February 26

All day, the rain thick & unrelenting, mixed variably with wet snow falling in streaming clumps, small comets of vapor that no sooner alight upon a blade of grass than being decimated by pursuant drops in quick succession. Put in one hour of pulling scotch brush between the holding pen & the pasture before I was soaked through & through to the legs & to the patched islands of cloth unpursed by my raincoat—cuffs & kidneys, line of the neck, the beard. Inside now, the wood stove put to good work, the pile of cut cedar & old madrona dwindling quick in this unforeseen cold. My gloves, stocking cap, work pants strewn in close to the heat to dry. Opting myself to stay in, reckon with myself without distraction, root out my own tendencies towards frustration of late that render me an early curmudgeon, an impatient wretch. I wonder from time to time if this waiting will only drive us mad, will only illumine our most dire idiosyncrasies & draw from me a child’s passive vitriol, not for self or other, but in general, the way it en-fogs, a fine appertaining mist. Wait long enough & you find your waiting a curio cabinet of your worst traits—on this shelf, your procrastination; on the next, your ineptitude at forming whole impressions of your own life; tucked behind that, your wordless, unintentional prayer for sudden epiphany; & there, the lowest shelf, recessed in shade, your cowering will. There is a Goya print of a dying man stretched upon a table, three dark figures huddled around him, their eyes shadowed, their surroundings trailing into utter black. The print is fine & small, almost a dust, an ash impressed upon the dull brown page from which vague insinuations of form emerge into precise detail. Under the image, the phrase “espero sin remedio.” He waited without remedy.

& so I meet myself in my comings & goings, over the slow song of a quiet day in, under a roof of cedar shingles that leak rain onto the floor above me, its scratched, glossy oak. In my greeting, I note my countenance, my general disposition, my endeavors. A bit saturnine today, I think of myself, or a bit “irretrievably weak & vacillating,” as Wilde had it. The bags under my eyes. The way my temper lives just under my skin, flaring & fanned by nothing at all, hotly defensive, coiled & ready to strike at no good provocation. I know these are the battlements of indecision, their fortress of cards erected hastily of a compulsion towards the recognizable. Look, my self says to my self, it’s anger. It’s hurt. The ruptured quick. But I know it to be something else entire, I know where anger plays predator, perched over my waiting with its beady amber eyes fixed & ravenous. It takes a persistence to dig beneath impulse, beneath pulse itself, where hot blood flows in hot vein. It is, I find, just this quiet tumult in me, after all, this repentant heart, this boundless uncertainty. It is reason stripped bare & left behind, its stream of unregenerate babble fading into obscurity, a language for which I have forgotten the syllabary. A string of questions like barbs upon a fishing line untouched.

Some days, the undeniable & intransigent presence of the uncertain within me wears the aspect of great possibility. Others, it gnaws at me, a quiet infliction.