These places & persons as things & spots are all inside any one of us. ... the whole world & all experience is, no matter how real, only a system of metaphor for the allegory (Keats called it) a man's life is.
- Charles Olson

Some chemical smell, oldfashioned shoe-polish or melting electrical, overpowering here but not a stroke (yes!) because I lose the scent when I walk through other rooms. I've checked the outlets and the cords, put the computer to sleep ... is it coming through this window? Someone burning plastic? Ech, nauseating.

I'd wanted to have the Thing finished, what I'm writing. I finished final edits on paper yesterday late morning, meant to keyboard them early afternoon, but as I was winding toward the work (lightening anxiety by organizing rooms, thereby organizing mental energy, as I do) Husband descended to start his own day. I told him what I was doing and that I had a deadline. He congratulated me and proceeded to talk virtually without stopping for breath until nearly suppertime, and me practically in tears. I still do not know how to express needs firmly. I had expected him to coffee and withdraw, which he does every day without fail. But not yesterday. And oddly enough not back on the day when this material all came to me in a rush I had to get down or lose it, and so I lost much of it, back in December.

Anyway I blurted finally that I had to get going, and he asked to remain in the room then reading quietly, and so I went outside to water plants and unconfuse myself. When I returned he had gone upstairs. I sat down then before the text column on the screen and soon realized I was so weary and overheated I would lose the music that sang to me so clearly just that morning. So I closed the file, showered, curled up for sad nap.

No one's fault, I decided. Something wants me to slow down. And it was true, after the morning's edit I was burned out. So why can't I begin work today? Husband has promised not to talk to me until evening. But I am groggy today - where's the jar of guarana? - and having doubts again, and since the deadline for online submissions where I wanted it to go is midnight tonight, I'm afraid I will rush now and damage it.

I'll get to it, in a bit. I'll take it easy. Other, later deadlines are out there.

Anyway, eventually I'll have a MacBook and can do computer work in trailerSylvia.

I received a bushel of cheap used books in yesterday's mail. Husband accepted the packages at the door, to my embarrassment. Why books ordered on this day and that over the course of a month must always arrive at once on a Monday I will never understand.

I finished reading Brother Souls all teary-eyed on Sunday afternoon, and so today I've started several other books hoping one or two will grab hold of me. Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg's Composed On the Tongue account of his acquaintance with Ezra Pound at Rapallo. Poor EP! All Ginsberg seems to do is sing him Hare Krishna. But I love the words he finally squeezes from the otherwise stubbornly silent 82-year-old Pound:

[Ginsberg]"Ah well, what I'm trying to tell you - what I came for all this time - was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion - unless you want to be a messiah ... anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?"

He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

"I do," he said " - but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything - " This is almost exact.

... and I responded, "Ah, that's lovely to hear you say that ... " and later "as it says in I Ching, 'No harm.'" (pp.8-9)

Olson will be more difficult to crack. He seems so lacking humor or joy. But he shares my birth date of December 27 (though his is 1910), so I am curious.

Those are the two volumes near to hand as I type. There are others.

I was thinking yesterday how adult life is like a kind of exile in a foreign land and when you approach old age you want to go home again, live as you did as a child, where things are familiar. And so people who grow up in the countryside go off to cities and then return to the country late in life, and I, who formed my Self in central Los Angeles and have sought remoteness most of my adult years since then, now long to immerse myself again in urban energies.

I think maybe it's immoral, environmentally, for humans not to live in cities. Perhaps the only ones who should be allowed to live in the wilderness are holy persons - farmers, monks, and such. Then we would have to learn how to make cities healthy and livable because we could not flee them.

But who would want to live in such a restricted world?

[Midafternoon addendum: I sought Husband's brief company for coffee at lunchtime. When it seemed clear his (otherwise welcome) stories would continue again for a while I stood abruptly in his midsentence and said "I've got to go." And he said, laughing, "I'm so proud of you," and stood himself and kissed me. God sent him to me for many reasons, but surely one of them was this lesson.]

Image of Charles Olson from pavellasmusic.wordpress.com via Google

As you get older, you husband your attentions, they seem to concentrate themselves more, you are more fluent about less. You use your energies and, with any luck, they burn with an intenser light. ... One can't get on if paralyzed by the grinding knowledge of the brevity of life, and the ephemerality of works. And getting on is our most important duty, a vow we make in the worthiness of the baffling endeavor of remaining human. One part of being human is sometimes failing to keep the faith. For a writer, who spends his time so many fathoms down in the murk and complexity of the human personality, periods of "savourlessness" are inevitable. As I say, they usually presage an on-coming change, and the only way to initiate that change is to pass through (not around) the temporary melancholia. You can't reach dawn without enduring the night. Wishing won't make it so.

            --John Clellon Holmes

Mild summer. Dry, because this is desert after all, but, once you've acclimated, the 90-degree days are kind of pleasant. It takes most of the day to reach that temperature, after all. And nights are cold, so we're lucky there. It's the searing light that gets to the plants, but they seem to be getting used to it.

Coming off my third monthly three-day greenapplepurge. I didn't do so well fasting this time, and so yesterday was very difficult. But I was well by day's end and it's another month before I do that again. Meantime, discomfort is gone, again, and I continue to dodge the surgery bullet.

Oh but I was so hungry I stuffed myself with bowls of stew last night, frenzied almost. And was finally calmed.

Husband continues to instruct me in astrology. Finally I understand progressions, and that adds a new dimension to self-understanding - and other-understanding. How the natal sun advances around the chart at a degree per year (and other planets by something likewise) so you can see how you have changed and grown over time, encountered and overcome challenges (or not), and so on. My own sun has moved from the thudding Capricorn of my birth, through the disconnected Aquarius of my middle age, and now shines in Pisces, of all places! Which makes such sense, as I have remarked often on my sensations of feelings thawing and love understood.

I was ill three days with my chronic mono after doing all that heavy lifting last weekend (damn! I didn't take my tinctures to prevent that, it was so long since I'd been sick), and then with the fasting thing I was out of commission all week. I worried yesterday that it might be that I've forgotten how to be well. I am so accustomed to my bed and pillows.

So I must remember my tinctures and vitamins and brotherB's, too, and to drag us outdoors for walks every day in the sun. B's becoming sturdy again, too. Almost a full head of hair now.

Have I anything of interest to say? Evidently not. I hear husband running water in his bedroom sink for brushing teeth, and now his TV goes on and the urgent sounds of a broadcast horse race trickle down the stairs. From brother's room the clunks and thuds of dresser drawers opening and closing as he put his clean laundry away. Lovebirds screech from the kitchen. Doves coo from the powerlines out the window. dogApple sighs in sleep at my feet.

We had chosen CarmelValleyVillage as destination of our planned Great Escape from the ModocPlateau, a concrete location to visualize living in and so create an energy to follow out. Lightning can't strike unless the stricken object first sends up a little tendril of request, and we imagined that's what our picturings were, in the energetic scheme of things.

It made sense, because Husband's siblings and mother all live in nearby Monterey, and his children from former marriage live or visit nearby. It would make it easier to keep in contact. And I had grown up in Southern California (when I wasn't exiled to the Iowa farm of my grandparents) and could easily imagine the environment there, familiar enough.

But the picture wouldn't hold, much as I loved the hot smell of baked earth and manzanita I conjured, and the sensation of dappled shade.

Next we chose Chicago, where Husband grew up and lived and worked for many years. He misses it often, I think, and still has friends there. I had no sense imagery to put with it - my only contact with Chicago was a 30-minute airport layover en route to New York in 1982 - but we collected photographs and websites and I was getting to know its layout pretty well.

Although it never felt quite right.

New York might never have occurred to us if we hadn't played around one day with location astrology to see where our planets and asteroids were best aspected. And there it was, New York City, shining like a great beacon across the basins and ranges and plains between here and there. As though made for us.

So here's a street map of Manhattan on the corkboard at the foot of my bed, and this week a promising series of dreams located there, in which I always get an apartment easily and easily afford it.

I think it could be the place for us to stay, for a while. That's what the stars say, anyway. Now to do something to make that lightning strike ...

"Knowledgeable." That's the key. It was only after beginning the input of new book inventory into the old online bookseller account that I remembered. It came up fuzzily, with a fringe of little question marks, but soon enough I had full recall of the fact that no money can be made whatever UNLESS you have listed at least several thousand titles. For one thing, there's the monthly fee for using the web site. For another, all that competition means that even a five-star rating can't help you much.

Sobering. What am I doing??? I thought. Do I REALLY want to get into all this again? If it isn't a full-time activity then it's just a giant energetic drain with no hope of profit. You're either in with both feet or not.

