The wind is thrashing the house in gusts that shake the windows and whistle over the gutters this early and dark November morning. It's not quite 5:00 AM and I am already up and sitting here in my windowed corner seat. The wind isn't actually pushing through the window panes behind me, but my soul feels just as if it were. I feel colder than the temperature in the house suggests I should.
In the center of things
between the pressing of the window and air
---a small space---
there is a meeting that defines
nothing, everything
- Rachel Sherwood, from Windows
It has been almost a full year since I last wrote anything in this space, and what a wind-slammed storm of a year it has been, this pandemic year.
The politics of a leader's narcissism and the opportunistic indifference of those who have actively stood by has leveraged the biases of our citizens to further secure the transferred power and wealth of the already privileged.
...we ought never to have let actors
enter the city, with their songs& long noses, making a joke
even of our deaths. Take them,
those who have died with those
still living. Dispose of them some way.
- Tom Disch, from In a Time of Plague
In April we should have moved to Mexico, except that the world closed down in the weeks just before then. Our flight was cancelled, as were most of our plans. We spent a lot of our home-tied time making new plans and putting them into action. Now, with luck, we might be off to Portugal as early as February.
The sun is almost up now, and through the rain and the light of early morning I can see the hummingbirds returning to our little red feeder, still swaying in the last light winds. This light passing through the windows behind and beside me augments then overtakes the illumination from my phone's little back-lit screen. It is time to make the coffee.
I lived in the first century of the world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
- Muriel Rukeyser, from Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)
