April 27, 28

An interesting day.

***

The morning after the conversation. Still, a kind of heightened processing, a thrumming back-&-forth, mind to heart, heart to mind. Good to hear her voice, & my reeling from it more subdued than I’d imagined. & so. Today finally the sun & a sustained sky of blue. A snipe overhead last night, & a first mosquito lighting on my skin. So spring seems to have arrived, tardy, maybe, but charged with what it bears. The light lingering well-past eleven already. Impossible passages of sleep.

Sixteen pages into Hopkins & charging ahead. Writing, writing, writing a dissertation, writing poems, writing quick sketches for stories, notes for a book review. & caulking time stable with reading, walking long & regarding the brittle tall grass swaying just so in the softening firn wind. A sense not of pursuit or urgency but of receptivity, vulnerability. Open-selved. Saying—rush through me, gale & gust—there is nothing will pierce the heart. I flood into landscape where word is restrained, into breeze where touch is abstained. An unpeopled place. It is my conversation. I do my best to think it something other than monologue.

I am no kind of hermit.

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