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MARI ST
COLLEGE
WINTER
1967
Editorial
... I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
- - Dylan Thomas
In this year of the world's turning, from pole to angry pole - -
dawn breaks in New England, all blooming and sensuous, while the
bloody sea is loosed upon bleak southern shores - - from the silent
sounds of carolling, the gilded chapel bells, frorri the racket of
rushing cities, (from the trumpet of the tawdry campus)
.
.
.
to blasts
of banal bombs, and the groan of the ghetto behind. Yes, Dylan, this
is indeed a strange world
1
In the ambivalence and ambiguity -- when beauty is lithe and
fleeting - - in these str
.
ained years of growing, we offer you a litera-
ture
:
yearning, hew ildered, and ecstatic.
Leonard Russo, f. m. s
.
EDITORS
TREASURER
CONTRIBUTORS
COVER
FACULTY ADVISOR
STAFF
Fran Murphy
Richard Carn
Leonard Russo,
f. m. s.
Raymond Anello
Mrs. E. Rimai Fisher
Mr. Robert Lewis
Ed Lowe
Clifford Melick
William Werner, S.
J.
Mrs. E. Rimai Fisher
Mr. Robert Lewis
.
•
WALT WHITMAN JR. HIGH
Sharp March winds
collect lunch bags
and huddled negro boys
in building corners;
middle-aged females
bark civics questions
within the well-screened windows;
erect pickets fence the granite
from a scratchy lawn,
studded with glass and condoms.
The restless truce prevails
for two more hours -
hollowed halls toss
the afternoon's melange:
home ec, Thoreau, the A&P;
gym, driver
ed,
the GNP.
The curriculum resolves
what Thoreau couldn't:
black and white, god and flag
the stomach and soul -
all screw tight
in a syllabus of citizens,
till the bell springs
an orgy of ironic glee
at three o'clock
when all is
ended.
At eight o'clock a porter,
chased by darkness
down the hall,
pushes the ctay' s heritage
to th
.
e street;
the great, grey-bearded sky
moves swiftly strangely silent.
- Robert Lewis
ACADEMIC MIGRATION
Regular and sudden as birds,
A busy swarm
·
of Hondas and coughing autos
Droned down highway nine
Under the piled cumulus of hot June skies.
Open-shirted
,
still white
,
They broke the tight mental lease
,
Kissed irreverent goodbyes
To academic landlords.
Th
e
y've swapped their books
For the warm beads of sweat
On thinly tufted chests,
And the blood's quick
,
chugs
.
Skulkin
g
in the moist night corners
Of
July
,
or on the bright cracked streets of August
Goes, hopefully, the strangeness they heard of
In the scheduled classes of a scheduled year.
In the tossed green of summer days
To lay with an unscheduled love;
To unfold in pungent sunlight
In a warm, unscheduled way.
Bundled in the stale
·
air of cities and towns
Their bodies bake and brown to September perfection
;
Only summer, t6o
·
generous confectioner
,
Brings them back - tired, and laughing, and slack
.
- Robert Lewis
THE ENCOUNTER
I sit in a big
cathedral
bench in a station at the metro, my
shoulder-blades pinning themselves against the hard-back ebony. The
body-frame nudges downward, my two feet stalking forward as the
flush incline of each leg spreads apart.
-
A
bulging mou
_
nd above the
belt, and pants pinching my
groin
add to the day
1
s vexing
·
exhau~tion.
People, like particles, speckle before me in the
criss
-cross of
the afternoon rush
.
A
negro boy flashes his bright
teeth
-
-
'' Shoe
shine, Mister?"
--
and dashes bye: the
last
trace of the busyhood.
I fold my hands behind iny head and take a deep breath of
thf
urban air - - a fabric of cigarette smoke.,
_
grey
carbori dust and stale
odor -
-
and exhale a long steady stream of the afternoon's activity.
My hands plummet to either side and hang over the bench seat.
Hands -
-
two entities dawdling in space adjacent to the body's
terrain.
Insensible
to their cosmic design in the
,
coqtour
,
of fRre -
arms and shoulders, they loiter unconsciously -- suspendin~c;
,
them-
selves in nothingness.
I
gaze down (my head, a sphere of consciousness) and tighten my
focus upon them, but I am unable to vitalize
_
these
estranged
paws.
I never realized how distinct they are: distinct from each other
in their tapering yet tensile fineness,
and
distinct from my own
circumscribed awareness. The more
I
observe them, the more
I
see them as alone - - and as alien-"
Isolat
ed
integers in the distance,
I
try desperately t9 make them
tangible. I clench each fist, only to feel a
,
contri.ved
,
ta~tness and the
impress of the fingernails quickly fade into oblivion. Gnarled
and
!mob-like, they float away from my sensibility.
.
.
Lengthening
tnern
a
·
c
:
utely;
,
the
-
initial:
tl
1
nsion
.
gives
pla-ce
to
·
fingers
like arrow-shafts, again drifting
.
from
.
m~ mental -cont,rqL
.
.,
.
:
,
Abandoning the mechanics of these
methods,
I
gape at their naked
character
-
-Surrlounded!by the atn1osphere's unbearable quiet. Fingers
curl -- almost as
if
groping
to grasp, to hold, to fuse with --
and
re-
main alone,
empty,
and twitching.
I peer at the animate rudiments of these palpitating hands, their
color altering -- a blood-spotted texture. They begin to stagger in
the genesis of their own agony. My head, omniscent, casts a rapt
glance on one,
·
on the other.
·
They begin to move; acros
.
s the terrain they gravitate toward
each other. At the pin-point of touch, sentience spans the
·
entire body.
Fingers fold, thumbs interlink in the meeting. Each hand is attentive
of the other - - and of himself touching the other
.
Palms join. The blood-warmth of togetherness flows through the
• forearms, through the shoulders - - and in the late
afternoon
my
pulsating body is brought into being. The mass of the microcosm is
responsive and
.
is aware of two hands joining.
