The Andrean - St. Andrews Archive

The Andrean
St. Andrew's School
1999
Artists
Rob Ward '99
Liza Tucker '99
Leslie Hirsh 'oo
Liza Tucker '99
Laura Sibert 'oo
Rob Ward '99
Laura Sibert 'oo
Rob Ward '99
Julie Teach 'oo
Laura Sibert 'oo
Julie Teach 'oo
Akil Geddie 'oo
Meghan Keeley '99
Leslie Hirsh 'oo
Maria Morse 'oo
Jamie Todhunter 'oo
COVER
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The Andrean
1999
TABLE 0/CONTENTS
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The Return oflshta Mary Vaughn '99
Bizarre Excercise Rob Ward '99
Shades of Blue at the Art Loeb Trailhead Peter Teigland '01
Un elephant va a la bibliotheque .. . Kiel Berrett 'oo, et. al.
Sketch in Black Sarah Bowers 'oo
The Groundhog Meredith Counts '99
Symphony Hilary Hammell 'oo
Memory Peter Teigland '01
Dust Ann Awantang '99
Half the Man I Used To Be Basil Simon '02
Writer's Block Mary Vaughn '99
Vietnam Sonnet John Vassalotti '99
Objects in the Mirror.. . Maria Morse 'oo
The Mornings After Meredith Counts '99
Paseo Maria Morse 'oo
Lumberman Meredith Counts '99
Paws Kicking Peter Teigland '01
as the last black snow . .. Maria Morse 'oo
Republicans are some o f . . . Mr. Chester Baum '36
The Return oflshta
MARY VAUGHN
Alooga!
Ishta ast coomfat!
Ishta caloom'd far to Uumstaat,
and salshed the migna Boolsh!
Over the keefs and paks they voomralled,
yet Ishta hoopled with a glowish brimm.
Taalc Ishta!
Mulkned the briner,
and paratus a fiast —
Ishta ast coomfat
and sanf ed oomus!
Taalc Ishta!
Bizarre Exercise
ROB WARD
Her hands were pale, growing
Paler as time passed,
And her palms screamed from their pores.
They rolled on a thin layer of air, placed as if
To protect them from the ground.
Like the intricate patterns on fine lingerie,
The flowers traced the meadow's features.
"Shall we hide under petals,
From the world,
And drink the sweet dew?"
"Of course,
But the dew will make us weary,
So where can we hide?"
Shades of Blue at the Art Loeb Trailhead
(after Richard Hugo)
PETER TEIGLAND
You could be here on a Saturday afternoon.
Just here to stretch. The last deep breath
you stole was last month. You see at the trailhead the paths
trampled by the lazy, spotted deer
transient in life, resilient Black Bear, padded fingers
of striped-tail raccoon going to wash in the creek.
Only the Tulip Poplar stand watch. The trail-side latrine
is 5 years old now. The one ranger
checks it frequently, usually has to clean it out.
The most prevalent game-tracks now
are boot prints. Treads of the various people
the city sends, some driving here in rusted pickups,
Cadillacs, the young yuppie bankers
whose boots step out of Forest Green Explorers. One lonesome
valley left and foot paths can't contain "adventurers."
Only the Tulip Poplar have stood watch
in the Carolina sky blue, their flat-tipped leaves yellow
and ridge-high above the valley poplars,
a dozen turkey vultures smell
the rotting, padded fingers of raccoon. Her carcass
will be food for what seems a month.
Isn't this your home? That good breath
still pouring into your chest? Isn't this invasion
so complete, the cicada in the poplar seem
a love song unanswered: buzz and no reply?
Don't expectant doorbells buzz? Do footprints
and photographs do justice to an old game trail,
not just the Art Loeb, but trails
of Douglas Fir, elk and grizzly
your lungs will never taste
until your city's air spills out?
Keep your boots in the car. The one ranger, naive
when the latrine was dug and erected, still hears the cicada
although he smells shit. Someday soon
he says, that damn thing'll burn to the ground.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
Your tire tracks are still fresh.
The premade walking stick you have in the trunk,
the one you bought in the city, is poplar
and the hiker at the trailhead
is old and her padded bare feet trample the grass.
Sans Titre
KIEL BERRETT, ANNIE CASWELL, MS. MIKA COURT, JENNIFER DAISE,
HILARY HAMMELL, CLEMENTINE JAMES, LUCY LONG, MINTA MADELEY,
CRISTINA SANDOVAL, CHARLOTTE TAYLOR, ANN WOODS
Un elephant va a la bibliotheque.
