A Different Kind of Hunger (Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Series)

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A Different Kind of Hunger Fennelly, Beth Ann. Texas Review Press 188151515X 9781881515159 9780585173757 English

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1998 PS3556.E489D5 1998eb 811/.54

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A Different Kind of Hunger By Beth Ann Fennelly Winner, 1997 Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Series Texas Review Press Huntsville, TX 1998

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Copyright © 1998 by Beth Ann Fennelly All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America FIRST EDITION, 1998 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions Texas Review Press English Department Sam Houston State University Huntsville, TX 77341 Poems previously appeared in the following publications: Alaska Quarterly, American Scholar, Best American Poetry, Another Chicago Magazine, Best American Poetry 1996, Carolina Quarterly, Chariton Review, Cold Mountain Quarterly, Farmer's Market, Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Pearl River Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Northwest, and Sistersong: A Journal of Women Across Cultures Cover Art: Municipal Canteen During the Siege of Paris, by Henri Pille, courtesy of Phototèque des Museés de la Ville de Paris Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fennelly, Beth Ann, 1971A different kind of hunger / by Beth Ann Fennelly. 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 1-8815-15-X I. Title. PS3556.E489D5 1998 811'.54-dc21 97-44277 CIP

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The Snake Charmer On our first ride when you yelled "Snake!" I braced against the lump under your tires; the men I've known would swerve across two lanes to kill a sunning hognose, leaving its futile rattle in my throat. Not you. You stopped the car, crouched by the snake. Your fingers caught its neck like you'd pinch lightning in mid-air. Awed, you showed the grotto of its jeweled and earless head, white-welled muscle of mouth, round eyes without venom, the vent in its mosaic where excrement comes out. You brought it to the brush and then freed it. Almost purring, it unwound, slow silk circles down your arm into kudzu. Since then more than once, love-wracked, you've turned with that same awe: "How is it you love me so much?" Well, because you stopped. Because your fingers cup my neck, and tenderness rises beneath them. Because I'm free to leave. Open your eyes, my charmer: I'm still wound around your arm. When the snake loves, it's the fiercest kind of love.

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Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding You ask me for a poem about love in lieu of a wedding present, trying to save me money. For three nights I've lain under glow-in-the-dark stars I've stuck to the ceiling over my bed. I've listened to the songs of the galaxy. Well Carmen, I would rather give you your third set of steak knives than tell you what I know. Let me find you some other store-bought present. Don't make me warn you of stars, how they see us from that distance as miniature and breakable from the bride who tops the wedding cake to the Mary on Pinto dashboards holding her ripe red heart in her hands.

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Windows of Prague Store Window:

Restitution

A waitress suddenly owns a department store, as property seized by Nazis in the war is returned to the descendants of the owners of the loss. What has she to sell? A wedding dress and auto parts. In the window the bride's bouquet is a wrench. Fixed in time, the Skoda * can spirit her away to church. Castle Window:

Defenestration

1419: Protestant noblemen charge the banquet hall, seize the King, full bodied as his claret, and hurl him out the window. This glitch in Hapsburg succession is the Defenestration of Prague. After history, the story continues: moating the castle were peels and carcasses fit for a King and chamber pot refuse which pillowed his fall. In three day's time he crawled out, floated the Vltava downstream, found an alias, became apprenticed to blow glass. His windows were so clear, it was said, that they fetched one hundred crowns; as he made them in the field, kingfishers died to fly to him. Bloody feathers stuck in glass: the only proof.

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Sky Window.

Armageddon

The square's astrological glass dome: a man scans to confirm the known unknown, but discovers a thirteenth sign, overlooked stars that are burning to be recognized. All history is out of line, fate's lacking. In the cracked, unnatural sky, bears and lions hurl against their cages, Orion pierces the wine bag of heaven, and Pisces thrashes his tail against the dome, but the astrologer, unable to right the fish bowl, drowns in his own dream.

