| aphrodite's garden volume 3 part 2 - 1986 april-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
15th April In bed magnetizing the feet. Starts to drift. Saying there's another mind. She said "I've been wanting you to talk to me that way!" with such equal longing. As spirit was it. In essence. Oh are you there with them. Then phone rings. "After several such journeyings I understand something else: dream and reality aren't competition but reciprocal sources of consciousness." 16 In the upper chamber the two of them look at each other, move about, stand together with their hands on the windowsill. The many children, 9 or 12, are at loose: in the kitchen, the library, the laboratories, the gardens, the villages, the surrounding miles of a landscape clean like the inside of a body. Night and day, air water rock plants and animals. Life-times take place there. Ishak the Star. First gift. Bearings. Largess of space. Points of origin and the standing spheres of their reach. Lines. Timelines. St. Mor. The gift of motion. Acceleration and accumulation. Interval. Changes in speed and pitch. And Just at the last, a hermaphrodism of such exceptional beauty the life could be complete. -
What do I imagine - pink grain - a space set up, a lab - set up a plan for a test - film and video - what do I have on how - Riley.
Now - so different a state. What is the stress. (Ice cream?) Yelling with M in disappointment. Come in see the perfect small one and the quite nice tall one. Looking at him, could I get it here? He says "He's been going nya nya nya all day." Sharp disappointment. I can't get from here to there. Is it by connecting to RM's depression? Balance the forces.
17 Two fine women. Following with them on a bus, wildflowers in my hand. RM opposite gives me the wildflowers in his, awkward, "for your son" maybe the dark blue stubs in the centre. I say "I wrote you a letter, you'd like it." He dourly, "I'd like it except that he needs it," I assumed meaning the one of him he disapproves. (In the fog Jekyll and Hyde.) Going down steps reaching behind for his dry hand. Still looking for the fine women I was with, didn't want to lose them. Getting to the lecture theatre, squeezing into a row to sit beside him. Liking the other man I'm squeezing past, better than this shriveled dark soul I've chosen. The lecturer begins to talk on something other than they thought he would. They yell and put up their arms. He brings out a clipping announcing the lecture. They bring out theirs. He's being insistent. I don't know anything about it but I growl loudly to say he's being - what. RM beside me probably disapproves. 18 Coming on Rhoda somewhere. She's like a child, baring her chest. Wants me to kiss and suck the little nipples. Look up from doing so to see a ring of American servicemen, she says Navy, I say Army, I can tell by the light green uniforms. She goes on childishly putting her head down on or in front of people, somebody saying she's been seeming crazy. The state of seeing in - what do you call it Laiwan familiar serious and ready to find childhood laughter. The way somebody in the gym is playing Sunrise, sunset hootingly. Texture of mistakes and quicknesses, seeing, rivaling, generosity making it up. Amazingly rolling out of the processor left in the cassette for us to find stretched down 8' of paper: E E A T H E R OUT. 19 Tap running day and night. Raining - Saturday - baby day - water scraping in the pipe in the wall - unregular pulse - lowering at J and them, alliance - the party last night like a testimonial gathered against me - slept through but morning waking to pain - any moment in what it is, alive, the value - what's the stance to make it value while it is. (Fleeing - eating, reading.) What I'm seeing about Jam. What I saw and kept hoping I could change. Wanting to have the hunger solved. The folly of being angry at her. No, because with the power of full sight and clear sadness I could change her. For the short latency time. 20 At the top of the stairs T looking at my pile of paper. I set the baby bed on to cover. A knock. She's back, her worn-out face. What are we going to do about our future! I have the harangue ready. YOU MOVED INTO MY HOUSE AND MADE MY LIFE A MISERY. Etc. Looking at the white panties, matronly shape, I'll put on some turquoise green nylon lace ones, only I see they're on over the white ones. Take 'em all off, start again. The chauffeur will see. I'll