Volume 2 issue 2 fall 1990

THE

LITERARY

YALE

MAGAZINE

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1990

CONTENTS

1 Invitation ... Enrique Vega 2

... David Yu Acrylic on Paper. ... Susan Choi 3 The Way To Live Wisely.

8 Translation ofMarina Cvetaeva's"LETY SLEPOTEKU,VIJ VSXLIP"... Diana Senechal 8 Coffee Psalm... Diana Senechal

9 Etching ... April Hankins to Portrait of van Gogh ... David Arndt 16 Etching ... Sarah Sze 17 The Singer in the Shape ofa Poem ... Paul Saint-Amour a Convalescence ... Alex Shakar 26 Etching ... Peter Bregoli ... Carrie Iverson 27 27 Look at Me... Nicole D. Grunfeld 28 Acrylic on Paper ... Maria Creyts 30 Oil on Canvas ... Asia Freeman 31 Contours... Stephen Rich ... Russell Ferguson 35 Ink on Paper.

36 Dancing with Reindeers ... Semi Chellas 44 Etching ... Aaron Bloom 45 Going into Country... Hilary Liftin 46 Fragments...Jeremy Bendik Keymer 47 Excess of sorrow laughs ... Peter Rock 54 A Night Tale...Jeremy Bendik Keymer ... David Fludd 55 Oil on Paper.

ENRIQUE

VI GA

INVI1ATION

Oh Reader, come I am waiting for you .

So it happens That my reader will try to kill me, because he thinks I'm not tunny When I ani funny

(notice that the last Two lines actually Rhyme, Reader!)

Oh Reader come, etc.

Dark night one my will Reader come Upon knocking door my Chain-saw with me to kill

But since I am extending this invitation to you Reader, I am awaiting Chain-saw with you to kill. too

You think you will kill me, but Well kill each other.

Which is not the same

Oh Reader come, etc.

The key is under The welcome mat.

64,41

*"11404110

•

SUSAN

THE

CHOI

WAY

TO

LIVE

WISELY

ACRYLIC ON PAPER It A VII) YE!

L

.tter on she realized there must have been a reason for everything, for three women at a time,

for the nurse who did nothing but talk and for chit-chat about morning news and a facial cream before they got started with it. Nice women, their talk, a dry, papery little hand she was given to hold. Then they went at it but extolled her bravery as they did. She should have been an example, they told her, keeping so still except for those rigid legs and even letting those down when they said. And quiet. And no tears. Kept her eyes open on advice and glued them to a vaguely visible smudge on the opposite wall, on advice. Better to keep them open than closed, closed eyes breed dark thoughts. And in the room after it was done she got more juice and an old-fashioned pad on a belt. Then it was the next woman's turn and she got curtains around her bed. Though told to rest for fifteen minutes minimum she took off and later felt badly about it. There was a reason they told her to rest, they had been very, very nice and she was grateful and her attitude to doctors and hospitals was very changed. She should have rested because in the bookstore the novocainc still in her blood made her so dizzy she fell.

But enough.

She told me she had nothing but gratitude. Never knew there could be such kindness in a hospital, and it was an inspiration. I took her out that very same night but the restaurant had a bad effect. I took her home instead and made her a fancy omelette but she couldn't eat it. I was feeding her lately, she hadn't felt like cooking or eating in awhile. The last time she had had any pleasure in eating was at a diner when she folded a tuna melt on wheat right in half and stuck the whole thing down her throat in a single gratifying fill. She said she had been so ravenous, at the time she didn't know why. Out in the parking lot that thing came right back up the way it had gone down, quickly in a single whoosh with a little fanfare and a rattly cough. Since then she didn't feel like eating anything at all, and that is proof that eating-fortwo is just a myth.

The night before her appointment I had her to my house as we'd been doing all that week. It was winter break and she and I the only inhabitants we knew of in the whole town; everyone else was home for Christmas. I had no other home and lived at school full-time; she had been at home but when that tuna melt shot itself liquified out of the pit of her stomach she hopped right on a plane and came back. She was on the student health plan and they would do it on the house, she'd called in advance to make sure.

She was a little jittery because she wanted to know how to expect the pain. How would it hurt? she kept asking me. Like having your lungs pulled up through your throat? Like earpiercing? I made her a bowl of split-pea soup and a re-heated crescent roll, nice and simple, but she still couldn't get even a half of it down. That's when she asked me Did I have film in that camera? I did. Color. It wasn't going to look too good with this indoor nighttime light

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and no flash, but she was insistent. Didn't like her picture taken regularly but this, this seemed necessary. She said to me, It's the least I can think of to do. She made me promise to take them over to the one-hour place the next day and have them for her when she got home.

I said I wanted to go with her but she said No, absolutely no one but myself and my thought.

She had a singular thought of that thing, the fetus, a mental picture of it. She wanted to be alone with it in the morning. Of course that was a mistake. I should have gone but too late. I got her those pictures.

They all came out full of golden haze, that orangy indoor nighttime light that only shows itself on film. Her brown skin showed mustard in the frame, behind the single upright glowing leaf of a candle flame with its waver frozen still in that moment. She sat still for those photos, that was something new. She sat still and looked the camera right in the eye. There are funny things in the frame to remind me of that night, like a container of ricotta cheese sticking up into view like a skyscraper, in the foreground. And a half-empty bottle of wine.

She wasn't drinking, and had quit smoking too. I thought it was a funny idea, but she said it was not intentional. Liquor and cigarettes and anything else like that actually had been making her ill these past weeks, she couldn't take them even if she wanted to. She said, Cod has his way about it. And she then said, Christ on earth, just listen to me. You'd better watch out for me. Promise you'll watch out for me, I don't want to start sounding tragic, but I have ideas, and dreams... I've never been a religious person, not at all. And I believe in my rights, and I don't think I am a selfish person.

I had never known her well but I got to know her fast. When she had called Inc I knew it was because none of her good friends were in town but I said,

hold your hand. I'll go and hold

your hand and tell you bad jokes and complain about my weight and if you squeeze too hard I won't say a thing.

No,she said. just hang around with me awhile, that's good enough. • • •

My place is large and well-stocked; when you're a twenty-six year old junior in college this seems the wisest way to live, far and away from the campus life with a world of your own things.! was once somebody's wife but I doubt if I'll ever be somebody's mother. Keeping the refrigerator full of nice unnecessary things is for nobody's benefit but my own.

The day she went in was a Wednesday and since she wanted those pictures and her appointment was for eight Am sharp I figured I'd better hustle with the film-developing. But noon came around and she didn't show. When I called up I got her machine; she came on sounding thin and higher-pitched, with worry in her voice and a tart little say-so about not being home. That was an old message, made even before she went home and bad the projectile tuna melt. She told me that before she had left there was already something: a gagging of all the muscles in her throat, a rippling-upward convulsion that would shudder her without warning. Vomiting with nothing coming out. And she had tiredness, but who wouldn't at the end of the term with exams. She hadn't had any idea. Well, yes she had. And, she confessed to me, she had liked the idea. She had liked it. She had wished it would go on forever.

Liked it how? I said.

Liked it like I liked having it. I could attribute weird feelings to it. I felt sad, it was that. Or, I

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went bowling one night and bowled a sixty-seven, and it was because of that. I liked being in the power of it. I miss it.

I said, Other than that are you feeling right?

Alright. There's a weird smell of iodine when I pee, though.

She had finally turned up at my place past four, holding a bag of new books and some packets of aromatherapy bath crystals. She set it all down without saying anything and proceeded to stick most of her upper body into my fridge. She was looking at food all the time, but she wouldn't cat any of it. I saw her moving herself gently, as if she thought something was going to fall out. I asked her if there was pain.

Just blood, she said. A real pungent smell, it's mixed with a disinfectant.

I asked Was there a whole lot of blood?

Not a lot but it's of a difkrent kind. Thick, likc tissue. Color of brick. I keep taking a look at it.

Don't get any ideas about it, I said.

No,she said. Just that it looks foreign.

I asked what the books and bath crystals were all about and she said that the books were her own treat and the crystals were for me. She said, I bought the bath stuff before, because I thought I could treat myself to baths after it was over, something special. But they said no baths. The books are my consolation prize.

Then she crawled onto my couch and that's pretty much where she stayed until the term started again. That first afternoon sleep came to her quickly but after that she wasn't so lucky.

Sometimes it came, but it bore to her anxious dreams of fishes and deep water, her father hidden in an attic, and filth. Most of the time she did not sleep.

When we went out to the restaurant, like I said, something funny happened to her. And it was all the people, she said. Not the food. There were just too many people, too many stories.

For every single person in here, she said, Two people made love and one woman got pregnant and the handful of jelly she had inside at seven weeks turned into a person capable of ordering Chinese and making their own life. Not to mention everybody here was had, by someone.

Their mother, I said.

It's actually making me feel a little bit sick, she said.

I took her home and made her this beautiful omelette but that, like everything else, seemed too complicated for her. Too much had gone into it.

Can I see those pictures now? she asked me.

Truth be told, even with the orangeness and the tower of ricotta cheese, they were nice pictures. Because she looked tired, and beautiful. She was resting her chin on her hand, in one of them, and gazing straight into me. There was something magical about her beauty that I knew she was noticing. Maybe it was just the fuzzy light. She looked like a woman who had been sanctified, and knew about it. She looked like she had a rich secret.

In that picture, she said to me, I'm a mother.

• • •

It was dead of winter when she was with me and although it was only for a week it felt like longer. Those are slow days. The way they end so quickly only makes them seem slower,

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longer instead of shorter. My apartment was on the fifth floor in a corner, and from my couch we had a wrap-around view, sort of, of the changing sky. Sunset came on early and was stronger, deeper in feeling and more acute, than summer sunsets. While watching it, behind your head the other side of the sky would suddenly turn its dusky cornflower velvet, that thick winter color, and just when you turned around to notice it it was gone, and die night came on, all by six o'clock. For awhile we wouldn't bother with lights, or we'd light up a kw candles. The world was small, for that week she had only me to be with and this strangely simplified. Other things were forgotten.

She said, I'd like to clean out my life. Get rid of everything I don't need, go through my clothes and give them away, send my stereo home. Sell my records and go to cassette. I'd like to have as little as possible.

I gave her my philosophy of life then: The best way to live is off by yourself and with your own things, don't be afraid of your things, they can be a comfort. Cook yourself dinner, have a warm robe and fuzzy slippers. Keep those bath crystals because six weeks isn't so long and when you can bathe again you'll want them, they're your treat. Get a nice cat.

She said, I don't want a lot of things, I want to live wisely, simply, purely. No more pain, no more clutter.

The way to live wisely, I said, is not to resolve. Let be. Take a bath, go to sleep.

Of course she couldn't do either of these things.

Sleep got a little better for her but the dreams got worse. She dreamed people were speaking to her but she couldn't hear what was said, that they were taunting her and fading away on purpose. She dreamed of the bathtub drain choking up clots of blood and hair, and that she was being driven quickly away in a car from somewhere she had to be. She did not want to sleep while this was happening, she stopped trying. I bought her a blank book, a beautiful one, and a pen, and I told her to write them down, to fill up a book, to make the dreams her dreams, something she had. You don't want to forget this pain, I told her. This pain is special, you told me that yourself.

She had said she was afraid that she was forgetting it all. She had told me, that week, the

way

the procedure went, both in the nurse's words and in her own words: the nurse who did nothing but talk described the whole procedure beforehand, step by step, and then in the room she told it to you again, while it was going on. That way there wasn't much to fear, each pain was familiar because you'd heard about it before. The nurse would say, 'I here comes the next dilator — You'll feel crampy —'and then you did. And the talking nurse held your hand, also. She stood quietly with your hand in hers, or she talked, but she never looked away. She looked down into your face while you gazed furiously at that spot on the wall and she said You are brave. You are so brave.

The term started up again and I didn't sec her much anymore. She called me once to say there were narcissus blooming in her apartment, I ought to come on over. In her own place she seemed longer, stronger. The narcissus in bloom had gotten so tall they were keeling over, flailing their sharp scent all around the room. She tried tying the stems together with twine, strength in numbers, and made me a cup of tea. Her place was still full of things, in spite of her resolution, but they were strictly tidy. Magazines in neat stacks, glasses all lined up by size. In her bedroom she had a little plant next to her bed that she said she looked at before she went to sleep; first she had had a little goldfish but that hadn't worked out. Only her bedclothes were messy, wrung together and flung by the wall.

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We were awkward with each other; it didn't look like we'd make good fair-weather friends.

She seemed to feel like there wasn't much to talk about but her condition, that she was supposed to keep me posted. I was quiet. Then she gave me the book back; it was full of a fierce black scrawl. She said, I'm done with it now. I don't know why, I thought it'd make a nice gift.

I said I would read it.

• • •

In the last dream, she says to me, Everything happens exactly as it did in reality, only it takes the dream to bring it back. I am trying not to be angry at the doctor, and I start thinking of her as a warrior who's on my side. In the dream I feel but I can't see, and I hear the talking nurse saying, as I feel the coldness, Here comes the speculum — it's metal — it's going to be cold — and as I feel dull shooting cramps I hear the talking nurse saying Here conies another dilator.., and another one. Then the doctor tells me, I'm turning the machine on now, and when I hear this I think, Oh god, here comes the vacuum cleaner, and I wait to feel a sucking, torn feeling. I wait for the ripping sound. I'm expecting it. But all I feel is a little fluttering inside of me, as if of wings. And what I think at that moment is, There'll never be a person like that again. Good-bye, little flying thing.

And the doctor says, We're done.

