March 30, 2018

Wiley responds to Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers: “David, I'm about halfway through and just floored. When did you find time to write a book like this? Goddamn, that poor Charlie. I can hardly stand the heartbreak. And that shocking turn with the Tree family? Jesus.” These are actually the first words anybody has said about the book in this form. Relief.

Mountain Xpress informs me that I’ve won honorable mention in their poetry contest. Honorable mention. . .

The ground around my house seems different now, having been blessed by the bear.

Deeply meaningful Maundy Thursday service. I took onto myself the responsibility for the gap that had grown between then Lord and me. In the midst of prayer I realized that the Demon had disappeared. For a year, scarcely an hour free of it, and now Free. I am a running river, a pure stream with light clear to the bottom. These things are not marked with incidents, as they would be in a movie. One instant the world is dark, and then it is light, and there was no transition, no blast of trumpets.

Twisted my knee dragging the Cross out of the All Souls basement. Agony, sometimes, but endurable. Meaningful Good Friday service. Sam attended, and we had lunch afterward. Pastyme concert this evening, rich, my mind following deep pathways. When we left the church, the full moon glittered between tears in the clouds. I can hear my chimes banging away in the night.

March 29, 2018

Maundy Thursday.

Waiting for a Fed Ex parcel chained me to the house for the morning, so I dug three plots for ginseng in three different places in three different ways, hoping that the seeds would be pleased by one of them. Tony G stopped by, took out the dead dogwood, and alerted me to the presence of a bear behind the ancient maple between my lawn and the neighbors’. It was a very large bear, a female, I think, though without cubs.  First sighting (by me) of a bear on this side of Lakeshore, though my hummingbird feeders were ravaged by something. I’m always amazed by the black bear’s black. It is very, very black. Made a pot of linguine for breakfast/lunch. It is one of those magic dishes, for no matter how many times I go back to it and how much I eat, it seems still to be full.

March 28, 2018

The student I was worried about in senior seminar suddenly blossomed and produced good work. A palpable sigh went round the room. The one who stomped out and demanded “accommodation” in another class because I told a joke wants to read with the group next Sunday. I wonder if parents teach their children anything but the limitlessness of their entitlement. Took my Irish Renaissance kids to Jack of the Wood, where we read Irish poetry and discussed The Crock of Gold over beer and nachos.  Sweet. Today as I was heading our for High Five, I noticed that cars were swerving away from something in Lakeshore Drive. I got out and looked. It was one of my opossums, destroyed, coughing blood out of its muzzle but still alive. It sat in the middle of the lane, unable to move, behind its bewildered eyes maybe hoping that someone would put it out of its misery. No one did. I didn’t. I thought of running to the tool shed for a mattock, but I didn’t. I called Animal Control and just sort of stood there protecting the mangled thing until they came. I couldn’t even watch whatever they did. I consider this a horror and a failure. Wept bitterly, thinking of the confusion in its little brain, just pain and surprise, nothing to explain it with. Unless, as I pray with all my heart, the Great Mother was whispering in his ear, “It is all right, darling, come home, come home.”

Watched my best friend for thirty years ignore me from the other side of the café.  All things change and are built again.

Excellent day at the studio, much progress until the inflammation in my shoulders made it literally impossible to work.

March 26, 2018

The anniversary of mother’s death. She has been dead for forty-four years. I knew her for twenty-three years. Such statistics are unthinkable. I spent that day in the Cornell library, reading, close to a phone where I could call home from time to time to check the progress of the surgery. On that phone I learned the news. Was it the worst night of my life? Other claimants may win, because of the measure them of pure unconsciousness. My playwrights were lively, and one of them, my sanatorium patient, excelled.

March 25, 2018

Palm Sunday and I did not go to church. Went instead to the studio where I worked well on new projects involving heavy collage elements– viz, dismantling and reconstructing a horrible old children’s book about clowns, with text of almost unbearable unconscious pathos. The book was withdrawn from the Black Mountain Primary School library God knows when. “Rejected” is stamped inside its covers. All that must mean something.

