Volume 7 issue 2 fall 1995

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1995

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Yale Literary Magazaj93p Volume Seven Number Two Fall 1995

"Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque YALENSES Cantabunt SOBOLES, unanimique PATRES."

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Editor-in-Chief: Danielle R. Spencer Associate Editor : Rebecca A. Lesnik Managing Editors: Michael Y. Jo Lorraine H.Smith Senior Editors: Erik C. Grafe Phyllis E. P. Thompson Art Editors: Daniel M. Filler Sara Gilbert Design: Timothy McCormick Danielle R. Spencer Staff: Lily Aguirre, Christina Cho,Jennie Chu, Andrew Cohen,Sarah Courteau, Jonathan Gottfried, Julia Green, Kamran Javadizadeh, Prem Krishnamurthy, Barbara Lewis,John Monroe, Behi Rabbani, Eric Rosenthal, Stacey Sanders

The Yale Literary Magazine is a non-profit, registered undergraduate organization at Yale University.

The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editors, staff members,or Yale University.

Yale University is not responsible for the contents of the magazine.

Subscriptions to the Yale Literary Magazine are available at a price of$13 for individuals and $33 for institutions. Please make checks payable to the YLM Publishing Fund and send to: The Yale Literary Magazine, P.O. Box 209087 Yale Station, New Haven,CT 06320 Library of Congress catalog number 7-19863-4 The contents of the Yale Literary Magazine are C copyright 1995.

Copyrights remain the property of the individual contributors.

No portion of the contents may be reprinted without permission. All rights are reserved.

Thanks to: Josh Benton and the Yale Herald Harvey Goldblatt Philip Greene Kathline Hartch Paul Mellon Lorin Stein Robert Stone Mark Strand The Sudler Fund Yale College Dean's office Yale Printing Service Paul Wojtasik

The Yale Literary Magazine, including recordings of poets reading their poems, is available at hhtp://www.yale.edu/ylit.

The YLM's Fall'95 short prose contest awarded first prize to Skye Lavin; honorable mention went to Paul Festa. The contest was judged by Robert Stone.

Fiction Grace Skye Lavin 8 Last Meal John Barnard 38 Interview An Interview With Mark Strand Rebecca Lesnik 2

contents

Poetry Purple Coneflowers(a la Louise Gluck) Stephen Weiss Singularity Rachel Dilworth io God's Country Rachel Dilworth 14 When All Breaks Loose Kate Seward 18

Photography Panos Kokkinias — cover Panos Kokkinias Lee Passavia 19 Panos Kokkinias zo Elizabeth Kratzig 31,32 Mimi Lien 33 Gail Albert 34 Isabelle Sajous 35 Lee Passavia 37 Prints & Drawings pencil, ink Karacabey Levni Sinanoklu 6,7 etchings Marie Watt 9,11,13 lithograph Ashish Mahajan 16 charcoal Simone Dilaura 17 collograph Margaret Thomson 26 watercolor Alicia Wirt 28 lithograph Jennifer Dubnau 39 lithograph Wojtasik 42 Paul

It's Time for That Waltz Again Todd Polenberg 27 Bethlehem, NY Todd Polenberg 28 Travel: Points of Departure Stephen Weiss 29 Wild Kingdom Lizzie Skurnick 36 How to Escape the Year 2000 John Monroe 43 Translation Some Poems of Flowers by Gong Zizhen Translated from the Chinese by Chi-Hung Yim

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Stephen Weiss Purple Coneflowers a la Louise Gluck

1. Autumn My lover has laid a feast for me from his table, sustained me with water, nitrogen, and compost but where once I was two and one now I am one half.

Separation of the roots is painless enough (it is late in my season, the cold anesthetic).

I have felt myself dying. I am ready to go.

Soon after, iron rakes and hoes bury me in the ground.

2. Winter I sleep so much now, I hardly get out at all.

A friend told me I am hiding. Sister: I do not hide that which I do not feel.

I am a hermit until spoken to, then I am full of theories.

But the air is thick and heavy, my only defense hard earth and snow.

There is little privacy within this dirty room, the hard racket of worms a constant threat.

3. Spring When I first arrive, I am ugly.

It's hard to distinguish me from grassy weeds, and the danger here is accidental plucking.

But I am no longer what I once had been: I move away from leaves that touch my back, and once or twice, I plant my roots on others.

The wind pushes me around, and I am afraid.

4.Summer I heard a man say if he lost her he'd cut all the coneflowers out of the garden. It's an act of love: this means we are important.

I spend a lot of time by myself and I am patiently neglected.

Yet I have spread myself along the land: purple (like pomegranate overripe) spiked petals. A patch upon the hill: this is my act of love.

Many of us have come back, older, some with children. We tell stories and get drunk on rum.

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world, many with my desire to be identified with Orpheus, a few with high jinks or comic relief. Some of them have to do with childhood,from which I departed many years ago.

When you began, did you have a notion of what you were working towards? When you began to condense it, did you have a notion of what the final form would be?

Rebecca Lesnik

An Interview With Mark Strand Mark Strand is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which is Dark Harbor, published in 1993.

His works include two books of prose, articles and books about art, and three books for children. He has also edited several anthologies. In 1979 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, and in 1990 he was chosen to be Poet Laureate of the United States.

Yale Literary Magazine: Your most recent book of poems is Dark Harbor. It begins with a piece titled "Proem." which is italicized and set off from the rest of the text. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Mark Strand: Well, I wanted to include it with the text, but there was no place for it. It seemed to work as an introduction to the whole book: starting out on a journey, orchestrating the forces— such as they were. It's a "proem," which is just an introductory poem.

The rest of the text is a long poem in numbered segments. Do you have anything to say about what goes on between the sections, what kind of movement occurs in the blank spaces?

I had a hell of a job organizing that. I had to fill in the gaps so I had something like a continuous movement. You feel sometimes that you move a great distance between sections, and other times it feels like you just move into a sequel. And that seemed fine to me because it was loosely organized to begin with. I didn't want a sustained arc. There's no narrative progress; the poem is distinctly non-narrative. What it is is the exploitation of a single voice that's made to do different things. There are stories told and there are bits of narrative, but the whole thing doesn't constitute a narrative. One could say that it's a journey, but it's a fractured and fragmented journey. There are many themes weaving in and out of the poem. Most of them have to do with departure. Many of them have to do with the under-

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No,I just was lost. I wrote it all in a burst of energy that spread out over four months, and I didn't look at it as I was writing it. It was all hand-written; I just stacked the papers up. It wasn't until Jorie Graham insisted on reading it— and thought it was terrific and was very encouraging— that I started being curious about it.

I knew it would need rearranging and that there were sections I'd have to throw out. I knew the last section would be the last section, but I didn't know how to begin the poem. A friend of mine, Charles Wright I think, suggested the "Proem" idea.

Several friends, Charlie Simic, Charles Wright and Ed Hirsch, looked at it and gave me their input about how to structure this thing. And they were very helpful.

So, do you find that you often have the experience of working and reworking a piece? Or do you have poems which are born fully formed, with the proper number of digits in place?

I've had that experience very few times. Most of my poems are worked on again and again and again. And they're slow in developing, in taking shape. Oh,once in a while I write a poem that needs very little work. Dark Harbor was amazing in that respect. I did very little rewriting; some of those sections— in fact, some of the best sections— came out just as you read them.

I'd never had that experience. I guess it happened because I was in a very good frame of mind and I was very healthy. I was doing a lot of mountain biking.

It was that extra oxygen...

Yeah. I never felt tired when I sat down to work. I was biking with a woman named Anne Waters, with whom I would have long conversations as we biked, usually surrounding things I was going to write about later in the day. I would sort of try out ideas. And by the time I got back and showered and sat down to write, my mind was pretty set. It was between the biking and the attentive ear of Anne Waters that this poem was made possible.

Do you write every day?

No. I don't have time. I travel a lot, doing readings. I teach.

And I cook dinner every day, so I have to go to the market. I have a family I have to engage with. So I can't write all the time.

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You're at Johns Hopkins now. What are you teaching?

Do you teach workshops?

I teach a graduate workshop, and I have been teaching an undergraduate introduction to poetry. Next year, I'm going to begin team-teaching seminars. I'll teach a graduate course on 19th century American literature with another member of the English department.

You edited the 1991 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that like?

Mainly the experience is one of being overwhelmed by poetry.

Your vision gets blurred, because you read so much. You wonder if the poems you saved might just as well have been thrown away. In the end it's not a happy experience. Except for the people who were chosen, I imagine.

I wanted to talk to you about the line between prose and poetry, which is questioned in your work The Monument. There are also several prose poems in The Continuous Life, including a sestina which you present as a continuous block of text instead of in the traditional stanzas. What's different about a poem presented in that manner?

There are several kinds of prose poems. There are the very poetic prose poems, I mean the very high— like Rimbaud's Illuminations— where extreme language can be used. And then you have the very plain— like Kafka's Parables and Paradoxes.

