March 8, 2025

Shoulder tender from yesterday’s vaccines– an unusual reaction for me. Back into the garden: weeding, uprooting of wicked vines, planting of white rhododendron and hellebore. Left unfinished (a hole dug and fertilized, but the last rhododendron not eased into it) because of the shoulder and a faint flu-ache that I think must also be related to the shots. 

The hawk-shape flying over my shoulder as I worked was not Sweetboi, but a Cooper’s hawk– sleek, silvery, more compact than the red-shouldered, and with a faster– maybe more orderly–flight. 

Listening to Russian sacred music. Holy Russia is not to blame. 

Dream during a brief nap. I heard slow, firm footsteps outside my bedroom window. I rose and saw a huge antlered creature–an Irish elk, perhaps-- making its way under my dogwoods. 

Some great emotion builds in me. I don’t know when or in what form it will fountain forth.

 March 7, 2025

Wandering the ruins of the garden. It’s actually much improved in every objective way, but right now I’m fixating on the destruction of things which I would have saved. Nothing could have been done except to walk every step with them saying “no” or “si.” The debris-filled dumpster is hauled away. Jason returned my two tools– hoe and shovel– which found their way onto his truck. 

Got COVID and pneumonia boosters. The nurse talked about what a medical disaster RFK Jr is. “You’re just in time,” she said, “who knows how much longer these will be available?”

 

March 6, 2025

Mezzaluna. 

Ash Wednesday

 March 5, 2025

Folia on Pandora.

Ash Wednesday. Surprise phone call from Jason, and now my yard is full of Mexicans working at a red heat. He speaks to them in what seems to me fluid Spanish. They’re doing more than I wanted, but I know that later on I will wish it to have been done, so– Sound of chainsaws. . . I can’t look. 

Read America: a Prophesy for our Blake seminar. The mightiest poetry that ever was in English, though blowing in from a place so foreign one doesn’t always know what’s going on. 

Late afternoon. Started Folia again. The gang finished up in one day rather than the prepared-for two. I’m glad of that, and not only financially. The procedure was surprisingly stressful. I had to stop myself from running out screaming “Get out of my garden!” They cut down Sweetboi’s perch. I asked them not to. . . but. . . .things did not always translate. All six workers were finishing up, and I asked, “How many of them are in danger of being deported?” Jason shrugged, said, “I don’t know, but if they send them away, I close my business. I can’t go through that a second time.”

Shrove Tuesday

 March 4, 2025

Shrove Tuesday. People wear bright beads, and I realize I’d forgotten this or any day can be joyful. Need to go into hiding from the media: I could be content among my birds and flowers. The clearing of debris from the garden will begin, to my surprise, tomorrow. Wrote gigantic checks to satisfy the IRS. The lady at the accountancy and I discussed the possibility that, the nation crumbling around us, nobody would know or care whether I paid my taxes. My personal taxes, it must be noted, are greater than Elon Musk’s, if things are as they’re reported.  

 March 2, 2025

The sermon related the story of Jesus walking amid the crowd after the Transfiguration, and the man running out and crying, “Master, look at my son, my only child!” The grief I felt relating to him was unbearable. Glad I was seated in the back row behind people taller than myself. Recalled later when I was in Israel our guide stopping at a service station for our comfort, then pointing casually to the hill across the road, “And that is the Mount of the Transfiguration.” 

Revising. . . proofreading. . . unsure that anything will come to anything. 

Terrible world, terrible age. I don’t know what to do. 

 

March 1, 2025

Saint David’s Day. His flower is the daffodil, and I have a few just putting forth incipient yellow tips. 

Cool, bright. More work in the garden, largely pruning. Excessive growth of hydrangeas and sweet shrub has constricted my driveways for a couple of years now. I am SO much the person who adjusts to his environment, rather than changing it to suit himself, that it never occurred to me to prune them back. I relied on maneuvering my car just the right way. J who came to do the estimate lit on that first thing. Another I pruned back to allow peonies in the front garden more light. Mockingbirds thronged me as I worked. A black vulture soared low over the garden, banking almost at the ground before rising again. His hugeness altered the perspective of size in the garden for a while. 

Playing tracks of the Ukrainian National Hymn and weeping. This is America’s lowest point, a traitor to our friends and a lap dog to the worst of our enemies. Shame consumes me. 

