February 7, 2017

As I left the gym, the sky above me was dark turquoise, slashed with the fuzzy silver of one vapor trail.

In moment of resolve I bought tickets for Venice for spring break. Had anxiety about it until the moment it was done.

Message from a former student in Armenia, thanking me for some experience I can’t now put my finger on. Gratification.

Painted pretty well, but with a short temper. That is the refrain for the week, the pissed-off blues.

SS says that he (and most of the playwrights he knows) will not write a play until sure that a production is forthcoming. I do not fathom that about writing, but I guess I do about painting, waiting for some kind of palpable audience before I tackle the big projects I have in my heart. L’homme arme while I paint.

Yellowish gray daylight, too warm for February. I drunken E-bayed a Pluto dog to sit beside the one I had since before my first birthday, desperate for some kind of succor, likely or unlikely.

February 6, 2017

Allowed my voice through a heavy singing day, though I was also in a terrible mood and stomped around Cantaria rehearsal like a fly-tormented bull. Excellent sermon, taking the Powers of This World to task.

I bought a pot of hyacinths at the grocery store. They are coming into bloom, night-purple, spreading their perfume throughout the house.

Raging at the keyboard for typing things other than what I type.

February 5, 2017

Bitter cold night. My furnace struggled to blow its breath into the far corners of the house.

Downtown last night with Sam. Virginal drinks at the XYZ (he’s still but twenty), which was brimming with beautiful reddish dogs, as well as people. Then to the Wortham, where I was greeted by two dozen people from my more public past. I felt myself hoping he was impressed. Aquila’s Much Ado was a disappointment–even an offense–the cause of which was evident in the first five minutes. They had decided to do the play with three players. Turns out this cannot be done. It was a mere stunt. Claudio was played by two different actors in the same scene. Hero was a ship figurehead plopped down in the middle of a bar whose back wall was the Union Jack, or a blond wig on Beatrice, whichever. The bating scenes were ludicrous, one actor trying to do the lines of three. “I am the only love god.” Even I who can practically recite the play by heart had a hard time knowing who was saying what to whom. Any semblance of character or meaning or nuance was sacrificed to the stunt. School children are meant to see the work on Monday. What they will make of it I can’t imagine. It’s been years since I went to see the Aquila, and the reason was a horrendous Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which also suffered from criminal casting. People did laugh. All was sacrificed for those laughs.

Heroic Judge Robart in Washington has stopped, for the moment, Trump’s executive order banning travel from the Middle East, some of it. The irony is this: Nobody in his right mind would deny a president (some president other than this one) the power to stop entry into this country by some people or peoples in a time of emergency. But in his arrogance and wilfulness, Trump chooses the wrong people, too many people, and in the wrong way, which means that somewhere down the line, when this power is really needed by a president, it will be hobbled and muddled up by messy precedent and the legalities trailing along from this sad moment. This is the way in which Trump is going to weaken the presidency for the foreseeable future. He will require Congress and the Judiciary to install checks and barriers that would not have been necessary, would not have been thought of, had he taken a one day course in how to govern in a constitutional democracy.

February 4, 2017

Sam and I have tickets for Much Ado about Nothing at the Wortham tonight. Had to be pushed into going because I’ve become such an old limpet clinging to the bottom of my rock.

The Greensboro play was supposed to come with a cash prize. Of course that never materialized. They gave me a cardboard check three feet long for $5000. It was a joke.

February 3, 2017

Congress rolls back citizen protection in the environment and finance. They’re like a gang of bad children left suddenly without adult supervision.  Better poems today. They actually listened to me. Young poets are afraid of actually telling the story of the poem. They’ll present a mist of uncertain generalities and someone will ask, “What does this mean?” and the poet will say, “Well, this is about the time I lost my buddy in Iraq,” and you’ll fountain forth Why the hell didn’t you say so? Someone introduced the concept of universality without telling them how it is to be achieved.

February 2, 2017

A rouse for Brigid the Blessed.

Venus, Mars and the moon lined up last night in the clear sky. People said Uranus was in line behind them, but he could not be seen, at least by me.

Reading fiction submissions for ___ Magazine’s fiction contest. Out of 25 entries read so far, I put one in the “Yes” column for future consideration. Made some “Maybe’s” just so the orange card of “No” wouldn’t predominate so. Lots of mediocre work.  Is this a true indication of what people are doing? Limp. I blame Trump.

Some bad poems in class yesterday, me realizing that my pedagogical technique stops being so fluid when it comes up against the need to say, “No, that’s not it at all.”  After I corrected one poem’s mass of abstract diction, a class member said, “I LIKE the abstract words. I like the fact that it is so–abstract. I like the idea that you can’t really put a meaning on it.”  What needed to be said was, “In the world of the academic, that is one of the very few opinions which is absolutely wrong. always, in every context, and which cannot be countenanced in a serious classroom.” I don’t remember what I did, in fact, say. It wasn’t that.

My body spends its days digesting its own blood and wringing the fluids out of me so I stagger around in a daze and can’t sing more than fifteen minutes without my throat becoming a desert within a desert.  Only anger keeps me moving.

Lilac crocus have been blooming for weeks, recently joined by yellow. DJ says my daffodils at the old house are in bud.

Phone call to J last night. Relief and joy, the sound of his voice just like old times. He was suffering all that time, and hid it from me.

February 1, 2017

For me, the Boy was a prefiguration of Trump, an ill-qualified narcissist dismantling a working institution without consultation with and in eventual defiance of his betters. Those who try to save them from their mistakes are treated as traitors.  It does no good to point out the destruction they cause, because it is THEIR destruction and therefore sacred. The mills of the gods grind slow, but in these cases I pray they grind exceeding fine.