Dinosaurs

 July 4, 2025

The most tragic and hypocritical Independence Day of my life time. I would take up arms, if I could, if I had any, if I knew where to aim first. 

Ingegneri on Pandora. 

DJ and R and I to Asheville Pizza last night to see the latest Jurassic Park film. In terms of storytelling (and of acting) the best of the lot, perhaps because, as DJ pointed out, Spielberg’s hand was off it. A large family sat next to us. The youngest boy (I’d guess about 4) was clearly too young to watch monsters devouring people twenty feet tall fifty feet away. He climbed from his seat into his father’s lap and said “I don’t like this movie.” I lost track of that drama until R stiffened beside me and said, “He just slapped that child across the face.” I don’t know what I would have done by myself, but R’s indignation aroused mine. We left little doubt that we had seen and it would not go unremarked. The father’s response was, “I’ll do what I want with my own family.” The answer to that was, of course, “No you won’t. At least not in public.” The wife said “We’ve taken care of our own problem,” but they hadn’t counted on R’s moral sense. I’m not sure of the sequence of events, but R went to the lobby to call the police. The father confronted him there, strutting about like the redneck coward bully he revealed himself to be (you are a coward and a bully to strike a four-year-old in the face, whatever the provocation). R did call the police, who came with Child Services in tow. I got this from employees standing around discussing it when the crowd exited, and later in DJ’s phone call to R.  At one point I assumed there would be fisticuffs between me and the young and very fit father. Thank God the wife was sitting between us. But I was happy with the mood in my mind, which was absolute fearlessness and readiness for whatever came. Part of my character was wasted, I think, in a basically tranquil life. 

Heroic weeding in the first half of the day, a visible dent in the work that needs to be done. 

Prom King

 July 3, 2025

The painting that moved me so in the Frick was The Purification of the Temple. KS is the beautiful delicate boy in the Glass House.  Wikipedia reveals he is 32 and has had a far bigger career than I imagined (having gotten his age so wrong as well). I’m glad I didn’t use the phrase “very promising” to one whose life is already in full bloom. Though he still lists High School Prom King among his credits. 

 July 2, 2025

Part of my feeling terrible yesterday was the onslaught of phlebitis, which after the strain and stress was quite expectable, which I caught in time to head off with the magic pills. The lesson I keep learning is that the bad feelings are never age (which of course is what I think it is) but the disease gathering in my vessels. 

Sat on my porch last night to revel in the difference between my garden and Times Square. On the capital of one of the columns was a fuzzy shape I took to be a bird nestling for the night. It was gone this morning, so whatever it was it was mobile. 

Lilly's

 

July 1, 2025

Home, planted upstairs in the blast of my fan. My last night in New York proved sweet. A little stroll (one block off 8th Avenue and it’s a neighborhood, sedate and picturesque) supper at Lilly’s on 9th with a waiter, Michael.  from Dublin. Incredibly, a firefly flickered and fluttered in the Paramount Hotel bar. My bartender was an immigrant from Bangladesh, who said the problems in his life were caused by the people poorer than he, who sucked away resources which might otherwise go to him and his struggling family.  The Republican strategy of making the poor blame the poorer rather than turning the right direction and blaming the rich has worked utterly, unaccountably. I couldn’t even form a sentence to counter him, so passionate and ingrained was his conviction. Quite dark dreams before waking and taking the plane, with minimal event, home. My body aches with a not quite definable ache– maybe just exhaustion. Lawn has not been cut. Hope Tony was not seized by ICE.

 

June 30, 2025

Walked north to 5th Avenue yesterday morning to attend mass at St. Thomas. Magnificent, as usual. I was not in a worshipful mood, but all was glorious as it had been before. Attendance not much better than All Souls. Attended the final performance of Old Friends, a review of Sondheim’s greatest hits, with some of Broadway’s brightest stars, like Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Some trick of having booked only a few hours before got me in the front row, where I do long to be. I could have reached out and touched Bernadette Peters’ shoes. Did not do so. Peters spent a surprising amount of time looking at the front few rows– at me, I fantasized– while others kept their eyes on the back of the balcony. Was she expecting someone? Had she always been that way? Was it a gimmick to involve her audience more personally? Matthew and I met a portion of the cast at the Glass House across the street afterward, and one of the boys– the most beautiful onstage– apologized for spitting on me, so I know he too scanned the front. I assured him it was an honor to be spat upon. The show was quite wonderful– overpowering, even, sitting that close to the tip of the action, close enough to note every gesture was precise, sharp, readable, no slack moments on any face. Peters was a little delicate and past her prime, and there were a lot of crepey bare arms onstage– the cast being”legends” after all–but the energy was a blast furnace. I expected to be a little patronizing and above-it-all at such a spectacle, but assuredly was not. It was their final performance, so everybody got weepy onstage and all the backstage crew had to be introduced and applauded. Matt came down from Washington Heights to meet me afterward. We retired to the Glass House where, as I say, the younger portions of the cast gathered to celebrate loudly. I met them, praised them with extreme praise which was, nevertheless, fully warranted. Two of the main boys looked towering onstage, but were actually not quite as tall as I. The one I mentioned before was unimaginably beautiful, with the affect of kid right off the farm. He said he’s waiting with fingers crossed for his next role, having done a number of auditions. You never know for sure, but I think he has stardom written on his brow. Matt and I talked mostly about teaching, writing, and how much we hate Trump. I fell on the bar steps, and had to be levered up by Matt and the hostess. After Matt left, I retired to the Rum Bar and chatted with the giant Albanian bartender, who told me how to say “stupid” in Albanian, and that the word is also the word for a kind of flute. A couple from Columbia seated across from me were almost unnaturally beautiful, as though they had been chosen and set there by a theatrical director.  

On the street were mostly boys in glittery costume returning from the Pride Parade. V offered me a place on the Riverside Church float, but riding the streets of gay New York in the heat was not on my agenda. Besides, I had nothing appropriate to wear. Maybe somebody would have lent me a boa. Stopped answering V’s phone calls after the first one went nearly an hour, with lists of his acting credits and genealogies extending back to the old country. People look remote and dignified until you get them on the phone. 

PM: After a series of subway mishaps, wove my way through Union Square and Washington Square, sweating profusely. It was a mistake, based on the theory that Tuesdays are easier travel days than Mondays, to add this day. I wanted to be home the whole time, staggering here and there out of a sense of duty to fill each hour. 

Bryant Park

 

June 29, 2025

Yesterday spent largely in and around Bryant Park, dwelling, writing, watching, taking it all in. Trying to imagine what I would do and be had I chosen to live in New York City. Weaver finches took dirt baths at my feet. 

I do think my walking and wandering around is no less than it has been in the past, which is well, but at greater cost, which is a controllable variable.

Hiked down Broadway to 28th  to see night two of the play festival, only part two this time, my play and two others. Drank something sweet at the Milk Bar. How ludicrous I must look tottering about alone and adventuring at my age! Again, my team and the audience’s response fully satisfied. The other pieces (and those I heard through the curtain, having arrived early} were almost unbearable.  Like Mozart, I’d heard them but once and could practically recite them word for word. Nylon Fusion is a lively and popular enterprise, and I was honored to be part of it. I wish them well in all times to come. 

28th Street

 

June 28, 2025

Big Friday. Hauled off to the Frick, newly remodeled and newly opened, which meant crowds and lines, as the demand for tickets was great. Arrived early, sat in Central Park watching the passing show until my entry time. They were filming a fashion shoot which involved a statuesque woman and a dog walking across the street in a provocative way. The dog maintained his dignity. The first painting I saw was El Greco. I burst into tears. Wept through pretty much the first half of my tour, as one profound statement succeeded another. El Greco moved me; a big Corot landscape, practically monochromatic, moved me. Turns out I remembered my long-time favorite, Bellini’s St Francis, backward, as he faces left instead of the right in my memory. The crowd eventually got to me, and the clever way it was arranged so that if you veered off to the toilet or to get a coffee you could not return for a second look. Kept the crowds moving. 

My taxi driver from Central Park, an immigrant from Ghana, mistrusts both progressives and populists, insisting that virtue must find some middle ground. 

The part of town where my play is (W. 28th and environs) is fascinating and even, by the lights of the City, homey. Arriving early, had time to cozy in and get comfortable at a table on Broadway, sucking down some intricate juice. I worried about taxis and such, but when I arrived, I found a subway entrance (which would whisk me to Times Square) on the same block as the theater. Everyone and everywhere reeks of weed. Nylon Fusion is, by the way such things are judged, long-standing and surviving. The TaDa Theater, which they rent, I guess, is squalid outside but business-like inside, almost indistinguishable from the theater where Jack and Bruce did my plays farther Uptown. In an evening of brief plays, you expect some OK and some better, maybe a clinker or two, but you also expect that in New York the quality would be uniformly higher. It was, but only by the merest fraction. They didn’t know me from a haystack, and yet chose my play, so I know the selection process is upright, but, still– these were all they had to choose from? The end of that observation was that my piece was by levels of magnitude the best. It got tremendous laughs (I didn’t know it was that funny), and, as I sat in the front row, I could see the exertions my actresses put themselves through to sell the show. My gratitude, ladies. They read the room correctly. I wanted a little archness, a little more subtlety; they correctly came as close to burlesque as they dared. They were, for that moment, right. 

