Reading, Later

Wallace Stevens at the island. I'd kept it out because Glenn kept quoting him, from "Credences Of Summer" -A hermit's truth nor symbol in hermitage./It is the visible rock, the audible,/The brilliant mercy of sure repose,/On this present ground, the vividest repose,/Things certain sustaining us in certainty.- Exactly. I've been reading poems for hours, all over the board, some Shelley, some Stevens, dear sweet Emily (hot deep Emily), "The Kingfishers", some Sidney Lanier, looking at the way charged language carries its freight of meaning. Prose, you know, I just let the program wrap the lines, there are no hard stops. Everything becomes different. Enjambment, for instance, is not the same, internal rhyme achieves a different result. Parsing. I had a box of Jiffy Mix Cornbread, there's a corn dish I use it in, and late last night, the stove was hot, I decided to make corn sticks. The cast iron pan makes seven sticks, I wiped it out, heated it to smoking with a drop of bacon fat in each form. I didn't have any milk, but I had some half-and-half which I diluted and soured with lemon juice, an egg. These were so good, I have to say, that I ate them all, the last two with molasses. God, if there is one, would meet you at the gates with these. Cold, tonight, but then warming, the cookstove is spiked, I could anneal steel, tandoori frog legs, but I choose a simple cream soup and bread. I always wander through the produce section at Kroger and I had bought the smallest Butternut Squash there was. I don't think I did anything different, it's all about the sugar transformation, the way things are stored, but this was a good soup. Grown people cried. Me. There's a tell here, if you dig deep enough, you want other, another, but the precise one is yet to be defined. Spooned with no demands. Listen, the crows are settling. Brush and trees from the ice storm are stock-piled and then ground to mulch at a designated spot west of town. Huge grinder set up yesterday, a couple of piles maybe 15 feet high, 20 feet across; this morning, in the cold, they were smoking. I stopped and plunged my hand in up to the elbow. Warm, 150 degrees. Would be perfect for slow cooking a large brisket, rub, wrap in several layers of foil, center of pile for 24 hours. This would work. My new recipe book: Cooking In Compost. The lady at the donut shop wears too much makeup. You want your donut shop lady to be fairly plain; and her hair, god, so 60's southern; also, too much perfume, I can taste it on the donuts. I only eat plain cake donuts. My donut career lasted a year, Freshman in college, night shift, while rehearsing a play and taking a full course load. Demented. I made the largest cake donut that would fit in the fryer for the opening night party of "Henry the Fourth, Part 2", a twelve pound monster with crude icing pennants for the various houses. Cops really did come in for free coffee and donuts. I was always high and they knew it, but we had a certain rapport and they chose to ignore it. The three nights a week I was off, I built the set; this was the era of Black Beauties as a diet aid, and we sped against the future, everyone's mom had a bottle in the cupboard, they were almost free on the street. My mom was taking them, prescribed, after the birth of my brother, 10 years after me and she couldn't lose the fat; she was fine with me taking some, after all, the Doctor said. Nice foray below the floodwall, I get some hardwood. I can heat with this. Building that set, I remember, late at night, we'd run out of materials, but they were building more dorms across the swale, and we'd just go take what we needed. Midnight shopping. Theater is its own world, above the law. The show must go on. Most people ignore the question and look the other way, the fact remains. It was the birds, that drove it home to me, the way they flitted through the under-story. The way things are construed. I could sell this house and build another, I'm not without skills, though with the recent robberies my tool kit is wanting, I don't have a hammer for instance, and I really need one, they took my drill. Fuickers.