Hawaiʻi Review Number 15: 1984

UNIVERSfTY OF HAWAII UB ~ARiES

l~B RA JrY

ONLY

( PERIODICAL

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U.H. LIBRARY

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Issue No. 15

Spring 1984

Hawaii Review is a student publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are solely responsible for its content. Subscriptions and manuscripts should be addressed to Hawaii Review, University of Hawaii, Department of English 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a self路addressed, stamped envelope.

Hawaii Review is a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. 漏

1984 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

HAWAll REVIEW Spring1984

Editor Managing Editor Poetry Editor Fiction Editor Staff

Lizabeth Ball donna Gordon Bair Zdenek Kluzak Rodney Morales Tim Arney William Danks Ann Kamimura Shirley Lee Charles Miller Nancy Mower Dan Ness Margaret Russo Jeannie Thompson Holly Yamada

CONTENTS

Four Poems Washington Park Three Poems Mother of Pearl The Foe The Nesting Ground in Fall Two Poems Hakalau Gregory Orr in Conversation Two Poems Seedless "Think of the Children, the Little Children" Wolf-Shepherd Cross A Natural History of Sea Turtles The Papayas Foreign Salesclerk Two Poems Might Leave Here

By Summer' s End

16 19 25 29 30 32 33 40 43 44

Victoria Emery Steve Rinehart Steven Goldsberry Christine Kirk-Kuwaye TyPak Mitchell LesCarbeau Reuben Tam Chris Rust Vesna Gaspari-Roberts Debra Thomas Kathy Matsueda Janos Kandel

45 46

Tim Arney Barbara Wright

52 53 54 56

John Unterecker Holly Yamada Charles Edward Eaton RobDudko

1 7

...

Victoria Emery

READING ANNA KARENINA

Is it possible you reach me through layers of winters that sleep in the dark: small silvery sparkles fill the air drawing me into the same fog and snow, surrounding me with the same words, cold breath of air around your temples.

You stand in the same railroad station through which you passed three years ago, and through which now passes everything that was before: young men in uniforms, beardless students, third-class passengers with their awkward bundles, voices rising from the crowds on a spurt of wind, then dying in a long moment of rapture, of undrunk wine, restless, unappeasable ghosts.

Dazed eyes discern how the town fades in the distance; an endless sorrow pushes her towards an exit revealed in the dark.

The guardians of the sky approach and fumble through the coronas of her heart.

She scorns them, steps out alone towards the rails that shudder and rattle under the incoming train, and no one sees her beautiful eyes full of sleepless nights, her dreams migrating into the white cover of snowed-in fields, soaking in all summers and springs, green-blue leaves of the hazelnut tree, electrified by Tolstoi's geniuswho throws his arms in the damp air in large sweeps like some cosmic beast covered by its own bloody skin and it's over.

1

BALLAD OF THE VILLAGE SCHOOL TEACHER

In Serbia it is said that no grass grows again where the horses of the Turkish Army have set their hooves.

(From a folk legend)

With a step more strident than the village women returning from the fields, she starts toward the meadows, leaving behind the dark rooms of the limewashed school house and her children chewing on slices of bread spread with cream cheese. The history class has just ended; severed heads of young warriors watch from the spikes along the shrub fence. Out in the meadows women weep and a child cries in a cradle. She paces across the grass, making a lonely path like someone who has survived a battle, working out in her throbbing head the letters of an ugly scroll, a dark summary of sin.

Insects rise like canopies over her, a small stream hides in the grass, in the loose soil frail roots break the brittle bones of ancestors; the wind has scattered their dust in mouthfuls and planted their words silent and clean from here to the murky waters of Stambul.

Her dress beats the thick grass as if there were a devil to be found and evil to prevent from spreading.

Her dark eyes are the late rays of the sun, layers of summer transparencies in the vapors of the brown earth.

Swaying her hands backward, forward, she walks straight and far, memorizing a thousand years of history and one five-pointed star flower bluer than the deep sky.

There has always been a battle to fight in this small and ancient land, but this is autumn now,

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time to reap or sing in the cleared-out fields.

Dusk falls. Tired villagers on their way home stop to talk to the teacher, accustomed to seeing her in the meadow. She tells jokes, plays pranks- puts a frog in someone's basket, hides a stink bug in a pocket, touches the village flirt's bare legs with fire grasstells again how she's cheated Drago, the shrewd householder, thirty five dinars on two dozen eggs, and everyone laughs.

Her laughter trickles like the hidden stream, her smile blazes like a furrow on the hard palm of a plowed land, glowing bronze and crimson like the line of hills, defeating pain and the ravages of age, alone with the sprawling grass, with the flora of the seasons and the vapors of the earth, sensing that there exists some other justice which is the key to all secrets and which makes grass grow from barren ground, water clear after the horses' hooves.

Her eyes pour out their silent wish scented with the first grass cut in her youth- like drops of sweat that mix with dew, like children's sticky fingers curling over pencils, like muddy water clearing over white pebbles yearning to step from their dark hollows into the phosphorous light of this October day.

3

THE SWEETHEART

You're under my skin, in my hair, under the floor in my tight apartment.

How to raise a fist of heart at you when this place becomes s mall , restless, how to pull myself away from your dreamy, different hour.

Oh, how much my spirit must endure to hear over and over your steps around the house, this opening and closing of the doors.

Didn't I have myself before when I was myself?

I s till have that cat with the annoying meow who keeps me company when I sit nights, the patch of peeled tiles on the kitchen floor that looks like the back of a fish speckled with dried-out fungus, a bed of ferns in which I can lie and close my eyes. drives, honey, wine children, superstitions, administration clerks butter, jungles, greasy spots flags, nails, scissors, hate At night my refrigerator, white, urban, hum s like a pond filled with lilly pads, like a sweetheart; I can't count the ways I love thee my love.

4

A WOMAN IN THE BEACH PARK GAVE ME A LILIKOI

Oh how its deep seeds glitter, the words wreathe in coils, run away in all directions.

How it doesn't have a casing, how it doesn't smell of gun-powder, of smoke or of brush fires , how it doesn't hang on a nail.

How the seeds whistle, simmer, how they play, how they play that distance, that shadow of an ellipse that drops in my core.

In this fruit the flower of summer bends towards me; this liquid gold in the blue sky, this blue flower in the deep water.

And how it pours its dark eyes, how its mouth melts, how it embraces my arms, bites my teeth, its scent splashes my forehead this naked song, this shortage, this infinity heated to a white -heat under my core.

And the yellow forest doesn't know what the black seeds think, the deep seeds do not know what the song thinks, my head doesn't know what my song thinks, but how it plays in my core, it plays so it spins in my head.

5

Little more, little more, let the summer last.

Let it play in my throat, let it play.

Let it announce my staying behind to the itinerary of the last departures.

Even though my blood may be diluted with yellow cells of tropical light, even though my head may be rummaged by its winds, and by tides from the bottom of the sea.

6

ASHINGTON PARK

If you were seventeen and lived in Washington Park and you wanted to drunk, you went to National Liquor on State Street, East St. Louis. and Dutch and I were in high school and we often made the trip. But Bobby lived in Washington Park; Dutch lived in an expensive house in Belleville, and I lived behind the chain-link fence of Scott Air Force It was funny, though, if we three decided to get together, we'd meet at Bobby's house in Washington Park.

Bobby's house was ... comfortable, Dutch and I figured. What was even more comfortable was Bobby 's garage. Bobby's dad was usually there and Bobby's mom was generally in the kitchen making something to bring out to the garage when the work was finished. And the work was always Bobby's van.

The truth is the van belonged to SPONGE, but you wouldn't know that to talk to Bobby. He claimed it because it always seemed to be sitting in front of his house or in his garage, on account of none of our folks wanted it anywhere near them. It was that ugly. That was typical, though, and I guess it reflects why we ended up at Bobby's house all the time anyway.

Nobody wanted to come on base to visit my house - there was too much talk of strip searches and pot-sniffing guard dogs at the gate. Dutch's house nearly always contained Dutch's dad, a subtly frightening man who we didn't discuss, even when we were morose and reflective on Everclear punch.

But Bobby's father was special, and still is. I'll never forget the day I first met him. We were young- freshmen, I think- and we'd piled into Dutch's dad's Olds in our crackly new letter jackets which smelled like the inside of a showroom automobile, and headed for Bobby's. Bobby's house was wood路 frame and white, one of those typical square-lot ranch homes where the front door never gets used. The r.eal entrance was in the breezeway that jutted out of the side of the house like an east wing. It had cinder-block steps that led to a gravel driveway.

That day we were heavily armed with pump-action BB rifles and had made the stop at Bobby's house for some ammunition before filling East St. Louis with small, round holes. I was already a cramped six feet tall and always the general pick to be driver, although it was Dutch's car that we

7

borrowed . It didn 't bother Dutch's dad that I had no license, at least I figured it didn't, since he never asked . I guess he was so relieved that we didn't hang around that the question hadn't occurred to him . Anyway, I needed to stretch my legs, so I climbed out and leaned against the warm hood.

A man who was both dusty and greasy slid out from underneath an old Ford in the garage and squatted on the floor , wiping his hands on a filthy red and black rag. He got to his feet wearily and sort of ambled out of the garage and into the autumn sunlight, squinting like a tired hound. I would realize later that his leathery face was the sort that's impossible to shave properly, at least for bank or insurance work. Not like my father's face. He would've received a goddamn demotion if a hair were to struggle to the surface.

Bobby's dad walked toward me. He had bushy eyebrows and tousled greyish hair, and there was grey matting covering his chest, too. It seemed that a generous portion of it had slid down onto his protruding belly, which hung over a pair of work pants. He held a cigarette in his cupped hand, junior-high doper style, and he glanced sideways quickly at the breezeway window before he flipped the cigarette butt into the neighbor's hedge. It hung suspended on a small fork in the leaves and trailed smoke into the still air.

"Yo 'sheen, brotha?"

I froze. What? If I hadn't been staring directly at him I would have sworn that that voice had come from a black man. He was looking at the grill of the Olds and scratching his chin. One of the car doors slammed and I heard Dutch's voice.

"It's mine, Mr. Kessick . . . my old man's." Dutch had come around from the passenger side and was kicking the front tire. Mr. Kessick grinned at him. His teeth would not see his son through high school.

"What's she got, Bugs?"

"Big one ... four fifty-five." Dutch amazed and humiliated me. Son of a rich lawyer and he could talk naturally to this man who I could barely understand. I needed to learn that. This man was for real, no uniform.

When Bobby came out of the house I looked at him with new respect. He would be the first of his family to attend college; the first to leave Washington Park.

Bobby had told us the story of East St. Louis and Washington Park than once, easily enough times for me to remember it now. Sometime in the fifties, when the skyscrapers were being dreamed up for the Missouri Louis, across the ugly Mississippi, and before the Browns became Cardinals, somebody had named East St. Louis the Model City of When I picture the city as it was at that time I see it in black and white. I

8

kids with baseball caps walking with one leg on the immaculate curb one leg on the street, whistling, and there are milk bottles with foil caps the doorsteps. All the automobiles are black.

The dissolution of East St. Louis began at the River- 1st Street- and a flood tide of wood rot and weeds inched its way hourly into Illinois. said his dad had told him that they could actually see the decay ing. Most of the men who had built houses and families in the model saw it move in the form of blacks emigrating from the sprawl of ropolitan St. Louis , crossing the MacArthur Bridge via the train tracks nnâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘rn,..<:arh, and beginning not a march but a crawl of decay and despair the river.

The white working-class Catholics who were mostly employed at the north of East St. Louis, above Washington Park, pulled up stakes and shuffled back to the upper Twenties and Thirties, and later to the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. They slid up State Street, the spine of the city, and branched out tenuously from its center. They hitched their trousers and swore, and sometimes they slid into their black Fords and drove down their old streets slowly. And they brewed a bitter hate.

The best description of the decay of East St. Louis belonged to Dutch. He once said that the difference between urban ghettoes and East St. Louis- a kind of suburban slum - was the weeds. East St. Louis weeds were sinister. They sprouted first underneath chain-link fences and through sidewalk cracks. When they grew large they were like fruitless tomato vines, thick-stemmed and hairy. After the severe midwest winter's temporary victory over the weeds, snow crept back to reveal their husky corpses and the first signs of the inevitable next generation.

The weight of despair eventually claimed the city, its blistered paint and sagging carports. The Kessicks and others gathered their children and sidestepped north, to Washington Park. They carpooled to work and paid extra to send their kids to school in Belleville or O'Fallon, out of the East St. Louis school district. And they waited, keeping their deeds and leases where they could be easily located.

My father was transferred to Scott AFB in 1974, my freshman year at O'Fallon High School, the same year Dutch's father joined an O'Fallon law firm . We met Bobby quickly enough- we all played football, drank, and smoked dope. We were also the original and exclusive members of SPONGE - the Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything - not a dangerous club to be in at all-white O'Fallon High. Bobby took the credit for inventing the club and the acronym, a claim that I wasn't altogether comfortable with, since he was not the creative type.

The club vehicle was an old Ford step-van, a high-ceilinged job that had

9

once been the property of the O'Fallon High School Marching Panther Band. Bobby discovered it one autumn afternoon behind the band room, flat-tired, the dog collars that had once proudly supported tubas along its inside walls sadly sousaphone-free.

"It's a piece of shit," I said .

"It'll be pussy heaven," Bobby declared.

"It'll never run," Dutch added.

Bobby lashed out at him. "It was running yesterday, dick."

The van did run when its tires were filled, and we did get the interior looking sharp with stolen lumber and remnant carpet, but it was anything but pussy heaven. Any O'Fallon girl with half a mind on her reputation wouldn't dare have it tainted with news of a country ride in the SPONGE van. We contented ourselves with Everclear punch and a hastily spray路 painted message on the rear doors: DON'T LAUGH, YOUR DAUGHTER MAY BE BACK HERE! O'Fallon fathers needn't have worried.

