Mandala: An Art and Literary Magazine
May, 2012 Northfield Mount Hermon School Mount Hermon, MA 01354 i
I dream of painting and then, I paint my dream. Vincent van Gogh
The Fish We all began slowly Our sharpened tails urging us from the start Off we went sliding in elegant s’s And sharp turns of tails On we went in groups of one then two and more Our scales gilded with sunlight Free of direction and speed With each turn all care forgotten In our journey through the new medium In patterns of leaves and sharp arrow points we circled Fresh with life Red green and blue Colors of springs come and come tomorrow Till the last turn made and off the ice Our skates removed in the water no more On the thick pavement of earth Now new and bright again in the complexity of its ocean Josh Sheppard
Excerpt from Letter To My Son It seems to me, Ben, that many of us never develop a personal sense of history. We live our lives in the here-and-hectic now of shopping malls and fast food fever, of rising prices and dwindling resources. Yet if we happen to stumble into the web of time past with its radii of vanished people, places and events, we may emerge with the beginnings of an understanding that would be difficult to cull from any text or dusty document. I was first confronted by history one long-ago afternoon when, released from school to late spring sunshine, I decided to take a walk. Now walking may not sound overly thrilling to today’s average twelve year-old: an activity, perhaps, that falls far short of a mediocre night of television and a bare cut above washing behind the ears. I might exchange walking for exploring, then, since this is really how my friends and I thought of it. Growing up when and where we did, the world of woods and streams seemed exceptionally fresh, sufficient invitation to any young person of even modest curiosity and imagination. As I think I have told you, Long Ridge village where I grew up was - and is - a small quiet collection of old homes in southwestern Connecticut. For many years, the village was little more than a wide spot in the road that connected Stamford, some nine miles to the south, with Bedford village and other New York State hamlets to the north. After World War II, Stamford reached out and, despite the mild protests of villagers, claimed Long Ridge for its own. No matter. The villagers still drank their own well water, relied upon their own volunteer fire department, and patronized their own small general store, Holler & Schofield’s. The only obvious casualty was the old Grange Hall which, temporarily abandoned, sank into faded disrepair. Several miles west of our home in Long Ridge was the relatively wild area of the Gorge through which ran the Mianus River. A fine trout stream, the Mianus meandered south toward Long Island Sound through miles of second-growth forest with steep hillsides, impossibly tall evergreens, and here and there an unexpected field that murmured of long-ago cultivation. But the Gorge was reserved for major expeditions and camping trips. Another, smaller area lay close at hand. Across the village street from our home was a working farm run by one Bill Miller. Miller’s fields rose eastward to a low ridge. On the far side of this ridge, the fields gave way to woods that, dropping gently at first, soon paused atop a series of uneven cliffs guarding a valley. Through this valley ran a small stream. Technically the east branch of the Mianus river
but invariably referred to simply as “the river” (which was “back in the woods”), this stream crossed Rockrimmon Road to the north, passed down the valley through several small ponds, and finally vanished to the south. Surrounding this stream was an accidental preserve of perhaps six square miles that, for some mysterious but fortunate reason, seemed of no particular interest to the adult world. But what others chose to ignore was paradise for my friends and me. We built leantos where fields met forest on the back side of the ridge. We mined vast quantities of useless quartz from the steep cliffs guarding the stream. We caught innumerable sunnies in the still, sun-dappled pools where the stream widened and lied to each other about monster brook trout encountered while on solitary expeditions. We dammed the stream with rocks and lay in the dark, woodsy water with only toes and noses showing. Once, fishing at Big Rock with a friend named Jeep, I was stunned to see him drop rod and worm can and launch himself straight out over the still, dark pool. “Copperhead,” he gurgled, surfacing some ten feet out from shore. And sure enough, there was the snake coiling contentedly on the warm rock near where Jeep had been standing, heedless in its sun-stunned satisfaction of the thrill it had given two young boys who, for the next several weeks, felt more like adventurers than ever upon entering the wooded valley. Our usual territory included all of the fields and forest on our own western side of the stream. Save for a few brief forays, we had never bothered much with what lay beyond. There the woods were thicker, more forbidding, and lacked the lure of cliffs to climb. But I had recently come across some maps that my father had drawn. Based on these, I had concluded that a crafty woodsman like myself who crossed the stream and hiked straight on for a couple of miles would find himself coming out on the lower end of Rockrimmon Road. To be precise, he would find himself re-entering civilization in the vicinity of Sawyer’s chicken farm. Sawyer’s chicken farm! Traveling by car the long way around, this had always seemed a world away, infinitely remote in terms of the village and its surrounding fields and woods. Surely no one in Long Ridge had ever walked to Sawyer’s chicken farm! And yet, studying my father’s hand-drawn maps, I thought how really simple it would be. So I set out one afternoon, having taken care to fortify myself with several sandwiches before leaving. God alone knew when I’d get my next meal! The early afternoon was glorious, my aim was lofty, and my imagination seemed to have a life of its own. Hot damn!
