April 18, 19

Bought ample wood at the lumber yard to fashion a desk & chair today. Would you believe that it took all of my will, all of my careful composure merely to ask after two by fours? Tensed, my voice a sliver, shoulders doubled over, wisp-of-self. & a wind blows a reed. The usual perambulations on the beach, trying to work recalls with Willa in the snow, her attentions focused on the lazy circles of blackbirds. Retreated to the cabin, a soft rain, my dear quiet. Notched & sawed & pounded a handful of nails, & for eleven dollars of hickory & metal, I now have desk & chair. Now, the gloaming. The four-hour evenings that haunt & linger. The lights on the spit distance-muted & glowing orange, small fires upon the sea. My heart skittish in its hold, a crumb pecked along, a sparrow’s beak, eggshell-thin. There is no revelation here. Only hour tacked on to hour, an interminable addition of days upon days, layer-thick & holding. I sidle, a tired ring around a silent pith, saturnine & blazing blue. That mark I leave the fire all burned up, a comet’s tail drawn taut in screaming wake.

***

Less weight this morning, almost lung-room for breath. Sun filtering in through glacial clouds, the ridges over Halibut Cove crisp & sharp across the bay. Imagining in briefest warmth the firn wind. Here, noted the pussy willows beginning to bud, their russet bases jutting up from the tundra scrub & tamped long grass pulled into sudden puddle, a minefield of felled tree & detritus in the field behind us where we direct our morning walks. After breakfast, read some Hopkins letters & sipped coffee. How indolence finds purchase, I suppose. Now to the beach for a run, the hardware store for screws to stabilize the chair, To shake the nightly inundations of my vivid dreaming, pirate of reason, that would draw before me this procession of tableaus, charades of the possible left like smoke to stilt their siphoning. There is nothing extraordinary in what rends up deepest, calls our hearts to bare. Pound wrote “nothing thou lovest well shall be reft from thee.” We are haunted in small measure, each & all.

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