June 17, 2009

Rolling thunder in the distance, random flickering of gold and green lightning. I saw that the lilac on the terrace had been buried under vines, so I crept out just before dark to rescue it. The rains that we’ve missed for several years now have turned the vegetation aggressive and predatory. There’s no way one man can keep ahead of it. I snipped and yanked and ripped, through sweetpea thick as a child’s arm, poison ivy, nightshade, greenbriar, poke, clematis, some berry-bearing thing I didn’t know. The apparent surface was four feet above the actual surface of the ground. I got my lilac excavated (it looked green and content, actually), but came away spent, drained, as though the vines had fought back with more than physical resistance.

Summer since the beginning of summer school has been, with some lapses, cardio at the Y around 6 AM, classes, weight at the Y after class, and then home to some of the deepest and most desperate napping I have known in my life, the sleep of the all-but-dead. I don’t know if it’s the increased exercise, sometimes very late in coming meals, or some enervation come with the weather. It is pleasant. It is not a problem. . . . unless it is a problem. This is how I felt last year at this time, when my dad was in the last week of his life.

Wrote a poem yesterday morning at Starbuck’s. Forgot about it until I opened the notebook this morning. I think there is a flood of work behind a dam, but I don’t know what the dam is made of–unless simple exhaustion, which is how it feels– and hence how to open it up.

Missed the River District arts party tonight by not even thinking of it until this moment.