June 14, 2022

Great thunderstorm booming down from the north. As I sat with coffee at the kitchen counter, twisty stabs of blue lightning seemed to stand all in the same place in the sky, so far off there was almost no thunder. I thrust the red-handled spade into the ground–I guess to tell myself where to start again when I started again, which won’t be today–and now I imagine lightning striking it. Maybe Zeus will till my garden for me. The rain is blessed, the sky dark as evening. 

Reading Thom Gunn’s recent collection of letters. I try to stop thinking, “I’m a better poet than Gunn, yet it’s unlikely that there’ll ever be 700 pages of MY letters in a book.” I haven’t written that many, I don’t think, living as I did on the last frontier of letter-writing. I do know why my reputation lags behind my labor: after Exeter, I accepted rustification, not forcing myself into the forefront (fleeing, in fact, from the forefront), not making the necessary friends. All in all, it is well. The energy of cunning socialization went into writing; one hopes that pays off in the end. 

Tumult after the meeting last night. Maud got in a mood and began to urinate on the bathroom counter. I leapt up to prevent that, scaring her so bad that she leapt down, slicing my left leg and foot open on the way. The bleeding was profuse, and made worse because I tramped through the house looking for paper towels, leaving little footprints of blood everywhere I stepped. It looked like a murder scene in a TV show. Then beside the blood appeared clear pools, which I realized was the lymph fluid that always gathers in my legs, which also would be released by a scratch, but worse, because, containing no clotting agents, it could be the start of a seepage event which might last for days. Wrapped my leg in towels and went to bed. Sometime in the night the seeping stopped, and Maud made up profusely this morning, bumping me with her head and insisting on being lifted up.