April 15, 2010

Have begun reading through the material bought and given to me at the AWP. Started with Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s Shy Green Fields. It’s a wonderful book, spare, humorous, metaphysical, elliptical. I sat on the porch, reading, taking in my breath sharply every few lines. I have a vivid memory of the poet when he traded his book for mine, and I would like to meet him again. We are in some ways opposites, in our view of what a poem sounds like, but harmonious in our view of what a poem is.

Yesterday was in all ways perfect. The air was filled with white-green petals fluttering from somewhere. I suspect the sweet gum, for the source had to be very high. I gardened through the morning, moving the water gardens and spading up under their old spots, setting new perennials in their places, filling them with clean water in their new spots, having discovered their old plants were already greening up from the pots. Then I read some, drank a little, and had an experience that I have to call mystical, though it was not deep, but rather airy and sparkling. Tom said at coffee in the morning that he sat on his porch reading, and when the breeze blew one way, red petals fell from the redbud, and when from another, whit petals blew from the crabapple, and he asked, “What, is this paradise?” I asked the same, and realized in the instant of the asking that I had put all my love into that which is eternal, made of beauty paradoxically changeless and yet ever-changing, that which is purity and majesty and mirth, and, given that, what could possibly be amiss?