Praha

 March 26, 2026

Mother’s death, 1974.

To the vanished Jewish Quarter (now a sort of theme park in which there are few Jews) last night, to a restaurant called Ariel beside Helena Rubenstein’s birthplace, for a traditional dinner and klezmer music. Lovely. German students gathered in the adjoining room, all of them nine feet tall. One doesn’t expect turkey to have been an ancient Jewish staple. Turkey feathers decorated the trappings of Polish hussars, the museum witnesses, so–

At the hotel bar last night Karel the bartender gave me a tutorial on vodkas, the subtle but clear distinctions between those made with wheat, rye, and potato. One should prefer potato. Everyone is packed with information they long for the opportunity to release. Karel had visited NYC on his way to Mexico. 

Enormous, complicated, uninviting Hilton outside of the interesting areas of Prague. I won’t be able to take the walking tour tomorrow, unable to go that far at the pace that society would dictate. This trip has far too many moving parts, far too many fellow travelers. Viking is efficient, but I don’t want efficiency on vacation, but peace that lacks the need for efficiency. L and J are here, which may prevent this town from being a bust. What we passed of Prague on the bus was truly beautiful, all Renaissance pastel. I may have gotten away with a free bag of groceries. I was making a hash of self check-out, so I waved my card across the window and walked out while the screen was still reading “Please remove last item.”  The clerk had been helping me to that point, so I had no idea what the last item was. A crowd formed behind me. I panicked, grabbed my groceries, turned and fled.  

Czartoryiski

 

March 25, 2026

Auschwitz. Birkenwald. I will say nothing.

Czartoryiski Museum: small, dark, far more interested in showing me guns and swords than I was in seeing them. Some fine painting, including the famed da Vinci Lady with an Ermine, which is far from the most interesting piece in that collection, but which was nevertheless surrounded by a horde of French schoolchildren. You wonder about renown and how it is assembled. My guess is if the painter was Johannes Doe it would be hanging on the a common wall with other excellent, enigmatic, but not quite priceless artifacts. I liked the medieval pieces best, and a staff apparently inlaid with emerald. Stopped for chocolate, on Michaela’s recommendation, at Karamela’s, around the corner from the museum. The most chocolatey chocolate there ever was. I am still in a bit of a chocolate coma. Saw thrushes in yew scrub outside St Florian’s gate. Sat for a while in the market. Twice a pigeon landed on my hand (two sequential pigeons, I should say) and regarded me inquisitively. The amazing thing was the unexpected coolness of their claws.  

Krakow

March 24, 2026

Evening of an excellent day. 

Swans fly over and float on the green back of the Wistula

The reading was not at the university, but in the market square (“the largest in medieval Europe”), as part of a festival I never properly understood, but whose central events  were a giant balloon and a track meet rather than a gathering of dottering international poets. It’s all right. I was cheered madly by people who likely didn’t understand a word I’d said. I gave my book to a woman standing nearby. Maybe it will be the occasion of my return. The boys flying around the square with batons in their hands were unspeakably beautiful, carrying themselves upright like gods charging into battle. Lunched at Piano Rouge so I could continue to watch the heats. The French family behind me was loud and funny, enjoying one another’s company. 

Today’s foot tour of the city was informative, but– the Guided Tour has never been one of my favorite things, and I’ve fallen into the flaming, thundering core of it. The guide women are supernatural in their ability to keep the vocal stream going minute after minute without so much as an interrupting breath. Even pleasant voices cloy. Had to take the device out of my ear finally to keep from going berserk, thus missing city blocks of interesting information. Visited Wawel Castle, where it all started. Heard the charming story of the Krakow dragon. Got to St Mary’s Basilica in time to be in the front row for the Opening of the Altar, one firmament of sculpted gold opening to reveal a yet grander one. A nun enters with a stick and pulls aside the golden curtain.

Bussed to the suburbs to see the Krakow Ghetto, which, unlike Warsaw’s, still stands. Empty metal chairs stand in the town square, each one representing 3000 people annihilated. One person in six was a Jew in Krakow in 1938. The Jewish population of the city now stands at 350. According to Michaela, one and a half million people in Warsaw in 1938 had become 1000 and 1945.  You’d expect such a place to be a ruin for a thousand years. 

