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[25 Dec 2011|01:49am]

[15 Dec 2009|09:59am] goodbye old diary.

[20 Feb 2009|07:46pm] oh little february. how i love to go for a walk with a terrible headache, and see the big dipper standing on its hind legs. and think to myself, twice i have thought i've seen a deer in that tree.

[12 Dec 2008|01:42pm] As an aside, the further one has gone into being a freak the more prone one is to suddenly start using words like darling.

[14 Jul 2008|11:27pm] A friend of mine, to whom I was showing some of these drawings, when he came to the one of Thomas walking with his mother in the land of dreams, said he thought the child's arms were too thin. As a matter of fact, I made them that way on purpose, because I felt sorry for him. I could not help feeling he was rather unhappy, and the only way I can make people look sad is by giving them very thin arms.

[14 Jul 2008|02:23am] I am acquainted with a lake, out in the country. at first it looks like one big body but there are hallways that lead to other lakes. do you know the small, almost handheld staircases at monticello? the byways between lakes put me in mind of them. they are so narrowly carved out of the tall green reeds as to barely even be the breadth of a boat, and the water in them is only one foot deep. go back a few years and my favorite dreams were those in which I rode a boat through a flooded house. it is just like that here. you have to hold your paddle vertically and hope to float through the corridor on some invisible impetus. like a bicycle when one stops pedalling, deep stillness in spite of moving. the force of the other lake draws you along simply because you are thinking of it. it is in this second in a series of lakes that there used to be an old abandoned house. the barn beside it was otherworldly, like clouds passing over you at night. rising out of the lake, with that rocking hill behind it, the hill that is silver when it's windy. as in a dream you would come to the place where the soul of the house once stood. it has been torn down since you were last there, here, three years ago. you only saw, coming across the water, certain sky-space that had once been a hayloft. remember how, in high summer, how everything stands for something absent, even the white waterlilies are like the swans who should be there who are somewhere else.

[06 Jul 2008|10:29pm] I went swimming today. in a pool and all, which is not the ocean in new england, in fact it is warmer and you can watch everything underwater, provided you wear a pair of goggles. so I wore goggles. amazing. it's so blue down there, and you can't breathe, which is kind of nice. I mean it's nice to not be able to breathe because of something nice, such as swimming all around alone in a crazy swimming pool and the light (outside) keeps changing, storm-hope, clouds, birds, but you don't know about it firsthand, it has to be filtered down, like reading something in translation, but when they did it nice, you know, like constance garnett. in any event when was the last time I watched my lungs leave a real trail of breath behind me? a hell of a long time ago, I guess. in 1931, in fact, when I was french swimming champion jean taris, and vigo made the film of me, beating my legs, of my breath everywhere. afterwards my parents took me to the co-op and I tried to wear my goggles inside--I thought I looked good in them--but it made my mom really mad and she wouldn't buy me any groceries until I took them off. I forgot ricemilk, which was the one thing I sincerely wanted.

[04 Jul 2008|11:15pm] it is sad like wearing the hood of horse-grey roses. a minnesota not quite the fine light feeling of not being loved. as of some other seemingly-remembered summer.. on a map of migratory bird routes I once saw minnesota called a haven for the flightless. it was either minnesota or Казахстан... it is harder to breathe here, where there is no ocean & the blood slugs along as though. the arteries have learned various sorts of crazy nautical knots and do this to themselves all day. the season you wish for far away, the feeling that it had to be reached by train. islands and all. little loosestrife-covered bridges. the bees will want to see me. who knows why I half-feel I was you once. I think you still live. you do not smell a song in your sleep, you do not know, from far above, where a heart lies, the horse who lifts a hoof down there..

[28 Jun 2008|11:21pm] this morning i woke up in st. petersburg. i wore the bluebird tunic. i stepped off of an old ship humming songs. i know the life history of a ship somehow.. ever since i was little. your years in your eyes i was alone; the streets were foggy with white bees or with white hay balanced across the handlebars of a bicycle.

[16 Jun 2008|09:46pm] When I am at home, I am more often than not in my library--as fine a one as you will find out in the country... It is in the third story of a tower, and was formerly a large storeroom and the most useless place in the house. The first story is my chapel. The second, a bedroom with closet, where I frequently sleep in order to be alone. Every morning and evening a great bell rings out, the noise shakes the very tower, and at first I thought I could never stand it. But now I am so used to it that I hear it without any manner of offense, and often without waking. My library is round in shape. The only flat stretch of wall is behind my table and chair; and so with one glance I can view all my thousand books about me, curving in rows five shelves high. The room is sixteen paces clear in diameter, and its three windows open on wide and noble porches. I am not there so continuously in winter, for it is the windiest spot in the house. But I like it for being remote and rather of a climb, because of both the exercise it affords, and the seclusion.

