Deafening.

I require a constant interior dialogue in order to keep myself patient, to keep from becoming self-censorious, to keep my flagrant wishing in check. Even talking to myself all the time doesn't stop it. I think of compulsive friends I've known--generally men--the ones who can't keep from straightening a thing put awry in their vicinity. I am not compulsive that way; for the most part I could care less where the things around me are. But my mind does get hold of ideas and hold them tight, keep them obsessively, turn them over and over and around, trying to keep them valid even when they're clearly not, and it's this tendency that my interior dialogues have been trying to override of late. Only: to work so hard at stopping them means that I still have those wrong ideas in play, and it's incredibly, incredibly difficult just to set them aside.

I walked around town today in a fog of my own creation, hearing only the low wrong note that had sounded in me during a conversation I'd just had, hearing it over and over and over, parsing every word of that quiet missing of beats that's happening where harmony should be. I realize now that I carried on this way for a good hour, maybe more--all the time it took me to make my way through back lanes to the big and shiny new John Lewis, all the time it took me to find their gloves and pick a pair to replace the ones I absently left in the cab home from the train station Friday night, all the time I fingered the purple silk dress from the Hobbs window, there for sale on the department store floor, all the time I chose a pillow and pillow cover for my reading chair.

It quieted a little by the time I reached the music store, picked out a book of scales and a book of manuscript paper, made my way out into the darkening side road, tried to figure out from the falling light just what time it was.

But it didn't stop altogether until I heard the man on Clare Bridge, the ripple of bass notes running up from his silhouette. It was dark enough by then--though it was only, I could see by the Clare clock, 4:40--that at first all I knew was sourceless sound. I had heard the notes while I was still in the college's court; I slowed down as I emerged between the court and the bridge, pausing in hopes that they'd sound again. And they did, and I followed them and found him. From where I was, he was ageless, maybe an undergraduate, maybe not, and rather than walk further and risk his stopping, I stayed in shadow where I was, took pictures of the tree, another tree I've come to love, pretended to be looking out toward the river

when actually I was rapt and reaching for a wordless note to leave with him, one I didn't find, didn't need because someone he knew walked up, stopped his evening song by greeting him, brought him back to the speech of familiars. And so it was that as I passed I didn't even smile.

Today was like that. When I finally had the chance to practice my own music, it was all I could do to quiet my head enough to be with what I was playing. There's so much I continue not to understand, so much that seems likely to remain utterly beyond comprehensibility, that sometimes I can't stand it.

Just when you least expect it...

Just what you least expect.

C'est vrai, non?

Horoscopical.

Yes, this one is pretty good:

You're going throughd an emotional slowdown at the moment, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy life. It's just one of those days that calls attention to your deeper needs, so pay attention and play along.

And really: this never gets old. Not for me, anyway.

Tonight, I've discovered an unexpected (and dubious) benefit of living under the worst dollar-to-pound exchange rate in history: when I click over to J.Crew to gaze at their lovely party dresses and imagine what it would be like to get danced off my feet in one of them, I don't think, "Sheesh, that's expensive." Instead, I see a dress that costs $180 and think, "Hunh! Only £90? What a steal!" Which is not to say, by any means, that I've been over here buying £90 party dresses. Though I've found an excellent one, in red, that I would own in a second if I had a place to go fancying about in it.

Oh. Hell. Yes. The Atari 2600, staple of my young life (how many evenings did I sit on my father's lap while we played Space Invaders? I can't count them), just made the Toy Hall of Fame. If I had a 2600 here, I would play many celebratory games of Pong, or maybe Bowling. Also, I suspect that if I had known about the Strong Museum of Play, my life in Rochester might have been a lot more fun. I always did sense that it would be a much more fun city if one had a partner and children with whom to cavort.

That's what I want: a fellow cavorter.

You see how my head is today.

Repositorial.

I tell you: you have to read your tickets and read them carefully.

Otherwise, you may find yourself, at 19:25, staring at a departures monitor that shows no 20:01 to London--only a late 19:30. And when you ask a First Great Western representative whether there is a 20:01 that just hasn't come on the monitor yet, he will at first say, "Yes," and then correct himself--by telling you that the 20:01 leaves from the city's other train station. When you ask whether you can just board the train that will arrive on your platform in five minutes, his partner will tell you that you'll likely be penalized if you do so, since you have a specific kind of ticket. But fortunately the first representative will realize that if you hurry back underground and hop on the currently overdue train headed toward Preston, you'll be able to get to the other train station in time to catch your London train.

