The Yale Literary Magazine Winter 2007
Volume 19 — Issue 2
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The Recital Amy Lee 3
Untitled Rachel Rose
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Wedding Day, Slovakia Diana Mellon
7
Untitled Liana Moskowitz
8
Untitled Richard Espinosa
11
Untitled Sharon Madanes
Desire. Adam T. Gardner (3
8
A Walk Stephanie Richards
Eureka Steven Kochevar
13 Mapping- (Graphite) Ali Van 14 Untitled Rachel Rose
16 Morey Hill Rachel Caplan 17 Untitled Diana Mellon 18 The Yale Literary Magazine and Robert Hass: A Conversation
22 One Year Since Katy Waldman 23 Point Reyes Nicholas Robbins 24 A Good Deal Paul Goehrke 25 Buenos Aires Carina del Valle Schorske 26 Wingman Matt Kozlark
26 Untitled Jon Connolly
30 Untitled Sharon Madanes
35 Carpentry Tyler Theofilos
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The Recital
The first time she saw him The piano loomed over his body,
Amy Lee
A black wing curving Over the boy. When she was younger her parents Had made her play, But she had liked it — Before him, she had believed It must be easier To play an instrument you could hold. She could tell that He was talking to the piano, And at first It didn't listen to him So he had to try harder. He was playing Chopin's Raindrop Prelude. It was a Sunday afternoon.
He asked her to take her clothes off, Which she did, in the silent white room, And he asked her to kneel, which she did, But did not close her eyes, which he also asked, But watched him say the words, until finally, He reached out with two fingers to close each eye, Which she allowed. She imagined he was humming, She imagined she could feel it In his mouth.
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Another day she walked in on him playing. The song was about shackling Noise to music. The song was about Walking into the living room And shattering all the light bulbs (after uselessly unscrewing them one by one from the lamps) And pulling down the curtains and cutting them Into slivers with the kitchen shears And rubbing wine into the carpet And sweeping up afterwards. It was Especially about the sweeping up afterwards. This is at least what she heard As she closed the door behind her And let him practice.
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Desire
Reading about desire, I decide to move from theory to practice, abandoning
Adam T. Gardner
my reservations, my fears, giving myself whole and docile to another. I choose lovers for their size, the smaller, the quieter, the more like me, the better. Like the design of a church, my work is deliberate and public, ornate and subject to revision. In the Turkish bath, I sit like a toy with older men, moving my body into inviting shapes, smiling. In the museum, I stop at each naked figure, waiting, posing, willing someone to approach. I have become a lecher. Walking towards the Vatican, my foot beginning to bleed and mosquitoes biting at my arm, the realization is as sharp and profound as a vision. Here in Rome, with uprooted palms at both my sides, I see the artificial becoming a dangerous prospect. Inside the cathedral, I visit with men preserved under gold and glass, feeling recognition swim through me and begin to rip me apart. Like an ancient reliquary, my face is a mere likening, and my body has gone missing.
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A Walk
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Stephanie Richards
I thought I saw my faith walking along the cobblestones of Meah Shearim. I imagined it a boy in black socks throwing stones against the eroding walls of the city's sober pulse. You felt the yoke of tradition, I the ringing heat. I don't love your body but I need it next to mine. You press into and around me, but all that I hear are the echoes of the city's forgotten notes gone limp at the roots of its darker holy walls. I'll ask for nothing but the salt you took from my tongue — my bones — onto your own. I'll press my hands against the stones, feed them with iron from my supplications. I tried to find my faith in these walls, in you. I am sixteen again and shaking.
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Eureka Steven Kochevar The city was soggy. He was no meteorologist, but by his estimations it had been raining there for four hundred and eighty-five years. The foundations of the city had long since been carried away, replaced by river silt. History was a vine that drank up the rain and clung to deep roots in the silt. The people's dreams and crimes and shit kept the silt rich and the vine strong. In the night, it grew into their mouths and coiled around their hearts. It replaced their veins with its tendrils and their blood with its sap. One morning he had woken up with leaves growing out of his fingers, and he had been in jail. Now that he had left the halfway house, he was kept in a three-quarters house. He had little doubt it would be followed by a seven-eighths house and then a fifteen-sixteenths house and on and on, the walls and barred windows ofthe houses stretching out in a grim asymptote. The diminishing fractions would suffocate him before he could move home. But the walls of these houses, he guessed, were soggy from all the rain. In a dream, he laid his palms flat against the wall of a one hundred twenty-seven one hundred twentyeighths house and pushed. The wall buckled like a section
of wet cardboard, and the seams along the floor and ceiling burst, letting in the deluge. He pushed and pushed and burst through, finding himselfin the humid stickiness of a jungle. He wondered if he could ever remove the vine. This thought had occurred to him before, but he had written it off as a prison thought, kept it safe and fantastical by dismissing it. But now, instead of a,ton of steel and concrete, there was just a rotting wall keeping him from the moist allure of the jungle. What if he left the downpour? Would the vine shrivel and die? Where would he be if he left here? What if he collapsed without the vine's support, a bundle ofloose guts steaming and limp on the linoleum? Anger had determined much of the course of his life. Anger was an angel, the one with the flaming sword. The sword would point and the angel would speak, and he was powerless not to obey. At times, the commands had been very inconvenient for him, but he had resigned himself to them and no longer tried to talk back. He received a letter in the mail, and felt the beating of wings somewhere close behind him. By the end ofreading it, there was no longer any
4
doubt. The only question was which way out of the city the imperious brilliance was pointing.
The letter was burnt. He walked out of the house and got on a bus. The rain did not cease.
He remembered an old drunk he had worked with. He
He learned the ways ofthe road. He learned that if you
would lurch around the site, reeking of alcohol, perpetually about to cause a disaster or get himself killed. He would bitch
lifted up the Great American Roadway like a rock in the park, there were all kinds ofinsects that crawled and scurried
at everyone, telling them how shitty the work was and how he
over the damp earth beneath. He learned what rest stops really were and truck stops. He learned to pick out roadside
was about to get the hell out ofthere. He was always about to . It was this magical place where there was always go to work and no one gave you shit and the roads were paved with
diners like fruit and eat his fill. He began to enjoy himself. Washing dishes in the back of a Denny's in Memphis,
steak and blab blab blah. The drunk had been there for awhile and some personal disaster had forced him to leave. He talked
wondering how he had come so far south, he could feel his hands bloating in the boiling sinkwater. Soon they would be
about it like he had fallen out of Heaven. He had forgotten about the drunk or actually he just didn't remember him until
tender enough to eat. A different hand, pale and white and thin with worn down nails, drooped across his belly. A head
someone in jail mentioned the place too. It was where this
leaned on his shoulder spoke, "I swear to God I'm going to kill those fuckers. It's a long night, huh huh." She withdrew
guy was going to go when he got out. Everyone who lived there had done time, so it was a good place to be. Up north. . He couldn't remember the name. The drunk was in his dream. He walked over to him and asked what the name of the place was. The drunk's mouth moved to answer but no sound came out. The drunk seemed annoyed he couldn't hear him. He started shouting the name
and turned towards the backdoor. "I'm going out for a smoke. You want one." Dozing in the back of a bus tracing the underbelly of the Great Lakes, he dreamt he was back in jail. He had discovered the walls of his cell were soft like marshmallows. If he walked straight into them, they would give and he
at him. There were other people in the dream too, like the man from prison who talked about the place, and soon they
could push his way forward. He had gone through the back
were all shouting the name at him. There were normal
his cell, only a crease in the white tissue. That was when he
sounds in the dream, bird noises and the sound of all their feet
recognized the weird rhythm of the walls' pressure. They
crunching on gravel, and he could hear all of that. The people were just on mute.
were breathing, ever so gently.
