Box of nails - thoughts

[handslive]

It's been long enough now since I wrote that last entry that I have thoughts about it.

• The first two lines feel clunky together.  I was avoiding the obvious grammatical structure, but maybe it needs to be there for flow?
• The reference to widdershins is actually a lie.  The order I present is the order I went in, but that order is also clockwise.  I felt like I wanted to imply a sensation of turning both ways, but the more I look at it, the more it bothers me.  It might be sufficient to just...gyre.
• The reference to the house, and especially its pre-occupied state comes from out of nowhere, which feels like sandbagging the reader with a detail I know and they don't.  The earlier reference to the barn sets up the later reference to stalls and pens, so something similar is needed for balance.
  
  • Arguably, a line breaking up the first two with a reference to the house would solve two problems.

I signed up for Master Class this spring in order to get my mother-in-law a gift of membership for her birthday (buy one, get one free).  Recently, I've been taking Reading and Writing Poetry with Billy Collins.  I haven't read any of his material previously, as far as I know.  The most recent video had a bit about keeping a notebook where first drafts, notes, and just basic scribbling can happen.  I did this all the time in junior high and high school, but it was a clipboard with a cover that held a pack of paper, the kind with the glue strip across the top and the cardboard backing.   But it also became a folder of other bits of scrap paper and notes, marginalia on other printed things, even bits of music notepaper.  I stopped packing it around in university.  It was practically in tatters by then, the blue plastic covering tearing away to expose the heavy cardboard underneath, and bag space for class notes and materials was at a premium.

Those notes above would have been probably a few quick lines in a different ink (like actual boxes or brackets drawn around the words, possibly an arrow from "house" to the top two lines) and maybe two actual words:  clunky (maybe spelled klunky) and No!  This is a lot more elaborate because it lacks topological context.  And, in some sense, I feel like I have to describe it for whoever might be unlucky enough to read about it.

I've had other notebooks I carried around since, but I keep thinking of them as journals, which has made it hard, mentally, for me to write in them.  The thing about scrap paper is that it's transitory, recycled or reused.  It's obviously not the finished thing; it's only not trash by virtue of being kept.  A weird bit of ordering in my world I hadn't pulled up into the light before.