Roses

 

July 28, 2021

Some madness (or a sale) led me to order roses in the summer. They arrived yesterday. I searched this morning until I found a hardware/nursery that opened at 8 AM (Tractor Supply). I loaded soil and mulch into my truck, dug the plot, planted, fertilized, mulched the four mysterious roses, unloaded the truck of the extra bags, showered, and was done with all that by 10. To this I owe my renewed stamina. I don’t know how it went and how it came back, but as I endured the one I will rejoice in the other.

The back garden exploded unplanned with four o’clocks and sunflowers that came up from plantings of years gone by. 

Dmitry Selezenv on You Tube. I want to be him, or marry him. I have his low notes, and then some, but I don’t look handsome when I’m hitting them. 

 

July 27, 2021

Canon A characterizes our trip to Israel as a “holy pilgrimage.” I can get into that. 

SS and I were interviewed for an Internet program last night. I’m too casual about what I do. I have too few opinions to justify the fuss I want to be made about it. 

SS joins the group who remark that I am looking younger. I accept this joyfully, without being able to confirm it myself. Having left off drinking cannot show so soon. Its just being the release of not teaching any more would be sad. 

Fatboi

 

July 26, 2021

For a minute or so my radio station played the Brahms First Piano Concerto and the overture to Bernstein’s Candide at the same time. The effect was sickening, literally: difficult to explain.

Fatboi the groundhog cropping the grasses, the rabbits hunched over a little apart, as though embarrassed by his voraciousness. 

Bears not only rip out the basement window at the southeast corner, but dig down, as though trying to undermine the foundation. I have nightmares about this before sleep.

MES

 

July 25, 2021

Mother’s 97th birthday.

Email from Oberon Magazine:

Dear Contributor: We are pleased to accept your submission(s)"Coal Country: 1919"

for publication in the 2021 annual Oberon poetry magazine. Thank you for submitting your fine work!

With appreciation,

Mindy Kronenberg, Editor

Oberon poetry magazine

Unveiling of the painting Heritage at All Souls this morning. It turned out very much better than the first submitted version–yea, quite beautiful– which raises my estimation of the power of collaboration. 

Mexican sunflowers abloom atop their sequoia-stalks. Heat lying like a body on the body of the garden.

 

July 24, 2021

Lunch with DV, who told me of his last years in Hawaii and Seattle, finally drifting back to the old home place. He prepares to be a Jungian analyst. His life seems to be in order. Contact with that is a relief and a joy. Revising some Irish material. Ending the day angry, not exactly sure why. He still cherishes a painting I gave him which I do not remember.

Farmington Vespers

 

July 23, 2021

Having all day every day I can’t explain why I still miss days writing here.

Got a haircut, upon which everyone remarks. Six (of course I counted) people have observed since the reawakening of public life that I look “great” or “much younger.” J watched me lumbering up to AGMC rehearsal and said, “I didn’t recognize you. I thought you were a much younger man.” Abstinence is not yet extended enough for me to put this down to stopping alcohol. In any case, as far as body and function, with alcohol and without it so far seems exactly the same. Clearly, I had not become dependent. 

Wandered downtown–bustling and brightly lit, though a little murky from burning California. Bought shoes, realizing that otherwise I would have to wear sneakers to Daniel’s wedding. Wandered into two new galleries. One, the Momentum, is owned by my old friend J and his wife. Bought a John Cleaveland painting called Farmington Vespers 2021, a crescent moon in a dark forest, the sort of thing I was always trying but never got right. This house isn’t actually great for hanging art, but we’ll find a way. 

MT came to visit yesterday afternoon. The boy can talk. His spiritual journey continues in ways that seem to one like me both laudable and unembarrassable. Among his stories was the one where my class on “Ode to a Nightingale” saved him from thoughts of suicide. In fact, much of what he said was a paean to my poetry classes, wherein he learned how to read poetry and unlock it as a source of wisdom and inspiration not available either at the pulpit or the therapist. He may have come here to say just that, the Holy Spirit prompting him that I need to hear such a thing at just this point in time, when I am too tempted to look back on my career as a teacher as a loss. 

Present cause of fury is that I can’t seem to type a sentence without a typo. That last one was flawless, as if to mock my concern. 

 

July 20, 2021

Y first thing in the morning. Everyone there, and at Starbuck’s afterwards, unusually friendly and open. 

