Storyman 5

ISSN: 2009-2369

The Linnet's Wings

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

Mahatma Gandhi

i

ii

Also by The Linnet's Wings: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow One Day Tells its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine Randolph Caldecott's The House that Jack Built

Frontispiece

My Inner Colours Máire Morrissey-Cummins

iii

Published by The Linnet's Wings, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, of transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit www.thelinnetswings.org to read more about our publication.

ISBN 978-0-9930493-2-3

iv

TABLE OF CON TEN TS WINTER L AST Q UARTER 2014 INTRODUCTION Prologue xii Editor's Note xiv Epigraph: Ernest Shackleton, xvi

Passive Youth by Frances Gapper 35 No Alternative By John C. Mannone 37 Fifteen by John C. Mannone 38 There Were Balloons by Cathy S. Ulrich 64

SHORT STORIES Come Back Out by Michael McGlade 3 Once They're Gone, They Keep Goiing by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri 19 Archie and Grandma Bond by Bill Frank Robinson 87 There Were Balloons by Cathy S. Ulrich 64 PEGASUS by Mara Buck 65

CNF

SYNONYMS, dishearten, dispirit, deject 17

POETRY Editorial (Outside the Inn by Ron. Lavalette), by Oonah Joslin 43 A Few Thoughts On The Soul by Constance Brewer 47 AUTUMN RHYTHMS (by Jackson Pollack) by Martin Burke 45 bitter, despite the creamer by Joshua A Colwell 46 Childhood on the River Circa 1960 by Ronald E. Shields 47 Lament for When I Did Not by Mary Lee 48 Columibade by Jane Burn 49 Lost Laundry by Katheen Cassen Michelson 50 Marbled Chocolate by Máire Morrissey-Cummins 52 Meeting point by Nick Bowman 53 Memory Games by Constance Brewer 54 Naked Beauty by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson 55 Skellig Michael by Mary Lee 56 Penance by Máire Morrissey-Cummins 57 Soul Skating by Julie Hogg 58 The Moment by Ronald E. Shields 59

NOVELLA EXCERPT VOX by Jan De Wilde 70 BOOK REVIEW Marie Fitzpatrick: The Blue Box by Jürgen Olschewski 33 FLASH FICTION French Knitting by Elizabeth Hopkinson 1 SPANISH SECTION Rapunzel 12 MICRO Venus Still Shines Even After Fifty Years by John C. Mannone 31

v

Resonant Frequency by Nick Bowman 60 Whiskey and Cigarettes at the End by Ronald E. Shields 61

POETRY ART Autumn Blues by Marion Clarke 39 Winter Garden by Marion Clarke 62

Managing Editor Marie Fitzpatrick Senior Editor Bill West

ART for Review SONGWRITING AND PERFORMANCE EditorsEnglish Top of Page: The Donkey Ride by Eva Songwriter: Jürgen Olschewsk Bill West Gonzales Yvette Flis Song Title: Any Sweet Thing Marie Fitzpatrick The Knitting Shepherdess by JeanFrancois Millet, 1 Poetry Rapunzel, from an edition of Grimm's Oonah Joslin Fairy Tales, illustrated by Johnny Spanish Gruelle 11 Marie Fitzpatrick The Fiancee, (Illustration) MLF 19 The Mirror of Venus, by Edward BurneContributing Editor Martin Heavisides Jones 32 Poster. Historical exhibition of art Consulting on Photography objects in favor of injured, Ivan Maia Cavelli Biliban 33 Consulting on Copy Title: Gauze, Artist: Paul Klee 37 Digby Beaumont Following Matisse, Marie Fitpatrick 38 Web and Database Management My inner colours, Artist: Máire Peter Gilkes Morrissey-Cummins 48, 51, 54, 55 Park of idols, Paul Klee, 63 To the Unknown Voice, Wassily Kandinsky, 70 Sunrise Impression, Claude Monet, 94 Websites Researched: www.gutenberg.org/www. wikipaintings.org, www.goodreads.org

vi

Artist: Heorhiy Narbut Completion Date: 1910 Place of Creation: St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

Style: Art Nouveau (Modern) Period: Petersburg period Series: How mice buried the cat Genre: illustration

vii

The scholar and his cat, Pangur Bán (from the Irish by Robin Flower) I and Pangur Ban my cat, 'Tis a like task we are at: Hunting mice is his delight, Hunting words I sit all night.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye Full and fierce and sharp and sly; 'Gainst the wall of knowledge I All my little wisdom try.

Better far than praise of men 'Tis to sit with book and pen; Pangur bears me no ill-will, He too plies his simple skill.

When a mouse darts from its den, O how glad is Pangur then!

O what gladness do I prove When I solve the doubts I love!

'Tis a merry task to see At our tasks how glad are we, When at home we sit and find Entertainment to our mind.

So in peace our task we ply, Pangur Ban, my cat, and I; In our arts we find our bliss, I have mine and he has his.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray In the hero Pangur's way; Oftentimes my keen thought set Takes a meaning in its net.

Practice every day has made Pangur perfect in his trade; I get wisdom day and night Turning darkness into light.

Robin Flower He was born at Meanwood in Yorkshire, and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford.

He worked from 1929 as Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum and, completing the work of Standish Hayes O'Grady, compiled a catalogue of the Irish manuscripts there.

He wrote several collections of poetry, translations of the Irish poets for the Cuala Press, and verses on

viii

Blasket Island. He first visited Blasket in 1910, at the recommendation of Carl Marstrander, his teacher at the School of Irish Learning in Dublin; he acquired there the Irish nickname Bláithín. He suggested a Norse origin for the name "Blasket"] Under Flower's influence, George Derwent Thomson and Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson made scholarly visits to Blasket

After his death his ashes were scattered on the Blasket Islands.

Happy Christmas, guys. It's been another great year for 'The Linnet's Wings,' as we built and designed new web and print templates to promote our contributor's work, which as far as we're concerned is some of the best on the web -- and as far as I'm concerned is the best. But then I manage, design and publish it. l got to see and participate in Irish Water march on the 10th Dec. To see people get out and say NO to government in a peaceful manner. To see them being motivated by the idea of right and repulsed by the appearance of new greed was great.And most importantly they were allowed the right to protest.

And so we go in 2015 and we wait on the results of everyone's efforts. It's exciting and scary; for as we move towards our centenary celebrations in 2016, we're seeing new land being ploughed and tilled, and how the seed is scattered will depend on the sure touch of a balanced electorate. Have we got it, have the Irish got the balance required. The Spanish sure have, which is why they got their government running scared imposing impossible fines on people who wish to partake in their human right to peaceful public demonstration.

Les Miserables Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night?

It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies.

Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.

They will live again in freedom In the garden of the Lord.

They will walk behind the plough-share, They will put away the sword.

The chain will be broken And all men will have their reward. ix

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Somewhere beyond the barricade Is there a world you long to see?

Do you hear the people sing?

Say, do you hear the distant drums?

It is the future that they bring When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Somewhere beyond the barricade Is there a world you long to see?

Do you hear the people sing?

Say, do you hear the distant drums?

It is the future that they bring When tomorrow comes # Like many many people we have a great interest in the Shackleton story: The Irishman who managed to escape the hell of the ice only to go back to take his men out. And he didn't find it easy to get back either, but his men waited on him:They trusted him and he lifted them. How cool was that: There are a few Irishmen about today with a chance to do similar, Dennis O' Brien being one.

If anyone of you guys have written up work-- prose or poetry-- on any aspect of his relationships with Scott, his Mrs., his comrades, his friends, or any of his expeditions, you might consider given us a shout at: thelinnetswiings@gmail.com please, we'd love to hear about it and read it wiith a eye to publishing.

Thank you all for your support during the year and alll the best for 2015.

Hugs, Marie

x

We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders.

We had reached the naked soul of man.

Ernest Shackleton

xi

xii

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

French Knitting

by Elizabeth Hopkinson

Artist: Jean-Francois Millet Start Date: c.1856 Completion Date:1857 Style: Realism Genre: genre painting Technique: pastel Material: paper

Each night, the witch knits Rapunzel's hair.

Round the peg, over the peg, down the hole. Round the peg, over the peg, down the hole. The witch uses a staff, smooth as obsidian after years of knitting, to lift each loop of hair over the last, push it down the limitless pit, straighten the arrangement before making the next loop. There are seven pegs, each as thick as Rapunzel's waist, when the witch first brought her to this room. Seven points of a magic star. Seven nights in each turning of the week. Seven years the witch has knitted, while Rapunzel's figure has changed from smooth stick to gently curving bough. The pit is wider than the witch's ample The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

hips, and dark as shrivelled elderberries. The loops of Rapunzel's hair criss-cross it: a giant, golden cobweb.

Round the peg, over the peg, down the hole. Round the peg, over the peg, down the hole.

At the end of each night, the witch descends the pit, skipping the cobweb to its hub. She grasps the braided cord, lowers herself and tugs, so it hangs down the centre of the pit like a plumb line. Slowly, slowly, hand over hand, she climbs downward. Knitted into position, Rapunzel sees nothing.

"Where does it go?" She has asked the question often these last seven years.

"To the centre of the earth," the witch replies, as she always does. "I am knitting you into the soil, the rock, the fire at the earth's heart. You will be the golden thread running through the centre of creation."

Each day Rapunzel contemplates, while the witch is lost in earth's inner regions. Through the window she can never reach, she watches the ever-changing sky, feels the sun's warmth on rice-pale skin, hears the mating call of the blackbird, smells the scent of nettles after summer rain. Each sound, each smell is as intimate as her own heartbeat.

"The witch is wrong," she thinks in her silent heart. "Creation is the golden thread that runs through me."

The French-knitted cord tugs at the roots of Rapunzel's hair, as questing badgers tug at the roots of ancient oaks. The witch climbs, skips, takes out the polished stick to knit once more. She tugs at her handiwork and descends back into the darkness at the centre of the earth. Beyond the forbidden window, the stars come out: silver on ebony. Beryl, garnet, aquamarine. An ancient song of the spheres thrums in Rapunzel's temples.

"She cannot knit me to the stars," Rapunzel thinks. "Out there, I float free, encircling the round world. She cannot knit cords with my heart."

The rope of hair tugs, but it is different. After seven years of knitting, every night the same, Rapunzel knows it is different. She strains to turn her head. Hairs snap. She bites her petal-pale lips in pain.

Something is rising from the pit, straight and dark as a stick of obsidian. A second cord of French-knitted hair, standing tall like a young tree. Climbing up it come a pair of feet in toed stockings, legs in patterned silk breeches, a torso in a loose silk jacket, rising upwards and yet impossibly hanging as though their owner were standing feet-down on the ground. And from the centre of the golden web comes a man's voice: "I am knitting you into the soil, my prince. Into the rock, the fire at the earth's heart. You will be the golden thread running through the centre of creation."

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Come Back Out

by Michael McGlade “Me and Pangur Bán, my cat, ‘tis a like task we are at,” said Da. [CHARACTER DESCRIPTION] Arms solid as hewn granite; face creased like well-worn cowhide; eyes of faded denim; grey hair, 62-years-old, 5’6”; farmer.

Da shifted the pickaxe shaft between his hands and stuck sparks off the curved spike when it punctured the stony surface and he rocked the embedded spike to break up the surface and then moved along a few inches and repeated and continued and repeated until the line of the shore was etched in the earth.

[EXPLANATORY ASIDE] A shore is a drainage system used in agricultural land to remove surface liquid from waterlogged fields. It consists of a bedded system of interconnected pipes laid in a stone-filled trench beneath the surface which collects water and channels it into a dry well, soakaway, stream, flume, bottomless pit, alternative dimension, etc.

“Messe agus Pangur Bán,” said Da. “Cechtar nathar fria shaindán.” The pickaxe struck the ground. “Bíth a menmasam fri seilgg.” The pickaxe pulsed with a drumlike rhythm. “Mu menma céin im shaincheirdd.”

[PERSONAL NOTE] I’m Cathal, I’ve recently graduated from Trinity College Dublin, and my final summer of

freedom before I begin a teaching career has been allocated by my Da into this daily ritual of digging this feckin shore by hand. Day of digging: number one. Time: nine AM. Temperature: hot as the surface of the sun. Countenance: forehead glistening like igneous rock.

I hadn’t been home in six months and during this time the ancestral family home had been demolished and a new home built on the same location. The rubble from the old house had been used to backfill the area and during the excavation process of this shore I expected to encounter various-sized chunks of masonry, splinters of doorframe and floor tiles to be revealed and to complicate and lengthen the timeframe allocated to this task.

“Me and Pangur Bán, my cat, ‘tis a like task we are at…” said Da. He would often recite this poem when we worked the fields. His father had recited it to him when they worked together. He wanted me to finish and he watched me and waited.

“Hunting-mice-is-his-delight, hunting-words-I-sit-all-night,” I said in a rushed jumble like I was nine-yearsThe Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

old again stood up at the front of the living room reciting my multiplication tables. I don’t know what it was that made me feel like a child in his company.

[SCENIC DESCRIPTION] Slieve Gullion Mountain is located in the south of County Armagh in the province

of Ulster in the country of Ireland, an island located in the north-west of Europe, between latitudes 51 ° and 56° N, and longitudes 11 ° and 5° W. Slieve Gullion means “Mountain of the hill slopes” and from on top can be seen Antrim (50 miles), Dublin Bay (65 miles) and Wicklow (110 miles). I am currently located in a valley carved by glacial erosion at the base of Slieve Gullion Mountain and gazing at the summit some 1,900 feet high with its rocky outcrop of grey granite known as the King’s Table which sits above a scarf of purplish heather and dry heath.

It had just gone nine o’clock and a swollen crimson sun hung menacingly above the eastern peak of Slieve Gullion and the valley heaved a single breath of air which rustled the oak and ash trees, and ghosted our two fields of cut hay grass, which stretched either side of the lane that connected the road to our house.

[EXPLANATORY ASIDE] Lots of Irish mythology is set in the Slieve Gullion area. It’s where the Irish warrior

Cú Chulainn lived as a child. It’s where Finn MacCool was tricked by the Cailleach Beara to dive to the bottom of the bottomless lake on top of the mountain, from which he emerged as an old and withered man. Finn was a robust young chap but not as savvy or mentally acute as evidenced by his disproportionately overdeveloped biceps. Luckily, the Fianna, Finn’s group of fighting men, forced the Cailleach Beara to release the curse and change Finn back, which she did, except his hair remained grey. These were the kinds of stories Da would tell when we worked in the fields to gouge potato drills or collect by hand, and often on the knees, the surface stones turned out after a ploughing, and each stone collected into a kern for later collection by tractor/trailer would earn the next line of the myth. It got to where, after a week of work on a five acre field of newly ploughed meadow, the stories no longer resembled any of the myths I would later research in books. Exhibit A: Finn MacCool stole a metal glove from the Mole People, which facilitated his digging of a tunnel from Ireland to China where he had tea with Marco Polo. Exhibit B: Finn battled with the Balrog, a lava demon, and spawned the Giant’s Causeway with its hexagonal 50p-shaped basalt columns.

Exhibit C: Finn, who had to wear a nappy after a feed of the bad turnips because he didn’t want to cause his Fianna embarrassment, at the special meeting of the Justice League in the courts of King Arthur.

I shovelled loose scree from the trench of the shore and Da returned to the beginning and pickaxed back to the end and I followed in his shadowy wake.

“Tell us the one about Finn marrying a wasp,” I said.

“Finn’s about to get married and is all kitted up for the ceremony in his cleanest thong,” said Da. “But Gods curse the like of it didn’t the Cailleach Beara, Finn’s old flame, get jealous and turn Finn’s new wife-to-be into a wasp. Now, this wasp took umbrage that Finn had invited his old flame to the wedding, so she stings Finn, and she keeps stinging him, and to get away from her Finn dives into the bottomless lake at the top of Slieve Gullion, which was silly because the last time it turned him into an old man.

“Now, this had the whole wedding party, the Cailleach Beara and the Fianna in stitches ‘cause it was a good bit of auld craic. So the Cailleach Beara she changes Finn back into his youthful self but she won’t lift the cure on Finn’s wife because Finn had broken the Cailleach Beara’s heart.

“The story goes that poor Finn just had to get used to the constant buzzing in his ears and endless jags from his wife.”

“Sure,” I said, “to hear a story as grand as that there’s no finer hall than this.”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

The countryside was serene, with the nearest public road several hundred yards away and the next door neighbours were three fields over, unless you counted our sheep and cows which were the only signs of life and they were mostly laying in the short grass, chewing the cud. Air drier than tinder. Cloudless sky like bleached cloth. The vapour trails of jet planes looked like squeezed toothpaste.

The needle of hobnails boots echoed from the road where our next door neighbour, Danny’s John, was walking, and Da said, “Look at that auld codger go.”

[CHARACTER DESCRIPTION] Danny’s John, 72-years-old, 5’7”, farmer. Walks alongside a 1930s pushbike where is balanced a bale of hay on the crossbar. Daily mile-long pilgrimage to feed cattle.

I swapped tools with Da and punctured the ground with the pickaxe. He kept his eyes on my work like a setter and when the scree had been loosed he pounced on it like a cat on a field mouse. He’d been vigorous with his efforts all morning and I had said to him to slow it down but he’d hear none of it. I didn’t want to tell him I’d blisters on my soft hands and that it was hard to get used to working with something that didn’t have batteries in it. I punctured through the stones and rubble into a layer of think black muck with a malodorous odour.

“Put the shaft of a shovel in my hand and I’m happy,” said Da. “It’s home to me, Cathal.”

The sweat was pouring down our faces from the force of the work. There’d be no five o’clock whistle for what we were doing, this thankless work paid for with brow sweat. Not being one to back away from a challenge, my old man being an expert at laying shores, I matched his speed of intensity and honesty of effort and we continued toiling in this fashion in silence for a half hour until the shore stretched twofeet deep for fifteen yards. It would need to be five-feet deep before we could bed down the drainage pipes and backfill the trench.

My mobile phone summoned me with the beep of a received message and I used it as an excuse to climb out of the shore and take a break. The phone was on the window ledge of a whitewashed outhouse, and our lunch was packed in a pail and rested in the shade. Even though we were digging this shore outside our home we wouldn’t eat lunch inside; we always ate where we worked, out in the fields.

“Off to a hooley tonight?” asked Da. [VECTOR OF MESSAGE] Bearing a lascivious quality but in good banter. Gist of message: invitation to party with old school mates. Interpretation: fortification of the body with the imbibing of various alcoholic concoctions with the distinct and unenviable result of an embarrassing evacuation of stomach contents through the convulsing of oesophageal muscles taking the vomitee by utter surprise sometime before midnight. Prognosis: hellish day digging the shore tomorrow. Result: worth it.

“I’ll go out for a sociable pint or two,” I said.

I checked the mobile phone signal but it had dropped out and I was unable to send a reply. This reunion with my old friends was something I had been looking forward to with great anticipation because it would mark the end of an era: I was moving permanently to Dublin to pursue a teaching career, which meant I would only make it back to the area for holidays and special occasions. Tonight’s party was to be a grand send off, a wake for my old life.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“Don’t drink too much,” said Da. “Stick to the stout, Cathal. Those shots you see the young ones downing would kill the quicks in a ditch, they would.”

Da was practically a pioneer, a teetotaller. He rarely drank, except for the occasional hot whiskey made with Powers and administered as a medicinal nightcap or the obligatory case of MacArdles ale for Christmas.

“Still can’t drink a pint of stout to this day,” said Da. “Our fella sickened me on it. Da and uncle Jemmy were divils for the drink, and me and Patsy got this idea that we’d see what all the fuss was about.

I was fifteen, so that’d make Patsy sixteen. Me and our fella went to O’Hanlon’s bar in Mullaghbawn and got set up with a pint of the stuff each, and it went down a treat. And the great thing about the stuff was that it’d help you spin a yarn the length of your arm, not that our fella needs any help with that. So on we goes with the drinking not noticing how much we were having but the craic was ninety and we were having a great time of it, lit with the drink.

“I see his face turn red as a turkey cock’s wattle and Patsy pukes his ring out all over the place.

Doin it all in great style he was. Puked on people’s clothes, shirts, handbags, caps, the bar, tables, in people’s glasses – it was like a geyser. But it was the unexpected nature of this outpouring and unending voluminous quantity of the expectorant that must have gotten to me for the next thing I know I’m puking everything I’d drank up between my toes and I’m puking stuff I didn’t even know I’d eaten. I puked so much I puked air, so I did.

“I had such a tumultuous time of it being sick, I made a compact with Patsy that we’d never touch the stuff again. And we were on our pledge for a week before we gave it another go. It took a few more times like that before I learned my lesson.”

