the first word from every book title on the brown wooden shelves in my apartment

Neurosis
How
Create
Organic
Gifts
Transfer
Fire
Collected
Homeland
For
Field
Standing
Room
Three
can't
Artist's
Introvert
Essential
Wisdom
Questions
Dream
Teaching
Kissing
Red
skin
Selected
For
End
Best
Junior
Cry
poem
Bend
365
Solace
Week
Flight
Chop
Leaf
Midnight's
Doing
Robber
Who
Two-headed
Poetry
Touch
Dharma
actual
away
Sand
Graphs
Negotiating
Speak
Floating
Field
Feel
Taking
You're
Home
Desert
Memory
Thirst
Earthsteward's
Waiting
Complete
Beyond
Wood-Frame
Sewing
Home
Geosystems
Natural
Good
Kombucha
This
Rock
Lifguarding
Meditations
Creative
Stop
New
Colorado's
There
Enchanted

those sixteen measures

"It is not surprising that in his later years variations became the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities."

(Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)



I still believe in love but I am not sure about romantic love.


I laughed and replied, I've become less whimsical over the years.

Still in the past six months I have returned to flesh and blood. I have returned to being a person who is, at the very least, receptive to whimsy.

Even better, I can receive whimsy and decide whether to act on it, and how.


I have returned to being a person.



I do not miss you all the time, any more, which seems significant. Which is not to say that I do not miss you.


When I tell him about the dog at the shelter who stands up on her back legs and hugs me halfway through our walks, I see that it affects him. It makes me feel hope.



I am imagining two become three,
temporarily,
four pairs of hands and two tongues


To be able to lay down the guitar and step to the marimba lumina. To be able to walk softly aross the stage while your bandmates play around you, pick up your guitar again, and start to play.



On Sunday I road a lift to the top of the mountain and snowshoed three miles into the backcountry. Oh such a wide white expanse, snow above and below. Such quiet, such godliness. The entire time I was completely alone.

POWER yoga (heated)

Now equipped with a Peppermint Patty I try to make sense of this mess.

I slept til 9:30 and pronounced that contrary to the plans we had made I would be spending the day in bed.

He was more understanding than I would have expected. So was I.




I laid there and I read the book for hours. Were it my copy that thing would be earmarked and penned to shit by now. But seeing as it belongs to the library the next town over I tried instead to commit the resonant bits to memory.

For most of those hours I felt like I was holding my breath.

If I let down my guard I might cry for years, and that would really interfere with the plans I have laid.


Still I am trying to let myself feel.

It is very hard, harder than I had thought, and I thought it would be hard.

It helps that Wilson stays with me, content to sleep through his breakfast hour in order to remain curled under the afghan between my shins. 

It helps to watch a movie in the middle of the day.

It helps to go to yoga.

It helps that he has quit drinking. Instead he buys me almond milk, Halloween candy, potato chips flavored like pumpkin pie. He retrieves my green socks from the bedroom and gently slides them on over my feet.

Thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love*

From the point of view of the obsessed, the best cure for obsession is possession.


I have felt anger and shame.



In truth the solution has proved a severing of options.



We woke up early and climbed the mountain.

At the top we could see other mountains. Many of them. We meditated for ten minutes (not eleven).



I cannot help you again I am sorry.

I am not always this selfish but I need to take care of myself, for a while.



I told him, I have worried that I made a mistake.

I told him, Sure, we can find a use for that ice.



Telling = a liberation. 

There are so many words I have not said.

I wonder if they would have changed anything.




I respect you too much to    .

He loves me much more than I thought.




I am learning to distinguish fantasy from my own life.

We are not melting. 





*Moulin Rouge

"Dialogue with an Artist" by Matthew Sweeney

the lonely

Incorporating the words of L.S. Lowry

I used to paint the sea, but never a shore,

and nobody was sailing on it. It wasn’t even

the sea, it was just my own loneliness.

It’s all there, you know. It’s all in the sea.

The battle is there, the inevitability of it all,

the purpose. When I switched to people

they were all lonely. Crowds are the

loneliest thing of all, I say. Every individual

in them is a stranger to everyone else.

I would stand for hours in one spot

and scores of little kids who hadn’t had

a wash for weeks would group round me.

Had I not been lonely, none of my work

would have happened. I should not have

done what I’ve done, or seen what I’ve seen.

There’s something grotesque in me and I

can’t help it. I’m drawn to others who are

like that. They’re very real people. It’s just

I’m attracted to sadness and there are some

very sad things. These people are ghostly

figures. They’re my mood, they’re myself.

Lately, I started a big self-portrait. I thought

I won’t want this thing, no one will, so

I went and turned it into a grotesque head.

memo to lowry

You’re right, there are grotesques who shine

a dark light that lures us like how the sirens

tried to lure Odysseus, and yes, maybe we

ourselves are among the grotesques, but

there are also the beautiful who, if we’re

lucky, save us from ourselves, and validate

the sun’s light, and maybe also the moon’s.

from "Nothing is Far" by Robert Francis

Nothing is far that once was near.

Nothing is hid that once was clear.

Nothing was God that is not here.

 

 

 

from "Last Hike Before Leaving Montanta" by Patricia Traxler

Sometimes absence can prove presence. That's not exactly
faith, I know.