Momentarily, train travel will not seem very romantic, especially when (on board the Preston-bound train) you have a seven-minute breathing space to devote to two lines of thought: whether you'll be asked for a ticket you didn't have time to buy before boarding this train, and why on earth a return journey clearly headed BRISTOL TEMPLE MEADS to CAMBRIDGE (the route you believed you were purchasing) actually departs from Bristol Parkway--which, of course, you now see that you should have seen all along.

Fortunately, all will be well, leaving you to wonder whether people ride the Virgin Trains between Temple Meads and Parkway for free all the time. And by the time you've caught the next train, then caught one Underground, then caught another, then made your way right onto the train waiting at King's Cross's platform 8 to take you back to Cambridge, you'll start to wonder whether your own ticket will ever get checked. Which it won't. Which will make you wonder whether you could just have boarded the wrong train in Bristol after all.

All told, though, the return journey will be surprisingly quick. You will only know your own exhaustion when you manage to lose your briefcase in your flat within a minute of arriving home.

But: remember the moral: to minimize the chances of absurdity, read all travel documents with care. Put another way: know better. Take nothing for granted.

Pictorial.

The archive innocent was back today. Just before he left with a digital camera full of images for his project, he exclaimed, "This is brilliant! I think I'm going crazy!" I know how he feels. Archives will do that to a person.

I'm not getting enough exercise here, so I took a walk this morning to find the childhood home of the person I'm researching. It was a bit arduous, but I found it. And then it was a bit arduous to figure out how to get onto its grounds, but I found that too and then did my very best "if you look like you know where you're going, no one will stop you" confident walk about the property.

In the afternoon, one of the special collections librarians stopped to talk to me (after several days of barely registering my presence--which brings up a story that I don't have sufficient battery life to tell but will, if someone reminds me, offer another time). When I mentioned I'd ventured out to the house this morning, he asked whether I'd looked around inside it. Within a few minutes, he had decided to call the warden of the house to ask her whether she'd show me around tomorrow. It now looks as though I have a plan for the afternoon.

On my way back to the hotel, I stumbled upon a terrific example of one of my favorite kinds of English domestic architecture: the crescent. Royal York Crescent, to be exact.

I found my way to its pedestrian terrace and was able to catch excellent vistas of Bristol--at long last. (We don't really have vistas in Cambridge, because we don't really have hills.) As I walked along the terrace, I also found the plaque that offered me some explanation of where I was. In the window beside the plaque stood a stuffed dog.

Only a good 30 seconds after I'd taken this picture did the dog shake himself and turn to look at me. I didn't fully understand why the dog was acting as he was until I realized that a white-haired, white-bearded man approaching me on the terrace (you can see him in the picture below--I passed him both coming and going on the Crescent) was the dog's owner. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind that I'd just taken a picture of his home.

Just before I reached my hotel, I passed another white-bearded man; he was talking to a younger man. The younger man said, "What's your name again?"

"Santa," said the white-bearded man.

All three of us laughed.

Trivial.

One of my favorite things about working in an archive is watching other people using the archive. It's been especially good in this one for the past couple of days because some professor at Bristol has obviously given his or her students a rare books room reading assignment: a small parade of undergraduates has filtered through, one by one, to consult the same two sets of books. Today, two of them coincided beside me for a few minutes and decided to take a few minutes to discuss an essay that they have to write about psychoanalysis and art. I did my best to shoot them a glance that would at least make them whisper instead of talking in low voice. Then again, I was banging away on my laptop, so it's not as though I was being so very quiet.

Later, a young man came in to work on a project about someone who once painted the Avon Gorge. When he came through the door, he said something akin to, "Whoa! Cool!" He had obviously never been in a rare books room before: when he passed through to the office where he needed to sign in, he said, "You have some really old books here!" He sat down beside me at the table, and the librarian handed him a form for ordering books and asked him if he knew the title of the work he needed. Terrifically, he proclaimed, "I don't know anything! I don't even know today's date, to be honest!"

