No turnaround.

And then there were the days when she simply decided to leave town altogether.

Yesterday, I realized that I would be driving for two hours today in any case--and that by adding only two more, I could be in Indiana with my parents and the deaf dog by mid-afternoon. And so it is that I am in

with a deaf dog asleep at my feet. (No. I'm not in the van. Don't be so literal.)

This morning, heading down my favorite road out of Knox County--some way before my favorite sign, reading "NO TURNAROUND," at the mouth of a driveway, always making me wonder what sorts of trouble the house's owners have had with people joyriding into their driveway--I saw my first calves of the season--four black wobblinesses being nosed about by a red adult. Trees are starting to bud in mid-Ohio (though we woke to snow this morning), but here they're in full force. Along the way--both before and after my morning coffee with my flaming-sworded friend, and a stop to have my appearance neatened a bit--I saw barns and the heartstopping symmetry of fencerow oaks. And so, so very many goats, with long floppy ears. In one field, goats roamed everywhere, eating everything. In another field, five chickens pecked their ways away from the nearest barn.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, there's a Georgia O'Keeffe painting called "Sky Above Clouds IV" (1965). It's the largest painting she ever did and hangs in a huge, open stairway in the museum. Throughout today's drive, the sky reminded me of that painting. I couldn't photograph it, couldn't try to get the brilliance of white barn on blue; I'm getting pickier about my framing, and perhaps (given my run of bad luck with the car lately) smarter about my car safety. I wanted to be able to set up shots of the things I was passing; they all, so many, pass so fast that I can barely register them at all.

The trees in front of my parents' house are breaking into bud. "Be sure to get up close and get pictures of the pear tree's blossoms," my mother said as I grabbed the camera and left the house in the early evening light. I oblige when I can: though the pear isn't quite in blossom, the maple beside it is. We won't have buds and blossoms like these for at least a couple of weeks yet.

Yes, it is true that I am hooked on narrow focus. Perhaps tomorrow I'll force myself to stop down to a smaller aperture and let more things come into focus in my frames. But I do love the feel of focus against blur.

And then, see...

Then there were those days when nothing much happened but the things that hadn't been happening in previous days. And at the ends of those days, she found herself wishing she could name her tasks differently, give them lightsome epithets to catch at the ways they were satisfying to undertake, gratifying to complete. But at the ends of those days, she also found herself tired of contemplating those things that were over and that required no memorialization. Good work, well done. There were things she needed to do, and things others needed her to do, and so she did them. Some days are like that. Some of the best days are like that.

Shadowy starry glow, shadowy starry glow.

Sometimes I end up loving pictures that may have no business being loved. This one's one of those. It's the maple in the background, backing up the starry weed: it's that dark diagonal that sinks me.

I sat with the computer last night until I wanted to be away from it until morning. Then I went home and sat in bed with it. Then I slept, and then I sat up and wrote. And now everything is back under control. I had thought I'd wait to start Heyday when everything was officially out on its winging way to England, and everything might not be on its way until tomorrow. But it's such a good-looking book--the actual book, I mean: its dustjacket, which of course won't be on the book while I read it anyway but who is anyone to ask me how I make these decisions--that I might just pick it up the moment I get home. Which means that I should probably perform my remaining obeisances and industriousnesses right quick, before leaving. Once I'm home, I'll be sunk, and loving it.

Speaking of love: I am feasting on this man's pictures. A friend wrote not so long ago that one of my bird pictures made her want to bite herself and run around the room. Wright Morris's pictures make me want to get in my car and drive away and not come back until I've found innumerable abandoned buildings to photograph head-on in bright light. His photo-text The Home Place is quite good, as well, though I kept wanting it to be Sebald's The Emigrants, and that's just not fair.

In England, the ruins are different, as are the birds. These are, of course, not the only things that make me hopeful about what I'm about to send across the Atlantic.

(Ooh, a several-hours-later postscript: turns out I'll get to start Heyday as a reward after all; the application is signed and sealed, and I'm going home to curl around a book. And to eat some toast and blackcurrant jam.)

(Another postscript, this one a picture with Miscellanie's name on it. The light's coming back, my friend. Do not slip.)

Sunning myself.

You all wouldn't know it unless I tell you, but you're about to do me a great service. My horoscope for today tells me to rally my troops with my planning and enthusiasm, because they'll follow me anywhere. I'm not actually going to ask you to go anywhere with me, but I'm going to pretend that you're following along while I write this next piece of prose that I must write in order to earn next year's keep--or, rather, to earn the right to hitch myself to someplace prestigious by paying out the keep I've already earned.