Tout le monde est tres triste.
La voiture noire frappe et il est mort.
Voila! Les yeux!
Mais le sac est tres beau 1'a
II veut acheter un BMW.
bleu
Je voudrais les chaussures bruns mais
ma mere ne les achetera pas pour moi.
Je suis fache.
En amour il y a toujour quelqu'un qui embrasse et qui offre le joue.
Les films de 1'Oscars etaient tres bien.
Oh la la-
Sketch in Black
SARAH BOWERS
The lights flicker back on, and the car is still empty. A damn it, as she
pitches sideways a little before regaining her balance. The tracks slide beneath
her feet, sending vibrations through the spaces between her toes, warming them
until they are numb from the buzzing. The subway runs through her mind,
drudging up some lame seventies book about condoms and the difference
between boys and girls — she'd been half-amused, half-terrified by the vivid
account of a girl having an orgasm from the rumbling of a train underneath
her. Now she can smile, think, god that's funny, when all she has are numb feet.
Hardbacked orange seats beckon her to stick to their fake leather,
already wraped by innumerable other torsos and backs of legs into a mushy
mold for sitting. Those who haven't been baptized with wads of solidified
chewing gum spell out histories: Dana loves Jason, and Matthew is a faggot.
Someone named Matthew wrote a story about a carpenter who ended up nailed
to a dead tree — he wasn't supposed to be gay, though. Matthew, the writer, she
means. She doesn't know abou the carpenter. Probably not. He was too busy
acting holy. She laughs out loud at this, tossing her head backwards and honking, then quiets and clings to the metal bar in front of her, while grawing at the
other hand's thumbnail. Ignores the seats.
The bruised Coke can rolling towards her distracts her. What are the
physics in that? she wonders. Her teacher had promised her beauty in the sci-
ence. Rolling, and then the sticky floor catches it, and she stoops to press her
eye to the tab opening. She won't try to taste the air inside again, she'd gotten
her tongue stuck in that hole when she was ten. She'd thought it might be slippery enough to wiggle in. Instead, the opening pinched a circle around her
tongue until she'd tasted O positive. But her mother ripped it off for her in the
end.
Her lashes blink past the tunnel of the can and she sees black. She can
imagine it into a kaleidoscope, covered with ink, and even as she turns it, the
shape stays the same. What's the stupid British song? Kaleidoscope eyes and all
that... But the scratch scratch scratching sound of the flailing roach that trickles with flat soda down her thin shirt front, snagging itself in her thick, tangled
hair. It clings there, maybe for dear life, whatever that means.
And it's big, at least the size of her eye, reflecting the black inside of the
can. She plucks it from her tangles, one hand still on the metal bar to steady
herself, and looks closer. Antennae, six writhing legs and the nauseous feeling
in her stomach, as she squeezes. Roach guts make her fingers sticky while she
presses them together and releases them, crunching the rest of the insect shell.
Then arrives the fluctuation of her insides. Watching the goo smear on her fingertips, she spills a waterfall of lunchtime grape juice and heroin onto her hair,
her clothers and her subway floor. Now that is beautiful — purple in liquid, her
body, drenched with vomit.
She follows her mess to the floor without really knowing or giving a
damn, and naps quietly in the dripping pool as it extends its liquidy fingers
throughout the car.
Stupid how details are important — stupid how life events are
clumped into the shit that happens to people. Stupid how there's no point
sometimes. Just a nasty picture.
This is what the random man thinks, as the sliding doors woosh him
onto the car. A subway tunnel, some fucked-up druggie, she's probably insane
anyway, a dead roach for company. Standing in a vomity puddle, the most he
can think to whisper in her ear is, "You have beautiful hair."
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The Groundhog
MEREDITH COUNTS
I walked past a dead groundhog
on the side of the road where the grass
met the asphalt.
And the sun spilled heat over the cement,
pooling around that full still mound.
I tilted his pliant side with the tip of my sneaker
and the light slipped
over his sleek hide like water on oil
except on his left thigh
where the wound still shone like a purple heart.
I stooped to examine the glistening lesion,
still pure and dark
and not daring to seep into his coat
while he kept still
vigil on the deep weedy ditch
with one open and terrifying eye,
sharp and black
over the flat and raised nose
of his dusty face.
