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rejectomorphRain began after noon Saturday, and grew steadily stronger. It fell for hours, and never a break for me to go to the badly designed, badly placed mailbox until after eight o'clock in the evening. As I feared it might, the box held the latest issue of Harpers, utterly saturated. I spent the next several minutes placing paper towels between the sodden pages, all the while laying curses on the entrepreneurial imbeciles who flipped this place five years ago and chose those entirely obviously inappropriate mailboxes. The magazine might be readable in a few days, though it will never fully recover. I regret that I don't believe in Hell, to which I would gladly consign Sergei and Justin, to suffer some abominable fate.
The rain is still expected to continue for the next three or four days, and will likely total more than three inches. A flood warning has been issued, to be in effect from Sunday evening through Tuesday night. I might lose considerably more than one magazine if this place floods the way it did in the spring of 2019. I've got a lot more stuff now, and lot of it is absorbent and sits on the floor. And I really don't have the energy to deal with catastrophes anymore. I mean really, really, really.
One more annoyance. For the last couple of days the front of my neck has periodically been itching like crazy. I have no idea what brings it on. It's the wrong time of year for mosquitoes, and I'm pretty sure I don't have fleas... although I did get a visit from that cat a few days ago. Still, I can't think why fleas would confine their depredations to one small stretch of my neck. The whole thing is most irritating, anyway, but I suppose I'll just grit my disintegrating teeth and look forward to the sweet release of death. It cant be that far away now.
Sunday Verse
by Ruth Stone
The ten o'clock train to New York;
coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.
Steam wheezes between the couplings.
Stripped to plywood, the station's cement standing room
imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.
Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife.
Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.
It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.
Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.
It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.
I think about the subjugation of women and horses,
Brutal exposure. Weather that forces, that strips.
In our time we met in ornate stations
arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.
I remember you running beside the train waving goodbye.
I can produce a facsimile of you standing
behind a column of polished oak to surprised me.
Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?
Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks.
Mounds of rusting wire. Grotesque pop-art of dead motors.
Senile warehouses. The train passes a station.
Fresh people standing on the platform;
their faces expecting something.
I feel their entire histories ravish me.
The rain is still expected to continue for the next three or four days, and will likely total more than three inches. A flood warning has been issued, to be in effect from Sunday evening through Tuesday night. I might lose considerably more than one magazine if this place floods the way it did in the spring of 2019. I've got a lot more stuff now, and lot of it is absorbent and sits on the floor. And I really don't have the energy to deal with catastrophes anymore. I mean really, really, really.
One more annoyance. For the last couple of days the front of my neck has periodically been itching like crazy. I have no idea what brings it on. It's the wrong time of year for mosquitoes, and I'm pretty sure I don't have fleas... although I did get a visit from that cat a few days ago. Still, I can't think why fleas would confine their depredations to one small stretch of my neck. The whole thing is most irritating, anyway, but I suppose I'll just grit my disintegrating teeth and look forward to the sweet release of death. It cant be that far away now.
Sunday Verse
Winter
by Ruth Stone
The ten o'clock train to New York;
coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.
Steam wheezes between the couplings.
Stripped to plywood, the station's cement standing room
imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.
Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife.
Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.
It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.
Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.
It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.
I think about the subjugation of women and horses,
Brutal exposure. Weather that forces, that strips.
In our time we met in ornate stations
arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.
I remember you running beside the train waving goodbye.
I can produce a facsimile of you standing
behind a column of polished oak to surprised me.
Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?
Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks.
Mounds of rusting wire. Grotesque pop-art of dead motors.
Senile warehouses. The train passes a station.
Fresh people standing on the platform;
their faces expecting something.
I feel their entire histories ravish me.
