Monday, 01.04:
while the glacier of time calves about us in waves
: : Devon Balwit, “I Also Saw” [Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats]
Wednesday, 01.06:
T asked if I’d seen the nonsense going on at the Capitol—I hadn’t, and pulled it up online then ended up watching the television news for almost an hour, something I never do. Insurrectionists. Bullies. Criminals. I don’t understand why no one anticipated this? We arm cities to the teeth for a Black Lives Matter protest but no one thought Trump’s incendiary rhetoric would not incite this kind of violence? Even after Charlottesville?
Thursday, 01.07:
T went to bed at 6:00—he’s still on the 4-till-noon shift—while I stayed up. It’s too early to go to bed, though I did try setting my alarm for 5:30 this morning just to get some tasks done. Ended up turning it off and staying in bed till 9. I slept poorly again. Need to wean myself from coffee, especially drinking it after noon.
I opened the upstairs book room and watered the plants. They looked stressed: cold (there appears to be no heat whatsoever going into this room and we generally keep it closed off) and neglected. Will see tomorrow if they’ve perked up. There’s a great deal of cold air coming from the sagging window. T thinks our windows are due to be replaced this month but I think it will be closer to March, based on what I thought we were told when we signed the contract.
Of course I had a job then. Which I refuse to worry about because we had planned to use the house fund to pay for the windows. My checking account is down to about $900, which will last me, realistically, into February but not much longer. I need income. Jeff had said he’d planned to buy “about a hundred” extra copies of his chapbook (which comes out mid-month). I don’t know if that will happen but even if it does, it’s not enough money to live on.
Unpacked a box of chapbooks from the book room but only stacked them in front of the shelved chapbooks in my study. Three boxes on the floor were blocking my access. Moved some things to the basement. Washed dishes. Started laundry. Moved some things from the dining room to the basement and garage. The day consumed itself in increments. My main project before noon was to write a letter of recommendation for A, my coworker from AG, who is applying to graduate school for the Master’s in Social Work program. I worked hard on it and hope it’s enough. She didn’t give me much to go on so I had to speak mainly of her character.
Last night I drew up a chapbook cover using one of Randy’s photos, a bare tree on a hillside that he’d digitally enhanced. I thought we might use it for David’s chapbook (due out at the end of this month). I emailed my proof notes/corrections to David and Micah (and need to mail the physical copy of the proof tomorrow). David’s email today reminded me that we had already selected an image and as soon as I saw it I remembered. Much better than the tree photo (though I like that and hope to use it someday).
Sent four poems to Mark yesterday for Impossible Archetype, one of which, “Swerve,” I’d shared with him in drafts last month and which he said he wanted to publish. So he took that one for issue #8 and also asked for another, “Peas,” for issue #9 (in August).
T’s last Christmas present came today: the handmade John Grant album cover coasters he’d seen online. They’re unique and a little strange. Like him. So that’s a fit.
Friday, 01.08:
I sent the new poem (“Who Are You?”) to Mark late last night and woke up to an email from him that made me feel so good: that he really got the poem and the sense of haunting, the sense that anyone, everyone in the poem was a sort of ghost. Excited to put this one into the manuscript but mostly thankful that the poem came to me.
T texted me from work this morning—Could you do some things around the house today? I said yes, of course. I had mentioned wanting to try to fix the bathroom sink (hopelessly slow to drain) and he said if I stopped at Lowe’s for heavier brackets he’d help me to put the shelf unit back on the basement door.
He wasn’t much help, questioned every time I’d pull out a clamp to discard it once it started going in at the wrong angle. I explained that it had to go in straight and that once a nail was bent it was no good. Once I got one clamp on each side I told him I could take it from there. We’re only using the shelf to store lightweight things like paper towels. T thinks I had too much heavier stuff on it before but I think the problem was the thin plastic of the cable clamps we used—the wood screws just cut right through them and weakened them.
Next I tackled the bathroom sink, which was a painstakingly slow process, a cruddy mess of congealed hair and soap and what looked like feces and I don’t even know, some yellow fatty substance. The drain has a built-in strainer that’s not removable and some sort of baffle system—at first when I pointed the halogen flashlight up through the open pipe I couldn’t even see light. Picking the gunk loose with tweezers, trying to loosen it in clumps and remove it took forever. I also got a lot out of the elbow pipe I’d removed. It’s lucky you can’t smell, T said, and he was right. Used cotton swabs and the tweezers and kept pouring hot water through it to loosen the crud. It’s clean now but I need to find some kind of strainer to keep a lot of hair from going back down the drain.
