Issue 37 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

COLUMBIA
A Journal of
Literature and Art
#37

COLUMBIA
A Journal of Literature and Art

Editor-in-Chief:
Production Editor:
Layout Editor:
Managing Editor:
Poetry Editors:
Fiction Editors:
Nonfiction Editor:
Art Editor/Cover Design:
Assistant Poetry Editors:
Assistant Art Editor:
Subscriptions Manager:
Funding Manager:
Web Site Manager:
Tiffany Noelle Fung
S K. Beringer
Stephen Johnson
Ryan Bartel may
Ericka Pazcoguin & Anna V.Q. Ross
Morgan Beatty & Claire Gutierrez
Stephen Johnson
Quinn Latimer
Kristin Henley & Idra Rosenberg
Claire Gutierrez
Joanne Straley
Aimee Walker
Tami Fung
Poetry Board: S K. Beringer, Farrah Field, Quinn Latimer,
Joanne Straley, Craig Teicher, Aimee Walker
Fiction Board: Molly Johnson, Christopher Hacker, Michael
Johnson, Mark Gindi, Farooq Ahmed,
Alex Mindt, Jennifer Oh
Nonfiction Board Kelly McMasters, MacKenzie Pitcairn,
Jamie Pietras
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art is a not-for-profit literary
journal committed to publishing fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art by
new and established writers and artists. Columbia is edited and produced annually
by students in the Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University's School
of the Arts and is published at 415 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY
10027. Contact editors at (212) 854-4216 or e-mail
columbiajournal@columbia.edu. Visit our web site at www.columbia.edu/-tnfl2
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art welcomes submissions of
poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork. We read manuscripts from August 1
through Feb 1 and generally respond within three or four months. Manuscripts
cannot be returned. Please include a SASE for a response. No e-mail submissions
are currently accepted. Please visit our web site for submission guidelines,
contest information, and notification of upcoming readings.
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art is indexed \a American
Humanities Index (Whitson Publishing Company). National distributors to retail
trade: Ingram Periodicals (La Vergne, TN); Bernhard DeBoer (Nutley, NJ);
Ubiquity Distribution, Inc. (Brooklyn, NY).
©2003 Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art
The Editors would like to thank those who made this issue possible.
For generous Financial Support:
New York State Council on the Arts
Columbia University School of the Arts Writing Division
Siri von Reis
Tom Healy & Fred Hochberg
For Advisement and Technical and Creative Support:
Ben Marcus
Erica Marks
Anna Delmoro Peterson
Michelle Steer
Alan Ziegler
For Contributing to Readings:
Arthur Bradford
Eamon Grennan
Scott Hightower
Julia Vicinus
Alan Ziegler
Michael Scammell
Andrea Cammack
Paul LaFarge
Melissa Monroe
Holiday Reinhorn
Front Cover: Mark Milroy. Buttercup, 2002. Oil on canvas, 50 x 34".
Courtesy the artist.
Back Cover: Mark Milroy. Birds, 2002. Oil on canvas, 41 1/2 x 28 1/2.
Courtesy the artist.
Subscription Information:
Annual subscriptions are available for $15 (two issues). Two-year subscriptions
are available for $25 (four issues). Sample copies are available for $8, and back
issues are available for $10. International subscriptions add $5 per year.
Support Columbia:
We encourage you to support fine literature, fresh voices, and continual growth
in our magazine. We rely on the generous support of readers like you!
Become a Member:
For $50, Members receive an annual subscription to Columbia.
Become an Associate:
For $75, Associates receive a two-year subscription to Columbia.
Become a Patron:
For $ 100 or more, Patrons receive a two-year subscription to Columbia and have
their name listed in the journal.
Please make donations to Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art payable to
Columbia University, with "Columbia Journal" indicated in the memo space of
the check. All donations are tax-deductible.

Table of Contents
Poetry
Nadia Herman Colburn
Matthew Zapruder
Beth Woodcome
Peg Boyers
Billy Collins
Ruth Stone
Glyn Maxwell
Timothy Liu
Jean Valentine
Ray Gonzalez
Anne Coray
D. A. Powell
Karen Volkman
Paolo Manalo
Mark Wunderlich
Mary Quade
Tom Paulin
Brian Henry
Joyce Sutphen
Suji Kwock Kim
Doris Umbers
Anne Babson
Gareth Lee
Reunion
Then
The Book of Oxygen
Sweden
Decadence
Exile: Paraiso Tropical
Celebration
Tell Me
Submission
The Stay
Antediluvian
That I Had Treated you Badly
The Grape
Before Angels
Vestiges
[the ice hadn't cracked, stingy . . .]
[robes and pajamas, steadfast . . .]
Sonnet
Sonnet
Nihil Obstat
Still Life With Fallen Angel
Tamed
Tractor
An vollen Buschelzweigen
Scar
This Blueness Not All Blue
Residue
Not Us
Annunciation
Resistance
The Goose Egg
The Recounting of a Polite Occasion
Old English Days
10
11
12
21
22
25
42
50
51
52
68
69
70
71
86
87
89
92
93
118
119
120
121
127
128
129
130
131
132
143
146
172
174
Emily Fragos
Kevin Pilkington
Martha Rhodes
Oliver de la Paz
Kimiko Hahn Cuts from
Fiction
Sam Lipsyte
Matthew Derby
Heidi Julavits
Diane Williams
Padgett Powell
Christine Schutt
Lance Contrucci
Nonfiction
Joe Wenderoth
Colette Brooks
David Shields
Thomas Beller
Jeffrey Faas
Nicholas Frank
Cranberry
Clasp
Noah
Alchemy
Santorini
Ambassadors to the Dead
My Dearest Regret
Zuihitsu on My Daughter
Island Late Summer ('00)
Captain Thorazine
Gantry's Last
The MacMillan Hair
Joint
Confidence
Isabel in the Bridge House
The Guide to Sumptuous Living
187
188
189
190
192
193
194
196
15
27
72
90
99
122
148
The Summer Agony 22
24 Frames 57
Notes on the Local Swimming Hole 94
The Toy Collector 104
Five Years to Life 160
NXT.XRPTS 176

Interviews
Ruth Stone
Breyten Breytenbach
Art
Mark Milroy
Roz Leibowitz
Yayoi Kusama
Mark Bradford
Robyn O'Neil
Seventy Years of Poetry 43
"Let's Survive" 133
Daisy Dress
Elliot
Phone Call #3
The Hare-Lip
My Milk Teeth
The Fall
A Woman Dreams
Crowd
Infinity Nets—White Rain
Fireflies on the Water
Portrait of artist Yayoi Kusama
reflected in Fireflies on the Water
C'mon Shorty
Same Old Pimp
20 minutes from any bus stop
Biggie, Biggie, Biggie
Snow Scene
Diamond Leruso, Accident Victim,
& Runaway Lionel
Snow Scene
l
ii
iii
iv
V
vi
vii
viii
ix
X
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
XV
xvi
xvii
xviii

Every proposal is fictional in that it has not yet been executed. It is
nonfictional in the sense that it means to actually be carried out.
—Joe Wenderoth
How is it that I hear this echo,
Catching even in my blind eye the death throes of a distant star?
—Ruth Stone

10
—Nadia Herman Colburn
Reunion
The road reminds us nothing remains itself:
cucumber burrs around the dark rough trunks
clasped twirling in the leaves, new mosses
climbing over gray, exposed roots,
and, through the open plain, grasses—
Later may come concrete blocks and strip malls,
but the desired stillness never appears.
The copper autumn leaves, once lost,
point back only to a dirty
fingered oblivion.
Don't let the glass mark the table top,
take your foot off the chair.
These things assume relationships
like geese cawing into spring,
shitting on the front lawn, rising, riding
the air, flapping into that beautiful Information,
always getting it almost right.
Then
Out back where the poison sumac grows,
Where the vine wraps twice around the trunk
And falls, and the snag-grass spreads
Like wild fire out to the wall
Of the old stone house that sits abandoned
Through the seasons like a dry water-fall,
We buried the small gray mouse.
We marked the spot with a rock that fit perfectly
In the hand—black granite with a streak
Of quartz that glowed in the light
Like a pale thin band of yellow sunset
On a cloudy day or, against the sure
Night sky, the path of a firefly.

12
—Matthew Zapruder
The Book of Oxygen
(for Matthea)
I am always a house
with nobody in it
not the middle of winter
not even me
taping plastic to the windows to keep
cold air filling
the house with sails
Now we're moving
just fast enough
on the couch to see you
about to always
spill
your limbs
a glass of syntax
lying a little
golden window
on the tip of your tongue
Pass it to me
Let's see what calibrations
and kindnesses I am
always in your handwriting
rediscovering
I am always
in your handwriting
rediscovering
always I am
into my desk drawer
cabinet of wanders wandering
to rediscover it's snowing
through it I touch
a nail someone gave me
to hang a great task on
say describe
a painting you
have never not walked in
its tiny
colored
glaciers drifting
down to the floor
or something so easily
left undone
say a schedule
of instances
with the deaf ear
of childhood heard
behind the platitudes
composed in red pen
and left oh for breezes
through a white barn
to do
hills decreed
by december's
infallible bureaucracy
delivering little
caskets of tears
are in your eyes
to be won on the radio
songs
I hardly ever
understand the ritual
deliver me
everywhere
guardian spider
guardian decade
through the leaves through me
without further election
ending deliver me
everywhere
everwhere

14
the radio decrees
the transparent runaway taxi party
inoculate the party
of the lost domain
thus I silent
and unlike
a father hang
in watch of the hill
where so full of
morning glory
and portents you flew
a butterfly for hours
in the shape of a kite
you were hardly there
beneath your feet
undisturbed
the grasses blew
—Sam Lipsyte
Captain Thorazine
Catamounts, here I come.
Perhaps a patient man would wait until his first update found
its way into the alumni bulletin before submitting another, but
patience has never been a virtue I could call "Pal," or "Royko," or
"Homes." Hey, I'm an impulsive guy, a gun-jumper, a faith-leaper.
I cannot, will not, hold my horses. My horses are gorgeous things,
sweat-carved, sun-snorting beasts. Look at them go! See them gallop
at some equine destiny I am ill-equipped to comprehend.
It's been ever so.
It's been ever so since the candy bar incident.
Pardon? Candy bar?
Witness me briefly through the bent lens of history. See boy me,
homely, surly, nipples afire with hormonal surge. This boy's mother
buys him a candy bar. Big doings, a candy bar, in a household loyal
to fruit, to kale, to sprouts and curd, to something called, apparently,
bulgar. The boy guards the candy bar the whole ride home
from the mall. He hides it in his sleeve from the sun. There beside
his mother in their boatish beige sedan, he awestares up at her, her
beautiful nose. It's a big, slanting, sacred thing, this nose of the
woman who has given him life, sheltered him from Nor' Easters,
asteroids, the death rays and Stukka dives of his mind, the nose of
the woman who has now bestowed, against all nutritional creed, the
only thing he truly craves.
"Don't eat it right away," she says. "Save it. I know a little trick
to make it even better."
A trick to make a candy bar better? She's a sorceress, his mother,
a good witch. She takes perfection and perfects it.

16
it.
"What trick?"
"We'll put it in the freezer. Wait, L., wait, and it will be worth
He loves it when she calls him L.
Home, he bolts from the car with his candy bar under his shirt.
He must shield it from the elements. It's a fine spring day but he
knows full well there are elements about, eager to drench, to blight,
to melt. He runs to the kitchen and eases the candy bar into the
freezer, slides it between some cellophaned soy burgers and a foilwrapped
package he knows from past reconnaissance to be a halfloaf
of zucchini bread. His mother trails in after him with the grocery
sacks, sees him standing sentry at the freezer door.
"It's going to take a while, L. Go play."
Go play? A mighty and delicious molecular transformation is
taking place!
"I mean it, L. Go play in the basement."
Go play in the basement? How far from the locus of his happiness
must he trek? Okay, the basement. He treks down to the basement.
Play commences with some British commando, his usual
wade-in-the-river-scale-the-pylon-stab-the-Kraut commando, but
when he gets the rubber knife in his mouth and starts up his father's
stepladder, the blade, he swears, tastes of nougat.
He does Gettysburg instead, dons his Union cap, wipes out the
Axmy of Northern Virginia with his plastic musket from the hobby
shop. Those dead racist bastards pile up in some dry valley of his
mind. The slaves make songs for him, a vaporish version of his
father beams. Still, he notes, his musket is much the color of milk
chocolate. Is Witch-Mommy's alchemy working? Go play, god
dammit. He wills himself back to slaughter, Omaha Beach, Khe
Sanh, spits clips at Victor Charlie until his musket, now by dint of
an alternate grip an M-16, jams. Just fucking typical. The Cong
burst out of the broom closet, AK's blazing. He hurls himself at the
wood-paneled wall. Drool for blood slides down his chin.
"I'm hit, I'm hit," he says. "Medic!"
It's a bitch, but it's not Charlie's fault. He had no right to be in
Charlie's basement.
The last thing he sees before he dies—and for a while afterward—is
a spider on the new smoke alarm.
Spooky.
Enough is enough.
He finds his mother at the kitchen table. She's doing crossword
puzzles with a fountain pen. There's a faint dark smear on the tip of
her nose. The candy bar wrapper is bunched in a coffee cup. What's
a five-letter word for traitor*
"Mommy," he says.
"I was just . . ." she says. "I had to test it, L. Too see if it was
okay. It was bad, baby. It was a bad candy bar. I'll get you a good
one."
God, the guilt, hers, his. She gets him cupcakes, candy corn,
gooey-sweet tarts. They never speak of freezing things again. Years
later, when he kisses her cold calves in a hospital room, he sees what
the trick had been. The trick was to give unto others that which you
mean to seize.
He'd be a sorcerer, too.
"A sorcerer?" said Gwendolyn, one of the few times I told her
this tale. "Just because she ate your candy bar? My mom guzzled rye
and beat us. My uncle put his dick in my armpit while I slept. My
cousin hid my college acceptance letter until it was too late to reply.
Your mother ate your candy bar?"
"It's symbolic."
"That's what people say when they know they've come with the
weak shit."
"Fuck you," I said.
"Excuse me?"
"I said fuck you," I said. "I've been meaning to say it for a long
time. I just couldn't find the right words."
Yes, this exchange occurred during a particularly frenzied juncture
in our unraveling, but I always thought Gwendolyn missed the
point of my story. The candy bar incident, aside its obvious revelations
regarding my character, or the deformation thereof, imparts an
tremendous lesson about life's treats in general: Munch
Immediately! Maybe that could be a chapter of the self-help book
I've been meaning to write, The Seven Habits of Highly Disappointed
People, which I could probably bang out in an afternoon if I weren't
so busy updating you fine people on the latest in the life of me, a
man once voted Most Likely to Recede.

18
Felines of the East, I rejoice to announce the birth of a spanking
new bank balance, courtesy of Penny Bettis at the cola outfit.
The check was cut last week and now I've got a cupboard full of
noodles, reasonable wattage in every room. Is this perhaps what it's
like for some of you more respectable Catamounts, with your pension
plans and golden parasails, that sense of sated languor, as
though Fate, suddenly, and without solicitation, had offered up her
stippled shins for your tongue's worship?
Not too shabby.
This must be how our very own Phil Douglas feels. Philly Boy,
congratulations with heartiness of the utmost on your continued
success at Willoughby and Stern. May the Dow rise to meet you.
Still, I should relate, when I perused your item in the latest issue of
Notes, I wasn't what emergency medical technicians would define as
a trauma case. You've always been a persistent guy, Phil, a real plugger,
whether the task at hand was to find a hole in rival Nearmont's
vaunted line, or a fag to bash after the Friday night game. Though
not the most talented athlete at Eastern Valley (this honor obviously
belongs to varsity deity Mikey Saladin) you were always the most
brutal and adamantine of Catamounts, an avatar of the jock warrior
code, if you will, which I'm sure you will.
I'm also fairly certain at least a few of our contemporaries shared
my fantasy of cornering you in Eastern Valley's dank shower room
and firing a hollow-point round into your skull. We could picture
the startlement in your eyes, the suck and flop of your dead-beforeit-hits-the-floor
body hitting the floor, your brain meat chunked,
running out on rivulets of soapy water across the scummed tiles,
clogging up that rusted drain the school board never saw fit to
replace. Your pecker would be puny with death.
We'd never do such a thing, of course, not like those suburban
murder squads of today, those peach-fuzz assassins in their mailorder
dusters who lay down suppressing fire in cafeterias. I remember
watching TV with Gary during one recent stand-off, that magnet
school in Maryland where those dodge ball refugees exacted
payback with Glocks and grenades. SWAT teams scoped for headshots
while the TV shrinks railed against video games.
"Video games?" said Gary, fingered the carb of his bong. "Try
school!"
We'd ordered in fish tacos. We were watching the horror, as one
anchorman put it, unfold.
"Fuckers did it," said Gary. "I mean, I don't condone what they
did, ultimately, but, ultimately, they did it."
"Totally, ultimately," I said.
"Balls to the wall, baby!" said Gary, let go with a war whoop, or
maybe a war gargle. All the old salty agony.
"Captain Thorazine," I said. "Good to have you back, sir."
"Teabag, son," said the Captain, "lock and load."
But our vengeance by proxy vaporized in an instant. Some correspondent
hunkered near the bike rack delivered the news via video
phone: the duster boys had killed the only black kid in the school,
called him the N-Word, "Nigger," too, shot him in the gut.
"No!" said Gary. "No! No!"
"God, no!" I said. "God, God! No, No!"
"They ruined it!" said Gary, near weeping now. "Why did they
have to be racists? The bastards ruined it!"
The bastards did ruin it. Their pure hate was tainted now. We
pine for avengers, we get bigots, thugs. Only love survives contamination,
Catamounts. (Man, if I'd had this on paper at the
Aphorism Slam in Toronto . . .)
So, Phil, my dear Mister Philly Douglas of Willoughby and
Stern, locker room sadist, source of my very nickname (another
time, alums), please don't worry about my tender little shower murder
fantasy. We who may share it never posed a threat. We have no
weapons, no nerve. We're gentle rejects, bear no kinship to the
nihilist gunsels of this epoch. They'd probably whack us out, too,
not even knowing "gunsel" derives from the Yiddish word for rent
boy!
Besides, good Catamounts, I'm getting on with my life, getting
to the brunt of it. Today I woke early, near noon, brewed some coffee
in my mother's old Silex, watched a tiny bird outside my window
dance a little dance on the air conditioning unit. I felt a great
communion with this creature, hummingbird, sparrow, whatever
the fuck it was. What we both have is today, I thought, until we
smack into deck door glass, or fall from the sky twisted up with
some avian virus.
The milk was bad but I poured it in my coffee anyway.
Make do. Like the Donner party.
A din came through the kitchen wall—stabs of noise, the sound

20
of human laughter. Those kid neighbors Kyle and Jared were maybe
on another speed binge. One of them, Kyle, I think, tells me they're
grad students, though there isn't any college nearby. They grind it
out past dawn a good deal, their rants growing shriller by the hour:
the birth of combustion, the chromosomal make-up of chimpanzees,
the reason for rainbows, war. I don't mind it at all. Kids
must coddle their excitements. Most are normies before you know
it, have "mixed feelings" about the President, believe good cholesterol
must prevail.
Now the laughter came softer through the wall. The sun was
maybe funny to them. I could picture the ashtrays, heaped, the
smeared mirror in daylight. Fly high, babies! Guts aflame, beaksmash
looming, fly baby birdies, fly!
A sudden fatigue fell over me. Sudden Fatigue Syndrome?
I put myself down for a nap.
I've always been a heavy sleeper—never a peaceful one. I'm a
bully in the rack. I used to shove Gwendolyn around, snatch pillows
out from under her head. I had no idea I was doing it. One night
I socked her in the nose.
"You fuck!" said Gwendolyn, switched on the lamp. "What are
you doing?"
Blood gathered in the groove above her lip, fell in thin gaudy
drops to the sheets.
"I have no idea, baby!" I said.
Somnambulistic innocence only takes you so far. People get fed
up. Gwendolyn got fed up. She'd laid out so many reasons she was
leaving I figured there was probably just one: the brute I become in
slumber.
Maybe it's punishment for past sins or else I just nap too much,
but I've been having a hell of a time falling asleep these days. Those
car alarms out on the boulevard don't help. That whine, that wail,
tripped by the merest graze. Touch me and I'll scream. I swear, I'll
fucking scream.
Dusk and I'm up again, take cold coffee to my desk. My computer
snoozes with ease, the bastard, but when I set my mug down
with too much force the monitor pops into brightness. What hath
God wrought? I am become death, destroyer of worlds. Show
balloons?
—Beth Woodcome
Sweden
Try hard, it's midsummer.
You're a little ill, these waves.
You're a little gone. Sailing on the Baltic,
with a man, while your mother's dying
at home. Remember that. Her dying
is all over the place. It followed you,
little bug. Your grandmother called,
your mother is dying, only louder:
your mother is dying. You're missing it.
What kind of kind are you?
Today, my god, the smothered
herring, I ate so many things.
Don't touch. Not like that, or now.
You feel life scared to live itself.
You're north, with failure.
Here, this land of bereaved nights
where the sun hangs its own
noose and won't climb in.
What have you gone and done?

22
Decadence
The village whispers are turning red and the voices,
like a barn fire, get the horses panicking. The window
panes of these quarters belong to neither of us,
and they chatter all night.
When I choose to, I can recall all the days I've ever lived.
Pulling back the curtain, I understand which year it is.
I understand why we celebrate the seclusion of being
partly wanted. How thankful can I be? And who will answer?
You say my name, lead me by my smallest disaster,
and have me be quiet. I don't respond to much anymore.
If I were to turn to you in my sleep and show you my face
you would know that I dream of your wife and daughters.
Their mouths are filling with grass as the fields are spreading.
Let me assure you they are so pale, and can't wake up.
—Joe Wenderoth
The Summer Agony
In the months of preparation for the summer Agony, The Lunatic
becomes a gardener. Each day, he plants one flower or one flowerbush.
He has seeds, but no tools. He does not water the flowers he
plants; he hopes for rain. He plants as he sees fit. No kind of flower
or flower-bush is off-limits (though many, due to climate, will certainly
never thrive, and he may or may not have knowledge of such
facts), and there is no prescription for where he should plant, save
The Sconce (discussed below). He may choose to plant only in the
vicinity of The Breeze, he may choose to plant only around the
imagined center of the field (i.e. around Being itself), or he may
choose to plant at the walls of The Frontier—it is completely left to
his discretion, just as it is completely left to spectators to develop an
interpretation of the plants (or lack of plants) as they adorn the field
on the day of play.
The Lunatic always plants, in summer, a circular hedge around the
spot wherein Being is to be placed, and this hedge is called The
Sconce. The Sconce is a distinctive feature of the summer Agony,
and the symbol for the summer Agony references it. A summer
playing field that does not have a Sconce is likely to be regarded as
the saddest field of all. Spectators view such a spectacle—
a Sconceless summer field—as a stern and well-deserved chastising.
They feel as though they have failed to devote enough energy to the
ornate—the decidedly impractical—and so, have failed to dwell in
a proper understanding of "things." In any case, the failure of The
Sconce to grow is never felt to be an indication of weakness in The
Lunatic.

24
In the summer Agony, there is a feeling for the good bursting of
things. There is also a feeling for the ways in which this bursting can
be repressed and absorbed. The Sconce is meant to make apparent
the simultaneity of the bursting and its repression, the buds of the
bushes rising and opening into the sweet deadly oblivion of the sky
while the bushes themselves form a neat circle, containing the most
precious and unbursting object the game has to offer: Being. Such a
repression is form, and form, in summer, is not evil—it too is good
because it anticipates the bursting that it holds back and then manages
to endure its inevitability. The bursting is—in itself—good . . .
because it is massively complex, because, that is, it outstrips the
power of that which means to register it. Specific burstings
inevitably leave specific (and obvious) husks, but it is difficult for
the spectator to focus on such a specific husk-instance when it is
surrounded by—and indeed submerged in—an orgy of countless
new burstings, each one of which seeds its own exponentially
expanding chain. After a while, spectators and players alike begin to
have a feeling that all future Agonies will be summer Agonies, as
though the world itself had become a Sconce or was at least founded
upon the notion. But this is just a feeling; every Sconce is in fact
temporary, and likely to be trampled even before its grand season
dies down.
In both the winter and the spring Agony, there are obvious extraneous
dangers woven into the consciousness of players—cold stone,
shards of glass, in winter, and a tiger in spring. In the summer
Agony, the most immediate threat to players is Agony itself, which
is to say, the game-oriented violence of other families. Players may
come, therefore, in summer to feel that the game should not be
played, or that the rules of Agony should be revised so that it is less
violent. Such feeling is naive on two main fronts; first, it assumes
that summer will last; second, it assumes that Agony is for those in
Agony. Paradoxically, the lushness of the summer game is the origin
of a new bitterness, in players, toward Agony itself—a bitterness
that spectators cannot entirely possess, but might sense as it impacts
upon the style and the substance of play. For spectators, this bitterness
is in almost all cases understood as a positive development, as
it unfolds a whole new set of potential attitudes with which Agony's
drama might be gouged and sucked toward clean.
—Peg Boyers
Exile: Paraiso tropical
Miami Beach
Breakfast again at the local dive.
The usual order: cafe con leche, Cuban toast
and a side of platanitos.
Estrellita, the starch-capped waitress, dodges
the plastic macaws swinging from the glittered stucco ceiling,
delivers a tortilla to the blonde septuagenarian
with too many face lifts.
On Collins Ave. the traffic is one way—
north—as if the place itself knew to send you home.
A triple picture-window frames the sidewalk scene,
passersby divide into continuous Muybridge panels:
construction workers in overalls,
dirt and plaster blurring their origins,
a painted teenager with matching toes, fingers
and cell phone, bent seniors with their pushcart groceries.
They walk, glide, pant across our little stage,
glassed in (or out), silent as a Murnau,
sun-scorched, cut
off from the other heat
of radio jazz this side of the glass,
while the breakfasters stay cool,
satisfied in their pastel bauhaus
air-conditioned fishbowl.
Inside the cafe" there's a mainland sound
crowding out the island beat,
smoothing over its style,
appropriating the mix—

26
Tito Puente with his New York band asserts the primacy of brass,
Nat King Cole croons in Espaflol—
A-cer-cah-tay mds, ee mds,
pay-roh moo-choh mds—
His anglo r's and long vowels
re-shape the words
into marketable units,
the idiom bland, accessible.
Syllable upon smooth, articulate syllable
generating hits far from Cuban—
another American commodity.
(This is known as the transmutation of culture.)
Across the street a stooped suit with a yarmulka
enters a pharmacy, fills his prescription, collects
his clothes from the laundromat and toddles
home to his seedy deco hotel.
He's lucky to have a bridge game
in his has-been glitz of a lobby, under the gold and aqua
fish-mosaic cupola. There he'll trump his peers
with diamonds and hearts and pictures of kids back in Jersey.
—Es un pedazo del alma
que se arranca sin piedad.
The sliced cylinders of toast
arrive with the rest.
I dunk
—sube y baja, sube y baja—
'till the butter rims
my cup and the caffeine buzz hits,
at last: another day
in el exilio.
—Matthew Derby
Gantry's Last
Gantry sat behind the training facility, hidden from the
burning tower exercise by a broad stand of tall yellow weeds, eating
the pills his mother had prepared for him, orange pills that tasted
like orange drink, the ones that stopped him from doing things like
cursing in other languages or petting the faces of strangers. His
classmates at the Ministry of Defense Summer Day Camp were suited
up in flame-retardant coveralls, strafing the tower with pink
chemical gel. "Closer! Get closer!" He could hear the instructor,
Colonel Roger, shouting through a heavy cardboard cone. Gantry
was pardoned from the more stressful, physically intense group
challenges because of his chest, which had been all wrong for as long
as he could remember, as well as his general slowness. He didn't like
to sit on the bleachers and watch his peers at work, though. When
he watched them, he thought too much about the terrible acts he'd
like to perform on them in return for what they did to him on a
daily basis, and when he thought about that he was almost always
overcome by dizzying, paralyzing guilt.
The camp was for children who were too smart and resourceful
for their own schools, but also for slow children who were bussed in
from the craggy, burned out cities in the distance. The idea was that
the smart children would lead the slow ones out of the darkness of
their ignorance or at least prepare them for a brief stint in the military.
Gantry was there against his will. His mother wanted him to
learn to defend himself so that he might one day come home from
school without a bandaged head, or carrying an I.V. bag, or in a
wheelchair.
He looked at his homework. The first question was, "If I have

28
forty acres of forest, how many search dogs will I need to find a fugitive?"
He slid the sheet back into his yellow plastic portfolio and
sighed deeply.
A bird approached his feet, looking at him sideways, its head a
worrisome cloud of nervous activity. It was small and brown, a nutlike
handful of a bird, and it was close, closer than any creature had
ever come to Gantry, even when he had food in his open palm, even
when he was down on all fours, panting, calling the creature by
name.
"Chirk Chirk?" the bird exclaimed, peering up with one empty,
opalescent eye.
Gantry stared back at the bird with a startled, open expression,
one that told anyone who might be looking that he was a boy prepared
for nothing, a young man on whom any number of people
could mount themselves, bury their heels in his soft, shapeless flanks
and thrust away at his life until all that was left was the shredded,
musky rind.
"Spare a dime?" the bird asked in a voice that sounded thin and
frail, born somewhere else in a flurry of spastic air.
"Beg pardon?" Gantry said.
"Got any change for a wayward sparrow?" the bird asked,
retracting one of its slim, scaly legs into the downy mass of feathers
covering its bright red breast.
"I don't have any money," said Gantry, pulling at his pockets to
suggest their emptiness, "and anyway, you're full of crap. No sparrow's
got red on it."
The bird's mouth opened again, wider this time. The lower
beak slid back mechanically and from the resulting hole a tiny
human arm protruded, giving Gantry the finger. He looked up and
saw Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt off at the other end of the facility past
the obstacle course, holding a small remote, laughing and cursing.
Mr. Cushing was the one who put a bag of fire in Gantry's locker.
Mr. Felt was the one who had called Gantry "cum shovel" and drew
the picture of two sheep doing it with a tree trunk on his forehead
during Sleep Deprivation Workshop, which was where all of the
slow kids were put when the instructors ran out of things for them
to do. Gantry had seven Sleep Deprivation sessions today, and gym,
and lunch, which was only called a class if you were slow and had
to keep saying things like "this is an apple" while you ate the apple.
And now Gantry was hiding in the weeds, staring at the tiny,
bare arm protruding from the bird's mouth, middle finger proudly
erect in the breeze. He always hid in the weeds whenever he could
because the weeds was the only place no one would follow him.
Most people at camp followed him because they knew that sooner
or later he was going to get worked over and that was something
they liked to see. He could not understand why he'd been singled
out. There were uglier children, and slower ones—a few could barely
even walk, and yet they were spared. There was no making sense
of it. The beatings had gotten worse in the last few weeks. Gantry
had to wear a face mask during Bio-Chemical Trauma Reenactment,
when the others would hurl things at him—one time even a burning
oil drum—the impact of which made Gantry bleed from the ass
a little. He hid this from everyone but his mom's friend Conrad.
One night, he shuffled into the family room with a clutch of toilet
paper, in the center of which bloomed a bright red stain. Conrad,
who'd lived in Gantry's house for nearly a year, hugged him and told
him he was honored that Gantry had shared this private moment
with him but did not actually mention whether or not such bleeding
was indicative of a deeper, hidden wound.
Today the patch of weeds, too, was despoiled.
Gantry had four toys in his portfolio: one was a yellow block
that was his mom, one was a brown block that stood for Conrad, a
third, big red block that could be a car or a boat, and a small stick
that could be a snake or a phone or his father, depending on
whether he wanted to think about his father, a person he had never
seen, primarily because Gantry was made when his mother's old
girlfriend, Shelf, emptied the contents of an aluminum tub into his
mother's womb. There was a picture of the two of them standing on
either side of the device, grinning, holding champagne glasses. A
piece of colored paper was taped to the front of the machine. It said
"Daddy." The photograph was hidden behind a bit of torn fabric in
his mother's jewelry chest. Gantry had found it the other night
while looking for money. He brought it into the living room, where
Conrad and his mother were watching a program on elephants.
"What is this?" he said, holding the picture out at arm's length. His
mother burst out crying and left the room. Conrad turned to punch
one of the oversized throw pillows on the couch. He followed his
mother into her bedroom.

