. . . .

Bored without eyes. No reading no writing no tv no running no sorting drawers no email no driving, not without great effort and difficulty. You are looking at an act of great effort and difficulty. With glasses. Cracked a dish in the sink this morning, found the sliver of glass by touch but not the fault line in the bowl, with glasses. A symbol for my vision:

***

. . .

Do I know it's not allergy? I've been asked a number of times--not just by you Dr. S--and I don't, no, I don't. But woke with two worrisome eye infections this morning...trying out home remedies...taking in the world blind. Have been legally blind without lenses since ten, my glasses have given me a headache and are blurry besides, so no eyes today.

***

. .

last days of summer: week thirteen

Also: was laid out flat for a week with a bad cold while in Del Rio, my first bad cold in years, at a time when the head says "you're living the healthiest life you've lived in years, the sanest, the happiest," and that was 23 days ago. Woke up at 3 a.m. with a sore throat after driving all day to get there. And now again, sore throat in the middle of the night, fatigue, graphic dreams, burning sneezing nose. I don't get it, but if this too is arriving, then okay: okay. The body thinks it has time to rest.

***

. . . . . . .

"There is a souffrance de la destination (no, not a fate neurosis, although...) in which I have every right to recognize myself. I am suffering (but like everyone else, no? me, I know it) from a real pathology of destination: I am always addressing myself to someone else (no, to someone else still!), but to whom? I absolve myself by remarking that this is due, before me, to the power, of no matter what sign, the "first" trait, the "first" mark, to be remarked, precisely, to be repeated, and therefore divided, turned away from whatever singular destination, and this by virtue of its very possibility, its very address. It is its address that makes it into a post card that multiplies, to the point of a crowd, my addressee, female. And by the same token, of course my addressee, male. A normal pathology, of course, but for me this is the only meurtriere: one kills someone by addressing a letter to him that is not destined to him, and thereby declaring one's love or even one's hatred. And I kill you every moment, but I love you" (504).

Derrida, Between the Blinds, "Envois"

***

. . . . . .

The shrine in my mother's house for her mother, Carmen Rios, flood victim, Del Rio, Texas, August 22, 1998.

***

Nate is ordained in a few hours.

***

. . . . .

In this picture: a butterfly, a spinning top, a sea star.

***

Also: grocery shopping in town has changed since Super Walmart went up over the summer. The first three packages of chicken breast were bad when I bought them, I noticed when I opened them and smelled the turned meat. I returned them to HyVee where the workers stood around quietly waiting for customers. I was the only one in line on a Tuesday after-work evening when the store is usually crunching. The dates on the milk were all old.

***

Also: I've filled eight garbage bags with clothes that must go. Including the size 4 crushed velvet dress from the eighties and its shoulder pads and the cutoff pinstripe denim Guess overalls I wore in high school. I have 4 empty bins now and a 5th full of hangers. Changed my mind on a pair of over-sized brown trousers, pulled them out of the pile, pulled them over my hips, and found the silver pendant and chain I lost months ago and mourned (also from my mother) in the front pocket.

***

Oh, and I would run my three miles--I trained all summer, I'm ready I tell you--but it's either pouring and storming outside or the steaming heat is so thick I couldn't breathe or move my legs the last two times I tried. It's like running in a jacuzzi. You people who poke at me for going to the desert all summer: this is preferable??

***

There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that men who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the world, like inert matter.

~ Simone Weil

***

. . . .

Incidentals the last three weeks. All four tires buckling with dry rot Deming New Mexico, a man happened to notice while clearing litter from the service station drive through: you don't just need air. From his sparse rack he rolled a new four, all he had. All I needed. --The new phone's charger for the long drive home? The wrong model sent and not noticed till the phone lost power over nights in the car, the night I would've talked to you but for your lost new number on top of everything, the one you couldn't remember either when you called to say: not there yet. --The card was denied when they thought I changed homes, when they they thought it was unusual to buy ten .99 cent songs from home, when they thought Arizona was too far from home, three times darling. So the other card worked when tested, I found after years of not testing, so now there is balance. --And my watch, a slow death baffling my time! I was lost! Then the new ugly free cheap watch showed up from my mother, a pair of bare feet engraved on its face. "It was then that I carried you." Though not in the shower. Not even in the same room as the shower. --Then the 30 year-old fridge went down, took with it two bags of new spinach, four beautiful avocados, a broccoli tree, the salad dressings, a chicken breast, a gallon of milk, the frozen blackberries, corn, and carrots, two bricks of tofu, all the ice in my world on the hottest wettest days I've lived all summer. The refrigerator man left an oily puddle on the floor I mopped yesterday, puddles on the counters, puddles on the stove. The kitchen is humid and sticky. --The bedroom too. So hot and damp in bed it's impossible to sleep. Dragged the big window a/c unit into the bedroom, sweat rolling down my belly and back. Plugged it in, turned it on, blinked. Blew a fuse. Laid awake or wandered for water all night. Found an ice pack for my swollen feet. --Fixed the fuse (not me but the landlord) today, a little while ago, then watched the storm kick up minutes later, wind and a downpour, leaves, twigs, mud spattered on the porch like a blender hit the windows, power flickering, downed branches in the roadway, a mess. All of fifteen minutes. Sirens everywhere in the distance. The trees are broken. The fuses are blown all over the house.

I've been busy.

***

"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written. Myself, I am a man of speech, I have never had anything to write. When I have something to say I say it or say it to myself, basta. You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. I have necessarily written upside down--and in order to surrender to Necessity" (512).

--Derrida, Between the Blinds, "Envois"

***

. . .

summer: week twelve

. . . . . .

. . . . .

So the occult books are bound in purple. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is also. I can see their spines from here.

***

& day one hundred and eighty-one or eighty-two, whichever

***

. . . .

Alone in my house with suitcases and a closet. Overcast and overgrown. The fan rattles the pinata. A car passes in the street, a generator kicks on. No birds sing.

***

postcard: Joplin MO to Galesburg IL, 499.9 miles, seven hours and twenty-six minutes

postcard: Del Rio TX to Joplin MO, 720 some miles

postcard: Tucson AZ to Del Rio TX, eleven hours and nine minutes

Packing the car and saying goodbye...

***

. . . . .

. . . .

***

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. “That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?’ ” he said.

Mr. Simic said he preferred to think of the point of poetry in the way a student at a school in El Paso put it when he visited in 1972: “to remind people of their own humanity.”

***

. . .

In the dream he inserted into the right side of his chest a pair of tubes, one end aided by small hooks which kept the pair inside in place, the other plugged into a pump and his drug source: cocaine. The transformation was immediate, from awkward man-boy to a tired-skinned bruise-eyed lurch who put his face close to mine, exhaled through his nose, then rose to go. There were others in the rooms. He delegated. His sharpness had the clarity of glass, a refracting lens pointed at himself. He watched himself film himself. He made noise to keep the center together. He no longer felt sad.

***

Wisdom before impulsivity; bravery before self interest; the common good before pity; and your own good judgement above all else. --Carmen's Oma

***