Entire delight at Quail Hill Farm

Today was our first harvest day at Quail Hill, the community-sponsored farm we've joined. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, members come for harvest days, and the people who work the farm post signs to tell you what's ready, and how much you can pick. The farm's spread over twenty acres, and there are intensely cultivated fields, and an apple orchard, a barn, a chicken house, and greenhouses. Today, while the rain mercifully held off till we were almost done, we took our orientation tour and then picked our share of what was ready: four kinds of lettuce, arugula, pointy-leafed spinach with a slightly purple tinge at the leaf edge, pea shoots, sage flowers, chive flowers, bronze fennel,intensely-flavored lovage (like concentrate of celery) -- plus garlic scapes and ten astonishingly slender long whips of green and violet asparagus, which we had in an omelette for breakfast. But not before rushing through the radish rows as the rain began, and pulling up little eggs of scarlet, plum, white, and even the French breakfast kind with their scarlet tube tipped in a white point. All came with the brown rich Amagansett dirt clinging to their roots, which made a veritable skim of mud in the kitchen sink: beautiful food and beautiful earth. It's like getting your hands down close to the source, "the dearest freshness deep down things." But it comes with a reminder that Hopkins' "dearest freshness" is also a sign of vigor, of a great wild force moving up and through, out into the rainy light, as though whatever fueled the thunder also came pouring up through the new roots and into the upshooting leaves.

Another moving day

We're back, after a fairly endless day of moving that actually wasn't all that bad, just long and wearying. Woke to a rainy dim Cape morning, with the ashen aspect of the breakwater and Provincetown Harbor out our motel window. It looked like some moody English seaside resort. For breakfast We went to a place we've always liked, a decades-old local restaurant, doggedly unfancy, with stuffed fish on the knotty pine walls. It represented something likable about Provincetown, with its mix of old Portuguese families, gay and straight tourists, old people -- all having fried fish platters and various kinds of cod, accompanied by baked potatoes and bowls of iceberg lettuce. Very sweet. Though this morning when we walked in, the woman at the door actually said -- instead of say,"Good morning"-- "Well, you're not fisherman so I'll have to seat you in the back." Every head in the place swiveled when we followed her to our table; we were the only gay men in the place, as it seemed to be some kind of fishing breakfast club meeting. I was steaming, sent to the back of the bus because I wasn't a hetero guy. I mean, does the fact that we're wearing nicely dark jeans and stylish glasses definitively indicate that we're not fishermen? Are gay men and fishermen two exclusive groups? Somehow this seemed especially wrong after the President's marvelous speech this morning, which we'd listened to over in-room coffee in the motel. Americans and Muslims, he noted, are not exclusive categories, are not in opposition. With homosexual men and fishermen, it may be a different story.

Or maybe that's just Provincetown, where the ongoing drama of sexual difference -- which seems to offer freedom and acceptance -- goes on provoking tension and polarization.

Then to the storage unit, where in a while two very nice Haitian guys showed up, and very carefully loaded their truck with all our boxes and furniture, talking soft Creole all the while. I was moved, watching them carry things out, because the old furniture looked so beautiful, and suddenly I felt that it really had been worth it to store that stuff for three years, and that something wonderful had been saved from the past. The loading took till noon, followed by an afternoon of traveling, and what with waiting two hours for a ferry it was after eight when we got home, and nine by the time the movers arrived. They carried things in (with lots of assistance from us) in the dark. Now our house seems disorderly and full of things to be attended to, but in truth there's lots of promise, too.

I opened only one box, which was labeled "kitchen." The contents seemed to have nothing to do with the kitchen whatsoever -- some framed pages from a 19th century botanical album of pressed and labeled plants, and an open tin can of Arden's favorite food, in which we'd saved, in the weeks after his death, the bits of black dog hair we'd find on the floorboards or on the rug. The very first box I open and it pierced my heart.

Opening Pharoah's tomb

This morning we're driving to Provincetown. It's a pretty glorious trip: first to Sag Harbor, then over a tiny ferry to Shelter Island, then across that green isle to a slightly longer ferry to Greenport, and then a drive to Orient Point. From there, it's an hour or so on our third ferry to New London. Then things get a little less romantic, as we take 95 to southern Massachusetts, then the Bourne Bridge onto the Cape. Ah.

We're cleaning out our storage unit in Truro. Tomorrow, quite early, a mover will meet us there, load everything up, and then the somewhat distilled accumulation of 15 years in Provincetown will arrive in the Springs. Books, a bunch of sweetly bad old landscape paintings, my majolica collection, probably a little too much of the old painted New England furniture I love: an apple-green jelly cupboard Wally and I bought at an auction in a darker green Vermont field twenty years ago, a wonderful little blue wooden cabinet that I bought from my neighbor Frank on Pearl Street, an old red table with a page or so of 1920s fashion advertisements stuck to its finish for ninety years. Lots of boxes. In truth, I don't even remember what's in them, though I will when I open them. One of the repeated processes of moving is confrontation with memory: out of the box, which could contain practically anything, comes the evidence of a specific day, a particular person, a year. I don't mean to portray this as an occasion of glowing sentiment: it seems an experience made of equal parts of joy, startle, sadness, and the plain dumb-to-language experience of the strangeness of being in time.

