November
02 Smelling salts 03 Impatience 04 Just scraps 05 November evenings 06 Another November evening 07 Sunday trouble 08 Arrival - Williams 09 Quartz and ash 10 Needles and pens 13 Broken but healing 14 Painkillers 15 We all have to go out 16 Three of midnight 17 Chrysanthemums and cursing 18 Am I a child? 19 oil loss solstice 20 operation 21 Perfume of thank you 22 "I've always longed for adventure" 24 Williams' Improvisations 26 Isn't it ironic 28 weekend weakened 29 anchor inspector 30 What I learned in kindergarten
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November 02 Smelling salts
Ummm, ... what am I doing here? I don't know what the hell is going on. There's terrific wind tonight and rain and green lightning and darkness, lots of it. All the ghosts have been blown down the street along with the lighter garbage bags and a great quantity of leaves. My hair is streaming damp from bringing in groceries during the storm and I feel like a completely different person than I was last week. I didn't want to be her anyway. She was too quaky and quavery. Who really believed that such instability could be sustainable. So the earth settles and the big rocks and boulders find new levels and the water trickles make new trails and corridors. Dust lies down and becomes smug smiling mud and all the cracks close up. No more disturbing skylights. No more heartbeats. No more insectlike flutterings. Just one deep continuous sigh. Vapor is not where it's at. Let's go downstairs and have a radical snack.

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November 03 I m p a t i e n c e
What is Impatience? I read too much of my old journal tonight, looking for clues. Now I have no fresh words. I just have a rage of impatience about the past. A much more futile emotion I can't imagine. impatient with the dawn impatient with insomnia impatient with my children impatient with growth impatient with a man impatient with my house impatient with my pets impatient with my body impatient with my friends impatient with the muse impatient with the divine impatient with software impatient with correspondence impatient with the system impatient with the unspoken impatient with the kitchen impatient with the pearl I'm becoming very undisciplined and useless. Today I walked very fast through the cold woods until I came to "The Cut." It's a long gash in the earth where the entrance to a quartz mine used to be. It's now surrounded by a tall chain link fence to prevent people and animals from falling into it. You can see the bottom. Water, floating leaves, a trickling sound. I stared into it for a few moments and then I walked very fast back to my cubicle. Opposites of impatient: trusting, graceful, observant, accepting, optimistic, distracted, sublimating {patience, as itself, doesn't exist} Time to go outside one more time for today.

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November 04 Just scraps
"impatient with the pearl" That's a good phrase. I don't know what to do with it. "Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of a miracle of poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?" --Charles Baudelaire Which one of us indeed. This is quoted on The Prose Poem's website. Which I CANNOT recommend because the frames just don't work IMHO. There's a great poem by Russell Edson out there called "The Goldilocks Compulsion." It's in Highlights from Volume 6. Don't try to find it; it's not worth the aggravation. I'm feeling almost receptive to poetry. Which is a good thing because I haven't yet been able to face up to the fact that I got this (meager) grant from the city to produce a special issue of the poetry journal. My Astronet horoscope today contained this sentence: "The things you say or create for mass distribution could bring enormous emotional fulfillment." Is it referring to my technical documentation or my online journal or the poetry journal? Who knows. I am feeling extremely cocky and accomplished tonight because I sorted and emptied two boxes of stuff. I have picked up and put down these particular boxes 50 times in the past year. Just touching them used to make me feel overwhelmed. I'd rifle through the contents hardly looking, feel sick, and then move on to something else. Why that then and this now? I'm curious. I have learned that, for me, there's no use trying to clean until the time is right. This is a very slackwilled maxim, but it's true for me. Eventually I will clean.

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November 05 November evening
This leaping sweetly ball of flame blooms into the shape of pear and then erupts exploding into into into high clouds dazed with sunset come here to paint on arms and legs and naked waist while while while a feast of cooing calls a pure white pigeon with pink eyes to sleep at the top of the roof and then a spine sits wrapped in damp of peat leaves and translates flight into a faded trashy notebook ###

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November 06 Another November evening
"Oh prepare my soul with flowers and sirens and lack of fear and white pigeons and tongues and awe. " (quoting myself) Today: Cut back the mint bed. Clear debris from under and around the mock orange. Cut the overgrown ivy away from the brick stoop in front. Tear the vines out of those tall front evergreens. Rake leaves and debris out of the front yard. Prune that other tall evergreen using the stepladder. Clear debris and grass from under that scraggly rosebush. Take my son bike shopping and make him visit three stores for comparison purposes; then buy him the bike he wanted originally (a K2 Pick). Read two great articles in American Poetry Review, one on the poetry of rapture, the other a review of a book of letters between W.C.Williams and Denise Levertov. Now I'm craving Williams. Fell into exhausted sleep on the couch for several hours. Got up to partially make the October archives and write this dumb entry which is not even worth fighting with the web server to serve. The web service has been temporarily very bad for the past week or so, but I think it's getting better.