 February 28, 2025

New music last night. Sight reading is one of my joys. 

Physically active day, including the first real gardening since the fall. Carrying cement blocks, I discover, will be off the agenda until I get my iron levels back up. 

Made the mistake of comparing effort in the arts with achievements in the arts. Spent the rest of the day sad. 

White Rhododendrons

 February 27, 2025

The First Baptist Choir threw a lovely reception for us last night, orphans they took in. 

Renewed my ACLU membership. 

D sends video of Stetson playing with his rocking horse (my Christmas gift), not actually riding it, but wrestling with it. My rocking horse was wooden, white, with blue saddle and bridle. Things disappear from your life. 

$20000 of my $24000 loss in the market was from a dingle holding, Polaris. S my accountant reports that I owe $18,000 Federal tax. “Capital gains. You made $100,000 more than you did last year.”I suggested to S that one doesn’t pay capital gains during a Republican administration. 

Bought white rhododendrons. 

 February 26, 2025

Days of mundane, enjoyable, activity. DJ to the eye doctor. The clinic was enormous, shockingly well designed, and stacked to the walls with old people. Do the young so somewhere else? The crowd dismayed me, but the operation was efficient and many were seen to as I sat. A service dog sprawled on the rug nearby, looking very bored. I resent when there’s a dog and I can’t play with it. 

Got an estimate on cleaning up the yard– not from the hurricane, but from the cable pruners who left a mess afterwards. Turned into an estimate on cleaning up the rest of the wildness and opening all to the hand of the Gardener. I realized I was being led by the guy from Yard Bro, but his suggestions were things I wanted done but had imagined I’d have to do myself. The stock market has been diving since Little Hitler took over, so the thousands of the quote stagger me, but I’ll assume the approach of better times. I expressed my preference for Mexican workers (he is very Anglo) and he assured my all his workers with Latino. 

Chamber Choir back in rehearsal. The guy beside me was having trouble. I thought it was because he was a baritone and I a bass, and sometimes we had different notes. But he said, “I have trouble singing beside you even when we have the same notes. But it’s my problem. I’ll figure it out.” The guy on the other side had just said, “Thank God I was sitting by you.” Don’t know whether I’m a help or a hindrance. 

Blazing spring day. Turned off the heater in my studio. Pruned the laurel so it can be a tree rather than a bush. The landscape guy insisted that bay and laurels were different plants. Makes me worry. 

Tried to get to Reems Creek to shop for white rhododendrons, but the inexplicable Asheville traffic stopped I-26 west dead. Sat still for ten minutes, finally exited the exit after the one I entered. Turned north on Merrimon and was stopped dead there too. U-turned and went home, to shop another day. No fleeing to the north today. 

Diving into the Moon

 February 23, 2025

Rewrite of NW complete last night. Lost 3000 words. I think it’s beautiful. Working through manuscripts, I decided, for the moment, that my first attempt at the novel, Diving into the Moon, is likely unsalvageable. My desire that the tone sound like it arose from the time setting of the book (1950's) worked too well, and now I can’t get around it. I began it before I left for Exeter. 

 

February 22, 2025

A hole left in my records, as it’s been too cold to use my studio. It’s too cold now, except I’m newly arisen and fresh and have a cup of coffee steaming at my elbow. Images in my head of dry snow falling perpetually from the north, almost horizontal, lit through the day by the various colors of the sky. Lovely. I shiver out to renew the bird feeders. The little downies don’t even bother to fly when I approach them. Working hard and unexpectedly on a rewrite of The Nurseryman’s Wedding. Most of its sins were the sins of excess, which is the easiest to cure.  I have been happy doing this, even when my eyes bleared. 

Second Blake meeting with P. 

National situation deteriorating. Vance blames Ukraine for invading Russia. I vow not to listen to the news, but fragments seep in. Antietam of the soul. 

 February 19, 2025

Cancelled the reservation. Something felt wrong. At the back of my mind was the thought that I didn’t want to be away from home when the civil war began. 

 

February 18, 2025

Precipitous booking of a room at Folly Beach. No remorse yet. 

Laundering the comforters after– well, before the Hurricane. . . .

 February 17, 2025

Weary of posting philippics against Trump. They sound brittle and shrewish even to myself. Clearly I am not the one designated to make this right. 

