a good day for soup.

i am drinking a complimentary coffee from dave's - where i stopped on my way to work to buy a $.75 bag of spinach to go in my lunch.

i always feel like an impostor there, like i don't belong, picking out nice cheeses or meats, acting as if i shop there all the time. i guess i do.

but i don't feel like i ought to; starving artists shouldn't shop at dave's.

it has taken me all this time to realize that i have a routine that i've been building all summer long. that little things like sleeping through my snooze and reading a lot of emails from home and never actually going running but instead going somewhere for coffee happen every day. later, when the season shifts up and i have some other job or frame of life, i will look back at these distinctive things as the substance of the time.

this has been the summer: scrambling out the door a little later than intended, coming into the office at newspaper p. and staring for a half hour, rousing myself by a jaywalk over to starbucks, getting down to work just before lunch.

i started reading girl meets god by lauren winner last night. i mistrust the title. i like to think that her publisher forced it on her or that maybe she is like me and gets paralyzed when it comes to naming something that she poured months of herself into.

my best titles are only lifted quotations, a segment of someone else's thought and i do a miserable job writing my own headlines.

i like her also because she is an intellectual and never sacrifices that, but she befriends you with her writing. she shares awkward stories about herself, but has to define a word every other chapter.

her style reminds me of kathleen norris and anne lamott: the fragmented confessional memoir. chapters end and begin with no immediate connection to each other, yet they all gather into a whole of thought by the end of the book. if i ever write a book it will probably be like that too.

i read the first two chapters last night and she made me want to travel again.

"when [hannah] lived in paris and i lived in cambridge, we used to meet in london for weekends. she brought french chocolate and we sat in pubs and teashops for hours. we darted in and out of churches and bookshops and walked through parks."

a year ago i was in berlin and we were sitting on church lawns, journaling on park benches, eating on balconies by the train tracks. we only had 10 days.

i just opened the window so i could hear the rain better and the cars coursing down main st..

raindrops are lining up along the bottom of the thick telephone wire that hangs outside my window and dripping in groups onto the people at the bus stop below.

it's almost lunchtime so i guess i can get to work now.

from january

"You Don't Know What You Need"

Southern Rhode Island Coast

I swear I didn't sleep last night.

I realized the other day that the cadence most natural in the poetry I write resembles the rhythm of a children's book or a nursery rhyme,

Lying on my back on the sand today, reading T. S. Elliot and Kierkegaard, groping for a political philosophy, and then stretching out beneath slumber, all my thoughts in fragments still,

The ocean and the continuity of self. Learning that it helps my later self, in some ways, to force out a record of days, even if my words have no artistry, even if I can't finish or properly punctuate sentences,

Here at a side beach, enclosed by stone jetties, watching the Block Island Ferry, a tall white layer cake with frosting windows, floating back and forth on a string, jelly flags whipping. High blue sky, gulls (sky rats), fishing boats crawling below, and kite surfers cutting in angles and spitting white foam. Houses, stretching out along the arm of horizon, shingled, grey,

All of my words, always the same,

The ocean, rolling, like Ecclesiastes, and me watching, groping after words (vanity, vanity),

I can't match the things I've read, Fitzgerald's blue ocean of promise denied, Camus' boiling Algerian Sea, Warren's muddy Louisiana Bay, somehow still inviting to Anne and Jack, with space to float and sky, sky, and grey and slate and storm and cloud,

I can see, more than imagine, Sylvia Plath's Cape Cod, where she nannied and slept in the sun, pressing her brown body into a heated jetty stone, pulling periwinkles off the rocks, and the green brine of low tide, and cleansing wind regardless, and the way the salt stays in your hair all night