Henry Taylor

At times it is like watching a face you have just met, trying to decide who it reminds you of— no one, surely, whom you ever hated or loved, but yes, somebody, somebody. You watch the face as it turns and nods, showing you, at certain angles, a curve of the lips or a lift of the eyebrow that is exactly right, and still the lost face eludes you. Now this face is talking, and you hear a sound in the voice, the accent on certain words— yes! a phrase . . . you barely recall sitting outside, by a pool or a campfire, remarking a peculiar, recurring expression. Two syllables, wasn’t it? Doorknob? Bathroom? Shawcross? What the hell kind of word is shawcross? A name; not the right one. A couple of syllables that could possibly be a little like something you may once have heard. So the talk drifts, and you drift, sneaking glances, pounding your brain. Days later a face occurs to you, and yes, there is a resemblance. That odd word, though, or phrase, is gone. It must have been somebody else. Yes, it’s like that, at times; something is, maybe; and there are days when you can almost say what it is.

It may seem morbid of an embezzler to keep a memorandum, yet many of them do. It may be mere neatness. -Wallace Stevens, "Surety and Fidelity Claims" I've made a little sluice-gate in the flow of cash across the spreadsheet on my screen. Amid torrential chaos and foreseen disasters it maintains its small and slow on-off diversions, so my work can show the delicacy of difference between the beans I count and one uncounted bean, and where the latter might invisibly go. The hollowed shoe-tree, the hermetic jar are gadgetry I might revert to yet. There is the money of the thing, the far secure retirement years, the deep-hedged bet, but I love working where the unknowns are, and writing down what I need to forget.