Pig and farm report

  Now there's a roar inside me like a carnival in full blast.
~ Henry Miller, Black Spring

It's spring all over the place but I've never been fond of spring and now is the month my father died. I never forgave spring for taking my father away from me with the noisy lush savage green growth everywhere. I got my first vaccine on February 25 absolute winter and today I made an appointment for my second vaccine at the end of winter. Making the first appointment felt like a Jesus miracle. Making the second appointment felt like a panic attack. The first vaccine knocked me on my buttocks I tell you what I thought for sure I'd get the shot roll my sleeve down put my coat back on and head for my car ignoring the advised 15 minute wait but I ended up being exceeding grateful for that wait. Whoa. Who cares. I don't want to die.

My son is camping with his friends at the state park eight minutes away from here. It's the first time he's seen his friends in over a year. He came home for a minute last night to gather firewood from our yard and he smelled like a campfire his clothes and hair thick with sea air and matches and dinner cooked on a grate. He is intensely beautiful.

I feel almost normal these days. Better than normal. I float up and out of my chair up and out of my body. There are bears and wild salmon and orca under my skin pulsing my blood along with growls and fluid muscular grace. Yesterday I bent down in my garden and an eagle flew up his heavy wings flapping right next to my head and my heart hammered in its cage. Incredible. This is called healing. I am not overly fond of spring so I ignore it and consider summer dresses and flats and my awful shrub of hair. I am too terrified of humans to get a haircut yet. Or a manicure or any damn thing.

I am terrible insecure about my writing which sometimes flows and sometimes falls to the ground screaming pretending some bloody wound. I am writing poetry but at a glacial pace. Once I cleaned my body of all the benzodiazepines I had been taking for over 15 years it took me a few months to align myself with my interior solar system. That is where I've been but it's a long boring story. I think it's good to feel insecure about writing. I think if that didn't happen every once in a while I'd be in deep trouble. That awful feeling of nincompoopness when it comes to writing is extremely important to my writing practice. I don't want to be the person who knows everything the smartass guru of HOW TO WRITE GOOD. I want to be opening up to it for the first time. I want to be a new pair of shoes on Easter morning. I want to smell those sheets hung in the sun to dry. I want to fall down the hill my first time up on skis. I want to crack it open each goddamn time I give it a shot. I just looked in my notebook and there's not a whole lot in there not really. No wonder!

I wore a pink and gray sweater in a diamond pattern and soft gray wool trousers with deep pockets to my father's funeral. I had one of those awful 80s perms that burned your hair up and I wore red framed sunglasses. I was angry that spring was going ahead being spring I remember that clearly. Spring was insulting me. I was mighty stoned. I got in an argument with the preacher after the service. I wanted to argue my father's death away. He was only 60 years old. I went to my father's house after the service and his wife gave me three of his sweaters and a box of his books. I wore those sweaters until they fell apart and for a good while after that.