let him. Show them off, pose my pelvis at him. In the back seat with his thin legs up. How can he see to drive. I come on top of him letting the fire through. Now I understand why you didn't want to masturbate me, he says, I think he says, indistinctly as we climb out the door on my side. Courtesan. I'd like to learn the high art of setting it up. Dark, downtown into the malls, a man with worn teeth, on the compo. The woman lurching in dark mirrors, black face, hatred, spite, loneliness, fury that on a day of my time I'm so hounded by pain I have nothing to do but go ugly shamed disabled by shame, to a movie. Everybody erased, only me left, to the whole earth. Would I like that? The pain wd be gone. Could I live that way now? Sandy Wilson alright, the kid - Coming out of it to worse, pain and pressure so intense I imagine leaving without saying, as if dying, as if killing, a few boxes for Mary to keep, Michael can have the house and the baby. I write a note to Mary, let them here think I've died. It's Jam and them, but not forgetting how I've had to keep moving. Father and Walter aging into blackness. What the state allows is ignoring Michael. Makes him settle in. Watch him try and guess. Angry he says. Yes. A blue van on the street. I come in shaking. I'm saying, you're useless. He says, I won't go though you say so. 911. "Police, fire or ambulance?" "Police please, there's a drunk here who won't leave." Hollering at the dispatcher, say anything. Throbbing voice and solid calculation. After I start shouting the dispatcher agrees, "I'll send a car to get him and he'll go to jail." She says it with vengeance. He sits down. I go to the back room. Oh, he'll face it out, I'm thinking, but he doesn't stay to earn a star. Still talking, goes. So what inferiority am I ignoring? Anger about the party. How many they have, that they did keep me out of this town and themselves. In a book 1982 Rowan a Canadian. 22 Bergamot, horsemint, monarda. The stem in my hand, opened it to exactly that, taking a while to dawn. Diana's bushy plants in the streetlight without color to identify them. Sitting. When I went to imagine cutting the cord with Jam, in imagining the time it was made, how it might be taken or given back. And then later in the evocation of freedom from pain the sense of sitting taller, stretched or suspended in a wider darker space an even free fall. D about the time she radiated waves of pure anger. Golden yellow maybe. Window, the sky was unlatched and flew, red scarf, Larsson's house and children to show M in the Swedish store, walking blown in passageways in sight of towers of finely reflecting glass. Scarf unwrapping, so pleasant bright cold streaming walking, more occupied in it, less heavily in the passer-bys. 23 Forgot to say at the art gallery the corner of small trees many-stemmed with joined canopy, new leaves tossing and running east, and among them, gold lights! Strings of fire filament simple clear glass bulbs left on though in sun. Come closer see the leaves, very fine pointed small leaf (Japanese) maple, little claws. Laiwan at Britannia. "Did Jam come on to Nina in Hong Kong?" "No she came on to me." "Are you sure?" "I don't understand how she is about sexuality." That it doesn't go through the body. "She circuits it through an image of herself." "An ideal." Dislike, "We played so badly," as if it had to do with being gentlemen, lifelong strain. Offers to 'help' that are wishes I'll love and reinforce her again. Seeing her letter copied here flipping by it queasy. These days M hatching his house. Old man's rotted body he would like the baby in. To begin creation. Rowen in the bath. I'm at the table with the cards. Hear not a big splash, suddenly listening, a muted kicking sound, dashing in, looking down into the open eyes and open mouth of his face underwater. Drownd aghast. Seized, brought wet against my chest, turned upside down to drain, but he seems not to have taken any water, doesn't cough or sputter, cries, wrapped in towels, but not long. Big shuddering heartbeat, mine. Then is swimming on the floor [sketch] bare bum, little singlet, pushing with the right foot, pulling with both forearms, scissor corners. Stopping and looking as a puddle forms underneath. A yellow carrot-fibre shit neatly extrudes. 24 I think the balance meant is for me a push into doing. 25
