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l e v i a t h a n m a g a z i n e f o r t h e a r t s 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. 2 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 3 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.