Sextet

The chapbook was the right instrument for the last decade: Miller's wind was shorter but the voice undiminished, and Capra's little books — hand-somely printed, sized to one sitting — let each late meditation stand alone. Sextet binds six of them into a single chamber suite, and the range is the late repertoire entire: comedy about the body's decline, gratitude for the era outlived, grief conducted with jokes, and the recurring rehearsal of his own approaching exit, performed without dread.

The piece readers keep is 'Mother, China and the World Beyond': a dream-narrative in which Miller, dead, meets his mother — the adversary of the whole shelf, the woman Capricorn blamed for everything — in an afterlife anteroom, and finds the war simply over. After fifty years of settling scores with her in print, the reconciliation arrives as a gift from his own unconscious, and he has the grace to write it down unimproved. If the late books are one long practice of dying, this is the page where the practice pays.

Six pieces from the Capra chapbook years, bound as one: meditations on old age and its absurd mercies, farewells and tributes occasioned by the deaths of the era's last companions, and 'Mother, China and the World Beyond' — the dream of meeting his mother past the grave, the collection's still center. The forms are small, the stakes are last things, and the tone stays defiantly light.

An evening apiece was the original dosage; the collected suite works the same way, one movement a night.