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,

Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

* * *

I've read a lot of John Donne's work during the past six months, and a lot of it I haven't enjoyed. For me, he is a difficult poet to love: spleeny and cerebral, often petty in his angers . . . but when he's on, he's on, and this sonnet is most certainly on. I mean, good lord, that first line. Yesterday I copied it out, mostly because I wanted to feel what he was doing with the punctuation--not least those crowded apostrophes. But what about the simile "I, like an usurpt town"? What about that skin-crawling rape me, God ending? It's a poem that makes me shake.

At the moment I am not writing particularly well or easily, but at least I am reading hard. I'm immersed in Byatt's The Children's Book, which is complicated and painful and full of specific history, and Donne is racketing around in my brain. I suspect I'm on the cusp of a new project, but I don't know what it will entail, what it will demand of me. All I can do is keep paddling. This is not my favorite state of mind, but it's familiar, and it will end.

Today will be mostly housework: taking down the tree, putting away decorations, dusting, cleaning up the needle mess, plus my usual Friday schedule: washing sheets and towels, cleaning bathrooms and floors. It's possible that a day of plain chores will open some creative door; my brain does seem to be linked to my hands. In any case, I've got this sonnet to haunt me.

The year is rolling toward its end, and I worry that I've wasted my few precious open days. I had such plans for them, yet I've made hardly anything at all. Still, I did read. I did walk. I did think.

I'm still not formally back to work, but yesterday was as much of a work day as I've had lately. After getting the laundry and groceries under control, I hashed out writing prompts for an upcoming class, messed around with some revisions, read Donne's Holy Sonnets, and transcribed a poem into one of the handmade blank books I'd made in Monson before the holiday. This was really my first chance to get acquainted with the new desk and to figure out how it will function in my work setup. I use my standing desk for the computer, and I read and run zoom classes from the blue easy chair, so the sit-down desk won't be my primary workspace, unless I'm handwriting. But given how tiny the room is, the desk needs to serve usefully as a staging area, even if I'm not sitting at it. Yesterday, as I worked on prompts at the computer, I spread out all of my possible source materials on the desk behind me, where I could go back and forth among the splayed books as I cogitated. Then, when I was transcribing the poem and gluing up decorations on the pages, I sat at the new desk and worked efficiently and spaciously.

I know this seems like a silly topic for a post, but for my entire career my writing space has been half-assed. In Harmony I worked on one side of our bedroom, in a room without a door, on a table and in a space that weren't usefully designed for my body or habits. Gradually things improved, most notably when T made the standing desk. Then, during our year in the apartment, I was wedged into another bedroom corner and had to use the bed (a mattress on the floor) as a work annex. Finally, when we bought this house, I had a room of my own, ready to be made useful . . . and then the pandemic interrupted, and my son moved into my study, and I was back in a corner of the bedroom.

So maybe you'll forgive me for the disquisition on writing space. It's been such a long time coming. To possess a standing desk, a sit-down desk, a reading chair, and a good laptop; to arrange all of this in a small room of my own, surrounded by poetry books: this is a strange and thrilling luxury.

We got home midafternoon, driving into the sudden dense fog that was hanging over the little northern city by the sea as if we were crossing the line into Brigadoon. We unpacked bags, piled up laundry, then lit a wood fire and ensconced ourselves in front of it . . . books, cat, a cribbage board . . . eventually I did get up and make a frittata for dinner, but a foggy slide into a foggy evening was the theme du jour.

This morning, we're leaping back into the usual schedule: 5 a.m. alarm, T bustling off to work. I've got housework and groceries to deal with, emails to catch up on, my exercise schedule to reignite, desk things to organize. This week between the holidays is always an odd time--not vacation, given that T needs to go to work, but not exactly the daily grind either.

I've got Donne homework to catch up on, class planning to work on, poem drafts to mess with. Maybe some of that will get done this week. For the moment, my mind is overflowing with thoughts of dirty laundry and a bare refrigerator, but I can imagine other worlds.

I learned yesterday that my essay on poems by Baron Wormser and Teresa Carson was one of Vox Populi's most-read pieces of 2023, so that was cheerful news. Maybe I should write more essays than I do.

We stayed up very late last night and thus I have arisen very late. The house is still very quiet, and outside a high fog tangles in the tall white pines.

Christmas was sweet-tempered and messy and a walk by an ice-skimmed pond. It was games and books and panic over how to operate a new oven. It was dishwashing and dishwashing and dishwashing. It was, as it always is in this house, a deeply secular holiday punctuated by good cheer and silly competitions and extravagant meals. It's an easygoing day, except for the cooks, and that's the cooks' own fault.

This morning, after a late breakfast, we will head back to Maine and plunge back our own lives. Tonight we'll be inundated by the grievances of the cat. T will go to work tomorrow. I will wrestle baskets of laundry. But it's been good to be here, in the land of beef tenderloin and grasshopper pie . . . to hug one big son and talk to the other, to bask in the company of my long-beloved in-laws. Hurray for laughter.

Merry Christmas from the Yeti of Amherst . . . kind of like the Belle of Amherst: ironic and reclusive, prone to messing with expectations.

The Yeti is a new neighbor who resides a couple of houses down from my in-laws'. I don't think I've ever seen a better chainsaw carving. It's not an art I'm generally attracted to, but this Yeti is very handsome. And, as you see, quite festive.

* * *

As usual, I'm the only one awake around here at this hour. So I'm saying Merry Christmas to the tree silhouettes outside the window and to the reheated coffee in the cup beside me, and to you. I hope your day is silly and safe and peaceable, that you get a chance to step outside and breathe in a lungful of sharp wind, that you will wrap your arms around a person or animal or chunk of granite you love.

The Oxen

Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.