He woke up with it on his lips. The men he shared the
wall a ways until he could no longer see his way back into
Twice he almost quit. The first time happened in Michigan. In a bar, someone thought he was something
room with laughed at him when he stood up and said it, a fist
other than what he was and bought him drink after drink.
clenched in triumph. "Eureka!" It was a funny sort ofjoke. It
After the fourth or fifth, he did not know where he was but
made an awful sense. Eureka. Eureka!
only that the walls of the bar were the limits of his skull
For a time he couldn't find it and began to grow
and that he lived in the hollow place between. He awoke in
despondent. He pored over maps and tried to make the aged
the woods behind the station, his wallet and shoes abruptly
computer in the three-quarters house work for him. He
absent. Lying in dirt and leaves and pain, he briefly wanted to
became terrified that Eureka was a dream, and he should
die. He rolled over, clutched the ground like a blanket, and
just let it glaze over his eyes until the vine swallowed him
went back to sleep. Later he woke again, stood up, and got on
into happy oblivion. And then there it was. Hiding up next
the next bus.
to Canada on a nosebleed perch high above the rest of the country. How to get there? Money was an obstacle but a familiar
The second time was in one ofthe Dakotas. He got off the bus and on all sides was an empty flat line stuck to a gunmetal sky. He wanted to rush to the nearest route east
one. He devised a plan: go as far as he could go by bus and
and tangle the vine around him like a lover. Nothing could
then stay there and work until he could leave again. He would
be worse than that loneliness.
crawl across the country in a jagged line until he made it. A day was spent in doubt. What nonsense it all was. He wouldn't do it. A second day was spent in a strange paralysis. He would do it. Tomorrow.
The mountains came, big teeth munching on the plains. He fell in love with them instantly. He loved what they did to the bus too. For too long the inside ofthe bus had been a stale constant, impervious behind its membrane ofsteel and glass and putrid air-conditioned air. But the mountains
0• 00 00 compromised it, made the bus' engine heave and change its register, and weakened the steady suck and blow ofthe airco.
any help around here, thank you. But you should call Davis Gretzky. He's crazy as fuck. But, in my opinion, less crazy as
The mountains were trying to break in. They were trying to
fuck than the three other contractors who would be wanting
get to him.
your time." Pete slid on a pair of reading glasses and grabbed a book from under the bar. "Yes indeedy. Mr. Gretzky 238-
He awoke in the darkness; the storm had broken. His whole body felt hot, and his stomach heaved. Over the pounding in his head he could hear the night noises of the mountain; dark shapes crept and slobbered in the forest.
5189. He will be who you're wanting." Gretzky was a mountain offlesh with two eyes peering out the dome of its summit.
He looked up and saw an ashen sky tinged with inferno. A
"You work construction previously?"
maelstrom pulsed along the ridge ofthe mountain, and the smell ofchar carried through the air. The rock's dark shape
"Yes."
above him took on an ominous and terrible significance. In his nightmares it was a yawning gateway to Hell. Morningside, he dragged himself to a clinic in the town.
"Oh good. You're going to Clearwater. You ever heard of Donna Regatoni?" "The movie woman?" "Yeah, actress. Nice tits. Showed 'em off in Silent Dawn.
He got pills and questions and realized he was alone and in
Know her?"
the mountains with little explanation. The doctor regarded wondering how one of you ended up in a shit town like this."
"Not personally." "Ha, yeah well. You're going to be building her new house. And so you know, if you do get to know her
Later the bus drove past acres and acres of charred woodlands. The driver cheerfully related the news of
personally, I've put out a thousand-dollar award for whoever poaches her first."
him with curiosity and detached amusement. "I'm just
wildfires, and he remembered the burning trace of the mountain's ridgeline in the night. Eureka, it turned out, was a shit town. It was the glorified intersection of two perpendicular lines, the highway and a farm road. A post office, a town Hall, and a boardinghouse were the glorification. Down the road was the Salthammer, a hole in the wall where you could drink yourself into the ground. Up the highway were a real town, a bank, and a bunch of people with lives who needed houses built and septic tanks put in and people to fry their food on the weekends. He checked into the roominghouse. His room was threadbare and small. A bed with an ochre zigzag blanket and a little table with a Bible on it were the only things. He had a bathroom too with a tiny shower and a toilet. It was a
"Oh. Good." "Ha ha, fuck yeah. I bet she is. You go for it." His tone changed; the little eyes narrowed and got angry. "Now, I am a man who prizes loyalty. If I hear you are in discussions with any gentlemen by the names of Douglas, Howards, or Smith, there's gonna be consequences and repercussions. I pay better than those sacks ofshit, and I'm not a huge fucking asshole on top ofit. Understand?" "Yes sir. How much is pay?" "You get twenty an hour if you're not a lazy sack ofshit." Gretzky misinterpreted the look on his face; the eyes narrowed again. "Ah fuck you, what's Howards paying now?" "No no. I don't know. I don't give a shit what that
cell hiding beneath the thinnest sheet of domestic comfort. Beginning to settle in made him think of a crab lowering
goddamn prick son of a bitch is paying." Gretzky was taken aback; eyes widened. Then his dome
itselfinto a shell, legs all awiggle. The Salthammer was Pete's place. He went in one afternoon, and the place was almost deserted. A guy with
swiveled back and he cackled. "Oh I like you. Van leaves the post office at 5:00." In the city, there weren't any jobs. People tried to build
wrinkled leather for skin and a thin gray ponytail scrubbed the bar. A sip into his beer he started his pitch,"Do you
new houses in the silt, and the rain was merciless on their efforts. He imagined what wealth would feel like. Thompson found him in the Salthammer. Hunched
need any help around here? I don't mind working in shit. I do dishes and yeah." He stopped; the man was staring at him like a frightened squirrel, his dishrag clutched in nervous paws. Then he chortled, went back to scrubbing, "Fresh
over his beer, he noticed he was being watched. A big bald guy sat a few stools away, eating sunflower seeds out of a glass bowl on the bar. He slid the bowl down to him. "The
meat. That one's on the house for you then. I do not need
Salthammer's got sunflower seeds instead of other kinds of
A
•• 00 00 snacky bar shit because Pete's wife Rita loves 'em. And Pete hates peanuts." "I'm allergic." Pete grumbled. "Hmm." Thompson had a tattoo that curled up his neck to lick his ear. "I just thought you might want to know. It puzzled the hell out of me for the longest time." Thompson took him to a trailer set back from the farm
"No. No. Maybe because I'm new he doesn't think I could be boning her. Yet." "This," he paused and flicked off a sticky piece oflabel, "is true." "Yeah." "I mean I wouldn't mind fucking her. I do believe she's had her tits done." "Yeah." "Robo." "What?"
road. A skinny guy with a twitchy mustache sat in a plastic turquoise chair in front of it. There was a matching plastic
"Me. Robo. You. Guest. He. Thompson."
table in front of him, on which sat a bottle of Skoll. He
"Yes."
meticulously peeled off the label as they approached. "Has
"You need to meet Chuckles. Chuckles!"
Gretzky asked you about his wife yet?" They were unsure
"Chuckles?"
how to respond. The man looked up at them; his glasses were thick and made his eyes bulge bug-eyed. "Gretzky thinks one of his guys is boning his wife. He keeps needling me. It pisses me off I'm wondering if he's done it to you."
