coldhearted scientist وداد

I always think I ought to read fiction – novels, plays – but I like history, letters, essays, and poems. Now I am reading Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, in his collected poetry. In the same volume is a letter describing the house I wanted to live in as a child:

Their house is built mainly of Oz books, a grate to burn wood, a second story for guests, paintings, poems, and miscellaneous objects of kindly magic. Cats. . . . It is a postoffice. . . . I . . . walked down the outside stairs and saw (or heard but I think I saw) the ocean and the moonless stars that filled the sky so full of light I understood size for the first time.

From that house I remember Victorian children’s books, oil pastels, paints, easels and spinach pasta, which fascinated me because it was green. The stairs were narrow and steep, like the streets outside. The coats hanging in the hallway smelled of sweet tobacco and the jackets had thin black armbands sewn onto the sleeves. The letter continues:

[I]f you come back to California I will show you where they send letters — all of them, the poems and the ocean. The invisible

Axé.