January 01 needing Soap
I found Ponge in the bookstore on New Year's Eve. Le Savon (Soap). Ever since then, I've been immersed in a froth of slobber. I am deeply impressed by this book. I'm so impressed by everything that I have nothing to say. I'm wearing my hair in four little thin braids and this has affected my thinking. I don't want to write anything until I figure out what I'm doing. I'd rather read Ponge. From beginning to end and then over again. He has a lot to teach me. I will do a lot more cleaning. I will work on the poetry journal project. I will help teach about the Six Banners at Sunday School. I will keep trying to write my way out of a paper bag. I will hang in with the dad and the kids and my family. I feel sinking in the pit of my stomach. Overtired. I watched "Life is Beautiful." I am surrounded by these infinitely touching human struggles to stay strong enough to cheer each other up through this long endurance. I wasn't speechless yesterday: Have I been too charming? Or not charming enough? I just know that one of my gifts is to love. Really. It really is. And I will be able to express that. I don't want to be hysterical. I do want to be loved in return. I do. I don't want to worry about publication. I will write to Russell Edson. My gifts are ecstasy and love. I am not the typical Aquarius. I don't know where I came from. I ran out of the tower onto the snow covered fields. I spun around and around and around. I chanted. I chimed. My name is Catherine and I live in Stamford CT USA at the end of 1999. I am moving fast as fast as I can backwards into innocence. I am trembling with delight at soap and ice and ferns. I am thrilled with repetition and with the passing of time. My blue hands make what they can. "Gem-tactics." Today I feel sinking in the pit of my stomach.

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January 02 beyond the Pale
Stepping out with too much faith is making me sick. I want my irony, apathy, and victimized helplessness back. I feel like an idiot. I'm going to do the mailing tomorrow. It's not a very big mailing. Just the announcement of the poetry journal to 160 people, asking for participation, and it has my name on it. We are much happier when the writer does not seem so out of control. We feel much better when the writer dazzles us with commanding flourishes. We sense weakness in the writer. We wonder where the hell is the editor. We sometimes prefer sentimentality. We don't like it when she experiments with us. We are not guinea pigs. It is very unfortunate that she is so idealistic and starry-eyed. Is it really necessary to let untreated raw emotion spill into her work. We are dismayed by her lack of discipline. We don't really care about the writer. The writer should disappear. The work should stand alone, like the cheese. "With this work, he began to turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open form, a kind of prose poem that incorporates a laboratory or workshop, recounting its own process of coming into being along with the final result. The outcome is a new form of writing, which one could call "processual poetry." Ponge's later work, from Soap on, is a very important tool in the questioning and rethinking of literary genres, of poetry and prose, of what is literature." (blurb) I cried for about an hour today, outdoors. I was inconsolable. I was lonely. I felt poisoned by initiative. I felt beyond the pale (love that phrase). I felt abandoned by the gods and goddesses. I was full of doubt. The only thing that happened was I got tired of crying. This is a peculiar form of hygiene. How can you say that? How can you say that? How can you say that? We are asking for the faint warmth of the winter sun to reach us.

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January 03 beyond the Pale ii
Strange. I got a letter in the mail requesting submissions for a poetry anthology. The topic: the invisibility of the middle aged woman. Why now, when a spotlight is shining on me and I feel so vulnerable, revealed to all my enemies? What about this: Invisibility as a strategy. After all, our mode of operating is the glimpse, not glory. I'd like to write about the invisibility of the middle aged woman and when and why she chooses to gives the glimpse. It's up to her. If you don't beg for it, if you don't prepare yourself, if you don't stay ever watchful, you'll never see it and that would be a pity. This is what Francis Ponge said: "I will agitate, then, for the conservation (either on the sidelines or on the sly) of the noble, delicate values to which I give the highest place, as being the aim of life." "the beautiful and the delicate" Francis. Are you sure? B and I are talking about aesthetics. The pretty and the sentimental. This is what I said: "Sometimes the sentimental is confused with the feminine." What am I talking about? I'm afraid it's the roaring salty feminine. For a while now, I've been troubling myself that there's no word, no story, no myth for the menopausal heroine. Why isn't this time mythologized as a great struggle? It's certainly just as, if not more, disturbing than the time of young manhood. Where is our version of Beowulf? Maybe people didn't live long enough to experience this as a general phenomenon. Maybe the struggle is too internal, too abstract. Maybe this is the stupidest idea I've ever had. Maybe by the time I'm menopausal I'll have figured out the story. Well, it's not like I've never experienced mood swings. But who hasn't? Eureka. It's universal.

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January 04 a pile of things
Rain has no rhythm. Rain has no refrain. The rain chorus, innumerable. Too early for crocus. Too early! The strain of restraint. I can't settle on anything. No flow. Okay day. Suddenly I have a lot of work. The light of miserable the dusk of serenity the oil of paleness the faintest whiff of massage the terror of goodness the spiral of continue the baroque abstraction the fragile restraint of the crocus the pity of birds the mercy of moths the frozen grove of rain the hair bracelets of the blind the marvelous black soap of glass the articulation of winter the shiver of the stairs the irresistible sword of touch the melting reptile of the past the surgical removal of the lips the soft prison of vapor the smile of never the smile of over