"Chuckles. Charles Davis Harrison the Third. No, not really the Third. But Chuckles. Charlie. Chuckles. Charlie chuckles. Ha. Ha ha." Chuckles kicked open the door of the trailer and pointed
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a roman candle at the three of them. "Die, motherfuckers!" A blob of bright red fire flew towards them; they scattered. Robo threw the little plastic chair at the trailer, and Chuckles
in Clearwater. There were just a bunch oflonely old men
retreated behind the door. "Aiyee, one of them went offin the kitchen. Fuck
out there had a still and produced something called 456 which he sold in hand-labeled pickle jars. The shit was potent
fuck fuck." He ran outside hooting. Hours later, in the Salthammer, Robo took out his deck of dirty playing cards.
and poisonous and guaranteed to fuck you up faster than anything you could by in a store. Chuckles swore by it. Robo
Pointing to an ace, he told him,"Now she has had her tits
reviled it after the one disastrous night he had tried it and almost lost his mind. Its efficacy was not in doubt: Robo went
done." Thompson gave him the lay ofthe land. Eureka had a peculiar set ofzoning laws. If you'd done time for drug stuff or you were one ofthe few folks around that had a clean record, you lived close in to the crossroads of Highway 92 and Farm Road 18. Mayor Douglas' wiry frame was a gift from heroin; the postal workers were baked pretty solid. If you had larceny, burglary, robbery, or some of the more mild flavors of assault you shook out between the crossroads and Route 64 which ran parallel to 92. The Salthammer was there in the middle, and Rita and Pete lived in a trailer behind it. The violent crime people mostly lived on Route 64 orjust past it. If you took Farm Road 18 all the way out to where it hit Farm Road 123, you'd be in sex offender country with the hardcore pedophiles and serial rapists. There weren't too many ofthem, and they lived pretty far apart. Things generally got more diffuse the farther out you w•ent from the crossroads.
mostly. His uncle had lived out there for awhile. And anyway, they weren't making any hospitality visits. One of the rapists
through handles and handles of booze while Chuckles nursed a single jar of 456. "It's the soul of it that's all wrong. That shit is ofthe devil." The house and its owner were innocuous enough when they arrived. Mr. Samuels had a penchant for roosters and kept a flock in his backyard. His kitchen was littered with little statues of roosters and rooster plates and had a clock that crowed the hour. He opened a special freezer on his porch full ofjars of the good stuff and handed one to each ofthem. Thompson gave his back, politely saying he'd just steal little sips from Chuckles. The old man laughed, "You've really got to have a taste for it." The sun crashed quietly into the mountains on their way home; the jar of456 sat heavy on his lap. • Never again.
Eureka had a lot ofland area if you counted all ofit. He went into Clearwater to get his head shaved. He had
Donna Regatoni came by to see her new house taking shape one afternoon. She was thinner than he would have
been able to shampoo it since his time on the road, but he knew he had been unable to get everything out. His hair was
thought, so thin she looked sick. She was dressed all in black and wore black sunglasses. He wanted to take her home and
long enough to pull back in a ponytail and when it hung in front of his face he could smell relics from the road on it. He
feed her. Gretzky heaved around the site by her side. She was a good foot taller than him, which was ideal for Gretzky; his
could smell Denny's grease and the many indeterminate flora that flourished on Greyhound upholstery. Underneath was a
little eyes had only to slide over to their corners to ogle her chest, and his hard hat provided good cover. She didn't stay
husky charcoal scent that reminded him of his night on the mountain. It all had to go. As it fell in hunks to the floor, he
long but gave her empty Frappucino cup to a Eureka guy to throw out. Gretzky narrowed his eyes at him. Later that night, the guy offered the trophy to Pete to be put on display
imagined he saw bits ofleaf and stem and viney coil falling with it but stopped himselffrom checking. The crown of his head was blotchy and irritated. In the mirror, he saw a monstrous elderly baby.
in the Salthammer. Pete gave him his frightened squirrel look and offered to throw the cup away behind the bar if the guy wanted. The man sauntered off mumbling and the cup
said.
disappeared into his home. Two nights later he had a dream about Donna Regatoni. It was brief; she appeared beside him naked but covered
He and Thompson and Chuckles drove out past Farm Road 123. Robo refused to come."The peds freak the living
in freshly printed birth certificates. She smelled like blue standardized ink and sweat. She beckoned him, and the
shit out of me." Chuckles figured they weren't too bad as long as they didn't start applying to be school bus drivers
dream devolved into sound. Robo requested that the Salthammer have a karaoke night.
Thompson ran his hand over it when he saw him. Calluses scraped across the tender revelation ofscalp. "Eureka!" he
4
Pete had sighed, scrunched up his nose,"You mean like with
"Or a couple pounds in my case."
the kimonos and shit?" Robo began putting up flyers for the big night. When it came, he appeared in his improvised
"We should get a house."
spotlight wearing a bowtie and slacks, making wild claims about the amount of good tunes and good times that could 4
"Yeah, Chuckles' been talking about that. He and Robo want to set fire to the trailer and get into that open house out on 64." "No, I mean we should get a house."
be pumped out of the black block of plastic he had rented in Clearwater. He crooned a Beatles song and sat down. He sweated and tapped his foot until someone from Route 64
The astringent pink ofthe Salthammer's neon sign washed out Thompson's face. His eyes were hopeful and sad.
ventured into the light and belted out "Eye ofthe Tiger"
"Yeah, yeah. A house. When we can get enough, yeah."
in a rumbling bass. A geezer from out past Farm Road 123
Thompson faded out of his life after that. Seeing him
warbled through "Like a Virgin." Things got going. Soon the songs were flowing as fast as the alcohol and at two Pete
stirred up some uncomfortable memory of gross necessity.
was talked into letting things live a little longer. Rita brought
Edinborough. He had a war zone of a face: broad and black
down the house with "I Will Always Love You,".and the
and covered in scars and acne. He didn't work. He would sit
party was over at five. A bleary yet triumphant Robo drove
in the Salthammer and order whiskey shots all day and take
the machine back to Clearwater and into legend.
other people's money. He took their money by removing a
There was a man in Eureka that everyone called
"But we don't need chickens."
deck of cards from the bag he always carried with him and
"Ha, yeah."
inviting whoever it was to take one. They would do so and
"They just take your fucking money and your fucking
memorize whatever number or face and color was theirs and
time. And after awhile they don't even give you pussy
then hand it back to him. Edinborough would then do what
anymore.Just suck the life out of you." "Should be sucking something else out of you."
he called "raping the deck." Powerless in his long vicious fingers, the cards would dance, contorted and unhappy,
"They just want their pound offlesh."
shuffled and shagged. Laid out in a long row face down on
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the table, they would flip over, naked in the light. The cards would divide in half and become fans for him, one in each hand, and then throw themselves into a neat pile between his elbows. Somewhere in all this, one of the cards would fall away from the others; a truant queen or a terrified ace would escape the.melee and flutter down to freedom, a mistake in the perfect routine. But as sure as breath, that card was always the one the person had chosen in the first place, and they'd pick it up and puzzle over it. Flashing a whiskey grin, Edinborough would make his deal. He'd do it all again, and give you a hundred to your fifty if you figured out how he did it. There was a night when he woke up suddenly from a dream and couldn't sleep again. He lay in bed for a long time, and then he went to his bathroom and sat, naked, on the toilet. He peered out his little square bathroom window at the night. It was cold already, and he watched slow gusts of snow roil silently across the pavement in the amber twilight of the highway lamps. The lights were huge and bright and when the gusts passed directly by them each particulate drop of moisture would shine and be visible by itselffor just a moment and then be gone again. When the night's hard black softened to blue he went back to bed and got up in the morning and went to work.
Morey Hill Rachel Caplan
The road began in a rocky dirt And decayed into ferns and daisies. Beyond the hillcrest were the walls Ofthe mountain graveyard, and the guts of a dead truck, Red with rust and full offlowers. In October, the man from the agency took me here to see a house. The field was skirted by a high forest, The hill ridged with a spine of blue stone. Morey Hill took us steep through Maine's Lesser mountains, where the house was only seen In evening, in the mist. On the porch, the man ruined the fabric at his knee Bending to pick the lock. When I was twelve, and cruel, I broke into an abandoned house that looked to me Like one of my lost worlds. I touched the things that lay over the mantelpiece, Like at Christmas. I stole. The houses of my childhood were sad and solemn, The departures swift and sure, as iffrom flooding cities. Once you leave, you can never return. The man admired the furniture, the dark upholstery, And stood in the corner, looking at his hands. Would I like to keep a chair? If I looked beyond him, someone would be outside, Picking through the tangle of pale blueberries, Or walking the far hill path. I looked at the things: books, cups, Photographs of daughters. When I came back, it was almost winter. The forest whistled with birds and winds, And the mist made me forget the mountain. Rain rattled the chimes on the second-story balcony, And fell where I buried the key and the deed, By the ancient stones in a line in the grass. Because I understand this house, I will dismantle it like the others. Because I understand it, And because it is so like those other houses, With its household gods, and its mysteries, and its dead.
