May 3

The yawning hours, laid out quiet & haunting. How they shiver in me, premonitions of their disuse. & what would a life look like, here? How rest my head upon my pillow & know an honest accounting? Is it the glacial fields spreading & sprawling across the mountains, the gunpowder-blue in the bay? Is it the sound of lapping wave, the under-rush of shifted alluvion? Is it Alaska at all? Or this wilderness in me, this landscape unpeopled, abiding grief, itinerate hope. Because this does not feel like a life should feel, does not thrum & ebb, sounding its whimpered song. I don’t know, I don’t think, how a life should feel. How I would have it feel. & in that restlessness how I have run my finger over a cornstalk or down the bark of a red cedar or cut it through the lulling tide to hold it to a wind that I can’t read anyhow. No, I’ve said, no, not this place, nor this, nor that other. As if a geography would draw lines around me, enfold me in its being-settled, its ongoingness. The cartographer’s erasure. But everywhere I go my voice echoes off whatever it will, vale or valley, skyscraper or shock of air, & comes back to me ever my own, ever intoned in familiar under-pattern. & aphasia worse still, fear pinning tongue to tongue-bed, hour upon hour of grating silence. A quadrille rattled off with every partner a ghost. Me in this empty place, waltzing to this imagined cadence. How to escape a life in its living, tunnel under the heft of its conceptualization to find, after all, a fine soil under the nails, or the spiring blue breath, wisp-of-self, flower-of-breath blooming to dissolve. & on. Every day a clutching after vague designs penned of smoke & ash. Wave a hand & watch them falter, disappear. The design is in the day, onus of the heart, fulcrum of the quick will. & mine so slow.

***

Sixties today & cloudless azure that falls now into pink light, shadow rising like contusion from the sheer steeps, that after-sun when sun has passed, its salmon glow on the ice-fields, soft-haze. Ran with no shirt today—a thing I didn’t think possible in this state. Five sandhill cranes in sharp skein drawing down towards the water. The woods brimming now with life, the hours leaning long to bookend the starlight. Halibut & collard greens for dinner, a brief walk with Willa, & Anna Karenina waiting for me. Today it was that general befuddlement, that way I have of hesitating over nothing at all, infirm, overcautious, as if walking to get a paper would toll some hidden danger. Do I dare eat a peach &c. & kept from town, letting Anchorage flush through & return north, leaving hoof-prints & atv tracks striping the Spit. The emptier the beach, the better for Willa & I. Worked five or six new pages on Hopkins, nearing a rough draft of chapter three. Four hours for those pages—I am unaccustomed to working so slowly. But today I am ghosted heavy & wrung that way. My own & not my own in mind. Errant, corner-struck. Some days you feel like a stubble-field fallow & blown over by some intrepid wind. Sort of barren, divested. & so, what can be done about it? What was that Wiebe quote, “forgetfulness is the dream of sleep?”