The strong teeth flashed
between those two curled lips,
tight and parted as if poised.
And I ran my fingertip
over his black-booted foot,
over its smooth tread,
worn and gray like the battered sole
of a steadfast soldier,
tipped with the five ragged grapplers
packed deep with brown soil.
The thick muscles bunched
in his stalwart haunches,
cocked, now becoming stiff,
which I hadn't recognized at first:
That slow contraction of his legs,
the inertia of their luster,
felled on the edge of the weedy front;
A death withering,
soon dry and hard on the ground.
So I rose from that scene,
leaving in rest such a haggard cadet
to his pride, and the sun
and the dirt.
Symphony
HILARY HAMMELL
I smile into the rain and it plays on my face like a marimba
and creates cool steel music, grey-blue wispy calypso on my skin
wet like a peach, pink and orange as red seeps into the curve
The bows of gods saw across the electric cellos of clouds
and the sky
vibrato
hums.
as metal bristles of drum-brushes play whale-songs fresh onto
my toes, naked and curling into the yielding wet sheet of earth.
Memory
PETER TEIGLAND
A blanket, one which has
Felt five generations pale and grow weak,
Like its woolen plaid fibers shorn
From half of one dozen sheep suckled
Once by a ewe who remembered
Blue and Gray
Soldiers clashing on the very pastures
Of her birth almost two centuries past,
Lies silent in a brush heap set ablaze.
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Dust
ANN AWANTANG
Red clogs every pore of the town
thickly coats every leaf and petal
obscuring every color
Gravel on our scalp
Coloring and drying the moistness
at the corners of our mouths to
brickish crusts
Mottling our white clothes
Packing the corners of our eyes with grit
Coloring our phlegm as we wretch
Throats plugged with it
Nail beds glutted chock full of it
Shoes caked in it
Our skin choking on it
Red soil
to remind everyone exactly where
they came from
But when we walk home and red washes the
air and hovers in hazy halos after the us and
when we are surrounded by the rusty sunset
scenery and when we get home and wash up,
we will look longer at that rust red as it loosens
itself and leaves our skin and we will look longer
at our faces silked and layered with a soft powder
fine lingering of red and we will wash them last.
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Half the Man I Used to Be
BASIL SIMON
My whole life revolved around one thing: fat. It was how I looked,
how I acted, how I talked, and how I dressed. I wallowed in it, reveling in my
190 pounds of pure, rolling, folded over and creased layers of blubber. I was the
heaviest kid in the grade: it was my only distinction. I was fat, and good at it.
My white T-shirt was always slightly pulled taut, so that the curves of my substantial torso were suggested, although never tight. Over this, I wore a loud
Hawaiian shirt: a different one every day of the month. I routinely made loud
obnoxious comments, generally unrelated to anything in particular, merely to
get more attention directed toward myself. I was fat and invincible, ready to
take on the world (mostly by sitting on it). My parents said it was merely a
phase that I would grow out of. They knew they were lying. I ate like a pig.
More accurately, I never stopped eating. Life was a giant buffet: food in my
locker, food in my gym locker, food in my friends' lockers, food from the vending machine, food from local restaurants, all consumed in a giant parade of
gluttony.
There comes a time when one wants to change, when one wants a
change of scenery, when one wants to dump a lifetime of yesterdays like old
garbage and move on to tomorrow. My time came this spring. I wanted to get
out. Out of my life, out of my school, out of my fat. I was coming to Saint
Andrew's. The day I received my acceptance letter, I stopped eating. I knew
that if I wanted to have a new life, I would have to change who I was; what I
looked like, what I acted like, what I felt like. I would be like Superman-remove a false outer layer, and emerge a dynamo, a different person: calm,
charismatic, intelligent, entertaining, relevant, important, and able to shine. It
was not so much that the quantity of lard upon my feeble frame was inversely
proportional to my behavior, but that it was what prevented myself from changing; it put my life in stasis. My size was the embodiment of all that I was, and
all that I hated. It had to go.
Sometimes I wonder how I did it, how I survived. I ate one piece of
fruit every day. That was it. Sometimes the pain was incredible, the hunger
driving me virtually insane. At times like these I did sit-ups, jumping jacks,
went running, and did anything to distract myself. The pounds melted away,
almost like shedding a skin, emerging new and whole. But nobody noticed.
