free write

days spent with my umbrella, i twist the words around my page, trying to wring from them something new, but i all can think of is everything else - the holes in both knees of my blue jeans, waiting for their promised-but-postponed patching; the summer of bending and lifting that wore them there; the peach that grew brilliantly all along, that might still be swelling on the branch, had i not reached with both hands to bring it earthward. and it might have been otherwise, jane. for a short hour, however, as i repeated the gentle pulling motion with a tender respect for the trees, whose only work these hot days has grown so surely (forgetting the forty days in which no one has had need for an umbrella), i knew briefly and fully the tremendous holiness of first fruits, first harvests. ...back to what your sister said: she described some strange up-raveling of the language, a kind of procedure by which you hang the page in a noose of your words, such that the ink has its taste of victory. but is there any rest? how can you write so? ...the kildeer we protected all summer are without umbrellas today - and had no interest in my single borrowed peach. perhaps they eat spiders. i don't know what it means to leave, but i know well what it is to stay. there must yet be meanings we have not found. your voice is a river in my head, and my umbrella is half-papered with words - funny that your noun can be my verb, isn't it? there is no paper in my umbrella.