| volume 9 of time remaining: march 2020 -march 2021 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Notes: Brian Eno, Mark Knofler, Eva Pierrakos, Tasnimal Hasan Toki, Eric Newby Slowly down the Ganges, The idea of perfection: the poetry and prose of Paul Valéry, Barry Lopez Horizon, Peter Godfrey-Smith Other minds, McMurtry on the heartland. Pinsky's Dante translations, Jacob's room, Virginia Woolf diary vol 2, Peter Manning , Master and commander, Anthony West on Rebecca West, Tim Stephens (Astral Reflections astrology site), This is us. Rowen, Freya, Gideon, Patch, Mouse, David McAra, Paul Epp, Louie Ettling, Jody Golick, Tom Fendler, Emilee, Susana , George Konrad, Allan Wood, Cass Dolen, Pat Mills, Pat the plumber, Anne Konrad, Dr MacLeod, Ian MacIntosh, Joyce Frazee, Gloria Moses, Dr Sra, Kathy Bara, Mary Epp, Chris Kennedy, Rob Mills, Paul Molnar, Luke, Don Carmichael, Brad Smith, Gabriel Perrier, Kate Soule, Paul Sylvestre, Bill Volk, Madeleine Murray, Yvonne Lord, Paul Emory, Shaun Inouye, Jam Ismail. Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, Planet Hair, Pinto Creek sawmill, Nicola River, Grey's anatomy, Jerusalema, The queen's gambit, Jill Chisholm, Dorothy Richardson, Raw forming, CISR, Being about, iPad, last light, trapline, storming of the Capital, Ezra Pound, Wittgenstein Philosophical investigations, Limbaugh, Nyingma, Peugeot bike, Jimmy Perez in Shetland, NY Review of books, Echo test, Here: a notebook, Karagarga, Men in Kilts window cleaning, American Enterprise Institute, Jordan Petersen. |
8 March 2020 I open the door for Patch when she asks. Sometimes she's out for just a moment, sometimes she wanders in the garden. Sometimes I forget her. Just now I heard a clawing at the door and saw her pointed little face at the door's window four and a half feet up. She was hanging by her claws. I'm still laughing. She's clever. I've suspected it from the way she's cynical and depressed. Snow sifting down, nine on a Sunday morning. 22 March This morning I posted this with the photo I took of myself under an aspen sapling with the pasture behind me:
I love the photo. Seen against Ed's bullying it's a photo of true me, actual continuing me, my steadiness. She's posing with a young tree. Behind it the pasture and its poplar bluff, the driveway, a granary's little mouth: the eternal yard. She's wearing a dress she likes, second-hand, thin red nylon with its white dots worn off. I like her slender shoulders, smooth brown skin. She's fifteen. She's got her grade 9 results but she doesn't know yet that she has the medal. In relation to her father she knows she's won, she knows she's stronger than he is. 29 March Toward the end of talking to Rob last night I got into telling him about being in the hospital when I was fourteen. I could feel that he thought it was going on too long but kept going and told him about Paul Sylvestre. He said it was a sweet story and I should write it. I'd been thinking that as I was telling it. He said in Spain they are keeping corpses on ice in skating rinks. Mouse winds round my ankles crying The bowl is empty! It's EMPTY! Oh EMPTY! EMPTY! 8 April Full moon last night, two black cats creeping on the garden paths. Earlier on when I was courting Mouse, when I was eating pork sausage I'd give him tiny bits by hand. I'm not courting him now, he's too haughty and evasive and Patch is nicer to me, but yesterday when I was on my bed eating a sausage Mouse jumped up and stood at my elbow purring eagerly. Anticipation. 13 April The yellow tulips are out. Others showing buds. FB stories. Yesterday Luke and the Somalian, today Louise's party. Why do smart people leave dumb comments. I keep wanting them to talk about the writing but the comments just tell me which little bit of a story people recognize themselves in. The cats each have their spot, Patch up next to my pillows and Mouse against the lump of hot rock at the foot end. There they both are now asleep with Virginia Woolf Diaries vol 2 between them. It's not her best volume, she talks too much about insignificant people, I suppose to erase their imprint. I reread Jacob's room remembering reading it when Rowen was newborn, saying then that it seemed brittle. This time what I noticed was that it's about London, about England, flies about noticing not Jacob but his lifetime. Not brittle but venturesome - as writing - whizzing along inventing so much on the wing. It's not warm about him, she doesn't feel for him, but she says where he was. I like to watch her thinking about herself, thinking how to manage herself. She's 40, 41, 42, 43. Isn't all the way there yet. Sort of hacking her way into Mrs Dalloway in jerks among other tasks. She thinks about how to manage her energy but she isn't using her diary to think about writing the way she does later. It's occurred to me that the way to write about her and DR would be to compare them - though they're living in London at the same time and both feminists and both self-educated they have such different strategies and temperaments and placements. DR is a sturdy roving bootstrapper like me so I've been grateful to her for studying that condition. She's heavy though. VW is a delicate privileged snob who grew up with her famous father's library. She doesn't study my condition but she teaches methe speed and lightness of her privilege. - It's a speed and lightness I actually had when I was fourteen in the hospital though without the sophistication given by that library. So, for instance, what I posted today:
I like it because it's light and fast and accurate, it's who I was at that party and who I was when remembering it, it has pleasure and disappointment and puzzlement and more pleasure and sardonic poise and weather and a happy ending. It's a complete tale. 20 April Posted male philosophers. Under 1962 thunder-fear Jim said,
22 April Yesterday amtrack december 1996. Zimmerman said Wonderful! I could read your posts all day. I said You must be a writer. When Patch was sleeping near enough so I could hold her little skull with my left hand I felt such definite electrical surges in my palm. She was very sound asleep. 26 April The touching way that Mouse, when Patch has been outside just for a moment, comes crying to me to let her in and then runs alongside her bumping her belly as if to say I missed you, I missed you. Mouse is such a child. The way when I'm walking to open the door she runs beside me twisting her head up eagerly, Are you coming? 29 April Anne liked my letter about her book. After I got her note I snipped together parts of what I wrote her for a post about Oma, with the photo of her shrine and a photo I'd forgotten was there, of me very dark-skinned with a lot of hair and my arm around small white Oma in her kitchen. 30 April Scent of the air when I step outside soft fresh and green. I look at my whole yard with pleasure at its order and say this year I did all of it with no help. There are the tulips standing down the centre of the strawberry bed's new leaves. There are the shapely beds around the house, the rock-edged nectarine bed clean now with garlic chives and six paeony clumps in shades of copper-red; the porch pad's edge bed with iris spears and moss phlox blooming mauve; cowslips with white moss phlox. The apricot starred all over with very small blossoms, under it a ripple of dark blue muscari, yellow Empress tulips bloomed out; alongside the porch pad four many-legged paeonies; a yellow primula blooming like mad. Currant all over dangling yellow-green flowers. Gravel paths not as raw now and defining the beds just right; crabapple with unopened white tulips spiking up under it; pea bed with its comb of sticks; knotty black plum limbs foaming with white. Blue wheelbarrow standing with dandelions on mown grass. New leaves all different shapes and colors on the spindly roses. Coldframe windows standing open. And oh the new self-organized meadow-tapestry in the water corner, completely sown with little flowering things of different textures, hollyhock mounds spaced among them - the way that corner designed itself in perfection. - Anne says write a book about myself as a child in La Glace, in the hospital, in Clearbrook. I've been doing things today sometimes thinking why I don't want to. Then here on the screen I see a sheet