Lingering Light

 April 27, 2024

Great & full day. Attacked the outside-the-fence garden head on, planting Shasta daisies, cat mint, false indigo, zinnia, and bishop’s flower. When did bishop’s flower stop being Queen Anne’s lace, and why? Golden spurge inside the fence. Much spreading of straw to protect seed until they sprout. I’m deep into my tenth year here, and this is the first day it occurred to me to heave the hose over the fence to water the space outside. It’s laborious, but works perfectly. Water was my great doubt about beyond-the-fence, and now that is alleviated. My other great doubt is the public tendency to vandalism, with its urge to damage anything beautiful in order to put one’s mark upon it. Maybe flowers are too lowly to count. 

I's son C comes tomorrow to wash windows. I engineered the job for when I’m at church, so I don’t have to witness any of it. 

Whatever my intention when I begin a painting, it turns out a little haunted.

Trump on air twenty four seven. Tolkien’s Sauron seemed over-the-top to me until Trump entered the picture, a being with no redeeming qualities, devoid of any sense of the other, a bottomless vortex of selfishness, the seal of all gluttony, soulless. Yet people adore him, find him Christ-like, feel that he has been victimized. That is the puzzle. That is the darkness one despairs of lighting, ever. Justice would have been for him to face a firing squad on January 7. I pray some more complicated justice awaits in the future. 

I rejoice now that light lingers deep into the evening. 

 April 26, 2024

Got one shield fern into the ground before being driven indoors by rain, not much of it, but enough to make outdoor plans unsalvageable. Couldn’t write. Painted.

Mountain Xpress

 

April 25, 2024

From Mountain Xpress:

UNCA professor writes play 

A God in the Waters, a new play by award-winning playwright, poet, memoirist and fiction writer David Brendan Hopes, will run Thursday-Saturday, May 9-18, 7:30 p.m., at the Bebe Theater.

Hopes teaches literature at UNC Asheville and is known to theatergoers for his plays Washington Place and Ben & Angela, which ran at the Bebe Theater last fall.

A God in the Waters follows an egocentric maestro whose family life is upended at the reception for his final performance, exploring themes of family and the making of art. “I’d been working with the Asheville Symphony for a while, and the two things blended together,” says Hopes. “What surprised me most was to discover, through the course of writing, that I really do have strong opinions about what makes good art and bad art. I’d thought that doing it and having opinions about it were somehow inimical.”

Hopes has been an Asheville resident for over 40 years, and the region is responsible for his turn as a writer. “I never wrote plays or prose until I came here, but whether that was in the air here or just a natural progression is difficult to know. My recent novels The Falls of the Wyona and The One with the Beautiful Necklaces have a fully Appalachian setting, so certainly in the sense of scenery it has made a whole lot of difference.”

A God in the Waters is produced by the Sublime Theater. Seating for the six performances is limited.

The Bebe Theater is at 20 Commerce St. For information visit avl.mx/dlz.

Indescribable Moon

 

April 24, 2024

GMC meeting here last night. We needed another song that expressed adversity, and I remarked that just about any Gospel song does that, and there was no such thing on our program. 

“We already have a Gospel number,” says B

“What?”

“Pilgrim’s Chorus.”

“That’s not Gospel. That’s Wagner opera.”

“Well, it mentions God.” 

I gave up. Whatever else, the group’s apparent hatred of religion, or Christianity anyway, pretty much limits music selection to mediocrity.

Began planting the new garden. Got two climbing roses for the fence and a tangerine bush rose not for the fence. Planted sweetpea and lupine that I’d already got. The big garden mystery remains the couple dozen tulip bulbs I planted, not one of which came up. Except that the bulbs were defective I have no explanation. Forgot where I got them, so I can’t even complain. I was right that the big machine scrape didn’t get the roots, so I’ll have to dig each time before I plant. At least it made them accessible. Alexa promised rain, but there was no rain, so I spent an hour hauling cans of water to the new roses. 

Indescribable beauty of the moon last night.

 

April 23, 2024

Shakespeare’s Birthday. 

Cool, and then lovely. G and his mute helper came early in their yellow steam shovel to scrape away the honeysuckle from my outside yard. I’ve not actually inspected the outcome, but I suspect it’s both horrifying and satisfactory. That it wasn’t the job it was supposed to be is likely, as they didn’t scrape deeply enough to remove the roots. But the incredible biomass that refused to admit even the sharpest spade is gone, and I can find the roots myself, dig them out one by one. I watched the elbow of their machine shaking the mulberry and the cherry. Perhaps they survived. Their leaves at this hour remain unwilted. While they worked I did the same job more traditionally on the other side of the fence. This effectively doubles the size of my garden. I bought huge amounts of seeds, as though I’d planned this project unconsciously this winter. G and Tony share being Mexican and talkative, which means I spend a measure of time listening to anecdotes I don’t fully understand. G told me about eating delicious cherries either on a job or back home in Mexico, a conversation brought on by his admiration for my mulberries, which are known and cherished in his homeland. He observed that several of his recent clients had been named David. 

