Whoosh, whoosh, crash
We endured a huge coastal storm starting Saturday during the night, lasting all of Sunday and continuing and finally dying down on Monday. The winds were gale force and the rain came down for hours in sheets. It was all rain here, snow farther north. We left at 10 a.m. in the midst of the storm and drove to Yarmouth. The only restaurant we could find open to eat with Martin and Katherine Espada gave Woody heartburn and me a stomach ache. At one-thirty we met the family and the other 14 poets at the Cape Cod Cultural Center for the memorial for Jose Gouveia. Woody was master of ceremonies and I read 5th. That was my choice. Martin had put an immense amount of work into organizing the memorial. All the better known poets behaved themselves, stuck close to the five minutes allotted each and read well. A couple of the less known went on and on and on and on and on. I have never understood why they think that does them good with an audience. It turns everybody off and the poets still to read will hate them forever. We left a bit after four and drove home through the still raging storm. We turned onto our road, came round a curve and ran smack into a huge tree that the storm had knocked down. It was blocking the road. We sat there while cars converged behind us. The DPW came at last and with a huge bulldozer, cut up the tree and pushed it out of the road. Half an hour after the crash, we were home at last. But the truck sustained damage and today Woody has to drive it [held together with duck tape] to Orleans and leave it. Our friend Dale will pick him up. Since Woody was driving fairly slowly, we weren’t hurt. We went to the Wrentham outlets this week to get some needed items: warm sox, underwear, a digital watch and a box of Godiva chocolates. I was able to navigate it from one end to the other, something I couldn’t do last year. I hurt but I can do more and more. The first pass of my new poetry book MADE IN DETROIT that will be out in March arrived and I’ll be working on it all week. I sent one new poem to my editor at Knopf and she agreed it was a major poem and should go in, so we have been working together to figure out how to shoehorn it and another poem I had added last month into the book. I think we have it solved as of yesterday late. I finally have the cover I wanted and I appreciate all the work at Knopf devoted to finding out how to get permission for the graphic Woody found on the internet. It turned cold yesterday. Woody took down the bean towers and weeded the lower garden. We are still getting lots of hardy veggies from the Rosa and the Main gardens. Today we need to take the screens off and store them. Then Woody has to put storm doors on.I have to feed the plants I brought into the diningroom and feed and maybe thin the seedlings in the greenhouse. Much of the week was devoted to local and house problems, but I did write a couple of poems. Rewrote part of what I’d written of the new short story.