Transformative labors.


By afternoon the morning's rain and power outage are a poem, furled and furling on the table's corner while the article's sentences become paragraphs become arguments fleshing out and finishing. The endings--of each, of all--are always what's most difficult: a clean break is too simple, too done, doesn't follow through on the promise that seemed to be there, or is there, or was. In the end, we are at our beginnings again, feeling for the match, deciding whether growth has happened in the right direction, whether we can keep what came next. In the foggy night a detail--in this case, a refrigerator--wants to stay where it started, bloom where it was planted, and yet the place where it would hold no longer seems to want it. And who wants a blooming refrigerator? Or does it evoke its keep after all? The drafts pile up and up and up in a file; I am abandoning them for my bed.

Slipping under.


In this dream, a space like a residency, a photographers' workshop. A room full of project tables, full of projects. I befriend others easily, concealing my sense that I am the youngest, that I have less fully formed ideas for why I'm there at all.

At night, we screen parts of a film. Somehow, there are Obligations attached to screening this film: perhaps we make presentations or explicate clips.

My family seems to be in attendance, and a new beloved who may be an old beloved, and suddenly at crucial moments, I am disappearing from view altogether. That is to say: I am still present, but I am not visible. Nor am I audible. When I begin to rematerialize, my sound comes first, and my brother is the first one to start hearing me again. The beloved is the last to hear or see me, which seems disastrous because he is crucial to something that must happen when it is my turn to perform my Obligations related to the film's screening. And so I spend no small amount of time at his heels, but invisible, inaudible, quietly, self-possessedly inconsolable. My time in that place seems to be passing so swiftly.

And then we are on the water, my father and a young couple and their small child, and we are in a pair of boats, and it would seem that we are on a lake that is still the water for which I long. And then the child and I are in the water together, beside one of the boats, swimming along. When she slips my hold, I discover that whatever inflatable thing she has worn is not a life preserver at all: she does not float. I see her getting smaller and smaller; someone swears in the background. And so I do what must be done, take an immense breath, do what I was trained to do, kick and pull myself downward toward the tiny falling body.

And I return to the surface with her, but she is not breathing, and then I am treading water, grateful to be so strong--mercifully, never wondering how it is that I have become so strong--and I am having no trouble holding my chest and shoulders out of the water so that I can breathe life back into this motionless child. And I am administering mouth-to-mouth again, and again, and then doing chest compressions, one after another after another, and the whole time I'm trying to remember: which is it that we're meant not to do now--breaths, or compressions? [It turns out that we still do both, but now the ratio is 30 chest compressions for every 2 rescue breaths, instead of 15:2 as it was back in the day.]

I pause to check her pulse, and somehow she has become smaller and smaller while I have tried to revive her, so that now she is bird-sized, she has perhaps become a bird, she is like a small figurine of a bird: hollow like that, and motionless. For a moment, I think she has a pulse. Then I realize that the beat I feel comes from my own breaking heart.

(Bless you, Maxine Kumin: what serendipity.)

Dog, dog, my pedagogue.

From the dog she learns what it is to be away too long. He measures time in the pages left to eat. For him, the hardback on the mantle ticks. It hums and calls. The proteins in his muscles rise and dance, reach and chain. He is up before he knows it, tonguing the spine, nosing the thing floorward. And before he knows it there is paper flying: if he whips his head from side to side he can create a blizzard from her absence, can cry his parents' departure and his far-lost youth. One cover goes, and then another, and then he can taste the glue, and the acidic pages are like manna from the ceiling, and there are still more to rend, to perforate, to tug from their binding. By now he wants it loose: he is eating this book alive, he is running it around, he is chasing his mistake, he is fueled, fueled. He eats The Teacher, The Teacher's Methods, Great Teacher and His Pupils. By the time she returns--and she has been gone less than an hour--what is left of The Art of Teaching is strewn, leafing the floor, so that at first glance her stomach sours: her research notes, what's left to write of the article, her new volume of Christopher Smart. But it is only a book she has always been meaning to read, nothing important yet. Still wild in the eye's corner, the dog does not regret; he does not say a word while she fetches paper shards up from the floor. He will not tell her what he has learned in that morning's sun.

