Plum blossoms, pear blooms, thin fans of almond, nectarine: Mourners come out into the spring. They have been walking around something utterly cold. Openly cold. Parking lot classical radio: “Pavane for a Dead Princess” by Ravel, someone actually arranged it for tuba. If time seems too dark for hope, my eldest cat fits his gaunt length into the window; he watches eyes of his juniors reflect full moon. Where did I read this? — a memory of separation: When the deceiver left his wife, she threw his two hundred hats out into the rain. Memory of a corner in an old house: Little white irises of Danish oils cope with fealty to a sinister stream. Walter said he sometimes just wants to go live in a painting. The humid colors of an empty street…

In 1966 Peter Matthiessen missed the party of the decade. His explanation that he’d hit a rhythm with his writing didn’t appease a miffed Truman Capote. No one else — other than William Styron, also mid-manuscript — had turned down an invitation to Capote’s Black and White Ball.

The buzz preceding that party vibrated far beyond the boroughs of New York. Guests flew in from Kansas and California; Cecil Beaton came from London. As San Franciscan Herb Caen said afterward, “The elevator operators, the cab drivers, the doormen, as soon as they saw you with a mask or headdress, they said, ‘Going to Truman’s ball, huh?’”

Adoptee is a word that sounds unfinished. The long double ee sound resonates against the hard palate inside the pink, ridged cave of the mouth, the tongue lying down, the tip touching the back of the bottom front teeth, the jaws slightly open, the lips apart. The skull vibrates for just a moment after the sound itself is gone. It is a word that refers to a permanent exchange, it refers to the choice of the adopter. It defines the adoptee as an artifact, something created by the will of the adopter. The mother or father or parents do not have any word related to adopt attached to them. The best we’ve come up with is birth parents, biological parents, and more recently, first parents — except it’s usually just about the mother because the father in many cases is unknown, shut out of the exchange…

Some time later after she had us, after the dust had settled, Mom looked back at her old motherland Poland. It was in a terrible economic state during a horrible political period and she wanted to do something to help, or give something back because after all, she was living comfortably in a house with not one but two refrigerators, not one but two cars; just thinking about Poland gave her swells of grief and pity. Then, an idea. She would bring people in… Mom wanted to do something bigger…

in the giraffe house as another one sails
mast first through the wall and the shyest one licks a cloud
from the scenery. It is nineteen degrees outside

so they are in here, a room the size of your parlor but
limned with a far-off horizon
and you notice the tennis-ball lump in their chin trembles

like an aunt’s whiskered throat as if waiting for a tea tray
in the painted savannah. It is so private here today,
I lay on the visitors’ bench to nap —

In my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in the late sixties, a friend invited me to the chess club, which was actually the pensioners’ club and populated by World War II veterans. I was thirteen, my friend a few years older. My history teacher read newspapers on a stick in a corner; an old cop who had been suspended for killing an unarmed man in a bar paced around, kibitzing; some of the men wore partisan caps with red stars. In the back room was an air-rifle shooting gallery for the young (so that the country would have a good crop of sharpshooters for future wars) where I had spent a few evenings. In the front room, in the stinging smoke of stale tobacco, through which you could see the weak round lamp like a moon drifting in clouds, men lined up along the tables and slapped chess clocks.

I get all regrets
to my party! So decomposes my up-to-the-last-
minute gaudy hour: yellow balloons
flaccid, the bubbly
corked in its rack. Costumed sommelier
hovering the epergne
(figment himself, & soon dismissed)
rescinds the all-but-imminent cascade.
Somebody has been saying about
me that I don’t exist, I bet…

Helga Olshvang Landauer
BY Zachary Deretsky

The twentieth century, particularly in Russia, offers some of history’s most dramatic examples of conflict between the individual artist and the state. Being an artist in this totalitarian society meant, among other challenges, facing tough moral decisions; a creative choice had the ability to change one’s fate as well as the fate of family and friends. A few words of poetry written on a piece of paper could become a reason for arrests, executions, and martyrdom. Akhmatova was not a dissident, but her mere existence, the scale of her words seemed to be percieved as a direct challenge to the system.

Benny Bean was walking down the forest trail looking sour. What a sourpuss I am, he thought, and the thought made his expression even more sour, if that were possible.

You and I heard him: he shouted to the Dear Lord, but either his voice didn’t reach the Dear Lord from the middle of the forest, or the Dear Lord simply didn’t feel like answering.

“Dear Lord! Why am I always sour?” he shouted, perhaps a bit too loudly. No matter. There wasn’t a soul near or far who could’ve heard him. To be sure, he wasn’t shouting so people could hear him. In fact, he wouldn’t have dared shout at all if anyone had been near. You and I heard him: he shouted to the Dear Lord, but either his voice didn’t reach the Dear Lord from the middle of the forest, or the Dear Lord simply didn’t feel like answering. In any case, he left poor Benny Bean alone to stew in his sour juices. And stew he did, without a doubt. But first he looked around apologetically, because in response to his outcry the forest froze in silence, and Benny Bean didn’t like the muteness of grasses, trees and birds. What he did like was the stillness of grasses, trees and birds. He waited until the forest resounded once again with cheerful stillness before he picked up where he left off: “Of course, it all comes down to this oversized monster, this scabbard of a nose, this cucumber of a nose… what nose? A trunk! A gloomy, crimson mountain-top, a Kilimanjaro, a Popocatepetl…”

As a classical musician, I feel we should take on a social role wherever it is possible to have an influence. In Philadelphia, for example, I was an organizer of Musicians for Social Responsibility, which produced three Concerts for Humanity, a fundraiser, two conducted by Riccardo Muti, which bankrolled many anti-war organizations supporting nuclear arms control in our community. I also devoted nineteen years to a local chamber music group, which I helped organize, and which performed four concerts a year. We included many of our Philadelphia Orchestra colleagues and attempted to bring “culture” to the suburbs….