New Year 2007: Issue 43

Fiction/Memoir
Joyce Abell | Sally Bellerose
Miriam Karmel | Laurie Klein
Hylarie McMahon | Robin Reinach
Lucille Schulberg Warner | Evelyn Wilson
Janet Yoder

Poetry
Judith Arcana | Carl Auerbach | Guy R. Beining
Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard | J. Wesley Clark | Carol V. Davis
Patricia Fargnoli | Wendy Hoffman | Gene Kimmet
Peggy Hapke Lewis | Stephen Massimilla | Marissa Mattys
Ardelle Osborne | Mary F. C. Pratt | Hilary Sallick
Florence Weinberger

Editors
Mary Azrael | Kendra Kopelke | Christina Gay

Assistant Editors
Jaye Crooks
Sandra L. Jones
Anup Pradhan

Cover Art by Evelyn Wilson
Evelyn Wilson was born in 1915 to Hungarian immigrant parents and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She graduated from Hunter College in 1936 and in 1940 married the painter Ben Wilson, her companion for 65 years. The couple had one child, Joanne, in 1942. A sculptor who has exhibited widely in museums and galleries in the United States and abroad, Wilson has work in many public and private collections and has received numerous awards. For many years she divided her time between sculpture and as an executive in the perfume and cosmetics industries, for which several of her inventions were patented. The work that appears in this issue came from a book of memoirs and sculptures, Prince of Whales, compiled as a gift by her daughter Joanne Wilson Jaffe, who is herself a sculptor. Their work can be viewed Online at The Gallery of Functional Art.

Excerpts from Issue 43

Birth Days

Every forest remembers its own green birth in dirt.
I remember sun on my skin that summer: heat and light.
Like trees, we two were seeded by wind and rain.
The moon was red or silver, the waves were black or gold.
We walked the shore of the lake through night to morning.
Every forest loses trees to lightning, clean and dead.
Then tight green curls push out, up through hard black sand.
We were struck over and over, toppled, emptied and scoured.

Learning from that flash of sudden fire, we saw by sky light
what's born inside of flame, what lives inside of coal.

Judith Arcana

The Night My Father Died

I didn't think that he would really die.
It was like the Halloween when I was ten,
and dressed up as a clown, and loaded down
with candy corn and Hershey bars and five dollars
all in dimes, took the short cut I had heard about
past the sawed-off tree on Williams Way
and saw numbers going down instead of up
and ran and ran and ran and I was lost.
I saw his skin turn yellow, watched flat blue lines
worm their way across black screens. But his will
had been so strong, he'd been so much his own law,
I half-believed he'd sit up on the bed,
open the back door of a light blue Chevrolet
and say it's dark out there, get in, I'll drive you home.

Carl Auerbach

Anguish

There's a man waiting for me to lay down
my pen, and it is not you.
His presence in my bed says
we won't be discarded now
that our friends and lovers are dead,
even if we are strangers to one another.
After you died and I was left breathing,
the charge that glows off skin
in the dark drove me so far past you,
I could no longer keep what was us.
I rub the man's back, plunge my fingers
into his hair, knead his shoulders.
My hands shake with their lack of knowledge.
I practice like a swimmer in shark-filled waters,
loving here, where blood has been spilled.

