A few things.

From Verlyn Klinkenborg's "The Trouble with Intentions in Writing," from the Times today:

Become a connoisseur of ambiguity. Sentences are wily and multifarious, secretive, mischievous. Language is inherently playful, eager to make nonsense and no-sense if it gets out of order. Inexperienced writers tend to trust that sentences will generally turn out all right — or all right enough. Experienced writers know that every good sentence is retrieved by will from the forces of chaos.

From Don Delillo, Cosmopolis:

It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.

 From Ann Berthoff, "Learning the Uses of Chaos":

Learning to write means learning to tolerate ambiguity, to learn that the making of meaning is a dialectical process determined by perspective and context. Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times.  

From Bruce Beasley's "Having Read the Holy Spirit's Wikipedia," in Theophobia:

Glossolalic and disincarnate, interfere
in me, interleave me
and leave me through my breathing: like some third

person conjugation I've rewhispered
in a language I keep trying to learn, a tongue
made only of verbs, and all its verbs irregular.

When exactly do I have to go back to work?

This panic-inducing question seems to pop up in my head more frequently these days.  But panic is a sad way to spend your days.  Instead, I shall enumerate what I am doing with myself:

• finished a tome.
• started and finished a Dublin detective novel.
• reserved one more of the Dublin novels at my library; ordered used copies of the rest of them from Amazon, because hey, I have to go back to work soon, and I need to read those books. I don't have time for the library's robot to figure out that they're missing half a dozen Dublin detective novels! for my reading enjoyment!  Sometimes a girl's gotta take matters into her own hands.
• played around with Adobe Illustrator because it's fun.
• made a modest tiny little movie.
• played around with Garage Band.
• worked on an elegy.
• worked on another poem.
• wrote down some notes for another poem.
• Re-read "Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca":  

When you fly dressed as a peach tree,
when you laugh with a laugh of hurricaned rice,
when to sing you shake arteries and teeth,
throat and fingers,
I could die for how sweet you are,
I could die for the red lakes
where in the midst of autumn you live
with a fallen steed and a bloodied god,
I could die for the cemeteries
that pass like ash-gray rivers
with water and tombs,
at night, among drowned bells:
rivers as thick as wards
of sick soldiers, that suddenly grow
toward death in rivers with marble numbers
and rotted crowns, and funeral oils:
I could die to see you at night
watching the sunken crosses go by,
standing and weeping,
because before death's river you weep
forlornly, woundedly, [abandonadamente, heridamente,
you weep weeping, your eyes filled [lloras llorando, con los ojos llenos
with tears, with tears, with tears. [de lagrimas, de lagrimas, de lagrimas.

• re-read "Lycidas":

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. 
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew 
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not flote upon his watry bear
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of som melodious tear.

• had lunch with my friend
• saw Che (I know, you already know this, but it's my list, and it needs to be complete)
• saw Confessions of a Shopaholic with my daughter
• watched plenty of high-quality television
• read part of an article in CCC on holy cards/immaginette (isn't that a great word?)
• bought some yellow shoes
• contemplated these words from Frank Bidart:  "you cannot make me feel embarrassment at what I find beautiful"
• took Bruiser on several walks
• admired the stormy sky yesterday
• felt the wet, raw edge of spring in the air

The week's not over yet, my friends.  Tomorrow:  breakfast with my friend, a walk with another friend, an appointment with the historian, then movies! and vegetables with Chad! and visiting my grandson! and the Oscars over at my daughter's!  Moreover I have plans to consider the following:

• high culture--symphony, ballet, opera, theater--why do I resist?
• how does urge fit into everything else?
• pantoum--a poem about a movie, The Strangers
• the word "scry"
• flesh flesh flesh

I am psyched.

Looking back.

Today I spent an hour or so writing in a book. That's right, you heard it here: pen, paper, by hand, in a book.

Awhile ago I had the insight that there was a usefulness in keeping a daybook--a way to record my emotional temperature, as it were, and speaking of climate change, as well as the little things I notice and think. Over the years, such a practice has yielded plenty of poems, but it's also a way to frame my days and think through them. Something about writing by hand, I think, makes a difference.

Of course, the fact that I had this insight didn't mean that I actually kept the daybook. In fact, the book isn't quite half full, and I have entries dating back to 2002. Most of my composing I've been doing, for years now, at a keyboard. Anyway, looking back through it gives me a glimpse at certain themes: I love flowers. I love observing the weather. And I think I should simplify my life to make more space for writing.

In 2002: "Today, silence, the joy of it. The only trouble with silence is, it makes me a little giddy, what to do with it all."

In 2003: "Wanting more time, quiet time."

May 2003: "Want to keep focused, and also to stay relaxed. Feel I should start writing this week. Long enough from school--time to start. Want to make headway."

August 2003: "not trusting myself--this crazy this so easily off-balanced"

And this, January 2004:

I want order but not law.
I want time.
I want the field in back of my house to stay a field.
I want to wake up to my husband's body forever.
I want fire.
I want color, sparkle, and gleam.
I want the spangled garment of my flesh to flash like a fish in sunlit water.
I want light feet, vertical leap, speed.
I want language, my familiar, to sleep and wake with me like cat.
I want all my chances back.