Dawn Potter's Blog

T goes back to work today, but with a later start than us...

T goes back to work today, but with a later start than usual so we've had yet another small respite from the alarm clock.

Despite my small wake-up holiday, I've been editing hard all week and have nearly caught up to where I should be, schedule-wise. And I've prepped for my Monson class, finished the Ondaatje novel, and spent time with The Waves and Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette. Work is getting done.

Today will be more scattershot. I'll need to drive my car back to the garage for an inspection sticker. I'm walking with a friend early; then another friend is dropping by in the afternoon because he needs to mourn Baron in company. Maybe, after he leaves, I'll work in the garden--cut down a few more dying perennials, spread a few more bags of soil. I don't know what my state of mind will be, but I am beginning to feel less tired . . . less wrung out, anyway.

In a few minutes I'll get showered, get dressed, get moving. I'll deal with laundry, dishes, firewood, litter box. I'll drop off the car, make breakfast, kiss Tom goodbye. I'll prepare to be sociable.

But always, behind the busyness, the rattle of loneliness. A pebble in a cavern. It echoes.

Somehow, though the wind whipped and the skies glowered, ...

Somehow, though the wind whipped and the skies glowered, we never got a drop of rain yesterday. Such a disappointment. I long for days of wet, but the drought goes on and on.

Tuesday. T is home again, so I am allowing myself another slowish start before I trudge up to my desk. I'll finish editing a chapter, then turn my thoughts to high school plans. I'll get onto my mat; I'll return a library book; I'll figure out something for dinner.

In the meantime the big kitten curls against my shoulder and purrs into my ear. Dear little Charles. He glows with such cheerful light.

Today Vox Populi has published "Don't Tell Me You Don't Know What Love Is," my elegy to Ray. I didn't choose the timing but it is poignant. Ray died last October, while we were staying at the cottage in West Tremont. And now it is another October, and we'll drive out again to the cottage on Saturday.

I wrote a note to myself while cooking dinner the other night: "In a way it is romantic to grow old." All of the loves gathering round.

Monday morning, and Tom is still asleep. Because he's bei...

Monday morning, and Tom is still asleep. Because he's being shifted from one house assignment to another, he's ended up with a couple of empty days, so he's taking them off, and I'm glad for him. We're heading to West Tremont next weekend for our autumn visit to the cottage, which means he'll have time off next week too, and that's a very good thing. He works so hard; too hard. Being an aging laborer is not an easy life.

But I'll be at work today. I'm already behind schedule on the editing project, thanks to being sick for three weeks. And I need to prep for next week's high school class and return to my Poetry Kitchen plans and keep grinding away at the Baron essay.

Still, I was able to sleep a bit late, and I can sit here quietly for a little longer than usual. I'll get out for my walk before the rains begin. Even though I have to work, I feel less rushed than I usually do on a Monday morning.

I did get another few pages done on the Baron essay yesterday, and I did attend to my poem draft. I weeded and deadheaded dahlias and spread new soil in the garden boxes. I fell asleep, hard, for two hours. I made baked penne with fresh sauce and leftover lamb. I made quick pickles. I listened to an hour of baseball and was delighted to learn that the Blue Jays' radio broadcast is sponsored by "Armstrong Bird Food." For some reason that struck me as hilarious.

And today the rains will come. And I might start a fire in the wood stove early, to celebrate. And I'l make fish chowder for dinner because chowder is a rainy-day comfort.

We are snug here. And I am still feeling kind of lost.

I slept badly for most of the night, then fell asleep har...

I slept badly for most of the night, then fell asleep hard at around 4 and didn't wake until after 6. I do appreciate these unclocked weekend mornings. So many years and years of 5 a.m. alarms . . . it's been wearing. I'm naturally an early riser, but there's something exhausting about being constantly told what to do.

The house is quiet. Tom and Chuck are still a-bed. I hear a distant growl of traffic. I hear a crow.

Yesterday I tore out the cucumber, bean, and cherry tomato plants. I took down the groundhog fencing, pulled up stakes and trellises, emptied flowerpots, lugged everything into the shed for storage or to the leaf pile for composting. I cleaned and trimmed the garlic that had been curing in the shed. I chopped hot peppers for the freezer. I simmered a batch of sauce.

