The midnight zinnias.

After my summer class ended this afternoon, with the usual term's-end mingle of regret and relief, I spent a good part of the rest of the day reclined in a pair of chairs on a lawn, my feet bare and sunned, my ears full of more Sufjan Stevens. (Seriously, have I recommended him to you yet? The concept albums, Illinoise (2005) and Greetings from Michigan (2003), are both great, but the album that came between them, Seven Swans (2004), might be my favorite right now, for the spare, devastatingly complex simplicity of its lyrics and its strings. Try "To Be Alone With You," for one, but don't let yourself think it's a romantic narrative.)

And that was good enough, that sitting in the chairs in the shade on the lawn, trying to get comfortable enough to put my thick and swimming head back and to sleep. Or at least it was almost good enough, perhaps a shade short.

And then a poem walked up and wanted to be written down, and so I started. And then I stalled, distracted from the poem by what was not the poem, what could not be the poem, what the poem needed to excise in order to exist.

Striding away from the chairs in the shade on the lawn, I reached the man selling vegetables near the path. Beside the multicolored squashes and the tiny tomatoes and the greens leafing wetly in plastic bins, there on the red bench, there were the vats of zinnias, yellow and red and orange and fuschia and white, their stems rich and strong below the gorgeous multifarious fullness of their blooms. "How much are your flowers?" I asked the man selling the vegetables. "Three for a dollar," he said.

I walked the gravel path toward home in the five o'clock sun bearing my nine perfectly chosen zinnias, these sweetest and boldest of favorite flowers a gift to the girl who waited for years to get blooms from another before deciding to give them to herself, over and over and again. Now, in the half-dark of the porch, I look at these stems, and at their profusion of petals, and I memorize all over again the ephemerality of sweetest and boldest things, and my hopes (I had written faith, but I'm still struggling that way) that such profusion cannot go unseen and unneeded--that it fills its presaging purpose, that it leads to some greater, necessary growth, that brightest beauties don't go wasted.

Such slipping.

Tonight, I am both empty and full, wakeful and exhausted. There is both more to say and nothing to say, the day having gone over largely to reading and thinking in concert with my young ones, guiding word choices and interpretations, fielding stress and confusion, administering confidence when possible, praise when deserved.

But the best part of the day: a drowning nap, this afternoon, on the couch in the window, under and in the breeze, the curtains drifting, the light swimming, enough coolness for a quilt, enough sun for forgetting one's dreams.

The coneflowers, the coneflowers: they are starting to show. We will have them for much of the summer now. They're hardy; even I couldn't kill them, even in my Ithacan garden of neglect. They came up summer after summer, wending their ways through the weeds, stretching their quirky glory into every available shaft of sunlight.

I don't think I've actually told you about the lilies in Gambier. They are everywhere, lining every yard and every campus green, it seems, and they are enormous. I have not loved them in past years; I may not love them now. But in tonight's early evening sun, they were diaphanous, shadowing over and into themselves, a powerful recommendation.

Ah.

Tonight, just rain, and rain, and rain, and lightning. And rain. And somehow, that drumming and drubbing is exactly what's meant to be here. The day was long and mighty, the weather swift and flighty. My taste for rhyme is, apparently, unslakeable, unslackening, unstoppable even at the end of a pounding, pressing day. Heading from a happily abortive attempt to get dinner in a dining hall, over to a happily successful dinner somewhere finer than a dining hall, I checked on the coneflowers but could not take their pictures--too much speed, too much swiftness in our passage through town. But pictures of yesterday's vanguard will let you know how things are coming along. Tonight's rain will, I suspect, bring these even closer to their final selves.

The wonder of clarity.

We have reached that moment in the summer course where the students are writing their final papers, which creates a tiny lull while we wait to see what they'll create if we just leave them alone for a few minutes. After weeks of having pushed so hard to craft class sessions and ever-deeper thoughts about Morrison, I have suddenly found myself a few minutes of quiet and un-stir. I spent part of that ease this evening drinking wine and talk on a lawn with my excellent novelist friend; by the end of our couple of hours, as I headed back toward home through the dark, I realized that my leg muscles were the slightest bit wavery, the slightest bit at sea, despite the strange solidity of everything summery around me, from the depth of the night to the layering of the lamplit leaves to the shiftiness of the gravel under my feet. I thought of the days and nights I breasted the dipping and beating of the sea against a boat, walking decks with traveling companions in Greece and Turkey, and the dipping and beating of a train against the air, walking aisles first with traveling companions and then simply myself, all those years of train travel in this country and others. I thought of the days and nights I breasted the dipping and beating of incommensurable lives, walking the streets of every place I've lived, walking my way toward some kind of clear integrity.

