Tuesday, June 24, 2025

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. 


Wednesday, June 18, 2025

 


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. 


Sunday, June 15, 2025

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


Saturday, June 7, 2025

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. 


Saturday, May 31, 2025

 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. 


Wednesday, May 28, 2025

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. 


Tuesday, May 20, 2025

 

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. 

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

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. 


Friday, May 9, 2025

 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. 


Saturday, May 3, 2025

 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. 


Wednesday, April 30, 2025

 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.

Sunday, April 27, 2025

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. 

Saturday, April 26, 2025

 

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. 


Friday, April 25, 2025

 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.  

Thursday, April 24, 2025

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. 


Friday, April 18, 2025

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. 


Saturday, April 12, 2025

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. 

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

 


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


Monday, April 7, 2025

 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. 


Monday, March 31, 2025

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.


Saturday, March 29, 2025

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. 


Friday, March 21, 2025

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. 


 March 16, 2025

Evidently a storm of proportion last night, lightning and thunder, downed trees, power outages. I slept right through it, wondering in the morning why there was water on both my east and west windows. 

Jazz concert at St. George’s. I slept through part of it, having dreams curiously unrelated to anything that was happening in my environment.


 March 15, 2025

In the silken gray before dawn I watched an opossum scuttle through the garden, at one point accompanied, with clear intent, by a robin. 

Friday, March 14, 2025

 March 14, 2025

Rehearsal last night was turbulent (or is it me being impatient?) with a bunch of new singers finding their place in the order and our director showing them how much fun we have at rehearsal. It IS fun, but it is also wasteful. Gay men chatter more than women.

Shreds of bright colored plastic flutter from the branches of trees, blown there by the hurricane, and too high to reach. A lovely tatter of blue floats in sight of my front porch. 

Dug bamboo. Planted spearmint in the ground and succulents in pots on the porch. Relied on rain for watering, but there was no rain. 

Birthday

 

March 13, 2025

Father’s birthday. I seem to be in unusual places on this day. Once Venice, once Valletta, once Tel Aviv. Today it’s the waiting room for the Service Area of Anderson Toyota, where the car and I have come to get our 5000 mile check-up and have some recall issue (explained to me in vain) addressed. Reading a biography of a fairly boring, very important poet. An old man and an old woman talk loudly about how they were always Republicans but how the last several weeks have turned them around. I realize I like the smell of tires. 


Daffodils

 

March 11, 2025

Biggest day in the garden yet. On the inspiration of the clean-out last week, I attacked the tangle at the northern edge of the garden, pruning and wall-building, uncovering sassafras and persimmon from the cover of other trees, opening the gap under the lilacs wide enough for a bear or an agile person to pass through. 

Discouraged at the slow slog of proofreading The Nurseryman’s Wedding.

Rehearsal turbulent. The music isn’t challenging and we have an unusually long rehearsal period, so our director has a chance to exhibit every exhausting tic directors develop to fill the time. “Now read the words speaking only the vowels. . . why don’t we count-sing that . . .”  

Daffodils popping out like stars at evening.


 March 10, 2025

Lenten Arts Series opened well yesterday. I feared the remoteness of the venue would limit attendance, but it didn’t seem to be the case. 

Planted the last rhododendron (for now), pulled out wayward growth, enlarged the garden wall.

The huge shape in the tree behind me as I worked was a red-tailed hawk. Whoever bought me the subscription to hawk-of-the-day has my gratitude. 

Watched a show called “Fifty Worst Movies of All Time.“ I’d seen one of them, Attack of the Killer Shrews. 


Saturday, March 8, 2025

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.”

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

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. 


Saturday, March 1, 2025

 

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. 

Friday, February 28, 2025

 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. 


Sunday, February 23, 2025

 

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. . . .


Tuesday, February 18, 2025

 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. 


Sunday, February 16, 2025

 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. 


Saturday, February 15, 2025

 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. . . .