Complex and joyful dreams before waking. I’d taken a long sabbatical from teaching, during which time I’d bought a tiny airplane, the size of a Volkswagen bug, and learned to fly it. Over the rolling fields we’d go, sometimes over bare golden grass, sometimes over great herds of giraffe and whatnot. I decided to go back to school. I’d been gone so long I didn’t recognize it, now laid out like a carnival in a series of tents. I found Kirk and asked him to get me an office. He was so happy to see me he embraced me, and then began to babble happily but incoherently. I wandered away and came to a sealed tent. I managed to open the tent, inside of which children had been kept in captivity. They ran to me and embraced my legs, crying, “He will get us out.” I woke. I suppose that the part of me that stayed in that world got them out. 

 February 16, 2025

Wondering how long I can endure the uncertainty of AS. Our exile is not nourishing my soul. Put together After the Hurricane last night, just in time (within two hours of the deadline) to send it to a contest at Sarabande. Cold. The lady on the TV says it will get colder. 

 February 15, 2025

Valentine’s Fundraiser last night unexpectedly merry and successful. All possibilities of mortification remained unfulfilled. Sang well. None of the cabaret acts was bad. Great joy in the house, probably more than we performers understood. Came home with a bottle of wine. 

Took my materials to the tax people in Biltmore. We talked about the flood. They are on the second floor of a building whose first floor was annihilated. 

 February 14, 2025

Saint Valentine.

Bach on Pandora

Last dream of the night featured P, of whom I lost track in the eighth grade, lecturing me on how my life has been, essentially, pointless, and how the confusing light beams that come from my glasses make people hesitant even to talk with me. 

Took DJ to the doctor. The waiting room was filled with misery, debility, fear, people helping one another in and out for door, waiting in the rain for uncertain rides. I compared this to moon-faced Musk cavorting on the TV, oily with health and stupidity. 

Each day brings new horrors from Washington. We are in not an incipient but a full-blown dictatorship, accomplished in two weeks by people who warned us every step of the way what they were about to do. One of the things one never imagined for oneself. Somebody will stop it. Law will stop it. An independent judiciary will stop it. A tradition of rationality will stop it. A tradition of country before self will stop it. Wrong–so far–on every count. If I thought guns would stop it, would I join in? I’m not sure at all of my aim, not having handled a gun since Boy Scout camp. I shock myself by thinking, “yes, as it appears now, it is that dire.” The NRA justified its otherwise blood-soaked existence by saying it would keep people ready in case of the rise of an oppressive government. Waiting. . . .

The felonious mayor of New York is released from penalty if he will agree to betray his own immigrant population. 

No single Republican is free of the onus of this. 

A curious line of thought, though, skirts the edges where I am, or had been, in the tinniest degree of agreement with the apparent ends of the putsch. DEI was a calamity for academia. Our former and eternally despised Provost ruined the English department (or maybe it was the whole university?) by declaring that all hires henceforward would be diversity hires. It’s not that we doubted the existence of excellent diverse employees, but knew, in the current atmosphere, we would never get them. We recognized a deliberate effort toward mediocrity, or worse, mediocrity being easier to control than excellence. Our long line of female Chancellors and Provosts need not have but did in fact illustrate the perils of diversity hires. It’s impossible to believe that in any case (except MG) that they were the best candidate offered. Serving on one search committee or another, I recognized that the appeal to diversity caused us to settle on the second–or third–best candidate. We were willing then, assuming a great injustice was being balanced by a little one. That acknowledged, The Trump scourging is like noticing your house needs a new paint job, and deciding therefore to burn it to the ground. 

Also, one acknowledges that none of this is in Trump’s mind or in the minds of any of his cadre. It is all about the seizure of power, by any means necessary, with any excuse widely palatable. Mitch McConnell, hypocrite and corrupt Machiavellian that he is, is now the lone man in the Senate. If you live long enough, you will end up doing some good thing. . . .

 February 13, 2025

The only news is the Fascification of America by Trump and Musk. Someone must have power to block the door. 

Rehearsal for our Valentine’s Day Gala Benefit Fundraiser. Less awful than expected, though I’m practically useless in the sphere of table decoration. Admire those who are not. Also sang badly. Also, in this passage of the anemia cycle, I get winded walking from the car to the door. I stand in the corner catching my breath, trying to look ready for action. 