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DIANA

SENECHAL

TRANSLATION OF MARINA CVETAEVA'S "LETY SLEPOTEKLI61J

IleTia cnenoTexyupdi BCX/IHTI. ilonr THOA re6e OTIPJ11413H: CHHT C &mow, ene-ene MHB B neneTe cpe6poreityinxx HB.

VSXLIP"

L

HANKINS

ethe's blindilyflowing woe.

Your debt, relieved, released in the tow Of Lethe, is just dimly aglow In the willows' babblyflowing blow.

HBOHMA cpeeSponeTeticxxii nnecx

Hnauyupati...B cnenoTexyunfit cxnen HarxxTeti nepeTomanachl cnpain.

BHBOHMit cpedponeTeticxxn mum.

Willow's silverylethal crest Crying..,to the blindilyflowing depths Of memories — overlanguished! — tie

Ha nnemx cpe6po-cenism nnainom CTaptiecxxna,cpeeSpo-cyxman nnxnnom Ha nnemx nepeToraxnachl --mar, cnenonereticxx# mpax

To willow's silverylethal cry.

Cumbering — silvery-grey of coat Ivy-old, silvery-dry afloat

Maxi:mutt--x6o xpacmati naeT CTapwrca,x60 nypnyp cen B TIBBMITH, H60,BLITIHB BC10 -CyXOCTHMH TOKy.

Cumbering — overlanguished! — lie back, Incensed, blindilylethal black

C/HITIOCTHMH,l'OBOBHMX HCTOM

SENECHAL

Of poppy-fields... since the color red

TyCKAOCTHMH: yineptSnexmax MOM CIWITOCTHMH,MOBOBLIX CHBH/1/1

DIANA

Ages, since grey-souled purple is dead In memory, since, having drunken so —

COBOCTHMH: CHHHHOM.

All drynesses I flow.

COFFEE PSALM

C

all it a dream: this morning, spilling over

All dullnesses: the torn-up veins'

the rim of baked containers, spiting fear,

Bloodlessnesses, the Sybillic strains'

rinsing away the pain of last night's beer,

Blindnesses, the weighty head's

spotting the stench-stained cloth, painting it over,

Blacknesses: like lead.

call it a dream, I'll dream it ten times over, I'll hold it close, I'll let it disappear into the bleak of day, since you, my dear friendship, burst forth when signs declare you over, not like auto-reverse, or auto-drip (that sudden sputter of a hushed machine); there's nothing automatic about magic.

It's not like anything; approaching rhymeless, it bathes my head with tears that leave me clean, and fills my mug as I, forgiven, sip.

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The Yale Literary Magazine

DAVID

ARNDT

PORTRAIT

I

should like

OF

to

VAN

GOGH

paint the portrait ofan artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who

works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature. Ile'll be a fair

MaIl. I

want to put into

the picture my appreciation, the love that I havefor him. I paint hi,,, as be is, asPithfidly as I can, to begin with.

But the picture is not finished yet. To finish it I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate thefairness ofthe hair, Iget to orange tones, chromes and pale lemon yellow.

Beyond the head, instead ofpainting the ordincny wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background ofthe richest, intensest blue I can contrive, and by this simple combination the bright bead illuminated against a rich blue background acquires a mysterious cilect, like a star in the depths ofan azure sky. [Letter #520, August '80] In the painting of van Gogh a certain gaze manifests itself. Stand before his works and you will feel it: a fascination with a few particular subjects, a devotion to the singular form of each specific object, and above all an absorption in color and a love of color for its own sake. Van Gogh's work gives us access to a vision which is other than ordinary sight. I'd like to try in this essay, through a literary reading of his letters, first of all to define the specificity of van Gogh's gaze, the way of seeing that his paintings can teach us, and secondly, by relating his gaze to a few subjects which characterize his work, to clarify the power of fascination that these themes held for him.

I.

Seeing Ordinarily, seeing is the power to grasp and place things in relation to one another. Through sight "we" encounter "things," the world appears as a stable realm of delimited objects. But this encounter is experienced as the orientation of a subject towards an object from which it remains apart. "I" come to be as the isolated center of "what I perceive," separate, and powerful in that separation.

The sight which comprehends tends to look past what is seen because it is primarily concerned with the invisible order it constructs. This constructed order constitutes our sense of presence to ourselves. Despite its appearance of sovereign isolation, the "I" would not be able to recognize and remember itself as separate and interior if it could not already recognize and remember its self in the stable forms of the "outer" world.

The Trajectory ofhis Work In his earliest work van Gogh finds himself drawn to a different way of seeing. Through the discipline and ascetic rigor of his observation he accedes to a gaze whose attention has freed itself from personal concerns and, absorbed in what appeared to his eyes, is able to spread unconstrained over every visible surface. Years of drawing teach him to see with a look that

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does not grasp and possess but which lingers on the pure appearance of things, accepts and affirms them as appearance. He finds, in the absorption of his work, that things tend to fall away from the surface of familiarity, to withdraw from understanding and become strangely fascinating, and that he himself is no longer there, no longer present to himself in what he sees. lard on what is Inlior one. And one must be so absorbed in it that in a short time something is

Me hand may not tremble, nor ?Play the eye wander, bld

?Midin

pincluced on the paper or the canvas that was not there befine, so that afierwairis one hardly knows how itgot knocked into being.!mid May '821 At this early point van Gogh strives for the most exact reproduction of things in line and color, as if fidelity of imitation were the measure of the purity and detachment of his gaze.

His artistic concern gradually shifts to a focus on pure color, but the imperative of impersonality remains constant to the end.

In the first paintings color is merely a means to reproduce the visible surface of things, "to express the bulk — the body — of things."[August '82; p.I64] Color is used only to be used up, to itself become invisible within the virtual space of the painting. The task of the painter is to reproduce what stands before him.

The colorist is he who seeing a color in nature knows how to analyse it, and can say for instance: that green-grey is yellow with black and blue, etc. In other words, someone who knows how tofind the greys ofnature on his palette. 1/sly 31 '821 A year later he reports to his brother Theo "a kind of revolution in my way of working" connected with "a certain power ofcolor awakening in ?ne, stronger and differentfrom what I have felt to now." He now tries less to imitate things themselves than to reproduce the sentiment of a scene. Accordingly his visual concern is no longer to extract from what stands before him the forms which constitute the objectivity of things. The task is to see the world as color. ... now that I let ?nyselfgo a little, and look more through the eyelashes, instead ofconcentrating on thejoints or analyzing the structure ofthings, it leads me more directly to seeing things more like adjacent contrasting patches ofcolor.

When I look at /my last painted studies) I rediscover the sentiment of that dreaey rainy day, and in the figure, though it is nothing but a few patches ofcolor, is a kind oflift, that is not calledforth by correctness ofdrawing,for there is in effect no drawing. What I ?nean to suggest is that in these studies there is something ofthat mysteriousness OM'gets by looking at nature through the eyelashes, so that the outlines are simplified to blots ofcolor. !August '831 Two years later, in October of '85, his work changes again. Color is no longer a means to reproduce either objective appearance or sentiment. A new regard for color will appear in his paintings, originating in the discovery that "color expresses something by itself"Color is now itself the end to be made manifest. The task of the painter is to observe what colors do of their own accord, and from color to create a pure visual music. ...a painter does better to startfrom the colors on his palette than.from the colors in nature. .. A man's head or a woman's head, well con te?nplated and at leisure, is divinely beautiful, isn't it? Well, that general harmony oftones in nature, one loses it by pain/idly exact imitation, one keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, that ?nay not be exactly orfarfrom exactly like the model. Always and intelligently to ?nake use ofthe beautifid tones which the colorsform oftheir own accord, when one breaks them on the palette, I repeat — to startfrom one's palette,from one's knowledge ofcolor harmony, is quite diffrrentfrom.fidlowing nature mechanically and obsequiously. !October '851 Van Gogh's task becomes the contemplation of pure color. In order to approach his later work with the vision proper to it, we need to think of what contemplation might mean here.

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Contemplation have a terrible lucidity at moments, when nature is so glorious in those days I am hardly conscious ofmyselfand the picture comes to me like in a dream.[Letter #543, September '881 In contemplation we find ourselves at a distance from our familiar position in the world.

Contemplative vision transports us outside the familiar; it is itself this transport. Within it, we fall away from ourselves. Everything appears at an infinite distance from where it normally tends to be. And yet the force of the plunge outside the ordinary, the inexhaustible significance which each thing seems to promise and yet withhold, pulls us more intimately among things than before, returns us to their elemental realness as from sleep or forgetfulness. Thus an infinite estrangement and a more intimate concern belong together.

This double movement, into absolute distance and absolute proximity, is at work in van Gogh's later painting.

In both van Gogh's paintings and his letters, certain subjects recur with a strange insistence, as if they obliquely touched a point which was itself undisclosablc, but from which every visible image drew its power. We would attempt here, through a literary reading of his writings on these themes, to trace their trajectory, interweaving, and gathering, and through their resonance to feel the force of that point.

Stars Two months after his arrival in Arles he writes to Theo: I must also have a starty night with cypresses, or perhaps surmounting a field of ripe corn; there are some wonder/id nights here. I am in a continualfever ofwork. lApril '881 Many of his later letters will include references to the stars and the night sky. Stars (as well as gas lamps), each one haloed in a nimbus of light, will maintain a steady presence in his later paintings. Why this fascination with stars and more generally with radiant points of light?

Stars are among the few things whose distance from us can't be gauged in terms of a visible dynamic relation with other objects. They resist being located within the familiar space in which we situate ourselves and of which we are the center. It is in the context of this insight that we need to read part of a letter written in August of'88: ...the mysterious brightness ofa pale star in the infinite. ...tofeel the stars and the infinite high and clear above you. Then life is after all almost enchanted. I#520 August '88] We need to think about the words he uses here. He implies, for instance, that the stars and the infinite are felt together, as though infinity could most easily become manifest in and through their light. But what is the infinite? The infinite of which van Gogh speaks is high above us. It thus would have a spatial element, even if it could not be located in objective space which, as the element of discrete distances, belongs essentially to finitude. The infinite s and would be distance without end, ad astra, a space without boundaries, without I delimitation. The infinite of which he speaks is also something felt, that is, something tactilely perceived. What is felt is that whose distance from us has been completely effaced, that with which we have come together and made contact in total proximity.

To feel the infinite would thus mean: to be placed in contact with what yet remains absolutely distant. Van Gogh's words suggest that the lights of the stars absorb him, seem to come to him across a more spiritual distance and touch him in his very being, and that through this contact he is drawn up toward them outside himself, in a limitless immobile ascent. The

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contemplation of the stars opens him to an other space in which sight takes on the force and immediacy of touch.

Sunflowers Van Gogh speaks constantly in metaphors of heat in reference to the colors of the sundrenched landscapes of Provence: "the white-hot heat;"[#608) "the wheat field in the sun, which represents extreme heat;"[#597] and "the furnace of the height of harvest time, as surrounded by the whole Midi. Hence the orange colors flashing like lightning, vivid as redhot iron, and hence the luminous tones of old gold in the shadows."[#520] But he uses the metaphor of heat most strikingly with reference to his sunflowers.

I am thinking ofdecorating my studio with halfa dozen pictures of"Sunflowers,"a decoration in which the raw or broken chrome yellows will blazeforthfrom various backgrounds....[#15; to Emile Bernard. August,'88] To work up the heat to melt that gold — not anyone can do it — it takes the concentration and strength ofan individual whole and entire. I#573,January 23, 7191 It is tempting to read this as a simple visual analogy: that in their hue and shape his images of sunflowers would resemble fire, would seem to be the very instantiation of flame. One might also add that like flame his sunflowers are fascinating — that they seize the gaze that looks at them, exert a power to hold the eye spellbound, as if searching for something hidden in their flaming depths. The implicit analogy also suggests another property of fire that the sunflowers might share, that flame is the manifestation of color without any material support.

The opaque radiance of fire does not define the boundaries of an object but appears as disembodied light, color as light. To compare sunflowers with flame is to suggest that there might be a certain visual gap between color and contour, that for a certain gaze their color would no longer define a surface but an opening onto an insubstantial depth, an abyss of disincarnate color, like the sky reflected in a steady lake.

Yet van Gogh speaks specifically of heat and warmth, which have nothing to do with light or vision, but with touch. And what is heat if not that which allows us to sense, as through an immediate palpable contact, the presence of what nevertheless remains separate from us in space? What is uncanny about flame if not that it seems able, transcending the objectivity of space, to touch us as though from a distance, that it seems to create an invisible immaterial extension through which we are placed in contact with what yet remains out of reach, separate and ungraspable? That heat is the irradiation of the presence of flame outside the boundaries of what nevertheless remains its source? Van Gogh's references to heat and warmth need to be read as rigorously as possible. From the moment he becomes fascinated by color, begins to locate real life in tone and shade and brilliance, he will have begun to stray from the visual surface of the world, where color refers to things, is a mere property of things, towards the visionary depths where things vanish and color itself becomes being, itself becomes the conduit to a dazzling and unfathomable reality. The more van Gogh concentrates on color, the more it ceases to be a means of expressing something else and becomes itself the end to be made manifest, the more he finds himself attracted to a realm devoid of the sober separation of looking, where color, becoming visual heat, effaces the boundaries that separate him from what he sees and draws him out into contact with every visible surface.

The Sun There is a sun, a light thatfor want ofa better word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is![#522, August'88]

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From his first encounter with the light of Provence, in late February of'88, van Gogh begins to work under increasingly frequent and intense bursts of inspiration. His torrent of work is interrupted only on Christmas Eve by his first attack of delirium, which he himself links indirectly to his infatuation with color.1#570 and #626] I have a lover's insight or a lover's blindnessfor work just now. Because these colors about me are all new to me, and give me an extraordinary exaltation./#541, September '881 ...I cannot tell you often enough, I am ravished, ravished with what I see.[#539, afew days earlier.]

