September, New Moon in Virgo

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Two nights ago, I was bitten in the face by Hamilton the long haired grey cat who only visits us at night. Up until last night, Hamilton and I were bffs, and I had zero fear about picking up any cat. But I'd had a martini, but he was afraid. And he quickly bit me in the cheek when I picked him up, tried to walk toward the porch. He was purring when I put him down. When I came inside I was angry, embarrassed my feelings hurt.  Your voice changed when you told him to go, R. said. Are your feelings hurt because it was Hamilton and he was your friend? Leave me alone, I said. I slathered my face with Neosporin, bandaids. Don't fucking touch me.

R., of course, was right. I felt betrayed, but also stupid. Don't pick up strange cats in the dark and try to kiss the tops of their heads is a solid piece of advice. I'm an idiot.

Last night, Hamilton and I made up. He always comes after dark, to sit by the rat hole near the coop, comes running when I step outside and say his name, throws himself on the ground and purrs loudly when I rub his belly.  I am obsessed with the neighborhood cats, all cats. Obsessed with my garden, with this house, with harvesting tomatoes (so many of them volunteer this year), roasting them, making sauce, making bread, collecting the chickens' eggs, using the poopy straw to fertilize the hydrangeas, the tomatoes, the volunteer acorn squash. Urban homesteader--a phrase I learned when we first moved here and lived in Ladd's Addition and the house down the street from us had transitioned the entire yard to garden, had roped off the driveway for ground bees--friends! native pollinators!--.

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Who am I if not a dean, if not a professor, if not the primary breadwinner? I was a single mom for a long time; before that, money leached through our accounts like a sieve, though I never spent any of it. I am seriously contemplating quitting my job, if a few financial things come through for the short term.  The thought of going back to campus makes me physically ill. I hate being a dean, though I love my faculty and my staff (because they are actual people and I love actual people, and they care about things like art and literature and sociology and languages, like I love/ed my students and my former colleagues, most of them). But I do. Not. Give.A Shit. about higher ed. And the administrative robots, who regularly remind me that I am one of them too, seem to see no value in the actual people, but in the money which comes attached to students. If no students signed up for, say, English or history or art, the college would happily eliminate those programs in a heartbeat.

A college is a business too, I am regularly reminded. But. I am not a capitalist, and what I deeply care about: people and poems and deep thinking--are not valuable to the Institution, despite what it claims. 

I want to talk about poetry, about literature, about socialism. I supposedly have to be back in the office (though most of my division's classes are remaining remote) in a week and I'm having panic attacks on a daily basis. I want to spend my days in my garden, I want to spend my days feeling valued and supported and not like I'm supporting a system which is designed to grind us down. 

I am not a capitalist, but I have a mortgage, and need health insurance for the family; need to pay for travel and food and the hope of retirement. 

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By now I thought i would be the kind of poet who had something to say. Who could declare the infinite in the banal, who lived in a brick house on a brick street and taught poetry to undergraduates, who sat in a book-lined office, baked casseroles, went to France for sabbatical. It feels likely I will never teach again, it feels inevitable that I will quit my job (though I know I've been saying I'll quit my job for years but have been to cowardly to do so), that I will forever be a minor poet in somewhere, America, utterly detached from the academy and the work that fed me. My face has grown lined. Despite all the miles I run, the weights I lift, the yoga I do, when R. startled the cat into the water dish and the kitchen was upended, I laughed and peed myself a little bit. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, etc.

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I am on the porch and looked up to see a river of crows flowing overhead; the police are practicing bagpipes on the roof of the station to the south of us--drums and bagpipes and a sky marled pink and violet. They move through jig to march to Amazing Grace (they only appear to know three songs). The sky goes magenta, color of the crepe myrtle. I am reading Ruth Stone, Layli Long Soldier. Golden orb weavers have begun building their webs on the porch, their bodies still small and young.

It is no longer August, but it is Autumn. My life is going to change. I can feel it. 

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