This would really be an adventure to recount to Jeep and Nick and John and Matt who, poor tame souls, were all occupied that day with some mundane activity or other. I set out. Climbing through the fields to the top of the ridge, I surveyed what lay before me: the valley below, then miles of green treetops unbroken by chimney or visible clearing. “Somewhere over there is Sawyer’s chicken farm,” I murmured, much as I imagined Columbus or Cortez or some other earlier explorer might have speculated on a new continent or ocean just over the horizon. I went on, making noises to myself as human beings often do when walking alone into the unknown. In my case, I alternated between verses of “I Love To Go A’Wandering” and snatches of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land that, for reasons known only to him, my college-age brother Jim had taken to reading aloud to me in recent weeks. Muttering incantations to myself involving Madame Sosostris, Phlebas the Phoenician, and others of Eliot’s strange crew, I reached the stream and crossed on the ancient trunk of a tree that had fallen across the water years earlier. Now it began! Having spurned not only the fact but the whole idea of a compass, I faced squarely into the vertical tangle of maple-beech-birch-pine-oak trunks and put one foot fearlessly in front of the other. Half an hour later, I was lost. Oh, not badly, irretrievably lost. I was fairly certain that I could find my way back to the stream simply by following the westering sun. But that would defeat my entire purpose. Sawyer’s chicken farm - my by now grossly-idealized goal lay ahead rather than behind me. Or maybe ahead but slightly to the left? I pushed on, the sun still warm on my neck and my hopes still relatively high. What is not gained but through adversity? I wasn’t sure if this was a quotation or an original thought, but it seemed to fit the occasion. I had long-since worn out my limited repertoire of T.S. Eliot and was now embarked upon the collected poetry of A.E. Houseman. “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves…” Just maybe, I thought, I’ll stumble upon a Wrekin and finally learn exactly what it is. Instead, I stumbled upon a path. Not much of one, really, but still a faintly discernible track largely free of significant shoots or saplings, a way rarely used and overhung with boughs. Someone came this way more than once, I thought, adding: But not for a long time. Having arrived at this determination, I found myself wondering if “a long time” meant a month, a year, or a hundred years. It felt strange indeed to come across this path in otherwise neglected and unbroken woods. But I did not hesitate to follow it. The path seemed to be
heading in my general direction. And besides, what explorer could have turned away without learning where such an unexpected track might lead? So follow it I did. The path cut through some dense woods, skirted a stand of evergreens, and wound around the base of a low hill. Then I got my second surprise as, without warning, the woods on my right suddenly opened into a field, once cleared but now overgrown with hay and studded here and there with small trees and bushes. Young and naïve as I was, I still knew that cleared land meant people. And sure enough, my third surprise waited for me at the far end of the overgrown field. It was someone’s cabin - or had been, years before. Now even from where I stood at the far end of the field, I could see that the small structure was abandoned. It had that look of total, empty desolation that, I would eventually learn, is common to all those things that humanity creates, loves for a time and then abandons. But empty or not, it was clearly a cabin. Here was a discovery beyond anything I had anticipated. Who could have lived way back here? What could have brought someone to the tumbled, wooded wilderness midway between Bill Miller’s pastures and old Wes Sawyer’s chicken farm? A dozen such questions crowded and clamored in my head as I moved closer, finally slipping through the empty doorway into the cabin itself. Dust was everywhere, I remember. It rose with every move I made and found the