Today the table was full of readers: a man reading huge ledgers, women researching garden architecture, students reading about good women. For the most part, we sat in silence. Every once in awhile, someone would laugh out loud at something only he or she could see. A woman stood on a kick-stool under the fluorescent photo lights with her Pentax, photographing folio volumes full of engraved gardens. Her shutter made an impossibly slow sound.

The things I have come here seeking seem not to exist, something that makes more sense to me as I read more and more letters that talk about how many letters and papers were burned after this particular subject's death. But I've found all manner of other things, and as usual the archive has given me its own kind of direction. Tonight, as I walked home with my box of butter cookies and my tiny wedge of French sheep's milk cheese, I wondered at what point I would know myself to have wandered too far from the track of what is important, what matters: archives have a strange, narrowing, focusing power about them: they make it possible, sometimes all too possible, for me to forget bigger contexts as I go in pursuit of the next piece of whatever puzzle presents itself. But I have a new story to tell, and that, as you know I am fond of saying, is no small thing.

I'm not seeing much of Bristol, though; by the time I leave work, the sun is well down. Today, because the rare books reading room was so crowded, I was forced to sit where I could see a window and watch the light go and go and go.

Here, I have heard three wolf whistles, after years of not hearing any. At least one was for me. It's strange in the West.

Archival.

Four more eight-hour days buried in a basement seem likely to yield me knowledge that no one else has. My first day saw me finding my feet, remembering how not to be overwhelmed by masses of raw data--by the catalog that tells me what raw data might even be available, even before I encounter the data itself. My brain re-learns handwritings I have known well. There's an art to being in the archive.

By the end of the afternoon, I have slips and order forms in spades, ready to be dealt out to the archivists who have a surprisingly chaotic pair of rooms, a reading space more crowded and less rulebound than any I've ever used. "If you have a digital camera and want to use it," the woman who helps me says, "go ahead. And feel free to use our lights!" I come away from my first day with images of letters that have been crucial to arguments I have already made, and with hopes of even finer things as the week goes on.

Arrival.

The sun in Bristol.

Also, I find myself wanting to say: I realize that it's a big deal that Guy Fawkes was not able to blow up the Houses of Parliament back in the seventeenth century. But so many days of fireworks in a row, they start to seem excessive.

Up, up, and away!

Or, as the case may be, over, down, down some more, over, and over. Yes!

On the eve of leaving.

I have never had to leave the Cabinet behind for more than a day, but it's possible that I will not be able to write for you from Monday through Thursday, when I will be happily ensconced in an archive in what is referred to (on motorway signs here) as The West. It's not slightly clear to me whether my hotel has any sort of internet access, nor whether I'll be able to cadge a corner of bandwith from the library at the university where I'll work. But we'll all know soon enough.

Tonight was one of those nights when I gleefully jettisoned my vague plans to work as soon as one of my friends here said, "Do you want to get a beer after dinner?" When we finally decided on which pub to visit, it turned out that neither of us had actually had dinner, and so we stayed there for a good two hours of eating and drinking and telling stories. I gave her a copy of Middlemarch this afternoon. She's a scientist. It will do her good to read it, though she professes to be daunted by its length.

"Is Middlemarch really worth it?" someone asked at dinner the other night.

You can imagine where we went from there. I believe that almost no matter what you imagine as the antecedent of "it" in that question, its correct answer is yes.

Ooo! My Chicagoan friend (whom you all know as Poking-Stick Man, a joke I could explain but won't) will be happy to know that today he became the Cabinet's 20,000th visitor. He has been wanting to be one of the importantly numbered visitors for a long time, and we've hit no more important number than 20,000 yet. Congratulations, my friend.

A workout of some kind.

I sat at the college's electric piano (which feels remarkably like a "real" piano, with dynamics and everything--who knew?) and warmed up with scales. C major, G major. Go, go, keep trying until you do it right several times in a row. Don't forget where to cross over; don't forget when the thumb crosses under. What comes after G? Think about sharps. If F is the first sharp and G is the second scale, and C is the second sharp, then D will be the next scale. Indeed. C major, G major, D major. Do them all. Run three octaves. Run two octaves and then split apart for two octaves and then come back together and run back down. Run three octaves on each. Run two, faster. Two sharps are harder than one. Keep going until it's in there. Tomorrow, it will be in there all the more.