"They're interested in the ones that are going to succeed." 26 Given her what wd - advise. A bed beside the street, climbing out of the covers, a man passing says don't do that --- ---. The way I was moving my pelvis maybe. He's an anxious older man, black hair, bald, black eyes. Instantly assessed, a certain kind, the too unraveled kind, something there, intense, but too cross and away in himself. On the street corner parlaying, he something about encouraging me, meaning something like taking me on? I wondered. "You could encourage me momentarily." Being sprightly. He says no, fretting. We run into each other again when I go to the table in the park to gather up my pages of work that they've set together on the bench because they're clearing up for dinner. Talking to them, a literary conversation. He's quite firm and clear, but when we're walking away not together but alongside he's as he was before. downstairs, them plotting, which way is it. Map of Italy shape, down or up or that way. When I'm awake dreaming of a man with black eyes, warm, steady, who would see me somewhere and startle and keep looking. I'd do the same, it's a dream of certainty. Then he'd like to ask about it all, keenly, and tell, to hear it resolving as he told. Eventually there'd be an evening with such tension in the room I'd ask to go out. We'd walk. Say goodnight at the door. I'd go to bed in an ache. Oh, no, now it is time, and meet him returning on the street. Lend a toothbrush. Wash separately. Get into bed. He or I would know what to talk about in the dark to let the bodies create the field away from our attention. But we'd be at the same time steeping in it, raising hope, to the moment when a hand could stroke the slope of a ribcage. And then when he's come in, imagining the field condensed like shock waves at the nosecone, the pull isn't the release it's the pulse of tension. When I get up I'm sick or dizzy, staggering. The way there's one black haired man there seems to be also one story I look for - Caroline and pushing too much to see their house. Michael hideous with exhaustion and pressure, pressing. Jam leaning forward dramatically to say "Sheila is with child." Rowen liking her flirtation. Laiwan was in the peace march and sickened by the smell of hotdog relish at the dome. Monday 28th Rowen at Crabtree Corner [daycare] in a swank highchair looking closely around. The tilt of his forehead and nose in his curiosity, like me. A brownskinned person inept with cup and bowl. The small critter beside him was eptly plucking it in without picking up the bowl and dumping it over the side. At the corner thinking of coffee, alright, relent, take him some, slantways up the chickweed on the bank, yellow and white and green, yes, and the boy in a better mind. I've offered 2 days more. 29 He was hours in bed crying to get up, a horrible night with solar plex blazing and aches in muscles and joints, then the so light little voice saying ooh-kay ooh-kay, what I say when I do come for him. Robert is happy somewhere. I buy Michael sheets pillowcases curtains and kitchen towels. Crabtree calls to say Rowen isn't well. Like yesterday, icy damp from the north. Sitting in the yellow kitchen or wanting to put my cheek on his pectoral slope. The front room is clean and pink, an iron fire to dry the floor, light in the corner. Yesterday on the way out I saw there is a rowan sapling near the steps. At night I was battling Jam maybe, or trying at least to get or keep her out of the solar. Wondered whether that battle is the pain. 30 Mail brings by impersonal medium Robert you thorn. M in his house already changed. Choy phones: he thinks to wreck the garden. [landlord wants to reclaim the driveway I turned into a garden because he'll need parking during Expo] Paul is the one who feels it. 1st May And something about dear one. 3 The open ground. Walking like tundra, water, moss, gravel, reeds. Killdeer? with white and black collar bands. Cock pheasant planing up with feathers spread, robins on lumps, goldfinches (Michael said joyfully) jumping in a bush. Water crackle and glitter. Plot drawn in red string, with a gate. Around the periphery yesterday, and again, carefully looking at the rocks, granite setts found singly, large slabs of sparky white stone for seat and lintel. 