30
"What is this?" he said again. No other words were possible.
"Oh, you know what that is. How could you have just—what
were you doing sneaking around?"
"Is this my father? Is this where I came from?"
"Gantry, you know where you came from. You know that Shelf
and I," and here she stopped to collect a long breath, "Shelf and I
wanted a child. This was the only way. How was I supposed to know
what would happen afterwards?"
"What did happen afterwards?" Gantry asked, but his mother
only fell on the bed, covering herself with the floral sheets.
Gantry went back to his room and looked at the picture. Shelf
had been gone for years, without so much as a stray hair left behind.
He could barely bring her name up without his mother collapsing.
But he thought about Shelf often, almost as often as he thought
about his father—he imagined a rail-thin man, brimming with ejaculate,
vibrating solemnly in a small, dim room somewhere in a nearby
city.
There were Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt, holding the remote control
at the other end of the park, cackling, and there was the bird
with its mouth open, giving Gantry the finger. He thought about
crushing the bird, about how easy it would be to stomp on its leering
little head and grind it into the blacktop until it was just a smear
of plasma and wires. But then he thought about what would happen
to him next, how they would fill a baseball cap with dog mess
and make him put it on, or stuff him up with pebbles, or mummify
him with tape—all things they had done to him at one time or
another, and none of them were things he enjoyed, except the mummification—that
he'd actually liked until his mom and Conrad had
to peel the tape off one piece at a time. It hurt so much that he was
sure they were taking the top layer of skin right off his body. But
afterwards they said they were sorry and painted him with new skin
and put brand new sheets on his bed and he felt so nice and warm
again in the darkness that he forgot about the dreadful camp and
Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt altogether.
But it was hard to forget about Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt for
long. They had a way of always coming back at him; they had a
sense for where he would be at any given time, and they would be
there first, prepared with tools. Once Gantry decided to play in a
massive leaf pile Conrad had blown to the curb with a blower-thing,
and they had just been, like, hiding inside the leaf pile all afternoon,
just waiting to strap Gantry into a rubber nude suit, a white one
even though Gantry was mixed. They made him walk up and down
the street in the stifling suit, past Katrina Boda's house, twice, while
they shouted things at him from behind through a megaphone.
That episode had even made it into the local paper, with a large
photo in which Gantry's privates were blocked out by one of the
radar sticks the police used to calm Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt down.
Colonel Roger was wicked pissed, and made all three of them work
the hygiene stand for the rest of the week.
The bird drew the small arm back into its mouth. It cocked its
head and looked at Gantry with its other eye. He kicked out his foot
gingerly to test the bird's reaction. It dodged the foot, hopping
backwards, looking him up and down as it did so, taking a brief,
humiliating survey of his body, as if to underscore that even it was
capable of taking him down. In the distance Mr. Cushing gestured
wildly with his elbows as he maneuvered the bird out of Gantry's
path, while Mr. Felt jumped up and down, cupping his mouth with
awkward, oversized hands.
The bird, now several feet away from Gantry, bent down to the
ground until its beak nearly touched the pavement, and spread its
wings. Two slender tubes emerged from underneath, and Gantry
knew he was about to be strafed with behavior medicine—Mr. Felt
had copied the keys to the camp's bio-chemical pantry, and daily he
pilfered tiny vials of whatever he could get his hands on. Gantry
drew his limbs in close to his body, hugging his long, spindly legs,
both hands clasped over his mouth and nose, in preparation. One
thing he excelled in at the camp was the assumption of self-defense
positions—no one could touch his "Stop, Drop, and Roll," his
"Henderson Shroud," his "Top Jimmy." He started to breathe slowly
and deeply. Behavior medicine was supposed to sting a little. But
there was a swooshing sound instead, a great rustling of leaves, and
when he opened his eyes all Gantry saw was the swiftly retreating
form of a colossal truancy robot, in whose chest cage Mr. Cushing
and Mr. Felt sat cross-legged, fuming.
It was time to see the nurse. Rather, it was time for the nurse to
see Gantry, because it was she, after all, who came to him and did

32
all the looking. Gantry just squatted over the machines and grimaced
as warm jets of air were fired high into him, so high he swore
they were massaging his heart.
"Nurse," Gantry said between clenched teeth, "what is it called
when someone puts something on you so that you cant go near
them anymore?"
"Like a preemptive hood?"
"No, not a garment or a magnet or anything. I mean like a document.
Something that says that a person has to stay a certain distance
away."
"Restraining order," the nurse said coolly, unfastening the nozzle
from Gantry's chest catheter.
"Exactly. So, what, like, conditions would someone have to be
under for a person to have one of those put on him?"
"Abuse of some kind, I imagine," she said. She had a deep,
untraceable accent, and her black hair smelled like rich soil.
"Like if she had a partner who was beating the shit out of her?"
Gantry asked.
"Who?"
"What?"
"Who?"
"Yeah, who what?"
"You said 'she.' 'She had a partner who was, you know . . ."
"Oh," said Gantry, his face flushing bright red. He did not want
the nurse to know that the person he had in mind was Shelf, that
his mother had put a restraining order on Shelf when he was four.
The term was incomprehensible to him at the time—it hovered over
him, bearing down at all hours. "No I just meant someone, anyone,
who was being beat up in some way. That's the reason people get
restraining orders, right? They would need a restraining order to
keep other people away from them?"
The nurse held a clear tube filled with Gantry's vital juices up
to the light and tapped it gently with her forefinger. There was
something wrong with Gantry, but no one had yet figured out the
specifics of the condition or the cause. "Seems to me," she said,
"there's no way to keep a person away who feels it their right to stick
around. It's like keeping a wasp in a jar. Either they'll find a way out,
or they die."
Gantry did not understand the example. He felt as if he were
the wasp in the jar, crashing against the aluminum lid, choking on
the sweet, dead air.
Gantry stood in the wide foyer of the restaurant, waiting for
Conrad and his mom to get out of the bathroom. The walls and
ceiling of the restaurant were padded with light quilted material, so
that children who were floaters would not be hurt. Gantry, at least,
was not a floater. His generation had been the last to receive the
inoculations, before it was determined that the inoculations tended
to flatten out the forehead, putting pressure on the frontal lobe of
the brain. Gantry's forehead was broad, firm—it made him look
angry even when he wasn't angry, which was most of the time. But
people thought he was angry, and that was all the excuse they needed
to avoid him at any cost.
He pressed his fist into the fluffy wall. It sank into the fabric,
right down to the elbow. In the corner there was a candy machine,
half full of bright, multicolored lozenges. Gantry ran his finger over
the smudged glass surface, taking careful inventory of each candy,
naked and pulverized, fused into grotesque clumps from disuse.
"Them candies have been in there a year," the hostess called out
from behind a massive register. Gantry turned around, terribly
embarrassed.
"Pardon?"
"Them candies. I think they put them candies in there like a
year ago? Them same ones have been in there since I started working."
The girl was not pretty even through the most generous, highminded
lens, but the sight of her made something heavy move
inside him. In her plain, quilted one-piece uniform she seemed to
zero out the whole history of beauty, render it irrelevant.
"I'm still hungry, though," said Gantry. He could feel gobs of
blood racing up through his neck to form in awkward splotches
across his face.
"Have this," the girl said, coming towards him, her left palm
outstretched. Resting there was a tiny brown cake.
"Boy, it's a small cake," Gantry said.
"Yes," said the girl. "It's a private cake."
"How much would a cake like that cost me?"
"Normally it costs a lot, but I am giving it to you for free on
account of I just stole it from the display counter."
He looked. There was a single missing spot in the fanciful array

34
of tiny cakes under the glass of the display case. "Won't you get in
trouble for that?"
"I don't know. Usually we don't get in trouble, we just get yelled
at. Or put in the cold room."
"Okay." Gantry took the cake from the girl, lightly and inadvertently
brushing the surface of her palm with his fingertips as he
did so. Her hand was white and chalky, ridged as if she'd been
immersed in bath water. He put the cake into his mouth. Its texture
was rich, meaty—it made the saliva glands at the back of his
mouth tingle and spark.
"This is a robust cake," he said.
Yes.
"I go to camp during the day. To fight terrorists."
"If you come to the back room I could take off your pants and
do things to you," she said, but as she said this Conrad and Gantry's
mother emerged from their respective rest rooms with alarming
symmetry, and the girl disappeared.
The next day the instructors wore black masks and attacked the
campers, throwing nets over them while shouting in a foreign language.
They bound them with nylon cord to stout posts in the basement
of the facility and hung a plastic medallion containing a sugar
marble around their necks. If they got into a situation they could no
longer control, the instructors advised them in halting English that
they were to eat the sugar marble. This meant suicide and for the
rest of the day the students who ate their sugar marbles had to sit in
the Guidance Counselor's office.
Gantry ate his marble as soon as it was issued to him.
"So, can you find things out about people with that computer?"
he asked the Guidance Counselor, Admiral Sedge, who was navigating
his way through a database in order to pull up Gantry's
record.
The Admiral only huffed, moving his hand over the smeared,
hazy touch-screen. He was nothing but a grainy, oversized pencil of
a man slumped at the other end of the long desk.
"I need to find some stuff out," Gantry said to the Admiral.
"Huh."
"I need to find out where my mom is."
"Your mother is at home, son." The Admiral bit his lip, tapping
repeatedly at the screen.
"No, this is my other mom. She went away a long time ago."
The Admiral stopped tapping. He looked at Gantry. "The hell
do you want me to do about it?"
"Where is she?"
"Gantry. You know I can't give you that information."
"So that means you do have the information. Good, now what
would it take—"
"Gantry."
"I just want to get this straight. You have an address or something
over there?"
"I have nothing Gantry. I don't even have my own address
here."
"You couldn't, like, give me a hint? A street name?"
"Please don't do this." The Admiral bent over, possibly adjusting
a shoe.
"I wouldn't be asking you about this unless it was really profoundly
important. Everything about the person I am is inside her
head."
The Admiral did not respond. He was bent completely in his
chair, so that all Gantry could see over the desk was the rippled aperture
of his pants opening out on the small of his back, cinched by a
flimsy belt.
"Is there any way I could be allowed to have her street address,
a speech bead number, something?"
"Gantry," the Admiral said from beneath the desk, "this is not
the first time we have been through something like this."
"Those other times, okay, I will admit I was a bit frivolous. I
admit that I wasted your time with the petitions, the demonstrations."
"You faked your own death."
"I faked my death and if it were something I could take back,
you know, I would be holding it here in my arms right now as I
speak to you. But what I'm telling you is that this is an emergency.
This is the kind of thing they'll be making a documentary of later,
after the dust settles, after the bodies are recovered. The camera crew
will want your perspective. Do you want to be a part of that documentary?"

36
"XT "
No.
"Great. So if I could get a phone number."
"I can give you a made-up phone number. Would that help?"
"Yes. Thanks. Also, I think Mr. Cushing is going to kill me
when he gets out of jail again."
Shelf was not in the phone book. There were seven different
entries for "Shelf" in the phone book but none of them were the
right Shelf. Gantry knew this because he called each one asking,
"Are you alone?" before hanging up. It was late. Conrad and his
mother were in her bedroom talking softly and moving furniture.
They were trying to make a child together. "The real way," Conrad
had said once, and when Gantry's mother had given Conrad a
shocked, hurt look he put his hand up over his mouth and never
said anything about it again, but there it was, hanging in the air in
their living room, casting out a rude, penetrating light.
He sat down on the living room couch, taking slow, contemplative
bites from a withered stick of beef. On the television, two
men were beating each other with clubs in slow motion. The thing
to do, thought Gantry to himself, the only other option that he
could drum up was to ride around town on his three-wheeler going
up and down every street until he found her.
It was hot out. The sky was low and wide, scalding everything
with furious white rays. Gantry sweated through his face mask. He
yanked it off and stuffed it in his pants pocket, pedaling hard. The
houses were aggressively identical. He would know her house when
he saw it, though. It would resonate somehow—didn't elephants
return to the place they were born in order to die? It would be something
like that, Gantry thought. A knowledge beyond knowledge.
He turned onto the street with the restaurant. Maybe the girl
was there—maybe she would give him another cake.
"You," she said from behind the counter. She was not as awful
looking as he'd remembered. Or maybe he'd just gotten used to the
way she looked.
"Can I have another of those cakes?"
"No. I got in trouble the last time."
T
"Want to help me find someone?"
She looked around, leaning over the counter to peer into the
prep kitchen. Two short men were working with diced beef, hurriedly
chucking handfuls into a chrome bowl. The place was packed,
simmering with customers. "Meet me out back," she whispered.
He parked his three-wheeler in the bushes and leant on one of
the high, green dumpsters, constantly readjusting his pose for an
imagined audience that he felt followed him everywhere, even into
sleep. His dreams, he suspected, were always under intense scrutiny.
The girl opened up the window to the prep kitchen and stuck out
a bare leg. Her body was powerful, stocky. He thought about the
naked pictures he had found in Conrad's tool kit, how for years he
had known what intercourse looked like but not that there was any
movement involved, so that his idea of sex involved nothing more
than a sustained pose, held perhaps for hours. This image was so
vivid in his head that what actually happened, when it had happened
last summer with Katrina Boda out underneath the Trusty
House of Flavor was a crushing, humiliating disappointment.
The girl rushed up towards him.
"What can I call you?" Gantry asked. "Otherwise I'm just calling
you 'the girl.'"
"I keep forgetting my name," she said, looking down at her tag.
"It's Elle."
"Like the letter?"
"Like the magazine."
"Anyway, I'm trying to find my mother. You could ride on
back."
Elle walked over to the three-wheeler. She spread her hand out
on the seat. Her face lost its shape. "I don't know. I don't like
mothers."
"Why not?"
"They spend the first part of their lives trying to get something
out of them, and then they spend the rest of their lives trying to get
it back inside."
"Huh?"
"I just get sad when I see mothers. They're always coming into
the restaurant. They look at me like I owe them something."
"This isn't the mother that had me. It was my other mother.
She left a long time ago and my mother, the first mother, put a

38
restraining order on her."
"Really? Why?"
"I don't know. That's part of what I want to know."
Elle lifted herself up onto the seat. "No thanks."
Gantry put his hands in his pockets. He gripped the soaked face
mask there. It was like a large, cool raisin. "What do you want to do
then?"
"Just see you with your clothes off."
They went to a quarry, where some cars had been abandoned.
Gantry held the girl in his arms, tightly, as if she were something to
be hauled across a vast expanse of empty road. His shirt was off,
stuffed into the glove compartment of a broken station wagon. He
looked into her eyes until all he could see was his own burly, misshapen
face staring back at him in duplicate. "Kiss me someplace
that I've never been kissed before," he said onto her face. She withdrew
a little from Gantry to take an inventory of his soft, whitened
torso, and then ran a finger cursorily across his chest. The skin there
had a translucent quality. Her finger left a red trail of engorged
blood vessels across the milky window of his flesh. Gingerly, she
took his hand and raised it, upturned, to her lips, which she pressed
softly against the smooth flesh of his wrist. The lips made a mark.
"That was nice," Gantry said.
She moved closer to him, cradled his neck in hers.
"Actually, though, I had some place specific in mind," he said
into her ear.
The girl pulled back. "What?" she asked.
"Do you know where the perineum is?" he said.
She looked at his neck, at the fierce bobbing of his Adam's
Apple. It was almost as if she'd just lost some of the air that was
keeping her puffed up, like she was a parade float being put away
for the season. But she knelt down anyway, and unbuckled Gantry's
Velcro belt.
"Wait a second," Gantry said, clutching her wrist because it did
not feel right, the whole scenario, with Shelf out there, somewhere,
slowly masticating the most pressing secrets about his life. "Tell me
if you know. Why do people stay in places they know they're not
supposed to? And how do they know when it's time to leave?"
The girl looked down. "Are you not supposed to be here? Say
the truth. I can tell if you're lying and I'll beat you."
"I don't think I'm supposed to be here, but maybe that's just the
part of me that knows I am supposed to be here playing a trick on
the other, weaker part. Like you know how they say that one side of
the brain is weaker than the other? Maybe that one side is more
powerful than we think."
"What does your body say?"
Gantry was tired of the conversation. He fell over and the girl
knelt beside him, gently kissing his bare, heatstroked chest.
The houses, as he slowly passed them in the falling darkness,
didn't ofifer the slightest indication of the whereabouts of Shelf.
Through the shuttered windows Gantry could see only flickering
shadows. What else had he expected to see? A woman kneeling by
the window, weeping softly into her hands, keeping a vigil for her
son? The absurdity of it all hit him hard in the waist. He pedaled
the three-wheeler laboriously, cursing at his own gullibility as he
huffed the cool, brittle air. Shelf was far away, as far away as a person
could get, and who was she, anyway? She'd been his mother for
nearly half his life, but he could remember only the half after she
was gone. All he knew about her came from muttered remarks his
mom had made to Conrad when they were sure he was asleep. The
restraining order—who was that meant to protect? His mom?
Conrad? Himself? Why had he poured himself into Shelf so fully,
when he really had not the slightest idea what sort of a person she
was? Gantry tried to bring up her face, but all he could muster was
a postage-stamp size portrait, muddied and damp; nothing more,
really, than an outline. Meanwhile, he had just run from the girl at
the quarry, whose slushy, threadbare presence bore down on him
like a private storm cloud. He'd woken up in her arms—after he fell
she'd dragged him into the back seat of an old mustard-colored
cargo van and had been stroking him, gently caressing the back of
his neck. He pushed her away, fainting again in the process. He
fainted a few more times on the way to the three-wheeler, busting
open his knee and cutting his face on a rusty exhaust pipe, but each
time he came to he saw her, standing in front of the sliding door,
one foot propped up on the running bar, elbow balanced on her
knee as if to suggest that this was the sort of rejection with which
she'd already spent a short lifetime; that she exuded the sort of

40
familiarity that made people comfortable enough with her to leave
whenever the thought occurred to them, and knew it.
He couldn't shake the girl from his head—where was she on the
food chain, one notch above him or one below? He could not tell.
The houses started to look different—cheaper and newer,
which meant that he'd made it all the way out to the suburbs. There
was no easy way home from here because they wouldn't let him
carry the three-wheeler onto the bus, and the buses, anyway, had
probably shut down for the night.
"Conrad?" he called from a pay phone outside a Trusty House
of Flavor, one that was built in the shape of a gorilla.
There was static on the line, and the distant sound of furniture
being built. "Yes, son?"
"Oh, Conrad, please don't call me that."
There was a pause. He heard his mother at the other end of the
room, asking who was on the phone. "Where are you buddy?"
"I am gone. I have no idea. I got myself lost, hugely lost."
Gantry looked out onto the desolate array of chain stores that lined
the interminable boulevard. Bathed in the static cadmium light of
the streetlamps, emptied of patrons, they looked like the gaping
mouths of young animals, eager to consider anything that might
happen to fall within their purview. Steadying himself against the
glass wall of the phone booth he described the shape of the building
to Conrad, gulping hot mouthfuls of air as he did so that he
would not start to sob.
After a brief, muffled silence, Conrad let out a thin, calculated
sigh. "I will see what I can do for you, Champ."
Mr. Cushing was out of jail by the end of the week. They kept
Mr. Felt a week longer because of the laboratory's worth of chemicals
they found in his locker. Without Mr. Felt standing next to him
Mr. Cushing seemed slightly out of focus, his face pixilated and
vague. He could sense this, though, and it made him more irritable.
Gantry was in detention because no one could think of anywhere
else to put him. He was putting his toys out on the desk
when Mr. Cushing was brought into the detention bay by two
armed Orange Jackets. In addition to the blocks and stick, his
mother had given him a yellow marble. "You can pretend this is
your little sister," she'd said, placing the glass sphere in his glistening
palm.
The detention instructor was a substitute and not knowing
what might happen, put Mr. Cushing in the desk directly behind
Gantry. Soon enough, Mr. Cushing stuck a pencil in Gantry's back.
"Why did you stab me?" Gantry said, trying to reach his arm
out behind him to cover the wound.
"I didn't stab you."
"Why is your pencil totally covered with blood then?"
"Your dad is an anal meteorologist."
Gantry was not completely sure what that was and anyway, the
thought that his dad could actually be something, actually out there
somewhere and not just the contents of a test tube like his mom
kept telling him, was comforting enough so that Gantry let Mr.
Cushing plunge the pencil into his back again right in the same spot
and wiggle it there. Gantry leant into the sharp point, heaving himself
up and back, bolstered by the quiet, unnamed hope that the
pencil might poke right through the small kernel of his heart.

42
—Billy Collins
Celebration
The day we walked side by side
under a low canopy of shade trees
could have been Beethoven's birthday
for all we knew
or the death day of a general,
the centennial of an institution,
or the anniversary
of the invention of penicillin.
We stopped on the gravel path
to face one another
knowing only it was early in the week
around the middle of May.
And you were breathing
and the wells of your eyes darkened
on that feast day of some saint,
maybe a national holiday in some faraway country.
—A COLUMBIA Journal Interview
Seventy Years of Poetry:
An Interview with Ruth Stone
At eighty seven years old, Ruth Stone is busy editing her ninth
collection of poetry. Her bold, uncompromising work has had such
a strong following of readers, that in 1996 Sandra Gilbert compiled
a collection of essays by other writers on Stone's work, The House Is
Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University
Press, 1996). This past year, Stone was the recipient of the National
Book Award for In the Next Galaxy and the Wallace Stevens Award
from the Academy of American Poets for mastery in the art of poetry.
I asked Ruth her thoughts on writing poetry for seventy years—
she began in 1921 at the age of six.
Idra Rosenberg for COLUMBIA: Sitting down to work on
your next collection, do you ever find yourself returning to certain
poems you wrote earlier in your life?
Ruth Stone: I don't sit around thinking about the past very
much. After my poems were printed, I rarely saw them unless I had
to read them. I never learned any of them by heart. It was always the
new poem I was interested in. I have gone back over my work sometimes
and noticed that I've written about that, and that over and
over again in different little ways and was unconscious that I was
doing it. And then you probably don't do it anymore and you have
another thing you're trying to grab at. What comes out in my work
is probably what I've learned or some apprehension of what has happened.
Right now, I'm putting together this new book for Copper
Canyon because they want me to send it immediately, and I've

44
noticed that sometimes when I read them I hate them. Then, the
next time I look at them, I think they're all right. I've talked to other
poets and it's the same with them. You can't order the poem to
come—you can coax it sometimes. Then you go back and you work
on it. They are seldom perfect, of course. None of them are ever perfect.
I think my approach to poetry changes all the time; I think it
always has. Everyday you are dififerent. Your body doesn't stay the
same day to day. The universe doesn't either. The world I look out
on is not like it was last year or last week even. It's always different,
and your mind is concerned with different things. It's like the fractal
way water works running down a hill. That's exactly the way our
lives are. We only have the moment and memory. We can project
the future but we have no real control over it. What we can deal
with moment by moment—that's our lives. I think that poetry is
really trying to capture a moving life. A painter does the same thing,
to try to hold it in place.
I've lost a lot of my notebooks and poems. Poems used to come
to me continuously and I didn't write them down. I lost ninety percent
of them for many years because they would come and by not
taking the time to write them down, they'd be lost. And I was always
up against the fact that my mind was so fast and I could only write
so quickly. I couldn't hold onto them. I've had poems come to me
while I was driving and I'd pull over to the side of the road to write
them down and the police would think I was drunk!
IR: Was there ever a time in your life when you stopped writing?
RS: I remember one time in high school and I woke up and
thought: what happened to me? Everything in the world had turned
colorless. I had stopped writing. It stopped coming to me. It was the
most terrible experience. It went on for a month or so. It was just
awful. I really thought I couldn't live. And then it disappeared. It
was such a relief. It's happened again, but that was the first time and
that was the most shocking. It's happened all along, periodically,
and I endured it. I always think the writing won't come back to me.
When I mention it to my daughters, they say, "Oh, Mom, it'll come
back. It always does." And it does, it's such a miracle. I guess I'm
terribly dependent on it.
IR: The women in your family often come up in your poetry.
There's a lot about your Aunt Harriett and other aunts you spent
time with as a child.
RS: My Aunt Harriett's still alive. She's living in Boston right now.
She's four years older than I am. And I have an Aunt Jenny living
on the West Coast who is six years older. Aunt Harriet was my playmate
and she would walk quite a ways to get to my house. We'd play
games like writing poems. We'd put subjects on paper and pull them
out of a hat and then we'd have to write a poem about them. I guess
it was an odd way of playing. But she was my companion. We read
a lot. I've spent my entire life reading. I think I have a fortunate cultural
background. I had great women in my family. My great
grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and my sister were all
wonderful, intelligent, deep and feeling people who were not selfconscious
about any of their behavior. They were wise and able to
express themselves and not be ashamed of their feelings or their creativity.
My mother would say to me: go write a poem. And I'd go
write a poem. I grew up with a family that read all the time. But
they were also engaged in life. I wouldn't call them bookish, but
they were very literate.
IR: Did your writing undergo any changes when you became a
mother?
RS: I had to give up prose writing because of the kids. I remember
one time I had my typewriter on my lap and my foot against the
door and they were on the other side. I wrote the whole story with
my foot against the door. I made spaces between the lines so I could
fill in the rest later. I could write a poem much easier than I could
prose because prose took a lot more time. I still write prose but I
don't do anything with it.
I had grandmothers who were like that too. Almost everyone in
my larger family was creative. I remember sitting on the kitchen
steps watching my grandmother paint. She had her easel set up in
the kitchen. She raised seven kids and she was painting all the time.
I think that if a person is creative in a thing like language there is no
way they can really stop doing it. Maybe it takes more of a demand
from your mind that you do it, more of an imperative demand. I

46
really think it depends on what drives you. What you cannot not do.
Maybe if I hadn't had a mother who hadn't loved what I did it could
have been killed off. Maybe you can kill off creativity in children
and the ones who don't have it killed off are very very lucky. I think
some of it is a little bit genetic.
IR: Your poems often juxtapose a scene of something inside your
home with a reference to the stars or some kind of galactic explosion.
How did you come to develop such a refined awareness and
ability to write about the galaxy?
RS: The reason is: I think I should have gone into astronomy. I
love all the sciences. I loved them for the pleasures they gave me to
read in them. I'd lay on my back in the backyard at night as a child
and look up at the sky. It's just part of my life. I can't explain it other
than that's just the way I think and the way I approach life. I have
a real and earthy relationship with my family and always have. I love
my children and I would die for them. But on the other hand there
was this other part of me that was obsessed with the sciences, in all
the fields. Botany. Biology. You name it. Because it's like peeling
off layers and layers of how things are, how it is.
I suppose it's just a non-ending curiosity about life. I always
read science magazines and science books. Now, I can't see anymore.
But I listen to all I can. That's the terrible thing about losing my
sight. I lost my vision at eighty four and I've really lost my life. My
real life. It's caused me to write really short poems. I've been writing
about not being able to see quite a lot, which I think is a tiresome
thing to do. In one poem I talk about coming up to a wall and it
goes up, up, up. And that's it. That's what it's like: coming up to a
wall and not being able to do anything about it. My eyes did everything
for me. I was a visual person.
IR: One of my favorite books of yours is Who is the Widow's Muse?
In part because the entire collection is dedicated to one subject and
explores it with such depth. How did that book come about?
RS: Kandace Lombart asked me that question when I was in
Buffalo once. She had become a widow and it was a terrible experience.
She was trying to live with it and learn. She was doing a PhD
thesis then and was writing about looking for the widow's muse.
She asked me that question and I said, "That's an interesting question.
I've never thought of it before." I was staying with some people
in Buffalo and the next morning when I woke up answers to her
question starting popping up in my head. These little poems. These
little things. And it just did it and did it. I was at fifty one and someone,
who said he later regretted it deeply, said, "well, fifty two is a
magic number, so stop there." So I stopped there. I wrote fifty-two
and quit.
IR: Publishing your most recent collections, have you sensed any
changes in the reception of writing as a vocation in the United
States?
RS: I guess there are some changes. It's no longer looked on as a
trivial pursuit. I think it's become a respectful form of art more so
than it used to be. Families used to say to their children, "You don't
want to be a writer. You can't make a living doing that." I don't
think that happens so much anymore. I think it's partly because of
publicity. It's okay to be a writer now. But the [President] Bush
world is trying to eliminate all that.
IR: Many of your poems have a political element to them, an
awareness of different forms of injustice, like in the poem "Some
Things You'll Need to Know Before You Join the Union."
RS: I remember that one. I think it's making fun of the poetry
publishing world. It's kind of laughing at people trying to climb up
in their field. It sounds like I'm poking fun at them. But now I think
it's so much more serious to write about human rights and against
war. Don't you think? I probably wouldn't write that poem that way
now. Then, I think I was poking fun at people who were taking
advantage of it. When I wrote it. I was probably thinking about
particular poems. But yes, a political element is always there in my
poems. I grew up in a family that was always interested in what was
going on in the world. My grandfather was a state senator, I think.
I remember hearing even my great grandmother talk about the
Civil War to my grandfather. They were politically very aware and
long-time democrats, of course. No matter what's happened to the

48
Democratic Party. I don't think there are any Democrats anymore.
They've been made vilified to the point they are ashamed to say they
are. It's very cunning what public radio, newspapers, and television
have done to the idea of democracy. The media has been purchased
by really huge money corporations. We don't have any freedom of
speech any more. The forums for it have really shrunk. And if you
think about the hunger and homelessness in this country now—it's
horrifying. It's not like a modern age. But not many people seem to
even be thinking about it.
IR: What is i that compels you to keep thinking about and addressing
issues of justice in your poetry?
RS: I think it's empathy. You want to do something about it. Your
mind starts talking to yourself about it. You do it in ways that
become your natural art form.
IR: You've taught poetry for many years and all over the country.
What are your thoughts on studying poetry writing in a university
setting?
RS: One thing I have always tried to say to others who are writers
and want to be writers is that no one can tell any one else how to
write. No one can tell anyone else how to think or how to react.
These are things you can encourage people in. But that comes out
of your own head, your own experience, and your own reactions.
The one thing you can encourage people to be is to be able to
be as honest with themselves as they can be. It is out of a deep ability
to recognize and admit what you see and hear that you can really
speak about it. I think this removes falseness from writing. One
of the requisites for this that I see now, looking back, is having no
shame and not being embarrassed to reveal anything. You have to be
what you are and tell the truth. And by that, I mean the deepest way
of looking at things. There is sentiment and there is sentimentality.
IR: How would you define the difference between them?
RS: Sentiment would be honest, actual feelings. And your feelings,
the way you look at the world, can change year by year, or moment
by moment even. But sentimentality is superimposed. It's a way of
twisting things in an untrue way, into what you want them to be.
IR: And what are your thoughts on publishing or sharing poetry
beyond the classroom?
RS: Being recognized and getting published are not necessarily
good for you as a poet. Having certain people like what you do, yes.
But a lot of recognition can take away your ability to be a spontaneous
reactor to the world the way you were before. I don't think I
could write if the idea of publishing were foremost in my mind. It
would clutter things. I've never been able to do that. I can't write
that way. It's not where it comes from. You want to share your work
if you have something you're pleased with.
That's fine. Publishing may drive some people. It certainly
never drove me. I think it would have harmed me to be that way.
I'm not a highly competitive person. I know who I compete with—
I compete with myself.
IR: And how about teaching poetry? Do you think it can be harmful
or have an influence of some kind on the way one writes?
RS: Well, I guess it could be harmful if you're under surveillance.
But the universities where I've taught left me alone. I took no interest
in how they ran their departments when I realized all the men
were running it anyway. They wouldn't let women do anything. It's
the story of the world. I taught the way I wanted to and I can't call
it teaching. I was in a position to appreciate and encourage the students
I had who were writers or who wanted to be writers. They all
did well and have all gone on to do well. All you have to do, it seems
to me, is listen, appreciate, and encourage. The person who is bent
on doing this form of art will go ahead and do it. I taught at
Binghamton recently for a few weeks. It was mostly graduate students
and a few undergraduates, and they are all going to come and
visit me on the mountain in Vermont here. It's going to be so much
fun. We'll sit around on the screened-in porch writing and eating.
And laughing! It'll be a good time.
4:

50
—Ruth Stone
Tell Me
"Tell me Ruth, how is your vision?"
"Lord," I say, "know you not how it is with me?
You who are blind to the sorrows of all things temporal,
you who are not even the wind sliding under the door;
how is it that I hear this echo,
catching even in my blind eye the death throes of a distant star?"
And you say, voiceless as the forests of the mountains
of the Sahara, of the Gobi, of the Kalahari,
"Oom, ah, swept away."
Submission
The poem was hanging around in the locker room
chatting it up.
"Five laps," said the poem,
with a strange look around the slits in its skin.
"D is for dolphin," said the poem.
The junior editor oiled his AWP guidelines,
rubbing his left leg with his right hand.
"We're backed up two years," he said.
"We're that constipated.
We've got enough stuff to make it to 3001.
By the way, rhyme is in.
The alphabets out. And hey—
we want you to try us again sometime.
We suggest you subscribe.
Just send us a check.
E is for effort,"
he said.

52
—Glyn Maxwell
The Stay
The group, the gang, the team.
We park in failing light
on gravel and stand dark indoors, impressed.
Two weeks, nothing the same.
We go in all directions, make a start,
make light of it, get to all places first,
open shutters, sigh:
yesterday, today . . .
We glimpse the pool not all that like its picture,
giddily wonder why
one door is locked, then fold our stuff away
in drawers profoundly shocked to smell the future.
We straighten back and stare.
Dust slows the trembling finger
across a hell-black canvas. Heavy loads
I volunteer to bear
into the house and bearing them I linger
briefly at a loss. I hear clear words
from who knows where, and follow
footsteps to a stair.
First plans when we few meet are tentative:
friends should arrive tomorrow;
for now it's television—nothing there—
and fuss of things we have or have to have
somehow to spend this time . . .
Morning, Italian morning,
more light than we can total from a year.
No side of the villa seems
to go without, blood-purple ivy streaming
by most windows. Lizards flick from here
midway through the word sudden.
Pennilessness of luck,
pulling his pockets out. There is no more!
I write in the walled garden,
where crickets saw my every stanza back
to cricket-length and make me leave it there.
Marble, terra cotta,
steps to a terrace, rooms
well-shaped for games of some kind, what games
we reckon we'll discover,
and uses for all corners. Twilit times
we gather. We all claim macabre dreams
and swap them over wine.
We mean to ship some back.
You lose your cigarettes, I hear a comment
no one hears. Alone
in turns we telephone, we turn our back
on who it is needs more than us a moment,
though the great nights, it's true,
are something. The old town,
we think we'll look at: in our twos and threes
we try a regional brew,
raise eyebrows. Down the blazing afternoon
black jewelry-men and shell-pink families
make a beeline. Eyes
closed see red. The beach
an hour away gets you. I'm of the gang
that feels our pool's the place,
and patter from it to discover lunch
unheated, check the kitchen and find nothing.