Emailed Ed today, having finally screwed up the nerve to ask if he’d consider being my literary executor. He replied within minutes, saying he’d be honored, and we agreed to chat about it sometime later this month. For now, I don’t want to second-guess myself. I do think that some of what I’ve written is worth preserving, but I need to figure out where and for what purpose. Have a library archive everything, as Christina did? My “papers”? Need to figure out what questions need answering now, and which later.
Thinking about the font that someone created as trees: tree silhouettes, one for each letter of the alphabet. Imagining a note or a poem written in tree ideographs. Not oak but willow, willow. If only your bristlecone pine would open to me. We will neither of us survive the necessary fire.
Sunday, 01.11:
Emptied six boxes in my study. There are only four left and then I can finally settle into this space. Until they come to replace the windows and I have to move half of it out of the way. Need to contact Brian, the sales rep, for an update on when that might be.
Started typing Ed’s Sebastian chapbook. All I have is a hard copy of the original, so there’s no shortcut to this one, which is good, allows me to get more deeply into the poems. Really looking forward to seeing this in print again (ReBound Series). Emailed Ed this afternoon to see if he’d heard back from Alejandro, the artist, and to say I am perfectly fine with “Sebastian’s Back” on the cover (the ass shot through with arrows).
Thinking about a new poem for our collaboration, antidotes. Poultices. Something about the way it’s so simple to point out jewelweed springing up near almost any patch of poison ivy.
One antidote to nettle is, surprisingly, nettle . . .
T’s dad came over today with the frame pieces he’d cut and stained; we (T mostly) helped him measure and drill and get everything up on the wall. It looks amazing and of course will be quite a shocking piece of Lego art once it’s done, thousands of tiny squares forming a pixelated fellatio image. On our dining room wall, no less.
Saturday, 01.16:
J is visiting from Chillicothe. He arrived around 4:30 yesterday. I made breakfast tacos for dinner. T went to bed around 6:00—he’s still getting up at 2am for his morning shift—and J and I sat up watching the first several episodes of Schitt’s Creek, which he hadn’t seen yet. I stayed up to keep folding page sets until about 10:30.
Up again this morning at 7:30 to keep folding pages. I printed off the poems I’ve written this month and taped them to my study wall: something to remind me that this is where my focus should stay for as much as I can keep it there.
Started a very small flat of hosta seeds yesterday and repotted a few of the cuttings from the grow light station—there are more to be repotted—and thought about ways to just get all the hosta seeds planted out on the deck now—they would be treated pretty much the same as if they’d been left out naturally, but in some kind of covered but ventilated pots? Just shallow open pots? To be checked every couple of weeks so they don’t dry out? I don’t want a thousand hosta plants; these are the kind that grow out at Mom’s and spread like crazy if left to seed. I would cut the stems off after flowering. Just that they’d be an easy ground cover for the shady area along the back fence, at least until they are gradually replaced by astilbe, ferns, hellebores and better hostas.
Saturday evening
Going Viral: Could we find another way to say this, please?
Sitting up late on the couch because my stomach is upset, trying to read and use the bathroom quietly. The house creaks so faintly it sounds like snow pinging the windows. I don’t get up to look. I’ve been writing more in the last month than I can ever remember: I just go there and something comes out. This can’t continue, I know; I have to find a job. I’ve been here so many times before but I’m grateful for this time to be more fully myself. That’s how it feels.
It gets in through a gap in the threshold, a puff of chill mixing and dispersing in the quiet house.
The wiring strung tense in the walls.
The dust flecking loose from the plaster.
The hair from our bodies cast down and collecting in corners.
The wart on the wrist always snagging.
The pulse in the throat.
The knees always complaining to the stairs which have their own pains, oh girl, we know, we know.
Snug in its lipid shell, it lasts for days adhered to the doorknob, the cellphone, the keys.
Go ahead. Touch your eyes. Scratch your nose.
Remember when people thought AIDS was airborne? That the gay waiter might sneeze into the salad or touch your fork?
How completely stupid that seemed?
