The little family that moved into the neighboring rental after Jewell&Deaven's group departed were not there very long. The mother complained that nothing was repaired, the place was a shambles, and they packed up and moved unexpectedly and overnight only a few weeks after moving in. The place sat empty for six or eight weeks. Then ten days ago a crew of laborers swept through it, hammers and saws banged and rasped day and night, and I awoke yesterday morning - 5:30! still dark! and a Saturday! - to a cacophany of shrill echoing excited little-dog yelps and barks that lasted for an hour. At some point I did get up and close the window, but the pitch of the barking was such that it penetrated anyway. The walls. My skull. Later in the day while moving sprinklers about I noticed a flat-bed trailer laden with rolled-up carpets and upended tables and chairs parked in the driveway there and heard the barking again, now muted, from within the house. At some point the trailer was emptied and everyone vanished.

They're back now, this morning, late, and so I guess they're moving here from somewhere far away - Los Angeles, maybe, or Portland, or Boise. The dogs are barking in the delirious and anxious way small dogs do. I finally see them. I was guessing Shih Tzus but they seem a little thick and closely clipped for that. White. Two adults and three pups. Five disoriented Shih Tzus. In the chain-link-fenced concrete-floored enclosure. Next door.

"Maybe they'll give us a puppy," I said to husband. He was sleepily preparing his first cup of coffee. It took a minute for my words to sink in. He expressed alarm.

***

I've started reading a novel by A. S. Byatt. The Children's Book. Three halting pages in I finally have to stop altogether and look for the dictionary. How my vocabulary has shrunk. I love how Byatt's vivid worlds consume me. Yet I must stop once per page, at least, to look up and note down words that probably are commonplace in her milieu.

The terminus of an arch. I think I know what that is. Kobold figures - no. (I find the dictionary. And remark how few words there are in English, apparently, that start with the letter 'k' . . .) I love holding this heavy cloth-covered volume with its clean ivory pages deckle-edged and dust jacket newsmooth and cool in both my hands. And I don't mind having to dredge up my Webster's from deep within the bedside midden. Still, I sigh to think of my Kindle with its helpful cursor that generates in the margins automatically the definition for any word it stops at.

We forge ahead.

Ah! Here is the great old keyboard, its '1' key gone missing
somewhere in the compost of bedside detritus
accumulated in the months of its neglect.

Oh frabjous day! the brilliant wallpapers
blossom and fade across the screen -
wedding revels and lion prides, sunsets and seas
and lipstick prostitutes leering from littered sidewalks
- vivid images I acquired by casting wide my inter-net
in years and years of my old illness

so that now, so much weller am I and able again to be
and move in the world of actual things and animals and air,
I can meditate and marvel at the grandeur of a world
that has such cameras in't.

***

Working very hard with others during recent weeks to conduct a week of extended hours - 9 to 5 instead of the usual anemic noon to 4 - at the Friends of the Library bookshop we've made. This was meant to seduce the late summer passers-through to spend their money here, and the first day or two it did so, but then the doldrums set in, we drifted into the midweek horse latitudes of a crossroads village people speed through on their way to somewhere else.

Thursday we had a terrific thunderstorm that knocked out power, and confusions and ignorances kept the shop doors locked all afternoon and customers were turned away. I felt such frustration and remorse for lost revenues I opened alone on a Saturday, yesterday - not in the shop, which can't be open if the library is closed, but in the little trailer back behind where we practically give away the dowdier volumes ("a buck-a-bagful"), and I stayed there on my own from 9:30 to 3, lugging about great heavy book boxes as though I were a longshoreman or something and not a grandmother with basal joint arthritis, and we made 17 dollars.

So today I stay flat in bed again, and read and read, and later catch up my internet bookshop and the internet bookshop of the Library Friends. I flex my stupid old muscles that are not sore but are tired and love to be still today and not be pressured and abused into unreasonable exertions.

The sky is gray. No more blinding high-altitude sunshine and punishing heat. The air out there is cool and the world a blessed pillow of forgiveness. Let me find my book, my hot tea and jelly toast, my cat and my dog.

Back to typing on my iPhone again. The used MacBook Pro I bought from eBay five months ago has a hard drive that is grinding unto death, and so to spare it further insult I do everything I can do from the 'phone. A new hard drive and operating system have been purchased and await installation - await accumulation of chutzpah sufficient for me to open the laptop up and replace the drive myself. Terrifying. But I've rewatched the how-to video on Youtube a half-dozen times and I think I can do it. Soon.

