December 29, 2009
Two incidents in Sav-More grocery. A, my student long ago-- and marginally insane then-- passing, as always, arm in arm with his barking mad mother, sneaks a bottle of hair product into my shopping cart. I watch him and wonder why. A sort of greeting? He knew it was my cart and wanted to send a message? He had no idea whose cart it was and was playing a random trick, or picked up the wrong bottle, or had filled the bottle with acid and was willing for fate to set the course-–what? Last night as I watched in fascination, a big handsome young man in a pale fleece coat scanned the front of the store, and ran out the doors with a full basked of unpaid-for groceries on his arm. I watched as he ran to his car and sped off, tires squealing. He looked too prosperous for it to be a needful act. A prank? A dare? A forgotten wallet? My mistake was to tell the clerk. It made her very sad. I had actually gotten the license plate, but I think that would just have made her sadder.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Poem for the Ensuing Year
2010
A decade shyly ending, an age beginning–
one is meant, I think, to scribble bravely on,
struck dumb again by the howls of Hecuba,
and yet, simultaneously, stung to singing
by the rough-hewn, fire-crowned tarantara
of half-onsetting, half-retreating dawn.
Hymn we the nuptials of Natural and Artificial:
the silk-shot trappings on the sweating stallion.
Any bard with half a heart now, furtive, broods
half on the coy, the metaphysical interstices,
half on the hurt dog howling in the woods.
The magician’s toy is from his both hands gone.
I have loved you madly, but exactly why?
I have aspired, and hung my manly hopes upon
a vision both secret and insanely bright.
I read our names writ somewhere in the sky.
All was gathering to a head. And then came night,
a vampire standing on the toy-strewn lawn.
The diary page is white. The virgins are in red.
One soldier whets his blade; the others yawn.
The room still titters, remembering when I said
“Love and poetry will set things right.”
Except for the vampire who on the starlit lawn
smiles and licks her lips and whispers, “Oh, they might.”
A decade shyly ending, an age beginning–
one is meant, I think, to scribble bravely on,
struck dumb again by the howls of Hecuba,
and yet, simultaneously, stung to singing
by the rough-hewn, fire-crowned tarantara
of half-onsetting, half-retreating dawn.
Hymn we the nuptials of Natural and Artificial:
the silk-shot trappings on the sweating stallion.
Any bard with half a heart now, furtive, broods
half on the coy, the metaphysical interstices,
half on the hurt dog howling in the woods.
The magician’s toy is from his both hands gone.
I have loved you madly, but exactly why?
I have aspired, and hung my manly hopes upon
a vision both secret and insanely bright.
I read our names writ somewhere in the sky.
All was gathering to a head. And then came night,
a vampire standing on the toy-strewn lawn.
The diary page is white. The virgins are in red.
One soldier whets his blade; the others yawn.
The room still titters, remembering when I said
“Love and poetry will set things right.”
Except for the vampire who on the starlit lawn
smiles and licks her lips and whispers, “Oh, they might.”
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
December 28, 2009
Spent yesterday afternoon with Brad Roth, whom I hadn’t, we decided, seen in thirty years. He brought his painter friend James along with him, as well as photos of three charming daughters, who were at a safari park outside Charlotte. Brad remembers a whole lot more about me and my life then than I would have expected. He choreographed a dance for “Sestina Altaforte” inspired by my dissertation, which I was writing when we were housemates. The afternoon was better and easier than I’d anticipated. They almost always are. He was very much more precise about date and occasion than I. He was a better friend than I gave him credit for. Then, I kept wishing he would go away, so my sexual escapades, approaching fullness, would not be curtailed by the ordinary business of life.
Spent yesterday afternoon with Brad Roth, whom I hadn’t, we decided, seen in thirty years. He brought his painter friend James along with him, as well as photos of three charming daughters, who were at a safari park outside Charlotte. Brad remembers a whole lot more about me and my life then than I would have expected. He choreographed a dance for “Sestina Altaforte” inspired by my dissertation, which I was writing when we were housemates. The afternoon was better and easier than I’d anticipated. They almost always are. He was very much more precise about date and occasion than I. He was a better friend than I gave him credit for. Then, I kept wishing he would go away, so my sexual escapades, approaching fullness, would not be curtailed by the ordinary business of life.
