Cynthia Zarin

[Image: Dempsey and Firpo, by George Bellows. The reason for its inclusion here will be obvious once you’ve read through this post. The fight in question is covered by Wikipedia here.]

From whiskey river:

When you’ve lived as long as I have, you tend to think you’ve heard everything, that there’s nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don’t understand the first thing about life.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and not from whiskey river:

Sunday
(excerpt)

iii at the museum (bellows)
For Alexander Nemerov

The man in the left-hand corner
of Bellows’s picture of the Dempsey-Firpo
fight, the picture a dream, so not a real
fight — a picture of a fight — his flayed hide
just visible under his blue pinstripes,
the watcher and the fighter
indistinguishable, one inside

the other, lion and lion tamer,
the paint daubs faces or fingerprints
and the lights staring and staring across
the fretwork of the ring, and Bellows
himself, next to him, looking surprised,
as if to be there was to give himself up
without our noticing it, as we all do

in a gesture, or word, leaving something
behind we should have taken with us
or even guarded, a way of not letting
something be over and done with.
The fight was over in four minutes flat.
A curious thing about the painting
is that Bellows chose to show us

the moment when Firpo sent Dempsey
careening, with a blow to the jaw,
one of the two times he laid him out,
and we, with the spectators crammed
into the foreground of the picture
have to help push Dempsey back
into the ring where two-and-a-half

minutes later he will defeat Firpo,
who went down four times to his two.
In Assisi, at the Basilica di San Francesco,
in the panel in which Giotto depicts
the moment Francis gives away
his worldly goods, the palm that Francis
raises up to the hand that is reaching

down to him from heaven, a hand out
of the blue, open, ready to give or
receive wonders, is the same hand
in Bellows’s picture raised behind Dempsey
one wing of a dove, the impulse is
to press our own palms to it, and despite
our better judgment to hurl him back.

(Cynthia Zarin [source])

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[Image: “Black Boulangerie Alsacienne Food Truck,” by Tuur Tisseghem. (Found it at Pexels; thanks!)]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day

To Mary Jo Salter

Beyond the ice-bound stones and bucking trees,
past bewildered Mary, the Meer in snow,
two skating rinks and two black crooked paths

are a battered pair of reading glasses
scratched by the skater’s multiplying math.
Beset, I play this game of tic-tac-toe.

Divide, subtract. Who can tell if love surpasses?
Two naughts we’ve learned make one astonished 0—
a hectic night of goats and compasses.

Folly tells the truth by what it’s not—
one X equals a fall I’d not forgo.
Are ice and fire the integers we’ve got?

Skating backwards tells another story—
the risky star above the freezing town,
a way to walk on water and not drown.

(Cynthia Zarin [source])

…and:

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there — the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.

(Frederick Buechner [source])

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All the Mysterious Comforts of Winter