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