Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't. -T. Roethke

This is a quote I love.  It's one I could live my life by, for.

I think it's true.

On another note - a Sept 17th note - I couldn't keep my hands out of the dirt today.  Everything was covered in dirt today.  Mostly me.  I guess.  I thought it was planting day.  Wondered at my mood, realized later why I was so dark.  It's burial day and, for awhile, the last of the dark anniversaries.  Not doing so well today, for a few reasons.  That is one.  "The only thing that matters, the only thing that lasts."  (quote out of context, but echoing.)  Nothing was ever harder: the 6th to the 17th.  That searing, grim, endless, morbid suspension.   A wait to get her buried.  Em's birthday needed to be celebrated -did, in between.  Necklace with a world on it from her mommy.  Poor girl.  and Poor girl.  and Poor girls.  Then another week.  So long.  Too, too, too long above ground, like that.  I'm still in Central Park, clutching the fence at her resevoir, looking at that hard white indifferent truth of a moon, feeling like the whole of it was trying to pass out of my chest.  

Or the big, wooden screw above my heart, tightening.  Feel it still tonight.  Will I never, ever heal?

Mom called the other day, no anniversary, just in searing sobs and I tried so hard to not understand, though our comraderie on this is complete.  We both know everything.  Went through everything, or almost, together.  She, in fact, had it worse.  And yet earlier in New York: the Second Chapter.  In Hell's Kitchen.  Well...

Another quote then, from Wendell Berry: “I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.” 

Enduring then.

And then, well, ... some disappointment. Bummin' me.

And then still just reeling from the most outrageous bill of all time.

So okay.  

Worked my ass of today.  I suppose that's good.  Quiet as a mouse.  Blistered hands.  Will go sit in my  little hot tub and bob for a bit.  Now, of course, I need that moon.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste...  I'll think about that a bit more instead of all this, without apology for redirecting seriousness to seriousness.  It's just that kind of day.

Hopefully, true things matter.