After twenty minutes of scales, I cracked open the Beethoven, worked hard on the first page, then went ahead and played the whole thing, just to see how it sounded, just to see how it was. Played it again. Played it again. Oh, that run of notes there? It's just a D major scale. Use that moment to look ahead to the next thing coming; your fingers know what to do already, and you don't need to pay attention to them. Feel how good it feels? Feel that?

Near the end of the piece comes a point where my nails revealed themselves to be too long--so long that they clicked on the keys--and I remembered another thing I've forgotten: I always had close-cropped nails not just because I picked at them but also, and more, because when you play you don't have anything extra on your hands: no jewelry, no long nails, no polish, no bracelets, no watch. Nothing that gets in the way.

When I'd been there for an hour, I realized that I only had a half-hour left before dinner, and so I stayed, stayed until my fingers were a little sore, stayed until I could feel how much more familiar everything felt. Now I know how to practice; now I know how to hold myself to what I'm doing, why not to mess up the fingerings, how to set up good muscle memory. I may well make 5:30-6:30 my practice time--so that I'll go to dinner feeling high every night.

Now that I'm back from dinner, my horoscope has arrived:

Your body is yearning for a workout of some kind and now is a great time to run, swim, or otherwise burn off a few calories. You'll feel great and it should certainly pay dividends in days to come.

For real. I don't mess around.

Everyone here is asking when I'm going to play a concert. It's a little early for that, I think. But I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to: getting back enough skills to feel excellent about playing on one of the college's grand pianos.

The teacher retaught.

At 2:23 p.m., I was standing outside her house, uncertain of what to do. "The street is shaped like an L," she'd written, "and my house is the white one in the corner, with the hedge." I had imagined it would be in the opposite part of the corner; I had forgotten that houses here are almost never detached and that I thus would not be looking for a single white building. There was only one white building with a hedge. I walked up the block, trying to kill another few minutes and my nervousness.

It was low-level nervousness, I'm glad to say. I kept reminding myself: you are a student. You are not here to perform. You are here to learn. And if you don't like her, you don't have to come back. As I turned around and began walking toward her house again, I realized that finding a piano teacher might be like finding a therapist: I might not match up with the first person I tried. I might have to gather more recommendations, try more people.

As I stepped into the hedge, I could hear the sound of a piano. I was in the right place after all. I stepped to the door and stood for another couple of minutes. At 2:29, I rang.

The woman who will be teaching me piano until August came to the door, showed me into her living room, invited me to sit at her beautiful grand, fetched out the two pieces of music I'd told her I could probably still play, even after eighteen years. But before we began, she asked about my history with the instrument, about my motives for coming back to it. She wondered aloud whether guilt at having quit was part of my return. I told her no, filled her in on the things I've already told you. We talked about sight-reading, particularly, and I realized all the more forcefully how much different it is to learn when you know how to ask the right questions. I will think about this issue more before I return to Gambier: how do we help students learn to ask the right questions about what they do not know? How do we teach them to ask for a piece of knowledge or a skill that will fill in a gap? First one has to be able to see the gap. I was able to explain how frustrating it is not to know how to make my way through an unfamiliar piece of music.

She had me play a scale. I played with both hands, my fingers falling right back to the correct fingerings, the ways to add a second octave, where the beat falls, how the fingers curl and push and rest. As soon as I was finished, I knew I was with a teacher. "I can see so much about your history just in that scale," she said, just the way I might read and respond to a student's diagnostic writing. "You have strong fingers, and none of them is particularly longer than the others: these are good fingers for the piano. Your form is excellent. You're putting the beat at exactly the right place. You obviously remember your fingering. I can tell that you must have been quite accomplished when you were younger." None of this sounded like flattery as she said it aloud. It sounded like frank appraisal, and a statement of confidence that, in fact, I have the potential to learn and to develop again under her tutelage. "Now play it again," she said, "and be more aggressive with the instrument. You're being timid, and I know why. But give it some volume." And I did, and it was wonderful. It was better than returning to something that I used to love. It was being told not to criticize, not to be afraid to trip up.

When she asked me to play a C minor scale, I couldn't do it. Now I look it up; now I see what it should have been. Even on the walk home, I was figuring it out. But this: this is what slipped away in those 18 years.