Everyone still thought I was fat, and that I would never be anything but fat. I
told them I had lost 45 pounds. Their mocking, disbelieving laugh echoes in
my ears to this very day. It was as if they were blind, unable to see anything but
their harsh memories of me. They still ridiculed me in the locker room, they
still thought I was slow, they didn't notice that I now had a chin, emerged from
the folds of my gargantuan neck. They didn't notice that my gut no longer
sagged over the top of my pants, peaking out from under my shirt.
I remember, one day, several years ago, I sat upon my porch in the hot,
summer afternoon. As I sat there, sipping a frosty can of coke, my eyes wandered to my bare belly. I saw the trickle of sweat running down my chest,
emerging from a grotesque, organic, crevice. I patted it with a certain degree of
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fondness, like a young man pats his childhood dog. A constant companion kept
between my muscle and my skin. There is a certain feeling of loss, when I look
for him, and he is no longer there. It is almost like he has passed away. I do not
dance upon his grave, nor do I mourn his passing. There is merely an emptiness, a hole left by his passing. Although I had vanquished my foe, I had
known him. Fifteen years we had toiled, I trying to banish him, he trying to
conquer me. Indeed, he was a worthy opponent.
Writer's Block
MARY VAUGHN
"Welcome to Macintosh ..."
The screen smiles at me,
gills breathing heat,
leathery skin scraping my fingertips.
My body frozen,
mind climbing —
a reckless grab and bloodied fingernails
from those stupid metaphor mountains
and jagged simile cliffs,
then falling like a cannonball with a bird-like roar
back into my chair.
With sweat-popping sway,
I begin to write.
Vietnam Sonnet
JOHN VASSALOTTI
There was a time when these men had been boys —
A time of drive-in movies with some girls —
When baseball and rock music were their joys;
And insulated suburbs were their world.
But Uncle Sam's arthritic finger chose
To poke at places far across the sea,
Not knowing that the poke was felt in those
Scared boys now loving and hating eighteen.
A ghastly pall arrived on ship-out day —
The father's chest stifling the mother's mouth,
The frightened son who tried to find a way
To stifle nervous frowns but knew not how.
His frowns said: "even if my body lasts,
My life will still have suffered many blasts.'
OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR
MARIA MORSE
this ugly wasp
crashed
onto the right
side-view
mirror
Its foreign figure
froze
inert inside
an aerodynamic
chrome cavity
except
Its cycloptic antenna
flailing
in exhaust —
child-locked window
censors
an imp's id
to squash
this ugly bug
the curious
passenger
no longer desires
to discipline
the ugly intruder —
illiterate blue eyes
coundn't read a
subtitle's warning
while
watching
the ugly comedian
meet
Its identical twin —
two yellow-jacketed jesters
entertain
this only-child
with a brand-new
lopsided ballet
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solarized windows
homogenize
Its glaring costume
into
prison-uniform
gray
wingless insect
limps a backward spiral,
Its first dance upon a silver stage.
The Mornings After
MEREDITH COUNTS
There must be a dent
in this bedroom mirror.
Those gray thighs kiss
too hungrily
like fatty lovers, full and tight,
or baked ham in packs of two.
And this stomach never folds,
thick-lipped like a drunken Buddha,
or winks with one purplish eye.
Out here, breasts do not sag,
or shrivel and swing like wet socks,
even after years of wear.
And this hair is blond,
not honey or wheat or ash,
and it does not shed from the crown
of this head like some old golden retriever's.
It must be refracted light which sallows
that face, jaundiced and pliant, almost plastic
like a Barbie's, but not so firm.
A true mirror would only add ten pounds,
not twenty,
and blue sacks wouldn't bulge
under these veined eyes, like a beaten prizefighter's,
mirror, mirror.
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Paseo
MARIA MORSE
Avenues of uneven cobbles will trip the unsuspecting tourist, and more
in the afternoon, when the wet stones, like a warm ice, smell of fruit and the
graphite dust of diesel. Popsicle sticks and Cuban cigar butts drain down hills,
into the dry mouths of sewer grates.
Rain never comes to cleanse taller things, like stork nested steeples, or
leaves of the avenue's pigeon feathered trees. The gardners have hosed their coveted bath over the stones, permitting desiccated weeds to bloom red poppies
from unshaded cracks. These green men have washed through the avenues,
leaving the stones sanitized and chilled.