We consider those the extremes. I don't know why there can't be other kinds of prose poems. Both the Parables and Paradoxes and the Illuminations are prose first, in that the structural units are the sentence and the paragraph as opposed to the line and the stanza. The one thing that makes these bits of prose poetic is the specific gravity of each individual word. They seem to have a greater weight and a terminal character that words in conventional prose don't have. In reading conventional prose, language erases itself so that you can continue, I believe. Whereas in prose poems,language adheres. It doesn't go away as easily as it does in conventional novels.

It retains a sort of primacy...

That's right. And unfortunately, in The Continuous Life, those prose passages are very prosy and have a very marginal relationship to poetry. I wanted to have a fatter book,so I put them in.

Some of them have, thematically, a relationship to poetry. And others are literary, like the Kafka letters or "From A Lost Diary."

"Travel" is sort of poetic in that it has driving rhythm. In "Chekov: A Sestina," the sentences follow the order of the sestina. I mean, that is very plain; it's a Chekov parody, or pastiche.

But it relates to poetry because I've done something that you do

in poems to prose. I didn't think The Monument was poetry. It was a meditation on a serious matter, but done in a very lighthearted way, I thought. Now,it seems more and more like poetry to me and less and less like prose. Maybe because the sections seem so much more dependent on each other, they seem woven together in a particular way. Maybe I think it's more and more poetic because it's about poetry.

You studied painting at Yale after attending Antioch.

You've said that it was a teacher at Antioch who made you want to write, and then you came here and discovered you weren't a very good painter— Well, I wasn't bad. But I wasn't as good as some of the other people.

What led you to choose to pursue the one discipline over the other?

I took English courses and I did extremely well. They said that I wrote nice papers. That turned my head a little. I wrote a few poems; they published them in the Yale Literary Magazine. Then I published one in The Yale Review. I just got more and more interested in poetry. I'd always read it; I'd always liked reading it.

I'd always carry Wallace Stevens around with me. I hated my painting, that was the other thing. It wasn't so much that I found other people so much more talented, although they were.

It's just that the paintings I did, I couldn't live with. Well, the poems I did were horrible too, but I could live with them somehow.

You've stayed close to painting though. Your monograph on Hopper came out last year, and a book on William Bailey in 1987. Your poetry often has a very strong sense of the visual.

Yeah, I think so. Well...I've started painting again. A little. And I'll continue to do it with increasing fervor, I think. I love painting. I love being with painters. There's a kind of wistfulness, a sadness, in my attentions. Really, I wish I were doing it. I wish I could relax enough to do it and not demand that I be good. Just enjoy doing it regardless of how terrible my paintings were.

Maybe I can do that now...relax enough to create a little ugliness. But I'm very envious of my friends who paint. I think that it's the best thing that one could possibly be.

Even better than a poet?

I'd much rather be a painter. Poetry's so hard. It's just words on a page. But paintings are these big canvases with so much going on. These wonderful objects. A poem isn't an object. A poem is nothing. It doesn't even have a shape in the mind. I find poems very airy. On the other hand, when I'm writing well, I'm very happy. And happy with poetry. I don't mean to downplay the

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importance of poetry for me. I don't want to suggest that I'm unhappy as a poet. I'm very pleased that I'm a poet. I will not die a disappointed man because I wasn't able to paint. Poetry has certainly been very fulfilling. But I still wish I were a painter.

I lack courage, I think. If I had some assurance that I would be even average as a painter, I would do it.

Well, I'm glad I caught you before you changed professions.

Does it have anything to do with outside recognition, or is it purely an internal thing?

Oh,do.

It's an internal thing. The worst paintings in the world get recognition from the outside. Some of the most monstrous painters that have ever painted are some of our best known painters now. So that's not a problem. God knows, I could probably paint paintings that would be shown at the Whitney every day of the week...

But that wouldn't mean that you were satisfied with them.

Me too.

I have an obnoxious question to ask...

You warned me when I spoke to you last that you might be "fresh" when we spoke tonight. So I have a fresh question. How do you do that?

I don't know. If I knew, I probably wouldn't do it. Then I wouldn't wait around all day for lightning to strike. Or wait two weeks for lightning to strike. I would know just how to begin.

And I would know just how to end. So I wouldn't debate for weeks over whether I can end the poem this way or should I end it another way...1 am no more adept at beginning and ending poems than I ever was.

Oh no. It wouldn't mean that they were any good. In fact, being shown at the Whitney would probably be a sign that they weren't any good at all.

Do you have periods when the lightning just refuses to strike?

You don't write fiction anymore. Why?

It keeps striking others.

Well, I didn't think I had much of a gift. I did that one book and it's amusing; a couple of the stories worked out...but it was such a struggle. It's not the way I think. I actually did start a story again after all these years, but now I've decided to make it into a one-act play. I'm going to write a couple of one-act plays; they're going to be funny. I like humor...and these are pretty wacky plays.

And you can see it from far off, and you're counting the seconds—

Are you writing poetry as well?

I've written a few new poems. I should have a book done within the year. And then I have a book of essays coming out at the end of'96 or in early '97. I just sent it in to Knopf; I don't even know what it's called yet. I'm working all the time. Eavan Boland and I are doing a book for Norton on forms and free verse. I have lectures I have to write— I usually talk about painting. Every time I get up in the morning, there's something I gotta do. I never get done. I'm always waking up in the middle of the night and thinking,"Jesus Christ, how am I gonna do this today?" Maybe my desire to paint is just a way of escaping all of this literary responsibility that's mounted up over the years.

What do you think?

I think that if you want to paint, you should paint.

Good. I'll paint.

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Right: Oh there it is! It's striking Simic again! It's striking John Hollander or Jorie Graham or somebody. It's avoiding me.

I wonder what Hollander would think about a lightning theory.

He probably doesn't. He can just sit down and write.

Well, I think he thinks of the writing of verse as a discipline. It's a craft, and you have to have the formal tools before you can dispose of them.

Oh,I agree absolutely. I would expect that of a poet.

A quality of surrealism is frequently achieved in your work. It seems that this quality, the mythic proportion acquired by objects and places which should be very familiar, allows you to articulate basic, existential truths. Do you think about that consciously, or does the poem make it that way?

I understand what you mean. First of all, I think that all poets are surrealists. They depend on chance as much as they do their reason. I mean, what the surrealists did was— I hate to use the contemporary word— "privilege" accident or chance over ratio-

nality. And most of their efforts went into establishing that primacy. I also think that things are sometimes better seen when they're removed from their usual context. It's one of the ways we can experience the world anew,or parts of the world anew. If things are in a new place, or if we rearrange the world,suddenly it takes on a luster it had lost. And we fall in love with it again.

We are attracted to it again, where we had begun to ignore it because it seemed so settled, so finished with offering us anything in the way of absorbing experience.

So do you think that part of the strange transformational power of poetry has to do with a poem as S way of seeing?

We throw around this word "accessible": "Is it accessible to the reader?"

Accessibility can be ruinous to a poem. If you play to an imagined reader, what's to stop you from writing to the least common denominator? And ending up with something like journalism, which is what's happened to a lot of poetry. In an effort to communicate with a reader who is deemed to be of average intelligence — or less — the poem becomes a poem of average intelligence. Or less. I believe it's the reader's responsibility to do whatever it takes to come to terms with the poem. Many things in this life are very difficult and circular and prolonged and don't reveal themselves immediately. So why should a poem be any different? •

Oh yes. Absolutely. I mean, I don't think poems are didactic in that way. I don't think poets set out to alter the way people see the world. But I think it's one of the byproducts; it's what happens. Views of the world are revised through the reading of poems. We experience things differently. Or we suddenly realize what our experience meant. The experience of the poem isn't our experience until we've read the poem; it's usually derived from some experience on the point of the poet. But whatever the experience is has a lasting effect on the way we experience.

That is, if we read attentively.

What does it mean to be a reader of poetry?

I think for people who read poetry, a lot of poetry, it's a strange addiction. They're not reading to escape, as they would if they were a reader offiction. There are no characters to identify with; there are no elaborate twists of plot that keep you up until they're resolved. The knowledge that one derives from reading a poem is hard to put your finger on. It's something else. Just what the experience is made of, I don't know. I don't know what happens to me when I really like a poem a great deal. It's not as if! were building castles in my mind or anything like that, because there's nothing in your mind. It's very airy and abstract.

It's an experience with language, and it has to do with an experience of rapture and illumination.

A kind of transport...

That's what it is. It's hard to get people to read that way; people always want to understand. The imposition of reason is crushing. Courses are taught, not to prepare the student or the reader for the experience of poetry, or to lead him towards an experience of what poetry is, but to understand and to know what's going on in a poem, almost as if the experience of a poem were unnecessary. Or almost as if the experience of reading a poem didn't exist.

