May 12: Winter Spring, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Another from "Kyrie"

Coming up to my university office this evening, the wind was more than bitter.  It was a winter wind.  Had the kiss of ice.  I'm not looking forward to going back outside.  It's what I would call a winter spring day.  It's May.  The trees are budding.  I've heard the peepers caroling at night.  But it feels like it's going to snow tonight.

It's quiet and dark in the English Department.  It feels as though I'm the only person in the world.  Certainly, I'm the only person in the building.  I have music blaring from my computer, just to stave off the silence.  Currently playing is "Concerto Grosso, Opus 3, Number 4."  Beautiful and baroque.

Feeling a little melancholy at the moment.  I think it has to do with the onset of the cold.  It's already dark outside, and it's only a little past 8 p.m.  Being a writer requires a certain solitude.  When I'm in the throes of writing, I don't even want to listen to music.  I crave isolation.

Tonight, however, I find myself craving human interaction.  I went to the gym after work.  Went to a counseling session with my therapist.  I believe I've been thinking inwardly a little too much this evening.  I need to think about something frivolous and stupid.

Anybody got a copy of George W. Bush's memoir to loan Saint Marty?

from Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie:

Snow heaped like a hat, square gray face,
the drift a shawl gathered at the neck--
a mailbox left unshoveled can be the sign,
a spirit crouching there beside the road--
I was at hand.  I followed the doctor in:
Go ye therefore into the highways.
Renie had been the warning, months before
the universal pestilence and woe.
We'd had a late frost, a ruined spring,
a single jay was fretting in the bush,
quick blue smudge in the laden spikes of lilac:
it was an angel singing--don't you see:
it might was well have been a bush on fire.

Always good for a chuckle