April 30, 2012

Awoke from extended, complicated dreams, all starring Jack Parsons.

Tiny brown ants were trying to set up housekeeping in my mailbox. Thought that leaving the door open all night would get that out of their system. I moved a cement urn and uncovered their citadel, so I have to be patient while they find another.

Free iced chai this morning at the café, for being “a regular.”

The fountain of perfume in the backyard is the volunteer bramble rose, small and white, snow on a tangle of thorn.

Yesterday was a most glorious day. Rose early and went to the studio, and painted well. I went to Jesse Israel’s for plants (maybe the last plants I can fit in this year) and on the way home received a call from Sidney about The Loves of Mr. Lincoln.  He is unhappy that the reading happens right after the Memorial Day weekend. I hadn’t thought of it, but now I’m unhappy about it too. My ignorance of the rules of Equity forces me to ask all sorts of stupid questions, which he answers patiently. Gardened then, had an early afternoon cocktail hour, napped, rose again and had a sweet evening. I don’t recall now exactly what I did, but I have a sensation of both peace and accomplishment.

Afternoon: my riverside storage space is now history. Gone are twenty copies of The Duchess of Malfi from the Black Swan production that never happened. The work table that Sandy Glass’s husband made, which she gave to me when she started to hate him, which I thought was too heavy for me to lift by myself but was not too heavy at all, rests now on the back terrace, awaiting those occasions I always imagine (but which almost never happen) when I’m sitting in my own shade of a summer day writing poetry. The bits and bobs of picture frames which I always imagined I’d find use for are gone. The hugest item is that eleven big boxes of periodicals, copies of all the magazines in which my work appeared, from The Windless Orchard when I was an undergraduate at Hiram forward to the recent but forgotten past, now reside in the Bell Storage dumpsters, awaiting whatever fate comes next. Two cartons of unopened, unsold Blood Rose joined them. I thought there would be a pang, a spasm of repentance, but there was nothing. I was waiting for some university to request my “papers,” but when they do everything now will be much more compact. Tossing the boxes into the dumpster made my achy shoulder feel good.

Took down Rough Beast. Trying to deliver the purchased pieces to their new owners, I was accosted by a woman who asked me to drive her home. I said “yes,” but I was grumpy and resentful, it being one of those hours when things had to go according to the clock or not at all. She was still in her Sunday clothes, because she had been taken to the hospital after church, and had already walked the–what?– at least two miles from Mission. Her home was nearly in Candler, and though I wasn’t watching the odometer, my guess is that her walk uphill and down would have been eight or ten miles, just having done a night in the hospital for an inflamed gall bladder. “The hospital doesn’t give taxi vouchers anymore,” she explained. Of course I was disappointed with myself for being, at the outset, so grudging. Of course all I had to do got done.