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Karacabey Levni Sinanoklu pencil on paper, 7 3/4" x 5 1/2

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ink on paper,

15"x 11 1/3"

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Skye Lavin

Grace I just want to doze and watch the late afternoon sun filter through the porthole and listen to the waves piling to each side of the ferry as it glides through the water. Instead, I listen to Grace's husband who sits beside me, talking about Martha's Vineyard, about the house they've rented there and the home they've left behind. His voice is slow and emotional, like a tropical breeze, always on the verge of tapering off into a sensual oblivion. Marooned in a short row of hard, uncomfortable seats, I ride the highs and lows of his voice, willing to follow them wherever they take me,even when they make me want to hug my arms to my chest and squeeze my eyes tight rather than look down at all the truth and distress. I am in love with his wife Grace.

"Plugs along, the farm," Will says. He and Grace work the apple orchard that Will inherited,fourth generation, when his father died. He is married to those old, gnarled trees as much as he is married to Grace. Every fall they produce hard apples, speckled light red and yellow, and every spring, Grace finishes a novel. I visit as much as I can, and it's become apparent that the coming of her books has eclipsed the coming of the apples. Her last book was sad, and it sold well.

"Whole," Will continues,"people are whole when they're rising with the sun. It takes sweat, and if you smell ripe, well, ripe is an honest smell. It takes too much out of Grace, the chores go on and on, but I don't know,I'd slop pigs over a vacation, any day." He stops and looks around, making sure Grace hasn't heard his blasphemy.

I see her standing on the outer deck, looking out at the sea.

Her hands are firmly clasped behind her back, and even though she is turned away from us, I know that her lips are pursed and her eyes are keen on the seagulls and the island on the horizon.

Will nods his head up and down, agitated. His smile breaks wide and nervous across his face, and his pupils dilate. He tries again.

"Oh,Edwin will remember to bring the sheep from behind the chicken coop. He will." He reaches out and taps my shoulder, tentatively affectionate."Are you glad to be with us, Thea?"

"Of course," I say. I'm used to Will. He speaks in blocks of words that don't always fit together right, but I can read him fairly easily. I can almost see the point he's trying to make swimming

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urgently around and around in his eyes as his lips struggle to get the sentiment across. Other times he seems desperate, as if he's hiding underneath a cloud of words, telling himself over and over again: I won't lose Grace, I won't lose Grace. Today it is a little bit of both, and he is eloquent. This trip is a chance, he is telling me, maybe a last one.

The night before, I had read a bedtime story to Ben and Hannah,a story about the little engine that could, the one that kept saying "I think I can, I think I can," as it huffed and heaved up a hill. Ben and Hannah had each leaned into the soft hollows under my armpits, curling closer and closer as the story went on. The wind banged up against the window frame, the thin walls shook, and a gust took the husk of a corncob doll and blew it off the sill, through the crumpled sheets and Golden books, and right off the bed. Grace slipped in behind us, pulled Hannah onto her knee, closed her eyes and listened. My voice went falsetto, and I infused it with everything I knew about life, that long, hard thing, which isn't much. Ben and I huddled together, and held our breaths in suspense. That rickety farmhouse was held together by duct tape and spit, and everybody in it knew that Grace had better places to be.

I looked up as the story ended, noticed the lamplight falling soft on her face and glistening eyes. She seemed beautiful, almost resting. She raised her arm and shielded her eyes with one translucent wrist, and smiled, gently."You caught the spirit of that story, Thea," she said. She sounded wistful. Ben fished his way closer to my ribs, both of us gazing at his mother. She pulled off Hannah's scuffed brown shoes, one by one, and set them lightly on the bedside table. "You'll make it up any hill you try to climb." She didn't once catch my eyes, not even when she kissed me good night.

The boat cuts smoothly through mile after mile of little waves. I cross my legs and let my head rest against Will's shoulder, barely. The hair on his arm prickles, and his breath quickens. I am close enough to feel the warmth from his skin, and the breeze brushes over my face and neck, comforting me. As he relaxes, his breathing slows, lulled by closeness. The breeze picks up the sweat and the hassle, and stirs up my hair, until my long red curls fly everywhere, up into Will's face and onto his cotton button-down shirt and into the grainy salt air. I look lazily out at the water through the haze of hair and light. I have never been to Martha's Vineyard before. I feel as if I am at the edge of the world.

The boat tilts up, then down,fast and sharp. My head almost falls into Will's lap, and the jolt snaps me further into my doze. I have almost fallen asleep, across his thin legs and new jeans, when I remember the kids. I sit up, embarrassed, and look around for Ben and Hannah. They are fine, both up near the prow. Hannah hangs from the railing, laughing so hard she looks like she's about to split in half. Ben stands still, looking frail and stunned by the sun and flecks of spray. Will is looking at them too."They are beautiful kids, really fine," I say. He can be shy,

but he takes my congratulations well, smiling appreciatively and nodding his head. It seems as if he has been waiting for me to notice."They are good kids," he says.

Both kids have inherited Will's long delicate-boned frame and almond shaped eyes. They have spent the summer reading books down by the pond, and it shows on their blushed, tan skin and in their bright, alert eyes. As we rubbed sun tan lotion on them that morning, Grace and I had joked that only flowers and children get that perfect peach color. Grace still stands alone by the railing. Her head is thrown back, and it jogs with each bump of the boat. She is wearing big, silver sunglasses, so I can't tell if she is sleeping on her feet or lost in a dark rapture. Ben runs over to tell her something, but when he tugs on her shirt, she doesn't respond. He looks up at her in awe, and runs back to Hannah. This is a family of lovers.

The ferry's blow horn sounds out. It is so loud that I imagine they can hear it on the shore and will come running out to greet us, naked Indians with spears on their backs and babies glued to their hips. Then I catch sight of a strip of stores that hang out over the water, bulging with signs and souvenirs, and remember that this is a tourist town. Grace wakes up on the deck, and puts her hands over her ears, cringing under the long, unbearable blasts. She walks towards the stairs, teeters down them, and stands at the bottom step. She looks as if she doesn't know if she wants to join us, and I wonder if I should guide her over and act as interpreter. I am about to stand up and run over to her when a blonde guy in a sailor suit holds out his hand and offers to help her down the last step. She laughs lightly and accepts. Will perks up and looks over. So do I. The blonde guy has an earring in his ear and a tattoo of a butterfly on his upper arm. He makes conversation with her, and she flicks her long, chestnut hair back and forth, back and forth. We strain to listen. She asks him about the navy. He tells her he was stationed in Scotland for a year, and that she reminds him of the women there, deep. She asks him how he knows she is deep, and he tells her he can see it in her eyes. Wild too, he says. She laughs, and doesn't correct him.

Will hadn't moved at all, but now he can't keep still, so he leans forward as if he is about to grab at something with his bony hands. His mouth is a little open, and he looks like a fish on a hook.

I wonder if Will has an ulcer yet. Grace asks the guy about his uniform, and then stands close to him and peers at his insignia, her face intent with mock interest. I

pretend not to notice and slouch against the rail. The guy starts to finger his muscles as he stares at her,flexing them slightly. His pants are tight, and he is not much older than I am.

I stand up and stamp my foot. It echoes loudly on the metal floor."Well, we're almost there, Grace." I speak slowly and distinctly, as if to a naughty child."Do you have your things together?" I don't care if I am being rude. I look around me, impatiently.

Grace's jaw hangs open, and then she starts to laugh. She laughs like someone who hasn't laughed in a long time. Her expression had been guarded, but now the thin, white light of relief flashes across her face, and all the pent-up hurt rushes to the surface. The laughter illuminates her character, and she looks preternaturally sensitive and aware. Will jumps to his feet and stands still, smiling at her as she laughs. He looks away then, and begins to pick up scattered books and sunglasses, throwing his arms around as if making point after point in a heated conversation. The sailor wanders off. Grace comes over and puts her arms around me. I can't feel her skinny, jittery arms at all; they are too remote from warmth.

She touches my cheek with her hand, and her weak smile is a signal that the awkwardness is over. Grace looks over at Will then, and smiles harder. She shouts to the kids who are still having a great time at the prow: Ben points to the island again and again, and Hannah pretends to be the figurehead, her pointed little face and squared shoulders holding fast and brave against the wet wind.

Grace's voice wafts over the crowd,"Martha's Vineyard,straight ahead," and they both come,obedient children. As the ferry glides into the slip, Will boosts Hannah onto his back and Grace and I ready ourselves with the bags. We make our way through the crowd, a tough, tired group, barely managing not to lose each other in the push of people.

Hannah begs for cotton candy and soda, and I blindly follow the sound, as steady an orientation as a radio S.O.S.

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"Thea, you up yet?"

"No." I pull the pillow down over my head, shutting out the morning. The door cracks open, and I am covered in a rush of little people. Smooth, hard heels gouge my stomach, and tiny toes, like pink dancing mushrooms,fly through the air. In the bed sheets, in my face, pulling away the covers, leaving me shivering and blinking in my nightgown as the bed bounces up and down, up and down.