50' carpenter's tape found yesterday at the pawnshop for 6 bucks! To measure out 5' across the top, 4 down the side, center path 2', ah, dig it up put the rocks in and it will be the drain. Pickaxe! Where. The shiny, heavy, poreless unhealthy clay, dumped in clods, dead stuff, though small worms, holding a month of rain in the top 8". Dry pan below (50# of lime) unbreakable with the spade. Wood chip cattle bedding with the good run out in tea colored water around the piles. Saturated crumbly loam under dumped daylilies at the end. Walking to and from, carrying it in a handle-less bucket on my shoulder. The firemen's clean asphalt and broom waft. Way across Prior a Chinese man in a picture window watching her work alone in the big, the vast, field. All the edges with hobo nests, hardboard from the produce warehouses, blackberry, broom, some little poplars rippling and glittering their beautiful way. down in the corner a marsh, marsh grass. Cardboard tents near the pools, many paths, takeout styro platters. Yesterday when I was laying string, rain sky, 9 fighters in a hawkshape buzzing the princess. And Josie! At the corner by Michael's. (And Trudy's plaster fell.) And Michael in his house and running across Hastings at the light. And Rowen in his puppy bed. This late afternoon working on Princess [cafe] dinner, sun. I can see the garden, I know how to make it. The work is sanity, blood acids gone, just being in the expanse with perimeters far away. Here at the house the tenants speak. Choy throws down the sign. Maybe he stamps the little sage bush too. The boy had hurt feelings. Josie when I say her friend looks nice, "Wes? He's so nice. I couldn't be happier." 4 Sunday. The legumy dell, baby sitting in it, cumulous in blue, behind broom bushes a young boy's voice saying "meadowlark" to his friend. Rowen with shoes in front of him. Knolls and dumped concrete slabs. In my site seeing when water pools, 'compacted subsoil.' What I thought to do is called a French drain and can use all the little rocks. 5 The pickaxe. What has to be quick, dig all the beds and rock drains. 9 These days noted on the work sheet not here, but tonight pink nightfall, copper blazing windows, with big black Mr Stiglich from Langley in a very slow three-quarter ton truck with rusted iron dump box, pulling so heavy I thought it was the load. The kid in sleepers and red windbreaker (in the other room now, 9 o'clock, singing), his first time in a truck. Sat on the grass while we fetched the cardboard. Big slow farmer with what kind of mouth is that, a shy hard worker, with a ridged lip like Rudy Wiebe, swart, far over the line into man, so big he got out of the truck to get to the money in his pants, four crushed 2's. Nice stuff, gorgeous, black, glossy, fibrous, warm. 10 Last week: lying somewhere with RM. His arms' dry heat. The way he gets up and leaves. Last night looking from shore to the freighters, see light through the scallop of green water under them. Realize it's the wave coming in, now I'll die for sure. Turned looking at the ocean bank. It's coming slowly. Looking seaward at the hotel I don't see it come but then water falling out the windows of the first three floors. Inside the water. How to be in it, I'll be underwater too long. The strong weight. On a bit of ground considering, the second wave will be coming. Riding on it as we should, groups on the big rolling slope, passing two people supporting a woman not treading water just standing in it. Rolling forward, we just find ourselves grating onto land,where, in a pit, a man seems to be tossing over a wrecked truck tire. Speedy, brutal. Burnt eyes and shoulders, cracked mouth from the weather. Brown face, bum muscles and forehead acid ache. A tearing organization mind won't stop, got its teeth into. Leaving Rowen coughing in the pushchair this morning, in damp cold, crying and then sleeping, I have to haul manure. Careless with people, don't care to impress, any talky mind, being like people, mindless. Conscience worried I'm not fine but loving the aggression, command, assembly, the plan, coming new to its materials, dirt, rocks, wild field, persons, events like Mr Stiglich and the manure, the keenness of the birds, Rowen in it, map elucidating, tools, library books, seed packages sorted in plastic bags, doing something and body able. Sometimes refuses, heats up, gets going. Will only work if fed. 12 Anyone who is in close sympathy with flower and tree and shrub, and has a general acquaintance with nature's moods, could tell the time of year to within a few days without any reference to a calendar; but of all dates it seems to me that Midsummer Day is the one most