Van Gogh does not fail to situate the origin of the brilliance of color which inspires I • : it is the sun. The sun is, in fact, specified literally as the source of a new vision, and implicitly figured as the source of inspiration.

The difference in the stronger light and in the blue sky teaches you to see, and especially, or even only, when you see itfor a long time. 1#604, September '891 You need a certain dose ofinspiration, a rayfrom on high, that is not in ourselves, in order to do beautifid things. 1#625, February '901 As the origin and focus of his inspiration the sun comes to occupy a central place in both his work and his life. He speaks of it sometimes in aesthetic terms, as a source of beauty. But occasionally he speaks of it in religious terms: "the good god sun;" "Oh! those who don't believe in this sun here are real infide/s!"I#5201 The sun is also indissociably linked with the two images of religious significance that consistently appear in his work — the sower and the reaper. Here we touch on an order which is not at all aesthetic: the order of the sacred. Van Gogh's sacralization of the sun cannot be approached as if it were an aesthetic phenomenon.

But it cannot either be approached in terms of the Christian spirituality he explicitly rejected: "I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting."[#531] Insofar as whatever spiritual significance he found in painting revolved around his experience of inspiration, these images need to be understood in terms of his relation to the sun rather than vice-versa. It is here, in the absence of any explicit statement, that any discourse on van Gogh becomes a mythology, and where we begin to play the part of the arbitrary colorist, whether we know it or not.

Icarus When Icarus first takes flight, art is the force that precipitates his upward plunge. Art is not itself the power of flight, but the space of solitude and concentration in which his involuntary ascent takes place. And this ascent is pure levity, lightness above oneself, freedom within necessity, traumatic exaltation; a movement through which the sky opens itself to him, becomes that open abyss, intimate and vast, which passes through him and into which he is dispersed outside himself. Through flight the sky's vault dissolves into a depthless deep, an other space of which he is not the center, which does not divide itself into an inside and an outside along the contours of his body, but in which his self is annihilated in being opened to a naked cxteriority. Flight is contact with a certain fiery outside, a ray from on high that is not in ourselves, contact not with the self's other, a non-self, but with a radical otherness in which the self is immolated. For Dacdclus it is enough that flight is a temporary means of escape from the prison which holds him; he is content to live on the ground even if he will never sec it in the same way again. But Icarus, forgetting his father's words, strays into a measureless movement that recognizes no limits, wants only to soar ever upwards and to be united with the sun. The sun is, for him, the blinding empyrean star at which inspiration, death, and timelessness converge. Exposing himself to its blazing heat, Icarus wills his own immolation, and so also, in effect, his fall and his perishing. His death takes place as soon as

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he leaves the ground since his flight is, in a sense, a flight toward death.

The Reaper Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.[#506,July'88( It is after his first attacks of delirium that van Gogh's fascination with the sun reaches its peak. He is supposed to have spent hours staring at the sun from his window in the asylum at St. Remy, behavior which doctors took for a sign of incurable madness. It is also during this period that there is a transformation in his relationship with death. After his first attack his references to the possibility of an afterlife (for instance, #506, #516, #518, #542) stop completely. In the 87 letters he subsequently wrote to Theo, he mentions death only twice and speaks of it with the certitude ofsomething which has already taken place.

Well; well; there are moments when Iam twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophesy, like a Greek oracle on the tripoct ...But when that delirium ofmine upsets everything I dearly loved, I do not accept it as a reality, and lam not going to be afalse prophet.

Indeed, illness and death hold no terrorsfor me....(#576, Februaly'891 It is perhaps this relation of certitude towards death, as if he sees the world from the position of one who has returned to reality and life, that impels him at St. Remy to paint a copy of Rembrandt's "The Raising of Lazarus." Van Gogh's "translation" of Rembrandt's work, however, contains one major modification: the figure of Christ is replaced by a huge, blazing sun. It is as though van Gogh, living on beyond his own death, feels the sun as that which resurrects him. But the sun does not resurrect him to eternal life in heaven but bestows on him instead,(a cruel and absurd fate in terms of Christian belief), one more mortal existence, an other terrestrial life. Thc sun resurrects him only in order to die again, a repetition potentially extended to infinity: it gives him the possibility not of eternal life, but of eternal death, of an endless dying always finished and always still to come. And yet it seems that this is a fate without sorrow since death, being linked to the sun, is itself transfigured, itself becomes a source of light, and levity, and inspiration. lam struggling with a canvas begun some days before my indisposition, a "Reaper"; the study is all yellow, terribly thickly painted, but the subject wasfine and simple. For I see in this reaper — a vaguefigurefighting like the devil in the midst ofthe heat to get to the end ofhis task — I see in him the image ofdeath, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is — ifyou like — the opposite ofthat sower Itried to do before. But there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light offine gold. (#604, September'891 Conclusions Aurier's article would encourage me if!dared to let myselfgo, and venture evenfisrther, dropping reality and making a kind ofmusic oftones with color, like some Morsticellis. But it is so dear to me, this truth, trying to make it true, after all!think,! think, that! would still rather be a shoemaker than a musician in colors.(#626, February'90( The power of van Gogh's work comes from the doubleness of his vision. There is a tension in his gaze between an impulse to remain faithful to the objective existence of what he sees, and an impulse to stray from himself towards another reality, a realm of pure color. And this tension runs parallel to a discord in the 'spiritual' dimension of his work, between a desire to remain true to the earth, and a movement that draws him away from the earth to the stars and the sun.

Quotations from all numbered letters arc taken from The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, published by the New York Graphic Society. Quotations cited with page numbers are taken from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill, published by MacMillan Publishing Company.

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.

PAUL SAINT -AMOUR

THE SINGER

IN

THE SHAPE

OF

A POEM

SARAII SZE .1

T

he instant in which it/s pronounced impalpable or blue or woad-blue, The night contains all poems about itself, just as it limns in the low tides And the crabs that toussle in the scree, tangling their syllables in kelp

And in the palps of weedfingers. Night cups the speaker against the hollows Of its belly, reminds him in mute aspirates that his half-made drowsy words Are tucked safe in the talus, that the infant moon still dribbles light As pabulum through parted lips, that the ceiling is sidereal about them.

Participled of the swarming brain, the sleeper's utterances perform a poem Of a possible many, in which his hoary forebears nodding over monodies Reinvent a sum. The sea accepts the sleeper though as only an etude for its Ode Among odes, in which night commits the rabble of the rhapsode's mind to a neap hush.

In his sleep, Tiresias communes with the sea. He dreams Of the boatswain laughing in his idle hours, wounding his memoirs Into whalebone until the tableau spangles his pink palms with grist, And the skeleton beholds itself told into scrimshaw.

But if the tattooed bone regrets the scrivening of men and clipper ships On the bone's flank, it regrets as flesh does wincing before the shock of rain, Or palimpsest before a new rune, or as an old man's flesh forgets The chafing of the loyal sand and the shock of sun Only less urgent on the threshold of the ear Than all the ululations of the sea's phonemes.

In his sleep, Tiresias is explained by the sea, which speaks The story of the singing-master into the aging singing-master's ear; Seeping down the stairwell of the skull, the tide erodes a gentle exegesis On the eye and brain. The sea perceives Tiresias and his rants in sleep Not as a photon swarm that sizzles through the tissue of the eye, but nascent As the sky's yolk drooling down albumin around the shoulders of the world, Or as, in the gloom, the seafloor eddies of the sleeper's own blue glades Unravel in a susurant soliloquy. Gathered to his ciphers, he dandles his head Against the water's raving, and confects his shibboleths in silence.

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ALEX

SHAKAR

CONVALESCENCE

C

an you hear me?

Inside, there is something swirling and rolling around and around. Bloated, waterlogged, a sleek repetition of waves sifting through. Things drift in the distance, foam-edged, surfacing, sinking for a moment looming at eye level, improbably large, demanding focal shifts which clarify at best one contour while distorting not only the rest of space, but his very eyes in the process.

There was a landscape dwindling below a shuddering patchwork wing seen through filmy layers of plastic and glass. There was a roar and a pressing on the bowels and ears, and a beaming stewardess, make-up encrusted with flat, drained blue eyes which reminded him that this plane was not taking him anywhere but away.

Can you move your toes?

Pale, depthless, but no tinsly mascara just venous, sunken skin around darting myriad eyes, imploring but inaccessible like a photograph or jigsaw puzzle, gaining in dimension only with the refraction of tears Ifyou can hear me Phil, move your toes. which would almost never appear but were always lurking in the peripheral folds, on the verge of existence. There was a plane, tormenting the air over a flat dark ocean, while he tried not to think about that woman who may or may not be alive, or that cluttered filthy apartment that may or may not be abandoned, or that dark transient city which he never meant to stay in as long as he did.

And as he disembarked and began to drift through another city, identical in most ways to most other cities, he was thinking of the one he had just fled. To which he was sent by an old, ulcerous uncle who had misplaced his seventeen-year-old daughter, and charged him with the task of locating her and bringing her back. Which he had agreed to not out of any familial obligation; it was just something to do, just something to put off doing anything else.

Mr. Siftos, Arrived today in Wan way, Ohio by train. Phone book contained no Siftos, but one Chance, S. (as hoped)location 81 Hostel St. Phone number (276-1889)proved to be out ofservice, and no one responding at front door. Neighbor (name unknown) recognized Stacey Chance in the photograph you supplied, but did not recognize your daughter. Have checked into Holiday Inn on Baltic Ave. and will try again tomorrow. Have charged $184.90 on the credit card toward train,food and lodging.

Phillip

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He had envisioned the old man, pinching the letter in dry fingers, propping it parallel to his ovoid, corrugated face to scan the lines. Mr. Siftos, to Phil's recollection, had never been young and had frightened him as a child on the few occasions when his now dead father's side of the family converged. At one such meeting, in the house of an absurdly distant relative, the old man had gripped his arm, tugged him aside and told him that his father's artwork was meridess; and then advised the twelve-year-old to be vigilant lest his life turn out to be a repetition of the wanderlust and dissatisfaction, the unfulfillment which marked his father's life â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and later, according to the old man, his death as well. Although Phil had never spoken to the young girl his uncle had later adopted, the only thing that surprised him about her flight was that it had not happened sooner.

Phil sent off the letter to Michigan and returned to the Holiday Inn bar; he put a bottle of J.D. on the tab and on the table, pouring shots and poring over the photograph of Stacey Siftos and Stacey Chance, who beamed flatly from the tabletop, arm in arm. Stacey Siftos, the adopted cousin, was bright and blank, with overexposure and youth and an obscenely perfect set of teeth: obviously never meant to be a part of the dark, brooding mediterranean family in which she was raised. The other girl was older and regarded the inferred camera with a careless, condescending indulgence, small and frail with a wide, thin smile and large eyes like bleached out skies.

Can you open your eyes?

From the perspective of three months and seven thousand miles, from the surface of a dank, liquor soaked table in an eastern European city, the ostensible object of his search still retained her vapid glow, illegible or simply nonsensical, while Stacey Chance had shifted her focus from the camera to his eyes and probed him with accusation and regret. He saw the beginnings of tears refracting the camera flash in the corners of her eyes.

His first shock was her eyes, when he found Stacey Chance on his second day in Wanway.

That infinite, silent stare recalled from the photograph was shattered into a manic, ongoing hunt which shrapnelled over every facet of himself and onto the drab, wallpapered hallway behind him, marking his unsure, shifting stance, the brown Sears suit which a hangover and an overactive sense of irony had led him to choose for its private investigatory look, a shaving cut in the vicinity of his adam's apple, and the empty Holiday Inn matchbook that was idiotically retained by his hand after going through two cigarettes on the sidewalk below.

Are you Stacey Chance, by any chance? he said, and regretted it.

She was even smaller than the photograph had hinted, a sliver of a woman dwarfed by an oversized oxford shirt worn loose like a smock and the high, boxlike doorway behind her.

When he spoke, her fractured state would tick frenziedly, an ocellar oscillation between each of his eyes, like synchronized metronomes beating allegro vivace.

She was here. But she's somewhere the, now, Stacey said. Thick shades blanketed the windows; a feeble grayish light managed to filter through a filthy skylight over the table at which they sat. Stacey Chance looked down at a large disconnected jigsaw puzzle: clusters of sails and waves and pieces of sunset floating on the tabletop. Her franticly calculating eyes seemed to tick over every piece, despite the glare from the skylight which levelled most of the fractured images to a uniform silvery haze.

If it were not for her eyes, Stacey Chance would have appeared cool and completely inscrutable. She sat still with one pale, skeletal hand resting on the table. Her lackluster hair was pulled back tight against her skull which she held tilted backward so that her sharp chin

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stood out against the bleached, drawn and slightly freckled contours of her face. lier mouth was stretched with wrinkles in the corners and her nose was straight and white as bone. Phil listened and now listens again to the questions he had prepared, and to the answers which she disinterestedly cast off with a low but shallow voice and a hand which occasionally flipped on the table, as if her words were marbles she intermittently let roll away.

She'sfine, and wherever she is, she might not appreciate beingfound, Stacey said finally.

Well, I miOt not appreciatefinding her either.

How long has he been like., how long has it been?

In a museum on the top of a hill, in the far corner of the uppermost chamber, he saw Stacey Chance, nude and kneeling over some unseen detail. The date on the sculpture read 1517. He thought to himself that she had lost some weight since then, but otherwise hadn't changed at all. On his way down the hill, shuffling the dust of an empty, winding road, Phil listed the images of Stacey which he vaguely hoped would serve as archetypal categories, into which all of his experience of her could be sorted. Once he had her sorted out, a pattern might be discerned, and a key produced which could translate the mass of raw data into intentions, motives and reasons.