Heading home, stopped at am open-air wine bar on Times Square, right beside the lighted flag, to sip Prosecco and take in night at the center of the world. I compared it to sitting by night alone on my front porch. There were resonances I could not in the moment explain. 

NY, NY

 

June 26, 2025

Eleventh floor of the Edison, overlooking a Mordor of industrial rooftops. 

Arrived at the Asheville airport on the day it opened its new and hugely enlarged facilities– got to use the new upstairs bar for the first time, damn near its first customer. No liquor license yet, so a good-luck bloody Mary was off the table. When I sat down the bartender cried out my name. He is a kid active in the local theater scene until COVID blasted his professional plans and turned him into the father of two daughters. Fate guided him well. He was less dramatically beautiful, but clearly happy. He is also whom I thank for my single worst on-stage experience– the laugh-riot King Lear at NC Stage many years back. I didn’t mention it. Perhaps he never saw it that way. The tide rolls in and the tide rolls out. 

Hobbled to The Joyce to see Pilobolus. I first saw them in Baltimore the year of their inception (or very close; it must have been 1973) and have done so at intervals since. They are less conceptual and more dance-y than they were, some of their gestures frozen into formula, but still marvelous to watch. It was better, or at least different, when they were all male. Some of the frisson is gone. They traded their odd glamor in to become an institution. Last night’s dancers didn’t really become their stage presences, as performers often do, but remained muscle-y boys who had learned a technique flawlessly while staying recognizably themselves. “Look what I am doing without actually being.” I think that is fine. 

When I caught myself in the last second from a fall down the Joyce Center balcony steps, I foresaw my end. It will probably be a fall, as my legs do not work, without my being able to say exactly why they do not. Took the subway to the Joyce and back. This was itself an adventure and a victory, for I imagined the subway and myself would not meet again. The steps were a tribulation, but minutes later my breath returned and I went on. The City was once the exhibit of my stamina, how I would run down the streets and conquer the subways and be ready for more. In the two days I’ve been here I have done what I would have done in past time, but very much slower, hardly able to move at the end of it. I’m glad tonight’s adventure is but two blocks away.

Drank my way back from the subway stop. The bartender at the Iron Bar was happy about the recent Democratic primary. “Anybody but Cuomo,” she said. The bartender at the bar that’s in the Paramount but not part of the Paramount said she preferred the devil you know (presumably Cuomo) to the devil you don’t. At the Iron Bar, a girl– very loudly– declared to the boy she was with that he couldn’t possibly understand her, as he was neither black nor female. She discoursed on her uniqueness and the unknowability of her experience at some length, and volume. Even most black girls couldn’t understand her due to qualities of her hair and complexion. One nods and agrees when people say that people who are not them cannot understand them, but I wonder if it’s actually true. What about empathy? What about the penetration of the eye of the artist? “You don’t understand” is one of those statements which cannot be corrected or even discussed, because all data are deliberately concealed. Yes, dear, I do understand, You just don’t like that I do, that anyone can.  

Fighting the terrible blast of the room air conditioning. Brought no jacket, anticipating the heat wave forecasted by the media. 

The hotel’s complimentary breakfast costs $6.50

 Bought a watch at the Times Square Swatch, as I have done for half my life. This is the third, at least. Somehow they don’t remember me from decade to decade. 

Hiked to MOMA. Ate incredibly overpriced salad on a balcony overlooking the sculpture garden. 

Evening. Attended Oh, Mary! at the Lyceum. Somewhat unexpectedly, a glorious evening. Cheap laughs became consequential ones. 

 June 24, 2025

Lovely supper with Mike G and the Moseleys last night, a perfect light summer repast, much talk of the University and old times. Mike’s retaining wall came down in the hurricane and has not yet been replaced. 

Worry about going to New York tomorrow, when every outlet shrieks news of a dangerous heat wave. Sitting here in the blast of my fan, I may not take proper account of the peril.

From the Nylon Fusion webpage:

This Round On Us:

Life In Transition

June 27th-28th, 2025

featuring the captivating theme of

"The Gilded Age/Cage."

at 15 West 28th Street, NYC 

Featuring New Plays by New Plays by John Patrick Shanley (A Dreamer Examines His Pillow), Lyle Kessler (Orphans) Migdalia Cruz (Fur), Nick DeSimone, Scott Carter Cooper, James McLindon, Sarah Congress, Ellen Abrams, David Brendan Hopes, Andrew Phillips. 

Spirits

 

June 23, 2025

Cool morning of what is expected to be a torrid day. I’ll be flying away from an Asheville expecting to hit 100 degrees to a Manhattan expected t hit 95. The task is to pick out clothes that can be sweated in without showing. The task is to beg the skyscrapers for their shade. 

The concert at the New Hope church turned out well, in some ways our best, as the pressure was off. Informal gathering afterwards to share insights and emotions-- really quite sweet, if not the kind of situation where I am comfortable. 

For two nights now I have meditated on my porch naked– or half naked, as the slats in the chair do not accommodate full nakedness. It has been lovely. One seldom feels like the animal one is blessed to be. I’m invisible from the street, and as much as I might long for it, no one ever turns into the drive to visit me. Wide thoughts, that are difficult to put into words on the morning after. Last night a great meteor appeared in the southern sky, pale green trailing into blinding white. It seemed so close I expected to hear a sound. Afterward, a spirit visited me that I recognized as Sweetboi. I recalled standing on that porch, and his flying toward me as if he were going to land on my shoulder, and in the last second veering up over the roof. I thought it was play. He was dead two days later. Now I think he was trying to tell me something; it was a signal, a warning I could not read. His spirit came into me by night. I spread my arms in the dark to accommodate his wings. He gave me strength, youth. May it hold.

Iran

 June 22, 2025

The Times reveals that I’ll hit New York the same time as a heat wave raising temperatures in Central Park to 95.

Weak little Trump has been teased by Netanyahu into bombing Iran. Add this to the list of unforgivable atrocities. The man cannot live long enough to undergo sufficient punishment. 

“Thank you” concert at Hew Hope Presbyterian. I had hoped to opt out of this, but they scheduled my pieces. All I want is for this round to be over. 

Concert

 June 21, 2025

Solstice comes to the garden in an overlay of gold and purple.

Thinking of conversation with P, the single most learned and intellectual man I know personally, or know well enough to taste the full savor of his learning. He has read everything. The obscure to him is a backyard and a cozy den. To call someone “intellectual” is not fully praise, for I notice certain things to which his nature is blind. He spent time dismissing St. Francis for being anti-intellectual. My suggestion that after Aquinas, et al, Francis might be good medicine did not register. Good deeds unbolstered by sound theory do not move him. He’s diving back into Pindar and Horace because, at 80, he fears he might be “losing my Greek and Latin.” People call me intellectual, but I think they mean by that “well-informed.” My approach to experience is not intellectual until several steps down, when it is finally time to compare and analyze. For P’s sake I opened up Pindar and read a little. Even in English, the majesty of it comes through. 

Weeding and planting yesterday before the heat of the day. 

Beautiful cream callas with purple throats. 

First of two concerts last night at Grace Covenant Pres. Our new voices are skilled, energetic, a little boisterous. In the one recording I heard (of “I Sing the Body Electric” ) the balance was better than it ever had been. We attempt too much in too little time, though, and the result is necessarily a little rough. We were reviewing notes in our warm-up time before the show. Concerts are problematic for me now in that they result in real discomfort, real pain from standing in on place so long, that takes considerable time to ease away. I had to lean on the piano to get my numb legs off the stage. I think my readings went well. In terms of individual exposure, I suppose I’m the star of the show. That’s funny. 

 

June 18, 2025

Lunch with P and talk of Blake, Pindar, Horace at Rye Knot. 

 

June 17, 2025

AG sends me a Facebook DM:

I’m not sure if you'll see this but I recently acquired this painting and am wondering if its one of yours and if you could tell me anything about it. Its small, 5x8.

It was mine, painted in Liam’s B&B in Sligo. 

Bought a T-shirt from a Facebook vendor. A seam opened after one laundering. I have T-shirts from graduate school. So we pass from gold to iron . . . .

Emptied the last jug of drinking water hauled from Atlanta during the hurricane crisis. 

Sat on the porch last night during and then after a thunderstorm. The frogs in the pond were hollering their heads off.

KH is dead.

Facebook videos of Cork and Dublin are slaying me. 

Brilliant, agate summer day, sometimes unfathomable blue, sometimes white and gray with storm. Gardening past the morning or before the evening is no longer possible. 

 

June 16, 2025

During the discussion by the actresses of my play, I noted how nuances that would be clear to a literary critic or an academic reader escaped their notice. It didn’t seem right to say anything. Later on I blessed my reluctance, realizing that though these nuances were discussable, they may not be actable. Anna says a number of things that would lead the attentive reader to assume she’s having second thoughts about a lesbian lifestyle. Neither actresses nor director noted this. Maybe they will, or maybe it’s something that would muddle rather than clarify enactment. Part of my history as a playwright/poet is to have left clues in the text to which more purely theatrical people do not respond.

Hit the “magic moment” with Purification, when the structure suddenly shimmers into place.

