Some Corner Of The Mind Poem by gershon hepner

In some corner of the mind,
field within a foreign heart,
there will always be a part
of you that you’ve left behind,
never changing with each season,
but recorded by a friend.
a message that he may never send
once it has lost its cause and reason.

If we remembered to engage
immediately with those who try
engaging with, their thoughts that die
might stay alive until we age,
but mostly part of us we leave
behind in others withers on
the stem, unless, before they’re gone,
we join with them and interweave.


Liesl Schillinger reviews Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins (“Eyes Wide Open, NYT Book Review, March 30,2008) :
To read a Tobias Wolff story is to sink into the soft seat of your grandfather’s strong, modest old Buick and let yourself be carried through an America of small towns, small joys, small struggles and small despairs — a landscape so familiar as to be invisible, the landscape of homeland. As each tale proceeds, unhurried, unjudging, the car slows, the turn signal makes its reassuring clicks, and the car glides without resistance into the drive, delivering you, consoled yet strangely disquieted, to the place you came from — a place you thought you’d left behind… And that is the painful genius of Tobias Wolff’s storytelling: to show that whatever someone once was to you, they remain — in some corner of the mind, in some corner of the heart, in defiance of fairness, of reason, of history, of time. The story begins and ends at the same place


4/6/08,3/2/09