If the thirst would subside just for awhile

It would be a little bit, enough.

--Ashbery"On the Towpath"

I am finally reconnected to the World. And I try to think of what to say or even think about the last several weeks as words come rushing like factory girls in a panic over a fire at the backside of my face, which is not a door. I suppose I’ve been building a fortress mostly. I like my handiwork so far well enough. I like the houseplants reclaimed from the snow and the smell of new paint and of the sage I burned to smudge the place. Locks (click click), stairs, up and up, closing the ways in behind me as I go, bricking them over, Rapunzel of heart. (Did Batgirl ever get a cave of her own?) I turn around and think that nobody would have the hutzpa or quixoticism or imagination to attempt to scale this, certainly not against my will. I’ll let down a knotted rope, maybe, if you know the password and have a jar of some kind of secret sauce as a fort-warming present. No fucking strangers allowed.

Meanwhile, I also get to know my tenants. They guard the first floor. A couple, their first apartment, she’s a graduate student and he’s currently working as a painter and retaking the GRE’s. She’s been going bonkers increasingly, first with no power for over a week, and no internet still as of when she left this morning. I hear her flipping out down there, weepy hissy fits, and then his appeasing voice. Once I glanced through the window on my way in when they were in the middle of one of those, at day’s end again with the hard hats not showing up again. He was kneeling in front of her, and she had her hands over her face trying to pull it together. I am deeply glad they are here—they are the perfect counter in spirit to the unhappy-couple vibe this place has been sucking up for too long, and I like particularly that they are on the first floor, where I remodeled to make everything so beautiful and wrote in my journal two years ago that its loveliness seemed in direct negative proportion to the punishing marriage resident within it. Like this year, I was living in two places, so to speak. The little couple in love are righting the chi on the other side of the torn wall. My side is still a gash. I’m working on that.

for Virgo this week: In a number of indigenous cultures, there's the tradition of the "joking relationship." Two members of an extended family, often a brother and sister-in-law, are expected to form a bond that revolves around them playfully teasing each other. If you don't have an ally like that in your life, Virgo, I urge you to get one. And if you already do have such a companion, raise your connection to an even higher level of loving mischief and jocular amusement. It'll keep you loose in just the right ways during the coming weeks and months.

the caesars - jerk it out