Palaces of Glass and Stone and Stalheim, and: Stalheim

Abstract

Palaces of Glass and Stone and Stalheim, and: Stalheim Deena Linett (bio) Chihuly in Jerusalem Palaces of Glass and Stone Though a man she's loved for fifty years is illshe doesn't say I love you. Anyway he knows. They call each other Sweetheart and My dear.She talks about the spaces in the skies beyond her windows where the towers were,tells him I could predecease you. He laughs. She's bought a pack of photographs of glassset next to crenellated walls and under cypresses in the Holy City where she's never been, formscurved like horns of rams in Bible-tales, like water-droplets just before they fall. Colorsto compel an unbeliever: translucent green of foam-slashed seas, blurts and streaksand blotches: smears of pigment stilled on disks and bottles, all spilledfrom the vast shining. A wild excess of feeling moving through has left its breathin edges pink as clematis or vulva, orbs like ornament in liturgies, a blue so paleher mouth fills up with water. Stacked cubes the green and white of glaciers, huesnever found in nature: tinctures of titanium and zinc tint plumes like pollen-bearing grasses,rounds of cobalt rolled to rest against stones beneath permanent skies. She wants to give himsomething, as if color were a gift of time. Glass drawn bright from furnaces, spun and cooled,fixes and goes solid. Iridescent opaque blue, ice-white, [End Page 112] sun-red. Everything that ever happened there liesin the stones and textures sand: argument, belief and slaughter, though everyone they happened tohas gone. She and the man were salt and grit common chemicals and water, the flux and fritof the subjunctive going on, impure and importuning. Stalheim Midsummer. Fifty years after the war,following a tour-guide's gesture, I find myself in a World War II bunker: HereNorwegian sentries watched for Germans. Wind roughens tough wild grasses,occasional bird-call. Inside the stone vault, curved cool goldwhite chamber lit by sunfrom somewhere, I look through a fist-sized hole in the stone onto the entire miles-wide valley:Twelve blues, Norwegians say. Rocky outcrops, stunted birch and maple. Spruce stunnedby wind, and scrub all the way to the river at the bottom of the Stalheimskleiven,deepest gorge in Europe. A Jew in peacetime, I remembered icy nightsin moonlight. No one could see me. [End Page 113] Deena Linett Deena Linett, Professor Emerita of English, Montclair State University, has published two volumes of poems, Rare Earths, 2001, and Woman Crossing a Field, 2006, both from BOA Editions, Ltd. Her novels and short stories have won national contests. She has had fellowships to Yaddo and to Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. Copyright © 2009 Purdue University