Hawaiʻi Review Volume 2, Number 2: 1974

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Beginning with the next issue, Hawaii Review will be under new editorship. We wish deeply to thank all those who have given their help and support over the past two years.

-D.N. EDITOR

Dana Naone

FICTION EDITOR

POETRY EDITOR

Mark Melyan

N en gin Mahony

MANAGER

Gordon Wood

Front and back cover , antique music sheets courtesy of th e Oxspri n g CoiJection

ADVISORS FICTION

Ian MacMillan Robert Onopa

POETRY

Peter Nelson

COVER AND DESIGN ISSUES 1- 4

Peter Nelson

Hawaii Revie w is publis hed twice yearly by the Board of P ublications. University of Hawa ii. S ubscriptio ns a nd manuscripts should be addressed to Hawaii Review, Hemenway Hall, University of Hawaii. H o nolulu, Hawaii 96822.

Manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped. self-addressed envelope.

Subscription rates $3.00 per year: single copies, $1.50.

ltl1974 by the University of Hawaii

HAWAII REVIEW VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO

JOHN LOGAN ROBERTBLY SIV CEDERING FOX

SPRING / FALL 1974

Poetry 2 Poem for My Brother 4 Two Poems from Kabir 5 Two Poems

DEBRA THOMAS MARl NAKAMURA

20 26

Two Poems Three Poems

MICHELLE IMATA DAVID EVANS CHERYL NI'ITA ROBERT LAMANSKY

32 33 34 35

Blue Fabric The 7-11 in Alexandria Nebula Fright Drinking Hot Sake with My Grandfather

ELIZABETH SHINODA GLENN KIMATA EARL COOPER

44 45 46

CLINTON YUEN

47

The Old House Two Poems After Giving up Fishing for the Day High and Quiet

RUSSELL EDSON

60

HOWARD ALLAN NORMAN

61

WILLIAM STAFFORD

63

Strange People in Space/ A Meditation Three Translations from the Creole Trying to Become a Confessional Poet

Fiction IAN MACMILLAN DAVID WILD MARl NAKAMURA LOWELL UDA ALAN S . FUJIMOTO

8 28 36 38 48

NOTES

64

The Rock Prelude Advisor

Hina and the Moon Flakes of Snow

John Logan

POEM FOR MY BROTHER Blue's my older brother's color. Mine is brown, you see.

So today I bought this ring of gold and lapis lazuli flecked with a bright bronze.

His blue is the light hue of his eyes. Brown's the color of our dead mother's long hair, which fell so beautifully about her young shoulders in the picture, and of my own eyes (I can' t tell hers).

I loved my brother some, but never quite knew what to think.

For example, he would beat me up as soon as the folks left the house, and I would cry big, loud feminine tears.

He was good at sports and played football, and so instead I was in the marching band.

My brother stole rubbers from the store and smoked cigars and pipes, which made me sick. But once we swam together in the Nishnabotna river near home, naked, our blue overalls piled together by the water, their copper buttons like the bronze glints in my ring. I remember once when I was very young I looked deep into a pool of blue water-we had no mirror-and I was so amazed I looked over my shoulder, for I did not imagine it was me, caught in that cerulean sky.

Thinking it was someone other, I tell you I confuse d myself with my brother!

Nothing goes with gold, but I can see in this rich blue stone the meeting of our clothes like the touching of hands when he taught me to hold my fishing pole well and wound up the reel for me. You know blue's the last of the primary colors to be named.

Why, some primitive societies still have no word for it except " dark." It's associated with black: in the night brother and I would play at games that neither of us could understand.

2

But this is not a confession; it is a question.

We've moved apart and don't write, and our children don't even know their own cousin!

So, I would have you know I want this ring to engage us in reconciliation.

Blue' s the color of the heart.

I won't live forever. Is it too late now to be a brother to my brother?

Let the golden snake bend round again to touch itself and all at once burst into azure!

3

Kabir

THE JAR FILLING Let's leave for the country where the Guest lives!

There the water jar is filling with water even though there is no rope to lower it.

There the skies are blue. and yet rain falls on the earth.

Do you have a body? Don't sit inside!

Go out and walk in the rain!

The full moon rides the sky all month there, and it would sound silly to mention only one sunthe light there comes from a number of them.

THE ROAD OF PRAISE The bhakti path winds in a delicate way.

On this path there is no asking and no not-asking.

The ego simply disappears the moment you touch him.

The joy of looking for him is so immense that you just dive in, and coast around like a fish in the water.

If anyone needs a head. the lover leaps up to offer his.

Kabir's poems touch on the secrets of this bhakti.

Versions by Robert Bly

4

Siv Cedering Fox

COMA BERNICES

I want to tell you something urgent.

I go outside. It is cold, the day of the first snowing. I look for the cat lost for days. I call him, call him. The wild roses down by the rocks have bright red leaf-buds. It is December. The raspberry thicket is a tangle of purple stems.

I want to tell you something, something about death, about stars falling, but my grandmothers have become the myth of their own soft-spoken stories.

I prayed, once, to the Pleidies: "Do not fall . Do not fall! " for they were, I thought, the heavenly counterpart to our family cluster. Now I study the stars, telescope and armillary, and the lives of the old astronomers wondering what there is to be found.

And I write you: there are six spiral galaxies in Bernice's Hair. Your father is dead. There is the space of your life, the space of my life. and space curves outward expanding.

5

A LETTER Mapping the Moon Zakarias, I know I have not yet begun to write the poems of the heavens.

Instead I keep a journal where I record the orbits in my brain.

I name the fruit, the birds, the alphabet of trees, trying to explain something to ~yself, my son.

The astronomers named the dark places of the moon: Sea of Vapor Sea of Nectar Sea of Crisis Sea of Rain Even when they knew that it was waterless: Sea of Moisture Sea of Clouds Bay of Rainbows Seething Bay It was as if by naming they could recreate a dream: Marsh of Sleep Lake of Dreams Lake of Death Central Bay

6

But I don't even know what dream revolves on the dark side of my skin Or what lunar ocean I must name in my belly' s belly Sea of Serenity Sea of Fertility Sea of Tranquility Sea of Storm

7

Ian MacMillan

THE ROCK Calder hits the water with the gleeful vigor of a boy, resisting the shocking cold by churning his legs in a burst of muscular energy. He aims himself at the mysterious, giant rock rising out of the deep water at the mouth of the bay. It is over a mile from shore and halfway there are the crushing breakers which will curl on him with unpredictable ferocity. He has been told more than once that sharks infest the area of the rock, and he has been toying with the idea of cautious approach now for six or seven trips out. Today he has decided that he will make it all the way.

He has only been diving four months, but his equipment, fins, mask, snorkel and spear, all show the satisfying scratches and salt stains of frequent use. He churns along using more force than he needs to because he likes to resist the gentle and powerful motions of the water, likes to challenge its vast, soft bulk.

There is something else-it is the quick and surrealistic, silent pastel brutality of the ocean. Perpetually amazed by it, he regards himself as a humble alien in the last real wilderness, moving in clumsy slow motion in an environment where survival depended on absolute attention. He has been eyeing the rock for months, has been venturing out further and further, through the violent and turbulent waves and into the relative calm of the twenty feet of water outside of the reef. He has gone as far as two thirds of the way without encountering anything odd except very large and dangerous looking moray eels and some different fish. He is drawn to the rock, trudges along using more energy than he needs to use, enjoying the mummified fear somewhere at the back of his mind thinking, stripped almost naked for it. Stripped down to nothing but a goddamned pathetic bathing suit almost a mile off shore in a place whose only sound is the hum and the ticking of a buzzing confusion of life and me the humble alien who trades in gravity for its opposite, goggle-eyed and frightened and enjoying every second.

8

Calder is a New Yorker in Hawaii. He got his year here through a few tricky manipulations of influence, losing a casual friend or two and probably gaining back two or three who would turn out to be more valuable than the ones lost. He designs air conditioning systems, and he was here only three weeks before he settled into his normal, lazy routine, a continuation of what he did in New York, almost nothing in the morning, drink a little too much at lunch, occupy a house a small notch above his means. Until he discovered the water there was little that interested him here after the initial one week introduction to what he decided was a corrupted paradise. Not considering the water, here he lived in the moist laziness of a perpetual New York summer without the familiar urban discomforts. Half the secretaries were oriental, half the men you dealt with were oriental, you could not get the New York Times when it was fresh enough to read.

In the evening you drank either your own or someone else's scotch, or you entertained at your house or were entertained at someone else's.

The rilled sand passes under him slowly and he feels like a slowmotion bird, his eyes darting into the corners of his limited field of vision and his legs churning along with more energy than he needs to move at a good pace. He raises his head out into the noisy wind and eyes the enlarging rock. Feels the fear and the eerie hollowness of the unexpected lying out there jaws open just beyond the pastel limit of his vision. Thinking, nobody near, so vulnerable, out of yell's reach close to obliteration without a trace.

Calder is thirty-two and not usually inclined to introspection, but the water and its ticking silence and its pastel madness of life and his own freakish isolation almost a mile out turn his mind into itself with him thinking nearly without words, naked and alone with fear and tense jawed excitement you really feel here, don't you, really, breathing hard enough to hurt your lungs. He slows down, gasping through the snorkel, through the little death rattle collected water at the bottom of the U, thinking, I can really un~a~;ne ·-.Jesus , I can reallyWhen he discovered the water he stopped smoking. He had all his adult life and quit with the convert's zeal. One not pay him a hundred dollars to smoke. Once after four he bought a pack and tried one cigarette, crushed the rest of pack and cast it into a sewer. He felt ten pounds lighter. His

1•u.•v.n•.,u

9

face broke out with pimples as if he were fifteen again and sexual desire bloomed in a sort of innocent lust. His wife accepted the benefits of this change with goodnatured amazement. The feeling drove him out of his office on warm afternoons and up to the university cafeteria to sit by the window and watch the braless girls ride by all perky assed and jiggly and lean on their ten speed bicycles. Just to watch, because they all seemed so beautiful. He had never realized how beautiful they really were.

Stranger yet than chemical innocence and lust was memory. It was reborn. He could remember with glassy clarity things he had forgotten by the time he was sixteen. Refreshed and weightless in the morning he would shower erect and happy and amazed at his head, and he would go and guzzle half a can of orange juice from the pieshaped hole in the can, standing with his hand on his hip in the falling coolness of the open refrigerator. He has not been smoking .two months now.

Having stopped smoking with his new memory and isolated in the freakish ticking silence and the bluegreen madness of the ocean, he began a kind of brooding consideration of his life and his new obsession with the rock, now closer, the forbidding and barren greybrown protrusion with the waves crashing against it sending fans of spray fifty feet into the air. In rhythm with the churning of his legs his mind chants the questions to itself, why the water, why the rock at the mouth of the bay. It is not danger itself. It is something else. He has begun to think of it as friction.

Resistance. This is what he seeks in the surrealistic madness of the ocean. Resistance. Without it what else is there that you could call life? Somewhere along the line I have negated resistance.

And reclaimed it now in the soft but infinitely powerful resistance of water. Chanting, forming the words into the black tube of his snorkel, he thinks, resistance and conflict. I have not felt like this in years. It was a frictionless rise, right up the line, you scratch my back I'll scratch yours. And now, in halfconscious and boyish daydreams he invites the shark, dreads it but secretly hopes for its attack, his thumb gently resting on the crude trigger of his spear. He knows he is defenseless if one comes at him yet he cannot turn back, knows he will push until something comes to him.

