Published by Associate Editor on November 16, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

dream by John Reinhart

narrated by John Reinhart

Illustration by Sue Babcock

of sunbeams making 
love to crystals and 
dancing with a million 
of their shimmering 
children, where tree 
roots tell legends 
to daffodils and the sun 
itself breaks into a belly laugh 
that extends eternity another day


One-time beginner yo-yo champion, state fiddle and guitar champion, tinkerer, and certifiable eccentric, John Reinhart lives in the Weird, between now and never, protecting discarded treasures, and whistling combinations of every tune he knows. His poetry has recently been published in The Vocabula Review, Black Heart Magazine, FishFood & LavaJuice Magazine, Star*Line, 94 Creations Journal and Liquid Imagination, and Songs of Eretz.

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Hard Row by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

narrated by Diane Severson

Illustration by Sue Babcock

This winter the bones of gods,
impregnated with chalcedony,
penetrated by the gold of fools,
frost heaves the jagged field,
Ragnarocking a tussocked down
under a spackled sky, fast moving, hieroglyphed,
good-word spreading to a mortal world.

This spring we bush hog the lower 40,
this year steel teeth stumble
on imperishable Tibias,
spatang off in divinely inspired trajectories,
cloud chamber trailing infinity.

My God, I worshiped
at Your empty tomb so long,
Your fragments, assembled,
a mighty God would make,
severed cervically, acephalic,
despite celestial sieving,
Your inspiration directionless,
but therefore ultramundane,
inerrant,
unquestionable,
unanswerable,
transcendent,
rising up with the sap,
blooming in summer's eyes,
swelling like young fruit.

We were warned to not take sup
Chez You, to never look back,
afraid over Who might be following,
or What, warned to not give ear,
for Your sake, to any crawling thing,
you can’t unlearn this knowledge,
can’t go Home, ever;
ignorance was bliss but now,
now grace’s a fleeting dream,
life a cup of sorrows,
till the harvestman counts your coup.

An aether compactor by trade, David Kopaska-Merkel began writing poetry after witnessing the Ascension of Tim. Kopaska-Merkel has written myriads of poems and stories since the 70s. He won the Rhysling award (Science Fiction Poetry Association) for best long poem in 2006 for a collaboration with Kendall Evans. He has written 23 books, of which the latest is SETI Hits Paydirt from Popcorn Press, http://www.popcornpress.com/seti-hits-paydirt/. Kopaska-Merkel has edited Dreams & Nightmares magazine since 1986. DN website http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/. @DavidKM on twitter.

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Harboring by Kate Gillespie

Illustrated by Sue Babcock

Touch its anaerobic sky
to be burned.

Sulfurous, tarry, black
underneath inner harbor.

Two half-centuries have flowed above, time trickles
between the flattened layers. 

Ancient organisms
never languid in fluid repose
stretch out filaments. 

Gather in aggregates, 
colonies where the chemicals
seep, deep, keep 
compounding novel catalysts. 

Eighty three years of folly falling
into the algae slime
into the city’s crime
into the sifting sediment.

Coaxed in nitrogen-flushed tubes—
refugees of evolutionary phylogenetic trees.

Feed them chlorine-coated
chemical compounds, PCBs.

Anaerobes exchange protons
for donation of electrons
and spit out anions
to go make salt somewhere else.

It’s hard-knock strife
between the bedrock of ages.

Liquescent horizons
tenuous microbial life.

Changing and rearranging,
from the bottom
up.



Kate Gillespie is a microbiologist searching for her creative mojo. She is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer who balances creative writing endeavors with her marine biotechnology doctorate studies. An active participant in Baltimore’s literary arts community, Kate has been involved in cultural outings including Poets in the park, EMP Collective readings, Glass Mind Theater Group public lab, and Baltimore’s One Minute Play festival (OMP) . Her work has been published in Eight-stone Press “Smile Hon, you’re in Baltimore!”, The Magic Octopus, and Urbanite Magazine

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Septuagenarian Flashback by Bruce Boston

Illustration by Sue Babcock

Stumbling into the humid
jasmine-scented dark
from a midnight cinema
playing an iconic art film 
rife with sidewalk cafes

and laconic actors whose
monochromatic silences
confabulate to a toxic 
conundrum of pale angst
and lost existential loves,

my venerable thoughts 
segue to foggy mornings 
in a metropolis by the bay,
wandering the slantwise
streets of stoned youth

and the fleeing tendrils 
of a Guatemalan high,
a great golden bridge
aglow with the blurred
headlamps of early traffic

rising out of the mist,
glittering like some fabled 
and fantastic behemoth 
that would carry me to 
a chameleon tomorrow.

