August 31, 2020

Dark of the last night of my 69th year. I have had birthdays before, but 70 seems momentous in ways they did not, the biblical three score and ten after which is mystery.  The idea of being “70" is not realized within me, a goal never anticipated, a reality without context. Three and a half more hours and I can never again call myself anything by “elderly.” It’s shocking. Kyle plans a socially distanced party for me here tomorrow night. I think that is sweet and kind and I know I will look back on it with joy. 

Felt the approach of the Infection last night, took the pills on time and in sufficient volume, so this bout is tiny, tiny, almost nothing. . . except something. . . an hour of fever, ten minutes of chills instead of days and days. One is meant to thank God that bad things were not worse.

A new bear visited this afternoon, young and leggy, maybe not much more than a cub, maybe out on his own for the first time. I’ll name him Orson, after Il Orso the Bear. His muzzle is darker than Bubba’s. He was not used to me, and when I opened the door to greet him he sped off into the bamboo. Clearly he’d not been in the garden before, because when he got to the middle of it, he panicked, thinking he was cornered and there were no exits. There are actually two in addition to the one he entered by, but he’ll discover all in time. I haven’t looked between their legs, but I say “he” because both bears’ behavior is what I’d call “boyish.” I wondered why there’s a fairly clear aisle between the bamboo and the elderberries, and I saw today that is the avenue of the bears. Maybe Orson will come to my party.

Lane has bobcats. I am sick with envy.  

Something made me think of the university. The inwardness of recent years made me forget the public energy of most of my tenure there, hauling kids downtown, putting on their plays for the people, acing, singing, sitting on committees, minding the business of all the arts in this municipality. If I don’t remember unless I work up to it, I wonder if anybody does. I wonder if I care. My name must be down in somebody’s notes somewhere.

 

August 30, 2020

I think I’ve put the final touches on Heroes All in Cloth of Gold. I think it is beautiful, but if it is beautiful only to me and only because I lived it remains to be seen. Wonder why I dropped it so close to its being accomplished ten, twenty years ago? I suppose because it couldn’t possibly be published, under my name, when I worked at the college. It might not make them uncomfortable, but it would me. My guess is no one suspects that a tenth of it happened. So many are dead, so many passed into the mists of distance and forgetfulness. 

 

August 29, 2020

Swedish madrigals on the CD. There’s a bit of everything in the world. 

Right-wing demonstration downtown, people from out of state with Confederate flags, tearing down (so it was reported) the veil from the Vance monument.  Basically a fizzle, as the locals pretty much ignored it. Looked at one way, the campaign against racism and prejudice has taken mighty steps back. Looked at another way, the crazies and bigots and troglodytes that always lingered have been emboldened by Trump to crawl out of the ditches. 

I have a page in TG’s beautiful new book, Sundays. You’re reading along and suddenly there you are, in a moment both recognizable and wholly not. Every time it is revealed that someone thinks of me, for any reason whatever, I am astonished. I try to keep the astonishment secret. CM relates on Facebook the experience of sitting beside me in class in college. I didn’t know there WAS such an experience. A truth about my life is that I have no sense of my presence in the lives of others, the impression I might be making. It usually comes out when I learn somebody has hated me with wolfish ferocity, and me without a clue. Sometimes, though, the opposite: the Lord be praised.

Praise to my beautiful garden. It is a little too orange. I’ll remember that when I’m planting in the fall 

 

August 28, 2020

A pure white mushroom appeared in the pothos bowl in the kitchen. Now under it appears a fine, thick dust of white spoors.

Watching TV last night I hit the “mute’ button because I heard something strange. It came from the open back glass doors, the weak spot of the house’s defenses during the summer. I expected and feared a bear (though they are not nocturnal around here), but it was the gray tomcat from next door, finally making Maud’s acquaintance. I couldn’t tell by Maud’s attitude whether she was interested or apprehensive. When I shut the door, the tomcat stood staring at me for a while, as though trying to figure out my motivations. He must have noticed how I never bother him when he’s stalking through my garden, or sleeping at royal ease upon the grass.

Fatboy groundhog has churned the area under the door to the shed into a fine dust. This has created a dustbath for the birds, who now resort there in considerable numbers. Ecology at work.

 Alden Thompson–he must be 3 now– came over with his mother and roamed the garden for a while. Young Alden was keenly interested in anything mechanical– far more interested in the pump than the pond, far more interested in the air conditioner (though it wasn’t on) than the garden. “Would you please not put that back on,” he said of the fake stone over the pump, because he wasn’t finished looking at it. He begged his mother for five more minutes to look at this or that. I wonder how much of a child’s life is spent negotiating for things they cannot actualize on their own. 

Almost on a whim, I applied for a Guggenheim, to continue to address my cycle of American history plays. I’d intended to apply to do something else, but the plays were in my mind so heartily when I sat down to do the application that I succumbed. Kind friends agreed to do the recommendations. Begging recommendations has kept my from applying for things like this in the past, but it turned out to be easy. I won’t get it. I don’t receive that sort of thing, typically, but the mere act of applying was enlightening. I counted up 106 productions of my plays. Some of those were quite basic, but still the number is astounding, and I was prouder of my achievements than I would have been had I left them unexamined. 