He thinks that his memory did it to him. After he stopped smoking, he started recalling the time when he was a boy on a piss poor farm, his chin like numb putty from the cold, herding the cows from the barn to the watervat, chopping wood trembling with hunger his hands numbly locked on the axehandle, shivering still hungry at night, his body tensed up so much that in the morn-

10

his stomach muscles would ache. Although those days on that ss farm were miserable, he remembers them now with an :ooselssive clarity, and he feels a funny sentimentality as if somethose were better days. He thinks of the present with idle ! coJnte~ntJme~nt, but above that in some loftier recess of his mind there lies a peculiar membrane of disgust.

At home after work he will sometimes sit drink in hand in hip colonial livingroom and moodily regard the denimclad crotch of his wife Emma. She will most likely read a magazine, own drink sweating on the glasstopped table. He loves her. is strong and attractive and slatternly. It is a kind of sexy ~.J.n~~::Âť~:~. He will sit, sniffing at the vague odor of sweet jungle which seems to hang in and around the house. His eyewill draw together and he will think, lazy, everything is too . How did we get here? Why do you just sit?

He does not choose to seek excitement in the lights of WaiUnlike his colleagues, who come to work on Mondays with ,.,,n"'""' about stewardesses and oriental beachgirls and hookers, finds the attractive depths of moral depravity uninterIWI¡J.nJ~e. He has made his slips, but the adventure he would have never materialized. His latest was here, on a lunch -a secretary who would lean over his desk delivering letand memos, moving in a way which suggested to him a carsubstantial mammary heft. It was lunch in her apartment, and a series of ridiculously obvious mutual suggestions she was and hanging on his neck. No conquest. It just-happened, that was it. And sitting, he can hardly remember it. He can ,..Ine1mber with more clarity his first time at sixteen, on wet and hay stubble in March at two in the morning, the moon casthis own shadow on the pale body of a girl a year older than a girl he had to fight a bigger kid to claim as his. He can 111Jine1mber being cold and bruised, and his shadow moving on At work or at home or at lunch he would sometimes sit find himself working his knees together and apart together apart like a boy being denied the shuddering relief of the -~•"n'""'" Wrong, something's just-wrong. He would find himsweating in his air conditioned office, an air conditioning which he himself helped to design. Air conditioning, he trudging along in the water, slowing down now with deep of satisfaction, air conditioning is the essence of the whole But the water makes him shiver so hard that on the beach

11

after being in for three hours he knows he will sit with the towel around his shoulders and tremble and he will remember again himself a boy trying to talk with a frozen chin, useless putty, remember the terrible itch after warming up leaning against the woodstove above the cherry hot metal and rotating so as not to overdo one side. He can see the line of his life as forward movement without friction or resistance. How did he come to make so much money when he was not sure that in the last seven or eight years he actually did any work? There is only the nebulous, conglomerate picture of himself behind desk or shoulder to shoulder with the right friends in the apartments or townhouses near Hunter or down the street fromHe missed-his spear disappears off into the sand and he tenses himself up. A parrotfish. big. Missed by only an inch or so. He is secretly glad that he missed. because he would have been burdened by the fish and he wants to go to the rock. Outside of that, his freezer has five of them stacked and wrapped in foil, no more than a nuisance to Emma who prefers supermarket fish imported frozen from the Bahamas or California. This has always bothered him because he feels a strong pride about his fishing. Retrieving his spear is a matter of diving down fifteen feet and finding the little trench it made before getting covered by the sand. He grabs the spear out of the sand and slowly ascending, slides it back through the handle and catches its notched rear end in the surgical tubing sling which, attached to the crude handle, makes the primitive rubber tension that provides the spear's thrust. It is held in place by a simple trigger which binds it in the handle, cocked and ready to fire again. He has no use for the new, technological air guns because they make fishing too easy.

He chuckles into the snorkel, thinking of Emma. One night, almost as if inviting a conflict, he told her about the secretary.

Fired up on his scotch at midnight a week ago he talked away about freedom and restriction and about how she was so liberal about things like that and knowing he should keep his mouth shut because he didn't want to spoil anything, he fell into this almost experimentally pushy interrogation. "Well, suppose I went off now and again and found some girl-" And she, in that wise, blond frankness of hers, said well who am I to tell you what to do? What if I went out and found some- He went on with, well I know how women are supposed to feel about this stuff andDon't worry about me, she said. And he stopped then, thinking.

12

very smart. Build a fence around a pony and he'll jump it and run. Take it away and he'll stay. Very smart.

So he told her, gave her a five sentence, objective picture of what happened, and then stood there and waited calmly for whatever she had for him. She looked at the floor. "Oh I see, I see what-that's what you're getting at. Well, interesting, interesting." When he walked toward her, across the glass shiny kitchen floor, she took a little step of her own, as if not aware of his existence but really evading him. So then she was crying to herself, and he cursed himself for letting her know, thought, now you've done it, now you've taken care of it. Six years. No children.

How easy it would be for her now to just- The speculations raced through his head, sending a shudder of odd exhilaration through him. " Only once? " "Yeah," he said. And she thought about it.

Finally she threw her hands up as if in annoyance and said, "Ah what the hell, it's the twentieth century after all, just be careful, okay?" Then she went off to bed, leaving him standing there in the kitchen looking out the window at the silhouette of the house next door, a carbon copy of his own, squat and comfortable and dark, surrounded by the sweetly decaying plumeria trees.

When he went to bed ten minutes later, apprehensive and cautious, she was hot and lying there in the rumpled bed in her slovenly nakedness and latched onto him and breathed her hot breath on his face and pulled him down on her liquid and softly demanding body. And he looked at her and said, "Whatwhat's the-" and then chuckled to himself in morbid amazement and gave in.

Calder takes very seriously what he is doing, even against the soft and reasonable protests of his wife, who will not go with him to the beach when he plans his excursions. He even enjoys her fear. The last time she went with him, along with some other people from work, they were all worried sick that he would not come back because he was gone for two hours. And Emma sai d, "It really scares me you know, please don't go out so far-you go out so far I can't even see you."

He looks down and nods when she says this, knowing that he will not be able to resist going even farther the next time. " I just don't understand why," she said. "They don't either," and she poked her thumb over her shoulder. "There's some sort of a-a blindness I don't understand. You say you won't and you

13

do." She held her shoulders up in a sustained shrug.

And he nodded and looked down at the sand. He cannot explain it yet, but is secretly warm inside that she should be afraid.

But outside of that there is the gnawing shadow of an understanding suggesting itself-he almost sees something he doesn't like, that in his obsession for the rock there is a certain puerile and egotistical and boyish motivation. There is evidence which he is almost afraid to examine too closely. Once on a short excursion he lost his spear in a cave and foolishly went in after it, knowing that the ocean could decide to drown him in there. Fishing around reef caves was dangerous anyway because one slip, one moment of loss of concentration could mean being badly bruised or even knocked out on the coral, because of the dangerously unpredictable nature of the waves. In the ticking blackness of the cave he retrieved his spear and tried to return to the light and a wave came in and then some strange current, which played with his life for ten seconds while he fought off the powerful impulse to breathe. Finally the current released him and sprung to the silver surface of the water and exploded coughing into the noisy air, and coughing his throat raw he went right into the beach and sat trembling on his towel, thinking, I almost died there, I almost did not come out.

And later, he had some people over as usual and told them the details of his scrape, not at the moment recognizing that he was romanticizing it somewhat. And Emma, wise, sloppy Emma, said.

"See what John Wayne's done to my husband?" Everyone laughed, Calder the loudest, and in the awkward silence that followed he sat in a haze of warm shame, as if Emma had insulted him.

And he thinks, what has John Wayne done to me? He deliberately passes up a lobster, sees the black feelers peeking out from under a blob of dead coral. Maybe she is right. Some blindness I don't understand. More evidence: heading for this same rock a few weeks ago he found himself half way, outside of the crashing breakers, and he felt frightened and happy and looked goggleeyed at the fish and the sleepy, deadly eels and the rilled sand. thinking, this is far, this is way, way out. Nobody, nobody wouldAnd he turned and saw something off in the distance. He raised his head out into the cold air and saw something protruding from the water and began to back away, muttering with fear into the snorkel. It turned out to be a boy. Local. There was another boy farther off, and when he realized this he moaned, sick of himself, and returned to the beach. Boys. It seemed to prove the

14

dilletantish nature of his adventure. And it was the same day that he looked at the ominous rock off the bay and thought, all right, boys, there. I have to go there.

He slows down and thinks, yes, there is something hokey about this, about me. He is thirty-two, idly resisting the halfconscious impulse to consider himself somebody' s christ. Why? he thinks. All right, so let's find out. He is convinced that the ocean holds for him some personal secret that only making it to the rock will reveal.

There is Martin, too, one of the right friends to have, also from New York. He is the one who said to Calder, " You want St. Johns or Honolulu? " Martin now pokes fun at him, calls him Lloyd Bridges, that guy from the old underwater TV show, or sometimes he says at work: " Ask Jacques Cousteau over there-" Calder resents Martin's joking, because he knows that the question of what John Wayne has done to him is important and touchy and personal. Emma, you wise bitch. You who look like a turn of the century New Orleans whore in the morning all hoarse and sexy, you are a wise bitch. How could he explain it to her? Resistance is life, therefore where there is none, then there is no life.

The human has purged resistance from his life. What would she say? Aw, up yours honey, come to bed. Those hot, enveloping thighs and the great squash of brea st that seems in the process of running off her chest. They seem to negate him.

He stops and puts his head out of the water and scans the mountains, the beautiful dark mountains with their outrageously green peaks in the clouds. He slowly treads water, his jaw quivering with cold. Then he looks at the minute dots of the houses, the crawly feeling at the back of his neck. He is not alert, and in principle, if he were a fish he would be dead. Living in the ocean means for them remaining perpetually alert. Or the shark, living for him means constant movement or suffocation. The eel sits in his hole and waits in perpetual readiness. God. He looks scornfully at the houses nestled under the mountains and shakes his head and snorts, thinks of himself sitting in his hip colonial living room which is decorated to make a social camelion of him, a place with no balls. He thinks, that is the most indecisive room I have ever seen.

"All right," he says into the snorkel. He looks at the rock, scanning the water near it for the black triangle of a shark's dorsal fin. Only four or five hundred yards. Today's the day. His fear and excitement balance each other out. No one can help him

15

now. He knows he is foolish, that this is not necessary and if Emma knew she'd probably call the rescue squad. He looks up again, his face whipped by the cold wind, thinking, god it's big. It rises fifty or more feet out of the water, a fractured cube, threatening and monolithic and raw. The water sloshes against it in huge swells and he knows he cannot get too close. He sees also that the water under him is forty or more feet deep, which means he cannot use his spear. In front of him and down the bottom goes, off into the frightening blue distance. He is cold, shivering now but all the time enjoying it with his tense belly and back and the shudders in the throat and jaw. With the water getting deeper and the rock looming and his eyes darting around in the limit of his vision for the shape of a shark, almost as if it is the shape of proof that he lives at all, he thinks okay Emma, okay, what do you say now? The plot is thickening honey. We'll move the cameras in when he comes at you.