Bruce Boston is the author of more than fifty books and chapbooks, including the dystopian sf novel The Guardener’s Tale and the psychedelic coming-of-age-novel Stained Glass Rain. His poetry has received the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov’s Readers Award, the Gothic Readers Award, the Balticon Poetry Award, and the Rhysling and Grandmaster Awards of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, and twice been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (novel, short story). www.bruceboston.com

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Interview, Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Interview with Featured Poet Roald Hoffmann

Introduction of our Featured Poet

Roald Hoffman

As always, it is with great pleasure to introduce our featured poets. But there is additional honor this time to introduce a fellow theoretical chemist who also shares a passion for poetry. I first learned of Roald Hoffmann when I was an undergraduate at Loyola College (Baltimore, MD) and even more so as a graduate student at Georgetown University (Washington, DC) in the mid seventies. I was fascinated with his application of quantum chemistry to understand chemical reactions. Apparently, so was the rest of the scientific world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1981). I never thought our paths would cross, but I had recently learned that Roald and I share pages in Thirty Three, the anniversary issue of Negative Capability Press (edited by the Alabama State Poet Laureate Emeritus, Sue Brannon Walker), so I invited him to grace our pages at Silver Blade. Contrary to popular belief, we scientists have creative minds and desires. I learned from reading his biography and interviews that Roald Hoffmann was so enamored with the arts that he almost majored in art history. Such passions cannot be be contained nor thwarted by a pursuit of science. In fact, I submit that science would enable inevitable discovery of one’s creativity.

Cited from his website (http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/), here is a short biography:

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

“Applied theoretical chemistry” is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry. The pedagogical perspective is very strong in his work.

Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public; he participated, for example, in the production of a television course in introductory chemistry titled “The World of Chemistry,” shown widely since 1990. And, as a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books, “Chemistry Imagined” with artist Vivian Torrence, “The Same and Not the Same and Old Wine” (translated into six languages), “New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition,” with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt.

Hoffmann is also an accomplished poet and playwright. He began writing poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of collections, “The Metamict State,” in 1987, followed three years later by “Gaps and Verges,” then “Memory Effects” (1999), “Soliton” (2002). A bilingual selection of his poems has appeared in Spanish. He has also co-written a play with fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled “Oxygen,” which has been performed worldwide, translated into ten languages. A second play by Roald Hoffmann, “Should’ve,” has had several workshop productions since 2006; a new play, “We Have Something That Belongs to You,” had its first workshop production in 2009.

Unadvertised, a monthly cabaret Roald runs at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Vilage, “Entertaining Science,” has become the hot cheap ticket in NYC.

Interview of Professor Roald Hoffmann

Roald Hoffmann (RH)

John C. Mannone (JCM)

JCM: I often hear that science and engineering majors are not interested in liberal arts, so how did your interest in poetry develop? And how do you balance a career in chemistry and poetry? Perhaps you can include your writing process.

RH: Like so many things in this world, it began in college. Columbia has a core curriculum, and after I took that (with some poetry in it), I took a poetry course with a great teacher, Mark Van Doren. He could not teach the writing of poetry, but he taught us to read a poem. I still remember the breakthrough point to this wonderful world – it was Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning”.

JCM: I have seen the stereotyping the scientist-poet: their poems are often funny, limericks, silly rhyme, cute, clever, entertaining, but often fall short of literary expectations. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to all of us; your poetry is certainly a serious work. What advice would you give your colleagues, science students, and scientific friends who might be encouraged to read and/or write poetry?

RH: First of all, put pen to paper, as they used to say. Sit down at the keyboard, start writing. Second rework it – I know of no poet who doesn’t need some drafts. Third, find a group of people to read poems together, criticize them.

JCM: In left-brain dominated disciplines, like the sciences, what do you do to energize the right-brain—the creative center of the mind?

RH: Nothing works better for me than to go out into nature, a long walk along a trail, around a pond.

JCM: Chemists and physicists have a plethora of new metaphors to tap into when we create poetry. And when it comes to revision, our discipline might enable the logical apparatus to kick in and assist in the evaluation of the different crafting elements of our poems, often simultaneously. Let’s consider a related question. In what ways could poetry help us be better scientists, better teachers? If you have any specific examples of this synergism from your experience, that would be great.

RH: I think poetry teaches us how to communicate emotion in words. Just a few words that establish an emotional tie between the author/lecturer and the reader/student are enough. If the reader knows that you are speaking to them, and that you care they listen/learn/experience you have their attention.