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Return To Krakow I want to return to the city where cobblestones bob like apples to trip the drunks, where a man in the Planty gardens slurred at me some vulgarity that I translated later as meaning, "You have such exquisite ankles." I want to return to the square to hear the clock tower's trumpet, its terrible caesura marking the time the Tartar's arrow pierced the trumpeter's throat, precisely not quite twelve one spring day in 1011. I want to be alarmed. Nearby in a park a person skims lives and deaths in a newspaper, while three black girls rollerskate by wearing all the fruits of summer. Look up at those girls and feel sad. Yearn for terrible speed and scraped knees. Come to Krakow, where things are not buffered by habit or ease. Let us be almost poor again, so different things matter. Let us search for the bakery where, lost and cold, I ate the best bread of my life. Let it steam in our chilled hands. Let us truly taste it. We will walk past kiosks, the castle cinched with moats, the venders of cheese and pretzels, the beer halls, the women weaving garlic into wreaths. We will walk past the Capuchin cathedral, the chandeliers made from the bones of monks, under which newlyweds duck fistfuls of coins, a cheaper tunnel than rice. We will walk followed by gypsy children hawking their enormous eyes, and the flower-sellers melting into moats of asters, calling, "What is it you lack?" Less, now. We will be lost, which means we'll notice everything. You could have been a dancer, you'll say, given half a chance. I'll say I can't swim, but dream each night of the ocean. We will stop to purchase directions with our handful of dear words. The cider

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seller will not tell, gives instead a steaming amber mug to share: "Drink, drink." You'll pirouette around a fountain. I'll toss in my watch. When it stops its tick, I'll make a wish. You'll save for me the last good sip.

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Orange-Bird The women closing their stalls see with the turgid eyes of the fish they didn't sell, as they dismantle the trays of the dead. Near the market, the cafe's few travelers think they've lost their shadows for good, this time. A Chinese woman motions to join my shipwrecked table. We speak in English, trade coins too small for the Exchange from countries left behind. The women wheel-barrow home to fishermen waiting with faces caught in the nets of their hands for a meal of rice, maybe a few mussels boiled until the tongues burst through the shells. The sun, unsold, has been carted from the market. You tell the difference between countries, she says, by the names they have for torture. China made my father a Singing Fountain. They brought us to the square, pierced his head with spikes, blood spurted out in streams. I was six. In this country, torture is simpler, but not inelegant. It needs only orders, a person peeled from luck, and a sack cradling oranges like a papoose. The beating crushes your insides but on the skin leaves no proof beyond the scent of citrus when they find you. In Spanish Town, they say you've met the Orange-Bird. Your Americans are no less violent, only they lack irony, and an appreciation for the poetic. If you wait long enough to return there, she said, you will see that all countries are one country. Then you will belong to none of them. If somewhere you tell of this meeting, do not give me a beautiful name.

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Madame L. Describes the Siege of Paris You say that you could never eat a snake? Had you been here, mademoiselle, in seventy one this zoo would seem the freshest of buffets. We too would have denied it of ourselves but war is turpentine that strips the gloss. We built a wall to keep the Prussians out and barricaded Haussmann's boulevards. We forged new guns, drilled soldiers for attack, then waited for the shells. They never hit. Too late we learned they meant to starve us out. It seemed almost a joke those first few days, our handsome soldiers yawning with ennui. When Bismarck sneered ''The Paris bourgeoisie will break after a day without eclairs," we laughed. Then had a day without eclairs. The jokes, and children, thinned. The markets stalledwe lost our fruit. We lost the beef and eggs. Stale bread and unripe camembert were hawked for sumsMon Dieu!that tripled overnight. The first milk-hungry babies made their moans. Flaubert bought braces, his first pair in years his belly couldn't hold his trousers up. We thought it'd gotten bad. Then it got worse. The ville des lumières went outno light! No oil for lamps! No coal to feed the stove! November, and too cold to sit inside. The poor huddled along the Champs Elysées mobbed kiosks, tore up cherry trees for wood. The staple cafe diet, God and art, was jettisonedthey talked only of food. The men got drunk and drunkerwe had wine and mustard in abundance all those months. Mustard and wine, mustard and wine, wine, wine.