On New Year's Eve of our seventeenth year an ice storm downed power lines throughout East St. Louis. We weren't about to see in the year sober, but the power outage thwarted every plan to get alcohol. All O'Fallon and Washington Park liquor stores were closed and no amount of hanging out by the doors and blowing anxiously on our fingers would open them. The only solution was National Liquor on Twenty-third and State Streets always our last resort and always a sure but frighten ing thing. N 路 would sell booze to a twelve-year-old, and wine and beer to a mat ten.

The thought of penetrating the heart of East St. Louis during a ula''-1\.uw was not altogether appealing to the three of us. Any chance of making daylight run ended when our debate continued past dusk. It was uc1.1u~;u that we would leave the conspicuous SPONGE van at Bobby's and drive Dutch's dad's completely inconspicuous Olds to National. Bobby and dropped Dutch off at his house and Bobby carefully maneuvered the along the icy highway to Washington Park.

As we neared Bobby's block I noticed a green bundled figure ho down the sidewalk to our right, and I guess Bobby noticed him too. trundled the van up onto the curb and motored slowly alongside the man. was Petey Coco. Petey was a husk of a black man, not really old or just kind of tired and bent. Bobby leaned almost out of his seat and at the man so strongly that spit sprayed throughout the cabin.

"Hey Petey Coco, you dumb fucker! You're a fuckin' weirdass you know that?" Petey stumbled , and stopped. I was watching him,

by Bobby's vehemence, but when Bobby stopped the van I couldn 't keep eyes on him and looked nervously at my feet, then at Bobby. Bobby staring at Petey and when I turned to look at the black man, he was at me. I looked at my feet again. I prodded Bobby with my elbow and

10

let's go. After I repeated it twice, he released the clutch and we dropped back onto the road and drove slowly to his house.

"He's the omen." Bobby turned to me after he'd switched off the ignition. "Every place we've lived that fucker 's moved close by and then they all come.

"Who?" "All of them. And we move again, up or over, and we sell the house for shit." " You guys are moving?"

"A lot of people around here are talking about it."

I began to feel the helplessness and when we went inside the Kessick's house to wait for Dutch, I looked for traces of anger around that house.

There were none to speak of. Mr. Kessick had rigged up his generator so that Mrs. Kessick could cook dinner. Once we were inside she pushed food at us and I politely bowed my head as Bobby rattled off a blessing. I gazed at the embroidered tablecloth and at Mr. Kessick's heavy boots under the table. I'd never felt as anchored as I did at that moment. I looked for signs of anger in the Kessicks' faces and found some only in Bobby's. Even as he finished the blessing he seemed to cross himself with a touch of tired, hateful heaviness.

We were on the road by eight-thirty. It was a short drive south to National Liquor from Washington Park. That night the trip seemed longer than other nights, maybe because the streets had been completely dark since five-thirty. We cruised slowly down the right lane past National and saw that it was lit , poorly, by kerosene lanterns. I realized we had never considered that it may have been closed like all of the other businesses in the black-out area. Somehow it was ominous that we were drawn to the darkest part of the city on the darkest night of the past ten years. We took several minutes and several deep breaths in the parking lot before we left the warmth of the Olds.

Bobby pushed his way through the doors before Dutch and I, and walked toward the counter and a weak yellow lantern. A small woman in a rocking chair was watching a battery-operated television and the glow from it outshone the kerosene lanterns and candles. The whole place flickered in black and white like a silent movie. Bobby switched on his peculiar imitation jive and asked the woman for "th' usuaL" She glanced up and asked him what that might be. His smile never faded.

"Gimme some o' that grain alcohol ovuh there." He pointed to the neat rows of shining pints behind the counter. She rocked forward in her chair then walked to the end of the counter without taking her eyes off the television screen. I walked to the right, towards the coolers and one of the lanterns. When I got to the cooler and slid open the glass door, the nearest lantern rose and moved to a point directly over my left shoulder. It hovered

11

.'it •I ~,- :"

·:i .

there, swinging slightly, and a cool black voice washed over the back of my head.

"Say, man, what you need t'night?" I didn't turn around. I grabbed two jugs of red punch and slid the door shut. The punch was warm.

I turned, ducking under the lantern, and walked away, clumsily carrying the jugs at my sides. The lantern followed, reflecting in a hundred amber points on the bottles that lined the shelves on either side of me. I placed the jugs on the counter next to Bobby and in front of the woman , and I calmly walked out the front door. Dutch was waiting on the street- he had never even entered the store- and we climbed in the Olds and locked the doors. Bobby was long in coming out.

Maybe it was the cold, but the Everclear didn't seem to mix that night.

The punch was warm and grainy and had a faint odor of something like lighter fluid or automotive grease. I drove, Bobby mixed, and Dutch asked questions.

"Man, I can't believe you guys went in there. They have guns- how many niggers were in there?" Bobby told him that they did have guns, all twenty-five of them, and they had kept them pointed at my balls the whole time. Dutch was impressed and expressed only token disbelief. I cruised out to the country; it seemed ghostly in the newly-risen moon. The ice hung upon everything. It glazed the stubble in the fields and draped the bare trees like overdone jewelry, heavy and gross.

"Go back to town." Bobby spoke up from the back seat. " Back to East St. Louis . .. Sixty-sixth. I want to see my old house." He hadn't said much for a while, so both his voice and his demand startled me. " You're high ," I said. " We already went to the slums once tonight and I don't want to go back." ''No, I got to, I got to see my old house before the year's over. C'mon. Go." His voice was heavy, pleading, and he smelled of punch. " Don't you want to see what they did to my house, what the fuckers did to it? Don't you care, huh?" I did care. I cared with the sudden passionate intensity of a bad drunk and I spun the Olds around in the middle of the road and pointed the front end towards dark East St. Louis. "Road show!" I yelled and blasted the eight-track stereo. Bobby pounded furiously on the back of the seat and howled.

East St. Louis was dead. The only cars on the street were parked against the curb. I pulled out the tape and crept down State Street and counted the street numbers. Sixty-seven, Sixty-six, and Bobby directed me right and I turned and cruised down a heavy tree-lined black tunnel. "Up three more," he said. "There." He pointed to the left of the street and I pulled over to the opposite curb. I twisted the key and the engine died promptly.

The house was a spotted ghostly white in the filtered moonlight. The remnants of a brick porch were strewn about the front yard, which was

12

surrounded by a heavily sagging chain-link fence. Through the half of the front window that contained dirty glass instead of cardboard I saw a dim yellow glow. Tacked onto the side of the house was a bowed carport, its supports broken and the pieces unjoined. On the small eave was a basketball backboard without a rim, and on it a black "K." Several minutes passed before I noticed Bobby sniffing and heard the rustling of the sleeve of his letter jacket against his nose. "We built that goddamn carport in one day," he blurted, the sound coming deep from his throat. "We put up that backboard and painted it. I cut the fucking lawn and cut the weeds. I shoveled the snow and cleaned up my room in that house. Right on the sidewalk there was where three niggers jumped me and pounded my goddamn head into the street and my dad came out with a crowbar and busted one of the tucker's arms. I got fifteen stitches inside my mouth."

I felt the inside of my mouth with my tongue and imagined it torn and bleeding. There was a taste like rust, and I wasn't sure if it was blood or punch.

The car door opened quietly and Bobby walked across the street in front of my window and stood before the house. He began softly at first, and I could only see the back of his head shaking slowly. "Niggers."

"Bobby," I called, lowering my voice when I heard it echo. "Get in the car. Come on, man, let's go." I was suddenly very cold.

"Niggers." Bobby speaking loudly now.

"Bobby, get your ass in the car."

Bobby was screaming and his voice echoed off the ice. "Niggers, fucking niggers!"

I was terrified. I expected lights to start appearing in the windows and a shadowy mob of black men to begin collecting up the street. But no lights appeared and the only person on the street was a hysterical Bobby, shaking his fist and sobbing. I was considering getting out of the car and hauling him back when I noticed that the door of the house was open and a figure stood outlined in the dim light from the front room. The light from the moon outshone the backlighting and I could see that the figure was heavily bundled up and was holding what looked to be a package, also tightly covered. Somehow I knew it was a baby, and I watched the door long after the figure had quietly stepped back inside. He or she had done nothing but stare at Bobby for maybe a minute and before I took my eyes off the door, Bobby climbed into the back seat.

"I'm going to burn it," Bobby said to me in his room a few days later.

"What about the people living there?"

"I don't care."

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"I won't help you."

"I don't want your help."

"Do it when they're not home and I'll help you." I looked at my shoes.

"Don't get me wrong. I hate niggers as much as you do, but it's not worth going to the chair for. " He looked at me and grinned. "All right, Bugs. AU right. " We decided to scout the area. Bobby jumped in the shower and I walked out into the frozen yard and climbed into the van. I thought of calling Dutch.

He hadn't come over or phoned since the night of the blackout. I slumped heavily into the driver's seat and closed my eyes.

I believed that I wanted to see the house burned. I wanted to see all of East St. Louis burned and a new white phoenix of a city to rise from ita ashes. I wanted to see the MacArthur Bridge reopened and the Mississippi clean enough to fish in. Though I had never seen it that way, as it had once been, I felt like I had. I felt like I had grown up on the river and watched the barges and boatmen instead of living behind chain-link fences with airplanes and uniforms. And I wore an artificial hate around my neck like a barbed wire banner.

A crash and the sound of glass shattering shocked me out of my reverie.

It was followed by another sound, this time a heavy metallic thud from the back of the van . I leaped to my feet and struck my head on the overhead of the cabin as a third smash broke the window next to me. I stumbled out into the yard holding my head and fell onto the hard surface. A wielding an iron bar appeared from the far side of the van and swung the bar crazily into the headlight on the driver's side. It was Petey Coco, and boots crunched the broken glass into the ice-packed street.

He glanced at me briefly, crazily, and stumbled over to the other headlight. He swung the bar with difficulty and this time he missed the headlight and brought it up against the metal bumper of the van. The bar rang out and he dropped it onto the street as if it had caught fire. While he shook his hand and groaned, I got to my feet and ran into the Kessick's breezeway and burst into the kitchen. Mr. Kessick was cleaning a carburetor in the sink and he dropped it as I slammed into the room.

"Mr. Kessick," I gasped, and my head ducked and swam sickeningly.

"There's a nigger smashing our van with a crowbar. You gotta help me kill him." I fell heaving against the sink and threw up on the carburetor. Mr. Kessick looked at me for a moment like I was some kind of animal, then grabbed a baseball bat from behind the kitchen door and bolted out. I followed weakly, stumbled over the cinder block steps, and crashed onto the lawn.

Then Mr. Kessick did something that stands in my mind as vividly as the first time I met him. He dropped the bat onto the lawn and walked slowly up to Petey Coco, who was knocking the last remnants of glass from

14

the windshield of the van. He grasped the bar as the black man drew back for another swing and pulled it firmly from his hands. He dropped it into the gutter and the black man seemed to melt against the hood of the van.

Petey Coco sighed and his shoulders shook. Mr. Kessick put one hand on his shoulder from behind and squeezed gently. Petey Coco sighed again. He turned and looked at Mr. Kessick. "I don ' wanna move, George."

Mr. Kessick squeezed his shoulder again. " We all movin' Coco. Soon."

Petey Coco looked at the ground. "You'all help me again, won'cha George?" Mr. Kessick looked over at me. "My boys will, Coco, my boys'll help you move." Petey straightened and shuffled away, up the street, his back bent a little more and his jaw moving silently. He slipped once on the ice and my body jerked instinctively. He did not fall. Mr. Kessick walked past me silently, and I lay upon the frozen lawn, gradually feeling like myself again .

15

Steven Goldsberry GOLDSBERRY'S GAZEBO

What is a gazebo but a shed for the bourgeoisie?

I built this one with solar panel crates, eight 4x4's, stolen windows, galvanized six-pennies, and too much time.

If I were God, the world would look like this:

caulked seams, crooked roof, whatever beautiful waves, wind , and rain - welcome to tear it down.

At night mosquitoes swing against the screens.

Cockroaches big as dates eat my manuscripts.

But I am happy in this wooden shed.

It exists because I stood parts of it against themselves and hit sharp steel the way my father taught, banging the useful applause of the hammer, my only praise my own.

16

"ORGANIC HARPS DIVERSELY FRAMED" -Coleridge

Let us surmise that the fish never falter, but swim purple, unassuming, their fins quavering like Chinese fans, their simple dance a scope encompassing what is lateral, vertical, true.

Then let us take down the orchestra, roll the kettle drums into the pit, toss the violins like hatchets after them , dismantle the pipes of the brass, the bells of the great horns crumple, and the chairs leave standing, not in ovation, but to be used, sat in.

Now we have four deductions: first, that art is where we least expect to find it, and until from there not art, second, that the fish, elemental, have their own music, a particular, uncalculated purity, and therefore deserve whatever Jove we have left, third, that wind, the unseeable, and light, the basis of opposition, are no longer the instruments of God but are, fourth, God.

17

COCKLAMATION

Would you love it more if it were detached?

What would happen to our obscene calls?

It can't talk. The phone would ring.

Silence on the other end. "It's you, isn't it?" you'd say. "Let me know you're there. " Erect, bald, and mute, it might thump its head on the receiver . A muffled clunk, nothing like flesh .

How did it dial? you wonder.

18

Christine Kirk-Kuwaye

MOTHER OF PEARL

At about Pearl's age, I came to Honolulu from a landlocked place. As a kid I only occasionally waded into a waveless and sedentary lake. Here the water leaps and frolics; to me it seemed to want to take me over, dominate me, take me out with it to wherever it goes. Pearl does not see the ocean this way, I'm sure.

Hawaii , except for the ocean, was a safe place for me. Everyone said so.

Some still call it paradise, although I think they're talking about the weather - at least the dry , sunny times when there is just enough night rain to keep everything green.

I am less certain of these things now. At this moment, I know only that the water at this beach seems safe, no unpredictable turbulence, no undertow, no irrational sea creatures this close to shore. And I know that my daughter Pearl, a graceless swimmer but a peerless floater, really seems to have no fear of the water.

She is waving at me now, and I can almost hear her greeting. She has just roused herself from some daydream and wants to reassure me. If left alone, she might forever float on her back, gently kicking, ears submerged, listening to the full silence of the water. I don't return her greeting; instead, I raise my arm, signalling that she should come in.

