Mine Are Mostly Reminiscences

After dark, after bedtime, and resting while Jeremiah's breathing deepens and slows, I recall that my twenty lines, my twenty sentences, are untouched, unimagined even, undone.

Procured signatures, final ones, for nomination papers, which allowed for half a dozen conversations, one of which included reference to Lyn Hejinian. Siamese cats lolling in the sun on the car while I talked. Do you want some tea or coffee. No thanks I've got to get going collecting signatures.

Cleaning the chicken hut with Jeremiah I thought how dried chicken shit actually has a sweet smell, the dust of it rising while I scraped off the roosts. Tomorrow we take the new pigeons out of quarantine and move them in with the home flock. In the woods, there were patches of dry enough ground that we weren't soaked coming home, though Song did need a bath.

Jeremiah and I ate lunch at the table outside while - no joke - three sets of neighbors, unrelated, separate houses, were all doing yardwork. Sweeping the road and so forth. While we munched pretzels and talked about how can peanuts climb trees if they don't have arms and legs.

Yet I do cringe at the sight of our front lawn.

Reading p. 116 of Harrison's Dalva, and thinking, why do I get shit for those long dense paragraphs? Then read it again and thought, well, something actually happens in his. Mine are mostly reminiscences. Also read Hanke, rereading him, The Jukebox, and liked how someone (Sam Shepherd I think) says that he reads like a guy whose right on the edge, whose words are literally all he has to hang on to. I liked that.

It was supposed to rain but it didn't. Joe said at the dump, "if this is rain let it rain all the time." Shari said she was okay, well mostly, okay, you know. I said I did, but I wasn't sure.