This morning is lovely, cool and still and clear (although bound to be painfully hot by midafternoon). BrotherB and I have had gluten-free pancakes, first try of Bob's Red Mill mix. Not horrible. I'll probably make them mostly for B in the future, though, because he's the celiac guy. They weren't <i>that</i> good.

B's hair continues to fill in and his health is turning around, now that his body isn't attacking itself, and now that he's able to absorb nutrients. He had his first Reclast treatment a couple of weeks ago, an annual IV chemical meant to halt his osteoporosis. He's still small and thin, and getting shorter every day. He's lost nearly two inches in height in the last year, and has developed scoliosis. I am so sorry about the dearth of competent caring doctors in our world. We could have prevented all these things - the alopecia, the bone loss, the thyroid disease - if someone had bothered to test and diagnose him earlier.

Last week I ran into ShirleyMayer, the elderly woman who underwrote the purchase of my home four-and-a-half years ago. We'd become estranged because of a misunderstanding - someone that deaf is hard to get through to. But now she was pleased to see me, and I was overjoyed to have my good friend back. I learned that she had sold her car and relied on a neighbor, now, for weekly transportation to the supermarket. She sees no one, stays in her house with her cats. She can't hear her phone, can't hear the voice of anyone who might call. She's only 76.

<i>Say</i>, I said (of necessity loudly and slowly), <i>would you like to come with me to yard sales on Saturday mornings?</i> She was confused for a moment, and resisted, but when I pulled up in front of her house yesterday she was waiting and ready to go. I had thought it would be great fun to drive around with my old friend as we used to, listening to her chatter and joke about her colorful life and remark on the world in her funny and philosophical way. But she was different now, quiet, and when I managed to tell her something about what was going on in the world (<i>All this smoke's blowing in from the fires up in Oregon</i>, for example), she argued and disbelieved me. I let it go. We had fun at each sale. I found a handful of valuable books and she bought some cute knickknacks. I stopped off at my house before taking her home. I wanted to show her what I'd done to the place since she'd seen it last, and to show her how the Siamese kitten she gave me had grown up into a beautiful, very special, cat. But she didn't notice any differences in the house, and didn't remember giving me the kitten ("Why would I give you a cat? Where did I get it?"). Then I tried to show her how she could use a smart phone to send text messages. She would be able to contact people for help, and they would be able to get in touch with her, if she would only wear it in her pocket to feel it vibrate. I used my iPhone and borrowed my husband's  to show her how we could talk back and forth with texts. I'm getting my upgraded phone next week and wanted to give her my old one. But she wouldn't let me teach her how to use it, getting angry when I tried, and then became so frustrated trying to teach herself she flung it hard across the kitchen table. She'd never use it, she said. 

As we got in the car to go back to her place I asked if she'd like to go yard-saling again next week. "I thought that was what we were going to do today," she said, irritable. <i>We did</i>. "Well, how many did we go to?" <i>Five</i>. "Oh. I think I kind of remember one ... Did I get all this stuff?" <i>Yep</i> Silence. 

She told me she got rid of her car because one day she got into it and couldn't remember how to start it. She'd gone into the house then and there and phoned her mechanic, and he'd bought it from her for $800. 

When we got to her house she couldn't remember how to unlock her door. 

"I think I'm worse than I was a year ago," she said. "Am I?" <i>Yes</i>, I said, <i>a </i>lot<i> worse.</i> I didn't bother to remind her that we hadn't seen each other in four years.

In the end I was so exhausted and discouraged from all her arguing and and frustration that by the time I got home all I could do was stare into the middle distance and try to process and recover. Clearly Alzheimers - not dementia (she's too young for dementia, isn't she?) - is happening here, to a woman who has no one to notice or care. An argumentative independent woman who will put up fierce resistance should anyone attempt to intervene. The neighbor she depends on is a single guy, a sort of ne'er-do-well, but maybe he cares about her. Of course, this casts her spontaneous generosity to me, back in the day, in a whole new light. She had seemed so sharp and rational and certain, but I should have realized it then.

I'll take her around to yard sales every Saturday and keep the conversation simple and light. But I think I'll call adult protective services, too, just to inquire about procedure down the line, maybe to see if someone can check on her.

