Founts

 

June 25, 2023

Finished the knotty play. Went back to painting, a dark horse romping on a meadow beneath a mountain. A green heron fishes a nearby creek. Days went by when I simply couldn’t think of anything to paint, working so hard on the play that all my invention went into language. 

Ordering plants for a no-longer-so-far-off autumn. 

Screeching of cats, sometimes right up against the house, tears the night. Once you know what it is, it’s less startling. I assume it’s love rather than war. 

Remembering a fist fight with C in the Hyre Junior High boys’ locker room. 7th grade, I think. He started a campaign of harassment that I resolved to end right at the beginning. Still recall his look of astonishment when I laid him flat. Not sure we ever spoke thereafter. I discover today that his wife and his daughter died of cancer. I feel close to him, as though something altogether else had happened sixty years ago. 

I assert that I was never bullied in school, but I think I probably was and simply didn’t notice, or interpret it that way. I was certainly a prime target, with my glasses and my brief case and my intellectuality and my inability to take gym class. Apparently some people recognized I was gay a decade before I did. When I was in 9th grade, a kid came back from Ellet High expressly, so he said, to apologize for his bullying of me. In fact, I hadn’t noticed, and had taken his attention, which he evidently meant as mockery, as a kind of affection. I’ve probably done that all my life, put the best possible interpretation on people’s behavior toward me, missing malice and hatred until they welled up frustrated, enlarged, and finally unmistakable. The other issue was that I was scrappy, even physically aggressive from time to time. Bullying based on the assumption that a person could get away with it quickly dissipated. 

Contemplating the truth that painting seldom went well before, and seldom goes wrong now. Contemplating the truth that the founts of poetry, which were meant to have dried twenty years ago, haven’t. I can sit down in a quiet place, and out it comes. Toward what end? Here is the great faith of my life.