A morning in the room of available time

This morning, I open one of the four books on my desk, Mothers, by Rachel Zucker. I have to read it right away even though I only took it out on Wednesday, because someone at UC requested it and now it’s due Friday.

I drink my organic High Mountain Red Tea and read “I am lame in the memory,” quoted from Jorie Graham quoted from Sylvia Plath, and go downstairs and get Plath’s collected poems and find “Little Fugue,” the poem it was quoted from. Meanwhile, I text back and forth to my granddaughter about the cats. I find this strange photo she made of herself on my phone when I go to text her a picture of the cats eating.

I read “Little Fugue” to Larry, who is making breakfast for us after I say I don’t feel much like making breakfast. Rachel Zucker mentions that Jorie Graham’s book, The End of Beauty, “exploded something inside me.” I go online to the UC library and request it, so that when I return Mothers it will be waiting for me at the desk. I’d like something inside me to be exploded by a book of poetry.

Larry wonders if the Women’s Final of the Australian Open is on TV. We look for it, to record later. The two carnivorous plants on the counter quietly go on catching gnats. The bay is a deep sparkling blue, no haze, no fog.

Rachel Zucker is talking about seven kinds of memory. I’m only on page 8.

This kind of morning is what I dreamed of in high school when I thought of college. A sort of meandering through literature, in good company, one thing leading to the next. College wasn’t at all like this, though. It’s taken me decades to find it.