Hawaiʻi Review Number 21: 1987

Spring 1987

Number21

Cover photograph courtesy of The Hawaii Theatre.

"In the Garden Late in the Day." ©Patricia Eakins , 1988.

"One Day;' pen and ink drawing, © Faye Kicknosway, 1983 (Grey Wolf Press, 1983).

"Monastery," "Winter Eel," and "Wood Butcher" are from Norman Hindley's

Winter Eel (Petronium Press, 1984), © Norman Hindley, 1984.

Sophia Hindley's "At Aki's Mango Bar," pencil on matboard, was first published in Literary Arts Hawazi (Spring 1987), © Sophia Hindley, 1987.

Hawaii Review is a semi-annual publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are solely responsible for its content. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Hawati Review, Department of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. The editors invite submissions of art, drama, fiction, interviews, poetry, translations, reviews and literary essays. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subscription rates: one year (two issues), $6.00; single copies, $4.00 . Advertising rates are available upon request.

Hawaii Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is indexed by the American Humanities Index and by the Index ofAmencan Periodzeal Verse. © 1988 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. ISSN: 0093-9625.

Staff for this Issue Jeannie Thompson Margaret Russo Barbara Gearen Zdenek Kluzak Nancy Castle and Shirley Lee

Editor in Chief Managing Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Reviews and Essays Editors

Faculty Readers: Faye Kicknosway John Rieder Robert Shapard

CONTENTS

FICTION COLORS IN THE GARDEN LATE IN THE DAY PAINTING THE PIECES MYOL' MAN MOTHER DIVORCED BY THE DEVIL POETRY THREE POEMS A SHIP LIKE A WOMAN ISLAND UNTIL SUDDENLY ALONE IN MARRIAGE THE LAST YEAR CHRISTMAS EVE WINTER FIELDS: GETTING THROUGH YEARS OF BUZZARDS HITCHING TWO POEMS RAIN-IN-THE-FACE NAINOA GOINGSNAKE STUDY FOR THE LEFT HAND ALONE LOUNGE LIZARD INJUNCTION ON THE THOUGHT EVEN AFTER HAVING BEEN UP FOR ONE AND ONE HALF DAY SOLILOQUY IN WAIKIKI GUNMAN TWO POEMS

7

Sylvia Watanabe

21 36 40 54 63

Patricia Eakins Brady T. Brady Allan lzen Leona Yamada Ursule Molinaro

1 4 6 18 19 20 31

Reuben Tam Richard Morris Dey Paulette Roeske Jim Daniels Alan Seaburg Sanora Babb Guy Rotella

32 33 34 38

Edward C. Lynskey John Grey Doug Turner Leona Yamada

42

Linda Relacion Oosahwe

43 44

Louis Phillips Joseph P. Balaz

47 48 )0 )1

James A. Miller Rob Wilson Jill Widner Lyn Lifshin

lV

72

Michael McPherson CarolAnn Russell Tracy Morisaki Joseph Stanton Dean Honma Barbara Gearen Norman Hindley

REVIEW CONFESSIONS FROM MOLOKAI: THE MALE IMAGINATION in NORMAN HINDLEY'S WINTER EEL

80

Rob Wilson

ESSAY READING LARKIN: ''SOMETHING ALMOST BEING SAID"

94

Angela Ball

PHOTOGRAPH JANUARY 1941

49

The Hawaii Theatre

62 71

Faye Kicknosway Sophia Hindley

TWO POEMS NEW HAVEN A CAT ON THE WALL PARROTS IN AIEA TWO POEMS COLLECTED LETtERS THREE POEMS

56 58 59 60 66 68

ART

ONE DAY AT AKI'S MANGO BAR NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

104

Day after day you are swirled into the sound of coral breathing and foam spilling, and your eyes are rounded to the myopia ofbutterflyfish rippled between algae and limpets.

Your reef has spun you into its matrix .

You circle with cowrie and urchin and the black crab, your perimeters the warm Waipouli eddies, uacks of eel and rings of shorestained flotsam .

You have memorized the vugs and juts of reef rock and the temperature of each tidal flow.

Long clouds stream overhead. They are not for you.

They bear climates for far vast places.

Last night in the orbit of October you heard the arctic plover singing the limitless sea.

And where continents slept beyond the oceanic night the horizon snapped, and far coasts flooded in to you.

1

CALLING OUT

Every morning the three bands of the sea, indigo, cobalt, viridian green , take their places, shining, opening another day to us, and the beach stones raise their faces to us, but I am not deceived .

I know we have been alone from the beginning, as on a raft, staring over water, watching for splashes, any sign .

Why do the creatures we call to hide from us?

How can we let them know we have needs like theirs, and the same sky, that we drink the same oxygen?

Perhaps the way we paddle water is unnatural , the shadows we cast too metallic , and our voices ludicrous, like our immense longings.

2

TO ANAHOLA MOUNTAIN

I have followed pueo the owl to its hover over the knoll from which you rise, and taken the trail of ridge bones left by the fire goddess after her feasts of long ago.

Through the thorns of lantana I see the pocked shadows of your ascent, bands of black cinder girdling your crags, and your ledges stacked in some toss of geology played before the birds came.

You are faced toward other mountainsMakaleha, Nonou , and giant Waialeale, stone acknowledging other kingdoms of stone, hurling spears of cloud and light in your own sky games.

I wait among your screes . I hear only the trickle of gravel you have dropped in your casual debt to gravity.

All I can ascenain of rock is the film of dust on my skin.

Nevertheless, where the tropicbird from the sea has strung its meridians of memory over your flanks, I have this afternoon left you my shadow, scattered among the cinders of your last lavas.

3

Richard Morris Dey A SHIP LIKE A WOMAN

This one arrived unexpectedly, some hybrid research vessel to judge by the gear she carried.

Where would she anchor, and for how long? There was rain in the east. Who was she?

I put down my book. It was hard to read her lines shimmering in the fierce bright glare.

She looked self-absorbed though, and had an air of high reserve about her, an unrooted contentment.

Steaming in across the wide bay, her wake was smooth as flesh .

When the squall, black and thick and blustery, struck, I lost sight of her behind its curtain of rain.

But it was then I felt the seas beneath her deck , and her deck beneath me ; the rise and fall was like breathing. I had sailed in her once, known her at least as well as I thought I knew myself. I stood up , grabbing the purpleheartwood rail: more years had gone by than the years we travelled together. For all that she looked uncompromised .

4

I saw the glazed clay tiles of the veranda steaming, breathed in an odor of flowers that was, in the squall's wake, fresh , disquieting: she'd meant more to me than any single ship has a right to mean-or so I'd always thought.

Before I took up my book again, I saw her swinging at anchor, all secure. Her flag stood out stiffly on the lifting breeze.

Where had she come from? And where was she going? Who was she?

Nothing betrayed that air of hers.

Paulette Roeske

ISLAND

A reef encircles it, separating the sea from reasonable waves near land . Here, they say, no shark can break through , but in California a newspaper photograph shows only the wetsuit, laid out like a corpse , right side gaping. The family lives with absence.

When we dive, I want my daughter to admire the fluted coral, to think of it as an arm around her waist. We drop over the edge. Quiet fins, cilia waving.

Hello.

We sprawl on the surface like uprooted ferns. Breath returns through the snorkel like a patient's safe in his hospital tent .

The water erupts beside me.

She jerks upright, her mask off, sputtering salt from her nose and mouth .

She tries to run , contradicting the waves' logic.

Out of the water, I see her ankles bleeding from the coral's explicit touch.

She holds herself, rocking like a small boat.

6

"Last night I dreamed," Little Grandma said, laying the blue volcano next to the red and yellow hula girls. "I dreamed I saw the hungry ghosts ,v.uu.J,,., home across the water. . . ."

Little Grandma was always having dreams. She said the spirits of our kin watched from the shrine on her bedroom bureau and spoke to her she was sleeping. She said they told her of sickness and family trouand where to hunt when Cousin Makoto misplaced his store teeth, what chicken to bet on at the chicken fights.

Every few months, even years after I left the island to live in the East, be stanled awake at three in the morning by the jangle of the tele. It was Little Grandma calling long distance. ''Yube yume o shita," voice would chirp into the sleep-heavy silence. " I dreamed I saw your "

" Tell her it can wait," my husband Ben would grumble , reaching me and drawing sleep close again.

Outside, it always seemed to be winter. I secretly cherished the sound her voice. As I dozed with the receiver to my ear, the colors of the island crowd into the darkness behind my eyes-the canefields, the eanh, sea.

Green , red, blue. The silver pins glinted in Little Grandma's hands, she laid the patchwork triangles, one by one, into the shapes of stars. gold cap on her front tooth gleamed. She seemed all tiny glints and like light shining through a creaky door. " In my dream, it was night," she said. "Makkuro datta. There was no moon--ontv black, the sky was; black the ocean . ..." She looked up from piecing and gestured toward the reson complex across the bay. " All over , where the hotel is now, mukashii no yoo na, there was only sand."

The scent of Three Flowers Brilliantine and stale urine drifted toward from Papa dozing in his lawn chair. As he breathed, he made a sound waves hissing out across the sand. A delicate stream of drool trickled the corner of his mouth.

"Come see!" I could hear him calling.

7

"Hana, come see!"

And once again, I was running toward the sound. As I drew close, he held his finger to his lips. "Shh. There. " And he pointed to the crownflower hedge alive with monarch butterflies, the mango tree where a mother cardinal was teaching her babies to fly.

During the last five or six years, the " forgetting sickness," as Little Grandma called it, had gradually stolen the names of things from him.

Only his eyes remained alive in his face, seeing and seeing.

In the past couple of years, I had not returned to the village-because of increased responsibilities at work, I said, when I telephoned my regrets.

Then, my marriage began to sour. . ..

Now, I could feel the silence seeping out of him, as he slept, swallowing words I hadn 't spoken, drawing everything into itself like a great hunger.

Across the yard, the summer quilt on the clothesline rippled like a sail opening in the wind. The late afternoon sun glimmered through the poincian~ above us-red, gold-across the whiteness of Papa's sleeping face, the whiteness of the sketchpad lying open on my lap.

"Then, from far away," Little Grandma was saying , "the sky began turning colors , the ocean was shining . ..."

Aunt Pearlie put down her newspaper and gave me a see-what-I-mean look. "We heard this yesterday, I think ... ."

Grandma turned the patchwork star in her hands, pinning it to a square of blue cotton. "The ocean was shining...."

Aunty took a sip of iced tea, then held up the article she'd been reading. Her lips left angry scarlet kisses around the rim of her glass. " Rise in Sex Crime," the headline read.

"Nothing's sacred anymore," she grumbled. "A woman's not safe in her own bed- not even here in this very village .. . ."

Aunt Pearlie, my father's younger sister, taught kindergarten at the Jesus Coming Soon Japanese Missionary School in Honolulu. She had never married . The only time she'd ever visited Ben and me in New York, she' d wakened at least twice every night to check the locks on the front door. Even then , she 'd finally cut her visit short by two weeks ; she couldn't take the loss of sleep, she said.

Little Grandma got up and threw her shawl lightly across Papa's shoulders. "Ko-chan, kaze o hiku no," she whispered . "You're going to catch cold, if you sleep with your mouth open."

He mumbled and fell back to sleep.

Aunt Pearlie raised her voice. "Just the other day, I was talking to Emiko McAllister over at the Koyama store. . . ."

8

Little Grandma settled back in her chair, then turned toward me.

"Where was I, Hana-chan?"

"I was talking to Emi," Aunty said, " and she told me ...."

"Oboeteru ka?" Grandma persisted.

"Oh, Mama! " Pearlie almost shouted. "Something about the ocean, for Pete's sake!" " Yes. So datta." Grandma laid down her piecing and looked out across the bay. "Akarukute, akarukute. The lights became brighter and brighter, closer and closer. . . " "Then what?" I asked.

"Then, I woke up."

"What?" Pearlie said.

"That's all."

"What kind of dream is that?"

Little Grandma serenely resumed her piecing. Pin, turn. Each movement fit into the next, like a perfectly-made seam. " It's not just a dream.

It's how the hungry ghosts come home every year at o-bon time, when we are asleep."

Aunt Pearlie pressed her lips together and frowned at her newspaper.

Watching Little Grandma, you couldn't imagine any other way of piecing a quilt. I looked down the hill at the cloud shadows moving like dream across the sugar fields . Pin, turn. Land curving into sea into sky. " How come you like New York so much, Hana-chan ?" She asked.

Her voice softened. "It's so far. Tookute, tookute, everybody has gone so far. You in New York. Pearlie in Honolulu. Ko-chan in ano ... ano . . . tokoro .. .." That place, she called it; she avoided the words-hospital, nursing home. She smiled. "But he's with me, now. When Grandpa comes home at o-bon, everybody will be together again."

The annual Festival of the Dead would begin in a few days. Already the scaffolding for the musician's platform had been built in front of the temple, the lanterns strung around the yard.

Aunt Pearlie turned the page of her paper, then crisply swatted the crease down the middle. "There's no need for anyone to be lonely. I keep telling her to come and live with me. . . ."

Papa sat up and rubbed his eyes. " . .. But there's no such thing as reasoning with people."

I rose to go to him, the box of crayons spilling from my lap onto the grass. Aunty waved at me to sit down again, then stood and held out her hands. "Come, Brother. Time for potty." She glanced at me. "Like I said, no such thing as reasoning with them." ''I'm hungry."

9

Aunt Pearlie rook his hand. "First, you go potty, then , I'll give you cake and juice."

"Honto ni ureshii," Grandma said, as we watched them shamble toward the house. "Grandpa will be so happy."

The week before , I'd been wakened in the early morning by the ringing of the telephone. It had been about two months since Ben had moved out. Even half-asleep, I missed his warmth beside me, the sound of his sleepy protests in the dark. In the tiny confrontations with nothingness that occurred, like this, at a hundred-odd times in a day, the pattern of our life together was becoming undone-falling away into incoherent fragments of color, into no-color, into blackness.

R-r-r-ing . It was midnight, according to the alarm clock next to the bed. Too early for Grandma. Besides, she'd called the week before-to relay another of her dreams, her way of reminding me that o-bon was coming up and maybe I should think of returning for the tenth year observance of Grandfather's death. I said I'd think about it, unable to tell her about Ben, whom she'd never approved of.

R-r-r-ing . Perhaps it was Ben now . What would I say? My hands trembled as I picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Hana, where have you been , oh my god.

It was Aunt Pearlie. " Oh. Hi Aunty. I was sleeping."

"Poor baby, I forgot about the time . Actually, I would never have called, except I've been at Grandma's the last couple of weeks ... and . . . she's so stubborn. She won 't listen to me. You 've got to come home.

Thlk some sense into her."

I struggled to grasp what she was not saying. It rook too much effort. I began to feel annoyed . "Well, it's not exactly like crossing the street . .. ."

"You'll never guess what she's gone and done now!"

Her alarm was beginning to be contagious. "What's happened? " "Week before last, the Director of the Leilani Nursing Home called me in Honolulu .. . ."

"Papa? Something's happened to Papa?" He had been staying at the Home ever since Grandma had fallen and sprained her hip the previous summer.

"Your Grandmother has stolen him out of there and won't give him back!"

The next day, I took a leave of absence from the design studio where I worked, closed my apartment, and caught a late night flight from Kennedy.

10

The row of finished morning-star squares glowed as Little Grandma held them to the light. The sun shining through them cast red and violet and orange reflections across her face. I could no longer see the structure of the bone and flesh beneath the shifting surface of color. Planes had become hollows ; hollows, planes. I laid my crayon down , the page before me empty.

That night, I dreamed again of the waves . The dream never changed.

The darkness. The empty beach. The rumbling of the ocean, like a great engine, drawing closer and closer in the dark. As I turned in the direction of the water, I could see the black shapes of the waves , tall as mountains against the sky. The rumbling grew louder. I scrambled for the sand bank behind me and began to climb. The sand slid away beneath my feet. The rumbling became a roar....

Papa's snoring filled the house . At first , I half-dreamed I was back in New York with Ben. "Shh, shh," I murmured, turning over. The moonlight streamed onto my face through the open curtains across the room.

As I blinked awake, I recognized the mahogany toy cabinet with the china tea set sitting on top, the red wooden child's rocker, Papa's paintings of birds and animals upon the walls. Here and there in the moonlight, a tangerine-colored bear or a lavender parrot sprang from the shadows in a vivid flash of color. The darkness was permeated with the smell of linseed oil and fresh paint.

The snoring quieted.

"Akai tori , ko tori," Little Grandma was singing upstairs in the attic.

"Red bird, little red bird, why are you so red?" As she paused for breath, I could hear the crisp sound of her sewing shears, snipping.

"We' ll all be in a nursing home before she finishes that thing," Aunt Pearlie said the next afternoon as we sat at the kitchen table, eating slices of chilled mango and looking out the window at Little Grandma and Papa under the poinciana tree. "She's been at that same quilt for the past four years, I'd swear. Did you hear her last night? I'll tell you, between the singing and the snoring. . . ."

"But we can't make her take him back," I said. " We can't go on like this-that's what we can't do! Besides, what'll Ben think, you being gone so long?" " Ben?" I reached for another slice of mango, took a bite, chewed. I shrugged. "He'll manage, I guess ...."

"But that's not the point, Hana ...."

It 's not that I don 't love you, he 'd said.

"I feel bad, we all feel bad about your Papa. " 11

. . . But I've stopped growing . ...