The air tonight is not resistant, by any means; we have had thick-laden humid afternoons--today was one of them, almost--and heavy-hanging evenings, but tonight offered a swift-staying medium, an atmosphere that left me able to skim over the half-mile home from downtown with a particular graceful-feeling speed. Tonight I think I carry my own private nimbus of hope around with me, born of who knows what elements, aimed at who knows what target. My thoughts have done so much wandering over the past few weeks, and to feel them perhaps starting to circle back, to crystallize and clarify once again, to ring up around the places where my life's meanings live, is a small wonder and grace. I suspect that they are not done with the wandering, but would I want them to be? The trick is to have them wander freely but always return. The trick is to remember that the thing itself, the beauty itself, is something I made and then commenced gravitating to long ago; it is no finished thing, and in fact the beauty of its lineaments resides in its unfinishability, but it is a staff and a support, a framework, a worthy structure, a stateliness.

Clarity and integrity were my thoughts' refrains tonight.

The colors into which we're moving now, at midsummer, are somehow both bolder and more muted than our spring colors were. The lilies are orange (and occasionally white or ruby or lemony yellow), while the coneflowers (still green stars) that will bloom within days will bring a soberly ecstatic fuschia into the middle of town. The gravity of my joy and the joy of my gravity are most difficult to explain, even to myself, these days. For a long part of my walk home, my striding cast two shadows.

The rain has begun slapping beyond me, draining off some of the excess and strain of the cloud cover under which I walked out and back tonight. It is so insistent a thing, raucously itself. And the smell it raises is one of some and all things, of particulars traded and loved, of generalities feared and needed, of necessary meeting, of inevitable sunder.

In the new project, the one that arrived as an unbidden visitation yesterday, the first piece is "The Invisible Girl."

Expect more of these stars, and expect them blooming, as these days trace onward.

Running running running.

Tonight, one of my summer students requested an evening conference about the paper he's writing, and since we're not in full session, the only place to meet him, really, was the classroom where he was working, nearly a mile away. I strapped my sandals back on, grabbed my good old (old old) hooded sweatshirt, and skipped out onto the street. Somewhere a few steps down the block, I realized how good it felt to be moving swiftly, and I lengthened my stride out, dropping my center of gravity just a bit, squaring my weight over my hips, and off I flew. Within a quarter-mile, I was about to burst into a run, just to run and run, following the cheerful insistence of the music in my ears, more of Sufjan Stevens's Illinoise (2005), the second in Stevens's projected fifty-album set, an album for each state. The sky was grey but not too low, the evening darkening but not too dark yet. By the time I hit the lawn outside the classroom building, I actually had broken into a run, bounding over the grass, leaping down a low-rising hill, springing through the swung door. It's all the energy of the underslept and overworking.

I am not trying to ignore everyone in my life, but I'm doing a pretty good job of that anyway, even without effort. I'm back up for air and human contact once I make it to Friday.

In the meantime: today, I shot the dragon for the first time in a long time. Somewhat on a whim, I lay down in the yard where he lives. Because I had headphones on, I couldn't hear my landlord when he came running over to find out whether I'd passed out on the lawn--and my not responding, of course, made things all the more frightening for him. Much blaming of technology ensued. However, I had already secured this image when the panic went down:

I suspect you can guess why I might have wanted to lie down for that one.

The real photographic business of the evening, though, consists of my giving you a much overdue installment of LRB personals. I will let them speak for themselves until such time as I can say something more useful of my own. I may never, ever agree with the classified manager's choice, but this week, in particular, I can say that I adore both his methodology and his prose.

Dappled and drowsy.

I think I've used that Simon and Garfunkel line on you before. I'm using it now, too, as a prelude to saying: today was a day of reading essay topics and writing a sonnet and eating a dinner and then picking brains for awhile, and now I'm tired. Which means that tomorrow I'll write, but tonight I'll sleep. Things are likely to be erratic in this way for the next few days, as the summer students and the teaching staff and I push through the final project that will cap their time with me before they fly off to their next engagement, small migrators. Tomorrow morning, Paul D will want to put his story beside Sethe's all over again, and I, as always, will feel like crying but won't.

