In spring, the night sky is as vulnerable and bejeweled as a fledgling debutante. The would-be poet, with longings inchoate, gazes up through tender branches now fluttering small green flags. His heart lifts toward a moon drifting and dreaming as though it had forever to complete its circuit.

The gravitational power of an unfamiliar wistfulness pulls the poet, and his heart flies up and he with it, clutching at stars and sipping falling dew. Continue reading “Poet and Moon” →

Before I fall asleep at night — though God knows I can fall asleep during the day, walking to the post box — I read from an old Georgette Heyer mystery, or an Agatha Christie, or any “cozy” in which seemingly intelligent, smartly dressed Londoners motor down to the English countryside in a Duesenberg or Bentley in order to be murdered.

Though she doesn’t really pen cozies, Martha Grimes will do as well. She has, after all, created the impossibly sexy (in my opinion) Melrose Plant, who eschews his title (Earl of Caverness), yet drives a Bentley and serves as sometimes-sidekick to Richard Jury of Scotland Yard. Continue reading “More Escape” →

I am particularly fond of lamps made of “pot metal,” dating from the 1920s and ’30s, their “sculpted” bases depicting women in flowing costume throwing themselves about in what one assumes to be dance poses. And/or women seated at pianos or holding mandolins while wearing expressions of exquisite vapidity.

I have no excuse for being particularly fond of these except that they draw me into a past I don’t recall, one that may never have existed. And yet, darlings, don’t we all yearn toward such a past — or could it be a future? — even as sunflowers yearn toward the sun?

Breathes there a man or woman so abysmally strong or dead that they do not hunger for a past that never was? If so, do not, for any reason, introduce us.