I’ve heard writers say that every now and again a story arrives fully-formed in their minds and writing it comes so easily that it feels like transcription. That’s never happened for me. Every time I finished a story in the collection and began another one, I felt as if I were learning how to write all over again.

Is it possible to fall in love with a house, as you might with a person, if you are seventeen years old, a small-town boy waiting for the adventure of his life to begin? I felt as if I had opened a secret door and come to the center of things.

I knew freedom

was not the act of flying
          but the steady beat of wings.

It was my steady black,
          blue and my blues were gone,

I wanted to be
          a bird and became.

When he died, John had been publishing books consistently for more than fifty years. He wrote more than twenty of them, as well as dozens of individual stories and poems. Much of the work—like this story—revolved around questions of faith and guilt, and he imbued all of it with his characteristic self-deprecation, compassion, and humor.

            I’m fitful
when I’m sleeping. Wakeful,
a minute. My ears wet
when I get up. Like drowning,
            though I’ve never.
All my dreams Chevrolet heavy.
This land would swallow me
           for one damn pearl.

Light: supreme optical clarity, quick-dry, scratch-resistant.
Clouds: feather-pregnant, groaning, insistent.

Exterior: A puzzle, one continuous Olde New Yorke alley.
I did not know you. You did not know me.

It’s no accident that postwar American fiction and television don’t loom as the determining influences on his novels, as they did for Wallace and his cohort in a way that seemed inescapable at the time. Lerner’s lodestars are the poetry of Walt Whitman and John Ashbery, visual art, and the classic European novel.

And maybe a soul is a satellite,
a small idea orbiting a larger one, a device
to translate the signal
and send it back.

The rat is still a rat.
There is no getting around what we are.

I was getting too worried about all that noise around symbolism, around beauty, around birds. I needed to be silent in some different way with that scene. If the stupid emotional truths were really stupid, at least I’d try to hear them, to identify them more clearly.