I found this list, in my handwriting but a mystery to me:
gesture
sarcasm
etymology
The Roches
opposable thumbs
brains and minds
Maps
Afghani
Wikipedia
Rough
This Frenzy
this frenzy / like bees stinging the heart all morning Anne Sexton
I found this list, in my handwriting but a mystery to me:
gesture
sarcasm
etymology
The Roches
opposable thumbs
brains and minds
Maps
Afghani
Wikipedia
Rough
This Frenzy 
gesture, she said, and i’ll know what you mean
it doesn’t seem real, this silence between words, the things themselves, bruised and irresponsible, specific as my hands are vague, and i am afraid to ask, afraid to know what she thinks i might have said
sarcasm, i know, was her defense and our clever pleasure together, and now that has failed us, earnestness becoming us closer and closest and then, in this distance between who we are and what we once became and what we must do, earnestly failing forward, naked now
etymology, she said, it’s the new and the old married in the present, dying into the future of language, the unsaid never said again, the thunder breaking open the cracks that become letters and later letters renewed, partial, the promise renewed and broken on each tongue
the Roches sang about this. “you’ll never come back,” they said, and we haven’t, have we
blame it on opposable thumbs brains and minds unstoppable, facing the chimera of memory
maps of trauma requiemed, chromosomes unwound and woven like mountains rising out of fire
Afghani women hide their faces when they see us coming,
Wikipedia offers no entry
rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues cut it open, and the sanity of honey pours out between, where meaning lives
My god I do love you, Carol Burbank. Why do we see each other so rarely?
I don’t know why we don’t see each other more often. Maybe because both of us are actually writing, not just talking about writing, so it’s harder to find time to talk about talking about writing or even about writing!
I’m having a hard week. I am writing through the blues, pushing ideas and theories and thoughts from long research onto the page, which I almost called unforgiving, but that’s not true, it’s really totally forgiving, in fact if we let it, it makes us out to be geniuses. So whether something good or bad comes out, it seems to always make me cry this week, because I can’t tell what it is, or how to measure, this stuff that is something entirely new to me, and yet feels as familiar as the elliptical machine at the gym, my language, my crying, my achy breaky brain….
hmph…
i wrote this recently, snowbound and feeling really really crazy, in the sane way crazy seems lately.
Lovely child, the woods are here and wilder than you hope,
and all your endings shatter in the cold,
your stories and your stories and your day
as sweet and horrible as every coming, every gone,
shadows and flesh, the bones of leaves mapping the way
top to bottom, young to old.
Not knowing need to grieve, wilderness aroused takes hand
in hand, and play wakes play, announces,
“I am what I am.”