On my way back to the hotel for a nap I trundled through the covered market, where I could choose from a near infinity of items made of amber. At the end of it I met Tomas, who touched my shoulder and said, “You! I want to ask you a question!” I stopped to listen. He lowered his voice to a whisper and said, “What do you think of Trump?” I told him, and we spent the next several minutes enlarging upon each other’s loathing. Tomas lived in Chicago for five years, where a black man aimed a gun at him and he was told to go somewhere else when he pulled into an all-Black service station. He was born in 1986, and had been in the World Trade Center 17 days before 9/11. He was still reeling from an American girl he liked who turned out to be a Trumpist, that being the deal breaker. His aunt is now visiting from Virginia Beach. He typed the address of the art museum into my phone. His parents had sent him to school in London, and he asked me to critique his English, which is clear but also clearly Polish. Tomas is handsome, rugged-looking, with stone green steady eyes. He touched and poked me as he talked, as old (and Polish) friends might do, and I took that as a greater compliment than if the crowd had swooned over my locally unintelligible poems. I think the original contact was to enlist me for a tour, but almost immediately he said, “I don’t want anything from you.” Part of me murmured “pity.” His friend with the glasses speaks seven languages. Sometimes the angel steps out of the crowd and gives meaning to what was a tangle of unrelated impressions. I have a friend in Krakow.      

Black Madonna

March 23, 2026

Krakow. The Radisson. My window looks out on the greenbelt separating the old city from the rest of the town. 

Saw two storks flying as we left Warsaw. 

Was almost berserk with frustration at Michaela’s endless outpouring of data. The amplified human voice is a known torture method. We need only so much history. After a time she did exhaust herself and I feel asleep, until we got to Czestochowa, and the fortress-shrine of Jasna Gora. That place is jam-packed with history, and our new guide about gave himself a coronary trying to deliver it to us. The Black Madonna herself is disappointing from an artistic standpoint, though something has given her an aura of power and holiness. She has several dresses which she changes Easter Day. The most beautiful one is made wholly of amber. One is studded with rubies. The congregation was full of kids praying for success on their exams. America has no place even vaguely like it. The walls of the sanctuary are covered with discarded crutches. 

The land around Krakow is quite different from that around Warsaw. The Warsaw plain could be Ohio, though somewhat messier. Krakow is a fairy-tale city placed amid a fairy-tale forest. Staggered into the Market Square, found the spot with the most insolent waiters, had zuruck and wine while night fell and the fat crescent moon rode high. 

 

Warsaw 2

 March 22, 2026

Slept ten hours. 

My intuition that these cruise vacations were not for a single traveler turns out to be correct.  I am the single single. No table has five chairs. 

Evening. Last night and this morning I feared this trip would be an ordeal to be endured. A rigid schedule, forced and unsympathetic society, the revulsion of guided tours. . . but by turning things back to the travel I remember, this afternoon redeemed all, finally released from the tour, alone, sitting across from Sigismund Vasa’s palace, drinking Belgian beer (which is what the waiter construed from what I asked) and thinking “Yes, this is me, back on the road, taking it all in.” I was happy. I was the man I’ve always been on the road. The great sponge absorbing, the great chameleon becoming. 

The morning bus tour through historic Warsaw was informative and grueling in equal measure. Our very cute guide fixated on the cruelties of the Nazis and of Stalin, but, since the Old City has disappeared, perhaps that is the balance of the story. 87% of the structures in Warsaw were pulverized. We went to the Ghetto, which was devastating even though time has been successful in rooting out every trace of physical remembrance. I turned my back and wept at the monuments. Can I go to Auschwitz? I barely endured the Warsaw ghetto, of which almost no palpable remnant remains. Men sit up at night imagining new sins, new atrocities. Laborious cruelty has been the ensign of the nations.  

Staggering back to the hotel across the many vast public squares I regretted tomorrow’s rush. Having discovered the Old City, I could spend days here in delight now, wandering around, poking into corners. Even the state of my legs was endurable. 

Why is the symbol of Warsaw a mermaid? Turns out she’s a Lorelei, a Wistula Maiden who lured men to their doom in the river when there was no one here but fishermen.

Warsaw

 March 21, 2026

Watched Blue Moon on the plane, then slept in a variety of unrestful positions till the sea was crossed. 