54
I make myself a feast
of what's in packets, sit
a moment in a room nobody's used,
try writing in it. West,
it faces and it's tiny: walnut light
is buried there. It lets me out, surprised
I wrote one word. The town
grows popular. Some now
don't eat here often. What you up to, stranger,
I smile one afternoon,
I set out on great walks, or once I go,
survey the valley, I'm a hillside angel.
I calculate halfway
and find we're at it now,
beyond it. I'm translating the wine bottle.
Two new games left to play
are mentioned. By the pool we wonder how
a day went by when no one even paddled.
Yesterday, today . . .
Up in the hazy hills,
some tiny settlement. A monastery,
I hear you read. The day
clouds over now. An English paper sprawls
across the floor and bows the company.
Some have deserted: rooms
have emptied in some cases,
London summoned back the indiscreet
narrations, the new rumors,
the sculpted shoulders and delighted voices.
The fridge air fans me and there's tons to eat.
Bare soles on the red tiles;
that locked door on the left;
somebody sketches; somebody learns lines.
And it's later than it feels,
by two hours generally, until this soft
pink light of evening, as a tape rewinds,
which might, it is agreed,
be how we'll think of this.
Care must be taken not to play our songs
too often: it will fade,
that quality, it goes. A yawning voice
suggests the beach and I'm who says Depends
though I'm who drives, in fact,
next morning. In the mirror
the house remains a while, old, beautiful,
beloved place we picked.
There is a movement to be back next year,
make a tradition of it, the Old Villa!
and those who want cry yes,
and those who don't walk far
for souvenirs and lay blue-silver bags
carefully over chairs.
I stare out at the sea and am found there.
Ahead as you drive back are the three crags
that disappear. The game
I hoped we'd play gets played:
I'm happy folding. There's a copper moon
across the valley. Time,
somebody yawns. Now everyone who's out
is watching game-shows in Italian.
55

56
I lay out clothes I need,
or zip them out of sight.
You lost my guide. I said I'd skip the town
to swim to the warm side
of this blue perfect pool. I reach my height
and rain on the salmon path. Across the lawn
where bats and racquets lie,
uncontested, done,
the boy brings coiled equipment for his work,
so I just go away,
mutely retorting that I miss the rain,
and do. A lizard flashes from the brick
and cases like a city
build in the cool hall.
We wear more layers, stand above our own,
exchanging what's a pity
we didn't do, until our own are all
that's there, and if there's time there won't be soon
for in-jokes. The car gleams
and everything is over.
I put my cellphone down to signal phone me.
I'll sign all seven names
in the book. They'll never know. I hear the owner
crunching across the gravel like an army.
r
—Colette Brooks
24 Frames
Three months before my brother's death, he walked up to me
and spoke quietly so that no one else could hear. Will you write
about me? He paused as if in response to my blank look. I don't want
to disappear without a trace. I listened to these disturbing words and
tried to remain calm. Of course I will, I whispered, but don't talk like
that. He nodded his head and walked away, and for a moment he
appeared almost peaceful.
Once upon a time I was someone's older sister. . . now, I have discovered
that a whole set of relations disappears upon a death. What
we think of as the roles that define us forever simply dissolve. Some
fashion absence itself into a sustaining force and in this paradoxical
effort, I think, lies the truth of what we mean when we speak of living
with loss.
It is early in September, and I am about to leave for my first day
of kindergarten. My brother, not yet old enough for school, is beside
himself crying his eyes out as my mother would put it. She holds him
back as I walk up the street. His sobs fill the air. Abruptly, I turn and
57

58
run to the house. It's okay, Billy, I tell him. /'// be back. Slowly he
calms down. The world so terribly out of joint falls back into place
and he feels much better.
I can't recall this incident myself. It was recounted by my brother
to my sister days before he died. He had rarely spoken of his
childhood and we had sometimes wondered whether he remembered
anything at all. But this was a memory he kept close at hand
for thirty some years before passing it on, and now I like to imagine,
at moments, that I remember it, too.
In his twenties, my brother began to take photographs; he
developed them himself in labs where he spent days at a time
exploring the intricacies of subject, contrast, and scale. He roamed
the Seattle area and later the Northern California coast for his compositions,
and as I view them now it seems to me he was born with
an eye for beauty. Each of these landscapes is infused with a feel for
the natural world, an affinity so unforced it hardly occurs to me to
wonder why there are no traces of a human presence here. And I
realize how he might have found solace only in places where he felt
that no one else was watching.
He took one self-portrait, a stark black-and-white shot captured
with the aid of a timer. In it I see a still-handsome face that isn't yet
haunted. He looks directly into the camera as though not yet afraid
of what it might reveal.
What can explain the unaccountable power of a photograph?
Why do we study with such avidity the figures and shadows that
form on a surface bounded only in square inches?
Maybe at heart we are all miniaturists, best able to encompass
our world only in the tiniest possible slices of time and space.
Or perhaps it is the stillness of the photograph that proves so
intensely absorbing. Maybe these images—because they are still—
help us forget for a moment that life really goes by in a blur and slips
away from even the most observant among us.
My brother never owned a home and had problems enough
renting an apartment; nor did he amass much in the way of personal
property during his life. After his death, my sisters and I found most
of his worldly belongings carefully stowed in a big cardboard box.
He had a few books, a backpack, a camera, a watch, some clothes, a
small spiral notebook, and a bike lock. We divided his possessions
among us.
Later, we were given the thirty-eight cents the coroner had
found in his pocket.
As I signed for the envelope I remember thinking: a penny for
each year of his life.
My late father, a man we never knew, once owned a picture
book that now belongs to me. It is titled, The Worlds Greatest
Wonders, and each of its pages recounts the glories of civilizations
long extinct. The black and white photographs (which seem themselves
of ancient vintage) are accompanied by captions that possess
a sure authority. Vast Ruins of Unknown Origin; Where Once a Great
Mayan City Stood; The Oldest Wooden Pagoda in the World. Each site
is insistently identified—this ruin rather than that—as if the past is
ripe for the reading by those who know its ways. In some sense I
find such appropriation appealing, but I also mistrust the impulse.
For when I look at these pictures in some moods, in reality I see
only rubble, one half-fallen facade essentially the same as another.
And in these moments the greatest wonder is that we should presume
to make such efforts of retrieval at all.
When I am at Harvard University, where I have sometimes
taught during the summer, I like to wander into Widener Library,
the largest facility of its kind in the country. It is a massive stone
construction that seems always to have stood there, older than time.

60
Some of its many thousands of books have hardly been dusted off
in decades. But it is not the scale of the structure or its traces of
antiquity I find affecting; what draws me to the building has something
to do with the inscriptions I first noticed inadvertently early
one evening. They were chiseled in the stone and placed inconspicuously
at either end of the library's broad portico. One reads: THIS
LIBRARY ERECTED IN LOVING MEMORY OF • HARRY
ELKINS WIDENER BY HIS MOTHER •
The other reads:
HARRY ELKINS WIDENER
A GRADUATE OF
THIS UNIVERSITY
BORN JANUARY 3 1885
DIED AT SEA APRIL 15 1912
UPON THE FOUNDERING
OF THE STEAMSHIP
TITANIC
As I studied these inscriptions, I began to think about young
Harry Widener, only twenty-seven years old at his death, who loved
the books which he had collected and the college to which he bequeathed
them. Harry's books are kept now in a dark room that is situated like
a sentinel at the top of a winding staircase. No visitor to the library
can avoid looking into the room; one sees immediately a large oil
portrait of a serious young man who gazes a bit stiffly at the viewer,
book clutched in his hand. Harry's collection includes some 3,000
rare books, and for every first edition of Milton or Shakespeare there
are five editions of Kidnapped or Oliver Twist. When I think of
Harry, I think of Billy, who also seemed to have read everything,
who always had a book in his back pocket. Most of those books
were paperbacks borrowed from the public library. Billy was never
able to go to college; he spent his adult years battling his illness. But
he always hoped that that he might one day live the kind of life that
came so easily to otiiers (I just filled out an application for the
University ofWashington, having requested such material from them a
while back when I must have been feeling unusually optimistic and
brave.)
I like to think of Harry and Billy and the conversations they
would surely have had about art and literature and ideas, two bookish
young men talking the evening away as they sat in a college cafe.
I also like to think about Harry's mother—the heartbroken
woman whose wealth could not protect her from the worst ache in
the world. It is said that she attached only one stipulation to her gift
to Harvard: in order to graduate, members of each senior class
would have to pass a swimming test. I know this story is probably
not true. But I know why this woman would picture her son swimming
his way to safety in the North Atlantic that night. And I know
how impossible it is, in the end, to keep those one loves out of
harm's way. Even if one has had a lifetime of practice.
My father also took an avid interest in architecture. One of his
books contains painstaking reproductions of architects' plans for
Renaissance palaces, courtyards, and city squares.
As I look at these intricate drawings, I marvel at the beauty of
abstraction. The lines are austere; the curves and angles arrayed in
patterns that are impossibly precise.
It is like studying a family tree: names placed neatly in bloodless
squares and boxes.
But who in this world could live within these ethereal lines?
It is only a dream of order with the dreamer standing off at a
distance as dreamers always do.
10
One summer, when we were small, our family drove down the
coast from Seattle to Santa Barbara. It was the first real trip we had
ever taken. Along the way we were menaced by a daredevil who
tried to run us off the twisty coastal precipice of Highway 1. The
episode frightened us all, even my mother, who was clutching the
wheel as if thinking this is what happens to women who are alone in
the world. Somehow we survived, pulled off the road, and found a

62
place where we could stay the night and wait for morning's light.
Sure enough, there is a picture of us kids posed in front of a Motor
Court ("AIR COOLED—ELECTRIC HEAT"). My mother has
moved back a good fifty feet to take the shot as if to prove beyond
dispute that we have finally come to California.
Our motel was overrun by crickets, as was the rest of the area
that season, and my mother spent most of the night knocking the
large brown insects off the ceiling and walls and away from our beds
so that my brother and I, half-hysterical, could sleep.
From our earliest days, it seems, anticipation and foreboding
were intertwined.
11
As children, my brother and I used to watch one science fiction
film in particular whenever it was shown on TV. There was a boy
in the movie with a telescope who looked out his window and saw
people swallowed up by the earth in his own backyard, and parents
who didn't believe him but were soon discovered to be under the
spell of the aliens themselves, and a happy ending that turned at the
very last moment into its opposite as the boy woke up from his
nightmare only to see the Martian ship land all over again outside
his window.
I don't know what the movie meant to my brother, but to me
it was a vision of reversal that I recognized and found almost reassuring.
12
At the time of his death my brother had a favorite T-shirt
labeled "Paris" in his possession with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on
it. He was always talking about travel. Whenever I look at that Tshirt
now I think: Paris is another city he never saw.
13
Some people asked me if he had ever been suicidal or if it had
just come out of the blue. I hardly knew how to reply. He talked and
wrote about it repeatedly over the years; it became a litany that
seemed the root of a single unending conversation. Yet when it
finally happened, it was a heart-stopping shock. I knew it but I
didn't know it: nothing ever comes out of the blue.
A therapist who examined him in his late teens told us matterof-factly:
he's a time bomb.
That was a good twenty years before the world ended, for him,
forever.
I always thought after that of ticking, of something ticking
away. Sometimes I could hardly hear it, and sometimes I heard little
else.
After a while that sound seemed as natural as a heartbeat.
14
When my sister called that April evening from across the country
to say Billy's dead, she had to repeat that simple sentence three
times before I actually understood it. In that moment, I remember
thinking: nothing can hurt him now.
15
Earlier that spring I had written him a letter. After his death I
found that letter in the box where he kept his belongings. I also
found the valentine I had made for him that year, the homemade
red heart cut out of construction paper and covered with extravagant
swaths of silver glitter. The letter was written as one adult
speaking to another; it went on for pages but could have been condensed
into a single sentence: / want you to fight for your life. The
valentine spoke to a more primitive impulse, and it bore the more
abiding message: I love you.
63

64
16
If my brother had had AIDS, I sometimes think, I would have
been able to say goodbye, I could have spent years perfecting the art
of separation. But he would have resisted such rehearsals. There was
always a part of him that wanted only to live.
17
I want to write the whole story, but I remember only disconnected
moments and I wonder: how that can ever be enough?
I remember my brother in restaurants: he would hail waiters
with a grandiose flourish, waving his arm, snapping his fingers,
sometimes shouting Garcon! to make his point. I was usually embarrassed,
but I enjoyed seeing him smile.
I remember him playing music: he used to riff for hours on a
setup he had assembled secondhand. Sometimes if he was broke, he
had to sell or pawn pieces of his system, but unless he was desperate,
he held on to his guitar.
I remember him at the river: we were kids, playing near rapids
in the Northwest. Suddenly, he fell down the bank and into the
water and was swept off towards the falls before I could even scream.
I saw him disappear under the churning surface, and then I saw
nothing, until his thin arm broke through the waters and grabbed
at a branch. He held on until an adult could run to help him out.
I have rarely been as happy as I was the moment he walked back up
the bank.
Yes, I remember, but given the slightest distraction these images
disperse, and the story seems even more elusive.
18
Would it truly be unthinkable, I sometimes wonder, to disappear
without a trace? Couldn't one leave this world as abruptly as
one enters it, here one moment then simply not? I imagine it would
be like letting go, harboring no hope of somehow being held back.
But to disappear in that way, one would have to root out memory
itself from the living, if not love, and most of the time that hardly
seems possible.
19
Pictures and documents can be held at a distance, I have discovered,
but voices float into one's head like whispers and are not so
easily dispelled. I have tapes of my brother talking, bits recorded on
an answering machine and preserved accidentally, but I never listen
to them. Hearing the voice I knew so well, in the most offhand
moment, would leave me with a sense of loss that was inescapably
immediate.
20
So how are you, my brilliant, lovely, flaxen-haired (that means
blonde, doesn't it?) princess of a sister? I found an old picture of you and
me standing in front of the pink house, you were about 6 or 7 and you
looked so beautiful—you were a beautiful kid, and though no longer a
kid, are still beautiful, as far as I am concerned. . . M-I-C, See you real
soon, K-E-Y, why? Because we love you! M-O-U-S-E. . . Love, Bill
21
I have collected all the photographs I can find of the two of us
in an album. So many years—I'm surprised there aren't more pages.
In one shot we are very small, sitting side by side in an armchair
so huge that it wraps itself around us and still there is room to spare.
The chair is covered with a tropical print, its leaves and flowers so
large that they loom over us so that we seem to have been thrown
unprotected into a primeval world. But no matter: though tiny, we
are together and so we laugh.
Time passes: we are at church, we eat popsicles out in the yard,
we attend our first formal affair (I with a frilly dress and patent

66
leather shoes, he with a white shirt, suspenders and tiny bow tie), we
visit Santa Claus, we pose dreamily in our pajamas, we squint into
the sun as we are held in place by grandparents, we sit for a series of
studio photographers, we begin to lose our sweetness as the gawky
edges of adolescence emerge. We adopt and discard personae with
abandon in those teenage years, changing hair styles and clothes as
if they were costumes.
We pass through our twenties and move into our thirties, living
in distant cities but still colletteandbilly to those who know
—partners, bookends, a pair.
22
But the picture I see most clearly was never taken with a camera.
It was during his last visit. I was at a grocery store, walking
through an endless parking lot. I spied him from a distance, riding
his bike, pedaling so intently that he sailed right past me as he began
to pick up speed. He moved through the lot and into the street and
up into the hills where his figure began to fade against the bright
glow of the sky.
I watched him until he disappeared.
And that is how I see him still: light drawn to light, heading
straight into the sun.
23
Once upon a time I was someone's older sister. . .
Recently I dreamt about my brother. He is on the landing outside
my apartment, trying to push his way in as I struggle to keep
him out. I manage to close and lock the door. I know he is still there
waiting, so I warn him that the super is on his way up. He begins to
walk away. I call out / love you as he leaves.
When I awaken I think: yes, I love you, but I have to let you go.
24
I sometimes study a picture of my family taken long ago, a candid
shot in which no one is looking into or even seems to be aware
of the camera. My mother crouches in the foreground holding a
camera of her own which she has aimed at something unseen that
lies off to the side; my father stands farther back, hands on hips, his
gaze following hers; my sisters stare off in the opposite direction
altogether, oblivious to whatever it is that has drawn the interest of
the grownups, and a fifth figure stands just out of sight, all but
invisible, taking this picture of someone taking a picture, capturing
four figures whose glances radiate outward beyond the fixed edges
of the frame.
Because I cannot tell what kind of event is being recorded—
who took the shot, when, or why—and because it is impossible to
determine what anyone is actually looking at, the picture seems
oddly empty.
The more I study this snapshot, the more I seem to see an
image on the verge of vanishing.

68
—Timothy Liu
Antediluvian
Such tabloid frenzy once word got out.
Never mind the flood.
Consequences standing in for God.
Question lyric authenticity.
This need we have to rescue ourselves.
As thousands storm the stage.
To trust mistrust instead of money.
Please go on. And on.
Sun and rain and the in-between.
A media circus in his pants.
Aboard an ark of our own making.
Far easier to go than not.
And love you long as the moment lasts.
—Jean Valentine
That I had treated you badly
That I had treated you badly
Born and bred in The Violents, over and over
set up house with them
That I had been born half-dumb, half-blind,
my dream life more vivid than waking life, still
I remember the long gray wall
where I got out of the car. When I left them.
That I couldn't be friends
if they wouldn't be friends
That you had treated me badly
Little black coats moving away
on the flat bowl of the window, the train

70
—Ray Gonzales
The Grape
He saw how soft it was and left it alone, thought of her and
wanted the grape to turn from a deep purple to green. The animals
were away and he found things to eat without going near them, skin
of the fruit slowly changing the world, days going by as he inspected
the grape without touching it, the dish it sat on as round as the
ear listening to him recite something about blackberries on the vine.
He recalled the sweetness of bowing down and taking her there, his
glass of juice on the night stand, her stories of the river at San
Miguel gasping in the dark room. He tried to describe the shriveling
grape but could not remove the dead skin from his mind, its
round insistence replaced by wet exhaustion, the white dish lighting
the table with a muted glow, the stem he plucked from the ball
rolling on his fingers like the silver needle he found embedded in
the headboard the first night they were alone.
Before Angels
A man speaks in the place of stones,
his arms burning candles
from the march toward home.
He is talking and his hands reach out,
bells ringing in things he does not say,
unable to spell what he wants, an onion
he owns rolling across the table as if
a planet shrunk and he could see
its white ball moving beyond
what he will never know.
He secures the avenues from
a certain wildness, says his glass eye
guarded him when he was a child,
saved his angels from extinction
when the eye fell out one day,
rolled away like the onion now
tottering on the edge of the table,
its axis spinning like a blind man
falling because wings are not
companions, only the roads
to the dusty floor.
71

72
—Heidi Julavits
The MacMillan Hair
The plain trouble was this: behind the Lizard house, all the
lawns ran together like a parched, brown flood. In front there were
adobe-styled mailboxes and complimentary pink pebbles instead of
grass, in front there were black roads coming from practically
nowhere and concluding at a pumice-crete utility shed, but behind
it all there was nothing but land with a breathtaking history of struggle
and triumph.
Babbitt watched their stepdad's satellite TV and knew about
things. Land with a breathtaking history of struggle and triumph,
Babbitt explained to his siblings (translating from the New Utah
Development brochure), is land without trees or animals or water or
fences; it's land where people fly in from the coast to shoot lonely
car commercials because it's cheaper than dropping a nuclear bomb
closer to home.
Dibs, the littlest Lizard except for the triplets, added: it makes
a person feel unhinged, all those missing things. The Lizards typically
felt queasy and undone after they'd roamed so far from home
in search of something confining, an ocean, maybe, that they couldn't
hear the dinner threats their mother Sal bellowed atop the new
fake well in the back yard.
I hope your dinner's spit-gluey and cold by the time you get
back, Sal would yell, kicking at the new fake well bucket where the
squirrels fornicated. I hope you get a corn niblet caught in your
throat. 1 hope you gag on a pudding skin.
Mfottt suggested to their stepdad, ^>Vg, that maybe a fence
mvght be a good 'idea. %, worked at the toutvst rodeo and \us
scarred-up race knew about fences intimateVy.
I'm thinking about marauders, said Babbitt, squinting over the
plains. I'm just thinking ahead to darker times.
Big always had his hands in Babbitt's hair like he was looking
for a pretend lost thing.
You're too damned thoughtful, Big chided, ruffling Babbitt's
hair. You know what I worried about at your age? Tackle equipment.
Who'd stole it, was it rusting, stuff of that nature. But maybe you
want to know how babies are made?
Babbitt shook his head.
A boy needs rules, Babbitt explained. A boy needs limitations
or he might wear himself out before he's hardly ten.
Well then, Big said, I command you to keep your pants on. No
fussing in those danderpatches, or a whipping I'll design for you the
likes of which you'll thank me for.
Babbitt smiled at Big, humored the man, who could no sooner
whip him than make their mother less sad.
Babbitt featured the ongoing boundary dispute with the
MacMillan neighbors in the Lizards' inaugural and ultimate issue of
The New Utah Daily Herald International Tribune Intelligencer.
On the nearer side of twilight, Tuesday, a mute four year old known as
Bud MacMillan roamed southward or so of the exhaust pipe marking
Blanco's grave and was struck upon his dumb head by one Polly Lizard
with what appeared, by some accounts, to be a roof tile.
Notice you didn't mention how he's unhearing and baby-sized!
protested an older MacMillan (they came in all sizes, the
MacMillan—Older, Wide, Skinny, Baby). Notice you didn't mention
how you can't go through life hitting deaf babies with rocks!
Notice it's only his ears that don't work, Polly said, rubbing her
tile. He can goddamned see where he's going.
Don't coddle the handicapped, Dibs advised. You'll make him
deeply useless.
This is one-sided crap, said the Older MacMillan. He ripped up
the inaugural and ultimate issue of The New Utah Daily Herald
International Tribune Intelligencer. He blew his nose in it. He shoved
73

74
it down his pants and fake farted on it.
The Seven MacMillans ranged in size, this was true, but they all
shared an identical rug-like orangish hair. It banished any light that
shone on it; it was tufted and prickly on boys, braided and prickly
on girls. It was terrible hair, more like a substance that has been
regurgitated from a river and dried to a lifeless fiber on a rockflat.
The MacMillans envied the Lizards their soft puppy heads, heads
that strangers rubbed in passing to remind themselves of less sentient
times. The MacMillans would rip it from the Lizards' skulls
whenever the two families met up for picnics or simply by accident
in the mindless forever behind their houses. They collected this hair
in an old thermos. The wide girl MacMillan braided the Lizard hair
into anklets that her brothers and sisters wore under their socks. She
told Polly that she was making a hair cape for each of her brothers
and sisters, so that their bodies could be more touchable.
Such a literal family I've barely encountered the likes of, Polly
said, scratching under her stocking cap, notice I'm not saying stupid.
The Lizards wore suntan stockings on their heads, nicked from
Sal's underwear drawer. The stockings were still the shape of Sal's
feet, her toes and heels kicking from the tops of their heads. Like
roosters, Big said. Like Indians, Dibs said. Like idiots, Polly said.
The stockings kept what hair they had left close to their scalps,
because they never knew when a MacMillan might lurch from
behind a bush, and set upon them with his freckly ripping fists.
The elastic turned their foreheads blue.
Babbitt suggested that a boundary might be established
between the lawns to contain the unrest. He actually said contain
the unrest, which Dibs misunderstood, because he did not care for
the satellite news quite like Babbitt did, that the MacMillans had a
contagious sickness that caused sleeplessness. This did not surprise
him, because they were so godawful white beneath their orange hair.
They had a sickness and did not respond properly to night.
We will dig a trench, Dibs commanded.
This was easily done. The trench was not straight; it respected
the single, unflowering cactus bush, it respected the grave of Blanco,
the MacMillans former ferret, it respected the natural to-and-fro of
the land that had once been food for some lumbering, fenced-in
animal. Babbitt and Polly dug with rectangular silver snow shovels;
Dibs followed behind them, pocketing the skull-shaped mushrooms
that grew in the earth. He put these mushrooms into jars. They had
little brown hairs; they looked like voodoo heads.
The MacMillans watched from behind an old golf cart their
father'd been planning to fix since the flood. They bulleted old golf
balls from a stiff knit bag in the back of the cart. They encouraged
Bud to pull his elastic pants aside and piss with the wind, covering
the Lizards with a light rank spray.
I hereby proclaim this land divided, Babbitt said, wielding his
silver shovel. It caught the sunshine and was hurtful to observe.
The MacMillans slunk from behind the golf cart, their white
hands over their whiter faces. They threw more golf balls. They
shuffled closer to the trench.
I say this land, Babbitt repeated, swinging the shovel like a
scythe, has been divided.
The MacMillans ducked and skittered. They all took shelter
behind the golf cart except for Bud. He stared at Polly and moved
his lips as he was accustomed to doing, chewing at the air but making
nary a sound, not even so much as a gargle. Dibs figured that
Bud ate sound, and for that reason he was a useful presence in their
neighborhood, which was bounded to the north by a truck artery
and loud in the night. Polly reached over the trench like she might
hit the quiet little man. Instead she grabbed a single, coiling strand
of his orange hair. She jerked with her quick wrist. She pushed the
hair in front of Bud's shiny, empty mouth like a word she'd pulled
from his brain. She paraded along the trench waving the hair over
her stockinged head, to prove to the MacMillans, beyond a faithful
doubt, that their age of influence had hastened to a close.
Since the procuring of the MacMillan Hair, domestic relations
at the Lizard house had devolved nicely. Big suddenly stopped caring
about being a special stepdad and sloggered into being a plain
old man, skimming the grocery supplements next to the white noise
machine. Sal grew listless and hardly worried when the Lizards
roamed as far as the pudding plant. The plant parking lot was lined
with blue trash receptacles, where the plant people disposed of their

76
clear plastic masks after work. Some of these masks had lipstick on
the inside. Polly liked to wear a lipsticky mask and sit astride Dibs,
also wearing a mask. They would press their mask faces together and
Babbitt would make suctiony noises against his forearm to hide the
sound of all that plastic cricking and dinging in a most unromantic
way. By the time they got home, Sal was knitting by the white noise
machine and Big was OUT BEING USEFUL which meant he was
FETCHING SALVE FOR YOUR MOTHER'S POOR HANDS.
She would hold out her palms next to her face as though she might
ooze tears from their withery middles. The Lizards high-fived her as
they strode past her to their rooms. Her hands were chapped and icy
to the touch, as though she'd been lost in a blizzard.
All and all, Polly said, things seemed somewhat back to normal.
By normal she meant Before He Left, because He had set the standard
for fiery neglect. Then He'd gone, and Big took His place, all
worked up to be likable. Big mucked up their sandwiches with old
family jams, he sang as he scrubbed the syrupy dishes, he acted like
their most miserably cramped moments were enough to make him
yodel with a kind of domestic ecstasy.
You haven't seen what lonely I've seen, he'd say, sitting on ends
of their wooshy mattresses, crunching their toes with his bony bottom.
Riding horses up high like I do, I've seen old water in the air.
I've seen clear through the tops of ladies heads. I've seen terrible
things only the sun can see.
You've seen down ladies dresses, you pervy old beanpole, Polly
would say, kicking upward with her feet, feeling the sharp places
where her stepdad's legs fused together inside his stiff rodeo pants.
Now get the heck off my bed.
No matter how much they ignored Big, he kept trying to
humiliate them by being useful. He bleached out stains that had
been on their knee-length sweatshirts since Before He Left. He tried
to erase dark things they had counted on as permanent.
Since the procuring of the MacMillan Hair, however, Big had
stopped bothering. He stole the fatty scraps off their plates and left
the dishes until morning. He didn't tell them stories about the
rodeo, where he barely hung onto his job. He disappeared every
night in search of bodily necessities for their mother, salves for her
hands or a poultice for her sagging face. The Lizards did as they
pleased, and nobody touched them or wished them sweet dreams
with a phony voice that went down-up-down SWEET DREE-
EEMS, nobody showered them with insincere munificence—in
short, nobody took them anymore for fools.
Best was that Big and Sal stopped trying to outlove them. This
had been the most disturbing development After He Left. Even His
Leaving couldn't compare to all the love that battered the insides of
their little house, gouging out sheetrock and knocking pictures off
walls. Big moved in and she competed with him to do their laundry,
she competed with him to do their dishes, she competed to sit
on their beds at night, she said SWEET DREE-EEMS louder and
louder until the squirrels abandoned their nests in the walls. The
Lizards woke up to the smell of sugar and soap, they woke up to the
noisy, stinking efforts of love on their behalf. It made them nervous.
Dibs developed chronic pains in his chest; Polly got a rash. They listened
to their mother yelling at night to LEAVE MY LIZARDS BE,
and Big would somberly say it was USELESS TO FIGHT WITH
HER OVER HER POOR, POOR LIZARDS, like they were
already raised on too much ruin to be considered much better than
dead.
Then Sal stopped using her white noise machine, because suddenly
it was important for her to listen, even though listening made
her sick. When He was around, she'd hear too much and have to
take to her bed. He bought her the white noise machine, and her
health improved. The Lizards missed the white noise machine, more
than they missed Him. It covered up the air uglinesses they were so
incapable of quelling, the air uglinesses that made Sal knit faster and
faster, her needles producing a sound not unlike that of a wolverine
gnashing her teeth.
Since the procuring of the MacMillan Hair, however, the white
noise machine had been unearthed from beneath its quilted cozy; it
was plugged in where the TV had been, in front of the bricked-in
fireplace. It was turned on ECON HIGH, because there were nighttime
blackouts that left the house dark and hot and hearable. Worst
were the hearable noises of Big and Sal so-called loving each other.
The worst kind of lying, Polly would say. Makes me sicker than a
cat.
7.

78
The MacMillan Hair was stored in a jar that Dibs kept under
the hood of His busted gas grill. This jar had been the home to various
other treasured items, namely
• a bullet
• a grasshopper
• a casino token (truck-flattened)
• a bird skull
• a big toenail (Sal's)
• a scab (Babbitt's)
• a maybe pearl, maybe small white stone
These treasured items had brought the family waves of better
luck from time to time, but their powers diminished when Dibs
forgot to think about the jar every day at the stroke of noon. The
gong of the nearby church bell, he eventually surmised, was
wrapped in baffling for religious reasons on the first Monday of
every month, and did not ring. On these days he forgot to think of
the jar, fixing it in his head, floating in blackness or sometimes blueness
or sometimes yellowness, depending on his mood, the bulletgrasshopper-token-skull-nail-scab-pearl
surrounded by an orbit of
light that expanded and contracted like a clear heart. Always after
this slip of the mind their lives would turn unpredictable. Sal would
want to hear about their digging projects. Babbitt's satellite would
get shorted out by a bird. He would leave or He would come back
or He would leave again.
Since the procuring of the MacMillan hair, Dibs had been tireless
in his remembering. He instituted a midnight policy, setting an
alarm in order to remember the hair—with its spiky end and its
white bulb follicle beginning, with its tensile strength of wire—
exactly twice a day. Polly complained and Babbitt beat him with a
pillow. But Dibs said BE WARY WHAT YOU DISDAIN, PEO-
PLE, and they stopped disdaining him and his mysterious habits; he
was the weather forecaster in the family, and he could call up clouds
or sun or water or night, it seemed, with his divining principles that
no one understood.
The MacMillan Hair was so powerful, Dibs felt, that it was possible
even that He might return. This was not necessarily to be
desired, but it did feel possible. He talked to Polly and Babbitt and
the others who were too small to have much of an opinion, the
triplets Chigger, Means, and Poquot, who loved to burble their lips
and listen.
Things were more predictable when he was around, Polly said
cautiously, notice I'm not saying better.
Better wetter wigger wog said Poquot.
Comebacks are for wafflers, said Babbitt. He kicked at a rock.
Polly accused Babbitt of favoring Big, because he took him fishing
and bequeathed him a pocketful of Big Family lures.
Lewders in the sewders said Means.
Lollalalalalallo said Chigger.
I'm saying it's best to be prepared for anything, Dibs said. Last
thing we need is a shock, People. It'll throw us off our game.
They agreed to be prepared for anything. Dibs required all of
them, even the triplets, to sign the Official Release Form which
Dibs would present to Him upon his return.
Best He knows He's free to go, Dibs said.
Nothing worse for the morale of a family than to have a bald
man coming and going, Polly said.
Chigger, Means, and Poquot gargled in agreement. Polly wiped
their triply flying spit off her calves.
There was nothing, however, that might have prepared them for
Sal's new hairdo. She came home a few days later from Hilde's Salon
with a terrible mind to look pretty.
What the, Polly said.
Sal had dyed her hair a MacMillany red. It was pinned up tight
and waxed glossy like a dining room table.
Notice I didn't ask your opinion, Sal said, whooshing her hips
back and forth as she put away the groceries. She bent low and
kissed Polly on the head. It's high time we made you less Lizard-like,
she said, hauling on Polly's dragging sweatshirt, so dragging it might
have been a thick cottony habit. I'll take you to Hilde tomorrow
and see what kind of girl-hope she can drum out of you.
The next afternoon, Polly hid behind the receptacles in the
plant parking lot, but Sal found her anyway.
Take off that damned mask, she said, as she drove to the salon.