"I'll eat y'all like a pair of raw oysters," I growl. They jump off the bed, and Hannah gives me a crafty look before barreling off. The clock says 7:30, of all ungodly hours. I flop back onto the bed. Two hours later, I wake to the smell of coffee and clinking silverware and low voices.

A slight breeze comes in off the ocean at the early tide, and I stumble out of bed with my eyes still unfocused, heading for it, past the smiling faces and cereal boxes and tea pots and good mornings. I open the screen door and my eyes at the same time.

The ocean stretches big and blue to the horizon. Sea gulls wing through the clear sky, and a cormorant perches on a pole ten feet past the shore. The drifting boats are serene with their plucky colored sails, and the sand is so bright, sparkling with conch shells and dried seaweed and smooth, wave-beaten rocks.

It could be the Mediterranean, or the inside of a plastic souvenir pen, paper boats dipping back and forth in a chemical bath. I breathe the salt air, and consider diving in, right over the marigolds and tile fence and beach. I feel a polite tap on my shoulder. Grace thrusts a coffee cup into my hand, and smiles into my face, her hazel eyes expanding. She looks at me the way I look at the ocean, as if I were unreal and wondrous. I thank her profusely."For everything," I say.

Grace invites me to walk with her later, to have a private chat. I agree,foggily, and follow her back into the house. There are four cheeses and some grapes laid out on a bread board, and the table has a centerpiece of black-eyed Susans. I sit down to eat, and Grace tells me that there is a tiny garden of wildflowers behind the boathouse. My bedroom window overlooks it, I tell her. I smelled them in the night. Lots of honeysuckle, I think.

Will passes me part of the New York Times. We talk about the headlines. Neither of us is well-informed, but we pretend. I notice a pile of books balanced on an embroidered footstool, mostly poetry. I don't recognize many of the titles. I pick up a book with a broken spine, and turn it over: Cities of the Interior.

Anais Nin. I put it back without comment.The taste of goat cheese lingers in my mouth.

"Have you explored the place?" Will asks. When I tell him that I haven't, he offers to show me around. It is an old house with steep, narrow staircases, oddly shaped rooms, and several squat Victorian bathtubs."The plumbing is testy," he warns, "but the furnishings are spectacular." He mentions that the art on the walls was painted by the original owner, an eccentric.

Most of the pictures are of the sea, in oranges and browns and

10 YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

reds. The waves are thick, and the paint curves off of the canvas in irregular staccatos and crescendos. There is a blue and purple nude in a back bedroom. It looks violent and moody, and neither of us mention it.

Will is self-contained, and until he shows me the master bedroom, I have no idea of his thoughts. He points out a Tiffany lamp with dark, silk tassels, and a sea-man's trunk bound in blackened iron at the foot of the huge, unmade bed. I admire these things, and my glance takes in the whole room,grey-green wallpaper, the stiff-backed chairs, and the two windows that look out over the water. A heavy mahogany wardrobe stands between the two windows, anchoring the room. The smell of brine and must and mothballs is strong.

I am glad to have been given a small, bright room in the back. It has a miniature yellow chair, and I am free to climb out the window and into the pure sweet smell of honeysuckle and primrose. The roar of the ocean must haunt this room, I think. I lean out of the window and look down at the clusters of sealgrey boulders covered with rings of barnacle shell and green seaweed etchings. It would be a long way to fall.

Will sits on his bed. He traveled in barn shoes, and I can see them tucked under the bed. His sweat has seeped through the old cracked vinyl, and the shoes are dusted in chaff. A few pieces of straw are stuck in the tongue. Will seems nervous, and his skinny fingers reach down absentmindedly. He picks out a piece of straw and chews on it. Grace has dressed him in chinos and an Irish linen shirt. He looks uncomfortable, chewing the straw and sliding around in his new clothes. I sit beside him and

Singularity Slight and long, a fine print of sky levels rush and light on the wet lick left by the backing tide. Sun jumps in sharp, short fires along the well of the near wave. Dawn wind slims to a holding calm. One bird, barely shifting, stakes himself at large, alone on the open sand. His eye walks over the flats around him. I sit down.

The sea moves. She heaves and shouts and cries out like a wide woman done unto by a hurried man. She rolls about her bed and shrinks into herself. She is unwell.

Rachel Dilworth

lean on my knees, cupping my chin in my hands. There is not much to say.

I consider the possibilities. We could be ecstatic and talk about tidal patterns and whaling and let the waves and the place rock us into benevolence. I know by the clatter of dishes downstairs that that would be a lie. Will could tell me about all his problems with Grace, but he won't because he thinks I am

young and that it would confuse me. He's probably right. I could confess that I love his wife, and I could tell him all the reasons why: the way her inner life leaks out her eyes, the way she dances sometimes instead of talking, the way her books are so ribald and blundering and wise. I won't because Will knows these things already, and it's a hard passion to share.

The silence doesn't make me feel stuck, but swept away.

Will twists his cap in his hands and chews the now-frayed straw.

He spits it out then, and turns his head towards me. I look into his eyes, and at first only my own face glints back at me from the surface patch of white shine. I read the expression again and again, and each time it gets deeper. An amber light pools into his dark brown eyes, and the crescent of his lower eyelids fill.

His pupils are gold. I am struck, again and again, as if by storm waves, by the sight of this golden wasteland, a revelation.

It can be painful to stare into a person's eyes for long; there is something too alike about love and pain to make sense of hard, primal looks. I pull back to take in his whole silhouette, precise and vivid against the peeling wallpaper. I want suddenly to be an artist, to get the dream-meaning of the light and sunleathered flesh onto a canvas, to make it a portrait, to hang it on the wall in an ornate gilt-frame. And before I can even imagine the finished product, I am remembering home,the dandelion

pastures and sunken dirt roads and the sun in the orchard. It is so right that I groan. Will's hand flies out and touches my shoulder. He seems a little alarmed, or just surprised. He lets his hand rest there."You remind me of Grace," he says softly."God, how she was at twenty."

I can hear the shuffle offeet on the staircase, and Will stands up and moves to the window. He doesn't hurry, but he also doesn't turn around when Grace swings through the doorway, clutching a book in one hand and the kids in another. She is gay and animated, but she shoots me a frustrated look over the kids' heads.

"The darling children are going to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, while...drum roll please...sitting in the wardrobe." I laugh and catch Hannah's eye. She looks unimpressed."Won't that be fun," Grace adds. Ben opens the wardrobe door and peers inside. There are piles offolded white sheets. Grace lifts him in, and then Hannah. Hannah knocks on the back of the wardrobe and rolls her eyes. Ben flips open the book and begins to read in a high, tremulous voice. At eight, he is old enough to sense tension, and has learned the benefit of immersing himself in fantasy.

"Drag out that polka dot bikini, Thea, and let's hit the road." Grace says. I snap to attention with a mock salute."Yes, ma'am." When we spin out of the driveway a few minutes later, I turn and look back at the house. Will is still bracing himself in the window frame,silently watching the waves roll in.

The road winds through an an airy tunnel of trees, and Grace tilts her head to let the wind buffet her neck. She seems captivated by it all, as if after too many land-locked months of only the loamy smell of dirt, she at last breathes air soft, smooth, and rich enough.She points out landmark after landmark: Walter Cronkite's pet organic farm, an open-air market that only sells clams and flowers, a marzipan bakery, and a boardedup Victorian mansion with overgrown topiary animals out front.

It is impressive, this rarefied environment. We talk about my career plans and school. I feel a little bit drunk. Grace mentions her mid-life crisis, and I nod,sympathetically. I wonder vaguely about Will, if he is impressed with this place, too. After a while, I don't think about him anymore.

We overshoot the spot where the path joins the road, and circle around. It is barely visible, bushes push in on both sides of the narrow trail. As we enter, I notice that the car sinks a little; the dry sand shifts under the weight. Branches tap against the windshield, and we have to go slow or the tires will spin. The drive goes on for at least a mile, and on the way I have to get out and unlock two different iron gates. Tucked in among the moss and twigs and young trunks, there are little red flowers shaped like buttons. I make Grace stop the car, but refuse to tell why.

Waving the blooms, I run back before she is too confused, and present them, laughing. She tucks a sprig into the band of her straw hat, and beams over at me with warm, private eyes. I am

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

II

embarrassed, and we both grow still, anticipating the ocean.

The woods finally clear, and the sky opens up and surprises us, right on cue. Actually the blue is faded and filled with drifting cumulus clouds, not very dramatic. We park, the only car in the square of crushed grass. The view to the back is countryside natural, fields of light green reeds folding into darker green bluffs. It reminds me of a serene Japanese watercolor of an American prairie, painted by an immigrant as he longs for the old country. It reminds Grace of a Beatrix Potter illustration.

The important thing is that we both see it, not just with an open-mouthed gawk or a forehead-wrinkling squint, but with our minds.

