Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

ROBERT TAYLOR, JR.
Union Street
Standing unclothed before the mirror, the young
man was about two inches short of six feet, with
angular shoulders, trim waist, long and slender
thighs. The hair on his chest, black swirls around the
tiny nipples, tapered like the funnel of a tornado until
touching at the center of his loins, and his legs, thin and
white and hairless, seemed aglow with a light all their
own. The woman, seated behind him in an armchair
beside the bed, her legs crossed, was very still, smart in
a navy blue pantsuit and white satin blouse. With her
hands she formed a steeple beneath her chin, each small
fingertip pressing against the other.
"You are quite beautiful enough, you know," she
said. "From where you look."
"Yes. Of course. From my point of view."
"Have you changed your mind then?"
"Don't be so defensive. I was only admiring you."
"Not me."
"Well. Your physique then."
He made a sound like a laugh and turned back to
the mirror. She sat calmly, her eyes opened wide, large
and clear eyes, artfully hazy lids and dark lashes, dark,
high-arched brows.
The young man was touching his small nipples and
his penis began to swell.
"I see blood," she said.
"Fuck you!"
I

He dropped his hands quickly to his sides. She
apologized. She hadn't meant to make fun of him. He
must go ahead. Please. He stood with his back to her,
facing the mirror without looking into it, fixing his gaze
above it, perhaps on the black-framed Bosch print, The
Garden of Earthly Delights, which hangs on the wall
above the mirror in three sections.
The room is as large as two ordinary-sized bedrooms,
has a window overlooking Union Street, and in
one corner a semi-circular "turret" juts out into the
space above the entrance way to the house. The turret
has three curving windows which slightly distort the
view of the sidewalk and the street and the many colorful
shops and sidewalk cafe's that stretch from this
corner (Union and Webster) to Van Ness Avenue. I
have placed a small writing desk in the turret and often
sit here in the late afternoon, pen in hand, gazing down
on the street while the fog rolls in. I am a clerk. Once I
believed myself a poet—by calling and temperament—
but now I know that my veins flow with clerk's blood. It
is easier this way. I sit at my desk in the turret and look
down on the crowds passing before me, beneath me.
You can see me (although you must look carefully; the
windowglass distorts) evenings after five-thirty, irregularly
on weekends. On weekends I often go out. I walk
among you, down Union Street, jaunty in blue blazer,
white silk neck scarf, plaid bellbottoms, shining harness
boots. You've perhaps seen me, noticed me as I pause
before a shop window displaying, say, fine jangling
jewels from Thailand, but you give me only a quick
glance before you enter the shop. Later, when you see
me again, this time as I sit in the sunshine at Luigi's, a
cup of espresso and tiny slice of rum cake before me on
the small round table with the bright red tablecloth, you
do not connect me with the man you saw gazing at
jewels. I blend in, I fit, I am here.
You enter the room, noticing first the splintered
glass on the carpet. A mirror—it used to hang there,
beneath that Bosch triptych—has been shattered. You
step gingerly into the room, forgetting to close the door
behind you, moving slowly toward the supine figure on
the bed. That redness—is it blood? A rose-shaped stain
at the center of the white slip that the sleeping woman
wears, and in her hand a knife. No, not a knife. A long
sliver from the mirror, curved like a small cutlass. Jesus
Christl You've got to get out of here fast.
The young man, his back to the mirror, now appeared
to be a young woman of some means. Across the
room the woman rose from the armchair and stepped
towards him.
"Not bad," she said. "How do you feel?"
"Fine. Just as I imagined."
She embraced him, and then he went to the
armchair, stood alongside it, letting one hand rest on
the high soft back, the other touch the satin surface of
his blouse.
"It's very strange," the woman said. "I've never
felt so ... maternal."
"Maternal?"
"Yes. No. That's not the right word. Matronly. I feel
very matronly."
He smiled, looking straight ahead, at the blank wall
above the bed.
"You seem awfully quiet."
"There's nothing to say."
At work I am conscientious, able, well-liked by the
man who supervises my work. This man, whom I do
not care for, is a retired air force clerical worker, a
homosexual living in sin with a "roommate" and two
poodles somewhere in the outer Mission District. He
has a butch haircut, air force regulation at one time,
with a bald spot on top. A chain smoker, he has no

espect for those who supervise him (they would not
have survived the regimen of the air force). He brings a
sack lunch every day consisting of a hard-boiled egg, a
bag of barbecue potato chips, and a thermos of orange
juice laced with vodka. His job is to type the invoices,
then bring them over to me, who must then fill the
orders, pull the books from a long row of shelves, stack
them neatly on a long table and pack them in cardboard
cartons. Late in the afternoon I load the heavy cartons
into the company's Volkswagen van and drive to the
Rincon annex, a good thirty blocks, maybe forty, from
my place of employment in the inner Mission District.
From Valencia Street I go directly to Mission, follow
Mission all the way, past the main post office at Seventh
Street, that gray building with the pigeon-infested
steps, past the dark warehouses, the dreary furniture
outlets, the office supply dealers, until I come to the end
of it, the Embarcadero, the loading docks of the Rincon
annex. I relish each moment I am away from the mail
room, drive the long route back, over Potrero Hill, the
engine of the Volkswagen van whining on the steep
grades. When I return, all that remains is the metering
of the first-class mail. We have a hand-cranked meter,
for the company is yet young and the profits, I gather,
not substantial. But the meter has an attractive feature:
it seals the envelopes. I have learned to be very fast with
this postage meter. I like the feel of the crank, cold at
first, then warm, smooth, vibrating from the inner cogs
and gears it sets in motion.
II
It seemed so innocent. But what, after all, had she
expected? Chains? Whips? To be forced to wear ludicrous
spike-heeled boots and tower over him like some
fierce Amazon while he cowered at her feet? Well, but
she would have done it, had gone into it prepared to do
anything, so long as no serious physical harm was done
to anyone. Anything to break that deadly tedium, that
orderly decay. Of course, it was not quite the affair she
10
had imagined, but she supposed no one had that affair.
Life was always compromising you, teasing you with
the promise of something close to that other desire, then
forcing you to settle for second best or nothing at all.
She had had enough of the nothing at all. And so when
she'd seen him that afternoon at the Coffee Cantata on
Union Street, sitting alone at a small table for two, sipping
a green daiquiri, his pale languid face set off by his
dark hair, by the brilliant red of the wall behind him,
she had seemed to know immediately that she
would—not on this afternoon perhaps, but on some
other, some rainy Saturday when her husband was in
Fresno with his boyfriend—get up from her own tiny
table and walk across the room to him, calmly take the
empty seat opposite him and ask if she might buy him a
drink. When he'd stood, taken a deep breath, looked
her straight in the eye, it was as though he believed he
had the power to read her mind. But was choosing not
to—not at that time. She was pleased with this display
of fine arrogance. It showed that there was more to him
than met the eye.
You have the sensation of being in a room beneath
the sea, or in a chamber underground. No, beneath the
sea. For there is that stillness, and outside, beyond the
windows, a slow-moving dark and deep world. In here
you are alone with the woman. She lies on the bed,
perhaps by now asleep, her arms extended straight,
each hand with palms turned down. Fingers curved
slightly, so that the red fingernails, long and shining,
seem to merge with the bright red bedspread, directing
your attention away from the rose-shaped stain on her
white slip. Or, rather, rendering it only part of a pattern,
a design in which the color red is seen to be inseparable
from light itself, becomes the medium of
light.
I am thirty-five years old, but she thinks me
younger. I look younger, perhaps ten years younger. At
11

work I am treated with deference, if also condescension,
although at first Ted was spiteful, resentful of my presence,
apparently in the belief that the mailroom was his
territory and not to be invaded with impunity. My efficiency
won him over; my calmness under duress
charmed him. By my silences I have convinced him that
I share his convictions, so that now he confides to me
his many hatreds. Laziness, he argues, is rampant;
everywhere you turn, dogged incompetence. Welfare!
He'd show them welfare! From time to time he speaks
of Gary, his roommate, and of Jean Paul and Marlon,
his poodles. I must have dinner with him and his little
family some time. He can promise a fine meal, creatively
prepared.
There is nothing effeminate in Ted's manner. He
walks with a long swift stride and has heavy, largeboned
hands, fingernails broad and yellowish from tobacco.
He is perhaps fifty years old, types sixty-five
words per minute with a minimum of errors,, claims no
desire to be promoted, considers himself indispensable
in this small publishing company. He does keep things
running smoothly.
The young man was in the bathroom (dressing, as
he put it, for the night) when she heard the knock at the
door. She stood, quickly slipping into her shoes, but
then did not move. The bathroom door remained
closed. More knocking. She looked around the room as
though for advice from the chairs, the drapes. The tall
floor lamp next to the desk in the turret gleamed fiercely,
and the oriental rug in the center of the floor seemed
full of little pig-like shapes, purple and red, with
sharp-pointed blue corkscrew tails. She took a step. The
bathroom door opened, just a crack, enough to throw a
narrow shaft of bright light across the carpet to her feet.
His face appeared in the opening, quickly, like a small
black hole in the light, but then lit by the glow of the
table lamp. His eyes seemed unnaturally large, with
lashes too long, too thick, his cheeks white, lips a brilliant
red. Again the knock, this time louder, more insis-
12
tent, and the bathroom door was silently closed. She
took another step, making no sound, then stood still, at
the edge of the oriental rug, her dress immaculate, pale
green crepe blouse with soft ruffles, a wide collar which
left her neck bare, long black skirt with tiny silver buttons.
Save for her breathing, it was silent in the room,
no sound at all from behind the bathroom door. Then
from the hallway: a cough, a whisper, still another rapping
on the door.
Her husband? I thought so at first. And had a moment
of panic. A few minutes later and no doubt I could
have handled it—but I was in disarray, undressed, unfinished.
But it would not be her husband. He would be
in Fresno. Who else then?
I heard her stand, and so I went to the door and
opened it quickly—my door, the bathroom door—gave
her a look intended to convey a command to stay put,
not answer the door. She looked shocked, perhaps
frightened at my half-complete state. Believing that she
would not go to the door, I shut myself in again. I was
fairly calm now, calm enough to look at myself in the
mirror and enjoy the humor in the situation. I would
wait it out. Go about my business. Later we would
laugh together.
Ill
It is as though you have stepped inside a painting.
All is still, quite motionless, the very air not so much air
as color. You breathe rosiness into your lungs. There is
no looking out, and the mirror is broken. You think
you're onto something here. Then you notice the figure
on the bed. A woman, sleeping. No. She moves, is
awake. No. Not a woman at all, and still. There at the
loins—Jesus God\ Put that knife down\ But it is not a knife.
A sliver of glass. There is nothing, at any rate, that you
can do. You turn away in disgust.
13

In bed, on the verge of sleep, she rehearsed in her
mind the various possibilities. First of all, there was
always the chance that he might not appear at the Coffee
Cantata again. Or he appeared, but with someone, a
woman of his own age, a man her husband's. He was,
she imagined, the kind of man her husband would find
attractive. Well, and why not? She could win him over
though, even if it meant, at first, letting him use her as a
diversion, a means to make a rival jealous. She would
be kind, tolerant. If he were "strange," and she was
rather certain that he was, why then she would nourish
his strangeness. In the end—but she would not invent
an ending. Only say that she will be infinitely patient,
eager to forgive.
The following Saturday he was not there. She left
the Coffee Cantata, strains of a Beethoven Quartet, the
"Serioso," throbbing in her head. How shocking to see
that the sun still shone! It was really very strange, this
feeling, as though having been frustrated in this desire
she now was freed from all desire and could, ironically
enough, look around her and enjoy the smaller
beauties, the sight of a pair of well-formed hands, the
spring in a child's step, the warmth of the sunshine, the
fleeting sensual lilt of voices overheard. Then she
looked up and saw him. He was looking at her from a
window in a turret high above the street, his face very
pale, long, distorted surely by the curving glass, but his
face—and this time the stare was absolutely steady.
She opened the door. A short, slender man with a
very short haircut and large thick-lensed glasses smiled
at her, then stepped inside, briskly, and went directly to
the armchair. Closing the door, she said, "I'm afraid if
you're looking for—he just this minute stepped out. I'm
surprised you didn't run into him on the stairs."
"And who are you?" the man asked, sitting down.
She stepped away from the door.
"I might ask the same of you."
The man was looking at her as if he knew her well
14
enough after all. He had large, rough-looking hands
which he let lie still on his lap, the fingers outstretched,
long and thick like breadsticks. His hair was a light,
reddish brown, very fine, close-cropped, the bald spot
at the top clean and shining, surrounded by short, soft,
tendril-like hairs.
"He told me he never goes out," the man said,
"and that he never has visitors."
The bathroom door was closed and, she hoped,
locked.
I was good at it. I knew I was good. And yet when
it came to this, this sharing (her word for it), I was almost
overcome with doubt. I questioned my sanity.
What next? If I were so good at it, would it not be
conceivable that I might wish to "do it" all the time?
But when we faced each other that first time, I saw
that I had nothing to fear. She smiled, extended her
hand, and I had the sensation of being welcomed into a
secret society. Christ, how happy I was at that moment!
What had she done? In the hallway she hesitated.
She should go back. She knew she should. But in the
next instant she was hurrying down the stairway, remembering
the hands, the thick fingers, and the eyes so
glassy and assured. After all, who knew what their relationship
was? He had never mentioned a man, but was
it so unimaginable? Mightn't he in fact want a man—to
complete the tableau? No, she had done what she had
to do, what anyone would do.
She walked quickly up Union Street to her parking
garage. It was cool inside her car and the sweet smell
was her own scent.
Ted's house is spotless. The two poodles yelp,
jump, snap at you until Gary steps in to box their ears
with a rolled-up newspaper. Gary prepares a splendid
meal, but the conversation is bland. You realize how
15

