What's Moving

These days it's tough getting things moving. Tough thinking about how words fit together and how all those words fitted together formulate a whole vehicle that moves entire essays, works, novels. I am not creating a vehicle as we speak. I'm watching an engine sputter, a window crank rust. I'm not doing much moving.

But Ida is. 100 year old Ida Fasel. Poet Ida. Sent me home three weeks ago with a book of her poems, All Real Living is Meeting. Sent me home two weeks ago with another, The Difficult Inch. She said she would really like to hear what I think of the books.

What I think of the books.

I've decided, in a completely premeditated act of spontaneity, to use a pencil to underline the parts of the poems that get me. Like "runners passing deep in purpose" and "the flesh of grass." But those lines are both from the same poem--Carlo. I'm having trouble reading lately. It's not difficult to read so much as it's difficult to move myself to read. And to write, for that matter.

I'm perfectly capable, have two hands to hold the book, two hands to type the letters, two eyes to read the words, and I can't seem to motivate. Ida, on the other hand, can't stop thinking about working. 100 years old, fell and broke her nose, suffers from heart failure, weak hips and swollen calves, needs constant oxygen supply, and she is always asking when she'll be able to write again. She said once that sometimes she stays up all night writing. I wonder if it's true--that she still does. 100 years old and up all night writing. Or does she perhaps confuse her present self with a former, younger self?

It doesn't entirely seem to matter. She wants to write, but for me that feeling is, sadly, fading.

I want to want to write.

Where does this leave me? Stalled. Busted. Broken down, but looking, jump-start seeking. Bubbling. Refilling.

Not worried. Or, worried, but hopeful. Hopeful and ready.