Author's Intro

This is an intensely autobiographical, possibly even narcissistic piece. If anyone sticks with it and finds something universal in it, I'll be pleased. It was a pleasure to organize these threads of thinking and feeling about "the Good Life" that have been circulating in my being for nearly half a century.

 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS

Something’s a little strange:

I sit at the table cradling the

Norton Anthology of Short Fiction ,

Its Contents a treasury

Of whispered portents:

Updike, Melville, Nabokov,

Sprinkle in a little Tolstoy,

Cheever, Maugham, Munro,

Carson McCullers: names

That validate my being,

My “literary taste” refined,

The world filtered

Through these rarified lenses,

Consciousness distilled into print,

Reconstituted as I read.

Before I went to Andover, that summer of ‘62

I’d no idea of this canon.

I lived in ignorance, it was old Mr. Basford,

Instructing us across the polished wooden table.

Using as text an anthology,

The Expanded Moment.

(I bought a copy online, not long ago.)

Its cover showed, in black and white,

a photograph of impact

on the surface of some liquid.

In Mr. Basford’s class I became

Enrolled in this—religion,

These priests, these artists

Sanctifying prose.

2.

And even now, at 60,

After finding God Himself

Long ago, having dropped

into a chasm, a crucible in which

I could no longer dryly draw

My tutelage from print,

But screamed in a nightmare,

Swirling down whitewater

Toward the Falls, having tumbled

From a rickety bridge

Through missing slats—

a dream I had back then, which found

symbols for the horrors of my actual life—

My desperation moved God Himself

To scoop me out.

But even so,

On a more explicit spiritual path

For all these years, I still retain

Old notions of “the Good Life”.

3.

Actually, I see now that Mr. Basford

Fleshed out what had been introduced

In high school by Miss Rothschild,

My sophomore English teacher,

who dabbed rose water

Every morning on her wrists,

And chose each word

she used with care.

Words. Miss Rothschild did not tell us,

But showed their value

In the way she spoke.

I see that now.

Language is like water,

taking on the value

of its spokesperson.

Miss Rothschild, and Mr. Basford

Championed words.

My father burdened them sometimes,

As when he called our dog

“Black son of a bitch”! He was

Submerged most of his life

In worries about money.

My mother, angry in those years

To have been pulled west from New York.

Grandmother, living in the guest bedroom,

With the most banal advice I’ve ever heard:

“Always be one of the many,

never be one of the few.”

Every word in that structure bent

and groaned misuse—

not of grammar, but

of sentiment.

My glimpses

Of something

Beyond that vacuum

Showed me there could be

A gift of words.

4.

A gift of words.

And now, at 60,

Long at the feet of a Master,

Meher Baba, who was silent

(but Francis Brabazon, Baba’s poet,

Showed me words that have their origin

In Love can still have meaning),

I still sit, mornings

With these bibles, with their chapters

Of stories by the canon:

Faulkner, Joyce, O’Conner, Chekhov, Shaw,

These guardians of the faith

Who did their best to live the Good Life,

although some ended miserably in drink,

Or blew their brains out.

Still, I take their focused efforts—

“The unexamined life is not worth living,”

Miss Rothschild used to quote—

I take them as efforts

at awakened life.

5.

Me and my

Mythology.

Funny thing is,

Sometimes I just hold

The book, don’t even read.

Today I found and read

Three really short ones.

If the story runs even ten pages,

Often I hesitate.

All this makes me ask myself:

What am I really doing?
What am I after?

And maybe the book is just

A touchstone for my own thoughts

And pen, a whetstone

For my consciousness.

I hope the book is not

Like some memento

Held by an old woman

In her rocking chair

As she dreams away

Her final years.