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November 07 Sunday trouble
I'm very confused. 1) Stolid middle-class treadmilling in no way redeems addiction and murder, does it? If not, why do I keep trying so hard? (many tears this morning) 2) I start to cry hard in church. There's a sentimental reading about autumn, and needing to stop the car and look at the leaves, and how life gets more baffling as we get older, instead of less. This makes me cry helplessly. I'm not sure what the point of this is, so I stop crying and blow my nose. Then I sign up for more volunteer activities which I can't possibly do and start to worry about my pledge which I can't possibly pay. 3) My friend B comes over and climbs up on the roof. She finishes pruning the evergreen from above AND cleans out the gutter. I stay on the ground like a wife. Mario taunts us from the street, calling her a big squirrel. She yells down at him that her big butt is keeping her balanced up there. She flings handfuls of black debris at the ground while I run around in whirlwind of compost, trying to clean up. Why the persistent feeling that a husband should be doing this? Isn't it much more adventurous this way? 4) Is rapture passivity? Is that wrong? I think so. 5) We go to the library. I check out a large sack of books, poetry, Williams and Pound, Mitchell and Digges, more than I can ever read. Then we go to McDonald's. I have painful cognitive dissonance caught between my bag of books and the boys wolfing down french fries. I still feel it, hours later. "Chew, chew," B cries to her son. I want to chew but I'm can't get the food to my mouth. 6) A young Haitian mother with an elegant face and a glamorous dress is very upset. She paid good money for a birthday party there at McDonald's. They weren't set up AND they weren't being nice to her. She complains bitterly to us. We're both completely stumped and resort to complimenting the little boy on his outfit and asking him how old he is. Four. The older children look horribly embarrassed. There's a nice big cake. How to act? What to say? 7) We eat dinner, B and I, my son and her two. The table is shaking with their energy. The boys are relentlessly and hysterically retelling episodes of The Simpsons. Not even knowing what I'm doing, I turn the conversation to Sunday School. My son won't talk about youth group, besides saying they talked about "stuff." So I get the youngest boy to retell most of the story of Jacob from his morning class. Yep, he was in a pit. I go into Socratic mode, questioning the boys about the story, taking control, working really hard. I don't know the point of this either, but I do feel a little calmer. 8) B has no interest in discussing my stupid romantic problem. I know she would marry a man quick as anything if she could find one. I tell her the ridiculous story of what prompted me to get married back in 1978. What kind of commitments are these? They are all completely unreliable. I need a festival of Lights. I'm in a vacuum of mythology. I just want to live quietly in the temple. But there is no temple.

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November 08 Arrival - Williams
Arrival And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom -- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind ... ! William Carlos Williams Sigh. I love Williams. The biography by Paul Mariani is a little intimidating -- 770 pages. But I started reading it because I want to know so badly. I got to the quarry today and just past it, to Old Mine Park where the Pequonnock River forms a pond. It was a strenuous but exhilarating walk. After work I came home and cooked and washed up and vacuumed and scrubbed dog stains out of the carpet until I felt thoroughly wretched, worse than Cinderella at her worst. I'm snapping out of it though. Poetry is whispering to me. And my non-housecleaning projects.

