Free Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach

lives and works on Deer Isle, and is a serious (and yes, avid) collector of editions of modern poets. Sybil says he makes her feel secure in her business, because there is always a stack of his books ‘on hold’ on the shelf, almost as if he were investing in Wayward Books’ future. A few days after we first arrived to take up residence in Maine, Sybil showed her books at a fair in Bucksport. She had one customer, Charlie, who bought a first edition of Wallace Stevens, I think it was. After that, she says, she felt reassured about the future of Wayward Books Down East.
    Next day: Ed Kessler writes from Washington (and American University) that End Zone struck him as ‘a sea-level book, a stoical book.’ He says he senses no rage against the dying of the light and asks: ‘has the Hound of Heaven lost your scent?’ and sends me a poem by William Carlos Williams called ‘To Waken an Old Lady.’ I’ve never read it before:
    Old age is
    a flight of small
    cheeping birds
    skimming
    bare trees
    above a snow glaze.
    Gaining and failing
    they are buffeted
    by a dark wind—
    But what?
    On harsh weedstalks
    the flock has rested,
    the snow
    is covered with broken
    seedhusks
    and the wind tempered
    by a shrill
    piping of plenty.
    Ed advises me: ‘Don’t be too resigned; keep some shrillness in your piping of plenty.’
    The postscript to Ed’s letter is a scene he witnessed in his bank the other morning. A large black lady waited at the front of the line before the cashier’s station. Further back on the line stood a man with a little boy. The black lady’s beeper went off, and the boy said to his father: ‘Is she backing up?’
    Another correspondent, Dagmar Miller, a woman of about my age, I surmise, delineates the many similarities between her life and mine that she noted in my book. She too loves the water. For her, too, it serves as a recuperative element. She grew up in New York City, ‘in the Washington Heights area and remember its good days,’ was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, had a photographic memory, was going to join the WAVES but ‘the War ended too soon,’ worked in Washington as a journalist, spent time at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, knew my friends Howard Simons and Jim Boatwright, both now dead, one of cancer, the other of AIDS.
    In her youth, she memorized the same astronomical facts as I did.
    â€˜Every so often I, too, silently recite the names of the planets. But over the years, Pluto has become Plato.’
    She liked my book, she writes, and I enjoy reading her praise. My pleasure reminds me of Mark Twain’s remark: ‘Oh, I do love compliments—we all do, humorists, congressmen, burglars—all of us in the trade.’
    Yesterday I heard of an old lady who was driving out the Main Line after an afternoon concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra. A young driver, under the influence, crossed the median line and crashed into her. She died instantly, while her head was still filled with fine music. Or so I imagine. From that single point of view, I consider her a lucky woman.
    A book Sybil picks up at a sale: an intriguing history, published in 1971 by Robert Reisner, of graffiti. It contains a photograph of drawings found on the wall of a cave in a prehistoric Egyptian tomb (they can be read) and advances through time to the present. It is full of quotations. I liked two modern graffiti found on walls in universities.
    â€”At Cornell University: ‘I think I exist, therefore I exist, I think.’
    â€”At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: ‘It often shows a fine command of the English language to say nothing.’
    Norman Mailer wanted us to believe that graffiti were an important form of popular culture. This book at hand, by exploring their history, takes the phenomena very seriously, turning them into literary art. Anytime now I expect to see a graduate thesis that connects subway scrawls and