"Life goes on after all!" Aunt Pearlie cried.

Bright, dark. The morning light flickered across the walls. The contours of the room shifted, as the boundaries between shapes melted, and colors slid away into shadow. . . .

"If Grandma were by herself, she could sell this place , come and stay with me . ..."

The sea rumbled faintly. I squeezed my eyes closed, as if that would help me to shut out the sound.

"You know the real estate company that built the hotel across the bay? Well, one of the developers dropped by the other day. . .."

Hana, come see! " . . . He said they were interested in buying all the land around this area, putting up a shopping mall. . . ."

I remembered the sound of Papa's voice, guiding my hands, as I learned to mix colors. "How do you make red redder?" he'd ask. " How many different kinds of black can you see?" The rumbling died away.

"Look, Hana," Aunt Pearlie said. "We've got to be practical about this situation ...."

Emi McAllister, our next-door neighbor, had let herself in the front gate and was coming up the walk. She was carrying what looked like a dish or tray wrapped in a grocery bag.

"What's she got there ?" Aunt Pearlie reached for her spectacles in her apron pocket and put them on. "Hmmm. Probably some of that brown fudge that sticks to the roof of your mouth ." She started for the door. "Or some of those hard little puffed rice cakes."

Emi stopped to talk to Little Grandma, then looked up and waved to Aunty.

"Oh, rice cakes," Aunt Pearlie said, taking the bag as Emi came up the front porch steps into the house .

Emi had just come from working in her garden and carried the smell of fresh air and sunlight into the kitchen. "Just a little welcome home for Hana." She smiled at me. "Your Papa's looking fine."

"You think so? I guess."

"Well, he's not fine." Aunt Pearlie offered the dish of cakes to Emi. ''I've been trying to talk some sense into this girl. She's as bad as her grandmother.'' " I didn't say he shouldn't go back," I protested. " I said we couldn't force Grandma into taking him . . . ."

Emi waved aside the cakes. "Never touch 'em, too hard on my old teeth." She patted my hand . "Things going badly, huh? "

12

Aunt Pearlie frowned. "So, Emi, how're you doing? Heard any more news about the robberies?"

For the last several summers, the village had been plagued by brief outbreaks of laundry burglaries in which residents from all over the village had found articles missing from their wash. The burglaries never followed any particular pattern and never went on for more than two or three weeks at a time. In the past, missing items had included the scarf from Emi's gardening hat, a pair of her husband's running shorts, the pink rose from Cousin Missy's scholarship dress. During the last month, the burglaries had started up again.

"Mrs. Koyama says the dancing-school teacher is missing her white satin nightcap."

"It's disgraceful that this situation has been allowed to go on for so long! Who knows what someone like that will do next?" Aunt Pearlie cried.

"Well, you have to admit, he hasn't done much of anything in the last four or five years," Emi pointed out.

"He's probably just testing the waters. We've been lulled into a false sense of security." " It's true, no one can ever really know what anyone else is thinking."

"It's about time the police began doing their jobs! " Emi sighed. "From what I hear, the sheriff doesn't have much to go on. The burglaries always stop before any real clues turn up."

"What's this world coming to? You don' t know how I worry about my mother- all alone here ...."

Emi clucked sympathetically.

"Look at this place! It's just too much-especially after she sprained her hip last summer. And with Brother the way he is-you've got to keep your eye on him every minute, or he wanders off. Just before he went into the Home , the vegetable man found him walking the road to the upcountry about three miles out of the village . ..." ''That's strange.'' Emi was looking out the window.

"It's impossible, I tell you! " Emi turned toward Aunt Pearlie. "I was just talking to your mother out there a minute ago."

Aunty and !looked out too.

The quilting mat was still spread under the poinciana, but the wind had blown the cover off a shoebox full of piecing and was scattering the bright scraps across the grass. Neither Little Grandma nor Papa was anywhere to be seen.

13

"Papa!" I called, scanning the rocks and tidal pools along the shore.

The sky and sea were the color of fire. A wave broke over the lava shelf and came swirling around my ankles. I had to hurry. The tide was rising and the way to the point would soon be under water. "Papa!"

Shortly after we'd discovered them missing, Little Grandma had come limping up the road to the house. "Hayaku! Call SheriffKanoi! Kochan has run away! " she panted .

On a hunch, I'd slipped away to the beach, while Aunty got on the phone to the police. In my childhood, Papa took me out to the point almost every weekend in fine weather. At first, he'd bring along his painting things, but he'd always forget the time as he stood working at his canvas, and we'd end up staying out too long. Once, he lost an easel when we tried to cross back to shore as the tide was coming in. After that, we took walks to the point "just to look," as Little Grandma put it.

We watched for whales in winter-each of us vying to be first to spot the beautiful white plumes of spray rising above the waves. He taught me the names of the sea plants growing among the rocks and how to identify the schools of fish flashing just beneath the surface of the water. A green flash for manini. Silver for papio ....

The waves were washing higher and higher upon the shelf. The red in the sky had deepened.

"Papa!" I called, raging against time which gave us everything-all love, all beauty-only to steal them back again.

Then I saw him. A speck of white at the end of the point. I picked my way through the jagged rocks, the waves crashing higher and higher, until I was wading through knee-deep water toward him. "You've scared us all to death," I scolded, as I pulled myself up beside him.

He turned toward me, his face transfixed. "See, Hana," he said.

"Oh, see." He gestured toward the glittering path of red and gold, leading from where he stood, across the water to the sun.

"I turned my back for one second, and then he was gone!" Little Grandma was explaining again to Aunt Pearlie downstairs in the kitchen, as I drew the water for Papa's bath. " That's why I keep telling you ... ," Aunt Pearlie replied.

Papa sat shivering on the toilet seat, watching me.

"Just a minute and I'll help you out of those wet things," I said. "I think I know why you run away, huh, Papa?"

He had not spoken since out on the point.

"You feel something missing . . .."

I unbuttoned his shirt and helped him pull his arms from the sleeves.

14

" ... It 's like Ben told me once, about growing ...."

I pulled Papa's T-shirt over his head. " ... well, not exactly. But we're all looking for something.

I kneeled before him and began unlacing his shoes. I looked into his face.

"Papa, talk to me. I heard you out there . . . ." " Hard-headed old woman!" Aunt Pearlie shouted. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs. A door slammed.

Papa reached for the gold chain around my neck. "Pretty,'' he said. " ... talk to me ... ,'' I whispered.

When I finally got to bed, I lay listening to the sounds of the housePapa snoring, clocks ticking, the back porch door banging in the breeze, and weaving in and out, making a single song of them all, Grandmother's voice, humming upstairs in the attic.

I dreamed of the waves. Once more, I was scrambling up the sandbank, the sound of the ocean drawing close behind me . It was dark, so dark. The faster I climbed, the faster the sand slid away. The sound drew nearer, it was almost on me. I reached the top. Safe. I looked behind me.

And saw the waves.

I was wakened by the sound of silverware rattling against dishes and cupboard doors slamming. The smell of fresh coffee filled my room.

As I walked into the kitchen , the wash was going , and there was french toast burning on the stove. "Grandma!" I turned off the range and poured myself a cup of coffee. "Grandma?"

Aunt Pearlie pushed through the back screen door with an empty laundry basket under her arm. "I was just out hanging the wash. You want some toast?"

I shook my head. "Coffee's fine for me."

She pulled out the chair next to mine and sat staring through the window as she clasped and unclasped her hands. Finally, she spoke. "Quite a little adventure yesterday, huh ?" " Mmm .. . do you know where Grandma is?"

"She and your father have gone to the Prayer Lady's . .. to get a laying-on of hands, or whatever it is the woman does."

I got up and went to the stove. " Maybe I will have some toast ."

"If you ask me, he needs more than a good massage to fix what's wrong with him . ..."

I turned and faced her. "Why do you have to keep going on and on about it ?"

15

"Because someone has to! What are you going to do-spend the rest of yourlife. . . ."

"You act as if you want him to be locked up!"

She was silent. Her hands lay still upon the table. There was a funny bruised look about her eyes.

"What did he ever do to you? It's not as if he were some son of maniac! " Her mouth was set once more in an ugly stubborn line . "Oh, isn't he?

Look, Hana." She pulled something out of her apron . "Look what I found in your Papa's pant pocket!" She laid the dancing-school teacher's white satin nightcap on the table.

Little Grandma took the news calmly. She agreed with no funher protest that Papa should be returned to the Home. Aunt Pearlie said that he could stay until the bon festival was over, the following day.

Pin, turn . One by one, Little Grandma laid the patchwork triangles into the shapes of stars. The late afternoon sun flickered through the poinciana above us, casting red and gold reflections across her face . My sketchpad lay open on my lap.

Pin, turn . Aunt Pearlie snored in her lawnchair, her newspaper covering her face. Papa sat on the grass, digging at the roots of the tree. " Honto ni ureshii, everybody together," Little Grandma said.

For the first time since Ben had left, I began to weep.

Little Grandma put aside her piecing and took my face in her hands.

"Shikkari shite," she whispered. "You must be strong." ''I'll never see . . . I'll never . .. oh, Ben ... ," I sobbed, " . .. and they'll put Papa back in there . . . and he'll ... we 'll never... ."

"Maybe so." A sly look flickered across her face . She shrugged , then stood and walked over to Papa. She helped him to his feet and began heading toward the house. She waved at me. "Come. You come too!"

Little Grandma led us up the stairs to her room on the second floor.

Inside, it was nearly bare-except for a tiny cot with a hard, loaf-shaped pillow , the family shrine on the camphor wood bureau, and the tattered photographs of our dead kin which covered every wall.

"Come, come." She directed us through what looked like a closet door, leading up another narrow flight of stairs to the attic.

She switched on the light. A quilting frame stood in one corner. In the middle of the floor lay a mat covered with little piles of geometric shapes cut from scraps of fabric . Along each wall were stacks of shoeboxes and grocery bags spilling over with bits of piecing and applique in various

16

of completion. I recognized a blue scrap from one of Papa's old smocks , a yellow piece from my first party dress.

But it was to the far end of the attic that my eyes were drawn. An immense quilt hung there, made of appliqued squares separated by strips of morning stars. The quilt was not finished, but already it covered the entire back wall, from ceiling to floor. From where I stood, perhaps fifteen feet away, it seemed to contain every color in the entire world.

I moved closer, and the colors began to cohere into shapes. Each square depicted places and people in the life of the village. There were the sugar fields sloping down to the sea. The rows of identical green and white company houses with a different-colored dog in each yard. There was the singing tree in the temple ground and the old head priest at o-bon, leading the procession of lights down to the bay. There was Emi McAllister in her garden. Every detail was perfect-down to the green and pink scarf on her tiny sun hat.

I looked closer. No, it couldn't be. My heart beat faster. It just couldn't. I glanced quickly over the rest of the quilt-at Doc McAllister out for his morning run , Cousin Missy standing at the window of her Papa's house, the Koyama-store lady in front of her store ... it was true.

There, in that quilt was every single piece of laundry missing in the village during the last four years!

Little Grandma smiled. " To not forget," she said.

I turned and walked down the stairs and out of the house, into the colors of the afternoon.

17

Jim Daniels UNTIL SUDDENLY

Sometimes we tire of the flatness of our days of toothbrushes and paper towels of watering plants, taking out trash.

Days pass like a nap on the couchshort, unsatisfying-we're still tired and waiting for the next, trying to find magic in their names: Moon Day, Saturn Day, but every day seems like Wednesday.

They pass, like the branches fall from our dying Norfolk Pine, dropping so gently that I can't resist walking over, pulling more down.

And so we pass each other on our paths, refrigerator to table, bathroom to bed until suddenly one day: fresh ginger, full moon, your towel falls away.

18

ALONE IN MARRIAGE

In the Monday early sky a woodchuck, such a fat newness when I am on my own, when I am alone in marriage, Jean would have seen that animal, for she was of cats and chipmunks and woodchucks, Jean would have Nature this sesquicentennial year, for she was of reading and trying thought, On my own I ride our Green River road, adjust Oscar's cows and the second mowing, alone in marriage I see only what I need , Why should I enjoy Jean through the past, why should not I continue the original relationship, what we saw I see, what we believed I do.

19

SanoraBabb

THE LAST YEAR to james Wong Howe

The tree you planted years ago Grew in two strong trunks Joined near the earth: Our lives, you said.

The trunks branched wide and full, Leaves and yellow flowers shaded A place we kept for birds, Water and grain.

A window where we sat watching Wings glide down to sanctuary.

I sit here now.

The acacia trunks have aged, Furrows dent their roundness, Sap runs low, But old scars, grey eyes on grey bark See my tears as they saw your own Kept secret from me-you thoughtWhen the days left were only a few.

You longed to be with the growing, Not the dying, so you lay in the sun And the wind where every tree Spoke in its way of moving , And white clouds drifted that the sky Would be bluer for your hungering gaze.

We held hands, our love more eloquent Than in the passions of our youth That cannot know how deep the roots, How high old branches range the air, How beautiful love is full of years.

All seasons we grew in tenderness and strife, Still two, but two in harmony, The symmetry now broken.

20

IN THE GARDEN LATE IN THE DAY

Before Dorothy left me for Eric McLull , the contractor renovating our weekend home, she seemed unusually contented , mulling over nursery catalogs, moony with the names of roses. "La Belle Sultane," she would murmur, " Travamuende ." I sometimes surprised her in front of a mirror, holding to her face swatches of chintz strewn with roses-cabbage roses, gigantic and blowsy. Yet I was unprepared for the note I found taped to the television set when I went to tune in "Wall Street Week ." Our children seemed to understand far better than I-to understand, and, on a level I couldn't fathom, to approve.

"She did what she had to," said Tom. He would like to be a news anchorman and practices a bland though dignified manner.

"Mother loved surprises," said Laura, tasting the watercress omelette she had made for our breakfast. Laura has also settled on a career, though she, like Tom, is still in high school. She would like to be the proprietress of a small, nouvelle cuisine restaurant, of which I am to be the principal backer.

Both children counselled that worrying was a waste of time; we might as well hire a housekeeper, get on with our lives.

"What about the weekend house?" I asked. This was the morning after Dorothy's note; we were seated in the breakfast nook .

Tom said he had been offered an internship at one of the cable stations. Next Fall, he reminded us, he would be staning college. The weekend place-some m iles from here-did not figure significantly in his plans. Laura had a summer job with a caterer on Long Island, preparing platters for cocktail patties, and would board there.

"That house was really Mother's place," she said.

Though I was shocked by her casual use of the past tense, I couldn't find words to reproach her; I found myself oddly preoccupied with cleaning my glasses. Without them the children 's faces were a near-sighted blur, yet I felt them staring at me, perhaps because Dorothy had only left the night before. It seemed that she might momentarily materialize, fork poised above her omelette, her old quilted bathrobe buttoned high on her fine, slender neck .

21

"We plan to see Mother quite often," said Tom . " We'll watch her you."

"She's really O.K.," said Laura, patting my hand. "Her next move shade-loving plants like hosta."

"Where is she?"

"I imagine she'll tell you when she's ready," said Tom . He was ing his tennis whites, twiddling his racket between his palms. I let him and let Laura go , as she was meeting a friend, another aspiring teur, for an exchange of significant recipes.

That afternoon I inquired at an agency for housekeepers, though was hardly prepared to place an ad for a recently renovated weekend I was concerned about the gathering silence of our principal Dorothy 's note had said her lawyer would be in touch. I welcomed prospect that she would return for talks about our household furn · · the objects that contained our history-the wedding presents, say, friends of our parents now mostly dead-the toaster, the umbrella the photo albums.

How had I failed her? I had permitted her to purchase ......,....,.... amounts of Shaker furniture-one of her interests-as well as called Sandwich glass . I understood . These unadorned chairs and with chenille-bedspreadish bumps were hers, as were the roses u though I had paid for them. I also saw as hers her clothes , which · valuable red fox jacket and a necklace of uncut emeralds. Everything considered " ours," though I wanted her to have-I had always wanted to have-anything she wanted but Eric McLull.

I am the C.E.O. of a small manufacturing firm founded by my father ; my work is demanding and interesting. So, tabling the matter Dorothy's defection until the attorneys should have brought us to the gaining table, I engrossed myself in corporate affairs. Meanwhile housekeeper left dinners to be heated in the microwave, my daughter bits of yellow pepper in the breakfast muffins; I almost forgot Dorothy's absence from the other bed in our room was supposed to be manent.

My shock was great at hearing her principal interest in our assets was financial. She didn' t want dishes, silver, furniture, didn't want her clothes. All she wanted were stocks and bonds and the weekend home, where she planned to live with Eric McLull- a c __ ----~ man , by the way, with sparse red hair, a worn face and hands. JI.Jv•vu•• said her attorney, Roger Wilcox, who had telephoned my office, even want photos of our children.

When I replaced the phone in the cradle , my hands were shaking.

22

't know how long I sat at my desk, staring at the photo of a much Dorothy, Laura and Tom as children. Suddenly my secretary, Ms . ..,,,_uu-.~.... v-·•v"'"u".u before me, with her handbag, asking if there was . .. ,, ...,,...,,I wanted before she went home.

That evening, I found myself beginning to lose interest in the microdinners, though they were well prepared. I was also losing interest in 's breakfasts , despite the variety of muffins. And I began to find the bedroom oppressive, particularly the sheets on our beds, which were printed with roses, as was the skirt of Dorothy's dressing table. These furnishings didn't reflect my tastes, I knew , though I wasn't sure what my tastes were. I moved into the library, a small room downstairs that contains a television set . .I began sleeping and dressing there, watching McNeilLehrer from my exercycle.