He thinks enfolded in the pastel silence of the water with the blue nothingness below him, once you get there what will it mean? Behind this a more threatening thought comes to him, as if he is grimacing at himself in the mirror-he really is hokey, he really is a boy. This is almost too much for him. Trudging along slowly with exhaustion approaching, it is almost as if the excursion is ruined. He is shivering but inside he feels hot with shame. He has had this thought many times before but today it wells up like a wave in his mind and he cannot easily rid himself of it. He looks up and sees his magnificent rock and now the fear begins to outweigh the excitement. Now the mask hurts his upper lip and the fins are chafing his Achilles tendons and his throat is salt raw as if someone has run a woodrasp down it.

Now he is tired and wonders if he should try the last few hundred yards. He looks up and sees that the land jut at the mouth of the bay is actually closer to the rock than his point of entry. He decides he should head for it, the humiliating thought gaining ground in his mind. Another time sonny. Tomorrow maybe. He hangs exhausted in the water and looks down at the bluegray nothingness of what must be sixty feet of water, hangs blank and tired and thinks, tomorrow Lloydo, tomorrow Jacques. This is enough. He is too far out. Jesus, he thinks, I got to get back in. I really got to get back in. Head for the jut. He will have to go through scary, unfamiliar territory.

But he does not go in. Hanging suspended in the water and now a little angry he thinks, why waste it just because someone implies that you are an irresponsible fool? Nothing to lose out

16

here but doubt, boy. Sullenly biting down on the mouthpiece and disregarding the exhaustion which drags him down he churns on toward the rock, grimly forcing himself on despite the fear which now lies dormant somewhere, shadowed out by his brooding anger at anyone or any thing which would influence him not to go as far as he goddamned well pleased.

He is rewarded quickly. Off in the distance, against the soft blue of the ocean, the reef around the rock begins to materialize like a photograph in a chemical solution. The reef is a hundred yards into the ocean around the rock, and it seems alive with fish, and scanning the picture whose clarity increases steadily, Calder sees nothing indicating danger. It is all beauty. It sends a shudder of excitement through him like ponderous electricity. It is incredible-he has never seen anything like this in his life. The yellows and pinks and the fish in schools and the fish alone, going on about their business. It is as if he has crossed a desert and come out into a beautiful town.

He spends ten minutes in a gawking, amazed inspection of part of the reef before he decides to fish for a few minutes. In his excitement he misses the first shot at a large parrotfish in a hole and he stays down, looking into the hole with his body inverted, and grabs for the rear end of his spear which lies across a crevass full of little silver fish. He almost has the spear when the spotted eel flashes on his hand. There is no pain, only momentary shock in which Calder even feels the eel's tongue on the palm and sees that its teeth are buried as far as they will go, and in that same, peculiarly objective expanded half second he sees the little malevolent eye buried in the fat, bulbous head staring back at him sleepily. He jerks his hand out of its mouth so that the teeth painlessly shred the palm and back and he springs off the coralhead already taking water into his throat and he curls up around his shredded hand like a leaf in a fire. He rises to the surface blowing air from the snorkel in a yell and then hangs there waiting for the pain which does not come up beyond a cold and wretched discomfort. Wailing softly with each breath he looks at his hand. The slashes are closed with blood escaping in little billows, like smoke. He gasps his breaths numbed with fear and trembling wretchedly and clasps his hand to his chest, thinking, oh Jesus so far out, and blood escaping, Jesus.

Still without feeling much pain he turns and scans the water again and begins swimming backwards, frightened at the little billows of blood which disperse into the water. No defense, none at all. Get in. He looks up again at the jut of land, and rejecting

17

the hollow fear of what must lie behind him and against his exhaustion he churns with all he has toward the jut. Before going two hundred yards he stops, gasping, cold and giddy and hopelessly tired. Before he can control it, bile scalds his throat and the inside of his nose, and he floats, eyes shut, trying to hold back the dreamy nausea which robs him of balance and strength. In order to keep from throwing up he hangs still, holding his hand against his chest, letting the ocean do to him what it will. For a moment he has a strange feeling, a strong impulse to just hang there forever, just die there enfolded in the water.

He needs to concentrate on something. Floating in aimless exhaustion is terrifying. He looks again at the hand, bringing it off his chest as if it were incredibly fragile. Still, the little billows, the seepage, and a kind of morbid interest in what the eel did makes him gently open one cut. It is even worse than he expects, like razors right into the muscles, all the way in, and the heel of his hand is partially severed, a one inch chip in the flesh.

He chokes with fear again and trudges on cautiously, because of his stomach, half consciously muttering into the snorkel, jesus god bad, my god my god, and he is too tired to glance back for the shark he is sure is on its way to finish the job. He can only chuckle with hopeless exhaustion and watch the rilled sand pass under him and curse with his teeth clenched when the ocean gently holds him back with one of its exasperating currents.

It is almost as if he sleeps, trudging along in the blue-green silence, as if he is at peace with his hand and now must simply go home. He has no idea how much time it takes him to make it any distance and he does not care. The fear has crystallized at the back of his head so that whatever feeling it is when some pair of jaws clamp on his neck will make him respond by simply drawing his shoulders up and wincing slightly. For long stretches he swims with his eyes closed, almost not caring if he is going in the right direction. His mind cocoons itself in a half dream and it is only the growing pain that keeps him aware. Then the powerful breakers wake him up and carry him violently toward the shore so that he must raise his head out to get air. The sea is all foam, tossing him and pushing him and washing over him, all toward the beach, and he lies, his hand clasped to his chest, intent only on getting the air he needs when the ocean will permit it.

Before reaching the calm water he has the wind blasted out of him by a high piece of coral which lays open the skin on his ribs.

He continues on, a little hopeful because he is inside the reef, and the searing pain of the blow on his ribs wakes him up. And with

18

horribly gradual progress, the bottom comes up to meet him.

On the shore he ploughs up to dry sand, still holding his hand, and falls back. He is almost too tired to keep going. but the recognition that he has made it to shore gives him a temporary energy and the noise of the land wakes him up and the blood streams from his hand because it is now not held in by the pressure of the water. With his good hand he pulls the fins off holding the bad hand aloft so that the blood runs down his arm over his elbow and toward his armpit. Gasping more air than he needs he is driven by a sullen fear as if something could still chase him and he begins trotting along the beach toward his car which is a mile away, and he fights the sand which slows him down.

A man intercepts him bearing a towel, which Calder numbly wraps around his hand, and the man leads him into the bushes saying, "Oh Jesus the bugger got you-oh Jesus-" and Calder hardly hears him. It is as if Calder is still in the silent ticking ocean and numbly he follows staring glassy eyed at his own feet in the sand and then on grass and finally wet and shivering and salty he finds himself sitting in the front seat of the man's car, holding his wrapped hand against his injured side.

The bleeding has almost stopped and blood crusts his wrist and forearm and soaks into the towel. Now he sees that the man is Japanese, old, and keeps glancing at Calder's wrapped hand.

Calder looks around, at the ocean, and at the white line streaming into the hood of the car. It is as if he wakes up suddenly. He pulls the towel away and peeks at his hand. It is cupped against his side so that the seeping blood collects in the palm. He is suddenly apprehensive about going home, as if he were路 a boy who had injured himself doing something he shouldn't have done.

But he snorts angrily at that thought, and turns to the man.

"Have you-have you ever been out there, by that rock? " His voice crackles, almost as if the question is urgent.

"Not for me," the man says, laughing.

"It's- It's beautiful," Calder says, " I've never seen anything like that in my life."

Now he is relaxed, calm, almost content sitting there hunched around his hand, and he thinks, against what reason would tell him to think, if this is the blindness they make it out to be, then I aim to keep it. He takes another look at his cupped hand and at the brilliant little pool of blood in the palm. He holds it as if it is something valuable he has found in the ocean.

19

Debra Thomas

My mouth is a vegetable in the gas station white paper evades me like a bird, wings folding cracking in the wind I roll the window up and see my face reflected in the quadrogram window the street light gives my pores attention ballet with the stars Makapuu throw us out to this grey cushion.

Ocean your windy lurching mouth black clouds passing by the moon moon' s light shines through like a negative clouds white bandages of a wound blow out from my captive soul star twinkling even as I stare flashes of yellow and pink running across the sky tightrope dancing up to a cloud curtain looking at heaven my hand between those clouds fingers fit into the blue spaces like a phantom glove the moon held out rays of rainbows filled with stars the moon wearing a crown of lilac.

My sister runs like a broom gone nuts a brown long swishy broom sweeping in and out of the spaces waves leave clean unsalted as they m~ke shorebreaks. broom sister scurrying up and down speaking to the big brown lion mountain stretched paws on the cool sand he growls the wave roar how good a ruler he is over white lights stars glowing headlights along the highway of his belly he guards them like ants on his body and won't let them fall to the ocean mouth.

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I'm bleeding on the sand my blood is warm I cannot move the wind is as concerned as a cat, seacat swirling around my body when she feels like it. lying on the mattress of clouds looking down here at beach sand sparkles and turning I gape at space purple goddess on white sand palms cupped to grains hot arms both pushed out fingers hot knives each grain of sand aware sticking in a raw skin.

I rub the sand from my neck and wrap Indian flowered wool blanket over my naked body come where waves break on the shore I have no eyelids and eyeball stings for salty ocean frothy lips a cocky lover sensuous beyond what I could imagine lips tremble and take, pounding.

Lava black mountains fungus clouds colorless under full moon we are rocks coming out of creation lava mountains set us free to Hawaii-Kai lightview streetlight sombrero map on the hillside white star spider armies spiders only stopped approaching because I'm looking (blood I'm bleeding into black leather smooth interior soul) abandon your houses spiders leave in the bright plank white bridge from your window to the sea canal stars are only a web with flags of clouds.

Lilac dawn caressing St. Louis Drive-In Movie screen at 2 am jazz air raid crusade jazz like a busy bee talking to roofs

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entering into the soul of UH campus at 2 am it's sleeping bare unembarrassed, an unhappy letter opened to us Susl1rra purring velvet smooth as still water blood on my skin reaching the garden I take up the hose to wash the blood from cold pale legs in silver moonlight I strip my body rinsing blood cold water hosing my blood running to the green blades that are trees around my toes in suspended wake-from-sleep time the lilac sky fooled by full moonlight dawn seems for hours at 2 am my sister laughs as I wash warm blood from my limbs. in the Tahitian gardenia tree's shadow black slime was blood on my thighs purple goddess left her white slip stained with red flowers by the doorpost.

22

Debra Thomas

sun mannikin feeling reef surfaces press. a bruise in my leg looks like ingrown seaweed kiawe trees drowned corpses in a lava bed salt to green. cactus water plains calm wave advances seething relief scallops receding wind blown white outlined scallops in groups are bubbles jerking out at sea the sky glows more aqua buoyance lifted by, greeted and swallowed into salt green aqua beds. mermaid is all around a silky blanket that suspends sun conference speech delivered to water plains in fluorescent band translated by mermaid reader she extends her arms to mother center and looking up reads illuminate screen is she studying or hearing of broad new occasions occasions all hers to come. a mermaid has starfruit eyes the seeds are her pupils the five arms are her clear olive yellow eyes a starfruit cut crosswise. Mermaid traversing kiawe drowned desert. a mermaid safe in turquoise ponds safe from purple creatures

23

who bend their heads to the earth whose spines are curved to the sky scallop spine curve feet and mouth suction-cupped to purple bed. mermaid lands like spacecraft on a sandy bottom pressure from suction feet causes sand to spray out as mermaid feet land. sun spiraled cloud speaks only to me fluorescent light bulb ring around the ocean ocean blue closet white dog strokes, carries in a lime green frisbee white sharkfin sailboat out, their region where sun is placed resided in reflected disks saucers of melted sun like honey translucent honey stripe most intense of three colored wave band that rolls stretches flattens to lava feet honey and lavender light.

