2. I'm actually grateful to my angst for motivating me to prepare well instead of putting off or ignoring preparation.
3. Afterward I did the feared thing --I mingled a lot, talked to everyone who wanted to talk to me.
4. Even though I knew most of the people --some well, some peripherally --it was so hard to receive love from them.
5. Like they were touching a tender place that wanted to be touched, but the touch was overwhelming.
6. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of all three of us poets who read that night. We did well.
7. I don't think the audience realized that this reading for me was my re-entry to the world, and how vulnerable I really felt, standing up there.
8. It was a return to that performance space in my head that feels like pure joy, but also, I was so vulnerable. For example :
9. I almost didn't make it through the closing poem, "In Place of Speech," which I've done 100 times. I almost lost my voice for the tears that wanted to break through it. But I finished the piece.
10. After I left the bookstore I felt like I had mastered something. Or re-learned a hard thing that I had forgotten how to do.
11. And the only feeling I felt that night was accomplishment, and I had a celebratory drink.
12. But on Sunday I started to feel a little ... strange. I'm usually pretty good about naming feelings and their motivations, but not the Sunday strange feeling.
13. On Monday after some journaling I figured out what it was.
14. That reading was me, stretching to achieve. That reading was me, at the limits of my current capability.
15. Friendly faces had asked are you teaching in the fall? and are you holding out for a really good offer on your manuscript, or has it already been accepted?
16. And I felt : sadness, derision, longing. The thought that entered my mind in the breath I took to formulate my answer was I want to die now.
17. If only. If only I were able to teach. If only my MS had an acceptance letter from anywhere I'd sent it. If only I hadn't lost a year --perhaps more, because I still don't quite feel capable of it --and had been sending the MS out relentlessly, in different versions, sending chapbooks....I can't even look at it yet. Their questions were like pieces of my previous life washing in with the tide, slapping and stinging my bare legs as I stood in the wet sand and let my heels get sucked down into it.
18. Borrowed Bodies is out of print. The press has shut down. After that, I have no artifact that says, I'm good enough. I have to be a lion. The rejections, which used to just pass through me, now slice me open when I receive them. Is this change permanent?
19. Will I get better?
[.................]
20. This morning I woke up and I wanted to cry-- not just to cry, to cry so much that I let myself become unhinged with sadness-- because being unconscious was so much better than being awake, yet it was time to wake up. I got up and made the coffee instead, b/c that's what I'm supposed to do.
Here's a painting [click to make larger] :
Bird Brother
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