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.