137

04

GUEST EDITED BY EDWARD HIRSCH

TriQuarterly

TriQuarterly is an

international

journal of writing, art and cultural inquiry

published at Northwestern

University

IriQuarterly

137

Editor of this issue: Edward Hirsch

Editor

Susan Firestone Hahn Associate Editor

Contributing Editors

Ian Morris

John Barth Lydia R. Diamond

Operations Coordinator

Rita Dove

Kirstie Felland

Stuart Dybek Richard Ford

Cover Design

Gini Kondziolka

Sandra M. Gilbert Robert Hass

Assistant Editors

Edward Hirsch

Joanne Diaz Jean Hahn

Li-Young Lee

TriQuarterly Fellow Carolina Hotchandani

Lorrie Moore

Alicia Ostriker Carl Phillips Robert Pinsky

Editorial Assistants

Susan Stewart

Maria Lei

Mark Strand

Margaret McEvoy

Alan Williamson

Contents

poetry

9

Yesterday; Sub Dennis O'Driscoll

36 Back in the Early Days of the Twenty-First Century Simon Armitage

38 Grandmother with Mink Stole, Sky Harbor Airport, Phoenix, Arizona, 1959 Michael Collier

40

42

Stein, in Produce; The Joke Philip Schultz Mantra; The Classics; Fifth Season Tony Hoagland

48 Iguana Song of the Children; Watercolor; Lesson; Dovecote Stuart Dybek 52 Catch Linda Gregerson 55 The Buried Life; The Poem Found in a

Dress for Success

Iudith Hall 59 The Lake on the Hill; Forgotten Painting;

The Garwood Arms 'ames Longenbach

68 Ivan Ilyich at the Lake; Shaking off

the Snow

Ieffrev Harrison

7I

After a Death; Sandhill Cranes at the Platte River Naomi Shihab Nye

73

Pigeons, a Love Poem; Impossible Dance Barbara Ras

76 On Cantrell's Pond; Campfire in a Light Rain; A Heron on the Oconee David Bottoms

81 Nectar Lisa Bellamy

82 Storm Cicadas

John Kinsella

83 Early Evening; Plate Glass Catherine Barnett

85 Descent Karen Whalley 93

Sarangi Music; The Curvature of Earth Arthur Sze

100

You Are a Traveler at Heart. There Will Be

Many Journeys.

Jynne Dilling Martin 101

In the Garden of Tiger Lilies; The Journey Meena Alexander

128 Cold Sweat; Rock-Out Austin Segrest 130 From dear someone

Deborah Landau

131

Spinning Joanne Dominique Dwyer

133 Alaska Aubade (Summer) Olena Kalytiak Davis

134

Desire; "Dad, with your one

...

"; The Stove

Michael Schmidt

138 Frost on the Octopus Nicky Beer 139 For Me Nothing

Stephen Berg 140

Algarve Sarah Arvio

142

Three; Nine Harriet J. Melrose

144

Talking Back to the Mad World Sarah C. Harwell

145

Mommy Writing Poem Now; And Speaking of Strategic Planning lisa Badner

148 Aftermath Bill Johnston

162 Visions for the Last Night on Earth Brian Barker

adapation

translations

90 More for Santob Peter Cole

87 Tired Animal; Sleep Peacfully Alfonsina Storni, Translated from the Spanish by lauren Watel

89 From Mal des fant8mes (Ghost Sickness) Benjamin Fondane, Translated from the French by Alissa Valles 104 Love Poem; Overcoat; Bread; The Dream Milan Djordjevic, Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic

109

Yes, I am; Last Night Ryszard Krynicki, Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

112

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets Wislawa Szymborska, Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

122

Since you've lost your memory; The Rhone

Valley Adam Zagajewski, Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

fiction

12

The Master of Novices Amber Dermont

29 The Leaper

Tracy Daugherty 114 Gurov in Manhattan Ehud Havazelet

essays

63 Greenhouse Dreams Marjorie Sandor 124

What Really Happened

Madge McKeithen 149 Reverse Immortality: The Memory of Music Sarah Rothenberg

165 Contributors

Cover Painting: C by Amy Sillman

Dennis 0' Driscoll

Yesterday Been there.

Done that.

Digested the three requisite meals.

Reacted with

appropriate outrage to whatever headlined

controversies there were.

The dead took no hand, act or part.

The children of the future made no demands.

Its like will not

be seen again.

Those of us alive then had the whole world to ourselves.

The whole livelong day.

9

Sub

And if, from the get-go, life were available

like a magazine subscription, would you­

knowing what you do now-sign up?

Take the six-month trial ("Money back if not satisfied")?

Tick the "Yes, please" box?

The "Please rush me" one with the "Bill me later" option?

Or would you sit on your calloused hands,

refusing all inducements, declining the introductory gifts, the easy terms available to new subscribers?

Sit there, lend your name to nothing?

That warm morning, saved like a lock of ungraying hair, when you dragged a

stiff kitchen chair to the garden,

the gold-embossed blue cover of your school library classic

matching the hyacinth-blue wrapper of the Cad bury's chocolate bar you'd stocked for later pleasure.

That blackbird whose voice was

recognizable from the old

monastic poem penned in the margins of a vellum page.

That observant lake: logging every detail,

noting everything it saw, taking an impress of the morning like the credit card of a hotel guest at the check-in desk.

IO

That moment in summer when butterflies re-enter your orbit:

package holiday tourists bounding through Arrivals in Hawaiian shirts.

The dipstick iridescence of a dragonfly.

You know well you'd end up

pretending to hover over the boxes before ticking "Send no further offers" or the one starkly marked "No, thanks."

Then get on with your life.

I I

Amber Dermont

The Master of Novices

I. Via Dolorosa

That summer, before we lost her forever, my older sister, Rachel, helped me

memorize the Stations of the Cross. While Dad fished his river and

Mom tanned her freckled skin, Rachel and I huddled together in her

basement bedroom under posters of The Cure and Bad Religion studying

supposed-Savior as he stumbled falling once, twice, three times, on the way to his tomb. I was a rising junior at Mercy Academy. Rachel, at

our

twenty-one, had just dropped out of Salem State College. We both agreed that our favorite station was the sixth, the one where Veronica

knelt beside Jesus to wipe the sweat and anguish from his forehead.

Rachel liked it because she thought it was sexy. "Veronica was a fox. She

wanted Jesus. Wanted him bad." I liked the station because the photo­

rendering of Veronica in my Spirituality Now! confirmation guidebook looked just like me when I wore my hair pulled back, silhou­ etted my lids with smoky eye shadow, and bit my lips to make them puffier.

As I sprawled across Rachel's queen bed, cramming for my confir­ mation, eager to become a "soldier of Christ," my sister sashayed around the room snapping an orange afghan. "The Veronica is the name of a bullfighting move." Rachel had spent that fall of her junior year in Spain studying Gaudi, EI Greco, and a Basque bartender named Enrique. "The matador dances super-close to his prey, grazes the bull with his cape, and then strikes." My long-limbed sister dropped the afghan net over my realist

12

head, tackled me, slapping my belly, spackling my face with kisses. Mix­ ing her affection with violence.

While at Mercy Academy, Rachel liked to wear a blue bra under the white blouse of her school uniform. Liked to flirt with Father Patrick

Burleigh. Liked to fail Physical Education and get .Ns in Advanced Cal­ culus. Liked to taunt the nuns with nicknames: "Sister Afterthought," "Sister Sacrifice," "Sister Slippery When Wet." I still remember Rachel canceling her own confirmation. The night

before that ceremony, my sister decided to dye her honey-colored hair a vivid magenta. When I woke up the next morning, the yellow guest

towels, the ceramic tiles in the bathroom, the wicker hamper, and

porcelain sink were all stained a murderous red. I was certain that some­ one

had been killed.

A week later Father Burleigh expelled Rachel from Mercy for "god­

lessness."

With her punky tresses, her buttery skin, her sharp feline features, Rachel was less groupie and more rock star. Her magenta makeover in

tandem with her renunciation of God, and her glorious schoolgirl ex­

pulsion boosted her boastful confidence. After her aborted confirma­ tion, I carne home from catechism to find my pink-haired sister tying herself to her bed. Rachel wore a patent leather bustier and army surplus pants as she busied herself, binding her ankles together with strips of silk, securing her feet to the anemic iron rods that fenced in her foot­ board.

"Are those Dad's neckties?" I asked.

"Help me out," she said. "I need you to do my arms."

I was curious, and so I used a standard square knot to fasten my sis­ ter's bony wrists to her head posts. Crucifying her to the bed.

"Is this some kind of game?" I asked.

"Vince McGowan wants to tie me up and fuck me. I need to know

how tight to make the knots."

II.

Receiving the Cross

As Catholics, my sister and I had the added pressure of parents who'd

both been in their holy orders. Our voluptuous mother joined the con­

running away from the constraints of her own devout She lasted for almost six years. Neither Rachel nor I ever took family. vent at nineteen,

our

glamorous mother's bout with religion seriously. Curvy and fertile, 13

Mom was quick to warn us: "I got pregnant the first time I had sex."

Mom spent every summer of our childhood wearing a bright green bikini, smoking thin chocolate-colored cigarillos and reading to us from embossed with golden lockets and paintings of men thick

paperbacks

and women in the onset of arousal. She called us, "her bounty," and as­ sured us that we constituted the one right choice she'd made. It was our father the near-priest who worried us all. Mom, Rachel, and I each feared that he would eventually abandon us for God. A well-stocked river snaked behind our modest cedar-shingled house. During the school year, Dad marked his time as a librarian at

dur­

Bridgewater High in order to spend his vacations fishing. One night downstream from Dad, the ing that final summer, Rachel and I stood three of us in khaki waders flicking our lines overhead. Dad and I were and con­ strictly catch and release, but Rachel proudly killed, filleted, sumed her trout. We listened to Rachel complain about college-the lack of intellectuals, the crappy dinning hall, the dingy dorms. "I'm not for Derrida, not expecting Le Cirque, I don't even demand maid

hoping

school." service, but would it hurt to run a dry mop over that "I had maid service once." Our father bragged that he'd lived for a lllinois. This time at what was once the Hilton Hotel of North Aurora, the summer of 1962. Dad was in his first year of study as a Jesuit. The an up­ resort our dad called home had been erected near brick and

was

glass

scale horseracing track with the promise that the new interstate would racetrack pros­ glide right by the hotel's luxury accommodations. The Hilton was the were but when the finally constructed,

pered,

roadways

"What if you built a hotel and twenty miles from the closest off-ramp. room in the inn." The no travelers came?" Dad joked. "Too much Hilton Catholics dodged a major financial loss by charitably donating hotel to Saint Loyola's Society of Jesus. "I lived their

Ignatius profitless a relic 109." Dad jangled a set of imaginary keys summoning from his former life. "My sliding glass door opened out onto a courtyard with an Olympic-sized swimming pool."

"Sounds like the good life," I laughed.

"You should have seen me dive off the spring board," Dad straight­ ened his body, saluting us with his muscular arms, pretending to jackknife to Rachel. into our river. "I gave up that good life for you." Dad pointed in room

"Does that make me the anti-Christ?" Rachel asked.

"This remains to be seen," he said.

14

III.

Falling For The First Time

Typically, a man joins the Jesuits right after high school. Our father en­ tered after college. By then he'd had sex with at least two different women. Rachel and 1 weren't supposed to know this. From her basement bedroom, Rachel treasured upon a box of rotting bibles. She fished out our father's red leather journal from the decay.

"You know how Mom and Dad oppress us with their virginity? Well, I've got the scoop on Dad's first time. Mom was like maybe his third."

She wouldn't let me hold the journal or thumb through its gilt edged pages. Rachel motioned for me to sit and play audience while she deciphered our father's tight, slanted cursive. She read to me about Dad's first sexual encounter. On a stormy afternoon at a friend's beach house in Cape May, a chubby Polish Catholic, lost to our father in a marathon game of "Sorry." She offered up her virginity as reward. Said, "I don't know how to do this," then squeezed our scrawny, knock-kneed

dad hard between her pink-sunburned thighs. Dad thought she'd break him in two.

The best and last of our father's pre-Jesuit lovers was a married Protestant who worked at his parents' grocery store. He often thought of

Lois Pendleton on his afternoon walks around the Hilton-imagining

the two of them on vacation there together, playing tennis, ordering

service, the only guests in the entire resort. He knew that she was back home, stacking cans of stewed tomatoes, counting the inven­ busy room

tory on miniature jars of baby food. Lois was tall. She could reach up to

the highest shelves merely by stretching her arms. Sometimes, when she did this, her sweater would rise above her waist revealing the muscles of her lower back. Dad imagined Lois in her home at night pouring a shot of rye for her electrician husband, brushing her gray teeth with baking

soda, undressing for bed. The final time they had sex, he made her cry out to God, made her entire body shudder and convulse. He stopped, pulled back, and watched her recover on his narrow bed, her toes

pointed, her face and chest blushing red. When he asked if she was okay, she rolled over, laughing. "Funny boy," she said. "That's more like it."

Six weeks later, our father joined the Jesuits. He knew what he was missing.

15

IV. Judged by Pilate

Once I mastered the fourteen Stations of the Cross, Rachel offered to

quiz me on my saints. She didn't know them herself. My sister, her brown hair sugared with streaks of platinum blond, strutted past me in a familiar pair of white terry cloth shorts, a red and blue striped

tube top.

"You look like a patriotic trollop," I said.

"True or False," Rachel challenged. "Saint Innocent is the patron saint of pedophiles."

"Wait a minute," I moved closer to her. "Those are my clothes."

"True, but I fill them out." Rachel shook her ass.

I cinched the back of the tube top stretching the elastic, exposing

the top bulbs of her breasts.

"Perv," she said. "If you want to see my tits, just ask." Rachel shim­ mied the tube top down past her nipples flashing her C-cups in my face.

"Mom gave me these. What did she give you?"

"Self-respect." I buried my face in my study guide.

Rachel swiped the book away, rifling through the pages. "All of these names repeat. Six Saint Marys, John of on-and-on, Francis of this­ and-that. Total lack of imagination."

"Father Burleigh claims each one is different." I protested.

"No." Rachel squeezed her breasts together. "Trust me. They're all the same."

V. The Virgin and the Crown

Rachel kept disappearing that summer only to return from her lost weekends hung over and insolvent. Her skin blistered and peeling. From my bedroom window, I'd watch as Rachel kissed-off a different deadbeat

boy, piloting a different rusted beater. The boys hightailing it in reverse burning down our driveway before our father had a chance to shame and menace. My sister left college because of all the sex she'd had. "I'm the whore of Salem State," she told me one night. She'd misplaced herself among a host of guys: a sculptor named Ephraim, a dorm security guard she called St. Christopher, a struggling actor who impersonated a war­ lock at the witch trial museum, a bisexual Harvard divinity student, a late-night caller our father referred to as Him Again.

"Ephraim thinks I'm a slut. St. Chris figures I was abused. The war16

lock believes I'm certifiable. Truth is I'm just promiscuous. Like Daddy was before he got all full of Jesus." She knelt on her bed and began to bounce. "At least I'm not afraid of sex."

I hadn't so much as kissed anyone. My only crush so far was on an­

other girl. Malaya smelled like lemons and mint. Her family had just moved from the Philippines where her father owned a matchbook factory.

One afternoon, while we waited outside the church for our parents to pick us up from catechism, Malaya dared me to lick the blue tip of her father's

strike-anywhere matches. "They taste like blueberries," she insisted. The matches were waterproof and after we kissed them, we struck them against the church walls sending a shower of sparks across the limestone.

"I know what's wrong with you," Rachel trampolined on her bed.

"You're frigid."

"And you're a Catholic girl cliche," I threw a throw pillow at Rachel.

"No." She caught the pillow in midair. "I'm a revolutionary."

"I bet you have diseases." I countered. "I bet you get pregnant."

Rachel stopped jumping. "I've been pregnant twice already," she told me. "If it happens again, I'll probably keep it."

My parents and I spent the hours before my confirmation searching for Rachel. We checked her walk-in closet, our next-door neighbor's gazebo, under the derelict screened-in porch. I scouted the river, scoured the marshy backyard, turned over Dad's abandoned canoe, and called Rachel's name out to the early morning. When we were kids Rachel's favorite game involved convincing me to hide while she promised to seek. Fool

that I was I would always agree tucking myself into a kitchen cabinet while Rachel, my seeker, rode off on her Huffy twin-speed. When I was

three, Rachel seduced me into following a leathery black toad as it hopped all the way down into a construction trench. She abandoned me a dozen feet below ground and feigned ignorance when Mom asked where I was. I was

trapped for over an hour before an off-duty mail carrier heard me

singing for my sister. At the emergency room, while the doctor set my bro­ ken wrist, my father nicknamed Rachel "Bully" and me "Damsel."

As we left for church without Rachel, Dad scribbled a note and

tucked it under a Jesus flaming-heart refrigerator magnet: "Dear Bully:

Why hast thou forsaken us?"

VI. Veronica

When we arrived at St. Theresa's, my sister was already there, kneeling in a center pew, purple and gold light from the stained

glass windows

streaming down over her penitent face. She'd walked the three and a half miles in plastic flip-flops. Rachel smiled upon seeing us and said, "I came

early to pray."

Our father slid gracefully into the pew and knelt beside his eldest child. He'd given her a non-Catholic, Old Testament name: Rachel, the

beloved daughter of Laban, the favorite wife of Jacob, the younger sister of Leah. Dad had told us how Jacob worked seven years for Laban in order

to

wed Rachel, and when tricked into marrying Leah, Jacob

worked another seven years to earn the hand of his true love. Though my name was not Leah, I had a sense of what it was like to be something

other than the chosen one. I watched Dad hug Rachel's burnished shoulders as Mom kissed the apple of her cheek. I couldn't help but feel

that this day was no longer mine.

The ceremony was a series of prayers and processionals. Our regular and special confirmation names were read aloud by the priest. Then

each one of us made our way to the front of the church so Father

Burleigh could lay his calloused hands on us, ask us to reject evil, and bless us with chrism oil. Mom had told me how before Vatican II, the

priest would say, "Pax tecum," "Peace be with you," and then slap you across your face. Just enough to sting you. Just enough to make you ques­ tion what it was you were doing.

I wore a white silk gown fitted at the waist with opalescent beads

embroidered on the skirt. When I sat, I felt as though I was perched on

pincushion. My mother had woven a crown of fresh lilacs into my blond hair. Malaya sat beside me smelling my purple flowers. I could see the shadow of her brown nipples pressing against her white linen dress.

We paid little attention to the Mass, rubbing our stocking feet against the worn leather kneeler. Malaya pulled at my pearls. "You look like a a

duchess," she said.

I church-whispered, "Want to meet my parents?"

"The nun and the priest?" she asked.

"The sexy nun and the not-quite priest," I said.

When my sister went up to receive communion, she stared into Fa­ ther Burleigh's jaundiced eyes as he placed the Eucharist in her cupped hands. A moment passed between them. I could feel her hatred, his dis­

dain, and something else. Maybe lust, maybe disgust. Rachel did not

bring the sacrament to her mouth. I watched her hide the Body of Christ in her hand like a card shark palming an ace. She returned to the pew, and knelt down, inspecting the thin,

translucent wafer. Rachel had

refused her own confirmation because she didn't aspire to be a child of God. "I'll do it if you want," she told our parents. "But I'm not ready to commit." Dad surprised us all by saying that he understood. "You're not eager to be nailed up on that cross."

VII. Cyrene

At the end of the service, my family did not rush to congratulate or pho­

tograph me. Instead I watched our father grab my sister by the arm, steering her down the aisle and out of the church, her flip-flops slapping against the marble floor. Our mother followed, whispering at my sister's side, "We're near the end with you." When we reached the parking lot, Dad insisted Rachel take the Communion.

"You can't hold onto it," he said. "It's not right."

Rachel looked away. Her arm flexed as she tightened her fist.

I wanted to make a joke, defuse the drama, reclaim the day for my­

self. I thought of mentioning that I too had always considered smuggling out a Eucharist wafer, just to have it, just in case. I didn't see the prob­

lem, but I was still thinking like a child.

Our father held Rachel's face in his hands. For a moment, I thought he might kiss her. A moment later, I wanted him to strike her.

Dad backed Rachel up against our Fiat and squeezed her wrist. Our Mom begged him to stop. Rachel fought him with her free hand, pound­

ing his chest and shouting, "Do this in memory of me." One by one he forced her fingers open. She'd crushed the Eucharist. Our father swept the crumbled mess up from my sister's palm, opened his own mouth, and dissolved the bread on his tongue. Then our angry red-faced father walked away from his daughter, stranding his family in the church park­

ing lot. Abandoning us like we always feared he would.

VIII. The Second Fall

Mom ran off to calm Dad while Rachel drifted downtown. "I need a

drink," she said to me as she wandered, anxious for the bars to swing open their Sunday doors. 1 hailed a ride back home from Malaya. We

gossiped together in the back seat of her parents' station wagon sweat­ ing in our white gowns. "Your sister's beautiful," she said to me. "But she needs to be careful about her anger. It will make her old and wrinkled."

Malaya's family invited me to brunch but I declined. Afraid of seeming too eager. Afraid that I might covet her parents. When they pulled up to the river house, I snapped off one of the pearls from my dress and handed it to Malaya. "So we remember," I said.

With nothing to do, I sneaked into Rachel's room and read our fa­ ther's journal. Discovered how that summer at the Hilton Seminary, my father and his best friend Brother Anthony Scibona found a movie pro­ jector and a cache of film reels in one of the hotel's entertainment rooms and instituted an outdoor film festival. Brother Ambrose, the Master of

Novices, the man in charge of shepherding the younger Jesuits on their

spiritual course, a man who threatened always to drain the Olympic­ sized swimming pool, insisted on viewing the films in his private cell be­ fore granting his approval. The Marx Brothers were deemed acceptable.

The Three Stooges too subversive.

One night, in honor of the North Aurora Thoroughbred Derby, Dad chose to screen the Marx Brothers' classic A Day At The Races. A group of Jesuits from Chicago had driven up to North Aurora with a handful

of inner city boys in tow. These urban Jesuits had promised their city kids a spiritual retreat and a trip to the track. My father described how one

of these men, a handsome, athletic- looking priest named Dominic,

knew Anthony, how this man commented on the heat and asked if any­ one ever

used the pool to cool off at night. "What do you say we have a

midnight dip?" he asked. Anthony laughed. My father said nothing.

Dad had seen A Day at the Races several times, but he loved sitting on the warm lawn watching the men in starched Roman collars and the young boys in white cotton 'Tshirts howl over the purity of these other brothers, the Marx Brothers, and their desire for a good prank, their holy need for fun. My father began to hope that another film might be shown, a double feature-maybe Saint Joan or Some Like It Hot. The brothers rarely had access to entertainment and hardly ever heard reports on the outside world. The first disruption Dad noted came in August of 1962 when Marilyn Monroe died. That night at dinner, Brother Ambrose spoke of Marilyn's overdose as a parable, as an exam­ ple of how excess would always be punished, as a warning against wan­ tonness and sacrilege. Ambrose advised in his Irish brogue, "We can all learn a great deal from her passing." Though more familiar with the fa­ mous men she'd married, and though she'd always struck him as a little 20

dime store, my father thought shouldn't we mourn, shouldn't we cast our judgments aside. As the old priest sat down, the young, celibate men hunched over their simple meals, bowed their shaved heads in unison, and prayed for their lost platinum goddess.

