MAKING SELF-ABSORPTION SEEM HEROIC

Butterscotch woke me up underneath the covers.

I thought we were down one cat, Oona, star of yesterday's post. (The cat above is Butterscotch.) She generally comes when I call but neither did she respond last night or this morning. She has been so reliable that I was sure she was gone. When it started sprinkling this morning, she appeared on the breezeway roof which is netting. There is a hole that she sticks her head through and there was that head along with some of her signature crying.

Still very stormy looking, although I can see a patch of blue. Idris/Ry/Wynonie/Elvis is messing up things on my desk. Janet is late for going to the Senior Center again.

They gots no respect for the laptop.

Much later.

'Twas not a good and productive day. Besides the usual rounds of aging parent absence of meaning, I've another friend whose despair knocks me out. Not that I don't get that despair. But the hopelessness and general inability to reach someone in that kind of defensible state is very painful, as are the challenges it presents to those near and dear to them.

I tried to nap with no success. I tried listening to two different audio books with only minimal success. The day went by. I am still here. And I am going to bed. I am not even going to try to clean up this html.

THE SIN OF PRIDE

turns out not be a sin at all, but in the guise

Of self-esteem a virtue; while poetry, an original

Sin of pride for making self-absorption seem heroic,

Apologizes again and shuts the door. O Small

Room of Myself, where everything and nothing fits,

I wish the night would last forever as the song assures,

Though it never does. I make my way not knowing

Where it leads or how it ends—in shocks of recognition,

In oblivion deferred, too little or too late, consumed

By fears of the forgotten and of the truly great. Morning

Brings a newspaper and a ordinary day, the prospect

Of a popular novel, though it's hard to read. I write to live

And read to pass the time, yet in the end they're equal,

And instead of someone else's name the name I hear is mine—

Which is unsurprising, since all our stories sound alike,

With nothing to reveal or hide. How thin our books

Of revelations, the essential poems of everyone

Mysterious on the outside, but with nothing to conceal—

Like the stories of experience I go on telling myself

And sometimes even think are true, true at least to a feeling

I can't define, though I know what I know: of a mind

Relentlessly faithful to itself and more or less real.

— John Koethe, 1945. Published on Poem-of-the-Day on 9/20/17.

Thanks to SMS for his 3:15 am missal.