This Is A Journal Entry

Tuesday June 24th 2025

It has come to my attention recently that my reading comprehension might not be the best. That I can only see the trees and not the forest, the stone and not the mountain. (Though I can occasionally look up from the stone and see the mountain.) In many ways this is what makes me a poet, the fragmented, that I hold on to a scene. That I take what is offered without looking underneath. (I hear this is the problem of our times.)

When I dream it is only of two or three things. Either I am directing, or I am being directed. It is almost always night and there is always water. Usually there is weather. Rain. Snow. Sometimes there is a fire. And there is usually a man, someone from the past stopping in.

There is a young poet who writes me anytime I share something, which I think is endearing because she is the superior poet, there is something to being young in Los Angeles and not being attached to rooms. That when I picture August and a porch over the creek, a fiddle being played out in the prairie, I also have to consider my daughter. A gun going off in the night.

I write the young poet back and say I am waiting for my ex to tell me to stop writing about him. (Even though you is a you is a you is a you.) And we both laugh, how so many people make up one poem, and they are not always men.

I am back in Los Angeles so I am clearing out my office. My books stacked everywhere, an endless pile of clothes growing to give to my girlfriend’s daughter. Wondering how it is possible that my child needs more clothes, some summer pants, all her leggings with lining when we thought we would be moving East. Bleeding all over the sheets at one of the oldest hotels in the United States. The last time I was alone. The night bending and buckling before me. Eating a dessert so good I wanted to go back the next night. Finishing I Who Have Never Known Men chilling me to the bone. Because despite everything, I still want to live forever.

I think about my youth a lot and you. An old friend writes. A hill catching fire.

I know ther are fires here. I say to the woman who has said hello to me, whose face is one of the most famous in the world. Well not here. She tells me, pointing to the dirt at our feet.

I run after my daughter, whose idea of hide and seek is to have me count and her hide until she comes out and says I found you Mama! as I say Ready or not here I come! Hiding behind the trunk of a tree and I look up and gasp Cherries!