I thought it was my imagination when I felt a bite till I saw him scuttle away and flicked him off the ledge little crab I would have pressed the life out of your vitals against a kiawe sponge knob if I hadn't seen another in a lava pool white, his belly to the sun, non-reactive to wind driven disturbances that crack the lukewarm surface shimmering then scallops. raining just came back in from the sea wet and raindrops keep hitting me like droplets from waves sad blond tandrel-haired girl walks along the shorebreak spurts a smile to her face as she watches three people in the sand then her face returns like a rubber band eyebrows tight where did she go floated away across the sand a feeling to ripples and Latin electric guitar defining ripples in the waves by wind carver

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I with my pen and thoughts pushed out to a wave receding in space pry off a piece of seaweed and looking under see it is an animal clamp seacups star-crossed sits on a lava rug. look what you offer your pedestrians, streets; asphalt clammy corners sweating in front of automobile heat like a curtain that came down and confounded on all sides then my sister runs through Kapiolani Park one of the fairies with kiawe hoods.

25

Mari Nakamura

WOMEN You admit women into your dreams one by one.

Opening the gate and smiling, you are ever the courteous host.

They are women without heads that float beside you.

When they need to agree with something you have said, they bend their bodies, the lovely ladies, you cannot let them go.

I enter your dreams, hear their necklaces like windchimes on an eave.

Twilight falls, the ladies have to go.

You wake up with a smile.

Tumbling out of your dream in time to be beside you when you turn, I do not tell you where I have been.

As you kiss my throat, your eyes move up to my silhouette, thrown ag ainst the wall.

26

GREEN APPLE

I am so close to the skin that a thin blade cannot separate us cleanly.

I am not like the flesh of an animal, hidden beneath a heavy fur.

You pierce the green surface, and we both cry.

When the skin falls from the knife in spirals, a cry rises from a child's throat.

Two girls are playing hopscotch on the sidewalk before you, and one of them is the woman you will love.

OLD LOVERS

Meeting his eyes, a cry rises in the woman's throat.

It circles low and returns to its nest.

If she could be an animal, remembering all the other creatures she has touched. But only the skins of animals come to the city, like a procession of the dead, disguised as shoes.

They nod, their hands almost touching each other's in the mirror of a passing car.

They turn and walk in opposite directions.

In an office two blocks away, a woman is startled by the arms she wraps around herself.

27

David Wild

PRELUDE The streets are so quiet out here. City's edge the ruby-colored night inert between midnight and dawn and the streets so quiet The quiet pure and as I walk each step defiles each heelclick raucous in the silence. The keen of the wind the drip of the rain from the brooding black trees inanimate sounds in the pure silence and I moving dont belong. Walking.

Walking because motion of legs concentrate on the movement because walking you concentrate can forget. Or at least not remember although there is so much now and too many associations because walking I walked so much with her Karen Karen -where and I stayed the you know how-no will not remember.

Like a vast brooding circle with one hot white spot you try to run past the spot but mothlike you return. Because once in thinking I have touched it it is hard hard not to touch again and again to finally r elive it-karen where-e xcept. Except that there is rain now and walking and I can concentrate fo rget.

Walking although I had been driving MG graduation present last year but we stopped. Suddenly were stopped I didnt do it but it felt right. Lights burning in the silence but that felt right too I got out walking in the direction the headlights pointed until they swallowed a memory behind me in the dark. The wet asphalt between the trees the opulence the wealthy hiding behind crewcut lawns neat hedges precision walking the wet asphalt left foot right foot aortal cadence to leave to escape -flick light him sprawled bedforget it forg et forget forget stone shoe feel it full weight on it drive into flesh deep gouge blood skin grind hurt goddamn it hurt.

Hurt of the stone from the road narrower now and sloping beginning to knot up and writhe downhill into a deeper darkness.

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The houses spaced more widely more impregnable their isolation. The narrower road potholed less secure underfoot closer to the graveled track of before before the city spreading and taxes forcing the affluent to flee beyond its boundaries-the irony of landlords who live beyond the pale-veneered the patrician villas along its sides. The trees grown taller vaulted arched cathedrally concentrating the waxing drizzle into bulbous raindrops that splatter.

Raindrops. The blacktop and me and the rain and trees houses. Strange in flight from light center of people to find the rim fringe darkness inhabited by the homes of the elite but on the freeway effortless speed floored cleaving to the dotted line because to either side lovely black abyss hoped it would independently skid spin take flight and in the crunch of metal an oblivious peace. But it would not skid I couldnt let go even off the freeway the backroads so easy but I couldnt. Stop at last to walk. In the rain.

Rain trickling down the hill with me Karen always used to like to walk in the rain shoeless toes squelching long brown legs from under the skirt rippling about her kneecaps but not at night would she walk. I once explained lucidly to her the attraction of the rainy night for the contemplative man the meditative atmosphere engendered by the mindless murmur of the trickling drops the subdued soft velvet texture. But she wouldnt walk in it at night too bright a color I guess for it she would glow too brightly. She wouldnt understand this night either where the rain and rustle of trees a mournful plainsong the deathcelebrative movements of monks in stain-glass lit chancels. Karen Karen it s eemed real so often the touch of hand of eyes of voice thought. Because I think Karen I will talk see her tomorrow think of hair lush brown of face eyes and the abyss suddenly - m o nday afte rnoon i see her in crowd yell karen karen run and closer karen where you been i been calling all weekend y eah jeff hi well i spent the weekend in town with a friend but who i called all i knew the ones you introduced me to if you insist o n knowing i spent it with jerry reeve jerry not that its any of your business but i was down a t the g r een turtle friday you know drinking alone and we met and i drank too muc h we went up to his place and i stayed the night you know bow it is i mean dammit jeff i gotta b e free free free free -

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Cigaret. Fumble for matches light glow in the dark smoke soothes in around nose throat and the nerves subside thoughts flow onward downward along the downward sloping road the night spiraling down like a vortical maelstrom sucking me along.

The wetness on either side of the road a false freshness the suffocating sweet of a funeral bouquet the scent of long-buried springs exhumed from the roadside dust. Dust roads have been on so many now since yesterday I left-spent the night-her roads lead to -him sprawled bed gross withshut up shut up goddamn sonofabitch thoughts whirl multicolored glittering I cant stop thinking thoughts always return to damn it concentrate no past no future only the darkness and the road sloping.

Sloping. And becoming meaner more primitive as it tends down an abscess in the smooth earth fathomless deep. Turtleback macadam between tall brooding uncivilized woods winding around down into the darkness. The steady flow of raindrops cold dank dismal. And my swollen head with the ruby thoughts flickering more slowly in the sodden inertness of this night but so fast.

How far have I come how far yet to go and it doesnt matter the road stretching back so long asphalt before that concrete the interstates aseptic neon large standardized roadsigns to mark towns beyond the fence therefore nonexistent starting from the campus sunlight turned gray her-i gotta be free-and here the end now the windings smoothed a certain leveling and distantly the gush of land-channeled water.

The road now at bottom and it straightened to cross a further deeper gorge old concrete WPA-inscribed mossy bridge narrow ferrying the asphalt over the gap where the trees would not follow and all around so dim the blackness. I walked out onto it to the center to lean on the concrete railing to stare down into the gorge no light a pure neutral all-absorbing quiet blackness. No indication of depth but from deep within the rush of water an intestinal gurgle.

The road continues beyond the bridge slight turn left and sharp angle begins to climb but center of the bridge I can go no further. Center pit of blackness road's end lightless depth of my mind can go no further. No further because pit of blackness so lovely so deep. Black is not a color but rather the absence of all color the absence of light the absence of sound of cold of pain doubt emptiness of life. I lean on the concrete and the black is

30

all around muffling a final absence masked by the whisper of the dripping rain the deeper rush of water.

Because I ran. Because Karen in the sunlight that turned gray and hollow absence vacuum like you should die and dont so I ran got the MG drove into the false sunlight. Because I couldnt go home nothing but blandness the plaintiff shall have custody of the child but she working all day weariness at night incomprehension after all the years a final inadequacy. He who had been on court-decreed visits so much the strength wisdom of reality so much the friend hello son and the zoo or a park later call me John men together dinner and some nightlife. Him then and an address west so I drove into the sun long freeways until dark on in the black until it rose blinding but gray in the rear view mirror and it was overhead sinking to my front address and I found -apartment house and i parked ran up knocked no answer pushed the unlocked door shades drawn so i flicked the light him sprawled folds fat queers the two on the sodden sheets smell stench he raised up on one elbow who jeff oh god iranleaning on the bridge and my cigaret had burned almost to my lips a final convulsive drag and picked it from my lips threw it one swift motion far out into the blackness it glowed desperately bright as it hurtled down a bright speck of light spiraling until the blackness extinguished it the blackness snuffs it out speck in transit will be swallowed the blackness speck of light still glowing in the dark and when snuffed out alone I will be solitary in the blackness will be myself in the center of large attractive final black.

31

Michelle Imata

BLUE FABRIC I found a piece of blue fabric in the bottom drawer of the chest.

I cut it and pinned it and sewed a shirt for you.

Soon it was finished and I held it to my body standing before the mir ror wondering what I would feel like pressed softly against myself, breasts swaying before breasts, hipbones that pull hipbones towards themselves.

In this light my teeth glisten.

The tip of my tongue passes over them, and they are smooth and cool as melting ice.

But where my hands slip over my skin it is warm, and I wait for you, listening to myself coming home.

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David Evans

THE 7-11 IN ALEXANDRIA

We stop for more cigarettes and beer.

The morning buses go by like loaves of bread, their windows stained with dust and the light, gold as your wedding ring etched with lines like the edge of a chalice.

It was almost dawn when you took it off.

The absence is narrow, and white as the lines on this highway.

It lies on my thigh, these crystals of frost, white as the surplice I wore as a child, white as the body of my mother rising before me.

33

Cheryl Nitta

NEBULA FRIGHT Sometimes the moon dazzles through my window sterling white.

The stars send beams piercing the air silvery.

Slivers settle on my window glass Mixing with fine dust, Kinetic glitter, Drilling through the invisible skin screen.

My blood feels metallic As it glows all over my sawed-off bed.

Electro-shock waves Trans!ucency.

I'm the tin woman, Female Frankenstein Sliding on the incredibly slick sidewalk.

Metal on mirror.

Mirror on metal.

The platform sole touches the wet plate glass and conducts.

I'm electrified.

34

Robert Lamansky

DRINKING HOT SAKE WITH MY GRANDFATHER

hot sake in a teapot painted with persimmons the glint of fine porcelain at morning i sit cross-legged in jeans and pour first into gra ndfather's fragile blue cup then into mine the last drops poised like a waterfall at the tip of the spout as i stop then smile then raise my cup " hey jiisan i've come to drink with you" red anthuriums a nd the wind dazzling against the carved black stone

35

Mari Nakamura

ADVISOR When they first brought me to this cemetery, I cried. I thought I should fill one of the many freshly dug holes, just to be able to touch the earth. But they patted my back as if to comfort me-the dead people-and told me again and again until I understood what they wanted of me. Then I was not so frightened.

