April 2

A light snow beginning to fall on today’s thaw. Up to the mid-thirties earlier, the drives & culverts & watercourses all puddle over in layers of water, then slush, then winterlong ice. The black soil gives underfoot like a sponge. A good day to have neoprene boots. & as is my two-day habit, back in the cabin for an afternoon intermission marked by a sunken heart. Each morning when I begin the day’s endeavors I do so with zeal, with breath, & over the brief hours it fades & flees from me, & there rises that quieted ghost in me, a swelling pith. A moment ago I felt a guilt at its feeling, but recognize the lunacy in that. It will reside in me for some time. Grief, or sadness, or whichever it is, has a palpability that other emotions cannot stir, a kind of tintinnabulation, a thrumming that, when it opts for clear & cutting tolls, cannot be denied nor skirted nor left for later. Taken by grief, they say. Possessed of it. & so.

Took Willa to Bishop’s Beach this morning, where she had free reign for a solid mile or more of oceanfront along the Kachemak Bay, the wind a good deal less piercing today than yesterday. Looked at postings at various places in town & found two cabins past Fritz Creek that I will see tomorrow, both of them rustic & removed, but both with electricity anyway. Imagine. Stopped into the woodshop of the captain I was going to crew for to introduce myself in person & talked for a brief while. Now, wondering what to do with myself. As adept as I have become at inhabiting liminal moments, I am still susceptible to time’s ripdtide, its undercurrent of quick undoing that thieves a still instant of its stillness, hollows one’s senses & lends instead a breed of dull & witless panic. An ought to. A should be. An anything but sitting unbuoyed without design of mooring. Here it is, though, the crucible I conjured, the stepping flame. Let teach the present, & let fade those borne along desires that tether me to a ruptured past. Hass wrote in his best poem, to paraphrase, “longing, we say, because desire is filled with endless distances.” It is the endlessness that kills us, the fact that in order to desire there must be in the first separation, distance, space yawning out between. The greater the distance, the more profound, it seems, the longing. & so a word that would reference a person, a place, a shared moment in the past, becomes a fainter & fainter shadow, further from its light. Well.

So perhaps the weight of it awaited me fully at the tugging anchor, at the end of the road. But I made it, anyway. & now.

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