I'm trapped under a sleeping cat

I'm working on a poem for my next workshop, and my feet keep coming out all wrong:

Métis (a fragment after Keats)

I.

Volcanic Age: young gods but newly bound,
And she a barefoot girl with owl's eyes
The source's maid, Oceanus' sound
And gentle counsel; mother of the wise
Girl Tritogenia, migrainous surprise
Athena: seahorse child of Zeus' crown.
Wise Counsel slept mornings in, hair unbound
Gainst Zeus’ thund’rous arms, soft igneous thighs
Like rocks smoothed soft by rivers; longing lovers drown’d.

II.

As dreamers sleep conjoin’d in Jungian fens,
Their exit breaths informing ev’nings gloam,
And lovers drown in exhalations -- men
Drawn off the path by light from phantom homes
As Aphrodite, luminescent, roams
The cookie-batter continents again.
So Métis, turning in her sleep, a wren
Spelunking snugly in her mountain home,
As biggest boy exhaled a soft psookhen.



But really. You try fitting Tritogenia and Oceanus into a Spencerian stanza. And that psookhen bit? Totally not sure about it. But see the liguistic path from 'psyche? Eh? Eh?

An Update for my Mother, Who Wishes I Would Update More.

Oh, hello. The cat is sound asleep and I'm sitting in a pile of books and papers. I had class this morning at ten and stayed up 'til four last night. Somehow that seems to be the way my mind wants to work; it gets more and more awake as the night goes on, and then by the time I force myself to bed (because the room is a little wobbly and my eyes keep wanting to shut) it's racing so fast that I can hardly sleep. I didn't mind getting up five hours later, either. Though I did take a bit of a nap this afternoon.

I'm working on course proposals for next semester. One I like right now is 'Odysseus and the Search for Self' looking at the Odyssey, Philoctites, and Ajax. And maybe that new Margaret Atwood book. I'm not sure.

I'm also applying of to San Francisco State for a second BA (in Classics this time). Every time I tell one of my old professors, they say I should go straight for the Masters and just make up the languages somehow (I mean go to class and stuff, not re-invent them). I wonder if they think I'm smarter or more learned than I am, or if they have a more realistic sense of what'd be expected of me in a Masters program.

Part of me just wants to be a kid again, an undergrad only smarter this time, happier. Better dressed.

I need to call my seester. Hi, seester.

So.

So I was supposed to go into surgery yesterday. Unfortunately, though, my insurance won't cover this whole shebang until January (when, apparently, it'll cease to be a pre-existing condition), so here I am, out in the world, neither hooked to a morphine drip nor free of my schwannomic influence. Alas. (It just occured to me that I could start blaming my schwannoma for all sorts of things. "Excuse my absence from work today... I am under a schwannomic pall... What? I must pay for these groceries? But my schwannoma, it is hungry). Anyhow.

I'm kind of sad not to have this all done with, but I can't say that i regretted not being in surgery yesterday (though I was in an odd mood, like perhaps I really shouldn't be around at work and in class. And I slept til noon, perhaps in protest).