Soon Laura went to Long Island to take up her summer position, leaving me a supply of frozen muffins. Already Tom was frequently absent, as a young man with his own car will be, though he always taped to the TV notes saying where he was. However, I was losing interest in TV; I didn't care where Tom was. It was clear the children could take care of themselves.

Though I felt a sense of duty towards them, I had to admit, I didn't know or like them any better than I knew or liked my employees.

As C.E.O. I had felt it was wise to maintain a certain distance from the Grunemann, Inc., people, so I wouldn't be accused of favoritism or cronyism. Our company manufactures menstrual-cramp pills; a laxative; no-stick hair-spray ; a chlorophyll substance (time-capsule or suppository form) that removes the odor from breath, sweat, urine , feces, and flatulence; and Finishing Touch, the feminine hygiene spray. Maintaining and increasing the market share of these products is complex and risky, dtpendent on many shifting supply-and-demand factors, so I had been involved with corporate decision-making over the years on a more-than-fulltime basis. I had delegated to Dorothy participation in community affairs and in recreational activities such as golf Apart from driving the family around the lake in our boat, my principal leisure-time activity had been photography. Most of my pictures were of family, taken either at home or at our weekend house, on the usual holidays or during the short vacations-chiefly to visit relatives-! was able to take from corporate responsibilities.

Dorothy had always seemed to treasure these photographs. She had mounted them in a series of albums stored near the Encyclopedia Bn-ttanica in our library. Once I had moved in there, I became more and more interested in leafing through the overlapping plastic sleeves, one photo to a sleeve, each photo identified with a caption on the back in Dorothy 's rvu.... ,.......

23

girlish hand. "John at the zoo with Tom (7) and Laura (S )" said one Dorothy must have taken it. The image seemed to waver, to shimmer ia great heat-probably a function of Dorothy's nervousness at having any路 thing to do with the camera, which she had always said was "too much" for her.

In this photo, Laura, in a plaid dress with a ruffle at the bottom, is pulling on my hand, her body swung out at an alarming angle to my legs.

In the hand that doesn't grasp mine, she has a taut string, which muse have been attached to a balloon which isn't in the picture. The back路 ground is indistinct, some blurred greenery, a gray-blue sky. I can no longer remember what animal she was pulling me toward .

Tom stands in front of me, his legs slightly apart , his weight evenly distributed on the balls of his feet. The sun is in his eyes, and he frowns at it. His hands clenched, his elbows bent, he seems to be accepting some challenge that has come to him from outside the picture. I don't know what it is. I don't remember the trip to the zoo, or Dorothy's taking the ptcture.

I tell myself my memory is bad because I've been so busy over the years, earning the money it takes to maintain a principal home with an oak-panelled library, a swimming pool, the clay tennis court Tom so enjoys , a large , fully equipped kitchen with a collection of antique mousse molds and copper pans. We're fortunate to have this home, this life-style, not to mention our weekend home on a quiet mountain lake with a spec路 tacular view and a garden of rare and antique roses, elaborately fenced against the deer that would nibble the tender, fragrant flowers . All these things, I tell myself, are worth having, worth keeping. In the case of the weekend house, it would seem Dorothy agrees .

Several days after her attorney's call, I told my attorney, Emlyn Altman , to tell Wilcox, if Dorothy wished to enjoy our vacation home, she must enjoy it with her family. Otherwise it must be sold, the money divided between the children.

Altman informed me that Dorothy would relinquish her claim on the house ; she mostly wanted her freedom . As I had no idea where she was, I was in no position to argue. Yet I found that my loss of interest in the meals I ate at home had been augmented by a loss of interest in lunch, a meal I was accustomed to eat in a good downtown restaurant, often with fellow officers of our company, with suppliers or customers, but sometimes alone . I happened to be alone when I found myself nauseated by a lamb chop; the next day I found I was unable to eat a swordfish steak in the presence of our firm's comptroller, though I was able to down two martinis on the rocks without vermouth . I saw at once that I would soon be an alcoholic if that kept up ; so I began working through lunch , cancelling

24

engagements. This went on for about three weeks, though Sally ordered sandwiches for me. Sometimes I sampled them, but tuna and grilled cheese didn't interest me. I was interested only in the pieon my desk of my wife and my children-a picture I had taken myself.

Hmrnr•v, in a pretty linen dress, with her shoes off, has one arm around each of the children, who are wearing matching sailor suits. Dorothy is smiling, pointing at something out of the picture. I don' t remember what she was pointing at.

Evenings I had the albums to browse. Sometimes I brought a photo to work, propped it on my calendar for study. There was one of our vacation home that compelled my attention. It showed the house in three-quarter profile from the lake, a dark blur among the trees, and must have been taken from a boat, probably our nineteen-foot cruiser with a two-hundred horse motor. I couldn't remember taking the picture, though I must have .

Why else would Dorothy, the children and a couple, the Metzgers, I believe, some neighbors on the lake, have been waving at me from the dock? Surely it was I at whom they waved .

"Why don 't you eat your lunch? " asked Sally as I considered this photo. " It was good of you to order it." I said some such thing; I wasn't hun, uuun.vu '""·ct-n,n

"We have to eat." " I eat at home." " Go for a walk," snapped Sally. "You can't sit there staring at that photograph all day."

Now I was hardly in the habit of obeying Sally Preston , yet I rose without a word and walked out the door of my office.

The streets were crowded. Many individuals were patronizing vendors, gobbling greasy bits of meat from sticks, avidly sucking at ice concoctions . I passed a fountain encircled by a low wall on which office workers were leaning back to let the sun shine on their faces. Construction laborers were sitting on the sidewalk, their backs against a building, laughing at something one of them had taken from his lunch box. I crossed the street to avoid these men and noticed that a crowd had gathered. At first I supposed the occasion of interest was a three-card Monte game, a magician or a juggler, a car being towed away. However, the people were looking at something inside a window, something which turned out to be an automated photo-developing machine emitting a stream of photographs, many of them similar to my own.

The first group I saw were of a family 's vacation-an elderly woman in a straw hat posed with a younger woman in a billed cap, a teen-aged boy and girl in sunglasses, and a much younger girl, who shaded her eyes with

25

her hand and squinted in front of a waterfall, by a camper, next to directional sign, and in front of a modest, sparely landscaped home. foundation was so clearly visible I was sure the home was new.

Then came pictures of someone's girlfriend or wife-a fleshy woman in a red-and-white striped bathing suit and high-heeled striking a number of poses. The young woman wore glasses, which her face a light-struck appearance. She looked not unlike Sally even to the engagement ring that flashed on the appropriate finger.

Many of those gathered to watch the rolling pictures thought the must be an entrant in a beauty contest, else why would she be .......u'"'•1 high-heeled shoes with a bathing suit , indoors? However, one young insisted the girl must be on her way to a costume party; she was too to be a beauty queen . Besides, he said, for a contest-entry photo she have removed her glasses.

Mter the girl came pictures of a cat-a gray-striped one of the eery-store genre, photographed in a room without flash; the animal's low eyes gleamed from murky gloom. The cat seemed in no way tiona!, though it was evidently cared for. One spectator opined that occasion of the photos was the eat's birthday. She was pooh-poohed on grounds there were no candles in view . I heard my own voice insisting cat had been lost and now was found. I headed back to my office at once.

Yet the next day I returned to the photomat to view a wedding, a crooked shot of a bride and groom kneeling before an altar flashed by, tablesful of people standing, glasses raised, the bride and groom · · at the camera among assorted groups of dressed-up individuals, stand:tnr stiff as bowling pins in formal clothes. I thought I recognized the ushers, in matching pink cummerbunds, pink lapelled cutaways, the thickwaisted brides' maids, carrying corsages, in rose-pink dresses. And these older pairs were the parents, handsome and prosperous. Impossible to say which pair belonged to which new spouse; the pictures moved too fast.

In my library that night, I turned once again to my own photos, Laura in a blue-flowered dress, a carnation on her wrist, Tom standing by a bicy· cle , grinning. There were Dorothy and Laura standing by a Christmas tree trimmed with cookies in heart and house shapes. That was the indoor tree, in our vacation home kitchen, and here was the outdoor tree, covered with ribboned lumps , suet for the birds. I fell asleep with the albums in my hands, the light on. When I woke, I searched until I found my camera, which I had not used for some time . I thought I would take it on my lunchtime walk , photograph the workers by the fountain. I might photograph Sally, the officers of our company. I thought of group shots in our company waiting room, which is furnished with a handsome set of

26

chairs and has our corporate logo on a sky-blue wall of which I am very fond. I was unsure what photo opportunities would present themselves, but I liked to think of being prepared for any that arose, so I packed the camera in my briefcase. I don't remember ifl noticed then or later a roll of undeveloped film in the camera.

At lunchtime I delivered the film to the photomat, then stood with the crowd outside the window, waiting to see my pictures roll past. I wondered what people would say about them, people who didn't know me , Dorothy, Laura or Tom. However, my pictures didn't come up, only some photos of another man's party.

There were gold-colored 50s taped on poles that held up a striped marquee. In front of them, two smiling, white-haired people were kissing each other behind a many-tiered cake, like a wedding cake, with the same little bride and groom on top. There were also pictures of various individuals standing among groups seated at tables; they seemed to be proposing toasts. After several shots of elaborate buffet platters came a number of shots of little girls in pastel dresses, with wreaths of greenery in their hair.

The oldest or tallest of these girls carried electric candles.

When I went home that night, I didn't bother to put my dinner in the microwave or tune in McNeil-Lehrer, though I bicycled a while on my machine, as I was comforted by the humming, the intensity and volume of which I could control by the speed of my pumping. I was beginning to feel downright annoyed with Dorothy, who had disrupted all my routines, annoyed at the children , who didn't seem to care, and most annoyed at Eric Mclull, who had presumed on a cordial business relationship.

I had his card-a cheaply printed affair with raised lettering, a small square picture of a home, smoke coming out of the chimney. I suspected his business address was his residence as well (there was only one number on the card) so I decided I would call from my exercycle. I would demand to know what his intentions were with my wife, who, despite her large eyes, her thick black hair, her long legs, is no longer young-in fact is middle-aged, as I am, as Eric Mclull is, though my impression is that he is somewhat younger than we are .

I dialed the number and waited, pedalling, trying to decide whether a soft, conversational approach-man-to-man-would be more effective than a brisk, businesslike tone. I knew that when Mclull picked up the phone I must speak, even if I hadn't yet firmed up my tactics. The phone rang many times before it was answered. When it was, a woman spoke who was not Dorothy.

"Be good enough to get me Mr. Mclull," I requested. " He's not here."

"Where can I reach him?"

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"Oh, I just don't know . .. who's calling? Who is this?"

"I am a customer."

"Well, I don' t know where his is. You can leave word if you want; I don't know if it'll do any good."

"When do you expect him to return? " "I don't know where he is. I'd like to help you out, but I don't know where he's gone. He left his tools, that's all I can say."

Although I've never met this woman, I can picture her clearly-a mousy blonde, her hair skinned back from an uneven hairline. She has bruised-looking eyes and a slight space between her front teeth. She isn't married to McLull, but she had lived with him a long time. She wonders if children would have kept them together; she wonders if he's attracted to Dorothy for her money. Over and over she reminds herself she's younger and prettier than Dorothy. When I hung up, she stood by her phone for a long time , staring at it, biting her already bitten nails. I was dialing the lake house, determined to interrupt McLull and my wife, strolling in the darkened rose garden, stooping to cradle the roses in their hands, deeply inhaling the fragrance. The phone rang twice; a man's voice spoke.

"Eric McLull ," I said , quite a bit more loudly than I had intended.

"What? Who is this anyway?"

"This is John Grunemann, and you're in my house, dammit. Is this McLull? Who the hell is this?" " Dad, this is Tom. Didn't you get my note? I'm up here with Patty Fredericks-you must have met her-a couple of people from the station.

We won't hurt anything. In fact , I put a new washer on that leaky faucet, and Patty has been pulling some weeds from Mother's garden. We're just going to have a little barbecue and swim in the lake. We'll be back tomorrow. I told you, Dad, in my note."

"Is your mother there?"

"Now, now , Dad. Easy does it. You can come up here if you want.

Join us. It would do you good to breathe a little mountain air. The boat motor's running very well. I gave it oil."

Tom sounded younger than he usually did-more spontaneous. He had sounded concerned about me, though. I wondered why. I prided myself on handling difficult situations well. Still, I was moved to walk upstairs to the master bedroom, which smelled faintly musty. I raised our shades and opened the windows-that room has always had excellent cross-ventilation. I went to examine my person in the full-length mirror on the door of Dorothy's closet, ignoring her clothing, which someone is going to have to go through, as they would the clothing of a dead person.

I noted that I was a vigorous man in the prime of life, with high coloring and most of his hair, very little fat- predictably less fat, in fact , than

28

I had had before Dorothy left. I was wearing a white shirt, a striped tie that Dorothy had picked out. At this point in the inventory, I found that my vision was regrettably blurring, due to the fogging and streaking of my glasses , so I removed them ; I wiped my eyes and peered closely at my facial features.

I saw that there are a number of lines around my eyes. These are very small, and, when I smile , produce a pleasing reticulated effect. Less pleasing are the two deeper lines between my brows, which I saw, upon resituating my now-clean glasses, produce the predominant effect, one of stern disapproval. This effect is misleading, as I am, I believe , a genial person.

However, my concentration on the intricate affairs of Grunemann , Inc. has affected my personal appearance in a somewhat negative manner.

Removing my glasses once again, I noted the area around my eyes was paler than the rest of my face; at the bridge of my nose, where the pads of the glasses fit, there were two hollow-looking bruises. It was quite a surprise to realize that without my glasses I had the expressionless look of a blind man.

Soon after, I picked up the photos I had left for developing. I sat down by the fountain among the office workers sunning themselves in the fine mist. I examined the pictures, which seem to celebrate the renovation of our weekend home. The first one was of Dorothy, Laura, and Tom, standing in front of the new bay window on the garden side of the dining room. This addition, which Dorothy had wanted for years, gives the room a splendid view of the rose garden as well as of the mountains beyond the meadow in which Dorothy has been rusticating day lilies. In the photo, the new window frames have not yet been painted. The wood is blond and pale, like the hairs on Dorothy's sun-tanned arms, and the stickers are still on the window panes.

There was another picture of the lake side of the dining room. There we have installed sliding glass doors onto the porch ; that view, of the island-studded lake , the tall green fir trees, more purple mountains and the cloudless sky, is also much improved . In this picture Dorothy, Laura, Tom and a smiling stranger are standing in front of the new glass doors , which, like the bay window panes, still have stickers. The stranger, I see, is not a stranger, is Eric McLull, whose face I examine more carefully, though the flash I must have used has obliterated much detail.

McLull has a benign, pink look, particularly around his nose and cheeks. This may be congenital-red-haired people often have thin, frail skin-or it may be the result of his work, much of which must take place outdoors, in inclement weather. He is wearing a tee-shirt that bears the legend of a beer company under a moosehead.

Dorothy, Laura, and Tom are looking at the camera and smiling , but

29

Eric McLull is looking at Dorothy, a tender, bemused expression , the of a man who has long since realized that women have their own ways that are expressed in the gentle slope of their necks into their ders, so different from the muscular bulk of McLull's broad shoulders, thickness of his pink neck.

All the rest of the pictures are of Dorothy and Eric McLull in the garden. Here is Dorothy beside a species of rose, Sericea, it is called, flowers and large, winglike, blood-red thorns through which the shines. This is a head shot, Dorothy against the light. The tendrils of dark hair escaping from the queue at the nape of her neck make a uc.u.UUIII mane around her face, an aureole. And here are Dorothy and Eric by the sun dial. It is late in the afternoon. Dorothy is gesturing out toward the lattice enclosure, covered with climbing rugosas, that out the deer, the gaily cushioned benches built into the wall, an construction job, perhaps-yes, surely-accomplished by Eric McLull. that why he was strolling in our garden among the roses and · shadows? Were we showing him what Dorothy had made of his work? were he and Dorothy planning some new construction? At some point arbor was discussed . This would also have supported climbers, which explain Dorothy's gesture toward the wall , a gesture so large it seems continue beyond the wall, to reverberate into the world beyond the like a pebble dropped in the still brown lake water rippling out and out.

It's impossible to see through the interstices of the lattice to meadow beyond the wall where the deer chew the lilies. However mountains are visible above the eight-foot garden walls, mountains, gray-lavender and deeply spruce-shadowed green, towering over ...,v·•vi.JLU and McLull. Dorothy is smiling, her eyebrows slightly raised, as if she just asked a question . Eric McLull, his thumbs hooked on his belt, looks at her, though he's much taller than Dorothy. This effect of looking up is function of his head's being lowered, yes, the freckled bald spot on top revealed, so that he looks up through his lashes-no, he's taller Dorothy, he's looking down at her. He's looking up and down, he looking Dorothy up and down, yes, there's a slight blur, his head was ing, he was eying Dorothy in her plain white camp shirt, her faded skirt, her frayed espadrilles, the softness of her body suggested but revealed , he was giving Dorothy an exploratory, speculative look in her garden of almost unbearable fragrance, answering her question with one his own. He was nodding "yes" as I exposed the film .

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y Rotella

EVE

Even on this night it 's past the hour for church.

The little town the mountains cup lies still.