She pronounced it SAH-LOW, in the French Persuasion. Do you
know where that mask has been? Do you?
Hilde smiled at Polly and rubbed her soft head and said my my
she looks just like Him now, doesn't she, poor fish, snapping a black
trash bag bib around Pollys neck.
Sal tried to pull the mask off Pollys face but Polly fell out of the
chair and pretended she couldn't breathe.
Hell, just let her wear it, Hilde said, approaching Polly with her
metallic blue scissors.
On the car ride home, Polly cried into her mask and rendered
it gummy. Sal took long side looks at Polly with her short stiff hair
and her pins and said you look just like a lady. Might just make
something useful out of you yet.
BUFF FYE TOO, Polly spat.
Just like me, Sal concurred.
Polly didn't reply. Instead she mouthed words inside her mask,
talking soundlessly to herself in the spirit of little mute Bud
MacMillan. I'M NOT ONE HAIR LIKE YOU, she mouthed into
her mask. She realized how much more responsible it was to talk
when the only person who had to hear you was yourself.
NOT ONE HAIR, Polly mouthed, YOU DAFT KNITTING
LAYABOUT.
It was Dibs who discovered that the MacMillan Hair was missing.
Stoled, I presume, he said, his eyes trawling long over the trench
and Blanco's grave to the golf cart and the MacMillan house
beyond. Can't be certain, of course, until the Committee files its
report. The MacMillan lawn was empty, had been empty for weeks.
The MacMillan kids, when they saw them at school, were cowering
and clumped together like old noodles. Teachers kept a safe distance
and whispered over their travel mugs TROUBLES IN THE
HOME.
Babbitt said he knew about the troubles, or at least, from his
satellite watching, he could ascertain. I ascertain civil uprisings in
the MacMillan Strip, Babbitt said. I ascertain a low pressure zone
originating in the Western MacMillans.
Polly said she'd seen the Mrs. MacMillan crying in the golf cart.
She'd seen her put a golf ball in her mouth and examine her round
white OOOH in the cart's rearview mirror. She'd seen the Mrs.
MacMillan pour water down the exhaust pipe onto the body of
Blanco, like he was a plant and she was watering him.
Lady can't contain her unrest, Dibs said.
Polly didn't say what she suspected, that the Mr. MacMillan had
a shine on Sal, and Sal had a shine on him. Sal was very obvious, her
desires were color-coded and easier to read than a baboon's bottom.
She dyed her hair like the men she wanted to attract, and always it
worked, the two people matching themselves up like animals. Polly
had seen it before, she'd watched her mother change her colors
before. This was how she made herself feel useful. He was totally
bald, He was never one she could match unless she shaved herself
clean like a nun. He had left her and she was relieved, now she could
keep her hair forever and stop feeling badly that she couldn't find a
purpose when he was around.
But Polly kept her mouth shut. There were necessary quiets
between the Lizards, because Dibs believed Sal's head was noiseruined
after living on a truck artery with noisy children and noisy
neighbors, and this fueled his need to make the house safely neglectful
with his stones and his skulls and his jars.
Unrest be damned, Dibs said. We must activate the Holy Hair
Recovery Committee.
Dibs put double-sided sticky tape on the hands and feet of the
triplets, whom he commanded to walk on all fours in increasingly
large circles around the gas grill. He examined their woolly hands
and feet, picking through the twigs and grass and insects.
Nothing, he reported at bedtime. The Holy Hair Recovery
Committee feels it can confidently state its findings: this was no
goddamned accident.
Dibs gave Polly the Committee-Issue Holy Hair Recovery
Goggles, which would make the MacMillan hair appear a bright,
bright blue if she spotted it. The glasses were Sal's gold reading
specs, the lenses replaced with black paper into which a sewing needle
had been inserted then removed. They only worked at night.
After the house had gone to bed, Polly walked out past the grill in
her nightgown and sweatshirt and put on the Holy Hair Recovery
Glasses. She bungled her way around the yard, following her pin-
81

82
prick vision. She saw dark and dark and more dark, which she
would report back to the Committee. Darned things are worth a
damned darn, she'd tell them.
She didn't realize that she had crossed the trench until she
kicked the soft tire of the golf cart.
Polly fell forward, bracing herself on the sun-crackled seat vinyl.
She slid into the passenger seat and stared forward through the broken
windshield toward the floodlights on the MacMillan porch.
The two pricks became like night stars she could make wobble if she
threw her head around. She put her hands on the dash and she
chased Him down. She dodged trucks carrying milk to the coast,
she made good time and could see His bald head like a daytime
planet trailing through the wheat. He had never liked her much, so
it was easy to follow Him against his wishes, it was easy to swing a
silver golf club like a thresher and try to topple off His head to slow
Him down. She clenched her hands around a pretend graphite
twenty iron, borrowed from the Mr. MacMillan. To herself she
mouthed the word FORE. To herself she mouthed the words
FASTER FASTER. In her left ear, she felt a wet, fleshy wind.
Her pinprick eyes moved sideways until all she saw was blue. It
hurt her brain.
She pulled off the goggles given to her by the Holy Hair
Recovery Committee, pressed her thumbs into her eyes. She
blinked. In front of her was an entire head of holy hair. Bud
MacMillan sat behind the wheel of the golf cart in his nightshirt,
mouthing words at her.
Polly reached up and smoothed his rough, gnarly, orangy pelt.
She kept her hand on his skull and could feel the backwards shooting
wind of his talking as it bounced around inside his own skull.
Polly rubbed his daft, holy head. At the bottom of her mean
self, Polly just wanted people to stop worrying. She heard everything
Sal couldn't hear, because everything had to be heard by somebody.
The Lizards split up the listening in the house so that Sal
could stay out of bed—Babbitt heard the trucks passing, Dibs heard
the nature, the triplets heard kitchen noises, she heard the worryings.
It was hurting her head to hear the worryings of Dibs and
Babbitt. She could steal another Holy Hair to present to the
Recovery Committee and the world would quiet up. Same hair,
she'd lie, found it under that rock there. Then things would return
to normal. Then He might or might not come back. Then Sal
would unMacMillan her hair. These goggles are an invaluable gift to
science, she'd tell the Committee, who would fund more R&D
projects like the one that funded the invention of the Holy Hair
Recovery Goggles. Dibs had begun to listen to the satellite news
with Babbitt; she knew he'd begun to worry that the committee was
under a great deal of fiscal pressure.
Bud MacMillan bounced up and down and he turned the steering
wheel, his white tube legs bobbling out from his nightshirt.
Polly leaned down and fingered the anklet made of Lizard hair, hidden
beneath his gray sock. She undid it and put it into her pocket.
She watched Bud's mouth and tried to see what he was worried
about, but there was too much spit and skin. Still, she tried to make
sense of him, because she realized as a way of giving up that retards
are the messiahs of this world and every hair on their dim heads is
a caution against darkness. She put on her Holy Hair Recovery
Goggles, because Dibs was always schooling her that LATERAL
THINKING IS THE SOUL OF INVENTION. She pressed her
two hands into the sides of Bud's bright blue head.
She still couldn't hear, but now she could see what he was saying.
She could read it in the blue light that pushed through her pinprick
glasses like so much mimeographed newsprint.
He came back, Bud was saying. He stole the Holy Hair.
Who? she asked.
You know who, Lady Girl. The bald man your mother ran off
to the coast. And let's not omit the fact He's mad as hell.
Polly stiffened. The thought of Him picking his way through
the dug-up lawn, the thought of Him rummaging in his old gas grill
for the Holy Hair made her tingle. Before He left He was always
scraping the grill clean and feeding the blackened powdered bits of
hamburger to his dog, who was a fiend for anything exceedingly
dead. That's why He was so angry at them. His dog had choked on
the red coil and was colder than Blanco. The Holy Hair had
wrapped around his heart like a worm.
That's a matter of opinion, Polly said. Some might say He ran
off on account of his own skitchy feet.
He came back and stole the Holy Hair, Bud repeated. The Holy
Hair made Him come back.
He stole the hair because it wanted Him to come back?
85

84
Of course He wouldn't have come back if he didn't have to. You
know how He is, Bud said. He doesn't like to be forced into things,
particularly not by His very own Lizards.
Dibs said it was only a possibility, Polly said. We prepared his
Release Form. We didn't mean to ask for anything outlandish.
Yeah, but you asked, Bud said. You asked and you know how
unattractive asking is, it is goddamned unattractive.
Polly nodded. I know, she said. It's very unattractive.
She squoodged her hands through Bud's hair. Her face was hot
and red. She was ashamed that Bud knew about the things she and
her brothers stupidly wanted. It hardly made them seem smart
enough to know a relic from a piece of trash. In the midst of her
embarrassment, Polly found herself wishing she had a pair of plastic
masks from the plant so that she and Bud could kiss and make a
cricking plastic sound as they talked to themselves inside their own
hot protected spaces. She wanted to push her mouth as close to his
mouth as possible without actually disturbing his talking and for
this she needed a mask. Kissing without masks was just a meaner
way to shut a person up.
Polly put her hands near to Bud's blubbering lips. She almost
touched him there because that was where the true holiness was, it
was an unspoken word that couldn't be trapped inside a jar or stolen
by a father or eaten by his dog.
Instead she reached high and to the left, she dug her hand into
his head and jerked loose from his baby skull a single coiling hair.
Through her two needle prick eyes she could see his eyes filling up
in the porch lights, she watched them spill over and land onto the
cracked steering wheel of the golf cart that Mr. MacMillan would
never fix, just as he would never leave his sleepless wife for any
matching-haired neighbor, just as Big would always be somebody's
stepdad, just as she and Babbitt and the triplets would feign belief
in Dibs's stories about holy stupid things, just as Bud would always
be a half-sweet cretin, just as He would keep away no matter what
until His teeth fell out like his hair and He was only good for soup.
It was the fact of things that was both upsetting and soothing; it was
the fact of things that made something like a stupid hair, even a
stolen hair, a fake special hair, an outlandishly asking hair, seem like
the crucial threshold between bearable and pure unbearableness.
Polly pinched Bud's thigh through his nightshirt and made him
cry harder and quieter. His crying sucked a dead quiet over the
lawns until even Dibs's worrying and the sound of the trucks was
nothing more than far-off bug whine. She flipped the Holy Hair
Recovery Glasses over her head and pushed the Holy Hair deep into
her sweatshirt pocket. She strode back over the trench.
Poor Deaf Bud, she had thought to herself as she pinched his
thigh. He was turning out to be an all right, useful little fool.
85

86
—Anne Coray
Vestiges
Already the light shepherds its spirit
to the west; already the clouds darken
to a kinder definition. I am better now,
though my earlier rue is not lost.
It has only moved on into distant hills
brushed with indigoed snow and spruce;
it has only stepped, like a small
four-legged brute into the creche of night
and bedded down, reserving its final lonely right
to remain silent.
The world at such times is a furl of affirmation.
Soon I will turn to go back inside,
cross this bay of wind-swept ice,
not even a star to guide me.
And to those who have led me before to believe
in a trail of assurances they were unable to deliver,
I give my thanks. I'll chance it home
cleansed of the nascent smell of incense.
Summer will arrive. I'll make a jacket
of silverweed and wool.
I will not kill the animal.
—D. A. Powell
[the ice hadn't cracked, stingy ground:
frozen with its hoard of bulbs]
a song of the resurrection
the ice hadn't cracked, stingy ground: frozen with its hoard of bulbs
how long would march flail us. bastinado of wind and hail
one morning I rose, declared an end to winter [though cold persisted]
convinced that the dogwood wore its quatrefoil splints of convalescence
because the land gives back. I wanted warmth within its chilled pellicle
radiating blades of cordgrass and wild rye. the demure false boneset
on the phone with mary my friend: she too persuaded of the thaw
so long withdrawn a blindness had us. desensitized to sneaping frost
we set out for the bluffs, surely clover pullulated along the crest
and the air [no longer chiding] would teem with monarchs
I had word of a marigold patch: the welkin dotted with butterflies
orange blaze: the deceit of wings and the breeze's pulmonary gasps
the journey stretched, why hurry? the promise of the garden enough
the road a pleasant shifting through riparian forest: a windlass a wander
87

already I have taken a long time to tell you nothing, nothing awaited us
nothing sprouted out of the ground and nothing flew about the bluffs
brown twigs: a previous splendor born to another season, now swealing
the wick had held its brief flame: sodden, the earth received it
whitetails foraged what was left of vegetation: we startled them grazing
one cardinal held watch at the empty beds: injury in the stark white trees
in the town a church kept bare its cross: draped with the purple tunic
we knelt to the wood, and this I tell you as gospel: the sky shuddered
a bolt shook our hearts on the horizon, for what seemed an eternity
[for we knew eternity by the silence it brings] void: then scudding rain
—for Mary Szybist
[robe and pajamas, steadfast and softer than
anyone who touched me]
Papa's Delicate Condition (1963, George Marshall, dir.)
robe and pajamas, steadfast and softer than anyone who touched me
in the blear night dark: black your spine a musty bible, we sway together
wrinkled lovers with tousled hair—a cocktail in hand—a pillow soiled in sweat
snowdrifts of terry cloth soaking where I spilled—mostly water: we measure
in drams and centiliters and shots: give me another, my sotted boys, roll footage:
A LIFETIME OF HAPPINESS CONDENSED, or, HAPPINESS OF A LIFETIME CONDENSED
we slip and slop and spill our soup—we pop our rocks—droop and droplet
flung over the back of the sofa: limp as a cashmere coverlet, damp as a bloodclot
takes after his (insert member here) I heard of others, but me? I took after the dog
I don't know who brought these strawberry gin blossoms but surely they are mine
won't they look lovely next to the tv—the vd—the pictures of mom and pop
who fell in love with the circus, brought it home every night: we cleared
beer bottles off the endtables: there, the stinko bears had room to dance their dance

90
—Diane Williams
Joint
Life's as blurred as all the literature, fire, the classics, humor,
business, and more! Gradually life becomes more possible. We're
aroused, violent, thoughtless with worry. This is the place to enter
for a fresh start.
One of the most faithful promulgators of life's procedures—
decked out in passionate attitudes—will describe what actually can
take place. She has something in common with Bud. She's a matron
exposing herself to our gaze. She's awkwardly proportioned, has
slightly parted jaws, seems about to sit down. She's buxom—up on
her hind legs, then she plunges into a chair—her hands open, lifted.
She gives one a very plausible type of inspiration.
It's so hard to get inspiration these days—those procedures to
harness, and to assemble, to purify, and to chunk.
She says we need an adventure, that this is good so far, that all
we need is an adventure.
Fly, her, bee, seated dog. Who is that? Do you know who that
is?
When the woman turns on the light in the pantry, she sees the
paper knife in my hand. My face. My hand in your hand.
Carry on.
It's not black tie, but I didn't want you to wear a T-shirt and to
end up feeling bad.
All that this needs, the sayer says, is an adventure—the largest
adventure in the entirety of the hemisphere.
She let me put her glitter on. There is no known way to prevent
that.
I eat dainties.
They made a rib roast. I'm going to see what she says about rib
roasts—the cause and the prevention, how the chine bone's
removed at the end.
The workers finish their party jobs and we go to police headquarters
to give the names of the suspects so they can track down
the suspects. Excellent hotel-style.
Eagerly I began to search everywhere too. The places may conceal
them. Where should I look?
For the first time I noticed Mr. Did, the realtor, now returned.
Am stunned. Perhaps this is an optical illusion—no rack is needed.
"Won't you please sit down, Mr. Did?" Mr. Did did for three
hours. Don't do this, I scream. I was so wrong.
I went to one of these meetings. I was so bored. I was
approached in a very inviting manner by Philip, the butcher. From
time to time he seems to be happy. Sometimes I cry tears. My small
girl's body, my legs which like to jump, my frenzied interest unaccountably
to leap, do not impress the butcher. He has two sons.
The light is off. I am crouched by an armchair, perturbed, squatting
in a skirt.
"I'll make you dinner," he says. He made me a fried egg with a
gold yolk, served it with a slice of soft gold cheese and with a glass
of milk. And with this I became the golden girl and live just like in
the novels!
91

92
—Karen Volkman
Sonnet
Name your weapon. Wanton wink of lip,
or fraud of languor activates the ruse—
lofting litany or freighted fuse
ignites the slant, the stammer, and the slip,
mummery dumbshow, livid as a whip.
Egg or pupa, crush it where it cues
the baited future, tongue and scab and bruise
attached and hatching, spawning in the rip
needs and plangencies, and all is ill.
God of creatures, cripple what you kill,
engined, agented, the suckling spawn
replicated in the heaving mill.
Each breach is touch, each touch a flinch and spill.
Each urge a freak of need, a seeded yawn.
Sonnet
Now you nerve. Flurred, avid as the raw
worm in the bird's throat. It weirds the song.
The day die darkly in the ear all wrong—
all wreck, all riot—the maiden spins the straw,
the forest falters. Night is what she saw,
in opaque increments deafening the tongue.
Sleep bird, sleep body that the silence strung,
myrrh-moon, bright maudlin, weeping as you draw
white tears, pearl iris in a net of eyes.
The spinning maiden darkens her design.
Gold gut spooling, integument of awe,
a baby breathing as a bird is wise
(the bird-bright heart that flutters like a law)
which eats the excess. The strangle in the shine.
93

94
—David Shields
Notes on the Local Swimming Hole
I recently took a two-week break from swimming and was
surprised by how much I missed it. I'm not a good swimmer. I
trudge along doing the breast stroke in the slow lane. But when I
got back in the pool I realized it's where I get (to quote Evelyn Ames
in Postcards from the Edge) "my endolphins." I can hardly bear
Sundays, when the pool is closed.
Outside the Greenlake Recreation Center in Seattle are the
healthy people—the gorgeous rollerbladers and runners and powerwalkers
doing laps around a large lake in the middle of the city, the
buff basketball players, the junior-high baseball players, the yuppie
frisbee-football players, the latte-drinkers checking one another out,
the Euro-cool soccer players, the volleyballers, the softball players.
The indoor pool is the wetland of the maimed, home to those carrying
canes, knee braces, neck braces—for who else would be free or
motivated to be here at, say, 1 p.m. on Wednesday doing laps?
Swimming is the best tonic I've found yet for my bad back, and
I'm joined by people recovering from knee surgery, spinal surgery,
car accidents, obese people who weigh themselves daily but never
lose a pound, a man in a wheelchair with his faithful dog barking
away at any potential interference, another wheelchair-bound man
whose assistant is an almost cruelly cheerful Nordstorm shoe salesman,
the Walrus Splasher (a huge guy with a handlebar moustache
whom we're all trying to build up the courage to approach about the
tidal waves he sends our way as he pounds away at the water), a preop
transsexual from New Jersey who, daily, is wearing more and
more feminine attire and is sticking out his butt and chest with
greater self-confidence. He's the one who told me the locker room
was closed one day due to an outbreak of leprosy; it turned out to
be just a homeless guy who had shat his pants. Nearly everyone here
is trying to come back from something; you can feel it in the men's
locker room, where we don't talk that much.
The few good swimmers while away too much time talking;
they're not desperate, as the rest of us are, to claw their way back
into shape by doing their assigned fifty laps. The good swimmers
have an uncanny ability to just sort of skid across the top of the
water while the rest of us plunge down, down, down. The falling
apart of our bodies; the perfection of youthful bodies; the pool is,
for me, about one thing: the tug of time.
Every swimmer feels to me lost in his or her own water space .
(Whenever I accidentally touch someone's toe or shoulder, it feels
thrillingly, wrongly intimate.) I'm never so moved by the whole
human perplexity as when I'm at Greenlake with my fellow bodies.
We're all just trying to stay alive; we have no greater purpose than
glimpsing a shadow of ourselves on the surface as we glide underwater.
What is the point of floating? To keep floating. I feel the
weightless, gorgeous quality of existence.
95

Mark Milroy. Daisy Dress, 2002. Oil on canvas, 50 x 34". Courtesy the artist.

Mark Milroy. Elliot, 2002. Oil on board, 63 x 45". Courtesy the artist.
Mark Milroy. /%o»

Roz Leibowitz. 77JI? Hare-Lip, 2001. Pencil on vintage paper, 14x8 1/2".
Courtesy Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York.
Roz Leibowitz. My Milk Teeth, 2001. Pencil on vintage paper, 14 x 8"
Courtesy Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York.

Roz Leibowitz. The Fall (detail), 2001. Pencil on paper, 11 x !
Courtesy Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York.
Roz Leibowitz. A Woman Dreams, 2001. Pencil on vintage paper, 11x8 1/4".
Courtesy Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York.

Yayoi Kusama. Crowd, 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 76 3/8 x 51 "•
© Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Nets—White Rain, 1990. Oil on canvas, 46 x 36".
© Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

Yayoi Kusama. Fireflies on the Water, 2002. Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights, water.
© Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
Portrait of artist Yayoi Kusama reflected in Fireflies on the Water. 2002.
Photograph by Yoko Kawasaki © Yayoi Kusama.
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

Mark Bradford. C'mon Shorty, 2002. End papers, Xerox paper, acrylic paint
on canvas, 72 x 84". Courtesy Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
Mark Bradford. Same Old Pimp, 2002. End papers, Xerox paper, acrylic paint
on canvas, 72 x 84". Courtesy Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Mark Bradford. 20 minutes from any bus stop, 2002. End papers, Xerox paper,
acrylic paint on canvas, 72 x 84". Courtesy Patricia Faure Gallery,
Santa Monica, CA.
Mark Bradford. Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, 2002. End papers, Xerox paper, acrylic
paint on canvas, 72 x 84". Courtesy Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Robyn O'Neil. Snow Scene, 2002. Pencil on paper, 30 x 40". Courtesy the artist. Robyn O'Neil. Diamond Leruso, Accident Victim & Runaway Lionel, 2001.
Pencil on paper, 10 x 12". Courtesy Inman Gallery, Houston, Texas.

Robyn O'Neil. Snow Scene, 2003. Pencil on paper, 6 x I
Courtesy Clementine Gallery, New York.

—Padgett Powell
Confidence
I don't think, today, that I think much or have much to say. But
let's sit here and see. That is a compound verb. I do not have a compound
eye, or brain. Some people do, the latter, some insects the
former. They look menacing and intelligent. The dragonfly in particularly
looks like a small but lethal military unit.
Now I am thinking of turds, small and lethal non-military
units. It is snowing so I do not have to go to the gym. I should want
to go to the gym, and maybe I do, and maybe I will, go.
The snow looks like blown rice. I am new to snow. I like it
when it resembles popcorn and floats back up, and thwartwise, at
points on its way down. I wish I had a place to plant five thousand
trees on. Blue trees, perhaps. I would like it most if they were from
seed in good rows about five inches high, no bigger than annuals,
blue, in perfect grid array, a tree carpet. One of the benefits of living
alone is unguarded farting.
Another is no one watching when you sleep and when you
don't. You may pursue whatever is mindless until you yourself are
tired of it. You may control the density of stuff in the refrigerator.
If you find your fly open, you may leave it so for a bit. No rush.
Lonely and a little chilly, I go down to the Thumb and Thumb
Lingua Spanka Academy for some human intercourse and convivialismatic
rompromp. Earl Thumb gouges my eye not five feet in the
door, and Wonka Thumb comes over with a broom and pretends to
sweep me, trash on the floor, back out the door. "You fuckers," I say,
99

100
and Earl is at the computer telling me I am not paid up, and Wonka
drops a knee on my stomach and hisses viciously, "I bet you think
you need a woman!" He begins outright beating me with the broom
as Earl hands me a dues bill. It's always good here, always fun. A
child runs naked screaming through the room with a smile on his
face looking for approval and disappears into the locker room.
"Who's that?" "That's a boy we are going to adopt," Wonka says, "as
soon as we decide what to rename him. Negotiations are underfoot."
"Don't you think Eel is a good name?" Earl says.
I say I do or I don't, it depends on the boy's character. If he is
an Eel, well then maybe. You have to wait it out, as with a dog.
"Great character-warping injustice is done at the maternity ward
with the birth certificates," I say.
"Eel Thumb," Wonka says.
"Eel Thumb," Earl says.
"He belongs to one of Earl's ex-wives."
"Can you lend me ten dollars?" Earl says, apparently to me.
They want to buy supplies to make pull-candy to entertain the boy,
and I contribute ten dollars.
I go on my way, feeling better.
At the used-car dealership around the corner a fat salesman is
leaned into the open hood of a car throwing onions from it without
regard to where they fly. "There's going to be hell to pay when I
catch the fuckers did this," he says, still in there, addressing no one
but himself. I cop two whole nice onions.
The zoo has about a 65% occupancy rate as near as I can tell.
It is finally better to determine a cage outright empty than to contain
a moribund specimen of this or that and 35% empties makes
for a mood-lightening visit. The concessions are all closed, which
also helps. The little train is not running. No geese are around the
lake. The action is limited to a BFI truck arming up dumpsters and
banging them into itself and setting them back down. The bull elephant
gets a boner standing in his compound by himself. It pulses
down to the ground, looking part leg, part trunk, touches dirt, and
then throbs shrinking back up into himself. Fine day at the zoo all
around.
The helicopter factory, where I am said to work, has an area of
rotor blades that I love. It is two acres of stacked, carefully packed
alloy blades that look like giant slender knives, sashimi knives for
whales, say. The blades are coated with teflon-y stuff in subtle yellows
and grays that makes them just reek of well-made. I like to feel
the coatings, thump and pat and stroke the blades. I object to wearing
my hardhat and in a stupid protest have pasted a nude Ridgid
Tool calendar girl inside it, distorting her as I am told the figures are
distorted on the ceiling of the Cystine Chapel. It is hard to tell in
fact that it is a naked woman inside my hat. Nonetheless, this
announces somehow that the hat and my wearing it I regard as
absurd. I would never have an upright and intelligible picture of
such a woman on, say, the door of my locker.
Not having pets is depressing, but having pets is a troublesome
prospect. So I hold steady, without.
I had a wife but she ran off and married the President of the
United States. Her ultimate choice of mate subjected me to an
unusual level of scrutiny from our government. I was at first regarded,
as part of her background, as something about which all should
be known, and then I was regarded as a potential threat to her and
to the President. I have assured three branches of federal law beauragents
that I am happy for her, and for Him. They almost believe me
sometimes. A brown car is parked at all times on my street with one
or two beauragents in it. The best I can do. I do not overtly notice
them, which they prefer. You may not, I have discovered, offer
baked goods to your stake-out men without causing them some
paperwork they would prefer not having to do. I remember when
they explained all that to me ("off the record") saying, "Gee whiz."
That's all I could come up with. Not Holy cow, not Boy oh boy,
not Dang, not Darn, not Fuck that, but Gee whiz!
I want to paint something but I don't know what. Something
around me needs a bold new redness or blueness and everything
would be better. It will have to be a subtle hue—an auburny red, a
blue with purple and aqua lurking in it like the surface of a fish,
say—and it will have to applied with consummate care so that it
looks professional, not grubbed on in a hurry by someone who
shops at malls and watches a lot of cable TV. This new red or blue
thing around me will have to look like it came from West Germany

102
or Sweden and has consultants behind it. It will make me or anyone
else near it feel assured of things, as if, say, one could certainly afford
at this moment to eat a piece of candy with no compunction. And
do some exercise. Offer an apology where none might be strictly
necessary or anticipated—not a big deal, mind you, but just a sign
that one is sensitive. Yes. Paint.
If Greta and Kitty come over, I will make love to them simultaneously.
They don't like this particularly, but they like the alternative
less. When they come over together, I feel that they have made
a choice in this respect. The difficulty is ardor, specifically with
showing it. Showing ardor is regarded a good thing usually, but not
when a third party is idly standing by waiting her turn. So things get
rather unnaturally subdued, as if there are children in the next
room, say, when in fact it is a woman who ostensibly approves of
everything going on sitting, or lying, right next to you.
Kitty is the younger and the prettier of the two sisters and she
usually defers to Greta. She has the resources, mental and physical,
that allow her to wait. Then Greta watches us with a sad and somber
aspect, her lip almost trembling, and sometimes I am nearly
unmanned by her expression, but Kitty's insistent enthusiasm and
fine form and gleaming eye, winking at me or Greta or both of us,
keeps me to the task. They grew up on Aruba and are cosmopolitan
girls. I would not expect behavior like theirs from most bona fide
American sisters, unless they were from deep in the South, say
Kershaw South Carolina. The cosmopolitanism of the true sticks is
huge and always surprising.
I saw some Marine recruits working their way through what is
called a Confidence Course on Parris Island. It resembles an obstacle
course, and whether Confidence is a euphemism or whether
there is another course called an Obstacle Course I do not know.
You would not think the Marines given to euphemism, but they are
peculiar in their psychologies there. The boys were not prime physical
specimens and from the way they were moving I believe them
to have been made sore, deeply sore, by their drills. They looked to
have great difficulty climbing over the equivalent of a sawhorse. I
believe they were bone sore. The Marines wanted them to move
when they felt they could not. This, I suppose, engenders confi-
dence. I would like to apply myself seriously to an endeavor that
would make my life a serious, confident proposition, not a whimsical
one, but I so far I cannot.
When you break a tennis-racket string, do you take it to the
shop for restringing or should you have bought a spare racket and
continue that day with the spare? On the one hand the second racket
means you have taken yourself and time seriously, on the other it
means you have taken playing a game more seriously than keeping
thy money in thy pocket, a Biblical injunction. So how do you tell
what to do? This I cannot discover. I am not wise. I can but walk
around, greeting the friends I do not have, Hi Earl, hi Wonka, hi
Eel, you now Greta, now you Kitty, seeing the animals in their cages
and not in their cages, the geese on the lake and not.

