April 8, 2015

Woke sad yesterday; woke exultant today, without any inkling why the difference.
   
Subsequently, yesterday was one in which every mechanical or material thing when absurdly wrong. Jars could not be opened. Mixing bowls were broken in the sink. Piles of cat vomit appeared which were larger than the cat. Went stupid in the middle of a presentation on the Smart Board. Rain started the minute I walked outside, etc. Today is another day. Good class yesterday on Wilde.
   
Smokey’s Tavern is closing. It was the first bar I ever entered in Asheville, when it was deeply red-neck. My first local boyfriend and I entered on a dare. Long-ago patron when it was a boys’ bar. Sudden, slight nostalgia. Sold them some of their art. I wonder if I could buy it back?

April 7, 2015

Nick the dark-eyed mower man came yesterday. I didn’t see in the dark of the morning, but smelled the mown wild chives mingling with the hyacinths and the perfume of rain. I amuse him in some way I do  not fully comprehend.
   
Maud vomiting on the Turkish rugs when I came through the door after the work-out.  Some small thing one finds, nevertheless, almost unendurable.
   
Long talk with Will, who thinks he might be back in the buying vein again. Everyone knows better gossip than I do.
   

April 6, 2015

Holy Saturday morning I rose, covered the delicate plants against a freeze (Did it come? Probably not) and drove to Atlanta. Linda and I went to Easter service at North Point (our Saturday afternoon service was one of eight or ten they have in order to accommodate the shocking thousands of people who want to attend). I found it moving, and could see why thousands and thousands come, though I could not put my finger on exactly the attractive element. At All Souls the Mystery is shrouded behind ceremony and tradition, which gives it majesty, yes, but not the immediacy of North Point, which tells the story as though it had happened yesterday and no one but us had ever heard it. It’s child-like, but in a sweet and exuberant way. I looked for things to object to, but everywhere was openness and exuberance, and I became open and exuberant under the influence. I think the effect rather depends on novelty, even a little shock, but for the moment it was what I needed.
   
David and Daniel had had a weekend first of charity exhibition boxing and then of with fraternity antics in the wilderness, which left them both a little spent, but also glittering with healthy and heedless young manhood. I cannot even imagine what their lives are like. They are the boys whose lives I could not imagine in college, handsome and athletic, the center of intrigues they didn’t even know of. Nothing is past them. Every path can be considered. No one shrugs off their friendship. They are whom I think of when I hear the phrase, “Lord, shield the joyful,” for certainly a good deal of privilege goes into their lives, but my response is “so what?” They did not ask for it, nor do they rob anyone else in having it.  It’s also puzzling where their god-likeness came from. There’s not any precedent in my family, nor from their father, who was and is a nebbish. A Visitation, I suppose. Most particularly they have each other. I have never seen two young me so comfortable with one another. David is naturally and Daniel is studiously kind. We watched their boxing matches on the Internet.
   
The redbuds were in titanic flower over the mountain toward South Carolina, and slashes of pure yellow lit the forest where jessamine climbed a tree. We watched the red moon rise over their deck Saturday night.

April 5, 2015


Come, Beloved. Beloved, come.

April 4, 2015

Holy Saturday.

Yesterday it was a reading of poetry for the “Queer Conference.” I was the only one actually to mention sex. I thought that’s what it was meant to be all about, for once. One is an egret among sparrows. One set out merely to be a superior sparrow.

Atlanta. Chill coming and I won’t be here to protect my plants.

April 3, 2015

Spent the afternoon with S. He is quite beautiful when his beard is shaved and his hair cut short, though it is not my place to say so.

Did my work-out, sat in the gym café and wrote a poem. I foresee a number of gymnasium poems.

Pink and powder blue dawn.

April 1, 2015

Early afternoon, and already I have had the prince of days.  Rose very early and was at the gym when it opened. Did my weights and my feeble pool laps; poured out stress into the steam room. Then I sat in the gym lounge and wrote two poems, and the sun was not yet up when I had finished. Remembered how much I like institutional coffee whitened with that powdered creamer than could be made of anything. Then to the studio, where I worked hard and well and was thoughtlessly happy. Then, when it was warm, home to heroic gardening. Set the angel’s trumpet and Christina’s milkweed into the soil. Dug new space, fertilized the roses; watered everything. If I can stay awake, the afternoon is devoted to writing. 
   
Looked 205 Harvard Place up on a real estate site. It looks very much different from when we lived there, except the bathroom, which seems the same, and the magnificent banister that was made, apparently, for a far more elegant house. What horrible memories! Found Richard–the main cause of the horribleness of the memories– in an interview for a Syracuse paper, in which his Narcissism is as monstrous and as unconscious as ever. He tried to Facebook friend me once, and I wondered if it were contempt for me or the most exquisite lack of self-knowledge that would permit him to do such a thing.

Typos are proof that God doesn’t love me.

A pileated woodpecker crossed and recrossed the sky above my yard as I worked.