Light and Shadow: Jeanne Mackin

Six Essays

BLUE

Blue he is, in his sea; so is nature; blue he is, as a sapphire, in his extreme distance; so is nature; blue he is, in the misty shadows and hollows – John Ruskin

THE BLUE WE SEE in the Madonna’s robes, in the wings of Cimabue’s angels, in that ultramarine that speaks of depth in water and the heavens, once all came from the same distant source.  Oltramarino means beyond the seas and once referred to many things: spices, cloth, glassware.  Eventually ultramarine came to refer to the blue color made by finely grinding a semi-precious stone. The finest lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan from a place called Sar-e-sang, the Place of the Stone. When you look at an old painting luminous with that particular blue, you are looking at jewels and history and foreign lands.

            My husband, a handsome middle-aged man who still had the air of a renegade, of someone who might as easily pull away on a Harley as in a Volvo, came home from Switzerland wearing ultramarine suede shoes.  He’d been gone half a year, exhibiting in Germany, in Italy and Switzerland, those countries that still romanced the airplane and artists who use them as paintbrushes, as did my husband, making of the sky a canvas.  He looked tired and harassed, as do those who come through customs carrying large portfolios and small crates.   Half a year. I waited for the sense of stranger to creep into my perception. 

            Those shoes would not allow me the distance with which I wished to experiment. Half a year, an ocean, many borders between us, yet those barriers were thin as the air over our heads. When he saw me and waved, they vanished completely.  He is of blue; his preference, his art, his spirit are made of ground jewels, the color of angel wings, of height and depth.

PRISM

Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its brilliancy.  There is no shade in a rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl – John Ruskin

LIGHT CAN BE SLOWED DOWN and made to reconsider its own path, its desire for velocity.  When light passes through glass, it slows and makes a detour we call refraction. Refraction is matter’s way of saying, “Let’s rethink this.”  Shine light through a diamond and it slows its speed by almost half because of the density of the crystal.  If you lived inside a diamond, you would be twenty-five when your peers were fifty; you would live twice as long, and twice as slowly. A water droplet, perhaps the opposite of diamond’s hardness, is also a prism.

            That thanksgiving it was warm and humid, so after dinner we went outside.   A triple rainbow hung over the forest. A double happens once in a while, but in the sky that day after the storm three nestled inside each other, and we looked, knowing we would never see such a thing again. The rarity of it locked us into silence; we grappled with the event the way medieval people contended with comets or halos around the moon. Wonder and fear refract our direction, bend it into new paths.  The wonder takes hold of us and says “I have caught you.” The fear says “I am going to change you whether you wish it or not. From now on, up will be down, and inside will be outside.”  But wonder cannot last.  Colors fade, especially in a rainbow.

            After matter emerged from chaos, the first miracle was the creation of light, and with light came time.  When the triple rainbow began to fade, we came to ourselves slowly and with confusion.  We went indoors carrying new desires with us and I wished I had seen the triple rainbow when I was a child, not a grown up. I think somehow things would have been different.  I cleared the table of our dirtied dishes and glasses and the vase of yellow garden mums.

SHADOW

Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.  – John Ruskin

                                                                       

FRANCIUM HAS A HALF-LIFE of twenty-two minutes and a melting point so low this metal would be liquid at room temperature. It is an element of dream time. At any moment less than thirty grams of francium exist on earth; it is measured not in cupfuls but in atoms trapped in laser beams in a magnetic field, floating like snow flakes in the glow of a street light, casting shadows larger than themselves.  We will live our lives without ever seeing this metal, without experiencing its catastrophically brief existence.

            There was a boy once, like that. By accident, though there may be no such thing, we sat next to each other in a Boston pub, listening to revolutionary songs of a different country. He had black hair and white skin, the coloring you often find in people who recite Yeats from memory. We drank brown beer and drew codes in the sawdust floor with the toes of our boots.  He was with his friends, I with mine, yet we knew we were together. His arm slowly curled around my waist, under my coat, where no one could see it, but I could feel it.  We hadn’t spoken a word to each other yet we belonged to each other.   This is not a true story, you see. It is a story of unstable elements, of rare metals and all that we cannot see of existence, all that cannot be imitated. It is a story of solitude.