After late dinner we took a walk. Us three. Husband in his T-shirt and pajama pants and new white athletic shoes, brotherB in his faded jeans and "Alturas" hoodie and heavy black leather shoes, me in my enormous green rayon fat-lady dress and bungie sandals. We walked the warm dark streets under the waxing gibbous moon. "Mooh," said Brian, pointing. Then "Boah" when we passed a fishing boat parked in a driveway. We walked fast, Husband and I fondling each others' fingers and palms, B falling behind and then moving ahead, wandering into our trajectory and then angling away. We cut across the high school athletic field where a pair of young people sat talking quietly in the grassy edgeshadows, drinking beer. When we reached the street beyond we turned west and made our way in the dark toward the cemetery on the top of a rise at the town's edge. It's fairly wild there. Maybe we would spot a coyote or a bear or an owl. After a while we reached the graveyard and opened the gate and walked a circuit, wary for vampires. On the pavement again I pressed on past the cemetery, drawn by a great hissss-ing, to where enormous robotic sprinklers crawled across a field disgorging water in a fine torrent that made a dim rectangular fog on the darkened landscape. A young couple walked past us there, dark forms leaning into one another in the moonlight, oblivious. I stood for a while with Husband and brotherB and wondered at the vast mechanical irrigators. These acres across from the graveyard were the dead empty area annexed for expansion, no? They were forcing water onto it all the dark warm night using unpeopled machinery, bringing the dead ground to life in order one day to bury their dead there. Perhaps. I shuddered. We turned then and headed home. A little chill was settling, finally. "Bahr," said B, pointing to a distant outbuilding. As we walked, moonlight on the broken glass along the roadshoulder sparkled like stars, but only if we kept moving. We never saw any wild animals.

***

Today I opened a random book at random. I stumbled randomly, then, on the perfect expression of the way I have been feeling for a long time.

The Other

I killed someone
inside of me.
I didn't love her.

She was a fiery flower
of the mountain cactus;
she was thirst and flames,
never stopping for refreshment.

She traveled a rocky way,
and pressed her shoulders against the sky;
she never descended
to search for the eyes of water.

The grass withered
where she rested,
burned by her breath
and face of incandescent coals.

With rapid resins,
her speech hardened
never to be set free
in a glorious cascade.

This mountain flower
did not know how to bend -
but by her side,
I bent.

I allowed her to die,
robbing her of my heart.
She perished like an eagle
left to starve.

The thunder in her wings
became silent;
she fell and withered
in my hands,
final embers ...

Her sisters still cry out
to me for her sake,
and a clay fire
claws me in passage.

As I travel,
I tell them:
Look through the ruins
and with the clay create
another eagle with wings of fire.

If you cannot, then,
oh! Forget her.
I killed her.
You must kill her too!

(Gabriela Mistral, trans. Maria Giachetti)

I could not have said it a fraction as well.

A little weirdness. A little anxiety. Don't know why. Free-floating.

The neighbor kids climbed into a U-Haul truck with their Mum & Step-pop yesterday and drove away forever. I had laden them with stuffed animals and glossy picture books and double-A batteries to keep their other toys going, a big plastic tub of scissors and paper and paints and brushes and glue in case the neighbor lady where they moved didn't have these things for them to borrow. A porcelain statuette of white doves on a branch for the eldest girl, grown remote from me in adolescence who was a nervous grinning whirl of energy when we met four years ago.

I cried a little, and then in the early evening in the front yard as I untangled the skeins of garden hoses I'd finally pulled out from winter storage I met the new neighbors - Samuel, Akyra, Freya, aged 6ish, 4ish, and four months, respectively - as they took a constitutional with their proud parents. Not the same, these guys, though cute as buttons all of them, but I feel a little better knowing they're there. Spent my whole life expecting to channel the grandmothers who did so well by me when I was small - wanting to pass on some of that - not understanding the vast misunderstandings that would intervene to prevent this expression to my own grandchildren. So the kids around me give relief in a way, accept what I have to give. I feel a little less pointless.

As for the hoses, they survived winter intact, and now the sprinklers are squirting the white clover and yarrow. Later I'll grease up the lawnmower and see whether it will start.

In the new New Yorker
I read the story by Bolaño
and swooned. I read the three poems
and felt envy and remembered.

Earlier I wrote a directive to myself
to remember to write an essay
about my deforming thumbs.

My brother's radio is loud with stupid music
and my language evaporates like steam
in wisps I grasp vainly for
like a dream I must remember
but which cannot be recalled.