I just sit on this bed and listen to them. Every morning when I awaken, there are already a number of them standing around my bed. Sometimes they have their hands on my blanket, near my chin. I tell them that I can't help them unless they give me space to breathe, because living people need a lot of space. This isn't exactly true, but I say it because having them so close still makes me edgy.

One by one they tell me their problems. They fly toward me as if I have some gravitational pull; as if I am a conductor, and they, the orchestra. They come with rotting clothes and mildew.

These things I have gotten used to, but the maggots ... ! I shouldn't say such things. It's cruel; it's like talking badly about a person after he's dead. Oh, what am I saying?

The dead can be divided into two groups. One group consists of the dead who occasionally step out of the cemetery. As soon as they pass through the gate, clothes fly on them, their hair returns, their skin covers all of the uneven flesh. In appearance they are quite human. But there is something missing-a resonance-that sets them apart from the truly living. It doesn't take long to notice that this quality is not there.

So I am teaching them how to say " Ah ... . " It is a word that must come from deep inside in order for it to sound genuine. I am also teaching them to know when to s a y it, and how t o distinguish the "Ah . .." of pleasure, of pain, and of surprise. Most of them can pronounce the word, but it is an " Ah ..." that travels up from their throats. If they can bring it up from deeper depths, they will be that much closer to life.

36

The other group consists of the bodies that have never left the cemetery. They come to tell me how the rain caused them to get dirt in their ears; how wet weather brings the worms that crawl all over them. Mo st of them just want someone to listen to them.

Roy. the head body, is in this group. He must have died three centuries ago, so little of life remains in him. He is in love with me. He sits at the edge of my bed long after the others have settled in their places, and tries to make me happy by acting human.

One night I looked up at the stars, and was almost happy that I had someone to talk to.

"Aren't they lovely?" I said. "So many of them! " "Yes," he said, " but there aren' t as many stars here as there are in the country."

"But why? Don't we look up to the same sky?"

"Yes," he said, as if proud to be able to show me that he had an intimate contact with life. " But the city lights reflecting onto the sky makes the sky brighter, and dims the stars. So people in the city see fewer stars. It's the reflection of electrical lights. you know."

He sat there smiling at me. I felt like kicking him off the bed.

It's ridiculous. If he ever takes my hand, I'll howl. Last night he came close and kissed me on the cheek. One of the going-outinto-the-world bodies must have told him about the goodnight kiss. I'm nervous. I'm beginning to cry again . . .

37

Lowell Uda

HINA AND THE MOON Amidst the cold sea spray, Aikanaka's priest spoke to the cloud rolling off the Kauiki headland. "0 Lono! Who hides the moon, and stirs the sea! 0 Lono of storms! " He raised his hands in the moonlight. " Great Lono! In the rolling cloud! In the still cloud of Kauiki!"

From the dark hut where his sons, Puna and Hema, were sleeping came Aikanaka, chief of Hana. For a moment, just outside the shadow of Kauiki Hill, he surveyed his wife's cluttered work area: the kapa and hala leavings, the glowing sheet of white kapa drying in the moonlight, his wife's long black kapa board, her beaters, and the unfinished hala mats on the ground. Then he moved abruptly toward the sea seething before the priest.

"Lono in the feathered clouds of day!" the priest continued, still talking to the rolling cloud. "Of night! Lono in the valley!

Lono on the ocean! In the great dog-shaped cloud! In the little dog-shaped cloud! Great Lono!"

Wet crabs gleamed on the jagged lava rocks, and scuttled away from Aikanaka's feet. The water plunged and sucked at the rocks, the spray spattering inland. " Great Lono!" said the priest. " Here is my chief Aikanaka!

Lover of his people! Of the fat land! Of the growing land! Of the green land! Bless him!"

The priest lowered his hands, shook his damp cape, and slithered down from his rock. " Lono dodges the moon," said Aikanaka. " It is a strange white nig ht." " Yes," said the priest. " It will rain."

Aikanaka and the priest gathered the sheet of kapa, the beaters, the unfinished hala mats, and a pile of hala leaves and put them under a tree. Then they climbed Kauiki Hill and looked

38

off toward Ulaino, where grumbling Hina and her servants had taken the children's excrement. " She comes from a strange land across the sea," said Aikanaka. " When she came she was very beautiful, and a rainbow followed her." " She comes from a strange land across the sea," said the priest, "and she doesn't understand. She's impatient with the kapu you have placed on your children's excrement. You have gained some land, both of you, by your industry and your prowess, and you have gained some enemies. If they get ahold of your children's excrement, they will use it to pray them to death, and I will be powerless to prevent it."

"Hina loves her children," said Aikanaka. "She works hard, and the people of the land are happy."

"Yes." The priest nodded. "The people of the land are happy ... ."

As the two men stood there, a mist chilled them, and they pulled their oiled capes tighter. The cloud rolling overhead rumbled, then brushed the moon poised bright over Ulaino. Suddenly, something dropped from the moon to the forest toward the mountains.

II

" It's from heaven," said Hina, turning the sweet potato round and round in her hand. She licked it. "It tastes and smells of heaven."

"Whatever it is," said Kaniamoko, " I will not eat any of it."

"Neither will 1," said Kahapouli. "It must be planted."

Hina squeezed sweet juices from the glowing wands of ginger blossoms beside the forest path, bathed her hands and face, and sat down on the cold ground beside her water-calabash to eat the strange fruit. " Oh, eat with me!" she said. "Please. Lono has watched us all night from the clouds above Kauiki, watched us with our burden of hair, spittle and excrement, and he has taken pity on us. More than once he has moved his giant body from the path of the moon. He knows we are tired and hungry, and he has kicked down this fruit."

"No," said Kaniamoko. Kahapouli was silent. Neither would sit down with Hina.

"All of you weary me!" said Hina. "Just when the smell of my children stops choking me, you choke me with your stolid faces and I am nauseated again. You bespoil my life. None of you are any good."

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"We do not bespoil your life," said Kaniamoko.

"I would eat with you," said Kahapouli, "but the fruit of heaven is not for us alone, but for all. It is for your children, Puna and Hema, and for your husband Aikanaka and his people as well."

"Ah, Aikanaka," said Hina bitterly. "He eats men, or so I was misled by his name when I came from Kahiki. He eats poi and fish and seaweed .... " Kaniamoko sat down beside Hina. "I did not know you felt this way. Aikanaka is a good man and a kind ruler."

"I am weary, weary!"

Kahapouli wept. "You are our chiefess."

"Ah! Ah!" Kaniamoko and Kahapouli fell silent. Hina bit into the sweet potato. It made a crisp sound, and Kaniamoko and Kahapouli watched their Hina.

"If the children weary you, if their messes bespoil your life," said Kaniamoko, "then let me take Puna, and I will raise him, and Kaha can take Hema. We will raise them, and follow your husband's kapu on their hair, spittle and excrement, and you will be free to beat your kapa or do whatever you like."

"Oh, leave me!" Hina said. "If you don't, I will die!" She bit again into the sweet potato from the moon.

Kaniamoko stood, and her shadow fell across Hina's back.

"Come, Kaha. Let us go."

"Oh, come with us, Hina," said Kahapouli, crying again.

Hina gnawed at her sweet potato.

As the two women turned to leave, a moon-rainbow began forming on the forest path. It reached upward toward the blurring moon and disappeared. The rainbow formed again, a half of a rainbow, extending from the clearing to the sky above Kauiki Hill.

III Glimpsing the disturbing arch, Aikanaka halted. " We are near the place," he said. "I saw it fall . .. on this side of Ulaino."

The two men were startled by the sound of women crying.

They began running, dodging branches and trees. The rainbow grew more brilliant, and the forest lighter. Breaking into the bright clearing, they found the two women, Kaniamoko and Kahapouli, at the foot of the rainbow. Their cries echoed through the forest, as Lono grumbled in the clouds over Kauiki.

"0 Aikanaka!" said Kaniamoko, rising. " Hina has gone up the

40

rainbow. " Over her finger, the two men saw the chiefess, bathed in the colors of the rainbow, fighting her way closer and closer to the moon. There was a storm at the top of the rainbow. " 0 Hina," said Aikanaka, "my strange woman from Kahiki! Return, 0 Hina, my beloved!"

Kahapouli wailed loudly.

"Why has she left me?" Aikanaka asked Kaniamoko. "What have I done? Tell me."

"She's gone to get more of what fell from the moon," said Kaniamoko. " What?" " She ate it," wailed Kahapouli. "She ate the fruit from heaven." " 0 Hina!" Aikanaka cried. " Have I not drunk deeply from your gourd water sweeter than the water of Kane! Night after night, have I not emptied you, and have you not filled me with rich sweetness and warmth. and together have we not slept through the rooster's crow? Deeply, I have drunk of you, till no other woman can slake my thirst." " You are a good chief," said the priest. " Your lands grow fat. The people love you." " But then, why did she so selfishly eat the fruit of heaven?" said Aikanaka. " Had she brought it to me and had we planted it, they'd be happier still. Why does she leave her children?"

The priest was silent. " I will go after her and be with her."

"0 Aikanaka," said the priest. "I have prayed at the temple.

You must protect your lands, your children. From one will come a line of kings. Disassociate yourself from all who break the laws of the land-and of the gods."

Kahapouli wailed. " Look," she said. " The storm has turned her back."

IV Slowly, enfolded in the colors of the rainbow, her hair wild and green, Hina descended clutching desperately her last bit of sweet potato. Not only was her hair green, but her eyes sunken, depleted. She was another person. " Hina ... beloved ... ," said Aikanaka.

Hina stopped. Except for her eyes, her face shone in the moon 's light.

"Return, 0 Hina my beloved," said Aikanaka, "that I may again drink from your gourd."

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"My gourd is dry," said Hina. " If I return to you now, you will go unnourished. Leave me alone." She brushed green hair away from her face. "It storms near the moon," she said. "I am battered and beaten. I must ascend higher . .. ."

"Return then," said Aikanaka, "to your children. Beloved Hina, Lono blesses and watches you and all women who have kapus to observe." " 0 fierce and wise Aikanaka!" Hina laughed. " -Man-eater.

Lono knows that my children befoul the world, and he calls me."

Aikanaka faltered. " Why, Hina, have you betrayed us?" " Ah, I am weary. I must have more," she said, looking up at the moon, unclenching her fist. " It is in my teeth and in my body." She found the last bit of sweet potato in her hand and a te it. " Oh, Hina," said Aikanaka, bitterly anguished. " I see now that I shall never again drink from your gourd. Your sweet g ourd is for me .. . befouled! " He leapt for his strange wife, enfolded in the colors of the rainbow. Catching her by the foot, he tried to hold her, to recognize in her veiled eyes the familiar woman of old, but she struggled and scratched and bit, and they rolled about in the colors. He would not let go of her foot, gripped in one strong hand, and she pulled and twisted desperately, until her ankle bone snapped and her flesh tore, and she fell free. Still gripping the foot in his hand, Aikanaka rolled off the rainbow and crashed into a clump of ginger plants.

