July 31, 2015

Akron University Press has been annihilated as a cost-cutting measure by the University’s new vandal president (who makes over $400,000 a year and has spent $350,000 renovating his mansion). This means A Childhood in the Milky Way is in the wind. Dodd-Mead, Pecan Grove, AU have been shot from under me.
   
Threw shoulder out lifting weights and knee out during unnecessarily heroic gardening. Felt awful through the day, better a little now.
   
Temper so close to the surface– I wonder why? Too much time at home? Too much time between travels? Working too hard without any palpable return?
   
Dreamed last night that Ollie Messenger (these long years dead) called for a reunion of our old Indian Guides tribe. The Mingos, as I recall. Was trying to get the reunion but kept passing gigantic, commodious bathrooms, which eventually woke me with the conviction of a full bladder. How is it that Ollie Messenger lingered in my mind all this time? He was very quiet, his son very loud.

Evening.

Sat in my garden at twilight. I wrote poems and was happy. I have never written like this, or only in the first electrifying months, when each line, each word was a world opened and a gate swung. Now, again. The music stands in the room and begins to play when I enter. It is miraculous, and the more so because my life for so many years has been so bare I do not know what to do with the abundance. I have been the best writer I knew. This is something different. It is off the scale as I understand it. Sat in the walled garden and imagined my mother and Mrs Deppen and my grandmothers and my grandfathers and Dr, Shaw and Hale Charfield and the boys I knew in scouting, all coming to the garden at twilight, because I invited them, because it was so beautiful I thought it might give them peace. Perhaps they do not need peace, now, but I do. And they sat in the chairs and wandered around in the grass, and I begged their forgiveness, assuming that I had failed them in some way, that I had fallen short of expectation, that I had dishonored love by not recognizing it. But I was happy, too. Is that what heaven is, sadness and joy so entwined there is no dividing them? For I would not have lost the sadness if it meant losing them. The sun was gold and the shadows of trees were emerald and my lost ones wandered in the garden, and now I have no idea what to say. That is the garden that is beyond poetry. One wanders; one keeps silent.