it is ironic that I begin to do most of my writing in arrears. In retrospect, while traveling, it was difficult to take it all in. I did a few watercolors, but not enough, and no poems came. I am gathering new material I keep telling myself. John writes many poems that captured the moment. And I have nothing more to add. So I write very little in my own notebooks.
However, we did do several collaborations in English and in Spanish in his notebooks. Sometimes I dictated to him in my simple Spanish. All in present tense of course. I will need to get copies of them and put them into my own journal at one point.
Rereading my notes from Thanksgiving Day I realize I've come full circle from the disillusionment of Tijuana to the tropical ease of La Páz and Cabo San Lucas. It took a long time to process the Third World shock. Nothing can prepare you for it. My second day in La Páz restored my equilibrium.
We stayed at the Hotel La Perla, right on the waterfront on the malecón, facing west over the harbor. Hotel la Perla is a Mexican middle-class hotel and there were very few gringos staying there, El Arco took that crowd in, at considerably more pesos per day. The Hotel La Perla was about nine dollars US, per night.
It is hard to remember not to drink the water here, especially when they bring you ice drinks on a hot day. Brushing the teeth with tapwater is one of those automatic responses, like opening your mouth in the shower both are no-nos. I began to brush my teeth with a hot top tapwater at Hotel La Perla, and to drink some things with ice. Even a lettuce leaf or two.
Everything was suspect and I became rabid for the taste of fruit, anything fresh. Mexican fare begin to tax on my system. I thought if I saw another huevos for breakfast that I'd absolutely die.
I reread all those poems you wrote me: odes to orchards, satellite discs, drunks in a one-hearse town. You wrote enough poetry to paper a wall, and, there's more to come. The last man to write me poetry got bitter and vindictive when I said no to him, and after that I never could read his poems. I've been saving them for old-age.
When romance becomes a dim habit, I can burrow through the mountains of paper and old love letters and say yes I was loved. Yes I was wanted once. Men found me desirable.
Your stack of poems keeps growing—some of them good, and it doesn't seem like we're looking for it to end. Last night you told me that in the last 40 nights we've only spent eight of them apart. And here we are living in separate houses trying to live together at the same time. You say you want us to live together and I say that we already are
DREAM JOURNAL
One night I dream of entering my front door but across the opening, spiders have done their work. This web cloying thick and sticky— only the web of a black widow spider is like that. Soon there are hundreds of shiny black bodies dancing on the snowy white web, like cloth draped over me. I am killing spiders right and left. And I can't get rid of the web. Their bodies are shiny and tough, and they make such a cracking sound as I squash them but there's too many of them and no matter how fast I swat them. Some will survive and it's only a matter of time before one bites.
12/5/1985
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