divagations vol.2 by advancedleisure

vol.2, winter2024

editor

Troy Jollimore

assistanteditor/artdirector

James Moog

digitallayout

Emily Choi photos/artworks

Heather Altfeld

Emily Choi

Troy Jollimore

James Moog

Hae Kyung Shin

coverart

James Moog

legalcounsel

Micah Zeller

available for free:

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comment from our editor

Just after graduating from university, I took a train trip across the eastern part of Canada. I traveled from Halifax to Toronto, making stops at various points between. I was just coming out of a five year relationship, my first serious romantic entanglement. We had wrecked it together, and now it felt like I dragged the wreckage behind me wherever I went. In the fall I would begin graduate school in New Jersey. I was shifting from one country, and one life, to another. Inevitably, then, the trip had elements of endings and of new beginnings. Some of the stops I made were to visit friends from my university years who were now living elsewhere. And I wanted to see, before leaving my birth country, more of it than I had up to that point. To get a feel for the cities, the outposts, the vast spaces in between.

Now, decades later, many of my most vivid and enduring memories from that trip are memories of art. In Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa I saw works by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. These were paintings I had seen before; or, rather, I thought that I had already seen them. Prints of them hung on the walls of my high school, or were to be found in books. But when I stood in front of the actual works, I realized, rather belatedly, that looking at a reproduction is not at all like standing before the real thing. I had never understood, for instance, why Tom Thomson was held in such high regard. The print of Northern River, which I had walked by every day on my way to or from the school gymnasium, was revealed to be a dim and disappointing counterfeit that in no way captured the

flamboyantly alive colors of the original. An echo at best. A faded memory. The actual painting, the real work, was extraordinary, arresting. It froze and silenced you. You might as well have been standing in the woods, with Thomson at your side. I stood there, in front of it, for a long time. It was like being in church; or rather, it was the sort of experience you were meant to have in church, though my own church experiences had always proven less intense, less satisfying.

I remember, as well, standing in front of Mark Rothko’s No. 16. This painting had been recently acquired by the National Gallery in Ottawa. I knew nothing of Rothko prior to my trip, but on the train I had read a news article about the controversy. The work had cost the Canadian government a little under two million dollars and had caused a public outcry. Surely there were better uses for that money than an abstract painting a painting that, to repeat the frequently reiterated skeptical complaint, looked like the work of a child! At the time part of me still saw myself as a kind of skeptic: a sensible, hard-headed realist. While I believed in beauty and the power of art I had gone to university with the intention of studying literature in order to become a writer I was still somewhat dubious about postmodernism and non-representational art, determined not to be taken in by the duplicitous avant-garde. (Okay, it was the midNineties and the painting was from 1960, hardly “avant-garde.” But I was still catching up.) And, while my Ayn Rand-reading (and Ayn Randquoting!) days were behind me, I was still quite willing, at that point in my life, to lob the occasional complaint against the irresponsible profligacy of the government.

But the painting itself, the real thing, silenced those thoughts. Standing in front of it, I wasn’t thinking about the government’s spending decisions, or about anything in any way related to money. I’m not sure that my thoughts had any sort of identifiable conceptual content at all. It’s a bit of a cliché to describe aesthetic experiences through an analogy with spiritual ones. But in my life, my most powerful experiences have often tended to be aesthetic in their nature and spiritual in their phenomenology. Like my encounter with Northern River, the time I spent standing before No. 16 demanded to be described in such terms.

In the same room as No. 16 there was a work by Barnett Newman, Voice of Fire, another relatively recent acquisition of the National Gallery. That painting did nothing for me. (It still doesn’t). So that’s something else my younger, slow-learning self learned on that trip about art and beauty: you like what you like, and some of it leaves you cold. I was okay with that. I didn’t feel any urge or obligation to open my arms as wide as possible and embrace everything I saw. Indeed, the self-evident depth and authenticity of what stirred inside me when I looked at No. 16, or Northern River, rendered such pretense not only impossible but distasteful. Beauty is about spontaneity; it rejects obligation. It speaks to different people in different ways. That doesn’t make it any less real, or any less important. In the end, it’s about seeing the world, about looking at things and really seeing them, about deepening the bonds of vision that connect us with reality. And about taking joy in the things we see, and in the very act of seeing. And what could be more real, or more important, than that?

Troy Jollimore

A discarded umbrella in Bidwell Park <photo by Troy Jollimore>

<photo by Troy Jollimore>

Heather Altfeld

Epilogue for Job

Why couldn’t I have died as they pulled me out of the dark?

Job

At the end of the 140th year of his life, the wind in his lungs whirred to a halt in the middle of its hymn

and those who had long watched his suffering, spectators to his pain, were able again

to tether themselves to the strange and forgetful thing we call faith. He who’d lain stretched out

across his burned land like an unrequited lover, watching all he possessed in the first round of his life

cattle and sheep and goats and camels and bulls and rams spinning into the centrifuge of the sky,

so numerous they eclipsed the sun. His crops sizzled to a black crisp.

The luminous face of his first daughter flattened and sucked dry as a doll without wool.

The muscled backs of his sons stretched until snapped so that each boy became a scream on the blank-burned prairie.