little you are interested in hearing about Ted's handiwork,
his cleverness at "fixing things up," his pride in
Gary's commandeering of the kitchen, his delight in the
superior intelligence of the poodles. You seek consolation
in drink. Gary, in tight-fitting dungarees, is eager
to keep your old-fashioned freshened, and by the end
of the evening you feel almost happy, can hardly stand.
In a reclining chair that vibrates and rocks, you listen
to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic" through Ted's new stereo. One
of the poodles jumps onto your lap. At last Ted passes
out—or, rather, disappears from the chair opposite
never to return. And so, with affectionate apologies to
the dog in your lap, you rise and accept your coat from a
smiling and still fresh-looking Gary. Certainly, you will
come again. It is a promise.
You seem to pass away from yourself. You look on
yourself, that is, as you might examine a charming, if
commonplace, piece of sculpture by, say, Cellini. Indeed,
it is difficult to say, finally, just where you stop
and the room begins. You have stepped inside
yourself—most stark of rooms! A triptych by Bosch, beneath
it a mirror, now broken, a desk in a turret, a rug,
pseudo-oriental, a bed on the other side of the room, a
modest-looking armchair beside it, perhaps of mohair,
brownish red in color, more brown than red. On the
bed the motionless figure of a woman in a white slip.
How long has she been there? You take it all in, then
glance away, calmly, as though the lamp on the other
side of the bed is, after all, a more interesting sight.
Then you shudder, pace the room with quick nervous
steps, avoiding the shards of glass, remembering where
you are.
IV
Laden with packages, laughing at themselves for
being so foolishly indulgent, two women enter the Cof-
16
fee Cantata. A tall young man with a pleasant smile and
soft voice takes their orders: two old-fashioneds. Around
them sit fashionably dressed matrons, in pairs or coupled
with young males. The waiters, all very slender
and blond and swift, with clean white aprons tied
tightly around their waists, move from table to table,
collecting and delivering glasses on small shining silver
trays. Sunlight shines through the stained glass window,
a fluted column of red, green, blue. The music:
Bach for unaccompanied violin.
Standing on the commode, my head out the small
window, my shoulders through it, I readily perceived
the folly in this plan. I would not have the use of my
hands until I had fallen onto the roof below, a drop of
about six feet, and the roof sloped downwards sharply.
I would drop, probably striking the back of my neck,
then rolling rapidly towards the edge.
And outside the door—it was Ted. Who else? She
was gone. The traitor! First letting him in, then making
her own escape. I refused to panic. I touched my cheeks
with the soft, moist blusher. Finish the job right.
Handel. The Water Music. It was as though the
music called him forth, demanded just such an arrival to
complete the effect of the brilliantly trilling flutes. How
easy it was, a few moments later, to rise, to step
through the column of red and green light, to stand
before him at his table, the wine and music gone to her
head, her heart beating out the rhythm of stately dances
and fluttering fans and powdered wigs swaying in
warm high-ceilinged rooms. This was the art of love,
passion of dream. She was perfectly confident that he
recognized her at once, was therefore not surprised
(seating herself gracefully, in time to the music) to observe
on his face the beginning of a shy but distinctly
flirtatious smile.
17

They sit together in the turret, one opposite the
other. The man smiles, tapping his fingers on the desk,
making a rapid steady beat like a drum roll, keeping his
eyes on this . . . should he say "woman"? ... in the
long red gown. The face is as perfectly articulated as a
model's, with dark eyes, blushing cheeks—and those
hands he'd thought made for sorting orders, for cranking
postage meters and operating gummed-tape machines,
now extend, as though shyly, from ruffled
sleeves, nails long and as red as the gown, as the lips.
He must reach across and touch that hand. Where, he
wants to ask, have you been all my life?
The sex of the figure on the bed is perhaps best
described as indeterminable. There is the woman's slip,
white and silky, and the nylons, dark and silky. The
eyes appear to be heavily outlined, the lashes thickened
by craft. Draped across the chair is a red gown, and the
air in the room is heavy with perfume. But see how the
legs spread far apart, see the dark chest hard where all
ought to be soft and white, the arms long and with such
sharp lines, the large hands and thick fingers.
Sad contradictions. It is as though the pathetic creature
had got into its head the notion that it could create
itself anew—through force of will make itself over into
something, somebody, someone (the body not fully reckoned
with until the end) of its own choosing and design.
Ha! Ignotum per ignotius.
Ted tells of a strange dream. He defies me to explain
it.
He walks across a lawn, a spacious, green lawn, a
well-manicured lawn, and sees a large bird, perhaps an
eagle, crouching or sitting as though on a nest. He feels
concern for the bird, worries that it might be injured,
and therefore walks toward it with a view to being of
service. But the bird rises, flaps its great wings, soars
upwards before he can reach it, then glides in circles
18
above him, floating in wind currents. He sees another
bird, though also in the grass, this one certainly an
eagle, and, unlike the first, not rising at his approach, in
fact rolling over onto its back, sticking its talons up into
the air, looking for all the world as if in desire for him to
stroke its feathery chest. He takes the bird, heavy and
warm and unresisting, into his arms, cradling it as
though it were an infant. But now it seems that there is
still another bird on the lawn. Yes. And another. These
birds are everywhere. Disgusted, then afraid, he throws
the bird down and runs toward an open field in the
distance, hearing behind him the fluttering of wings.
We must not, I tell Ted, deny our maternal impulses.
The room is silent. Before leaving, you turn for one
last look. The figure lies as still as before. But you notice
a red effluence on the slip—how could you have missed
it? It grows even as you watch, a bright red flower,
radiant rose, blossoming as if in response to some sudden
nurturing light. At the very center of the loins,
against the whiteness of the slip, it glows, tinting the
room a pale red, the brilliance becoming so intense that
finally it is all you can see, all you want to see. You
know that you could never leave.
V
Clearly I had no choice. Look, I told myself, you
either climb out the window, whatever the risk, or you
open the door and go into the room. I could wait no
longer. To continue to do so seemed only to prolong, to
promote, the old duplicitous life. My situation was in
movement, ex necessitate rei. Give myself over to the
multitudes, the hapless bourgeoisie, by plunging from
the window? No, there was nothing but to open the
door, steal a last look in the mirror, enter the room.
19

ROD JELLEMA
Cutting Paper with Matisse
Drawing with his scissors, one whole movement
linking "line with color, contour with surface",
Henri Matisse must have left an awful clutter.
To find those scraps of color now
from which he lifted shapes would be to find
strange negatives of paintings,
the stencils of the firmament.
Perhaps it only happened while cleaning up
that he picked scraps off the floor
and pasted them onto their positives
like pieces of the mirrors
in which his mind was learning to see.
The eyes can never see enough.
He cut his random way through stacks of paper,
even sailed to Polynesia just to study
"the altered proportions of light and space."
This random poem of mine has nothing to study at all;
it follows a child's left hand
strolling a right-handed scissors
through silent planes of snow
to anything. To the stiff paper snowflakes
I tried one day to cut in my room after school,
all geometric, little chops and snips.
To the magnified snowflakes I studied later,
swirling valleys. Through bigger microscopes
I saw fields rinsed by stains of gentian violet
20
to colors blazing in from every side
and still those shapes, and other shapes that
the dreamer hand remembers and remakes
until the sea is churning spirochetes
and fossil-leaves, tiny birdwings from back
so far behind the lens that only the hand can find them,
and moons, and the sky holds still to show
protozoa orbiting the little bones of fish.
(Matisse: The Cut-outs. National
Gallery of Art, October 1977)
21

RICHARD SPEAKES
Scrimshaw
The man that hacked my gums with an axe, slammed
and
threw his arms around to make room for his booming
heart,
leans gently over his own shadow, a relic in his hand,
and carves down into me my own size, makes me
bigger than in my dreams,
and the men so small, an etch or two, barely there
in boats no bigger than a fin, look down
into my mouth and see the black world can be killed,
carved on the white of its own bone.
I come out of a sailor's dark pocket like the pole-star
suddenly emerged on a night of storms, when all
the bearings cross in the heart, when the reason
for a man being here is in his fist, his thumb rubbing
over and over the lines engraved, making
a heat he tries to live in.
22
CARL LITTLE
Water Lily
Catalpa pods rattle,
and when I shout down
into the well, the words
of my father echo back:
Get out, Get out.
Deep in the pond's mud shallows,
my toe touches a bottle
and I pull up a water lily root.
It bobs at my knees,
it won't stay planted.
No wonder: father's on the dock.
From behind a willow,
I watch him toss corn to geese
because he loves them
and knows where I am hidden.
Part moss, part water,
I can outwait anyone.
23

CARL LITTLE
24
An Ascent in February
"Summer knowledge is not winter's truth.
Delmore Schwartz
Grandfather was conceived
beneath a spruce: he remembers, he says,
the dark smell of evergreen,
and where his mother sat
nursing him in the orchard
when blossoms haloed the trees.
And when every branch bears a spine
of snow, and the sparrows grip old suet
swung in a gust, Grandfather learns
what sweet fern is all over again.
Riding his father's neck, he had known
the whole swamp: maple roots
coiled in moss, black pools,
the treehouse with its tin roof.
Once a loud shelter from the rain,
only its nails were left, festering
the bark. One mild midwinter day,
leaning his back against the trunk,
Grandfather fell asleep and dreamt
he lay on the windowsill of a dark house,
outside a bedroom he knew was his;
and the quiet night covered him
with its shawl of cold sky.
Trying to rap on the glass,
he rolled off into deep snow.
He cried until his father's hands
took hold; then up and up
he climbed through the chill air
to where his mother stood waiting,
breathing perfect clouds in the porchlight.
25

ELAINE FORD
Whin
I
met Ivor in a pub. Actually, it was not so much
a pub as the back adjunct to a grocery in the Irish
town of Dundalk; I'd come in to buy bread and
canned meat and had become entangled in conversation
with the bar man. He was the sort of man who liked to
start things. He called out to Ivor in a wisecracking
voice, "Hey old man, which way are you headed?"
"North. Home."
"How'd you like to take this girl with you?"
The barman's laughter at Ivor's startled look was a
wise cackle. "She's hitchhiking. A Yank," as though
that explained me.
"My great-grandfather came from Cork."
"Sure you're going the wrong direction." Ivor's
statement was flat, but I could see he was curious about
me. My hair was wet and had not been combed for a
long time; my only possession was a frayed knapsack.
"No, I've been to Cork."
"So it's up to the black North then."
"Just to see if it's as black as they say."
The barman laughed again. "Better her than me."
"Aye, that's right." Ivor set his empty glass on the
bar. He nodded to me, shrugging his neck into his collar,
and went out to the street.
"Go along," the barman urged me. I felt like a
badger shoved into a pen of dogs, but I hurried after
Ivor anyway. Going north, a chill expedition. Late afternoon,
a thin rain falling, and hardly any traffic on the
road. Ivor opened the left-hand door of his pickup truck
26
for me. I could see that he was not as old as I'd thought,
though his face was worn and slack. He wore a short
wool coat and a knitted cap pulled down to his ears. But
he didn't look comical. Not a jokester. He'd be indifferent
to how he looked, preoccupied.
"In ye go, then."
We drove out of Dundalk and along the highway
for several miles before either of us spoke. Then he said,
puzzled, "It's a wet wee land for a tour. This time of
year."
"You'd think I'm crazy if I told you why I like it."
"Och, we're most of us a bit daft here."
"When I feel cold and wet at least I'm feeling something.
I know I'm alive, anyway."
"Aye," he said shortly, reaching into the catchall
for a rag. No surprise in his voice, and that surprised
me. "My name's Kate."
"Strachan. Ivor." He said no more until we reached
the border town of Newry; when we stopped for a traffic
light he said, as though pointing out a local attraction,
"See that pillar box? We're in the North now, so it
should be red. The Republicans paint it green. Then
they paint it red again, Her Majesty's Post. Must have
twenty coats of paint on it by now. Still, the mail goes
through."
"Painting's better than bombing."
He smiled for the first time. "They do plenty of
that, too."
After Newry the countryside became more cluttered.
New pebble-dashed bungalows, a bombed-out
hotel, some small factories. A Land Rover full of British
soldiers passed us, going the other way. The rain fell
harder.
"Is Strachan an Irish name?" I asked finally, for
something to say.
"Is now. My people came from Glasgow to work in
the linen mills."
"And that's what you do?"
"Not much work in linen now. I'm a joiner."
27