And I worked on a poem, the first I've attempted for many weeks.

The garden isn't bare. There's still kale and chard and lettuce. I left the okra and pepper plants. Marigolds and nasturtiums and zinnias and dahlias are blooming wildly.

I wish I could say that my poem draft is also blooming wildly. But I'm not sure what it's doing. At least it exists, and at least I am attending to it.

My plan today is to do some weeding and then start spreading bagged compost over the garden beds and boxes. And to read Woolf's The Waves and Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. And to attend to that poem draft.

What I am is tired.

Saturday morning dark. Coffee steams in a white cup. A bi...

Saturday morning dark. Coffee steams in a white cup. A big kitten full of breakfast leans against my shoulder and purrs lustily into my left ear. Outdoors the air is chilly, but in the house dregs of warmth still rise from last night's wood fire.

I have nothing on the calendar, nowhere I have to go. My plan for the weekend is to work in the garden, work in the kitchen, work on Baron's essay, work on my own poems. I'll probably treat Monday like a regular weekday as I'm unsure if Tom has the day off. (His schedule is temporarily weird.)

The living room is shadowy. On the mantle Baron's dahlias are rosy and subdued in the gray light. The kitchen clock ticks. The refrigerator growls. The books on the table are mysterious.

Yesterday afternoon Teresa, Jeannie, and I met on zoom to talk about Baron. For all of us his death has been a blow, not least because he was the one who brought us together. I met Jeannie at his house in Hallowell. I met Teresa at the Frost Place when I was his assistant at the teaching conference. That was the kind of thing he did: he saw who needed each other, and he opened a door.

It's hard to overstate how lonely I was as a writer in Harmony. I had made two friends at poetry retreats; yet though they were real friends (and remain so), neither clung to poetry with my obsessive seriousness. But Baron not only taught me; he led me into a world of real ambition: not for place or prize, but for poetry itself. As a Romantic, I was starry-eyed. This was what being a poet could mean. This was the life I dreamed of.

And in many ways it is the life I have lived, the life that Baron showed me was possible. To make poetry the center of my days. To bring words into conversation with the work of my hands. To become more generous to other people. To take the risk of saying something that is almost impossible to say.

Last October, Ray died, and with him a certain wildness in me died. But Baron's death has left me in a different state of mind. In all the years I knew him, he was constantly working to give me to myself. He strove to keep me from depending on his opinion. He pushed me into teaching situations that I didn't think I was ready for. He gave me friends and then detached himself, let us swim away into our own futures. His goal as a teacher was to teach himself out of a job, and that's a motto I have since shared many times in my own classes and conferences.

Yes, I do feel like an orphan. But also I feel like a poet.

Outside the temperature is 34 degrees and inside the furn...

Outside the temperature is 34 degrees and inside the furnace is running for the first time this season. Maybe we didn't quite get a frost, but it was close.
Yesterday afternoon I picked all of the Serranos, the only one of my pepper plants that came to anything in the drought--though it was supposed to be a hot pepper and the fruits are not, so what's the explanation for that? I picked a few tiny eggplants and the last of the cherry tomatoes and a bouquet of basil. But I let the beans and cucumbers ride: they have more than done their duty for every other vegetable this summer.
The day was busy. I cleaned house, finished most of an editing chapter, and walked down the street to pick up our first CSA delivery, a beautiful bundle of carrots, potatoes, peppers, spinach, and scallions, with a fat spaghetti squash on the side. When Tom got home, we drove to Yarmouth to fetch my car from the mechanic. I made a batch of biscuits and took them with me when I went out to write.
And now it's Friday. In a few minutes I'll deal with recycling and trash and compost. I'll get sheets started in the washing machine. I'll do my exercises and answer emails and get back to my editing. I'll go to the grocery store and have a zoom meeting.
Behind all of this busyness, the memory of Baron shifts in my mind like small ripples in a cove. He was a gardener, with a special love for flowers. He cared about the work of the hands: digging soil, splitting wood. Our chores were a bond, as much as our passion for words.
I am doing my chores.

