Writing a few pages and giving up. Between one stopping and another starting there was always an interlude, filled in its first part by regret at having stopped and in its second part by excitement at starting again, finally, and I tried to write about that too once, or maybe twice, I don’t remember, a tragicomic tale of my endeavors to write that other thing, this one to be titled Pendulum. Or Oscillation, to avoid associations with Poe. And wrote several more pages that I filed away with the rest. Rejecting the temptation to lay them out on the floor and scribble all over them with a big red crayon, the way I used to scribble over my drawings when I was a child and they refused to look the way I wanted. Scribbled them out, crumpled them into little balls, then threw myself down on the carpet and screamed. My mother would say, “Do you think Matisse lay on the carpet and screamed when he was your age?” I have sparrows on my window ledge this morning. I don’t have a hairbrush. I don’t know who lives at Spring Hope now.
