a poem to say hello

How about a poem to say hello? I know I've been missing, but I'm finally settled in one place (well, for the next nine months at least), so I can resume talking to myself on my blog. And to answer: I left San Francisco in late June, was home on the Coast of Mississippi from late June to early August, and recently moved to Oxford, MS, where I'm writing and teaching at Ole Miss for a year.

It's good to live and write at home. I've missed the South. But it's also hard, partly because I'm working on the hardest book I've ever written. And I'm not surfacing on the internet at the best time, I suppose. My brother's anniversary is this coming weekend: loss drains me. So have some Neruda: he speaks of grief, and I hear him.


Walking Around by Pablo Neruda

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

(translated by Robert Bly)