Reset Forty-Two, Day Fifteen

[rejectomorph]

Waking up on Saturday was not as unpleasant as usual, with fewer aches and pains, but that didn't presage a more pleasant day. The appalling heat is still here, and for me it was exacerbated by the weather report that my browser displays (no choice of my own, it just appeared one day and has stuck around ever since) which this time was from Los Angeles, where it was a mere 81 degrees. I've never told this unsolicited application where I live, and it fetches weather reports seemingly at random, one day showing one from Sacramento, another day one from Seattle, then perhaps Las Vegas or Phoenix. Those from Seattle are most depressing, as it is almost always below 70 degrees there, but L.A. can be pretty annoying too with its frequent summer mildness.

Anyway, I muddled through what was left of the afternoon and then the still-sultry evening, finally getting a bit of cooler air near midnight. I had to drink an awful lot of water again. It's getting tedious. And I'm getting tired, as the computer crashed and I had to wait a long time for it to fully reboot. I'll just do this then get to bed:




Sunday Verse

Pledge

by James Merrill

from A Scattering of Salts


House on alert.
Sun setting in a blaze
Of insight kisses book and budvase
Where they hurt.

Did the page-turner yawn and slacken,
Or an omen flip by unread?
Prime cuts that once bled
Now blacken.

Her brimming eyes say
More than they see.
He is all worried probity
About to get its way.

Dance steps the world knows curiously well
Ease them asunder—
Friends "rallying around her,"
His "move to a hotel."

Which one will get
The finger-wagging metronome,
Which one make a home
For the aged cricket

Who sang togetherness ahead
From a hearth glowing bright?
In the dark now, I write
Propped up in bed:

"You who have drained dry
Your golden goblet are about to learn—
As in my turn
Have I—

How life, unsweetened, fizzing up again
Fills the heart.
I drink to you apart
In that champagne."