***

The redhaired children, little neighbor boy and girl,
confusing their dates, stayed the night here
Saturday, and tried to spend the days on either side
as well. I spurned them before and after,
weary and dreary as I am now always.
So only the late afternoon and evening -
they drew pictures of my cats and colored them
orange and purple and green; they
watched the supper assembling
and exulted later in their full plates.

When they slept it was together on my brother's bed,
like diminutive angels curled into themselves
and somehow glowing, and the morning was all toast
and oatmeal and further drawings, more ambitious
projects using colored paper and glue - "Deaven's House"
with three upper-story window flaps that opened and shut
and behind each flap a sibling facing out,
and concealed in a corner at bottom
the mother
and the new stepfather
facing each other.

They went home when I shoo'd them away midmorning
with smiles and hugs, and later in the day I slept three hours
and hadn't known how tired I was. They'll move away
next Saturday. Already their trampoline
has been dismantled and removed.

***

Last night I dreamed I saw my father's name
in a scrap of newsletter, as offering a class.
I traveled to North Carolina to the address shown.
I entered the home he shared with parents
and siblings' families. George Mills. Taught literacy
evenings to the underprivileged. He was quiet.
He wore glasses. He was respectfully distant
but not un-warm. Hurt, it seemed by my years
of absence. I didn't know, I didn't know my refrain
and my excuse. There was a pier and a ferry.
I embraced my father, held my lips near his, knew
it would be misconstrued, I just felt so loving
and grateful to have found this missing piece.

I'm always surprised by the fact that the more exhausted I am the less able I am to sleep. Dropping off is easy enough, but lately waking occurs not at my usual 7 but at 6 or 5 or sometimes 4 a.m., as today. It seems always to correlate with liver stress from heavy lifting, but what a drag. Still, it's nice to have some hours entirely alone - well, almost entirely. Cats and dogs welcome an early breakfast, and even the dimmest kitchen lamp will elicit the lovebirds' piercing It's-morning! bleats and shrieks.

The exhaustion sets in in the midst of a thorough reorganizing of the Friends-of-the-Library bookshop behind the donation and installation of nine large new shelving units. I can go no further alone. Today I put out the call for volunteers. It's risky - everyone seems to determine the difference between fiction and nonfiction via cover art - but it must be done. Or I just might fall over dead.

***

The hugs-dispensing chatty bright gorgeous neighbor kids, my beloveds since the day I first looked over this property four years ago and they clambered over the back fence to introduce themselves and welcome me, are moving away next week. I'm a little griefstricken about it. Strolled about the grocery store yesterday weeping a little (see exhaustion, above) to think of losing them. KierstuhnDeaven&Jewell ages 12, 9, and 6 will leave this remote little town next Saturday for a beautiful new home in a big city hundreds of miles away. And my life will be so much the poorer.

We have a tentative plans for a farewell sleep-over here on Friday night.

I'd better rest up ...

After snowstorm, after gustful & steelgray afternoons & mornings, after one last serious go at winter
yellow light the tender hue of piss or narcissus leaks past the sunfamished ficus & cagebird cage
via the eastward windows. I sit in a westward room observing. Drowsing after au lait & OJ
trying to remember/not remember the nightdreams I have yet to record: tricked into entering
the great gray monolith I found myself imprisoned, at the mercy of a grim tyrant.
It was very 1984. The dream went on for years. We lived in tiny cells. We left them only when summoned.
When summoned we strode the corridors escorted to a despot's forbidding offices.
We dared not attempt escape - such adventurers were murdered or else tortured & returned.
Yet we did attempt it. "We" - two or three of us acquainted via our common misery.
We shifted away from our watchers & sidled out to a walled yard ("just act natural")
to where a gate groaned open on a patch of thoroughfare. Our hearts raced to glimpse it.
But the opening closed again & we were reassimilated.
Without incident
& without escape.

Odd combination of pleasant and unpleasant morning. Spring has arrived – late compared to many places, but so very welcome – so outdoors the 25F degrees of sunrise will climb to 72 today and yard work will be addressed.

The pleasant part indoors, where I am, is the Saturday-morningness of it all - the freedom I have to stay in bed and surf, and read, and drink the only coffee my body will tolerate anymore (small part coffee & large part hot milk), and relax. The unpleasant part is the reason I indulge myself in the pleasant part: back spasms, the worst I’ve known since 2006, which lightningstruck blam as I reached across the bed to set my coffee glass down on the nightstand in the early a.m.

