By ROBIN MCLEAN
That was Mike hanging in the brass chandelier. He was Tarzan with a crew cut and farm boy grin, swinging upside down. Hilarious. Mel could get Mike to do anything.
1.
I was twelve when my family shared a big gray house on Fire Island with the McKennas. The house was at the end of a series of narrow boardwalks, just over a small dune from the ocean, which was easily visible from our veranda. I believe the house also had a sundeck off of one of the upstairs bedrooms, because I have a vague memory of someone—my mother, I think—telling me not to disturb Mrs. McKenna, who liked to sunbathe “in the nude.” I had never heard that expression before and, at first, could not believe I had understood it correctly. Only the weird blend of excitement and disapproval in the voice of whoever was speaking convinced me that my interpretation was exactly right. I have no memory of the sundeck itself, however, nor of ever seeing Mrs. McKenna in anything more revealing than a one-piece bathing suit.
Maps are one way humans make sense of their environment. In this age of Google Earth, where a few mouse clicks call up a satellite image of almost any inch of the globe, it can be difficult to imagine a time when maps were often based as much on hearsay and guesswork as scientific surveying.
In this island human corpses are not buried and do not putrify,
but are placed in the open and remain without corruption.
Here men see with some wonder and recognize their grandfathers,
great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers,
and a long line of ancestors.
—Topographia Hiberniae, Giraldus Cambrensis (1220)
I have seen them in other guises, in dreams or along wind-blown streets here and across the sea
where they go by with a nod or sometimes not, benign or monstrous, familiar passers-by
and now it is I who pass before them where they recline, still upon the rain-polished limestone,
each in his own bed
Happiness has just walked into the room and I don’t know how he looks to you
but to me he’s wearing the t-shirt you wore outside pruning the fruit tree.
Fox’s series the X-Files starred David Duchovny and Gillian
Anderson as FBI
agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully
Lights fade on this snow-erased suburban street as our screen flickers with roadside
bombs & body count. News is another stalled front,
a season past its prime. The house rattles with gale-force winds & Doppler radar
promises more.
for Deborah Tall (1951—2006)
Baltimore, 2006
Not cool for September so we walked
slowly, slowly to cross the still-green campus
gold-struck in morning’s light.
That’s the kind of phrase I’d have used,
years ago, an undergrad arriving in town
the same year that you’d left.
Not apocrypha, as in Scipio salting
the Carthaginian fields, a curse
on re-inhabitation; not the blacklisted
feature nor Jagger’s salute
to the working man, but that
which purifies, preserves, seals
a bargain, signifies wisdom, intelligence,
and virility—.
By CURTIS BAUER
This was bitter—the rain pouring down on us,
the too early risers, waiting in line outside
the National Portrait Gallery.
By TESS TAYLOR
I.
At the end of the pier,
light on a rocking boat.
We walked away from land
and our rented cottage.
Beneath us the planks groaned.
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