called writing childhood, from a time maybe still in Van?, when I thought I was going to. Why don't I want to now. If I write childhood I have to narrate background and persons and sequence in ways that seem not worth what would have to be a large effort. When I work from the journals most of the writing is already done. When I was first with Roy childhood was vivid to me and I wanted to tell it but couldn't. Now I feel the things I could want to share aren't shareable. "The sand bank." I couldn't give that spot on the road so anyone else could see it. My writing childhood document lists episodes and images and why don't I want to enlarge them. What I wanted to say about childhood is more silent and visual and I said quite a lot of it in notes in origin, the photos and text. I used to want to write only the landscape. When I thought of writing the people I thought I'd have to write about them as an exotic group. I don't want to write anything about this group that a child wouldn't feel interested in. I was interested in the buildings. I was interested in the shape of the church. I remember the evening service when gravel dust hung on the road outside lit with sun far in the west. I wasn't very interested in people but I was interested in how they looked. There is a tone to be found for these interests. Not a childish tone. The interest was subtle and strong and clear, although its expression would not have been possible. Her story is shallow and factual. I'd have to write mine deep and psychological and I don't think what I'd find to say in it is as advanced or as needed as the work I did later. What about my little FB stories - they don't need setting up and they roam over the whole life and they needn't be even in tone - travel tales, therapy tales, love and sex tales, philosophy tales, teaching tales, friendship tales, many other kinds of work tales - and when they're out of the journal they show how that time writes. Does that matter? Does only the farthest style matter? What is the farthest style - the swift accurate located unselfconscious journal mixes of observation, feeling and reflection that only the best can like for what they are. 2 May At nearly eight the air a leaden grey in which new bits of leaf on the linden's tips and the church's crabapples show faintly luminously green. There were a few spits of rain on the window but they dried fast. The street has a look of vacant quiet. New yellow stripe down the centre of the pavement. It's the anniversary of coming here, beginning of the fifth year. Am I going to live through the summer? It says yes. I posted Phyllis Altman today. This is how it ends:
What I like is that what I tried to do with woman with a hole in her head I got right this time with the slightest of means. 4 May David Mac. I opened the file and thought I can post this, I can post fiction. I can make that imaginary place stake creation. A sound artist, an electronic composer. The air is his notebook. (Who is she?) Writers who find an imagined man splendid and capable enough to carry them. Le Guin, Mantel. The air is
So yes it's huge, it's universal, it's the hugest there is, it's large enough, I have an imaginary guide, I have four moment-sketches, whether I have a little audience yet to discover, so far not. Who is she. She's vision and has a notebook too. She's trying to make an Orpheus film. 6 May Grey dawn coming up, cats asleep in their places on my bed, boiler rumbling though this morning it's only for two degrees. Kate wrote to say the story of David and the muffins is potent. I'd said I'm less confident when I leave the actual. The question I'm feeling is shall I write it as raw fantasy, shall I write it as research into fantasy, ie as an old woman piecing younger desire and unfinished art. How to be truthful in fantasy. Honorable. I respect the actual because I can trust what I don't know about it, the vast penumbra that exceeds me. The refractoriness of the actual. What I can't have, can't be, in this life. Fiction has to be massively backed up by actuality to be worth anything at all. 9 May 5 in the morning, lopped spruce and half-leafed linden cut sharp against ... there is no way to say that textureless pale orange shading rapidly through pale yellow to palest blue. Can I say how I feel it? Immaculate. A bird flaps through. Another a minute later. Thankful. That something is good. The mighty sky. The trees' complex long standing. I let Patch onto the porch to smell the air, which is intoxicatingly fresh. Mouse doesn't know where she is, bumps my ankles anxiously. I open the door a crack, Patch glides in, Mouse rushes to touch her flank, smells the air on her coat. - Gosh, a contrail. Pale pink and thick as chalk. Yesterday I was on the Nicola's bank hearing blackbirds, water's chuckle against a fallen branch. The river is high but this year isn't going to flood. Scent of balsam poplar, chokecherry blossom. Blackbirds crying TZUT. High up the fine tips of two Lombardy poplars in small yellow-green leaf tenderly stroking the blue. The river at that hour slipping under long shadows lying upstream and then under a bright green glaze by the willow. Most of all the constant constantly varied slight chuckle of water in water. Everywhere, up the street, far and across, trees in leaf. 12 May They meet on the plane. She does her gig. They don't see much of each other. She goes home imprinted. He works. She works. They write letters. She gets a 3-month research grant, comes back. They're working not together but parallel. Grain work. His notes, her notes. Here's my difficulty, there's no dynamism in the ideal. Le Guin makes it his quest, their separation. In Orpheus it's her capture, his quest. I could decide there doesn't need to be a plot, the whole story is just being together and apart and working. That's my mode, showing people who notice and feel. We leave the story with nothing decided. They'll find a way. What is my question. What could have been the work and love trajectory if desire hadn't needed the strenuous compromises there were. - Posted Tom's hand creeping in my thinner-than-it-was fur - "He got my pants down so that people in A seats in descending airplanes could see his hand creeping about in my thinner-than-it-was fur and later very lusciously stroking my bum." It's not popular but Janet leapt in first thing with a red heart. Relatives following me now include Aunt Hilda, Aunt Lillian, Uncle Bernard and four cousins whose degree of piety I don't know. 13 May They are such touchingly small people. So movingly gone when they're asleep. Yesterday I watched Patch's tail twitching as she began to drift. She was definitely having thoughts. This morning Mouse as usual gobbled the treat nuggets I put down. I wanted Patch to have one too so I touched her back and put one next to her. She glanced at my eyes as if to say What was that for. I realized it's the way they look at my face that makes them people to me. - Just now Mouse is on the dresser in the laundry room. The top drawer is a bit open and he has his long arm down into it fishing for anything he can get. He pulls out a sock. I laugh. Patch curled on the bed looks up. They have a charming word that must mean hello or here I am. Mouse says it to Patch when he jumps up onto the bed where Patch is sleeping. Patch says it to me when he jumps onto the desk where I'm at the computer. It's a voice sound not a body sound, indescribable but vibratory a bit like a one-syllable purr. They also say hello by brushing each other with their bellies. - In awe in awe of Eno. Reading my Eno notes I get mind-blown the way I do with my Orpheus bits. That means a sense of knowing its utter rightness and not being equal to it 15 May A small person with small hands and feet and a large voice. She said she was a man and yes she stomped when she walked and could be pompous and overbearing but that wasn't always what I saw. She had slippery Chinese hair and there was a thing she'd do in company that fascinated us all. She'd put her hand to the elastic holding her hair back and suddenly turn her head so her hair pulled free. Suddenly and just for a second there was a woman in front of us, startlingly beautiful. Working with sound notes seeing how much irrelevance there is in what I took - I couldn't focus the way I do now. 18 Reading my sound notes I'm as if feeling why I stopped making films. The real work is in sound now. Vision isn't abstract enough. If I'd been wise and brave I'd have gone with my pleasure into acoustic composing. What about writing. Writing plays the brain directly. The means are not in the same register as what's evoked. 19 May - If I'd been wise and brave enough, but no: I was wise and brave as a philosopher. I needed to sort something and I could. People who are only artists can sail on intuition without nailing things down. It's a valid conflict and I chose a branch and followed it a long way. 20 May Knofler last night - a pinnacle - the whole stage rocking - choir swaying - orchestra clapping - his loose grace doing exactly what he is - manhood for everyone. Why don't I imagine David Mac like that. He isn't famous, he isn't physical manhood released, he gropes in outer space. He keeps his privacy to be able to do that. He's cosmic. He wants the far edge. -
