Saturday, April 10th

YESTERDAY I accomplished next to nothing, except a good walk through the woods with Bramble and Tamas. There, only the rich brooks, overflowing still from winter snows, speak of a change of tempo, of something coming alive.

In the Times a report on John Hall Wheelock reading his poems at a special celebration at the Institute of Arts and Letters. He is ninety, and what he said that struck me was, “As life goes on, it becomes more intense because there are tremendous numbers of associations and so many memories. So many people you loved are gone. It’s almost two societies, the living and the dead, and you live with them both.”

But does life really become more intense with age? I feel so much less intensely than I used to. I wake up nearly every morning (at five now because Tamas sees the light and wants to go out and bark the sun up) thinking of something, someone, sometimes a small forgotten incident that flows in on the tide of memory. I do lead two lives, the past and the present, and sometimes the past is far more vivid than the present. How moving Wheelock’s long passionate love for his wife, Phyllis! In one of these new poems he evokes her as he first saw her, coming out of the ocean, “dark eyes out of the snow-cold sea you came” …