2025 Alphabetical Diary
with apologies (again) to Sheila Heti
Hello dear readers and Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were lovely! My holidays were prefaced by the very pleasant surprise of having 3 poems published: “Era già l’ora…” in The Oxonian Review and “Sunrise” and “Sweet Rose” by The Society of Classical Poets.
Anyway, for the third year in a row, here are some snippets from my 2025 diaries, remixed and alphabetized. All credit for this experiment is due to Sheila Heti.
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A beautiful floating world of waterlilies. A full moon, light coming very brightly through the window. A good test of a material is to see whether it glows with something rich & strange & subtle in sunlight or candlelight. A ring is a thing of nothing. Alcaics—Alcaeus and Horace—Mary Sidney, Sidney Psalter—Tennyson—Auden. Almost jasmine. Already February! And I am happy that we are moving forward with our lives together. And now I can write poetry, which is what I really want to make more time for this year. And talking about his raising $15 million, as if that’s what makes me love him. Another thing I miss is hearing Telugu spoken. Anyway, I am glad that winter will be arriving soon, arranging itself in the withered pockets with hands as contented as a lady’s in a fur muff. Anyway, I took refuge in the Ulta Beauty like last time. Art made simple as Nature and Nature made glorious as Art. As wise old Socrates or Solomon said, “Drink a pot of tea / And you will have to pee.”
Because they were so devastatingly itchy afterwards. Berry picking—boysenberries for the first time and marionberries. Blooming all over with orange and pink-orange flowers and rhododendrons. Blue-silver windblown waves of the lake, blurred moon, then the lake dark liquid obsidian. But I put the heavy glass lid on the jar and I suffocated it and watched the flame go lower and dimmer and die out, little by little, until a thin smoke hung in the glass and the glass grew hot, and then I took the lid off. But now the panic has been put aside. But the jackdaw said, “I don’t know what happened to the squirrels.”
Canada Lily, Wood Lily, Chocolate Lily, Mahogany Fawn Lily. Canada Toadflax. “Chocolate-enrobed” sandwich cookies. Clasping Venus’s Looking-glass. Coin-operated laundries should not be a thing in this day and age—even parking meters take credit cards now. Colorful little townhouses, the winding uphill streets, the tiny playgrounds. Compared to last year they had so many mango cakes, so many gleaming fruit tarts, so many cookies, honey lollipops with bee pollen, spanakopita and other hand-pies, orange-flavored cakes dusted with powdered sugar that they said were traditional. “Cutie pie, I’m captivated by your idea of a car that runs on bubbles.”
Dark stream running like thought, lots of new green shoots by its banks. Darkness wrapped her up in a soft cocoon of sleep and dreams. Doing the figures in my diary has started to give me a twinkling and a tinkling and an inkling of hope again. Don’t have it in me to do it because it wouldn’t feel real to me. Drives in the evening, the sky pitch-black, my mind automatically and inevitably goes to my mother.
Everything seems to have become lush and green so suddenly. Even if I don’t get to my writing today, at least I will have more time for it tomorrow if I do all of these things. Even the simplest things are so beautiful.
Felt we were sitting somewhere at the bottom of the sea together. Fiction is the telling of lies to reveal the truth. For the past three nights I’ve been having dreams about my mother. Four poems about water/the sea that capture that liquid languor: Coral Bracho’s “Water’s Lubricious Edges,” Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Jellyfish,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Aquatic Nocturne.” Fritz Kreisler—car accident—coma—woke up speaking Ancient Greek, which he had studied along with Latin at school. Full of beautiful old furniture and china and lots of knickknacks, everything covered with a thick layer of dust.
Glad to have him back to normal, glad to understand him better. Gleaming off the gold dome of the State House. God smiles on those who believe. Good strong tea infused with orange and spice. Got into a staring contest with a squirrel. Green willows bent down along the paths, and there were a few benches here and there for lovers and two small bridges across the water where we stood a little bit contemplating the evening. Greens and purples separate themselves into a thousand varieties and filaments of color.