I. Stacey solves the puzzle: With subdued rapture, slowly but haphazardly, awed as the pieces cluster together, crystallize, a fingertip towing a fragment to its port through the cardboard soup. Upon completion, she tries to see the image in its entirely, but her eyes themselves are scattered across the board, forever lost among the details. She pauses, and carefully crumples the scene; the chaotic shuffle of fragments is audible as she returns the box to the highest shelf.

2. Stacey is coming: She shuts her eyes and whimpers softly, an octave above her normal range. Or she screams and carves his back with her nails, and afterwards, brings a trembling hand to his face, searching with wide and frightened eyes for the origin of her feeling.

3. Stacey smokes a cigarette: Picassocd jumble of limbs. Angular elbow on cocked knee, other leg curving inward, other arm propping head, halocd by smoke, a glowing point dissects the air.

4. Once, Stacey smiles when lie kisses the corners of her mouth. Another time she cries.

5. Drunken, brimming with passion and malevolence: He is holding her drink in her absence, feeling foolish.

6. Stacey, stir-crazy or insecure, over-cherished or unloved: The first time, when she leapt out of bed hours before dawn, when she began to struggle into her clothing, demanding he be silent and let her go, he begged her to stay and told her Ile loved her in a way he couldn't yet explain; and she cried, shaking in his arms. The second time, the last time, he said nothing, and watched her leave, and watched her return, docile and self-scarred.

7. Stacey brushes her hair: She sits on the bed, torso cocooned in white tcrrycloth. She holds it by the ends, the impossible tangle torn at by the brush. Proudly and awkwardly, she combs it smooth. ...wish he would say somethingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;well be never was that talkative ha ha Mr. Sifios, Apologiesfor the two weeks ofsilence. Have ascertained that your daughter Starry had lived herefor the greater part ofthefour weeks separating her disappearance and my arrival. Stacey was living with childhood companion Stacey Chance and working with her as well, as a waitress at the Terminal Diner (5 Outer Edge Dr.). Due to wild indiscrepancies as to her destination when she departed (20 days ago) and when, ifever, she was scheduled to return, I am forced to remain here until more information suifaces. Ms. Chance has agreed to introduce

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7111

e

me to other ofStacey's acquaintances who may know ofher whereabouts and plans. This may take some time.

That morning the eggs were a disaster. He was trying to make them over-easy, but he cracked them badly and the pan was not hot enough and he was using a butter knife for a spatula; the desired pristine packets of yolk enveloped in their own seared skin materialized as a gory mess. Stacey opted for a cup of coffee and a piece of toast while he defiantly scooped the dripping, peppered mash into his mouth. She read the letter to his uncle, and laughed, a â&#x20AC;˘

sound which still reverberates: a stifled repetition followed by a quick scraping in of air, like she'd never meant to let it go and hastened to suck the sound back in. She told him his uncle would become suspicious; he shrugged nonchalantly and gagged on his eggs.

He left to empty his bowels, shredding a tampon upon finding no other paper within reach.

When he returned, Stacey was in that other world of hers, bounded by prescriptive lines and questions formulated to be answerable. He watched over her shoulder, pretending to take an interest in the crossword. She was counting letters, crossing words, and he was watching a minute, bulbous eye on spindly stalks, creeping upward on the frictionless, blank terrain of the margin. She crushed it in the fold of the page, and went on scratching letters into boxes.

The corpse remained, immediately forgotten in its paper tomb, one of many eyespots or inkstains of the margin.

She looked up and asked him what he was thinking, and he couldn't say.

They went for a walk that day, down along the tracks toward the edge of the city, which faded noiselessly into grayer and lower buildings, and stretches of weeds and scabrous earth. They traded histories as they walked. Hers invoked the images of an alcoholic father found asphyxiated in a car idling in a suburban garage, a sullen and silent, career-minded stepfather who was for his family a shadow of a man, and a once beautiful and increasingly schizophrenic mother, who resented her daughter's youth. Philip's adopted cousin, Stacey Siftos, had adored and emulated Stacey Chance in every way she could. Within a year, she had transformed her own childhood from normative to aberrant, cultivating an existential vocabulary, a singular fascination with puzzles, and an eating disorder. After Stacey Chance had said something about the value of suicide, in the flippant manner she sometimes adopted, the younger girl attempted it; after Chance had dropped out of college and moved to another city to work as a waitress, Siftos gave up on high school and ran away from home.

Strangely enough, this was the only time he learned anything about his cousin. It amused him to think that he was quite possibly the worst detective who had ever lived. He had an eye for details and a case to crack, but somehow he always got sidetracked. The mystery of his cousin gave way to the mystery which she had been trying to solve. At least they had this in common, that they had both found something in Stacey Chance, something compelling. And now she had supplied him with her case history; now he had more facts with which he could do nothing. It was not an explanation or a completion, it was just Stacey, telling her version, one of many versions.

She asked him for his version, and he uttered his halting rendition: Of an idealistic, unsuccessful father, who had died presumably of brain cancer after a series of debilitations; and of his mother, bravely living only for the present, bolstered by occasional sedatives and a library of pseudo-oriental philosophy and self-help literature. Of the four silent and inauspicious years spent hidden in the lines of books and the seats of lecture halls. Of a series

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of pursuits and relationships, all categorically but inexplicably abandoned. Of how his father, bedridden and infrequently coherent, had advised him: keep on moving; how Phillip had laughed through his tears and then shouted at the invalidâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that he was a hypocrite, that he was not moving at all; how his father struggled for breath and motioned for Phil to lean close to his mouth: Details, he said, with a feeble shrug, details...

He sees her now standing then on the tracks on the outskirts of Wanway, the broad and exotic planes of her face opalescent with serenity, framed by wild, wind-rippling hair and a blank and luminous sky. He remembers her, a phosphorescence in the distant dark. He seizes the image, holds it at length, buries himself in its folds. He left her unfinished and unresolved, he uprooted himself and hurled himself across an ocean. And now all that is left is a solipsistic possession, to fulfill her by granting her the status of unending reiteration.

And maybe, between the reformulations of moments, through the superimposition of images, she will appear to him in some new way, gaining further in dimension, living anew and approaching completion. Like in a crossword, when an unknown word is at last filled in by other words in overlapping spaces; and then you know another word. going to take a sample you mightftel a slight...

She would start to appear to him everywhere, behind a window, seated on a bench, passing in a car. For some reason he didn't find this strange; he imagined her recurrence to be part of a puzzle, a somehow decipherable code. He would add to his list.

Stacey, whom he asked if she remembered the time when, and she said she could but she refused to. Refused to remember.

Stacey, who said when she was a child she would look up farther and further, and see the farthest furthest sky, and in the highest sky would see the shapes that twist and fly, the twisting forms which cloud the clouds and dance across her eyes. Who was scared the shapes would gather there and cat her eyes. Who tricked the shapes by looking away and away again.

Whose lids he kissed, rippling vigilantly even in sleep.

Stacey, trapped in her cramped little world, with the feeling that anything she could do would remain to mock and rot beside her. Who wanted to live without affecting or affection, who wanted to forget and be forgotten.

But Stacey, who found a hermit crab and turned it over and watched it writhe, who cornered his hermit soul, diagnosing it, cursing it, screaming: You aren't even alive, you never get upset, you're above everything, you walk around and stare into space, you talk so goddamn seldom, so goddamn slowly as ifit was a burden to actually say anything, like I should know it already, your only purpose in the goddamned world is to distract yourselffrom it, to find a distraction that lasts a whole life long, distracts you right offtheface ofthefucking world â&#x20AC;&#x201D; well I'll tell you something, did you know that I was stupid enough to imagine us together with a child living together like people are supposed to end up living? To whom he said nothing.

Who said in turn: Goddamn you. I hate you. Goddamn you.

Stacey. In self-defense or self-exile, daring him to leave her. Daring, and finally beseeching, after the third time.

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Can youfed this?

The first time Stacey cut herself with a piece of concrete. It was the closest thing within reach.

She wrapped it in her small white fist and carved a line across the venous underside of her wrist. Initially the line was white, and with repeated etching, it turned to pink, then red, and then the blood came, in beads which clung to the line, and then the line was all blood. The pain was too much to continue, so she scratched another line a quarter of an inch above the last, and then another.

The second time she used a serrated plastic knife. The third time, that same night, she went into the bathroom and cut open her forehead, he never found out what with. He spotted the broad, eye-shaped wound before she turned off the light and returned to bed, calmly. She wrapped an arm around him. He heard the muted and sporadic clicking of her teeth. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that she was biting an incision into the outside of her thumb, near the bottom knuckle. He took her hand slowly, trying to make the gesture seem more affectionate than preventive, and discreetly felt her wrists, which were undamaged. She kissed his fingers, and tried to get back to the work on her thumb, but he kept a finger tracing her lips, patrolling the perimeter of her mouth. She sifted his hair with her fingers, and he traced the lines of her face, from the shallow rictus of her cheek to its high, pronounced bone, and haltingly continued upward along the temple and then across. She grabbed his hand and threw it aside, rolling over, perhaps preparing to make another trip to the bathroom.

I'm sorry, he whispered. After a still and agonizing moment she rolled toward him and kissed him, deliberately, passionately, while rubbing her thigh against his. Leave me, she said. She kissed his neck and his ear and he felt her lips mouthing the words, pleadingly, leave me, leave me. She kissed him again.

Early in the morning he awoke from a dreamless slumber and groggily wrapped an arm around the sleeping girl. Then he remembered the night before. He smoked a cigarette, staring at the wall, then dressed and left her still sleeping, her expression drawn and pale and peaceful.

After staring for half an hour at a plate of yellow brown food placed beneath his eyes, ravenous but unable to go through the motions of eating, he left the diner and left Wanway on the first available international flight, planning never to return, somehow fated to circle it again and again along the deeply grooved route of his inward imprisoned senses.

What happened, Phil. What happened. Phil. Your eyes don't look. . .

Mr. Siftos, I have just received word that your daughter has flown to Pozpoznik, a small city on the Adriatic, apparently the home ofafriend she made in Wanway. Jam sending thisfrom the airport, having booked aflight which departs presently.

Philip The streets of this drab, foreign city had few outlets; on his nightly walks they led him through their inexorable windings. The city was built on a marsh, a woman in a bar had told him: the buildings slowly sink into the land, which puts the upperfloors in high demand..

An old drunk with a withered face and eyes that glinted sad and fragile hovered in a doorway.

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Phillip thought of his dead father and cursed him for his plaintive, questioning gaze, and for those final words which sentenced him to aimless and continual movement in the treadmills of streets and cities. Moving even now, inscribing and erasing himself, into and from people's lives, for the sake of movement. To move is to endure, maybe, but nothing endures except the movement, heedless and scornful of moved and mover.

He thought of himself, shuffled through space and time, shuffling his pack of facile images. It was impossible, absurd, and inevitable that there would be some future moment when she would no longer matter to hint. And still he would know her, still, he would have instant access to a thousand straggling details that may never coalesce. He found himself in front of the ancient wall which grasped around the old city like a pale knotted hand; he veered left, absently seeking entrance. Far ahead, he saw the outline of a woman, walking away from him, a bone white hand trailing out to the side and back to graze along the wall.

Stacey!He might have known it wasn't. But it had to be, had to be her with her slightness and languid slouching gait and fingers careless and persistent along the cracks of the wall. She vanished around an angle and he started to run, shouting again the name. As he ran he began to make out the dark mass of the Adriatic, the black undulations splintering white against the beach. He rounded the corner of the wall and saw the stooped and swaying forms of three men. One was singing, the unintelligible words sounding over the din of the crackling shore.

Stacey! he shouted; the girl was not in sight. The men saw him and abruptly silenced; they approached slowly in his path. He slowed his advance and tried to circumvent them, but they spread out to intercept him. Two seized his arms, and the one who had been singing now stood facing hint, spitting a guttural question in a foreign tongue.

She... There was a ... I was sent tofind â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The man stepped up to hint, so that Phil saw first the squarish head and then nothing but a set of icy eyes fringed with red, pressed boxlike under the weight of a single brow. There was the impact and the numbness on his lips, then a screaming through his guts. The dark earthen colors loomed upward, and distantly he could register a prolonged buffeting against his head and ribs.

He awoke on the beach. It was still night, though he couldn't remember what night it was.

He couldn't remember anything, and all he could grasp was that something had happened, that something was happening, and that all of it meant nothing. The small stones on which he was sprawled were hard, and wet beneath his abdomen. He got up, feeling lighter and less substantial titan the smooth veneer of sky and the tar-black, gelatinous sea. His vision fogged with a static of dull colors; he inhaled, his torso splintered with sharp, fibrous pain, and then he could see again. Hunched over and with small steps, he walked to the shoreline. The skein of water was flowing up around his shoes; and dragging back with a kind of vacuous longing over the worn pebbles, which rattled like dice and glowed like eyes imbued by the predawn pall with a nacreous glow. He walked slowly into the water and felt a numbness rise up his legs, and after another sinuous twisting pain in his bowels, all was numb and blank and light.

The water turned him around to face, far away, the shore. The tops of the mountains behind the city burned with the first tentative sunlight. This means nothing, he thought, and smiled.

He saw, unmistakably, his cousin watching bun from the shot e, and then his senses were stanched with a fervent brightness.

Phil. I know, I know you're there. Phil. You're there. You are...

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His father is here as well, and now they were again in his father's studio on an endless afternoon. Phillip was gazing up into a gigantic canvas, streaked and swirled, a chaotic tumbling of blue. His father knelt beside him and looked up at his work. What do you think, Phillip?

