Catharsis Insued

I'm ready to be home. As silly as Salem is, and for as little I know about how to handle the inlaws, I've had a nice time. It has been so refreshing to be able to hangout with L. and O. without having a bunch of crap hanging over my head, but all of us are about ready to be back in the AZ. The more I see poison oak and blackberry thickets and big shady trees the more I just want to see some saguaro or an agave. I'm excited to get on my vespa in mid afternoon and feel the wind bake my skin on the way to the bookstore. We're also anxiously anticipating the move to Tucson. It appears that we may have a house secured for rent just south of campus. It's adobe with blue or purple trim, just as any home should be. It's old and has built-in bookshelves--what else could one want?
I've got a pretty good BJ#2 beard rocking right now. He'd be proud, and although I see how stupid it looks in pictures, I think I'm a little proud too. I haven't been writing as much as I'd like up here, but I think it's been in a good brain-chill sort of way, not a non-productive sort of way. Basho talks about how a poet's job isn't to just to sit down and say, Ok, now I'm going to write a poem. The poet is constantly writing poems in her head as some foundational reaction to life--it is merely incidental that some of them come while she is writing, and those ones get written down. While I am not constantly living one poem-thought after another, I think it's a nice reminder that most of poetry, and I'd guess any art, exists in the backwaters of the mind, under the surface of casual identification, and the expression of good art is the climactic points of the rushing current underneath the surface that others can see and make the deep connection from someone else's art-climax down into the individual's backwaters, touching them and maybe even revealing something new about themselves or challenging themselves in a new and dynamic way.
That said, I've been reading a lot more than I expected this trip, and have had some touchingly passionate moments-of-self. Crush, by Richard Siken has slayed me the most of anything I've hit this trip. It may be the best book I've read this year (People of Paper is pretty tough to beat, however). I reread Jane Miller's August Zero and, for the first time, read her book Wherever You Lay Your Head. I still can't believe I'm going to be studying under her. I read the fun biography of George Washington during his stint as commander of the revolution by David McCullough called 1776, and had fun doing it. I read a crappy book on how the New Testament of the Bible was collected that was sitting on Penny's nightstand. (I should have known better.) Yesterday I finished Marvin Bell's The Book of The Dead Man, and am almost done with a poetry collection by Forrest Gander that I picked up used in Salem, complete with a funny inscription and signature and, most poetically, a spill of red wine on the title page (the spill is why I bought the book). Sometimes his language is a little too abstract for my little mind, but at other times he rocks my world (there are a few poems about having a miscarriage in the book, which have been carthartic).
I made an(other) appointment to get my tattoo started on the 31st. Let's hope.