sunlight that spilled in the door. And for all the dust that I disturbed, still more lay thick like soft grey carpets on every horizontal surface. There was a single small room, perhaps twelve by twelve feet or a bit larger. The rear wall framed a stone fireplace and chimney, the mortar dry and crumbling and the stones faintly loose to the touch. Looking up, I could see where the wall and chimney had begun to go their own separate, amicable ways. Against one wall was a low bunk built of logs and covered by a skimpy, rotting mattress and what looked like an old army blanket. Set in the wall opposite the bunk was a single window, just an empty square covered by some kind of wooden shutter. I gave this shutter a tentative shove and it came loose, falling to the ground outside and letting the afternoon sunshine stream in. Fascinated, I studied everything: the clearly hand-made table and single chair near the window; the low shelf along the fireplace wall with its collection of one tin plate, one rusted enamel pot, a few pieces of equally rusted cutlery, and an old pint milk bottle; the hurricane lantern hanging from a bean near the doorway. Light poured in the shutterless window and spilled into corners of the cabin that must have been dark for years. Poking
through the rubble on the floor, I realized that the place had not been totally abandoned. Mice had lived here, surely. Some larger creatures, too, judging by the droppings. Almost through with my search, I found an old tin box on a small shelf over the bed. Inside were two corncob pipes, both well used. Lifting one to my nose, I thought I caught the faint pungency of tobacco. There was also a small scrap of stained cloth and, wrapped in this, a bit of flat stone of the kind that is used to sharpen knives and other edged tools. This, too, had seen much use. I held it in my hand, trying to visualize the fingers of the mysterious person who, years earlier, had put this stone into service. Outside again, I searched around behind the cabin. Within minutes, I found one faint path that led me to a tiny spring, another leading in the opposite direction to the tumbled skeleton of an outhouse. Going around front again, I poked through the field and found what might have been the outline of a garden. At least the tangle of hay and weeds was defined here in what might, with a little imagination, be seen as a rough rectangle. There was a jungle of wild mint growing in profusion at one end of this rectangle. Most of the young trees in the field were maples. But two looked as though they could be wild cherries, their dark, uneven bark much the same as that of our backyard cherry tree in Long Ridge. There seemed nothing more to discover, and yet I found it hard to leave. Instead I wandered back inside the cabin, then came out again and squatted in the empty doorway. The sun was low over the western trees by now, its light fading to gold and its warmth diminishing quickly. And thinking of the solitary individual who must have built this cabin, who must have thought of it as home for at least a little while, who must have looked out over the garden from this same doorway, leaned against this same wood, touched this same earth - quite suddenly I felt the invisible mesh of time past all about me. This was history, then! This was what all those books and teachers and wrinkled, absent-minded grandparents had been trying to explain to me. Not a collection of dry facts and dull characters in outlandish costumes, but real people who lived and worked and cared and died before I was even born. At twelve, I found this a revelation beyond compare. An old man living alone in a cabin - in my culturally-constrained imagination the inhabitant could only have been male and elderly - became the tip of some vast and unexpected iceberg. The signs of his living, his projects and concerns and small personal routines, were all around me. And through these signs, this life, came bit by bit all the lost wealth of life before him: his parents and their parents and grandparents, no longer just blurred faces in cracked old photographs, but people living as I lived myself, and so a part of me.