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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE AND ROBERT HASS:
A Conversation
YLM: Two years ago, the Lit used this very center section to ask a number of people who work with language in one Robert Hass's first book of poems, Field Guide, won the 1971 Yale Younger Poets Prize. His four volumes of poetry
capacity or another how language "brings them up short." Many of your poems—perhaps none more than your most
since then have amassed immense critical acclaim including, most recently, the National Book Award for 2007's
recent in Time and Materials—worry the issue of the viability oflanguage as either an agent of communication or, perhaps
Time and Materials. From 1995 to 1997, he served as Poet Laureate ofthe United States. An acclaimed translator of
more pressingly, as a rival to the beauty of sensual experience. There is the question ofsuperfluity—is language superfluous
Czeslaw Milosz and Japanese haiku, Hass currently teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Senior Editor
to the world, a supplement, or part ofits material? We circle back to our original, clumsy question: how does language
Carina del Valle Schorske, a California native herself, conducted this interview in the Fall of 2007.
bring you up short? RH: It might be possible to answer this question by meditating on the phrase "bring you up short": four words that run together in that particular order are an almost Steinian disconcertion, were there such a word. But I will try to be more direct. Language brings most of us up short, I would think, in two ways—either because what we want to express seems to lie outside it, or because it seems, almost automatically, to express more or less or differently than we intended. I also loved your phrase, "the question ofsuperfluity." Is language superfluous to a western fence lizard? Probably so, unless the gestures of aggression and courtship they exchange count as language, and in that case not. Or unless human language, by naming them or evoking their existence in the universe ofshifting meanings that constitute the site of human language, begins to bear on their lives, which seems possible, then also not. For humans, ofcourse, language is never superfluous. It makes us. And we are often inadequate to it or overpowered by it, especially purely verbal language, as opposed to music, gesture, movement, mathematical symbol. Sometimes we speak it, sometimes it speaks us. Most ofspeech inhabits some middle ground probably in which we are mostly bespoke, but to some extent speak. And in the end the gestural in language may trump (there's a word!) speech. The truest thing we could say may be a gesture offace and hands and feet, a shrug or a scream or a dance. A shiver or a wince.
IL—
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YLM: What does it mean to translate from a language that you do not speak, read, or hear fluently, as is the case with your work translating from Japanese and Polish? Do you think ofit as an English-language project, or as a project of extra-linguistic communication (between you and Czeslaw Milosz, for instance)? What are your priorities as a translator—what, to you, is the "task of the interpreter"? RH:The work that I've done in languages that I hardly know was quite different in the two cases. I was studying Japanese but I knew that I was never going to get there and I had a great deal of help with vocabulary from friends and with nuance and allusion from the criticism and scholarship I could read in English. With Milosz's poems, there was the YLM: When W.S. Merwin came to Yale two years ago, he told us that writing daily wasn't possible for him, but translating daily was. It's a "physical" thing to do, he said, almost in the same breath as he said that it's the art of the impossible. What, then, is easy about translation that is not easy about writing an "original" poem? What is impossible about it? Do they not share certain impossibilities?
interest—most of the time; early on I worked with other Polish speakers—of collaboration. But in both cases I was aware, or somewhat aware, of how much I was missing. It was, I said to myself, like making love with gloves on. You know that you didn't, wouldn't ever have, immediate contact with the original. My task in working on haiku was to bring as much ofthe
poems. It's much more involved with problem solving. I
poem as I understood it across in the simplest and most natural English, or in the few cases where I understood that
found, working on haiku, that a way of getting the poem
something other than that was happening in the Japanese, in
into English or, in some cases into leaner, clearer English than some other translation I had seen, came to me in a
the most appropriate English. With Milosz, with such a wide body of work, written in so many different formal modes,
flash. That felt like writing. Mostly with translation it is
different urgencies, and—for that matter—what seemed to
a different kind ofintellectual labor. Nieobjeta in Polish
me and to him different degrees ofsuccess, I was aware first
means "uncircumferable," in that objeta is "circumference."
of all that these were the first translations, that people wanted
"Uncircumferable" is impossible in English, even though
to read them and that our job was to get them into English,
Emily Dickinson said her business was circumference. So if
that the greatest poems were apt to be revisited later by other
Czeslaw Milosz writes about an (no articles in polish) nieobjeta
translators with other ideas. Secondly, the author had to be
ziemia, an uncircumferable earth, you think about synonyms,
comfortable with the phrasing. And the issues could turn on
RH: In my experience translation is not much like writing
the writer's intention and temper of mind and typical range
very small differences. An early poem, spoken by a beautiful,
of diction, the rhythm of the phrase in the line in Polish
somewhat mournful female voice: which opening line sounds
and what might be the rhythm of the phrase in English and,
better to you? "Earth falls away from the place where I am
as often as not, arrive not at the perfect but the somewhat
standing" or "Earth falls away from the place where I stand"?
adequate solution.
To my ear the first phrasing is infinitely to be preferred, much more accurate to a flowing and falling rhythm than the
As W.S. Merwin said to you, one thing about translation is
hard closure of a final stress. The author preferred the second
that it is work one can do. Its use in making poems is that it
of the two. I would argue for fifteen minutes or so, shrug
is a great way to study poets, and deep study of other poets,
and move on (though I kept my file of alternative versions.)
especially really good poets, is almost always helpful. It's good
After that, what one worked for was a combination oftonal
for your sense of possibility and of excellence and you absorb
accuracy, a form that suggested the formal qualities of the
whole intellectual and emotional and formal vocabularies
original, and that other thing that [can be] described so nicely
that way.
as "vapor."
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YLM: As a former poet laureate and newspaper columnist, and an environmental activist, you have operated very much as a poet in the public sphere. What do you think poetry's role is (or should be) in the day-to-day lives ofthose who read it (and those who don't)? What, if anything, does poetry do besides animate the individual spirit? Or is that no small thing? RH: Yes, that's no small thing. Poetry—written and oral— seems to have had very different roles in different cultures. In the United States, at the moment, and perhaps for the last hundred years or so, a sort ofcruel and externalizing way of describing the role of poetry and ofliterary reading in general is to say that it is first a school subject, a way of transmitting a cultural history and the traces of the history of the inner lives of human beings to the young, and then later a leisure activity of the educated middle class. If you include song lyrics in the definition of poetry, you could drop the phrase "educated middle class" and say "society." Of course, from this point of view, prayer, making love, having children, and dying are also leisure activities.
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YLM:Do you see poetic and political projects as related?
A remarkable number of206 century poets, from the best
Ifso, in what ways? Is it against poetry's nature to serve a
motives, were either Stalinists or fascists for some important
political cause, or is it against poetry's nature to quarantine
part of their creative lives. In Russia many of them went
itselffrom the political life of the world in which it is
to jail for not being Stalinists and outside Russia some of
produced? Do you attempt, or have you read and witnessed,
them went to jail for being Stalinists. The lesson—or one
some middle ground (not to sound centrist)?
lesson—would seem to be that a gift for poetry or an appetite for it isn't likely to confer a practical sense of how to get to
RH: It was a cautionary slogan in my generation—raised
the goals one wishes for mankind. Another is that those who
on the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War—that
used that as an excuse for apathy paid their own price because
everything is political. I think we meant then that even the
apathy is almost always a tacit form of collusion with any
idea that you were apolitical was political in its consequences.
status quo.
We were for the most part raised in a decade when politics was regarded—as it may be again today—as a special interest, quite apart from our daily habits, decisions, and preferences. So the idea that everything was political was, in effect, the proposal for a course ofstudy. If the price of breakfast cereal is political, please explain how and why. If social attitudes toward homosexuality were political, please explain how and why. It gave us a way of thinking about everything. In this sense, of course, all poetry is political—Dickinson's that did not have a political agenda as much as Whitman's that did, Stevens's that did not have a political agenda as much as Eliot's that did, or came to. But to talk about the poetic and political projects, one has to get a little more specific about what is meant by politics. If it means the art of governing, for example, the role of poetry would be to make people feel the force ofthe idea ofjustice, but it wouldn't be very good at proposing how exactly to deal with, say, the fact of twelve or so million undocumented workers and their families living in the United States. By the time I was in college I had become aware that my elders seemed ready to blow up the world, or at least kill millions of people over the question of whether the economies of nations should be publicly or privately owned and managed. I was aware that, though I had a hunger for fairness, for a reasonable world in which people could have opportunities
YLM: What question do you wish people asked of poets, or of you, more often? What question do you think is most worth asking?
and grow up without fear, I had no experience and no personal opinion about whether the government should own
RH: Well, besides "Where can I find your work?" I can't
oil companies or not, but that I imagined that, in practice,
think of a question. The appropriate response to poets is
people would find out which worked better empirically, or
to read their poems and to take your responses to those
at least would find out who benefited the most from either system, and that it didn't seem worth killing millions of
poems—which may take the form of writing poems or of a resolve to live more somethingly (fill in the blank: consciously,
people over.
unconsciously, fully, vividly, carefully)—into your own life.
