Storyman 2

“She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: "Winter is dead.”

A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

ISSN: 2009-2369

The Linnet's Wings

SPRING 2014

Peek-a-Boo by Georgios Jakobides Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

William Butler Yeats

The Linnet's Wings SPRING 2014

Also by The Linnet's Wings: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow One Day Tells its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine Randolph Caldecott's The House that Jack Built

Frontispiece P. 1 Peek-a-Boo by Georgios Jakobides

MARCH 2014 INTRODUCTION

MICRO FICTION

SHORT STORIES

ESSAY AND SPANISH TRANSLATION

The Linnet's Wings Information Page v Foreword by Bobby Steve Baker x Epigraph by Rabindranath Tagore xii

On His Toes by Marian Brooks 55 Recession by John Sindell 64 Tomorrow Comes by Daniel Clausen 66

ARCHIE CLEEBO , Bill Frank Robinson 1 Artist at Work, William Reese Hamilton, 11 EPIC , Martin Burke, 23 Souvenirs You Never Lose, M.E.McMullen, 83

TRANSLATIONS

I’m a Jellyroll, Joseph Giordano 93

The New Art of Writing Comedy by Lope de Vega (Excerpt) 45 Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca 47 Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega 49 Música: Doña Francisquita, Amadeu Vives Letra: Federico Romero y Guillermo Fernández-Shaw 51 The Language of Flowers by Federico García Lorca 53

FLASH FICTION

A Shadow of Doubt, Mary J. Breen 58 Water, Ian Butterworth, 62 DPP v Morgan, 1975 by PARINEETA 89

ESSAY

Blake’s Chimney Sweeps

CNF

36 ,

Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas: The Legacy of Spanish Theater, Diana Ferraro 43

, 30

POETRY

Plath, Anthony Langford 80 The Table in the Garden by evie robillard 82 Neutral Ground by Jason Sturner, 77 Wasps by Ed Higgins 76

Girl Reading by Georgios Jakobides

Barely Escaped by Ed Higgins 74 The Beast At Your Side by Holly Day 72 What Is There To Lose by Holly Day 70 Fleeting Laziness in Birds and Catching Myself Being Selfish by Nonnie Augustine 68

CLASSIC

The Champa Flower, Rabindranath Tagore 10

ART

Boy Smoking by Georgios Jakobides 1 Various sketches and a beggar by Hieronymus Bosch 3 Reclining Boy Leaning on His Elbow by Egon Schiele 5 Two Lovers by Reza Abbasi 15 Return from Field Work by Gheorghe Petrascu 11 23

Et in Arcadio Ego, Artist: Aubrey Beardsley 27 Evening Landscape with Rising Moon by Vincent Van Gogh 29 The Path intersect the Garden, Artist: Grant Wood 31 Wordly Folk Questioning Chimney Sweeps and Their Master Before Christ Church in Philadelphia

by John Lewis Krimmel 35 The Wandering Moon by William Blake, Series: Illustrations to John Milton - L` Allegro and Il Penseroso 41 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quichote by Paula Modersohn-Becker 43 Study of Monsters by Hieronymus Bosch 45 Grammar by Paul Serusier 46 The Dream by Odilon Redon 47 Hope II by Gustav Klimt 50

Fragment from 'The Children's Concert' by Boris Kustodiev

Edmee Lescot as a Spanish Dancer by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 56 Study of the Graduations of Shadows on Spheres

by Leonardo da Vinci 57 High Waters by Isaac Levitan 61 Ice Flowers by Raphael Kirchner 63 Self Portrait in Lavender and Dark Suit, Standing

by Egon Schiele 65 Mlle. Leotine Desavary Holding a Turtledove by Camille Corot 67 Page preceding contents list by Aubrey Beardsley 69 Single Items by Raphael Kirchner 71 Animal motif for a picture book by Koloman Moser 73 Bees by Louis Marcoussis 75 Clara the Rhinoceros, by Jean-Baptiste Oudry 77 Nervous Heads by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 79 The Water Garden by Childe Hassam 81 A Souvenir of Velazquez by John Everett Millais 83 The Cup of Chocolate by Pierre-Auguste Renoir 88 Thoughts of the Past by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope 89 Houses by the River (The Old City) by Egon Schiele 91 Red Elisabeth Riverbank, Berlin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 94

Web Sites Researched for this issue: Wikipaintings and Gutenberg

TEAM Managing Editor M. Lynam Fitzpatrick SENIOR EDITOR Bill West EDITORS FOR REVIEW ENGLISH Bill West Nonnie Augustine Yvette Wielhouwer Flis

Offices Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, ROI Motril, Granada, Andalucía Online Offices Provided by Zoetrope Virtual Studio Web Hosting Provided by www.thelinnetswings.com

SPANISH Diana Ferraro Marie Fitzpatrick

Design© TheLinnetsWings.org 2013

Consulting on Copy Digby Beaumont

Founded, in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, in ROI, in 2007

Spanish Translations Diana Ferraro

Publisher: M. Lynam Fitzpatick

Contributing Editors Martin Heavisides

Published by The Linnet's Wings

Photography Editor Maia Cavelli

###

Database Manager Peter Gilkes

FOREWORD

In America Four Times a Day

by Bobby Steve Baker

Two years old, raped, shaken, burned, “Here’s what happened.

She fell down the stairs.”

That’s the story. That’s the case.

White coats round and round.

Everybody lawyers up.

Social services a-buzz.

We will now show this baby the best that civilization has to offer.

Deal with it Professionally. That is my task.

Visualize events,

Poem Taken from our Upcoming Publication: 'This Crazy Urge to Live' by Bobby Steve Baker

Alone at crib-side, with the mini-mickey whoosh ventilator-breath fed baby, tend-me-tone multi-monitors, the emitting diode light show, these all fade.

I am alone with the baby, motionless both of us, except a rise and fall of chest, her’s mechanical, mine catch and release.

Her’s scheduled to stop, when the committee votes.

These are not the findings of a baby who fell down the stairs.

You see, good people, the size of a baby’s head compared to the strength of the neck musculature, when shaken violently by the shoulders subjects the fragile brain to high velocities of deceleration…

And so it goes, so goes the accounting of the mechanism of neural injury.

Ending with the diagnosis, non-accidental trauma incompatible with life.

Previously published by:The Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, (reprinted from Strong Verse)

unthinkable events, in detail; accurately enough to present causality.

Tediously, I testify, one more time, to one more jury, ordinary men and women bewildered by the horror, desperately wanting to believe there was an accident.

I will explain again, that this particular constellation of injuries; the swollen, hemorrhagic brain, blood in every layer of the retina, fingerprint bruises on the arms, multiple fractures in varying stages of repair, torn vagina, cigarette burns; these do not happen by accident.

“The smile that flickers on a baby’s lips when he sleeps- does anyone know where it was born?

Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.”

Rabindranath Tagore

tiny house, surrounded by vacant lots, sits on a back street. The rising sun enters the house through cracks, under the door, and around the edges of the ragged blinds. It creeps across the floor and dust particles can be seen dancing in its rays.

In the front room a shabby couch sits along the north wall with a radio next to it. The walls are covered with faded wallpaper. A broom handle, fashioned into a clothes rack, is nailed cattycorner to adjacent walls directly across from the couch. Sundry clothes on metal hangers are hanging on the makeshift closet. Below the clothes is a large bed, bare except for a heaped-up blanket near the head. The blanket moves and Archie Cleebo peeks from under the blanket.

He looks across the room, measuring the distance to the bathroom door. His eyes race to the alarm clock ticking softly on the dresser next to the bed. Eight-fifteen, too late to go to school but it’s Saturday. He sits up, pulling the blanket tight around him as the cold air rushes in, and searches the dresser top, looking for his dime. It’s not there. Mom always leaves a dime for the Saturday picture shows but she hasn’t been home since Monday when she got fired and blackballed to boot. He studies the watch on his wrist and knows it’s not working. It’s a Mickey Mouse that he got for his tenth birthday two weeks ago.

He stiffens as he is reminded that he is in danger of peeing the bed. Only babies pee the bed and he ain’t no baby. He throws the blanket on the bed, revealing his long underwear and races for the bathroom. His teeth chatter as he stands over the bowl, releasing his bladder and remembering the old tease: “PART YOUR HAIR IN THE MIDDLE AND SIT DOWN TO PEE.” He ain’t never going to do that like some little girl He almost makes it back to bed when he remembers that he needs a dime or at least nine cents. He stands on the bed and searches the clothes rack, pulling down a heavy gray wool long-sleeved shirt. Back on the floor he pulls the shirt on; it hangs almost to his knees and his hands disappear under the cuffs. He folds the cuffs up to his wrists, buttons the front, and reaches under the bed for bib overalls; the overall shoulder straps can only be buckled after a lot of tugging and jumping around in a circle. The shirt-overall combination makes it hard to reach his feet but he struggles to his tennis shoes and dons them without socks. He remembers tennis shoes are good because the rubber sole never wears out.

He walks through the arched passageway into the kitchen and finds a box of Kellogg’s corn flakes, sugar, and a glass bowl in the cupboard. The icebox is empty. Archie searches desperately: he can’t have breakfast without milk. The milkman! He runs to the front door and throws it open. Milk! And the way he likes it with icy cream on top. Mom always says, “Archie don’t take just the cream and leave skim milk for the rest of us, mix it in a pitcher before you pour it on your cereal.” But Mom ain’t here so Archie spoons the frozen cream on his corn flakes, hammering the edge of the spoon on the chunks to break up the ice. The sugar bowl

empties onto the flakes and becomes soaked by the thawing cream. Archie carefully scoops up the wet sugar, laced with ice slivers, and swallows it greedily. Only after the cream and sugar are gone does he eat the cereal. ### “Archie, where’s your mother at? Is she at home? Are you home alone?” Mrs. Troutman steps past Archie and glares across Rosedale Avenue at the tiny house down the street. “If you’re home alone I’ll call the police. I swear I will. Your mother has no business leaving you by yourself.”

“No ma’am. I’m not home alone.” Archie, standing on his neighbor’s wood porch, fights the urge to run away. He should never have asked for a job mowing the lawn. Nobody mows their lawn in the wintertime. Besides, Mrs. Troutman, although she has hired him before for lawn mowing and running errands, is a troublemaker. She’s gonna put him and his whole family in jail.

“I don’t see smoke coming out of the chimney. If your mother’s home, why hasn’t she built a fire?” She stands in front of Archie and glares down at him.

Archie, swaddled in his oversize clothes and long stocking cap to shield his ears, tries to draw even deeper into his garments but he can’t get away: he’s got to answer. “She’s sick in bed.

She can’t build the fire because we ain’t got newspapers. I need a job so I can buy a paper.”

“Hufpmt…Well I haven’t got any work for you. You’ll have to go elsewhere. If you’re lying to me I’m going to find out about it.”

“I ain’t lying.” He turns and runs hard for home, feeling Mrs. Troutman’s eyes boring into his back.

At home he pulls the cushions from the couch and runs his fingers down in the seam.

One time he found a dime and two nickels in that seam but today there’s nothing. He walks into the kitchen, picks up a piece of cornbread wrapped in waxed paper. He pulls the paper off and drops it into the garbage can. He inspects the bread closely and tears the green mold away before pushing the remainder in his mouth. Still munching noisily he picks up a box of matches, opens the back door and steps outside.

The sun blinds him and he pauses and shields his eyes till they adjust. He peeks around the corner of the house and up and down the alley. Satisfied the coast is clear he turns and removes a panel from the side of the house, revealing a crawl space. He wipes spider webs from his face as he crawls on hands and knees. Deep inside, he pulls the matches from his pocket and scratches one to life. The flickering light cuts through the total blackness and reveals an ivory-handled hunting knife encased in a leather sheath. He shoves the knife in his front overall pocket, pushes the match into the soft dirt and crawls to daylight.

“Boy, where’d ya get this pig sticker? Don’tcha know that ya could go to jail for carrying a dangerous weapon like this?” The pot-bellied, unshaven pawn shop owner in a filthy sleeveless undershirt and a cigarette dangling from his tobacco-stained mouth holds the knife to the light and inspects it. “Did ya steal this? If ya did I’ll get the cops over here right now. Thieves don’t get very far in this town.” He turns and fixes Archie with his blood-shot beady eyes.

“No, sir. I ain’t stold it. I found it.”

“Found it! Ha! Where?”

“Over by the potato slide at the high school.” Archie eyes the knife clenched in the pawn guy’s hands and Archie knows he ain’t gonna give it back.

The shop owner shoves the knife in his pocket and turns away. He looks back over his shoulder and says, “I’m taking a big chance here but I’ll give ya a dime for it.” He turns and walks into a back room, closing the door behind him.

Archie stands in front of the caged counter with his eyes on the door to the back room. Twenty minutes go by before a customer enters and rings the bell on the counter. The owner hurries out, stops and does a double take when he sees Archie. “You still here? I told ya to get lost an hour ago.”

“I need my dime.” Archie holds his hand out.

“Get outta here, kid. You’ll get your dime after I check with the police to see if that’s stolen property or not. Come back in a week or two.”

As Archie pushes through the front door he hears the owner say to his customer, “Kids now a days don’t got no respect for their elders. If ya let ‘em they’ll walk all over ya.” ###

Archie walks uptown to the Lyric Theater where he stands in front and looks at the painted posters in the billboard cases.

The pictures show cowboys, Indians, horses, and cattle in action. It’s always a cowboy double-header on Saturdays and both these movies star Don “Red” Berry his favorite cowboy. In addition there’ll be a Mickey Mouse cartoon, newsreel, Pete Martin short, and best of all, The Spider.

The Spider is a fifteen-chapter serial where the Spider is dressed in a black suit that looks like long underwear. He wears a hood and mask that covers his head except for his mouth and chin. The bad guys are led by The Gargoyle a really bad guy who wears a sack like mask.

The Spider throws a net over the bad guys then beats 'em up. Each chapter ends with the Spider in mortal danger. Last week he chased some bad guys into a little house. The bad guys run out the backdoor and the Spider found himself locked inside. The ceiling, studded with sharp spikes, slowly comes down and the Spider grabs two spikes and is forced to his back. The show ends with the Spider trying to stop the ceiling from impaling him. The voice of an unseen man says, “Is this the end? Will the Gargoyle now be free to dominate the world? Come back next week to find out.”

If only Mom was here she’d give him a dime. But she’s in Tracy. Last Monday both she and Dad come home early. She called Archie in the house where she said, “I’ve been fired. The dirty son of a bitch fired me. Only last month I was called the best waitress in Modesto. Now I’m fired and blackballed too. That son of a bitch called every restaurant in town and told them not to hire me.”

“What are you gonna do now, Millie?” Dad, sitting on the couch with Archie, pulls a Mason jar under his chin and squirts a stream of tobacco juice.

Millie walked back and forth in front of them with a frown on her face. “I ain’t beat yet.

I’m gonna catch the Greyhound tonight. I’m going to Tracy. I know I can get a job there. You and Archie stay here till I get things figured out.” She turns and points her finger at Cab. “I’m counting on you, Cabby. You gotta stay here with Archie while I’m gone. Harvey, over at the grocery store, will give you credit. I’ll pay the rent before I go. I got money for that. Remember, I’m counting on you.”

They walked Millie to the bus station, Millie carrying her large battered suitcase. As she climbed aboard the bus Cab said, “Don’t you worry about us none. Me and Archie are gonna do just fine.”

Back home, Cab said, “Archie, you’re a big boy now. I got things to do downtown. You take care of things till I get back.” It was the last time Archie saw his dad.

Archie walks along H Street towards home. His mind races but he can’t think of anywhere to get nine cents and time is running out. He walks past the shabby storefronts, pawn shops, tiny churches, groceries, hardware and second hand stores. Up ahead he sees a sign, “The El Dora Club”, a bad place. He crosses the street and watches the unshaven, shabbily dressed men standing on the sidewalk in front of the club. They look unclean and dangerous. Mom told him to not go near that place. But she also said that he could always find his dad there. He walks past the El Dora and stops at the corner and looks around. Nobody is looking at him. He crosses the street and walks quickly back past the club and through the loitering men; nobody pays attention to him. He walks back and tries to look inside but the windows are painted black. He pushes the swinging doors open and steps inside where he is met with tobacco smoke and loud music. His eyes adjust to the dark interior and he sees a line of men standing at the bar. Some are talking energetically with their neighbors, some look half-asleep, and all have beer bottles or whiskey glasses in their hand or on the counter. Most are smoking cigarettes.

Farther back a group of men is sitting around a large round green-felted table. Red, white and blue poker chips are stacked separately in front of each man with a pile of all colors tossed haphazardly in the center of the table. He sees his dad dealing the cards. Cab Cleebo asks each player in turn, “How many?” and each one answers with a request for one, two or three cards. Some say, “I’ll stand.” Archie walks up close to the dealer.

