May Day

May 1, 2010

April’s last day was a corker. Met with the Cambridge crew for the first time. They’re nearly all girls and nearly all gorgeous. Jeff has already noted that his view of the world and mine are various enough that it should be an interesting month. He calls it the difference between a Teuton and a Celt.

Attended the reading for the new issue of Headwaters. MO was a courtly emcee, as well as being drop-dead handsome. I wonder if anyone else notices that, or if they do, why they don’t mention it? He looks like Daniel Day Lewis. The student work was quite good. I left itching to get my own pen to my own paper.

Evening, I was a reader at a do thrown for Cathy Smith Bowers, North Carolina’s new poet laureate, at the Black Mountain Museum. I have the relationship with poetry that some men have with women– I want everything to be right for it, everything from it to be the best it can give. If Apollo isn’t in the room, why bother? But, there were moments, and Bowers herself read a poem about her brother’s death from AIDS– actually about her trying to find a god willing to stave that off-- that I would not hesitate to call great. Re-acquainted with Seb Matthews and my old co-conspirator Ted Pope, and they brought me joy. Ted gets teary-eyed thanking me for being kind to him and his wife when they were young and vulnerable. I remember no such deed, but it’s sweet that he does.

From there to the New French Bar, where a couple of bands were playing. DJ had arrived early and got us a table. I gobbled down a green apple and Gorgonzola salad as though I’d never eaten in my life. We’d gone to see Mike and Casey in Poor Mouth, but the band that opened for them–whose name I never heard–was excellent too, with lyrics I knew were subtle, even though I could hear only fragments. Poor Mouth was sloppy, noisy, merry, goofy, badly miked, lyrical, drunk with poetry, inspired, aflame, sublime. People danced at the edges of the crowd, as of course one must. Apollo might not have been in the room, but Aengus the Young was-- golden and fresh and half-drunk, honey and poetry dripping from his lips when he sang-- and my jaws ache even now from smiling & smiling. I wrote MA in an email that it may have been the best time I ever had out in Asheville, and it may have been. The bass player from the other band thanked me for coming–it must be novel to have the elderly in the crowd– and assumed I was Casey’s dad. Had I thought fast enough I would have claimed it. Yes, I am his father, and his, and hers, and the father of all the rest. The All-Father, claiming even what might not claim me.

Rose at dawn and shaved my beard, one of the not-optional options for May Day.