Careful, careful, already distracted by email. Don't go there just because it comes up on the screen.

Brilliant morning. Intend to plow ahead now with lengthy worktimes. The words are Down. The structure is there. No, one can't have the same vision twice, but one may enter a skeleton and give it flesh and breath and set the heart to beat. As I will now in this phase.

Dipping into the books accruing on the nightstand, including a little heap of things by and about the elder poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), writing here between the ages of 97 and 99:

The storm we had the other day was rather spectacular; I felt it was somehow a message. It seemed so threatening at first, and then suddenly it was just a little downpour. And it dissolved into a quite peaceful late afternoon. I interpret it positively. I had felt a sense of foreboding, certainly for the past few months, and psychologically this seemed to say, "Stop thinking negatively about whatever's happening now. Find out what you can do and do it."

And

When the skies are ablaze, it's hard to focus on anything else. We've all been through so many storms, they all seem to merge into a single great storm, lashing across.
           In a similar way, when you have an overwhelming emotional or psychological crisis, the taste of it is so full of memories it encompasses the whole history of losses.--Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

Ah, the sun is early today in the skylight. So warm against my eyelids, soothing on my face. My forehead unclenches and I had not realized it was furrowed.

Yesterday I wrote 648 words for the final chapter--7. I need add only a dollop more today and the first draft will be ready to embellish, prune, polish, and publish at Amazon Singles--as my trial balloon. The best things to come out of this project well may be a renewed habit of daily application and a sensation of completion. Thrilling, really. And if I continue without pause I can finish the two other parts for a trilogy that can make up a volume lengthy enough to be an actual book.

So, yay.

Otherwise I have nothing to report. Little has been accomplished this day. The sun shines again, and still. The world outdoors is brown and arid and very very cold. Seed packets still arrive in the mail. I have named the writingtrailer Sylvia. Someday she will be parked on a plot of land in the woods and I will go there for extended stays and have more to report than I do now.

I don't know how to make stuff up, as Spalding Gray said. I know only how to deliver my experiences. Key here, then, is to cultivate the experiences.

Bright beam full in my face.

Unfortunate noise on the headphones, what the--oh, Janacek, Taras Bulba I. Noted.

I start writing the final chapter in the little book today. Finished Chapter 6 yesterday with a 700-word burst.

Yesterday we walked out, all three of us together, to Cemetery Street (as I call it) and down to the end of the public road to where it becomes some rancher's private drive. We in fact entered the cemetery and strolled a couple of laps. Holding hands. BrotherB running ahead laughing.

What did we see? The cemetery deer herd grazing in the fallow fields across the way. Graveyard blossoms cloth fake flowers, wire stems plunged into the soft earth near their headstones, brilliant reds and greens against the dormant winter lawn. Warner Mountain Range to the east so brown and dry and patient waiting for drought to end. Our eyes his blue mine brown gazing steady and well, each into the other's, and recognizing the pure spirit again. And hear? Only our three voices entering and leaving us. What did we feel? Our hands, my left his right, clasped tightly together.

Our hearts soaring.

Never having heard of him until he died last year (well, surely I heard of Riddley Walker, but I paid it no mind) and I read his obits in the literary news, I ordered a sampler of Russell Hoban's writing--A Russell Hoban Omnibus--and it arrived via UPS at 9 a.m. today. I opened it at the first page of the first novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, and read the first sentences and swooned.

There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind--tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

Russell Hoban where were you all my life and why did I not know you until after you were dead?

***

Drought continues hereabouts. We have a fraction of the precipitation we normally get--a fraction of a very small amount, in other words--and it is alarming to look around at our mountain surround, usually white-blanketed since November, and see not even a spot of snow, only brown. If we do not make up for the shortfall in February-March we are in for a fiery 2012, and that's for certain.

Our January continues warm during the day, 40s and 50s F., dropping to 10 or 15 at night.

Little packets of seeds keep arriving in the mail and one afternoon I will plant the cold frame I readied last fall. I bought big hot Christmas lights half-off at the hardware store last week, and I'll suspend them in the cold frame and cover it with the otherwise useless rat-gnawed pads from the trailer to keep it warmish overnight, and we'll see if we can't grow mesclun and radishes.

My step-grandmother's favorite breakfast--fresh red radishes with brown bread and butter.

Here comes the sun.

Another full moon, another night brimming with forgotten dreams--except the last one, which came to me this morning after sleepus interruptus. It was not a Big Dream, nor even meaningful particularly, But my brother in the dream looked just like Gregory Corso sitting cross-legged on the floor looking unhappy. He wandered out the door while I was distracted by a gentleman caller, and who later I found sitting cross-legged on sidewalk staring at grocery-shop door waiting for me to open it: running the shop was my job in the dream and many customers were preparing to leave because they were so tired of waiting in the cold dark shop. I ran to turn on lights, called frantically after departing customers wait! wait! and a man said someone named Ari (the owner! oh no!) had telephoned repeatedly to ask whether I'd opened the shop on time.

And in real life getting impatient to find large blocks of time enough to finish the book. Completed 400 words yesterday before spending the remainder of the day, a Sunday, with recovering and now almost fully present and balanced husband, what a relief! to have him back again. What a disaster that almost was, disastrous enough in its way that we had to figure out the source of his imbalances on our own.

And now I have a meeting to attend as rep for the county's In-Home Supportive Services workers, blows a big hole in this day. Rest of the week I will do nothing more than write, because the book, a small one, novella-like, is nearly done, will be done this week, and then just to polish it and get it into AmazonSingles with parts 2 and 3 to follow in quick succession.

There's that sunbeam. Gotta go.

Last night on my way into bed I stood under the skylight that framed the near-full moon dead center in the clear night sky and the moon showered me with its glow-white for a while. It was a freshening, and afterward I slept in fits and starts waking every couple of hours with a new raft of dreams receding. I slept late then (it's Sunday) and made the morning waffles and coffee and returned to officebed to work, all the while swimming in dream elements washed all together and bobbing to the surface out of order, and dropping below it again, confusing and weird.

***

Yesterday's game day was a great success. I lost badly in our first learning game of "7 Wonders" but it is the kind of game that involves building a civilization across three ages of time, and the building process is so absorbing one forgets to compete and it becomes satisfying just to experience the group efforts and support one another in commerce and so on. What is purported to be a 30-minute game took three hours as we laughed and conversed, a welcome respite from my normally silent isolated daily existence here at the Old Same Place.

I didn't work on my book yesterday, nor have I begun to yet today. I hope I don't fall out of step with it.

***

I ordered a bunch of heirloom seeds last week to put in the cold frame, cold-weather things to experiment with in this bizarrely warm and snowless winter. Now I have the new J. L. Hudson paper catalog and I can't wait to dig in for some exotic goodies to start indoors now for planting out in May or June. There is no space whatever for planting-pots and trays in these cramp overstuffed quarters, but I think I'll set up my desk for a nursery table under the skylight since I never use it anyway.

Spilanthes acmella. Artemisia absinthium. Galium verum Can hardly wait.