One of the gamblers sees him and says, “Cab, you got a visitor.”

Cab looks around and Archie says, “I need money for the picture show.”

Cab picks a red chip up and hands it to him. “Take this to the cage.” He points to a man sitting on a high stool inside a small space enclosed in wood-framed chicken wire. Archie pushes the chip across the counter through a small opening in the wire and the cashier pushes a quarter to him.

### Archie holds the quarter tightly in his right hand, which he shoves deep into the front pocket of his overalls. He skips up H Street, up towards the Lyric. He stops at Payless Drug Store and shades his eyes with his nose on the window to look inside. The wall clock shows it’s a quarter to eleven; he’s got an hour till the box office opens. The sign on the window reads, “ICE CREAM SODAS—10 cents.” That’s what the kids in the comic strip, Gasoline Alley, always eat.

Archie spoons up the ice cream and tilts the fancy bowl into his mouth to finish the soda.

He picks his dime and nickel change up and heads for the snack aisle. There he chooses cupcakes that are five cents and a penny licorice stick. He pays at the checkout stand and gets his nine cents change.

Archie runs hard through the growing crowd of pedestrians, dodging here and there like a broken-field runner. At intersections he waits for the green light then dashes into the street sometimes between and around cars blocked in the crosswalks. He gets to the Lyric in record time where he sits on the sidewalk with his back against the front of the box office. He finishes the cupcakes and licorice just as Billy and Arnold walk up.

The two boys frown as they stand over him. Billy says, “You’re always first in line. How’s come you’re always first?”

Archie pushes his money hand down into the pocket with all his might. He looks at them without answering but decides it’s better to say something. “I dunno.”

Arnold says, “You’re a dumb kid too. We oughtta knock your block off but we don’t want to dirty our hands on a little kid like you.”

Billy nudges Archie’s concealed hand with his toe. “You got candy in there?”

Archie turns sideways, pressing the pocket and hand against the wall. “No.” “Whatcha got in there?”

“Just my show money.”

“Oh yeah? How much?” A crowd of boys has appeared and they circle Archie, waiting for his answer.

Archie tries to sink deeper into the sidewalk. “Nine cents.”

Billy pulls back his head and roars with laughter, he turns and shouts to everyone, “Did you hear that guys? This little shit ass is going to the movies with only nine cents. He can’t even read.” Everybody starts laughing. Archie raises up and reads the sign over the opening in the window.

It reads: Admission 10 cents.

Arnold sticks his grinning face down at Archie. “They raised the price last Monday. They ain’t no nine cent picture shows in this town no more.” ### Archie is sitting on the bench in West Side Park. He slowly counts and recounts the nickel

and four pennies in his hand. Arnold’s words go through his mind: “They ain’t no nine cent picture shows in this town no more.” Every Saturday for a long time now he woke up and found the dime that his mom left him on the dresser, a penny for candy and nine cents for the show. Now his mom was gone and they had raised the admission to ten cents.

He looks around. There’s nobody around on this gloomy day. The trees and bushes are bare. The swimming pool is empty with brown leaves caked to the bottom. He remembers the chilly summer mornings sitting on the edge with his feet dangling, waiting for the park man to turn on the water, the freezing water that pushed him away as he leaped at the torrent rushing out of the pipe. The water never got higher than his knees. The grown-ups call it a wading pool.

A lone figure is running on the street just outside the park. Archie watches as the guy throws punches into the air. He runs funny with his knees going all the way up to his chest. The runner turns into the park and comes straight at Archie. He’s wearing a stocking cap pulled over his ears, sweatshirt, long pants, and high-topped work shoes. Archie looks at the ground as the stranger runs by.

He watches the retreating figure turn around and come back. The guy’s got a big smile on his face.

“Hey, little buddy. What’s ya doing out here all by yourself? All the other kids are at the picture show. Why ain’t you?”

Archie begins swinging his legs. “I dunno.”

“Ha! Ha! Ain’t you sumtin’. Ya ain’t in the movies and ya don’t know why. If I didn’t know better I’d think ya was a dumb kid.” He keeps running in circles, every so often throwing a punch.

Archie stares hard at the ground, his feet swinging back and forth with increasing energy.

“Ya know, little buddy, this is a hard life. If ya don’t speak up nobody can do nothing for ya. Ya can lay it on old Andy here and we can figger somethin’ out.”

“I wanna go to the picture show but I only got nine cents. It costs ten cents.”

“Whoa! That’s a hard ‘un. If I had a penny I’d give it to ya. But…hey, ya ever do any boxing?”

Andy runs by and throws a quick punch that stops an inch from Archie’s face.

Archie jerks his head back. “No.” “Hmm … where ya live at?”

“At 313 Rosedale Avenue.”

“I know that house. Your pa Cab Cleebo?”

“Yeah.”

“Cab Cleebo the poker-playing man. They say he can sit at a poker table for three days and three nights without getting up even once to go to the bathroom.”

Archie hugs his knees and stares at the ground.

“Your mom, Millie, jest got fired for sassin’ the boss’ wife. Fired and run out of town.”

Archie leaps to his feet. “She didn’t get run out of town.”

“Whoa. Hold on, little buddy. I was jest telling ya what I heard. Where’s she at now?”

“Over in Tracy.”

“Tracy? That’s a long ways away. How’d she get over there?”

“Greyhound bus. She paid a dollar and a half too.”

Andy stops running and places his hand on Archie’s shoulder. “Tell ya what, little buddy, come over ta my house and I’ll give ya a pop bottle. Ya can take it to the store and get your penny.” ### Andy ain’t high-steppin’ it no more and even though he’s running at half speed, Archie is having trouble keeping up. Archie studies the figure in front of him; there’s something about him that triggers old memories. And he’s taking Archie onto a street that Archie has been told to stay off of; there are lots of bad guys lives around here. Archie’s mind is racing: who is this guy? What’s his last name? Then it falls in place as a large old wood house looms ahead; that’s the Johnson house. The murdering Johnsons, killers, every last one of ‘em. And this is Andy Johnson…Andy the killer? Murdering Andy? Just what do folks call him? He heard about Andy when he was a little kid but he ain’t seen him in a long time. Where’s he been? In jail I betcha.

And they called him the Assassin. But there was another word in there: sumthin’ the Assassin or the Assassin sumthin’? Archie can’t remember the other word. They say the Johnsons would kill a little kid like him, throw him in the stew pot and pick their teeth with his bones—they’re cannibals.

Andy stops running and turns around. “This is my house. Don’t be scared. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with ya when you’re with me.” He motions Archie around to the garage at the side of the house and swings the twin doors open. The floor is crowded with old car parts and a bicycle. The bicycle is upside down and the wheels are off but Archie remembers that Andy’s the only kid in the neighborhood who has a bike.

Andy picks up a greasy pop bottle that’s filled with a clear liquid and stoppered with a rag. He pulls the rag out, empties the bottle on the ground, rinses it under a faucet in the front yard, and hands it to Archie. “Here ya go, Little Buddy. Come back sometime and I’ll sweettalk Grandma into fixing ya some biscuits and gravy; ya need ta put some meat on them bones.

Hey! Wait! Ain’t ya gonna say thanks?”

Archie keeps running but turns and shouts, “Thanks.” He looks at his useless wristwatch and decides he can make the second show if he hurries. The fastest runner in Washington School sets his sights on a beeline to Harvey’s Grocery Store.

The End

by Rabindranath Tagore mother Supposing I became a champa flower, just for fun, and grew on a branch high up in that tree, and shook in the wind with laughter and danced upon the newly budded leaves, would you know me, mo!

You would call, "Baby, where are you?" and I should laugh to myself and keep quite quiet!

I should slyly open my petals and watch you at your work.

When after your bath, with wet hair spread on your shoulders, you walked through the shadow of th champa tree to the little court where you say your prayers, you would notice the scent of the flower, but not know that it came from me.

When after the midday meal when you sat at the window reading Ramayana, and the tree's shadow fell over your hair and your lap, I should fling my little shadow on to the page of your book -- just where you were reading.

But would you guess that it was the small shadow of your little child?

When in the evening you went to the cow-shed with the lighted lamp in your hand, I should suddenly drop on to the earth again and be your own baby once more, and beg you to tell me a story.

"Where have you been, you naughty child?"

"I won't tell you, mother." That's what you and I would say then. ~~~ Art

Page 1 Title: Boy Smoking, Artist, Georgios Jakobides Page 3 Title: Various sketches and a beggar/Artist: Hieronymus Bosch Page 5 Title: Reclining Boy Leaning on His Elbow, Artist: Egon Schiele

Return from Field Work by Gheorghe Petrascu

Make no mistake, this is a love story, however badly we might have played it. y phone rang sometime after three in the morning, hauling me out of a deep erotic dream.

I had been up late editing a raw noir novel in my cramped Westside flat – trying to hammer gold out of lead, my boss called it – and it had drained me. The voice on the line was the same as in my dream. I hadn't heard her voice in five years and all she said was, "Hi," but one syllable was enough.

"It's been a while, Fé. Long while."

"I've been thinking of you, Charlie Frank," she whispered. The irony brought a wry smile.

"So you wrote on the postcard. Three years ago, was it?"

"Morocco?"

"Not quite. Sardinia. What brings you back to the States?"

"I came to be alone. I'm trying to work." Then, as if that tasted strange, "Paint."

"But I heard it was going so well for you in Europe."

"I learned some things."

"And?" "Eventually you've got to move on."

"So you're back."

"I need you," she said, the words hanging a moment, as always enticing. "Your help. Your good opinion."

"I don't know, Fé. My tastes run pretty academic."

"I trust you, Charlie," she said. "You know that. Always." And then without waiting, "Can you come tomorrow night?"

"Where's that?"

"Connecticut. You do have a car?"

"Sort of. A street Beetle."

She directed me to an obscure mill town somewhere northwest of Hartford. Carsonville was just barely on the map. I left work early the next day, trying to avoid the clogged highways. Still, by the time I got there through the Friday traffic, it was almost dusk. Most of the time I had spent working my way up from the coast along a polluted valley of industrial ghost towns. Their purpose gone, they lingered on in a kind of half-death, surrounded by the waste they had generated long ago. In Carsonville, a single brick factory on the hill loomed over the rows of workmen's cottages.

Out of Dickens perhaps, I was thinking. Or Upton Sinclair. The sky flushed red at sunset, violently enough so I felt I should have ashes falling on me. What an unlikely place to find Fé. How many times had I passed her parents' place on Fifth Avenue, thought of her wandering along some lonely, exclusive shore at dawn, where only a privileged few were allowed?

The streets were narrow there, poorly lit, laid out in that time when a single company could dominate an entire town. But things were no longer very busy in Carsonville. What perhaps had once been the company store was now a grubby little bodega, held open this late in the vain hope someone might still drop by for a Coke or a pack of Camels. An old half-lit neon sign in the window still advertised "Cerveza Schaefer."

"You know where this street is?" I asked, holding up a scrap of paper with her address on it.

"Cómo?"

"Lincoln." He pointed up toward the factory.

The big rusting cars parked along the streets were as out-of-scale as they were out-of-date. "For Sale" and "Se Vende" signs rose from the tall weeds on cramped front lawns. A few scruffy kids played catch in the failing light to little piping calls of " Óye" and " Míra, " but I doubted they could see the ball anymore. Some teen machos had been drawn like moths to a just-lighted streetlamp, heavy gold chains glinting around their necks. Men sat on front stoops, beer cans in their hands.

Cigarettes glowed in the shadows, occasionally the flutter of a TV screen, and some distant salsa drifting from a boom box far below. Most homes were dark. It took me another half-hour to find her place.

The cottage was small and commonplace like the rest. Set on the last street under the brick factory. But there she was, waiting for me in the doorway, framed by the bright light inside. It took me a moment to recognize her. The dark hair had been cropped short and bleached, so in silhouette she could have been mistaken for a boy, wearing overalls and a white T-shirt. She looked slimmer, taller than I remembered. But what I noticed most was her neck. The short hair made her head small, her neck long and elegant. Modigliani, I thought. I loved Modigliani. I folded myself out of the Volkswagen and reached back into my cooler for two bottles of well-chilled wine. "anyone lived in a pretty how town," I called out to her, my arms reaching wide, a bottle in each hand. The greeting was a little ritual I had started with her in college. When we saw each other, I called out e. e. cummings to her. And at first she laughed and called back, "anyone's any was all to her." Of course, I had never been even close to "all to her," so she soon shortened her reply to "anyone's any."

"Oh, Charlie, do we have to be so damn literary?" Immediately I knew I'd played her fool. But I wouldn't quit.

"C'mon," I urged.

"No." "C'mon." "anyone's any," she mumbled, screwing up her mouth like the child who didn't like saying her prayers. She hugged me in spite of it, perhaps because of it, pulling my head to her breast in a soft, sisterly way. The contact sent a shiver through me, and because I was a step below her, made me feel like a child. So I pulled away and stepped up beside her, where I was half a head taller. And we entered the bright room that way, the two bottles of wine clanging together as we embraced. I didn’t move to kiss her.

She looked washed out in the sudden blaze of light, but I saw it was merely that she wasn't wearing makeup. Only the corners of her lips were darkened by pigment, and when she smiled, the thinnest line along her upper lip, just where it met her teeth.

"Still sucking on paint brushes," I guessed.

I couldn't help myself. I looked shamelessly into those dazzling sea-green eyes. Then turned away.

The front room was chalk white – ceiling, walls, floor, trim. As if the same great whitewashed roller had passed over everything, narrowly avoiding the windowpanes. A white enamel-topped table, four white folding chairs.

White pull-down shades in the windows. A white floor lamp throwing out what seemed excessive wattage. The brightness threw me off balance, made me feel suddenly vulnerable, as if I had just stepped onto a stage.

"How long have you been here?" I asked. "In this cottage."

"Six months, maybe eight."

"You might try furniture."

"For what?"

"Easy chair would be nice."

"Easy?" She didn't seem to like the word. "I don't spend much time here."

I took the wine into the kitchen and put it

in the freezer. There was a six-pack of Bud in the refrigerator. How quaint, I was thinking, probably for some blue-collar down the street. But I was also very thirsty after my long, hot drive.

"May I?" "Please." I popped one and gulped it in a single long pull.

"Do you really have to be so Spartan?" I asked. I looked into the other small room. A single metal bed, a second-hand bureau, stacks of books on the floor. And there, hung over the bed like a crucifix, the only piece of art in the house. I recognized it immediately. Dark gray paint on plaster. An exquisitely stylized Mayan jaguar glyph. Colón would always be with her, I thought. Colón, who had lured her into the netherworld of New York to leave small jewels of graffiti in unreachable places. Colón, with the straight black hair and cinnamon skin, from whom she had learned the power of iconography.

I asked if I might use her bathroom.

She was anxious to show me her work, she told me, but I was damned if I'd make it that easy. I grabbed another beer and straddled one of her white folding chairs.

"You're going to have to fill me in a bit first, sweetheart."

"But I will. There's so much to tell, to show you." I watched it welling up in her. But I was determined to make her wait.

"Just sit down a minute and talk to me, can't you?"

"But why here?" She was uncomfortable even in her own home, like some animal outside its natural domain. Finally, she did sit all at once, stiffly, as if being punished, then just as suddenly she was up and pacing out to the kitchen. She came back without having gotten anything. I put it down to childish impatience – a spoiled little girl who must have her way. And so I decided to keep her a little longer.

"Sit down just a minute. And let me look at

Two Lovers by Reza Abbasi

you. What did you really do in Europe all that time?"

"Spelunking, for one thing. You know, deep underground caves," she smiled proudly. "A couple of group shows – Bonn, Kassel. And I studied some at Joseph Beuys." Oh, yes, it just had to be Beuys, I thought. Beuys was in. The art world’s darling of the moment.

"The coyote guy?" I couldn't help sounding a bit sarcastic.

"Please, don’t."

"What?"

"Be so stupidly literal." All I really knew about Beuys was that week he spent talking to a live coyote in some New York gallery. That and the cockamamie story about his survival from a plane crash in the tundra. That was enough as far as I was concerned. But I saw she didn't care for my irreverence. She spoke very seriously about Beuys and his belief that museums were a straitjacket, busy selling Rembrandts and Picassos like packaged goods. "He’s rethought the basics of art, using materials metaphorically. Materials we never thought of as beautiful. Like animal fat."

"Animal fat."

"Yes. And others sensitive to heat."

I felt the urge to say something about knowing the difference between shit and Shinola, but I saw things were already rocky. I believed Beuys was a charlatan, selling absurd shamanic tales of angels and animals as gospel, but I couldn't help being moved by her genuine respect for him. So I listened more than spoke, watching her exquisitely mobile lips mouth the words, remembering what it was like to touch them. Yet even while she was talking, she was somewhere else and anxious for me to go there.

