I am the smooth world's double face

1. I think the strangest thing about yesterday was the timing: one moment we were hearing that the lockdown on Watertown and its adjoining cities and towns had been lifted and wondering how the uncertainty of a suspect still at large was going to affect the rest of the weekend, the next the suspect was no longer at large and we were listening to the last fifteen minutes of He Walked by Night (1948). derspatchel and I had already gone out in the afternoon; as the day wore on with very little in the way of actual news, I realized that if the shelter-in-place recommendation was going to continue through the weekend, I really needed groceries, and besides I was going stir-crazy. Quite a lot of Somerville must have felt the same way, because the number of pedestrians in Davis Square looked about usual to me. There were cars on the streets. Businesses were a coin-toss—it surprised me that Dave's Fresh Pasta was open, but since they had almost all of the foodstuffs that CVS turned out not to stock, I handed them my money and didn't complain. It was a warm day, the kind Rob and I had joked the previous night we were guaranteeing (on the model of the apotropaic umbrella) by walking back to my apartment to retrieve the sweater I hadn't packed when I left for the funeral on Thursday morning. What I did notice, as we were eating dinner at the Boston Burger Co., was that most of the conversations we could overhear were current events, bouncing around like a hall of mirrors. I like to think we managed to discuss some other things, just to make a change. I missed the press conference in the early evening because I was trying to write some Latin. Later, afterward, I bought ice cream from J.P. Licks. I have other thoughts; they mostly pertain to the alien-ness of a lot of human behavior to me. I am glad the Watertown dragnet did not, in fact, end like the Richard Basehart film noir.

2. Today was supposed to involve sleep and decompression. Instead it involved me walking into urgent care because of a crying-level headache that did not break or even ease slightly after two doses of extra-strength Tylenol equivalent, eventually reaching the point where I couldn't listen to street noises, children's voices were acutely painful, and a low-flying plane had me burrowing into Rob's shoulder until it was gone. I'd called around nine o'clock and gotten a noon appointment, but they saw me early because at ten-thirty I walked in and slumped in the waiting room, feeling like some kind of J-horror ghost. Covering doctor ruled out a bunch of scary neurological things and sent me home with painkillers, which are the only reason I slept the couple of hours in the afternoon that I did, exhaustedly, between Rob and an intermittent Abbie the Cat; I may still have to call more doctors on Monday. At least by evening I was functional enough to go out to dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company with Rob, and then walk rather too far in search of dessert on a Saturday night, but I wouldn't say I feel well right now. Tomorrow had better not contain contractors, emergencies, people being politically stupid, or any more bobcat of any sort, unless we are talking actual bobcats, like, roaming the garden, in which case I'm all for it.

3. I got home and sitting on the living room table was my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #28, containing my poem "The Ceremony of Innocence." The title comes from Yeats by way of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw (1954); it is not quite the dream I had once of Britten setting Kipling's poems, but it started there, thinking of lost children and other echoes. The rest of the issue is a standout: Dominik Parisien, Rachel Manija Brown, Sofia Samatar, Alicia Cole, just to name a few. Get a copy, read the announcement. They are not the first magazine that published me, but the first that published me as a poet.

The Post-Meridian Radio Players are not performing tomorrow at the MIT Museum after all, which saddens me. I just re-read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) and E.L. Konigsburg has died. I wish I were writing. I have to see if I can sleep now.

They say God forgives, but I can't learn the same

A couple of years ago now, cucumberseed asked me to name my least favorite god. I answered:

. . . Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I think I'm going to go with Ares, because if Athene is the stratagems and the weighed cost of war, Ares is its senseless bloodlust, the blind berserker violence, smashing his shield into your face over and over and over again until someone pulls him off the ruin. His sacred animals are dogs and vultures, scavenging the carrion off the field. It's no accident that his most famous children are stark terror (Φόβος) and dread (Δεῖμος), ingredients for a successful rout, qualities that make it impossible to think straight. One of his daughters with Aphrodite is the revenge-goddess Adresteia (Ἀδρήστεια, the inescapable), who rides with him to war: on the one hand awesome, but on the other imagine endless reprisals, blood-feud, the eye-for-an-eye that never ends. Even the Iliad feels ambivalently about him. He is beautiful and insatiable, the hyper-masculine lover of love herself; he is the mad bastard who will get us all killed.

So last night I finally slept for eight hours and I had dreams that were not that sick-stunned hit of a week's worth of REM in fifteen minutes and all stupid nightmares and in one of them I was sitting high up in the casement window of an apartment building somewhere with the skyscraper density of Manhattan and the brownstone aesthetic of Beacon Hill and a woman was speaking from behind me. I don't remember if it was my room or hers. I had thought she was younger than me, in the confusing way that college students now look incredibly young (the crowd of Tuftsies at J.P. Licks on Friday night), but seeing her in heavy ropes and crowns of coin-jewelry like Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea (1969) I thought maybe she was ten or fifteen years older: she had a curving face, neither angular nor classical, and I knew that her hair was supposed to be black, but I remember it with a kind of greenish bronze-rippling sheen, like certain kinds of underwater photography or curtained light in a blue-painted room. There were no explosions in the blocks below, no planes falling out of the sky. I couldn't hear gunfire and it wasn't even a clear day, just a sunny one with skyscraper windows glancing back gold and the edges of roof gardens starting to green with spring. But she said from the other side of the room, where I could have seen her leaning with her arms folded between the mirror and the cracks on the wall (not looking anything like an Alma-Tadema painting, which is how it sounds when I write it out: modern, hip-cocked, genuinely bored), "Why would you want to stop?" and I knew who she was then and I was suddenly afraid I wasn't dreaming.

Jesus, brain, don't you want to try a normal anxiety dream for a change? I mean, I've been having those and I hate them, but wouldn't it be a change if you came up with something subtle?