In memoriam.

My favorite William Blake image is a small one, the ninth plate from The Gates of Paradise (1793). In it, a hatted man has hitched his ladder to a crescent moon and seems about to ascend; a couple stands behind him, embracing. In The Illuminated Blake, a compendium of Blake's illuminated works, David Erdman's commentary on this image describes the man as looking back at the embracing couple, the woman of whom is "not too busy to wave or direct him upward" (273). As I peer at the image, knowing full well that I don't have any reproductions good enough to allow me to quarrel with what Erdman was undoubtedly able to see while he used the originals and magnification, it always looks more to me as though the climbing man is entirely focused on his impending ascent. Blake's key for this image explains that the man is "On the shadows of the Moon / Climbing thro Nights highest noon" (Erdman 278). These details are mostly beside the point of this writing, which has more to do with this image's caption than anything else (though the image itself encapsulates so much that is important to me about the way I exist in this world). At the bottom of this plate, which is one of the only ones that didn't undergo some kind of serious change when Blake re-released Gates of Paradise perhaps a quarter-century after first engraving it, Blake includes the simplest of cries: "I want! I want!" This spring, I finally found a coffee mug bearing the engraving on one side and the caption on the other. I'm using that mug today.

What I want (I want!), this afternoon, is to mourn the loss of an excellent dog, my favorite Ohio dog, one of my longest-standing Gambier friends. You will recall, perhaps, my writing about the beginning of his decline, back in April. As it turned out, he had only two more months of life beyond that writing. On Thursday evening, while I was out cavorting in my midsummer's sense of lingering, yearning youth, my friend was dying in his home, his breath caught by a thunderstorm, his life stopped by a fear and trembling that became an unconsciousness that (they tell me) stayed until a sigh from the backseat of the car, speeding to the vet, came to stand as his last sign of life.

Yesterday afternoon, coming home from my morning and afternoon teaching sessions, which had more than their usual share of strange hilarity, I saw my excellent friends walking their younger dog. The absence of my dog friend was no surprise; he has not gone on a long walk since April. Nor was one friend's nose-blowing a sign; I assumed he had a cold about which I didn't know because I hadn't seen him since our gala-fabulous dinner (at which I was distractable to the point of not being able to sit still, and of barely being able to finish my dinner) on Saturday night. Because we're in Gambier, I stopped my car in the middle of the road to ask how they were. "Well," came the reply, "we're fine, but Toby died last night." I parked the car in the driveway (for they were right outside my house when I met them) and started getting the story, but what I also started getting was numb, numb beyond reaction or inscription, numb beyond sensitivity and sympathy, numb beyond all the years of love and company I have spent with a dog I will never see again, a dog I didn't see even once in the five days leading up to his death, a dog I would in any other week have petted and communed with at least a handful of times.

I was looking the other way when he went; I was busy helping my young readers try to make sense of why it matters to people in Beloved that they were looking the wrong way when the four horsemen of a latter-day apocalypse rode into town to cap off Sethe's unliveable life. I was busy feeling wet grass under my toes, busy trying to get a match to light a firework, busy scanning anapests under the table during a discussion of a book I didn't like, busy teaching others how to teach, busy, just busy. As he lay dying, I was busy eating carrot cake in the power-outed dark on my porch, busy watching a moth fly at his own candlelit shadow on my porch ceiling again and again, busy trying to figure out how to explain the contradictory vagaries of desire and regret and love and sorrow to eighteen-year-olds, busy trying to figure out how to let myself simply put on a pair of headphones and be sung to sleep by music I don't know well yet, in a full, early, foreign dark.

"There's nothing you could have done," said my young poet friend, who happened to be the first to arrive at the house after I'd gotten the news, and I know that he is right. And I don't think that what I feel today is guilt. I think that what I feel is sorrow, though not for what would seem to be the right thing, not just yet. I'm sorrowing over my absence of surprise, which feels too uncomfortably akin to an absence of caring, even though I know it is not that absence. "I don't know when it's going to hit me," I told my friend yesterday afternoon, "but it sure as hell hasn't yet." Later in the evening, as he and the rest of my teaching staff were sitting about in a pie stupor, in our variety of supine poses all over my front porch's furniture, the dog nosed worriedly into my conversation, pawing the floor with his left front paw just as he always did when he wanted the thing he could not articulate but that he knew we would intuit because we knew him well. I told a Toby story or two--for one, the story about his being taken to Texas to stay with my excellent friend's parents in 1995, left there with the leaving-home refrain "We'll be right back," not to be picked up until a year later when my friends returned from their year of teaching in England--and after a full silence, my friend quietly asked the nine-hour follow-up: "Has it hit you yet?"