"Please, Charlie," she begged. And that easily I gave in. I insisted on taking the wine with us.

After all, I had kept it cold all the way from New York for just this occasion.

She was very excited and trying not to show it. When she took my hand, I felt the vibration pass through me. She led me out the back door, through a short, narrow alley and up the steep hill to the factory. From the darkness below, young voices rose into the night.

"Fe-li-ci-a," a boy called and whistled. "Ay, mi Fé."

"What? Who's that?" I stuttered.

"Mi amor," sounded lewdly into the night, "Ay, ay, ay."

"Cállate, pendejo," she called back.

"No puedo vivir sin tu amor." "¡Carajo!" she shouted.

"Por favor, mi vida."

"Vaya a tu mamá."

"What the hell, Fé?" I turned on her, grabbing her arm.

"Don't pay attention. Just neighborhood kids."

"Sounds like they know you pretty well."

"Children, Charlie. Had a beer in my house once and think they own me."

It was black now, no moon or stars. Her flashlight guided us over a series of steps along a chain-link security fence, where she unlocked a heavily padlocked gate, then a side door, with heavy old keys she took from deep inside the front pocket of her overalls. She panned the light inside along a gray-green wall to a freight elevator. The paint was chipped and scratched and dirty. I heard a scurrying of small feet somewhere deep inside. She pulled me into the elevator, slid the heavy meshed gate closed and we ascended with a quick jerk and a clanging of chains into some dark upper region. She had turned off the flashlight, so all I was aware of was the heat, the vibration of the elevator and her body beside me. Then the hushed voice and the strange question.

"What if you were a primal man?" I stayed silent, trying to figure what game she was starting.

Had she been by herself too long? The old freight elevator rose in noisy fits and starts. "No science, no economics. First Man. Alone among the animals, searching out unknown gods."

"What if I was in the dark with a lovely loon?" I asked, laughing.

"Try to be serious."

When the elevator jolted to a stop, she pushed the gate back, snapped the flashlight on, and the wavering beam led us down a long inky corridor, our footsteps echoing out into a seemingly endless void. She stopped, turned off the light and spoke very earnestly.

"What if you were trying to survive in a world you couldn't understand, only feel?"

"God, this place is immense. What the hell did they make here?"

"Bolos."

"What?"

"Machetes. The ultimate in Yankee ingenuity. Machetes for Cuba, Hispañola, Central America, the Philippines, God only knows where. All manufactured right here by Carson Blades & Co. Axes and adzes too. But the real money was in bolos."

"No kidding?"

"Think of the endless hordes of campesinos marching along, swinging their shiny Yankee steel. You see them in Rivera's paintings. Orozco’s. First we conquer them, then we export to them. Isn't that what they really meant by Manifest Destiny?" I was suddenly made even more nervous by the extreme blackness around us. I couldn't help it. Perhaps if I had been there the first time in daylight. I ran the sweating wine bottle up along the side of my neck and face.

"Who else uses this place?"

"A couple of artists keep studios down on the second floor. But it's all mine at night. Me and the rats."

"Rats."

"Live and let live."

"You don't mind working here alone?"

"The dark make you nervous?"

"I live in New York, remember? A little paranoia's good for the health." I tried to tune them out, but I kept hearing the distant echoes of our footsteps.

"This is my cave," she said, reaching along the wall and flicking on a single dramatic spot.

The painted panel that suddenly appeared rising before us was huge, perhaps fifteen feet high.

And I felt at once the aptness of the word, "cave."

It confronted me, forcing me to crane my neck and look upward. Something dark and powerful. I needed time to take it in, to assimilate its implied weight, its coarse mass. How to put it into thought, words. Crude. Blacks, grays, sepias. Rock. Scraped and polished. Eroded by water perhaps, cracked by fire. As if we were deep in the heart of a mountain.

But over that rough surface there was the hint of movement. Something running or swimming or in flight. Something elusively quick. As if it had been and no longer was, now only the remembrance, a swift shadow over stone. I recalled what she had said about spelunking and thought at once of French caves with huge primeval creatures painted across their ceilings.

But this was not defined as mammal, foul or fish. It emitted energy without showing form.

What was its power? Space, line. Mystery. Suggesting instead of telling. There was a series of panels. And she lighted them theatrically, one after the other, so they appeared suddenly out of the void. All slightly different in color and movement, yet the same.

She was waiting. I could sense her waiting. But I had the odd sensation of being swallowed whole. Was it the art itself or the sudden shift from darkness to light? I wanted to reach out and touch. To feel its reality.

"I could use a cold glass of wine just now," I said finally. We sat on the floor in our ring of light, sipping the delicious dry fluid from short glasses she retrieved from somewhere out there in the dark. Icy on the tongue, coursing warm through the body. For a long time I couldn't speak about her work. So I babbled around it, about art in general, about abstract expressionists, minimalists, ops and pops. About flatness and depth, conceptual art and theater of the absurd.

Naming names. Mumbling theories. I can't always feel art, but I can almost always talk the hell out of art. Nervous babble. Like speaking in tongues. At least I was clever enough not to ask her what they meant.

"They don't let many people into Lascaux anymore, you know," she said. "The breath of tourists was killing the timeless art."

"But I'll bet you were there."

"Helping a very nice photographer. I was with him in Altamira too."

"They're magnificent, Fé," I almost shouted. I was talking about what she had created, but she was still in the rapture of Lascaux. Her eyes had a glaze to them, like moonlight on water.

"Well, they're gods," she breathed.

"Solid," I said. "You've created the density and rigidity of the rock.” She looked at me as if waking from a dream.

"Rivera called them 'moveable murals.' He learned to keep things portable after he had to destroy his work at Rockefeller Center."

Then for a long time we were quiet. We sipped our wine and stared up at the great rock wall over us. I couldn't help thinking of Colón and being jealous of the kind of ardor he must have aroused. If only I could have been the one to first lead her into the dark unknown.

"There's a Frenchman who has a theory about how they painted some of those fantastically fluid creatures in the caves," she told me. "He learned it from the Aborigines in Australia.

They hold the pigment in their mouths, chew it and spit it out onto the rock. With great force.

It's a kind of aspiration, as if they're breathing their life into their images."

"Sounds pretty erotic."

"Saliva is a very powerful adhesive." She smiled at me, showing me the thin line of pigment along her upper lip. "Charlie," she said suddenly. "Will you do something for me?"

"Isn't that why I'm here?"

"Something different, without asking why?"

"What?"

"Have you ever modeled?"

"You mean like posing in front of people?"

"Naked to the world. Like the First Man." "Never."

"Will you take off your clothes for me?"

"Really?"

"Will you help me, Charlie?"

"You first," I said.

"Oh, of course."

"But a little more of this wine first." I was of two minds about this. Yes, my whole body was lusting to touch, to press itself against, but I had only to remember that fifteen-year-old kid standing below Felicia's window on that long ago night on Cape Cod, staring at the star above, dreaming of what was almost his while feeling the painful, icy blade of rejection, to be hesitant. So, as I helped her move the first great panel out of the darkness into the circle of light, I was thinking over and over, "Not so goddamned easy."

I was surprised by the lightness of the panel. I had expected something much heavier. It was rigid, course, dense, but not so hard for us to carry and place flat on the concrete floor.

She brought out a large plastic paint can. Then I stood and watched as she casually took off her sneakers, unbuttoned the bib and let her overalls fall to the floor with a clank of the heavy keys. She pulled off her t-shirt, then dropped her panties as unceremoniously as a dishtowel and stood before me, the woman I had longed to hold ever since I first saw her rise from the surf on Cape Cod. But for Fé this was just the business of art.

"Well?" she asked.

And so I clumsily shed my loafers, my chinos, unbuttoned my shirt, and finally, embarrassingly, my boxer shorts, regretting all the while that I hadn't spent more time at the gym toning my muscles, at the beach bronzing my flesh. For a while we sat on the floor, "le déjeuner sur l’herbe," sipping the last of the wine, feeling its effect, looking at and into each other. Was Manet's heart pumping like mine?

"Come over here," she said, standing beside the large paint can. She lifted the lid, dipped

her hand into it and carefully stroked a mucous-like liquid down the side of my thigh.

"I thought it was paint."

"Glaze," she corrected. "Paint shows you, glaze merely suggests. Now come and lie down here close to the edge of this panel. Careful. Don't move." She pressed down on me, imprinting the shadow of my thigh into the rock. "Now get up slowly. Careful. Don't smear it." She took more glaze, painting it across my hip and buttock and laying me on my side against the rock. Then my right foot, ankle and calf, my bent knee, each impression considered and precise. We all have our private fears. I now hallucinated on George Segal setting his models, imagining myself encased by him in plaster, an anonymous white figure left at the edge of a gray bed, hunched over in isolation. Or an aging woman with sagging breasts, lying apart, having allowed herself to be manipulated for the artist's purpose. Fé was stroking the glaze over my penis and testicles.

"Good, uncircumcised, like the First Man," she said. "Now, press yourself here firmly against the rock. She placed me in the lower right corner, so I made my impression where the viewer might expect a signature. And all the while I was thinking, hell, I edit noir, I read a lot of crazy shit, this shouldn't feel so strange. I laughed nervously.

"I knew this preppy at college who claimed he once humped a tree in the rain."

"OK," she said, her mouth in a puzzled smile.

We leaned the panel against the wall. She studied it from different angles, then began rubbing each impression with a damp rag until the glaze was barely visible, eliminating it altogether in some places.

We dragged another panel onto the floor. She scrubbed me with paint remover, then soap and water, rinsing me carefully. Then she painted my left side, and this time herself as well. She placed me in the corner, around a section where the rough surface welled out. Then she lay tightly behind me, embracing me.

"Do you know Ecclesiastes?" she asked.

"Vanity of vanities."

"Not that part."

"For every thing there is a season."

"Not that either."

"Two are better than one," I quoted.

"Again, if two lie together," she said, bringing me close, "then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone." Was this the same girl who had liked my reading poetry to her, asking me to kiss her "like Keats"?

Once again she got me up off the canvas and washed me, and I washed her as well, stroking her breasts softly, feeling her nipples harden and rise under my touch, stroking her belly, her thighs, carefully rinsing the last particles of glaze from her pubic hair. And again we lay together on the side of a third panel.

She spoke so softly I could barely hear, telling me about a mountain and a winding path that climbed treacherously to its crest. She asked me to imagine hiking this path close behind her, up and up until we lost ourselves in the clouds, then snaking our way slowly, cautiously down to the

sea, through thick stands of bamboo, under precipices dense with fern. Colored birds streaked by. Invisible monkeys howled in the forest. Finally, in a desert-like region by the sea, hidden for years from the press of the world, lay a colonial village where barons once manned their haciendas with slaves, cultivating cacao for the world's finest chocolate. " Kakawa, the Maya called it," she told me. "The sweetest gift of the New World to the Old." The barons had long since left, their lands falling into decay. Descendants of the slaves had taken over, worshipping in their own way once European gods and beating tribal drums to ancient rhythms late into the night.

I wondered what she was starting now, one part of me resisting, but the other giving itself over and going along for the ride. After all, this had the feel of a sensual travel piece – a Graham Greene, perhaps, or a Somerset Maugham – and her voice a warm breath across my ear. Like any good editor, I had begun categorizing.

Young girls, fresh out of school from across the Atlantic, trekked to this village, blonde Brunhildes in shorts and hiking boots, searching out their own dark experience. OK, I decided, here comes the D. H. Lawrence bit.

"Sweating sweetly in their lederhosen," I added. She ignored me.

"The one they look for is called Monte Quema'o, Burnt Mountain."

"A giant, no doubt." My voice sounded thin.

Monte Quema'o was, in fact, tall and willowy, beautiful in form and surprisingly gentle with them, she said. She detailed the soft way he touched them with his fingers, his lips, his tongue, murmuring like the wind. It was not like any sex they had known. It was more like being rocked by gentle waves. His scent was like the land and the sea around them. So it's female erotica, I concluded, in the not-so-subtle style of Anaïs Nin. "A scar runs across his abdomen, from a fight perhaps. He asks them to run their fingers very lightly along the keloid ridge."

"Really?" I hadn't heard that one before.

"We have an unquenchable thirst for mystery," her voice husky. I wanted to ask if she had herself been there, but I felt drugged.

In a clearing, deep within the forest, moonlight on the water, a breeze off the sea in the palms, he took each of them, very slowly, until their ecstasy echoed in the night.

While I listened, playing my sad little editor's game, I was actually unconsciously giving myself over to her voice like some child to a bedtime story, lapsing into a kind of lethargy. So I was late in realizing she had been for some time touching me, very lightly. Christ, all she really had to do was touch me.

However I might have wished to play the scene, I found it too late to resist what she had already taken so far and gave my all to her, letting my semen arc out, high and crystalline through the bright light, across the hard, dry rock.

"There, there," she murmured tenderly. "That was lovely."

When I finally rose, bathed in sweat, I couldn't help stare in amazement at the silver arc I had launched. It had a pure and primitive force I never thought to find in myself. An

abstraction flung into the night, never to be identified by another mortal as anything but pure energy.

"Damn," I shivered, sensing the first wave of shame.

"Yes," her mouth brightening into an innocent smile. "It might even be a more wonderful adhesive than saliva. I'll dust it so it shimmers like a vein of gold. Now you're immortal, Charlie."

Immortal, hell. I felt nothing like her First Man. I felt like a rabbit, trapped and skinned.

Used. Mapplethorped. And that was when I lost it.

"Bitch," I raged, my voice echoing out of the blackness. "Stupid, selfish ..." I spit it at her. And I slapped her. Hard. Open-handed, but hard enough to send her sideways to the floor. For a moment I thought I had knocked her out. I knelt beside her. A little blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. Then she blinked and looked up at me as from a dream, her green eyes widening, swimming in tears .

"My god," she whispered. "My god, Charlie." And suddenly she pulled me down, offbalance, onto her, kissing me hard on the mouth, so I tasted her blood, and fucking primitive, I was thinking, fucking animal.

"Jesus, Fé." And her blood taste was warm in my mouth, her fingers deep into my back, moaning, writhing in paints and thinners on the rough factory floor.

“Yes,” she cried.