So ... not.

Whew. That was close.

***

Labored a third afternoon yesterday in the heat and dust with friendKathleen emptying the Bookworm shelves and making a space in my storage unit for the boxes therefrom. Today I lounge and study and recover, grateful for the unexpected gift of cool gray the morning brought.

I just read a study that says persons, like my brother, who have celiac disease, more often than not react to corn gluten, too. This explains why he hasn't bounded back as strongly as I'd hoped when I changed his diet two years ago. He has regrown about 60 percent of his hair, and I noticed yesterday a bunch of pale whiskers just visible on his pale cheeks. So we have made some progress. My main concern is bone loss, though. He gets smaller by the day and has developed scoliosis. I trot him 'round in the sun every day and give him supplements, but corn has been a big part of our diet.

Out with it, too, then. Damn.

Spent yesterday afternoon in bowels of local Friends of Library "Bookworm" used book trailer clearing shelves of decades-old compost to make way for (finally, at long last) fresh stock. Much of what we removed will be "recycled" at local junk store or landfill, but I was privileged as volunteer to skim the cream, though not as completely as I would have liked. Found a couple of volumes that will go for 50 or 100 dollars, but I may spend tomorrow rooting around in the stacked garbage-book boxes (awaiting Monday pickup) for more.

Today we continue - I have offered a free corner of my storage unit for the group to store the boxes of high-graded material soon to be donated to another FOL group 50 miles to the north, which is starting its own shop and needs good stuff to get off the ground.

I am so incurably mercenary I can't stand the thought of any possibly valuable volumes being lost, even though the idea of returning to my old bookseller daze makes me queasy. It was something I did while my mind recovered from emotional breakdown mid-2000s, when I couldn't think well enough to do anything else. I enjoyed it. Eventually though my physical health broke down, too, and in 2010 I got rid of my entire 20,000-volume stock to make space in my hovel and to rest for a few years. I can't believe I'm into it again, but the profit potential when one is knowledgeable is seductive - especially if, like me, one is barely surviving on minimum-wage dole while attempting to create "art."

Flat dry heat and relentless hammer of UVs returns. The plants burn and curl no matter how moist the soil.

I dreamed last night of an old African woman who fed the famished inhabitants of the drought-stricken interior from the gardens around her hut beyond the mountains, in a green moist crescent up against the sea and sand.

Nights chock full o' dreams lately - New Moon.

Yesterday was midsummer gift of overcast and cool breezes. Soft and almost unreal. Gratitude was boundless. I had been reduced to sobs last week to see my outdoor canopy and umbrella thrashed and smashed by wind and my plants deer-nibbled. The oppressive heat and sere desiccating everything, my brain, my skin. I couldn't water hard enough to make it up.

I feel better now, indoors working and determined to keep detached from results of yard work. I water, I cultivate, but I no longer invest hope. We redouble our efforts to escape the grim desert plateau we've been confined to for far too long.

Set back to work on opus part 3, which will be done now in a minute and lobbed into those offices all unprepared to receive it. Resume was updated and cleaned up, but I find I can recall no reference names from back in the day, and the venerable Rolodex has gone missing. So - stalled. Again.

When you give birth there is a stage just before crowning called "transition" where many mothers weaken and give up, ask for drugs, anthing, in their fear. They are told, always, "Too late. It's almost over." And so it is, in a joyful rush.

And that seems an apt metaphor for this work: I grow discouraged, convinced of my words' unworthiness, and certain I labor under delusion. Then I pick up one of these biographies and learn that every hopeful artist gets to that point - repeatedly, with some - and gives up, goes underground, hits the rails, whatever, to escape his or her failure. That's when, inevitably, everything comes clear, and the work gels.

I must remember that.

Rare high desert midsummer gray, cool soft skies wrapping us in kindness.

I have deserted Sylvia after several months of trailer life. Made my bed in the Little-Big-House livingroom instead, and the past two nights I have slept (sort of) back in my creatures' midst. Awoke today with all five cats and one dog pressed against me, very welcoming.

I have taken this room over now during the day. If I need complete isolation for some work that actually begins to flow, Sylvia is available, but such a creative breakthrough seems unlikely. I polish old work here, and, yes, polish my resume as well. It's time to get real. The thyroid supplements have taken hold at last and it's time to earn money again somehow now that I have clarity of thought and vigor of body.

My tower computer died briefly last week, refusing to power up. I had written it off and resigned myself to iPhone computing until a laptop could be acquired - how, I couldn't imagine - but then a brainstorm sent me cracking open the computer case and hunting around for a tiny gray button somewhere in the innards. Sure enough, a quick press of the PRAM reset got the beast back to its feet, and it looks as though we're good to go for a while longer. I haven't had to reset a PRAM for 15 years ... I'd all but forgotten about it.

I have still a few minutes before I head in to the Big House. Heat finally hit. High 90s F and dry wind. I give thanks for flat-rate water, although the succulants wither and brown, sunblasted, despite wet roots.

I typed up a yellowing sheaf of old scrawled poems on my Skyriter manual, and then reworked them in ink, as of olde. It's satisfying. My only computer burned up somehow over the weekend so I can't do fancy Office editing. I like seeing the sheets pile up on the desk and the close lines of fuzzy black Courier type all scratched and scribbled on.

The afternoon's wind pounds and rocks poor Sylvia. The little AC hums along coolly. DogApple and catGreta are happy to nap here.

And just like that the cloud lifts.

I wake as usual in a bitter lonely funk and go through the morning motions as always, half-there, ruminating on the death of a notion of family that exists nowhere anymore, so why mourn?

And having portioned out the kibble and seed and porridge among the House creatures that pass for my family now, poor things, I retire to trailer with my bowl and my mug to break my own fast while scrolling through my iPhone apps for news of the day, then take up my pen and my book.

In my little SylviaSanctuary, redone now and so sweetly blue.

I glance up from the text beyond my reading glasses to notice the peace of the scene, the rumpled comfort of it, and the breathing animals. And from outside declared and redeclared the innocence of sparrows and the dreamlike everpresent approach and retreat like oceanwaves of big rigs on the highway.

And I remember again, as I did when I was 40 and 20 and 12 and 4 and anguished from isolation, how beautiful and perfect things can be in the instant, the pedestrian Now, and all misery and loss and abandonment - that's what actually constitutes illusion.

Outage. Bodyhealth stuff. And then wholebody edema that brought my mood low with the pointlessness of everything. Odd attitude for a former Pollyanna. But I recognized it as soggy brain syndrome and knew the bad attitude would pass as the water did.

I worked too hard in the yard for too many days in a row under the fierce light and a summer heat that was not fierce yet, particularly, and yet it knocked me out. Ah well. Here we are now.

We have acquired a 10-by-10 four-footed gazebo sunshade and erected it over the top of the wobbly umbrella for double protection, enjoyed sitting outdoors scribbling and bibbling. But although every day starts calm and cool with birdsong and sweet air, each day ends with a vicious wind, one day from the north, the next from the south, and before I knew it my staked-down gazebo had tipped up and over. BrotherB will help me carry it back and set it up again. Stakes don't count for much in this stony soil, I guess, so I'll bind each of the four legs to a strawberry planter pot and hope for the best.

I have tomatoes planted finally - mature plants left over at the nursery - along with their unbought squashes and sweet potatoes, with some parsleys and cilantros and nasturtiums for the planters. Leggy remnants of their spring garden stock.

Reading, taking notes, Olson's "Projective Verse" essay. Pausing to write little notes to loved ones who respond only to the nonpersonal matters, as though for an older person to confide in a relative were an embarrassment best left unaddressed. Young people have become so strange and mean. So good-bye to them, I suppose.

Yes, depressed. It will come back, the lifespirit, I'm pretty sure.

Echh what a miserable and sick 24 hours that purge was. Foolishly I tried Hulda Clarke's Epsom-salts method, not understanding what Epsom salts, intended here to be used by non-fasting people, actually can do to a body. I should have realized that, after my three days' fasting, Epsom salts would be a violence to my body - and was it ever. I swallowed my two doses Friday evening at 8 and at 10. It began scouring my innards immediately, and by midnight I was a weak and dehydrated and heart-pounding mess, heart pounding all the sleepless night as I tried to lie flat and still (fat chance! running to the toilet every 15 minutes) and let the olive oil do its work on my gall bladder - which it did, I suppose - as before, all my right-side discomfort is gone like a miracle - but I was feeble and sick afterward and empty for sure. Gradually yesterday I returned to normal as I ate wonderful food and drank blessed water. No more Epsom salts for me! My gentle, effective apples & olive oil will suffice for my monthly cleanses after this.