104
—Thomas Beller
The Toy Collector
It was cold, early evening, and the street was crowded with people,
none of whom I looked at because my gaze was directed down,
focused on the sidewalk, where I could block out all the people
crowding the sidewalk and focus on what was pre-occupying me,
which were the tiny people. A friend had been making pottery and
attaching these tiny little figures to it. She would hover over a large
magnifying glass and hold them with one hand while dabbing them
with a paintbrush. The effect was scholarly. She had small, strong,
willful hands, but they were gentle and she would use one hand to
hold the tiny people by an arm, or a leg, or a head, in between index
finger and the tip of her thumb. With her other hand, she would
draw their clothes and face with a very fine paintbrush.
The tiny people had heads the size of apple seeds, but she managed
to paint them all in detail. The women got to wear nice dresses
and shoes, and some of the men wore ties which were as wide as
splinters. In some instances the figures were relaxing, as though at a
table with a cup of coffee. In others they were standing as though
waiting for a train. In still others they were doing something a bit
dramatic and even cantankerous: One of these little people was waving
an umbrella in the air, as though they were hailing a cab, or
maybe yelling at someone. These tiny people were made in
Germany. Their designs were from the sixties. The people they were
modeled on had eaten strudel and a lot of potatoes. They were portly
but dignified.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a strange flash of yellow, a
neglected color, that made me look up. I found myself staring into
the window of a toy store. My friend had mentioned a store where
she got the tiny people. I thought I would buy her more, a present.
I went in.
The linoleum on the floor was smoothed by the years. White
fluorescent tubes ran along the ceiling.
"Excuse me," I asked the man behind the counter. "Do you sell
miniatures?"
"Miniature what?" said the man. He was in jeans, trim.
Mustache. He said it as though he hadn't quite heard me right, as
though he was having to deal with mumblers all day. He was old
and wore a plaid shirt tucked into jeans. There were toys in glass
cases all over the place, but not modern toys. The store didn't have
any of the pink manic energy of toy stores meant for kids. This was
not a place for pop-rocks.
"These tiny little plastic people," I said. "They're in different
poses, and you can paint them. Architects use them a lot. For their
models."
"Miniature people?"
"In different poses," I said. The velocity of the street was still
with me, but this man was stationary, he was content in his one
place, and had been for a long time by the looks of him. I forced
myself to slow down. "They're really small, the size of a finger nail
really."
"Let me check," he said.
He moved slowly out from behind the counter and towards the
back of the narrow store. I knew already that this was the wrong
store, they wouldn't have the tiny people. The tiny people were perverse
in some way and this store had a warmer atmosphere, one of
memorabilia, it was a time capsule, the store itself and what the
store sold. I calmed down. The tiny people were a gift I wanted to
buy so I could to apologize for the fight we had. But the fight had
taken place in my own head as I barreled down Bleeker Street. It
hadn't even happened.
I forced myself to breath deeply and not be a jerk to the nice old
man and his old store with old toys, who was at that moment standing
in front of a dilapidated partition at the back of the store calling
someone's name.
I cringed. I could hear the intimacy in the man's voice—it was
like he was waking someone up from a nap. And sure enough,
10

106
another man's voice called out from behind the partition, cranky.
"What?"
"There's a man here, he want to know if you have miniatures."
"Miniature what?"
"People."
"Hold on."
Now I was really hating myself for causing all this trouble but
it was too late, someone was scrabbling out from behind the partition.
It was another old man, even older, and apparently the boss,
wearing a mustard yellow sweater that echoed the mustard feel of
the whole place. Whether these two guys were romantically
involved I could not say for sure, but they had the old married couple
vibe about them. The older guy now stood before me, a kind,
skeptical face, no hair, a little vein by his temple. Outside, on the
street, there were heathen rushing up and down, and in here everything
was delicate and still.
I described the tiny people. The man said he didn't have any.
Then, because I felt bad to have dragged him out from his nap, or
his snack, his privacy, and because I wanted to distinguish myself
from the rushing heathen who probably came in here all the time
asking for stupid things like cigarettes or condoms or whatever, I
said, "So you sell old toys?"
"Yes, we do."
"Have you been doing it for a long time?"
"Thirty-two years in this very spot."
I looked around. In the glass cases were antique trains, dolls,
doll house furniture, wind up toys, and old bits of advertising
ephemera.
"I know a guy who collects toys," I said. "But he's not as eclectic
as you. He's mostly into cars. He's a neighbor. Jack Herbert."
"Oh Jack!" he said, and his face lit up. If I wanted to make the
point that I wasn't a heathen—I succeeded. "I've known Jack for
thirty years! He and I were some of the very first people who started
collecting antique toys. Nobody took it seriously at the time.
They couldn't believe it when Jack paid fifty dollars for an old toy
car. Now it's probably worth five thousand."
"I live right next door," I said, proud. We made friendly noises.
His name was Van Dexter. We shook hands and I said goodbye.
Outside, in the bustle, I looked back into the narrow window and
saw the store's name on the green canopy: Second Childhood.
There is a gap on my block. It comes between two brownstones,
is a little wider than a man, and a little narrower than a horse.
My block is in the West Village, and is mostly brownstones,
interrupted a few times by low-flying apartment buildings, nothing
higher than eight stories.
My landlords live in the building: Carey and Holy. They've
lived here long enough to raise four kids and now their kids have
kids.
Their oldest three kids were girls. I never thought about the
daughters until one evening when I found myself explaining, over
dinner exactly where I lived to a bunch of people. Two of the guys
sitting there—one an actor, the other a cellist—had been friends
since childhood. They had grown up in my neighborhood. When I
told them my address, their faces went slack.
"265?" said the actor. He brought his hand to his pale cheek.
"Oh man," said the cellist.
They explained, taking turns, that the daughters of my landlords
were the famous beauties of their youth. The sidewalk across
the street from my building had been the scene of stake-outs and
longing stares up in the direction of the girls' room. We discussed it
for a while and determined the room they had been fixated on was
where I now lived.
The block has a variety of residents, as any block does; some old
guard, some new. Some of the brownstones are single family
dwellings, recently converted and updated. These have a sheen
about them that is a little cold, really, though during the great
upgrade of the block, when about four or so brownstones got a
facelift, I became friendly with Mr. Brown, a Jamaican man who
was a master craftsman at making old things (the facade of brownstones)
look new, but in an old way. The proper new face of the old
is a serious issue in my neighborhood—there are laws, preservation
committees, etc. Mr. Brown was a nice guy, although a serious hardass.
Sometimes he worked with his young sons. He had started out
in Bed Stuy, first working for someone else shortly after he arrived
in the United States in the early Eighties, then going out on his
own. When Park Slope went through its big upgrade, he got a lot of
work there. Now he works mostly in the West Village and on the

108
Upper East Side. In Jamaica, he was a baker, and I liked to watch
him mix his special plaster mixture whose color was so integral to
the proper new face of the old brownstones on my block.
What you wouldn't know from staring at the front of these
brownstones is that behind them is a world of ample backyards. In
one of these backyard spaces, the one next to mine, is a small wood
house with a chimney. Its scale is peculiar. The front door looks out
onto the backyard of our building. The house is square, slightly
nautical, and has an A-frame roof. The little chimney sticking out
makes it look like a gingerbread house.
The gap in my block is a narrow alley that separates my building
from the one next door. There's a steel gate that is painted black
and faces the street. You would hardly notice it because it is right
next to my neighbor's stoop. I never thought of it until I went up to
my own roof one day shortly after I moved in here, in 1995. I
looked out over the backyards. Our own was an unruly garden with
a giant Elm tree whose tortured, massive, and beautiful branches
rose up to eye level and even higher. To the left, I saw a little house
in the backyard of the brownstone next to mine, and realized that
the black gate led to the pathway to the front door of the little
house.
One day I saw a man emerge from the gate, and I assumed he
lived in the little house. He was a strapping figure with brown hair
and an almost barrel chest and his cheeks were a ruddy pink. He was
a little over six feet and walked with a very erect posture. He had
some of that Ronald Reagan (circa first term) robustness of an older
man, and also the tiny hint of vanity that goes with it. There was
something athletic about him, even though he was an older guy, but
it wasn't a sports kind of athleticism. It was more like someone who
was once a sailor or who knows how to fix things with his hands.
My first and for a long time only conversation with my neighbor,
whose name is Jack Herbert, involved my bicycle. I had taken
to locking it to the lamppost right in front of the little alley.
"I hope you don't mind my leaving my bike locked up there," I
said.
"Not at all," he said. "1 think it lends a little panache to the
block."
And after that, panache was the word that came to mind when
I saw Jack Herbert strolling with that upright posture of his around
the neighborhood.
The initial conversation was not developed. We nodded hello if
in the immediate vicinity of our front doors. Occasionally there was
even a big, exhaled, "Hello!" said out loud. Beyond that, he was a
man on the street. Even though I was curious about the house, I
wasn't going to ask him questions. Some of this was the natural reticence
of neighbors in New York, for whom the impulse to avoid is
at least as strong as the more advertised and romanticized desire to
pry.
For a while it looked as though Jack Herbert was going to go
the way of the Heavy Metal Puerto Rican.
The Heavy Metal Puerto Rican was a figure from another
neighborhood, and another, earlier, time in my life. I never got his
real name. In fact I'm embarrassed to say I never moved beyond a
few extremely tacit, barely acknowledged, practically imperceptible
nods of acknowledgement that passed between us over the five or so
years we saw each other on a regular basis.
The Heavy Metal Puerto Rican had a withered left arm. It hung
in a sling. There seemed to be a tiny amount of use in the withered
hand—he could hold money in it, for example. Otherwise it just
hung. But the withered arm wasn't the only reason, and wasn't even
the main reason, that he was a distinctive figure around the housing
project across the street from where I lived. A lot of characters hung
around the little park that separated that battered metal door that
was the project's entrance from the sidewalk. None of them looked
remotely like the Heavy Metal Puerto Rican. He wore leather vests,
biker boots, and a black leather cap modeled after a Confederate
Army cap from the Civil War. He was a biker. Amidst the Hip Hop
and R&B emanating from that park, I sometimes heard the unexpected
sound of Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Hendrix. It came from
the boom box he always carried. Once, very late one summer night,
I walked by the projects and he was out there alone. We nodded. A
few steps after that the street filled with the sound of a Led Zeppelin
song.
I was fascinated by him for years but never spoke to him other

110
than a wordless nod hello sometimes. It just seemed too weird to
approach him as some sort of journalist/anthropologist and inquire,
"Who the hell are you?" I was shy, I thought.
But the reason was stranger than that, I realized one day, when
I found myself regaling a group of people about the Heavy Metal
Puerto Rican and one of the people listening said, "Oh, I know
someone who knows that guy. She knows all about him." I was
given a name and number. It was a golden opportunity.
But I didn't call. I suppose the desire to know may have as its
center of gravity the word "desire," not the word "know." I never
followed up. The Heavy Metal Puerto Rican remains a figure on
whom I have committed a kind of literary frottage—I felt him up,
and he never knew. Not to suggest I had a crush on the Heavy Metal
Puerto Rican. I swear I did not.
One warm and lazy summer afternoon I was about to unlock
my bike when I saw a sign on the black metal gate that lead back to
the little Ginger Bread House. It read: "Toy collectors, this way."
The gate was unlocked and I wandered through the narrow
alley. It was the first time I'd been in there. On either side were brick
walls not much wider than my shoulders. I looked up and it was a
strange sensation—two brick walls rising six stories above on either
side opening to a sliver of sky. I couldn't help feeling I was entering
a passage to a secret world.
There is a patchwork of backyards behind my building, but
mainly there is a trio of large ones, of which my building is the centerpiece.
The owners of the building where I live have been there
over forty years and their backyard has a rambunctious quality, two
converging paths through the ivy, the gigantic Elm tree rising up in
the middle and, in spring, two huge forsythia bushes at the back.
These giant forsythia bushes are a new development and are the
one positive effect of the Renovators, who are to the right. The
Renovators moved in a few years after I did and (as you can guess)
they promptly began renovating. The father of the Mr. Renovator
has been involved in fomenting democracy in Eastern Europe and
for a while it seemed as though gigantic numbers of Poles and
Hungarians were working on the building next door. Specifically,
they were walking from the backyard to a giant dumpster on the
street with buckets of earth. It was almost biblical, the amount of
earth being moved, and I expected landscaping on the scale of
Olmstead, a mini-Central Park. In the end, the backyard was covered
in slate. The cool grey slate, very smooth, or so it seems, is
interrupted by a dramatic Douglas fir tree. And there is one wide
indentation, where water collects in a shallow pool, giving it a
Japanese rock-garden feel. The back yard of the Renovators does not
get much use; the only occupants are usually a pair of black labs
who are set free to roam its austere plain, lolling around by themselves
and looking bored and decadent—sleek black dogs on
smooth grey slate, with a giant white Douglas fir rising out in their
midst.
The Renovators removed so many trees and tore out so much
vegetation that our forsythia bushes suddenly had all that water and
nutrition to themselves and they began to bloom. This was the one
small pay-off for the invasion of the earth-bearing Poles and the
other construction workers who descended on the endlessly renovated
house, though the Poles were very well behaved, and I was
always impressed with how at the end of the day they would change
out of their work clothes and be so clean. Their mustaches were elegant.
They knew how to smoke a cigarette, as though it were a pleasure,
not a vice. Towards then we started exchanging friendly nods.
Looking down from my roof the three backyards form an interesting
trio. The Renovators to the right, the rambunctious chaos of
ivy and forsythia in the middle, and, to the left, the ginger bread
house. It sat there like a secret in broad daylight. My perspective on
it is usually from above, standing on the roof and looking down, but
now I was walking in there myself.
The exterior of the little wood house was a beige color, with
white window frames and green shutters. The front door faced out
towards my house's backyard and had a little cupola above it. There
are some wooden steps to get to the door, which was ajar. I pushed
the door open, and my very first impression was that of a captain's
quarters on an old boat into which the captain had invited some
guests. The A-frame roof rose up above and light poured through
the skylights and windows. Wide wood planks made up the floor
and walls. The room was pleasantly cluttered. The tables and the

112
shelves were filled with ... things. At first, I couldn't make out what
these things were, but there were some books and there was other
stuff, too. I waved hello to Jack Herbert, who was sitting on what
seemed to me to be an old couch, but an old couch in pristine condition,
vintage. He greeted me with a wave.
"Hello there!" said Jack.
"Wow," I said, and stepped inside.
Now I saw that the things were mostly old boats—some that
could sit on your palm—but mostly bigger than that, and made of
metal or wood. There was an old Staten Island Ferry. There were
some little soldiers. There was an old metal horse and carriage.
There were little planes.
"Am I interrupting?" I asked.
"Not at all," he said.
It turns out Jack Herbert is one of the preeminent collectors of
antique toys, and he keeps them all in his tiny two-story cabin.
I came back a week later with a pad and pen. We both sat down
on his couch. Light filtered pleasantly into the room from the skylight
and windows. It was very quiet. I asked him questions and he
answered. My questions were precise but laced with speculation
about how a man becomes a toy collector. His answers were precise,
but there was going to be no speculation on how he came to be a
toy collector. I thought of another Republican president, the first
George Bush. "Don't put me on the couch," he once remarked to an
interviewer, trying to discern something about him, and that
seemed to be the subtext of Jack Herbert's remarks to me while we
sat on his very nice couch: Don't put me on the couch.
Jack Herbert had grown up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He has
lived in New York ever since the end of World War II when he came
here to attend Fordham University. The Village was where he wanted
to be. His job at the time was selling ad space for radio, and he
spent a lot of his days going from one appointment to another, with
time in between. He had plenty of opportunities to look at property
I kept looking around while we spoke.
For all the slightly disheveled oldness of the house—and of the
toys—there was a somewhat military precision to the arrangement
of things, the cleanliness of the couch. For some reason the immaculate
unfrayed quality of the couch intrigued me. It was an old style,
but new. But it did not look like something he had bought for a lot
of money at a vintage furniture store. I could only conclude he took
good care of his possessions. He wasn't going to spill anything on his
couch.
"There was this lovely French girl and she knew of this house
which had previously been rented to a set designer," he told me.
"He'd apparently had all sorts of plans for it, but he ran out of
money and shortly thereafter he ran out of town."
I struggled to imagine the personal collapse of the set designer
whose big project was going to be building the set in which he
would live—this house. But then it all fell apart. He left town.
Why? A romance gone bad. A relative fallen sick. The money dried
up and he left out of shame and not being able to succeed. Jack
Herbert knew nothing about it.
"When I first came to look at it the floors were black," said
Jack. "The walls of the place were painted blue, and they were peeling.
But I fell in love with it right away. I thought, I have twenty five
square feet in Manhattan that is mine and mine alone, no one lives
above me or below me."
He made a deal with the sisters who lived in the brownstone in
whose backyard the house was built, and moved in. He came every
night and scraped the walls and the floors while listening to the
radio. The Cuban missile crisis was under way. "Kennedy was giving
Kruschev the word on Cuba," was how he put it.
I asked about the sisters who lived in the front house.
Their name was Maximillian, he said. They were born in that
house at the end of the 19th Century. They died in their late
nineties. They lived their entire lives in that house. There were three
sisters and one married. "There is offspring," Jack said.
But two of the sisters continued to live there. "Somewhere in
the early days they ran a hat shop on Madison Avenue, back when
ladies wore hats," he said with a laugh.
I noticed the peculiar habit of Jack's in which he seemed to
enjoy looking back at old times with a certain nostalgia, but the nostalgia
was bleached of sentiment. Whether he was against nostalgia
on principle, or if he was simply not emotional, or if he was so emo-
113

114
tional and nostalgic that he had out of self-protection willfully
removed and locked away that impulse, I could not tell.
He told me the main house was built by the Maximillian sisters'
father around 1875. He built Jack's house, an art studio for a friend
of his, some time after the turn of the century.
"The sisters lived until the late eighties, and died within a few
years of each other.
"One lost her sensibilities, and the other had to try and help
her," said Jack. "They would invite me to their parties, mostly family
parties, which was nice. But in all the time I've been here, forty
years, they never once came back! I don't think they were afraid, I
should hardly think so. But who knows? Adele is the one who kept
her faculties. She kept things cracking and so on. The one story I
know is that when she was really very old, she was taken over to St.
Vincents for some reason and while she was there the Rabbi came
to see her. And she said, 'Get out of here! I'm not going!' A year or
so later she did."
The sisters lived on the second floor and rented out the rest of
the place to tenants. For a long time they hauled up and down their
enormous steps. They had five tenant apartments: Ground floor,
Parlor, 3rd, 4th, and then Jack as the fifth.
"So they were doing all right," I said, somewhat crassly, I admit.
"I'm not so sure," said Jack. "Taxes in the city at one time, back
in their days, were reasonable, but what income could they have
had, poor things? They didn't live lavishly, but they lived."
I asked about the narrow alleyway that led back to his house.
He speculated it dated back to the days when people would park
their carriages in front of their house, and unhitch the horse and
bring it to a stable. "You could have brought a filly back through
that space," he said. "And the fact that the top floor of my house has
very wide planks, made me think that perhaps they had a barn back
here."
I paused to consider this variation on the parking ritual: you
not only have to find a spot, you have to wash and feed the horse.
Then I looked down at the couch. The truth of the matter was I was
letting the conversation veer in all sorts of directions other than
toys. They were all around me yet I was having some trouble focusing
on them.
"This is a very nice couch," I said.
"It a convertible couch. I've had it since Lincoln was in power!"
"It's in very good shape," I said.
"I've had it re-upholstered once. Had to. Forty years is a long
time," he said. "The secret of anything is, if you can, get something
of the best quality to begin with and then you won't have to fuss
about it. At my gym a funny little plumber came in and did everything
with domestic showers, and they lasted two weeks. For something
like the gym, they ought to have industrial showers."
So with some effort I brought the conversation around the toys.
He showed me some of the ships. They were very pretty, but they
also fell into a category I found hard to respond to: they were
antique, they were, in a way beautiful, and they were toys. We all
have our blind spots. I recall a friend's father once remarking on the
subject of antiques, "Why would anyone want to sit in used furniture?"
Maybe I was having a similarly philistine resistance to these
charming artifacts.
As Herbert explained it, collecting antique toys was a new
hobby when he started. "It grew, and I grew with it."
His professional life had been spent running restaurants,
including a place called Bentley's which thrived in the neighborhood
until he went into semi-retirement. He had a star waitress to
whom he turned over the operation. But she had a boyfriend with
a coke habit. It's a Thai place now.
"When you're doing something as stressful as running a restaurant,
sometimes you need to get away. I would come back to this
house a ... getaway."
He specialized in transportation, he said. He doesn't do dolls or
trains.
"You have to specialize or you go bananas."
Jack Herbert has the biggest collection of its sort in New York
State. There is a guy in Massachusetts who has more, he said. "But
it's too much. I've seen it. You leave sort of depressed. And if you are
a collector and you go there, you are going to see everything you
ever saw. It's like doing too much of a museum."
Then we went downstairs, which was really more of a basement.
The living room area was so complete in its mood and light and
architecture that I forgot that there was no bed, or kitchen for that
matter. Also, though I didn't think of it at the time, the stuff in that

116
room, impressive as it was, did not seem to amount to the largest
collection of its kind in New York State.
The staircase was narrow. As we walked down, the floor of the
living room became eye-level, then disappeared.
The downstairs of the house felt different than the upstairs.
Upstairs there is the vaulted ceiling, the skylights, the tall bookshelves
filled with books and toys, the beautiful furniture, the rug.
Most of all, the light.
Downstairs, the ceiling is very low. I had to duck. There was a
bed against one wall, made up as immaculately as if this were a
showroom. There was a small table with a laptop computer on it.
The light was artificial here. Something strange was going on, and
it took me a moment to identify it: the room was filled with toys.
More specifically, the walls were covered in narrow shelves, and on
each shelf, perfectly arranged, was a small toy car or, in some
instances, a plane, something that could fit in the palm of your
hand. But bigger than a Hotwheels. The shelves were about four
inches apart from one another. The walls were covered with these
shelves. A rough estimate of the antique cars and planes sitting on
the shelves of that room that Jack gave me: two thousand.
In the morning, he opened his eyes to these toys. And at night,
when the lights were out and it was dark, they surrounded
him—replicas of things that take you places that were staying exactly
where he had put them. I did not have that feeling Jack described
when he visited the super-collector in Massachusetts. I did not feel
depressed or overwhelmed. But I felt something that welled up in
me as I wandered among the shelves and made admiring noises as I
peered at various models or cars or planes.
By the time we went upstairs I had forgotten completely where
I was.
Toy is a strange word. In the early sixteenth century one of its
definitions was, "a light caress."
Among the OED's definitions: "A thing of little or no importance,
a trifle, a foolish affair, a piece of nonsense. A thing to play
with, often a model or miniature replica of something, especially for
a child."
The example of this is a quote from Macbeth that plays up the
nihilistic aspect: "There is nothing serious about mortality—all is
but toys."
Then there is the definition of toy that refers to a human being.
"I saw him becoming . . . my slave and my toy," is the reference
drawn from Allan Hollinghurst.
Then there is the verb. "To deal lightly or frivolously with,
amuse oneself (with a person or activity) also consider (an idea, etc),
handle, or finger idly. To behave in a superficially amorous manner
(with a person). Dally, flirt..."
Jack Herbert is a pioneer in the toy-collecting field. He writes a
column for Antique Toy World magazine. His involvement in the
field is his business, and I am not going to put him on the couch.
My question has to do with my own hobbies. What do I collect?
I recently called up my friend, the potter who used the tiny people.
When I referred to her as a friend before it was a euphemism,
but now that is what we are, I mean that is all we are, we're just
friends now. She doesn't do the tiny people anymore. I spoke to her
the other day and asked her why not.
"They made me feel too tiny," she said. "Now I do vases."
11

118
—Paolo Manalo
Nihil Obstat
Carving the lost years
On a fish. A coagulum
Fever blistered and sore.
A smile the smell of early
Rope. Star shaped.
So early to believing.
An earthly kiss
Perhaps narcotic as sleep—
Walking on water. Having dreams
Glass eyed, knucked.
Their exhortations are a Latin
For ass pains, hypodermically
Speaking. Were there side effects
Against the light. This light
That the three could see four
Corners to a world gone flat
And where's the thrill, in that
To be saved we were willing to kill.
Still Life With Fallen Angel
Concealed in meteor, in weather balloon.
Taken enough to mean substitution.
Salvage in sleep like this
Ascension. Not when or how
But which and faster ride
Fastening the split—haves
And have not experienced.
When it was over, the seizure
And then depression—an added
Cavity, a false lung, in breathing,
Where the secret is safety. "To have
Become." There.
Presence in the missing
Implements, there where
The internals can doubt
The change but cannot be seen.

120
—Mark Wunderlich
Tamed
That summer I broke a gelding. For a year I taught him to arc
toward the handle of my whip, tensing. He grew, though I remained
small, a boy made thin by the rigors of an imaginary life. When I
strapped the saddle on, his eyes rolled like romantic clouds. He
snorted as his future became smaller. Later, I sat upon his back
which had only borne the weight of insects. He braced himself and
walked stiffly in a circle. He hated me instantly.
When the milkweeds blew their pods in the pasture, he knew to
stand while I slipped my boot into the metal D. He knew the taste
of metal though I warmed the snaffle in my fist before he took it in.
My short spurs urged him into five gaits.
I had a suit made—vest, jacket and jodhpurs, all in officious blue.
I bought a bridle and girth to match. He was sufficiently tamed.
I was thrown several times. Each time I rose up from the dust to
catch him by the reins. It wasn't discouraging. I knew I deserved it.
—Mary Quade
Tractor
Somewhere you have a tractor.
A man finds his father's tractor
in someone else's barn, someone else's county.
When he last saw it, no one had
air-conditioning. He cannot remember the names
of the dogs of boyhood—
but the machine, the relic of tinkering,
he knows, has watched his shadows
pass under it. Power is what happens when
ego has nowhere to go. Imagine
the tractor. It is cresting a bulge
of dirt, the mesmerized tires,
the lathering stack. It turns, tips, no shift
in weight, only weight itself
pulling, a kind of destiny.
A boy carries his arm across acres,
the approaching house, empty, the arm's bones and tears,
the juggle at the door.
He climbs into the bathtub
so he won't bleed on his mother's floors.
The tractor leaves a testament of pull.
Men return to the field,
triggering the clutch with a broom handle, hips
lonely for knees;
the slopes roll up around them.
No machine I could kill you with
would be this heavy.
12

122
—Christine Schutt
Isabel in the Bridge House
Isabel in the Bridge house stood near a closet holding onto the
sleeve of Ned's shirt and staring at his covered bed. The stillness had
been from the start. They undressed in different rooms; they did not
often fuck. Ned called her his wife and she wore his name and his
mother's ring, but it was something else between them. She couldn't
say what. She would have to think.
All total? Seven years.
The last few they had been counting.
Before the suicide Isabel sometimes drove the car to a deserted
house off the Reach Road and broke what windows were left to
break.
Ned had said he didn't know what it was about her but he did
not find her sexy. Maybe it was her clothes.
"What clothes?"
"My point," he said. "Exactly."
Isabel in the Bridge house packed away Ned's clothes as fast as
she could; let somebody else paw through them. Two long-sleeved,
French-cuffed shirts she kept and a slouchy, dirt-colored sweater.
The long socks knotted in his sock drawer, she threw away.
Anything with a netted interior, of course, was also out. Haha.
She had told him that his penis was small.
That his penis was small, he knew; but her cunt, he said, was
enormous.
In whatever game it was they played, Ned and Isabel had made
a point of staying even.
She coiled his belts in a shoe box for charity, but his hairbrush
she kept for his smell.
Ridiculous!
How could she explain herself to herself or to anyone? They had
lived together for seven years. They had lived in different cities.
New York, the longest. A lot of their possessions were not in the
Bridge house at all; some objects Isabel had left in New York in the
bin on White Street—for whoever might want it was her attitude
then. Sometimes she walked through the White Street loft cataloging
what was missing, what was broken. She stood in darkened
corners of the loft and saw tables, lamps, bookcases, the worn-tothe-cord,
blackened prayer rug against which Ned more than once
had scorched her back. Fucking, being fucked, being hurt lasted
(the great lengths between), but then came Ned's glooms. Long,
silences, whiskered quiet, pages being turned, so that she wished he
would go away and she tried to scare him away. Once she broke an
antique goblet full of red-black wine, mess enough to make him cry
out, "Great-grandmother's wedding-trip glasses, a hundred years
old, you cunt." The astonished splatter in unlikely places, flecks of
red on a far white wall—oh, Isabel could be bloody and dramatic,
but in the end, Ned had outdone her.
Now what?
She had to consider and where better to consider but here in the
Bridge house in the shut-in months. The Bridge house had not
changed for her because of what had happened in the basement.
She had rarely had cause to go there. Nan Black came with the
house; she had cleaned and washed, a little here and there, from the
beginning of their tenancy. Since Ned's death Nan came every other
day and always brought a treat. Today: biscuits and berries and
cream. Raspberries.
"Raspberries. My own," Nan said. "From my own back yard."
And the biscuits were easy as pie to make. Nan said, "I could teach
you if you like."
Isabel, in scuffs and bathrobe, saw she had come to the door
wide open, and she sashed herself tight then held out a plate of
somebody's cookies.
"Look at these."
"Sinful is what them are."
Isabel sat with Nan eating chocolate cookies. They sat at the
kitchen table next to the window that looked onto a melancholy
field, a wavy, scratchy fall-colored patch of land and a lot of sky, and
12

124
Isabel was not afraid. She was not afraid to sit at the kitchen table
and she sat and watched Nan at her coffee.
"The first of the day, this," Nan said, indicating coffee, taking
a slurp with loud pleasure. Then the rest of the day was decided and
Nan stood. She took her cup and saucer to the sink, put on her
apron, found the broom, shook open a trash bag and began moving
through the house.
Isabel said, "You're going to need that bag. I've been throwing
away a lot of Ned's stuff. The baskets are full. I've been at it since
early this morning."
Isabel said, "Anything you find, you can have, Nan; otherwise,
it goes to Goodwill. I've no use for any of his stuff." Ned's stuff.
Why did everything she say sound mean? But Nan was banging up
the stairs and must not have heard her; she didn't answer. Once Nan
Black was started, the house, the furniture seemed to shake itself
erect. Lights went on from room to room. Open windows, disrobed
beds; the smell of bleach and an oily polish scented lemon. Nan didn't
break for a cigarette or drink more coffee, not until lunch at one.
But Isabel had no time for lunch. Not now, this side of the
house had begun to falter so that Isabel had to tiptoe away from the
mail she had been opening all morning.
What did a person say to such audacity as Ned's? It's hard to
believe ... we didn't know ... I would never have guessed.
Isabel moved lightly, slowly but definitely, away from the
kitchen table. Isabel left her mail there and Nan opening her sandwich.
The Bridge house had begun to teeter—too much weight on
one side—and unless Isabel moved, they would all, house and all,
fall into the sea.
When had this started?
Months ago.
She knew it was stupid.
"Stupid," Ned had said, had said to many things. Her cat, her
brother, Helen Fin. All she had to do was look around the sun porch
and she saw him, Ned, picking ofifthe dead parts of the geraniums,
reading Robert Frost or rocking in the rocker with his head in his
hands.
The poems she wrote then were bad, but Ned wasn't working at
all. Again and again and again, he came out of his study slack or
angry, sometimes, too, a little mad. He sat in the porch and rocked;
he read more Robert Frost.
More than once Isabel had heard him say, "Sadness doesn't cut
it." What did he mean?
The Bridge house at least now sat firm. Isabel could lie on the
chaise in the sun porch and read catalogues.
Stupid.
Late afternoon, Isabel with Nan, Nan ironing in the kitchen.
Nan was on the appliance side of the kitchen and Isabel was on the
other; the house was balanced. The thwump, thwump of the iron
against a shirt, the kitchen smelled so sweet with it, ironing; she was
all nose and mouth and it felt as if her eyes were shut. Isabel was this
contented, and she licked sugared cream pinked with raspberries off
a spoon. "Delicious," she said to Nan. "You'll have to teach me
about the biscuits." This was good, the food and the smells and the
light coming in, light, a consolation. From one room to another in
the Bridge house, light fell all day; it honeyed the wide-board floors
and the upstairs bedrooms in the late afternoon. Unobstructed light
struck in geometric shapes Isabel liked to stand in.
Light, of course, her direction. Up the stairs.
"I'm going to nap," she said to Nan.
Here in the Bridge house on any sunny afternoon if Isabel
looked up the stairs (and she looked up the stairs when Ned was
alive and when he was dead) the door to her bedroom yawned in
light, floated, a rose-yellow outlook, and she took the stairs to the
room and slept. Most of every afternoon, she slept, no matter the
lengths made her sick, and she woke with a headache and Nan gone
with only a note, no matter the quiet she woke to, Isabel got into
bed and today was no exception.
The knock on the door was the loose door itself in the wind, in
the wind and the pitched light of sunset.
When Isabel opened her eyes there was Ned, returned, at the
foot of the bed as always, not quite sitting, leaning against the bed,
legs out, feet crossed, Ned with his pretty ankles, shapely leg. Too
handsome. Too handsome to all. Stephen especially had loved him,
and look what Ned had done to him.
12L

126
The story always started with, I was invited to this party.
Isabel shut her eyes and listened for a voice, a word more,
which, when it came, came from a woman.
"I'm off."
Who would Isabel find at the end of her bed if she opened her
eyes a second time?
No one, no one at all.
Downstairs the folded ironing lay on the table pressed against
the open window. Isabel didn't move to get it. The Bridge house was
not reliable.
Stupid.
The Bridge house, 1858, red clapboard, the red almost all worn
away. Old, enormous trees. Old windows, wiggley glass. The Bridge
house was historic but not in need of any propping or painting or
repair; the Bridge house was austere—a beauty.
But why would she who had lived through finding him want to
stay here? Was she really partly glad? Was she overexcited?
—Tom Paulin
An vollen Buschelzweigen
(Goethe)
Chestnuts ripen—spiky a bit like traps
then their shells split open
and then or before that they fall to the ground
the first one I ever—age five—saw
lying in my grandmother's garden
I thought it a small glossy brown
—brown and raw—dog turd
and progged it with a stick
it was hard but it wasn't crap
and almost I thought enjoyed being rubbed
in the palm of my hand
just as likewise—a long time later—
I'd rub a drop of amber
before placing my hand on your lap.
12/

128
—Brian Henry
Scar
To see a body thrown beyond its boundaries
to fly and learn the bones have no borders
the flesh a wedge to hold the air in place
the air dilating to keep the span intact
is to confront the burn skinning the eyes
to feel light scrape across the space inside
wherever the eyes choose to lodge
This Blueness Not All Blue
It resembled a sun but could feather
It resembled a woman who spun
into what she touched slowly
What she touched resembled the residue of sound
that burned anyone within hearing
You walked into it and were burned
You smoldered in degrees of distraction
until the she it resembled kneeled to carry
you into a room furnished by the heat
in your head and a pain to shake your lungs dry
The sound of the touch of the she it resembled
seared into your scrap of a body as you
slipped from those arms and wondered
what it wouldn't have been like to fly

130
Residue
The way the sun works the powerlines
one could be excused for thinking
one mattered to the hill disrupting the horizon:
footprints and tire tracks break right
at the base of, lose themselves into the woods
rimmed with shit, the residue
of marijuana smoke clinging.
Birdsong might be strangling, but the hum
is what we hear as the air warms below,
between, the air about to split from the attention.
This swathe affords a stellar view, the tracks
wind endlessly. One could push a Snowcat
to its last gallon without reaching anything
like an end; one could string a year's
worth of garbage along this scratch of land.
Walt, who jogged this route for ten years, says
the thrum in the air will stunt growth,
says his neighbor's kids are shorter than each
of their parents, says he himself has shrunk.
A bull and heifer escaped from the patch
across the river once, stayed a week
before being found. All's they did was fuck
under the transformers, that cock matched
by a cunt open—for what, pleasure?—
and the boy who found them locked, smoking,
one wonders where he's ended up,
or if.
—Joyce Sutphen
Not Us
We, when you say it, is never me and
you, but you and the someone you were with
when you did everything first so that
now there is no place I can go that you
have not seen before, no streets where you two
haven't walked once in that time you say was
long ago but which comes back and leaves me out
and tells me things I did not care to know
about you and someone who was not me.
On the other hand, I have not always
been a part of what I call us, but had
a we made up of me and someone else,
and perhaps we ourselves may someday be
the ones who are not us when I say we.
13.

