Independence Day

July 4, 2009

A better Independence Day cannot be imagined. Drank iced chai at the café and wrote a poem in the gray marble morning light. I rendered my own zucchini into stew. I napped on the couch, where I was visited by the most wonderful dreams: I was beginning my life over in Keats’s Finer Tone, matriculating at Hiram again, but this time Hiram on a grassy blade of stone in an Alpine wilderness, immense mountains and deep emerald valleys all around, and one swam through silky golden waters to get from building to building. I sang on the mountaintop. I officiated at Allison and Owen’s beautiful wedding, where everything was sweet and casual and tender. Met people I will like forever f they allow me. I went to the reception, where I signed the official documents and was given a basket full of goodies, which can sit in the fridge until I return from travels, thereupon to surprise me again. When I arrived at the reception on Grove Street, Bud said, “Your timing is perfect; Ann just left.”
I stood in my garden moments ago. There is still daylight, though one would not call it “broad.” I was thinking that I am anxious to get to Ireland tomorrow, and yet desire to stay right where I am. This is a very good ambivalence. It is practically the first time it has happened in my life, an orb of gold in either hand. As I drove to the reception, I passed a dozen unique specimens, a man walking, playing his guitar; people in face paint, tattooed Goths; women with flowing gray hair, all passing under a bridge whose pylons are graffitied into a wild museum, and I thought, “I love Asheville.” Popping of firecrackers from one hillside, then another.

Played Springsteen’s Born to Run to honor America.


Independence Day, 2009


A day more perfect could hardly–
a day more purely summer-
more moving marble in the heavens,
more green, more cuddled to the
bosom of some more radiant god,
more blue crystal Carolina
could ever– well, you understand.

I will dedicate this day to Allison’s wedding,
where I will wear white,
which is less hilarious than some may think.
A week ago it was Jeff’s funeral,
where I refused to wear black
in my place at the pole
which bore the casket, refused to wear black,
but green instead,
to honor the great wheels turning
even at that moment all around us.

I will go to Allison’s wedding in a white, white shirt
and those white shoes one has for summer,
and the rest of the time
shall cook the two immense zucchinis,
forearm long, forearm
most recently produced
by the energy of vine
and dirt and rain
to make my dinner
on a summer afternoon, before an evening wedding.
when you know the summer Constellations–
oh! wheeling there, and wheeling–
will be as
Fireworks, so slow,
the “Ah!” drawn out into the days of God.