Managed
to capture
an image of
the beautiful
woodpecker at
the suet feeder outside my
kitchen window before he flew
off...

Later in the morning I encountered an especially lovely tree as I made my way down a path...






***

 Back from a sunset walk at the conservation area, my second - no, third - walk there of the day (two short ones in the morning, with a supermarket & farmstand run sandwiched between).

I had the car for most of the day, along with a request to get it back to D by 4:30.  Went to the library, listened to some favorite songs on headphones, checked a few headlines, googled a few IP addresses, saw the most wonderful satellite shot of Western Finland, land surrounded by a body of water - a sea? a fjord? - and mist between the satellite and planet earth.  All very mysterious & beautiful.  Oooh the water croons Van Morrison appropriately enough just now.

In a fierce fever of missing you today, where are you, I can't tell you all the thoughts going in my head as I pound the path and work the weights around the figure eight of the park.  But you do know, don't you.  But where are you?  Oh please don't have gone all RSS feed on me.  I won't believe it, not after all these months.  It's just not the same, it isn't.    

When I saw the moon high up in the sky  -  I now had my back to the river, heading back to my car - Tom Waits' Grapefruit Moon song came to mind, and I sang as much of it as I could recall out loud (park to myself, just me and the circling swifts and a hawk).  Grapefruit moon, one star shining, shining over me... every time I hear that me-lo-dy, something breaks inside.

I don't have much for you today, my dearest.  Just this sensation all day long of images rushing past me, beautiful views and sensations all day long.  So hard to capture, the constant flow of it.  Coming down 9J towards the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, for example, the Catskills in the foreground, large, gray, misty at the peaks, still spots of dark autumnal color in the distance, the steel bridge itself, tiny in comparison to the close-by mountains on the other side of the river.

Did the CSA run for the neighbor this afternoon, always such a joy.  It was before four and the light was lush, golden, magnificent, lighting up the landscape, at the farm a distant vista with grazing sheep in the middle distance.  I enjoy the CSA ritual, going from bin to bin picking up the allotment as decreed in chalk on the blackboard - potatoes 1 quart (I pick out the tiny ones), beets 1 quart, 1 rutabaga, 1 bunch kale, 1 quart tomatoes OR 4 large beefsteak (I took the quart), 1 bag mixed apples, 1 onion, 1 golden cauliflower.  Lovely, lovely stuff, so earthy.  Neighbor gets most of it, of course - it's her subscription - but I took some of the potatoes and beets, and a couple of apples, tomatoes, & sweet potatoes.  Would have enjoyed nabbing the kale but couldn't justify it....

Just communing here with you, my dearest, as I sit up here in the aerie.  Still reading the McGilchrist - of course, it's a lengthy book - but though I do put it down - I can hardly put it down.  And yet it's best read in small bites, it's so dense with detail.  Look, you know the fever I'm in but I'm thinking he must be fantastic in bed - he's got the drive and the gestalt.  Where is the passage I'm looking for, not far from the "Melancholy and Longing" subchapter - oh M. & L. - honestly, that's been the cast of my entire life, I kid you not, every single day of it -  and for what? - as McGilchrist notes, Romantic poets too felt it, not only Romantics, but right-brain dominants through time....  I can't seem to find it at the moment, but boy it put me in mind of former paramour again, of how I think he must have viewed me, as an object - by which I don't mean in a bad way necessarily, it's just that he was all about drive - while I was sort of the mirror opposite, all about vast, vast very connected (not at all desolate) landscapes when he was doing his thing & I was ecstatic.

Oh where are you indeed.  Not to mention - who are you.  I thought of another lover I had a million years ago - college, that is - since someone googled the image of a professor whose Heidegger courses I audited a couple of semesters at the time (late seventies).  I remembered about an MIT dorm room I stayed in for a month during a Wintersession (the January break before spring semester).  I remember that room vividly.  It was on the first floor, and had a window that overlooked a very windswept plaza with a large modernist sculpture, by someone famous, but I don't remember at the moment who.  With most everyone away I had the floor of the dorm to myself (and by the way, MIT wasn't my school, but Wellesley kicked everybody out at the holidays too, and I was temping in Boston/Cambridge for some income, so it was very convenient to stay at MIT).  So I remember this tiny cement-block room, but whoever it was who I was borrowing it from was neat & tidy, a civilized sort, the place was very orderly and swept and monastic yet somehow not - I don't know, soulless.  I was staying in the room, sleeping in the cot, of a nice guy I think.  Who knows.  I did actually meet him once, he was a very tall Scandinavian fellow, but bland, and now that I think about it more - I wasn't even slightly attracted to him.  But a nice guy.  But so what.

What I do remember is that this Basque-Welsh sexy lover of mine would come for what would now be called booty-calls.  He was engaged to someone else.  He was really into me, very very seductive.  And he was fantastic in bed.  And we had an intellectual connection too.  We dated  (if that's the word) on & off for quite a while.  (I think he audited that Heidegger course too, though in the classes I was actually holding hands with someone else, the guy I was seeing, but didn't feel electrically connected to.)  I remember him coming over to that desolate dorm room on frigid January nights.  The pipes of the radiator clanged and banged all night.  There was tons of heat in the room, and I'd crack the window open onto that windswept empty plaza with the famous Calderesque sculpture (maybe it was a Calder), and I didn't mind having the window open, not only for the thin lozenge of frigid air that would rush in to cut through the boiler-room heat, but also because I was a terrible smoker, smoked all the time, and yet couldn't stand the odor of it.  (I have long since quit - doing the math now - wow, 12 years ago this month.)    Anyway, he was great in bed, and very romantic in his way.  Maybe sometimes he spent the night but usually not - he was engaged.  It's so funny thinking back now on a connection like that - we were both so young - I was perhaps still in my teens, he in his early twenties tops.  I was trying my hand at writing poems & short stories, and he was interested, I'd try them out on him.  But they were so lame, they really were, much too influenced by the minimalists of the day - which was counter to my natural style, to what, decades later, I might have to say....

Good night, sleep tight, my darlings, including the sexy, soulful guy who made my January nights in that empty dorm so many years ago...  

Launching without proofing.  I know, it shows.  Fascicles - later.