March 24, 2018

Great Day of the Children’s marches. Morning spent at the studio. The weather so bad there were few visitors, but I liked the work I got done. Some of the electric outlets stop working and I can’t discover why. Bought $200 worth of marijuana butter from Steve, to bake into cookies and calm my inflamed shoulders. Leland borrows the truck to move furniture. As the weather worsens, I look at the keyboard, and the work I could do there, with increasing greed. 

March 23, 2018

Bright, though not yet especially warm. Small white-and-purple species tulips peak through the dirt, accompanied by bluebells and the first unfolding mitts of bloodroot.  Without having planned it, but probably destined by the nature of the day, I planted a persimmon, a red buckeye, ostrich ferns, and hollyhocks. Began using the mound of ground up pine tree left by the stump annihilator. Slept after the Great Planting, and dreamed I was in Venice.

Joined an ensemble that increases rehearsal from two to four hours. Not sure I can sustain that. B, forced to sit beside me, still does not utter a word. It’s hard to forgive those who catch us doing wrong.

March 22, 2018

A man named Stephon Clark is murdered in his grandparents’ backyard by the Sacramento police, who said they thought the cell phone he carried in his hand was a gun. He was shot twenty times. They were looking for a suspect who had been breaking car windows. The first question is, why have guns drawn for that? Why bring out the full firepower of the battalion for a vandal? The second question is, is it cowardice or malice that compels the police to be so murderous? At least I am living in a time when police murders, especially of black men, do not go unnoticed, though too often still they go unpunished. I feel that if a cop kills an unarmed person, he must be tied for murder. Not excuses. Cowardice and bloodthirstiness are not extenuating circumstances.

Good writing at the High Five, where I sat across from a UNCA Environmental Studies student named Whisper. She was taking notes from a text covered with pictures of echinoderms.

March 21, 2018

Thin snow for the Equinox. Lovely on the peach blossoms. Good classes this week. I don’t seem to have offended anybody in several days.

J S arrived looking lankly and determined, like a handsome Lincoln– probably my favorite student of all time, my warrior-saint. He caught me up on his recent activities in South Africa (keeping the government from torturing mental patients, etc), his disappointing clerkship in New York, his new and possibly exciting job in DC. Glad he’s in this hemisphere again. He is God’s success rather than mine, but I a willing to accept everything he attributes to me.

The Brahms Requiem is my current ear worm, Could be worse. 

March 19, 2018

A boy in Tampa made this haiku for me, asking for a single evocative word to start with. I gave him “agate.”

Such layers in this stone
like layers of the earth:
a world of agate.

Missing a syllable, but he was striving with his typewriter the whole time.

Barbara Boylan has died of Alzheimer’s. Never was there a more vibrant woman–before all that. Her porch in Fairview was thronged with hummingbirds.

March 18, 2018

Quiet Sunday. Because of the quiet certain things pass through my mind, turn, pass through again. I lie beside the cat and nap, and wake, and then there are new thoughts. The sky just before dark is gray and yellow.

I think of the two student complaints against me since last semester. They are absurd, groundless, either spite or hysteria, but the spite and the hysteria come from somewhere. What do I do or say to provoke people? I certainly never intend it. Why is the protective loyalty I feel toward my students apparently not returned? The way things are set up in the institution, these questions cannot even be asked.

Why did my father have a positive horror of my seeing a Broadway musical? I remember a fight on the sidewalk over The King and I at the Goodyear Theater, and when it was over his asking me if I liked it and I said “yes” and he said, “You’re lying, just like your mother.” I remember asking to see The Sound of Music for Christmas, and it was like my having asked for meth–though at last we went, everybody treating it like it was the Grand Tour. I wondered “since when did going to the movies become such a big deal?” We were going to the movies together once and he asked what I wanted to see and I said, West Side Story, but when we got there and he realized what it was, he refused to go in. We went to see Helman’s The Children’s Hour instead, of all things, he being fooled by the title. One more thing that cannot be asked. Perhaps he hated them that much, but I can’t think that was the real reason. I do not even know why I thought of this. Because the sky before dark is gray and yellow.

Sent money to the new theater. Who knows how THAT will turn out?

End of break and beginning of school tomorrow.

March 17, 2018

Blessed Saint Patrick.

DJ and I saw The Shape of Water last night. Very literary. Drinks at Avenue M after.

Working hard on Sam-Sam.