clearly labeled, by the full and perfect flowering of the elder. Indeed I have often noticed that however abnormal may have been the preceding seasons, things seem to right themselves about the middle of the month. Gertrude Jekyll The kid red-cheeked, slimy nose, better though. Oogay he sang in bed this morning, o-kay. Coming for him, he's asleep in the puppy basket, hard little belled shoes, short overall elf in the house's Norwegian sweater. Michael's in sleeping bag with hat sadly on, drained and lonely for it to be like it was yesterday. Body heat. Soft knock, Hew, with thick hair low on the forehead and back in ponytail, other people's slave until now he said, but now, he doesn't know anymore, is his birthday December 9? 13 Laiwan on the phone, in Finnish myth. Roane Queen of the fairies, whose rowan tree . May 1st. Ugly J, bragging of workmen. I'm worn out, wrists, ankles, lower spine, hands, bum-muscles. These last days, radiation rain. M's day for freakout - a month since. I had come from the field and return it. Then by evening we're laughing at how the sequence goes. Oh such red and green, a starling's purple necklet. 14 We work till 6. The kid eats, talks, does little acts in the mid, is happy the whole while, four hours. What a good day. Sun. Laiwan coming with her childy clean face and nice slight clothes. Liking to look at a big bumble butting in the grass heads. Taking pictures of Tex's and Andre's houses [in the wild area] and a man in a sleeping bag, who stirred. Oh the glitz on the reeds and little rocks. Two more sidewalks. We mention martins and see one zoom. M digs gate post holes and has got what he wants, she's nice to him again. Turkish peasant family. He and Laiwan making the same kind of jokes. Fork, spade and pick, seeds in their pots. Moon same color as those cloud things. A short rest. Seeing Rowen Baby's wool hat fiber clear in the deep blue. He pat pat and finger tip nibbled. This evening! in the bath, Michael does a monkey scream, R laughs, screams his worst. (Used to do it on construction sites.) They're talking now. Water postcard, puzzling, I know this writing, who, long time later, oh - Last night the black woman, a lot of other story, but, big very bright mischievous and on, she puts her arm around me from behind, says I'm your grandmother. I say, A while ago I dreamed a black woman said she was my grandmother. (She was too.) What else. One of my journeys to the south. 16 The man with black hair, Dewey, Ken, Ian Mackintosh, the dancer's picture. The agronomist. Oh a child with - It's only a thin fantasy but could I, should I build it - [clipping, Jay Scott's Globe and Mail review My beautiful laundrette] Rain, on the beds, is alright - Omar and Johnny kissing in the beautiful laundrette. Sweetness of London balance, forgiveness. The house Jam has moved into is the house on Clearbrook Road. Walking through it seeing what she's done with the furniture, to make it her particular impressive own. Dining table pulled to Islamic bench along the wall. In the bedroom the window sees half wildness. A bank with trees we say later he planted. Those on the street too. "Like locust." I meant acacia maybe. Bean trees. The bank on the right is more like aspen poplar. There was a name I took to mean that. Later a man is there with his baby, my own baby at the daycare till 5:30. I offer to babysit for a few hours so he can go out and look around. Blomfont was the school the little girl went to. I say it wrong, a compromise with the Low German. He says it in Low German. I took it for a Mennonite place but remember now it's South Africa. Earlier in the mountains, a view of the side, farming people. Out on the prairie my house and garden. Working with falling water, standing water, a dead small poplar, dead broom, swelling cracking seeds, especially the peas like nice fat babies. Heat in the beds, where from, don't know, warmer than the air. Transplanted herbs perky and reshaping. The Chinese gentleman's Sunday visit, curious, courteous, intimate, human. A feeling like the Korean gardener. My quality too. His rib cage, bone chest. I liked holding his hand but oh poor face, his grin of fear. He likes the spangled London sari for his pink room. "Strong soft and flexible." Yeah! 19 Over the weekend the kid learned to pull up to stand. Did it at night. Crying, couldn't get down. With Laiwan in the old green chop suey house. The perfect edges of her teeth. Tonight