lover's angel told the captain's man

We know little but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, that ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

--Rilke

how much more difficult, then, to not love when love has burrowed deep into you. though I guess it's more difficult to love if by love you mean to bear love, not to exalt in it. if love were a skin, and we were reptiles, leaving it on hot stones at midday, already feeling the new skin up against the ligaments, how much less weight we'd bring to bed with us at night. but we're not reptiles, and the skin of love is not skin at all, but blood, and we carry it with us, feeling at times like we are little else.

mallowy red of sunset and sunrise clouds

this morning I woke up to all this pink light. winter dawn in my morning windows is red, red like brothel light red, a both comforting and disorienting wakeup nudge from the cosmos.

other mornings I've been groggy and delirious, so delirious in fact that I regularly have been forgetting or failing to wash the conditioner from my hairs, and so I dry off, get dressed, put on makeup, jewelry, etc., only to discover that my hair is filmy with residue and I have to stick my head under the tub faucet for rinsing. this, like the newspaper, is exasperating.

but really, with freshly percolated coffee, what does red light and filmy film matter anyway? it's all about the folgers moment, except with a guatemalan medium roast and without the dark haired broad shouldered man smiling sleepily next to the folgers can. which frankly I'd rather prefer. I don't like strange men in my kitchen.

news that's fit to print

there was a great picture of vladamir putin in the times this morning. he looked like an incredulous turtle.




and he says things like I don't want to say that your opinion means absolutely nothing to us and that we want to spit on everything... . it was good reading. and by that I mean entertaining. also I learned about the book that says that women are supposed to be like cats and that men like shiny things and that's how you make one love you. the whole thing was very exasperating. like listening to my mother only it was in the news.

ah well. I'm sure there was actual news too- stuff about indictments and supreme court justices and hurricanes. but somehow I feel a little grateful for the sunday fluff. takes the edge off.