Today I saw a Vizsla tearing around a field, in search of whatever ecstasy of smells she was discovering, and I was reminded of my beloved Marika.
Without Dog
She won't eat,
drinks only small
sips from the bowl I hold
oiut to her.
Please, I say, please.
She attends earnestly,
panting, watching the air.
~
I learn to stick the neeedle
quickly. I learn
to do it in the dark.
One hand holds an IV bag
high, for pressure,
the other slips the needle in.
Since Election Day, or really, the morning after the election, when I woke up to a new reality, I have had a difficult time settling down to write. Partly this is due to the agitation I feel, a generalized sense that bad things are happening. That worse things will happen. This fear fuels my knitting, which calms me with simple, repetitive motions, and my cooking, which has its own dance of repetitive motions and at the same time fills the house with the comforting smells of onions caramelizing on the stove, squash cooking in the oven. My grandchildren have benefited with a slew of new sweaters, my husband has been served an array of new meals, and I have generally kept myself sane. But I have not been writing.
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I thought I'd be fine without internet. Aren't I self-sufficient? Someone who loves to read, write, take long walks, someone who can spend hours sitting and staring out the window? No internet would be a boon. More time for the things I loved.
I knew that this image of myself might be slightly skewed
Here's my interview with Jody Carr for her series of Jewish writers interviews, published on Carr Talks.
If you hadn’t been a writer, what would you have been?
At one point I took my law boards and applied to law school. It’s strange to think
I know how I should be writing: each day, day after day, so the words accumulate at a steady pace, so my writing mind gets into a groove. For years at a stretch, when my kids were little, I wrote every morning from the moment they went off to school till the minute they
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Summer. With time to read. And time to write. What a relief after the busy-ness of the school year, when I'm trying to balance teaching with my own reading and writing. I had high hopes for this summer. I planned to spend uninterrupted hours reading the poetry books and journals that were piling up
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My first post on this last day of May, here is a link is to a conversation with Patricia Caspers Rogers on the Ploughshares blog series, Women Versing Life. Like me, Tricia is a poet who writes about the death of her father. Her fine manuscript is titled Life with Fever. I enjoyed working with Tricia
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