I’ve been hauling book boxes nonstop for months, and dragging/lifting great contractor-sized trashbags of dead books, and armloads/teetering piles of books to shelve or catalog, both here at home and at the two little Bookworm venues I manage. One would think I’d grow stronger. This is never the case, though. And yesterday I added the insult of shifting about the household furniture, exploding the office I’d kept in the livingroom to replace it with livingroom furniture. I brought in a loveseat I got from Freecycle and dragged the old kitchen table outside to give away. Then I dragged the maple table I’d used as a desk into the kitchen. And carried around hundreds of books books books in teetering piles and in impossibly heavy boxes.

But such happiness at the end of the day to see my house a home again, welcoming and open, and not the dark deepdusty bookcave it had become over winter.

And so now – spasms. Soon I’ll drag out the kidneybrace my bestfriendJane gave me years ago and strap myself into it, and then go about my day. But my body is telling me I must slow down.

Oh, but there's so much to do.

Much happening. Last week a day spent in transit to and from a city 100 miles to the north so husband could have outpatient surgery on his eyelids, which drooped so low he could barely see. Then (and ongoingly) the followup, treating his eyes four times a day with antibiotic ointments and moisture goop.

Last week also I was befriended in the Bookworm shop by a local person who is an alien abductee. His stories are hair-raising and plausible-sounding. He suffers frequent and severe depressions due to his lifetime of experiences at the hands of malevolent extraterrestrials. We also discussed eastern philosophy and he insisted on lending me one of his Native American flutes. I must only play it in nature, and then listen for the reactions of the birds. I may do this. If I can find some nature.

Friday FedEx brought me a (very) used laptop computer. This changes everything, and soon I can clean out Sylvia the writing trailer and get back to work, and this time finish my projects.

But my joy in finally receiving the new-to-me tool was tempered by grief: when I went out last week to give my surely thawed-and-hungry goldfish their first feeding of spring, I found to my horror that a crack (or something) had developed in the great Rubbermaid tub, and when the thaw came the ice in the crack must have liquified and allowed the water to run out. I found a dry trough and my beloved fish dead and dry on the bottom of it. I ran away, sick with shock, and wept all morning. This was our fourth winter together and I had looked forward to greeting my babies again this spring. The 200-gallon trough had still been full only a few days before.

This is the second mass fishkill I've endured here (the first due to poisoning from raw blackrubber hoses). I told husband I will get an aquarium now, instead.

Abductee recommended I use the flute in ceremony for my deceased fishes. Maybe I will.

What a sweet Sunday morning. Outdoors the air is bright and still, with some frost at the edges. I'm back in bed nursing my carrot-orange juice and tepid cafe-au-lait (ole!) and cold gruel-with-blueberries-and-goat-milk.

This is the last week goat milk will be available here at the supermarket. Stocking it was a bold experiment that didn't take. It was in my own budget too rarely to convince their accountants it was worth keeping, I guess, so it's been discontinued, and I bought up what I could of the shelf stock and froze it.


Yesterday I put together the heavy white corner desk and chair that came in a kit from some online close-out sale, the perfect birthday present for brotherB. I've never seen him as happy as he is this morning, hard at work there with his stencils and pens. Meanwhile in the livingroom a mountain of coats and sweaters, the storage for which had to be eliminated to make room for B's new desk, looms dark and enormous. I will scale it anon.

From my spot on the bed I can see through the door and out the livingroom window our little herd of deer in the vacant lot hungrily cropping the green furze. Winter's far from over here, but this past warm week or two brought some tender tips of grass out.

It's been a week of frustration and annoyance at the Bookworm shop. I was out ill until Thursday and then hit it on all cylinders Friday. But the shop will falter and fail: The steady stream of donations that keeps the shelves filled must first get past the head librarian, who steadfastly refuses to release them. All she'll let us have are the boxes and bags of tatty romances that go straight to the landfill or storage shed. For a month her sorting table has been heaped with gorgeous like-new biographies and histories and travel books, cook books, CDs and videos, and the shop is starved as all the good stuff has been bought and fewer and fewer customers return for the fresh stock that consistently is not there. It's as though she wants to starve us. But really, she doesn't understand the marketplace, and how deadly such games can be.

I'll draft an email, yet another plea, explaining how the flow of volumes must be constant to keep the shop alive, and this time I'll cc some Friends-of-the-Library brass.

