Michael S. Harper

Office Hours: A Memoir and an Interview with Michael S. Harper

I first met Professor Harper in the fall of 1999, as a nervous sopho more. I was paying my way at Brown University through odd jobs for the local oligarchy. So, to the side of my humanities classes, I was earning an auxiliary education in tutoring the distracted chil dren of the very wealthy; cataloguing for an agoraphobic math pro fessor; mowing the lawn (and once, accidentally, the hibiscus) of a mournful divorc?e; and tending the rose garden of a Shakespearean scholar with meticulous prepositions. At night, while my roommate headed to the dorm rooftop with a new stash of marijuana, I dreamt of the Shakespeareans weeds among, beside, down, during and except the rosebushes.

Elegy for a Metaphor: Dogwood/Pear Tree

at the Paradise Theatre you named the cellist with the fanatical fingers of the plumber, the exorcist, and though the gimmickry at wrist and kneecap could lift the seance table, your voice was real in the gait and laughter of Uncle Henry, who could dance on either leg, wooden or real, to the sound of the troop train megaphone, catching the fine pitch of a singer on the athletic fields of Virginia.