We could have lived here forever, I heard Max Laberman say to my parents, all of us older now, our faces slipping at their various fault lines, my parents having bought the house from the Labermans how many years ago?
Dear Kid, Lady, Z—, Old Foe Friend Stranger Death,
Someday you’re going to get as far off the beaten track as Nevada, & your radio dial’s going to spin like a compass in the Arctic, with no place to lay its weary head, & you’re going to wonder . . .
There wasn’t much in the house. Just some furniture, linens, and old ceramic mugs; a box TV and a remote, a study with a little desk and some files, and a printing calculator almost the size of the landline telephone. There were a few coins under the cushions of the couch . . .
Chimney Point: since I know you’ve never been, I’ll sketch it for you. A forefinger of land that pinches into Lake Champlain & narrows it. On the other side, its opposable thumb, is Crown Point, New York, site of an old British . . .
The café was a wide hallway in a refurbished century home. It had Doric columns at the entrance and stained-glass windows in the doors. It was all offices now, walls moved around, glass doors upstairs, very sleek.
Of grammar’s simple machines, I’ve decided that the CLUE is the simplest. A conjunction of time’s sentences. It joins them—well, dreamily, if not in fact.
I said, when they see that wave coming, they start to panic. Some of them throw their bodies in front of the sandcastles – these meticulous, towering sandcastles they’ve built all day . . .
Emphysema, or the wisdom teeth emerging, or love: what goes on inside a body is always an elaborate, painstaking development, a one-act play in a black-box theater for an audience of one. Changes happen slowly, mostly, & we are slow to mark the change.
First things first: don’t start. Maybe you think you have the willpower to be a tourist, to chip on weekends, on payday, when you’re stressed out because your mom phoned you up asking you to send her another moneygram . . .