I didn't know what a joiner was. I had an image of
pipes being fitted together, or maybe parts of a body, as
though set in casts.
"A carpenter, that is. Odd jobs, too. Sometimes I
tar roofs."
"Not a very pleasant climate for that."
"Och, well, I don't have to think about it, since I
don't have a choice."
That was a dig at me, I guess. I didn't have to be in
the black bone-chilling North. "Are you coming home
from a job?"
"My son makes doormats. I was delivering them in
Dublin."
I was surprised to hear that he had a son. He
seemed like a solitary man, not worn smooth by rubbing
against women and babies. "Have you a large family,
then?"
"No." That's all he said, and I too became silent. I
looked out at bleak fields; newborn lambs pressed
against their mothers. Rough-looking bushes were
tipped with yellow blooms. I asked what they were.
"Whin—or gorse."
"What's the difference?"
"Depends which side of the border you're on, what
it's called."
I picked up the rag and rubbed at the misty
windshield so he could see better; my wrist touched the
coarse wool of his coat sleeve. I felt he was strongly
aware of me, my presence inside the cab of his truck,
though we didn't talk much. We went through Banbridge,
a strange town where the main street cut
through lower than the shops, almost tunneled beneath
them, and where there were few people. I wondered if
it was stripped of its population because of the Troubles,
or whether the inhabitants were in hiding, or
whether they were simply in out of the rain.
It was nearly dark by the time we reached the M-l
beyond Hillsborough. Ivor pulled into a petrol station
and got out to work the pump himself. When the tank
was full and he'd screwed the cap on, he came to my
28
window. I»rolled it down. His cap was sparked with
raindrops and his face seemed raw with the cold. "Are
you wanting to go on to Belfast now? I go west from
here."
"That's okay. This is a good place to hitch." I
groped for the door handle.
"Is someone expecting you in Belfast?"
I considered lying, to get him out of his predicament;
he clearly felt it would be dishonorable simply to
leave me by the side of the road. But somehow I didn't
want to lie to him now. "No. I don't know a soul in
Belfast."
"I'll take you in the morning, then. I have to buy
timber."
"No, I'll be all right."
"We have room for you at home." I didn't say anything,
and he looked down at the tarmac. "Sure, you're
not afraid of me?"
"No."
"That's well." He went inside the station to pay for
the petrol, and my hand gripped the cold curve of the
door handle.
Ivor lived in the village of Dunclogher, some miles
south of Magheralin. His house was set apart slightly
from the others on the main road, a square house made
of large blocks of cut gray stone. It had almost the look
of a prison, except for the white curtains in the
downstairs windows. Inside were low plastered ceilings
and the smell of coal fires.
"I've brought a wee surprise."
A woman's voice, low and calm, came from the
back of the house. "Have ye?"
We went to the kitchen and found two people sitting
at the table. The young woman finished pouring
tea into her cup, as though it would take more than a
bedraggled hitchhiker to surprise her. Perhaps there
had been many a stray here. "This is Kate," he said, and
I was struck by the fact that he remembered my name.
29

I'd only spoken it once. "Moira, and my son Brian."
"Take off those wet coats and have your tea,"
Moira said, collecting more plates and cups from a shelf.
Ivor hung the coats side by side near the stove. I wondered
whether Moira was the wife of the father or the
wife of the son: she looked the right age for neither. Her
body was young and slight, but her dark hair had a
patch of gray above each ear, as a cat might be marked,
and her face was gently lined.
"Kate's American."
The son smiled. "That's grand. Where in
America?"
"Philadelphia."
"The Liberty Bell."
"That's right."
"There's a crack in it, so I believe—like this cup."
"Sure there's no crack in that cup, Brian." Moira
was buttering slices of wheaten bread.
"Aye, there is, I can feel it."
"Well if there is, it's a wee one, and never mind."
She passed a plate of sausages around and a dish of
fried potatoes.
Brian's fingers traced the edge of the cup. He had
strong white hands, and his face was smooth and white
too. His eyes made me think of fever: bright blue, but
somehow cloudy. "Did you study about the Liberty Bell
at school?" I asked him, to make conversation.
The shake of his head was almost imperceptible.
"Brian doesn't study. Brian's blind," Moira said.
"I'm very stupid."
"I hear about things on the wireless," Brian said.
Moira gave me a brief glance—yes, you are stupid, it
said—and she picked up an orange and peeled it and
divided it into sections. But when she passed the orange
on the plate to Ivor rather than to Brian, my feeling of
confusion increased. She turned away from me. "Did
you sell all the mats, Ivor?"
"Aye." He picked a bottle of whiskey out of a cupboard
and poured himself a glass. "It's not a job I
fancy."
30
"Tell me about America," Brian said. Moira
brought the plates to the sink and scraped them.
I thought it best to start from the inside out, because
when you are blind you grope from sensation to
abstraction. Or that's how it seemed to me. "The pavements
are hard, people shove into you, even a cracked
bell has a clearer sound than street noises. They're all
mixed up. The smells, too. Nothing clear."
He smiled politely, and that's not the reaction I
wanted. Moira was now making up a folding cot next to
the fire in the front room. I supposed it was for me. But
no, I had to sleep in a proper bed, she told me.
At the top of the stairs were two bedrooms. It
turned out to be Brian who was displaced, who stayed
downstairs on the cot.
There were pictures of sailing ships on Brian's wall.
As I was falling asleep I heard voices in the next room:
Ivor's tight and bitter, and Moira's a flat monotonous
undertone. I slept under layer upon layer of wool flannel
coverlet.
When I came down in the morning I found Brian in
the kitchen. He was drinking tea. "My father went to
bed with the bottle last night. Moira's at Mass."
His face revealed nothing, but I was not so sure
about my own voice. "Does that mean he won't be
going to Belfast this morning?"
He shrugged. "Tomorrow maybe."
The situation was different now; I felt like a spade
forgotten in the garden and left to rust. Or maybe not
anything so useful as a spade. There was no way I could
hitch from here, far off the main road.
"Do you mind staying?"
"The trouble is, there's nothing I can do for you in
return."
He tapped a hard-boiled egg on the side of his bowl
and removed the shell so that it was hardly cracked. He
finished eating before he said, "There might be something
you could do for me."
31

"What?"
"I want to go to my mother's grave." He squatted
on a rug near the stove and picked up the ends of hemp
rope. The fresh hemp had the same smell as the tea I
was drinking. "She's not buried in the Methodist
churchyard in Dunclogher. She's with her father's family
in the ruined church by the river. There's a fence
around the old church and a gate with a lock, you have
to stop at the post office to ask for the key. I can't ask
Moira to take me because she's Catholic and wouldn't
want to be seen there, and I can't ask my father—he
won't go to her grave himself." His mat began in the
center; he pulled the ends tight.
"I don't mind going." I washed the few breakfast
dishes in the pantry and then we set out together on the
road through Dunclogher. He carried a cane but was
not skilled with it; I guessed he did not often leave the
house. He waited outside the post office while I went
inside to borrow the graveyard keys from the woman
inside. She also sold hair oil, cabbages in bins, sweets,
newspapers. I bought a roll of mints to give her a little
business.
"Shockin' weather, so it is," she said, handing me
the pair of rusty keys tied together with string. "Not
many tourists come to Dunclogher; no saints or poets
buried here. Maybe some relative of yours?"
"Not that I know of."
"Well, bones are bones," she said, as though she
were saying cabbages are cabbages.
Outside, I put a mint into Brian's hand, and then he
took my arm and used my guidance instead of the cane.
His shaggy hair, obviously home-cut, was damp with
the heavy mist that did not so much fall as slide. He
sucked the mint, enjoying it.
Except for the post office and two pubs, there was
very little to the village. We passed a row of brick terrace
houses with damp alleys behind and then some empty
fields. The ruined church was on a hill on the right side
of the road, but at first I didn't see the river behind. I
turned the larger key in the gate lock and put it, lock
32
and all, into my pocket. I felt weighted down. Brian
seemed content to hang on to me, but I didn't know
where I might find his mother's grave. I didn't even
know her name. Then he said, "My grandfather's name
was Muir. She'd be buried there, in his family plot."
The church was made of stone and was now roofless,
so that we went under an arch and were again in
the rain. The tower was the only part that had not
crumbled. We slipped in the wet grass. The gravestones
on the slope behind the church were so close together
that one leaned against the other. Ivy grew into the
stones so that they cracked. I could see the river now,
and a short way upstream was the linen mill where the
Strachans had worked. No clacking of the looms, just
the squabbling of ducks on the water.
I led the way down the slope, Brian's hand in mine,
looking for the Muir name. On the bank of the river
were a few clumps of daffodils, their buds like tightly
clenched fists.
"What river is that?"
"The Lagan. It goes wandering to Belfast and
empties into the Lough. To the Irish Sea. I've never
been there." He laughed in an ironic way; I was supposed
to feel scorn for someone who lived so close to
the sea and couldn't get to it. But I would rather have
had him stay in Dunclogher, though I couldn't tell him
that.
Then I found the stone. A low square white stone,
marked only with her name and dates of birth and
death. Elizabeth Muir Strachan. I pulled his hand down
so he could trace out the inscription.
"I believe it now."
"Didn't you before?"
"My father and Moira took her away in the night
and they would never talk about her, so I never felt
sure. She might have only gone away on a visit."
"How old were you then?"
"Eleven." He had been kneeling in the grass; the
knees of his corduroy trousers stuck to his skin. We
began to walk uphill to the church, threading our way
33

etween the gravestones and the paper-fragile snowdrops.
"There's a tower," Brian said suddenly, as though
remembering something he hadn't thought of in years.
And then he looked doubtful. "Or did I invent it?"
"It's there, all right."
"Can we climb it, do you think?"
I turned the lock with the smaller key on the string
and put it into my pocket with the other. The door was
wood, heavy, saturated with rain and age. The slimy
narrow steps turned like a screw thread up the dark
shaft. Tufts of moss grew between the stones.
I had then a sense of what blindness must be like
for Brian. He tapped with his cane on each step and I
felt the wall. When we reached the top he said, "Tell me
what you see."
"How do you know I can see anything?"
"I know light from dark. When I first lost my sight,
I thought it was because there were weights on my
eyelids and if I only tried hard enough I'd be able to
open them."
"There's mist out there. Chimney pots, bogs, cottages
with smoke curling up, some sheep." We stood
together at the slit between the stones where monks
had shot arrows at infidels, and he touched my wet
hair.
"What is the color of it?"
"Brown."
"Like Moira's."
"No, not as dark as hers."
"That would be right."
"Is Moira your father's wife?"
He laughed. "Sure, she's our housekeeper."
I didn't know whether to be pleased or not.
"I wonder why my father brought you to our
house."
"Why?"
"He never drinks whiskey. You like him."
"Yes."
"We'll go down now."
34
There was almost no conversation in that house.
When Ivor came down for his tea in the late afternoon
nothing was said about his absence, and there was no
more word about going to Belfast. As he broke his egg
and scooped out the contents, he glanced at me, not
surprised to find me part of his household. When he
finished eating he nodded to me, the same way he had
in the Dundalk pub the day before. Without knowing
where I was going, I followed; we took our coats from
the hooks by the stove and went out to the yard in back
of the house. His workshop was there, a wood lean-to
with a corrugated roof.
He set about lighting the paraffin heater and arranging
his tools before he spoke. "Moira tells me you
and Brian walked out of the house this morning." He
handed me a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a
block, and we each attacked an end of a pine cabinet
framework. I didn't say anything.
"Where did ye go? It was a grand day for a stroll, I
have no doubt."
"It rained." I suppose Moira herself saw us
scrambling around the gravestones. It would not be
simple to do anything private in this place. "Does Moira
know everything?"
"No, not everything."
"Brian wanted to see where his mother was
buried."
He laughed shortly. "To see it."
"He wanted to make sure she was really there."
He picked up a cabinet door and held it in place,
measuring with his eye the way it would swing. "She's
there, right enough." He leaned the door against the
wall and scraped the sandpaper over the frame again,
working toward me. "And did he tell you how she
died?"
"I didn't ask."
"She had bone cancer; she was only twenty-nine
years old; it took her two years to die." He scrubbed
35