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November 09 Quartz and ash
I will just have to write and see what happens because I have no preconceived ideas. What I want to write about is so elusive -- something about the combination of quartz and ash, which I saw today in the ruins of the Old Kiln. Something about the brown brown brown monochromatic but marvelously textured color of the winter carpet of leaves. Something about that layer, the layer just above earth, where air and earth touch, where air lays her hands on earth, strokes and inspires the quartz, the ash, the leaves, or where earth gives her own husky whisper into air's ear. Something about how I really find my way by the ground, even though I look up to notice landmarks at eye level. The real landmarks are that triple cascade of gnarled roots warning of the crossroads, that patch of dried blond grass shuddering within the path's curve, that handsome rock outcropping striped white like a skunk signalling the sharp left uphill. Something about the peculiarity of this woods -- the openness of the ground, the lack of brush and brambles; the playful spookiness of the many close pits and hills, which today I realize are artificial, manufactured by the old mining operation. Something about the way its metaphors eventually speak to me, but not right away. The Cut is a dungeon, water dripping from the wall 30 feet down. The snake is a live story startling out of the cold surrounding my feet. There's a lookout somewhere, surrounded by more broken glass than we could ever clean up. A bear roams in here, stinky and lost. The highway went through this valley, although the town fought it, and now I hear it droning, cars unintentional in their trance of no-dream-time, no air-kiss-earth layer, the gory chaos of oh well road kill. I keep coming back to the quartz, quartz and ash, ash, quartz, quartz, ash, quartz, ash. I am white, crystal clear and resolute, tainted with a vein of bitter rusty ore. Then black, wet, without structure, dissolved, and burn ravished.

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November 10 Needles and pens
Were you a fiber artist as a child? Did you learn to make bound buttonholes? Were you told to make the back of the embroidery as neat as the front? Did your grandmother tell you she'd teach you to tat someday, and then never do it? Did your mother keep buying you embroidery kits? Did she give you the world's biggest sampler kit, the year you left home? Did you wad it up in a paper bag in the closet and never finish it? Did you leave the needle permanently stuck in the material? Did it make a rust stain from the dampness of storage? Did you make yourself purple velveteen bell bottoms and keep sewing the thighs tighter and tighter until they were unwearable? Did you wear homemade orange pants into the Financial Accounting Standards Board one day? Did you make Moroccan style pajamas for your little boys? Did you lose all patience with needlework? Why? pen vs needle letters leap from world's tallest sampler in vain attempt to form words quilt gets disorderly, pattern scrambles, explodes, falls in shards rude pen scrawls in ink right on your cheek crewel needle draws no blood

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November 13 Broken but healing
My little son broke his wrist very badly. He had to be in the hospital overnight. He's in a lot of pain and when not pain, discomfort and understandably severe grumpiness. I'm trying to be the nurse. Sometimes his dad is the nurse. "variously disturbed" (LeGuin) I don't feel like writing because there is not too much to say. Or there is too much to say. I just don't know how to say it. Stephen Dunn says "fictionize." I understand exactly what he is talking about. The only reason I know what he is talking about? my writing experiments here. Do we fictionize in the journal? Sure, why not. "The Writer's Chronicle" from the Associated Writing Programs is really a very good publication. I admire James Laughlin (New Directions). I was reading his book on Ezra Pound in the hospital. This felt strange, but pleasant. I developed an animosity toward Pound in college. Laughlin helped me see Pound in another light. And recognize some kindred spirit there. Not a lot, but some. Melopoeia is a great word. I'm feeling a lot of pain. Pain that belongs to other people. Underneath that empathic nerve melding, I feel calm. It feels so unusual. Maybe I am healing at a different level.

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November 14 Painkillers	A great book: Pound as Wuz, Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound by James Laughlin
"Beautiful gray Beautiful gray Beautiful gray" (late afternoon chant in honor of the sky) ~~~~~~~ (short story) A loud crash thump. I opened the door and found the comet crumpled on the doorstep. She was shivering, her hair was streaming and filled with clots of dirty rotten ice. I for one thought she would never leave her eccentric orbit in the far dark. "What happened?" "I thought I smelled oranges, and then I found out I have something they call fingertips," she said, holding out her shaking hands. ~~~~~~~ Ezra Pound was interested in the Minnesingers and in the Eleusinian mysteries. Reading this gave me the strangest feeling. Like meeting someone totally unexpected coming through the dark from the other side. I felt recognized. ~~~~~~~ Tapinosis -- "the application of colorful slang to serious topics" ~~~~~~~ The Cantos "a new kind of personal epic" "his experiments with a collage structure" "Words, phrases, whole sentences become 'ideograms' that are placed together without the usual connectives." "Pound liked to be mysterious about his work and the references in it." "He provided no notes for the Cantos." "...we are listening to a long monologue." "Fragments are inserted in new combinations that give them deeper meaning." "intensely visual. Everything is concrete and shown; there is very little symbolism and no extraneous rhetoric." ~~~~~~~ (paradiso terrestre) -- will you please please please come outside on a night in December to observe the night sky with me? Oh never mind for now I hear the footsteps of Despair hunting with his heavy arrows and I have to sprint away.

