Overnight comprised a series of abrupt departures from bed. Sleep arrived in spates of 30 or 45 minutes. The necessarily opened window brought those big rigs--always almost near enough to touch, seems like, as they pass by at night--the opened windows brought them right in over us, ka-blam, every time. (Once it stays warm enough to warrant running a window fan, its white noise will neutralize the sounds, right?)

And then poor dogSally, panting and pacing and needing out anytime she saw me on my feet. Is this her 15th or 16th year? And there's a growth and a discomfort and since this winter past she's deaf as a post. (Still, she bounds and smiles at breakfast and dinner, and on her runs with us afternoons at the end of Cemetery Street.)

Time's insistent attrition. My Letters to the World may become a series of weepy obituaries. (But why anticipate? We're jolly now, kind of ... )

Anyway, I paced around and even Our Sofa of Merciful Slumbers could not help. But at 5 I made a bed on the Visitor's Couch, the good one I never use, and I slept well there for hours enough.

The world Out There is restless and it leaks In Here. Spiritually, sure--the moon is full--and literally: a cold front comes after all these days of heat, and wind whistles and flutes at the windows and doors, and I feel like Dorothy Gale. But I'm too heavy--spiritually and literally--to lift so easily, just light enough to knock from bed to sofa to couch.

I try to work here in the gloaming of approaching Weather, but sleep leans down, presses on my stupid head. Cats sleep there and there and there around me in the room, and Sally, worn out, stretches on her side and snores. I can hear brotherB rustling about his pens-and-paper business in the other room, his music contained in his headphones and in his head.

Traffic passes and passes. Dimmer enters the window light, and the ancient windows rattle in their frames.

9 p.m. Monday. Pretty beat. Got a lot done today. Making a plant-potting area under the stairs. Getting ready to add more fencing sections to the side yard. We ran many errands and made some household repairs--successfully!--with very little swearing. Installing the air conditioner has made me cocky.

I have assembled all my writing on a banquet table in the social hall. Let us see what we may make of it.

I read a couple of John Donne "satyres." They are wicked wonderful.

Away thou fondling motley humorist,
Leave mee, and in this standing woodden chest,
Consorted with these few bookes, let me lye
In prison, and here be coffin'd, when I dye;
Here are Gods conduits, grave Divines; and here
Natures Secretary, the Philosopher;
And jolly Statesmen, which teach how to tie
The sinewes of a cities mistique bodie;
Here gathering Chroniclers, and by them stand
Giddie fantastique Poets of each land.
Shall I leave all this constant company,
And follow headlong, wild uncertaine thee?
(from Satyre I)

And they who write, because all write, have still
That excuse for writing, and for writing ill.
But hee is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue,
As his owne things; 'and they are his owne, 'tis true,
For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne
The meate was mine, th'excrement is his owne.
...
When sicke with Poetrie,'and possest with muse
Thou wast, and mad, I hop'd; but men which chuse
Law practise for meere gaine, bold soule, repute
Worse then imbrothel'd strumpets prostitute.
(from Satyre II)

Received a biography of John Berryman in the mail today. Only the mature spawn of terminal alcoholics may understand alcoholism's power both to fascinate and repel. I want to understand, and yet I get angry when I try to. And yet I keep trying. I love these guys.

I had some good newses today. I expect more tomorrow. Must be that Flower Moon.

Have to quit now. Too tired even to think, I think. I will fill this out a little on Tuesday. Good night.

[Addendum: Bringing in the Sheaves

And we will come rejoicing ... ]

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency says more than 200
relief workers have been buried by a mudslide in Sichuan
province.

The Chinese government has declared a three-day period of
mourning for the May 12 quake. It has estimated that as many
as 50,000 people died as a result of the earthquake.

From the the NYTimes article.

That moon's a-waxin'. Pretty cool. When will the moon ever stop amazing me? You'd think it was my patron saint or something ...

Today I installed the air conditioner in the kitchen window. Yay me. Something had to be done. It's been over 90F in there for days. The rest of the building is cool, mostly. Just the kitchen--which kind of hangs off the western end, clad in corrugated metal--you get the picture.