When my mother and father returned home, they apologized for

leaving me at church, promised to fete me with lobster. 1 pouted and claimed it wouldn't be enough.

"It was my confirmation," 1 said. "Didn't it mean anything to you?"

Dad nodded to Mom that he would make amends. He invited me out to our screened, in

porch, overlooking our river. Dad insisted he was

proud of me. Joked that 1 might carry the cross for all of us. "Maybe you'll be our archbishop," he said.

"Do you ever miss it?" 1 asked.

Dad lamented the fact that he never went through with his mis­

sionary work in Chile. "I was keen on trolling this one lake famous for brown trout-big as a man's thigh. But then 1 met your mother."

Having spent the afternoon reading about his past, 1 quizzed him on leaving the brotherhood, abandoning his pursuit of righteousness. Dad smiled and reached into the beer cooler he kept on the porch. He told me not to take things so seriously.

"That Jesuit stuff was a long time ago. To be honest, 1 never really bought into it the way some of the other guys did." He twisted the top off the amber bottle. "The self-denial, the kneeling, the silence."

"You didn't talk much, did you?" I asked.

"When we did, we spoke mostly in Latin."

I imagined my father speaking in a dead language with men who had made their desires half dead.

IX. The Daughters of Jerusalem

Later that night, I went downstairs and found Rachel packing. She con,

fided, "I'm five months along. Due on Halloween." Then shoved a knot of clothes into a knapsack.

I noticed that she'd packed my favorite nightgown.

"Are you keeping it?" I asked uncertain if 1 was referring to her baby or my

nightgown.

"I'll give my spawn away. A wealthy Presbyterian couple, maybe a

pair of devout Buddhists, or a kick, ass family of Unitarians. No fucking Catholics."

2I

"How did this happen?" I heard myself ask.

"Don't you know," Rachel twirled around on her bare heels. "There

only so many stories for women. Be a nun. Get married, get raped, murdered.

Get pregnant and become a mother," she paused, "or not. get I want my own story, an unknown plot."

"I could be an aunt." Even then I suspected I might never have chil­ are

dren of my own. "Do mom and dad know?"

"Only if you tell them," she said.

My sister didn't leave that night. She disappeared for good a few days after my confirmation. Since she'd gone missing so often, our par­ ents didn't know to take this vanishing seriously. I said nothing. The days became weeks and I fantasized that Rachel had returned to Spain, that she was living in Barcelona earning her keep as a flamenco dancer.

I wanted her to send me postcards of men in pink tights fighting blood­ ied bulls. I'd hoped she might ask me to join her.

As time passed, my mother and I stopped attending Mass. It was the summer, and we were lazy from the heat. Mom and I went swimming in­ stead. She bought me my own green bikini. With every outing, I be­ lieved Mom was on the verge of confessing that I'd always been her favorite, that we were better off without Rachel flaunting, squawking.

"Rachel is her father's daughter," Mom balanced on top of an inner tube, swirling around one of the river's tide pools. "It kills him that they're so similar, so stubborn. I suppose she's like me too, I mean we look the same. But you, you're your own person. I was never as smart and

grounded as you."

"I'm like you and Dad in some ways." I dove under not waiting for a response.

With Rachel's disappearance, I felt free

to

invite

Malaya to the

house for sleepovers. The loud bickering space where Rachel preened and prodded was now filled by an elegant, quiet presence. When we

changed into our pajamas, Malaya always stripped off her clothes in front of me, unashamed, unafraid to let me see her. I'm not sure if Malaya understood how I felt, we were barely fifteen. Sometimes we'd

sleep in the same bed, her front pressed against my back. I'd feel her breath on my neck and hope that she might lean in, might brush her lips against my cheek. I wasn't even sure what women did as lovers but I

thought if there was some signal, some way for us to both agree that we wanted more, wanted to explore, that it might happen, and that both of us

would know what to do.

Only my father kept going to Mass kept praying for Rachel's return.

22

Dad had eavesdropped on late-night phone calls. I eavesdropped and heard him tell Mom that he believed Rachel was pregnant. He was cer­ tain that St. Christopher was to blame. Dad tracked his missing daugh­ ter down to a

boarding house in Hartford, Connecticut. She'd already

left, but the manager confirmed that the woman he'd been renting the back bedroom to was carrying a child.

In the Benedictine convent where I now volunteer on weekends,

where I clean the kitchen, stock the pantry, read verses to the dying nuns,

there are still young pregnant women who seek shelter before

Frightened, silent girls who suspend themselves in prayerful sleep. Wishing to be roused when their pregnancies are over.

Hoping to return to their lives with the promise that nothing has changed. During those months before giving birth, I am certain that my their adoptions.

sister did not go to a convent or a home for pregnant unwed mothers. I

imagine that pregnant Rachel found a willing man on a motorcycle and road off with him to his lakeside cabin. Maybe she taught him to fish the way

Dad had taught us. Even in brown, green waders with her belly

swollen, Rachel would have looked irresistible. Though this stranger was not her baby's father, with his Jesus hair and his Rasputin good looks he would make her swoon, pay the bills, and keep her happy until the time came to give up her child. He would beg her to make the baby theirs, promise to tum in his leathers and Kawasaki for driving loafers and a sedan. Rachel would be tempted, but my sister had convinced her, self that the child was not hers.

X. Stripped of Garments

One Sunday Malaya and I woke up on opposite sides of my bed. We had

planned to go to church together. At some point in the night, Malaya kicked off her blankets. I heard the rustling of nightclothes, the snap' ping of an elastic waistband, the movement of fingers. Watched her arm saw back and forth casting rapid shadows on the ceiling. Felt that side of the bed shake as her legs kicked. I wasn't sure if this was a signal. I asked, "Are you okay?" Malaya said nothing. I asked again. She said, "I'm sleeping."

Malaya dressed quickly that morning and insisted on calling her parents. "I'm not feeling well," she lied into the phone. While we waited for her dad to chariot her away, I showed Malaya my father's journal. To, gether we read about that night in North Aurora, how my father woke 23

up in the summer of 1962 and heard the splashing, the men running across

the concrete and torpedoing their bodies into the pool. Dad de­

scribed how he left his room, slid open the glass door, and spied the naked men and boys at play, the floodlights beaming over their bodies,

the boys muscular and taut. A potbellied Chicago priest, stood in the shallow end, smiling. His hand snaked down the front of his shorts.

None of the naked boys were being touched, but all were being watched.

Dad couldn't believe no one else had been alerted. Fearing he was stuck in a dream, he went and knocked on Anthony Scibona's door,

hoping his friend might help make sense of the evening. In his journal, he noted that Anthony said, "Come in," but my father was forever in­ clined to barge in unannounced. The door was open-why would a door in a seminary ever be locked? Anthony and Dominic were not having sex. Their clothes were strewn on the carpeted floor. The blankets and sheets pulled back. The naked men lounged with only a chessboard be­ tween them.

It was Dominic's move.

"Is that why your father quit?" Malaya asked me "No. He quit because he met my mother. They left their orders for

each other."

"You should have read the part where they met." Malaya seized the

book from me, began flipping through the pages. "What's wrong with

you?" she asked. "Don't you know how to tell a love story?"

XI. The Third Fall

A week after my father caught Anthony and Dominic together Dad was

roused from his sleep by Brother Ambrose and instructed to hurry to the rectory. Once there, Dad was surprised to see Dominic and several other

brothers all standing with their heads bowed. My father was certain that he was in trouble-he'd said nothing about the swimming, about the

potbellied priest and the naked boys, about his best friend and the hand­ some

Jesuit. This was his chance to come clean. Brother Ambrose

looked directly at my father as he spoke, "One of us is lost."

Brother Ambrose handed my father a flashlight, told him to search the grounds. "Check the trees," Ambrose said. "Our brother may be

hanging from one of them."

Dominic had come to visit Anthony that night only to find a sui­

cide note. "I love you. I've left to hang myself." He brought the note to Ambrose who asked no questions.

The brothers cut a path through the loamy woods surrounding the resort. As Dad stepped on wet moss and hemlock needles, he strobed his

bright beam over the lush canopies of hackberry and pear hawthorn, their green leaves burning in the moonglow. The men sought a body in the branches. My father did not want to find his friend.

Earlier that evening, half a dozen racehorses had broken free from their paddock at the North Aurora track. The thoroughbreds stam­

peded, galloping into the night, exhausting themselves until they found Brother Anthony Scibona, barefoot and wandering, a noose of rope cra­ dled in his arms. He'd been walking for miles on the traffickless road, praying for a strong tree bough. Instead he found himself corralled by these tired, breathless animals. An approximate sign from God.

XII. River of No Return

In the Old Testament, Rachel bore two children, Joseph and Benjamin.

She lost her life giving birth to her second son. When my father filled out the

missing person's report, he did not think of the biblical Rachel.

He thought of Marilyn Monroe dead in her bedroom and of Brother Ambrose's insistence that anything could be learned from her passing.

Marilyn couldn't have children, couldn't be anything other than sex to most people. I know from a television special that Marilyn visited schoolyards and longingly spied on children. I like this hearsay. In play­ grounds and parks across this country, I have searched for Rachel and her child on jungle gyms and swing sets. I have watched little girls and boys kick and pump their legs out to the sky, and I know that my sister is still alive, still present in the world in a way that I am not nor ever could be.

XIII. Missa Pro Defunctis

Anthony and Dominic drove up from New York for Rachel's memorial service. My numb mother introduced them to me as partners. I asked,

"What sort of business?" The men smiled. I knew they were gay, and wanted them to talk to me, wanted them to recognize some part of me.

"We're your father's old Jesuit pals." Anthony explained how he'd abandoned God for Hollywood, for best boy gigs on low-budget biker

flicks.

"It was fun while it lasted." Dominic rolled his

eyes. "Now we Ian­

guish in Westchester and run a multiplex."

Anthony placed a hand on my shoulder. "I'm sure you love her very much."

There was no body, no death to mourn. The service more of a vigil than a wake. Three months had passed since Rachel's disappearance. I wore my

white confirmation gown, the dress tight around my waist, the

pearls hanging on by their loose threads.

"Do you still play chess?" I asked Anthony. "My father told me that he'd always catch you and Dominic playing chess late at night."

Anthony raised his eyebrows, but Dominic understood. "We play," he said, "as often as we can."

XlV. Lamentation

In the decade since my sister's disappearance, my parents have hunted

down and blamed every one of her lovers. Have interrogated motel clerks and accused Father Burleigh of driving their daughter into de'

spair. In their pain, my mother and father have often forgotten me. I no' tice and try not to mind. My job writing grants for Catholic Charities keeps me busy toiling long hours securing funds for Christ. Dad shakes his head at my work. Mom who has long ceased going to church con' siders me a traitor.

A few weeks ago, when my father first saw the potbellied Chicago

priest on television, he called me at my office. I listened to his story while staring at a brochure pinned to my cubicle. An image of a starv­ ing Filipino girl, a bowl of rice her salvation-all for a yearly donation of thirty-two cents a day. Dad only met the priest once almost forty years

prior, but he recognized this man's obscene body. In the news clip, the priest wears a black cassock and though the sleeves are long, they can, not hide came

the handcuffs clapped around his wrists. Four boys, now men,

forward with a litany of touching over the clothes, under the

clothes, in the parish and after sporting games. The priest coached and counseled a youth sports league and the men testified that he offered them gifts and incentives: sneakers, football gear, tickets to Bulls games,

trips to the racetrack.

I've never revealed to our father how Rachel and I read his journal.

The book went missing at the end of that summer just as Malaya with,

drew, claiming I made her uncomfortable. "You want something from

me?" she asked. "Don't you?" I'd always suspected that Malaya stole the

journal. That she used her father's matches to scorch the Hilton, the horses, the chess game, our friendship.

As I listened to my father over the phone, I considered how difficult this church scandal would make my job. How much harder my cam, paign, my fundraising might become in the shadow of more abuse. Then I thought of all the stories that had gone unspoken in our family. The secrets. The omissions. Remembered my mother's insistence that Rachel was

somehow a greater reflection of her parents' love. That I was my

own person.

My own mistake.

I asked my father, "What did you see?"

He said, "I saw nothing. I saw a man in the pool."

"Who was he with?" I asked.

"There was no one. There were several boys."

"What did you do?"

"I did nothing," he said. "I looked away."

xv. Resurrection

For me, my sister is always in Spain, living it up with Saint Ignatius Loy,

ola, a man who began his adult life as a playboy before submitting to his own divine conversion. Rachel and Ignatius are waving the Veronica in a bullring. Rachel svelte and healthy, Ignatius drunk and carefree, the bulls indifferent to their good time. My sister with her pink tiara of hair, dressed in my gauzy stolen nightgown is so dangerously beautiful that she has the power to keep Ignatius from God. I know that what my fa, ther regrets most is joining then leaving the Jesuits. Had he stayed in his order there never would have been a Rachel. If St. Ignatius had com, manded any hold over my father, he would have remained, but my fa, ther knew sex and could imagine a life with my mother, even when she was a

young, virginal bride of Jesus. Had Dad never joined the Jesuits,

he might have stayed forever with Lois Pendleton, his Protestant secret, a

barren woman who died one October evening when her electrician

husband strangled her with an extension cord.

My father, the holder of so many stories, could not save his own children. When I think of that long' ago night at the Hilton, I know that Dad should have joined the swimming boys under the stars. He

should have

frightened their handsome, dark-haired molester. Dad could have taught the boys how to dive, how to use their bodies as a 27

weapon, how to protect themselves from evil and temptation. My sister

loved to swim, loved to hold my head underwater to see if I could go without breathing. The day she left, I almost confessed my crush on

Malaya. I know that Rachel would have laughed and encouraged me.

"That's great. Kiss her hard. Make me all kinds of proud." I have yet to live up to my sister.

While my father awaits the Chicago priest's verdict, we often fish to'

gether in the rapid currents of the Wading River. Sometimes my Dad will call out to me in excitement over a golden trout racing on his line.

"Rachel," he will say to me. I do not correct him. Instead, I push myself through the water. "What is it, Father?" I ask. "How can I help?"

Tracy Daugherty

The Leaper ForW G.

Griffin stopped the car on the eastern side of the bridge, near a concrete

pylon black with old algae. All around the bridge, the land, crusted and mildly hilly, seemed haunted by the absence of water. Could wood and steel confess dispiritedness, Griffin wondered. The bridge appeared to be ashamed of its presence here. Splinters and rust; shadows of vines and vanished plants imprinted in the textures of the wood, the skin of the steel, rough-hewn and flaking.

The bridge had always been a mistake: built to the wrong specifica­ tions. Its pitch was too steep, causing dizziness, drivers claimed. And it swayed. Concrete, steel, and wood were not supposed to sway, swore Griffin's mom when he was just a boy, so she always left the car, politely but firmly, whenever Griffin's father, driving the family out of town for a picnic or a visit to nearby relatives, approached the bridge. "Ain't gonna see Glory at this rate," Griffin's dad called to her as she slipped from the front seat. She'd grip the bridge's railing and mince forward in her fine leather heels (which she always wore, even for an outing in the wilderness). "If I get there, I'll get there alive!" she yelled in return.

Early on, Earl, Griffin's brother, two years older, joined her in her stilted walks across the bridge, while Griffin and his father drove its length, parked the car, and waited for them on the other side. "We coulda made it as far as Mexico City by now-coulda been sipping mar-

garitas-if you hadn't held us up," said Griffin's father, arms crossed and sweating on his chest.

"Don't you nettle me, old man, else I'll throw myself off this infer­ nal contraption and then you'll be sorry," said Griffin's mother.

"It's like the two of you don't want to leave town," her husband

told her.

The family's bedrock truth. Griffin's mother never ventured more than a few miles from the place; she died while he was finishing college up in Dallas. Earl dropped out of high school when he was seventeen

and went to work in the Eagle Valley Paper and Box Factory, the only

job he would ever have.

Now, nearly thirty years later, Griffin had returned to Texas for his brother's funeral. Years ago, he'd heard that the river had dried up­ where does so much water go?-but to see the sandy bluffs emptied of moist

vegetation, to hear the heightened zizzle of the horseflies (no

longer muffled by the rapids), to smell the bready staleness of sun­ touched stones stiffened Griffin's spine and made him feel old.

A sign next to the pylon said he'd face a thousand-dollar fine if he

drove across the bridge. It was closed now. These days, the way into town

lay six miles south of here, on a brand new bridge near the railroad trestle.

He could get back, but not the way he used to. Or the way he used to be.

how, on weekends, people paddled wooden canoes down this stretch of the river-children, families. People rode horses He recalled

along the banks.

A metallic ticking rose from the idle engine beneath the rental car's hood. The drive from the EI Paso airport (the nearest, though it was more than a hundred miles away) had been arduous. He'd forgotten what it was like, driving in the Lone Star State: the chalky dust, the harsh southern light, the challenge of desert roads, often ill-paved. How did the old joke go? Crossing Texas ain't a trip. It's a career.

Griffin squinted against the four o'clock light, across the bridge and the gulch where the river had once coursed with so much careless power toward the Bottoms, the lip of town where the poorest factory workers used to live-probably still did. Griffin didn't know. He'd lost touch with his brother through the years.

"Professor," Earl used to drawl into the phone, back in the days when they still called each other on holidays and birthdays. Ten, fifteen years ago now? After school, Griffin had moved out west to teach in a small

30

liberal arts college on the Oregon coast and to write books on the pas­ toral tradition in twentieth-century Irish poetry.

"Brother," Griffin answered Earl, on the phone.

Inevitably, their conversations turned to Griffin's betrayals-a word Earl never used (like many West Texas men, he rarely used words at all, and would have been happy, Griffin thought, as a mute), but it suffused the very timbre of his voice. Griffin had "gone and got educated" (be­

trayal number one), left Texas (two), and devoted his imagination to some misty, far-off place (case closed).

Like the bridge, he'd been badly engineered.

"Ireland's in our blood," Griffin tried to argue with his brother. "Our ancestors come from there."

"Who all died hundreds of years ago," Earl countered. "You're a Texan. What the hell does Ireland matter to us?"

Truth be told, Griffin wasn't sure he knew the answer to this ques­ tion, beyond his passion for Irish rhyme and story, which he'd first heard in high school right here in Eagle Valley, Texas-an eccentric English teacher hated by all the other kids (what had happened to her? Evapo­ rated like the river, he supposed; like his mother; like a whole genera­ tion in town).

Besides, the Irish, historically oppressed, knew enough not to trust their deepest feelings-a relief to Griffin, for Texas demanded of its chil­ dren firm allegiance to nation, state, family, church, and place. Above all, place.

Never leave. That was the message in public prayers, pledges to the

flag, football fight songs. And if you did: betrayal.

"You care more for some old Irish blatherer than you do for Mama,

Daddy, and me," Earl accused him regularly.

"Of course not," Griffin said. But listen, he wanted to add, listen to a

wise old blatherer, your distant countryman,

Heaney: "The actual soil /

...

a poet named Seamus doesn't matter; the main thing is / An

inner restitution."

What does he mean? Listen: he's treading carefully (like Mama on the bridge), mistrusting the ground beneath his feet. The Long- Term is a lie,

Big Brother. Nation, State, Glory. The river. The Irish know-the poets know-you're damn lucky if you can see the next step ahead of you.

"Yeah, well, just think about it, bro. What is it I do?" Earl chal­ lenged Griffin one night. Beneath his voice on the line, Griffin heard the hiss of long-distance emptiness. "I make paper so you can have

31

something to scribble your goddamn wisdom on. Where would you be if I hadn't stayed put, huh?"

Brother, where does this bitterness come from? Griffin longed to ask.

But he had to own up to the fact that probably he'd already grasped the answer.

There were betrayals, and then there were betrayals. He sat quietly be­ side his rental car. His first treason wasn't his embrace of poetry and the Emerald Isle. This much was certain. It was a small wooden bench in the

Bottoms, near the paper plant. In the shadow of the bridge.

One night, Griffin's junior year in high school, he sat on the bench with Martha Henshaw, who, like Earl, had dropped out of school to work in the factory. Martha had just gotten off shift, and Griffin had

skipped supper with his family to meet her.

They didn't speak. Her fingers brushed his lips. He turned soft as smoke inside. Clouds scattered over the river. Her hand opened on his chest. Together, dizzy above the water {water sipping clay, spinning leaves, drumming stone} they lifted like divers off a high board in a gold and sudden flutter.

"Griffin!"

The tug back down.

"Griffin, what the hell are you doing?" His brother's voice. Night. The bridge. The moon going green, behind the factory's processed clouds.

"Leave! Now!" Martha whispered to Griffin. He saw it in her eyes:

she wished to rush onto the bridge and leap into the river. Instead, she turned

to

face Earl-her lover of nearly

a

year.

Griffin, the pesky

younger brother who'd never let the couple be, who from the first had

quietly flirted with the girl, scrambled down the riverbank.

Leave. Yes. And so Griffin had, by slow degrees-all the way to an imaginary Ireland. Bitterness? Well. But he and Earl had managed through the years. It's true they'd never trust each other again, not quite.

They'd engage in heavy sparring on the phone. But at least they'd stayed in touch. And even when the phone calls stopped, it wasn't the sign of a rupture. Their father had died. Peacefully, in his sleep. Griffin had re­ turned to Eagle Valley, briefly, for the funeral, eaten a meal with Earl and his wife, and after that, for the next ten or fifteen years, there simply wasn't a compelling reason for the two of them to talk. Earl sank into his natural muteness and Griffin accepted that. No hard feelings, no feelings at alL just Martha? Long forgotten. Earl had married someone else and stayed ...

32

married, apparently happily, for over twenty years. Griffin, who had left for college a year after the night on the bench, didn't even know what had happened to the lovely Miss Henshaw.

Lost water. Under the bridge.

Then last month, the call from Earl's wife, a quiet woman named Lori. The lung cancer, she whispered. An unexpected return. This time it was brutal and swift.

Squinting now in the afternoon light at the green haze beyond the bridge-a reeking haze, an odor like a bee sting, if stings left a residue, acrid, sharp, the smell of paper being made-Griffin wondered just how unexpected the illness was, if this was the air you breathed.

Even the river couldn't survive it.

He heard a soft slapping of hooves, and turned around:

a

young

peanut-colored pony, galloping up what used to be the riverbank. She wore a dazzling white shirt. Griffin caught only a glimpse of her before she disappeared over a squat, craggy rise.

A strange music swelled above him in the girders of the bridge: a humming shriek of steel in a burst of wind, a knocking of wood, like an old man cleaning his pipe on a tabletop (one of Griffin's fondest mern­ ories was of watching such a man in a Derry pub one night, on his first and only trip to the north of Ireland five years ago. All evening, the man had told him ghost stories of people lost on the moors, in the bogs).

A grand and rolling wail from deep inside the bridge, the nails and bolts, as if the whole structure wanted to rise and slink away, having out­ woman on a

lived its usefulness.

The actual soil doesn't matter. The main thing is an inner restitution.