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January 05 un re dis covery
When I woke up this morning, my mind said "the pyre of consuming possibilities." It was a synonym for "a pile of things." I was excitable today. I had to get my driver's license renewed. I had to get next semester's tuition money out of one kid's college fund. And I had to take the other kid to the doctor to get his cast taken off. Each of these things seemed BIG and together they seemed VERY BIG. Oh yes, and I think the website is back in order. That's also BIG. I feel a little better. I don't know exactly what happened at the ISP and you know what? I don't care. Vrijheid is an antonym for apartheid. It signifies freedom and love. This came from Olga Broumas. On New Year's Eve, I dressed up like a Navajo, wearing two colors of flimsy velvet, four little braids, and six completely different necklaces: bubbles, white seed beads, pearls, jet, polished stones, and a hollow gold heart. I danced in the public library while the five kids worked themselves into various states of intolerability. Then my son and I wandered around town trying to stay awake. We had a little snack at Dunkin Donuts. Then we went to see the fireworks. The whole crowd counted down. When the fireworks started going off, I screamed and screamed and screamed, along with the jumping girls behind me. The harmonics of screaming filled up my head so there was no room for any other noises. It was very exciting. Reading Russell Edson is like smearing jelly all over your face and then leaping into a bath of hydrogen peroxide and then drying off with a rat and putting on a bathrobe made of old skin. He is in the phone book. The last time I looked he was not. The address is down near the Stop and Shop where I used to stop and shop. He's completely untherapeutic and there is no I in his work. I wonder how that happened. I guess he pointed the back end of a rocket at himself. I'd like to talk to him. But the conversation would have to be on another planet.

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January 06 a wrench like me
"Reality I call it." ~~Virginia Woolf "My purpose has always been reality, and it still is." ~~Russell Edson God, I love reality. There is nothing better. I just don't know what to do when reality is taken away from me. I get plagued with acid tears that cause skin erosion and make me all holy. Then, hoo boy, reality sneaks around the corner on long black imp legs and slaps my face with two pounds of salmon, one for each cheek. Hallelujah. What makes tonight's refreshment even more interesting is that this shock of reality was completely imaginary. It unrolled on the hillside like a city full of lights seen from above, from a perch up in the dark rocks. I would never want to go there, I said to myself, and suddenly, I really didn't. Praise be. Muscular unknowable reality runs nude around my house all day and leaves great sinkfuls of dirty dishes and wet spots on the carpet and grey globs of soapy hair in the tub. Woohoo! I say as I kiss and clean up. I know, I know. The emotions are my pets. I like to line them up and run my fingers through their long silky hair and put lipstick on them and worry about whether they are getting enough nutrients. But when they start shrieking and scrambling up the walls, plastering the windows with their bodies to block the view of the city -- hey. Get out the Hav-A-Hart traps and transport them to the far reaches of northern New Hampshire. Amen. Alleluia. What a way to live.

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January 07 Moby in the snow
Not a good night. I thought it would bother me to be surrounded by couples. That wasn't a problem; it bothered me being surrounded by people who talk. I want to stay up all night being miserable. But I can't. What I'm thinking of: Moby Dick, the white whale of a car, he had a cool square steering wheel Pepin was going home for the holidays to Sault Ste. Marie; I learned to say "The Soo" He wore a white thermal undershirt and a red bandanna tied over his head; he had big bony shoulders, bad skin, and a tortured attitude I offered him a cigarette after he almost drove us all off a cliff in the snowy mountains coming east from Omak He took some drug to be able to stay awake driving and then he couldn't sleep for about three days which seemed really stupid to me Now he's married to an Indian woman and has two daughters as lovely as princesses I drove all night through Montana and the reservation land going west Nespelem and Disautel started to sound like home It's easier and more pleasant to be lonely if you're on a long road trip Kathy and her mom sat around the kitchen table in Indiana and talked and smoked, hour after hour; I had never seen this behavior before Somehow Pepin and I both gravitated back to Kathy's mom's kitchen table much earlier than we were supposed to show up Then we just hung around there like strays until New Year's Pepin and I hung out one night at the playground on the swings and smoked and talked, I don't remember, about something philosophical; but he was much too bitter a person for me, and he was on-again-off-again with Kathy at that time, and oh yes I was making a big mistake and falling in love with the da at that time Each of us got Moby stuck in the snow once Mine wasn't too serious just driving off the road which after all looked just like everything else in that flat snow field Kathy spun the car completely around on an ice-covered highway in South Dakota and we ended up facing the wrong way off the shoulder on the other side of the road We were rescued by a guy whose truck was filled with mounds and mounds of sunflower seed husks, a foot deep in places We stayed in his house overnight; his wife's name was Alice and they listened to the CB radio around the clock for entertainment They only went to rescue us because somebody said we were kids; when they saw us they had doubts; twenty-something scroungey disreputable-looking kids Alice gave us mounds and mounds of the most delicate, beautiful, buttery, homemade cookies out of her freezer to take away with us

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January 08 Bathing Arcida
Too much contact with the world today. Lack of words resulting. Arcida is bothering me. There's no way in hell to write about her. Arcida in hell. I just can't redeem her pathetic little life. She's trapped. I can't change her into nobility either, like Carol Emshwiller did to one of her heroines ("Glory"). She gives me nothing to work with. She's not very strong. (I'm not very strong. I keep saying "I feel sick." I do feel sick, not sick-sick, but my strength is sick.) Why won't I let Arcida have any positive qualities to work with? She's just so damn timid, no one would know if she had any positive qualities. I don't want her to have to build on anything. I don't want her to have to change. It would be too much of a strain for her. There's no story for her. So she just goes along and goes along and then -- she's in hell. She's a devastating stereotype. They all are. Arcida is the worst. I think it's her name. I keep thinking about it. It has "death" in it. What can be done with a stereotype? Repeat it until it loses all meaning Put it in a strange setting (collage) Challenge it (too much of a strain) Dissolve it Decorate it Send it through a portal Give it another consciousness randomly and by accident Attack it with surrealism -- beat it with an ape (Edson's old women) Gossip about it Bless it with a touch of lunacy or witchcraft Shatter it (Duchamp) Torture it - victimize it - it brings out the cruelty in us Bathe it* Scale it - make it tiny; then make it huge (Alice in Wonderland) Give it an interior monologue that's bizarre and incongruent We did it with paper dolls. We did it with Barbies -- make them swing from trees by their hair naked and deep sea dive in the toilet. I can do it with Arcida, somehow. I saw "Being John Malkovich" tonight. As usual -- not as wowed as I expected to be. Some interesting things. But any movie that shows the slimmest hints of originality -- all of a sudden it's fabulous, Roger Ebert's number one pick. (Cranky.) So, what is "Being Arcida..." *My favorite answer

