The day’s light disappears white and almost icy blue below the hills I can see from this upstairs window. It’s already darker behind me, the side of the house that faces east. Can a mood lift, a day be better simply because it isn’t raining? Because I accomplished something like setting my web site up? Because I’m planning to take us out to dinner tonight rather than fuck around in the kitchen with pots and pans and onions sautéing in olive oil on the stove? Is it knowing that R. is cleaning the house tomorrow? That J. returns on Friday? That C. goes back to his job for two days and I’ll have Friday here, empty, unscheduled, me blissfully alone?
In the online poetry class — very well-organized and smart so far — the teacher shares a quote from his former mentor, Norman Dubie, about writing “follow the musical thread and the meaning will be there.” I like that idea of that. Then he moves into a less familiar thought to me: Richard Hugo’s ideas about using sound as a guide to discover meaning rather than using meaning as a justification to manipulate sound.
Could today have been better because I didn’t even try to do anything new or different with my own words? Maybe as a friend said on the phone earlier today, I am too hard on myself. But what would being easy feel like, be like?
Gorgeous moment, this being here now. Fire in the wood stove thriving. Wood hauled in earlier, two giant stacks, will keep us going for days. Aimee Mann pop music from the CD player downstairs. It’s
been strangely nice to sit at this larger computer screen this week since my iBook bit the dust. Vistas I looked at when we first got here but haven’t in three or four or five years through this other window in the room where I’ve lived, really, since we got here in 1998. Years, how did that get to be the unit of time I traffic in? Is that what comes with the opening up of my days, to out-of-time living again?
The public domain photograph above by Dipankan001 is entitled “Lake at Dusk in November.”
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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