Philip K. Jason   SHADOW PUPPETS If you sit so that shadows flicker across the words you are reading, the words will take on shadows, too, and each phrase, each vaulting passage, will leap from its long dark soul and tear into the world of time and light. When the sun is overhead, the words go flat and your mind's ear shuts down with no echo. ......................The blanched page spills over the fragile characters still trying to go on. At night, in a darkened room, the letters scatter and recombine on a black field. Each shadows the other in a scrimmage of twins. The words that are cast from us as we move between the sun and our patches of space are eclipsing shadows. On a page, in a book, they resurrect the world.   Mansoora Hassan Spiritual Journey Series #1, 1999 Mixed Media on paper 30in. x 22in. see more of Mansoora Hassan's work       INTEREST We are rooted here in the profound momentum of compound interest, and the precise unfolding of its dark cousin, amortization. These are phenomenon that shape our lives, not only our exchanges, with something not too far from beauty, the beauty of dogwoods counting out blossoms that divide in mathematical precision into pink and white petals until a strong wind runs them aground, mixing them with progressions of whirling seedpods from the red maple, and the green. These numbers, then, are not just vanishing debts and spiraling totals, but the interest compounding on sun and water, the cycles of diminishment and growth. In each of us, too, there are intimate mortgages, ledgers and tables of root, branch, and flower, annuities of love and generous impulse, generations of quantity, color, and shaping will. Collected or not, I have interest in you and you, as you have in me: amor, amort, amount.   SOUTH FLORIDA CHOPPER PILOT In his youth, in another land of palms, he sometimes flew medivac missions, sometimes set down troops into a zone cleared for landing by machete or explosives, sometimes blew thatched roofs into a million flecks of straw. Now, in the citrus groves, the strawberry fields and tomato patches he hires out to guard the crops, hovering over a cold LZ making it hotter or at least safer as the waves of bladed air caress the leaves and buds, fondle the unripe fruit, to keep the frost from forming.   BLIZZARD Calumny will be closed today, as will Arrogance and Sloth (except for New Sloth Beach which is opening two hours late). Penury is closed. The District of Ambivalence is open with a liberal leave policy: check with your supervisor. North Affectation is closed, but the toll booths will be open. Sodomy is open but will be closed after noon. We still have no word in from Modesty. Freedom is open but hazardous: an emergency plan is in effect. Beauty and Truth are closed, but plan to open tomorrow. Love will remain open but transportation cannot be provided. Last night, before the first flakes, Cowardice announced it would close. Pride, as usual, will not be closed: everyone is expected in on time. Gluttony and Lechery are closed except for essential personnel. We will be watching things along; our reporters and camera crews are standing by and more calls keep coming in. Mendacity, reported earlier as open, is really closed. We will run through the latest list of closings after the news.   LIVINGROOM Let the rug be someone you trust and depend on, let the couch be a loss of memory, and that tangled lightcord beneath the desk a map of the night. The desk itself is your doctor, bankteller, broker. Why do you look at that picture, the one you so dislike? Let the two lamps be hither and yon, yes and no, binary breathing. Let the round table be a pool of regrets, the chair in the corner your zone of exile. Why do you come back? The doors are lovers, evangelists, beggars, chances, detours, tombs. Why do you come back? Who has removed the ashtrays, old papers, the wrappers and husks of casual foodstuffs? Why do you look at that picture? Let the rag of cobweb be stirred by absence. Let the curtain, parted, be me. Let the window, open, also be me.   Philip K. Jason has taught literature and creative writing at the United States Naval Academy since 1973. He served for twenty years as an executive editor of Poet Lore and was also for many years a member of The Writers' Center board of directors. Among his sixteen books are three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Separation, published in 1995. He is co-author of the Creative Writer's Handbook, now in its third edition, and the author or editor of several books on Anais Nin and on the literature of war. Published in Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2001.