away at the surface of the wood. Paraffin fumes filled
the small hot room and sandpaper dust permeated the
air like a choking mist. Suddenly he looked up at me.
"Come with me, girl."
Outside, the paving stones were uneven under our
feet, and the sky was so dark that if I had not been with
Ivor I would have been afraid of falling into a hole or
over a cliff. We walked through the village and
crossed the Lagan at the bridge beyond the church where
his wife lay buried.
The road was narrow and enclosed on either side
by stone walls and avenues of tangled hawthorn. We
now had a scrap of a moon and the hawthorn was
bright, as though delicately touched with snow. Then
we were in an orchard, an old one; notched planks supported
the sagging limbs. "I made those crutches," he
said. "I was an apprentice then. She used to come down
from the big house to watch me work. One day she
kissed me, I don't know why." He shrugged. "We were
married. Her father said it would come to no good. He
was dead right, so he was."
The mist cleared and the moon was now gaudy as a
stamped-out piece of tin. Next to the orchard some
sheep, hostile and indolent, hunched against a thicket
of hedge; their necks were marked with dye. Below the
field was the bog. Whin bloomed there. "That's where
we went hunting that day. He was keen on it; boys are.
Moira didn't know how to cook rabbit—you can't fry it
like a chop—and Elizabeth wouldn't have anything to
do with it. She must have had a foreboding."
"Of what?"
"I shot him, Kate. I carried the gun. I told him to
crouch down in the copse but he saw the rabbit in the
bog before I did. He jumped up. I was crazy with worrying
about Elizabeth and I just let go, not thinking. The
shot hit his eye."
He pulled at one of the apple branches and let it go,
and drops of water came down on us like shrapnel. I
wanted to kiss him in the orchard, as Elizabeth once
had, but his thoughts were too much inward. "Aye, I've
36
been round many a wee corner, Kate."
I took over more and more of Moira's tasks without
anyone noticing. I put the eggs on to boil in the morning,
I sliced the bread, I brought the milk bottles in from
the windowsill before the tits could pierce the caps with
their beaks and skim off the cream. Moira went out to
Mass—she had to take a bus to a town seven miles
away—and came back to find the meal prepared. She
and I got on well together. Like a cat, she found the
warmest place by instinct. I envied her that.
In the evenings she sat at the kitchen table mending
or knitting, smiling softly to herself. Ivor did not touch
the whiskey again.
I watched Brian make his mats. He pulled the hemp
taut and knotted, then let the rope go slack to make the
rounded corners. Each mat was exactly alike; they
might have been made by machine. He laughed at me
for my Americanisms. He took out a pair of spectacles
that were as thick as the bottoms of jam jars and peered
at me. "You are like a film actress."
"You're wrong. I have a lump of a nose and
straggly hair."
Yet still he looked at me, his eyes magnified as
though under paper weights. No one ever put so much
effort into seeing me before. I am happy here, I thought.
One afternoon he came up to his room while I was
napping in his bed. I half awoke, hearing his soft rap on
the door. "Kate, can you find my cardigan?"
I took it from the hook and moved behind him to
put it over his shoulders. I lay my cheek against his
back. He turned and touched my hair and neck. "You're
wearing my shirt, so you are."
"I've been using it for a nightgown. Do you mind?"
"Aye, I mind." He smiled, but I knew he meant
what he said. "You are becoming too much part of us."
"Why too much?"
"That's just the way things are." He touched my
breast and then suddenly let me go. "I hear Moira's step
37

in the street."
"How do you know it's Moira?"
"I'm used to listening for her."
"But what does it matter whether she's there or
not?" He didn't answer; his hand was on the door knob.
"Brian, did Moira knit your cardigan?"
"Aye."
"What else does she do for you, Brian?"
He shambled down the stairs, pretending not to
hear me.
"We're away to Belfast the day, Moira. Pack a lunch
for me and Kate; bread and cheese will do us." Ivor
went out to his workshop and Moira also went out,
carrying her string shopping bag. I cleared the kitchen,
thinking bitterly that Moira would have to do all the
chores herself from now on. Notice around here was
short.
When he began on his mats I said to Brian, "I want
to stay."
He shook his head. He bent over the mat and he
wouldn't let me see his eyes, clouded though they
were. "We can't have you."
"I can get money from home so you don't have to
keep me. I'll sleep on the cot in the front room."
"Sure, you don't understand."
"Well, explain then."
His fingers moved deftly, pulling and knotting. Finally
he said, as though answering quite another question,
"The gunshot blinded me in one eye. The other
followed after, to be like its mate."
In the alley behind the house Ivor was loading the
truck; we'd leave some cabinets in Lisburn on the way
to Belfast. I leaned against the brick wall, watching him
tie the canvas down. I didn't offer to help him, and he
wouldn't ask.
38
In a while Brian came out, carrying a parcel.
"Here's your lunch. And Moira says to say goodbye."
"Thank her for me." My voice tight. "Well, you've
certainly made sure I can't climb back in." Cement had
been poured along the top of the wall and shards of
glass stuck into it, a primitive and evil-looking fortification.
"Don't be daft, Kate. You know that's because of
the Troubles."
"Are you such a special target?"
Very softly, so that Ivor on the truck couldn't hear:
"Moira is."
"Well, why do you let her stay on? Surely you can
find some Protestant girl to clean your scullery. I was
doing very nicely, and I'm Protestant. More or less."
"Moira nursed my mother for two years. It didn't
matter that my mother came from the big house, nobody
else would do that dirty work. And she took care
of me after I couldn't see anymore."
"Maybe they'll hurt you by mistake," I said,
ashamed of my anger.
"Maybe," he said, shrugging. "Or maybe they
don't need to bother."
"We're away," Ivor called, starting the engine.
"Goodbye, Brian."
"Safe home," he said, smiling.
When I looked through the back window of the
truck, the last part of Dunclogher I saw was a field
blooming with prickly whin bushes. Whin or gorse,
doesn't matter what you call it; it's all the same thing.
39

ROSANNA GAMSON
Changing Weather
Marc Oberfest (1958-1978)
But, I have to tell you, this summer was lovely.
The long surprise— you on your back in the dark
face up in yourself and the bed buckled and fuming.
Such an old death. I play it over and over;
your lips coming apart like a spent poppy,
the stinking bubbles rising in your beautiful throat.
The death of the sleeping swimmer;
the lonely backstroke forgetting itself.
I dug in my garden, planting and spitting on the seeds.
I watched the summer padding faithlessly along.
Some days even the dust was bright.
Some days it rained. Nothing changed.
I waited for a telegram, a red ghost, three-legged
dogs. . .
No news. No creak in the frogs or the floor.
I set a candle down between two open windows.
If it flickers, then he thinks of me.
The candle burned calmly
between the evening's haunches.
Because you loved falling I imagine you kissing the
ground.
The weather here is changing. Every morning
I see more and more of my breath
40
and still you are falling.
I fasten my shadow to my ankles and elbows.
When I walk it bats against me like a cape of brown
paper.
My mourning changes with the length of days.
I'm alive. I'm alive. I sole my shoes with tar,
throw loaves out onto the water. I regret everything:
apologies for my appetite or good luck. Even
when I'm not alone I hear splashing oars.
It's the sound of your footprints being wiped
clean of gravity. They float up like grey birds.
All signs that you once moved
are gone or disappearing. There's little left behind:
the curve of your instep—a dark ribbon at the base of
my skull.
41

CLEOPATRA MATHIS
Journey in the Snow Season
l.
They are trying to make you safe
in the white bed, in the white room.
Heart, you think, webbed pattern
of crosses, how the flesh performs
its good rituals. But nothing stops this blood
from flowing: again it passes
the soft packets of tissue. Painless
you begin to say, though the gripped circle
of your waist is wrung and wrung.
2.
You have been looking at your hands.
They have become guests, removed and private.
You can't explain your life.
You only think of the ducks fluttering in the park
late at night, across from your own room,
the scream of the peacocks. You remember
one night the reindeer in their pen charged
and shook their antlers against the ice
as if it were spring. Taking lettuce, you found
two wild rabbits by the road. They let you feed them
and afterward, put their noses to your hand.
Over and over, you've watched the animals
live out their lives. The earth takes in water
or blood, indifferent to whatever falls.
In the spring the grass comes back thick and green.
42
3.
You have loved your body for the wrong reasons.
How capable it is, and vain: it loves to walk
and lie down. Imagine the tiny roads
drawing into the heart; a house
visible through thin ribbed trees,
those intricate lines covered, as if by sleep.
When the snow begins, you are resting in that net
of branches. By now the deer will be perfectly still,
their noses lifted in the first snow.
You can see the white moon
over the clean white land. A veil of snow slides
from a branch; the particles of light fly out
and disappear. When the snow has left that simple
quiet,
sometimes a yearling will raise its stumpy antlers
and begin to dance, stirring the others
to rise and race across the pond. Furious,
they shake their heads, leaping at one another.
In the morning blood glistens on the ice.
Again this fall of cell and nerve
says nothing will last;
the young bones change and lie down.
43

DENNIS SCHMITZ
Building on Farmer Creek
a stream sweetened by roots
the sun in two buckets
you lug back
to us your arms counterstressed
with fatigue, the mix is blended
until the sky tires & the blue
cement thickens,
beads as its weight sweats out water.
man or wooly lumber oozing musk,
knot for knot ennobled
by unwitnessed existence that presses
to Tom Crawford
for form against us—
the footings are poured before you can wonder,
the aggregate stirred
with the same shovel Gary earlier laid
in the coals to cook biscuits.
you quit a dull but honorable job to live here;
looking down you see mud to blind yourself
burned-back grass
& the shit of the animals you love—
44
let them multiply let them feed us.
the goats pluck sour grass
beyond the arbitrary joy of the chalkline.
we are not exhausted
we race the dogs beyond our strength
until I sit by you, your credulous friend,
my nerves retreating with blisters.
I want one of the three houses you plan—
I will choose a work for which I am not fit,
suffer an inner vertigo.
the three of us sit down in the stream still clothed.
45

STEPHANIE STRICKLAND RICHARD HENSLEY
46
Lives of the Saints
Into the ladlings of sunlight
a gauze curtain dips
its white sieve, brims with yellow, spills
some and rides
wider, emptying.
Hidden between bright parsley in a tipped
pot and a crook of gold
squash, the dark
tomato reddens on a white enamel sill
until its shoulders open.
Deep scratches web the blue
counter, which is cleared
cool
and so quiet
even the spider stops moving,
hangs
in the air.
The Antique Buyer
We were all living in the country back then. It was
exactly as Faulkner -describes it: oppressive,
melancholy, terrifying, with every et cetera
imaginable—et cetera in the form of trees with overhanging
branches, pines, willows, black oaks, magnolias
on wicked lawns; broken wagon wheels hidden
sometimes in the tangle of ditches beneath weeds; lanterns
crushed and splintered into glass in certain backyards
of houses; houses . . . they were few and far between.
We lived in one very far between, very very far
between . . .
"How boring it is to live in the country," we said to
one another. We thusly got upon each other's nerves.
"Why dont you leave the country then?"
"We're too damn poor." We all laughed. Too damn
poor.
"That chandelier, dont you think its going to fall on
us some day?"
"It must; it just must." And besides that there was
a gun hung on the wall; a gun very definitely hung on
the wall.
"We're too damn poor." We all eyed the chandelier.
Several hours later (but terrible hours, filled with
pain, hate and suffering, inflicted and received; indeed
we cannot even skip over these hours: no, we'd better
live through them in their entirety, boring as they are.
Everything is boring in the country; nothing happens;
and our nerves are swollen like muscles on male beauty
47
J

contestants) something dreadful happened . . . but in
fact it had already happened, happened in the leaves of
the trees, in the mud of the creek, in the rust of a buried
rifle barrel, so long ago . . .
We were all living in the country back then. We
were sitting around the house in vagrant corners of the
room. Suddenly, but with a certainty that made us
realize he had been deciding on it for years, Uncle
Tinthorn started dying—then with just a puff of light,
and a flash of wind that scattered some dust, he was
gone from the rocking chair where he had sat annoying
the hell out of us with his creaking. Tasha took the
opportunity to take the rug which had been wrapped
around his shoulders, shake it out, and lay it back on
the floor. He was quite gone from the chair; but in his
place was an awesome odor—that of garlic and red
cabbage—which made us all uneasily shift about where
we sat and wish the windows were open; indeed, Uncle
Tinthorn was such a mean bastard old man that he did
that to us, and there was more in store.
The chair without the blanket began to rock, or at
least we thought we saw it rock, it rocked once, we all
agreed; and then we realized that for about the past four
months Uncle had not been rocking like he used
to—and we had not noticed it. This certainly portended
that we had had it easy in the past and things were
going to get worse for us. Now it seemed that those ten
or twenty years when Uncle had rocked us into hysteria
were a flea in the wisteria compared to what was in the
cards for us. But we were wrong; always we were
wrong; above everything else was wrongness for us.
"I reckon we're in for it now."
"No. Things are going to go on as boring as ever."
"I reckon I'd rather something dreadful happened."
"This is what is the dreadfulness."
Luckily there was a phonograph in the place. Tasha
turned it on and some of us danced. The dresses swirled
around and we thought it was very gay to be living in
the country. The record scratched and spit, and only
48
one side was worth listening to, but what was that but a
fork compared to a hill of beans. We twisted and scuffled
until the sun set in the windowsill and blew motes
of dust into the room. Then we were tired anyway.
Then it was time to fix dinner. But something wonderful
had happened; unbeknownst to us because of the noise
of the faded phonograph, Christina had born little
Mick. We all loved little Mick. We just knew that he
would not survive; we invited him to dinner with us
and set to preparing it. He squalled lustily, albeit with a
tubercular tinniness. The sun dived like a duck, sending
up after its tail sprays of darkness which hardened.
We were all living in the country back then, and we
loved it.
Then someone came walking down the road towards
our place. He paused by the ditch outside and
toed a broken wagon wheel; but he was not thinking
about it; oh, he was thinking about something else. He
looked over at our place and saw the gaiety inside. He
adjusted his sack over his shoulder, which contained
something (something!), and took a, step forward, up,
out of the ditch.
We know all about this stranger now, every fucking
detail, but we knew nothing then—we were as dark as
the reader is now—and furthermore we were unholy
ignorant Southerners, dark bastards in our vacuity, our
hospitality. We let the stranger inside when he
knocked. We were suspicious, maybe, foolhardy,
perhaps, but most of all bored. It is so boring to be
defeated and poor. It is so boring to dance to scratchy
and out-of-date records. It is so boring to have infant
kids die, as Mick had practically done by now; and we
would just as soon be raped and murdered by an interesting
stranger, if that's what he had in mind for us.
Whatever he did, it was bound to be entertaining.
The stranger was an antique buyer. He spread out
his sack, which was a large handkerchief of fine material,
indeed the handkerchief almost captivated us as
much as what was in it—it was both blue and yellow
and red and Raymond said he saw green, made of fine
49

