A few maples are turning red at their tops. The water’s barely warm enough to swim in. Warm is the wrong word. More like tolerable. But once I’ve made that initial plunge, gasped, and headed out, the water becomes skin-like, fitting my body until I don’t think cold anymore. Rapturous. Swimming has been both a pleasure and a pain this summer. My hips/back need a day’s rest between. Soon, I guess, I can get another cortisone shot. But there’s something about trying to figure out what will help, on my own. Something about moving this way and not that, stretching this way and not that.
If you’re a writer, your job is to exquisitely feel things, see things, and sort through your vocabulary to translate all this life somehow. That’s step one. Step two is to find a way to swim though all that. Meaning, let it act on you so that you’re no longer the director, you’re the swimmer. Why am I pontificating? You already know this.
This raven has hung around Merrie’s Market for days and days. A portent, a harbinger of winter, I guess.
We’ll be leaving the lake at the end of the week. It’s gotten too chilly most days to sit on the dock and read. Children and grandchildren have gone home. It’s getting lonely. And dark, under the trees. I would not want to spend the winter here unless I were more enmeshed in a community to distract me from the weather. Besides, even the little cottage where we stay would be freezing. It’s not built for winter.
I’m looking forward to being back among people. I appreciate feeling a part of things. There’s something about having even brief conversations that fills out the human shape, don’t you think? Being seen.
Speaking of that, I’ll be reading with Mike Delp in Northport at DogEars Books on the 30th, and then at Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids with Patricia Clark on October 3. Yay! I get to read with these good poets.
“Retirement” is so different. I used to be relieved to get time to write. In my teaching days, I escaped to the lake alone to have a blessed week to work. Now the days mesh together. Actually, it is all quite weird. I wish I could tell you. The drive, the wish to succeed, whatever that means to you, begins to fall away. When/if you write, it’s partly habit, partly a sincere wish to continue to write well, to continue to write better until, if you’re lucky, you’re lying in your final hospital bed like James Wright, poems spread out around you, arranging them for your last book.
The total of my life will be all those books? Not really. I’m thinking there’s no such thing as a total. No one at the so-called pearly gates is going to check over your resume. I don’t think you need to recruit someone to give you a stunning introduction. All this work you’ve done, the work of your lifetime, was not building toward something but was simply the expression of your being.
Your being in this configuration can last only so long. You may be anthologized. Your words may be quoted years hence. But not forever. It might be that some of your words change the trajectory of someone’s life, in which case the echoes of you might live forever. The writing you’ve done—it shifts, however subtly, the whole landscape.
Ollie has eaten up more than one box. It’s exhausting.
On the opposite end of life, Ollie’s a teenager, only 10 1/2 months old, getting heavier and bolder. chasing everything that moves this morning. He has his mouse, his purple snake I found again under the sofa, his pipe cleaner. circles. He has the little throw rug to slide up into a wad. He’s pretty content either at the cottage or at home, as long as we’re nearby. He’s chewed up several boxes and shredded several bags. He likes to perch like a gargoyle on top of the refrigerator and wait for us to finish our cereal. The minute we’re done, he leaps down to the table and licks whichever bowl is left. We’re ridiculously indulgent.
What else? I’m reading Zadie Smith’s Fraud, interestingly old-fashioned in its tone. And funny. Recently I’ve read Isabel Allende’s The Wind Knows My Name, Herman Diaz’s Trust, Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, The Betrothed, by Manzoni, American Ending, by Mary Kay Zuraleff. All over the place, no plan at all. A head full of words. No, a head full of worlds, all true, all authentic.