l e v i a t h a n
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Volume 33 Issue 2 Winter 2007 Special thanks to Dean Edmonds and Roberto Garcia of the Colorado College Admissions office for their generosity and financial support. Another round of thanks to faculty contributors David Mason, Jane Hilberry, and Kate Northrop. l This winter, the love is music. The CD is in the e back of the issue—let it keep you warm. v The Editors Poetry • Tara Menon
i Prose • Lucilena Williams a Visual Arts • Cameron Mansanarez Music • Jeffrey Glenn Hansen t Magazine • Sean Anderson-Branowitzer
Committee Members
Hallie Harness, Alex Blumenfeld, Jillian Keahey, a Beverly Broome, Brenna Swift, Kate Dawson, Jena Winberry, Kritika Dwivedi, Katie Grubb, Lealia Vargas, Mandy Moench, Lea Norcross, n Liza Sparks, Samuel Hart Johnston, Kristina Caffrey, Julie Aiello, Lauren Cowart, Ginger Jentzen, Jeffrey Hansen, Amy Krull
Colorado College’s Magazine for the Arts. A Cutler Publication.
Volume 33 Issue 2 Winter 2007 Contributors
Poetry
Kate Northrop • Delphinium • 27 • Night Snow • 39 Jeffrey Glenn Hansen • With Delicate, Magnanimous Precision • 2—3 • The Distance of a Street, in Love While We Sleep • 53 • Closing Day of Fall • 62 Samuel Hart Johnston • Living with it • 26 • The Family Rage • 45 Adam Goldberg • flame-smudged exhale • 57 Katie Boland • Nocturnal • 56 Lucilena Williams • To Breathe • 16 • To You • 28 Chloe Fields • Sea Creatures • 54 Jane Hilberry • Royal Blue • 48 • Intervals • 61 Mandy Moench • The Intersection • 47 • Half-Knit, or Spontaneous Abortion • 58 David Mason • Once More • 11 • A Good Laugh • 46 Jena Winberry • Untitled • 25 • Untitled # 2 • 51 • Surprise on a Stroll • 59 Anne Marie Kelley • Encounter • 4 • Invocation • 52 Michael DiGiulio • Untitled • 49
Visuals
Lucilena Williams • On the Pass • 20 + 21 Cameron Mansanarez • Benny Boy and Unca’dog • 50 and 55 Nicole Gautier • irm and march forth • Front Cover and 18 John Barker • Peeling Aspen and Annie’s Frontyard on Independence Day • 17 and 19 Whitney Conti • Untitled Portrait • 29 Jeffrey Glenn Hansen • This Time, Slower • 60 Megan Dickerson • Boots • 23 Kate Trefry • Jay-Z and Questlove • 22 and 24
Colorado College’s Magazine for the Arts. Prose John Thorp • Hart of the Matter • 5 Ginger Jentzen • Skiing with Constance • 30 Volume 33 Issue 2 Winter 2007 Leviathan Winter 2007 1 With Delicate, Magnanimous Precision
Eleven days ago, I posited to a friend, with whom I am in love, that any form of pure, unadulterated happiness is ignorant of something. I could never write this song, I said. For what of the dying, the starving, depressed? What of the lonely? I ride a road, unpaved and lawless; leaveless. My lover asked if she did not make me happy.
Autumn smolders below us, burnt dry, when days ago the flames were brilliant and blinding. Even that transition was more settled than this. In the coming winter, and the far coming summer, the river will decide to flow or stay, but for now it is bogged and mildewed, and we focus not on the speed of the water, but the rate of retardation.
Pilot, will you please turn the plane? I want to see the sun fall down as we land— the moon looks so sardonic in this light, through this frozen, dirty, double window.
Winter 2007 Leviathan The business man, silent and stoic, reading Entrepreneur as we begin our approach, has put away his self help book, ignored his conference planner, and finished his Diet Coke, with just a bit of ice. He is piquant with lucrative love affairs, here in the great grey north.
These waves in the wind are the great unevenness of things, and as it turns out, tonight the moon is full.
- Jeffrey Glenn Hansen
Leviathan Winter 2007 Encounter
The earth was full-bellied with early spring, rain rising up to swallow the grass whole, and rushing down streams with a vengeance.
Foot-weary, I sat for a moment to breathe in the silence and sweet-scented cold. The old log gave beneath my weight, just a little.
Then, I beheld him, perched in the crook of a branch, silver hair flying like thistle above pointed ears. His wings were worn, ragged, and bent.
Fierce, tiny tears dripped slowly upon me, and sobs shook his shoulders, all crooked and bony-- I queried what caused the lament.
His eyes fairly pierced me. He spoke very softly, “You see,” said the man, “I’m a poet.” One look at his wren-quill gave birth my reply: “I can tell by the ink on your hands.”
“The piece that I pen, here, on this fallen leaf, is a tale of incredible loss. That old log where you sit, there, once housed my whole family, and now, my dear fellow, I fear they’re quite squashed.”
- Anne Marie Kelley
Winter 2007 Leviathan
Hart of the Matter
by John Thorp
Ernest’s mother drives her child out the washboarded gravel road on Sundays and leaves him where Brigham leans against a sovereign telephone pole sometimes with a cigarette and other times not. They walk abreast, neither the sighted lead- ing the visionless nor the knowledgeable leading the ignorant to places named in local history but marked on no map, except the one handdrawn and nearly indecipherable where they sit with Charlie, armed and not talking. Brigham swings his left arm through the quiet and points west. The gnarled finger guides from the cuff of the brown flannel, his elbow at the child’s nose. Smells of mildew, guts, wet dog but mildew the strongest. The bitch rises taut and whines. “Quiet, Charlie.” Ernest butts the weapon to his shoul- der and planes the barrel to the crooked arm, his cheek on the stock and his eye to the sight. He waits, aimed at nothing but the sun. Three mourning doves crest the foliage and cross the field, their paths too distant for a killing spread. He lowers his arm and the boy lowers the gun as well, their eyes following the birds over the beeches and maples rising opposite. Brigham feels for the empty stump, moves to it. He faces where the birds have left, though never seen still as perma- nent and familiar in his mind as every dove that has flown across a cornfield in Ohio. Ernest turns away, forgetting them. Youth scribbled quickly with pencil on pages of the book that will later settle undulant and dry on one side of the scale against which he will weigh the eventuality of adulthood. Impatient for the stasis that comes at the end of the rapid progressive, regressive and non-directional fluxes that are adolescence. The challenge being not how to achieve but how to maintain at moments when the
Leviathan Winter 2007 balance (verily found or constructed by artifice) is compromised by the resting of another volume on the scale at the close of ten years or a single day. Never concerned with the past, brief for him as it is, and therefore not yet knowing the value of the book but “Brigham does knowing at least its invaluablity, and not smile. ‘Decide that he would frequent it as all adults later if you’ll pull come to whether childhood to them the trigger,’ he had been of import or insignifi- says. Death to him cance, until the pages gloss at the edges dark and greased. The reposi- is not an affair tory preserving that he will mature feared or evaded.” from it, as those who ignore their childhoods cannot be anything but children. Memories distinct in moment and place but laid on top of one another not without consequence, breeding in the dark- ness of the sealed book he is not yet able to read. Absorbing the day and the woodsman and the birds with reflex better itself in distant maturity than years spent rereading the fragmented and unfinished lines with his mind still undeveloped until the pencil marks blur and the spine rots, shedding pages like leaves. Brigham drags yellow fingernails against the bottom of a chin that sprouts gristle thick and brown, seeming never shorter or longer: a sound like raking oak leaves from a sidewalk. “Raise your gun sooner,” he says. “Before we see them?” Crows’ feet tighten around the damaged eyes and he coughs. His voice harsh from not finished years of tobacco smoke. “Always. Learn to draw a bead before you see. Then before you hear. Anything that moves.” “What if it’s another hunter? Or a farmer?” he asks. “Some man.” Brigham does not smile. “Decide later if you’ll pull the trigger,” he says. Death to him is not an affair feared or evaded. Like the child will come to know, he knows of its triumphant and arrogant finality, embracing it in the field and in himself.