Kingdom Phylum Class Order

 February 12, 2025

Rain. Cold. I don’t know where the hours go. Assembled Kingdom Phylum Class Order.

 

February 9, 2025

Quick trip to my Schwab account looking for tax materials reveals I’m down $18000 for the quarter. Thanks, Trump.  

In the Country of the Young

 

February 8, 2025

Sweet summery days, that the TV news says are numbered. Blades of daffodils emerging in their multitudes. The heat is almost unbearable in my study, but I won’t turn the heater off just yet. What if it doesn’t come back on?

In the bracket with things I never expected to see are bears in my yard, a hurricane in my mountains, an American government become a toxic, fascist clown show, the clowns somehow not dragged offstage with a hook and thrown into the hoosegow. The news allows us to imagine Musk as a three year old with a crayon in his hand, whirling from room to room trying to deface as much as he can before an adult steps in. It’s more systematic than that. He chooses and his senile boss agrees to the choice of halting everything that has to do with control, safety, oversight, regulation, equality, anything that protects and strengthens, anything that tries to level the playing field, anything that might curb hate or ignorance (so useful to Trump at all times), anything that defends the weak against the predation of the strong. If it protects workers in the workplace, animals in their wilderness, children in their schools, patients in hospitals and pharmacies, innocent men and women trying to live their lives, it makes Musk itch with impatience, because nothing can be allowed to stand between the super-rich and the easy acquisition of an ever greater portion of the common bounty. If it interferes with profit or slows the 1% ever so slightly in their gobbling up of resources, it must go. Safety oversight, food and drug quality, health care, day care, workplace safety, retirement, civil rights, culture and civility are irrelevant to those who can buy them for themselves. Billionaires are the only constituency considered by this unfolding administration, the only constituency which can possibly profit from actions taken in the last week by that moon-faced fraud. The Supreme Court is bought lock stock and gavel, but where is Congress? Where is the NRA, who justified their bloody existence in the past by promising to be ready when tyrants arose. I vowed for my own health not to look at the news, but sometimes the hubbub becomes briefly audible between cat videos. 

Tried to go on my sister’s Rhine cruise, but it was sold out.

PBS documentary on Jefferson. Informative. Inspiring.  I was never sure just what a Federalist was, and why Jefferson didn’t like it. 

Believe I have finished In the Country of the Young.

Blake

February 5, 2025

P comes for an afternoon discussion of Blake. The most civilized thing I’ve done in a long time. Old brain muscles working again. 

Two healthy girls come with bags collecting canned goods for Manna Food Bank. I have exactly one can in the cupboard, ancient peaches which may well have come over from 62. 

Encounter K in the Alley behind 62. She says “What’s your secret? You look ten years younger than you used to.” I decide to let it ride without refutation or contemplation.  

 

February 4, 2024

DJ’s van fails him again just when several necessary things needed to be done at once. The difficulties circumstance throws at him are so various and unending as to be, in one sense, ludicrous. It would make a scene from a sit-com if one were not personally experiencing it. The worst failures seem to be when I’m there to add nothing useful.

Workers replacing the roof of 62, which I replaced thirteen years ago. Maybe hurricane damage. 

 

February 3, 2025

The midnight wallbanger was a bear. I know this not because he was ever visible, but because he pulled down the birdfeeders, which, because of hot pepper infusion, he couldn’t eat, but upon which he could vent his disappointment. 

Candlemas

 

February 2, 2025

Candlemas. Pale lilac crocus in the front yard. Queer banging sound on the eastern outside wall, like somebody throwing pebbles. Nothing visible there. DJ’s van has a grand mal when I try to start it. He doesn’t make it to church. Our insane blob of a president starts a tariff war with Canada and Mexico. 

Brigid the Blessed

 

February 1, 2025

Brigid the Blessed.

Trump blames recent plane crashes on diversity hires. The amazing things is that he says it in so many words. We cannot defend ourselves with misunderstanding. Denali is back to being Mount McKinley. Trump says this is to restore honor to a great American president, and I wonder by what measure McKinley can be called great. No Black history month. The Gulf of America. Why is nobody laughing? 

Jupiter glittering northward of the quarter moon. 

January 31, 2025

Sultry day, visited at the end by rain. This is good to melt the bird droppings off my car.