30 May A pleasure talking to Paul about for instance lying, Mennonite high civilization in the Ukraine, his kids and mine, his cat and mine, aging, Michael Mitchell's death. His so-pleasing warm steady often-eager often-ironical voice. I think I'm slowly very gradually working out what the story needs to be so it isn't useless shameful fantasy. 2 June O little beasts. I wrote that and Patch jumped onto the hassock next to my legs. Here you are, I was just thinking about you! A couple of strokes and she turns around, lies down, licks her flank. Meantime Mouse across the room crying that the bowl is nearly empty, not empty but soon will be. Mouse is intense. Now he's crying because he needs something to do. He's wandering the room with his tail waving above his proud little round anus, sniffing here and there. He looks at me often with sharp distrust but is fierce in demand. When Patch is outside and wants to come in he runs crying loudly all the way to fetch me. Open the door! OPEN THE DOOR! Then sometimes a rare other kind of moment. Yesterday when I was lying down reading he jumped onto the bed, walked deliberately toward my head, lay down with his forepaws on my chest and gazed into my eyes. Then wandered away. Once when I was touching myself he came curiously to smell my breath. He's vividly a child, desperate to learn. Patch's weary trust so moves me, the way she takes shelter, comes to lie near me many times in a day, follows me in the garden, lies under my chair. She's like me always lying down but she can move like lightning too, I've seen her dash to the end of the garden and back chasing with her kid. When they wrestle she's swift and ruthless. But when he has a needy moment and flops down on top of her she scrubs his face - the insides of his ears, his eyes - and he purrs, sometimes latches onto a nipple, which she allows patiently for a while before simply getting up and walking away. Sometimes I'm her mother - she kneads my belly and sucks my shirt button - and I think she must be mine too, I speak to her in a way I've never spoken to anyone. I listen to myself wondering to hear childy feeling without human cautions. I rub my face on her belly many times in a day. I say Sweetheart, here you are. Hello Darly. Nine in the morning, grey light, blue and white irises at the window, the boiler grumbling though it's June, Patch's belly rising and falling at my knee, Mouse gone quiet somewhere out of sight. 4 June I'm watching TV at my desk and look down and see that Patch has carried me a roll of toilet paper using her tiny teeth - hard to do. It's a half-used roll that must have been lost, maybe rolled under the tub, because I don't start more than one at a time. Another day I looked down to see a yellow scrubbie that must have fallen from a shelf above the cellar stairs, maybe fallen as far as the cellar floor. I'm flummoxed, is she meaning to thank me? I often feel baffled by the two of them. I love the moments of understanding, for instance when Patch at the verandah window has scratched lightly to say she wants to come back in we look at each other and then the instant I begin to rise to open the door she begins to move to meet me there. She assumes I'm coming because she knows I've seen her. And Mouse knows he can fetch me to let her in the back door. When I get up to do it he trots beside me as if confidently. I look at his tiny eager back feeling moved that he has to live as so very small a person. 7 June Gloria Moses called from the gate when I was working in the garden. I begged her to stay and visit. We sat under many green plums the size of olives. She wore sparkly earrings and has bunchy brown cheeks, is 79, said she was ten years in Indian school in Lytton. Said that last year she had a skin condition that itched day and night so she was suicidal. I liked her coming out with it like that. I like her so much that I'm outright with her, when she was leaving I said "I took to you". She said "I took to you too, I said 'I have a new friend'." This morning I posted a little Tom piece that has him saying we should buy a dil so I can fuck him. My next post this aft was a photo of Krinkled White opened today, with below it Aunt Hilda saying like. 15 June Can I do anything about what happens with work. I sit down with tea first thing and can work sometimes for half an hour or an hour and then it's as if my brain glances off the work files. Or if I eat or go into the garden it's instantly over. Is it like losing interest? Feeling no grip. Then I give up for the day. Go back to bed and read until I doze and then the rest of the day unless it's warm enough to work in the garden is a waste of time. 20 June I knew how to persist in philosophy. I don't in fiction, I fizz out in project thoughts. This is one too. 21 June Happy at the end of this day, I could work - could bend over weeding or picking strawberries without feeling faint - didn't get tired - didn't eat too much - sat under the plum tree holding Patch, who curled her head into my armpit and went to sleep. I gazed down the new-mown path through long grass. Blossoming mock orange boughs tossed in the wind. More roses open every day. Now Munstead Wood, Alnwick, Morden Sunrise, Lark Ascending, Golden Wings, Darcey Bussell, Sharifa Asma, the Beaverlodge pimpinellifolia, Liis's rugosa and Harison's Yellow on the fenceline, the r.woodsii from next door, Thérèse and Blanc Double still going - is that it? Generous Gardener tomorrow. 22 June The garden has begun to show off to the road. Red and pink Shirley poppies, a strong dark blue salvia at the gate with orange California poppies, paeonies and iris along the path. A young man when I was in the front watering roses with a jar said he always walks past to see it. A woman walking with her friend said she likes to drive by. 7 July When I woke sometime in the night I felt Mouse settling at my knee. When I really woke in beginning daylight he came and peered into my face, purred, turned around, lay against my arm still purring, circled, tossed himself down against me, and on and on until I got up - sniffed my sweat. Patch strolled past below. I have to be careful when I phone Paul. I like talking to him, and who else do either of us talk to now, but he's nervous that I'll overrun him with my old brilliance and nervous the other way too that I'll be needy. He wants me curbed. 16 July Hollyhock masts at the window, white, black-maroon, peach, pale pink, darker pink, ivory, swaying gently. 6am, sun caught in the lower branches of the linden, tip of the Russian olive. Street absolutely still though the biofuel man's truck has small getting-ready lights on. When I'd begun to fade last night my heart went uneasy. Was it vibrating? Was it fluttering? I never know what is happening when it does that. Is it dangerous? So I talked to it. I kept repeating Calm down on the breath, kept having to do it again, waking and changing position and talking myself down. I didn't want to take my pulse at night because I didn't want to be still more anxious but when I took it this morning it was so weak that at first I couldn't find it. - Some nights ago when I had the verandah door open Mouse was outside wandering on the paths cut around the edges of the long grass. I was wanting him inside so I could start shutting doors so I was chasing him but he kept dashing ahead. We went round and round in the near dark, I in my socks, he a light fleet young creature down there in the stubble enchanted by little white moths. 