Michael Watrow's inventions are so appropriated by the students of the genre, that we glimpse his work, more often than not, in the reflection in the eyes of one or another apprenticing master who never met his triumph. We see it in such lesser texts as The Grace of the Minority, where the elegant feet that slap hardness into their soles equate to the lightness of the fingerprint that is the darling's face in a dream. Such sentiment is enough stimulate the mind for an hour at most, but it is enough, by contrast, to look past his fleet of pupils in various anthologies to see the eye of the master who taught us again to see the pink of the cuticles, or when you stop in your clutches, where the knee is shifting over the belly, moving towards the mouth.
In The Matchless Ambassador, one of the few works where he treats the subject of decay, we feel the invention of Tom the Eunuch, whose craggy hair no one would follow to the basements of parties, or involve his stare beyond the circumstances of a languid gesture through an arm. The phrase “the declining curve of earth” has been copied and rendered so many times that it fuzzes into a cloud of print in the notebooks of Jerome, and comes to nothing by the time it is presented to David George for review.
Michael, who wrote about the mountains with such dexterity that commentators asserting the writer's favorite would come to blows, turned the aspects of each into a tapestry that ruminated over his intimate problems of loving many at once. In his studies of second wives, there first appeared a taste for the sweet grotesques that populate his later work. We marvel at his descriptions particularly of trees, how they are at once tall beyond the rows of houses, and yet bending to the will of the lower servants preparing bread in Cecilla in the Marsh, and then awakening in the mind of Laterneau as a multi-colored brush that clears his mind for the final resolution in Cecilla of the Haunted Caves; and then proliferating into a sea of stalks among the prayers of Cecilla Walks in Throes.
And it is in this final piece that sets the pace of our thoughts when we read it again, after so much was lost in the fifteen years since it was written. What was once stirring in its use of the verb “faint,” slowing the most sudden of words into a languor that regarded the centuries as the sleep passed over everything else—an ending that even in our beginnings did we admire—we now find the greater charm in his sonorous exhalations as when Marco falls ill: “he roomed in his rock,” or Greta sighs, “I want a house were you can put things.” This awakens us in our own stores of junk that cannot be thrown out. Such prescience is in these words as we enjoy again Michael's company.