I cried briefly, I remember - a very few hot tears that were not for happiness or sorrow but simply because the moment was too intense, too absolute, to do anything else. Then, wiping my eyes dry with my fingers and feeling slightly stupid, I rose and started home. I never made Sawyer’s chicken farm through the woods, not that nor any other day. Perhaps it could not, after all, be approached from the direction I chose. More likely, I got involved in other things. But I remember the excitement that lingered in me all that long walk home. It was dusk before I found the tree-trunk bridge over the stream and almost full dark when I climbed the ridge and looked down over the fields and across the distant street to where lights burned in my family’s home. My parents would be waiting dinner for me, I knew. I’ve since wondered if they noticed anything different about the boy who arrived home that night, out of breath from running the last stretch and as filthy as the underside of a rock. For my part, I could only summarize the experience by saying something trivial like “Hey, I found this neat cabin back in the woods!” Maybe there was something in the way I said it. I don’t know. I do know that the impact of that afternoon in the abandoned cabin has never left me. Since then, I have spent countless hours poking about in the neglected corners of time past: in books and cellar holes, in rock formations and personal anecdotes, in lines drawn on maps and in the lines of an old person’s face. Such efforts bring a host of small yet real rewards. Blurred photos become living families, old trees or stones become forgotten boundaries, and wood-lots yield to fields that once lay fertile in their own late afternoon. As on that distant day I knocked the shutter down and let fresh sunlight into the cabin, so caring and imagination still conspire to let a golden light play on yesterday’s people, places and events. I went into the woods behind Long Ridge that afternoon as a small, scruffy boy possessing little more than a healthy appetite and curiosity to match. Thanks to the unknown individual who built a cabin just where I might stumble across it, I returned home with a personal sense of history, a connection with the past that has never been severed. I can honestly say, Ben, that no simple walk has ever brought me greater joy or profit. David Rowland
Genesis In the beginning, there was fear A void swallowed by itself, colourless in its anguish Then a Voice in the darkness spoke. It spoke of withering roots and burning sand And the ebb and flow of sweetness. It carved a space in the dark, a nest of Nil Touched by neither rot nor growth. From this nest there hatched Glys, the heart of the world Burning ivory immaculate with cold fury Its glassblown layers washed agleam by anti-light. Now the Voice commands again It speaks of the sap of light, frothing at the seams of time And waves of purity descend upon the great Heart, Spellbound by the essence of creation This we call Dorh, the stuff of life. Lo, the Voice shouts, Let there be hunger And a verdant patina spread across the tides Driving their will through the currents to feed on Glys’ wrath. Lo, the Voice shouts, Let there be strife And the will of the voracious turned on each other Choking the greed from their tendrils The eddies and torrents ceased, And land, silent as the dark, is born from death. Now the Voice whispers, Let there be voices as great as mine And a great multitude supplants the Silence, Voices High and Low, of Aire and Fyre. These we call Erevin, The choir of balance, The Living Anthem. And there was Strife and Silence, Light and Darkness, Aire and Fyre, The first day. Wei-Hung Cheng
12
Of Tomorrow The moonlit footsteps of my red and grey Vans Traversing over Bostonian sidestreets, littered with cans, Glide in the stride displayed by youth’s triumphant pride. But what do we have to celebrate? What makes our youthfulness so euphoric and great? We don’t know. And that’s the beauty! We don’t know the ways of tomorrow, you see, But soon! Yes, soon we will embrace the morrow with the setting moon, And we will ascend the years with vigor! Fanning fires of love and loathing as we tickle the trigger… Of tomorrow. Edward Yankow
Ode to Gail Carter Demaine Perennially you smiled with your whole body and strode longlegged into life. Even later with your canes, climbing hills, always forward. A human sequin: purple, gold and blue. A tall elf in tennis shoes. The day I met you, summer shone in the trees and on your face. A strange gold shape hung from your neck on a chain: Martha’s Vineyard, you later explained. I could picture you with David and your beautiful sons, eating blackberries, barefoot in the sand. For girls far from home, you were mother to many those years in Crossley; you were our lighthouse. You believed in people with motherforce, reflecting our light back to us. You were a torch held high. Who could not be buoyed by your bright beam? No small gift for any teen or friend, adrift or slicing through currents. At some point, every one of us needs someone waving on the shore.
