Serenity filled the world this morning, ice sparkling like shattered topaz, even the tar patches filling and seaming the cracks in the decrepit streets glimmered like gold in the early sun. Facing east the light was as bright as a theater stage, shadows like black or burgundy velvet, all sounds lost in the dimensions and spatial differentials. I could have danced this morning on the river bank to the sound of the rushing water, and been happy to have been seen as a crazy fool.

There resides a craft inherent in working words. A whistle, a wink. Akin to stringing pearls, or working gemstones, care to enhance the natural beauty, what do the words intend? Each so individual, turned this way and that beneath a jeweler's lamp. Such is the running course of poetry, droplets on a spider's web.

Sometimes word craft is like farrier work on a racehorse's hooves, don't cut too deep, but make the edge clean and sharp and intended for speed.

Sometimes it's a stranger proposition, finding words to indicate the intangible, similar to the shadow and motion that blur the distinction between rock and water, or the thick white steam escaping from the black slick streets that pave the connections between dream and hope, similar to the hushing sound of falling snow.

It snowed last night and at 3am the whole world was brilliant with reflected moonlight, silent and muffled but the stars danced madly. I didn't stay outside long in my bare feet but long enough to breathe long plumes in the damp air and think about the connections between things, made much more apparent with a blanket of snow. It comes unbidden like a dream of joy or desire dressed in white, unearthly and blessed. Our house stayed warm because he made a fire and let the oak logs burn into the night, and crisp buried coals still burned this morning, ready to be rekindled.

I'll spare you the minor mundane boring mediocre daily interests or troubles, minutae irrelevant, for the weight of your own timely scythe is enough, and I know that like I know the retina burn of you, watching you to read you for any signs, any distemper, any frowns or impatience. Hush, hush. Shall you show your contempt? Shall it burn? yes, it will and it did. Eggshells beneath my bare feet, and I know you, and I listen.

It's not easy. I'm feeling distracted and heavy, and unexpectedly lost my balance, feeling like I was pushed.

And should I shall I will I edit this a hundred more times, worrying about it? I don't like second-guessing. I don't like it at all.

Scudding is a cloud word, he said looking up at the night sky, balmy wind sweeping the soft edges of clouds over the gibbous moon. But these clouds aren’t scudding, because I think that means there’s a hard edge to the front of the cloud, a thunderhead brewing, skipping like a stone on the surface of the atmosphere.

We watched the swirling edge of the storm’s spiral, the clouds pulled by the high fast wind, but only a gentle balmy breeze lifted my hair and waved the remaining maple leaves on the tree.

Racking, then, racking is a cloud word… but it’s not quite the description of these clouds. These clouds look like Chinese dragons, they fly like dreamscape swirled horns and scales and claws. When they pass over the moon it shines a prismatic halo, and they’re flying like music and swirling into nothingness.

A midnight glimpse at an ethereal silver light and violet darkness world.

Last week I got to visit the shiny new Federal Building with my boss, to see where the hearings will be held. We wandered all over the place, strange angled walls, artistic-industrialist furniture, up to the top floor, down into the basement, through key-code doors, past painters and plasterers. In the below-street-level parking garage in which only judges are allowed vehicle access, some workers were wiring the lights. On a huge cement pillar hung a calendar, and the picture was the dogs playing poker print. I thought that was hilarious.

Foxtrot slow, slow, quick quick quick comes the coming winter, and there’s wood to buy and a chimney to clean, dead grass and leaves to rake, straw to lay in the garden so it doesn’t turn into a muddy bog when the storms start rolling in from the ocean.

I keep writing and backspacing to erase, and I don’t think what I wrote is worth the time I took to write it. What then to write? The process of writing, or rather writing about the process itself reminds me of roadwork, stop and go traffic, yield signs and authoritative sun-tanned people wearing bright orange and sunglasses holding walkie-talkies. Stop. Slow. Big machinery moving earth and gravel and asphalt.

I don’t want to do that anymore.

Last Saturday we went partying, it was the uptight “Oh what do YOU do?” crowd who discuss their resumes at parties. The hosts were fun as always, and I bobbed for apples and whacked on a piñata, but S and I finally ended up alone in a corner of the front room, sipping sparkling juice and hemming and hawing.

The drive home from the party was interesting, both Homecoming and the weekend before Halloween, and all the little freshmen twits were drunk in the streets down by campus. Fifty kids drunk off their asses, milling in the middle of the street at 2am, forming a roadblock of stupidity… and I have to ask, this is our nation’s best and brightest, students at the university?

One girl was so drunk she could barely teeter on her spiked high heels, standing in the middle of the street. I honked my horn at her and she turned around with a huge amazing grin on her face, a pretty girl, and pulled her shirt down to expose the red bra beneath her black shirt. I honked again, and she turned around and pulled her shorts up into the crack of her flabby ass. Other kids were screaming at her to get out of the way but Brittney Oblivion was too far gone, and another kid pulled her to the side of the road. S said Let’s go around them, go slow, turn here. Last year these geniuses were lighting couches on fire. So that’s what ‘party school’ means? How much fun, get shitfaced, half naked, and stand in traffic. I yelled Go to BED at them like that would help.

Sunday we spent at home, laundry & dishes & tidied up, ate lunch and drank a bottle of wine on the back porch despite the fog and cold. S made a fire in the evening and we enjoyed a quiet day. It was the first day in a long time when neither of us had something else we needed to do. And half the day spent in bed wasn’t bad, either.