p.s.-I already have my next plane ticket. :-)

past

(oil pastel on paper, 19" x 13", 2001)

by Denise Levertov

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

(nothing).

I have written and erased about five or six paragraphs now- all about different things... then I delete it and try again and something different comes and then I delete that... Never mind.

Something wrong with this picture...

My Italian is missing!!!! That is what is wrong with this photo!!!!! I want my Italian back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We are forever hugged.

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! How am I going to leave him HERE?!

I am taller than him. (please, it's the picture...)

(...will resume updating my blog around Sept. 20)

I am going out of town and will resume updating my blog around Sept. 20.

(self portrait, charcoal on paper, 11" x 7", 1999)

The past is over NOW.

The best thing ever.

I had thought that I was unlovable. And now I know I was wrong.

One of the worst dreams I have ever had.

All I can think of now this morning is the image of Frida Kahlo's painting, "The Wounded Deer". When I was young my father used to hunt and then hang the killed deer near our house and take out the guts and shave the skin off with a knife. Last night I dreamed I was watching him skin a deer. Except I also WAS the deer that he was skinning. It was this enormous knife with a blade seven or eight inches long and he pulled one part of me taut and skinned me from one side to another and now I am awake but I still feel sick and shaken and scared. I am sick of these nightmares. I am sick of the past and the thousand ways it comes back in to haunt me. I can not sever myself from my past but I will not let him still torture me- and still while I try to sleep.

Guest Post by Jessieh

This is for YOU (all of you) and your ME that lives in Italy.
Whenever I saw the countdown on the side of the page, I just couldn't help but think of this song as the soundtrack:



I love you.

the fritter, jessieh

"In Memory of W.B. Yeats", by W.H. Auden

I am reading this poem two or three times a day now. It changes the way that everything looks for me. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544