17 July Always feel that I am wonderfully slowed down and brought into a realm of senses feeling and thought all inseparable. sue. thank you. 'senses and feeling and thought all inseparable' is what i've worked my whole life to try to be and i do thank you for noticing. 18 July This moment a van slowing outside the windows, a woman with a pink phone leaning out excitedly taking a photo of my hollyhocks. 20 July When I pass through the kitchen door a blast of sweetpea scent. Next to the sink Graham Thomas with carrot flower in a vase. On the other counter four crimson velvet heads of Munstead Wood. On the plate rail in front of this chair a single soft cream Litchfield Angel nodding next to my pinch pot. Another with the two NASA xeroxes. On the desk the pink vase with scents of Generous Gardener and Sharifa Asma. Flower scents in the house are what I mean by wealth. Patch saying mmrrrr twice and jumping onto the hassock. 24 July These nights I've been often awake feeling my heart bumping my chest wall, which I think goes with a chaotic pulse. Somewhere toward morning when I woke worried by that Mouse came onto the bed and flopped down next to my chest and vibrated quietly against me. When he got up and wandered away a bit later my heart felt better. 26 For the last couple of days and nights my heart is scaring me almost all the time except when I'm working in the garden or distracting myself with work or iPad TV. Now it's not vibrating but bumping in the way it does when pulse is very uneven. - Just now Mouse and Patch and I gazing at the twilight garden, I in the silver chair on one edge of the porch, Patch sitting straight in the centre, Mouse on his folded paws on the other edge, spaced and motionless together under an ivory glow that picked out the white flowers - silverlace on the garage roof, tall anise hyssop, bowing clumps of carrot flower. Mosquitoes were out. In the dark kitchen behind us hot jars were cooling on the counter, red currant jam and raspberry preserves. I'd picked the currants in the morning and gone out again when it was cooler to water and weed. 6 August Yesterday I got on the ladder and picked apricots. There were 30 or 40. I canned 7 half-pints and have been drying a trayful. They're so so good. 8 August Stranger tales. The journal's very short stories of people's lives. The Vietnamese day trader, Eric from the Rim. They marvel. Coast Starlight is another whole short book about America. 11 August Late in the afternoon I weeded the way I used to, focused and tireless for hours. The garden has shifted into autumn, I'm having to clear beds. Pulled garlic and onions and spread them in the garage. Hollyhocks that weren't watered are bare poles. Rob's clematis is thick in the grape's arms. Alnwick and Lark Ascending in rich second flush. Scent of stargazers next to me. Almost the moment I came awake, heart or whatever it is vibrating, Mouse was there black in the dark crouching against my chest. 23 August This afternoon I got into the box of Mary's letters, approx 1961 to 1975. Dashed through them - not all of them - hating her. I wrote letters to make them laugh. That's a courtesy she didn't have. She wrote letters to try to hold me. She is so heavy. Hunger and concern, worry and reproach, and always lying about Ed. Then in 1966 the crisis about sex and after that more about god. At 9:30 when I stopped my systolic was 178 up from 131. Near the bottom of the pile were a couple of my later notes - 1992? - brief, written in lower case pencil, so even, so light they were like stepping into free air. I'd made it out. - Heap of pages written small and edge to edge. She names things but doesn't describe them. Mostly she names people. Her letters are full of encounters. It's not only her, it's their way of life, in a small fixed community people are large in each other's view. In her it's quite a blank largeness. There isn't enjoyment of being, just a miasma of need. And there I am in relation to them a ruthless girl unshakeably sure of myself. I hold out against her distress. When Ed is embarrassed and furious that Judie and I have fucked Rasheed and been found out by the Bible Institute I tell him his crimes against Paul. I demolish them firmly, reasonably: what you believe is useless to me. Really, wow. "You found out you didn't need anybody." Is that the way of it? It says yes. 26 August When I wake in the dark I say Mousie? quietly a couple of times. Then I hear him say Meee somewhere on the floor and know he's coming. Here's his black silhuoette against the windows. Drops light and warm between my upper arm and ribs, purrs. I stroke his velvet back. I'll want more but he won't stay long.When I wake in the dark I say Mousie? quietly a couple of times. Then I hear him say Meee somewhere on the floor and know he's coming. Here's his black silhuoette against the windows. Drops light and warm between my upper arm and ribs, purrs. I stroke his velvet back. I'll want more but he won't stay long. 3 September Garden beginning to be bare as I clear out dead stuff, bare and dry. Flat row of tomato vines with small orange fruit. Silverlace vine heaped on the garage roof flowering thick and full of bees. Alyssum foamed up all under the apricot and around the little fig sometimes scenting the porch. Little birds in the high sunflower heads. Plum halves drying in the sun. 5 September I think it was Mouse left a grasshopper on the carpet by my chair. 8 September There's a lanky patch of sunflowers, the kind with small heads, that seeds itself down next to the cherry tree every year. When the seeds ripen in early September it's busy with small birds all day. Patch follows them with her eyes but doesn't get excited. Mouse, though, crouches below them staring up with his round yellow eyes. 10 September Dark at almost 6, dark but clear, palest yellow above the hill, one bright star moving out of sight in an upper pane. Scent of nasturtiums. O planet Earth. California is burning, Corral Canyon and Bobcat Meadows where I camped the first time out, the Pine Valley trail where Tom and I walked north and he was willing to hear any number of names of bushes. - By 7 the sky is bright ivory and there is a crow on the apex of the church's steep strong roof. 12 September I posted Orion with its graceful paragraphs from many times. Grace of pleasure in time given. 17 September Evening - pleased because I made grape juice - cut a great heap, washed them, sat on the porch pulling them off their stems, set up the steam juicer and learned to use it - was doubtful would the taste be wrong - canned 5 white-wine-colored half pints and 2 pints, froze a plastic soup-container full and put the half-glass left over in the fridge. Got it out when it was chilled. Thrillingly delicious. Tomorrow I'll want to pick what I'd left for the birds too and maybe some plums for juice. There are still pears to come but nation-wide shortage of jars and lids. 20 September She sent us a book, Why wait for marriage, not understanding that her own marriage had already convinced us of what we had to evade. If she had said, I'm an example of what you mustn't do, I was a virgin led to the slaughter, too ignorant, too intimidated, too silenced, too deceived to be anything but helpless in what they'd made me sign up for, then I could have had confidence in her, I could have said I'm out here in the world fighting those wrongs for you, I'm your scout, I'm your warrior. 21 September That was interesting, I declared the hate and found the love in a loyalty that has held through the whole of my life. - Little Mouse at night flopping down between my upper arm and ribs, nosing into my armpit, giving my bicep a little bite, reaching his soft paw to touch my mouth. Light bones in silken fur, warm and thrumming, so sweet an armful. 22 September There hasn't been a frost yet though the sky is clear again. The garden is emptier but there's a spreading flood of alyssum under the apricot, lapping the porch. Late roses. Brilliant orange of Calif poppies either side of the gate, showing against the drying-out row of magenta cosmos. After I'd juiced plums I added orange juice and zest to the pulp - bit of honey - and made two pints of something delicious, not exactly jam, sauce? 