It is spring, John Keats, and you are dead

In a mood the past couple days, so I'll keep it to pictures. Something about the precise thread of mistrustful and mercurial has really exemplified the parts of my personality that are concerned with obsessive and repetitive cleaning. So here is a little showing off.


Little raspberry sorbet violas in amongst the fancy lettuce.




There's something about a geranium in a clay pot that really makes me happy.
I made new prayer flags out of some scraps of fabric I had lying around. They look a little ragged here, but I'm quite happy with them.
Last year's Nithavellir black violets have come back a little purpleish, but I still love them.

I meant to take a before and after picture, but please, let me impress upon you the eleventy-fifteen metric tons of dead leaves, glass, wax, beer tops, pumpkin bits (?!) and other refuse I cleared off this porch. I even dusted the rockface.

My camera is broken, which makes even this attempt to photograph a brief trout lily melancholic, fuzzy and fartsy.

my heart doesn't ache; sometimes though it rages

I loved and admired Adrienne Rich. She was very, very strong. It was good to read her tonight, considering this week and everything.

This week and everything. I shouldn't be so dramatic because I have very good things. I feel finally like I'm actually beginning to make progress on a lot of fronts. Maybe this has been going on for a while. Maybe it's the spring. Maybe somebody told me something I needed to hear today. It's always baby steps, but there are a couple seriously good things. One of them is that I've been working really hard on my book. Another is that I still hold the Faerielight of Tuvestar. So, yeah.

---

Well, that's finished. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

-VIII, Twenty-One Love Poems

I think I'll take from mine instead

I feel like I'm in grad school again tonight, picking at a better writer's work while a history book by Helen Rountree about Powhatans sits in my lap. It's not a bad feeling, but I know it's false.

This week poems and vague, uneasy feelings

Like the Rain, Smell It Coming
by Aricka Foreman

I am dreaming of tornadoes again, too many for the sky to contain. I have checked eight websites and the dictionary on my nightstand. I did not need technology or a writer to tell me there is chaos in my heart. I don’t tell people sometimes my dreams come true. I fear some parts are not metaphor. In the mornings I check the horizon. I am relieved when there is some whisper of light. On the way home from camping, a large storm made the highway a blur of brake lights, my fingers killers to my steering wheel. I kept searching for funnels, their willowy bodies twisting their way to the ground. Mapped out escape routes and viaducts to pull beneath. Today I fell asleep on the couch again. The wind rustled me awake, and parts of the sky were dark again. I can’t shake that something is coming. I don’t do well with worry. My mother built me to fix things.

More updraft than uplift

I’ve got a gun to my head
and a knife at the throat
of the gun and a machete
somewhere, I lost my machete
but found my grenade, what’s
the saying: god never closes a door
without breaking a window?
-Bob Hicok

my breasts are just fistfuls of wasps

Today was a stupid fucking waste of a day in which I felt like shit or, alternatively, was batshit crazy. Evening came. I turned murderous. As I was internally plotting the faking of my own death, pulling weeds a lot harder than necessary, I was surprised by getting literally pounced on by a young gray tomcat who'd probably been passing through the tall grass and been attracted by the fluttering movements of my grim, muttering rageweeding.

Self-loathing and gardening < rolling around on the grass with overfriendly Kitten while a scandalized downy woodpecker looked on from the feeder. Later there was ice cream. Sometimes I'm a child.

I need to start sleeping better.

Nothing and everything. Just so.

Here is what the most exhausted girl does on Sunday Night:
-Drinks wine in bed and reads archeology books, complete with extensive note-taking.
-Avoids updating her facebook in case it hurts the feelings of the many people she owes thoughtful letters and messages.
-Listens to stupid Andrew Bird.
-Gets very excited because next week is C-ville's Festival of the Book and she thought she'd get to go see the good readings, but is dismayed to realize she'll be needing to be in Vanaheim by the time the good ones come around.
-Does not, as previously promised, discuss her weekend.

I'm also editing this little poem for an editor who seems to want it. It's a poem I'm deeply fond of and I'm leery. Sending anything out--even into the hands of an old friend who requested it--always feels a bit like the first day of school.

I always feel like a frontier lady when I come back to the wilds of Staunton from NoVA. This is not just because I can't purchase sensible things like leaf mulch out here.

Here are a list of goods I brought home from Manassas:
-wine
-a bag of leaf mulch for my garden
-A bunch of leten roses (Helleborus)
-handmedown earrings, dresses
-assorted meats
-a huge slab of corned beef (see assorted meats)
-laundry
-conditioner
-bag of fresh thyme and cilantro, two herbs I cannot grow well

Morning in Manassas. A town named for the Massowomeck Indians, enemies of Powhatan, but my hometown. The weather is foggy and wet, but warm. Purple finch and titmouse at the feeder.

It's been a heavily-strange weekend and I want to post in detail about it. But I haven't slept and I feel inarticulate. I'll be back tonight and maybe post a better, more amusing run-down. I haven't forgotten that if nothing else, this blog is supposed to be a little funny.

you can say it one more time

I'm sitting up in bed in my sleep shorts, feeling the unseasonably warm arm flowing in through the open window. A hundred little spiky green things are coming up in my garden. I love this time of year.

I've been doing some good research for my book. Already finished Love and Hate in Jamestown by David Price, which was a delight, if a bit dramatic at times. I got a few chapters into (the) Dr. Kelso's Jamestown: the Buried Truth which might as well be titled It's Jamestown, Motherfuckers: I Found It, Suck my Cock. I generally like my history in forms of colorful lists and chewy little interpersonal anecdotes, and so his stripped-down archeological narrative featuring himself as the protagonist is not terribly interesting nor is it as illuminating as I expected. I drank my mint julep really fast when I was reading it, though, so perhaps on a second run it'll be more useful--or at least my eyes will see paragraphs through to their conclusion.

Big weekend ahead in which I have nothing to wear to the wedding at which I'm reading. All of my clothes have suddenly gotten too big, too stupid-looking, and are all the wrong season. I tried on my backup dress and was suddenly and awfully reminded of the words uttered by Jr3 when I bought it: matronly. I'm trying to decide whether or not I should try a last-minute ditch shopping trip tomorrow or sit around waiting for shoe-maker elves or fairy godmothers to accommodate me.

A bit jumpy tonight, if I'm being honest. Claws out.

I can't put this day back

Today I'm a Capricorn. Today I'm the same person I was when I was seventeen. In a lot of ways, I think I was a better writer when I was seventeen than I am today. Today I think of snappy comebacks hours or days or years later.

Tonight I'm not picking up my phone. Tonight I'm in too bad of a mood to even fix myself a feel-better drink. Thunder, venom, endless cycling through. Tomorrow morning, an interview for a low-paying job I would absolutely hate. Tomorrow morning, serenity, the courage, and the wisdom?

More Sappho

Really, Gorgo,

My disposition
is not at all
spiteful: I have
a childlike heart

Sappho Fragment

]bitter
]
]and know this

]whatever you
]I shall love
]

]
]
of weapons[
]

Full Moon in Virgo coming on: picky, picky.

Having not finished one useless, unreadable book of poetry, I instinctively begin researching another. I drink all the tea. I tried to buy these dragon stamps in the post office today but fuck if they weren't sold out. I also figured my natal chart and it's bad news, kittens, bad news. I want to write some good things to keep this going, but I feel a little clumsy with my words this week.

How do we feel about late season snow? How do we feel about early season heat? How do we feel about practice essays? How do we feel about gratuitous pictures?