Dreaming Sloth Leisure

Still mourning the passing of summer--the slippage from heat, light and leisure to frost, darkness and haste.  Once the semester starts I feel forever behind--in tatters, belated, in arrears.  Breathless.  I will never catch up.  So I hear, particularly loudly, Robert Lowell's lament to Elizabeth Bishop, when, in the full sweep of too much going on he writes: 

[C]an anything be well done that isn't accompanied by dreaming, sloth, contemplation, leisure?

In part, he's trying to make Bishop feel better about the painstaking slowness with which she writes--months and years may run out before she completes a poem.  Though at this writing, in late October 1963, revolution and a military coup are brewing in Brazil, where Bishop lives with Lota de Macedo Soares, and Kennedy will soon be assassinated--preoccupations that may slow even the speediest of poets.  And within weeks Lowell will be hospitalized by the onset of another manic episode--his own painful way of braking excessive speed.   

I just catch the flu--and then scramble on.  As Lowell writes, signing off, "Pardon this flurry.  It's just in the nerves."

Notes
Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, "Letter #285" (October 27, 1963). Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.  Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008): 513, 514.

What We're Here For

17 February 2010
San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

Wind blows the dust out of the hills, off of the roadways, from dusty parking lots.  I eat a fish taco and drink a limonada and wait for Marike to come back to land.  She's on the boat with Salvador, the electrician, doing repairs.  I've been online all day trying to figure out how to get the computer to stop thinking the gps feed is another mouse or pointing system.  No luck.  Next to me a couple speaks urgently, quietly, into a telephone.  There has been an acidente grave.  They seem to be everywhere these accidents.  We've had word from home that our doctor's daughter was thrown from a car and hangs between life and death; her pelvis shattered, she's in an induced coma in the hospital. 

Inside the bar, Cesaria Evoria sings and men drink alone, so I've come out to sit in the sun and watch the street--and the dust--blow by.  The couple next to me goes on speaking softly, anxiously, in Spanish, reviewing the details--four young people in the car; one girl--the woman's neice, and three young men. Suddenly the man breaks out into English, his accent pure LA--SH I I I T!  How'd that happen?  Nothin'
 moves fast here, not even a burnin' bar.  What you got to be in a hurry for?

So I eat slowly and watch the palms bend in the wind.