She paddles slowly to shore, not wanting to part with the water. The other day, she told me that she wished land were water because she feels so light. The realist, I told her that if land were water then water would be land and we would be right back where we started.

I didn't miss the point she was trying to make about her weight ; I just didn't want to talk about it. She is heavy, well beyond the chubbiness girls have before adolescence. I worry about her weight, but I don't know what to do about it. Oh, I know what people think. They think that she has an emotional problem and that is why she is heavy. Food is a substitute for love, something she feels she doesn't get enough of, so she eats to comfort herself. She is loving herself with food because her parents are divorced, her mother doesn't give her enough time, Eddie moved in with them and took some of the time, the space that was for her. Or the reasons might not be fancy at all: could be that she is going through a stage- baby fat, they used to call it. You see, I've thought all that myself, said all that myself.

19

As Pearl wades out of the water, I notice her breasts, no longer soft mounds but sharp cones that show darker on the nipples through her peach colored bathing suit, and her stomach, a little flatter perhaps after her swim, but still very round. Her thighs are heavy, rubbing together when she walks. I stare at her body a little too long. She bends down in a half crouch and runs to me. She feels she has to hide her body.

I might be better able to help Pearl through this time. But all I have are observations, perhaps mine, perhaps not, instructions from various sources, where I can 't recall. They sound like prerecorded messages that could be played for any eleven路year-old girl who required instruction on certain subjects. Perhaps they are ancient tapes, passed from woman to girl, mother to daughter, elder relative to younger, generation to generation.

You almost forget you ever learned these until you have a daughter of your own, and then you hear yourself mouthing warnings.

One night, after her shower, her hair a wild tangle of wetness, Pearl tells Eddie and me about the atrocities the girls suffer at the hands of the boys.

She says that she hates boys, but her fascination with them is deep and sincere.

Tonight Timothy is the topic of conversation. He is the one who wants to date all the girls in the sixth grade, the one who plans to have sex with a particular girl this coming summer. (When I first heard this I asked Eddie, after Pearl had left the room, if it really were possible for an eleven-year-old boy to achieve an erect penis and negotiate it into the vagina of a young girl.

But Eddie just shrugged, as if to indicate anything were possible. Perhaps he truly doesn't know.)

But in her telling of tonight's story, Pearl plays the roles of attacker as well as victim. She shows us Timothy rushing from the playing field, coming up behind Tanya, and pushing his hand between her legs and- I look to Eddie; he is a cipher. Pearl looks to one of us then the other, waiting.

Caught defenseless, I mutter banalities about reporting incidents to the teacher. I think about rape.

For a time Pearl's nightmares were all set on city streets or desolate stretches of countryside. Nowhere was safe. There was always a featureless man, transfigured from the amorphous monsters of earlier years, who thrust a gun at her. " Come with me, kid," he would say. But always she was prepared: she was fleetfooted in magical jogging shoes; she had a black belt in karate and leapt into her stance, invulnerable and deadly.

I saw her dreams as visions of her self-sufficiency; she saw them in quite another way. She reassured me that in daylight or darkness, on any street

20

in Honolulu or in the most remote places of the island, she would save me.

"You can count on me, Mom ," she told me.

But night is no time for a woman to be out alone. When I began telling her this, if in fact I did, I can't remember. But I must have. Perhaps I and the papers and the nightly news. Now she dreams only of her father coming back to us or her dead grandfather alive again. No more adventures, no rescues.

Pearl can't read enough about the Atlanta slayings. They at times comfort her because the victims are boys; they haunt her too for the same reason. "Not even boys are safe," she tells me. And the story in Life has girls in the roll call of Atlanta murders, yet they do not really belong to the same killer, authorities believe. Pearl can recite one section from memory: "the girl in plain view, t ied to a tree, strangled with an electric cord, and with someone else's panties stuck down her throat. " Eddie remains aloof from my sermons on safety. I caution her about strangers, male and female now, who speak to her. I tell her to avoid anyone who looks strange.

Eddie takes me aside when Pearl is in her room, out of earshot somewhere. " You wouldn't treat her like that if she was a boy." I would, I insist, I definitely would. The world is crazy nowadays. He only shakes his head and looks at me in a way I know he doesn't believe me and yet knows he can't make me prove it.

Eddie brings home a scale. He has an idea that she will take control of her weight if she can daily record her pounds on a large chart in the bathroom. He has convinced Pearl that he too could stand to lose a few pounds. Eddie steps on the scale first; Pearl on all fours watches the numbers whiz forward then back and finally stop. Then her turn, but she makes him promise not to look. She has believed for months that she is only ninety pounds. But, a full twelve inches shorter than I, she is my weight.

She can't believe it, she says. But they record their weights. And when lam in the bathroom, I stare at the chart with the red numbers. A stray thought startles me: she is becoming a larger target.

Actually, quite the reverse may be true. To discuss her weight with her I might begin by pointing out that fat women - and by extension, fat girls too, although no one has ever told me this- may be far safer from assault than the thinner, less sturdy, more attractive. (Must I tell her this?) I have heard that heavy women come to understand their excess flesh as protective armor against men, against having to deal with the too-friendly male stranger on the bus, in the market, as one waits in line at the bank. By

21

padding one's self out, one, oddly enough, cancels one's self out. To larger is to become invisible. The more there is of you, the less there is to seen. Somehow. Would you, at age eleven, believe this? I have come to the logic of this, but I am left feeling comforted by the fact that my da may be daily expanding herself into obliteration.

Eddie becomes impatient with her after supper. "Take out the gar he says. "It's almost dark," she says. "What's that got to do with taking the garbage?" I know what he is thinking about her: she is gold · lazy kid, doesn't want to do the chore that's been assigned to her. "I take garbage down in the morning," she says. "Now, ''Eddie says. "The gar smells." And I wait for us to get to the real reason. She says, "There creeps out there," and she plucks at her bright purple Danskin, adj the leg holes to cover her panties. "Put on shorts," he tells her. She looks him and then me. "Will you watch me, Mom?" "Stop being paranoid," Eddie says. And she is gone with the gar although I hold the door open for her and shut it as she leaves. Perhaps has learned that word somewhere and understands the challenge. Maybe is all in his tone of voice.

But like a small boat on a gradually lengthening rope, Pearl sails out sea. She catches buses alone to meet friends at the shopping center. have three hours to wander. The sky is clear, no storm warnings. returns safely. She goes out alone to help a friend sell newspapers, to her grandmother across town, to borrow books from the neighbor library . She keeps coming back unscathed, and I think this is how it supposed to be for children. I also feel that all it takes is that one time, quick, unpredictable change in the weather.

"What are you worried about?" Eddie asks me. "Put it into words you think can happen." I stutter and mumble something about stra and psychopaths and all the things that can happen to little girls. shrugs: what can anyone do about these things? You do your best and that all you can do.

I knew what Eddie said was true but there is one last incident.

The police told us we did several things wrong. We should have them from the beach, not from home. The officer who has the Ala u•v<tliiG" beat might have been able to spot a likely criminal and perform shakedown right there.

We should have concealed our belongings better. Not only my purse

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Eddie's good slacks and his only brown belt were missing. Or we should not have brought these things to the beach in the first place. How lucky that Eddie had hidden his set of house keys under the floor mat, allowing us to get into our apartment.

I had nothing to add to the conversation; Eddie, having quizzed me on the way home about the contents of my purse, detailed it all for the police. A few dollars and some credit cards, my driver's license, house keys, and checkbook. I didn't tell Eddie or the police about my favorite lipstick or the black ballpoint pen I liked so well nor did I say that I was very fond of my brown canvas bag and felt violated - yes, that is the word - when I thought of someone's hands on it and in it .

Once upstairs, Eddie changed into dry clothes and left for Sears. He was off to buy new locks and rent the locksmith kit to install them. Pearl sat in the middle of the living room floor with a piece of paper and pencil. It was my job to recall the credit cards I'd lost, hers to write down the names.

While I looked up the telephone numbers of my creditors, I lectured her on the penalty for carelessness with one's belongings . I was a perfect example, Itold her, of what not to do. Never take valuables to the beach. "See," I said , "even I don't think sometimes, even as old as I am."

She contradicted me, defending me from myself, telling me it really wasn't my fault. How was I to know that there were thieves at our beach; Eddie did hide the stuff in the back sear; they broke into our car. "No," I disagreed, "carelessness, simply not thinking."

This conversation rankle<\ me. I knew this was her way of comforting me. Why I didn't accept it, I'm not sure. Perhaps it was too perfect an opportunity to be at once the teacher and the lesson. I thought that something this close to home would make a deep impression on her, cause her to exercise greater care.

I waved her toward the bathroom and told her to get out of her wet suit and into the shower. She shook her head. "Mom," she said, "they have my picture."

I knew which one she was talking about, fourth or fifth grade, a crooked smile, bangs that needed cutting, blue and green muumuu.

I knew what her picture in my wallet meant to her. That was the first set of school pictures that she herself cut loose from the strips they come in.

It never sat quite right in my wallet; the white border was wide and thin, curved and chopped.

"I'll miss that picture, but I still have you," I told her.

She pulled away from me. "You don't understand ," she said. "They know what I look like now."

She shivered and her eyes filled with tears. "My card, Mom , my card."

She whispered this as if we might be overheard.

I felt impatient. I wanted to get on with my calls. I wanted to be the one

23

who suffered the loss while Pearl felt grateful she had been spared. So I without kindness, " What card are you talking about?"

"My card, my card. I told you, Mom. I asked you to leave it home. now it's stolen and they have it."

I pretended I still didn't know what she was talking about. I wanted hold my ground. This was all wrong. I had suffered the loss. It was upside down.

"Damn it, Pearl. What are you crying about?" " My birth certificate card. The only one I have! " She was sobbing huge tears were rolling and rolling, falling on her bathing suit, onto the carpet, splattering against her crossed legs. Her face, her seemed to droop, to be pulled down by the weight of my loss that was hers.

"They know who I am, when I was born. They have my picture, andShe couldn't go on for a moment. I simply sat and stared. "Your license them where I live. They'll come for me!" Her eyes were wide and she waiting for me to react.

I began calmly enough. "You know, Pearl , I realize how you must Think how I feel! But you are not that important." (Should I have said it way?) And I went on, watching her to make sure she saw the sense of "That is the way things are ," I said to her. "All we can do is not about them." She didn 't nod but she didn't openly disagree.

"We can take things only so far," I told her. "We can't be afraid everything. Look- " But I couldn't go on with this any more. I wanted to gentle. " Now why don 't you shower and when Eddie gets back we'll maybe go for a drive."

I listened to the water and studied my list again. For the first time si was a young girl, I would go out that night and be nameless. I would have purse to carry, no way to prove who I was. This night I could be anyone chose to say I was. I felt relieved at that thought and decided I would Pearl about the freedom one feels in loss, to get her thinking another about all of this. But Pearl, a room away, isolated in the warmth of shower, thought on this thing in her own way.

Dry now and scrubbed and looking much happier, she listened to my theory about loss and freedom and found a solution. She requested from now on I simply call her by another name in public. "Call me she said. As it happens that is my name.

24

TyPak THE FOE

Flying over Sangtuc Valley near the Laotian border where G-2 had reported a concentration of Vietcong regulars, the men in the chopper sat rigid, alert for any noise above the drone of the propellers. Lt. John Makini hated these rides. Though the craft looked sturdy close up, its aluminum body hard against his knuckles, it was as vulnerable as a balloon. It might climb vertically, plummet, wiggle, scuttle, and execute many fancy maneuvers, but up there in the sky it was still a sitting duck. The men in the chopper, totally at the mercy of the ground snipers, could only hold their breath and wait helplessly for the fatal blow.John had opted for jungle duty precisely to avoid this, but in Vietnam one ended up in a helicopter no matter what his tactical classification. The Vietcong hideouts were simply inaccessible by other means of transportation.

Of course the jungle had its risks - poisonous snakes, six-inch-long leeches, mosquitoes, booby traps, and the cunning Vietcong themselves, dedicated fighters with spears, daggers, Soviet-made rifles, grenades, and rockets. Nevertheless, he had a fighting chance in the jungle, where he could melt into the familiar element. The Vietcong couldn't be any more elusive or deadly than the tusked boars of Kahaluu, cunning and lightning fast, which he had hunted with his father. But he would do anything to get away from the limbo of the chopper's belly.

Involuntarily John turned to look at Lt. Paul Singer, the pilot. How could he stand it day in and out? But apparently he did, very well, and thrived on it, surviving a dozen crashes - one of which had involved John.

Caught in a Vietcong ambush, every member of]ohn's nine-man patrol had to fend for himself. Once separated from his men, John could not reconnect. Blindly he ran for cover but bullets followed him everywhere, forcing him down. The moment he raised his head an inch or made any move, a burst of bullets pinned him down again. He could/eel the stealthy steps in the dark, closing in for the kill.

Out of nowhere a chopper buzzed overhead, blasting away at the Vietcong. They turned their attention to the new target, shelling it into a sieve. Undaunted, the chopper kept up its counter fire, deliberately seeking

25

the enemy. The pilot had no reason to expose himself and his machine to such overwhelming odds. Nobody would have faulted his loyalty or courage if he had beat a retreat at that point. But he hung on, returning bullet for bullet, drawing the fire to himself. Then a slammer got the chopper in the forward section. The engine gurgled dead and the craft exploded into a fireball.

"The poor guy!" John said to himself, smitten with guilt and gratitude as he watched the fire smolder away. He had scrambled to higher ground during the diversion.

Startled by a swish near him, John almost squeezed the trigger when Paul's voice stopped him in time. After parachuting out just prior to the explosion, Paul had found his way to the hill, guided by John 's transponder.

Soon several choppers converged on the area, blocking further pursuit by the Vietcong.

The red warning light flashed. In sixty seconds it would turn green and the exit door slide open. The men would jump off the chopper at four-second intervals with clocklike precision to prevent a pileup on the ground.

Trustingly, they would plunge into the black abyss of the night, as if it were some warm pool, though it might very well be the last impression of the earth they would ever get. Looking them over ,John felt his heart swell with pride- professionals barely out of their teens, prematurely aged by the war, wearing their 100-pound chutes and backpacks like tailor-made suits.

