start of month two in florida. i'm very alone here, but not lonely. disconnected- and i prefer it that way. although i stopped going out back in new york, the proximity of it all made it hard to truly disconnect. i think what i am experiencing here is why people make drastic moves, across the country, to the middle of nowhere.

we were thinking of getting a dog but house rules don't permit them. will have to settle for the lizards and snails in the walkway.

the homeless here are burnt brown and barefoot. and they mostly sleep sprawled out on bus benches.

the sky in our backyard feels oddly close to the ground, as if you could reach out your hand and grab a cloud if you wanted, as if the sky has an end and it's right behind the trees across the canal.

when driving in midtown manhattan, you have to make optimal use of your peripheral vision and watch for pedestrians, bikes, sometimes horses, buses, cabs. but at certain stop lights today, i felt uneasy and had to check through my skylight to make sure nothing was falling out of the sky.

boo, forever

spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
          top,
i'm haunted by all
the space that i
will live without
          you.

-brautigan

while watching and listening to feist tonight, my chest knotted up and i had to blink and swallow back tears. it's stupid really, that i get like this. it's not sadness. it's more like an all-consuming joy akin to what christians feel when singing praise songs. it's that eternity you feel in a note that is combined with the right lyric. this doesn't happen to me often. it happened while listening to k.'s stereo for the first time, while listening to an acapella version of shenandoah in the dark. it also happened at a tori amos concert i went to in the fall. it happened when i first really listened to the national recently, especially their song "today." it happens every time i listen to sigur ros and write. actually, it's happened a few times while sitting on k's couch and listening to music. it happens when i listen to john cale sing "hallelujah." ok, i guess it happens a lot. and it's very distracting.

a few things i learned tonight from feist:

-when i was a young girl i used to see pleasure, when i was a young girl i used to drink ale.
-you should not love too many people in your lifetime.

if there is any kind of truth, it can only be found in a living text. this is what drew me to poetry. the best poetry uses language that lives, where the inherent meaning is not found in the words themselves but someplace outside of the text. meaning grows with reading and rereading, is palimpsestic. "you can never step in the same river twice." it's the kind of language that shows us how to live our lives. the bible is necessarily a living text, must be interpreted and re-understood with time in order to maintain its authority. and i'm realizing that the law is also this kind of text, one that guides us but must necessarily be living and malleable in order to be true and just.

fiction is not a living text. i am having problems with fiction.

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