saturday, february 9
midwinter midafternoon; depressed as hell
sitting in a huge cabin in the rich-people mountains
writing a sprawl, pages, of melancholic midlife bullshit
outside the snow gives way to broken clouds and the
clear unyielding light of the high country sun fills
the room, tracing the edges of fixtures no one in
particular has ever really owned
i go down to the kitchen for a cheese sandwich,
crack a bottle of beer, the spell half-passes
seven years and some months i've been in colorado now
i track this number constantly and carry it like
a kind of token, like the bone necklace
tui gave me in christchurch or the smooth pale rock
i picked up on a gravel road in iowa in 1990-something
in the minutes just before sunset
like the single line in some awful adolescent poem
that betrays a moment of vision
though i've tried at times to let them go,
my life is full of these objects, physical or abstract,
signifiers in a private vocabulary, indexes into the
vast but fractured catalog of remembrance —
and i suppose no one else is much different really
for as long as memory itself survives the usual whips and scorns
we tend to write our own histories across the surfaces
of our lives in languages only we will ever understand
longing all the while for a reader