It's cold this morning--28 degrees--and everything damp from yesterday's rain-spatters has frozen up tight. I was glad to have a wood fire last night, and a warm bed. But today the sun will come out, the frost will melt, and brisk spring will return. I hope to take a long a walk. I hope to hang clothes on the line. I doubt I'll have time to scratch around in the garden, as I've got zoom meetings and housework to juggle, but one never knows.

I went up to Maine Med yesterday morning to visit my friend Jay, who was recovering from open-heart surgery. He looked better than I've seen him in a long time--bright-eyed, good color--and we sat in his room and we walked the halls and we drank the coffee I'd brought and he talked about poems and baseball and cardiologists and the Torah, only two of which I know much about. But I left feeling light-hearted, which is not a usual response to a hospital visit. Jay was so full of gratitude, so full of second-chance glow. And it rubbed off on me. I felt full of second-chance glow as I mulled the offerings of the grocery store, as I fell suddenly in love with two giant purple-and-green artichokes, each as big as a baby's head. Ah, I said to myself, and tucked them into my basket.

As sustenance, they were nonsensical. Tom and I needed 45 extra minutes at the table to finish them, but we did it, dipping each leathery leaf into yogurt sauce as the Red Sox managed to win a game in the background, as the fire ticked in the stove. Eventually we worked our way into the center, scraping out the prickly innards to reveal the massive heart beneath. All of this sounds like a metaphor, but sometimes metaphors are just what happens. I went to visit a friend with a mended heart, and then I fell in love with an artichoke and I ate it.

Well, I've closed (almost) one chapter of this year's schoolwork. Next Friday I'll go up to Monson for the kids' show opening, but I'm done with schoolteaching for the nonce. It was a good year. After what were essentially two pilot seasons (thanks to Covid), I feel as if I finally was able to construct a full, useful, year-long plan that, with tweaks, I'll be able to keep leaning on in the future. And my students were stellar, the Monson Arts administration was hugely supportive, and I managed to figure out some personal solutions to managing my perpetual road trips.

The kids were full of emotion about their last day. There were tears. A year spent with poetry does that people. I, too, felt sad all the way home--the good sort of sad; a welling up of pride in what the students had accomplished; worry, also, about their future struggles. And I was tired. It has been a long, focused year of work--not merely the act of teaching but also the massive project of curriculum creation. Future years will be easier in that regard because I now have a template. But creating the template was an undertaking.

Today will be a this-and-that day. I may do no desk work at all. There's nothing crucial to accomplish, schedule-wise. I finished an editing project on Monday, so I'm on hiatus till the next project shows up. I do have a friend's poetry manuscript to read, and teaching-conference prep to continue, and Poetry Kitchen arrangements to make, and of course my own poems to work on. But I might give myself a day off from thinking. I'll go to the grocery store. I'll visit a friend in the hospital. I'll fidget in the garden, if it doesn't rain. If it does rain, I'll fidget with housework. I'll take a walk.

It's April in Maine, and the tulips are budding, and the radishes and arugula have sprouted, and a rough breeze rides in from the sea. I want to be in this story.

It's my last morning in Monson for a while. The sun is shining, the sky is clear blue, the air is chilly with the promise of modest warmth. On my walk to the store for coffee I passed the big mail delivery truck, backing into the post office hatch. I passed a man motor-sweeping winter grit in a parking lot. I passed pickup trucks heading north and south toward their labors. Red-winged blackbirds trilled and swooped. The lake water, ice-free now, rippled like a flawed mirror, and a faraway speck that was a loon curved, dove, and disappeared.

Last night I ate dinner with a new batch of travel-weary artists who'd just arrived from far-flung homes around the country, slightly bewildered but game to spend four weeks in Monson trying to make art. Last night, when she saw me, the chef cried, "Dawn! When are you giving me a book of your poems?" And then, this morning, I walked into the store for coffee and was greeted by name. I am a regular up here now. That's one thing I lost when I left Harmony: the feeling of being a regular. Of course it's not 100 percent comfortable to be a regular. It's also a good chance to feel embarrassed and sheepish, to be forced to take sides, to know for sure that people are talking about you behind your back. Still, it's something to not be a stranger.

Every class morning I write a little remark on the whiteboard, to greet the kids as they come in off the bus. Today I'll be writing this:

Time’s up. You’re in the house. I’m through the door. 

It's the last line of a poem by Kim Addonizio; and in this out-of-context setting, I thought it encapsulated some of what it feels like to be a teacher on the last day of school. So many times I've directly said in class settings, "My task here is to teach myself out of a job." That's true whether I'm working with poets, with teachers, with young people, with my own kids. "My job," I say, "is to help you not need me."

It may be a righteous mission, but it's always a poignant one too. What is more sorrowful, more wondrous, than watching a bright-eyed searcher light out for the territories? 

I got so much work done outside yesterday . . . all of the front-yard and some of the side-yard beds cleaned out and weeded, grass mowed and edged, compost bought and spread. I sowed escarole, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. I planted six pots of pansies. I harvested ramps and chives and kale and sage. The backyard still needs attention, but this was a huge bite out of my chore list.

Today I'm back in the saddle--heading north to Monson for my final high school session of the year. I'll see the kids next week too, when I go up for their gallery opening, but tomorrow is the last class. I've got a big collaborative, multi-genre, performance project planned out--a whole day of play. And then it will be over, and the kids will disappear into their own lives. It's always bittersweet, the last day of school.

