May 3, 2009

Read for WordFest on May Day. I’m not sure I was very spectacular. I didn’t feel spectacular.

Student Stephanie N and her big friend came to clean my gutters. She wanted the job, and I insisted she bring somebody to hold the ladder, and she brought Goliath, which was well. Goliath’s name is Andy. Andy mentioned that he is engaged. I said, “To Stephanie?”
“No,” he said, “but it would be all right if I were.”
If I had seen them together on my roof without the preliminaries, I would have thought them very good friends indeed. The rain came not only as I was finishing my planting, but as they were finishing the gutters.

I whined that if I had a few days unencumbered, I could work wonders. Well, I had Friday, Saturday, and today (having been a truant from church) for the most part unencumbered, and I finished planting my garden (hours before the drenching spring rains); I finished the Whitman essay for Harold Bloom’s series on the Sublime, and I “finished”– preliminary to revisions and re-visions– The Falls of the Wyona. I think that is something to be proud of. I think that is almost miraculous. Moreover, I was joyful every second. It wasn’t as a task, a labor. . . it was youth returned, the golden age as I lived it. Now, if I fall in love tonight, all will be a sphere of gold. Yes, thinking of what I have to do yet tonight, that is extremely unlikely, but not impossible. The magic weekend is not over.