Paul turned around in his seat and flashed a big dimpled smile. John reciprocated, pushing his thumb up. Forty more seconds to go! John could already feel the rushing wind caress his skin like the waves off Waikiki. In the brief seconds of freefall he was floating on his back in the Pacific, staring into the night sky, the sea lapping around his ears and murmuring a thousand endearments. His friends had told him he was crazy to swim at night, when the sharks closed in from the deep for their nightly feeding.

Occasionally the fear had gripped him , especially when some detached seaweed or floating debris nudged at him, but he had grown used to it.

John's first jump had been from a C-135, the regular paratroop carrier.

He had been freefalling for at least ten seconds. The gravity-sensitive button would open the chute at the right altitude automatically. He did not have to worry about counting the seconds and hitting the button as with the old models. What if the gadget did not function? The only way to find out before it was too late was to check the length of descent against the jum altitude; he could hit the manual button if the chute didn't open at 2 feet. How many seconds did that give him? The jump-off altitude was 18

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feet. Exactly twent y-t hree seconds to freefall 16,000 feet. But he had forgotten to keep track of the time. How could he have been so stupid? Was that unlikely event happening to him , t he failure of the automat ic pressure button? He pressed t he backup button and pulled hard at t he cords, wondering whether the chu te would respond in time. It ope ned instantl y, jolting him , changing t he pitch of the wind gus ting by. He hit t he ground hard but was unhurt. Did the automatic button work properly and he panic for not hing? Even after many jumps he still could not answer w it h certainty. In any case the scare had been rea l enough and never left him.

Particularl y disturbing was the recurring image of him self bei ng skewered on a tree limb like a s his h-kebab.

The green light was just flicking on when the barrage came. Inch-thick bullets ri pped throug h the fuselage, s mashing the t op propellers and sending t he c hopper into a tails pin . The pilots s truggled with the s teering wheel, ki cked at the levers, a nd madl y ac tivated th e emergency controls, but t he ship spun a nd spun , tossi ng the men about. Then came the crash.

John regained consciousness, coughing with the s moke , gagging in the heat wave, the crac kle of fire all around him . Scattered about him were broken, twisted, bleeding bodies. Death mu st have been in stanta neous. Not a hand twitched . Sgt. Dan Simpson , an explosives expert from Bowling Green , Ohio, lay nearby, his back t urned to him as if he were asleep. J ohn turned him over. The open eyes s tared lifeless. Kicking the tangle of bod ies off, John made his way to the cockpit. Paul's head was stuck in the s teelrein forced bullet-proof windshield. His face, raked by the jagged teet h of t he broken glass, was a bloody mess. The copilot was crus hed between his seat , and the trap door bent inward.

Waving the flam es aside, J ohn dashed to the midsection, yanked t he hatchet off the wall , and hacked away at the door, but the buckled jamb held the door locked tight. Leaping back to the front, J ohn s wung the hatchet at the windshield around the pilot 's head to widen the opening. The hatchet s lipped in hi s sweaty palms a nd struc k the skull , s plitting it with a s ickening crunch. Wiping the .blood tha t s pat tered his face, he tried in vain to pry the head out of the opening, st uck as in a vise. The fl a mes began licking at hi s boots. Joh n lifted the hatchet and s truck t he neck. The hatchet sank deep, parting the neck bone, but head a nd thorax held together by skin and tendon . Six more strokes were necessary to effect a clean cut . J ohn pushed the s lumped torso off the panel, then kicked Paul's head out , clearing the opening. The flames were already s ingeing hi s hair. Desperately John widened the opening w ith the hatchet , knocking the glass off a nd bending the wire mesh out. He squeezed t h rough and jumped off the burning cr aft , and w as greeted by a burst of bullets. No sooner had he

27

ducked, zigzagged and dived behind a clump of brush than a barrage of bullets cut it down to the ground as neatly as grass under a lawn mower.

Exposed ,John ran, flopped to the ground, rolled over, and crawled behind a rock. Stone chips stung his face and puffs of dust filled his nose, leaving bitter grit in his mouth. The explosion of the helicopter drove him further into the ground. The dull glaze of the mushrooming fire made his bloody hands and clothes seem even bloodier.

Something dangled in his left hand. Paul's gold necklace with his dogtag and cross, blood-soaked, bits of chopped flesh and bone stuck in the links. A sudden surge of fury sent John to his feet. No longer hearing the screech of missiles flying at him he ran screaming, blasting away with his M-16 toward the spot where the fiercest barrage was coming from. With every change in the direction of fire he turned and ran to it like an indestructable machine, emptying clip after clip. When his ammunition was gone, he hurled the grenades three or four at a time. When they were gone, he fixed the bayonet to his rifle and thrust at the shrubbery, behind trees and rocks.

After nearly an hour of lunging and stabbing, he noticed that the area was quiet. Either the fire at the wreckage had burned out or he had moved far enough away from it so he couldn't see. The Vietnam night was so thick that he could almost grasp it.

He stalked after any rustle or creak in the jungle, determined to rub out Vietcong vermin from the face of the earth. He stumbled into a bubbling stream, ankle deep. Carefully he waded across, trying not to disturb the gravel or the music of the water. The bank rose steeply before him. Waisthigh reeds and grass sighed and insects chirped mutedly.

Vaulting up the ridge, he came up against a black shape, a Vietcong, judging from the small, slouched silhouette. The point of a bayonet poked at his breast. Though his entire body froze, by reflex he raised his bayonet to the Vietcong's chest. An eternity passed before his blood recirculated and his senses functioned again.

"Amerikang!" the Vietcong whispered.

In the heightened perception of the moment, John felt the man's pulse, sweat, and smell. Perhaps this was a young farmer whose wife and child had been killed in a bombardment, who had been run out his home and fa(m, who had gone to school and learned classical Chinese, French, and math.

"Vietcong!" John replied.

As if by mutual accord they relaxed the pressure on their bayonets, then slowly backed away, a step at a time, until the darkness swallowed them up.

28

Mitchell LesCarbeau THE NESTING GROUND IN FALL

A time of extinction or escape, or the strange middle ways of encrustation and long sleep.

I walk with my child behind a baymouth sandbar where in a flurry of sickles and pickups they hack a crop of wild marsh hay for next year's garden mulch.

My daughter leans with a predatory sleekness over the clear salt pools, rolls of baby fat smoothing out to curves it seems before my eyes.

Her bloodstream drips its metamorphosis in regulated ticks not so far removed from these trickling clockwork tides.

In the hollow light we watch the spangles of adolescent shorebirds probe our flats for unsuspecting protein, catch the hunched and gluttonous night heron picking off mummichogs with vicious stabs as the estuary yearlings shiver their fins to unknown urges hooking the gillslits south.

Thickening their carapace at our feet crustaceans scatter like spiders and begin their laborious mud-burrow in armor bulged with stores of winter fat.

A small hawk glides above, talons clamped to something wriggling back.

When was it she wept at such sights?

She hates it here.

She wants to move to the city.

29

Reuben Tam

MONHEGAN, OCTOBER

What are these rafts that ferry cargoes of light from the island to the open sea, breaking our shorewater, pirating our silver, leavi ng us this wake of black water?

We watch from a torn coast.

Some days at sunset our drowned shoals emerge a long the horizon, doubling and arching like gleaming porpoises 路 released in a new sky.

Some days gulls ride the tide past Nigh Duck into the calling straits, never to return. The cove also goes, slipping from contours pebble by pebble, leaving our maps.

Down in the emptying pools colonies of mussels weave their threads into the layers of stone.

We wait between the sla nting foreland and the scoured headland .

Look down from Burnt Head.

The bottom of the sea might be stirring from its da rk sleep of kelp.

Wait. Stay. In the white upwelling we might yet be offered a storm of flowers, garlands to shore us, to island our time.

30

TECTONIC

Islanders away from their island will hear surf.

Geology drifts with them, folding the grit and crack of reefs into the seismic air, shadowing the salt distances.

The island appears whenever I summon place.

It was waterfalls and black mountains, guava and cane straddling the fissures, shoring the broken craters.

Kauai. When the sky turned, the island tumbled from cumulus to rain to rainbow.

I played in a ring of banyan and coral, and learned where lava began, where it drowned.

It was Kauai that called the oceans in.

Roil and thunder at the outer reef, flotsam scouring the beach, margin after margin, and logs riddled with codes of other coasts.

At Kilauea Light plovers fell from the North, scattering season and stars against the cliff.

In torn wings I touched the dew of tundras, in bones the cold, the Humboldt.

Jagged under tides, the force that drives the crust seals the sea.

The rims of continents grind and gleam, plated to the island, drifting with it.

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Chris Rust

HAKALAU

Cold black river eases past the ruin of the old sugar mill into the salty tub.

The black stone beach chuckles as the waves wash and wash and wash under nature's arms.

The rising sun scrapes five o'clock shadow from jutting black rock chins on opposite sides.

A gentle mist rinses the sleep from this valley's eyes and splashes the day's after-shave.

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Vesna Gaspari-Roberts GREGORY ORR IN CONVERSATION

Vesna Gas pari-Roberts: you begin writi ng poetry?

Let's establis h your background. When did

Gregory Orr: I grew up in t he count ryside, in upstate New York along the Hudson Ri ver. My father was a country doctor, so I grew up outside small towns. Poetry began a s a result of different personal crises - deaths in my family: the accidental death of my younger brother in a hunting accident, for wh ich I was responsible, when I was twelve years old; and a few years later t he death of my mother just overnight. It left me in a s piritual isolation as well as in the isolation of the country, so it was a doubled isolation. I had this vague idea from my mother about being a writer or being an architect. She had s tudied to be an architect before s he married my father. Then w hen I was seventeen I wrote the firs t poem that I can remember writing. As soon as I did that, I knew I was never going to do a nything else again; there was a s udden sense of release.

Gaspari-Roberts: sense of isolation?

So your poetry was a result of a personal crisis and a

Orr: Wh at my poems represented was the first glimpse of possible freedom from an intense isolation and despair. The famil y I grew up in was a Protestant family where silence dominated. Their attitude towa rds expression of feelings or toward s s uffering always led to silence. People were ex pected to bear their crosses. The better the person you were, the heavier the cross you could bear through life - all the way to the grave, wit hout speaking of it or complaining. That's okay. It's one a ttitude towards life, but it 's not conducive to mental health. It's basically ver y repressed and not introspective at all -or silently introspective.

Gaspari-Roberts: What does writing poetry represent to you personally? How would you descri be your own poetry?

Orr: My poetry began as an intensely personal thing: not as therapy - I don't like that notion- but simpl y as the self searching for what it believes

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and what it feels, needing to express certain intense experiences, and t rying to find out what they mean. What the poem is always after is to discover meaning or to establis h meaning -finally, I believe, to create it. There isn't any meaning- that is one of the horrors of the human condition - but the poem creates meaning. Fros t says that poetry is a momentary s tay against confusion. What that means is that confusion dominates our lives and poems represent sacred spaces where things come together and " mean."

Coming out of that very provincial background, I had no idea what a poem was. I simply had these intense experiences. I felt that language in poetry was magical a nd that it differed entirely from prose. Language in prose is descriptive; it may describe or even create a world, but in poetry it is fundamentally magical. That's a tenet of my faith . I am a lyric poet , not a narrative poet.

Gaspari-Roberts: In what sense is language magical?

Orr: It seems to me that language is fundamentally an irrational thing a nd that the word is the object. Of course that's illogical and irrational, but finally humans a re irrational and language itself is irrational. This idea goes back to t he late nineteen-century a nthropological assertions like LevyBruhl's "participation mystique." We do take part in nat ure and language is one of our bridges. Cassirer's Man, Myth and Language was also important to me. It was important as a conceptual validation of what I t hink is t he lyric poet's experience.

Gas pari-Robe rts : T hen can we say that language expresses certain myths?

Orr: It might. It probably has in my early work, but I've moved away from that. The analogue for my early work was the dream where t he meaning is clear, not the dream that is misty and obscure. The kind of a dream that lets u s wake up saying, "I know that mean s something! There is some message in this to me. Some crystallization of mea ning." It 's the embodied meaning t hat you get in stories , not the meaning you get in philosophy or moralizing or any kind of commentary.

Gas pari -Roberts: Then it has nothing to do with logic or discursive t hinking?

Orr: No, I don't think so. I t hink it has to do wit h symbols a nd stories, and those are what I believe in. I t hink they are far more intelligent than logic. I t hink they have an emotional as well as an intellectual complexity a nd that,

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cherefore, t hey are more profound. Story comes first.

Gaspari-Roberts: Do you think that the actual s haping of a poem is important? Once you possess these intense feelings, once you sense that the language is magical, there is still the actual creation of the poem .

Orr: Absolutely. But shaping is a thingthat's difficult for me to describe. I am a free verse poet. The belief is that the s haping is somehow- this idea is especially popular in America- a means to discover a form inherent in the material. I am not a formali st. My favorite poems in the world happen to be sonnets, but I myself don 't believe I could write a sonnet. If I did, it would be a false s hape and therefore not worth doing.

Gaspari -Roberts: You are involved in teaching the craft of writing poetry. To w hat extent can poetry be taught? And how does teaching poetry fit in with writing it?

Orr: The analogy I always start with is oil painting: the French workshops in t he nineteenth century, the ataliers, or the Italian Renais路 sance workshops. These serve as models of places where a craftsman learns his trade. T he MFA Degree constitutes a very brief apprenticeship with an older crafts person. You are not teaching students to be poets; the French painters were not teaching their s tudents to be pai nters. They were teaching them those aspects of painting that a re craft, that can be taught: eye coordination , anatomy, compos ition perhaps . None of those things will turn someone without talent into a painter. Someone without talent cannot be given it; but if one has talent, learning from someone who has much more experience, w ho has devoted his li fe to the craft, can save a lot of time.

Disciplining or channeling th is talent is vital provided you chose the right atalier or t he right person to apprentice yourself to. I think it 's always a difficult experience. We have fifteen students in the Graduate Works hop where I teach. The goal is not to produce fi fteen poets. Out of a hundred students maybe one will s pend a whole life writing poetry, and we might not even know which one that is. I wouldn't bet any money that I could tell.