            The door opens.  A cold wind blows snowflakes into the pub, and the codes in the sawdust of the floor are wiped away by the draft. We shiver and leave behind the dream time.  His arm snakes back into its private Eden leaving behind this memory of a boy and that knowledge of rarity, of immeasurability.  The memory lasts longer than the moment and that is how we know we are, and have been. We measure such moments by atoms of the unexpected, not cupfuls of what is known. We exist in a single moment surrounded by before and after.

PURE WHITE

Under the direct yellow light of a descending sun . . .  pure white and pure blue are both impossible – John Ruskin

WHEN THE SUN DESCENDS, our humanity is optional; our goodness flees to animal history.  Day is not night, and dark is not light. Twilight obscures, while light illuminates, and under cover we change who we are. Sunset begins the masked festival of anonymity, when nature overcomes all the encumbrances of civilization, of education.  Shadows elongate till the children playing on the pebble beach cast darker outlines of alien origin.  White pebbles turn grey and purple; the wild chicory flowers lose their blue and flee to burnt lavender.  As the children play outside, inside wives dance into the shadows with other women’s husbands. Frank Sinatra croons them to the moon.

            The children, enticed by the music, leave the pebbled beach and the fireflies and creep to the clubhouse windows to spy on this secret interior.  The summer-hot world is divided into two camps, that of children and that of grown ups, and both camps on this summer evening are reverting to wildness, to those disremembered spaces formed in early history around campfires, inside caves.  Music and stories make the night bearable.  The grown ups fox trot and whisper.  Outside, the children press sticky faces to mosquito stained windows as lightning flashes in the distance.

             The teenagers who are just learning the ritual of courting dances and hormone bravado splash into the water to play daredevil: the lightning invades the sky, banging and flashing overhead, ambushing the lake.  The last child to leave the water, just before the lightning hits it for the first time, is the hero of the evening.  The younger children, impressed, resort to punching and pinching each other till the very youngest cries.  But no adult comes running.  They are fox trotting and two stepping and whispering on their way to a private moon.

PURPLE

. . . . the angels’ wings burn with transparent crimson and purple and amber.  John Ruskin

IN JAPAN, PURPLE IS A SACRED COLOR, the color of victory, the color of the cloth used to wrap sacred objects.  The author of the 8^th century The Tale of Genji called herself Lady Murasaki – Lady Purple.  In the west the Victorians chose subdued purple as a color of mourning. Perhaps death and victory are the same thing.

            In my grandmother’s bedroom a black shawl embroidered with purple pansies hung over her ogee mirror.  She loved purple flowers above all other colors, and filled the house with vases of lilacs in the spring. The aroma of lilac still brings me back to that mysterious bedroom I was allowed to visit only once, the bedroom of a woman who had outlived generations and some of her own children. The furniture was heavy and dark wood, their veneers crackled with age.           
           When my grandmother began to die they carried her down from that room and placed her in a hospital bed set up in what had been the dining room. I was eight, and the process of leaving life terrified me. We sat in a row of chairs, watching and waiting, hours and days of watching and waiting, and I thought of that mysterious room upstairs, the room now emptied of its greatest secret.  She seemed willing to go, not at all afraid. Or perhaps after so many years of being mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, she had learned to hide the fear from little ones. 

            After she died and even the hospital bed was emptied of her, the house filled with the scent of lilacs.  This happened in March, before the lilacs bloom.  In the Mass card that commemorates her death, angels kneel over a tomb and their wings are white with purple at the tips.

BLACK

It is at first better, and finally, more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they are, than as they are not. – John Ruskin

WHAT IS MOST UNKNOWN in our world is the ocean. How do we contemplate the unseeable, that heavy and murky darkness, the weight and depth of those alien environments? The deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, the part never measured, barely imagined, is the Mariana Trench, seven miles below seagulls and boats, six miles below the depth to which submarines dive, four miles deeper than the watery grave of the Titanic.  It is a stratum of ocean completely unknown to us, a womb where life must survive pitch blackness, salt, near-freezing temperature and a pressure of eight tons per square inch.  But there is life there.  Life is.

            In a spring and summer twilight, color, before it mutes and darkens, glows brighter as the defiant sun grasps for more time.  Is this our central metaphor, more time, please? Time and life use the same verb: they pass.  They are wasted or well used, celebrated or mourned.  Grief glows brighter at twilight, when memory invades.  Memory illuminates the shadows and varies the color of all other emotions.  Every day at twilight my elderly father told the same story. Something about the pure white light of a Florida sunset reminded him of a day sixty years before, when he and other boy soldiers clambered over the sides of a boat and stormed a beach in the South Pacific.  There were so many bodies we stepped on them, he said each time. We couldn’t see the sand.