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Le Journal left off printing world affairs, gave recipes for cooking rotten peas. Outside the barricade the Prussians drank French wine, slept in French beds, and nibbled brie from lips of well-fed maidens, also French. Inside, the city withered, locust-stripped. I was young like you and had a man, an officer, but stationed in Angers. The tracks were cut. Although I dreamt of him and how he'd feed me beurre et sucre crêpes, the weeks grew long. Soon I just dreamt of crêpes The plump girl he had loved discovered ribs and collarbones and hips under her dress each day I molted memories like a snake There was a boy named Jacques who hunted crows inside the TuilleriesI dug for root of dahlia, and we would picnic there. Sometimes he put his hands inside my blouse, a different kind of hunger. Afterwards he'd tell how he would feed me if he could madeleines and berries dipped in cream, gorging me with words til I was full. No help came from abroad. Always no news. Shipwrecked, we tied our pleas to pigeons' legs and ate the olive branches they returned. We sent hot air balloons up from Montmartre that blew into the Prussian's chubby hands, our Grand Sortie laid bare for them to squelch It seemed we dreamt the world up long ago. The hundredth day of siege: I queued for bread while baby coffins circled Pére Lachaise like white ants choosing their last picnic spot. A claustrophobic humor reigned the streets. We all were single-minded: food; so speech became superfluous, the same ideas in every house. The cats, suspicious, felt

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in stroking hands the butchers' greedy thumbs appraising embonpoint. The dogs were dumb. Meows and barks soon came from butchers' carts. I ate a slice of Siamese at Maude's that tasted just like chicken with her sauce; the meatballs made of mice caused Maude to toast: "To enemies made friends in cooking pots!" Victor, my dog, was old; though it was triste to fatten him for Christmaswhat a roast! A good dog, Victor, til the very end. With Paris circumscribed, why keep a horse? My father used his cane to beat the mobs who tried to steal his mare, but acquiesced to mother's frank "She's starving; why should we?" The butcher stayed for filet de cheval and courted me with eggs. The town dehorsed. The soldiers used their strategy on rats; they baited lines with wax and fished in sewers. Then we ran out of rats. The city paused no howl, no cheep, no whinny in the streets and panicked. We turned upon the zoo inside our zoo. Trumpetings and ape-cries from the ark: The hippopotamus, the kangaroo, wapiti, bear, and wolfall mustard-doomed. We killed them two by two. We cheered the boys who drove the weeping zoo keeper away and broke the locks made strong to keep us safe. On fire, we roasted camel on a spit, danced palm to bloody palm. The drinking troughs were filled with wine. Two elephants, the pride of town, Castor and Polluxtheir trunks were sliced over a barrel for blood. My torch revealed two twin girls eating monkey from their hands, some boys working a bar loose for an albino koala skewer. While at the lion's cage I felt a hand slip underneath my skirt. Beard on my neck. Feathers and bones

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were all we left to greet the stricken sun. I threw that dress away, it was so stained. Later that week Thiers proclaimed defeat, ceded Alsace-Lorraine, our francs, our pride. The walls came down and Paris could reworld. The Brits sent mutton, pies, and currant jam. And things returned to normal. Shelves restocked. The butcher shop on Fauborg Saint-Germain took down its rhino horns. And gardens grew. Resuming lives, we fought amongst ourselves a civil warwell, who would govern now? Who pay the money owed? Who seek revenge? We were reminded who was rich, who poor, and so if the poor starved they could be blamed. Well, that was years ago. Since then I've seen more warcalled "Great"if what they say is true, we'll see another here before too long. I've stockpiled tins of flour, sugar, grain. I eat well always now, though it seems bland. Maybe because I'm old. But my tongue holds the taste of bear passed from a stranger's mouth. So me, I settled down, bought "Victor Deux." I plumped up, took a husband and his cares. My life grew dense: I bore him seven sons. The four that live prepare themselves to fight the grandsons of the ones my husband fought. Jeanthat was his nameis gone. I spend my days on this bench in this zoo. I like to watch the animals and think of things and people I have known. It's strange how fresh the siege is in my mind, as if my life's composed of those eight months. I think we keep ourselves so tightly wrapped we never see our spools. We saw them, clear as skeletons, that time. What's wrong? What's right? To live was right. To know that you could take the heart and eat it raw.

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Sestina For Your Return Flight to the Czech Republic Space will be tight, I know, but somewhere in your bag I'll find an absence the size of a sigh for this letter. By now you're high over Arkansas, picking the vegetables from your beef marsala, having forgotten in your backwards way to pre-order vegetarian. I picture your intense concentration on the Times crossword, and send greetings. Ten hours will bring you back to the country where "Greetings" and "Farewell" share the same word. We couldn't tell backwards from forwards there, twisting tongues; "If present tense is all we can speak, we must live in it,'' you wrote in a letter. Word lists taped next to the toilet: our brains would bag like Czech pantyhose. We memorized: man, hand, fruit, vegetable. Some terms were more useful than others, for no vegetables all winterexcept for my birthday present, a bag of eggplants! In November. You told me of the tense black market exchange. A student met you without greetings, gave you advice and directions looking backwards over his shoulder. You followed his suggestions to the letter. Kathleen, now I can only hear through letters what were once shared exploits. Send greetings often. We're both questioning our choices, their pretenses This year I will be staked and rooted like a vegetable; you return to gypsy nights, all you own on your back in a bag, your bed; a seat on a night train facing backwards. Don't you wonder if we've got it all backwards? Maybe I should be readying for landing to claim my bags, watch the Czechs perform their strange pageantry of greetings, with you here in an Arkansas kitchen slicing vegetables? Truth is, you felt more at home there. No vowel letters, but you mastered those words of smashed spiders. I was tense