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January 09 Work
I distributed 700 flyers this past week. Today I made 300 more copies. I am interested to see what comes of this effort, if anything. At least people got some nice flyers in the mail, even if they threw them away as fast as they could. There are discouraging contacts and then there are rewarding contacts. Discouraging: The Barnes & Noble community liaison reacts with horror when I ask if they held an Open Mike. He goes on and on about how Open Mikes just didn't work out for them. I just asked if they had one, a simple Yes/No answer would have sufficed. Discouraging: The UConn branch has most of their bulletin boards enclosed in locked glass cases. It is the most sterile college environment I've ever seen, in spite of all their lovely (empty) seating. I am proud of my son, the poetry flyer anarchist, who figures out a way to slip a flyer between the glass doors of the Biology bulletin board. I get a kick out of that, and the fact that I don't try to stop him. Instead I tell him, well that's how poetry behaves. Rewarding: A friend is very touched that I remember her son's haiku and want to publish it. He died last year of cancer. Much longer story ... Rewarding: Finally get the courage to write email to my first graphic design teacher. I tell him I'm still struggling with it. I tell him I'm this project is over my head and ask for help. It feels good to recognize that I'm not being such a dilettante anymore; I've committed to this interest since Fall of '98. Rewarding: My younger son says to me "Dad and I saw your flyer in the bookstore." I wonder what it's like to grow up with a poetry activist for a mother. Weird to say the least. Rewarding: I ask my older son if he knows anyone that writes poetry. He says the only person he knows who writes poetry is himself. I ask him to send me some, and if it's any good, I'll print it. He says he thinks he writes really good poetry. We've never talked about this before. A Baby Shampoo Weekend -- "no more tears formula." But I do feel like a zombie since I worked on so many chores. A guy in church stood up and said He had such a peaceful day yesterday and such a good meditation. I wanted to throttle him. I guess that is not a good sign.

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January 10 It's personal
Improbable. That's all I can say about any of this. Losing all kinds of qualities, shedding toes and fingernails and hairs, gaining extra digits in the wrong place, four eyeballs, coming and going of salty waves in the belly, marbleized skin, horse sized hiccups, murderous knees, elbows in the shape of bellows. Who's the MONSTER around here? I talked to a very nice gentleman from the School of Business. He wanted me to come to a reception for the new Dean at the Sky Club. Only the most successful alumni in the area were being invited. I was planning to go until I realized it was the same night as the once-a-month poetry open mike. I wanted to meet some cool business men from Oregon in the Sky Club and impress them with my knowledge of Java and spite. January is a damn weird month. Some freaky hiatus, chinooky, the sky is so pale and peculiar. I had the horrifying realization that Arcida, killer of art, is "the angel in the house." I have to kill her. I didn't want to go that far. In fact, I was feeling rather tender towards her. Just another one of her ruses. When I realized her true nature and the full meaning of her name, I felt faint. Completely inadequate to the task. Immobilized by empathy. Woolf, help me. I don't know what to do! ~~~~~~~ Spiteful, I don't want to be spiteful. Timid, I don't want to be murderous. Mild, I want to be a deep freeze. Monstrous, I want to be innocent. Moon, I want a man. Stone, I want a sun. ~~~~~~~ I can invoke Audre Lorde in the poetry journal. She lived in Stamford for a while. I will use quotes from that part of her autobiography. Cool idea. ~~~~~~~ I wrote Russell Edson a letter. It's personal.

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January 11 Starting with soup
I made a fantastic fish chowder for dinner tonight. Onions, potatoes, baby portabella mushrooms, potato water, clove, bay leaf, big chunks of catfish, a splash of white wine, and milk. I feel like this is the first time I've cooked something, really cooked I mean, with a recipe, in -- months. And my son, who usually dislikes soupy, stewy food, even said it was good, although he left half of his serving in the bowl. I even made a quick trip to the grocery store for milk and Italian bread to mop up the soup. Maybe I'm finally getting back into some kind of rhythm. I prepared this fish chowder really fast. I didn't worry about getting the onions chopped all the same size. I didn't worry about "cubing" the potatoes. I boiled them first to save some time and then I hacked them up randomly with the chef knife. The mushrooms -- I cut a little off their sides so they would lie flat and then just chopped away at them. I omitted the carrots because I really do not like carrots in a darkish creamy soup. I didn't add any flour because I had quite a lot of mushy potato substance. I used the recipe just for the ingredient ideas (clove turned out to be good) and a rough sense of proportion -- like two cups of water, one cup of milk, a pound of fish... This was a lot of fun. Maybe I'll cook my way through the rest of the winter. I bought barley at the grocery store Sunday. Barley is a favorite. Here is a project for me: get a new boning knife to replace the one Breaking Monster broke. Then figure out once and for all how to keep the knives sharp. I hereby vow to take care of these knife issues. It's ridiculous that I've gotten so old and am still in a bad way with knives. I bought three good knives after I was divorced. It was a sign of cutting ties and of being able to cook for myself. It's ridiculous how much I rely on symbolic gestures to get through the day. Then again, "Poetry is a thing of gesture and sign, and almost a nonlanguage art." and more, just for the pure, extraordinary pleasure of it ... "Poetry and fiction are two sides of the same coin. But neither succeeds without being something of the other. Pure poetry, for instance, is silence. It was fiction that taught poetry how to speak. The personal journey of the prose-poem writer recapitulates this process. It's a primitive pleasure enjoyed by intuitive simpletons." R. Edson, The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 1999