I turn around. In the direction of the ocean, the blue and the reds meet halfway down the sky, the color fulminating in a thin bright line above the shaking reed tips. Grace tells me that the line is a reflection of the water."The entire ocean condensed into a thin line," she says."Imagine that." I think about the graphite scratches that sloped across the last letter she sent me, page after page."I believe it," I reply."Why not?"

We walk over a wooden bridge, and stop to look at the creek underneath. The water runs over a bed of stones, and I can see our shadows in the water. Two small heads bend towards one another, topped by my frizzy hair and Grace's wide-brimmed hat.

I am apt to forget that I am a real person who actually exists in time and space. I remember now,shy. We look at our reflections a long time. Grace shivers, and lets her eyes go stony grey with longing. I want to take her hand. As we walk to the shore, the exhilaration swells. She touches my shoulder to point out a seagull, and I understand,suddenly, this place.

"The beauty slithers everywhere," I say, watching the graceful white bird take flight into a clear sky.

Grace's reply is a gush of pleasure:"That's because it's in the motion of things, Thea, underneath the appearance." She starts to laugh, and runs to the water, one precise footstep after another. I follow, kicking away at the wet sand.

The waves lap the sand beige, but Grace stops running in a dry, white dune out of the water's reach. She surveys the beach carefully, and except for a family playing naked in the waves, there is no one. They look like sand people,steaming, tan blurs half-mile away. She sits gingerly, stretching out her legs, into a rather awkward sunbathing pose. She smiles at me,and lets a bit of sand run through her fingers. I sit cross-legged a little ways away from her, and close my eyes, and turn my face up to the sun, as ill am intent on soaking up the rays. I feel clumsy and squirm around. When I open my eyes she has her sunglasses on, and I feel very alone on this big beach. Grace begins to talk, and strangely it is about nothing important, at first:"We're going to the carousel tonight, if you and I make it back from this wonderful, wonderful adventure. And of course we will go back."

I break in — "Let's just..." I stutter a bit,"stay here."

Grace swats away my interruption. I resolve to keep my mouth shut, and she continues:"At my wedding, we had a

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

maypole, and Thea, I thought then that it was the most grand thing. Will and I kicked off the dance,standing around this long, silver pole that seemed to come out of the darkness and chaos of the night sky and hit the ground like a shiver of silver lightening. He and I, we picked up our streamers, mine was light yellow, I remember, and danced around the pole, all alone in front of the crowd. Everyone oohed and aahed and I knew this marriage was it, the soul mate bonanza, and he and I danced and I twirled my skirt around me, light and sure, and he, he swayed his hips.

There was something in that, the circling, that made things holy." Grace pauses, and her face seems to deepen and unfold. "I may have been the biggest idealistic fool that day. Or maybe not, I'll never know for sure." She takes off the glasses and looks at me now. There is a kind of confused joy in her eyes."On the carousel tonight, with those ferocious wooden horses." I nod."It will be nice to watch the kids on the horses. Maybe you'll join them,Thea. I like the idea of that, you on the horses. Maybe • you'll ride for me, all alone up there."

In spite of myself, I am truly shocked."Sure," I growl from low in my throat. My left leg begins to tremble, and her voice rings in my ears, for me... for me... for me. Grace puts her hand on my knee, to steady it, and her face is full of questions. I don't have any answers.

I say I am going swimming, and pinwheel down to the water, letting it be a dance. I start to frolic around,jumping and running around in the waves, looking anywhere but behind me. I am afraid, really afraid. That isn't right at all. I run into the water, and dive in, and stay submerged for a long, dilated moment. All the pressure seems to slip my insides back where they are supposed to be, and by the time I come up for air, I am kicking myself. I should have kissed her. What had I been waiting for? I turn back to the beach casually, pretending to wrench myself away from the important work of looking out at the endless floating froth. Grace has gotten up and is walking down the beach, looking serious, heavy in thought. She bends over, picks up a shell or pebble, I can't tell which, and tosses it out into the water. It isn't an angry toss, but a fanciful, light-hearted one that makes a loose arc before plunking into the water. It floats there, resilient and mocking, refusing to sink. I feel better.

I drift through the water, now dipping in, now gliding in the waves, now ducking down and standing on my head,flipping my feet around in the cool air.

It was as if we were two halves of an hourglass, she and I, one pouring into the other, and between us we could play with time; time was our toy, and our tool and our sustenance. I could see it in her face and the way she was, it was the way I was going to be, either by nature, or because I was determined to become it, right or not. It was as if I wanted to touch the time I had ahead of me, I wanted to see what it was made of, and how it cried, and came apart, and grew. And she probably wanted to get back inside the person she used to be, before she was so tied down,to see how it would have been if things had worked out

differently, if she had made different choices. No wonder we wanted to claw at each other.

When I come out of the water, Grace comes up to me,and I stand there, and I resolve not to run in the other direction. Her words come out in one big rush,"Thea you are better than any husband could ever be." And then she kisses me, this hard kiss of thin lips and big teeth. I feel eight again, timid, but then our mouths get loose and free, and I reach up and put my hands on her shoulders, and they are so small, so thin. I feel dazed, and sink gratefully into this new openness.

The wooden horses are works of art, necks thrusting and bucking, manes frozen in wild tufts, saddle and reins in garish colors. Hannah sits on a yellow mare with flowers strung around its neck. She is earnest about this ride, waving at the crowds, patting her horse. She is fetching, and knows it, sneaking looks at herself in the mirrors that shield the organ within the carousel's hollow central pillar. Ben has chosen a bright red bench, instead of a mount. He cringes with his book in front of his face, sure that he is too old for rides. I, on the other hand, have chosen the most out-of-control horse, a snarling black beauty. My thighs grip the slippery porcelain, and my feet nearly reach the aluminum floor.

The carousel jolts to a start, the organ jangling out a peppy tune. I watch Grace's face in the mirrors. She is standing next to Will, and his arm brushes against hers. Will looks almost relaxed. They are talking to each other, little soft words that don't carry over the crowd.

As the carousel brings me to the front, Grace waves at me, and it is a normal wave, no dramatic flourish, no private sign. I feel silly and exposed, perching on this big horse. I slide off the saddle to one side. I clutch at the silver pole, so as not to fall off, and it is milky-smooth metal. At first it is hard to get a grip, the pole goes loopy and flexible under my groping hands, but then I pull myself secure in my seat. The pole fascinates me; it is as if I am a potter, shaping a stream of liquid mercury into a perfectly round pole. Like a kid, I get lost in this, and the tinny music jangles in my ear, and I ride and ride and ride, the circles overlapping, binding me to this horse that lives and breathes and races only underneath me and to music.

When I notice Grace again, she is radiant, and Will is beside her, and she doesn't twist away, she stands beside him, almost sweetly. Her glance is heated and sharp, but, up here on the horse, I don't feel conflicted anymore. I am free. •

1.

11•0"...00.

Marie Watt Etchings

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

I

Rachel Dilworth God's Country

The North opens onto itself: so much god laid out.

I had expected the trappings at the checkpoint— gun cradles grinning, luridly hunkering in the midrift of the guardtower; sandbags building another Babel, still unsuccessful; stone hackles raised up along the through road, slowing motion; sign after sign of warning.

The arresting thing was the small green light cautiously perched on the side, directing the rite of passage into a coming age, into a new country.

The eager wire services never bothered to relay the beauty, the green on green again in gregarious extension to every edge of a rolling world.

Wide flanks of sheep-shorn field surround the lone road here.

The cut of everything seems low and broad.

The late-light sky is old romantic— diaphanous violet crusting it like the skin of hot cream, now and then clouds the indigo of high religion.

An ellipse has opened in the upper air.

White fire leans from it in planks as if God's one good eye were leaking down hard direction to heaven, turning its burning gaze, finally, on this country, weeping vision, wreaking clarity.

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

Along the road I come to ruins— a castle broken to the earth, in a bad state.

It is only a vestige, an echo, but its strange, stiff power is still evident.

An infant spring lamb trapped inside is bleating a quavering plea for rescue.

He is helpless in that stone enclosure, but not abandoned.

His mother cries and cries to guide him out, shrieking ever louder until he finally finds her meaning and staggers to her.

The ram stands with them then, considering his child, proud and fearful at once.

4

Panos Kokinnias

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

15

4

Ashish Mahajan Li thograph ,

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

10 X 6 7/8"

Simone Dilaura Charcoal on Gessoed paper,

10"

x

12"

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

17

Kate Seward

When All Breaks Loose

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

If the angels knew anything, there was gossip to be had about Paradise. God wanted his coffee black. Raphael went about looking as if someone had struck him in the back. It rained and rained.

Michael's temper was short and he snapped at harp practice, muttering something about morons, how he couldn't believe that after centuries no one could fucking tune to E. There was whispering around the celestial throne, but no one had the guts to ask the Big Guy what was wrong. Meanwhile, back in the garden, Adam and Eve were having a rough time of it. How could you be so stupid? Adam shouted.

