Here it’s only starting to get a little cooler but now this means rain too. Rain falls most days, even just a little, and lightning sometimes comes across the sky looking like nothing I’ve ever seen, brighter and somehow more electric, heavier almost, reaching always westward over the interstate. I’ve lived in Texas five months yesterday and my mother’s visited and nobody else.

David still gets The New York Times delivered, and I’ve been doing the crossword, still, every day. I don’t really read the paper but I like when David tells me about it. A couple weeks ago I cut out a big photograph I liked and taped it to the wall in the hallway. It’s a shot of a fruit vendor in Taipei, selling pineapples and watermelons and kiwis and apples out of boxes along the sidewalk that’s really just the street, you can tell by all the scooters and vehicles contending for space right beside the little cartons of limes, and the awnings are all lit up, long, so long they almost seem to meet each other from across the street, and you can see some upstairs rooms whose lights are on even above the shuttered storefronts and you wonder whether maybe people live in there, right there. The article to which the picture was attached outlined the effects of China’s ban on various Taiwanese exports. Taiwan is not to sell off any citrus fruits at all, as well as two types of fish (something called horse mackerel and something else called hairtail). This is payback for hosting our speaker of the House. The few Taiwanese businesspeople interviewed didn’t seem too broken up about it. More than anything it is symbolic.

Earlier this week we went to the Drafthouse, trying to see a John Carpenter movie, and then we realized that it’s actually playing next week. They were showing some installment of Halloween that night instead, but we did not stay for that. We’ll go back. Tonight we’ll drive up to Austin to see a couple things, one I like (Irma Vep) and another I’ve never seen before (The Hole), but which I expect to like. I do like most movies. All in all, I love movies. I love going to the movies. We do this a lot, go to the movies. We go out a lot, generally. There’s a whole lot to get to, to get to see, and all over, but here everything feels very far away.

When we first came out to San Antonio to find a place to live, the agent looked me dead on and said, “I think you’ll find Texas very accommodating.”

There’s a wet light through the trees first thing in the morning and the last hours of the day, but it’s better at the end. This is light like after heavy rain. And but here there’s hardly rain until late summer, and now I’ve seen it. I do not know whether this holds throughout the year but I’ve not even been here a two seasons yet and so to me it is true. Today in New York they say no rain.

I’m not so sure yet as to “accommodating,” seeing as I’ve really not been in Texas long, or far, but I do find the City of San Antonio very forgiving. Took me entirely too long to realize “forgiving” as the right word here. (Obliging, tolerant, excusing, with disregard, or to write off, no, no, none right and then what a pain just to realize “forgiving.”) Anyway: here, and maybe elsewhere, I don’t know, there seems a unique urban phenomenon: the “turnaround.” This city is built for cars and bound for traffic and frankly its design makes no sense but at least this is known and so here you have the “turnaround.” You miss your entrance or exit or there’s just legitimately no way to get where you’re going but by like sanctioned U-turn so here you’re going east, east, east (say), and you hook the turnaround (just shy of the stoplight ahead) to go a little west, west, west (say), and you’re on your way. Anyway I’ve got a Texas driver’s license now.

I think of Auden on Freud: “He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told / The unhappy Present to recite the Past / Like a poetry lesson.” And but not a little later: “But he wishes us to be more than this: to be free / Is often to be lonely.” But he doesn’t mean that. Or he doesn’t want that answer, I don’t think so. Maybe I just don’t want it to be true. I like to think Auden really means it when he writes, earlier, that Freud (as anyone) is “Able to approach the Future as a friend / Without a wardrobe of excuses.” Let’s retell the Past to the unhappy Present so that we can welcome the Future. It’s easy to be cynical and it’s easy to be lonely but it does take some time to conceive and to conceive of a life, or the idea of one. Only a little later: “One rational voice is dumb: over a grave / The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.”

As I write this I can hear that David’s trying to catch a spider in the house. Now he tells me he was thinking about instability in the Middle East when he saw the spider. That’s how he said it. He’d been reading the paper in the kitchen, beside the white chrysanthemums that have lived two weeks now. I wonder how much longer they have. I wonder how old they were already when David brought them to me. And I wonder how old the spider was, and how he got inside. I know how the flowers got inside. So the light?