February 29. My room. A table covered entirely by a heap of magazines and books: they look like the seven dresses of La Tula . . . They look like a man with a cane. They look like a careless bazaar on a market day.

A small night table is littered with drugs, an half apothecary shop.

A bureau whose drawers never close well (like a man whose slant teeth forbid his mouth to shut well) carries the two brushes I have and my phonograph records.

The mirror is cockeyed.

How shall it save me? to say: went out to say: saw squirrels chasing one another through the sycamores (the sky as dry as Wordsworth’s road was wet); to write: watched the loosened leaves kite slowly down. Another day. Another dolor. Nothing retained but a pun. Of Culp’s contrivance. What the hell. Another day. Broke out. Encountered my wife shouldering aside cloud. You’d look a lot better with a belt, she said; that roll around your middle makes your pants spread. I reply with a sad clown’s grin that I suffer from a surfeit of imaginary pies. In the house, read death lists. Poked about the basement. Ducked my memories of my children. Groused.

I’ve no mirror, cockeyed or otherwise. One wrinkled window. Above: a worn lace curtain like a rusted screen. My thoughts seem pulled from my head like the poetry of Rilke. The journal of my other self, he once thought to call his book. The journal of my other book. How’s that for this? Went out. Saw: hospitals. Saw self. And if I cried, as I am crying now, would Rilke heed me, or any of his angels? I once worked hard on him, and out of love, too, the way I still work in the garden now and then, or order canceled checks. Remember to buy milk. On my desk is a lamp whose base is a brass image of young hectoring Jesus. Stolen from Germany. Swaddled in underwear. Transported by trunk.

What will you do, God, when I croak?

I am your jug (when I am broke?)

I am your ale (when I’ve gone flat?)

Your daily stint, your feathered hat . . .

You won’t mean nuthin after that.

Jesus is showing us a text from the Good Book, but the inscription is so worn can’t make it out. No doubt it the usual. Faint inscriptions are always that.

If you are laughter, I am joke.

January 28. I shall not remember what happened on this day. It is a blank. At the end of my life I may want it, may long to have it. There was a new moon: that I remember. But who came or what I did—all is lost. It’s just a day missed, a day crossing the line.

A twinge today when I bit into a cookie. Watch it. Watch it. What? Thoughts pulled from my head and collected the way hair wads in my wife’s comb: milk, mirror, thievery, the youthful brass Jesus, translated Rilke. I’m glad I don’t have to live through the rest of your life, Lou said.