            Otherwise, my father, as mysterious to me as the deepest part of the ocean, never spoke of the three years he spent on Saipan except once when we were watching one of those John Wayne World War II hero movies.  My father said: It wasn’t like that.

*   *   *

JEANNE MACKIN is the author of seven novels and has published short fiction and creative nonfiction in journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and is an award-winning journalist. She has taught English at Ithaca College and creative writing in the MFA Program at Goddard Collage in Vermont and Port Townsend, Washington.


  
Jeanne Mackin's latest book A Lady of Good Family, the story of the early landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and her relationship with her niece Edith Wharton is available online at this link: http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Good-Family-Novelebook/dp/B00OQRL57U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1433293389


*   *   *

Tim Keane: Two Poems

Bolero

after Robert Corless                                                                                                                               

Untitled painting by Robert Corless

are those inky dendrites colluding with tender nettle?

is the daubed, swampy pool-tide opposed with itself,

drained while it fills the space, and cresting while it recedes?

are the besotted strokes and the entangled cords, coupling

in the moment's enclosed whoosh, threading their own back-pedaling motion,

and is it a barnacled trestle, is it a brush-map of future flight patterns?

is it the outlawed, black-patterned encrusted flower

and the trick of ebony, wearing fine, melted red and blue residuum

at this arrested opening, then a thrust, leaping south into the ensuing black reversal?

is it a spring-ploy set in grim winter, circular and whole, then collapsing, angled,

at sin's synchronous cue, to arc, spin, halt, turn, fondle and scrum,

is it a coal-go, and an oil-streaked downdraft and a whirligig blotch that stains

and darkens another turnabout?

*   *   *

Manor Tree, Eddie Johnson 1964

The Manor Tree

after Eddie Johnson

Black thorny spindles spoil the cold grey pitch,

and spindly and taut lines bind one frozen branch to another.

A squall coats a skewed-V and the splayed trunk resembles

the exhausted legs of a shadowed nude, a bark of pale torso,

skin swathed in hoarfrost, sated, prone, in a sheeted

bed of snow, snug, drowsy, under a capacious billow.

Is it a compromised view on a dozing lover? Or the capsized

profile of a startled hare, hunkered, breathing desperate breaths?

Sleep to be sure, a light snore, by the manor tree, as the squall’s

gauze settles down, or settles in, and on, to no-one, no-thing,

and then to what? Then end of gray, the end of black in winter's

gradual, blinding white erasure.

*  *  *  

Tim Keane is the author of the poetry collection Alphabets of Elsewhere (Cinnamon Press). His award-winning writing has appeared in Modern Painters, Shenandoah, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Reader (UK) and numerous other publications. He teaches writing and European literature at BMCC, CUNY, in lower Manhattan.  web site: www.timkeane.com

The poem Bolero and the Corless painting first appeared in Sleepingfish in 2013 and are reprinted here with the permission of  the author, Tim Keane 

Checking for Measles

Stephen Poleskie

a short story

I

t was the winter almost everybody in our third grade class got the measles. While this disease was constantly of concern to my young mind, I must admit that at the time I had no idea what measles looked like. Those unfortunate enough to catch it were fortunate to be allowed to stay home from school until it was gone. My mother told me that measles were hot, scratchy red sores that you got from other people. I couldn’t understand how you could catch them if the people who were sick with measles didn’t come to school—yet every day another one or two of my classmates disappeared from our homeroom.

            That was also the winter it snowed and snowed, with thick flakes that froze on my eyelids as I crunched along on my way to school. As this was before school busses were popular, and everyone had to walk, there were no days off for deep snow, even though in some places it came up to my waist.        

As it was Saturday, my best friend Beebus and I had decided to spend the day making an igloo out of the snow. I can’t remember why he was called Beebus when his name was actually Robert, but that was his nickname. It wasn’t going to be a real igloo like I had read about in my geography book. We weren’t going to carve out ice blocks and stack them on top of each other like Eskimos did. Instead, using borrowed coal shovels, we had piled up a small mountain of snow in the corner of our backyard. I call it our yard because Beebus and I lived in the same building. We shared a two story house in a rundown neighborhood, where the space between the aging structures was only wide enough for a walkway. We were on the top floor, while Beebus’ family had the apartment below. The small, fenced-off area behind the house and between the alley and a garage was common to both families. As there was a war going on, our fathers had planted Victory Gardens in a corner of the space last spring, but both of them had been called away before the beans and tomatoes were ready to be picked.