Shading his eyes, scanning the uppermost reaches of the steel frame, Griffin registered another white flash, this time on the bridge.

Was the girl on the horse crossing the gulch? No. He lowered his gaze to

pinpoint the movement. Too late. Whatever it was vanished over

the bridge's far side.

He swore in just the glimpse he'd had it appeared to be (naked? did

that account for the startling whitenessi) a person leaping into the sun­ baked river-trace.

Griffin scrambled up a dusty bluff next to the pylon. Gingerly, he

placed a foot on the bridge's sloping surface. The girders sang. He clung to the cable railing, the way his mother used to do while his father waited in the car. He made his way to the center of the structure where the figure he thought he had witnessed had jumped. He peered over the side. If a body had plunged into the packed sand below-an arrow 33

piercing flesh, a knife falling from the sky (yes, by God, he knew his Irish poets! )-it would have left a small crater, not to say a rather grue­ some

corpse.

Nothing. The bridge swayed. Griffin's head spun. He sat against the singing steel, and felt the song in his bones.

All right, he consoled himself. This isn't so strange. Traces of mern­ ory, of false memories (the leap his mother never made to spite his fa'

ther; Martha Henshaw's almost-hurtle into the river). The smoke of guilt? Absences. Hauntings. The vast desire for movement, any move, ment here, now that the water was missing.

He stood, steadied himself with the railing. All still, below. Open and empty. Gravel, rocks. Heat-gorged weeds.

In the moaning of wind in the steel, he caught an echo of Lori's voice as he had heard it two days ago on the phone. "I'll box up a few of

Earl's things for you," she had told Griffin, audibly swallowing tears.

"You can take them with you after the funeral."

"No no," he'd said. "There's nothing I want."

"I know his stuff ain't worth much-"

"That's not it."

"-and you ain't got any use, at home, for silly trinkets from Texas-"

"Lori, I just don't want to trouble you, that's all."

"Griffin. Sometimes some of us like to be troubled, you know? In spite of what it looks like."

It was as though she'd bit his lower lip. Immediately, and ever since,

he had swallowed Lori's words, carried them in his body-they had cost this quiet woman, he knew, just as the meaning behind them, as far as he could make it out, may have cost his brother, and they served as the final indictment of Griffin's betrayals over the years. A mute howling

that would never cease, as lacerating as the wind on Shannon's waves.

Still, what would he do with a box of his brother's things? He looked up. Of course, he thought, shading his eyes against the sun. The white

flash, the leaping figure: it wasn't a memory at all, nor a wistful haunt, ing, a guilt, induced fantasy. The sun, burning itself up, made everything clear to him now. An illusion, but ...

The future. That's what he'd seen. Surely, that's what the straining was

all about in the flexing of the girders. The music he heard was the

music of matter wrenching toward its end.

He would take the box and throw it off the bridge

...

at

last, free,

ing his brother from this godawful place.

In spite of what it looks like. He envied me, Griffin thought. Did he 34

envy me? The phone calls, not bitterness and hate, but jealousy-and not just Martha, long ago. Nothing as small as that. What was it he'd

said? "Where would you be if I hadn't stayed put?" How had Griffin missed the longing in those words? Surely his brother wished to cross the

bridge. Why he hadn't done so, Griffin would never know.

It's the least I can give him now, he thought.

Just as he, in some way, kept me here.

Griffin glanced at his watch. He still had two hours before motel check-in and the call to Lori. The funeral was tomorrow morning.

Tonight, there would be a small supper with Earl's old friends, none of whom Griffin knew. Afterwards, maybe, Lori would give him the box.

Would he bother to look inside? He figured he wouldn't.

He stepped carefully off the bridge and down the embankment be­ neath it, past brittle old rattlesnake skins, translucent as fingernails, scattered bird's nests, tiny animal bones whose peaceful arrangement in the sand belied the violence that must have left them there. The actual doesn't matter. His eyes prickled with sweat, with the factory's foul air.

He walked to the place where the leaper would have landed. Here, ac­

cording to his vision, the box, his brother's leavings, would land. Griffin stood there in the river's past track, on a small incline that cradled the future. He gazed up at the bridge's faded arms and tried to see the next few hours of his life.

35

Simon Armitage

Back in the Early Days of the

Twenty-First Century Back in the early days of the twenty-first century I was working as a balloon-seller on the baked and crumbling streets

of downtown Mumbai. It was lowly work for a man like me with a sensitive nature and visionary dreams, but at least I wasn't moping around like a zombie,

tapping the windows of taxis and limousines with a broken fingernail, begging for biscuits and change. Besides which, these were no ordinary inflatables, let me say, but titanic, gargantuan

things, like gentle, alien beings. To drum up business I'd fill one with air and slap the flat of my hand on the quivering skin,

the sound booming out among passing tourists,

reverberating through body and soul.

It was a sticky and slow Thursday in March

when he crossed the road towards me, that man in his seersucker suit, and chose a purple balloon from the bag, lifted it with his little finger like evidence found at the scene of some filthy crime, and said, "How much for this?" We haggled and he bargained hard, drove me down to my lowest price, which was two rupees,

then he said, "OK, but I want it blowing up."

"No, sir," I said, "that price is without air."

"Blowing up, buddy, right to the top, or I'm walking away," said the man in the seersucker suit.

Well, trade had been slack that day. In fact in ten sun-strangled hours this was my only nibble, and to walk home with empty pockets is to follow the hearse, so they say.

So I exhaled at great length, breathed the air of existence into that purple blimp, and to this day, readers, I wish I had not.

For with that breath I was bought. Bought once and for all.

And for what? The price of a cup of betel nuts?

A lighted candle placed in the elephant god's lap?

So his lazy daughter danced with me once

and left me to slouch and gag in the stinking womb of my own stale breath.

Then his fat boy bundled me straight to his room, and when I wouldn't yield to his two-fisted punches and flying bicycle

kicks, all the spite of puberty coursed through the veins in his neck, and the glint in his eye shrank to a white-hot, pin-sharp, diamond­

tipped point.

37

Michael Collier

Grandmother with Mink Stole, Sky

Harbor Airport, Phoenix, Arizona, 1959 It rode on her shoulders

flayed in its purposes of warmth and glamour.

Its head like a small dog's and its eyes more

sympathetic than my mother's eyes's kindness

which was vast. Four paws for good luck but also tiny sandbags of mortification and ballast, and in the black claws a hint of brooch or clasp.

Secured like that the head could loll and the teeth in the snout's fixed grin was the clenched "Oh, shit!"

of road kill askew in the gutter. This she wore no matter

the weather and always, always,

when she stepped from the plane and paused, at the top of the

rolling stairs, she fit her hand glare of concrete and desert,

to her brow against the

not a white

glove's soft salute but a visor

that brought us into focus. Mother and Father waving first.

Then the oldest to youngest, dressed in our Easter best, we were prodded to greet her, she who gripped the hot,

gleaming rail, set her teeth in the mink's stiff grin and walked the waterless, smokeless mirage between us.

She who wore the pelt, the helmet of blue hair

and came to us mint and camphor scented, more strange than her unvisited world of trees and seasons,

offering us two mouths, two sets of lips, two expressions: the large, averted one we were meant to kiss and the other

small, pleading, that if we had the choice, we might choose.

39

Philip Schultz

Stein, in Produce Over there, hiding behind the oranges,

giving some guy the same old line about how we're all just a tiny piece of a bigger picture, is my ex-guardian angel Stein, blinking, spitting, shivering the same old volatile symphony of tics.

Ah, this poor slop, Stein's latest salvation,

probably thinks he's hearing voices, but soon enough he'll see a frayed, sardines, stinking stout angel, mumbling about how love isn't an invitation to sponges and artfully aligned pyramids of detergents eager to disinfect the future, but an obligation to continue his own kind. Visible

only to

the lost and self-neglected, Stein must be weary of being an antidote to self-pity,

sexy as a bundle of budget diapers. Once

he performed best in girlie shows, where the lonely practice the art of diversion.

Married with two sweet boys, now I'm a success story,

my photo in his album

of Happy Losers. Sequestered behind beer

and pretzels, I watch him guide his recruit

through the glistening tomatoes and peaches toward the luxuriously painful, ever-ripening roses of love. I admit I'm jealous. Perhaps the art of happiness is just another diversion?

The Joke Today, a friend called to tell me a joke: "Alec Baldwin lives near you, right?

Drive past his house and see if there's a For

Sale sign. He said he'd leave the country

if Bush got re-elected." This is five days after the election and he knows my wife and I

suffering, that we fear raising children in a world that hates them. Surprised, I say nothing. He helped me make money once, for which I'm grateful, and guilty.

are

He calls when the loneliness at the top of

the American mountain becomes intolerable, and his great striving to be a tiny walled city sours his sleep. I understand. He can't be vulnerable with people he fears,

and therefore respects. Compassion is a weakness, he thinks, my desire to give is a kind of greed. That's why people like him are

in power, he'd argue, because people like me

have no stomach for war and death.

He's right. I don't hate my sensitivity, as

he hates his. High thought is impossible

without compassion, Socrates believed.

It asks us to love the minds of others as if

they were our own. War loves only itself.

Though he can't feel his pain, my friend is suffering. That's why he told me this joke, because gloating is his way of asking for sympathy, something even all his money can't buy.

Ask and he'll say he loves me. Yes,

but like a village he must destroy in order to save.

41

Tony Hoagland

Mantra

Sometimes I sit down and say myoid mantra to myself: a

sound that, maybe just because it is secret and repeated, still seems spiritual to me:

two

syllables of Sanskrit transported from the far east during the 1970S

and distributed by a nut' brown Maharishi, like frankincense or hashish, to gullible young Americans who held out their hands and a check for eighty dollars.

I might be in a hotel, sitting on the floor,

the roar of freeway faint as surf outside, the TV silent, the Bible snoring in the bedside drawer, and if someone burst into the room while I was doing my humble cross legged mumble I would be embarrassed to be caught

doing something that looks like make-believe.

Fact is, I was one of those for whom meditation

didn't work: I am one of those who had to be tamed

by other kinds of redundancy; who had to serve as a kind of a bridge for the dump trucks of the 70S and 80S to roll over, and to wait for the archbishop of Time to administer his soft brushwork of gray hair

to the sides of my brow.

When I lean over now and touch my forehead to the floor, as

if to pour my brains into a dish,

I do it in remembrance of the former me,

that diligent little believer, the one who was desperate or hopeful enough to push himself under the surface of a word he didn't even understand-

plunge it again and again like laundry deep into a vat of water until all the stories were scrubbed right out of it-

to

Until the one who was doing the laundry

just disappeared, and nothing remained but the quiet of time

filling the room with its fragrance of clean clothes.

43

The Classics

Try not to make too much of suffering.

Try not to make it a profession.

Your story is like the others: you kissed and

you cried

The tears dried slowly on your face like words upon a page And the moon rose dripping from the sea Like an old bronze shield.

Remember what you promised in July?

Never to forget the smell of horses in the barn?

Or the color of grandfather's sweater Or the little white flower called Mother's Milk

which grew outside the kitchen?

You bent to sniff it

and when you stood You had that old, bewildering sensation

Of having just arrived on earth

Without a history or a name, On some mission secret even to yourself.

Pain and pleasure were the way

You learned to walk,

And you liked them both As you wandered past your many destinations

And the stars were like books on a very high shelf:

-Telling archaic stories

44

Of voyages and battle, Of love & tribulationThe ones they call, The Classics.

45

Fifth Season

Some old guy with a lawn chair and a tackle box

has taken himself out to the end of the stone jetty that juts like an index finger into Galveston harbor, and he sits there with his floppy hat over his eyes, not even fishing,

letting the spray of the pulverized waves mist up around him and shine-

I like the seagulls that rise and wheel in flocks like ash or

spin down slowly like sediment;

I like the flat brown water of the bay, and the aging surfer who arrives at three o'clock to coast the

muddy surge towards shore.

I like his beach boy paunch and the little hop he makes to gain his board.

It speaks of pleasure with no pride.

It speaks of sticking around past the season.

Now summer gathers the last of its strength

and pushes it into the sky where it is not enough to hold back time but tries.

I'm glad I found out what the pronoun it refers to in the expression "I'm losing it."

I still am not fond of the word "squandered."

I don't regret the pain that gradually

turned me into a human being.

This humidity which fogs my glasses,

which then require wiping; The surf that flashes its white skirt from left to right­ the tiny pale-winged birds that dash along the sand;

The something behind which keeps

slipping in and out of view, as

if to catch my attention-

Or is it looking back at itself, without speaking?

47

Stuart Dybek

Iguana Song of the Children Don't take me away, Ig-ua-na, Don't take me away, Ig-ua-na,

(Repeat until iguana runs away.)

Watercolor

Foam absorbs the tracks of shore birds,

tide swallows the holes of ghost crabs,

please wade toward me once more from the snarled shade of mangroves,

polished by a glare dissolving as the ocean climbs your hips, bare breasts lifting with each swell, until your hair fans out, a trail of light amidst the shadow wings adrift on a translucence more

ancient than air. Cries

of seabirds remind us that we've plunged from an incalculable height; fathoms up the sky turns deeper blue.

49

Lesson

Out of the glare, a strange

boy becomes recognizable as my brightest student, Aubrey Aubert, who was, just yesterday, dressed properly for school: charcoal trousers, yellow shirt, but now stands half-bare,

holding a trident-tipped spear, a stringer

of octopus tied at his waist,

their dripping tentacles swaying like a hula skirt.

His trident gestures

the way, in class, his hand raises in anticipation,

and before being asked, he answers: "To kill the sea-cat, me son, you bite his eyes."

50

Dovecote

A Santero keeps a dovecote in the trees below,

tended by his godsons, Jesus and Luis; I can see their tenderness with doves from here.

The fluting of doves floats from morning

haze, up along a jungled slope of smoldering coalpots,

through cacophonous heat-riotous roosters rehearsing vain salutes, fish crows still bickering over some slight from yesterday. If a sound gave shade, I think it would be the coo of doves.

The godsons wear white shirts and beads for the doves are sacred, raised not for sacrifice,

but for the ritual of cleansing: two birds brushed along the body, and then released, while drums beat-at night, I hear them, too-­ and the name Obatala, Bringer of Peace,

King of the White Cloth, is chanted.

Hekua, Baba, Hekua, Blessings, Father, Blessings Afterwards, weighted with spiritual woe,

...

sometimes the doves can't fly, as if their

feathers are soaked with rain or tears, and their grounded cries are haunted;

but come morning, before it's time to take the bus to school, I watch my students,

Jesus and Luis, tossing white birds into air.

51

Linda Gregerson

Catch

You'd swear it was all

improvisation­ mismatched piping, flatbed truck (its ancient wheelbase straddling the bike

lane), sacks (some canvas

discards from the Royal

Mail) of elbow joints and T�joints, and the three of them in hard hats

fitting shallow exoskeleton to brickwork (red

Victorian) with its cornices and bays-but you'd

be wrong, the rhythm's practiced,

they have simply favored function over show.

Unless you count

the showy competence: the young one, on his

shoulder a stack of a eight-foot

planks, ascends the ladder (right hand as a counterweight) and

(burden as lithe as the bearer)

safely shelves what might as easily have maimed a dozen passers-by on brackets where only this morning was

only air. His friend

the foreman slides a

double-story vertical,

two-handed, in its metal cuff (how useless two on two

will be if ever the

piping starts to over-

balance) and, with one hand freed (the pipe extending eighteen feet above him), pulls a

socket wrench

and bolts the skybound strut in place. Some casual treatment of

potted plants (the neighbors having failed

to clear their

whistling

balconies). Some

to the

partner on the ground. Then twice: the pliers

lofted, purest vertical, to tree height, work height, slowing, nearly caught but by an inch elusive, wonderfully sparing the casement

or two

windows on their way back down. Again.

53

(By now the labor saved has long gone theoretical. And none of it

touching the labor the scaffold itself is meant to serve.

Re-grouting? Freshening paint? No matter.) Once again.

And so the rise, the

reach, the capture: bright

alignment, like the heron in its dive. The very pavements

catch the gleam.

54

Judith Hall

The Buried Life

And certain he was That his life could be as easily moving down Into the crumbling earth as over it, For whether he was in the earth or of the earth,

Did it matter, if Both were dark and slow?

Who could be slower than he was, the stones?

He knew the stones admired moonlight and knew

The mice gathered on them, eating snails and

Singing together To the softest moon.

The weeds were singing In the night air too, satisfied with a progress

Few considered perfect or even progress.

Yet everyone considered them progressive.

True. But have they not

Been rinsed of malice In the vapors of the night? He was certainly

Unmalicious with his feet in the air.

A turtle moment on his back. Entirely turtle.

And certain he was That his life, if now

55

Examined, was not Worth living, but of course, if examined, Was it not exposed, and was exposure not a Form of progress, and progress, however conceived,

The goal? He had never Seen his feet so Near to dancing as they waved about the moon.

Now the likelihood of another character

Happening by to hear his troubles, tum him over, Seemed as small as the

Weeds; and sure enough,

Suddenly, he did What heroes do, confronted by danger, he cried.

True. And so the weeds stopped singing, mice fled Far into the crumbling earth, and his comforting

Assumption that he Was moving, moving

Ahead, faded as he watched his feet and the moon.

And certain he was that, as he waited, Outsiders in other villages, among the reds And cold amber-golds And old lush brown leaves That darted over And down, remembered him dearly. Turtle dear.

And the memory of this, the fantasy

Memory was, moved to certainty as Swiftly as the rashness Of a young hare.

Outsiders seemed protected in their morning light, As if the sun poured a perfect shell on each in tum, And as the day turned and hardened them,

They waited for they Knew not what alone.

56

Entirely turtle.

Shell to shell. True. True. If earth is heaven, Necessities should be anaesthetized.

Have I not been asleep all these years on earth As if I were bored To tears in heaven?

And certain he was that his life, herein explained,

Exposed, was, thus, able to move, moving ahead, However defined. He could hear the weeds, Mice too. His feet were

Dancing on the moon.

57

The Poem Found in a Dress for Success

I never stooped to charm,

And for a Southerner, Such enormity needs No frippery, no accessory.

Not counting an austere

Naturalistic brooch.

So chic, so chic.

No whimsy in signature

Details. For whimsy is

Frigidity too bored To be hysterical.

Who finally would choose A whimsical Almighty?

So bleak, so bleak.

I never rose, ridiculous,

Thinking polka dots, Moody, inexpensive Mysticism, conquer A night's mistakes.

Some mistakes are poems.

So few, we happy few.

58

James Langenbach

The Lake on the Hill

Often I walk the dog at night.

Once around the block, maybe twice,

And sometimes we head up to the reservoir.

If it's snowing, I put a little coat on the dog, Booties if they've salted the street.

Everything you need is up there.

You can see for miles and you've got a lake, Not large, the water black and still.

Emptiness where the city ends and farmland begins, Lights of the houses below, and if you're quietSounds you couldn't actually hear.

Clock ticking on the wall, pipes, A nightstand with a lamp, a desk, pencils in a cup-

Then it's time for the dog to go home, Have a biscuit, go to bed.

Sometimes there's a kid with a skateboard, No cars, they close the gates at dusk.

Not really a lake: it's lined with concrete,

The opposite of an island But it beckons, as islands do.

I like arriving or leaving.

Thimble, Block, Brigantine-

59

When I burned my journals some of it

caught Immediately, a brown stain Spreading from the center of each page.

Some was stubborn: gray scraps

Rising like messages in the air.

60

Forgotten Painting A woman stands on a city street.

She looks at nothing; an owl looks at us.

Remember Joan Baez singing Banks of the Ohio-

Willie, oh Willie, don't murder me, I'm unprepared for eternity?

Honore Sharrer's Don't Murder Me, oil on canvas, II X 12, Won't resolve into a scene.

The woman lifts one comer of her apron to her lips.

Above her, in salmon-colored sky, floats a chair.

Remember The Tempest in the Accademia, A woman nursing a baby, a soldier looking at her

While behind them, above the castle, A lightning bolt breaks the sky?

The last time I saw it the piazza was flooded.

Reflections of innumerable pillars,

Purple, white, a touch of gold from the mosaicsHonore Sharrer worked in a farmhouse near Rochester, N ew York,

Disregarding the tastes of seven decades.

At ninety she forgets how to paint.

Remember Marjorie Daw, who sold

The bed and lay upon strawSee saw, Marjorie Daw, sold her bed and lay upon straw?

To remember is to mourn; to forget is to be changed.

A woman reclines beneath an umbrella.

Cigarette butts, cutlery, bits of straw.

Her shadow refuses to lie flat.

61

The Garwood Arms

My parents lived in a small apartment, A garden apartment, which meant they had a view.

Because they owned the only television in the building Betty and George came over to watch I Love Lucy on Monday nights.

George left teaching to become a mailman.

Betty worked as a teller in the Garwood Bank and Trust.

Though my mother didn't say so She admired Lucy: smarter than Ethel, No matter how impractical or prone to tears.

The landlord of the building was Italian; He planted vegetables in the courtyard.

After George left Betty for another woman she divorced him.

That's how they always put it: she divorced him.

Years later, we'd visit her in the bank.

Northampton, where my parents grew up, was a cement town.

Dust from the factories polished the sidewalks smooth.

My father played French hom, my mother the trombone.

His brother also played trombone.

Because she wanted to be a doctor

My mother studied home economics at Cedar Crest.

Home economics was science for girls.

All summer they watched the garden­

Tomatoes, peppers, rows of beans.

In fall, before it started to snow, The landlord dug a trench beside his fig tree.

He bent the trunk, secured it in the trench with pegs,

Then buried it under dirt and leaves.

Either it's lost or I'm mistaken, but I believe

My father made a painting of The Garwood Arms.

I remember him pointing out their window.

Marjorie Sandor

Greenhouse Dreams But would not working among green things make for a certain bliss? Harmony, peacefulness? What had disturbed

the Nurseryman that he was drunken among his growing

things?

...

If you, among healing flowers and leaf, got a

kind of madness, what about us lost in the bloomless? If the green be mad, then what of the dry?

William Goyen, "In the Icebound Greenhouse"

The greenhouses of the state university are clustered on Orchard Street, on the western verge of campus, and of town. One winter night I hap­

pened to walk past them with a friend, a male colleague from my de­ partment. What harm in it? Two people in winter coats, bundled up against the cold and dark. But we found ourselves suddenly curious: how was it we'd never noticed these greenhouses before?

We paused, leaned forward over a hedge, cupped our palms to the glass. There were vines staked in pots, some wilted and strangely crisped; others lushly gleaming. Our breath fogged the view; our palms left smudges on the window. We sprang back, and as we walked away, we turned our coat collars up, peered around comers, behaved like spies.

But in the joke was a faint, brief leaning, a bumping of shoulders in

heavy coats, and just as quickly, a pulling away. It was nothing. We were

good friends; we taught together. Besides, I was married, and had a young daughter. His wife had recently left him, but sometimes drove up to the front of his house and parked there until he came out.