Florence Weinberger

Things We Do for Love

"Reach for the blue one," the stranger says. "Take your time." We are eye level, even though he leans over the first floor balcony. I cling halfway up the rock climber's practice wall, jaws clenched, chest heaving.
    "Blue," he repeats, "and don't look down."
    If I disregard his advice, I'll glimpse Kevin, our mountaineering guide here in Canada's Purcell Mountains. Blond, compact, and confident, he's on belay—the rope attached to my harness. His stance and attitude remind me of Jeff, a young man I've loved like a son these past few years. He'd be all grins and admiration today, seeing me try this. Angling my gaze sideways, I spy the blue synthetic foothold. I have to heft my right foot 18 inches. I can do this. Despite my white-knuckled fear of heights, I've already survived daily helicopter rides, hiking with my husband at 8,500+ feet—an anniversary brainstorm embraced for his sake. Earlier this summer, when he'd first handed me the brochure, I had misread Heli-Hiking, seeing Hell-Hiking instead—which turns out to have been prophetic. Grateful for my effort and proud of my grit, for three days my husband has helped me traverse loose shale and mud, boot-wide switchbacks, and grizzly runs. He's a seeker of peaks with a taste for the glacial. I however, lack the adventure gene. Give me an armchair, a stack of books, shortbread and tea, and I'm transported, albeit through someone else's story. Instead, each morning this past week we've choppered through tummy-torqueing winds to some new cliff. Oh, the things we do for love. Then we trekked for hours through snow and fog and hail that only partially obscured how far we might fall. Talk about turbo-charging one's prayer life. Hiking provided one benefit: it distracted me from recent sorrow as fear edged out grief. I often felt like crying while shuffling along a ledge, but I needed my wits and clear vision. I rediscovered both every time I looked to my husband, who glowed with well-being.
    After the final hike, we had feasted with the other climbers in our group: goat cheese in puff pastry, orzo and tenderloin with onion confit, snow peas and asparagus followed by hazelnut chocolate mousse with blackberry ice cream. I had staggered away from the table.
    "Let's try the climbing wall," my husband said.
    "Go ahead," I told him. "I'll pray."
    In his raggy striped sweater, Kevin, our guide, stood at basement level to belay the man I'd married 31 years ago. He clambered partway up, grinned and waved, then rappelled down with a whoop. Meanwhile, a second beginner, assisted by the Swiss guide, failed to sufficiently hug the wall. Out she swung, hurtling through space like a wrecking ball. The Swiss fellow expertly reeled her in, but vicarious panic shunted through me.
    "Your turn," Kevin said, motioning. His forearm was lean and smooth, not nearly as muscled as Jeff's. For no reason I could explain, I wedged my feet into the purple Rock Jock shoes, even joked as Kevin politely cinched the harness around my nether regions.
    Slack-jawed with disbelief, my husband had waved me on, then run for the camera.
    Now, I'm frozen here, halfway up the wall. The stranger across from me catches my eye. "Go," he urges.
    "Blue," I mumble, eyeing that next foothold. Blue. My throat aches, as if I've swallowed a pound of rope, fraying more with every breath. One foot edges onto a fist-sized hump of plastic, and I strain for the next handhold. Why am I trusting this guy in the balcony?
    "Doing fine," he says. "Embrace it; breathe; le-e-ean in."
    My groin creaks. Torso-to-wall, I feel like an insect in someone's collection: thorax pinned, legs splayed. I have an audience too. Ranged across three floors of landings in the stairwell behind me, fellow hikers have gathered, cheering each move as I venture higher.
    The Swiss guide motions the next in line to wait, so invested in my exertions is he. "Higher," he calls. "Ja. Go all the vay!"
    Above me the wall looks diseased, a rash of multi-colored lumps. Aren't I too old for this? A year shy of senior meals at Denny's, cheap seats from Fandango, I should be watching Hollywood thrills, not tempting death.
    As with any near-death experience, scenes from my past unspool. Lashed to stilts at age nine, I tottered across the lawn toward my father. Segue 15 years to bushwhacking up a ridge with my husband. Chin lifted, hair blowing, he straddled a ledge over the canyon while I molded myself to lichened rock—in fetal position. Fast-forward to 2002: Jeff striding into my kitchen, that slightly tilted eye of his catching mine.
    "Come climbing with me," he said, an oft-repeated invitation. For Jeff, mountaineering embodied faith, creative risk-taking, committed teamwork. It meant doing whatever it took to avoid falling. Above all, it meant freedom. Joy. Why do the men in my life crave heights?
    "You'll be safe with me," Jeff always said, that mega-watt grin washing over me like a hot flash. "Brave this, and nothing'll faze you."
    Pitons, grigris, screwgate carabiners—the lingo alone gave me the heebie-jeebies. So I had declined his invitations, forcefully, and repeatedly.
    Now, a camera flash yanks me back to the present. "The kids won't believe this," my husband calls. "Keep going. It's easier than three decades of marriage!"
    Some of the spectators chuckle at this, a few applaud. I'm tired, though, and press my forehead against the wall.
    "Sit deep in the harness," the balcony guy advises. His quiet confidence calms me. It also kindles untapped nerve. There's a patch of ceiling above me that needs my sweaty handprint. I yearn to touch it, as if in doing so I can somehow redeem fear, those refusals to climb with Jeff. Sweat pools in the small of my back; it seeps through my shirt. Energy flags and everything quivers.
    The balcony guy clears his throat, and I glance down at him. "You can do this," he says. He sounds just like Jeff.
    I reach for a yellow handhold, slide my fingertips around its lip. Tendons flex. Strength surges through my knee as it straightens, catapulting me upward.
    "She's a natural," someone says.
    I eye the red rock shape, gauge the stretch and go for it, surprised when foot and hand fluidly coordinate—a fluke, but it feels good. Savoring the illusion of balance and finesse I spider up a few more yards. Our camera flashes again and again. The ceiling seems alive, a presence, leaning down toward me, and the remaining distance compresses with every reach, each step. I'm a mountain goat: pliant, springy, sure-footed. If Jeff could see me now.
    "Terrific," Kevin says, and I risk a downward glance, seeing Jeff again in our guide's short hair and dazzler grin. "Just a little farther," he says.
    The crowd eggs me on; however, my brain says, Quit. Much as I want to wow my husband, the crowd, myself, everything stalls and jitters.
    "I'm done, Kevin. That's it."
    "Okay," he says, adjusting the rope. "Let go."
    Let go? I'm three stories high, nearly five times my height.
    "I've got you. Let go and kick out from the wall. This is the fun part."
    My pulse accelerates, blood hammering ribs and lungs as the crowd yells encouragement. I glance up. Then down. I search the room for a second opinion.
    The balcony guy quietly says, "Hold the rope lightly with one hand if you need to."
    But I huddle against the wall, shaken and numbly passive. Sometimes even simple activity demands monumental effort. Walking, for instance, requires negotiating that pause between each foot's rise and fall, an interval of trust when one's full weight is suspended. I have to believe in physics as well as the ground meeting my shoe—an everyday act of faith which helps me believe I can also meet and be met by Grace, right here and now.
    I wipe my hands on my shorts until they stop trembling. It will come to me now, in my fear, my grief. I smile, and my husband snaps another picture, recording the moment.
    Tomorrow, I'll realize my bizarre compulsion to brave this wall was not about facing fear or impressing my husband. It was about the freedom I'm meant to enjoy, in spite of my fears and resistance. And the week after that I'll understand I kicked free from having let someone down, someone I loved—Jeff, who had recently died in Baghdad. Eventually, I will glimpse the lengths the Maker of Mountains goes to sometimes to give us another chance at joy as well as making things right. But that will take more time.
    For now, I hold the rope lightly and dangle one foot over emptiness, waver, thinking Dear God . . . exhale, then push off with the other foot. Faces blur, the floor balloons toward me, but I am breathing again, unafraid as a goldfinch scalloping thin air, weightless, bounding. A girl on the moon. Applause erupts when I touch down, and I throw my arms around Kevin.
    My husband claps, too, louder than anyone, his eyes glassy and bright as the faithful lens of our camera.

Laurie Klein