Cambridge

July 12, 2011

Several melancholy turns around Cambridge yesterday before and after class, much writing, but also much musing on past, present, shimmering, indiscernible ghosts of the future. I haul from café to café having cups of hot liquid, writing a poem, moving on, a perfect but unsustainable temporary lifestyle.

Rested for a while in the Bath House, where the cheery barmaid saw me reading Mrs Dalloway for class. She exclaimed “Oh! I love that book!” I answered that I wished she could make my class love it as well, and one thing followed another until I had invited her to my class as guest lecturer. Her name is Eloise Jenkins, and she is a second year student at Leeds, and she did come, and she acquitted herself brilliantly, in addition to giving the class a little break from me.

A thrush abides in the thicket under my window. I hear him rustling gently around sometimes, or see him on a branch looking in the window with one bright eye. It’s like having a very quiet roommate.

Did the last laundry I will need to do this year in Britain. Liberating. Glowering rain, but not actually raining.

Evening and night: supper at the Bath House with Eloise, then pool with the gang at Sir Isaac Newton. Met everyone’s sexual partner for the summer, and theirs. And then to bed, saying to the walls and shrubbery what I forgot to say to the merry company.