These greenhouses are long and narrow, with gray concrete foundations, set

about with the high green armor of privet hedges. All that winter,

they-and we-were gazed down upon by orange streetlamps. Deep in the winter night the glass buildings whispered a fertile, incubatory gos­ sip, the murmuring talk of the afterhours, the unmarked hours, under their own orange lamplight. Picture the brick walls in alleys behind city

nightclubs, for this is the light of greenhouse seduction. We walked past them a second time, and a third. We yearned to get inside, to be touched by what surely must be a rare and silken air, unknown orchestrations conducted on an ordinary street, unmarked, unsupervised. Surely there we would be stirred into dreams by a faint breeze coming from a source we couldn't see, seduced into putting one finger tenderly to the pale green lifting, lifting, from the precise dark soil of birth. How could one not go

mad, just wanting to get in?

We didn't break in. We were law abiding citizens. It was enough for us to lean over the

hedges, put our palms up to the windows, and peer in, like novice cat burglars or peasants at the prince's window, sussing out the scene of the crime-for at night, the greenhouses looked vulnerable,

unobserved by the authorities, like jewel cases in a museum, the day

guards gone home to bed and no night watchman in sight, just the two of us, left alone with the jewels in glass within glass. Surely alarms would sound if we dreamed seriously of trespass.

And besides, what would become of us if we went further? It was

enough to have secret dreams, to pray to be lost, like those children who walk through doors into kingdoms unsuspected, into a time not mea­ sured in this world, for in a greenhouse, time is not measured in seconds, let alone minutes-how dull, how enormous and heavy an interval we live in! A plant-breath is the measure we wanted to know, the slipping

breath of frond and leaf and infant bloom, opening, opening, all night long. Daytime they grew, too, of course, but we didn't care. It was the

night that interested us; night, when the plants and their growing be­ longed to us.

Did we pause too long at the windows one night? For now we began to notice the number of locked doors and forbidding signs. Authorized Personnel Only. Danger, Keep Out we chanted, suddenly insouciant. We

leaned forward, wiped the windows clear of fog, saw, and almost knew.

Asked each other innocent questions: Are those potato vines ? Tomato plants without tomatoes? Is it all right that I'm in love with you?

Above one long table a light snapped out, all by itself. The others continued to blaze.

By spring we'd sinned-cupped faces in hands, and kissed. A pale sin, ning these days, but listen, that's no impediment to guilt, let alone desire. How different they looked to us now, those greenhouses, stern holders of the keys to righteousness, where, by day, orderly researchers work with steady logic, wisdom in their smallest moves, never lurch, ing or leaping, untoward, past a necessary step. They understood that it was safer, smarter, better for everyone, to knit the earth together by measuring the harvest between days, the white fields between words.

One must not ask for more. We'd been like that ourselves, only months before. Law-abiding all our lives, good children, careful and obedient, afraid to distress our parents. Oh, to simply walk past those greenhouses now. To be able to say, we're still just friends, aren't we?

We're just stirred by the possibilities of breaking and entering, though it would not be to steal, we said to ourselves, but only to breathe there, to say, just once, I have penetrated the greenhouse, I have been inside.

And then, like good citizens, to go back to our regular lives.

Oh, to be a night watchman, a guardian of greenhouses in sleep; that must be restful, a calming occupation. Then desire would be tamed. But maybe not, with all that glass, all that watching, the sound of the thousand plants breathing, making their terrible secret plans.

Possible diseases, taking root at the cellular level even as you watched, seeing nothing, not a flutter, not a breeze (though what were those great fans outside, what engines did they run?). And-a new thought-what of insects? It wouldn't be possible to keep them out.

No doubt the researchers infested the plants on purpose, just to see what would happen. What terrible experiments might a night watchman witness? Or would the quiet murmur of growth and decay be enough to drive him mad?

It was midsummer when I confessed to my husband. The little, halting

words spread through all the small roots of our small town, from hallway

hallway, house to house. By August, when we walked, we passed the greenhouses in daylight, without stopping, without turning our heads. to

65

On we walked, past the university barns for

sheep and pigs and cattle, bridge, beyond, beyond, like children with a destination deep in the wilderness, their parents fast asleep at home. Should we tum around? We didn't know how, or when. So we just kept walking. out to where the creek rushed swollen under the white

By autumn, I had moved out of my house, into an apartment on the other side of town, where my daughter joined me half the time. A strange calm descended, a blue calm of wood smoke and rotting leaves,

of everyone busy again with the dramas of their own lives. And gradu­

ally, slowly, we ventured out on our walks again, sometimes taking my daughter with us. One night, we discovered two greenhouses we'd not noticed before-not on the edge of campus this time, but deeper in, be­ tween Theater and Philosophy. They were old, these greenhouses, and had a frosted delicacy the others did not have, like Russian hunting lodges in fairy tales, cupola'd and spired, the old windows deliciously milky. My daughter, coasting past on her first bicycle, looked long and hard at Philosophy and asked, "Why there are pictures of plants on their tiles?"

A good eye, a discerning eye. Once upon a time there were plants in this

building too, we answered. We didn't say what else we were thinking: may she have, along with that discerning eye, a forgiving heart, a gift for adaptation.

It is winter again, the season of greenhouse dreams. Years have passed,

and still they tendril their way north and east, calling us out from the old house we have found together, milky-white itself with dark green

shutters, across from Chemistry, and behind the university's student Catholic center. "Where were the greenhouses going

" ...

my lover says.

"It's a poem by Roethke, I have to find it." He searches among his books

until he finds his Roethke, finds the poem; it is taped now to our refrig­

along with my daughter's yellow post-it note: Sorry, we're not home, we got eaten by tarantulas.

Our home isn't far from the great humming engines of the green­ houses, engines of danger and disgrace, the shock of touching the secret, dangly roots of love. Sometimes late at night, we think we hear a secret singing. And just yesterday I noticed, beneath the western windows of our kitchen, a greenhouse beginning. When, and by whose hand, did this come to be? Was it really mine? It must be, for look, here stands an erator,

66

old wooden table crowded with plants. In the late afternoon, sunlight collects there.

We are gazing at the comer together, my lover and I, talking about

greenhouses. "Did you know," he says, "that they actually draw in the light-by their very design?" And he makes a fantastic, incantatory ges­ ture, both hands up, then drawn to the body, as if pulling in the last of the light to hold it close, capturing it for the coming dark.

] effrey Harrison

Ivan Ilyich at the Lake

When the dragonfly landed on my book, I was drifting on the lake in a kayak

reading Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" in a paperback so old that each yellowed page came loose with a tiny cracking sound as

I turned it-the book itself as deciduous

as

the maples onshore, which had started to tum.

I was fifty, and naturally the story

had led to thoughts about how false or true my life had been, to all the ways

I was and was not like Ivan Ilyich.

To think that I had failed at everything

he had succeeded at-money, status, connections, an impressive beard-seemed

only self-congratulatory. I had my own sins and shortcomings, which I avoided with my own evasive maneuvers.

68

I was just going back to the story when

the dragonfly appeared, like an answer that refused to answer other than with

itself, seeming to ask nothing of me but that I look carefully through my reading glasses at the

intricate veined structure of its wings,

the mineral sheen of its out-of-proportion eyes, and its long, thin, segmented tail of gasflame blue that pulsed above the still-fastened page.

I was grateful for the quick gift of its visit,

but I saw that it too might be only a

diversion, a way to avoid looking hard myself-and just then it took off

at

with a sudden snapping flutter of its wings and darted away in erratic flight,

leaving me to return to Ilyich's death, the blue lake shimmering all around me.

Shaking off the Snow The snow was heavy and clung thickly to the trees,

and there was no sun yet to start it melting and give them some relief. Some trees had cracked, others bowed in fringed arcs over the trail, and some bent so low they blocked the trail entirely.

I shook one off and watched it spring back up

and laughed as it dumped snow on me and on the snow-covered ground with muffled thunder.

Then I kept following the closed-in trail

and opening it up, shaking the trees and letting them go, and showering myself with snow.

The branches that sometimes whipped me in the face and the clumps of snow stinging my neck and forehead were a price worth paying to see the trees fly up.

One pulled my glove right off, a woolen leaf.

One good-sized oak almost lifted me off the ground.

I thought of Frost's birches, lifting the boy up,

and of his crow that shook snow down on him, changing his mood. It seemed I needed more than just a dusting. I needed to be covered

from head to toe. And I couldn't get enough of the bowed-over trees springing back up.

By the end, I was soaked, sweating under my clothes, almost happy, my pockets full of snow.

Naomi Shihab Nye

After a Death

You had time.

You had so much time.

And what did you do with it?

You threw it into a tunnel.

And where is it now?

Still in the tunnel.

Beneath every day you walk on.

Inside the skin of everything you touch.

No wonder a lemon feels deeper

than it did. Even the lemon tree scrolls up double speed because of the tunnel.

The eyes of the woman down the street follow you when you leave her house because one day

her husband and dog went to the park and only the dog came back alive. Now the tunnel is deeper than the world you can see.

Maury, Daria, Johnny, Edward, Nina, Elizabeth, Aziz, Mahmoud.

Four people called to say Henry was gone.

Not one called to say he was ill.

Still, you love them, these people

walking on top of the tunnelclutching little lists, plastic tubs of summer squash to share with neighbors, high hopes and their shadows.

71

Sandhill Cranes at the Platte River

Under their wild landing cries

echo the cry you made before you died.

Something far, full of horizon­ how can they sound so lonesome with all the flock around them?

Rest, now.

Gray wings wheeling toward icy water, bellies full of com.

Barbara Ras

Pigeons, a Love Poem The pigeons are back, shitting and laughing in the eaves, gangs landing out of reach, laughing

the way I once laughed so quick my mouthful of wine flew across the table onto my friend and his funny story,

and in the pigeons' laughter we can hear liquid gurgling,

dumbly defying your latest invention, a motion-activated sound machine that made a mechanical wheeze every time a bird landed, and yes, the pigeons fled

the noise of what sounded like a motorized heart,

lurching in the direction of life, but when I complained that the on/off of an artificial heart left me breathless, you gave up on the deterrence of sound and set to work on a

silent water-shooting device, bringing water

up to the second-floor porch with a garden hose,

which looked to me like a code violation, snaking up against the swami yellow of our clapboards,

and as you perfected the ultimate pigeon banishment, a

board flew out of your hands,

the way the wine flew from my mouth, the way pigeons flew from the made-up groaning heart, and in the same way my wine landed on Dave's shirt, your board landed on

Billie's convertible parked in the next-door drive,

ripping through the canvas top, and even though this was

the second board to make the flight

from your hands to her car (last time the hood), and though for the price of our homeowner's deductible we

could have hired a guy to sit on the porch for a short

eternity to shoot the last pigeon into Kingdom Come, I laughed harder than the time I spit the wine, I laughed 73

over

and over, passionately, enough to waste

bottle's worth of airborne Bordeaux, and because your hands have held onto me for more than thirty years, never a

slipping, never letting to, what's a couple of boards over the edge and what's love, if not this?

74

Impossible Dance Standing at the window, at a loss, I listened to a radio left playing next door in the house now vacant,

the music vacant, too, so hollow

I could supply my own song,

but what came instead was a vision of clear balloons of jellyfish

sailing through the airiest water, transparency held aloft in transparency,

tender animate emptiness propelled

by tentacles and sighs.

After they took my mother's shell

place it would bum, I remade her bed and lay there, to the

wild, pinning

myself to her last place.

Her air-alII wanted was her air.

Five years later to the day, again I go

through the stations of grief, death's awful offices, a dance never learned, or ever done, the only partner, sorrow, yanking me to step to an orchestra out of

always

earshot, somewhere beyond belief.

75

David Bottoms

On Cantrell's Pond

I

When I was a boy there was a pond behind our house,

muddy pond of stunted catfish that eventually filled up with construction runoff­ a

a

mosquito hole, fetid,

wallow and paradise for copperheads, rats, moccasins,

frogs,

and no few turtles that could take off your finger with one surgical snap, and at night, year round, the stench rose thick and seeped in waves

through the cracks in my window where I'd curl like a snail at the foot of my bed, drifting on

deep breaths, far back.

I'm always dreaming my way back to water: to a washed-out

logging road

plunging to a river where high buzzards recon the kudzued pines, to a cove on a lake of monster gar, a tumbling creek of killer rocks, a sky-black swamp choked with cypress where I wade out knee-deep with my rod and rattle-bug and never, in my exhaustion, out run the cottonmouth that blesses my heel with its flower.

2

Why all of this middle-aged noise about getting back?

Though, for sure, in the mornings the leafy banks rustled with birdsblue jays and cardinals, a towhee or two,

robins, thrashers, and dozens of bam sparrows mobbing the dam where our neighbor, Mr. Cantrell, tossed biscuits to his fish, and in the summer the forest of sunflowers

nodding in the wind at the edge of his garden, and the rose bushes crawling the bank from the brush dam to his tool shed all the way up to the chicken house collapsed in a thicket of briars.

3

But out here, in middle-age, or a mile or two beyond,

why all this hubbub about beginnings?

And why only one brief dream of that pond when now there's no other way back?

Or only a way back to kudzu and concrete, to a a

an a

Kentucky Fried Chicken where our house once stood,

Taco Bell, a Pizza Hut,

oily gas station, and across the highway

Kmart strip mall, a Waffle House

where my grandpa once grazed horses.

In my dream the sky was a loose tumble of charcoal,

the silky trees bare and trembling.

Tall grass bit my ankles. I lifted my feet, I had some place to go. Then brush stalks shivered as

I stepped off the bank

and began to walk, carefully, not on water, but on the

parched bed

of an empty pond

cobbled entirely with turtles.

77

Campfire in a Light Rain

Out here near the end, sometimes in a tent

into the truck bed,

my despair, I pack

a few

camping tools, firewood and kindling to save me some trouble, and sandwiches, of course, and sardines, water, soda, whatever,

and sometimes drive east to the Oconee River to sit all

night in a folding chair,

feeding sticks into a fire.

No radio, no cell phone, but a

battery lantern for books.

Even at the end, I still need books, though the crickets are witness that the story goes on a little while longer, and the mallards skiing in

twilight to bob under a sunken tree, and the hermit owl far back in the woods at

tossing out his eerie vibe, and the tree frogs in the pines above the river bank,

and the pines in the wind above the riverbank.

2

My granny used to hear voices from her childhood, the voices of school children in Pickens County

long shoveled over in sanctified clay.

She never told anyone for fear of being shut away, but took them as testimony for that land beyond the river, that Canaan of the saved.

You tell me what the end looks like to you,

and I'll tell you about a river

under a night sky, about the stars guttering out, one by one, while a thicket of scrub pine darkens into a wall.

Does anyone have another idea?

3

The charred logs sizzle in the rain, and the chill off the river bores like a dull blade into my knees.

By the time my old man my age he could hardly move without a groan.

was

I sit under the tent flap

and watch the mallards dabble around the fallen oak, and a few wood ducks, an egret.

Three geese took off an hour ago, stringing out north over

the logging road, and everything now

is settling toward nightfall.

Whatever happened to the promise of wisdom?

The gray beard came, the cracked teeth, the vanishing hair, the trembling hand, but what became of Solomon's crown?

I toss a few more sticks into the fire

and ponder my foolishnessall of this time searching for purity and never grasping the nature of ashes.

79

A Heron on the Oconee

Now on the Oconee, on this shallow elbow of quiet water,

the first moist sunlight seeps through the thicket, and a heron streaked in feathered light strides out among the rocks.

Ruffled and muddy, it wobbles out into the river and balances on sticks among the rocks,

utterly motionless among the rocks.

2

Near the end, the way myoid man stared into the distance,

the way he leaned from his armchair

toward a window, elbow quivering on his walker, and gazed through oak branches into a broken sky, is the way this heron, ruffled, muddy, stares downriver at the water

80

rippling into the trees.

Lisa Bellamy

Nectar

Bees relinquish the cult of personality to extract nectar

from flower after flower with long, elegant tongues,

motivated by far more than industry, duty.

They crave sudden pleasure, the speed-of-light energy coursing, exploding throughout their tiny bee torsos like uncut cocaine.

Nectar: from the Greek nek -"death" and tar -"overcoming."

In the moment, they do believe they are deathless, radiant gods riding the wind, mouths open to updrafts, lighting on infants' foldy necks smelling of newly-turned earth, daisies, remnants of trilobites; crowning Sikh turbans like jewels, suckling magnolia blossoms for the extravagant fun of it, inserting themselves mischievously under worn babushkas, bee feet prickling a scalp like Neil Armstrong on the moon, giddy, wings beating harder at the sound of a yelpdon't be surprised! Surely we've learned gods are capricious.

Later, the garden grows dark; dirty wrappers blow against trash cans.

The bees press against the beating hearts of hummingbirds; the birds flyaway. The bees see they are alone.

They start to feel the sadness pervading the universe.

"All compounded things appear and then disappear," says the Buddha.

Through the night, they listen to the music of quasars radiating grief with neither beginning nor end.

Mixing nectar with tears, the bees produce honey.

81

John Kinsella

Storm Cicadas

Cicadas ring loudest when you're alone.

Up on the hill you are so close to the thunderheads you can almost touch them. Standing on boulders you invite a lightning strike, but it's not from there you notice that a storm is active within the storm,

that it has its own earth to strike up from, to connect with. In

there, night has already

collected and will drop like a black sheet, to be

ripped up then healed again. In there are

the mixed metaphors and split infinitives you grew up fearing-your mother an

English teacher. Storm cicadas

halve the day. Birds make late flights, late swoopings. They risk being closed out.

It's the ringing in their ears. Last week,

climbing a staircase down in the city, you thought a young bloke descending was

going to slam your head into the wall,

and that would be it for you. Nothing.

He passed awkwardly, benignly,

but you sensed that immensity of nothing.

The storm within the storm doesn't know it exists.

It sees nothing destroyed when it strikes.

It just strikes and things look the same

though you know in description things change, rearrange, and roll further east. You keep dying and filling the nothingness, the absolute silence, with cicadas and birds, storms within storms.

Catherine Barnett

Early Evening I thought we were safe under the trees, I thought the storm would end but it came down

harder, its eye passing over our blue umbrella, the two of us pressed together with nowhere to go

and no one to ask but the lightning and where was it coming from?

We were watching the sky and then what got lifted into the sky. Leaves, trash, a circle of dirt-

Then the boy's cap took to the sky, the sky swallowed the cap, red bird

floundering on a black pond, red soaked with years of sweat and then with storm, red like a buoy.

Plate Glass

Inside the laundromat the mother folds

the clothes while the boy plays on the sidewalk and looks back at herHe is outside with his imagination and she inside

with her bleach and coins.

The cord between them is old and sheer,

ready to be broken.

He gives himself up entirely to the cold

and leans against the window,

letting the vastness of the world, which disquieted him before, rest now in him.

Karen Whalley

Descent

He lowers himself down The invisible filament To land on the vast white Of the stove, his several

landscape legs

Swimming against the heated porcelain Of the oven he couldn't know Was there. Then, almost

flailing, he Raises himself the same way he came, like a climber On the face of a glacier, To a ledge of safety.

Soon, he tries again, descending From the hood of the fan

Above the burners, a little more

Slowly, this time, as if he can't believe What he is feeling, as if he can think What he wanted to find there into

being.

Each time he touches the

burning surface,

He weakens, his

panic Becoming a giving in, a surrender.

Probably, he is an ounce of body Held by the curling eyelashes Of his limbs, and I realize he is

cooking in air,

And I take the thin pencil Of a chopstick and let his thread

Attach to that and move him To the coolness of the sink Where he rests in that silver mercy.

85

I do not know the life span

Of a spider or an ant; I do not believe he embodies

The soul of someone's grandmother, But I can see the cruelty

Of something blindly dying, And I rush to intervene, imitatio dei.

86

Alfonsina S torni Translated from the Spanish by Lauren Watel

Tired Animal

I want a fierce love of claw and tooth

that assaults me treacherously at midday and stifles this arrogance of mine, the pride of being all powerful.

I want a fierce love of claw and tooth

that bleeds me raw to see

if the melancholy

that corrupts my soul will end.

I want a love that is a storm

that breaks and renews everything because a deep energy feeds it.

If only my mud could be revived there my poor, tired animal mud

sick of covering the same old ground.

Sleep Peacefully You said the word that is music to my ears. You

already forgot. Good.

Sleep peacefully. That face of yours should be calm and lovely at all hours.

When your seductive mouth casts a spell it should be cool, its speech pleasant;

for your career as a lover it's no good to have a

fiery face that often weeps.

More glorious destinies await you

than wearing a mournful expression between the black wells under your eyes.

Cover the ground with beautiful victims!

The foolish sword of some barbaric king did more

harm to the world and there's a statue of him.

88

Benjamin F ondane Translated from the French by Alissa Valles

From Mal des ientomes

(Ghost Sickness) Is there nothing that can quench us?

A little snow on the lips of the stars, a

little death given in a kiss?

Myself in all this-Who?-Myself?

Fondane, Benjamin-the navigator whose feet measure verse and earth and the vast whirlwind of dead men bent over their papers. World's end will find him sitting playing at dice.

Take a look at yourself in the mirror,

Fondane, Benjamin. Heavy eyelids.

A man among many. Dead of hunger.

1943

Peter Cole

More for Santob (de Carrion, fourteenth-century Castile)

I.

Everyone's So High

Everyone's so high on "Yes." Nothing has made me happier, though, than the day I asked my lover if she had "another"-and she said "No."

2.

Spell in Praise

A choir of quatrains in praise of the servant

who asks of me nothing

for what he does.

For years he's afforded me as

spectacular favors, though in fact he served out of love.

He somehow bears­

though slight in stature­ the weight of the world within his words,

and blind he sees what I hold in mind; deaf he absorbs what I've not yet heard.

He knows what I want

before I've spoken, and without speaking says who I am.

And so I've done as my debts demanded, and sung for this spell

in praise of the

pen.

3. How Friends Act

Is anything better

than a pair of scissors, which separates those that separate them?

They do this not because they're bitter, but out of desire to meet

again.

When they're joined,

they do no harm­ hand to hand and lip to lip;

only when parted can they destroy­ that's how strong their loyalty is.

Those who'd learn what brotherhood means, and how friends act

when all is done, 91

should watch as scissors make one of two--

and when they have to-­ two of one.

4. For Being Born

For being born on a

bush of thorns

the rose is certainly worth no lessnor

should wine

be scorned that's fine but comes from lesser parts of the vine.

The hawk is likewise not worth less

for being born in a humble nest,

and proverbs aren't less subtle or true for being spoken

by a Jew.

Arthur Sze

Sarangi Music Black kites with outstretched wings circle overhead-

Sticking out of yellow-tongued flames on a ghat, a left footNear a stopped bus, one kid performs acrobatics while another

drums-

Begging near a car window, a girl with a missing arm-

Mynah bird sipping water out of a bronze bowl sprinkled with jasmine petalsTwitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man-

In relief, a naked woman arches back and pulls a thorn out of her

raised heelMen carry white-wrapped corpses on bamboo stretchers down the steps-

She undresses: a scorpion on her right thighA boy displays a monkey on a leash then smacks it with a stick-

She wrings her hair after stepping out of a bathA portion of a leograph visible amid rubbleA woman averts her gaze from the procession of war elephants-

93

Two boys at a car window receive red apples-

Sipping masala tea in an inner courtyard with blue-washed wallsAn aura reader jots down the colors of his seven chakrasA bus hits a motorcycle from behind and runs over the driver and his passenger-

Discussing the price of a miniature elephant on wheelsGreen papayas on a tree by a gateLit candles bobbing downstream into the sinuous darknessA naked woman applies kohl to her right eyelid-

The limp tassels of new ashoka leaves in a tomb court yardA cobra rises out of a straw basket before a man plays a bulbous instrument

-

Corpses consumed by flames and in all stages of burningThe elongated tip of a bodhi leaf-

Arranged in a star pattern on a white plate, five datesOn a balcony, in the darkness, smokers staring at a neem treeHis head golden, and his sex redA naked woman gazing at herself in a small, circular mirrorAt sunrise, a girl rummages through ashes with tongs-

Along the river, men and women scrub clothes on stones.