This one should be the easy one: it's about what I've already done, what I am already doing. But I am choking and whimpering a little bit in the face of having to do this thing. These are old, old fears, freshly freighted with new tasks I worry I won't get right. I am a big believer in Anne Lamott's concept of the shitty first draft. I introduce that concept to my friends and students whenever I get a chance. But when it comes right down to it, too big a part of me hears the voice in advance saying, "Wow, that's shitty," and I cannot be cavalier about it because that's not how I am.

My horoscope for yesterday told me to clear my head of unnecessary materials--including self-doubt--and so I'm about to pretend that I'm explaining my research to you all, rather than to an audience ready to refuse me with a snarl. And while I talk to you, my skin will thicken up again, which is what my skin does when I talk to curious, interested people. Like the custodian who talks to me at midnight and wants to read my book. Or the student who says, "I didn't know that's what you've been working on all this time." Or the woman who asks me to hurry up and get it done so that she can read more than just one little piece. The people who say we all love your work. My beloved Brooklynite who writes to say, "Lady, you should write for pay." My poet friend (soon-to-be-Alabaman!) who asks to see more work, who tells me where I might send photographs. My excellent friend who looks completely perplexed when I worry aloud that my writing about my own work is dry and dull.

And when my skin is thick again, all will come right once more. It's working already. And this new novel Heyday is lighting up the end of the tunnel.

It took me almost two years to realize that I can see the river from this office window. But there it is, going along and going along.

As will I. Right now.

Two by two.

This is a true thing:

This afternoon, I got into my car and drove and drove, making the rounds, seeing my places. I went far from here, came back. I drove with the windows down, in silence, my hair whipping. I talked to myself, inside my head and maybe even aloud, for hours.

I saw an Amish buggy ahead on Zion Road and slowed down so that I would not impinge upon it. I took an early turn from Zion, to pass over hills and around curves. As I turned, I saw two goats--one young, one old--standing side by side, watching the horse that was drawing the buggy.

This is a true thing:

Today someone dear to me is in pain, and when I ask for a way to be helpful I am given silence, and all I can give back to the quiet from this distance is hope.

This is a true thing:

Today the sun was so warm and the air so light that I skipped out on my workday and spent the last two hours of daylight walking and walking, bearing both cameras and photographing everything. I took 225 photographs. I practiced changing my good lens from one body to the other. I crouched next to a prairie and loved its tendrils. I thought of my brother, whose new boss asked him during his interview, "Are you a Nikon guy or a Canon guy?" I turn out to be a Canon girl. It's a cosmically bad joke--and one that I can make doubly bad: this literary critic shoots with Canon.

This is a true thing:

When these two geese flew over as the sun was going down, I tried to take their picture but had a crucial setting wrong on the camera. And I was worried for them; they seemed lost and frantic, hovering alone, the rest of their vee nowhere to be seen. They left me alone with a sky of hanging hawks. I counted: twenty hawks, circling together. A few minutes later, I could hear the geese coming around again, and this time I was ready. I have wanted a good picture of Canada geese for probably five years. It's no easy thing to get; somehow they get grossly sentimentalized when they're made into art, and I have never had the equipment or the know-how to get my own image. What I wanted was an image that would make me feel the way I feel when I hear them coming back as the winter slips away.

What I wanted were the geese I got.

Whew.

There's only one thing more fun than getting your own good job, and that's seeing your friends get good jobs. Both of my poet colleagues for this year have now secured plum positions for next year (and, deo volante, for many years thereafter). And I am so pleased. And their future students and colleagues are so lucky.

This time of year is cruel and terrible in academia. It's cruel and terrible because so many demonstrably excellent and deserving people emerge at the end of a six-month process of putting their lives on hold and have virtually nothing to show for it. I hate that. I think that any of us with our souls still intact must hate that. I breathe a sigh of relief for every person I know who comes out okay at the end of a market cycle. I breathe a prayer of hope and strength for those who may now be getting ready to wait until September to try again.

And for now I'm back to work on my own bid for next year's new berth. My Freudian typo: next year's new birth. Yes--that too, almost without question.

(Oh yeah, and that picture? Yesterday, 7:45 p.m. Thanks, daylight saving time!)

Nesting anew.

Today I'm shooting film, so I'm giving you a picture from a week ago.