All of those bodies melted back into the earth to be repackaged as molecules of air he was forced by the joke of life and the stubborn laws of matter to breathe. It was a wonder that he did not, while alone, pocked and marred with boils, drowning in a constant broadcast of eulogies, stuff his pockets with rocks and throw himself into the nearest river. Or stand at the edge of a precipice in the Negev and fling himself into the void of hot rocks. No. He endured, even when his unnamed wife told him to go ahead and die already, living under the laws of god and atoms that do not allow for disappearance or escape, sleeping off the horror of his devotion, waking in the night to stare at the stars.

Each speck a bright blister, each flicker the flinch of the sky it had bitten when it died.

It is a shame we do not believe in ghosts, because they are just another form of matter.

It is terror to believe in prayer, because it is invisible as wind.

When he departed, his soul burst into a million thousand pieces,

scattering from Canaan to Quetzalcoatl like the mortal rain of his first life.

We die to make memory remember us. We die to become the understory of trees.

We die to show that we trust the process of being pulled from one darkness into another, because it is the only way we know of finding light.

earth becomes smaller

Whose face do you think of in the long violet moments just before the first faint dawn? What sad lark sits at your window, singing you his last heart’s song?

Whose fine curls shriek against your shoulders, crowding your lonely crown? Listen, the shrill ring from the slipper of a phone, my voice eats your voice, inhalation without exaltation, whisper without sound. what did we promise on the promissory’s edge, those minor notes now disappeared like rain, caught in the strand of our quietest embrace?

Letter to S. from the Embassy of Shadows

Dear S. It seems wrong, somehow, to write you, as if I might come across like Anne Sexton, catwalking in the dark with a cigarette in hand, transference clinking in her gin glass, as she rants on about being a delicacy devoured by her therapist, a momentary luxury, a paint that washes off when he returns to his wife. But I trust you to understand that a letter sent your way on the back of a pigeon, the only reliable transit here, could never cheapen the long hours we have spent staring into the abyss together with a cold glass of desire or regret. I am writing you from a little table in the shade of a shadeless place, waiting, as we do each day, for the sun to finish boiling the horizon. From here, I can see the tease of a distant oasis, the green of palm trees, a lone acacia, half a day’s walk away. I have been warned that in the Sahara things never are as they seem to be, that distance, in particular, is a superb magician, that I could leave on foot with a compass, a map, litres of water strapped to my back, even a guide, only to find myself perched alone, hours later under a few inches of hot rock, waiting. And for what? A stray truck loaded with dates for the market, a goatherder, with a dozen thirsty baby goats, for darkness, for God, for death?

Inshallah, everyone says here, if God wills it, it shall be, there will be oranges tonight after dinner, inshallah, the baby will recover from his surgery, inshallah, inshallah, there will be water enough to wash before prayer. A word missing, do you not think, from our lives, a mantra for your patients when all other language fails to cure them of their madness, the clearest translation for hope,

when hope is all that is left to you, a reminder of how minute our control over anything really is sand, wind, rain, fire, time, love?

This is what it was like when you found me, there, at the bottom of the well. You lowered yourself down on the rope to see what it was like in there, you kept me company, in its cool depths, you saw that, even while drowning, I was thirsty.

When you want to make a blessing upon something, you say bismillah. Bismillah, for the food we are to eat, bismillah, for the safe journey, bismillah, for the uneventful return.

This letter is the only thing I have written since arriving weeks ago. I’ve passed the days reclining on cushions, checking for the scorpions that arrive each day on a peculiar wind called an azwoo, who might startle, and then sink, into the meat of me.

I do not know what wind brought me here, or exactly why I have stayed, amid the roiling heat, the sandstorms, the various venoms of snakes, palm rats, camel spiders, the tiny white moths with their tiny toothy mouths that nip me each night in my sleep.

I keep returning to a book I found in the library here, its pages gritted with sand, called The Eighth Day, by Christian Bobin, whose work is rarely translated into English; his translator notes that in part we rubes find it too difficult to classify. Bobin writes:

One can be a mine of learning and spend one’s life in total ignorance of life. It is not the books that are to blame, but the meagerness of our desire, the narrow limits of our dreaming. At bottom, if truth is sometimes lacking in us, it’s because we first failed truth, by claiming to direct and know her. So it is right for her to punish us and send us back into the dark, dismissed with a reprimand recalling us to our solitude, as to some long-neglected homework.

Perhaps this is it, the reason I have sent myself to this inferno, back into the dark, with nothing but chalk and a slate. Maybe this is not punishment, but arrival, a stay in what was set to be the certain execution of the self. We send our shadow on an embassy, Bobin says, far ahead of us. We watch it talking to other shadows, shaking hands with them, and sometimes coming to blows. Just when you think the day here will never end, the sun finally melts into the last dune and for a while, before darkness arrives, there are no shadows at all.

The mourning doves, who sang to each other all day, return to their nests. The stars are still asleep. In the tiny village, dust spins around the children playing futbol.

The tower on the hill flickers its strange morse from the zone militaire, where the gendarmerie take their meals, thinking, perhaps, of their wives, of the radiator, which has been leaking, or of nothing, which is what this place does. It empties you of everything, so you are light enough to be blown across the border, where the stones are called by a different name. In this pink hour, I saw the beautiful cook and the handsome driver slip into the courtyard together. Somewhere, his wife prepares dinner, knowing he will not appear until long after dark. Are they lovers or shadows, or just a softness the evening wind brings, a door that will soon be buried by sand?