Just found this Charles Simic poem to bounce off of the first paragraph here:

My father writes all day, all night:
Writes while he sleeps, writes in his coffin.
It's nice and quiet in our house.
You can see the specks of dust in the sunlight.

I look at times over his shoulders
At all that whiteness. The snow is falling,
As you'd expect. A drop of ink
Gets buried easily, like a footprint.

I, too, would get lost but there's his shadow
On the wall, like a perched owl.
There's the sound of his pen
And the bottle on the table sunk in thought.

When the bottle empties,
His great dark hand
Bigger than the earth
Feels for the moon's spigot.
("Poem" from Charon's Cosmology 1977)

In the same way, after my perplexed apologetic post about my failing internal editor--all the misspellings--I read a relevant bit of Ted Hughes in the letters:

This letter, I see, wouldn't get very full marks in a typing class, or even in an English class. One has to be very strict to check all the mind's little punning and inverting games, which don't matter and are all part of the essentially dreamy operation of composition for oneself....

"The mind's little punning and inverting games"--I like this much better than I must be going mad; I can't spell anymore.

I've been working for some time on my writing projex. Studying all morning, "adding to my store," and writing something new, in three drafts, before quitting midday. Then I go to work cataloging books, until 9 or 9:30 at night, with a supper/DVD break around 5 or 6. Book sales are at a virtual standstill--four sales in five days, down from 5-9 per day. I suspect this may be a sign of things to come: school is ending. Summer months may be the bookselling horse latitudes, for all I know.

Changing direction now with the poetry--I am oversaturated with the Wounded Alcoholics (I just completed a re-re-survey of Lowell & Bishop & Berryman & Hart Crane), rewounding themselves continually and then pointing to the blood. I'm reading all the Simic I have, instead, now, and it's stimulating and cleansing.

I'm using my time this way, immersively and gratefully, and I might add somewhat urgently.

I have made a plan for what will be done with brotherB if anything happens to me, but it occurred to me that I haven't made a plan for what will be done with me if anything happens to him. We care for one another like an old couple, but the truth is that, except for the food money that my book sales bring in, I am entirely dependent upon Brian paying his half of living expenses with his SSI, and the in-home supportive care funds that I get for watching over him to pay my own half. I doubt that book sales alone ever will suffice to keep a roof over my head while I write write write.

We had a scare the other day. B and I were carrying books from storage up the stairs in paper grocery bags. I would hand them off mid-staircase and he would carry them the rest of the way up into the apartment. After only a few such trips, though, he sat down on the top step to breathe and rest, and I saw that he was green, white-green from head to foot. I ran up and touched him. He was ice all over. He insisted he felt fine but I made him lie down on his bed for an hour. What would I do without his bald white head to kiss? He has been well since then, but I will not let him help me anymore.

On Mother's Day I spoke with the Tarot lady in Phoenix, JeanneFlowers, who will turn 89 this year and who sounds younger and stronger everytime I call. She said "We will always have a room for you here, Sam." It seemed an odd thing to say at the time, but now I think she may have meant more by it than I realized. I trust I worry for nothing, as usual, but I should prepare in any case.

I haven't been able to get my iBook to access the broadband connection since the two guys came and screwed everything up with their swapped radio equipment three or so weeks ago. I can use it only to send email, and that only after five or six tries. But sitting at a desk, upright, is difficult. So I keyboard what I need, as now, reclining, using the iBook, and then I email the text files to myself, retrieve them at the tower computer, and work as quickly as I can sitting up at the desk, copying out of the emails and pasting the text here and there. But it's an unpleasant and tiring process. If I can't get them to put the broadband stuff back the way it was, I'm thinking I'll get a Verizon USB modem and go entirely cellular.

Still no sign of that Beetle ...

