March 31, 2021

More rain, more roaring rain. It’s like a sea with one wave rolling forward forever.

My pair of thrushes put in their first spring appearance. They seemed joyful diving among the wet leaves. 

Sweetboi perched on the fence and screamed, and I threw him his meat. FS says I cold train him to take food from my hand, but that responsibility is too great.

Intense dance rehearsal this morning. I felt good, stretched-out, afterwards. Ann is distressed that she dances so feebly at 74. I find it hilarious to be dancing at all. Rather like it. Had I been a different person, with a different body and different health, I might have pursued it. 

The first day I didn’t have to take aspirin against the pain in my tooth. . . or in the crater of my tooth. 

Wild Honeysuckle

 

March 30, 2021

Focused attack on the wild honeysuckle, south and west.  Opened up a little space by the street, into which I’ll put the mallow I bought at Reems Creek. Unburying hellebore and rose in the space beside the driveway. Planted a forlorn half-price delphinium that had fallen behind some tables at the nursery. Rescue flower. 

Palm Sunday

 

March 28, 2021

Palm Sunday. Read the Passion on ZOOM this AM, then motored to All Souls to record the Good Friday music, including Tallis’ “That Virgin’s Child.” I sounded good, I thought, though it was hard to catch a full breath behind the mask. Low notes in particular require a measure of wind. More rain. The cedar rejoices in my having placed him in the ground at exactly the right moment. 

Quick, violent

 

March 27, 2021

My garden grows beautiful, yellow and purple.

Quick, violent storm early in the afternoon. 

Discovered I have an app on my phone that allows me to tape the ruined refund check back together, photograph it, make a distanced and virtual deposit. It worked!

KP leaves UNCA to become director of the Bascom Museum. One prays that position will give her less scope for ruin and mendacity. Foolish, destructive woman. During UNCA’s autopsy, her footprint will be among those found on its neck.

Forty-Seven Years

 

March 26, 2021

Mother has been dead 47 years. 

Almost unbelievable rains last night, Alabama stricken with tornados. When I briefly looked out the window, all shown green and new here. 47 years ago, in Ithaca, it was frozen and snowing. 

Let days pass without writing here. Don’t know what I was doing instead. 

Ann says she’s satisfied with the progress of our dance. I strive not to imagine what I look like. 

Returned to the Y early yesterday morning. Of course, after a year’s absence, I overdid it. We politically correct people pretend it’s not hard wearing a mask and exercising, but it is.

Tooth still hurts. Maybe it’s a ghost tooth now. Called the dentist to leave me scrip for antibiotics. 

ZOOM reading for the UNCA Queer Conference. Three poems. 

Rehearsal for ZOOM Passion Reading for Palm Sunday. Mark, to my ears the least heard of them. I’d forgotten the poor fig tree. That part is not often read. 

Planting today if the ground is not completely sodden. Work on The Garden of the Bears if it is.

Evening: Planting it was, and strenuously: a whole plot reclaimed from weeds and bamboo, in which is now set a host of scarlet canna. Also, calla and an Alaska cedar. The cedar look a little ragged, but I would too had I been in a box several days. 

Found mail sodden in the bed of my truck. Most of it I threw away, but the official looking pieces I lay on the front porch to dry in the sun. One was a $2600 check, part of my mortgage refinancing.  That, of course, I tore a little. We’ll see if they take it. 

Summer hot. I am almost comfortable. 

 March 22, 2021

JD writes of a piece I gave Megan twenty years ago: It’s a helluva lot more aesthetically pleasing than frenetic vomit Jonas Gerard has been unloading on dim witted tourists for decades. Maybe Dr. David Hopes should have a wall in the airport celebrating his artistic contributions to Asheville...

Ann finishes our dance. I have 5 weeks to get it right, and I think that might be possible. 

I asked H to write a blurb for The Ones with Difficult Names, and what she comes up with is :The Ones with Difficult Names moves the reader through a geography of public spaces and innermost mind across a time during which public spaces became, to us, possibly gone forever. This possibility arches over the poems as humans and animals alike seek escape, support, distraction, and love while the abyss gazes back in at them. It is a difficult and soul-opening collection. While reading, I felt the truth and fragility of life creeping up on me. After reading them, I felt the poet sitting beside me, assuring me I’m unalone. The truth is you’ve allowed my heart to feel what it’s been afraid to or did and I missed it. ❤ 

I don’t understand a word of it. I don’t even know what she is making reference to.  What am I supposed to do? Rely on the probability that she’ll never see the finished book? I feel bad, though, that one of my friends wouldn’t make an effort. She could just have said “no.” 