            Our first idea had been to make a snow castle. However, after struggling for most of the morning Beebus and I discovered we lacked the skills necessary to create the towers and turrets we envisioned our castle having. Besides the pile didn’t look like a castle at all, but was a natural igloo. We carved out an entrance, and then began hollowing out the inside. This was when I got into trouble.

            The problem was my mother had a clear view of the backyard from our kitchen, which was why I seldom strayed from my own small corner of the world. I heard her window rattle up, and then her voice rattled down:

            “Johnny! What are you two up to? ”

            “Just playing, Mom. . . .”

            “And what are you going to do with that pile of snow?”

            “We’re making an igloo, Mrs. Starzinski. . . .” Beebus shouted up. Being a year older than me, he was in the habit of always answering for me.

            “You’re not planning to go inside that thing . . . are you Johnny?”

            “It’s gonna be our camp,” was my unwise reply. I imagined the two of us sitting inside in the semi-darkness making up stories, and planning and scheming all sorts of things.

            “Now you listen to me . . . don’t you dare go in there. It might collapse on you, and then you’ll suffocate.”

            “Awh, Mom. . . .”

            “Don’t you awh, Mom me, Johnny. You come back in here just this minute.”

            “Awh, Mom,”I repeated in a more pleading tone.

            “Can Johnny come inside to my place to play instead?” Beebus asked, rushing to intercede on my behalf.

            “Well, okay . . . but just for a little while,” my mother compromised. Then she gave me her usual warning: “But Johnny, you’d better come when I call . . . it’s going to be getting dark soon.”

            This was how I happened to end up downstairs in Beebus’ apartment on this gray, winter late afternoon. His older sister Lilly was home alone as, besides her regular job in a sewing factory, their mother worked on Saturdays at a five and dime store in town. Their father was presently hunkered down in a damp woods in Belgium awaiting a German counterattack. According to a pin stuck in a map hung up in our kitchen, my father was more fortunate. He was at an air base in Mississippi training tail-gunners. 

            Lilly had pulled a kitchen chair up to the enameled coal stove and was warming herself in front of the open oven. The stove was kept constantly lighted, being used as a source of heat as well as for cooking. In those days we all used coal—the mine was just across the street, its dark colliery towering above our house as the slack pile towered above that.

            Lilly was in the fifth grade. I remember her now as being rather comely, although the word was not then in my vocabulary, and the word has since fallen into disuse, at least when speaking about young girls. Not that one might suffer disapprobation for using the word today, which one surely would; however, the teeny rock princesses who nowadays parade their bejeweled navels and tattooed arms up and down Main Street in the summer could hardly be referred to as comely.

            “Mommy said I should check you for measles when you got home,” Lilly announced to her brother as soon as we came inside.

            We had both taken off our boots at the door, and then our heavy coats, which we hung over the backs of chairs. I sat down. But Beebus, who had moved closer to the stove, was continuing to remove the rest of his clothes. He was already down to his long johns, which I didn’t know he wore, when he looked over at me. He gave me a self-conscious grin and then removed that last covering also.

            “Stand still!” Lilly commanded her naked brother.

            She began running her hands over Beebus’ skin, starting at the back of his neck, checking behind his ears, under his chin, working her way down his body.

            I felt out of place just sitting there observing what was going on. Lilly kept glancing over at me to see if I was watching. I looked around the room, at the calendar, the clock, the crucifix hanging on the wall, but my eyes kept returning to the activity going on between the brother and sister.

            As strange as their theater was I must admit that my main curiosity was still about the measles. If Lilly found them on Beebus I would finally see what measles looked like. But then it would be too late for me because I probably would have them too, having surely gotten them from Beebus.

            Lilly shuffled her hand around her brother’s stomach, her index finger probing his belly button. Beebus’ penis seemed to be standing up straight, and was much longer, not like the time I saw it when we peed together in the woods. Lilly took hold of the knobby thing, bending it back, checking the underside, running her other hand around his testicles. Lifting up the whole set, she bent her head down low to give each item a closer inspection, her fingers smoothing the pale skin. The examination of Beebus’ privates was taking much longer than that of his other parts. I was sure she must have discovered something.

