The thing about a blog is this: it is different from a book because it happens late at night and I can write about you because you show me a little picture of your face when you sign on as a follower, or you confess in an email that you have been reading the blog... (I should tell you that because I am a little ashamed to be associated with the bloggers and blogs of the world I refer affectionately to this little bit of periodical as 'the skinnytree'--I hope you will too because 'blog' and 'blogging' and 'blogger' can be such an embarrassing thing to claim, mostly because the word log is involved and I hate to imagine the skinnytree reduced to firewood, you know: logs, and such unless you are going to build a giant bonfire so you can keep warm while you sleep all night out on the beach...)
[Dear gawd, those were good sleeps out there with nothing but my favorite sleeping bag (which I still have), my bestest friends (all boys, ironically) and their giant bonfire made of huge timber brought forth to us out of the roils of the pacific oh!-shen...]
Anyways there are these things I am thinking tonight and because you are not just reading a book I wrote, not just perusing a collection of my poems I can take advantage of a sort of subscription you have bought into and keep you up to date. woo. hoo.
so for one thing
I was reading through Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow and thinking that it might be my favorite book these days because he says things like
But sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it. Sometimes you just trustfully and easily pass into the other world of sleep. Sometimes the bird finds that what looks like an opening is an opening, and it flies away. Sometimes the shut door opens and you go through it into the same world you were in before, in which you belong as you did not before.
He keeps writing things like that. All kinds of things like that godamnit. You really should try this book out. I mean it, in the most Reading Rainbow spirit of recommending books. Lavar Burton is going to jump out from behind a tree at any moment and say you don't have to take my word for it.
and for another
We have been working like little mules on a video which will be sent out to possible donors so the graduate school I love so well will be more sufficiently funded (it is young and so has no endowment). We transcribed the interviews and read through the text of it until we were drunk from the possibility that these things these folks are confessing in these interviews are not just hopeful, they are also true. Which leads me to wonder as to how many of the things we hope to be living also happen to be true about life in general, if only we would stumble upon some kind of proof? Too bad hope evades proof... if you could prove it you would have just passed it by anyway and you wouldn't have to hope in it anymore; it would turn into something from the past, rather than something for the future and ouch. That would suck, I think.
So I keep noticing things that portend some kind of larger lovely thought or even something as simple as the next poem. I keep on tracking with the next blossom, the next bead of sweat on your brow or the next drop of rain. I hope for the next favorite book to reveal itself or the next friend to send word she is pregnant. I wonder when you will photocopy your degree and send a copy via snail mail, I wonder when you will tell me you have been reading along and the skinnytree is helping. I worry (just a little) that you will refuse the anti-depressants or forget to take them each day because I hope that you will even out and integrate so that when you cry you won't feel as though it is reason to abandon who you really are.
so here is a quick little poem about it:
there is a song,
a sound
about
around about
the night I lay bleeding and
nestled, nested,
wrestled, rested, against the cotton
of your folded wing during the storm.
In and out of my waking, the sleep and not sleeping moments between cloudbursts and lightening bolts,
over the din of dreams, under the drowning of my sorrows,
which wove us tighter together:
where before only a prayer tied me to you
now there is a rope and its knot:
a body and its blood
(whole and parts of it
moving together like one note among the rest in the notes, love).
A shoebox full of loveletters is like
trying to contain a river in a wine glass...
I can't recommend it.
but if you made copies of all the things I wrote
and sent them back to me
well,
at least that is real...
evidence of the way the exchange never ends.
it is a little like how
tears are part of the water cycle, the process by which water moves up over down and around:
evaporation condensation precipitation
love is like that
too:;:;
particles
clouds/fogs
droplets
the rising and falling and song of it against the window and puddling
all about around about.
& that is enough for now I think. goodnight.
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