���������� ����What passes
all day for our ghost, at night
is it otherwise? Inside is it red?
::::.Heather McHugh
::::."White Mind and Roses"
i feel grubby from cleaning up the house in this heat (my parents are visiting tomorrow, & thursday): & for some reason this grubbiness makes me feel adult, & those moments of grown-up-ness, although they are increasing, are still rare & strange to me. i don't know why having dust-&-soap residue all over my legs & wrists makes me feel adult.
bean is making me a long lovely green skirt which i will wear on thursday when my parents are here. she is sewing it on her iMac-colored machine & when she is done i will embroider some beads onto the drawstring & so this is what i am doing tonight: cleaning the house, making a skirt to wear, avoiding poems.
at work i had a moment, a long moment, of utter childishness & wanting-to-cry because it suddenly occurred to me that there is no reason why i should be making poems at all. i am never going to graduate school for anything much less my (nonexistent) MFA, & i never wish to be published, & i don't even like to show what i've made to bean or to anyone else (faxing drafts to addie doesn't seem to count; how i want to write poems, after kenyon, is to show them to her in the middle of them). why should i waste my time over any of it?, i asked myself over & over in the little office this afternoon. am i just holding on to this thing that i've told myself i wanted since childhood?
� but then i thought, if words are going to fall out of my head i might as well write them down. whether i show them to anyone else or not. (NB: i have no emily-dickinson-esque delusions. i am not sylvia plath getting up before dawn to write poems before the rest of the house wakes up. i am not wallace stevens writing poems while working an un-poem-ish job [although, like wallace stevens, i do not drive a car]. i am just ricka putting down words in red felt-tip onto notebook paper, here in the very back corner of the apartment which i am trying to keep uncluttered.)
i think those minutes of childishness & self-berating rose up out of the panic i felt when dr b____ handed me the fax that had come from addie with her handwriting all over it. with her handwriting all over the two leaving-a-house poems i sent her. i stuffed the faxpages into my notebook & i didn't even look at them until most everyone else had left work for the day. & then as i squinted at her faxed-to-hell handwriting, i felt more calm although also nervous in that way i used to feel in whoever's dorm room it would be, watching her read things with the stick end of a paintbrush in her mouth, tea cooling on the windowsill, wondering whether she would laugh or cry. wondering why i even bothered putting things down in the first place, if i knew even then i didn't want what most people seem to want out of poems.
:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:aside.
i suddenly realized just now that i use spanish for these:
1 praying
2 poetry
3 saying love-y things to bean
4 cursing
� & i wonder what that means.
i had a japanese professor once who said that you can tell what language a polylingual person is most comfortable in, by seeing which language s|he uses to count, uses to pray. (i think also: which comes out of the mouth during sex. but this professor would never say that sort of thing to students. too stereotypically shy.)
:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:i called addie last night to rile myself up about going to boston. october, a week in october. i was hypericka by the time we got off the phone.
& then i had to call my brother to make sure that he wasn't so crushed by the things my father said to him yesterday. my parents (who, you will recall, are visiting me tomorrow & the next day) have a way of withering the important things. unintentionally too.
still. look at all the things we throw at them. neither of us has turned out as expected.
just today, bean & i sat having iced coffee, talking about my never-going-to-grad-school. talking about how everyone thought, all my life, that what would make me happiest would be to stay in school forever. when what really makes me happiest is being out of the whole game, also forever.
:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:a lot of long words in a skinny white plane down the middle of the screen. it's been a long time since that.
despite all of the things i have to say: nothing interesting happened today.
i did think, all inner conversations about adult-vs-child-hood, about poems or not poems, about my parents, all inner conversations aside, i did think about the time that claudia & i were talking about music lessons we had as children, & she said, "my parents couldn't afford a piano. [perfect pause.] but they could afford an accordion."
i think i would like to play the accordion. sitting on the back porch with it in my lap.