And, yes, I took her … Or did she take me?

~~~

Illustration for the epic "Volga," b Ivan Bilibin

n his rooms in the Cloisterstraat he felt immune from the world. There he created not a feeble world of weak dreams but a startling world of the imagination. The name of the street was suggestive to him of the life that he wanted to lead which was the life he led. He was an anchorite within the fortress of the city. A piercing mind and eyes that saw, but did not participate in, the workings of the city. Not that he was disdainful of it. On the contrary, he loved it, but it was love best expressed by silence and distance rather than by participation. To love was to take a step backwards, to remain the silent observer, to set up a counter-gravity to the gravity of streets, shops, offices, government buildings, and people beyond his windows and walls. Yet to observe was to participate, but to do so on his own terms and conditions, not on any that might be imposed on him by expectation and custom.

It was a satisfying life.

By day he worked in the Insurance claims office and did so with the necessary diligence, but without passion. Passion was reserved for those evenings and days alone when he could devote himself to his thoughts.

His thoughts were many, and no matter their variety held to a single premise --that of being the manifestation of his imagination in private but startling ways.

The rooms were as non-descript yet as pleasing as any in the street or as any in the city yet within them he had created a world of such vastness and scope that he doubted if there was any who would understand or be capable of appreciating just what his achievement had been.

His rooms were no less than a miniature geography of everything he had read, written and thought.

The book shelves he referred to as Mt Athos. The right-hand corner (as he faced the windows) was to him the site where the epic of

Gilgamesh took place, while alongside it, on the desk containing three photographs neatly arranged, was the winnowing-ground of Beowulf.

The left hand corner was Greece, the central stove (which he used for heating and cooking) was the territory of the Anglo-Saxons, while the three plants (he loved that number) was to him the bower of the Celtic scribes. The bedroom was the southern Americas, while the hallways containing a coat-rack and two of his paintings, was the new land of America. There was also a storage room into which he poured every idea and name that he could as yet give no definite place within the geography of his apartment.

The three steps leading to the bedroom he also referred to as Mount Sinai. While the window of his bedroom looked out on the upsweep of Mount Tashkent.

It was a satisfying life. Passion and duty were balanced. Purity was maintained. He was immune from the small concerns of his fellow citizens.

Not that he despised them. He didn’t. He recognised their necessity and worth, but the concerns of wives, husbands, children, and heating bills were not his concern. His concern was to have brought the world of time and space into these three rooms (his favourite number, which was why he bought this apartment in the first place) and to live there a life unrestricted by time and space.

He moved effortlessly through the centuries of his rooms. Times zones were entered and left without any dislocation occurring in his mind. The space of the Americas and the tight-knit bower of the Celts were not in conflict nor competition. Balance had been carefully erected and maintained. He was content.

All of this was further confirmed when he read the story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by J.L. Borges –for these were his own initials and he recognised in the author and the character created (or revealed) a brother soul in whom he could confide and with whom he could have companionship.

And yet he lived alone. The absence of a living companion had saddened him in the past but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that books and the imagination were his lifemate rather than a living soul. This was not something which he reluctantly lived with or struggled with. It was a fact, a fact that in its way added to the completeness of his life in a way that perhaps no living companion would have been able to understand and live up to.

And so it was a life neatly proportioned (he would never have used the word ‘divided’) between the necessities of work and the larger necessities of his rooms.

The one did not impinged on the other. There was no conflict of interests.

Yet even as he filled on the forms of a car accident, and went through the procedure with the claimant, he was thinking of P. M., and what such a happy coincidence of initials might mean.

And what it might give rise to. And how this happy fact might alter ever so slightly but in a positive way the balance of his house.

The step from thinking of it as a coincidence to something akin to prophecy was a small one, but on a Thursday afternoon, sixteen days after reading the story, it was one that he took and it was that which changed his life forever.

His first thought was to rewrite Beowulf (one of his favourite poems) but he had before him several ‘translations’ of this work including the exquisite translation of Seamus Heaney and he realised that it had already been done by the best of hands and so it would not be possible to thereafter claim the work as his own. No, it could not be Beowulf, it would have to be something else. Not that it could be the Quixote. That had already been done by P. M., and he was seeking fidelity to the concept which Borges had outlined not merely some copy of every word and thought.

He would have to choose some other masterpiece for what would be his own masterpiece.

He would have to select a book that bore no precedence but with which he could identify as far as the final full stop.

The choice when he made it was so simple and natural that he wondered why it was that he should even have to think about it.

He would rewrite the epic of Gilgamesh according to the rules set out by P. M., which was, he began to think, a distant but real precedent and manifestation of himself in another life but

a life to which he had full authority to access. Nor would it be difficult to make the definitive version of the story. For while there were various ‘versions’ of the tale in circulation, none of them possessed the accuracy of the original and none has a truly individual voice animating them. They were dream translations, they were fantasy versions, faithful only to the vagaries of various writers none of which had truly laid down before the work the service of their minds as he was prepared to do.

This was not an exact copy of the method of P. M., but it was the essence of him and the essence is what he was aiming for and intent on delivering.

He moved his desk and placed it before the window facing the street. He wanted life to pour in and life to pour out and what better junction for such an intention than a window.

He read the story again. And then read various translations. With the story firmly fixed in his mind he slowly set to work.

There are stories Dante -Beowulf - Irish tales This is something different Yes, it was different, and how superior his opening to the tepid introductions which various other authors had sought to begin the work with. His opening was by far the better and situated the story firmly at the origins of creation. The origins of creation! Was not that what he was doing? Drawing the story back to its source, restoring its pristine beauty and force? Clearly he possessed innate access to the cauldron the story had been formed in and clearly his was the only version which possessed, or would possess, for he had only begun, authority. Yes, he was courting the origins of the tale as no other had done before him. It was as if the story did not exist in the world but only existed in his mind and pen and only as he wrote it out was the story revealed to the world.

This preceded those others Is the first story of the world In the world before the world You don't believe me?

Then listen and judge The beginning? What is the beginning?

It begins with words in mist In fire, in stone In the memory of a people entering history as myth There! Which writer had every composed so fine a set of opening lines as these were? No one had and no one thereafter ever would. The story was his and his alone to write and then be given to a world which did not as yet possess it. He was giving the world the gift of its origins as an act of necessity –for if he did not do it then who would? He felt an enormous responsibility –but instead of weighing him down with an extra weight responsibility added a new depth of buoyancy to his life and to his work. The duty of passion was one to which he fully gave himself and did so in such a diligent manner that the tasks ceased to be a tasked and revealed itself as an act of joy.

Et in Arcadio Ego by Aubrey Beardsley

He continued his work at the insurance office of course, but it was a pass-time, a time of recuperation and relaxation from the exacting work he had set himself. Colleagues notices that he seemed a happier man in his work and while never noted as the most social of men was thought to possess a new degree of happiness they suspected a woman was the root of. And so, evening after evening, weak-ends and free days, he worked slowly but with surety at the epic. And so there came the moment when he was finely able to write So stand where he stands at the journeys end Outside his own city where all began Where carved in stone is the story you have followed To this beginning There are stories Beginnings before the beginnings Ends that do not end their implications And I have told you this one This will endure, this will endure This will never end His satisfaction was total. He felt none of the emptiness which writers were supposed to feel when a work had been emptied onto the page.

Instead he possessed an overwhelming elation as if truth itself had guided him to this moment. There, he had given the world what the world did not possess, and could not possess if he had not written it. No, the gift had been his alone to give, it was written and now it would be given in the only possible way that would ensure that the true story of Gilgamesh could find its way into the world.

He walked to the printing office two blocks away, commissioned the printing of one hundred copies of his manuscript, and returned home to the rooms which were now, more than ever, the site of revelation.

When the printer delivered the books three weeks later (as can be imagined, this occurrence of the number three again delighted and confirmed him) he set about the next part of his plan. Which was simple: he would register the work with the national library of Belgium and would send the books to the major libraries in the country and in the universities. Fortunately the costs in doing this were not a

problem for him. He earned a good salary, he was thrifty with his expenditure, he had savings a plenty. And to what better purpose could they be put, indeed, why had he been saving at all if not in some hidden foreknowledge that such a moment would arrive when he would be called upon to render a service that would add to the totality of the civilized world?

With each copy that he sent out he enclosed a letter outlining that while the libraries might think to possess a copy of Gilgamesh they in fact possessed nothing short of a bogus version and here was here presenting them with the only authentic record of the facts. And they were facts.

Not superstitions, not imaginings, but fact. And he had access to the source of such fact. Therefore the libraries should remove all other copies from their shelves and place his work there as the only authentic and accurate version of the tale. The libraries need not go so far as to destroy the other works (such a thought was repugnant to him) but the paper could be recycled into instruction manuals or school texts for younger children –and so in this manner achieve a purpose which they could fulfil instead of attempting a purpose they were not capable of delivering.

And then came the thought that should have been there from the beginning –he would write to Professor Borges, enclosing a copy and explaining in detail the process which had led to the work, a process in which the professor had played no insignificant part.

This letter was a pleasure to write. He felt he was writing not just to an equal but to the one mind capable of appreciating the uncontrollable urge which lay at the root of his mission. Yes, dear professor, it is a mission, a necessary one, a delightful one, which I know you will understand in its fullness.

He address the letter to Borges via his south American publisher and felt that the work was now complete in a satisfactory way and so he

could devote himself to other tasks.

Days went by. He received no response to his work from the Libraries apart from a few perfunctory notes of acknowledgement that the work had been placed among the other books and entered in the catalogues. This was disappointing.

He had not merely given a book to a library he had given The book to them. For them to treat it as an addition rather than as the only solid version of the story was intolerable. He waited, a few more replies came in the post but again they said the same thing. No invitations were issued to come and speak on the subject. No requests were issued by the press for interviews. Not one journal made reference to the fact in their issues.

It was as if the world had swallowed his life’s work in an act of callousness that, for him , bordered on the barbaric.

It was two months later that he received a reply from the South American publishers to tell him that the writer J. L. Borges had in fact died some years previously. The epic of Gilgamesh was of course well known to him and one that he enjoyed. They were happy to see that he had followed the masters footsteps and could think of no more befitting tribute that that the work should be presented to the National Library of Argentina as part of the Borges collection. ~~~

Evening Landscape with Rising Moon by Vincent Van Gogh

y mother’s mother died years ago. Her passing, as passages do, led me to reminiscing of my two other grandmothers who had also “gone home” but will always be eternally linked in my memory.

My great-grandmother, Sally Lackey, relocated to Pottstown, Pennsylvania after some of her children moved (to escape the oppressive South) from a rural area of Virginia. She was my granddaddy’s mother and I always found it a source of amusement that a man his age still had a mother to answer to. Upon arriving in Pottstown, Grandma Sally settled in and married Mr. John—a widower. From what my mother tells me, they were both pretty ancient even then.

My grandmother, Emma, moved to Pottstown from one of the Carolinas. There, she settled down and married Levi Faison, Sally’s next-door neighbor. Sometimes proximity is all the seed of love needs to germinate. That was the case when Emma’s son and Sally’s granddaughter eventually fell in love and married. I am the product of that union. Sally and Emma, once neighbors, were now almost family; when my parents later divorced, the only reason they remained that way was through me.

550 and 552 Walnut Street, those were Sally’s and Emma’s respective addresses. You can’t squeeze a nickel in the space between the houses. When I was younger, the houses themselves were near identical except for hues, porches and floral landscaping. The backyards were practically the same: mini gardens, more flowers, doghouses and requisite mutts. Grandma Sally’s house was probably the last still using coal. That lasted way into the 90’s as it was consistent with her way. She could be insistent in her beliefs and rarely followed trends.

Title: The Path intersect the Garden, Artist: Grant Wood

would ever admit to being petty or of wanted to be greeted first—but I remember those looks: Sally with her strong, tractor-beam stare; Emma with her Siren-like, come-hither smile. I’d eventually just run up and kiss Granny One and then immediately relay to Granny Two and give her a little extra “sugar” to make it right.

During the day, I divided my time between their command posts (porches) when not playing with my cousins. I spent most nights with Emma.

We had a morning ritual that consisted of breakfast while watching My Favorite Martian and Gilligan’s Island. Somehow, it felt appropriate to watch old shows in an old woman’s house. Emma didn’t have any vices; she once admitted to pilfering a batch of whiskeysoaked peaches and learned a lifelong lesson when she got sick from eating them. Sally was a lover of oral snuff and her house had an accessory that was always a source of great comedy: her ever-present spittoon. She’d pack that powdered tobacco between her bottom lip and gums so tightly, that she slurred lightly when she spoke.

The nights I spent with Sally were for exploration. I’d secretly rummage through her drawers to see what artifacts I could find. The interior of Sally’s house was museum-like: antiquated furniture and appliances, faded photos and a host of familial relics. It was always a bit “Hot out today, Ms. Sally” dim but always tranquil. Emma’s décor was “Yeeees ma’am. You called tha’ one right” livelier and a smidgen more modern; her “Don’t seem to ‘ffect the younginsmuch tho’” appliances, a generation newer (she owned an old color TV, as opposed to Sally’s old black-and“Need brains t’feel heat” white one).

Neither watched much TV. In fact, the only When I arrived each year for my summer stay, it was always an ordeal if both women were time I can remember Sally watching television in sitting on their porches at the same moment. length, was as Oliver North sweated through the We’d pull up, I’d get out the car and stand on Iran-Contra hearings. But when it stormed, TVs the sidewalk—directly at the midpoint between and radios were to be cut off—that was a time to their houses (my Treaty de Tordesillas, of sorts). commune with God. With each flash of lightning It was torment. Which porch do I go to first? and clap of thunder, she’d nod her head Who gets the first kiss? Neither grandmother approvingly and reply to the ether, “Yes, yeeessss My grandmothers were always a package deal.

As ancient as the cosmos, they were my twins, although they didn’t resemble each other much.

Sally was born sometime between 1900 and 1905.

The facial features of her West African ancestry: a broad nose, high cheekbones and skin as dark and smooth as black obsidian—were a constant reminder of her bloodlines. Emma (about twenty years Sally’s junior) had a deep caramel complexion and more modest features. Both wore their hair in braids, although Emma regularly adorned a wig; she wasn’t going to allow old age erase all vestiges of her feminine vanity.

Their personalities were akin but also different in many aspects. Emma had a light temperament and was generally a sweetheart.

Grandma Sally was stern and had an appraising way of looking at you when she thought you were full-of-it. Both spoke freely and while Emma may pity a fool, Sally didn’t suffer them gladly. Their interactions had an interesting dynamic, mostly because they didn’t always see eye-to-eye. And when they were having an off day (or month), it was more of a cold war than a war of words.

Those storms would pass and then the women would sit on their porches and meter out conversation

Lawd. I hear you Lawd. Talk to ‘em Gawd.”

Emma was a church-Sunday lifer, she’d leave in the morning and come back late in the afternoon. Sally stayed home most Sundays and although she was illiterate, if you read a Bible verse wrong, she’d say, “That doesn’t sound quite right, read it again.” Both were women of strong faith and it radiated from them. Thankfully, they weren’t overbearingly pious. Still, I suspect that their faiths fortified them and carried them through the more turbulent times in their lives.

I often wonder what life must have been like, growing up in the South, when Jim Crow was king. Sometimes I would pursue them for information (for history) about living in that era. Neither grandmother seemed eager to expound much about those times. They’d give me a tidbit or sometimes not say anything at all. Even today, I’m uncertain if their pasts were too painful to talk about or perhaps they felt I was too young to discuss such heavy content. Maybe they’d already come to terms with their histories and didn’t see the point of me carrying on about things that were settled with them. However, for all they didn’t say, I saw for myself. I saw the shotguns hidden around their homes. I heard stories about those shotguns; Sally threatening to blow a hole in my aunt’s abusive husband; Emma leveling her shotgun’s barrel at some thug threatening my cousin.