Have been reading The Pickwick Papers and now appreciate a good Wellerism. He can be very hard on people in a way that feels very scary. He had a long table that was marked “William Randolph Hearst.” He is very lovable to me then, sleeping on his side, his hands tucked under his cheek, his legs drawn up to his chest, a large man curled up like a baby. He kept telling me to STOP COMPARING MYSELF and to not listen to my mother. He looked more like the lawyers than those they were defending. He saw a pair of beautiful chairs with inlay in the back and green velvet seats, and I spotted a beautiful little vanity that I could use as a desk, and I also liked a Monet print that was coincidentally of a painting I had written about yesterday, and we saw a china set that was white bordered with gold that R was drawn to and a beautiful set of floral Limoges plates and a green plate with a little chip in it and a gold border and a Roman chariot in the middle, which of course I had to get. He says I bring a lot of joy to his life. Her happiness was so fragile that a speck of dust could dash it to pieces.
I can always start over and do better. I don’t even know how to begin excavating this grief. I don’t know why or how she gets so mean like that. I ended up going to the BPL and sitting in the dark room with all the Sargent frescos on a hard wooden bench, reading Daniel Deronda. I kept thinking about Daddy and how he used to hold my hand after my eye doctor appointments. I know what it is—I think I have discovered the root of the problem. I said between now and when I die you don’t know what I’m capable of. I sat on his lap, and he asked me questions that frightened me. I shouldn’t have gotten so emotional over the whole thing. Imagination is the engine of empathy. I showed him The Young Girls of Rochefort, and he loved it. I took a kind of detached, human interest in it, a writerly interest, and I thought of Dickens and how he’d worked very early on as a court reporter. I will write and hope; I will submit and hope; I will receive rejections and hope. In Boston you can always blame the T. It felt like spring because the snow had melted. It imparts a warmness to everything, in spite of the gray. It was a wet, bleak December morning, two days before the New Year. It was one of those gossamer, periwinkle blue-hued dusks. It was very foggy.
Jealousy of his passion for the stock market could not have been the reason I was so bothered by it. Just want to tap into the power of deep focus.
Kindling this feeling was the episode of SATC I watched yesterday.
La primavera, le printemps, the first time. Later he said that my friends were funny and that he had enjoyed talking to them. Listened to The Carpenters; we were very happy. Listening to Schumann’s Träumerei with the sound of birds outside. Little desk only $32, Limoges plates $25.
Men haven’t learned the relief of weeping. Might think artists a vagrant bunch, living off the sweat of other people’s brows. Minutes and hours seem to just be seeping and leaking away. Mouse spotted—it paused in front of the bedroom door, very boldly in my opinion, and seemed to look at me with an impertinent eye before scurrying off. My feet sweated in my black flats, I moved my hair from the back of my neck to my shoulder, from my shoulder to the back of my neck. Mysteries of life and death seem to hover above me like the wind moving through trees.
Never acknowledges that other people might have their own goals and priorities. Nice to poke around in everything together. Not able to shower because I’m out of leggings and camisoles. No peace of mind at all, always people continuously, noise, headaches, no chance to write, botherations by everybody. Not that I have quite executed it. Not that I was able to articulate it that fully or intelligently back then, because all I had were these great vague furies of emotion. Nothing better on Earth than a baby smiling. Now it is afternoon, early afternoon, calm and gentle, and the morning has melted away like light ice into grass. “Now sleeps the crimson petal”—“waves”—> “winks” —> “wakens”; “droops”—“lies”—“slides”—“folds”—“slips”/“folds”—“slips”; “sleeps” and “slips.”
On the way back I liked the building for European Studies. One black bird like a Roman statesman, orating, proud, senatorial, sharp-eyed. One path in the park took us through a thicket of trees out into a clearing where a quiet Grecian temple looked over a small pond; there a fountain sent forth its stream. Only on one side is there such a burst of orange that catches the eye and shows the handiwork of the fairy Autumn. Onyx vases look beautiful in candlelight. Or does she worry about my safety and happiness? Our lives running side by side peacefully like two streams. Our zenith as a family was that beautiful trip to Greece. Outside a fierce wind is whipping the bare, sunlit, white tree branches into a froth, and the sky is a good strong blue that presages spring.