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November 15 We all have to go out	Quotes from a partially remembered A. A. Milne poem which I can't find in the house anywhere
Have I lost everything because I didn't start out being imitative of Keats? or Browning? or X, Y or Z? Did I start out imitative of anything? Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, A.A. Milne, Mother Goose. I don't want to write about this. It will be a much longer time before I come to any terms with "tradition." Maybe never. This dog is driving me nuts with his whining. Every time I get up the cat gets into my chair and will not be moved. A big old dopey skunk meanders around the neighborhood. I have no idea what I'm doing. "Roundabout, and roundabout, and roundabout I go ..." Back to school and back to work tomorrow. The son's bones are doing much better. "All around the table, the table in the nursery ..." The dog ate half a bag of chocolate chip cookies. Someone left the baggie just barely hanging over the edge of the counter. I'm surprised he had enough restraint not to finish it off. That explains his problem. He's having a sugar and chocolate rush. "I'm feeling rather stupid and I don't know what I am ..." The dopey skunk stopped me and the big black man dead in our tracks this morning on our walk. The black man is big. I had a dog. But the skunk can go wherever he wants. "So roundabout and roundabout and roundabout I go ..." The night smells of snow. It is black and as icy cold as my velvet jacket. I HAVE TO GO OUT>

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November 16 Three of midnight
Rose of november, cold rose, agnostic rose, feral rose, you are dropping your crinkly pink petals into my dishwater and I persist in finding you fascinating even though you are tragic. Lips of november, bitten lips, disciplined lips, mutable lips, you won't stop scheming to run away from my face into other people's ears and I persist in wanting to imprison you even though you are innocent. Stars of november, mechanical stars, moral stars, mathematical stars, you can't stand those teenage meteors crossing your permanent paths, now I want to scream so loud that all the stars will fall into my hands will someone please unplug me? this poem just disintegrated.

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November 17 Chrysanthemums and cursing
Dream I was uncovering a great hedge of chrysanthemums, waist high, bushy, perfectly fresh, light purple and maroon. I had placed them along a fence in the backyard and I was removing some covering the nursery had used to protect them. I hesitated. I thought -- these are far too outrageous and beautiful, what will the neighbors think? Then I thought -- oh, what the hell -- and brought them into the open. Cup Holder I was carrying a little bouquet of chrysanthemums around in my car in a cup of water placed in the cupholder. They have stayed fresh for weeks because the temperature has been so cool. Good Move I walked in the woods today in a daze. I fell down. I was carrying chrysanthemums and I lost my footing on some slippery leaves. I just kept going down all the way to the ground. At least I didn't break anything or fall into a pit. I banged my knee on a rock and I tore a hole in my pants. I lay on the ground for a second and felt incredibly stupid, but I didn't curse. I said something sarcastic, outloud, like "that was a good one." A Gesture I was carrying chrysanthemums into the woods because I wanted to throw them into "The Cut." I felt the need for a gesture. I limped up to the fence and stuck my toes in the links, raising myself about six inches. Enough to get clearance? The flowers had to go into the pit, not just fall awkwardly at the edge. I heaved them over and down they went. Then I looked at them and cried a little bit and felt like even more of a baby because I had hurt my knee. Return All the meanings of the gesture swirled around in my head, around and around, flowers for people in dungeons, renunciation of flowers, distancing from flowers, propitiation of the underworld, incubation of flowers, winter is coming. No need to settle on an explanation. I just breathed and breathed, great big gulps of oxygen, feeling like I had never breathed before. Cubicles Both of the people who sat in the cubicles next to me have moved out. I feel strange about this. Especially when I've been coming in from the woods after lunch hour with my hair full of twigs and holes in my pants. I had some chrysanthemums on my desk in a coffee mug. I threw them out. I'm taking a break from chrysanthemums.