            Suddenly I felt very hot in my own crotch. Oh my God, I thought, Lilly’s found the measles, that’s where they are, there between your legs, hot, itchy—I must have them too. But her hand abruptly moved away from her brother’s penis. She gave a perfunctory scan to the rest of his body, which apparently was not that susceptible to measles. His feet were ignored completely.

            “You’re okay,” Lilly announced decisively. “I found no sign of measles.”

            I was relieved. Beebus started to get dressed. Lilly turned to me:

            “What about you, Johnny . . . want me to check you for measles?”

            I didn’t know what to say. I though about the hot spot between my legs, but by now it seemed to have gone away.

            “My mother checked me this morning,” I lied.

            “Okay,” Lilly said. “But I think now you boys had better check me.”

            That said she began unfastening the front of her dress. It was the kind of frock that no young girl would wear these days, and not too popular back then either, brightly printed cotton with a floral pattern, loose, with buttons down the front. It had probably been handed down to Lilly from her mother.

            Now I must admit until Beebus had taken off his clothes in front of me, I had never seen anyone naked but myself. And I had not actually even seen myself as the only mirror in the bathroom, where I got undressed, was high over the sink.

            Lilly finished draping her clothes over the chair by the stove and then turned around to us—completely naked.

            “Come over here, Johnny, and examine me,” she commanded.

            As I approached her bare body, I could feel the heat growing between my legs again. Or was it just the warmth from the coal stove?

            My eyes were immediately drawn to that place where girls were supposed to be different. I blinked in confusion. There was nothing there. Where Lilly’s penis and testicles should be was only a fleshy slot that kind of looked like where you put the money in a soda machine. I just stared.

            “Well don’t just stand there . . . come on, examine me.”

            “Johnnnyyy!!!”

            I heard the cry thrown outside from the kitchen upstairs. It echoed off the garage, and then rattled on Beebus’s window.

            “Johnnnnnyyyy!!!!!” The cry repeated, louder, longer. I knew there would be one more.

            Back then we didn’t have cell phones. We didn’t even have any telephone in our apartment, nor did Beebus. When my mother wanted to call the doctor she had to go to the grocery store on the corner and use the pay phone in the back by the boxes, where the butcher didn’t sprinkle sawdust on the floor.

            All the mother’s shouted out the window for their children. I still remember the different sound of the calls. Grant, was a loud bark; Billy, a shrill note that went down on the end; Leon, a kind of bubbly noise; and the two syllables of Beebus sailed out like insects escaping a hive.

            By some unwritten agreement there were always three calls, no more, no less. If you didn’t respond by the third call you were in big trouble, and usually caught it when you finally did come home. If you were too far away to hear, which you shouldn’t have been, someone often responded for you, or “told on you” as in: “I think I seen him with some of the other boys down by the colliery, Mrs. S. . . .”

            “JJJOOOOOHHHHHNNNNNYYYY!!!!!!”

            It was my third call.

            “Coming, Ma!!!!!!!” I yelled up at the ceiling. “I gotta go now. . . .” I said to Beebus and Lilly.

            “Hurry on home, momma’s boy,” the naked Lilly mocked as I headed out the door. “Beebus will examine me.”

            As I slowly climbed the steep stairs to our apartment, my young mind pondered the muddled events of the past hour. I suspected Lilly imagined her fun to be perfectly harmless. What did I know then of the pleasures of the flesh and carnal life. The whole business seemed blurred, as cloudy as the gray afternoon. Lilly’s strange and suggestive maneuvering had offered me no meaning. While it was true that a great mystery had been revealed to my eyes, my first vision of the opposite sex, something that I would never forget, I still didn’t know what measles looked like.

*  *  * 

Stephen Poleskie’s writing has appeared in journals in Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, the Philippines, and the UK, as well as in the USA, and in the anthologies The Book of Love, (W.W. Norton) and Being Human, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  He has published seven novels. Poleskie has taught at a number of schools, including: The School of Visual Arts, NYC, the University of California/Berkeley and Cornell University, and been a resident at the American Academy in Rome. He currently lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife the novelist Jeanne Mackin.

Website: www.StephenPoleskie.com

*   *   *

Debra Dolinski, artist

The artist with one of her digital artworks
photo by Ottavio Sosio

Thoughts On My Work
Debra Dolinski

I

 remember a wall, it was morning; I can’t have been more than 5 or 6. The white surface was scattered with a pattern in cobalt and purple, reflected shadows from the dogwood in bloom outside my bedroom window.  Walls, walls coming together, corners of the room. Crying for hours in the corner at nursery school. Out and in.