Today I remembered all over again how much of friendship--real, true friendship, not the stuff that just pretends--is about knowing exactly how to push, which sometimes means exactly how to tell someone else she needs to push. Today I remembered all over again how much I sometimes need exactly the right person to say, "Now tell me ..." at exactly the right time, and then to say it again when the first telling's done. And so it is that I go out of this day--with, gloriously, a whole hour of light left to go--having drafted one piece of writing that I need right now and having sketched the next one, which also happens to be the outline of my first book. I've been meaning to write up that outline for about a year. And today a combination of exigency and just the right amount of prodding made it happen--in an e-mail, of all places--before I was even out of my pajamas.

As a reward for one of these accomplishments and a goad to start the other, I loaded up a roll of TMax 100 and wandered to the officehouse taking pictures. Something about shooting film makes me feel strangely unworthy, low on vision itself. It's as though all the rules are completely different, as though the pictures must be more interesting if I'm even going to put the camera to my eye and take a look at what I might see there. Just as I was starting to get over that feeling this afternoon, some stranger with his own camera turned up in his S.U.V. and seemed to be taking pictures of my taking pictures. Now, at best that's just absurd. At worst, it's too weird. And in either case, it made me self-conscious again, and for that I could have kicked the guy's ugly white car.

A crow flashes a shadow, flying between me and the sun; he's carrying something big in his beak. The crows have cawed and rattled all day. Yesterday four of them traced the perimeter of my lawn, turning up one small pile of leaves after another with swift tosses of their heads. They are big like dogs, these crows, and (while on the ground) clumsier.

By tomorrow, the dirty remains of our snow will be even smaller.

We're all heliotropic now.

Last light for old leaves.

I don't always pay a lot of attention to dead leaves that hang around until spring, but yesterday they were doing such tricks with the sunlight that I couldn't help but notice. (They did their tricks tonight, as well, but I saw them chiefly from the upstairs windows in my house, where the seeing is less good than down on the ground.)

Here, too, is the nuthatch who mewled while I walked around yesterday. Or at least one of them. I couldn't get today's tufted titmice, either: they are too quick, too frantic. They only land provisionally.

And tonight while I work, owls whoo whoo in the woods nearby.

Silly dragon, drains are for...

(It would be in bad taste for me to finish that sentence.)

Right on cue, he's back. Earlier today, I was musing on how someone obviously didn't know the Rules of the Dragon when he reappeared last week: he disappeared almost as soon as I'd taken his picture, and I assumed that someone had stolen him. But tonight, walking home on the first leg of my voyage to get grocery store sushi for dinner, I could see a little spot of orange up ahead. And I found this little poser waiting for me. (I think he's posing as someone who might take an interest in fixing the yard-scars from last fall's pit meter installations up and down my street.)

Poser!

Today, trees started showing their buds, nuthatches mewled as they foraged for grub, and I got to walk around in shirtsleeves for the first time this calendar year. We're on the fast climb out now, my friends.

There's more--when, all gratitude given, is there not more?--but first there are all these photocopied and microfiched books to be read, all these proposals to be written. The ruthlessness is upon me.

And at nearly 7 p.m., there was still a little bit of light. In my book, that's the best news of the day.

Tricks and traces.

My writing here goes up and down, I know; this semester, though, you can pretty much assume that a small day in the Cabinet is a big day in my research. Today: much of a biography that I find so, so winning. For example: "She liked fundamentals, the bones of things, and would, if she could, have touched and handled materials." For example: "She still read Mathematics gently." For example: "The impression that this lady produced...was reassuring and pleasant--in spite of having cigarette ashes in the flounces of her skirt."

And today: more fun with microfiche, continuing to gather together writings to which it just so happens that I have the best (in fact, the only) access in Ohio. And so, overall, today: three or four steps closer to the next big thing, which seems to be tracking me as much as I am tracking it.

Oh, oh, and okay: here's one for the academics in the house. Even some of you who aren't academics may know the Penn Call for Papers (CFP) mailing list, which disseminates to thousands of people CFPs on all literary and cultural topics imaginable. For a long time now, I've watched with no small amount of dread and/or loathing as those things have filtered into my CFP mailbox by the tens and twenties. Tonight, about fifty arrived while I was downstairs photocopying something in the officehouse. My first response was, as usual, to consider unsubscribing from the CFP list altogether. And yet somehow I fear to do so. I've been a subscriber for nearly a decade (and generally the whole thing is a feat of totally admirable administrative stupendosity). Somewhere, deep down, I must believe I'll get a prize (or perhaps just learn something useful) if I hang in there long enough.