Winter 2007 Leviathan Learned many ways but above all from battle: a squad sheared of life in a distant but always manifest Pacific jungle by auto- matic fire from impalpable mounts. Flashes fast, deft from all sides. From the earth itself. He the only to walk out, ungrazed but wracked worse than those laid down and this way because of them. He returned to Lois County and seceded from it not quietly. Brandished volatile immortality, curtaining the self-ha- tred brought on by freak survival. This, compounded three years by reconstituting stability with drink, love with indiscriminate tryst and strength by the peerless grit with which fought hand and foot over a poorly parked car, a misheard quip, a married woman. Then with blindness, his secession finished in silence. “Maybe that last bird stumbles,” Brigham says. “Maybe the wind picks up and they all do. Ten yards closer and you take that shot.” They face the cornfield again, air dry and chill in their mouths. Brigham knew the land south of the river and covered it better when he saw, and “All those bullets still better when he did not, than that started the Amish carpenters and farmers that owned it. His legs swift and strayin after he doubtless. His feet familiar to the come back maybe Earth and she to them. The breeze hit something they intimating where each ribbon of wasn’t intended wood divides plot. Where bluffs to.” look over traveled trails. The lone and hidden path of shallow water, a maze of black mud through the swamp. The patterns of every game there. He traps across the county for himself, never returning with fewer skins than the espoused few with whom he still shares drink at season’s close before returning to his cabin at the edge of the marsh, them saying Must’ve done some wrong to lose his eyes like that. All those bullets that started strayin after he come back maybe hit something they wasn’t intended to. Well. I doubt that. Man prolly just traded his eyes for that revolver he has. Thing don’t miss no matter what he aim it at. Must’ve come from wickedness. Perhaps he ain’t blind at all. I hear he jus sayin that after
Leviathan Winter 2007 tellin some woman from Westmill he was. Tried to get er ta lead‘im‘ome. Maybe. Still don’t explain though why them Augusts let their boy run with im. Ernest believes none of this. Only that his mother says it clearly has nothing to do with God. Brigham points a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the dike. Says, “They told me I couldn’t build this. That it would never hold back water. Be too big to build even if it would.” He exhaled sharply through his nose. “Laughed when I brought in the backhoe and had the dirt trucked over. But I made it and it held, god damn it. Twelve feet high and two hundred feet long. Dynamited the lake and flooded her in forty-one and she been here since. “That marsh too. It’s always there since all that water moves. Real slow but enough so it don’t freeze over like the lake. There’s food and open water there all year and ducks come here by the hundreds in the fall cause they got no place else on their way. Give em a place to rest. Trade was, me and everyone else round here got to kill a few.” The dog whimpers again and Brigham stops talking, turning east. “Charlie, quiet.” She does. The child sits, butt tight to his shoulder. Fingers twitch open and closed once on the forestock. A single dove comes from beyond the trees. “Wait till she’s over the corn,” Brigham whispers. “She’ll drop and circle, looking to roost.” Ernest swings the shotgun “Water swelling and with the bird, thinking foaming brown a few not of killing but of that moments. The boil and day four years before his low rumble. White crested birth when the earth on manes. Arched diving which they sat had been necks. Flared bubbling dynamited and thrown skyward. Water swelling nostrils.” and foaming brown a few moments. The boil and low rumble. White crested manes. Arched diving necks. Flared bubbling nostrils. Waves surged over the ground suffocating
Winter 2007 Leviathan the shrubs and tree roots and in the same instant breathing into swamp grasses, the wampee, the octopus plants. Not killing but trading. Black smelling muck waistdeep. The tree growth ended and the bark shed. White Grecian columns still erect in a geom- etry suggesting what they may have shouldered before the flood. He pulls back on the trigger when the bird drops and the shotgun report hangs without echo. The barrel follows the path of the dove and she diverts earthward from the flightpath and from a handful of her down, rolling “The sound of the collar like a shoulder almost a small bell as she trots back backstroking. A nearly and drops the dove, dead but pear-shaped stone. Charlie runs down open eyed at his feet. the dike into the corn, Feathers cling to her face.” snapping stalks in front of her. Kicking up clumps of earth as her back paws strike, passing where her front paws left the same earth. Off when the gun rang, maybe an instant before. The sound of the collar like a small bell as she trots back and drops the dove, dead but open eyed at his feet. Feathers cling to her face. The child stands but Brigham does not. Ernest picks up the bird and stuffs it into the bag that hangs from his back. Sits down on the stump facing the field, shadows grown to cover half. He breaks his gun and smoke pours from the empty cas- ing when he removes it and puts it in his pocket. Loads a fresh shell and snaps the gun closed laying it back across his knees. They do not speak for several minutes until Brigham raises his arm again, pointing to the opposite end of the field; Charlie gets to her feet, the boy shoulders his gun scanning for another dove, a pair. “No.” Ernest turns to him still holding the weapon but lowering. The dog sits. “Not birds. A deer I ain’t told you bout over there. Years ago in the winter. Most impossible animal I ever known. Like a ghost sometimes, but more present with me at other times than I could tell you.”
Leviathan Winter 2007 The child puts the gun back down, looking toward the corner and past it. The bluff steep and barren in the snow. The beech trunks tower smooth and pale and the oaks twist dark, furrowed. The ground bright and frozen. “I’d seen him the winter before on this dike, and the winter before that on the lake and before that he was in that gully and never between the seasons. It was the third time in as many days I’d followed him, snow to my knees, crossing and recrossing every trail but still hadn’t seen him. I knew it was him by the way he left track cause that’s all he was: a bodiless track making no sense.” Brigham speaks as he would of a lover, the sporting lust. Her guile and how she teases him, clutching herself, running and him clutching also, laughing through his teeth all the way. “By midday, I’d come to a clearing where the snow was fresh and unmarked the day before, but when I got there he’d torn it up leaving track and piss everywhere, maybe like he was being chased by a pack of hounds. Trying to throw me off. Like he’d been run a time before in his life. Then, there was no sign leav- ing. I walked it three times and didn’t see anywhere he walked out or could’ve even leapt. “Brigham speaks “I was ready to quit and headed for where we’d both come in. I as he would of a looked at the track again. Snow was lover, the sporting wet and it was hard to read. Mashed lust. Her guile and so I hadn’t seen before that he how she teases him, walked right back out on his own clutching herself, footsteps and jumped a log, taking running and him off down the bluff knowing then I’d lose him or lose enough daylight so clutching also, it wouldn’t matter. I seen a buck do laughing through that before, so I didn’t think much his teeth all the of it. Fool I am, didn’t know what I way.” was looking at. So I kept following till I got back up top where I seen a few small circles he’d made, looking down on the clearing. Watching me fuck around.” Continued on page 12... 10 Winter 2007 Leviathan Once More
Having flown so far in the winking night, next time I won’t care what I come out as.
An insolent porcupine that turns its back on the world, an upright meerkat, a staring monk
whose prayers dissolve in some exotic river. I’ve seen myself in other forms of life,
or maybe the anti-me, eloquent scrawl of lichen, leaf mold or persistent weed.
