February 5, 2013

Four women are in my advanced poetry class. Just them. I knew most of them from unrelated classes and thought it was going to be an unpromising semester, but I was wrong. What variety of approach and experience just in that little group!. One is clueless about what poetry is, but not about what it does, and there is purity enough there to build on.

Tinnitus. It’s been at me for half a year now. I was ready to throw up my hands and settle in for the duration, but internet sources (which one believes, of course, if they say what one wants to hear) allege that it’s treatable, and not necessarily associated with hearing loss. I hadn’t noticed hearing loss. I still fly into a covert fury when the old people I must associate with now sit around the table saying “huh?” Who knows? I’d pictured myself as Robert Schuman going mad hearing forever the concert A, but maybe some different, more unique madness is in store.

Wasted at the end of Mondays. Up early Tuesday anticipating a new start. It takes me only 24 hours to forget I’m anything but a kind of drone, in my cell at the appointed hour. Busy, busy, laying down the wax.