Is it heaven?

His father laughed softly. That's a good guess. Well me, I think it's what the sky would look like ifit were in the sea.

Phillip watched his father's face. He had a prickly beard with patches of white. Dad, what's heaven like?

Rocking on his haunches, with a wan half-smile and eyes squinting as though discerning something a long way off, he said, Heaven is kind oflike retirement, you can sit on a cloud and relax. It's like a dream. You've got a pair of wings, and you can watch everything and be miles above it. He thought for awhile, and went on airily, Ifyou want to be with someone, you snap your fingers, he snapped, and they appear. Even if they're actually somewhere else. He took a swig from a flat bottle. The wings are just for show, you know, because you don't moveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;everything just comes to you. All those crazy moments between what you want and what's there.., they're allgone.

Willyou go there?

I dunno. We can all dream sometimes... His knees creaked as he stood, returning to his work; the bristles of his brush scratched steadily along the canvas.

He tries to shout, but he can't; a shimmering surface lies just out of reach.

There is an outside that he can hear. Voices, the hum of machines, a steady, puffing breath, something beeping in the distance, sweeping by and around again like a lighthouse beacon.

Soon, he will try again, because there is something he wants to say, and the words are gathering now. He feels calm, a perfect, suffusing calm, like he felt that afternoon when the sun was glinting on things and Stacey was sorting her hair with a brush after they made love and it got tangled in knots. There was a song on the radio, unravelling and waving in the air; they had been humming it all week, and were now trying to listen to the words, but they kept forgetting so that all they ever knew was the music. What song was that.., if only he could remember.

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CARRIE

IVERSON

T

his is the kind of light, pale and half gone, that goes

NICOLE

D.

GRUNFELD

out and is not brought back.

Last night it strung itself across the ice of the pond with that iron hopelessness and its pale grey shadows shining underneath the coldness, leaving enough room between LOOK

AT

ME

for those people who carelessly dropped a candle and now stand on toe point, delicate thin arms stretched up, lips open, eyes closed.

I

can give them what they want

Their hair wavers with an exhaustion of cold

I can have my way I can eat nothing

their shirts cling in folds as precise as

or the whole world until I make

if they had just stepped out of a model's bath and are

myself sick and I can wear

holding out their arms smiling.

large sweaters or all black and I

It is the same studied smile, the lips choreographed more

can exercise for hours or lie

painstakingly than any arched or floating feet.

on my bed and cry, but 1100k

(I wonder if this cold rain light that is filtered through curtains and glass fogged from the heat of the bath can be seen straight on and I open the window a crack to see.

The outside looks terribly distant and the single thread

the same in my mirrors and I feel the same in yours Willing, I am rarely turned down and lam not naive

of pale green I tied to the curtain rod wavers in the unexpected air. I sink into the bathtub, wondering at the way everything seems too terribly white. I see, years from now, someone coming into this room, the bath water green and frozen, my body shrunken

(do you laugh behind my back I know you talk) I do not love and I do not trust and I do not expect I oqly wait

beyond itself and the same light, the same curtains greyer and

for that moment when head on any

the rain with its aching. I see this so clearly

chest and any arm around me

it must happen and there cannot be anything beyond this wavering

I know that I am beautiful right

between breathing and cold.)

before I am asked my name

This is the way to meet the light, apart and silent and unable to string any words that will not skitter on the ice.

Feet seem to slide with more precision and understand their direction and the reason for it as they meet the shadows that intertwine while our bodies stay miles apart and the night begins to fade with the cold and everything has the stillness that forces people into great moments, and the ice begins to show its veins, pale silver threads that run in between the green. I turn and look toward the trees, too aware of your sliding feet behind, too aware there is no sun.

Underneath the ice the water stirs and rumbles.

I turn away wondering about tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;will everything indeed become confined, a small and empty closet and the air dark and warm as water around me?

Will I be able to push the window down and lean into the weighted air and smell the clearness and the emptiness as it rains and the entire pond sinks into itself?

In the glass, reflected against the echoingly grey and rain colored sky your curved lips bend into their studied (orerleq) 11://1/. I U ON

PIP I.: I?

smile. I turn away and my fingers tremblingly close the windows to the cold light.

M .1 It I .1

I:

STEPHEN

RICH

CONTOURS OIL ON CANVAS ASIA FREEMAN

I

n a memory, an eyelash wiped from a sleepy eye by the first knuckle of a child's hand. I

awoke from a nap slept beside my grandfather, at first untangling the confusion of our bodies which sleep had sewn together, pulling arms out of arms, unravelling stitches of legs. His chin buried in the uncut thickness of my hair, the world expanded and contracted with his breathing. His arms enfolded me from around my shoulders, and, as I leaned my cheek against the worn, red velvet shirt which smelled deeply of cigarette smoke and sweat, I felt myself gently crushed beneath the persistence of his breath. Rolling under the heaviness of his arm, onto my right shoulder, my forehead pressed against his chin, facing the smell, curling up into it, I willed myself to sleep again. When I awoke the next time, he was gone.

There is a mirror in the first floor bathroom of our house, facing the hallway through an open door, whose lighting is unlike that of any other mirror in our house. From the distance of the hallway, it provides almost a full length view of the person reflected in its image.

Always when I walk past it, I see him go past. Always I stop and look, expecting his figure to be mine, expecting to have shed my own face entirely to a memory. I have come to know my grandfather more through these glances in a mirror than by all the memories I can summon to mind.

Ill stare at myself in the mirror, it is not out of vanity: I am interpolating history in the contours of my face.

I am popping out a cardboard figure from the perforations of a cereal box, I am cutting men out of pictures in a magazine. As a child, extracting memories from photographs. Bending pictures into fragrances, enlivening them with voices, animating them with stories recounted not from remembered experiences, but from the first time they were told to me.

I sat on the floor in front of the cabinet beside the pin striped couch in our family room, and prepared myself to catch hold of the avalanche of photo albums and loose packets of photographs that spilled forward when I opened the cabinet door. Even by the age when I first began to look at these photographs, most of the memories had already faded. My periodic effort in revisiting these images was one to reconstruct the details of my earliest childhood. Without this exercise I should remember nothing of that part of my life except the most insoluble glimpses and opaque gestures which creep up close to me every time I turn out the light and roll over toward sleep. But I can hardly distinguish between the glimpses of the camera and those of my memory when I encounter photographs of my grandfather and me asleep on his bed.

The dimensions of the photograph unfold to invite my presence within its image.

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I no longer sec my fingertips at the print's edges. The image opens to my entrance, and the instant of its shuddering snap spans an eternity of stillness. Time to secure myself within it, time to comfort myself upon the bed and its cushion. Time to slip back between my grandfather's arms.

What I can remember: Sitting on his lap in the center of a room full of people, waving and blowing the smoke out of my face, and his crushing the cigarette out. I remember the smoke and the orange embers at the tip of the cigarette smothered under his blackened fingers.

At this age, while sitting at the kitchen table in my grandparents' old house, surrounded by unfamiliar relatives, I liked to amuse myself by drawing loops with a pencil on a sheet of paper so that the loose ends met close to one another at an acute angle. This masterpiece I called a "fish," its tail composed of these two dangling ends. But, at three years old, I could never seem to draw the fish large enough so that it would cover the entire sheet of paper, and I had difficulty explaining to other people that this was what I intended to do. When the lines were forced to extend for too long they became wavy and wrinkled, and my fish took on die shape of a raisin. I was soon convinced that my small hand and limited visual scope could only produce diminutive shoe-string fish. So! would say to whomever happened to be seated at the table alongside me, Draw me afish. Draw a BIG FATfish. Rejecting one attempt after the next, desiring nothing more aesthetically complex than my original looped species of osteichthyes, I would shake my head and snatch the pencil out, of peoples' hands, demonstrating for them just the particular kind of fish in which I was interested. Finally someone would get it right, drawing a huge, round fish and maybe adding a single-lined mouth and an eye, pleasantly complimenting my original design and coaxing the fish to life out of its simple lines. But my relationship with all these people has changed, insofar as the moment I was able to draw the fat fish for myself I no longer needed them anymore.

In the backyard of my grandparents' house there was a forest into the body of which I never strayed so far that I could not see the house over my shoulder. I walked through the forest between the thick interspersing of birch and maple trees. These were the knotted, gray poles of my grandfather's hair.

The sureness of a line: Where the line between memories and photographic chronicle is obscured, though this permits me to enter the space of the image, there is always a place I cannot enter. In photographs which record events occurring far before the beginnings of my life, the image is black and white. A line is drawn, threading a collection of a new kind of impenetrable memories, unreadable faces, unknowable stories.

In these photographs, men wear black neckties to match their faces. Black suits, white shirts.

The images are full of pose, bursting with occasion. The moment captured by the film is not a moment excised, not a moment snatched quickly from other moments, but a moment constructed. A moment performed. Candid pictures taken from this time capture with wideeyed surprise the intrusion of the photographer, and then the intrusion of the looker who picks the photograph out of a shoe box some decades later and (urns it over in his hand for the first time.

In the most postured of these photographs, the faces sink back into the milieu of the image, into the clothes, into the sepia tinge of the print. On the porch of a little white house, hands poised along the banister, waiting for the shutter to click, for the frame to he snapped around them. These photos emerge from the past, but they were taken in the future. they anticipated

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the looker. I am anticipated in every clear, expectant face.

If they foresaw me, was I a part of their memories or a figure in their dreams?

I have dreamt of my grandfather, as recently as just last night. I remember nothing but the gruffness of his voice, like the sound of tar and gravel being flattened into the street. Nothing but the gray waviness of his hair. I remember nothing about the dream but what I remember of him. These are all one memory.

The dreams are not nostalgic reveries or fanciful vignettes. They are exigent remonstrations, urging my diligence toward the fulfillment of obligations which I have to both my grandfather and these faces in the photographs, to both palpable and impenetrable memories.

Their expressions are the ones that I dangle at the end of my studies, at the fruition of the opportunities given to me in my life. At the end of work, and at the very end of everything.

I hate to let my own photograph be taken, for I am afraid that someone someday might find such a picture of me in a shoe box, study my face and remember nothing. I am afraid that this person will be met by an overcrowding of stories which will prematurely signify his life, and he will have to respond to my expression with every motion of his pen across a sheet of paper, with every stare he launches at himself in the mirror.

What I cannot reclaim: the butterfly-stomached anticipation of Christmas mornings, playing pool in the game room of my grandparents' basement, family dinners when everyone's mouth wore a leg of fried chicken slapped across it, and I don't know what else ... a thousand things.... What my grandfather said to me while I sat on his lap.

What I would do to avoid history: grow a beard. Turn away from the mirror.

When I was seven years old, my family left our apartment in Greece to return to my mother's home in Virginia, where my grandfather was dying of cancer. We had been overseas for two years; I had not seen him in that time. When we returned, I was not allowed to see him. The sickness robbed him, I am sure, of every precious quality he had coveted in his health: his independence, his composure and his manhood. My grandfather was an athlete in his youth, he was a soldier; on the walls I have seen the trophies and the pictures. As my gray-haired grandfather, his figure could absorb and contain the activity and tensions of a room. The family quarrels, the burnt suppers, the squabbles with "know-it-all" sons-in-law like my father whose tightrope relationship to my mother's family has always been one comment away from cataclysm, and from whom I have inherited my disposition toward the sardonic truth and my refusal to grant intellectual concession. Had my grandfather contained these things in me as he cradled my sleep?

The bed that I slept on this time while staying in their house was a fold-out couch, too big for a child. I slept fitfully. My room was located directly across from my grandfather's. When the door swung briefly open I could catch a glimpse of him lying in bed with people crowding around him. Then the door would shut quickly and I would be consigned to listen to the voices of consolation and complaint, of comfort and pain, none of which was my grandfather's. His was a whisper of patience, a sucking of the sickness back through fiercely tightened lips.

One night the others were all in his room. I went into the bathroom to prepare myself for bed. The bathroom was directly outside his bedroom door. I heard him vomiting, I could

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hear the voices. In a moment of fear and jealously both at the attention he was receiving and at my own inability to be near him, I leaned my head over the toilet and pretended to vomit, loudly. My mother came rushing into the bathroom. She told me to stop. lm vomiting, I said. I know, but stop. With those words she sent me to bed.

The next morning was Easter Sunday. As my mother walked into the room, I sat up sleepily, yawning. Her eyes and face were red. She was smiling. Your grandfather died last night, she said. The words froze painfully in my brain, like ice cubes, and I cried because I was sorry for the thing I had done, because he had heard mc through the door.

When I was born, the doctor dragged my body out from my mother's body. He dragged my head from between her legs, and dangled me above her before she secured me in her embrace.

When I awoke beside my grandfather, I disengaged myself from his slumbering hug, before nestling back into it.

The looker arrives before the mirror to find himself tangled in the image. The hand reaches to reclaim itself.

1 approach myself from the mirror.

The

Yale

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SEMI

CHELLAS

DANCING

WITH

REINDEERS

T

was brillig. Snow,she said. And shut the blinds.

Days like these arc torture for the weak in spirit. It is only four-oh-eight, she told him scornfully when he asked a second time. The house smells of fish, and the cats are crazy for it.

Earlier today they ran out onto the front lawn and discovered winter. The grey Siamese had a word with God about the situation, but the smaller black one, always a coward, turned and slipped back through the door before it fully closed. Sat for the afternoon with a paw against the window.

Gravity is too much for her. She sinks to a chair, hand rippling down the tiered blind, and coming to a rest on the window frame. The small cat, chastised, watches her now. Ile is impervious to the fish smell, but it is tea time and he knows he should be fed. She sinks from the chair onto her knees, in front of the window. Pets a patchwork tabby. Fat Sam, everyone's favorite feline, leaps heavily onto the counter in the kitchen, questing for cod. A pan, precariously balanced, clatters past a footstool to the floor. She is crying again and he is about to get up and kiss her.