Hina's hair was wilder, greener. Treading on foot and ankle, enriching the rainbow with her blood, she continued to toil upward. " 0 Hinal " cried Aikana ka. " I have crippled and maimed my beloved! " Looking up the bloody rainbow, he saw her, so small a t that great height, leap to the moon,

v Dropping the hot stone from the oven on the coconut and hala blossoms and the bits of sandalwood floating in Hina's old perfume-making calabash, Kaniamoko watched the mixture hiss and boil. Then, drying her hands on a band of kapa, she skirted Hina's black kapa board and returned to the shade of the tree where Kahapouli and several women sat rubbing spider eggs into the kapa sheet Hina had beaten on the day she went up the rainbow. Since then, the kapa had been dyed, and now it was being finished, waterproofed, with spider eggs.

Beyond the women, the priest stood talking to sad Aikanaka, who held three golden sweet potatoes in his hands. " The plant is

42

truly magical. The foot is gone, but in its place are these 'fruit.' " " Lono watches us well," said Aikanaka. " Lono-moku, the crippled Lono, watches us nightly, too. Now she beats her kapa on the moon and watches over all women who journey in the night."

A group of women and girls came by with more spider eggs in cups of banana leaf. They gave the cups to Kaniamoko and Kahapouli, who scattered the eggs on the sheet of kapa. Another group of women and girls came by with bamboo joints filled with the blood-red sap of the candlenut trees of the forest. They went into a hut and came out with a dried, perfumed sheet of kapa and bamboo brushes. "0 Ehu!" they prayed, in the shade beside Kaniamoko and Kahapouli. "First kapa-dyer! Guide our brushes!

Invest our dye with the sunset! With the color of the rainbow!"

Unable to watch or listen to the women anymore, Aikanaka left the priest abruptly and retired to his hut, that smelled faintly of his children.

43

Elizabeth Shinoda

THE OLD HOUSE Around the yard, the long straw roofs Shine black with sleep The silence landing in the open Mouths of seed pods.

A grey wood pile Of old houses or branches Of a salt cellar comes To an old grey mother.

Below the ground, as in houses, Mothers crawl among the earth grains Storing bundles of light and food.

In water ladled in leaves, a yard star Holds the hollows of winters Where the child returns.

A round face breathing wet brown leaves Turns, like a shepherd From his all day place And the yard shapes itself Around the old house Going back to the earth.

44

Glenn Kimata

CELEBRATION Water reflects the ocean night pregnant with light Tiny crabs shed their shell and raise their fleshy claws While we sleep they protect the yoke of night Spiders watch from mountain shadows the moon burns their h air like dry grass

TO KIM: A POEM IN TWO PARTS Two village boys huddle in the shrubbery of night, Crinkling their noses they listen The chant envelopes the Ho'opa路a; Blooms like p etals of fire (Ants overtake the earth!) the boys run homeward shouting The dreamer stirs There is only beauty and perfection As when you came to me with parted lips Sharing the loneliness o f your affairs With a touch as cool as wind soughing through heavy stalks of cane It was your chant my love A chant which brought the Ki'owa'o rains down from Nu路u 路anu

45

Earl Cooper

AFTER GIVING UP FISHING FOR THE DAY

Water comes endlessly down the mountains. • The steep fields of snow are contracting, and in his cabin under the snow the trapper wakes, climbs from his furs, his blankets, and fires his rifle into the log beams of his ceiling just to make sure the air around him is still alive.

Under the mountains in the flat meadowland I'm standing on the riverbank knee-deep in water, the cold of the stream tugging at my hip-boots.

All around me the spring run-off flows over the fields of small flowers, flows clean and crisp as mint over the beaver slips, over the fine yellow flowers.

When I cup my hand into the stream and bring it up to my face, the water is so clear, so full of light the lines of my hand are shining.

46

Clinton Yuen

HIGH AND QUIET Wake suddenly from a nap.

Journey to the highest floor.

Below lies the black quarry.

The blinking of reflectors.

Or maybe I rubbed my eyes too hard.

And gazing out to a jungle of lights.

Me alone, no one knows I'm here.

And even if they did, they couldn't hear my thoughts.

Imprint of a photo only traces to be forgotten and to claim they hadn't existed.

The world of technology.

I could only vision the aircraft's pulsating light as a machine gun in rapid fire.

Only to imagine flashes in the city too far to be heard.

Street lamps like photo pans reflecting the white moonlight.

Knowing that somewhere out there a baby is born.

Lovers struggle to be won.

An old one sleeps.

Two people meet.

And a bar closes down.

The pond is quiet the guests are at rest.

47

Alan S. Fujimoto

FLAKES OF SNOW

"No!" Kazuyo shouted. "If you come any closer, I'll bite off my tongue and die."

Baffled by the effrontery, the young man stood with his lips parted. His spotless clothes and neatly combed hair were, at such moments, nothing but dull ornaments on a lifeless body.

The woman in front of him should have been at his mercy, but in the midst of the turmoil she was adamantly defying him. He could not imagine she would really bite off her tongue, but his fee~ as if ice, would carry him no closer.

Kazuyo was sprawled on the dirt floor with her exquisitely patterned Yuzen kimono torn to rags. Her obi was twisted around her like a powerful snake about to strangle her. Through the torn layers of cloth, small streaks of blood sparkled on her delicate skin.

The young man's gaze was set firmly on the dark eyes of the woman lying in front of him. A flame, quiet yet intense as the sun, seemed to burn there, throwing out a desperate heat. A chill ran through his own body, and he quickly turned his eyes away from hers. It was only then that he noticed the small nipple of her right breast protruding shy and lustrous as the rising sun, stubbornly refuting the sleeping world. It seemed as if her secret strength was crystallized in that one spot, on the tip of her gently sloping breast, rising palely from the dark hollow below. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and the nipple seemed to float there like a red buoy in the rough waves of a storm.

The young man was aware of his heart pounding as a force within him urged him to grasp the breast, to tear away her defiance-the buoy that marked the extreme limit of her strength. To make her completely and undeniably his own.

When he leaped on the dazed woman, it was more from a beastly intuition than any rationally conceived action, and his

48

clumsy left hand groped fiercely for the breast that she tried to protect with her hands that seemed as heavy as lead.

The woman gave a piercing scream, but her cry did not ward off the excit~d man fumbling over her body. ln an act of desperation, Kazuyo slid her dry tongue between her shaking teeth. A teardrop trickled down her soft frosty cheek. Then she gnashed her teeth together as a rush of infinite strength streamed through her body.

The sensation that followed was not one of an agonizing pain but a swelling dizziness that seemed to rapidly consume her consciousness. Blood filled her mouth, and she spat out the overflowing blood along with the tiny piece of tongue she had severed at the man who was engrossed in the sweet sensations of her unyielding body.

His face was suddenly drenched with a warm, thick fluid, and when he realized that it was her blood, he pulled away in horror. The woman's face seemed to glow with an invincible tenacity. Blood was spurting out of her mouth like a waterfall.

Her skin and kimono were soon soaked scarlet. Her cheek took on a deathly pallor as her fiery energy drained away. She was overwhelmed by a pain that diffused through every corner of her body. The intense lancination defied expression. Although she wanted to scream, her voice had forsaken her. Her tears had also run dry.

She began to think the pain was really pure joy that one could only experience at the supreme moment of intolerable suffering, but her life was draining away rapidly. She tried to convince herself that to expect any joy beyond this was impossible. She longed for instant death. But at that moment, she felt the pain sharply focusing on her right arm around her elbow. It stung her like millions of tiny needles piercing her flesh . The joy was drifting into oblivion, and she was unable to grasp it firmly. The pain momentarily enveloped her in a mist of indescribable gloom. *

" Are you all right?"

The voice seemed refreshingly warm and friendly, but the shock of discovering a youthful man gazing at her as she awoke intimidated Kazuyo, and she drew her head away timidly. ''I'm sorry if I frightened you, but you seemed as if you were in pain."

The young man spoke rapidly, and Kazuyo, who was not particularly fluent in English, could only make out the general drift of his words. The youth seemed to be in his mid-twenties,

49

and his Caucasian face glowed with hospitality. His hazy-blue eyes sparkled sympathetically under dark, masculine lashes, and, deep-set as they were, they seemed to cast an aura of imposing dignity. His sharp nose glowed rosily in the cold, and his cheeks were tinted in a healthy pink. His mouth was small, and his thin lips fluttered delicately as he talked. His hair was cut short and trimmed neatly. He wore a light-brown woolen coat that resembled a pea-jacket, but its styling was distinctly fashionable.

As her fear slowly subsided, Kazuyo became aware of a deep pain in her right arm. She thought that the world of the nightmarish dream had, like the waters of a flooding river, spilled over into her waking reality. Or was she once again dragged back into her dream? Her eyes wide open in trepidation, she scanned her surroundings as she lay on the cold ground to look for anything that would confirm her existence-the simple fact that she was alive.

Her expensive kimono felt intact as she had clearly remembered wearing it-had it been the day before?-at her house in suburban Tokyo. Her solicitous parents had rushed her, fearing that she would miss the important flight. Her tongue was unharmed, and there was no blood to be seen anywhere. A young man sat in front of her, but his gentleness was quite apparent. The snow that fell silently on the shining white ground outside and the huge mushrooming clouds she could see in the distance were all absent in her dream. She concluded to herself that she was definitely alive-and awake. But the pain in her right arm would not go away. " I .. . I must have .. . broken my arm." She spoke falteringly as she indicated her right arm with a slight nod of her head.

* Kazuyo Yuki, who had turned twenty-two in January, was on her way to her paternal grandmother's residence in the outskirts of Sapporo when the accident occurred. Kazuyo was to have reported to her grandmother her recent engagement to the promising son of a family with close ties to the Imperial household. To the Yuki family, such an opportunity was a divine intervention by the heavenly gods. Their family fortunes had been on the decline since the end of the war, and the establishment of relations with the financially sturdy Kaneshiros was thought to help them re-establish their own fortunes to those of the pre-war days.

Kazuyo's grandmother had foreseen the decline of her son's estate, and when her husband died shortly after the war, she

50

had retreated to the snowy remoteness of the northernmost island of Hokkaido. She had despised her son's frivolous ways and had requested to have his only daughter brought up under the auspices of her own careful eyes. Although her request had been bluntly turned down, she had at least found solace in the fact that Kazuyo had grown to embody the perfect ideal of the Japanese tradition of an elegant courtly woman.

So it was natural that she would be overjoyed to learn that Kazuyo had found a match in the noble ranks of the enviable Imperial household. Actually, Kazuyo's grandmother had already been notified through a letter of the formal arrangements of the engagement and the proceedings that led to it, but tradition decreed that the Yukis personally arrange to visit her in due time to report the engagement. There were few families left in Japan that adhered to these traditions, but the Yukis were ardent followers of the old ways, at least in style.

Normally, Kazuyo's parents should have accompanied her on the trip, but her father excused himself on grounds of his recent ill health. Her mother was simply not disposed to the long trip by jet and excused herself accordingly. Besides, Kazuyo was the only one on particularly good terms with the old lady.

Kazuyo boarded the All Nippon Airways 727 in the early evening of February 9, 1970. The day had been a stormy one at sea, and reports indicated that flights over the normal Pacific Ocean routes along the eastern seaboard of Honshu would be precarious. The flight controllers were reluctant to reroute the flights over the Japan Alps because of the possibility of dangerous winter currents over the mountains. They were at first inclined to cancel all the flights for the day. But the Sapporo Snow Festival was in its last few days, and the flights to the northern city were solidly booked. After some deliberation, they finally decided to send all the scheduled flights by way of the inland route.