Loutish teenage thrushes galumph across the front porch and through the grass, a successful season of generation.

Gemeniani on the CD

In the afternoon, warm hurricane rain, and after it blazing, wondrous heat.

 

August 25, 2020

Applied for a Guggenheim all in one laborious day. 

 

August 23, 2020

The birthday of Poetry for me. Fifty-four years a poet. The bones chill writing the words. Yet, it kept me busy. It gave me a name and a destination.

Started looking seriously online for independent publishers for my rout of books. Every one I’ve hit so far has said “Not accepting submissions at this time. . . taking a hiatus. . .  “

 Plowing through an old essay I found another reference to this house before I lived in it: I walked down Lakeshore Drive to the video store for videos. I could see the video store from my window but for a few things in the way. One house blocking the way is empty but for the periodic appearance of the realtor and prospective buyers.  The realtor has kept the lawn clipped, but not otherwise looked very deep or taken meet measures. The wild clematis all but devours lawn and hedge and porch pillar, beautiful,  a sure sign of neglect. It looks like the house is being swallowed by sea-foam. Anyone with a sense of the life of wild things will smell something wrong. A man was murdered in this house. That’s why they can’t sell it. A father shot a grown son, as sometimes happens. In the struggle between the old lion and the young lion for rulership of the pride, the old one sometimes wins. The wild clematis thinks it was called to cover everything up. 

 

August 22, 2020

Calm night, music of the Renaissance on the CD player that was not dead at all, but merely unplugged. Made some progress on the unnamed book. Look into my beautiful garden, but all day do not step into it. 

 

August 21, 2020

Rainy Friday. 

Oddly, last time after the cleaning lady’s visitation things were fouled up in my study, and the same seems to have happened yesterday. My keyboard did not function. I tried one I kept around (after it had stopped functioning) and it worked fine. Did she switch keyboards somehow? Think it would be a joke? Did she have nothing whatever to do with it and there are other sorts of gremlins? My CD player also died between Wednesday and today. Maybe digging up material on the house I called Rick Turpin’s name and he decided to come back for a visitation. 

Traffic slowed on Lakeshore to accommodate a procession of turkeys, surprisingly large animals. 

Ran into Tom at the post office. He tried, and failed, to mail a gigantic box (a toy he’d sole on Ebay). He sold the toy for $60 and postage would be $100. He had to speak. I didn’t recognize him under the mask. Made plans to meet for coffee. Will we? 

My ordinarily uneventful life rendered catatonic by the quarantine. Plenty going on in the imaginary world, but all that gets set down on other pages.

 

August 19, 2020

De Lassus

Beautiful summer. People complain about the heat & humidity; I do not. Tried my hand for the first time at writing a music (Country music) video for a former student, whom I don’t remember, but who sends me messages all the time. Don’t yet know how she likes it.

Morning glories work summer blue in among the stalks of the garden. They’re all volunteers, as is the borage growing by the porch. I tried to grow borage in containers last summer. That failed, and I dumped the containers, and from that dump arose the heavenly blue. Looked for groundhog damage, found only comfrey nibbled to the ground. My main comfrey stand is outside the fence, where he never goes, so I didn’t care that much. The tomatoes have this strange cancer-growth, so he can have them too.  

 

August 16, 2020

Bach on the Internet

Finished Knight of the Flowers last night in a wondrous overflow of writing. Sat on the sofa afterwards with gin in my hand, cursing God, I think, though the memory is addled. I feel there was immense sadness, whatever the cause. I try to keep faith pure, but in order to do that one must turn one’s face away from the world. I have been looking too much at the world. 

Had to examine my files to remember the books I’ve beaten into some sort of shape in in the last twelve months: Diving into the Moon, An Age of Silver, Jason of the Apes, the Nurseryman’s Wedding, Knight of the Flowers. Three of them are resurrections of ancient material, but still. Heroes All in Cloth of Rose is extant, but not fully revised. 

 

August 13, 2020

Years of material backs up in my computer files. I could mine the quarries, I think, for the rest of my life, depending on how long my life is. Surprising how nearly complete, nearly accomplished a piece could be and yet I would abandon it. Maybe my subconscious was waiting for now.

Trump admits that he’s destroying the USPS in order to suppress voting in November. Yet he is free. He is not in irons. He will be on TV tonight as though he were legitimately a president.

Revising Heroes All in Cloth of Rose I come across references to my house before I lived in it:  

Went into the bathroom last night at about 11:30 and heard a strange sound. It was a sharp report followed by a human cry, like a child being struck with a paddle, except that the voice that cried out was adult. I thought at first that the Andricks next door were beating their children, an event so unlikely as to be unimaginable. A few moments later the sirens began, and I knew that what I had heard were gunshots. When I went out Lakeshore Drive spilled over with ambulances and police cruiser, even a firetruck. The story gradually emerged. The man in the charming white house on the spit of land where Lakeshore bends had shot his son in the chest-- four times if my ears were right. I'd heard from the rescue team's radio the words, "We have full cardiac arrest here." Nothing in the paper, which certainly everyone who stood in the flashing lights pored over this morning, like vultures, hungry for every detail. 