I laughed at that story of his until I had stitches in my side. “When the drink’s in the wit’s out,” I said. “Why is it you took over the farm and not Patsy?”

Da didn’t answer for a long time. “Well, he was older and he’d left home, gone to London. I had to take it over. Da could hardly walk anymore with the arthritis. I had no choice. I was in my second year of apprenticeship as a stone mason and had to give it up.”

I’d never heard him speak of this before and had never thought to ask about it until now.

Da leaned on the shovel shaft and stared off into vacancy. “Cathal, I’ve always regretted not being a mason.” He took hold of the shovel and struck the point of a large piece of masonry from the old house that was obstructing the shore and would need to come out. “Shouldn’t let anything get in the way of your dreams, son.” He struck the shovel tip off the piece of masonry and listened to the ring of the steel. “It’ll have to come out.” He took the crowbar and wedged it into position and rocked the masonry. It was an unmistakable obstacle that would take the two of us a sizable amount of time to surmount. We wrestled at it for half an hour, an hour, even more. At times Da’s face was twisted in a rictus of exertion and, I thought, agony, but he did not stop and so I also did not stop. I pickaxed around the area to free it for movement and between the two of us we joggled it loose and it released into the bottom of the shore. We remained motionless and silent for a long time like the winner of a long distance race who has expelled all energy on the approach to the finish line.

“That’s the goat’s toe,” said Da. [EXPLANATORY ASIDE] Note that I am neither a farrier nor a veterinarian and I cannot vouch for shod

goats, particularly those with a penchant for wearing iron shoes, them being an equine-type creature with keratin exterior to the hoof, but it is believed by the author that the weighting of said phrase bears that of an exclamation

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

such as oh great! wonderful! but with a hint of deserved triumph.

Da studied the object that had been freed from its grave. Part of its DNA an eight-inch masonry block.

[CHARACTER DESCRIPTION] Face like a crumpled dish cloth.

“That’s the quare fellow,” said Da. “I built the extension on the old house with that block. Used them a year before you made an appearance.”

He flattened the scree on the bed of the shore with the shovel heel.

“Cost me four bob a hundred,” said Da. “Eighteen miles there in a tractor with no roof. Christ curse the likes of it didn’t it always rain. Must have made the journey a half-dozen times. Got a hundred on the trailer at a time. The fella that worked there was a bit of a kiss-my-hand. Had an awful time haggling with him. But four bob a hundred, that’s a decent price, and I said it to your man’s face. Almost didn’t get them, but it was all I could afford, so I had to haggle him.”

I was still on my knees with the block of masonry and had affixed a sling around it ready to haul it out of the shore.

“Up on your legs, man.”

[COGNITIVE ASIDE] First time my father has ever referred to me as a man. A momentous instant of acceptance.

He had recognized that his youngest son would not follow in his footsteps. Middle son would take over the farm and I would help from time to time, and send part of my wages each week.

“No use being on your knees, man, unless you mean not to get back up,” said Da. We both moved onto the sling and dragged the masonry out of the shore.

“The grass is turning,” said Da. Both fields of grass had been cut two days previous and were yellowing in the sun. “It’ll near be time to bale it.”

“We might be lucky,” I said. “But it’s meant to rain tomorrow.”

“We might be lucky, Cathal. The frogs are black, though, so it’ll rain soon.”

Along the lane came a boy on an eighteen-speed mountain bike and he stopped next to the shore and peered over the edge of it like someone near the brink of a cliff.

“What are youse at?” he asked.

“Laying down the long shore.”

“Long sure?” he questioned.

[CHARACTER DESCRIPTION] Drooped jaw.

“Looks like a lot of hard work. Would youse not get a digger? A digger would do this in minutes.”

“Doing the work is half the sport,” said Da. The boy took out a piece of folded paper that said Sponsored Walk.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

[EXPLANATORY ASIDE] Sponsored Walk: an annual event organized by the church in which sponsorship

is collected on the basis of a money per mile equation. The sponsorship collector is then obliged to walk the eight mile course around the Crooked Lake and finish in the lakeside picnic area where charred burgers and warm cans of coke are served, and the walker can bask in the warm summer glow of riotousness in having collected money for a worthy cause, ie the Catholic Church.

“Go on up to the house,” said Da. “There’ll be someone there with a purse.”

The boy got on his bike and took it atop a pile of rubble and ploughed toward the back door of the house.

[REMINISCENT ASIDE] I took part in the Sponsored Walk for five years from the age of nine. I was guilty

of the sin of deception, which I never mentioned in the confessional for fear of offending the priest who had arranged and adjudicated the annual Sponsored Walk. I only ever completed the first section of the walk, which led west from the village along the main road, up steep and twisty Sturgan Brae, south along single-lane Ballynalack Road for another mile… and this is where the shortcut came into effect. It removed half the journey. My mates and I would climb through the vegetation and pine trees down the lakeside, which from there was a short swim to the picnic area and a couple of hours spent peering through the chain link fence at the stock-car racing track. Swimming was the scariest part because the consensus was that this end of the lake contained a vortex that was capable of submerging and drowning children. We’d dry off in the sun and time it so that we trudged past the finish line somewhere in the mediocrity of the middle of the group. The best bit was messing around down on the shore. Áine sure hated my guts but always made me kiss her.

Waves lapped against the lake shore … I realized I had been mistaken and it was the echo of a passing car on the road behind the thicket of oak trees where pied wagtails paid out their tune and flitted hither and thither. The sun beamed down like waves in a microwave oven.

I came upon on a shard of cardinal-coloured tile, which used to be the floor of our living room, which in turn, before the extension, had been the kitchen of the original two room property. The living room had an open fire for cooking on and the ceiling was so low that by the time I had turned fifteen I could touch it with my hands. The living room floor was covered in carpet and as children my brothers and I would race around the room and where our feet fell the loose tiles beneath clip-clopped like horses’ hooves.

“Me and Da laid those tiles,” said Da. “I must’ve been no more than twelve. Do you know what I’m going to tell you, I don’t think I enjoyed one minute of it because it was summer and he was making me work when I wanted to go outside and play. He was an awful one for the work. Couldn’t sit still a minute. Even with the arthritis he never stopped…”

Da stopped speaking mid-sentence. His mouth had turned down at the corner, a grimace perhaps, lips thinned to the thickness of a paper cut. We’d been working hard all morning, too hard. I was worried he might be having a stroke. I scrambled to get out of the shore, but his face relaxed and he took hold of the shovel and continued to work.

Reluctantly, I returned to the dig and sifted the excavation. I unearthed a leather boot sole that belonged to granddad, a yellow Lego brick that I hadn’t seen since childhood, a mess of fine copper wire from an electric motor that me and my mates had unravelled and strung between two paper cups to use as walkie-talkies in a game of soldiers, a toy plastic farmyard cow, and the wheel of a stroller I had The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

used on the ill-fated maiden voyage of a soapbox car. It was my life thus far I had been digging and unearthing.

“I think you’ll do just fine in Dublin,” said Da. “Just fine, Cathal,” he said. “It’s what you want and don’t ever let anything or anybody change that.”

“I’ll not be a stranger,” I said. “I’ll be back home. I promise.”

“A shore is a particular thing,” said Da. “They cut through the land and then disappear. Years from now, this’ll still be here when we’re long gone, and nobody will know of it because it’s buried beneath the surface. You only really ever learn of something’s existence when you start to dig.”

The sun had reached its zenith and lunchtime had arrived. I climbed out of the shore, which had steep loose sides that were above the height of my shoulders. I entered the outhouse to retrieve the food. Bluebottle flies traced crazy parabolas. Panger, our cat, wanted to eat too and it mewled and studied my approach.

I opened the lunch pail and took out a wheaten bread farl. I noticed Da had gotten down into the shore.

He shovelled loose scree out of the bed of the shore and flattened the ground with the back of the shovel in little tap-tap-taps.

“It’ll make a good bed,” said Da. “And Gods be good we’ll never see what goes into it ever come back out of it, the longest day we live.”

“I won’t want to see anything come back out of it,” I said.

I watched Panger leap on something. Between its claws was a field mouse, a terrified mass of trembling brown fur. My instinct was to shout at the cat to try and scare it into releasing its captive but it would not have changed the situation or reversed the nature of life. I looked beyond Panger and all you could see now of Da was his head with its thinning grey hair. His head bobbed up and down as he worked so that it disappeared from view and reappeared. Farther on toward the treeline the swallows flew low. They were down catching flies, which only happened before a hard rain. The sun poured down like melted wax.

When I no longer noticed Da’s head bobbing into view I knew something terrible had happened. I went to the edge of the precipice of the trench and Da was laying down the long shore like he were sleeping on a bed and he was face down and unmoving. ###

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

QUOTES Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Ronald Reagan I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

John Steinbeck

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Desmond Tutu

Our brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant.

Frans de Waal

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.

Walt Disney

The mice think they are right, but my cat eats them anyways, this is the point, reality is nothing, perception is everything."

Terry Goodkind

Those who'll play with cats must expect to be scratched.

Miguel de Cervantes

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Rapunzel Un cuento de los hermanos Grimm

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Había una vez un hombre y una mujer que vivían solos y desconsolados por no tener hijos, hasta que, por fin, la mujer concibió la esperanza de que Dios Nuestro Señor se disponía a satisfacer su anhelo. La casa en que vivían tenía en la pared trasera una ventanita que daba a un magnífico jardín, en el que crecían espléndidas flores y plantas; pero estaba rodeado de un alto muro y nadie osaba entrar en él, ya que pertenecía a una bruja muy poderosa y temida de todo el mundo.

"¡Ay!" exclamó ella, "me moriré si no puedo comer las verdezuelas del jardín que hay detrás de nuestra casa. " El hombre, que quería mucho a su esposa, pensó: "Antes que dejarla morir conseguiré las verdezuelas, cueste lo que cueste."

Y, al anochecer, saltó el muro del jardín de la bruja, arrancó precipitadamente un puñado de verdezuelas y las llevó a su mujer. Ésta se preparó enseguida una ensalada y se la comió muy a gusto; y tanto le y tanto le gustaron, que, al día siguiente, su afán era tres veces más intenso. Si quería gozar There once lived a man and his wife who had long de paz, el marido debía saltar nuevamente al wished in vain for a child. Now there was at the back jardín. Y así lo hizo, al anochecer. Pero apenas of their house a little window which overlooked a había puesto los pies en el suelo, tuvo un terrible beautiful garden full of the finest vegetables and flowers; sobresalto, pues vio surgir ante sí la bruja. "¿Cómo but there was a high wall all round it, and no one te atreves," díjole ésta con mirada iracunda, "a ventured into it, for it belonged to a witch of great entrar cual un ladrón en mi jardín y robarme las might, and of whom all the world was afraid. verdezuelas? Lo pagarás muy caro." Un día asomóse la mujer a aquella ventana a contemplar el jardín, y vio un bancal plantado de hermosísimas verdezuelas, tan frescas y verdes, que despertaron en ella un violento antojo de comerlas. El antojo fue en aumento cada día que pasaba, y como la mujer lo creía irrealizable, iba perdiendo la color y desmirriándose, a ojos vistas.

Viéndola tan desmejorada, le preguntó asustado su marido: "¿Qué te ocurre, mujer?" One day that the wife was standing at the window, and looking into the garden, she saw a bed filled with the most beautiful rampion, and it looked so fresh and green that she began to wish for some and at length she longed for it greatly.

This went on for days, and as she knew she could not get the rampion, she pined away, and grew pale and miserable.

Then the man was uneasy, and asked, "What is the matter, dear wife?"

Oh," answered she, "I shall die unless I can have some of that rampion to eat that grows in the garden at the back of our house." The man, who loved her very much, thought to himself, "Rather than lose my wife I will get some rampion, cost what it will." So in the twilight he climbed over the wall into the witch's garden, plucked hastily a handful of rampion and brought it to his wife.

She made a salad of it at once, and ate of it to her heart's content. but she liked it so much, and it tasted so good, that the next day she longed for it thrice as much as she had done before. If she was to have any rest the man must climb over the wall once more. So he went in the twilight again; and as he was climbing back, he saw, all at once, the witch standing before him, and was terribly frightened, as she cried, with angry eyes, "How dare you climb over into my garden like a thief, and steal my rampion! it shall be the worse

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

for you!"

"¡Ay!" respondió el hombre, "tened compasión de mí. Si lo he hecho, ha sido por una gran necesidad: mi esposa vio desde la ventana vuestras verdezuelas y sin tió un antojo tan grande de comerlas, que si no las tuviera se moriría." La hechicera se dejó ablandar y le dijo: "Si es como dices, te dejaré coger cuantas verdezuelas quieras, con una sola condición: tienes que darme el hijo que os nazca. Estará bien y lo cuidaré como una madre." Tan apurado estaba el hombre, que se avino a todo y, cuando nació el hijo, que era una niña, presentóse la bruja y, después de ponerle el nombre de Verdezuela; se la llevó.

"Oh," answered he, "be merciful rather than just, I have only done it through necessity for my wife saw your rampion out of the window, and became possessed with so great a longing that she would have died if she could not have had some to eat." Then the witch said, "If it is all as you say you may have as much rampion as you like, on one condition - the child that will come into the world must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and I will care for it like a mother."

### Verdezuela era la niña más hermosa que viera el sol. Cuando cumplió los doce años, la hechicera la encerró en una torre que se alzaba en medio de un bosque y no tenía puertas ni escaleras; únicamente en lo alto había una diminuta ventana. Cuando la bruja quería entrar, colocábase al pie y gritaba: "¡Verdezuela, Verdezuela, Suéltame tu cabellera!"

Rapunzel was the most beautiful child in the world. When she was twelve years old, the witch shut her up in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither steps nor door, only a small window above. When the witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and would cry, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel!

Let down your hair! "

Verdezuela tenía un cabello magnífico y larguísimo, fino como hebras de oro. Cuando oía la voz de la hechicera se soltaba las trenzas, las envolvía en torno a un gancho de la ventana y las dejaba colgantes: y como tenían veinte varas de longitud, la bruja trepaba por ellas.

Rapunzel had beautiful long hair that shone like gold. When she heard the voice of the witch she would undo the fastening of the upper window, unbind the plaits of her hair, and let it down twenty ells below, and the witch would climb up by it.

Al cabo de algunos años, sucedió que el hijo del Rey, encontrándose en el bosque, acertó a pasar The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

junto a la torre y oyó un canto tan melodioso, que hubo de detenerse a escucharlo. Era Verdezuela, que entretenía su soledad lanzando al aire su dulcísima voz.

El príncipe quiso subir hasta ella y buscó la puerta de la torre, pero, no encontrando ninguna, se volvió a palacio. No Verdezuela soltó sus trenzas, y la bruja se encaramó a lo alto de la torre. "Si ésta es la escalera para subir hasta allí," se dijo el príncipe, "también yo probaré fortuna." Y al día siguiente, cuando ya comenzaba a oscurecer, encaminóse al pie de la torre y dijo: "¡Verdezuela, Verdezuela, Suéltame tu cabellera!"

After they had lived thus a few years it happened that as the King's son was riding through the wood, came to the tower; and as he drew near he heard a voice singing so sweetly that he stood still and listened. It was Rapunzel in her loneliness trying to pass away the time with sweet songs.

The King's son wished to go in to her, and sought to find a door in the tower, but there was none. So he rode home, but the song had entered into his heart, and every day he went into the wood and listened to it. Once, as he was standing there under a tree, he saw the witch come up, and listened while she called out, "O Rapunzel, Rapunzel!

Let down your hair."

Enseguida descendió la trenza, y el príncipe subió.

And she let down her hair, and the King's son climbed up by it.

En el primer momento, Verdezuela se asustó mucho al ver un hombre, pues jamás sus ojos habían visto ninguno. Pero el príncipe le dirigió la palabra con gran afabilidad y le explicó que su canto había impresionado de tal manera su corazón, que ya no había gozado de un momento de paz hasta hallar la manera de subir a verla. Al escucharlo perdió Verdezuela el miedo, y cuando él le preguntó si lo quería por esposo, viendo la muchacha que era joven y apuesto, pensó, "Me querrá más que la vieja," y le respondió, poniendo la mano en la suya: "Sí; mucho deseo irme contigo; pero no sé cómo bajar de aquí. Cada vez que vengas, tráete una madeja de seda; con ellas trenzaré una escalera y, cuando esté terminada, bajaré y tú me llevarás en tu caballo." Convinieron en que hasta entonces el príncipe acudiría todas las noches, ya que de día iba la vieja. La hechicera nada sospechaba, hasta que un día Verdezuela le preguntó: "Decidme, tía Gothel, ¿cómo es que me cuesta mucho más subiros a vos que al príncipe, que está arriba en un santiamén?" - "¡Ah, malvada!" exclamó la bruja, "¿qué es lo que oigo? Pensé que te había aislado de todo el mundo, y, sin embargo, me has engañado."

Y, furiosa, cogió las hermosas trenzas de Verdezuela, les dio unas vueltas alrededor de su mano izquierda y, empujando unas tijeras con la derecha, zis, zas, en un abrir y cerrar de ojos cerrar de ojos se las cortó, y tiró al suelo la espléndida cabellera. Y fue tan despiadada, que condujo a la pobre The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Rapunzel, from an edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, illustrated by Johnny Gruelle

Verdezuela a un lugar desierto, condenándola a me away on thy horse." They agreed that he should come to her every evening, as the old woman came in una vida de desolación y miseria.

the day-time. So the witch knew nothing of all this until once Rapunzel said to her unwittingly, "Mother Gothel, how is it that you climb up here so slowly, and the King's son is with me in a moment?" "O wicked child," cried the witch, "what is this I hear! I thought I had hidden thee from all the world, and thou hast betrayed me!" In her anger she seized Rapunzel by her beautiful hair, struck her several times with her left hand, and then grasping a pair of shears in her right - snip, snap - the beautiful locks lay on the ground.

And she was so hard-hearted that she took Rapunzel and put her in a waste and desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery.

In the beginning, Rapunzel was frightened when she saw that a man had come in to her, for she had never seen one before; but the King's son began speaking so kindly to her, and told how her singing had entered into his heart, so that he could have no peace until he had seen her herself. Then Rapunzel forgot her terror, and when he asked her to take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and beautiful, she thought to herself, "I certainly like him much better than old mother Gothel," and she put her hand into his hand. She said: "I would willingly go with thee, but I do not know how I shall get out.

When thou comest, bring each time a silken rope, and I will make a ladder, and when it is quite ready I will El mismo día en que se había llevado a la get down by it out of the tower, and thou shalt take muchacha, la bruja ató las trenzas cortadas al

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

gancho de la ventana, y cuando se presentó el príncipe y dijo: "¡Verdezuela, Verdezuela, Suéltame tu cabellera!" la bruja las soltó, y por ellas subió el hijo del Rey. Pero en vez de encontrar a su adorada Verdezuela hallóse cara a cara con la hechicera, que lo miraba con ojos malignos y perversos: "¡Ajá!" exclamó en tono de burla, "querías llevarte a la niña bonita; pero el pajarillo ya no está en el nido ni volverá a cantar. El gato lo ha cazado, y también a ti te sacará los ojos. Verdezuela está perdida para ti; jamás volverás a verla." El príncipe, fuera de sí de dolor y desesperación, se arrojó desde lo alto de la torre.

Salvó la vida, pero los espinos sobre los que fue a caer se le clavaron en los ojos, y el infeliz hubo de vagar errante por el bosque, ciego, alimentándose de raíces y bayas y llorando sin cesar la pérdida de su amada mujercita. Y así anduvo sin rumbo por espacio de varios años, mísero y triste, hasta que, al fin, llegó al desierto en que vivía Verdezuela con los dos hijitos los dos hijitos gemelos, un niño y una niña, a los que había dado a luz. Oyó el príncipe una voz que le pareció conocida y, al acercarse, reconociólo Verdezuela y se le echó al cuello llorando. Dos de sus lágrimas le humedecieron los ojos, y en el mismo momento se le aclararon, volviendo a ver como antes. Llevóla a su reino, donde fue recibido con gran alegría, y vivieron muchos años contentos y felices.

The same day on which she took Rapunzel away she went back to the tower in the evening and made fast the severed locks of hair to the window-hasp, and the King's son came and cried, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel!

Let down your hair."

Then she let the hair down, and the King's son climbed up, but instead of his dearest Rapunzel he found the witch looking at him with wicked glittering eyes.

"Aha!" cried she, mocking him, "you came for your darling, but the sweet bird sits no longer in the nest, and sings no more; the cat has got her, and will scratch out your eyes as well! Rapunzel is lost to you; you will see her no more." The King's son was beside himself with grief, and in his agony he sprang from the tower: he escaped with life, but the thorns on which he fell put out his eyes. Then he wandered blind through the wood, eating nothing but roots and berries, and doing nothing but lament and weep for the loss of his dearest wife.