 

June 15, 2025

Trump’s speech for Army Day was not actually idiotic. Disappointing, in its way.  Cameras reveal few viewers and vast expanses of empty grass in DC. Red Boise had more protestors against Trump than Washington had supporters, most of whom were soldiers under orders. A man with no shame. 

Watched a movie about mutant alligators infesting a city’s sewers. Thought about the main actor, who was able and competent. I imagined him thinking ruefully, “Here I am more than half way through my career, starring in a mutant alligator movie.” I couldn’t sit on the porch that night for fear of alligators. 

No Kings

 

June 14, 2025

Storms last night from the north. Given the times, I at first mistook the thunder for artillery. 

End of a big day, the fan on High pointing at my head in the sun-beaten attic. 

Went downtown for the No Kings demonstration. Arrived early, so fortified myself with a bloody Mary at the Restoration hotel bar, where the bartender showed me on her phone a list of things to do if I were to be attacked by the police. Discovered that the gathering place was Martin Luther King Park, so I hiked there and watched the crowd grow and seethe. Anti-Trump chants from all sides. At one point everyone crossed onto Charlotte Street and made for Pack Square. I was carried along like a stick in a flood. It was exciting. It was bracing. I wept for joy to be in the midst of so many people aroused to action for the good. I am not happy with crowds normally, but this one was not random, but directional, an arrow headed to target. Exhilarating. Had lunch at Twisted Laurel, made it home in time for a ZOOM rehearsal of Roses and Violets. I was reminded how wonderful it is to have New York actors. They ran through twice. I thought the first time was fine; the second, though, was epic. A suggestion is enough to sharpen everything. The three women spent most of the time talking over one another, but their messages somehow got conveyed. 

 June 13, 2025

Black calla blooming. 

Concert at Givens Estates last night. I think the event went well enough– except that S missed my first solo gabbing away to the crowd and then moving on to the next number. Turbulence before the concert, though, as S determined to use our warm-up to “rehearse” pieces not on this program, about which she had anxiety for next week. Her anxiety translated into an unusual pitch of the usual hysterical frenzy. She can be brutally rude and unproductive in that state, a condition people (including myself) seem to excuse more often for her than the would for another, perhaps because it’s alloyed with sympathy for her panic. You push down your anger to get through the show. You stop at the Village Pub with your friends to drink and bitch about it all until deep darkness. 

Progressing on Purification. 

Mounting absurdities in California. US Senator in handcuffs for trying to ask a question. 

One man walks away from an Air India crash that kills all others on board. He will spend the rest of his life contemplating this. 

 

June 10, 2025

Woke from a vivid dream of leading my father on a tour of London. I had dwelt there, apparently in shady parts of town, and I took him into pawn shops and dingy artists’ ateliers to introduce him to the people I knew. London was very hilly. He was an eager traveler, interested in everything. 

 

June 9, 2025

Gentle summer rain here, though the TV flickers on and off as though there is a great storm somewhere. 

Spent a chunk of the day on a painting which I thought was disappointing when I left it, but doesn’t look so bad now that I return to it. If I’d ever had an art lesson maybe they would have taught me how to deal with backgrounds. 

Pruned, weeded, planted what NEEDS to be this year’s last shipment of flowers, a big pink rose. 

A word on the haunted pool pump: when I finally got what‘s-his-name to replace the pump motor, it worked for a week, then slacked back to a drip. It pumped some paltry water out over the falls, but the suction/filtering feature was gone. Water stood still in the pool except for a trickle oozing over the rocks. I figured that was enough to keep the pool from dying. The last time I cleaned out the trap (last week) there was no detritus in it, as it hadn’t been filtering. I removed everything and felt around in the water (I almost don’t have enough arm to reach the motor) but there was not much glop to remove. Plugged it back in, and noticed that the stream was minimally better, but still not much, still not enough to inspire filtering. Once again I reconciled to a trickle that might, nevertheless, be enough. Today when I was down there fussing with something, I saw that the flow is easily ten times what it was, a veritable Niagara, filtering and pouring with the delicious tinkle of moving water. Did it heal itself? How after weeks of meagerness it is now rich and full? It is a machine, but one muct at times like this assign to it a mind of its own. 

At least four leopard frogs call my pond home. 

A bear tore out the barricade of cinderblock protecting the last airhole in the basement. Deep claw marks score the bottom of the window– which, now that I think of it, is no more than four feet from my head in sleep. Thank God bears have no application. 

Orange Hitler sends the Marines to enforce his illegal ICE maneuvers. Gavin Newsom is my hero. 

Whitsunday

 

June 8, 2025

Pentecost.

Missed Hendersonville Pride yesterday. It seemed something I was not ready, at this advanced age, to endure. Judging from the Facebook messages it was, at best, debacle- adjacent.

Planted two white native hibiscus

Nylon Fusion

 

June 7, 2025

Email from Nylon Fusion in New York:

NyLonFusion <ny.lon.fusion@gmail.com>

Fri, Jun 6, 7:37 PM (12 hours ago)

Hello David- GOOD NEWS! Thank you for submitting.

We’d like to present Roses and Violets as part of our festival-on June 27-28 at Tada! 15 West 28th. 

I can put you in contact with team if all is good with you. 

I look forward to hearing from you. 

The festival will have new plays by John Patrick Shanley, Lyle Kessler (orphans) and Migdalia Cruz (fur) 

Ivette 

I looked at the play after receiving the news. I wish it were longer. On the bill with me are Migdalia Cruz, John Patrick Shanley, and Lyle Kessler, who turn out to be famous people. 

Trimmed the droopy-down big-flowered magnolia. Trimmed the mulberry branches that extended out into the street and whacked cars as they passed.  Weeded mightily in the beyond-the-fence garden

The loud crash last evening– I thought a car had hit the back of the house-- turns out to be a bear pushing over the (quite empty) garbage bin. They still maraud, but by night, like little gangsters, so one doesn’t have the pleasure of seeing them. 

Booked flights to and accommodations in New York.

Deerfield

 June 6, 2025

Concert at Deerfield last night, more nearly a success than one expected. My voice was 70% clear. Appreciative audience. They seemed– the choristers too-- to appreciate my readings of Millay and Shakespeare in particular. One wasn’t sure they would. R said the poems were the highlight of the evening. I argued for master poems because the original suggestion was for spoken-word testimonials from us choristers concerning love, the thought of which made me cringe. We’d never dream of doing songs we’d written for ourselves (knowing they would be, largely, terrible) but poetry is apparently an amateur sport, wherein everyone has equal say. Sincerity counts in art only if technique has already been mastered. Fought hard, and in the test there was victory. Many people came to talk with me, including the mother of a former student –SW– who said she recognized my name immediately because I had changed her son’s life, and he mentioned me often. He mastered Chinese practically on his own, and now teaches in Taiwan. In the lobby of the Community Center at Deerfield is a huge vitrine housing exotic finches, at least one of which has tiny golden fuzzy babies with their heads sticking out of the nesting hole. 

Trump and Musk hissy-fitting like schoolgirls. Anything that weakens this presidency is good for the future. 

 June 4, 2025

Meditated on the back porch last night until the stars came out. The Big Dipper hangs directly over my garden. 

The chorus of cicadas softens. Bits of them, wings, hollowed out bodies, severed heads, lie everywhere. Every other spadeful of dirt while I’m gardening buries a body. 

Flickers gathering ants (I suppose) from the grass. One stopped every now and them to feed the other– father still doing his job even after the chick is fully his size. 

Three days now of quite heavy gardening, today the least of them, but still, progress. Fiddled with the pond.

Meditation

 

June 3, 2025

Madame Towhee is building a nest in the laurel tree. She flits around, gathering sticks and dry grass, conceals herself in the thick leaves and builds. My weeding has aided her in this, causing an abundance of dry stalks to be seasoned just right for the purpose. Is she repairing an old nest? Building a new one? How many broods do the towhees raise in a summer? She seems so happy at her labor. 

Transcendent night in meditation on the porch. I don’t remember getting to bed, but I surely did. 

 June 2, 2025

Last night was particularly dark. Magna nux animae. Again. So with some surprise I woke today with alacrity and seemingly inexhaustible energy. Were the concerts, or the thought of them, wearing me down? Hard to see why. Some demon passing in its own sweet time? Whatever the case, I rose and made the most of the day. Dug, spaded, weeded, put in three more small plots of 4 o’clocks, to try to do justice to the magnitude of seeds purchased without apparent forethought. GMC meeting, underlining the perception that I should never be part of something that moves forward gradually, needing to recap the last four steps before getting on to the next one. I do keep from screaming, and for that I give thanks. 

New vision for painting.

Whole scenes for my play waiting to be typed onto the computer.

 June 1, 2025

Parents’ 78th anniversary. 

Spring concert at St George, the one planned for AS last fall and wiped out by the hurricane. Though all the music was Baroque, copyright issues allegedly muted most of it from the You Tube feed. What I heard was disappointing. The soloists were wonderful, the audience was pleased, so all is well.

Disappointed and exhausted tonight. It has to be more than the concert. 

Eileen Goodnight

 May 31, 2025

The half & half I bought yesterday at the Fresh Market was soured. The first gulp of coffee was a bitter awakening that has not yet faded in memory.