K stopped by, and we chatted as we do once every year or so, living a two minutes’s walk apart. She continues to shed a realistic light on life as a flight attendant. 

 April 22, 2024

Earth Day. Surprise from ZR Landscaping that they can do the yard beyond the fence tomorrow. Must dig up whatever I want to save today. 

Thought of dad’s building projects, and how he must have anticipated with joy being a father: a sandbox with a roof, so we could play in the rain; a teepee made out of burlap; a dollhouse you could go inside and play in for my sister; most famously, “the big slide,” a sliding border bigger and faster than that on the school playground. I could go far beyond the neighborhood and be identified, metonymally, as “the Big Slide.”

 April 21, 2024

As to the yard work, one quote was $600 less than the other– but also the one that put me off at first, not knowing one vine from another. Have to decide if my scruples are worth $600. Likely not. 

An orgy of revision: Bathory, The Class of 1960, a section of The Garden of the Bears

Sweet notes from Charlie (whose baby will be a son) and Fred, who remembers the glitter of an ecclesiastical New York long gone. 

Strange passage before bed last night. I united with my mother and father in prayer, begging their forgiveness for all I did that hurt and disappointed them. I supposed they understood I was opening a new chapter, for the first time around, I could not possibly have known how to do better, largely because of their own example. Understanding one another might be enough. 

 

April 20, 2024

Booked flight for Shannon. Happy. Snuggle down in my chair like a happy kid. 

Regarded from my front porch the pale gold peonies, the brick of the porch floor, as if by intent, the perfect backdrop. At the base of some of their petals lies deep scarlet. I wonder why every garden in the world does not have them. They, like some of us, are slow but indestructible, bearing on their unlovely branches blooms so voluptuous, so abundant, so redolent of Eden you think they were intended for some other life. For some reason you seldom stand just here in the evening light. You will now, the golden mountain throwing a mountain of darkness eastward, where it will meet the sun of morning. 

T send an audio message, of him rapping (largely to the tune “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” the most bitter (yet somehow unspecific) vituperations of me, beginning with my name. Sometimes you think it’s comic; sometimes you don’t. But in there among how I stink and am loud and everyone wishes I were dead, he notes honesty, and courage (or at least stubbornness) in expressing truth, which makes one think it’s a satire in the voice of someone who hates me for truth-telling. The whole performance is too drunken for one to know for sure. He’d have to sing drunkenly worse than that for me to forget the angel who fronted Sister Raven on stage with us so long ago.

Cork

 

April 19, 2024

Slow rain, the shrieking of a woodpecker through the upstairs window. Music from my college production of Marat/Sade has been going through my head since waking. 

Yesterday I sat by the river and finished the first act of my new play. Restored the raised bed out back and planted golden zinnias. All this before noon. Two landscape companies came to prepare a bid on my work beyond the fence. Very different affects from each group. Unless there’s a huge price difference, I’m going to take the first. The second guy (huge man, my hand disappeared in his) identified poison ivy when in fact it was Virginia creeper. Somewhere down the line, those things count. 

Official notice: 

Cork Arts Theatre Thu, Apr 18, 5:29 PM (15 hours ago)

Hi David,

I’m delighted to let you know that your play, ‘Alfie and Greta’, has been selected by one of our directors for production in May. If all goes to plan, it will be performed with 9 other short plays from Tuesday 28th May to Saturday 1st June at the Cork Arts Theatre. The director has begun the casting process and rehearsals will commence shortly. I’ll be in touch again over the coming weeks to keep you up to date on progress. It may be a bit far to travel but, if you do make it over, we would be delighted to see you there and would like to offer you complimentary tickets.Congratulations on being selected. It’s a wonderful achievement to make it through to the final 10 plays from a total of 318 plays submitted from around the globe.

Talk again soon, James Horgan, Event Co-ordinator, Cork Arts Theatre

Morningstar reports that my investments profit 13% above the market. Good enough. Greed is not among my vices. Wish I could get rid of envy and wrath. 

Rehearsal last night far less infuriating than usual. . . fun, actually. Only one– me– can reach the bass notes on “Blessing,” so I blast away from the depths. 

Had a lesson in docenting for the Cathedral. 

