April 14

Crushing, these afternoons. Today it’s like a dirge in my blood, the echo of some sad song reverberating in my chambered heart. Sick with it. I am of no use today & hereby check out. Took Willa for a hike, ate a cup of soup, walked along the beach in the coming rain, the little waves lapping after each other. Came upon a dead dog hefted parallel the wave-arm in the sand, ten yards from the water. Or coyote, one of the two, its teeth bared in a frozen grimace, no bodily wound upon its coat. From a distance I thought it burled driftwood, but closing in, saw its black pads flecked in sand. It looked a painful death, its muscles all contorted, its countenance braced against sudden trauma. & then more rain, & more sad songs about love on the radio. Here in the cabin, I talk to myself, ask myself what I am supposed to do in this situation, how to greet it, how to breathe into it, bowled over by it as I am. You can be conscious of a longing in you, a filament, a fine kind of thrumming that endures over days without eruption. & then, floodgates are hurdled, the shabby architecture of the day thrashed violently into splinters, & the body left quiet. The heart struggles against its constraint like a prisoner led to execution, a maelstrom between the ribs, a tempest spilling out. It will calm over, I know, but just today, just this afternoon, how it whirls around me to drag me down. What fight against it? Deny my missing, tamp down my pulsing heart? It is nothing to ignore. A flood that passes. & me, a wake.

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