January 9, 2017

The prayed-for voice comes back just enough to get through a 11:15 service and a Cantaria rehearsal. Whatever damage it is seems not to be permanent, for I can go an hour or so without the hoarseness creeping back. The humidifier steams away beside my bed.

The South still sitting indoors shivering, fearing to test itself against the third day of ice and snow. I would be defiantly out and about had I an urgent reason.

Revising poems, I came across one I’ve been trying to write since 1970. It has always been called “Crossing Jesus Green,” and concerns my walking home at night from downtown Cambridge to Maggie Norton’s house on Milton Road. I look up through the branches of the lime trees, and see the stars. My soul was born on those nights, the part of it which recognized something more in itself than had been hitherto allowed, which longed to flutter out of itself into some unnameable immensity. The attempt in 2010 was right off the mark. I wonder how I would find older versions now. Maybe they were purer. Maybe it’s the poem I was not meant to finish. But when I think of it I remember the moments, and maybe that is enough.

Dream before waking. There was a part I wanted in a play. Desperate for it. Auditioned, waiting for the results, wondering of every person I saw whether he had auditioned too, comforting myself with the ways in which I was a better actor. The waking part of me was already calling back into Dream State, “do you really want all that bother?”