April 16, 2013
Tuesday

. . . In the grid
of days, I see her habit had been to record
in pencil what might be erased, moved, saving
the indelible black for what could not change . . .
— Claudia Emerson, b. 1957
American poet
from “Daybook”

I announced it with the same verve I always do for what my mother called (witheringly) one of my “enthusiasms”: the project for this year’s National Poetry Month: Read one poem a day from [a collection of periodicals], first the flagged poems and then anything else, post a quotation to Facebook and Twitter for #todayspoem, and write some kind of post for Markings, even if it’s only the poem and a brief observation.

Although I have kept up with the reading and the excerpts to Facebook and Twitter, I faltered on the Markings posts. I kept a list of notes inspired by each poem, with a chart for how I would compose not one, but two, or even three, pieces a day, filling in the blanks between April 3 and whatever day I managed to take up the project again. I kept making the notes through the first part of Gallivant 2013 (the Carry On Tour), a thousand miles to Vermont and back. I wrote fiction, visited a biker bar, became uncharacteristically homesick, and wound up yesterday at my studio, where I wrote for three hours and then, at about 3:30, took a break.

Claudia Emerson’s poem is in the June 2001 issue of Poetry, a volume into which I have placed no flags, and which looked unopened when I plucked it out of the stack this morning. The title, “Daybook,” drew me. Yesterday I wrote part of a scene in which my character, an 83-year-old priest who knows he is at the beginning of a slide into dementia, begins keeping a diary. He notes the day, the date, the weather, world news, and details about his health and his activities. He thinks he might need the information, should it become important to know when the memory faults and brief periods of confusion became more frequent.

The poem was given to me on a day when world events make me think, not for the first time, that I should keep a public diary, a daybook I wouldn’t mind someone else reading, perhaps when I am unable to read it myself, about who I was and what I was about in the second half of the second half of my life.

It would be a scrapbook as well as a chronicle of world events and physical symptoms. I’d paste into it the receipt I found yesterday in the bottom of the backpack in which I keep the working files and materials that are the daybook of my novel. Dated February 19, it shows that I stopped at Sheetz #312 in Mt. Joy, Pennsylvania, at 10:12:20, to purchase 3.44 gallons of gas.

Mt. Joy? Only 3.44 gallons? It took me a moment to remember. I was on my way to the funeral of a friend’s grandmother. The funeral was set to start at 11:00, and I had at least 30 minutes of the 60-minute trip left. I’d gotten a later start than I had planned (as is my habit but never my intention), I needed gas (having neglected to get it the night before, when I had made the same trip for the viewing), and I had to go to the bathroom. Pumping a full tank would take at least eight minutes, using the bathroom another eight. So I split the difference, pumping just enough gas to get me to the church on time, and running in to the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to look for one in an unfamiliar facility. I had no idea that the Sheetz off the Esbenshade Road exit of Route 283, where I frequently stop on trips to Lancaster, had a Main Street, Mount Joy address.

I opened my calendar this morning after I read the poem. In pencil I find today’s appointments: hair at 1:30 (color, allow 40 minutes) and an appearance by author Nichole Bernier at 6:30. In ink, I’ve noted, with colored symbols, the days on which I wrote fiction (purple), read fiction (blue), exercised (green), and attempted to clear clutter (orange). In black, I noted that on Sunday, I sent my application for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and had dinner with a friend, and yesterday, I mailed our tax payments and learned of a bombing in Boston.

And I pasted the receipt, with a note about what it was, in a blank journal.

Carry On.