Article

Unfinished Business

trans. Italian Ruth Feldman Sir, starting next month Please accept my resignation And, if necessary, find a replacement for me. I leave a lot of uncompleted work, Whether from laziness or practical difficulties. I should have said something to someone, But no longer know what or to whom: I have forgotten. I should have given…

Spacetime

When I grow up and you get small, then — (In Kaluza's theory the fifth dimension is represented as a circle associated with every point in spacetime)      —then when I die, I'll never be alive again?            Never. Never never?            Never never. Yes, but never never never?            No . . . not never…

The Darkness of Love

the darkness of love, in whose sweating memory all error is forced. – Amiri Baraka   DAY 1 When Handle woke at ten in the morning, he got up and walked to the far window. Hungover, he half expected the sound of traffic or the fading drone of an airliner as he lifted the window….

Chess I

Only my enemy for all time, The abominable black queen, Has had nerve equal to mine In helpin her inept king. Inept and cowardly mine too — that's understood: From the very start he's crouched Behind his row of plucky pawns, Then fled across the chessboard, Askew, ridiculous, with little stumbling steps. Battles are not…

To Be A Poet

trans. Czech Ewald Osers Life taught me long ago that music and poetry are the most beautiful things on earth that life can give us. Except for love, of course. In an old textbook, published by the Imperial Printing House in the year of Vrchlicky's death, I looked up the section on poetics and poetic…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editors for This Issue James Alan McPherson DeWitt Henry Managing Editor Susannah Lee Editorial Assistant Eileen Pollack CONTRIBUTORS Gina Berriault's novels, Conference of Victims and The Son are being reissued by North Point Press, which has also published The Infinite Passion of Expectation: Twenty-five Stories and a new…

Chess II

You mean that — halfway through, With the game all but over — you would like To change the rules of play? You know perfectly well it's not allowed. To castle under threats? Or go so far — if I am not mistaken — As to replay the moves you made when you began? Come…

Nocturnal Divertimento

ALLEGRO NON TANTO It's getting dark. But don't turn on the light. I like to look at your eyes      in the dusk. Tell me then! How's Vienna? Do they still sell in the market bunches of lavender, that sweet fragrance of bygone loves from the end of the millenium? My mother used to put them…

Site

I went again to that place I loved not far from here, or from the noise of cars though quiet enough this early— where the sound of a stream found a deep ear in the woods, and came out in me; went to that place as one might go to the slain body of a…