"No," is all I could say then, all I can say now. No. No, but also why, why, why don't I feel it yet, where is it, when will it come, when will it hit me, when will it hit me, and then I realize that as I keep asking when it will hit me, the antecedent of "it" is changing, is becoming all those losses and deaths I have missed over the years, all the sorrows I have not felt, whose blanknesses I have not understood, so that when I think O for the loss of a dog, O, O, what I am crying with these tears that won't come is O for the loss of my mourning for the grandparents who loved me in ways I didn't understand until it was nearly too late. O for the loss of my grandmother who went to sleep one night and died not long after, leaving my grandfather unable to find us (we were at the beach for a few days longer; only she had known where we were), leaving my parents to depart for Detroit so swiftly that they forgot their clothes and my mother had to borrow one of her mother's dresses in order to go to her mother's funeral, leaving the preparations to come together so swiftly that my brother and I could not get to Detroit in time to be present at the funeral of a woman so capacious and so loving and so proud that I would give nearly anything just for a morning over toast and butter and honey at the breakfast table in the yellow kitchen, would give nearly anything to have her make me a cup of coffee in the percolator, to trade pie crust secrets with her, even to know what her favorite kind of pie was.

I missed my grandfather's death, as well, both times it happened: I was in England (with my excellent friends, then my teachers, while their dogs were in Texas) when he had the terrible car accident that catalyzed his Alzheimer's (leaving him fulfilling my worst nightmares, the obliteration of consciousness's power, perhaps placing the nightmare in my genetics). I had no idea how bad it had been, when my parents e-mailed to let me know; I was too focused on my own successes and failures, wearing the rictus of my academic anxieties, handspanning my way through train timetables and subway lines and new cities and romantic hopes' playing out over London bridges, beside the Thames, through museums, in playhouses. I continued having no sense of the magnitude of this event until we went to Detroit during my surprise visit home for winter vacation and I saw my grandfather supine and still in an intensive care unit, metal rods clawing into his skull and into the halo stabilizing his head, protecting the encasement of the brain that would never let him be himself again. And even after I saw him in traction, weighted down, freighted with the force of an accident of which I think he was never fully aware, I didn't fully get it. And when, years later, a phone message arrived on my old answering machine, my father's voice announcing the death of my grandfather and telling me what time my flight would leave Ithaca for Detroit the next night so that we could have a weekend both of burying my grandfather's ashes (which my brother and I seem to have taken turns holding on our laps in the backseat of the car) and also of celebrating my grandfather's life, I think that I still didn't get it.

I don't know whether I ever cried over my grandfather's death. I know that I did cry over my grandmother's death, which was far more a shock, a suddenness that never closed, an event from which I didn't really recover, even as I didn't really sink into it. What happened with both of their deaths was that I started feeling their absences slowly, lengthily; my grandmother's death, in particular, has carved a hole in some of my most significant pleasures, a quiet desire that I could tell her or show her how things have turned out for me. She'd be worried about a lot of things, I suspect, but when my life turns well, I hear her voice in the back of my head, saying, "That sounds like it was real nice."

It is time for me, for now, to stop writing this prose elegy (which in some ways I didn't really get underway) for my furred friend, who used to resist eating his dinner until Plato, his long-gone compatriot, would bark and bark at him in his frustration, who lay on the floor under the table when I typed my grad school applications while taking care of him, who settled quiet in the office while I hashed out my senior honors thesis with one of his owners, who used to hold feet with me under the dining room table on Fridays, who used to come lie on the hard floor next to my end of the couch just so he'd be there when I wanted to lean over the side and pat him, who used to put his ears in my hands so I'd put my fingers in them (which no one else would do), who loved rice and broccoli, who could not even lift up his back legs to have their insides scratched by the time this summer started, who could barely get up from the hardwood floors these last two months, who nevertheless always came to the door to cry an always-worried hello when I, always worried, appeared to call him O Tohhhby sweetheart and pat his frame and rustle his ears and pluck out his undercoat and snap on his leash and sit on his bed with him through youth to seniority to decline. He was the son of Samson and Sheena. He turned fifteen in May. He was beautiful, and beloved, and the best of dogs. He was, as some friends of mine used to say, good people.