I spent so much time talking yesterday--blessedly, over c...

I spent so much time talking yesterday--blessedly, over coffee with Gretchen, then over the phone with Teresa, then another phone call with my sister, then via countless notes that I still haven't fully waded through. I did manage to do some editing around the edges, but the sorrow words were heavy. "That's not bad, though," said Tom, after he got home later in the afternoon. I was standing wanly in the kitchen, surely looking overwhelmed. But he was right. It's been more than not bad. It's been necessary. When a beloved writer dies, words are the mourning.

Last October, after Ray died, Tom and I and our boys knew that we were not officially family, but we were nonetheless treated by the real family as part of them, given our long and complex closeness. This time around there's a starker difference. I'm in no way family. But I know I do stand in a unique place: I was Baron's student who became his colleague and then the chosen heir of his program. He brought me up, and then he trusted me to carry on a sliver of his work. There was certainly a kind of parentalism involved, but also, in later years, there was a detachment. He didn't oversee me. He left me alone to find my own way of managing the conference. I wonder if that was difficult or easy.

Today I need to continue working my way through the emails. I need to clean the house. I need to get more editing done. My car is still in the shop, but supposedly it will be ready sometime today. I dearly hope I'll go out to write tonight. I've missed two weeks in a row and I'm lonely for my poets.

Ah, sorrow.

My dear mentor, Baron Wormser, died yesterday, only weeks...

My dear mentor, Baron Wormser, died yesterday, only weeks after being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. He died at home, quietly, with his wife and children and sister present. It was, his wife tells me, a good death.

I told her that I don't know whether the fact he died on my birthday is a weight or a lightness.

I told her that Baron made me, as a poet. He gave me myself.

Tom took me out for dinner last night and we had a celebration/wake.

My car got towed away to the shop. My phone is pulsing with love notes and sorrow notes. Apparently something shitty happened in the public realm yesterday, but I haven't been able to look at the news yet.

A small rain is falling. The scent rises through the open window.

Last night after dinner we got into the car and Steve dr...

 Last night after dinner we got into the car and Steve drove us down the dark gravel roads to Kingsbury Pond so we could look at the moon over the water. How long it's been since I've been out on these roads after dark! And the moon was a glowing dinner plate, and the dog quietly splashed in the shallows, and Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" laughed to itself on the car radio, and the windows were rolled down, and a quiet wildness spread among us, because here we were. Here we were.

Meanwhile another friend is dying.

Meanwhile today is my 61st birthday.

When we lived in Harmony, we often climbed nearby Borest...

 

When we lived in Harmony, we often climbed nearby Borestone Mountain on one of the weekends surrounding my birthday. Now that we live in Portland, we go to the ocean, most often the Wells Estuarine Reserve at Laudholm Farm.

Yesterday, on a blue-sky, soft-air October Sunday morning, we stood barefoot in the surging North Atlantic and watched flocks of piping plovers wheel over the sand, then suddenly land together and run back and forth into the foam like little windup toys. We heard the cries of a yellowlegs, glimpsed hawks among the reddening trees, watched distant seabirds ride the waves. Our lungs were full of wind, our eyes full of sun. The hour was sheer delight.

A visit to the sea was a good way to counter my next few stressful days of driving and teaching and dealing with car sorrows. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'll be spending it in class and on the road--not my dream celebration by any means, but on the bright side I'm staying tonight with homeland dear ones, so that will make things much better. This morning I'll gather my bits and pieces around me. I'll go for a walk with a friend. I'll borrow a car that knows how to pass inspection. I'll remember those flocks of plovers spinning over the glittering surf like a single thought.

Yesterday for dinner I made stuffed shells for maybe the first time since 1980: cooked down a small batch of fresh sauce, hand-mashed a small batch of fresh pesto, then mixed the pesto into a filling of ricotta, diced chicken, and prosciutto. For salad we had our usual green beans and cucumbers--nothing new at this time of year but still delicious. And then we ate the last two slices of apple pie. So, as you can see, my not-thrilling week got off to an encouraging start . . . the ocean, the garden, a copy of Mansfield Park lying open on the kitchen counter.