Feverish Woolf

The Waves perplexes me. I've put it down more than once, thinking to myself how odd it reads, how I can't make head or tails of it. I pull the book into bed with me in the early morning as my husband sleeps. I read the first lines, I read them again. I make it four pages in and I have a headache. I fall asleep to my love's breathing. The day is set off in rhythms, like the sound of the tide. I feel it all as a rhythm, even my thinking ebbs in and out. This is what Woolf has done to me: gotten into my head. I try to read something else, to put some distance between myself and her words. Nothing seems to work and I feel I must go back. I must finish and whatever that makes me: I will be better for it.

Birthday Letters

I find I'm more apt lately to read books of exquisite beauty and meaning than the light fluffy stuff that leaves you half empty always hungry. Oh but if I had the time on my hands to really and truly read! This is my wish for today: a more literary life. I already have all that I want and I count my blessings every day. Today though, I checked out Eavan Boland's new book "A Journey with Two Maps" and came home with a sack of birthday treat that I bought for myself at the store. I don't do this often but sometimes I binge on sweets until i feel slightly sick. I stop and swear them off for a time. Today I am belly-ached-full and contemplating cracking open the book. In the early morning I sit hunched over a book of poetry while I sip on my breakfast. I only have time to read a little before heading out the door but the world seems so full of possibility. I'm so full of possibility.

"I like to feel that I've transcended my destiny" - Anais Nin

Sunny Friday and my mood is lifted although the heat beats on the earth like a hot oven opened. Oh summer...please go on vacation! Everything droops in this heat including my basil plants and my husband. He comes home peevish, more than heat-brained. I long for Autumn. I love the month of October. There is nothing finer than the deep orange of October, the cold nights, the sense of harvesting your work. Will I have something by then to harvest? I feel a change sweeping over me..a deep sullenness has been lifted from my spirit, a threshold passed. The weekend is here and I'm planning all sorts of fun things including some reading. I have the desire to go through Anais Nin's diaries while I wait for something else to arrive. I have a need to clean and organize and to sleep. My desire to write is always present. The need to fill that void has lessened.

Does Anyone Have a Net for Poetry?

The day starts out like this: grey, overcast sky piled on top of a city skyline that I can see in the distance. Concrete matches the sky. I sit in my car on my commute listening to a book on cd trying to resist the urge to veer off onto an exit and keep driving to the nearest coffee shop and re-group over a mocha hold the whipped cream. But it starts off really like this: big fat splashes on my umbrella rolling down and dripping onto my arms. I'm juggling my bag, my coffee cup, my umbrella and walking the block and a half to my work. Someone calls out good morning as they pass. I return the greeting but they are already on the crosswalk. Missed connections, slight natural disasters, the inescapable sense of lethargy creeping over me. A poem wells up inside of me while I'm at my desk and this time I sit quietly...I catch it and put it down on paper. I've learned that poems come to me now like butterflies or fish and its my job to wait quietly and patiently until my time comes. I'm a poem catcher.

Stuck in My Creative Life

Why do I have such a hard time writing? Why? Why? Why? When I go to write I'm suddenly too tired to take on such a task and yet I crave it deeply. All day I have thoughts that cross through my narrow-stream of a mind and before I can catch them, the current sweeps them away. You see..I was a writer once and someone told me I'd always be one whether I liked it or not. It left though, and now I'm stuck (stuck being the very best word in my vocabulary to use) with the desire but not power to move. Even writing this is so hard for me that I get up often to look out the window to check my phone or pop chicken in the oven. What happened? I wish there was some clear explanation - a literary trauma that has created a deep mire for my creativity but as I search my mind I can't find it. One day the words just stopped and the words I had produced I hated with a passion so deep that I burned them in my father's wood stove. I want to be unstuck. The more I try though it seems the more stuck I become.