I wrote "Shaman at the Door" during a time when I was reading both Mircea Eliade's "The Sacred and the Profane" and the Platonic Dialogues. Reading them at the same time seemed an odd blend of mysticism and reason, yet both Eliade's essays on the rituals of ancient peoples and the Socratic questions deal with mystery. Which made me wonder: how does anyone dwell in mystery while living in the information age, when we are bombarded by facts, figures, monetary concerns? With our desire for all things understood, I imagined a shaman knocking on our doors, shaking up the worlds we live in, asking questions which perhaps are unanswerable, enlarging the domain of our ignorance. Living with mystery can be frightening but perhaps, in the long run, liberating, if we take exception, now and then, to the routine of our lives.

"Prelude to Stillness" was conceived about four years ago. My father had been battling cancer, and my mother called me one early October morning to tell me that he had only 24 to 72 hours to live. I rushed to get dressed so I could drive to their house, and be there to hold his hand at his bedside. But I was too late -- twenty minutes later she called again to say he died. I was frustrated, angry even, that I hadn't been there in time, and I asked his hospice nurse, Merline, to tell me everything he said, everything that happened in the hour leading up to his death. A week later I sat at the typewriter and wrote down his final moments. Though I wasn't there to witness his dying, the poem allows me to "see" the scene she described. The relative absence of emotion comes, I think, not only from not having been there, but from having written it so soon after his death. "Prelude to Stillness" appeared in Volume 6, Number 1, Summer 2000 issue of Rattle.