The return.

Today was, a few notes here and there to the contrary, the first time I decided to write. I found a document I call "daily writing," secreted away on my hard drive, opened it, discovered notes--daily notes--from 2009.

Now: this is not discouraging. There are things there I can still use. That's why it's good to take notes. But it is a good reminder of how the dailiness of writing can be a harder to sustain than one would like to acknowledge.

Here are a few highlights:

driving to school heard an interview with Maya Lin—talking about the Vietnam Memorial, and others, the tiny scale of the text, which is, as she said “like bringing a book outdoors and not bringing a billboard outdoors”—you have to get closer to read a book—

 then some monument she has built that deals with disappearing birds—the loon—some significant percentage of vanishing species has to do with vanishing habitat—

and this:

Is my body my habitat? Or does my body need a habitat?  The separation of the two and I can’t tell 

the difference, sometimes, between myself and mybody—who am I? where do I live?  

A. pointing inside her own mouth when I asked, where’s A.?

and this:

thinking about a true thing I read in this Mankell book, Kennedy’s Brain—

she reads the letters her son sent to his dad and feels angry with him, 

for being a person she did not/could not know.

and this:

Saw a cormorant take off.

Saw a little black-headed, yellow-breasted bird flying.

Rain in the afternoon.

At duskiest dusk, bats flying past the big picture window. Seemingly without pattern to their flight.

and today, this:

I want to write about what feels lost to me. What feels unrecoverable. 

Which seems unseemly in poetry now. 

and also this:

the ruins we visited, being excavated bit by bit

or falling to pieces second by second (cannot see it)(can see the excavation happening, 

but cannot see the decay as it happens)

Here we are, summer again. Since Friday, I've cooked meals four different times for four different groups of people--it feels so great to cook in my kitchen. Tonight, family came over (a family that's big enough now, we often do it in two shifts). The light in the evening is sublime, not to be a diva about it. We ate and played outside. There's something that feels almost eternal about evenings like this. Eternal summer; also the time to write every day, daily notes, with poems sometimes to be made out of them.