Still windy but cool here now, and cold nights. Early Saturday - maybe 5 a.m. - as I writhed in wakeful tachycardic misery in my little trailer, a powerful rainstorm swept through and pounded the roof tin, winds rocking Sylvia and us inside her (catGreta, dogApple), & delightful healing din of whitenoise water and fitful air. Everything is clean again now. Summer heat is due back next weekend (it will be July, after all) but I'll be ready for it this time, and won't complain. Maybe.

I'm looking at the day's third Granny Smith apple, untouched (the apple) on the sill. Tonight is the Second Big Gallstone Purge and so I'm supposed to stop all intake, solid and liquid, at some point - 3 o'clock? 6? It's OK because by Day 3 of the apple fast you're not hungry anymore anyway.

Glorious gray gusty cool today. I'll have to lower the south awning again before it's ripped from its hinges. Hark! is that rainspatter din on tin roof? Splendid. I didn't want to mow the lawn today, anyway.

Reread Hemingway's "The Gambler, The Nun, The Radio" this morning, tangenting from discussion of white noise in the choral interstices of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues. Strange story; I'd forgotten how strange. Odd repetitions and refrains. I'll read Hemingway for Part 4 of the Thing I'm Writing, and Gertrude Stein behind Part 5. Joyce will do for 1, and for 2 maybe tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur - that's it! I'll just burrow into My Book House. Part 3, my finished "Road Choruses," is Kerouac. Six needs something sensual, overwritten - something Jamesian, maybe, or out of Virginia Woolf.

The Lombardy poplars across the way bend and sway in their neat row; trees always seem to dance in slow motion, in any wind. When I was young and paid attention to the World Out There I used to hypnotize myself watching them communicate among themselves, especially if the leaves were shiny and the sun was high, all the sparkles. I remember lying in bed during my second miscarriage, having taken too much Darvon for the pain, following, waltzing with those leafglints in the grove out the window.

Billowing curtains - same thing.

(blasted heat)

(blasted wind)

Janet Frame's mystical conception of her creative source was a place called Mirror City, where a demanding Envoy waited for her to bring her memories and perceptions to use as foundations for the palaces she built there - her novels and stories. At the end of the third volume of her autobiography The Envoy from Mirror City, she has the Envoy say,

What does it matter that often as you have departed from Mirror City bearing your new, imagined treasures, they have faded in the light of this world, in their medium of language they have acquired imperfections you never intended for them, they have lost meaning that seemed, once, to shine from them and make your heart beat faster with the joy of discovery of the matched phrase or cadence, the clear insight. Take care. Your recent past surrounds you, has not yet been transformed. Do not remove yet what may be the foundation of a palace in Mirror City.

Writers who are mostly Rememberers as opposed to inventors are very often Aspies like me, I think. If male, like Jack Kerouac, they may follow the common male Asperger pattern of using alcohol to relieve the chronic anxieties of coping in the bizarre and confusing society of NeuroTypicals. If Female, they may follow that pattern and study and mimic NTs to the best of their abilities, withdrawing to seclusion at every opportunity and for as long as practicable.

In many of us the compulsion to record and transform every memory and perception begins as soon as one can write, because the mind processes so slowly, and too often memories evaporate before that processing takes place. To incorporate them, then, we preserve them and study what we've written or drawn until it becomes a part of us.

We keep Childmind into old age. It's our neurology - the emotions never mature. And although this gives us a rough life - we never figure out how to be grown-up; we falter without tenders and managers - at this point in my own life I finally find Childmind a blessed relief. I am able to see the world fresh every day.

Grief and confusion because of my alienated family consumes me still, when I let it, but gradually I am learning how to let that pain go and stay present and mindful of life where I am.

Consuming Aspie biographies like bonbons these past months has paid off with understanding and some peace. Those shy turbulant socially ill-equipped artists so focused on their work that great palaces rose up around them - what matter they were built of mirrors?

Several days of cool, then another, now, of wind and heat and dust.

I've begun my monthly greenapple fast, just Granny Smiths and bottled water, with black coffee in the morning to fend off withdrawal headaches. This first day is challenging mostly because I have only four apples, but two of them are large, and as of now (3:07 p.m.) I still have two waiting. I will allow myself today, as last time on Day 1, a beverage (right about now) of molasses stirred into hot water, to ease the sugar jones.

I wasted yesterday from 10 in the morning until quite late in the evening dealing with a techno-crisis that turned out to be no crisis at all. My iPhone suddenly was "unable to join" the house's wi-fi signal, and also refused to recognize my email. After hours spent on Skip's cellphone talking to three clueless tech-support persons in succession, I ended up wiping and reformatting and restoring the unit's contents - 108 apps, 259 songs, hundreds of books, etc - which is a criminally slow procedure.

And ultimately unnecessary. All I had needed to do was reset the wi-fi router and change my email password. Which I figured out once the reformatting was already underway.

The upshot is that I lost a day of work, so have had to cancel my Wednesday visit with friendKathleen to make up for it.

I spent most of this very hungry day burrowed into Nicosia's Kerouac biography and Janet Frame's autobiography: Jack descends into suicidal alcoholism while Janet, at last diagnosed as sane-all-along, embraces her calling and finally earns literary fame.

And then of course I've scribbled some - written a letter to artguyJim down in Yolo (who gave me this trailer) and then faced the terror of My Own Work, which gradually becomes less and less terrifying. I have a title for the overall opus, and names for nine of its parts (with a tenth and eleventh TK). Part 3 is completed already, and Part 1 virtually so, requiring only the gathering and consolidation of a series of sort of hallucinatory early-childhood bits from an old blog.

Husband and brother are doing very well and so are the pet people.

I'm pretty sure it's time for that molasses now.

Yesterday - murderheat boiled my brains before I knew it. Evening, staggered with brotherB to storage unit and dug out from the back of all the junk a tiny Samsung airconditioner brand-new still-in-box someone gave us back in 2006. It fits exactly into one trailer window and ahhhhhh is so good in here now. How did my then-angelfriend know I'd need it one day?

Study today includes deconstruction of the Kerouackian sentence and further reading in a bewildering Paris Review interview with an incoherent and months-from-death Charles Olson. I want to understand the whole Projective Verse deal (tried before, back in college daze), although this interview is not likely to help me there.

Still time to scritchscratch at some poems before I go indoors to invent a lunch for my people.

This hot arid wind means I will have to water everything deeply again today. Cruel climate. Nothing grows, at least not without llama poop around it for good magic. A one-foot-tall lilac cutting I planted three-and-a-half years ago is still one foot tall. Likewise the wan honeysuckle still struggling at the foot of a fencepost. Few of my perennials came back this year - but here are the comfrey, faithful friend, and feverfew, yarrow, and a lonely hollyhock. The three-foot pine tree I planted in '09 is now ... three feet tall.

I gotta track me down some llamas.

Another warm fore- and afternoon. I missed my cool-of-the-day walking window; perhaps early evening instead, then. These breezes (as opposed to gales) sweeten the day.

Hard to believe school is out. Neighborkids are with their fathers abroad for a week or two, so quiet prevails, and no interruptions other than those imposed by my role as care provider to my brother, husband, and pets.

Inevitably, then, I remain stalled creatively. I struggle not to toss it all in the fire: keep the eye on the process, not the result.

Movement of body moves the mind. This is true. So I break from Sylvia's innards and go out to tend the wilting yardplants and feed the trough-fishes, run the errands, make the stew to get us through to payday.

Tormented Elm lends her winddriven stems to the afternoon chorus, and I can detect no suffering behind her generosity.

A magnificent afternoon, wind just starting to come up, temp around 85F in Sylvia here. The leaves rustle seductive in the Tormented Elm framed in the narrow doorway.

My mind feels turned-around, a little, not quite grounded, as though one foot of me still stood on the ground of vivid dreamworld I woke from so reluctantly. My dreams of night are sweeter and fuller with every sleep since I move toward full health. It's a blessing.

But this mindframe prevents my concentrating on the page, any page, whether bookstudy or journal.

I keep drifting away ...

A noise of chainsaw - another tormented tree, perhaps. Among the dry weeds here a fawn-colored butterfly flits - blossoming salsify and alfalfa - and a housefly swerves ess-ing around.

But sparrow twitter from neighbors' shrubbery, constant, and whoosh of movement from the highway yonder.