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January 12 so stubborn
. I am very undignified here tonight. Starting with a period. I want to lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, and lie some more. Then I will blurt, and then I will be cruel, and then fall down wretched on the heaving carpet and let the snowy ceiling make my dust portrait. Too much Kafka. Actually, very little Kafka is far too much. Too much beer. In my case, one. I felt unsteady on my feet. My drive home became a phantasmical night garden of word machines churning out poems made of aluminum foil, all crumpled. I can't remember them now. I had a bad feeling all day. It had to do with the Single Vendor Solution, which we sought for many years, but never achieved. It had to do with me. I'm standing up, but I don't know why. My legs are a miracle and my eyes are as incredible as grapes. I saw the moon fall on her back just beyond the hill. Her breath was knocked out of her. She wiggled and wiggled and wiggled her horns until she finally turned herself over and crawled away. Now I see a tree standing up outside the window. She waves her branches at me like a supplicant, but she's all sticky with streetlight. Forget about them, moon beetle, tree plea, and the night garden. What about me? What about meeeee? Here I am on this frigid beach, my unprotected skin scalded red by the future. ~~~~~~~ She doesn't want to talk anymore, she collapses into third person, she ends, pouting, with a period.

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January 13 so lonely
Hanging on the edge of negativity all day, about -1. I talked to G about the Six Banners Sunday School project. I realized I could handle lessons on Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism with just things I have around the house. Multi-media even. Tapes, CDs, posters, pictures, stories. Not everyone can say that. It still takes some effort. And I already feel drained. Loneliness. I am so lonely. A combination of a lot of emptinesses. I know there are actions I could take to help. For now, I'm not doing anything but moaning with loneliness. I miss Lucy. I miss my lunchtime Al-Anon meetings. I miss lunching with friends in town. I miss my old co-workers, some of them anyway. I miss Auntie Gail and wish she could come out here and clean my house with me. I miss all the various classmates I've had over the years. I miss laughing. I'm so lonely I don't even feel lonely, I feel frantic. So much has changed. I've been lonely a lot. I was programmed in many ways to be lonely, lonely, lonely. It would be so easy to get stuck in it. What should I do? G said I was the only person who responded to her call for help with the Six Banners project. A lonely volunteer. I had to do it since I have so many resources. At the same time, I feel resentful. I guess I'll either snap out of it or continue on in pain. I wrote some lines of poetry about pain a couple of years ago. I really love them. I keep reciting them to myself, especially the first line. Unfortunately, I don't know where to go with this poem. I can almost hear the rhythm I want for the next line, but I don't know what the next line should say (obviously). Not only that, it's the wrong time of year for it. But anyway: Are you in pain, magnolia? holding all your handkerchiefs swollen with tears luscious with tears

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January 14 what am I doing
Fighting the poison tonight. Fighting the poison. I fought the poison with my own substance. I did not know I was doing it. The poison jumped out from beneath my skin, an inner sheath the shape of my own body. It slithered around the floor, squelching out of my hands when I tried to grab it. It was a muscular poison like a snake but a rubbery poison like a tendon, wet and slippery. Fighting the poison. I fought the poison with Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein's words on Ezra Pound, calling him "the village explainer." Gertrude Stein's words about Miss Toklas having a bad tooth, and besides we want to pick wildflowers. Echoes, echoes, echoes and the reverberations of echoes filled the arena of easy chairs. I whacked the poison over and over with the sheaf of wildflowers. I snarled at it showing my bad tooth. Fight, fight, fight, fight the poison. I rolled with it under the chairs. I held it over the cold air vent while it squirmed. I drizzled hot tea on it and smeared chocolate on its private parts. At that simultaneous moment, I stood up and made a mouth around words about writing practice, discipline, feminism, and my concepts. My concepts flopped out of my sudden mouth like soaked paper flowers while the poison, caught by my surprise, wrapped its hands around my ankles and yanked me under the table. Fighting. Fighting. Fighting. Fighting. The. Poison. I have no weapons. I have no weapons. Silence not a weapon. Gesture not a weapon. Helpless not a weapon. Timid not a weapon. I try. I try. Futile. No use against the yellow of confusion. And here now the white of unknowing.

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January 15 Akhmatova
from White Flock, Anna Akhmatova, tr. Jane Kenyon Like a white stone in a deep well one memory lies inside me. I cannot and will not fight against it: it is joy and it is pain. It seems to me that anyone who looks into my eyes will notice it immediately, becoming sadder and more pensive than someone listening to a melancholy tale. I remember how the gods turned people into things, not killing their consciousness. And now, to keep these glorious sorrows alive, you have turned into my memory of you. 1916 Slepnevo