Sofitel Victoria, Warsaw. The design of the city between the airport and here is largely Soviet, softened by elegant plantings of trees. It seems a new city, a development, as I suppose it is, having been obliterated in the 40's. Turned the radio on to a station playing Western standards, “Bring Him Home,” “Perfect,” which are then repeated in Polish. Long expositions between songs of which I, of course, understand nothing. We Viking voyagers are all elderly, some of us in wheelchairs, some so deaf they don’t know how loud we’re talking, asking the thitd version of the same querulous question. I’d not appreciated the profundity of my own decline. Stairs, a fast pace, a high step undo me. Fell twice. I’d not appreciated how much the Americans with Disabilities Act smoothed the path for people who are not counted as disabled. The Munich airport is all stairs, no elevators, the assumption being that if one travels one is up to a little challenge. I am not anymore. Racing for the Viking van I heard myself praying, “Let this be over.” Nobody my age travels alone. I noticed this in every corridor and waiting area. I’ve always been an anomaly, but some variations of that become more difficult to conceal. Give it up. Have some sense of proportion.

My first bartender couldn’t mix a cocktail because she was too young. She’s at school studying :to do somethng with hair.” My second  bartender gave me a cup of wasabi peas for a midnight snack, as I had praised the ones that were set before me with my drink.  

Keanu Reeves speaking Polish on the TV in a Shao Lin combat movie. 

After five or six hours, I judge the Poles to be sweet natured and tribal. 

March 19, 2026

Furnace people came to inspect this AM. One was a Tolkien fan and spent time perusing my bookshelf. 

Lunch with SS to get the skinny on what was a laborious casting process. We seem to be on even keel at the moment. I’m absconding for two weeks, so it’s out of my hands. But, a general comment is that everything is too damn hard.

Ready to fly out tomorrow. Ready for some unseen circumstance to cause me to stay. Glad that those impulses are in equipoise, and I’m ready for any outcome. 

Did not cram German as I meant to.  

Tidy

 

March 18, 2026

Much activity before departure. Sound of the dishwasher on the floor below.

I’ve remarked before how my chronological age is a shock to me when I think of it. The way I feel inside my head is indistinguishable from the way I felt when I was 25. I have the same excitement, the same anticipation, the same naive faith in the goodwill of the universe, the same caution about risk,–not that I’m averse to it in the abstract, but because I fear delay or detour to “What I Am Meant by Destiny to Do.”  You’d think that Destiny’s manifest indifference to me would have pushed that thought out long ago. 

The ferns by the back door are slaughtered by the freeze. Have not looked elsewhere, fearing what I would see, unable to effect redress.

Congratulating myself on finishing off this and that in the refrigerator before I depart. “How tidy he was” the officials will say if I do not return. 

Blessed St. Patrick

 March 17, 2026

Blessed Saint Patrick. Packing; unless I have a change of mind, packed. Angry snow last night, thinning out to a tiny sprinkle of diamonds every few minutes. 

My sister and I both leave the country Friday, to meet in a week in Prague. My emotion is anxiety, hers excitement, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same emotion pushed through different filters. 

Session of prayer deep into the night. “Warfare” would have been another name. It would be nice to be certain of something, anything, some time. I believe my life has come to nothing. To be certain of that would save expenditure of energy in the time left to me. 

The mercury plunges; I drag around in my winter cap and coat, wondering what to stuff into the slits under the windows. 

Sligo by Night

 

March 16, 2026

On the hypochondria front, in the dark of the morning I was seeing flashes of light behind my closed eyelids. I thought I’d read something about that being a symptom of stroke, and I prepared for the worst. Then, finally, I heard thunder & opened my eyes on an actual plain-old lightning storm, which still continues rain-wise, though the electronics are passed in the east. Bad night, all in all. Was it the weather? Something led me from one turbulent dream to another.

My most recent painting, Sligo by Night, was painted over the weekend on a panel that I've had for 52 years. It came with a painting I didn't like very much (but somehow remember in detail) which I painted over years ago, and painted over again this weekend. I love reusing backings, and this is an especially sturdy one. The vanished painting was by W Korybut. I looked that up. W Michael Korybut was King of Poland and Grant Duke of Latvia (or something). I don't think the painting was actually by him, but by Wanda Korybut, born in 1907, one example of whose work is noted for sale online. The lost painting was called "Quiet Garden" and featured a birdbath in yellow light amid a green landscape. As I say, it is vanished under other images, but I remember it well. There's a note on the back which reads, "To David with love from Keith and Denise, 5/4/74. " A gift from an enduring friend at one of the worst times of my life. The yellow birdbath is gone, but all else evolves. 