Yes, they were tough—growing up as vulnerable black women in an unforgiving South had seen to that. Yet, they never appeared bitter. I remember Emma debating a man about mixed race relations; they were fine by her (as long as the parties involved were Christian, of course). I always felt she was pretty progressive despite her age.

Sometimes, I like to visualize my grandmothers as young women and imagine what their love lives were like; were they flirty, modest or salacious? They certainly obtained love later in their lives. I never knew my Grandfather Levi, but I’d come to understand that he was a sweet and upstanding man; that Emma loved him dearly. Anytime she spoke of him, her eyes glowed with a knowing affection.

Sally’s Mr. John was alive a significant portion of my childhood. He was quiet and gentlemanly.

I considered him my grandfather and he treated me like a grandson. I forgave the fact that he could never quite pronounce my name. Although they married as an older couple, Sally and Mr. John were together for over twenty years. Mr. John was a few years older than Sally. He died—as should we all—peacefully in his sleep. At the wake, I watched Grandma Sally closely. I was curious about her state of mind. At first, she seemed unaffected. That led me to think that when one dies of old age, perhaps it‘s not an occasion to mourn. But when she was escorted to his casket, her knees sagged and her strength waned as she keened deeply for a moment…then she was right again.

Sally had many children; some died in adulthood from cancer. Grandma Emma also knew the grief of tragically losing her children. My father was murdered by a jilted lover who set his house afire. He lived just down the street from Emma. It always pains my hurt to know that she had to watch that house burn knowing her son was inside. Emma’s daughter, who lived in North Carolina, was shot to death by police in a botched rescue attempt during a bank robbery/hostage scenario. Emma was cut deeply by those losses; she’d often beg me to stay clear of trouble. She was essentially telling me that she couldn’t shoulder another loss. I obliged her by staying drug free and managing not to get myself killed—which isn’t always so easy living in Newark, N.J. I ran the streets but didn’t succumb to them.

During my summer stays, I made it my duty to be Emma’s personal jester. I loved to see her

bent over, laughing: hak-hak-hak—that dry cackle escaping her belly. Emma always enjoyed a good laugh and her cackle, could often be heard emanating from the closed doors of her home.

Sally was more sober but she wasn’t devoid of a sense of humor. Once, the family had decided to throw her an (eighty-something) birthday party. My crude aunt had bought her a phallic sex toy as a joke. Everyone was a bit nervous that the prank would raise Grandma Sally’s ire. As she unwrapped it, everyone became still. She held the toy, studied it and after a beat said, “What’d I need with this thing? I don’t deal with plastic. I deal with meat.” As comedians say, she killed.

Grandma Sally died in her ninety’s. But she somehow managed to linger on through Emma. It was if Grandma Emma was a historical place-marker for Sally. As long as l had one grandmother, the other could never truly be gone. I now only had one porch to perch on during my summer stays. Emma and I would relax in the afternoons and I’d glance over at Sally’s empty porch. It wasn’t hard to imagine her sitting there. It felt only right. Grandma Sally’s house eventually ended fell to some contractor. Emma and I would look on suspiciously as the intruder made changes to the facade. Emma was oddly protective of “Sally’s” house and would harass the contractor for what she thought were unseemly renovations. She consistently fussed over his work and although he was always cordial, I knew he had to be quite annoyed. I found her badgering to be sweet and valiant in a way. Grandma Emma died on Thanksgiving of 2003. We were eating dinner when the call came. I had called her earlier that day but to no answer. Had I called in the morning, as opposed to the afternoon, we may have had one last conversation.

I still visit Pottstown two or three times a year. I always make the customary pilgrimages to the houses where Sally, Emma and my father lived and died. My last drive to Pottstown was on Memorial Day. My young son made the trip with me.

It was a good day to reminisce. Sally’s and Emma’s houses haven’t changed much; not much at all, so the memories come easy. We got out of the car and stretched our legs. And I wasn’t surprised—not at all—when my son walked up and stood, right at the midpoint between their houses. ~~~

Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University

Wordly Folk Questioning Chimney Sweeps and Their Master Before Christ Church in Philadelphia

by John Lewis Krimmel

Blake’s Chimney Sweeps

William Blake (1757-1827) was unknown in his time. Born in London to a tradesman’s family, he apprenticed at fourteen to an engraver, a craft he practiced all his life. Although he had slight contact with the radical elite – Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestly – Blake was not even a casual acquaintance. He lived in obscurity and poverty all his life, a difficult person, an impossible friend, and an uncompromising idealist. Blake despised organized religion and gentle Jesus, but he hated the rationalism of Newton, Voltaire, and the British Empiricists. He pledge allegiance to Albion but loathed empire, kings, and constitutional parliaments. Blake is acknowledged now as a brilliant visual artist; his engravings and water-colors possess rare imaginative force. His poetry constitutes the breakthrough

Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University

moment of English Romanticism, and most particularly his “Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience” (1789, printed, 1794). These short lyrics appear almost child-like, masking a profound reordering of our values, and a bitter assault upon the complacency of his contemporaries.

We assume that poetry celebrates the softer virtues and the beauties of Nature. Readers wish to be enthralled by words and transported to higher realms of being. Blake defies these expectations. His writes guerilla poetry, setting off road-side bombs along the gentle path of verse. London is Blake’s diorama of madness and brutality. The metropolitan colossus of his time, Blake’s London is a demonic hell-hole where cruelty and corruption rule under a false banner of reason and sensibility. Blake gives his readers bad dreams, destroying their confidence that London life is sound and secure.

“The Chimney Sweeper” (“Songs of Innocence”) demonstrates this incendiary simplicity.

For Blake, child enslavement to chimney-sweeping epitomizes the corruption of his glorious city. London was a city of fireplaces burning coal in the houses of the comfortable; but all Londoners were familiar with troops of urchins marching the streets at dawn bearing their brooms and buckets. These children were as young as three and no older than nine, in order to fit into the narrow chimney stacks. Better not to ask where these tykes, their fair features smudged with soot, came from, and what were the circumstances of their lives. It would be painful to picture these families from the recently enclosed countryside now released into vagabondage, and their children sold into forced labor in London. It would be better, too, not to ask about Christ’s teachings concerning those who corrupt innocence and all that the Churches had done to help their congregations forget.

Blake places his explosive charges strategically. The unnamed speaker of “The ChimneySweeper” is a boy simple and kindly, with heroic endurance and generosity. His life a horror of abandonment and travail, he retains his trust in the world’s goodness, which makes his suffering more outrageous. We cannot help but adopt this boy and measure his humanity against the mean-spiritedness of his fortunate contemporaries. We learn as he tells his story about Tom Dacre (Tom of the Acres?), who recently joined the troop of infant workers fresh from a happier life in the countryside. The speaker consoles young Tom with perspectives that make his new circumstances seem reasonable – his luxurious hair is shorn (innocent lamb), but this violation protects his fair hair from the soot and filth. The speaker’s gentleness, given his hard life, is extraordinary.

Little Tom dreams that all the boys are liberated from black coffins (the suffocating chimneys), and an Angel leads them to a natural paradise, sun-lit and playful, with cleansing waters and fresh blowing wind, and a Father who cares for them (unlike those who abandoned them). Warmed by his dream, next morning little Tom marches off into the cold. The speaker’s concluding remark twists us with ironies. The speaker intones: “So if all do their duty they need not feel harm.” We applaud his pluck, his ability to sustain hope amidst distress. We know, too – we are not innocent – that his trustful words sustain an illusion; soon enough, he will be cast aside on London’s streets without even the misery of sweeping chimneys to sustain him.

Blake confronts his gentle reader with truths he would prefer to avoid. Who would be

Blake’s Chimney Sweeps

reading poems, and in what setting? A poetry reader in 1790 has been well educated, can afford purchasing poetry books, and has the leisure and luxury to read them in a clean, well-heated room. Perhaps, too, he has a child or two upstairs, snug in a warm bed, under a thick comforter against London’s chill. Perhaps this cosseted child stamped his foot in anger at receiving a toy he didn’t want or in jealousy at the gift his brother received, and father now sits himself down to ease his exasperation with a bit of poetry.

Consider further -- the poem resembles a nursery-rhyme, with short tetrameter lines, the rhythms of relaxed speech, and plain diction. In a small space Blake recounts the speaker’s life miseries and also his attitude towards them. The speaker is matter-of-fact about terrible things -the death of his mother, and his father abandoning him, just emerging from infancy -- the repetition of “’weep” is the chirp of a little bird pecking out a meager life. But the closing line of the quatrain hurts most: the speaker accepts it all. He directs his attention to us – “your” chimneys – but without complaint. He exhibits no rancor and trusts it somehow makes sense. If only he would have cursed us!

Tom Dacre is a younger self. Little Tom lacks forbearance and cries at his abuse. The violation of Tom flits past in quick metaphor, his luxuriant hair rudely shaved. The speaker links causes and consequences only with “so,” signaling that these things follow reasonably. Little Tom cries but must learn to accept his lot in life; so the speaker offers what anyone would, tender consolation.

This “so” is remarkable. First, the speaker assumes that he does what anyone one would for another in pain. For the speaker this is unremarkable, for us astonishing. We would expect the older boy to treat the child with contempt, “wise up, kid, you think you’re the only one kicked around by life?” The speaker is a saint. His “Hush, Tom!” a loving parent’s voice from a speaker who has had no loving parent to ease his fears.

His advice annoys us. Tom is to be consoled that the loss of his hair promotes cleanliness.

But the loss of his hair “curled like a lamb’s back” is a catastrophe; the notion its loss can be a gain is preposterous. Still, the speaker is kind, the tone loving. Readers are caught in a bind.

Accepting such abuse makes us impatient, but the calming spirit appeals to our need for orderliness.

Asked by the speaker to think of himself as yet another boy in this condition, Tom imagines “thousands or sweepers.” Like the speaker, Tom reaches beyond personal suffering to imagine the pain of others, all buried alive, and of their shared liberation. In the madhouse of London, however, this kindliness is infuriating. It would be better if Blake had not made these youngsters loveable and brave.

Tom’s story unfolds as a “and …then” story that children tell. Events unfold naturally. If we are buried alive in black coffins, an angel will rescue us. Set free, the boys will leap and laugh and run. They will wash themselves in a clean river, as they cannot do in London, and shine in the bright pastoral sun. “And then” the story proceeds in its innocent rush of excitement, they will be taken aloft and “sport” in the wind. Tom dreams they will fly away together, rollicking in flight.

The angel assures them, then, if Tom accepts his lot without complaint, the Father of all will protect him, and he will enter a life of pure joy. “Pie in the sky when you die” a cynic would say.

The final stanza has two instances of “so”. Reassured by the speaker’s consoling wisdom, Tom, and the rest of them settle into their daily tasks. Perhaps they all had Tom’s dream. The dream keeps them “happy and warm” even in the morning’s cold. The final “so” is outrageous –

Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University

“so if all do their duty they need not fear harm.” These saintly little chaps must believe a dream to keep going – abandoned, exploited, and abused. We know their compliance will not protect them. They have much to fear, even doing what they are told. There is no angel and no key in London to save them. At least the consolation of religion provides the wherewithal to survive the day. If religion is the people’s opiate, as Marx tells us, at least an opiate alleviates the pain.

We admire the pluck of these little workers and wonder in dismay what to do to save those who are the best of us? The comfortable reader squirms uneasily.

The companion song, “The Chimney Sweeper” from “Songs of Experience” sheds light on “Songs of Innocence.” It is a shorter, harsher, meaner poem that employs sarcasm in place of the lighter, but more agonizing irony. Here an observer sees the child “A little black thing,” nothing quite human, a bird in winter. His street call advertising sweeping is reduced to an infant “‘weep ‘weep”, a grim pun connecting the services offered with the tears shed by sweepers.

This child has parents, but they have gone off to church and abandoned him. The observer asks the child where his parents are, and the boy answers with a sardonic twist. Instead of the innocent “so,” he says “because,” seeing the grim connections in things. The causes of his misery are ignorance and spite. He did not lose his rural delight “happy upon the heath” and then find himself enslaved to soot and despair. In this case, “because” he was happy he was condemned to suffer. Now dressed in the black costume of his trade, he has been taught “the notes of woe.”

While this boy retains some infant joy, his parents try to beat that out of him, believing that by condemning him to useful work they have done their duty and him no injury. This boy, unlike his innocent counterpart, understands the circuit of deceit. Londoners give allegiance to “God & his Priest & King,” a trinity for whom the torment of innocence is heaven’s plan. The boy’s voice is terse and bitter. Is he happier than his innocent double? Does his dark knowledge arm him for the struggle for justice, warm him against the cold, and help him confront an evil history?

Does it arouse the reader to sympathy or push us away to protect us against the anger of the dispossessed? Surprisingly,the voice of innocence abused produces a more bitter poem, with greater power to arouse us in defense of kindliness and affection.

“London” is an anthem to anger and despair. Blake explores the connections that blind us to reality and the fractures of consciousness in the age of empire. The poem is severely compressed – just sixteen lines, in terse tetrameter, and with meager vocabulary, including much repetition.

Still, this air-tight and laconic poem measures London and the mind of its residents.

The speaker wanders the city taking impressions, like snapshots, each an electrified image of London’s degradation. While the speaker wanders, the city is owned and tightly measured by its corporate grip. The streets are not just “charted” (defined on a map) but also “chartered” (licensed by the city). Looking up, the wanderer sees the plaques identifying each establishment as approved and regulated by the city – each store, pub, and workshop done by public decree and by arrangements benefitting the city’s governors and enhancing their powers.

While accustomed to licensed businesses, we may find it strange that the Thames has also been claimed for ownership and regulation. A “charter’d Thames” may appear to flow, but according riparian rights, the Thames and access to it belongs to the government and is leased out to property owners and businesses at a price. Make no mistake, the enclosure of country fields and legal control of what had once belonged to God and the people, has reached its logical,

Blake’s Chimney Sweeps

but insane, conclusion in the city, where even the river, flowing and irregular, is real estate.

The wanderer “marks” the impact of this totalitarianism in the faces he sees. Long before Orwell’s 1984, Blake notes the timorous fear in people overwhelmed by the gigantism of government. The verb “marks” intensifies “notes,” “sees,” or, “observes” – and in the sense of “marks out” answers the notion of “charted”/”chartered”. Similarly, the “marks” he sees testify to the ubiquitous terror. The wanderer sees what others fail to notice; he also connects the psycho-social trauma with the laws of ownership and control the state insists upon. The play of what we see and are unable to see is fundamental to the poem and to Blake’s powerful project to “cleanse the doors of perception.”

Of the 23 words in stanza two, five of them are “every” and all in positions emphasizing Orwellian totality. Men and infants “cry”; infants, not yet capable of speech already have imbibed the fear bred by the city. The terror pervades London, seeping into the way infants cry and adults voice their constrained daily lives in the strangled pitch of their voices. These traces are audible to the wanderer, who takes impressions freely. London suffocates its people in prohibitions, in “bans” that require vigilance by its citizens. Londoners have learned not to notice the undoing of their natural force. The state could never have imposed its restrictions if the people had not accepted them as natural and reasonable. Power rules without direct force, but by ideology alone. Blake’s phrase “mind-forg’d manacles” expresses a remarkable insight. The linking of the blacksmith’s forge with airy notions and ideas hammers this into our imagination.

The first eight lines present the indictment; the next eight find warrant for these claims.

Blake mentioned chimney-sweepers elsewhere, but “London” makes a political case. The “cry” of “’weep, ‘weep” now joins the city’s chorus of pained cries. The cry of abused childworkers, soot-covered, “appalls” the churches, all of which are “black’ning.” In the highly confined space of this compressed poem, this knot of metaphor comes shockingly quick. “To Appall” comes from Middle French and means to make something become ghostly white, as the blood drains away in terror. The chimney-sweeps strip the chimneys of soot to burn cleaner; yet paradoxically this cleaning blackens the London churches; a result that causes these churches to turn a ghostly white. Blake has constructed a dizzying puzzle where physical reference and moral significance collide. To sort it out, we must stop and think. The chimney sweeps physically keep the London churches clean. The observer could take pride in these gleaming facades, except that this brightness costs the innocence of London’s suffering children. These proud fronts, then, must been seen properly – another moral stain upon the city. While bright to the eye, they represent a ghostly horror. Christian churches that should be standing by Christ’s teaching and protecting the innocent (Luke 17:2) stand condemned by their purposeful ignorance of the plight of the poor. London’s radiant churches are “whited sepulchres” (Matthew 23: 28 …”which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness”).

This tangle of images challenges Blake’s reader to put aside meanings enforced by mindforg’d manacles, and adopt new ways of seeing. Suppose every Lexus we see, far from signaling a person of merit and application, displays another cheat who has grown rich submitting false Medicare claims, or evicting struggling families their homes, or working the system by

Blake’s Chimney Sweeps The Wandering Moon by William Blake, Series: Illustrations to John Milton - L` Allegro and Il Penseroso

leveraging legislation for favors and who refuses to pay taxes or send his children abroad to the wars that make him rich … London.