Rehearsal last night infuriating. Maybe it wasn’t infuriating; maybe I was just infuriated. 

Good painting today. I would much rather repaint an old canvas than start a new one. 

 

 January 28, 2025

Sweetboi swept Lakeshore Drive outside of the window where I was sitting, then placed himself on his branch, knowing that I would have a morsel for him. Can a hawk see into the house? 

ASC rehearsal. Mozart, Handel: fine by me. 

Visions

 January 27, 2025

So, the Lord wakes me out of nothingness. I do not know he is the Lord. He looks like a beautiful youth to me. We are in a garden, surpassingly beautiful. He says, “Will you tend my garden?” I fall down upon my knees. When I am done giving thanks, I rise up to tend the garden. 

What if all things rise to a point severe and exquisite as a single molecule of diamond? 

What if in our last stumbling steps we see of a sudden the pattern of all, so intricate there was no keeping track of it while we bore the burden of life, but, on the last few tiles before the Door, revealed in such complexity and majesty we must cry out, as a baby being born.

I go to my little pond to feed the fish. The pond has been swallowed by a wide sea under moonlight, under the full moon setting the waves ablaze. Far out, Leviathan aims for shore, aims for the place where I stand, ready to take the morsel from my hand. 

The bird that flutters to my hand is a great hawk of the Zenith. His eyes pierce. His talons close around my hand. I am fearful for a moment, until I perceive he is lifting me. Lifting. 

The praises which have fallen from my lips have become blue flowers. I step out of a dark wood and see rolling meadows of blue flowers, stretching way to blue mountains, which are the Mountains of the Lord. 

 January 26, 2025

One is overcome by the hatred and mendacity of those who seem to have any power at all, a thickening, universal web of deceit and misery. But if you look below the web, there’s DJ’s neighbor getting out of bed to jump his battery so we can get to church. There’s townsfolk painting the houses of strangers so that, someday, they may have a home. We need a news network that just reports the good, the decent, the everyday miraculous. The world is more balanced than the reporting of it is. 

 January 25, 2025

Briefly excited about being in A’s play, because it was A and I’d be Richard Burbage. Signed up for an audition time and memorized a monolog. Backed out, though, because of time & chorus conflicts, and looking on the webpage and seeing performances stretch through the entire month of May. Too little time to do too much. One of the advantages of being old is that one can back out of things for the vaguest “health reasons” and one is never questioned. 

Enduring cold. 

Working hard on ICY. It contains some of the most beautiful writing I have ever done. It’s either silly or lovely that I can still be ravished by my own words. 

Video of a driver hurdling off the fishing pier in Virginia Beach, “barely missing a pedestrian.” The pedestrian was D, out jogging. Brushes with fame. . . . 

Strange events, sometimes in dreams, mostly in waking, when, like a mirror shivering in the distance, some mystery come clear, some conundrum resolves. The experience is sensual rather than intellectual. I see an opacity, then its moving and shattering, and then some great (or little) clarity. I was watching videos of babies and young children racing for their fathers when they came home from work, dancing and crying out in transports of love. I felt sad for my father, wondering if he ever experienced that. Then I realized– remembered, beheld-- that yes indeed he had, and that when those moments ended, it was because he ended them. The vision did not reveal why. I was, in some moment now irretrievable, thrown back upon myself, and three quarters of a century could not undo it. I remember two or three times when he was uncharacteristically loving toward me: the thought came into my brain that perhaps my father had been hidden or taken away all this time, replaced by an imposter, and this new man, the one who seemed to love me, was the original finally returned after the expiation of I did not know what trespass. But, no. It was back to normal in the next hour. I’ve sought in my heart for the behavior that turned him away. It was not me. What baby has that power? Some great angel or gift of fortitude allowed me to go forward another way, relying on myself, asking little but cobbling my own world together, in which it was possible to live. But not to live unscathed. I am as one returned to the nursery where he grew up, finding all the broken toys, helpless to put even one of them back together. I feel sad for my sister, because I think I almost remember when things were well, and I’m not sure she can. Mother’s rather glorious loyalty to her husband made sure she went the way he led. Or perhaps they warred in the silence of the house, and she could not overcome him. 

Enigma

 January 22, 2025

Blizzard in New Orleans. Snow on the beaches of Florida.  Flurries in Key West. The kids, anyway, are ecstatic. Trying to sled down the banks of levees. Bitter cold here. I went to get the mail and froze my chest.

