Reset Forty-Eight, Day Thirty

[rejectomorph]

Saturday I plagued myself with a large dinner, and it was done earlier than I'd expected, and was not as good as I'd hoped, but I still overate and now feel incredibly bloated. Worse, I'd made pancakes for a late lunch, thinking dinner wouldn't be until eleven at night, and then it arrived at nine o'clock, so I downed two big meals in a period of about five hours. I could do that when I was twenty, when I was forty, hell, even when I was sixty. I can't do it now.

I'm having a hard time getting used to the clearish sky. There haven't been many clouds for most of the last couple of days, though there has been a persistent haze. There is enough sunlight for shadows all day. It's just so bright out there! I have to leave the blinds closed in the room where I have the computer, as the glare washes out the monitor screen. We should get clouds back Monday, and Tuesday we will probably get rain, but then we'll go back to the horrid sunshine and impending explosion of flowers. How will I ever get through the spring?

The dinner loginess won't go away, so I have to go to bed. Getting to sleep this early (if indeed I can actually sleep, and not just lie there like a sack of semi-conscious potatoes) invariably leads to my getting up too early in the day. Early to bed an early to rise make a man life almost despise. I think Shakespeare said that. Or Ben Affleck. One of those guys. Maybe it was Plato. Anyway, I can't sit here much longer as my back is aching and wants to be horizontal. So let's get this out of the way:



Sunday Verse

Place

by A.F. Moritz


A place belongs to the one who has most deeply
loved it, they said, has hoped in it beyond
its self-corruption. The land, people, the city

is his if his nights are for recalling it,
calling it in tears of aloneness and amazed
thanksgiving: that luck let him kiss it in his childhood,

that it grew into him, is him, that he still wants
to have it, save it, he wonders what it knows
tonight, right now, how it is with that place,

if it's happy, dying, dead. So he went back
carrying his book of that city: a great book,
yet only a dim sketch of his memory,

though in its pages, closed and dark, the alleys
of cracked windows and lintels, and children's paths
through towering weeds behind the empty stores

and under sycamores down to the river, burn
with bright emptiness that in the city were full
discarded bottles, concrete crumbs, and rusted

shavings in broken light. He did not have
a dollar in that place. He could not find
a door to open. He did not know a soul.