I’ll be an aspen shooting from a burn-scar, a microbe in a vapor cloud on Mars.
Maybe like that collie I walked for my boss— after my brother died, the sympathy
of its water eyes became a kind of love, a personality costumed in matted fur,
that eager bounding and the cowed return to the chain-link fence. Maybe I’ll be still
too eager to please, too hungry for love, eloquent only in running away.
- David Mason
Continued on page 12... Leviathan Winter 2007 11 Still facing the distant trees where the deer printed in the snow, Brigham shifts his stare across the horizon, moving them only fractions of inches for the miles they had run. “He took off north for the river from there. I hurried then, asking the few men I saw if they seen a buck, knowing they hadn’t but knowing he’d come that way. My boots were heavy with snow and mud when I took the last ridge, silent. He “Then he stood was looking at me right from the bank. Like he was waiting. I didn’t back up and took understand then how he could face a five steps, walked to death he knew coming, and not run. the river and drank. Not even be afraid. Waded out like “I got down on one knee, there wasn’t a bent snow to my waist and put my weapon piece of lead in his up.” Brigham raises his arms as if to play a phantom violin, the form of guts and crossed.” an unseen shotgun. “I took a breath and he did too. Then I fired. Hit him square in the chest.” Brigham paused. The field is shaded. Both the woodsman and the child facing north still, their gazes parallel. Ernest sees the blood on the snow where it had sprayed. He hears the report that had been years before his birth. Clear as if he had pulled the trig- ger with his own finger. The antlers bow with his head. The last breaths of steam and the river slipping frozen at the edges past the banks and over the smoothed stones. Blood coming from the mouth, snorting. Organs fail and torn muscles wrench. Snow begins to fall and melt on the hide of the animal and the head makes no sound as it lays. “His front legs crumbled under him, like he was kneel- ing or like he was wanting to pray. So I let him,” Brigham says. “Then he stood back up and took five steps, walked to the river and drank. Waded out like there wasn’t a bent piece of lead in his guts and crossed.” Ernest sets his gun on the ground and faces Brigham whose wrists are on his thighs, his gnarled hands hang limp and tangled between them, each exhale a fragment of
12 Winter 2007 Leviathan cloud. The dog’s breaths are measured, she lying like a comma, words passing from the man and hanging between them as the child listens. “Unload,” Brigham says. They rise and leave the stumps, Ernest with his gun hanging broken in his elbow. He picks the two shells from his gun and puts them in his pocket. West across the dike, they turn left at the end through the woods, the bitch leading at a trot in the twilight. “Why kill him?” Ernest asks. “He’d run so long, why not let him keep?” “Don’t you worry about that. Cause he ain’t dead.” “You said he walked into a frozen river with a slug in his chest.” “Yeah.” “Then how do you know he isn’t dead?” “Because now I know what I was looking at when I pulled that trigger. Like to think that’s why I pulled the trigger, but that ain’t true. Just didn’t know better.” Ernest does not speak. “Next day I went to a woman’s house,” Brigham says. “A woman I known but didn’t see for a long time. Since before I went into that war and she thought I died there, thou- “Because now I know sand miles from her.” He what I was looking at pulls a cigarette from his when I pulled that trigger. shirt pocket and lights it with a book-match as they walk, Like to think that’s why I it hanging from his mouth. pulled the trigger, but that “She opened the door in ain’t true. Just didn’t know green pants same color as better.” her eyes and a white blouse, hair pulled back in a headband. Neither of us said anything, but I won’t forget how I saw her. Can’t, cause it’s the last thing I did see. Took a step toward the door, heat coming past her. Her husband had salted the steps that morning but it got cold in the evening before he came home again so that it froze right back
Leviathan Winter 2007 13 up. I stepped on the ice and fell. Hit my head on a brick step. Never saw nothing again.” The evening reclines into darkness, the boy now hav- ing to follow behind Brigham who strides through the woods, catches his toes on nothing. Ducks under the low hanging pine bows as Ernest stumbles but does not fall on the trail that winds like a primeval and massive annelid, segmented by fallen logs and erupted roots. Pauses only to drag on his cigarette, his dead eyes reflecting orange ember and stops until Ernest gains and says, “You don’t think it was a deer, then.” “No,” he says. “But I hit something in the chest with a twelve gauge shotgun. Didn’t know what then, but I do now. No thinking about it, either. Just is.” Pinches the butt out with his calloused fingers and pockets it and walks. Ernest lags again toward the last clearing before the tele- phone pole with no wire, where Mrs. August sits in the brown, idling station wagon with the lights on. Brigham stops and takes the revolver from his belt. He asks Charlie to heel and she does. The muzzle flashes before the child hears the shot and he stops walking. A thick downy flutter of a thousand wings, birds beating themselves like muffled drums but so multiplied that the host sounds of one body swarming from where the shot came. A directionless and con- stant migration from and of fear. “Brigham stops and Deafening not by the amplitude of takes the revolver the sound but by the absence of from his belt. He any other in that darkness. Feroc- asks Charlie to heel ity so loud that Ernest knows and she does. The when he says, “Mr. Brigham?” muzzle flashes that the woodsman cannot hear. His ankles fold over the ruts of before the child the plowed field as he runs, see- hears the shot and ing only the black trees barely he stops walking..” distinguishable from the blacker sky. “Mr. Brigham,” he shouts, hearing only the wings until the second pistol shot flares; the woodsman frozen for an instant in
14 Winter 2007 Leviathan the muzzle flash, facing up the sight of the gun aimed into the swirling flight and silencing it. Ernest picks steps carefully toward Brigham, losing him in the darkness but hearing the awful snap of bones and the liquid hush of organs being carefully removed, sorted and walking toward that. The smell of blood. At his side, Ernest sees the pistol back on the belt, a dove held dead. The clumsy digits moving with the practice of a surgeon, fingers instead of scalpels making tears instead of incisions. “Put out your hand,” he says. “Mr. Brigham.” “Put out your hand.” Ernest does, extending a small upturned palm. Brigham sets the slick heart on it. “Don’t chew. Just swallow it.” Ernest thinks before he speaks. “I don’t wanna go blind.” Brigham snorts a laugh. “You won’t. If this was what that deer was, she wouldn’t be dead in my hand like she is right now. It’s just a dove,” he says. Brigham grabs the tips of Ernest’s fingers. “You have to get this” —shaking them, the heart roll- ing moist and growing cold— “as close as you can to this” —thumping him on the chest. “So you’ll know like I didn’t. So you let him walk away when you should.” “Yes, sir,” Ernest says.
Leviathan Winter 2007 15 To Breathe
Your mouth curled around the pipe, an O plaintive in the upstairs room, your socks scuffing against the wood grain. The rocking chair a loan for twenty years, the slotted back curved from your wife’s nursing pose. This room was lined with newspapers; late seventies. You ripped the walls apart, young man. Sleep visits infrequently, after cups of coffee, and most mornings you’re awake, thick woolen bag against your dark arms, old swimming lungs pushing your ribs. Are you lonely? Of course. Our house is sad, our angry women, you are lonely. On Sunday calls you ask, How do you feel, in the language of weather? Like sun and rain. But there’s no rainbow coming. I don’t ask. Too afraid to hear it. How is your playing? Early mornings, the window faces east; with our old willow gone, rotted through and tipping towards the house, it’s warm. Playing is quiet; those pipes could rouse warriors but not our sleeping dead, arms spread-eagle above their heads, wrapped in sheets asleep. You’re awake, alone. That unwanted cat is poor company, the squalling bag a melancholy partner. We’re seeing someone, you say, and old stories come out of woodwork; old drugs, absent parents, a man who touched you once. Your wife loved someone else for a while. That first time I saw you cry, noises happening too, so unashamed, it shook something in me. Last summer, washing lettuce in the sink, you cried again. I have grown unused to kindness, you said. I was afraid to hear it.
