already broken
[note 2.24]
[macbeth, 2026]
There’s a concept in Buddhism of the already broken; that whatever you have and love and hold close will one day be dust. It helps me some days, when I drop a cup and it shatters, it helps me to appreciate all the days it wasn’t shattered.
I was alone in a car, driving to Albany to pick up a roof rack for another car. It was one of those really hot days we keep waking up inside, this one 103, but it felt like 116. Inside the car the AC was on but when I stopped and opened the door it was like stepping into, yes, an oven.
The car I was in was a 2007 VW Rabbit. I’d bought it for my daughter for her graduation (too good a deal to pass up: 60k miles, 4k$),
The roof rack was so we can move her to college at the end of August.
On the drive I was listening to the Slate’s Culture Gabfest (Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, Dana Stevens), which I’d been listening to since before covid. It was their last broadcast, they were calling it quits, after 18 years, which was the same number of years my daughter has been walking this earth, and it was all so poignant, how nothing is forever, how from the moment I began listening I knew it would end (already broken), how they had led me to some very good books and films (and some not so good), but they always seemed to actually care about what they said and how they said it. At the end Stephen recommend a poem by Richard Wilbur, about a daughter typing behind a closed door, but he wouldn’t read it out loud because he’d get emotional, so I went home and looked it up and here it is:
THE WRITER
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
~~~
[quick note for those in nyc: come to the Roxy tonight at 5:45 to see me in Beth B.’s film GLOWING; then join us for the afterparty at the Parkside Lounge at 8, where I’ll do a little reading, along with some really special performers]