The second example in stanza three constitutes a more horrifying instance. The splendid facade of King George III’s palace, if seen correctly, is awash in blood. This image forces another rude collision of fact and ideological fantasy. To the “manacled” eye, the king’s palace is a shining evidence of grandeur and honor. That grandeur, like all other London boasts, has been purchased at the cost of the “hapless Soldier’s sigh.” In the eighteenth-century, young British men were sent to kill and be killed in the Indian sub-continent and in North America by the tens of thousands.

They were “hapless”, or unlucky, in being sent there and finding themselves victims of disease, deprivation, and the grim reapings of battle. The King’s palatial monument to empire, seen correctly, is a mausoleum of shame and horror. “Cry” here gives way to “sigh” as the British

Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University

soldier, facing the horrors of Calcutta or the savage woods of Canada, recognizes the hopelessness and submits to his destruction.

The concluding stanza is most shocking of all, for in this instance London’s moral rot and suffering spreads everywhere. The disease travels from the weak and hapless to their “betters” and threatens directly the existence of this imperial city. The circuitry that connects one suffering to another is again far from obvious to the untrained imagination.

London throughout the eighteenth-century experienced the influx of impoverished country workers displaced from the land. Unprepared for city life and moving into an economy unable to accommodate them, many took to thievery and prostitution. Eighteenth-century literature is full of highwaymen and “gypsies” and trollops and barmaids, the dangers of the roads and of the backstreets and low saloons. These colorful moments in fiction and engravings note the realities of the underworld and the demi-monde. London accommodated its fortunate country milk-maids with “downstairs” service, but for many others survival required the horrors of back alleys.

As “London” notes, prostitutes were numerous, in a way that allows the poem to allude to them casually as well known to any reader. Walk the “midnight streets” and you encounter them everywhere. Their “curse” has a double valence. It is another version of “cry” and “sigh” – another sounding of despair in the London chorus of anger and hopelessness. The prostitute, finished with her client, curses him for his misuse of her. But this curse has another and more powerful effectiveness. This milk-maid of the country-side now carries a venereal plague and transmits it to the man who abused her, to his innocent wife, and to the child who should be the glory of his household establishment. The connection is medical. Having passed her STD to her client, the harlot has paid back her abuser with gonorrhea, long since known to endanger the new-born with infection and blindness. The “new-born Infants tear” then becomes a horrifying battleground where moral corruption is repaid with hideous vengeance. Where one connection “appalls” and another causes blood to “run”, this new link in the circuit “blasts” and “blights with plague.” In this world of reverse meanings, the marriage coach and all its hopefulness becomes a “Marriage hearse,” yet another transformation of false front masking death and rot.

Blake wrote ugly poems, beautiful only in their craft of compression, the poetry one would expect from an engraver working in tight spaces. There is no filmy sentiment or heaven-climbing elations here; these poems are hard as nails and nasty in intent. Blake is an unreasonable man rejecting the Age of Reason and casting his lot instead with the biblical prophets, with Isaiah, in his condemnation of the grandeur of ‘houses of hewn stones” and what these glories cost our fellow human beings. Sitting in the heart of empire, he counts the costs and forces his readers to know what they would prefer not to. His is a poetry which, unfortunately, shows no signs of losing its timeliness. ~~~

Diana Ferraro

The Legacy of Spanish Theater Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quichote by Paula Modersohn-Becker

hile many may have at this point forgotten that the famous quote of Emperor Charles V about “the Empire where the sun never sets” applied to the Spanish Empire and not the British, a few remember the glory of Spain in the old days. Well before the British set the rules of world etiquette and good manners, the Spanish way of doing things at the Court inspired every country in Europe. With its own character and refinement, the literature of what is called the Siglo de Oro, the Golden Century, remains as one of the most important cultural legacies in the world. There’s Cervantes, of course, at the top, but close to him and Quevedo, the brilliant poet and essayist, three great dramatists have left some of the most endurable plays in the history of theater: Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina.

SPANISH TEXTS- Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas Spanish theater started early on during the Middle Age with primitive plays such as La danza de la muerte and the Eglogas of Juan de la Encina, it reached a maturity in 1499 with the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea by Fernando de Rojas, which later changed its name to La Celestina and which, to this day, remains a masterpiece of literary drama. It’s during the Siglo de Oro, though, when the art of playwriting attained its full national potential. Cervantes wrote some comedies— exactly eight comedies and several entremeses, brief light plays—which represent only an avant-taste of what Lope de Vega would deliver in his major plays such as El perro del hortelano (The Gardener's Dog), La dama boba (The Lady-Fool) and, above all, Fuenteovejuna, in which a whole village rebels against a Commander who has taken the city and tried to take two women, one of them Laurencia, who will bravely resist while her lover is going to be hanged; Calderón de la Barca in comedies and his theological Auto Sacramentales and in his masterpiece La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), where Segismundo, the main character, unfairly imprisoned, reflects about life; and Tirso de Molina in his remarkable El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest), the piece in which Don Juan was first presented on the stage.

After the Golden Century, the Spanish audience’s taste for the theater didn’t decline, adding to the preference for comedies a new genre, the Zarzuela, a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance. The most important author of the Neo Classical period was Moratín whose lovely comedy El sí de las niñas continues to this day in every Spanish high school syllabus.

During Romanticism, a few more plays would join the classical repertoire, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sinoby the Duque de Rivas, Don Juan Tenorio by José Zorrilla and Muérete y verás by Bretón de los Herreros, the most famous among many others. Later in the 19th century, the wonderful novelist Benito Pérez Galdós would contribute with some plays and, by the beginning of the 20th century José Echegaray, the author of several melodramas, such as El gran galeoto and Mariana , who would in 1904 earn for Spain a Nobel Prize.

In 1898, the Spanish-American war with the subsequent loss of Cuba, the last Spanish colony in the Americas, put an end to the Spanish Empire and marked the hour of essayists and poets who would reflect on greatness and decay, glory and change. Dramatists temporarily waned from the scene, even though a new set of successful zarzuelas—a tradition that had also spread to Cuba and the former colonies, including the Philippines--provided a distraction and joyful entertainment to the large local audiences.

During the 20th century, the Spanish theater would revive, not only in the zarzuelas played to this day—such as El Barberillo del Lavapiés, La verbena de la Paloma, La corte del Faraón and Doña Francisquita—but in the numerous and successful plays written by playwrights, novelists and poets that would supply comedies and dramas not only to the stage but to the movies and, later the television. The greatest Spanish author in the 20th century is the poet Federico García Lorca who before being murdered during the Spanish Civil War left a series of masterpieces: La casa de Bernarda Alba, Yerma and Doña Rosita la Soltera o El lenguaje de las flores.

The tradition of Spanish theater was continued in the colonies and, after the Independence, each country would develop its own theater. Among the Latin American countries with a greater theatrical production, Argentina—whose capital Buenos Aires has as many main and off theaters as New York—Mexico, and Cuba, the latter one having above all inherited the musical legacy and the two others having extended the stage into the movies and television, building two powerful industries and carrying them into the 21st century. ~~~

Diana Ferraro

Fácil parece este sujeto, y fácil fuera para cualquiera de vosotros, que ha escrito menos de ellas, y más sabe del arte de escribirlas, y de todo; que lo que a mí me daña en esta parte es haberlas escrito sin el arte.

No porque yo ignorase los preceptos, gracias a Dios, que ya, tirón gramático, pasé los libros que trataban de esto antes que hubiese visto al sol diez veces discurrir desde el Aries a los Peces.

Mas porque, en fin, hallé que las comedias estaban en España, en aquel tiempo, no como sus primeros inventores pensaron que en el mundo se escribieran, mas como las trataron muchos bárbaros que enseñaron el vulgo a sus rudezas; y así, se introdujeron de tal modo que, quien con arte agora las escribe, muere sin fama y galardón, que puede, entre los que carecen de su lumbre, más que razón y fuerza, la costumbre.

Verdad es que yo he escrito algunas veces siguiendo el arte que conocen pocos, mas luego que salir por otra parte veo los monstruos, de apariencia llenos, adonde acude el vulgo y las mujeres que este triste ejercicio canonizan, a aquel hábito bárbaro me vuelvo; y, cuando he de escribir una comedia, encierro los preceptos con seis llaves; saco a Terencio y Plauto de mi estudio, para que no me den voces (que suele dar gritos la verdad en libros mudos), y escribo por el arte que inventaron los que el vulgar aplauso pretendieron, porque, como las paga el vulgo, es justo hablarle en necio para darle gusto.

Ya tiene la comedia verdadera su fin propuesto, como todo género de poema o poesis, y éste ha sido imitar las acciones de los hombres y pintar de aquel siglo las costumbres.

Study of Monsters by Hieronymus Bosch

por Lope de Vega (Extracto)

SPANISH TEXTS- Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas

by Lope de Vega (Excerpt) This subject seems easy, and easy it would be for any of you who had written less about them and still knows more about the art of writing them and about everything; for what it hurts me about this is to have written plays without the art.

Not that I ignored the precepts, thanks God, for being a grammar apprentice, I ran through the books that treated this theme before I had seen the sun ten times moving from Aries to Pisces.

Because I found that at time in Spain comedies were not as their first creators intended should be written everywhere in the world, but rather were treated by the many barbarians who showed the people into their coarseness, thus prevailing until now in such a way, that whoever writes them now with the art, dies without fame nor awards because, among those who lack his brightness, costume wins over reason and strength.

It’s true that I’ve written sometimes following the art that so few know, to let myself later write in some other way.

I see the monsters, plays full of themselves, that attract the common people and the women who canonize this sad exercise, and thus to that barbaric attitude I’m led and, when writing a comedy, I lock the precepts under six keys, I throw out Terence and Plautus from my studio, so that they don’t talk to me (for truth often shouts from silent books) and I write with the art invented

by those who craved the vulgar applause; since the comedies are paid by the people, it’s fair to use the dumb language they like.

For the true comedy has already its own goal set, as any other genre of poem or poesis, and this has been none other than imitating the actions of men and painting every custom from their century. ~~~

Grammar by Paul Serusier

Diana Ferraro

Calderón de la Barca

The Dream by Odilon Redon

Acto II SEGISMUNDO: .....pues reprimamos esta fiera condición, esta furia, esta ambición, por si alguna vez soñamos; y sí haremos, pues estamos en mundo tan singular, que el vivir sólo es soñar; y la experiencia me enseña que el hombre que vive, sueña

lo que es, hasta despertar.

Sueña el rey que es rey, y vive con este engaño mandando, disponiendo y gobernando; y este aplauso, que recibe prestado, en el viento escribe, y en cenizas le convierte la muerte, ¡desdicha fuerte! ¡Que hay quien intente reinar, viendo que ha de despertar en el sueño de la muerte!

Sueña el rico en su riqueza,

SPANISH TEXTS- Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas

que más cuidados le ofrece; sueña el pobre que padece su miseria y su pobreza; sueña el que a medrar empieza, sueña el que afana y pretende, sueña el que agravia y ofende, y en este mundo, en conclusión, todos sueñan lo que son, aunque ninguno lo entiende.

Yo sueño que estoy aquí de estas prisiones cargado, y soñé que en otro estado más lisonjero me vi. ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ficción, una sombra, una ilusión, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. Act II

SEGISMUNDO: We live, while we see the sun, Where life and dreams are as one; And living has taught me this, Man dreams the life that is his, Until his living is done.

The king dreams he is king, and he lives In the deceit of a king, Commanding and governing; And all the praise he receives Is written in wind, and leaves A little dust on the way When death ends all with a breath.

Where then is the gain of a throne, That shall perish and not be known In the other dream that is death?

Dreams the rich man of riches and fears,

The fears that his riches breed; The poor man dreams of his need, And all his sorrows and tears; Dreams he that prospers with years, Dreams he that feigns and foregoes, Dreams he that rails on his foes; And in all the world, I see, Man dreams whatever he be, And his own dream no man knows.

And I too dream and behold, I dream I am bound with chains, And I dreamed that these present pains Were fortunate ways of old.

What is life? a tale that is told; What is life? a frenzy extreme, A shadow of things that seem; And the greatest good is but small, That all life is a dream to all, And that dreams themselves are a dream.

Translation: Arthur Symons (From: Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, collected and arranged by Thomas Walsh.

G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1920.)

Diana Ferraro

Lope de Vega Laurencia: Amando, recelar daño en lo amado nueva pena de amor se considera; que quien en lo que ama daño espera aumenta en el temor nuevo cuidado.

El firme pensamiento desvelado, si le aflige el temor, fácil se altera; que no es a firme fe pena ligera ver llevar el temor el bien robado.

Mi esposo adoro; la ocasión que veo al temor de su daño me condena, si no le ayuda la felice suerte.

Al bien suyo se inclina mi deseo: si está presenta, está cierta mi pena; si está en ausencia, está cierta mi muerte.

Translation

Laurencia: When in love, to suspect harm in the loved one a new pain of love becomes; for who expects harm in the beloved adds to care, fear.

Thoughts, steadfast and sleepless, when afflicted with fright are easily upset.

Seeing the good stolen by fear is not a light pain to someone with a steady faith.

I adore my husband; the case I’m seeing condemns me to fear his harm if luck will not help him.

To his goodness my desire is so inclined, If present, my pain will be certain; If absent, my death is assured.

SPANISH TEXTS- Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas

Hope II by Gustav Klimt

Marie Fitzpatrick

DOÑA FRANCISQUITA Música: Amadeo Vives Letra: Federico Romero y Guillermo Fernández Shaw "Por el humo se sabe"

¡Vana ilusión!

Fernando: Por el humo se sabe donde está el fuego; del humo del cariño nacen los celos: Son mosquitos que vuelan junto al que duerme y zumbando le obligan a que despierte.

En amores no vale matar la llama, si en las cenizas muertas, queda la brasa.

El amor se aletarga con los desdenes y parece dormido, pero no duerme. ¡Ay, quién lograra de verdad para siempre dormir el alma!

Y, en la celdilla del amor aquel, borrar el vértigo de aquella mujer fatal. ¡Ah! fatal.

¡Si yo lograra, de verdad para siempre, dormir el alma!

Y, en la celdilla del amor aquél, borrar el vértigo de aquella mujer.

Por una puerta del alma va saliendo la imagen muerta.

Por otra puerta llama la imagen que podría curarme el alma.

Se me entra por los ojos y a veces sueño que ya la adoro.

Cariño de mi alma recién nacido, la llama extingue, ¡ay! de aquel cariño.

SPANISH TEXTS- Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas

"By the smoke one knows"

Fernando: By the smoke one knows where the fire is; from the smoke of love, jealousies are born.

Like mosquitoes they fly over they who sleep, and, buzzing, force them to wake.

If I could win, in truth, forever, the sleep of my soul!

And in that one love cell, Erase my dizzyness for that other woman.

Through the soul's door the dead image is leaving.

Through the other door an image calls that is able to cure my soul.

She enters through my eyes and sometimes I dream that I already adore her.

Love of my soul, newly born, The flame extinguished Oh! of that one love.

Vain illusion!

In love it is no good to douse the flame, if in the dead ashes the embers remain.

Love grows drowsy with slights, and seems sleepy, but isn’t sleeping.

If only I could enjoy truly, forever, sleep in my soul!

And in the haven of this love, Erase my mad passion for that other fatal woman. Ah, fatal!

Diana Ferraro

Federico García Lorca

Tía: Alguna vez tengo que hablar alto. Sal de tus cuatro paredes, hija mía. No te hagas a la desgracia.

Rosita: (Arrodillada delante de ella.) Me he acostumbrado a vivir muchos años fuera de mí, pensando en cosas que estaban muy lejos, y ahora que estas cosas ya no existen sigo dando vueltas y más vueltas por un sitio frío, buscando una salida que no he de encontrar nunca. Yo lo sabía todo. Sabía que se había casado; ya se encargó un alma caritativa de decírmelo, y he estado recibiendo sus cartas con una ilusión llena de sollozos que aun a mí misma me asombraba. Si la gente no hubiera hablado; si vosotras no lo hubierais sabido; si no lo hubiera sabido nadie más que yo, sus cartas y su mentira hubieran alimentado mi ilusión como el primer año de su ausencia. Pero lo sabían todos y yo me encontraba señalada por un dedo que hacía ridícula mi modestia de prometida y daba un aire grotesco a mi abanico de soltera. Cada año que pasaba era como una prenda íntima que arrancaran de mi cuerpo. Y hoy se casa una amiga y otra y otra, y mañana tiene un hijo y crece, y viene a enseñarme sus notas de examen, y hacen casas nuevas y canciones nuevas, y yo igual, con el mismo temblor, igual; yo, lo mismo que antes, cortando el mismo clavel, viendo las mismas nubes; y un día bajo al paseo y me doy cuenta de que no conozco a nadie; muchachas y muchachos me dejan atrás porque me canso, y uno dice: "Ahí está la solterona"; y otro, hermoso, con la cabeza rizada, que comenta: "A esa ya no hay quien le clave el diente." Y yo lo oigo y no puedo gritar, sino vamos adelante, con la boca llena de veneno y con unas ganas enormes de huir, de quitarme los zapatos, de descansar y no moverme más, nunca, de mi rincón.

Tía: ¡Hija! ¡Rosita!

Rosita: Ya soy vieja. Ayer le oí decir al ama que todavía podía yo casarme. De ningún modo.

No lo pienses. Ya perdí la esperanza de hacerlo con quien quise con toda mi sangre, con quien quise y... con quien quiero. Todo está acabado... y, sin embargo, con toda la ilusión perdida, me acuesto, y me levanto con el más terrible de los sentimientos, que es el sentimiento de tener la esperanza muerta. Quiero huir, quiero no ver, quiero quedarme serena, vacia..., ¿es que no tiene derecho una pobre mujer a respirar con libertad.? Y sin embargo la esperanza me persigue, me ronda, me muerde; como un lobo moribundo que apretase sus dientes por última vez.

SPANISH TEXTS- Drama, Comedies, and Zarzuelas

Federico García Lorca

Aunt: Sometimes I have to speak out. Get away from these four walls, my child. Don’t accept this misfortune.