- Lucilena Williams 16 Winter 2007 Leviathan
Today Zeus plays in Portugal: the thunder metal clouds, waves in fists cheer and crash, the boulders do their job.
A tiny yellow pebble who nests among the rocks, prays to Zeus,that booming god, to let him keep his house.
But Zeus pays no attention, the pebble’s prayer lost. He’s swept like sand to other shores —Bedouin,unmoored, tossed.
And there I sat, a silent part, prescient to the show. Zeus ignored, but I—observer —simply let him go.
- Jena Winberry
Leviathan Winter 2007 25 Living with it
We will hit the hereafter with the tips of our tongues, bent in laughter at what we become. The dirt will smell as heaven does, and the smoke will motion up through the rafters of night. Will we be clouds? No, something of more snap and shiver, something in breath, lowered, and passing here and there. We will be the subject of specters, subtle differences between the firelight blush. We will come afterwards, filling our souls with the water that sits in those upper boughs of the ocean, and, as phosphorescence, we will glow.
- Samuel Hart Johnston
26 Winter 2007 Leviathan Delphinium
You see they are not silent
Like a row of windows at twilight Living with it Or a circle of charred wood, stones
We will hit the hereafter with the tips of our tongues, You see like dreams they are private bent in laughter at what we become. No matter the traffic the descriptions The dirt will smell as heaven does, and the smoke will motion up through the rafters Though iridescent between hedge and pine of night. Will we be clouds? No, something of more snap Upright in the garden and shiver, something in breath, lowered, and passing here and there. We will be the subject of specters, subtle differences They never will mirror you between the firelight blush. We will come afterwards, Only absorb you filling our souls with the water that sits in those upper boughs of the ocean, and, Only send back this blue as phosphorescence, we will glow. Perfectly strict still
And like the note held - Samuel Hart Johnston Back in the throat
Rising outside the body What you hear in the garden
You later will hear inside At night in your own voice
I am awake Do not touch me I will be awake all night
- Kate Northrop
Leviathan Winter 2007 27 To You
When you begin to write, do not write about love, or your losses. It’s not hard. Start to write, begin on the blankest page. Tell about that ride home: you pedaling circles on the craggy concrete, turning over and over. What did air do? It swifted by. You were fleet, you were not thinking, love, you were not losing, life became unlost for you, lovely. Tell your life, but not love: beyond-love, pedaling, body of water, the making of food. Tell us, on this beginning, how to be. We want to know: how do we crawl through this evening? Tonight, when our hearts are breaking, write us a line, not love. Tell us how you take your life. We want something of a physical dimension to occupy, we want to be weighted. Begin to write. Your body has felt the weight of things, the quelling force of mass on your hips and breasts, your shoulders. You have read words; you have loved things: thin books, the bed of a sister. You have lived moments you still remember. Begin and take what you wanted: to make for us a feeling, here and now, this page. You want to say thank you. Write, love, and lacking love, write tonight about this night, your lost body on this page, turn over and over, tonight, lovely lovely words. Yes, you want, love, but don’t.
- Lucilena Williams
28 Winter 2007 Leviathan
Skiing with Constance
by Ginger Jentzen
When they first began dating, Sven brought Sophie to the old Victorian house to show her off to Constance. No one had been home, so they sat for a while looking through pictures. “You are so much like her,” he said. He concentrated on the box of old photos. “She still looks a lot like this.” Sven pulled a newspaper clipping from a stack of a young girl in a racing swimsuit. With the ensuing pictures, Sophie saw the same girl’s thin frame wearing a high-waisted party dress, then bell bottoms, then stonewashed jeans. The side part with a tortoise shell bar- rette and the elbow length black hair never changed, from the top of the pile to the bottom. “I definitely don’t look like her,” Sophie had said. She fingered through the decades of printed memories. “That’s not the point, is it? You have the same way about you,” Sven said. “You’re trying to be artistic like she is.” “What’s her poetry about?” “Usually nature, Minnesota, memories with my father” Sven had said. “She Nordic skis a lot. Since my dad’s knee sur- gery she hasn’t had anyone to go with her. She’ll probably ask you to be her ski partner for the winter.” They stacked the photos carefully inside the shoebox.
The proposal came around Christmas time, Sophie’s ulcer incipient and unnoticed. “Nordic skiing can feel like run- ning,” Constance had offered. She placed a tea tray of oatmeal raisin cookies between them and sat at the head of the table. Sophie smiled at the petite librarian and reached for a cookie. “I can agree to try skiing, but you have to hold me to it. It’s easy to make plans to play in the cold when the house is so warm.”
30 Winter 2007 Leviathan “I bought extra boots, skis, and poles at a rummage sale for twenty dollars,” Constance said. “Their last owner comes into the library a lot. She told me she’d bought them brand new and used them only once,” she said, her voice trailing off as she left the room toward the basement. She returned a minute later, a set of Rossignols in tow. Sophie took the fiberglass and ran her fingers along the bottom. The stickiness of old wax on the runners stirred memories of watching her father prep for morn- ing skis when she was young. With violent flashes of green and lightning bolts of yellow, the fiberglass skis were a glaring antithesis to the soft brown of her father’s old wooden ones. She wondered if the fiberglass would make the same scraping sound across the snow as the wooden ones; perhaps that had been streamlined too, perhaps the noises of skiing considered obsolete like the dull brown of the wood. Edwin and Constance Gustafson knew most of the turns in their son’s relationship with this Duluth, Minnesota na- tive. Sophie’s admiration for them both, especially Constance, had grown, just as Sven had predicted.
Now it’s early February. Sophie lies in bed with the morning light tripping over the bed and onto the floor. Her head sinks into the feather pillow, the sides puffing outward like foam buoys which have kept her afloat “Sophie has fed since the beginnings of her failed mar- her ulcer with riage. Turning toward the light filter- the worry of ing through the gauzy curtains across speaking with the bay window, she snuggles her her mother-in- cheek deeper within the feathery soft- law.” ness, the covers just low enough on her shoulder for her to see. The sky reveals nothing of the ground from where she lies. The small ulcer developing within Sophie’s stomach has been draining dread for today’s ski through every muscular fiber of her limbs, her body like lead within the protective sheath of bedsheets. She hopes today will be too icy for Nordic skiing. Ice domi-
Leviathan Winter 2007 31 nates even expertly waxed skis, and as much as she wants to see Constance, Sophie has fed her ulcer with the worry of speaking with her mother-in-law. Shivering, she pulls the quilt further over her head with the last thought I‘ll let my muscles rest today. Sophie springs from bed on the phone’s first ring. She stands watching the old rotary dial jingling of the call. “Hello?” she says, with audible anxiety. She bends close to the phone, her elbow length hair covering the phone cord and message pad where Sven used to write the post-row apologies he taped to her vanity mir- ror. She knows she can’t decline the “She knows she invitation coming from the other end can’t decline the of the line. She questions her own enthusiasm though her mouth speaks invitation coming without consulting her mind. In real- from the other ity, she’s dreaded this day for weeks. end of the line.” Could have tried harder to sound mellow for chrissake, she thinks as she straightens against the wall. “It’s sunny, about 15-20 degrees out, and the ski trail hotline says they just groomed. It’ll be perfect with that bit of powder from last night.” Constance informs her, “Looks like perfect conditions for Magny.” The winter was already half spent; this was not the first time Constance had suggested skiing the Magny-Snively trail on the west side of town. Her work at the library had interfered as many times as poor weather conditions. “If you like the steep- ness of the J loop,” she told Sophie, after a triumphant run on the Lester trails, “you’ll love the hills at Magny. The ones that aren’t steep go on forever. I‘ll be at yours in twenty minutes.”
