January Retreat

posted October 2, 2019
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The Road and The Vaster Wilds: Anti-Odysseys (Part 3 in an ongoing series)

By happenstance, I read Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 apocalyptic novel The Road and followed it with Lauren Groff’s latest, The Vaster Wilds. It was September, technically still summer, but both of these novels take place in life-threateningly cold weather, and each author made me feel that cold, that terror of being consumed by the natural world, an awareness of the scarcity of essential resources, the distrust of other human beings–even our intimates. As I revisit these novels today, fittingly on Halloween, when the air in Massachusetts has grown chill and my body continues to fight against that novel corona virus, I find myself sharing some of these primal fears. When the terrain is unknown and the enemy invisible, who and what can we trust?

River Roads

Here’s the strange thing about me: I can completely forget I’m a musician until I arrive at the gig. It’s as though that part of me is a set of clothes for another season, kept in a moth-proof box in the attic, out of mind until the weather changes.

Siphonophore

After Stephen Philbrick. They say the mysteries of the heavensAre nothing compared to the mysteries of the seasWhose leagues we cannot fathom,Whose depths we take for grantedUnderfoot, our terrestrial backyard….

Nerissa’s Pandemic Diary, Day 1 or Maybe Day 11

I haven’t been posting because every time I have something to say, the world changes to make my insight obsolete. We don’t know what is going to happen, how long…

Poem #17 Milk

  We needed milk this morning So I put on my coat and walked to the Zee Mart Assaulted on contact by the smells Of fried chicken, stale gasoline, old…