I'm pleased to report that I have stepped back from the possibly-turning-into-a-zombie brink and am now just a regular woke-up-too-early human being. Thank goodness for yesterday, which gave me time to fall asleep on the couch at 9 a.m., subsequently take several more couch breaks, walk for a few slow miles, read and fold laundry and clean the upstairs rooms, play a couple of games with T, and make a slow satisfying evening meal.

I realized, as I was setting the table last night, that my cooking routine can be a big help in getting me back into a tolerable groove. I didn't make anything fancy last night--just black beans and rice, a beet salad with roasted pumpkin seeds, and a raspberry cobbler--but the process of putting each element together felt, for some reason, like a convalescence. I don't always have this reaction to making a meal; sometimes cooking is just a straight-up chore. But yesterday I needed it.

So here we are at Friday, a dark and rainy morning, the cat's 12th birthday, which he is celebrating by crunching up some chow in the dining room. The ides of March . . . "Et tu, Brute?" I coo at him, and he purrs, for backstabbing is his delight.

I spent all last night dreaming about teaching revision to kids, which shows you where my head has been these past few days. But the mundanity of today will blast that out of my skull. Today is recycling day, sheet-and-towel-washing day, downstairs-room-cleaning day. It's a day for grocery shopping and a zoom meeting and my exercise regimen. If the rain stops and the outdoors dries up a little, it will be a day for raking out another garden bed or two.

Yesterday I worked in the backyard beds and uncovered green everywhere . . . shoots, unfolding leaves, budding crocuses and scylla, nodding pale snowdrops. I'm not rushing; there's no hurry--a half-hour of raking, here and there; the slow revelations of thawing soil, and my body relearning its motions.

Waterloo

 

 

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most

intimate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Hölderlin” 

 

 

Dawn Potter

The lindens in the square tremble

in the wind like peasants kissing the feet

of Jesus. They lift their arms and wail,

and I have read of such kissing,

read of how bodies drown.

The sky grows. Agnès, who is busy and shy,

 

weeps to hear the peasants weeping,

weeps for the lindens buckling into the wind.

In the square, horses clatter and rear, their hooves

ring on the cobblestones. Drowning and wrath,

drowning and wrath, night and day, but Agnès

is kissing the wind, weeping,

 

as the lindens sway, as the lindens tremble.

I have read of such kissing. 

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]