I
One Year Since Katy Waldman
The room's too hot. Outside a sprinkler slaps The hard gray ground, all water turns to tin, And clotted clouds sweat light. Those sullen taps On windows are sleep trying to get in. It's June: I pick at slow days like a skein To be untangled, thinking more is owed To hours rimmed by silence, to the chain Of echoes barely clinking on the road. When snow floats sideways, people dream too much: Coat sleeves pulled down to keep the warm inside Like lives tucked under time. The melting touch Ofsun on sleeted fields, a door thrown wideI looked for you in spring: was that you there? Or just the sprinkler shaking loose her silver hair
IIMII
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Buenos Aires Carina del Valle Schorske
I came from winter in the north to summer in the south. The seasons changed, of course. But first, swirled turrets ofice cream: bitter chocolate, lemon mousse. The plaza turned pink with flowers as though a goddess, in the form of a brown girl-cow, were expected by evening. Time had begun again— had an old world surrendered? I still stopped to feed pigeons in your name. Names remained. The girl-cow was stopped at the city limits. If you enter, you will die. The border patrolman's fortune-telling knife was sheathed. He let a truck crammed with children pass. The river-smell did not reach the provincias, and my eye could not reach the other side of the river, so the river became the sea— both were crossable in those modern times. I dreamt I took a train, then I took one upon waking— does that follow? When I arrived I saw the girl-cow behind a wire fence. The patrolman was gone. I held my hand out for her wet nose and enormous tongue. We couldn't touch. If you enter, you will not die. They want to save you for the slaughter. Do you understand? If you enter, you will not die.
o
i
Wingman Matt Kozlark On Friday afternoon, in accordance with McGavin's Plumbing & Heating company policy, I drove over to the Brunner's house to "check up" on the faucet in their master bathroom. Not in accordance with company policy, I clogged their sewage drain, cracked three of the pipes underneath the sink, and disconnected the hot water heater. All in all, it was enough damage to keep me working there for a week, with breaks long enough at lunch and dinnertime to watch
chipped plate and a paper napkin in front of the fourth chair at the kitchen table. The Brunner family lived in a beige colonial with burgundy shutters in the northern section of town about a mile down the road from Danbury Municipal Airport. Whenever a plane took off, the plates in the cupboard and the glasses on the table danced and rattled and fell to the Formica
Liesel Brunner sunbathe, or maybe even sneak over to the golf course, where I had taken Liesel's virginity in a fairway
floor. Like painters keeping their brushes handy, they held their knives, spoons, and napkins in their left hands, while jabbing at their Caesar salads with their forks in the right.
bunker on the seventh hole. I discussed none of this with Liesel, for I figured the less anyone knew about my actions the better, particularly
The roaring overhead was constant. "How does one acclimatize to this?" I asked, clutching onto my plastic cup of milk (At his wife's command, Mr.
Mrs. Brunner, who frowned at me from behind her massive tortoiseshell glasses when I told her the bad news. Was this
Brunner had poured milk for everyone). "It's an ongoing process," he said grimly. "You can imagine what a bargain we got the house for, pool or no
the hot-water pipe, she wanted to know, because that had been replaced last November. This was everything, I told her, and if we didn't immediately set up a work-schedule, she'd "be in hot water," as McGavin's Plumbing & Heating slogan warned. Mrs. Brunner scowled. She already despised me for having kept her daughter out past curfew the night before. When Liesel asked
pool." Mr. Brunner was bald, and his beard was roughly the same color and looked to be made of the same material as the lambskin sweater he wore in defiance ofthe July heat. He had a habit oflooking away when he spoke, either out of a natural shyness, or to shield us from his pale blue eyes, which would
if I could stay for dinner, she nodded curtly and dumped a
momentarily bulge when he was excited. Another plane
screamed past, and the mullions fell from the windows.
if anyone could switch into the earlier one." "I still don't understand why we're paying money for
"And yet my husband insists on becoming a pilot,"
Liesel to fly to Colorado to play the piano," Mr. Brunner said
Mrs. Brunner said, "Another flight test in a week...He's
at the sink. "We've got a perfectly fine piano in the living
contributing to the problem."
room. A Steinway!"
Mr. Brunner stared into his salad: "You told me I had stopped pursuing life."
"And get embarrassed in the fall?" Mrs. Brunner said. Liesel had won a full scholarship to the Eastman School of
"When did I ever say that?"
Music, and hardly needed any extra training, but before she
"After you had me clean the pool."
could protest, her mother swung back around to face her.
Liesel, who didn't care for Caesar salad and had fixed herself a peanut butter and bread sandwich, said: "Are you going to take me flying, William?" Liesel called her parents by their first names, which I thought decidedly mature. "Of course," Mr. Brunner said. "We'll take James here too." I felt a burst ofloyalty towards him for calling me by my first name, rather than "Jimmy," which is what Mrs. Brunner
"And no, you're not going to the later session. You're leaving tomorrow." By this point, Liesel was starting to cry, and I was slumped low in my chair. "Maybe we can talk about this later," Mr. Brunner said. "Ifshe doesn't —" "There's nothing to talk about," Mrs. Brunner concluded, and she swept out ofthe kitchen to the hall closet, retrieved a massive black suitcase, and marched up the stairs.
had introduced me as. She had spent most ofthe meal alternately nudging her lettuce leaves from one side of the
to follow. According to Mrs. Brunner's house rules,
plate to the other and staring at me out ofthe sides of her eyes
Liesel's bedroom was a sterile zone that my presence would
Liesel chased after her in tears, but I didn't even bother
with a mixture offear and disappointment, as ifshe sensed
permanently contaminate. Instead, I sat with my head down
each time Liesel's bare foot brushed up and down my shin.
at the kitchen table while Mr. Brunner furiously scrubbed at
When Mrs. Brunner did address me, it was in the form ofleading questions, mostly about the health benefits — or
the salad bowl with a Brillo Pad, muttering the whole time about always having to do the dishes.
lack thereof-- a plumber received for what she called "dirty, dirty work." At first I answered her earnestly about the family
That night, at the piano in her living room, Liesel played
company I was heir to, about how my grandfather had started
me a parting etude. After a minute or so, she swiveled on
it, and my father had taken it over, and how it would someday
the piano bench towards me, her fingers still pressing down
probably be mine. But as Mrs. Brunner's questions became
definitively on the keys.
more pointed and skeptical ("You mean you want to install water-heaters for the rest of your hfe?"), and her daughter's foot became more active against my leg, my answers shortened to "yes" or "no," and a huge smirk plastered itself to my-face. After dinner, disaster struck. While her husband was bussing the plates, Mrs. Brunner removed her tortoiseshells (she looked about fifteen years younger when not wearing them), turned to her daughter, and announced, sweet as can
"Can you flip pages, my dear?" she said, her eyes half-closed. She gestured with her nose to the book in front of her, and I hurried to her side. I had no idea how to read the notes, but I kept my thumb and forefinger hovering importantly at the corner ofthe page. I was hoping Liesel would send me some sign when she needed the page flipped, and sure enough, a moment later, she slapped me on the wrist. "Sorry," I said, smoothing out the new page.
be, that Liesel would be attending piano camp in Colorado
"I'll tell you sooner next time," she said.
Springs in two days' time.