As the moon rises over the bed of what was once a river, I see a figure, waiting for me.

He has a goatskin drum strapped to his back and a tin cup, an offering, a request?

When I passed him on the road, here and there, over the years, I gave him a thimbleful of water and scurried away. The most important rule of the desert: One must never travel alone. Now, this Virgil is here beside me. We will need each other.

Inshallah, we will travel long together. May we survive what comes. Bismillah, may this punishment be a blessing. May the well be full of water, may it quench what thirsts. When night comes, the sound of his drum could be mistaken for my heartbeat. It is a song I have always loved. I send you my gratitude, express, on this fierce wind. Thank you for fixing me. Yours always, Heather.

Camel Herder, near Merzouga <photo by Heather Altfeld>

Essouaira <photo by Heather Altfield>

Alfred Corn

SERIALISM

Homage to Anton Webern

Twilit clarity. Hardening into radiant shadow, Precisions scattered over your alert daydream. A fevered guess training itself on the target, station by station.

2. The hurryers-home open their door, Warding off a peopled solitude that presses in. Prismatic obsessions, their goals not yet conceded.

3. This time, not to arrange for what will be liked. Not to force charm on anyone. Not to let fact pinch-hit for fable.

Three decades after the firing squad took aim at twelve dissidents in a disused warehouse just beyond the outskirts, four journalists came to inspect. Roof fallen in, a floor exposed its concretion to the sky. Weeds, vines, and even one small tree had grown up through the cracks. Rusting machine parts and broken glass lay scattered among a drift of dead leaves. Overhead the sharp caw of a crow, disappearing through an escape-hatch in the clouds.

The disputants you hoped to hear having hushed but heated exchanges. A sort of cut-rate drama the whoosh, the fling, the dirt of their byplay.

6. Spirits were strong and we ready To drink. Tears brimming a star, A liquid regret locked in crystal.

Chimney swift. Pilgrim. Stillicide. Finial. Tyrant. Trowel. Mower. Paladin. Whip.

In the distance, flames boiling up the Rathaus Façade. Packets of food reached toward trembling

Hands extended through half-opened cattle-car doors.

A gnarl of smoke rising from his pipe Falls in with the suggestion that war must be waged In filigree, its bloodshed bloodshed but delicate.

10.

Tan and blue, periwinkle shells heaped up

On the sand, a horde of logarithmic spirals, Like the one in the sunflower’s dark heart.

11.

Polyphonic tunult has finished its seaside tour Of duty. The trig sandpiper, rigid with intention, Steps forward on hinged calipers. A dart of the beak .

12.

Dark sky, pinpricked by stars. The watch’s cricket seconds

Tick by. A match strikes, cupped for the cigarette. The rifle reports. Lid to the keyboard closes.

PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

She’d been put up for auction. The bidders hemmed and hawed and didn’t meet the price, so she bid on herself and swept up the lot for a song.

He poured us tea and said, “Not sure which cup tastes better, the one you drink with a friend or the one you have all to yourself. We’ll solve the riddle by having one together, all to ourselves.”

Half the world is bullet, the other half quarry, and both move very fast. When we bet on one of the two to win, we know that wager’s also a kind of bullet aimed at the half we want to lose.

The man pruning his apple tree hailed me. When I stopped the car, he pointed the pruning hook at your house and asked if I’d be living there. My yes won me two apples.

In Mayan Chichèn Itzà, during the games a rubber ball repeatedly pounded and rebounded from a masonry wall of the ball court. The players all died five hundred years ago, and the court is empty. But far from being drowned out, the pounding sound comes down to us even now.

You hurled a boomerang into space. A year later it returned just slightly smaller, but you noticed extra weight, maybe two more pounds more than last year. At which point a voice said, “Never express surprise again.”

They looked at sagebrush for a long time and saw that it didn’t regard the desert as desert or even as dry. No, the waterless furnace where it lived was paradise. Longer they looked, closer they came to dying of thirst. And returning to life as sagebrush.

It approached halfway. I approached half the remaining distance. It halved that distance and I, half of that. And so on, ad infinitum until, realizing the method would never succeed in bringing us into contact, I burst into calculated laughter, and the distance evaporated.

One part of my mind loved another part that didn’t return the love. No solution but to overlook and forgive the failure. After all, genuine devotion makes no demands and is glad to feel a strong attachment even without reciprocity.

