pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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RUMPELSTILTSKIN

215.

Yawn! I am sleepygrrrl this morning, but should wake up soon because I have just ordered a decadent blue cheese burger from my favorite burger joint for lunch. An editor is picking up food there for a bunch of us, so my afternoon has a much better forecast than my morning had.

I volunteered to make new business cards for two body workers in chorus and they have changed them about ten times now. They e-mailed more changes this AM, so I revised them and sent yet another version off into the ether. Hope that�s it!

Must make an graphic for chorus next, then start thinking about the chorus ad I need to prepare before 8/15.

This morning has been pretty frantic because our on-site high-speed printer/copier was down AGAIN. And it was user error AGAIN.

I got it figured out, but am learning more than I ever wanted to know about this damn equipment and don�t understand why the print assistant can�t read the manual and figure it out if I can. Gawd I�ll be glad when the print-room supervisor returns to work (and wonder why he has protected this guy's incompetence for so long).

Bitching aside, I had a great weekend with Pottergrrl and am really glad that I called in sick on Friday so that we had three days together. Really enjoyed the arts festival we attended, and I was good and only ate two fair-food items: a corndog and a plate of butterfly potatoes that we shared.

My "check engine" light came on right as I was pulling up to Pottergrrl�s house and was on the entire way back home though (which means I was worried about breaking down the entire drive back). All the fluid levels are okay and I replaced the serpentine belt a while back, so who knows what I�ll have to spend money on now?

VWs have all these damn diagnostic messages that cost $150 bucks to read, and I will be very pissed if I pay for tho clear the message and all it says is �time for your eighty-thousand-mile tune-up� (as if I don�t know how to read an odometer!).

Anyway, it�s the orange light, not the red one, but I�m still going to take it in and get a quote on a replacement fog light too, which I just wired back to the car even though it hasn�t worked since I hit that raccoon.

(Just an aside, Hiss and Tell wrote a funny, funny entry about Kris Kristoffersen today. I always thought he was kind of hot too, especially in A Star Is Born.

I�m too busy to be contemplative today, but will paste a favorite sexy poem here instead:

RUMPELSTILTSKIN
By Olga Broumas

First night.
Mid-winter.
Frightened
with pleasure as I came.
Into your arms, salt
crusting the aureoles.
Our white breasts. Tears
and tears. You
saying
I don�t know
if I�m hurting or loving
you. I
didn�t either.
We went on
trusting. Your will to care
for me intense
as a laser. Slowly
my body�s cellblocks
yielding
beneath its beam.

I have to write of these things. We were grown
women, well
traveled in our time.

�

Did anyone
ever encourage you, you ask
me, casual
in afternoon light. You blaze
fierce with protective anger as I shake
my head, puzzled, remembering, no
no. You blaze

a beauty you won�t claim. To name
yourself beautiful makes you as vulnerable
as feeling
pleasure and claiming it
makes me. I call you lovely. Over

and over, cradling
your ugly memories as they burst
their banks, tears and tears, I call
you lovely. Your face
will come to trust that judgment, to bask
in its own clarity like sun. Grown women. Turning

heliotropes to our own, to our lovers� eyes.

�

Laughter. New in my lungs still, awkward
on my face. Fingernails
growing back
over decades of scar and habit, bottles
of bitter quinine rubbed into them, and chewed
on just the same. We are not the same. Two

women, laughing
in the streets, loose-limbed
with other women. Such things are dangerous.
Nine million

have burned for less.

�

How to describe
what we didn�t know
exists: a mutant organ, its function to feel
intensely, to heal by immersion, a fluid
element, crucial
as amnion, sweet milk
in the suckling months.

Approximations.
The words we need are extinct.

Or if not extinct
badly damaged: the proud Columbia
stubbing
her bound-up feet on her damned-
up bed. Helpless with excrement. Daily

by accident, against
what has become our will through years
of deprivation, we spawn the fluid
that cradles us, grown
as we are, and at a loss
for words. Against all currents, upstream
we spawn
in each other�s blood.

�

Tongues
sleepwalking in caves. Pink shells. Sturdy
diggers. Archaeologists of the right
the speechless zones
of the brain.

Awake, we lie
if we try to use them, to salvage some part
of the loamy dig. It�s like
forgiving each other, you said
borrowing from your childhood priest.
Sister, to wipe clean

with a musty cloth
what is clean already
is not forgiveness, the clumsy housework
of a bachelor god. We both know, well
in our prime, which is cleaner: the cave-
dwelling womb, or the colonized
midwife:

the tongue.

�

READING: Hiss and Tell�s funny, funny entry

LISTENING TO: Lou Reed and John Cale�s Songs for Drella (Andy Warhol)

SANG IN SHOWER: curse the radio for reminding me of this song that I would have been happy to forgot: Jimmy Buffett�s �Cheeseburger in Paradise.� Ugh!

BEST SPAM SUBJECT LINES: synagogue amazon � malay disembowel � extramarital sibyl

12:12 p.m. - 2005-08-01

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