94

The Curvature of Earth

Red beans in a flat basket catch sunlightwe enter a

village built in the shape

of an ox, stride up an arched bridge over

white lilies; along houses, water,

coursing in alleyways, connects ponds.

Kiwis hang from branches by a moon

doorway. We step into a two-story hall with a light well and sandalwood panels: in a closet off the mahjong room

is a bed for clandestine encounters.

A cassia tree shades a courtyard corner; phoenix-tail bamboos line

the horse-head walls. The branching of memory resembles these interconnected waterways: a chrysanthemum odor permeates the air, but I can't locate it.

Soldiers fire mortars at enemy bunkers, while Afghan farmers pause then resume

slicing poppy bulbs and draining resin.

A caretaker checks on his clients' lawns

and swimming pools. The army calls-

he swerves a golf cart into a ditch­ the surf slams against black lava rock,

95

against black lava rock-and a welt

spreads across his face. Hunting for a

single glow-in-the-dark jigsaw piece,

we

find incompletion a spark.

We volley an orange ping-pong ball

back and forth: hungers and fears

spiral through us, forming a filament

by which we heat into argentine light.

And, in the flowing current, we slice back and forth-topspin, sidespinthe erasure of history on the arcing ball.

Snow on the tips of lilacs dissolves within hours. A kestrel circles overhead,

while we peer into a canyon and spot caves

but not a macaw petroglyph.

Yesterday, we gazed from a mesa tip across the valley to Chimayo, tin roofs glinting in sunlight. Today, willows extend one-inch shoots; mourning cloaks

flit along the roadside; a red-winged blackbird calls. Though the visible world leafs and branches, I ache at how

mortality fissures in the lungs: and the pangs resemble ice forming, ice crystals, ice that resembles the wings

of cicadas, ice flowers, drift ice, ice that forms at the edges of a rock

midstream, thawing hole in ice, young shore ice, crack in ice caused by the tides.

Scissors snip white chrysanthemum stalksauburn through a black tea bowl rim­ is water to Siberian irises as art is to life? You have not taken care

of tying your shoes-a few nanoseconds, a few

thousand years-water catlaps

up the Taf Estuary to a boathouseherring shimmer and twitch in a rising net-

rubbing blackthorn oil on her breastsin a shed, words; below the cliff, waves­

where a i aa a e a means island in the riverwhile a veteran rummages through trash, on

Mars, a robot arm digs for ice-

when the bow lifts from the 0 string, "This is no way to live," echoes in his ears.

Sandhill cranes call from the marsh,

then, low, out of the southwest, three appear and drop into the water: their silhouettes sway in the twilight, the marsh surface argentine and black.

Before darkness absorbs it all, I recall

97

locks inscribed with lovers' names on a

a

waist-high chain extending along

path at the top of Yellow Mountain.

She brushes her hair across his chest; he runs his tongue along her neck-

reentering the earth's atmosphere, a satellite ignites. A wavering line of cars issues north out of the bosque.

The last shapes of cranes dissolve into vitreous darkness. Setting aside

binoculars, I adjust the side view mirror-our breath fogs the windshield.

A complex of vibrating strings:

this hand, that caress, this silk gauze running across your throat, your eyelids, this season where

tiny ants swarm large black ones and pull apart their legs. Hail shreds

the rows of lettuces beyond the fence; water, running through sprinklers.

swishes. A veteran's wince coincides with the pang a child feels when

she masters hooked bows in a minuet.

And the bowing is a curved line, loop, scrawl, macaw in air. A red-

winged blackbird nests in the dark; where we pruned branches, starlight floods in over the earth's curvature.

99

] ynne Dilling Martin

You Are a Traveler at Heart. There Will Be Many Journeys.

It's irrefutable fact that rubies and albino snakes glisten

instead of corpses inside old coffins, and I once saw a pigeon that ambled off-kilter like Abraham Lincoln: therefore,

friend, life beyond the grave must crackle and mutate in most unexpected ways. After all, what becomes of the rest when the bulk of man sinks to so few pounds of bone?

The fish-eating nations near Egypt consecrate the sea as

their grave, restoring the debt their bodies owe to the oysters.

My morose aunt drinks ashes of dead relations.

But your average buried man must ask himself

what's next, and of equal or greater interest, where he's already been. Absurd to scorn reincarnation:

people, wake up to the facts! Constant atomic flux gives each being a new body every seven years, recycled from the limited particle matter of the universe, so you

have been, or will be, sewage, cabbage, a handheld device,

the ozone layer, a stash of belladonna in a sultan's silver ring.

I'm drafting a map for my coming corporeal dissolution:

posture my body in the grave precisely per my instructions so my legs may become lava sulking in the earth's volcanic core, my heart the inner lining of your favorite winter coat.

100

Meena Alexander

In the Garden of Tiger Lilies

When Mirza Ghalib saw a bathhouse

Keeper burnt by passion A brown man with bits of dirt On his face and thighs He knew that the sun had to be sucked Into the leaf of his manuscript.

So that in unremitting light The human stain would pour straight into soil And blunt rock.

II I am dying into my own life-he wrote

There is no help for this

Only music without words.

My body is growing old And so I need to remember

This body, this flesh.

III A child who befriends stones

Searching out ants for company Letting them crawl on her flesh.

101

I am putting clear things together

So they will make a cacophony

Ruled by that richer harmonic The poet sought, dreaming A dark corona around their faces As they stood still in the garden.

IV Picture the child

Carrying around the wound That no one else could see,

Fearing it would slop blood Over the stiff sheets on the line In a garden planted with tiger lilies, Water in a black well

The gleaming pot of hair On the cowherd's thighs.

V Music originally for voices Now for the sun.

I am transcribing music without words-

Seeing nakedness like that And being moved terribly How old was I?

102

The Journey I was blindfolded and had only the mercy of the sea

(And sprigs of jasmine in my arms).

The journey was awkward: lines blown inward, syllables askew.

Gulls nestled in tom pages.

There were many languages flowing in the fountain.

In spite of certain confusion I decided not to stay thirsty.

When we got to that country, a war was going on A mound of stones grew outside our window frame.

I was five years old and tried to understand what was happening.

My soul ran away with me.

Forests with branches tom off, mouths that split open into my mouth,

Eyes that mirrored mine, ears tom off, few birds warbling.

Close at hand, afloat on water, a tall cliff scarred with glyphs,

Visionary want, attuned to nature's substances.

Rock and ruin, pathways of salt, scents of crushed jasmine,

Returning me to what I cannot bear to remember.

103

Milan Djordjevic Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic

Love Poem

My dear Nothing, with love and words I keep trying to breathe life

into you.

With all this flirting I'm becoming a part of you.

My dreamy Nothing, daughter of human nothingness, I want you dead

but you are indestructible,

truly untouchable like everything imagined.

Will I be free of you, one

day perhaps?

Or will I hide you deep within me

while all around me you give birth to monsters and

specters?

You'll whisper the same stories, pour over me

the same black ashes

and desert rains without erasing the bloodstains of my childhood.

104

My sweet and formless, bloodless and colorless, best-loved Nothing,

with what eyes shall I look at you to see you

truly

and remember your face forever?

Overcoat

Overcoat lies. On the floor.

Without a drop of blood in it.

Overcoat lies. Weary.

Crumpled, discarded and black.

-Overcoat! Overcoat! Overcoat!

-Dear brother! Rise! Rise!

At least kneel next to your

Milan Djordjevic!

Dear brother, guardian of my solitude, beaten with rain, snow, curses, flatteries.

Rise! Rise!

1 will feel your empty pockets

with my hands.

They'll flutter their wings in them.

Inside your gaping sleeves I'll Iet the care-worn little animals

That are my arms crawl!

So it may begin to breathe

and open its eyes, shudder, then move one sleeve,

spread its wings, fly, caw and drape me with its darkness.

1, who am its blood and guts.

106

Bread

It has shape of goodness.

How peacefully it lies on

the cutting board.

Blissfully awaiting the quick verdict, the knife in the back or

being tom into chunks.

The whole world is a loaf of bread.

Bite into it as

if it were the body of God's only son.

Go ahead and do it,

break its crust and the silence will fall.

The silence of the beginning,

Ah, the blazing silence as

the world ends.

107

The Dream

When I come to its sharp edge,

the sharp edge on which I may cut myself, the way I cut my thumb on a sheet of white paper,

the way I colored its cutting edge with my blood.

When I got there, looked down, I saw a dream, even more a

terrifying than this one,

dream in which someone dreams of me

ten years after my sudden and violent death.

I know that all my dreams will die the day

death takes me to a place where streets

have no names, the houses no numbers or address.

I know all my days will be like crumbs and fine dust under this country bed in which I lie dreaming.

My days will be a row of milk pails and buckets filled with midnight liquids darker and thicker than melted pitch, so that in the end all the pails and buckets will be spilled and everything dark and white in me will be mixed.

lOS

Ryszard Krynicki Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Yes, I am For many days now I've been walking back

through hazy Krakow but I'm not yet home

from the pink sand and pink limestone of my Jerusalem.

I'm still returning

from the Wailing WalL I still wander in the narrow labyrinth

of the Via Dolorosa.

Sometimes the gap above my head

reveals the moon still fulL I still wander in the beginning.

Are you a Jew? an

old Hassidim asks,

probably younger than me.

109

Yes, I'm the poetI want to say for once

but I just smile and answer:

Schalom, achi!

110

Last Night .

.

.

als ein Kranich

P.e.

Last night I visited your sleep in a crane's shape.

(You won't remember this when you wake, you can't remember this-

always remembers differently than the other, one always feels it differently). one

Why a crane? I don't know.

But I desired you, though I don't even know if I was a man.

(Besides you had your own).

What did I do? Nothing, only called mutely in the predawn mist,

behind the seven mountains, behind the seven forests that grew then between you and me, behind the seven-armed rivers of the fatesin yours, or mine: I don't

know?

III

Wislawa Szymborska Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets Faces.

Billions of faces on the earth's surface.

Each different, so we're told, from those that have been and will be.

But Nature-since who understands her?­ may grow weary of her ceaseless labors

and so repeats earlier ideas

by supplying us with prewom faces.

That passerby might be Archimedes in jeans, Catherine the Great dressed in resale, some

pharaoh with laptop and glasses.

An unshod shoemaker's widow

from a still pint-sized Warsaw,

the master from the cave at Altamira

taking his grandkids to the zoo, a shaggy Vandal en route to the museum to do some oohing and awing.

The fallen from two hundred centuries ago, five centuries ago, half a century ago.

One brought here in a golden carriage,

Another conveyed by extermination transport, 112

Montezuma, Confucius, Nebuchadnezzar, their nannies, their laundresses, and Serniramida, who only speaks English.

Billions of faces on the earth's surface.

My face, yours, whose-

you'll never know.

Maybe Nature has to shortchange us, and to keep up, meet demand, she fished up what has sunk in the mirror of oblivion.

113

Ehud Havazelet

Gurov in Manhattan

On a January day, a little before nine in the morning, this was the situ­ ation: Sokolov, fifty-two, lecturer in Russian Literature at Lehman Col­

lege in the Bronx, two-years post-transplant for leukemia, stood on Riverside Drive looking north to Canada, while Lermontov, his suffer­ ing aged wolfhound, tried with trembling exertions to relieve himself, looking south toward New Orleans. The day was cold, scrubbed clear, one of the January days in New York that slice through you and deride your hopes that winter will ever open its fist. The vet, a young woman with auburn hair braided and an athlete's boney litheness, the kind who caught Sokolov's eye {the kind whose eye he used to catch-alas, no longer} told him dogs Lermontov's size were lucky to reach ten, eleven.

If, as Sokolov said, he was thirteen it was a miracle, and she smiled at the dog tenderly while Sokolov {she didn't know him} thought sourly that only the carelessly youthful and naive {the healthy} could have the

gall to think surviving is blessing enough.

It had not snowed in a week and the last storm's remnants were

pocked glacial outcroppings crusted with soot and cigarette ends and an­ imal droppings {alas again: none Lermontov's). In the trees along the drive half a dozen crows perched without a sound. Sokolov chanced a quick peek. The dog had an intestinal blockage, perhaps a tumor, and had

top of the diabetes, was too old for surgery {thirteen, Sokolov said. Could be thirty-five for all he knew. He was Kelly's dog, and Kelly on

wasn't there to ask, was she?}. If he didn't somehow {more miracles} come

114

through in the next few days, it wasn't fair to let him suffer. Again,

Sokolov stared broadly at the pretty young face that hadn't more than the glanced at his in passing since he hauled the reluctant dog through the tipping as if she knew, as if anybody knew office door. Let him

suffer,

Ten years ago this might point between life's durance and life's ending. have been his opening, the moment he'd inject a wry observation,

oblique, evocative, European.

This morning he'd simply said, "How many?"

Still looking at the dog (maybe if he set himself on fire

...

) she'd

said, "How many what?"

"Days."

Then she did look, as if that fact, the number, and Sokolov's bring­ see him: gruff, ing it up, was tactless indeed, and made her unwillingly bothered, indifferent. (Balding, gaunt, nearing toothlessness). He was He'd been given numbers once, a lot of past caring what she thought. them, none good. He'd wanted to know, and now he assumed Lermon­ tov wanted it also.

"I don't know exactly," the doctor said. "Let's say two."

"Two," Sokolov answered, barely noticing she ignored the witticism.

He paid at the desk, stopped by the door to give the dog a couple of good

whomping pats to the side, the way he liked it, then made the ten-block walk to their comer where they, Sokolov looking one direction, the dog another, waited for what was next.

Time was, Sokolov wanted everything. Now he wanted less. Or more this is what Sokolov wanted: to want less. Coming to this

precisely,

or more realistic than the country with dreams not all that different conquistadors' visions of EI Dorado, he'd thought that the combination

of his past (Leningrad, gray), his education (doctoral thesis: "Response Pastoral in Theodore Dreiser," laughingly wrongheaded, unpub­ lished), his genealogy (rabbis, radicals, a thunerous drunk or two), and his, by general report, Slavic handsomeness and insouciant Old World charm ensured he would be welcomed, transformed from the young man with old man's maladies (melancholy, dyspepsia), free to wander in this big fat orchard America and pluck its ripest fruit.

Two unfinished novels and incinerated memoir later, a dozen-odd ignored applications to schools out of the city, floored by the hoof of a Cossack horse kick by cancer, left alive but with tingling blue-edged fin­ and thinning but matted gers, toes, riotous bowels, hair not only grayed like a horsehair blanket, he was an old man with an old man's maladies. to the

And alone. Kelly, after three years, was gone and Sokolov still couldn't 115

believe how quickly, how briskly, how efficiently this woman he'd lived with had disappeared from his life, leaving only her declining dog as re­ membrance.

How long would Lermontov take? As pathetic as his silent clench­

ing was that he'd dutifully stand there and try for an hour if Sokolov didn't, with a flick of the leash, release him. Were it warmer, or Ler­ montov

younger,

maybe he'd leave him tied to the meter outside the

coffee shop, continue his lacerating study of the waitress there, Amity.

Chancing another bleak glance he saw Lermontov motionless, maybe done, but then beginning again the stiffening hopeless crouch, the shakes working from the legs up that indicated he was still-who could blame him?-trying.

How had they met (he, Kelly, the dog)? It was, for once, something actually out of a book. Sokolov on his mid-afternoon stroll, after what was probably a fruitless morning laboring over an essay, banging his head against the lunacy of American academic prose (thicket of colons, slashed made-up new words, snide allusive jargon of a boys' club), lunch a quick sandwich and black, scalding, coffee he had come out to give his frustrations some air. There on a bench, Kelly reading a thick hardback, long-limbed in red pants, brown sweater, lissome even in silhouette, massed jet-black hair untidily stirruped over a shoulder; Lermontov, as if nothing he'd younger then, regally bored, looking straight ahead seen warranted a tum of the eye, immediately gaining Sokolov's admi­ ration. Bored as the dog, Sokolov figured What else do I have going today? and after sitting on the bench's far edge, patting the dog once, twice, ventured, "You know, there's a famous Russian story about two

people meeting over a dog."

Kelly took a moment, as if she needed first to finish a sentence in her book, then turned on Sokolov two astonishing brown eyes. "Yes," Kelly said. "But the dog was white, and small. And it didn't turn out too well for the lovers."

He'd not used the term, intentionally. "Didn't it?" Sokolov said, as­

suming his best devil-may-care, roguish grin.

And that was that. Kelly was finishing a doctoral course at the Lit and Women's Studies. She was what Sokolov

university, Comp

pretended to be but disagreeably knew he really wasn't-anarchic and determined and free of constraint. When they made love she entered into it with such vigorous abandon he wondered if she remembered

he was there; the same night she cooked an enormous lamb stew he could still summon the taste of. She had drunk at least as much of II6

three bottles of wine as Sokolov, and by the time she perused his heaped bookshelves and piles of untidy notes with a scholar's propri­ etary eye, wearing just panties and one of his button downs, then set­

tling into the easy chair (Sokolov's favorite) with a new translation of Turgenev he'd been meaning to get to, Sokolov was, as they liked here, head over heels. When he saw and commented on her studio apartment (shabby, unlit), it seemed only natural she pack up

to say

and move in with him. It was two months into their relationship,

Kelly was already calling him Gurov (he superstitiously desisting from calling her Anna), Sokolov had found a true friend in Lermontov, an­ other refugee cast below his station in life, also not a complainer, and they had lugged her boxes and plants and fancy Scandinavian mat­ tress up in the cramped service elevator. Kelly bought new shower curtains and lined his dusty shelves with paper, a three-foot ficus that immediately began the business of dying in the thin airshaft light, and they started: three years of life, desultory happiness maybe, a restive­ ness almost welcome for the torrential manner in which Kelly would respond to it. Conferences (hers: San Francisco, Montreal; his: Cam­ den, Baltimore), a wild trip through the Adirondacks (this was early) drinking chilled vodka from the bottle and listening to Chaliapin on Sokolov's old tapes, eight days in Key West unconvincingly joining the resident vacationers who gathered at the pier each night to pay homage to the sunset, drinking too much at Hemingway's bar, talking to everyone (this was later) but each other, waking with pounding headaches and the brittle realization they were sullen, disconsolate, exhausted.

So? Tolstoy had hated no one as much as his wife and they stayed

together. Chekhov, based on geographical evidence, enjoyed his actress wife more through the mail than in the house. Who, in his right mind,

expected everything?

Sokolov, apparently.

Then the illness, life slamming its lid on him, and Kelly, who had

perhaps considered many experiences would come to her at twenty­ eight, but caring for a terrified middle-aged Russian who clung to her harder the more his terror rose, was certainly not one of them. Yes, Sokolov was no model patient. Yes, he tolerated the sunny prattle of the nurses with ill-concealed impatience. Yes, he raged, yes, cursed and wept, yes when the drugs wrecked his stomach and the radiation stripped his mouth and tongue bare he allowed himself great waves of pity and remorse and yes yes yes he behaved nothing like what he would 117

have written for himself (if he still wrote): not the moody doomed po­ etry of Pushkin but the frantic unmanned panic of the clerk in Gogol's story, which Sokolov had always dismissed as sentimental, a febrile hal­ lucination until one day he found himself living it.

Kelly had stayed. He would not forget. Stayed through the treat­ ments and the endless doctors' visits, the biopsies and tests, the nights on morphine when Sokolov dreamed a landscape of tiny men burrow­ ing with axes in his brain, the fevers and chills, when, had he the

strength, he would have wished to die. Kelly had stayed.

So then? When for the fourth six-month interval his biopsies were

clear, when she had asked every possible responsible question of the doc­ tors and nurses and pharmacists and social workers, after an uncharac­ teristically quiet (relaxed, Sokolov, idiot, had thought) dinner, she announced she had accepted a position at a women's college in Virginia, and would be leaving, now Sokolov was all right.

All right?

Floored, flummoxed (he had again drunk too much wine and his ru­ ined innards were letting him know what they thought about it) Sokolov searched for his old poise like a man fumbling through a closet in the dark. What of the Chekhov story? Didn't she remember? Gurov, Anna, the hard part? What if they had survived that, the hard part?

What if now would be easy?

But Kelly was a student of literature, a better one, Sokolov knew, than he, and she looked at him in pain and weary apology but unshaken in the knowledge of what he knew as well-Chekhov hadn't written this story-and when he had returned from answering his intestines' calamitous summons, she had a suitcase out and the ficus (grandson to the first, also deceased), was poking spindly branches at Sokolov from the trash bin where Kelly had tossed it.

A shift in the breeze scooped even colder air from the river as a rich man in a camel-hair coat talked into a phone and followed two galumphing

bassets across I08th. They paused by Lermontov, who, after a half­ hearted sniff ignored them, and the man, who kept telling somebody on the phone "That's not what I said. I never said anything like that," was hauled on his leashes past Sokolov up the drive. The crows, now as if

struggling to stay awake, flapped a wing or shifted position in the branches. Lermontov and his owner regarded each other a wordless mo­ ment, then Sokolov, not bothering to examine his motives, turned him-

lI8

self and the dog toward Broadway and the odd pleasurable torment of contemplation and regret that awaited him daily at the coffee shop.

Amity was her name {it would have to be}, she'd been there six weeks {four since Kelly had traveled south}, mid-twenties, briskly attractive, blonde, toned, {she rode a bike to work, even in this weather}, with lit blue eyes that stopped Sokolov in his tracks every time. What would it be to have those eyes look at you?

A forensic sociologist, self-appointed, Sokolov {failed writer} had

made a study of the issue. What alchemical burst in the cortex, what detonation of the synapses, what pheremonal heaving in every nerve

and muscle, was set off by beauty? Made the male animal tense with op­

portunity, recognition before awareness, led just by instinct's unwaver­ ing dowser? What symmetry if feature or cadence of glance and response, what shimmer of illuminata in a passing eye would become suddenly Beatrice, Helen, your Tatyana or Anna or Dolores Haze?

What, in your hollow, dried-up receding, made you feel, suddenly, alive?

