CHAIR-ISH IS A WORD I'D USE TO DESCRIBE YOOOOU...

"Chain-sawed Windsor chair." Several words you never thought you would hear together in a sentence. "Hal," I asked, "Why a chainsaw? Why a Windsor chair?" Chain-sawed anything--it sounded like something out of Appalachia. But then he drove down to the city with a box of bowls he was leaving me to try to sell, and he plunked this little chair right down right there on the curb. Great, I thought. More apartment clutter. I kissed him goodbye and hefted the box and the chair up to the apartment past the doorman's gimlet stare.

I put the bowls out on the bookshelf. The apartment was not the right place for them. They were interesting, but they competed with each other and all my other *stuff* (white Haeger pottery, books of poetry, Scott's CDs...just too much *stuff*). A place was found for the chair and I resigned myself to...I don't know, living with it. But then something funny happened. I started to like it. It's sort of insane--carved with a chainsaw out of one piece of red oak, all splayed legs and drunken angles. It's a little whimsical, a little strange--somewhere between Isaac Bashevis Singer and a queasy nightmare. Just a tough little survivor, much stronger than those fragile slats seem like they could be. Hal said people do make chain saw furniture, but "it's usually really clumsy--like those bears you see carved out of logs," he went on, "and something about the delicacy of a classic Windsor chair made me want to do it just to see if I could." He had to dump a lot of shellac on it to keep it from splitting as the wood dried, but it seems to work, somehow.

Donskoj Gallery put this one in the window to advertise the show he had last summer--they hung it from wires, which is funny--they too seemed to get the flying-away quality it has (sit in it, you might be transported to Prague, circa 1356). "People tell me they've never seen anything like it, " Hal says. "*I've* never seen anything like it," he adds. He priced it at nearly $6000. I asked owner Georgi Donskoj, who obviously liked the piece, what he thought of the price. "I thought it was a little high, but he has a right to ask what he wants for it," Donskoj said. "Maybe it's not something he wants to let go of right now."

Funny how much comes back to letting go.