I rise and begin to walk
.
. . I return home to my family.
- Leonard Russo,
f.
m
.
s.
SCENE 1:
Across my vision flashes
The city,
Groveling upon its
Dirty concrete stomach,
Its neon eyes
Glowering hostility
at
the world
And-- -
SCENE 2:
Before my eyes splashes
A
cow,
Green grasses
With corn weaving
Its never-ending patterns
To a cloudy
sky
And- - -
SCENE 3:
Through my brain slashes
Painted pictures of
A
little town
Nestled within
The hills
And purpled with sage
And---
SCENE 6:
SCENE 4:
Upon my mind mashes
Faces of People
Standing atop each other;
Whiskey sours and
Cocktails; endlE!ss streams
Of
words talldng, saying
,
nothing
And---
SCENE 5:
Through all the others crashes.
A
train
Whose wheels plc>w
Over the coun
,
try
With its peoples,
Pushing them out its way
:And.,--
-
Inside of me clashes;
A room, narrow
and
Limited by
My horizons
And my voice which
Shrieks in anger and
,
ma
.
ddness
Louder than it all
"And---STOP ! "
EXIT.
'-
Clifford Melick
I am a firm believer
that blouses were made
to be lifted
and that virgins truly
do not exist and
I am fully
tired of God's
inefficiency and thoroughly
unable to live
without him
I have a feeling that
individual freedom does
not exist and
that there
is
no
heaven and
I am continually mistrusting
good will among men
or exceptionally large
rosary beads
in the
hands of
exceptionally
old
women
I have been told that
priests are finP
listeners and that the war
is not really a war
but a progressive step
towards human unity
and that all things
are actually getting
much better
I cah remember praying
and cannot forget not
really being answered and
I saw our holy father
th
e
pope befor
e
vast
audiences and I've seen
sweet pictur
e
s of christ
rubbing small heads
and smiling inhum
a
nly
and have h
e
a
r
d that
our country helps the
poor and the negro
e
s
and I have not
been moved
In two days and
one night I hav
e
watched death tak
e
an old woman slowly
.
to the music of
''Heaven is Bl
e
ssed''
I am the livin
g
end
and a pretty wr
e
t
c
h
e
d
beginning
.
a
nd I am
very passiv
e
ly
unhappily
obs
e
rving
- H
a
y
..
1,n
e
ll
o
Our Father who art in (every
hospital night-room soothing
sickened eyes and throats)
Our Father who (is in
all
our war
trenches kneeling and kissing the
blood from the heads of our
dearly beloved in you)
Father (who does not hide his face
from hate and from the way
Joe my friend hurts my heart)
Our dearest divine mirage
- Ray Anello
THE BEGGAR
Laugh sir
even though your eyes
hang drenched from an inside
life that throbs too much
weep still more
you harmless frown of humankind
(and we the people
in order to form
a more perfect
union
will throw you an orange
daisy)
- Ray Anello
ON CLOSENESS AND PARTING
In our culture even full trees are bought,
Roots trimmed and balled, and set in the ground
In some prepared place to grow because
Tim
e
is short: brief benefit must be found
Since there is no pastoral time to pause
For home sown seeds; and this is no inhuman thought.
Urb
a
n friendships must grow in some same way
With a person putting roots from his prepared
Parched soul to another to quench some thirst first bared
By p
e
rception of that other's finer clay.
.
'
And until the shortness
.
shows there is in trees
Or friendships no imp
e
rmanence; until
The modern motored chain saw rasps dispatch
In a crowd: colorful, looking on, at ease,
Som
e
, oth
e
rs pained to
.
see the toppled kill:
There is nothing b
,
ut benefit in this timed match.
But then the tree is quickly carted off by truck;
The stump is lev
e
l
e
d, graded, grassed, forgot
By the world at large,
i::>y
most dismissed with a cluck,
Or sigh, but the grow:i,d, for the roots do
,
not unknot.
- William \\'ern
e
r, S.
J.
WILLIAM
He is an
eleven
year old who
can
not
Read the word cat, for whom the letters
contain
No mystery. One Thursday I
called for
him
And we walked in slow
spring
drizzle
from
that place
He lives to the gym
a
block
away,
I
Silently
studying
wet brown
cobblestones
And
William leaning
to
race, his
smile a
tug.
He had been suspended from
school and
when I
asked
His teacher what to do she
said, "Just
be
With
him; he's so lonely; he needs
companionship.''
Another
tilne she told me he was her
one
Favorite. She told m
e
many
other
things.
How William
cries
when they get measured;
''When
Will I grow?" How his mother beat him the last
Time she saw him. How he's
a
sc
a
pegoat
where
He lives.
And
I
told
her,
"He
has so much love
_
To
give," and
she
--
agreed.
He flew
as
high
As I
could
push him
on the
climbing rop
e
And in the
empty
silen
ce
of the gym
I heard his hushed,
ecstatic
laugh
.
- William Werner,
S.
J.
OPEN LINES
I heard a clear flute melody
Which singly wandered through the song
Until it opened into chords
And th
e
bord
e
rs of my heart broke down;
And I was on an open field
Betwe
e
n high sky and rolling grass
And freshness blew upon my face
And touch
e
d my narrow soul.
.
- William Werner, S. J.
J;\T
MY ROOM TODAY FOl:R YEARS AGO
Many clays I seem to stumble on my past
In hu
e
d ac
c
idents of brief old light
Refracted into th
e
pr
e
s
e
nt
a
s by this lit
Geranium which conjur
e
s Venetian spring,
.,\ncl
an L•
a
rly morning glimpse of pots upon
A
crumbling wall outside the window, back-lit
Silver with warmish Italian sun: so r
e
al
In different modes
a
nd
yet
I
·
\,·onu
L'
r how.