132
Annunciation
Suppose the angel never comes.
Suppose you spend days waiting
in the empty room, staring at dust
in the ordinary beams of sunlight
falling from the high windows.
Suppose you scan the horizon and see
blue everywhere, suppose no one appears
in the doorway, no one descends in
a lightening flash saying the thing that
angels always say: "Fear not!"
and all of your hopes wilt on the stem,
the lily that was your emblem fades,
and you are not after all required
to bow your head to the impossible.
What then?
You leave the room. You marry
and have children who are not divine.
Your heart breaks in other ways.
—A COLUMBIA Journal.'lnterview
"Let's Survive":
An Interview with Breyten Breytenbach
Breyten Breytenbach is a survivor. The South African writer and
painter was made an exile from his homeland for many years in the
sixties. He was arrested by the government as a "terrorist" for opposing
apartheid and imprisoned for seven years. He endured his county's
difficult transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994. He
has been scarred and shaped by history.
Long considered the Dante of the Afrikaans language,
Breytenbach emerged from his political and personal odyssey to
become a noted writer of memoirs, novels, and poetry; a renowned
painter; and an advocate for international peace and democracy. In
exile, in prison, and in freedom, Breytenbach has come to see his life
as a matter of artistic and political survival—for him, freedom must
ultimately exist in the mind and in the body.
When I met Breytenbach in New York City, nine months after
9/11/01, he was warm and seemed at ease, enjoying life as an international
figure, though as we spoke of global events he was filled
with righteous anger. The busy writer was in the city to promote a
new collection of poetry, Lady One: Of Love and Other Poems, do a
reading for "Dialogue Through Poetry," take part in a Canadian
conference on exile, and fly to the Middle East to serve on a delegation
for writers. As always, his life is a union of the artistic and the
political.
These concerns have existed from the beginning of his career.
Living abroad in France in the 1960s, he became the most famous
poet in Afrikaans. He married a Vietnamese woman, Yolande (who
is still his wife), but their interracial union was illegal under
13

134
apartheid ("for you I cut loose/my beautiful country"), and they
were barred from his homeland.
Breytenbach became fiercely politically active, and in 1975 the
admittedly naive activist made a botched attempt to re-enter South
Africa only to be arrested and imprisoned, which he chronicled in
his classic memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. The
book documents his arrest and lack of political sophistication at the
time; as a well known artist trying to be a spy, "my going there was
contrary to all principles of underground organization." It also
describes his two years of solitary confinement and his uneasy
alliances with prison guards. Upon release, as an activist, he helped
the A.N.C. in ending apartheid.
Breytenbach's writing thrives on the small details and intensities
of life. In prison, for instance, a toffee wrapper, a leaf blown over the
wall, or a thread of material was as if he'd never seen color before in
his life. His writing is an onslaught of sensations and physical
details: dogs, dirt, blood, light, decay, dust, birds. Loss and memory
are never far off.
Many of the later poems in Lady One show a tenderness for
everyday life and objects that a former political prisoner must truly
cherish. Poems about his wife, to whom the book is dedicated, are
especially gentle and unironic ("to her who is fresh snow between
the sheets"). In fact, being with her might be the closest the former
exile gets to home.
Breytenbach, who lives in Senegal and Paris, is now free to
explore the possibilities of the mind and the world. But there are
still battles to fight. Lately, anxiety about an impending third world
war feeds upon him.
On the eve of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, he sends me and other
American friends an elegiac letter, "random thoughts at countdown
time, a reaching out before death comes raining down." But there is
hope. Like a leaf or thread over the prison wall, writing may yet save
us in the politically explosive days to come. His faith is typical of his
life's design: "May the ink overcome the blood. Let's stay in contact.
Let's survive."
Stephen Johnson for COLUMBIA: This new collection of
poetry spans roughly your early days in the 1960s, the prison years
from 1975-82, and the post-prison years.
Breyten Breytenbach: Right now, my publisher and I are in
the process of publishing my collected verse in Afrikaans, and we're
breaking it into those three chronological time periods you men-
tion.
SJ: It seems that in prison you'd have nothing but time to become
endlessly abstract. I think the prison poems from the new collection
are so richly detailed. Did being a writer and painter help you keep
your sanity, save you in way?
BB: I would say so. I realized in prison that writing or any other
form of artistic expression becomes a sense organ like your eyes and
ears. You need it to observe and translate what's happening. It's a
way of integrating and therefore accepting your condition—a way
of understanding. It becomes really very basic.
SJ: After your release in 1982, you wrote that every sensation in
the outside world was now "horrendously beautiful, like seeing for
the last time, everything dying, everything reborn." How did your
perceptions and writing change?
BB: In the sixties, when I was younger, I had an almost surrealistic
obsession with growth and decay. In prison, detail takes on
another meaning, the need to memorize things in a way that I imagine
a blind person would. You try desperately to recreate the world
you have lost.
SJ: It seems to have shaped you a lot as a person and writer. How
did you survive prison?
BB: The first thing you realize when you end up in prison is that
you screwed up terribly. How the fuck did I end up here? I thought
I was going to walk away or get though it, you know! Prison is a
tremendous shock to your psyche. You are stripped of sensation.
You are profoundly shaken in the ways you look at yourself. In this
barrenness, in the absence of outside stimulation, anything that
comes up—the smallest detail—becomes tremendously important.
SJ: Was there something that helped you to make it through the
13.

136
experience that other prisoners lacked? Why did some people break
while others didn't?
BB: For me it was a complicated pattern of letting go and hanging
on. If you can't balance that, you'll break. You must hold on to
your past, to your own worth, to your sense of self. But not too
strongly or you're not going to make it—it's too much of a disconnection
of realities.
Morally, you lose a hell of a lot. You're exposed to absolute
degradation and you're impotent to do anything about it. You see
others beaten up and tortured. It's a form of destroying your sense
of worth, the confidence you have in your own moral convictions.
They literally debase you in order to create in you a self-disgust and
from that point on, you'll defeat yourself.
Perhaps there were reasons I made it and others did not. First,
I felt that however stupidly I had carried out my plans, I had done
the right thing; I was on the right side. Second, I was immensely
loved by various people on the outside, especially by my wife.
I was also used to working with "myself." I was a writer and a
painter. I was used to making distinctions and being able to recognize
elements inside myself, to look at the good and the bad a little
more objectively. I'd also had some experience with meditation—
not that I did much in prison. I was able to watch my mind and go
through its monkey tricks, create a little bit of distance from the
horror.
Some prisoners make prison reality their total world to the
extent that they're incapable of every leaving it. You're caught in a
logic which is going to grind you down. If you do not step back, you
can go all the way and become totally brutalized; we called it
becoming "institutionalized." In fact, the majority of prisoners go
into this poorer version of the world. The only thing prison teaches
you is how to become a prisoner.
SJ: So after your release, you help end apartheid in 1994 by organize
conferences, in particular. Yet, in one of your books of memoir,
Dog Heart, you write, "When I look in the mirror I know that the
child born here is dead. It has been devoured by the dog. The dog
looks at me, and he smiles. His teeth are wet with blood. This has
always been a violent country." Was there some disillusion or regret
about post-apartheid life?
BB: When I wrote that in 1999, there was a subjective realization
that somehow we didn't make it, that the "revolution" we'd been
striving for in South Africa, that we'd brought about, didn't come
about. After 1994, it was a situation of normalcy, which was far less
exciting than before! South Africa was a society that had been
deprived of a revolution, in a sense. There was a personal feeling of
self-disgust. "How could I have been so naive to think things could
be different, so really different?" There was certain ruefulness. And,
of course, there was the question of getting older.
As a writer, as you get older, you start visiting your previous
selves like they were figures in a wax museum. Beyond sixty, your
youth is like another country. As you grow older, you write against
yourself, into the echo chamber of your own previous work.
SJ: How do you see South Africa developing since the end of
apartheid?
BB: There is equanimity but there is still violence, and more people
are dying in police custody than during apartheid. After 1994,
the African National Congress utterly changed the programs they
came to power on. The idea was more justice for more people and
to share resources more equitably. Yes, the program was too idealist
and had to be adapted, but the A.N.C. made historical compromises
with the I.M.F., the World Bank, and Wall Street. They were told:
"You're entering a global economy, privatize, cut back on state services,
don't put money in public utilities, wealth will trickle down to
the poor." Well, the rich are never moral about these things!
SJ: You're also closely involved with efforts at promoting African
democracy and literature.
BB: You're referring to the Goree Institute, a Pan-African N.G.O.
(non-governmental agency associated with the United Nations) on
Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal. I'm the executive director,
which is a whole new ball-game—I have to learn things like cash
flows, and managing budgets and people.

138
Goree is a center for democracy, development, and culture in
Africa, which works in the overtly political field. It's a center for
political dialogue and research, where we can discuss the real underlying
problems in Africa such as bringing people and groups together,
speaking up about human rights abuses within Africa. We do
community development, support local sports clubs, find means to
send students to university, teach fishermen about managing their
budgets, etc. That arm of the Goree Institute figures out how to
strengthen these mechanisms in civil society.
Culturally, it's like an offshore think tank or an "open-air university"
for writers and artists. I'm trying to make it the reference
place for literature on the continent. We'll have a regular series of
residences and an annual conference with African and other writers
talk about problems of writing in the context of Africa. For example,
why are there no decent publishers? Why are there so few bookstores?
How do African writers get published, get translated, and
how do we distribute books? Of course, we'll deal with deeper questions
of identity, diversity, the function of the writer in society,
memory, etc. In fact, Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote the last part of The
Shadow of the Sun at the Institute.
SJ: Speaking of Africa, you've written a lot over the years about a
"black Africa" and a "white Africa." Could you explain?
BB: Even Africans tend to forget what a culturally, ethnically,
politically mixed place the continent is. Of course, colonialism left
a harsh legacy. In Memory of Birds in Time of Revolution, I wrote
about a somewhat typical, white colonialist from decades past. He
is from the old country, has been living in a local African neighborhood
for years, he learns the local customs, and takes a black concubine
whom he dresses uncomfortably in Western clothes. Some
nights, he closes his eyes and stares out to the sea and waits for death
to come. He turns up his classical music while below his open window
street urchins clap along to a sonata and make up words in
their own language to accompany the notes.
You see, there is no such thing as a pure South Africa; it's a land
of incredible hybridization. Even Mandela admits he probably had
a Khoikhoi ancestor—these are the people who were there before
blacks and whites arrived. Even now in Soweto, you might have a
third-generation black African who has been influenced by Latin
and European music, who speaks a derivative of Creole Afrikaans
and who imitates lifestyles from old American movies. At the same
time, there are real demarcations, real differences in lifestyles, and
obvious effects of social and historical situations like apartheid.
SJ: In terms of Robert Mugabe's presidential election victory in
Zimbabwe last year . . .
BB: You mean Mugabe's theft.
SJ: Right. He's such a despotic figure, almost a caricature of the
African strongman. He seems to use these black-white tensions to
repel legitimate opposition, but the more the West criticizes him,
the more he cries out for black solidarity. Then again, a white
minority does own most of the land in Zimbabwe. So what's really
going on there?
BB: Mugabe certainly is effective. But I don't think this discourse
goes down well even with the majority of his own citizen—black or
white. People are far more concerned about their standards of living,
which have gone to hell since he's been in power in the last
twenty years. There is a lack of food, lurking starvation, violence,
rampant corruption.
But his appeal touches upon certain realities. Something should
have been done about the fact that seventy percent of the land is in
the hands of a small minority of whites.
Remember, we Africans have a real sense of feeling different
from the rest of the world, of wanting to solve our problems within
a pan-African context free of outside influence. To the extent that
Mugabe is criticized by the ex-colonial West, he's always going to be
supported within the continent, even if those colleagues and fellow
presidents are Western-oriented, capitalist fat-cats. It's a historical
solidarity, which follows centuries of real humiliation and real pain.
It's stronger than anything else.
SJ: It's like Hussein in Iraq. He's another despot hated by his own
people, but the more pressure put on him, the more appealing he is
to his citizens.

140
BB: Instead of supporting corrupt regimes such as Mugabe's and
Mobutu's, the West could offer real solutions, take the lead in solving
the land question in Africa, be serious about annulling the death
of the Third World and about transferring knowledge to bring the
poor world more even. But that would take a massive change of
mind.
SJ: You see this in the U.S.'s inability to forgive third-world debts
accrued under corrupt dictatorships.
BB: Exactly. The power of the West comes from a mindset that
precludes that kind of generosity. The sense of equality, of social justice,
or even cultural equality is not there. The Western mind
thinks, I'm born into this world to transform it. The African thinks,
I'm born into this world to adapt to it. There's a very deeply imbedded
need for Western cultures not only to transform but also to conquer.
It's a venture doomed to fail because you always have to renew
it. You're always running after the chimera of paradise.
SJ: As an outspoken critic of terrorism, what are your thoughts
about the 9/11 attacks, especially given the tensions between the
West. . .
BB: And the non-West? It's strange. The people who committed
the 9/11 acts of terrorism were themselves the most Westernized of
their people. They had fairly middle-class backgrounds, educated at
Western-type schools, and they spent time in Florida and Germany.
The question to ask is: what is it that sets off such a huge resistance
or frustration or anger in the minds of people?
Let me say: Terrorism cannot be justified anywhere under any
circumstances. When it's carried out by a legally constituted state,
then the state loses it's own legitimacy. If it's carried out by people
who think they are liberating their own people, as in the case of the
9/11 attacks, then I think they are devaluing and destroying the
moral credibility of the cause they're fighting for. If you're killing
innocent people, you're screwing up very badly.
That said, I think America needs to ask why there are people
like that arising in the rest of the world. There is this enormous
discrepancy between the West and the non-West that people are
aware of because American culture and media floods them with this
information daily. You are being ruled in the rest of the world by
corrupt, repressive regimes that are armed to the hilt by Western
support. In the process of arming friends and enemies, the West has
destroyed the middle ground that would help these countries move
towards a normal political process, towards greater representation,
towards greater social justice. There are so many legitimate opposition
movements, who are secular and moderate, who for years have
tried to bend American ears for support, to recognize them, to not
support corrupt regimes—they can't even get a hearing. Look at
Egypt, look at Algeria. So in the absence of that, what do you do if
you're a young Muslim and you want to oppose your government?
You're going to grow a beard, radicalize, and run to the mosque! It
is cynicism, but it is happening.
SJ: What heightens this kind of cynicism?
BB: The line that the West will not allow the rest of the world to
cross is not between terrorism and non-terrorism, fundamentalism
or non-, fanaticism or non-, it's between the global economic system
and those who do not want to take part. American foreign policy
is largely made by oil lobbies.
Obviously, no one wants to undo globalization—the sharing of
world culture has been a positive thing. But if Bush thinks solving
the problems of the poor is by making the rich richer, it just does
not work! The free market has worked marvelously for the U.S. for
certain complicated reasons, but it is not necessarily the best or the
only model for the rest of the world.
SJ: What about writing in times of terror? After 9/11 there was
poetry on walls, scrawled on makeshift public shrines of New York,
all over the Web. People seemed to really need it.
BB: It was an objective illustration of the extent to which people
need poetry. Poetry is one of the miracles of history and human consciousness—it
might take the form of chanting, incantations, magic
formulas, but it's always been there in all cultures and languages.

142
It has no ties to nationality or even evolution. It's fantastic to think
that in the 20th century people read and write poetry for the same
reasons now as when we were just getting up off our hind legs. I
think it needs to be more center stage, a more central part of public
life. I don't have the illusion that we're going to change the world
through poetry, but it's a very deep vein that needs to be kept alive.
—Suji Kwock Kim
Resistance
for my great-grandparents
Snuff out the collaborators, sense by sense:
the eye that caught a Japanese soldier beating you,
a man who looked like your brother,
as like you as you were to yourself:
the nose that smelled gunmetal and sweat:
the tongue I bit until I tasted blood:
the skin shivering, each hair standing on end
to feel you flinch at every blow.
Cut off the ear that heard our children scream for mercy,
that heard bone crack when he broke your jaw with a rifle-butt.
What was worse, his beating you
or your seeing them see you beaten,
ashamed this might be how they'd remember you,
afraid their cries would kill us all.
I whispered Lie quietly. The wont will be over soon.
And calmed myself to keep our children calm.
He took you away to prison.
You lived behind watchtowers and barbed wire for the next sixteen years.

144
Bless the chestnut trees I climbed as a boy,
the fields of dragon-tongue fern and Manchurian windflower I ran through.
Bless the old men smoking gourd-leaves in bamboo pipes
thinking "anti-Imperial thoughts,"
bless the children playing yut during school,
expelled for not swearing the loyalty oath to the Emperor.
Bless the deported who refused to pray to the Empire's gods,
to bow down before sun-colored torii gates of Shinto shrines:
bless the exiles who ran opium from Burma,
who hawked sesame oil or fried chicken-claws in Shanghai.
Praise the prisoners arrested for speaking Korean,
for not answering to Yamada or Ichida or Sakamaki, their new names by law:
praise the guerillas who starved during the '29 uprisings,
"hunger mountain" before the barley ripened.
Remember the coal miners ordered to war in Manchuria,
the Land of the Rising Sun's "East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere:"
remember the factory workers who joined the resistance in Vladivostok,
relocated at gunpoint by Stalin in '37 to Kazakhstan.
Remember the "Comfort Corps" raped forty times a day,
the woman screaming who could not scream because she was on fire.
In Cholla-namdo we used to break the bones of corpses' feet
so their souls wouldn't walk back from the other world, but would you walk back?
Once the guards forced us to watch a comrade being skinned alive.
Later they bludgeoned prisoners to death to save bullets.
What won't we do to each other?
After liberation I saw a frenzy of reprisals against former collaborators.
An old man—guilty or innocent?—lashed to a grille of barbed wire.
Bodies hung from trees beside roads, swaying.
At night a sickle glinted in the sky, sharp and pure. What did it reap.
Summer wind sang through the corpse-forest.

146
—Doris Umbers
The Goose Egg
Along the same root-lifted pine path,
in and out of the cabin, I stop stunned
by a body in unnatural movement,
so small a thing, a mole, dragging itself
the distance before me. And I remember
the stories—Maycomb's bird dog shot
at the end of the road, or Old Yeller,
or Seton's sweet yaller dog dying soft
on the steps in snow. When then
did it begin, the dread of unexpected
little deaths and their call? Not with
the six kittens dying on my chest,
and late night steal beneath a public oak
for their private wake. And not
on the edge of the thruway with
the black dog in winter, paws folded
the forward sight of his dark eyes,
now dying with shoulders still erect.
Nor did it begin with the white shepherd
I saw stride headfirst into the highbeams
and fly, Jesus, maybe ten feet into
near death. No, it was the goose egg
in its uneven roll along the metal pan,
the taste of its strong yolk saved for the dogs,
a crack of its resistant shell against the crock,
the white split and there, the breathing body
fully formed but for the belly still clinging
to the sac, and that cry from the perfectly
translucent beak awful in the cold kitchen air.

148
—Lance Contrucci
1'iction Winner
judged by Binnie Kirshenbaum
The Guide to Sumptuous Living
i
In the middle of the night, the lights would suddenly turn on
out in the barn and Elizabeth would wake with a start. The first
couple of times it happened, Dale thought it was prowlers. She
thought it was little Andy, come back home. But they were both
wrong—it was the goats. They had learned how to turn on the
switch. They liked the light. Who could blame them? Some nights
she'd go out to the barn. Disappear into the mist of the yard, the air
so thick that summer it was like walking through a pond. The dew
on her bare feet. Hilltop, a distant, jutting mountain down at the
base of the valley, all silvery and mysterious beneath a cradled half
moon. She'd walk to the edge of the yard, shine the flashlight into
the field, but see only the lacquered eyes of deer. Never Andy. She'd
shiver. She'd turn off the flashlight and stand there a moment, trying
to detect something ... a sound, a feeling, a presence—of him.
There was nothing.
In the barn, the daddy goat and nanny would cock their heads
and stare at her. She'd flick off the lights and stand there a moment.
Goats baaing in the darkness. The smell of hay. She'd step back outside,
pull the door closed, and glide back across the lawn. Before she
even got to the house the goats would turn the lights back on. Who
could blame them?
She'd have a cup of herbal tea or a glass of Tab. Maybe watch a
rerun on TV or play a hand of solitaire. She liked card games.
Always an eye to the window, looking for Andy.
If it weren't late, she'd call her sister in Virginia, who always
tried to talk her into coming down for a visit. Thought it was just
what she needed. We'll see, she'd say. Maybe in the fall, maybe in the
winter. And then she'd crawl back into bed with Dale.
"See the goats?" He'd ask.
"Yeah. They were acting sheepish."
Some nights he chortled, some nights he didn't. She felt his
warm body through the cotton sheets as she stared at the yellow ceiling.
We've got to paint this room sometime. So many things to
do—so many things undone. Finish the living room. Paper the
bathroom. And Andy's room still untouched since the day of the
accident, a sealed time capsule.
And then she'd drift off to sleep.
A Saturday morning in mid-August, the grass was as dry as a
carpet on her bare feet. Dale was cutting brush on the other side of
the dirt road by the barn. She crossed the road slowly, careful of the
stones. She was aware that there was a time when she would have
done this in a coquettish fashion, in a little halter top and cut-offs,
up on her tip-toes, her brown arms extended as if she were walking
a tight rope, her back arched just above her tiny waist. These days,
she just plain walked, the girlish gait was gone, maybe forever. She
was a big girl, tall, with broad shoulders, big dark green eyes and a
big curly mane of auburn hair, with streaks of gray now that she was
approaching her forties. She'd gained some weight. She was still in
good shape, but the size six of her college years—well, wasn't going
to happen again. It was true she had let herself go. Watched too
much TV. Started using double negatives when she talked. Slurred
her words and developed that lazy country twang to cover it.
"Whatever happened to that girl I knew in college," Dale asked
one time. "The Home Ec major with the minor in English Lit? She's
starting to sound like Dolly Parton."
"All Home Ec majors come to sound like Dolly Parton," she'd
replied, "if they gotta live on a stupid farm."

150
She walked up to a weathered old fence that framed a rectangle
of ground known as the corral. The goats wandered over. "I don't
nothin' for you to eat," she said. They shrugged, ventured over to
the other side of the corral. Three enormous hogs rolled around in
the mud beside an old bathtub that served as a watering trough. "Hi
Susan, hi, Mary, hi Julie," she said. Dale had named the hogs after
the wives of his friends. Everyone in their circle enjoyed the joke
except Julie, who was of ample girth and a boorish disposition.
Dale was on the other side of the yard, in a ravine choked with
brush. His T-shirt was draped over a fence post. Bits of leaves and
dust clung to his glistening brown back. He stood there silently,
staring at something, the machete in his right hand.
"Dale," she called.
He didn't move, just stood there ramrod straight, like that statue
in town of the Civil War soldier, a steely, purposeful look on his
face.
"Dale!"
He didn't flinch. What the hell is he up to now, she wondered.
She shook her head in disgust. She looked around for a moment,
drinking in the countryside. Summer was at its peak, about to burst.
The barn was at the bottom of a hill of corn. Spindly green stalks
shimmered in the wind. The oak tree at the top of the hill was pregnant
with leaves. The hollow was a thorny morass of weeds and
vines; her rose bushes ached with flowers.
Soon it would all come crashing down. She'd been here before;
knew the drill. Harvest hit these parts like a war. Dale's tractor
would inflict its carnage. The tall, splendid stalks of corn would be
reduced to a pile of hog food in a cage. This beautiful field would
be leveled as surely as if it had been bombed, with nothing but broken,
busted stalks, like beard stubble. As if there was a war going on.
A Holstein cow ambled out of the woods on top of the hill and
stood there looking down at her. It was Alice. Two weeks before she
had escaped, and they hadn't been able to catch her.
She turned her attention back to Dale, who was still motionless.
"Dale, Alice is on the hill," she said. He didn't move an inch.
And then she saw the groundhog, ten feet from Dale, standing
beside a mound of dirt. "Oh for Chrissakes, "she said. "My husband
is having a Mexican standoff with a groundhog."
Suddenly Dale burst towards the animal, his machete high over
his head. The groundhog scampered like a little seal. Dale dove,
bringing the blade down like a guillotine. It went thunk in the dirt;
the groundhog dove into the hole, just missing the blade.
Laughing, he rolled over, shaking his head. "Damn," he said.
"That groundhog was fast."
She leaned against the fence post, staring at him. That was the
image he would later remember, that face. "Full of color," he would
quietly tell his family and friends, "red as the tractor." Her eyes were
wide, her mouth slightly open, almost sensuous, as if she was sexually
turned on. He smiled nervously. And then the scream. She sat
down in the dirt and wailed.
"Just opened her mouth and let out a sound like an air raid
siren," he would explain. '"Why did you have to do that! Why
would you want to kill that groundhog?'"
She didn't stop for three days, until the doctor gave her some
medication. "It's about the boy, isn't it?" Dale asked. "The accident."
The doctor nodded.
The pills made her stop crying, but she was slow and lethargic
and sometimes hard to figure.
One night at dinner she aimlessly spread a pat of butter over an
ear of corn. She looked up at him and asked if there was some way
that he could pick the ears of corn without damaging the stalks. She
liked the way they looked in the field.
He gaped; the kitchen light, a round fluorescent bulb, reflected
in the lens of his glasses like twin halos. "You could pick it by hand,
but it would take forever," he said.
She stared at the corn. "Why do they call them ears anyway?"
she asked.
"I dunno. I guess someone thought they looked like ears when
they're on the stalk." "You ask me, they look more like dicks," she
said.
"Not mine, I hope," he said.
She smiled. "No." She savagely bit into an ear. They both
laughed. What a release it was to laugh. She bit again and they
laughed even harder, so hard she began to cry, and within moments
she was bawling again. She dropped the corn on the plate, buried
her head in her hands. She continued to cry. He sat there, not
knowing what to say. Eventually he started eating again.
"It's just that I wanted to prolong summer," she finally said.

152
"Why do you want to do that?" He asked. "I thought you liked
autumn."
"It's okay, I guess." She sopped up a hot sloppy tear with her
napkin. "But I don't know if I can handle autumn this year." The
opaque look returned to his face. He stared at her, a forkful of beans
in his right hand.
"I mean, this place is hard to figure," Elizabeth said, hot tears
once again dripping off her cheeks.
"Hard to figure?"
"The landscape changes from green to brown to white. I look
back and I can't figure it out. One minute the ground is gushing
weeds and flowers, and the next thing you know the meadow is
brown and the tomato plants have given up the ghost. Look at my
roses; they're already starting to droop their heads."
"That's the cycle of life," he said. "Everything that lives eventually
dies. Life and death. It's, you know, karma . . ."
Her temper rose so suddenly she felt it—her forehead got all
hot and tingly. He was trying to placate her in the worst way.
"Oh, please," she hissed. "I used to believe in luck and karma
and poetic justice and all that astrology crap," she said. "It's bullshit,
Dale, and you know it. Life isn't a buyer at the farmer's market. It
doesn't strike bargains. It don't make deals. It just rolls on and on
and on, throwing cards from a shuffled deck."
"Huh?"
"Like this." She dealt an invisible card from an invisible deck,
pantomiming a card dealer. "A sunny day." She dealt another. "An
incident." Another and another. "A new pair of jeans. A death. A
birthday. Life is like playing blackjack in Atlantic City. You just take
the cards you're dealt. Sometimes you win, most times you lose."
He just sat there, wondering how her once-lovely green eyes had
ever turned so hard. She carried her dinner into the living room. She
finished it while watching Entertainment Tonight. Dale stayed in the
kitchen.
The main story on Entertainment Tonight was about Sharon
Stone. She said she hadn't had a date in a year. Elizabeth rolled her
eyes. "Tell me another one," she said to the TV.
And then they did a profile of Jimmy Stewart. He had been
raised in nearby Coalport, as had Elizabeth and Dale. All their lives
they'd heard stories about Jimmy Stewart and his father's hardware
store on Main Street, where his Academy Award was displayed in
the front window.
"He's back in the news again?" Dale said, wandering into the
living room with a bowl of ice cream.
"They've been doing a lot of stories on him lately," Elizabeth
said. "Something's up."
"Must be about to croak." Dale said.
She shot him a look out of the corner of her eyes. He grimaced
and looked down. "Sometimes I never say the right thing," he said.
"Most of the time you never say the right thing," she said.
She was working in the yard the next morning when she heard
a commotion of birds in the sky. Just overhead, a cluster of sparrows
buzzed around a big old crow. The sparrows were chirping up a
storm, zigzagging around the crow like if they'd half lost their
minds, the crow big and dull, completely unfazed, like it was stoned
on drugs. And then she saw the reason for the commotion—the
crow had a sparrow in its beak. A terrified little thing making the
most god-awful, pitiful sounds.
They disappeared over the line of hemlocks behind the house.
A stark reminder of the times flashing across her sky like a news bulletin.
That kind of stuff happens here all the time, she thought, staring
at the sky. For face value, it's a happy little white house, a barn,
and a shed. But everything out here dies.
Maybe she could escape it. Move back to Coalport. Live right
in town. Near the college.
And then again, maybe there was no escape. Maybe every place
was about as bad. The universe was conceived in violence. That was
a fact.
She seemed to get better over the next few weeks. She read a lot.
Paperbacks of "tumultuous passion," as Dale called them, sometimes
two a day.
Late at night, she still went out into the yard with the flashlight.