5 October I posted lummi marsh this morning. I'm proud of it. It's full and free. The place and time and the people meeting them are in balance in it. It shows the accomplishment my life was aiming for from the beginning. Ros said write about liberation. Now I can say write liberation itself. - Would the writing of the ideal man look weak beside the story of the actual men. 6 October I posted the obscure piece called Orphée this morning and then went into the Tom stories folder where I kept finding story after story so bright and brisk and lightly balanced that I thought they should be the book and call it Tom stories. 8 October Golden trees all over town. The linden turned overnight. Today is the day it's unleafing. 14 October The garden this morning wet and misty like October in London. I took photos. 15 October I particularly like the photo of two apples on their branch wet with rain and shining in the mist's all-surrounding light. What I like most about it is that I grew them. I grew Cox's Orange Pippins! That London name from the fruiterer's shop on Swain's Lane in 1970. Coxes and Bramleys the specifically English apples and Coxes tasting like no apples Canada had ever seen. I bought the little tree my first spring here, seized it in the nursery row as soon as I saw it. It was the first tree I bought and the garden wasn't ready for it yet so it stood under the plum tree in its pot until its place in the far corner was ready a year later. It's prone to leaf-roller moth and this year I solved that problem almost well enough. - I really am so frightened of what it means if Trump wins this election. 16 October Yesterday morning before the sun rose I opened the door onto the first frost of the year. Went out and took photos of frozen leaves in the tender light of a completely open sky. 17 October I thought of the long-trip family photo and the Enno story during the night and this morning trimmed enough of the 13-year-old's gush so I could post it. It had somehow occurred to me that there was something about a story of a thirteen year old girl meeting a twenty year old farm boy in a Marine's uniform - he having stopped because he wanted to talk to a girl and ending dragged to church by her parents - and just candidly telling the tale. What took me there and what I was really telling it for, though, was the moment when he said "You'll be like this until you're seventeen." It was friendly and direct and amused. Maybe he had sisters. Was he right? Sixteen maybe; till I had a real boyfriend. People liked it, even Rowen who never comments, and I like it too, the excited girl writer and the old woman writer sixty-two years later who has earned a dozen people willing to read her. The girl's writing has a foamy surface but under it there's a firm talented sense of what details to tell. The black glove rapping on the glass. The small farm in Indiana. Daddy's loud guffaw. "I knew he'd say a proper goodbye so I opened the camper's window and waited." 22 October I phoned Rowen to ask what he'd liked about the Enno piece. He paused carefully and said it told him things about my dad. A bit further on he said it was cinematic, he saw it. 23 October Full dark at almost 7 and may be snowing all day. Bits of inventing DM. Photo more like him than any so far. At moments I feel I'm really creating him. What I'm mostly wanting is how lovely he is in bed. Slow. 24 October What is it about the photo. I'm gripped by it and startled by it. It's really someone. I'd like it if DM looked like that but it's startling to have him look like anyone, my imaginary men have always been perfectly faceless. As I describe him I can see I'm in some ways describing myself. He has my virtues appreciated by me as they haven't been appreciated in me. I also see how far Tom was from what I actually want. 28 October Posted the story of Ladner dyke with David. Such flow and balance and exactness. Yesterday a famous poet's book about her marvelous husband's death so without any of those qualities that I ripped through it annoyed: why do people write such abstract summaries, don't tell us about your life, get into your moments, give us that. "Are you writing a memoir?" "Not exactly I think." - Notebooks all over the place. I'd been a student in high-end abstraction and now I was studying material world - child-raising, pottery, construction, gardening, housing, photography, yoga and meditation, design, nutrition, sex, education. Feminism. How to live. There are a lot of film notes but they're a waste until I get to the experimental film course. Where to enter work life. 1 November Yesterday I posted Desser's photo of me in the Academy Hotel when I was 24. I posted it because hardly anyone had been noticing recent posts even when they were good. People like personal history photos but not personal writing. So: 17 people including two Jims, two Bens, etc. Today I'm posting something philosophical again but with a photo. The relation of the writing and the photo will likely not be interesting to anyone. 4 November Such a pall of discouragement these years, that the stupid and greedy and resentful and deluded are being allowed to smash the gains good government had made. That men even now are determined to keep women down. That 43 percent of women are complicit.4 6 November in a way, my contribution will be more on a theoretical basis, about suggesting greater freedom Eno about his music. I like it as a description of the writing in my FB posts. - Early afternoon the sun had come out. I was at the monitor. Heard a meow, Patch at my feet looking up into my face. She had said a word. As I got up to cross the room she ran ahead of me because she had understood that I had understood. I opened the door and she ran out. It's the first time it happened that way, she'll ask to be let out when I'm in the kitchen but she had never come to another room to ask me for something. I keep not being able to say how personally I feel her. The look on her face when she was saying what she said, which was Please, struck to my heart: you really need this. 7 November I'd posted the paragraph about Patch coming to ask for something and then taken a photo to post with it, of Patch gazing at the frozen garden from the porch. I love its colors. Her glossy black and brown fur in live focus with the frozen space she's seeing in soft pastel, and something about the bands of white, black and grey underneath her as if they mark her locatedness. 8 November Seeing what the whole of a photo says or suggests is more sophisticated than my readers are. Default setting is to see an object against a minimally noticed background. In taking the photo it's the uncon that sees the whole as such. Maybe in some of them seeing it the uncon sees it too. 11 November Inventing DM's work formation seeing I'm describing my own. Minimalism and the notion of engineering attention, loyalty to beauty and wonder as forms of love of the world, interest in being, interest in the uncon, recognition of the notion of field, recognition of quality of being in others and in work, ethic of quality of consciousness in himself. Wanting work to be ultimately metaphysical. 16 November 3:18pm, thick snow at the window. It's Monday, two high school girls walking home with their hoods up and heads down. I've cranked the thermostat. 