Poetry also taught me that a turn of word, an interesting way to say something, can have a tremendous effect. I used “Solid Memory” in the title of a scientific paper, for how extended structures have features similar to their component building blocks, and that worked very well.

JCM: Sometimes we see a quote from Dirac, a physicist I admire, taken out of context. But when we know the story, we might understand why Dirac might make a condemning statement about science and poetry. He was talking about Oppenheimer’s (apparently unaccessable) poetry (commenting to him about the poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote):

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say … something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

—Paul A. M. Dirac (Quoted in Steven George Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha Redux: More Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians (2005), 169)

RH: Well, Dr. Dirac was a wonderful scientist, but he never tried to read a poem. Or no one took him by the hand through a poem the way Mark Van Doren took me. And his statement can be reversed – look at the unscalable walls of jargon surrounding much of science.

JCM: (cont.) And After I read one randomly selected Openheimer piece, I must concur with Dirac. (http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/bond/notes/safe3.018.193-sea-01-large.html) Can you comment on the importance of accessibility in poetry?

RH: Well, John, you are sentenced to find other Oppenheimer poems. There are only around five. Here is one:

Crossing

It was evening when we came to the river
with a low moon over the desert
that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,
what with the cold and the sweating
and the ranges barring the sky.
And when we found it again,
in the dry hills down by the river,
half withered, we had
the hot winds against us.

There were two palms by the landing;
the yuccas were flowering; there was
a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.
We waited a long time in silence.
Then we heard the oars creaking
and afterwards, I remember,
the boatman called to us.
We did not look back at the mountains.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer

Do you see that as obscure? He was, in his time, a brilliant kid, influenced by Ezra Pound, TS Eliot. Look for the poem that he marked, as he sent it to his high school teacher, as “my first love poem.”

JCM: My gut feeling is that poetry might bridge physics (and chemistry) and metaphysics. I can’t help but think of things that transcend equations describing the beauty of nature when I see an electron microscope’s image of a layer of atoms, or, in a telescope, see a cluster of galaxies enshrouded in what might be dark matter. What do you think about this, about the questions science raise that cannot possibly be answered by science? Poetry might indeed be the language to “express the inexpressible.”

RH: Yes, it could be that way. As science fiction does. Though to be honest, poetry has not led me to any specific new idea I can point to in my science.

JCM: I have often heard to keep away from scientific language in poetry. The usual indictment is that scientific terms are sterile, and that Latinate words are not poetic. What say you?

There are problems, with people not allowing us/themselves to float on the sound of the words when meaning escapes us, at least for a while. I think Archie Ammons was a master of using complex words, even scientific ones, in poems. I would recommend a reading of his Hymn; here’s a piece of it:

“And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces”

JCM: One of the fascinations with chemistry I’ve had is the luxuriant sensory stimuli in the laboratory—the exotic glassware, complex smells, an infinity of colors. Have any of these types of things stimulated poems for you?

RH: Occasionally, but not often enough. I’m more likely to be inspired by some chemical words, as words, or as ideas.

JCM: What about chirality*? It’s inescapable in any science fiction poem or story that promotes some kind of genesis not to address it. Poetic license can only buy so much. And while we’re on the topic of life, what about life forms based on some other element than carbon? I know some have suggested silicon, nitrogen and phosphorous based life, but these elements don’t have the chemical diversity of carbon. There are no yet-to-be-discovered elements (except from the islands of stability, which would not likely offer a stable model for life).

* For the benefit of our readers, chirality is a word chemists use to discuss identical molecules configured differently, in particular, their mirror images. Just like your left hand is a mirror image of your right, they are quite different (try to comfortably put your left hand in a right-handed glove). The building blocks of life (amino acids) in humans are left-handed. If I understand it correctly, we could not have evolved from some primordial soup containing a mixture of left- and right-handed molecules.

RH: Oh yes, chirality, handedness has intrigued me. Here is one section of a long poem entitled “Specula”

Tetrahedra, screws, bolts on car
wheels always tightened the wrong
way; in silver mirrors, in molecules
growing on handed clay surfaces, or
seeded, panspermia, into cauldron
atmospheres, chains growing, left
clasping left, sculpting double
helices, to be nicked in mutations,
building, building, to Alice’s
passage, in cyclones and anti-,
born from nonconservation of parity,
the four-pronged, chiral universe
marches to an asymmetric tune: left,
right, left, left…Remember, o
explorers, to bring along a hand
when you rocket to the far stars.