A father downy woodpecker brings his chick to feed from the winter’s seed column. He pecks out a chunk, puts it in the baby’s moth. The baby is at least his size.

L texts that E died this afternoon. Spent time looking at an old photograph of the “S” grandkids. E is sitting on the ground smiling an enormous smile. Every one of the faces in the picture (except grandma and grandpa) stood at the open door of their life. None of us came through unscathed. It is possible– though my bitching and moaning about every little cross disguises the fact–that I knew the least tribulation. I hope every one of us would say that. It is a strange thing. One world fades. In twenty years, no one will know who those faces are. 

So exhausted after rehearsal that I went to bed. Woke in pale yellow of late rainy afternoon. 

 May 30, 2025

Days of often monumental rain. After choir on Wednesday night we made our way to the Barrel House through cloudburst. Merry. GMC chorus rehearsal last night was disastrous for me because I was in such wretched voice, the mucus on my cords making hitting the pitch I aimed for a continuous adventure. The chorus is by far the largest it’s ever been, which is good in many ways, but bad in that it provides an audience, and rehearsal devolves into long passages of banter and showing off not much different from burlesque. A good time was had by all, but–.

Perhaps Trump is himself a kind of vaccine, inoculating the electorate against anything vaguely resembling him in time to come. Alas, though, that Fate took our time to give this lesson. 

Service

 

May 28, 2025

Variegated day, cool and gray punctuated by blinding azure spring light. Cool and gray now. Napped four hours. The dreams mostly had to do with theater. The “check engine” and “See your Dealer” light were lit on my car display, so I made an appointment at Toyotaland. Two hours after arrival, I was summoned to the desk and told that the problem was fixed and it was that I had not tightened the lid on the gas tank when I fueled up last time. How the car knew this, or cared, was a miracle to me. I hate when there’s no one to blame. Though I suppose two wasted hours is a smaller price than some have paid for inattention. Not a complete waste: did write a connecting scene for Purification. Did meet a giant gentle Alsatian named Shep. 

May 27, 2025

Painting a marsh scene. The initial colors were so pretty I just wanted to sit and take them in and not finish the piece. I think I have to fight past some version of that with every work. 

William Byrd on Pandora.

I understand the arguments, and have to fight off agreement with them, concerning the efficacy of autocracy. People largely are not willing to take on the discipline and process of education necessary to govern responsibly– as witness several of the most recent elections. Yet the experiment is ruined for a long time to come. The benevolent and wise ruler which might have loosened our grip on our sovereign rights did not arise, but rather the single most piggish and corrupt person in American public history. Maybe benevolent autocracy is destined to be a thought experiment only, the real world inevitably bringing forth the worst candidates. To seek the position is to be unworthy of it.

 

 

May 25, 2025

Lord, come to E. Give her peace. Take her fear away.

Wreck on Merrimon right against the lake. The vehicles involved declined to pull over to the side, so a line of stopped cars stretched back to Woodfin. When I got close and saw what happened, I attempted to pull into the opposite lane and get around the wreck while the nearest oncoming car was still far away. But when that car saw me, the driver sped up to, I would guess, at least 70MPH and lay on his horn. I decided I wasn’t going to move– I couldn’t anyway, as a car had pulled into the space I just left. I expected a crash at any second, but in the last few feet he swerved and drove down the berm . I moved on. 

 

May 24, 2025

Cold continues. The furnace itself was cold and came on of its own volition. Dug a little, planted a tiny patch of red 4 o’clocks. E cannot recover, lies in considerable discomfort in her hospital bed and, though counseled by nurses about ways to stop treatment, clings to life, crying that she’s afraid to die. She wants every possible measure taken. Even the nurse’s saying bluntly “you’re going to die anyway” didn’t move her. Visibly, she had no kind of life that you’d want to prolong. Hard to know what is in people’s hearts. 

4 o'clocks

 

May 23, 2025

Sky blue as blue, with a few hurrying white clouds. Very cold. All the windows shut. 

Dug, weeded, planted four o’clocks with their surprisingly stout seeds. In the patch where I planted them I carefully weeded and cultivated around old four o’clocks planted in another year (four or five ago) and reseeded or somehow surviving. Moments such as that, precise, intimate, rewarding the striving (which does not always happen in the world), are the best of gardening. 

Internet is out so no news of the world reaches me. I’m  intolerant of such moments, furious not to have the convenience even if I wasn’t right then going to use it. 

Ten years ago I was in Omaha for the first iteration of Washington Place.

Cancer

 

May 22, 2025

Deep wind, tearing leaves off trees, making the wind chimes into full orchestras. Cicadas fluttering through the air like golden, foundering dirigibles. 

Rose early and drank chai at High 5, and wrote a scene of Purification. Saddled up and  went downtown. Turns out nothing opens until 11, so I had time to stroll around, sit on benches, have a bloody Mary at the Times Bar. Almost too cold to be sitting in the shade with only a T-shirt on. One disturbed young man stomped by threatening to cut Marcus’ throat for messing with his bike. All I could think to say was “I’m sorry,” but that seemed to be the right thing. Unhoused person asked for money. I had one bill in my wallet, a $20, so I gave him that. When I left the bar terrace I encountered that boy again, stuffing take-out into his mouth. It was gratifying to see my $$ do immediate good. The downtown Wells Fargo is closed. Probably as been for years and I simply didn’t notice. Visited the AAM, bought a membership, listened for a minute to P lecturing about some needing-to-be-explained works in the lobby. The museum has come a long way since I first knew it, though it seems there is actually less art being shown, and more gleaming negative space. Visited Blue Spiral (first time since COVID? Possibly) and found the works there, especially in terms of execution, disappointing. Spent $20 on parking, which is, I suppose, part of the New World Order. 

E is lying in a hospital in Akron dying of uterine cancer, which she ignored as it metastasized. Our lives did not touch much. I ignored her, and when not ignoring her I joined the other cousins in teasing her. She was kind of hateful, and that would be our excuse. But which thing came before the other? One does not like being reminded of one’s own cruelties, especially when they did not seem cruelties then, but a natural response to natural order. Why does the mind dwell on one’s sins long after anything can be done about them? 

I See Marion

 

May 21, 2025

Concert at St George’s went well, I think, though the offerings were slim. I was, as predicted, disengaged. 

My sister says that Uncle Richard’s last words were “I see Marion.” I wept the opposite of bitterly. 

Lovely rain in the night. 

 

May 20, 2025

Drill-voiced tribulation brought in as a “ringer” for the ASCC concert. I left rehearsal, as I had before, with a literal headache. I’ve been called in as a “ringer” many times myself, and at those times I didn’t realize how discouraging it can be for people who have rehearsed for months to have a new person added at dress rehearsal. Lost interest in the event. Tonight’s performance will be automatic and disengaged. 

Cicadas still in full force. The first time I heard them en mass was at Camp Manatoc. I could not yet have been seventeen, so there was probably no time before that. 

 

May 19, 2025

The malaise I was feeling was because I wasn’t writing. I know that because now I’m writing.

Eating mulberries from my own trees. They are incredibly delicious. Their taste is indescribable except to say they look like they’d taste exactly the way they do. 

Dug, weeded, planted stonecrop. 

May 18, 2025

Long OM of the cicadas. 

Drove Saturday to Waynesville to present Washington Place to subscribers. The drive through the mountains is stupid beautiful. I think I did OK, though I was the only one without actors or a scene to present. My director is in Spain and I was left to figure out for myself what “present your play” might mean. But, I enjoyed it. Got big laughs, which is the important thing. I’ve been gone so long I recognized maybe three or four people, the rest being new and young and overweight. Reintroduced to the “theater kid,” bouncy, witty, exuberant, dance-class elegant in carriage. in touch with the jargon and traditions of the theater, fully alive only in the dim light of backstage. Attractive, very sweet, but disturbing in a way it took time for me to put my finger on. I’d not been one myself. As a mature actor I seldom did the big family musicals, so contact with them was slight. But I reaffirmed the last time I did large-cast theater (Magnetic’s one act festivals) what I’d noticed before: that the bounciest, most deeply obsessed and committed “theater kids” are all but invariably bad on stage. I recall sitting with two girls at the Magnetic who reeled off anecdotes of recent theater history, shared techniques, did esoteric exercises and warm-ups, warned others against violations of backstage superstitions, and yet, on stage, were inert as buttered dumplings. Yesterday two galumphing boys in sailor costume (doing a scene from Anything Goes) livened backstage with antics and sweet-tempered goofing-off, but bombed horribly on stage. Their colleagues were delighted to add this to future backstage anecdotes; the audience was robbed. This is a general, even if not an inevitable, rule. A person has so much energy, and that which goes into identity is lost to performance.  

Now that my brain is on this track, it notes that it’s seen this among writers, too, poets who are so MUCH the poet in affect that their work becomes an afterthought, shored up by “borrowing” and redecoration of others’ insights. The stakes are smaller in poetry, the pay-off less immediate, so the syndrome is less pronounced. When I was briefly writer-in-residence at Montana, that ship all but foundered under the weight of WRITERS. People wondered what the “quarrel” between K and myself was. There was no quarrel, but exactly this, so great his desire to BE a poet that the actual making of poetry became an exercise in concealed plagiarism. 

