seeing colors

Today for a little bit I am seeing colors again, and by that I mean I'm reading. Slowly like I am regaining my vision or like I have waken up from a long sleep. The Ohiolink copy of Maggie Nelson's Bluets I sat in the little forgotten room on the second floor of Bierce library and found myself able to be soothed by it. Such a surprising book in all of the best ways. A catalogic meditation on the color blue - but also on desire and loneliness and such fearless writing of the body, of fucking in hotel rooms. That feeling of being raw and soothed that I get too reading Anne Carson, "Glass Essay." All of these lovely essays on red beating hearts and blue little lonely fingers. I wonder if at some point I should try to be an essayist again. To be able to sift through the self in a meditation on a single topic. To be able to awake from the self. I am reading through essays to teach a creative nonfiction workshop in the fall at Cleveland State, reading through past copies of the Seneca Review through the online library catalogue, all of these gorgeous bite-size meditations I wonder if I will ever have a self so singular, so pure. Not this spilled over messiness.

And then I had a bright red book to counter my blue book, Sophie Callie's Exquisite Pain, her art book on traveling escaping from an abject love affair, gorgeous shiny end pages like a prayer book.

And tomorrow, New York. The reading at Bookthug Thursday night. Kiki Smith at the Brooklyn Museum.

I feel, slowly, stirred.