JCM: I am fascinated by your poems (“Voliton,” “Crossing the Mekong,” and “A Different Kind of Motion”). Can you give us back story to them?

RH: “Volition” was an attempt to write a poem like a collage by Vivian Torrence, an artist with whom I collaborated on a book “Chemistry Imagined.” Take a look on her website, http://www.viviantorrence.com/ for her work. “Crossing the Mekong” came out of reading in one place on the Hmong people, and elsewhere about the evolving cultural practices of apes. “A Different Kind of Motion” was a tribute to a Dutch choreographer, Katelijne Vanduffel, the way she brought up emotions in her dancers. I tried a word dance for her.

JCM: I was moved by the end of the poem by Charles Tomlinson (“Farewell to Van Gogh”) quoted in your Banquet Speech when you were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1981). (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1981/hoffmann-speech.html#not) Do you still use poetry in your speeches, lectures and in your introductory chemistry classes?

RH: I do, in just the settings you mention. Sadly, in straight science settings, that is the only place one can use a poem. Not in my papers, the gatekeepers won’t let it by.

JCM: The scientific language of some of the great scientists of the Renaissance was poetic. I visualize Newton’s Principia, Bailey’s description of a solar eclipse, and many others. Perhaps this is a rhetorical question, but why not write scientific papers today with a creative non fiction flare (at least a little)? If nothing else, the metaphors could help someone new to the field understand better.

RH: I think nothing in the structure of science would be damaged if we did allow metaphorical language, narrative, a personal involvement. But it is not a battle that I will win…

JCM: Who are some of your favorite poets? Besides yourself, I found several chemists who also are/were poets & writers: Isaac Asimov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov), Carl Djerassi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Djerassi), Primo Levi (http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/primo-levi-181.php) Are there other scientist-poets you admire and/or those that should be on this list?

RH: You have named some great ones. One of Israel’s leading poets of the past century was an inorganic chemist, Avner Treinin. Unfortunately not much of his poetry is translated into English. More accessible to people is the work of Czech immunologist Miroslav Holub. And David Jou, a first class physicist in Barcelona, is a leading Catalan poet.

JCM: Are there any literary projects you’d like to tell us about?

RH: Well, I’m desultorily working on a book on narrative in science, called “Not Just So: The Importance of Storytelling in Science.”

JCM: How can we find your work? Website?

RH: I think two of my four English poetry books are still in press: “Soliton” and “Gaps and Verges.” Leads to many published poems, and other nonfiction books, and essays are on website roaldhoffmann.com.

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

“*” by Simon Perchik

narrated by John C. Mannone

Illustration by Sue Babcock

*
This spoon all night on tiptoe
listens for the careless splash
that will never make it back –the cup

half hazelnut, black, half-filled
so its prey can be tracked in the dark
the way one mouth finds another

feeds on the voice that can’t escape
–hour after hour being eaten
by the silence longing for the light

though even with the walls in place
even with her hands over your eyes
begging you from behind Guess who?

you circle the room, flying blind
spread-eagle, and hear the You
no longer moving between your teeth.




Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press(2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

The Near Shore by Michelle Markey Butler

Illustration by Sue Babcock

The wagon stubbed over a rut. Byre bumped, shroud shifted, coins fell from closed eyes. Hidden beneath the linen. No one saw.

But, then, he could. A half-sight not of eyes but spirit Unencumbered by the winding sheet.

How strange to watch his own burial. Bound form lowered into a fresh scar In a graveyard maimed by too many, and too new. He felt as much as heard the coins slip, Lost in folds until they fell free. One to the turned soil beneath, one to the sparse grass beside.

The baker's boy scooped it up, fast as a frog.

Habit, perhaps, kept him near the mound As it greened, and sunk. Where else should he go? Without passage, the farther shore was barred. He had no wish to haunt his relations. He had been well-tended in his illness despite their fear, Well-treated until the waggoner grew careless and no one saw.

Soon enough, more graves joined his, And no relations remained to haunt.

He had known burials did not stay In crowded churchyards. His eviction was still a shock. He brooded his scattered bones like a hen.

When the anatomist came on a moonless night, he followed.

Coins changed hands But did not come near the empty sockets of his eyes. A pang, that. He felt trapped, as he had not since The first moments the dirt sat down upon his shroud.

Days spun themselves into weeks, Wove into years like fine linen. The alchemist collected coins until he could buy books.

The far shore, it was said, was unchanging. Not so the alchemist's rooms. Men visited, bought and traded A tidal crew of glass and gold, gems and needles.

