http://people.tribe.net/feithline/blog Tribe.net. Local Connections http://people.tribe.net/feithline/blog/4ae99b4d-e0b6-4312-9205-bc8608bd0dd0 <div>No Taos, this and each day I lose to too many bills of one kind and too few of the other is another step closer to never having set pen to page, ear to silence, eye to light, foot in Taos, that poet's paradise. Instead, we have this too small house, this tiny square of something verging on city. No culture to speak of, and anything vivid an hour a way, and us with no time to make the trip out to Toronto Island where we dug our toes into warm sand and forgot we were beholden to the lives we'd chosen, if only for a little while. Our children dress themselves up as orphans, neglect to brush their unstyled hair, drop bags and shoes in front of the door, throw everything they're done with on the goddamned floor, turn their noses up at chores, protest that everything's unfair, let the cat box get so filthy that they piss on our sheets as though we are the ones who forget to scoop. Cat dander dances in thin shafts of light, and the dog smells like dog, and the furniture smells like dog, and my clothes smell like dog, and me as asthmatic as they come. Our house is this collection of lives we've lived apart, a jumble of experiences and pets and children, thrown together, shaken liberally, dis and re assembled over and over again. Nothing's really gelled yet. I fear that nothing ever will, and yet the cats are fat and happy and the dog has learned to sit and the children laugh from some secret depth and we eat together every night of the week. We fuck as often and as awe-stricken and as loudly as the newly fallen. The laundry, the dog, cat piss, coffee grounds, banana peels, weeds, this godforsaken house, unfinished projects, unpaid bills, dental work, all of it, all of it, and Taos unseen, will plague me until the day I die, but here's what I think: I will die beside you and you will close my sightless eyes, and having loved you to the last, I'll tell you: No Taos, this, but still. It's been good, this living poetry. </div> Mon, 20 Jun 2005 16:12:53 GMT http://people.tribe.net/feithline/blog/4ae99b4d-e0b6-4312-9205-bc8608bd0dd0 feithline 2005-06-20T16:12:53Z