Archives for May 4, 2005

Went to Washington, ate my dinner, saw my show, marveled yet again at the maximal coolness of my friend (who, among many other things, makes incredibly funny faces). Returned to New York this morning to find 99 e-mails (not counting blogmail) and two brush fires (one at a magazine, the other at a newspaper). Put them out, went to lunch, and found myself standing on an Upper West Side street corner next to two casually dressed young women who were walking their dogs.

WOMAN NO. 1 So, how’s the Prozac working?

WOMAN NO. 2 (beaming down at her dog) Oh, it’s just amazing–he doesn’t bark nearly as much since we put him on it!

I bet they don’t have conversations like that where you come from. Wherever you come from.

Radio silence resumes as of now. Something tells me I’ll be up late tonight flogging away at the last item on my itinerary….

“The most infuriating thing about men was that they were both predictable and impossible. Their buttons were ridiculously easy to push, but unfortunately, every button came with its own self-destruct program.”

Donald E. Westlake, Watch Your Back!

Old Dominion

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors

of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.

Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking

across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.

It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell

I stared at on the backs of books in college.

He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.

He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.

It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov’s,

everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized

because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of

or because someone somewhere had set the old words

to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn’t hurt.

Now the thwack…thwack of tennis balls being hit

reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax

in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns

where the young terrorists are exploding

among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.

I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay

in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,

never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,

the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis

whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Robert Hass