Sylvia's wall thermometer reads 85F degrees. The top of my head is beginning to simmer a little, no sizzle yet. Roof vent has been popped, shad-side window cranked out, small floor fan pushing the air around. I overslept, now trying to catch up studying, still copying notes from Nicosia's Memory Babe Kerouac biography.

The poet Robert Duncan, reading this [cafeteria, Visions of Cody] scene in manuscript in 1954, was struck by Kerouac's extraordinary ability to sustain a 1500-word narrative in which the only exterior action, besides the passing of pedestrians, is the flashing of a neon light.

and from Visions of Cody itself,

"... my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream."

***

I dreamed of a small personal jet a wealthy friend owned. I let him park it on the vacant lot near my house. I looked out one day soon thereafter to see it being stolen - towed off down a shady alleyway at the lot's far end. I ran to cach up with the thief but I was too late. The towing tractor had reach the vacant nighttime avenue the alley gave onto and joined the column of carnival acts moving out in drays and flatbeds to some faraway venue, where it would be exhibited. I told the policeman I called then that I'd had it nearby because my friend had promised to teach me to fly it, if only I could get past my fears. Secretly I knew, though, that I would not have needed lessons. Secretly I knew I would have flown it just fine, on instinct.

Great winds rocking the little Aladdin caravan all night long. I left the fiberglass awning up to fend for itself, unwilling to go fiddle with it in the dark and cold wind of aftermidnight. Caught in the gale, it filled the cabin with a groaning and creaking that wasn't unpleasant, and wasn't the reason I didn't sleep. That I can blame on a sugar binge yesterday midafternoon and then icecream dessert too late in the evening. Shameful. But blissful as any narcotic. (Careful, though, careful ... )

Slept late in the morning, then fed the crew, fetched in the mail (package - a browned and marked-up used paperback on "the lives & literature of the Beat generation"). Back in Sylvia's warm officebed I consumed my own oatmeal&blueberries and mug of coffee, swallowed my magic thyroid pill, and spread around me the day's books and notebooks. (Interruption: a quick online foray to order refills for my Energel pens ... )

Conventional modes of composition had forced the writer to ignore much of what he really thought. Lifting the censorship of the conscious self, Kerouac opened the door to the unconscious, by all accounts the mind's richest storehouse.

That's the storehouse I want to access. It's the core reason for all the isolations of my days. And now that I'm recovering finally from a decades-long decline and enfeeblement, now that I am (ironically) revitalized in this my 60th year, I may again participate in the common realities of the consensus world, take them in and set them down transformed. Time to allow some life in. Refill, refill.

To prove me wrong -or, better, to give me a little gift - the worldgods have bestowed upon us these eight or ten days a taste of spring, gray and drizzly, sometimes downpour, sometimes a fresh burst of sunbright chilled in breezes. I am loving this. I hope it goes on and on.

The Friday-night overnight so looked-forward-to was a miserable failure, though no fault of the children's. The point of it for me was the grand breakfast I'd planned for Saturday morning, much anticipated by hungryboyDeaven. His sister was ill and did not come along and so it was only he who dropped off so nicely before 10pm on the trailercot at the north end. I, old-ladyish, anxious stayed awake until 3 at least, ruminating. So the awakening at 6:45 was rude indeed, his sister's knocks at the trailerdoor: send him home now. Now. NOW. I was surly and ungracious about it, having had no warning about his family's planned sunrise departure to shop in the city a two-hour drive to the north. Rude, I thought, thoughtless and inconsiderate to permit him his first sleepover the night before such plans. And so after they left I burned through the pages scribbling a short story about a childish grumpy old woman's experiences with a red-headed neighbor child.

It virtually wrote itself.

But anyway we had a good dinner together.

***

Sprinkles now on the trailer tin. Two cats and a dog napping alongside me today as I work. catGreta hunted all the gray damp morning, patiently staking out entrances to ground-squirrel nests in the vacant lot next door. Now she's here for her afternoon lie-down.

Abundance of wonderful nightdreams this week - fullmoontime - my own, husband's, friendKathleen and her husband, and all very similar in their positivity, even in setting. My own had me waking up reluctantly, so vivid and thrilling it was, and I was filled with happiness all that day because of it, and every time now whenever I call it to mind.

Summer is here with nary a spring. It's only taken me the entire 13 years of my confinement to this area to grasp that, on the ModocPlateau, there is no spring. The snows and freezes sublime directly into punishing heat and lightblast, desiccating wind.

But no matter. Yesterday Husband helped me raise the grubby fiberglass awning over Sylvia's long south window, and now it's not unpleasant in here at midday, until time for me to leave anyway and tend to The House.

I sit with my volumes and papers heaped around and watch the line of dark-blue prayer-flags flap in the quickening air. I can't read the Sanskrit on them, so I am ignorant of what it is we pray for. From time to time a paperwasp settles on the cloth there for a moment as it passes through.

From time to time, too, a yellowjacket enters the trailer and bumbles deeply at me and exits again, so I won't forget who's in charge.

Got the ambient noises going on the speaker, catGreta stretching in deep sleep at my elbow.

Bright, warm, spring day. Outdoors, the green stuff is drying out after a week of rain and damp. So is my lawnmower - the first time I've ever let it sit out like that, in the weather. I didn't even fetch a tarp for it. I hope it forgives me. They sometimes do, in my experience. But forgive me quick - the lawns are knee-high in alfalfa and dandelions, thanks to all this moist.

My trough fishes are happy today, too, I'll bet, since they sink in stupor whenever the temperatures drop. When the sun shines, they can eat! and boy do they have appetites.

Neighbor kids have asked to spend the night on Friday and I said sure, in my great happiness, having hoped all my life for grandchildren who would stay with me as I stayed with my own grandmothers as a child. Now I hesitate, though - where will they sleep? Can I handle two at once (these particular two fight and argue incessantly)? Maybe on Friday I can track down foam pads at the second-hand stores and fix up the bunks here in Sylvia opposite my own bed. Otherwise they'll sleep on the floor in the house and I'll have to doze in the recliner or something. Then I'll be wretched in the morning, and I so wanted to fix them waffles and strawberries ... OK, don't get all Aspie about it. This will be fine, you wait and see.

***

Here's dogApple right this moment:

Had a head full of words and delayed setting them down just long enough to lose the thread. ... Well.

***

Eventful week, from my perspective, given that I usually stay shut up in Sylvia most of the day and night and shut up in the house the rest of the time. It rained and rained, which is unusual for these parts and most pleasant to experience from Sylvia's innards. Wonderful sound on the trailer roof, and with the barn heater going and the curtains open wide, catGreta to my right and dogApple at my foot, I was snug and happy indeed. Read copious amounts, taking notes from a heap of books-in-progress. Did almost no writing.

On Monday I drove the old Cougar down the mountain, a rapid turnaround trip for a cheapie ultrasound from a clinic there that serves uninsured people. I suffered not one whit from the journey, so my heart must be beating again behind these thyroid pills. The result of the imaging was - gall stones in plenty, due to my sluggish no-thyroid decades. Doc says let's remove your gall bladder forthwith; I say not so fast.

And fast I did, on Granny Smith apples and spring water, for three days (ugh). Then Friday night I flushed my system with olive oil and lemon juice and spent much of yesterday passing softened (from the malic acid in the apples) stones in great quantity, from sand and gravel to end-of-my-thumb size. Impressive. Felt much relieved, most pain and discomfort of past several years was gone, and I was down another two pounds.

So, yay.

I'll do this every month for another 2-3 months, though, and incorporate lots of raw apples into my menus - at least one Granny Smith every day.

I think all may be resolved.

***

I've been reading John Clellon Holmes's essays in his 1967 volume Nothing More to Declare. If, like Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac is considered anomalous and undeserving of critical respect and more closely looked at in biographical terms, then John Clellon Holmes was Kerouac's Ted Hughes.

In a way.

Having read Kerouac's notebooks, journals, and working drafts during a time in the late '40s when his friendship with Jack was particularly close, Holmes, perhaps not believing Kerouac would ever publish, and lacking themes of his own, wrote and published the novels Go and The Horn and, particularly, the essay "This Is the Beat Generation," using ideas and materials sseemingly culled directly from Kerouac's papers. When Holmes was the first to be published and celebrated it was a slap in the face to the trusting Kerouac, who fumed for a year or two before finally forgiving him.

But I find, at least in this autobiographical collection, which does not seem self-serving but rather generous and affectionate, that the great betrayer has been misunderstood. Here, he is Kerouac's interpreter, apologist, promoter. I find no trace of guilt, but neither do I see any defensiveness. Humility in plenty.