The snow has stopped . What warmth its coming brought dissolves, and cold slips back upon a man, up late to lay the morning's presents out. He stands there in his frozen yard beside the shed to watch air clear toward heaven from the ground.

He feels the telling presence of the sky, thinks to himself, it's really Christmas now, then, listening, bends his head, hears nothing in the sigh of settling snow that silences the night, as though the murmur blessing on sufficient emptiness, as though the stars' thin light should swell and spill and absence fill the cradled valley up .

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Edward C. Lynskey WINTER FIELDS: GETIING THROUGH

This morning the melancholia you posed makes a sort of sense: February can get awfully, awesomely blue.

But here past the dim rock wall, the hoarfrost shellacking left last night creates a loveliness surpassing that of snowfall. I breathe deep downy silence; the early morning breeze plays a scherzo, shaking the shaggy trees.

Twiggy fists of crystals shatter. Limbs tremble at the increasing tempo of wind ; veils and streamers shower me. Powders catapult, collapse from the evergreens .

The air of sudden becomes alive with snow-music.

Then all of note is finished. Hemlocks unburdened: I trudge homeward .

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Grey

We have seen many years of a flattening, The top soil broomed by a relentless wind That you can talk to on the interminable Prairie but you never get an answerI wonder some nights as I see dust squalling Away in an easterly direction where Oklahoma Is running to. Is it being rebuilt grain by Grain on the west face of a mountain in Tennessee? Does the excavation ever stop?

I expect to see the Lord Carnarvon expedition Step out from behind the brush-wood any moment with King Tut's Mummy wrapped in sheaves of wheat.

Flagellated earth bruises easily as I walk Across the sharp index of history, scratching The lonely compromise of farming from my wounds.

Where else can you stand in the very center Of yourself and hear turnstiles click in Distant railway stations? Or porters hustle The shreds of buzzard meat along the concrete Platform? The parade putters to distant cities With marching bands drumming their last weary Footprints into these acres of shrill death.

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Doug Turner

HITCHING

They pass by me car after car after car after car down this highway, & the sun gets higher & hotter in the sky & my outstretched thumb is being ignored by the drivers, most of whom seem to be vacationers, husband & wife in the front, children in the back, all on their way to a few weeks of fun, they pass by car after car after car, down this highway & to some I'm the lowest form of citizen; the hitchhiker I can see it in the faces, the driver grips the wheel tightly, & his face distorts & his lips move silently behind the windshield (rotten no good son of a bitch!) & the wife's face contons like she's smelled something bad (sniff, sniff he could at least take a bath!) & they both turn their attention from me to the highway, staring intently through the bug-spattered windshield at all the fun waiting for them & praying that none of their children will grow up & be

34

like me, they don't see their children, gaping through the back window, laughing lc smiling (I'm gonna do that when I grow up!) lc flashing with all sincerity two fingers raised; the sign of peace , & even though I don' t get a ride I like to think

35

Brady T. Brady PAINTING THE PIECES

I was standing in my room, one hand braced against the beaverboard wall , kicking off my pants, when my father came in. I stepped behind a chair, pulling my pants back on.

"It's ok," he said. "Get ready for bed."

I came out from behind the chair, slipping off my shons. I couldn't ever remember being naked in front of anyone. Our house was full of women; my mother, grandmother, an aunt, my sisters. I didn't know it was all right to be naked . I pulled my pajamas on, crawled up on the bed.

My cowboy hat hung on the bedpost. I reached it down, set it on my head.

Then, remembering, I got out of bed and knelt on the throw rug. Crossing myself, I began my prayers, "Now I lay me down to sleep. . ." My father stood in the doorway, smoking, watching until I finished. I'd taken my hat off to pray. Tightening the string under my chin, I climbed back in bed.

He sat by me smoothing the covers, his smell, beer and cigarettes, familiar as the blue of his eyes. I wondered if I'd done something wrong.

We'd said goodnight already. It wasn't like him to come to my room unless he had something important to say. He sat on the bed looking at me, tapping cigarette ash into his cupped hand. "Tired?" I tightened the string under my chin a little more, ran my hands around the brim of the hat, fidgeted with the covers. "Uh-huh." I straightened my legs under the covers, stiffening the knees, waiting.

He glanced around, looking for somewhere to stub his cigarette.

Weaving a little, he walked to the window, pushed open the screen, flipped the butt in a shower of sparks into the dark of the backyard.

"That was your grandfather's, you know."

For a minute, I thought he meant the cigarette. Then I saw he was staring at the plaster lion's head on the wall. A fierce looking head. Sometimes at night, lying in bed alone, I was sure it moved. There had been a bulldog's head too. Heavy, reddish, with bared teeth. I'd tried to hang it on the wall by myself, dropped it, and now there was only the lion.

"He made it, the bulldog too."

This is it, I thought. I'm going to get in trouble for breaking the bulldog.

36

Now he picked up a model of a Messerschmitt off the table, held it to light. "You did a good job on this one. Painted the pieces first, huh?"

"Yeah, just like you said. It comes out better."

Setting it down, he walked back, sat on the bed. A book lay open on nightstand. He turned to the front; there, in black ink, in a schoolboy Grandpa's name stood out on the yellowed page.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Nana's garage. She's got boxes of them. She said it's ok."

He turned the book in his hands. In orange letters on the dark green the title: Pee wee Hams on the Trail. In the lower, right corner the name: Percy Keese Fitzhugh.

"Is this the one where he falls asleep in the car?"

"Yeah and he does Morse code and everything. It's great."

"And he's walking down the street and somebody throws an appleat him?"

"Yeah and he catches it without even looking around."

"And eats it," we both said at once.

"Yeah, it's really great, Dad." We sat quiet awhile. My father turning the pages of his father's book . ...,....uaJ•t:. out from under the brim of my hat, I saw how his eyes were a little , how whiskers stuck up, tiny black spikes on his face, how wrinkles deep, wavy lines in his forehead. He looked wonderful to me, strong handsome. He can remember every book he ever read , I thought. I more of Grandpa's books, I wanted to get them out, ask him about , but he was reading and I was comfortable with my cowboy hat, my ..,.............., and him sitting there on my bed.

Finally, he lay down beside me, his wet cheek couching mine. I didn 't why his cheek was wet. I didn't know then that grown men cried. I just thought everything was ok. I wasn't going to get in trouble. Not tonight.

37

Leona Yamada

FOURTH GRADE

Mrs. Fujii and the principal blocked the white chalk writing on the boards under the small American flag.

Mr. Okamura addressed the walls behind us, looking over our heads.

"How many of your fathers are veterans of the 442nd ?"

Hands , almost in unison, rose with smiles.

The adults surveyed us, their gazes turned to each other, and then returned to me. '' Are you sure your father was in the 442nd?"

Everyone else had a Japanese name.

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Alben Einstein is drawn

on the convex wall of my cream-colored cup.

He's seven inches tall but two-thirds of him is head.

His hands are in his jacket pockets or behind his back.

He does not look at me no matter how I turn this stoneware mug, its large handle pinched in my hand like a second left ear.

39

Allan Izen MY OL' MAN

My father, he one tahf ol ' man, you know. Filipino-Hawaiian, him.

Kinda small, but oh, dapowah! You see me, eh? How much you t'ink I weigh? Almos' t 'ree ftfty, eh? But I telling you, man, dat buggah t'row me down any time he like. An' da guy still workin' yet. We get one dairy fahm ovah Waianae side an' every day he out deah, workin' away .. .

I remember one time, yeh? We jus' get these calves from ovah Santos' place , eight Holstein.,One morning me an' my sistahs wen' out fo' brand 'em. The ol' man was there too, limpin' aroun' da place, smokin', scoldin' us-Ho, get one ugly mout' , dat guy, wah-wah-wah alia time.

Stahted out one reg'lah morning, nice an' cool , but six o'clock, sixthirty like dat, wen' turn Kona. Da air come all hot an' stink from da cow pens. The calves staht actin' up. Me an' my sistah was holdin' 'em while my other sistah put the iron on. So dis one calf bus' loose an' ram my sistab. Wow, I get mad like anythin'! Ho, man, I wen' grab dat calf an' push 'em up on top o' da wall. Man, dat calf went bananas. I went bananas too.

I stahted punchin' i's head an' It' inking I goin' kzJI dis fuckah.

AHa sudden , woah! I up in da air, wavin' my arms an' lookin' at da roof. My ol' man wen' yank me by da shirt an' belt. He carry me outside ovah his head an' slam me onto da groun' hahd, you know, like one 1V rasslah .

He stay deah lookin' down at me wit' his ftsts on his hips, one sloppy kine, han' rolled cigarette stickin' outta his whiskas. "Who da Goddamn human aroun' heah?" he yellin', "You no can ac' bettah dan one baby cow, you ain' goin ' work heah, God damn! " In my head I t'inking, hell wit' dis ol' man . .. Hell with dis fahm!

Hell wit' Waianae, hell wit' dis whole family, hell wit' everything. I walkin ' 'cross da yahd thinkin' dis kine stuffs.

But I goin ' tell you somethin', brah. My baht so heavy an ' full of shame I no can go on, eh? Long time I stan ' deah, but bumbye I come back, real slow, you know, to weah dey workin'. An' you know what? My ol' man nevah say not'ing to me. All he say is, "C'mon a'ready. Get two mo' only, den pau."

40

Was, lessee , nineteen sevenny-t'ree ... Sevenny-fo'? Mebby ten yeahs ago.

He still nevah say not'ing about it, but I know he remembah, 'cause we was brandin' calves las' week, eh? One of 'em wen' gimme a kick . Not too bad, but still, make me sit down real swift, you know, an' yell, "God dammit!"

My ol' man, dat pilau buggah, he smile down at me an' say, " Even now, yeh?"

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Linda Relacion Oosahwe RAIN-IN-THE-FACE NAINOA GOINGSNAKE

I was born in a sterile air-conditioned hospital on an Indian Reservation not of my tribe . My first name is Rain-In-The-Face . My dad's people call me by my Indian name. My mom's people call me Nainoa. I'm basically known as Rain.

I am very proud of my name. I was named after outstanding brave men. There is power in my name. I feel the strength of the men who first had them.

When I was six years old I told my mom I wanted to change my name.

She said if I could think of a new name and if we also had the money, my name could be changed.

For weeks my sister and I thought up names . It became a game that always made us laugh . After weeks of playing our naming game , I knew I would always be Rain-In-The-Face. I forgot about wanting my name changed.

When it rains, I stand in it, face to the sky. I thank the Great Spirits and know I am blessed.

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STUDY FOR 1HE LEFT HAND ALONE

Sinister. Always to be On the difficult side of life, Breaking, dropping, juggling & all the frippery of gauche.

When Botticelli's Venus Rises scallop-shelled from the ocean, It is her left hand, Clutching golden hair, That conceals her marvelous sex.

The west side of the body When one faces North Understands how to be reticent In embarrassing situations.

Listen, you primum mobile Of false starts, pencil-pusher, Waggle me home in opposable directions.

In some countries, it is an insult To offer one's left hand, But better one left hand Than two left feet.

In Titian's Prometheus, The vulture gnaws at the left side. & which side did Adam 's rib come from?

Tell me another thing, old friend, Why I am typing all this With your rival hand ? Sinister.

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Joseph P. Balaz

LOUNGE LIZARD

With scales gleaming like sequins her alluring tail slid by taking his eyes with her.

She disappeared mysteriously into the crowd at The Sand Bar where a full house altered their senses on cactus whiskey and tumbleweed wine.

Her desert perfume and oasis smile removed him from his stool to find out where this unusual female had slipped off to.

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He moved slowly through the lively nightclub as on stage Billy Gecko and the Alligators rocked to the latest top forty.

In passing a nearby table he overheard a group of loaded leathernecks argue that Tyrannosaurus Rex was no myth and that the fictional Godzilla gave everyone a bad name .

Unconcerned with such reptilian jive he scanned the entire ground floor until he caught sight of her again sitting in a far corner.

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Though she dressed like a local he recognized her as a Tuatara from those outer islands near New Zealand.

With exotic spines in the middle of her back and a well-developed third eye she was an intriguing beauty.

As he walked over he imagined her undressed and was just about to deliver his line when a huge Komodo dragon in a pin-stripe suit returned from the restroom.

No one but his pride saw him slither away as the Indonesian brute sat down and kissed her in a dream-shattering embrace.

46

James A. Miller INJUNCTION ON THE THOUGHT OF WOMAN EVEN AFTER HAVING BEEN UP FOR ONE AND ONE HALF DAY

Don't let me sleep while the sanguine world goes on its half-hearted and full-throated and full-hearted and half-throated way.

Don't let me sink to the level of the beasts all unconscious of munificence, decay.

Resist, resist, I tell myself. Within the living of the present meaning lies curled.

The Polish woman in her striped shin hoes the Ivy League plot of her urban garden and the Budapest businesswoman ties the Dane of protection to her clothesline. The boundaries of freedom extend the length of a moving chain.

A children's game of shuttlecock and racket follows the sun. Then finally, slowly, it goes.

Chopin at intermission of "Bosoms and Neglect" orchestrates a keyboard of lives-how many laughs at infidelity resonate from within and how much loneliness seated together, how much shock when chemise falls , bodies begin and how many lives reflect themselves in analysis-evoking Forster. Only, only connect.

The supermarket of leggy wonders, tennis dresses tents to fairly and tanned and never-ending poles wandering amid apples and tangerines, succulent pears forever luscious in themselves: this is how the sleep comes. Knowing the rhythm of the world forever dares to stand against and then move through the blithe inen , everywhere proclaiming this, everywhere confesses.

47

Rob Wilson SOLILOQUY IN WAIKIKI

All night in a steakhouse in Waikiki She rubs her stumpy hands, Clapping them gleefully at the called-out numbers, Talking over coffee to a friend nobody sees.

We can hear her muttering to herself in the black booth, Hear her conversation rise and fall, Breaking out in shrill laughter at arbitrary points Only she discerns.

She sits in a booth-world of her own making, Each night in a booth-world of her own making.

We know there is the sanity of art, the health, Just as there is the madness of words nobody craves.

Lady, you go on talking to a night Nobody hears, Your conversation finds no issue Over coffee in a booth of words Spoken to yourself so that others may overhear And leave, happier they are different, grand Fiddlers of the news.

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Jill Widner

GUNMAN

He wants the hightail kick and leap over stones of a she-deer shot, the vital spot missed, running, camouflaged soft as talc through fog.

And when she flings herself on three legs into the thickettoo tight with grey and thorn to be pursued, it pleases him that she's intractable and he leaves her there wounded, the color of the branches .

And because he's thinking of the beer in the oily bed of the truck, because he's thinking of the climb , he thinks nothing of his debt to a heartbeat lessening, to blood gathering on the earth, both dry and smeary as a certain man's hands, a certain man's heart.

50

Lyn Lifshin

you wouldn't believe the jokes, we were all glad to get there and not in a at least we body bag could sing and ogle blondes those of us with eyes still and lips that could move.

I'd have been out sooner than 12 months if it wasn't for the skin grafts. No one felt funny because nobody had everything they'd been born with Even the quadriplegics would go on about girls Even in the copters with blood filling the cock pit matting hair the first thing those who could talk whimpered or moaned was "Hey, mate, do I still have my balls?"

51

HE SAID IN THE HOSPITAL IT

isn't much like you'd imagine they're joking paraplegics putting on rock 'n roll real loud to bug some dudes who just like Aida we were glad to be coming out of the jungle not in body bags first day out with my new leg and I think I'm hot stuff don't know its got this spring-loaded thing and I twist on a bar stool and my leg spits and flings itself out yanks a brief case off this man's arms and throws it across the floor he gives me a funny look then once one foot turned around so I looked to be walking backward and forward and a kid pointed it out

)2

and said look that man as his mama was hushing you 'd be surprised what I can do with it but Honey, there are some things its more comfortable to take if off for

53

Leona Yamada MOTHER

Before her mother died in December, she arrived with a small cage containing two hamsters. "These are for you," she said, "because I can't care for them while Mom is with me. She'll need so much help and I won't have the time." The larger animal was red-eyed-an albino female; the younger was brown and white, a male. In their rusty cage, they tried to squeeze themselves into opposite corners under two plastic food bowls that hooked over the horizontal bars. They were the last hamsters she had because twenty died when she had her house painted; the chlorine solution for mildew removal had a strong fume that killed the sleeping animals before noon on the first day. " She'll be in heat in two nights-so good luck," she said. "I wasn't planning to breed her-she's pretty old-but there's no choice. Hope we have a new colony soon."

They mated all night. Except for an occasional squeak in the ten-gallon tank, there was no sound. I've had them now for fifteen days, and enjoy their company. The female is pregnant; her name is Satori (which means "enlightenment" or "inner peace"). The male is in a separate cage. After the mating, she chased him around the tank, biting him until his face and back bled.

I'm a night person, sleeping past 10 a.m. and staying up till three or so every morning. It's quiet, and I can read and work then. The hamsters and I are synchronized. We've spent these past nights sharing my desk, sometimes staring at each other. We like the same foods-cheese, nuts, granola and vegetables. The whirring and thumps of their wheels from 8 p .m. matches the hum of my blue IBM Correcting Selectric. We look alike from behind when we run, and the similarities in our hands when we hold our food inspired a friend to take a series of photos showing us eating. I've got two friends left. Since my divorce, with the kids gone, and in this room, alone, the nights have been hardest to live through ... until now. I'm glad pets are allowed; it's likely that, if we'd had pets, they'd have gone with him too- like most of our friends. His friends, his kids.

