4 a.m.

I
I wonder whether yoga
might save my hip.
The month's money's gone already.
Our new dentist got it
just for his howdy-do.

Every night I wake up earlier
in the morning, from the pain.

Why does switching the light on
ease the pain? I wonder.

I never thought I'd get so old so quick.

II
On eleven September
the morning sky
remained black
at five-twenty-five.

Outside
lowdwindle wanemoon
blazed like a razor
against the black

and painlaser stars.

I meant to sleep
but instead woke early
not even the tips
of the fringes
of dreams retreating,

only my bones
grinding away
when I wasn't aware.

III
These pets believe that
because I'm up
it must be time for breakfast

and now the lightbulb's
alerted the cagebirds too.

If I give in now
they'll only be famished again
by nine.

These several days ill, a mono episode behind moving the livingroom furniture around on - Monday, was it? Anyway, sore throat malaise and screaming arthritis in hands hip knees shoulders. Was sorry not to be sprightly for the visit of artguyJim of Yolo (photo below), but we had good talks on Friday and then lunch and long afternoon coffee yesterday. He looks fabulous in his new thin self, cut hair, and brightwhite walrus-y mustache - like the Spaniard he is, with his long dark face. He brought us a half-dozen bags of VHS tapes he no longer wanted (he's a compulsive collector of video and needs to eliminate anything he's replaced with DVD). Sick last night, I couldn't sit in the sitting place to watch movies with Husband, so we organized it around my bed and watched together from there, brotherB cross-legged on the floor. What did we see? Oh, Blood Work for the boy film, a late Clint Eastwood entertainment. For the girl film, The Apartment, a black-and-white Billy Wilder winner from 1959. Very sweet.

And, too, I posted a half-dozen of the rarer tapes for sale online.

It was satisfying to show Jim the little trailer he gave me last December since transformed from its rat-poop cat-pee trashfilled disaster into a tidy colorful comfy writer's shed. (Oh but if only it had a toilet!) He got a chuckle out of it.

It's been sort of a dreamy week, in nightsleeps. Nothing spectacular but strange plots and twists. An image from last night's dreams - outraged high-schoolers carried a 20-foot typewriter platen (on which was painted the word "typewriter") down the street in a protest parade. An elderly teacher had created the giant thing decades before for the generations of young ones to come to express their societal disappointments with. It gave him satisfaction to know they still used it for this purpose.

In reading, I miss Mr. Olson sorely and have tried to make do with other messed-up artists, reading Recovery, John Berryman's autobiographical novel ("it's all true" he wrote in introductory remark) about drying out from his third alcoholic psychosis. It's not very good or interesting but I'll try to finish it.

I put ambient forest-bird noises on the iPhone earlier today, plugged into a small speaker, for the lovebirds (in the cage on the kitchen refrigerator) to hear and respond to. I left it on my bedside table playing away while I started some laundry down the hall. The lovebirds called and shrieked happily for a bit, but then the ambient sounds stopped and they went quiet again. When I went to investigate I found the unplugged speaker in the middle of the bed and the phone nowhere to be seen - and catLobsang crouched there, tail twitching. some crawling and creeping and stretching retrieved the phone from behind and well under the bed. I started the noises up again and watched as - sure enough - Lobsang went wild, attacking the phone again and again until I rescued it and turned it off.

Huh.

I don't know what the typewriter dream means, exactly, but I suppose I will return to trailerSylvia and finish typing those final poem drafts on my old Smith-Corona Skyriter. Today? Tomorrow? Very hard to jump in the river again, or even find it, once you've been drug out on dry land for a spell.