Pot-luck before ASC rehearsal– convivial, full of variety. I made brazed cabbage, which I liked so much I devoured the left-overs through the following day. Rehearsal bore out my theory about choral directors: K insisted that we separate the K from the rest of Kyrie (which is wrong), then had to stop to correct someone for not leaving a gap Every Single Time the word occurred, then had to begin correcting us when the duration of the gap was too much. I stopped counting at the twelfth stop to deal with the single word “Kyrie.” If you have to repeat and repeat your instructions, you are wrong. 

Deeply affected by a video of a shark (a great white) coming to shore to solicit the aid of bathers, he having gotten himself wrapped up in fishing line. They cut him loose. This is what we were made for. 

Elgar from Alexa downstairs. 

January 20, 2025

Instead of watching the Inauguration, I’ll be filling the bird feeders. I’ be making sure the mealworms set out for the bluebirds sit on top of last night’s snow.

ML said, “Here I am, starting over at 70.”

 

January 19, 2025

Grainy snow,  mercury dropping like mad. Complex dreams, intertwining with my waking life to an unusual degree. Dreams which try to inform my life many minutes after waking. 

Met ML in The Fresh Market. She was one of those whose home was totally destroyed, and who faces that with an equanimity I find laudable and foreign. Her little creek became a raging torrent when the floodgates were opened at North Folk. Gallantly, she affirmed that opening the gates “saved everybody in my neighborhood.” She was buying supplies for a trip to the beach, to “get away from it all for a while.” FEMA paid to clean her property up, but no farther than that. America is not set up to save her people. I think of the Irishman in the bar in Sligo, “I’d be terrified to be an American. There’s nothing to break your fall.” 

 January 18, 2025

Sat on my porch in the afternoon sun. Led to cleansing. Also a finished crossword. 

Porch sitting becomes complicated. The couple– especially the man–at 52 Lakeshore are dedicated porch sitters, and their front porch looks directly at the western side of my house. Not an issue in summer when the leaves are on, but in leafless seasons they have a direct view into my bathroom, with the toilet right up against the window. Again, during the day this is probably not a problem, but when the bathroom light is on, I’m lit up like a Broadway stage. I could close the blinds, but I love looking out into that bit of garden. I’m also paranoid about ruining the blinds by pulling them up and down too often. I tell myself that if they don’t want to see, they’ll look away– but is that fair? Should I influence their porch-sitting time in that way? At night I’ve looked from my toilet seat at his shadow scurrying into the house. Did he catch a chill, or was it because of me? Decided to pretend I never thought of this, and allow them to choose their reaction, look or look away. 

Napping, I was sure Circe lay against me. I made certain not to move, so as not to disturb her. 

 January 17, 2025

GMC last night, many new members, a brotherly and convivial atmosphere. I was in terrible voice. I’ve observed in the past that almost all the choral conductors I’ve had possess at least one deep delusion or error in otherwise sound practice. It varies from one to another, but you can identify what it is pretty quickly: the issue a conductor is wrong about is the one he corrects or repeats admonitions against most often. Corrected the same issue of interpretation three times in a rehearsal?: that’s where you're wrong.

Loose flocks of robins (mostly) driving toward the north. Sometimes bluebirds or starlings tag along, but they may be locals momentarily joining the party. 

Sat on my porch in the afternoon sun. Led to cleansing.

Racing toward a complete re-write of In the Country of the Young, which, of course, I thought was finished long ago. Resent having to leave it for other things. 

 

January 15, 2025

ASC back last night. My voice was gone half way through. Sat beside a new guy named C, slim, elegant, British/Italian, teaching history remotely at DePauw. He lives in Marshall, but his house stood above the water. We lamented together the fall of UNCA, but then it was revealed that A is his aunt, and that his house stands on their mountain beside hers. I refrained from observing that his aunt is the person who started my university irreversibly on its decline. Small world.

Sweetboi came back, and took his tribute yesterday. Maybe he doesn’t migrate at all, but makes his rounds among his benefactors. 

Occurred to me last night that I didn’t say goodbye to either of my parents. That must mean something even now. 

