Thurs. Aug. 7, 2025: Challenges

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Thursday, August 7, 2025

Waxing Moon

Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, Mercury, Chiron Retrograde

Hazy, humid, cloudy

You can read the latest on the garden over at Gratitude and Growth.

I had such trouble getting going, mostly because the ghostwriting weighed so heavily on me. All I wanted to do was to go back to bed. I need to find a better system/rhythm for it.

I did a revision on the strawberry poem. It’s closer. Not there yet, but closer. And then I did another revision, which is very close. Because I print it out in large font to read (and to put in breath marks), the spacing changed, and then I started reworking it some more with an eye to enjambment, which made for an interesting change in certain rhythms. I always worry when my stanzas contain different numbers of lines, but since I’m not working within a specific format (such as sonnet or villanelle), maybe I’m getting away with it. Some of the time! The stanza design near the end isn’t quite right, although the actual words are saying what I want to say there.

I’ll keep working on it. With a few more passes, it will work for Sunday, and then I can take it into the residency and ask my fellow poets their ideas on restructuring.

I’m trying to figure out what to bring into the residency this year. I like bringing in stage play excerpts, because poets have such a great eye for word specificity and rhythm. But my poetry won’t grow unless I work it with them. I still haven’t figured out how to pull off the comic horror cleave poem, which I hope to start playing with again next week. I want at least a very rough draft to bring into the residency. But I need a lot of mental space in which to work on it. Maybe I’ll block off Aug. 17 as “cleave poem day.”

Once I wake up from the three things I’m supposed to do on the 16th

Folded the laundry and put it away. Poured the 16-pound bag of cat food kibble into glass jars that keep it fresher and are easier to handle. Finalized and approved the flyer, which I can now forward to the Collective. And you’ll be seeing them all over social media between now and the reading in October! Plus in September’s newsletter.

As much as the sidewalk replacement annoys me with the noise, watching them work is rather interesting. The way they measure and then mark with chalk reminds me of how I use dressmaker’s chalk when I quilt and/or sew. And then, instead of using a rotary cutter on cotton, they use a big (noisy) cutter through the concrete.

However, they are putting crime scene tape across people’s front walks. You can’t trap people in or out of their houses for days. The whole thing is so poorly organized. And the construction dust is making it impossible to keep the house clean. I can’t keep windows closed in summer.

We don’t need new sidewalks on the street. We need the bridge replaced on Rt. 2. There’s a ridiculous amount of money for those “repairs” but that whole section of town is going to be redesigned anyway, so again, very disorganized.

Worked on the ghostwriting. Still not finished. Fortunately, yesterday was my deadline for it, not theirs. I hope to get it done today.

Got my act together and headed to the library in the early evening. Picked up a stack of books that came in, put them in the car, and then headed upstairs to a friend’s program about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time in North Adams in 1838. She wrote a book about it, which was published last year (I bought it the day it came out). It’s just delightful. I was very happy to be there, both because the content was excellent, and to hang out with colleagues.

Home, heated up leftovers for dinner, did some reading. Had trouble getting to sleep. Woke up at 3:30, fretting. Fell back asleep and had weird dreams.

Today will be challenging on multiple fronts, so I’m just trying to buckle up and deal. Four more days until Mercury goes direct. Feels like years, not days.

Have a good one!