The Dog at the Center of My Life Recognizes You've Come to Visit

• Seal Cove, Mt Desert Island, Maine, last night's fog at sunset
• We originally planned to leave for Maryland this morning but our hosts gave us two extra days in the house, leaving Sunday morning
• Yesterday rain and fog so we stayed off the mountains so as not to break our necks on wet rocks and wet roots, wet roots, the fuckers
• Last evening I threw another round of disc (while Earthgirl painted in Seal Cove) at Hapana Disc Course in Trenton, first town on the mainland after leaving Mt Desert Island, it's short and technical so even if I haven't been playing at home, hiking with Earthgirl instead, I can pretend my score (even Monday, -1 Tuesday, +3 Wednesday, -1 last evening) signifies I'm better than I actually am, roc

• Songs from the drive home from disc course last evening
• I am a sort of Slothrop: yesterday, within half an hour of seeing each, a story about an 84 year old woman in Southwest Harbor, a town five miles from where I type this sentence, getting a job as a hotel maid (in America this is presented as a feel-good story), and a story of just around the corner from my house in Maryland, three hundred yards at most, kablammed by thunderstorms Wednesday night
• First year here I haven't daydreamed of living here, Maine
• partially because I am fated to live in flat bland eternally gray Michigan unless and until my daughter moves elsewhere, which she won't
• not because being two weeks earlier than normal this year and catching the end of bug season reminds me there are only three months of the year I'd want to live here
• mostly because this year feels like an escape hatch from the accelerating shittiness and to live here would to bring the accelerating shittiness home to the escape (which is home for an 84 year old woman who needed take a job cleaning up after shits like me who fly in for a week and then leave)

• Who is the most dangerous fascist?
• Encapsulating mainstream Liberalism
• Motherfucking Democrats (at least my congressperson voted yes)
• Waking up is violent but easy
• Don't let a plague go to waste
• The pandemic is the least of it  
• The emotional equivalent of fuck you money
• The Edge of the Map
• Napoleon Emergency Alert System still active
• Recycled

              

HOW IT IS

Maxine Kumin

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?

A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.   

The dog at the center of my life recognizes   

you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

In the left pocket, a hole.

In the right, a parking ticket

delivered up last August on Bay State Road.   

In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,

a flinging from the pods of the soul.

My skin presses your old outline.Th

It is hot and dry inside.

 

I think of the last day of your life,

old friend, how I would unwind it, paste   

it together in a different collage,

back from the death car idling in the garage,   

back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,   

reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish   

into a ceremony of sandwich,

running the home movie backward to a space   

we could be easy in, a kitchen place

with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

 

Dear friend, you have excited crowds

with your example. They swell

like wine bags, straining at your seams.   

I will be years gathering up our words,   

fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,

leaning my ribs against this durable cloth

to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.