Dream, Mood, Poem

I pace a lot these days.

I always have been a pacer, someone who has to move to think. When I was six, I wore a path through my grandparents grass lawn with me shuffling from one end of the yard to the other, an arc slicing through the verdancy to expose the supple dirt underneath.

I pace listening to music. I pace when I contemplate how I want my poems to unfold on the page. I pace thinking on television episodes, on bouquets of flowers delivered for any reason, on names I want to give my children someday. My feet guide my head sometimes.

Today I have been dreamy and unfocused. My novel sits on my desk, untouched. My tea is cooling in the big red mug that Aunt Carrie got me for Christmas a few years ago. I cannot focus on Olio, the book I am currently reading, even though I only have a few dozen pages left.

I’ve been hearing the refrain for a new poem all evening, and I pace so that I can think about it before I attempt to wrestle it into a cast of words. I’m calling it “Quinceañera,” and it has two parts, one called “Moonshine” and one called “Mariachi.” I tap out with my toe the silent music that will drift behind the letters and spaces and white frontier that is the journal that I reserve for all poetry.

In some ways, this day of dreaminess is in keeping with my general disposition for a month or so. Instead of actually working on my novel, I made a mood board, a sophomore attempt because I am actually not certain how else to do it. I don’t know how to pitch a novel, and soon I will be finishing my queries and dribbling air on them, as though they were paper boats on the calm sea, and watching them bob out into the lake of literary agents. It’s all good. I can say things like, “It’s found family. It is portal. It is dieselpunk and steampunk. It is a story of the American West and Southwest. It is a story about stories. Its arrogant daydreams are desperate for it to be the Great American Fantasy. It is a sliver of my soul shaved from my ribcage.”

I pace while I stir oat milk into my tea.

Fable crawls into my lap when I sit down and write this. His big, gray, furry bottom rests on my chest, his face on my legs. Why do cats like to stick their rumps in our faces? I don’t mind. Fable and Bijou are the warm spots of my life, as all cats are to those of us who spend a day ruminating on them.

In my desk, I have an image that my dear friend, Daisy, made of my character, Erwilian. It takes up space on the mood board, occupying the entire left quadrant. Beside that, I have small trinkets that my mother gave me, a carving of a cat that I can no longer recall the origin of. My novel really is a mosaic of crunchy colors and hesitant memories from when I was young to myself now as a woman who still has to pace to get the thoughts to line up.

I wish it had rained today; today would have been a good day for the clouds to come to weeping. My poetry notebook is buried in a box somewhere, waiting to be shuffled to my new apartment. I’ll have to write “Quinceañera” in my head for a little while longer.