We went out seeking eagles.


Instead, we found deer.

One of my Clevelander students has wanted for I don't even know how long to see a bald eagle. And it turns out that there are bald eagles living near Gambier, on a road called Kilduff. And it turns out that I saw one of them at a nearby quarry last night:


(I needed a stronger telephoto lens than I have.)

Tonight, we climbed into my car with another Clevelander (former) student just after 8 and went searching for the eagle who perches at the quarry every night. He was not there, and I felt worse about it than I'd suspected I would. I know that he will be back; we may just have to try a few times before we espy him together. But I wanted her to see him as soon as possible.

It's no small thing to see a family of deer, though. We rolled the windows down all the way, and while I took pictures, my students called to the deer until they high-tailed it out of the field. Deer-jeering: our own fun. When we found the bucks all gathered in a nearby field, we whistled until they saw us. And then I waved. And then we drove on down the road and made another pass at the eagle's perching place, where he was not. Another night, I'm hoping.

Onward, onward.


Now the dog and I hunker down to survive the heat: thank goodness for air conditioning, which makes all the difference between sweating through the hours (while wearing next to nothing and cursing myself for not having used our cooler days more productively) and cruising through my writing quota for yet another day. It's not big or obsessive. It's not dramatic. But it brings me a few pages closer to a completion, and that is no small thing.

I forgot to tell you, the other day, about what might be my favorite bookstore moment ever. While I ate a bagel for lunch on Monday, two high school girls sat at my table, paging through magazines. "Ugh," one of them said, "this magazine is too long." I looked her way, from under my eyelids, trying to be subtle. She was reading InStyle--and a short issue of it, at that.

We all have our burdens.

Overhaul.


I believe that it was yesterday's arrival of the autumn Boden catalog that finally brought it home to me: I'm going Somewhere Else for the year. There, no one knows me. And I won't be flitting in and then flitting away again: I'll actually be living there. I'll actually have a chance to become a real person for the people I meet, and they'll have a chance to become real people for me. Not transient cartoons. Not strange ideals. Not caricatures of ourselves. Every move opens more new vistas than we anticipate, for good and ill. The closer my next one comes, the more my interest is getting piqued.

So part of what I've been thinking about today is, shall we say, self-presentation. I wouldn't put it at the top of the list of things I've been thinking about. But because today was one of those inevitable slightly-lower-down days, turning sartorial possibilities over and over in my mind wasn't such a bad way to fill some gaps and ward off some doldrums. And since I won't be dressing for the classroom or for gravel paths as primary means of transport, a whole world of sartorial possibilities is opening up.

I think it's time to take my winter coat to the dry cleaners. There's more than one way to redefine archival scholarship.

'Swonderful.

I was half-fearful that it would be no good at all, but I'm pleased to report that No Reservations is a movie eminently worth your moviegoing time, especially since it's summer, and especially if you like looking at food and/or Aaron Eckhart. If you can get ice cream with someone you like beforehand and then root for the heroine with her through the whole film, you'll like it even more. At least, you will if you're like me.

The History of Ever.


Earlier this week, a good friend referred to me as The Best Girl Ever in the History of Ever. When was the last time someone spontaneously called you something like that? Did you stop and recognize how fantastic that kind of remark is? I grinned and am still grinning just to think of it.

This time last weekend, I was crouched on a sandy shore, playing with a river lake. This time two weeks ago, I was prowling the edge of a cornfield. I'd say it looks as though I'm scouting edges these days.


As of course I am, given that nearly every week this summer has brought another departure, another arrival, another trade-in, another trade-up. In just over a month (deo volante), I'll have packed my bags, schlepped them through the bomb-checking machines, and made my way over an ocean in the dark. Between now and then, I'm gathering steam for the change.

