I’m always so sorry to miss Thanksgiving. I pretty much abandoned social media yesterday for fear of it.

I’ll console myself tomorrow at the Frankfurt Christmas market, before flying back to work in Barcelona, with its dust, sun and mild temperatures.

I was in a cab the other day with some colleagues and one asked me something about my weekend plans to which I answered something surely confounding and someone attempted to help by saying “Sarah leads a complicated life” in a voice that sounded as if about to launch into a long story. (Mercifully, this didn’t happen.)

All I could think of is this poem by John Logan, which hangs in my study:

Believe It

There is two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken
and a sad lamb with seven legs
whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland,
California. I saw the man with doubled eyes
who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit.
Will it snag upon this aging flesh?

There is a strawberry that grew
out of a carrot plant, a blade
of grass that lanced through a thick rock,
a cornstalk nineteen feet two inches tall grown by George
Osbourne of Silome, Arkansas.
There is something grotesque growing in me I cannot tell.

It has been waxing, burgeoning, for a long time.
It weighs me down like the chains of the man of Lahore
who began collecting links on his naked body
until he crawled about the town carrying the last
thirteen years of his life six hundred seventy pounds.
Each link or each lump in me is an offence against love.

I want my own lit candle lamp burning in my skull
like the lighthouse man of Chungking,
who could lead the travelers home.
Well, I am still a traveler and I don’t know where
I live. If my house is here, inside my breast,
light it up! and I will invite you in as my first guest.