Monday, December 28, 2009
December 27, 2009
Yellow-gray morning for the third day of Christmas. Drove from Atlanta last night under a sky of the most vivid and tasteless sunset orange-pink, backed by a base of lilac. This morning’s peony silk is restrained, Puritan by comparison. I ate the wrong snack, and Christmas Eve service became something to get through without running out to be sick, and I succeeded, but the wonder and the mystery were mitigated. The terrible weather that night made me fearful, and I slept badly before I drove to see my sister and the kids. They are well. The boys are giants. Jonathan and Daniel and I went to see Avatar Christmas night, which they had already seen multiple times. My sister and I talked about out father until the subject began to wither and dry in my head. I think I am done with that for a while. Ate lunch at a fine pub in Alpharetta, and it crossed my mind to drive down and visit it from time to time, until the drive home into the mountains reminded me just what that would entail. Here there is still snow. It must have been hardened rather than disintegrated by the colossal rain.
Much laundry to be done. Much trash to gather and evict. Floors to be swept.
Yellow-gray morning for the third day of Christmas. Drove from Atlanta last night under a sky of the most vivid and tasteless sunset orange-pink, backed by a base of lilac. This morning’s peony silk is restrained, Puritan by comparison. I ate the wrong snack, and Christmas Eve service became something to get through without running out to be sick, and I succeeded, but the wonder and the mystery were mitigated. The terrible weather that night made me fearful, and I slept badly before I drove to see my sister and the kids. They are well. The boys are giants. Jonathan and Daniel and I went to see Avatar Christmas night, which they had already seen multiple times. My sister and I talked about out father until the subject began to wither and dry in my head. I think I am done with that for a while. Ate lunch at a fine pub in Alpharetta, and it crossed my mind to drive down and visit it from time to time, until the drive home into the mountains reminded me just what that would entail. Here there is still snow. It must have been hardened rather than disintegrated by the colossal rain.
Much laundry to be done. Much trash to gather and evict. Floors to be swept.
The Worst Weather in the World
December 25, 2009
Christmas morning, the worst weather in the world, rain in a gale from the south, like someone aiming a fire hose at the windows unceasingly. In moments, the flooded road and the blacked-out windshield Sigh. What happened to a slow morning with cocoa in your pj’s, and opening almost more presents than you have the energy for?
Christmas morning, the worst weather in the world, rain in a gale from the south, like someone aiming a fire hose at the windows unceasingly. In moments, the flooded road and the blacked-out windshield Sigh. What happened to a slow morning with cocoa in your pj’s, and opening almost more presents than you have the energy for?
December 24, 2009
Off and on since returning last from Ireland, I have been dipping into Michael MacLiammoir’s All for Hecuba, as one sips now and then from a complicated, expensive brandy. I’ve been often enough where he has been for there to be the frisson of recognition: he stayed in the Hotel Russell in London eighty years before I did; I know the theaters he talks about in Dublin, and can follow his characters down the short Dublin streets. Most of the people he talks about I don’t know. Some of them are names now unrecoverable from the dust of time. But they were brilliant in their day, I do not doubt, and the abundance of them reminds me that I know nobody, really, of moment in my chosen arts, and have guarded and protected my obscurity in those times when I was not lamenting. It. All for Hecuba is the best of all the actors’ books and is dear to me because I actually met and heard MacLiammoir, doing Yeats at the Corn Market in Cambridge forty years ago.
My idea of the perfect Christmas is one where I don’t have to go anywhere.