Espresso volcano; or, a morning miscellany.

Once again, I'm in bed with my words and my pictures. The first floor rooms were a gleaner's delight: my arms full of telepathy and Victorian education, of Tolstoy and blank paper, I started picking up more: Cole Swensen, Karla Kelsey, David Abram. Searched out my ink pen. Picked up my pen case, so as to have a choice of ink pens. One of the strange old books that just came in from Alibris. My Isabel Burton mug, full of milky sweet espresso.

When I walked into the kitchen to check on the espresso earlier, I found it bubbling right out of the stovetop pot, spraying all over the place. I love to use that little pot. It reminds me of the time I drank a whole mug of espresso before a major fellowship interview. It reminds me of the afternoons my dissertation director (wisest of women) would brew a pot that we'd split at her kitchen table or on her patio, making our strange conversations whose lines of affection ran deeper, I now sense, than either of us could tell the other, or tell from the other. I didn't quite know yet, those afternoons, how to read the affection of people who offer themselves in ways different from mine. I was starting to get it by the time I moved back to Gambier.

It's rare that I have a rough night, sleep-wise, and in fact last night wasn't rough once I was asleep. But before I could get there, I had to sleep a little desperately on the couch for awhile, had to curl and arch against some pain I hate, had to breathe low and remember that it always goes away and is not a stranger thing, not a thing to fear, nothing even to hate. Just another thing. Just the body doing one bit of its work: familiar complaint against forgottenness, small mourning of the foregone. My strange dry cough from eighteen months ago seemed ready to make a re-appearance early in the evening. Earlier, I'd seen a friend's bathroom for the first time, seen lines of prescription bottles, thought of my own bottles at home, thought of the body's fallibilities, how we patch and hide them. It took me the rest of the night to put back on my sheer of forgetfulness.

And now I'm apparently taking it right back off, though this writing was meant to be about the beauty of curling under covers with my stack of books, about (for one thing) the beauty of how much I have learned and of what I still do not know about contemporary poetry (but for one: a small, lovely press like Ahsahta will, if you send it a prescribed amount of money, send you everything it publishes in a year; if you're late enough to the party, you will get six books of poetry in the mail as a surprise one March morning and the only thing you'll hate is that they use those padded mailers made of eaten paper that blows in fat flakes everywhere around your living room when you open your packet of beautiful books that you chiefly ordered because you wanted this one that you've now brought back to bed with you).

Hem was my alarm music this morning, and when Sally Ellyson began singing, I decided not to get up right away to stop her. What's the point of that? I thought, burrowing a little, seeing in no-focus that my hand was curled up and open the way I think it always is in my sleep. My feet were bare, far away in the dark caves of covers. I twitched my toes to remember having stripped off my socks and tossed them across the room, last thing last night. Eventually I felt like getting up, and so then I did. Because everyone here is on break now, I feel less guilty about this behavior than I might have last week.

Yesterday a new lens arrived for the camera, maybe twice as heavy as the old lens and for good reason. More zooming is now possible. I have lost a tiny fraction of my wide-angle capability in the switch. To me this seems a worthy tradeoff. I'm now geeking out so completely about my photography that people are starting to laugh and roll their eyes when I say, "Guess what?" They know what's coming. I'm going to talk about a lens, or something I've just figured out, or a picture I want to take, or (still) the fact that the camera was once blind but now it sees. My earnestness is a shield against teasing, as is my awareness that I'm geeking out. I find myself meditating on problems: when one flies with two SLR cameras, how does one carry them? Do I travel with just the film SLR and the little digital camera? But what if I miss something?

If I had it all to do over, I don't think I'd go visual instead of verbal. And I don't think I have to make a choice, anyway. For one thing, I don't think I'd see what I see if I didn't carry my verbal framework into these fields of different signifiers. But I do find it funny to think first of missing something because I don't have a camera and second of missing writing something down. Overall, I suspect it's because I'm less advanced in photographing than in writing, and so everything feels new and possible with the camera, whereas my knowledge base with writing is so much greater that I have enormously high expectations for myself. I've gone through this state of things before, back when I thought about switching disciplines. Now I know even more fully that I am a both/and person, not an either/or.