Well, we're ready. We're all ready. It's been a long school year, and for me it's not over yet; I've got classes scheduled into July. But I'll be glad to take a hiatus from at least one batch of curriculum planning, to pause my constant travels north.

In two weeks I'll be curled up on a seat on a train, heading midwest into the setting sun. I hope to have the yard and garden in good springtime shape before I leave. I hope my editing pile will be thin. I hope to be ready to write. 

Yesterday afternoon's reading turned out to be such fun: a car ride spent getting to know my fellow reader, and then a small but but very engaged audience who asked lots of questions and also bought books. It was very uplifting, really.

This was my only as-advertised National Poetry Month activity. I don't know if less fuss is being made about National Poetry Month than there used to be. Or maybe I'm just doing more poetry-related jobs year round so I no longer notice the dividing line. Certainly I'm busy, and my work balance between freelance editing and poetry-related gigs has shifted. I still need the editing jobs, but I earn more these days from poetry than I ever have before. You couldn't call it a living wage, but it is a palpable contribution to the coffers.

For me, my biggest changes in fortune were (1) the invitation, in 2019, to design a high school writing program at Monson Arts and (2), during the pandemic, the rise of zoom as an independent teaching platform . . . though of course both of these opportunities were direct consequences of my first big gift: the chance to direct the teaching conference at the Frost Place. It's interesting, in retrospect, to track the slow shifts. Because I don't have either an MFA or a teaching certificate, I could not make my way into classrooms via the usual routes. I was not hireable. The side path was slow and it was stony. And yet here I am, dusty and still trudging. My first Poetry Kitchen offerings are completely full. I'm finishing my third year with the high school program and feel as if I've found my groove there. In June I'll be team-teaching two teacher-training sessions for the arts education organization SidexSide. In July I'll be leading the inaugural Conference on Poetry and Learning in Monson. In August I hope I'll be doing nothing but my own work, though that is likely a pipe dream. And then, in September, back to a new batch of high schoolers. It's almost what you could call a career.

***

Yesterday evening, when I got back from my reading, T announced, "I made dinner reservations!" So arm in arm we walked around the corner to our local, Woodford's Food and Beverage, and we ate mussels and drank cold white wine, and then we strolled home and watched an old Peter Gunn episode, leaning into one another on the couch. Every day I miss living in the woods, but I am ready to admit that the delights of the city are intoxicating too. How pleasant it is to walk out to dinner, to sit idly in a restaurant and watch night roll in, to watch the car headlights assume a noir-movie glitter, to listen to voices, to the clatter of plates and clink of glasses, to smile at my dear one across a starched tablecloth.

. . . and, today, to have the good fortune to be home together. I'm going to work in the garden, maybe go out to buy soil and pansies, maybe hang clothes on the line, maybe listen to afternoon baseball, maybe fall asleep on the couch, maybe read a novel, maybe go for a walk . . . 

Concord Street Hymn

 

Dawn Potter

 

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

Woke up to a mild rain, just what the newly planted seeds are longing for. And now I am sitting here quietly, enjoying my first weekend morning at home for a while. Midday I will need to head out for a reading, but for the moment I am unhurried and unperturbed.

Yesterday afternoon Delle, Teresa, Jeannie, and I ended up in a two-hour zoom confab that mostly centered around Anne Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay," which we'd all read beforehand and, unbeknownst to one another, all deeply disliked. So that was interesting: discovering, unexpectedly, that the four of us had meshed over a poem that is generally treated as exemplary. To me, it felt imaginatively untrustworthy, among other things. But of course I was worried about saying so, assuming that others had read it "better" than I had. It was surprisingly cathartic to discover that my admired friends also mistrusted the poem.

Otherwise, I had a plain day. I walked. I edited. I did laundry and mopped floors. I made chicken stock and then chicken and rice soup. I played cribbage and lit a fire and drank a beer and listened to a peppy baseball game. I read a history of the Comanches and I read a novel about the Maine coast. I felt sad about my neighbor, who died in his house two days ago so can no longer love the daffodils that bob brightly in his front-yard grass.

This afternoon I'll be reading at the Gibbs Memorial Library in Washington, Maine, at 3 p.m., alongside the poet and archivist Jefferson Navicky. He and I will also be carpooling together, and I'm looking forward to some conversation with him beforehand. The venue is a small library in a small town, and the reading will undoubtedly have a small audience, but what's new. Small is the story of poetry. 

I went out to write last night, for the first time in two weeks, and I guess it was the right thing to do because all three drafts poured out of me, a rush of words, a swirl of geography, bits and pieces of my reading, of my days, floating like jetsam in the torrent of lines.

It's possible that next week I might have a chance to work on some of the material in my notebook. There's a lot to comb through: I haven't had revision space for weeks, and I won't have it today. I need to finish the editing project; I need to prep for tomorrow's reading; I need to meet with my Poetry Lab compadres; I need to clean the downstairs rooms and wash sheets and towels; I need to make chicken stock and weed the gardens. There's not enough time in the day, some days, most days . . . especially in spring.

But there's happiness: the alarm didn't go off at 4:30 this morning, and I slept hard all night long. I've drunk my one small cup of coffee, and a dark blue sky is unfolding behind the silhouetted maples. This morning, before breakfast, I'll take a long walk; I'll amble toward my slate of obligations and keep watch for hawks and mockingbirds and woodpeckers and bobbing daffodils.

What a fancy world I live in, gilded with poems and clothespins and packets of seeds.