Day 39----

The breezes are room temperature again--that temperature where you can lie naked on top of your bed in intermitted sunbeams, caressed by wind and man.

reading: Feminist Revision and the Bible by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Every other sentence prompted me to pull more and more and more books of poetry off my shelves. Never have I been prouder of my library--that they were all there at my fingertips. I emerged from a haze at the end of naptime surrounded by a precarious nest of poetry.

Actually, before she woke, jesse asked me if I felt smarter than him, as he gazed at me furiously reading ten books at once, making notes in all. He said that when we first got married he thought he was smarter (ha!) and that I was fiercely anti-intellectual but that now he doesn't think that and he worries that I'll be bored by him. I object slightly--I obviously was smart enough back then to know that intellectualism wasn't intelligence--often to the detriment of my own image. His friends did not think I was smart at all and I felt very superior and smug that they were so shallow and college-y to misread the situation so deeply. BUT, I think I'm still anti-intellectual. I hate being inconsistent. And I know that people think people who read are automatically intellectual but that's bullshit. Maybe I'm cleverer about how I am an anti-intellectual now, but I still am. That's why I call the bookcart Common Books. I'm opposed to books as the intellectual version of get rich quick schemes. They should be for pure joy. If it bores you, toss it out the fucking window. And I think women writers should be household names just as much--more even--than the coiner of that phrase is.

That said, it does give me joy to be able to draw from an ever increasing pile of poetry. AND THAT IS NOT INTELLECTUAL.

Also, I am not smarter than jesse. Very equally smart. I concluded and he did too.

Lucille Clifton on Mary:

"i wonder/ could i have fought these thing?... i wonder/ could i have walked away when voices/ singing in my sleep?"
-"island mary" from good woman p. 202

"woman shook by the / awe full affection of the saints." p. 203

"so many eyes. such light, ... /joseph, i shine, oh joseph,       oh/ illuminated night."
-"holy night" p. 200

When "ecstasy becomes normalcy" for Mary -Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Feminist Revision and the Bible p. 85).
The thoughts of women-- I always replace the thoughts of the mother in Blueberries for Sal, I vary it each time a little--bambi expects it and nods approvingly now--but I am always thinking too small. Making her think about "the novel she's writing" or the dissertation, or the ... just like a kid saying what they want to be when they grow up. These though, THESE are the real thoughts... exactly what Mary must have grappled with the rest of her life. Her mind never again quiet.

Sometimes I think I hear, in the silence left behind the M-15, a beer can bounce down the street.
And then I realize, that that is what I heard.