September 7, 2012

Birthday dinner at J and L’s, very sweet, a select group and cooked-just-right kabobs on the grill.

I don’t want to say that recent days have been blank slates, but they have been slates upon which there was not much will or opportunity to write. Classes are good, my students’ writing and participation outstanding. But I come home between and afterwards and sleep. I had underestimated the severity of the depression I entered in Sligo I think I am just now climbing out of it.

It is an odd green outside, the green world crushed under the gray silk of an enduring fog.

Looked carefully at the poetry of the poet whom nearly everybody cites as their favorite, who is quoted almost every time a contemporary poet is quoted. I read her poems with my lips tight, wondering what the attraction is, finding them not quite drab, but uninspired, ordinary, even a trifle borrowed. Perhaps that is exactly their attraction, drabness, lack of inspiration, extreme familiarity. Safety from the rigors of discovery. I picture a housewife strolling into her backyard and remarking, as if the world were just now belatedly revealed, on the niceness of everything. Her daughter is pulling a buttercup. Her neighbor makes excellent pies. A bird sings. She herself is so filled with love and understanding. She embraces the whole half block she can see from her patio. It is not nice to call other people names. Not that any of this is bad, but that it should be handwritten on pink paper and folded into her husband’s lunch bag for a sweet noon surprise. It should not pass as the voice of the age.

September 5, 2012

Re-blooming white iris is a ghost in the garden minutes before dawn.

Addendum

 In 1973 I bought a plastic laundry basket at the Westcott Variety Store in Syracuse, NY, for $1.79 (the price is still inked on the bottom) TODAY that finally-broken-down basket is going into the recycle bin. Well done thou good and faithful servant. 

September 3, 2012

Third night in a row downtown, and this time it was Caleb’s Poetry Cabaret at the Altamont. It was sensational fun, with a wide variety of poets performing. I arrived to find that I was a “featured poet,” a little embarrassed (and a little satisfied) to be singled out from the crowd like that. Read poems from The Glacier’s Daughters. It was good to hear them again. I appreciated that all kinds of poetry were represented, but it is still the case that performance poetry–slam poetry as it was called, rather nostalgically, last night– depends for its effect not on itself but on the supposed authority of the performer. Our featured slam poet did undistinguished poetry about being gay, which was received with enthusiasm because it was assumed he had suffered all the anti-gay indignities, enjoyed all the gay delights, mentioned in the poem. I think of this because it’s the sort of thing I obsess about, the long struggle between moment and eternity, between fad and culture. A lot of surrealism. Balance of the races. Girls in lovely dresses. No one but me like me. Two guys from the drunken, laconic, Kerouac-Hunter S Thompson-Bob Dylan-late-arriving and instruction-missing- hipster camp, whom I thought I would loathe, but who turned out to be clever and entertaining. All styles, in any case. It was good to see the K's at the front table. The rain had stopped by the time we took our pictures and headed home, and the city gleamed with slick streets and a misty, fading moon. The night gleam of the city made me think I was hungry.

Everything is dull with mist now. Kevin let fly a few bars and then, as I might in fact do, subsided back into amphibian sleep.

Was told to lie about the bike wreck, telling people someone ran into me, rather than to admit no one was within half a mile and my own brakes did me in.

Addendum

Took my bike out for the first time in a couple of years. Wrestled with inflating the tires. All that kind of thing is more frustrating to me than it should be. Anyway, rode around in the empty parking lots and roads by the Woodfin Y. In one sense it was not a successful venture. I had forgotten how efficient the brakes are, and when I first applied them, they grabbed hold and I went flying over the handlebars. I landed flat (I’ve always been a good faller) so nothing got more of a shock than anything else. Not even scraped skin, though my already damaged shoulder was jarred and aches like hell now. On the other hand, I feel terrific, spent and energized at once, as I remember from the old days.

September 2, 2012

ACB remembered my father as gentle and kind. She said “all the other adult men in the neighborhood were gruff. Your father wasn’t.”

The golden boy climbed onto the roof and fixed the leak–so we think until the rains come–in fifteen minutes. I had worried about if for six months. I introduced him to the cats, and he thought Circe was a nice name. Being the Village Explainer, I said, “Circe is a witch in the–“
”I know,” he said from under his golden thatch. “I read.”

SC sang “Happy Birthday” to me over the phone.

Slept through most of my birthday, as though a wish I’d uttered long ago to be turned into a cat were being fulfilled. Did write a story in the morning, which turned out to be about my father. The last two years I bought a vehicle on my birthday; no such thing was going to happen this year, but there had to be something to commemorate the day, so I bought a set of Italian wine glasses at an antiques store under where I used to have my studio at the Candle Station. Also Rosetta Stone collections for French and German, to honor the passion for languages which has come upon me late, but, I hope, not futilely.

In the afternoon I met MN and his wife J, who are here for a wedding, and took them on a brief tour of the area, including a chunk of the Parkway, my studio, Biltmore Ave and Pack Square downtown. M’s kindness is what I remember from high school, and that has deepened with the years. Also noted that I have no domestic conversation, they almost nothing but. This is not a criticism of either side, but rather a source of wonderment. I learned–happily–the ins and outs of their complicated family histories. The N's always live in a clump, like an old Italian princely clan, and when one moves, the others move too, until the same proximity is achieved in a new neighborhood. I envy this. They bought me dinner in the midst of the hubbub on Pack Square, and we were all happy. I told M I remembered him from his first day in first grade, a transfer from another school. He was small (I felt myself wanting to protect him from the newness of it all) and had wondrously dark hair. He was the first human to whom I remember applying the adjective “beautiful.” I recall the moment clearly.  I’d opened a new door of perception with that unuttered, but fully considered, word “beautiful.”  They, husband and wife, had a perilous and heroic courtship one would not guess at regarding their extreme domesticity today. I’ve no idea what they learned of me. I don’t recall saying much about what I’ve seen and done. What would I have said? In the sense they would recognize, I have had no life at all.

Last night’s moon was even lovelier than the night before’s.

September 1, 2012

Brilliant moon last night, a blue moon, though ivory white, casting shadows to the north throughout the visible garden. Active morning, though the infection in my legs encouraged me to nap mightily in the afternoon. At evening I went downtown to the opening of Apothecary. It’s a small space on Eagle Street, but plenty of room for the engaged imagination. Frank and his friends had already decorated with spare brilliance and unexpected taste. I was early, and so heard none of the bands, and felt shaky, so I couldn’t stay. But I saw the moon rising behind the big steeple over Eagle Street, and I thought that made much well. I was a bit disoriented and had a minor accident in the parking garage, so part of today will involve restoring a hubcap.

Birthday greetings on Facebook, which I receive with boyish delight. I am too old for most of the emotions I have.