I am never there when the people I love leave; I think it's that grief that's smiting me today.

Back at my post.

At 4:45 p.m. yesterday, the western sky darkening and darkening, I started to suspect we'd lose power. By 4:55 p.m., the power had flickered out one, two, three times, finally staying flickered out. The carnivalesque set in almost immediately: a student stuck in the office with me while a fast-moving summer storm berated and battered asked about whether I was planning to write a book and ended up paging through the dissertation; two-thirds of my teaching staff showed up at the house, later, and then all bets were off for the night. At about 10 p.m., coming back home from more bocce and sparklers on this greenest of deserted campuses--the ground so wet that the bocce balls kicked up their own celebratory fountains as they rolled, the night so light that when a jet passed over, its four engines and blinking lights (early stars) were just drifting, floating out of place--I realized that I was going to miss my nightly writing, for the first time since December. But as with so many other things I was missing, skimming near-bodilessly over the gravel, it seemed all right, mostly fitting, unavoidable anyhow. By 10:45 p.m. I was listening to Sufjan Stevens, a worthily fervent recommendation from a friend, through my best headphones; by 11 p.m., I was asleep. Just before I settled into bed, I looked out the back window of the house; the fireflies in the backyard were legion, hovering lightly in the startlingly pale (though moonless and clouded) night, their blinking an irregular, silent song of beauty and longing and transience. And as I slept, I dreamed for the first time in many days.

Small things.

Today, another marathon day. Tomorrow, yet another. Friday, yet again. So, this evening, impromptu almost-pick-up bocce, the grass short and wet, the light already going. A game, some sparklers, some dogs. Laughter and running barefoot to claim closeness (my aim has run true!). Forgetting the usual fear of glass, of foot-cuts, crossing Middle Path to write our names with dying sparks under the silently musical angels I don't even like all that much. (Occasionally they beckon.)

Tonight, glimpsed from the coffee shop, one of my summer students, walking along on the sidewalk, her nose in Beloved.

Last night, a fifth poem, this one in a swinging meter, anapests and dactyls, my favorite feet. Three days ago, I changed the name of the file containing the poems so that it's no longer the first poem's title; now, it's simply "Poems." I am starting to scan people's speech, listening for rhythms, feeling out words and finger-counting syllables.

Another necessary poem.

I don't know whether I've shared my love of this one, but I will this morning--it's going to be a long, long day, and last night's little companion in unfurlment on my porch made himself seen too late for that post, so think of this one as a post's worth of postscript, today an add-on to yesterday.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

--Walt Whitman

The workings of weather.

Tonight, my teaching staff and I packed up our summer brood and took them to a literary reading, where a number of lines caught my ear ("pain's roar blasting my body," read Maurya Simon, in an exquisitely sad poem of mourning that perfectly capped off my viscerally sad day with Beloved and the film Osama, a day that left me wondering what we do, we humans, with all this loss and this pain that get showered down upon us not only in life but even in our art, inescapably in our art, in our art so that our lives do not simply end, but why, but why; "the horse is meant, like us, for madness," David Baker told us, later suggesting that "madness is its own mythology"; Rebecca McClanahan spoke of the courage of dailiness; I thought with some rue of the small, spoiled courage of holding one's own in the face of no real danger). By the end of the reading, I was meditating on words of refuge, in a day when language has seemed to do nothing but make me raw and exposed, a theorist of pain, a lecturer on sorrowful horror that simply leaves me empty, paying homage to suffering I cannot explain and cannot abate and cannot imagine. I am in a thin-veiled week, I fear, and to do anything but look the suffering in the eye and call it by its name and make my students call it by its name and sing together the sad sorrows of these vast human lives--to do anything but that would simply be wrong, immoral, points for the wrong side, the battle lost, the war over.