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from the strain of translation. Kathleen, the future tense approaches. Like a message read in a bar mirror backwards we must decipher what Fate dictates in her letters. She separates our laundry into different bags, She sends her Christmas cards with separate greetings mine to a place where even Quick-Mart has vegetables. You tense as the plane touches down. Get your bags, don't look backwards. I wish you luck and vegetables. Write letters. In a word, farewell. And greetings.

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Corrections: The Editors Regret the Following Errors Made in The History of Art I. She gave away her dresses and furniture and went to live in that cabin on the hill. She wanted to find the spool of her days while there was still time left. She thought keeping it simple would do it. She put her only chair in front of the one window. She looked through its frame on nothing but the tops of evergreen and, farther down the hill, a telephone wire that bisected the window. Hanging from the wire was a pair of men's shoes, knotted at the laces, their soles parallel to the ground as if all they needed for walking were legs. She could not imagine how they got there and could not stop trying. Having them there was hard on her. When it rained the shoes filled with water. When the wind blew they rotated slowly like a mobile above the bassinet of forest. The snows came and they were a pair of blackbirds, a scratch on her glasses, motes in her eyes. After a long time the snows melted and men came to work on the telephone pole. With a casual backhand, one flung the shoes from the line. What she had wanted all along. After that, her arms were sore for days, trying and trying to get those shoes framed just right again. II. Somewhere in the white space on the upper right-hand corner of your page is a door you have not sketched. Behind it, I wait in the one chair in that shack you lived in by the sea. The windows are open and paper molts from the slanting walls. There is sand that you carry home from your job at the boardwalk where you scoop up basketballs and hand them to children paying a dollar to see if they can swish the nets four times out of five. It is a game they do not play in your country. We meet after work in the corner bar and your friends buy us drinks. After, we go home and make love, the sand on the sheets scraping my back raw; your hands, blackened from ball handling, scraping my back raw. The tips from my last shift are jostled from the night table and the quarters and dimes roll parabolas back and forth on the warped

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floor before settling at last. The next morning, waitressing again, my shoulders chafe under my flounced tuxedo blouse. I enjoy it. You draw the door to a close. III. Which, after all, has more truth: the mistake that we've based our lives on, or its correction? A man purchases at great price a beloved Goya. The painting is worth so much more than his house that no one will insure it. Friends urge him to put it in a vault. Instead, he hangs it in a white room and buys a pair of German Shepherd bitches. Every night he brings them to that room and sits in the one chair before the Goya. The dogs sit on either side, and he pats their heads intermittently. All three look at the painting and the man points out its miraculousness to the dogs in a low voice. He talks to them about cobalt blue and garnet red. They seem to understand him. In this way, the man's nights pass in splendor. His life is augmented. Years later, at the man's seventieth birthday party, an art collector proclaims the Goya a fake. Infrared refractology confirms this to be true: ghosts from this century wander through the priming, vulgar in their craftsmanship. The man is alone his house. Should he: (a) sit with the dogs, his aging brides, in the white church of the one true Goya, or (b) shut the door upon them, leash their lonesome howling to his bleached and bankrupt heart?