cloth from a New York mill, the colors twisted and integrated
into patterns that boggled our eyes, loops and
curliques and spirals which did not begin before they
ended, and radial fibers and fingers and paths—a
handkerchief with many coins in it, gold and silver and
copper. He spread all of this out on the small table,
which we had not well cleared of crumbs; and we
gathered around to watch.
He looked at our baby, but he was not much interested
in him; he was interested in our stove. We
needed that stove, we told him, we could not buy
another for so much as he would pay us. He shrugged;
then he was interested in the rifle on the wall.
We let him take it down and look at it.
Oh, believe us, we were living in the country then;
we knew the back roads and path to the waterwell, the
nearest neighbor's house, the bark of trees in autumn,
the swollen mud of creek-banks. We saw the leaves
turned yellow on our own roof; we saw the rabbit skirting
the wood, his tail pumping the air like a lever handle
as he ran. We had a dog that slept and would chase
rabbits, and now we had a baby. What did we know of
the rifle that hung on the wall, but that Uncle Tinthorn
had placed it there? We were pleased: we grabbed the
antique buyer by the armpit part of the arm and pulled
him out from beneath the chandelier; we sat him down;
we found some bourbon, would he like some bourbon?
We would pour him some bourbon.
It was boring living in the country.
Dust turns into dust; all the drugs in our bathroom
cabinet were stale; the water tasted of rust; the neighbor
borrowed our rake; then it rained. We went for trips
into town; we brought things back for our house; we
spent too much; we quarreled; our females had cramps,
and our males looked at them pityingly. Our dog liked
every kind of food we offered him; he romped in the
yard; it was cool at dusk; we threw things to him; we
wormed him; he survived and survived. We sat on the
porch; we were dying in the country, ha ha! Then it
rained.
50
We noticed it, and closed the windows all the way,
so the curtains wouldn't get wet.^We drank bourbon
with the stranger. He wanted ice. We had no ice; we
were sorry. He would buy the gun. Oh, yes, we were
interested in selling that gun; how much would we take
for it?: we dont know. It grew cold in the house with the
stars coming out . . . why did he want ice? there, there
was our ice, in the black sky. The antique buyer left
everything on the table and he walked out with the
musket. We did not want to put the record back on
while he might still be near. It had stopped raining as he
stepped outside.
It did not happen immediately. Perhaps we
thought it would not happen if it did not happen immediately;
perhaps that was the fairy-light thought in our
minds; perhaps each second that raced away leaving
only echo relieved us more than the last, and the last—
but we could have known, and must have known in the
anchor of our mind, that it would not happen like
that—it would happen later. How long did it take? we
could not say: we sat motionless until the chandelier
fell. We could have come alive, we thought. We went outside
and stood in the still wet grass to watch: Tasha held
the baby; Christina sat on a log; her thin dress grew
damp where and beyond where it touched the greysoaked
wood, mostly barkless, stretched across the
ground across tufts like fists and fingers of weeds.
Tasha turned the baby on her hip, rocking and rocking
through a slight angle, watching the house, Christina,
then the baby, tucking its blanket. Bowler's hand burst
from his red hair—he threw up his hand—then he let it
drop to his side. Lamont, Lamont squatted, squatted
and balanced with one hand; and stood and idled
around; and lost attention, then returned attention to
the house. Raymond stood looking at the house.
Therese, so young, legs like wings in retirement, thin,
looked through her always soft eyes at the house. And
the house began to fall.
We could have come alive, but this is fun to watch.
51

Fun: the fingers of a hand on the ground toy with dandelion
roots, soil with specks of shell—from the ocean,
former tenant of this land—soil with excrement of
worms, dust of crops, smell of artifacts. The eyes toy
with the wall which slowly caves, then the roof which
sinks, then the window which with a fine shattering
bursts and lies like a flock of sparrows on the ground.
Then the groaning of a timber toys with the ear, till
another joins in too painful disharmony; yet they do not
turn away, they flinch and watch, enchanted. The timbers
crack. Oh, the antique dealer!
It is all spectacle now—clouds of splinters, a twisting
gale of shingles, a suspicion of death within—the
clank just once of pots and pans, the crunch of the stove
which should have protested more, the sighing of curtains
and sheets, the comical slide of pictures down the
wall, into the rising lap of the house . . . Oh, the antique
dealer! The spitting of tiles and splints of wood
from the floor.
How exciting it is to watch a house in the country
come down. We were too damn poor. We quarreled. We
had blood between us which connected us as though
with tiny sharp wires; we could not pull but we would
feel a tug; our chests rose as we breathed at different
rates; when someone laughed it would resonate, or it
would not. But we could all watch. And then Tasha
stood with Mick on her hip; and Christina scratched the
itch from her ankle of a blade of grass sawing at it; and
Raymond hesitated before saying something; and the
rest also breathed. A frog, a frog was in their midst, but
they let him stay, and he spoke; and the house came
down with the frog speaking, and the other frogs joining
in at the edges or within the wood; and the stars
were cold as ice, and there was no fire; and they were
mostly without speech.
But Tasha said, turning, and turned so they would
hear her, "Ah, it has died!"
52
RICHARD JONES
Writing Poetry On Black Paper
You get up, try the phone,
but the wires have been cut.
Suddenly there is a pounding
on the door. You imagine
women in torn gowns. It is
Paganini. He smashes
your ex-girlfriend's violin,
waves his white scarf,
and dashes into the woods.
You walk outside,
sit on the stoop.
All night
the stars drop
like white coins
into the black cup of the meadow.
53

JANE MILLER
The Heart Climbs Devilishly Back into the
Body; or, Field of Red Thistles
Noon, noon, noon, the muted creek, the mare locked in
the barn. Winter to break, about to break, about to
mother-me-down. I dream of her in a clear, plastic suit
cracked down the back and tearing, which I have to
stop. Finding myself sobbing periodically, mother of
hard vinyl like a telephone with her flesh exposed keeps
asking in the high voice of the mortally wronged, what
does anyone know about poetry, or care? Who looks
through Baudelaire's windows, who sees him undressing
there? In time we discover the hard blue sky is hard.
And the summer figs, the cherished tan of last season?
now only blare at me, and the leaves by the road-side
pith and collect. I trembled when I heard their words
and the empty minds of the poor scavenged trees.
Moon moon moon in them, owl, hawk, owl. All saying
now Halloween, now, blaspheme of roses, cancelled
weddings, interior monologues. Inside the barn the
whiskers on the horse gather frost. And the steam
knocks, and the wicks sputter. Magnificent sunset,
mother going down. Inside the house her heart climbs
back into her body, bloodying the back steps. The action
begins again, the failing light, the underside of the
moon imagining me here. Dusk pulls a mauve tarp
across a field of red thistles, and catches.
54
MARK O'DONNELL
The Diner
An Oriental man is sitting alone in a restaurant, sadly
eating apple pie and coffee. Clearly, he only knows how
to order "apple pie and coffee". It is the only phrase he
knows. What if some understanding waitress with nails
as red as roses brought him veal cutlest when he ordered
"apple pie and coffee"? He would be grateful, and return
every day, as she brought him omelettes, salads,
steaming newborn roasts— all from orders for "apple
pie and coffee". They would smile at each other, since
they could not converse. She would give him credit for
what he was willing to mean. They would go dancing
and ask the band to play "Apple Pie and Coffee". There
is no such song. The parade of days would pass. All
seas would retreat. They would marry and have rosered
Oriental children. When evening came, the children
would play on the darkling lawn, shouting "Apple pie
and coffee". The stars would divulge themselves above
the trees. Life would be worthwhile.
55

' • ' %
3
ALBERT GOLDBARTH
Math Song
So we want it perfect, lofty—Aristotle's
exacting reason which, without the trickle, hitch,
smudge and grunt of experimentation, computed
purely
in thought. We want quintessence. He was wrong
sometimes, of course, the male doesn't have more
teeth than the female, any doublechecking
prise open of two brute smoochers would have shown
him
that—but that's not the point. He kept his
plane high, and inviolate, figured infinity out
and kept his figuring neat. But the terror
for lesser beings, for us ... Look. You know the
even numbers extended to infinity, that many.
Yes, but the regular line-up, odd-even-odd-even-oddeven
extends to infinity—how can half that shebang
go as far as the whole? Arrgh! No wonder, sometimes
at night, the buildup finally shows and I
turn like a flipped patty over in bed with a gesture
supposed to console and it smacks you
oof. Hey! The endless, empyrean, stellar reaches
balance suddenly here on your gum's blood
staining the pillow a red splotch. I'm sorry. Lemme
look . . . it's not bad, just a messy little dental opening
56
up of the animal salt in you, here where you're
tongueserpent,
cunttextured, oh even anger can fuel a
night's sweet prickles. True, once we lay in bed, odd,
even, and no touch reconciled. Aristotle looked out
—he can see this far—and plotted our finite capability:
faulty as man-woman, gravitybound as north-south.
So it won't go forever.
But we'll look it in the mouth.
57

URSULE MOLINARO
The Chemistry of Miracles
It couldn't be later than 5:30 1/4 to 6 at most by
the purplish blade of evening sunshine that was severing
her father's impasto neck from the impasto shoulders,
on the portrait above the sofa.
The exquisite antique sofa with the dark mahogany
dolphins which she had brought down south with her,
although Martin would have liked her to leave it behind.
—Warning her about termites, to persuade her to
leave it behind.— She couldn't have lived with the
thought of his lady analyst sitting on it. Making a dent
in the green-golden upholstery, with her degreed opportunist's
ass.
She sat across from the portrait staring at the
portrait on the edge of one of the four Queen Anne
chairs she had also brought down south with her. & had
had reupholstered, to match the green-golden velvet of
the sofa.
To entice her mother to move in with her. Getting
her historical little house ready to receive her mother
careful to match colors & styles, not to insult her mother's
well-remembered critical taste before she went to
see her mother, at the boarding house. These people
didn't know how hard she'd tried. She had no reason to
feel guilty. No reason whatsoever.
Was that still her heart, hammering in her ears? It
sounded so real.
58
Save me, Daddy: she said to the portrait: Perform a
miracle. Wipe this last year from my life.
Miracles, my dear Mildred—: the recent recentpsychiatrist
voice of her ex-husband echo-chambered in
her head:—require a specific body chemistry, often
stimulated by extreme stress, or shock. Which modern
psychiatry tries to stimulate artificially. The miracle of
modern psychiatry—
Stop hammering! she said out loud.
She had no reason to feel guilty, even though she
would never have moved down here to this godforsaken
southern town to be closer to her old invalid
mother. Even though it would never have occurred to
her to want to be closer to her old invalid mother, if
Martin hadn't asked her for the divorce.
Out of the blue. Right after he passed his finals.
That horrible Friday evening, during dinner. When
she'd thrown up into her dinner plate.
—It was hard to believe that that horrible evening
was less than a year ago. Not quite eleven months
ago.—
When he had asked her to: stop acting like her
daddy's spoiled little girl. In a new, professionally
soothing now-now voice. Which made her want to
throw up more.
—They were both adults, for God's sake, both into
their forties. Old enough certainly to be sensible. To sit
down like two good friends & talk this out. Now why
didn't she take the opportunity—
The opportunity! Need he be cynical to boot!
—& go to Egypt for a while. Until she felt better.
For years she'd talked about wanting to go to Egypt—
But not by herself! They had wanted to go to Egypt
together, after he passed his exams, to celebrate his doctorate.
For which she had worked all these years reading
proof at printers' offices all over town, ruining her
eyesight in horrible fluorescent light. Supporting
them him so that he could get his MD & become a
psychiatrist & now!
59

