Verbal Ice
When I was young, we had a summer cottage by a lake. That was where I learned to swim and waterski and sail; to recognize birdsongs and flowering plants; and to hike and camp out. One January the pipes burst, and my father took me back with him to the cottage. Towards evening, when he’d done what all needed doing, he took me out on the frozen lake. The sky was a russet gray. He held my hand and we walked together away across the lake towards town, looking back at the cottage in the trees from time to time, while stars spurted from their coverts, and the wind, keening, deafened us.

That was what it was like learning to read—holding notional hands with the author in an altered landscape, turning water to ice in my mind so that each paragraph could sustain our ungainly weight, as we made our way, under starlight, against a challenging wind, looking back to contrast all we were exploring with my quotidian life. Not infrequently at first, from time to time even now, my concentration will break, at the beginning of a chapter, in the middle of a sentence, the ice melts and I find myself floating on my back or treading water.

Learning letters, words and grammar was like learning to swim or ride a bike—mechanical, habitual, something I could do alone. But reading has always seemed to me part magic, always required a change of state, water to ice, world to mind, suspension between doing and being; and it remains a mystery, something that always incorporates chance, promise, and treachery, more like flying than like riding a bicycle.

When you’re up on verbal ice, it can be slow going; philosophy and philology are slippery and uneven, considerably more perilous than walking or swimming. But with fiction you can use skates, know instinctively where to go, and start to see the relations between things, how the world is vast and complex, everything like something else, teacher neighbor to treacherous, change to cant and can’t and choice. You feel you’re accelerating at the limit of control, at risk of injury, but somehow also proficient and substantial. And then a chapter ends, and you put the book aside to follow the accruing ideas and associations out along their hermetic trajectories, traveling where no map could ever take you.

We sold the summer cottage long ago. I haven’t been back in decades. But I remember it and the lake and the town and the neighbors as if it were yesterday, as if I had read about rather than met them. That is the power of a valid metaphor. It transforms everything it provokes.

157 East Drive
It was colder then; the snow fell in storm feet
Too brighter
While the moon equably lit the neighborhood
The sun augmented and ripened it, trumpeted
Turned it from something merely visible
To something tangible, almost edible
Day, night, day
And in postwar suburbia, transplanted city folk stumbled and erred
Inadvertently teaching their children about change
The willow outside our window
Gone in a day when it threatened the foundation
To clear the way for the forked maple
Which then, unbraced, split in a high wind
DIY landscaping all we could afford

I lived with my brother in a 12 by 10 foot box
Bunk beds wall to wall
(Because knees didn’t fit under the desk
Did homework at the kitchen table
Or, standing, on the ping pong table in the basement
Where the model trains had once trundled and whistled
And mother cut patterns for sewing during the day
In the pungent dusty air
Adjacent to the short wave radio
The file cabinets and pegboarded tools and oil tank)
Once after lights out I asked him gently to turn down his transistor radio
And he said, “Why? You can’t hear it.”
He was only six.

Nonnuclear:
Penny, a house dog, relegated to the split level first floor playroom
Sweet and well-behaved until, undogged, undone by thunderstorms
She cowered, shaking, under the couch
Or broke taboo and slunk upstairs
And Grandma, also first floor, moved at 92 into the-room-behind-the-garage
Extended for her out into gone-in-a-day willow terrain
Her parroting refrain: “God has forgotten me”
For five years kept her thermostat at 82
And wore gloves indoors
Whatever the weather

Back then in the night
The grief of the inconsolable trains
Intruded a larger world into each emotional and metaphorical greenhouse on our street
In our town
Invoking the lonely hills and shoreline to the north
The lonely dunes and bays and causeways and feral ocean to the south
Rogue hurricanes and nor’easters
Flooding, trees and phone lines down
(Our rotary phones, the CHapel 9 exchange)
Bare live electric wires
And to the west
Town after town each open to the sky
Counties and cities and states
The vast evocative quilt
A country young and victorious then
As full of promise
As we were
Baseball mitts in the garage
Scrabble and Chutes and Ladders in the closet
Moon River and West Side Story and Harry Belafonte in the record cabinet
Opulent snow gleaming in the sunlight
How far we have come since then.