Stop it foot, I said to it. You’re fine, you’re fine. Foot didn’t listen. But my head did and my heart and my stomach, which is a start. Yeah, they said. We’re cool.
I am ready to write something else. Not just to move on from the novel and poetry manuscript. I am ready to leave my old obsessions behind. Jack the Ripper, Mr. Rochester: I don’t think I’ll see you again. I am ready to find new obsessions. I’m ready to tell you something else, something about the mist in the mornings; something about my heart in its coat, kept warm.
I am sitting at Mike and Joe’s, at the table by the window with the small magenta orchid (yes, like yours), working on a poem about light, and outside, a woman is washing the street by splashing a bucket of water over the concrete again and again. That’s right. Wash that away.
There was a window in the stairwell by the dressing room last evening, and I opened it. An old fashioned window with panes that burst out, like in a castle, like in the hostel in Venice where I threw open the shutters and on the bright street below, a man carrying roses upside down (by the stems, blooms hanging down), looked up at that instant and waved and shouted: hello there, girl! in English.
Hello there, girl!
On a plane trip months ago, I dreamed a new novel, start to finish. I have the first poem of a new book. How do I know it’s a second book and not the first? Because the last word is yeah.