- \\°illbm
·
\\vrn
e
r, 5.
J.
PATTERNS
1.
As a young man he drove cattle
'
across stretches of Ari~ona flat-
land. He knew the sound of wind
.
and the savor of sand-dust; his hands
were leather-worn and his face was
.
baked by the burning sun.
His forearms grew big and sinewy
as
he pitted his will against the
pitch of the stallion. The
groaning,
the whistle,
gallop and
snort:
these were applause beyond any
acclaim.
The task was trenchant and
the goal was the trail
ever
before
.
him.
Branding was the boon of every cowboy's labor. One left not only
the impress of a hot iron but the mark of his strength on the side of a
shorthorn. He loved the roping of a steer, the wrestling, and the run-
ning of its nozzle into a rut of dust and turf, til its
eyes
,
like nuggets
of amethyst,
gaped at
him in dark defeat.
At night he sat round the capering fire with experienced cowhands.
They told
'
him how he was
like
the stark sapling in the fields
-
- mold-
ing the bare
and
virile trunk of his later life. And he slept feeling
good.
2.
Towns dotted the trail. He
.
knew their drollery -
:..
the tang
and
the flutter - - but his own frame sought
.
food thgi.t was
solid
and his
heart was saddled in the hustling herd. He worked long hard hours,
grew strong, and remained alone until he met a girl who was
·
no girl
at all.
..
And
he learned that a w
_
oman was like
,
a harp to be gently
handled.
Together they shared their thoughts. They walked in the woods,
passing through endless hills of hemlock and spruce. Their words
were spa
:
ced in fresh pine scent
.
In
the spring they were married, and the first
flowers
were bud-
ding from forked branches
.
3.
'
Marriage brought a new meaning to his life. He grew weary of the
trail -- its rush and its rigor. The thunder of thudding hooves no
1onger held the throb of him.
He soon settled a small farm. He fed five round cows with big fat
utters, and grew golden corn and barley. And he and his wife worked
in
the wonder of it all.
They fingered the soil with their own maculate hands and hurled
fistfuls of grain to the furrowing winds. The land was live whh sound:
the
hills were rustling and the trees were
a
mouthful of reeling crea-
tures.
In the evening they stretched before a low. fire. And he thought of
the farm
and
his future, and his children running - - flowers and
r
a
in
- -
and
he and his wife racing through the high hills ...
4.
The lands
grew
ripe
and
lusty, and the fields we re filled with
fragrance.
But his thoughts were throttled with fear for
a
war ~as
storming
across sinless meadows.
Reports were raging and rampant. The riot, the squalor, feirnfu
'
iit
'
and
fury
'
: these were a threat to his own faithful life.
.
'
.
.•
·.i
:.
r, .
.
. ·
.
For four days he had been away and he knew
1t
was only
a:·
m;'J.tt'er
of months
before he would be needed to fight for as long
as
the battle
was.
He rode home recalling the raw years
of
youth,
and
how his wife
had
changed
it all - - sharing the sheer splendor of a farm. He gal-
loped on
a
stallion, pacing hard
and
steady. He felt its huge hammer-
ing hooves pommel the fallen apples into autumn ground.
5.
He was home again in the late
afternoon and
his wife
came
racing
toward him. Her skirt whirled up in the billowing
breeze and
hali
her bare thighs were showing.
He held her in his arms and pressed her lithe frame to his own
weary body. Vision dimmed and dawn broke in his mind: the lands
glistened, the mist dispersed, and the sun rose radiant from its
smeared hori
.
zon. But war hovered in his thoughts and he was torn
in the trembling of the burden.
He gazed at the garden with its swollen blossoms. Some had
dropped to the ground from tender stems and lay still in the sands.
And he knew how autumn torrents wo
.
uld wash them into the sodden
gully.
6.
The hills were browning in brisk October. Blasts of testy wind
had stripped branches of their beauty. The leaves, chestnut and
saffron, slapped against the barnside and bony sketches remained
behind.
He
s
,
aw
the sun, like an angry
god,
withdraw from sight, and
hoary
hills
shudder in the naked air.
Leonard Russo, f. m. s
THE 2/4 WALTZ
The savage soil
Screams
to
be exploited
Unwillingly,
,
my hands plun_ge downward
Laden
with t)1eir burden they rise moist.
The pleasure,
I
marvelled
at
tts mysteryT
I
returned often to my soil
'
To taste its musty odor,
To watch the seasons change it,
To watch
the sweat of the night vanish in the morning sun.
One day
.
,
knowing roots slave
erosion,
And
feari~g
-
foss
above
all,
I
placed
a
seed within.
I built my home
around
that seed
And leisurely I tended
·it,
For with the sage sky dispensing its gifts,
I knew the soil would k
_
eep
it.
1
'
,
.
.
:
,
EASTER
i966
The German found the body .
. .
And the Pope
,
cancelled Easter
.
- Fran Murphy
But the
.
cho
_
cofa~e
industry protested
.
.
.
So Halln1ark ma,de ''Spring
B\1nny
Day:'
And Jesus sav
.
ed
became
'
the by,,·ord
·
.
.
.
'
:
Other than that, the routine remained unbroken
.
•
Ex'i)ept
'
•
; ,
'
.
:
a
f
e\\'
n1~n
stopped
having
chi
l
dren
.
What life contains such beauty
That pain of knowing peers pain of aloneness?
Ground into our being,
This pain of heart and beauty of love,
Until such day brings an end,
And end becomes beginning.
- E. Rimai Fisher
Gentle the light in vaulted night.
So the clarity of heart.
Earth burned by day,
Scorned and scarred in darkness,
Looked upon with anger and revolt,
The herded rag
e.
Yet patent answer lies in care of
Man for man.
Strange interlacing, each to another,
To turn dissolution to bond
.
of oneness,
Cover of calm, fabric of repose.