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January 16 Cold
The weather is unsafe. It's so windy and so cold. I feel threatened. I worry about the house. I worry about my older son whose car has no back. I worry about the pigeon. I think I just heard the pigeon house blow away. The recycling boxes will be all redistributed in the morning. I was hibernating most of the day. Cold, dull, lying down but not sleeping, sad. Does this happen every January? I forced myself to go to church and to the grocery store. I talked to my sister-in-law on the phone. She lives in St. Maries. She says its beautiful there. The road gets even darker and you can see the tops of the mountains. She didn't sound scared. Neither did I. Ah. The backless car just pulled up out front. The driver appears to be moving normally, not frozen into a block of ice. What did we have for dinner? Oh yes. My specialty. Mussels in spaghetti with a sauce of olive oil, a little butter, lemon, and capers. This is so delicious and so easy to make. But my son thinks mussels are disgusting. I'll eat his leftovers for lunch tomorrow. I imagine tomorrow. Silly faith. Going back to the fear. Sometimes I call fear "nameless dreads." This sounds more insubstantial, less fierce. I was petrified with fear every morning for a month before I left my job last April. Finally I found some music that could absorb the fear. I'd play this tape in the dark when I woke up afraid. It worked so well, sometimes I was even able to go back to sleep. Today I touched the tape again. It was still in the tape player. I was afraid of it.

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January 17 Blankie and pen
I've been ranting in my head about the online journal for a few days now. When I sit down to write, the rant just won't flow. Why is that? Is journaling "building up a slagheap of consciousness?" That's what I heard Friday night. What am I doing?
	This is how I feel lately. I need my blankie. My socks are dirty. My tomboy clothes are out of synch with my sunbonnet. I can barely sit up, my shoulders are limp with role overload. I have a big welt on my forehead and I'm just stupefied by everything. Notice the right hand. It wants to reach for the pen, but I didn't learn to write for several more years. I didn't start keeping a journal for several more years after that. Then I started building up a slagheap of consciousness and a major case of nearsightedness and astigmatism.
I don't want to let myself write the rant because what I'm doing does not need to be justified. It is just happening. I really want to write love poetry but I'm damned if I can figure out how. The emotion and the words are just not connecting. I feel so politically incorrect, putting on lace under my boy's clothes. I don't want to give in. I don't want to be a puddle. At the same time -- I don't want to conquer. I'd rather be overwhelmed. I don't want to climb on top of everything. Blankie - pen - blankie - pen. I am still feeling amazement at those Akhmatova poems I ran across. Maybe I just need some more distance. More - more - did you say DISTANCE? I've had enough distance to last for a lifetime. What I need to do is give myself a chance to be stupefied in private. Goddamn freewriting onto the slagheap in spite of what he says. "Look at him, the redbud. At least he bleeds more privately."

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January 18 Musings from the den
I got offered my boss's job today. He's leaving. My intuition was exactly right about him. I didn't think it would happen so soon. I think it will be better for me to be more engaged and to have more responsibility. But -- it's hard to say. I was trying to fill the responsibility void with creative action. Oh hell, I don't know. I'll just make a little more money and start being able to save for younger son's college education again. Work stuff comes so easily to me. It's everything else that's hard. Chenille socks. This phrase is making me feel better. I bought three pair of really nice designer socks over the weekend. They are colorful and cozy. I am slowly starting to address getting my wardrobe in order again. Then I will worry about getting my car in order. And then -- my house. Everyday maintenance life just disintegrated when I left my job. I didn't expect that. I could have predicted it though. I got impossibly cheap and didn't keep up with anything but the dentist and the dog's shots. It's taking me a long time to get back. I'm still impossibly cheap, trying to live within my means. And I'm working in the wrong town, away from all my maintenance providers and my house. I hibernated tonight. Got in bed and stayed under the comforter for a couple of hours. I finally got warm. I got into a mildly troubled mode of putting everything on hold. It looks like depression from the outside, but it's not. It's hiberation. Eventually I got up, took out the rest of the trash (the boys said they did it, but ...), and turned on the computer. Then I got stalled reading my journal from the winter of 1988-89 when life REALLY sucked. I had a strange thought the other day. Healing. It is really quirky and unexpected that healing happens. Why not just total decay once a hurt or disease gets started? Why should there be a healing mechanism in place in the world? I don't know. I have seen enough healing to know that it exists; I've seen dramatic, miraculous emotional healing in the 12 step program; my own was probably one of the most dramatic I witnessed, although I can't say I'm quite there yet. I can't deny that healing exists, even if I don't know why. Today I read that someone saw their Higher Power as the power of healing. I liked that.

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January 19 kissed by Fire
I've had some small inklings every day, faint reverberations of the poetry journal project working out there. The son told me there was a flyer on the door of his reading class in middle school. Of course, he didn't let on to anyone that he had any connection with the project. My first graphic design teacher is going to make the cover "Project 2" in his course this semester. This is great news. At least there will be a cover, if nothing else. I want to be very very kind to the people who write to me. Some are so tentative. "What's a bio?" ohmigod. I just love every small bit of reaching out that I get. I want to send them kisses, kisses, kisses. I am not a firm type of editor, apparently. Fire Story. I had just finished telling my younger sister to SHUT UP (which she did!). I had given up trying to spray the burning roof with waning droplets of water from the hose. I had come down from the ladder and crossed the road to wait for the fire department. I was wet because I had wet myself down with hose water so I could stand the extreme heat from the burning roof. I had blistering burns on the top of my head and on my upper arm. Once I crossed the road I finally let myself panic since there was nothing else I could do about the house burning down. And no family members were around on that side of the road to enforce my cool aspect. So I was jumping on my feet with panic and begging the fire department to come quickly, in a fast loud chant. No one told me to shut up. A small crowd had gathered over there across the road to watch the house burn down (or to watch me?). Finally, reaching the edges of panic, I hugged a strange man. He patted me on my skinny wet back and said "they'll be here soon, young lady." He was a regular, middle-aged, tubby, balding man wearing an undershirt. It must have been a weird experience for him. I didn't know the woman who was our neighbor down the lane. I had never spoken to her before. I can't even remember what she looked like. She took me to the hospital. The nurse there asked me how I got burned. "House fire," I said. They sympathized. They taped gauze over the burn on my upper arm, sticking the tape to the hair under my arm. Then my neighbor took me home to her house. She put me in her college-age daughter's pink room. I was supposed to rest in there. Instead I looked at all Margaret's things and felt really strange.

