David Searcy’s 21 essays, collected in SHAME AND WONDER, are at once sublime and surreal, knowing and unknowing, earthy and ethereal. Each piece starts in a seemingly familiar place with recognizable silhouettes and easy images but moves to reflections on somehow nonparallel topics: the possums in “Didelphis Nuncius” connect to the bedrooms in a new house of his children after his divorce. Figuring out which new car to buy slides into nude photos of young girls close to home (“Sexy Girls Near Dallas”). The links are haunting, spot-on perfect and always unexpected.

In “Nameless,” Searcy pays tribute to Doug MacWithey, his artist friend who had a huge three-story studio in Corsicana, Texas, and who died running in the middle of the night in Uncertain, Texas. Searcy returns to see a really beautiful posthumous showing of MacWithey’s work and acknowledges the imperative of diving into and expanding rabbit holes of reality and his imagination. There was a peg-legged Jewish itinerant who came to Corsicana in 1884 and planned a ropewalk across a wide intersection at 20 or 30 feet high with a large iron cook stove on his back. It is not clear why he came to town, perhaps an attraction for an opening of a store. But he fell and was crushed by the stove. He refused to give his name or “any information whatsoever about himself beyond his Jewishness” and expired either in the street or in a nearby hotel room.

"If holding one’s breath for the duration of an essay is praise, then praise be given. Almost unknowingly, certainly at first, then more and more aware of not breathing and forcing myself to take breaths, I read on."

Searcy continues and somehow connects the images of the wooden leg, the rope and the stove with the fruitful, functional picture painted by Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Imagine that Brueghel painted MacWithey, he suggests, and we see beyond the hump of his t-shirt, red like the plowman’s in the painting, into the glare of ambiguity, out past Icarus, to where the tiniest brush is needed to show anything. Faithful to his friend and to his own understanding of his loss, Searcy shows us something that we have no idea ever “was anywhere except, perhaps, in dreams.”

“On Watching the Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan Documentary about Lewis and Clark on PBS” is minimally longer than the title. Searcy questions whether or not Burns captures the sadness and relevance of history and its moments of crimson sunsets on the prairie or whether we find in ourselves the difficulty to establish a presence, that we evaporate and lose our position. He says Burns is good at baseball, the Civil War and history, but how he does that good is ephemeral.

“Didelephis Nuncius” shows Searcy’s return with his three children to a childhood home after his wife, Jean, leaves. He wonders about the girls’ bedroom windows and what shadows will appear on their walls, and about the story he may or may not have begun after sitting on each child’s bed. He comes back to the offerings of caught possums that his mutt offers once or twice weekly: shadows on the backyard deck, then real, then shadows again. The intangible sense of sadness and loss lingers through the aging of the family dog, and Searcy envisions Mr. Possum appearing once again.

If holding one’s breath for the duration of an essay is praise, then praise be given. Almost unknowingly, certainly at first, then more and more aware of not breathing and forcing myself to take breaths, I read on. If you’re not the type to hold your breath, you’ll construct your own response. Of that I am sure. I am also sure that Searcy will get us where he is going.