Okay, I'm so tired my head is falling into my chest and I can barely see to type. C and I went up to Wilbur Hot Springs for a 24 hour getaway and cavorted in the smelly (think healing sulphur smell, a la Esalen) warm waters, relaxed and read on the comfy couches.

He played piano and sat in with some other wonderful musicians who were up there. We both sang. It was a beautiful time and we came back and I taught four classes today at the high school ("My brother, who is as gassy as Pluto,") and four more tomorrow in the first grade. In between more making and eating of big meals, and lots of strong coffee...

My body is crying out for a swim, but it may have to wait until next week when I get some time off because the high schoolers are having STAR testing, whatever that is.

I'm exhausted but content. Can't wait for real time, in which to clean my room, send poems and poetry mss. out, and work on some of the many fragments scribbled in my notebooks. There are the beginnings of a new play in there, more poems, ideas for new essays. (There's a tribe in the Amazon that have no words to describe abstract thoughts, no desires for more than they own, no Creation myth, no way to talk about the deep past or speculate about the future, (no apparant desire to do either, or the words would have been invented,) no numbers higher than three. I read about them in The New Yorker. A perfectly Zen culture.)

I got an idea the other night--in my Zen way-- that maybe I could raise money for Malawi by writing some erotica for Penthouse. Do they still pay for that? How much do they pay? Does it have to be real conventional boy-girl, rippling muscles and heaving bosoms and cocks going into all the expected openings, or have they gotten more interesting? I bet I could write something fun, 800 words, say, and sell it.

And I have to arrange with Masankho's friend to work in an orphanage in Malawi while I'm there. So much stuff...the important thing, though, is to be cradled and rock and swim and be held, to press all of my passionate energy up against another body and be fully wholly finally met, with no holding back. It's amazing to me that I don't have to diminish myself to be in this relationship--not my power, nor my real desire, which was to be in something sexually exclusive, primary, monogamous.

I get to be powerful and vulnerable and myself--amen! And Anna is doing better and spring is definitely here--the figs are purpling on my tree, and as soon as I learn how to squeeze an extra three hours into a day everything will be fine.