Constance waves from the driver’s seat of the green Vol- vo and pops the trunk. Sophie can see Constance already wears her wool hat and winter coat despite the sun. Even her wave is similar to Sven’s, Sophie thinks, as she approaches the car’s back end to place her skies inside. The pains in her stomach flare up
32 Winter 2007 Leviathan toward her ribs. She gives her abdomen a reassuring rub, opens the door, and gets into the car’s passenger seat. Sophie wears a fleece vest to block the winds from her torso, above worn blue corduroys fastened by a brown fabric belt. Her long-sleeved green t-shirt hangs over the waist of her pants. For Sophie, the car ride is tense and quiet, the air thick with her feigned contentment. She anticipates the unfamiliar Magny hills, where the tracks mislead or where dips lie dis- guised by the horizon. Each bend may be lined by jagged areas. “Sometimes I feel like a series of faulty roller coaster carts when I hit the icy tracks,” Constance says, when Sophie tells her she’s fine, just worried about the trail. Falling is nothing to worry about, Sophie knows, but falling leaves a mark in the snow like a fingerprint, evidence clinging to socks and pants in declarative wet markings. No one wants to be clumsy. It’s really no one else’s business, Sophie thinks, if I fail. Or mishandle myself, let alone someone else.
“What can I say to your mother that she doesn’t already know?” Sophie had said to Sven one night while lying in bed. “She looks at me in this way, regarding me with so much ad- miration, or something.” Sophie sat up, shifting her weight to one “When she talks shoulder against the bed frame. about me, I’m sen- “And I can’t even tell whether I sitive, not neurotic. deserve that from her.” My logorrhea is Sven remained on his charming, not hid- side facing away from Sophie, his eous.” eyes trying to focus on the blurry objects against the bedroom’s side wall, a game he liked to play without his glasses. Ready to sleep and feeling uninspired with the idea of the next day’s work, Sven asked, “Shouldn’t that be a compliment?” He flipped onto his back, chiding, “I know how much you hate those.” Sophie began pulling at her earlobe. “It’s not that.
Leviathan Winter 2007 33 When she talks about me, I’m sensitive, not neurotic. My logor- rhea is charming, not hideous,” Sophie laughed loudly at her own comparison. “Or embarrassing. She’s my own personal Shakespeare, like-.” “Again, good.” “-what’s that one-” con- tinued Sophie in thought, “that Sophie is sure Con- one where he’s complimenting an stance feels the unattractive lady for all those things he loves about her. You know, that same perplexing one where she’s good enough for hope for a bend in him, even for all her flaws.” the trail grow “I love you, go to sleep.” within her. “Ah,” Sophie released her ear and settled within the covers, “he always thought he was so great in that poem. The speaker, his attitude in that poem, like he’s just really something for be- lieving she’s so beautiful. Despite her imperfections.” “But you don’t like it when my mom does that? What in the hell are you even talking about?” “Forget it,” Sophie replied, rolling her eyes and pulling the blankets over her shoulder.
They begin Magny like mountaineers, huff-puffing up the spine of a hill. “This’ll get your blood flowing,” says Con- stance, no slower working up the hill than the younger Sophie. Despite the discomfort, Sophie is attached to the calluses on her feet, as she’s sure Constance appreciates her own. A new part of their appendages, Constance had once said, physical repre- sentations of the winter spent. A lengthy stretch of straight trail greets them at the top; the trees tall, darkening the tracks, its never ending appear- ance making the skiers vulnerable and small. Bullets of sun- light shoot through the trees, the breadth of landscape like the low ground in battle. Sophie is sure Constance feels the same perplexing hope for a bend in the trail grow within her. That
34 Winter 2007 Leviathan blurred area at the crux of the bend where a little light sprays on the snow pulls them forward, leading them to a new far- thest point, the natural lyrics of light moving them onward. A straight trail demands little from the imagination, offering too much of what’s to come. As she feels the acid of her body rise within her blood, Sophie’s bottom lip swells with the pressure of her teeth bit- ing into it. She works into a frenzied punch and kick, fighting through the tight webs of light trying to hold her back from the open snow. Her eyes wither against the cold and throw tears on her windy wake. A ball of acidic energy rises through her esophagus. “Look--” Constance points to impressions in the snow spanning about three feet, droplets of red be- “Her eyes wither tween them. “Looks like that’s where against the cold his wings touched down when he and throw tears on took off.” The snow from the trail her windy wake. A to the markings is pristine, as is the rest of the small clearing. Constance ball of acidic en- releases her feet from the bindings to ergy rises through kneel near the marks. Turning their her esophagus.” faces to the treetops, both women stay motionless. Sophie waits ready and alert, rehearsing in her mind what will happen if the owl reappears. They stand motionless in the snow. Up ahead lies a bend at the top of a small hill, the city of Duluth spread out below. “Sven brought me up here, right after we were married,” says Sophie, straightening before the landscape. She remembers eating sliced pepperoni and cheese on crackers. And the con- versation. Did the stomach pains begin that early, Sophie won- ders. She remembers the conversation veering from airy talk of the hike to the weighty topic which brought cheerful conversa- tion to a crashing halt. “If you want to write, you’ll write. Same as a painter will
Leviathan Winter 2007 35 paint if that’s what they naturally want to do.” Sven had said. He was an adamant advocate of self-teaching and had never given much credit to Sophie’s college education. “Yes, but there’s something to be said for training. You’d train academically as you would in any tech field. It’s helpful to study other painters, writers, and I think it’s best with guidance.” “Don’t waste your money.” Sven had sliced two thick circles of pepperoni, handing her one. “What about your mother?” “She’s just really talented. She’s always been a writer.” “But she still went to col- lege. There must be something to “The winter can be be said for that.” Sophie’s manic so difficult to write attempts to convince Sven ruined about. There seem afternoons, without fail. to be so many “You just don’t work susurrations felt enough, Sophie.” Sophie could through the woods tell Sven knew what he’d said was rough. He had looked at the trees and not really in the distance to avoid Sophie’s heard.” face. Sven isn’t here this time, Sophie thinks, twisting her neck to release the memories. Constance speaks between bites of a granola bar. “Scientists say snow actually absorbs sound.” She chews while adjusting her wool hat, stuffing the bar’s wrapper into the pocket of the teal Columbia jacket she wears, her outfit an amalgam of garage sales visited over the years. Only the fiberglass of their skies incongruously dates the scene. “It’s true,” Constance continues, turning back toward the trail. “I tried to write a poem about that silence. The winter can be so difficult to write about. There seem to be so many susur- rations felt through the woods and not really heard. But even then, somehow it’s not completely silent. I always listen for that whistle before really twisting into the snow to gain clearance. Edwin says he misses the kick, one foot back to create a glide.