 

April 17, 2024

Interview with MP. He asked quite good questions. Hope I answered in ways vaguely interesting. Have had a crush on him since we met. I wonder what people would do if they knew such secret things. Breakfast afterward at Early Girl with happy tourists. Many high school kids on the streets, “On a field trip” said one from Owen High.

Wondered every now and then about that jackal S. I looked her up today. She has been dead since 2014. Her career as judge was speckled with errors and indiscretions, reported in the local media. Some satisfaction there. Why didn’t I feel it when she died, youngish and evil? 

Lupine

 

April 16, 2024

Crisis averted, new actor comes on board. I had a very bad feeling about the alternative dates, troubling, but so vague I would probably never have expressed them. 

Exhausting gardening day. Put in lupine, freed lilacs and hazel and peonies in the back garden from vines; gave everybody a big drink. 

Still transcribing the lines I wrote in a white heat on the Folly pier. 

Nap dream that I was on a mission to the moon. I enjoyed it, so I signed up for a mission in which one is lifted in a belt of open containers vertically into the atmosphere. I thought my acrophobia wouldn’t kick in, but it did. I was so terrified I thought it was better to throw myself out and die rather than endure it any longer. I did so, woke in a start realizing I was lying in bed. 

Delphinium

 

April 15, 2024

Tried to mail a book to SA, but the Post Office overflowed. Couldn’t figure out why until the woman in front of me observed that it’s tax day.

A steel-colored skink at least a foot long crosses the porch in front of me.

Planted seeds from a packet that said, in handwriting, “Aunt Muriel's blue delphinium.” I couldn’t remember whose Aunt Muriel.

Windows open at night for the first time.

Production in such upheaval I won’t even look at mail or messages until tomorrow. One more calm night.

 

April 14, 2024

Woke feeling amazingly hale. Looked out the window in time to see Fatboi and a rabbit crossing the street, as if setting out on a morning adventure together. 

Note from SS that G dropped out of A God in the Waters. Things were going too well, too many people claiming already to have bought tickets, too many allegedly excited about the production. My belief is that if it's moved, that momentum can't be salvaged. 

 April 13, 2024

A MX reporter sent me questions about the upcoming play, asking particularly about “the foraging of families.” Reporter from the Asheville Watchdog asked to excerpt my recent screed about the turmoil at UNCA.  Feel like a public person again.

Attacked the honeysuckle tangle between the fence and the street, making heroic progress, but also deciding that some heroics are unnecessary and it’s time to call in the professionals. Found in the same place one of my barrier poles broken (by a car, I assume) and a quite large dead animal, a raccoon, I suppose, though its stage of decomposition and my reluctance to poke around makes identification uncertain. One certainty is enormous curved, snow white canines. Maybe a dog. Because I’m going to call the yard men, today’s labor seems wasted, though it was good exercise and I retain the benefit of that. 

Fatboi and I gave each other heart attacks when I went out on the back porch and there he was. 

S says Washington Place is on the schedule next year at HART. So it was said for this year. I decline to celebrate just yet. 

 

April 12, 2024

Bears pulled down the seed feeding stations, even the hot-pepper ones, breaking the dogwood branches as they pulled. 

Fifteen year old boy shout in Akron by the police. Cop fired three seconds after stopping his car. The boy had a toy gun. 

He-man weeding between bouts of rain. 

Mouse

 April 11, 2024

The surprising realization that I’m in a better financial situation than “billionaire” Donald Trump. 

Day began with wildlife conflicts. Heard a tiny but unusual sound: figured there was a mouse in the washing machine, and there was. Lifted him out, made him promise not to come back, and set him down in the grass. Rodents are faithless and I knew even in the moment that he’d try to get back. Meanwhile, ants had made a nest in the mailbox. Brushed off the mail. Went for the RAID. 

Drove in hard rain to buy shoes. The young man who helped me was named Connor. I said “I wrote a book whose hero is Connor.” 

“Did you write about me?”

“Maybe. Are you a werewolf?”

“You never know.”

Realized from the shoe-buying that I had likely worn socks two or three times in the last two or three years. COVID ruined what fashion impulse I ever had. 

Almost unbearably enraging rehearsal. Interruptions interrupted now and then by rehearsing.

 

April 10, 2024

TG sends his new book on poetry. I remark that our varying perspectives would have made an excellent team-taught course. He responds:  That would have been fun to teach together. It's probably not a surprise there's some connection between us--you were pretty much my first teacher. I listened hard to you, and then after we moved and started writing letters, I studied those letters and poems you sent almost like scripture, learning my own language, I guess, by inventing a way of responding to yours, trying to keep up. 

