March 30, 2018

Wiley responds to Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers: “David, I'm about halfway through and just floored. When did you find time to write a book like this? Goddamn, that poor Charlie. I can hardly stand the heartbreak. And that shocking turn with the Tree family? Jesus.” These are actually the first words anybody has said about the book in this form. Relief.

Mountain Xpress informs me that I’ve won honorable mention in their poetry contest. Honorable mention. . .

The ground around my house seems different now, having been blessed by the bear.

Deeply meaningful Maundy Thursday service. I took onto myself the responsibility for the gap that had grown between then Lord and me. In the midst of prayer I realized that the Demon had disappeared. For a year, scarcely an hour free of it, and now Free. I am a running river, a pure stream with light clear to the bottom. These things are not marked with incidents, as they would be in a movie. One instant the world is dark, and then it is light, and there was no transition, no blast of trumpets.

Twisted my knee dragging the Cross out of the All Souls basement. Agony, sometimes, but endurable. Meaningful Good Friday service. Sam attended, and we had lunch afterward. Pastyme concert this evening, rich, my mind following deep pathways. When we left the church, the full moon glittered between tears in the clouds. I can hear my chimes banging away in the night.

March 29, 2018

Maundy Thursday.

Waiting for a Fed Ex parcel chained me to the house for the morning, so I dug three plots for ginseng in three different places in three different ways, hoping that the seeds would be pleased by one of them. Tony G stopped by, took out the dead dogwood, and alerted me to the presence of a bear behind the ancient maple between my lawn and the neighbors’. It was a very large bear, a female, I think, though without cubs.  First sighting (by me) of a bear on this side of Lakeshore, though my hummingbird feeders were ravaged by something. I’m always amazed by the black bear’s black. It is very, very black. Made a pot of linguine for breakfast/lunch. It is one of those magic dishes, for no matter how many times I go back to it and how much I eat, it seems still to be full.

March 28, 2018

The student I was worried about in senior seminar suddenly blossomed and produced good work. A palpable sigh went round the room. The one who stomped out and demanded “accommodation” in another class because I told a joke wants to read with the group next Sunday. I wonder if parents teach their children anything but the limitlessness of their entitlement. Took my Irish Renaissance kids to Jack of the Wood, where we read Irish poetry and discussed The Crock of Gold over beer and nachos.  Sweet. Today as I was heading our for High Five, I noticed that cars were swerving away from something in Lakeshore Drive. I got out and looked. It was one of my opossums, destroyed, coughing blood out of its muzzle but still alive. It sat in the middle of the lane, unable to move, behind its bewildered eyes maybe hoping that someone would put it out of its misery. No one did. I didn’t. I thought of running to the tool shed for a mattock, but I didn’t. I called Animal Control and just sort of stood there protecting the mangled thing until they came. I couldn’t even watch whatever they did. I consider this a horror and a failure. Wept bitterly, thinking of the confusion in its little brain, just pain and surprise, nothing to explain it with. Unless, as I pray with all my heart, the Great Mother was whispering in his ear, “It is all right, darling, come home, come home.”

Watched my best friend for thirty years ignore me from the other side of the café.  All things change and are built again.

Excellent day at the studio, much progress until the inflammation in my shoulders made it literally impossible to work.

March 26, 2018

The anniversary of mother’s death. She has been dead for forty-four years. I knew her for twenty-three years. Such statistics are unthinkable. I spent that day in the Cornell library, reading, close to a phone where I could call home from time to time to check the progress of the surgery. On that phone I learned the news. Was it the worst night of my life? Other claimants may win, because of the measure them of pure unconsciousness. My playwrights were lively, and one of them, my sanatorium patient, excelled.

March 25, 2018

Palm Sunday and I did not go to church. Went instead to the studio where I worked well on new projects involving heavy collage elements– viz, dismantling and reconstructing a horrible old children’s book about clowns, with text of almost unbearable unconscious pathos. The book was withdrawn from the Black Mountain Primary School library God knows when. “Rejected” is stamped inside its covers. All that must mean something.

March 24, 2018

Great Day of the Children’s marches. Morning spent at the studio. The weather so bad there were few visitors, but I liked the work I got done. Some of the electric outlets stop working and I can’t discover why. Bought $200 worth of marijuana butter from Steve, to bake into cookies and calm my inflamed shoulders. Leland borrows the truck to move furniture. As the weather worsens, I look at the keyboard, and the work I could do there, with increasing greed. 

March 23, 2018

Bright, though not yet especially warm. Small white-and-purple species tulips peak through the dirt, accompanied by bluebells and the first unfolding mitts of bloodroot.  Without having planned it, but probably destined by the nature of the day, I planted a persimmon, a red buckeye, ostrich ferns, and hollyhocks. Began using the mound of ground up pine tree left by the stump annihilator. Slept after the Great Planting, and dreamed I was in Venice.

Joined an ensemble that increases rehearsal from two to four hours. Not sure I can sustain that. B, forced to sit beside me, still does not utter a word. It’s hard to forgive those who catch us doing wrong.