- E. Rimai Fisher
Tonight I write with concern
to temper the
'
severity of recent
·
words;
the vague thoughts of reg
'
ard so expressed.
It
is but my way, to write,
at the quiet end of evening, to rest,
even in the evasiveness of language.
The search is within,
to stay the structure-s of feeling,
to fabricate in sadness and rejoicing a complex of sentiment,
the search continues.
Words.
They are
.
of foretime and of tomorrow,
warm, close, very alone
.
Unused words.
Unspoken words
'
.
Added words to define that which we regard as precious.
,
Fresh words to order the thoughts we prize.
,
New words to convey the ford of care.
A
ll
words to weave the
Unrealities
-
of today's exercises into
the Continuity ofdiving.
So I would write,
Though impoverished manner and indefinite spe
e
.
ch
Be symbols of intention,
In understanding
involvement is made competent,
to qualify for friendship.
- E.
Rimai, Fisher
PETER
I usually begin stories about Peter by saying something like
'.' ... and there was this guy on our bus ... " I suppose that there really
is no other way to do it, because whatever intimacy there was between
Peter, Ed Flaherty, and me has long since dissolved, making the
memory of Peter nothing more than the memory of "a
_
guy on our
bus." Fellows who knew of Peter love
to
hear Eddie or me ramble on
about some of the crazy things he said or did. And, I must confess, I
get a kick out of it, too.
Peter was as incredibly small as he was int
e
pigent
.
He managed
to weigh in with double figures while over-cloaked in his brother's
baggy clothes, but it has been said that, denuded, th
e
scales would not
grant him so much as a fortune card. His skin was of a sickly white,
and a good portion of it was str
e
tch
e
d over his
e
normous hooked nose
.
To and fro on that hideous breathing machine a pp-ir of thick lensed
glasses periodically slipped. And no living being has ever seen him
exhale smoke through both nostrils at the same time. Now that I
think of it, the first time I saw Peter walking through the halls, I got
sick.
He walked like Groucho Marx, and he hat
e
d John Krull because
John wasbig and John did his homework. "The most despicable thing
about him
'
, " Peter would snort, "is th
e
part about his doing so much
goddam homework. Big gu
y
s c
a
n alw
a
ys b
e
kicked in the groin. But
any kid who thinks he has to do all that work is definitely a mess.
'
'
Peter hitch hiked
to
school from W
e
st Islip at least
'
thr
ee
times a
week (that's about thirty miles), because h
e
mi~sed the bus. He lov
e
d
to
argue; frothed at the mouth whenev
e
r he did; h
e
read, r
e
vered,
memorized, and applied
to
me and Flaherty all the teachings of
Sigmund Freud; and he took untold pleasure and satisfaction in pr
e
-
dieting my future. Quite a few people considered him a loser.
Peter was horribly proficient in bus-ride debates, bµt his con-
clusions were always the exact opposite of what they should have been,
if
not completely irrelevant. He would build a concrete
.
argument,
from foundation to climax, and in one gallant sweep of c
°<
mclusion
deny everything he had said.
It
became impossible to deny his denial
with
·
any
.
basis in reason, for his argument being so utterly rational,
the only deniable point was the final statement, and all we could ever
do was to simply deny it. Peter would be furiously indignant: "What
do you mean 'right.
.
. right. .. right
.
.. right. .. right. .. WRONG'? I
spend twenty miserable minutes backing up an indisputable point; you
agree with everything I say; and then at the last minute you tell me
that I am absolutely wrong! '.fhat' s blasphemy! How can you do it?
On what
grounds
... Oh, you blundering fools
are
wasting my time.
"
Eddie and
I would just laugh,
and Peter
would
continue-
-laughing,
himself.
"Fools.
Fools. Fools.
I simply
cannot
understand how
the
two of you could be such fools." As he laughed, he would curl
up in
a
wormy little ball like some kind of gnome.
In
spite of
our
failure
to "
...
und
e
rstand,
comprehend, or
other-
wise
'dig'
the absolute
logic
of
any
given argument,"
Peter passed
ov
e
r us in his scorn
of
homo
sapiens.
Whenever we disagreed with
him,
he would scream for
a
while, but ultimately
calm down enough
to treat
us
with
the patient tolerance
of an
intellectual
giant--with
that
oh-well-what-should-I-expect
attitude
of
genius
.
He
even con-
fid
-=
d
in us,
to a certain extent,
when he told us
about
his own destiny:
"I
read
The, Agony and
the
Ecstasy
last night
and
decided that
Michael-
angelo was
not
as greatas
William
Blake,
and my work is infinitely
better
than
Blake's.
Ergo,
you will boast
about
having known me.''
He
was
not
all
talk,
though.
One fine
day,
he decided that the
hum-drum life
of a budding
scholar was
either
too much or too little
to endure
.
So,
he
left. During
the
months
spent
in Greenwich Vil-
lage, Peter read poetry in
coffee
houses, burglarized small
grocery
stores,
had
a common
law
wife, and even
lived for
a
while
with a
homosexual. (Considering
the
normal
developmental
progress
of
legends, half
of
that
should
be true).
But Peter was only Peter when
he was
"the guy
on
our
bus.'' \\"e
comprised one
p
f those high school cliques made up of snide
and
arrogant
little
rascals who
thought
that
because they ranked in the
upper ninety-eight percentile in the
PSAT'
s, the world was theirs.
There, Peter
was
a
monarch
among
pseudo intellectual sixteen and
seventeen year olds.
We
admired
his romantic
·
courage,
because we
kn
e
w no
other
individual who would have the nerve to be so different.
We
respected
and almost gratefully embraced
the fruits of his
ex-
tensive reading.
And sometimPs,_
maybe more than
sometimes,
,,·e
liked him.
He was right
about
one thing: we do boast
about
having kn0\n1 him.
