The Artful Trade

Heart Failure     copyright@ Will Maguire At 39, in his artistic prime, the composer Frederick Chopin began to feel a nagging and then constant ache in his chest. That year he had been in a tempestuous and ultimately ruinous affair with a woman, but only later did it become clear that the pain was a medical issue. She loved him, but Chopin lived the financially insecure life often demanded of an artist.  So she gave herself to a man who could better provide for her and they both went on ruined in the way that love can ruin two souls simply by the knowledge of each other’s existence. She became someone else’s wife and then a mother and lived with a tepid affection for her innocent husband, haunted by that rare Supposed to Be passion that she had given up. Chopin for his part took what was given, which is to say what was taken, and used the longing to forge a new kind of music.  It was the sound of a heart fractured by its own feeling.  Later that year, over...

Mother's Day The last time my mother knew me was a few years ago on Mother's Day. She had started forgetting and remembering in the wrong order. Forgetting the things around her, remembering the distant past...like Time was suddenly dyslexic. They had her in this hospital ward for the elderly on some back street off the main drag called Memory Lane Memory Lane would be funny if it wasn’t so cruel. Sometimes living's the same way. She kept asking for a mirror but didn't recognize herself anymore. She was 17 again but trapped in an 80 year old body. A young girl staring in disbelief at the person she would become. She didn’t know her husband or daughters or sons anymore. Some days she thought I was her long dead uncle or her brother. And near the end she thought I was her father. She pleaded with me again and again to let her see that Irish boy that was just back from the war, the one that got shot in the head and survived and kept knocking on the door...

The Smell Of Bleach                         I have a scar on my hand and another on the back of my head. I got them both when I was 22 working on a construction crew down south. The scar on my hand came from trying to beat back loneliness. And for a time I did. I shattered it one night along with a pane of glass. The scar on my head came from the business end of a shovel swung by a guy whose jaw I broke trying to save a girl. As it turned out the girl saved me….though that took the better part of a year. A scar is where the true gets forced in. That’s never easy. Something is usually broken when it tries. That year what’s true about loneliness and bravery, about the stains we all carry and the hope of absolving them cut their way into me. Some nights I can feel them reach toward each other, trying to  meet somewhere in the middle like the true is trying find its way down into the heart of me. My scars ...