discontent (as a good thing)

there's the eternal movements of monkey, fussing, learning to coordinate, to vocalize, to stuff things in her mouth. there's how hard it is to look for work right now; the economy, sure, but more what i told d.: i want to be around people who are real.
last night in his wood book, i read about wood as signifying the real. authenticity, a claim of being made by heidegger? how monkey demands. you pick her up. she sticks her fingers in your mouth, and then in hers. her eyes are yours. you sing to her. i remember her weight on my lap, her head on my shoulder.
discontent as something about reaching, you quote. i am thinking about desire. how various it can be, when paired with real love. discontent as a necessary temporary condition, as a reminder of what 'the sovereign' -- as the building on parade street is named -- means. on the q, making my way to k-dog, there was a six- or seven-year-old girl asking her father questions about countries, states, continents, quizzing him about hawaii, whether it was an island or a state or its own country.
i watch your exhaustion. a happy exhaustion. mine is as well, however otherly originating. your monkey, your out loud desire. d's shirt i put on today, a way of protecting feeling close. what it means to reach: the risk of, the risk of, and watching words fail, or miss their mark. 'matching outfits,' the girl behind the counter yells. how i wanted to move to the country now, begin some other kind of life. and that the stability came in another form.
the way words can help me now by not mimicking, but simply approximating, by forcing me to imagine what the sadness yesterday was, what i was mourning all evening, night, morning. d. telling me he thinks of happy things when he wakes still sad. i thought of the moments before the end of my childhood, a seahorse in my outstretched hand, and he said he understood why i'd gone in search of that childhood last year.
he told me he'd witnessed the end of a child in someone he loves. now monkey is crying and you pick her back up and she unclenches her mouth. i am happy that we have children in us, that you have a child outside of you, that outside is a park whose cobblestones make her jiggle. i feel like someone's taking the bandage off of my discontent and letting the wound air. i know what it means to be touched, to decide to let all the feeling in, to feel it again and again and again, and for the first time i am welcoming the discontent, because now there is a content.

Joy

Linda said Jack said
I lived my life with everything in it. Not somebody else's life.

and: I like the feeling of being inside myself.

I always forget the line from the Mark Doty poem about watching the dolphin
Is it joy
or grief
he mistakes for something slight.

She's crying, won't take bottle
he said.

I left the reading during Megan O'Roarke
(who we liked despite ourselves)

and rushed home, not stopping for food.
wrote a poem on the way home
about leaving the poetry reading
to go breastfeed. She was asleep when

I walked in, peaceful on the couch.

You sit across from me with your screen
and me here on mine
between us, she is talking like crazy
singing almost, something wildly important.

You asked me to write about joy
maybe because of her, or my sadness the other day
about how love fails. Or because it sounds like Jo,

I don't know if I'm always living my life.
But it catches me from time to time.

I pick her up so we are eye level and her eyes fill with it
as she reaches out to touch my mouth.

the red haired woman we both knew twenty years ago.