January 20, 2014

Beethoven on Pandora. I packed seven cases of CD’s, wondering now if I’ll ever use them again. If I could have the money back for all the clothes I gave to Goodwill and all the CD’s I decided at the last moment not to, I could buy another house.

Good sermon from the Dean, on the truth that one usually finds what one is looking for. Our yearly rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”  Was in better voice for Cantaria than I expected to be. Paella for lunch: still picking bits of shell out of my teeth.

Took an online Alzheimer’s test. No fear of that yet. Except if the creation of typos were a sign of it, I’d already be hospitalized.

Though it is the dark before morning, I would have been and expected to be in my new house, at the least having a look around in my first perfect solitude there. But Stewart came over last night and reported that his movers were nine hours late and that they hadn’t brought enough padding, etc, etc, and couldn’t I give him a little more time? I said yes, of course, but this morning I’m feeling bitter about it. I’m never late, nor do I ever leave anything to the last minute. You’d think some apparatus involved with the Golden Rule would insure you some against those vices in others, but it doesn’t work that way.


Selling the House


I’m going outside now in the gray winter rain
to find the stubs of iris,
to kneel down over them and say goodbye.
I’m stealing to the peonies, their last leaves
purple with the cold, to hymn them
thank you, thank you in the harshest music that I know.

I don’t remember what god was in my heart
when I put in the grove of elderberry and paw-paw,
but I will pray whoever comes after honors him.

O! I say to the bloodroot, be in bloom
when my successors make their decisions.

O! I say to roses, I understand how hard beauty is.
Others may not: shrug off rust and aphid
and appear in perfect storybook.

O lilac! O camellia! O! thick thugs of meadow weeds
welcomed when you came homesteading,
they don’t teach you how to speak to such an hour.
I have to make it up, standing over you like Niobe
in a painting of two centuries ago, hoping
that the neighbors cannot see,
hoping to be hidden by the moon and the
ungathered stalks of you, beating the wind to whispering.

I know the world loves lawns and the mower
eat its fill, and this laborious Eden shall take on
one day the geometry of the plot next door.
So Nineveh went under desert and all those towers
foundered in the sea, and it sounds petty strung together
like that, but one’s ruin is one’s ruin,
and the flint all sink down upon to howl, the same.

I think you should be prepared. When I leave
I will not be able to turn around and took at you.