On the drive back I passed a sizeable forest fire just west of Candler. No mention of it in the news.

Watched a catbird snip the wings of a cicada, dip the body in the birdbath to moisten it, swallow it whole.

Evening: went to One Word Brewing in West Asheville to hear A’s band, Minor, at his father’s behest. A hundred people in the yard of a micro-brewery, with the performers, students at the Asheville School of Music, under a tent. The band was good. The girl vocalists were very good indeed. Rock has its traditions and its classics, and the student band was learning them, showing them off. A new scene for me. 

Evening: went to One Word Brewing in West Asheville to hear August Dolce’s band, Minor, at his father’s behest. A hundred people in the yard of a micro-brewery, with the performers, students at the Asheville School of Music, under a tent. The band was good. The girl vocalists were very good indeed. Rock has its traditions and its classics, and the student band was learning them, showing them off. A new scene for me. 

 

 

May 16, 2025

Too much  & too hard singing last night. Woke up unable to speak. Couldn’t ask Alexa what the weather was going to be. 

Memory from long ago: the first time I went to the ballet (Swan Lake at Blossom Music Center) I was astonished that you could hear the thump of the dancers’ feet on the stage.

Finally reading Arch Brown’s book A Pornographer.  Looked in the index, as it was not impossible that I might be mentioned in it. 

 

May 15, 2025

Woke to a sound that made me think I’d left the water running. It was the cicadas. Decided I love the sound, and would be happy if that were the backdrop of every summer. This is more poignant because, assuming a seventeen year cycle, I may never hear them again. 

Called GOT-JUNK? And had various metal items– spent arbors, bent metal chairs, the firewood holder mouldering against the fence--hauled away. It was more expensive than I expected. The two boys who did the job (one slight and white, the other huge and black) were touchingly interested in doing well at that rather elementary job, and in securing my approval. Pride in workmanship has not wholly disappeared. 

Planted pink turtlehead and $100 worth of ferns. 

Sligo

 

May 14, 2025

Huge advances in the War of Weeding, opening so much new ground I ordered more seeds. 

Signed up for FaceBook posts from Sligo, which end up making me unexpectedly and purely happy. 

Cicadas

 May 13, 2025

Cicadas louder than before. They seemed to stop during the rain, or perhaps the rain’s sound covered theirs. 

JB writes from South Carolina: 

I hope you remember me. And I hope you are having a blessed and beautiful life. You had a significant impact on me and on my journey as a writer, an artist, and an art scene provocateur. I always thought you were punk rock (which is the highest compliment from me, as punk rock is where I first encountered DIY, unapologetic expression, and open inclusion of the fringe). 

Rehearsal went well, for I was in good voice, though much too long, and I was not in good voice at the end of it. The other 2nd basses useless. They won’t even sing if I drop out for a minute. 

 May 12, 2025

Considering the grace of having gotten all the planned garden in, to the very last annual seed, before these last days of rain. 

Yellowthroat

 May 11, 2025

Yellowthroats teemed this morning in the west garden. They burrow into the thick cover provided by the jungles of anemone and green dragon. You see leaves tremble as they shoulder through. Blessed. 

Last night DJ and I at the Symphony in Thomas Wolfe, with Chris Thile as the antic guest artist. Drinks at the Bier Garten afterwards– in the past at least a weekly routine, now long past.

In a mood this morning– could hardly bear to speak to anybody at church. Too much effort even to form a sentence. 

Earthquake

 

May 10, 2025

Dear God, I’m older than the Pope!

Sitting downstairs at my desk sending messages when I felt an earthquake. It lasted a few seconds and, as such things had in the past, made me feel nauseated. The Internet confirms a 4.1 near Sevierville. 

Planted cosmos, coneflower, and blue-eyed Something (I forget what now). Have seed enough left over for a football field. Looks like last year’s ironweed and white swamp hibiscus are survivors. 

 May 9, 2025

Wet morning. While it was still wet, I revised old poems. Then into the garden to plant Tradescantia and butterfly weed, and succulents in two more pots on the porch. A mighty digging of weeds, bamboo, weeding of vines. 

The Mayor of Newark has been arrested by ICE for defending his people. There will be no limit to atrocity until we end this evil man and all his retinue.

Pope Marcellus Mass from You Tube. 

Tempest

 May 8, 2025

Throb of cicadas, always seeming to be distant from oneself. 

Election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American, delight to the believer and infuriation to the unrighteous. I was watching TV when he stepped out onto the balcony. The joy of the people in St. Peter’s Square communicated to me. I felt a good thing coming after so many bad. Glad it was an American (and not the douch-y Arch-bishop of New York), that the evil done in the world by Donald Trump might be in some measure balanced. 

Apocalyptic hailstorm. Haven’t checked the garden for damage, but the hail came in two waves, with stones the size of blueberries. We were promised golf balls, but I was not disappointed. Sound of transformers exploding on poles throughout North Asheville. Dead traffic lights causing mayhem on my way to rehearsal. 

After rehearsal I sat on my porch with a strong drink. It still rained intermittently, drops striking me from one side, then the other. Pink lightning branched and waved in the distance, and the garden was revealed by flashes in pinkish detail. The rolling of thunder never ceased. I was at war with God. The tempest was perfect illumination.

 

May 7, 2025

ASC concert last night at Central Methodist, Handel. Mozart, others. I think we did well. Surrounded by people on other parts, I think I did rather gloriously. Couldn’t hear another bass 2. Many too many people on stage. Concerts are in general physically uncomfortable for me, sometimes to an acute degree. The era of my standing for long periods of time is over. Talk in the halls and in the men’s room of what a “fascist” our director is, how he treats his singers like naughty children who must be kept in line by force of will. You never know when relating information like that will be helpful and when it will do harm. I think his ability to keep so many balls in the air at once is miraculous. Hiked to the Times Bar for a negroni after the concert. Was given shots of exotic liqueurs by the bartender. 

 

May 4, 2025

The terrible anniversary.

 May 3, 2025

Windows shut against the cold. Cicadas leaving their shells on vegetation. Worked on poems in the morning. Because I’m used to my life, I don’t notice what anxiety shrouds the concept “free time” for me. I don’t recognize free time. I don’t allow myself free time. Even my leisure is purposeful– not sunbathing and barbecues, but museums and cathedrals. This is not thought through, but reflexive. If I’m not writing or painting or gardening or sending out manuscripts, I feel that I’m doing nothing at all. I read maybe three books a year for pleasure, because that is too much like doing nothing. When I lived with Eddie he complained that I never just sat on the sofa and watched TV with him. I recognized he was correct, but also that I could not do otherwise without maximum commitment. Today, for instance, the morning was OK because I wrote and revised and entered contests. But I did nothing in the afternoon, and caught myself lamenting a wasted day. The fact that there was nothing in particular needing to be done should have been taken into consideration. The cream of the jest is that all hours and years of application came pretty much to nothing. 

 May 2, 2025

Lovely Beltane. After rehearsal, returned and sat on my front porch crying “Draw on, sweet Night!” Heard myself uttering blessings for my life. Felt the air for the thin veil that is meant to exits between worlds on such a night, the mundane and the sublime, Asheville and Faery. Drank red wine, fell asleep in the rocker, woke at some undetermined hour, so perhaps I passed between worlds with no recollection of having done so. Perhaps that’s how it must be done. As I sat it began to rain. Never have I rejoiced in anything more than in that rain. 

Dug, weeded, transplanted milkweed out of the lawn into the garden. 

Rain now. Maybe it’s time to go outside. 

Beltane

 

May 1, 2025

Beltane. 

Overcast morning, faint metallic sheen in the sky. 

Rehearsal disastrous last night. K brought in a friend of his to “bolster:” the bass section– in sixty + years of choral singing, the ugliest voice I ever encountered– no concept of blending or ensemble, but an unmodulated, piercing, mechanical buzz– like singing beside a dentist’s drill. Left with a literal headache. What goes through peoples’ minds? 

First visit to the Barrelhouse, a nearby bar that people figured would be after my taste, and it is. 

Dream before waking that I had a new boyfriend, with whom I was still getting comfortable. A terrible blizzard was predicted, and my friend wanted me to move the car for some reason. I knew the car was fine where it was, but I suited up and went out into the stormy night to move the car to please him. A lesson in a situation I am unlikely now ever to face.

Sassafras

 April 30, 2025

Rehearsal last night exultant because, after months, my voice was nearly 100%. Let’s say 85%. Felt like singing with a steel blade. C has really no 2nd bass but me. Two old guys making faces and not even dropping below the staff. 

Dream that I was in a play with A, and after the play I had to find my way home through a city grown suddenly colossal, and my usual routes blocked. It was OK, as I discovered new things, and noted in the dream how much better my wind was than it used to be. In the dream. 

Weeded, cultivated, planted white cosmos. Way too many seeds, so I threw some hither and thither, allowing them a chance to find their own way. My sad task was to dig up the failed-to-prosper sassafras and return it to Reems Creek for a refund, but when I got there, a green shoot emerged from a green place near the bottom. I trimmed the dead wood away and promised I would help it recover and ascend. This made me unaccountably happy. The cherry I thought was dead last summer is in full leaf. The winter clean-up uncovered hidden trilliums, and a rather extensive plot of Quaker comfrey. The chewed-on comfrey explain why rabbits have been making the dangerous journey outside my fence. 