154
The hills steeped in the scent of an early autumn, the sky splattered
with stars.
Dale was preoccupied with catching Alice, the bovine fugitive.
She took off whenever he got within fifty yards, and she was
damned quick for a cow. He chased her on horseback but she
slipped into the thick woods and lost them.
One day he climbed a tree at the top of the hill and waited for
her, figuring he'd lasso her and tie her to the tree. While he waited
he smoked a joint. When Alice finally did come out from the
woods, he stared at her in admiration. He wondered why he had
never noticed how cool cows are. Such big proud heads, such large,
totally intense eyes. The fur is like a dog's, he thought, except it's
. . . different. The cow meandered back over the hillside and he
watched it affectionately the whole way. It wasn't until she was gone
that he remembered he was supposed to lasso her.
To make matters worse, Alice wasn't shy. She dashed in and out
of their lives making comedic cameos at the least opportune of
times. When they had a barbecue for Dale's mother, the cow lumbered
across the yard creating pandemonium. When the man from
the bank came to appraise their property for a loan, he looked up
from his writing pad to see Alice sneaking across the road with a
sunflower in her mouth.
The bank appraiser looked at Elizabeth. "That's our cow," she
explained.
One afternoon Reverend Boyd paid a visit. Elizabeth served
him iced tea on the back porch. He was going on and on about little
Andy and God and how Little Andy was with God when suddenly
the cow peeked around the corner of the house. The
Reverend's back was turned to Alice so of course he didn't see her—
Elizabeth did. She burst out laughing.
The Reverend looked at her oddly. She pointed at Alice, but by
the time he turned to look, Alice was gone. And then she really
laughed, knowing she looked like a big idiot.
"My cow," she said, holding her hand to her mouth in a futile
attempt to suppress the giggles from gushing out. "My cow was
right there."
The Reverend stared at her blankly, and then patted her knee as
if to say There, there.
One night Alice's mooing awakened them. Dale opened the
window and saw her standing there in the pumpkin patch, the
whole valley engulfed in the light of a full moon. "Get out of there,"
he yelled. He made exaggerated shooing motions with his hands.
The cow looked up at him, cocked her head in curiosity, and mooed
again.
"That damn cow," Dale said to his wife.
The cow looked away, bored.
Elizabeth smiled, rolled over onto her stomach. It was early
September, good sleeping weather. "She's just serenading us is all,"
she said.
Early one evening the next week when Elizabeth was at the
mall, Roger Pennington and Sam Isenberg stopped by with a couple
of six packs. They worked for American Gas Drilling and had
been working at a gas well just down the road. They were covered
with mud and smelled like kerosene. They wore Brogan construction
boots and serious jeans. Roger was squat and beefy, and had
dirty yellow hair that perpetually fell in front of his moon-shaped
face and hound-dog eyes. Sam had a tight crew cut. He was six three
and weighed 270. He didn't get cleaned up too often. Elizabeth had
once said neither one of them was exactly fun to look at.
Dale was gazing at the field when they pulled in. He had harvested
the last of the corn earlier in the day and was now surveying
the damage. He was thinking about how she had said that autumn
hit these parts like a war. She was right. It looked like the site of a
massacre. The stalks were all busted and broken, except for one, a
solitary stock, somehow still standing in the middle of the field,
waving a shoddy, moth-eaten leaf like a flag of surrender. The treasures
of the battle locked safely in the silo.
Roger parked his new red Cherokee pickup beside the barn. He
opened the doors and turned up the radio, which was for all intents
and purposes permanently set to the classic rock station. A song by
Arrowsmith. Something to talk over. They hung out beside the
truck. Roger and Dale smoked cigarettes. Sam, who was trying to
quit, chewed on a weed. They talked about construction work and
football. In an hour or so, they finished the six packs; Dale went

156
into the house and came back with another. "Fresh horses," Sam
said. He sat on his heel, couched in the growing shadow of the barn,
and looked out at the valley.
"Some day I'm gonna build a house on Single Tit," he said. It
was his name for Hilltop, which had clear slopes and a cluster of
trees on top.
Roger snorted. "I ain't gonna shovel your driveway in winter,"
he said.
"Can't say I like the image much," Dale said. "A house on
Hilltop."
"Don't worry about it," Sam said. "I don't know how old man
Gallagher farms it, let alone how someone would build a house on
it." He took the weed out of his mouth and appraised the end of it.
"She's too steep."
They talked about the Steelers; they talked about the Pirates.
Dale went into the house and came back with yet another six-pack.
"Fresh horses," Sam said. Roger popped the tab on one and spray
whooshed out. He held the beer away from his body and sucked his
gut in.
"That's a live one!" Sam shouted as they guffawed.
A new song on the radio . . . electric guitars, a heavy beat. "Yes!"
Sam cried. "Green Grass and High Tide!" Roger jumped into the
cab and cranked it up. Even the hogs looked over.
"Twenty years old and it still rocks!" Dale cried over the racket.
"Twenty years later and we're still rockin'," Sam said, wiping
beer drool from his chin with his shirt. The song ended and Roger
turned down the radio. They were silent for a moment. The drone
of a single engine airplane could be heard somewhere in the distance.
"I hate them bars where they play music too loud," Roger said.
The others nodded in agreement.
"How's your brother doing?" Dale asked Sam.
"About the same, I guess," Sam said. "Quid Isenberg—10;
World-0. At the half."
"That's a fuggin' fact," Dale said. "It's Quid Isenberg against the
world. It's always been Quid Isenberg against the world. And he's
winning!"
"You're damn right that's a.fuggin fack,"Roger intoned drunkenly.
"Quid Isenberg must be worth damn near thirty million
dollars. He'd be the richest man in Calico County, if only he lived
here."
"Shud-upppppp!" Sam grinned, slapping Roger against the
chest with the back of his hand. "You don't know what you're talking
about. He don't make near that kind of money. "
"He's the most successful oil executive in the world," Roger
said. "He lives in a mansion acrosst the street from Martha Stewart."
Sam burst out laughing. "No he don't!"
"Yeah he does!"
"He's my brother, I oughta know!" Sam said. "He ain't the most
successful executive in the world and he don't live in a mansion. He
has an apartment in New York City and a house that ain't even
much bigger than mine."
"Except I'll bet his house has a screen in the screen door." Dale
said. "Unlike yours."
"That's probably true," Roger said.
"I seen your cow the other night," Sam said, changing the topic.
Dale made a sour face. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know," he said.
"Where did you see her? Down at Bing's Tavern, I suppose.
Someplace like 'at? Everybody's seen my goddamn cow."
"No, she went into the 7-11 in Sycamore Landing. Ordered a
hay hoagie." Roger guffawed.
Dale smiled. "You fuckin' guys," he said.
"What are you gonna do about her?" Roger asked. "It's getting
colder. She's gonna freeze."
"I dunno. One of these days I expect she'll march down the hill
and turn herself in."
"I'd turn her in." Sam said. "I'd turn her into meat." He made
a make-believe pistol with his hand and pointed it at Dale. "Boom,
he said, pulling the trigger.
"Elizabeth's been having a rough time," Dale said.
An uncomfortable silence. Roger tapped his hand to the radio.
A song by the Doors. Roger looked up at his truck. The baby goat
was dancing around on the hood.
"Hey, you son of a bitch!" he said. Sam and Dale roared with
laughter. Funniest thing they ever saw, a goat dancing around on
Roger's brand new pick-up truck. Dale chased her off it.
"Ole' Alice is just gonna freeze in the winter anyway," Sam said,
examining the hood for scratches. "We might as well go bring

158
'er in."
"Elizabeth'd flip," Dale said.
"She ain't here. Tell her the cow ran off."
"And what am I gonna tell her when I suddenly have two sides
of beef this winter?"
"Tell her you bought two sides of beef," Sam said. "She'll never
know."
"Tell her Alice went south for the winter." Roger said. "We
could shoot her now and take her to Dutch directly."
"Dutch works for the grocery store," Dale said. "He can't butcher
a cow for me."
"He's now freelancing," Sam said.
Dale thought a moment. "Oh, what the hell," he said. He went
back to the house and came back with a six-pack in one hand and a
rifle in the other. Sam looked at the gun. No scope, bolt action,
stock all shot to shit. He wouldn't be caught dead with such a sorry
ass firearm. Dale pulled some bullets out of his pocket. They looked
damn big.
"Thirty-ought six?" He asked.
"Seven m.m.Magnum," Dale said. Roger whistled appreciatively.
They climbed into the pickup and drove up through the field,
over the busted corn stalks. "Just like a commercial," Sam said. They
were halfway up the hill when Alice meandered out of the woods at
the top. She looked at them.
"Stop," Dale said. "She'll run."
"But we ain't close enough for a shot. Not without a scope."
Roger said.
"Maybe not for a normal man," Dale replied. They snickered.
They knew he was bullshitting, but they didn't know to what
extent. Dale couldn't hit a bull's ass with a baseball bat.
They climbed out of the truck. Dale crouched in the dirt on
one knee, used the other knee for support as he leveled the gun. He
took aim and squeezed the trigger. It clicked.
"Oh," he said, sheepishly. "I forgot to load it." They burst out
laughing. Memories of past hunting experiences flashed before him
in his drunken haze. His own father hadn't been much of a hunter.
They used to just sit in the car, drinking cocoa, waiting for deer.
Dale pulled three massive bullets from his pocket and loaded
them into the gun. He slammed the bolt home and clicked off the
safety. He pretended to take aim, but in reality drew a bead about
ten feet above the cow. He squeezed the trigger. The whole hill
rocked from the repercussion; their ears rang fiercely. The bullet left
a trail of smoke like a rocket. It hit Alice directly under the right eye.
She staggered and dropped.
"Good shot!" Sam said.
"Lucky," Roger said.
Dale just stared, saying nothing.
They gutted the animal on top of the hill. It was a mess—nothing
like gutting a deer—and they were covered with blood. They
hoisted her into the back of the truck and drove back down the hill.
They arrived in front of the barn at the same time as Elizabeth.
Elizabeth got out of the car. Took it in. Alice all bloody. Her
husband and those other two fucking jerks drunk. Alice all opened
up and empty. Looking at her through dead eyes.
Oddly, she felt serene, anchored by some distant memory of a
time when things were different. Not better, just different. The softness
of life. A song ran through her mind. "Go ask Alice, when she
was just small ..."
She didn't wail, didn't holler. In some ways she felt better than
she had in a long time. A clear solitary thought was her beacon and
her anchor, for she knew in that moment exactly what she was going
to do.
"Good day, gentlemen," was all she said, walking to the house.

160
—Jeffrey Faas
Five Years to Life
Nonfiction Winner
judged by Patricia O'Toole
It was the first week of June, 1991. I'm not sure exactly what
day it was, but it really doesn't matter. Dan and I had been on the
river for five days or so, pitching our tent on various islands that
dotted the Mississippi between the Minnesota and Wisconsin border.
It was our maiden voyage on the flat-bottomed fishing boat we
bought for five hundred dollars. We spent a month fixing the boat
up—painting it, patching holes, replacing worn parts. When we
were done, it wasn't powerful enough to pull a skier but it was powerful
enough to carry us away from the real world for a few days.
We chopped wood for fires and roasted hot dogs and burgers.
We drank whiskey and rolled our own cigarettes. When it got hot
during the day, we jumped in the water, fish biting at our toes.
When we ran out of food, we fished for sunnies and carp, boiled
water to drink. We explored inlets, hidden waterways that led to
nowhere. Or we just sat back in the boat and let the river take us
wherever she wanted to, listening to dragonflies and watching the
turtles slide silently off logs. Some days, we stayed on the water too
long, squinting to see in the dark, the moon our only guide. We
maneuvered the boat, slicing through the quiet water, avoiding
floating limbs and underwater wing-dams. Then one of us would
recognize a tree branch that hung over the river, or a familiar rock
that jutted through the glassy surface, and we would find our way
back to camp, our home for another day.
We didn't know how long we would stay out there and
again—it really didn't matter. It was summer vacation, our first year
of college was behind us. Textbooks gathered dust, professors went
on vacations, and the freshman dorm-room we shared sat empty.
"This is the closest thing to total freedom we will ever experience,"
Dan said one night, digging his feet into the sand. We had
just finished eating and were sitting around the fire smoking cigarettes,
taking warm shots of Jim Beam.
"But it really isn't total freedom," I said. "We still have responsibilities—school,
family, jobs. Eventually, we have to go back."
"Who says? There's nobody out here telling us we have to do
anything," he said, taking a long drag off his cigarette. "We have
total control of our lives right now, at this very moment. We could
stay out here forever if we wanted."
"What about in the winter?" The logs on the fire crackled and
spit. I put my bare feet a little closer, the night air turning cool and
breezy. "We couldn't survive out here in the winter."
"We go south, like the birds do," Dan said. "Louisiana,
Arkansas, Mississippi. We could follow the river all the way to New
Orleans. Then in the spring, when the ice melts, we come back
upriver."
"Would you ever consider doing that?" I asked. "Would you
leave everything behind and just live out here?"
"No, probably not," he said. The fire cast shadows in the
woods behind him, moving silently between the trees. "I just like
knowing that I could."
For four summers in a row, Dan and I spent most of our days
on the river, taking advantage of the freedom she offered us, an
unspoken bond forming each day.
It is September 5th, 1995, one week before our Aquinas High
School five-year reunion. I receive a letter today from Dan. We have
been friends since high school, roommates for four years. But now
he is in prison, Month Three of a five-year sentence. He has recently
been moved from Wausau Correctional Institute, a maximumsecurity
facility, to Fox River Correctional, medium-security. In the
letter—our only means of communication for the past three

162
months—he informs me that I am allowed to visit him now since
he has been moved out of maximum-security. At Wausau, only family
members were allowed to visit, but the visitation policies are less
stringent at Fox River. He tells me about an outdoor barbecue coming
up, a special meal rewarding inmates with good behavior
records. He says it would be nice to see someone besides family,
that they cry too much when they come to see him. Dan says I
shouldn't come if I don't feel comfortable or if I have other plans.
He would understand if I didn't want to.
It is Saturday, September 12th, the day of our five-year class
reunion. I am on a rural highway, driving to Fox River. Through the
rain-splattered windshield I watch the farms of central Wisconsin
crawl by thinking about what I will say to Dan when I get there. A
sign along the highway reads: Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers State
Penitentiary—10 Miles. My stomach hurts. I smoke another cigarette
to calm down, a whole pack even though I rarely smoke. I've
never been to a prison. I've seen prison movies; most of them starring
Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone. This is all I know of prisons.
It is in sight now, looming lonely and massive in the drizzle,
surrounded by miles of vacant fields, dead corn stalks. The main
watchtower is three stories tall, the top encircled with windows and
men holding guns. There are cinder block walls two stories high
maybe, with lookout towers every hundred feet. More men with
guns pace back and forth between the towers. A chain link fence
forms a second line of defense, running around the prison walls. It
is topped with razor wire, coiling on seemingly forever. I pull into
the lot and stop at a gate. I swallow hard to get rid of the lump in
my throat.
"Identification," the man in the booth says. He wears mirrored
sunglasses and a blue uniform that seems too small. No nametag.
I smile, say hello—my voice cracking—and hand him my driver's
license. He looks through some papers on a clipboard and
writes something down. I want to ask how his day is, comment on
the weather, anything to make my stomach stop wrenching. He gets
on a phone and says something I can't hear, hangs up, and waves me
on. I follow the signs to visitor parking. There are a few people get-
ting out of cars, and this somehow comforts me, to see other visitors.
A black woman and a little boy I assume is her son get out of
a car next to me.
"Are you here for the barbecue?" I ask, satisfying my desire to
talk to a person who doesn't carry a gun.
"Yes," she says, taking the boy's hand. "You too?"
"Yeah," I say. "I'm visiting a friend."
"This is your first time here." She says this more as a fact than
as a question. I follow her across the parking lot avoiding the rain
puddles. The little boy drags his feet and is pulled along.
"You can't wear hats inside. Gang colors," she says, looking back
at me. "And your boots can't have laces. Those metal eyelets won't
work either." I never thought of my Packer hat being associated
with a gang or the laces of my boots as potential weapons. I'm out
of my element here. I could turn around and leave now, tell Dan
that I got into an accident on the way, slippery roads, freezing rain.
He'd understand. I should be at home getting ready for the reunion,
trying to disguise my receding hairline, preparing phony lines when
old classmates ask me whatever happened with that Dan Kendall
incident.
"This is all I brought," I say, looking down at my black work
boots, which suddenly seem like the worst thing ever to wear to a
prison. She is wearing slip-on leather sandals and the boy is wearing
Bert and Ernie slippers. They have been here before. "Will they still
let me in?"
"They'll let you in," she says. " But you can't wear them boots.
Better hope your feet don't stink." Her boy, who is probably seven
or eight, lets out a giggle. Seeing his innocent smile, especially in a
place like this, makes me feel better.
There is a small building with a sign on the door: Visitor's
Entrance, Wait for the Buzzer to Enter. The black woman and her
son go in first. A few minutes later the buzzer sounds and I open the
door. Inside two men in blue uniforms are seated behind a Plexiglas
window. There is a speaker in the glass and a small slot near the bottom.
"Who are you hear to see?" one of the men asks. He is an older
white man, probably late fifties, witii thick silver hair. He has a
Navy tattoo on his right forearm badly faded against cracked leathery
skin.

164
"Kendall," I say. "Dan Kendall."
"I need a driver's license and social security card," he says. I slide
them through the slot. The other man gets up. Seconds later he is
in the room with me. He is also a white man but closer to my age.
His hair is short, military style, and he has a solid build. Probably
training to be a guard.
"Strip down to your underwear," he says. I take off my clothes,
wishing I hadn't worn my Simpsons boxers. "Hold your arms above
your head and slowly turn around." As I turn, he runs a hand-held
metal detector over my entire body, concentrating on specific areas
where I might hide a file or a knife. I wonder what they sometimes
find and where they find it. It makes me cringe and I pray to God
that the machine doesn't beep. When I check out clean, he takes my
clothes and runs the metal detector over them too. Nothing beeps
until he gets to my boots.
"These have to stay here," he says. "Your wallet, keys, and hat
too." He hands me my pants and shirt and I fumble to get them
back on.
The older man slides me an orange key with a number on it.
"Put your stuff in locker seven," he says. "You get your ID back
when you leave." I am given a pair of size twelve prison-issued shoes.
A buzzer sounds and I am led through a series of steel doors. The
last set of doors leads outside to a holding area fenced in by chain
link and alarmed gates. Up the hill about a hundred yards, the
prison stands solid and stoic, gray stone with steel-barred windows.
There is a chapel and a gymnasium next to the main building
dwarfed by the magnitude of the prison itself. Several inmates are
out raking leaves and pulling weeds. The rain has stopped but a
light mist still falls keeping the air wet and foggy. About ten other
people are waiting in the holding area with me, including the
woman and her son. We are told to wait for a guard to come down.
"Took your boots, huh?" she says, glancing at my feet.
The prison shoes are basically slippers with hard rubber soles
with no laces or eyelets. I look down at the shoes and nod, wondering
who wore them before me. I wonder if he is on the outside living
among the free, or if he died here.
Two guards emerge from the prison and let us out of the holding
area. I follow the guards and the other visitors. They have all
done this before—everyone except me. I can tell by the way they
walk, the way they aren't interested in what surrounds them, their
casual talk. Not even the children seem fazed. One of the guards
blows a whistle and holds his hand in the air.
"Enter the visiting room and sit down at a table. We will send
the prisoners in one at a time and they will find you. Remain seated.
If you need to use the rest room, raise your hand and wait for a
guard." They open a door and we file into a large, well-lit room
filled with tables and chairs. In one corner of the room there is a
children's play area with a plastic playhouse and slide. Toys are scattered
on the floor. There are several children playing and many of
the tables are already full. I find an empty table and sit. Everything
is plastic—no metal. I am surprised and relieved to see I don't have
to talk on a phone, separated by a piece of glass and chicken wire.
That's how it is in the movies. Another surprise is the number of
children here.
I watch people around me, careful not to make eye contact for
too long. The prisoners wear brown jumpsuits and brown shoes. If
it wasn't for the uniform they would be hard to pick out. Most of
them don't look like the prisoners I have seen in the movies, especially
the ones reading Winnie the Pooh books and fussing over
baby bottles. But don't get me wrong. There are plenty of scars and
tattoos, missing teeth, and shaved heads. I notice the white people
sit on one side of the room and the black people on the other. A
group of Hispanics gathers in a corner watching the door for their
loved ones to come through. I look for the woman from the parking
lot. She is sitting at a table across the room talking to an inmate,
a man with dreadlocks that hang past his shoulders. Her little boy
is wrapped around the man's leg, laughing, the leg moving up and
down like a seesaw. The woman is showing the man photographs,
pointing to the pictures and smiling. I imagine she is saying words
like birthday, picnic, Little League, first day of school.
I watch for Dan and rehearse what I am going to say. What can
I say? How's it going. What have you been up tot Have you been raped
yet? I hate this. A guard eyes me from the corner of the room. I must
look nervous—suspicious maybe. My eyelid twitches and a drop of
sweat trickles down the side of my rib cage. I want this day to be
over. When Dan comes through the door, I stand up then quickly
sit down, remembering what the guard said. Dan looks sick but he
smiles when he spots me. His hair is matted down. Oily strands

166
cling to his forehead. His face is gaunt, the cheekbones protruding,
pushing against the pasty white skin. He doesn't look like the man
I roomed with for four years. He doesn't look like anyone I know.
We shake hands but don't hug. We aren't huggers anyway—especially
not in a prison.
"How are you?" I say, just like I planned in my head for the last
six hours.
"I could be worse," he says, in typical Dan Kendall fashion.
Keep a positive attitude, he said in a letter once. "This place is definitely
better than maximum-security. It's like a country club compared
to Wausau."
"I'm sure it is." I can't imagine what that place was like and I
feel stupid even implying that I might. I don't know shit about this
world. "It seems pretty nice here."
"Yeah. They let us do a lot more too. Back in the other place,
we were in our cells most of the day. Here, they let us go to the
chapel and the library. They have a gymnasium and a decent weight
room. I even joined the prison softball team."
"No shit? That's really cool." I say this like it's the greatest thing
I've ever heard. "Who do you guys play?"
"Usually, inmates from other prisons. Sometimes, though, they
let teams come in from the outside. Those guys always look pretty
scared when they get here." He smiles, probably seeing a similar
look on my own face.
"I can imagine," I say. "It must be nice to spend some time outside."
"Yeah. It's nice to get out of here once in a while, get some fresh
air," he says. He looks across the room, at a window. The rain has
started again. "When I get outside I just wish I could keep going,
over the wall, into the corn fields."
"Some day," I say, sounding like a line out of a bad movie. "I
mean, maybe you'll get out sooner than you think. Nobody ever
serves their whole sentence, do they?"
Dan shrugs his shoulders and doesn't say anything. He brushes
a strand of hair out of his eyes. He looks older than he did three
months ago. I catch myself staring.
'I look pretty shitty, huh." Like the woman from the parking
lot, Dan says this as a statement, not as a question. His hair falls
back into his eyes.
"Don't worry," I say. "You were always ugly."
"I don't sleep much," he says. His hands move up and down on
his pant legs. "My old cellmate killed his own brother over a game
of Nintendo. Sliced him from the sternum down to the groin. It's
tough to sleep with a nutcase like that three feet below you."
We sit in an awkward silence. How the fuck do I react to that?
Nothing I can say will do justice to what should really be said.
Maybe I should make a joke. Maybe I should just shake my head.
Maybe I should say I understand, but that would be a blatant lie. It
used to be simpler than this. Sitting in the bars, watching TV on the
couch, floating down the river in our boat—Dan and I never had
an uncomfortable moment, never searched for the right thing to say.
I pretend to cough and look down at the floor.
"It's better now though," he says, breaking the silence. "Now I
room with a little Asian guy. Armed robbery, but he's harmless. I'm
starting to sleep a little better. Its really not that bad here."
I don't know if he says this to make me feel better or to make
himself feel better. Looking around the room, I wonder how many
of these guys don't sleep at night. There is a young man not more
than nineteen sitting at the table next to us. An obese woman wearing
a sweat suit sits next to him. She might be his mother, but I can't
be sure. She is reading a book to herself and they don't talk. His eyes
dart around the room, his leg moves up and down rhythmically.
There is a fresh scar running from his temple to his left nostril. I
wonder if he got that scar in here. I wonder how many of these men
deserve to be here and how many are good guys who fucked up one
day, one hour, one second. A whistle blows and several guards
march into the room. One of them announces that it's time to eat
and shouts instructions for the prisoners. We are separated from the
inmates and led outside. The rain is coming down hard so we can't
eat outside as planned.
The gymnasium doubles as the cafeteria and is set up with additional
tables and chairs to accommodate us—the outsiders. The
inmates who don't or can't have visitors have just finished eating and
are filing out of the gymnasium. Most of them wear shackles on
their legs. One man is handcuffed and led by two guards on either
side. These men look far more threatening than the inmates in the
visitor's room. Some of them glare at us, cussing under their breath.
Some look down at their feet and don't make a sound. Some of

168
them wink at the women and children, others eye the men. These
inmates have a sinister look about them I didn't notice in the other
inmates. I can't explain it. Maybe it is the look of men who are no
longer loved, men who are only capable of hating and being hated.
These men are more real than anything I have ever seen outside of
these walls.
It's a campus house party on a Friday night. My friends and I
drink, smoke marijuana, listen to music, socialize. Do you have a
boyfriend? No one is getting hurt. We are just having fun. After several
hours the keg sputters and dies. It's late and the party is over.
Girls and guys exchange glances, touches, innocent brushes. I see
Dan leaving with a woman, his arm around her shoulder. They
stumble up the basement stairs out the door to a dark bedroom
somewhere on campus. Don't wake up my roommate. She has a test
tomorrow. There is kissing, touching, petting. Under the comforter,
on top of the sheets. Clothes drop on the floor in piles. I shouldn't
be doing this. Keep going. Don't. Stop. Don't stop. Alcohol breath
reeks, mingles with cologne, perfume, smoke, the smell of sex. The
next morning, names are forgotten, faces unfamiliar, fake phone
numbers are exchanged. Guys and girls walk home, take long showers,
try to remember, try to forget. What happened last night? How
did I get here? What did I do?
Dan and I sit down to eat at a long cafeteria table set end to end
with other tables that stretch the full length of the gymnasium. An
odor of sweat, like a locker room, lingers over the tables, overpowering
the smell of the food. Dan's plate is full but mine is nearly
empty, one chicken leg, and a roll. I have a carton of milk, too, the
kind we got in grade school for a quarter.
"Not hungry?" he asks, glancing at my plate. "This is as good as
it gets in here."
"No, it's not the food," I say. "Just nerves, I guess." I feel
ashamed that I am the one who can't eat, the one who is nervous.
I'm the one who gets to leave here in an hour.
"I don't blame you," he says. He butters a roll. "I barely ate for
the first month. Some crackers, maybe a slice of bread. Stuff that
wouldn't come back up. I lost twenty pounds, but I'm eating better
now. At least I'm keeping the food down."
A guard blows a whistle when everyone is seated and the gymnasium
falls silent. The inmates bow their heads, some fold their
hands, some mumble prayers to themselves. I bow my head and
pray for the first time in months. Pray that I never end up here. The
silence is reassuring, calming, orderly. But then the whistle blows
again. It's time to eat.
During lunch, Dan tells me about the politics of the prison,
how money is replaced with cigarettes, chewing tobacco, soda,
candy. He tells me about the different gangs, the men you avoid and
the men you befriend. There is a hierarchy in prison—child molesters
at the bottom. Seniority means respect, drugs mean power. He
explains the prison labor system. Dan works on the grounds crew,
raking leaves, planting gardens, shoveling snow. Twenty-five cents
an hour, but he says just being outside is his reason for doing it. He
is going to enroll in some classes that the prison offers through a
local community college. All the schoolwork is done through the
mail, but the credits are transferable once he gets out. He asks about
our friends and about our hometown. He asks what people are saying,
if he was in the papers, what they said on the news. I tell him
not to worry about it. I tell him things will be the same when he gets
out, but he knows I am lying. A buzzer like a fire alarm sounds and
the inmates get up from the tables.
"That means it's time for lock-up," Dan says. "We have to go
back to our cells." Around us, prisoners hug their family, friends.
Dan and I shake hands, a quick pat on the back.
"Thanks for coming," he says. "Say hi to the guys for me. Tell
them I can have visitors now. And take good care of our boat."
"Don't worry, I will. We'll be out on the river before you know
it," I say. "You take care of yourself."
I have trouble looking him in the eye. As he turns and walks
away single-file with murderers, rapists, robbers, child molesters, I
wonder if Dan remembers what really happened that night. I wonder
about the woman, if she still thinks about that night, if she
remembers what really happened. I follow the other guests out of
the gymnasium down to the visitor's entrance. None of the guards

170
say goodbye or tell us to drive safe. They hand me my clothes and
drivers license.
"You're free to go," the man behind the counter says. He presses
a buzzer and I push the door open and step into the parking lot.
The wind blows through the treetops, littering the wet ground with
orange and red leaves. It is starting to get cold. I hurry to my car,
desperate to get out of here before it gets dark. I look around for the
black woman and her son but they are already gone.
In my rearview mirror the prison gets smaller, slowly disappearing
into the gray mist that blankets the countryside. I think about
Dan's parents driving this road, leaving their son behind in that
place, wondering what will happen to him when they go, when they
are no longer there to protect him. I drive faster, stepping on the
gas, leaving the prison behind me. I watch the land through my car
window, longing for something I recognize, something that lets me
know I am almost home.
It is March 27th, 1999. I am sitting outside of a reception hall
on the banks of the Mississippi River taking a breather from the
relentless barrage of activities they inflict on the groom. The water
moves by slowly around the ice chunks that remain from the relentless
Wisconsin winter.
Dan comes out and stands next to me hands shoved in the
pockets of his rented tuxedo slacks. He has been out of prison for a
few months now after serving three years of his five-year sentence.
He is still on probation and had to receive special permission just to
drink a glass of champagne during his toast. He has forever lost his
right to vote, own a firearm, and run for office. There will always be
a black mark on his record, something he must tell every employer,
every girlfriend, for the rest of his life. Part of his probation prohibits
him from going into bars, bowling alleys, anywhere that
serves alcohol. We still hang out, shoot pool, watch football on TV,
go to the movies. Things are different though and I wonder if they
will ever be the same. Our conversations have awkward silences,
filled with nail biting and downward glances, flashes of prison walls
and brown jumpsuits. I'd like to say I don't see my best friend any
differently than I did three years ago. But he was in a place I never
want to see again, a place that doesn't fit into my conception of the
world. Maybe he sees me differently too. Does he resent me for not
having experienced what he had to, for not coming to visit as often
as I should have? I told Dan that things would be the same when he
got out, that nothing would change. We both knew I was lying.
"I never got to thank you for being my best man," I say to him.
"It means a lot to have you here."
"There's no way I would have missed it," he says. A fish jumps
in front of us, sending a ring of circles spreading across the water. "I
would have busted out of prison to be here."
"I know you would have," I say, and I believe him. "Did you
ever think what it would be like to break out?"
"Every day," he says. "Some days more than others."
"Were there ever any good days?" I ask.
"When my parents came to visit or when my brothers and sisters
would bring their new babies. Those were good days. But then
again those were always the worst nights too." He lights a cigarette,
a pack a day since he got out. "The first time you came to see me.
You know, the day of our class reunion."
"Yeah," I say. I watch the reflections of my friends and family
dancing in the flawless surface of the water. "What about it?"
"That was a pretty good day." I wait to see if he has more to say,
more that he wants to tell me. I don't ask him how he found out
about our class reunion. I don't ask him what really went on behind
those prison walls for three years, what really happened to him during
those first few months in maximum security. I just wait to see if
he wants to tell me. We are both silent, like in the prison that day,
but this time, it isn't an awkward silence. It feels right, for the first
time since this all began, even if just for this moment. Together, we
stand on the river's bank, listening only to the familiar sound of her
water moving by us. The edges of the river are still frozen, but summer
is approaching. The days are getting warmer and the ice is slowly
melting. Someday soon the river will invite us back home again.

172
—Anne Babson
The Recounting of a
Polite Occasion
Poetry Winner
judged by Giyn Maxwell
A sugar cube of well-planned nonchalance festers in my throat and
infects it with unspeakable secrets, things that demand shuddering.
My chords are scraped hoarse from "Thank you!" to party crashers
who Don't deserve it—especially from crooning it to you. I am
fatally polite and wait for my kindness to kill my enemies in this
grand baroque tea house, in this cobweb-strewn parlor, but you
don't seem at all close to dying from it. Did you know that I am
swallowing bitter pills now at the rate of four before every meal?
They are supposed to help me lose and fit precisely into this itchy
matron's tea-dance ball gown you have bequeathed to me for this
polite occasion.
There is no room for outrage in the cleavage of this gift dress. There
is no room for cursing around the zipper up the hips, just for,
"Please pass me . . ." the moldering watercress sandwiches, and for
"Would you care for some more" of the urine-flavored tea. There is
no room in the waistline for screaming or sharp laughter. You compliment
me, say I look nice. I somehow manage to wheeze out
something to say anything—I stammer, "I adore sitting here with
you. My, what lovely weather we are having."
I wish the sleeves had room for me to reach across the table and slap
you back. I wish the collar were not so high and tight, that I might
tell you how much I wish you would go home. I am so good at smiling
gamely while it strangles me, that you are too arrogant to suppose
how much I loathe it, that your grandbaby at my sagging
breast will leech me dry one sad day, that the successful husband
who now nightly hammers at my hip bones athletically will imagine
that I am somebody else at that crucial moment—the one where
your litanies to a male God are answered, then roll over and snore.
Watch how I caress his arm—look how tenderly I gaze up at him
while he speaks to you! "Are you having as much fun as we are?" He
asks you, and you nod vigorously.
I used to wait for the day my grunting husband would love me savagely.
I would wear a hide sarong on a tandoori-baked island, while
I hunted wild hare, breaking their necks in snares and roasting them
on a spit. Instead, I speak French fluently and know niceties from
the official languages of the United Nations. No Crusoe, I, and you
no Friday—This apartment is no mud hut. I own three complete
sets of European hand-painted china and two sets of wedding silver.
Some of it is monogrammed with your initials. I regret hungrily I
have neither killed an animal for food nor an in-law for sport, but,
lest we forget, this is a polite occasion, one where nothing compels
the crashers to leave.
I dread the pending day I sit sedated in some suburb, in a house
with its own flagpole, an island in the kitchen, and a television in
each room so that someone else never misses a game. I sense my
own irrelevance welling up in my throat, waiting for the day I can
howl it out—Perhaps in the attic of the old house, while an au pair
girl takes the stroller around the petting zoo—that should happen
in about five years or so—I can hardly wait for those next few minutes
of personal time! Then I can finally rip his itchy thing off of me
for a deep breath before I gather it up again and go downstairs to
serve the next meal and to proffer to you a few excuses for my odd,
momentary absence.

174
—Gareth Lee Contest Runner-Up
Old English Days
The monastic huts illuminating the swampways
with their tallow and other
anti-snuffs,
reeds and stoves
tendered by monks.
Cut to: books afloat on the water. Cut to:
the viper slinking back
to its shadow,
a hiss in pre-suburbia—
resting on the grass on the absence of legs.
I see these things outside
of these things,
my vision backed up to a spot twelve feet
behind the projector.
And celluloid shattering
the monotonous dark of this room, each image backlit
by a bulb.
So it's the movie that tells me
these things, the reel-spur
turning, and meanwhile—
England ransacked, the clink
of Norse oars in its waters
as the brutes spit and grendel.
But here in Nova Scotia, the place's name alone
smothering my tongue in so much snow,
nothing like that.
Hot chocolate
next to me. The clock a comfort. And the reel
spools out frames the way
a factory might manufacture bottles.
nature in a predictable hiccup,
stars repeat themselves.
Outside,
Cars fail to start;

176
—Nicholas Frank specie aeterni other than through the work of the artist. Thought has
such a way—so I believe—it is as though it flies above the world and
leaves it as it is—observing it from above, in flight.
NXT. XRPTS
The term "ticking," used to describe the passage of time, will outlive
its usefulness. The word is an onomatopoeia, derived from the
noise made by the mechanism of a mechanical timepiece as it
swings the second hand around a circular clock face. The circle aptly
symbolizes the infinite nature of time.
Now, time is more and more tracked by digital clocks, timepieces
which have no moving parts and thus issue no 'ticking' sound
as seconds pass.
Digital time: a series of progressively larger numbers piling
upon each other, cancelling each other out, each describing an
absolutely unique spot of time, then crashing back to zero, and
repeating.
We say "the world will come to an end some day," and in using
someday, we think or feel that we have grasped the infinite.
We find an analogy, embody it in our language, and then can't
see where it ceases to hold.
Philosophers who say: "after death a timeless state will begin,"
or "at death a timeless state begins," and do not notice that they
have used the words after and at and begins in a temporal sense, and
that temporality is embedded in their grammar.
... it seems to me ... that there is a way of capturing the world sub
like birds
It is very remarkable that we should be inclined to think of civilization—houses,
trees, cars, etc., as separating man from his origins,
from what is lofty and eternal, etc. Our civilized environment, along
with its trees and plants, strikes us then as though it were cheaply
wrapped in cellophane and isolated from everything great, from
God, as it were. That is a remarkable picture that intrudes on us.
Viewing from eminence the wide expanse of country netted with
hedges & crowded with towns & thoroughfares, I grant that man
from the effects of hereditary knowledge, has produced almost
greater changes in the polity of nature than any other animal.
Some people think music a primitive art because it has only a few
notes and rhythms. But it is only simpler on the surface; its substance
on the other hand, which makes it possible to interpret this
manifest content, has all the infinite complexity that's suggested in
the external forms of other arts and that music conceals. There is a
sense in which it is the most sophisticated art of all.
235. In Zoonomia, p. 155, is the following similar passage: ". . . the
singing of birds, like human music, is an artificial language rather
than a natural expression of passion."
Structure and feeling in music. Feelings accompany our apprehension
of a piece of music in the way they accompany the events of
our life.