Found a flea on my hand last night. Mystery.

Tyler at the Verizon store says my phone is fine for traveling.

 March 15, 2026

Clouds gathering to the north. A turkey, having discovered how to flap to the top of the wire trellis and balance, perches there, looking into the guest room window like a nosy neighbor.  Got to read the Lesson from Samuel wherein God, despite insisting otherwise, holds a beauty pageant among Jesse’s sons to make rosy, beautiful-eyed David the next king. 

 

March 14, 2026

Returned to painting. Felt tension leak out of my body like cold water. I’d been dreaming of having art shows in tents and vast, rickety building, where I could revise my huge, bright canvases in front of the guests if I wanted to. 

Eugene

 March 13, 2026

Dad’s 107th birthday. The poems I write on his day involve travel, because when I was working this date happened in the middle of spring break, and I was often somewhere exotic. 

P and I on Blake. 

Some of my mind’s energy is spent wondering why I never “got” my father, why I seldom appreciated what he did, and why what he did was so seldom what I needed. I long to go back and thank him for this or that particular thing. He took us to California. He built the Big Slide and my teepee and Linda’s play house. He suffered through the Boy Scouts. Sometimes I was horrid. Sometimes he was horrid. Even if he was troubling to me, I should have recognized what my sister says all the time, “He was doing his best.” Something made me repelled at his presence, embarrassed by him, whatever the cause being buried in that time before there is memory. I think it was not my fault– how could it be? If I had known what it was I could have forgiven it. Or perhaps not, and it’s better that I never know. But I think he lived long enough for all those rocks and jags to become a level plane. And now, so have I.

 March 12, 2026

Bitter rain straight from the north. No gardening today. Power flickered a number of times, whatever it is in the house that whistles when the power goes out whistling its heart out. The news says that temperatures will hit 20 in the next few nights, so it’s possible that the gardening I’ve already done will be for naught.  However it goes in the next few days, a truth I take away is that I’m in better shape this year than I was last, the work do-able, even enticing, and never the debilitated staggering to a chair that ruled last season. Who can explain why things come and go? Years with terrible acid reflux– gone. Years with fierce and daily muscle spasms– gone. Difficult breathing and exhaustion– coming and going, but for the moment in abeyance.  Leg infections endure. One concedes they are small among possible afflictions. 

Checked Schwab. Thanks to Trump I’m $80,000 in the hole. It’s early in the day and the red numbers continue to plunge. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has done absolutely everything wrong in his life, every blessed thing. It is amazing on its own, but that it should be tolerated, or have been tolerated past his youth, is more amazing still.

Briefly snowed. 

Hart's-tongue

 March 11, 2026

The pear tree that died three years ago slipped out of the ground easy as pulling a knife from butter, as I hoped it would all this while. Planted hart’s-tongue, pulled weed vines, watered. 

Had a panic attack when I realized I’d booked no hotels in Europe. A phone call assured me that Viking does all of that. Feeling, therefore, very old and very rich. 

Watched the much-reviled Melania. Unlucky triviality in a time when the expense of trivialities cannot be borne. 

Grudging submissions to various outlets and contests. 

Perfect weather. 

 March 10, 2026

Strenuous gardening day. Spaded up some of the streetside garden to plant mint and groundcover. Dug around the roses so they’ll be free of grass.  Replanted what had been dug up by the squirrels. 19 minutes deep in ASC rehearsal, and I’m not there. I’ll be missing the concert, but I thought I’d go to rehearsal anyway, for the sake of repertoire and society. I guess not. 

 March 9, 2026

The bloodroot is in bloom. Planted woodruff and a white plant whose name I forget in one of the raised beds. 

 

March 8, 2026

Gentle rain. Hacked bamboo yesterday, planted lupines, hit Mountain Madre with friends from the North Side. At table many remembrances with the details gone awry, or at least disputed. My restaurant bills are less now that meals do not include alcohol. Watched Netflix’s The Dinosaurs with anticipation and delight. Watched the film Hamnet. What do I think? I’ll know in a little while. The last scene, where hands reach from the Pit to comfort Hamlet dying on stage, seemed to me the epitome of the power of theater, the moment that all else leads to and recedes from. Wept alone in my own house without understanding that could be put into words. 