They have six cats and a gerbil named Mud. I have begun in the middle and I am not sure where I should have begun. Begin with the day: she got up out of bed in the dark and he thought it was the middle of the night. But the days are short now, and her birthday is the shortest day of the year. Have I begun with day? I am afraid I am making a terrible mess of all this.

All right then. Just before she woke up. They lay sleeping, she on her front, arms crossed over her stomach, cushioning her breasts. Her face turned to the wall, mouth open: she drools in her sleep, but that is a secret. He, curled away from her, so still that he is hardly a presence in the bed at all. For fun, she tells him he snores. This keeps him awake at night, long after she has rolled onto her arms and her breathing is regular. Her arms hurt in the morning from the weight of her ribs.

Mud is nocturnal, and he runs on his wheel most of the night. So they had to put his cage in the kitchen.

One cat sleeps in the small of her back, and another just to the left of his feet. The other cats are sleeping on various radiators. On colder nights, they roast their fat furry stomachs on the electric blanket, but she is into conservation, and even the radiator is turned down. No quilt is large enough to cover the entire bed, so they stagger the blankets and the thickest pile is the space between them.

They no longer sleep curled together, because neither of them really liked to in the first place.

But all of this is detail and most probably useless.

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So: she wakes up long before she shows any sign of it, and when she finally opens her eyes she might as well not have, for it is pitch black in the room, and with Fat Sam on her back she cannot twist to look at the clock. It could be any time before dawn; she forgot to set the alarm. In the kitchen, the faint whir of the gerbil apparatus dies for a moment and begins again with renewed energy. She shifts slightly, and Fat Sam is suddenly on his feet, arching his back to the ceiling, tiny cat feet pressing down on her back.

He flexes his claws, but luckily there are quilts.

And she throws him off suddenly, swinging her feet into the chill air and tentatively lowering them onto the cold floor boards. She makes a small surprised sound when they touch, but she rests them there, massaging her right wrist. This is when he wakes and, in the darkness, thinks it is still the middle of the night.

But how early could it be? They went to bed at three-thirty. He doesn't think of this, but he stretches a lazy arm toward her in case it is a crisis. Fat Sam intercepts; the hand touches the warmth of a furry skull, and pulls away surprised. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She rubs her eyes like a child. Suddenly remembers what day it is. She locates her slippers under the bed, happening accidentally on a cat who is asleep and who is not pleased to be woken.

So far she has disrupted almost all members of the household.

And it's only seven-forty.

And why should this day be different? It should be the same, that is the only way to celebrate something as serious as a goodbye. Why should this day be sadder than others? They have a day together, a whole day like their other days. No reason to cry. No reason to cry until after it's said. So she will go about as usual, luckily it's her weekend. And he will blame her for being indifferent, but not until later when he can do it over the phone.

Dawn comes first to the kitchen, and never to the bedroom because â&#x20AC;&#x201D;don't laugh â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they live in the shadow of a mountain. No, it's true: Tunnel Mountain, and the sun never hits the back of the house until late afternoon. But she watches the kitchen light up with the color of pink carnations and when the light turns yellow and dayish, she feeds Mud a bit of lettuce and a mix of seeds from which he only ever eats the sunflowers.

Outside, dry ground with hoarfrost and thirty-two below.

Wednesday through Sunday, she sells sweaters in town, thick ski sweaters imported from Norway, dancing with reindeers and pine trees. They keep the store cold because people come in still wearing their ski clothes, too bundled to try on sweaters which are all extra-large anyway. The store lends her a sweater to wear every day, a moving mannequin, but also for warmth. She owns nothing purchased from the store. She could not afford it.

Mondays are weekends, then, for her, as for most of the town. Tourist towns are like that.

And on Thursday, in the winter, the population quadruples. They come on buses and in cars, in discount tour groups and on honeymoons from Japan. They buy sweaters from her which sometimes cost nine hundred dollars. She cannot imagine spending that much money for anything.

Her monthly rent is two hundred and forty dollars. She rents the lower floor of the house from the owners of the store. She budgets: fifty food, fifty fun, for every two weeks between paychecks. It's not a lot. She eats a lot of fish.

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She takes the cod out of the freezer and puts it in a Tupperware dish to defrost. Puts it high on a shelf, because of the cats, to whom the mysteries of Tupperware are nothing. She hears him moving in the bedroom and once again he will get the first shower. They fight over this priority every morning. Usually it annoys her that she never beats him into the bathroom, because she is always up first.

Today it makes her cry.

When she hears the water burst from the tap to the shower head, she goes back into the bedroom. It smells of human warmth. She turns up the thermostat, a little. She is still crying.

A little. She has light eyes, hazel, and when she cries they get darker green. She puts on her jeans and a sweater from the Bay, twenty-four, ninety-five.

A dollar and a quarter in commission, at five percent, for the salesperson. Nothing to laugh at, that. Her commissions often run to twenty-five or thirty dollars. But she only makes about three sales a week. Which is more than the men who work with her.

She opens the curtains. It's December but there hasn't been much snow. Just unbroken cold.

The ground is barren and brown with the winter air. The sky is steel in the midafternoon. She brushes her short hair over her ears to warm them.

Boots, the kind with fake fur lining, but good leather and made to last.

Anorak. No one calls them that except Banff townies and the inuit.

Scarf: smells sourly of heavy breath.

Gloves.

She is going to go out. as any, will not do. It But if I send her into the world I had better give her a name. An arbitrary one, because she is obviously me. And mine, as arbitrary A not too must be a name as practical as she is, but soft in the center, with room to move around in. It must be a nice name, because mine is so horrible. proud name. A not too common name.

Sascha. her brother Good. She's a little bit Polish and Ukranian; parents were expecting a boy and compromised. And compromised again when they named had better get a Jack. And everyone calls her Sasch, except him: he calls her Cha. Which isn't as horrible as it looks, when you hear him say it. And he eyes. blue his suits It do. name too, even though he's hardly out of the shower. It's harder with him, but I think Greg will On the way out the front door, she turns off the Christmas lights that frame the house.

This is a lot tidier. Tidier still is the way she makes a mental list as she walks down the middle of the wide street under the shadow of the mountain. The sun is up all the way now, except that this far north it doesn't curve in an arch over the sky, but follows the horizon around to the West and then sets. And the sliver moons hang perfectly vertical on clear nights. In Florida, for instance, they hang horizontal.

She lists in her mind like the little animated girl on Sesame Street: a loaf of bread, a carton of milk ... cat food. Wool. Because she has taken up knitting, having learned the value of a sweater. Because there will be little to do tomorrow, and the next day.

But she'll get over it. The very barren truth of this fact touches her and she is crying again, but the tears actually steam because it is twenty-eight below.

Everyone who lives in town knows everyone who lives in town. All of the city kids who come up to work at the big hotel know all the American kids who come up to operate the lifts and work in the ski lodges. The tourists are the ones who don't say hi to anyone on the streets.

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ME6

Sascha buys bread, milk, cat food and pickles from a woman she went to high school with.

Only two years ago. She and the woman, Doris, were never good friends in high school, but that was before they discovered their mutual love of mountains. Of devouring them: climbing them, sliding down, on skis, on snowboards, digging picks into them and scaling them, hiking around on them, and, in Sascha's case, flinging oneself naked into their lakes. In the summer only, of course, and only for seconds. Hypothermia is no joke.

In fact, Doris stole Sascha's boyfriend in tenth grade, but all in good humor. And Doris slept with Greg at a New Year's party three years ago, before he and Sascha met. It's a small town.

Doris's boyfriend Merry was Sascha's cat Mike's mother's owner. That's how they remet, and now they ski together on coinciding days off.

And they have a conversation: Is it the nineteenth already?

No,I know! The nineteenth ofDecember and no snow since November. Bad season. Better look up in February.

Its my birthday on Wednesday.

Are you doing anything?

Greg and Icelebrated last night. He's going back today.

Oh. Yes. Where does he live again?

Vancouver. He's going back to LIBCfor spring term.

Cool. Coming back in the summer?

Suppose so. I'll be gone by then.

Home? That's eleven-ten Here. I think I have a dime. To Toronto, I think.

You'll visit.

Yes. Walking up the street, she takes off her scarf and the sun soaks into her dark hair, pulling with static toward the sky. The air is so cold that her face numbs and she has the feeling that the sockets around her eyes are filled with chilled dough. Because she is awkward that way, she practices the goodbye.

But gets no better at it.

The wool shop has jingle bells wound around the door handle, and embroidered Christmas decorations at the cash register. The woman behind the counter knits with incredible speed.

Samba.

Mrs. Potter. Thinks: Beatrix. Visions of a childhood mug and the taste of melted marshmallow in cocoa. Bunnies at the bottom.

How's the scad?

Sascha's first project. Finished. I'm going to give it to my boyfriend.

For Christmas? Sweet.

No, he'll be home. As a goodbye. My mother said she'd send me a checkfor sweater patterns and wog It's my birthday coining up.

How young are you, dear?

Twenty-one, going to be. I'll take this.

Pretty currant colour. Five-fifty.

Doing anything specialfor Christmas, Mrs. Potter?

I'm visiting my sons in Calgary. One ofthem has a little girL Merry Christmas.

You too, dear.

Her key freezes in the lock. Greg is fixing eggs at the stove. He turns around at the sight rather than the feeling of the cold which rushes through the door when she opens it. A white spectre pushing into the kitchen, and she shuts the door quickly, scraping the frost from the bottom.

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4

Good morning, love.

And she is all warmth before she even has her coat off, because his voice, so familiar, holds no edge of goodbye, and he is going to feed her an omelet.

Got milk. She kisses him and it is strangely embarrassing, a stilted gesture, tame in the face of her birthday celebration the night before. They made love in the bathroom at the Banff Springs Hotel, not once but twice, and plied themselves with designer chocolates from the sweet stand. And then, in the Rose and Crown, many beers, but the last two abandoned when of they ran off home, hand in hand, gaiety not forced but rather forced upon them by a sort wildness of love out of control, and they would have made love on the living room carpet as they had in the summer but it was so cold that they had to get into bed.

So when she kisses him, it is sort of silly.

He is so big, tall as the doorways, but thin, a skier's back and arms like wire. Black hair that hangs in his eyes. Eyes like the morraine lakes in the mountains, bright, bright blue. Mouth he too big, but a tame kisser. She is still getting her coat off, not to speak of the boots, but keeps kissing her, lightly but right on the mouth.

Of course the omelet burns.

Later, they have toast and cereal and read the newspaper, a thin affair with mostly weather reports and ski area warnings. She folds the paper back and prepares to fill in the crossword with an almost dried out felt pen that the cats have chewed. The patchwork tabby, a recent acquisition and as of yet unnamed, rubs against the leg of her chair. Let's call him Sevenktter-word-beginning-witb-a, Sascha says. Tomorrow she will call him anything she wants.

She cannot guess a single clue in the entire puzzle. Greg drinks coffee from a mug she made at pottery class, one of the many she has taken at the School of Fine Arts. The bedroom is lined with batiks, ugly ones. They annoy Greg. Read the personals, he says. but They depress her too much to read out loud. She comes around the table to sit in his lap, to clamors nose, there is a cat there already: Mike. Taylor, small and black with a white snub go out, but it is too cold to open the door without steeling oneself. It is already almost eleven.

She clears breakfast, poking the crust of her toast through the gerbil cage. Mud is fast asleep.

I'm going to take photography starting in January, she says, feeling defensive.

Greg looks up and focuses for a moment. CooL This is too domestic.

Shall we go out? do No. She runs water in the sink, rinsing the cereal bowls and the butter from the plate. Let's things together. mountain. She knit and he packed half-heartedly. Said things And I can elide thc rest of the morning. Light across the living room and the sound of the I should have had them get up later, so that the day to each other. Broiled the fish. Talked about the summer and the fall and when it might snow. might not have been so long, so replete with silence. looking at the mountain. The streets are empty and Noon. Sascha goes out and the temperature is dropping. She stands in the middle of the street, Christmas shopping to do. She turns the other way, quiet, even main street, intersecting two blocks from where she stands. No snow, and people have people fill in their leisure time. Greg calls her from the her back to the mountain, and looks up at the town. Such a sad little place, an emptiness that doorway.

Greg calls her from the doorway.

Louanne on the phone.

Louanne invites her for Christmas dinner.

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Thanks. No, Greg won't be here. Only me.

Greg watches her hang up the phone and his wide mouth is set. Christmas is going to be lonely for me.Just parents.

Maybe.

Sascha hasn't seen her parents since her father was transferred to Toronto in the summer.

Willyou come up when the season ends?

Maybe. Sascha likes to think that she cannot come and go at will. She likes to think that she is one of the people who really lives in Banff. One of the people the town needs.

I'll miss you,('ha.

Yes. She tries to think if the same is true for her. It doesn't seem to be.

Nor is she indifferent. His leaving makes her feel helpless, although she knew he would leave, sooner than later. She lived alone last winter before they met and liked it. The cats are good company, especially Fat Sam. So why the helpless tears? Last night, celebrating, they said a lot of things about staying together. She knows this is a fiction: for her, there are people who stay and people who go, and the people who stay are never hurt by the leaving. It is a necessary condition of the way it is in the town. Everyone who stays knows everyone who stays, and they cannot allow the contamination of outside heartbreak. If she broke her heart over Greg she would also have to admit that moving to Toronto would be going home; that all of this, the mountain in the morning, and the snow on the walk and the gerbils and the sweaters, all of this has been temporary, a passing through.