Tonight that has meant moving large files from one external hard drive to another (and finally figuring out how to make my power-sharing cable do its job with one of my drives), a process of gathering like things together, setting them to copy, and then puttering around with some other task that has long been languishing--like corresponding with people who have sent me e-mails this summer, and returning overdue library books.

The officehouse is quiet and changeful these days; my poet colleagues have moved out of their spaces, and their nameplates came down this week. Soon my nameplate will come down and be replaced by that of the colleague who will occupy this space within weeks. Everything is teetering on the edge of last departures and first arrivals: with special dispensation, students can begin moving into their dorm rooms on Wednesday, and first requests for coffee dates have started to appear in my e-mail. Colleagues who have been away for the summer, or for longer, are (I'm guessing) beginning their treks homeward, or have returned but not yet reappeared here.

My shorts and trousers begin to ride lower, loosen out; it would seem that last weekend's canoeing and cycling (on miniature, folding bicycles, up and around the campground, mostly to the bathrooms but also to the lake's shore for photographs, for skipping stones, for wishing that lake were my own, sorely missed one) have jumpstarted my interest in actually using my body for something. This week found me careening all over Gambier on the bicycle I, for no apparent reason, neglected to the point of rustiness while I lived in the old house. Now it is my best way of getting from the dog's house to my apartment to the post office to the officehouse. My helmet is so old that the pads are disintegrating, sometimes right into my hair. I want so badly to go without it, and yet I remember the feeling of my headlong flight over a pair of curved handlebars almost twenty years ago, and I know how damned lucky I am to have come back up off the gravel where I'd fallen and to have sustained only tiny, scraping injuries. And so I strap on my old helmet before I head off over the lawn and down the street. Tomorrow, perhaps I will visit the prairie, or search for barns I have not yet seen, on the bicycle.


At this very moment, a languorous dog is lying somewhere in his living room, wondering whether I'm ever going to come home. He is, perhaps, hoping that we will take a walk as long as last night's, when neither of us seemed ready to turn back for home and thus ended up all the way down at the officehouse. It's easier to go for miles when the sun has slipped beyond the trees.

Tonight, my tiny fantasy is about markers. I ran out of cash for the coffee- and olive-colored ones at the bookstore tonight, what with buying the Sunday Times. But now it turns out that I can get twenty, and all in their handy case. (Handy cases, of all kinds, form my other tiny fantasy this weekend, as I start planning my return to the Container Store.) I already have the ten-pack; finding out that there's a twenty-pack made me coo aloud at the computer. It is a tiny fantasy; it's not the one around which I've built my day. But that doesn't make it nothing, not in the History of Ever.

Espied toads.


First, you have to know that I am (and have pretty much always been) enamored of books about writing and creativity. And so it is that this week, as part of my attempt to re-center and prepare for eleven months of expatriate writing, I've been reading a couple of writing guides: Ted Kooser's and Steve Cox's Writing Brave and Free and Victoria Nelson's On Writer's Block. Today, in large part because of a recommendation somewhere on Andrea Scher's Superhero site, I'm also reading some of Danny Gregory's work--Everyday Matters and The Creative License (which latter makes me nervous because it makes drawing sound so doable, and so appealing, and yet I am so not excited to try drawing freehand, and I am so pleased with taking photographs, and so I have to remind myself that my way of being creative is acceptable even though it's not his way).

By the time I went to bed Thursday night, after having read large sections of the Kooser/Cox and Nelson books, I was feeling as though yesterday could be a good, solid day of writing. I sketched a schedule, based around the patterns I'm falling into with the dog, and climbed into bed.