A painter I knew put the last brushstroke on an oil landscape but called it only a sketch which began to vanish when, bit by bit, he scraped away at it with a palette knife. Eventually the canvas was cleared, and I was told the painting was finished. The painter completed sketch scraped canvas told finished. Sketch scraped canvas finished. anvas

Maple Trees <photo by Hae Kyung Shin>

Korean seaside in Busan <photo by Hae Kyung Shin>

The Wanderer <linocut by James Moog>

Matt Hart

THE DUSK-CHARGED AIR

The air is charged with ions, the eye with consciousness. And somewhere a bull charges a bystander, who holds a cigarette in one hand and a camera in the other. The camera is also an eye, but an unconscious one charged only to imprison a moment in its outercurrent solid state diode, transistor momentum. Similarly, I am charged twice for the same purchase. I dispute it, not the purchase, the being charged twice. Is Being the same as existing? Surely not. Just as to be charged isn’t the same as being changed, to open one’s eyes to another possibility. Another possibility is that the letter/word “I” is charged with consciousness, but it isn’t, since it’s only written, not writing. I do not attend the word to learn anything personal or true about a writer’s bioluminescence. I attend the word to learn via an author, who is neither personal nor true, the Truth about the World,

of which all possible versions of the writer are a part. Thus, we are charged with possibility, though sometimes we are charged with defiance or crimes many of them highbrow but others misdemeaned. O where are the interesting words when I need them? Capacious and patulous and indeterminant. I even used to be called Rooster by someone. Recently I was called or, I should say charged in a dream to “keep doing the work.” Large refrigerator cases stood guard and did hum. Purple mountains lit the sky with drunkenness and disco balls. Such were the ancient, daft parties of the gods. Our air remains charged with their laughter and slaughter, their vices and devices, the going and the gone.

IMAGINAL

The tall grass is mowing and the wildflowers. The short ribs are smoking and the memes. Then steam and the barking the bones off. The egregores walk like the shirts on our backs. Like Birnam Wood up to Dunsinane Hill the whiff of the insane there and the here in the there there, and the air in the err and the ear and what it means.

I like not understanding how a large small machine breathes charcoal dust and elm pollen and my vision getting worse when I look into your sparks and see all the moons of Jupiter in your mouth, my dreams those nightly invasions of undead and frost. I’m afraid when I’m in them, but even more when I’m not.

Death Stars, choke flowers, satyrs never-ending. The rabbits transcending and the soccer. The succor. The suck air. My wings extend

to the egg-bearing cloud.

Nominally, oophorous. Congenitally, rapacious.

I am drinking coffee of a morning in the middle. 54 years old! This long bomb pass into life’s end zone. My daughter in college. My wife an installation. I am a poet who would like to be a mystic. The yellow fades from red to green. The invisible world seems pretty clear to me. It tells me I’m a living doll, vast in the watery eyes of my dog. Tall storms cooking in the spirit of the sun. Our missiles fly through them every day like they’re nothing.

PERSONAL POEM #12

Suddenly, I hit my high voice, and the sky is in blossom with dive-bombing blue jays and chestnut-colored clouds. At least, I can see it that way, desultory as I may be feigning a promise to be more than a little garishly chaotic good and ever-present for the people who matter most to me my unspoken love letters listening to the Ritual Trio and muttering along to the thumb piano’s plink It’s actually called a kalimba And electrified, I am not worshipping at the altar of forever for nothing, so this is another day of me paying attention to the small things and the terrible Agnes’ garden snail, Patrick-Patricia, died last night, and the dog we call Bear won’t eat, because he’s stubborn and jacked-up

like a juicy IPA bro, and Mark won’t like me asking what it all means, because he wants answers and for the battery’s power to be an overflow of powerful understanding which I do not understand, since almost nothing makes sense and what does is only trivial The real light is with the squirming soil and the dictionary reconfigured reconjectured reconnaissanc’d and c. Later, Alejandro and I will talk to our students about the letters and the willful force exploding, but willful should be little, and the deliberate derangements should be ubiquitous, and the ones we make mistakes inside habituated Vasts

When I capitalize words idiosyncratically it’s so you’ll know they’re impossibly alive and grave, so so much more beshadowed than the tiny pink pencil with which I now draw some blood out of the white paper where so many friends stood and eventually fell in accumulating snow It’s summer and a cold chill rifles through me

Amazonian Warrior <photo by James Moog>

Leonard Kress

The Babylonian Talmud Teaches

They ply their trade at twilight or attract customers with the music they play or sit by crossroads during public gatherings like sheep-shearing. Hard to resist or avoid. Which is why our lessons in Hebrew school discounted Rahab's tale, how before the siege of Jericho, Rahab hid the Hebrew spies in her brothel, at twilight working their enemies, illustrating the lesson that loyalty (or betrayal) changes the play in Joshua's favor. The city walls could not resist his screeching avant-garde horns and his gathering forces, straight to the Promised Land, gathering the tribes. There were others besides Rahab Abigail, Yael, Michal, beauty pointless to resist, why it's dangerous for boys to head out at twilight, why parents cut short their wild outdoor play coercing them back to their school lessons.

These stories came from the Megillah, lessons collected throughout the ages, a gathering of Rabbinical wisdom. At home the tv played

cartoons like Magilla Gorilla (more fun than Rahab) . Bowtie, suspenders, and derby, airing at twilight. These were antics we couldn't resist,

like visiting the zoo, where Matilda Gorilla can't resist him, or winning the rodeo after bronc-riding lessons, or joining the French Foreign Legion, in the desert twilight. alone. We shouldn't forget that a taxidermist gathering jungle wildlife brought him here. Or that Rahab's name, repeated more than once, would play

endlessly inside your head, until you play with yourself (warns Rabbi Nachman). Resist the urge to ejaculate, girls like Rahab (he says) lead to heartbreak, nothing will lessen your suffering. It should not surprise you gathering rosebuds it's all for naught in the glimmer of twilight.

