Losing My Nerve?
I was so hopped up, excited really, about sending off the MFA application to Warren Wilson. Dutifully got my ducks in a row: the requested transcripts, the forms off to the recommenders, the personal essay polished, the portfolio edited and printed in triplicate. Now, facing a two-page "reader's response" to a book I've recently read, I'm freaking out. Every book I pick up seems hackneyed, less-than-stellar, so-what dull—everything from Jane Hirshfield's newest After, The Collected Poems of James Wright, Below Cold Mountain by Joseph Stroud read and loved several months back, and the Essential Haiku edited by Robert Hass.
Is this just hunger and hormones talking? Or has my beloved cat's departure four days ago shaken me up enough that clarity and doubts are doing battle inside my head?
A day of rain, sun, rain, sun, rain, sun, no rainbows. A day of drops of rain shiny on the blades of grass and me looking out windows, peering into thickets of blackberry, into the hold of the fallen log pile, along the sides of the driveway as I head out and down the hill for my 30-minute walk: where is he? why can't I see him? find him? where is he? how can he be gone? Is this simply grief ecllipsing the pitiful inadequacy of words?