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January 20 tempo ludic
I want to make something, I want to make something out of words, something like an egg, or a stone, or a small stalagmite of ice. A crystal shape that turns slowly, suspended one inch over the leaves, over the snow over the leaves. Now I see, the line break lets in air cold air this chill of hesitation or should I? Should I or shouldn't I, the line moves away too fast in any case. My son got a ticket, driving too fast for the conditions, yesterday, before snow even started. He skidded on sand and jumped through some bushes into a personal yard and there were five police cars immediately surrounding him. And here I am, not learning from his mistakes, and driving too fast for conditions, and no police cars yet, but I'm using too many ands, and too many commas, and is a line break the faint of a comma? a comma in a coma, or not? The question mark slows me but I run away in fear before the answer as unborn as egg, as dust is stone as ice ghost formed by breath Why don't we write in poetry all the time, all the time, all the time, try it! It's just as fun as jazz.

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January 21 Thoughts from the room
I like Hayden Carruth's prose very much. I just finished Beside the Shadblow Tree, A Memoir of James Laughlin. He lived in Meadow House, where he ate his soft-boiled egg every morning and took off his clothes every night, but far more accurately, he lived in the company of beautiful language and cogent thought, in the world of poetic myth that is ultimately so much more substantial than any other world. I like Carruth's focus on everyday arrangements. I like his perspective on his mental illness and how he never shies away from bringing it into the story. I like his anarchism, and how he nevertheless lived with the benefaction of the aristocratic for so many years. I like that he writes about the women, Ann, and Gertrude, and Wonza, almost as much as Jas. I like how this memoir is written so casually, relying on his long years of association with words as a foundation rather than an overstrenuous checking of facts. The last few pages are thrillingly sad. But he's wrong to be nostalgic about Literature. It's wrong to write this: As the American twentieth century proceeded ever deeper into political corruption, social demoralization, and economic fatuity, as the qualities of greed and egomania more and more invaded the domain of esthetic consciousness, as pedantry flourished and talent was driven into diaspora, these two friends were overcome together by great sadness. The goodness and beauty they had seen and heard and touched were fading out of the world. My shorthand phrase for this kind of talk is "going out of the room." No one has any right to do this. You must never write about a "century" or "American" or generalized unmeasurable (but increasing) qualities of fatuity, greed, and egomania. It's not scientific. The soft-boiled egg is much more scientific. You must never fall into nostalgia for the fading of goodness and beauty. That's shockingly lazy and demoralized. You become so useless. My definitions of "moral" are weird. I'd like to write philosophy. Once, in a philosophy exam, I leaped out of an essay on John Dewey (?) to speculate on why the professor had given us this particular essay question. It was shocking. One is not to "be in the room" in a philosophy exam. The professor loved it. I would bet he had never read anything like that before. I wanted to insist that classmates replace the word "Man" with the word "You" or "I" in their papers. See if the sentences still sounded right. This is a good idea, but no one will ever buy it and I don't know how to sell it. I don't think the concept of original sin would ever have been invented without this massive brainwashing that Man exists. Speak for yourself. My life is full of immense challenges. I'm barely aware of them. I feel completely alone in them. One is: not to become nostalgic as I get older. Does this have to happen? I want to be a woman living in perpetual surprise.

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January 22 another day
"Observation and construction make imagination, that is granting the possession of imagination, is what she has taught many young writers." Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas I'd rather be in the bath. Nothing is happening here. One year I moved beyond the limits of bored restlessness into numb resignation and routine of householding. We are eating prunes. They are so delicious. There's a prune joke too -- once when I was in high school, my mother sent prunes in my lunchbag. A squeamish girl used to a diet of Ding Dongs screamed at me "Don't eat them! Don't eat them!" Of course, I did eat them, I like prunes. Now my son and I scream at each other "Don't eat them!" and then proceed to pop the black alien fruits into our mouths. We stop each other after four or five though. I silenced myself this morning and it affected my whole day. I tried to recover. Spent time on some email. Spent time on the phone. It didn't help. Now I'm exhausted and I can't write. I'd rather be in bed.

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January 23 a little more fluent
More mechanical weekend. Prayer to Ganesha. Tear festival. Cherry pie. Music Student went back to school by train. Now to get the dirty feet smell out of the living room. B is moving rapidly away from representational art. But she's stuck on the faces, the stupid faces. She can't get away from the faces. How does this correspond to writing? The fried egg part of her collage was so beautiful, we were shocked. Use a tiny window. Maybe this will work. A little mat. No, I don't think so. It will just show a letter of the alphabet. I vacuumed the whole house today. Almost. Take a sentence, any sentence, and expand from there? I'm looking for a mechanism. Maybe this is wrong. I was tuned into Annie Lamott's Traveling Mercies for awhile. Not good for me. I loved it a lot. But it was the wrong frequency and -- too much static. Metallic has a strength. Ice melts. Crayons melt. I made a lot of pancakes today. Fourteen of them? I made a lot of pages, a lot of hysterical pages. That was enough. Ouch. Those faces. Pricked my finger on those perfect permanent faces. We want to travel down the body to ? the waist? Dream: A lost nipple. Late. Wet hair. I'm falling through the ice. The cold water here is muddy and fluent but not much better.