Two hours later, a massive stormfront rolled into Knox County. Those of you keeping score at home may recall that I am virtually unshakeable in my sleep; we had rough storms two weeks ago that utterly failed to move me, much less wake me up. And so when this one whipcracked me awake at 2:45 a.m., I knew it was a big deal. Indeed, the power was out within a few minutes, though it came back on soon enough. The dog and I stumbled up and out of the bedroom, not sure of what we should do. He ambled into the other bedroom and lay back down on the floor; I turned on the television to see how worried I should really be. Since there were no tornado warnings or even watches afoot, I idly flipped channels for nearly an hour, ending up on mid-night reruns of Top Chef, while the storm pushed through my county.

And then I slept until 11:30, so that my day began four hours later than I'd planned.

It was only about an hour later that the dog and I encountered the hidden toad in the yard, though--again, fortunately--only two of the three of us realized that the encounter was happening. Where the dog and I had thought there were only weeds, I suddenly saw a living creature, and that living creature suddenly saw a huge dog snout coming his way.


Our mutual startle left me thinking about the manifold and divergent ways one might read a surprise appearance like this one. Victoria Nelson, in particular, warns would-be writers about their unsuspected negative influences, the internalized voices and selves that cause writers to shut themselves down peremptorily. In a way, I thought, the toad's sudden materialization corresponds to one of those agonizing moments when--sometimes without our knowing it--we find ourselves blocked and beaten by an antagonistic force we may have forgotten, or one that we may not even have recognized and grappled with yet. I've been thinking a great deal about forces like these, given that I've been dragging my heels like a spoiled child every time I get anywhere near the article I'm writing right now--even though it's about a unit that I loved teaching within a course that made my whole academic year, and even though I actually like it once I get started. I've even found myself relapsing into my old "I don't even like writing all that much..." whinging, in the past few weeks, and such halfhearted claims tend to signal that something is happening that requires my notice and my care.

In another sense, though, the toad represents those insights (some of them well-nigh miraculous) that sometimes seem to appear out of nowhere--but actually appear because we're finally paying the right kind of attention, in part because we've finally been able to shut off those antagonistic forces, those self-defeating voices, or personae, or whatever, that threaten to obstruct us. (In this scenario, the dog figures forth those amassed and avoided forces, under whose nose the idea-toad stays quiet lest he should attract disastrous attention.) That is to say, the toad is precisely that thing that I can't see unless I'm fully and creatively engaged.

And in some third, somewhat more literal sense, the toad stands as a reminder of those actual toads in our midst--the idiots and naysayers who lie in wait for us in ways that have not a single thing to do with our artistic capabilities or aspirations but that still threaten to disrupt those capabilities and aspirations. (I've got one of these in my life right now, a pure shot of poison that, all on its own, makes me glad to be getting away from the village for the year.)

It's not a fable, in the end, though I still half-want it to be, not least because (in conjunction with the bookstore's Employee Appreciation Day) I picked up a discounted copy of W.S. Merwin's The Book of Fables yesterday. It seems entirely likely to me that this one will join my list of Things to Be Expanded Upon--a list that has grown and grown with the week's progress. There are so very many things to be Written and Expanded. It's just a matter of making sure that the ones that need to get finished for work actually do.

Today, Danny Gregory's books inspired me to buy the latest in my long line of blank books, but this one is different: it's a full-on 11x14 sketchbook that has already started functioning like an off-line version of the Cabinet. Now, you see, I'm dreaming bigger.

Unexpected toads.

As I brought the dog home from his morning walk today, he nosed around a little bit in front of his house. Somehow, he nosed right over this creature without seeing it, and thank goodness: the last thing I needed this morning was to have my dog gleefully wrangle a toad:


Instead, I quietly took him into the house and crept back out with my camera. Tomorrow--unless something even more exciting develops--I may well give you a fable to go with these images.

Extra distractions.