20 November Patch is so mean to him and yet he's so devoted. Just now he came from the kitchen crying all the way. He's telling me she wants to come in. I go to open the door. There she is. 21 Novvember When she sleeps on the floor he sleeps nearby. When she goes to the bowl to eat so does he, their two backs bent forward side by side. When she goes out he has to go too; he knows she wants to stop him so he shoots past out of reach. Saturday morning, clear sky, 7:28 the moment of shining ivory and black twigs. Saturday morning quiet in the streets. A chimney behind the spruce tree breathing sideways across Hamilton Hill. Its hunting evenness of flow. And now it's rising against the sky, a gnarl in the air. Interlibrary loan pile yesterday. I'm so critical now when I read. I used to be able to read anything, by pinning myself down taking notes that later were mostly useless or by just racing along plucking bits that struck me for reasons of my own. Now I have to see the sloppy metaphysics, trivial characters, implausible details, falseness of voice, faults of style. I get impatient and start skimming and then it's over, I might as well just stop. 23 November There was Patch lying on the floor on her back, opened like a loaf torn lengthwise, legs spread wide, paws limp. She looked so self-enjoying that I laughed. She folded instantly, rolled over, walked away: don't laugh at me. 24 Novvember 6 in the morning, cats outside in the dark. I stand on the threshold and call. Mousie! Come on, it's cold! Black shape flowing over Doug's fence. Which one is it. Yes Mouse. It still thrills me a bit when I call and they come. The times Patch is at the foot of the garden and flies straight up the path. 26 November Eric Newby 1966 Slowly down the Ganges. All those books I couldn't read but why can I read this one. It's not empty. He's doing something intrinsically interesting and he's just taking notes. "There were villages on the left bank now. At a place called Ferojpur, where there was a landing place with a big flight of stone steps, women with baskets on their heads were carrying sand up from three high-sterned country boats." "According to the stationmaster, the distance to Raoli was eighteen and a half miles. We set off at three thirty, by which time the wind had dropped, but three-quarters of an hour later we were still footling about above the bridge." - Those two completely at random and perfectly typical. I guess its charm is what it doesn't do. There's very occasional mild humour but he never seems to be trying. We see the river, we see the sky. We see what he's seeing and that's just right. The idea of perfection: the poetry and prose of Paul Valéry. I believed the review and sent for it. Am so fed up with it I won't name the editor-translator. It's the opposite of Newby, nothing to be seen but a man poking his neurosis over and over. "Ah! To delay being me. Why, this morning, should I choose myself? - What if I left behind my name, my torments, my chains, my truths, like dreams in the night?" Inflation and abstraction, a vapid nothing. I liked Valéry's epistemology, I admired how far he'd got in his time, but his notebooks make me ashamed. 29 November Liking to imagine DM's reserve and competence. Ways he's the opposite of Tom: he doesn't lie, he doesn't flatter, he doesn't sell, he doesn't seduce, he isn't an addict, he has money, he feels his body and looks after himself physically, he isn't sexually jaded, is intelligent in bed. He's organized, he's educated and traveled, is curious, holds his temper, is ambitious and thoroughly committed in work, follows through, has physical skill, mechanical skill, high spatial intelligence, country love and knowledge, is generous in conversation, not at all misogynistic, has warm eyes, is affectionate when he can be, socially aware but autonomous, accurately protective when he decides to be, thinks for the whole in as large a way as possible, feels his pain, doesn't hide from it. Has an engineering sense of human relations: what's the best way to do this, best for everyone. Is curious rather than distressed by differences. Is sad rather than angry. a courage carried lightly, without expression It was all there. It had manners. It was sad to a depth that no lead sounded He comes from a similar latitude. 3 December Mouse is sick. Yesterday many times a horrible sound of retching, foamy yellow puddles. It went on all day. He was wanting to hide behind the tub, under the bed. Did he have a fever, I couldn't tell. He was breathing faster than usual. Sometimes I'd hear little mouth sounds. I was thinking of times the daycare phoned and said to come and get Rowen because he had a fever. I'd sit in the armchair next to the kitchen window holding him through the afternoon. Afterward he'd be better and I'd be drained. I was hoping I was doing that for Mouse. This morning when I'd turned on the light in the kitchen he was there on the floor. A really plaintive cry and then he was retching pitiably again. Now he's in the farthest corner under the bathtub. I'll have to phone the vet. I'm mourning his lovely spunkiness and sweetness. Is he going to die? 4 December He's at the vet. This morning he was feeble enough so I could get him into the carrier. His distress cry is a bleat of pure misery. He'd come from his hiding place into the middle of the floor and I'd hear it once or twice before he retched. I'd get a tissue and wipe up his little spots of yellow bile. Then he'd find another hiding place and he'd lie quiet for three hours before it happened again. If I touched him he'd move out of reach. This morning at 5:30 I heard him retching from my bed. When I got up to wipe he settled on my blankets. We slept for another three hours and then he threw up where he was. He doesn't stay where he's vomited so then he was crouched next to the water bowl without moving on and on. I put a towel over him and bundled him into the carrier. Yesterday he was strong enough to fight but this morning he was so done-in he had no fight left. I went to bed last night feeling what concern is like. I don't want his dearness to end, his so-particularness. I remember the sweet way he'd reach to touch my mouth; his loud cries coming to fetch me when Patch was at the door and his eager trot beside me going to let her in; his unfathomable yellow stare; his gormless wondering gaze from the floor when he was a little scrap; his careful but determined dashes out the door past Patch; the way through the summer he'd come from the verandah when I was awake in heart distress and called him; his valiant wrestles with Patch, the way he'd keep coming through she was heavy and mean; his dances with a dead leaf or a hanging shirt in the closet; his delight in hunting flies, the way he'd leap up a window pane and actually catch them; his disappointed cries when he couldn't get at the bird on the top shelf; his silkiness; his long-necked long-chinned Egyptian beauty; his strong fine-grained electrical field; the touching way he'd creep into my armpit; his ADHD boy-restlessness; his timidity, his fear of anyone but me, his mad scramble to get under the bed when Kathy arrives; his gallops with Patch straight through the garden and back; his sadness when Patch started driving him off; in the morning his chirping cries at the cellar door when he heard me awake; his lonely crying when he didn't know what to do with himself. 5 December He's not vomiting anymore but he isn't eating and he's been hiding behind the sofa in the bedroom since I brought him home. I'm sending Patch outside so he won't be frightened and he did come out but he was crying pitifully and licking his mouth. It seemed he was wanting me to help but I was useless and he went back to the narrow dark notch he was in all night. I feel almost sick with worry. 6 December Yesterday I was so stressed feeling for him that I needed to talk to someone. I phoned Rob. I'm telling that because though it's what other people do it's not what I do. 7 December When his room was dark last night he came bumping me with his head purring and when I lay down next to him he crept into my armpit in his old way. This morning he threw up again but walked out into the kitchen to be with me. Now he's lying under the desk lamp breathing too fast. - Took him to the vet again. More anti-nausea meds, rehydration, maybe a feeding tube. Now most of the anguish is uncertainty and waiting. - He's at the vet's overnight, drip fluids, barium to x-ray his bowel. It took until 4:30 for the vet to speak to me, a hard day. 8 December Mouse isn't worse. He hasn't pooped yet but the barium is in his colon. They want to keep him on fluids for the rest of the day so I should pick him up at 4:15. They'll leave the needle in but capped for now. 11 December Snow this morning. Photos of paw prints and the street. 12 December Mouse threw up again. Yesterday morning too, just once. He's licking his mouth a lot. He's so thin. I'm worried by how little he eats. The sick feeling of dread. 