A couple of facts

A couple of facts about myself I'm likely to forget, forget because I think them only in passing, only in vertical consideration.

1. Many people have given me the benefit of the doubt. Many of these people were wrong. Mostly it's innocuous stuff -- lies about homework, suggestive silences that I don't mean. I quite enjoy listening and people have told me they consider me a good listener. Part of this is being silent, which leads to the speaker filling in certain questions about me, usually favorably since they keep talking, keep confessing to me.

I

O what a physical effect it has on me

To dive forever into the light blue sea

Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,

Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still,

It is beautiful, when October

Is over, and February is over,

To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet

Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then

Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.”

Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?

Aren’t my eyes bigger than love?

Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins?

Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun

What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!

Is love what we are,

Or has happiness come to me in a private car

That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there?

                                                       2

We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider

Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you.

I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love

I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.

                                                       3

Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s

Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood

Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s

Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s

Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill,

I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets

Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing

Appear and reappear—electricity! I’d love to be how

You are, as if

The world were new, and the selves were blue

Which we don

Until it’s dawn,

Until evening puts on

The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . .

Water! your tear-colored nail polish

Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new

As a calm

On the sea, where, like pigeons,

I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated—

Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!

December 17

"there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of men who make for the men who explain."
G.H. Hardy ... why the introduction to my portfolio was placed last

Bird watching

I spent Sunday bird watching with my father in Jean Lafitte park. It should be spelled Laffite, as that is how the man in question spelled his name! I spotted and he identified. It was really exciting and here are pictures of what we saw. The pileated woodpecker was pretty spectacular and fairly uncommon, though we also saw some hawks, merlins maybe, and as creatures they are always impressive. 

gray catbird

belted kingfisher

american egret 

pileated woodpecker

american kestrel 

yellow rumped warbler

victoria

Like a mother to her daughter, I can say I've a newfound ability to relate everything to my cat

For some things, all that can be said is "thank you" "thank you for coming into my life." The thank-you moments call attention to the time-space that they occupy in that it is also thank you for coming into my life at this moment, because with this happening I feel suddenly that now is when (where, now feels too like a where) it belongs, the only space in which it fits.