We put on our purple shirts and went down to McCormick Field and auditioned to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a Tourist home game. We had somewhat over-prepared, but the experience was a sweet one, all in all, meeting the sots of people who want to sing the anthem at baseball games.

I do not always appreciate the effort DJ must expend in simply getting from one place to another. Heroic.

Planted hellebores I forgot I’d bought. All the stone fruits are in bloom.

March 15, 2018

Quail Bell, an online magazine, has accepted “The Locust Tree.” I’d forgotten what “The Locust Tree” was. Turns out it’s a story.

DJ reports that my pine’s coming down has let light into his front window, across the street and up the hill, for the first time ever. It truly was a tremendous tree.

B is giving me the silent treatment, averting his glance when we cross in the narrow ambulatory. I have often noticed, but never understood, the impulse of some people to punish those whom they have wronged.

Excellent bout of writing at High Five. The barista had a tattoo of caffeine on his arm.

Rehung the chime.

Went to Jesse Israel and bought another cherry and a pink rhododendron. Sat in the blaze of my backyard, now, and wrote a meditation.

March 14, 2018

Deep saucer-flaked snow in the night.

The Treemen cut down the windchime limb of the maple and laid the chime in among the peonies. This was wanton. The chime was yards from the tree, and in the perfect spot.  Sadness.

Much submission and catching up with connections made at AWP. Writing meditations.

March 13, 2018

Father’s birthday. He would have been 99. Bitter, blustery, snowy outside. My voodoo lilies remain under their shielding barrels.

I think I am going to do the unthinkable and turn down Yale. 

Bruce and Robin here for supper last night, and to plan their trip to Ireland. I made a sensational blackberry cheesecake. Bruce brought a jar of narcissi and hyacinth which now perfume the room. My peach and nectarine are in bloom, unless this bitter cold ends their career.

Planted yesterday’s cherry tree. Tony the lawn man chatted with me while I did so.

March 12, 2018

Racquet Club before dawn: weights, and, to my astonishment, a half mile on the cross-trainer, breathless for a few seconds, then evening out.

Email from Yale:

Dear DH,

We are writing today to update you on the status of your application to the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. It’s good news: your play Washington Place has been selected as a finalist! This group will be around 60 scripts, out of an original pool of over fourteen hundred.

While this is wonderful news, we do have a couple business items to take care of today. Firstly, we need you to confirm your interest and availability for the summer. The conference begins June 27th and runs through July 29th. If you are invited to participate in the conference, your presence on campus will be requested for the entire term. Of course, we understand the need to leave for a family wedding or brief business trip, and Mondays are campus-wide days off, but the balance of the term should be available for your residency and workshop in Waterford. Please confirm your interest and availability, and let us know now of any immovable objects in your schedule.

We need to be sure that your play is still eligible for the conference. The conference requires that your work remains unproduced through July 31st, 2018. If your play has had (or will have) a professional production prior to this date, please let us know immediately. Your work cannot be part of the conference, but we sincerely congratulate you on the success.

Given that you are interested, available, and eligible, you are welcome to submit for consideration an updated draft of Washington Place. Please send this updated draft within 24hrs of receiving this email. We are working on a tight selection timeline, and we believe our having as much time with the scripts as possible is to everyone’s benefit. You may also submit a career update to let us know of any news. Both of these can simply be sent as a response to this email.

In order to speedily announce conference selections once decisions are made, we are asking for additional material from you for publicity purposes. If you already have a profile on the New Play Exchange and a listing for Washington Place, please email us the link, as well as a high-resolution headshot (Headshot should be 300-500KB min, 3-5MB max). If you do not have a profile and listing, we encourage you to consider making one. If you’d rather not, you can fill out this simple form to give us the necessary publicity information. Please get us this information within a week.

Additionally, should you wish, we will use your New Play Exchange listings and other provided publicity materials to create a listing of our finalists and their work. (For an example, visit the 2017 Finalist site). We will share this listing with our script readers, artistic council, and friends and colleagues in the theater community. If you would prefer no not to be listed, please simply let us know, and we’ll use your materials only if you’re selected for inclusion in the summer conference.

 We know that many of our finalists may be under consideration for other summer opportunities.  If you are offered another opportunity that conflicts with the conference, please get in touch with us before accepting or declining.   We will do our best to come to a swift conclusion regarding your work, so that you know your options before cementing your summer plans. 