I learn from his book, among other things, how little in comparison I responded to my contemporaries, how much to my ancestors. 

Drive J and L to that chaos of an airport. It was a mistake to privatize the airlines. 

 

April 9, 2024

Rain keeps me out of the garden. Publicizing the Kirkus Review, probably too late for any kick in sales. 

Lilacs in full glory. I don’t remember deciding on this, but I planted a variety of colors. 

Eclipse

 April 8, 2024

First rehearsal of A God in the Waters at a power company in Hendersonville, owned by the dad of one of my actors. Perfect, though odd, venue. The cast is the most immediately adept I’ve ever had. 

Solid cloud cover concealed the eclipse, though I did manage to see a bit of the moon shadow crossing the sun late in the show, with the glasses I’d got at Ace Hardware for the purpose. Sat in my garden in the weird twilight, which must be like the blaze of noon on Mars. 

Fatboi

 

April 6, 2024

Squalid dreams that gradually became graceful dreams, like riled water clearing. 

Finally opened my Kirkus review, which arrived Monday:

THE FALLS OF THE WYONA

David Brendan Hopes

Red Hen Press (203 pp.)

$10.61 paperback, $10.08 e-book

ISBN: 9781597098939 May 23, 2019

BOOK REVIEW

The love between two teenage boys is threatened by the homophobia of a football-mad town in this plangent romance.

Hopes’ tale follows four friends growing up in an unnamed small town in the North Carolina mountains in the 1940s: gifted athlete Vince Silvano; oddball Tilden Roundtree; everykid narrator Arden Summers; and Glen Copland, a “sissified” St. Louis transplant who stargazes and collects local flora and fauna. The boys roam the sylvan landscape surrounding a 100-foot waterfall on the Wyona River, a gorgeous but treacherous watercourse that is said to kill one every generation. Vince and Glen covertly fall in love as they start Eddie Rickenbacker High School, where Vince becomes the football team’s star quarterback. Unfortunately, the domineering football coach, who likes to toss around homophobic slurs, is Vince’s dad, and when Coach Silvano discovers the relationship, he quashes it by administering a beatdown to Vince. Tensions come to a head when Glen appears at homecoming dance and kisses Vince on the lips. Hopes’ yarn vividly portrays the fervent bond between young boys—camping out, bantering, double-daring each other into crazy stunts by the Falls—with its occasional erotic undertow, and the way it fractures under the pressure of stereotypes and bigotry. His young characters are full of vigor but also experience poignant, tongue-tied confusion over their warring impulses. Hopes’ prose is intense and evocative, infusing nightmarish scenes with a mordant lyricism: “Something that was less like water than everything else was bobbing on the near side of the river, snagged on the roots of a clump of willow…The way the Wyona was treating her, it almost looked like she was alive, lifted up by the waters, then settled gently down.”) The result is a gripping read with an undercurrent of elegiac yearning.

A darkly vibrant coming-of-age novel, richly textured and full of passion.

*

A fair day for gardening. By no means too hot. Bought plants to put in tomorrow, pulled strangling vines out of the hibiscus beds. The wind in the bamboo behind me was especially ghostly. I kept turning around to see who was there. 

Fatboi is back, looking so comical when he tries to conceal his immense self under the tool shed. 

DJ motored down in the chair to vew the garden. It was modest, assuming he’d come back when it was in full glory.

 

April 5, 2024

Quite cold, a look back into winter. Clouds out my upstairs window: it was brilliant at the beach. I’m home now, and not liking it. The vacation was brief but glorious, a renewal, a deep breath, and being back is not setting well– returned to my shoes stuck in the same pool of mud, me tugging away. Drive uneventful except, again, for long traffic jams. Standing on the pier last night I realized there is no particular reason (except for the bother of getting there) why I can’t live at the beach.

Maud did not patter out to greet, and then scold me for going away. Grief. 

Phone call to my old UNCA number from people who want to feature A Childhood in the Milky Way at a book fair in Los Angeles. What sounded a delightful surprise turned out to be, of course, a scam to get me to pay them money. The voice on the phone wavered when I told them the book is thirty years old. They didn’t do much research. Five calls after I hung up on them. I wonder why nice things can’t actually be nice once in a while. 

The radio program that bored me on the journey is now playing downstairs. All the PBS station must buy from the same list. 

 April 4, 2024

Chilly, brilliant day. Spent most of it walking around in my red Boy Scout jacket in the most spotless joy. Sitting and writing, moving to the next spot. I was happy. Am at this hour happy. I was morose yesterday (the storm?) but Tuesday and today have been the kind of days I would like to pile one upon the other till the end. The sea is a rich brown dotted by the swift shadows of clouds. Began a play in various benches overlooking the waves. Ambrosial beans and rice at Jack of Cups. The most vacation-y vacation in remembrance. 