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Letter from Gauguin's Daughter Papa, Enclosed is what little money your last exhibition made here in Copenhagen. Please do not be discouraged; the light is so filtered and muted here, not even snow can be white. Your thick impasto of magenta, of orange of course the reviewers would see it as caricature. You ask about our health. Mother is not improved. In her fever she forgets our reversal of fortune, the exile from Paris. She dreams of our home on the rue de Lorette, asks: are you home from the bank, or at your Sunday hobby, painting picturesque birds? Bedridden, she rings me to describe Paris from her window above these rotting Danish docks. I am well, besides missing you and France. Every day my Danish aunts introduce me to the blond eyelashes of some local Lars or Søren who seeks a hard-working wife. I suppose I should be grateful, being 27 and too thin. Yes, I am still sketching between stints with the seamstress, and I'm glad you think I capture well the harpsichord in the parlor. Papa, it's five years since you left us here, telling me care for mother, telling me six months. But you paint someone called Vahinè, who sits with earth-tipped breasts, weaving a basket from screw pine. On her blanket is a pipeFrench and familiar. And the birds you're painting now are not even slightly picturesque. Just yesterday I looked in the pierglass, Papa, and laughed to realize I'm still waiting

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to get prettier, happier, waiting for my neck to grow graceful before I wear my pearls. But we stop growing, Papa, or most of us do. I never told youonce, as a girl, in your study I heard the pterodactyl . . . " Papa, I must finish this letter. Yes, you'll have money when the seamstress next pays me. What do you think of my sketches? Excuse me, the bell rings Aline

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Easter in the Beskydy Mountains I. She holds it breath-gentle, tongue seeking that opening round and moist as a tiny mouth. She drawstrings her lips around a bag of breath and blows. She blows as the spring breeze on the creek where the children sail their walnut shell boats, measuring to see who'll go farthest from home. She blows, and the white, viscous liquid drips out. Holding the egg shell to her ear she hears the ocean, which she will never see. II. The boys and their switches: thin and knobby, with a whip to them. Across the creek they pass the bottle of slivovice on elder branch sticky with creosote. They sing the Easter songs, plait whip handles. They laugh and whole plums fall from their mouths. III. The violence and pleasure: they are older than Easter. They are

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from when the steaming earth cracked like an egg, moisture filling fissures, two subterranean plates colliding, scarring the earth with the mountain range where the first boy and girl grew plums, where now every day the people walk to the graveyard, place their prayers under pebbles on tombstones, as if nightly the restive dead sit up in bed, needing the fears of the living to read themselves to sleep. IV. The girl waits with marvelous fear. Alone, each girl has prepared an egg, first hollowing it with air, then wax of white on white and wane of paint, each stroke with him in mind. And ribbons for the others. The boys come to her with flying colors, whips ribboned in other houses, now landing across her backside. They cry to strip the bark! because they were told that in the long winter virgins grow wooden from neglect. The girl thanks them, ribbons the whips that raised a mountain range of welts. She gives the egg to the one.

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V. Passion Friday: the girl's egg is ready, paint-crescents turpentined from cuticles. The grave mother sits up in bed, drips ocean down her thighs, feels a mountain breach the box of her house. She palms the love line of a cracked egg, as if she didn't ken the future, as if she could read herself to sleep.

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You Who Have Never Arrived (after Rilke) You who have never arrived, I don't even know what songs would please you. I call out in crowds, sensing you almost-there. In the festival I lost you in the dervish of dancers rattling gold coins linked on their ankles. Or you were the masked and goat-footed one behind the crowd, separate, eyes worrying the curb spackled with lottery tickets and confetti. You have never arrived since the beginning in my girlhood, the yellow balloon enteethed in the cathedral of the great elm was released by your hand. None other. And from the ascending escalator, midway between floors, the fingers that combed the length of my hair as I descended were yours, then gone. We could never place each other. In all places I have not-heard your voice, although your echo was one of the oval echoes from the distant football stadium spiraling into the whorls of my ear as I stood at the precise point alone becomes lonely, and yours was the voice I held in my hand late at night, late in the century, telling you "wrong number" then suffering the silence, the receiver's tremolo wail. Because of you I accrue nostalgia for places never visited; the wave that lapped my calves on the cusp of a new sea must have sloughed its salt from your sun-burnt shoulders. And I know why, over grappa, the bar mirror gave back my too-sudden imageyou had just carried yours through the swinging door, still flapping its emphatic farewell. Those were your footsteps on the esplanade, the starboard deck, the ballroom floor, the rope bridge. When the too-crowded elevator parted for your as-yet-unrealized shape, I was laboring up the stairs. You had been waiting for me on the roof-top observatory; when I got there the eyepiece of the telescope focused on Venus was still warm from monocling the arc of your socket.

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You who have never arrived, dopplegänger of longing, my earthly fit: if found, we would teach each other how to love perfectly. Our spirits would break from our human shapes and rubspark and fuse into whatever we composed before being breached, deformed into the monsters that we are, each other's better half.

