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Sleep
Readers Write
Up All Night
Ovid’s Metamorphoses; sixteen yellow, legal-size pages; the Sea of Tranquility
August 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Tell Me Something
Everything of my brother’s fits on a couple of shelves: boxes of records, books, a few photographs. When you’re killed at eighteen, you don’t leave much behind.
August 2008
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
May 2008
The universe will let me know when I’ve worn out my welcome. Until then, why don’t I make myself at home?
May 2008Photography
Into Silence
Over the course of two years I photographed my grandmother Marjorie Clarke on my weekly visits to her home in rural Butler, Maryland. With her health declining and Alzheimer’s disease loosening her ties to everyday reality, I spent much of my time reading aloud or singing songs to her, attempting to hold her attention as long as possible.
April 2007
Poetry
Infant Pneumonia
She wouldn’t suck. She wouldn’t cuddle. / Her eyes rolled toward me, then away again. / I hugged her to my chest and ran / from the doctor’s office to the X-ray lab.
December 2006
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
May 2006
What a big appetite fear has. What a succulent morsel I was last night.
May 2006Sy Safransky’s Notebook
July 2005
Today is four years since the accident that nearly took my daughter’s life; four years since the phone call that yanked me out of my Sunday routine, my idiotic notion that the day would go the way I wanted it to. It was a car crash. It could have been a bolt of lightning, Zeus showing off.
July 2005Quotations
Sunbeams
February 2005It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights. But on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones I’ve never gotten credit for.
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