Second of Five
Two Page Openings from
The Way We Live
by Burt Kimmelman  

Wild Onions (After Robert's Letter) For Robert and Elizabeth Murphy I think if I were very old I would want the wild onions growing in my yard to take up housekeeping with me — "their flower heads," once "bobbing in the wind," poking from a jar as they fade to a fine dust, so I might see in them who I have become — more lovely than I am in the morning mirror where I glimpse who I once was.	..	The Deception Still Life by Giorgio Morandi, 1955 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 2008 How easily we settle into the picture — some squat, plain boxes and a long-necked bottle— those simple objects arranged together so he might catch them in their soft browns and yellows, and among them an intransigent, opaque white spot, but everywhere else in the canvas black traces he must have applied with the most informal of brush strokes. He means to discomfit us yet we surrender ourselves to these sure shapes assembled as for a camera though without occasion, nothing to be done, since it is best, he must have thought, once he knew he loved to paint, to leave things unspoken — the mute smears of color, the bare ground of the horizontal — a made world, something of his stubborn craft.