54

Satori is huge; I see the babies under her skin. They move so much she cannot rest. Sometimes she jumps while she eats, and her red eyes meet mine.

There's nothing we can do. My friend who left the hamsters took an emergency leave from work. Her mother's gotten bad. She's glad there will be babies, but I'm thinking there will be no room. My friend's mother doesn't recognize her. The doctors say it can't be much longer. Last time I saw her, my other friend was here. She used the timed shutter and the flash on her camera for a group photo; all of us have red eyes.

Satori had her babies last night. They were tiny-little pink erasers streaked with blood. Like human embryos. One came right after another; I lost count. There were more than a dozen. Each baby was transparent. I could see its beating hean and watch its stomach turn white with milk. She lay over them like a parachute. Sometimes a pair of kicking feet rustled her belly fur, then disappeared.

This evening, so few are left. I lift the tank to look underneath. Five sucking on their mother. Her eyes are closed most of the time, red slits in the white face.

It is midnight. She holds the last in her small, delicate hands. Once, her eyes open wide. Then she yawns like a snake. Her teeth are long, sharp, and yellow. I wonder how they fit in her mouth. She keeps her eyes closed now, biting leisurely. Her albino fur, pink lips, and hands shine translucent and wet. The shredded white napkin-soaking in red since yesterday.

She eats its head first. They are so soft when they're born. I hear it scream -a very small shriek-and I stare. I think, sometimes, of my children.

In the corner of her glass tank, two transparent hind legs and a tail hang, pointing down : spit from a casual mouth.

ss

Michael McPherson WHITE HORSE IN THE FAR PASTURE

We've come suddenly to this wide and long landscape, the sun's last glimpse of the white mountain over green hills shadowed into blue by windblown clouds of afternoon.

Those hours of talk 100 miles of ocean away swirl and dissipate and touch nothing here, like ashes over the burn barrel they twirl and dance away with their sad forgotten moments.

So much that is dead is now put away at last and how small it all seems in the last dip of a wing from a passing plane, small lost island of dreams and working the unworkable out.

Here is simplicity, only the slow passage of time and wind, and the white mare grazes by the long stand of ironwoods through the bent grass.

So many little goodbyes can never be believed, but here is still another island of green hills slightly out of reach behind the wind's fine mist, for this moment sheltered from ravenous want.

Or so it seems. The grass grows tall and sometimes at night a wind sings and ,grey dancing mist blows cold .

S6

All morning the machines squeak, clatter and roar as this earth 路 opened and set aside, in black plastic end to end and covered with sand. , sewer, electric like veins in an embryonic arm, a pulse, while in the sky birds circle in their turns.

What can't be replaced is given a steel plate and left for later.

If again there can be no bones before the dark comes home, we will bury everything.

57

CarolAnn Russell

NEW HAVEN for Ken Florey

Something's tired here, the sky a blue like old glass streaked with rain. I'm looking for a job and come alone through two time zones and bad connections to uncertain spring and a motel with no hot water.

But this is the first elbow into the soft stomach Of the future and I wince, knowing I've asked for it.

There are compensations. De Rose's Fruit and Vegetables on State Street opens its door to me, its striped awning flirting with the breeze. The checked tiles are smudged with footprints and mine with midwest dust feel welcome.

I touch the cabbages, their layered heads at ease in wooden baskets, watching over brussel sprouts below like distant relatives. Mounds of pasta salad reveal their hearts of artichoke and soft feta lumps.

Avocados huddle nearby, still hard from inexperience.

Gently, like a first true love, I pick one up and cup it in my palm until it warms.

This tiny store, survivor of the past and slums when a neighborhood once smiled new paint and rattled clear Italian for blocks, still opens every day. The owner, fat as a Nebraska cornhusker, behind the counter discusses the merits of vanilla beans and the freshness of kale today, taking my money as though we are sharing bread .

These little acts of sunlight the simple transformations, life sentence of the child.

Above the cashbox, olive oil shines in bottles straight as soldiers offering to end my battle for a home. When we leave I imagine the produce breathing soft Mediterranean hellos, my body lifting off on new and neighborly wings.

58

Tracy Morisaki A CAT ON THE WALL

He was a panther of a cat, Black-haired and yellow-eyed : A creature of darkness and night, Of black onyx and topaz .

And he sat on the wall In the garden like an ancient Egyptian god worshipped by Marigolds and daffodils And a blue-haired Persian With a kink in her tail.

And like a dead god Or a statue of stone, He did not careHe only sat on the garden wall, Carved blackness in The white of daylight.

59

Joseph Stanton

PARROTS IN AIEA

They do not belong here, but every day at dawn and dusk a green flock circles and recircles, screaming, always screaming.

Like so many of us, they have found lives by changing their ways of living.

They live off seeds of haole koa trees, weeds that grow like weeds.

The parrots crack the thin brown pods in powerful, curved beaks that were made for tougher nuts than these.

In the real jungles where they really live there is more to eat and more that wants to eat them.

Here nothing or no one notices.

My neighbors do not believe me when I say that every day a large flock of large green parrots circles our suburb, screaming.

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"Why don't we hear them? Why don't we see them?" my neighbors complain.

But there is always screaming somewhere that we do not hear, somewhere beyond or above or within our lives, and these fly so high their cries are no more distinct than the cries of traffic from the freeway.

You have to listen at the right time and with careful ear, to hear them cry" Where! Where! Where! " with every beat of wing.

I tell my little girl, "Come, I hear the parrots," and we go out to a darkening sky heavy with high green whirrings and voices that cut and cut and do not belong here.

61

One Day

Faye Kicknosway

Ursule Molinaro

DIVORCED BY THE DEVIL Mary MacLane: May 2, 1881 -August 8, or 7, 1929 For Alice Loftin

What is it that isolates one daughter from the rest of her family. From her mother, her sister, 2 brothers, a stepfather, who seem to be content, living in Butte, Montana.

Selfishness. She has cocooned herself in selfishness: chorus the mother I sister I brothers I stepfather. In the familiar unison that feels like an unscalable wall to the one isolated daughter.

Who protests: She's not selfish. She is not an egoist ; she's an egotist ... & a genius.

It's my genius that sets me apart from the rest of you: she cries.

Soundlessly, onto a page she heads: Today. Followed by 314 pages she heads: Tomorrow ... Tomorrow ... Tomorrow . . . Which she covers with causes & descriptions of her bitter 19-year-long isolation among the seemingly contented. Of her exclusion from almost all of humanity. Except for Lord Byron. & Napoleon. & the Anemone Lady, the one teacher who was kind to her in school. The only person in Butte who seemed to understand her, but then moved away.

I'm a philosopher! she cries onto hundreds of pages of tomorrows.

I'm a writer, & a liar, contained in an admirable young woman's body!

Which I worship .

Which is adequately fed 3 times daily at the family table . & exercised, training the litheness of its admirable young woman's legs during solitary walks through hours of Montana barrenness, & nothingness, & rock-strewn stretches of sand. Toward red-lined Montana sunsets. & by doing housework. Training the elasticity of its admirable young woman's spine by scrubbing the familiar kitchen floor.

The bathroom, where the orderly row of familiar toothbrushes terrifies the genius/philosopher/writer/liar. Who is more truthful than the orderly contentment/the contented orderliness of the toothbrush owners.

Who never seem to question the need for getting up & eating 3 meals & doing a little housework & having a few conversations & going to bed & getting up . ... Who are hypocrites, pretending to find

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contentment in the terrifying repetition of getting up & eating 3 meals & doing a little housew()rk & having a few conversations & going to bed. Of being born & growing up & marrying & bearing children & dying & being born & growing up & marrying . . . .

Which she will not do. She will not marry! the genius/philosopher/ writer I liar solemnly pledges to the bathroom mirror. Which reflects a solemn, plain-featured 19-year-old face . Redeemed by admirable hair, the color of glory.

Which the 19-year-old genius/philosopher/writer/liar craves more than anything in the world . Glory, the color of Montana sunsets, her very own red line of sky. Which would redeem her bitter isolation, her youngwoman's genius, misplaced in Butte, Montana. Where no one recognizes it; except the Devil Who eventually comes to visit.

Bring it to me, Devil. Bring me my very own red line of sky. For just one hour, and take all, All-everything I possess: she cries.

Prophetically; her glorious sky suddenly clouding with fear images of dying in a lonely hotel room .

On cenain evenings the admirable young woman's body is alluringly clothed. With fresh stockings on its washed, walk-weary admirable young woman 's feet. & the genius/philosopher/writer/liar goes to sit by the window of her room, to stare at the near perfection of ugliness all around her.

Perfecting her egotism until it becomes rare indeed.

Comparing the starvation of her young woman's soul to the seemingly satiated souls of the seemingly contented all arcund her. Who label her nameless wanting: greensickness.

Who are old, & raise age-thorned eyebrows or young as she is, & stare at her with dead-fish eyes when she tries to explain to them why her painful heart is made of wood.

Or when she says that she wears a necklace of turquoise & fire that has as many stones as her starved young woman's soul has had lives.

Or that, to her, sex is: a blest impediment a celestial encumbrance a radiant curse.

Or: that Christ has no humor.

Or: that her admirable young woman's brain is a workshop of the Devil.

In Whom she ardently believes.

Although she also believes that God is worth seeing. Although one can see Him only as one dies.

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For over 300 pages of Tomorrows the genius / philosopher/writer/liar sits by her window, clothed in alluring anticipation of the Devil's Coming.

He is a kind Devil, Who understands her need for glory. & brings her her very own red line of sky, which lets her escape from the prison world of the seemingly contented toothbrush owners in Butte, Montana. & propels her to Chicago , & New York. For one flaming-red year, that feels briefer than the one hour for which she pledged everything she ever possessed.

Which the kind Devil accepts in exchange. Leaving the dispossessed genius/philosopher/writer/liar to flail for a livelihood between bouts of drinking, & desperate gambling . Between Chicago & New York. Until one of the seemingly contented toothbrush owners travels east to find her, delirious with typhoid fever, & brings her back to Butte, Montana. To renewed isolation. & renewed anonymity. & renewed nightly writingafter the fever leaves her body; less admirable, with no-longer-glorious lackluster hair. & renewed windowsitting, in anticipation of another visit from her kind Devil.

Who has, however, lost interest in the more & more rarefied egotism of the less-admirable-bodied, lackluster-haired, less & less young woman.

Who has nothing more to give Him. Whose nightly self-documentation takes on a whining tone.

Who finally flees Butte, Montana for a second time. But this time isolation & anonymity travel with her. Back to Chicago. Where she had been famous or notorious for one red-lined year of glory.

Which fades further & further into the past, as the isolated anonymous woman becomes increasingly ill. & increasingly poor. Until it almost feels as though her one year of glory had never really happened. As though she had imagined it all .

Which she has NOT! She really was famous once. She really was a much written-about best-selling author, contained in an admirable, much photographed 21-year-old woman's body. disparaging review Whose glorious photographs & less glorious clippings the 48-year-old woman arranges & rearranges in orderly rows on the dresser in the prophetic hotel room where she had feared dying Where she may or may not have seen the God she believed was worth seemg.

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DeanHonma

WATERDANCING

This time, it comes at night, the house bent over the slivered and patterned surface of the black-water bay, a night so nonh it heaves with cold , surrounds us with hunger, reluctance , a cause for being misunderstood .

But not by the dancers, their steps already heavy, choreographed in character, their voices electric into the static dark, a pure disregard for placement, novelty, strangers.

Spinning and twirling, cups and consequence flown into the bay, the travellers , too light to ever stop, move on through the night , drink the fullness of the bursting moon, leaving all that could be worried for swaying crazily in their current.

And the place at last concedes to friendship, collects them like a Sunday bowl, balancing and beautifully drunk.

And the dance, far from home and for a moment, lost , explodes, the players in wild joy, like pigs , like ducks, finding home anywhere it can be, desperate and innocent and slipping so helplessly beyond what's left in this world.

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ARRIVAL forCKT

A cold moon last night, and this morning there is fog, thick as Cuban cigars.

I pull the slow lane to work, smoke more than usual, drift on an old tape.

It is not so much a difference than on other days, just more beautiful, a routine of the unnoticed, a matter of running alone .

It is a day made for you, drawn in moods, colors written in grey silk, an old and perfect black-and-white. A day made oflorca, Li-Po, and duende, of daughters and sons, the blue warmth of being poor.

A day we might love, and take home , our backs turned at dawn, like regret, our skin long as stories.

And somehow I know this: to foreshadow is for old men, words past and ugly, discarded like first draft, a truth we trade for convenience, and always maybe necessity.

But you will be here tomorrow, and philosophy is a sure thing.

The rest has no need for prediction among friends, though I bet my life on the sameness of weather.

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Barbara Gearen COLLECTED LETTERS forNH

I'll be editor, Norman.

I demand the job.

There are others more qualified, I know, but I've gotten the jump on them, anticipated, begun already collecting the material, saving mine, xeroxing what I smuggle from your friends' opened mail.

Folding and stacking the 8 1I 2 by 11 's like a housekeeper her linen, I iron them flat first, make plenty of room for the new stuff I'm sure is on its way.

When you die, after 80 or so years of everyone-friends, family, yourselfexpecting the untimely cut-off, an accident in the mangrove, some violence , your head creaking into a nod one evening after a dinner of scotch and grilled salmon, shamelessly peaceful, your lucky cap, Superman "S" on its rim staring at the floor, tipping its orange porn porn toward your hean, an average-massed star gone red giant , I'll be ready.

I'll have worked a lifetime.

The design determined, I'll have jacketed the volumes in burlapthe bags we slipped off Dry Sack to toast each of your books of poetry sewn into shape with 20# test line.

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I'm printing the letters the way you write them, keeping the water-blue dawn scrawl, the Emily Dickinson dashes, the lines of frenzied metaphor, your world view in a blink. There'll be diagrams of envelopes, holiday specials you origamied to suit the works inside. The countless nicknames, hugs from the distance addressed to your friends, will be cross-referenced. It' II be a textbook. A toy.

Its piece de resistance a pop-up: you in your Molokai kitchen at midnight in 3 dimensions , a sinkful of magazines and beef tongue, garlic cloves strung like a chandelier above. In their light, scissors poised, you cutting pink construction paper valentines, your crazy landlady counting her canned goods behind you .

But that's it, no photos of anyone going from toddler to senile in eight pages.

I'll make it timeless instead , tack on an appendix: a hex scribbled down fast one day by your son; your wife's painting reproduced in book size

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but still showing its dark ladies washed thin, their colors edged by bits of fine, English lace.

I'll add recipes I record surreptitiously by your stove, menu tipsthe superiority of creamy liqueurs on shredded wheat for breakfast, the desirability of raw fish at every meal, its ocean taste a mouthwash.

Footnoting a certain letter on music I'll bind in a cardboard 45 , a bonus, Big Mama Thornton wailing as your words printed on the label revolve: "Women," he said, "have the best voices."

Norman, I know there's one somewhere, a little batty, who sashes her firewood with silk, who saves your correspondence in velvet ribboned bundles.

Let's find her. I'd like to talk her out of them, loosen the pages, sew her ribbons into your collection as bookmarks, like the Bible, the Joy of Cooking, a finishing touch.

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At Aki's Mango Bar

Sophia Hindley

Norman Hindley

WOOD BUTCHER for my father

After the Navy and war You drafted big prints and started a summer house In Bay Springs. I was your helper, and that first year We worked weekends through most of the winter.

The wind, your cold immaculate tools, the hole In the floor of the Ford we traveled in . . .

I hated it all. Especially my carpentry. I ruined doors, My tape never returned, I couldn't saw for shit. "Measure twice, cut once."

You said it a hundred times.

I tried everything to please you, You my ex-flyboy, the perfectionist.

Even your smile was mitered. Your hands cool and silky On the tools, brown as the lining Of your flight jacket. Mine were white, Mitts of a wood butcher.

You never said that, But when you carne across the scarred paneling, The wrong nail, the split grain, Doughnut grease on the new glass, I'd watch your eyes, the drained bluebirds That flew your face .

I messed some screens up once, Wrinkles, wavy frames, You broke them out with a chair.

My best day I spent hauling dry wall,

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Holding while you fitted and tacked.

For years I would devote myself To carrying and fetching.

Strong, good with mortar, but squirrely.

A world class gofer.

I want you to know That today I finished a boat, designed it , 22 feet, foredeck , wheel , A transom you could hang a Pratt & Whitney on.

But none of this is challenge or revenge, The boat is a way of speaking, a tongue Saying I still want to please you That it's your disappointment that drives me.

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MONASTERY

Bow season there is late fall, two weekends Before the gunners go in. The maples Have peaked, and the left leaves are brown, Curling, crisp as fried fish. Since 12 years old I'd hunted on the monastery grounds, never Killed a deer but shot at one my second time out And was hooked.

With an o.k. from the main monk I put up a tree stand high in a pine. I Learned to climb without rattling arrows, To draw down and release smoothly Guiding the riding arrow like a beam Through tunnels in the leaves and limbs.

I killed and cleaned small animals. Lived In the tree like a crab.

And I watched the far-off holy brothers In pairs on the worn prayer roads, they Took vows of silence and were very good About it till late afternoon When they gathered in the bluestone chapel And chanted for all their lives In blowing, high Latin .

As I got older I went less often But was as possessive as ever. I kept Then stand in good repair, camouflaged it And took to hiding the 8 tree steps When leaving. I always brought My bow, by then a Bear recurve, 55 pound draw, but rarely did more

74

Than string it. I was going to be alone, Content to sip a thermos of cocoa, suck On a pipe .