Rosita: (Kneeling in front of her.) For many years I got used to living beyond myself, thinking of things that were far away, and now those things no longer exist I keep turning and turning around a cold emptiness, seeking an escape I’ll never find out. I knew everything. I knew he had married; one of those well-known kind souls took the pain of telling me, and I went on receiving his letters with an illusion so full of sorrow and sobs that it astonished even myself. If no one had said anything; if you had not known; if no one had known but me, his letters and his lies would have sustained my illusion, as they did in the first year of his absence. But everyone knew, and fingers pointed at me, giving an air of ridicule to my chastity as a fiancée, and making a grotesque fun of my spinster’s fan. Every year that passed was like an intimate secret snatched from my body. And one day a friend marries, then another and another, and tomorrow one has a child, and the child grows and comes to show me his school report, and people make new homes and sing new songs, and I am the same, with the same shudder, the same; I am the same as before, cutting the same carnation, gazing at the same clouds; and one day I go down for a walk and I realize that I no longer know anyone; the boys and girls leave me behind because I get tired, and one says: ‘That’s the old maid’; and another, a handsome boy, with curly hair, comments: ‘That one, who would want to feast on her now?” And I hear him and I can’t cry, only tell myself to go ahead, the mouth bitter with poison, and an enormous desire to run away, to throw off my shoes, and rest and not move again, ever, from my corner.

Aunt : Child! Rosita!

Rosita: Now I am old. Yesterday I heard the nurse say that I might still marry. There is no way.

Don’t think about it. I have lost all hope now of marrying whom I loved with all my heart, whom I loved and….whom I love. Everything is finished…and yet, with all illusion gone, I go to bed and still wake up with the most dreadful of feelings, the feeling of a hope that is dead. I want to run away, I want not to see; I want to stay calm, empty… Doesn’t a poor woman have the right to breathe freely? Yet hope pursues me, circles me, bites me, like a dying wolf sinking its teeth in for the last time.

You might fall in love with someone you’ve never even spoken to. It can happen when you dance. You might hear each other’s heartbeat in the music if you listen closely. Your feet will move together, silent partners gliding through a slow, sensual rumba or a dramatic tango. There is no need for talk. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. You look into each other’s eyes and know that some small flaw, some tiny misstep may lead to ruin later on.

That’s precisely what happened to Jill Merlet and Frank Michaels.

Jill was the “Belle of the Ball.” She could whirl and spin with the best of them. She was light on her feet, always in sync with the music, never tripping or stepping on anyone’s toes. Jill had been a regular at the Blue Rose Ballroom for over five years, sometimes teaching when the instructor, Jose, was out sick. She wore glittery, low cut blouses and heels too high for most women to walk in. Jill danced for several hours, five days a week after work. She had little desire to go home to an empty apartment unless she was too exhausted to notice. She took a shower, massaged her feet and climbed into bed under her new down comforter. Jill did not feel comforted at all.

Frank was much sought after as a partner at the Blue Rose. He was an elegant man with a full head of gray hair, silk ties and Armani suits. Frank knew how to make women look good on the dance floor. He knew how to lead without being aggressive. He held each partner firmly in his arms as he waltzed his way around the large, mirrored room, smiling at his own reflection.

Frank was in charge and he knew it.

Strangely, Jill and Frank had never danced together. Perhaps, each saw the other as too pretentious or worse, as a more accomplished dancer. Last Tuesday night, all of that changed.

It was was late and few dancers were up for the complicated patterns of the quickstep with all of

its hops and runs.

“May I have this dance?” Before Jill could answer, Frank took her hand and off they went.

Everyone else stopped moving. The couple seemed to barely touch the ground as they covered the floor at at an unbelievable pace. A quickstep is a pleasure to watch but difficult to manage without losing your balance.

As time passed, they danced almost exclusively with each other. Frank began escorting Jill to her Honda and, most recently to kiss her, deeply. They watched movies together and joined other elegant couples in the world of competitive dance. Soon, Frank joined Jill under her pink comforter.

It didn’t take long for Jill to have regrets about letting Frank move in so quickly. He never paid for any household expenses or even dinner out once in a while.

He claimed, “I still have upkeep on my own Edmee Lescot as a Spanish Dancer by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec apartment to worry about you know. And then there’s the alimony and child support.” He snored so loudly, Jill often wound up on the leather sofa in her living room. He rarely read a book and, for a strikingly handsome man, had a limited vocabulary and some appalling grammar. He showed no versatility or imagination during their lovemaking “You’d think dancers would have some exciting moves,” Jill thought. It was all over faster than a three minute waltz and Jill was thankful.

After about three months Frank began to dislike Jill. Once she started humming, he began to dislike her even more. She had a high-pitched cackle for a laugh. Jill dragged Frank to family picnics, weddings and holiday feasts. She was beginning to grow plump and in bed, she was as brittle as a potato chip.

“It’s getting harder and harder to dance with you, Jill. Must you lead all the time?” he whined.

“You’re stepping on my feet and you seem to have lost the beat entirely. Last night you almost drilled a hole in my instep with those silver spikes of yours.”

There was no response from Jill. Her nose was buried in a romance novel.

She could speak relentlessly about many subjects. Most recently, she started speaking about marriage.

Frank made plans to foxtrot his way back to his own apartment.

Jill’s choreography was perfect. ~~~

Study of the Graduations of Shadows on Spheres by Leonardo da Vinci

he door opened, and a girl no more than eighteen peeked in. “Mrs. Taylor?” She was wearing a cropped sweater, jeans, and high boots.

“You’re very young for a doctor,” Mrs. Taylor said.

“Oh, sorry. I’m, like, not a doctor,” she said taking a few steps into the room. “I’m Melody, and I’m in Rec and Leisure. I’m on placement. From the College.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Taylor said. “So where’s my doctor then? My foot, it’s very sore.” She winced as she tried to flex her ankle.

“Um, I don’t know. I’m just here on placement. From the College.”

“Well, good for you, dear. And your name is—?”

“Melody.”

“Melody. Like a song.”

Melody smiled. “My grandma always says that.”

Mrs. Taylor didn’t smile. “My ghost showed up again this morning.”

“A ghost . . . wow!” Melody glanced around the room. “Is it still—” “Oh, no. She only comes early, around dawn. Just stands there, never moving, staring at me with that smug smile of hers, and then she’s gone by the time it’s bright.” Her voice began to rise. “I want her to go away!”

“Um, do you think—do you think it’s a real ghost, Mrs. Taylor?”psychosomatic “Well it must be. It looks like one and ghosts always appear near beds.”

“Wow!” Melody said again.

“Would you wheel me down to the sun place—you know—the sun something-or-other?”

“Um, you mean the sunroom? Oh sure.” Melody’s eyes were still flicking about the room.

“But, was there, like, really a ghost in here?”

“Well, I suppose it could be one of those—you know—they float around—” “Um, clouds?”

“No!” “Airplanes?”

“No! Those—um, angels. That’s it. Angels. Maybe it’s my Guardian Angel. Angels wear white, and this ghost has a white gown and a halo.” She looked at Melody more closely. “Who are you again?”

“I’m Melody, and I’m on placement. But, Mrs. Taylor, who is your ghost? Do you know who she is?”

“No, but I know I’ve seen her somewhere before.” She laughed. “Maybe she’s my sister, come back to haunt me. She’d enjoy that. So are we going down or not?” ~

Mrs. Taylor insisted on using the wheelchair because of her sore foot. As they headed to the elevator, they passed a woman inching along with a walker, a nurse hovering by her side.

Mrs. Taylor reached out to grab the woman’s arm. “Paula!” she shouted. “I’m going to the beach!”

The woman named Paula gasped, and her nurse bent in close to steady her. Then the nurse winked over at Melody. Melody figured they should keep going.

“That Paula Ford,” Mrs. Taylor said, “always been snooty. We went to St. Brigid’s together.”

Suddenly she laughed out loud. “Ha! Maybe my ghost is a nun, a flying nun. Nuns wear white when they’re brides, you know, Brides of Christ.”

“Wow!” Melody said again. She wished her classes had taught her what to say to someone like Mrs. Taylor.

“I wanted to be a nun,” Mrs. Taylor said, “but I got married instead. Quite a grand wedding too.” She hummed a few notes of the Wedding March. “At least I think it was.” She looked back at Melody. “It’s awfully cold for summer. Who are you again?”

“I’m Melody from the College,” Melody said. “And it’s winter, actually.”

“Right, Melody. Like a song.”

The sunroom smelled like a greenhouse, moist and mouldy. As soon as Mrs. Taylor saw the row of baffled-looking people crammed in between the plants as they stared at the expanse of snow, she became agitated. “No, no. Not today. Take me back. Besides, I’d like to have a nap.” She paused. “Corduroy has a nap. Velvet does too, and cats.” ~ Back in her suite, Mrs. Taylor asked Melody to bring her shawl from the bedroom. Melody tiptoed in warily, half-expecting to encounter the ghost. As she turned back with the shawl, she noticed a large, formal portrait of a woman in a wedding dress and veil on the dresser. She remembered that her teachers had said old people like to talk about their photographs, so she brought it back to the sitting room along with the shawl. “Is this you, Mrs. Taylor? You’re soo-o pretty.”

“It’s her!” Mrs. Taylor shouted, turning her face away, her hands up to ward off an attack.

“You tell her I can’t stand it. I can’t stand her staring!” Her voice was breaking. “You tell her to stop!”

Melody pulled the photo to her chest and looked around for a place to hide it. She spotted a row of photo albums beside the TV, and as she slipped it in between them, she noticed the writing on the back: Wedding of Josephine O’Brien and John Taylor. Toronto. Nov. 14, 1948.

For the first time since she’d arrived, Melody had the sense she might have done something right. “There, Mrs. Taylor,” she said. “It’s OK. She’s gone now, and she, like, promised never to bother you again. She really did.”

“Oh, good.” Mrs. Taylor smiled up at her. “Now, doctor, what about my foot?” ~~~

High Waters by Isaac Levitan

I look back up as I sink, blowing silver bubbles, glass beads through the corrugate shards of sun to the surface, a skin. My senses are sharpened as I sit, arms across my chest. Striped, bright shoals flick, always away from me. There is no smell. The water fills my throat, salty as I sway towards the gritty reef and the ribbed sand. I do not panic. I have a grace which is new to me.

Surrounding the reef is the greenest light, beyond that black, where I shall die. Can I hear or imagine the churn of the boat above, the cries of my family and the crew? There is a rushing in my ears, which must be silence. A glint of light catches my watch, a gift from him. An apology.

Again. Time is mute and I gently laugh.

A weighted rope plunges close, uncurling like a lizard’s tongue. An orange ring bobs above, perturbed. The rope dances and I spread my limbs, shaping like a star. The sea brushes between my legs like a snake. Nothing, no one has touched me for so long.

The dusky hull hangs above me. The water begins to chill. The sea had been rough as I jumped and the clouds hovered. Rain will seep past me as I furl to the deep. My sternum presses hard and tight. Bilal, stone-crushed for his faith, comes to my mind. My throat constricts. The dull clunk of a body distracts me. It pulls towards me. Fish flee and burrow. The captain’s son, young and eager and frightened. I smile at his panicked eyes. His face contorts as I twist away and he bellows up for air.

Coral reels away as I veer into the darkness. I see my husband now. ‘Love me,’ he says. I feel his hand clamp my face and I kick at him and spin over the void and I can’t cry out though I try from the soul of my being and I’m falling not sinking. And he looks at me or through me and his fingers dissolve and I float like a bird or the gentle snow in a soft country and all is peaceful and calm. From Him we come and to Him shall we all return.

And I see him again. His frown has gone and a smile has warmed his face. His hand is outstretched and he reaches out for me, through the pain. ‘Love me,’ he says.

Ice Flowers by Raphael Kirchner

by

Mom posted 6,542 pictures of me before I was ten. If I picked up a ball or even a fork, the camera was on: “Danny and me—date night!” We’d sip milkshakes and watch for likes. At twenty–five, I’d throw my arms up in triumph. Dad would growl, and Mom would shriek, “I’m teaching him counting!” I was eight when Dad left.

At ten years old, my grin was so weak I refused to smile. “What’s wrong?” Mom cried. She reached for me, but I jerked away. So she stalked me, sneaking shots of my back. At twelve I gave the camera the finger, and she stormed to the car and we cried it all out.

From then on she only photographed things. I set my RC boat in the lake. The pictures show its voyage in stages. Thirty feet. Sixty. At forty yards it could barely be seen. I imagined I was on it, sailing away.

I’m twenty now, and I sail with my dad. He sits on the edge and watches the water. He doesn’t speak and neither do I, we just slice through the water away from the shore. ~ end ~

Self Portrait in Lavender and Dark Suit, Standing by Egon Schiele

By

Tomorrow comes.

On my futon mattress next to the window, I wake up automatically in the early morning darkness, outpacing my alarm clock. My two eyes are the eyes of an uncertain someone, whose head tells him that something is terribly wrong. These are the same thoughts that have occupied my head for a long time now, and the act of ignoring them comes naturally to me. I want to lie in bed, curl into a ball and let things take their course, but then I realize that I still have a job, and that it needs going to.

Well, why not? Until my heart stops, until the world ends, until something better comes along.

Why not? ~~~

Mlle. Leotine Desavary Holding a Turtledove by Camille Corot

What There to Lose What IsThere Is to Lose

Page preceding contents list by Aubrey Beardsley

Holly Day

The Beast At Your Side

Single Items by Raphael Kirchner

Holly Day

Barely Escaped

Animal motif for a picture book by Koloman Moser

Ed Higgins

Wasps

Bees by Louis Marcoussis

Ed Higgins

Neutral Ground

Jason Sturner

Plath

Nervous Heads by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The Water Garden by Childe Hassam

A Souvenir of Velazquez by John Everett Millais

Scars are souvenirs you never lose

---` Name’ (Goo Goo Dolls)

iles’ girl friend left a while back, sending him, as Miles put it, to a bad place. If you knew Miles, you wouldn’t have to ask why she walked. She lugged out several large boxes of anger and two cartons of unhappiness with her, not to mention a whole trunk of angst and a large crate that’d been totally emptied of concern for anybody but herself, all of which she could keep, says Miles.

Dear, sweet Gloria.

She took good things too. Her collection of reggae CDs; her blank stare, her profound indifference to Miles and that sparkling cloak of flirty attractiveness she threw on when she wanted something.

She took a decent repertoire of dishes, a great clam dip recipe. Fed up with Miles’ brutal deprivation, the relentless facials and arduous hair appointments he forced on her, the grueling shopping trips and the cruel full massages that Miles doggedly subjected her to week after week, she’d finally had enough.

She called him a cluck, and to be sure he didn’t miss the point, slammed the front door in his face with enough force to jar loose the big mirror in the foyer, which came down on the tile floor with a horrific, gut wrenching crash, shattering into a thousand pieces before Miles’s horrified eyes. Gone forever with the mirror were the Japanese pillows, the cigarette butts and the coughing. Gone was the cast iron table, the moose antlers, the assorted voodoo dolls and the stuffed grasshopper collection.

Gloria wasn’t coming back. The whole episode, Miles reflected, shows how people can take you to bad places if you let them.

I am Dodds, Miles’ selfless, long-suffering buddy and sometime confessor. I endure his infantile rants over misadventures largely of his own making. Beaten down by life to the point where he’s not sure if he can answer the bell next time, Miles gains insights all the same, as when it occurs to him that Gloria might’ve had something with this cluck stuff, or that maybe he was a little hasty calling her a complete phony when she was really only a partial phony, not that it mattered. She left a scar on his memory, but she made good pancakes, so it was kind of a tradeoff with Gloria.

With her mouth screwed up into a tight little ball of scolding disapproval and her hair scrambled down across her face like wild ivy on a long neglected wall, she could look ghoulish. At other times, when she bothered, Gloria was more than presentable. Miles started thinking about her one cool Saturday morning and developed a sudden craving for pancakes. He was up early, stomach grumbling.

He mumbled something like, ‘ Honey, why don’t you cook some pancakes?’ but she didn’t answer. She’d been gone for months. It freaked Miles out afterward. He threw on a jacket, headed for the door. “I could practically taste those little golden beauties,” he recalled, “all soggy with maple syrup, drenched

in salted butter.”

Barry’s Big Burger up on Mainline Road used to have decent pancakes. The Raffle House (Home of the Raffleburger) on Highway 61 serves those little silver dollar pancakes you eat by the dozens, but the best place for pancakes was Mort’s White Rose, which was where Miles was headed on the fateful day of which we speak.

Joey Mort played two years for the Chicago Cubs before he came back here to be the star of our local Carpet Town minor league team, the Rugs.

Joey bought the team and the White Rose when he was with the Rugs. He put in a breakfast bar, came out with the ` Rug Special’, featuring the ` best pancakes east of the Pecos’.

A trip to the White Rose was Traffic Jam City, a clogged road near a busy freeway ramp but the pancakes were calling. According to Miles, a state of being came with the first loving swallows of those White Rose pancakes, less belly than mind, a sense of well-being thicker than that sweet old sticky syrup itself.

“The world’s a better place,” Miles says, capping his apotheosis to the great hotcakes of the White Rose. “Maybe I’m not a cluck. Maybe, I’m hunting the sugar fix; like you, Doddsy, the victim of a pathological person.” This last remark is a reference to the vicious psychopath, Ramona ` Rummy’ Dodds, my take-no-prisoners ex-wife, determined as ever to dance some day on my grave.

Quaffing a few in the Don Lee’s Tavern, I marvel at Miles’ ability to cast his sad tale of unrequited love as tragedy, in view of the horror that was my marriage. If there are, as is said, three sheets to be put to the wind, two of ours are already flying high and the third is being moved into place as Miles proceeds with his sob story.

“First, I fight the endless southbound traffic on North Bend Road,” he says. “Big, big ass

delay, which gives me a freaking headache.

Limping along in the fits and starts of stop and go, finally making that right turn into the White Rose parking lot, I’m so close to the pancakes of my dreams that I’ve become a quivering, salivating wild animal and do not notice at first the bulldozer and a twenty foot pile of rubble where Mort’s White Rose once stood. No Wild Rose pancakes today or ever. Cascades of alienation replace the anticipated sense of wellbeing, superimposed over raw, gnawing hunger.

I am lost but not just lost. I am out of touch with life.”

“Not a happy prospect, Miles, but neither is it a disaster of the magnitude of the train wreck that was my marriage.”