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November 18 Am I a child?	Really the 19th but who cares
Am I a child? I feel like a child. But a child wouldn't get up and go to the computer when suffering from insomnia. A real child would lie in bed and cry out for comfort. A monstrous child - or an adult - would lie in bed silent, believing he could punish the Mother with his lonely independence. I am grateful that I went to my younger son every single time I heard the slightest peep out of him in the night. I just trained myself not to fuss about it, not to care whether the dad ever did it, just get up and go to the baby. I would never ever ever let a child cry itself to sleep to "train" it to sleep alone in its own room. I'm horrified at the majority of people (Americans of a certain class?) who think this is the way to handle infant's night fears. Gradually the child gets older and soon they grow out of calling you at night and maybe they are a little bit secure. (And maybe you are a martyr of some kind.) I don't remember nights with the older one very well. That was 18-19 years ago. It was early in my marriage then and I was a lot more confused. I'm taking care of my younger son again in some childish ways because of his broken wrist. I'm helping him put on his shirt, tying his shoes, zipping his jacket, washing his hair in the sink. I'm taking some pleasure in it. It's poignant. I realize I probably wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for some accident or illness. Last night, he wanted something from me and I just didn't handle it very well. I don't know what he wanted. I felt like he wanted me to watch him doing his homework. He wanted to complain to me. He really wanted to cry, but he couldn't. I did a bunch of really stupid stuff, like get mad at his math teacher, call the Homework Hotline, get mad at the defective phones, run out suddenly to get the milk I forgot earlier, be really distracted, cry. When I got home with the milk, he was in bed but not asleep. He said he was tired -- I'm sure he was. With a huge effort, I put all the hard words that I wanted to say aside, and just told him goodnight and kissed his forehead. With kids, you just hope the next day will be better sometimes. I don't have so many theories about the dog whining, which he is doing right now.

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November 19 oil loss solstice
Oil! I discovered oil! And what a difference it makes ... My car has been making a chattering noise for awhile now. As usual I procrastinate and worry and wonder if it will just die on me on the way to work. Today I thought I smelled something hot as well. So I forced myself to pull into the garage right across the main drag from work. Mr. Service came out to take a look. He started it up and listened and then lifted the hood and checked the oil. No oil. Damn. So he added three quarts and charged me $6.75 and sent me on my way. Car things NEVER work out that easily for me. How did I get away from changing the oil anyway. I don't think I've had it done in about 9 months. I've been at the new job 1 month. I still feel disoriented and full of emergency (lacking routines). They're making a cafe in the open area of the floor. Soda, coffee, CNN, games, etc. ~~~~~~~ This is what Stephen Dunn says: Inexperienced poets tend not to think of themselves as fictionists. That is, as writers who must create a chain of interconnections which links the poem's occurrences, thus hinting at its purpose and design. Poet/fictionists know that their true love is the poem -- that experience made of words -- not the experience behind it. This may mean that as we describe the woman or man who has left us bereft, heartbroken, we're primarily interested in phrasing and pacing, not to mention the exploration of the inherent large subject -- in this case loss -- which we must remember is not peculiar to ourselves. Maybe at the same time we're thinking of the vicissitudes of history or the quarrels among philosophers or some funky comment we heard on the street. We're ready to bring the unlikely to our subject. in '"Experience, Imagination, and the Poet as Fictionist," AWP The Writer's Chronicle He's wrong. The true love is not the poem, it's the blending and melding and shading and expanding that language gives to the experience. The poet can't be so cold as to be primarily interested in phrasing. He's right. There is a stepping away from experience. It can be a relief to take poetic license and find a design or a purpose beyond the experience. It can be a joy to find correspondences in experience, history, funky comments, and the weather. I wanted to put this in here because I have been struggling so hard recently with "how" to write about experience. ~~~~~~~ I feel a science fiction mood coming on. One evening recently, I thought what would it be like, a world with no solstice. I'm getting kind of sick of myself. I have to escape.

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November 20 operation	"The Passing of Venus," detail, tapestry designed by Edward Burne-Jones
A different beast came into the Room. Its name was Resignation. It had a halo and rough fur. It grabbed all the chunks of flesh I had lying about and sewed them neatly back inside my skin. No pain, no muss, no fuss. My friends were standing outside the kitchen door, watching for enemies. B said if anyone tried to get in here, she would fucking kill them. I felt glad to be so protected. Oh Resignation, you will never be impulsive. You will never be impatient. I think you are a very dull beast with rotten teeth and watery eyes. I'm sorry, I will never tell you thank you for your deft touch. But when this was all done, hey, I could see myself in the mirror. I felt friendly toward electronic things and filing. I could even take a joke. And maybe now I'll be able to sleep.

