April 29, 2012


The white roses of York, which lay fallow last year, are in bloom.

April 28, 2012

I stood still beside the water gardens long enough, and the frog forgot about me and kicked up from the depths. He is a big, stout bullfrog. He looks heftier than he did last year, but maybe he profited from having all my bugs to himself. I bought goldfish for the pools, to combat the larvae I saw dancing in the water like dust in a storm.

Went to the studio late today, mostly to try to rearrange, but did a little painting. Most of my paintings are back from the restaurant, and “Rough Beast” comes down Monday. I don’t know how many people saw “Rough Beast,” but certainly no more of my friends than managed an appearance at the opening. I long ago grew accustomed to my colleagues’ and friends’ indifference to what I do (maybe a scar over the place rather than full reconciliation) but what continues to perplex me is what I interpret as a lack of curiosity. You’d think there’d be interest in knowing what people you know do. Morbid fascination, even. I think I have such an interest. I think I go where I’m invited to see the people who invite me in action. My students thought it was canny of me to assign a book that had two of my plays in it, making that fifteen cents royalty and all, but I did it because I would have been devoured by curiosity if one of my professors has been a playwright, or a poet, or an exotic dancer. I would have gone to see, whatever the cost. Earl Wassermann’s book on Shelley came out while we were his students, and the few copies that could be had at first were treated as sacred relics. So much community is available at our fingertips, so many devices and social networks, that perhaps curiosity is a thing of the past, like hunger in a place where the tables are always laden.

TD has me watching a TV stream of Smash, a show about putting on a Broadway musical.  It is funny, slick, horrifying. Most of its horror is that it rings true. One line did stand out, the assertion that most shows take three or four years to reach the stage. I think the tears I wept over Lincoln may not have been so much wasted as premature.

Devouring time, now that I have it, like a rich dessert.

The roses are in bloom.

A pair of mockingbirds is raising their brood in my rose thicket. It turns the yard into a war zone, them attacking everything that moves. They’ve stopped attacking me, probably assuming I’m a sort of lumbering ruminant who means no harm and has manifested no bird-eating behavior. I blame them for banishing my towhees. This is a grievous thing, and I don’t know how to make it right.

April 27, 2012

Thunderstorms across the land, like the trailing hems of violent dancers.

White iris in the front yard, a cloud of them. Apricot and purple in the back yard.

David Nard is dead of a stroke. It is a shock; there was no mark of imminent mortality upon him.

One of the cleaning girls left her jacket behind. I hung it from the dining room lintel so I’d remember to return it, and the scent of cigarettes filled two rooms.

First hummingbird to the feeders by evening light.

The frog–or at least a frog–is already in the water gardens. I rejoice.

Gave two exams yesterday, peered at empty spaces in the grade book, as I do semester after semester, wondering what to do, wondering what they could be thinking. No simplicity, no number of repetitions of the requirements seems to be enough. Perhaps, as on TV, they expect to be saved from mundane failure at the last moment by discovering they’re a superhero or a concealed interplanetary princess. I’ve little room to talk myself, twisting the evidence in my mind to find them a pass, searching for ways they might have gotten the information without being in class, without writing the paper, trying to convince myself that they tested badly rather than just didn’t bother opening the book, trying not to compare them to their brilliant or diligent peers who somehow managed to do everything right. He was ill. Her parents are crazy. She couldn’t hear the instructions, maybe, past her earphones. He has a kind heart, so maybe these test scores don’t matter so much. I think I made a mistake by trying (irrespective of success) to do everything right in my own life. The energy, the concern go to those who screw up. I have to force my mind from wringing its hands over the weak students to rejoicing over the (more in number) successful ones. This is a kind of fault I don’t even know how to define. People think it’s harder, somehow, to screw up than to succeed. I detect that belief in myself. I turn off the computer and rest my brain.

April 26, 2012

Senior Gala at Barley’s last night. I had organized it, so I was more committed to it than in times past, and perhaps that was the reason I had a good time. I think I made a friend of the bartender, John, for in my anxiety that everything be right I came early, and we had a long time to talk. The faculty came early and the students stayed late. Thunderstorm as I made my way to the car afterward.

April 24, 2012

 After turning my yard into a sort of war-camp, temporary structures lifted above the ground over every delicate plant, I don’t think it frosted last night at all. Well enough, though, for it gave me something to do at first of morning, packing the bivouac away, leaning over to smell the white cup peony, inhaling the most amazing fragrance on the earth, natural and unnaturally sumptuous at once, heady and lingering. Why is there a bee anywhere in the world but inside that cup?

 My storage area has considerably less in it than I remember, and that means that my nightmares of getting another space to store the stuff were for nought. Made one emptying trip today, wherein I rid myself of old picture frames, an aluminum easel, unsold Urthona Press books, and the plastic hydrangeas acquired for the production of Piss. I was in a hurry, so sealed boxes went to the studio unopened. Two more loads or so should do it. Once upon a time I had TWO of those vast storage rooms. Sic transit gloria mundi.

 Last night my students did their original brief plays in the Grotto, using mostly actors from the drama department. I have orchestrated this more than twenty times now, and this one was the best– nearly the best in terms of the quality of the plays, far and away the best in terms of the ease and drama-less-ness of the process. I said “do you want to do this?” and after they said “yes” I did practically nothing else. I was so proud of their inventiveness, their application, their orderliness. The ten consecutive days when I think about retiring are interrupted by one day like that, and the tally is set back to zero.

 William Billings in my head from last Sunday’s anthem. MR gave me a liter of moonshine. “Never‘shine in cut glass had such clarity.”

April 23, 2012 Covered the tender plants last night. The news suggests that tonight will be the night of frost, but I do not regret getting in a day’s practice. Breakthrough on Dinosaur Movie. Have a Persian rug which I rolled up and stored in the garage because Titus and Conrad kept vomiting on it. Now that the dear vomit brothers are gone, I got it out, beat it clean of dust and laid it on the living room floor. Maud and Circe change their pace when they reach it, stretching their legs out and going very carefully, as if unsure of what, exactly, they are walking on. The motion lights on the side of the garage were on all night, interpreting the fern fronds and branches whipped by the wind as someone passing by. Return to the Y. Treadmill. Feel 600% better.

April 22, 2012 Cool morning. The purple Dutch Iris are in bloom, the white and yellow German bearded right behind. In the time before Bach rehearsal (which went less badly than before) I planted peppers and melons. Drove to Sylva last night to read at the City Lights Bookstore for an anthology I’m in called . . . and love. . . Some of the literary lights of the west were gathered in the upper room, reading our poems to one another. People seemed to know and love my books, and to remember my readings with delight, whereas I go around imagining myself in a well of profound obscurity, so the evening was both a puzzlement and a pleasure. The drive to Sylva was wondrous beautiful, the mountains in their most delicate shades of green, a tapestry of infinite green offset here and there by purple threads of pawlonia. I’m always delighted by Sylva and always vow to spend more time there, but when it comes to it I never do. Woke this morning with a feeling o physical well being, notable because I have been ouchy or sniffly or logy for so long.