When I walked out of the reading, what had been a hot, still day had gone lively, spectacular, the last kind of beauty I'd have sought: grey stormclouds roiling, a cold breeze dropped in, rain biding the last of its time before starting, first the slow drops, so slow that if you keep moving they will only graze you, then the hard patter, the rattle and slap, the coming of more water. Usually I do not like to be damp but not wet--I am all for immersion--but this evening, I broke into a smart run across the road, from the car to the post office, and upon returning to the car, wanted nothing more than to stand, to get drenched, to catch that other silver that the rain becomes at dusk, molten half-light, accumulation of liquefaction and need. Halfway back to the car, the thought dashed across my mind that I could run and keep running, could run despite dress and dress sandals, could run on into the night with the rain and the wind, could stretch my legs and just keep going, never breathless, never tired, never my old self, simply a running rush of motion under earthbound waters.

When I reached home, I claimed my fourth poem.

Such wind today.

All day it blew, through the house, through the trees, over the bedclothes, over my books and my reading, over my distractions and difficulties with working, over the third poem that perched in my ear and snarled until I wrote it down, gave it a place in my gut to hitch a ride. But when the evening settled over, looking like rain, dropping slow soft drops for moments, the warm wind quieted to cooler breeze, and now it rustles and rushes in the night, low wordless whispering. And in between? Fireflies scattered out over the landscape, causing exclamations and e-mails up and down campus: one person's coo of delight at an insect never seen caught, another's exhortation that I venture back out and see a glory not to be missed. Now we are all settling in for the night, the fireflies darkened to rest, the wind soothing and speaking itself hushingly, some of us reading, some of us sleeping, all of us safe (or as recklessly safe as safe's likely to get) in this small, lovely place.

The night deer.

Perpetual deferral of the commemoratory post. Perhaps I am reiterating to myself that life happens not in neat packs of one hundred, nor in neat palindromic figures. Instead, it seems to be a big jumbly mess, and the best I could do today was to choose my lightest dress and walk out into the night, heading along to dinner with a pie balanced on one hand and Hem singing in my ear. And now I seem to have gotten myself so tired and confused and slightly grouchy and certainly meditatively melancholy that I can barely see my way straight to a writing tonight. Nor can I find the lines of advice my excellent poet friend offered tonight, from William Carlos Williams, about writing a poem about the feeling of blockage.

But in the process of not being able to find Williams's lines, I have produced some of my own. Tonight, I feel like the inside of an old edge's fraying, and somehow what has soothed some of my unraveling is--of all things--my second poem of the week, the second poem of the decade in fact, and so I'll offer it, and here it is, though I actually wrote it before I wrote this paragraph, making these words some kind of proleptic postscript.

The Night Deer

Did you see the night deer?
that shadow massed in darker darkness,
the bent neck, the heartstop's reach,
that gathering near the silence at the edge of the wood?
She is quieter than this slow wind, this subtle stirrer
whose feet sweep echoes through my leaves,
red rustling shocked silver by this moonless night's lamps.
Last night I watched two finches.
They ascended the air as if sprung,
red beside brown, to pause on that high branch,
to sit without singing, to look dead ahead,
to drop straight back down. I have come to see the birds--
the woodpeckers, the wrens, the nuthatches--
that poke about, beaking bark. In last night's dusk
a wren plundered a branch of last resort, tiny and pliant,
and I saw and believed I knew better. But in the dark
of this night's feeding I know that I knew nothing.

Summers are not usually so fraught. I can hope that tomorrow will be a bit more easeful.

More wisdom from unexpected sources.

My morning's couplet, taken from today's junk e-mail:

Knowledge is solving problems no one else can:
quit your deadened job, make more money.

Of course the second line actually said "deadend," but my linguistically hyperactive brain automatically fit another vowel in there, in keeping with Beloved, through which I'm swimming once again, with yet another lively brood clamoring behind me. I'm not so into this particular version of a found-text experiment to make a whole poem out of these things. But I do like these two together, and I like the strange, mystified agency of "knowledge," which makes me think of knowledge running about with a little toolkit, fixing problematic toilets and lightbulbs and solving difficult derivatives and functions and perhaps even doing a little bit of close reading and dictionary legwork. It's the kind of statement that sounds aphoristic and possibly even true, until one starts to poke at it a little more. Is that an actual definition of knowledge? What if knowledge is actually recognizing which problems are insoluble? Or knowing how to help other people solve the problems? Or what if knowledge really is as independent as this sentence's literal level of meaning makes it out to be: a free-floating force that one might harness temporarily but must always lose control of almost immediately?

And the afternoon's junk mail declaration: No one is told off.

Well, I guess I'm running late here, as well.

This post is #200, and I simply cannot do an appropriately commemorative event this evening. You will have to love the palindromic #202, instead.

