Jean Nordhaus   ILLUSTRATIONS I knew the rudiments: his into hers. What I lacked were illustrations. My parents handed me a solemn book. It would explain what they could not. Feverish, I browsed the chapters ("Eggs," "Pollen and Sperm"), past grainy fish roe (black and white); a nest of speckled eggs, a flustered German Shepherd bitch who nursed her puppies like the Roman She-Wolf standing up. All this I took for metaphor. Likewise, the sad fallopian lyre, the bristling snapdragons, the peacock's gorgeous poker-hand of plumes. Only to reach the final chapter, where an uxorious bull and cow moose browsed in a soggy glade, fondling the ferns with blowzy lips. And this, it seemed was frenzy's end: the bog, the weeds, the slow beasts cumbrous in their bodies.   THE WHITE MEAL Lord, give us food for angels and invalids, poets and madwomen, all who find the savor of this world too strong-- mourners and saints and those volatile souls whose joy ignites dangerous fevers; for these a cloud, a polished bone, a cup of snow is sustenance enough. Spread them a tablecloth clean as the page of an unwritten book and serve upon crockery plain as a nurse: the clear broth of memory, skim milk of exile, cooked grains and potted cheeses, purees culled from roots of loneliness, breast-meat, slivered from the bony tent. Let this feast be lean as Pharoah's seven dream-cows, humble to bless the blue feet of the starving and let each vessel, passed from hand to hand above our plates, inscribe a circle over circles. Let no clamorous spice, no storm of seasoning distract these diners from their secret craving--to hear a mother's tongue tolling again in the rooms of their childhood, watch steam rising from that early soup, sunlight glinting from that first spoon raised like a lighthouse over waves-- a beacon for the hungry voyager.     Susan Goldman THREE PATTERNED VASES, 2000 monotype 30 x 42 see more work by Susan Goldman JUNK....... On James Hampton's Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, Museum of American Art, Washington, DC Everything begged to be saved: three-legged tables, arthritic chairs. The blind light bulbs and sprung valises longed to be lifted, transformed. With his dreaming eye, he saw them as they might become: an altar wrapped in foil; the gimpy chair reborn as throne--though it would not support a child; six twinned pedestals with flower-faces, strumming brassy music of the unreal world. Emblazoned over all, this legend: Fear Not. The kingdom of heaven is made of junk. Busy as a spider in the dark garage, he built it, fettling forth Winged symmetries and curious entablatures. A makeshift architecture, tenuous as a breath. Exposed to public view, it leans away, still hoarding its darkness. Soon we will walk away into sorrier streets than any Hampton knew. A velvet ribbon bars the door to the unenterable room.   AUNT LILY AND FREDERICK THE GREAT After the war, she painted her walls a French blue, pale as the watered blue silk of her eyes, filled her rooms with cream and gold-leaf chairs, and when she raised her porcelain cup with pinky arched and blew the word "Limo-o--o-gges" across the lip, that made a tender wind, as if a host of cherubs rafted through the room. Mad for all things French, she'd never read Voltaire, went straight from the Academy of Typing in the Bronx to work for Mr. Hyman at the J.D.C. In 1945 she went to Paris--ah, the city was a shambles then, American cigarettes were currency, her Yiddish far more useful than her French in working with the refugees. History was hell, she learned, but life moved on. She purchased silver fruit knives, teacups, pastel figurines, and tottered home on platform wedgies to attend the rattle and attack of morning trucks along Third Avenue and to receive us kindly when we came to call--in short, to lead a life not sans souci (for there were deaths, and loneliness), but of her own design. You'd never guess King Frederick and my aunt would have so much in common. Both were short, bilingual, stubborn, confused, enlightened in some ways, benighted in others, tyrannical, clever, benevolent, fierce. Like Frederick, she flourished, like Frederick, she died. She was tiny and great and is buried in Queens.   DRINK When we came that day to the spring I made my customary speech: whoever drinks this water will surely return. And though we both half-knew you would not be coming back, you picked a careful path across damp stones and buoyed with sudden hope, put your mouth to the pipe-mouth buried among rocks and cress, to the mossy O and drank. Since then you have joined the silent ones beyond all thirst and hearing. Yet whenever I bend to the green pipe, it is you who bend with me to drink, and you who enter my mouth as water welling from the aquifer of memory to plunge again into the secret tubes and vessels of the body.     Jean Nordhaus's books include My Life in Hiding, A Bracelet of Lies, and The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn, which was published by Milkweed Editions in 2002. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, New Republic, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2000, and The Other Side of the Hill: 1975-1995, an anthology of poems by the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, published by Forest Woods Media Productions in 1996. Nordhaus has served as Coordinator of the Folger Shakespeare Library's poetry programs and as President of Washington Writers' Publishing House. She lives in Washington, DC.   Published in Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 2004.   Read more by this author Jean Nordhaus on Mark Strand: US Poets Laureate Issue