Saturday, 03.22:
There’s nothing we can do about the heart.
–Judith Vollmer, “Thaw” (Level Green)
To bed before 10:00 after a three-day weekend. I spent most of the day folding pages: twenty sets of Rhett’s new chapbook, ten of David’s, ten more of Ed’s. Need to trim and glue covers tomorrow. I think I may never catch up.
Cold and windy today, and the stove in the living room keeps going out; we can’t figure out why. Setting my alarm for 5:00 instead of 5:30 so I can cook breakfast before leaving for work.
Picked the Vollmer book from a shelf just to read a poem or two before bed, even though my bed has six or seven other books on it. I was getting her confused with Marianne Boruch. I don’t remember having read this book before. The final line of the opening poem stabbed at me.
Monday, 03.24:
E-mail this morning from Miriam, inviting several folks to write a poem a day during April. I last did this about five years ago; I’d like to do it again, though it seems almost impossible (given how little I write these days). All the more reason to try?
Sitting in the car for a moment. Just drove home from work. R texted me around noon to say he might have an opportunity for rental assistance, but he was afraid to bring it up with P & J because of J’s chatter last month about raising our rent (which P squelched, but with J you never know). Anyway, I phoned P and she assured me that no, they are not raising our rent and reiterating that they are so happy to have us at 27. So hopefully R will have a bit more money, something he’s often moody about.
Saturday, 03.29:
I was up before 8:00 this morning. Was just finishing breakfast when I heard P and J in the back yard: this is the day we’d agreed to build the new raised bed for the garden, four by sixteen feet. I went out. It went well, considering how difficult J can be to work with, and we finished just before the rain started, a gentle mist overall that’s lasted on and off for hours.
R had come out to join us but left pretty quickly, due to something someone said I guess, though I don’t know what. I saw him walking away down 4th St, looking back (at me? at us?) but I continued helping J. The new raised bed looks good. P & J left to run errands and see a friend; I went off to Walmart to look for snow pea seeds (found them) and ended up buying a nine-pack each of kale and rainbow chard. Planted the kale and four chards out along the edge of bed #1 (where we grew jalapenos last year); the other chard I planted in the box we bought two weeks ago for the deck. I transplanted the mesclun I had started in peat pots in February under the grow light in the porch room. Hope it doesn’t get cold enough to kill it.
Dumping out a hanging planter into the new (empty) bed, I realized the red cascading begonias we had last year are still alive and sprouting from corms. I had kept that planter in the porch room all winter; glad now that I did.
R borrowed the car to go to Danville—I think for a date. I’m glad we didn’t argue over whatever had been bothering him. I started a load of laundry then took a shower after cleaning up my gardening stuff.
Miriam’s invitation: I need to respond. Need to work on my Catches & Stays poems and invite some folks to write collaborative poems for the After You project. Tonight, chapbook-making. I’m so far behind.
Reads in the Trees 