Eve sat weeping, an apple core in her hand. Adam shook his head and clutched his rib. Some companion, he said. What a complete waste offlesh. Satan, a beer in hand,smiled at the fruit of his day's labor.

Come on, now. Supposedly these two jerks had reason.

But they made their own bowers, they had to lie in them.

And oh, what a story for the boys back in hell!

4

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

Panos Kokkinias

Gong Zizhen

Some Poems of Flowers Translated from the Chinese by Chi-hung Yim

Confucius once remarked, "Atfifty I understood the Decree of Heaven." Gong Zizhen (1792-1841), whose literary name was Dingan, did not have the chance to attain such a tranquil state of mind. He only lived to the age offorty-nine, and he died an inglorious death. He is believed to have been poisoned to death by a certain lover of his, or by the lover of his lover. This alone gives some idea of Gong Zizhen's eccentric lifestyle.

Gong was, however, more than a dandy. He was a patriot, poet, and scholar whose interests embraced many diverse fields: political reform,foreign trade, geography, archaeology, Confucian classics, and Buddhism. In his questfor a public career, however, he failed utterly. After five attempts, Gong did manage to earn the degree required to gain a public appointment. But he never rose beyond the position ofa minor official. Nevertheless, Gong has the distinction of being a leading poet and one of the most influential thinkers of his time. His influence was even felt in the May Fourth literary tradition of twentieth-century China.

Flowers are recurrent images in Gong Zizhen's lyrical expression.

Selected and translated below are some of his most lovely poems of flowers— blossomingflowers,falling flowers, fallen flowers, "heavenly"flowers. One receives the impression that Gong was not only obsessed with flowers but was also possessed by them. Through these few poems, we are invited into Gong's poetic vision, in which we meet him as the frustrated scholar, the romantic husband and lover, the Buddhist layman, and above all, the eccentric. His poems offlowers are his autobiography, should we pursue an allegorical reading.

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

On a Spring Day,

Thinking of the Peach-blossoms on the Mountain, I sent This Poem [to My Wife].

Drenched I find the east wind,sweeping in from the sea.

Green and spring have returned, the Chang'an people say.

Spring has returned, yet it shuns this poor alley.

The flowers on the mountain must have bloomed, I realize.

On the mountain— the flowers bloom; The sun shines.

For whom do you wear such arresting makeup, So pleasing and so subtle?

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At night she burns a censer, pressing the ashes of the fragrant herbs tight, In the morning she seals her tears in a letter, to send to her faraway man.

The flame of her powder dissolved into the ink, the ink all the more shining and smooth.

Just yesterday I received a "letter from Jingnan":

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"My dear one, please hold on to your aim, Do not sing'Summoning the Recluse.' 2 Do not be nostalgic, for the flowers bloom every year, They will wait for you for ten years, until you return to find them."

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For you my beloved, this poem in reply, Attentive and thankful,for the understanding of the peach-blossom: "Do not begrudge the flame of your mirror, For my sake, share some to brighten the flowers.

Do not be stingy with the water with which you clean your face, For me,shower it upon the flowers, lend them the color of your cheeks.

Yet, do not forget the subtle meaning of fragrance and chastity, Do not let the roving butterflies of the garden glimpse the flowers.

Thousands more words would I write to you, But words fall short of my heart."

Peach and plum blossoms of Chang'an grow ever more colorful, Yet they can never match the charm of those on the vernal mountain.

Spring is charming, Yet, solitude engulfs the mountain.

The days of pure zither and jade flagon are long gone.

When again can we play chess by candlelight?

Oh,how can I bear to sit here yearning for the warm spring?

Better go home and serve her by her dressing-table.

1 In Chinese poetry a "letter from Jiangnan" is an expression for a letter from afar.

2 The content of"Summoning the Recluse", written by Zuo Si, is irrelevant in the present context. Gong merely borrows the title of the poem to suggest his wish to become a recluse.

Miscellanies of the year 1839

No.5 Immense sorrow, parting under the slanting sun, My riding whip pointed east, I head for the world's end.

The fallen blossom is not heartless, Turning into spring soil, it nurtures the flowers.

No.26 [Author's note: On the day I departed from the capital, seven li away from the gate I had already gone when I found Wu Hongsheng, a Metropolitan Graduate of my same year, standing on a bridge to wait for my passage. We ordered some tea. In tears, we parted.]

Off we go, my dappled horse engulfed in the falling petals, The thatched tavern in the village ahead is our dwelling.

I hear that someone stands idly on a small bridge.

We take solace in tea, yet we cannot help shedding tears on the fluttering blinds.

No. 205 [Author's note: Missing the peony of the capital.]

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YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

It is a pity that in the south there is no such flower, If you speak of seduction, even the tree peony is less voluptuous!

I remember when I came home in the early hours from the western palace gate, As a gift I lay on her dressing-table some flowers, her mirror a cloudburst of hues!

[The following three poems were apparently composed for Lingxiao, a courtesan Gong met in this year. Lingxiao later became Gong's concubine. One theory about the sudden death of Gong in 1841 is that he was poisoned by Lingxiao because Lingxiao had found a new lover. In the following poems,the "heavenly flower" and the "goddess" can be taken as Lingxiao.]

No.97 [Author's note: Lingxiao is a person's name.]

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I cannot shake off the heavenly flower that clings to my sleeve, I am ashamed that, unlike Shengwen3, I cannot resist temptation.

Some time or other, the historian may bother to relate: "Master Ding encountered Lingxiao in his late forties."

3Shengwen,sravaka in Sanskrit, literally means"one who hears the voice." It originally refers to a disciple of the Buddha. Later, it refers generally to a follower of Hinayana Buddhism, who contemplates the principle of the fourfold noble truth to attain Nirvana.

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It is not enough to call her "exceedingly beautiful", Describing a goddess is no easy matter.

Is she "the soul of the flowering plum," or is she "the shadow of the chrysanthemum"?

How can I bear to compare her to the flowers of this mortal world!

No. 278 [Author's note: When I was still travelling along Shunhe I sent her one more poem,and politely declined her suggestion [of marrying me]. Thereafter I composed no more poems for her. It was on the tenth day of the tenth month that I sent out this poem.Two months later when I returned from the north, I went to Yuanpu again and asked for her. I learned that she had already returned to Suzhou and closed her door to all visitors. The traces of this person's whereabouts and her true feelings are somewhat enigmatic,so I here note.]

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An encounter with the heavenly flower revealed my next life.

She for whom I exited my meditation was determined by past karma.

By a lone lamp in an old tavern I sit, purifying my mind— He whom you see in your dreams is no more than my former self.

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

2,5

Margaret Thomson Collograph, 13 1/4" X 6 3/16"

Todd Polenberg

It's Time For That Waltz Again

My brother in Jerusalem woke up with an inch-long black beetle Twisting its way out of his ear. One minute a ringing buzzing sound, the same sound that I hear when my hands are pressed over my ears or at night without the thin sound of a fan or the computer, and the next a crunch, then a clenched tweezer and it crawls out. It could be a piece of candy except for the thin legs and mandibles, and it doesn't wear a yarmulke or anything. He kills it and every other bug he sees for the next two weeks. Then he comes home and all my friends have shaved their heads but you, and he sits drinking beer and smoking grass with his mimeographed friends on the blankets I've laid out in my backyard.

For the record, I laid them there for my friends, and filled the yard with candles. some of these candles smelled like vanilla and some like raspberries, and sometimes I wish my brother would grow donkey ears and whisper all his worn-out drug narratives, the ones his friends eat up like lemon drops, to the reeds that grow out behind our lawn where you can step on a baby rabbit even if you are as careful as you can be.

We had little chickens in Mrs. Murphy's class in second grade, and when one died we put it in the same cigar box, tan and glossy, that kept your pencils. The sixth graders, presumably, dug them up and flung their feathers across the field where we played "Pickle," and "Come Over Red Rover," and I remember bringing in the trowel for when we buried Them all over again. That word, "trowel" was new to me.Then I found a bird with one wing on the side of the road, but that was ten years later. Each of these animals was much smaller than me but took much longer to go about its business, and scampering about for help, in the field or the road, would have been just another old word.

You would have cried, though, even though I couldn't.

But still I'd like to think that there are sanctuaries for us. Perhaps our bodies, the hairs that cover the inner cavities ofour ears, a thin plaid hatbox, the lid slightly crushed under an oblivious bedpost, moved to give everyone a little more comfort, or your arms, the mattresses pushed together so tightly I can't struggle, twist, or play out my last moments, pushing against the walls of the box which are shaping the sounds and the curves of my spine. Night is coming with its slow ominous ringing, but this time we don't have to tell the whole story but enough to line the causeway with moss-covered trees whose glossy leaves stay thin enough to reveal the veins engraved in their complex, moist skins.

