Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
Page 1 and 2: ROBERT TAYLOR, JR. Union Street Sta
Page 3 and 4: espect for those who supervise him
Page 5 and 6: In bed, on the verge of sleep, she
Page 7 and 8: They sit together in the turret, on
Page 9 and 10: RICHARD SPEAKES Scrimshaw The man t
Page 11 and 12: ELAINE FORD Whin I met Ivor in a pu
Page 13 and 14: I'd only spoken it once. "Moira, an
Page 15 and 16: etween the gravestones and the pape
Page 17 and 18: in the street." "How do you know it
Page 19 and 20: CLEOPATRA MATHIS Journey in the Sno
Page 21 and 22: STEPHANIE STRICKLAND RICHARD HENSLE
Page 23 and 24: cloth from a New York mill, the col
Page 25 and 26: JANE MILLER The Heart Climbs Devili
Page 27 and 28: URSULE MOLINARO The Chemistry of Mi
Page 29 and 30: now. Any day now, perhaps. Perhaps
Page 31 and 32: silhouette on the historical balcon
Page 33: Where she had perhaps planted the t
Page 37 and 38: C: You have translated Whitman into
Page 39 and 40: also describe my high school years
Page 41 and 42: sequence and sequence. Not in the b

Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?