Housekeeping Part II

It was evening. The sky glowed like a candled egg...
I toyed with the thought that we might capsize. It was the order of the world, after all, that water should pry through the seams of husks, which, pursed and tight as they might be, are only made for breaching. It was the order of the world that the shell should fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. Say that the water lapped over the gunwales, and I swelled and swelled until I burst Sylvie's coat. Say that the water and I bore the rowboat down to the bottom, and I, miraculously, monstrously, drank water into all my pores until the last black cranny of my brain was a trickle, a spillet. And given that it is in the nature of water to fill and force to repletion and bursting, my skull would bulge preposterously and my back would hunch against the sky and my vastness would press my cheek hard and immovably against my knee. Then, presumably, would come parturition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved that name, and why should I hope for more from the second? The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness, but could such a birth be imagined? What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate?

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, the story of a girl whose grandfather drowned when his train slipped into the depths of a lake, whose mother drowned by driving her car into the same lake, is beautiful, subtle yet haunting. Each word is delicate yet heavy. I read it slowly, over a period of months, and I want to continue reading it, picking it up while at a lake, at night, on a train, or whenever the wind tells me to.

I Know a Man

I Know a Man
Robert Creeley
(May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005)

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
Amiri Baraka
(1934-)

Apple Cake

From Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
Abigail Thomas

"Apple Cake"

I am not a girl. I am the grandmother of six. I bake cakes for all my grandchildren. My name is synonymous with "cake." I have taught them this. Nana, Cake, and they clap their little hands. Apple cake, this is my specialty. In the past twelve days I have baked seven apple cakes for seven separate occasions. These cakes contain walnuts and raisins as well as golden oil and apples. You would beg me for a slice if you could see these cakes. You would beg for their perfume alone. They do well for holidays. Thanksgiving, for example. Anniversaries.
I have had my good times and my bad. This was long ago, my dears, before most of you were born. I was not a prudish girl. Nor was I wise. When I was young I gave myself away; it was all I had to offer. But not today. Today I will bake a cake. The cake is not a metaphor. Say the words "apple cake." Apple cake.
See how the mouth fills with desire.