It's poss ible when young to imitate poetry, to appear to be a poet, if that's what you wish to do. But we do not know who will be a poet.

On the other hand, I do not think our students are diminishing their lives by learning to write poetr y. I do not think it is going to save their lives or make them suddenl y find meanings or transform them into poets. The more people who commit themselves to learning about poetry serious ly the better.

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It is also good for your huma ni s tic v.alues. If you do not have humanistic values, it is not going to crea te them. For not on ly can poetry be aspi red to, poetry can be talked about. There are people who notice t hings in great poets , and sometimes it's only an older a nd wiser poet who can point out s uch things. Poetry s hould not be left entirely in the hands of professors at uni versities, because many literar y historians and critics teach just with t he mind , not with the heart . Obvious ly, poets are going to start with the heart and with love and then bring in t he mind. We don 't just teac h poetry w riting but we necessarily teach the reading of poetry as well. It is my opinion that, for the most part , poets teach the reading of poetry better than scholars and critics because we love it.

Gaspari -Roberts: The accent would be placed on other things. One wouldn't necessarily dissect things.

Orr: Exactly. Not just analyses, though seeing how a poem works is helpful. And certainl y not dissection. Dissect ion presupposes a corpse. You ca n't do that with a poem. That kills it and anyone's love of poetry.

Gaspari-Roberts: But if you a re a poet , then persistence and stub路 borness are important.

Orr: Of course. You have to be s tubborn and crazy. Wh y would anyone spend a life writing on little pieces of paper t hat nobody would ever read?

You have to be half cr azy to do it. But it is wonderful. It is a great way to spend yo ur life if you wa nt to do it. Ezra Pound said at one point, " Poetry is character. " And, finall y, that is true. If you have got the character to persis t , t o dema nd honesty of yourself and dream t he possibility of great poems, then you will write poetry. You might not write great poetry , but you will write. What do people want out of li fe? Finally, you can say, well, ma ybe, this is what someone would wa nt. It is not a ve ry rewarding acti vity. Certainly not materiall y very rewarding. And I do not think t hat fam e is ver y big in the world of poetry. Someone cou ld be an absolutely s uperb poet and live without fame. There aren' t man y ind ucements; bu t if you are going to do it, if you want to do it , you have to do it!

But I ha ve also discovered I love teaching. What is nice about teac hing poetry writing or teaching the reading of poetry is that you are paid to talk a bout w hat you love. You do not love your own poetr y - you love poetry, so you are being pa id to s tand up there and express your intelligent love of poetry. Christ, it's ridiculous, it's perfect. My experience is that all teachers that we value are teachers not because of what they teach but because of how they teach, the enthusias m with which they teach.

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Gaspari-Roberts: Then teaching is a disciplined way of encountering poetry and a way to keep learning.

Orr: It is a way of constantly continuing to learn. I guess when I was a student my fantasy was the fantasy of the surrealists in Paris in the twenties and thirties. Sitting in cafes and talking about poetry and arguing about it and so on and so forth- all these people who cared passionately about it. I don't know whether that ever actually exis ted in Paris, whether it exists now in Europe. It does not exist in America. Perhaps the best substitute we can have is this kind of interaction between yourself and the class about poetry. I wish we had more. The workshops, of course, are one way, where one is dealing with young writers. They are serious, they are committed, they do have ideas of their own and they love to argue with me and that is a pleasure. And they're good at expressing their own loves and hates. You need that kind of thing. You can't as a writer exist in a vacuum, just listening to your own ideas. They eventually become very stale and static. You constantly need to be changing and growing and you can't do that unless you receive some challenge from the outside.

Gaspari-Roberts: Yes, everything has to relate back to the real world.

Orr: Maybe the only thing you do not know when you make a poem is whether you are shaping something with which to face the world or whether you are creating a shape that is already existent from the past and you are absorbing it, clarifying it, articulating it. You never know.

Sometimes you think you are writing a poem that can clarify your future and that offers some glimpse of something ahead of you. Then you write that poem and you read a poem that you wrote ten years ago and discover it is the same poem again , or even the same story told differently and you begin to think, "Am I changing in any way?" The question is whether you experience the illusion of change and growth or whether there is some self that persists. Stanley Kunitz calls it a "principle of being" that persists within you and that is less flexible than we would like to believe. On the other hand, it is something that sustains us. It encounters new realities, but does it encounter them in a new way or does it shape them to an old pattern , and does the new way of encountering change the old pattern a little? This is very exciting. It is an essential part of the writing of poetry. And the writing of poetry is a way of staying a lways in touch with this self, with yourself in the world . What better way is there to live until you die?

Gaspari-Roberts: Vasko Popa, the Yugoslav poet, said that poets should not turn to other poets and that poetry is really abou t one's relation to the world and about the endless paradoxes that happen to one. What do

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you think of his statement " Searching for one's intimacy does not lie in oneself but in other people, in the world."

Orr: Well , that is wonderful. Popa in my book is a great poet. He has arrived at that point where he is able to make gnomic utterances. But they are diffic ult to interact with. You can either agree or disagree. I agree. I couldn't say it as well as he is saying it. Even Vasko's utterances are of a whole, like his poems. There is no entrance to them , no place where you can say, "Let's stop and discuss this point. " What he said is beautiful. But there is possibly one false moment in it. He was reacting against the idea that poets read other poets in order to grow them selves . If he denies that , I think he is being disingenuous. All poets are born of poetry as well as of the world.

If they are born only of poetry, they become what we call "literary" poets and ultimately their poems will float above the world and won't be anchored in the world. In that sense, he is absolutely right. You have to search in the world rather than in literature for the model of what you are, what your originality is. But you also have to search into your own past, your own memory, your own childhood. He would say less of that. But I would add, " Well, Rilke convinces me that this is true." Certainly to argue against poetry that is only derived from literature is a sound idea, but to pretend that other poets don't affect your own poetry is not being entirely honest.

Gaspari-Roberts: Do you consider yourself as belonging to the younger generation of poets in America today and if so do you see a certain similarity in terms of sensibility?

Orr: I would make one vast generalization that I think is worth making.

For the mos t part, when I look at other poets, I don 't feel myself to be a part of a generation except when I put it in terms of a historical framework and say, " We grew up in the sixties." Then something clicks. And it is not a link between poets, but just a linkage throughout the whole generation. We grew up in the t ime of drugs, rock ' n roll, the sexual revolution and most important of all, possibly, in a time when young people resisted authority and what they recognized as a world moving toward disaster . All of these things came together to break the patterns of conformity. We were a very ill behaved genera tion. We were very disagreeable and I think that was very wonderful. In poetry one of the results also was to break out of conformity. I think American poetry resists imagination, distrus ts it. We are an extremely materialistic culture. Baudelaire, writingabout Edgar Allen Poe, says that America is such a totally materialistic culture that there is no place for the spiritual in it. He uses this to explain Poe's life. Poe wanted the s piritual world and was destroyed by the material world. Well , that is a little simplistic but fascinating. We are extremely object oriented. We are

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extremely materialistic as a culture and I think drugs, sex, radical politics -all these things- break you away from the materiali stic world , or they can.

But there is a great spiritual longing in America. You see it constantly in all our crackpot religions and cults. Under t he materialistic orientation there is a great emotional and s piritual longing that seeks expression and manifests itself in different ways at different times. One of the greater upheavals was in the s ixties. I think t his spiritual dimension is in everybod y. The question is how repressed or how awakened it is. It was awakened in our generation through these various circumstances, and it is reflected in the poetry of that generation. Now, of course, I see more and more a reaction against my generation . We are again being reviled in newspaper and magazine articles. We are told that we are no good. They can' t oppress us because we already exist. We have already grown to maturity. But both older and younger generations try to dismiss us as a "bad group." They will probably say we are bad poets, which I don't think is accurate. Now in America some young poet s once again want to write formal verse. They want to return to the fifties, and s ure enough we have Reagan in there. The pendulum is swinging in the other direction. I think of it as a pendulum . I feel my generation is being attacked from both sides.

That amazes me!

Gaspari- Roberts: Many people have also compromised.

Orr: To grow up is to compromise. That is inevitable. We have all made our peace with the world. We don't look like hippies anymore. We don't march in the streets. We have taken our place within the institutions of our culture. But we still represent, I would like to hope, certain principles that have not been compromised out of existence, principles we believe in. The civil rights movement is important.

Gaspari-Roberts: You mentioned that a tremendous longing exists in the States for spiritual and emotional values.

Orr: Do you know the poetry of Theodore Roethke? He is to me in some ways the great American poet, much more than Lowell. Lowell seems to long for a sense of history or a sense of ego. He wants something solid in that direction. But to me Roethke is the great American poet of his generationthe generation before mine - because that longing is both toward the natural world and the spiritual world in the natural world. This turning towa rd nature- open fields and forests and mountain streams - is also a very American experience.

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Debra Thomas

the moon is held in a bucket of stars shake it up everything melts together pour it out the liquid is pooling around your legs as you sit in the red bucket of water on the lawn we are together in the light I pick three lemons to float with you between your hands the bobbing splashes beads on your arms like fading diamonds in the afternoon your eyes have a liquid over them that so shines you seem to know things with a new sparkle the moon is held in a bucket of tears spin them round they melt suddenly away you laugh in the mirror often we do not s peak I give you milk when you turn to drink from wherever you were thinking not distracted but pleased at angles of light in bird of paradise orange quills or shinobu fern frilling in wind what is sweet you take to naturally a smile brings a smile sometimes you give one to me when I have been off somewhere with dishes or the telephone for you are always ready teeth pearled protruding more each day dimples at the knuckles of your coconut brown hands grabbing at your own toes

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or taking a swipe at my hair you whistle through your teeth softly not to attract attention but to punctuate perhaps incoming impressions in the sunbeams pooling we stay as long as we can then I wrap you up in the blanket and you sleep the moon is held in a bucket of dreams stick your hand in they are all reachable light takes on your fonn of sunshine

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rain rain why did you love me so rain rain don't tell me I have to go even as the light goes into your water your drizzle goes into my hair rain rain where goes the daughter that loves you into a white lehua on waihi river.

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Kathy Matsueda

SEEDLESS

The raisins are all gone The peanuts you shelled have left autumn on your floor And the way the light falls on your typewriter strikes you suddenly as awesome.

You tilt your head back to let ennui lay you to rest like a newspaper over a park sleeper's face.

The phone call , you know, may be important A prayer from a repentant lover An acknowledgement from your idol News from Sunmaid that you are being shipped a crate of seedless.

Your hand, tired from supporting your cheek as you conjecture, Snakes to the arm of your chair and hangs.

You think "If I would take up smoking or wear stockings, I'd have reason to polish my nails; If I would try to recall the rhythm of a conversation, I'd have reason to go somewhere, reason to speak to someone, to feel his face change mine, reason to be hungry for company."

And, you think, reason to let the brown flakes on your skirt join the pile on your floor when you rise to go.

You close your eyes and mumble "Yes but the raisins are all gone."

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Janos Kandel

"THINK OF THE CHILDREN, THE LITTLE CHILDREN"

When I read the headline Israeli Troops Gun Down Sixteen-Year-Old Girl, I think of the days streets rang with gunfire, into air, into the air, but into the buildings too, to keep our heads inside, and sometimes into us.

By God I was dangerous at the age of twelve, and that Soviet machine gunner had a perfect right to shoot at me after I drenched his tank with burning gasoline.

The gun barked like my dog Rex; the slugs hummed by my ears like honeybees.

What did I care! What did I know?

Now I know that adding styrofoam to gasoline will make it jell and stick like burning napalm on an eight-year-old bogie's back.

When his scars heal he will wrap ten grenades round his waist, and pull the pin in that stainless steel mess hall where my best friend Tim was cooking hot chocolate.

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Arney WOLF -SHEPHERD CROSS

Girl-love of my life, I've gone down with the dogs to some other summer, where the big pussy bitch and the dog with the dick to his knees make it in the yard.

The dog-yard is cratered with cool sleeping holes, mounded with small mountains of shit.

No barbecues are held here; the wolf-dog and his bitch . and the master and his. keep the neighbors at bay.

We hope the girl-dog gets knocked up, 'cause when the bleeding and licking of dogbirth is over the puppies are beautiful, and we sell them for fifty bucks apiece.

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Barbara Wright

A NATURAL HISTORY OF SEA TURTLES

Turtle nesting season is over, but there are turtle tracks from the high tide line to the dunes. Ida May is confused.

She stands on the wooden walkway built on stilts above the dunes. It is early morning, her favorite time of day, and the sand, sea and sky are pearly gray. No one else is on the beach, no sound except waves, the rustle of sea oats and an occasional gull's cry. She wears a blue路flowered skirt and a white cotton T 路shirt rimmed with lace she crocheted. Her hands and face are rough, mottled, reptilian, but the deep lines radiating from the corners of her eyes make her look as if she is always smiling. The only pretty pink skin left is on her scalp, which shows through her thinning white hair. She carries a crushed straw hat and a ski pole her grandson gave her because the cane she uses in the house is impractical in the sand.

She looks down the stairs at the tracks in the sand. It is unlikely they were left by a sea turtle. Loggerheads are nearly extinct, and this ledge of North Carolina beach is as far north as they come. Still, she wants to examine the markings more closely. She pulls her hat over her head and puts her wrist through the red plastic ski pole thong to free her hands.

Shoulders hunched, she braces herself against both weathered rails and moves down the stairs, pausing at each step. As she juts her head forward, the frayed taffeta poppies bob on the brim of her hat. The ski pole drags behind her, fluttering and clicking on each step like a woodpecker.

At the bottom she stops, catches her breath , then looks at the tracks.

Turtle tracks. She is sure of it. Only a giant loggerhead could leave traces like that: smooth where the turtle dragged her belly, fluted like the rims of wedding cakes where she flapped her front flippers. But nesting season is the full moon of]une and July. Today is August fifth. In two more weeks the full moon will pull the tides three, maybe four feet higher, lapping at the soft underbelly of the dunes, covering the nest. Why has the turtle laid her eggs now? She must be senile. Ida May steadies herself with the ski pole, hand over the top as if protecting it from the sun. The turtle needs help, she thinks.

