September 30, 2006


Morning began in the red armchair with the prophet Hosea and the northern chickadee on the table to my left carved by a deceased fisherman and cousin, and thoughts skip from the prophet who married a whore to Cape Cod where red tides close down shell fishing. And so the world is one, and now in the dark out into it having donned my favorite moth eaten lamb’s wool 3 button sweater that I garden in, in cool weather.

The green lawn speaks continuity and respite, even in the dark; it has a kinetic symbolic energy found latent in all nouns. It brings peace to my soul and pleasure. The symbolic gives rise to thought, and the green lawn’s implication is the surplus of being.

Yesterday: treatment 4 in the 2nd 12 week cycle of treatments included again a dose of subcutaneously injected Procrit because the red blood cell count was 10.8, up from one week ago, but still too low. Already she has donned her hair and is out the door to violate the Sabbath rest and give aid to those who suffer at Emory hospital. There is too much too little. (Don’t weep for me, Dulcinea….) It lays on me like a black pall of the olden days.

September 28, 2006

It’s hard to watch
the deterioration … on the other hand,
there is the shear
heroism
of it as the poisons take their toll
puckering skin and,
now in new ways: the bloody nose,
the tiredness, the constant runny nose.

a monstering horror swallows this unworld
and this is not the story
of history nor, for that matter, salvation …
by flood, fire or blood.

Hold fast to those things that shall endure
writes the psalmist. And so
what are those things? Shall we return
to the devout / or the misanthropic to come to know them?:
As for me, / I’d rather be a worm
in a wild apple than a son of man! The worm
has no love, but only the taste for acidic-sweet
and the rot of the compost. Like the worm in the pile
I’ve read through the Misanthropic Moods
and find no glory in them, misanthropy has
a troubling ease of self-fullness. It is not
the things that last that one has an insatiable
taste for, but the fiery things that turn
to dust, that Lot’s wife craved for, skin
and the firmness of bone in the cleft beneath
the chin, the softness of the flesh in the
concavity of the underside of the shoulder,
things touched and remembered, the aroma
of the May rose. Good-bye is the Amen
that turns life to knee-felt prayer. The Why
is locked into the doodles of imperfection
and arrhythmias of the primordial genome project at its source:
we live despite the war and pain, and find
angels and laughter
squat in every quarter. But thank you for these
creatures that give up their substance to heal
the humans that do love despite it all.

September 25, 2006

Read The Lost Son this morning, Theodore Roethke. The mysticism of it enchanted me though I did not understand one word…except: A lively understandable spirit / Once entertained you. / It will come again. / Be still. / Wait. Then I went out to snip the roses, pinch off the black spotted leaves, deadhead the marigolds. In the cool morning, the secondary rain running off the cherry limbs felt like ice down the back of the spine…so I wait for the goose-skin thrill of the enchanting presence heralded by the wren call. (I have found it again! / What? Eternity. / In the whirling light / Of the sun in the sea.)

The lawn has become a nearly perfected patch of repose with the rain and the sun throughout the summer, a joyful rest that brings a slight up-turn to my lips and wrinkles the eyes in a Zen of quiescence I created (Give me enough time in this place / And I will surely make a beautiful thing). Beneath the dogwood the blue hydrangea reblooms surrounded by a sea of pink and fuscia impatiens dripping from yesterday’s rain, clashing with the orange of the house.

That’s my morning start. I go back and read what I wrote the 13th of the month, and realize my idiotic redundancy…of the yard, the season, my tunneled perception, the narrowness of my life, its poverty. The pineapple sage with its magnificent red wings has just begun to soar 4’ above its annual cousins the salvia so enticing as it is to the rubies that buzz my head.

September 13, 2006

The earth, O Lord, is full of your love;
instruct me in your statues.

I rise to the morning (prayers) and to the rain, that is:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,
the mysticism of dawn as the Gestalt of night
splinters into the multifarious day, I watch…
the foggy enchantment of faith ebbs.

Through the dark, the garden: a thousand
points of light, rose and marigold, beneath
the dogwood, petunias and impatiens,
lantana around the cherry. Angels I think,
and recall The Secrets of Enoch: I made
the heavens open to him, that he should see
the angels singing the song of victory and
the gloomless light. These are the strands
of dawn to knit as the bats dimple their wings
once finally and tuck themselves away wrapped
inside those wings for the day clinging to the limbs of oak:

instruct me in your statues, who can miss
the grace of it? Superabundance as the rain
falls through the gloomless light and the flowers
in the place of the populators
of the nighttime’s solitudes, the stars, sing the songs of dawn
I know so well.

Still, it’s the sixth day
following the first treatment in
the second course of treatments:
the tiredness knows no lapse: she wakes
to sleep, though different than my own: she thinks
God! … had a day of rest to sit
on the banks of the river to enjoy the pleasure
of his garden of delight. Her wonder, too, is not
my own: can I, that is she, make it the final 11 weeks
with so little rest to rise to and endless work?

Sein und Zeit—Sturm und Drang and the beauty
of the hummingbird six inches from my nose. You are
given enough is the message to Job whose fortunes
were then restored and Lazarus’ sleep to demonstrate
the glory of God…I wonder too.