excerpt from “Time Change”
Waking in the dark, daylight-savings gone, I’m remembering the Biltmore, killing the afternoon at the MLA in ’81, the hopeful with their haircuts upstairs being grilled like fish. I knew better than hope. I’m remembering that dark bar Larry and I had all to ourselves, and a hard, green chablis from a jug at $3.19 a glass which unscrambled my nerves enough so I could ask about his work. And yes, I said “work,” trying to sound as if I’d packed some scholarly resources in the inner pocket of my sport coat, trying to sound objective, although I had committed at least a hundred lines to heart. He looked up to the one blade of afternoon light slicing through a transom and said what he was trying to do was stop time, casually, the way he’d say “Fresno” when asked where he was from…and that, to me, rang as true as a tree, or a shoe, made sense as clearly as a star burning through to this one blue dot in the outer precincts of the Milky Way.