i’d almost forgotten summer.

it is absolutely sweltering here already in my second-floor carolina bedroom where i have the window unit blasting for a few minutes before bed and the other window shimmed up with a fat stack of books because it refuses to stay open on its own. there is additionally the tail-end of a good hangover, a new pile of blankets on the floor at the foot of my bed, and the question of how long i should hang around here with this crazy gang of artist kids who move at warp speed when my washington is warming to a mild, slow, river-swimming summer. i wonder also why this fox site has devolved into posts like this, all of which are tagged with “men,” and i wonder which men i will survive this summer.
things that i want right now:
long, long stretch of sleep. top sheet only.
a fan that doesn’t sound like an airplane taking off.
enough focus and shade tomorrow to disappear into the beautiful copy of treasure island i got at the salvation army.
a toast-and-jam kind of companion.
that week in the pennsylvania mountains.
to pick up my brother at the bus station tomorrow and just keep driving.

word of the day:

stormy petrel \STOR-mee-PET-ruhl\, noun:

1. any of various small sea birds of the family Hydrobatidae, having dark plumage with paler underparts; also called storm petrel.
2. one who brings discord or strife, or appears at the onset of trouble.

sad sap.

i am starting to get irrational. angry, even. or maybe just tired.

all i want is a creative partner in crime, and i nearly had one just then. one that i really fancied, despite all the difficulties.

it’s a part-time position. maybe even temporary. i don’t ask for much: just produce with me. tell stories. record stories. make mischief in the creek and on the street. i just can’t be alone with all my thoughts anymore, even when they’re good ones.

i was not supposed to talk about my fox feelings on here.

today was a day for smelling washington. it was in the trees, in the grey sky, in my unwashed sweater. in washington, among scientists and farmers, i held up bushels of whimsy on my own. now here, though i am surrounded by artists, it feels like an unattended one-man show.

return of the sun.

i am young and overwhelmed by possibility.

a wonderful flowering vine seems poised to choke out every other haphazard planting on this property, the old, budding oak is necked in ivy, and i just witnessed the bumblebee of summer’s first whine and reach.

i am eternally confused about what i am supposed to be. i think it does not have a title, the thing i might become, but then if i am meant to be a composite of various creativities, it is difficult to know where to dedicate the hours in a day. how many different ways can one tell a story? too many.

and every other day i feel at the edge of something immense, like a ravine with life at the bottom instead of death, or at least a river of heartache at ideal bathing temperature. “the forest stands ajar, and i could get up from this chair and disappear into the coldly steaming pine,” says galvin. but what is always, at the last second, holding me back? what mother of the steep and narrow keeps installing a handrail in my path?

writing is at once the most possible and well-fed product of my energies, and the thing i throw out the window again and again because it is not enough. there is so much more to my practice–elements of performance, visual documentation, things that remain unattempted or fully explored. but if i try to do everything, will any of it ever be great? need it be great? i can get more time, but time is time and a different thing from space of mind.

the whole practice of ART, the need to be recognized and deemed a success, seems such a fallacy. surely art is not whole without the accompanying conversation, that’s why i’ve never been able to keep a private journal. but in every genre or practice, no matter how radical, there is some degree of accepted method, a cocktail party checklist of names, places to see and be seen. contemporary art is less and less a part of the money economy, less and less object-based as well. but still there is the run-around, the need for affirmation, even inside me.

i know i am over-thinking this, but then everyone is asking for my name. what program do you want? what teachers? what community?

i need to speak to a few visionaries.

day, in three parts.

morning:
despite its anglo-christian origins, the sunday meal is an institution of which i will never tire. today, in pj’s on the back stoop, it is a plate from the women who sell creole food at the farmers’ market–okra, red beans & rice–and a cheddar biscuit gleaned from the day-old-donations pile at elsewhere. in the course of the meal, my sleeping socks come off and the awkward neighbor-boy, probably in avoidance of me, walks his dog twice around the block.

afternoon:
i do not mind how men look at my legs when the weather changes. we all forget our bodies in the winter. but all the men i see in the grocery store are going home to grill meat for their families, and i am just there in cut-offs, making eye contact and taking more than my share of under-ripe cantaloupe from the sample trays.

evening:
low-grade lonely and accomplishing nothing on my list, i bike to the park to check the post-snowstorm water levels under the overpass. the creek is low and wide-banked today, with the last edges of sunset throwing trees and power lines and all manner of skywards across the still water. quiet, quiet, quiet, nevermind the traffic above, and i hop down into the gravely mud to watch the westward orange for just long enough. down here close to the water it almost smells like my carolina, the one i left behind last spring.

the westerwood dogs are all tuning up behind their fences on my ride home, unprepared, as i am, for flowering trees and families parading to the neighbors’ for dinner. i recall the pilgrimages my family used to make in the warmer months, casserole in hand, or later, my college friends with a bottle of rum under each arm. that school-days carolina is surely a done and gone thing, but why can’t i seem to put a grown-up finger on this place? why, week after week, can i not sit still on anybody’s sociable porch or go to bed content?

“so go downtown, things will be great when you’re…downtown!”

since irony follows the poet like a hound on the hottest scent, it was the federal government who finally came to me with a job offer to rectify two months of unemployment. but the first few days have been proof positive that you don’t put wild critters in office buildings, no matter how desperately said critters need cash to blow at the local forest cantina.

i have already received an INTEROFFICE MEMORANDUM, one of my supervisors plays in a Contemporary Christian band, and the cover of our clerks’ manual features an illustration of several happy collaborators and the title, “working together toward goals.”

furthermore, in training we had to introduce ourselves and share something “weird.” since i was already feeling suicidal, i paused at length and then said, “i am…a writer?”
of course when the game reached j., an over-eager woman on the young side of grandma, she declared herself a writer too.
later, on break, j. asked me, “so what kind of poetry do you write?”
me: “um…”
“you know, like rhymed verse, or more like e.e. cummings?”

on the bright side, i have located the most perfect (and deserted) specimen of a 1970′s powder room lounge at the far side of the building. also, we have a lot of maps on the wall and sometimes men point at them.

do vagabonds make plans?

i shall, officially, return to my washington: june, or something like it, if i can hold out in the city that long.

cowboy says if i really want a dog i should get a herding pup, raise it up to have a sense of purpose. in the meantime i have acquired a sky blue typewriter in miniature suitcase, circa 1965. 

what i want is out from under this cold grey, out from under my new(er) and most unfortunate job, to live in the same town as any of my lovers. for now, it’s the same-old foxtrot in the rain.