Ma? They have tea.

Or maybe: Knowing that he will leave, as she has seen people leave, has finally defeated something in her. Maybe she is pulling the last of her pride and self-sufficiency around her to hide a deeper hurt. As he thinks her cheerfulness is a gauge of the smallness of her love, she thinks his very leaving is the ultimate betrayal. But she knew,she knew. She tries to be fair.

Tea? Fuck you.

They have tea.

Greg says: I'll graduate early by a semester, and then I'll spend another fall out here, and maybe we can get a place a little farther from town. I'll have a degree, and we can live here, or up at Lake Louise. I'll teach skiing. You can teach pottery up at the school or something.

I hate to say it, but he would never come back to stay.

Maybe she doesn't know that.

When the thermometer outside of the kitchen window gets to minus forty and stops registering a meaningful temperature, she lets the cats out, because they have been asking for it. Greg tries to write her a check for catfood after he is gone â&#x20AC;&#x201D; at least two of the cats are his, Tinker and Taylor, the kittens â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but she laughs and rips it up and then he gets mad.

He sulks. She is madly cheerful and he can't help being hurt. He asks her what time it is. You won't miss your bus, she says hurtfully. I know, he says. He waits. Then he asks what time it is again.

she said, tasting the nonsense of the word. Tea time. Fourish. Four-oh-eight. And then she looked up from her scat on the floor, and said the word in a funny cracked voice.

Snow.

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So there will be people to sell sweaters to, and snowboarding on the days off. There will be a Boxing Day rush and parties at the top of the mountain. New Year's will be wild and promiscuous, like last year. This time she will make sure not to get sick afterwards.

There will be long days in the apartment with her sketches, and photography to look forward to. There will be only herself to feed, but less grocery money too. There will be six cats: Nermal, Tinker, Taylor, Fat Sam, Mike and the crossword cat. There will be a gerbil: Mud. She doesn't get lonely, and it's only till spring. Sweaters don't sell as well when the lifts close.

She'll have to take time off, get unemployment. Maybe a job up at the hotel, during the summer rush. I don't know what she will do. In the fall? Move to Toronto, live with her parents. Maybe college. She doesn't plan ahead. She can only laugh now.

The whole apartment smells like fish.

They bundle up to go into town for dinner, a luxury.

Too much wine, and on the way home they get into a snow fight. There is a good thirty millimeters, by now. It is dark as midnight, but only nine. He puts snow in the hood of her coat and she feels it burn down to the waist of her jeans, pulled tight by the excesses of dinner. The snow is too light to pack into snowballs, so they have to resort to pulling each other into the mounds at the side of the street. She gets him a good one in the mouth, before he reduces her to helplessness by tickling around the back of her neck. By then they are cold and soaked from the inside out. They run the length of the street hand in hand, and she cannot locate her keys in her pocket because her fingers are numb. All the cats rush the door when it opens. Their mistake. She shuts it fast, and Greg unwinds her scarf which is stuck with melted snow.

She slips off her boots and sneezes three times in a row.

So now she has a cold to look forward to,too.

Derek from the ski hill gives them a ride to the bus station. Sascha sits in the front and manages to almost flirt with him. He drives wildly in the snow and they jackknife at an empty intersection. Sascha laughs, throwing her arms into the air; in the back, Greg says nothing, stuffed against his suitcase and breath showing white in the air.

In the bus station, they hug together, barely touching through the thickness of sweaters and jackets. They kiss but not too much because the bus is about to leave.

Q: I love you.

A: Yes. I love you too.

Yes. Strange that it could be over so suddenly. Strange to fccl so empty so suddenly, and lonely in a moment, no longer than the average silence. Strange.

There's a bus that leaves Banff at midnight, going west. In winter, the frost and the headlights play with the night. It carves a path through the mountains, leaving a trail of silver.

If you pretend to doze off right away, no one tries to start a conversation. They have lost themselves in books and magnetic checker games, and it's the midnight bus, so sooner or later, most people fall asleep. You can always have a whole row of scats to yourself on the midnight bus.

The first stop is Lake Louise, and a few people get on and off there. Then it's over the pass, and, early in the morning, little towns: Field, Golden, Rodger's Pass, Revelstoke, Sicamous... names you hardly hear when the driver shouts them up the aisle.

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When you look out into the darkness, you see the shadows of trees and the reflection of the snow and the headlights of the cars, but, superimposed, you see the reflection of your own face in the window. At Golden, you've traced the curves under your eyes a hundred times, and

by Sicamous, you're tired of seeing your features change from tears to frown to surprised clown face: always there is the backdrop of winter and the night. When you stop playing, you see your face as it is, tired and anxious and helpless. Then you lay your hot cheek against the glass and, if you are lucky, you might sleep.

The bus goes on clumsily through the early morning leaving no trace of itself; the sun rises sideways in the sky; and no one is awake to hear the driver call Armstrong.

And what does he think of all this?

I forgot to ask him.

Did I say her eyes were light? I was wrong.

They are as dark as the silhouette of the mountain at the end of the street.

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ETCHING AARON BLOOM

A.

HILARY

LIFTIN

GOING INTO

COUNTRY

1

The Train

Traveling north, the cautious reminder that hours can fall into windows and sleep.

I turn to Mercano, not knowing what to say when everything outside is changing, asking what state are we in and what color would you call my hair.

The grasses by the tracks are long and we are a thin blue vein scattering the green.

The restless windows scold our speed, not framing, only dragging a blurred hope across the periphery.

Distances grow in all directions when we move like this.

3

Arrival

I huddle into Mercano because it is getting dark and lam so asleep that I want him to carry me in when we get there so I don't have to drink coffee with Ann and Hoover who waited up to greet us.

I don't want to be awake enough to realize I won't know how close the house is to the water until morning.

I hope the guest bed is higher than ours at home I whisper to his neck.

2

Landscapes

Here is where the pavement stops, and buildings and metals and wires stretch and burn and turn to trees.

Easy, I tell myself, as if/am going to sleep, and it is not exhaustion but trying dreams or taking shapes.

What I see, that evergreen, that fence,

Beds in the country should be higher.

I am already mad because Mercano won't be tired and will want to talk with them, because they are his friends, not mine, because he can read when lam on his shoulder.

Years, it seems, I have hated him for these things.

In the morning I'll put on my yellow jacket against the grey and go barefoot among mussels and Maine rocks wanting only to be alone in this drenching of spirit, and the early morning bay water, so cold and alive.

I become, forgetting to be shy.

This, I think, is what we know of beauty, late day closing in, the silent transformations, vague boundaries of being. lam in that tree, cradled like a small, blue idea.

This is what I mean when I talk of landscape, the way it molds itself.

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JEREMY

BENDIK

KEYMER

FRAGMENTS

1

0n grey streets rain rings like a reminder of the reflections formed in mutable places.

Think that I had stayed the instant: Oblivion as life would have flown through me.

2

In my sleep the bat-edged thoughts wander to the break of day.

The afternoon dwindles in pools the red lit streaks of taillights the green "GO" on the corner.

And dawn rose flexing.

A ruby vase shook with shards of rock.

We sink deeper into tables.

I see a face past beaded glass.

We part at the corner:

Inside I see a face within a booth.

First our hair

It crumbles through an opaque glance

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which was wet â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

whispers:

Then our jackets, our umbrellas.

That was your hollow, the laugh of a double In the movement of the sky the thick water dropped.

3

Gargoyle backs run grey with soot.

Headlights spread on liquid faces.

The downpour dropped on the face of day.

I remember a smashed interpreter his arms run through with scars sat in the churchspire niche overlooking the imperious town.

When my face is your the world will flow through fractures, fissures.

In the coiling of the Ouinnipiac's shadow The fallen myth spins through the Seine Filtered in a false reflection.

The mirror running opposites passed away.

It was the laugh of memory.

The wine drunk bum rumbled from beneath his tarp and smelled the rain dark ozone saw the foreigner and the tart saw the rain drenched faces beneath the arch.

And still streets steam while taxis stretch the causeway toward the edge of

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PETER

Excess

1

ROCK

of

sorrow

laughs

Y

ou'll get sick, or you already arc," I said. The bones of my knees were bent up to touch my ears as I sat on the railroad track and watched Miranda. It was the day after my seventh birthday and my mother had not been there to remember it. Miranda stretched out on her

side, her tongue hanging along the ground and covered with grains of sand. A clump of grass grew green out of the desert and Miranda chewed at it sideways with her teeth. I heard the leaves quiver above me, catching wind, but the breeze stayed out of my reach. The air was motionless down low on the tracks and I opened my lips in circles at the sound. My innertube, round patches over old hissing punctures, rested in the sand close by. I had been careful not to set it down on a cactus.

"My mom said dogs are sick if they cat grass," I said.

The eight dry fingers of Miranda's nipples pointed at me from her stomach. She raised her head slowly at the sound of my voice. The grass hung from Miranda's mouth a green beard and she stretched her legs, her ears flopping inside out.

"What if I just like the taste of it?" she said, and I said "Miranda?" at the sound of her strange voice.

Sadie's laughter swung out from behind a tree and I saw her long black hair swinging back and forth with the sound. She was laughing at me and Miranda barked, her tail sliding across the desert, scattering sand.

"I tricked you, Jordan," Sadie said, laying the black 0 of her innertube next to mine. Her eyes were the green of the grass in Miranda's mouth. They reminded me of my mother's eyes.

"Mirandall get sick if she cats grass," I said. Sadie had laughed at me. I unravelled a white string along the bottom of my cut-offs and threw it at her. Sadie laughed at me as I reached out my lingers to grab hold of Miranda's slippery tongue. She is an old mongrel, her legs short as pencils, her body long and it swivels in S's when she walks. I straddled Miranda and picked the grass out of her mouth as her eyes rolled back, as her cars rolled inside out. Sadic's long black hair folded over the railroad tracks.

"I'm going to get my hair cut by the train," she said.

"It couldn't look worse," I said. Miranda's tongue twisted in my fingers and she windmilled her legs, scratching white lines into my skin. Her claws are yellow, bent like fishhooks.

The wind was caught high in the leaves, but it was still and hot where we sat. I pulled my

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shirt over my head. Earlier that morning, the train had smashed loud through the air, stirring it up, sending sand out from its sides like wings. I had watched the train, sand in my eyes, waving at the people until Miranda chased the red lights of the caboose. Sometimes I put pennies on the tracks. It heats them up, it makes Abe Lincoln disappear.

"You'll have to wait until noon," I said to Sadie. Two trains come through Lovelock a day. The one in the morning and the noon train that only carries freight.

"All right," Sadie said, lifting her head and her hair rising from the tracks, "let's go."

Once I heard Sadie's mother say I like this town because there's no wrong side of the tracks. and I My mother, she had snorted at this, wind in her nose. We were in Aunt Louisc's kitchen said, listened, pouring salt from the shaker and onto Miranda's tail. Either that, my mother or there's no right side. My mother and Aunt Louise are sisters. Sadie is my cousin.

"My mom is mad at you," Sadie said."You left without doing your chores this morning." her I picked Miranda up off the ground, her brown fur soft on my ribs, and set her down on family, four paws. I reached for my innertube and hurried to catch Sadie. I lived with Sadie's c since my mother had left in July. School had started a week before and still she had not when I back. My father left before I was born. My mother said my hair grew in straight up those days was a baby, and I pulled it out in fistfuls. Now my hair grows in patches and in Aunt Louise cut it close to my scalp with scissors.

Miranda.

I have always moved with my mother, from place to place, living together and with things in We came to Lovelock at Easter time and she worked in Cooley's Grocery, adding at my laughing said, always her head. Faster than a machine, no mistakes. Arithmetic, she homework. against "I'll do my chores later," I said to Sadie as we walked along the tracks, the sand warm on someone maybe our feet. I'd wanted to see the train pass that morning because I thought for me and then it was looking for me. It could have been my mother or father, watching to me and seeing me standing beside the tracks, waving until my wrists ached, Miranda next my chewing the tender green grass. I watched that train every morning and I always expected have could it father's face, surprised in the windows of the train; or that morning, those days, pointing been my mother in the windows, smiling through her long black hair, laughing, That morning toward the station where she would pick me up and tell Miranda be quiet, girl. and his eyes just only one man had stood looking out of the train, his hair slicked back shiny wind. They hollow holes. He didn't wave. The faces on the train slid by in the noise and didn't look much like me. webbed toes and "Try this," Sadie said, balancing her bare feet on the hot tracks. She had and smelled the took off her shoes to show her friends at school. I hugged my innertube stepped carefully rubber, heat sagging into my skin. Rubber comes from trees, I know that. I sticking out, not after Sadie, along the tracks, but I was used to balancing with my arms mouth and I Miranda's from grass holding an innertubc. My arms were covered in the sticky lost my balance and I stumbled and I bumped into Sadie. from where she'd "I almost made fifty steps!" Sadie said, petting Miranda, looking up at me are green like eyes Her fallen. "Your legs are too long," she said, "your steps are too long." my mother's.

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"My legs have stopped growing," I said. They hadn't.

Sadie is ten, three years older than me and I'm glad she's my cousin. She looks like my mother and her laughter is the same. Sadie reached out and put her fingers on my arm.

"Wait. I just remembered." Sadie looked at me with her eyes green. I'd told her about the girls at school, how they'd whispered at me, told me they'd lift up their shirts for a quarter.

"How much did those girls at school say?" Sadie said.

"A quarter."

"Did you bring a dime?"