Bears broke the sunflowers in planters on the porch. You can see the chewed heads of the flowers strewn across the grass. You’d think they would have profited more by letting the seeds develop and eating them then. 

Vestry meeting last night. Smooth sailing, except there’s too much to be done and I don’t know how to do most of it; except for some people are “still hurting” from an incident happening two years ago and explained into atoms since. N and M left us  because they had more attractive offers elsewhere and not because of some hierarchical or misogynist cabal working in the shadows, yet some long so for that cabal that they need to bring the issue up long after the issue’s death, with the one excuse they know good Christian people will not reject out of hand: “I’m hurting!” Republicans are hurting–genuinely, I suppose–over the results of the last election, but that doesn’t mean they deserve further explanation or accommodation. I want to say, “If you’re hurt here, go somewhere else,” but I’m not sure that is say-able under the church’s roof. Though, the church has always had a way to deal with the stirrers-up-of-strife. Dante put them in hell. One of my gifts is to be able to tell fairly accurately the difference between a reasonable perspective and an emotional one. Surprising how often that kind of discernment is not welcome. People worry that we won’t be able to call a new Dean until we have our internal conflicts settled, but the nature of those conflicts is almost too petty to acknowledge: not doctrine, not principle, not finances, but the hurt that comes from not being paid the attention which we think we deserve: babies fighting over papa’s lap. 

 July 19, 2021

Third day at the Y. Hoping to get the habit back. 

Baked five dozen cookies for the art unveiling, have about that much more to go.

The pandemic has caused me to hate all my T-shirts and all my coffee mugs.

Teetotaling

 

July 18, 2021

Exceptionally near miss from an agent. I contemplated the betrayal and took to my bed. 

Now, misty, intermittent rain, one of my favorite times for writing. Hammering away at the Thanksgiving play for a theater in New York. It is the hardest slog I remember in a while, every inch fought for. 

First rehearsal of the Cathedral choir, and the next day first rehearsal of AGMC. All the things that infuriated me about AGMC reasserted themselves at the rehearsal, but somehow I was not infuriated. Maybe retirement and the relative tranquility of the pandemic set the tossing waves of disappointment farther away from shore. Affectionate re-acquaintance with some of my fellow singers, renewed mutual disdain between those who have armored themselves with that. Too many things stand between us and excellent musical performance, but perhaps we might have some fun. 

Coffee at a new place off Old Lyman with K and G, the playwright of Kore. I got to ask “Why the hell do you pronounce it CORE?” and her answer was that she had never given it a thought, just assuming it was some metaphor for “core of being.” It was good to get that off my chest. Good also was the three-way conversation we had about theater. Complex, meandering, fulfilling, smart women with perspectives tantalizingly different from my own. I missed learned conversation from such remoteness that I didn’t even realize I missed it. None of the people I normally socialize with have any interest in talking about things close to my heart, so I forget there are other people in the world. I should get out of my house and find them. Yes, yes, when all the work is done. 

Nine days since my last drink of alcohol. No change in sleep; no change in waking. The effect is essentially nothing, which leads me to wonder whether I should bother. The weight loss possibility must still be investigated. 

Enchanted Evening

 

July 15, 2021

Sweetboi perched on the big redbud branch for nearly an hour. The bluejays never mobbed him. He sat at the edge of my garden and was silent, and I let him, just checking every now and then to see if he was still there. Some magic in the approach of evening.

Everything is at least in tentative bloom.

 

July 14, 2021

Second visit to the Y, this time to Woodfin. Oddly not sore. Return to rehearsal at All Souls. Wayside afterwards, which I normally love, but which was inexplicably irritating to me. I think I’ve lived with my own thoughts so long that those of others seem jarring and trivial, especially when they are getting drunk and I am not. Have not had alcohol since Friday afternoon (This is Sunday night). This is not a great life choice, but something I wondered at. On some nights I would have a bottle of wine and a cocktail or two, though often not nearly that much. I like drinking. I like alcohol. I like staggering to bed almost too drunk to walk. But could I stop? Is all that alcohol keeping me from losing weight, even though I eat less than I would have thought possible for a grown man? The second question remains unanswered, but the answer to the first is “yes.” Never even missed it, except as an activity. I got into the habit of drinking before bed, and that seems a necessity, but the drink doesn’t have to be alcoholic. The last several nights juice or flavored water has done fine. Nor was I tempted tonight at the bar. I may have been better company had I indulged. 