-
Ed
l.O\\'l'
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COLLEGE
WINTER
1967
Editorial
... I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
- - Dylan Thomas
In this year of the world's turning, from pole to angry pole - -
dawn breaks in New England, all blooming and sensuous, while the
bloody sea is loosed upon bleak southern shores - - from the silent
sounds of carolling, the gilded chapel bells, frorri the racket of
rushing cities, (from the trumpet of the tawdry campus)
.
.
.
to blasts
of banal bombs, and the groan of the ghetto behind. Yes, Dylan, this
is indeed a strange world
1
In the ambivalence and ambiguity -- when beauty is lithe and
fleeting - - in these str
.
ained years of growing, we offer you a litera-
ture
:
yearning, hew ildered, and ecstatic.
Leonard Russo, f. m. s
.
EDITORS
TREASURER
CONTRIBUTORS
COVER
FACULTY ADVISOR
STAFF
Fran Murphy
Richard Carn
Leonard Russo,
f. m. s.
Raymond Anello
Mrs. E. Rimai Fisher
Mr. Robert Lewis
Ed Lowe
Clifford Melick
William Werner, S.
J.
Mrs. E. Rimai Fisher
Mr. Robert Lewis
.
•
WALT WHITMAN JR. HIGH
Sharp March winds
collect lunch bags
and huddled negro boys
in building corners;
middle-aged females
bark civics questions
within the well-screened windows;
erect pickets fence the granite
from a scratchy lawn,
studded with glass and condoms.
The restless truce prevails
for two more hours -
hollowed halls toss
the afternoon's melange:
home ec, Thoreau, the A&P;
gym, driver
ed,
the GNP.
The curriculum resolves
what Thoreau couldn't:
black and white, god and flag
the stomach and soul -
all screw tight
in a syllabus of citizens,
till the bell springs
an orgy of ironic glee
at three o'clock
when all is
ended.
At eight o'clock a porter,
chased by darkness
down the hall,
pushes the ctay' s heritage
to th
.
e street;
the great, grey-bearded sky
moves swiftly strangely silent.
- Robert Lewis
ACADEMIC MIGRATION
Regular and sudden as birds,
A busy swarm
·
of Hondas and coughing autos
Droned down highway nine
Under the piled cumulus of hot June skies.
Open-shirted
,
still white
,
They broke the tight mental lease
,
Kissed irreverent goodbyes
To academic landlords.
Th
e
y've swapped their books
For the warm beads of sweat
On thinly tufted chests,
And the blood's quick
,
chugs
.
Skulkin
g
in the moist night corners
Of
July
,
or on the bright cracked streets of August
Goes, hopefully, the strangeness they heard of
In the scheduled classes of a scheduled year.
In the tossed green of summer days
To lay with an unscheduled love;
To unfold in pungent sunlight
In a warm, unscheduled way.
Bundled in the stale
·
air of cities and towns
Their bodies bake and brown to September perfection
;
Only summer, t6o
·
generous confectioner
,
Brings them back - tired, and laughing, and slack
.
- Robert Lewis
THE ENCOUNTER
I sit in a big
cathedral
bench in a station at the metro, my
shoulder-blades pinning themselves against the hard-back ebony. The
body-frame nudges downward, my two feet stalking forward as the
flush incline of each leg spreads apart.
-
A
bulging mou
_
nd above the
belt, and pants pinching my
groin
add to the day
1
s vexing
·
exhau~tion.
People, like particles, speckle before me in the
criss
-cross of
the afternoon rush
.
A
negro boy flashes his bright
teeth
-
-
'' Shoe
shine, Mister?"
--
and dashes bye: the
last
trace of the busyhood.
I fold my hands behind iny head and take a deep breath of
thf
urban air - - a fabric of cigarette smoke.,
_
grey
carbori dust and stale
odor -
-
and exhale a long steady stream of the afternoon's activity.
My hands plummet to either side and hang over the bench seat.
Hands -
-
two entities dawdling in space adjacent to the body's
terrain.
Insensible
to their cosmic design in the
,
coqtour
,
of fRre -
arms and shoulders, they loiter unconsciously -- suspendin~c;
,
them-
selves in nothingness.
I
gaze down (my head, a sphere of consciousness) and tighten my
focus upon them, but I am unable to vitalize
_
these
estranged
paws.
I never realized how distinct they are: distinct from each other
in their tapering yet tensile fineness,
and
distinct from my own
circumscribed awareness. The more
I
observe them, the more
I
see them as alone - - and as alien-"
Isolat
ed
integers in the distance,
I
try desperately t9 make them
tangible. I clench each fist, only to feel a
,
contri.ved
,
ta~tness and the
impress of the fingernails quickly fade into oblivion. Gnarled
and
!mob-like, they float away from my sensibility.
.
.
Lengthening
tnern
a
·
c
:
utely;
,
the
-
initial:
tl
1
nsion
.
gives
pla-ce
to
·
fingers
like arrow-shafts, again drifting
.
from
.
m~ mental -cont,rqL
.
.,
.
:
,
Abandoning the mechanics of these
methods,
I
gape at their naked
character
-
-Surrlounded!by the atn1osphere's unbearable quiet. Fingers
curl -- almost as
if
groping
to grasp, to hold, to fuse with --
and
re-
main alone,
empty,
and twitching.
I peer at the animate rudiments of these palpitating hands, their
color altering -- a blood-spotted texture. They begin to stagger in
the genesis of their own agony. My head, omniscent, casts a rapt
glance on one,
·
on the other.
·
They begin to move; acros
.
s the terrain they gravitate toward
each other. At the pin-point of touch, sentience spans the
·
entire body.
Fingers fold, thumbs interlink in the meeting. Each hand is attentive
of the other - - and of himself touching the other
.
Palms join. The blood-warmth of togetherness flows through the
• forearms, through the shoulders - - and in the late
afternoon
my
pulsating body is brought into being. The mass of the microcosm is
responsive and
.
is aware of two hands joining.
