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Month: May 2026

September 13, 1971

September 13, 1971

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September 13, 1971
Three and a half hour drive
Father, mother, me
Park on College Street
Bustling with cars and people
Forty-somethings and eighteen-year-olds
Suitcases and backpacks and boxes

Formidable Gothic facade
Stone edifice framing Old Campus
Pass through iron gate
Father, mother, me
Sprawling courtyard
Intimate, august, intimidating
Cloistered quadrangle set apart

Walk to northwest corner
Father, mother, me
Granite steps front Wright Hall
Soulless red stone towers above
Three flights of stairs, cold and dark
Middle floor of five
Bare door 323

Inside stark empty colorless
No furniture save rude bunks plain desks
Just me two suitcases and a backpack
Quick goodbyes, too brief hugs
Then no father no mother
Just me in a place very much not home
Now what?

Two toothpicks

Two toothpicks

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Two terrified toothpicks stuck
In quivering yellow jello
Slender silhouettes smothered
With gelatinous goo
Not able to move, not able to breathe
Not able to touch, not able to be
Not able to perform the humble duties
Of their courageous calling.

Alas! Alas!
How did it come to pass
That two such noble picks
Landed in this terrible fix?
Was it fate or chance
Accident or happenstance
Or the malicious machinations
Of a singularly sadistic cook?

It matters not
The die is cast
And regardless of intent
These wooden soldiers are now bent
On a path most formidable
Its perils truly unthinkable
If perchance that jello be piled
On the unsuspecting plate of a child.

Two tormented toothpicks stuck
In insidious yellow jello
Their destiny not to be forsworn
None but me left to mourn
O doomed wayfarers
Wrenched from your appointed vocation
May I now sing of your unrivaled nobility!
May I now praise your unmatched magnanimity!

Hanging Wallpaper

Hanging Wallpaper

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Lynne and I cannot hang wallpaper together. No worries, of course, because who hangs wallpaper any more? But if we were to, we wouldn’t.

One of would want to get the job done and then move on to the next thing, satisfied with checking another item off the to-do list. The other of us would be checking and rechecking, placing the four-foot level against the wall as each sheet was unfolded and eased into place, making sure the seam was still perfectly plumb, running the wooden roller over the seam again and again and again, until the edges of the adjoining sheets were determined to be perfectly flat and perfectly abutted, no hint of bare wall between and not the slightest overlap, sweeping brush and sponge over the face of the sheets smoothing out each and every bubble, taking tile knife and straightedge to cut top and bottom perfectly flush to ceiling and baseboard (unless of course the baseboard had first been carefully removed so as to run the wallpaper behind before carefully replacing the baseboard and happily avoiding any bottom edge at all which could curl or not precisely match the top edge of the baseboard, a step — that is first removing the baseboard — one of us would consider to be wholly unnecessary and a waste of time), and then, finally, after completing all the tasks for that one sheet, the other of us would stand back, not admiring, but inspecting, and if everything were not just so, would go back to that one sheet, pushing and pulling, rolling and adjusting, standing back and inspecting, until that one sheet were just so, or failing that, would rip down that one sheet and start over with a new piece.

Lynne and I cannot hang wallpaper together, and, God be thanked, it has been thirty years since we would have ever dreamed of doing so.

Emptiness

Emptiness

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Clay is used to make a pot
But it is the empty space within that makes it useful as a container
(From Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11)

And yet the empty space becomes useful only as it is constrained by the shape of the pot. The emptiness by itself cannot hold water or carrot soup or haddock chowder. It must be transmuted into a certain kind of emptiness, an emptiness that is no longer amorphous but defined, delimited, made purposeful. And the defining, delimiting, purpose-making, though accomplished by the pot, is not of the pot’s intention. The pot is the means by which an artisan transforms the emptiness and infuses it with usefulness.

Artisans employ imagination to transform emptiness. The imagination of a homebuilder fashions of emptiness a warm and congenial and inviting space to which to retreat. The imagination of a poet transfigures emptiness into the freighted silences between the words. The imagination of a peacemaker makes of emptiness, not an uneasy and anxious hiatus, but a contented and hopeful quietude.

Emptiness is the raw material, as it were, out of which artisans create not only usefulness, but beauty. The emptiness within any pot can hold water or carrot soup or haddock chowder, but that emptiness becomes all the more precious and the experience of the emptiness serving its purpose all the more satisfying when the pot is shaped with an artful or whimsical or exuberant eye. The silences between and among any string of words may be freighted, but the freight may be dull and uninspiring, or it may be enthralling and exhilarating, depending on the skill and imagination of the poet.

Out of emptiness emerges all that we may find gratifying and delightful and sacred in this life, when it is laid in the hands of a viruoso artisan.