She has been coming to Windsong Beach for over sixty years, and for many of those years turtles have been an obsession. She used to get up after midnight during turtle nesting season, pull a chair to the window and stare

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at the beach, lighted only by the full moon . And there, with Edward snoring lightly in the background and the children or grandchildren safely in their beds , she would wait.

During those years , she only saw the mother lay her eggs once, the s ummer her son was in the war. She stood on the porch in her blue cotton nightgown to take one las t look at the sea before going to bed. Then she s potted it. Down the beach a hundred yards, a large black shadow floated in the surf. Ida May padded barefoot to the hall closet for the binoculars, rushed back to the porch and scanned the beach in time to see the turtle wash up with the waves, bump gently back on the sand and wait for another wave to carry her nearer the dunes. When the highes t wave beached her, the turtle waited , her carapace wet and luminous in the moonlight. Then s he nuzzled the pale gold sa nd as though smelling to see if this were her birthplace. When she raised her head , sand dribbled from her nostrils a nd she darted her head back and forth , more like a lizard than a turtle. Finally, she started her slow, tortuous journey to the dunes. Whe n s he reached the rise, s he made a few trial swipes at the sand with her front flippers, then s moothed out a cavity large enough for her body. With her front flippers held back like wings , s he s tarted digging the nest with her back flippers.

Ida May knew that once a turtle s tarted laying her eggs, nothing could stop her, not even popping flas hbulbs or people reaching beneath her to catch the eggs as they dropped.

There was no time for Ida May to put on a robe. Too bad if neighbors saw her in her nightgown and thought s he was crazy or, worse, indecent. She hurried down the beach, close enough to see the nesting turtle's crackled, leathery s kin that fell in rolls around her face and the wart-like barnacles and patches of marine grass that covered her reddi s h-brown s hell. Ida May felt like an intruder , s haring this intimate act. Still, she stayed.

The turtle ignored her and continued, holding herself s teady with one back flipper and scooping with the other, patient of the sand that trickled back into the hole. Her toothless mouth, caved in on itself, was held in a determined grimace, and the pouch under her chin qui vered like a bullfrog's.

Then Ida May saw something that has haunted her ever s ince: dripping soundlessly from the turtle's hooded eyes were large, s ilver tears. She has s ince read that turtles cr y to protect their eyes from the sand, but s he knows now, as s he knew then , that it was more.

Ida May trudges through the sand to the high tide mark, leaning on the ski pole, which leaves a zigzag of circular imprints. She examines the outer edges of the turtle tracks, scalloped like tatting where the turtle pulled her

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front flippers forward, then back, to heave her hundred and fifty pounds to the dunes. "Well, you old turtle. It took you long enough to get back here," Ida May says to no one in particular. "Lucky for you I'm here to take care of things." Turtle eggs area delicacy and some poacher may see the tracks and dig up the eggs. She must protect them.

Supporting herself with the ski pole, she brushes her oxfords back and forth across the tracks. The sand gets inside her shoes and grinds against her feet. She wishes she were barefoot, but it is too much trouble to bend over and take off her shoes, so she tries to ignore the gritty feeling between her toes. After working for a few minutes, she gets tired and stops. It will take her a long time to erase the tracks, but this is all right. She has plenty of time.

If her son's wife could see her now, she would think she was crazy. But Judy is inside asleep. Ida May appreciates her coming from Colorado to spend the summer with her. But]udy is not her daughter, the one she lost and longs for. Her daughter wouldn't take over all the household responsibilities, as if Ida May were helpless. Her daughter wouldn't throw away butter wrappers that could be used to grease pans or paper napkins that could be reused for another meal. Her daughter would understand why she refuses to get rid of Edward's prescriptions dating back to 1951, even though the bottles clutter the medicine cabinet. He died three years ago. She took care of him when he was sick, emptied his bed pan, fed and clothed him. They grew up together, were married fifty-six years, and as he became more and more senile, she shared with him the only period of his life she had missed: his infancy. Now there is no one to take care of. nothing to fill the hours except play solitaire. And cheat.

Ida May looks at the gentle arc of the two turtle paths, one approaching the nest , one leaving, though it is impossible to tell which is which. The sun is higher in the sky, casting violet shadows that make the crenulated edges of the tracks come out in sharp relief. Ida May chuckles to herself, happier than she has been all summer. "Don 't you worry, turtles. You 're in good hands now," she says.

A wedge of pelicans glides low over the water and shrimp boats have appeared on the horizon. Whitecaps are starting to form on the waves and the gray edges of the clouds look threatening.

A sudden gust of wind lifts Ida May's hat. She snatches at it, but only comes up with a handful of air and watches helplessly as the hat tumbles down the beach. She doesn 't have the energy to chase after it and knows she must muster all her strength to rub out the turtle tracks. It will be harder to work bareheaded; the sun is not kind to old people. But this does not stop her. She has only erased four feet of the tracks and has much more to go.

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After sweeping her foot across the turtle's trail for a few minutes, she feels her pulse beating in her head, chest and lower back. She pauses, takes a tissue from between her bosom and pats her forehead and upper lip.

In sixty days the clutch of eggs will hatch. She remembers the last time she saw it happen. She'd marked the nest in front of her house with driftwood and broken shells and counted off the days on the calendar. On the evening of the sixtieth day, she drank coffee to keep herself awake. At midnight, she took a lounge chair to the beach and sat beside the nest.

Neither the moon nor the stars were out, but the surf twinkled as it broke against the phosphorescence in the sand. No turtles hatched. She slept during the day and went to the same spot the following night. Still no turtles. The third night was damp and chilly, so Ida May tied a red scarf around her head and covered up with a wool army blanket. She was so tired that several times she nodded off and woke only when her neck bobbed.

Shortly after one thirty, she shined the flashlight on the nest again. This time she noticed the sand above the nest bubbling. The nest erupted and dozens of loggerheads the size of silver dollars spilled out and scrambled toward the sea, wagging their oversized flippers against the sand. One group stalled at a gentle rise. A lone hatchling charged up from behind and rammed into one of the turtles, setting off a chain reaction like marbles that sent the rest scuttling to the sea. When they reached the wet sand they stopped , and with their bellies stationary, wiggled their flippers in frenzied bursts of swimming strokes until the waves washed over them and carried them out to sea.

When half of the turtles had reached the ocean, Ida May noticed a low-flying night gull dip into the surf. She took the scarf off her head and ran to the sea's edge, shouting at the gull and waving her bandana like a crazed flagman. The lights came on in several surrounding cottages.

Edward ran out to the beach and put his strong arms around her. Her shudders turned into uncontrollable shivers, partly from fear, partly because she was cold and wet, and partly because of something that she couldn't explain to Edward, though she tried: that she had just witnessed the completion of a cycle that had been continuing unchanged for two hundred million years.

Today, Ida May knows only one turtle will survive out of the hundred or so eggs laid. She hopes the survivor will be female, so it can return to this same stretch of beach for a century and lay eggs. Ida May has always wanted a daughter. Hers is a family of a son, grandsons and great grandsons, as if there were no such thing as mathematical odds. She had a daughter. Once.

Marion was a rosy, good-natured baby, not quite a year old, with bright

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blond hair and tiny perfect hands. In the summer of 1925, Ida May and Edward left her at Windsong Beach with their live-in maid Easter and returned to Greensboro to a wedding. While they were gone, a hurricane hit the coast. They found out about it in the afternoon paper the day after the wedding, and left for the beach immediately, driving through the night rains that exploded against the windshield and scattered like sparks. When they reached the beach twelve hours later, the rains had stopped.

The island was completely destroyed. Of the two dozen houses, only three were left standing and one of those had lost its roof. Sea oats were bent over on the dunes like thrashed wheat. The sand was rippled where the ocean and waterway had met at the center of the narrow island, then receded. Water carried away what the wind had not. Picking their way gingerly through the lumber , cement blocks and shingles, they located the foundation of what had once been their beach house.

Ida May was not hysterical. Some higher power took over while her mind was suspended, as in a trance. She sifted through the debris around the house, looking for something familiar.

Several days later, a shrimp trawler casting in the inland waterway pulled up Easter's bloated blue-black body in its nets. Marion was never found.

It was not Ida May's fault. There was no way she could have foreseen the hurricane. At least that was what everyone kept telling her afterwards.

These things happen. God 's will. It was also God's will that she was not able to bear another daughter. And God's will that for sixty years, when the winds were up and small craft warnings were out, she could hear Marion's plaintive cries being returned to her on the white tips of the waves. Perhaps that was why, when the sea foam skittered along the water's edge announcing the arrival of a distant storm, she still walked the beach. And listened.

A thin layer of sand blows over the turtle tracks. If the wind keeps up, the tracks will soon be obscured. Ida May walks over to examine the nest.

The sand above it is packed hard where the turtle stood erect, then collapsed , stood erect, then collapsed, again and again until she had tightly pressed the sand with her hard white undershell . Around the nest are crumbs of sand where the turtle, with all four flippers, tried to disguise her work from raccoons, dogs, ghost crabs and other predators.

The sun has gone behind the clouds, deepening the gray but illuminating the edges. Dried seaweed tumbles down the beach and the hoary crests of the wind-furrowed sea are restless. A storm may be brewing after all, and her daughter-in-law will make her come inside. There is no time to waste.

The storm will pull the tides higher, covering the nest. The salt water may

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percolate the sand and kill the hatchlings. Ida May knows now that it is not enough to cover the tracks. There is something more important she must do.

She sticks the ski pole in the sand next to the nest. Cupping her arthritic hands, she scoops up the sand, one handful at a time. After a lifetime of summers building castles and moats with her son, grandsons and great grandsons, she knows what she is doing. She will dig a hole and uncover the eggs. She will save the hatchlings. She will gather the eggs in her skirt, carry them to her bed and cover them with a quilt, safe from the poachers and the rising tides.

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John Unterecker

THE PAPAYAS

The papaya wounds the high gloss of the table.

The bulge of its octopus forehead shrivelling into a frown, the tired octopus eye studies my eyes.

Behind the mottled green and yellow bag a yellow form, older, heavier than death, swims through a brown sea.

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Holly Yamada FOREIGN SALESCLERK

Porcelain skin draws taut against miniature cheekbones breaking perfect heart lips in two.

How can she clench those teeth from behind and make it look like smiling?

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Charles Ed ward Eaton

BLUE NUDE

In the nostalgic evening the sun is seldom rude After the raw fictions of the day one needs a softened light , The brilliant white skin turning blue upon a standing nude.

Time which has flashing banners also takes the veil The net of twilight settles down into the flesh Which lifts the small, preceptive bruise upon the half-moon of a fingernail.

The beautiful nude comes forward at this hour As if she had broken the law, walked through every stop sign, And left prostrate in the streets some vivid and exploded power.

You and I who told so many stories in the acid light, Rolled the manhole covers down the street like giant, blinded eyes, Mean, so we say, to go right on forever fighting in the night.

But at the lowest level of the day something is the matter We see the blue light in the window, the white woman retreatingIs she the one iconoclasts save for last to shatter?

We will not give in, of course- What then could be the trouble?I look at a vein in the arrn, you call for a glass of wine, And every victory in the world, in that blue nude, is looking for its double.

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/".

THE RAISON D'ETRE OF RAPTURE

Will I ever get over it, this trauma ever quite be done: The fruit of desire, the always salivated tongue, The drops flooding to ocean, the islands in the sun?

This blue and golden vision is the one I decant, "Life's delicate child" becoming always pleasure's son, A fruit from every nerve, the spine a suave, equilibrated plant.

A slice of green melon filled with blue, the bay Gives out that larger image that the soul requires, The world itself magniloquent of what I want to say.

The body's drops, of course, must sometimes go to tearsThe sweat of love slides in runnels from breast and thighs, And you have brought quite past her fig the loveliest of your dears.

One may indeed, in time, become oneself the heaviest, single fruit, Strung up like Mussolini by the heels, the vision downward slumped, engorgedThe samba and the soaring, the jagged palms against the sky, the starsall mute.

And yet, not quite, I think, nor, in such straits, would one forget The glorious tree that tilts its fruit this way and that before it lunges, Reeking of perfume, full, ecstatic, negotiating still for balance in the sunset.

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Rob Dudko

MIGHT LEAVE HERE BY SUMMER'S END

Things are never good Things go from bad to weird Lou Reed 1981

Airports always have an aura of suppressed filth in a sterile atmosphere.

This always bothered me. Here is all this glass, stainless steel and damage路 resistant plastic designed and molded by some hot shots who obviously knew what they were doing and it is destroyed by the dirt of mankind going somewhere else fast. Even at fourteen this bothered me. My mother and I and sometimes my rude, older brother Karl would drive my busy father to Kennedy International Airport and deposit him on a plane. Where he went mattered little to me. He would come home talking big dollars and I could only think of bigger color televisions and possibly a trip of my own. Alaska, perhaps. Maybe a season box at Yankee Stadium.

One summer airport morning when we were young, my father was on a tirade, howling at someone over a pay telephone and attracting attention from passersby. I don't think this even bothered him as he raved on. The travellers of the world had became his audience. I edged away from him, a blank expression on my face, as if I were going to Bombay that very morning. A group of stewardesses waltzed by with dresses so tight that my heart tried to exit through my throat. I expertly scanned them without being obvious. My father's eyes, which bulged as if he had taken a .38 slug in his already ulcerous duodenum, calmed for a moment. My mother stood somewhere between us with that crazy, spooked-out smile of hers that meant I don't give a goddamn what happens anymore.

Here at the hospital they let me keep my little Sony in my room so I can watch the Yankees. They think it'sgood therapy and I can't help but agree.

Sometimes they encourage me to bring the Sony out into the lounge and share it with the other kooks in here. I prefer to take my baseball alone; not with some psychotic who's raving about the Holy Spirit landing a spaceship under his bed at six every Sunday morning. Who needs that?

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But look, the game hasn't started yet and I can tell you a bit about myself before the national anthem. Wait a minute, just let me fill out my scorecard.