I rise and begin to walk
.
. . I return home to my family.
- Leonard Russo,
f.
m
.
s.
SCENE 1:
Across my vision flashes
The city,
Groveling upon its
Dirty concrete stomach,
Its neon eyes
Glowering hostility
at
the world
And-- -
SCENE 2:
Before my eyes splashes
A
cow,
Green grasses
With corn weaving
Its never-ending patterns
To a cloudy
sky
And- - -
SCENE 3:
Through my brain slashes
Painted pictures of
A
little town
Nestled within
The hills
And purpled with sage
And---
SCENE 6:
SCENE 4:
Upon my mind mashes
Faces of People
Standing atop each other;
Whiskey sours and
Cocktails; endlE!ss streams
Of
words talldng, saying
,
nothing
And---
SCENE 5:
Through all the others crashes.
A
train
Whose wheels plc>w
Over the coun
,
try
With its peoples,
Pushing them out its way
:And.,--
-
Inside of me clashes;
A room, narrow
and
Limited by
My horizons
And my voice which
Shrieks in anger and
,
ma
.
ddness
Louder than it all
"And---STOP ! "
EXIT.
'-
Clifford Melick
I am a firm believer
that blouses were made
to be lifted
and that virgins truly
do not exist and
I am fully
tired of God's
inefficiency and thoroughly
unable to live
without him
I have a feeling that
individual freedom does
not exist and
that there
is
no
heaven and
I am continually mistrusting
good will among men
or exceptionally large
rosary beads
in the
hands of
exceptionally
old
women
I have been told that
priests are finP
listeners and that the war
is not really a war
but a progressive step
towards human unity
and that all things
are actually getting
much better
I cah remember praying
and cannot forget not
really being answered and
I saw our holy father
th
e
pope befor
e
vast
audiences and I've seen
sweet pictur
e
s of christ
rubbing small heads
and smiling inhum
a
nly
and have h
e
a
r
d that
our country helps the
poor and the negro
e
s
and I have not
been moved
In two days and
one night I hav
e
watched death tak
e
an old woman slowly
.
to the music of
''Heaven is Bl
e
ssed''
I am the livin
g
end
and a pretty wr
e
t
c
h
e
d
beginning
.
a
nd I am
very passiv
e
ly
unhappily
obs
e
rving
- H
a
y
..
1,n
e
ll
o
Our Father who art in (every
hospital night-room soothing
sickened eyes and throats)
Our Father who (is in
all
our war
trenches kneeling and kissing the
blood from the heads of our
dearly beloved in you)
Father (who does not hide his face
from hate and from the way
Joe my friend hurts my heart)
Our dearest divine mirage
- Ray Anello
THE BEGGAR
Laugh sir
even though your eyes
hang drenched from an inside
life that throbs too much
weep still more
you harmless frown of humankind
(and we the people
in order to form
a more perfect
union
will throw you an orange
daisy)
- Ray Anello
ON CLOSENESS AND PARTING
In our culture even full trees are bought,
Roots trimmed and balled, and set in the ground
In some prepared place to grow because
Tim
e
is short: brief benefit must be found
Since there is no pastoral time to pause
For home sown seeds; and this is no inhuman thought.
Urb
a
n friendships must grow in some same way
With a person putting roots from his prepared
Parched soul to another to quench some thirst first bared
By p
e
rception of that other's finer clay.
.
'
And until the shortness
.
shows there is in trees
Or friendships no imp
e
rmanence; until
The modern motored chain saw rasps dispatch
In a crowd: colorful, looking on, at ease,
Som
e
, oth
e
rs pained to
.
see the toppled kill:
There is nothing b
,
ut benefit in this timed match.
But then the tree is quickly carted off by truck;
The stump is lev
e
l
e
d, graded, grassed, forgot
By the world at large,
i::>y
most dismissed with a cluck,
Or sigh, but the grow:i,d, for the roots do
,
not unknot.
- William \\'ern
e
r, S.
J.
WILLIAM
He is an
eleven
year old who
can
not
Read the word cat, for whom the letters
contain
No mystery. One Thursday I
called for
him
And we walked in slow
spring
drizzle
from
that place
He lives to the gym
a
block
away,
I
Silently
studying
wet brown
cobblestones
And
William leaning
to
race, his
smile a
tug.
He had been suspended from
school and
when I
asked
His teacher what to do she
said, "Just
be
With
him; he's so lonely; he needs
companionship.''
Another
tilne she told me he was her
one
Favorite. She told m
e
many
other
things.
How William
cries
when they get measured;
''When
Will I grow?" How his mother beat him the last
Time she saw him. How he's
a
sc
a
pegoat
where
He lives.
And
I
told
her,
"He
has so much love
_
To
give," and
she
--
agreed.
He flew
as
high
As I
could
push him
on the
climbing rop
e
And in the
empty
silen
ce
of the gym
I heard his hushed,
ecstatic
laugh
.
- William Werner,
S.
J.
OPEN LINES
I heard a clear flute melody
Which singly wandered through the song
Until it opened into chords
And th
e
bord
e
rs of my heart broke down;
And I was on an open field
Betwe
e
n high sky and rolling grass
And freshness blew upon my face
And touch
e
d my narrow soul.
.
- William Werner, S. J.
J;\T
MY ROOM TODAY FOl:R YEARS AGO
Many clays I seem to stumble on my past
In hu
e
d ac
c
idents of brief old light
Refracted into th
e
pr
e
s
e
nt
a
s by this lit
Geranium which conjur
e
s Venetian spring,
.,\ncl
an L•
a
rly morning glimpse of pots upon
A
crumbling wall outside the window, back-lit
Silver with warmish Italian sun: so r
e
al
In different modes
a
nd
yet
I
·
\,·onu
L'
r how.