Pearly Everlasting. Pile of dishes in the sink—when R came home from the gym, he called it “Mount Ramya” and said that monks would scale it in order to achieve nirvana. Portland is the “rose city.” Pranks begin in jest and end in sorrow. Probably one of the longest weeks I’ve ever experienced in my life. Puzzle-patches of river and sky recede into their new light.
Quarrelsome day for us. Quite sweet indeed.
R put his 6’3” frame in a tiny child’s chair and pretended to sip tea from a child’s tiny tea set. R rubbed olive oil all over my legs, very gently and lovingly and sweetly, and I felt better instantly. Read Shakespeare and was very happy doing so. Reconciliation without accountability is impossible.
Saturday—in the morning I saw an ant, and then another ant, and then another ant, and R killed all of them. She didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and she didn’t want me to have anything to do with her, either. She entered his arms like a ship sailing into harbor. She is like a basin that collects his tears and reflects him as he is, human, not a marble pillar or a god. She runs races and won something to run a marathon, I think, in Berlin. She was kind to me, and we embraced. Shimmeringly alive characters. Snakemouth Orchid, Crested Yellow Orchid, Small Purple- fringed Orchid. Some kind of orange oil on the wood so that it would have a beautiful glow. Sounds emitting from the soft featherball of a bird body. Structure is paramount in poetry.
Telephone poles stretching into the distance and mountains blanketed by evergreens in the background, lots of wildflowers, a little gopher poking his two buckteeth out of a hole in the ground. That was what I wanted anyway, but now that I got what I wanted I feel sad about not seeing him. That we had done a murder and eloped so that we couldn’t testify against each other. The Charles was frozen over, strange to see, and the sun setting behind the clouds looked beautiful. The cinematography was beautiful and the first part was great, but the second made no sense. The clothes were dripping all over the floor. The silhouettes of the trees and the soft warm lamps in the flowers and the faint pinpricks of stars in the dark blue sky made a very pretty picture. The sunlight flashed in and out of our embrace, warm and golden. Then all of a sudden the man said that everything was now half off, which changed everything. Then they asked me what shape it was, and I just made up something, which was not a real shape, and the whole thing was a mess, and then I felt put on the spot and embarrassed. There is a magic to names, over and apart from the common sounds of words. There is a strange kind of twilight hanging in the air. There is something morally beneficial to cleaning—something good and self-respecting. These summer days in Oregon are very long and beautiful. Thinking of her made me think of peaches and sunlight. Tints and hazes of gold in the thick green leafage that hung over the little brown rustling brook. Took the T to Park Street, then transferred to the Red Line and got down at MGH, whence we walked to the Esplanade.
Umbrella Tree. Unto forever.
Valentine’s Day: R and I got married. Venus is a slippery, sea-born goddess. Very rude, abrupt, unaware of social graces. Very sensitive to any perceived criticism. Viridian green to cool blue to deep violet to a pinky magenta. Voices and laughs through the open windows.
We are going to make coronation chicken sandwiches. We rearranged the items on the dresser. We treated each other badly because we knew we could get away with it. We went home in a magic spell. Well, that turned out to be the accursed place we had gone on Mother’s Day. When I heard that I felt sick, foul, scared, unspeakably sad. When it flew up all of a sudden, I almost gasped to see that white stripe expand into a flourish of vermilion. When she saw me she gave me a tremulous smile, and I smiled back. While we were on the trail we found a baby freshwater turtle, whom we later namer Arnold. Will try to use a safety pin. Wind, sand, sun, sea. Woolf again, my beloved Virginia Woolf. Working on myself to be less reactive, to not absorb people’s emotions, even when they are very intense, to take deep breaths and calm myself, to remind myself that between action and reaction there can always be a pause.
X-ray a harmonious marriage and you will find its skeleton is comprised of the calcified bits of all such tricks.
Yes, that is what happened to us when our plane landed. Yesterday when I was taking a nap he went out to the bakery and got a beautiful cake—a strawberry cake. You may find this cynical and unromantic. You, whoever may be reading this—(I am a voice crying out in the wilderness)—if you are married, has that also been your experience?
Zero art is zero romance, feeling, poetry, life. Zones of something higher and truer swam above me, and I reached up to them.
Please let me know how your 2025 was and what you are looking forward to in 2026! As always, I love hearing from you in the comments.