I've never made up my mind on contemporary poetry. Or any poetry written during or since Modernism. I do not know if I love the democratic spirit of the hyper-personal high-school journal poetry that is widely written. I should love it. I don't. I hate it. I hate that is exists. I want more Frost and Jeffers. I want poetry that speaks to everyone and to the personal. I don't just want radical free verse filled with ultra-inside information and self-referential bullshit. But that it is out there should really make me happy. I should really love the widespread application of poetry. I should. It should please me. I am still torn.

I hate you Jorie Graham. I love you.

I wish I knew Russian right now. I wish I could just know it so that I could go and read all of Akhmatova in her native language. It would make me feel better about reading her work. And after Akhmatova, I would read Mayakovsky. Because.

Barn Swallows are incredibly aggressive. They are also incredibly resourceful and quick when it comes to nest construction. And inventive. Their nests fit into every nook and cranny. I am constantly amazed - even when they dive-bomb me when I walk out to the garden.

What is the term for the idea of being oriented toward travel in three directions but traveling nowhere, relatively speaking. Bursting to go in one of three directions, or all three, and still staying put. Is it inertia? Is it some sort of Quantum Mechanical term? I am sure there exists some elegant mathematical equation. I hope there is, at least.

The flowers I am growing for my friends' wedding are doing rather well. One of the varieties has already begun to bloom. A couple others are a week or so away. I am hoping that the others will be ready and spectacular by the wedding. Of course, the flowers will be the easy part. Despite the fucked up year we have had climatologically speaking, the flowers are fine. There is, of course, something more I would like to say about this, but it hasn't fully come up to the surface, and I do hate to force things.

Some people are simply too beautiful to even consider.
You wonder what makes them tick...
What makes them talk to you.
And what would make them talk to you forever.
And if they would consider that,
And if you should even consider them considering you.

The sky has been amazing the past several days. All pinks and oranges. Colors that really change the look of the entire landscape and make you want to question the appearance of everything. I have to imagine that in more pre-historic times, Dawn and Dusk were seen as times of altering or changing or transformation or metamorphosis or something. Maybe not. Maybe I am reading too much into it.

The night sky has been spectacular, as well. Now that it is Summer, the Milky Way spans overhead like a bridge. It is a brilliant and smudgy smear across the top of the celestial zenith. I have only had the telescope out a few times, but the gazing has been brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Venus shines like a small moon. I make time by it as I would by the Big Dipper. It is beautiful clockwork for now.

I am slowly trying to get myself writing again. Lurching. Glacially. It feels like I am re-carving the landscape and making deposits of soil and rock. You know, like a continental glacier. Carving out a Great Lake or five. Or six if you count lonely Lake Champlain. Which I don't, but we should at least consider it. It is a beautiful lake and I really haven't seen it since I was a kid and my father took me to Fort Ticonderoga...one of the most militarily useless forts ever constructed. Just ask Ethan Allen. Anyway...yeah. I am trying to get myself writing.

Every day is another micron or so ground off the cog; it is only a matter of time before the cog disappears entirely with a frail, muffled whimper of a collapse. That is how it proceeds.
But you move along.
Like the Canadian Corps. at Passchendaele.
Like the Turks at Gallipoli.
Like Cleveland.

Ah.

It has been far too long since I've written anything - and I am not simply referring to this blog - which I started with high hopes two years ago in a tizzy of creative-feeling. I really don't know what happened.
I simply stopped writing.
I also stopped typing.
I haven't given myself any time to think anything through.
I don't think too deeply about anything.
I let too much pass over and past me.

My hands are in the soil and my thoughts are there, too.

After several long years of personal solitude, I have finally grown sick of being alone.
Which is disconcerting because I've always admired the hermit and the recluse.
I've envied those who could venture off into the great distances and live humbly and alone.

But I do not live in a cob cottage out on some long-forgotten barren moor.
I do not live in a quiet cabin on the shores of a lake in the middle of the nearly impenetrable forests of the Alaskan Range.
I do not dwell in stone huts tucked away from the winds on St. Kilda, or on a lonely, unnamed river somewhere in the Great Slave Lake's basin.

I live amongst people. In a hamlet near a village outside a relatively well-populated post-Industrial city on the shores of a large lake across from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the World. And I am lonely.

So I held my nose and signed on to a dating site.
A popular free site. And waited. And waited. For nothing. I was actually anxious for a while. But for no reason, really, because nobody said hello. No women in the vicinity were interested.
But I expected that. As a fat guy, I am used to that. You are not seen as being a sexual entity when you are fat. You are there. People like you, maybe, and think highly of you...but there is hardly any notion that you may have romantic potential; the thought is probably disturbing.

Then the other day, after months of nothing, I received a message. The woman was attractive and shared many interests with me. We've made small talk over the past couple days. And I am locked into the mindset that this can't happen because she will not come to see me as a sexual being; she will not recognize or acknowledge and chance for romance. Layers of fat will distort her view. And I can feel the negativity flowing. Pessimism. Rampant self-doubt. I am now more worried that she WOULD be interested and then that, upon meeting, she would be horrified or completely let-down.

Foolishness.
I have to punch myself back to normalcy.