In this siesta sun, grandmothers walk daughters' infants. The sun filters
through the parasol of draught, drawfed trees, heating these walker's age-spots.
They walk the same serpentine avenues—a tourist's labyrinth—that always lead
to home. Their hair, fine and metallic, is like the dust that lost taxi's leave here.
The grandmothers walk to avoid tripping on cobbles, that have always
been bumped rudely together. Their legs grow purple veins that swell to press
against the damp leather of sandals. Their bleached blouses, thinner than hair
and sweated in spots, are like the drying and cooling cobbles.
Black and white cats that sleep among the poppies, hide not from the
sun or the green men's baths, but from militantly walking grandmothers. The
cats envy the siesta-time captives that are strolled to sleep, with bellies filled
with canned milk.
The grandmothers sit where trees sit, weary without rain. And like
cows dry of milk, they wish to drown themselves in the sweet tears of still blue
eyed infants. The infants dream of a mother's breast waking them from shade
and swaddles. When the sealed eyes become lachrymose, arthritic fingers must
pacify mewing mouths.
The grandmother who lifts the infant to her sagging breast has forgotten that she cannot console. The grandmothers are old, perhaps too old to realize that they walk in circles, always the same shaded avenues that lead to home.
Lumberman
MEREDITH COUNTS
He strains, rip-ready,
Squeezing the sap-stained grip and
Sights gauged,
Blasts splinters of woody flesh,
Smoky,
rapid-fire.
Paws Kicking
PETER TEIGLAND
On an April day the color of wet slate,
Under a Tulip Poplar whose budding leaves
Glistened with dawn's dew this morning,
Under a Cherry whose silken petals
Shower the glowing grass,
A squirrel squats, patting a beechnut
Into the mud with paws kicking.
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Untitled
MARIA MORSE
as the last black snow
of earlest dawn
drifts
and settles,
capricious frost
weaves
crystal lattices
upon panes
of fogged
hot-house
glass,
a late gust
might
charm
ice-bearded
chimes,
unstill
a wintering cat.
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Untitled
MR. CHESTER BAUM
Some reflections about Ensign Edward Kohn, United States Naval Reserve, and 1st
Lieutenant Richard Peter Richards, United States Marine Corps Reserve, both of
whom died in a war that ended fifty years ago. Richards was in the class of 1937 at
St. Andrew's School and Kohn in my class, 1940, at Haverford College. The reader
should know that in the late 1930s some prescient people who saw the dangers of
Fascism joined the International Brigade to help the Loyalists in Spain against
Francisco Franco, who was being supported by Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Many of those prescient people were killed.
Republicans are some of my best friends.
At college I said that about the Jews
Until I heard shocked cultivated boos
From cliche spotters. They would reprehend
As passive bigot one who pretends
That liking one's Jewish friends could excuse
Not hating Hitler. They said I could choose
To risk my life in Spain to make amends.
One of my best friends was a Jew named Kohn:
Cartop down, heater on, he seemed to say,
"I'm funny, rich, and apolitical."
Schoolmate Peter Richards was WASP to the bone.
Ensign Eddie Kohn was drowned in Savo Bay:
Pete Richards blown to bits on Guadalcanal.
"This is about Republicans?"You say.
I wish Eddie Kohn had lived to be one.
His tastes were expensive. He would shun
In summer the hot and humid Chesapeake Bay,
Live in cool New England, where he'd dismay
The prudent and drive nights, top down, heater on.
The Kohns were patrons of the arts, loved their son,
And outdid WASPS in the good taste of their display.
Pete Richards may have died Republican.
Though if there are no atheists in foxholes,
It's unlikely Republicans are there.
Eddie was wittier and wiser than
Those who find Limbaugh's elephantine wit droll.
Would God he'd lived to shock the doctrinaire.
Punta Gorda, Florida
January 1995
The Andrean Staff
Nathan Atwater '02
Sarah Atwater '99
Sarah Bowers 'oo
Tommy Burns '02
Meredith Counts '99
Caylei Fujas '99
Hilary Hammell 'oo
Maria Morse 'oo
Emmy Nicklin '99
Cristina Sandoval 'oo
Peter Teigland '01
ST. ANDREW'S SCHOOL
350 NOXONTOWN ROAD
MlDDLETOWN, DE 19709-1605
(302) 378-9511