She squinted to find her place and then resumed playing,
I nearly choked on a crouton. Liesel frowned:
not the least bit upset. Delicate music filled the room once
"What are you talking about, Sally?" "I just got a call from the music director," Mrs. Brunner
more. I admired her hands gliding over the keys below me; they were slender and efficient and her fingernails were
said, her eyes slowly flushing with triumph. "They've got too
painted bright green. I tried to move as little as possible so as
many musicians for the later July session and wanted to know
not to disrupt her.
"Now!" she said, and I flipped the page like I meant it. This continued for another five pages, and by the time
Singing, according to Mrs. Brunner, was less of an ingrained talent and more of a joust between mind and body.
Mrs. Brunner barged in wearing a nightgown with a treble-
She challenged her students to unlearn their reflex to swallow
cleft print, we had developed such a rhythm with this call and response, it was as if we were playing the piece together.
and to tinker with the position of their jaws. Lying on my
"Say goodnight, Liesel," Mrs. Brunner said. "But it's only ten o'clock," Liesel said. "We all have busy days tomorrow," her mother said. "Jimmy included." "My name is James," I told her. "And we refuse to go to sleep." Mrs. Brunner flinched and began blinking very quickly, but then she turned away, called me a "fucking handyman," and Liesel pecked me on the cheek. When we heard her mother snoring upstairs, she sprung from the bench, grasped my hand, and we tiptoed into their finished basement, the walls of which were decorated by self-portraits of Mrs. Brunner. In the middle of the room was a rowing machine, and we embraced furiously on it. I whispered to Liesel that when she returned, I'd take her to Norwalk Beach,just the two of us. She reached around the back of my neck and kissed me again. We were sitting so close, I really only saw her eyes, but I could tell she was smiling at me, and I felt my insides crumble. Twelve hours later, her father drove her to La Guardia airport for a three o'clock flight for Denver, and she was gone from me for a week. Over the next few days, the Brunners didn't seem to notice the sulfuric odors rising from their back lawn beyond the pool, the rusty tap-water trickling from their faucets, or if they did, they kept it to themselves. Mr. Brunner spent his time at the airport preparing for his check-flight, or behind a mountain offlying manuals and textbooks in the den, shuffling out only for another glass of milk or to accompany one of his wife's students whenever she hollered for him. They both taught music at the high school, and in the summer months, Mrs. Brunner offered private vocal lessons in her living room, which she gave four times a day. Each of these sessions lasted ninety minutes, and from the looks of the checks collected in the wicker basket on the bookshelf, cost fifty dollars an hour. She changed into a new outfit for each one, trading in a pair ofshockingly orange tights and matching sweater vest for a peasant skirt before the next lead in her middle school's musical fluttered in.
back underneath the sink, I listened to the girls whinnying and coughing and yelping in falsetto as another expulsion exercise was endured. "Massive!" Mrs. Brunner would say after each one, no matter how frightening. "Your chords are making their full sound." However patient she was with her students, she was just the opposite with me, especially after she noticed leaks from the basement pipes and water stains spreading to the size of beach towels around her rowing machine. Almost immediately, she stopped leaving out the leftover chicken on the kitchen counter for me to heat up in the microwave for lunch. By the end of the week, when the water was an inch deep in certain spots in the basement, Mrs. Brunner was standing over me in the master bathroom for ten minutes at a time, her nose wrinkled and her arms folded, her gray clogs tapping the tile. It was clear she wanted me out of the house immediately, but I wasn't ready to leave. For one thing, I wasn't completely convinced Mrs. Brunner would ever let me back inside again. For another, it was strangely comforting to work somewhere that reminded me always of Liesel. The house smelled like her, a bit like peanut butter; she smiled out at me from pictures in every room. And so like Penelope at her great loom, I undid my work as I went, tightening and loosening with the same wrench. I began stealing her childhood photographs from the huge leather-bound albums Mrs. Brunner stored on the bookshelf. I smelled Liesel's bath towels hanging over the shower and, standing right there in the bathroom, masturbated to the scent. I stared again and again at her bedroom door that was always kept shut, and whenever I passed it on my way up and down the stairs, I felt an impulse to break Mrs. Brunner's house rules, which were still in effect even though her daughter was thousands of miles away. "Can't have you dirtying my daughter's room," Mrs. Brunner told me, and when she turned and walked away, I gave her the finger. That afternoon, in an act of revenge, I didn't so much break her house rules as shatter them. Here's what happened: while Mr. Brunner was at the airport making last minute preparations for check-flight, and his wife was shepherding a student through an a cappella
version of Handel's "Messiah," I carefully opened Liesel
Mrs. Brunner stood quite still, not blinking, studying me
Brunner's bedroom door and snuck inside, a tingle growing from my stomach and spreading all over.
as I doubled over in front of her. What began as a series of stifled laughs ballooned into a sustained shriek not unlike
Her room was cooler than the rest ofthe house and solemnly quiet in the five o'clock light. On the walls hung posters ofBenicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp and the lead singer from "The Darkness," and I'd be lying if! said I didn't
those I had heard during the expulsion exercises, and at some point in the next two or three minute period, I realized to my horror that Mrs. Brunner's disgust and my laughter were directly proportional to each other, which made it that much
feel a certain level of hostility towards these men. Underneath the queen-sized bed I found storage boxes marked "Personal belongings" in Liesel's loopy, reckless cursive. She had already
funnier. Tears were forming at the corners of my eyes. I
started packing for college, which, again, I thought decidedly
"Get out," Mrs. Brunner said softly, and I frantically
couldn't stop. "I'm sorry," I said to her, "But I have needs."
mature. I quietly dragged out a box and rummaged through the CDs inside: classical stuff I didn't recognize, but also Dave
and trudged past her towards the master bathroom."Out of
Matthews Band, Natalie Imbruglia, Hootie and the Blowfish,
the house," she said. "Get out of my house before I call the
the soundtrack to Romeo +Juliet. Her quote in the senior yearbook, below a stunning portrait, read: "There is nothing
police."
I have done here that I could not have done elsewhere."
tell him first that she no longer required the services of
I looked again at that portrait and stared deep into those
bobbed my head up and down and bit the sides of my mouth
She didn't call the police, but she did call my father to
green eyes that gazed out at me with such longing and
McGavin's Plumbing & Heating, second that she would be urging everyone she knew in town to reconsider
intensity. It was as if we were sitting together again on the
doing business with our family, and third that it was her
rowing machine, and when I held the heavy yearbook up to
recommendation he seek out some sort of professional care
my face and pressed my lips onto Liesel's picture, I could have sworn she kissed right back. The page had a perfumed scent
for his son.
that excited me, and before I knew it, I was down on the rug beside her bed, my jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, my fist
to church, listened to this with his head slumped over the kitchen table. When Mrs. Brunner hung up, he fired me on
flying between my legs.
the spot.
My father, a man who wore the company sweatshirt even
"What are you doing in here?" Mrs. Brunner was standing behind me in the doorway, her mouth white, and two pieces of sheet music in her hand. I leapt up, grabbing at my jeans, which had fallen around my thighs, frantically pulling them up and buttoning.
A week later, Liesel returned from Colorado Springs, and when she called me at six o'clock that evening, any and all of my embarrassment and shame instantly evaporated.
"What?"
She reported that I had left my plumbing bag in the master bathroom. Mrs. Brunner had wanted to toss it in the pool, but Mr. Brunner had rescued it for me. I asked Liesel if I
"I — I don't know," I said, looking down at the rug, my
could drive over and pick it up.
"No — I was just —"
face hot. "Am I paying you to be in here?"
"I don't think that's the best of ideas," she said. "Sally thinks you're a stalker."
"I'm sorry."
"What do you think?"
I glanced up at Mrs. Brunner. Her tortoiseshells were
"I don't know," Liesel said, and the flat tone of her voice
quivering slightly on her nose. We stared at each other, and while we were staring, I was thinking of what I could possibly say to explain myself, but each excuse was more ludicrous that the one before, and when I finally thought I
startled me. "What are you up to tonight?" "Sally's hosting a concert for her students at the Ancient Mariner."
might tell her I was rerouting the hot water pipes through
"Are you going? Can I come?"
there, it struck me as such a futile, wildly inappropriate idea that my lips twitched, and twitched again, until I released a
"If you want Sally to arrest you, then yes."
peal of pent-up air.
