March 7
Spent the week in the woods with a chainsaw, a pair of loppers & a rake, tidying up the drive on a 75 acre property, pulling down alder & sapling & briar grown thick. Took a severed branch square in the left eye & winked incessantly for two days. Piling the scrub & scratch in the bed of an old Ford & loading it high on to a burn pile. Went from sleet two days ago to straight sunshine today. & in the meantime, we crawl forward, clawing after each inch or letting go, allowing ourselves a present in which joy is no taboo, in which we recognize our love & are heartened by it. All of this, after all, in its service. Perhaps the most difficult thing is the willing of the rupture, the moving on it, the quick blind scratching into some unimaginable future uninhabited by one another. We talk about its every detail, though we hesitate in doing so. These are to be individuated decisions, after all, unfiltered moves. I was to work on a salmon charter in the Shumagin Islands the summer through, but could not, it being facilitated by Stef’s old friends. It will be my Alaska, my blank, gaping footfall, & I will not have it otherwise. That each particular should bare only my witness, each wafting smell of sun-bleached pine needle, each caw of the blackbird, each shifting pebble underfoot, each morning yawn & evening nod should be of my own report. To possess the mundane, know it in no relation. This is the point.
& what I want of it is simple. I will take time before building to loosen my grasp, to let fly the chaff, swirl & snap aside the dregs, find some spring in my own selfsame gait. Let silence feather in. A beehive in my head, always, & a bird’s nest in my heart. Let quiet the buzzing to let sound the song. This time a gift to myself, of myself.
Asking, what is it that underlies these contradictions in me? Wielding a chainsaw & getting a doctorate. Reveling in this simple barn & chasing chimeras through theoretical labyrinths. How I could watch the play of light on the pond, enthralled. Talking to my brother, I noted that my thesis ostensibly looks at a poetics of uncertainty, taking a lyric poem’s foray into the indeterminate as an act deeply imbued with the ethical implications of reaching unto another, opening beyond the self. & here, in my life, how odd then to find my days the evidence of negative capability, absent of any “irritable reaching after fact,” strung one to the next neither by design nor determination, but by an unprepossessing willingness to investigate possibility. This, a praxis. This is the life I have dreamed of living, for all of my years; one in which the footholds blur & grow indistinct, in which the horizon seems the tightrope upon which I walk, in which detail is illumined without prior favor & circumstance unfolds beyond my grasp & predication. I am, simply, at the mercy. Heart of things. Cordate gift I untwine. & let go, let go the buzzing.
& what I want of it is simple. I will take time before building to loosen my grasp, to let fly the chaff, swirl & snap aside the dregs, find some spring in my own selfsame gait. Let silence feather in. A beehive in my head, always, & a bird’s nest in my heart. Let quiet the buzzing to let sound the song. This time a gift to myself, of myself.
Asking, what is it that underlies these contradictions in me? Wielding a chainsaw & getting a doctorate. Reveling in this simple barn & chasing chimeras through theoretical labyrinths. How I could watch the play of light on the pond, enthralled. Talking to my brother, I noted that my thesis ostensibly looks at a poetics of uncertainty, taking a lyric poem’s foray into the indeterminate as an act deeply imbued with the ethical implications of reaching unto another, opening beyond the self. & here, in my life, how odd then to find my days the evidence of negative capability, absent of any “irritable reaching after fact,” strung one to the next neither by design nor determination, but by an unprepossessing willingness to investigate possibility. This, a praxis. This is the life I have dreamed of living, for all of my years; one in which the footholds blur & grow indistinct, in which the horizon seems the tightrope upon which I walk, in which detail is illumined without prior favor & circumstance unfolds beyond my grasp & predication. I am, simply, at the mercy. Heart of things. Cordate gift I untwine. & let go, let go the buzzing.
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