Wolf Moon

 

January 14, 2025

Recalling how snow-cover renders the mysterious night garden fully visible, so you can see and identify anything that moves. The Wolf Moon of the last three nights made the illumination almost painful. The snow also reveals the tracks of a man (I suppose) who wandered down my drive at some lonely hour of the night. You hoped for dog tracks beside him, but there was not even that.

Thunderbird

 

January 12, 2025

Lovely snow cover significantly eroded by the end of the day.

Finished The Joiner.

Listening to videos of the Los Angeles fires. Catastrophic. Every now and then a house or two stands untouched in the midst of ruin. 10,000 buildings consumed. Some suggest the fires were deliberately lit. It began Tuesday; today is Sunday. It is my understanding that it hasn’t ended yet. I don’t like the idea of being helpless, utterly without a useful suggestion to make, a remedy to offer. One man wept bitterly for the dogs he’d left in his house. One woman screamed from her car, “I have to find my father!” It was foolish to keep watching after I began to sob. 

Our hurricane and California’s fire bring something into cruel focus. Our emergency services are not up to the task, nor are they intended to be. Biltmore Village stands empty and dark. Roads into the mountains will never be rebuilt. FEMA stops paying hotel bills for people who have nowhere else to go. Firefighters and linesmen, etc, are not part of this issue: they worked until they fell in their boots, and no one can level criticism at them, heroes all. Nor can the victims be blamed: we dragged people out of the water, cooked meals, opened our homes; Californians stand on burning roofs trying to save the houses of their neighbors. The people behind the desks are a different story. They scrimp in the name of economy, but that economy serves mostly to get money into the pockets of the rich. Let’s see how little can be enough, until we’re exposed by the next disaster. It will be worse with the incoming administration, which says outright that its purpose is to get money into the pockets of the rich. The American government does not exist to enable or defend the welfare of its people. It is a miraculously well concealed plutocracy, and somehow the masses buy into it. I wish I could fly over LA like a thunderbird, shedding rain from my winds. 

 January 10, 2025

Our much-heralded winter storm was a fizzle– maybe an inch on the ground, melting as it gathers. The brunt seems to have passed to the south, enabling news reels of students at Clemson gamboling in the snow. The sound on my study window now is much like rain. Disastrous fires continue in Los Angeles. One commentator said an area the size of San Francisco is charred. An aspect their fire has that our hurricane did not is the celebrity apocalypse. Anthony Hopkins’ home went up in flames but did not float down the French Broad. 

Sweetboi is gone. He’s like a grown son who comes back on holidays, has a few square meals, and then is off on his adventures. 

One neighnorhood lady walks her bulldog on my side of the street instead of on the sidewalk. I thought this curious, until, watching today, I saw her let her dog shit on my lawn, where it wouldn’t show and she wouldn’t have to clean it up. Mystery explained. 

Fire

 January 9, 2025

Los Angeles is aflame. It’s the next big national disaster after ours. All in all, I’d prefer wind and water to fire, so my heart goes out to them. Videos from Malibu and Pacific Palisades are horrifying. 

Trying to reconcile my apparently insatiable appetite for feral hog hunting videos with my belief in the sanctity of all sentient life. 

Discovered that I have a seat warmer in my Toyota. The little blessings. . . .

 January 8, 2025

A bluebird perched on Sweetboi’s branch. Which pleased the branch more? The branch reorganizes, re-projects itself according to who’s perched upon it. 

Rose yesterday and wrote in the dark before morning. Morning was a long time coming, but when it came, the east went purple-gray. 

Bluebirds and robins still thronging. I don’t know exactly what to do for them. Maybe I already did it by not raking the leaves. 

Resolved to visit M in Mission Hospital. It has been thirty years since I was there, and I'd forgotten how dauntingly enormous the place is. I parked at the exact farthest corner from the place I was meant to be, so I wandered through the mass of it. Reminded me of the several times I worked in hospitals. M was having a procedure and not in his room. I waited for an hour, but he didn’t come back, so I went on my way. He is so sick the presence of a visitor might not have been a pleasure anyway. Security is tighter at the hospital than I remember, or would have imagined. One is photographed, IDed, watched suspiciously in the corridors. That did allow me to ask directions quickly on those several occasions where I found myself lost. The view from the hospital windows is spectacular, frosty blue mountains rolling into the distance. 