When she put Beethoven in front of me and asked me to start playing, I was more careful than I've ever been not to let my memory do my work for me. And what I found was that I could pay attention to more than I thought I could: I could watch the fingerings and follow them, rather than just doing what I remembered from long ago. At the first stopping point, she stopped me and began disassembling the piece--not just separating my hands, but peeling back the measures so that I could see the harmonic structures under lines I've known more than half my life. "Play it again," she'd say. We talked about dynamics, emotion, where a crescendo should come, how a decrescendo should start.

Her next pupil rang the doorbell.

We made a plan: regenerate this piece that I used to know and love so well, but regenerate it from the inside out, looking for the structures Beethoven uses. In all my years of lessons, I don't remember ever having close-read my music, ever having learned how to do the equivalent of formal analysis.

And the best of all, better even than being told that the amount I've retained after nearly two decades is impressive, was to be encouraged to think about the pieces I'd love to learn to play. This, too, was never the way when I was young. I played from a set book; we went piece by piece, building up and up and up. When it came time to leave the set book behind, my teacher chose my music; for the last two years before I bailed altogether, none of the things she suggested were suited to my taste or to my pre-teen fingers. But when I told my teacher that I want to learn the Goldberg Variations eventually, she didn't tell me I was crazy. When I told her that I want to work on this Beethoven piece again, she told me which edition of the music to buy: the Urtext. "We don't want editorial interference," she explained. "We want to get as close as possible to the author's intent."

Editorial theory at the piano. My heart sang all over again, sang as it had been singing from the moment I touched the keys, even when I made mistakes and flinched as if I'd been scorched. ("Don't worry," she said. "Don't worry. Play it again.")

When I returned home, having walked, it seems, all over Cambridge today--for my teacher lives nearly three miles away--the Verlag edition of the Urtext of Beethoven's Sonatas (volume 2) was in the crook of my arm, and I was still smiling.

It seemed only fitting that in both my coming and my going, graffitoed figures sang heartsongs, too.

Precedent.

Though it was 27 years ago, I remember some things about my first piano lesson. I was very small, of course, which made the stone building at Daemen College in which my lessons took place seem all the larger. I remember climbing at least one curving flight of stone stairs with my mother. I remember that there was a long, lovely window, possibly even with a windowseat, to the right of the piano as I sat. I remember being asked to play, being told to keep my fingers curled lightly and my wrists suspended above the level of my hands. (Do I really remember having letters written on my fingernails and being told to curl my fingers enough that I could see the letters reflected back to me in the underside of the keyboard's cover? And what were those letters? HAND? STAR?) I remember playing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and then playing it in variations. I remember that "run pony, run pony" was the most difficult variation: it took a familiar song and quadrupled the number of times I had to hit each key. "Bounce, roll, bounce," on the other hand, had a tantalizing pause over its middle note. And only one person I know will remember what the other variation was called. I have forgotten it.

I remember feeling nervous about whether I was doing things correctly.

My fingers remember what nine more years of that gentle curl, that carefully suspended wrist, felt like. There are things I never learned: how to use the pedals appropriately. How to read music fluently (this particular problem is not uncommon among Suzuki-trained children, apparently, which makes sense: I was trained to play by ear first, and I never made the transition). How to improvise anything. There are things I learned all too well: how to mark a recital's or a competition's date on my calendar and watch it coming closer and closer, until the moment when I had no choice but to start practicing regularly if I didn't want to look very silly. I never wanted to look silly.

I remember walking through a parking lot with my parents after a recital. I must have been about five. Each of them held one of my hands. On counts of three, they lofted my little self off the ground. The sky was grey.

I remember those strange, omnipresent sawblade spirograph symbols that were the Suzuki trademark. I remember getting to spend years and years in wonderfully close company with my mother: she drove me to every lesson; she sat with my teacher and me during every lesson for many years; she sat in a chair beside my piano bench while I practiced for many years. Sometimes she sat at her long quilt frame, and we worked together, she at her fabric and I at my fingering.