Joyfully reunited with Marco yesterday. He has a little goatee almost as laced with gray as my own. We stopped trying to remember when last we saw each other, because it was clear it was going to be rather more than a year. I assumed he simply wasn’t that pleased by my company, but it is, I think now, something less personal, an obsessiveness in him that resents intrusion, even if the intruder himself is welcome. I should understand that. He showed me his paintings, and some are very good and others are not, and their excellence is in direct proportion to the degree they distance themselves from his fetishes and obsessions. His commissions are masterworks; what he does for himself. . . well, are not. I wonder if it’s a truism that an artist is at his best when he is the greatest distance from self-indulgence? I wonder if that’s true of me? Would we even know when we are indulging ourselves if there weren’t somebody to tell us? We might imagine that we were born to do the very thing that keeps us from greatness.
Facebook contact from Brad Roth. I complain about the people who undervalue me; he is one I rudely undervalued when we were roommates, and maybe I have been given, by this estimable invention, another chance.
Afternoon: Fell asleep in the midst of the cats, and woke in the middle of a radio program about Christmas music on the radio in the 40's. Woke also with a spirit of jollity in me, a perfect holiday spirit, ready for whatever comes in the next score or so of hours.
Tomorrow night commemorates one of two great Mysteries of the West. With the first Mystery, man shares his state with God; with the second, God shares His with man, that both may be full. At the Nativity, God is received into the world, protected and nurtured as fathers and mothers and friends protect and nurture. For a while He is subject to our sorrows, and though I don’t know why, I guess that without it His perfection may not have known compassion. That God should be a child in my own arms is a concept profound beyond my grasp, but also tender and immediate– a profundity which need not be grasped at all, but only performed. Protecting a baby against the cold is the first great Test, and one so simple and plain and human that almost nobody could ever fail. At the Resurrection, man is received into Eternity. As we have welcomed God among us, He opens the door of Himself at Easter. This too need not be understood, only performed, only that we welcome death and push on it as upon an unlocked door. It is a reciprocity flawless and immense. Ever since I was able to think about it at all, I have believed this was the truth of it, Time folding into Eternity at Easter, Eternity giving itself to the sorrows of Time at Christmas, and all the talk of sin and atonement a theft and a lie, the attempt of evil (or perhaps fearful) men to bind us to by the chains of human ignorance forever. Christ no more came into the world to save me from my sins than the rose blooms to give itself to the worm. The worm comes, but it is an incident, part of the payment for life, and forgotten at the doors of Resurrection. Christ is no more a sacrifice than any one of us, born into a dangerous world. He presented Himself as an example. That we have made of him an exception is the great fault of the faith I call my own. By the example of Christ we are made free; by his Church we are enslaved to sin it has, for the most part, imagined. There are sins and there are sinful men and sinful impulses in good men, but they are irrelevant to the Mysteries at both ends. God does not come because of them, nor will he leave anybody marooned in time to punish them. The Judge is a fable to justify the wicked judges of the earth. The Babe and the Risen One are truth, and one of them is born this night.
Off and on since returning last from Ireland, I have been dipping into Michael MacLiammoir’s All for Hecuba, as one sips now and then from a complicated, expensive brandy. I’ve been often enough where he has been for there to be the frisson of recognition: he stayed in the Hotel Russell in London eighty years before I did; I know the theaters he talks about in Dublin, and can follow his characters down the short Dublin streets. Most of the people he talks about I don’t know. Some of them are names now unrecoverable from the dust of time. But they were brilliant in their day, I do not doubt, and the abundance of them reminds me that I know nobody, really, of moment in my chosen arts, and have guarded and protected my obscurity in those times when I was not lamenting. It. All for Hecuba is the best of all the actors’ books and is dear to me because I actually met and heard MacLiammoir, doing Yeats at the Corn Market in Cambridge forty years ago.
My idea of the perfect Christmas is one where I don’t have to go anywhere.
Joyfully reunited with Marco yesterday. He has a little goatee almost as laced with gray as my own. We stopped trying to remember when last we saw each other, because it was clear it was going to be rather more than a year. I assumed he simply wasn’t that pleased by my company, but it is, I think now, something less personal, an obsessiveness in him that resents intrusion, even if the intruder himself is welcome. I should understand that. He showed me his paintings, and some are very good and others are not, and their excellence is in direct proportion to the degree they distance themselves from his fetishes and obsessions. His commissions are masterworks; what he does for himself. . . well, are not. I wonder if it’s a truism that an artist is at his best when he is the greatest distance from self-indulgence? I wonder if that’s true of me? Would we even know when we are indulging ourselves if there weren’t somebody to tell us? We might imagine that we were born to do the very thing that keeps us from greatness.
