Dear love, full of sweet thoughts of you all day, unchangeable constant in a day of highly changeable weather. Overnight came torrential bursts of rain, each in its thrashed aftermath followed by stunned silence. At dawn the sky in the east, wind-tossed, teeming with turbulent shades of gray, dramatically parted to reveal a horizontal slit of gleaming platinum light - portal glimpse to another dimension, dark clouds massing all around. At times, later, the sun would come out, dazzling all the drops of spent rain, and then the skies would turn broody, glower, darken again. Later I drove north - trees red, orange, yellow, dramatically blazed against charcoal sky. There was a brief respite from rain, sufficient window for me to pick up the ritual weekly mix from the CSA farm. Now I sit up here in the aerie, lamps on in the house, and it's begun to rain again. The rains are accompanied by ominous thunder, though I haven't seen lightning. So summery. It's humid and mild, though not hot. At the farm I stepped along a muddy border & snipped cosmos of various pinks, which I've since divided between a mustard jar on the kitchen table, and a small vase on my desk. I clipped among the last of the zinnias - red, orange, yellow - spritely blooms tucked in a tiny old blue-glass bottle on the sill where I can enjoy them whenever I'm standing at the sink.

My dear, sometimes I think I read a little too much into those page hits - Hell Gate - as bad as that? We have our metaphysical exquisite union - never to be corporeally realized - yet I hope on another plane (in that sliver of light back behind the obscured dawn this morning) that you're happy. I don't know, that seems hollow, even to me as I type it. I don't want anyone to be miserable, myself included. It's strange to say, but you make me happy, or thoughts of you, and knowing that you think of me. I find it very buoying.

Well, anyway, it's raining again, I love the sound of it, that steady pattering, and it's still & quiet up here, like being in a cozy sheltered treehouse. The staircase is a mess, in transition. The runner had been coming away from the risers, so D took it all up and replaced the liner with proper felt (comme il faut) and I laundered the pieces - but they shrank infemitously (OMG! how do you spell that word? I have to look it up!) - infinemetousy - wait - infinitesimally - there. Anyway - just enough that D couldn't get the pieces to line up again. I had been about to go to the library, since D was reinstalling the runner, but we both scrapped our plans and went to the carpet store instead, picked out & ordered a new piece of carpeting for the stairs. Of course I instantly fell in love with a high-end wool carpet that would have cost $700 for our little staircase. It is amazing the exquisite taste I have - I go unerringly for the unaffordable. But I'm content with what we settled on - at under $200, a commercial grade, in similar ruby tones. And I have floated the idea that perhaps this is the time to repaint the stairwell, before the new carpeting goes in, and D doesn't seem averse.

Just trying to keep things spruced up. I vacuumed the house over the last couple of days, and cleaned the baths today. Fresh flowers. Laundered linens & drapes. My way of fighting entropy.

Oh sweetheart, I wonder where you are, I imagined today that you were somewhere on your "approaches" (or perhaps it's they who are approaching you). I had a wonderful time with you today - I do just about every day now, best in years, which I'm very happy about, that that part of me is recovered, I don't even need to watch Dr. Oz (though I appreciate his forthright, positive way of addressing sensitive issues such as that - truly a public service).

I woke before dawn to the sound of the rain, and couldn't fall asleep again, got up to check the computer, drank a glass of water in the glow of the screen, returned to bed in darkness, and couldn't get back to sleep. It was barely five. I held an extra, long firm pillow for a bit, very comforting, and thought of you. As a girl I never, and I mean never, had been into stuffed animals - but now I find a single pillow of sufficient heft very soothing. I turned over on my side, and the pillow fell softly against my back, and that was so exquisitely calming, especially coupled with my imagination, being able to think that it was you lying against me, that I was able to fall asleep almost immediately, for a couple of hours, it - you - were so comfortable.

I can only imagine what E.D., and John Donne, and Andrew Marvell, might have done with that simile - your love is like a pillow.

But I don't know that I'm so much about metaphors - metaphysical as I am, and as our love is - perhaps I'm more about voice...

Your love is like a bell tower
upside down in the middle of the night
as I kiss your lips
and feel the rising pressure
and I know that yours is useful
& wonderful
and has in all its glory just what I need
in exactly the right scale
unlike that odd structure in Ypsilanti
is that how Ann Arbor residents get their water?
I'm a water tax paying citizen of my small burg
whose blimp is blue
oh yeah, kind of like the color of my little blue
effective toy that's curved at the top
stand in for you
and also - I might add, darling,
with my eyes closed, the Washington Monument
(sex drive - so American - so nonpartisan!)
ah how will I ever close the cocks of this poem
when the rooster - cocks too - crow at dawn?
I'll make a lover out of you yet, my pillow
and - oh how wonderful, oh batfilled one -
you don't take batteries - telltale sign, all that recharging!
never a need to recharge a pillow
just launder the sheath every once in a while

The End.