Cocking his head in defiance of the forces of nature and the cruel vagaries of life, in total denial that anything could compare with his lonely, futile existence as a cluck, he stares into his beer. “There’s more,” he says.

The drive he describes is well known, reviving memories of Rummy’s embarrassing disaster when she was caught shoplifting exotic soap. Nabbed before I could intervene, she was soon mouthing off to an assistant manager, pushing a clerk and trying to kick a cop. Hauled away by the cops, taken right up that same long curvy driveway very near the place of the great pancakes, she left me crestfallen, following in my car up that same back driveway of Miles’s nightmare experience, making me part of that same miserable fraternity somehow. We faced an existential catharsis there, Miles and his pancakes, me and my coming to the dim realization I’d married a crazy woman. I tried that summer, with Rummy, I mean, I really did.

I helped her deal with her sleep walking and her ongoing psychosis, trying to let her exercise control over her demons. She paid back my concern and kindness by shoplifting exotic soap and throwing a fit when she was caught. My

thoughts went running back to that same narrow driveway, like some narrow passageway in our lives.

“Can you picture, Doddsy, that driveway winding down the hill at the back of the lot where the White Rose once stood?”

“I can.”

“Past the Wal-Mart Parking Lot,” he says, “past various commercial venues arriving eventually at a road with very little traffic. Congratulating myself for remembering this back way, I cruise around the bend and over the hill, following the narrow lane as it curves down, with no way of knowing, of course, that dark personal oblivion awaits just around the bend.”

“Dark, personal, ---” “Oblivion, yes, beginning at the spot where the driveway’s blocked off by a plastic saw horse barrier with a large sign saying NOT A THRU STREET. The only thing keeping it from being a thru street is the large NOT A THRU STREET sign. Most discouraging of all, the road ends abruptly just around the bend, and there’s no room to turn around.”

“All for pancakes.”

A grim look passes across Miles’ face. “There’s more,” he says. “Taking a quick gaze over my shoulder, I twist around awkwardly, drop her into reverse and start backing up, very slowly, around the bend, going okay for a few seconds until the tires bump hard against the curb and the back bumper rides up over one of the saw horses.”

“Not good.”

“Rocking the car to get free doesn’t work, so, I jerk the wheel, hit the gas and seriously crunch the sawhorse, double jamming it underneath the car. My stomach’s in my throat, my eyes are bugged out, and I’m beginning to feel like a candidate for some kind of fatal attack; a stroke, cardiac arrest, mental meltdown, something bad.”

“You know, Miles, ---” “There’s more,” he says.

I try to picture it.

Out of the car, Miles has a go at the sawhorse, sliding underneath on his back in the grit, cursing and growling at it. As he’s reliving the experience, he begins to sweat profusely, his face a mask of anguish and despair, reminding me of my own frustration the day dear Rummy maxed our four credit cards to the tune of forty eight thou in one vindictive, self-indulgent spree, charging everything from mink-lined walking boots which she never wore, to a grand piano she couldn’t play, all of which I learned about, ironically, at the very spot where Miles tangled with the devil plastic sawhorse.

This diabolical event proves Miles was indeed the cluck he always feared he was. The tortuous bending and twisting of the malleable sawhorse as he attempts to dislodge it lends a macabre animation to the scene in my mind, as if the plastic came alive just to bedevil Miles. In the viral You Tube posting that followed, Miles became a kind of everyman hero figure standing for all the frustrated fools who ever were, and for all the clucks who ever got into a life and death tussle with an inanimate object that could anticipate his every move and trump him at every turn.

Prying at it only infuriated it more. Cursing it, beating at it only makes things worse. When he finally crawls out, he kicks a tire and hurts his toes. Stupid.

“Here’s a kid, ten or eleven, passing by on his bike,” Miles recalls, “catching this incredible cluck show on his cell phone camera. The sawhorse encounter turns out to be the kid’s first truly viral posting, which may be his break in showbiz, make him world famous before he turns twelve.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought about a cryptic quote for posterity,” Miles said, “like how easy it was to get dragged into bad places, but I figured if some good came of it, all the better. Maybe the kid learned a lesson.

Maybe not.”

“Any good come of it?”

“Not until last night,” Miles said.

“What happened last night?”

“She asked me not to mention it.”

“She?” “Ramona. She heard about the internet post and called me. We talked about Gloria. We talked about the sawhorse. We talked about a bunch of things. Mostly we talked about you, Dodds.”

“She called me a few months ago at four a.m., claiming she wired a bomb to my car, which I knew wasn’t true because she couldn’t wire anything to anything. I hung up on her. My car started fine."

“It was chocolate allergy. She’s been off chocolate and her life has totally turned around. She says she feels terrible about what she put you through, Dodds.”

“I’ll bet.”

The chocolate rap sounded like another Ramona denial fantasy, like the bomb wired to my car. Boundless as it was warped, her imagination often ran to places where distinguishing between fantasy and reality was a challenge. She believed her own excuses for ‘jumping the trolley ’, as she described her meltdowns. As long as she had someone or something to blame besides herself, she was fine. As for her feeling bad about it, that might have been true. When the feverish hurt finally wears off, another more permanent hurt takes over. It begins with remembering only the hope at the beginning and ends with the stupid ache that hangs around forever after the hope is long gone.

“She was very clear-eyed, Dodds. Very sure in her speech. She was on the level about the whole thing. The chocolate messes up brain chemistry. Couple éclairs, she turns into Attila the Hun. We’ve had coffee a few times. I may start seeing her, Dodds. I hope you don’t mind.”

Mind?

Well, the idea caught me cold, but once I thought about it, I did mind, not that I’d ever let on to Miles. If he wanted to see my ex-wife, fine. “Go for it,” I say. “Is there such a thing as Chocolate Abuser’s Anonymous?” I might have smirked through that last line. The notion that Rummy had

The Cup of Chocolate by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

gone straight over night struck me as unlikely, but it did give me an idea. Since I actually did run into Gloria at the grocery store, which I didn’t mention to Miles because he goes into shock when her name’s mentioned, working himself into a funk over some unkind cut from her, maybe I should call her.

“You know, I saw Gloria a week or so ago at the grocery store, and I have to tell you, she was definitely on her game. Like I say, I thought about, you know, ---” “Calling her?”

“Would you mind if I did?”

Miles grins, which I know for the fake grin he often throws up when he’s trying to grin his way through one of the bad places he is routinely being sent to by fate. Seeing his pal and confessor Dodds with his ex girl friend would frost him for sure, but he would never admit that for a second. “Give her a call.”

“Maybe I will,” I say, doubting I ever would, but reserving the right anyway, deciding that I just might for spite. Sometimes you just don’t want to hear certain things because you don’t want to hear them. They connect you to places where you don’t want to go, and the problem it that there’s always more hurt where that came from, more old scars.

“There’s more,” he says.

“There always is.” ***

Thoughts of the Past by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

It was a long time ago that it had happened, she was an old woman now not given to long remembrances. But yesterday that journalist who had wanted to do a feature on her vexed her considerably by his probing. In the end he had successfully made her return to the past.

*

er first marriage had been to Stanley Morgan, now languishing in jail but once a sprightly and good humoured gentleman, the kind of easy going fellow whom no one could ever manage to have a fight with. Good old Stanley. He had found her reserve and distant ways highly intriguing and married her after a short courtship.

Why she had given in to the short courtship? A veritable orphan, with a father long dead, the advantages his sycophants used to bestow long withdrawn, his protection gone. Her mother remarried to a highly jealous and possessive man who could not bear that her attention be diverted from him or his child – she was almost veritably alone.

The first burst of attention from this happy go lucky suitor who always seemed in high spirits and a cheerful mood had gladdened her heart and made her think that to be married would not be a bad thing at all. Had she not committed herself after such a short courtship she would have known how emotionally immature her husband was but as it was the attention had taken her completely by surprise and she could see nothing else. Having been a shy wallflower throughout high school she had been on a drug induced high weeks after meeting him.

Their wedding was as most weddings are but the bride looked tremulous and uncertain in the photographs. In one she can hardly be seen, her husband’s arms are crushing her. In the other she looks like a deer caught in the headlights.

After a short honeymoon period during which they indulged the physical attraction they had to each other– they began to drift away. Stanley spent all his time with his mates and hardly any at home. He would socialize as if driven by some inner compulsion and his generosity towards his friends was unlimited. Two seconds without company and he would behave as the fish does when held out of water. He would seem to be on the point of expiring.

Such over dependence upon friends was fatal to the relationship even if the initial point of attraction had been his having many friends and her having been an introspective loner having none. At least none that she spoke regularly to. She found it hard to regularly be conversing with them. Phone calls with her were short, to be cut off when she was tired even when she really liked the person at the other end of the line.

She used to say at home when asked to go to parties that she had had enough interaction with people at her office itself. She was only an administrative assistant but she felt that she was lucky to have even this job in these times of economic stagnation. Stanley of course was in the RAF as was reported by many columnists when the case made headlines.

That day at the bar, his friends had told him that his wife was very beautiful. He used to solicit these praises very frequently, he couldn’t live without them either regarding himself or about her. This day, this autumn day when the dying leaves were curling onto themselves and scattering on the ground. These four trampled on to Morgan’s house. My wife loves sex, she is a little kinky though so she’ll feign protest. But you’ll enjoy yourselves immensely. I can guarantee her as the best you’ve ever had.

The crackle of the leaves underfoot and the gaping stars as he ushered them into the driveway with the words I pick up the tab for this evening’s enjoyment.

Houses by the River (The Old City) by Egon Schiele

When she had opened the door the light from the hallway fell upon her husband’s face. In response to her queries and concern he simply took her into his arms and they tumbled in the hallway. He waved his friends inside and asked her to make something for them to eat.

She put some cheese sticks and crackers before them with resentment saying that their cupboards were half empty. Morgan was supposed to have taken her grocery shopping in the car due to the uncertain weather. She had never learnt how to drive.

She had gone into the store room and was ironing the last of Morgan’s clothes. Ironing was something she did when stressed; the rhythm of the work calmed her down and steadied her. The guests were in the sitting room, united in agreement and mustering courage.

The frail looking and lean limbed Mrs. Morgan was waylaid on her way to the bedroom.

She was carrying the empty clothes basket which was tossed aside, she was dragged on to the bed where she lay akimbo splayed like a starfish, arms pinned against the sheets while all of them took turns.

Later medical practitioners found heavy injuries around her vaginal area and thighs which demonstrated that force had been used. This inspection was after she had filed for rape. The defence who could not claim consent against this evidence claimed mistaken but genuine belief in consent. We thought she was protesting to heighten her arousal.

The House of Lords said that the belief in consent need not be reasonable but it does need to be genuine and honest. In such a case it is not possible that the claimed belief in consent could in any way have been honest. They could not even have been fooling themselves.

Three of them were convicted and the husband who could not be due to spousal privilege was convicted of aiding and abetting. * This was the life that she had been given once. In a small house among a row of houses on the sidewalk.

-----------------------

Red Elisabeth Riverbank, Berlin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

walked into a Dresden club hunting for a gig and saw a woman on stage with eyes like glowing coals. Dashni’s voice had a mournful sound that squeezed my heart. We sat in the bar after her set. She was Alvi Kurd from Çorum. Her mother and father were killed in a bombing, and she was smuggled by cousins into Dresden. She spoke without bitterness.

“Enough about me. So Kurt, what’s your story?”

My forehead creased. “I’m from East Berlin.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Turks think Germany is rich, and everyone born here was lucky.”

“My father was a bureaucrat in the Berlin city government. We didn’t have family in the West. Those with relatives on the other side of the wall flourished on the income from selling smuggled goods. A pair of Levis sold on the black market for two months of my father’s pay “I can still see my father’s ashen face the first time he left home for the West. Chairman Erich Honecker was to speak in East Berlin, and city officials wanted to give him the red carpet treatment. They feared embarrassment or worse if Honecker tripped on an unsecured rug, so my father was given Deutsch Marks, an official pass through the checkpoints at the wall, and instructions to locate a shop and buy double-coated tape to secure the crimson mat. My father said that when his superior gave him instructions, a chill ran through his body. What if the official papers he carried raised suspicion to Western guards that he was a spy? He’d be imprisoned in some concrete gaol and never see his family again. He said his heart rate didn’t slow when he passed into West Berlin. The return examination would be more intense, and his stomach soured at the prospect he’d be mugged by one of the homeless thieves or pimps that he’d been told ran rampant in the West. The specter of either incarceration or robbery and disgrace, all for some damn rolls of tape, kept his hands shaking until he safely delivered his purchase.”

Dashni leaned her chin on her palm. “History condemns the wall.”

I tilted my head. “My father wasn’t impressed by the 1963 John F. Kennedy speech, with the quote, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ intending to say, ‘I am a Berliner.’ Proper German would have been, Ich bin Berliner. Ein Berliner was a pastry; Kennedy had called himself a jellyroll.”

Dashni put her hand over a smile. “I never heard that.”

“The wall was built in 1961, years after the occupation, and the Soviets received tacit permission from the West to erect it. West Berlin feared a flood of East Berlin refugees. So the occupation powers built the wall for their protection. But two decades later when the people tore at the wall, governments acceded to its destruction. Afterwards capitalists created a booming souvenir market for tiny pieces of concrete and barbed wire imbedded in Lucite cubes to be placed on bookshelves as a reminder of the superior culture of the West. My father laughed at the jellyroll joke until the wall fell. Then he cried. In a short time the West Germans ran everything, and he was out of a job. My mother’s heart gave out after my father was unemployed. He’d sit by a front window from dawn to dusk and peer at the street. One day, I found him slumped over and cold in his wooden chair.”

“I’m sorry.”

I nodded. “We had to adapt to capitalism or suffer. Our industries weren’t given time

to adjust. I worked in a candy factory. We made crap; the smell of dark chocolate still makes me retch. But it was money in my pocket, until the business was forced to close, and we all were turned into the streets. The West Germans sucked us into their sphere like a sponge absorbs water.”

“I didn’t realize East and West Germans were so different.”

“Consider our fairy tales. The story my father told me was of a king who confiscated all the spinning wheels in the country because a sorcerer foretold that his princess daughter would die from the prick of a spindle. Without spinning wheels, the peasants couldn’t make clothes.

Many faced starvation because their livelihood was taken from them. They protested to the king, but he turned his back on them. So the peasants rose up, overthrew him, and the spinning wheels were restored.

“In the West, fairy tale princesses aspired to marry handsome princes, who were rich and would support them in extravagant style. We had a saying in the East, whether it’s a female lion, or a male lion, they’re both lions. Our women worked; they didn’t dream to be turned into chattel.”

Dashni said, “I like that adage.”

“After unification, the East German singular act of defiance was to keep the street-crossing icon, Ost-Ampelmannchen, the striding symbol with a fedora that switched red or green at crosswalks.”

A waiter came over. Dashni shook her head to another raki . I ordered a beer.

Dashni said, “What did you do?”

“I left East Germany as soon as I could. Music was my passport. My first purchase in the West was marijuana. As a boy, I’d acquired a tape of the Sex Pistols on the black market. I played God Save the Queen, over and over until it shredded in my recorder. My cousin, Herbert, also played guitar. Herbert and I grew black, Rasputin beards, and wore octagonal granny shades. We looked like wraiths from the Black Forest. We both played base and formed a band called, Zwei Berliner. We hitchhiked throughout West Germany. We played stoned, rapped through our lyrics, and closed with a tribute to Sid Vicious.”

Dashni said, “I’m trying to picture you with a beard. You must have looked quite mysterious.”

“Perhaps, but the bars didn’t book us a second night.

“The dialects I encountered in West Germany reminded me why the ancient Greeks coined the term, barbarians, because their speech sounded like, ‘Bar bar.’ Herbert felt compelled to go east. He settled in Dresden and took up with a pig-tales, blonde, Freida, who gave Slaughterhouse-Five tours. He sold East German nostalgia products, like Vita Cola and OstAmpelmannchen emblem tee shirts, from a kiosk. He kept his beard.”

“What about you?”

“I decided to become European, and try sun in my life. Greece drew me: cloudless skies and a sea so blue, it stuck in my throat. I earned some money playing in clubs near Syntagma Square in Athens. I lingered in the city longer than I intended.”

Dashni tilted her head. “A woman?”

“Kia lived with her grandfather, bushy gray mustache and calculating eyes. He moved from Cyprus after the Turks pushed him off his property and drove his Jaguar into the swimming pool

during the 1974 invasion. One evening, when he had a snoot full of tsipouro, he told stories about the World War II German occupation and executed Greek civilians. Kia’s face darkened. Her grandfather’s lip curled, and he became stony. I almost told them I wasn’t a Nazi. The next day I set off to visit Herbert.”

Dashni said, “Then we’re both refugees.”

I sat back in my chair.

She pointed to my guitar. “Do you have any music with you?”

I produced several sheets with lyrics. She read and smiled. “These are heartfelt.”

I strummed some cords, and she sang the words in Kurdish. People at the tables around us applauded.

Dashni beamed at the reaction. She said, “We should play together.”

I looked into brown eyes I could dive into. In my heart, Ost-Ampelmannchen turned green. ~~~