I have never been one to believe in Heaven, but now that you are gone from our days of blackberries and canopied maples, I am beginning to hope for a place where I might meet you again and say Thank you, Gail, thank you again, a place where the sun warms your dear dark head. Megan Buchanan Cherry
Mushrooms Mushrooms. Tiny egotistical bastards. Center point. Limelight. Shining. Dying. We can only last so long. The man at the pearl gates laughs when I arrive. Stamps my hand with a purple and shoves me down to hell
panda bear.
Spinning. Whirling. Twirling in pink lace tutus. Twisting and turning. I HIT a pile of mushrooms. Golden yellows. Fluorescent oranges. Deep blacks. Outrageous blues. Rainbows of the world resting in Hell. In despair. Simple to love. I spread my arms and legs. Push my liar tainted ruby RED lips into them. Feel their loveliness. their evilness. their longing to belong. and I became one. A mushroom. Tiny egotistical bastard. Center light. Lime light. Gill Friedlander
Cemetery I: Looking for George Woodhouse Banished to hallowed ground’s eighteen inches of dirty March snow At odd intervals vaporizing underfoot like burnt toast, Ill-shod bird dogging searcher’s pitched off-kilter with muttered curse and snow-filled shoes. He’s sent this fool’s errand by nephews long-lost and some number of greats removed but nonetheless so prayerful for news He figured why not help them on their path to God. Now aimlessly aiming for a far corner’s trinity of stones, He’s hopelessly hoping somehow the four orphaned boys had found a way to stick together in death as they had in life From Manchester’s Meadow forward to that August crime. Today Hill, Morris and Tobin drown in frozen white wash Just as sixscore and six summers since Connecticut’s blue wash swallowed them; Then, reaching helplessly toward helpless Woodhouse, eldest of the twelve disciples, Today their stones cant toward his in struggling gesture transfixed sure as sure pointing the way. Dead at thirty-eight, struck down by God as he prepared to sing a gospel hymn, His body sent from Brooklyn to this peaceful yard to sleep, George Woodhouse lies beside his mates. He’s found: three souls save one at last. Peter Weis *In June 1883, D.L. Moody brought 12 boys (known sometimes as “the twelve disciples”) to Mount Hermon from an orphanage, “the Meadow,” in Manchester, England. The following summer, two of them, George Tobin and Austin Morris were drowned in a swimming accident at the Connecticut River. Their classmate George Woodhouse tried unsuccessfully to save them. Woodhouse went on to a career as a gospel singer and died suddenly, as described, in 1909. Because Woodhouse loved the school dearly and considered it his home, his widow asked that his body be buried in the Mount Hermon Cemetery. The present day story of the search for a gravestone is as I’ve written it. Though he died with them, James Hill was not one of the twelve, but this is a poem, after all.