So he wandered several years in misery until at last he came to the desert place where Rapunzel lived with her twin-children that she had borne, a boy and a girl. At first he heard a voice that he thought he knew, and when he reached the place from which it seemed to come Rapunzel knew him, and fell on his neck and wept. And when her tears touched his eyes they became clear again, and he could see with them as well as ever. Then he took her to his kingdom, where he was received with great joy, and there they lived long and happily. ###

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“Of all their enemies -- the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization.”

Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage Monday, December 21, was beautifully fine, with a gentle west-north-westerly breeze. We made a start at 3 a.m. and proceeded through the pack in a south-westerly direction. At noon we had gained seven miles almost due east, the northerly drift of the pack having continued while the ship was apparently moving to the south. Petrels of several species, penguins, and seals were plentiful, and we saw four small blue whales. At noon we entered a long lead to the southward and passed around and between nine splendid bergs. One mighty specimen was shaped like the Rock of Gibraltar but with steeper cliffs, and another had a natural dock that would have contained the Aquitania. A spur of ice closed the entrance to the huge blue pool. Hurley brought out his kinematograph-camera, in order to make a record of these bergs. Fine long leads running east and south-east among bergs were found during the afternoon, but at midnight the ship was stopped by small, heavy ice-floes, tightly packed against an unbroken plain of ice. The outlook from the mast-head was not encouraging. The big floe was at least 15 miles long and 10 miles wide. The edge could not be seen at the widest part, and the area of the floe must have been not less than 150 square miles. It appeared to be formed of year-old ice, not very thick and with very few hummocks or ridges in it. We thought it must have been formed at sea in very calm weather and drifted up from the south-east. I had never seen such a large area of unbroken ice in the Ross Sea.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Ernest Shackleton “I had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth”

demoralizing to deprive (a person or persons) of spirit, courage, discipline, etc.; destroy the morale of: The continuous barrage demoralized the infantry. to throw (a person) into disorder or confusion; bewilder: We were so demoralized by that one wrong turn that we were lost for hours. to corrupt or undermine the morals of.

Cause (someone) to lose confidence or hope: the General Strike had demoralized the trade unions MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES The way you defeat an army, is by demoralizing the individual soldiers in it, or getting them to desert or retreat.

I object, not to the paperwork that demoralises teachers, but to the undermining of them as caring and knowledgeable professionals that it represents.

Now, the national side, which once ruled the football world with a haughty confidence, is completely demoralized and there's less than a year to prepare for the great campaign on home ground.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Once They're Gone, They Keep Going

The Fiancee, Graphite Pencil on Card, MLF

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

My mother was a woman named Sylvia Drew, and when I was sixteen, we lived in an apartment overlooking the steel mills to the east, with the pool hall, a few family-owned grocery stores, and a dress shop interspersed between. It is a place where everyone had their own connection to the mills, however inconsequential. My mother, however, was from Philadelphia, from a family of lawyers.

She was an English teacher at the high school, introducing students to Hemingway and Mark Twain, trying to get on however she could, since my father had left when I was two. She had once wanted to be an actress, although her father disapproved. He considered acting a profession dominated by Jews and sent her to Wellesley, where he hoped she might make sense of her life.

The apartment is abandoned now. I’ve visited quite a few times. It was a small three-room and smelled of cigarettes and burnt hamburger, although the windows have now been boarded up with planks of wood, and the lower floors turned into a disco. At night the sounds of male laughter from the pool hall and sputtering motors on Franklin Street drifted in, putting me to sleep. I would ride to school with my mother in the morning and go home with her in the afternoon.

That was our routine on the most normal days.

My mother was a thin, flame-haired woman with a foul mouth, which she cheerfully deployed in every situation. She insisted on being called Sylvia because Mother was a reminder of the world she’d come from, a world of lace-curtains and kitchens. She’d married my father because she wanted a chance for adventure, to reinvent herself. That was what she wanted, without thought to the scheme of things, but I can’t blame her. She was young.

“I’m thirty-eight, Mattie,” she said once. “You always think you have time and you put things off. You wake up one morning and life’s drifted by. You don’t fucking recognize yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to grab the opportunities by the balls,” she said. “Don’t be an observer.”

I wish I could have lived in that manner, but I didn’t know the world well beyond the confines of that life with Sylvia. I had dated here and there, a few girls from Munster, brief flings that hadn’t gone far. I had also gotten into trouble with my friend Frank Lawrence, knocking over garbage cans and playing mailbox baseball, which I had tried to hide from Sylvia, unsuccessfully.

I’d wanted to become a lawyer then, something I’d kept largely to myself. I’d been following the trouble in Little Rock that fall, and wanted to defend Negroes down South, to advocate for civil rights. I thought we were all stuck in the worst stations, underdogs trying to get a piece of the action. But, more than anything I wanted it, because it was a profession of which people took notice, where I’d have some tangible proof of my place. Of course, Sylvia disapproved. She worried that I was taking after her family, whom I’d rarely seen since my father had left.

“Lawyers are good-for-nothings, Mattie,” Sylvia said. “Tell me you want to be an artist. A writer.

Something with a bit of fucking heart.”

“What’s wrong with being a lawyer? It puts money on the table.”

“Unlike me, you mean,” she’d said. “Don’t dance around it. Your father hated lawyers. He said they ruined this country, and he was right. They’re looking out for themselves. Justice with a few dollar signs.”

My mother spoke little of my father, aside from the fact that he’d been a labor leader. She claimed from time to time that he’d left the country, and was a Communist. This was unlike the gossip I’d heard in town, the stories of which seemed to keep coming. He was in jail. He had taken his life. He’d started a new family. The thoughts gave me an uneasy feeling within my stomach. There were times, I felt that there was something missing in me, some indefinable weakness that my father had not liked, and had led him The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

to leave. I didn’t know where to fit in, and had no one to tell me.

I never told Sylvia this, because on some level I think she felt the same way. In those little moments, especially after I’d been in trouble, playing the piano or doing homework, Sylvia would hover over me.

She spoke everything with her frantic glance, the way she leaned in, overwhelming me with the scent of her Chanel No. 5. She spoke of her guilt, the guilt that I was not a normal child, or at least her version of a normal child, the Salvador Dali-meets-Hemingway type. She wanted to be able to speak of me with pride amongst the other mothers, in that little war mothers engaged in, exchanging facts about their accomplished children, like cards at a Friday night game.

The one thing we had between us Elvis. He could transform Sylvia into a different being, lighthearted, full of nervous energy. Some nights, listening to his records, which she bought religiously, she’d imitate the way he swiveled, pursing her lips into a sneer, using a broom for a microphone.

We played the records according to mood. Hound Dog was our way of celebrating some small victory, a good grade on a test, a week without Sylvia drinking, being able to pay rent with a little left over. Blue Suede Shoes was reserved for Monday mornings, to prepare us for school and work. The song we played the most frequently, however, had to be Heartbreak Hotel, which Sylvia thought dark and masterful. It was written for every man and woman, unlike that second-rate garbage Sinatra or Perry Como produced.

“Down at the end of lonely street,” she said. “Everyone goddamn lives there. You can be in a crowd and still be on goddamned lonely street.”

It’s fair to say we didn’t speak of the way our lives had played out, or even the way they might, especially where my father was concerned. I think that perhaps Sylvia thought to leave things unsaid was the best.

It seemed right, and I couldn’t blame her. We’d go to movies, and some nights, she would make herself a Tom Collins, which she’d never drink, and sit beside me while I drifted off to sleep. We’d talk about the most trivial things. Republicans. The latest scandals in the neighborhood, things which I have long forgotten, although I wish I hadn’t.

On better days, we took long drives through the back alleys, past the pool hall with the scent of rotting trash, past frame-houses with porch swings and broken bicycles, old churches with stained-glass windows and discordant organ music, all the way to the old bridge with its skeleton girders over the river, where we could look out on the town at night, and make up story after story. I settled for the role of spy, which is how I used to picture my father’s organizing duties. In every story, I’d climb from fire escapes, with a momentary thrill between every space of my body, a moment all my own. It was absurd, but we needed absurdity. We needed to laugh.

It was a Thursday night right before Christmas when old man trouble appeared. It had started to snow, and different incarnations of Santa smiled in every store window. Sylvia and I were on the way home in her 1956 Chevy Bel-Air. We’d been discussing colleges, something we hadn’t discussed much, what with Sylvia dead-set against my legal plans. She was ranting about the self-important pricks at Harvard, when she turned to me, an odd little smile lining her face.

“Mattie, I feel like going to a Christmas party,” she said. “Who gives a care about routine? Let’s go to a goddamned party.”

“It’s not like we have many friends.”

“It’s more fun to look around,” she said. “Just to take a detour here and there. I don’t feel much like grading tonight.”

“Sounds good.” I rolled my eyes.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“You don’t believe me.” She patted me on the arm. “You’re too young to be cynical, sweetheart.”

We turned onto Franklin Street, instead of Fifth. Houses were lit up, the light reflecting on freshly fallen patches of snow. Silhouettes bobbed back and forth in the windows. A woman smoked a cigarette. A man carried cocktails. Television screens flickered on and off.

“Have you ever had pot?” Sylvia said. “I have. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

I felt there was something different in her voice, something that disturbed me, even though I didn’t know what. It wasn’t the pot, which I’d seen her smoking when she thought I was asleep. I’d grown accustomed to that.

She flung the front passenger side door open. She wore her green wool winter coat and pillbox hat, stretching a hand outward, like a housewife dictating to a servant.

“What do you want the most out of life, Mattie? What’s the one thing you have to have?”

“I’d like to live long enough to experiment,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

She gave me a long look and sighed. She was not angry, but looked as though a veil of sadness had settled over her.

“People are always so unprepared.” She motioned toward a two-story Colonial, where a female silhouette rushed around in the living room, brushing away a child. “I wonder what her parents taught her about life.

It leaves people so helpless. Sometimes for good.”

I didn’t answer. I thought she knew only of her English classes, of abstract ideas and principles. If, in fact, she was right it was by mere coincidence.

“I wish I could give you more,” she said abruptly. I remember only nodding, and thanking her.

The wind whispered, shifting branches around in the evening air. A string of geese flew overhead and Sylvia smiled.

“Listen to that,” she said. “How I’d like to just pack up and leave. Wouldn’t you like to take flight? It’s the most liberating thing. You’re looking for something, but don’t know what.”

“Yes. I suppose I would,” I said. “New York. San Francisco, maybe.”

Sylvia smiled at me. It wasn’t that odd little smile from before, but a lighthearted, pleased one.

“Well then,” she said, pointing at the Colonial. “This is good news. Let’s celebrate. This seems as good a time and place as any.”

“I’d like to.” The last party I’d been to was Frank Lawrence’s, where I’d chipped a tooth, trying to open a wine bottle. Sylvia had never let me forget that.

We were halfway up the driveway when Sylvia stopped, head turned upward, her hand pressed to her ear. Freight trains were switching cars in the yards to the east, and a foul, moldy stench wafted in from the dump to the east. A man walked past, a bag of candy canes slipping from his lanky arms.

“Fuck it all,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

Sylvia let out a long sigh and laughed.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.,” she said. “I need a minute to catch up with myself.”

The moon drifted between clouds and I smelled the waxy scent of Sylvia’s red lipstick in the breeze.

Her eyebrows danced up and down in this funny way, and she hummed softly to herself. A man in a rumpled suit stared out the window, a beer in his hand. Sylvia frowned, shaking her head.

“Well, good for them,” she said, her eyes flickering. “Once they’re gone, they keep going. They’re high on life, that’s for sure. Come on, Mattie. Who needs those assholes? We can have our own party.”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“You’re the one going on about living. Well, I want to fucking live tonight.” I turned my back on her.

“I want to get drunk like the guys, ride around.”

“Is that your opinion? Or what your friends think?” She pursed her lips. “Your friend, Frank Lawrence.”

“Mother, I’m going to that party. Merry Christmas.” I whirled around, bathed in the warmth of the lights inside.

“Fine. Have your goddamned party. You’re so like your father,” she said. I knew she was displeased.

Not with me, but with something indescribable, something I can’t put my finger on, even now.

The door was slightly ajar. There was a large Christmas tree in the living room. The room smelled of pine needles and tomato soup. Half-empty martini glasses lined the coffee table and the top of the television.

The Drifters were singing White Christmas on a hi-fi. The man who’d been staring out the window sat on the couch. He waved at my mother, a crooked smile lining his face.

Sylvia stood frozen, as though she were a stranger, caught between two worlds and uncertain of which to choose.

“Hello,” she finally said, frowning.

“Sylvia, I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said, his voice reminding me of Gregory Peck. He had jetblack hair that was neatly parted at the side, the traces of a beard growing in. He looked like he was Sylvia’s age. He thumbed through a ripped Time magazine, shaking his head, and his legs were propped up on the coffee table.

“I suppose that’s a surprise to both of us.” Sylvia looked down at the carpet, squeezing her hands together. “This is my son, Matthew. Matthew, this is Nicky Schmidt.”

“Is he a friend?”

“Nicky teaches at the college, sweetheart,” she said. “English. We know each other here and there.”

He nodded, but didn’t speak. He took a long gulp of his Pabst, belching. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could make out a long V-shaped bruise across his right elbow. This was a man who had fought. He knew something of the world. I knew that then.

“Out charming the ladies, are we Nick?”

“No. Not much.” He laughed.

“That’s good to know. I’m going to get a drink,” Sylvia said. She slipped into the kitchen, stopping to talk to a group of women huddled around the dining-room table.

Nicky looked at me again. He twirled the bottle cap again, staring at it in fascination. He smelled of grime and Old Spice, mixed with a hint of grease, something I’d only noticed now.

“Nobody bothers you out here,” he said, looking at a large crucifix on the wall. “That’s what I like about this place. Bet you’d like to get the hell out, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like to be a lawyer,” I said.

“A lawyer,” he said, shaking his head. He laughed. “I would have said a football player. You’ve the build for it. I used to play at Notre Dame.”

“I don’t like football,” I said. “Sylvia says it’s a gladiator sport. It’s the downfall of the United States.”

Nicky smiled, raising his Pabst in a salute.

“Damned good beer,” he said. “Pabst. Nothing like beer, while we rot in football hell, according to your mother. Do you drink?”

“A little,” I said. Sylvia had occasionally let me have a glass of wine, which I know did not constitute The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

drinking in Nicky’s scheme of things. In Nicky’s world, teenagers drank beer and took to the streets, something that repulsed and fascinated me.

A dog barked across the street, and a man in the kitchen told a joke, something about Nixon. A woman shushed him repeatedly. The wind was picking up, and a distant plane light glowed across the horizon, heading for some hidden, wonderful place. I wondered where Nicky came from originally, what he knew of life here. He seemed different somehow from people here. People who made you feel like you were their most intimate friend, even though they were withdrawn and evasive when it came to what mattered.

“You know your mother and I used to date?” he said. “Back in Philadelphia. We used to be quite the couple. I wanted to marry her, but she kept going on about seeing the world, doing things on her time.”

“What about now?” I’d never thought of my mother having a lover. It hadn’t seemed to fit. I wondered what she’d told him of our lives. About me.

“I’m not one for labels,” he said, lighting a cigarette. He blew a cloud of smoke in my face. “It’s complicated.

You tie yourself down that way.”

“Life’s an odd lot,” he added. “I ran into your mother in a bar a few years ago. It was pretty damned funny, because she didn’t recognize me. Your mother knows what she wants out of things, at least. More than I can say for myself and I fought in Normandy.”

“I don’t know. My father left, you know.”

“They’re all leaving now,” Nicky said, looking toward the door, as though he himself wanted to leave, but didn’t know where.

A young flaxen-haired woman in a lavender party dress slipped past, smiling at me. I felt a quick flash, and part of me wanted to ask her on a date. I pictured us among the warm scent of butter, tucked away in the theater. I pictured the closeness between our bodies, the unspoken commonalities in our lives. We’d watch something forgettable. The Attack Of The Crab Monsters or An Affair To Remember.

“So you were a war hero?” I said. He looked at me in a funny way, as though he were angry. I was glad.

“Did you kill some Krauts? I’m sure you did. Big war hero.”

“Not particularly,” he said. “Not more than the rest of the fellows. Let me tell you something, buddy.

Every goddamned move we made, we didn’t know whether it would kill us. We tiptoed around Death, literally.”

“What a hero,” I said. “My father was a labor leader. He got his schooling in orphanages, on the street.

He was always on the run from the police, like a stranger.”

It felt good somehow to lie, or at least to tell something that was not a certain truth. I felt a certain power over Nicky just then, even if Sylvia wouldn’t appreciate it. I needed it.

“And look where he is now,” Nicky said, adjusting his collar, making an odd growling sound. “It’s a wonder how your mother lasted as long as she did. Good thing she decided to get that divorce. It’s all too easy getting into these things, but hard as hell to get out.”

He looked straight at me, his brow furrowed. He shook his head. I felt a certain distance from it all, the voices around me distant. I felt as though we were entirely alone. I wanted to ask him another question, but didn’t know what. About my father. About my mother.

“Of course, some people can’t handle the whole marriage business,” he said. “They want the easy path out. They don’t give a thought to the moral obligations. Young men, especially.”

He smiled, a thin smirk, and shook his head. I could tell that he didn’t like my father. I wondered how much Sylvia had told him, and what, exactly. It seemed wrong to me, to judge a man whom he knew nothing The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

about. I hoped then that my father was enjoying himself somewhere, in Canada or Mexico, that Sylvia was wrong.

Sylvia came in, two martinis in her right hand. Her face was flushed. She swayed, giggling over the low-pitched rumble of conversation. A man in a sweater vest and newsboy cap danced around the Christmas tree, laughing, nearly knocking it over. A young woman grabbed him by the hand, leading him out the door. He pretended to bow as he left.

“I could have given her something.” Nicky took a long swig. He slammed the Pabst hard on the table. “A better shake. She’s always the Romantic. Some people are fucking stuck.”

I wondered at that moment if I would end up in New York or San Francisco, and whether Sylvia would remain in that apartment alone. If she’d marry Nicky, or some other man, someone I hadn’t known. I thought she wouldn’t.

Sylvia ambled over to the couch, placing herself between Nicky and me. She stretched her arms, and let out a grunt.

“Well, are you men picking on Sylvia?” she said, half-jokingly. “Poor Sylvia.”

“That and the whole ball of wax,” Nicky said. Sylvia shook her head.

“What’s with Nicky?” I said, trying to keep my temper. “What business does he have here?”

Sylvia took a long swig of her martini, staring at the books that lined the mahogany shelves next to the Christmas tree. The Sun Also Rises. Bend, Sinister. The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight.

“You spoil the boy, Sylvia,” he said, his voice rising. “He doesn’t know a thing about the world. He plays at detectives and spies, and thinks he knows everything.”

“He’s all right, Nick,” Sylvia said cooly. “I think you’ve had a drink too many.”

Sylvia tried to smile, turning away. She stood at the window, among the men and women, laughing and smoking, talking about accounts at work, trips to Paris. I wanted to comfort her somehow, but I couldn’t. I just wanted Nicky out of our lives.

“Matthew here needs a man,” he said. “I wonder what that husband of yours would have done. Of course, you’ll cover up, pretend it’s not an issue. That’s your problem, Sylvia. The boy needs to wake up.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. I wanted something to happen, something to make itself known right away. “That’s none of your business. I should kick your ass from here to Michigan City.”

“You do what you have to Nick,” Sylvia said sharply, trying to brush me away, as though that would make everything all right. “I’m sorry if my choices don’t suit your ethos.”

Nick smiled at me, conveying a sort of condescension, a sense that I would never see the world as he had or would. I pictured my father there, a young man with one of those pencil-thin mustaches.

Sylvia alone in the kitchen late at night. She was someone should have had a chance in life, but who had to learn about the world too young, someone who still saw the world through the prism of nicely wrapped dreams.

“Get the hell up, Schmidt,” I said. I raised my fists, the way I’d seen in the movies. There are multiple ways to fight, things I knew little of, but I knew two things, thanks to Frank Lawrence: You can fight for the sake of feigning victory, or you can fight to win.

I tried to strike Nicky square in the face, but he was quick on his feet. He pushed hard. Not a nervous push, but a full heave, uninhibited. And that’s how he knocked me square into the coffee table.

I lay there for a minute or more, with the once-welcoming lights blinding me. I could feel a throbbing The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

in my head. When I looked up, I saw Nicky standing on the other side of the table. He had a wild look in his eyes, which were bloodshot. He inhaled deeply, like a beast.

“Shit,” he said. “Okay. It’s okay. Shit.”

He squeezed his fists. Sylvia just stood there staring, a dull look in her eyes. It was like she was incapable of moving, as though there were some force within her that wouldn’t allow it.