Those were my obsessions then, my themes now. Out: the sky: endless, limitless, freedom.  In: shadows, neither dark nor light - ambiguous; doubts.

When I was angry as a child I’d paint flowers. When I finally had a room of my own (my last year at Cornell, summer session) I found light. I’d set objects on a windowsill and paint them. The object didn’t matter: an egg crate; an onion, slightly dented and with the green sprout pointing, it was the sculpted light, carving things up. In fact, later a friend would say your work that year was like a salami, just cutting up slices. I had a show at Cornell of that work and a painting was bought by a collector - a trustee’s wife. It seemed like success.

Later, much later I was already living in Italy - eternal travels. As my daughter was born I was always looking at the sky, the abstract of the clouds, the breathtaking beauty that seemed to mirror the miracle that had occurred in my life. I started “sky diary”, a daily record of the sky, marking the compass direction and the time and location. As my second daughter was born this became my hedge against not working. I would do a sky each day, as necessary in those years as a prayer.

In winter my gaze would turn inward. I would stare at white walls, fixate until they became color. I would paint the subtle mutations of dark and light, thin layers of color one over the other like petals. Later still, when stretching canvases and working 60‘s big no longer seemed my scale, I started photography. I would record the subtle changes on white walls from one hour to the next, the same crack, the same corner of existence. Like Robert Smithson wrote “look closely at a crack in the wall and it might as well be the Grand Canyon”. (Robert Smithson; The Collected Writings). I’m still there and I’m still outside: in and out, light and dark with all the mystery.

*   *   *

Debra Dolinski, born in Boston 1950, started her artistic studies at the Boston Museum School

when she was still in elementary school. A summer stage at Columbia University with Steven Greene and Alan Kaprow was seminal in enrolling in the school of Art and Architecture at Cornell University where she studied with Steve Poleskie, graduating in 1972. In the same year she moved to Europe, initially for art related travels (which she has not finished) and continues to travel from her base in Italy. In her first years abroad she became a member of the Swiss artistic group “Movimento  22” joining in many group shows held in prominent Swiss museums. She continued her education at the Brera Academy, Milan under the guidance of Luigi Veronesi  spending several years concentrating on color theory. Numerous one person shows ranging from New York to Lugano, Como, Monza, Cantù and Milano. Paul Guidicelli, Franco Passoni, Elena di Raddo, and Stefania Carrozzini have reviewed her work. Debra lives in Como where she has her studio and continues creative art laboratories for children both in public schools and privately.

You can learn more about Debra's digital artworks on her web site:  www.debradolinski.it

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The Art of Dennis Hopper

Mike Foldes

I see Dennis Hopper's art collection is scheduled for auction at Christie’s.

I wonder if anyone dressed in blue velvet will ride in on a Harley,

and if she does, will she also wear a clear plastic mask hooked up

to a canister of nitrous oxide slung over her shoulder, and will she also have

a bandoleer of poppers to snap under the noses of climaxing bidders?

Dennis, old man, you were indeed the bad boy, you and James,

and Sal and Peter and Jack. Will there ever be another your equal

for suburban anarchist youths to model themselves after – even as they,

like you, become aging hipsters?  One by one the old guard

is replaced by the new, but not all will be survivors, as you were,

to finally find yourself hawking financially sound Ameriprise investments 

to septuagenarian peers, an irony sharp enough to cut through Rothko,

Rivers, Rauschenberg and other radical contemporaries you lived with

in your head and on your walls. So, Hopper’s collection is up for grabs.
That’s what happens, you know, the great works, the enduring ones,

just go shuffling about, house to house, room to room, wall to wall

at the will of the money changers. But at this stage of the game,

where hangs the art of Dennis Hopper is not in the living room,

but in that room for living -- not to be traded off for anything.