 April 29, 2025

Distant thunder. 

A young messenger from my insurance company (or something like that) arrived this morning to ask a series of questions. That I was working in my garden when he arrived got me many points. He said he’d been employed before getting this job with a group specializing in “wounds.” I didn’t ask what kind of wounds and how obtained. Later it was a haircut. The barber explained to me how Greek and Hebrew were so different there were bound to be uncertainties in translations of the bible. I quite agreed, but couldn’t imagine what got him on that subject. Maybe my white and sage-suggesting hair. 

Yesterday’s hard gardening caused a flare-up of arthritis in my left thumb– never quite gone, but sometimes all but unnoticeable. Noticeable it has been the last few days, the ache climbing to my shoulder, and some hours with it intrusive and very distracting. I think I won’t sleep, but I do. Arthritis. It’s always something. 

 April 28, 2025

Massive (for a skink) skink becomes active on my sunny front porch. He’s silvery with a brown head, and very timid. 

As of today, stock market losses are $27,230. Down from nearly $70,000. 

Last night was another Mystic Transport on the Porch night. I began in the garden. I’d not sat in the garden at night because, frankly, I was afraid of bears. But the garden turns out to be well enough lit by ambient urban light that I could, against expectation, see anything as it entered. Cloudy, so it seemed I was in a little room with trees as its walls. Moved to the front porch, because the stupid street lamp at once compromises the mood and makes me feel safer. Feel asleep in the chair for who knows how long. Any number of bears may have sniffed me where I slumbered.

Weeding

 April 27, 2025

Early rising, playing hooky from church. Wrote some, finished Magdalene Running, a painting that took two months after I thought it was finished to find its true subject. Then, a night and a morning to complete. Then into the garden, achieving what I believe is the most extensive bout of weeding yet at this address: the iris bed and the eastern bed freed essentially, if not quite absolutely, of interlopers. Every years there is a new primary culprit: this year it is cleavers. Tore out the entwined vines along the pond, aided by recent rain softening the soil. I had not intended all that weeding, but once I got started there was no reason to stop until the designated spaces were freed. Got one pink dicentra planted. Arthritis in my thumbs makes all such actions problematic, but not impossible. 

 

April 26, 2025

Day divided in half. In the morning I watched the Papal funeral. I felt sightly unwell, and worked at the keyboard. I don’t really recall what was accomplished, Napped, felt better, went out for some strenuous gardening. Only one white dicentra got planted, as I had spent the time trying to dig in the impossible, pebble-filled east side of the property. Fussed with the pond, improved the flow of the waterfall. Day ends in perfect celestial blue. 

 April 25, 2025

Exhausting rehearsal last night. Most of the expenditure of energy is frenzy and misdirection, little remaining for music-making. Returned home, watched the movie Conclave, pertinent to today’s situation.

Today almost perfect. Night rain. Dream of visiting a beautiful city between mountains and the sea. Was invited to go swimming. There was no beach, but one jumped directly into surprisingly warm water. As I swam, a skate attached itself to and accompanied me. Excellent omen. Rose early and finished correcting Poets in Our Youth. Then rough gardening, which was a little planting but mostly strife with the bamboo thicket. Turns out that the big clippers I bought do shear through bamboo, if I make the right face. Sat on the porch listening to the birds, reading Whitman, drinking chilled vodka. I contemplated the fact that I was happy. 

Rain

 April 24, 2025

Rains came, a blessing for my plants and for the fires creeping across the mountains, eating up the trash left behind by Helene. Planted blue phlox, preparing to plant the annual seeds. 

Yellow trillium appears magically in my yard. Did I plant some long ago, and the vegetable cover is only just now light enough for it to emerge? Or a blessing from the gods for all my good works. 

Sudden artesian emergence of new dramatic writing. Everything is welcome. 

Too many rehearsals leading to too many performances in the next two months. Holy week was, in this sense, monstrous.  

*

From email this AM:

WS-M <@gmail.com>

Wed, Apr 23, 7:31 PM (12 hours ago)

David, friend, I hope you are well! You and I had the pleasure of meeting circa 2019 in Los Angeles at the time that I was featuring as Piers Gaveston in a snippet from Edward the King in the LA Fringe Festival. At the time, I requested your blessing to adapt your incredible work into screenplay format, and you generously gave it. Now, I find myself on the east coast and I think I found the perfect director. However, after the pandemic and two or three moves across state lines, I no longer have the original script. May I kindly ask for you send me another copy? Whether via email, or I can give you my physical address? I would love to continue promoting your amazing work.

P.S., I am in the process of helping to produce WorldPride 2025 Washington, D.C., where there will be a theatre micro-festival as one of our partner events – i.e., Gay for D.C. Theatre.

Big hugs,

WS-M

Birds nesting in my garden, or using it for a primary feeding ground, include blue jays, brown thrashers, gold finches, mockingbirds, towhees, Carolina wrens, robins mourning doves, red-bellied woodpeckers. I’d despaired of catbirds, until a pair appeared yesterday.  

Francis

 April 21, 2025

Pope Francis is dead. I was in Istanbul when he was elected. 

Somewhat surprised to see two of my poems in this edition of The APR. Had said “yes” to K, but, I thought, for something else. But, good news. 

Planted the last of the callas. 

Easter

 

April 20, 2025

Easter Sunday. Fine spring day murky with the smoke of forest fires. 

Heater put away upstairs, fan plugged in and turned on.

Downtown last night for the theater, which is ever an excuse to get re-acquainted with my bustling little town. Excellent cocktail at Sovereign Remedies, where former employees bought and run the enterprise. A girl on Pack Square wore a boa constrictor around her neck. Went to SS’s new play at the BeBe. I sat in front, but as much as I could tell without craning around it was a full house. Disturbing to know practically no one, Walking back to the car I had to urinate so urgently I finally chose a space behind a parked car on Market Street, hoping that nobody would see. Sat on the porch afterward, breathing in the musk of peonies mingled, this time, with new mown grass. 

Two Easter services, then brunch with many people at Rye Knot. Then a nap so heavy I’m surprised I didn’t wake up in the cellar. 

I thought I would enter a long discourse about Easter, but I’m groggy and impatient just now. 

Russian sacred music from the computer. 

 

April 19, 2025

Holy Saturday

We were back in the cathedral– empty of furnishings– for the Good Friday service in which the men chant. To tell from the recording we sounded wonderful, rich and supple. The tomb-like atmosphere of the church was perfect. The Dean’s homily was life-changing. J wears a tiny jewel on his neck which he found in his wife’s drawer after her death. Returned that evening for AVE’s program of chants and ancient music– again, exquisite. 

The habit of porch-sitting I acquired after the hurricane– when there was no electricity and hence nothing else to do– has led to a genuine practice of meditation. Did so last night after the music at church. The fragrance from the peonies was the greater part of the holiness, sharper and cleaner than incense, pervading. Opossums crossed from the little slanted woods outward to the street for their night forage.  Thoughts deep and wide. 

Rehearsal with brass this morning. I should have skipped, as I half intended to do. Everyone in a bad mood. Lunch afterwards at a Patton Avenue chicken place, whose manager asked me if I didn’t once teach at UNCA, and having been assured that I did, told me that I was her most inspiring teacher. “I HATED Romantic literature till I had your class. Now I love it.” 

Sweating profusely in my not-yet-be-fanned attic. 

Planted oxalis. 

Good Friday

April 18, 2025

Good Friday.

My reception of Dark Easter, before sunrise on the third day, is colored by my rejection of the myth of the Blood Sacrifice, wherein God is a brutal sacrifice exacted by God to atone for our living according to the energies God gave us. It is a canker in the bloom of Christianity, exactly as slavery is the canker in the bloom of American history, twisting and perverting– or at least compromising– every good impulse. It is a tyranny exacted by tyrants, who cannot imagine an actually free gift, who mistake a blessing for a contract. 

Maundy Thursday

 

April 17, 2025

Maundy Thursday. 

Sent out play manuscripts.

Weeded, dug, chopped incipient bamboo, planted calla lilies. 

Brilliant and cool. 

Maundy Thursday services at St George somber and. . . something I can’t put my finger on. I think my impression of services is affected by the fact that all I can see is the back of the tenors’ heads. Good for hiding, less good for participation. 

Sat on the front porch in the dark until it was too cold. The Spirit met there is so impersonal that recriminations fall away. 

The family at 52, across the street, has been gone, and their lights have been off, and that side of the street sat profoundly and disturbingly dark. They were back last night, and I rejoiced in the familiar illumination, even when he sits on his porch and I cannot use the bathrooms without being observed.  

 

April 16, 2025

Finished Since I Don’t Have You. Wept. It was right. 

Random memory

 April 15, 2025

Rather alarming wind, shaking the attic doors, whining through the slits I’d left in the windows last night for air. 

Odd rehearsal. Sat by the kid who always stands up. He has a lovely voice, sings all the other parts when he has a chance. Just as creepy as he can be. 

Moon circling the house from east to went as the night progresses. 

 April 14, 2025

Grand day in the garden, digging, pulling up intransigent isles of vine, planting the last two bags of day lilies. I forget what they are meant to look like, but I’ll know soon, and they have discouraging names. Lanky ginger guy comes to check my dehumidifier. We talk about gardening for a minute. Plunging ahead on the new play.