Facebook contact from Brad Roth. I complain about the people who undervalue me; he is one I rudely undervalued when we were roommates, and maybe I have been given, by this estimable invention, another chance.
Afternoon: Fell asleep in the midst of the cats, and woke in the middle of a radio program about Christmas music on the radio in the 40's. Woke also with a spirit of jollity in me, a perfect holiday spirit, ready for whatever comes in the next score or so of hours.
Tomorrow night commemorates one of two great Mysteries of the West. With the first Mystery, man shares his state with God; with the second, God shares His with man, that both may be full. At the Nativity, God is received into the world, protected and nurtured as fathers and mothers and friends protect and nurture. For a while He is subject to our sorrows, and though I don’t know why, I guess that without it His perfection may not have known compassion. That God should be a child in my own arms is a concept profound beyond my grasp, but also tender and immediate– a profundity which need not be grasped at all, but only performed. Protecting a baby against the cold is the first great Test, and one so simple and plain and human that almost nobody could ever fail. At the Resurrection, man is received into Eternity. As we have welcomed God among us, He opens the door of Himself at Easter. This too need not be understood, only performed, only that we welcome death and push on it as upon an unlocked door. It is a reciprocity flawless and immense. Ever since I was able to think about it at all, I have believed this was the truth of it, Time folding into Eternity at Easter, Eternity giving itself to the sorrows of Time at Christmas, and all the talk of sin and atonement a theft and a lie, the attempt of evil (or perhaps fearful) men to bind us to by the chains of human ignorance forever. Christ no more came into the world to save me from my sins than the rose blooms to give itself to the worm. The worm comes, but it is an incident, part of the payment for life, and forgotten at the doors of Resurrection. Christ is no more a sacrifice than any one of us, born into a dangerous world. He presented Himself as an example. That we have made of him an exception is the great fault of the faith I call my own. By the example of Christ we are made free; by his Church we are enslaved to sin it has, for the most part, imagined. There are sins and there are sinful men and sinful impulses in good men, but they are irrelevant to the Mysteries at both ends. God does not come because of them, nor will he leave anybody marooned in time to punish them. The Judge is a fable to justify the wicked judges of the earth. The Babe and the Risen One are truth, and one of them is born this night.
December 22, 2009
Thaw continues. Most of the city has clawed its way out of the drifts and is back in business.
Went to the Y to give blood, and was tossed out by the question, “Have you had sex with a man since 1977?” I asked the technician with the gold-furred, heroic forearms, “Who hasn’t?” and he laughed. Then I asked, “Do they ask that question of women?” He shrugged and said. “No.” I think it is possible to be recklessly cautious. In any event, all my blood is yet my own.
Walked into the Woodfin ABC store at exactly the right time, and took the right bottle (Bushmill’s Black Bush) off the shelf, and ended up getting about $60 worth of free liquor from the distributor who happened to be standing there with an armload of coupons, samples, two-for-ones, discontinued items, rebates, freebies. Christmas.
Thaw continues. Most of the city has clawed its way out of the drifts and is back in business.
Went to the Y to give blood, and was tossed out by the question, “Have you had sex with a man since 1977?” I asked the technician with the gold-furred, heroic forearms, “Who hasn’t?” and he laughed. Then I asked, “Do they ask that question of women?” He shrugged and said. “No.” I think it is possible to be recklessly cautious. In any event, all my blood is yet my own.
Walked into the Woodfin ABC store at exactly the right time, and took the right bottle (Bushmill’s Black Bush) off the shelf, and ended up getting about $60 worth of free liquor from the distributor who happened to be standing there with an armload of coupons, samples, two-for-ones, discontinued items, rebates, freebies. Christmas.
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