When They Hurt, I Call My Feet "Pods"

Because the twenty sentences tend to be written in the morning, before or during the first cup of coffee, then tend to refer to recent dreams. Also, because they tend to be written from the office - with its view of the lawn, the fields beyond which reach to the old airstrip, Route 112, all the flora (and sometimes fauna) in between - they include a lot of flowers, birds and weather.

For the second day straight, I'd rather not be bothered with writing them.

Last night my dreams sort of bled over - bled into - the images and elocutions and the issues of my waking life. A phone call was returned that had not been, to my professional chagrin. In the dream I answered the phone precisely as I took M.'s call during lunch yesterday. Will you excuse me, please? Dreams of this sort trouble me, or mock me, or - absent any brilliant unanticipated leaps of image and/or narrative - indicate some real crisis unfolding. As if the peril - what peril though - is so near and great that the authorial impulse cannot risk ambiguity. What would Bhanu Kapil say of this moment, writerly, when the distance between the waking and sleeping narrative grows so thin it can barely hold its beats, cut a circle, or drape veils over shoulders, windows, eyes.

Of course it's raining. A warm spring rain - a Wordsworthian, a Thoreauvian rain - I guess, a watery caress. Fine as rains go (maybe more so if one is a plant (God am I really writing this this way)), but I have to drive to the office, shop for groceries, etc. - hence, go through it . . .

I write often - identify often - about/with puer aeturnus, the eternal youth who hovers perpetually above the earth, unconnected, incomplete. That energy - the energy of the untethered, undirected (unspecified but still rich and crackly) longing, boyish yearning - suffuses my days, these days. The sense I have of not having ever committed (in a religious way, as to a calling) to any of the many crafts that once/still beckon - music, poetry, detective fiction, politics, journalism - and thus leave me a silly, a chirruping dilettante. Is that right - would you say?

The lilac blooms - tiny royal hives - unfold slowly at the window. When the wind blows the upper limbs creak and make buckle against the gutter. These are not especially interesting or "torqued" sentences but so what. Completed, do they not at least represent, however dimly, distressingly, however tentatively, some relevant (even, under the circumstances (perhaps), radical) implantation of pod (really? pod? yes, pod - sometimes, especially when they hurt, I call my feet "pods") to soil.