Monday, May 30, 2005

On keeping notebooks as you travel: "However random the exercise, Moore stimulated [Bishop] to use details as a probe, to save them up, no matter how long, as they slowly revealed the indwelling strangeness of the landscape, its import for her." (from Becoming a Poet, p. 64) Sunday night, late All is well: Greta has drafted another mouse as (unfortunate) playmate. She and Sally lie alert, ear-cocked either side of the wooden crate where I keep the loose pages of journals and poem drafts, where these persecuted varmints always seek asylum in their despair. Which creature will snap the third creature up first? And will this go on all night? And where is Apple? who should be deeply unconscious of all this activity at the foot of the bed snoring, but instead did not come in from Last Call, and the rain is pouring, and I call and call, and she must be a bad dog ignoring me this late, making me wait, when all I want is to sleep sleep or else WAKE UP to write something meaningful instead of sitting on the bed watching the black wand in my hand loop and coil along its rules, as my lids droop... zzz... Whoops. Gotta check one more time. And there she is, and drenched, like a, like a ... wet wet dog. And practically doing backflips in her joy to be discovered at the miserable black door of long waiting in rain. *** I have figured out why I find it so difficult to love the genius pair, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (they're like the Old Testament Yahweh of poetry--you don't have to love them but fear is paramount), whose every utterance gives off an aura of beatitude. It is not, or not merely, what Dr. Omed once said, "perfection is hatred"--although I think perfection is not so much hatred as it is not-love--but this line I read as I study Ms. B's poet-volution, which she wrote in a letter at age 26, "Mother-love, isn't it awful. I long for an Arctic climate where no emotions of any sort can possibly grow, always excepting disinterested friendship, of course." And why am I back with Moore/Bishop et al.? Because I pick through slowly and leap off in tangents continually to anthologies, and so I'm still just at page 67 of the Kalstone biography even after all these weeks and months, cleansing my mental palate now with their clean coldness after a compulsive interlude with the Plath-Hugheses which massaged the lower-down brain places but contributed little of method... OK. Lights out. Good luck mousie. Monday early This rodent not as successful a fellow as the last. I find its compact furry oblong beside the writing desk, its long tail extended behind, feet hidden under, and the little spit froth of tiny mouse blood dried at the head. And it must be the season, for no sooner had I put Greta in the plant room for her kibble breakfast but she caught another--no puny house mouse this time but a fat cream-bellied deer mouse, and who needs these ugly food-scented pellets when such delights offer themselves up? And Apple in the wet grass this morning, even Apple murdered a ground squirrel for sport, tossing its limp corpse again and again with great happiness and would not come in. *** Rain again all night. I think of holiday travelers to the high desert--those few--stranded and shocked or maybe thrilled by it. Speaking of which--I stumbled on this definition in an old medical dictionary of my grandmother's, who was a nurse, on what to feel for when you palpate the heart to detect a "thrill"--a thrill is a vibratory sensation likened to that received when the hand is placed on the back of a purring cat. *** Finally, this image from "The Slow Pacific Swell" by Yvor Winters--"... The skull / felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair." 7:47:52 AM    comment []