Feeling ever-so-slightly more human today. Last night the ladyfriend brought me a bouquet of lovely little purple lilies (perfect for my funeral!), topped off with the most artistic bouquet twig I have ever seen.
It is a long, meandering, and graceful twig. It has a sort of Japanese elegance to it. It forms a perfect counterpoint to the more stately lines of the lilies. And, this morning, as I awoke from my cold medication haze, it was poking towards my pillow as if with tender concern.
“How are you feeling this morning?” the Artistic Twig seemed to inquire. “Shall I call off the lilies and tell them not to expect to be thrown onto your casket?”
That is correct, Artistic Twig. You can stick around.
No pun intended.
SO. While I am still wearing socks and coughing up things of an exotic hue and consistency, today I’ll be coloring a page of Family Man and addressing and stuffing orders that have a time crunch on them.
Probably while Azumanga Daioh (still the only anime show I’ve gotten attached to) blares away on the television, because it never fails to be both soothing and peppy:
Fancy hearing cake indeed, ladies. Fancy hearing cake, indeed.
As a postscript to today’s poem: I’m been fighting off a wily and rapidly mutating virus which has been plaguing me since bloody Easter. It’s finally decided to just render me totally useless with fatigue and fever.
I very much want to start mailing out books, especially since a number of you will be heading home from college and will thus have a change of address in a week or so. But I’m also my only employee at the moment, and I’m not in shape to execute a massive mailing effort. Also I would be coughing all over the wares, and the thought of any of you inadvertently contracting this nonsense is not a fond one.
So I’m going to try not to anger my loved ones by wearing myself out even more and prolonging this dreaded illness. I’ll start mailing out in a couple of days.
And now I’m going to go back to bed, where I am going to take nyquil and ibuprofen and albuterol and drink a lot of tea and fade in and out of consciousness until this is all over.
Fever 103 deg.
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern–
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise–
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)–
To Paradise.
Sylvia Plath
