Still no text to report. No words to zap into this space. No keyboard, no new phone, no energies with or environments from which to hurl those lucid ramblings that used to fill these column inches so mountainously.
Maybe not mountainously. Hillfully. Mannahatta-esque.
I read a bunch of Elizabeth Jennings and feel like I found the bottom. The message. The gentle torments that drove her to poetry. Articulate and disciplined, that’s EJ to me.
I also breezed through a bunch of Naruda, mostly reading twice or thrice but feeling no need to re-read again.
My mother’s house is empty. It seems like it should have been more momentous but we put her in an assisted living facility a couple of months ago and after a month of drama it seems to have evened out. It would be un-momentous to me because all I do is write checks. My sister and her husband did all the work and made all the decisions, and also absorbed most of the guilt and dramatics. I try to call my mother but on most days she does not know how to use a phone.
I see my mother sometimes, walking on the sidewalk outside my apartment, I mistake an older woman with flattened hair and rigid shoulderpads limping but walking, walking demonstratively, walking so that each step tilts her body and echoes with a splat. That woman walks faster than my mother ever did, and her gait is my clue that this woman who resembles my mother is someone else, walking to where I do not know.
I am sitting in a corner of a pub where bruises — big, jet-black bruises — have happened. Pecking out this, which amounts to a lengthy text message.