 

July 13, 2021

Returned to the Y. Did a weight set (pounds lighter than in my prime) and a mile on the crosstrainer. I noted that I never gasped for breath. I noted on Sunday that I could go full phrases in the hymns without breaking them up for a breath. All this is well.

Towhees

 

July 12, 2021

From The Adirondack Review:

The Adirondack Review <adirondackeditors@gmail.com>

Sun, Jul 11, 11:25 PM 

Dear David

I'm pleased to inform you that your poem "Red-Shouldered Hawk" has been accepted for publication and will appear in the Fall 2021 issue. Additionally, "Big Crow, Little Tree" will appear in the Winter 2021 issue. Thank you for your interest in The Adirondack Review.

Sincerely,

Lexie Slotterback

Associate Poetry Editor

Something rattling around in the laundry niche this morning. Imagination made it an opossum or a racoon, though it was probably a mouse. I’m living in a rain forest.

Fledgling towhees twittering in the lilacs, trying out their frst bold TWEETs

Arrive at the window in time to see Denise scoop a tiny mammal off the driveway. I hope it was this morning’s mouse visitor.

 

July 10, 2021

Interesting sound of the garden gate swinging open in the dead of night–

Theater last night at the Magnetic, a sparse house for the world premiere of a play called Kore. I monitored my reactions to the play as much as the play, I suppose because of a recent Face Book discussion on criticism and its uses. Also, back in the theater game after the Plague, I’m always measuring– whether I intend to or not–my work against other new works. The first thing was that Kore– “the girl,” Demeter’s daughter-- was called CORE (rhymes with “bore”) throughout the play, about four hundred uses of the word, and each time digging into my nerves. Was it deliberate? Was it simply ignorant? Does that level of ignorance not call the whole enterprise into question?  I was going to blame the production until a rhyming section showed that the playwright herself had made the choice. The unnecessary first scene was set on the stage floor, where everything’s lost if you’re not in the first row. Not the playwright’s fault. There were moments of surprise and strength, whole passages that were lyrically mysterious. At other times (4, I counted) a character just stood in the middle of the stage and told the audience what they should be thinking. The play dipped into and out of the myth, sometimes clearly missing the point. The Theater itself is developing a clean and readable expressive technique, and I think the play may have been better for having been done there rather than somewhere else. Did I enjoy the show? Yes. I found it interesting. I laughed at several jokes. The guy playing Hades was subtly magnificent. There were moments of real inventiveness. It was better for me than sitting home watching Jeopardy. I learned something of the craft by watching it, how certain strategies play to an audience, what things to avoid. Sent me into an orgy of revision in the AM.

Revised Nighthawks and Make Me a Willow Cabin in one day.

Every Second Thursday

 

July 8, 2021

Every second Thursday is a time set apart for adventure, as that’s when the cleaning lady comes and I don’t want to be home. Had a gift certificate from REI, so I headed down 26 amid the neverending construction. Visited Barnes & Noble, where I made the mistake of looking to see if I were there, even on the “local authors” table, and I was not. It was the wrong morning for that, I guess, for I had to find a hidden place to work through the unexpected vehemence of my reaction. What the hell has it all been about? I have entered the secret life of language day after day, have set what I saw down honestly and well, and if it has come to anything, it’s nothing measurable on a human scale. I am the Lewis and Clark of one particular wilderness, and to my letters back home there is no response. Of course there were prizes, but in my career I doubt that I have made $100 on straight royalties. The critical world has not whispered a syllable. At Jack’s party, J and L broke out in praise of Wyona, and I was amazed because I’d grown used the idea that not even my friends care about what I do. On what I want to call my Vision, the world is fundamentally silent. Is it not really any good and I am so self-deceived as not to see that? I think not, but how, finally, can one be sure? I am the Bird of Paradise calling in the forest, thinking my song is perfect, my plumage adequate, so why is there no response?  My own explanation is that the Lord takes from me and gives to those He loves. That is the explanation until it is otherwise.

This is true everyday. It doesn’t bother me every day. 

Maud lies down on my foot. She thinks that helps. She’s right. 

K cancelled our coffee, by which I was to know the fate of the revised Frankenstein Rubrics. I feel she cannot fail to like it better than the earlier version, but my strike-out record is so high now that conviction can’t be trusted. 