Friday, 01.22:
Picked a journal off the shelf this morning when I went up to my study to collect some chapbooks needing sewing. I’ve been writing and composing poems almost exclusively on the laptop—my hand hurts and the fingers don’t always bend as I want them to—but then to pick this up and re-read the draft on the left [“Things happen and I don’t know who to tell”], which I’d completely forgotten about, from May of 2019: it’s got so much energy and is a fine first draft. I think I abandoned it bc I was afraid it was too sing-songy, but now that I’ve collected sorted so many poems into three manuscripts, now that I’m starting to work through serious revisions and looking to comb through these manuscripts to see what holds up, holds together, and now that I have been writing new poems every week, I can look back at this old draft with anticipation for what it might become.
Saturday, 01.23:
the god rail.
Wednesday, 01.27:
Started a new collaboration with Mark yesterday, picking a line from the list he’d sent me in December. He responded quickly and we were off and running again, back and forth. This morning he’d sent more lines and I entered the poem again easily, grateful for the quiet time to do so, and sent off my part, whereupon Mark messaged me that he thought the poem was done and needed only a title. He suggested “Flood.” Good enough for now. I don’t think it’s a flash in the pan that we write well together, and I’m grateful too for that.
Begonia dust: studying the photo I took of the tiny leaves poking up next to a phlox cutting I’m rooting under a grow light, I wondered if these volunteers might be begonias? If so, what kind? I remember planting hardy begonias along that spot at Mom’s (just outside the porch gate) but they didn’t take, didn’t come back, and that was a few years ago. Is it possible that the seeds came with the stem cuttings? Seems highly unlikely. So: something in the soil I used to start the cutting. So: what else have I grown in that particular cell, or near enough to it that flecks of begonia seeds landed in the soil? More likely, and in fact very likely, as I think about it, is that there were traces of roots left in the soil from a previous cutting that may have died. (I left this propagation set out in the garage too long and it got very cold in October before I brought it into the house; I remember throwing away some dead African violet leaves and probably something else that didn’t survive the cold and lack of light.)
Still I am thinking about begonia seed and how I once saved some, the small papery triangular capsules from hardy begonias, and how it’s possible I scattered some on the soil and forgot about it. Such things take time. And luck. We’ll see. It could be the little rex begonia. It could be something else. How many seeds make up the top few inches of soil, waiting, waiting?
Wednesday evening: I stayed up to fold 15 page sets of Jeff’s new chapbook then went upstairs to read for a bit. It’s been snowing lightly all evening and seems extra quiet out there.
We watched another movie tonight—Alien 2—after watching the first one yesterday, which I had seen once before, huddled on the living room floor at Mom & Dad’s, actually shivering in suspense in the dark room—do I remember that right? T went to bed at 6:30 as usual (he gets up at 2:30, as usual) but I wanted to get those page sets done so I stayed up. Some nights I tuck in with him and try to get up extra-early, which for me means anywhere between 5 and 7.
While cooking in the kitchen I often raise the shade on the kitchen door to look outside at what will be our garden. Right now it’s two apple trees and a crabapple, planted in a triangle directly opposite the kitchen door. The rangy hedges are often filled with dozens of sparrows that flit down into the yard and peck into the mulch rings set around the apples or range around picking and pecking through the grass and leaves in the lawn. We raked very lightly this fall. The leaf cover wasn’t all that heavy but I wanted to leave it down as cover for whatever beneficials might need it.
The sparrows are busy, antic, and seem constantly in motion, hopping around in the hedge or down into the yard or quickly fluttering back up again. I’ve seen a few cardinals in the hedge, too, but I don’t set out seed because I’m trying not to encourage squirrels or (especially) deer.
Years ago, when I imagined having a house and garden, I also imagined giving it a private name: Heartsease, after the little yellow-and-purple viola that will sometimes reseed and establish itself. It’s also called Johnny-Jump-Up. Based on our few months here so far, if pressed to name our home it would have to be called SparrowHedge.
Thursday, 01.28:
Up at 3:15 just after T left for work. He’ll be home at half-past noon to shower and pack for a visit to E in Indiana, gone a few days. My first time, I think, alone in the house, so we’ll see how well I manage the old fears and bad dreams that rise up like weeds when it’s just me tending this place. (Or any other.)
Today my poems seem
only the spells I muttered
while waiting for poems.
—Hayden Carruth, The Clay Hill Anthology (1970)
Reads in the Trees 