Tonight, dinner with poets (the aspiring and the accomplished) and talk about Hopkins, and others, and others, and trespass, and sheer gorgeousness, and a sweeping storm of sheep. By consensus, eating by evening light only. And the dark seeping, the room dimming, the night lovely, lovely, a slow and quiet sigh of nearing summer.

(It is a thing I have always wanted to do.)

I tried this one as haiku and didn't like it much at all, so I'm back to the keyboard. Sitting in my office tonight, watching the sun sink on toward setting, I remembered that it's been quite awhile since I last thought about my dream of seeing the midnight sun, at some year's solstice. For many years, I contemplated the old Icelandair trick: fly to London on Icelandair, and you get a stopover in Reykjavik, where today the sun rose at 2:57 a.m. and set at 11:57 p.m. (with dawn and dusk at 2:27 a.m. and 12:27 a.m., respectively). Then, one year I actually flew to Europe on the summer solstice, but I didn't muster the courage or the organizational prowess to place myself in Iceland that evening; instead, I flew USAir and arrived in London some six hours after I left Pittsburgh. But I hang on to the dream, particularly on nights when I look over my shoulder out the window at 9:48 and discover the sharp silhouettes of trees in a still-silvery sky, and I simply want the light to linger.

source for tonight's image (because I haven't gotten to see it myself yet): a broken-down Cross-wise site.

Admit one.

Reading and talking writing from the inside out has been the business of my long day's journey into a fatigue setting in with its swift weighty way. Today's bosom companions: juxtaposition, multiperspectival narration, discernment, delineation, and, surprise of surprises, relineation and enjambment (the stealth, the heartsoar, the breathcatch, how the twenty-hour-old prose sketch becomes a shivery moonbeam beckoning over a line some false hand struck in the sand all those years ago, picks up a title, shakes out its embodiment, stands up as stanzas I could carry at my heart, little late valentine to myself this year).

Some days, like today, I overestimate my energy from first consciousness. I've never been great with long-term pacing. I am the sprinter: I swam dashes: the fast kid in the blue suit, off the blocks to anchor the free, to close distances, to go all out, blindedly, trying to pull more than my weight. Decades later, I am still learning how to be on a four-person team, not to need to do the whole relay myself.

When I was younger, my father handed me a ticket stub that said, "KEEP THIS COUPON." I looked at him, and he said, "Well, keep it." I prefer the other kind of ticket stub, the one that says, "ADMIT ONE." Well, admit one. I suspect you want to.

Full moon.

When last in a bed not mine, I slipped up from sleep to find myself silvered, lightened, loned. The moon, the moon, it was the moon in the east window of that stranger place, the moon nearly full, the moon in slow traverse, the moon, and I was in it, and I slept again, not soundly, but selved.

Last night, lying to sleep early, light where I never see it. The moon, the moon, it was the moon in my south window, the moon singing nothing, scant signer, simply staring, so palpable that I could not but resume my sight, could not but look and see and look and lose, and lose, and lose.

Tonight's sky, stratified, silent, seemingly too late for light: palest, paler, pale, then the luminescent dark before a day-off moon, the summer pinpricks of first stars, the solstice stealthily sooning, the year's light grace gathering to leave.

Rooftop meanderings.

I still want to tell you about my wooden spoons, but all these other things keep showing up, wanting to be told, and who am I to say them nay?

Eleven years ago tomorrow, I packed my father's car and drove myself to the Indianapolis airport and flew off to JFK (flying TWA, no less, so I actually got to experience the Saarinen terminal before it went empty) for my first international travel: to Athens, Greece, where I'd live on and off for six weeks while doing a summer study-travel program. The year before had been scarifying; the trip to Greece, I would realize even by the time it was over, marked my decisive farewell to the terrified version of myself who had careened through the academic year, fearing that the work could never be good enough, wanting to drop out of school, falling for someone who made no effort (at 20) to hide his alcoholism and his arrogance. And so it mattered that I drove myself to the airport (though things just happened to work out that way), and it mattered that no one was there to tell me how and when to flash my passport, and it mattered that I knew no one on my flight, and it mattered that within a few days of arriving, I had locked in with the people who would be my fast friends for the rest of the program, and that they seemed happy I was there, and that we all laughed at each other's jokes. I floated through my days in sandals and wide-legged linen pants and sleeveless tops; I felt, as I put it in my journal, very continental. I have never been so tanned. I may never have been so happy.