13 December A new Vancouver-based journal is launching early next year with a focus of regional experimental art, and I've been invited to write a piece for their moving-image art section. I've actually been wanting to dedicate more words to your practice, and, in particular, the lasting significance of Trapline (one of the finest Canadian film works ever, in my humble), so I've proposed a profile on, well, you! Shaun this morning. 15 December gives us his world for its own sake, because he is attached to it work not of one poet but of many 16 its main concerns - water, stone and light Luke's birthday tomorrow. Fifty. Ice in my belly at the thought of phoning him. Years of always phoning him on his birthday, liking to. I've sent him as if a card instead, just a photo of Mouse. 18 December First there's regret at the loss of his lovely small being, his company; and then increasingly there's dread of stress, which feels like illness. They say come for him at 1:15. The phone rings and it's Paul Molnar. He said Mouse doesn't seem to want to get well. He says yes I can inject the anti-nauseas and steroids at home as needed. When I was trying to say I think Mouse is going to die I choked. He filled in, You want him to be at home and comfortable. I said in my choked way The vomiting is so horrible. I trusted him enough to feel that burst with him. - He's in the back room. Sofa useful. I've read or watched the iPad there so he can have company. He drinks, eats, is restless, climbs onto me, jumps off. Lies against my legs, lies on the floor. Cries. Is so so thin. His little face is pinched. 19 Still dark at 7:15, short open slot showing pale on the eastern edge. Amaryllis buds have opened to red loudspeakers pointing in four directions. Christmas week, should I go up the hill for a tree. My thought for Christmas dinner is ice cream with plum sauce. Maybe a roast chicken? Mouse lying on the chair's arm next to me quiet but open-eyed as if he can't completely let go. He wants to be near or touched by me all the time. His silky fur is rough. - When I replied to Luke I said briefly that I'm in a hard time with a dying cat. It was a test. If it's really love you'll want to reply to that. If you're just having a moment when you like yourself you will ignore it in Ed's old way of ignoring what a woman says. 20 December Mouse is quiet this morning, not eating, poorly I think. When I was getting the hypodermic ready my left hand was shaking. Still dark at 7:15, short open slot showing pale on the eastern edge. Amaryllis buds have opened to red loudspeakers pointing in four directions. Christmas week, should I go up the hill for a tree. Mouse lying on the chair's arm next to me quiet but open-eyed as if he can't completely let go. He wants to be near or touched by me all the time. His silky fur is rough. - When I replied to Luke I said briefly that I'm in a hard time with a dying cat. It was a test. If it's really love you'll want to reply to that. If you're just having a moment when you like yourself you will ignore it in Ed's old way of ignoring what a woman says. 21 December Solstice. It's right to have a tree of lights in the house. Eighteen inches? It snowed fast all day. When I opened the door for Patch she was faced with a wave of solid stuff twice her height. I sit with Mouse in the back room to give him company and watch his signs. He's weak and still, lies gazing as if sadly. I'm more peaceful with his illness now, settled into making him comfortable at least. His vomiting was the worst but there's something now I can do if it happens again. He's thinner every day. 22 December Patch on the bed, Mouse on the corner of the desk where he can see her, boiler grumbling, tree's bright spangles in a line between them, pale sky lightening over a thick rutted porridge of snow. Patch on the bed, Mouse on the corner of the desk where he can see her, boiler grumbling, tree's bright spangles in a line between them, pale sky lightening over a thick rutted porridge of snow. I'm seeming to myself to be on a good keel but when I'm watching something on the iPad I'm instantly and repeatedly cracking into tears. 28 December 4:38, streetlight glinting orange on icicles at the window, tree's lights reflected on the floor, quiet lamplight, Mouse on the rug, Patch at my knee, a good room. I've been mulling Louie. I'm baffled by the way after 15 years she's still hanging onto a bad mood. Friendship's strict limit the way she hates me when I love anyone but her. Hates. There's nothing more to say about that is there. 30 December Mouse vomited again this morning. Emilee in intensive care with liver failure. Neighbours shoveling their sidewalk and sprinkling salt. Icicles longer every day and weeping slowly. So pleased that Shaun called last light a stunning work. 31 December I was talking to Tom in my head last night, saying that my stories about being with him are a female On the road. I've posted new year's eve 1996 this morning and like it as a story of presence and happenstance. "You're the one I can have the real adventure with." 2 January A year ago today Angie opened an animal carrier on the floor by the bed and two small beings crept out, a blotchy small mama I thought ugly and a silky terrified mouse of a cat who dashed under the bed and stayed there till I pried him off, clawing into the rug when I wanted to put the two of them into the back room for the night. Today Patch my respected commensal and poor skeletal disrupted young Mouse resting on the sofa's arm with a look of dumb stoic endurance. 3 January Frustrated by the vets' lack of analysis. I want it laid out: this is what we have eliminated, these are the remaining possibilities, this is how we are going to test each. Their heads are too weak: they've learned procedures and when those don't work they flounder. At the moment all I can do is watch. 6 January Mouse came in my bed when I called him in the dark. 3am. Lay against me just bones in skin. He doesn't purr now, doesn't vibrate at all. I lay trying to have both hands on him somewhere in case it could circuit some kind of goodness through him. Was praying. Was saying to him You helped me when I was sick and I want to help you now. Maybe feeling him carefully could help him? He hardly moved but when he did I tried to be with him in it. - The Dems in Georgia have won majority in the Senate. Maga people stormed the Capital because the pig pres told them to. 8 January Mouse lies all day under the lamp on my sweater on the kitchen table. I read up on how to tell when a cat is dying. He's skeletal with fur all disordered and dusty. I don't want to take him to be killed by the vet. I look at the garden wondering whether any of the soil is thawed enough to dig. Many times in a day cracking into wet eyes. 10 January So touching the way Mouse though starving, down to 6lb, comes crying weakly to fetch me to open the door for Patch. 16 January Mouse is weaker, fell this morning when he tried to jump onto the table. But he still and always walks with tail high. 19 January Freya says they're inducing today. Class photo from grade one. The photographer must have told the girls in the front row to cross their ankles. A line of us with scuffed toes. I look brighter than the rest of them but when I enlarge the photo my expression starts to look more uncertain. I posted that yesterday and today I put together what I've remembered from Pinto Creek sawmill. We're in our cabin on a bright evening, waiting for supper guests. There's a radio on a high shelf and I'm sitting under it on a little bench listening to the children's program on CFGP. It's my birthday and I'm waiting to hear the radio man say my name. - Wandering alone in my red snowsuit. Tall trees, blazing whiteness, blue sky, smell of sawdust. There's a creek with a ramp of trampled snow, horses' hoof prints around a hole chopped in ice. Then a snowdrift slanting so high and hard I can walk up it onto a cabin's slanting roof. Stovepipe sticking up. I'm so high! - Bunk bed along a north wall. I'm sitting back in the lower bunk with a book on my lap, sounding letters one by one. Suddenly they connect. I'm reading! What was it about those moments. Are they all moments of self-awareness. The moment of learning to read is like a flashbulb going off. Going out into the bright day alone is what I've gone on being. - A little crash from the other room. Painful. Mouse has fallen when he was trying to jump. From my bed this morning I heard tiny crunching sounds, Mouse eating a kibble. I lie there longing for the sound to go on but it doesn't. 20 January The woman I didn't like, though I had no good reason not to like her, has died. I'd see her riding her bike past my window, toward the high school I thought, or walking her floppy old dog. How is it people I don't know can feel like a loss. John the very old man who every day used to plod past with his walker staring at the ground. Hughie across the street with one of his junk cars. Because they're there one feels they're like a tree or building, permanent, but then they vanish. 