"Alfie and Greta" has been short-listed for the summer festival in Cork. If it’s chosen, I’ll go. 

My cleaning lady is from Mongolia. I welcomed her to America and she smiled and bowed. 

 April 3, 2024

Waking: harsh rain over the ocean. 

Family with young boys in the next room. They keep dropping something, sounds like marbles, if kids still play with marbles. 

Instead of retiring last night when I felt I should, I toddled into the little town and attended an open mic at Planet Follywood. For starters, pretty good vodka tonics were $5. It was red-neck paradise, with local boys hollering blues and zydeco into the little room. Those I heard were quite good, and emotive, clearly feeling comfortable among their peers. I walked home on practically empty streets, panes of light falling from windows where the waiters were mopping floors and setting up for the morning. This could be a decent hometown. 

Seated at breakfast opposite a high school baseball team from Virginia, here for a tournament. Perfect hair, round boy muscles, gestures and mannerisms hardening into personality. Courtly, as if they’d just learned manners and were trying them out. Two of the boys played catch in the hotel pool with the storm raging around them. 

Evening. The storm, which was terrifying for a while, goes out to sea where it may terrify the fishes. The water drained from my toilet. The sink thundered. I don’t know what causes that. The bartender says there’s a pond in the hotel storage area. Couldn’t leave the hotel until about now. Soon I shall. I feel that I’ve had a bout of anger, but I can’t remember why. Maybe reading email from my ordinary life, which I ought not to do. W calls certain music we tried to consider “boring.” The word “boring” loses meaning when he uses it. The Resurrection would bore him unless Christ wore a sequined gown and twirled flaming batons. 

The bartender noticed me writing out on the terrace in the sea wind. He too lived in Baltimore for a while. 

 

April 2, 2024

Peach colored dawn over the pier. Early walkers and beachcombers already out. Oddly restless night last night, considering how exhausted I must have been. Couldn’t get comfortable in bed. 

Spent a happy morning writing on the hotel terrace, blown by the sea wind, chattered at by grackles and laughing gulls. Bloody Mary at Drop In (new to me, and a new floor of sleaze) and lunch practically on the sidewalk at the Bounty Bar, where the passers-by were, in a striking proportion, nubile young girls with their parents. Boys with their shirts off, enough.

Found a little art gallery upstairs on a side street. Awful stuff. I’d be the Raphael of that place. I thought about asking if I could exhibit my beach paintings– I’d even buy in– but the elaboration that lay ahead daunted me. They must pay the rent with the sale of megaladon teeth. 

Climbing the steps to the pier I suddenly was reminded of the decades when I would engage the gaze of every male I passed on the street, checking to see if he desired me, or would allow himself to be desired. It was exciting. It swelled the time with expectation. It came to something more often than modest relation would allow. For a while, that and “poet” were my definition of myself. I can’t remember when it stopped. Over time? In one night? When did I stop missing it? I was picking up men on the streets of Dublin into my middle sixties. I thought many inroads into the realm of Venus would find me a true lover for all of my life, as I thought that dedicating myself to writing would get me a life as a writer. I was misled on both accounts by poetry. 

Huge afternoon nap made up for last night’s restlessness. The sound of the sea is unfamiliar to me, and every now and then I’d almost wake and wonder what turbulence was out on the street. 

My balcony is directly above the hotel pool, so pissing or hurling things from the window is out of the question. 

Beach

April 1, 2024

Woke to the chuckling of my turkey hen, stretching out her neck, as though calling to the rest of her flock. She gave up and ran around the perimeter of the garden until she found a way out. 

Folly Beach, ninth floor of The Tides hotel. Buddy’s and my drive here was long but uneventful. Stopped dead four time in I-26, and jammed up in a long line trying to get onto Folly, but still adding only forty minutes to my ETA. My assumption that the week after Easter would be sparse on the beach proved inaccurate. The little town is packed, mostly with young people– me a tottering von Aschenbach with a whole range of Tadzius to choose from. Dropped an unopened bottle of vodka first thing. The maid who came to clean it up did a hilarious and accurate pantomime of how I must have looked when a full bottle of liquor broke on the floor. Coming home after supper and first stroll to the end of the pier, I had to vidit Buddy in the parking lot, to assure him I was nearby and all was well. The dominant group on the beach now is the laughing gull. I hadn’t remembered seeing so many of them (or any of them) here before.