During the second week of our trip, we traveled on the overnight ferry to Crete. By this time I was fully smitten with an exceptional fellow traveler, who was eminently taken, all but engaged to the woman he married a few years later. (I do unrequited and/or ill-timed exceptionally well, I'd say.) Our first two nights, we stayed in a small, central Cretan town called Zaros. It was on the way to Zaros that I first had more than one drink at a time; at the taverna where we ate lunch, the spaghetti was incredible and the retsina homemade, and my friends and I drank a carafe together ("bread and grapevines and sun splotches on our hair and tables," I wrote later), and I realized one could drink without making drunkenness a goal, and everything changed for me. That night, our group made too much noise at our hotel's bar, and so four of us peeled off into the night. Peeling off into the night, or watching the night peel down, was our favorite pastime. That night: "Because we were sick of plastic chairs by a neon-lit bar, we walked into the darkness of the hotel walkways, only to discover that the sky was literally filled, covered, saturated with stars and planets--hundreds of millions, covering every visible bit." The week before, at a fish taverna (psarotaverna) near the little cove on the east coast of Attica where we swam in the clearest water I've ever seen: "The lights on the other side of the bay twinkled on one by one as the sun set behind our taverna, and I watched the sky darken and the boats on the glassy sea grow less and less distinct on the other side of the low whitewashed wall." As I type, I can picture it: there was a conical island out in the bay; we sat under olive trees; everything grew night-grey and the tiny fried smelts were unparalleled.

But the night that I've been remembering for the past couple of days is the one we spent in Heraklion, the main city on Crete's north coast, after our travels through the breathtakingly stark landscapes (landscapes that I still think would make a richly beautiful quilt) of the central and southern regions of the island. The Olympic Hotel, where we stayed, had a roof deck that, in my memory, was no great shakes aesthetically (though were I to check it, I might discover that it had a fancy roof bar and we simply slummed away from it, young and moneyless as we were). By the time we were there, we had all been together for nearly two weeks, and our loyalties were setting themselves up for good. And at the end of the night, my favorite friend and I met up on the roof, where we sat in the dark, talking for hours. From him, I learned about shaggy dog stories. Or maybe I taught him about shaggy dog stories. It is appropriate that that bit of the story could go either way. There were no stars; the city street below us sent up the hazy sounds of engines and night-calls; it was still warm, in the way that cities are still warm, exuding their day-heat, long after the sun goes down. There was no moon; the moon had been full when we arrived in Athens and was nearing new by the time we were preparing to leave Crete. Our view was of more postwar buildings across the street in downtown Heraklion, and of a tiny bit of the bay if we leaned forward and looked right.

I have no memory of what we talked about. What permeates me still is that night's unspoken feeling of reckless hope, of a happiness hovering just below giddiness occasioned by the very fact that I was still around, and that I was so improbably there on a Mediterranean roof. I think about our sitting on that roof, our feet propped up on the low wall before us, away from all the people who had grated on us for days (for we were kindred spirits in our need for quiet retreat and managed, as the summer wore on, to carve solitudes out for one another through impressive and sometimes desperate subterfuge). And I feel again how loose and easy the night became, how time fell over into itself while we talked about absolutely nothing--literally nothing, in my memory--and how somehow that seemed enough, and how relieved I was to be there, so daringly adrift in the moment, so vividly and viscerally and blissfully aimless, so safely unmoored.

A trebled postscript, veering: On the road, on the way to the grocery store for pie rhubarb: two misshapes in the road, grey from a distance, geese up close. In the store, having picked out the rhubarb ("select stalks no bigger than your thumb," says the Joy of Cooking): a gleeful child perched on his crouching father's lap, learning about the tanked lobsters, doomed beyond even thunking the glass with banded claws. On the road, on the way home from the store with rhubarb and everything else, Aimee Mann singing "I feel like a ghost who's trying to move your hands / over some Ouija board / in the hopes I can spell out my name": three turkey vultures, one swooping down with improbable majesty, reconnoitering in a field.

How the dragon has fallen!

Before (Thursday afternoon):

After (this evening):

I do have stories to tell. I do. But I also have a deep syllabus-building fatigue and a very strong need to check in with William Faulkner before I sleep.

The moon is up and full tonight, our clear sky the deepest luminous indigo. And such coolness I could not have imagined for mid-June.