For now, I suspect it's time to do the reading I came back to bed to do. But first, I've acidified a photo for you. It looks to me like my kitchen plant's brain scan, if my kitchen plant were to have a brain and get it scanned.

I know better than to bring this many books to bed with me: my brain doesn't know what to want first, how to order what's beside me. Poetry or prose? History or aesthetics? Biography or fiction? It is a palatial morning, and this is my gratitude.

Plays of light.

The earliest trees are starting to bud here, hard and hopeful and ready for what might still be coming before spring. Surprising things cast shadows; curious things happen at ground level.

On the wing.

Tonight is one of those nights: things are effervescing over here. And so I'm simply giving you another of Friday evening's marvels: these hawks on the wing, only a fraction of the group that circled and wheeled in the windy dusk. I identify: here's an updraft, there a cross-current, and I catch one, then the other, a dip and a turn, a gilding of edges, an effort of grace. Remember how I didn't want to leave home? All of you who said I'd change my mind can now say I told you so (though I'll immediately point out that I agreed with you). I think I've found my archive.

Tomorrow, I hope you'll get more than hawks from me.

Sweet Jane.

It has been brought to my attention that at least one reader out there finds himself frustrated by my not using a picture of myself in my profile. While I appreciate the sentiment behind that frustration, the thin veneer of pseudonymity has always been part of the Cabinet's make-up, and so I'm not likely to switch to my own mugshot anytime soon, or ever. But it occurs to me that I've never explained who that woman looking down on my writings is.

In some ways, she's the woman least likely to be a fitting stand-in for me. She's Jane Burden Morris, born in 1839 in Oxford. By 18, she was hanging out with a bunch of the guys from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dante Gabriel Rossetti used her as his model for Guinevere; William Morris used her as his model for Iseult. When she was almost 20, she married Morris, with whom she had two daughters. In the 1860s and 70s, she probably had an affair with Dante Rossetti (part of the time, her husband was off in Iceland, where many Victorian Englishmen seem to have turned up at one time or another). If nothing else, she became one of Rossetti's artistic obsessions: he photographed her (or had her photographed) and painted her repeatedly, always emphasizing her long, long neck.

When I was a junior in college, a friend and I discovered Jane Morris (whom we called Janey, for kicks) because we were studying William Morris in our nineteenth-century seminar. That was also the centenary of William Morris's death, so the V&A had an exhibit dedicated to him, which gave us even more Janey material. We used to crack each other up by imitating her neck in these photographs. We once had a long argument about whether or not she was even pretty. I know that I, for one, have always thought her strangely beautiful, and utterly mesmerizing--not least because she looks so thoroughly cramped and unhappy in all of her photographs, contorting under the weight of all that massy hair and masculine attention. I always find myself wondering whether she was really that miserable; I always find myself hoping that she wasn't.

(And a postscript: I've never gotten the sense that she was a particularly sweet woman, this Janey. I just couldn't pass up the chance to namecheck a favorite song.)

source for tonight's image: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Moon-lit colder.

Last night, the weatherman told my excellent friend and me that the forecast for the night was "moon-lit colder." Yes.

But hours before that, I had gone out from my house to check my mail and, more importantly, to see what I could see. Though the camera had come winging its way back to me on Wednesday, I'd found myself preoccupied with other things, not the least of which was the awful rain and grey of Thursday, not the least of which was a piece of writing I had to complete for Thursday morning. On Thursday, in fact, I didn't even carry the camera with me, now a highly unusual situation. But yesterday was free and clear, in every way. And so out I went.

As you know, from yesterday's writing and picture, I made it about ten feet before I'd gotten the camera out and started crawling around on the ground, where things look different:

(These flowers--snowdrops, or Galanthus--are the favorites of my dear classicist friend, who used to bring the first ones of the season to my Greek classes in a tiny copper vase that he used only for this purpose.)

(And, so that you can see how different things are here today, here's what I saw when I walked out to meet a student for brunch.)

But hours before that, before the snow came back, it was a gorgeously sunny evening. At 5:05 p.m., the whites and blues before me were brilliant and staggering, almost too much to take in. I had this experience in Greece once; we arrived on Santorini (that old volcano, that big draw) in the middle of the night, and when we emerged from our inn the next morning, I could barely keep my eyes open. The world was that dazzling.

You see that today is a day for digressing.

