Issue No. 3, May 1998 Mote     DEVOURED, ROSE OUT   The tension of a tonal irresolution pervades the poem: is it only the trembling of the light before extinction, or the sign of something overbrimming, about to spill over even the ultimate limit?" --Andrew Joron on Joseph Donahue's "Terra Lucida"     "I thought of the pit"-     and was afraid of its black dazzle, pure altitude and looming foam.     "I thought of the pit"     a shining vault that could not stay its own iridescence, an ocean devoured by its crest. I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors.... They were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about the pit, its memories and secrets as well as what it contained, like instinctive animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace. One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered that the pit had been covered over. It was then that I understood with horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this dark well the air shaft. Orhan Pamuk from The Black Book Gripped by that deepest cold, that sea that had turned to sponging grime, a vast spiderweb of holy words was swept from the very windows: I called that cleansing TERRA LUCIDA. Leonard Schwartz           Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York 1996) is translated by Güneli Gün.

Issue No. 3 Copyright © 1998 by The Transcendental Friend. All rights revert to the authors upon publication.