She Came in Through the Bedroom Window

She came in through the bedroom window, raising up the sash, surmounting the ledge, and silently walked over to my writing table, waving an unlit cigarette in my face and miming the flick of a struck match, as if she hadn’t just risked her life for a smoke.

I tried to make it clear I don’t smoke, but she didn’t understand. The open window allowed a breeze that would’ve extinguished a lit match. I realized how narrow and precarious the ledge was, and how quickly I become riveted to her face, eclipsing everything spread across the table

in front of me. She could be sitting on that table right now, and I’d still be enveloped by the smoke she’d never blow. I knew I couldn’t face a future without her, as she left by the window. I expected to see her dangling from the ledge, but no, she disappeared. A match made and then unmade, game, set, match, motion seconded, amended, then tabled, some sort of sophisticated legerdemain, a precinct of mirrors and smoke, pried open warped window to the soul, joker trumped by a queen’s face.

Now, if forced to face a photo array, I could not make a match. That doesn’t stop me from courting windows, or making the surface of my writing table a filter as with the smoked glass used in cross-staves or sextants, to record in a ledger, a surface on which to project how much a ledge shifts or quakes when saving face or simply blowing smoke when a match is made, not in heaven, but under the table, where something of value might someday enter the window.

Lone Elk Park <photo by James Moog>

Patrick Madden

Recense (heard)

I have just heard Eddie Money’ s “Take Me Home Tonight” on the radio for the umpteenth time. Umptieth? Umptedth? The ordinal suffix here matters. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the song and I have intersected only some-teen number of times. And even a number between twenty and ninety-nine might not do it. But I’m confident (orders of magnitude being what they are), that somewhere in the hundreds would provide a sufficient upper limit for my hearings of this popular, if somewhat grating-in-its-ubiquity, song. And in any case, with no difference between the suffixes on hundredth and thousandth, “umptedth” is more than sufficient.

Of course, now I’m wondering “why ump-?” How’d we agree on that prefix for an uncertain and unspecified number? The only other ump- word I can think of is “umpire,” the person who makes judgments and enforces rules in sports (I was going to say “baseball,” but remembered that American football also has an umpire, who’ s distinct from the referee and various “judges” on and off the field, which raises an additional question about whether the terminology is arbitrary or if the umpire’ s role is specialized and essentially tied to the name etymologically). So let’ s look it up.

“Umpire,” like many words in English, is a transformation of a French word, originally nonper, which means “without peer,” as in “the greatest,” which I can see why you ’d want that person making and enforcing decisions about your competition with other mere mortals. From the Normans to the Angles over a few centuries the pronunciation became “noumpere” (also spelled “nompere” and “nwmpere” and “nounpier” and now I’m imagining a wooden jetty with a bunch of old guys patiently waiting with their lines in the water fishing for the right word; one of them feels a tug, awakens to action, gently, steadily reels in his catch with a contented smile, nets and buckets it; it’ s “umpire”), which, through mysterious but completely understandable processes, lost its initial n and resolved into the word we currently recognize.

As for “umpteen,” my research tells me a few different things: that first there was “umpty,” the scaled-up version, which mirrors “twenty” and “thirty” and so on, but which sure seems also to recall good old Humpty Dumpty, which, because I respect your time, I’ll not get into here. “Umpty” is also said to have come from the phrase “iddy umpty,” which was a fanciful way of saying “dot dash,” as in Morse code, and thus came to refer to both the code and to telegraph operators, especially those in the army during World War I. Why you ’d want to double the number of syllables when you make a nickname, I don’t know. This seems to be an example of what my brother calls a “Nicholas name.” In any case, the idea behind this, that “umpty” or at least “ump-” represents the dash, has a certain mathematical appeal, as a dash might be used to convey the unknown, just as might the letter X or, in certain cases, N, as in “to the nth degree,” which I also like for its contiguity with umpire’ s lost n.

The backward trail stops around the turn of the last century, though some folks have discovered “ump-” s that predate “umpty,” discrediting the authoritative utterances in The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins and the Dictionary of Word Origins and A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and others all claiming definitive knowledge of where this oddity came from. Better, I think, to give up that posture of certainty and recognize that language is always and only relative, and that while we might trace certain sound combinations to earlier sound combinations, their meanings are utterly referential, pointing to something we hope to convey but can never assure, as communication requires the participation (based on previous encounters or educated guesses) of a hearer.

A hearer like me in my car rounding the point of the mountain on I15 when

103.5 The Arrow played the Eddie Money song again, and I remembered how when I first heard it I did not entirely “get” it because in 1986 I was 15 years old and did not know or could not access my memories of the 1963 Ronettes song “Be My Baby,” which Money borrows in his chorus, including guest vocals from Ronnie Spector herself. I experienced the song in a kind of isolation. It was itself only. Or perhaps it was a participant in Eddie Money’ s oeuvre, or one more mid-80s

American pop song with a kind of retro sound, what with its saxophone solo. But it wasn ’t until later that I picked up on all the clues that Eddie was giving us with “Just like Ronnie sang ” to introduce her “Be my little baby” against the backdrop of that iconic Hal Blaine drumbeat: dum dum-dum, p-d-lat; dum dum-dum, p-d-lat, which I’ve now

learned isfeatured in songs by dozens of artists, from the Beach Boys to the ShangriLas to Badfinger to Billy Joel to Meatloaf to The Clash to Yes to Lady Gaga. Even

Rush, in Neil Peart’ s drum solo “Der Trommler” nods to Blaine’ s genius, just two

bars of that famous beat as transition from one thunderous uproar to another.

