The poem "At Chassy" was written during a winter I spent at an artist's colony at Chateau de Lesvault, a manor house and estate in the Morvan countryside in Burgundy, France. One morning in February I and two local friends were driving up to visit the famous basilica at Vezeley; on our way we passed the old farm of the painter Balthus Klossowski de Rola, who had resided in the Morvan during the 1950s and had become famous not only for his landscapes, but for his controversial paintings depicting pubescent girls.

My friends, who had lived in the area for years, began to tell me about the Chateau de Chassy's resident--Balthus' niece, model and ex-mistress--now an eccentric recluse in her 60s. It seemed she opened her home to visitors only once a year; my friends had visited Chassy one summer, and they told tales of a place overrun with dogs, of bizarre placards on the walls prohibiting the killing of spiders. The 17th century residence was beautiful, though, something of a cross between a fortress and a farm--weathered grey stone, a battered courtyard, sheep in the meadows around. That morning in particular it seemed unutterably tranquil, with that pale late-winter beauty of the Burgundian countryside.

The reality behind those stone walls intrigued me--in particular those mild eccentricities that must have developed over decades of solitude. What would inspire someone to place such a taboo on killing spiders, for instance, if not for some deep affinity with what they represented: patient predation, eccentric industry, the spinning of a home out of the threads of one's very self?