Saturday, 01.03:
. . . No wonder spring opens with the ram.
Winter must be bashed against a wall
so that the thick sap of revived oaks
can flow again . . .
: : Jorge Sanchez, “Troubling Thoughts on New Year’s Eve”
Monday, 01.05:
ketchup face.
sorry mat.
Katie (!) stopped by–Andy had just mentioned she was in town; he and Katie are going to cook dinner for R & me (a surprise for R) on Thursday night. It’s been so obvious that they are together, but why state the obvious?
Monday, 01.26:
The goose guarding the rooftop nest, landing on the ledge as we sat through our New Associate Training. The sudden blast exhaled from its nostrils fogging the glass, like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park.
Friday, 01.30:
Accidentals: birds blown off course. The term showed up in a story we’re considering for West Branch (by Alexandra Leake, “The Mockingbird Project”) (another bird but actually after the film) (of the novel) (everything telescoping to another referent) but I remember a story about a scarlet ibis blown off course. The theme’s appealing somehow. Why do I tend to think immediately of poem clusters, and not one long poem? How does Nancy construct these long poems, return, examine, reenvision the theme?
Friday evening, reading slush. R is upstairs listening to the new Sarah MacLachlan CD we bought tonight. We’d gone to look for a CD player, a small one for the kitchen (the old one finally quit) and then R decided that since he wants to go up to Wegman’s tomorrow (for rice flour), he could (we could) stop at Circuit City and see what they have. I bought a Sony Walkman, a radio, very small, with digital tuning that picks up the local NPR station from anywhere in the house, which makes me very happy; I’ve missed their programming.
Stargate comes on at 11 and he wants to watch it. I think we watch way too much TV and that’s partly why I’m too tired for sex. But tonight, coming home, R said he’d heard from Matt, and I said Matt who? and he said he’s in school, remember, and you fucked him, remember, and I didn’t, couldn’t. Still can’t. It’s as if that part of my brain has been gradually turning itself off. I hardly miss it. Which is even more unfair to R.
Poem from the slush by Steve Lapinsky. Don’t think we’re taking it, but I can’t let it go:
Swimmer
Shaved as a swimmer
I’m clean in the pool,
diving like a lie
into the mouth
and out,
unseen, not even a ripple.
You can’t swim.
Maybe, you are truth.
and another:
At the weeping rock in Zion
The shelf let down its tears of water, but there was no sadness,
a man lay dying from the climb, a kid resuscitating him,
his breath the pungency of onions, not that anyone cared,
due to the dulled sensory organs of the living. Two girls,
matured into their late teens, holding hands
and kissing each other after it was over, made the scene
seem imaginary, and adults turned their children’s eyes away
from the man getting up, into the ambulance, to the water
lapping over a moss covered rock.
Reads in the Trees 