Bent Creek

November 21, 2007

Rehearsal for the Christmas show was better last night, giving a sense of coherence to the whole project. Parents of the innumerable cast of children will love it. Here’s what I learn: there are no basses on Broadway; I spend most of my time floating around at the top of my range, tenor Es and Fs and a couple of memorable Gs. T said the other night, “Chris doesn’t know you. The music in this part. . . it’s high. I mean it’s HIGH. I mean it’s VERY HIGH.” Finally he played it, and I sang it, and he shut up about how high it was.

Afterwards to Michael A’s, for “poetry night,” though what was going on was boys and girls sitting around in a smoky room listening to Springsteen and probably conversing happily before I showed up. They were smiling, friendly, convivial, getting ready for their Thanksgiving vacation drive to New Jersey, and I felt very much “on,” like a performer invited as entertainment to a party. I hope I rose to it. I hope I was scintillating; that was what I was aiming for, scintillating, though now that I think about it, the mood of the room was friendly, tranquil, relaxed, and perhaps I was just meant to sit tranquilly and soak in the atmosphere. I don’t sit tranquilly very well, and need a stronger signal when that’s what’s expected of me.

Evening: Of the things I might have done today I chose what turned out to be the best: I went hiking in the many-times-bent valley of Bent Creek. It was a fiercely, almost ludicrously beautiful autumn day, with the brown leaves falling and fluttering in piercing white light. Aengus the Young was upon me with his golden harp, as well, and I couldn’t walk half a mile without sitting down upon log or stone to write at a poem. I was sitting by the creek itself when a woman came by, a very old women with two beautiful necklaces on. I startled her there, hunched over quiet at the foot of a tree as though I were a stone myself, but then she called my name. She said she had been to my studio and that she liked my books, and wasn’t I writing another one there with my pen in my hand inches from the face of the water? I allowed as how I was. I skirted the south of Lake Powhatan, as I had not done before, and on the waters of the lake played a bufflehead. I shouted for joy, but not so loud that he might hear me. Maybe there was a female about, too; I didn’t see her. He did not run along the surface before flying like other ducks, but lifted himself directly into the air, fluttering his wings like a songbird. He spent as much time under the lake, I thought, as upon it. A little white bird on the green-gray waters, as happy as I.

Once there were cyclists, and then they went away, and I noticed then that the loudest sound in the world was falling leaves crashing into fallen leaves already on the ground. The second loudest was the scratch of my pen across the page.

A woman with three children came behind me on the trail. I was sitting and writing along the length of the creek, and they came over and began to throw stones in the water exactly where I was sitting. I wondered why this was, given there were thirty miles of meanderings to choose from. But I got up and left, trying to appear resolved on my privacy without appearing huffy about it. She was a nervous mother, and couldn’t let the kids throw their stones without harping at them constantly about getting too near the water. “You’re right at the very edge!” she was shrieking when I finally put a hill between us. What would happen if a child fell in? He would get wet and then come out again and have an adventure to talk about, the stream there gentle and shallow. I walked a long time in the deep woods before I came out again upon the path. I sat by the lake a while and finished my poem, and the mother and her children came out of woods again and did exactly what I was doing, exactly where I was doing it. Again I got up and left, wondering what on earth was on her mind, given the vast expanses available to her which I was not in. As I walked I thought, though, that here was a woman without a husband, three children without a father, and maybe he was missing for more than a walk in the woods. Maybe they had gravitated to me for a kind of protection, for a male presence nearby, without even knowing they were doing it. I hope I didn’t fail them utterly. At the lake, anyway, they could have seen me for a long time moving down the opposite shore, stopping now and then to watch the bufflehead, and even them, with their picnic and their red coats and the little voices piercing the quiet.