trunk of a Spanish galleon or the salvage of an accident on the high seas, quaintly used as a coffee table. The sofa began to rot, I don’t remember exactly when but I had to throw it away. At times I thought of getting rid of the rest, too. It reminded me, when I was in a certain mood, of things I would rather forget. For example sometimes I am asked by the occasional journalist who wishes to interview me why I stopped writing poetry. Either I say that the poetry I wrote wasn’t any good, perhaps it was even terrible, or I say that a poem has the potential for perfection and this possibility finally silenced me, or sometimes I say that I felt trapped in the poems I tried to write, which is like saying one feels trapped in the universe, or trapped by the inevitability of death, but the truth of why I stopped writing poetry is not any of these, not nearly, not exactly, the truth is that if I could explain why I stopped writing poetry then I might write it again. What I am saying is that Daniel Varsky’s desk, which became my desk of more than twenty-five years, reminded me of these things. I’d always considered myself only a temporary guardian and had assumed a day would come, after which, albeit with mixed feelings, I would be relieved of my responsibility of living with and watching over the furniture of my friend, the dead poet Daniel Varsky, and that from then on I would be free to move as I wished, possibly even to another country. It isn’t exactly that the furniture had kept me in New York, but if pressed I have to admit this was the excuse I’d used for not leaving all those years, long after it became clear the city had nothing left for me. And yet when that day came it sent my life, at last solitary and serene, reeling.
It was 1999, the end of March. I was at my desk working when the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the voice that asked for me on the other end. Coolly, I inquired who was calling. Over the years I’ve learned to guard my privacy, not because so many people have tried to invade it (some have), but because writing demands that one be protective and adamant about so much that a certain a priori unwillingness to oblige spills over even to situations where it isn’t necessary. The young woman said that we’d never met. I asked her the reason for her call. I think you knew my father, she said, Daniel Varsky.
At the sound of his name I felt a chill through me, not only from the shock of learning that Daniel had a daughter, or the sudden expansion of the tragedy I’d perched on the edge of for so long, or even the certain knowledge that my long stewardship had come to an end, but also because some part of me had waited for such a phone call for years, and now, despite the late hour, it had come.
I asked how she’d found me. I decided to look, she said. But how did you know to look for me? I only met your father once, and it was a very long time ago. My mother, she said. I had no idea who she was referring to. She said, You once wrote her a letter asking if she had any of my father’s poems. Anyway, it’s a long story. I could tell it to you when I see you. (Of course we would be seeing each other, she knew perfectly well that what she was about to ask for couldn’t be denied, but all the same her assurance threw me.) In the letter you wrote that you had his desk, she said. Do you still have it?
I looked across the room at the wooden desk at which I had written seven novels, and on whose surface, in the cone of light cast by a lamp, lay the piles of pages and notes that were to constitute an eighth. One drawer was slightly ajar, one of the nineteen drawers, some small and some large, whose odd number and strange array, I realized now, on the cusp of their being suddenly taken from me, had come to signify a kind of guiding if mysterious order in my life, an order that, when my work was going well, took on an