“Mother,” I cried. “Sylvia.”

“You asshole,” Nicky said, glancing around. “You foolish asshole.”

I don’t even think Nicky was talking to me. He was just saying whatever occurred to him then.

“Nick,” Sylvia said, still looking down at me. “He’s hurt. He’s goddamned hurt.”

“Goddamn it,” a man in a beige suit shouted, pointing a finger at Nicky. “Look what you’ve gone and done.”

I began to look at life differently at that point, to define my life in terms of that day, and even now I remember thinking this: Choices can seem avoidable long after they’ve been made, but in the heat of the moment, you’re confronted with a thousand paths and no clear way out. You can start out on the periphery, and end up old man trouble’s first victim.

In a moment, a woman helped me and Sylvia out to our car, with a crowd gathering outside, muttering unintelligibly to themselves, shadows in the snow. I can only imagine those thoughts exchanged between them. We were not a boy and his mother, but two helpless creatures. Helpless and unwittingly selfish. Unable to love, or to even go through the motions of comfort, the motions that they’d grown accustomed to.

I noticed Nicky, still standing by the coffee table, gazing out, and in that moment, we exchanged a glance. It was as though we’d seen something in ourselves we didn’t like, and were oddly brought together by it. We hated and respected each other. I hoped Sylvia hadn’t noticed this, and given her state, I didn’t think so.

It was late when we got home. The drive had seemed like a nightmare that you know isn’t real, but that you can’t escape nevertheless. Sylvia just stared straight ahead, keeping the radio silent. Riding past the lit homes and darkened apartment buildings and warehouses, I wondered if Sylvia would forgive Nicky, and what this whole night had meant to him. I wondered if there was any family of his own to explain this night to, and how he would piece it all together, or if he would go about life trying to deny it. Even if he might realize that these things can get out of hand at any point, and recalculate his way of living.

Sylvia unlocked the door, turning on the lights. The beige hi-fi sat in the corner of the living room, a stack of papers strewn across it, marked with pen-marks and soda stains. She stared at the photograph of her father on the makeshift coffee table. He wore a forced smile, a bristling mustache complimenting his bulbous head.

“People are strangers,” she said. “I didn’t speak to my own father for five years after I got married.

I went for a visit once, when you were little. For two hours we couldn’t think of a single thing to talk about, except for the weather and finance. It seems funny now.”

She shook her head, sweeping the papers off the radio into the briefcase. She adjusted her glasses, glancing at the picture again, which she brushed aside.

“You’d love it in San Francisco,” she said. “People talking ideas. Writers, actors, even a few Communists. Wouldn’t you like that?”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“Are we moving?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.” She tossed her head back, laughing nervously. “It would be the best. But the best isn’t always fucking practical.”

She grabbed a small pinstriped suitcase from the hall closet, shoving several nightgowns, several pairs of underwear, a few dresses, and several photos. I glimpsed one of me on her lap, when I was five or six, the two of us laughing at something. I wondered what it was.

“Turn on the hi-fi,” she said. “You choose the record. You know what I like.”

“You’re fucking leaving, aren’t you,” I shouted. “That’s what this is all about.”

“Play me some Elvis,” she said, giving me a long look. “I can use it now.”

“You’re going to keep on running.” I picked up a small glass paperweight, feeling the weight beneath my palms, a thickness that weighed me down. “You’re going to keep on running. Maybe Nick was right.

You’re just goddamned stuck. You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

She stood there, her arms folded. She shook her head, as though she wanted to say something, motioning for me to pick the record. I wondered what she was thinking, about the world beyond our lives. Something had changed between us, and it wasn’t something I wanted to think about right now.

“I don’t love him, Mattie,” my mother said, still calm. “For the love of God. Play some Elvis.”

“Is he some important big-shot? Is that it? He can give you some better life, and you leave me in the middle of nowhere.”

“Play some fucking Elvis.”

I picked Don’t Be Cruel, not because it was appropriate for us, for the way we lived, but because it was the only thing I could think of. She nodded approvingly.

“I’d like to get away,” Sylvia said. “I’d like to go to a movie. I don’t know. A motel.”

“You’re just going to leave aren’t you?” I said. “For good.”

Sylvia just stood there, waiting, staring at the paperweight in my hand, as if she were expecting me to do something. She gave me an uncomfortable glance. And I looked down at the floor. It was all I could do. I set the paperweight down, slowly, with Sylvia’s eyes bearing into me. It felt as though it were resisting my grip, as though it still wanted a target. The hi-fi or even a window. But that time had passed.

“Get to school in the morning,” Sylvia said. She looked as though she wanted to hug or strike me, I cannot say which, exactly. Perhaps some mixture. “You’re not a delinquent.”

I wanted to stop her from going, like when I was little. I’d try to follow her out the door when she went to class or just to the store. For some reason I didn’t, though. Maybe I thought she’d come back, as naïve as it sounded. In that moment, I think I was torn somewhere between, between wanting to be suspicious, and wanting to believe her, whatever the cost. Maybe I wanted a mother I couldn’t have.

I walked into my bedroom, a streetlamp breaking through the curtains.My Westclox Big Ben ticked on the nightstand, each tick piercing me like some machine. My Hardy Boys books were strewn across my dust-coated shelf, my detectives with their worlds in which everything e magically turned out all right, worlds without Nicky. I pictured him on a tank, riding toward me with that same wild look he’d worn earlier.

“Get to school in the morning,” Sylvia called again. I turned off the light, pretending to take a nap.

She came in a few minutes later and sat beside me. I don’t know for how long, just that she looked at me.

“You shouldn’t have to see this,” she murmured at one point. “Not at your age. I’m sorry. This is nuts.”

In that moment, I felt an odd closeness, as though she could somehow protect me from the worst, as though she could give me that illusion of everything being simple and wonderful again. All too soon, she’d The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

left, leaving that behind, and a moment later I heard the door close, saw the headlights of her Chevy spilling through the window and into the night.

Things rarely end in a nicely wrapped up series of events. For a time, I believed I was pulling myself out of a storm, trying to find even the simplest sense among the ruins. In the morning, after a long, restless night, I took the school bus. I wondered if Sylvia was gone for good, if she’d taken up with Nicky again, if she’d thought about me. I thought she had.

I was called to the principal’s office during history class late in the morning. I was excused for the day, as my mother wanted to meet me at Lipinski’s Café, over on Third Street, and we’d have a bite to eat. It had snowed all night and the Victorian rooftops and streets were covered in a thick dusting. In a few days, winter would set in for good.

Lipinski’s was in an old redbrick building, near the steel mills, facing the river to the south. The goldleafed sign in the front window was faded and there was a large crack in the upper-right hand corner, as though someone had thrown a rock at it. A large jukebox sat in the corner, near the front door.

Sylvia sat in a ripped booth, glancing around nervously. She wore a navy polka-dot dress, her hair pulled back into a bun. She smiled at me, as though a force had been let go. As though she could look at it all differently, even me. I felt that things might be better between us, that I couldn’t hate her.

“This is the high life, isn’t it, Mattie?” she said, motioning for me to sit. She stared out at the front entrance, where a woman with jet-black hair and a little boy huddled near the jukebox, laughing at something or another.

“How was class today?” She said. “I couldn’t concentrate, if I were you.”

“It could have been worse,” I said. “You look nice.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “Do you want something to eat?”

I wanted to ask her where Nicky was, but it occurred to me at that point that he was out of her life, that it was over between them, and she no longer cared how he went about living, any of that.

“Not really.”

“That’s fine.” She smiled at me again, and as I said, she looked different, younger in some way. She reminded me of a happy-go-lucky heroine in some movie.

“There are times I look where I’m at and I wonder,” she said. “I wonder if I’m just looking in on life from the outside, like there’s someone else living it for me. It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” I said. I knew this was true because of what had happened, and what wouldn’t, and even now it still seems incomprehensible.

“There are times I just freeze up,” Sylvia said. “I don’t know what to do. Even with the smallest things, just having a conversation. Do you think your old mother needs help?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. I looked out the window and saw the black-haired woman and her son walking down the street, the boy skipping around, shouting at something. I envied them.

“I’m not a great listener right now,” Sylvia said, coughing. “I’m sorry.”

She sat there, while I went over to the jukebox and played Love Me Tender, because it seemed so innocent, so full of hope and foolishness, the dreams I would have liked, if I could afford them.

“Is there anything you’d like to know?” Sylvia said, looking at me as though she expected a certain kind of answer. “You can ask me. I’ll be truthful, no matter what. I don’t blame you if you don’t trust me. The time’s past for that. We’re both adults.”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“Did you leave Dad?” I said.

My mother gave me this sharp look. She wasn’t frowning or smiling, but had this strange look in between.

“No,” she said. “Who the hell told you that? Nicky? That bastard has no idea when to stop. That’s just wrong. No doubt, I’m a negligent mother, too.”

“He didn’t say that. I just wondered,” I said.

“Oh, believe me, he did,” Sylvia said, tapping her water glass. “He just loves to make drama. The truth’s not good enough for him, that’s his problem.”

“I just wanted to know,” I said “I’m sorry he said all that,” she said. “That Kraut bastard. You shouldn’t have gone there, though.

What a waste.”

“I’m fine,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked about me, perhaps because it wasn’t the first thing on her mind that afternoon. I expected her to talk about the fight. But she didn’t. It seems we were still waiting even then for something.

“So this is what you wanted to grill me about?” Sylvia said, pulling out a small portable mirror. She stared at it for a full minute and scowled. She brushed back a loose strand of hair, trying over and over to pat it down. She was angry, not with me, I thought, but with life, with my father and Nicky, with people I didn’t know. I felt sorry for her.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “Nothing else, really.”

“Your life is a frightening lot,” she said. “Sometimes you just want to run, you’re so alone, and it seems like everyone speaks a different language. I think that’s what it was with your father.”

“I’ve always been a mother or sister, or daughter,” she added. I didn’t say anything. I knew there was nothing I could do to change the way she lived, the way she looked at it from that point on. At me. So, I stayed silent.

In a while, we had lunch, and she told me that she was going to New York, to try to feel complete in some way or another.

“The domestic life isn’t my biggest strength,” she said, trying to laugh, but I knew she was serious.

Teaching was no way to live, she said. She needed a change of scene. She was sending me to stay with her friend Mrs. Porter, who taught music up at the high school, until she could “think again.” These were just bare facts. She didn’t want or expect me to try to talk her out of it, or to reassure her. I do wish that I’d tried to keep her from leaving, though. To leave can result in the worst consequences, but to stay leaves open that possibility, however slim, of picking up the fragments.

When we walked out onto the street, it was snowing again and the streetlamps had come on. It was one-thirty and cars ambled through the fog like ghostly science-fiction creatures. A woman in a Plymouth shook her head at us, as though we were somehow up to no good. It didn’t matter. We were alone in this mess.

My mother was going to the railroad station, to catch a train to Chicago that afternoon, and she’d go to New York the next day, she said. She kissed me, and hugged me very tight, and I could smell traces of cigarette smoke on my cheeks, mixed with perfume and lipstick. She stood for a full minute or two, an arm around my shoulder, just staring at me, as though she wanted to tell me some inner thought she’d

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

kept all these years.

“I used to think being an adult was something grand and mysterious,” she said finally. “I suppose it still is. Learn the secrets, Mattie. Let me in on them.”

She laughed, and walked across the street and waved at me, disappearing around the corner past the warehouses, and rows of old run-down wooden houses. I stood there alone, listening to the wind whistling, to the sounds of cars disappearing across the river and around the edges of town, the occasional sound of laughter, probably for a half-hour. Figures here and there darted out into the street, never hazarding a glance in my direction. I was glad to be alone and longed for some small word of comfort at the same time, even a simple greeting.

By two-fifteen, it had become dark as night, and I decided to take the long route home. I walked back to the high-school where my mother would have otherwise been teaching her tenth graders on the thirdfloor. I turned down Eighth Street past the old opera house, the old Linn Theater, the crumbling marquee still showing Jailhouse Rock, which Sylvia and I had seen five times, past the old alleyways, their packing cartons stacked like some majestic cathedral.

Walking through the old alleyways, I knew that my life had changed, in some way that I might not be able to figure out for the longest time. I might never know, exactly. Walking down Lincoln Street, past the old pool hall around the corner from our apartment, the questions piled through my mind, like the delicate flakes of snow. Why had my mother really left? Why would Nicky say that she’d left my father?

Why would my mother take up with Nicky? Why did she live the way she did?

In five years, Sylvia had gone from place to place, from Greenwich Village to San Francisco, Chicago, Indianapolis, and even London at one point, working in various bookshops and cafes, little low-end jobs at that. And in the years since, I’ve seen her here and there in crowded coffee shops and bars, with years between us at a time. If nothing else, we still catch up over each other’s lives, at least the good points, or the points we want to be good. I’ve not figured out these questions, nor have we spoken of them together.

It is some force within, that leaves us to take flight on the merest of whims, leaving us entirely alone and unable to bear life beyond the shortest, inconsequential periods that mean nothing. ###

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Venus Still Shines Even After Fifty Years

by John C. Mannone

The silent elevator lifts the silver-covered plates—fillet mignon and lobster—from the highrise kitchen to our private table on the loggia overlooking the hollow of the valley. Her eyes sparkle candle-flickers. Moonlight fills our wine goblets while cello notes float above burgandy mountains, carressing night, the soft sex under a bowl of stars.

###

The Linnet's Wings

Artist: Edward Burne-Jones Style: Romanticism Genre: mythological painting Technique: oil Material: canvas

The Mirror of Venus

Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham, the son of the owner of a small framing business. His mother died within a week of his birth. He was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and, since he was gifted at drawing, attended a government School of Design on three evenings a week since 1848. In 1853 he went to Exeter College, Oxford, with the intention of eventually entering the Church

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

The Blue Box by Jürgen Olschewski Late one night, Thomas Ruder receives a strange package: a small blue box. Another such item is delivered to Liselotte Hauptmann. These ‘gifts’ will change their lives forever.

The Blue Box is a story about identity, about fulfilling your dreams, and becoming the person you always were, at whatever cost.

It is a story of journeys, both external and internal.

In the far-off border town of Grenze, a play is to be performed at the Sheol Theatre. Reynard the impresario expects a very special audience. Thomas, Liselotte, and their friend Johann, are drawn into Reynard’s seductive web, as Daumen, the box- maker, must decide who his master really is. ###

I love beautiful prose and when it's attached to a good novel read it makes me happy. I go into smiling mode. It's great and I love it.

For it's word choice that drives the sentence to build the paragraph, it's word choice pins the same chapter that drives the story.

Good word choice drips the image down the page and finely tuned verbs harmonize to their melody to paint the scenes, so that slowly the space between the heartbeat opens and you step in and you meet the three dimensional character that waits on the other side of the door.

And for a while you check out of your own reality into someone else's dreamworld and you trust the voice to maintain a steady beat to ease you through the character trials and tribulations, their hopes and dreams and you trust this voice to resolve the character's issues in a best fashion, so that when you close the cover you have a memory to add to a treasured mind collection that only you have the key for and you put that invisible key on an invisible chain and hang it around your neck for safe keeping.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

I remember doing that with Bram Stoker's 'Demeter Scene' in Dracula, and I did it also with Melville's wonderful church preacher scene from 'Mody Dick,' and there are more there too in my treasure trove.

And with 'The Blue Box' by Jurgen Olschewski, I got some more wonderful images to add.

And this is only his first book! I'm first in the queue to read the second.

Marie Fitzpatrick

REVIEWS of The Blue Box ‘A truly original story that is incredibly well written…Highly recommended.’

(Amazon review) ‘The author has created a magical and deeply effective universe where the characterisations and the narrative drive compel the reader to turn each page as if their life depended on it!’

(Amazon review) ‘This novel is brimming with imagination and ideas…’

(Amazon review) 'Jürgen Olschewski takes you on a compelling journey with his creativity. The words fall seamlessly off the page...'

(Amazon review) ‘There is a magic in the narrative…A brilliant book.’

(Goodreads review) ‘Jürgen Olschewski creates characters and the worlds they live in with striking images and writes with a very fine touch.’

(Goodreads review) ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jürgen Olschewski has published numerous stories and poems in a wide range of magazines and anthologies in the UK, Ireland, and Italy, and has had work broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. He has been shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize.

The Linnet's Wings

Passive Youth WINTER ' FOURTEEN

by

Frances Gapper The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Artist: Ivan Bilibin/Completion Date: 1904/Style: Art Nouveau (Modern)/Genre: Poster

"A historical show of art work to help the wounded and those ill warriors of the Army under Royal Emperor Alexandra name" Poster Text Translated: Valery Petrovskiy

...

They slump in chairs and on sofas, or lie on the carpet and we have to step over them. Their dishes and cutlery pile by the kitchen sink, we spend a good part of each day washing up. Trying to find love for them in our hearts, or any non-negative emotion, we greet them with cheerful politeness. In response we get silence, the occasional grunt.

Their rooms are a mess. We don’t tidy up for fear of offending them, but every now and then we collect their dirty clothes to put in the washing machine and hang on the line. We steel ourselves to clean their toilet, using powerful chemicals. In the shower we find a strange orange mould, never previously encountered.

Coming downstairs again, we groan and hold our hands to our backs. We have arthritis, fibromyalgia. They don’t sympathise, never ask us how we are.

They seem to have no serious thought of leaving. We’ve shown them estate agent details, places for rent, but they’re not interested. Girlfriends come and go, young women with lives of their own, jobs, flats. At first they seem happy, then puzzled and finally annoyed. Voices are raised, our front door is slammed, cars drive away.

We suspect they’re waiting us out – hoping eventually to inherit the house, plus our savings accounts, so they’ll never have to go anywhere, do anything, take any sort of initiative. But we don’t resent this, it’s natural. We worry about how they’ll cope, after we’re gone.

###

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Like a silver cloud of wings—a gauzy lace—insects descend, settle upon us like alien fog. It is useless to run. And we cannot hide. So we hold hands, kneeling in a wide circle, each of us praying to our Creator.

The liquid moon shimmers as I close my eyes waiting to be dissolved.

Title: Gauze Artist: Paul Klee Completion Date: 1940 Style: Expressionism Period: Late Works Genre: portrait The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Fifteen by John C. Mannone

Strawberry and lime streaks her hair; purple eyeliner and gothic black fingernail polish sheens under escalator lights at the outside mall. With one hand, she clicks buttons on a smart phone, messages her dreams to Casey. With the other, fingers brace a menthol cigarette whose smoke rises toward the stars, disappearing into the vast night.

### Art Title: Odalisque, Following Matisse, Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

WINTER POETRY

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

A POETRY EDITORIAL BY O ONAH V J OSLIN

O UTSIDE THE INN

by Ron. Lavalette

There would, of course, have to be a star —as there always is— but only a single star, luminous beckoning above the merest shelter.

Around the meager dwelling, its wattle daubed with ordinary midnight, there would of course be shepherds, nodding, and music of sheep bells a softly ringing lullaby.

There would have to be an angel.

The sky, a clear intoxicant, would open and the angel would sing and the shepherds, keeping their sheep would have to spread the word and be certain.

Outside the Inn by Ron Lavalette, remains one of my favourite poems. We published it at Every Day Poets, on Christmas Day 2008 and included it in our first anthology. I have read it every Christmas The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

since and today I have come back to it again. Why? Because it is not just about Christmas. It is about history, art, tradition, scepticism and magic.

First of all the title tells us Ron is going to turn Christmas inside out and outside in: he is going to examine this tale that began long ago with a guiding star.

“There would, of course, have to be a star”

That is a great hook line. So matter of fact. We all accept that, don’t we? But why would there ‘have to be a star’? Because it’s traditional as Ron points out. Only this star is unique. It is not just a star among many in the night sky. It is a guiding star.

Now ask yourself: which of us nowadays would follow a star? We may read the occasional horoscope for fun but to believe in it is a different matter – to let it guide your life. But that is what religion is about – guiding your life. And to physically follow a star is not part of our modern mindset at all. We are not ancient astronomers. We are not medieval sailors. We live in a world where stars are understood.

When I first read the poem, I immediately thought of my favourite part of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

by C S Lewis: “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

replies Ramandu, who is a fallen star. I have always loved the thought that mythology goes beyond our physical universe and in a way Lewis was saying that religion and science have two different ways of looking.

Ron takes advantage here of the whole mythology of stars and of all the stories we heard as children.

We didn’t literally believe all of those but they give us reference. He is challenging the complacency of our beliefs and our sense of logic.

This particular star turns its spotlight on; “the merest shelter.” “its wattle daubed with ordinary midnight”

I love the way he describes the scene as painted – daubed. This is the ordinary, the humble made into a tableau, instantly recognisable by millions: recreated for two millennia in art and nativity backdrops, painted scenery, miracle plays: make-believe.