[14 Jun 2008|01:48pm] one breathes more quickly around a birthday--with thirty white horses, i think, there were thirty little white horses made of wax ablaze on an old cake. and presents and flowers, and those drinks--to go with the cake--fashioned from cherry chocolate soy ice cream and ameretto. one wishes manhattan were in maine. it is too far to go grueling along on a bus, and furthermore there is only one single raccoon who should inhabit my whole island, but in manhattan there are many. many, many, and right at midnight one of them appeared where i was sitting in central park and shared a donut with me. shared two donuts with me. one glazed, the other chocolate marble swirl, though one could not tell the difference between them in the dark.

[03 Jun 2008|10:48pm]

[02 May 2008|12:21pm] a bit of graffiti that seemed to be awaiting me read "you will die at 10 o'clock." i took this to be a favorable omen.

[01 Apr 2008|10:19pm] it is so dark and warm, and windy, which rings--the buoys must most of all become sort of horse-shaped bells. i did see a deer, finally. the main thing now are blueberry pies. god only knows how long my life went whirling on without having ever laid eyes on a proper blueberry pie, and now that i have there is no end to it; i eat acres of pie. i eat one every day almost, and anybody who eats half of what is left in the morning before i wake up is surely a horrible person.

[23 Nov 2007|10:03pm] I will walk across the island looking for the lost pony in the moonlight. even if he isn't there the shape "as dark as the devil's sheepdog," I say to myself, will be in the field, and one can look at that with limpid eyes as though it too would move, would be something other than an ordinary bush, would hopefully be either george harrison in 1965 or an enormous black belgian sheepdog, would come toward you now, in november, to eat apples from your hand. and yet a dark shape shows no sign of appetite as long as one stands staring at it. and yet here there is an endlessness of windfall apples...

[05 Oct 2007|11:56am] i rowed out here last week. as neighbors go it's my favorite, owing to the fact that it still flashes on and off in such a sweet way. from the island it looks like candlelight, a birthday cake signals to passing ships, and everything is as it was before the advent of electricity. sometimes in new york city one still sees hotels where a lamp is truly burning, the dakota, actually, being the only one i can remember, which isn't a hotel at all. it's quite impossible to go inside the lighthouse, unfortunately. i only found out when i got there. the handsome scaffolding is all in a shambles these day, being not much more than a dilapidated bit of train trestle. they've really neglected it in the event of badgers who might be rowing such a long way out over the ocean & hoping to take a nap upon arrival. i think there may still be a way.. it merits further investigation, following epoxy. yes, you see, epoxy makes everything quite safe.

[23 Sep 2007|12:04pm] dear dear uspensky chapel

[22 Sep 2007|08:54pm] dream of early morning between 8&10 o'clock wonderful woodpecker friend. a nightmare, almost, at first, as woodpecker (in my room) was attacked by invading blue jay. he bled a lot as i carried him downstairs, but a paper bird hanging over us as we descended the steps was in some small way alive as well and seemed propitious. photograph of the two of us taken by passing through turnstyle towards subway tunnel maybe, myself with woodpecker sitting on shoulder certainly nicest ever photo of myself one has seen either asleep or awake. a man standing beside the camera with spare ears and such in glass cases.. boxes spare beaks.. the beaks more alarming because they had come from birds. i think he was some sort of surgeon. he kept demanding money from me for the photograph, something in the neighborhood of 21 cents which i naturally did not have. in rocking chair with woodpecker in lap

[20 Sep 2007|07:51pm] north orchard window with notched wing: I saw a sheet of paper with an egg resting upon it floating in the ocean today. looking at it for a long time made me wish I had a pet woodpecker. I thought it might be a woodpecker egg which rolled back and forth across the edge of the paper without ever falling into the water, but it seemed too big to be one. even an ivory-billed woodpecker egg would be so small. can you believe the size of eggs sometimes? I found an eggshell from where a baby robin was born in central park this summer, and I couldn't, though clearly it once was large enough to contain an entire life. this is the same way one is surprised by the size of paper on which death certificates were printed. I live in a house (ghost of hazel town) which is right by the sea where there are many things to rummage through: I mostly rummage through myself but sometimes I sit in the triangular closet under the gable stirring through paper everything the color of cemetery hydrangeas the delft blue dust of old diaries I had never really seen death certificates before, maybe they are still that size. it is terrible who has died in this world on such small sheets of paper. nick drake, especially. he was who I thought of when I thought of someone who had died.

[11 Aug 2007|10:38am] i don't know. it is august and the apples are lavender. i do not think of anything anymore because when i begin my heart swells practically to the bursting point, which seems strange now. i suppose i'm out of practice. the only thing i have practiced all summer long is wanting there to be a way a lamb could live with me. i daydream the cemetery will be deeded to me: a lamb could live there...

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