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January 24 party food
I've grown very fond of the streetlight. It's always ready to listen and it keeps me orangey-colored company all night. ~~~~~~~~ I got my birthday early this year. All my celebrations are coming one to two days early, Thanksgiving, Christmas -- well, New Year's had to be on New Year's, it was very stubborn, I'm sorry to say. Today I got The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Volume 8 in the mail. I gobbled up several of them, and suddenly my house was populated with FOOD! I was an oyster po-boy sandwich, life-size. My son was a five-foot-tall pineapple, nodding his prickly fronds. The dog became some piquant overripe relish tray. This transformation made me feel so hilarious that I told my son a story about my day, a story that included a coworker, nests of hair in the ears, and a nosebleed. I laughed so hard I cried and my stomach felt like I'd done 50 situps. Then we both told stories of times we had laughed so hard before, and we laughed so hard again at each one. We've been a little tense. This is what prose poems do to me. In fact, those funny stories are kernels of prose poems. I've written some of them down. The Stirling Stories -- they're prose poems. Or -- I have to make them into prose poems. A whole series of them. They're not comedy-funny, they're just weird juxtapositions of people and actions and reactions. Wes and the Hay Truck Getting in touch with the Gas company Trout chow Jim Fenton, cat man Don't let them take the woodstoves Prince and the Oakland freeway The Happy Russians and their 40 dead canaries Oh man, there's a million of them. I've read a few of the Stirling Stories in public and I get that uncomfortable need to laugh, and soon I'm just laughing and crying because the story is so uncomfortably funny (for me). The audience starts laughing at me laughing 'cause they sure don't get the point. Part of the effect is cumulative. Everything that happened there was true and it became more and more uncomfortable and funnier and funnier. Working in a damn actual NUT HOUSE where the walnut harvest came in cooperatively and rolled down through metal tubes with a loud crashing laughing noise. ~~~~~~~~ I know what happened to me. I entered into a rare and unusual "state of being." I'm still in it. I had just better get used to it because that's the way it's going to be for awhile. Soon I'll even learn to take advantage of it. Ha!

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January 25 accessing the inaccessible
I've always known her as "the inaccessible one" and "Hard to Reach." I wondered at my choice, to pray to the Powerful One in her aspect as "Hard to Reach." Figures. The explanation I had came from Devi: The couple [Durga and Shiva] are said to spend thousands of years in love-play, and have to be interrupted tactfully when, as in the Mahatmya, divine anger and violence are needed to save the world from demons. So I thought she was "Hard to Reach" because she was a little distracted. I could understand that. Then I came across this in The Prose Poem: An International Journal, in a poem by Robert Lunday: Durga -- "difficult to penetrate;" one name for the wife of Shiva Um -- does "hard to reach" translate into "difficult to penetrate"? I think these new words put a slightly different slant on the concept. But I'm not unwilling to consider them. "Difficult to penetrate" -- if she spent thousands of years in love play, I don't think the meaning can be taken as purely physical. Unfortunately, I'm afraid most readers of The Prose Poem will take it that way. They will come away with only one experience of Durga -- as virginal and frigid, and that's quite wrong. What about "Hard to understand"? Women are, you know. What about "Virgin," in its meaning as a woman whole unto herself? I guess. I think "difficult to penetrate" is kind of a stretch. And I just don't think it sounds very good. Here's more from Devi: Any goddess or even any woman is, according to the principles of Hindu spirituality, a manifestation of Durga, the unmanifest, the inaccessible. Is that why I have vastly more poetry submissions from men than from women? That women are unmanifest, even to themselves? I don't like it. At the same time, I like the unmanifest. It's mysterious. And that's good. How many times was I told, as a child, that a certain theological conundrum was to be accepted because it was a "mystery"? I was frustrated, but also thrilled to be surrounded by all this mystery. As usual, "darshan" (a look, a glimpse) may be the key to the whole problem. In one salutation, the Lalita Sahasranama, he greets her by one thousand names, and gives one gift, such as a leaf or petal, for each name; at the same time he touches his own body in one thousand places, and says one thousand times, "namo 'stu te, I salute you by taking your name." The Devi in turn gives him darshan, a "look" at her one thousand powers inside himself. These mysterious voiceless women. They just want to keep their poetry private. Or they are busy with love-play. How reverent would I have to be to get them to give me "a look"? And then would I betray them with a publication? Oh, I'm frustrated and not making sense. Maybe I'll just stick to worshipping "The Irrational One" (Chamunda, "stomach-body").

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January 26 another demention
I've really gotten the hang of living one day at a time. I've really gotten the hang of living one day at a time. I've really gotten the hang of living one day at a time. What I haven't gotten the hang of is the fifth dimension. Let's see, that's three dimensions as in three dimensional, the fourth dimension is time, as in one day at a ..., and the fifth dimension is Imagination. I sit here stupid and trapped. I want to go somewhere and I want to go there fast, like an arrow. I don't want to go over to tomorrow. I know that. I'm very familiar with fantasy machine. I know what he does. He tries hard to produce the future, like the monstrous assembly line cookie maker in Edward Scissorhands. There's tomorrow. There's the kiss. There's the call. There's the end. Ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka. I just watch him with disbelief. You gotta be kidding me. I want to go somewhere besides tomorrow. I want to go to Wonderland. I want to go to Undermorrow. I want to go Beyond Belief. I want to go Over the Woods and Through the River, to the Great House. That would be Grand. Where I would go: We all wear our hair on the inside. Harmless disembodied lips jump up our spines, soft and friendly. We pet them and put them to bed in a bowl. The kitchen is painted deep maroon and peach, with floor-to-ceiling cupboards full of spices and intrigue. Hours of whispers carpet the bathroom, so plush we can lie down in there and try to decipher the charming mosaic dimension on the ceiling. Marigolds run into the house when we open the door. Then they pee in the corner. The fussy violets come around once an hour and clean up. None of the secrets have teeth and all of the voices have hands. No one cares if I dig holes in the floor. And you are in every room.

