Vincent is much calmer this evening, sitting at the table eating his blueberry “ee-gurt” (i.e. yogurt), but last night was an entirely different story. Among another unspeakable acts, he decided to eat a chunk of soap — I guess it looked creamy & delicious to him — but oh, the reaction once it was in his mouth — he yowled & yowled. You’d think he’d eaten poison.
Marvelous. Who am I kidding? I just went to check on him, and there he was, grinning & holding out his yogurt-covered hands which he was using to paint the table…
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He’s jealous, he wants me to get off my new toy, a “new” laptop I bought at this great used typewriter store in Amherst. Very cheap, it’s a used PowerBook, a big step up from my old ibook — and it has wireless! Whee!
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A poet I really like who haven’t seen a new book from for a while is Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Her collection, Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992 is so subtle and elegant, the language so rich. The following poem is one of my favorites:
Snow Melting
Snow melting when I left you, and I took
This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow
Before I left, exposed beside a brook
Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know,
Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day.
Though at the time her wild human hand
Had gestured inexplicably, I say
Her meaning now is more than I can stand.
We’ve reasons, we have reasons, so we say,
For giving love, and for withholding it.
I who would love must marvel at the way
I know aloneness when I’m holding it,
Know near and far as words for live and die,
Know distance, as I’m trying to draw near,
Growing immense, and know, but don’t know why,
Things seen up close enlarge, then disappear.
Tonight this small room seems too huge to cross.
And my life is that looming kind of place.
Here, left with this alone, and at a loss
I hold an alien and vacant face
Which shrinks away, and yet is magnified–
More so than I seem able to explain.
Tonight the giant galaxies outside
Are tiny, tiny on my windowpane.
Marie Gauthier 