A turning point in his reckonings had come when he first saw the girl. She was on break, at the counter on the rotating stools, reading a paper. Sokolov was paying his bill-coffee, soup, a hard roll-when he saw her and something wheeling in him froze. Amity (he'd learn her name the next day), the loose disregarded hair, the perfect chin and shoulder, then the blue eyes suggesting behind them an empyrean, spring, eternity, joy. He stood there like a gawker at a country fair and she eventually looked up, took him in in a second and returned to Page Six. Nothing had cut him so deeply in years: Sokolov, Old World con­ queror, who had held the gaze of every woman in his Novels class, who

had wooed dozens just by a line from Herzen or a pose struck thought­

fully looking out a window, who had slept with half the Humanities fac­ ulty at Lehman, knew all at once age, irrelevance, invisibility. And standing there with a five dollar bill in his hand, for the first time since the terrifying clap of mortality when the doctor pronounced the diag­ nosis, felt the brush of the dark angel's wing on his neck.

And since, he had returned daily to verify the sensation, rage and concede and quietly wonder at the many ways we pass into insubstan­ tiality. An old fool in love.

Lermontov, who in his nimble youth would bound at traffic, partic­ ularly cabs, as if their presence in his street was outrageous, now stood on the west side of the avenue, looking back uncertainly at Sokolov. Just

119

quick cup of coffee, Sokolov assured him, then for you a big bowl of soup. North on the avenue the light was dimmer, a gray haze suggesting more snow. Not quite dragging the dog, Sokolov made it across the bent to tie the street, aggrieved animal to the parking meter in front of Tom's, assured him with a pat and a word or two, turned to go inside.

And there she was, Amity, talking with another waitress through the smeared half-steamed window, at the counter, maybe five feet from where Sokolov and his dog stood watching. It was like watching a scene from a movie, Lubitsch, maybe. She way crying, or had been, and the other waitress, a broad-backed matron who must have been here when La Guardia came looking for free pie, had her arm on Amity, gently rub­

bing the muscled back of her black leotard. And then it happened.

Sokolov, who for weeks had been wanting nothing more than a look of interest, of open feeling, of vulnerability from this young woman, got it.

Through the window she locked eyes with him and the look she gave was of such fresh youthful misery that it was Sokolov, voyeur emeritus, who turned away.

As the movie shifted scenes, his visions, one by one, drifted toward

him and disappeared: Amity turning her head when he finally found the

right thing to say, about to laugh; Amity on his couch, cradling a big glass of wine; Amity in his bed, flushed, exhausted, satisfied, Borodin on the stereo, or if she was another Kelly, Shostakovich. Amity. Such an odd enclosed crystalline word. He knew nothing about her.

It was much easier getting the dog back across Broadway. Maybe he had heard Sokolov's telepathic offer of soup. Maybe he just wanted to get out of the cold. Passing the bank and the falafel stand and the cut­

shop, Sokolov felt himself relent, slipped into a quiet sad­ ness of relief and withdrawal, of repudiation. He remembered the rate sundries

moment in the Chekhov where

Anna, a

Gurov, about to get what he wants from

pauses to eat a watermelon on the table. "There followed at least

half hour of silence," the story read, before he took her to bed.

Sokolov's teachers had seen this as a further proof of Gurov's heart­ lessness: assured of his conquest, why not first a fortifying snack? But this

reading never sat quite right with Sokolov, who was sounder in his doubts than in his disorganized assertions regarding them. Was it possi­ ble Gurov, knowing only the buoyant pulse of seduction, had here first actually seen the woman whose life he was about to change? And his own, internally shifting from snatched, temporary, disposable affection to something else-deeper, permanent, at so much greater cost?

This is what swept through Sokolov's head as he followed 120

Lermontov-the old dog suddenly moving fast, nearly racing-past the sleepy doormen and people rushing toward the subway. What had he to offer this girl, this stranger? He remembered no poetry. He could give her no advice about whoever had made her cry {at least it wasn't Sokolov). Face it, old man, he told himself, reflecting on his once ever­ spry organ, now a flabby curled up pasha who would, since the chemo, never

again see reason to stir himself. When Sokolov closed his eyes at

night trilobites swam in the darkness before him. What had he to offer?

Nothing: let her live her life. And an image if Kelly, on a campus some­ place warmer, carrying books from the library-Kelly, too.

At their comer Sokolov, ready for a nap, moved toward the stairs but Lermontov pulled him back to the soiled bank of snow. Why not?

Sokolov scanned the branches but the crows that had seemed immov­ able earlier now were gone. East somewhere, over Garden city, Mineola, the sun, angled low, broke a moment through the clouds and Sokolov saw

his shadow and the crouching dog's stretched westward into the

street, then vanish when the

sun again drew back. Lermontov, with what might be pride, or relief, or happy fatigue, stood before a small clus­

ter of curled brown

turds. Sokolov found the plastic bag in his pocket,

cleaned up, gave the dog a solid pat, another, looked back at Broadway a moment, over at

the river and New Jersey, then followed the straining

dog up the broad cement stairs toward their apartment and the promised bowl of soup.

I2I

Adam Zagajewski Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Since you've lost your memory Since you've lost your memory now

and can only smile, defenseless, I want to help-it was you,

after all, who opened my imagination like a demiurge.

I remember our excursions, wooly clouds

swimming low over a damp mountain forest (you knew every path in those woods), and the summer day when we scaled the heights of a lighthouse above the Baltic

and we watched the endless rippling of the sea, its white stitches frayed like basted seams.

I won't forget that moment, I think you were

moved too--it seemed as though we saw the whole world,

boundless, calmly breathing, blue and perfect, at once distinct and hazy, near and far; we felt the planet's roundness, we heard the gulls, who played at aimless gliding

through warm and chilly currents of the air.

I can't help you, I only have one memory.

122

The Rhone Valley High walls, sheer and powerful.

All New York could fit here,

along with its airports and city of underground hallways But the Rhone doesn't wait for comparisons, it flows swiftly, drunk on its own youth.

They vineyards are more cautious-they never rush, they lie on hillsides, placid as the Swiss.

But the clouds move on to Italy, to Bergamo, to Padua and Ravenna--crossing borders.

The valley contains memory, gray as stones, as granite.

The young Rhone rushes to the sea but thoughts move in the opposite direction.

Streams fall endlessly in the white robes of mist

but imagination, like a solitary climber, battles daily with force of gravity.

The old masters still live here,

unrecognizable, under assumed names, in modest houses, little gardens; you may catch sight of them in summer evenings, when lazy bonfires blaze -they tend hollyhocks and bees, naive like Le Douanier Rousseau.

You and I are silent, listening to the night.

It takes us even higher than the Alps.

123

Madge McKeithen

What Really Happened Find the North Carolina Department of Correction Public Access In­

formation System website. Enter the name of the offender. Write down the seven-digit offender ID number. Click on the box to see the

photo­

graph. Or you can do this later.

Write down the name of the correctional institution in which he is incarcerated. Write down the name of the corrections officer who will

coordinate your visit. If you are invited.

Ask a friend who is a lawyer to search the record to make sure the offender is not insane. Write down the name and telephone number of

the lawyer who handled the offender's appeal and who is now a judge.

Call him. If you must leave a message, say I am considering visiting the offender's name

...

and

and use the victim's Say I am a friend of name. Say you would his on what to expect, given appreciate thoughts his knowledge of the offender's mental state. Be direct (others have use

...

...

called before you with similar questions).

Answer the

phone courteously at 8:30 on a summer Saturday evening. Thank him for calling back. Listen to the judge say you should go. Listen to him say that once you've been incarcerated twelve years, most visitors, even

mothers, stop visiting. Listen to him say murderers are

not like the shark in Jaws,

they are not monsters, usually and they are more

like you and I than we may want to know.

Thank the judge and walk quickly outside because you know walk­ in the city helps everything. Walk to the river. Walk the river ing

along

for a while. Watch normal people doing normal things. Find balance.

124

Return home. Take a note card from the desk by the front door and write the request for an invitation to visit. Be direct. Make it three sentences.

Remember that you knew the offender. Remember what he has done. Remember he can invite you or he can refuse. Remember her.

Use sincerely to close. Put the note in an envelope and address it.

Put a stamp on the envelope and look again at the address. Check the seven

numbers after his name. Make sure you have them right. Leave

the envelope by the door to be mailed Monday morning.

Tell one person you trust that you are requesting an invitation to visit a murderer you know in prison. Say yes,

life sentence. Say no, no chance of parole. Listen when your friend asks why are you going? Listen to yourself when you say because I loved her.

Early on Monday walk to the post office two blocks away and drop the card in the inside mail slot.

Wait for a response.

Call the other two who knew her well when you did. Talk together.

Mention her freckles, her strawberry blonde hair, how good she was in

math, how well she danced, how much you laughed together, what a ringleader she was, an instigator, how she was the first among you to have sex but not by much, how you went over every detail she would give up that night at the Pizza Inn all-you-can-eat buffet. Say you have been thinking about her because you are all turning fifty. Do not bother them with your thoughts of visiting prison.

Wait for an invitation.

Find the Christmas cards with family photos she sent each year.

Look at the two of them and their three children on the beach, cos­

turned, poised, staged, fun-one year in ski clothes, another in Mickey Mouse ears. Look at her children. Count back-estimate 5, 8, 12 that

morning. Count forward--estimate 19, 21, 25 now. Probably older.

Look at the newspaper clipping your mother sent of the firstborn's

wedding. Look at the old photos of her wedding. Call the other two friends again. Call her mother. Do not leave a message. Remember more

high school silliness, a little college silliness, the long blank of the years after. (Note: remembering a blank may leave you quiet) Ask yourself why you get to be alive.

Take the long envelope fat with pages out of your mailbox. Read the tiny handwriting pressed hard into the notebook paper on two sides.

Twenty pages. Notice the putdowns. Notice the excess verbiage. Irnag­ ine that he has little else to do. Notice no kindness.

125

See the invitation to visit the offender in prison.

Thursday from 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm works best for me but I'll leave the choice to your discretion. I can tell you from experience that the two hour imposed time limit will simply fly by at an unbeliev­ able rate of speed when the conversation is centered around events

leading to the tragedy of Feb '96 because, in reality, a proper verbal accounting of the situation's nuances would take at least 6 months of 8 hour days or a written analysis as long as Durant's Story of Civ­ ilization.

Notice his words.

If ascertaining 'Why?' is your aspiration

...

it is my opinion that

you will fail in your quest for a true understandable answer, just as no one can

comprehend oceanography by examining a single drop

of seawater or an isolated grain of beach sand through a micro­ I suppose there's really no one else left but me who knows what really happened. scope

....

Put the pages back in the envelope and look at the calendar. Find three

dates. Write back. Receive a response. Choose a date. Rent a car. Drive

528 miles to Bayford Correctional Institute. Think of her first car-that red Triumph Spitfire. Remember her energy, the curves of her body, her hands.

Drive all day. Do not call anyone. Be quiet. Listen to music. Be quiet. Drive down the Delmarva peninsula, the out-of-the-way place

that it is, especially at the southern tip. Drive over the Bay Bridge Tun­ nel. Keep driving. Do not stop.

Arrive in Oriental at the B&B you booked. Let yourself in. Follow

the instructions left on the table by the door. Find your attic room.

Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Go to bed. Stare at the ceiling.

Hear you are there for her

...

to see,

ask, hear

...

because she isn't.

Sleep. Awake and find the muffin and coffee at the base of the stairs to

the attic room. Dress in clothes that cover. Notice the rain on the

rental car. Notice that the town is still quiet. Notice that there are more

sailboats than cars in this town called Oriental. Follow the MapQuest directions to the prison. Notice it is all gray and wet-the building,

parking lot, fence, razor wire.

Look at the official visitor instructions that came in the mail. Take only your car keys, four dollar bills, your lip balm and your driver's li­ cense.

126

Lock the car. Wait with the others outside the kiosk that looks

like a Cineplex ticket booth. Look neither worried nor curious. Do not look directly at the other visitors.

Wait for the loud buzzer to sound. Line up. Show ID. State the name

and number of the offender. Sign your name. Go through metal detec­ tors. Pass through automatic doors that open and shut with a Star Trek, like whoosh. Continue inward. Wait for more automatic doors to open and close-two of them. Enter what looks like a cafeteria.

Hear the guard say the offender must sit facing the clock. Sit in the

chair with its back to the clock.

Look at him when he enters. Show nothing. See how much older he looks. See that he has no teeth. Listen for two hours.

Notice he always says the tragedy that happened. Notice he never says I killed. Ask why could you not just let her go? Why leave the children with

neither parent? Hear I had come to believe they would be better off with her Hear it takes courage to do difficult things. Hear like the men who flew into the World Trade Center towers. Hear no remorse. Hear no regret.

mom.

Buy a soda from the vending machine as the visitor instructions per' mit. Hand it to him. Sit back down.

Wait for the time to be up. When the time is up, walk to the door.

(Note: You may feel oily, dark, in need of a Brillo pad to scour off every' thing that has corne toward you in these hours, and the feeling may be

physical and metaphorical.) Drive north through the Great Dismal Swamp. Keep driving. Drive horne.

Receive the hundreds of pages of letters he sends over the next six

months. Save them for a while. Keep thinking of her. (That part is not hard.) Write from her son's perspective. Write it as fiction. Write from her perspective. Listen.

Ask. Where are her words?

Shred his.

Wait several years. Attend a wedding. Be sociable. Hear the charm,

ing man next to you talk about his four children, his wife, that his father killed his mother when he was small, his career, his hopes for his chil­

dren, his love for the grandmother who raised him. Talk to him about family and fun and food and New Orleans. Laugh. Dance with your man.

Hear her now. Hear Love life. Hear Love especially those who have no

need for the word "lugubrious." Hear that's it.

Say back what really happened is your life.

127

Austin Segrest

Cold Sweat

When my mother danced alone to Wilson Pickett's caterwaul

we were

snowbound in New York

drinking whiskey to stay warm.

Her shimmy baited the candles

from their wicks, and I burned

like I'd been left out in the snow.

My aunt clapped from her chair and my uncle smiled across the den as

if to say it wasn't what it seemed.

I called her drunk and ugly

because she meant everything, every rock and swivel of her hips.

128

Rock-Out

A pale thrashing in the den, all femurs

and metatarsals and huge gnarled hands, Chris Parr plays the best air drums in Alabama.

No one around but truants and drunks to hear his speaker towers shatter the smoky air,

he channels exactly Dave Grohl's tantrum in the final surge of Nirvana's "Lithium,"

the part where Kurt wails he's not gonna crack.

Chris stands up, victorious in the feedback, and slinging his sticks to the crowd, kills the last

of his Busch, and drops, crashing face-first through the glass tabletopa

drum kicked through the head.

I29

Deborah Landau

From dear someone

dear someone

forgive me for not sleeping this city is all spinning

all sky

this city is dry and the people all wanting each with a coin purse

each with a thirst in her mouth

I put a shimmer on for you all lies I am all sequins tonight

dear someone

for you I've slit my skirt made a neckhole of longing I am always nighttime on the inside

barefoot and heretic I need god or at least the police

lie down with me

let the night pour up through us fluid and cherry dark

others are lying down bedrooms are going deep red with it

all over this town

130

] oanne Dominique Dwyer

Spinning Another morning of snow, and of a son who does not speak to me because my lover is not his father.

I broom the white weight from my car windows.

Drive to the gym for spin class

where nine other storm-wet women

find reprieve in the rhythms and beats of the Blues and Afro-Cuban pop

by pumping our legs on stationary bikes.

We sway and sweat as if we are on

the dense-bodied dance floors

of speakeasies, Tennessee roadhouses, NYC discos, New Orleans Blues bars, and barns. Where calves and colts are birthed,

where rusted tractor parts lie collapsed in a comer, where on a Saturday night a black-walnut banjo, a

waxed fiddle, and an acoustic guitar

make lovers out of the ordinary and the numb.

My son nearly mute.

His only words: Get away from me.

If I were honest I would tell him

that I never loved his father enough.

And that his pain is my making.

Our children delivered to us

by negligent gods and large-backed birds­ nearly flawless in body and soul until we drop, nick, and chip them.

And sometimes worse things are done to their bodies in circumstances beyond us.

131

The woman on the bike next to me is the thinnest and always cold.

She keeps a beach towel wrapped around her while the rest of us shed layers.

She watches our bodies to tell hers how to move.

But this morning, when Muddy Waters sang about lust,

and again, when Al Green crooned about love, I heard her howl a little hoot,

like a convalescing animal in a cardboard box.

I drove home on the icy road.

Passed my son on his way late to school.

He lifted two fingers from his left hand ever so

slightly from the steering wheel.

I was grateful

that he was still movingeven

132

if in a direction away from me.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Alaska Aubade (Summer)

although 'twas very late when someone took the truth and dared to touch what untouched

belonged only to another o

teeth and flash

once

skinflint sun fingered

the summer flesh of the unfamiliar

thigh wellmet thigh and sigh sent sigh searching for what yet could be uncovered: (0 to die into this life this light)

the truth took time

night never fell and now and still the willow cleanly crying in the window that refused the lullaby abides unmet unsatisfied stay

atop the white white covers more and so much (endless) light by which to see your lover

133

Michael Schmidt

Desire

Did we feel desire? We felt it. We felt desire.

And what did we do with it? We suffered it Behind the ribs, between the eyes and the ears, In bowel and groin, as if struggling for breath, As if we had been tackled or felled or had fallen Out of normal day onto a fist.

Our own palms sweated and pricked, We peered out between our fingers. It had not seen us.

What did we do next? We read it, we got it by heart; We put our ears to it and heard its little lungs

Puffing. We kept it warm, we fed it sweet things, We sang to it, we turned it on its bed,

Plumped its pillow, cleared away the pans.

We held it close, it smelled yeasty, it smelled of soil.

What did we do? For a year we harbored it, As if we were a modest town by a bay

And it dropped anchor, furled its sails, ran up its pennants The beautiful sailors with their sharp starched blue flaps,

The captain a wingless angel

...

no, the captain a man,

And at night the Chinese lanterns, bobbing, enchanting, An ensemble of pipes, tabors, and a fiddle

Shuffling the heart, making it dance. It danced.

We watched from the quay and never went aboard.

They urged and urged us but we never went aboard.

134

...

One day it was all over. We woke, it had gone.

Like when the circus leaves a suburb lifeless, Or it's Epiphany and all the lighted trees

Smolder in backyards and the smoke makes tears.

We turned to one another then with nothing to hold But one another. We stayed in the town by the bay.

A moon swelled out of the sea and, once risen, abated Into the now literal night we inhabit together.

135

"Dad with your one

" ..

Dad, with your one blue eye now sightless Gazing into the humid warmth, and gazing Into the red and gold smell of the roses,

All of it visible except the light.

Above, from the gable window, not seeing you, A child-girl or boy?-looks out and out; The combers roll and, off to the south, the cliffs are, Above which pool of air the thermals shimmer, Curious birds revolve their one obsession.

The sun has come up and these things are there, I see the gables of the house we lived in And all the ghosts arranged. And where am I?

The Stove .

.

.

And kisses on the rowan tree

The scarlet ulcers of the unseen Christ.

Sergei Ensenin, "Autumn" (translated by Geoffrey Thurley)

In the big round stove they're burning up the trees.

It's hot all day in the tall kitchen. Outside It's freezing, it's sunless as if a shadow was cast

By the ghosts of the trees that are burning, and the stove Stays glowing all day, even when nobody's by.

They are burning the trees. All over mother Russia The forests bum. Her face Is darkened with smoke and labor, is grimed with soot.

They are not big trees but thin sticks of birch they're burning, The graceful wings of pine and spruce, the blood-berried rowan.

137

Nicky Beer

Frost on the Octopus The blue�ringed octopus is one of the most

poisonous animals in the world.

She is as at the fair both circus tent and sideshow freak within, each blue-ringed spot an ornament

and affliction intent

advertising, in the polyglot speech of nature, her peculiar venom on

which seizes the victim first in a rush of wonderment, freezing his limbs in some sudden winter, all the while a weird thrush mottles his tongue with rime, so that his first words of love should be perfectly preserved for this tattooed girl, this contortionist adrift in the lonely excess of her power, so rife with death throughout she will at times,

upon her own breath, taste its chill.

Stephen Berg

For Me Nothing

It's quite possible I said to myself

that Larkin died alone except for nurses; a

few friends must have dropped in though to chat,

bring flowers, candy, gossip, then "My God it's almost 5

" ...

and he in his clean bed

tilted up near the middle of one wide window soldered shut: through its glass

hospital buildings, church tower with weathervane, treetops, the insidious scrim of twilight suddenly there, dimming the white steeple, the trees hardly visible dark green; he hears Stat, chatter, rushing wheels, as someone flat-lined is shocked back into existence

Larkin listening, the windows black.

139

Sarah Arvio

Algarve An algorithm for an Argonaut or

something rhythmic in the argument

ergo I'll go ergo I never will

I will not go with Jason for the fleece or

all the algae washing on the beach

grey and silver green and

silver gray

but there's something rhythmic in the art

all the plant life of the ancient sea all the plastic bottles and old twine

beaching up onto a bed of sand I said I'll go with you anywhere and I'll come there too if you are there

for where is anywhere if you are there the dune flowers silver gray and blue the washing of the waves along the beach these are the ornaments of what I mean

the organza of a revelation

the orgasm of a something rhythm in the gauzy morning near the sea in our good bad all garbled algebra

which is the "binding of the broken parts"

which was the offering of AI,J abr there ergo I'll go elsewhere if you are

the abracadabra of Al-Khiva

Harriet]. Melrose

Three

Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. Three Furies, three Graces, three Fates.

Three times three Muses. Pythagoras called three a perfect number, "the beginning, middle, and end," the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Dante's Divine Comedy's divided into Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio.

Each has thirty-three cantos. The verses are in terza rima, a rhymed pattern of tercets. Man possesses body, soul, and spirit. The human

has three canals, the middle ear, three ossicles. Three primary colors. Three is the first odd prime number. Three Greek column classifications are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Francis Bacon wrote, ear

bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

Do what you must: beg, borrow, or steal. We have the NEA, the NBA,

a

the NIH, the NFL, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Potters use three types of firing: reduction kiln, pit fire, and electric. Philadelphia is the home of the Fountain of Three Rivers. Three Bronte sisters. Three Lives, the first work of Gertrude Stein. Three witches in Macbeth. On hippies,

Ronald Reagan wrote, "They look like Tarzan, walk like Jane, and smell like Cheeta." Albert Einstein observed, "the distinction between past, present, future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Nine

The Styx encompassed nine circles in Hell. The Greeks gave us nine muses. Baseball, nine innings. The Supreme

Court, nine justices. Nine planets until 2006 when Pluto

dropped off the list. From the earliest history, nine represented a mystical number. For nine days, Deucalion's ark went hither and yon before it landed on top of Mount Pamassus. Milton imagined the gates of hell thrice three,fold;

three folds are brass, three iron, three of admantine. The gates were

bestowed with nine plates and nine linings. Some people

do good acts only to secure a place in heaven. Damned to Dante's Hell-who would want that? If you want to see the

on a

fairies, place nine grains of wheat

four-leafed clover. To see nine magpies brings

bad luck. A gypsy with a gold capped tooth invented Love Potion NO.9. The Beatles wrote Revolution 9.

The virgin priestesses numbered nine. The curse of Scotland is the nine of diamonds. Nine's a Motzkin number. I swam in a sac nine months to come here.

143

Sarah C. Harwell

Talking Back to the Mad World I will not tend. Or water,

pull, or yank, I will not till, uproot,

fill up or spray. You, mad world, come to me,

stinking of big bombs and weedy losses and expect what from me?