I know things now--about myself, about how my brain and body work, about the number of disparate pursuits I can keep going at one time, about patience, about motivations that are worthy and motivations that are not, about how to express and clarify desires--that I did not know in those long-ago years. I know about cognition, and I know about choice. I know how to do things for myself, how to want to excel for the sheer joy and gorgeous discipline of the thing, not for a ribbon or a certificate or a medal or a sticker.

I know about apprehension and worry. I also know about hope and eagerness.

How much difference that space of 27 years makes--and yet how little.

Upon further reflection.

You know, it's funny how a list of hopes works. It turns out that you have to look at it and remember what you wrote if you're going to make headway. I had a bolt-from-the-blue realization earlier that was so good that I acted on it without giving myself time to back away from it. That's all I'm saying for now.

Tomorrow, I will practice telling people "no" because I seem to have devised the perfect Thursday evenings for myself, only they're going to conflict with a reading group I thought I'd join. For goodness sake: as if my whole life weren't already a reading group.

Oh, Romola. I have been devoured, head first.

Sing your melody; I'll sing along.

The good things you may have heard about the movie Once? They're all true, and then some. You should see this movie.

My epigrammatic writing will, I hope, expand again soon. For now, my head is full of widowers.

And of my flaming-sworded friend's birthday! She is extraordinary. She blazes brighter than the big tree by Clare Bridge. And does that tree ever blaze. Happy birthday, my friend.

First day in the dark.

I know that we're not actually more in the dark today than we were yesterday, but when the clocks have rolled back an hour and the sun has gone down by 4:36 p.m., it feels as though the day has shortened measurably. (Which, in fact, it has: we lose nearly four minutes of daylight each day here, and our length of visible light is down to just under 11 hours.)

So: thank goodness for George Eliot, whose Romola (1862-3) is blowing my mind. I couldn't have known that I was giving myself a great gift for late October 2007 when I continued not-reading Romola for all those years. But I was. I was just saving my last Eliot novel for exactly the right time--which is now. I don't think it's where I'd tell you to start, if you were to decide you wanted to get to know her work. But it's damned fine.

Before there is a heart.

It's writing #700 here at the Cabinet, and I feel as though I should do something commensurately grand in celebration. But I'm having something of a lonely evening and don't much feel like writing, not least because I just reread the list I made in celebration of writing #300. (That might have been a mistake: I don't seem to have gotten very far with any of those hopes, save #6--though, to be sure, I didn't see Cambridge coming this time last year, either, and so the dreaming will continue!) And so instead we'll take a look back to a poem I discovered almost exactly a year ago and that rings every bit as true tonight as it did then:

First Vertical Poetry No. 27

Where is the heart I am calling?
Heart become eyelid
of an eye on its way to where I am.
The eye is not here yet and already I can see.
Before there is a heart I am made of beating.
I am calling in an open doorway.
I am calling from inside.

-- Roberto Juarroz (trans. W. S. Merwin)

When we did the favorite poem wall in the officehouse for National Poetry Month, this one was one of mine.

Deep calleth to deep.

For the first time in many weeks, it seems, I have spent a day and its evening largely on my own (though with a gorgeous interlude spent with my beloved Lexingtonians). There was no question in my mind that this week I'd give a miss to Friday evening's family supper in hall; I am fond indeed of my community here, but what I wanted at the end of this day were the soar and shadow of evensong at King's, the silence of a solitary walk to the Wine Merchant to choose a gorgeous red to carry home in my purse and have with dinner, the purposefulness of a stop at a bookstore to pick up an order.

Today was a day of boundless feeling and slow, spreading realization. It's possible that I'm now writing in circles within the piece I'm working on; certainly, my forward momentum in terms of word count is starting to get swallowed because I'm converting draft notes rather than crafting entirely new language.

In my reflection in the darkened window, I can see how much more closely my new haircut follows the shape of my skull, the head shape my great-grandmother praised when she first met me, the shape she told my parents to preserve by rotating me in the cradle. This feels right: I too want to follow the shape of my skull more closely. I may be about to start paring away unnecessity, though I'm not quite sure what that would mean. For one thing, I think I may be getting fed up with all this resting. It might be time to be a little more rash, just a little faster. And yes, it does in fact say something about me that when I say a thing like that, I'm thinking of my work--that long love, the one who showed up and claimed me first. I have nothing if not a faithful heart.