Epiphany

 January 6, 2025

Epiphany. Almost incredibly inclement outside, with high winds from the north and swirling veils of grainy snow. The ground and low air skitter with robins. I’m glad I don’t rake my leaves, for they’re scratching around under them trying to find sustenance. They gather on my east porch, a little out of the full brunt of the wind. Little birds, sparrows and wrens and my handsome towhees, shelter in the tangle of raspberry stalks I leave outside the bedroom window, where I can see them from my bed. The wind and the trees and the birds all move in various directions, making the earth turbulent to behold. 

I’ve been keeping this journal for 56 years. 

Looking up JG’s house, I strayed onto mine, discovering a bounty of former owners, and that my roof was new in 2005. All the photos online are from before I moved in, but as the place was when I first saw it. Certain listings cite my father’s care facility in Alpharetta and my former PO box downtown as former residences. 

Wind howling like Coleridge’s poem, and like Yeats’. 

 

January 5, 2025 

Berlioz for the 12th day of Christmas. Cold. Flare-up of the old fury, which maybe I put down. Not so bad as in the past. The benison of bluebirds continues. 

Movie Night

 

January 3, 2025

Movie night at DJ’s last night. I ate ungodly portions of fudge. 

Blessing of waves of bluebirds through my trees. 

Odd experiences with Alexa. I was considering what to put in a stew, and said aloud, “I like spinach.” Alexa came awake, unsummoned, and recited the history of spinach. I was having an internal argument with someone and said aloud, “You are a blasphemer.” Alexa woke and said, “I don’t know how to help with that.” 

Removed the drawn-and-scribbled-on wrapping of a Christmas gift from Bekka’s daughters and turned it into a collage painting. 

Stars and planets of unusual immensity. Mars in the east like a drop of blood. 

 January 2, 2025

Looked in my journals to see that twenty years ago I was in Cork, for a joyful freezing New Year. Twenty years ago toay I had the following conversation:

*

In one bar I fell in with the three members of a band which was opening for another band in the bar next door a little later in the night. I don’t remember the name of the band, but I remember the scruffy beauty of their faces. They knew Fergal from McGarrigles in Sligo, so we had something mutual to talk about for a while. They used their own system of notation, with the words of the songs written in pencil on sheets of paper, with some sort of mnemonics based on the thickness of the stroke with which the words were written, by which the band members were trying to cement the tunes into their heads. All systems created to make up for not being able to read music seem more complicated to me than simply reading music. The inevitable happened:

“Has anyone said you look like Elton John? In his younger days?”

“What makes you think I’m not Elton John?”

“Because you’re having a pint in this pub with the likes of us.”

*

Sweetboi has been missing for three days. The carcasses I put in their usual places go uneaten, until consumed by whatever hunts my garden at night. Such a handsome boy is likely to have many friends and protectors, or perhaps he’s stoked enough to fly south. 

The Falls of the Wyona does in fact appear on Kirkus Review’s “Best Indie” reviews of 2024. Can’t imagine how anybody would see it. I searched online for a good ten minutes. 

“Spem in Alium” on Pandora. 

The new owners of Grace Plaza are clearing out the trees on the east-facing hill. This spells the beginning of the end for me, as the roots of those trees are all that keeps the steep bank from collapsing. I wont have the money to fight them. 

First

 January 1, 2025

First tune from the radio in the new year: Smetana, Overture to The Bartered Bride. 

Crow was the first bird of the new year. Crow was the second bird of the new year. The first bird that was not a crow was a blue jay. Rough, strong birds for a year that will need roughness and strength. Intermittent shimmers of snow. 

Turned on the TV thinking to catch a bit of the Rose Parade, discovered that fourteen died in New Orleans last night when somebody rammed a truck through the crowd. They’re calling it a terrorist attack. 

Good Riddance

 December 31, 2024

Orlinski singing Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater. For most of the last ten years I’ve had a big New Year’s Eve party. Not having one tonight. No one mentioned it, longed for it, missed it. No one invited me to theirs. Maybe the hurricane ruined everybody’s party spirit. My life has been an epic of social exclusion which, after some measure of sadness, I have been able to take in stride, in fact, in some ways, to prefer. Peace in enveloping darkness. 

Revising paintings, as one does poems. 

Don’t know what to say about the New Year. I am well. It may be well. The night I threw down my burden on the front porch, darkened by the hurricane, has set me on a different road, upon which my foot has not yet stumbled