And in Ron’s poem the music begins as: The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“sheep bells a softly ringing lullaby.”

Again that simplicity shines through here and it also reminds us of sleigh bells and those other good old myths we used to believe but discard in adulthood. Should we not do the same with this is a tale of a baby and of shepherds? In a way it’s a story about ordinary folk. Then all at once in stanza 4, the supernatural takes over.

“There would have to be an angel.”

There would?

“The sky, a clear intoxicant, would open and the angel would sing”

Really? “an intoxicant” Well yes. What are these guys on? Appealing to our logic, perhaps they’d taken a wee nip of something against the chill. That would explain things.

So far Ron has challenged our belief but in the final stanza, he turns that inside out and challenges our scepticism and he does it through the medium of language used in a traditional Christmas Carol, The First Nowell, which people have been singing for two hundred years now – not two thousand. You probably know how it goes and it tells the same story: “The first Nowell the angels did say Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay; In fields where they lay a keeping their sheep”

“certain poor shepherds” doesn’t mean they were certain about anything. It is an old fashioned way of saying ‘some’, or maybe even, ‘a chosen few’. Whatever the case, those shepherds were impressed enough to leave their flock and go down to see this new baby. Shepherds do not neglect their duties lightly. Sheep were their livelihood. Why would they do that? And why would they take the risk of talking about it all over the place; spreading the word? They’d have to be pretty certain it was real, wouldn’t they?

So maybe they were utterly convinced of the supernatural.

And there Ron ends the poem – on the word ‘certain.’ And with that phrase; “and be certain.”

Or to be precise

“spread the word and be certain.”

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

He brings us full circle.

This is a very short poem, succinct, complex in its apparent simplicity and beautifully written. As befits the topic, it is traditionally set out, making use of subtle rhymes and assonance, tapping into allusions from our collective memory, literature and song and turning Christmas inside out and back again.

I love it and will always love it because it speaks to me of what Christmas is really about – that sense of mystery. That magic. Our need to tell a story and the one thing we all long for -- the gift of certainty. ###

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

A Few Thoughts On The Soul by Constance Brewer Wouldn't it be better to share a soul, to pass it back and forth like a bottle of good red wine under moonlight, to drink deep or not as the mood struck?

Wouldn't it be better to not choose a soul mate, instead gain a half by random coincidence because maybe they like opera and you don't, but you can live with that oddity?

Wouldn't it be best not to worry over your soul's imminent demise and give up the whole heaven and hell fantasy as an old wives’ tale, even though you're an old wife?

Sometimes it's better to disregard a soul altogether, and run up and down the picket fence of the heart dragging a stick against the slats until you end, out of fence and eager for dinner.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

AUTUMN RHYTHMS (by Jackson Pollock) by Martin Burke Tender – of all his many intensities this the most tender He in his nakedness cast on the ice of a cold tradition yet from such barbarity the new cave-dweller emerges and of this there must be no betrayal Thus he makes love to the true entanglement of light where the atoms of his fertile mind explode like the Buddha’s dream Thus the flame and thus the fire and thus the new Prometheus articulating the new Atlantis – and do not say it does not exist for he possessed the unerring scripture you refuse at your damnation Is he nature?

Yes, he is nature, casting the self he has become against the self of the moon in his most amorous anarchy As native to the earth as anyone can be Pure America – albeit with an unwritten history wherein his brethren are its outcasts whose fire-dreams wake the shaman of the mind with de Kooning saying, “it’s time to crack the ice” Fathers he has none nor any required to justify the painting which proves itself in the lived-in world Atlantis neither finished nor final – ever.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

bitter, despite the creamer by Joshua A Colwell My mornings are filled with half-empty cups of coffee bitter, despite the creamer.

Each sip rinsing away the taste of last night's dinner but not the taste of you.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Childhood on the River Circa 1960 by Ronald E. Shields There was the pretzel cart on the wide sidewalk.

The ice cream truck, Good Humor, trolled all summer.

Johnny the donut man was always the favorite.

Slow planes circled the airfield. Their engines’ thrumming rare and low as hummingbirds.

My brother could catch squirrels and sparrows in a trap he made from a box, a stick and some string.

A boy named Glen could hit a baseball over the roof ofour two story row house. When the rough kids chased us from the ball field because they wanted to drink beer we played stickball in the street.

In school we learned to duck and cover.

Nuns taught the old math and did what they could to turn the unfortunate lefthanders. God still spoke a foreign language.

Sunday mass was a solemn ghost story, strange with the mysterious allure ofGod’s body trapped in an atom ofbread.

People were beginning to ask questions in loud voices.

Young men were refusing to die for reasons they did not understand.

Music became a sign ofgrace, poetry the howl ofan anthem.

The world invaded our homes. Television broke down the walls.

Childhood slipped through our fingers, became our wake in the river – the long slow river making its own blind way to the sea.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Lament for When I Did Not by Mary Lee abandon others’ opinion of me.

Befriend the present with presence.

Cover shells of egoism with the tireless tide of cleansing.

Drown grains of regret; appreciate others; frequent the solace of surrender.

Greet the face of graciousness.

Heave hospitality on every boulder of opposition. Ignite sparks of desire in the twilight of yearning.

Journey to the frontiers of fantasy.

Kindle confidence in nooks of despair and fear.

Listen to the aspen leaves.

Make friends with grief.

Coax shadows to join the newness of morning.

Quench the thirst for acceptance.

Plunge into crests of compassion.

Search for wild orchids.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

Title: My inner colours, Artist: Máire Morrissey-Cummins

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Columibade by Jane Burn We were burnt offerings.

Our shoulders dusted; sometimes ashen-grey, sometimes tinged with browning in the buff.

The white ones, pure in your sight carry shadows on their backs, yet you crave them, need their clean.

Magicians pull them, docile from hats – you command them to your wooden cotes; the sight of snowy feathers; this is how you picture angels.

Blood from clean ones – scarlet yarn and hyssop on your dirt to cleanse the skin; your sparkling seraphim. Praise that! And cry to us for your crop-milk. Those pigeons, pecking on the streets in dowdy coats, dismissed as rats my brethren are the same. They became disease because they live amongst you, scavenge on your soot.

Our hearts are so much larger, beat much faster. We need air for wings – you need it for words, for reasons; why, why, why ? Need it for chanting. Our flight alone is prayer; stay on the ground.

We looked on you when the reeds still rustled with spirits and the forests were a scratch of fear.

We are vessels for the Spirit - we searched for land when water came to rinse the world of you. We had a taste for olive.

We are innocence; are light with it. Psalm the heavens all you want and try to raise the skies. You will never be birds.

Psalm 55:6 Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Lost Laundry by Katheen Cassen Michelson When you asked me to find your pants, confessed they had not come back from the laundry at your new assisted living place, I fought against crying. I wanted to hurl obscenities at these people who are supposed to help you.

Don’t they know those pants were the last ones you bought for yourself? The ones you got the very last time you visited your sister?

When you returned from that jaunt to Kansas City with those dark green pants under your belt, you beamed at the completion of a road trip without incident.

Still. These people who now do your laundry, don’t they care? In the basement of this building are rows of freshly-washed clothes hung just so, waiting to reunited with their owners, but your pants have disappeared and I am so afraid of the day when you will do the same.

Weeks later I learned you’d had a fender bender in KC, had quietly fixed your car. How odd to know embarrassment made you lie to your own daughter.

How clear that you ache to get behind the wheel again, see the activity bus here as the poorest substitute.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Title: My inner colours Artist: Máire Morrissey-Cummins

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Marbled Chocolate by Máire Morrissey-Cummins When I recall my first taste of chocolate, it smacks of your seed cake with almonds neatly layered on top.

It was a treat on Saturday after piano practise, one thin slab on a white china plate choked down with a glass of milk.

Penance, but I never told you.

that they were common and poor, and shop-bought was a sin.

I lost all interest in food, spent years in therapy learning how to eat.

I remember your madness when I came home from Mulligan’s, told you they had shop-bought cake, a triangle of marbled sweetness; Battenberg.

They had sliced pan too; white and fluffy, and on Fridays, fish and chips, lashed with salt and vinegar, wrapped in old newspaper.

I used to stand outside the chipper watching people queue, hungered to be like them.

You beat me senseless.

The cane snapped in two as you yelped and wailed

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Meeting point by Nick Bowman Shingle and a red cliff.

A falling away to surf, the dim surge of a perpetual clock.

“My father loved this beach,” I say.

You look over your shoulder as if to find him.

I’d watch him fill his lungs with it, unfurling his back and shoulders with the long muscle of familiarity.

He’d follow the current of people, cupping his ears to the stirring of dogs, cricket bats, the rattle of change in the tuppenny waterfalls.

This was his beach disguise, the blown out salt edges of his childhood glimmering on golden afternoons.

Eyes shut to the breeze he would circle with bragging gulls over high cliffs, rock pools, the salt and vinegar sea front.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

You think of him too, guiding you across slippery rocks, plodging in the shallows.

The same sea’s rhythm is in you.

This beach is our convergence, where we face the same sun, see the same bright dresses flap tight to thighs like a tatter of flags.

Here time drags our lives to a single point, along the furrows we plough fetching water for our moats.

Our backdrop, a scatter of children, red limbed, in a wash of ozone and seaweed iodine.

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Memory Games by Constance Brewer All the cards lie face down on the table.

I turn them over in pairs, seeking mates.

A smiling monkey, a grinning donkey.

Next round, a prancing show horse, an elephant balanced on a ball. Two tigers later I begin to clear the cards and match each with its counterpart.

I'm trying to train my mind to be more responsive to cues. Laughing dogs don't cut it, though. I shuffle the kid's deck and place each card face up this time. I still can't match a circus bear to a circus bear without slow perusal of each and every animal.

I'm convinced the camel has no mate until only six cards remain. What internal decider I once had has faded, and left me to play children's games without

Title: My Inner Colours, Artist: Máire Morrissey-Cummins

the cut-throat surety of a child. I deal myself a full house of lions, and play on into the night.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Naked Beauty by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson Morning news. A photographer is interviewed about his new book of female nudes. He justifies his work, tosses around terms like beauty, genre, landscape, body-as-art. He says he created this book for women.

whose foreheads furrow with thoughts that might precede questions and who choose to undress in the dark, while fully aware of their worth.

Safe-for-television images appear on the screen I search for a body like mine: matured, well-traveled, lined, broken-in.

There are none like that.

I understand focus, tight frames, attraction to unblemished skin and stomachs un-stretched by motherhood, lips yet to be wrinkled by years of kisses and uttered words like “I love you”.

But don’t tell me this book is for women.

Be honest.

You, Mr. Photographer, in your tightly-focused shots, left out the multitudes whose bodies languish beneath modest clothes. You ignored the women The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

Title: My Inner Colours, Artist: Máire Morrissey-Cummins

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Skellig Michael by Mary Lee Was the monastery building, the hand chiseling of each stair, a body torture?

Was it joy to carve two thousand three hundred steps from sandstone to reach the pinnacle of the Skellig?

Did the forced quarantine by Atlantic’s turbulent exposure impose indefinite isolation, bravery, silent endurance?

And was it soul-stirring to witness the massive power of ocean surge, the unyielding persistence of Skellig rock?

Did the monotony of circling, wailing sea birds dull the senses, quell desire to raise the heart in prayer?

And was the Divine Word in every soaring bird, every fledgling flutter?

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Penance by Máire Morrissey-Cummins Hands locked tight like jigsaw pieces, knuckles bony white, shine in waxen light.

Knees knob, bump along the pew, her mind riddled with sin.

Blessed and forgiven, she bows out backwards into a vacant seat, mouths her penance then shudders into a neon noon.

She walks cleansed through coal black streets, shine of alabaster, a halo around her head.

She is pure, scrubbed clean, yet hollow with hunger.

Into the abyss of curtained darkness, the murky odour of guilt, She kneels in the silence.

A purring whisper, hidden behind a sliding screen, warm wine breath penetrates the cubicle.

His rhythmic prayer, soothing, In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost…. she recites her confession.

Her voice falls like specks of dust sprinkling the dim light.

She stammers into the latticed grid, the face of the gates of hell.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Soul Skating by Julie Hogg one small push a solitary touch of dissonance was all it took minimal friction travelling physics on narrow steel blades stroking the ice sustained gliding in velvet soft freedom, breeze through my skirt spray in my hair traced my name in a neglected repertoire of human linked movements seldom seen triple flips of the soul in a true lay back spin tender spiral position became 3-dimensional once again.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

The Moment by Ronald E. Shields And Jesus said Forgive them as he entered the moment.

Looking down from his wooden tower he saw a lovely heaven in every grain of sand.

And every grain was rightly placed as if by miracles in every moment of the day.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Resonant Frequency by Nick Bowman In a car’s wake leaves skip like jumping jacks.

A gold road, where trees’ bones lurch out of blinding sun.

Dabs of rich lichen blues, soft moss patches on walls that line a route between here and somewhere.

I was there once, I think, with you.

In a fire’s shadow dark corners wither an evening.

Stuttering wood, red as a gothic novel, heats us a little.

A carriage clock chimes unseen.

We are talking, voices soft stringed, lute-like, not about love, but loving.

A sun sets in your eyes.

and leaves fall, yellowing.

One lands on your shoulder.

“That’s lucky” you say.

The rest are taken by the water, round the bend to….. somewhere else.

These images seem clear, yet sharp corners are rounded off, if they were ever sharp at all.

I hear myself breathing, smell your perfume, sense a sequence reducing to meet my memory’s resonant frequency.

When it does, will I bottom out on some unknown mud flat?

A bend in a river.

It is morning, mist loiters over the water and a first frost turns threadbare.

Sudden wind on my cheek

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Whiskey and Cigarettes at the End by Ronald E. Shields Winter drizzle, a hill cemetery naked but for the stumps of stone arranged in neat precise lines or laid haphazardly, depending upon the desire of the deceased and will of the living.

Jackstraw pines separate the hill from the road.

Most are dead or dying from exhaust fumes and oil slicked runoff.

On a path at the bottom of the hill a small white-headed man pushes a smaller white-headed woman in a wheelchair.

He stops at a bench, turns her toward the stones, lights a cigarette for her, hands her a flask, settles onto the bench.

Sitting still, waiting patiently, they are dressed for the weather, as if they intend to wait for a change.

The old places are all deserted. The old times are all abandoned.

What remains are a few faces, the flavor of tobacco and whiskey, food is a necessary evil like using the toilet and clipping toenails.

The business that remains is more than just letting go, it is tearing loose from what is left of the grand possibility – what was made and what became of it.

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

The Linnet's Wings Poetry, Winter 2014

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Title: Park of idols Artist: Paul Klee Completion Date: 1938 Style: Surrealism Period: Late Works Genre: landscape Technique: watercolor

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

When the old woman died, there were balloons.

They went dotting into the air like colorful punctuation marks, dragging tails along after them. After a while, the balloons disappeared, but they were still there, really, his mother said, just gone somewhere they could no longer be seen.

Before the balloons had gone into the air, a man had been holding them. He was a grandly fat man with magnificent bulges of flesh that made him seem very important. The child would have liked to hold one of the balloons, but his mother said they weren’t for children, though balloons usually were.

That day, the balloons were for the old woman.

The child had fidgeted when they were at the church until his mother finally told him shush or she’d put him out in the car. He didn’t like his bowtie or his shiny shoes that pinched, but his mother said the old woman would have been pleased to see him so dressed up.

The old woman, before she died, had given him kisses when he and his mother came to visit. He didn’t like them. Her lips didn’t feel like lips at all, too dry and too sharp. But if he let her do it, she would give him a butterscotch candy from the bowl on her dining table.

Once, while he was at the old woman’s house with his mother, a small black kitten wandered in through the open back door and began licking a half-empty can of tuna the old woman had put out for it. The child had wanted to pick up the kitten and hold it, but the old woman told him he shouldn’t.

They watched the kitten lick the tuna can while his mother put away dishes for the old woman.

Another time, his mother sat at the old woman’s piano and played the Chopin mazurka she’d learned as a child.

How lovely, said the old woman, and closed the piano lid when his mother was done.

After the very fat man let the balloons go up into the air, the child’s mother dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief and was sad, but he wasn’t sad. He watched the balloons go up and up, except for one that was caught in the scraggly branches of a tree. It was a yellow one, and he wished the tail was long enough for someone to pluck it out of the tree.

On the way back to the car, the child was carried by his mother though he was nearly getting too big for it.

Will we come back here for another party? he asked.

This wasn’t a party, said his mother.

I thought it was a party, he said. He turned his head back to look and it was still there, the yellow balloon, entangled in the tree branches, bright and round and alone.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

PEGASUS

by Mara Buck

The golden horse was broken. It was a palomino, but she hadn’t known that at the time. She had only blindly loved it as her favorite, had been so since she was little and it had pranced with the other horses along the mahogany mantle beside her grandfather’s rocker. For decades the horse galloped through her dreams. Sometimes she clung to his back and other times she raced beside him, her hair and his mane mingling in wind-driven meadow grasses. He was her talisman, her savior, her protector. Now his pieces sprawled broken within crumpled tissue. The movers had said, “Sorry” and had themselves moved on.

Vera hummed as she worked, composing a private melody, lullaby-soft as she glued the horse together.

She pricked her thumb on one of the shards, but so intent was she on her task that she never noticed, and her blood seeped into the porcelain, staining the roughness of the broken leg. On a scrap of paper, a scrid really, she jotted a few tiny words to her grandfather, like birdsong on a summer’s day, the thinnest quill of message to take flight, and she rolled up the paper and stuffed it into the hollow leg. The glue from the hot gun singed her fingers while she stoically pinched the fragments tight until the golden horse was able to stand once again. His neck was arched and his mane flowed as gloriously as ever and his right foreleg pawed the air. He was her only family now. There would be no others. Not since the miscarriage. Never more since Darrell had kicked her down the stairs. Today her limp was hardly noticeable, and the outer scars were only the lines holding her pieces together.

Each thing she did she did reflexively as if done many times before, without thinking, yet it was as if the first time for everything. Vera had no use for time. * The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

A rusty Socony emblem ornamented the side of a friendly barn in the island village of Bright Harbor where waves kissed the seaweed shores with the passion of a promise. A single railroad spike pivoted through the horse’s back on that metal sign so whenever the wind gusted in from the east, sneaking underneath the steel, the horse reared in place, surging forward, never gaining, forever pinned to a barn which offered him no shelter. Every day Vera waved gaily at the horse on her way to school and every day the horse pranced back in answer. She asked her grandfather what it meant, the red horse with the wings, and when he told her the story of Pegasus, she said, “That’s what I’ll name my golden horse. He is Pegasus. He can fly. He don’t need no wings.” The old man smiled and corrected her grammar.

The enchanted paths of fairy tale islands can twist and turn and often darkness falls too early. A hurricane of remarkable ferocity ripped the metal horse free from his barn, and he sailed through the gusts to the open ocean, lost forever, drifting on the outgoing tide. The same ill wind, a rain-slicked road, a hair-pin curve, a washed-out bridge, and Vera suddenly lost her human family as well. Only she and her grandfather remained.

The accident aged him from vigorous to elderly before his time, and he shrank to no more than a husk, fishing by day, mechanically placing supper on the table by night, attending to life by rote. Without womanly attention, Vera’s clothes grew disheveled and her braids flopped undone in stringy abandon on her hunched shoulders. Rather than a place of friendship and learning, for her the island school became merely a place to be endured, and she increasingly withdrew into the magic of her daydreams.

Living in a house crammed with books and chatting with the imaginary friends on the pages set the little girl still further apart. Neighbors were sparse in Bright Harbor, surrounded on all sides by inlets, outlets, and open ocean. When humans huddle together like seals on a rock, hostilities can inbreed and what may pass for civility masks core-deep animosity. “She’s right peculiar, that one,” they all said. “Still, it’s a shame,” they all muttered. “But what can you do?” They all shook their heads and went about their business.

Vera climbed an oak tree with a book in her teeth, squinted down through the leaves at the life passing below her and pretended not to care. Other girls giggled and held hands as they walked, and she yearned to pelt them with acorns, but they continued unmolested on their way to birthday parties and sleepovers and those things that were shared. She perched on a sun-warmed granite ledge overlooking the ocean, and spread books around her like friends at a picnic. She lay spread-eagled on her back in the field and talked to the shapes hidden within the cumulous. In the evenings from the mantel Pegasus and the other horses watched her read and dream, and their shadows grew huge on the opposite wall, and when she flickered the lamp, they galloped. Smoke from the old man’s pipe circled, crawled its applescented self through the light, and caressed the shadows of the horses on the wall, clouds for them to climb. It seemed a simple childhood, yet Vera was not a simple child. Her mind churned with mythology and metaphor and she would scan the distant horizon like a shipwrecked sailor to discover angels and horses within the fog. Winged beings of deliverance.