Three flights had already left for Sapporo, and Kazuyo's was the last flight of the day. * " Does it hurt?" the youth asked, narrowing his eyes with seeming concern. He thought that the slightly grimacing face of the young woman made her seem sorely attractive. Her beauty, which easily surpassed the beauty of any Japanese woman he had seen or could imagine, seemed, in her pain, to force out a glowing radiance. Her soft white skin refused to be smudged in wrinkles even in its painful contortions and held a warm distinc-

51

tion that seemed to him proudly arrogant.

She wanted to say yes and would have done so had he been a Japanese, but she only nodded her head slightly as if to say, " Just a little."

The young man smiled to say that he understood. " I don't know. If it's really broken, I should get you some kind of a cast so you won't have to strain it when you move," the youth rattled off quickly but gently. " But this situation really isn't the best to be in when you have to be taken care of, you know."

Kazuyo could tell by his delicate facial expressions and his tone of voice that the message was not very encouraging. She nodded her head slightly as if she understood perfectly. The manner of his speech led her to think that he was quite dependable. But the vivid memory of her dream still lingered in her mind like the ripples on the surface of a pond disturbed by a single pebble, and she resolved to be cautious about his approaches.

But what if he were to jump on her without warning? What could she do? In the snowy desolation, she was all alone with a young and vigorous man. She could cry for help, but only bodies lay scattered in the snow. What good were dead ears?

Her cry would only be absorbed by the snow and be buried beneath its cold veil. With her broken arm, any attempt at resistance would be doomed. Then would she not have to bite off her tongue as she did in her dream? How else could she preserve her honor? " I'll see if I can get you something. While I'm at it, I might as well try to scrounge up something to eat. I'm not about to start chewing on this thing."

As he rose, he placed a Japanese magazine by Kazuyo's side.

She slowly leaned over to take a look at it and realized for the first time the heavy weight of the thick, black coat that had been placed over her. Noticing that it was torn and soiled, she looked up at him with inquiring eyes. " Oh, I took that off a dead lady hanging on a seat. I figured she wouldn't need it. This one I'm wearing is from a guy near her. They were the best I could find. I thought you wouldn't want to die of pneumonia before the search party got here. If they do, that is. Since there's no way we can build a fire, we've got to stay warm somehow."

Kazuyo was appalled that the man could be so indifferent about the sanctity of the dead, but she was more uneasy with the fact that she was being kept warm by a coat belonging to a

52

dead woman. She grimaced as she fumbled around with the coat. " Oh, come on now. A coat is a coat, and you're not going to die just because you're wearing one that belongs to a dead woman," the youth said firmly. "Besides, that's really nothing.

This snow and wind don't seem to be letting up so we mig ht be stranded here a couple of days. If we can't find anything to eat, we might end up eating that lady to stay alive."

The thought pierced a sensitive spot in Kazuyo. " Isn't anyone else alive?" she asked uneasily.

The youth, who was about to step out into the snow, turned around. "Not that I know of. I'll try the cabin where I found the coats. That's the only place besides here that anyone could have stayed alive overnight, I think. I was so preoccupied with getting these coats that I didn't recognize anything else last night."

Then he stepped into the brightness outside the crude shelter. * With the man gone, Kazuyo felt a growing sense of relief.

She breathed in the cold, dry air. As she slowly exhaled, she w atched the frosty haze disappear into the darkness of the shelter. Although Kazuyo never smoked, she felt like an elegant lady in a European film puffing on a fragrantly rich cigarette.

Then she abruptly stopped. The white vapors reminded her of the thick mass of clouds that the jet had been penetrating moments before the crash.

The accident h ad occurred at night. But the dazzling whiteness of the clouds shimmering past the window . remained clearly etched in Kazuyo's mind. It was almost as if the plane had been flying in the heavens all that time, eternally apart from the world below.

It was a turbulent flight. The stewardesses were having a rough time trying to keep the tea they were serving from spilling, but they attended to their tasks nonchalantly as if the plane was flying smoothly. Whenever an air current jolted some tea out from the cups onto the serving trays, they smiled apologetically as if it was their own mistake.

Kazuyo was dressed in a formal kimono that her parents had ordered from Kyoto especially for the occasion. The pattern on the white wisteria color of the cloth was of a red peacock with a sloping tail flying over a small bamboo grove. Her scarlet Nagoya obi wrapped around her waist subtly accentuated her gentle breasts and radiated a freshness like the waters of a spring in a winter snowland.

53

Hardly anyone else was dressed in a kimono. Most of the women passengers were clad in fashionable Western dresses or comfortable pant suits. Although all the passengers had been wearing heavy winter coats at the airport terminal, in the heated comfort of the passengers' cabin, they had discarded them and placed them on their laps as blankets or put them away in the luggage compartment.

The passengers were all aware that the day's weather had been rough, but they seemed to be under the illusion that the high skies were a region totally separate from the stormy world below. That illusion was shattered shortly after the plane took to the air. The plane shook and fidgeted. It would suddenly be shaken like a bus running at full speed over an unexpected bump in the road. Soon the shaking became routine, and the passengers' reactions were subsiding when the pilot's anannouncement came on.

Kazuyo, who was engrossed in the passing clouds outside her window, picked up only snatches of his speech: " ... your pilot, Shinoda . . . shut off one engine ... right of tail wing ... blizzard . .. not operational . .. other two engines ... flight capacity .. . delay in arrival .. ."

The pilot's words telling them that one of the engines had stopped made the passengers exchange glances.

Those passengers on the right side of the plane looked out their windows into the dark toward the rear of the plane where the dead engine was located. There was no way they could tell simply by looking at it that the engine was dead, but the pilot's words had placed a deadly veil on the bulky mechanism. On the other hand, passengers on the left saw the luminous and vigorous engine that was carrying them to their destination.

But when they looked back into the cabin, all they could see were weary faces.

Moments later, a strong wind from the east coupled with the unbalanced power to one side had veered the aircraft into the direction of the peaks of the Japan Alps. The sound of the speaker system being turned on was heard, but all that came through it were jumbled phrases of the crew in the cockpit.

The passengers started shouting at no one in particular. The stewardesses tried in vain to calm them. A small girl started crying. Women began to scream. Even some men cried out. In the next instant, the plane shook violently. That was all Kazuyo could remember. * The aircraft plunged down wildly like a suddenly incapaci-

54

tated bird and crashed into the range. of snow-clad mountains.

It touched on a huge plateau and was shattered to pieces. The nose and the front section were annihilated on impact, and the debris was scattered upon the snowland destroying the perfect symmetry of the smooth contours. The engine section on the tail hit the rocky edges of the plateau and disintegrated in a sudden explosion that sent a surge of black smoke rising into the dark night. A large section of the central cabin remained intact and skidded across a good length of the plateau through the settling fragments of the shattered aircraft. As it came to a halt, it seemed like a battered tin can roughly discarded on the icy snow. Inside, the seats were uprooted and thrust forward with many of the passengers fastened to them by their seat belts.

The right wing was torn to pieces and added to the debris. A large section of the left wing had broken off from the body and had settled by a boulder bordering the plateau. It lay obliquely against the rocky protrusion to form a huge awkward tent of silvery metal. Kazuyo had been thrown into the air and had landed under the wing on the dry dirt beneath the boulder.

The man had been thrown directly into the deep snow. He remained conscious long enough to trudge his way through the snow and fall into the shelter.

In the dark hours of the early morning he was awakened by the piercing cold and got up. It was only then that he noticed the young kimono-clad woman breathing silently beside him on the dirt. Then as the cold became unbearable, he ventured out into the dark to look for something to keep him warm.

He found coats for him and the young woman to use as blankets, and when he returned to the shelter where the woman slept, he placed the thicker coat over her. He tried to get some sleep again, but he lay awake until dawn.

Although the broken wing sheltered him from the snow that continued to fall, some snow had already piled up under the cover across an area bordering the dirt section where he lay.

The dirt was damp and sent chills through his body as he slowly sat up and stretched his arms. At that moment, he was hit by a gust of wind that carried in particles of snow, which melted on his flushed cheeks. He put on the coat that he had been using as a blanket and rolled himself into a ball.

The woman had not moved. The darkness of the night was gone, but the sun was invisible behind the mass of clouds. It was almost as if the particles of snow themselves lighted the area. He thought that he should go out to survey the circumstances of the accident, but he wanted to stay in the shelter. He

55

decided to wait until the girl woke.

He noticed a magazine lying near the edge of the snow. It was a Japanese ladies' weekly. Some pages were soiled and torn, but he carefully thumbed through it with his hands that were numb from the cold. Since he could not read the language, he quickly flipped over the pages laden with masses of characters.

When he came to the pictures, he studied them, guessing at the captions underneath. He was momentarily stunned when he came across nude pictures of a young girl. From the " 12" that he noticed in the titles, he guessed that she was twelve years old. Her features had not yet matured, but her body showed the makings of an attractive woman. She posed in vari,ous postures, and each picture captured her in a mood of eagerness and vivacity typical of youth. But why would she want to expose her immature body to the public, he thought ...

He heard the woman beside him cry out, and he turned around. She had awakened.

•

He felt sick as he looked through the debris of the annihilated aircraft cabin in the light of the day. During the night he had not realized the ugliness of the dead bodies scattered within the torn cabin.

The body of a middle-aged man was sandwiched between some seats with his stiff, pale hands hanging at his side like icicles. His disfigured face was turned towards the aisle, and the sight of the lightly smashed head was nauseating. His eyes were wide open and seemed ready to fall out at the slightest provocation. His skin was deadly white, and its coldness could be sensed intensely from a distance.

As he walked the short length of the cabin, he could not help shaking his head in utter disbelief. The lifeless bodies which would have been traversing the grounds of the Snow Festival, viewing the marvelous statues, were, themselves, cold solid casts of lifeless matter.

He had said to the woman that they would have to be eating human flesh if worst came to worst. But the sight of the bodies sickened him.

He passed the lady and the young man from whom he had taken the coats the other night. He did not look at their faces.

The aisle was scattered with personal belongings of the passengers and bits of shattered glass and metal. A woman was lying face up. It was a stewardess in her dark blue uniform.

Her hat had blown away somewhere and her stiff hair was ruffled into a wild conflagration like a bush uprooted in a

56

typhoon. She was not extremely beautiful. but her dead face was charmingly attractive. He thought she resembled the girl he had seen earlier in the magazine. Could she be the girl in the pictures suddenly matured into a woman? He looked at her breasts. Under the tight uniform were two rounded mounds of human flesh. A tender warmness seemed to flow from her body.

Getting down on his knees, he slowly started to unbutton the suit. The bulge was more clearly visible under her white blouse.

He unbuttoned the blouse and tore apart the undergarments.

He reached for the bare breasts. But the cold flesh brought him back to his senses, and he pulled away his trembling hands. He wondered why he had bothered with dead matter.

He thought about the young woman back in the shelter awaiting his return. She was at least alive, and, with her broken arm, she could only depend on him. The thought eased his mind, and he placed a thin smile on his lips. * With the heavy coat over the layers of her kimono, Kazuyo did not feel the cold too severely. She sat huddled by the bare boulder, partially hidden from the fierce wind that occasionally penetrated the shelter, rattling the broken wing. Her arm still ached, and the pain disturbed her reading with sporadic bursts of stinging twitches.