 

March 21, 2021

Realizing I haven’t left the house, except to patrol the yard and check out what I thought was a camera hidden in my holly trees. It wasn’t. Corrected, for the moment, DSL. The squirrels keep gnawing at the suet cage though it is quite empty. Habit? Still some taste on the wires? Tooth still aching, though more distantly than before. My hatred of the repetitious kicks in even as the actual pain lessens. Praise for my paintings on Facebook this afternoon. Too late. Though, if I had the space, I would paint again. 

Vernal Equinox

 

March 20, 2021

Vernal Equinox, cool and brilliant, the flat pale blue of the sky, the red hawks flying over, crying. Transplanted the pine seedling (the last scion of the great lost giant) to a place where it could grow as great as its sire without imperiling the house in a hundred years. Dug a new garden from the place where I planted the smoke tree back to the old hibiscus plot. I think I’ll sow it with the orange cosmos I love so much. Napped. Practiced the dance to the tape we made Friday. I can get from beginning to end in a crude way, but I’m always going too fast. Realized the door of the tool shed is the door to my closet repurposed by a former owner. Why not just get a new door? But I see that the closet door must always have been banging the bedroom door, so maybe it was a gesture of frustration. 

 

March 19, 2021

Good rehearsal with Ann. She assures me that most of it’s done, and if so, there’s some chance that I might remember what I’m doing. 

Sweetboi came diving through hard rain to pick up his pork neck bone. His beauty astonishes every time 

Tooth (or socket thereof) still throbbing. How long does this last? I’ll have to buy another bottle of Advil. 

Tadpoles

 

March 18, 2021

Deep rains turn to pale blue light. 

My tadpoles arrived, and now squirm along in their new pond home. 

Tooth still throbs. Impatience. 

Cleaned lawn, untangled wild woodbine from the hydrangeas. 

Taste and touching and seeing to discern Thee fail. . . .

 March 17, 2021

Ann had an attack of Meniere’s, so our rehearsal was off and I wasted a shower. Wore my green, did nothing else Irish, except think of Ancestry.com and wonder when I could push past Peggy O’Neill. Began corrections for DSL. Stopped in my driveway by K, who was delivering a copy of APR, along with his usual whirlwind of name-dropping. He parked beside me and got out of the car, and I didn’t recognize him until he stood straight up. We all change so. I met him my first year of teaching here, when he corrected Alfred Kazin on some literary point. He remembers me as a brilliant teacher, and opined I must be tired of hearing that. No, in fact. I gave him a copy of Beautiful Necklaces. remembering only afterward that he, or at least his family, is in it.

Extraction

 

March 16, 2021

When I sat down at the desk tremendous rain beat the roof. It’s a little slacker now, though gray through the windows. I did finish DSL last night, rounding off a rough ending this morning. Now the editing and sloppy proofing begin. These are the novels I have to market now, somehow: Jason of the Apes, The Nurseryman’s Wedding, An Age of Silver, Diving into the Moon, The Dead Shall Live, the Living Die, Knight of the Flowers, plus a book of short stories, The Prince in the Tower, and The Sun in Splendor, which I may pull out of mothballs if it pleases me the next time I look at it. The Garden of the Bears stands about 1/3 finished. 

I wonder if I’ll ever be completely warm again. I wear my outdoor coat in the house. 

Vestry last night. People sometimes take the oddest stands, stands often attributed to ethical convictions, and I wish I could see that in them rather than self-indulgence. 

Tooth yanked out of my head this afternoon. The pain now is far worse than ever the toothache was, and after three hours I’m still oozing a little blood. Not a highly successful afternoon. 

Dead Shall, Live, the Living Die

 

March 15, 2021

May have finished The Dead Shall Live, but-- I having written that piece almost out of it-- it requires a new title.

Went to Dr LeStage and had my tooth looked at. They seemed not to be very alarmed. Extraction tomorrow. I was hoping to get everything done at once, but that’s not what happened. Disability takes up time. There are two male dentists and about a dozen female –what? Technicians?– and everyone was running around trying to compensate for computer glitches. Dr LeStage related to them like a henpecked husband. Did not inspire confidence, but it was amusing. My last dentist visit was 28 years ago, so if it’s the same span this time, I won’t worry.

 

March 13, 2021

My father’s 102nd birthday. 

