Free Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach Page B

remember why: Helen is not answering her phone because she is in New York for the month.
    I decide I am hungry. It is ten o’clock. I cannot be hungry. I’ve eaten a good breakfast.
    But of course I know what is wrong with me. My affliction is creative drought, another oxymoron. Today I am a dry well, a milkless breast. Diagnosis: an aridity of words, an absence of ideas, a lack of verbal vigor. Nothing for it but to water the indoor plants that, by now, are as needy of moisture as I, put a CD of Frederica von Stade on the player, and, when that is over, go out and shout at the marauding red squirrel if he, at least, is still at work.
    I had planned to revise the first, sticky section of Unnamed . ‘Nothing doing,’ as we used to say. I give up. For some reason, Paul Valery’s dictum comes into my head: ‘A poem is never finished, it is abandoned.’ Equally true of a novel.
    Sybil comes back from the bookstore for lunch, bringing the mail and the newspapers. A welcome distraction. She is very cheerful and tells me of her profitable morning. She priced books, vacuumed the store, rearranged the remainder table, sold a book via the telephone. Barren and unproductive, I say nothing. When she leaves, to return, presumably, to a profitable afternoon, I go through the Simon & Schuster catalogue again, and am amused to see that it is publishing The Birdcage Book . Birdcages, the copy reads, are the ‘new, new, popular collectible of the ’90s.’ I ought to send for it so I can shelve it with another absurd volume I have kept precisely because it is so ludicrous: Robert Gottlieb’s big, glossy book on plastic handbags.
    I go upstairs to take a nap.
    Next day: The sun, at long last. True, it is a pale cast of itself, somewhat sickly. But it lights up the faces of the few pansies still clinging to life in the round flower bed, and illuminates our white rowboat lying upside down in the rough field, looking as though it is huddled, like the green canoe nearby, against the cold.
    Feeling mentally alive once more after the sterile disaster of yesterday, I settle down to work, and then waste good time searching in the manuscript for my lost place where I stopped correcting the day before yesterday. Losing things … Elizabeth Bishop has a poem about that:
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
    so many things seem filled with the intent
    to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
    Bishop catalogues all the things she has lost—door keys, places, names, her mother’s watch, houses, cities, a beloved person—and ends with a fine couplet:
    the art of losing’s not too hard to master
    though it may look like ( Write it !) like disaster.
    L’envoi: Working well again is the process of finding what one thought one had lost. It is discovery of what one did not know one knew. The sun, thin as it is, shines indoors, on the words that emanate from my clipboard, on the screen of the display. Warmth rises from the unlit woodstove, and all seems well with the world in my head.
    In today’s mail, I find three more adjectives to take careful note of. Alan Cheuse, critic and acquaintance from National Public Radio and Washington, writes to say he liked the book all right but found it a little ‘testy’ here and there. Good friend Joseph Caldwell, filling in at Yaddo for the director while the board tries to find a new one, and putting the finishing touches on his novel The Uncle from Rome , thought it ‘melancholy.’ And Joyce Thompson, a student at Florida’s Atlantic Center for the Arts a few years ago, author of two published novels, says it is good, if somewhat ‘bleak,’ company.
    Next day: After some desultory shopping in Bangor, one of Maine’s three large cities and the nearest one to our peninsula, we lunch at Olsen’s, a favorite restaurant for natives in the Brewer area (Brewer is on the edge of Bangor). It is the habit of many retired