October’s End

My hands smell like Clementine and the sandalwood soap I bought in Bruxelle.

Lightness. Freedom. Memory.

In less than two weeks I’m taking a little vacation from the farm. One night in Arles , two nights in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a little gypsy homeland where they breed the white Camarguaise horses. On the 11^th of November, the festival d’Abrivado, running bulls on the beach. I have a horse reserved to participate. Hotels and rail tickets all taken care of. It will be good to see trains and cities again. I am isolated up in these mountains. I am glad, however, that I am coming back here again afterwards. Isolation is simple and the mountains are sheltering.

To buy: hand cream, a notebook.

Morning abed, like a queen. Reading on my stomach with my face pressed into my mother’s old copy of Ulysses, that wonderful sweet smell of vintage Book. Written in fountain pen on the inside cover,

Diane Blanda 4/23/68
DBQ 7/71

Soon, my own name.

Bloom passes a tea shop and imagines India . I imagine with him and realize that I am waiting for someone to travel with to these places that feel far and frightening—India, Morocco, Tibet, Afghanistan . They are not places I want to go alone. Looking for that traveling partner for the longest voyage. Won’t find him here. Didn’t come for that anyway.

I feel elegant. Well-aired soul today.

Mat spread on the floor, clothed in brown, Neil Young singing songs I’ve never heard before, let out the light. Sun salutations and headstand, downward dog.

I dream an endless reel of my peers. Smoking cigarettes, driving cars, like so often in my dreams. Alone here, my friends come to me in my sleep. Every night their images parade through me, conjured by my love for them, and for this I do not feel lonely. They exist in my sleeping heart and as streams of text and video in the folded book of my computer. And—they exist as themselves—somewhere.

A few days ago we locked up the farm house and the whole crew went out for a long ride to the other side of the mountains. Granola and chocolate in the saddlebags, jumping fallen trees. I ride the black pony as my standard favorite, the dominant female, spirited and eager. The silent understanding that grows as we get to read eachother perfectly. A good horse. Berte dismounts and lifts the wire of a fence high in the air with a branch for us all to pass under, mounted. Deep dense clouds sinking down to cover the mountaintops when we return to the farm in the evening. Almost dark already, at five. Hot baths and card games with the children around the fire. Cookies baked with the peanut butter I found in the reserve. Jack-o-lanterns carved for their first taste of Halloween.

Black cat, bleached-out mountain, the drone of a fly and the drone of the radion in the kitchen. Coffee and cream—le cadeau matinal de la vie.
Cinnamon
Shea butter

Rosewood.