I swear they pitch Guidry too much. Threw his arm out in '78.

Maybe I can give you some tips on the lock-up scene at this crazy house.

The first problem is how to position yourself before the doctor comes in to avoid revealing anything. When he glides into the office in those crazy-ass bohemian clothes of his- Jesus! Where does a psychiatrist get off wearing clothes like that? - I know very well he's already thrown his analytical, highly educated brain into gear. Don't cross your legs. Or fold your arms.

No blank faces. And don't ever hold the chrome arms on that expensive corduroy-covered chair too tightly. (I once told him the chair felt womblike and he lit up like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.) Otherwise my Dr. Foster Harris - call me Foster if you're comfortable with it - will know something is amuck in my little southern Connecticut paradise.

Make the hour go by as smoothly as possible. Turn and stare out the window across the lawns and s ugar maples a nd talk about ... let's see now ... ah, movies! Or baseball. Both. Okay? Of course I'm no fool. I went to college and graduated magna something. I, for god's sake, know all about cognitive therapy, primal therapy and any other pop cure that rolls down a hospital corridor.

But Foster, as I expected, does not bring up movies or baseball. He brings up my father. My father, who is now sixty路three years old and lives quite alone on the water. Who feeds the screaming gulls at seven every morning of the year. Who hasn't spoken to me since ... well quite a while now. Mr. jetlag himself.

So I'll talk a bout fathers in baseball movies instead. I'll always remember Tony Perkins climbing up the backstop in Fear Strikes Out. There he was, this talented psycho of a baseball player going up that cage like a squirrel monkey on high-powered amphetamines. All the while his father, Karl Malden, did bugeyes. Some movie. Actually I'm quite addicted to baseball. Maybe it's the romance of watching men - forever boys chasing white spots against blue skies. I find a certain adolescent escape in the game and my good doctor is quick to point this out. I can buy that, but I really like the game for its sporting grace. Summer , beer, hotdogs and fine green sod. I mean sometimes Foster sounds like my ex-wife. Ever yone is so sure they've got you pegged. I continue to ra ttle on about the game just to keep the ugliness inside at bay. He never knows this.

But I guess on this particular moldy fall day my little diversionary tactic didn't work. I guess I knew it wouldn't.

"It's all right to cry, Paul," Foster said . Listen to his voice, I told myself.

It sounded as if he were pulling a chain that could set loose an enormous cloud of gray, damp light around me. " I know that, Foster."

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"Here then." His arm snaked out towards me with a shining box of designer tissues.

"Why these?" I asked. Was he trying to evoke tears from me? Jesus, is that what Blue Shield and my ever-dwindling trust fund are paying him for? I put my hand to my face to feign some shock and felt the tears. My face was soaked. Again my tear ducts had been pumping full tilt c.nd I hadn't even felt them. Again. ''I'm tired Foster. Let me go now.'' He did and it being late September I wondered who would win the pennant this year. Not the Red Sox. Please, never the Red Sox. Back in my room I began to shake uncontrollably and cried a long while. I looked out the window and remembered the morning paper. Hurricane season was almost past.

My parents, my brother and I lived in a large, L-shaped ranch house in Westport. It wove through our three acres of land maze-like and provided plenty of room for two pre-adolescent boys to go hog wild. Hog wild. My demure mother would always say, "Now don't you two hellions start going hog wild." We would laugh in unison and do precisely that.

Thanks to an overpaid landscape architect, the yard was impeccable.

Holly and rhododendron were molded around the house. In the spring the rhododendron exploded in pink and white flower balls the size of a baby's head. When the yellow daffodils bloomed along the deteriorating stone wall built by determined colonial farmers, I began to follow the progress of spring like I now follow the progress of the Yankees- with a fanatical obsession which made springtime my time of year.

When my wealthy father was home, the house remained silent. Oh, you could hear him mixing his drinks by the liquor cabinet. Or newsprint being turned with methodical care. To this day the sight of a New York Times or a Wall Street journal sickens me. Newsprint gets on everything.

But when he was off on business, which was more often than not, the sounds of Glen Miller and Cole Porter filled the house. Playing those same records over and over, my mother could not help but strut and dance around the house. She loved them more than she loved the sea, her new friends and -now that I look back on it- probably more than my father. Once last month I watched one of those mindless wildlife shows. A lone zebra broke gracefully across the dry veld . It made me think of her dancing and started the tears. I wallowed in despair and taunted myself with old memories. Like when I was five or six and running an almost manic fever, vomiting and seeing things that still haunt my dreams. It was late. I remember my mother humming Cole Porter and soothing my fever with an alcohol rubdown until the first morning light came across the foot of my bed. And my wife holding me and caressing my slightly flabby stomach when I was passed up for a promotion at the bank and poisoned my young ulcer with

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_..,..,._,,..,,· ve bourbon until I cried in my own sloshy self-pity. I even remember father showing up for a Little League game somewhere near the fourth .,.,..,·"'K· and in a moment of strength and pride I knocked an €.asy triple down crooked left field line. I almost tripped over first base when I saw my ys business-like old man jump up and howl with approval. By the time reached second I was so stunned by both his actions and mine I did trip the base, gave up hope for a triple, crawled back to the bag and held on dear life. I bit down hard on my lower lip to stop the flow of tears welling inside. These are the memories I dwell on over and over. I can't stop . I can't stop crying. Once last month I actually got down on my knees offered a wayward prayer to anyone who would help me. Are there for the inept? Are there winged saviors for those of us who are afraid can't fit in? Afraid we will fit in? In the morning I cursed my weakness scoured the sports page for an hour.

But let me go on. Once, when we were very young, by brother and I had just come home from some birthday party at the beach. It was summer and very hot. My mother had been drinking. At the time we thought her white wine was ginger ale. But ginger ale doesn 't give you kerosene breath. And ginger ale doesn't make you fall down. But I'm getting carried away here and it's already the third inning at Yankee Stadium. My mother put on her music. She gently swayed over the turntable and made Karl and I dance with her at the same time. On and on we danced; it seemed like hours.

Darkness fell and she wouldn't let us stop. We danced and danced while she drank her ginger ale. We danced until I couldn't take it any more and began to cry. Then my mother, whose hair fell in a thick blond braid, began to weep. She and I both. Karl ran into the garage and hid in the Country Squire. In the morning after we both woke on the living room floor, my mother and I hunted for Karl until we found him still sleeping in the back of the station wagon- rolled in a ball like a puppy.

I have been in this hospital - which sits neatly and serenely on fine grounds overlooking Long Island Sound- for nearly eight months now. I was admitted two months to the day, February 18, after my wife julie left me for the third and final time. My small, witty and logical wife of seven years left me in my thirty-fourth year. I have not been able to stop crying since. It took me only a month to lose my job at the bank in Stamford. There my star had been rising faster then my savings account balance until I started crying at board meetings, urinating out my eighteenth floor office window, chasing secretaries and female bank officers with a shameless and disgusting vengence, and appropriating funds to construct a $20,000 batting cage complete with an automatic pitching machine in the basement of the building. I miss my mother who drank herself silly and finally to

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death one week before I graduated from high school. And I miss my excuse for a father, who hasn 't spoken to me since the day he and julie me committed to this reform school for wealthy eccentrics.

Julie and I spent the last four years of our marriage in a condomin路 near the harbor in Southport. We were almost evicted on nu occasions, due to my lust for playing old Rolling Stones' albums at only loudest levels. Julie called me immature, and the pompous old downstairs, Muriel Cummings, called the local police often enough silence one of the few remaining joys in my life. julie was, and still路 suppose, a copy editor for a medium-sized publishing house in the city. would commute together daily by train. I got off in Stamford and left] with her newspapers to ride the nearly useless and totally 路 Conrail line to its terminus in Grand Central. We rarely had much to say the train. Or at home. Or after making love. Basically we stopped talking each other the year the Orioles won the pennant. I guess our sex life mediocre at best.

Julie said I was too fastidious. Fussy was the word she used. ' Paul," she said to me, "this whole thing about cleanliness is driving me wall. You scrub the kitchen floor three times a week. Do you realize had the outside windows cleaned seventeen times so far this year? will not take a shower after we make love. When we make love."

Julie spoke in small tepid bursts. It was easy to detect her pack habit by her short-windedness. That was probably my fault too. But on day she seemed afraid of something.

She went on: "You're obsessed with this baseball thing. I don't you even derive any pleasure from the damn game. You just sit mesmerized and numb in front of the television and then you start how like a madman."

"Balk," I politely belched.

She began to cry and I froze like a rock. When julie cries, I get frightened. Her eyes, hollow and darkened, filled with tears.

"Please Paul. Please see someone. You need help. We need help. I you." She left the room quickly. I went to the television to find a ball

Early last month they let me out, a weekend reprieve from insanity.] had broken the news two months earlier that she was seeing someone Seeing is a funny word. Does seeing mean touching, smelling, tasting fornicating, for god 's sake? Oh Jesus.

Her new beau was a photographer. A talented fellow, I've since out, whose work is often called brutally sensitive. I like that. I was to have dinner with them at her new place in Westport. A homey cottage by the water.

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Julie and I had courted and made love near the waters of Long Island Sound during the time our love was strong and true. Though I must admit I quickly sought out a shower to rinse the salt off after a late-night naked swim. That clammy feeling, you know. One cold January night eight years ago, I proposed to Julie in my heap of a car at Boiton Beach. I remember a quarter moon hung over the stacks across the water in Port Jefferson.

Now she lives in an arty cottage, a short run from the beach. I arrived early for dinner that night- just to throw them off. When I got to the front door I could see her through a small bay window. She was lighting one of six white candles in the candelabra set my wacky great aunt had given us as a wedding gift. She was wearing a white dress with fine lace across her breasts. My heart jumped and the flutters began.

I rang the silly door knocker and was quickly ushered in. When I shook hands with Richard, Julie's new man, I immediately detected the pungent stench of Dektol solution. Once a photographer, always a photographer.

This guy reeked of darkroom. He was a pleasant enough man at first .

Graying along his temples with a well-hidden receding hairline. But he had a strange accent that began to offend me as much as his chemical smell. I started to despise the poor man.

Dinner hadn't gotten very far when I blew the evening away with a quick, lively freak show. We were eating salad -Julie's special Caesar Salad where she crushes the garlic against the side of the bowl and strains the lemon through cheese cloth- when I brought up baseball. I knew this Richard wasn't a baseball man. Probably tennis or cross-country skiing were his games. Anyway, I intended to grill him just to have a little sporting fun. He wasn't one to hedge and made it perfectly clear he cared very little for the game. At that moment he gave Julie one of those intimate don 't路 worry路darling-l've-got-everything路under路controllooks and I felt my insides cave in.

Often during my lifetime I've broken out of my usual introversion just long enough to shake someone up for revenge. I've taken my old-fashioned manners, my quality education and enforced shyness and chucked them in favor of just desserts. Many have called this terminal immaturity. I call it survival instinct and equate it to a sophisticated form of emotional violence.

No one saw me palm the cherry tomato from the salad.julie was talking weather now, obviously nervous. Richard picked at his salad. I poked a small hole in the tomato under the table with my fork. It was a ripe beauty, maybe the size of a ping-pong ball. Julie began to calm, I talked of the demise of network television (except for sporting-event coverage) and Richard seemed truly interested in what I was saying.

I waited for him to cut into his green salad. When he did I expertly feigned pain in my right eye I howled and raised my hand to my eye. Richard had a quizzical look on his face. I screamed once more and squeezed the

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tomato so that its pulpy innards shot across the table and zapped his polo shirt as if my very eye had exploded on his chest. Tiny seeds trickled down the alternating black and green horizontal stripes.

"That's not very funny, chap."

Julie began to hyperventilate. Both Richard and I jumped at once. I tried crawling across the small table but only succeeded in knocking over a stainless steel bowl of gazpacho soup, which spilled all over Julie's white linen dress. She fell to the floor in a dead faint.

"You're a child and a madman," Richard sneered.

"Right," I answered, attempting to clean the soup off Julie's breasts.

"Take your hands off her, Paul."

"Go away," I told him. "Can't you see we want to be alone?" Julie was beginning to revive. "Play with your cameras or something. I want you to leave my wife alone."

With that Richard quickly moved towards me. At the time I didn't realize Julie's revival had caused his sudden move. I took it as an act of unwarranted aggression and sank my teeth into his left knee. He roared as I pushed him away. Julie attempted a scream, but lost consciousness first. I panicked , bolted for the door and sprinted for the empty beaches of Long Island Sound.

Less than three hours later, an almost-silent squad car sidled up next to me. I calmly got in and they took me back to my home on the hill. It was obvious to the head floor nurse that I was in control when the two young officers took me through the large windowless front doors. She told me to shower up and someone would come by with a sedative. It was not yet midnight and the wave of emotional fatigue that had enveloped me earlier was passing away.

I had my radio on. The beginnings of a letter to Julie were scattered on various notes over a table in the corner of my comfortable room. My door was open and the hall was almost silent except for the occasional cackling from Johnston Adams' room. He was no doubt watching the Carson show.

He was the one person in this outhouse I could relate to. Johnston was convinced he was the only person on earth who could photosynthesize repeatedly managed to smuggle in food coloring to dye his whole body included) green . I found this both interesting and amusing.

His knowledge of horticulture was truly amazing. We would take walks around the grounds of the hospital, he meticulously explaining flora and fauna to me. In turn, I taught him how to throw a mean curve an effective screwball and a passable sinker that still needed work. His and mother had him committed eleven months ago and have been 路 hopping in the Aegean ever since.

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The night was dry and if I used my imagination, I could detect the first mention of fall in the air. That odor of decomposition which heralded the end of summer. I stared out my barred window and the tears began to fall in perfect time. A soft hand on my right shoulder brought me out of my dreams.

"Here Paul. You're supposed to take these." Cathy, the graveyard shift nurse, held out a tiny paper cup and two tablets. " I know orange juice is your favorite. Rough night huh? Listen, why don't we each take one of these and talk about it for a bit. Okay?"

This was just her style. Cathy was an unacknowledged ally of mine at the hospital: one of the few staff members I could actually trust and finally even care about. She drove me wild.

