September 30, 2009

So, Steve the Plumber fails to find the leak, suggests that the only thing to be done is drive a new pipe from the meter to the house. This will correct, he says, the bizarre meanderings which mark the present set-up, and amend the fallible antiquity of the hardware. I agree. The new route, though it misses Jocasta now, drives through the north garden, and I have spent the morning frantically transplanting. Before that I had run two miles and done a double weights set, so if I am alive at then end of the day, amazement will abound. I try not to think of the garden. I dig up what I can. I reconcile myself to losses. I threaten the workmen with death if they damage the tree peonies, which seem, anyway, to be aside of the route. The city utility guys arrive to tell them where not to dig. Stocks plunge. But Ty, the sweet Warren Wilson guitar playing country boy they have digging for them, works with his shirt off. One tries to prize the compensations offered.

Evening. I come home to a long trench gashed through the garden, from the street to, and through, the porch. Though it will be filled with pipe and covered with dirt, I almost wish they would leave the trench, so I could watch it erode, the walls soften, the floor rise, to see how long it would take to disappear, to see if something would grow in it that was buried long ago and grows no more in my garden.

Crawford Murphy brings over the proofs the The Beautiful Johanna poster.

I watch a DVD set in Sligo. Terrible homesickness.