Woke from a nap to hear Ruth Bader Ginsbear tearing at the barrier I put around the basement window. I shouted her away (it was harder than before, and she stamped her front feet once and whuffed at me). Have not checked yet to see what inroads she made, but I heard claw on concrete, so she at least made it to the blocks. She and two cubs spent the rest of the time in the garden, where they are welcome, eating waterlilies, climbing trees, foraging here and there for this and that. They are always welcome in the garden. My mind took a photo of mama lying at ease in the shade and the babies reaching over to smack the wind chimes. I’d try to make a deal with her to bring us both peace, but nature doesn’t accept conditions. 

Anniversary

 

July 7, 2021

Forty five years ago today I lay in surgery at Cleveland Clinic. I suppose that was the best money I ever (or Goodyear ever) spent. It’s hard to tell if things fall apart now or merely follow their natural progression, but, at any rate, that day gave me nearly half a century.

Whistle-pig

 

July 6, 2021

Languid summer day. 

Cut out a mimosa that was crowding out its neighbors, Cut out a gigantic vine– stem thick as my fist-- that rode the crown of bamboo and was just touching my beloved tulip. If it had just not touched the tulip. Already it droops over the tops of surrounding trees like melting wax. 

K announced that she wants to put The Frankenstein Rubrics on Magnetic’s 2022 schedule. I spend two days, early in the morning till the cool of afternoon, rewriting so I can stand to see it on the stage. It was a good seed badly developed. I hope I whittled away the superfluities and grew the seed. It is the nearest I come now to the sort of plays they like, rollicking and episodic and witty enough for someone to be laughing every few pages. It may be the last thing they ever do. In writing it I deliberately wrote down, hoping for a popular victory.  

Announced as a finalist for the Guy Own Prize– which I’d been applying to for thirty years– but when I investigated I saw that the poem, “Certain Things.” had already been published. Twice. Once in “Best Poetry of “ whatever year it was. Of course it would be THAT poem. Feeling sad and foolish and inattentive.

Bit an unripe pear from my bear-attacked pear tree, hoping, between the bears and the whistle-pigs, to get a taste of my own. Took one bite and left the rest for the whistle-pig. 

Independence Day

 

July 4, 2021

A more perfect Independence Day in the sky cannot be imagined. At church, Kyle played some variations on “The Star Spangled Banner.” When the music came to a clear statement of the tune, the entire congregation stood. I was very proud. 

At coffee afterward, lady of the church walked up to me and said, “Release from pressure suits you. Since retirement you look younger and happier.” I am.

Fatboy was not dissuaded by my chemical attack. Maybe he heard me crying for forgiveness. 

Party

 

July 3, 2021

Poured ammonia under the shed to convince Fat Boy to move away. The minute I did I was filled with remorse, sat on the back step crying about what a bad host I am. Four rabbits cavorted in the garden in the evening light, and I felt better about everything. Party at J and L’s, for L’s cousin and his boyfriend visiting from NYC. Handsome, shapely gay boys. We laughed and ate. There has not been such a time since last March. 

 

July 2, 2021

Finished In the Valley of the Moon.

I think my mailbox was robbed again, this time in daylight. Or else this is the second day in my adult life when I have received no mail. The first day was the day the box was robbed for sure. 

Rabbit still as a statue in the shade of the hollies as I came back empty-handed from the mailbox. 

Sometimes when I think about matters of family I consider that I may have been a selfish and inattentive husband, a cruel and arbitrary father, and I give thanks that things turned out as they did. Sometimes I think it might have been otherwise, and I cry tears down.

July 1, 2021

An anniversary. Today I have been retired for one year. What a year. . .  Looking back at it, what strikes me most is the productivity, in terms of writing. No other year like it, even in my inexhaustible youth. 

Donald Rumsfeld is dead. We can begin scouring one human stain from the earth. 

Picked up brushes and painted for the first time since last winter, using the water media that had fallen into the single box I saved from the studio, egg tempera, gouache, casein. They seem to mingle together OK. I painted the pond and the fence behind it, which I could see from my little side porch. If I am going to do this again I must do it differently: I must discover rather than impose. 

Meetings

 

June 30, 2021

First face-to-face meeting of any kind since last winter, the All Souls Arts Commission. Drinks afterwards at the Wayside, which suffers like all local restaurants from not being able to hire and retain enough staff. The Pandemic may have accidentally changed society’s mind about how much pay is enough, how much is insulting. Yes, I would pay a dollar more for my cocktail if I thought the server could thereby pay her rent.