Evensong VIII (26 January 2024)

 Day 5 in bed.

I tell myself it is winter. The animal body knows it is winter, the season of rest.

Bill collectors call at the same time every day. They make their own form of time and grow impatient, threatening, menacing, when I fall out of rhythm. They want me on the one but I falter at the down-beat.

The knock at the door goes unanswered so long I no longer have an address on record. Something about disappearing, being invisible, etc etc but let’s just say now that I’ve fully divested. No longer participating.

Day 5 in bed. Write from bed. Read from bed. Make toast. Make tea. Eat in bed.

In bed, blow a cooling breath into the porcelain cup, saucer in your palm, liquid surface rippling, your pursed lips. Steam. Slurp and sip in bed.

Take the ferry across the New York Harbor. Think about the billion oysters anticipating a vertical life from their gabion nests. See some art. Hug some friends.

Get back on the ferry.

Get back in bed.

Listen to Bach. His Inventions. The way you wanted to extract the poetics. Now think about your piano, where you left it strapped to a furniture dolly in a garage in Connecticut. All of those runs, the arpeggios and riffs. Clumsy. Inarticulate. More longing than precise. Everything is an experiment.

On YouTube, a grief counselor talks about brain fog. She talks about a brain injury. She reads from a text off camera and you watch her pupils move back and forth back and forth back and forth, like a typewriter carriage. She reads and speaks and instead of hearing the words you imagine the text and then she’s probably telling you something important that you should know about yourself but you’ve missed it. You were reading her eyes reading, wondering who wrote her script. Maybe it was she, and she is also filming herself, and she’s letting you know that there is no longer the same activity in your frontal cortex. She’s saying something about the lizard brain, (which you don’t believe in), about being stuck in fight or flight or freeze.

You search for videos of foxes running. Last spring you saw a fox running across a hillside in Virginia. Evening was falling and you'll remember it and remember it and remember it, like a question that can't be answered. Like one of the twilights coming down. You understood in that moment why fox hunts were a thing - you had to stop yourself from chasing the fox. It was mysterious and beautiful and urgent. More like ballet than ballet.

Day 5 in bed.