*   *   *

Mike Foldes is the founder and managing editor of Ragazine, an online literary magazine.

editor@ ragazine.cc 
http://ragazine.cc
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Join Mike on MySpace & Facebook
Mike is also the author of Sleeping Dogs, A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping
Download at www.Smashwords.Com and www.Amazon.Com
Purchase the paperback at www.splitoakpress.com

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Review: A Lady of Good Family

A novel by Jeanne Mackin
NAL/Penguin 2 June 2015

A Lady of Good Family is a magical novel about the power of place and how one American woman of the gilded age, Beatrix Farrand, devoted her life to gardens that can inspire,  restore and renew.  A wealthy and privileged woman, niece of Edith Wharton and connected to some of the most powerful people in 19th and early 20th century America, Beatrix turned her back on convention and other people's expectations of what and how ladies should live, to became our first female professional landscape designer. But what did she give up in the process? Mackin's novel is playful and romantic, full of insights about human relationships and the importance of creation.  It's a fun read, and a thoughtful one.

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available online: http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Good-Family-Novel-ebook/dp/B00OQRL57U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1433293389

Naked Sunset

Sreemanti Sengupta

T

hat morning was different. My eyes felt locked in a cage of dreams. And the bed was floating in ill smelling semen. I tried to remember last night. In Paris, I was with San Tiago the street artist who was travelling with me from motel to motel. My life came back to me in bits and pieces of flesh that I feed the stray dogs on the beaches of Orissa. I remembered the lady who stared hard through her party mask and said how inappropriate it was for a late Hippie to turn up for a book launch. The laugh I laughed walked back to my senses, like a dancer in the Middle East, teasing me to massage her backside. Or was it the front? I cannot recall. The backs and fronts and ins and outs collide and converge and push up like a ball of vomit that’s uneasily trapped in me for centuries. Very soon a laugh escapes as the vision of a Punjabi wedding hall, the one I sneaked into one hungry night in Ludhiana. The mountains of food were hallucinogenic..and soon they were nothing more than tits and asses and buttholes that people lined up to eat.

San Tiago, like many other men looking for exotic flowers that bloom in dangerous swathes of forests, asked me for marriage. The joint almost burnt into my fingers when I told him off. I told him I was getting fat and I was squinted, I was too vain and too beautiful, too free and too much of everything. That he was a street painter, and that all his work was trampled over by cars and feet and pissed on by dogs. He told me about Beauty and Art. About the inky black roads that lead everywhere and his Madonnas emerging aka thrusting out like pelvic bones from the cosmopolitan consciousness. “It is not about how many people stop and look, it is how much they are disturbed by a nonsensical burst of colour out of the corner of their eyes. It is like the fly that you cannot kill.”

My throat was parched for the want of Darjeeling tea. I rolled over and Darjeeling appeared as I had first seen it, emerging like a comely bride from the windows of a chugging train. The explosion of green at my window had probably inebriated the little me. I could hear Ma coaxing me to eat the bread and hard boiled egg. I simply watched, a sandwich uncouthly stuffed in my mouth. Darjeeling emerged in intolerably green tea estates past my window. I even waved to some Kanchis but no one waved back. Later in Geography, I learnt they were intent on plucking two-leaves-and-a-bud.

.

As a child and often afterwards, I have been confused about vacations. I had a strong urge to jump and run in the green fields that the train was carelessly cutting through, towards the horrible definitude of a vacation. I watched the lapis lazuli sky over the fields and wondered where colours came from, I almost stretched out my hand to catch the wings of the flying stork. Soon I would be itching to take a vacation from vacations.

Teetering on the thin railings of a balcony somewhere in Mumbai, my drunk mind sang a poem to me. Rosa was clasping my hand, equally drunk. We had decided minutes back that we would commit a grand suicide, for we were pained by the terrorist bombings in Mumbai, that the little boys who were playing with red balloons on the beach, now had their brains spattered on the sands. Rosa didn’t know much, understood less. It was a blessing I told her. She had told me not to die. I took breaks from puking out stale chicken kebab and demanded an answer. “Don’t you see green fields that rush by a chugging train? Don’t you see white sea gulls floating over the blue foaming ocean? Don’t you see wild creepers shooting out of old walls like little rebellions? Don’t you see babies being born out of nowhere, growing up, marrying and producing more babies?”

I sneer when I think about Rosa. Rosa was the widow of a man twice her age whom she married when she was sixteen.

--“But why?”

--“Because he was the only one who did not demand a dowry.”

-Why did you conceive so early?

-Because people started saying I was late.

I remember people looking at me queerly when I hung around with Rosa. They thought it weird that girl from a respectable family to be spending so much time with a brown uneducated widow from a remote Maharashtrian village. I gave a damn of course and suffered secretly. I suffered when there wasn’t a single soul to pass me a glass of water when my body was burning at one hundred and four degrees.