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.1

Todd Polenberg

Bethlehem, NY So it's true that you were born in the same small town, Spoking the wheels of your bicycle with the black-eyed Susans at the edge of the road, the ice-cream man your Pavlov and Mrs. Murphy with the feather in her sky-blue Bonnet playing harpsichord. Every morning she Waved her hand up and down like a seagull's wings Mi re do, and you sang out the clear blue note of your voice, Lips pressed together like a bone-white angel.

Did you see Jesus at night in the stars? Press Your cheek flat against the moon-wet grass And its smell offrankincense, dewy and Perfect? My books were bound with gold, Just like yours, and last week I was in a coffeeshop Talking to a girl whose nametag said "Myrrh," and She didn't understand my friend Jason's story, About the drugs he was taking to make himself Feel better. She gave me a bagel though, and while That was nice it tasted more like a flower than Anything else.

Alicia Wirt Watercolor 5" X 5 7/8"

So each morning with your mouth full you'd wake And sit and believe it as hard as you could. The Winds would blow through, but all the sand in the Desert couldn't add up to one cubit of what you Needed, that they had to stir around and invent the word Begrudging, and of course you cried when it was over, Your parents bowing their heads together in the dim Hall, all grown up now, taller and just as thin, walking and Stalking down the side of the dusty road.

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Immo.

Stephen Weiss

Travel: Points of Departure

Which of you new friends will slip the glass into my ice-cubes?

1.

Was anything accomplished?

No. I returned and fell into a deep sleep.

When I awoke, all was as before.

Now I am supervising construction on project nostalgia.

8.

I am the only observer in the woods, ok: in ovens made of stone, blackberry pies come to life. They are delicious flowers.

2.

Fireflies in Iowa. We were mud-running and got stuck. At 17 years old, Laura Cihac is the most beautiful American I have ever seen.

3.

West on 1-80, late afternoon, the sun hurts my eyes. I hide in the shadows of trucks.

4.

Through prairie heat wave I move into bad lands. Don't tell me ghosts don't walk the backroads: Indians sell feathers at Wounded Knee and I'm a murderer; I visit Wild Bill's grave and lose 20 dollars at the casino.

5.

Trucks like silent buffalo in the night.

6.

I am sick in Boulder. Alisa Hall nurses me with tea.

7.

Kind strangers offer me sleep: Angela of Seattle, maker of journals, handsome, leather-bound.

Here I am with runaways and militants, an ex-convict tells a joke from jail: play hearts for breakfasts?

9.

San Francisco. City of seven hills.

In a park on a Tuesday, I give everything up: imminent departure.

10.

Stay me through the night Johnny Cash. We are crossing Nevada.

11.

Months have passed.

I have almost completed the discovery of Mrs. Patel's secret curry recipe.

12.

I want to leave you all again, but will olive-green flannel sheets not detain me?

Yes. All night I was up writing this poem.

Now I realize it's not a poem.

It's an easel.

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I

Photography Gallery

Elizabeth Kratzig

C.7

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JIMMENN..

Lizzie Skurnick

Wild Kingdom

36

The family is thought of in anthropological terms: That strange tribe with their strange customs.

Dinner at nine. The laundry on the floor. Clocks always, always, set to different times.

There is an older Bear, the largest Bear, with hair the color of a chimney.

Smoke comes out of his eyes.

Smoke comes out of his ears.

There is never enough porridge.

The Monkey waits in the tree.

Water hardens on her face.

She hides her teeth behind her hands and nods her head up up up up— Then she stops to talk to all the neighbors.

(The neighbors' clothes are cut from crinoline and their faces carved from Ivory bars.

Everything about them is clean.

The hands are clean. The mattresses are clean. The dimples are clean.)

Where are the little bears?

The oldest one is telling jokes.

Why does God have such little hands?

Wee paws. That's one joke, split in two.

For station identification— God thinks he's Nelson Rockefeller, today.

This oldest bear gets Most Unobserved.

He waits upstairs with his geodes,spaceships, and rubber-bands.

The youngest bear is yellow and cuddly.

She gets Most Butter Face.

She goes wee wee wee from 9 a.m. to 3:15.

She is the Monkey's afterthought.

This middle bear waits in the grass.

Baa, baa, black sheep— Have you any wool?

A headful.

She gets Most Kissed. She is anybody's anything.

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Lee Passavia

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John Barnard

Last Meal

I put on my shades and stepped out onto the porch. Bill was sitting there in his boxer shorts. He handed me a bottle of water.

"I'm getting fuckin' tired of this." His eye was black and shining in the morning sun. He had a cut over his other eye and there was dry blood under his lip.

"You look great," I said.

"So do you." It was true. I had a few problems of my own.

Celina had slugged him good and then dropped a clay pot of plastic flowers over his head. I took a few fists from an old boyfriend of hers. I had a vague memory of the ground striking the left side of my face. I went inside and turned on the radio. I came back and sat next to him and looked at the high water of the stream as it flowed by. The porch was well-situated, facing the stream, parallel. Past the stream was the mountain. It was big. There was snow in patches near the top. I stared at the mountain for a while, thinking it was good. The radio played My Baby Put Me Down.

Bill held a block of sharp cheese in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other. He handed me a block of cheese.

"That's some sharp cheese," I said, chewing it.

"You know it." He handed me the bread. I took another piece of sharp cheese and ate it with the bread. He picked up his rod.

"Cast or cut bait?" he said.

"Cast."

He cast. The fly bait skimmed the surface as he reeled it in.

"That water's pretty high," he said.

"We may have to move."

"We'll just get some fish out of it." He cast again.

"That's gotta be one big fish."

"Damn big, I'd say." He jerked the line."I'm gonna get one fuckin person-size fish."

We sat on the porch and finished the bread and cheese and then Bill gave up on the fishing.

"We're not doing it again," he said, throwing the rod across the porch.

"Not ever."

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Another whiskey appeared before me. Somebody was in a good mood. It was the third free drink of the night.

"I'm going to run her through." Bill handled his pool cue like a lance. He pointed it at my head.

"You'd never do it."

"The hell I wouldn't." He leaned over the table and smacked the cue ball. It hit three balls. Everything rattled around the table. Bill took the cue and smashed it against the wall. It made a good splintering sound. I watched the pieces fall down. They made a loose spiral pattern.

"Good work," I said. He looked at his work. He was stunned. Celina walked over from the bar.

"Hi boys."

"Hi girl," I said. I felt stupid saying it. I felt stupid saying anything. What the hell was she trying to do?

"What's going on?" She pointed at the ruins of a perfectly good cue.

"He was just saying he was going to stick that thing through your lung."

"What?"

"Just shut up." Bill looked nervous. I figured I had made a mistake.

"I'm getting out of here."

I went to the bar and talked to a woman about Hemingway.

She said she didn't like him. I agreed, just for the hell of it.

Whiskey continued to appear. The woman invited me home to smoke a joint. I was in no condition to refuse anything involving the word home.

I woke up with a small foot in my face. I tried to get my bearings. The sun was coming in from the left. I couldn't figure out what that meant. I stood up and wondered where my pants were.

"Where are my pants?" I asked. I heard a mumble. I pulled on my pants and looked for my.socks. I couldn't find them.

Bill was sitting on the porch when I walked up.

"Where the hell did you go?" He held his hand over his eyes.

"I'm not sure."

"You look like hell."

"I couldn't find my socks." I scratched my head and looked at the stream and then at Bill. "I got here as soon as I could."

"Who was it?" he said. Sharp cheese was in his mouth.

"Someone with small feet."

I regarded Bill's face. It was swollen again. There was more dry blood than usual.

"What happened?" I said.

"Same fuckin' thing."

"Just her?"

"It got pretty ugly. A lot of people. Maybe the whole bar."

"Well done."

"I'm fuckin' tired of this." His forehead wrinkled as he said

7

it."My face hurts and I've got no money. This is the last of the cheese." He offered me some. I declined.

Bill stood in front of the stove and stirred a pot of Kraft macaroni and cheese. .

"You really should eat vegetables sometimes," I said.

"Most diners around here list this as a vegetable." I nodded and lit my cigarette.

"Are you sure you should eat that before going over?"

"Probably not."

"You shouldn't let me stay." I slammed the empty glass on the bar. Red threw his towel over his shoulder and leaned on the polished wood of the bar.

"You're fine," he said, popping beer nuts in his mouth.

"You're not spilling."

"I'm just saying." I jerked my head left, then right. It was still clear."There may be trouble."

Jennifer Dubnau "Why not?" He dumped it out into a bowl."Don't we have any clean spoons?" He rummaged around in the sink. He gave up and shoveled it into his mouth with the big wooden spoon.

"It might give you a cramp."

"I'm not worried." He continued to cram large spoonfuls into his mouth."Besides," he said."I need it to drink." He wiped cheese off his face.

"You probably shouldn't drink."

"No," he said, chewing, holding a large spoon near his face.

Red wiped the bar and poured whiskey into my glass.

"Don't say I didn't warn you." I watched the football on the TV above the bar. Dallas was beating the crap out of New York.

