each small thing:::::

I have been working on this assignment from McIntyre: Please write a poem about the places you have been but no longer are.

These are some notes, in which I am jamming together sentences, making paragraphs, and thinking about places as emotional places; you will recognize the last paragraph from yesterday's post. Notes! By the way, yay, I've been doing this, keeping it up for a week now, and it's been so good for me, for my writing mind, so thanks for indulging me;;;;and now, Notes!:

Sentences and Paragraphs

It’s a lot different to be in the room with a dead person even if they can’t talk. Even bees breathe. I am looking forward to painting and drawing with Finn this afternoon. This feeling is a place where I have been. Another place is self-awkward and not writing a children’s book. A struggle with never thinking lightbeams only thinking scritch and what else do I know. Center of everywhere, center of friendship, the crickets in high grass, get back to the making that is just for the joy of it, get back to the new kind, after difficult places.

Where have I been that I no longer am? What is a place, now? Place, place, place. Place where I am now: place where I no longer am.

No longer am I in an ocean or a sea. I have been in places like that.

I have also been in a situation in which I feel uncomfortable and compromised when I should simply be so full of love. Nervous breakdowns,low-grade depressions, anxiety and stress, moving once or even twice a year, upheaval, no money, crisis in parenting and being an authority and being kind and firm at the same time. Crisis in loving each other. These are places I have been. I have hung on a linden tree branch in labor, staring at a clinging cicada shell. And I have been to the place in that dream I had with windows.

First the moon came closer through the trees until you could touch it. Then came the bubbles streaming off in symmetrical cityscapes at the top of the grass. Next came a whale upstream—appearing like a grey and blue sun around the bend, and then jumping over a rock, into the field with the compass plants. It could have been where we stood two minutes ago. Therefore be bold and present.