August 16, 2009

Strewn across the kitchen floor is a set of cookware that I’ve had since grad school. It’s aluminum, white, with blue lids and blue floral decorations on the outside. I’ve been acquiring quasi-professional cookware (seeing the Julia Child movie added fuel to this fire), and I was wondering if I should pack these pieces– a couple of sauce pans, a couple of skillets, a Dutch oven– away to make room. They’re cheap, aluminum, hard to clean (being white). But they were the gift one birthday from my father. I think he got them as a premium for opening a bank account. He gave checks, but almost never gifts. I never use them without thinking of the surprise and pleasure of that.

Hamlet rehearsal at HART. It was pleasurable, somehow, even delightful. I reveled in the company, the words, the corporate creation of a thing of beauty. Steve wants me to grow a beard, as the lines suggest. I said yes, but resisted in my heart, out of vanity. My beard is white now.

Strangely sentimental all day. I thought of people I have known in the past. During my scene with Hamlet on the midnight battlements, I missed a father terribly, though I don’t think it was actually my father I missed. Emotions are always something of a jumble, and mine have been particularly jumbled, perhaps by the beginning of a new school year, perhaps not by that at all.

Brought Landscape with Stigmata home to hang on my wall. It is the best I’ve yet done.

Wrote a poem to God:


To Him on a Summer Evening


Like some carved-in-an-instant image of the panther
in full flight from his precipice upon you,
arcing in beauty that is the ending of a world;
as a shotgun out of its case, random and annihilating;
as the sea opens at the ship’s knuckles knocking,
seeking to go down, go down--
you have you been in this life
which is all the life I know of.

Perhaps I overstate. Like the hourglass spider
under the rose. Like the merchant who packaged
the wrong merchandise, far less than what was paid for,
and again paid for. What was sent we did not order,
cannot be used, and of the real thing all supplies
are, apparently, exhausted. The shimmer of garments
at sight’s edge. The beckoning
of those cities called “dreadful” in the stories.

Like the voice of one calling in dreams, one now long dead,
and you wake to sob again as you sobbed then,
aloneness in the prison built twice, in the dart twice shot-
As the lover turning away, and your hand out,
and he could take it and the story have a different end,
and you know, yet, never, never--
as the work of your hand is lost in the chaos of works,
and your labor in the retort of mockery.

O, yes, O yes,
have driven the argosy upon the rocks
because I heard you singing--
Have stepped into the fire because the gold was
your garments dancing, the scarlet was the rose
that lay upon my bed at morning--
Have plunged into the darkness for that fragrance
that was you, so I thought, beyond, fleeting and secret.

Be sure of this. My sadness would climb to heaven
and throw you down. My hunger would chew your name
from the pages of the books. I would whirl with my red hair
in the avenues blaspheming down all the stations of the night.
I would, if sung to, silence.
I would, if called to,
turn from all.
Coming running. And come running