Raritan Quarterly
Selections from our Current Issue
William Firebrace
A light tapping sound. Cracks appear. A pterodactyl hatches from a large and ancient egg, smashes its way out its glass cabinet in the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée of the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle, located in the Jardin des plantes in Paris (from now on – relax, breathe out slowly, sip on a glass of dry white wine from Crétace - simply the Gallery), flutters upwards, breaks through the glass roof and flies off to terrorize Paris. So begins Adèle et la Bête, the opening volume of the first of Jacques Tardi’s ten graphic novels, set in Paris in the years preceding and following the First World War.
That Infinite Unknown (poetry)
Garret Keizer
The way I know the corners of our rooms
in the dark and pass with tactile confidence
along invisible walls, like pharaohs in their tombs
whose ghosts know gold within a void of sense,
I find my treasures unerringly in bed.
Likewise your thoughts, most anyway, before
you speak them, even the ones you leave unsaid.
I know your sharpest edges and your hidden door.
No less I know that what I’ll never know
is deep, as secret as the formulae
for mummycraft and Greek Fire. We row
above an abyss and reach across nebulae.
And yet we touch, despite immeasurable space,
that infinite unknown less than love’s grace.
Jana Prikryl
It rains all night
the sound a passerby, there there
or then again it whispers
pretend you didn’t hear
a kind of manual industry
like weaving, another human practice
of which no first-hand knowledge falls to me…
George Scialabba
Imagine that the scales fall from the eyes of some egregious exponent of American exceptionalism – Thomas Friedman, for example. Somehow or other, the horrendous toll of American policies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America since World War II is brought home to him for the first time, along with the complete lack of any relation between those policies and democracy, legality, or the welfare of the victims. Imagine also that, after donning sackcloth and ashes for an appropriate period, Friedman wishes to make reparation for the harm he had done by his cheerleading for American foreign policy over several decades.
Myra Jehlen
Finally one afternoon, reading in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, I understood how it came about that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ---a novel where all the villains are white, most of the whites fools, and a black man the only character never villainous or foolish-- has been banned from American classrooms for racism.
Featured Poems by William Logan
Anthony van Dyck, Marie de Raet
Clothes were the first imprisonment.
To the luxurious black dress
that reads hyacinth in the highlights,
add ropes of pearls trammeling
her bodice, even her wrists;
terrapin-blue ribbons coiling
round her upper arms; spidery lace
to throttle that pale Antwerp neck;
and the feathered black fan shaped
like a club—plumes, pearls, silk,
all straight off the dock. Surprised
into being, she purses her mouth
as if unable to protest, brows lifted
in some distant cousin of pain—
or, as she stands before the painter
hour after hour, untutored
wholesomeness at being bound.
The imperious clothes, like duty,
must weigh a ton. By dead
reckoning, she must be at least
seven feet tall. A dead-eyed spaniel crouches at
her feet, its attention elsewhere.
I do hope now, my dear fellow, . . . that, in my presence at least, you will throw out nothing to the prejudices of the sons of the Puritans.
—The Confidence-Man
The slug crawling
across the kitchen floor
had purpose and benediction,
like Augustine in his own
corrupt path
toward grace. The trail led
to the Empty Quarter,
avant-garde capital,
even now, of stagnant
philosophers. The wind
was pregnant,
the birches shuddering
in green expectation.
Let them arrive at an
unexpected address,
all fallen things.
The pigeon rested,
an Achilles after
yet another battle,
armored, a knot of rage,
saying not a word,
for after blood what
can be said without
blasphemy? The next
battle, the next,
fruitless rehearsals
for death that does not
come, no matter
that a man wants to die.
Even wrath must rest
at the edge of the garden,
knowing wilting leaves;
shriveled, forgotten roses;
a scuttling among the weeds.
How comes it that under his own hand, St. Augustine confesses that, until his thirtieth year, he was a very sad dog?
—The Confidence-Man
The battleship gray behind the swaying
yews could replace curtain fabric,
those drapes in that long-lost house
in Westport Point—modest stone wall,
immodest maple, angry dogs.
The river hunkered below the land,
the sea behind the dunes.
I drifted through childhood,
a page of newspaper blown
down a road crumbling into verge,
past the prim Gothic Methodists
and antiquarian cemetery, past
the general store’s genteel porch,
the miniature post office, the tavern
warning us never to enter,
onto the rotting wharf. There
among long necks spitting at tourists,
oysters refusing interrogation,
lobsters like brute black tanks
holding their demonic congress,
I at last felt at home.
I have an awful feeling we’re not going to get our fees on this job.
—Get Carter
Smears of charcoal in the sketch
of dawn suggested darkness
to come, the sky Noah saw
as he penned the lion with the lamb.
Civility is not Biblical; politesse,
perhaps. We know creatures
by their wary glances.
Naming them is another
matter, anonymity itching
at privacy. We pay never
to be recognized, to watch
the skies turn mercury
at the leading edge and not be afraid.
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