The sun, unrelenting now, hammers my head. Blooming white and lilac azalea flowers spill from ceramic pots that line the famous Spanish Steps. Rows of people, most sitting, their faces to the sun. The winter coat weighs on my shoulders, high heeled boots bite my toes. Greasy sweat between my breasts.

In contrast to Kandinsky’s intricate articulation (in both theory and practice) of the spiritual purpose of form, de Kooning’s work is an interesting anomaly.  It is curious that de Kooning, in this period of artistic uninhibitedness, is regarded by more than one critic as evoking a sort of vacancy in his work, a deliberate descent into visual paradox, an emptiness and a void. 

There is a Zen story in which a student’s teacher has taught the student, “When drinking tea, just drink tea,” yet the student comes across the teacher in the act of reading a newspaper while drinking tea. The teacher says, “When drinking tea and reading the newspaper, just drink tea and read the newspaper.”

Called forth by my father’s words, the cave sprung up howling in my mind. The pine trees around it lashed in the wind, lacerating the sky. Below, waves keened. Black, white, green, gray.

When Ephron began regularly writing essays for Esquire the 1970s, she must have felt a pull toward the world of quality journalism, or perhaps the editors wanted someone who could write about women’s issues for a male audience. Perhaps both. Something about these circumstances, writing for a primarily male audience about issues that interested her as a woman may have shaped the way she used tone to convey an attitude. The breezy, flippant tone of such articles as “A Few Words About Breasts,” employs humor to talk about what was beginning to be called “the male gaze.”

“Everyone will tell you that I am not a musician. That is correct. From the very beginning of my career, I classed myself as a phonometographer . . . Science is the dominating factor . . . I think I can say that phonology is superior to music…”

Inside my mother’s dark body, I developed lanugo and little limbs, my own fingerprints and bones. Her body recognized that my blood was not her own. Every part of her identified me as a pathogen and endeavored to destroy me. Instead of carrying vital oxygen and other essential nutrients, my bloodstream was contaminated with my mother’s antigens, triggering an immune response that identified me as an invader and urgently signaled for my removal and destruction.

I remember hearing certain people thought flowers were obscene. That floral displays were essentially pornography, with uncovered carpel and stamen, reproductive organs for all to see, spread open, luring us in with vivid displays of botanical sexuality.

Words wash up on the shore of your brain. Less and less tied to the world where the rest of us live. It is fitting that you – a poet to the last – speak in koans.

Scores of Manhattanites were fleeing to the suburbs, desperate to escape the city’s descent into financial and moral decrepitude. The general feeling was that the city had passed its heyday and was, like Rome and Philadelphia before it, about to fall. War, plague and a scourge of porno shops would soon consume the land. Such dire predictions, however, didn’t stop hordes of young career aspirants, like myself, from swarming into the city every day, our suitcases packed with little experience and outsized ambitions.