So much to do today. I can hardly keep myself from getting out of bed. I'll make a list of everything I must address - outline my PSA presentation for the FOL meeting in 9 days, send out the announcement for the first monthly brown-bag workshop in the library conference room (where I'll orient volunteers and teach them how to examine and describe books to post for sale online, and how to clean and repair them, and how to pack and ship them, and so on), keyboard and print labels for the shelves and new pricing signs, and then finally my personal goals for the week month and year (and even lifetime) - and then I'll lay out the tarot as I used to those years of Sunday mornings when all I could do was lie here and convalesce.

Then I'll get up and tackle that mountain.

So here I am, up and about. Yesterday I tried actually to stay put in bed, and I managed to do so most of the time. Today I have made it as far as the livingroom bigsoftchair.

But soon I must shower the film of illness off my skin and out of my hair and dress myself in layers of black turtlenecks and heavy denim and make my way to the Bookworm to try to catch things up there. The LibraryFriends have sold a book and I must track it down in their storage and ship it. The sweet developmentally challenged couple who volunteer for the Thursday four-hour shift in the Buck-a-bag Book Trailer start work at noon and usually need some reassuring.

And I'm sure there's sorting to do.

Yes, I'm still coughing a little, still filling great bandana-handkerchiefs with nasal effluvia, but I can't stay in bed forever.

So here I go. In a minute.

The world out there for several days has alternated moments of sun with longer moments of gray and snow - dry graupel snowpellets that sublime quickly into the cold-desert arid air. We had some pleasant windbluster and naked trees tossing and bending. Soon it will be too late, too warm, to gather balsam poplar buds for salve-making. It may be too late already. I'm sure the balsam is thick and heavy on the buds this year, because this past January gave us so many weeks of below-zero temps.

But I don't even know where to find balsam poplars on this side of the Warners, here on the plateau. I had a whole forest of them around my little house on Little Dream Farm, but that was long ago, in the SurpriseValley over the mountains 30 miles from here. When I bought this little house, I bought two saplings to plant in my back yard, from the ForestFarm catalog. But hungry towndeer persistently gobble them to the ground. So.

I have 20 minutes now to pull myself together. OK then. Nice visiting with you.

Several weeks of foolish common viral illness. Flu, then head cold, then almost well but not quite, and so then bronchitis and some days of fearful bedrest imagining a lurking pneumonia (an old enemy from a former life). Now the lingering cough and return of the headcold double-blast. How much phlegm can the body of a stupid poet generate? Gallons, certainly, by now.

I have had to get substitutes for my this-week's shifts at the FriendsOfTheLibrary used book shop I coordinate so I can concentrate on really getting well. Although of course I spent every day here catching up housework put by in my bookshop frenzies elsewhere. On the weekend I drove to a remote ranch and bought many near-new and vintage volumes for my own business, and another canvasbagful from a sale in town. I had a fever but went out anyway - such opportunities are rare hereabouts - and I have paid for my folly healthwise while benefitting in terms of business: every purchase was a gem, worth its weight in dollar signs.

I've got to get well, though, and so today I'm back in bed with cough drops and lomatium tinctures and my trusty Vicks Vapoinhaler. And every cat and dog in the house, and brotherB frantically crayoning his colorbooks across the room. Last night as I got in bed he said, "Sore throat? Drink water ..." motioning at the same time with his big flat fingers in his peculiar pidgeon-sign language. His concern is worth worlds. And I take seriously his health advice, always. His instincts are good.

I do have a book to mail today, but maybe husbandSkip can take it to the post office for me later. Meanwhile I try to lower the flame on my hyperactivity and keep still, keep still, drink water, pet pets, read Robert A. Johnson's Inner Work on using dreams and active imagination, keep Eno on the headphones, and daydream that soon I will resume writing, soon I will make a garden.

New Year's day

I move about chill digs in hungry morning,
feeding four-leggeds, feeding small
retarded brother, feeding me
too, porridge, & black faux coffee,
carrot and orange together juiced and diluted.

Out the big windows ice glitters on dazzlesnow
& morning temperature is 1 degree.
While water comes to kettleboil I try
an old routine on the yoga mat. Ugh.

My old body, long accustomed just to sit or lie,
incredulous. Just what, it wonders, am I doing?
I wonder it too - nothing stretches, nothing holds.
I shudder at shoulder, wobble at knee, I bend halfway.
I stand. I still stand pretty well.

Cagebirds mutter & peck. Old fed terrier snores in the corner.
Brought-in potted plants array glad leaves
receiving a.m. windowlight.

Out there, ice, ice.