The gray square above is meant to stand in for a photograph of my dead wife, may she rest in peace. For a photograph, that is, of my wife dead and in her coffin, which I took during the first moments of the 

The summer that Henry Wilder was in love with Jane Pratt—he was fifteen then—he was also much under the influence of Otis Purney. 

The Massif has a perimeter of approximately one hundred and twenty miles and its rock face rises impregnable and sheer as a fortress to three thousand feet, and it dominates the departements of the Drôme and of Isere.

Dean Faulkner Wells, who has put down here William Faulkner’s ghost story “The Werewolf” as he told it to her and her cousin Jill (Mr. Bill’s daughter) and her cousin Vicki and the other children of Oxford, is Mr. Bill’s niece. She was named after her father Dean, who was Mr. Bill’s 

The proud red glow was gone and for a terrible moment Henry thought the gateway to the west had been wiped out in the night. Then he reached for his field glasses, sighted along his secret tunnel off 95th Street, out over the river, over the folded layers of laminated shale (known to the dumber guys as the Palisades) and closed his eyes.

“Good just barely afternoon, Kee-mo Sah-bee,” purred the voice in his shirt pocket, and on signal Morty smiled secretly, brushed his hand inside and without losing a heat of the packing and stacking, fondled the warm little head and whispered back “Good just barely afternoon, Kee-mo.”

Hey you guys wake up, we’ve started all over again, but this time it’s going to be serious, the real story, no more evasions, procrastinations, and you won’t believe this, it begins in the future

no I’m not kidding, well the near future, can’t stray too far from the present, and besides there is a certain logic to keep in mind, a certain urgency too

1942: the soldiers were already in the courtyard, calling their names. It was early in the morning, very early, five in the morning, in July, I think. Or perhaps August. Hard to remember now.

I swam fast toward the rocks—the sting of a jellyfish couldn’t be worse than listening to him go on about his mother.’

I realize of course that I’m no longer worthy of the name musician, if I ever was, though officially I’m still registered as a specially-funded pianoforte soloist with Segismundo Alegría and the Vienna Philharmonic for the duration of the Estabrook Festival, Summer 1978.