Rewriting Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself. It was a warm, beautiful day in May, a day so beautiful that it excited the already effervescent mind of Clarissa Brown, who just turned eighteen a few days ago. The clock began striking. Clarissa hurried toward a flower shop to purchase flowers—the prospect of the frenzied air at the high school graduation party was enough to imbue her steps with a giddy sense of urgency. Averting her mother’s questioning with indefatigable exertion, Clarissa squarely bore a single reason behind her such action: to give the flowers to Peter Walsh, her first love as well as her soul mate whose deep appreciation of Joyce Carol Oates paralleled hers. Then her gaze was fixed at an advertisement of a plastic surgery clinic in New York. With a deep sigh, she looked at herself in the window. Should I really do something about it? Must it be in New York? Clarissa then thought it horrid – to lose her own appearance, the one thing that made Clarissa, Clarissa. For a moment, Clarissa was dazed by the warm bright illumination as if the flashing light scooped her very soul out of her body and mischievously hung it midair. She felt herself dim, distant, a little benumbed as her delicate silhouette was taken onto a fluorescent sheet onto which an imprint of Septimus and her was made. The poster would be out in the streets before long, at which time she would garner even more attention from strangers passing by. Then it was Liz, who, with her gaping mouth, told her: she should not, better not, be disturbed, if not for Richard, who was waiting for her in his office. Clarissa was not able to spare a little time for herself, not for her immediate family, not even for Richard. She felt bitterness in her stomach. She had a well-off husband. However, it was she who perpetually occupied the center stage of an ongoing show. She was possibly the most famous actress in the country. Clarissa, mindful of her soaring fame, hurriedly left for her next schedule. The clock began striking when Clarissa got into her van for her final schedule of the day. It would take a few hours to get there, Clarissa, Liz said. Against the drab colors of the van lay a bundle of flowers from one of her passionate fans. The flowers, the flowers, she talked to herself. The scent of the flowers immediately brought alive her memory of the high school graduation party ten years ago and how frustrated she felt at that time. How she wanted to born anew and to appear, with a nonchalant, rather arrogant look on her face, in front of Peter as a pretty and alien being he would immediately fall in love with. She vividly remembered the time when they would sit together at lunch, nibbling cranberry tuna sandwiches and discussing We Were the Mulvaneys: one nourished their bodies, while the other nourished their souls. They were immersed so deeply in the conversation that they would run into class after the bells had already rung and still felt fine! Clarissa now thought she was happier at that time, for there he was with her in her English class, in the school cafeteria, at Friday night parties, and most importantly, in her heart. Then there was Richard. When Richard came to propose to her, she didn’t expect it or like him, much less loved him. Why do you want to marry me? She wanted to ask, but then she desisted. Richard would make her secure; it was Richard who would help her become famous and feel, yes, liked. Before
long they were purchasing their bed. Nothing could be as simple and careless as that. In the midst of her reminiscence of her thoughtlessness, the voice of Liz brought her back to reality: another 2-a.m. shooting against a harsh wind, rain, and her dire need to sleep. Feeling as if the world came to an end as she heard this, Clarissa typed, almost impulsively, a message to Peter: Hello, Peter. Would you please come to my party tonight? Perhaps this was going to be Clarissa’s graduation, thought Clarissa in her crimson evening dress, something that she would hold onto, not hark back with nostalgia. But why is he not here? She speculated countless possibilities she could think of as the reason for Peter’s absence. As she welcomed the last guest of the line, she convinced herself that he would come eventually, though she was well-aware that it could be just an unsupported, or even vain, belief as Peter was not the kind of person to be late. Her gaze constantly returned to the door with the firm faith that he would be here soon. Although she had been waiting for this party as the single moment in her life in which she truly felt that she was alive, all the blithe voices and their pleasantries rippling around from the party did not excite Clarissa or contain her fretfulness. At the very moment she finally put aside the thoughts of Peter came the urgent voice of her manger, who reported that Septimus just threw himself out of the window of his house. Clarissa was thunderstruck. It was a decision that Clarissa never anticipated, though her knowledge of his struggle was intimate. Clarissa, betraying little consternation, walked out of the party. Her shoulders started to tremble; she started sobbing. Again, she imagined of her and Septimus, lain supine on a white sheet, their skin pale – this time, immobile. Is this what it must be like when one ceases to be? Doleful, Clarissa drifted to the pond she used to go to take relief from busy shooting schedules. The ripples gently caressed the shore line. The ducks and geese bobbed motionlessly with an occasional ducking under the water. A cobbled path—the path she had never seen before—wrapped around the pond with curves and swerves. Like London’s Serpentine, it prophesied what could not be anticipated: sudden twists and turns, a violent break off the beaten track. A little down the way was a park bench with chipped white paint that served as a throne to a little old lady whose frail hands held out birdfeed to the dozens of pigeons surrounding her. The clock began striking. She must go. When she returned to the party at its full glow, she found, to her alarm, Peter Walsh rolling his eyes, trying not to look to be eagerly looking for someone. Such action seemed slightly pathetic to Clarissa, as she clearly knew that he was looking for someone. It did not matter to her that he showed late. It was a simple fact that he was here now that brought her a sudden upsurge of excitement. Several years had passed but everything was the same: the antiquarian good manners, the deep brown eyes, the aquiline nose, and the elegant coiffure. Walking along the familiarity of her old days, she gave him a brisk cuddle and brushed her lips against his soft, chubby cheeks, trying to dissipate the uncomfortable feeling creeping through her heart. Though Peter didn’t change, Clarissa did, and a lot that it was apparent to even blunt eyes of Peter.
