Coal and Cardinals: No Feeling is Final

“Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

Dear Reader, 

Word Raccoon completed an astonishing number of tasks today, though I did calm her down about the bathroom sink situation. Actually, I managed to get her to move it way down the list until she can hire someone locally to do it. But she says she’s not going to let me forget about it.

Trust me, raccoon, I will not.

WR is hissing now because she says she has had no brain food the past two days, and what do I think she is made of, anyway? Actually I supposed she was part Coke Zero, part Oreos. She’s had two Oreos today; I owe her some Rilke for Monday’s discussion and Shakespeare which is also coming up too soon. I hope that will do.

I noticed something about her poetry last night: it was about Appalachia, about her childhood. About the characters that made up her extended family. She, pardon the pun, struck a new vein of coal poems. 

Some day I’ll write here about the pervasiveness of coal in every arena of life in West Virginia, at least when I was growing up. From the scent of it upon waking in the winter, to the roar of the coal trucks whizzing dangerously around the curves, life was infused with it. 

Redecorating, remodeling, they make you see other things more sharply. A Mansard roof across the street reminds you of someone drawing one once in your presence. Its scales feel like they want to speak, and you’re reminded how parts of you come achingly alive in the right conditions. How one tidbit of information makes you crave more. How the cardinals currently outside on the grass, a male and a female, are hopping about the tree, looking for something. They are quite far apart, but then the male comes towards her for a second, then wanders off, then it’s her turn. But no one can mistake that they are somehow bound in whatever it is they are looking for. 

In the distance, children whoop in a pool. A rainshower has come and gone, unlike the clamorous thunder this morning.

I call this tired writing. No feeling is final. 

What even are words today? 

Drema