Indwelt Spaces

I was sitting alone at the bar, this was a couple of days ago, nursing a beer. I was watching the top ten plays of the day before on ESPN. A ritual almost. The young woman, Misty, had come in for a to-go lunch order. I put a hand out, to stop her, something I wanted to say, but I wanted to watch the top play, an amazing catch against the left field wall, and my hand came to rest on her left hip. She did nothing to dislodge it, watched the replay with me, asked if maybe we should get a drink after work. I was shocked, just wanted to tell her I liked the highlights in her hair. One of the new barmaids, Leslie, tall, long narrow feet, asked me where I'd perfected my technique. The UP, I told her, where you don't waste time in fear of freezing to death. You, me, under a pile of buffalo robes. Astra pours me another draft, and she is so beautiful it plucks my heart strings. The world is too much, I scamper back under the leaf where I habitate. I am curious about what Emily felt toward those various father-figures. Something beyond the driven snow. She was hot for Lord, gushed when Higginson came to visit. Context is everything, What I remember exactly. Fried bread, in various guises. The sculptor Callimachus, on viewing an acanthus plant, invented the Corinthian capital. Another rainy day. I read Walter Benjamin for eight hours. A very funny paragraph, he quotes J K Huysmans from Croquis (Paris, 1886) about a long row of female mannakin torsos (mannakin has three different spellings), he describes them as an ebb tide of bosoms, and goes on at very funny length. Page 694 in "The Arcades Project". This book is almost too heavy, physically, to read in any kind of comfortable manner, but it's beautifully made, Harvard University Press, and it will lay flat and stay open to any page. Can't say that about many books. I make a grazing station at the island: tuna salad, mixed with lots of sweet relish, two kinds of cheese, two kinds of crackers, two kinds of olives, pickled jalapeno slices. The book stays flat, I can sit on a stool, or stand. I have the computer in my writing program, so I can walk my desire paths from place to place. I get an early drink, maybe four in the afternoon, slip into a reflective mode. Sure, I've done some things wrong, such is life, you only learn from mistakes, be honest with yourself. At least once a week I go back over the really stupid things I did the previous week, so I might avoid those in the future. Everything's conditional. You don't want to get me started. Laughter is shattered articulation.