July 2

A storm rattling in over the canyon, the leaves on the dwarf birches & willows outside the window blown taut & rippling, the clouds rumble & roil, a sudden shock of clay-cold air after a warm day. To hear a thunder storm roll in one of the finer pleasures, to be sure. A reward for cleaning up after Roy when I got home, leaving him still at work. & now the evening, & me here, in some little quiet, waiting on some rain to fall. & all day the body thinks without thought, the mind in its mute perambulations, & then, come the later hours, I pause to find myself exhausted from a thinking I didn’t know I was doing, from a pulse I couldn’t feel upon my wrist. & not merely that I have lived & have not properly accounted for the hours, but that I live here in this suspended animation, this shock of being. This morning, quarter to six, walking past Rock Creek on my way to work, I felt the heft of this absurdity. It hits me that way, sudden, without warning, completely. We act out this charade, I suppose, & feel it no less sincerely, but time & again it strikes me just so. How a dark puddle reveals its reflection only briefly between disturbances. How you can look yourself in the eyes in the mirror only so long before you fall apart, like a word repeated too many times, untwined, loosed unto slapdash syllable & hollow intonation. How to remember here, when here falls from me into alluvion at my feet. Carving a statue until you realize you have carved the last splinter & there, where Daphne’s form should have emerged from the laurel, those fine wood shavings peeled off the blade & piled in the dust. Which is to say I feel far from myself. Which is to say I am tired of trying. Which is to say I am always trying. & will be, blood in me, bone & breath. & when comes the worm to my last flake of ash, it, too, will struggle against its fate. It is our nature in us, or mine in me, gale-force, refusing constellation. I will tattoo myself in stars & maybe, then, stay myself.