a care in Harare. South African raid. "I am he, the one who stands in the flux of rebirths and goes back and wakes them all." Dorothy. Then they were all awakened by Rudra, and they all rejoiced and looked upon one another's rebirths, seeing illusion for what it was. Then Rudra said, "Now go back to your own places and enjoy yourselves there with your families for a while, and then come back to me." And at doomsday all of us, the bands of creatures who are part of me, will go to the final resting place. [can't find who this is] 20 Anxious in the disorder of the house. At moments the memory of a basic sensation of a mind/time. It's an orientation by coordinates of flavor. I get the memory in the reverie state. 'Flavor' because it is the definite invisible essence, but a back/ground, like a sky color. "You were such a darling, so interesting a companion." Her brother in danger, was it wrong to send him what will we know, does the wild one's good wish carry power. She said I liked him when I was little. [Uncle Pete diagnosed with a brain tumor] -
The usual about getting it here and there in bits. I say "I do that now but what I don't know is how not to be mean and cynical about losing hope. Energy. I know the energy comes when I imagine there's a possibility." "Say it this way: the energy I release when I imagine there is a possibility, the energy I withhold when I see there is no possibility." 'Thinking.' Energy withheld. "Let's not call it thinking." There's the puzzle. When there is no possibility, and it isn't the other's fault, there's tantrum or depression.
I went not having found out CFDW won't give an advance. Michael's five dollars, traveling there faint and disoriented from not having eaten, buy an orange juice, there's little time, go back for a small fruit salad, $2.25. Taking it to her office, some pieces fall off. I'm jittery, the boots with heels worn dangerous, I stumble on the stairs, most of the fruit jumps out into the water. Why do I forget the sadness of fearing starvation. Michael in it too, I think. Explains fury at people I met (who can eat). And why I went on resenting her and holding back. Worried that I've suddenly become thin. Aching, dizzy, stumbling. The black woman - wants to see me, whether I'm Black Hawk. Illumining a bush in big white blossom, wonderful springing bush, the green and white in blue-white light. 22 On the morning of his birthday - sparkler, balloons - he bites - Michael comes with sad face - oh here we go - he doesn't want to know he's angry, he thinks he has to feed me this week - fuck off I say - he with a naughty curl in his voice, should I take him too? - quick shuffle - sure - in a rage that cleans my house, gets me to the MHR. Then it's alright to tell him I wd have shared. Go to Woodwards with a voucher, the old pleasure of - smoked salmon, strawberries, lettuce - a dinner - invite them on the way home - looking in last year's journal, thinking to invite Jam - she comes later - M shows his best relation to Rowen (or doesn't hide it) - I like showing her the woman with the hawk - and there's the black woman behind her! The pleasure of the horse and black sky - you are Black Hawk. Her Katmandu pictures, animals at home in the streets. The coldness with the baby. [photos of Rowen] 23 Who is breaking my nights worse than ever. Baskets. A woman the shadow of whose hair on her hair is a bleached white streak. "You said that because of Sharon." What are the uses of wood, drumming on the side of a lectern, the vibrancy stops when the clergyman on my right isn't adding his. Going down to let Jam in, shocked and woken to find her with Trudy's door open standing on the threshold looking in. Uses of wood: that lying all over the world, grey dead wood, it reflects light back into the atmosphere. The way she left it, saying how my situation is well saved, Michael so nice with the baby. When I say I was ill for a reason, glossing it. Jane Austin 1775-1817 I'm not yr basket, goodbye. You are Black Hawk: girl's bedroom, dead woman, blom fontein in artificial light, a rotted plank, feeble light grown enough to see, the light, the whip, thrown in with the lot. Bloemfontein cap. of Orange Free State She's not a man: she's archetypal female power 26 Jam with her bag of food. What does she want. At sea. "To not have recognized forms of abandonment." "To not recognize over the years what you were actually doing for me and for the relation."