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January 27 getting warm
So... today I sent Junior a check for $100 to cover some text books, then I paid off the rest of the Christmas bills, then I acted like a manager and tried to pin down the scope of the PB505 project, then I acted like a manager and interviewed a candidate for the open position, then I did a lot of work, then I went to a rah-rah meeting about how the next 90 days are going to be hell and how happy we should feel about it, then I came home and found flowers had snuck into the house while the door was open, just like I wrote yesterday, so I freaked and crawled under the covers and tried to get warm.

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January 29 bland blankness
I don't want to hear anything I have to write tonight. It's the source of a bit of conflict. Last night I went to bed right after dinner, exhausted by a partial removal of doubts. Too much -- sugar, orchids, lilies, ferns, chrysanthemums. I'm numb. Letter from my sister. I don't want her to hurt as much as I have, but I guess she'll have to. I only want to write in prose poems from now on, now that I know what they are. But I can't. It seems too hard. It's all too too hard. I spent all day doing -- nothing to speak of. Saturday is often a blankness, requesting a fillup. I have to trust it. People whose poems are just too bland: Ursula LeGuin, James Laughlin. I thought, what I need to do is work on a page behind each entry. Commentary, expansion, or taking off from a place that interests me. Could I do that? It sounds painful and frustrating. I want to go to the circus. It's coming in March.

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January 30 the Very Angry Goddess
It's snowing hard. The house is so quiet, except for the tapping of the keyboard and the ticking of snow on the windows. There's a small windchimes hanging from the roof outside this room. It's making music with the icy snow. I won't say I taught Sunday School this morning. I was more like a really incompetent ringmaster. I had to invite three older boys to come to the class because their teacher wasn't there and they were hanging out in the social room looking ready for trouble. One talks nonstop and is extraordinarily hyper and rude. He kept bringing up Playboy and Penthouse (which I somehow started calling Playhouse because I couldn't think straight). The second one wants to challenge everything I say. He verges on existential despair at age 11. The third one is my own son, who examines my every move with a critical eye and later says I'm not a very good teacher. So anyway in an utterly ridiculous lesson out of left field, I exposed them to Devi and the story of Durga and the buffalo demon. Some of them were suitably impressed with the horrifying pictures of the goddesses standing on corpses, Durga yanking the demon out of the dead buffalo, and black Kali with her long tongue on fire. I actually said I thought Hinduism was more of a religion of sex and violence than Christianity. Then I actually said to this older boy who was obsessed with Playboy that he should study Tantra. That shut him up for about five seconds. I also told him the Great Goddess didn't think much of Playboy and Playhouse. I must have said 10 times that she was a Very Angry Goddess. The youngest boy, Jeffrey, is so enthusiastic. He's fascinated by everything I say. He takes the information home to his family. I let him read part of the story, which was a smart move because the older boys stopped talking to listen to him. But he got stuck on the name Mahishasura and turned the book back over to me. So I read the story of the battle with great energy, and tried to ignore all the incipient chaos and totally random questioning surrounding me. At one point in the story, the buffalo demon appears to have won and the whole world is laid waste. John, the boy of existential despair, argued about this vigorously. "But isn't that what he wanted?, Didn't he get what he wanted?" I didn't know what to say. I said very lamely that the victory was coming later and the whole world would be restored. (At home afterwards, upon reflection, I thought, well, damn, isn't that always the way it is with war.) I asked the class what they thought about these violent stories in the Hindu religion. Jeffrey said "bad" and David said "good." Then Jeffrey started talking nonstop about the Flanders, who are the Christian characters in the Simpsons. So we didn't get very far with that line of questioning. I asked them what they thought about worshipping the goddess. Joey said it would be okay if she was hot. I ignored that and started talking about the Virgin Mary and how her statues were different from the Devi statues. John said he thought Hinduism probably had more respect for women. After the class sort of exploded and all the other kids left for coffee hour, John stayed behind and looked at the book for quite a long time. I told him more of the stories behind some of the pictures. We talked a little bit about religion. This is how he understands it: "we're lonely and we want to know why we're here."

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January 31 so much for january
You were caught in a storm of gorgeousness all day. It wasn't your fault and you didn't cause it. You woke up as cranky and sluggish as ever. You shoveled two inches of slush off the driveway. Your job is too hard. The snow is too brown and too ugly. You're late sending cards for two family birthdays. Even so, a storm of gorgeousness. A twister full of opals and lilies and openings. The sound of charming chiming bells. White tablecloths. Little warm bellied pots of tea. Navy clouds clustered on the horizon, venting into space. Remembering shellfish. Circuses everywhere. The color coral. Vanilla. A party. Tourmaline. The feminine. Window music. You're helpless. You look for shelter in homework and chores. But you can't avoid gorgeousness. Once it knows you're there, it won't leave you alone. It swirls and swirls and swirls through your mind like the great red storm on Jupiter, like the primordial storms which bore life on this planet. It's big. Big! It's small. And still -- more and more gorgeousness. Gold envelopes. The pearl. The fingertip. You have teeth. Your friend paints. A little white wine and the lights of the city. Giggling about the boudoir and the bidet in the elevator. Going home. You make it small and calm enough so it will fit onto the page. Birth it backwards to the gorgeousness of two cells joined to one. A spark! Or any thought.

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