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Yield She makes them still, recipes serving eight or ten or twelve. It's what she is, the stroganoff, the lasagna. She herself now dislikes food, the empty table, nibbles crust while rearranging curdled quarts of milk, bronze cold cuts oxidizing green, pork chopsher husband's favorite. Sleepless, she bruises garlic and pulls the beards from mussels. Morning at the gargling disposal: she marries ketchup from two familysized bottles. A habit. A necessary lie. If there's a way to cook for one, she can't remember or who she was exactly when she knew. Her babies, grown and quarrel-scattered, come back only in dreams to search the freezer, asking, ''What is there to eat?" She pleads, "I'll make you anything you want," then wakes, plugs in the twelve-cup coffee pot. She writes a list of what's gone bad, what's gone, then shops, avoiding contents that have settled and check-out clerks who ask, "Will this be all?" The years flip backwards, indecipherable as journal pages from that honeymoon to Italy that she wrote in shorthand. What she remembers now are the requests, the favorite birthday dinners of each child, the man she fed for thirty years who loved her mashed potatoes, who walked out one day. She's kept his dinner warm for seven months, her fingers thinning, wedding band so loose it falls into the batter of angelfood.

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The Insecurities of Great Men It is a job for great men: to pack a space probe with what we do and love. To say to the infinite: "Here we are." Imagine the great men grown from boys who used to dream of hitting a ball so hard it never came back, a homer's wild ellipsis out in space. How did they decide what to include, Carl Sagan and his team of rocket scientists, one of which, the blind physicist, has never seen a star, but listens for a poem in their waving emission, in the frizzy hiss of space? Naturally selected to represent us, here are their chosen world views: photos of astronauts, eagles, children, a sequoia, a seashell, the Great Wall, the sun, the Taj Mahal, and a stick-figure pregnant woman. One wonders at this bare-bones sketch of her, what part of pregnancy offends: the crusting of colostrum around the darkened areolas, the stitches of white thread on the stretching seams of skin, the linea nigra, that dark track linking navel to genitalia, reminding even great men of the black hole from which they sprang? Or is it the everyday miracle she represents that the sum of their studies has failed to explain? Or again, the pure non-Euclidean plane of her, the fuzzy math, the census taker's irritation at factoring She-who-is-more-than-she-is? Does the death rattle of some distant star give birth to more in them than a universe kick-starting beneath her swollen fingers? Or perhaps the substitution was a concession to the delicacy of the imagined aliens? Oh great men, how will those creatures R.S.V.P. when they circle in the wet grass where the probe has landed, belly up, slick with perspiration, moaning open in their arms, yielding its precious issue with a gust of steam and rust into their holy and natural world, and a woman made of sticks unhinges in their hands?

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Mary Speaks to the Early Visitor at the Laying Out You're welcome here, kind sir, take off your cloak. It seems you've traveled far to pay respects A friend from Cambridge? No? Well, never mind. Anne, Deborah, and I have baked the day and you shall be refreshed, though father died and left us, orphaned, with the larder bare. Yes, you're right. He'd taken a third wifethree wives and three daughters, he loved his trinities. So no, we're not quite orphans, the wife is here to share my share of naught. Have a glass of elderberry wine? I'm pleased you like it, we made it ourselves for men who came to meet the famous author. Not that he'd have a glasswater alone passed his lips the three and twenty years I've been on earth. He was not a man for simple pleasures. He'd forget to eat. When Deb and I read him the Hebrew Bible (we didn't know the languages but we pronounced the words) we'd find we needed more than vowels to chew. "Can we eat our gruel?" He'd raise his blind, bleared eyes in our direction. I daresay that he now enjoys the cotton that's puffing out his lips as much as joint of mutton. Well yes, I'll tell what happened, despite my lack of skill at giving speeches I haven't had much practice. His first wife left their two-month marriage, returned to her mother; his second rose to old St. Peter, taking baby Johnny with her; the Great Fire charred his house on Bread Street; his childhood home became the Great Plague's grave; Cromwell's head (which Papa'd praised) was carried on a spike;

