Understand, I didn’t set out to be the guy who writes the poems for movies: I, like you, wanted to be in the May New Yorker. But you’ll only ever hear my work when the studios need to crap out another picture about a sensitive poet. Can’t go on stealing from Auden forever, I suppose, but it’s quite a shame that when an audience should be feeling something, instead, they’re getting spoon-fed what wouldn’t have made it into my high school literary magazine. For the first few, I attempted, I really did, but learned better. Grief is a dwelling, a massive black house that every studio executive wants to live in. So that’ll be every first line: my grief is a house, or my grief is my childhood home, or my grief is a fucking skyscraper. They write themselves, yet I’ve steady work if Gwynneth Paltrow is co-producing another turd, and if not me, Dave Pelican, who paints for every movie that needs a gallery scene. Every time someone stands in front of the giant canvas in wonder, I hope you’ll consider Dave, hunched on a backlot, some twenty-five year-old knob director asking him to make it a little more colorful or a little more dour. We’ve spent more than a couple nights in the quiet L.A. bars, wondering why we don’t just trade, because I’m more than a little handy with a paintbrush, and he does a mean D.H. Lawrence impression. But we end up in our studio apartments, and he’s painting something suitably sullen and I’m making notes for the next project: grief is a mansion just big enough for Leonardo DiCaprio.

I’m getting ready to drive over to Quail Ridge Books and drop off some copies of Ellen C. Bush’s Licorice. You can get a copy over there, or you can always order one online. The book may need a second printing. That would be a blessing.

Julia, feeling sufficiently chided for not being feminine enough, sat for hours with her legs crossed, hoping the feeling would soon become familiar, hoping her legs could hold the pose as habit. She had practiced so hard at being Italian that it hadn’t occurred to her that she would ever need to practice at being anything else, as if learning to live in a new country had been all the masquerade and subterfuge a girl would ever need to master. Soon she imagined that she was a still life, being painted, no longer girl but fruit or vase. There was no pressure in being a fruit or a vase. They had only to be fluent in one thing. Their legs never ached.

Misery, thy name is migraine. Leave this temple, which is already oft-profaned. I looked at Madeline. Her irises were green reflections of the concern in my own eyes. We were sure that the preacher had lost it. Begone from my sight, he said, and suddenly, I was out of my own body. There was white light above the preacher’s head. I looked to Madeline, and she was floating above her own body too.

Jennifer Grotz’s reading yesterday was absolutely wonderful. I am a giant nerd for her poems. For those of you who have read Cusp but have not heard her new work, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. I like Cusp a great deal, but some of these new poems have lines that I simply cannot get out of my head. I’ve heard a few of them three times now, and think I might burst if I don’t get written copies of these poems sometime soon.

I feel like a commercial. The one where the two dogs are running into the house. A big dog and a small dog. The big dog has the sad face of a bar brawler. The small dog has eyes like the bulges from black balloons under too much pressure. The big dog has a gruff voice, and says, “I’m gonna get some Gravy Train.” The small dog has a charlatan’s voice and agrees. I do not know if I am the big dog or the small dog. But I am gonna get some gravy train.

I bought a used copy of a book by one of my colleagues. Inside the back cover was a note:
“I’ve never been there.
We went there one night.
SJ can go to any state
school for free because
her father was hurt -
Vietnam and can’t have
children.”

Jennifer Grotz is here to read today. I’m milling about Greenlaw until I can catch up with her, which should be any minute now. Exciting! I think she’s a pretty darn good reader.

My policy, abruptly canceled. The letter, from my insurance company: your life is canceled. I knew I had life insurance through them but apparently did not know the terms. Can they cancel my life as well? What step do I take to reinstate my life? Or, unable, what steps should I take to confirm the cancelation? I consider myself lucky; may car insurance policy (thankfully through a more humane company) was terminated, my car was spared. Perhaps I am lucky that my life was not terminated in that letter. No, I am just canceled. I plan to eat dinner now, some string beans and a chicken breast. As a child, both foods were used to describe me. With my recent cancelation, will all derision end? Will I fall asleep tonight and finally experience the sleep of someone who was never really there?

The big meeting that stressed me out all weekend was postponed yesterday, so now it’ll be tomorrow morning. And suddenly, I’m none too stressed. I had breakfast today with Jim, and that always helps.

