14 April 2007
Thursday we woke up to half-a-foot of snow on the ground
yesterday was bright and warm, grasses and fruit blossoms
I thought then to wear a bright dress to work today but
damn! it's pouring rain this morning, so back to protective denim.

My aunt in Louisiana phoned the shop yesterday to tell me
of their pygmy goat in labor too long
and the head of the dead kid stuck
part-way out, and the rush to the surgeon.

5:30 a.m.      What month is this? Mar ... no April, oh
I remember, I've been writhing and night-
maring about taxes, till I remembered
"cut-off date" does not equal guillotine.

This feels good, waking early and writing. I would like to say I've missed it, but in the weeks of absent impulse I've missed nothing. March was the shop's worst month since its opening 16 months ago, and I could order no books and the shelves have grown anemic. That mercenary alarm, and the tax bit looming, and all accounts in disarray since December's move, receipts and statements disappeared, and the body swooning and drooping: no poetry there, only sleeping late napping napping and in other hours reading compulsively

convulsions of Shakespeare
I spend my late evenings stalking
the seventeenth earl of Oxford,
dear Edward, threading behind the scent.

I did take off a Wednesday afternoon
to drive employeeRory 'round
the SurpriseValley, where he's never
been, so he finally might under-
stand all the fuss, and see where
half our customers hail from.
I found the place suddenly changed, with
an Internet espresso place, and
a gallery in the saddlery, and a
billboard at the four-corners promoting
"6-acre ranchettes."

I tried some Journeys, those mental
forays into inner dimensions
(infernal dementia) that so fascinate me.
In one I was guided down a
broad thoroughfare to a capitol dome
and briefly I imagined myself supinated limp
across father Lincoln's alabaster knees
like the Pieta.
In another I swan deep and deeper
till I bumped against a living wall of whale-hide
there was no getting past.

In a high moment this week
I told a dream to a shop-customer friend
as though it were prophecy.
She countered (her husband a psychologist) Jungian, with
      a certain more internal perspective.
Yes, I said, yes, you're right,
and I let it go--but doesn't she get it?
I thought later
(later, when I got it)
that all this outer is only projected inner?
That all this "inner" is just the breeder
      for molecular circumstance?
The scales fall away ...

6 a.m. Do I go make a Serious cup of coffee?
or slide down
under the down
and go back (go back!)
to sleep? O let's be strong:
coffee it is, then.

Two earls to tell of today.
I mentioned Edward Oxenford already,
whose labors of love were lost behind Shake-speare's mask.
But I found another earl, as well, recently, and sent for
the little book Near False Creek Mouth
Earl Birney's poems from 1964 Vancouver. He wrote I guess mostly in the '40s and taught at the University of British Columbia and an image I find personally devastating from a poem called "Memory no servant," its last line--
        But what I can be certain not to forget:
            ten feet from the first bridge
            on the highway north from the town
            a turtle coming up from the gulf
            Both wheels ran over its middle
            The sound      a crushed carton
            Looking back:
            the untouched head
            ancient      stretched      and still
            moving

(Strange thing about living in town now. I am not privy to the conversations of wilderness birds but can hear the mews and cries of gulls who populate the vacant lots here. I used to see them before in fields, I remember, just after plowing, but their daily cries at all hours, this is new to me--or renewed, inasmuch as they were ever-present in my Culver City childhood.
These, I suppose, must be the inland,
Mormon gulls
fond of locusts and alkali.)

But I find behind these Birney lines
a pointed kind of racism, dated chauvinism,
and a lot that bugs me.
So I suppose I'll do with the moving head
of the crushed tortoise
where the book falls open anyway.
and re-price it and put it on the shop shelf.