Rosa often told me of her village.

-My husband never beat me.

-Hmm

-There are homes where the man just walks off one morning and returns with a wife. A man lives with as many as five wives in our village and beats them all.

-Uh Huh

- Our neighborhood is too noisy, with children and women squabbling. The men mostly snore after a bout of country liquor.

I adore the ocean. I can sit at its fringes and think about Rosa’s village, about how children are produced like steel billets. How women are forced to behave like conveyor belts of babies spilling over on soiled sheets in soiled hospitals. How my grandmother had dropped one of her fifteen siblings accidentally. She was little and excited when she heard the hawker calling out wares. In her rush, she had placed the new born too near the edge of the bed. It had rolled over, fallen and died after breaking a hip bone. Nobody cared, there were fourteen others, and soon the mother would bring more.

San Tiago tells me I am too vain for my ideals. I am as common as the strip dancers at the streetside dance bars and as exotic as Caribbean folk music

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I get up naked and strut around the dingy room. It seems that for years I have been travelling from dream to dream, where one opens gates to the next. I cannot find my way back. I push my head outside the window and immediately the eve-teasers start cheering from below. I turn and look down at my cleavage and spare them a smile. Poor, Poor desires!

It is the lull before great storm. The sun is about to set on a breathless landscape. I smell the tense air, anticipating, hoping against hope. The horizon turns crimson in minutes, a beautiful calm drapes over the high-rises beyond.

In moments, the storm will arrive.

When I was in school in that village of mine, in the poverty that sucked away dreams like an octopus wrapping tentacles around his victim, I sat near the window, and suddenly the mathematical tables etched with white powdery chalk on the black slate grown old and weary with overuse, the sensation of the straw mat tickling me under the skirt Ma had patched up in several torn places, my hair, grown a straggly length just touching the shoulders, beating lightly with the wind, the heat and the salt of teenage skins all repeating after the teacher like tightly railed tracks. I sensed a remote storm building up somewhere, a storm that resembled hundred years of pent up desires of a squadron of soldiers sent to fight some war in Siberia. Back when I wasn’t sure what desire meant. Back when I didn’t know what any of this meant. This, me, here, sensing everything letting go, melting, dissolving, into a force beyond. Another time I had lost consciousness, staring into the village pond, feeding the giant fishes and watching the ripples. The village doctor pronounced that the spirits had possessed me. I was a cursed child. I felt a giggle escape me when I saw Ma crying about how am doomed to be an old unmarried maid. Who is going to take the hands of a poor dark mad girl?

San Tiago and Rosa do not believe me when I say I was born in a village. That I made my way to the world.

-Your skin is too bright. You don’t smell of the earth.

One of my early lovers complained that my body smelt of endings and death. I had smiled and pulled him close and switched off the glaring light that seemed to peel off layers of my epidermis and distribute a disturbing fragrance everywhere. I could not of course tell him the truth. I am free because I keep running away. Each escape piling up a like small death in me, like deceased embryos bursting at the pores of my skin.

When I tell San Tiago of my lovers, he merely turns his face and plays the flute. He says one day he shall make a portrait of me at Times Square and then I’ll have no way of escaping him! “The magic is in spontaneity. Streets and Traffic do not give you preparation..time is as scant as in the preparation of a Revolution. A revolution can begin with a baby’s cry in some remote, inaccessible corner of this planet..it gathers mass like a skeleton gathering flesh..it is the virility of a single voice that strings together an entire generation..”

It is one of those days when the bed is unmade and the room stinks of cheap wine. It is humid enough to trace beads of silvery sweat that balance themselves like ballerinas on my eyelashes. The sun is down and the darkness is screeching with crickets. Outside, the ice cream vendor puts me in a daze..

I screaam..I screaam....I screaam

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Sreemanti Sengupta enjoys a world of divided minds. She is an advertising copywriter from Kolkata, India, a poet, a struggling author, an e-mag editor, an elocutionist, previously published in various online journals such as Mad Swirl, Paragraph Planet, Certain Circuits, Bare Hands Poetry, Ppigpen and more including print anthologies in both English and her vernacular Bangla. She founded and runs The Odd Magazine celebrating alternate creativity herewww.theoddmagazine.wix.com/thisisodd and blogs atwww.weareideating.wordpress.com




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