Today was a dramatic turnaround from the weekend, which seemed as it was happening catastrophic but was really just disappointing. So much so that when I returned home and found a reply from a submission that I sent out quite a while ago to a magazine which usually reports back quickly, I had my hopes up. No such luck, but I am undaunted. Today is better than yesterday. I should like to continue this trend until the end of time, but until the end of the week would be acceptable.

Teaching classes does brighten my spirit, though sometimes I fear my students wouldn’t know it. I have an extra class again this week, subbing in for a friend. I’ll sub in for his class four times this semester, and I like this class quite a lot. In stunning opposition to the adage “I wouldn’t want to be part of any group that would have me,” I tend to feel great affection for any group that will have me as a teacher.

Night driving, and I have written of this before, I transform the car into an X-Wing. It is a clumsy name for the craft, of which I have also written before, unjustly out of sync with the sleekness of its body, the snug of its cockpit, the smooth of the seatbelt between breasts. Of course, this is the seatbelt, and no women flew for the rebel alliance. I have written of this before.

Hey, speaking of Star Wars, CeCe Garcia, you can eat your heart out. (Found this after writing the above.)

Guitars a little out of tune. A constant buzzing. A few bizarre habits, bearing no mention here. But on the bus, daily. Sleeping in bunks, laid out longways like tomorrow’s clothes. Headphones, cord curled over itself into tangle. Blindfolds. Reliably. Squeamish in the deviation from it. All these long rides. Calm. Calming. Rotations over eight axles. Comfortably. Comfortably. And they said it was a Kurt and Courtney, but no: friends, it was warmer. Guitars a little out of tune. A constant buzzing. A few bizarre habits. But on the bus, daily, comfortably.

Buzzard. It’s the only word I have to describe the last two or three days. I have missed every opportunity to see friends I don’t get to see enough, have probably done this to myself. Well. That’s foolish. I should spend tonight working. Instead, I think I’ll spend it reading something biting. You know, to reverse the spell.

Suddenly, all his belongings had legs, and scurried away in different directions. The phone, the sofa, the television. His own legs could not carry him in all the different directions. His brain seized. Instinct told him he should be chasing down the refrigerator, the slowest lumbering vault. Intellect told him he should chase down the most valuable item. Was it the computer? Was it the file cabinet with years worth of tax returns and the old love letters from Jana? Faced with this predicament, he could hardly define value. So his own legs fell numb, broke down. A heap on the ground, he found that even the clothes he was wearing had grown legs, pried themselves loose of him and began flight. He made a feeble attempt for his undershirt and boxers but his back was full of bricks. So he lay looking at the sky, bemoaning, anticipating a swarm of bees, a throng of locusts. The clouds scattered above him, the sun set too quickly, and he could see the moon, could see it grow legs and run from him, the awkward run of a giant lumberjack, or that of a duck.

All over the body. Welts, hives, sores, scrapes, bruises, boils. All forms of pain, hanging on the skin. Nothing inside, all external. All blighted. All worn. Worn like a coat, like a blouse. Like a badge. Like so many red and purple badges. Signifiers, symbols. To where you might walk into a house, a house you’d never been to, and the strangers there would stare at you as though you were an authority figure who might soon speak, and in speaking, correct their lives. Or they might, by your example, learn how not to live. They might stone you for your troubles. This would cause new welts, new scrapes. Or perhaps at some point suffering would end. Just end, but not in death. In its own white blinding. A bodily white noise. You might rejoice. My troubles ended, Lord, I will wear red robes, will wear a purple sash. You might walk to another house, another house you’d never been to, and the strangers there would bow and kiss your feet. O Lord, they might say, thank you for Him whom You have sent in these robes, O Lord, let Him cleanse us of the pains hanging on our skins.

Lunchtime at my desk. I gots lunchtime at muh desk. Starin’ at kittie pictures with funny catptions. I’m in ur desk, eatin ur sammich. Chomp chomp chompz. This beats the suxx0r of this morningz.

Chall was worried that while her parents were quite human, she had descended from spinach. It seemed reasonable that such a smart plant would want its agents among people. She wondered if her parents were complicit or if somehow, spinach had switched her with their real baby in the hospital, if somewhere there was a human baby raised to be a spinach leaf. She shared this fear only with Micah, who confided that he believed he was an agent of the stoplights. “They are tired of change,” Micah said. “They have sent me to enforce the status quo.” Chall knew of no such agenda for spinach.