Arrest or no arrest, I showered, combed my hair and then messed it back up, and drove the Volvo to the Ancient
r
Mariner, a popular restaurant and bar in town. Next to the
"Wow."
chalkboard that listed "NY Sirloin" as the special every other
"We must have been inseparable brontosauruses," she said
night, Mrs. Brunner had assembled a small black stage and an electric keyboard. She played the music while, one by one, her students. mounted the stage, clasped their hands reverently
and giggled at the image in her mind. "I find that hard to believe," I said. "In any case," she said, "at least he's...mature." This was
together, and belted out show tunes. The black banner that
true, and I smiled as sadly as I knew how, but she only blew
stretched above them said: "Dinner-Time Song-Fest!" in
smoke-rings in my face. I wanted to show her the pictures
bright red letters. The lighting was dim, but through the haze of cigarette
I kept always in my wallet, the ones I had taken from the Brunner's family albums; I wanted to talk about Norwalk
smoke and the fumes ofspilled Budweiser and the surging
Beach, and tell her how my bed at home was nowhere near as
80s music that competed with Mrs. Brunner's students from
comfortable as the fairway bunker on the seventh hole.
the jukebox, I spotted Liesel. She was sitting at the bar, an
Instead, what happened next I can account for only by
enormous plate ofsteak fries in front of her, talking to this
reiterating that the bar area was oppressively warm and
guy with a huge afro like a large, blond piece of cumulus
greasy and smoky, and I had just finished my Budweiser in
cloud.
three lengthy swigs, and the dueling songs — "Surrey With
"This is Jeremiah," Liesel said quickly when I approached.
the Fringe On Top" from the stage; "Billie Jean" from the
I hardly recognized her. She was wearing a sweatshirt with
jukebox — created such discord in my brain, and the sight of
the hood up, and her smoky eye-shadow gave her neutral
Mrs. Brunner maniacally pounding the keys reminded me
expression a glaring quality. "He lives in New York City. I
not only of all the business I had lost for McGavin's Plumbing
met him at camp."
& Heating in the last twenty-four hours, but also of the night
"Liesel's told me a little bit about you, but not too much,"
Liesel and I spent playing the piano together, and in the
Jeremiah said, grinning and extending a smooth paw for
distance, like death itself gliding up the beach to meet me,
me to shake. He was one of the few peers I had ever met who could wear boat-shoes without looking incongruously
Jeremiah was returning from the bathroom in what appeared
middle-aged.
and they toppled to the floor with a muffled crash, spilling
I sat down on the stool next to him and immediately ordered a large Budweiser. On stage, an eight year old was singing "Defying Gravity," decorating it with lots of trills.
to be slow motion. I pushed the plate ofsteak fries off the bar, everywhere. I grabbed her small, salty hands. "Liesel," I said, "I think I love you." And she burst out laughing.
"Jeremiah won a full scholarship to play violin at Juilliard," Liesel told me."He might play in the pit for 'Phantom of the Opera."
I fled to the bathroom. I stood there on the slick tile, examining my beak-like McGavin nose in the mirror,
He put his paw on the small of her back.
panting over the soapy sink. I counted the drips from the
"You're embarrassing me," he said, and they shared an
faucet and listened to the laughs and screams outside and the
awful laugh.
groans of tables being moved together. I would have stayed
Two songs later, Jeremiah stood from his stool as if it were a regular chair and sauntered to the bathroom nearly in time
in there all night, but a line was forming, and then someone
to the music from the jukebox. I looked across the plate of
past ten guys with cigarettes behind their ears, back to my stool at the bar.
steak fries at Liesel, who had pulled a cigarette and a Little Mermaid lighter from her bag. "He's tall," I said. "Six five with the hair," she said, flicking the ash with the most precise of taps. "So you just met him?" I said. "It's weird," she said. "We've only known each other a week, but we're so compatible, it's like we knew each other in a previous life."
starting pounding on the door really hard, so I shuffled out
Liesel and Jeremiah were nowhere to be found, and I started calling myself names not worth repeating. I knew Liesel wouldn't be returning to the Ancient Mariner that night, and that it would be awhile before I held anyone that way I'd held her, and that it was probably best for me to drive home, but I sat stubbornly at my stool, ordered another Budweiser, and stared at the crowd gathering around the stage.
There were the parents of the performers of course, some of the dads shouldering giant camcorders, but there were also a fair number of townies: men and women who wore motorcycle jackets and moustaches. They were shouting show tune requests at the girls: "Singin' in the rain!' Singin' in the fuckin' rain!" Mrs. Brunner ignored them and continued pounding away on the keyboard. She had taken her tortoiseshells off and laid them neatly in front of her and she didn't look nearly as old. Her face was red and sweaty, and her blouse was unbuttoned enough to reveal the top of a white bra. It was only when one of the townies demanded that she show him her boobs that her nose began to quiver with anger. She wasjust about to launch into another rendition of"My Favorite Things," when she noticed me sitting there at the bar. She stopped playing mid-intro. The Ancient Mariner was silent. Her student on stage, a tall girl wearing braces, gazed around like a deer while Mrs. Brunner put the tortoiseshells back on, raised an arm, and pointed at me. I looked to my left and to my right, but there was no one else sitting in a five stool radius. She snapped her fingers, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the bouncer, a bald man with veins running up the sides of his head whose name tag said "Todd!" Todd smiled at me. He smelled strongly of disinfectant, and I got a good look at his khakis and Timberland boots as he plucked me from the stool and dragged me past the tables where one father pointed his camcorder in our direction. He held the Ancient Mariner's heavy oak door open with a boot sole and tossed
over the deserted bleachers, then up through the black walls of trees lining Ridgebury Road, marked every half mile for an upcoming triathlon. The rain drops sounded like applause on the Volvo's roof and slalomed down the front windshield, scrawling out letters and numbers — a backwards S, a shaky 6 — printed for a moment and washed out. I tried not to think about Liesel and Jeremiah, but the more I tried not to, the more I did, and the more I did, the more I felt like screaming. I realized that I had started following signs for the airport, towards the Brunner's house, and I kept speeding in that direction. In my mind, playing on a loop, was this image of Liesel and Jeremiah grasping each other on the rowing machine in the Brunner's basement, all fifty of Mrs. Brunner's self-portraits smiling their approval. I wanted to burst in on them, deliver a long, passionate monologue to Liesel, and then punch Jeremiah in the face. I parked next to the Brunner's mailbox and walked around to the basement window, but the lights were off, so I pounded on their front door. Mr. Brunner answered wearing his lambskin sweater and red boxers and asked me if I was aware that it was a little after ten o'clock. "Is Liesel here?" I said. "She's not." "Do you know where she is?" He grimaced, or grinned ever so slightly, I couldn't see well in the rain. "And here I was," he said, "Figuring she was with you." "I saw her at the Ancient Mariner, but she was with this guy she met..."
"Come back soon," he said.
Mr. Brunner understood what I was saying. He nodded wistfully a few times and then he drew back his lips to form a
The show tunes started again, and I thought about
meek, sympathetic smile.
me out.
running back inside and smashing Mrs. Brunner's keyboard to pieces, but of course I didn't. Instead, I picked my body off the sidewalk and trudged slowly over to the Volvo. It had begun to rain, and the pavement smelled like hair held too long under the blow-dryer. I unlocked my car on the second attempt, demonstrating to myself that I was still more or less functioning and fine to drive. I adjusted my seat-belt so it was real tight, and when I pulled out of the Ancient Mariner's parking lot, it was as though I were guiding a ship out of port. I drove fast down Main Street, where the stop-lights were blinking yellow. I turned onto Route 35 and drove past two police cars skulking in the high school parking lot, past the football field down below where the lights blazed all night
"You want a drink?" he asked. I followed him inside. He had only one light on in the entire house, and the shadows of the music stands loomed like giant, overhanging oak trees on the living room walls. There were four or five empty Coronas on the bookshelf and a halfempty one on the coffee table with a large lime wedge sunk at the bottom. Mr. Brunner shuffled into the kitchen in his woolen socks and returned holding a bag of cheddar Goldfish and two more Coronas. "Let's sit out by the pool," he said, and balancing everything in one arm, he slid open the glass door. It was dark, and it was raining, but we sat out there on chaise-lounges missing their pillows, wearing the resolute faces of alcoholics. Mr. Brunner's legs were covered with tiny
•• •• ••
red pimples, and I tried not to look at them.
