July 4, 2015

Little owl calling in the night rain.

Fireworks from the Grove Park last night, visible above my trees. The cats didn’t like it.

Have noticed a dissociation between me and my memories, me pushing some of them back as they arise, not because they are bad, but because they seem not to lead to the sort of life I am willing to live, or, as time grows short, to have lived. Reading my big biographies of Williams and Tennyson et al, I do wonder what a biographer could say of me. Have I had incidents in my life? A visible direction? Has anyone bothered to have insight into what I do or how I am? When people do express something of the sort it always seems skew to me, like a blow that has glanced just off target. When I try to do so myself, to plunge in and down, I detect a rich world, but one that I have made deliberately strange, seeking for, longing for, demanding something else. It has, in any case, been pointlessly hard.

Oddly comforting rhythm of the washing machine downstairs.
   
Unexpectedly spend the day on poetry.
 
I find a photograph in a box from my mother's closet. A baby sits in a highchair, a pillow at his back because he's too small. The apartment too is small, and whoever is taking the picture can't back away far enough to get the edges in. The highchair has a metal tray that can be removed for cleaning. The arms of the highchair are padded. The baby's right hand rests on a padded arm. The left hand cannot be seen. Behind are a couple of kitchen cabinets, a chest of drawers between them on which sits one of those baskets covered with gauze that people send fruit in when somebody is sick. The line of the window is softened by a polka dot curtain. On the table in front of the baby is a round glass serving dish and on the dish a birthday cake shaped like a heart. Something is written on the cake at an angle the camera does not catch. I know it is Happy Birthday Davy, because I know the baby is me. Out of the cake heart soars a single burning shaft of candle. The baby's face is a mask of ecstasy. Whether mesmerized by the candle or by its being his first birthday or by sheer life, he is radiant. His mouth opens in the sideways O of delight. The baby is not especially beautiful, but he is happy. He focuses on the one point, the shaft of light. If there were only someone to ask. If someone else were in the picture, a third point beyond me and the candle to establish a plane. But there's just his -- my-- eyes and the dancing single light, the rest of the room effectively empty. Focused. Obsessed. Delighted. So I know it was like that from the first.