- \\°illbm
·
\\vrn
e
r, 5.
J.
PATTERNS
1.
As a young man he drove cattle
'
across stretches of Ari~ona flat-
land. He knew the sound of wind
.
and the savor of sand-dust; his hands
were leather-worn and his face was
.
baked by the burning sun.
His forearms grew big and sinewy
as
he pitted his will against the
pitch of the stallion. The
groaning,
the whistle,
gallop and
snort:
these were applause beyond any
acclaim.
The task was trenchant and
the goal was the trail
ever
before
.
him.
Branding was the boon of every cowboy's labor. One left not only
the impress of a hot iron but the mark of his strength on the side of a
shorthorn. He loved the roping of a steer, the wrestling, and the run-
ning of its nozzle into a rut of dust and turf, til its
eyes
,
like nuggets
of amethyst,
gaped at
him in dark defeat.
At night he sat round the capering fire with experienced cowhands.
They told
'
him how he was
like
the stark sapling in the fields
-
- mold-
ing the bare
and
virile trunk of his later life. And he slept feeling
good.
2.
Towns dotted the trail. He
.
knew their drollery -
:..
the tang
and
the flutter - - but his own frame sought
.
food thgi.t was
solid
and his
heart was saddled in the hustling herd. He worked long hard hours,
grew strong, and remained alone until he met a girl who was
·
no girl
at all.
..
And
he learned that a w
_
oman was like
,
a harp to be gently
handled.
Together they shared their thoughts. They walked in the woods,
passing through endless hills of hemlock and spruce. Their words
were spa
:
ced in fresh pine scent
.
In
the spring they were married, and the first
flowers
were bud-
ding from forked branches
.
3.
'
Marriage brought a new meaning to his life. He grew weary of the
trail -- its rush and its rigor. The thunder of thudding hooves no
1onger held the throb of him.
He soon settled a small farm. He fed five round cows with big fat
utters, and grew golden corn and barley. And he and his wife worked
in
the wonder of it all.
They fingered the soil with their own maculate hands and hurled
fistfuls of grain to the furrowing winds. The land was live whh sound:
the
hills were rustling and the trees were
a
mouthful of reeling crea-
tures.
In the evening they stretched before a low. fire. And he thought of
the farm
and
his future, and his children running - - flowers and
r
a
in
- -
and
he and his wife racing through the high hills ...
4.
The lands
grew
ripe
and
lusty, and the fields we re filled with
fragrance.
But his thoughts were throttled with fear for
a
war ~as
storming
across sinless meadows.
Reports were raging and rampant. The riot, the squalor, feirnfu
'
iit
'
and
fury
'
: these were a threat to his own faithful life.
.
'
.
.•
·.i
:.
r, .
.
. ·
.
For four days he had been away and he knew
1t
was only
a:·
m;'J.tt'er
of months
before he would be needed to fight for as long
as
the battle
was.
He rode home recalling the raw years
of
youth,
and
how his wife
had
changed
it all - - sharing the sheer splendor of a farm. He gal-
loped on
a
stallion, pacing hard
and
steady. He felt its huge hammer-
ing hooves pommel the fallen apples into autumn ground.
5.
He was home again in the late
afternoon and
his wife
came
racing
toward him. Her skirt whirled up in the billowing
breeze and
hali
her bare thighs were showing.
He held her in his arms and pressed her lithe frame to his own
weary body. Vision dimmed and dawn broke in his mind: the lands
glistened, the mist dispersed, and the sun rose radiant from its
smeared hori
.
zon. But war hovered in his thoughts and he was torn
in the trembling of the burden.
He gazed at the garden with its swollen blossoms. Some had
dropped to the ground from tender stems and lay still in the sands.
And he knew how autumn torrents wo
.
uld wash them into the sodden
gully.
6.
The hills were browning in brisk October. Blasts of testy wind
had stripped branches of their beauty. The leaves, chestnut and
saffron, slapped against the barnside and bony sketches remained
behind.
He
s
,
aw
the sun, like an angry
god,
withdraw from sight, and
hoary
hills
shudder in the naked air.
Leonard Russo, f. m. s
THE 2/4 WALTZ
The savage soil
Screams
to
be exploited
Unwillingly,
,
my hands plun_ge downward
Laden
with t)1eir burden they rise moist.
The pleasure,
I
marvelled
at
tts mysteryT
I
returned often to my soil
'
To taste its musty odor,
To watch the seasons change it,
To watch
the sweat of the night vanish in the morning sun.
One day
.
,
knowing roots slave
erosion,
And
feari~g
-
foss
above
all,
I
placed
a
seed within.
I built my home
around
that seed
And leisurely I tended
·it,
For with the sage sky dispensing its gifts,
I knew the soil would k
_
eep
it.
1
'
,
.
.
:
,
EASTER
i966
The German found the body .
. .
And the Pope
,
cancelled Easter
.
- Fran Murphy
But the
.
cho
_
cofa~e
industry protested
.
.
.
So Halln1ark ma,de ''Spring
B\1nny
Day:'
And Jesus sav
.
ed
became
'
the by,,·ord
·
.
.
.
'
:
Other than that, the routine remained unbroken
.
•
Ex'i)ept
'
•
; ,
'
.
:
a
f
e\\'
n1~n
stopped
having
chi
l
dren
.
What life contains such beauty
That pain of knowing peers pain of aloneness?
Ground into our being,
This pain of heart and beauty of love,
Until such day brings an end,
And end becomes beginning.
- E. Rimai Fisher
Gentle the light in vaulted night.
So the clarity of heart.
Earth burned by day,
Scorned and scarred in darkness,
Looked upon with anger and revolt,
The herded rag
e.
Yet patent answer lies in care of
Man for man.
Strange interlacing, each to another,
To turn dissolution to bond
.
of oneness,
Cover of calm, fabric of repose.