And yet: coming home from town, I paused on the bridge to watch the water, sleek in the dark. Upstream, beyond Clare Bridge with its broken sphere (so many stories I haven't yet told you), I could see what looked like a moored punt lit with candles. I wanted so much for it to be so that I didn't even go to see what I had seen. I am crying out with my whole heart--hearts were calling and crying throughout tonight's slow, steady service, its form into which so much feeling can go, and from which so much feeling can spring. I am asking to be open to what is, to what might be coming. I am asking for openness actually to want what I want and to see it when it gets here. I am asking forgiveness for the fact that I want so much for it to involve something like the glossy purple silk evening dress I saw in a shop window on my way home. This is obviously not a paring down. This is a wish for the grandest extravagance, such outlandish happiness it can barely be described, joy so great that my cheeks hurt from grinning, and under all of it the ceaselessness of slow water making the sky over again in its image.

Tonight, three candles: one for those who have gone, one for the ones I love who are elsewhere, one for my own clarity's sake. It's taken me weeks to notice where the candles wait to be lit. Tonight, the unspecified prayer: please, let it. I'm admitting it, really trying to, even though I thought I'd admitted it long ago: I don't know how this works. So: my hands are up. My eyes are open. Please, let me.

And today: 620 words, all the sweeter because I was about to avoid them.

Fragments shored.

Slow fall, then faster: what I may or may not have known when I first saw them is how recently they were whole, how until 1687 the temple stood solid, housed church then mosque then Ottoman gunpowder, took a Venetian cannonball in September that year, fell in, fell to pieces.

Sunday morning, between the queue for tickets and the strange unspoken dance three who know each other only in pieces will make through galleries: a coffee shop, a slice of tart, a fat teacup of filtered coffee. An abstraction: how much of the weekend spent watching, listening, taking in another's ways of talking with those beside whom I am utterly strange, barely known. An abstraction: to fall away from self, from anchor, to plummet through the thought of just how much farther the world stretches than the limits within which I have been living, to find even my familiars passing strange: she asks about sprung rhythm, he talks Hopkins, I grab the words to myself like a greedy thing: Glory be to God for dappled things-- / For skies of couple-color

And I am cowed by this brinded crackling morning, I am stretched thin and taut, I am hoarding: counter, original, spáre, strange, fickle, frecklèd, who knows how. Over my shoulder, out the door, a correlate I can only imagine after its sounds start: full bin of bottles lifted high, then higher, up only to be tipped, to pour out last night's clears and greens, and it keeps up an unthinkably long time: as I watch their mouths move, what I hear is the rolled roundness of glass finding its level anew.

Back in the museum I am on my own ground again, find myself finding faces, finding eyes that are left, that stare emptily to where other faces once were. And I am falling, seeing them again: I fall, gall myself, gash gold-vermilion before them, though no one can see or will know. Still the faces, still so many eyes, still so much silent missing, so much that I wonder how they sounded as they fell, as the ones who are gone sheared away, marble crashing to marble under stars, blown out beyond all recking beneath that impossible sun on that gorgeous unwelcoming hill.

So much is gone that what remains seems to emerge anew from the stone: field of folds yields a hand, smooth blank of skull grows an ear. Beauty is twinned with pain, presences made with absence: my mind is a-race with stopped stone: with swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dim: and yes I am praising though I know so little.

I go a long time without taking pictures before a tiny scene of unseen tending catches at me, makes me want to have it when I go. But once I am shooting, things are easier: all things are easier: I have kept so carefully to myself, careful not to crowd my companions, wanting anything but to say the banal of these half-gone faces. Once I am gathering, glorying, I need be nowhere near.

The piece I cannot return to take is the one that shakes me most: stern Athena quiet and cool in triumph, having won her city with a tree. Wise Athena, headless, limbless, single-breasted. Silent stone rent where a heart would be.

Sick and tired.

Tonight I'm a little of both. It is nothing to worry about, but it is a reason for me to be quieter than usual here, while this cold/flu/whatever lurks and tries to linger and (d.v.) gets vanquished.

Paul Guest has great news, courtesy of the same grand foundation that's bankrolling my year here (though I think his doesn't become official-official until a press release appears in a couple of days) (oh--there it is!). If you're not reading his poetry yet, you should change your ways.

Today: 1014 words, before I really started feeling like crap.