What I mean is, it’ s all subjective, all dependent on context, all coming from somewhere and participating in the milieu, all connected: words or drumbeats, the attempt that is this essay, trying to say something new via arrangement of words and

ideas amidst all the things that have been said before, to you, whoever and wherever and whenever you are and whatever you bring to your reading, whether you ’re unfamiliar with these songs or you ’re Eddie Money’ s biggest fan or maybe even sat next to Mr. Money on a plane from Chicago, as I once did.

For me, one of those people without peer is Neil Peart, whose name, as fortune would have it, rhymes with “noumpere,” at least how I’m pronouncing it, as even the Oxford English Dictionary does not provide a pronunciation (probably with so many variant spellings, even beyond the four I listed, the word also had variant pronunciations?), but even he, in all his brilliance, did not invent the drums, and any beats we can credit him with are only variations on what others had done before. He would say as much himself.

Playing along with Top 40 radio was a major learning experience for me, and in the mid’60s, if I was playing along with the hits of the day Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Roy Orbison, the Association, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Mamas and the Papas, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, even the Carpenters I was playing along with Hal Blaine. I didn’t realize it until years later, but in that way Hal Blaine would obviously become an important influence on my early development. (I sympathize with another drummer of my generation who once said that he was surprised to learn that his five favorite drummers were all Hal Blaine!)

So maybe we can say that Hal Blaine was his own peer. This is all very interesting in a swirly kind of way, but we still haven’t answered our initial question of “why ump-?” Although I’ve read suppositions that the sound is onomatopoetic, derived from the sound of a telegraph generating the long dash, I don’t buy it. Not that I’m around telegraphs much, but I did check some videos, and you can hear a quiet click and a loud electronic beep. That’ s about it. And you can ’t tell me that tapping your transmitter more quickly for a dot would make an “iddy” sound. No way. So I’ll have to be content not knowing how “umpty” or “umpteen” or “umptedth” came to be or caught on or what they might reference in the pretelegraphic past if anything at all. Just as I’m content not knowing how many times

I’ve listened to Eddie Money’ s crooning and Ronnie Spector’ s response to him and to her past, or how often I’ll hear them in the future, now years after they left me and the rest of us behind.

Maurice Manning

Disquisition of The Possum Man

When I went over to Little Short’s, who pointedly could reach the clouds if he stood up, I found him sprawled in the grass below the plum tree making a snapping sound with his toes not out of line with the person he was, a sound-maker prone to shoeless ditties and witty oddities because he liked to feel the ground, his reason being if ever he needed to speak about the world he reckoned knowing it fairly well would likely clip the wings of error, and besides, the barefoot approach to knowledge gave the lessons oomph.

I’m reading the book of the world with my feet, he liked to say. Why are you making that snapping sound with your toes? I asked the morning I stopped by Little Short’s. Pretending I’ve got possum feet, he said and clapped his feet in the air. Now, Little, why is that? I prodded. Well I’ve been studying up on possums, and you know I never was much on a shoe.

There’s not a possum in this world that’s ever worn a shoe and look how they make out! Not a care in the world, and a possum could walk straight up this tree! He pointed a toe at the plum tree. And another thing, a possum is clean, and peaceful in all the wars of the world there’s never been a possum war. For a backward man, Little, I said, you know a lot about the world. Well, son, I’ve got a hungry mind, and the world is always there to learn. It’s the best book I’ve ever read, he said and snapped his toes again, and I’m still not done with chapter two! But don’t you know the path to know the world is long because there’s nothing about the world that’s ever short there might be short things in it, but the path to know the world is long and here I am a living pun, a sleepy riddle in the middle of fun, a man named Little Short going on in a poem about something long, so long, and there’s not a shoe in the world that can cover the ground I’m talking about.

One View of Time

You have to squint to see that it’s there under the eave at the peak of the barn, the hook where they used to hang the pulley when it was time to put up hay. All Tinnie had to do was cluck and the mule, ever a grace to watch, would step away from the barn and haul the haystack up to the shadowy mow, and Tinnie would take a pole from the ground to poke the stack and get it swinging like the pendulum of a tall clock until it swung into the mow, and by some knowledge it had the mule with further grace stepped back, the rope went slack and the stack was gone. The mule went on like that all day, pulling up and stepping back as stack after stack swung into the barn. You’d think the barn was eating time, but I’ve had other thoughts as well, the figure of Tinnie May poking a pendulum of hay to prod along an afternoon of time, for us to learn that it’s alive, as if all it needed was a poke and then you’d see it moving, Time, rigged up at the top of the barn by a rope passed through a pulley and hitched to a mule

Tinnie May called Tick, old Tick, the mule who could travel back and forth in time, as if time was his dominion and he passed through it like a king.

“As I was about to give up and descend the mountain, I had the whiff of a distinctive smell of the ocean. A little fishy but somehow refreshing. So I continued. Once I saw this view, I was glad that I didn’t give up so easily.”

