May 27, 2013

Yesterday divided between wet and solemn, and cool, dry, blue, as recent days have been. The sky just before evening was blue agate, the calm almost supernatural. I sat at Edna’s and wrote poetry, then–freed from mass for a good long while, I think– went to the Arboretum. I wandered the maze of gardens near the Visitors’ Center. It was raining lightly, and all was cool, gray, muted green, the drops hanging in silent pearls from the edges of the plants. I thought it must be like those sections of paradise where souls go after violent death– soldiers blown up on the field, innocents murdered on the street or taken down in sinking ships. There they sit amid the quiet and the calm and the healing mist, until they are ready for the onslaught of full heaven. Right for Memorial Eve.

Had blundered in on the last day of the Rose Society’s rose exhibition. The scent hit you as you entered the doors. As I seem to have opened a paradisal theme, I might as well mention it. The room was almost impossible to get through– each new rose smote me as a masterpiece on the wall of a museum, perfection close following perfection. It was almost oppressive. I had to leave the room once in a while to clear my head. There is almost no point in writing about roses; the superlatives and comparisons were exhausted centuries ago. I wrote down a list of those I wanted for myself, though I know not where I’d put them, how I’d care for them. Do you adopt a coruscating spirit and expect it to prosper in your backyard? True, they prosper in somebody’s. There were green roses. There were orange and purple.

Thought in Edna’s: Reference to jazz in a poem by a white person is always a cry for help.

Arrived at the studio before anyone else was about. Painted happily, left, and still no one else had come. I devour my mornings fully.

Trinity Sunday. God is the kind of cruel lover who pursues you if you turn your back on him– I have the evidence of others to suggest this– but turns away laughing if he is pursued. He allows you to come close in secret only that he might betray you in public. A heartless coquette, he says “come hither” without ever intending to permit intimacy, he says “wait,” blazing his beauties in front of you, never intending that you touch or taste. He makes the invitation into your life a cause for the savage blow, close, where it counts, mortal, though you never seem quite to die of it. Love of God is the worst thing that ever happened to me.