Shh, let me watch my garden, my backyard of volunteers, grow.

The rain comes.

Or not. Plants: sun-fed,

moon-hopped, dirt-stuck.

Watch as flocks of wild phlox appear, disappear. My magic: my lazy, garbagey magic

makes this nothing happen.

I love the tattered camisole of nothing.

The world runs its underbrush course, from a great distance­ a

heap of beauty, fed by nothing, the nothing I give it.

The wars are fought.

Blood turns.

Dirt is a wide unruly room.

144

Lisa Badner

Mommy Writing Poem Now I dream the child I adopt is really my big red cat.

He will never learn to read or speak English.

Rush to the Ethiopian doctor in Addis. Burning up. No time for a shirt.

There's no fever. Clearly your first, the doctor says.

Cousin Otto and Danitza adopt a baby girl from a Jewish agency in the 1960'S. Poor girl got Danitza's nose anyway.

Pregnant mothers of three discuss the pros and cons Bugaboo chameleons, geckos and frogs.

Blond movie star spotted at LA ball game

high fiving adopted black son.

Jane Abramovitz inherited Selma's nose job. Go figure.

Say hi Tinky Winky Dipsy Laa Laa Po, Mommy writing now.

Otto's balls were shot off in World War II. Danitza followed her daughter everywhere, hid behind trees.

When my son is five I'll be forty five when he's thirteen three when he's fifty three I'll probably be dead.

I'll be

fifty

Aurora, Arizona and Isis share bunny grahams at sing-along.

Mommy's putting tampon in now. Don't look.

White woman with black child seeks advice from black woman with white child in Target elevator.

145

Danitza died after the cancer spread to her brain.

Her adopted daughter's eulogy was very moving.

Rumble and Tumble for Courageous Cubs is all booked up.

Mommy making caca now.

Watch overweight pink plastic dinosaur sing unoriginal music.

Diddle diddle don't bite my tit when I change you.

In the dream, he rubs red fur against Baby Einstein discovery cards.

He vomits every day. He only loves me when he feels like it.

146

And Speaking of Strategic Planning Yesterday's meeting was not to be believed.

So invigorating, it sent some over the edge.

The rollout agenda ambitious, the deadlines aggressive. Implementing critical initiatives at this critical juncture is critical, said Troy from Operations.

Steady as she goes. Thirty-seven glossy I I by 17 pie charts. Beverly from Licensing wore a long blouse over

her tattoos. Vickie from Finance

pink. Key is to strike a balance, said George, Chief Associate Deputy to the Deputy Associate Chief of Analysis and Audits, between the objectives of goals and the goals of objectives.

wore

Fran from Communications presented a soft

launch of the new mission.

In song. Then, Wanda from Data

dimmed the lights. Powerpoint blue

engulfed the northwest wall.

The anticipation unbearable,

Margaret from Research ran out.

Oh the pressure. The pressure.

The new logo was red.

And black. And purple.

Shadows of teal. A touch of magenta, when you stare for three seconds, then look away and blink, each eye separately, four times. It spoke to everyone, Collections staff cried. Enforcement

saluted. The fonts: Bakersfield Old Face and Brittanic Bold.

Sub text in Century Gothic

Estrangella Odessa.

147

Bill Johnston

Aftermath

After the war is over,

hauling its swollen body across the marsh at daybreak or

dusk-

what is left?

A castigating thunder, guarantor and executioner

dipping its tongue in the caustic waters of grace;

shit-smeared emeralds strewn like tumors

in the ash;

folds of flesh; shards of gestures;

anvils; the threadbare wing of the paraclete.

The war will never be over.

Sarah Rothenberg

Reverse Immortality: The Memory

of Music What is it that Binds me to these ancient Blessed shores, that I love Them more than my country?

Friederich Holderlin, The Other One

The Ruin.

European culture is founded upon the idea of an irretrievable past-the unassailable heights of Apollonian classicism cast a long shadow over the continent. And so the sense of looking back, of rediscovering rather than inventing, haunts the idea of Europe even at its inception.

But our memory is imperfect. The lost libraries, the countless books, plays, philosophy, works of art, and music never to be found again far outnumber the fragments of ancient Greece that we inherit. What we knew is forgotten; what we know only tempts us with what we will never know. We begin bereft, and so the seed of greatness carries with it the specter of death. The vast lacunae in our knowledge of past civilizations defy the myth of immortality through lasting deeds. If the prospect of our own individual death is ever inconceivable, that of the culture that extends before and after us is even farther from our comprehension.

149

The illusion of immortality that obtains most stubbornly is not that of ourselves, or those we love, but that of things greater than anyone individual. To imagine a future Europe without the plays of Shake­ speare, without Beethoven's string quartets or Mozart's operas, to imag­ ine a Europe without the great novels which together tell not

only their

story but ours, is to imagine a barren land, a desert, an Alphaville with­

identity.

out

When the two planes, one after the other, flew with deliberate speed into the two black towers on the island of Manhattan, the world awoke

with horror to a new era. The sudden death-filled void in the Manhat­

skyline provoked a distinct change in the way we would, from that explosive morning onward, see ourselves and the world in which we live. Six months earlier, the Islamic Taliban government of Afghanistan had announced its intent to destroy "all statues," including two massive Buddhas in Bamiyan dating from the fifth century, one of which was the tallest standing Buddha in the world. In response to a United Nations offer of funds to protect the Buddhas, a Taliban envoy explained (as re­ ported in The New York Times), "If you are destroying our future with economic sanctions, you don't care about our heritage."

The deliberate destruction of these internationally revered works of art spoke to a different threat than that of the crumbling financial tow­ ers. The collapse of the towers was a direct attack on our present; the blown-up twin Buddhas brought death to relics from an ancient past.

These 1500 year-old statues were emblems of immortality, silent wit­ tan

nesses

to

a

time outside of our modem cultural conflicts. The self­

exploding airplanes and the destroyed Buddhas together announced a threat to the idea of civilization.

new

In the weeks following 91 I I, the sirens continued to wail in down­ town New York and the dust-filled air smelled of death. We our

slept fitfully,

first moment of consciousness a horrible shock of memory. We lined

up silently to look down into the gaping black abyss. And soon, gradu­

ally, we returned to our daily activities. I went back to practicing the piano.

The music that I love relies on memory. The musical forms cannot be seen,

the plots cannot be summarized. The landscape of music is fol­

lowed by our ear blindly, and it is only the ability to remember, the un­ conscious absorption of material so that its variations and returns are

recognized, that allows us to perceive a cohesive shape that gives plea150

sure.

The demands upon the listener are great. The narrative is without

subject, it is about nothing. But it is about nothing in the same sense that life itself is about nothing; in this sense, it is about everything. De­ fined by time, it is time itself.

Since Aristotle, time has been viewed as a sequence of nows. Kant warned us that "time yields no shape." Yet, within the confines of a time period that begins and ends in silence, a great piece of music carves meaning in the air. It establishes a grammar of tension and resolution.

Building upon a basic concept of departure and return, composers de­ veloped musical forms that could expand to become extended narra­ tives. Out of nothing, a structure emerges, an invisible landscape of place with home, conflicts and wanderings, crises, doubts, climaxes and, finally, return. Through this musical language we experience metaphor­ ically, in a microcosm of time, the trajectory that is life.

The ability to engage with the music is sensorial; in the moment of listening, the music is experienced rather than understood. Sensorial but, unlike the primal sensual pleasures of food or sex, in need of the fil­ ter

of the mind. The necessity of the mind is central to this music's

greatness. The listener's engagement is a complex mix of attentiveness

and distracted daydreaming, only moments of which can be translated into words; and with complex forms of music, it is only upon repeated

there is always a listening that our engagement deepens. "In music the the of wrote Baude­ (a lacuna) listener," gap bridged by imagination ...

laire. How can we recognize the return without memory? We don't know we remember until we hear the return.

Some pieces actually begin with a memory. Take the final ballade of

Chopin, the magnificent Ballade in F minor, Op. 52. It welcomes us gently, enfolds us between the bell-like repeated octaves of the treble, adds a quickening middle voice and leads us downward to the resonant bass, searchingly repeats itself, and then finds a still center and waits.

Waits for a memory of a theme to arrive; a memory of something we do not yet know. The theme emerges haltingly, searching for itself, coming from a distant past and moving gradually into our present. The unfold­ ing of this haunting melody is one of the most exquisite sequences in all of Chopin's music.

Frederic Chopin, a frail Polish exile composing in the French coun­ tryside during his holidays away from Paris, his adopted home. But for each of us who listens, what is the memory of? It is the searching for that which cannot be held. The elusiveness of music is its magic-it is always in flight, can only be recognized in motion. When you stop it, as in a

music theory class, and give the

harmony a name, and show that this chord is the same one heard many times before, it may help us to un­ derstand a kind of anatomy but it tells us no more about the music than an

isolated organ reveals of the soul of the person we love.

What happens if you are born in the latter part of the twentieth-century in America, to first and second generation American-born parents, and find your most personal reflection, the mirror to your inner self, in music

created on another continent more than one hundred and fifty, at times two hundred and

fifty, years before your birth? You spend many hours a

day immersed in this language from the past; physically, emotionally, mentally immersed. You learn desire in music before you know it as a woman, you know the sorrow of loss before you have mourned. You feel

all this as you translate the black dots and lines on the score into sound and try to make sense of them. What does this do to your relationship to your own present, are

the physical present which surrounds you? Where

you when you lift your head from the keyboard and look at the

world?

You become a musician as a child. The differences between a child musician and an adult musician

perform today works of music that I first performed when I was eleven years old. When I play these works today-say, Chopin's mournful Prelude in E minor-my en­ tire life is there. The living room becomes again suburban, the piano sits are

minor. I

under a stairwell, my father reads the newspaper in the armchair, my

mother is in the kitchen talking on the phone, my brother is in his room behind a closed door. The Chopin Prelude, when I was eleven, became a

place, a place which I could enter that was entirely my own. With no

walls around me, I could move far into an interior space that was un­ touched by the activity and the tension-the often palpable potential for explosion that was underlying the domestic scene-that was around me.

The prelude was a haven; perhaps one could say a haven from the

present, but it was the present, as I put my foot on the pedal, lifting it and then pushing it down again with each changing harmony, and lis­

tened to the resonant sounds float upward around me.

The music was also a code. Here was a magical universe where I could confide my deepest secrets, make my most personal anguishes and unknown desires public without revealing a single name or betraying any confidence. No one knew what I was saying, yet here was a limitless

repository for feeling. And so I discovered early on the importance of

living in a world beyond words.

Years later, as a student in Paris, I read Malraux's La condition hu� maine. "Celui cherche aussi aprement l'absolu ne le trouve que dans

qui

la sensation." He who so fiercely seeks the absolute will find it only in sensation. Malraux was writing about a terrorist, but I thought it was about myself.

In early October 2001 I played my first concert after 9/II; a concert of

chamber music by Mozart: the Kegelstatt Trio for clarinet, viola and and then the dramatic Piano Quartet in G minor. In the second

piano half, I sat backstage and listened as Richard Stoltzman led the tran­ scendent quintet for clarinet and strings.

The audience was rapt. In those strange days, any large assembly of people felt oddly defiant, and there was an added intensity of both play­

ing and listening. The music of Mozart, with its uncanny ability to corn­ municate the full range of human emotions with disarming simplicity,

spoke with new urgency. How many times in the last two centuries, after horrific acts of inhumanity and violence, had Mozart's music reaffirmed for us the possibility of beauty, of life? How much evil had this music witnessed yet survived?

The music was still with us, but now it had for me a new fragility, a new vulnerability. These works were not inevitable; they did not have to exist and

they may not always exist; for so many people already this

music no longer exists. What had been previously unthinkable came to me as an

obvious thought: music was a cultural artifact that could dis­

appear like anything else. Playing this music suddenly, briefly, became a

dangerous act of passionate defense.

I live in three cities, and each one seems to inhabit a different century.

In Paris, the nineteenth century is not just nearby, it is present, we are

still living it. We need only get up early enough to cross the Tuileries

and the Seine before the tourists awaken. The twentieth and twenty­ first centuries are experienced as intrusions here. Plumbing and elec­

tricity seem to be recent inventions, functioning temperamentally; the Internet a luxury only fleetingly available. The solidity of the past and its beauty are our daily companions, and it is always against this back­

drop that the present is seen, and that we see ourselves.

In New York, we are firmly in the twentieth and twenty-first cen­ turies, securely surrounded by grand apartment buildings, libraries and museums constructed with confidence one hundred years ago and living in discordant harmony with their randomly designed and placed newer 153

neighbors. Change is a constant here, but the city remains grounded in monuments, landmarks, a vast central park and buildings whose func­ tions may shift but whose presence is continual. The sudden disappear­ of the World Trade Centers left a gaping wound, but in classic New York style, mourning quickly transformed itself into pragmatic argument ance

and heated disputes over the redevelopment of Ground Zero became part of the process of the city's return to life.

In Houston, there is no past. The continual construction is synony­

with destruction: expensive houses are demolished after a few decades to be replaced with larger models; nothing is built to last. An mous

exuberantly entrepreneurial town, Houston boasts cultural institutions that could be the envy of many a mid-sized European city. Built upon a swamp that is frequently flooded, this is a place where things sprout eas­ ily but nothing takes root. Here we are free of the burden of the past, which can stifle a city as perfect as Paris, but are condemned to amnesia in a sea of newness. Nothing survives. The physical present constructs itself as a paper city, a theatrical decor not meant to last any longer than a temporary production. In this thoroughly modem American city, one sits alone in a car, protected from strangers and random encounters. The idea of the city, in the European sense-a community imagined around a cohesive center of market squares, town halls, and cafes-is absent, the urban mystique of the flaneur wandering aimlessly through crowds is lost. The automobile defines a distinctly private space where strangers cannot

brush shoulders with you, conversations cannot be overheard,

and the city is observed rather than inhabited.

But here, in tension as it is with its rootless surroundings, culture

be transformative. The soulful melodies of Schubert reach out to the isolated driver waiting at an intersection. The radiant beauty of

can

Mozart lifts us out of our banal surroundings as we sit in rare communion in a concert hall. The trajectory of the music hovers with

neighbors

above and between past and future, and speaks to us from a time and place far from where we find ourselves.

Still, culture is lonely here, finding no sympathy on the street.

There is no building as old as a Beethoven sonata, and few that date modernist works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In back to the

early

Paris, I walk the streets traversed by Chopin, Liszt, Baudelaire and Delacroix, and their ghosts walk happily beside me. I visit Square d'Orleans, where Chopin and George Sand set up house in stylish new mid-nineteenth-century apartments soon after that productive summer which brought forth the Ballade in F minor, and standing in the court154

yard I imagine easily that Chopin is still working at his Pleyel. In Hous­ ton, Frederic Chopin the man is as distant as ancient Greece.

And yet, in each of these cities, when I get up in the morning and sit down at my piano, I am in the same place. I am home. Piano as place.

In the last century, European culture packed its bags and came to live were lost along the way, but those who made it here in America.

Many

came

ings

without homes, without possessions, without books and paint­ and photographs. They came with their memory, and they

brought us the memory of Europe. American culture was transformed, and the brilliant modernism that had exploded in the cities of Europe between the wars, only to be brutally condemned-first under Nazi fascism and then under Soviet Communism-settled down to take root in the new world.

Years later, when Europe again became safe, some returned, but the loss to the old world was already beyond healing. Most of the surviving great minds that had contributed to the creation of Vienna, Paris,

Berlin, Budapest had gone elsewhere, filling American universities and conservatories, medical centers and orchestras, passing the great cultural heritage of Europe into the hands of the brash, energetic, optimistic young Americans. And the cities of Mozart and Beethoven, of Picasso, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Freud, the cities where the classical sonata had been invented, where symphony orchestras played for the first time, where music had developed from chant to opera, where modernism had

boldly stepped onto the world stage-these cities were now haunted by their murdered citizens, the neighbors who had vanished, the children never to

be seen again.

Shame cast a new shadow across the continent. Memory was selec­

tive, recent history something to be written and rewritten for the rest of the century. Even into the new century, when the number of living wit­ nesses

had dwindled to the last aging few, startling hidden memories

rose to

the surface that only made us realize how little we understood

the past, and rattled our already shaky image of the present.

With the temporary triumph of the Nazis, the nightmarish trenches of World War I had given way to a new landscape of destruction. For many, the idea of Europe could not survive this second death. The ques­ tion was asked again and again in the following decades: how could the

descendents of Goethe and Beethoven commit such horrific crimes?

How could concentration camp commandants sing Schubert lieder on their dinner breaks? Adorno said there would be no more poetry, and 155

any lasting illusions of a moral authority tied to Europe's artistic and in­

tellectual achievements were buried.

But now, after 91 I I, we were faced with a very different enemy, one who had no use for Schubert and who would happily destroy all

vestiges

of these European achievements. An enemy who would

destroy our

memory. Did this make the Nazis in some way less evil? or more evil?

Was it morally worse to recite Goethe, to appreciate the greatness of

Beethoven, and lead your fellow man to death?-or to see godliness not in human achievement but only in death, your own and that of your en­ emies? The attack on the World Trade Center exhibited an evil which

anything but banal: here was an elaborately conceived scheme for martyrdom in which the driving force of ideological passion was exalted death. Here were people for whom the defining moment was not how they lived but how they died.

But one of the problems with the moral rhetoric that followed was was

that the culture we wanted to protect was not the American strain of it that dominated the rest of the world through commercial export. We

did not believe that football, television, fast food, and shopping malls were

universal markers of freedom with which one could liberate the op­

pressed. We wanted to protect a different culture that was already threatened, not from the outside but from within.

The cultural legacy that had fled from Fascism and Communism to take root in America had flourished in many ways, but was still not en­

tirely comfortable in the new world. Perhaps art is never to be too com­ surroundings. In any case, there was an undeniable parallel battle against a merciless marketplace that dominated not just economics but the way people thought. Spiraling commercial values were increasingly dominant, and art that was difficult and appealed to few was regarded with suspicion or scorn.

These issues had been part of the American landscape since the country's invention, but at the tum of the twenty-first century the idea of culture as commodity obtained as never before. Even among arts practitioners, the cult of salesmanship infiltrated the creative process and compromised aesthetic decisions. Hannah Arendt had warned, "thinking will atrophy in an environment that lacks the stillness that al­ lows us to concentrate on inner dialogue fortable in its

"

...

What was the world that I saw when I lifted my head from the

keyboard? On one side, a growing radical religious movement dedi­ cated to the violent destruction of the flawed yet comparatively free world I lived in. On the other, a fast-paced gadget-driven material so-

ciety that seemed increasingly at risk of living cynically, exclusively, in the present.

The enjoyment of music demands several skills that are not valued highly or exercised in our daily lives: memory, patience, and powers of concentration without visual cues. Memory was increasingly external­

ized, something outside ourselves and separate from our identity­

something that could be purchased for one's computer or cell phone, carried in one's pocket at fingertip availability. Listening to classical music is a form of contemplation; it encourages a state of inwardness, creates a sense of time suspended. Its invisibility makes it not just elu­ sive but immaterial-what Proust called "sine materia." Patience is

integral to sustaining interest in a large musical structure over an ex­ tended period of time.

These are skills important not only to the listening of music. The

ability to construct meaning out of one's life, to see life as a trajectory over time rather than a sequence of repeatedly re-invented nows-this is impossible without developing a relationship to time itself. And one can do this only through memory. A view of time that embraces the elusive balance of past, present and future-this is at the heart of poetic existence.

Society exists in a strange continuum of forgetting and remembering, moving as we do further from the past, and as we go collecting more in­ formation about what was once experienced but now is no longer known. As we move further away from a given period we continually rewrite what it was.

We experience life within a myriad of circumstances, starting with

the most personal of the family into which we are born and moving out­ ward to the public historical moment of that birth, all of which con­ tribute to how we think. It is virtually impossible to re-imagine life in an earlier time with any real accuracy. We would have to identify and sus­

pend everything in our thought process that is a result of the time and culture in which we live. Even in looking back on earlier periods of our own life, we may remember what we thought, but the most difficult thing to authentically recapture is the logic of why we thought the way we did.

In our search to understand the past, we occasionally come across a detail of daily life that brings a vanished world into focus. As we learned from Marcel Proust, it is not what we remember that brings back the past but rather the sudden re-emergence to consciousness of that which we

had, until this very moment, forgotten.

In a series of talks at the University of Chicago in 1945, the great pi157

anist Arthur Schnabel, a wartime

emigre who left Berlin after Hitler's

rise to power in 1933, described his concert career.

Begun in Vienna as a

child prodigy in 1890, Schnabel described the trajectory

" ...

from what

I would call the last flowering of an individualistic age to the first un­

folding of a collectivistic age." He told his young American audience that material pleasures were "time and thought-killers," reminisced about Saturday afternoon visits to Brahms's two-room apartment, and then made a list of things that did not exist, or were just appearing, when he was growing up-electricity, telephones, radios, ready-made clothing, typewriters, photographs in newspapers, safety pins, payments by check.

A decade before Schnabel spoke about his life to American college students, Walter Benjamin, that keen observer of detail, wrote his clas­ sic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Today we live almost exclusively in a world of reproduction, for in the digital age there is no original. We are confronted daily with existential puzzlers that challenge the very idea of authenticity: imitation food, cloned animals, "reality" TV; a world in which people reinvent their physical selves through cosmetic surgery and their emotional selves, de­ pending on the day, with mood-altering drugs prescribed by doctors. A world in which lines between public and private are thoroughly erased on an

internet which offers unlimited access to millions, intimate com­

munication between individuals who never meet, and infinite spaces for

private citizens to market themselves as products. A corporate commer­ cial world in which we travel across the globe only to find ourselves in front of the same stores and restaurants that we left thousands of miles away at home. Today we live in the Age of Inauthenticity.

In 1940, five years before Schnabel's lectures in America, Walter

Benjamin arrived at the border town of Port Bou in the final stretch of his flight from the Nazis, heavy black briefcase in hand. When the Spanish authorities ordered his return to German-occupied France, Benjamin, weak of heart and exhausted from his foot crossing of the Pyrenees, committed suicide. His death marked the symbolic end to a European way of life, a contemplative life intertwined not with univer­ sity positions and book contracts but with uncounted hours in sidewalk cafes. Never in his wanderings had Walter Benjamin become enough of an insider to lose his acute outsider vision; he was an outsider in time as well as place. "As though," wrote Hannah Arendt, "he had drifted out

of the nineteenth century into the twentieth the way one is driven onto the coast of a strange land."

What do you do when the present is so strange that you need to dissect and analyze the world around you on a daily basis, as though you had ar­ rived from another planet; you need to translate in an attempt to make with your surroundings? The hours spent at the piano are the peace

hours that need no explanation. But the outside world hovers precari­

ously, nervously; alien.

I was born into the post-World War II era. I became an adult as mern­

of documen­

ory was fading, there were few witnesses left, and a frenzy tat ion sought to create a legacy of historical justice before it was too late.

The Berlin Wall fell and we moved into the post-Communist era, a con­ fused time. And then came 9/II, and when I looked up from the piano I found that Europe had shrunk.