36 Winter 2007 Leviathan He says it’s like counting beats in a measure. I think it feels like running. But when you become se- cure enough in technique to lift your “Her muscles eyes to the birches and pines with visibly flex under the overhead branches offering only the yellow and small slides of the sky--” red lycra; she She looks back toward where they’d come, sunlight raining through holds her head the branches in puddles on the snow. down, intent in Turning forward, the trees’ spiky her workout.” silhouettes soak up the white light. Constance repositions herself in the tracks without completing her thought. Sophie follows silently behind, curious but without inquiring. I think I can understand how she feels, Sophie thinks. I hope I can understand what she thinks. “This is a fantastic downhill, you’ll see.” Constance breathes as they climb steeply, exhalations clouding around them. Falling into a rhythm, Sophie finally laughs. “I feel like a tourist; there better be something at the top for all the effort I am putting into this.” “You don’t like the interim working up the hill?” Sophie’s exhale evaporates with a chuckle. “Of course I do. I just feel uncertain on the snow sometimes. I like the markers along the path, you know? The little goals.” “When I first learned, I was afraid of sliding around,” Constance says. “I learned too late in my life. I’ve never felt that confident with the snow.” “Funny, and we’ve traveled on snow our whole lives. I’ve walked on snow, sledded on it, skated on ice. It’s like learn- ing the field lingo, you have to know how to speak their lan- guage. I guess it’s kind of like Sven and me. We dated for so long before we married and we’re still so young.” “I don’t understand. Are you saying you can’t speak his language?”
Leviathan Winter 2007 37 Constance’s words are trampled by the scratches of competition. A Nordic goddess approaches quickly from the left side of the trail, ascending with the great strides and mien of a Valkyrie. Her muscles visibly flex under the yellow and red lycra; she holds her head down, intent in her workout. The shabbily clad pair politely smile, paying their respects as she passes, though she remains enveloped in her personal suprema- cy. Once her lycra becomes a faint mark, Constance shakes her head. “Some people take things so seriously.” The younger woman sighs in agreement, though her stomach acid tells her through the pain that they share an intimacy with the winter, the woods, this cathartic activity, brushing playfully close to serious- ness. Confidence high, Sophie reaches the top of the hill first, Constance following close behind. “Steep and straight down,” Constance explains, “with a bend to the right at the bottom. Watch your skis.” Fitting herself into the “Her stomach acid grooves of the inner set of tracks, tells her through Sophie skis down, imagining the pain that they herself racing against physics to share an intimacy fly upwards and replace the snow with the winter, the under her runners with cloud mo- guls. The wind capriciously slaps woods, this cathar- her face over and over. A curve tic activity, brush- sends her left ski askew, clanking ing playfully close past hard chunks of snow, but to seriousness.” Sophie guides the ski at an angle around the bend. Coming to a stop on leveler ground, she feels older with a leathered, wind-wrinkled face and tousled hair. Sven never felt this, she thinks, remembering when he came on one of their day trips to the Lester trails. “My children have never really been all that athletic,” Constance had said as Sven had stuffed his skis through the
38 Winter 2007 Leviathan Continued on page 40... Night Snow
Slight hiss, as a canoe Pulled back over grass
And the flakes Disappearing where they slip Into patio stones, that place
Dark as a small lake Closing over at the edge of the yard.
Soon the necklace on the dresser Pools there, glitters—
Clean as the details Surfaced from dreams, though still It is a guilt gift
And beads, glitters there And the names, the faces Drawn through names,
Rise—hands, claims, eyes Often over the yard.
- Kate Northrop
Continued on page 40... Leviathan Winter 2007 39 Volvo’s back-end, expletives floating from his mouth on the exhaust from the car’s tailpipe and hovering through the iso- lated cul-de-sac. The women watched him in the rear-view mirror. Sophie’s ulcer had begun as a burning redness on her cheeks while watching Sven harangue inanimate objects for their relentlessness in maintaining shape, or better yet destroy them for their rigid qualities. He thought he could break the spirit of anything, Sophie thinks, turning to watch Constance. Constance follows down the hill, the tracks especially slippery for her wax. As she begins to round the corner, her body lurches forward as though chucked from a wheelchair in some dirty prank. Her left ski snowplowing out of control, the resulting clatter of poles and skis breaks the serenity of the trail, the white cloud of snow signaling that someone has fallen. Sophie scrambles toward her forgetting the awkwardness of skis, losing as much ground as she “Constance gains with each slippery step forward. looks like a little “God, are you okay? Was it a bad girl covered in fall or maybe not so bad?” she stam- flour.” mers, blundering like a school mascot through a crowded room. Constance, catching her breath, tries to right her- self. Sophie shifts her weight to each limb, at once supported by her poles, then back on her legs, half leaning forward to help then deciding to pull back. Giving the girl a condescending smile and laugh, Con- stance struggles to her feet, tentatively allowing her skis to ac- cept her weight. Once righted, they climb to the spot where she was sent out of control, and indeed, the outer tracks skip a foot to the right side at a precarious place in the turn. Skill didn’t matter this time; the trail groomer has the last laugh. “These trails are always testing your skills, especially if they’re unfamiliar.” The younger woman nods and smiles. Constance looks like a little girl covered in flour. “Just goes to show you can’t always trust the tracks.
40 Winter 2007 Leviathan You’ll still fall, but the snow is soft.” Constance leans back on her poles to consider what she’s said. “I’ll probably have a pretty bruise, though.” They move on, Sophie’s face turned to the tree limbs glittering “I could watch with snow. She knows she’s creating you for hours, she memories with her waxed plastic run- thinks. The owl’s ners skating across the snow. Though her insides burn a resolution settles head shoots up over her activity. She begins collect- and the girl won- ing the words to tell her companion ders if she’s said the truth. With a burst of speed, this aloud.” Constance shoots forward and ahead of her parallel with Sophie. Alright, Sophie thinks, after this bend ahead, I’ll tell her. Rounding the last bend in the trail they see an owl. A great grey with a freshly killed rabbit half-buried in the snow beneath his claws. The skiers stop as suddenly and quietly as humans can. Sophie catches herself, her mouth open and empty. The owl doesn’t notice them, his tail feathers up, face and feet examining the rabbit by tearing through it, his feathers ruffling from time to time. Sophie wants to laugh, yell, point, something, but she only grins, a smile encapsulating so much emotion her face red- dens. I could watch you for hours, she thinks. The owl’s head shoots up and the girl wonders if she’s said this aloud. Suspi- ciously, he turns slowly from side to side, instincts sharp; he swivels around to his audience. “He must think we’re hunters,” Constance whispers, moving her ski pole toward Sophie with a breath of the word “spear.” “We’re threatening his kill.” His eyes scream ‘I am not soft’ as he turns toward denser woods, his kill lifted with strong claws and his body lifted with sinewy wings.
After the ski, the younger woman rides in the green
Leviathan Winter 2007 41 Volvo, her head rocking against the headrest with every bump in the road. “So now you’ve done it all,” says Constance, “Magny and all.” “I’m glad we finally got to finish the winter, so to speak.” “Yeah, conditions haven’t been so good in years.” “Lucky I started this year; I’ll be spoiled and expect every year to be so nice.” Constance responds but Sophie “Sophie’s can’t hear her over the car’s motor. stomach screams Saying more clearly, though not for the through its first time, “Some of the best memories compromised in my life are of skiing,” she turns onto Sophie’s street, the cold-cracked pave- lining.” ment jostling them both, the clanking of their skis heard from the trunk with every pot-hole. At the big pot-hole up ahead, I will say something, thinks Sophie. When the Volvo hits it, the pothole triggers the words Sophie spews with the precision and consideration of a jackhammer. “Sven and I are getting a divorce. I know he hasn’t told you yet.” Constance doesn’t turn her head. She slows the car to a stop in front of the house. Her arms hang from the wheel, her hands hinged firmly to its leather. “I suppose I should speak to Sven. You should have told me at the beginning of the ski.” Difficult to read her oice,v Sophie thinks. “I know,” she says. Sophie’s stomach screams through its compromised lining. She gathers herself, opens the car door, and steps out. “I’ll call you in the morning tomorrow, then,” says Constance. “We’ll ski. It should be nice.” Sophie nods and moves to the trunk to retrieve her equipment. Walking down the sidewalk, she hears the window slide open from the vehicle still idling in front of the house she’d shared with Sven, their first and last home together.
