.
Switch House at the Taunton railroad crossing: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, April 1973
The galloping collection of boards
are the house which I afforded
one evening to walk into
just as the night came down.
Dark inside, the candle
lit of its own free will, the attic
groaned then, the stairs
led me up into the air.
From outside, it must have seemed
a wonder that it was
the inside he as me saw
in the dark there.
Robert Creeley (1926-2005): Somewhere, from For Love, 1962
Aftermath of an auto accident on Storrow Drive, Boston, nine o'clock in the morning: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973
When two, seated on the lap of a nurse on the on the front seat of a car beside my father as he drove through the city of Boston on some errand or other, I was showered with broken glass full in the face when a stray lump of coal shattered the side window. Again I recall nothing of it, and perversely the year that followed must have been a very happy one because I was not allowed to cry for fear of causing the affected eye further damage. For some time, then, the eye was left in place although it seems to have had little function. It began to grow larger, however, and so, when I was five, just a year after my father's death, the eye was taken out. That I do remember because my mother told me we were to go to the hospital on some routine business of her own, and once there, she suggested I wait inside, which was common enough. But from there I was taken to the doctor, and so on and so forth, till I came to with a great bandage covering my head, and the eye gone. So I wish she had told me, although I rationally understood why she did not, and why she also had not made clear to me our father wasn't coming back after we saw him taken away in the ambulance across our front yard in the snow. We knew nothing of the funeral, or let me speak for myself. Those tracks fading in the spring thaws mark for me the end of that previous time entirely.
But it is luck, which was the point, and the paradoxical fact that that his death and my injury had a curious consequence. The company employing the person responsible for the careful shovelful of coal paid damages of some nine thousand dollars, enough to see me through college, toward which I'd been determinedly propelled by my mother's sense of duty to my father.
Robert Creeley: from Autobiography (1989), in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the American Common Place, 1993
But it is luck, which was the point, and the paradoxical fact that that his death and my injury had a curious consequence. The company employing the person responsible for the careful shovelful of coal paid damages of some nine thousand dollars, enough to see me through college, toward which I'd been determinedly propelled by my mother's sense of duty to my father.
Robert Creeley: from Autobiography (1989), in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the American Common Place, 1993
Creeley was like the loyal philosopher brother one dreams of having. Creeley spoke almost dreamlike about loss. I truly believe he would have been the only one to help me see clearly. After all, he had suffered real loss himself, and his sense of psychic loss clung to him like a halo.
Jim Dine: from I Know About Creeley (2012)
Jim Dine: from I Know About Creeley (2012)
Switch House and Taunton railroad crossing: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, April 1973
Rear of Lord and Jealous Wool Mill in City Mills, a manufacturing town on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973
Wool mill in City Mills, one of thirty-five manufacturing towns along the eighty-mile Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, June 1973
Abandoned building adjoins Lord and Jealous Wool Mill in City Mills, a manufacturing town on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973
Mercantile Building -- corner of Richmond and Commercial Streets, Boston: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, May 1973
Waltham Watch Company. Waltham is a busy manufacturing city on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973
Waltham Watch Company. Waltham is one of 35 manufacturing cities and towns on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973
Public playground on the Charles River, near Soldiers Field Road, Boston: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, June 1973
Washington Street under the El, looking toward Egleston Square: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973
Elevated railroad structure and blighted area below Washington Street, looking south from the corner of Bartlett, Boston, Massachusetts: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973
House on fire at Independence Point on Buzzard Bay at Onset: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, May 1973
Auto accident on Storrow Drive, Boston, 9 a.m.: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973
Photos by Ernst Halberstadt (1910-1987), 1973, for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica Project (U.S. National Archives)