I'm going to try this again?

 This will probably be seen only by me...but i like the idea of having a repository for memory again. a record.

i'm not good a consistency and a lot has happened since getting my phd in 2012.

i've landed in tennesee and i'm teaching

and life has continued to add it's weight

mom died in 2017

janis died in 2023

it's a waiting game....i'm the youngest and if i live long enough

everything around me will erode until it's just me standing on the shore

oh god this is getting depressing but i can't help

but think about how unanchored i'm becoming...just waiting

maybe to float above the vastness of the this ocean i can't

stop looking at

anyway i might as well find something to do 

to occupy my time

nothing's lost forever

for rhonda...i miss you

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.” 

Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika

for rhonda part one

i teach writing, but i am not a writer. can i compare that to a tattoo artist who doesn't have a single tattoo on her/his body? there is an artist like that you know...somewhere in europe...maybe paris, yeah i think he lives in paris. anyway, is that an apt comparison? i love my art (or perhaps my profession) but not enough to commit my body to it. i don't think that i love anything that much.

i want to write something about my friend rhonda who has gone on. away. softly. but in this same instance...in the same paragraph even i change my mind. i don't want to or i find that i can't write about this loss, this absence now...or maybe i am narrating it anyway by not writing about it. with me, this sorrow seems to swim beneath the words. perhaps or because with me, grief can find no satisfying branch to perch on//no grammar to anchor it into place onto the page.

chela 4 july 2002-- 21 may 2015

maybe i will write something that will adequately express the grief that i am going through but then again probably not ...it has hardly been a year since maxwell left me and now...you.


and it was so very fast...

 i come home to an empty apartment...this is the first time i have ever truly lived alone and

 i miss you terribly

i pick up your ashes tonight and i wish the person who called me would have pronounced your name

correctly, and it's funny how deep that wound reveals itself...what emptiness it reveals: the scope, the depth



the world is wider and vaster...and starker now
but i guess that is what grief is all about...negotiating the growing space of loss

Gewiteđ þonne on sealman, sorhleođ gæleđ
an æfter anum; þuhte him eall to rum,
wongas ond wicstede. (Beowulf 2460-2)

grief and insistence

"All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable." Judith Butler, interview in Guernica (2010)

grief insists that it  be recognized...the on-and on-ness of its insistence is vast and untraceable and yet still it persists in its continuous quest for validation

chicago

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” ― Judith Butler

"The moment of change is the only poem.” ― Adrienne Rich

sorrow and the prospect of a resurrection

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.” 
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary