Narrative (24 January)

Holidays, among other things, never fail to remind me why small towns depress me. It is the terrible abundance of tennis shoes, of muss-headed mothers, of bark-- and of bark colored brick, and of brick colored sky-- one horrible mound of nondescriptness, emotional anarchy. Brown. As if color and feeling had proven too awkward a burden to live under.

Uncle D sells pottery and is very wealthy; he wears corduroy shirts that smell vaguely of clay dust and mint. Small towns remind me of what I ought to have aspired to, and, worse, of what I could still mend and become: arriving my slick-waxed blue Nissan into a small town, an Adamsville, stopping and living and dying there, wearing Carhartt rubber boots and drawling about pottery sales.

Small towns remind me of how instead I am flushed and rather fidgety in my white JCrew cardigan, dead broke, fragile and rather classically pretty, my main gig being how I am conversant in French and Shakespearean English. Uncle D speaks in dollars, and in dirt.

B, my cousin, eyes me as though I am a corn sample. On the back porch when the stars prick out white against the clearness, he looks at me squarely and says, "I mean, I'd offer you a joint, but, you know..."

Yesterday my boyfriend and I decided to define ourselves by doing everything that came to mind and reporting our adventures to the other. I report:

First, I tripped over The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Then, since I was already on the floor, I read through the highlighted ones (Anne Sexton has some fantastic sex poems. This is ironic because a) I am seventeen and a virgin and know absolutely nothing about sex; and b) 'sex' takes up half of her surname.) and translated the first page of The Bell Jar into Italian. Next I pirouetted down the hallway, which is surprisingly difficult to accomplish in toe socks. Mum gave me some walnuts. I kissed her on the top of her head and ate them, even though I hate walnuts. The End.

"I love you," he said. "That's all."

(When one is loved, the world becomes a mammal: all births are live; more light than muscle flickers under skin. And if the world is a mammal, it is necessarily a lighter sort of brother; and we, necessarily, great stompers of any facet of it which our Love does not inhabit. We idiomize love, and all is either in or out of love, and one wishes to become Love, and to stomp on the black throats of every other song: to become transparent, a carrier of it, as if it were a cancer or a chromosome; mute white angel with unsullied feet leaving puddles of water behind her.)

Last night I dreamed about Adamsville. A black-headed angel stood comfortably on the side of the interstate, red staff in hand, mud heavying the edge of its white robe. It did not light my tongue with fire, preparation for prophecy; it shook my hand smartly and said, "Yes. I will take twenty-five of the red Terra Cotta. How far do you ship? Oklahoma?"