If anything, I think his preemptive work probably broke the ice, provoked the curiosity that got Kerouac read later on - perhaps even got him published in the first place. Holmes could no more parrot Kerouac than fly, given his constricted verbal imagination. Clearly he envies Kerouac's casual access to otherconsciousness, the ease with language his own coifed and tailored approach could never incorporate.

He was not Kerouac's Ted Hughes, in the end, but his John the Baptist. And who remembers him now? This volume of autobiographical essays has been out of print for decades, and the few available used are cheaply acquired.

I think he was an OK guy, in the end.

Breezy enough to sweep through the open Sylvia door and keep her innards to 80F degrees or so, and so bearable and actually quite pleasant to work in as the air passes coolly over the skin.

The occasional yellowjacket drifts in then out again. Never had a yellowjacket on the place until I put up the yellowjacket traps last week. The label said it worked for paper wasps too, the kind that sting the bejesus out of my hands and feet every summer as they nest everywhere, everywhere around and about the house. Instead, the trap pheromone simply attracted every big fat bumblewasp yellowjacket in a five-imile radius to a property they'd never noticed before. The traps are half-full of these hapless critters, while the spindlier wispwasps with the mighty stings go peacefully about their papernest building in the eaves and yardjunk unperturbed.

So. A flawed plan.

Studying all day today. Not really writing. Except for a burst of poetry a month back I haven't really had beautymind in a long time. I do not fear. I know it will return one day.

Meanwhile biographies are closely read and notes scribbled, passages transcribed. Nightdreams ruminated on.

Sitting in Sylvia sipping soft coffee, eating soft oats mapled and raisined. Door open a crack - yellowjackets drift in and out ominously, deep humbuzzes loud in the otherwise silence. Earlier I heard a rustle and glanced through the crack to see a large robin eying me from the weeds just outside, cocking his head around. We gazed at one another for a while and then he hopped off and I meandered back to my book.

I dreamed prodigiously all night long and remembered them, mostly. In the last but one (the one that got away) I lived in a women's shelter. They gave me a very nice room all to myself. I decked it out with all my belongings. I went out each day and engaged in the shelter's activities, sat down to meals with the other women. There was a matron called Grace who was firm but generally kind. One night I decided to sleep in a first-floor cell instead of my own room and when I went upstairs the next morning I found myself locked out, some young black man named Quentin living there. But my things! Where had they gone? I was in a panic, ran about the building demanding to know why I'd been evicted and where they'd taken my things. I was assured my stuff had been boxed up and taken to "The Depot" - a storage place in the town. But when I spoke to Quentin through the opened door I could see much of my stuff remained there. He assured me he would'nt take any of it. Later I forced my way through the door to see that my record collection was missing, decades worth of irreplaceable vinyl albums. I was in a rage. Downstairs, Grace informed me firmly but not-so-kindly that if I wanted them back so badly I could buy them at her second-hand shop "Grace's." Fury. The women around me seemed indifferent. Only the caretaker, a black man (played in the dream by the actor who played Lester Freamon in "The Wire") was sympathetic. He went out with me to try and find an agency that would assist me. In the courtyard of some county offices, though, he collapsed, and I covered him with my coat and put a newspaper under his head and continued alone. When I came out again he was standing up. "Do you have narcolepsy?" I asked. "No, that just happens sometimes," he said. I went on alone, trying not to need a shopping cart (although at one point I pulled one along, humiliated to look like a bag lady). I gathered up some bright yellowgold blankets and sleeping bags from the shelter, things that had been my own originally, and walked out with them. They were awkward to lug around town but I knew I'd need them against the cold of night. I didn't know where I'd be sleeping. At one point I was near the sea, and I stood and watched the waves crashing in for a time. It was a clean upscale coastal town, not unlike La Jolla, the first city I ever ran away to in "real" life, back when I was 14. (There I bought a foil "space blanket" from a sporting goods store for $12 and planned to sleep on the beach before I chickened out and took the bus back home to L.A.) Late in the day, in the dream, as I stood at an intersection hopeless and bedraggled and exiled, I looked up and saw a block or two away the great glass edifice of a public library, darkly packed with so many books they were visible pressed against the window-walls. And my heart opened with gladness and I knew that I was saved.

Terrific afternoon. Skip reads in the yard-chair next to mine. The unmown yard grasses nod and twitch their heavy seed heads in the little breezes, dandelions' spherepuffs white and soft irregular amongst them. Birds twitter and peep, occasional repeated soft dove coo-call.

dogApple lies on the ground between us, alert and panting, ears pricked to hear better the distant barks and yipes of her lonely yardbound dogfellows.

No sleep overnight. Caught a couple of hours 9-11 a.m. Pluto retrograde sits on my natal Sun yet again. Go, go, off with thee, damned planet. This is third or fourth minisleep day in a row. I fear the thyroid supplement is waking me up to old sufferings. So liquid melatonin etc stuff that used to work sometimes, not so much now.

It will pass. We'll find new strategies. I thought I shouldn't waste energy in struggling to sleep, but instead should simply shift my schedule 'round to write at night. But at night I have no words - no images, even. Only endless reruns of the day's events, pounding residual headmusic from evening TV.

Maybe I should just go to bed at 8 p.m. That way it will be a decent hour when the struggle finally ends.

But anyway the immediate world here is beautiful and calm today. Green and gentle and warm.

Thanks.

First wasp sting of the season yesterday - on my sandaled foot as I walked out to water the hollyhocks.

O cruel nature, red in tooth and claw.

I'd had two close calls already that morning - the beasts are everywhere, setting up shop under the eaves, even starting a nest in Sylvia trailer near where I work and sleep! So it was off to the hardware store to buy a pair of wasp traps. Hope to heaven they work.

***

Ongoing health questions use up all my attentions and the Project languishes at the almost-done phase. Meanwhile I've outlined a more straightforward piece on my experience of starting a used-book shop though Asperger's.

The yard - well, much of it - got its first mow yesterday evening. Dragged the trusty mower out from under its eight-month winter tarps, gassed it up, checked the oil, gave it a squirt of starter fluid, and we were off to the races on the very first pull. Things are looking pretty neat and trim.

And the goldfishes in the trough are fat and happy, our first water-lily leaves unfurling at the surface.

Spring comes late to the high desert, and then in a heartbeat it's summer.

All the more precious, then.

***

Look at the time! Off to mail Mother's Day cards. love

The keyboard never is at hand

Again

I'm stuck with the pen

Neighborkids screaming, unhappy at each other

and their mother

shouts, to no end

I pull the headphones on - "Alone in Kyoto" track by Air from the Lost in Translation soundtrack

Alone in Alturas ... drowsy and a little down - will I ever sleep well in Sylvia?

But yesterday woke to gloomsnow and cold, cold

Today is bright, brisk, bluesky and gustwind buffeting
Sylvia

and I within, and dogApple, catGreta

who sleep well, wherever they lie

11:54, "Armellodie" by Gonzales

***

Reading Murakami, What I Think About ... When he runs he listens via earbuds to Lovin' Spoonful, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding. I rush to download the music - soundtrack behind a novelist's mind. Once I read a Nicholson Baker novel wherein the showering protagonist contemplated the satisfying shape and heft of a bar of Basis soap. I have used Basis soap ever since.

***

Has the childrens' discontent reached critical mass? I lift the 'phone off one ear to listen. Angry shrieks. Headphones secure again: Mike Oldfield, "Theme from Tubular Bells."

I have finished reading another wry story in The Grim Smile of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett. Now I take up the wrecked secondhand hardcover volume of Memory Babe, floppy in its cracked binding, and slide back under blankets, lids drooping.

At this rate nothing will be done.

Stephane Grapelli, Chapeau Blues.

Rain all night through, whitenoise on trailer roof, turning to whitesilence midmorning, that peculiar hush that brings one to the window or door to (astonish) fat falling flakes cascading draperies snowgauze across streetscape & trees. Lovely lovely, & so cold here in Sylviatrailer. Should go to house but this is sweet, just catGreta & me under downcomforters & iPhone radio droning ambient tones.

