Greetings from the land of the slowly recovering poet…
I’ve had bronchitis for two weeks and unfortunately this made my asthma act up so badly I had to go back on twice-a-day inhaled steroids. This is a bummer because they have yucky side-effects. It is also a bummer because the asthma attacks tend to happen mostly at night, and therefore I have been sleeping like nobody’s business. On Saturday, I went to bed at midnight, woke up at 4:30 AM with a bad attack, then slept til 4:30 in the afternoon. This was the day of my 12th Anniversary, which I was supposed to spend in romantic entanglement and various out-to-nice-restaurant-and-movie-type celebrations, but instead husband G brought me flowers and presents and dinner in bed. I’m so lame! Then I missed seeing poet friends on Bainbridge Island because Sunday all I wanted to do was sleep – again, this time til 2:30 in the afternoon. Today, I woke up at 9 AM to take my several dosages of various medicines, then slept til 11:30. I’m turning into such a sloth I am not getting anything done! Plus, even in my dreams, I’m apologizing to people for sleeping so much! So I’m hoping the bronchitis/acute asthma thing GOES away soon.
In the meantime, I’ve been haunted by a California quail that sits on a fence post outside my office window every morning for the last four days going “er-er-EEERRR” for about two hours. When I walk on my trail in the evenings, he follows me. Just one fat little male quail. Is this a message from the universe, and if so, what does it mean?
In other news, I’ve been reading interesting books – particularly Ink Dark Moon and Amy Uyetmatsu’s Stone Bow Prayer and Kimiko Hahn’s Ant and Mosquito. The organization of Uyetatsu’s book is extremely interesting – it is divided into sections based on the lunar calendar, and each section is focused in mood or subject related to the name of that month – for instance, section 2 is “Kisaragi – Month of Putting On More Clothes” which contains poems which discuss adolescence, modesty and the awareness of the male gaze. Brilliant, right? And Kimiko Hahn does these odd little riffs on Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, in the same style of seemingly random prose observations that seem to really work.
I’m behind on my freelance assignments and reviewing, but until I get better, my mind is shrouded in that weird fever-fog – which may be good for reading and writing poetry (and reading blogs) but bad for those practical critical thinking kinds of exercises. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with kind wishes about the Writer’s Almanac thing et al and those who bought my book 🙂 Grosses bises, as my French class friends and I used to say to each other when we were trying to sound cool.