His skull braced the alchemist’s favorite volumes, On a shadowed shelf lest they catch an eye. The ones that stayed. That he loved, and meant to keep.

Michelle Markey Butler is a Lecturer in the College of Information Studies and the Honors College at the University of Maryland College Park, where she teaches medieval literature and Tolkien. She has published on medieval and early modern drama, but her current research project focuses on internet memes as literary and cultural criticism. She is the author of SF/F stories and a debut novel, HOMEGOING, which releases in December 2014 from Pink Narcissus Press. michellemarkeybutler.com.

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Featured Poet, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

A Different Kind of Motion by Roald Hoffmann

Illustration by Sue Babcock

	 for Katelijne Vanduffel
	
The wolf-child creeps around the clearing
where children build a campfire. She hears
a new sound, laughter, cross talk. Upright
shapes jump blurred across the fire. But
they have dogs that smell her, so she can’t
get near. After they run off, she sniffs
the fruit skins, some colored paper they
left. She raises a paw, then tries to stand,
as she saw the children stand, but her rear
legs remain bent, she falls over and over
and over. She hitches away, in her crab-
like motion, fast as the rabbits she catches
and eats. From the edge of the forest
the wolf-child watches men hoe the fields.
They’ve begun to set traps for her. She
tries again to stand, her front legs
on a tree trunk, leg over leg up the bark,
rearing up so the sun coming through
the leaves hits her muddaubed belly. Her 
back legs hurt, like the day she tried to lope
after the wolves, before she came on hitching.
She falls away from the pain, with a grunt,
not the tinkling water sound of children
in her ears. In time, she learns to hobble
leaning on a stick, and the wolf-child comes
on stage with a different kind of motion.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, then Poland. He came to the US in 1949, and has long been at Cornell University in the USA, active as a theoretical chemist. In chemistry, he has taught generations how to think about molecular orbitals.

Hoffmann is also a writer, carving out his own land between poetry, philosophy, and science. He has published five books of non-fiction, written three produced plays, and six volumes of poetry, including two book length selections of his poems in Spanish and Russian translations.

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Featured Poet, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Crossing the Mekong by Roald Hoffmann

Illustration by Sue Babcock

The sun touches the treetops. In,
among the middle branch leaves,
ruffed gibbon faces. They stretch,
lick fur dry. It’s time, to greet
neighbors with the morning’s old
songs, time to check the soft-spined
rambutan fruit. Climbing high
for the launch, spread out flat,
changing direction in midleap,
shaping out of air a vector
tunnel of openings and branches,
the yelping gibbons' arboreal swing.

Their children cling,
				ours crawl.
We invented the beauty parlor,
				but take out our own splinters.
				They groom each other.
Apes have dominant males
				who defend estate, sexual
				territory. We get married.
				Gibbons are almost like us.
And when the stranger comes,
				swinging in an out-
				of-season coat, armed,
				smelling of his feed, we
				just look, furtively, look.
				They scatter to howl away
				the green-brown sky.
If mother is taken far
				apes cower, babies cry.

When a man of the Hmong dies
the gibbons know. They come
from the highlands in the night,
stand guard, eat the offering.

The monkey king gently wraps
the man's soul in a white cloth
bears it off in phantom leaps
the stars’ tree limbs meeting
his confident long hand reach,
across the muddy river, back home.

Published by Associate Editor on November 8, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Featured Poet, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Volition by Roald Hoffmann

Illustration by Sue Babcock

A gold coin centers this landscape.
It is drawn standing on edge,
so that we can see the ridges and a hint of the design,
which seems to be the Russian imperial eagle.
The coin is teetering,
and this is shown in comic book notation,
with some short curved lines.
The coin would fall
(and it is not clear to which side)
were it not for two dark arrows
contending
to push it over,
one from each side.
The arrows are each impelled by intricate machinery -
gears, cams, even engines and boilers.
This machinery is controlled
(we see two trailing wires)
by a man below
pushing buttons on a panel, and it is clear
that he directs both arrows.
At this point we notice that the floor around the engineer
is littered by loose letters in various fonts.
The composition is quite symmetrical:
to the left of the man is a fence, a big wave
about to break into it.
A dragon is partway over.
Some small figures are hurrying about
trying to unroll a hose against the dragon,
others are trying to pull out some bayonets
that have penetrated the fence.
Some of the figures gesture at the man at the control panel,
who should be giving them orders.
But he doesn't look at them,
not at the panel (though his fingers are on it). Instead
he looks to his right
at a sitting woman in a red and black dirndl.
She faces away,
painting what seems to be a landscape with two roads.