Then again: Passing the murderer's house across the street I shudder with the ordinariness of it all. The night of the murder the garbage was already put out, and picked up the next morning without incident. The murderer's lilies bloom. His walnuts hold their lancets to the sun. The grass is not yet shaggy. The back porch light burns as though waiting for someone to come home.

The day of the murder was August 27, 1990. The father/murderer was Dick Turpin, a retired postal worker; the son/victim was Rick Turpin. I wish I’d kept better track of the house– such as, when did it become yellow?–but I didn’t know I was going to own it. 

 

August 12, 2020

Tony comes to mow. He shows me his new glasses. I feel bad for the woodchuck, Tony having mown down all his grass, and I toss some carrots down by the shed.  I waste most of the day, though in the morning I do send out manuscripts. My days divide so I forget at evening what I accomplished in the morning.  Torrents of rain before night. What do people do not to be sick of quarantine? I’m sick of it every tenth day. McAfee’s book Ropes of the Sun fully engaging

 

August 11, 2020

Amazing productivity yesterday, writing till I was nearly blind. Still not sending any of the written items out. Heroes All in Cloth of Rose stands resurrected from long ago. At Distance is a group of playlets that can be performed in today’s quarantined theater.  SS moves swiftly forward on the publication of Washington Place. Another book, of Christly aphorisms-- I don’t know how it will turn out. 

Have resolved today to clean the porch. 

 

August 10, 2020

My bear turned and whuffed at me last evening . I was following too close. I launched an attack with my shoe brandished as a weapon, wanting him never to have the upper hand, and he fled. Later in the evening I felt the way you do after a quarrel. Only after thinking back did I realize it was with a bear. Something inside me interprets him as a person. 

 

August 9, 2020

Woke to earthquake this morning, the bed shaking, the water in the toilet sloshing about. An interesting sensation. I went to the Internet and found that it was true, the quake centered under DJ’s hometown in Sparta. 

Realize I haven’t seen TD in months. He was the center of my life for years. The last time we met it was so he could manipulate me into doing a favor for an old girlfriend, which she turns out not to have needed. You sit and wonder about such things. The missing is, now, intellectual rather than emotional, so I suppose it’s right to contemplate, to wonder how to do it better next time. . . except that most souls are so covert you cannot possibly guess what’s going on in them, and, if you have to ask, something ineffable is ruined.

August 7, 2020

Eight phone calls get a health insurance snafu ironed out. I’m told this is below average, though we’ll see if it’s actually ironed out. 

Downpour last night and tonight watered my new plantings. 

This afternoon I “finished” Knight of the Flowers, though tinkering and revision are inevitable.

August 6, 2020

The cleaning lady climbed to the study today, as she almost never does. It is cleaner, but also plugs were loosened from outlets, and when I sat down at my computer, it was dead, the screen was dead. I did not quite panic, but I considered it. 

Wearing the T-shirt a student at Classic Hill gave me in 1983, in trade for a copy of The Glacier’s Daughters. I meant the book to be a gift, I had such a crush on him. No gesture of love I have ever made has hit exactly, or even nearly, the way I intended it. 

Bear returns. I tell him as he approaches the empty trash bin, “that’s empty,” and he moves on without trying it. He is startled by the cry of a jay.

Drove to Reems Creek for stragglers, bring home pink hibiscus and joe-pye. Will need to water if God doesn’t.

Sit by the French Broad and write the last necessary scene of Knight. Battalions of geese fly low along the river as if it were a road. 

Have a commission to co-write a music video and a one-man musical. Feeling employed again. 

I would like to strike a bargain with God vis a vis my career as a writer: one acceptance for every rejection. Since I feel there should be no rejections, this is meant as generous compromise. 

August 2, 2020

Rose early to walk downtown before full light. The primary denizens of that hour are people walking their dogs and the homeless, some of them up and scrounging, some of them still asleep beside the fountain or in alleys. One approached me looking for cigarettes or a handout. I had neither. He had colored his beard green. We chatted for a moment when he mentioned someone who had been “talking shit on the radio,” by which he apparently meant a CB. He said, “If you’re part of the Brotherhood you’ll know him. Tell him Bubba was listening and he’d better watch his back.” I promised to convey the message. Google was not helpful on what “the Brotherhood” might be. It is astonishing how much life the street has, that has evidently nowhere else to go. Men use Pritchard Park as a living room before the rest of the city stirs.

August 1, 2020

Short walk through the neighborhood.

Blue heron taking off from Beaver Lake, looking ancient and gigantic.

Studying Gilgamesh and Zoroaster, putting things together as I not had before, thinking what a shame I will not have a class with which to share the insights. But I have a feeling the time for those sorts of insights has passed at UNCA, where exploration is not wanted, but confirmation.