What's In My Journal

What's In My Journal

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

William Stafford

3. Where is your favorite place in the world, and why?

The four of us met at the small gray dive every Wednesday night. We always stayed until last call, and since we knew the bartender we sometimes stayed after the doors were locked, talking and drinking into the morning.

It's since been torn down. I've lost track of everyone over the years.

14. What was the single most terrifying moment of your life?

The clock on the wall is the same type as the one in my history class
that always seems extra slow. This one is in my doctor's waiting room.
I'm going to find out my test results in a few minutes.

I can't take my eyes off the clock.

20. Open Question: Submit your own question and answer.

20. What is your guilty pleasure?

I'm going straight home this time. I won't stop there tonight.

The first cheeseburger goes down quickly. I try to savor the second,
alternating bites with ketchup drenched fries. I sit a few more
minutes, sucking down the last of my corn syrupy drink.

Next time I'm going to drive past, I promise.

15. If you have experienced a moment of sudden faith or loss of faith, what prompted it?

I attended a Christian fundamentalist middle school from 1979 to 1981. Right after John Lennon was killed he was the subject of our weekly sermon. He was in hell, we were told, because he wanted us to "Imagine there's no heaven."

My path to atheism began that day.

9. What is the worst betrayal you have ever experienced?

I still don't know when she decided to leave. Was it before or after she came and sat beside my hospital bed? When they finally let me go home all her stuff was gone.

12. What is your earliest, most vivid memory?

I am three years old. It is a misty, cloudy day on a lonely beach. My Dad and I are climbing a rock that is a mountain to me. At the top he points upward to a wisp of fog. He lifts me and I reach to touch a cloud.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close behind me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lonely worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air;
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke