Duet BY LISA ROSINSKY Two pairs of wrinkled hands and eighty-eight smooth keys, some black, some white: so simple. Two pairs of hands, one hundred and sixty-two years combined between them, like cords of thick rope hoisting the curtain of a late act in a long and richly-detailed play. Seven fresh-picked daffodils in a tall blue vase on top of the piano, shivering with each chord. One petal falls, and another. Candles, white; flames, yellow; points of light in the dim room. Two grey heads bent over the pages of Bach. See them through the thick panes of glass that inexperience slides before my younger eyes. Better, hear what they make: no pantomime, but a frenzy; each note no fragile flower but a flame, capering on a stiff thin stem; burning but alight.
BARN AND SILO
Where the Dead Live
COOLING TOWERS
By HOWARD J. KOGAN I have a black and white photograph taken in 1909 of my father Sol, who was four years old, his older sister Miriam, a younger brother Joe, his mother Leah, who looks pregnant and angry, his father Jonah, uncle Benny and his sister Rose. The adults look solemn; the children frightened. The men are in dark suits, the women in gowns, I wouldn’t be surprised if the clothes were supplied by the photographer. Only the children seem to be wearing their own clothes. It’s a formal, posed studio photograph taken to record a significant moment, perhaps their arrival in the United States. My father looks like I did at that age, as my son did at four. I guess that means this is my family and I wasn’t kidnapped from the palace of Czar Nicholas II. Everyone in the photo has been dead for decades. Yet, during the long moments I visit with them, they are not black and white images but people who are as alive as I am. People who, as I turn away, become like fireflies, dimly sparking in the long night at the end of our days.
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2012 • Page 5