Lotti

 April 13, 2025

Detailed dream before waking. I was quite young. I had been sick , and started running down a road through an open field to get my strength back. For energy I nibbled on a chocolate bar infused with iron, People warned me not to run like that, as I had been ill and was probably overdoing it. At the end of the path lay a marsh and another road. I took the road back into town, where I was starting a new job, my first. The job was as some sort of legal aid. Others had the job, and I was to sit and observe, except the others screwed up in various ways (two boys made out in the bathroom and were caught) and I moved up to the table, where I was evidently expected to listen to prisoners’ stories, taking notes, toward what end the dream did not reveal. 

Til Eulenspiegel plays on WCQS at least once a week. 

Lotti “Crucifixus” this morning. K said it was the best singing we’d ever done. Two presentations of the Luke Passion. 

 April 12, 2025

The wall between my emotions and the world thins. We rehearsed the reading of the Saint Luke Passion at St. George’s today. My cue came up and I couldn’t speak, for the last passage my colleague read was of Peter, that after the Betrayal he “went out and wept bitterly.”  I had to re-assemble myself before I went on. Watching Captain America on TV I began to sob, comparing the flaming Eagle of the West that America was in 1943 to the slinking, slouching horror it is now. Every heart that is not evil is broken. 

Returned to Father’s Day. Found it eminently salvageable. Happy working on it into the deeps of night. 

Red dog

 April 11, 2025

Days of cold and rain. Some spirit led me outside to cover the callas and bring the potted geranium inside against the freeze predicted for tonight. Desultory weeding as I waited for appointments. 

Rehearsal last night turbulent. I forgot the basses had a sectional, missed it, but it didn’t matter since we worked one song all evening and that was the same song worked on during the sectional– and we never got to the end of it. A good thirty minutes were spent in anecdotes, in correcting pronunciation that had been correct the first time though not mannered enough to suit, in stating at least six times each time where we were starting, as nobody paid attention. I counted six iterations of who was going to do what line in the divisi. Sat a few rows back this time rather than in the front, so I could not be seen weeping. The man I sat beside did not make an audible sound all night 

Wandered to the river. Talked to the owner of High 5 while he was conferring, I guess, with his contractor about bringing the café back from the dead. He seems determined. I told him I was at a loss without his café, as in fact I am. Moved down the river and met a woman with two dogs, a huge husky and a big (though not huge) red something I forget the name of. The husky barked at me and shoved her head under my hand because I was paying the other dog too much attention. The red dog was very playful, and we wrestled for a while. During the roughhouse, the dog took my leg in his jaws. I felt the teeth, but he made no effort to clamp down, so it was a sensation rather than an event. The woman was horrified and apologized copiously, however calmly I assured her that nothing had actually happened. I told her I’d invited it by roughhousing like that. 

 

April 8, 2025

Cold brilliance in the heavens. My lilacs have never been finer. 

Open mic poetry night at the Flood last night, eight or nine of us, then me as the featured “professional” poet. The poets were middle aged or elderly, various and, against expectation, quite good. My poems felt fussy and over-wrought after theirs. Became re-acquainted with A, the sad giant whose work I showed in Urthona gallery thirty years ago. He has plugged faithfully away at all the arts, shrugging  off a heavy mantle of sadness to do so. In the face of the efforts of others one sometimes feels frivolous and indulged. 

Indisposed in a way that involves no real discomfort, but rather an exhaustion that has allowed me out of bed only for a few hours at a time. Time for rehearsal. 

Brief bout of weeding. 

 

April 7, 2025

B impersonating Maya Angelou at St George’s yesterday. Good show, responsive crowd. 

Jay North is dead.

On a whim I looked up BS, from Hiram long ago. Found his obituary in the Paramus High School yearbook page. Dead too. 

Scolded my groundhog for nibbling on my roses, took a zucchini and placed it by his hole in compensation. 

Rain. Indoors-allowing rain.

Struggle with the printer resolved after only minimal fury

 April 6, 2025

Storm during the night. Had to get up to close windows that had been open for only two days. 

My dogwoods stand in full glory, an ivory wall between my bedroom and the street.

Two days of sun and a night of rain push the nondescript cotyledons high enough that they show themselves to be fern or Solomon’s seal or mayapple or weed, and may be dealt with accordingly. 

I count seven sizeable goldfish as survivors in my ravaged pond. I’ll try to do right by them. 

Cyrus’s demeanor is quite different from Sweetboi’s. Sweetboi presented himself visibly, and if that failed, by screaming, because he wanted something from me, which I was stupid with joy to give. Cyrus is content to laze about hidden by his almost perfect camouflage, calm if I spot him, indifferent if I do not. I haven’t heard the famous red-tailed scream yet. Some thought that he might be female, except that my recollection is that females are larger. 

Asheville’s protest pictured on the front page of the NY Times.

Hands Off!

 

April 5, 2025

Last night with the Spirit on the front porch.

Rolled downtown with my music under my arm for Asheville’s Hands Off! rally, protesting Trump and Musk and their perversities. In part it was a gathering of old friends, where I saw brothers, mostly sisters, from past demonstrations on various issues through the years. But largely it was new, fresh, good-humored and infuriated at once. When we marched up to sing, there was a crowd of 8000 (according to the Citizen-Times). They screamed and applauded for every verse of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “We Shall Overcome.” May well be the most exciting public event of my life. I had to struggle to keep from crying descending the stage. Of course, my voice was in bad shape, but I discovered that I could bellow past the phlegm if I bellowed loud enough. Throngs still entered the plaza when I dragged myself away and headed for home. The speeches were predictable, but that’s because the outrages have come so thick and fast they seem almost domestic. 

Cyrus

 

April 4, 2025

Fine agate blue and pale gray day. Planted white rhododendrons. The east lawn in some places cannot be dug, because of pebbles in the soil. In search for viable spots, almost gashed a water pipe serving the pond, within a second of cutting it with a shovel, thinking it a big black root. Cut down the saplings around the pond, except for maybe three I wanted. Continued cleaning the pond, locating a gigantic porcelain pot that I have no recollection of putting there, though I must have. It is itself quite heavy, and was filled with muck, so when I’d pulled it to the side with a hoe, knelt down in my aged way on the rocks and tried to lift it out, I could get it to the brim of the pond but not over. I realized I would fail if I used only the muscle available to me, so I focused my will, in a way more physical than a man like me is used to, and just managed to lever it out. Emptied it of its muck and tangle of roots and left it all to dry in the sun. 

Two amazing visitations. H drove up, visiting for a few days from Colorado. She was for a while my best friend, the two of us almost inseparable. We tried to catch up in the ten minutes she’d set aside for the meeting. 

I sat on the back porch with lemonade and club soda, glorying in my triumph over the drowned pot. Something moved on one of the fence posts. It was a red-tailed hawk. He’s bigger and more somber than Sweeboi, his body language more dignified than Sweetboi’s quick vibrancy. He was totally indifferent to me, which is a blessing. He sat and preened, and when he was ready dropped down into the forest. I sobbed, alone in my garden, thinking of the wild spirit miraculously restored. Some blessings are not explicable by the language of this world. I called him Cyrus, hoping that having a name would make him think of me as home.

L gives The Nurseryman’s Wedding a positive review. She asks when I’ll publish it, as if that were ever my decision. 

Abominations continue to roll out of DC. 

 April 3, 2025

Throat cleared enough that I could supply the contra C in “Shenandoah” for SC. The other two second basses natter and fuss like turkeys in a barnyard. They have known each other for a long time, and I will never be their third. But the throat is still a problem, sometimes clear enough, sometimes muck and sandpaper, never exactly clear.  

Z asked me to come in for a massage, and I did. He was the one who broke that ice, doing so with natural grace. After nobody’s touching my body for 2 ½ years, I stumbled out to my car throbbing in every fiber. 

Merry and muscle-y young man from Reems Creek dropped off my hundreds of dollars worth of garden stuff yesterday. Rain has been pretty solid (I give thanks) since then, so there it all still sits. I think of the young man because he seemed so purely happy to be who he was doing what he was doing. 

Hemorrhoid issues the last few days This happens once every four or five years, so, like almost everything else, I leave it alone.

Stock market still rocketing down. I keep checking, thinking the tide must turn, but the bad moon driving that tide endures, so why shouldn’t it? 

Planted calla lilies and the sassafras the happy young man brought. 

 

April 1, 2025

Watched a video wherein police in Huntington Park, CA, shot a double amputee frantically trying to flee on his stumps, because they “felt in fear for their lives.” They knocked him out of his wheelchair and shot him eleven times in the back as he tried to flee on his halves of legs. This is not an April Fool’s joke. 

 March 31, 2025

Torrential rain, a welcome sound on the roof. I imagine it dousing the fires on the mountains. My west plot was as dry as stone. J drove out to estimate the cost of a patio.  I never thought to have a patio until he mentioned it. I never thought of a lot of things until they were mentioned to me. The list of things which the world needs more than I need a patio scramble through my head. But, I will almost certainly do it, carried as ever by the current toward unknown destinations. 