When the rifts in his heart ultimately cracked through to a fatal fault, the old man passed on a rather prosperous chuck of this world to Vera, so she continued to study and survive in the book-filled house on the bluff beside the sunlit fields and shared her dreams with Pegasus. On those rare social occasions when she attended church, a town meeting, a funeral, Vera would slink deeper into the shadows, a wallflower at a perennial eighth-grade dance whose homemade dress whimpered of poverty and innocence.

A child whose scrubbed face eagerly awaited life while stinging from its slap. Only the shadows were The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

friendly to Vera, soft and welcoming as a grandmother’s bosom on a tear-filled afternoon. Lacking a grandmother, and now even a grandfather, she hugged her shadows close as substitute. The tread of years tiptoed along until alone became lonely, and books and porcelain figurines lent chilly comfort when her body yearned for the warmth of human embrace.

Summer meadows in Maine glow timeless with buttercups and paintbrush, framed edges welcoming secrets in the black-green shadows of juniper and pine, places for lust and love and the cravings of youth which are born and die on the whim of the wind from the harbor. Vera had met Darrell in such a field on such a summer, and it was in such a dark place at the border of the light that she had first fallen in love. He was her golden knight, her prince, her future. For him, she was. Only that. Only was.

Days mild as magic passed that year when she was in love. The lights of the bait shop on the wharf twinkled with the romance of Broadway when Darrell came in from clamming. As he slid down her jeans, Vera was enraptured by the symphony of the gulls and the perfume of stale fish, and no heaven could ever have been sweeter. One Saturday he crewed on a tourist sailboat, hustled a bit extra in tips and, in a generous mood, treated Vera to dinner at a railroad-car diner on the mainland. She ordered hesitantly, prudently opting for meatloaf while Darrell sawed into the rib-eye, and there in the privacy of the back corner booth, cradled in cracked vinyl, he presented her with a gold-plated chain bearing a diamond-chip heart from the pawn shop, and declared it was time he moved in with her. She was the luckiest girl in the world, and she traced another heart of her own in the spilled sugar on the faux-marble formica. The neon diner sign winked erratic red bursts onto the sugar heart. She couldn’t read the words the red letters spelled.

In whatever manner time is measured, Darrell replaced the books, the horses, the introspective nights and the magical days, with noise and grease and the never-ending debris of his chainsaw mind.

Cartons stuffed with Vera’s former life soon overflowed the barn, their permanent extinction threatened on a daily basis. With each encroachment she retreated farther and with each retreat his presence expanded until her life was his, which was no life at all. Those warm embraces debased into drunken grapplings, thence to hellfire bullyings and daily pummelings. She knew no refuge but the life inside her, that of her family yet-to-be, that and the privacy of her imagination. Like the golden horse, the whisper of her grandfather’s gentle kiss upon her forehead ghosted her dreams, reassuring her when Darrell became violent.

On a stifling night in July she dream-raced with Pegasus through cool mountain air, yet the dream warped into the surprise of nightmare as his swirling mane strangled her, and she awoke with Darrell flattened atop her, twisting the belt of her bathrobe tight around her throat. She was gagging, struggling for breath, flailing out, wrenching away from him, falling, struggling up, slapped back down, struggling up again. A punch to her ear drove her reeling into the bureau, grabbing the embroidered scarf, sending toiletries flying, scattering the floor with broken glass. She slid down and sat stunned amid the litter of her life, blood seeping like tiny twinkling jewels from the glass shards in her flesh. He pulled her upright and backhanded her, repeatedly, while she swayed in slow motion like a child’s weighted toy, unable to fall, unable to flee. He said nothing. She made no cries. The only sound was the slapping, the hitting, the breaking. Flesh to flesh, bone to bone. Tired from his efforts, Darrell dragged her into the hall and kicked her down the stairs, where she lay curled in an impossibly small heap, and the twinkling red jewels became a monstrous red ruby.

The staircase was not long in the old house, but it was steep in the way of old houses, and by the time they found her she had hemorrhaged to the point of coma. The ferry was ponderously slow and The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

the baby never lived to see landfall. Vera was herself transitional as her gurney sped feet-first into the operating room. It was days before she was able to speak, and it was months before she cared.

She had been a small girl and she remained a small woman, quiet to her soul. At the sentencing --- when Darrell yelled, “I’ll kill you, you sorry bitch!” --- people assured her that, “It’s what they all say, honey. He don’t mean nothin’ by it. Bet he’s some sorry. Bet he still loves you.” Vera knew better and transplanted whatever remained of her life onto the mainland three counties away, putting two rivers, several lakes, and many miles between them.

No, Darrell would never find her here. Not in this part of the state. Last she had heard he was working part-time at the hardware store on Main Street in Thomaston, close by his prison home of the past two years. He should have drawn more time for what he’d done, but the state was embarrassed by domestic violence, and the murder of her unborn was no more than a shrug of hard luck to the jury.

Manslaughter at best. Unintentional, anyone could see that. Vera placed the restored golden horse on the mantel of this new home. He pranced alone, owning his surroundings, proud of his scars.

Now, tonight, Vera dreams of the horse, resurrected. Unscathed, she rides him through the clouds, but tonight instead of gold, the horse is red, a pulsing crimson rich as sunrise.

She is alerted to the sound of the door glass breaking. This modest fifties ranch has no stairs, and her bedroom is a house-length away from the door, yet she can hear the man breathing, a monstrous sound that sullies the clean air with the filth of whatever it is that composes the core of Darrell. He seizes control as always and walks confidently though this house, her new home, not as an intruder, not as a murderer and a batterer, but with the arrogance of the lord of the manor. This time he calls out. This time he sings. “Vera. Veeeera. You can’t hide any more. Time to pay the piper, Vera. Time to ante up. You owe me, Vera. You gotta pay.”

But this time Vera too has found her voice. “You. Are. Scum. Darrell. You murderer. No, Darrell you bastard, it’s time for you to pay.” Vera has no weapon, nothing beyond the hatred that fills the empty spots within her, yet she draws herself up proudly, and she wears her limp and her scars as medals, and she walks naked from the bedroom to face her monster.

The orange flickers from the gas log in the hearth and the blue half-light of the snow swirling through the broken window caress her skin, clothing her form in jewels of fire and of ice. She glows and the immediate air pulsates ever so softly.

“Darrell,” she croons. “Darrell. Don’t you want to see the masterpiece you have made of my body?

Don’t you want to view your handiwork? It’s something, isn’t it, Darrell, how many ways flesh can be broken. And this is only the wrapping. Only the outside. I have no insides anymore. Do you Darrell, do you have any insides? Did you ever? Can we see?”

The man scowls and lowers his head slightly, like a bull about to charge. This is unexpected. She has never answered back before, only cowered and flinched, his forever-victim. There is something here his does not like, something that makes the small hairs rise and tingles the nerves at the base of his spine. Something unforeseen.

“Well, Vera. If you want me, you gotta do some better than that.” Darrell manages a tiny snort that translates more as a whine. “You never was really much of a looker, but you’ve sure as hell let yourself go.”

The man advances no farther and the woman stands still as well, yet the air about her continues its movements, a tiny squall, a vibration.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“Darrell.” She says it only once, but the name echoes through the room like a chant and her voice is backed by many voices --- voices that speak with the pounding of her veins emptying her blood onto the floor of the old house, voices that echo with the stilled heartbeat of their never-breathing child.

“Darrell. Darrell.”

The man draws his eyebrows together still tighter, inclines towards her, clenches his fists, considers a single menacing step. The pulsing grows louder, measured bursts of rage rimmed in colors of fire and ice. The corners of the room deepen and become rounded and something in time very violently shifts.

The man craves his revenge, yet his hatred is a paltry thing next to the forces unleashed on a snow-filled night in a small house in Maine.

Vera is a tiny woman-child, but she fills the room, recedes to normal size, fills the room again. She is solid, not solid, a pulsing fury and now the man shines with fear-sweat and cocks his head back ever so slightly. The pounding of his own heart thrumps loudly, erratic in the way of terror. “Darrell. Darrell.”

“You bitch,” he mutters. “What kinda trick is this?” He wears the stink of his vileness like a shield.

“Goddamn, you, Vera. I’ll get you for this crap.” He takes that step forward.

The air sizzles and the room strobes and the floor and the ceiling give way until there is only light and vibration and a noise the sound of centuries, rage gathered to crescendo, justice as lightening. Eyes and wings and clouds and creatures of fire and wrath. And from the center erupts a vast horse, a winged stallion, and his coat glistens as a heart jewel, and his hooves show the man no mercy until the man is also red, and the room is overcome by silence.

Except for the man and his redness, the house is abruptly empty and snow drifts in through the broken glass of the door.

###

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

VOX

To the Unknown Voice, Wassily Kandinsky

by Jan De Wilde The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

No, no, no. Not because I can’t –I can- but I won’t. Not now – not ever with or without its amen, amen.

Even when asked – she pleaded for this with the smell of weeds and roses about her. No, no, and no again, now and always, for it will always be demanded of me but I will not give it.

Negation as affirmation – this is my weapon in my battles and wars though there is but one war I’m engaged in. Old warriors I am come amongst you to be what I must and will be – your warrior-strength to the strength of my hand nor forgetting the mind’s fortitude and aptitude for matters yet unfinished or begun.

And the sea before me, the sea behind me, the sea on my right side, the sea on my left side. The mothering surf. From here across it yet let not your silence come upon me but wave after wave of utterance.

She also pleaded for utterance but I would not make it.

These shabby rags – inheritance and a broken pot whereas I in the cauldron will stir…

As a foretime so be it hereafter. And I will prove myself thrilling to the wind. Other lands, other tongues.

Tongues of fire to cast the earth in tongues of fire. In exile to be. From this place tonight. From the dark and dank wood. No patria.

Yet a mind held aloft like a signalman with a lantern (he who holds up the light is the light) Yet I see them gathered who are gathered against me. How brightly my eyes flash against them. How even my footprints will be spoken of. How my triumphs will burn the wind! Even the sunlight will be jealous as I outshine the dullness and sluggishness of these days. So let my pride be arrogance unto the meanness of this town – what do I care?

They cannot abide me and I will not abide here when on the waves of the sea I will ride – see, I stride the dolphins of my desire. Young Angus to the ancient town who will undo its culpability.

And today day zero of my calends.

Breaking all to remake all to the new delineations – see me, I am fire to old wood. For I have become the gathering and the dispersal. Cauterising the wounds of my soul - I am wounded but not grievously so.

Nor maimed into silence where the ways of words will gather about me to goodly ends.

And flocks of twittering sparrows in my hair.

The laurel leaves already about me and glistening in the sun.

So now must I instruct a Greek dilemma to their minds – which is my Greek dilemma, and under what stone can I place my sword? Or enter the chapel perilous with a smile on my mouth and a brash glance. Or draw it out of stone according to the prophecy I will fulfil under this thunderous rain? (ye gods of Greece I will accept no answer that is not my own) See them, newly come to inquisit the air about them who do not yet flash in the sun. That out of such formlessness I should form… - to kneel, perhaps, but in what adoration or in kneeling to espouse the counterprayer I yet might impart as has been given me by those few warriors I treasure.

Taking from the store-house but adding to the store-house like some sly prophet in the agora but not yet the proffered chalice to my lips. More to my liking are these buds of summer as my symbol – and not Greek but solid English as my weapon – sharpened on those stones (how the stones themselves are sharp) like a causeway for those who are dispossessed of weeds and roses (I am so dispossessed like one with the nudity of a god) Nor death songs about me to the flickering of candles (espouse that my true brethren, ye few, ye fewer, ye none, for that is and will be my true instruction my true admonishment) Unto the beauty of which…

As is now and will be – world without to the world within.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Into my innards as into no other (there is no other than I who can do this) Espousing only the fecund verb To Be (I will also be thus espoused) – but to their quizzing minds I am already ancient who nonetheless would place about me a ring of offering stones (hail disciples for your glittering tribute!)

That I be unto you also what I will be unto myself: see my stealth in this, my subversions of the modalities, my pennant flashing in the air above me.

O defiance!

Yet unto these my little ones…

Unto them as be unto all of us in our needs “yet you will, will you not, acknowledge the dogmas?” I will not, and if such is to be my transgression, against history no less as has been given from the old days, days of that woman’s betrayal through the womb of time – metronome of my blood and sinews.

O mothering sea shelter us from history again, the ongoing purge.

As it was in the beginning.

Shall we say… no, no, no – resistance (I have made of it the perfect armour yet I am pierced) Yet still the living gather about me –questions and accusations– that Greek dilemma as ever it was and will be. No end to it nor as they quiz my quizzing heart.

That perpetual light may shine and cancel the dilemmas with light abounding “But surely you…?”

No, no, no – not that I can’t-I can- but I won’t, and see, listen, see the old thunder rumbles again and nothing is resolved.

Who now will gather the bushels of light? That unto us be born. Also of the low ones of the world. By which name we might…

The unfinished sentence everywhere low light abounding now just above the trees.

O abundance of leafage, Greekness of perfusion that might be instructed unto the many. For the sake of which their questions are indulged if not always answered. Greek dilemma I have wandered wittingly into – I am pierced – the young Angus is the old Balder – “but surely you…?”

No, no, no! Even if the garden be despoiled, bright apples that I… Approvingly. And so to walk these formless paths I shall remake (not a stone will go unnoticed) Already I am plotting against the dilemmas. O brightness of this my angelic rebellion!

Sweet day that you are no brevity could be as nice. Good affirmations. Question the body so as to question the soul. Not every answer is a finality. Scallop of the pilgrimage city that I carry into the hard intractable day. Opening that does not always close.

As aforetime is not necessarily hereafter. The border of the body shifts into the border of the soul – what border has chaos?

Soul the unformed substance. I have none that is not the body’s delight in this intractable world.

Word of the world.

Apples to pluck for sustenance where the tree of knowledge is the tree of exile. Exiled into the world (and after this our exile show unto us…).

Show.

Shall I tell you oh shall I tell you?

Yes do.

Tell one, tell all for there is no fortitude in silence that will feed you to the bone and then some. Flowing, The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

oh flowing as you would want it to be and it always is what you want it to be and then it is some more than that that can’t be named no matter how often you seek to name it.

Shall I tell you, oh shall I tell you or do you already know what there is no need of repeating unless in the telling is a joy that has nothing to do with newness but everything with telling and wordness. Where A is saying to B what he can’t say to C. can’t or won’t, no difference and the world-word no better for it.

Telling no telling. That’s the way of it as it winds its way about you on its way to….couldn’t put it any other way because there is no other way to put it. Wouldn’t even want one if there was another one to be had.

But there isn’t. immutable. Lovely word in its accuracy. Another wordness to be savoured and saved. For what and for whom is not the question therefore there is no other accurate answer. No other answer will be give because none will be sought for therefore none will be found. Found that a good reply to his question. His question not worth any other answer therefore there is no other answer to be given as I am telling you and have told you up till now. Now. Here in this place and moment, in the immutability of sound and sense as they say if there is any sense to the now that we don’t yet know. What do I know? Will I tel you what I know? Will I tell you what I don’t as if I could. Would like to but can’t. can only tell what I know. Of him and her and she as they found themselves that day on the tram, or that evening on a beach.

Lovely threesome. Build on that a new theocracy. I will and I won’t. am already doing so. Will do so again because there is nothing better worth doing if anything other than that is worth doing that is. Let it flow, let it flow. All is water to the sea. See – I can see it from here. Always could and always will. Meanwhile oh meanwhile the world is going on and I am late. Shouldn’t be tell you this perhaps yet I will tell you.

What A said to B but didn’t say to C who desperately wanted to hear it. A said: -It’s all in the telling And B replied: -then tell me -And I will, I will, I will, he replied and when on to tell all the parts and divisions and implications that he knew.

-But that’s not something I don’t already know!

-Oh you may know your version of it but you don’t know mine.

-Same words, same story.

-Never the same words, never the same story.

And it never was no matter what the other one said to him because if it could be told one way then it could be told the other. Which it was and the difference was in the telling as it was always meant to be. which was what he wanted to explain but somehow couldn’t no matter how often he tried. And he tried, oh he was trying even when no one was listening and the last tram had returned to the depot and there was nothing for it but the long walk home. which he started out on but soon abandoned as if it was another story that he couldn’t get right to a listener’s ear. But no one was listening now. Shadows and street lights only and the occasional stray cat to call out to. And the shadows were as large as he was and he was soon taken up in the darkness in a somewhat pleasing manner.

-Your temperament is not what I would call pliable -I was not aware pliability was counted among the virtues -It’s a social more than a spiritual necessity -Then I will add it to the poverty which is mine -Do I sense the stirring of pride in your voice?

-I see it as a refinement of character The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

-Ah, so you are a believer -I have made the observance but no longer do so -Other rituals perhaps…

-Let us say I believe in a word’s incarnation -That’s merely a mannerism -Yet it is affirmed -In the flesh sir, in the flesh -Disputable I think -And in that is your satisfaction?

-No, in that is my dilemma His seedy words. His doctrines.

Yet if the self not incarnate the word…

What will this day incarnate? Some compatible form? Some paradox only a living faith might resolve?

He would say day is night’s grandeur revealed but on what revelation may I lay down my obedience?

In the noise of day Homer’s music resides.

Audible day and this my aubade. I will make no broken music. Mine to be the sonnet in stone as in those cursive manuscripts. Hail morning! I greet you thus. Lips to the flute, hand to the hand-drum – let there be new rhythms. Word incarnate in the bell of a sound. Gull’s cry or child voice.

And I will tell of the trembling. As no other has known it so shall it be. Word upon which and from which..Bell’s treble also. Sea-surf in some soft curving.

As it was in the..

Beginning! Beginning! Ah, but surely this is day’s grandeur also? Antigone’s cry (We are Roman or Greek in our circumstances and choices).

Audibility of my song to child and gull.

Word: a fount, baptisms. By water transformed. Thus to the sea of language I go. Where even as I walk my heels make music (And in the echo dwells the echo of an echo) Refute that! Or embrace it unto your betterment. Sweet gulls of joy sing to me.

And from the mothering surf…That in a word…After echo on the air. Audible.

That unto us be these things of the world. And unto the world be these acts of ours.

The act, the subtle gesture dormant in the unspoken and unmoved. The act: see it as a theatre of the mind. I have adhered, I have performed. Priestly in gestures and modes yet secular to my companions.

Already they gather about me-and I see them gathered.

Yes, unto me be these things of the world.

O sires of Sion, o children of the transubstantiation! You also within the compass of my mind. Forefathers of cunning, I am not less than you would have me be. In the flesh sir, in the flesh.

As aforetime?

As aforetime so hereafter.

Can it be other? –no, it cannot be other so let the usurpers tremble (I see them in their bothersome The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

imitations). They would ride the gilded carriage but the horse has cantered: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop: goodbye old fiend of the woe-begotten century even as the clock majestic ticks away remaining time.

That unto us be this and such as yet may befall.

Fall of Adam our mark yet featureless creatures abide. Slow tide of the mothering sea. Old graces and new worlds. So let me contradict myself even to the millionth part of the smallest decimal point: clip-clop, clip-clop.

My subtle gestures as counter-command to the waves. I am young Angus again. See me ride the dolphins of my desire. O sea see me!

A gesture and a subtle word. Chain-linkage of the mind.

My mind. No other to be mine. In the flesh sir, in the flesh. Incarnation and annunciations. Like a figure wandering out of El Greco into a Breugel setting to wander back again.

A reply sir, a reply!

Mythos of an island. Sailors. Fisher-folk. The nets that I have cast against those nets that there be transubstantiation! (forgive my exclamations). Land stories also. Hero with a crow on his shoulder or the dying gaul with his sword beneath him (not under a stone).

Termination of the race. New race begun: tick-tock, tick-tock.

-I suppose you…

Thus begins their sly inquisitions in nineteenth century mode.

-…do not see it as irrefutable.

-Or perhaps you acknowledge but will not admit to it.

-Admit? Must I offer evidence?

-Of innocence or guilt?

-You are placing a terrible burden on him.

-Every admission carries its own weight and consequence.

-Consequence? How did we get from a supposition to a consequence?

-It’s the logic of inevitability.

-Logic won’t solve the matter for him, or for us.

-You have, I think, a religious state of mind.

-Don’t deny it – we all make illogical leaps.

-True, but from what into what?

-It’s the not knowing where you will land which gives every leap its validity. The history of science proves that.

-But first you must have the meta before you have the physics -More the stuff of poetry I would think.

-O damn the evasions of poetry. We need facts, solid facts.