Now now now.
& now that she had served her purpose he was
kicking her out. To marry his analyst. To set up conjugal
offices with his analyst, in the very apartment for which
she had paid the rent.
But it was she who wanted to move out. To move to
some god-forsaken termite-infested little southern
town. Pulling all the chairs out from under him. The
sofa. Forcing him to mortgage his life away, so that she
could buy a gingerbread house for herself, around the
corner from her mother. Since that was what she
wanted, all of a sudden: to be closer to her mother.
What more did she want!
That was not what she wanted—
Then why wouldn't she go to Egypt—
Because she'd have to come back from Egypt.
Sooner or later; & face their friends—
Yes. & she was embalming herself in self-pity.
Making herself into a living mummy, living with an
invalid old mother, to punish him for living his life. If
she'd read his dissertation: The Chemistry of Miracles—
She had typed his dissertation. Had he forgotten!
During long nights after work. Ruining her
eyesight— He knew very well what she wanted. Her
old life their old life together that's what she
wanted. Back. Had he forgotten that they used to be
happy together. Playing tennis on weekends. Reading
out loud to each other. Going shopping. Their wonderful
adventurous dinners. All those years of happiness
couldn't just be soothed away with that nauseating
now-now voice.
If she had read what she had typed, she'd realize
that burying herself alive—
He knew very well she'd never felt close to her
mother. They hardly ever wrote to each other. She
hadn't heard from her mother in years.
Then why, in the name of Holy Reason—
Her aloof, elegant mother. Who had a fondness for
wicker. & for mother-of-pearl inlay boxes. & heavily
perfumed soap. & heavy perfumes.
60
I can tell your mother has come home: her father
would say, sniffing the air in the vestibule.
Perhaps she could learn to love her mother as easily
as she had loved her father.
—Who was, however, obligingly dead. Obliged to
take her side, if he wished to be remembered.—
Was Martin still jealous of her father? Even now,
when he was kicking her out.
No one would know her, in her mother's windy
little southern town. She wouldn't run into friends
feel like running from their friends who said: Hi,
Mildred! All by your lonesome? How come? Where's
Martin? Martin missing out on his tennis again this
gorgeous Sunday morning? Martin still studying for his
exams?
Had their friends known where he was when he
was not with her? That he was with his lady analyst, the
two of them together on her couch? Had they asked, to
find out if she knew what they knew? If she only pretended
not to know, for fear of losing her Martin if she
protested? Mildred sure puts up with plenty to hang on
to her Martin. Mildred must be blind. Blind, or stupid.
The shame of it. The shame. The shame.
Her mother was old now. & perhaps wise. A lovable
old lady, who would be glad to have a daughter.
They'd discover all kinds of tastes they had in common:
Like Queen Anne chairs; her mother was impressed
with her sense of color. That green-golden velvet was
like a caress to the eyes— & they both loved egg custard.
Which made them laugh every time they ate it: It
was uncanny how similar they were. How close—
Which was only natural. The natural affinity between a
mother & a daughter.
Martin had always refused 'to share her with a
child'. They had a perfect relationship, why let a kid
come between them. Did she realize how much that
would change their life! No more tennis. No more spontaneous
dinners out. At least not together. They simply
couldn't afford that kind of luxury. —& now!—
Perhaps he was having a child with the lady analyst
61

now. Any day now, perhaps. Perhaps that was why he
had been in such a hurry to get divorced: because his
lady analyst was pregnant.
Her mother had answered by return mail. Because
her mother was eager to see her?
—I may be old. But I'm not wise. I certainly
don't feel any wiser than I felt twenty-five years
ago. When I was your age.
Do you feel wise?
Everybody gets what he deserves. But few
people get what they want. I have both what I
deserve & what I want. & I intend to keep it that
way. I've made my bed, & I intend to lie in it until
the day I die.
I couldn't get out of it if I wanted to. My feet &
legs are paralyzed. I haven't been out of bed in
almost three years.
If I were wise, I'd probably have died. At least
three years ago. But breathing is a habit, like any
other. It's harder to stop than to continue.
You're welcome to move down here & buy
yourself a little house, if that is what you want.
There are plenty of houses, some nice old ones,
too. With jasmine hedges around them, & flaming
trees, & gardenias. You may like that. You may
even like the aimless climate. The pointlessness of
unending summer, if that's what you're in the
mood for. It might depersonalize the pointlessness
you may be feeling about your life, now that your
husband dropped out of it. It might affect you like
a convalescence.
Certainly nobody is going to make any demands
on you, in this historical little town. Where
nothing much happens any more. & probably
never did. People leisurely mind their business, &
nobody interferes when another Cuban shoots
himself for losing at dominoes.
I shall be glad to see you if you feel like
seeing me, after you come down & get yourself
62
settled if you respect my way of life. & mind your
business. But don't expect me to move in with you.
I'm no longer interested in Houses. Property. Possessions.
They never interested me much, actually.
My interest in material things was always limited to
the clothes I wore. Because they allowed me to be
myself, I guess. & to register the changes of that
self. I've never gone along with the notion that
nudity is a truer self than a dress. Nature isn't
"honest"; nature is.
& now I'm no longer interested in clothes
either. I certainly don't need any, to lie in my bed
in the heat. From which you may or may not
deduce that I have ceased to be my "self". Suit your
self. I have exactly what I want, & how I want it, &
I don't want it any other way. If you're coming
down here to meddle & make a fuss, please stay
away. I refuse to become the object of your devotion,
in case you feel the need to fill a void, because
your husband has dropped out of your life. I'm
suspicious of women over forty who change back
to their daddy's name. I have no taste for middleaged
little girls.
Besides, I get all the devotion I can use from
Freddy—
Her proud, proud mother. Who needed her, obviously.
Desperately, but had been too proud to write &
ask her to come to her. Too considerate of her daughter's
married life—
She had not been prepared for the shock of the grey
toothless skull in a grey felt nest of hair. With watery
puddles of eyes that looked at her leered at her
standing in the open bedroom door, holding her breath,
unable to hide her shock.
She'd had to wind her way toward the bedroom
door. Stepping over piles of paper bags & newspapers
& empty bottles. Over the sprawled-out legs of the old
63

wino Freddy on the leprous living-room carpet outside
the bedroom door. —Who had tried to pinch her
stepping calves.
He had tried to pinch them again when she left.
After her mother told her to leave —Please get out,
Mildred!— when she tried to prop a folded newspaper
under one leg of the lopsided bed.
Get out get out get out—when she had stood
in the open bedroom door with hanging arms, the
folded newspaper in one hand pleading with her
mother to let her clean the room, at least, if she didn't
want to be moved
—to her pretty little house a historical little
house it used to be a drinking & gambling establishment,
Mother— to a nice clean bed in a nice clean
room.
To a hospital bed, at least, where she could have
professional care, if she didn't want the care of her
daughter.
Whom she couldn't expect to stand by & watch her
mother die of malnutrition in a lopsided bed in a rundown
boarding house—
—Will—you—get out!
When she had gone back the next morning, the old
wino had refused to let her pass, blocking the bedroom
door with his crumpled body.
He had not been there when she'd come back an
hour later. When she had found the bedroom door
locked. & there had been a sign dangling from the doorknob
one half of a brown paper bag on which
someone her mother had written: OUT TO
LUNCH in red pencil.
She had tried to talk to the landlady of the boarding
house. Who had looked at her accusingly. & had referred
her to the social worker who came to feed her
mother twice a week. Who had also looked at her accusingly.
& had said enigmatically that she was an
honest woman who had her integrity—
She would have liked to know what her mother
64
had said to the old wino to say to the landlady what
her mother herself had said to the social worker to
make sure her daughter stayed away. If what she had
said was what had perhaps started these people staring.
& whispering.
She had stayed away then. But her thoughts had
forced their way into her mother's bedroom constantly.
Cleaning it. Propping up the bed. Holding loving
spoons full of soup to the toothless lipless mouth. Of
egg custard. Making her mother swallow her pride.
Every day she had walked past the boarding house,
in the evenings. Hoping for a sign. For the landlady
waving from one of the windows. The old wino
Freddy stumbling down the steps of the porch, gesticulating
& jabbering for her to come in. That her
mother wanted to see her.
Not unlike what had finally happened. Except that
her mother had been dead when it happened. When the
old wino had stumbled down the porch steps toward
her, & the social worker not the landlady had
waved to her from her mother's open bedroom window.
—Knowing she'd be walking by, 'stalking her
prey'—
She sat staring at her father's portrait with hanging
hair & hanging arms; the cemetery shovel still in her
right hand. It was dribbling dried grey crumbs of earth
on her Chinese rug. On the sea-green back of one of
the Chinese cranes.
It all had started with the shovel when she accepted
the shovel full of dried grey earth, & stepped
forward, preparing to throw the traditional handful of
earth on her mother's grave.
—Into the poor invalid old woman's face, like a last
insult: she had felt them thinking.
For months she had felt their thoughts weave ugly
spider webs around her little house. Around her reading
65

silhouette on the historical balcony. Around her, lying
in bed at night, clean & cool & comfortable, while her
poor invalid old mother was slowly dying of malnutrition
in a lopsided bed in a run-down boarding house.
She had felt them begrudge her the quart of milk
they'd see her buy at the grocer's, the blond stem of
Cuban bread. Their eyes boring holes into her back,
until she'd turned the corner, into her street. Their
pointed mouths hissing what a disgraceful daughter she
was.
Was it her fear that had planted the thought of
persecution into these people's heads?
Where it had been translated into: Retribution—
Justice—before it crystallized into action, when she accepted
the shovel. Which had given the signal for the
chase.
Not a real chase. A slow-motion chase. More like a
procession. Which might easily have turned into a real
chase, however, had she turned around & started to
run. Instead of continuing to walk slowly backwards
back back back groping for the curbs with her heels
before stepping up or down to make sure she
wouldn't stumble. & fall, God forbid, which might have
been the signal for them to fall upon her, & maybe
trample her to death.
Slowly slowly she had backed away from the
steadily advancing procession of eyes. Eyes that looked
black with accusation. Into which she had bored her
eyes staring back at them, hoping to keep them at the
same distance, with her eyes. —Her heart hammering
in her ears. It was still hammering in her ears, with the
methodical sound of nails being driven into wood.—
While they drove her back back back through
endless sun-parched streets with loose stones between
parched patches of weeds back—back—back
toward the door of her little house.
Into which she was able to slip, thank God, because
she had left her door unlocked when she left for the
cemetery.
66
They all left their doors unlocked, in this small
southern town. Which was inhabited by honest lawabiding
citizens. With a keen sense of justice.
Into whose steadily advancing faces she had quickly
shut her door. & locked it. As soundlessly as she
could, for fear of offending their honesty with the click
of her latch.
It couldn't be later than 1/4 to 6. Her mother's funeral
had been set for 4:30. It had started late, but the
sermon had been brief. & she lived only two short
blocks from the cemetery. The interminable backward
walk had lasted at most 5 minutes. They would go
home now, she hoped. & leave her alone.
She hadn't expected to see so many people that
so many people knew her mother, who hadn't left her
bed in almost three years. She had expected to be alone
at the grave, with the old wino. & perhaps the social
worker.
Perhaps she ought to pack a suitcase & go to Egypt
after all. For a month or so, to give these people time to
come to their senses. After they found out the truth.
Which the social worker might feel compelled to tell
them, when she was told what they had done to her
after the funeral. Were still planning to do to her,
perhaps.
If the social worker knew the truth. If she hadn't
been one of the black pairs of accusing eyes in the procession,
if the social worker had gone to the funeral.
Of course the social worker had gone to the funeral.
The social worker had more of a right than anybody to
go to the funeral. After taking care of the poor old
woman for close to three years. Twice a week.
It was the social worker who had peeled the poor
old body from the filthy sheets. Nothing but skin &
bones. Who had given the poor old body a good last
bath. Spraying it with a nice-smelling lotion, before she
put a decent clean gown around it. & cut the grey felt
hair to pageboy length. & put a touch of rouge on the
67

hollow grey cheeks. & a touch of lipstick on the lipless
mouth. & cut the long yellow fingernails which had
been as hard as chicken claws: no wonder she'd held on
as long as she had, nails like that were a sure sign of
longevity; they had almost broken her scissors before
she'd folded the bony hands across the bony chest. &
inserted a rose between them.
Which the daughter had pulled out to put a bunch
of lilies of the valley in place of the rose. The poor old
woman's favorite flowers, supposedly; because of their
perfume, supposedly. When the daughter had finally
arrived. After all the work had been done. By the social
worker.
When the daughter had cried & carried on, because
she felt guilty, obviously. With the old wino Old Freddy
patting & patting the daughter's hands. Almost sober,
for once. The sly old bastard, hoping that the daughter
would take over where the mother had left off, maybe.
Pay him a little something, at least, to stop patting &
stay out of the way.—
If the social worker knew that her mother had been
supporting the old wino all these years. Letting him
drink up her pension ...
Perhaps the old wino was the only person in the
entire town who knew the truth. Besides herself. &
might feel compelled to tell it in hoped-for exchange
for a little money in a drunken fit of remorse.
In which the entire town would share, after he told
them. They'd all be gathered at the miniature airport
with flowers in their arms to welcome her back when
she returned from Egypt. Asking her forgiveness for the
wrong they'd done her in their thoughts.
She couldn't go to Egypt! What if Martin had gone
to Egypt, on a honeymoon with the pregnant lady
analyst. —There had been no answer when she'd tried
to call him repeatedly to tell him her mother had
died.— She risked running into them at the foot of a
68
pyramid, & they'd invite her to play member of the
wedding. & force her to lie down on the couch in the
hotel lobby, to analyse why she was traveling alone—
Besides, if she left, these people might burn down
her little house. With sudden disregard for their town's
history, of which they were otherwise so proud.
She had a vision of four or five sweating pot-bellied
men —& women; at least one sturdy muscled woman;
the one who drove one of the town cabs— climbing
onto each other's shoulders forming a human ladder
all the way up to her historical little balcony with
canisters of kerosene which they began pouring over
the wicker chaise longue which she had bought to entice
her mother to move in with her, remembering her
mother's fondness for wicker.
There were glistening pools of kerosene in the four
corners of her balcony. & they were holding kitchen
matches to them. To the porous old wood of the historical
balustrade with the carved-out bottle- & diamond
shapes which had been an advertisement for liquor &
card games in the days when her quaint little house had
been a small illicit drinking & gambling establishment,
during the days of the prohibition.
—But not a small house of ill repute, since no heart
shapes had been carved out in the historical balustrade,
as a subtle advertisement for illicit love.—
She had a vision of herself, driving up in a cab,
after she returned from Egypt. The cab with the
sturdy woman driver. Who quickly drove off after she
got out.
Who did not drive off, on the contrary, but parked
along the street & waited, in case she decided to ride
back with her to the miniature airport. & watched her,
standing under her pepper tree, with hanging arms, her
suitcase in one hand, staring at the burned-down pile of
historical rubble.
She shook herself, in an effort to erase the vision.
Not to plant such a vision into one of these people's
receptive heads.
69

