Hilary Masters

This guy rings our doorbell and offers me $100 for one of the insulators that sit like glass bells on the top sills of our front windows. He wants the blue one, what I would call a Chagall blue, with “No.

A poet friend has sent me a collection of lines that were either cut from his poems in composition or never made it into a finished stanza. He has assembled these lines on a page—all gleaned from different mornings’ work and stirred by separate impulses—into a common cluster.

The photographer from Newsweek has walked me around to the rear of St. Pat’s and to a corner in the gothic masonry where the light is even. He has pulled a light meter out of his kit and holds it before my face.“A