Howells this morning, “Like as the hart.” When I was singing at Second English Lutheran in Baltimore and impatient with anything after the Renaissance, that seemed to me the one modern work I would have called of a piece with the ancients. Still would, though it is no longer alone. Today we did it meager justice. Tried to speak to T as we left church, but his face was red with fury, complaining to his wife about K’s correcting his own personal missed note. “I KNEW I had the wrong note! He didn’t have to stop everybody and–” I have been him, my rage banked by having no wife to share it with. K has not learned how to deal with mistakes, addressing them as one would a character flaw rather than an incident. One’s misbehavior is publicized and laboriously exorcized. 

Slept too big, woke out of the mood to fill the rest of the day with deeds. 

SS has cast Purification, asserting it was agony to do so. Not going to ask why it was so hard. The first thing you expect is that nobody liked the script. 

Strange, pervasive change in perception, the greatest one I remember, greater even than the change from childhood into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood, though perhaps I don’t remember them as sharp as they were. The image laid before me to describe is of a vast dome filled with space and clarity, and that is my mind. Like clear water under morning sun. Still. White and golden. I think of Yeats’s smiling sages sitting on their height in “Lapis Lazuli.” In times gone by I have known compassion as a correct behavioral choice, but I had not known it as a living thing, a plenum through which the soul moves and by which it must be pervaded. I wear perception like a coat, pulling it around me. I did nothing to bring this on; it just is. You hunt the quarry for a hundred years and come home to find it standing at your front door. Rage still comes, but it is like the throwing of a stone into a river, whatever effect it has passing in a moment, the flow continuing. I compare my spirit to my actual age, and the comparison is ludicrous. I am a boy. This is a boy’s white morning. Through my security cameras I watch me hobbling up the front steps, grasping the pillars to make it to the top,

 March 6, 2026

Morning by the river. T was at the café, running in half a minute down the list of his recent triumphs, his new grandchild, how his kids have moved back to town, how his next novel comes out in a few months. He introduced me to his wife, pretty much (physically) a female version of himself. Our last contact was when he failed, or refused, to produce a blurb for Beautiful Necklaces on the day it was due, after assuring me nothing would please him more. “I just can’t” said his plaintive email. Whether he ran out of time or hated the book I never asked. Clearly he’s over it. I’m not.

Held off gardening until dusk, when I filled the concrete Grecian urns with violas. 

 

March 5, 2026

Gorgeous spring day. Shopped at Israel’s and spent the morning planting what I’d bought. Sat on the pond bench and watched a song sparrow and a robin bathing on different rocks. I can feel the heat of sunburn on my head and neck. It is the most terrible world, and yet the song sparrows come down and bathe on a flat rock. Contested in the dark with the Lord the Betrayer, who remains the Betrayer, and yet the song sparrows come to bathe on the flat rocks. 

 

March 4, 2026

Mozart’s Requiem last night. A privilege to sing. I heard frog singing in my pond as the moon rose.

 

March 3, 2026

Huge gardening day. Many porch pots filled and planted, items put into the east yard to try to get something to grow amid the gravel, in the clay and shade. The nursery lady said “try these,” and so I do. Bought wholesale a huge box of anonymous peonies, got them into the ground. Planting one thing digs up another, and so things get moved around, compromising what original plan there was. 

 

March 2, 2026

An hour before the AVLGMC meeting at my house, a van arrived with people in it who wanted to demonstrate the Kirby vacuum cleaner. I said “OK” because they said they’d get a prize if I just listened for a while. It’s been a long time since I was so beside myself with impatience. 

Saint David

 March 1, 2026

St. David’s Day. Daffodils peeking triumphantly through the loam. Chatterbox choir substitute frayed my nerves. Power drill-voiced Harry the Substitute Baritone frayed my nerves. Left lovely sandwiches behind to get out of church as fast as possible. Amazing nap dreams did not fray my nerves. 

 February 28, 2026

Gardening in cool spring light. Had a bad night– awful thoughts, awful dreams, which somehow transmuted into a glad day. Woke and wrote a poem while it was still dark. Finished filling the raised beds, planted a snow white Lenten hellebore. Lunch with DJ. 

Trump attacks Iran during the night. Cannot face the thousand ways in which the attack is illegal, immoral, monstrous. Trump and Netanhayu like two jackals that attack another jackal and think they’re doing something useful for the world.