Evasion

On my morning walk, a young couple asks me where is ***? and I point and hear myself say y'ur look'n attit -- and who would guess that this fat, slow woman, with her ungroomed dogs and wild hair, comes home to write elegant poems?

I have been feeling -- evasive -- (this is not on the imood list) -- not wanting to pause, to notice, to feel -- what? -- anticipatory, rekindled grief, perhaps -- fended off with television, news magazines, the internet. Then I feel angry with this stubborn, evil world.

Women hide in Iraq as the fundamentalists assassinate them for not wearing their cloaks of invisibility. Now, in 2005, young American mothers rediscover their shared difficulties, without, of course, using language like consciousness raising or the personal is political. A maker of model cars discovers it has a great market for nearly-naked model toy women.

So  I take refuge from grief, in anger. It's almost as though rage is a place, a room in my house; always there, always open, always pleased to receive me.

This week's Joan of Arcadia used Emily Dickinson for the moral: this recluse who never published a poem in her lifetime, but we read her today and are moved. And of course this is what I want to believe, that my life has some meaning that may not be apparent in this painful, lonely now, but that will extend out past its ending.

               bright morning
                    kingfishers
                              call