Fact: I am in their company but am not of their kind.

Fact: the space between us is irrefutable.

Fact: I have the physics but seek the meta.

-Facts are conditioned by historical circumstances. Once the world was flat now it is round.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

-That was never a fact, it was only a superstition.

-It was more than that – it was a logical deduction from the available evidence.

-So what are you saying?

-I’m saying we don’t know all that we think we know.

-Socrates!

-His questions were always the right ones – there is value in not knowing, which he prized.

-Let’s leave the Greeks out of this – don’t you agree?

-If only I could.

-That’s defeatism, I expected more from you.

-But he’s right. The contours of every discussions has long been marked out by the Greeks. We are their children.

If so who be my parent?

Fact: no child is fatherless.

Of what terrible union am I the child, the wilful off-spring?

Fact: out of the two issues the one.

Father – who shall I call father?

Fact: or only in the mothering sea find solace?

-We are back at poetry – as I expected.

We are entering terrible lands.

-Poetry as an ideal, not as a practice?

-Now you are too Greek again.

First the separation, then the joining, then the issue.

-And your example is…?

-None that would bear too much scrutiny.

-Your statements are cancelling each other.

-When negations cross what can the result be other than what I have stated?

-You might make a poem of that.

-He might but I suspect that the practice would not equal the ideal.

-And the result would be…

-That nihilism known as pure thought.

-O save us from such sainthood! We have that damnation in abundance!

In abundance he said. Like an old father unto a congregation. Absurd priests – why do I walk among them? why should I lend my credence to their suppositions? Superstitions of the tribe yet they have not wandered – no fire or cloud before them.

Yet at gilded animals do they…And I to be the one to break the stones?

From what stern mountain can I admonish this people? With what fire and cloud may I go before them albeit for forty years?

O people I will admonish!

Out, out, out: declensions into negativity not to my liking yet from language to intimate a conflagration.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Yes, I will burn like a bush but I will not be blackened.

This is the law. Unavoidable. Sweet as a nut or a berry. Another abundance in another season – so what are the festivals I may attend or is it to be a profane canticle which must cross my lips into the world at large.

Sweet nudity for which there is no precedence nor is one sought in the guise of justification. This is the world. It is not other.

This is the world and I am a singer.

Echoes also of course – my feet on these stones and my words on the air – so you there, listen. The first and second abundance hath come upon us yet still at gilded animals do they bow in wilful submission.

Fallen Adam among them for the second negation. Yet I..yet I..not with the Calvinist doctrine of sin of the fathers unto the sons for I have disowned and ask again – father who is my father?

Silence.

Silence.

All is quiet on the air where apart from bells and birds there are neither echoes nor twitterings a mind might take refuge in. then let the nudity of god fall upon me as a seamless garment of my station and condition.

Condition: it is a mild spring day.

Condition: I am homeless and childless.

Condition: I owe no allegiance to any with, perhaps, the exception of these sparrows in the air.

Such nudity is my condition and I revel in my condition. So, who is he, that master workman; that I might be him? Gloss in the margin of a text where the text folds in on itself with a fine weaving – yes, let that be my guide if a guide there is to be. or failing that a blank page awaiting the forms of my signature.

(O Fortuna it will be thus!) nor lesser brightness be unto me a guidance.

They are not my kind yet I am among them yet they do not see the subversion. I the enemy within. I escaping the massacre. I the flute player atop the desolate gates of an over-thrown city.

Desolation.

The earth is desolate but I will populate it again. Ark of language. Potent verb, bright (and brightening) adjective. And the noun will assume its rightful place and occupation. I giver, I weaver, I woven thus nor otherwise shall be. living in the verb To Be (speak against that my accusers for speak against it you will).

Yet this is my commandment unto you.

As it was aforetime so shall it be hereafter.

But this is not world’s end. Merely one road leading into another. Junctions and joining – yes, but also the separations of the ways. Which path shall I choose when I have already chosen. does not matter yet destinations do not lie.

Mine the singular way. Mine to be the un-trodden path which I’ll delineate. Make of my world the world as it is. World that will be with or without its amen. No more fitting closure. My footprints for others. Others will, others won’t. (what are we that we should not be other?) yes, question wind and water. Question even the un-answering air.

I question and I answer to my own satisfaction.

“Will you…”, “I suppose…”

Away! Fiends of air be-gone! Nor any other lushness lure me to lesser affirmations.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

I will celebrate. As it was aforetime so shall it be hereafter. World unto world within a word. Only that which I know can please me (I the most pleased). As if the ancient traditions were made new or that there were no traditions to dull the beauty of my nakedness!

Either way…junctions and joining. Choice of one road opposing the choice of another. A different future in both choices and mine to chose. Left foot or right foot. And must I attire myself accordingly? Hat and cane perhaps. A steady pace or a slow saunter?

Then into what future am I travelling down this road or that? And what life will be unlived because I choose one road rather than another?

Junctions and joining. But also, in the same choice, denials and separations. Thus be it so for it is so.

I choose and have no regrets.

Forward!

Forward!

Battle-hymns upon my lips and my cane flashing like a lance!

O wonderful morning. O great day of my desire. Am I less than your expectations and demands of me?

Am I less than any fatherless child who has a right to be in this sunshine?

Forward!

Forward!

Choose a path and adhere to it. Break the obstacles in your way. Cast aside the useless traditions like useless cloths. Sing as befits your mood. Stride with confidence into the city because there is no other world and this is it.

(Stride: in motion; motive; motor; movable; mercurial; changeful; unquiet; restless; nomadic; runaway; hie; gang; wend; trail; flutter; wave; flap; walk; trip; tread; tramp; dance; leap; skitter; slide; slither; skate; fly; frisk; filt; flitter; dart; hover; cruse; progress; pass through; wade; tack; manoeuvre.)

Change the clause – make the past tense the present tense, measure the gravity of light, open the door of a possibility.

Yes I will!

Now. And hereafter. Or as he would say -You are becoming a poet again.

When was it otherwise?

And now my shadow before me becomes my shadow behind me. And this door which opens in opens out – so what should I do, push or pull?

Every moment is the zero moment of a beginning. This is my day and I’ll have no other. Now. Or as he would say – so, we are back at choice. Never moved from it. Never will. Measure that. Like water the good Greek stepped into and out of.

Hail equals – how beautiful is my arrogance to me! (forgive my exclamations) Can a shadow be measured? – if so I will measure it.

And the past is the present in its new attire. I am not other than what I am. Like the clock hands ticking towards a new zero.

Negate the negations – measure that into the new infinity. Yes, there is no other world and this is it – nor any other wanted. Will there be singing? – yes, there will be singing. And the river offering its guidance – o beauty of water. Am I now Taliesin’s child? And that shadow crossing mine in a new calligraphy.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Already I am ancient and ageless. And the poetry of that which is coupled with the poetry of that which shall be. Shall be. I and no other for no other sees it as I do. Do. Affirm the affirmations. Nor decry the dark for its necessity (of this there will be singing) Now what will you accuse me of ye doubting ones?

It does not matter.

Song along justifies me in my time and time beyond. And unto time. Nor can it otherwise be. For be it will be. The light measured in the scale of a word. Nor my thoughts alien to this day.

This day. Yes, I am a profane believer who would not otherwise be. See me – I am dancing, hear me – I am singing.

As it was in the beginning so shall it now be. Thus I undo to remake. Thus. And shall further undo (see me undoing and re-making) This street or that – what does it matter – it is my infinity which waits (ah my sweet arrogance how I love thee!) And whatever else awaits shall make itself known.

This street or that – neither will change my destination for I have already chosen. Shall make itself known and I will make it known. Bending it to my desires. Like a loom-worker – stitch, counter-stitch and shall populate my pages accordingly. Affirmation and negation which shall be, and is, my affirmation (do you hear me now my doubters?) And that unbending branch I shall take as my symbol. That unto me and mine…

An inheritance. Heirloom for the generations (ah my sweet arrogance how I love thee!) Give myself a new name which will be the ancient name. Lyrical and bountiful (old warriors I will take, and add, from your warrior-strength such strength as I may need) Nor will culpability pass my lips. As I take the measure of these shadows I walk amongst and out of.

-This obsession with identity -It is the only one worth having -Spoken like a true egoist -A condemnation?

-An admonition. There are other questions worth solving than the nature of the self -Such as -The collective identity cannot be overlooked -I find that to be a horrible thought -As I said, an egoist -I might take that as a compliment -Bur surely..this world exists for me as much as it exists for you -Ah, but is it the same world we see through different eyes?

-The world is what it is, it cannot be other -But it is other to every one -I disagree. Facts are not mutable. The world is as the world is. Interpretation is not possible on given notions.

-In that case tell me the colour of black.

-That’s a trick, not an argument -Or tell me the gravity of light -Another trick The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

-Another proposition -You’re cleaver but that’s not enough to shape a life by – even with your obsession. Sooner or later you will come up against a fact that can’t be challenged and when you do your whole world will come crashing down about you -And that would please you?

-Indirectly, yes -Because?

-Because you would have to face the emptiness of your notions -Or their acquittal – perhaps it’s the ‘facts’ as you call them which will fall -Your pride is wilful to the point of being dangerous. Don’t you recognise any authority other than yourself?

-What other authority can there be?

-The collective identity and strength is not to be despised. There is a wisdom in it which can’t be refuted -I see neither wisdom not strength -Because you don’t know how to look -That’s the dogma of a believer -Whereas you…

-Whereas I am in the becoming of myself and allow myself no other dogma nor creed -Yes, your pride is wilful. It will be your undoing -It is the making -But look at you – penniless and homeless –is that your vaunted freedom?

-It’s a start -You have been a long time starting. Everything with you is in the becoming never in the now of achievement -Time is my ally -No, time is the enemy waiting to ambush you -I am armed -O you’re not the first to say that nor will you be the last for an egoist can never understand the lessons of history -It has few lessons to teach me and those it has I have exhausted -Then maybe I’m wrong – perhaps you are not wilful and arrogant but that you possess the terrible purity of an innocence which I do not understand -In which case…

-In which case I despair of what will become of you.

-shall I tell you -do, o do -but there is so much to tell -then begin The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

-but I don’t always know what the beginning is -does it matter? We are water, we are flowing -I always admired the Greek in you -it’s a question, a matter of fidelity -to what?

-to what and to everything -I still don’t know where to begin -choose any point, select any junction, pick a face out of a crowd and begin to speculate -easier said than done -but speech is not always easy. Complicated thing. Past and present and future tense available to you and you only have to choose -but I can’t -but you can -and must I because I can?

-you must.

Must I? what is ‘must’ and what is ‘I’ that I should be answerable to them? From what pit do these questions arise with an authority that is difficult to refute. I refute or I accept but the questions remain regardless of my wishes or decisions. I am subject to I. there is no refutation of the self that is total. Even death can be a choice at a particular junction. There is no other world and this is it.

And not to be unto them what they would have me be.

Nor at their shrines to kneel as if a believer of their arguments.

I am other than they. This cannot be denied. I will not deny it and neither will they though they seek to undo me daily.

I was weaned at a different nipple. I have drunk other milk.

Not yet of paradise but that will come to pass or a total damnation will cover me. Sing of the dark?

I will sing of the dark if needs be, but I will sing.

Listen: my anthems are already upon my lips. I might warn but I will not coheres. Listen: my anthems are already ringing.

I will sing of no generation but only of the generation that I am. And I will be among them as the patriarchs were among their peoples.

I the burnishing and I the flame.

I onwards and out. Out. Out. Out. -As a parting shot, tell me, if you had to choose an ancestor, who would it be: Adam or Antigone?

The present is always on the verge of the past. Time is always on the verge of goodbye but I haven’t said it. Will do of course. Can’t stay here. No room for my soul’s forging.

That’s the nub.

Becoming. Being. All else is secondary. Not worth thinking about. Won’t think about it.

Down this street into the future. What meetings, what conversations await? I will not be guided. No is the equal, and superior, of yes in certain circumstances and pronunciations.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

A cigarette and a flame’s flare. In the daylight no less.

Must be careful in crossing the road. Traffic. The many lives about me – how shall they be named?

By fire or by cloud? Clouds above me like puffed meringues. Tasty. A good bakery will have them. Time to stop and eat soon – but with what coins my brethren?

No matter.

Melt in the mouth and are gone. Coins gone. Had so few paper notes to begin with. Had. Not now.

No matter. Something will happen. Something always does even if not the desired. That’s the future.

That’s the certainty of the uncertainty.

A saint’s dilemma?

Or a fools?

No matter. There is now and for the moment that is all that matters.

Though it might rain. White turn to grey turn to black clouds. Then darkness with no fire before me. Fire within. Best place to have it. The only true guidance. Albeit for forty years I will wander.

No sailor I – landsman. Breugel’s offspring with a Dantesque touch. But this is not hell nor am I in it. Would be according to his definition. Should be according to another. But this is not hell nor am I in it. Nor paradise for the soul’s delight.

What is my soul’s delight? This here, this now, this unfolding future.

You will die alone was her prophecy. Four coins in her hand placed to be told this. A cheap wisdom I bought. Yet have paid more and bought less.. Often. Too often. A double poverty. Yet not to my soul’s penury. Not that. Though Midas in reverse they call me.

Biblical facts that are not facts and yet are more than that. Names. Sticks and stones to beat a dog with. Will not break me.

Cross the street again. Dart down this lane. Emerge into the flushed silence of a square. Yes I am flushed. Of pocket only not of mind. I don’t mind. My future will replenish me. I the replenished. Now and in what will yet be. the future’s shadow already upon me. The shadow before me circling to become the shadow behind me.

That future has passed.

The particular not the general. That still waits as I stride to meet it. Street after street. No somnambulist I. now in my future’s beginning.

Now by water and weeping trees.

I will not weep. Didn’t when it was required of me won’t do so now.

Not mine the tear-drenched eye-lash. Clear-eyed to the world.

Not for a pittance will my soul lie down.

Neither by water nor pasture nor bridge.

Bridge I must cross. Uniting what it separates. Another symbol there if symbols be needed.

A bakery. No meringues. How fortunate that my poverty is not emphasised by abundance.

A small good-bye before the larger goodbye. A promise to the future.

A promise to the self.

-Yes he told me he met you – last Tuesday it was, outside the post office, and that he saw you later that same day by the main door of the library but he didn’t know if you were going in or coming out as you didn’t appear to have a book in your hand – as if that was their only purpose I said but as usual he The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

didn’t know what I was talking about so I left the matter stand as it stood and was on my way.

Cheerio!

Secretly I unwind my spool and travel back and forth within the maze. Secretly. Am beast and seeker.

The one who knows that the way in is not necessarily the way out. Yet I go deeper in so as not yet to go out. Unwinding as I go a golden thread to defy the works of minotaur.

But brightness now about me. Nor darkness overtake me. Nor silence come upon my mouth. Nor does my hand shake in trembling at the necessities of the day. And if he saw me outside the library – what of it? His eyes can never know my purpose nor the schemes to which I have set myself. Library: I will write a fine page. I will have no gilded web about me but I will write a fine page.

Now to my steps tempo my thoughts also. Am I already taking leave of familiar sights and sounds while carrying their essence within me? If so it will be so but there will be no silence. Nor gilded pages lure me from my purpose. I will write a fine page.

See him and her but I do not want to see them. Pass on as if un-noticing their gestures and not hearing their callings from the opposite side of the street. Their gesture are not mine to recognise and respond to. Useless words exchanged and the pleasantries gone through like a weekly ritual: How are you today? Fine weather for a stroll. How is the work coming along?

Bah! I will have none of it. Only essentials. That’s what matters. All the rest can flow away from me like useless water to a puddle.

Mud-water. Between the paving stones. Left-over’s from yesterday’s rain. Their words and gestures also. Formalities I have neither time nor inclination for. An embarrassment not to be responded to.

Gull and wave – sweet weaves of time as might be sung in a song (I will be that singer).

The transubstantiating sea. And a gull’s arabesque-hail mystery of craft and flight. Unto me be these things of the day.

Choir of the day my reply sir, my reply. Alpha, alpha, alpha.

Undertones.

Under the tones of bells I pass which tell the time and tell their convictions. Soft seepage of certain words and utterances as if I am required to dress for certain occasions. Hat and cane, a steady walk that does not break into a trot. Gentleman thus. Impoverish guardian of imperishable. Custodian.

Yet I guard only myself and the intentions of the sea. His undertones in his questions which always begin with “Tell me…’ and I told him.

The unspoken undertones in her eyes looking directly at me. Sea of glass with white horse waves.

Carry me, carry me. It is my impoverishment I guard. Naked pockets. Not a coin for the rattling yet of this I make my proud music. Light on the sea against that darkness I must guard myself against.

-Tell me I will tell but I will not turn back no more than I will disown.

Dreams my dreams are of the sea not his shadow coming across the floor from the doorway he blocked up.

So what language must I now speak and with what verbs will I form an alliance?

-Tell me I will tell but the telling will be mine no according to tradition even as I embrace the impoverishment The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

jingling in my pockets Like some monk in a scriptorium Like a solitary gull slung around the neck of inspiration Like a long shadow crossing their thresholds and blocking up the doorway with light His questions unanswered but they will be answered according to the new tempo. Music, yes, that’s the key – though into what door lock will I insert it? A question for myself, not for him nor some other to give the unsung answer to. Irrefutable as these stones or shells to the ear and their undertones like a wash of waves out of ancient chronicles.

-Tell me, would you…

I would and have and I will – and will again. Time will see to that. A dandy if ever there was one.

Cane and hat, the perfect attire of a mannerism that has Parisian precedence. But I’ll go. There and anywhere else where I can follow the soul’s undertones into the startling for I would be startling.

-Tell me..

Yes and yes. I have and I will: did so once and will do so again for the thousand time like a loomweaver with ply and cross-ply but there will be no undoing so as to start again.

Where is he now and where are those others and what does it matter my would-be brethren?

Answer and answer according to your whims or ride whatever animal as befits your moods and ways.

Tell him that. Tell him his liberty is his own and can never be mine but tell him to remember and treasure the spoken and unsaid between us.

I stride out of history into history: dull day to the bright incarnation of sunlight Hey sailors, be about your tasks that shame the landsman into action!

Nets I have and will. Overtone and undertone. Sing me a shanty or a lullaby.

Will I sing?

I am singing.

Abandoned hulk of a boat that could be symbol of…but away with symbols! I’ll have the day itself and nothing to replace it.

Nowness of my heel’s clatter. Irrefutable stones, sunlight on which can be dazzling. Yet with a clear eye to see it in its fullness.

Yet I have also abandoned.

And will do so again.

Soil I am not wedded to, a history not mine to kneel before. Saying again what I have said before because it is delicious to have such words in my mouth for utterance.

And what is the bell which is ringing its tone I pay no allegiance to the undertones of?

No matter, no echo. Day is day, bell is bell, I am what I am and are where I am. Not now to the dark and dank wood will I return. In my poverty is my liberty – empty pockets, but see what coins I carry as my currency. I will give alms to the beggars of time (come gather at the table of the beneficent one – I the most generous). Turn your umbrellas upside-down for a shower of coins. Gather about me, gather about me!

But they scatter. Afraid. Wax in their ears they will not remove. So be it unto them in this world. As if out of alien ground the hoards were singing songs of war but not songs of defiance.

O Fortuna that this should be my time and place.

O Fortune evermore in my song (will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing.)

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Hosannas for the new entrance. Laurel not palm. About me in the glittering (I will give new answers to the old numbered questions spoken, and answered, by rote). For mine is the arrogant pride of a maker: so be it so in the world; word, tone and undertone, semblance and shadow (how real now these shadows as I cross them and how insubstantial as I cross out of them and leave them behind me).

Will there be a gathering?

Yes there will be a gathering Will there be a reckoning?

Yes there will be a reckoning.

I will gather and I will reckon. Soft seepage and hard judgements – I the castigator! (yet a certain form of love abides in my harsh words which those who listen to the undertone will hear the tones of).

But softly, softly now nor bitterness claim me nor dark light issue from my eyes. Like a tailor I’ll thread my needle with a fine thread to make a rich brocade which some mason at his stone might be able to measure. Measure my steps and they are equal to my needs. No more and no less. A completion in themselves.

Yet if there is Alpha where is Omega?

Greek again, as all my dilemmas are. Unending, unending. Resolution for a time only, not for eternity – or is time eternity’s undertone? Riddle me that my sweet believers and doubters. Or shall I say the question is purely semantic?

Purely?

Purity of self and implication?

It matters, it matters not, or is the chapel perilous that must be entered. Grail of the word and world.

If I am well then all is well (I have asked the question and I have given the answer) so softly, softly, let no black fire issue from my eye nor bitterness fill the emptiness of my purse – so with what shall I pay the ferryman?