The attack on America in September 2001 was, after Nazism, the the idea of Europe, coming to a continent morally weakened in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. In the months and years next great blow to

that followed the terrorist attack, even as the Union extended its arms to embrace new

members, Europe shrunk.

It was not just that we saw a fragile modem Europe under siege, each country harboring a huge class of discontent immigrants, unassimilated

workers; we read daily of terrorist plots uncovered in England, in Ger­ many, bombs in Spain, murders in Amsterdam. But now the map of the world had shifted. Names of countries we could formerly not pronounce rolled off our tongues, huge geographical areas seemed to come into focus on the globe, and as these places became more real to us, Europe

became smaller.

I was raised on the idea of music as a universal language. Many of my

teachers spoke with the charming accents and dry humor of Vienna and

Berlin; they were not just teachers of music, but emissaries of the old world, not only survivors but witnesses who were closer to the musical source, both in time and in culture. I think of the Polish pianists Artur

Balsam and Mieczeslaw Horoszowski, the Viennese violinist Felix Gal­ imir, all of whom were remarkable individuals and dedicated teachers.

The fact of their presence spoke of the nearness of World War II, and by the time of 9/1 I, most of them were no longer alive. At the funeral of Felix Galimir, in the last months of the twentieth century, the many mu­

gathered sadly looked around and realized that the baton of musical tradition had now been passed to musicians born in America. The mittel�Europa Jewish humor and accent, which had been sicians who were

159

such a part of our growing-up and our education, would be heard no more.

World War II had dropped irrevocably further into the past.

In contrast to my European-born teachers, the ethnic make up of

the young students at the conservatory where I studied was testament to the far-reaching appeal of this music; the musical language could be learned by anybody. But the original inventors of this particular music, the composers and not the modern-day interpreters, could only have

European language and thought and specific historical mo­ ments. The language may transcend the culture that produced it, but come

out of

the connection remains.

Music is a form of cultural memory. After 9/II, the music sounded

different to me. I felt it when I played Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven,

Chopin. Now it was as though the music came out of a ghetto-an ern­ pire, yes, but a ghetto that was Europe at a certain time.

Different societies create different people, and our values and abili­ ties are reflected in what we create-our cultural legacies. What was the ghetto of time and place that had produced the last great works of Schu­ bert and Beethoven? What strange and unique set of circumstances al­ lowed these composers to enter into uncharted areas of metaphysical truth? To find in music a way to triumph over time, to reconcile, how­ ever

momentarily, the inevitability of death with the ecstatic possibili­

ties of life.

Beethoven's triumph, a music that testifies to the power of human will to shape its destiny, reflects a spiritual searching grounded in rea­

soned thought. Beethoven came of age with the French Revolution and embraced the heady ideals of democratic republicanism. He saw his own humble origins and innate greatness mirrored in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the personal crisis of faith provoked by the tragic dete­ rioration of his hearing was intertwined with his adoration of and then

subsequent contempt for the self-proclaimed emperor. The life span of Ludwig van Beethoven belongs to the Age of Revolution, a time of heroism, hope, social experiment, and disillusion; a time of war where casualties left hundreds of thousands dead on the battlefield.

It was a time of action and a time of ideas: a time when reason

fought to obtain over superstition, when the metaphysics of Kant and then Hegel opened new areas of thinking. Kant created a space for spec­ ulative thought, and with the late works of Beethoven, music actually becomes speculative thought-not its representation, but the act of thought itself, a journey of philosophical exploration inexpressible in

160

words. When we listen to this music now, two centuries later, the ideals of European humanism come alive.

Our Greeks were very concerned with immortality. They linked it to the

divine act of contemplation, and divided it into two parts: the first stage involved perceiving the eternal; then came part two, which was, as Hannah Arendt puts it in The Life of the Mind, "the attempt to translate the vision into words." This second part was the most problematic, for the process of describing the experience ultimately changed it. But when our transcendent moment comes from music, we eliminate the

second step entirely.

Immortality is not about living into the future, it is about having ac­ the unending past. This is the magic of great art, this time cap­ sule that comes to us breathing life. It is an error to view immortality as cess to

a

forward trajectory. When I sit at the piano, the music is of a culture

and the culture is of a time and when I live in it, which is often, I live

elsewhere. We could call it reverse immortality.

Brian Barker

Visions for the Last Night on Earth Then I saw the floodwaters recede, leaving a milky scum

scalloped on silos & billboards, & the eaves of farmhouses were

festooned with a mossy brown riverweed

that hung in the August heat like bankers' limp fingers, & the drowned com, sick from sewage & tidesuck,

reappeared like a washed-out green ocean of wilting speartips that bloated fish rode into the fetid moonlight, & the lost dogs came down from the hills, still lost, trotting, a tremolo of swollen tongues panting, their mudcaked

undercarriages swarmed by squadrons of gnats as dilapidated barns began disappearing at last, swallowed like secrets the & the muck, by ghosts of handsome assassins sat up in piles of hay & combed their pompadours & muttered in Latin their last prayers

before stepping through trapdoors flung open

like flaps of skullskin to the skyblue sky of oblivionthat same color of your panties, I thought, as you floated topless across our across

bedroom in a wake of sparks, a vision sashaying

the bottom of the sea, visions colliding, the sea rising, please

forgive me my terrors, love, for I saw your braided hair & imagined

frayed rope lowered from a helicopter, or, worse, the ropey penis of the horse a general sits in the shade as bluebottle flies, querulous & fierce, baffle the air above silhouettes bent digging in a field of clay.

For I watched the sunset so many evenings, holding your hand, & thought of the combustible blood of an empire, or laid awake in the long dark listening to your breathing a

& imagined sad Abe Lincoln pacing our hallway, his arms folded

behind his back like a broken umbrella, the clock ticking, the ravenblack sedans idling curbside in the suburbs of America, watching closely, purring greedily, as

they gulped down the last starlight, dreaming of some other dawn.

Contest. For many years a translator at the

CONTRIBUTORS

United Nations, she now also teaches po­ etry at Princeton. Lisa

Badner is a lawyer

and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Stanis­ law Baranczak is a poet,

literary critic,

scholar, editor, and lecturer. He

is

the

most prominent translator in recent years

Meena Alexander's six books of poetry

of English poetry into Polish and of Polish

include Quickly Changing River, Raw Silk,

poetry into

and IlUterate Heart (Winner of the PEN

book of poems, The Animal Gospels, won

Open Book Award) all published by Tri­

the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize and

Quarterly Books/Northwestern University

published in 2006. His poems, reviews,

Press. She is the editor of Indian Love

and interviews have appeared or are forth­

(Everyman's Library/Knopf) and

coming in such journals as Poetry, Kenyon

author of Poetics of Dislocation (University

Review Online, Ploughshares, AGNI, Quar­

Poems

of Michigan Press, Poets

on

Poetry Se­

English. Brian Barker's first

terly West, American Book Review,

was

the

ries). The recipient of Guggenheim, Ful­

Writer's Chronicle, Indiana Review, Black­

of

bird, Pleiades, and storySouth. He teaches at

England, and other fellowships, she is Dis­

the University of Colorado Denver where

tinguished Professor of English at Hunter

he co-edits Copper Nickel. Catherine Bar­

and CUNY Graduate Center.

nett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fel­

Simon Armitage has published nine vol­

lowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, the

including Killing Time,

(Faber & Faber, 1999) and Selected Poems,

Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Into Perfect

(Faber & Faber, 2001). His latest collec­

Spheres

bright, Rockefeller,

College umes

of poetry

tion of poems,

Arts

Council

Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus

Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice

James Books, 2004),

won

the Beatrice

Barnard,

the Corduroy Kid was published by Faber

Hawley Award. She teaches

and Faber in September 2006. He has re­

the New School, and New York Univer­

ceived numerous awards for his poetry in­

sity. Nicky Beer's book of poems, The Di­

cluding the Sunday Times Author of the

minishing House, is published by Carnegie

Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a

Mellon University Press (2010). She has

Lannan Award. Sarah Arvin's two books

received a Literature Fellowship from the

of poems, Sana (Knopf, 2006) and Visits

National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth

from the Seventh (Knopf, 2002), were pub­ lished in a combined edition by Bloodaxe

Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Founda­ tion, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship

in 2009. A recipient of the Rome Prize of

from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference,

the American Academy of Arts and Let­

and

ters (2003-2004) and a Guggenheim Fel­

poems,

lowship (2005-2006). In 2008 she won the eleventh annual Boston Review Poetry

have been published in Best American Po­

a

at

Discovery/The Nation award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and

reviews

etry 2007, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Naira-

165

tive Magazine, the Nation, Nerve, New Or­

Book Review, the New Republic, the New

leans

Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Par­

Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Prairie

Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at

tisan Review, Common Knowledge,

the University of Colorado Denver, where

Literary Imagination,

she co-edits the

has received

Lisa

Bellamy's

are

forthcoming

journal Copper Nickel.

poems have

appeared or

in New Ohio

Poetry,

among others. She

Guggenheim,

ACLS and

SSRC grants, the PMLA William Riley

Review,

Parker Prize, and the PEN/Book-of-the­

Fugue, Tiferet, PANK, Harpur Palate, and

Month Club Prize for her work on Russian

other magazines. In 2008, she

and Polish poetry. Peter Cole's most re­

won

the

Fugue Poetry Prize and received a Push­ cart

Prize nomination. She was a finalist

cent book of poems is

Things on Which I've

Stumbled (New Directions). Hebrew Writ­

in 2008 and 2009 for the Gerald Stem Po­

ers on

etry Prize. She graduated from Princeton

sity Press. Cole was named a MacArthur

University and studies with Philip Schultz

Fellow in 2007. Michael Collier is the au­

at

the Writers Studio, where she also

Writing is out with Trinity Univer­

thor of five books of poems,

including

teaches. Stephen Berg, founding editor of

Dark Wild Realm

American Poetry Review, is the author of

2006), his most recent collection, and he

dozen books of poetry and transla­

is the recipient of a 2009 Award in litera­

two

(Houghton Mifflin,

tions. He is a professor of English at the

ture from the American

University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

and Letters.

David

Man: A

Bottoms

has

been

published

Academy of Arts

Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Biography of Donald Barthelme,

widely in such publications as the Atlantic,

(St. Martin's Press) is forthcoming in pa­

the New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and the

perback from Picador. His new short story

Paris Review, as well as in some two dozen

collection, One Day the Wind Changed,

anthologies and textbooks. He has been a

will appear from Southern Methodist

Richard

University Press in the spring of 2010. He

Hugo

Poet-in-Residence

at

the

distinguished professor of English and

University of Montana and currently

is

holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos

Creative Writing at Oregon State Univer­

Distinguished Chair in English Letters at

sity. Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author

Atlanta,

of two poetry collections, most recently,

where he edits Five Points: A Journal of Art

Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other

and Literature and teaches creative writ­

Off and Back Handed Importunities (Tin

Georgia

State

University

in

ing. He is Poet Laureate of Georgia. His

House Books). Her first book, And Her

honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship,

Soul Out Of Nothing, won the Brittingham

Ingram-Merrill

Prize (University of Wisconsin Press). Her

American Academy and Insti­

honors include a 2004 Guggenheim Fel­

the Levinson Prize,

Award,

an

an

a

lowship in poetry and a 1996 Rona Jaffe

National Endowment for the Arts Fellow­

Foundation Writers' Award in poetry. Her

ship. Clare Cavanagh's essays and transla­

poems have

tions have appeared in the New York Times

journals and magazines including AGNI,

tute

166

of Arts and Letters Award, and

been

published in literary

New

England Review, Poetry Northwest,

the Draney camp, until being deported to

Michigan Quarterly Review, Field, Indiana

Auschwitz

on

Linda

May

where he

30,

was

Review, and in anthologies including Best

killed.

American Poetry I995 and Legitimate Dan­

collection of poetry, Magnetic North, was a

gers: American Poets

finalist for the

of the New Century

Gregerson's most recent 2007

National

Book

(Sarabande Books). Amber Dermont is

Award. She teaches creative writing and

assistant professor of English and Cre­

Early Modern Literature at the University

ative Writing at Agnes Scott College in

of Michigan. Judith Hall's recent books

Decatur, Georgia. Her novel Prosper and

are

an

her short story collection Damage Control are

forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.

Three Trios, translations of JII (North­

western

etry

University Press, 2007), and Po­

Forum

(Bayeux Arts,

2007),

a

Milan Djordjevic, who was born in 1954

collaboration with David Lehman which

in Belgrade, is a poet, short story writer, an

she illustrated. Jeffrey Harrison has pub­

essayist, and a translator. His first book of

lished four

poems, On Both Sides of the Skin, came out

full-length books of poetry­ most recently Incomplete Knowledge (Four

in 1979. He has received most of the pres­

Way Books, 2006), which was runner-up

tigious literary awards in Serbia for his col­

for the 2008 Poets' Prize-as well as The

lections of poetry, his stories, and essays.

Names of Things, selected poems published

Joanne Dominique Dwyer's poems have

in England by the Waywiser Press (2006).

forthcoming in the Amer­

A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fel­

Poetry Review, Conduir, Field, the

lowships, he has new work forthcoming in

Massachusetts Review, and the New En­

the Yale Review, American Poetry Review,

gland Review. Stuart Dybek's most recent

the Southern Review, and elsewhere. Sarah

collection of poems is Streets in Their Own

C. Harwell is one of the featured poets

Ink (FSG/Picador).

along with Farah Marklevits and Court­

appeared, ican

was a

or are

Benjamin

Fondane

Romanian and French poet, play­

wright,

literary critic, film director, and

translator. He

published frequently

in

ney Queeney in Three New Poets

(Sheep

Meadow Press, 2006). Her poems have been published in various journals includ­

major periodicals and formed a short-lived

ing, Margie, Stone Canoe, and Poetry. She

theatrical company named

lives in Syracuse, New York, with her

(1921-1923)

Insula ("The Island"). After moving

to

daughter, Hannah. Ehud Havazelet is a

Paris in 1923, Fondane affiliated himself

short-story writer and an award-winning

with

novelist. His honors include

Surrealism,

publishing

notable

a

Guggen­

poems, such as "A Madame Sonia Delau­

heim

nay." In 1940, Fondane was drafted upon

cently the Oregon Book Award for fiction

Nazi Germany's invasion of France. Taken

in 2008. Since 1999, he has

prisoner, managing to escape, and recap­

ative writing at the University of Oregon.

tured, he was hospitalized for an appen­

Tony Hoagland is an American poet and

dectomy. In March 1944, he was arrested

writer. His poetry collection, What Narcis­

by French Vichy policemen and held in

sism Means

Fellowship in 2001

to

and

most

re­

taught cre­

Me, was a finalist for the

National Book Critics Circle Award.

in the Paris Review, Tin House, the Kenyon

Other honors include two grants from the

Review, the Best American Erotic Poems,

National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000

Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She directs

Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a

the Creative

fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts

York

Work Center. His poems and criticism

the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of En­

Writing Program at New

University. James Longenbach is

have appeared in such publications as Po­

glish at the University of Rochester. His

etry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Three­

fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, will

penny Review, the

be published by Norton next year. Jynne

Gettysburg Review,

Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review,

Dilling

Martin's poetry has

appeared

American Poetry Review, and Harvard Re­

widely including

view. Bill Johnston is a prolific Polish lan­

Boston Review, New England Review, and

translator and associate

elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2008

professor of comparative literature at Indi­

Ruth Lilly Prize, and winner of the 2009

guage

ana

literary

University. In 2008 he received the

Found in Translation Award for his trans­

Boston Review

in the

Kenyon Review,

Discovery Prize. Madge

McKeithen is the author of Blue Peninsula

lation of new poems by Tadeusz R6iewicz;

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). She

this book was also a finalist for the N a­

teaches in the

tional Books Critics Circle Poetry Award.

New School. Harriet J. Melrose's poems

In 1999, he was awarded a National En­

have been published in the Gettysburg Re­

dowment for the Arts Creative Writing

view, Boulevard, and many smaller univer­

Fellowship for Poetry (Translation) for

sity and regional publications including

BaUadina by [uliusz Slowacki, and in 2005

most

he received

National Endowment for

Chicago Writers on Barack Obama's Inaugu­

the Humanities Fellowship for a transla­

ration. This is her third appearance in Tri­

tion of The

Quarterly. She

a

Coming Spring by

Stefan

recently,

Writing Program at the

The Writers'

won

an

Congress:

Illinois

Arts

Zeromski. John Kinsella has published

Council Literary Award for a poem pub­

thirty books and his many awards in­

lished in TriQuarterly 110/1 I 1. Her poetry

over

clude three Western Australian Premier's

book manuscript, What the Poet Knows,

Book Awards, the Grace Leven Prize for

was

Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry,

Prize competition. Naomi Shihab

and

was

the

2008

Christopher

Brennan

a

finalist in the New Issues Poetry

Nye

born in St. Louis and lives in San An­ Her

books

include

Honeybee

Award. Ryszard Krynicki is a poet, trans­

tonio.

lator, and editor. His most recent volume

(Greenwillow, 2008) and You & Yours

lives in

(BOA, 2005). Dennis O'Driscoll's latest

Krakow, Poland, where he and his wife,

collection of poetry is Reality Check (Cop­

Krystyna, run a publishing house. Deb­

per

orah Landau is the author of Orchidelir­

books include Quote Poet Unquote: Con­

is

Kamien,

ium

szron

(2004).

and Blue Dark

He

(forthcoming

from

Copper Canyon Press). Her poems appear 168

Canyon, 2008).

temporary Quotations

His other

on

recent

Poetry (Copper

Canyon, 2008), and Stepping Stones: inter-

(Farrar, Straus

Award in Fiction. Her essay collection,

& Giroux, 2008). He lives in Ireland. Bar­

The Night Gardener: A Search for Home

bara Ras is a poet, translator, and pub­

(The Lyons Press), won the Oregon Book

lisher. Her most recent poetry collection is

Award for Literary Nonfiction. Her work

One Hidden Stuff (Penguin Books, 2006),

has appeared in Best American Short Stories

and her first collection is Bite Every Sorrow

and the Pushcart Prize, and most recently

1998).

in the Georgia Review and the Hopkins Re­

the editorial staffs of

view. She teaches in the MFA program at

views with Seamus Heaney

(Louisiana State University Press, She has been

on

State

Corvallis.

Michael

Wesleyan University Press, the University

Oregon

Press of New England, the University of

Schmidt is the Professor of Poetry at the

California Press, North Point Press and

University of Glasgow, Scotland, and edi­

Sierra Club Books. Since 2005, she has

torial director of Carcanet Press and PN

been the Director of Trinity University

Review, The Resurrection of the Body, his

Press, San Antonio, Texas. Her work has

most

appeared in literary journals and maga­

Sheep Meadow Press. Philip Schultz's last

recent

in

collection,

is

published by

including Boulevard, Massachusetts

book, Failure, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

Review, Prairie Schooner, American Scholar,

The poems in this issue will appear in his

and Spoon River Poetry Review. She will be

new

zines

a

Featured Presenter at the

Sarah

2010

AWP.

Rothenberg is a concert pianist.

Her recordings include Shadows and Frag­

Brahms and

ments:

Schoenberg; Fanny

Mendelssohn: Das Jahr;

Rediscovering the

book, The God of Loneliness: New and

Selected Poems

(Houghton Mifflin Har­

court), out April 2010. He founded and directs the Writers Studio,

a

private

school for fiction and poetry writing in Manhattan. Austin

Segrest teaches En­

Russian Avant-Garde 1912- 1925; as well as

glish and Latin in Statesboro, GA. His

contemporary works. Olivier Messiaen's

poems appear in the Yale Review, Passages

Visions de l'Amen (with Marilyn Nonken)

North, Blackbird, and River Styx. Charles

was

released on Bridge Records in 2009.

Simic is

a

poet,

essayist and translator.

1967, he has published twenty

Her writings have appeared in Conjunc­

Since

tions, The Threepenny Review, Brick, The

books of his own poetry, seven books of es­

Quarterly, Chamber Music. This

says, a memoir, and numerous of books of

appeared in Dutch translation in

translations of French, Serbian, Croatian,

Musical essay

"Nexus 50:

Europees humanisme in frag­

Macedonian, and Slovenian

poetry for

menten," The Netherlands, June 2008.

which he has received many

Shorter English versions appeared in the

awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the

2008) and

Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship

Brick (Summer 2009). Marjorie Sandor is

and Wallace Stevens Award. The Voice at

the author of three books, including Por­

3 A.M., a volume of his selected later and

Threepenny

trait

Review (Winter

of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in

new

literary

poems, was published by Harcourt in

Wartime: Stories (Sarabande Books), 2004

2003 and a new book of poems That Little

Jewish Book

Something will be out in the Spring of

winner

of the National

2008. Simic is an Emeritus Professor at the

table Book of the Year in 2007. She has

University of New Hampshire where he

worked for the BBC, the Dutch Institute

has taught since 1973 and was the Poet

of War Documentation, the Jewish His­

Laureate of the United States, 2007-2008.

torical Institute and La Strada Interna­

He has two new books, Renegade (essays)

tional in Warsaw. She has contributed to

and The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (se­

Polish Writers on Writing (Trinity Univer­

lections

sity Press, 2007), The New European Poets

Storni

from

was

notebooks).

Alfonsina

of the

important

one

most

Latin-American poets of the modernist

(Graywolf, 2008), and Documentary The­ atre on

the World Stage (Palgrave Macmil­

period. Alfonsina was born in Sala Capri­

lan, 2008). Her poems and translations

asca, Switzerland and moved to Argentina

have

appeared in the Iowa Review, the

Her first book La inquietwi

New Yorker, the New York Review of Books,

del rosal (1916; "The Restless Rose Gar­

Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Verse,

den"), brought her recognition from the

and elsewhere. Lauren Watel has

literary circles in Buenos Aires; but it was

lished poetry and short fiction in Five

her volume El dulce dafio

Points, Ploughshares, Poetry International,

at a young age.

(1918; "The

Sweet Injury") that won her popular suc­ cess.

Arthur Sze is the author of nine

books of poetry,

and

pub­

TriQuarterly. She lives in Decatur,

Georgia. Karen Whalley was the recipient

including The Gingko

of the Jaffe Award for poetry in 2001. Her

Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and

collection of poems, The Rented Violin, was

Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005). He is also

published by Ausable Press in 2003. Her

the editor of Chinese Writers

Writing

poems have appeared in literary journals,

(Trinity University Press, forthcoming in

the most recent of which was the Spring

the spring of 2010). Wislawa

2009 volume of Lake Effect. Adam

on

Szym­

Zaga­

borska is a Polish poet, essayist and trans­

jewski is a Polish poet, novelist, translator,

awarded the 1996 Nobel

and essayist. His poem Try to Praise the Mu­

lator. She

was

Prize in Literature. Alissa Valles is the ed­

tilated World, published in the New Yorker,

itor and co-translator of

became famous after 9/11. He currently is

Zbigniew

bert's The Collected Poems

Her­

1956- I 998

(Ecco) a New York Times Book Review No-

170

a

faculty member on the University of

Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

Reprints Reprints of issues 1-17 of TriQuarterly are

available in full format from Kraus

Reprint Company, Route 100, Millwood, NY 10546, and all issues in microfilm

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