June, 1975 Archive

June 27 1975

Friday, June 27th, 1975

The Ashley drying the house.  I sit by it with a purring kitten and a cup of lemon grass tea.  Grey and green.  Rain for the last two weeks.  The sunshine that made us long for cover now a nostalgic memory.  Days when I felt like Adam before the fall:  cultivating my garden, prospering. My response was fear and guilt.

The horses race around the pasture, the beat of their hooves shakes the ground.  The two billy goat kids moan quietly because of the rubber castrating rings I’ve just put on them.  I’m minding the store: the goats, the garden, the chickens, the fire, the laundry, the boy.  My mind spills venom.  Where are my plans and aspirations?

Psalm 131

Lord my heart is not haughty
Nor mine eyes lofty; neither
Do I exercise myself in great matters or in things too high for me.
Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother.
My soul is even as a weaned child.

June 12 1975

Thursday, June 12th, 1975

1.

Midpoint of our years
Summer Solstice nears
Mothers giving birth
Sanctifying earth.

2.

Dawn and Dusk converge
In the sun’s ovoidal path.
Opium days
Like poppy buds engorged,
Violet velvet vulvae
Swell, slit, split, splash out
Orange-red radiance
Petals, pistils, stamens
Fingers, toes.

June 6 1975

Friday, June 6th, 1975

A lesson I want to teach myself as if a child: that which you want most–maple sugar, gum, great lovemaking, a baby, the ability to write–you cant get it by desiring.  Fate, the tide which brings and takes, is a sexual person, beautiful and proud.  She gives only of her own volition.  Insistent craving doesn’t attract gifts.  So turn your longing elsewhere and learn to do without, only then may it come, a surprise, a mystery, grace.  Its enemies are lust and satiation.

Last night at the dinner table drinking white wine in the wet sunswept yard and watching Jonah.  He’s in the field wrestling with his training-wheeled bike, kicking it, crying, spitting, calling it fucken asshole, finally abandoning it, going up the hill where Ezra rides the toy tractor.  He grabs it from Ezra, who struggles to hang on to it.  Jonah lifts it over his head and threatens to smash him with it.  Ezra goes back to the cabin where Jenny is riding the smallest car, rips it from her and starts hitting her.

June 5 1975

Thursday, June 5th, 1975

Went up the tree tonight with Stan.  Still no human habitation in sight. The tree put on lots of new growth this year.  Tips no longer yellow-green but whitish-olive, still tender though. ¦The farm, my mistress, my passionate affair, returned after two years.  Tempestuous love-hate. It beguiles and tortures and surprises and overwhelms me. I would fight for it as for wife and child.

June 4 1975

Wednesday, June 4th, 1975

It’s been raining for 24 hours”finally.  The garden and the people were getting oversaturated with sunshine.  A new mood: cozy, melancholy, irritable, brooding succeeds the ecstasy of the last two weeks of May.

The sound of rain on the roof. Between sleep and waking.  An intersection of horizontal and vertical, the intertidal zone of the mind.  With eyes closed, the water of sleep and dream washes over it, softening and swelling, enlivening past and future.  Eyes open, the clarity of time, hard outlined form, things to do.