One bitter cold, windless Sunday When I had no business sitting, freezing In a tree, two guys with a shotgun Between them and no beagles Passed through a clearing and curved away Toward a slight rise. They walked straight ahead As though late, crushing leaves with foolish, low shoes, Never stopping to listen. Eyes front . No Hats. No idea of the woods.

I listened but lost interest. So, worn Down by the cold and annoyed I left. And was cutting across A long cornfield home When the two stepped from a line of trees And broke toward me. The one with the gun Fired twice into the air, An autoloader. (The ejecting shells were fast , hard to follow.) The shot fell in the field Like spit.

One snugged the muzzle of the gun up Between my legs.

I felt a blue snow swirl Through my stomach. They robbed me . Folding knife, Hand warmer, stainless pint thermos, A down vest. Put a hand in my front pocket Went down to where I was warm . Then went through the arrows Taking only the showy, razor-edged broadheads

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On aluminum shafts. They couldn't figure the bow, Couldn 't string it . One kicked me . (Sunday shoes and leather soles, city socks, a grey December leg.)

They finished , Walked off down the center of the cornfield. I stood And knew that with no wind they were not hard marks.

When they were 45, 50 yards out I strung the bow, picked up one of four Field arrows they'd rejected, and went to full draw.

I would open the gunner's head in half Like a clam, and when the other turned The second arrow sounding like it struck A block of cheddar would take him high In the chest where the bone is.

I'd fixed on a spot and was steady But my fingers wouldn't straighten, I tried again. I felt the fletching on my cheek, Lowered the bow. I went all to hell, screamed.

I've been over this hundreds of times. I ask If that awful lust was conquered, went out of me Into the air that day. Or if it's inside waiting Like an unwithered muscle. I haven't Raged in years. I pass it off as maturity But it's fear. I'm a little crippled.

I wait for the gunman's face, the nose Like a boiled claw. I hate smooth black shoes, A cenain haircut.

I sleep and feel blue snow, Fingers in a ragged hole.

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WINTER EEL for Douglas Hindley Late October, November for sure And Block Island Sound Is the prick of misery. Gales Blow up your ass out of nowhere, Fogs crawl off the Atlantic, Sit eighteen hours in one And when it lifts you're popeyed, You can't find your peeker, And some prayer Stinks in your teeth like tuna.

Sharp rain's in your face Like fin bones. The Gulf Stream's Moved out. The Labrador Current in, south Around from Cape Race. And the water's Cold, fertile, black.

BLACK! as tautog.

Not grey as some poets say, Agape on the beach.

There to summon the wisdom of mussels, Commune with the skulls of haddock, Call crabs flowers.

To sit, ass and brain, twin barnacles In the sand.

BLACK! as flounder.

You hotshots better get wet, introduced.

Butcher a turtle See the hearts before soup.

Circle, turn like a shark, Take a risk, Bring back an interesting skin.

BLACK! as a hibachi.

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And here's more . Don't travel To fill your books with menus, English horseshit, Streets with long fucking names I can't say, Reptiles, ruins , piazzas and ices .

Even Manuel, dark, gloomy, Your piece of tail in Corsica, Is no villanelle.

Ripe with wintering, snuggling fishes . Cod .

Hake. Haddock.

Four miles offPoimJudith , Triangulate. White roof. Blue roof. Boat's bow.

And you're there.

Full alone with the fish below.

White meat, backbone , The whole blood of the Sound.

2

Sunday morning , Roar of the Ford And the Valley behind us Black as a watch cap .

Point Judith is a two hour push , Due south. A last weather check, piss call.

Pick up the bait And on the water by daybreak , one bird , No boat but ours.

The cold Sound, blue vault, Diamond light of the cold sun .

Cold cod bell Under the cold hull, Kiss our steel hooks.

You stack their hard bodies in boxes Like apple wood.

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You fire the hibachi, Prepare an area, Make way for eel. The conger.

You haul one in like a knot, Hack off the head, That cage of prehistory, And with a single motion Strip its skin.

The meat is white, crisp as a mackintosh, long as ice.

Sectioned, Lined up on the grill Like biceps.

The charcoals whisper with pepper, Lemon, olive oil, And the standard blizzard of salt.

Fishing stops. Fingers rinse in warm tea.

And the Sound wind goes inland With grilling eel , A pinch of citrus, Whiff of risen ash.

The eel Is unbeatable.

But the bowls You warm and serve in Douglas Matter more. They are symbols Of a simple dignity, Of a care, a grace, That finds us. Tempers us In a rolling skiff, Open Sound, smell of fish.

Bowl white as a quill, Bowls in our hands Like nests.

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Rob Wilson

CONFESSIONS FROM MOLOKAI: THE MALE IMAGINATION in NORMAN HINDLEY'S WINTER EEL Winter Eel. By Norman Hindley. Honolulu: Petronium Press, 1984; distn'buted by the University ofHawaiiPress

Growing up in Connecticut in the late 50's, a kid had to make a karmic choice: he could root for the bedraggled Boston Red Sox to the nonh or for the imperious New York Yankees to the south. Since the teams were fraternal rivals in the American League, however, he could not align his male dreams with both. Boston was an underdog team, full of house eccentrics like the mad Jimmy Pearsall (from my own Waterbury) or the arrogant god, Ted Williams, who daily scorned the press. The Yankees were winners, natural aristocrats, a corporation full of all-Americans moving towards perfection in a tradition of pinstripes that went back, beyond any history I knew, to the early twenties. Embedded stone monuments to Ruth and Gherig in center field shot up as burial sites of deities which aspirants to grandeur such as Mantle or Maris had to negotiate around.

Whatever your childhood affiliation in New England, a visit to Fenway Park with its monstrous left field wall or to Yankee Stadium with its ocular configurations of power suggested an excursion to the playing grounds of the gods . So it was that, since the days of Walt Whitman and his Brooklyn Atlantics, baseball came to inform the American imagination of fathers and sons with exacting yet unrealizable dreams, and, less visibly, an available "code" on how to play the inevitable social game with some power and grace, the makings of a personal style. To play for the Boston Red Sox conferred local immonality in New England towns which could last generations , even if one went back to work in the tool-and-dye factories or disappeared out west.

Norman Hindley's "Baseball," one of myriad confessional ones in Winter Eel, is a lyric whose voice seems grounded in this American male tradition. Written by a native Rhode Islander now living in Hawaii-who I can be sure identified with the Hub team and hated 'those prick Yankees' 80

-"Baseball" captures this American story of a once-pastoral game gone to economic rot. That a childhood friend of Hindley's, Walt Dusza, could have played in the 70's for the Boston Red Sox but instead ended up driving a produce truck past Fenway Park suggests a larger story of class determination , disillusionment, and imaginative betrayal which rings archetypal for American males who have, in Louis Simpson 's phrase, " contracted American dreams."

Hindley conveys Dusza's world in a voice of direct address slowly stripped of evasive poetic dictions and genteel thematizing-that "whole boatload of sensitive bullshit" which Ginsberg wildly banished in Howl. " Baseball," spoken "for Walt Dusza," reads in full : Maybe it was the salmon cakes He damn near inhaled for breakfast, Or the hundredweights of cabbage. By Jesus He was a ballplayer. A hitter, he could go To either field or behind a runner. He always batted Second. Played every position but catch (We couldn't risk his fingers .)

Home though was second base where he pulled Out hot grounders And double played all but the fastest clubs To death . His pitchers loved him.

In '62 when we took it all He hit .600 in the play-offs and saved The final game in the eighth With his glove.

The scout from Boston nodded .

He had to be big.

A couple of years in the farm system To develop, put on a few pounds, A season rn Triple A ball, Then into the " Fens" with its friendly Left fence and water-green infield. Ads For Gillette .

But something screwed up. He stopped, Married a big babushka headed girl, Bought an 18 wheeler And hauled produce and Christmas trees out of Boston Going right past Fenway Park.

I reject this. Walter You were born for ball, not Peterbilts. When you Went to your right Your arm moving across your body,

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Or rippled a high hard one into the corner I could feel the lyricism and sex Inherent in great baseball.

Watching you read hitters, work the infield In the hot summer leagues (If the wind was right I could smell cabbage from the dugout .)

Making bozos out of the best men.

You robbed me . You should've been at second Against Cincinnati, faced Guidry in '78, You would have made it good, Two Series for the Sox, My dream intact, And I could have shown you to my boy. (21-22) Hindley's "Baseball" is a deftly wrought colloquial poem written by someone who knows from the inside no less than the craft, embodied ethic , and lurking metaphors of this span. The terms of the poem embody this, both in the third-person description of the first two sections, and in the direct-address section which closes this poem (and most others) in a more scathingly intimate way. Dead metaphors from spans lingo such as " hot grounders ," "born for ball," and "high hard one" glisten with the sexual power of the male body, a tactic the narrative voice later makes explicit: "I could feel the lyricism and sex/Inherent in great baseball."

This working-class wonhy never made it from the "hot summer leagues" to immortal "Fens," but he did show Rhode Island fans some moments and moves of excellence. The poet would emulate such exacting spon in the clean, raw linebreaks of his poem.

Walt Dusza embodies for me the dream of a New England male childhood: to engorge yourself on ethnic food each day, to play a basic sport like baseball or basketball well into adulthood, to manifest male prowess both in the realm of play and work, even to marry a local woman and have little male New Englanders with the same will and drive to Yankee excellence.

Admittedly sexist and class-determined, his dream stops shan of the Boston Red Sox and the grandeur of the World Series. We want of course to know-why? Hindley's lyric story suggests an answer: Dusza has betrayed this boyhood dream by giving himself over to the working-class system, with its boundaries of mindless labor and the servitudes of an early marriage. It is more a failure of imagination than of courage. Dusza's wife is portrayed like some fatalistic soviet heroine of the tractors: ''He stopped, I Married a big babushka headed girl/Bought an 18 wheeler/ And hauled produce ...."

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The blatant irony is that he works past Fenway Park and not in it. Yet this story of youthful prowess amounting to ephemeral local glory is representative, and Hindley knows it. Hindley's own son will pursue his own dreams of American glory, which need not include baseball or poetry, as the father must accept. In another father-son dialogue, "Wood Butcher," Hindley with his clumsy "white/Mitts of a wood butcher" builds a boat on Molokai to serve as a belated communication to his more sure-handed father. The boat is one sign of his own fatherhood: I want you to know That today I finished a boat, designed it, 22 feet, foredeck, wheel , A transom you could hang a Pratt & Whitney on.

But none of this is challen~e or revenge, The boat is a way of speaktng, a tongue Saying I still want to please you That it's your disappointment that drives me. (24) There are 27 poems in Winter Eel, almost all of them consistent in style, voice, and excellence; some 20 of them are addressed directly to specific readers: mother, father, uncles, aunts, friends, brother, Diane Wakoski , William Blackstone, and the gentle reader whom the poems brazenly confront. This cast of characters and mode may seem familial and old hat by now, but Hindley's hard-angled way of rendering their voices in dreamy dialogue with his inner self saves the performance from sighs of cant or sentiment. His often-sonorous language remains crisp, taut, energetic, even when its economy of barely controlled male libido borders on subversive parody of the whole macho code itself.* *In "Macho/Macha: The Feminine Lurking at the Heart of Macho Poetry," Diane Wakoski explains (and highly praises) Winter Eel's ami-Hemingway pursuit of a "higher macho code" and a mythic self "beyond the sexual (and the macho)" which might incorporate male and female energies, American Book Review 7 (1985): 16- 18. On the "rhetoric of honesty" in the male stance (the raw) opposed glibly to prissy formalities of diction (the cooked), see Paul Zweig's skeptical analysis of voice in Stafford and Ammons, "The Raw and the Cooked," Partisan Review4 1 (1974): 604- 12.

II.

I knew some of Hindley's New England circumstances, his terms of fraternal rivalry: I, roo , wanted to win and excel, and so identified with the

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Yankees as a symbolic route up and out-to glory, pennants, dynastic perfection, bodily style, all of which I obtained vicariously at 11 or 12 through banal mechanisms of hero-worship. Crazy left fielder, Jimmy Pearsall, seemed just another factory drunk crashing his head into the green walls of Fenway in between hospitalizations when he could not work. The " Pearsall at Bat" column in the Waterbury Republican seemed a daily embarrassment as Jimmy fumed, went hitless, performed his anger against systemic violence in some antic wrongly directed against the umpire or the fans.

Seemingly wholesome Mickey Mantle, by contrast, meant daily power and elegance, a style to be admired in the milltowns of Connecticut. But Rhode Island was physically connected to "the Hub," so Hindley's poem "Baseball" records his Boston affiliation and dream. As a physical yet dream-deep narration of the American male psyche, "Baseball" put me in touch with my own origins, as did others in language which has the terse force of Lowell without his postmodern baggage of self-irony intervening.

(This essay became my homage and dialogue.)

Boston still seems mired in the New England dilemma: too many family eccentrics, too many self-defeating moral gestures, a tradition proud but losing its providential direction like John Cheever in What A Paradise It Seems or Fenway Park itself. The anonymous Walt Dusza seems another instance. If this 'black Protestant' ethos drove Roger Williams into the Indian wilderness, it may have driven Hindley westward towards rugged Molokai to emplant his worshipful poetic of earth and sea.

Only years later did the entrepreneurial vulgarities of Steinbrenner make the Yankees look like weary capitalists in blue pinstripes, with common names and floating loyalties. The cold negotiations for Rickey Henderson, as reponed in the Honolulu Advertiser, are one exhibit: " 'George, (Yankee owner Steinbrenner] is still insisting on present market value, although we want to get this thing done,' Safety said." Henderson yet dreamily contended : " I want to feel what it would be like to be a Yankee and be in a class with greats." The Red Sox, in their bumbling informality (shown again, amazingly, in the 1986 World Series), still preserve some of that childhood aura.

Yet "Baseball" speaks of and to Hawaii where Hindley, moving there in 1970 from Rhode Island, now teaches for a living . Despite Hindley's Rhode Island imagery, or indeed because of its grounded nature in details of person and place, his poems often speak to Molokai, that most wilderness-keeping island of the kahunas (shamans) and Father Damien, where Hindley has taught poetry (and related survival tactics) in Molokai High School. That is, such poems cut across regionality, speaking across the five

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thousand miles between Rhode Island and Hawaii, just as Roben Pinsky can make of boardwalk-sleepy Long Branch, New Jersey, the locus of his still-Jewish myths and dreams. Like a displaced Melville, Hindley indeed brings an ethic of New England darkness-and-light to the tropics, and American poetry is better off for this east-west exchange.

III.

I quoted "Baseball" in full as a way of discussing some qualities (and limitations) of form/ content in Winter Eel because this first book has been, in effect, doomed to marginalized publication outside the mainstream houses of New York, Yale, and Atheneum. Thankfully the University of Hawaii Press has decided to distribute the book nationally, but aside from a few solid mainland journals like Praine Schooner and Poetry Now, and despite a portfolio of his poetry in Hawaii Review ([1978] 9: 121-133), few American poetry fans have ever heard of Norman Hindley. But to classify his work as "regional" or "local" would be a misleading way of dooming its reading forever to the Islands, where Hindley has already become something of a folk hero as a rugged fisherman poet from Molokai, now teaching the craft and ethos of writing at Punahou High in Honolulu. You do not have to be a Boston Red Sox fan nor from Molokai to appreciate the cleanly craft and male insight of Winter Eel. Hindley works best in an all-purpose genre of psychological narrative that probes for archetypes beyond conformist selfhood, a mode of fictive imagining which Ginsberg and Lowell helped centralize in the American 50's, and which singular voices such as Jim Harrison and Diane Wakoski now ruthlessly deepen at masculine/feminine extremes of symbolic practice.

IndeedJames Wright's Ohio, Richard Hugo's Montana, or Jim Harrison's Michigan suggests an analogous male geography and voice, that of an American ego clinging to the wilderness as symbolic means to preserve some primal state of wholeness and power, a tactic to protect the self from aspects of western culture which Emerson swore "ends in a head-ache."

The precursor voicing such local, blooded life remains Whitman, with his macho, democratic affront (even echoed by the sleazy presidential candidate in Taxi Dn'ver): "I am the man, I suffered, I was there .. . ." Whitman's voice somehow transcends regionality by the full embodiment of it, remaining the poet-father who in Section 33 of the masterly " Song of Myself' even incorporates baseball as an aspect of h is New York/ cosmic self:

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Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island, Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance, Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside, Upon the race-course , or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball , At he-festivals . ..

Pleas' d with the native and pleas' d with the foreign ....

We might expect this all-absorbing voice of Americana to cite Niagara Falls or the data of Manhattan , but the phrasing of "horse-block" and "jigs or a good game of base-ball" still suprises after hundreds of readings of " Song of Myself." Somehow the voice of this " he-festival" survives by rootedness in a material terrain, some local Paterson, however vulgar or antipoetic it might seem at the time.

Hindley mines this male voice, blessing and cursing his local ground.

Spectacles of astroturf and Peterbilts , however, are fast neutralizing this call of the wild which native voices like Thoreau 's or Snyder's cannot symbolically gainsay. In the title poem , "Winter Eel," Hindley urges overcooked, bookish poets (such as Mark Strand or John Hollander) into the raw waters of wintry Block Island Sound, with his own macho affront: BLACK! as tautog .

Not grey as some poets say, Agape on the beach.

