Tomato, Nectarine, Toast

on summer

Here is the only thing I care about eating this week: tomato on toast. Good bread, toasted hard, a clove of garlic, a scrape of Marmite, and a ton of olive oil. And a tomato rubbed through a box grater and spooned on top. Sea salt, the flaky kind. A handful of basil.

A tomato leaf pulled off the vine and crushed in the hand just for the smell.

Repeat until the weather breaks. 

Yesterday I jumped into the lake for the first time this year. How is it mid-June? The days have got away from me: I thought it was maybe the end of May, but then Christmas feels a thousand years ago, so the calendar must be right. Time does this to me: speeds up, carries me with it, here we are in midsummer. Last week I scrapped the rewrite of the scrapped book I’ve been working and not working on (see letters passim). Last week I set myself free, just for a bit. That particular book had eaten enough time; it had made me scared of writing anything. Writing is a confidence trick and I had lost my nerve. Once when I was a child we were all jumping off a bridge into a river and everyone jumped but me. Everyone was watching me and I sat there on the parapet and it felt like hours. The sun was very hot and the river was a long way down and I was eight years old and I thought if I jumped I would die. After a long time they gave up waiting for me to jump and started eating the picnic and I was still on the parapet. Then when I knew they weren’t looking I jumped. Sometimes writing is like that. If too many people are looking at you you think too hard about what it is you’re trying to do.

If I think hard I can feel the stone of the parapet now. I feel just like her, that person, every time I start to write; but especially now. The duck-mite bite on my inside right wrist is forming into a blood blister and I am eating a Bourbon biscuit and the breeze is racing through the attic window and I am starting to think about making up stories in my head. This is what it was like to be eight years old. I was afraid then too, and it was always summer. And now it’s now, and I jumped into the lake and the thunder rolled and the dog-roses were dipping their soft and dropping faces down to drink in the cool water. 

It made me think of this poem, by Eileen Myles.

I am always hungry
& wanting to have
sex. This is a fact.
If you get right
down to it the new
unprocessed peanut
butter is no damn
good & you should
buy it in a jar as
always in the
largest supermarket
you know. And
I am an enemy
of change, as
you know. All
the things I
embrace as new
are in
fact old things,
re-released: swimming,
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money. Prayer
as a last re-
sort. Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight. I am
absolutely in opposition
to all kinds of
goals. I have
no desire to know 
where this, anything
is getting me…