Offers of charms and goods. I'm saying accommodation at end, I stand in my own story now. M telling me the story of the dream - the little skull bundle is the child who died - valor - fighting spirit - the cruel beauty is my cold streak, another version of the skull baby, who are both the woman in the motorized wheelchair who leads me into childhood - whose platform is broken. By steadfastness to look at the black woman - increases the light - and in it stands the bloemfont - the life jet - the nervous system alive - how beautiful, the cruel beauty says - invalid in the dark. "Can I mend your platform?" "Get out." I won't turn my back to her, she's cruelty. At the threshold I must give back also her flashlight that became my seeing, a willow/wand/whip. "Black Hawk" (you are) A strange town conference, going into the daycare? Seeing in another hut people raising champagne cups to each other, but not for us behind the scenes staff. Much I don't remember but by this small detour I'm walking toward the center of town again, much further than I thought, coming to, only here! the town gate. The town's fancied up like a festival, clownish. I stepped on wooden graves behind a picket fence. 27 With the light this morning early frail fine life on blue wall, earthen jug, bluegreen chest and the phlox stems and flowers. The delicate will and speed of myself in that summer when I was being inner. Drug journeys and Jam. Newness. Crucial. First I cut down the tree, grown too big, making the rose garden rank, and the old growth, though new growth always comes, was always sick, because the root system was never clear. With misgiving love and regret, to you, in your so other where. Did it mean you got the envelope too, and accepted. Sore bits. The garden's bare place and retracted wood. In the other, new, common land estate: Michael and Laiwan help move the stone out of the corner, the baby is uncomfortable, City Farmer politician shakes my hand, it's warm, new sprouts show from one half hour to the next. The pheasant hen and the cock twenty feet behind glide up the west perimeter. I see blood show and disappear in the earthworm's scribble vein. At the end of the afternoon when he'd pried the rock, his body like jointed levers, onto the bank. The real childish joy when it first moved. I did the leave-taking so badly. I am sorry Michael. His doors both were barred. 29 I was reminded of the letters I had written to my mother when she died and I was eleven years old. I used to take these letters out with me into the fields; there I would post them in rabbit-holes, under the overhanging cornices of streams, amongst the tangle of roots and stones and earth, in empty birds' nests, in old tins and bottles and pockets of ragged clothes on rubbish dumps, down waterfalls and millraces and a deep forgotten well in the garden of a ruined cottage. Once I posted a tiny note in a fat bunch of grass which I gave to a cow. Denton Welch journals Minute and faithful: all my life so precious. In illness remembering illness. Dying at 31. He could balance in such a volume of sensation. The great wide shining pale orange. Michael arrives ugly and wanting to crack - I ruthlessly clear him out, he goes in a fast huff. I work discussing. J and Roy and innocent me. Sore throat head cold. The kid in pink seersucker to sleep. I think Luke can come. 30 Gone to earth - the foxgirl hounded over a cliff - died when she lost Henry - because she held to feeling. Mary Webb Gone to earth 1979 Virago Michael when he finds me ill cries with liking. "There's no power struggle." "Because there's no power." Giggle. Would like, would like, this body to be the one firm enough to trust. 31 Body body thank you for being back - blue jeans and bare feet - to dance in - across the street when the music keeping me awake is good. 1st of June Somewhere in bed with Michael, a morning maybe, feeling later we'll - there's a knock or sound and I go to look and it's Robert ragged unshaved come from the wide world blackened - no hesitation this time - it's two parts I don't remember much of - a later sound, then I leave M with the baby, go out the door past T putting up a marquee, see him in the distance an overcoat tramp, grab him, kiss him, start to touch his flank, his shank. But the kiss has got very boring. His swelled naked head like the embryo of the brain-map. Autistic. I was while kissing him also hearing his poems. When