Ever so sheepish at the moment, despite glasses of port & feet dusty after walking forever today on a levee trail through salt marsh off the Dumbarton Bridge, past dumped gigantic drainpipes, a faded red boat beached in pickleweed, & skittish willets & black-necked stilts yipping into startled flight. How did I fancy that I had anything interesting to offer as a writer years ago? Foolish, pretentious girl!

Maybe in ten years I might excel as a writer . . . but only if I write everyday, through ennui & plain laziness & societal banality & the exigencies that life must offer. I can't delude myself any longer thinking that the imagined novel or good bloodwrit poems will just appear, voila, like wine in the afternoons when I know very well that Jimmy has driven (& he very much hates driving as he is always driving because I don't know how to drive) to the store for wine.

Just as well, as the absurdist that Jimmy insists that I often am (& too often when I should be very serious), I should not take myself seriously at all. To state quite cheerfully: I am nothing. Nothing more than my history; the bits of language picked up from school, books, cinema, family, friends, etc.; every emotion & idea I can hold within this unruly, vulnerable body of mine. Never to be so close to a whole dream-work, the breadth of the world, which I must always want to know, if only in rare, lucid moments called poems & novels.

Now I must run off & read the collected stories of Paul Bowles over a glass of something that will warm my throat & (most likely) guide the pen in my hand.




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