Was it a dream? Years back, she held the flowers in her back, feeling oppressed by the scrutinizing eyes of her friends and the ensuing question: to whom do the flowers belong? Beset by the friends’ attention, she saw none other than Sally Seton, her close friend who would soon be her black knight, her Savior. Clarissa did not fail to lose this chance and accosted Sally, who flushed as soon as her eyes kissed Clarissa’s. Feeling her heart fill up ineffably with joy, Sally extended her hands and offered thanks. Then came Peter. Seeing the bright halo of Peter with her fond memories with him discussing Oates’ novels, Clarissa became tragic and even indignant at herself for lacking the confidence to admit her affection for Peter. If I were much prettier, things would be different – she thought, lying down on her bed. She dreamed of her bed getting larger and larger – large, eventually, enough for two. In reality, a very narrow bed lay ahead instead, where she, recumbent, heard the ensemble of scalpels, drills, and hammers. Clarissa chuckled as this dreadful feeling entered and then quickly left her thought. Woken up by the effulgent sunshine seeping through the window in her bedroom, Clarissa was in a pleasant mood from last night at the party with Peter. Then Clarissa heard a line redolent of Joyce Carol Oates on radio and started beaming. At first, she didn’t know why; she did not understand what about Oates that made me feel suddenly elated. What about her? But then now, now she knew: it is Peter Walsh, she said, with whom she shared everything. Oates’ voice, though unheard and unsung, had become a rhyme of their own song, a coda to which their symphony would return again and again till their last gasping breath. The vision of their long friendship, camaraderie, unfolded in front of her at its unfathomable scale, overwhelming her more dazzlingly than the incandescent light of August. The clock began striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room. Her direction was clear. It was her first time visiting the university’s campus, yet neither the well-known statue of Alma Mater nor the ancient buildings was impressive enough to satiate her mind preoccupied with the thought of Peter. Like a mother who just lost her child in a stream of crowd, like a soldier looking for his fellow soldiers in the middle of a blood-stricken battle, Clarissa sought for him – a missing piece of hers that would make her whole again. And when she knocked on the door of his office, and entered, Peter thought to himself. What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. Hye Rhim(Ashelly) Suh
Fiction Serenity in sleep; Where nobody will weep. Serenity in the silence of the night; No electricity-the key and the kite. Serenity in love, But serenity is something people have a lack of. Serenity, serenity, O mythical paradise. Magical state, fictional and nice. Edward Yankow
The Return All the night in woe/ They traced the desert ways. William Blake I am called Ethan. Seen but hidden from others, I returned from slaughter to slaughter plagued retribution. As song abandoned the plain, the vacant voice moved us through charts of land & sky. Once & only once, did the mirror reflect that which is mine as his. Now, we are back. Innocence begot experience. Forgotten, I became wind and dust. A. LeMay
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. Friedrich Nietzsche
Acknowledgment The staff of Mandala extends its heartfelt thanks & best wishes for the future to those faculty & staff members who will be leaving the School at the end of this year.
Editorial Staff Will Greenberg Min Kyung Kim Rachel Wang Sam Youkilis Philip J. Calabria - Faculty Advisor
Layout, printing and binding by TigerPress, Northampton, Massachusetts Printed with soy ink. Environmentally friendly printing since 1985.