She wiped a tear from my cheek, pulled up a chair, and we both looked out into the black night. I took one of the tiny blue pills, Stelazine, and she took the other. We silently toasted the darkness and down they went.

Stelazine is a funny drug. It's one short step from Thorazine, which is a chemical straightjacket. I've only been subjected to that madness once and I don't care to go into it now. Stelazine ties intricate nooses around anxiety and stops a situation from getting any worse. Or better. A full dose will throw a fine net over any and all feelings and keep them buried for six hours or more in what feels like old, wet blankets. But deep inside you can still hear the ravings. Ship masts snapping in tropical typhoons.

Cathy scratched her white stockinged thigh and fiddled with my radio until she found an appropriate station. Mick Jagger was singing about a railroad station.

"Let's close this so the music doesn 't wake the rest of the wing," she suggested. As she fished her way to the door I felt something go clunk inside; the drug was beginning to hit me in very subtle ways. From behind, Cathy's twenty-three year old sway appeared to be one of the finer movements on earth. Her blond hair was haphazardly piled on top of her head. When she turned towards me her blue eyes were as calm as spring snow, her mouth as wide as a vivid imagination. Oh boy.

Like my doctor Foster Harris, Cathy was an outlaw at the hospital. Her methods and actions were what the board of directors would call radical.

Frowned upon. Wild. She was my kind of person.

It happened suddenly. Yet I knew it was coming down the pike as sure as I can call a pitch. The useless curtain of sexual inactivity that had been hanging on me dropped with a boisterous finale. How long had it been, I later asked myself, since I had allowed the electric-blue swell of pure lust to run through me? I didn't care to remember.

Cathy was notonetowaste time. We talked a bit, let the drug fully set in and when I shied away from her obvious stare, she firmly turned my head towards hers, smiled and began to pull off her dreamy white stockings. I felt

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a glorious chill run up t he back of my calves, then thighs and firmly bolt itself in my groin. Her hair fell and I felt a mourning for a certain unknown.

Was it for my wife or my long-dormant sex life? When she finished undress ing, s he started on me. I stopped her, contemplated jumping out of my clothes (out of my skin) and thought better. There was an uncontrollable trembling in my thighs a nd I feared if I didn 't s it down soon, I would fall to the floor in a raving, jelly-like mess. But I didn't. My fingers awkwardly pulled at her hair while s he undid my s hirt , my pants. My other hand found her sex a nd when our breaths both jumped I felt a tenderness and clearness I was afraid I had lost forever .

I fell into her wide mouth , we fell into my bed and I sank deep into our rolling lovemaking. The blast of sexual energy that washed over us cleansed many things. Lovemaking, when it worked with Julie, was a reaffirmation of my often neglected physical plane. It can fortify one's heart , body and soul in a splendid manner that no amount of talking, crying, drug taking or even baseball watching can come close to. After watching Cathy dress and leave, for a wonderful moment I placed the fragmented pieces of my life into a steady place. For once I didn't feel like crying. A warm autumn w ind sang through my window and blew traces of something which felt like relief across me and my bed. Dawn was a short nap away.

Blurry eyed, I sat in the lumpy corduroy chair in Foster Harris' office. He wore sandals- his feet looked cold- and pulled on his beard in what many would call a typical manner for a psychiatrist.

"I heard you had some trouble las t night. Wanna talk about that or something else?" He stopped playing with his gray beard.

"Sure. I guess," I said .

Foster leaned forward and touched my knee. " For a guy who's supposed to be careening on the edge of sanity and w ho had what a lot of us would call a traumatic evening, you seem awfully calm today, PauL You seem like a satisfied man . You 're more aware of your body today then you have been in weeks. What did happen last night?"

I told him . And when I stumbled on the lovemaking parts, I was aware of a growing bulge in my pants and frankly didn't give a fuck. Foster smiled a nd affectionately slapped my shoulder. "Good," he said. "I don't encourage or even condone nurses seducing !he patients here. But Cathy's a fine nurse, a nat ural healer . I'd rather have her jumping with you on the midnight trampoline than pumping you with god knows how many sedatives." His frankness startled me.

Then he s ta rted in. He questioned my lus t for baseball in a tricky way which upset me. He talked about the bank, about Julie. For the first time I

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became suspicious of Dr. Harris' motives.

We talked for more than an hour and parted. I went to my room, found my Rawlings fielder's glove, an extremely weather路beaten hard ball, and went looking for my photosynthesising friend, Johnston. Today we were going to perfect his sinker.

World series time came and we nt. Incredibly, I lost two hundred dollars to a burly orderly when the Dodgers took four in a row from Kansas City.

Something was slipping away. Julie visited me on All Saints' Day and said she had had it with me forever since that riotous night at her cottage. She was divorcing me and marrying her chowderhead photographer friend.

Fine. Spring training was only four months away. I cried and swirled in and out of a chemical mist for more than a week. At one point I cried for thirty hours straight until a hypodermic needle dammed the flow. I remained lost for days, sloshing around in my own saline hush.

It was at that time I was reminded by Foster that two weeks after I had been committedJulie came to me with some hard questions on a late winter afternoon. She ha mmered at me about my fascination with baseball and I actually stopped and wondered aloud why grown men chased horse路hide covered spheres with an unabated glee. And I concluded because it was fun.

"No Paul." She shook her head . And months later Foster too was saying, "No Paul, it's not that easy." Julie scared me that day just as Foster is now. I couldn't look either of them in the eye and felt a black horrible emptiness when Julie left my room. I believe Foster is abandoning me too, and I really have nothing left but baseball. In the wake of conniving corporate competition, sexual uncertainty and infidelity, and a world bent on vaporizing itself, what other anchors does a man have? It's sad to say but I haven't taken my glove out of my tiny bureau in weeks. I'm petrified to my sedated core.

I saw Cathy nightly although we never made love again. Sometimes we would talk deep into the night while she drank strong coffee and chain路 smoked Winstons.

Exactly one week before Thanksgiving I found a stranger sitting in my room with his slightly bent back towards me. He was gazing across the rolling grounds, maybe staring at the naked trees. It was my father.

He kept staring out the window and talked to me in a metronome路like rhythm. Pleasantries didn't last long. My dissolving marriage and mental state were verbally lobbed at me. His words were calm and cutting. His mission was to accuse and mine to accept. I got up off my bed and gently put my hand to his mouth. He hushed. His face was at first startled and then blank. I suggested to him that just maybe he had something to do with my being crazy in the first place. I knew he hated the word crazy. I asked him to

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look at his so-called family: a wife fourteen years dead, one son somewhere in South America whose only message comes to my mother's grave each May in the form of two dozen white roses, and me, locked up and committed to an insane asylum like a pet who has become a nuisance. Someone who couldn't be house trained so the hell with him, I ventured.

He stopped and blinked in a terribly sad and resigned way. My father then forced one of his hands into his tweed suit pocket as if he were fumbling for a pack of cigarettes - a habit he gave up years ago shortly after we buried my mother on a bright and hot June morning. He continued to stare out my window and probably, like the rest of us who waste our hours looking out windows, only saw yesterday's mistakes and tomorrow's flaws out there across the dying lawns. He shuddered.

Something was coming.

I swear I saw a tear in his eye. He cleared his throat and I felt the urge to flee. Maybe I could hide with my Sony under Johnston Adam's bed and lose myself in nine innings of baseball. Extra innings hopefully.

"What am I to do Paul?" he asked me. " Am I to bleed myself dry for you?

Your mother's long dead yet I still have frightening nightmares after all the years. Am I to blame for her and your brother who sends me hate mail every Father's Day?" He paused and looked me in the eye. Was my father reaching out in his own primitive way? Foster would love this. I looked away.

Baseball, baseball, baseball. " You are what is left of my family, " he said. " Oddly enough, you were the one I always looked forward to seeing the most. " I didn't want to hear this. I wanted out and out quick. "You're the one I cared about. You were the one I was counting on for big things."

"Big things?" I said. "How big? President of the bank in Stamford?

Secretary of State? First left fielder on Mars?" I started crying. In front of my old father, I was bawling like a child. I wanted to throw a tantrum.

"This is the big thing I've aspired to," I said, waving my arms wildly like I was shagging an errant fly ball. "You know," I said, " I'm starting to like it here." " I believe you are," he said with that old familiar look of benign detachment on his face . "Stay with your childish games Paul and you'll kill yourself as sure as liquor took your mother. " "Your wife!" I snapped. "Your wife!"

That did it. He rose slowly from his chair- an old warehouse elevator not sure at what floor to stop. I saw the moment and the chance to change things hovering between us. It was frightening. It was there all right and I desperately wanted to move my frozen body and grab my father, hold him and squeeze him until what once was would silently pass between us into what could be. I swear to god I wanted to hold him. We stood there motionless and each saw the moment fly away. He put out his hand to shake

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- -- - - --

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mine- a manly gesture- and I looked aw~y. It was an easy out for the both of us now. I cleared a path that would remain forever and he jumped at it like a little boy sneaking out the back door at a distant relative's funeral.

The bile rose until I thought I would choke on it. "You killed her, you know," I stammered.

My father left in silence. I was going to mention some trite Christmas greeting to him. I didn't bother. The tremors began and subsided. I cried for a short while. Maybe there is a difference between the games we play and the games we immerse ourselves in.

I tried calling my father at home on three separate occasions: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. There was no answer. I took this to be a bad sign and vowed never to call him again. I promptly called the Yankee Stadium box office for next season's schedule. There was no answer there either.

I've been reading more and more magazines.

The winter has dragged on and at times I can't tell one week from the other. I read this article on memorabilia in one of the flashy weeklies.

There's big money in old baseball cards . Somewhere in my past are a half dozen or so slightly worn shoeboxes filled with the complete series of a childhood's worth of baseball stars. Each series was arranged numerically, wrapped with a thick red rubber band and marked for safekeeping. I remember finding the boxes when I was an edgy teenager. They were in the attic of our home, near the dusty Christmas ornaments, packed in a knicked red toy chest my brother and I tried to share. I took out the cards, reviewed them and cried for no particular reason.

Where are they now? If I could find that red toy chest filled with those old, useless cards- remember how the bubblegum dust wuld give them a pink, talc-like quality - I would set it near the front of this place, soak it down with the nearest volatile liquid and torch it. But those cards probably went to the dump years ago. They are probably quite gone, one with the earth like my mother. I too await my induction into some sort of Hall of Fame. But until then I can quite purposely and contentedly lose myself in baseball. The old game of hit and miss, as my father would say.

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Contributors' Notes

TIM ARNEY is a student at the University of Hawaii and a resident of Anchorage, Alaska; P.O. Box 4-097, 99509.

ROB DUDKO was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1954. He now lives in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he is assistant editor of the weekly Norwalk News.

He has had fiction published in Groundswe/1 (University of Bridgeport, Conn.), and has worked for newspapers in Connecticut and Montana.

CHARLES EDWARD EATON's work in poetry and prose has appeared in Harper 's Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Nation, and many other magazines, and he has published seven collections of poetry, three volumes of short s tories, and a book of art criticism. His eighth collection of poetry, The Thing King, has just been published by Cornwall Books.

VICTORIA EMERY is a graduate student in English at the University of Hawaii.

VESNA GASPARI-ROBERTS was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and resides in London. She has recently completed the translation of two books into SerboCroat: Creativity and Taoism by Chang Chung-yuan and The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas.

STEVEN GOLDSBERRY's first novel Maui the Demigod is just out.

JANOS KANDEL is a student at the University of Hawaii.

CHRISTINE KIRK-KUWAYE's work has appeared in Hawaii Review and & Ridge.

MITCHELL LESCARBEAU is a former faculty member of the University of Hawaii, now living in Massachusetts.

KATHY MATSUEDA also wishes she could sing the blues.

GREGORY ORR is the author of four books of poetry.

TY PAK was born in Korea in 1938, and has taught at the University of Hawaii English Department si nce 1970. His recent book, Guilt Payment (Bamboo Ridge, 1983), is a collection of short stories based chiefly on the lives of Korean Americans in Hawaii. A naturalized U.S. citizen with three children and a wife, Pak finds the cultural setting of Honolulu an inspiration for his fiction writing.

STEVE RINEHART received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Hawaii in December, 1983. He is a 1982 recipient of the Myrle Clark Award. He spent his early childhood traveling in Europe with his Air Force family, and spent his formative years near East St. Louis.

CHRIS RUST is a student at the University of Hawaii and lives in Manoa.

REUBEN TAM is a distinguished artist residing in Kapaa, Kauai.

DEBRA THOMAS lives in Manoa.

JOHN UNTERECKER is the author of two books, Dance Sequence and Stone.

BARBARA WRIGHT lives and writes in New York.

HOLLY YAMADA is a student at the University of Hawaii.

A PACIFIC ISLANDS COLLECTION Cook Islands

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Available at your local bookstore dl8tribtl\ed by the Ulliwnityo(H•wali J>n., 2840 Kolowalu Hawaii 98822 (14.95).

s....... Honolulu,

boo ridge Teapot Tales and Other Stories by Oara Jelsma stories of Big Island plantation life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $4

Sun, short stories and drama by Darrell Lum contemporary short fiction, pidgin stories, and fiction and drama on growing up Chinese American . . . . . . . . . . $4

SmaU Kid TirM Hawaii edired by Eric Chock poetry by children .... .... .... .. ..... ...... .. ... . . $5

A SmaU Obligation and other stories of Hilo by Susan Nunes growing up hapa, Japanese and Portuguese, in Hilo ..... $5

Guilt Payment by Ty Pak stories of the Korean War and of Korean immigrants in Hawaii . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $6

Poets Behind Barbed Win edited by Jiro and Kay Nakano poetry by Japanese Issei internees .... . .. . ....... ... . $5

Bamboo Ridge, The Hawaii Writers' Quarterly quarterly magazine of fiction and poetry, 4 issues/ year .. $10

Bamboo Ridge, The Hawaii Writers' Quarterly Issue No. 20, Kauai Issue.

Writers and Writings from the Garden Isle ..... . .. .. $2.50

Bamboo Ridge Press 990 Hahaione Street Honolulu, Hawaii %825