Cleaning house (in broken prose)

Still sorting things out
I find I need a box, a sturdy one
Take one from the closet and find inside:

3 padlocks with keys
4 keys to automobiles distant men drive now
2 cafe curtain clips, brass-colored,
7 buttons, from tiny to large, none matching:
3 white, 3 brown, one sky-blue
3 glass rings
2 batteries, maybe charged, maybe not
1 cork-lined Pepsi bottle cap
1 black-and-yellow butterfly wing, disintegrating
2 nails
3 bolts
1 small ball chain
1 porcupine quill
3 pennies
1 plastic bottle of guitar-string lubricant: "Luthiers Choice"
1 tiny container temporary dental filling material
2 chips of shale with ferns imprinted

Batteries quill wing nail dust hair
into the trash, the rest distributed to shelves
and into the emptied box I place handfuls
of my letters to my mother
my mother kept.

you wouldn't believe it

I stood up out of near-sleep at 2-something a.m., realizing I'd misspelled roll for role in my preceding post (new phenomena for me, these homophonic anomalies--here for hear, there for their and they're, to for too, etc.--mistakes I wouldn't have made in first or second grade--I think they are less symptoms of early-onset dementia than of something shifted or unblocked, because a happy new access to images accompanies them) ...

Anyway, as I say, I rushed to fix the mistakes in the post at 2, and then stayed to poke around the Internet for no reason other than to avoid the awareness of sleeplessness, and then when I stood and turned to go back to bed at 3:15

WOW!

beyond the west window was suspended a wedge of luminous mango moon, vivid, a color not actually seen in nature, and the huge lopsided shape just hung there low in the sky under a rippled band of lit cloud and I felt so happy to see it, what a gift! but who will believe me? Look! Look now ...

Winging it

Lengthwise my bedside abuts the Main Street wall. I'm right there, up against the noise and fumes of small town street and state highway both; big rigs rattle the window panes all night long. The street lamps are a perfect height to cast their weird orange light right at us, too. But those blooming street trees, different kinds--plums, must be--two, specifically, exploding this moment in froth and most of all perfume, intoxicating, not for the faint of heart--or maybe, yes, just not for the allergic among us. No such here, and so I breathe deep. Wow. I'd forgotten that part about spring. Now all night through the open street window beside my head big-rig rumble and the sweetness of fertile flowers weave a ground for dreams completely new.

Last night in fact I dreamed of my friend who writes radio plays, usually with a political tack intended to enlighten his audiences about the ways humans have oppressed other humans throughout our histories. Politically correct, his plays, and in my dream he directed a play staged on a stage, with an audience, and I had something urgent to share with him before the play began. I had come to know something about the nature of life and of writing, someone had told me in a dream within the dream, and I had to tell him; it would change the way he wrote and thought forever. But it was almost performance time. I ran down the aisle as he climbed the steps in costume to assume a role in the opening scene. Les! wait! I called. I ran onto the stage behind him as the play began. He turned to me, not annoyed, willing to improvise and work whatever I might have to say into the fabric of his plot. I was surprised, halted to collect my thoughts. But I paused a beat too long, and he turned away and spoke his lines and the play was begun, and I was suddenly aware that I was on a stage, and that hundreds of people were looking at me, and, terminally embarrassed, panicked beyond words, I fled.

I think this relates to my own struggles here with my sometime embarrassment at what I write, and with my confusion about what is and isn't the right thing to do or say given the nature of the world. But not necessarily the nature of me. I'm very nearly healed now from the burning-away of what I thought my role was going to be when I reached the golden time of my life with the family I had tried to make. I'm very nearly new and improved, though flawed in new and important ways (for me). There are other kinds of families to have and different roles to play in them, other gives-and-takes. Adapting has been painful beyond expression. There are all kinds of hells and holocausts, smashups and natural disasters. Some of them happen in the small space of a limited little life. What's interesting is to see what happens next, how this branch will grow in its unexpected new direction, whether it will blossom and fruit or make shade or whisper a music, or store up water in the desert for those who come after.

I think that's what I'd like to do, that last thing. Probably it would be OK if I tried for that.

img src http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/fieldguide/saguaro.html