This is Elspeth's photo of me, when my head was taken in glory. It was a great trip. I missed my body. Someday I will write of it.
So here I am. I don't have writer's block, exactly, which is a dumb name and makes me think of laxatives. We don't want writer's diarrhea, either, just. . .well, I'll stop there. I have these lovely shards to a story and I'm not brave enough to throw them all into the fire.
Maybe it's not cowardice, either, that stops me--maybe just laziness, or weariness, or the water is too cold to jump in all at once. What I need to do is just plunge in like those fools I've known who whoop like gorillas and beat their chests and whip around their wet cold heads like buffaloes in heat. They are not fools at all. They are brave.
I wet a little bit of my body at a time, afraid of the full hit of coldness. . .and then the story is gone. This is not how I usually operate. Usually I write like mad for four hours and then sit back with my scissors and begin snipping. Martin comes in with his chainsaw and takes off all the appendages, leaving maybe just the head. Or maybe just an ear. "There's your story!" he says, holding up that one ear with a grin. A small silver loop dangles. I hold the ear, despair for a minute, and begin mixing up the plaster to construct a body around it again. If I am brave.
I think all the reading of Sylvia Plath's journals has taken it out of me. I looked at a mushroom today in the grass on the way to class and I wondered, "How would Sylvia have described this mushroom?" And low and behold if I didn't open my book at random in class and read, "A mushroom's black underpleats."
What is that high buzzing in my office? I hate high, constant sounds. They get behind my eyes and stick themselves down in my throat.
Maybe, just maybe, I will start that story. As soon as I finish this exceptional cup of tea. Then. And maybe when that buzzing goes away. A black bird just flew past the blinding, sunlit clouds, like the blur of a waving hand in an overexposed photograph. . . .Actually, not like that at all.