Sim City

Appropos of the previous posting listing the names of iris, here are those flowers in a bin at the Green Market in Union Square this morning. It was misting a little, and the produce and flowers there were aglow, so that everything for sale -- ramps, bok choi, mustard greens -- seemed phenomenally desirable.

On the way home, carrying my bags of asparagus, coleus and sage, I passed a fruit vendor on Sixth Avenue who was misting his grapes -- artificial version of the day!

And back home, West Sixteenth Street seemed weirdly wide. The movie that was being shot last week on Sixth, with huge klieg lights shone onto the old department store building that's now Bed Bath n Beyond, has moved over here. Artificial version of the street. Complete NYC moment: what is bounty and what is bounty's representation,
and who can tell the difference?

I broke my Lammy!

At the Lambda Literary Awards tonight, three hundred very hot people packed into a steamy reception room downstairs at the CUNY Grad Center, and then moved into the auditorium. Occasions of delight: Judy Grahn winning for lesbian poetry, becoming visible again after decades of work, often publishing with the tiniest of presses; Scott Heim accepting his award for his novel from a happy Dennis Cooper. And best of all for me, sharing the stage with James Hall, with whom I tied for the prize for gay men's poetry. It just felt so sweet to share the stage with James, whose work and person I love and admire, and to feel his delight in having a first book seen in this way. Yes! At the podium, I said that I wished I could saw my trophy into five parts,
since it was an honor to be on a list of books like this, a list where I loved every single volume. Lucky to be writing at a time when that is possible.

After sitting for two and a half hours, I was happy to join the line in the men's room (where Michelangelo Signorile was two guys in front of me, looking dashing). I set my trophy -- an engraved piece of glass in the form of a book -- and my program down on a convenient shelf, and when I came back from washing my hands I picked it up and whoosh, my trophy slid onto the hard washroom floor, and several wicked-looking chunks of it broke loose. The line gasped. I felt mortally embarassed, and said something like, Oh, easy come, easy go, which probably wasn't the right thing to say in that particular company. Oh well. Then I said, well now my award has more character, and when I got it home and saw it in the light this turned out to be true. Before it was a trophy, now it has a kind of chipped and dented handsomeness to it, which of course is the kind of handsome I like best.

(Also in the house: Jericho Brown, Tiphanie Yanique, Alice Quinn, Jill Bialosky, Donna Masini, Ed White, Scott Heim, Michael Lowenthal, Eddy Sarfaty, Andrew Holleran, Furry Wayne, Tom Healy, Honor Moore, Thomas Glave, tout le monde.)


_____

UPDATE: At BEA today I ran into the handsome and dashing mystery writer Scott Sherman, also a Lammy winner. "All that excitement last night," he said, "and what's everybody talking about but that you dropped your Lammy."

UPDATE #2: Some comments seem to have disappeared into the electronic ether somehow. If yours is one of those, apologies, please try again!

The Raconteur

I read tonight at Raconteur Books, in Metuchen, New Jersey -- a great little hotbed of culture, featuring new and used books, DVDs, and a universe of events from concerts to literary readings to arm wrestling tournaments (which seem to be universally won by Alex, the burly owner of the shop). In the store are portraits of Bukowski, Yeats,
and Frost, among others. When the reading starts, the lights go down and the reader's framed in a couple of spots, one of them blue, so there's a jazz-club feel to the podium. My new Rutgers students were there in abundance, even though they're not actually my students yet, and I love them already. They're sweet and smart and full of stories: a grade-school field trip to Emily Dickinson's house that's haunted a poet ever since, an upcoming summer volunteering for WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) in Costa Rica, and one fellow's the grandson of the Dominican dictator Trujillo's cook. It says a lot that I don't work there yet and I already think I have a phenomenal job. There were also a couple of other generations of (former) Rutgers students represented, including a woman who took the same advanced poetry course I will be teaching fifty years ago, with John Ciardi. She remembered the location and number of the room in which it met. And that, after the students had all turned in their poems anonymously the first week, Professor Ciardi read them over and said, Well, we'll just start out by reading Yeats.

A different sort of list

Tomorrow night in Manhattan, the Lambda Literary Awards. I'm delighted by the list of finalists for gay men's poetry:

* Want, Rick Barot, Sarabande Press
* Please, Jericho Brown, New Issues
* Fire to Fire, Mark Doty, Harper
* Now You're the Enemy, James Allen Hall, Univ. of Arkansas Press
* My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian, Wesleyan University Press

Fantastic company! I've already won two of these, and Jack Spicer has no use for an award in paradise, so I'd vote for one of three younger poets -- each of whom, by a happy accident, was my student at one time or another. Not that I had anything to do with their flowering, just that I take pleasure in seeing their terrific work coming to light!