"Tonight?" I asked.
"I was supposed to be at the Ancient Mariner myself," he said, "but I failed my check-flight." He drained half of his Corona. "I had a great landing, a textbook landing, but I was shaky on the take-off" He let out a huge sigh and the
"Why not?"
Goldfish tumbled down his sweater. "It's not enough," I said. "You want something more than anything, but it's not enough." Mr. Brunner burped in assent. We took our swigs of
"I don't feel like dying." "Me neither. I feel like living." "But we're drunk." "I'm not drunk," he said, and he jogged past me over to the pool, stripping back down to his red boxers. "Don't drown," I said. "I won't be able to rescue you." "I feel perfectly fine," he shouted to me, strolling up and
Corona and gazed out over the dark water at the back lawn. The smell from their still-damaged septic system, dulled only
down the diving board, balancing on one foot and the other.
slightly by the chlorine, was overpowering.
clipped pace.
"A great landing!" Mr. Brunner said with more energy than he had mustered the entire week. "We've been screwed over," I said. "I was so angry, you know what I did?" He reached down into his woolen sock and produced a silver key. He held it up to the moon like a war prize. "I stole the key to the Cessna." I threw back my head and cackled: "You did?" "Instructor didn't even notice," Mr. Brunner said. "Bastard was too busy failing me." "You should frame it," I said. "Put it up in your basement
He dove cleanly into the water and swam two laps at a "See?" he said when he had dressed again, toweling his head off, breathing hard — almost snarling — with tiny beads of water clinging to his lambskin beard. "Let's go check it out. It'll be an adventure." "This is the worst idea I've ever heard," I called, but he was already hurrying around the side ofthe house towards my Volvo, and I needed a ride home. Fifty yards to the left side ofthe sliding gate at Danbury Municipal Airport, there was a hole in the fence above the
next to your wife's portraits."
size and shape of an inner tube. From the passenger seat in
"She's the problem. How can I get my license with all her hassling?"
the Volvo, I watched Mr. Brunner wiggle right through. I thought about driving away, but he had taken all the keys.
"You can't," I said. "You just can't." "I've failed the goddamn test three times now, and I'm a fucking good flier," he said. "I know my suction gauge from my marker beacon, you know?" "I've never seen the cockpit of a plane," I told him.
Now he was motioning for me to join him on the tarmac. "It's fine," he whispered, as if he were telling me about the temperature ofthe water in his pool. "Aren't you coming?" "Give me my keys," I shouted out the window, but he turned and started towards the planes, which were parked in
"One of these days," Mr. Brunner said, "We'll drive over to the Danbury Municipal Airport, and I'll show you the
the distance by the low-slung hangar. I stumbled out ofthe Volvo, over to the hole in the fence,
inside of a Cessna."
and squirmed through. It had stopped raining, and the moon was shining off the taxiway's reflexive paint.
"I'd like that," I said, my head lighter than ever, laying my head back on the chaise-lounge and closing my eyes. Mr. Brunner stumbled inside to retrieve two more Coronas, his woolen socks slapping against the concrete pool area. "I'll get your plumbing bag too," he told me,"So you'll be ready to go when my wife comes home." Ten minutes later, he returned with neither my plumbing bag, nor the Coronas, but fully dressed in a dark sweatshirt and jeans. "You really want to see the inside of a Cessna?" he asked me from the doorway. At this point, I was feeling quite weightless, so his question took me a moment to register.
This was the second time in as many weeks I was trespassing onto private property with a member of the Brunner family, and I decided that being on the golf course with Liesel was much more fun. I kept looking back over my shoulder at the Volvo, parked there under the "No Parking" sign for a policeman to drive around the bend and see. "Take me home," I called to Mr. Brunner, but he was already at the planes, twisting open the gas tank to a sky-blue Cessna. He stuck his fingers inside, and when he pulled them back out, they shined with gasoline. "Full tank," he said. He produced the Cessna's key from his jean pocket and opened the door. The wheel reminded me of a flexing robot,
•• •• •• • O O 0 0 O
and I stared in at the dozens of circular gauges along the
seat was shaking underneath me. It was as if he had activated
black instrument panel. Mr. Brunner climbed in and flicked
some long slumbering beast.
the cabin lights on and off. Everything, it seemed, was in working order. Then he looked down at me from the cockpit and smiled. It wasn't that sad, sympathetic smile from before, but a determined smile, full of purpose. I thought that I was witnessing one of the most important moments in his life, and then I thought that maybe he Was witnessing one of my own as well, as if our lives were two lines intersecting at this
"I just want to say," I said, "I was the one who flicked up your pipes. I figure I should apologize before we die." "We're not going to die," he said. The propeller in front of us spun left for a rotation and then right, over and over again, until I could no longer see the spokes. Gripping the wheel with both hands, Mr. Brunner pointed the Cessna towards the runway. His hands — white hairs cropping up between the knuckles — were
moment to form a letter.
beginning to shake as well, and for some reason, this put me
"Let's go," he said.
more at ease. We each took one more breath, and then Mr. Brunner pulled back on the wheel. We hurtled forward and
My hands were quivering and my hair was wet, but I wasn't cold. Liesel and Jeremiah had blown completely out of my mind. I knocked on one ofthe wings of the Cessna, testing its durability, and then tiptoed around to the other side and climbed in. Mr. Brunner shut his door, and I shut mine, a metallic taste in my mouth, the blood jumping around in my head.
the Cessna rattled from side to side. The white lines on the runway disappeared beneath us, faster and faster, and the dark grass shot past. My seat was tilting back, and Mr. Brunner's was as well, and I closed my eyes as the wheels lifted from the ground. When I opened them, I was staring sideways down
We strapped our safety belts across our chests. I planted my feet on the cabin floor and looked over at Mr. Brunner. There
through the darkness at our town, which was nothing more than a simple, multicolored grid. The clouds had cleared and
was a frenzied, almost panicked glint in his eye as he put the key into the ignition. The Cessna sputtered once, twice, and
everywhere I looked there were stars. Mr. Brunner banked
then roared to life, louder than anything I had ever heard. My
star-filled sky.
to the west, and I let out a shout, and we charged across the
..•
Carpentry
When I was very young, my father found a nail nest in the garage.
Tyler Theofilos
He let me bring the eggs to class, but my teachers wouldn't believe me. We warmed them that winter in the incubator my grandfather had used for dove eggs. At last, they hatched in the palm of my hand, flitting about like little toothpicks. One morning, when I woke up, they were gone. My father had buried them head deep in a board. He left the hammer on the breakfast table with a note.
•• •• •• • • • Editors-in-Chief 0 0
S. Zelda Roland Jordan Jacks
Publisher Tess Dearing
The editors would like to thank Ruben Roman and the English Department, Paul Fry, Susan Bianconi, the Saybrook Master's Office, The Yale Review, Robert Hass, and their mothers. The designer would like to thank Henk van Assen, George Guman at RIS, and his mother.
Designer Tucker Rae-Grant
The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Poetry is "Buenos Aires" by Carina del Valle Schorske.
Managing Editors Diana Mellon
The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Fiction is
Caroline Smith
"Eureka" by Steven Kochevar.
Literary Editors Tae-Yeoun Keum Adam T. Gardner Senior Editors Carina del Valle Schorske Tyler Theofilos
Poetry was judged by Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor of English. Fiction was judged by Susan Bianconi, Managing Editor of the Yale Review. The text face is Bembo. Headings are set in Akzidenz Grotesk.
Associate Editors Allison Battey
Nicky Bernstein
The contents of the Yale Literary Magazine are copyright 2007. No portions of the contents may be reprinted without
Arts Editors Page Benkowski Rachel Rose
permission. All rights reserved.
Publicity Rebecca Dinerstein
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