ah, sunny but brisk

wind is up today, but in a little-ripply way rather than a big-waves way. the treetwigs are stirring vigorously. i burned my kale for the 3rd time last night, i just can't seem to get it right. what will i try today? cukes and red pepper salad, can't go wrong w/ that, nothing to cook on an unfamiliar electric stove. what is the etymology of "stove" anyway. i'll have to check but am afraid to leave my post here in blogland to check lest i lose this little passage, humble as it is. the cape is so mobbed in august, i miss the beautiful desolation (angelic, even) of the winter months, but it's paradise anyway. i wonder how much i'll have to weed my garden when i get back, after a month of dereliction...esp the polygonum and the stuff that comes up between the paving bricks on the walkways, oh and the garlic chives that take over everything...well i will have plenty of occupational therapy in the weeding mode when i get back, and i've got something already on the loom, plenty to do. xo for now! md

"your training is to enjoy every moment of your life!"

that is what thich nhat hanh said to the kids during a dharma talk at the retreat i just got back from. I will be taking it to heart, so stay tuned. today i got up early and ate my breakfast looking at the still still sea. so amazingly beautiful, with imaginative cloud formations constellating and reconstellating as they moved with fat purpose across the sky in a counter-intuitive direction. it was alternately cloudy and sunny throughout the day, now pretty cloudy but fairly still and heavy-leaved air, in fact entirely overcast so one can't speak properly of individual clouds but a white-gray wash across the whole of the sky. A few twigs laden with green twitch with anticipation of the next big thing, the raindrop or little wind gust headed its way. all aflutter with excitement, contained in serenity. Life is quite beautiful. I got my ms in the mail today, wow, i haven't quite taken that in, better not to, i guess. nothin' i can do now, it's just past 5:00 and the mail's gone out. love to all, md

caped weather

overcast but so mild and windy, humid, the paper in the printer gets all wavy after just half an hour's exposure to the cape air. lush lush lush, with fat unripe green concord grapes growing wild everywhere. proofread 400pp ms again, and again found plenty of errors, wish that were plenty of eros. mairead byrne will come up sometime in the next few days for lunch and chat abt poetry etc... that'll be nice. i'm so close to providence but rarely get down there, time slips by here...picked up a pound of mussels for dinner last night, they were -bummer! -kinda boring. wonder why. i've never had boring mussels before. the kale, on the other hand, just sauteed w/ a bit of onion, garlic, olive oil and water, was divine. and the mushy peach was redeemed by a few drops of honey and some of the real-but-fake-ish light-cream whipped-cream-from-a-spray-can left by the previous visitors. ah, mushy peach were paradise enow! the night before, dinner w/ celia and jerry brown's son and friends from london, jeffrey/kit baked a divine pasta dish w/ red peppers, organic ground lamb from mike brown's farm, and a bechamel/parmesan crust that was to die for. i had 2 helpings, and was reassured to learn from my sister that the leading diet experts recommend one meal a week reprieve. well that was it, as i also had a slice of mango-raspberry pie with aforementioned fake-ish whipped cream for dessert. that's it for now, folks. i can't go on i'll go on...xo, md

foggy woods hole day

spent the morning with joanne moore, the grand-niece of Yiddish poet Manileib Brahinsky, mother of Anna Malmude, and grandmother of James Davis. she regaled me with tales of her Yiddish New York bohemian childhood, her saintly grandmother and her audition, at age 8, with Balanchine to go to his ballet school after her Isadora Duncan training with the daughter of one of Manileib's mistresses. Her dad picked up Balanchine in his cab and asked where his daughter (joanne) shd go to ballet classes and B said when she turns 8 (she was 6 and already knew she needed some technique) send her to me. so he did and she went to balanchine's ballet school for 9 years. now she lives in woods hole and served me fabulous bagel-bottoms from H&R with butter, cream cheese and lox!!! v decadent. we walked from her charming cottage into woods hole so shd cd buy cigarettes and then looked in the liberty house for nice clothes, then went to the aquarium to visit the seals, but they were summering in new bedford so the seal-pool was drained. it was a great walk in sleepy, muggy weather, with great coffee at her house with real light cream (as opposed to the fat-free halfnhalf i found in the fridge when i arrived...
what a nice day, and tomorrow the poet mairead byrne arrives...summer's great!

hello my invisible and unknown dears

killing my wrists in wifi land, but loving it, here i am at the Coffee Obsession in Falmouth MA, wearing my favorite summer dress and answering email. v touched by everyone's concern abt the Mpls bridge disaster. i was on a plane to boston when disaster struck, and learned about it the next morning when my mother showed me the front page of the Boston Globe. Wow. a Dramatic Rendition in drawing, not photography. It's right by school, so i was a bit beside myself not knowing about my colleagues and friends. Now it turns out just about everyone's ok. I mean, as far as i know, the folks i know are doing all right. but what a wake-up call, in many ways. It's remarkable how distant i feel from it, though, once i learned that no one i know was affected, and that there were in fact so few fatalities. Is that screwed up?
The cape is lush, i'm not usually here in august. everything jungly and overgrown, it looks healthy, not dried-out like mpls. the water's warm, i've been in twice and there's no body-gasp when the water gets mid-midriff as there usually is. It's strange to transition into a rhythm of sloth and slowness; i spent most of today proofreading my ms for missing em-dashes and other typos. it'll take a while to get it out the door, i have to bring myself to revisit the introduction after having reread it and seen the overall lay of the land. ok, i'm just chilling. happy vacationing. a bit isolated but x funkhouser will be down here for a day, and then i've got a few poet friends around...gotta scare them up. over and out...