notebook entry 02.13.11

Robert Hass. Page 284. “After the Winds” — this. This is the approach. Begin with a point, a blur into the theme with various connections. Rather than setting them up as separate numbered stanzas—blur them as one. Likewise his second poem following. Page 286. “For Czeslaw Miosz in Krakow”— but twist it to your sensibility, your magic-realism: “For Ruth Dawson Doty at the River Lethe” — an element for mysticism to enter. For modernism. For an avant-garde moment of extreme language, imagistic.
• Today was hard. Brendan expressed a strong frustration throughout the morning into the afternoon and into the early night. He barely slept, just kept whining or crying out, arching his hard, little body as a landed fish—but not in pain, just frustration—as if he were restrained from swimming away, or tied back, unable to fly. At last, around eight, he exhausted himself and now slumbers, deep. His arms gesture slightly every so often.