I finished it.

The manuscript.

The witch book.

I finished it.

Or, at least, I finished the last of the poems — ten poems in three days!

It’s a wonderful feeling, releasing and relaxing and nerve-wracking all at the same time.  Now, of course, is when the real hard work begins — finding a way to put all of these pieces together into a coherent narrative, structuring, sequencing, building, unbuilding, revising, filling up the holes in the walls.  But the foundation and the frame, at least, have been built.  I’m hoping that the poems I’ve written in the past few days will form a strong base for the book and make the narrative clear.

I’ve realized that I’m dealing, in some sense, with language, and with systems of language.  There’s a line from Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” which has always haunted me: “This is the oppressor’s language.”  In the book, I’m dealing with the words of the oppressor and the words of the oppressed, and trying to present them in two different systems — the language of the oppressor, which is external, clear, codified, interested in law and dogma, and the language of the oppressed — in this case, the witch, whose language is more internal, shifting, sure that nothing can be codified, that law and dogma are one thing but life is another.  All of this is incredibly difficult, as the next line of Rich’s poem posits: “yet I need it to talk to you.”

For today, though, I’m leaving the witches behind.  I feel a bit like a battery which desperately needs to be recharged.  I’m taking the day off, traveling to Tallassee with my dear friends, and tomorrow, turning to other projects: my paper on Sylvia Plath and a book review.  Monday, though, it’s time for some serious construction.  And deconstruction.  And construction again.