The great joy for me at 5:05 was discovering that what I could see, the camera could see, too:

Until mid-February, all of these whites would have been brownish-grey, and by the time I'd gotten back to my computer, I'd have forgotten the precise arrangements of clouds and shadows. I might have gotten some of them back with some heavy processing of the image, but it would have been mostly accidental and also highly partial. To get a brilliant white? To keep that kind of blue? A blessing.

By the time I picked my way through the sodden lawn, I was already meditating on what it is that I try to do with the camera at all. I'm not necessarily trying to transform the world, though I also don't believe that my camera simply reflects an external reality. What I'm trying to do, as near and as simply as I can state it right now, is to put my viewer where I was when I went looking, to ask you to see what I saw--not least as a show of gratitude for my having been able to see it at all. It's an impulse that makes so much sense, when I think back to, for instance, fourth grade, when I took some little thing to show my teacher every single morning. While everyone was milling around and trickling in from school buses, she'd let us line up at her desk to show her our books or stones or pictures or whatever. I took something every day. I don't remember not having wanted to show things to people, or to tell someone something that just happened. It's why I teach, and it's why I write here. (It's presumably why you read, too.)

There was no good mail, but that was for the best because it kept me light. I stopped in at the coffeeshop for a cup of coffee--and they were serving Sumatra, my favorite coffee, the one that my grad school boyfriend used to have Peet's send me as a surprise every once in awhile. But they were also playing the worst music I've ever heard, so I gulped the coffee and hurried back out to catch more of the light and what it was doing to the world.

A field downhill from campus has flooded in our snowmelt and rainfall. I thought that I was going down the hill to photograph the flood, but there's not a good way to get near that field, especially at dusk, especially without a car. So, I did what I could with the river.

The tree you see dangling into the river on its left side there was bouncing up and down in the swift current (the river is twice its usual width and astoundingly closer than normal to the bridge, which has only a knee-high guardrail). Somehow, that metronomic tree was the most frightening thing to me about our swollen river.

Because the sunset had made a spectacle of the sky, I kept on walking away from campus, along the road toward the environmental center, continuing to revel in the fact that I can now work with my camera, now that the camera sees what I see--that is, now that its sense of light isn't so vastly diminished that I have to trick it into seeing anything at all. Because, honestly, how can I have been missing sights like this for even three months?

And what if I hadn't been able to show you what happened next?

As I was standing at the side of this little road, taking picture after picture of these clouds and what was changing about them with each second that passed, I realized that I should look back to see what was happening behind me. And there, the clouds were gorgeously layered, in a slightly different set of hues than the ones I'd been photographing. I took one vertical shot of these new layers. And when I looked away from the camera, lo and behold:

There was the moon. I could have cried right there on the road. Instead, I whispered and whispered and kept on shooting as the moon climbed higher and higher. The last line of a friend's poem--"This is one way of loving the world"--ran through me again and again. This being, this being on a road with the sun changing the clouds and the moon beginning its slow wheel across the nightening sky, this being present and alert and trying, with all humility, to capture some instant of the fullness of being there--this is my way of loving the world.

Here's a detail of that first moon shot:

I have almost nothing to say, in the face of that whole experience, besides thank you, thank you. I am so glad to have been there. Give me beauty, put me in its path, and I will do my best to be there, to give it back.

And then, a vee of geese made themselves heard, coming along from the west. I took pictures of them, too, though my zoom lens wasn't really up to the challenge, especially since the light was going so swiftly by this time, and they were so, so high.

And then the dragon. And then a night with my excellent friends, one of whom is a year older today, sharing a birthday with one of his favorite authors. Tonight I will learn to make pecan pie, in honor of his starting the next year of his excellent life, without whose presence in my own life I would be a much diminished mind.

And I continue to marvel: there were flowers growing under that snow all the while. All they needed was for that surprisingly heavy weight to melt off and let them back into the air.

Do I have a story for you.

Unfortunately, I'm so tired that I think I'll have to tell you tomorrow morning. For now, suffice it to say that tonight's was one of the best early evenings I've had in recent memory, and that my joy was actually facilitated by the camera, rather than hindered by it. You'll see. I'll show you when I get up in the morning. It started with these flowers, which--as it turns out--were growing under the snow all that time. I had just been thinking about how last year those yellow flowers were everywhere throughout February. And then there they were, all over the yard.

And just when I thought I could get no more ecstatic, look who turned up just after dark.

I suppose that with this new "labels for this post" option, on the new Blogeur, I could tag all of the dragon's appearances and make them easy to find. Perhaps I'll try that, before I sleep, even if I'm not allowed to use exclamation points in my labels.