I dreamed of Stiller and Meara (remember them?) in old-age home, settling into their little room together & the mean unheeding nurse. Stiller, Meara - the famously unsuited pair, she tall thin Irish, he short stout Jewish, famously funny. Now in my life - Stillinger, Mills - more unsuited husband and wife could not be imagined, she tall exhippie earthmother Asperger hermit, he short excokespoonwearing Armanisuit executive horseplayer worldtraveler. Brought together by circumstance in late life to age together. Not so funny sometimes, not famous at all, but happy couple mutual support, and pray - keep the mean nurses away, far away.

sweetness and sunshine defeat wintergrim at last

here on high cold desert plateau

wasps erupt from everywhere and set to, siting future nests here and there under the eaves

outdoors, 70 degrees F. - in the writingtrailer, oh! Sylvia, it is 95

unbearable

but we expected this

I am outdoors on cushioned patio chair, under umbrella tilted into descending sun

sliding devices about to follow the sliver of shade remaining

bit of breeze twisting the umbrella on its mast

today is a workday - weekends always best - but no sleep until 5am, and so slept until late, then stream of visitors and interruptions

now pets are fed, visitors gone, & my hands relax onto keyboard even knowing that very soon beloved Husband will emerge, his own work complete, at the agreed-upon hour

and I will welcome him

All right, then. Day four of Life in Sylvia (the backyard writingtrailer). Husband officially moved to upper floor, his bedroom there blacked out for maximum sleep, minimum stress. Landing equipped for his office, big TV & satellite receiver/DVR, his tower computer, desk, & monitor, half-bathroom there. Staircase that only worsened my edema trudging up day after day is perfectly suited to his small feet, to his miraculous thought processes going down them for inspiration, up again for recollection.

I got rid of ugly sofa and loveseat and brought in a newer plum-colored recliner to work from in the livingroom when I need to use my tower computer there. Still no laptop for this trailerwork, though, so I continue from bluetoothkeyboard onto documents created in smartphone office app. My eBay laptop scheme won't work after all: pros attach sniping software to these broken MacBook auctions, and it's impossible to outbid them. They refurbish them in bulk for later resale. So. I'll manifest something a different way.

And I sleep now in Sylvia until I can bring in a sofa bed or other similar for livingroom sleeping. And as I say this is my fourth day. Up early for coffee & oatmeal in here with little electric kettle. DogApple who sleeps here with me every night (catGreta does, too) would not go out in the rain early a.m. to relieve herself but snuggled deep into blankets while I went about my waking rituals.

Good news: all my health problems have been solved overnight with one simple answer that was in front of my face for a thousand years. My lower extremity edema, bellyswell, liverkidney stuff, high cholesterol (despite rawfood vegetarian diet), my insufficient cardiac output, exhaustion, virtual confinement to bed, confusion, hysterical search for answers for ... how many years?--new doctor even getting me ready for MRI expense and trip to faraway cardiologist--finally I delved again into the professional literature at MedScape on my own and voila: all the foregoing inevitably result from untreated-for-decades bottomed-out thyroid hormone.

Period.

Low (as in abysmal) thyroid causes all that. Not in the beginning, mind you, when it's just a nuisance. But ignore it for 40 years and watch what happens.

This is what happens. The extreme case. Sheesh.

So just like everyone else I know I begin daily doses of prescription thyroid supplement. If that can improve my cardiac output, everything else resolves. I don't know whether the edema already there will go away, but I certainly hope some of it does.

Mind too cloudy to write for weeks, now. Now we try to bring it back online. And never again fall into pit of chronic ill-health. Life is short. Getting shorter by the minute.

Slept facing the partopened window last night to get the cold real air, then awoke four a.m. as face was pelted softly in rhythmgusts of siftsnow through screen. Wondrous. Got up to shut the glass, looked out at bluish world snowblue deep in fine sideways windsnow. I was in love with the world in the dark.

And by noon all trace was gone, just damp ground & reminiscing wind.

Now late in the day I start work in Sylvia the Writingcabin, really Sylvia the Writingtrailer but more and more homelike to me. I got the camptoilet configured in the corner--no more trips to the house every half-hour--and made an excellent writingbed out of the dining area, lowering the tabletop and unfolding the cushions across it from bench to bench, covered in rugs and blankets with Turkish-carpet-covered cushions robbed from the housesofa. Color and comfort.

Next week Husband will maybe help me knock out the kitchenette and fridge/closet units to open up the guts of it. I'll assemble the clawfoot round oak table in the space thus opened and stack the square bookshelves up the sidewalls. I'm tempted to live here now, loath to leave it but I have family to tend to. Such a quiet little womb it is, Sylvia. She.

I missed my self-imposed deadline insomniac stupid but would not risk ruining the music of the third and final draft of the Thing I wrote by approaching it with anything less than a crystal-clear awareness. Now I seek time alone with the pages again. I can't work on such projects in here because I still have no laptop computer to edit on & so must stick with the venerable G4 in my upstairs bedoffice. I type right now on my iPhone, but the OfficePro app that opens my manuscript loses the formatting/linebreaks, and they are what this stage is most about, so I'm forced to keep to the house for that--which slows it all down, vulnerable as I am to creatures there. I'm monitoring eBay, though, and may figure out how to get a MacBook Pro--grab a dead one cheap (something that needs only a logic board) and have it refurbished for a few hundred dollars. I think it can be done.

good spring to you

Frustrating today just building up steam for my third and final draft of The Thing I'm Writing, to have it done before the 31st when it must go out in the papermail. Finished the first edit quickly on Saturday, so quickly it didn't raise a sweat, too easy, but enough to tell me it needed one more yank of the wrench on Sunday. I labored through only one chapter yesterday, then, and it wore me out, so I knew I was doing good work. Had to stop lest weariness lose the music for me. Now today I'm revved up and hankering to get back to it, BUT damn world real world must intrude, and here I go off to a brick building downtown for quarterly meeting where I am the area rep for in-home care providers. They always serve a lunch of diet soda which is poison and pizza which I can't touch due to gluten, so maybe this time I'll carry my own lunch and treat myself to an extra coffee (I've got myself down to one cup, with breakfast only, each day). Or not. I have to leave in 10 minutes and I'm still not dressed, having wasted my morning on breakfast and books.

22 March After days of noncreating, during which I gave up on writing altogether and began sending out resumes to solicit paid freelance editorial projects, I read a great deal and stayed mostly flat in bed between errands and housekeeping and serving meals, laundry, and so on. A second journey to the valley for my followup with the painfulacupuncturist became out of the question because the old car is too poorly maintained to go up and down the mountain anymore without worry, and likewise my old body, which will not sleep before such journeys and certainly not in the hardbed motels, and which breaks down from the strain of traveling around, canceling out any hoped-for benefit. I will buy the Chinese powder formulas, though, by mail, from painfulacupuncture person, as they seem to facilitate kidney function pretty well. And try to see the local nonpainful needleguy, who is less effective and doesn't do herbs.

Meanwhile I eat raw food for my first two meals each day and take enzymes and supplements, and I feel well, like I may come out of the woods long enough to earn some money from the page, maybe even enough in the end to move down off the dry high plateau to a valley where sunlight pounds a dusty soil and perfume wafts from the waspgall oak leaves.

wretched winter gloomdays without end
gray gray
sometimes snow

but

poetry.

And dreams.

***

I have a title for my project. The finished section in seven "chapters" will comprise Part 2 (possibly Part 3, if Part 1 grows too large to contain itself) of the larger work. They have titles now. Each Part will come out on its own--this Part 2 first--and when all has been said--and done--will come out together as a single volume, as well.

***

BrotherB's birthday was Saturday. He is 44. I made him a very nice gluten-free chocolate cake and we lit the candles and sang the song.

Neighborboy Deaven spent Sunday and Monday afternoons here. He will turn 8 in April. I hadn't seen him since Christmas, and I was astounded at the changes since just then--his growth is taking off, his voice has a far less screechy timbre, and he has more control over his excitements. His hair is shaggy and a deeper red. We made seedplanting pots out of halved cardboard toilet-paper rolls, and filled a nursery tray with them, and filled them with dirt. We were going to plant seeds yesterday but it was so cold and dim outside and I was hard at work editing my Thing, so he played quietly near my workbed with Legos until his sister came to fetch him home for supper. She is twelve now, and so very thin and mature (and her untended darkening blonde hair reaches now to her knees, and the ungainly braces on her teeth)--nothing like the chortling hollering desperate-for-attention little thing who invaded us three years ago. I praise Jesus and Baha'u'llah and Vishnu et al. that I may grandmother these two in my life.

Listen.

ooh wooooh airs piping past the window slid barely open just so. Gray weather is here, and damp, and chill. No notice of it until the little winds sing. Then memories of just such soft little breezeflutes and gray days from childhood flood the mind and bodysense, feelings from Iowa farm weathers just before storms, trees tossing and big white farmhouse humming and lilting in every little crack and draft.

And the strange remembered happinesses blossoming in the breast.

Ravens out there, too, just now. Near enough to hear their three-caw calls. Except it's not really a caw with ravens, is it? What English onomatopoeia best describes it? There's a slight ringing quality, a higher pitch. And a sort of excitement, an exclamation point built in. The tone of crow caws seems wearier and downwardturning.

