November 24

A difficult day of quiet strife, unfolding slow, almost inarticulate. Outside the sky remains inexplicably blue, the clouds few & hanging light & spare. The aureate glow of sundown hums about the farm & lends its odd illumination, the empty boughs of the deciduous trees black skeletons against the brilliant backdrop. & inside, inside the weight of our travels lands hard. In simplest possible terms, we have no jobs, the majority of our time is occupied by searching for work, the relentless cold of the barn has started to affect us & we are wondering how exactly we are going to get by. Every rock we overturn is slate-bare. There are for the time being two jobs that seem remotely possible for me here at present, though every day we extend our search. There is no room for timorous query here—if I meet someone, I have asked them within minutes if they have leads. & so it goes, with each day proving an addition to the last in some now mundane sequence of empty hope. It frays, subtly, insidiously, until we begin to snap at one another when we are neither to blame. There was a part of us, to be sure, that harbored that sweet dream in which everything would fall perfectly into place. The truth is many things have—our luck in meeting kind & generous people with open doors has been inordinate, really, & to have a roof over our heads & food in our stomachs & the like is already a revelation, at least in the way it presents itself to us here. I take to these challenges with perhaps more zeal than Stef, but in the end, they reduce our sense of want to a milder proportion. That line of Shakespeare’s, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang…” comes to mind; those extraordinarily busy & complex lives we led before, carried into this sort of austerity, & in that balance we find what it is we truly need & want, both merely to survive & subsist, & to endure & thrive. We are up against ourselves, & in spite of that difficulty, I hear lessons spoken in foreign tongues all around us. We are slow, sometimes, to the language of change though it is unremitting. I think of the last few lines, too, of one of the best of Oppen’s poems: “The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on. // We want to be here. // The act of being, the act of being / More than oneself.” How strife conjures this pressure moving in, this sense of self-responsibility, of inward dwelling. How maybe it ought to conjure notions of plurality, of opening out, seeking past that which we too quickly call a self. We shift, we tremble, we fall apart & put our selves together again. At no time are we free from flux. Light-shift, crest & trough.