42 Winter 2007 Leviathan “I will send you my next book when it comes out. Send me your address,” Constance calls to her. Without waiting for a reply she steps on the gas and drives away.
Sophie waits for Constance. The next morning, she sits on the living room couch wearing her corduroys, the cuffs tucked into her tall wool socks, her ski boots tied up. As the afternoon drags on, she opens magazine after book, reading articles or paragraphs, then re-reading until she feels she has no other choice. The sun setting, she’s heard no word. She’s tried to keep the pain through her middle under control, eating the usual remedy of bread pieces dipped in earl grey. Her stomach muscles quiver and refuse to settle. It was a beautiful day, she thinks. Snow soft I’m sure. The trails groomed to perfection. She stands. Hat and gloves in travel position, footwear on. I know they’re boots, she thinks, but whatever. And so she begins to walk. The Chester Creek can be icy but it’s the essence of Du- luth. Sophie walks along the little fourth street road leading to her old high school. A class of 350, she remembers, Sven and I among “From the side- them. Sophie remembers playing cap- walk, Sophie can ture the flag along this fourth street see Sven sitting bridge. She remembers Sven had there with his long hair in his high school days. She remembers their first introduction, a mother, their mutual friend giving them both a ride eyes the same for a concert down south in Minneap- shade of regret.” olis. Sven was so talented, she recalls, flashes of his intelligent and kinder qualities bursting in her memory. I remember first hearing his voice, she thinks, unable to remember when its timbre changed for her to an acrimonious ear-slicing pitch. Leaving the creek bed for the main road, Sophie bends to grab a stone the size of her fist, pressing its coldness against her stomach for comfort. As she approaches the Victorian along Watersedge Rd.,
Leviathan Winter 2007 43 Sophie’s eyes remain fogged in thought. The glow emanating from the heart of the house splashes through the oddly shaped window onto the road. From the sidewalk, Sophie can see Sven sitting there with his mother, their eyes the same shade of regret. Clenching her fists, the one holding the stone and the other completely empty, Sophie watches from outside. They speak and move around the kitchen of their house, living as a family inside the glowing womb on Watersedge. Tossing the stone to the ground, Sophie walks away, the warmth of her insides carrying her to the Lake Superior shore. She edges the main road, cars screaming past. She waits to cross, then traverses the asphalt at the traffic’s first opening. St. Mary’s medical center sits at the water’s edge between a Conoco gas station and Perkins diner. Pulling her hands into her pock- ets, she cradles her stomach through her jacket’s inner lining, the sliding doors of the walk-in medical center swooshing shut behind her. She says to the receptionist at the front desk, “My stom- ach hurts.” The receptionist replies, “Ah, it’ll pass. We’ll get you in to see the doctor shortly, if you’ll just take a seat. Write down your symptoms on the top white sheet, then tear off the bottom half of the pink one. You’ll present that to the doctor.” “Alright,” Sophie responds, moving to a chair. The sterile white room is a cheap imitation of pristine ski conditions, and Sophie shuffles her ski boots across the linoleum, head back, wondering who will be called next and how many names she’ll have to hear before it’s her turn.
44 Winter 2007 Leviathan The Family Rage
The world condensed, the snarling angels, rip through a living room that now becomes of age. The forced-blue face of grimacing love, oh love, what love, in loud gestures, in a fit of strangling reverence.
- Samuel Hart Johnston
Leviathan Winter 2007 45 A Good Laugh
It started in a clinic in the woods the time before the time before the time she sobered up for good. The exercise involved a sort of therapeutic dance and he at first resisted how they spoke, their lingo softened by concern for health. He’d rather be among his friends, with talk and whisky flowing freely, but suddenly the weight of thirty years in which she’d tried to stay alive made him decide to play, and there were others like him in the room with pastel colors and tall evergreens outside the windows. Faces in that room like his faced inward, bound by resignation. The dance was graceless so he closed his eyes and when it finished with them lying down and laying one by one their bones to rest, their sinews slackened and their jaws unclenched, he laughed a laugh withheld for thirty years. It rumbled upward from his diaphragm and burst out of his mouth like a rough cartoon of laughter, much too boisterous for his small frame and more than a little mad, completely free. For years his friends would know him in a crowd by his conspicuous and raucous laughter, uncontrolled in theatres, at parties, whether or not he’d poured out too much wine, whether or not the “she” he started with had found her way to safety by this time. It was a good laugh, a silly, foolish laugh, as if he had the spirit of a jester minus the wit, the motley of the air disclosing downpours after the long drought, and it was good because it was a laugh.
- David Mason
46 Winter 2007 Leviathan The Intersection
I have written a letter to your Laughter many times over over over And as the world grows crimson wild With fire, I try to snatch the leaves back From the wind, the tree grows thin as time Dries out and soars, but dies. And the colours of fall fade with dying day.
I watch the willows lie down and resign Out my window with widowed whine Orange light upon my hand—the Page grows tangerine.
And rain falls cool and paints me blue. The green, the cool, the earth, the black-and-white of the winter-set, the onset of the wizened wind, the misted air, the heightened fear.
And the headlights blur as fallen stars Another year to pass unnoticed, behind a frosted pane. Another leaf to fall, unwatered. One more dawn gone soft to dusk.
- Mandy Moench
Leviathan Winter 2007 47 Royal Blue
She says, I want, and I am. I try to hold on. I sleep alone. When I dream, I leave flattery and elegance. I feed the pigs with my white gloves on. She’s peacock feathers and coins.
- Jane Hilberry
48 Winter 2007 Leviathan She slips on her shoes One toe at a time Tuning up the laces Like a Spanish guitar Strumming her soles As she walks out the door
- Michael DiGiulio
Leviathan Winter 2007 49 50 Winter 2007 Leviathan percolating positions, incubating rancid dispositions turbulent toiling—turned down visions. it’s the worth worth the trouble, the fighting, the rumble; can anyone fit in the fitted time tumble? of courses, divorces— i never get full.
- Jena Winberry
Leviathan Winter 2007 51 Invocation
Some words are filled with wonder like a prayer on the tongue.
They quiver when they’re whispered as a harp string come undone.
Some words are simply poems-- spoken symphonies of one.
- Anne Marie Kelley
52 Winter 2007 Leviathan The Distance of a Street, in Love While We Sleep
There are but a few words left to say, I say, and close the book with care and a single fleeting thought of sorrow, but no regret.
This is not a tale of remorse; instead it sings a weighty burden of indefatigable hope: a riotous protest subject to fire hoses, tear gas and calls for retreat. “You do not belong here; please expatriate your self with the wind and leave us be.”
The folk singer’s beard laments the union’s loss outside the grocer’s store, weeping, “Revolution, now,” and the smiles avert their eyes, until a love is lost forever. Both think the other will be the love to make the first last move, precarious from across the room, eyes dancing with our feet, tapping out a rhythm vacant of vacancy, and begging for change from the lover we once knew, now lost.