There to summon the wisdom of mussels, Commune with the skulls of haddock, Call crabs flowers . (72) Hindley's underlying argument is to embrace a wilderness poetry which is close, bodzfy close to the fact of nature. His poems are implicit rejoinders against that voice which is so self-referential, mediated, and spectatorial that the poet becomes a ghostly absence hugging the shore and proclaiming the philosophical rightness of that stance. Hindley's is not the voice to proclaim deconstructively, as Mark Strand's enervated minimality does in "Keeping Things Whole" : In a field I am the absence of field.

This is always the case.

Wherever I am I am what is missing. (Reasons for Moving 40)

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Such sign-drunken stance parading the blessings of absence came to fruition in aspects of late Stevens, and it is time, physically and morally, to get on with something else.

IV. Hindley's physical language and wholeness of form suggest not so much the digressive, phrasal Whitman of Sea-Dnft but the closer-to-home Lowell, who centralized autobiographical confession as a genre prizing the self as central if not only subject. What connects Hindley to Lowell is not so much a shared subject and psychology-in this he may be closer to Hemingway- as a shared form: each poem becomes taut, rounded, moving towards wholeness of closure without pompous generalizations or tricks of rhyme to achieve some 'monumental' utterance , as in even a densely sensuous poet like Robert Hass .

Add to this form the juiced-up stance of "personalism" advocated by Frank O'Hara , making the poem an intimate address from one person to another as if in a nervously impacted love letter, and you would have some sense of the tradition Hindley is working in. A female analogue would be the brutally direct Wakoski, whose poems are more loosely confessional in a way that yet moves towards archetype, what she calls a "personal mythology" from the psychic depths of self (as in her stunning poem on the Persephone myth , " Nell's Birthday," in Cap of Darkness). Hindley confesses his debt to and difference from Wakoski in revisionary letters to her when she was a resident ofMolokai around 1978: I remember last summer's August Every light on in your house Burning, the rooms like aluminum And still not enough, Poet-of-the-Boxes-of-Joseph Cornell I want To fill them for you with Colemans, Exhalations of diamond light, Moons like ducks in the boxes , The argon of chardonnay ("White Light" 32).

Such a metaphor suggests Hindley's own ars poetica, as does a longer version called " Painting By Numbers" which portrays a formal apprenticeship to a precursor who is probably the drunken , bellowing Welchman, Dylan Thomas. "Winter Eel" similarly urges the poet-quester away from self-absence and into the murderous depths and strategies of the ocean.

Hindley (and the more dreamy Wakoski) burrow within this tradition

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of psychological narrative centralized by the master confessional poet Lowell. Each poem unleashes a voice exploring extremities of masculine/ feminine psychology and hoping to beget coherence to the self through brutally expressive tactics. Each poem seems stripped of allusiveness but not of mask or the play of a performing self. Voice would merge with mask to create a vividly recurring self, which did not quite exist in the same way prior to the ego-transfiguring story of the poem.

Hindley's poem aspires to commune in a one-on-one communication which the jaded audience seemingly overhears as emplotted journey into murky, empowering depths of psyche which the collective "poetic diction" of an era either represses or masquerades. Hence, the poems in Winter Eel (and even more so in Wakoski) seem brooded into existence, through the obsessive play of private image and symbolic landscape, towards some wholeness of narration (a kind of "keeping things whole" to use Strand's slogan). At a structural level, the goal becomes the wholeness of a psychic story regrouping daily facts, hence refiguring the ego .

The poem's typical form in Winter Eel becomes a letter sent from the depths of the psyche to a barely receptive friend, who must accept data that would normally be reserved for the confessional booth of the journal, that most Christian of forms . The voice/self confesses his solitudes, communions, and moments of grace in the wilderness that America still remains, urban or otherwise. Lowell's "Epilogue" from Day By Day suggests the snapshot-like limits yet also the deep, compassionate rationale of this mode. The self confesses his myriad appropriations as acts of heightening, works encapsulating mortality, signs of love: But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact .

. . .

We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name. (27)

v.

Such an epistolary, quasi-documentary mode compelling the poet to revision the karmic data of biography, suggests Hindley's main limitation (for

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me) at this time: a repetitiveness of form and mode, as if the poem is condemned to repeat once exploratory procedures. His line-by-line moves remain fresh, but the predictable form is not leading the content into diverse directions; hence, the self remains locked within a set of its own deep conventions and masks, within its own set letters.

The result is, in part, a delimited masculine psychology, with not enough airy journey to compensate for or counter, as in some fierce dialectic of selfhood, the often violent proclamations of man on earth. (The same charge could be made against Hemingway, but this is not 1930 and the world is no better for that war psychology.) Don't we demand of risktaking poetry, however, some counter-image to the vulgarities and polite brutalities of mainstream American culture? Shouldn't the confessional poem, as in the fiercely exploratory teleologies and unmaskings of Adrienne Rich, or even in the displaced salvation scheme of Carl Jung, move towards inventing some wholeness of androgynous imagination?

That is to say, isn't the poem our unique means to move beyond biographical data to invent some alternative self, a persona of the future which incorporates masculine and feminine energies in some vital synthesis? Isn't this what Blake, the political-poetic utopian, had in mind when his inventive poetic imagery envisioned a warfare of male Spectre and Female Emanation which moved beyond mere selfhood?

Above aJl, poetry stiJl represents the fuJlest claims and depths of the human imagination, whatever the cultural or political circumstances which would delimit it. An exploratory book like Gene Frumkin's Clouds and Red Earth, to invoke one counter-example, suggests as much in its mercurial changes of form and language from poem to poem, and from selfaltering landscape to alchemical images mined from "The Magdalena Silver Mine."

Despite the Hemingway-like psychology and ethos which are assumed in Winter Eel, I would also contend there are indeed such glimmerings of an imaginative reformulation of American male identity, as can be seen in the contrast of two poems, "Monastery" and "Sharks in Shapes of 8." In "Monastery," Hindley confronts not meditation and prayer as the good Catholic fathers urged upon him, but hunting and revenge, his own urge to kill; in "Sharks," he moved beyond the murderous claims of the blood by laying down, Deerhunter-like, the tools of the male kill which he has carried from Rhode Island childhood to Molokai .

In "Monastery," a teenage Hindley is depicted hunting , Indian-like with bow and arrow, on a monastery grounds in Rhode Island for deer and smaJl animals. While the " far-off holy brothers" try to keep to silence and

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prayer in pairs, Hindley waits alone , keeping to the little rituals of a wilderness hunter; two cityslickers with shotguns fire at him, robbing him of his hunting gear and tools. They leave him with the bow, he finds a discarded arrow, and as they walk off he confronts an urge to "open the gunner's head in half/ Like a clam." As in Cimino's Deerhunter, the poem records this conversion and change of hean towards something more-thanChristian: I tried again. I felt the fletching on my cheek, Lowered the bow . I went all to hell , screamed.

I've been over this hundreds of times . I ask If that awful lust was conquered, went out of me Into the air that day. Or if it's inside waiting Like an unwithered muscle. I haven 't Raged in years . I pass it off as maturity But it's fear. I'm a little crippled.

I wait for the gunman's face , the nose Like a boiled claw. I hate smooth black shoes, A certain haircut.

I sleep and feel blue snow , Fingers in a ragged hole . (67) Hindley moves beyond sensations of the moment , towards naming and distancing his vengeance, then towards some depth imagery which allows a forgetting of those American crazies (all too potential in himself, as his later "Eddy" poems suggest).

"Sharks in Shapes of 8" luridly depicts the seemingly ritualistic practice of Hawaiian hunting, with a Molokai friend, Gene Yap, for bloodthirsty sharks by spilling hull's blood in the reef waters and waiting for the kill with . 300 magnums and a Winchester. Captured by the power and even beauty of the mating sharks (" Their love/ Takes a beautiful shape,/ Like 8's" ), Hindley tells Yap of his conversion away from violence : And I'd stand with the Winchester and wait For the white tips, the hammerheads, the occasional tiger, To swim in from their blue vaults , To cruise the reef, Picturing wounds, fresh meat. If I played it right And gut shot one when he rolled , as you showed me, I could stand fascinated as the others Fed on his flesh by the bucket, Filled out with him . Gene, I've quit. Stopped buying blood.

It's not that I lost courage, Was afraid that some afternoon they'd pour

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Over the coral heads and catch me calf deep, Though they could have, But that I was ashamed of deceiving, killing These long swimmers, these survivors Of ice, of cataclysm. (45-46) What this American wilderness-keeper learns from the sharks is oddly a letting go, a letting live, an admiration of the will to live in other biological creatures; hence the makings of what Snyder calls the kindred "biosphere" of where you are: And I desire to go into the pond, To learn the patterns, participate, To slip through the opening of fallen wall , Make for the dark dark vaults . (46) Craft and vision in this poem are direct, stunning, as primitive blood urges and cultural forms are made to coexist in some tenuous code of man and nature.

VI.

In The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Levi-Strauss has memorably argued that the "gustatory code" remains the privileged code among codes, because it expresses, in tangible and concrete imagery of the collective tribe, the hardwon origin of culture from nature. In myth, the raw tends to be opposed to the cooked in a logic of opposition which explains, via narration, how cooked food functions as the sign of cultural mediation, of that numinous fire brought down from heaven to earth so that man, unlike code-deprived animals, might live apart from the dangers of the raw and the rotten.

Such gustatory images of turtle soup and hibachi-cooked eel abound in food-loving Hindley, as man eats off the sea and earth, which gives generously of its body. (He once hosted a wonderful seafood dinner which he caught, furiously seasoned, and cooked for dumbfounded Wakoski on Molokai, but such stories are standard in Hawaii.) So I will conclude this essay by quoting from "Winter Eel," the last poem in the collection, wherein Hindley repeats graphically the first American move from raw to cooked.

Hindley imagistically preaches in "Winter Eel" for a return to some American raw, that winter eel which is caught directly in the dark, cold Atlantic waters; then skinned and cooked in an unemphatic, communion meal on the small ship in a total process. If American poets can return to

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this founding origin of culture, this food of nature physically encountered in labor, then the raw eel cooked on the fire of the hibachi will take on full, fresh meaning as symbolic act: You haul one in like a knot, Hack off the head, That cage of prehistory, And with a smgle motion Strip its skin.

The meat is white, crisp as a mackintosh, long as ice.

Sectioned, Lined up on the grill Like biceps.

The charcoals whisper with pepper, Lemon, olive oil, And the standard blizzard of salt.

Fishing stops. Fingers rinse in warm tea.

And the sound wind goes inland With grillins eel, A pinch of cmus, Whiff of risen ash. (74-75) Too many American poets working within the reigning descriptive conventions outlined so scathingly by Robert Pinsky, Charles Altieri, Paul Breslin, among others, remain (as Hindley depicts in his moralized geography) eating on shore, delicately picking mussels and flowers in a ministerial role . The poet then functions as another belated Emersonian moralist, making tiny metaphors of the sea past Pearl Harbor. Yet Hindley is a latterday Yankee urging such liberal American souls into their local oceans, away from the safe shore, into no less than the dangers and risks of murder. In so doing, his poems disclose again the very origin of culture which (despite its pious idealisms) must live off nature in a direct, hand-to-hand, gustatory way.

"Winter Eel" becomes, then, Hindley's polemical symbol, his own sign of phallic urgency urging nuclear-age poets still to return to the wilderness for energy, origin, sanity-a crucial theme from Thoreau's "Walking" to Snyder's ecological visions in Earth House Hold which Hindley enacts first in the Atlantic waters off Rhode Island and later offMolokai.

Surprisingly, the last stanza of "Winter Eel" presents not so much raw materiality but a vivid image of the cooked, fish and poetry distributed as that food which is offered as gift from nature to human, poet to reader, in an unalienated nexus of exchange which suggests an aura of grace:

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But the bowls You warm and serve in Douglas Matter more. They are symbols Of a simple dignity, Of a care, a grace, That finds us. Tempers us In a rolling skiff, Open Sound, smell of fish .

Bowl white as a quill, Bowls in our hands Like nests. (75) A famous aphorism by Saint Augustine urges, "Love calls us to the things of this world." Now I do not mean to suggest that the displacedChristian poet, Norman Hindley, is a saint, but his poetry does call us to the things of this world, the muck, the grace, the animals, the stark reality of other people. And he does so with a physicality of voice that a more academic poet, Richard Wilbur, say, can barely manage, and with forms that rightly say their subjects. Hindley is indeed a poet of islands , of boundaries inhabited , of mythic territories, and Hawaii is fortunate to have him here.

As Wilbur wisely put it, " Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves."

Works Cited Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science ofMythology: I. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper, 1969.

Lowell, Robert. Day by Day. New York: Farrar, 1977.

Strand, Mark. Reasons for Moving. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves ofGrass. New York: Norton, 1965.

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Angela Ball

READING LARKIN: "SOMETHING ALMOST BEING SAID"

Now that Philip Larkin's death has sealed his self-predicted silence as a poet, it seems to me more important than ever to arrive at an assessment of his work-an assessment true to its character as opposed to its reputation in the world. That reputation makes Larkin a poet of lowered sights and diminished expectations, a singer of boredom, senility, and death; it makes his vision-if indeed any can be granted him-an insular vision of exhausted certainties. Calvin Bedient, for instance, cites Larkin's "imaginative bareness" (72), and Charles Tomlinson characterizes his poetry as "the embodiment of his own inadequacy," as the expression of a "tenderly nursed sense of defeat" (Tucker and Stein 267). In the world of Larkin's poetry, it is said, experience closes rather than opens; " unresting death" waits up for us. But in Larkin's work it is precisely this apparent disillusionment which becomes, by compelling paradox, the material of vision. His acknowledgment of limitation yields release.

True, Larkin feels most comfortable at home. "As for Hull," he tells us, " I like it because it's so far away from everywhere else. On the way to nowhere , as somebody put it ." He has little use for the exotic, either in the form of literature (the modernist "myth-kitty") or uncouth beverages (retsina, "that interesting wine that tastes of cricket bats"). Asked in an interview "Do you read much foreign poetry?" he answered, "Foreign poetry? No." When a well-intentioned critic urged him to read Laforgue, he responded, "If that .chap Laforgue wants me to read him he'd better start writing in English" (Thwaite 32). Not even English poetry, it seems, escapes Larkin's distrust. When his friend Douglas Dunn became Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Hull (where Larkin was librarian), Larkin's advice was "There's too much poetry on this campus. I'm relying on you to stamp it out" (Thwaite 59). His cynicism extends to social engagements. "Vers de Societe" opens with a satirical X-ray of an invitation from one Warlock-Williams:

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My wife and I have asked a crowd ofcraps To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps You 'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend .

(High Windows 35) These examples serve not only to confirm Larkin's xenophobia, but also to evidence his considerable sense of humor: a sense of humor fed by the poet's refusal ever to misrepresent himself, ever to capitulate to outrageous fashion.

Yet Larkin 's refusals are not entirely the flat, thumbs-down ones they seem. Speaking of Larkin's disdain of modernism , articulated in the introduction of his book on music criticism, All What jazzThe terms and the ar~uments vary with the circumstances, but basically the message ts : Don't trust your eyes, or ears , or understanding. They'll tell you this is ridiculous, or ugly, or meaningless. Don't believe them . {12) -Donald Mitchell explains that The negative credo ... refresents the obverse of-but perhaps is also responsible for- al the strengths of Larkin 's verse: its precision, clarity, formal mastery and above all its marvellous rhythmic organization. (Thwaite 78) The principle of refusal balanced by affirmative power can be applied to the substance of Larkin's work no less than to the style. His sense of constriction, of encroachment (in "Going, Going" he pictures an England composed of " concrete and tyres") is countered by a reach to " unfenced existence," to the pure open of " the moon's cleanliness" and high windows' "sun-comprehending glass."

Larkin's "man-of-the-world nonchalance," his dry, cynical wit, coexist with a seriousness which-in spite of and perhaps in part because of his professed lack of faith-can be termed religious. John Reibetanz's comments on a poem called "First Sight" can be applied to Larkin's general poetic method: Instead of tracing a journey from bright innocence to clouded experience, Larkin depicts the coming of spring as something which actually wakes and grows out of a 'wretched' world ... . (537) His poems, far from mere "genteel bellyaching," refuse the ease of despair, achieve vision through and with the ordinary, achieve what John Bayley calls a "poetry of arrest" that stands "on the side of the infinite ," where "the sense of exclusion" turns "into the renewal of art" (654). In Larkin's own words, "A good poem about failure is a success."

His title poem, " The Whitsun Weddings," is a complicated orchestration of tension and release , of unevent and event, that demonstrates

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Larkin's ability to set up a trajectory, a force of meaning that arises out of ftxities and deftnites to reverberate indefinitely. The poem details a train journey on Whitsun-holiday secular and religious-a journey that begins late: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quaners-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. (21) The journey is evoked in a series of vivid images-images of width, earthbound, shadow tethered: "backs of houses," "river's level drifting breadth .. . Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet," "Wide farms," "short-shadowed cattle." The poem's center of gravity is low, like the train's- "Canals with floatings of industrial froth ," "acres of dismantled cars." But there are, too , images of vertical space, expansion: " tall heat," "hedges dipped/ And rose," "down the long cool platforms whoops and skids."

In due course we discover that this ride , supposed to be without event, intersects a bevy of events-a string of weddings: Yes, from cafes And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. AU down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown .... (22) Throughout, the poem keeps track of time ("and for/Some fifty minutes") ; the description of the wedding parties is full of a sense of lateness, of ending. The bridesmaids stand As if out on the end of an event Waving goodbye To something that survived it . .