Amen, amen. Vivid on those lips I cannot see. Vivid pronouncement like a question asked of the accused. Ask. Ask and answer. One question leading into another. Junctions and joinings.

River into river from the bright pebble emerging. Where if not for the lyrical impulse…

Ask and answer again. Question into answer into question again. Like in the old days. Discussions on the rialto and agora. But the cup was handed to him and he drank – what cup will I drink to its fullness of sweetness or bitterness?

Stance and precondition condition me. I am not other than what I will myself to be.

Meanwhile, on the agora… As if in that gathering something useful might be said and adhered to.

Like the condition of a new preamble. (I will begin, I am beginning) river into sea, sea to the rock’s resistance.

Yes, I like that: resistance. If that is not what I am then what am I? riddle me that out of confusion.

But no confusion today.

Clarity of light. Clarity of thought all be they many and varied: I am a swirling eddy, I am a thicket in which a stag is tangled –see the freeing of the stag. See him who sees himself as an Abraham unto a people but there are no new lands for the old prophet and so pity the prophet with a broken crown.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Already he is a shadow disappearing behind me, going to where I’ve come from but without the same starting point. Already he is a shade out of Dante’s rounds slipping back into his old condition. Already The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

he is behind me and I will think of him no more. Already he is slipping out of memory like water escaping from a stone only to be lost in the ground. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Soft light on the froth of the sea. Soft froth of thought and sound. The world is an audible bell. And that gull also – he of sound and echo and soft swish? Bell and bell-buoy. A music for transcription. Mine will be the transcribing. Soft, softly now. Low light and far light. What sound has light? I have lost, I have gained. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

The stag has cleared the thicket and recovered the sword from under the stone. The stag has cleared the thicket and is now in the clearing. Let the horns blow, let the chase begin, I shall not be trapped. I am thicket and horn and stag. I bid you all goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. ###

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Archie and Grandma Bond by Bill Frank Robinson The light is fading fast on this winter day and a chill is chasing away the Sun’s heat. Both Lonnie and Archie are dressed in bib overalls and long-sleeved men’s work shirts. They walk side by side toward the Johnson family home. Archie shivers from the cold and looks up at the face of his benefactor. He sees a kind face but he also sees deep creases all over that sun-burned face—the guy looks like he’s a hundred years old. And he’s got something really bad wrong with his left leg; he limps low to the ground when he puts his foot down, then he swings it in a wide circle when he takes the next step. He smiles a lot just like Andy.

“So you know old Andy, huh? How’d ya meet old Andy?”

“He gave me a pop bottle so I could go to the picture show.”

“That’s Andy for ya. You’ll never find a better friend than Andy. Come on. We better step it up ‘afore it gets dark.”

Archie has to run to keep up with the fast moving Lonnie. This is the guy that his dad said was dead in the ass and ain’t worked a day in his life? Cab Cleebo said, “That Lonnie Johnson was born no good and he’s gonna die no good. If it weren’t for his wife, Molly, that whole family would be in the poor house. And he went and murdered that rich man’s son. I don’t know how he got outta that one. He should’a fried in the chair a long time ago.”

*** Grandma Johnson, tiny, toothless, wrinkled, and dressed in a long flowered dress and sun bonnet, pours hot water from the tea kettle into a cup. “Ya want some tea, Archie?”

Archie, sitting on the couch, leans forward and looks around the corner into the kitchen. “No, Ma’am.”

Grandma sits beside Archie and stirs tea leaves into her cup. “That’s what I like about you, Archie.

You’re the politest boy I ever met. And you know how ta have fun too. You can laugh with the best of ‘em.

Lonnie and Andy do a lot of joking and laughing but they don’t mean it; they can turn mean in a second.

And Paulie, his face would break into a thousand pieces if he ever cracked a smile. You don’t know it but The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

you and me are just alike.”

“We’re alike?”

“Yeah. Look at us. We both got freckles and our ears stick out to the sides more than anybody in history.

You know what I was told when I was a little girl?”

“What?”

“They said there was this old mule who had too much bran to eat and when he farted it hit me in the face and caused all these freckles.”

“Ha! Ha! They told me the same thing, Grandma.”

“See? I told ya. You got a Ma and Pa but they’re never home. I never had a Pa and my ma died when I was a baby so I don’t remember her. I grew up in a home for orphan girls. Do you wanna hear about how I grew up and got married and all?”

Archie nods his head as he smiles directly at Grandma; he loves her so much. And he’s the only one in the whole-wide world who can understand her because she talks so bad with her teeth gone and all. Ever since Lonnie brought him home for dinner he has been coming here after school to stay with Grandma.

Lonnie and Paulie don’t come home till dark. Andy and Molly are staying on a farm working. He slides across the couch and wraps his arms around her, laying his head on her breast. She pulls him close and hugs him tight.

“It was back in Topeka Kansas, they say my mother was walking down the road and carrying me. It was wintertime and she laid down on that road and froze to death. Some farmer come along picked me up and took me home. But he was too old to have a young’un around the house so he took me to the Emma Broward Home for Girls. They named me Emma Broward because no one knew my name or where I come from.”

Grandma pauses and takes a loud slurp of tea. Archie laughs to himself: Cab Cleebo would hit the ceiling if he heard somebody slurp like that.

“The women that run that home were mean, very strict, and never had nothing nice to say about anybody.

And the food was awful. Even us that knowed nothing else never liked it. The only thing I liked was oatmeal and milk with sugar sprinkled on. The desert was nasty, tasted like something rotten. When a new girl showed up we would give her our desert. She’d be happy ‘till she found out what it tasted like. Then she’d be in trouble ‘cause you couldn’t leave the table till you finished all your food. It seems like they would figger out what was going on and put a stop to it, but they never did.”

“We worked ever’ morning, making beds, cleaning house, washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking the chamber pots out to the outhouse. Everybody wanted to do the chamber pots ‘cause it was a chance to get away from your housemother. We’d empty the pots into the shit hole and scrub ‘em with water from the well. I always stayed outside till they come looking for me.”

“Ever’ afternoon we had reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious training. That religious training turned me against religion forever ‘cause those who taught us was always better than us. And they let us know it too.”

“All we talked about was getting adopted. People was always coming by, picking out a girl, and taking her home. We heard some of those girls come to a bad end because their new family was mean and rotten to the core. Still, we wanted to take our chances and hoped a nice family would take us. I was eleven or twelve when it dawned on me I was never gonna get adopted: I was too ugly. When I realized that it tore me up somethin’ awful.”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“Grandma, you ain’t ugly.” Archie raises up and looks at her with tears in his eyes.

Grandma pushes his head back down. “I am too. But that didn’t matter when one day one of the richest men in Topeka come by with his wife. They weren’t looking to adopt nobody but they wanted a girl to keep house. Miss Frawley, the head mistress, told them I wasn’t much to look at but I was a hard worker and their most docile charge. Docile? I didn’t know what that meant but I was ready for the job.”

“His name was Hugh Spaulding and his wife was Mrs. Spaulding; I never learned her first name. He was a big fat man who cared only about himself. He never talked to me or looked at me; any thing he had to say was told to his wife and she told me what he wanted. My job was to serve him his meals in bed, mostly breakfast but sometimes dinner too. When he and the Missus ate in the dinning room I served there too except when they had guests then I was supposed to stay outta sight. I had to change his sheets every day and make his bed. I emptied the chamber pot and laid out his clothes on the bed for him.

When he come back from hunting I had to pull his boots off and put his slippers down for him; my work was easy.”

“They gave me the closet under the stairwell for my bedroom and I ate in the kitchen after everybody was finished. Big Ned Washington, the black cook, always heated up the leftovers for me and that was the best eatin’ I ever had. Never got fat though: I been skinny all my life.”

“Most times I got done early so I was free to wander out back. There was stables, a barn, and horse pasture. There was pigs, chickens, horses, and cows. There was one mean billy goat with big horns you didn’t dare turn your back on. Further on there was a big apple orchard. Sometimes I’d talk with the coach driver or hired hands but mostly I kept to myself. One time I got brave and walked all the way to the river. It was so nice I took my clothes off and sit down in that cold water.”

“You got bare-butt naked with no clothes on? Grandma!”

“Hush child ‘afore you get me a blushing. There weren’t nobody around and besides I didn’t have nothing for somebody to see. I always wished I learned how to swim though.”

“Things was so good that I should’a been happy but I wasn’t; I wanted to have somebody to talk to.

I wanted to see somebody my own age. I was gitting paid two dollars a week but I never saw any of it. The Missus said that she was saving it for me. Don’t get me wrong I didn’t wanna go crazy I jest wanted somebody to notice me.

“Hee! Hee! You just wanted to meet some boy and swap spits with him.

“You little rascal you got me blushing for sure now. You’re gonna git yourself in hot water with your teasing. You learned all that teasing from Cab Cleebo. He’s the biggest and meanest tease in the county.

It’d be best if you forgot about teasing and just say nice things about folks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Jest remember don’t go laughing at folks, don’t make fun of ‘em and you’ll get a whole lot further in life. Let’s see where was I…oh yeah…One day Ned told me there was a circus in town. He said there’d be lots of folks there, young and old. I went to the Missus and said I wanted to go. She said she would ask Mr. Spaulding at dinner. When she asked him he didn’t know who Emma was even though I was standing right there. When she kept after him he said go on and let her go but if we all go to the poor house she can’t say he didn’t tell her so.”

“The Missus gave me three dollars and told me to be home before dark ‘else she couldn’t be responsible for me. Bradford, the coach driver, took me down to the trolley stop. I had tokens so I didn’t spend any money for fare. I been downtown before but never by myself. Ever’ time I turned around folks was bumping into me; I couldn’t even stop and look around. I went in a ice cream parlor and spent five cents The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

for a bowl of chocolate ice cream; I never had chocolate before always vanilla or peach. I asked the woman dressed in fancy clothes sitting at the table next to me where the circus was and she told me she was going by there and would give me a lift.”

“That woman had the grandest carriage I ever saw; it put the Spaulding’s coach to shame. It was mahogany brown and sparkled in the sun. Her driver looked like a king, dressed in his fancy uniform. The horses was Clydesdales and strutted with their noses in the air. She was the only nice rich lady I ever met.

She told me not to talk to strangers when she let me off at the circus.”

“Oh! I gotta stop now and fix dinner. I’ll tell ya more tomorrow. Grandma releases Archie, gets up, and walks into the kitchen.

***

Grandma Johnson is standing on her front porch watching Archie run toward her. When he stops she says, “You’re late and you’re coming from the wrong way.”

Archie hangs his head and looks at the ground. “I know, Grandma.”

“It’s Paulie and all those other boys. They been chasing you. Ain’t they?”

Archie raises his head and looks Grandma in the eye. “Yeah but they ain’t gonna catch me. I got everything figgered out.” He turns and runs out on the sidewalk, pointing his finger north in the direction of Washington School. “When school gits out they all guard the front. I go out the back door and climb the back fence. I walk out past all the streets and houses to the canal. I walk on the canal ‘till it goes towards town then I climb through the fence and walk through cow pastures and stuff like that. Nobody sees me ‘till I have to cross Paradise Road but once I cross that everything’s OK. I can come straight here ‘cause nobody figgers that I come from back that way.” While he’s talking he sweeps his arm in a wide arc with his finger pointing from north to west to south. “They always guard my house ‘stead of yours so I wait ‘till supper time to go home.”

Grandma shakes her head. “This ain’t right. And to think my own grandson’s involved in this dirty business. I’m gonna tell Lonnie. He’ll know what to do. This ain’t gonna go on much longer. If Lonnie don’t do sumthin’ I’ll take my skillet to him.” She puts her arm around Archie. “Come on. If I put lots of sugar in the tea will you have some with me?”

Archie and Grandma sit on the couch cradling mugs of hot tea in their hands. Grandma takes a loud slurp and Archie giggles. “Whatcha’ laughing about?"

“Sorry, Grandma, I can’t help it.”

“You little dickins you’re making fun of poor ol’ granny.” She sets her cup on the floor. “Come here to me so’s I can squeeze the daylights outta ya.”

Archie sets his cup on the floor and scoots into Grandma’s arms, wrapping his arms around her, and burying his face in her chest. “Archie, I don’t know how I lived my life without’cha. You make me feel so good when we’re hugging each other. That Ma and Pa of yours don’t know what a treasure you are.”

“I love you, Grandma.”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

“I don’t talk so good with my teeth gone. Seems like only you, Lonnie, and Andy understand me anymore. Paulie and Molly either can’t or won’t understand me. Where was we on the story telling?”

“That nice rich lady just took you to the circus.”

“Oh yes... I had waited my whole life to go to the circus and I was so excited. I wanted to see the bearded lady, the fat lady, the pretzel man, the tiny people, the sword swallower, the fire-eater, the trapeze artists, the clowns, the tigers, and the elephants. I wanted to see everything. I wanted to do everything but I couldn’t.

I just couldn’t go up to the ticket window and buy a ticket with everybody watching. I was so scared all I could do was walk and get bumped around by all the folks rushing here and there. Finally, I bought some pink cotton candy and I didn’t like it.”

“You don’t like cotton candy? I seen it in the picture show and it looks good.”

“Too sweet for me. Reminded me of the desert we got in the girl’s home: lots of sugar to cover up the nasty stuff underneath. Anyways I kept walking, just letting the crowd push me along and I ended up in the section where you could play games for prizes. You know, throw baseballs at wooden milk bottle-like things and knock ‘em over. Stuff like that.”

“I seen that in the picture show. I seen the circus there too.”

“You kids nowadays are too smart ‘cause ya seen it all in the picture show. Without the movies you wouldn’t know nothing.”

“What’d you play, Grandma?”

“I didn’t play nothing, at least for awhile. I just watched and walked around to see all the games. There was this one game that was crowded and lots of hootin’ and hollarin’ going on. I walked over there and the purtiest man I ever saw was in the stall running the game.”

Archie picks his head up and looks Grandma in the eye with a big smile on his face. “I knowed it.”

Grandma pushes his head back down. “Hush. It ain’t what ya think. This man was not only handsome but he had a way about him that had everybody wantin' to listen to him. And he talked. Oh how he talked.

He talked a mile a minute, calling out to folks that was hanging back, telling them to come over and throw a ring around some purty little doll. He even give away free throws just to get ‘em started.”

Grandma looks at the ceiling with tears in her eyes and a far away look on her face. “Then he said sumthin’ I will never forget. He said, if any of you young bucks are feeling frisky come out back with me after I finish here. I’ll give any man that can whip me in the boxing ring twenty dollars. Hell, you don’t have to whip me. I’ll give twenty dollars to the man that can last three rounds with me.”

Grandma uses a hanky to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. “I looked around and none of the fellers looked like they wanted to go for the money. There was two big men standing next to me. One of ‘em told the other, Don’t tangle with him; he’s a pro. I didn’t know what that meant but I figgered it was sumthin’ mighty powerful because they was bigger than him.”

“Then that circus man turned and looked right at me. He pointed his finger and said, That pretty little lady right there. Come on up here and try your hand at winning a prize. Don’t be shy. I’ll let you play for free until you get the hang of it.”

“Nobody called me pretty before. I tried to get away but the crowd pushed me right up front. I was shaking so bad that I couldn’t come close to those dolls. He took hold of me and I quit shaking. I throwed a few and I was comin’ close so he started charging me. I used all my money up and didn’t win nothing.

He said, I can’t let this pretty little lady go away empty handed. Choose a doll, any doll on the shelf. I The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

picked the littlest one he had and he said, No, only my best doll is good enough for you. So he gave me the biggest doll he had.”

“It was gittin’ late and I had to be home before dark so I walked over to the trolley stop and sit on the bench. I still had my tokens so I figgered to git home on time even if I had to walk from the end of the line.

Then his voice come from behind me.”

“Pretty little lady, fancy meeting you here.”

“I knowed he followed me but I didn’t care; I jest wanted to hear him talk and he looked so good. He had a new suit on with a tie and shiny black shoes. His Stetson was sparklin’ white, without a smudge on it. With his big shoulders he was perfect. I jest didn’t know what to say. But that didn’t matter ‘tall ‘cause he did all the talking. He told me his name was Tom Johnson and he been with the circus all his life. His folks died before he was old enough to remember them. He talked on and on and I didn’t want him to stop. Purty soon it was dark and the last trolley had already left so he took me over to the circus and hitched up a buggy.”

“I told him I was in trouble for coming home after dark and he said he would talk to the Spauldings for me. But when we got there the porch lamp was lit and the door was locked. My belongings was sitting on the steps with a note pinned to ‘em. Mrs. Spaulding said I had disgraced everybody by staying out so late and if she ever saw me again she would call the police.”

*** “Hey! Anybody to home? And where’s my supper?” Lonnie sticks his head around the corner and grins at Grandma and Archie.

Grandma, followed by Archie, leaps to her feet and follows Lonnie into the kitchen. “Lonnie, you gotta do sumthin’. Paulie and all those other boys are chasing Archie home every day.”

“Ha! Ha! I thought you had sumthin’ hard for me to do.” Lonnie roars with laughter as he looks down at Archie. “I’ll just get the ol’ boxing gloves out, line those boys up, and Archie can fight each and every one of ‘em till they don’t wanna fight no more.”

Lonnie stands in the tiny kitchen facing Grandma and Archie. His wide grin weakens under the shocked stare of both. “Hey! You two love birds! Don’t look so serious. I was only funnin’.”

Grandma’s tone is harsh. “This ain’t nothing to poke fun at. Those boys are gonna hurt Archie bad if they catch him. And Archie’s too little ta fight those big boys. Those boys are always fightin’ and Archie never has had a fight in his life. He’s just too nice a kid to have all those no-goods chasing him.”

Lonnie’s habitual smile disappears. “Is that right, Archie? You never had a fight?”

“I had lots of fights back in Denver.”

Lonnie turns back to Grandma. “See there? He knows how ta fight.”

“Hogwash! He was just a baby when he lived back there. He ain’t never fought nobody. Ya gotta do sumptin’.”

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Title, Impression, sunrise, Artist: Claude Monet, Completion Date: 1873, Style: Impressionism, Genre: cityscape

The Linnet's Wings

When Impression, Sunrise hung at its first exhibition in 1874, art critic Louis Leroy derisively used the term “Impressionistic,” from the title of this painting, to describe Monet’s works. This term was quickly adopted by what were soon to be known as the Impressionist painters, and the exhibition which included other works by Impressionist artists, was from then on referred to as the “Impressionist Exhibition.” This painting was later stolen in 1985

WINTER ' FOURTEEN

Lonnie smacks his fist into his open hand. “Well he’s gonna have ta learn how ta fight. Those monkeys are like a pack of dogs. They’ll chase ya till ya stop runnin’ and fight back. You’re gonna have ta teach him, Grandma.”

“Me? I’m too old for that kind of shenanigans.”

“Ha! Ha! You taught me and Tommy and Andy and ya woulda’ taught Paulie if he wern’t too ornery ta listen.”

*** Archie is standing in the alley behind the Johnson’s house. He is wearing faded brown leather boxing gloves. The surface of the gloves is hard, cracked, and worn. The gray wool-like stuffing is pushing through some of the cracks. Grandma says, “Keep your gloves up around your face. Don’t drop ‘em for an instant. Ya gotta learn ta get used to having those on. They’re gonna get hot and heavy but ya gotta not let that stop ya. Keep your hands up. For now, you ain’t gonna do no punching.

If you hit me I’ll have your hide. Jest sidestep to one side or the other when I come atcha. Don’t let me git close enough ta hit ya.”

Grandma steps towards her pupil and Archie throws his hands in the air and leaps backwards.

“No! No! That ain’t the way ta do it. I see we’re gonna have ta start at square one.”

Two days later Archie and Grandma are sitting on the back steps while Archie, wearing boxing gloves, cools off. Grandma says, “Remember when ya met Andy? Well ya didn’t know it but he was testing ya. He tests everybody all the time. He said you showed spunk when he said sumptin’ ya didn’t like about your mama. And when he shot a punch atcha, ya pulled your head outta the way like a real fighter. The capper was when he run with ya. He said ya could run fast and that showed that ya was stronger than most your size. He said for a little piss pot you had all the makin’s of a fighter and I never knowed Andy to be wrong about sumpthin’ like that. So don’t worry about nothing. Just do what I tell ya. By the end of next week you’ll know how to move around and we can start teaching ya how ta punch and ever’ thing else.”

Archie listens but his mind is in turmoil: what does dancing around in a circle have to do with fighting? He has begun to understand that holding his gloves up will help but moving around without punching just ain’t right. He studies Grandma and decides he’ll do it to please her. ### from the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris, but was recovered undamaged in 1990, and was put back on display at the museum in 1991.

The Linnet's Wings

WINTER ' FOURTEEN