I first saw him in the corner I punched his arm and said You're unhappy because you think you're better than other people. - Told to M to sweeten him for the summer kitchen cleaning he dreaded I'd overrun. Just start in one corner. Little nice dishes, agreeing which are the good ones, the beautiful cut glass square ashtray a mutual jerk forward. I sort, he distributes. Rowen in his brown plaid shirt with arms rolled up, peacock blue shorts barefoot dirty in the walker. "I'm having old-fashioned feelings, I'm hating dirt." "It's not old-fashioned, it's that there's too much of it." He's radiant bright eyed because I'm helping. The filthy fridge works. He likes the stove. 2nd The Armenian shoemaker under Sears in a cave - diminished, fixing my sandals, his conversations in hypnotic soft voice and eyes - is Jehovah's Witness. A service job. But $12 for the work. 4th Waking. Everybody interesting I've cut off. Then I hear the story from an unexpected direction, "one intellectual and thin, the other voluptuous and fun". Furious. A calendar made of week-cycles superimposed so each of 210 days of a year is a different name made of 3 vectors' factors. I'm understanding hermit and cutting off = harpy = anger = relation = abandonment = I often don't know whether I've left them or they me. When I'm abandoned I want to leave. The state is sudden wild - a storm - has to act to give something back, take something back, leave - it acts after the moment (something happens) that was split - it tries to make good the self betrayal at the earlier time but it can only think of killing that connection in my feeling. Joyce seemed to support. 7 M crying because he was passionate with B. He comes clinging kissing weeping about death so I'll forgive him in advance. [clipping] New studies link cancer to depression, immune system won't fight back. analyses of blood samples taken from women who have been recently separated or divorced showed their immune systems were operating at less than normal levels. These immunological depressions were evident even two years after a separation or divorce. Imagining the dark man, seeing myself in dark clothes with hair cut, crystals and open face again. What's bright and dark
8 Sunday Starhawk flash instant of dislike. Who of the diagonals I chose or they me. The closeby presence of roses known to be in my breast pocket. When the drum stopped the soul in outer space was a lovely silence with distant birds and near breaths. In the circle saying Elfreda daughter of Mary daughter of Luisa. That point very strained, heart, tears, seeing the others with tears. A huge grandpa woman, a pretty little granny. "I'm Shirley, I don't know who my mother was." The real witch rolling her weight. Two bright young ones. Wren, where's she? Starhawk's horrible tunes, robotic drumbeat, thin nasal voice, chin fat, mean beak and racial grossesse. 11 Weds Up north in one little house at Gilkisons waiting to move up farther into the bush into another one where we were living maybe last year. Lying down in the ditch the old woman thinking she's telling us a story to comfort us to sleep. A many little clump of strawberry plants. The south ditch at the foot of the east place seeing a light down the road, rumble, cowering, it might be they say a machine as big as a block, blowing a hole in the north of Holland. In the attic room of the old house, a few of my things, thin skin of snow. I think to pee by the wall, mark my place, but hear voices downstairs, the new owners' children. They've heard me, one child climbed up to see. I swing down, young farmer family, gruff man kindly woman. I'm explaining and pleading I had stuff upstairs. Nonsense. It's that I love the landscape so much. Do you need any help? I can fill cold frames etc. Contemptuous, That kind of wank, you would be able to do. I give up and start to go. She to him in the tone that says he shd stop bluffing, "They're going." Past the new buildings, rock foundations, one with the Jensen house on it turned into a greenhouse. I'm sobbing. She runs after. Waking with the memory of that sobbing. "Sometimes I am allowed to return to a meadow." I'd wanted to live there and make money writing. That shouldn't happen to my fearless, inquisitive explorer, my Rabbit, my blackeyed, raven haired little Indian. "Where is baby?" and Ellie searched everywhere. [These are Mary.]
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