my new found land!

I am in America! I did it! I flew the plane with the sheer effort of will, and while I was doing that I also wrote the last 1,800 words of my 3,000-word book review. Picture me, in the smallest plane seat ever, hunched 0ver my 12" iBook (which usually seems quite small, in fact) - which is perched on top of the two large paperbacks I am also trying to use for reference and which, when I am actually typing out passages from poems, I must commit lines to memory and then hold the books to me with my chin - hunched over, as I say, typing with my nose... talk about a sense of achievement!

And now I am in America. Speeding down the Massachusetts Turnpike in the car of my sister I was flabbergasted to hear my little phone ring. Amazing. We were in a large, air-conditioned car on a large motorway with gigantic trees and outcroppings of large rock on either side and I answered the phone saying, "hello? I'm in America!"

It constantly amazes me that I grew up here and it seems so strange now whenever I come back. Only yesterday I was riding in a cab through Regents Park, and now I'm in Hartford, CT, with its flat brick buildings and Mexican guys sitting on benches out front. I did grow up in this city but I've never missed it: in fact, every time I come back I'm more depressed by how dead the city is. beautiful old department stores on Main Street went, long ago, and now the green Sage Allen clock stands on its lamppost forlornly as a lady who has lost her way...

But now for the first time in 25 years I'm actually staying right in town, and a walk around this morning reveals some great regeneration work going on; the atmosphere is much more alive than it has been for years. Something is stirring. And my sister's neighbourhood is great.

It's as if every time I come here I have to work something out again. Renegotiate.

And it's muggy as all get-out here and hot. Yesterday was hotter: once, in a car park, I thought my jeans were on fire.

Baroque news, pictures, and reflections both poetic and otherwise will be forthcoming. There is some actual poetry which I know you will love. Right now, however, I have to do some things and then go and visit Papa, the Duc de Baroque, the reason I flew the plane at all in my present enervated condition, in his nursing home.

And I know it doesn't really matter because everyone else is away now anyway.