13 August 2018:
So it’s Sunday and we smell the smoke of other places, the whole town and all the mountains wearing a strange, yellow haze of smoke and sun.
I stare at my chapbook manuscript before I send it off for a friend to have a look.
I’m not sure what’s happening with it—as poems seems to be all over the place(s). And I can’t quite feel good about my choices. Not yet at least.
What should stay? What belongs? What needs to be abandoned?
(Maybe a friend will help.)
I stare, too, at all the books I’ve gathered in the past couple months, ones I still need to read, the ones stacked on the windowsill in the sun: Edward Abbey and his desert, Richard Grant and the Mississippi Delta, Marge Piercy’s Stone, Paper, Knife.
With such a stack, a million things wait in plain sight for me to learn.
Instead, I begin my Christmas worry early. I sit here and stew about a plane ticket, gifts, who I won’t see around this year. But who wants that layer stacked on a year so swiftly passing?
Today,
I want to try to remember August, outside the window now, warming up to nearly ninety.
So oddly colored. So full of other places.