AM and his magic fiddle at St. George’s yesterday afternoon. Pitiable crowd. Not his fault. The Dicentra is in bushy bloom beside the church steps. 

Exhausted yesterday as is humanly possible. Trying to build back a little today. The deluge will help by keeping me inside. 

Joyfulness

 March 30, 2025

Thought of the last time I saw BE: after church at All Souls. He was walking down the front walk toward his car, stiff, every step a new discomfort, the way the aged are. I called to him and he turned stiffly, looked at me with such a beaming smile, his joyfulness daunted by nothing.

 March 29, 2025

Theater last night at NCS. Well acted, well designed, well directed. Also, 95% exposition. I’m supposed to disapprove of that, but in the moment it was interesting. I asked, “Why isn’t this a film documentary?” But the question could be asked of some film documentaries– such as one I saw the other night about the tornado that destroyed Joplin, MO– why isn’t this a play? WP’s flawless stage technique–.  The play is three hours long, and I expected that to be a tribulation, but it was not. 

Pain in my hip– actually a genuine pain in the butt– makes walking difficult. For a while in the morning I cry out at each step of my left leg, cry out more shrilly if I hit some unevenness in the floor. It feels like a bruise deep and raw. Prednisone helps it, so it must be an inflammation. 

Evening: Sang at Grace Episcopal for BEs’ memorial service. Kind, good man. It was my good fortune to know him, to invite him to bachelor parties at my house. When we left the church the air was heavy with smoke. It looked like twilight, but it wasn’t.

Smoke

 March 27, 2025

As I was about to leave to get out of the way of the cleaning lady, Ben the Pool Guy pulled up with my new motor, the thrice longed-for. The wait extended from January. It was installed in three minutes, and the water moved in my pond once again. I cold hear the fish taking a deep breath. Ben mocked the filthiness of my pool, so I spent time scraping truly monumental masses of muck out of it with a hoe. Drove on (the cleaning lady still hadn’t arrived) to High 5, where I sat at a table, sipped chai, and wrote, as I had not done since the beginning of COVID. The people at the table behind me gossiped about Minneapolis politics. I was able to tell them I had been there last summer. The old gents across from me caught each other up on grandchildren and gardens. At my table I began a play, my first return to theatrical writing since The Review. You don’t expect to shrink from criticism like some callow Keats, but it happens whether you approve of it or not. Drove to Reems Creek and spent $700 on mulch and dirt and plants. Frantic to be writing and gardening and painting and going to rehearsal all at once. Sky clouding before night.

From the Nursery road you see plumes of smoke rising from the mountains. Helene piled up stacks of kindling for fire to be born from and consume what was not drowned. 

A red-shouldered hawk flew low over my yard, pursued by blue jays. I stood at the door a long time, wanting her to return.

Evening: Drove to rehearsal up Sweeten Creek with the smoke of forest fires heavy around me. The smell was sweet, all that burning wood. The dimness of the air–

R led us through a rehearsal without hysteria, tangents, wasteful undirected energy.

My pair of brown thrashers has returned. 

Ghost

 

March 26, 2025

Put the finishing touches on The Nurseryman’s Wedding.

Yesterday hiking at the Arboretum with L and J. Glorious day. Ate lunch at a restaurant that lingers in my mind because while it was being built, I “dated” the guy who installed the appliances. A good day. I was hardly even tired. Iron slowly kicking in. 

Left half way through rehearsal last night, my voice was so bad, and my throat hurt making ugly sounds, so there was no point. I’ve had some sort of voice-strangling infection for six months; fury over that hit while I was driving home. God was wise to keep his distance.

The chipper came, loudly reduced and transported the brush the Duke workmen had left. I assumed all that was going to be a big quarrel, never-ending, frustrating, but it went pretty much as they said it would. The workmen were cute. They enjoyed each other and their jobs.

Have been weepy since waking. Watch a cat video and longed for a cat. Every thought-road led to something grievous. That recedes as the morning advances. 

Fifty-one years ago today mother died on the operating table. I remember on the first anniversary standing outside my horrible apartment on Adams Street in Syracuse, in a blizzard, sobbing so hard I couldn’t go in lest somebody hear me.

Evening: Cultivated, then planted black lilies and daylilies. It was too cold, but the work warmed me up enough. 

One of those days when all bad notions come together in acute, blinding focus. Sat on the sunny cold porch with wine in my hand, cursing the Lord until I was too drunk to sit. Lay down in oblivion until the sun had traversed the sky. One benefit of the solitary life is that there are no witnesses to this terrible, and yet extended, moment. 

To have some measure of control over something, paid off my car loan. Will probably total the car tonight. 

Odd– I catch myself praying piteously to the Ghost I have spent two hours blaspheming. 

 March 24, 2025

City trucks in my driveway, sawing away limbs and branches near the wires, duplicating work done by somebody else after Helene, which I paid $2000 to get cleaned up. The guy on the crane amid the treetops said they’d brought a woodchipper and would clean up after themselves. Wait and see.

Saturday DJ and I hauled to St George’s for a LGBTQ discussion on how to protect ourselves during this predatory and heedless administration. My heart sank when I saw pens and stick-up notes and a white board, indicating the Episcopal (and Female) preference for process over action would predominate. And so it did. My inclination not to attend meetings presided over by women is thwarted by the fact that nearly every group I belong to is, essentially, a gynocracy. After an hour of self-examination, there was enough time for people to suggest a few pertinent phone numbers, and demonstrations to attend. There will be meetings before the demonstrations so we can– what? Participate with faultless self-knowledge, I suppose. 

L and J came for dinner last night. Cooked myself into a stupor, and I think it was a success. It was revealed that dad’s macular degeneration was brought on by cataract surgery– thus justifying my own hesitancy to get that done, or anything done that involves entering a hospital. L and J are like kids, footloose and fancy-free in an expanding world. 

Evening: The adventures of the pruners in my trees, on behalf of Duke Energy, went on all day, making me more miserable as the hours passed. Far deeper cutting than necessary, the almost-blossoming branches of redbud lying in heaps. My sadness probably exceeded the cause, but, in any case, enough with breaking and hacking and disturbance of the peace. Branches and debris lie higher than ever, higher than when I paid to have it all carted away. The sweet shy boy that I wanted to scream at but couldn’t said they’ll be back with a chipper and clean-up crew first thing in the morning. Even if it turns out, that means a day with a roaring chipper. 

Thought of Sweetboi, glad that he had escaped all that. The glamour is gone from my sky. 

 March 21, 2025

Bach’s birthday. Can’t think of what I did all day, but planning dinner for L and J was part of it.  Effulgence. 

More Face Book comments on the passing of Sweeetboi than any other of my postings. This makes me glad. Considering how to honor him. A play? Fiction? A dance would probably be best. Maybe I should tell the full story to A and see what she can do. I run it through my head, and it’s a dance. 

Vernal Equinox

 

March 20, 2025

Blake seminar with P. 

Vernal Equinox. Planted creeping phlox, fertilized the iris bed, met A for coffee and extended gossip, much of it about the astounding collapse of our university. Told for the first time the full story (as it stands now) of Sweetboi. Snow flying when I left rehearsal at 8:30.

Sweetboi 2

 March 19, 2025

What a terrible detective I would be! I posted about Sweetboi’s death on Facebook, and so far 90 responses have been recorded, which is lovely, but most of them assumed what had–until I read the posts– not entered my mind. I assumed he had thrashed himself to death after being caught in the bark. The blood on his breast and one talon I judged to be marks of that struggle– though I also noted that his body came loose from the bark almost without effort, and I wondered why he couldn’t have done it himself. The Facebook posts assumed he’d been shot, and wondered if I knew who did it. This makes mores sense. A new mystery opens. Who, then, deliberately hung him so I would find him? He had not been there the evening before, and he had not been dead long. I excoriated myself for not discovering him in time. He had not been there to discover in time. He had been killed and left where his body would cause the most hurt. I have a secret and vicious enemy. Furthermore, he had crept into the deep of my garden and done the deed without my knowing. He is an enemy of some intimacy, who knew what I loved and how to use my garden to display his deed. I’ve ever been bad at knowing my enemies. I have been reluctant to think I had any, not that the Universe hasn’t mocked this oversight in the past. Some grief fell from my heart, for my inattention had, if all this is the case, nothing to do with the wild fair being’s death. 

Sweetboi

 March 18, 2025

Warm spring day. I planted poppies and dug up ivy. I saw a strange pattern on the silver maple, and when I neared I saw it was Sweetboi, hanging dead with one talon lodged in the bark. Maybe he died from being stuck there, but there was a splatter of blood on his breast, and it was so easy lifting him down I couldn’t believe he couldn’t do it himself. Beautiful winged being. His lids were only half closed, and his eyes sent forth a fierce glare in the sunlight. I buried him. I crawled into the shadows to weep. I’m still there. El, the God Who Howls in the Wilderness, my Lord, I thank you for the companionship of this wild spirit. Let me believe I did right by him. 

Blessd Saint Patrick

 

March 17, 2025

Blessed Saint Patrick. 

The pond pump motor went out in January, and today I finally got someone to address the problem. He’s the guy who installed the pond, and I called him first, and just today he got around to fishing the motor out of the water and ordering a new one. The issue haunted me because I kept imagining the poor fish living day to day under worse conditions.