May 17, 2012

At loose ends yesterday, angry at all those (remarkably abundant) things which seemed a cross or a frustration. Walked a little on the Mountains to the Sea trail, enough to be ravished by the May forest. Planted paw paws. Persimmons were on my mind, but when I realized I had my wild fruits confused, I went ahead with the paw paws. Persimmons grew in the forests of my childhood, with trunks like the gray tile of a bathroom floor. You ate them off the tree after the first frost.

At Caleb’s repeated urging, I went to the open mic at the Vanuatu bar on Eagle Street. People always say “Vanutau” and “the kava bar,” and I thought one was a nickname for the other, but kava turns out to be a beverage made from the roots of a Polynesian plant. It tastes like dirt, but has precisely the mellowing effect people say it has. Remarkable, actually. At the open mic I recited poems in the High Parnassian mode– which was wrong for the moment, but what I do. The crowd was very young, mostly, about half black, and it was clear there was a sort of house style, in which most of the following acts participated. One girl was, of course, black and angry. One wild-haired boy had a lovely voice and a sweet manner and sang intricate, intoxicating songs about social harmony, and in the midst of his act, a wonderful thing happened. Another boy began to sing with him, in lovely high counterpoint, and a white boy in dreads began to beat an African drum in sophisticated rhythms, perfectly, without having heard the song before. A man named Kevin Evans (I remember because of the rhyme) went and got random papers from his car, on which were written in long hand really wonderful poems. A guy almost as old as I (he looked ten years older) played some old folk songs, and we discovered that we both grew up in Ohio (he in Hudson) and then the kid with the drum revealed he and his friends were also Buckeyes. My car was parked far down on Market Street, at is very end, and walking there in the urban dark I kept thinking of Cat People and expecting a panther to leap out from the dark. No panthers. Everything else, though.

Sidney phones that they have chosen a Lincoln, Robert Cuccioli, who got a Tony nomination for Jekyll and Hyde and played Javert in Les Mis. Solid choice. Now invitations can go out for the rest of the cast.