The jukebox was playing slow Mexican guitar. It was a pretty song. I felt like dancing with someone I loved. I looked back at the TV and turned over my glass.

"The Giants are a terrible football team," I said.

"One of the worst," said Red.

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I went into the pool room, as Red walked down the bar, wiping everything. A woman was bent over the table. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall. Her head was completely round. It was topped with a round tuft of curly blond hair. The cue ball spun lightly off the stick. It made a rotten sound when she hit it.

She was pocketing my second ten dollars when Bill and Celina walked in. I only had one shot at it. I should have known better.

"Play again?" she asked, batting her eyes.

"No thanks." I went to the bar to keep an eye on things. Bill and Celina were sitting in the corner at a small round table. A light bulb flickered over the table. The waitress came to the bar and asked for two mudslides.

"Don't do it," I said to Red. "I have to." He poured the drinks. He went easy on the vodka. I nodded. He sent them off. I watched Bill sipping it.

Celina was making large circles in the air with her hands. Bill was nodding. I swiveled on my bar stool to get a better look.

Celina looked at the ceiling. Bill glanced at me. He looked nervous. He waved me off. I turned around.

At about 4 AM,I was sitting on the porch throwing old tennis balls into the stream when I heard heavy breathing. Bill was running around the house. He tried to jump all the stairs.

Instead, he fell flat on his face. He didn't move. I poked him.

"Goddamnit."

"Are you okay?"

"What kind of a question is that?" He looked up, then planted his face back into the wood. I smelled something.

"What's that smell?" I sniffed around where he was lying.

"She hit me with a beer bottle."

"Half-full?"

"It was an ashtray."

"That's disgusting." I looked him over. He wasn't too bloody.

"Where'd she hit you?"

"Back of the head." He pointed to the back of his head.

There was dry blood in his hair.

"I thought she asked you."

"She did."

"This doesn't make any sense."

"No shit."

I went into the house and looked around the kitchen. A box of Froot Loops had spilled on the counter and the loops were all over the floor. I tried not to step on them. I checked the fridge.

One bottle of beer. I opened all the cabinets and found nothing.

I went into the living room and threw all the cushions off the couch. There it was. I picked up the half-pint of gin and brought it outside.

"Here." I held it in front of his face. He poured it over his head.

"What'd you do that for?" I was stunned. Now there was just

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a bottle of beer.

"Disinfectant."

I got the beer and came back out.

"Drink this," I said. He drank."Why were you running?"

"I was scared."

"Of what?"

"She drew down on me."

"Pistol?"

"Automatic weapon."

"Did she pull the trigger?"

"Yeah." He felt felt around where the cut was."She missed."

"Why didn't you disarm her?"

He shrugged, scratched his head and passed out, face down on the porch.

I found myself lying on the couch. I opened and closed my eyes a few times and tried to see what was happening. The cushions were all on the floor. A spring was digging into my hip. I stood up and went to the kitchen. Opera was playing on the radio. Bill was filling a canteen in the sink. His pack was on the floor. I walked over to him,stepping on a pile of Froot Loops.

"What time is it?" I asked, scratching my head.

"Eight."

"What's this about?" I pointed at the bag.

"Get dressed." He sounded serious."We're going up the mountain." He dropped a can of beans into the bag. I turned slowly, stepped on the rest of the loops and went to find my shoes.

I burrowed into the pile of clothes on the floor. The hiking shoes hadn't been used for some time.

We took the lift half way up the mountain. There were a few small children in uniforms standing around.

"Boy scouts," said Bill. He pointed at the troop leader. The troop leader was walking around fitting the packs on the children.

"Let's get out of here," I said.

It was a thousand foot ascent over fairly easy terrain. We walked quickly. I kept asking for the canteen. Bill drank nothing.

We stopped. I heard a bell. We climbed a few feet over the next ridge and found mountain goats. They made a bleating noise and had bells around their necks that kept ringing.

"Mountain goats," I said.

"Look at all the dingleberries." Bill pointed at them.

The mountain goats were a good thing to see but we had to get to the lake and stream because that was why we came. We walked on and the patches ofsnow became more frequent. I thought about the mountain goats as we climbed. I thought about the bells around their necks and about how I liked the bells and the goats and the dingleberries, but I wondered if the goats did. It was hot in the sun even though the air was cool at

that height. We didn't see any more goats. On the last ridge before the lake we looked down into the valley between the peaks. The little town where all the damage had been done was down there. It was down there and small and very far away and the sun was bright above us. Squinting, I could barely see the town. The clouds were thin and swirled around the other peaks so you couldn't see them. I looked hard and after a while I didn't know where the snow ended and the sky began.

"Goddamnit," I said, swinging my head back out of the stream.

"That's some cold water," Bill said, sipping it from his hands.

Then he stuck his head under the water.

"Did you see the football?" I said, lighting a cigarette.

"How can you smoke at a time like this?" He waved his arms around, indicating nature.

"Altitude," I said. "This is going to be great."

"That's true." He looked down."It'll probably kill you."

I shook one out of the pack. He took it.

"Who won?" He said, drawing on the cigarette.

"Dallas. Smith had 163 yards."

"That's a lot of yards."

"You said it." I regarded the nature around me. Everything was clean and pleasant.

"Smith is a great runner," Bill said, squinting, as if he were about to come to a conclusion.

"He's strong and he can't be stopped because he won't let them." I assisted.

Bill nodded and said, "It's time."

We were at the lake and the stream and it was all as pretty as it always was, and so was the sky and the mountain tops and the goats and the trail. We walked ahead to the rock. It stood at the far side of the lake. The lake was really more of a pond or pool of ice water and it did not take long to walk around it. The bank sloped up towards the rock at the far side of it, so we were getting higher all the time. There were two rocks but we always just said the rock because there was only the one that was good. We stood before it and looked up at fifty feet of jagged rock with several large strange holes. The wind whistled through the holes.

"I don't know about this," I said, watching pieces of rock fall down as we climbed.

"So what," Bill said, climbing ahead of me.

We climbed. Pieces of rock fell all around us as we did. We never went to the top. It was impossible, really, to go to the top.

We stopped at the place we always went before. The place was close to the top and it had two good places for sitting. We sat in these places, the two of us, just the two of us, and looked around.

When we had finished regarding everything else we turned our attentions to the food. I looked down and twisted my foot. Rock fell.

"This may be the last meal," I said.

"So what?" Bill said, not looking at me. He pulled a crusty

loaf of bread out of the pack. Bits of bread fell lightly through the air as I ripped off a piece. It reminded me of the rocks. A rock was sticking me in the back. I looked down and chewed bread. Bill was opening the can of beans with his pocket knife.

When it was open, the lid still connected and bent back over the edge of the can, he produced a pale red tomato and sliced it.

"We've got a right to eat this stuff," he said.

I nodded and looked at him and he put the beans and bread and tomato down on the rock. He was looking around,squinting. I looked at him then looked around and squinted too. I thought about saying something. I thought about asking questions. I didn't know which they were. What would you say, I thought. But you know, I continued to reason, that you say nothing. You stand on the mountaintop, listening to the mountain song of the wind and bells and running water, and you look at clouds that don't make any sense. That's right. It's just that easy. The old man always said it. You say nothing, you let your brain run on like the stream, putting words together like wonderful and nothing and pretty. And you know it, you know it's pretty, because you feel so pretty, but you can't say it, and it makes no sense so you just keep saying it, telling yourself. So pretty. No sense. But so very pretty.

"We carried it," I said, finally, my head clear, the wind whistling.

"You said it."

He dipped the bread into the beans, stuffed it into his mouth, and threw in a tomato,just for good measure. The wind blew, the mountain sang, Celina chuckled in the distance. We squinted seriously at the world around us. The town receded, the goats wandered and rang, bread crumbled. I thought about what a last meal might be, and I wished that was the last can of beans. There would be another meal. It was in the whistling of the wind. I was eating beans and thinking about sharp cheese and whiskey and I knew. We would be back. It was the sad truth and I decided not to think about it anymore. There was a momentary peace. We had a right to it. The beans continued to taste like tin, and the rock kept falling. •

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Paul Wojtasrk

42,

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE • FALL 1995

John Monroe

How to Escape the Year 2000 Put one foot in front of the other.

Do a dead man's float; let your unmailed letters, turned grey as gulls by their running ink, hover on the whitecaps.

Wipe the mildew from an old record, preferably one of a nightingale.

Play it, but ignore the changeless chirping; think instead of the crackle made by the rutted shellac, how it will sound different, louder, better-defined each time you harrow the disk with the needle.

Trace a groove with your thumbnail, and notice that the furrow doesn't feel like it holds any sound.

If you happen to find an oak-tree raining blossoms, don't report it to the authorities.

Keep all the hairs that collect in your razor.

Put them in a glass jar.

Remember that Narcissus was a balding author who,eyes aswim behind thick glasses, couldn't stop reading what he had written, and slowly turned into a book.

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