Sadie looked around, she turned her head from side to side, her black hair splashing as Miranda stopped to taste the grass. The houses along the tracks had thinned out. I listened to the wind in the trees. We were almost to the gully that runs underneath the tracks, cutting them at right angles and running three miles with the stream to another of this town's corners. Sadie laughed. Lovelock is a triangle town, its sides the stream and tracks. The stream runs through the gully and on through a tunnel that is ten feet wide and just right for i[[[[ertubes. The third side of Lovelock is just desert, spreading out sand for the coyotes that steal chickens and howl all night.

Sadie dropped her innertube. It bounced and settled and Miranda hurried to sniff it.

Miranda's nose was wet and her whiskers were like fishing line. She always hides under my bed when she hears coyotes. Sadie pulled the shirt over her head and I heard her long black hair slide through the circle of its neck.

"Are you ready?" Sadie said, standing in her bathing suit. I stepped closer.

She struggled the spaghetti straps off her pink shoulders, sunburnt and bare. Then Sadie stopped. She smiled. I shifted my weight from foot to foot as she braided her black hair and tossed it behind her. "There." Sadie rolled her suit downward, unpeeling it over her flat, white chest. I looked from her chest to mine and then back to hers. I turned my dime over in my pocket, fingering the heads and the tails. Sadie's nipples were dark red, round in the sun.

"What do you think?" Sadie said.

I felt the wind on my chest, the shadows of trees bending, everything in my eyes gliding backward and forward.

"I'm going to have big ones like my mom,''she said.

"No you won't," I said, watching Sadie glide back and forth, shadows on her skin, "you'll have ones like my mom."

Sadie cupped the air. "No, I'll have big ones. Your mom hardly had anything." She bent her arms back into the straps of her bathing suit. "She had almost nothing up there until she got fat all of a sudden and then they didn't look right."

"My mom is not fat," I said.

"Maybe she's not anymore," Sadie said,"if you know what I mean."

Sadie laughed.

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I stepped back onto the tracks. "You'll have ones like my mom, that's all I know." The rails were hot, holding the sun, smoothing the fingerprints off the tips of our toes.

"My mom is smart," I said over my shoulder. "She read all the encyclopedias. Forwards, then backwards." She did.

The desert is so flat that you can't see the gully until you're standing on the edge. Sadie pointed down into the gully and Miranda sniffed off in that direction, disappearing downward, her tail going last. "Let's go down here," Sadie said.

Trees grow at angles out over the stream, from the gully's crumbling sides. Weeping willows.

My mother told me they weep as much as pussy willows are cats. I think they weep more.

Underneath the tracks, the stream slips between a metal grating and into the tunnel. Miranda was already in the water, Sadie laughing. The water stays underground for three miles, silent along the edge of Lovelock, rushing back out into the light, spreading back into the stream. It is there, downstream, that the walls of the gully have been eaten away by the widening water.

The water has pulled houses into the gully, tipping them onto their sides at night, giving them to the fish.

"Jordan! Come down here!" Sadie said.

I had lived on that edge downstream, with my mother and Miranda. At night, the water calls to our house, my mother told me. We had been sitting in my room, looking through the windows, down into the stream. The smell of baking bread escaped the oven and was sliding along the hallway. Maybe if we put all the furniture on the other side of the house, she said, laughing, but I'm afraid our house listens to that damn water and its smooth words.

The stream bends back and forth while moving straight, like the way Miranda walks. She lapped at the water where it spun in brown knots. Long-legged bugs skated the surface, crayfish shot backwards and blind, they turn red in boiling water. We hung our clothes from the branches of the weeping willows.

"My mom could answer any question you could ask her," I said, reaching out to hold Sadie's braid with my fingers. I looked across the water to the opening of the tunnel, where a grating, bent and broken by crowbars, gnashed through the water. Someone had painted two sinister orange eyes above the opening. They stared at me from across the water and I shivered on the bank.

"You go first and we'll follow," I said to Sadie. Miranda already stood in the water, up to her elbows. Sadie's clothes hung in the trees as she stood thin in her bathing suit, scabs on her knees. Sitting down in the water, only her bottom got wet, stuck through the innertuhe's middle, her legs spread out, feet pointing into the sky. I watched her float into the slow current, braid splashing a furrow behind, calling back to me: "Keep your legs up in case of electric eels!"

I knew better than to believe that. It was not eels, but only beavers that worried me, floating on their backs, caught in the current like Sadie, disappearing with her voice between the grating's twisted teeth.

Miranda barked, her hair flat on the water and spreading out like a bearskin rug. The water splashed behind as I kicked through the shallow water and out into the current. I looked down, past the trees in the water and their weeping reflected, past my own face, covered with leaves. I could see them underwater, the fish hanging suspended, moving slowly upstream.

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They find their way by smell, my mother had told me, the place where they were born. But I know better. Sadie says she sees the same fish every year, and I know that they swim looking upward, waiting for Sadie to pass over them. Then the fish know they have found their way back. My mother said the fish find their way back, mate, and die, their bones sinking down and eyes falling out, their skin floating like paper bags and fallen kites in the water. I know this cannot be right. I waved at the fish as they passed below. I reached out to hold the grating's teeth and they were rusted. They colored my fingers orange. I changed my mind, afraid to float through the darkness, but I saw the orange eyes glare laughing down so I let the current pull me away, inside, and the darkness cut out the weeping of the trees. I heard my own breathing and Miranda's sudden barking, excited, echoing past me. Her long body swivelled in the water. Swimming is easier than walking for a dog like Miranda.

"Come on, girl!" Sadie called from where I could not see her. Her words fought upstream, against the current.

The current bends through the tunnel and the light behind me is gone. Plants stretch out from the walls, I feel their slippery beards tangling my fingers, trying to hold me inside. It is dark, cold, a beaver could make my leg into an hourglass, it could slap my head underwater with its strong, flat tail. I am not much of a swimmer. Beavers eat the wood from trees with their buck teeth like rabbits teeth. Rabbits pull fur from their stomachs to keep their babies warm at night. I grip my innertube tighter. My rabbit did that last year, smooth skin on her belly. The water seems colder in the dark. I went out to feed the rabbit and found the tiny babies spread stiff on the wire floor of the cage, their mother looking up bloody, skin on her belly, eating them one by one. We left that rabbit in Ely when we moved here, not even giving it away or telling anyone to feed it. The fish pass underneath me in the dark water, I can feel them. "Hurry up!" Sadie calls and the plants reach out to hold me back. Maybe there was something wrong with the baby rabbits, my mother said, or the mother didn't feel healthy enough to take care of them. We didn't buy a new rabbit in Lovelock, Miranda is enough, and I can hear her huffing behind me, trying to keep her head up and the water out of her cars. The fish underwater calm me. When they return, they have grown humps on their backs, hooked jaws and crooked fangs, but it doesn't frighten nte. I know it's their way of smiling. Cold drops of water fall from the tunnel's ceiling and onto my skin. My fingers press into the moss which covers the walls as I follow the current around the curve. I have never floated through the tunnel before and I won't do it again. Not unless I can hold Sadie's hand and we can go through together, our innertubes connected. I feel the weight of the earth above me, getting ready to cave in and bury us. "I'm out!" Sadie calls back and I see the sun turn on and behind me its wet reflection in Miranda's round eyes. "We're almost there, girl," I say. There is no grating on this end. The current speeds up, Miranda whines, the water fans out and the world opens up wide and round and colors and the trees pour their fingers out over the water into Sadie's laughter. Miranda floats past me, her body moving end over end, spin ll i llg like a slow pinwheel in the current.

Miranda was between us, turned sideways, her mouth open and panting, and through Miranda's mouth I saw Sadie's face laughing. Downstream, a house lay on its side in the bottom of the gully, swallowing water through its windows and doors. It was the first house the water had taken.

"That was Cindy Hawkins's house," Sadie said, "back in second grade." The water slowed down, it fanned out. "It tipped over in the middle of the night," she said, "and they ran out the front door and Cindy said her mom and dad were bare naked. She said they were hairy

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and didn't even try and cover themselves." My innertube rubbed againAt Sadie's and I reached out to hold her hand so we could float together."They just stood there naked," Sadie said, whispering, "and the house splashed them when it fell and their dog was trapped, barking from inside as it tipped over. They were cold and Cindy's mom was crying and the dog barking and her dad just looked down into the water, pointing with his fingers."

Our fingers were intertwined as the water carried us through a window of the fallen house.

Pictures of horses hung straight down from what had been a wall and then became the ceiling. The horses hung and twisted on metal wires.

"Cindy's room," Sadie said, and Miranda swam through a window, her cars inside out.

Crooked lines of mildew ran above the waterline, a light fixture stuck out strange from what had been the ceiling, I heard everywhere the water lapping inside the house, spinning green plants and sinking what it could. I watched the fish slide down the hall and circle the room. A bureau lay on its side below me, underwater, crayfish filled its drawers, they would turn bright red in boiling water. Sadie let the braid loose from her hair as the trees scratched the walls outside, trying to come inside.

"Look," Sadie said, pointing down into the water. There was a dollhouse underwater, also on its side. I saw a fish swim silver out a window, holding a doll's tiny body in its month.

Miranda barked and her voice echoed the walls. The fallen house was like a sunken ship, I â&#x20AC;˘ g had seen pictures in my pirate book. Looking down, I expected to see Blackbcard s â&#x20AC;˘ up at me, dagger in teeth, pistols with pearl handles, the tips of his braids lit on fire and smoking through the thickness of water.

"I remember that dollhouse," Sadie said, "there are postage stamps for paintings."

Then she was gone, sliding away through the hole in her innertubc. I watched her skin magnified by the water, her hair spun in the slow, wet wind, the backs of her knees. She stayed below, kicking toward the dollhouse, Miranda whining, nervous, Sadie sticking her hands through the tiny windows, reaching with her fingers. Fish slipped around her body and her legs floated upward, her hands holding the dollhouse and I watched the soles of her feet, the webs between her toes.

Sadic's hands came up first, shrinking in the air, the rest of her body suddenly smaller as she surfaced gasping and spitting, hands closed in lists, black hair wet against her cars and lips. I helped her back into her innertube. The willows wept outside, scratching the walls. Sadie opened her hands and showed me a tiny chair and miniature oven.

"I'll give them back to Cindy Hawkins," she said.

I kicked my way down the hallway. Trees of slow water plants tickled the tops of my feet and tried to pull me under. I kicked into the kitchen, where an oven hung sideways, its door hanging open like a huge metal tongue. In our old house, I had waited afternoons for my mother to return from work. I had sat in our kitchen with my feet in the oven to keep them warm while I watched out the window, waiting to catch sight of her, her black hair in the wind and laughter. Miranda swam into the kitchen. She had always known when toy mother was coming home, even if it was the middle of the day or an hour late. I would see her there, my feet warm in the oven. The fish circled the kitchen, deeper and deeper, above the shining treasure of spilled forks, knives, spoons. After my mother left, I had taken Miranda back there once, to the old house, and set her down in the road. To force my mother's return, to

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bring her back, but Miranda whined and hid, dug holes with dirt flying out behind her, between her legs.

"What are you doing in there?" Sadie shouted."Come out, Jordan!"

On the other side of the Hawkins house, past three more claimed by the water, I saw my old house, clinging to the edge of the gully, its curtains closed and shingles cracked. I watched it balance, I wondered if my mother had come back. Maybe she was laughing, rolling her green eyes, spinning around like when she was happy, the hem of her skirt lifting over her knees, hair in her face laughing and still spinning higher while she waited for the dough to rise. Yes, maybe she was baking bread, and below me I could feel the fish returning, swimming slowly upstream.

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AMMNIMI

JEREMY

NIGHT

A

BENDIK

KEYMER

TALE OIL ON PAPER DAVI 1.) F 1,11 D

W

ere crimes play out I shift my footsteps past.

Thunder and water roar to the innermost silence Of streams ...

Ito/low in. I unravel.

The first revenge is always relentless, But being first holds other efforts taught.

Within most forests breathe forgotten things, Formless and transparent, filled with restlessness, They flood surrounding static with their noise.

Then are gone.

Even the loudest justice Quivers beneath the sound that shakes its instance. luminosity

In the still undercurrent, Breaks into

fragments

of

glass

mut tic olored

The animals, even, shiver with longing.

If the deep rock caverns, the sunfall, the algae covered light ...

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Am=

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

An Undergraduate Publication Volume 2 Issue 2 The Yale Literary Magazine is a non-profit, registered undergraduate organization. Entire contents 01990. All rights reserva Copyrights remain property ofindividual authors and artists.

No portion ofthe con-tents may be reprinted without permission. Yale University is not responsible in any wayfor the contents ofthis magazine nor do they give us any money.

The YLM is a bi-annualpublication.

Subscriptions are available on a yearly basis to non-Yale students at a rate of$15 individuals, $35 institutions. Checks may be made payable to YLM Publishing Fund and sent to: Publisher Box 243-A Yale Station New Haven CT 06520

Editors-in-Chief: Hilary Liftin, Alex Shakar Production Managers:Kathryn Haines,Stephen Rich Art Editor:Sarah Sze Photographer: Drew Dole Photographic Assistant:Susie Sokol Editorsfor this Issue:Stephen Rich, Julie Puttgen,Jennifer Langston, Wendy Gash, Melissa Levine, Emily Wittman, Carrie Iverson, Martin Hale,Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Yahlin Chang,Semi Chellas, Kathryn Haines Staff:Pam Sturner, Chuck Witham,Jon Busky, Gwylym Czno, Peter Sharp, Tita Fancy,Jennifer Ross, Anna-Liza Bella, Jenifer Braon, Ken Shih, Adam Spivak, Tina Lee Magazine Layout and Design: Neeta Verma Cover Art: Russell Ferguson Thanks:George Kellner, The Sudler Fund, Pierson Master's Office, Phil Greene, Imprint, Butler Paper Company Apologies: David Yu

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