Oh, the impatience.

I might be too impatient to wait here at home for the water to boil to make my lunch, and this is how I go hours and hours without eating and days and days without eating well because the impatience is too great for me to keep up with the traces my living in a house leaves and so it becomes easier to abandon the house day after day, only coming home to sleep and then to drink coffee in the flannelled bed before getting up exactly 32 minutes before I'm due to be in the next place because that's how long it takes to shower and do all those things that stabilize the day before I run off to be three minutes late to whatever I'm going to, only this wasn't the case with photography today because all I was doing was developing yesterday's film (much of which was overexposed) and so now I am home for lunch, which I didn't think I'd have time for before the post office closes and yet I find myself wanting to get up and leave for the post office and for the officehouse where my people are and how am I supposed to feel good about leaving them next year and how am I supposed to feel besides impatient and how am I supposed to get anything done while I feel this way and what does it mean that I seem to want only to read books about beauty and start to want to write one and is this a sign that I should be reading Ruskin and if so should I and if so and when will that water be done boiling and was I ever serene I don't think I was but thank goodness the kitchen is clean and well-lighted and the pasta will boil and I will get up from the tympanic shudder of the porch's screen and will eat in warmth and then move again with increased fortitude and (d.v.) a grace in not-knowing, in remembering (for example) the fine flock that bloomed on yesterday's cold window.

* * *

The new snow is part of what does it, and the incessance of plowing though the streets are nearly clear. And in the past twelve hours I have read two poems I love: Ali (Stine) Davis and Geri Doran, I've never met you, but I'm so grateful. I too know about starry skies and silent birds. I too know about halving.

* * *

Being separated from this space: the nightmare of artists: nothing holding still long enough to be seen. Or not being able to locate, use, train your medium to enter that space and fix on a thing.... One hopes not only for transportation but accompaniment. Sad moment, when my friend said, "I'm not painting now, but it's ok (he is brave: it wasn't), I'm painting in my head."
       In the head? No. That won't do. I mean to be literal here. I mean the actual space between mind and work and how that slows, how that constitutes when one is at work, is working in the space. And I mean, too, the space art clears for us all--that place of density, interiority. I do not intend to be cozy. I do not intend to be abstract. I mean the actual space. I like, as Emerson said, the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary.

-- Lia Purpura, "On Sugar Eggs: A Reverie," from On Looking (2006)