Where she had perhaps planted the thought of the
chase in slow motion at the funeral. When she had
felt them leaning toward her, when she reached for the
shovel. Before they started moving toward her in on
her between her & her mother's grave. Cutting her off
from her mother's grave. When they had seemed to be
moving all at once, in a body, like a swarm of bees.
But these were peaceful honest small-town folk.
Law-abiding citizens, who left their doors unlocked
when they went shopping. Or to the cemetery, to funeralize
somebody, as they called it. Even at night they
left their doors unlocked. It was all her morbid imagination:
Martin would tell her: the persecution complex
she'd been cultivating, as a refuge from responsibility.
From boredom.
But I hear them! she said half loud. Belligerently.
They're hammering all around the house. At the back
door. Outside the living room window—
She did not only hear them. She could see them:
two red-freckled hands, driving long shiny nails into a
cross that was beginning to bar her living room window.
Martin wasn't always right now, just because he
had become a psychiatrist . . .
Above the sofa, her father's impasto face was
breaking into a wide purple smile.
70
TERESE SVOBODA
Arbor Day
You planted trees three times.
For less view, you said, and to break up
the sky. Mornings you hauled them plenty
of water and spoke to each in soft tones.
Prairie dogs, you prefer to think,
ate back the roots; the wind wasn't that bad.
Of course, backing over two with a pickup
didn't help much. But others had whole groves
that took to the sand like sagebrush. The dogs
are out now, hesitant and abrupt, the color
of earth against the sky. Hundreds appear,
bobbing up from their holes. All their eyes
seem to see you. It is as if all at once
the land takes them back again, leaving
the horizon empty, but for the lightning,
branching and blooming.
71

ROBERT CARNEVALE
72
I.
In the Long Room
for Skip Kreisell
Priestley is sorting out the gases.
One day one comes out so light
he's convinced he's found phlogiston,
lives to see it demoted to hydrogen.
Home in Penzance it occurs to Davy
salts he couldn't budge with fire
might be coaxed by a good shock.
Within a week he sees pure
sodium and potassium.
In your lab we pull down the blinds
to see by the light of two bunsen burners
the tendrillous crystals of iodine.
Everybody huddles around
as if it's a fight or a centerfold.
II.
I went to the Long Room at Trinity
to stand where James Joyce had stood,
to see Tara's Harp and the Book of Kells.
But I spent most of the time
staring into rows of glass cases
where first editions of Davy and Boyle,
notes of Herschel's and Von Helmont's
went from brown to umber to white
down to Bohr and Heisenberg.
I stood there wanting to learn again
how the elements were discovered,
but the pages kept using your voice—
a voice that allowed the same near whisper
to confide an off-color tale
or to unravel me 2
after classes in your office—
a voice I couldn't imagine raised
even after I heard it raised.
Within an hour whatever you said
turned to quicksilver in my skull.
But always there was that voice
as I reasoned my way home from school
through the pre-Copernican streets.
73

JAMES BRASFIELD
The Stringer
Called from my room to a death,
It is your unknown face that frightens me.
I drive past the city limits
And park my car. I did not know suicide
Could look that simple: your caretakers in white,
The beer-joint's neon script
The only bright color in the damp light.
I walk to you at the field's edge,
To you lying more still
Than the ground beneath you.
The sheriff pulls back your smooth sheet.
I absorb your half-opened mouth and eyes,
Your blue lips.
Everything you could not finally abandon
Is evidence.
I am infatuated with your wound, wet
Empty socket with its eye stolen.
I want to put my finger there,
The shallow well
Where someone will split you,
Gather your limp machine into a plastic sack
And never answer what dam broke
That so many rivers at once
Washed over you.
74
JOE DONAHUE
Returning
The prodigal does not feel
all that penitent.
He thinks forgiveness a trick
with words —
A parapet and broken wall
moulded from ice
fill the yard of his old house.
The children who live here now
are in for dinner.
His father does not hammer
the frozen latch and let him in,
as he might have in life.
The evening wind would creak the gate,
but the gate is gone.
The snowfort rises cold
as a household,
but he feels no loss.
He follows God's advice,
which is indistinguishable
from silence.
75

An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz
by Aaron Fischer and Deborah Gimelson
COLUMBIA: When did you start writing and why?
What was the motivation?
MILOSZ: I started writing when I was a high school
student and it's very hard to reconstruct such a remote
period of one's life. In any case, I treated it first as a sort
of exercise. I was experimenting with very classical
forms and my guess is that those poems, although I
don't have them, were not bad. They were, however,
stylistical exercises.
C: Who were you reading when you first started? Who
were your favorite poets?
M: Of course, I was interested in poetry written in
the tongue in which I was educated—in Polish. And
this poetry was quite interesting beginning with the sixteenth
century. We had a lot of Latin in school, translated
Ovid and Virgil in class, and Latin poetry influenced
me considerably. We also had French, and in
French we read some poets of La Pleiade. I guess one
poet who influenced me and incited me to write stylistical,
classical exercises was one of the French poets of La
Pleiade, Joachim du Bellay.
C: Do you find that you still return to these poets, or do
you have other favorites?
M: I have changed my interests to a considerable
extent. For instance, I developed a taste for the
medieval Polish language. I consider the best translation
of the Psalms to have been done around 1400 in the
medieval language.
C: What is it about the language that attracted you?
76
M: We now enter a highly specialized field. Of
course, you don't know anything about the character of
the given language, the Polish language. In my opinion
the medieval language was much more concise and
energetic than the language that later developed.
C: 7s this the same thing that attracted you to Latin
poetry, the discipline and energy?
M: Yes, except that maybe when I was in high
school, as I said, I was attracted by classicism: regular
stanza construction, meter and rhyme. Gradually I developed
a taste for non-Latin forms which is, for instance,
the form of Biblical verse. That is why my latest
work is a translation of the Psalms [unavailable in
English—eds.]. I learned enough Hebrew to be able to
translate directly. Usually, Polish translations have been
done on the basis of Latin and Greek. In order to compete
with the medieval translations I translated from
Hebrew. That's entering into competition with an unknown,
anonymous monk who translated around 1400.
C: In terms of classicism, your work has often been compared
and contrasted to Cavafy's. What influence has he had
on your work?
M: I heard the name of Cavafy for the first time in
the early Sixties, although some of my poems written
during the war have a more or less similar approach, a
feeling of historical tragedy. The discovery of Cavafy
was very surprising for me. I was influenced, to some
extent, by Polish poets, Polish poetry, but also by Eliot
whom I discovered during the War. During the War,
in order not to learn German, I learned English, and was
able to read Eliot for the first time. And so I guess that
there was an influence, but completely transposed, because
Eliot dealt with a world very far from the world I
lived in. I lived at the bottom of European hell and so I
transposed, besides Eliot, the use of persona which
stems from Browning, so there is a long line. There is a
similar poet, a Polish poet of the nineteenth century,
parallel to Browning, but not as difficult. In any case,
because of the pressure of events, I was forced to take
an interest in history and the historical situation.
77

C: You have translated Whitman into Polish, and he
seems to be an influence, along with the Bible, in your newer
work, especially in "From the Rising of the Sun' [Bells In
Winter, Ecco Press].
M: Yes, yes. Though let us say that Whitman was
not the only poet who used the long line. There is a
whole tradition, quite a strong tradition, a very venerable
tradition. That's the problem, for instance, when
translating the Psalms. I tried to preserve what is called
in French verset biblique, biblical verse. There is no word
in English for verset, just verse. The translators of the
King James Bible translated it into prose, while newer
translators divide it into sections and write in a column,
which in my opinion is also wrong. The idea is to preserve
the flow, what you refer to as Whitmanesque, and
we know that Whitman was inspired by the Bible; and
also observe caesuras inside, because caesuras are justified.
In the original Hebrew you have signs for
caesuras. So I mark the caesuras by little stars.
C: Earlier you mentioned your awareness of the "historical
situation". Did you find it difficult to come to this country,
where our sense of tradition and history is rather weak, and
very little of our poetry seems written from any sense of tradition?
M: Well, maybe things change. Immediately after
the end of the War when I went abroad for the first
time, I was connected with the Warsaw government,
the new government. I had my own poems, written
during the War, and some poems written by other
Polish poets, and I tried to communicate the contents
and to translate them to show them to some Americans.
They didn't understand what it was all about. The same
poems today seem more understandable and find an
audience. The same poems. So there is an evolution
which has occurred since, let us say, 1946. There is
much more openness to a tragic historical experience
among the Americans.
C: Our attitude towards war has certainly changed in
this country from the patriotic feeling surrounding World War
II and Korea, to the negative feeling focused on Vietnam.
78
M: That isn't really what I meant. Things which
occurred in Europe during those years of war took time
to be assimilated. The American outlook changed, and I
don't know whether this is a result of Korea or Vietnam.
In any case, a feeling that our planet is a tragic place has
somehow developed.
C: What you are saying seems to be an encapsulation of
the history of the last thirty years, in that there has been a
strong sense of the tragic developing. This is especially true of
the last 10 - 15 years, or of people in our generation. There is a
new awareness of individual limitations, and of the amount of
time it takes to change and accomplish things.
M: Probably. My mentality is very un-American
and I guess that our mentality over there still differs
considerably because that moralizing side which is very
strong in America is basically optimistic. Maybe we are
pessimistic. Take, for instance, Zbigniev Herbert. What
is interesting is his use of classical themes taken from
the Greeks and the Romans. But really, those are
paraphernalia. He uses them to get a distance, to watch
the events of our time, to place in a certain perspective,
to give a universal pathos or universal tragedy to the
events of our century. And this may exemplify the
anti-moralistic attitude in the sense that we should try
to do our best to improve this world but we should be
aware that it is always a place of tragedy.
C: Which is extremely Cavafian.
M: Very Cavafian in nature, yes.
C: Many of the people you mention by name in 'From the
Rising of the Sun' are Christian thinkers and Christian mystics
who were concerned with questions of duality, duality of
the spirit, duality of the individual, or of the world.
M: True, that's very true. You see, one of the decisive
influences in my life was my cousin who was a
French poet. He was not a close relative of mine, but
was a man of the same name. His name was Oscar
Milosz. He migrated to France. As a matter of fact, his
parents sent him to school in France when he was
eleven. He received his education in France and became
a French poet. In the spring of 1939 he died in France.
79

