the truth in one free afternoon

I didn't do my year-in-review this year because I didn't want to.
I found out this weekend that another close family member has an eating disorder. This will make 3. (What's wrong with us?)
My nose is bleeding again.  This time: a lot, enough to get wobbly.
I am working on a poem. It is about my feelings. (Great.)
I'm not sure how I stand with anything or anyone right now. (Least of all myself.)
My lip is cracked; I'm bleeding from everywhere.
I don't want anything right now. I feel oddly devoid of need.

Such things

I actually finished a pretty good entry during the snow, but I didn't post it because it had the word cunt in it, and seemed sassier than I really was. I don't feel sassy this week. The stars have promised me that the moon will phase out of apathetic Aquarius any moment here now, but all I feel is this vague sense of heaviness. My stomach hurts, and I wish I was having my hair petted. So, rally. Let's say: fake it.

A girl with a clean sink and a good hair day could be doing a lot worse. I looked up and caught my reflection in the tall windows; my roots are already getting a little sun streaky.

thoughts for being alone in the house on a sunday

If stillness is what I've been trying for these weeks, I make an attempt at keeping an attitude of it this morning as I do my chores. Nothing rocks my little boat. It's a good morning for caulking, and mopping, and silence. It's overcast and cool suddenly, the spring-like warmth of the last two days seeming dreamed. The street is quiet; even the yappy black dog tied up at neighbor's won't bark.

I realize that part of the quiet is the church across the street having shut down and gone up for sale. It was just a small church, with a congregation mostly consisting of little old black ladies in colorful dresses and hats, but when the preacher got going, you could hear him down the street, and services lasted well into the afternoon. I assume that churches, just like businesses, occasionally fail. There's cheap for-sale signs pasted all over the front of it, the sort that usually advertise for-sale lawnmowers, not old giant brick churches.

Later, I chop carrots for the chicken and dumplings soup I'm making for later in the week, when I'll be too tired and probably sad to cook. The carrots are thick, and so I cut them like tree logs: in half, then down the center, then into little quarters of carrot-kindling. This small thing, although stupid, makes me happy.

John Smith was a mercenary or

John Smith Will Not Return to Jamestown
"I call them my children, for they have been my wife, my hawks, my hounds, my cards, my dice, and in total, my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right."

This evening, the birds row across the sky in a way
that is not English. At dinner, it begins. I begin

to suspect I have not been here so long,
nor was I always so tired. Winter scratches clear

claws on the window, and that old dream,
back again. Somewhere the Powhatan savages

step naked into the sleet, through stick woods,
the fall line tight at their throats. They are narrow;

deep as creeks, and that white thrust of air does not touch them
the air loves them--

as they slip between gray dogwood without a sound.
I see them clean skin from a man

with only the opalescent light of freshwater mussel shells
and who else knows anything

about where the tuckahoe tubers nudge their dark thumbs
under the frosted crust of the world? Alone now

in the homeland, I consult my litany of survival,
with the cheese, the bread unattended on my plate: my hands

go on getting old. Virginia, offer the cup
of wasps, black and shining, to my lips,

lay me down again on the rock.

depending on what it was we needed

Late last night, I stood alone in my kitchen, looking out into my dark garden. I felt a strange sense of understanding of my place in the world, and distantly, overhead through the layers of floor, ceiling, and sky, I could hear the calls of wild geese flying over my house.

I remembered this time when I was young, and sitting out in a wooden fort my brother and I had built up against a fence in our backyard. It had snowed, and I was playing out there alone. All of the sudden, the sky above me was completely full of geese--a migration flock containing hundreds instead of the usual dozen or so. The reflection of the setting sun on the snow cast up a strange pink-gold light that caught on their wings and underbellies. I'd never seen anything like them, and it was so cool that it made me laugh out loud in startled surprise.

Neither of these incidents actually have any meaning or bearing on my identity. I just like hearing geese.

"Oak and iron, guard me well. Or else I'm dead, and doomed to hell."

Bottling day/showing off

 

When I'm less tired, I'll make a pass at deciphering the short hand crazy notes I one-handedly typed into google drive as I was bottling. For now, though, I give you this.

 

need, selfishness, blood, and justifying walks in the woods

There's something I wanted to write about a while ago, and it reminded me again a little bit ago, and then today, so I'm gonna write about it.

It was Valentines day, the last big snowstorm the Valley had, which is why I'm thinking about this. One of our friends was staying with us, snowed in, and on Valentines' morning, he got up and went out in the snow. I was working remotely up in my tower, so I could see him out in my backyard stomping out a heart in the freshly-fallen snow. He came up to the second story and took a picture of it to send to his far-off lover.

He saw me looking at it at some point and bragged, joking, about his gesture. He said, "Don't you wish that was for you?" I don't think he was being intentionally cruel, just sort of remarking.

I'm not by nature an especially envious or covetous person. I have secret little wishes in my heart like every person, I suppose. I have needs.

I guess I have thought a lot in the last months about what sustains me, what gives me value--to the world, myself, and others. What I want and what I need. I was walking home last night in the snow and the moon was so incredibly bright: a Cheshire cat crescent, live as a wire against an electric blue sky. And I remembered a lesson hard-learned: I'm responsible for myself. I'm on my side. When I look at these stupid mountains and skies that I love so much, and enjoy them, raw, I know: all of this is for me.

(A different moon.)

the moon came and impressed her

I went back to Lynchburg this weekend, briefly. Cities have such distinctive feelings to me. Harrisonburg, for instance, is big and genuine, homely, friendly, open. Charlottesville is thrilling, frightening, sharp-clean, thickety-green and associative.

But goddamit, do I hate Lynchburg. It just has this terrible sense like something awful is about to happen, or just finished happening. Everything is covered with this slight yellowish haze of dust or grime or particulate, and the angle of the light is always sideways, indirect. The downtown is all pre-civil war industrial warehouses that jut up like skewed rotten teeth on the listless wet mouth of the James. It feels relentlessly haunted, but not by any potent ghost, more like the spirits of barely-known drunk twenty year olds who drowned in the river, the dead homeless, and my own former self.

The last time I went to the Lynchburg riverfront it was spring, my last year at Hollins. An old professor was reading from her book, so I drove out and brought her flowers in a mason jar. Afterward, I went out with her and my mentor to this little hole in the wall bar that served red wine. I ordered a Stella Artois.  I remember it being pitch black inside and ornamented with huge, shiny steer's horns.

I remember exactly where it was--this little tucked away corner, a dark place on a dark street. Since we got into town a little early Saturday night, I tried to find it, but couldn't, and now the whole thing feels like a dream.

I'm not in a good mood really this weekend. I realize that, and I think it's okay for now, although I shouldn't let it become a habit. I feel guilty about it, and sorry for the people who have to put up with me. Tonight, I made an adequate lasagna and served it with an adequate wine. There's snow on the way. I feel really fat, but also really sore: the worst of both worlds.

The best thing was going for a hike earlier.

 

 

 



Also, I bought myself this blue chalice. Not because it was practical, or I needed a drinking vessel, but because I wanted it, and it was blue. I meant to use it for my shameful hobby but so far I have used it for my shameful regular life.
Achtung!