August 30, 2013

Went downtown and met handsome actor friend Patrick Porter, vacationing at his parents’ in Old Fort. Wine and beer at Old South, the whole town passing by, assorted clouds and thunders passing overhead. We chit-chatted to our hearts’ contents. I had not seen him since the reading of Lincoln. “What have you been doing since?” says I. “Fighting prostate cancer,” says he. That pretty much trumped everything. He’s fine now, and looked it. Lightning hit somewhere and the lights went, for a moment, out. Reached my car just as the downpour began. Oddly, I had dreamed that morning that I was in a kind of camp with Broadway producers, and, after listening to them for a couple of days, was just beginning to understand what they meant by what they said.

Transplanted anemones out of where there are too many to where there needs to be something. Hope rain eases them through the night.

Seamus Heaney is dead.

What Shall I Do Now that Heaney Is Gone


I saw him once at the Hawk’s Well in Sligo.
where I had gotten the last ticket,
where he could count on tweedy women to know
the syllables his decades might forget.

Oh, he was a right old man, I thought.
I fussed and critiqued and rearranged the words
the way from this hour forth I will not,
seeing his voice now is the voice of birds

gray on the gray foam skimming the sea,
neither wholly of the water nor of the air,
lost to my known places but–it may be–
gathered to another, wondrous, and there

with Rafftery and heroes of the ‘98,
with Yeats and the porter-blistered throng
to cry in time, now, what came late,
dragging those dark staves quiet into dawn