I need to get back to writing again, not only because when I go for too long without writing my legs ache ad I start feeling like there's something missing in my life, a sense of unease, a dissatisfaction unnameable until the moment I say, "Oh, I haven't been writing," and I know exactly why I am unsettled. I also need to get back to writing because I'll be reading soon with Richard Fox and Brandon Will and they are both very good writers so I want to have something new to read and impress them.
This is just a post to say that I found this in my notebook, dated Feb. 11th and it proves that I am still writing, even if I did not very clearly remember writing it. Sometimes that's why I like keeping a notebook, to discover how immediate a moment was for me a day or year or decade ago, and briefly inhabit that moment again.
The woman one seat ahead of me on the train has hair made of equal
parts silver strands and black; she is knitting; a ball of pale blue yarn is in
her black backpack. I cannot see her face; I wonder if her expression is placid
as she knits with thick and wrinkled hands. I was going to say that the yarn
was the color of the sky but then I thought, no, that's just the poet talking,
and I looked out the window at the snow, the bare trees, the ice on the river.
I looked up at the sky, clear after yesterday's modest bit of snow, and indeed
the vault of the sky was exactly the color of the knitting woman's yarn,
exactly like that. Now I'll probably feel compelled to say something
like, "the woman on the train, the woman seated in front of me has yarn in
her black backpack she is knitting the sky."