21 January We're so tired but we will share details and more photos tomorrow. Rowen is an amazing partner, and a wonderful and overjoyed father. Gideon Odysseus Cirulis by caesarean at 4am. 23 January Five in the morning, I'm at the desk, Mouse comes to my feet. He wants to be in company I guess. I lift him onto the table so he can lie under the lamp. He is so thin now that when he lies down it's as if his bones fold flat inside his fur. I was on the phone with Rob last night and remembered after a while that Patch was still outside. It was dark. I turned on the porch light and called out. Saw her black shape moving along the top edge of the lattice. She heard me, ran down the lattice strips like a ladder, galloped up the path. - This morning looking for text to go with rusty slope.jpg I found Pinsky's Dante scraps. What it is in Ezra and Dante is sound. Isn't it the same rhythm in Dante as in Pound when I like him? And that other quality hard to name, something in word choice that's aslant but perfectly exact. Who else has that. Shakespeare, Dickenson. 26 January Oh little Mouse. 8 on a white and grey morning. He came from his spot under the lamp and struggled to jump onto the work chair's arm so he could be with me and Patch who's asleep at my knee. He lies alone most of the day but has times when he needs the company of our family clump. Is he suffering? His face so thin and still. I'd want to hold him but he'd struggle away. Another kind of ruin: Louie has listed her place. I looked at the realtor's photos feeling she is wrecking my work as well as her own, its beauties constructed over twenty years. My hand in them: the wonderful sofa, the ficus tree, my eye at first and then her ambition. - There he settles flatter with his chin on his arm, his flank breathing slowly. He hears cars passing. His eyes are half open, is he seeing the sky? White sky, one dove. He looks so stoical and sad it's hard to bear. 27 January I look down from the desk and Mouse is crouching at my feet. There's a smell. I get up and look. Dabs and smears all the way up the corridor, he didn't made it to the box. I think he probably has it on his feet, get him onto the table with warm water. A mess of shit around his anus and then a long black thread he's had in his bowel for two months. I pull it. He cries out, it's stuck. A sudden hope. I call the vet and take him in. I go home and wash floors. Dr Molnar phones. He doesn't want it to be the thread because if it is he missed it. I say Mouse absolutely has had no access to thread since he got sick. He says Mouse may not survive anaesthetic. I say he'll die anyway. I say if the surgery goes badly he has my permission but I want to be there. He tries to put me off: he'll be asleep, he won't know you're there. I hold firm, it's important for more than one reason. Last night I fetched Mouse from the white blanket in the laundry room because he'd seemed lonely and I wanted to hold him. He wouldn't stay held but he lay on the arm of the chair beside me. Today when he'd pooped himself it was as though he came to me for help. - Molnar called me in. I was standing at the door of the little operating room. Both of us were in masks. Mouse was draped on a table. Molnar said the thread was tied around the base of Mouse's tongue and ran all the way through his gut. I could see round lengths of bowel and the black thread's tangle in the mesothelium, Molnar had already made cuts in the stomach and bowel and would have had to make more. I said we should stop. While the drug was going into his IV I had my hand on Mouse's chest, could see breath moving his bowels. Saw the breath had stopped. Molnar put a stethoscope to his chest. "There's nothing." I asked how long it would take him to sew the incision closed, I'd wait in the jeep. I closed him in the sewing room probably because I wanted to leave the back door ajar when I was chasing Patch. I forgot I'd left the drawer with spools of thread open on the blue chest. Then when I'd caught Patch I forgot Mouse was closed in that room. When I remembered I saw the open drawer. I thought, not good. I'm not sure whether it was the next day or later he started vomiting. I told Molnar he was having trouble eating and that he'd been in a sewing room but he didn't follow up on those clues. He didn't see the thread (he said) because it was at the very base of his tongue. Maybe if it had been white? It didn't show in x-rays - he said. Were they negligent? I can't know. I took a photo a couple of days ago of his sadness. It seems to me to show his sweetness grown tragic. I've posted it but not said why. I don't want them to make it about me. As it is they just feel his beauty and say love to him. 28 January Dr Molnar carried my crate and the box out to the jeep. I met him at the hatch. It was dark by then. He had the goodness to stand with me for a bit. He wanted to say it was hard for them too and to excuse himself but I didn't care about that. I just needed to say a few things. Dear Mouse is in the freezer wrapped in the scarf I bought to wear with a red coat. I see him the way he was these last weeks standing on his thin legs looking up, having to be so small and so unhelped. - I just need to say again and again Mouse I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Now I understand the way he kept working his mouth. He was trying to get the thread off his tongue. If I'd pushed Molnar to look again when I thought to .... I asked. Molnar said maybe nausea. What it was about him. Innocence, true-heartedness. Ardency, timidity. Grace. The way he'd reach with his soft paw to touch my mouth. At the end a quiet stoicism that felt so deep. 2 February This morning pieced together Mouse's obit and posted it. Deleted everyone's messages of sympathy. Photo of Mouse when he was little lying with Patch on the floor. 3 February I miss caring for Mouse. 4 February I meant I miss the sensation of caring. I picture him standing on his thin legs with paws a bit turned out, looking a long way up, a little scrap of sentient being. I'd pick him up to set him under the lamp and there'd be so little of him left, he'd be so light and loose. As the tea was brewing I'd start to brush his fur and he'd stand up because he wanted more of it. I'd have to brush carefully not to press on his bones. This morning after many good months I woke with a scary chaotic heartbeat again. I wondered whether caring for Mouse regulated it, whether it needs to love to work right. 8 February Arctic air pouring down, by Wednesday night maybe -30. Have wrapped the roses with blankets, curtains, spruce boughs, dead alyssum, tarps, garbage bags, a sleeping bag for Graham Thomas, a featherbed shared by Alnwick and Henri Martin. 15 February In bed a few nights ago, briefly slotted among the usual dissolving thoughts, a cat's right leg from the knee down, black fur - just the leg - reaching softly to touch me. It was Mouse. 19 February
2 March Banging heart woke me at 1:30. When I was standing in the dark at the bedroom window there were five deer on Granite Ave just next to the rowan tree. They seemed large and sturdy, stood listening. One of them had its ears turned toward me though it couldn't see me. Then they walked quietly west. I keep feeling I have one too few cats. 4 March The yellow Peugeot I bought in PB in the autumn of 2002 for $70 is sold to someone who wanted it badly for $50 and I have bought a white step-through cruiser Travis will assemble. Planted peas and sweetpeas. Started Wilczek on mass and light. The man who bought the bike said when he passes the garden in summer it calms him. 5 March Will be 76 tomorrow.
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