<photo by Shin Hae Kyung from Busan, South Korea>

Wayne Miller

THE LATE COLD WAR

Children, what can I tell you about that time?

When my parents separated, my father moved into the college dorms on Jefferson.

I have no idea how this happened. The adult world was a ceiling of clouds above me.

I visited my father on Saturdays. Each time a toy dropped into my hands. Meanwhile, my mother lived on the money her parents gave her. My best friend’s older brother had posters of nuclear explosions all over his bedroom. At night they became the walls of his sleep.

He let us listen to Bauhaus and the Damned until he went to his job at Friendly’s where he sold pot out the walk-up window. It’s impossible to understand what you’re born into

until enough time passes that all of it has been replaced by narrative. One night

we were driving to my father’s new apartment with the woman he’d left my mother for, and I could see the pale discs of Klieg lights sweeping across the clouds. I was eight and terrified the Soviets were invading. I clutched my backpack full of clothes in the empty dark of the back seat. My father, in a moment of pity, assured me we would drive until we found the source. It was a car lot having a sale.

Moikom Zeqo

THE SURREALISM OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

The chivalric romance was born in the north of France and then spread across Europe. Strangely, almost phantasmagorically, this sort of writing became associated with the name of Alexander the Great of Macedonia. Many such epic works, called Alexandrines, were written in the period. They descended from ancient and mostly inaccurate biographies of Alexander the Great. One such biography, made in the 3rd century CE in Egypt, was translated from Greek into Latin and the Latin version became the basis for the first French versions.

In the most complete of these accounts, Alexander the Great is depicted as a magnificent medieval knight. When he was a baby, he refused milk; his meals consisted instead of roast meat and wine, as if he were an adult. His caretakers wanted to feed him with a golden spoon, but instead he picked up a sword.

Some of the twelfth-century troubadour poets, such as Lambert d’Tor and Alexandre d’Berne, reveal that Alexander supposedly had one blue eye and one black eye (just like Eastern Roman Emperor Anastasius, who was born in Durrës and called Anastasius I Dicorus).

Alexander the Great is often represented in these accounts with the wings and head of an eagle, and/or the body of a lion.

His horse, Bucephalus, is a kind of mutant, a cross between an elephant and a camel. In his youth, Alexander the Great has two tunics one to protect him from wounds, the other from the cold.

The mashup of times and subjects is surreal. For example, the hero Alexander is baptized as a knight and gives his sword and bow to King

Solomon who lived in the 10th century BCE, six centuries before the actual Alexander the Great was born. Alexander’s battle armor is given to him by the Queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea who was killed by Achilles in the Trojan War in the 13th century BCE.

Such anti-realism is reminiscent of modern novels so-called “magical realism” and the grotesque braided narratives of self-important Nobel Prize–winners. The historical Alexander conquered his world right up to the foot of the Himalayas, thus becoming the most successful emperor in all of history. In the chivalric romances, in contrast, Alexander the Great moves freely through the German territories, across the Russian steppe, to the islands of the Vikings, across France, into Africa, and throughout the Balkans.

In his travels and campaigns, he is more an emperor of the West than of the East. We find flashbacks from across time and space, offering the strangest and most remarkable alibi in all of history: Alexander didn’t want to conquer the world; he merely wanted to learn about it and experience everything he could.

He also enters the universe of fables. He meets people with the heads of dogs, gods in the forms of turtles, wizards in the forms of tigers. In the Alps he stumbles upon the spring of eternal youth. He discovers a forest where, instead of flowers and trees, young girls sprout from the ground then, when the frost comes, they disappear back into the earth.

He travels for three consecutive years to the land of eternal darkness, then for three subsequent years to the land of eternal light.

At one point, Alexander meets a juggler who turns flowers into torches. Amazed by this ability, Alexander bestows upon the juggler an entire kingdom.

Chivalric romances about Alexander have survived in the Slavic countries, even in the Arab world. Alexander the Great has become an anthropological and anthropocentric hero.

The fact that Alexander the Great is presented as a Christian knight weeping for Saint Mary and pledging his commitment to Christ is one of the least-realized heresies in the world.

All these elaborate, arabesque motifs weave around the figure of Alexander the Great.

Such poetic romances like the Florimont1 manuscript are frighteningly double-edged. They make you grieve, they crush you and they crush the courage one has to write novels today.

All the conceptual divisions and stylistic breakthroughs of our present moment were discovered a very long time ago. Hoping to become an inventor of new forms is ridiculous.

Durrës, 2003

translated from Albanian by Wayne Miller

1 The Florimont manuscript is a 12th century illuminated manuscript written by Aimon de Varennes, a Lyonese poet. A prequel to the Roman d’Alexander, the manuscript tells the story of Florimont, the fictional Albanian grandfather of Alexander the Great.

