Toad & Toadstool, Sparrow & Sparrowhawk
Category Safe. Ah, no that’s not it.
Multitude, Magnitude, Amplitude. Quality joined. Ah…
“Safe” could yield safe-deposit or safe-cracker. Safe-house. Safe-days. Not at all the same. While toads & toadstools share some quality of, oh witchiness. Unlike, say, sun-dress, sunburn, sun spot, sun-dried tomato.
I don’t know why I’m writing.
Sun hot at
15th Ave«Bucks
The Worst Day of Spring?
What I want is an earthquake & look up hopefully each time the building creaks. Not hopefully, with eroticized breath—Bated. But the wind is blowing the umbrella outside & there will be no earthquake until I am thinking about something else. Toads & toadstools. Cat dreams.
Got a rejection today, the first of many, no doubt.
I want a good head of hair, I have Hilda slumped in a chair. Eating whipped cream. I didn’t think I thought something good was going to happen, but I must have, because now that I know nothing good is going to happen, it feels a long bump down.
I’m tired of not having to do anything I don’t want. As always happens, my freedom is tainted by my idleness. I spend too much time inside my apartment, inside my head.
I need to find the back door that leads out into the garden (where the toads & toadstools are real & a cat dreams in every patch of sun.)
What’s wrong with me is that I think so. What’s wrong with me is that I want some more. (That was clever of them only to let me sing freely in church…)
Just in Case
And then, just in case I’m not feeling bad enough, I get a rejection from the New Yorker, the only rejections that really hurt. And why? Because if the NYer took my story, I’d have agents calling me up & saying, “Well, hi!”
Would be nice if something/anything would happen to counter this massive annoyance. Something spare & strange? No, baroquely ornamented & yet familiar.
Something, I suppose, like April along the avenues & lilacs in bloom. Yes, yes.
But I want/need out of my apartment much more. Much further. To
All right. But everything that is wrong w/
I Know That Back
It was Fred’s back that I was massaging. He could hardly feel it, but didn’t he tell me years ago that he only had one nerve ending left. Where was he though? Not at my place. I think I was on his daybed with him. Anyway, we were friendly, companionable, nonsexual, and I woke up happy enough. Unlike—was that early last night or the night before when I dreamed…something bad enough to taint my consciousness. Big loss of some kind. Well, that’s what reality is all about. (And what if you can’t escape? What if the afterlife is just more of this?) (Well, Jesting Jesus, I hope not.)
Fred came 3 or 4 days after I invited him. Now, who should I ask? Jean? (She doesn’t email.) Tomas!
The weather is good. Blue sky. Blue & white clouds. My mood has been bad. Then better, but only a little (won $5) (looked at Smoke/Duty & didn’t think it stank.) Then worse. (The novel is lame & I don’t have the power to make it throw away its crutches and walk.) Then I sing at lung-top & am blessed. Being blessed is almost as enjoyable as smoking a cigarette—& in the long run better for you.
*
Then I think about writing about JHY & me. Starting the 70’s story. More fun than Dave? If the words will come & stand on their spots.
Trubba
The trouble with the good moods that come over me is that they go away again, yes, rather in a tidal manner, only dryer. I win something & get happy, but that happiness runs about $20 an hour. So if I win $20, I’m happy for an hour, if I win $5, 15 minutes & so on. Or I’ll grab at hopes like handholds on a (crumbly) sandstone cliff. I dream I don’t get any of the #s & wake up thinking that the law of opposites may well apply.
*
I’m reading a bad book on an interesting subject & pushing on in hopes that it will improve.
Does this sound like my life?
I keep hoping: For a story to sell. For 2 stories to sell. 3. 3 & an essay.
Why not?
The weather is bunny-love perfect & that helps. I can get an email from Jean, like I did yesterday, and go a-hummin up the street.
I just need more people/cats to love.
So humble & so bristly. That’s my trubba.
Protean?
We are the shape-shifters, and we don’t even try. We just cooperate with time… cooperate means merely not to rebel, to stick around. Anyone catch hold & hang on long enough---- Grandma!
And so I look through Starbuck’s front window to see Tom M. & a gray-haired woman…my god, that’s Judy, what happened to her… Well, she cut her hair & let it go grey. Does age a girl—like me. I miss Judy at the Cap. Hill library, but I’m sure she doesn’t miss us. Maybe, when the new Cantilevered Library (need a wag to name that sucker) opens…I’ll probably go down more often.
Squishy Sue is talking to the Soppy Latin Tutor. They’re talking about Emotions. It makes me want a cigarette. Another rejection today & some pelting-down rain. Makes me want 2 cigarettes. But right now, the sun is shining On My Head, so I will walk.
What We Need Here
Besides field trips, 2 a week, we need one warm & funny conversation per day, 2 friendly encounters, one nice surprise. And of course, a good book to read before bedtime.
Now if I could draw, I’d never trouble another word, connotative, denotative, descriptive, or even metaphorical, as long as breath draws me onward. I swear it.
Two cats & a piano, I’d never bother anyone else either.
Unless my fleshly infirmities kicked up too much, which I think we could safely say, they would. They did for Einstein—but did he complain? He sure did, I read it in the paper today.
Also that poets ruminate too much, yes, like scared cows, excuse me, I mean sacred scow. (Better a scow than a scull? I think not.) (I think [a] ton.)
I’m getting so I can see my own lens opacities when the sun reflects just right, they look like magnetic fields of light—isn’t that nice? (no) Why do they take such a form (I’m seeing it thru plate glass window—is it—the concentric shimmer in the window or my eye?
Or—ha ha ha—somewhere else…maybe it’s WiFi microwaves visible.
Spectral specters. Specks on spec.
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