Nope, maybe not. I don't like the look of the labels. For more dragony goodness, you can do a search for "dragon" right now.

In like a ... wet animal.

Excessive rains and threats of flooding, and so much fatigue here. A new season is struggling to be born. This rain might clear out much of our snow, but more snow will follow, and then more rain. This weather? Into the "not dealing with it much" box. There are, you see, all these applications to be written, all these plans to be made for going away for awhile. I don't mean to sound overly gleeful--all the things that made the thought of leaving sad a month ago are still in place. But departure's necessity reveals itself day by day. I want my alien registration card back. I want to expatriate for the short-term. I want to become a Sainsbury's customer again. I want to buy cheap Tesco tea biscuits and to haul home 3 for 2 books from Waterstone's.

I want someone to take me punting.

And I want to find the person who will get up and dance with me in a living room to this silly, terrible song (thanks, ModFab!). I mean, really. It seems not that much to ask.

Variations on yesterday, with found text.

I waited with bated breath all morning, barely able to contain myself, refusing to shower lest I should miss the FedEx truck a second day running. At 12:25, the truck pulled up. By 12:29, my camera was back together and I was taking this picture:

(and no, that's not dust on my plant--it's worse than dust, actually, a little web being made by the same kind of insect that killed my jade plants at the officehouse). And by 12:30, I was doing a welcome-home dance for my newly functional camera.

I have to say: if you own a Digital Rebel XTi and you've had trouble with underexposure, you should call Canon and get your camera fixed. You will be glad for the two-week investment; you will, I hope, have customer service as prompt and friendly as I received. This repair cost me $15 in postage; I probably could have argued that they should send me a postage-paid label, had I thought of it in time. And now I can actually use my light meter.

I spent the rest of the day in a slight fog, joy at the camera's return vying with sorrows held over from yesterday. But other things proceed apace. The weather warms. There's much to be found.

For one thing, chalkboard leavings:

(I don't think I've ever seen a stick-figure Christ before.)

For another, inexplicable blacktop sketches:

And for yet another, early signs of the growth that's coming:

I think that these are our lilies (you can see them back there behind the hostas).

I have more finding to do before I can sleep, though not images this time.

What we cannot keep.

On April 26, 1976, when I was thirteen days old, The New Yorker published Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art." She'd played with other titles for the poem: "How to Lose Things /? The Gift of Losing Things?" reads the top of her first draft. In that draft, she makes a chattier approach toward her reader than in the final poem: "I really / want to introduce myself - / I am such a fantastically good at losing things / I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences." Today I am thinking about how fantastically good I can be at losing things. And in part I'm thinking that through Bishop's poem--the final version (there were sixteen drafts). So, tonight you get a multigenre show. Think of it as my own private explication, only not fully private, because you're reading. And it seems like just about time I learned this poem by heart: my loss my gain. (I can be resourceful that way.)

The art of losing isn't hard to master:
so many things seemed filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

At 12:45 this afternoon, sitting in a booth at the coffee shop with my flaming-sworded friend, I reached to fiddle with my right earring and found my earlobe empty. This morning, standing at my dresser, I had begun putting on a pair of jade earrings that belonged to my mother when she was a teenager. With one in, I changed my mind: rather than those dangles, I wanted my grandmother's faceted hoops, the ones that catch and cast light better than anything else I own. My mother brought those earrings back from Detroit with her after my grandmother's sudden death and funeral in 1994. They have been among my favorite pieces of jewelry ever since.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I am not a person who loses things for good. I am, in fact, a person who generally finds things for other people. St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, lends a hand. Even before my friend and I had finished searching the coffeeshop, I had said a prayer to him. The good news: I had only been out of the house for two hours, and I had walked a limited round--first to the officehouse for a meeting whose subject was the very reason I had decided to wear the earrings that hold the most strength in them, then to the coffeeshop for lunch. A limited round. An assignment in close looking, in walking with downcast eyes, in retracing steps. In keeping my mind off of other things. In having a task.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

