High Priestess crosses Hanged Man up over the seven of cups under the reverse six of wands, with the six of pentacles behind me and the upside down Queen of cups in the front. Nine of swords is me, the Devil reversed in my house, ten of cups for good medicine turns out a four of pentacles.

All that is so much to say that sometimes I build myself up into these little dramatic castles of old, reheated emotions and blind reaction and leftover garbage and I miss the singular fact that I'm acting like a self-absorbed ass and not only not helping the people I care about and should be focusing on, but steamrolling over their perspective entirely. And that was today. And I feel like a heedless bitch for it and I'm sorry.

I know the robins bring me many things, but sugar?

Ten years since I was fifteen, and yet here I am still here propped up on the same shoulder in bed writing a stupid little thing when I should be sleeping, wearing the exact same tiny pokemon sleepshorts. It's funny how much everything can change and nothing really at all.

What a vague, fussy little thing this blog is sometimes. I wish it were funny or insightful or that I talked about things other than my cards and dumb emotions, but I guess this is right where I am just now. It's funny how in some rare moments you can see yourself, your whole life and what you are to everyone and even to yourself, with perfect impunity. I think I had one of those moments today when we were walking downtown.

If this were my usual sort of post, I'd tell you why the planets right now are perfect for me. Cold, awake, hungry and reasonable. I do feel finally proper myself for the first time this summer.

Speaking of seeing myself, though, I actually have had a "true" out of body experience once, but it's an embarrassing story so I don't like to tell it. I guess I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I was into this boy from work who was much older and cooler than I was. Except, the thing was, he wasn't cooler at all, but sort of a short little hobbit dip with wide, buggy eyes and, as I recall, terrible, small, stunted hands. Awful hands are a dealbreaker for me in men; I haven't felt up to unpacking that. That said, returning to my story, I had yet to discover self-esteem and I didn't know much about boys at that point. (Compared to now, the future, when I know absolutely nothing about them.) So when he asked me to go for a walk with him at this park I was absolutely dazzled and not a small bit confused.

He was older, so the whole time I felt like we were about to get into trouble and the dull roar of nerdish anxiety increased in my ears as we walked. By the time we reached this one bench, I was clammy and stammering. He kept looking at me sideways with his big weird eyes and I kept trying to turn my body so I was looking at him too. A lesser super power I have developed is to know when a boy is about to kiss me, and it was going off pretty bad, but I was so muddled up and confused because didn'theknowIwasadorkomg.

Finally, growing irritated with my playing the accidental coquette, he snapped "Stop moving, Goddamnit, I'm trying to kiss you!" and so I held still and he inevitably kissed me. And that was when the out of body thing happened. It was just as they described on wikipedia. I remember feeling a tipping over feeling, and then looking down at us from about five foot up, my gawky fifteenish self on the bench with this dumb boy that I didn't even like except that I thought I was supposed to.

It was only a kiss so there wasn't much to see, and if that was my one time to leave my body and look down on my life, it sure felt like I wasted it. I have had much, much better kisses since then; I've had kisses good enough to kill me, but I've never left my body. A few weeks later, that same boy would call the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing off, and oh, I was so, so devastated. I remember asking over and over "but I thought you loved me!" like the most pathetic creature in the world. Even now, saying that word makes me feel embarrassed, like it will be thrown back at me.

So that's an awkward story about my teenaged years that I'm writing for  penitence for not updating this thing enough lately.

don't look at me, I'm indiscrete (you're sharp all right)

I found a desiccated yellow jacket in amongst my extra socks and delicate things from last legends. Little fucker died waiting for me to push my blind, trusting fingers down into the ambush. I felt horrified and wonderful. It felt like a victory, but what did I even do to my notorious enemy if not just lazily put off emptying a small bag at the bottom of a box? All of my greatest incidents of viciousness have been accidental. Maybe everyone is secretly like this.

I feel weird and cold and aggressive tonight, not unlike how I've felt all week.

Rough, bad, rough draft but a draft?

In summer of 1608, John Smith sent an expedition south to locate any survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. It turned up claims of four Europeans living in a mysterious village called Ocanahonan, although subsequent efforts to track them down proved unsuccessful.


By slug hour, I bury my bad news,
my lists.

I see now
how, to history, we are already spoken for,

and neither the cards nor the stars care much
if we heed them,

austere minutes in the ledger of what is already known.

Here in my garden, snails stretch their necks
along the rockface and consume my vegetable goods
before my eyes, while the jimson weed burns white sweet
poison above our heads, my own land turned against me,
morsels in the damp mouth of this forgettable evening.

Here, I can tell you what happened to the Roanoke Colony.

Down the pine barrens and tiny villages, not much of a river,
so what if four leftover men lived for two or twenty years,
and Dare an Indian wife among them, so
what if their delicate cotton clothes
rotted in ribbons from their bodies?

Such love is unrequited.

I stutter in my armor

 

Impulsiveness, troublesome expectations, controlling aspect of men or fire. Remain receptive to indications of a disagreement or dispute and be the first to withdraw.

she tells fortunes with a deck of leaves until it comes out right

I keep meaning to update about my adventures up north, but my health has not been so good. Suffice to say, the whole thing was like Bilbo's birthday party meets the Great Gatsby, which is to say very overwhelming and fun and good pictures that I'd like to put up, but after it all, I'm just so tired and weird-feeling. A little too Gatsby, to tell you the truth. Also long bad sentences with too many commas. I'm not much in the mood, but I've been working on this little post in my head for a while, so here's a entry of snips, a device I haven't utilized in a while.

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I drew the reversed Magician today. Sometimes my interpretations feel more realized by the end of the day, and in this case, by now I see it in my own context as a sudden crushing reality, wasted, fruitless efforts, ineffectiveness.

Stirred and gloomy, I made the mistake of then reading my own cross tonight and it was genuinely quite terrible. It was like a bad joke made up of all my secret--or pathetic, glaringly obvious---fears.

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Jay has these kittens. He is out of town, so we look at them.

I went into his kitchen to get some water and I ran into some drunk, long-haired hippie boy apparently wandering the house. He asked me "Are you living the dream?!" I thought he said drain and so I was pretty confused, but then he clarified. That sounds like a fever hallucination, and that would be a fair guess this week, but it really wasn't.

It is a good question though.

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I'll say it: I'm ready for autumn. I've got that poem about the pharaohs and boys and love and jank that I always go on about this time of year stuck in my head. Also Robert Hass's line from the Problem of Describing Color. It's so plaintive and genuine and hopeless to me just now. "How could you not love a woman who cheats at tarot?"

I think I sound really stupid when I try to talk about why I like the poems I like in this blog.
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I do like, however, how long my hair is now. I'mma get it dyed again tomorrow and that will make me feel happy and confident.

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Here is a very good picture of the farm that I did not take.

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I had this moment Wednesday morning where I woke up at my house for the first time in a week and stepped out into my garden. The air was very cool and everything was a little damp from an overnight rain. The light caught up on all the water and mist; everything was gleaming and beautiful. I thought about all the wonderful blessings in my life, the rare and talented people I've come to love. I'm lucky enough to be a very common girl surrounded by uncommon people.

Then I saw a snail hanging on one of my tall white garden phlox and I went into a blood rage. I'm gonna execute some Order 66 on those motherfuckers this weekend. And also maybe paint my kitchen cabinets.

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Okay, but really.