Husband emerges from his downstairs lair. Good morning I love you I greet over the wall. Coffee water hisses now in its electric kettle. Crinkle of the stiff plastic bag around Husband's hand as he scoops the new grounds out.

Brief break in cloudcover brings in the skylight beam right on time, falls on my keyboardhands now, not my face anymore, as the arc moves north.

7Feb2012 fullmoon edition: gray day = chilly worktime in the writingshed. Bit drafty, no sunrays to cook the place up. Barnheater churns away.

The water froze again in my drinking cup here overnight.

I have conceived a form for the Thing I Wrote, so I suppose I should go inside and up to the officebed computer and make that happen. I want to print and submit it this week. And start on the next Thing.

Best get on with it, then.

4 February 2012 - First workday in trailer, after a couple of trial afternoons. Started the barn heater running early while I made my breakfast in the house with brotherB. Then, once everyone was fed and settled, I gathered up more Trailer Stuff - notebooks, thesaurus, coffee cup, sardines, etc. - and dragged myself out here. The water in the little cat bowl I put out for Greta yesterday froze solid overnight, but the food and water I stashed in the trailer's nonfunctioning "refrigerator" did not. It was not warm in here, particularly, by then, but the sun through the big window felt wonderful, and a jacket and blanket saw me through until we reached a comfy temperature. Now the heat comes from just sunlight through windowglass.

Here's a quote from Robert D. Richardson's First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:

We need the power to write, but that is only the beginning. We also need the resilience to rebound from our setbacks, the willingness to finish what we start, and the strength to hold out for performance over intention.

***

Here's a new wrinkle. Now that I am outdoors in my own little hut and freed from the need to wear headphones and able to listen again to the fine noises the world makes, some neighbor has acquired a new dog, sounds like a German Shepherd, and left it to bark all the day long. On again go the 'phones.

Damn.

My first note typed into my iPhone from my Bluetooth keyboard while sitting at the table in my writingtrailer. I'll burn some incense, and tomorrow, my first real workday here, I'll smudge and sing. I am thrilled to have this space to myself, this little sanctuary. No more headphones, no more affectionate little pets reclined on the keyboard or pinning down my writing hand. Too wonderful.

The reasons longhand scribbles on paper make the best first-draft medium: first, those simple pages are so much less demanding than the empty windows of a text editor, with its cursor blinking like tapfoot impatience. Second, your handwriting tells a tale all on its own, provides a perfect diagnostic tool for how you really feel about the subject at issue--the leftward lean of fearfulness, forward slope of confidence, squat loops of self-indulgence. Large = excitement, small = anxiety. Et cetera.

Now, the undeviating selfstandardized script of the perfectly integrated mature human being ... I imagine there's profit in watching even that unfurling under your hand.

Just received a little (11 x 5-inch) keyboard in the mail. It pairs with my smartphone (in my case iPhone) wirelessly and lets me use it as a word processor.

At this point computers, for me, are officially redundant.

In this one little device I have radio, TV, DVD player, newspapers, magazines, books, phone, camera, video camera, voice recorder, music editor, stereo, calendar, clocks, web access, research library, post office, gadgets such as levels and plumb bobs, tarot decks, meditation aids, yoga timer, dream interpretation references, I Ching coins and book, shopping mall, bank, bill pay software for all household utilities and insurances, blogger-tweeter-pinner-poster—I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Permaculture apps and resources, political action connectivity ... I will not feel guilt about this. Come the apocalypse I am fully prepared to forage and scrounge to survive, but until then this single tiny device replaces so many electronics units and libraries and tools that I can't help but consider it the environmental savior of the planet. Absurd as that sounds. But really, if it cuts electronics consumption by 90%, isn't that what it is?

Phone taps continued ...

& when the cloud moves again or a spot thins to a hole in the overcast, the sunbeam bursting through, I set aside my Kindlebook & bask my face some more, trying to be healed of heart. But can the light sieved through skylight glass have spectrum juice enough to heal? Don't know. It just feels good.

& then 11:51 the sun moves - earth turns - enough to shift the beam away for the rest of the bedroom day.

***

1pm now and breakin' - down the stairs to the cold back bathroom because Husband's using my warmer ornate sanctuary upstairs pissoir - so much for refuge - but lets me feel generous, not martyr.

Next heating a pan on the venerable Corning hotplate, & grating jack&cheddar cheeses from the just-bought 2-lb block, slapping over the hot corn tortillas & cheeses then splashing Tabasco & scooping on heaps of mealy hothouse out-of-season tomatoes I'd chopped. Hit two glasses of water with shots of grapefruit juice and there, luncheon for brotherB & me.

Plotting plans, reading and listening on headphones to Pandora cinema soundtrack music perfect behind all the mental Sturm und Drang of this silly life, chasing a furtive handful of chocolate chips with a swig of grapefruit water.

This morning 7:54 raven called three times softly at my bedside window. Blessed Raven.

All night I dreamed and dreamed and I recall not what of.

Cloud cover warmed us overnight. The gray outdoors. So I can crack the window here and get some air, opened just enough--just so--that the bit of wind flutes past wooo-woooo in that lovely way.

I wear my earbud piano music now to blot out the downstairs TV yet still I can hear it, and catTed's obese wheezings from his nap on the landing, and the light plastic bing-bang and rattle as Husband downstairs forages among the prescription bottles in his kit bag. And now the local lumber train passes.

***

I stopped work 1/2way through the first edit of the little book I wrote. Derailed. I'll get back. Yesterday and today I return to my Annotated Notebooks adding to each volume. Years 1998-2007 come to 625 manuscript pages now, and 2008-present is over 500. I may have to break the volumes into Parts before all's said and done.

Anyway, the compiling and editing of things are far more similar to my work habits as editor 25 years, and familiar, comforting, absorbing. And sweeping through the old notes is a wonder to me, of growing sons and lurchings from home to home and heart to heart. Mostly it doesn't make me sad to do it anymore. There are transcendent moments in plenty.

Nice meditation, 23 minutes--thanks to visualizations that kept my mind's attention. Even so, I came out before the journey was half over. Ah, the ADD of it! Practice, practice.

Time now with balanced Husband is like a second honeymoon. We get stronger day by day. I can look at him with such happiness: he is well and will stay that way; neither of us doubts it. The excitement and delight are palpable. We walk in beauty.

I am half-done with the first revise-and-edit of my pages, a little discouraged by the Amazon Singles process (having read the new rules). Perhaps I can market it on my own through the site, as an e-book seller. Any Kindle can read a .pdf, after all. On the other hand, I suppose the proprietary format prevents the thing from being shared willy-nilly.

I hate complicated.

In other news, I have discovered the meaning of a persistent dream image. For years my dreams were visited by goldfish in bowls or swimming through the air. Often they had been neglected or forgotten and came to life when I rediscovered them, healthy and mobile. Recently I was flipping through some old journals and saw where in recording one of these dreams I miswrote "goalfish." Huge a-ha moment for me in spotting that word. My dreams are particularly riddled with puns and the like. And this makes perfect sense.

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.

Jonathan Goldman Chakra Chants thundering in the headphones. Sunlight streaming in from skylight, kissing my cheek good-bye as it moves on along the wall.

First writing of the day. Glorious bright still day.

Must spend the afternoon with friends who come here every-other-week to play exotic board and card games, weirder the better. Group has been on hiatus for several months, it's our first Saturday back, and it will be a good time, I think. Today we play 7 Wonders.

***

Good dreams overnight I feel no impulse to record: moving among the friends from Central Casting, having long conversations, picking locks, opening doors. Several young persons I am friends with locally were there, and I was telling them with sudden dream-insight that they would go on to publish many books, that they were doing very well.

Made it up here before confronting needful morning conversation--got the porridge cooked and served to brother and me, fresh blueberries! affordable once again, and his banana and my huge glass filled with Sumatra coffee and cream, cats and dog fed and let out and let in again, then dashing up steps to my loftofficebed to eat and read silently in the blessed hoarfrost morning moan of gray January sky.

I took yesterday a long hike diagonally across the waste and vacant lots toward the highway out of town through the Brass Rail Trailer Park its Jesus Saves bumper stickers and satellite-dish tripods on cinderblock feet and barking guardbeasts straining at the ends of their tenuous tethers, and on past the Rim Rock Motel, to nowhere, more of it out there even than here if that can be imagined.

Wondering from time to time how it looked, grayhaired lady wandering among weeds and road trash (when in my head I'm 12 still in adolescent gawkbody and still as ever childcurious about the world).

