Fatigue's low blowing.

When you're fatigued, where do you feel it? For me, the deep stuff settles just on the back side of my retinas, circling my eyesockets and heavying my head. Here on the porch again, in a quietly vigorous post-rain breeze, my once-and-future San Franciscan friend e-mailing beside me, I feel as though I could put my head to one side (or, rather, leave it to the side where I've already put it) and doze, sinking into some pillow of tiredness that's cushioning me round this afternoon.

Five deer materialize in the yard across the street--three does and two fawns, all ears aflicker and tiny spots winkling and new legs ricketing across the road. One fawn makes a kind of mewing, seeking the group, then skitters across to the woods where all are. And then they are all gone, that loveliness, those lives. I will see them again--they come back over and over--but I learn them anew each time, just in case. In case of what, I'm not fully sure--perhaps utter disappearance, failed recognition, irrevocable loss.


Driving to Columbus along my favorite route yesterday, I was able to check on all the fields and the barns and the animals. The corn has sprung tassels suddenly, gilding the green fields, reminding me of how much of the summer has gone, of how we're beyond the midpoint now. The barns sit their vigils of ruin, even amidst the extravagance of growth. The fallow fields lie scruffed with weeds and brush, with various stumps and mounds anchoring explosions of plant lives that will yield nothing but their own profusion. And the animals: cows moving en masse, devouring: this sight is not so unexpected, though it still touches me every time. But yesterday, a horse farm, with colts--and one colt standing just behind a mare, its head pressed against her flank, just resting. That quiet companionability, that undemanding needfulness, seemed a small revelation.

We have continued having rain today, though not as much or as hard as the other night. Thus, though these pictures are yesterday afternoon's, they tell a story one could see along our roads today as well: the thick grey of summer stormclouds, the green-black silhouettes of lengthening cornstalks, the peeking of barns in sodden fields.


The breeze in the porch is perfect for a drowse; it is raincatch and wavelap, grassrush and skyturn. I have quiet hopes of brief sleep.

In my dream two nights ago, my beloved Brooklynite wrote to reveal a second pregnancy, announcing it using the descriptive bibliography notations I am learning: "If you want to know, P4 will have arrived sometime in May." In my dream three nights ago, I sat down in a diner with a friend and also with a serial killer whose next target I might have been, in the hopes that I could apprehend him (while sitting in a diner?) and stop his charismatic careening through my world. Even if you knew my mind well enough to tell me why I'm having these dreams, I suspect I wouldn't really want to hear you.