Via poems.com (which today has a gem by Steffi Weisburd titled "Little God Origami"), a Somerville News interview with Mark Doty with an arresting closing exchange:

DH: In the poem "Almost Blue" in your new collection Fire to Fire (Harper Collins) you write of the beautiful and doomed jazz musician Chet Baker. In the poem you imagine Baker's swan song which is composed of nodding out and falling out a hotel window in Amsterdam:

"and you leaning into that
warm
haze from the window,
Amsterdam,
late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds.
Breathing in the lindens
And you let go and why not."

Is this acceptance of things as they are, what is, is; something you try to get across in your work?

MD: Baker was a heroin addict for something like 28 years, so you could see that as a very long slow letting go. He fell from a hotel window in Amsterdam, maybe nodded out, maybe jumped. I wanted, in this poem; to try to lean into the feeling of addiction, into that state of mind that just says Oh, let me go, let it all go. What I want to admire, you know, is the Chet Baker who made all that incredible art, who kept producing that stunning music. But there's something about the toxic pull of addiction, of the poison -- you know, the deep allure of that. Acceptance? I don't know. Sometimes yes. Then sometimes I think you should resist with all your might.

[I haven't kept up with Doty's work in recent years, but I am going to have to get this book.]

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So blessed freaking much to do, but so much kindness and support to buoy me along, and plenty of perspective, too: the mountain of mail I've been going through included two thank-you notes from other people who'd recently lost their mothers. My best friend from college made a point of restocking my fridge and pantry while I was away -- and dictated three pages of notes to my husband on how to prepare it all, too. (Best friend happens to be a major-league gourmand, so there's a gallon of leek stock, several swordfish filets, a packet of chocolate-hazelnut cookies, and other wonders.)

I've just learned that many of the e-mails I sent over the past month never reached their recipients - a fresh source of aggravation, that, never mind the lost answering-machine messages - but I'll be resuming work on the urgent things in a few minutes, and everything else will just have to wait until I finish surfing this current wave of deadlines.

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When my father died nine years ago, I was the de facto coordinator of his funeral, but most of the official work fell to my mother, and she held onto almost all of his possessions. Over the years, she disposed of some of his clothes, but almost everything else remained in her house until her death. Sorting out their possessions (and the ones my brother and I had left behind) has been... complex, shall we say. My dislike of opaque plastic bags has escalated into utter loathing (Mom used them to pseudo-organize everything), and I've found myself contending with an additional layer of mourning I hadn't quite anticipated: acknowledging anew that I cannot spare the time for every hobby or project or cause that beckons to me, no matter how enjoyable or worthy. Even with my stubbornness and stamina (a good deal of it hereditary), there are only so many productive hours I can squeeze out of a day, and I'm having to be selective among existing commitments as it is. I could focus on just the writing projects for the rest of my life and still feel I'd barely gotten started on the list - never mind the editing, the languages, the lettering, the music, the house, the friendships - none of which I'm prepared to give up just yet, but all of which require much more of my attention to do right by them...

... so most of the tools and supplies - my old embroidery hoops, my mom's knitting needles, the many spools of thread, the unused greeting cards, and so much more -- I've been ruthlessly putting them in the "to donate" pile, and shushing the persistent "someday" demon that insists I could someday use them myself. Sure I could, but I already have my own stashes of papers, inks, and yarns, and projects from the early 1990s that I still intend to resume, and I've plenty of self-delusion to overcome as it is. I was sixteen when I first read Katha Pollitt's "Turning Thirty," in which she speaks of

that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky
when suddenly "choices"
ceased to mean "infinite possibilities"
and became instead "deciding what to do without"

and while you couldn't pay me to go back to my twenties (or earlier), and I love the plethora of possibilities remaining to me, it's still a struggle for me to acknowledge that choices do have to be made in order to do things well.

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My mother was an accomplished seamstress. I hadn't known she kept a sewing journal during the late 1960s/early 1970s, until I found it two nights ago. It documents the many outfits she completed during that period, with detailed patterns and sketches. I am going to make a point of shelving it next to my father's PhD dissertation.