Not long ago, I met a woman in her eighties in the parking lot of a library in Florida. I had been at the library to give a reading, and one member of the audience waited for me after everyone else had left, despite the brutal, engulfing heat. The stranger was attractive, elegant, and well-dressed,…
This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he’s…
Far away from this house, far from Concord, grew orchards where willowy women read scrolls, not stiff-backed books, picked pomegranates, not apples. There, as in fairy tales, houses glittered like gilt-edged books, princes and princesses walked in concord under the sun’s golden apple. But women had to be practical in this house, while the transcendentalist…
Not the rising sun, but the setting sun. Not the father, but the mother. Not the cross, but the circle, drawn in ink, not blood. The Word inhabited but unspoken, like a bell unrung. A cathedral of the mind, gray and cool as Time, with doors so tall and heavy that I must tug and…
In the single room of a bathtub, humming “Love Me Tender” to hear a sullen human voice. Then after, fainting in slow motion to the tile. Succumbing to steam and waking, on my own, drowsy as a rose. Mailing a letter and waiting, empty, beside a hornet’s thumb-small home, fit inside the lip of the…
Canny has always been an Irish word to my ear, so too its cousin crafty, suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work, fine-making, handwrought artistry, but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive, stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions, “silence, exile, and cunning,” in Joyce’s admonition, ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive. Craft,…
I’m a cipher. Before that, I was a loose cannon. Before that, I was a zealot. I preached on the street corners. I accosted strangers in subways to tell them I had good news for them. Before that, I worked on the assembly line in a fireworks factory. I stuck fuses in firecrackers and poured…
At first you were famously not good at it. You were coaxed, given cocoa, lectured a bit. On the morning of a journey they would gather you up And bundle you into the station wagon, asleep Or pretending sleep, among pillows and soft voices, While the car made its turnings through darkened places. Later you…
After Samuel died and I had to move up north to live with Faith and her husband Dan, I got rid of almost everything I owned. Not that I wanted to, but there was no space in their drafty house near the river for their things and my things too. I really only had a…
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