 Finally, we ask for your discretion in disseminating your finalist status.  We have yet to select all our finalists and notify those not selected. While we understand your need to tell collaborators, agents, and the ilk, know that by broadcasting this information now you may cause some needless panic in other applicants.  We are then likely to have to spend time responding to their concerns, when our time is better spent working on coming to final decisions.  Please help us keep our focus on the work at hand.  We will notify all in the next month, and will be sure to let you know when you can assuredly shout your accomplishment from the proverbial mountain top! 

Many thanks and congratulations!

Wendy C. Goldberg                                                                 Lexy Leuszler

Artistic Director                                                                       Literary Manager

National Playwrights Conference

Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

Bought a Montmorency cherry, but it was too cold to get it into the ground.

March 11, 2018

Thinking about how AWP raises the bottom, lowers the top, exalts the middle. It preaches that everyone can write, and diffuses standards to make that true. But, all in all, it feels beneficial. Fourteen thousand came to Tampa to testify to that. I’ve already been invited to read in Portland next year. Missed an offer of a date (a member of the audience for my reading) by not checking in email in a timely fashion.

Attended Ned’s outstanding organ recital at First Methodist. Ned’s touch is dry and clear, very much to my temperament.

March 10, 2018

Bloody Mary at one airport, Magner’s cider at another, and I slept through most of my flights. One man at the Irish bar in Tampa said the whole Syrian conflict is over the Quataris’ desire to build a pipeline. Another had in-laws in Carrick-on-Shannon. Dead run to catch the plane in Atlanta; they were calling my row as I arrived. Saw the yard for the first time in daylight, the vacant place where the great pine was. I cried as though I’d lost a friend. Also, Caroline’s ugly windows now look directly into mine. I prayed to the dryad that she hover a little longer until I bring a tree to replace the one I tore from her.

March 9, 2018

          

Wrote a little at a table in the Book Fair, but recognized that I was writing like the mass of AWP writes, a sort of middle-of-the-road smoothness, a surface expertise without height or depth, like a writing exercise where teacher says, “See that park bench?  Now make a poem about it! Go!” and all the talented children do. There are a number of reasons why my way has been slow: this is one of them; poetically speaking, I have no small talk.

          

Sat at the edge of the water and celebrated my neighbor the cormorant in a poem. This is how I’m best.

       

All the UNCA people attended M’s panel; none came right next door to attend mine the very next hour. Try not to hang on to such things for longer than I have to. The panel and the reading went well. The selection of The Falls of the Wyona is perhaps more remarkable because the judge is a Japanese-Hawaiian trans woman—who was tapped to insure inclusiveness-- who said that my manuscript floated above the rest, and that she knew on the first page I was the winner. I always feel this must be true, but when somebody actually says it, I am abashed. Liked the sound of it in my own ears as I read.

          

Back now at the hotel, feeling a little antic-climactic. Was this experience worth the time and expense? If not, how was I to have known? It was worth it to see Tampa.

          

Tried to find somewhere to walk. Went a little west of the hotel, where there was a lot with a few trees, and I let the content me. There was an anole sunning ion a piece of cement, and I let that delight me.

          

How I felt at the head of every flight of stairs tells me I am not as recovered as I hoped.

March 8, 2018

Offered to share a taxi with Melodie down in the lobby, but it turns out she had a car, a sleek Audi, and drove me and her friend to the Convention Center. She has published a memoir of caring for her aged mother. I lost my badge in her car and had to pay $50 to get another one.  Did almost nothing at the Meeting but wander the Book Fair from one end to the other, as I never quite managed before. It was great to be lionized at the various magazines where I have been recently published, especially at the New Ohio Review, which has not yet recovered from my poem’s leaping from their pages intro Best American Poetry. I am very much more involved than I was when I went to Seattle. Talked with scores of the smiling faces behind the tables, determined to be pleasant and cheerful all the way. Bought too many books, accepted too many hand-outs. Sat a long time sipping a drink at the bar across the way, soaking in the sun which was both hot and not. Hellacious getting a taxi back to the hotel. Uber and Lyft have never once worked for me. Didn’t go to the keynote speech, because I was exhausted, and because I feared being stranded downtown unable to summon a ride. Drank vodka at the hotel bar beside a man who assured me I’d much rather have my X-ray read by a machine than by a human. 

