Idiopathic

Full of vim and vinegar. Assemble the dirty laundry, collect the garbage, head down the driveway. Partly cloudy, but rain forecast for after noon. Library, laundromat, and liquor store; Kroger, for the makings of a ratatouille, but the eggplants are all bruised, so it'll be a variation. Home before the rain, I dump everything inside and take to truck back down the hill, walk back up, put things away. Clean linens. I hadn't made up my bed in months, sleeping on top of the comforter in my down mummy bag. Flannel sheets now. Just time to walk in the woods, widely spaced raindrops on the leaf-litter, and I find a few morels before the rain runs me indoors. Enough for an omelet. Fried in butter with just salt and pepper. I have a duck egg and two quail eggs. Delicious, a transport of joy. While I eat, at the island, I'm reading the Britannica article on the ossuary at Sedlec, a monstrance. The things people think of to do. There is a certain artistry, but the medium is so strange. Mistaken identification. What I took to be dead frog eggs, because the shape was not right, are actually salamander egg cases. The frog cases are a random jumble of individual eggs, the salamander cases are more like a smooth fist sized glob. A colloidal mass, almost smooth on the outside. I have what I used to think of as my frog field-fit, which I now call my amphibian field-kit, and intend to study them. I know these are salamanders, not newts. A malaise overtakes me mid-afternoon, thinking about my parents, lost loves, my daughters, the price of tea in China. The budding foliage is soaking up this rain. Could be a good year for blackberries. I'm tempted to make a wine, get a zinfandel extract from California, balance it with native blackberries, and that Elder Blow. Get it to go deep into a second fermentation, so it would be drier than smoke, with all that character. Communication is weird. I have a lot of time to talk to you, because I make the time, I don't do anything else, other than hanging shows and mopping, reading. I read a lot, but it's just my nature. Really, I don't know what other people do with their time. I'm rarely bored, I have a list of things I have to reference. It takes longer, to turn pages, but I enjoy the act, actually turning pages. Linda voiced a position I agreed with, but it really is necessary to separate the artist from the work. A good poem is a good poem. Breaks through. 'Called Back' suddenly pregnant with meaning. Linda is my best reader, she understands what I'm saying, almost no one else does, she reads me as the narrative I am, not as anything else. That rubbish pile of colappsed images. I talk to some health care workers. Seems it doesn't matter what you do: it all falls apart.