Egypt

Good, well up more mystery

in the hall for singing well

that's not really a choice

then is it she said

into the phone (I had never

met her or her still songs)

God, the bookshelves

stacked & stooping

God, the poet's bare thighs empty

fuck the heavy knuckles of sleep,

sick time, floor boards,

driving cloud over the well

with screws no pictures

hanging no condensation

to boot, street mats

stock boys & my sisters' bathing suits

flung off & my brothers' inner tubes

wrapped up send my baby off

in reeds send him off

to meet the queen

I want to be the queen

or fuck to sleep

or fuck to walk

together down the dark hall

to the door at the end of the hall

& say father, what son

& say mother, what daughter

& then out of the fluid dream

to feel your arm, sliding firm

to wake me up again

Paris

First off, I do a lot of crying lately. Poems sometimes help. Sometimes they amplify the sobbing, and that helps. Other times they quiet me, or wrestle me down, or serve to pin me up as if to a corkboard in a public hallway, my pain on display. Regardles, a good poem helps. Reading "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker I have become excited again about romantic, rhyming poetry, and have ordered Sara Teasdale's collected poems from Amazon, and later might order Mary Oliver's new and collected poems, and will read Emily Dickinson again, when I get a spare minute. I have not, recently, been blessed with many spare minutes - but perhaps that in itself is a blessing. When I have nothing to do, I am prone to despair. I am like a fly caught against a window, a swatter hovering dangerously nearby; I must keep moving.

Here's a bit of a poem by Sara Teasdale, that helps:

O shaken flowers, o shimmering trees,
O sunlit white and blue,
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you.

Sara Teasdale, who apparently sometimes suffered from something called imeros - a kind of sexual craving for romance, or lust for love, and died one day after taking morphine in the bath, also wrote:

I will make this world of my devising
out of a dream in my lonely mind
I shall find the crystal of peace,
above me
stars I shall find.

The narrator of "The Anthologist" mentions that Sara's friend Orrick Johns, who wrote about the whiteness of plum blossoms at night, killed himself, too, "and later Edna St. Vincent Millay fell down the stairs. So the rhymers all began dying out." And of course there was Sylvia Plath and so on but I will get into that later.

Last weekend I drank so much that I lost consciousness in the bathtub and came to with water in my mouth and nose. I thought, "So that's how Jim Morrison died, in Paris; nothing more to it than that, probably," and then I fell asleep again and woke up again choking and then finally made it out and into a towel and naked into my bed.

This weekend I am working, so, guaranteed, it will not happen again.