March 7, 2018

Seventh floor of the Westshore Grand. From my window I see down a long straight street to the towers of Tampa. At one time I would not have thought it too far to walk.

          

Arrived home after class last night in darkness, left this morning before light, so I didn’t have to see the great pine gone, nor the devastation wrought on my lawn by the heavy machinery and the rain. Ruination everywhere. Possibility everywhere.

          

8 PM: Taxi-ed to the Convention Center, got my catalog and credentials, sat beside the water of the Channel and watched the gliding pelicans. Have gone too long without watching the pelicans. My panel is F223: Taking up the Quill: Queer Representation through Writing Awards and Publication. My name is not on the list of panelists, of course. In fairness, the winner of the prize was known too late to get onto the documents. The fact is not consoling. I know I will love everyone. The Feminist tone of the conference is overwhelming—indeed, almost to the point of parody, especially since so many of the panels take as given the trope of female under-representation in the world of letters. All things balance in the end.

March 5, 2018

Tarzan the Treeman and his cohorts chopped away at my other trees in order to get their equipment in to tackle the Jotun pine.  One of them is up in the tree now, sending tree-sized limbs down on a rope, which they then put through a grinder and render into chips. The men are silent and efficient. The machines roar. I cannot judge their efficiency. I rather like having them in the yard. The cats don’t.

March 4, 2018

Opening for Works on Wood at the Flood last night. Sparse attendance, but good sales. None of the Group made it except Russell, and I was grateful for his presence. Met lots of strangers, and they seemed to like what they saw. Derek brought the entire family. Did a reading from Night Sleep. It sounded good to me, even through my coughing fit. At the reception had my first tamale.

Though they solicited me to have an Oscar party, though I had bought snacks and drinks, J called and said they wouldn’t be able to come. It sounded–fishy. Add that to New Years and we have a very odd record. Why would they ask me to have a party and then decline to attend it?

In trouble at school too. Informed that there was a complaint against me I learned that it was this: Last week several students in my senior seminar wore black turtle necks. Someone said they looked like beatniks, and that they should form a beatnik band. I said, into the general melee of the departing class, “You could be a go-go dancer.” I said this remembering the go-go dancers in the bands of my youth. One woman, to whom I had not even addressed the remark, took offense and asked to be removed from the class. Asked why she didn’t discuss it with me, she replied, “he’s a problem.”  Apprehension has turned to disgust.

March 3, 2018

Spent the morning enlarging and finishing Ben and Angela, toward the end of sending it to a contest which demands a minimum of 60 pages.

Black Panther with DJ and Leland. Found the movie sort of boring (too much action is no action), but with a provocative political message. The screen froze or went blank couple of times, because of power surges caused by the wild wind. Cocktails and supper afterward at the Hilton, with the enlarged Group. Happy and cold and drunk on the ride home.  Full moon of March.

Whatever I intended to do today, what I actually did was go to Reems Creek and buy two pear trees, a Bartlett and an Anjou. Intended to plant them in the space ready to be vacated by the giant pine, but instead planted them in the back garden, in space which will become, after perhaps a hundred years, light flooded in three days.

March 2, 2018

A day off, because my senior seminar voted itself a day of workshopping without me. Like a good father, I welcome this rather than lament it. They are probably more willing to listen to one another than to me, as we were concerning our professors at the same age. Do they scorn/worship me as I scorn/worshiped Chatfield?

Cantaria in the evening, during which I was in good enough voice, singing some of my old favorites. The bass row is suddenly full of migrated baritones.

March 1, 2018

Rose intending to do other things, but instead getting my tax materials together and taken to my accountant.  I spend thousands of dollars that do not actually need to be spent.

February 28, 2018

Dark of the morning, the dishwasher roaring comfortingly downstairs. Woke from an iteration of a recurring dream. The dream is this: In the middle of a park is a large restaurant notable for interesting, excellent food, and for the rumor that there is a pool of dark water under it, wondrously deep and cold, and that the pool is inhabited by fabulous creatures who either prepare the food or have some influence over it. The creatures have the bodies of beautiful men and women, but are often seen with knives or other implements where their hands would be.  I’ve had this dream several times. This time I managed to get a job at the restaurant. After working there for a time, I met one of the creatures and satisfied myself that he was human, but he did flash around in the pool for hours without a breath, so he was a water creature too, He was standing beside a sink peeling potatoes, I think, but majestically. I desired to talk with him, but I wasn’t sure my status at the restaurant allowed me to. As I dithered, I woke.