She had come across an article on the Snow Festival which she scanned inattentively. " ... numerous organizations .. . conglomerates and banks providing financial assistance .. .

Self-Defense Forces ... manpower . .. manpower ... gigantic snow figures . . . recent warm spell .. . lack of snow ... solved by trucking in snow from the mountains in the vicinity of the city ... " If the festival was held here, there would be no problem of snow. Kazuyo thought as she glanced outside for a moment. " . .. with statues of Momotaro, the Peach Boy, sailing away to fight the evil demons to a giant replica of the Zero fighter plane ... " She hesitated to go on further. It only brought back memories of her happy childhood.

The pictures of the city where she would have been had the plane made it safely to its destination floated into her mind and heightened her sense of desolation. She was in a lost world with the acrid smell of death pervading the cold air.

She put down the magazine and looked out from under her canopy. Through the swirling snow, she could see low peaks nearby. The mountains seemed to rise out of the snow like

57

ragged islands in ~he gray sky. She thought that she must be stranded fairly high. She wondered if a helicopter could make it so far up.

The mushrooming clouds she had seen earlier in the distance had diffused into small balls that enveloped the mountains like cotton wrapped loosely around them. The sky was dark, but the snow radiated a light that illuminated the landscape in a serene shade of white. The cabin into which the man had gone was hidden from her sight.

The splendor of the white world fascinated Kazuyo. For all of its deadliness, there seemed to be a pristine beauty about the place. She realized for the first time how beauty had such a trying affinity with death.

Would she be covered by the ceaseless snow and be buried under its icy blanket, her youthful beauty to be preserved forever? She wondered about such things. She imagined her icy grave being dug up to reveal her body that had lain there for years unchanged. She thought then that she would become a holy relic of ageless beauty and be praised by all women.

Unless some miracle were to take place, she was convinced, she would die here. It was simply unimaginable for her to subsist on human flesh if no food could be found.

Death, which had been a remote thing to Kazuyo, was becoming an intrinsic part of her, and she was frightened by that thought.

Her arm continued to pain her, but she was also beginning to feel pangs of hunger. The man was taking so long that she was becoming apprehensive with the passing minutes. Possibly, there was no food to be found. She could quench her thirst by taking a handful of the cold snow into her mouth. But that would not satisfy her hunger.

"What a wretched way to die," Kazuyo thought.

She knew that her funeral would be quite an event if it were to take place now. Her being betrothed to a close relation of the Imperial family was enough to create a furor in public circles if she were to die as the result of such a tragic accident. * The young man finally returned, panting and short of breath.

"Dead ... all dead . . . It's really a miracle that you're alive. We'll just have to make the best of the situation, I guess."

As he sat down, holding on to some coats with one arm, he placed two tangerines and a small package of rice crackers on the damp ground in front of Kazuyo.

"That's all I could find. And some more coats ... In this bliz-

58

zard, they won't be able to get here for a while. But the wind seems to be getting weaker so they might make it tomorrow .. . maybe."

The pessimistic tone of his voice startled Kazuyo at first, but the word " tomorrow" somewhat brightened her outlook. She picked up one of the tangerines and started peeling its tough, juicy skin. " Death be not proud .. . death thou shalt die ... ," the youth mumbled to himself. He looked at Kazuyo intently as she worked slowly on her tangerine. Her injured arm seemed to be bothering her.

Suddenly, a sharp excruciating pain from Kazuyo's arm flowed through her body with lightning ferocity. She reached at her arm as her face twisted, and she looked up at the man with beseeching eyes. " Are you okay?" the youth asked. "Lie down," he continued in a composed voice. "Here. Use this coat as a sheet."

He took the tangerine from her hand and laid a rose-red coat next to her. Then he slowly adjusted her onto the thin bed as she yielded to him. " Take it easy. You may feel more comfortable if you loosen your kimono."

Kazuyo gave no reply. The young man turned her gently onto her left side and thrust his hand beneath her coat to her back. He groped around for the knot of the obi.

He did not know how to unfasten an obi. The tightly bound bow at the back resisted all his efforts. Under her kimono he could feel a tense resistance. He groped fiercely. Then, suddenly the clip fell away, and the obi uncoiled in a low rustle of silk as it darted away from her body like a snake provoked out of its sleep.

In a confused series of movements, he tore at the layers of cloth that bound her weary, fragile body. Underneath them he could feel the rapidly beating heart of the woman almost in perfect rhythm to his own pulsations.

The layers of cloth were held together by straps that tightened as others loosened and fell away. Then, finally , he saw the glimpse of last white triangle beneath her flushed neck that gave way to a rich and fragrant expanse of skin.

The wind began to whistle violently, lifting the snow into a frenzy.Kazuyo lay silently with her eyes tightly closed. She did not resist.

59

Russell Edson

STRANGE PEOPLE IN SPACE/A MEDITATION

There was once a world tha t men are coming to, where the people have two little mouths instead of eyes. When they smile one sees that they are cyclops. What they have to say is spokesung in two part harmony, as they watch you with their mouths.

They are different from us. But then, we are different from them.

And though we are billions of miles from their planet, they are just as far from our's.

At a certain point in time, within a million or so years, they are very like us, and we like them, except for our eye and mouth locations.

When we build our space ship and get to them, or they to us, so much time has passed that they have evolved out of the animal state, finding it too much bother, and have become trees ... We too probably have changed places with seaweed, which has become muscular, walking on two stout leaves, balancing a large seed pod full of nervous tissue; some of its leaves prehensile with opposable parts . .. As we waver, like green chandeliers, in the oceans ...

We never meet these strange people, who would think us strange, yet, they are out there someplace, evolving away from our coincidence, as we from their's ...

60

Howard Allan Norman

RETURN TO A FRIEND I float on my turtle plank.

The thief bird flies over, saying he's been to my hut.

I'll let that trouble me later.

Now, I'll sleep in the sun.

I'll think of my good stick broom; when I return home it will be standing in a c o rner, poor wood friend. ''I've waited. I've swept your floor," it will say. " I w a s a lone all day a t sea," I'll answer.

61

Howard Allan Norman

THIRST SONG There was a slow donkey day. Oh, the boy went to the water bird to beg a drink.

"Just one feather of your good water, please?" he said. But the water bird soaked into the earth.

It was a sad day.

The boy's heart donkeyed down to the sea.

THREE POOR I sit by the hollow shell the crab lives inside.

Oh crab, if you should grow thin in there how would I know?

My hut is empty too except for one weed flower and the ashes of my best goat.

But do you have even a hammock in there?

Last night the dwarf snail scratched for food under my hut. I've come to tell you he must ache in his hunger more slowly than even you.

Translat ed from the Creole, West Indies with PaulB Barton

62

William Stafford

TRYING TO BECOME A CONFESSIONAL POET Out from shore they stretch nets for the sharks: other fish escape, but the sharks-fierce and aggressive-get tangled and are killed by the hundreds.

In the great streamers past your face no one can hurt or save you: yourself, you hurl yourself and weave your own net hammering the world with your head.

Walking along the beach, you notice big waves. They are respected, yes, but often a land-bound guess breaks loose: Fish! Fish!-those big waves, you didn't make them.

63

NOTES ROBERT BLY has published some of his versions from Kabir in a beautiful collection done by Lillabulero Press. The two here are recent; he is also working on translations from the Persian mystical poet, Rumi. Kabir, a 15th Century Indian, " was the son of a Moslem weaver in Benares, but his spiritual growth was influenced by Sufi poets and the ideas of the Hindus." Recent books by Mr. Bly include Sleepers Joining Hands (Harper and Row . 1973), and a collection of prose poems called Point Reyes Poems (Mudra, 1974).

EARL COOPER lived in Taiwan for two years before completing graduate work as an East-West Center grantee at UH . He teaches Chinese at Leeward Community College, and is also developing a poetry curriculum for the Hawaii public school system.

RUSSELL EDSON received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year. His latest books are The Childhood of an Equestrian (Harper and Row), and the Clam Theater (Wesleyan University Press).

DAVID EVANS has lived in Cuba and the eastern United States, now lives in Haaula. A UH graduate, he was poetry co-editor along with the Shadow Woman for issue #1 of Hawaii Review.

SIV CEDERING FOX has two books from New Rivers Press due before Christmas: Letters from Helge (a collection of prose poems), and Translations of Poems

by Gosta Friberg and Goran Palm. The poems in this issue are from a work in progress, Letters to Zakarias.

ALAN S . FUJIMOTO, born in Sasebo, Japan, grew up in Yokohama where he attended American schools. He came to Hawaii three years ago with his brother. and is an undergraduate at UH. MICHELLE IMA T A has lived in Manoa all of her life. A senior at UH. she works as a researcher for the Hawaii State Legislature .

GLENN KIMATA is a recent graduate of UH. He has just begun to teach with Poets-in -the-Schools.

ROBERT LAMANSKY, a graduate student at UH, is half Okinawan and half Polish. Raised in Kaneohe, he lives now in Honolulu where he is putting together the third and fourth issues of Tanta lus, a magazine he founded a year ago in order to publish work from writers in Hawaii as well as elsewhere. He also pla ns to bring out chapbooks by local writers. Manuscripts are. welcomed at Tantalus Press, P.O. Box 29331, Honolulu, Hawaii 96820.

JOHN LOGAN this year won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He is featured in the current American Poetry Review. He teaches at SUNY Buffalo, and will be at the University of Hawaii this spring as visiting professor. His latest book of poems is The Anonymous Lover (Liveright, 1973); The House that Jack Built a collection of prose reminiscences from early childhood is out this winter from Abbetoire Editions, University of Nebraska at Omaha. "Poem for my Brother" first appeared in Ironwood.

IAN MACMILLAN has published short fiction in Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, December and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at UH. MARl NAKAMURA is small, gentle. mysterious and seems to glisten-like a turtle. She was born in Tokyo, came to Hawaii when she was three and grew up in Hilo. This fall she took a train across Canada on her way to enter the graduate writing program at Boston University.

CHERYL NITTA (whose last name means " new land," or " garden" ) was bo rn on Girl's Day, March 3, 1953 in Honolulu. She is a senior at UH. HOWARD ALLAN NORMAN for several years collaborated with the West Indian Paule Bart6n on translations from Creole oral poetry. Last June he wrote, " The sad news is of the death of Paule Bart6n, at age 58 in Costa Rica. This news arrived only 2 hours before I was to leave for the Caribbean & later meet with the Bart6n family in Jamaica. Needless to say, this threw me off balance in the heart." The translations in this issue are some of the last the two worked on together.

ELIZABETH SHINODA was born in New York. has ties to the Pacific Northwest as well as to Hawaii. She has worked in an advertising agency, spends time lately collecting puka shells, and is a sometime student at UH. WILLIAM STAFFORD's most recent of four Harper and Row collections is Someday, Maybe.

DEBRA THOMAS grew up in Palolo and Manoa, has studied at the University of Guadalajara, and is a sophomore at UH. She is 19, of Okinawan, French, German, English, Scottish and Irish ancestry. These are her first published poems.

LOWELL UDA's retellings have appeared in Transpacific and the previous issue of Hawaii Review. He teaches at the University of Montana.

DAVID WILD, a UH graduate, is a jazz pianist living in Ann Arbor. One of his current projects is the transcription and annotation of saxophone solos.

CLINTON YUEN, a business administration student at UH, grew up in Waipahu.

He has lived, with his family, in Wisconsin and Japan for brief periods.

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