Matthew Zapruder

YOGURT PARK

Sometimes I need to walk out into the cool evening and like the opposite of a nearly dead from hunger explorer go in an utterly calm quest for the artificial glory of a mountain of what is surely frozen imitation fake petroleum loaded with little baby mountains of ostensible chocolate which all feels sinfully iterative what is the result I take

unnatural nature into my body digitally weep then turn away away from everything intelligent everything edifying everything sweet sweet and bitter are my loves how they beckon me back from this mountain of needless want and how despite the shadows I put inside me back to them I go is the great subject I avoid toward it I walk gradually then suddenly

THE EMPATHY MUSEUM

for Matt Small

I have never seen a face in a painting that made me wonder more what happens at night when the gallery is locked all the apertures to the world are closed so now with eyes still open the painting stares into the room no longer

is the painting mistaken for a mirror in which we believe we see the same almost nameable feelings which arise in us too now that we’re gone a little glow from afar maybe the end of dead galaxies or a streetlight whose light the word ancient cannot begin

to describe with total disinterest touches the eyes at last the museum has become a museum of empathy at last the face is where it belongs

DIRTY TESLA

on the train I ride through a cloud the conductor says as if to me there are many opportunities to smoke in Sacramento and then in Reno which seemed truer than anything you pass so quickly said a pine and now we are passing through a piece of California where people ate each other I do not resist the urge to say aloud to the lake down there that it sounds like the party got out of hand

far below a blue eye regards me not speaking of history

Dirty Tesla was the name of my band in high school don’t tell anyone how some things just get funnier while we sit here doing everything with no results why are you doing whatever it is no one knows except future historians is what I tell myself speaking of history my son attends Beach Elementary named for the first Californian ever to die in a world war

as soon as the first one started it already would forever go on his name was Egbert followed by a mysterious W his poor mother stood up so straight in the photograph of the funeral

I don’t know if he ever put on one of those striped suits and went to look at the sea before he crossed it

I just know he died in a field near a town called Bony all this I relate to my love as we walk by the building so utterly quiet in summer it’s so sad she said he was a person but everyone thinks he’s a place we were going as slowly as we could

toward the tea shop

owned by a friend named Grace where we would drink chrysanthemums grown in Fresno

Just one of many examples demonstrating widely spread shamanism/deity-worshipping culture in South Korea: These stone sculptures look very similar to a famous stone sculpture known as Dol-ha-ru-bang (means “Rock Grandpa”) made out of porous volcanic rocks mostly found in Jeju Island are seen frequently in South Korea. Sometimes, you might witness random women praying while rubbing the nose of these sculpture, hoping for a baby. There is a saying that if you pray for a baby to this “Rock Grandpa,” he will listen and grant you a baby.

Contributors

Heather Altfeld is a poet and essayist. Her two books of poetry are “Post-Mortem” (Orison Books, April 2021) and “The Disappearing Theatre” (Poets at Work, 2016). Her work is featured in the 2019 Best American Essays, Conjunctions Magazine, Orion Magazine, Aeon Magazine, Narrative Magazine, and others. She was the 2017 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award with the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at CSU Chico, and is finishing a collection of essays. www.heatheraltfeld.com

Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems, two novels, and three collections of critical essays. He has received the Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. In November 2017 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and UCLA. His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies appeared in 2021, and a volume of selected poems under the title The Returns appeared in 2022. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island." Websites include Wikipedia, "Alfred Corn". Facebook, Alfred Corn. Instagram, alfredcorn. Substack, "AlfredCornStacked” https://alfredcornstacked.substack.com/

Matt Hart is the author of twelve books of poetry, including most recently FALLING FINE: Selected and New Poems (Pickpocket Books). The Head of Creative Writing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he plays in the post-punk/indie rock band NEVERNEW and edits, solders, and publishes the poetry journal Solid State. Personal Instagram: @forkliftmatt https://www.instagram.com/forkliftmatt/ Band Website: www.nevernew.net Band Instagram: @nevernewband https://www.instagram.com/nevernewband/ SOLID STATE (the journal I edit): solidstateliterary@gmail.com

Leonard Kress has published fiction, poetry, translations, non-fiction, in New Orleans Review, Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Kress currently lives in Blackwood, NJ and teaches at Temple University. www.leonardkress.com

Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), and coeditor of After Montaigne (2015). He teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts; with Joey Franklin he edits the journal Fourth Genre; with David Lazar he edits the 21st Century Essays series at the Ohio State University Press; and he curates the online essay resource www.quotidiana.org.

Maurice Manning's most recent book of poetry is Snakedoctor. He lives with his family in Kentucky and teaches at Transylvania University.

Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections, most recently We the Jury (Milkweed, 2021) and The End of Childhood, which is forthcoming in 2025. His awards include the UNT Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six individual awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books from Albanian most recently Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac, shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation and has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century. He lives in Denver, where he co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, and edits Copper Nickel. http://onlythesenses.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/waynemillerpoet

Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. https://matthewzapruder.com/

Moikom Zeqo, born in Durrës in 1949, was one of the most prominent writers and public intellectuals in Albania. Over the course of his life, he published 100 books, including poetry, fiction, monographs, and children’s books. His poetry was suppressed in the 1970s and 80s during which time he reinvented himself as an underwater archeologist. In 1991, as the Albanian communist system was collapsing, Zeqo was named Albania’s Minister of Culture, and from 1998–2004 he directed the National Historical Museum in Tirana. In 2019, he was named a Knight of the Order of Skanderbeg, one of the highest civilian honors an Albanian can receive. Two of his poetry collections have been translated and published in the United States: Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015) and I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007). “The Surrealism of Alexander the Great” comes from the book of prose Sellers of Chaos, which was published in Albania in 2010. Zeqo died of leukemia in 2020.

<Photo by James Moog>

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