I didn't want to retire, I said to Robert, a 50ish electrician from outside Dexter who I played a round at Hudson Mills yesterday, now I can't retire and never will be able to retire. Robert, who can huck it but can't putt (I can putt sometimes and huck never), said, I want to retire but know I never will and knew I never would but now know I never can. Earlier in the day L and C and me drove to the Detroit Institute of Art and paid full freight to discover their entire wing of contemporary art closed for refurbishing, what we went to see, check the website before going, dummy. Detroit's Hands-Off even started on Woodward in front of DIA, we didn't join. Robert's red discraft driver somewhere in the reeds below, he can huck but not always control
I hate going on vacation, like vacation when there, can't wait to be home though dread the drive tomorrow, fine metaphors abound. Robert, an equal opportunity loather, a Trump hater, a Democratic hater more, and I didn't talk politics once our mutual kinship in despising anyone and everyone in the ruling class and their henchmen established. If I come back this summer he said he'd take me to a Tigers game if interested (I'd mentioned I saw Tiger Stadium, or whatever they call the ballpark they play in now when driving to DIA), maybe, I said, no, I thought. He declared his red disc lost, played his next disc from spot he best guessed the disc flew out of bounds at, moved on. This was on shuffle on drive back to cottage
TRANSACTION
A.R. Ammons
I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings:
I performed the rites, simple and decisive:
the long box took the spilling of gray ground in
with little evidence of note: I traded slow
work for the usual grief: the services were private:
there was little cause for show, though no cause not
to show: it went indifferently, with an appropriate
gravity and lack of noise: the ceremonies of the self
seem always to occur at a distance from the ruins of men
where there is nothing really much to expect, no arms,
no embraces: the day was all right: certain occasions
outweigh the weather: the woods just to the left
were average woods: well, I turned around finally from
the process, the surface smoothed into a kind of seal,
and tried to notice what might be thought to remain:
everything was there, the sun, the breeze, the woods
(as I said), the little mound of troublesome tufts of
grass: but the trees were upright shadows, the breeze
was as against a shade, the woods stirred gray
as deep water: I looked around for what was left,
the tools, and took them up and went away, leaving
all my treasures where they might never again disturb
me, increase or craze: decision quietens:
shadows are bodiless shapes, yet they have a song.