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November 21 Perfume of thank you		"The Passing of Venus," detail, tapestry designed by Edward Burne-Jones
If she has ears, let her hear. If she has eyes, let her see. At the end of a hard and junky day, time to reflect. Look, a pearl necklace in Black Swamp! small round miracles glowing in the murk ... (my thanksgiving) My metaphorical butt has been pulled out of the fire by connections I have worked so hard on for so long, connections I never knew how to make ten years ago, connections I often found frustrating. Connections -- I never knew why people needed them. To witness: Unitarian Universalists testifying in church: "I am so grateful for AYS " (I feel a profound split heal up in my chest); To receive: Feedback on my own work, and I can suddenly claim it again, after nearly giving it all all all away; To hear: A cautionary tale told by the friend who "illustrates" the poetry journal projects; To look forward to: Festival of Lights Nov 27 (I'm dancing); manygatherings; caroling; Rowe Wonderland in January; To do: a list of tasks for the new poetry journal project which was impossible yesterday; To want: I made a "Gift List" for Christmas for the first time in my adult life; To confess: I have a huge chip on my shoulder about men and I don't want it anymore. So tonight I just light la bougie parfumée in gratitude and go to bed early.		AYS = About Your Sexuality education program; now replaced by OWL = Our Whole Lives

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November 22 "I've always longed for adventure"	The Sound of Music. "...then why am I so scared?"
Adventure, adventure, adventure, adventure. The heart is craving adventure. (Heart growing hot.) The bare trees raise their crazy limbs and wave them about in a screaming motion as they walk down the hill out of the fog toward me. Their eyes are too high to see me though so I'm just left standing. The magpie lights on the cattle guard for a moment. The cows are cold, the ground is scourged with snow, and the sagebrush can't think straight with all that low high light in the winter desert outside of Omak. House fire. The light bulbs flicker -- will the wiring burn in the walls? Outside flaming brush piles spew sparks which land on the roof, inside the snuck cigarette lights someone's bedroom on fire. Cruelty at 1234 Darling Street. Will and I held the turkey's wings tight, while the dad hacked off her head. Bloody struggle, don't let go, the strength of afterdeath in her wing bones enters my arms and stays there. Then we ate her. 10,000 maniacs in the kitchen while I'm washing dishes, cranked up on the terrible little tape player until they make an awful satisfying racket under the wailing sweet whine of violin love. Ummm, since I can't go anydamnwhere, and I can't do anydamnthing, and I'm just a nodamnbody anydamnway, I'm just sitting here pouting and pounding adventure out of the keyboard.

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November 24 Williams' Improvisations
Listen to this! "...by the summer of 1917, he had begun writing his Improvisations, prose poems culled from the day's experiences, something written each and every day for a year, regardless of how tired he felt or how flat the day had been. They were unlike anything he had tried before, and they owed something to the prose pieces Rimbaud had done nearly a half century before in his Improvisations. It was a kind of automatic writing, Williams' attempt to 'loosen the attention' and descend deeper than ever into his poetic unconsciousness to tap energies so far left dormant. Later, the conscious mind could be called upon to select and order and even comment on what had been achieved. ... "Some of the improvisations are purposely obscure, obfuscated beyond reconstruction, but these are the exception. The derangement of the senses here is finally only partial, a way of making the reader slow down and engage the writer in the act of seeing what we call the 'common' freshly, as if we were to discover it for the first time. Everywhere Williams leaves traces of the kind of thing he is attempting. This is his world and he is the Emersonian cosmic voice, transcending his place and time, his mind floating up through the slate roof, but remembering to maintain certain self-imposed limits, like an airplane, Williams says, that cannot allow itself to lose all contact with the world from which is has taken off and to which it must return. For if 'all sense of direction and every intelligible perception of the world were lost there would be nothing left to do but come down to that point at which eyes regained their power.'" Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams, A New World Naked, p148-149

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November 26 Isn't it ironic
Strange as strange as rain more agile than feet more desperate than fruit One son reads Kafka, then sprinkles a million notes onto the travel guitar from his fingers. He borrows my car for the first time and brings it back safely. The other son, 11 years old, converses with me while I'm scrubbing the bathroom. "Isn't that ironic," he says. "Yes it is," I say. A pause. "How did you know I was talking about needing to clean the soap holder," he says. It takes me 24 hours to realize this conversation was strange. When did he start talking about irony? Why do I take my kids for granted? Why doesn't he trust me? We're doomed. We're all doomed. I didn't plan for it to be this way. I didn't plan anything. I just watched the steam rise and the rain fall. But I do want to be happy. It's my birthright. My birthright on my father's father's side is to be happy. My birthright on my mother's father's side is to see God, and not from the back, but face to face.		Isn't it ironic that I didn't want my 11-year-old home at all this weekend because he was getting on my nerves. He's at grandma's to give me time to think and to clean.