178
People leave radios on without listening because they desire background
music; a soundtrack to the inner movie of their lives. Their
lives are images inside of the real, the music a point of contact
between the real and the world of the radio, the world inside the
radio.
The songs of juncos, mad crows, a rattling woodpecker, and a starling's
imitation of a red-winged blackbird. The imitation was close
enough to fool me at first, and I was quite amazed that a red-wing
would be in the neighborhood at all. I expect to see them in marshes
far from the city, perched on cattails and issuing their distinctive
oke-a-lee, but not anywhere near a major metropolitan area, much
less in my own backyard.
After finally tracing the sound to a location, I saw that it was
instead a starling. It sounded somewhat like a ringing telephone.
There are ... many examples of vocalizations characteristic of one
species being copied by a second species. Such "vocal mimicry" is
well known in the . . . European Starling.
With most mimicked bird vocalizations, the true identity of the
singer is quite clear because the mimic imparts some characteristic
tonal quality, temporal pattern, or context of use that serves to differentiate
it from the model's vocalizations. The human ear can
detect these differences, and the model's more sensitive avian ear
would certainly be expected to detect the rendition of a mimic. In
short, in the vast majority of examples it is unlikely that anyone is
fooled by vocal mimicry.
Why, then, are sounds of other species (as well as non-avian
sounds such as the barking of dogs, screeching of machinery, or
human whistling) sometimes incorporated into a bird's repertoire?
What is it like to know that I don't see red and to say that I
do? . . . imagine a Robinson [Crusoe] lying to himself. Why is this
difficult to imagine?
Look at something red and say to yourself, "I see green," a)
meaning by green what usually you mean by red (i.e. speaking the
truth), or b) lying.
A massive project to renew the flora and fauna of the Milwaukee
River valley has machinery working all day, every day. It's amazing
the amount of noise one can grow accustomed to.
I only notice the whirring of engines and clanking of heavy
objects in odd moments when all else is quiet. Waking in the morning,
after sifting through the layers of birdsongs I notice it—noises
of trucks and cranes jumbled into white noise.
We deliberately introduced to our continent some of the most
abundant birds of North America. We owe the presence of the
extremely successful (and often pestiferous) European Starling to
Willam Shakespeare. Toward the end of the last century, The
American Acclimatization Society had the goal of establishing in the
United States every species of bird mentioned in the works of the
immortal Bard of Avon. Unfortunately, in Henry IV, Hotspur proclaimed,
"Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing
but 'Mortimer' . . . ." North American birds and people have been
suffering ever since.
Curiously enough, several previous attempts to get this short-tailed
black bird started were complete failures. In 1890, Eugene
Schieffelin, leader of the Society, brought eighty birds from Europe
and set them free in Central Park. In 1891, he liberated forty more.
These 120 birds have multiplied a millionfold. Their armies have
already crossed the Great Divide and are successfully laying siege to
the fortress of the Rockies. In January, 1948, I saw small detachments
in New Mexico. A few had even infiltrated to Portland,
Oregon. In recent years, as I sat at my desk on the sixth floor of

180
Audubon House at 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, on cold winter
afternoons it seemed incredible that the black blizzard of birds that
swarmed to the ledges of the Metropolitan Museum across the street
could be descended from a mere ten dozen birds released in that
very neighborhood hardly fifty years before.
"... this is a small roost, however, compared to some I have
seen. The swarms along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington must
exceed 100,000. If such a snowballing of numbers were to continue,
simple mathematics would indicate that in another decade or
two we would be knee deep in starlings. But, as with all things, there
is a leveling off."
The directors of the [Metropolitan] Museum, prodded by the complaints
of residents up and down the street, stationed four men on
the long flat roof to frighten the starlings off. Each carried a long
pole from which cloth streamers trailed, like the tail of a kite. When
the starlings were routed from one end of the buildings they flew to
the other—nearly four blocks away. For weeks, the uneven battle
went on while icy winds whipped down the Avenue. But the birds
won out. The Museum directors, unwilling to concede defeat, are
reported to be thinking of trying the aluminum owls that an enterprising
manufacturer has put on the market.
A great deal of money has been spent trying to control starling populations,
and many of the birds have been killed. In the 1960s, one
program in California designed to alleviate starling depredations on
cattle feed resulted in the slaughter of some nine million birds, but
left 5,000 starlings in the area alive to reproduce. In spite of such
massive efforts to reduce the numbers of descendants of those birds
introduced by the Acclimatization Society, starlings are today ubiquitous
on the North American continent . . .
The general delusion about free will obvious because man has power
of action, & he can seldom analyse his motives (originally mostly
>INSTINCTIVE< & therefore now great effort of reason to discover
them: this is important explanation) he thinks they have
none—
. . . this view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no
credit for anything (yet one takes it for beauty & good temper), nor
ought one to blame others.
I have recently been plagued by a phone caller who rings every
morning, every half-hour or so from 8:30 a.m. to about noon. The
caller seems to be a child, who either says nothing or one unintelligible
syllable, waits a few seconds, and then hangs up.
After several weeks of this, I figured I could avoid contact with
the caller by turning off the ringers on my phones and keeping the
volume on the answering machine all the way down; this way I
could sleep through the mornings undisturbed.
It seems after that two months or so the caller has finally given
up, apparently receiving no satisfaction; though I still am wary, and
keep the ringers off until afternoon. Every time I hear a phone ring
I assume it's the caller, and I feel a sinking helplessness in my gut.
So ... thought, however unintelligible it may be seems as much
function of organ, as bile of liver.—? is the attraction of carbon,
hydrogen in certain definite proportions (different from what takes
place out of bodies) really less wonderful than thoughts—One
organic body like one kind more than another—What is matter?
The whole a mystery—"
As man has so very few (in adult life) instincts, this loss is compensated
by vast power of memory, reason, etc., and many general
instincts, as love of virtue, of association, parental affection. The
very existence of mankind requires these instincts, though very weak
so as to be overcome easily by reason. Conscience is one of these
instinctive feelings.
Cuckoo lays eggs in Reed Warbler nest, chick hatches three days earlier
than Reed Warbler chicks. The chick itself, just a day or two
old, puts Reed Warbler eggs on its back and hoists them over the
edge of the nest, killing them. Then sings, mimicking exactly the
sound of four hungry Reed Warbler chicks, inducing parenting
response in Reed Warbler adults. The much larger cuckoo chick is
thus fed same amount as four Reed Warbler chicks would be.

182
The multitudes of Wild [Passenger] Pigeons in our woods are astonishing.
Indeed, after having viewed them so often and under so
many circumstances, I even now feel inclined to pause and assure
myself that what I am going to relate is fact. Yet I have seen it all and
that too in the company of persons who, like myself, were struck
with amazement.
In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson on the
banks of the Ohio on my way to Louisville. In passing over the
Barrens a few miles beyond Hardensburgh, I observed the pigeons
flying from north-east to south-west, in greater numbers than I
thought I had ever seen them before, and feeling an inclination to
count the flocks that might pass within the reach of my eye in one
hour, I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to
mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a
short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable,
as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose and counting
the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twentyone
minutes. I travelled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded.
The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noonday
was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike
melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency
to lull my senses to repose.
. . . how does consciousness commence; where other senses come
into play, when relation is kept up with distant object, when many
such objects are present, & when will directs other parts of body to
do such?
The passenger pigeon did not surrender its life easily—they are a
particularly tenaceous bird, and notwithstanding their size, they
cannt be shot successfully with a bullet finer than No. 6; even with
that they will fly a hundred yards and alight in a tree aparently
unharmed from which they will afterwards fall dead, from the
wounds, to the ground. Always after gathering my birds after a shot
on the field, I would follow the course of the retreating flock, and
under the nearest tree find from one to six additional birds; and it
is quite surprising to observe what a diversity of wounds and hurts
one will discover in dressing a quantity of them—the scars of previous
assaults. Broken and disjointed legs, bills that have been shot
half away, and grown curiously out again; missing toes, or even a
whole leg, and even healed-up breast wounds have I seen.
It has been stated by Manlove that the companions of a wounded
pigeon would attempt to aid it. The speed of the bird and this aid
would sometimes carry it several hundred yards after receiving a
mortal wound. He adds:
It was pathetic to see the efforts of the comrades of a wounded pigeon to
support him in his flight. One after another would dart under the
stricken one as he began to sink, as if to buoy him with their wings. They
would continue these efforts long after he had sunk below the general
line of flight, and not until all hope was lost would they reluctantly leave
him and rejoin the flock.
It was the habit of the passenger pigeon to follow closely every
motion of the bird ahead of it. A wounded bird might be followed
for a considerable distance before the follower realized that there
was anything abnormal.
It is extremely interesting to see flock after flock performing
exactly the same evolutions which had been traced as it were in the
air by a preceding flock. Thus, should a Hawk have charged on a
group at a certain spot, the angles, curves, and undulations that
have been described by the birds, in their efforts to escape from the
dreaded talons of the plunderer, are undeviatingly followed by the
next group that comes up ...
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
August 1845 I sit here at my window like a priest of Isis and
observe the phenomena of three thousand years ago yet unimpaired.
The tantivity of wild pigeons, an ancient race of birds, gives a voice
to the air, flying by twos and threes athwart my view or perching
restless on the white pine boughs occasionally; a fish hawk dimples

184
the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; and for the last
half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars conveying travelers
from Boston to the country.
May 9, 1852 Saw pigeons in the woods, with their inquisitive
necks and long tails, but few representatives of the great flocks that
once broke down our forests.
December 15, 1853 He had ten live pigeons in a cage under his
barn. He used them to attract others in the spring. The reflections
from their necks were very beautiful. They made me think of shells
cast up on a beach.
September 12, 1851 Saw a pigeon-place on George Heywood's
cleared lot, the six dead trees set up for the pigeons to alight on, and
the brush house close by to conceal the man ... The pigeons on the
trees looked like fabulous birds with their long tails and their pointed
breasts. I could hardly believe they were alive and not some
wooden birds used for decoys, they sat so still ... As I stood there,
I heard a rushing sound and looking up, saw a flock of thirty or
forty pigeons dashing toward the trees and who suddenly whirled
on seeing me and circled round and made a new dash toward the
bed, as if they would fain alight if I had not been there, then steered
off. I crawled into the bough house and lay awhile looking through
the leaves, hoping to see them come again and feed, but they did
not while I stayed. This net and bed belong to one Harrington of
Weston, as I hear. Several men still take pigeons in Concord every
year; by a method, methinks, extremely old and which I seem to
have seen pictured in some old book of fables or symbols . . . and
yet few in Concord know exactly how it is done. And yet it is all
done for money and because the birds fetch a good price, just as the
farmers raise corn and potatoes. I am always expecting that those
engaged in such a pursuit will be somewhat less grovelling and mercenary
than the regular trader or farmer, but I fear that it is not so.
You cannot draw the seed up out of the earth, all you can do is give
it warmth and moisture and light; then it must grow. (You mustn't
even touch it unless you use care.)
September 12, 1854 I scare pigeons from Hubbard's oaks beyond.
How like the creaking of trees the slight sounds they make! Thus
they are concealed. Not only their prating or quivet is like a sharp
creak, but I heard a sound from them like a dull grating or cracking
of bough on bough.
A possibility: The vocalizations of the extinct passenger pigeon—
adopted by one starling and passed down through generations.
I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap
of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the
ashes.
like birds

186
Notations and Bibliography —Emily Fragos
Wittgenstein's Lectures, from the notes of John King and Desmond
Lee, ed. Desmond Lee, Cambridge, p. 107, 1930-1932.
Old and useless Notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points
written about the year 1837 & earlier, early writings of Charles
Darwin, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett.
Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein, from ed. G. H. von
Wright, 1946.
The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North
American Birds, Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl
Wheye, 1988.
Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data," Ludwig
Wittgenstein, ca. 1935-6, from Philosophical Occasions, eds.
Klagge & Nordmann, 1993.
from Birds Over America, Roger Tory Peterson, 1948
Notes from BBC World Service radio report, June 6, 1998, 1 a.m.
CDT.
from Anthology, John James Audubon, edited by Roger Tory
Peterson, 19—
from The Passenger Pigeon, A. W. Schorger, 1955
Mark Twain
the journals of Henry David Thoreau
Clasp
The daylight enters and the birds begin their music.
For those who have left us in the middle of the night, there is
no staunch standing up to go toward the singing, no yawning
of the jawbone, hinged like a necklace, no hard hand
grasp. The long hair slicked with imperturbable dust
is not washed again and piled in a twist, soft and brown,
with only a few strands floating in air. What is slid apart
may not be clasped together; what is soiled by the spiders
will not be made clean. The door flies open only when
a ghost runs through it. The closed window stays closed.

188
II
Noah
I could get used to the closed door and windows
and forsake all others in an instant. Years of going forth,
of speaking and drawing others to my body
are erased. I have got going in the opposite direction
now as all my yesterdays have lighted fools the way.
Whatever I may need, let it come—and soon,
you'll see, there will be no want of anything more.
All that was familiar is suddenly odd. As if a flood
had washed it all away. I remain, with one of everything.
III
Alchemy
You were frozen inside my hands. I could not touch
for fear of being touched. Now the imperious cat
moves towards me as if to say "enough"; she sniffs
the rug where you stood offering gifts, and bored
with your scent as I am fed up with your death, chases
the frantic fly up inside the yellowed lampshade
where it bangs and bangs its head away. I feel the edges
of my body, the dance, with its screams and jitterbug leaps;
I open my mouth and bees fly out. I never expected this.

190
—Kevin Pilkington
Santorini
I didn't know how high up
on the caldera our villa
was until I stood on the terrace
and looked down at a toy boat
a child lost, before realizing it was
a cruise ship and the yacht sailing
past Skaros, I could pick up
and put in my pocket along
with the rest of the Euro coins
I'd been carrying around since Athens.
And where the sun reached
the surface of the Aegean, candles
were flickering inside waves.
A woman standing on a rock
was the size of a matchstick
I thought about using to light
my cigar until I found my own,
lit up, then let smoke the size
of a cloud float out of my mouth,
since there was no rain in it
to spoil the day. And I've learned
the man yelling next door
is how Greeks whisper.
Tiny white churches no bigger
than doves are scattered all over
the island. A flock sit along
the cliffs leading towards the town
of la on the northern tip
of the caldera that from here looks
like vanilla icing melting over
a slice of rock.
I pull up a chair, sit down and
stare deeply into this view the way
I never could into the eyes of a woman
until they belonged to my wife,
let my skin turn the color
of iced tea, then noticed how there
were now white caps on the water,
or thousands of angels swimming
towards shore.

192
—Martha Rhodes
Ambassadors to the Dead
They're pleased we've come.
Sweets? they offer,
trays of earthened fingers, syrupy.
Join us for a walk. Do.
We've traveled so far already
and what was familiar a moment before—
morphine-glazed now.
We've come to ask about our mother.
We know she'd like to see us. She visited our friend Maria
but not us. We don't understand why. We want to know where
you keep her. We've brought these things for her.
A leaf from her maple tree. Her cranberry cashmere sweater.
We demand to see our mother.
We want this second to talk to our mother.
We accepted no more food, declined their walk,
and the ornaments they offered to hang around our neckslittle
skulls they looked like little female skulls.
{They'regiving us little heads to wear?)
—Oliver de la Paz
My Dearest Regret,
You've found me and lost me again. How come
there are interruptions in your day?
How come the sweet grass and the hayseed? Pardon?
Pardon my leanings, I've wished you gone. Wished
you'd depart into woods, though you are the woods.
I've called you "thicket" sometimes. I've called you
bramble and black lorry.
You're my dearest one-ton truck.
Were you with me at the chimney or the season
which you listened with one ear? Sometimes
I think you don't hear me and yet you stand there
like a signpost, like a wrecked chute for grain. My dear bramble,
dear black lorry, drive on. Drive past the field where the ruined chimn
scratches the sky.
Dearest thicket, you've found me out
although I've been hiding in the silos
near the field. You dominate the field.

194
—Kimiko Hahn
Cuts from Zuihitsu on
My Daughter
Recalling that self that dressed the way my daughter now wishes to
dress—in as little as possible. Layers in order to get out of the
house.
[description of dress] [A skimpy crochetted thing.] [A velvet black
v-neck dress. Floor-length. Thrift-shop scented. Worn through
mid-June. 1972?]
1972
I can't imagine getting a facial—sitting for an hour with someone
tending my face: massaging, steaming, slathering creams,
rinsing—I tear when I get just a manicure. But lying on my
back with my eyes closed would be unbearable. So much pleasure.
How to calm the selves lost decades ago so as to teach her it is
possible to be—what?
the steam
the esteem
to wear those transparent blouses—
Chanel lipstick tastes so plush, the taste of mother and her
attention when Meg and I played dress-up. Squabbling over
high-heels.
A little consideration makes me weep and I tell her, A thanks for
remembering the soy milk at the market—would be welcome—
though I know this is my responsibility.
[tasks]
The toughest is protecting her from my poetry.
rinsing her long auburn hair in the sink
the sink

196
Cranberry Island Late Summer ('00)
22 26
He can't name the insect that clicks on the rocks beyond the stand of
pine. Some things only my mother knew.
But it's a grasshopper—black with yellow wings—making that clicking
noise. You show me you can name things before catching them.

198
Contributors' Notes
Peg Boyers is Executive Editor of Salmagundi and author of a
book of poems, Hard Bread. Her poems have appeared in Partisan
Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, Raritan, Southern Review,
Sewanee Review, and other journals.
Anne Babson was nominated for a Pushcart for work in The
Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal. She has won awards from Atlanta
Review, Grasslands Review, and others. Her work has been published
by many other journals. She has four chapbooks: Uppity Poems
(Alpha Beat Press, 1998), Dictation (Partisan Press, 2001),
Counterterrorist Poems (Pudding House, 2002), and Commute Poems
(forthcoming from Gravity Presses). She is Vice President of
Literature for "Women's Studio Center in New York.
Thomas Beller is the author of a novel, The Sleep-Over Artist,
and a book of stories, Seduction Theory. He is a founding editor of
Open City Magazine and Mrbellersneighborhood.com and a contributing
editor at The Cambodia Daily. His short stories have
appeared The Southwest Review, Ploughshares, New York Stories, Elle,
Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker, and Best American Short Stories.
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles and educated at
California Institute of the Arts. He divides his time as an artist, cultural
historian, and "beauty operator," working in a hair salon in
South Central L. A. and exhibiting in galleries and museums across
the country. He has had solo shows recently at Patricia Faure
Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New
York. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at ARCO,
Madrid, Spain, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the
UCLA Hammer Museum.
Breyten Breytenbach is a writer and painter. Among his
numerous novels, memoirs, and poems are The True Confessions of
an Albino Terrorist, Dog Heart, Memory of Snow and Dust, and
A Season in Paradise. He has recently published a new collection of
poetry, Lady One: Of Love and Other Poems (Harcourt, 2002).
Colette Brooks is most recently the author of In the City:
Random Acts of Awareness (W.W. Norton, 2002), which won the
PEN/Jerard Fund Award and will appear in paperback in June
2003. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New
Republic, Partisan Review, The Georgia Review and Southwest Review,
several which can be found at www.colettebrooks.com. She has taught
at Harvard University, Columbia University, Playwrights Horizons/
NYU Theater School, and The New School.
Nadia Herman Colburn won the 2003 PEN/New England
Discovery award. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming
in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The New Yorker,
The Paris Review, Volt, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
Lance Contrucci is a New York-based freelance writer whose
articles have appeared in dozens of publications. He has been a freelance
monologue joke writer for the Letterman show, a contributing
editor to the National Lampoon, the "Grooming" editor of a British
men's magazine, a finalist in the Chesterfield Screenplay Fellowship,
and a gossip columnist with the Dublin Evening Herald (though he
didn't know a soul on the island). The Guide to Sumptuous Living is
a selection taken from his first novel.
Billy Collins's latest collection of poetry is Nine Horses (Random
House, 2002). He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back To
Poetry (Random House, 2003). He is serving as United States Poet
Laureate for 2001-03.
Anne Coray lives in southwestern Alaska on the north shore of
Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark), where she was born. Her poetry has
appeared in Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, RATTLE,
Fine Madness, Many Mountains Moving, The Women's Review of
Books, and others. She is the author of two chapbooks, Undated
Passages, published through a grant form the Alaska State Council
on the Arts, and Ivory, winner of 2001 Anabiosis Press Chapbook
Competition.

200
Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times. His writing
has appeared in The Believer, Conjunctions, Fence, Pindeldyboz, 3rd
bed, and Failbetter. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Jeffrey Faas is originally from Wisconsin. He recently won The
Atlantic Monthly 2002 Student Writing Contest for fiction and was
a semi-finalist for the 2001 Chesterfield Writer's Film Project. He
currently attends Colorado State University's creative writing
M.F.A. program and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife,
Kim.
Emily Fragos's book of poetry, Little Savage, will be published
by Grove Press in the Fall 2003. She was the recipient of the David
Craig Austin Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in Best
American Poetry 1998, The Paris Review, Parnassus, The Yale Review,
The Boston Review, The Threepenny Review, Chelsea, The Southwest
Review, and other journals.
Nicholas Frank is a writer, artist, curator, dialogue organizer,
and musician living in Milwaukee. His written work has appeared
in Bridge, Sculpture, Art Papers, Purple, X-tra, and Oranges Hung, a
special volume dedicated to four Milwaukee authors. He is in a
band called The Singing Flowers, and his visage is visible at thesingingflowers.
com.
Ray Gonzales is the author of Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000),
which received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, and a
collection of essays, The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden
Landscape (Arizona,2002), which received the 2003 Carr P. Collins/
Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Nonfiction. He is
the author of six other books of poetry, including three from BOA
Editions: The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles
Book Award), Cabato Sentora (2000 Minnesota Book Award
Finalist), and The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2002 nominee for
The Pulitzer Prize, recipient of a National Book Critic's Circle
Award Notable Book Citation, and a 2003 finalist for The Texas
Institute of Letters Award in Poetry).
KimikO Hahn'S six collections of poetry include The Artists
Daughter, Mosquito and Ant (both W. W. Norton), and The
Unbearable Heart (Kaya). She has received The American Book
Award and fellowships from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
and the NEA. She is currently a professor at Queens College/
CUNY and is working on a book that largely utilizes the Japanese
forms tanka and zuihitsu.
Brian Henry has published Astronaut (2000) and American
Incident (2002). Graft, is forthcoming in England and in the U.S.
in fall 2003. Henry has been an editor of Verse since 1995 and currently
teaches at the University of Georgia, where he also directs the
Creative Writing Program.
Heidi JulavitS is the author of two novels, The Mineral Palace
and The Effect of Living Backwards.
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan. After
arriving in the United States in 1957 at the age of 28, she quickly
became an important force in the avant-garde movement of the
1960's. Her contribution, through painting, sculpture, installation,
and performance to early Minimalism, Feminist, and Body Art is
widely acknowledged. As an internationally acclaimed and influential
artist, she was honored with a major traveling retrospective of
her early work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York
in 1998. She lives and works in Tokyo.
Suji KvVOCk Kim'S first book, Notes From The Divided Country,
won the 2002 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American
Poets, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, and will be published by
Louisiana State University Press in Spring 2003. Her work has
appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review,
DoubleTake, Yale Review, Tin House, and other journals and
anthologies. She is the recipient of NFA., Fulbright, Stegner and
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown fellowships, as well as The
Nation/Discovery Award and grants from the New York
Foundation for the Arts, California Arts Council and Washington
State Artist Trust. Private Property, a multimedia play she co-wrote,

202
was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and featured on
BBC-TV. She is currently assistant professor at Drew University.
Binnie Kirshenbaum received a B.A. from Columbia
University and an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College. She is the author
of two collections of short stories, Married Life and Other True
Adventures (1990) and History on a Personal Note (1995), and three
novels, On Mermaid Avenue (1993), A Disturbance in One Place
(1994), and Pure Poetry (2000). A regional winner in Granta's "Best
of Young American Novelists" competition and a New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction, she has twice received
Critic's Choice Awards from the San Francisco Review of Books and
the public television show Today's First Edition.
Gareth Lee attends the M.F.A. program at Brown. He spends his
time making films and writing poetry. He received a Canterbury
Fellowship from Santa Clara University for his work, and his poetry
is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review.
Roz Leibowitz was educated at Hofstra University and
Columbia University, where she earned her M.A. in Library
Science. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at Gallery Sohyun,
New York, Gallery BAI, Barcelona, Ceres Gallery, New York, and in
the National Juried Show at the Soho Gallery, New York. She lives
and works in New York City.
Sam Lipsyte is the author Venus Drive, a collection of stories,
and The Subject Steve, a novel. He lives in Queens. "Captain
Thorazine" is excerpted from a work in progress, a new novel forthcoming
in England.
Timothy Liu's most recent book of poems is Hard Evidence
(Talisman House, 2001). He is an Associate Professor at William
Paterson University and lives in Hoboken, NJ.
Paolo Manalo teaches English and creative writing courses at
the University of the Philippines. He also edits the literary section
of the Philippines Free Press. His poems have been published in the
Philippines, Malaysia, and the United States {The Literary Review).
The two poems "Nihil Obstat" and "Still Life with Fallen Angel"
form part of his collection Jolography that won first prize in the 2002
Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, one of the
oldest and most prestigious literary contests in the Philippines.
Glyn Maxwell was born in Hertfordshire, England, and has lived
in the USA since 1996, teaching at Amherst, Columbia, and the
New School. He is Poetry Editor of The New Republic, and his latest
collection is The Nerve (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Mark Milroy was educated at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Ferrell Pollack Fine
Art, Brooklyn, NY, and Wooster Projects, New York. His work has
been featured in group exhibitions at Brickhaus Art Gallery,
Brooklyn, NY, Simon/Schade Gallery, Los Angeles, the Green
Room, MTV Studios, New York, and the Contemporary Art
Workshop, Chicago. He currently teaches at The National Arts
Club in New York City.
Robyn O'Neil was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She is currently
exhibiting in "Come Forward: Emerging Art in Texas" at the Dallas
Museum of Art and will have her New York solo debut in the
summer of 2003 at Clementine Gallery in New York City. She will
also be attending San Antonio's ArtPace in 2003 as an International
Artist in Residence. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Patricia O'Toole is at work on a book about Theodore
Roosevelt and teaches writing at Columbia University. Her book
The Five of Hearts, a biography of Henry Adams and his friends, was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
Tom Paulin most recent book of poems, The Invasion Handbook,
was published by Faber and Faber last April. He is currently working
on a collection of his translations and on a book of essays.

204
Oliver de la Paz was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in
Ontario, Oregon. He teaches creative writing and contemporary
poetry at Utica College. His book Names Above Houses was a 2000
winner of The Crab Orchard Award series in poetry and was published
by Southern Illinois University Press. His work has recently
appeared in Pleiades, SouWester, and North American Review, with
work forthcoming elsewhere.
Kevin Pilkington's collection Spare Change won the La Jolla
Poets Press National Book Award, and his chapbook Getting By, was
awarded the Ledge Poetry Prize. His next collection, Ready to Eat the
Sky, will be published in 2004 by River City Publishing. His poems
have appeared in many anthologies including Birthday Poems: A
Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England
among them; and a wide variety of journals, including: Poetry,
Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden's Ferry,
Columbia, Greensboro Review, The louisville Review, Gulf Coast and
Confrontation. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Pilkington
teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the graduate program at
Manhattanville College.
D. A. Powell is the author of Tea and Lunch. His work has
appeared recently in Chicago Review, American Letters &
Commentary, Southeast Review, and Pleiades. He is the recipient of a
fellowship from the James Michener Foundation, a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric
Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Powell lives and
teaches in the Boston area. He co-edits Electronic Poetry Review with
Katherine Swiggart.
Padgett Powell has published four novels: Edisto, A Woman
Named Drown (FSG, 1984 and 1987), Edisto Revisited (Henry
Holt, 1996), and Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men (Houghton Mifflin,
2000). His two story collections are Typical (FSG, 1991) and Aliens
of Affection (Henry Holt, 1998). His fiction has appeared in The
New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, Paris Review, BOMB, DoubleTake,
and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize
Stories, and New Stories from the South. His nonfiction and reviews
have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review,
Oxford American, Harpers, Travel & Leisure, and Best American
Sportswriting. He is currently a professor of English at the University
of Florida.
Mary Quade earned her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and
was a 2001 Oregon Literary Fellow. Her poems have appeared in
Colorado Review, Chicago Review, The Iowa Review, River Styx, Field
and elsewhere. She currently lives in rural northeastern Ohio.
Martha Rhodes'S work has appeared in Agni, American Poetry
Review, Columbia, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, among other
journals. She is the author of two collections, At The Gate and
Perfect Disappearance, winner of the 2000 Green Rose Prize from
New Issues Press. She is the founding editor and director of Four
Way Books and teaches in the M.F.A program for "Writers at Warren
Wilson College.
Christine Schutt is the author of a collection of stories,
Nightwork, a forthcoming novel, Florida, and a second collection of
stories to be published in spring 2004, of which "Isabel in the
Bridge House" is a part. Schutt's fiction has appeared in The Kenyon
Review, Mississippi Review, and NOON, among others.
David Shields is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction
including Black Planet, a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Enough About You:
Adventures in Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Ruth Stone is the author of eleventh collections of poetry. Her
most recent book, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press) won
the 2002 National Book Award. In the same year, she received the
Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry from the
Academy of American Poets. Her previous books include Ordinary
Words (Paris Press, 1999), Simplicity (Paris Press, 1997), Who Is the
Widows Muse (1991), Second Hand Coat (1987), Cheap (1975),
Topography (1971), and In an Iridescent Time (1959). Stone has been
a professor at Binghamton University for the last fifteen years but
continues to reside in Vermont, where she's lived since 1957.

206
Joyce Sutphen's first book of poetry, Straight Out of View,
won the Barnard New Women's Poets Prize (Beacon Press, 1995)
and was recently republished by Holy Cow! Press. Her second book
of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a
finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming
the Stars is due in Spring, 2003. Her poems have appeared in Poetry,
The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. Her awards
include the Eunice Tietjen's Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine,
a Loft-McKnight Artist Fellowship, a Minnesota State Arts Board
Fellowship, and grants from the Jerome Foundation. She holds a
Ph.D. in Renaissance Drama and teaches literature and creative
writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.
Doris Umbers's recent work is published in Lips Literary
Journal, anthologized in Dyed in the Wool, Dialogue Through Poetry
Anthology, Heart Songs for Animal Lovers, and forthcoming in The
Paterson Literary Review. She is the editor and publisher o£Bluestone
Quarry Press and a PhD candidate in Creative Writing/English at
the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Jean Valentine is the author of eight books of poetry, most
recently The Cradle of the Real Life (Wesleyan, 2000). She lives and
works in New York City.
Karen Volkman's books of poetry are Crash's Law (Norton,
1996) and Spar (University of Iowa Press), which received the 2002
James Laughlin Award. She is a visiting poet at the University of
Chicago and teaches on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing
Seminars.
Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore. He has two books of
poetry: Disfortune (Wesleyan University Press, 1995) and It Is If I
Speak (W.U.P, 2000), a chapbook called The Endearment (Shortline
Editions, 1999), and a novel entitled Letters To Wendy's (Verse Press,
2000). He is Assistant Professor of English at University of
California at Davis.
Diane Williams's most recent book of fiction, Romancer Erector,
is out on Dalkey Archive Press. She is the founder and editor of the
literary annual NOON. NOON 2003 was published in January
2003.
Beth Woodcome lives in Boston, MA, works at Berklee
College of Music, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. at
Bennington College. She is the poetry editor of Perihelion magazine
and the Boston Coordinator of Poets for Peace. She has published
poems in Born Magazine, www.canwehaveourballback.com, Web Del
Sol Review, and Posse Review.
Mark Wunderlich's first book of poems, The Anchorage,
received the Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Voluntary
Servitude, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. He is the 2003
recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship and a 2002 recipient
of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. He lives in
Provincetown, Massachusetts and teaches in the graduate writing
program at Sarah Lawrence College.
Matthew Zapruder's first book of poems, American Linden,
was the winner of the 2001 Tupelo Press Editor's prize. His poems
have recently appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, Crowd,
Both, and The New Yorker. He currently teaches poetry at the New
School, and is the James Merrill Writer in Residence in Stonington,
CT.