And in 1977, the hundredth anniversary of his birth was
celebrated by a special exhibition of Milosziana at the
Bibliotheque Nationale. There was a two-day seminar
colloque in Fontainebleau where he is buried, to which I
contributed a paper entitled 'Oscar Milosz and William
Blake'. He is highly regarded in French literature.
Abroad, he is little known, but his name can be found in
some literary encyclopedias. Curiously enough, you can
find his name in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, because his
mother was Jewish, but not in Catholic encyclopedias,
although he was Catholic and considered himself a very
devout Catholic. His influence was very strong when he
was a young man.
I received a very rigorous Roman Catholic education
with a lot of the history of the Church, dogmatics
and so on, which created in me a great interest in
heresies. And, for your information, I am teaching a
course at Berkeley entitled 'Manichaeism', that is, the
heresy of Manichaeism, where I deal with the medieval
and some modern Manichaeists. The duality that you
mentioned is a very good observation, a true observation.
They have always attracted me, dualistic thinkers.
One of the twentieth century thinkers I like very
much, and about whom I spoke in my Manichaeism
course, is Simone Weil, who had very strong sympathies
for the Albigensians. Albigensians in the south
of France were the direct inheritors of the Manichaean
duality, the two principals of God and Satan, so in part
this answers the question.
C: One of the things you return to is the multiplicity of
the selves in one self, in one individual. In 'Lesson' you talk
about the idea of locked rooms inside you . . .
M: Also in 'Ars Poetica' [Bells In Winter].
C: Yes, also in 'Ars Poetica' and through all of 'From the
Rising of the Sun.' You say there is a troubadour from Provence,
that he is speaking in your voice, and at one time you
and he were the same. We found that a fascinating thing, this
idea of many selves within the self, and we were wondering if
you would talk about it.
M: Yes, of course, that is a very intelligent observa-
80
tion. There is an issue of World Literature Today dedicated
to my work. One article is by Jan Blonski, a personal
friend of mine, a professor at the University of
Cracow. He analyzes one poem and he says practically
the same thing you do, that the difficulty in analyzing
my poetry consists in those multiple voices, multiple
personalities, so that even within one poem, you can
see contradictory voices, a sort of polyphony. He invokes,
of course, the theory of polyphony in literature.
Dostoevsky has been called a polyphonic writer because
voices speaking in his work are all part of his personality
and he is for none of them exclusively and for all of
them together. So he analyzes my poem and says there
are voices contradicting each other, internal dialogue,
parts of one personality, for and against, and it is true, I
guess. I am terrified by those voices and poems which
range from ecstasies to black despair, in one person. I
cannot do anything but give them free rein.
C: Not only are there different voices in dialogue, but at
the same time they come from all different parts of history.
M: Yes, and this is quite a problem in translating,
because certain allusions are connected with the history
of the language, and the history of poetry in a given
language, so there are many poems of mine where there
are linguistic allusions. There is, for instance, one line
obviously referring to a poet of the eighteenth century,
a pastoral poet, which, of course, is lost in translation.
They cannot be reproduced, and yes, your observation
is correct because I consider my poetry deeply rooted in
the whole tradition, a certain tradition of history of the
area from which I come and the history of the language.
In 'From the Rising of the Sun' there is a whole chapter
missing because it wouldn't be comprehensible in English.
The chapter refers to the district in which I was
born and there are localities, places; there are fragments
in prose from old chronicles referring to those places.
And then it closes into a very small area where my
family lived for several centuries and there are even
inventories from the sixteenth century. Humor and
drama are constantly fused in this particular chapter. I
81

also describe my high school years and my fascination
with heresies and with dualities that you mentioned,
which originated when I was a schoolboy. But I mention
by name various friends of my youth, and so it would
be very difficult to understand without notes.
C: What do you think has been lost in translation of your
work?
M: That is the great obstacle, the historical references.
C: We noticed in your Selected Poems that credit is
given for all the translations except 'The Raja'. Is that the only
thing you have ever written in English?
M: I guess it's the only thing. It was written in the
form of a letter.
C: We were fascinated by that because you have done so
much translation from Polish to English, and from Hebrew to
Polish. When you write, do you still write in Polish?
M: Only in Polish. I feel no temptation to write in
English because I am so rooted in one language. My
poems in English would be poorer, they would be without
that multifaceted character, without allusions. In
the history of the Polish language there were bilingual
poets, but in another language they were usually
weaker, one-leveled, while they were multi-leveled in
Polish. Of course, there were cases where they were
better in other languages. There is a Polish writer who
was brought up in German schools. He wrote German
and his German writings are better than his Polish
work. That is a question of the language in which one is
brought up. My French cousin spoke very fluent Polish
yet didn't consider himself a Pole, but a Lithuanian. He
wrote only in French; that was his language of expression.
He never could write in any other language.
C: The idea of persona comes up many times in your
poems. When writing in English, do you feel freer to create a
persona, a very identifiable one from which to speak?
M: I don't know. To be frank, I haven't given much
thought to the idea of writing in English. It seems to me
that writing in Polish gives me enough trouble. There is
something here I would like to read to you—
82
'Hypothesis': "If, she said, you wrote in Polish to
punish yourself for your sins, you will be saved" [Bells
In Winter].
C: Have you worked with young writers at Berkeley?
M: Young writers in Berkeley? No, no. In the sense
that I never taught any creative writing. Some young
people with literary ambitions profited from our seminars
and I also profited from their participation. I gave
seminars in translation so we would sit down and together
translate poems from Polish into English, occasionally
from Russian into English, and I used the technique
I learned when I was a high school student. I am
very much indebted to my high school; that is why I am
horrified by the situation in this country at the high
school level, because you have to learn everything later
on.
C: That has become very obvious to us.
M: But we had a very good Latin teacher, with
whom we translated Ovid in a very democratic way. He
would give his version, a line, and then say: "Now,
who wants to improve? You suggest this, all right, let's
read it—how does it sound? What do you think about
the improvement? No good? Let us try another solution
..." And so on. So I would bring my translation to
class, and then ask the students' opinion, and we would
work together on a given line, line by line in the poem.
Some of the students profited, and I profited from
teaching them. Largely, the result of those seminars is
my anthology of Postwar Polish Poetry.
C: Relative to our situation in this country, you have
written in isolation without a large community of people
around you doing the same thing. Do you have any thoughts
on that?
M: Let us first distinguish ... I lived in a community
as long as I was in Poland. The communal character
of literary life was ten times stronger than in America. It
was very strong before the War, but it was also strong
during the War, and even stronger after the War, because
during the War there existed the world of the
Underground. It was a compact community, everybody
83

knew everybody else, they read to each other, there
were clandestine poetry readings and publications and
so on. After the War, when the Communists came in
under the new system, the communal life of writers was
enforced. They simmered in the same kettle of The
Writers' Union. Writing classes do not exist in Poland.
This is not a European tradition at all. There are sections
of young writers, various local divisions of The Writers'
Union, which amounts to a sort of pupilship on the part
of the young writers. There are probably 10,000 poets in
Poland now. While abroad, of course, the isolation is
great. Due to the peculiar situation of Americans of
Polish descent in America, there are completely antiintellectual,
blue-collar communities of Polish workers.
There is no contact. When I give poetry readings in
Polish, in Paris for instance, there are so many young
people that my readings find a very enthusiastic audience.
And I noticed here yesterday after my reading
that many young people from Poland, who had first
read my books in Polish, were in attendance. That's the
question of isolation and community, but I wrote my
poetry mostly in complete isolation.
C: In the poem 'Mag-piety' you say ". . . my muse is
Mnemosyne, mother of the other muses" [Selected Poems,
Seabury Press]. In a section of 'From the Rising of the Sun',
there is a young boy turning around to look at things from a
wagon, because he knows that everything will be changed by
memory.
M: This is a very touchy thing. You know that
William Blake fumed against memory and opposed imagination
to memory. I have to remain somehow true to
Blake and at the same time be aware that memory for
me is very important. I guess the answer is there are
various kinds of memory and in general imaginative
memory is very selective and very purifying, which is
why Blake was for line in painting, clear line. This is
also connected with his praise of the imagination. Line
makes for clarity and clear delineation between what is
contained within and what is outside, so I guess I understand
memory as extremely selective; not just retain-
84
ing what happened but transforming it slowly until
something very clear is distilled out of, let us say, the
landscape. The boy looking at the landscape eliminated
various things so that it was practically already an act of
imagination and creation. He created a certain picture
which remains with him for life. There were many other
elements in that travel. I know, of course, to what travel
that poem concretely referred and would be able to talk
on the circumstances of that peculiar travel. It was usually
a trip that lasted three days, by horse-drawn
wagon.
C: I guess in that case it would have to be selective.
M: Yes, Indians are not mentioned (laughter). But
there were Indians . . . Did I answer this question? I
wonder. I don't know whether it was translated, but
(reads) 'Memory and Memory': "Not to know. Not to
remember. With this one hope:/That beyond the river
Lethe, there is memory, healed" [Bells In Winter].
C: Mnemosyne is also the other river in the underworld.
We were wondering if you had been thinking about that.
M: Beyond Lethe. I was not aware of that.
C: Did you find that there were special problems or difficulties
in writing a long poem, perhaps sustaining a poem
over so many pages?
M: You know, very often I feel that it is very commonplace,
that a writer has a vision of some large unit,
of some large, long book or poem and then he makes
sketches for it, and time and other preoccupations
change, shift his attention, and so the longer poem
doesn't come into existence. And very often short
poems, sometimes good poems, are by-products of the
larger plan. And sometimes poems which are just
poems, by their inner necessity grow, and a longer
poem grows. I don't know how I wrote the longer
poems, they grew gradually. First from fragments, and
later coagulating by themselves.
C: So it is not a linear process.
M: No. At a given moment the impetus is already
felt and there is a necessity to continue. The poem develops
into a special logic, and then calls for sequence,
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sequence and sequence. Not in the beginning. The beginning
is hard.
C: 'From the Rising of the Sun' is going to be compared
to 'The Waste Land' and also to parts of Pound's 'Cantos',
because it again makes use of many different periods of history.
One of the great differences in your poem is that while all
periods of history are called upon, the experience is not fragmenting.
There seems to be a unity running through all this.
Was that your intention?
M: To tell the truth, I don't know what my intention
was. You mentioned that there are so many voices,
so many personalities, and basically the intention was
more or less the same as it is now when I am writing. I
try to understand something, and I cannot. But I try
very hard to unify and to understand.
C: Have you ever had trouble writing? Have you ever
stopped for long periods of time, been blocked?
M: Yes.
C: During the periods when you were blocked, was material
being distilled? Did you break out of them to find that
something very important had been united?
M: I don't know. You see, being blocked can be
provoked by various circumstances, either personal or
not. In the years before the outbreak of the last war, in
the late Thirties, I was locked, at an impasse. I was in
the dark, let us say. It is not that I did not write, but I
was writing things which I do not particularly like now,
and those things bear, in my opinion, the traces of my
impasse. That was a result of personal complications
and historical complications. The situation in the late
Thirties in Poland was so ugly that the outbreak of war
for some of us was greeted as "ah, at last." Because
sometimes you cannot bear the whole upset. Let it
be ... the worst. So that was one period, one very
strong period, of impasse. It continued, I should say,
for the first two or three years of war. I could not find a
formula. I felt that everything which existed until that
time in my poetry was somehow false, inadequate, to
what was happening. And suddenly, when it was over
in 1943, something new opened, a completely new vein,
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precisely those poems which were translated during the
War, and since that moment I started writing. And then
I continued, and there was another impasse, when I
lived in France. It was also personal, very profoundly
personal, and historical. Of course in 1949 they enforced
the doctrine of socialist realism in Poland, and 1950 was
an extremely ugly year. I broke then with the government,
stayed in Paris, and I was at an absolute impasse
as far as poetry was concerned. Then I wrote "The Captive
Mind" because I was cornered, so to speak. For a
couple of years I was unable to write poetry. But then
suddenly it opened, in 1955, at the end of '55. So I
looked for a cure in that period. When I couldn't write
poetry, I wrote a couple of books of prose.
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Fiction
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ELAINE FORD lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
RICHARD HENSLEY lives in New York City. His fiction^'has
been rejected by most of the major literary periodicals."
URSULE MOLINARO is a translator, playwright, poet,
novelist, short story and non-fiction writer living in New
York City. Her work has appeared in a wide range of
periodicals; her most recent book, The Autobiography of
Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy, was published by
Archer Books.
ROBERT TAYLOR, JR. lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He
has had stories published in Iowa Review, Transatlantic Review,
North American Review, and many others.
Poetry
JAMES BRASFIELD grew up in coastal Georgia and is now
living in New York City.
ROBERT CARNEVALE was born in Benevento, Italy, and
grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. He has worked as a driver,
apple-picker, teacher, and musician, and has studied with
Stanley Plumly and Joseph Brodsky.
JOE DONAHUE is from Lowell, Mass., and is a student in
the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University.
ROSANNA GAMSON is a dancer and poet living in New
York City.
ALBERT GOLDBARTH is living in Texas. Seneca Review
Press will publish a booklength poem of his late this year.
ROD JELLEMA's second book, Lost Faces, is published
by Dryad Press. He teaches at the University of Maryland,
College Park.
RICHARD JONES is a poet living in New York City.
CARL LITTLE is at present fulfilling a prophecy made by
distant aunt at his birth: ". . . wind up working in a gas
station." He attended Dartmouth and the Columbia
Graduate Writing Division, and is not married.
CLEOPATRA MATHIS' poetry has appeared in The New
Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and Georgia Review among
others. Her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana will be
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published in September by Sheep Meadow Press.
JANE MILLER'S poems have appeared in Agni Review,
Antioch Review, Iowa Review, and Antaeus.
MARK O'DONNELL's poetry has appeared in Canto and
Ploughshares, and his humor in Esquire, The New York Times,
and New Times.
DENNIS SCHMITZ's latest book, Goodwill, Inc. was
published by the Ecco Press.
RICHARD SPEAKES is co-editor of Loon, A Journal of Poetry,
and Managing Editor of the Seattle Review. His poems have
appeared in Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest,
and others.
STEPHANIE STRICKLAND'S peoms are forthcoming in Iowa
Review, Poetry Now, and Small Moon.
TERESE SVOBODA is finishing work on translations of Nuer
songs with the aid of an NEH grant. Her poems have
appeared most recently in Poetry Now and Prairie Schooner.
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