It's true. Not even 24 hours after finishing Harry Potter, this afternoon found me sucked into another distraction: the third season of Bravo's Top Chef, a show I'd never seen before I watched it with my excellent friend last week. There's been a lot of coming and going in the past week. I think I'm in need of some hard-core settling down, the kind that television shows and pop fiction phenoms don't really provide. And so tonight is one of those nights when you just have to listen to me talk to myself, talk at myself, talk myself back down, back into orbit. But by now, I suspect that's why most of you are here.

My father canoes. He bought his current canoe many years ago while on a multiweek trip with my mother. In 2000, they brought the canoe to Ithaca, and we took turns going out into the middle of Cayuga Lake in it. In the mornings, my parents would paddle across the lake and back, even before my then-somebody and I made it out of bed and up to the state park where they were staying.

This year, my father decided that he was tired of his and my mother's having to carry the canoe from campsite to lakeshore, and so he designed and commissioned a two-wheel canoe dolly. It's a small white platform with a space in its middle; the canoe rests on it and can, once properly placed and strapped down, be smoothly steered over level ground by one person using one hand.

On the weekend, I paddled in the canoe's bow twice. The lake where my parents camp (are camping, still) was once a river. Then, it was dammed. Now, it is placid, greeny-blue the way lakes often are not. The canoe cuts through the water quietly; paddlers who know what they are doing (I do not profess to be one of these) can make almost an absence of noise as they propel themselves along. Such maneuvers are important in shallow water where birds might lurk, ready to take wing at any provocation. On Saturday, my brother in the stern, we couldn't do much of anything besides make way. Which is not to complain. Which is to say we did better than I'd have thought we would, entirely because my brother actually knew what he was doing and, watching my back, could tell me what I needed to do differently. On Sunday, my father in the stern, we slipped into a cove, bellied over a sunken tree, spied a heron, traced the rock ledges that bespeak nearby caves.

The severing of water. Its silent resealing behind us. The curls around my paddle when I tried to learn a new stroke, one that does not remove the paddle from the water.

The ripple of each shoulder: you might not believe it: I am only brain here.

The short shock of the tiny dragonfly's body, painted in the blue of my dreams.

Memory is why I don't have cable in my own home. Memory is better than television.

(I can't give you pictures tonight; the picture-maker is at the other house. But tomorrow, an update. A picture postscript.) (And now, the postscript is there!)

Faring well.


In the end, she would know almost instantly how perfect a parting she'd won from that long, strange year: the swift acknowledgment; the silent bearing of her friends past the person who'd hoped not to see any of them; the freighted minutes spent only feet apart, at tables beside one another, her conversation kept as low as her companions' hearing would allow so as not to disturb his reading; the last wave; the exit. The lingering of the paid bill on the other table for the rest of the night.

And then, her voice rising back to normal in the darkening restaurant. The heaping, steaming plates of rice and meats and cheeses and vegetables and breads. The leisurely drive through their shared hills, the proud display of her new home, the earnest bending-together over a computer past its prime. And over and around it all--over and around the red walls, the orange woodwork, the recalcitrant computer, the piles of books, the consulted dictionaries, the praised artworks, the glasses of wine, the talking before fatigue's low summons--the steadfast, lightening joy. Of being with those who were always there. Of resting in the love of those who knew her, and cared, and stayed.

Blame the wizards.


Yes, much of my day has gone over to reading the last Harry Potter book, through which I'm about halfway. Not a single spoiler or detail here, just a reduced ability to write much about the rest of my day: moving back to take care of the dog, eating dinner with my beloved classicist and artist friends, researching and then writing an e-mail message asserting my legal right to money I am owed. And now I'm going back to sitting with the quietly disconsolate dog and reading until I fall asleep. Stories of camping in Kentucky will come, I suspect, just not tonight.

(This picture shows you what is either Webb Mart's chief competition or its cross-road bait annex. I did not find out.)

My rambling days.


The sky was full of painters' clouds as I left town this afternoon and headed south to my beloved Lexingtonians' home. The newest Lexingtonian has gained four pounds in her first eight weeks of life. Tomorrow I may show her a Beck video, because she is starting to work her legs.