One year ago today I fled Dublin before a tide of Covid, certain, in the great Petrie dish of American Customs at the airport, that I wouldn’t survive.

Brown headed nuthatch and red cockaded woodpecker. 

Planted a patch of tiger lilies, thinking of my father the whole time. 

Noting the restoration of my strength, from a low this summer. Barely notice hauling those vast bags of topsoil around. 

Clock

 

March 11, 2021

Something walking on the roof. I hope it’s a squirrel. 

Went to Ann’s studio yesterday and was shown (would like to say “learned,” but I can’t) the first few minutes of our pas de deux for April 30. It actually felt good to do the movements, like an elegant stretch class. It would be best not to speculate on how I look. The dance is based on the life journey of her parents. The creek behind her studio is full of broken marble headstones.

Planted a purple smoke tree, dug out several plots of bamboo. 

The big Seth Thomas clock I bought in memory of my grandmother has sat on the bookcase for most of a year, silent until I read the directions at length and get it going. But today when I came in from shopping it had sprung to life, ticking, bonging on the hour (chiming on the quarter hour) like a live thing. Did someone sneak in and wind my clock? I wish they had set it as well. 

Got the ladder out to change the burnt-out light in the bathroom ceiling. I can’t reach it even on a ladder. I see a house darkening through the years, me unable to change the bulbs. The kitchen cabinets and all the clothing poles in the closets, too, are made for a race of giraffes. 

Hiram College Directory

 

March 9, 2021

Spectacularly productive day, not in terms of writing but in general housekeeping. Restored the catastrophic walk-in closet to order, as well as the guest room closet and the shelves in the dressing room, leaving me with a sizeable load of cast-offs for Goodwill. This was enabled by my breaking down and buying a step ladder with which to reach the inhumanly high closet shelves. Who lived here before? Maybe the floors have subsided. Learned how to use the portable battery powered pump, inflated the tires on the truck. As I was reattaching the garden hose to the spigot, I heard a noise behind that was squirrel-like but too loud for a squirrel. It was Buddy the Bear (gown quite enormous) hauling himself over my fence into the yard. I startled him, so he ran to the neighbors’, but our biggest, blackest sign of spring is again abroad. I smile inwardly even now. 

David has asked me to perform his marriage ceremony in May, 2022. 

The Hiram College Directory arrived yesterday. I’ve been going through it, looking at once-familiar names, waiting for dim images to form, or fail to form, in my remembrance. A number of people I remember vividly without knowing why. What I remember, of course, are selves fifty years in the past. How many would I know on the street? Little stars mark the decedents. Some I knew, many I did not. Many of the men we assumed, or knew, to be gay are gone, I suppose from AIDS. Almost all the black men I knew personally or even peripherally in that small place, are dead, which is testimony in itself.

This is what I wrote one year ago today: Late, late, just coming back from the bars I stopped at after the theater. One guy was singing his heart out with Billy Joel. Beggars are more numerous and strident than in times past, and more clearly bogus. Rain all day. It looked thicker in the lamplight than it felt. Walked to the National Gallery. In the Jack Yeats room I burst into tears. For the Road and The Singing Horseman in particular remind me of the high and great times here when I believed I could be an Irishman loved by an Irishman. As close as it came, it was never quite real. I wept for that. I wept for the decades when I thought I would be a painter and stand in a company with Jack Yeats. That too did never come to pass. The pain was sharper, deeper at that moment than it is now. Blessings on that. Visited Loretto at the Trinity Gallery, gave her a copy of FW and made a date for lunch on Wednesday. The play at the Abbey was The Fall of the Second Republic, and though it ended on the wrong foot, it was funny and clever and well done. The actor Andrew Bennet, whom I’ve seen in every visit to Dublin, played the rotten Teaschocg.. Can never cross over to America, because of its concentration on the Irish parliamentary system – a mystery to Americans--and its luxurious use of the word “cunt.” Walking home from the theater reminded me why I love Dublin so much, young and alive and grubby, unwholesome, elemental, eternal. 