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November 28 weekend weakened
Where have I been? No know left no soft little trail of gemshit to retrace my steps "Mom, why do they call it "America's Most Wanted"? They should call it "America's Most Unwanted." Oh yeah I gave darshan (a glimpse) of the Cowgirl Corral Why do they say "This place is a zoo?" A zoo, no place more dedicated to the regulation and control of life. This place is an aviarium aquarium where the exotic creature cross purifies herself in air and salt water then wriggles out of her element My son at three years old crawls repeatedly into the drier after he is told not to. His grandma is upset. I ask him why. "I wanted a no talking place." bird headed fish tailed (fish headed? bird tailed?) she walks on her hind legs but ends up crying because she doesn't want to be herself. No Talking Please.

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November 29 anchor inspector
Adobe GoLive told me the title of today's entry. Here's what I do: Write down these names on a piece of paper: Shirley, Helen, Nancy, Connie, Lee, Ginny, Marion, Lois, Catherine. Write down "IT'S NOT ME" on a piece of paper. The rest of the phrase is "It's God Above Me" but I don't write that down. Walk in the street, not in the woods. Persevere in this draining church photo directory project (Finished Tonight!). Start taking small steps in this draining poetry journal project (I have artwork coming in the mail for the flyer!) Cut my son's fingernails for him. Listen to my friend S talksense on the phone. Say "Failure is Impossible" to myself at work and keep showing initiative, no matter how feebly. Meditate long and long again on the meaning of "a glimpse." Think about the difference between a glimpse and everlasting glory. Make plans! I have lots of plans for December. I am feeling involved. Children's poetry on December 10. I am hearing the call of the Jumblies. Try to be more comfortable. I was told my house seems comfortable, but I am not comfortable. Sometimes the colder air feels good.

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November 30 What I learned in kindergarten
Here's my son's contribution for tonight: "Mom, we should invent a trash catapult." Can you imagine? Put the trash in it and sling it on out of the house, neatly landing in front next to the "No Parking This Side" sign. When I was in kindergarten in Madison, Wisconsin, many strange things happened. One of them was this: I discovered I could loosen my shoelace and fling my shoe off my foot with a snap of my ankle. The shoe would do a beautiful tight spin in the air in front of me. I practiced several times and then called my sister. "Watch this!" A specially energetic kick sent the shoe flying in a huge arc right through our apartment house window. Lots of glass fell into the pies my mother had set out on the windowsill to cool. The story of my pursuit of beauty. Another strange thing was this (have I written this before? these are classics): I was having a birthday celebration at school. I was new at the school having moved to Madison mid-year. My mother made up a brown paper bag of candy canes for me to take to school to pass around in celebration of my birthday. I was so excited about getting to be the center of attention in this way. When I opened the bag -- there was my dad's lunch. One more strange thing. I had never taken the bus to school before. I knew I was supposed to take the schoolbus home on the first day. I followed the right kid onto the bus and the bus driver stopped me. He was extremely ugly with a huge swollen pockmarked face and a wart as big as a marble on the side of his nose. "You don't belong on this bus." I tried to say I did. "Which way do you live?" I looked up the street and down the street. Something about the telephone poles behind the bus looked familiar so I pointed that way. "Well, this bus doesn't go that way." And he put me off! Ok, one more strange thing. The teacher wrote a long word on the chalkboard and asked the kids what the word was. Being the only smartass in kindergarten who could read, I raised my hand and said "Housekeeping." I have no idea why a kindergarten teacher would write the word Housekeeping on the chalkboard and ask non-reading kindergartners what that said. Maybe she was preparing us for chores around the classroom. But I can still see it plain as day in round chalky letters on the green board. Sort of oracular, right?

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