At a rest stop north of Cincinnati, a man's shirt said, "Hell yeah it's fast." Then, in northern Kentucky, a BMW 2002 from Ontario and I passed one another again and again and again: I'd zip by and be a half-mile ahead until a patch of road construction, when I'd slow down to the reduced speed limit. Then they'd pass me until we all resumed legal speed. By the third change, I was tempted to wave and smile at the young people in the car, but I didn't.

A soundly sleeping baby is an engrossing sight. And fireworks in the distance are a wonder.

Well, don't you look comfortable?


Less than an hour after I rolled (flipped, really) out of bed this morning (flipped up and out like my old Fortune Fish, which I rediscovered and then reburied during the move), my excellent friend and I were on our second trip to Columbus this week, heading to retrieve my framed Wendell Berry poem (huzzah), to choose some fabric for a project of hers (not so much huzzah), and to get her a haircut and sprucing up (huzzah huzzah).

Because I was in need of no beautifying procedures this morning, I had carried with me Kay Redfield Jamison's Exuberance: The Passion for Life (2004), which I'd picked up as bedtime reading last night. And because my excellent friend's salon is my salon too, and because I've spent a fair amount of time and money there over the past few years, I made myself at home on the purple velvet divan in one corner of the lounge: silver Birks placed neatly on the floor, legs curled up under, pillow on lap, book on pillow, coffee in hand. I read and read, engrossed and even able to block out the background music, most of the time.

An hour into my reading, a woman in a smart black and white checked suit clicked into the waiting area in her high, high heels and said to me, "Well, don't you look comfortable?" Indeed I was comfortable, and I did my best to turn back to my book without offending this talkative stranger, who wanted to discuss our dearth of rain (since it was threatening rain this afternoon, everyone was talking about how much we needed it) and what it's been doing to her flowers and her lawn and her lawn fountain. The book is such a celebratory one, and it was such a lovely luxury to rest there without reason to run off, that I didn't want to have to pretend to participate in a world of which I don't even want a part--the suburbs, the lawns, the lawn decorations, the forced cheer.

Instead: a day of real cheer, from thinking about the neural implications of childhood play, right on through experimenting my way to a new salad dressing (a blueberry vinaigrette) and resuscitating my pesto for a long midsummer dinner with my excellent friend and my poet friend. Right on through cavorting with the excellent dog. Right on through watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tap dance their way through the ship-and-shore comedy Follow the Fleet (1936). Right on through strolling home down the middle of the street, my empty picnic basket over one arm. And now all of my people are, I hope, where they're meant to be, and all is safe, and all is as well as we can hope it to be.

And at midday, a message of real cheer, from my flaming-sworded friend (thoughtful enough to get it on its way before leaving for island climes): a card asserting, "Your life is much more important than you can imagine." There's the comfort, there the grounding for the exuberant life.

Bakery.


You see this peach. Before it can slip into a bowl, it must lose its skin, must come out of its whole. Two minutes in boiling water will do the trick. Balance the hot fruit on the wide wooden spoon. Bear it to the cutting board. Slip the knife's tip under the piping skin and it will exhale. Slide the knife into the fruit, carve it to hemispheres, and the skin will loosen off in your fingers: hollow membrane, empty cup. The skin pile will grow and grow. Your fingers will wet and stick with juice. Will sometimes push into the flesh. Will pull flesh from flesh in chunks, in halves. Will find the reddened center, pluck it out, cast it away. Will stroke sharp steel through what is left, back and back.

Slices will be where spheres were. These cuts will be, will not undo, will startle your own flesh with their cold and silent ease. You will not cry, not while you boil, peel, pit, cut. Only, and only maybe, when you recall the warm, reddened gold of those rounds, there where you first saw them, so many, in rows and rows and piles. Only, and only maybe, when you remember that soft sweet of your fullness, your shy hope there might be something there for you to choose.