Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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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
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: They sit together in the turret, on
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 and 34: Where she had perhaps planted the t
Page 35 and 36: JAMES BRASFIELD The Stringer Called
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

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