I'm on O'hau right now, looking out over the town and the mountains and the ocean. With my baby. In the sun. It is paradise. I can hear the mourning doves. The mountains are sharp and pointy and VERY STEEP. I thought today was my birthday but it isn't. It's the day before my birthday. Ha! We're going to go down to the water again and see and swim with more fishes. I saw puffer fish and neons and parrot fish and multicolored fish I don't know their names. The land here is temporary because the volcanoes pushed up the melted rocks yesterday and then the seeds blew in and grew palm trees and hibiscus flowers and orchids and many other houseplants. And here they are huge and they grow up things, like your car.

I could just go over and jump in the pool but I'm saving myself for the ocean. Which is everywhere all around.

The moon is a melting lozenge, a fuzzy cough drop, a liquid blind eye. In two days I fly off to Oahu where I will put on a mask and a snorkel and fins. (After you put on fins, you have to back into the water because it is way too hard to walk in fins while the waves mess you up). Then I will spend as much time as I can watching beautiful fishes. It is MAGICAL.

I won't want to come home to face my real life.

Angel fish. Clown fish. Sea turtles.

I will not eat poi, however. Poi is nasty.

One of our babies was born last night. I would have too, with the full blowsy moon lighting up everything like it did. And a daytime rainbow. I was gardening, raking last year's leaves and whacking away at the fallen. Oh, and digging up the grape hyacinths. They are impervious to eradication, try as I might. Now there's four bags of yard waste by the curb. I wore a beautiful new (thrift store) shirt to garden in. Why do I do this? It is covered with mud which usually doesn't come out. I also do this with shoes even though I have several pairs of gardening shoes. No, I wade out into the garden in a new pair of shoes so I can get them irreversibly caked with garden mud. Why o why? Maybe I think Home and Garden is coming to photograph and I want to look my best.

Off to my teaching job. Maybe we'll go outside for the afternoon and contemplate the huge herb garden.

Not one, but two rejections. Both with 'comments' about sending more and good luck and so forth. Piffle. How hard is it to publish one leetle poem/chapbook/ magnum opus?

I mean, really?

I am effing sick of rain. Bletch! Feh! Snorf!

I'm going to Hawaii next week. I'm not kidding. Oahu. Take that you rain clouds. Kiss my grits.

Recipe for heart-brokenness.

Take your favorite sweetheart to breakfast, then to the hot tub place with a sauna and steam bath. Marinate and sweat. Cry on her shoulder. Make a huge dinner with lentil soup and roasted garlic and homemade apple sauce. Watch the latest Sherlock Holmes from the BBC. Imagine you are a high-functioning sociopath like Sherlock. With zero social skills.

Pet Lola, the dumb but beautiful cat. Go outside in your bathrobe and allow the wind and moonlight to wash you. Clean. Sit in your bed and watch the radio towers on Queen Ann Hill blink on and off.

I "cleaned out" my office today. It's a dreadful kind of task. I pile up many piles of photos, poems, books, check ledgers, cameras and more books. Then I go away for a while. I don't write in there. I write on the couch downstairs with the cats draped around me. By the pink and green plant I just got and the big one with the long leaves I fuss over all the time. There's a buddha carving in here too, for ballast. The upstairs office has a forlorn light. One of the cats sits on the desk and sheds cat dust. Today I found bits of bird on the window sill so I think there have been bird murders in there too.

But.

I went in there last week and made an awful mess, the kind I loathe. And I let it sit there for several days to marinate. This morning, my contractor guy called and said he was coming over to work in that room. Gawd. So I had to wade in and begin.

Here's the problem. I sit down with a packet of photos and then I'm lost. Lots of trees and water and mountains and skies and children, all different ages. And there are boxes of photos. Then there are the check stubs and statements. How long are you supposed to keep those? Forever? What about the homemade cards from the children? And love letters from people I no longer remember.

Mostly though it's the stacks of poetry, mostly mine. It's a giant pile, clipped and scribbled on and sorted and unsorted and manuscripts and loose and untidy, a gawdawful tangle. Busted notebooks and scraps of paper.

Besides, my sweetheart is moving in. Moving. In.

I haven't lived with anyone for the past three years. I have forgotten how. I think it's like riding a bicycle. A big beautiful bicycle that goes real fast along the lake. With streamers. And a bell.

My daughter was here for a few days so I could help her buy a car. She's my whirlwind daughter-taking over the kitchen, opening all precious jellies and artichoke hearts and throwing things away past their sell-by dates. Sheesh. And then she cooks up a storm.

Raw kale salad:

2 bunches kale, stem removed and cut into bite sides pieces

Marinade

1/2 lemon juice and/or orange juice

2 TBS apple cider vinegar

1/2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp corinader

2 cloves garlic, crushed very fine or through a garlic press

a bit of agave

salt

olive oil

mix all together and taste, adjust. Toss with kale. Oh yum.

Oh, the car buying business. Gawd. We put down $$ on one car and then tried another, way across town. She was set on a VW and she test drove one, liked it, sped through a residential area and thought that was it. Then she drove an older Acura. Ha! As she sagely observed" Mom, the Jetta is shite." I agreed so we went for a 2000 Acura with heated seats, electric everything, and I mean everything. A sun roof that opens and closes. Seats that move around on their own. Way more fancy than my car and less money. The miles were OK and the tires were not down to the rims.

She drove off this afternoon with her girlfriend and I fell into a funk. It will never be different. No matter how much or how little I help her, there will always be the feeling, the yearning to do more... I even made her go to the tire store this morning to be sure the tires were alright. No late night calls that they're stuck somewhere in Oregon with two flats.

Nerd universe

I just ran around Seward Park without stopping. This is a minor miracle. Granted, I was not fast. I wasn't even slightly fast. From a distance I probably looked like I was limping along. But I wasn't. I had 'running form'. And the sky was blazing with a sunset and the mountain was shimmering in the distance and the babies were all smiling and the ducks were quacking Beethoven's 3rd.

No, wait. I made up the last part.