April 29, 2025

Distant thunder. 

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

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

 April 28, 2025

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

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

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

Weeding

 April 27, 2025

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

 

April 26, 2025

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

 April 25, 2025

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

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

Rain

 April 24, 2025

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

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

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

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

*

From email this AM:

WS-M <@gmail.com>

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

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

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

Big hugs,

WS-M

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

Francis

 April 21, 2025

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

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

Planted the last of the callas. 

Easter

 

April 20, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Russian sacred music from the computer. 

 

April 19, 2025

Holy Saturday

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

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

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

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

Planted oxalis. 

Good Friday

April 18, 2025

Good Friday.

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

Maundy Thursday

 

April 17, 2025

Maundy Thursday. 

Sent out play manuscripts.

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

Brilliant and cool. 

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

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

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

 

April 16, 2025

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

Random memory

 April 15, 2025

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

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

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

 April 14, 2025

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

Lotti

 April 13, 2025

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

Til Eulenspiegel plays on WCQS at least once a week. 

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

 April 12, 2025

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

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

Red dog

 April 11, 2025

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

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

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

 

April 8, 2025

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

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

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

Brief bout of weeding. 

 

April 7, 2025

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

Jay North is dead.

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

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

Rain. Indoors-allowing rain.

Struggle with the printer resolved after only minimal fury

 April 6, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hands Off!

 

April 5, 2025

Last night with the Spirit on the front porch.

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

Cyrus

 

April 4, 2025

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

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

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

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

Abominations continue to roll out of DC. 

 April 3, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

April 1, 2025

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

 March 31, 2025

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

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

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