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the hangman set his torch to Papa's tracts; Papa, gnarled with gout, neck thick with goiter, cursedI heard himat the doctor's order: choose between the inkpot and your eyes. He worked for six more months in black and white and lived his last twelve years without a sunset. We sisters went to Pinkham's school for charm. Deborah sang like one of Papa's angels. I was fringing pillows made of silk. The eldest one is Anne, she is a cripple but sweet and could have been a curate's wife. (We were of the age to think of marriage.) But Papa called us home to be his readers. He rose at four. Which meant we rose at four. We'd lead him to his seat before the fire: "Girls," he'd say, "I need my morning milking." He'd say his lines aloud, we'd pull them down into our shallow pails of parchment paper. When he was empty, he would have us read. We got to where we could sound out Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Greek. This went on for years. He had us write "Doth God exact Day-labour, light denied?" We wondered if God factored who composed the labor. Artillery Walk was kept devoid of suitors; Papa barred us from the parlor when men came there to talk of art or God or hear how he met aged Galileo. Andrew Marvell saw me once in the kitchen but Papa said, "She's my amanuensis." Which put an end to that. It worsened. He felt his days were few. He'd wake with sonnets screaming in his head, scream them at ours. Sometimes I'd just pretend to write them down. When he caught on he'd ask to feel my sheet,

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traced the divots of my doodles, satisfied. He kept us up all night to write of Samson, "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves." We saw the parallels, but we, not him, braced against the walls and dreamt of rupture. Then came the birdless Monday when he moaned: "I'm dying. Let the earth be rolled in flames." He did, but it was not, praised be the Lord. That was three days ago. The layer out then bathed his body, strapped him to a board, and tied his legs so his soul couldn't walk. Blue fingers were so curled into his palm we kept them straight by fixing them to sticks. We tied his goitered chin so Lucifer and witches couldn't coven on his tongue. We placed two copper pennies on the eyes that nevermore would see they couldn't see. Most lacking where most needed, dignity was not an honored guest at Papa's death. Our narrow staircase twisting to the parlor could not accommodate my Papa's board. We took it high and low and on its side. We lowered him, at last, from the bow window. Neighbors got some ropes, I went below. If I live to be sixty-six like him I never will see a stranger sight: Papa swinging into sunshine, wings of gauze aflap his shoulders, bedsheets billowing. Descending from the sun, he blinded me. I wept, which I did not expect to do. That's the story best as I can tell it. I'd like to sleep in but still wake at four my tongue outstretched where Babel has been razed. We've sold his library to pay his debts and buy Deborah that harpsichord inside.

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Well, sir, you may enter at your leisure. We're grateful for your visit, but I didn't hear your name. Peter? That is strange, In "Lycidas," St. Pewell, never mind. You've come for Papa, he's laid out within. If you chance to pass this way again, we plan to keep a lively parlor now. Perhaps some whist? You could be our fourth, if you desire. Now that you know the path, please do return to join our company.

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The Passing (After "Woman Reading" by Frank W. Benson) I. The Painter The painter reads the shoulder-shadow dimming the nameless book the model holds as she poses, turned from the window. The tip of his brush strokes the place where the back of her ear meets her neck. If he were different, he thinks, he would put down his palette, press his lips into that tight tent of flesh. Instead he captures it in oil: no man to risk permanent work for passing pleasure. The woman turns an indolent page, shifts: a rearranging of his props. II. The Woman She reflects on the light, knows her profile delicate as a Belleek tea cup, with a luster as translucent, but knows too how this light spoils, how the sun passing through the eye of the window will rise on shoulders other than hers. This knowledge enters her fingertips, enters her collarbone poised like wings of a gliding bird, and she ages. The painter thickens her cerulean sadness. Beauty slips through her fingers like something inconsequential, the bristles of a brush, the pages of a book. III. The Author Across his soup bowl sits his mute companion, his manuscript, growing every night in this room where he peels his loneliness off in 8x11 inch

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sheets. He thinks this last work is his greatest effort, yet can't be sure it equals the good done in an average afternoon by a pretty Irish nurse, scolding mercury down a thermometer, marrying sugar to a diabetic's blood. He writes on, regardless. He thinks when he passes through the eye of the reader, his signature will remain.

Beth Ann Fennelly Beth Ann Fennelly, a native of Chicago, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. After graduation, she spent a year teaching in the Czech Republic. She currently teaches English while working toward her MFA at the University of Arkansas, where she is a Lily Peter Fellow. Beth Ann has won the Charles B. Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from The Carolina Quarterly, and she has published her poetry widely in journals in this country and abroad.

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