For the past week, my mind has been opening up more and more to what is exquisite about the prospect of reentering a traveling life. I can feel myself starting to detach ties, little by little, a couple at a time. Some things that should probably bother me more than they do are starting not to bother me at all. This afternoon, I realized that I have now conceptualized a little mental box in which can go all the things that I don't have to think or worry about, because (d.v.) I'll only be here for a few more months before (d.v.) I leave for nearly a year. It's like the box I kept during my final dissertation months, except that what I put in that box were all kinds of worries about whether or not my life would be meaningful. I couldn't worry about those things while I was trying to finish my project; they gave me something that felt like vertigo. I also couldn't think about the fact that almost immediately after I finished my dissertation, I had to move away from a house and a town I loved, to relocate and live and work among strangers. My dream life wouldn't let me forget these things, though; I repeatedly had elaborate, bizarre dreams wherein I (in the process of trying to figure out what I was doing with my life) would end up walking strange hallways in stranger houses, dressed in someone else's evening gown, searching for someone I knew. In one of these dreams, I was hired to seduce a foreign diplomat because I was the only person at my spy agency who spoke ancient Greek.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

When my mother was seventeen, she reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date with my father, who was eighteen. It was July. She had ironed her red hair, but it had frizzed up in the wind. She was learning to drive, and her friends picked her up at the driving school. My father was in the back seat of the car. Months earlier, she had lost a button from her chartreuse leather jacket. (That's how my mom rolls.) When she got into the car that July night, my father introduced himself and handed her the missing button. "Where did you get this?" she said. "My people are everywhere," he replied. She still has that button. I've seen it. She still has my father, too. Together, they've left three loved (or at least loved-in) houses (not counting the first one, which they only rented).

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

The day after I moved all of my possessions to Rochester and left them, still boxed, piled in the dining room of the house I would rent for the year, my boyfriend (just back from a sociology conference) broke up with me. Sitting on his couch, having expected to stay with him for the next five days or so, I watched the floor of my old life in Ithaca falling out from under me. It was at that moment that I realized how much home is where you have a key with which you can open a lock and go in without warning. My Clintonian batgirl friend gave me her key the next morning, and then I could stop feeling homeless. Over the year, I hurtled myself back to Ithaca frequently. Sometimes, on visits, I would spend most of my time not visiting people much. Instead I walked around, just being somewhere where I knew everything's place. I could never really explain my need to be alone when I came home for visits, and I know it hurt some feelings.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Today's not the first time in recent memory that I've lost a silver hoop. I have one pair of earrings that I wear day in and day out, unless I'm dressing for a special occasion or need (like today's). Last winter, I was on the phone one evening and reached to fiddle with my right earring, only to find that it was gone, fallen out while I'd visited the house of someone about whom I had a wrong idea. It took me until March 1 to get the earring back. When it returned to me, it was in an envelope, with no note, addressed to my departmental mailbox. I came in for work one morning, and there was my earring, waiting for me in the officehouse. That was the last straw, really, in a situation that had gone wrong. I never again saw the person who had finally returned my earring, but this was no disaster. This did not even look like disaster. It was good practice: I lost him farther, faster. I had not grown to love his voice, his gestures. I had not come to know his footfall, his foibles. He had no real place in my life to lose.

This one I've lost today: this one has place and meaning. Searching for that fallen earring took up hours of the afternoon, hours in which I walked that same limited round again and again, eyes to the ground, sometimes with other people (like a colleague who kindly took an unusual degree of care with me, insisting on accompanying me on my third search, or the people who got down on all fours and crawled around looking under tables with me). Sometimes I passed off what I was doing as a joke. "The key to all literature is somewhere in this mud," I explained to one student who found us peering into the muck our paths have become this week. Sometimes I felt the beginnings of fear that I really won't find the earring, that its small matter may have vanished forever. Master, disaster, master, disaster, master, disaster, master, disaster. An oscillation just like the poem's.

Mostly I wasn't lying when I told people that I feel remarkably calm about what I may have lost for good.

Ring around the moon.

I'm still feeling a little rocked by having read all of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1674) between 10 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. yesterday. It's an extraordinary experience, making it possible to sense patterns and movements in a way that shorter sittings simply don't allow. But it makes a day go by, to be sure, to hear angels fall, demons revolt, the world get created, Adam and Eve get tempted, the future of the world get presented to them before they're expelled from Eden. I'll pipe up with more things to say tomorrow, I suspect. For now:

I think that this poem is gorgeous and somehow so, so sad.

After a lovely dinner with a student tonight, I walked outside and saw a half-sky-wide ring around the waxing moon. Oh, moon, I said to the moon as I crossed the street and picked my way through the thick mud, back to the officehouse. Oh, moon. We go way back, the moon and I. Some things, in their constant changing, never change at all. And some of us are tidal creatures to the core.

Goodnight noises everywhere.