June 17, 2011

Some hoarse bird doing his best to call from the rose tangle.

Strangely lyrical, mystical day. Began it sleepy and worn out, some from the concert last night, mostly from the mental strife of the last few weeks. But I cleaned off the little table on the front porch and sat down with my notebook and began to write, and the focus shifted to something dreamy, misty, silvery, like looking at my garden through the subtlest panes of glass, that lent a little radiance to the objects visible in them. The goldfinches were mystical presences, almost exactly the color of the towers of mullein they rested in. When they sang, their little chests throbbed with the effort. Here are so many of them. Maybe it’s the mullein which draws them. I wrote poetry in the diary I bought to keep track of my investments in. I thought this was amusing. I stopped keeping daily accounts in February, because sometimes it was depressing and sometimes it was falsely exhilarating, and keeping daily accounts (as my father did) was putting it too close to the center of my being. The poetry flowed, and I was happy. When the poetry finished, I read my ballet book, and the goldfinches sang, and a chipmunk nibbled near my toes as if I wasn’t there. If I thought of the past or the future, I sank down toward despair. But as long as I kept in the present soft moment, all was well, as it continues to be now.

I felt I was Nijinsky, probably inspired by the ballet book, feeling the summer afternoon the way he felt it.

Near to finishing my article on Pound for The Asheville Poetry Review.

Casey is writing brilliant fiction in a new blog of his.

Wrote a blurb for a book by Donna Cowan, who professes to be a fan of mine. Luckily, the book was good.

Thought of when I was in the first grade and we were told we were about to learn to read. Mother had been away so long, and the first thing I thought was that maybe I could be with her more if I could read to her while she was sick, as they did in the movies. The image of me reading and her lying in bed under a red quilt is as vivid today as it was then. It never happened.

Daniel’s love affair on the ship put me in mind of my own first love, the one about which no word could be spoken except through the labyrinth of poetry. Leaving camp that last day, Stephen invited me to meet his father. I slid into the back seat of their car. Everything was cream and beige and pale. His father sat in the front seat, blond, sculpted, the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He said, “Stephen has told me all about you.”
“Yes sir.”
“He says you want to be a writer, just like me.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I know from what he’d told me, you are going to to be one, and Stephen will be proud.”
Then I got out of the car. But those, maybe, three minutes undid me forever. I wanted to be Stephen’s brother, with Stephen’s glorious father as my father. I wanted with desperate desire what I had known for no longer than the conversation recorded above. I think even now if I could go back and live that life, if I could have crawled in the creamy back seat and been whisked away, all might have been. . . . immensely, unimaginably well.

I have looked up every possible Maltby. They all seem to be British, none writers, few the right age, none in the right place at the right time. Did I get the name wrong? I doubt it.

Is Stephen proud of me? Would I ever be able to find him to find out? I cherish the hope that he would remember me. If not, the shock would not be that great, though the sorrow would.

The entire book Riding Funhouse is written about finding him, a fact of which I was–amazingly–unconscious through the process.

Some door is open, and I am letting everything through.

One student alone has not turned her humanities paper in on the due date. She is the one who always has a problem, who doesn’t understand, who is put upon and unprepared, who wanted people to carry her extra luggage, who has dropped my classes three times because “I don’t know how to pass a class of yours.” Now she is trapped. I’d put money on the paper appearing at one minute to midnight, with a note reading, “You said the 17th!.” the Greeks were right. Most of us act the way we act no matter what.

Some of us do not.

It is not yet quite evening.