- Jeffrey Glenn Hansen
Leviathan Winter 2007 53 Sea Creatures
Callous is my name when Dartfish flock to the shore. Or plummet too deep to the bottom. Where the sand wisps like slow-motion tornadoes and only the sleepy fish congregate. If I could put on a record of subtly tuned songs that last two minutes, I would station it right by the family of conk shells. Maybe they’d serve a purpose more agreeable to my mood. If I could wrap my poorly knit orange sweater around your shoulders to keep you going, I would. But it might get wet. And it might become blood- soaked and harrowed. Maybe when you break and we graze the patch of seaweed I’ll tell you stories of the swift journey from top to bottom. Some of the larger beings will swim by. They are of a different medium; we don’t meet eye to eye. Where they dine gourmet, we scavenge for the most decent treat. And you would never ask of their services. Creatures as such will relish your impotence. Never comes the day when all sea-creatures line up to conga. When one wants conga, the other wants mambo. Just how it goes. Wake me up when the nail hits the head, when all too suddenly the deep-sea tornado captures your follies. I’ll be hidden in the murky cavern with the lanternfish, doing the polka.
- Chloe Fields
54 Winter 2007 Leviathan
Nocturnal
With carnal thoughts and celestial dreams we’ll rouse a celebration for some premature dawn. Half-lit and shining we’ll dance in the weak flames, in half-lives; we’ll deny the forthcoming day. In some shimmering mystery, some constant shadow we’ll revel in the mist of artificial sunrises. And as the morning comes fully ‘round we’ll be confronted by the light, the bright, natural day. We’ll fall into misery at the sight, and crouch hidden, starved for nightfall. We’ll cower in the corners, under the sheets, shrouded in reveries of the dusk, the blurred, the hazed. We’ll be young, we’ll be old, we’ll be everything in between; recklessly tethered to the dark we’ll be camouflaged, catastrophically comfortable in the obscurity of the transition, the grey, the flux. We’ll sell ourselves for the elixir of the twilight, for the flickering, fleeting loves found in the cracks of life. We will be nocturnal.
- Katie Boland
56 Winter 2007 Leviathan flame-smudged exhale do you see this slender fury, the rippling of purgatory dust that twists these brittle bones? as it comes licking the necks of branches, a lungful of orphaned air clings to this livid woken house, my heart
- Adam Goldberg (composed of words by Samuel Hart Johnston)
Leviathan Winter 2007 57 Half-Knit, or Spontaneous Abortion
What once was is no longer. And I, holding a half-knit Blanket in hand, stare Placidly at an overhead fan, Not unlike a mobile. Not Unlike a baby.
This is—I am—the seed Fallen on barren ground. A spark, a fusion, a nucleus Blinked to utter void; Slighted, we bled.
Mary, you never knew The evacuation of a womb And had the babe within been thwarted, Thou long-awaited Saviour—aborted— You never knew.
And hid within the crook Of the chalice of your belly sprung hope. My miscarriage, Your great mismarriage of Heaven and Earth.
Millennia of holy men whispering in my femurs, A universe holding its breath— Unanswered. Are we not meant for this earth?
- Mandy Moench
58 Winter 2007 Leviathan Surprise on a Stroll
The green parrots hide between the leaves camoflauged in each other, practical in their choice of color.
- Jena Winberry
Leviathan Winter 2007 59
Intervals
Words stitched together in intervals, perfect fourths, minor thirds. I want to snap the threads with my teeth. I know the end of this book, but I can’t stop reading. The most of anger I can muster is a minor third. You are perfect fourths. This is not a garment, this shift I wear in secret. Give me a gown created by the sweep of a wand. Give me a song that’s not in measures.
- Jane Hilberry (with first line by Jeffrey Glenn Hansen)
Leviathan Winter 2007 61 The Closing Day of Fall
Everyone I know has come and gone, the party’s end begun with the sun. Loves found lost, and empathies exchanged. A jaybird’s eyes turned gray, and shamed.
Everything we know as lost, and anyone we thought we knew has gone. Today our flight heads back to Berlin, a heartstring softly cradled within. Eggshells crafted
into bowls of pearl. A tale wrapped in a winding curl. Beds left made, a tree burned down to rid the yard of shade. Tired lovers, slender thighs. The last surprise
did not survive the fall. The time before the time ahead is like the sweeping leaves that graze my bed. We lost our chance; I’ll loose your fall. Empty voices wake
the hall, as the champions of snowfall alight. Lead me down the road to our next town that the cities and the country dust have drowned. The sky that smolders
in the dust of dusk. The fingers of the mountains frilled with trust. Friends grow old and sell their wealth, and I collect my lovers, like shells on a shelf. Tightrope walking
octaved guitar strings, the sound belies the emptiness of things. A floorbound hull in pitching darkened robes has little left to fear but his own home. Vacuum shouts,
within and without, lost like rabid dogs to the pound. Vacant bottles, disused tires; it’s coming near the time to build a fire. Fruitless flowers sing the wind and browning
branches are mirroring the hollow walls worn parchment thin, left tortured like a weight within an aching heart for let. But there’s no one around to rent. This market has been spent.
- Jeffrey Glenn Hansen
62 Winter 2007 Leviathan Submissions deadline for Bitter Mid-Winter 2008 Body Issue:
February 13th, last day of block five
Poetry. Prose. Paintings. Drawings. Photography. Bodies in motion. Bodies at rest. Naked and powerful. Clothed and vulnerable. Yearnings.
lWhat’s your medium? l leviathan music 2007
1 Irresponsibility • Agargara
2 Easy Virtue • Fruit of the Loomis
3 Hayburner • CC Tiger Jazz Ensemble
4 Hey There, Snapping Turtle • Turtledogs
5 The Whale • Adam Stone
6 Submerged • Dark Frog
7 What’s Golden • Kubla Kahn Project
8 Jenny Cries • The Engine Room AKA The Giddyups
9 Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins, Op. 3, No.1, 1st Movement • CC Chamber Orchestra
10 Where My Money At? • Ian Asbjornsen
11 Cenizas • Joe Beach
12 Night • Kati Standefer
13 Concerto in D Major, RV 428 from “Il Gardellino”, Vivaldi’s Allegro • Sarah Mitnick
14 The Only Love Song I’ll Ever Write • Adam Stone
15 This Shining, Brave New World • Jeffrey Glenn Hansen
16 Haydn’s Quartet No. 14 in F Major, Op. 77 No. 2, Allegro Moderato • Maria Mack, Ben Burtzos, Bettina Swigger, Kristina Caffrey
17 Dragonflies • Kuny leviathan music 2007
Irresponsibility • Agargara
Easy Virtue • Fruit of the Loomis
Hayburner • CC Tiger Jazz Ensemble
Hey There, Snapping Turtle • Turtledogs
The Whale • Adam Stone
Submerged • Dark Frog
What’s Golden • Kubla Kahn Project
Jenny Cries • The Engine Room AKA The Giddyups
Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins, Op. 3, No.1, 1st Movement • CC Chamber Orchestra
Where My Money At? • Ian Asbjornsen
Cenizas • Joe Beach
Night • Kati Standefer
Concerto in D Major, RV 428 from “Il Gardellino”, Vivaldi’s Allegro • Sarah Mitnick
The Only Love Song I’ll Ever Write • Adam Stone
This Shining, Brave New World • Jeffrey Glenn Hansen
Haydn’s Quartet No. 14 in F Major, Op. 77 No. 2, Allegro Moderato • Maria Mack, Ben Burtzos, Bettina Swigger, Kristina Caffrey
Dragonflies • Kuny L