Through a Pane of Hoary Glass

"Oh how I wish I had taken some pictures."  That is my morning ritual, my morning's complaint.  Where once I was so productive. . . .

The hours of the days drift by.  Where do they go, I wonder, not having done most if any of the activities I'd planned.  A late breakfast here, a dinner there.  All about me, ideas pile up littering the couches and chairs and tabletops.  They litter my bed and haunt my waking dreams.  I read half a book, half an article.  I hold up decorative cameras. . . that is all they have become.  Fetishes, really.

And the words are all arguments.  Things have all been turned inside out.  My pictures should be arguments, my words decorative charms.

It is Labor Day, of course, so I should not feel badly about taking my leisure as I, too, labor even if my hands are not swollen and calloused.  I think of Frost's "After Apple Picking."

One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

I said to C.C. one day, "We are dying you know."

"I know," he replied in a tone that said not to talk about it, for what good will it do?  It is stupid talk, fruitless.

But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

There is much to do and much to be done, and I am just the man to do it.  Why do the jackals hamstring me?  I need help, not hinderance.  The mixed metaphors of dreams.  I have always been swimming upstream, alway pulling against the current.  I have thought it heroic.  Why, then, do I think it should change now?

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.

I can't help but think, perhaps--could I have been more subtle?