 

March 8, 2021

Received the second vaccination in the Reynolds High parking lot. The injection-givers were cute and I finished before the actual time of my appointment. I decided to hit the Parkway for a hike, but I began to get chills, so I turned around and came home. Nothing more happened. I realized all I was wearing was a coat and a t-shirt (to allow access to my arm) and so probably I was simply cold. When I got back from Ireland I was fairly sure I’d get the disease and die of it, but apparently not. Sense of freedom and well-being having the vaccine in me.  Sweetboi patrolling my trees

 

March 7, 2021

Attended–in blazing blue winter light-- Magnetic’s Walking with Magnetic outdoor theater along the Reed Creek Greenway. It was well written, well performed, and the outdoor venue was rich rather than distracting. The play would not have succeeded on stage, but it didn’t have to. I fear I will lose my struggle against gender-blind casting. The pride I’ve been taking in my walking and breathing at the same time abilities were somewhat dependent, I see now, on my being alone and setting my own pace. In a group I’m easily exhausted and left in the dust. I think it was a little impolite. I could not walk faster; they could walk slower. Anyway, I need to remember this is still light years advanced from a year ago– when, right now, I would have been stumbling about on the streets of Dublin.

 

March 6, 2021

Bright day, too cold for gardening, too late a start for a decent hike. 

S came last night, an image from bygone days. We decided that we could do without the masks.

Poking around in my Ancestry membership. Interesting discovery, that Grandfather Oliver was born in England. 

Grandma’s parentage reads “Ireland/North,” the first time I saw that in writing. 

Followed it far enough to reach Peggy O’Neill in Newry. 

IP sent me a book of poems to critique. I forget how I know him. I think I was on stage with his girlfriend. Critiquing poems is one thing I may be better at than anyone else in the world, but what a precise and minimal little talent after all! A further irony is that every book I’ve published has been hurled into a cloud of unknowing, without a single particle of advise or prior criticism from anybody. Times when I have sent something to people, longing for some sort of feedback, it was met with silence. One has the life one has. At least I don’t have to brood on not being understood by my friends. If I were I wouldn’t know. 

Oh, I take that back. P read The Sun in Splendor and her response was, “Why do you waste your time with that?”

Stony Knob Overlook

 

March 4, 2021

First phone call of the day reveals that I owe $30,000 taxes. Lump sum from 62 looks like a disaster just now. Put that to one side. 

Supposed that at least part of the Parkway reopened, so I drove as far south on it as I could. The barriers were up just past the Stony Knob overlook, so I parked there and took the road. It was far colder than on the flats, and very windy. Also very beautiful. Of birds I saw a flock of juncos and, high up, migrating robins. A vulture, too, but I was so high the vulture flew below me, and I could see the top of his head and back. The tunnel lay in my path, and debated whether to walk through it, but I could see the light at the end and surmised I’d never be in the total dark, so off I went. On the other side sunrise fell full on the road, glorious and, more to the point, warm. I walked from pool of light to pool of light murmuring, “I am happy.” It is still a novelty for those words to come from my lips, and it’s almost always on the side of the mountain. Returning, I tested the acoustics of the tunnel, which were uneven but sublime. I chanted Pange lingua and finished off with a solid series of OM. I hope the tunnel has a memory.

Sweetboi and Denise have settled somewhere west of here. I hear him crying high up at morning, but seldom otherwise. I though feeding them would persuade them to stay near me, but they are not so crass as that. I am probably defeated by the superabundance and availability of squirrels. It is both hyperbole and true to say that I am heartbroken. They were bracing and wild and beautiful. I suppose it’s how a parent feels when teenagers move out of the house.

 March 2, 2021

ZOOM early this morning with four charming Australian kids, for whom it was full night. They had questions about “Alfie and Greta,” which they are already rehearsing. They wanted to know if I minded if they turned the American place names to Australian, and of course I did not. I did mind that they were going to switch cast in the middle of the show, and that one Alfie– who represents himself as filthily, brutally male– will be played by a girl. I detest gender blind casting. But I also realized it was one of those school enterprises where you have to get as many students onto the stage as you possibly can, and there are always more girls than boys. The kids were bunched together and unmasked. When I remarked on this they said there is not one case of Covid in Western Australia. 

 March 1, 2021

Rain. Sickened by the birds’ turning my car into their toilet, made a trip to the car wash (the kids there wondering who brings their cars to the car wash in driving rain), rearranged the drive so the car would be out from under the great mass of overhanging branches. 

Made an off-hand comment to Ann that she needs to open her studio again if only to make a hardly-can-stand-up codger dance for me. I’d forgotten whom I was talking to. She’s going ahead and doing it, having picked music (beautiful music) and negotiated for performance rights. The idea of me onstage at 70 in a ballet is absurd enough for me to go ahead with it. 

 February 28, 2021

They played my recorded CAT poem at virtual church this morning. It was less embarrassing than it might have been, especially considering it was a first take.

Sat on my east porch reading and writing poetry.