Denver 3

April 9, 2010

My green dawn sky is even more beautiful than it was yesterday. The moon is cut to a sharper, more precise blade of fire.

Woke to a disturbing dream. I was at some festival–here, I think–but with personnel I knew a little better. When things began to break up, AP’s mother invited me to their house for an after-festival party. It was a long way off, and there was a complication of maps, bur I decided to go. The countryside I passed through was clearly Colorado. Just where I was about to make a wrong turn, A’s mother was there in her car to lead me in. The house was very large and beautiful, and sat in a lake divided from the road by a footbridge. A came in a tight black dress to lead me in. The bridge was narrow, without handrails, and arched over rushing water, and when I stepped on it, my acrophobia kicked in and I collapsed onto my knees. I must have grabbed A for support, for she fell too. Her reaction was, I thought, out of proportion, and she ran screaming into the house. Someone came out and showed me a back entrance which didn’t involve the bridge at all, and I went in, to find everyone in an uproar. A was apparently pregnant. She was afraid the fall would cause her to lose her baby. She certainly did not look pregnant. I heard her scream, “Well, I am NOT going to pay for this trip to the emergency room!” I slunk away, but when I was getting into my car, a number of men came boiling out of the house, to a strange vertical thing which was meant to be an ambulance, saying that A was having her baby right then.

It was great having Rick around to discuss that poetry session with. I wasn’t sure of my own impressions, though I was fairly certain something was wrong, though it might have been my losing touch with the last twenty years of poetry criticism.

I went to the Denver Center Theater Company’s production of Mama Hated Diesels. There was no plot; it was the minimal notion of having people give little tidbits of human stories–in this case truckers griping about the road–and interspersing it with songs, and after the first five minutes I expected to hate it, but I didn’t. It had drawn me in my the end, and everyone said it was a better choice than the interminable Othello next door.

Sauntered home from the theater, looking into places I had already entered. Glennis Redmond was in the Hyatt Lounge, amazingly, and I laughed with her and her friends until I staggered off to bed, the blue city gleaming clear and still through my window.


Today:

Went to a session on the poetry of Keats, and realized that my position at the university had made me lazy. What I know and how I express my knowledge of the great poets is enough for where I am and what I do– it keeps well ahead of the students–but it is not enough in the larger sense. I did attend several sessions, but the others were how-to, and unsatisfactory, for there is no way to know how to other than to do– but the Keats got the juices flowing. Sat in the sessions I liked writing poems. Sat in the sessions I didn’t like scanning the room for beauty, or, if disappointed at that, plotting a route to the door.

Rick introduced me to a friend who said, “You’re a genius!” and began citing my books to me. I reacted to the declaration of my genius by misidentifying his wife and generally blathering like an idiot.

Returned to Bayou Bob’s, gave Drew a copy of A Dream of Adonis. He wasn’t there, but will get it when he arrives for his shift. That is the perfect way.

Waiting for the Pecan Grove reading in some remote corner of this flat blue city.