This was the classic tactic of the would-be escapee: Attack when your opponents are weary and off-guard, attack at the moment when they are weakest and have least will to respond. Race when no one else wants to race.

A few years ago, I was good enough to do that. Or at least try that.

Picked up Matt Seaton’s book from the shelf over the weekend while I was delirious fatigued sick in the basement. I opened it one time only and read one paragraph, and this section was in it.

Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov’d
might secretly be indifferent to him.

Reading Whitman to the goats in the rain. It is a strange winter for them; they are eating their goat shed. Upon consultation, Bonnie Jo Campbell recommends a grass block, but also advises that, “they have their own way of negotiating the world…usually it is by eating it.”

He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real, he waited to forget who he was and to become the person doing it . . .

Finished the mss for my Lance book four days ago. Picked Roth’s latest up. I have almost a whole shelf from this guy, which surprises me. I didn’t know I liked him that much.

The only thing cool about this is that it proves I once worked with Phil Liggett. I have no idea who posted it or why. I guess the tips work, more or less. And, jeezus, I miss Marco.

Well, I say to live it out like a god
Sure of immortal life, though you are in doubt,
Is the way to live it.
If that doesn’t make God proud of you
Then God is nothing but gravitation

That’s Davis Matlock speaking from the dead in Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. I showed the book to Natalie a few months ago, and since then every couple weeks she’ll ask a couple nights in a row if  I’ll read a few with her, sometimes at random, sometimes following a name from one poem to the next. I think most people end up taking classic works for granted, dismissing them almost, simply because they’re classic, and we forget the power that made them so. I’m glad Nat got me to pick this back up. The old copy I have has a cover price of $4.95, so I guess I’ve had it awhile.

As George lay beside Rachel, the world seemed to him vaster and more complicated than before, and he finally understood the gravity of what his grandfather Harold has tried to tell him all those years ago, that once you had forsaken the simple rules about right and wrong and set out on your own, the universe was a humbling place.

You have to read it a few times to appreciate that all of that happens in just one sentence. I did, anyway. And she — Bonnie Jo Campbell — still leaves so much for the reader to fill.

Two galaxies collide—
I think I need an aspirin.
Since 1985

the number of people
with no one to talk to
has doubled,

and here
I thought that I
was all alone!

From Franz Wright’s new collection, Wheeling Motel. He must be as good as ever but maybe I am no longer as good a reader.

Her body in twilight was almost too much to look upon; her hipbone, her strange out-poking navel, her breast, the side of her throat were of some other world, and even in that world, where beauty was but the crudest version of whatever power Rachel possessed, there were no words for the fierce line of her jaw or the wing of her cheekbone.

Wow. Bonnie Jo Campbell.

After the desperate night with Rachel in the barn in autumn 1997, George had immersed himself in the business of self-loathing and tried to leave the girl out of it altogether, but his efforts only made him think of her more. Pushing thoughts of her under the surface resulted in roots spreading in all directions: She sprouted everywhere in his consciousness. Over the course of harvesting, George kept worrying she’d appear in front of his tractor, perhaps so suddenly that he couldn’t avoid crushing her. During his sleepless nights, he sensed her standing outside the house, cursing him. During the winter that followed, he walked gingerly through snow, imagining her lying in hibernation beneath each drift. By spring, he found that the soil under his feet was imbued with her, and the process of cultivating seemed criminal, as though by disturbing the dirt with his plows, he were tearing her body apart.

As of page 75, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Q Road is one of the best books I’ve read all year.

The street violinist who played for me
in her evening dress
simultaneously lived with Bach
and the clang of my coins.

Oh boy. Oh fucking boy is this me right now. Anyway, find or buy and, no matter which, read Different Hours, by Stephen Dunn, which this is from. Among the pages is a brilliant, heartbreaking imagining of Jack and Jill’s life post-hill.