Today was a good day. Today the words ‘emollient’ and ‘rapturous’ were utilized in inopportune ways.

As in, “that is a rapturous scarf you’re wearing” and

“your glasses appear quite emollient.”

Today is not over and there are events that still need to begin. The fish is not yet cooked but remains raw in the butcher paper, the olives are still dressed in an oily sheen. There are blank sheets of crackers with waxed wrapping that I like to pull off to look at them, to imagine what I will put on them.

Weight is everything.

The light today resembled what you would see in a glass, amidst water, in a globe,

where blurred eyes smear past and then take focus.

The snow may be false but the glitter still falls,

like small shining scales of fish.

Today I thought to myself that there are two kinds of people:

those that believe in future events and those that rely on the past.

And that it is all the same kind of blindness.

Sometimes a nowhere dog will bite you gently on the ass.

And amidst the blur I tried to determine who I was

and where, and it was like I was flashing in and out

of myself like the sun glancing in a mirror, just small shocks of light.

First clarity and color, then darkness, nothing, just nameless depth.

And then I stood up and felt levity and I was glad.

Today I laughed aloud at a line a poet wrote:

“An intelligent poet in Iowa is alarmed because she thinks we are made up of electrons.”

I laughed in public, at a bookstore, while people walked past.

And I was glad about this because I always found this poet extraordinarily sad and a bit self-pitying.

And today I thought that beauty would leave me, perhaps while I was asleep and I thought this to be cruel, but real and inevitable.

There is much to find lacking. There is much that overflows. For this I am grateful but don’t misunderstand: I clutch paragraphs in a manner that I can only describe as that of a suffering saint.

casualfriday

Rhonda’s egg salad was a hit. She lovingly whipped her mayonnaise using farm-fresh eggs, paper-thin cucumbers, and soft potatoes. And gazpacho. Gazpacho was key. Chilling the soup was a pleasure. She enjoyed wrapping the bowl in clear plastic, so the red heart color shone through, and placing it in the middle shelf of the fridge. The next day, she would take it out to show everyone. Cold Soup was always welcome on a warm summer day. And it looked magnificent against the gingham print. She would then raise a finger for an antioxidant announcement. Antioxidants were key to a healthy constitution and everyone likes to keep their ticker humming. And casual Fridays spread good morale among her staff members. She believed in good morale. She would look at her employees eating her food, their mouths going, wiping with napkins from her private collection, and felt excited and safe. She imagined an invisible army going to work in their bodies, erasing disease, killing all the free little radicals.

photo: Alec Soth

Last night the air had a Tuesday quality

Sad Ministers in Petticoats and Wilting Moustachios in the garden
She remarks about so and so and this and that and who is he in a white peasant shirt.

Blousy, she says.

Shocking, I say.

Seinfeld Shirt, we say.

Later, the shirt breezily remarks about the quality of air and water.

I agree astutely; it’s the hour to be astute.

And something about beauty, that made him trail after her in the bar,

in coca-cola tinted lights sparking some sound fuzz or another

while her hand crept on the wood, hiking her skirt
up to there to case a fresh wound.

If at times the skin has it

The skin a twilight shading

in yellow and purple

hues as it fades.

There is beauty in this
healing,

dermis lift and pale
and lighten to white.

Later, in the public restroom
where strangers take turns at rest:

there is
less and more waiting.

She turns her head this way and that.

Saying so and so said this.

To whom and what said why?
She doesn’t believe it.
Who is she to say anyway.

It is encouraging,though, to be invited to the zombie picnic.

To bray the sacred chicken on the dance floor.

glittering black witches

I dreamt of a glittering black witch.

Not a grimm’s fairy tale witch, not a hippie granola witch, no, she was a jackie collins, bad-ass dynasty witch. She wore a black jeweled cape. She had a little spear that looked like an icicle. This was a dream induced by a fever due to a shock to the head. there is something delicious about fever, something that the body surrenders to in earnest. It is working to repair itself, and in that earnestness, a heat, a disco of molecules that makes one feel a bit exhausted and strangely lightheaded and delirious and exalting.

yes, i hit my head. on my elbow a dark bruise. today the doctor looked into my eyes with a machine that looked like a telescope. look here, my ear, he instructed. i stifled a smile. he was rhyming. can you imagine what he saw? cones? vessels in tiny ships carrying blood molecules, little red sailors with stylish platelets? the onrush of a saline shore? were there birds and tiny tributaries? nothing viral, he said. (which strangely sounded like: Nothing Personal). and then he lightly touched my knee… was he hitting on me?

But while i was feverish i nursed an old wound. and had enough of it. this wound that wouldn’t go away, the sadness that always lingered after he stayed. and what did i do? i emptied my closets. quite literally. my closets were overfilled with clothes and i threw everything i didn’t need out. and this is not a metaphor. i was sick. my head ached and i was tired of this wound. and i wanted to be done with it. there is a beauty of course, in longing. but if it is to have any kind of resonance, it must depart and find distance, finally, like all other things, like ships and aeroplanes.

but about this witch. in the dream, she had a daughter. and the daughter sacrificed herself to save the mother. i don’t know what this means e only that i was afraid like a child because i was always afraid of witches as a child including the one that supposedly lived on my block. we would run past her dark front lawn in summers holding our breath and if we breathed, we would die. Sprinting past this fear, was utter exhiliration, utter freedom and excitement. and so shouldnt it be that we have such talisman in our dream vocabulary. aren’t monsters only what they are– representations of opening up our consciouness forcefully ? I have such sympathy for monsters in literature. In the tale of gilgamesh, humbaba, the forest monster, employed by the gods to guard the sacred forest pleads with gilgamesh not to kill him. And it struck me. this figure of fear, whose sole purpose is to incite fear, was being punished for doing exactly as he should. How can you kill me? he says, if this is what i am meant to do?

indeed…. (old diary 2006-2007)