Sept. 6 - First morning up early. Clear day, light yellowing, cold, among elm leaves. Last night: walk in odd primeval greening park - dark twisted rocks, crunch of acorns underfoot, every sprig of fallen bough shaping itself to squirrels. Now: coffee-vision, in spite of Ted using coffee percolator wrong, making poisonous brew, milk boiling over, mislaying percolator directions, waiting for desk (desk comes, all squat, ugly; doesn't fit doorway; men take door down, still doesn't fit; joy! it was so ugly; will bring up little desk from home with vineleaves on it). Story: woman with poet husband who writes about love, passion - she, after glow of vanity & joy, finds out he isn't writing about her (as her friends think) but about Dream Woman Muse.
Sept 12 - Last night: the horror of unknown physical pain, accelerating - the swollen back gum, blistered, loose, bleeding; the ripped stomach muscle from hoisting furniture: like a knife, turning, pivoting on a knife, that throbbed; then the left-over beef stew, with the white blobs of salt pork, fat, greasy & the hot faint rushes of fever at the sight of bacon fat, melted in the pan, and the pork sausages, exuding & oozing their own fat - the clenched fear: hernia, hemorrhage looming, and the horror of ether, the razor slitting the stomach, and life throbbing away, red flood by red flood - I lay, crouched, kneeling on the khaki quilt on the livingroom floor where there was air, remembering Spain & the poisonous red Spanish sausage; the channel crossing & the tuna sandwich & wine & acrid vomit in the nose, searing the throat & me crawling under the chairs; the Atlantic crossing & me kneeling on the floor of the little cabin under the electric light & the vomit shooting out across the room from the rich dinner, the lobster & pecans & martinis - now, in the bathroom, kneeling on the floor, thinking of fat, of the salt pork & fatty marrow larding the thick soup, & retching, dryly: "Salt pork," I said, & then it came, the first dilute retch of stew, dissolved in water, then the clench, then the ejection. Ted held my head, my stomach, over the white bowl of the toilet. Then I washed my face, the fatty fumes cleared, I could sleep, exhausted, cool, till the sun of morning, pale & slanted through the venetian blinds, & the sound of leaves, falling -
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