Emptied out the gifted trailer. Years worth of rat nests stuffed in every drawer, pine needles composted with foam-rubber bits chewed from the mattresses and bench pads, each of which is missing sizable chunks to rodent enterprise. Too, mattress coverings drenched & dried in ancient cat pee and here and there a long wafer of dried excrement.

The HEAVY rubber gloves. Hot water, vinegar for the stench of it, later (not combining) waves of ammonia and bleach in turn, not combining. Planned for today.

I emptied out the writing trailer late yesterday after first keyboarding 500 words for Chapter 5. I had started this project completing 1500 words a day, Now it's murder wringing out 500.

Hence, an analogy: my first two days of fastwalking I covered several miles and never was winded or sore. Since then, though, I crap out sooner and sooner. How does this square with building stamina? Husband, erstwhile drill instructor he is, explains that with much exercise after long slothfulness the body responds as though it were in emergency, and it hands you all the juice you need. But when a pattern of exercise forms, then the body adapts--this is the new normal--and returns to its pre-exertion levels of fuel and energy. So now I am winded after six blocks, now I pass out as soon as I get back home, and so on.

So with the writing: the emergency that carried me forward in the early chapters proves not so emergent after all, and now I have to build that muscle on my own. Ugh.

Let me find something pleasant to write about here.

My friend the artguy brought me the writing trailer, as I have said. He brought with it six sacks of VHS tapes--culled from his collection, now that he's done going over to DVD. So last night I sorted through them, have a sackful to give to the Friends of the Library thrift book nook. And a sackful of rarish Japanese and Chinese films, and a couple of Spanish ones, and some on Russian history, to mail to my friend LesLight in Sacramento, who is an art film person. There are enough westerns here to fill a sack--stuff with Charlton Heston and John Wayne and even cheapo recent things with Sam Elliot and Tom Selleck. These would have found their way to the thrift store, but Husband glimpsed them, and so ... My Brando collection has been enriched by six, and my Italian films by two.

Anyway, artguy gave us so many I think I can safely cancel my Netflix subscription for a while.

Best of all, he brought a boxful of persimmons just picked Monday night. A half-dozen are eatable now, so maybe I'll make persimmon pudding.

***

Sunbeam on my face now. Calm, calm. Feels so generous and kind. And of course warm.

My friend Artguy delivered a trailer to me today, which I have parked behind the house to be my writing shed. It is a dirty wreck of a thing and stinks of cat pee and rat nests (I think he preferred giving it away to cleaning it in order to sell it), and I am thrilled indeed.

"30 November [1914]. I can't write anymore. I've come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me. And I have become cold again, and insensible; nothing is left but a senile love for unbroken calm."--Franz Kafka, Diaries

***

CatLobsang hears the tapping of my hands on the keys and comes to engage--he will lie on the keyboard, or the mouse. If I pick up a pen he will lie on the notebook or rest his chin heavily on my writing hand as though purposely to stop me, calm me. As though my writing were a symptom he must treat.

Perhaps this is so.

Today is quite beautiful. Big puffy clouds scud about in the wind, which is high and blustery. The sunbeam is creeping into the skylight and should be full on my face in about 7 minutes.

Cat's head on my wrist.

"6 February [1922]. The comfort in hearing that someone had served in Paris, Brussels, London, Liverpool, had gone up the Amazon on a Brazilian steamer as far as the Peruvian border, with comparative ease had borne the dreadful sufferings of the winter campaign of the Seven Communities because he had been accustomed to hardship since his childhood. The comfort consists not only in the demonstration that such things are possible, but in the pleasure one feels when one realizes that with these achievements on the one level, much at the same time must have necessarily been achieved on the other level, much must have been wrung from clenched fists. It is possible, then." -- Franz Kafka, Diaries

***

Brilliant first day of what surely will be a pivotal year--for someone, anyway. I sit in the sunbeam from the skylight, which this time of year sweeps right to left across my bedpillows where I work, blinding me, and again I pause to search online for cheap raffia hats.

I received in the week's mail wonderful used books I ordered with my Christmas gift-certificate from faraway sister-in-law--Kerouac's collected letters in hardcover, two volumes, and Milan Kundera Art of the Novel and Kafka's diaries in paperback. I have to keep my head in it to keep going, in the cloud of words to remember.

My sculptor friend from Yolo (down in the valley near Sacramento) phoned to say he is bringing me an old trailer to park out back and write in. Long all-day drive up a mountain to gift me this miracle. Just like that. Oh that white-light meditation. It knows just what to do.

" ... The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed a theory to explain how outer events in our lives coincide with our inner development in a grand expression of 'pre-established harmony.'" -- Ray Grasse, Waking Dream

It's the eleventh hour of evening on the anniversary of the day of my birth, 27 December, when my mother bore me forth on a gurney in the Berkeley Medical Center assisted by a military doctor, she--my mother--only 19 and my 19-year-old sailor dad pacing in the waiting room or wherever it was men paced back then.

This day my birthday morning I lucked into the vein of my book and caught in the current flowed forth for hours. High with it, and happy.

[from journal of 30 November 2011]

Because the house is small and all the walls are partial, the activities of each of its three inhabitants are clearly audible to the others at all times. This necessitates a stratagem: headphones. We are a Headphones Household. My brother at the kitchen table traces his stencil alphabets and works wearing headphones plugged into a radio tuned to a Golden Oldies frequency. Husband wears headphones to shield me from the noise of the thoroughbred racing he watches on TV. I wear headphones playing iPod ambient sounds to cover my brother's whispered mutterings, which irritate me.

Yet sound is my stock in trade, so to speak. With my headphones on I do not hear the cats racing up and down the stairs or the clacking of my mate's keyboard as he chats with Facebook friends. I cannot hear my old terrier's thin wheezes and snores from where she sleeps at the foot of my workbed. I cannot hear the bleats and squawks of the lovebirds in their kitchen cage (which annoy my brother so, even through his headphones, and which make him mutter and curse). It makes me sad to shut myself off from the world's sounds in this way. My headphones are plugged into my iPod, and I listen to ambient music or noise-blocking sounds such as rainfall or ocean surf or even sometimes the recorded low roar of a gas furnace--most effective for meditation.

So much of my written work springs from auditory stimulation. "Silence"--the open untrammeled waves of household air. The small ambient components of quotidian quiet.

This tells me more than anything how badly I need a small writing shack to work in, so I can celebrate again the music the world makes.

Like Huckleberry Finn, I feel, by my closed winterwindow.

... I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, a way off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. ... Well, after a long time I heard the clock way off in the town go boom--boom--boom--twelve licks; and all still again--stiller than ever. Pretty soon I heard a twig snap down in the dark amongst the trees--something was a stirring. I set still and listened. Directly I could just barely hear a "me-yow! me-yow!" down there. That was good! Says I, "me-yow! me-yow!" as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and scrambled down to the ground and crawled in among the trees, and sure enough, there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me.

With these headphone sounds blotting out the music of the world, I might very well miss Tom when he comes to fetch me.

So I move within deep and deeper. Will that world offer its own soundtrack? Will I be able to hear it there? I must listen hard.

Out the window--wind's up. Unsettled weather. Overcast moving past. Tree tops swaying. Naked poplars and pines in their thick black coats leaning southward and then springing back north; lower limbs shimmy and twist, excited.

Enough of writing, though I could go on all day today, I think. Please may I have a trailer to write in? What can I give you?

Time for errands.

I miss your company.

In memoriam:

"Life cannot be destroyed for good. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique. ... History again demands to be heard."
                     Vaclav Havel, letter 8 April 1975, in Disturbing the Peace

***
Look at the wonderful universe I have made--the cat's rear foot--exquisite! Every delicate bone and tendon, gleam of skylight off fine white fur, long toes, invert teardrop of the long muscular haunch--what an amazing mind I have even to conceive it! And more--the vivid multiplicity of jellyfish, alien patiences in the crocodile's metallic gaze, Out the window here, the sodden frostbit yard so naked and drear in its season. I have an eye for balance.

Various nature's hysterical thrill, the manic impossible perfection of it, and in the balance, menaces of imminent catastrophe--anxiety of armaments encroaching, persistence of the poisoner to nullify and pollute--I made that, too.

I change my mind. I take it back. And also misery and lovelessness and hard isolation.

Return me now to the Good World, Dreammaker. Shift me back, please, to the glowgolden year of my familyheart embracing and longlaughter playing baseball in the rain, in the weedy ravine, with wine and bodylove in damp poetry evenings.