Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.
I am in black, dressed more and more often in black now.
Then next week. Next week it all slows, rides easy under apple boughs.
Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.
I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately. The Novel got to be such a big idea, I got panicked.
Of course he will, he’s a mathematics professor -he won’t want to leave any loose ends.
Eager always still for the promising future which, even if twenty years are gone, is not the final word, nor the stiffening of old uncreative age. Always the promise, the hope, the dream, amid whatever poverty, war, disease and adversity – always persists the credulous human vision, of something better than that which is.
And they have condemned you for being mad. Just like that. Because the fear is already there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and “suddenly go out” the way the moon would in the Blake poem.
I counted the letters. There were exactly a hundred of them. I thought this must be important.
I could not run without having to run forever.
Jilted My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart.
Laughing Lazarus. And I forget the moments of radiance. I must get them down in print. Make them up in print. Be honest.
Noticed rooks squatting black in snowwhite fen, gray skies, black trees, mallard-green water.
But in the midst of this terrible sorrow, this sickness, this weariness, this fear, I spin still: there is still the blessing of the natural world and those simply loved ones and all to read and see.
Is it possible to love the neutral, objective world and be scared of people? Dangerous for long, but possible. I love people I don’t know. I smiled at a woman coming back over the fen path, and she said, with ironic understanding, “Wonderful weather.” I loved her. I didn’t read madness or superficiality in the image reflected in her eyes. For once.
I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff like parchment.
I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms. And in truth it is terrible, Multiplied in the eyes of the flies.
Enough to snuff the quick Of her small heat out, but before the weight Of stones and hills of stones could break Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light She turned back.
It is the strangers that are easiest to love at this hard time. Because they do not demand and watch, always watch. I.
Sun struck the water like a damnation. No pit of shadow to crawl into, And his blood beating the old tattoo I am, I am, I am.