A long bout of some sickness is over. I am not certain what sickness it was. The symptoms that have disappeared are morbidly dry, itchy skin, severe muscle cramps, thirst and dehydration, and lightheadedness at any degree of exercise. Also, the insatiable craving for radishes. Was this all anemia? Did just mainlining iron cure it all? I will exhibit gratitude if not understanding.

February 26, 2018

Attended C’s first organizational meeting at Noble Cider in Leicester last night. It was, as I expected, an eye-opener. If I ever considered running for office, the colossal commitment to detail should discourage me at step one. I am not a detail person. I sort of thought I might be, but, no. Not sure where I can fit in, but I adore C, and if I were casting a movie about an upright Liberal candidate, I would cast him.

The fevers at the beginning of the year seem to have affected a number of things: I failed to pay several bills, even lost them somehow, including the mortgage. 

February 25, 2018

Theater at the Magnetic last night. The play’s one selling point was the broadest imaginable Mountain accents, and one inexhaustible salesman of an actress, who prepped, expanded, delivered, and then approved of every line. It was a little bit horrible and, of course, very popular. Chairs had to be brought to accommodate the overflow crowd. One lesson: if your accent is perceived as the accent of “home” and triviality with be taken as wit. One good joke: When Unitarians pray, the prayer is addressed: “To whom it may concern.”

February 24, 2018

Rose early, ate cinnamon roles and hauled paintings out of my studio, into the truck, and eventually down the road to the Flood. I feared for rain out of the clouds the whole time, but rain never came. Carlos gratified me by saying he would hang the show himself. He seemed happy for the work, grateful, even, and I’m glad I walked this road, even with all the dragging of feet.  Thirteen paintings on various degrees of wood.

When I went out into the yard I saw that the door of the truck was open. If someone had broken in, they took nothing that I missed. Had I left the door open all night? If so, what adventures had the truck had all night with an open door? 

In a dream I am walking at night along a street I recognize as Alaho, back home. I come to our old house, but I don’t go in. I sit on the high place of the lawn and listen. I hear voices. I hear my mother’s voice and realize, as someone in the dream had promised out of the darkness, that she had come back from the dead. Other voices, too: perhaps a party to welcome her. I am about ready to go in and join the party when, out of the forest that used to stand beyond our house, my little black and white dog Bimbo appears. He runs toward me. He jumps into my arms and wriggles with ecstasy. And I feel such peace and joy as I have never felt in my waking life. I wake sobbing so hard I have frightened the cats, sobbing so hard it takes me a while to settle down. I am lost. I have always been lost. I wait for some power out of dreams to find me.

February 23, 2018

Cantaria voted to change its name to The Asheville Gay Men’s Chorus. Goodbye to all that.

Edna’s Café is closed.

The Lenten roses are abloom, just as they ought to be. The calls of towhees in the garden punctuate the shimmer of the wind chime. If the glance is focused enough, this hour is paradise.

Carlos decided that we must hang my show tomorrow. It’s nowhere near ready. Still, the mark of my recovery is that I marched up and down those terrible stars bearing paintings and did not get breathless.

February 21, 2018

Billy Graham, a fixture since the beginning of my memory, is dead.

The green spears that herald daffodils break through the earth.

Removing the white pine will cost nearly $4000. I called Nick to rebuild the fence, and have yet to learn what that will cost. I realize I hire workers based on their beauty. I suppose there are worse things.

Daithi offers me a part in HART’s The Field, which I will take if Yale doesn’t invite me to the summer playwrights’ conference. 

Emotional exhaustion after one of those weeks where everything seems to be awry, and not in any predictable way, but a blow from the universe, a descending comet.

February 19, 2018

Returned, I hope steadily, to my old routine of rising early and going to the gym. Brent was there, waiting for his class to begin. I stood in the starless darkness listening to the crying of hylas in the wetlands.