- E. Rimai Fisher
Tonight I write with concern
to temper the
'
severity of recent
·
words;
the vague thoughts of reg
'
ard so expressed.
It
is but my way, to write,
at the quiet end of evening, to rest,
even in the evasiveness of language.
The search is within,
to stay the structure-s of feeling,
to fabricate in sadness and rejoicing a complex of sentiment,
the search continues.
Words.
They are
.
of foretime and of tomorrow,
warm, close, very alone
.
Unused words.
Unspoken words
'
.
Added words to define that which we regard as precious.
,
Fresh words to order the thoughts we prize.
,
New words to convey the ford of care.
A
ll
words to weave the
Unrealities
-
of today's exercises into
the Continuity ofdiving.
So I would write,
Though impoverished manner and indefinite spe
e
.
ch
Be symbols of intention,
In understanding
involvement is made competent,
to qualify for friendship.
- E.
Rimai, Fisher
PETER
I usually begin stories about Peter by saying something like
'.' ... and there was this guy on our bus ... " I suppose that there really
is no other way to do it, because whatever intimacy there was between
Peter, Ed Flaherty, and me has long since dissolved, making the
memory of Peter nothing more than the memory of "a
_
guy on our
bus." Fellows who knew of Peter love
to
hear Eddie or me ramble on
about some of the crazy things he said or did. And, I must confess, I
get a kick out of it, too.
Peter was as incredibly small as he was int
e
pigent
.
He managed
to weigh in with double figures while over-cloaked in his brother's
baggy clothes, but it has been said that, denuded, th
e
scales would not
grant him so much as a fortune card. His skin was of a sickly white,
and a good portion of it was str
e
tch
e
d over his
e
normous hooked nose
.
To and fro on that hideous breathing machine a pp-ir of thick lensed
glasses periodically slipped. And no living being has ever seen him
exhale smoke through both nostrils at the same time. Now that I
think of it, the first time I saw Peter walking through the halls, I got
sick.
He walked like Groucho Marx, and he hat
e
d John Krull because
John wasbig and John did his homework. "The most despicable thing
about him
'
, " Peter would snort, "is th
e
part about his doing so much
goddam homework. Big gu
y
s c
a
n alw
a
ys b
e
kicked in the groin. But
any kid who thinks he has to do all that work is definitely a mess.
'
'
Peter hitch hiked
to
school from W
e
st Islip at least
'
thr
ee
times a
week (that's about thirty miles), because h
e
mi~sed the bus. He lov
e
d
to
argue; frothed at the mouth whenev
e
r he did; h
e
read, r
e
vered,
memorized, and applied
to
me and Flaherty all the teachings of
Sigmund Freud; and he took untold pleasure and satisfaction in pr
e
-
dieting my future. Quite a few people considered him a loser.
Peter was horribly proficient in bus-ride debates, bµt his con-
clusions were always the exact opposite of what they should have been,
if
not completely irrelevant. He would build a concrete
.
argument,
from foundation to climax, and in one gallant sweep of c
°<
mclusion
deny everything he had said.
It
became impossible to deny his denial
with
·
any
.
basis in reason, for his argument being so utterly rational,
the only deniable point was the final statement, and all we could ever
do was to simply deny it. Peter would be furiously indignant: "What
do you mean 'right.
.
. right. .. right
.
.. right. .. right. .. WRONG'? I
spend twenty miserable minutes backing up an indisputable point; you
agree with everything I say; and then at the last minute you tell me
that I am absolutely wrong! '.fhat' s blasphemy! How can you do it?
On what
grounds
... Oh, you blundering fools
are
wasting my time.
"
Eddie and
I would just laugh,
and Peter
would
continue-
-laughing,
himself.
"Fools.
Fools. Fools.
I simply
cannot
understand how
the
two of you could be such fools." As he laughed, he would curl
up in
a
wormy little ball like some kind of gnome.
In
spite of
our
failure
to "
...
und
e
rstand,
comprehend, or
other-
wise
'dig'
the absolute
logic
of
any
given argument,"
Peter passed
ov
e
r us in his scorn
of
homo
sapiens.
Whenever we disagreed with
him,
he would scream for
a
while, but ultimately
calm down enough
to treat
us
with
the patient tolerance
of an
intellectual
giant--with
that
oh-well-what-should-I-expect
attitude
of
genius
.
He
even con-
fid
-=
d
in us,
to a certain extent,
when he told us
about
his own destiny:
"I
read
The, Agony and
the
Ecstasy
last night
and
decided that
Michael-
angelo was
not
as greatas
William
Blake,
and my work is infinitely
better
than
Blake's.
Ergo,
you will boast
about
having known me.''
He
was
not
all
talk,
though.
One fine
day,
he decided that the
hum-drum life
of a budding
scholar was
either
too much or too little
to endure
.
So,
he
left. During
the
months
spent
in Greenwich Vil-
lage, Peter read poetry in
coffee
houses, burglarized small
grocery
stores,
had
a common
law
wife, and even
lived for
a
while
with a
homosexual. (Considering
the
normal
developmental
progress
of
legends, half
of
that
should
be true).
But Peter was only Peter when
he was
"the guy
on
our
bus.'' \\"e
comprised one
p
f those high school cliques made up of snide
and
arrogant
little
rascals who
thought
that
because they ranked in the
upper ninety-eight percentile in the
PSAT'
s, the world was theirs.
There, Peter
was
a
monarch
among
pseudo intellectual sixteen and
seventeen year olds.
We
admired
his romantic
·
courage,
because we
kn
e
w no
other
individual who would have the nerve to be so different.
We
respected
and almost gratefully embraced
the fruits of his
ex-
tensive reading.
And sometimPs,_
maybe more than
sometimes,
,,·e
liked him.
He was right
about
one thing: we do boast
about
having kn0\n1 him.
-
Ed
l.O\\'l'
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