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing .... (22) But the sense of ending, of resolution , is bound up with a promise of the new: Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London .. . . (22) As the train quickens, the alternations of images of expansion and contraction, the earthbound and the skyborne, quicken as well:

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-An Odeon went _()ast, a cooling tower, And someone runntng up to howl-and none Thought of the others they would never meet Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat : There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss Came close , and it was nearly done , this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give .... (23) The poem has been working up a head of steam, gathering tension from contradiction-not only of horizontal and venical, of lateness and earliness, confinement (in time and space) and expansive force-but also from two strongly felt visions: one of tawdry cheapness in which car parts scatter the land , in which girls wear get-ups of "nylon gloves and jewellerysubstitutes ," in which "confetti and advice" are thrown together and uncles shout smut; and one of tradition survives all fakery, all "parodies of fashion ," and wherein a natural and fitting continuum of ritual lives intact with the always-freshness of earth: a vision of "human, unselfconsciously creative activities in a decreating world" (Davies )2) ).

Larkin gives the beauteous and the ugly the same patient, felt attention. We cannot, if we love the world, ignore the crude and unsubtle; the myriad ignominious details that give beauty the lie: "The father with broad belts under their suits/ And seamy foreheads, mothers loud and fat" (22).

The truth we suffer is here: and truth and love, as always, coincide. As Larkin admiringly quotes Hardy, "The poet takes note of nothing he cannot feel." Larkin 's affection for the people he describes is revealed not only in careful detail but in his evocation of their thoughts and fears : . . . fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding .. . . (22) In Larkin we have , wonder of wonders, vision that not only includes the ungainly and unseemly, but thrives on it:

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We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold , there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. (23) This final, transfiguring thrust combines earth and sky, ascent and descent, to deliver a mysterious fulfillment, a freshening that is intensely touching . Why? Because, perhaps, this strange physical/metaphysical release takes place "out of sight," "somewhere," because it has the teasing half-poignancy of the child's rhyme: "I shot an arrow into the air. It came to rest I know not where," because rain stands for both renewal and sorrow.

Because the poet and the brides and grooms and the other passengers have congregated in the presence of a rite that exceeds its participants. The journey that began aimlessly has found its mark, all tensions simultaneously detonated and set to rest.

"Church-Going," like "Whitsun Weddings," is dedicated to the human hunger for ceremony, for the earnest of tradition. In The Geography ofthe Imagination Guy Davenport describes Charles Olson's theory of a radical alienation in modern society in terms that might apply to Larkin: All this is part of what Olson meant by saying that we are alienated from all that was most familiar. Basically he meant that we no longer milk the cow, or shoot the game for our dinner, or make our clothes or houses or anything at all. Secondly, he meant that we have drained our symbols of meaning. We hang religious pictures in museums, honoring a residual meaning in them , at least. We have divorced poetry from music, language from concrete particulars. We have abandoned the rites de passage to casual neglect where once we marked them with trial and ceremony (19-20).

Like "The Whitsun Weddings," " Church-Going" begins "at the end of an event." In describing his secular visit ("Once I am sure there 's nothing going on"). Larkin details with merciless clarity the attrition of meaning the church has undergone. Instead of professing special feeling, Larkin treats the sanctuary with cavalier casualness, seeing it from the viewpoint of the profane: Another church: matting, seats and stone , And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long . Hatless, I take off My cycle-dips in awkward reverence,

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Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost newCleaned, or restored? Someone would know; I don't.

(The Less Deceived28) He signs the book, donates a worthless Irish sixpence, reflects "the place was not worth stopping for."

Yet stop I did : in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for. . . .

These last two and one-half lines function as a hinge turning the poem toward meditations on the church's fate and its future visitors: ... wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random ; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, A shape less recognisable each week A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were ?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh ?

Or will he be my representative, Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation-marriage, and birth,

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And death, and thoughts of these-for whom was built This special shell? (28-29) In his poetry Larkin is himself a representative, setting himself to chronicle the "ordinary sorrow of man's life." He admires the novelist Barbara Pym for her way of showing ordinary characters disappointed in their urge for momentous existence: "I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour" (Thwaite 43 ). He embodies in his own work, according to John Press, "attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity, boredom, aimlessness, and malaise," voicing "articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once lent rpeaning and hope to human lives'' ( 131, 13 2). In Larkin we encounter, says Seamus Heaney, a " compassionate, unfoolable mind and its own predicamentswhich we are forced to recognize as our predicaments too" (Thwaite 131, 132).

Larkin's power derives, at least in part, from an iridescent complexity of tone. Just when we think we are in the company of a cynic, a permanently dispassionate observer, he uncovers unclouded springs of importance and meaning-springs whose refreshment is rare, barely accessible, but permanently there: For, though I've no idea What this accoutred frosty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete, since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. (29) Larkin has remarked that "the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art." The contemporary novelist Margaret Drabble has suggested a legend to be placed over the door of a church: " Important, if true." In "Church-Going," importance survives faith , survives in the need for faith, for "a serious house on serious earth," a sustaining grace.

"High Windows;' title poem of Larkin's final volume, concerns itself also with "marriage, and birth, and death, and thoughts of these."

Like "The Whitsun Weddings" the poem describes a trajectory out of

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confinement, out of time and its determinations-except here the movement is much clearer, literally advancing the poem's argument. For a poet accused of stasis and complacency, Larkin's poems include an astonishing range of motion- not only kinesthetic imagery, but motion that joins the poems' emotional content, motion that moves us .

HIGH WINDOWS When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their livesBonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think o(the pn路est. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Ltke free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond It , the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. (17) In the first two stanzas Larkin describes-in technically direct terms (and with what John Bayley terms "wryly glum delicacy," "both heartfelt and judiciously contemptuous" (653)-the sexual antics of the young and the envy of the old, quite naturally including himself in the jealous sense of exclusion, of desire fulfilled elsewhere. But the image of the slide evokes a trivial dizziness-and "endlessly" renders this " paradise" suspiciously like a hell of repetition. Suddenly a window opens in the poem: Larkin, reflecting , imagines someone forty years back giving him the same look; and suddenly, with a new thought, the poem 's perspective changes again , expanding back and up beyond time, beyond words (as when the trees in his poem " Here " come into leaf "like something almost being said" ).

Each stanza enjarnbing, falling into the next, the poem bottoms out twice , then (like the arrow shower of " The Whitsun Weddings" ) keeps on

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going, ending in a line of phrases toppling over and over into the infinite, the ascent cancelling the two giddy slides, their endlessness locked on itself like that of Yeats' "salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded seas" and countered by another endlessness seen through and surrounded by our limiting lives.

The shift to the windows is effortless, off-handed, a tour de force of the unslyly sly. In sudden juxtaposition we are brought to imagine a freedom vastly different from the one attached to youth. The poem's subject, according to Bayley, "is contingency itself, distilled-Larkin's supreme speciality-into verbal essence" (654). We stand within time, looking out, enjoying (as at the end of "Absences": "Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!") a blessed respite from human nature, from what in " Going ;' "loads" the speaker's "hands down."

An especially fertile brand of abstraction is at work in the endings of both "The Whitsun Weddings" and "High Windows," abstraction that demonstrates Eliot's assertion that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." Both poems, along with "Church-Going," evoke at once the inevitability of death and of beauty, a sense both of our limitations and of an unknowable beyond that is blindingly empty, numbingly cold, but somehow a comfort: it is Clive James' "despair made beautiful" (Thwaite 108). Larkin names the purpose of his poems: to preserve "the experience. The beauty.''

Larkin's impulse to preserve what is beautiful or serious or important (mixed as it is with the ordinary and the awkward), his respect for ritual and tradition, has caused). R. Watson, for one, to nominate him a poet of religion. And Seamus Heaney quotes these lines: 'If I were called in / To construct a religion/! should make use of water', adding "but he could make use of 'Here' as well, and 'Solar'; and 'High Windows' ; and 'The Explosion' and 'Water'; the poem from which the lines are taken" (Thwaite 136).

"I write," says Larkin, "using words and syntax in the normal way to describe recognizable experiences as memorably as possible." His poetry makes a place for what the professed religious poet Geoffrey Hill calls "The vulnerable pieties/Not willingly let die," providing a sense of "regeneration, openness, unselfconsciousness, beyond the manmade world" (Davies 526). It could even be used to support Hardy's contention, in his Apology, that "poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing."

Larkin's hope for his poems was simply that they be seen and read.

Writing, he says, is a matter of "trying to preserve something. Not for

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yourself, but for the people who haven't seen it or heard it or experienced it." Of Larkin 's poetry, I can only echo the commanding wish at the end of his celebration of country ritual , "Show Saturday": "Let it always be there." Let Larkin be here- to speak to the irreducible need for a serious house on serious earth. To be our representative there.

Bayley, John. "Too Good for This World." Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1974: 653-

55 .

Bedient, Calvin. Eight Contemporary Poets. London: Oxford, 1974 .

Davenport, Guy. The Geography ofthe Imagination. San Francisco: North Point, 1981.

Davies, Walford. "An Ordinary Sorrow of Man's Life." Sewanee Review 84 {1976): 523-27.

Larkin, Philip. All What jazz: A Record Diary 1961-68. New York: St. Martin's, 1970 .

- -. High Windows. London: Faber, 1974.

- -. The Less Deceived. Great Britain: The Marvell Press, 1955.

- - . The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber, 1964 .

Press, John. "The Poetry of Philip Larkin." Southern Review 13 (1977): 131-46.

Reibitanz, John . " 'The Whitsun Weddings': Larkin's Reinterpretation of Time and Form in Keats." Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 529- 39.

Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Larkin at Sixty. London: Faber, 1982.

Tucker, Martin and Rita Stein , eds. Modern Bn"tish Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975.

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Notes on Contributors

Sanora Babb's poems and stories have appeared in magazines in the U.S. and England, twice in the Best American Short Stories anthologies. She is the author of two novels-The Lost Traveler and An Owl on Every Post, published both in the U.S. and the U.K.-andis at work on a new book. In 1987 Capra Press will bring out some of her earlier stories, The Dark Earth, in the Back -toRack Series IX. She was married to James Wong Howe, the great Chinese cinematographer, until his death.

Joseph P. Balaz lives in Punaluu. His first dramatic work, Da Seventh Dimension, won the 1986/1987 Kumu Kahua/University of Hawaii Drama Department's Division One prize.

Angela Ball teaches at the Center for Writers, University of Southern Mississippi.

Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Mickle Street Review, The New York Arts journal, Poet & Cn'tic, and The Southern Quarterly. Her book of poems, Kneeling Between Parked Cars, is set to appear in Spring 1987 from Owl Creek Press; a pamphlet, "Recombinant Lives," will be issued soon in London by Northern Lights Press.

Brady T. Brady lives and works in Sonoma, California, writes short stories, and dreams of hitting the Lotto.

Jim Daniels teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. His first book, Places, Everyone, won the Brittingham Prize and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press, 1985 .

Richard Morris Dey has an early Bequia poem included in The Harvard Advocate's Anniversary Anthology.

Patricia Eakins' stories and poems have appeared in Black 'Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Fiction International, The Massachusetts Review, Open Places, The Worcester Review, and Yellow Silk, as well as the anthologies Fiction '86 and A Reader of New Amen'can Fiction. A long story, Oono, has been published as a chapbook (1-74 Press). Eakins has also written serial fiction for Bus Stop Magazine under the pen name Patty Ann Briggs. She has been a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State 's CAPS. Recent stories appear in Minnesota Review and Other Voices.

Barbara Gearen lives in Manoa and writes poetry and fiction.

John Grey, born in Brisbane, Australia, has lived in the U .S. for the past ten years.

His poetry has been widely published in magazines, including Blue Light

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Review, Dekalb Literary journal, Descant, Gypsy, and Sub Rosa. Also a singersongwriter, he performs occasionally in folk clubs in the Providence, Rhode Island, area.

The Hawaii Theatre first opened its doors on September 22, 1922. The Hawaii Theatre Center has been responsible for the renovation and the preservation of the sixty-three-year-old structure.

Norman Hindley's Winter Eel (Petronium Press, 1984) is available through the University of Hawaii Press.

Sophia Hindley's art work in this issue was drawn pencil on matboard, 18 x 12 inches.

Dean Honma, born and raised in Hawaii, resides temporarily in Northern California. He is the author of Night Dive (Petronium Press, 1985 ).

Allan Izen, stricken with authoritis in 1978, has sold 18 short stories, which have appeared in such magazines as Aloha, The Horror Show, The Mendocino Review, and The New Renaissance, as well as occasional articles in music magazines. He likes to think of himself as a " free-lunch writer," and is now working on a novel.

Faye Kicknosway's recent collection, All These Voices: New and Selected Poems, was published by The Coffee House Press, 1986.

Lyn Lifshin's work has been the subject of a critical study by Hugh Fox, and her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S. , notably in Amen'can Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares, as well as Ms. magazine and Rolling Stone.

Edward C. Lynskey's work has appeared in Amen'can Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, College English, Georgia Review, Kansas Quarterly, New Mexico Humanities Review, Poetry Review, Praine Schooner, and others. Two books of poetry include Wrought Iron (Manassas Press, 1980) and Teeth of the Hydra (Crop Dust Press, 1986).

Michael McPherson lives in Kamuela now. His two books of poems are Singing With the Owls and The Alien Lounge.

James A. Miller has recent work in Manhattan Poetry Review, Poem, University Bookman, and others.

Ursule Molinaro-poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, translator-lives in New York City. Her ninth novel, That Which is Bright Rises Twice, is forthcoming from Capra Press; "Needlepoint:' a long short story, will appear as an independent booklet from Red Dust Press.

Tracy Morisaki, born on Maui and raised in Lahaina, is working on a B.A. in English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, after which she plans to go on for a M.A. in Library Studies. Aside from reading and writing, she enjoys traveling -especially to England-and likes parakeets, cats, and Arabian horses, which she hopes one day to own.

Linda Relacion Oosahwe's poems have been published in Germany and the U.S., appearing in magazines such as Akwekon Journal, Malama: Hawaiian Land and 'Water (Bamboo Ridge Press), and Phoenix Magazine (NSU). Her roots are in

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Kauai, Ewa, and Waipahu mostly, with sprouts towards Kunia and Wahiawa, headed for Kahuku. She now lives near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Louis Phillips-a poet and playwright whose collection of poems, The Time, The Hour, The Solitariness of the Place, was published by Swallow's Tale Press, and whose full-length plays include The Last ofthe Marx Brother's Wn"ters and The Ballroom in St. Patrick's Cathedral-teaches creative writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Paulette Roeske's poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, and other magazines. Her collection, Breathing Under Wllter, is forthcoming from Stormline Press in Urbana, Illinois.

Guy Rotella teaches at Northeastern University in Boston and has published poems in several magazines. He is at work on a study of "uses of nature" in 20th Century American Poetry.

CarolAnn Russell's book of poems , The Red Envelope, was published by the University Presses of Florida. Recent work appears in Iowa Woman, Pebble, and TendnJ. She teaches creative writing at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, a living example that a native Montanan can thrive in the glow of New York City.

Alan Seaburg is Curator of Manuscripts, Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Thoreau College and The Blue Robe. Seaburg serves also as poetry and fiction editor for Snowy Egret.

Joseph Stanton has lived in Leeward Oahu since 1972. Poems of his have appeared recently in The New l-Ork Quarterly and The Best ofBamboo Ridge.

Reuben Tam lives in Kapaa, Kauai as a full-time poet and a full-time painter. His poems have appeared in several anthologies and in local literary journals.

Doug Turner's poems appear in a number of publications, including Altadena Review, Blue Unicorn, Event, Malahat Review, NewsArt, Permafrost, Prism International, Pulpsmith, Quarry Wt!st, University of Windsor Review, and Wllves. He lives near the AL-CAN Highway, Quesnel, British Columbia.

Sylvia Watanabe has work in The Best of Bamboo Ridge and in The Ston"es we Hold Secrf!ÂŁ an anthology of women's writing published by the Greenfield Review. She is working for her doctorate at Berkeley.

Jill Widner has recent poetry in Cima"on Review.

Rob Wilson has published poems and essays in various journals in America and South Korea. A work called Wilking in Seoul will be published by Minumsa Press in Korea and the University of Hawaii Press in the USA. A study of the sublime in American poetry is forthcoming in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin Press. Less pompously, he is an avid basketball player and creature of meditation.

Leona Yamada completed her creative thesis in poetry and fiction, receiving her B.A. in English in May 1987. She is now at work on a M.A. in English (also with a creative thesis) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

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$4.00

Fiction by Brady T. Brady Patricia Eakins Allan Izen Ursule Molinaro Sylvia Watanabe Leona Yamada Poetry by Sanora Babb Joseph P. Balaz Jim Daniels Richard Morris Dey Barbara Gearen John Grey Norman Hindley Dean Honma Lyn Lifshin Edward C. Lynskey Michael McPherson James A. Miller Tracy Morisaki Linda Relacion Oosahwe Louis Phillips Paulette Roeske Guy Rotella CarolAnn Russell Alan Seaburg Joseph Stanton Reuben Tam Doug Turner Jill Widner Rob Wilson Leona Yamada Essay by Angela Ball Review by Rob Wilson Art by Sophia Hindley Faye Kicknosway Photography by The Hawaii Theatre

ISSN : 0093-9625