The last thirty years have brought a change to how
I work on writing. I used to like to go to a cabin
on Fightingtown Creek in Fannin County in
the north Georgia mountains. I used to work alone
for days, alternating between building a monumental
stone wall to keep the creek from eating out from under
the concrete block piers the house rests on, and letting
poems flow into shapes that often mention my adoration
of that creek’s going by, and whatever it is flows around
and through us that that is metaphor for. Heraclitus
and I love to sit down up to the neck inside such music.
Company is more important now than ecstatic solitude.
At seventy-four, I have pretty much stopped stonework.
I keep thinking I am going back to it, but I don’t act
on the thought. Almost every night now I walk
to this coffeehouse full of college students studying
and talking. Music playing. Johnny Cash tonight.
Lucinda. The students sing along with it so unself-
consciously. Uncivilized, almost primal. Oh, I used
to want a high-walled garden. Now I prefer a corner
in the open courtyard of a caravanserai well-used
by sugar merchants. Sometimes I sit up late-late
watching old movies and go to sleep in my chair.
I wake in sunlight at seven and go upstairs for proper
sleep in a bed, with my elaborate pillow arrangement.
I do so love these November nights that begin early
and last long, enormous, enveloping darks.
I have never considered suicide. Nothing is petty
or trivial, not really. It is a failure in my life that
I do not allot time to listen to classical music.
Mahler, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven. These would
maybe loosen new spontaneities in me, conversation
being the thing now, a kind of music to live inside.
Here you must hear now the opening of Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony. The slight small sounds that seem
to be waiting and walking with us in an andante
comodo, the convenient ambling along that is
a slowing and starting up as something catches
interest for a moment in one or the other of us,
like music heard inside watersound, as I once did
by that creek in the cabin with such uncertain
foundations, a building chorale, Beethovenish, but
with even more majesty. It was so real that I walked
outside and started down the creekside path—it was
night—oddly imagining the Stuttgart Symphony
and Chorus might, most improbably, be camped
on the property next door. I soon turned back to sit
in the dark and fully hear the music that was rising
from within, as the practice of joy in my soul.