100 YEARS AGO

[note 2.23]

Today, all I want to write about is whatever is happening right now.

I don’t mean the World Cup (though I do think that Harry (aka Tool) Kane golfing with MAGA has cursed England, for, as we all know, ETTD (Everything Trump Touches Dies).

But what is happening at this moment?

Right now I’m sitting next to Lili (I was about to say my wife, but that still (after all these years) sounds weird to me. I can hear the cicadas (we heard the first one yesterday; Lili calls them dog day cicadas, they appear every year, unlike the periodic cicadas, which only appear every seven or thirteen years).

The World Cup appea every four years.

Then Lindsay Graham drops (ding-dong) dead (he won’t be appearing again any time soon).

But it is really a perfect day. The earth seems to be tilting away from us, as if we could simply roll off into the sky.

I’m trying to write about what’s happening right now, but I keep slipping back into the past. This photograph, say, it’s from a day spent at High Falls, eleven years ago, a day when Nic Kahn dressed Maeve up like a wood sprite fairy, then had her dance with a giant bat (that image ended up being the cover of my book I Will Destroy You).

She is seven in this photograph. It appeared on my computer screen just now, part of some application that dredges up your past to surprise or disorient you (remember this day?)

Maeve is now eighteen (Please don’t say, It goes so fast. I’ve always felt that was a lie, that you could just easily say, Doesn’t that feel like a hundred years ago?)

I got to do a reading last night in Woodstock (NY) at the new library. I was there to celebrate my friend Donna Masini’s new book, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? It’s a collection of poems full of questions, like the title itself, that track subtle shifts of consciousness as she navigates this perplexing world. To me it feels like she straddles two horses in these poems—one we could name Disaster, and the other, Delight. We’re part of a writing group that formed during covid, and so I knew most of the poems in earlier drafts.

Here’s an excerpt (from a poem titled “Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With?”: