Hawaiʻi Review Issue 28: 1989/1990

Winter 1989/ 90

Issue 28

Vol. 14, No. 1

Cover Art, "After Day," by Takeo Miji Cover Design by Elizabeth Lovell Devarati Mitra's "Flowers Born Blind" was first published in Nija Hate, Nijaswa Bhashay (In Our Own Hands, Our Own Language). Calcutta: Anada Publishers Private Limited, 1984; "Amnesiac River" first appeared in Bengali in SANGBED, June-July 1986; "No, No, and No" was first published in Bengali in DESH (THE NATION), Anada Bazar Patrika, Ltd., 1987; and "The Green Stigma" was published in ]ubaker Snan (The Young Man 's Bath). Calcutta: Anada Publisher Private Limited, 1978.

Hawai'i Review is a tri-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 Hawai'i 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 (three issues), $12.00; two years (six issues), $20.00; single copies, $5.00. Advertising rates are available upon request.

Hawai'i Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is indexed by the American Humanities Index, the Index of American Periodical Verse , and Writer's Market.

Š 1990 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

ISSN: 0093-9625.

Staff Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Non-Fiction Editor

Elizabeth Lovell Wendy H. T. Chen Stewart Anderson John Gesang Paige Aranda

Special Thanks to: Jeannie Thomson Robbie Shapard John McDermott T. M. Goto Eric Folk Don Dougal Wes Calvert Stefan Baciu

Contents Glittering Sea White, Gray and Rinse Dream Scales Molecular Lung The Mercy Winds The News The Summer After the Summer of Love Chanticleer The Camera The Bomb Document Quo Vadis7 Concurrence Closed to the Natural World How? Alphabet House Snake Study of Repose Islands Zen Garden Reflections at Honneken Castle The Woman Who Wanted Two The Man, the Woman and the Other Man Movie Fireflies Heaven Apple Pie Paintings Mantis Dutch The Burying Alive of Mason Taylor

iv

1 11

Robert Wintner Nathan Whiting

12 13 14 16

Tony Quagliano Peter Robinson

17 30 30 31 32 33 34

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Scott Lasser Dan johnson

Mark Grimes Melissa Pritchard Marin Sorescu

Robert Kusch David Luisi Paul Kennedy Mueller Cory Wade

54 55 55 55 56 58 60 61

Guy Capecelatro III

62

Daniel Panger

Charlotte Gould Warren joe Tsujimoto Curt Hagen

First Will and Testament Baby Key in the Mechanical Forest Living Room in the Park Untitled Flowers Born Blind Amnesiac River No, No, and No The Green Stigma The First to Go PatandJoe Fowl Play Miss You Blue From the Air One of the Boys Ice Lake Three Poems Holy Orders Comedy with Gulkis: A Craft Interview Hearing a Poem the First Time Yellowstone Sand Poem Season Tickets Nightmare: Afterwards The Rose Garden Joseph of Nazareth The Career of Mungo Park Raven Considers Great Books Complacent Fervor: The Confused Role of the Critical Theorist in America Contributor's Notes

64

David Lunde

66 67 68 69 70

Mark Taksa T. M . Goto Devarati Mitra

71 72

73 85 86 86 87 88 89 90 93

/. Thomson Gregg Shapiro

95 97 99 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Edith Goldenhar

115 126

Patrick B. Mikulec Kenneth Frost A. M. Friedson

Michael Barrett Marjorie Power

David Starkey Donnell Hunter

Thomas F. Lannin, /r.

v

Robert Wintner

Glittering Sea The Marine Art Expo approached its "6th Big Year." So said Expo promoters. You can't have six years, much less six big years, without some pretty good business. Yet for some reason an artist living on this same little island in the middle of the glittering sea, whose own promoters describe him as "the world's most beloved marine artist," does not participate in the Marine Art Expo.

Instead his promoters promoted The Ocean Art Expo, also timed with the tourist season, and they planned for a 1st Big Year.

A claim common to many galleries here is "Local Artists Only." An instate driver's license and a local address are primary qualifiers, on the technical side. The practical side requires palm trees, reef scenes, breaking surf with mystically wisping spindrift, or whales. An inside-gallery shibboleth is: Whales mean sales.

More than art is for sale here. A feeling is for sale, a feeling that begins with deplaning, tradewinds infusing the soul with tropical balm. It's a feeling far stronger than the collective ability to express it. It's the wonder of nature, the beauty of it all and the magic. So local artists fill a need.

One highly regarded, strong-selling local artist put a waterline across the center of his canvas .

Above the waterline he painted: -Beauteous night, full moon, many stars.

- Beauteous breaking wave.

- Beauteous woman, supine on rocks, at one with beauty.

-Beauteous palm trees in beauteous breeze.

Below the waterline were: -Beauteous reef fish, visible under water, at one with the beauteous sea .

-Whales, sea turtles, and sea horses of about equal size smiling in reef frolic.

The land mass fell straight down at the waterline so that if the beauteous woman took one step into what looked like six-inch foam above the waterline, she stepped instead into six hundred feet of deep ocean. With no bottom, the beauteous breaking wave had no reason to break, hardly any reason to wave. If you pressed PLAY, and the beauteous woman hesitated to scramble in the pronto mode, she would be lunched bigtime by the beauteous breaking wave.

1

Picky picky- the original sold for $28,000. A limited edition of prints sold for $800 each until they were half gone. The price went up from there, and resale prices would be handsome, if any of the fortunate few were willing to sell.

This particular local artist's style is both borrowed from and loaned to a coterie of local artists. Far more local artists strive for success now than in the past, the market is so good. Those at the pinnacle are easily identified by the cars they drive- German and Italian cars mostly, new cars in the roadster mode, most in fire-engine red. In a perverse display, these contemporary artists reflect success the way other artists in other places, other times, may have held a different sort of communion in cafes and garrets, on the edge of hunger.

Another local artist is James Broughton McClainne. His promoters call him "America's most beloved marine artist." They base their claim on several important moves in the market place. First they sent an original James Broughton McClainne to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, personally, to the President of the United States of America . Then they bought considerable advertising on a local TV station, the public access station, hitherto known locally as the tourist channel, Channel 16. They then promoted greatness, as seen in The White House, by The President of the United States of America and his wife.

It worked. So the promoters hired a film crew to go on location with James Broughton McCiainne for insight into James Broughton McClainne. The resulting half-hour show allowed visitors, aflush with arrival, to see the meaning, the reason, the intensity, the overwhelming, undeniable, insatiable, metaphysical, allegorical, institutional feeling that James Broughton McClainne feels, really, really feels when it's one on one, just him and the brush . James Broughton McClainne's wife attests to "the privilege" she enjoys, just being up next to that kind of action. James Broughton McClainne mentions Gauguin and Degas, who also painted in the tropics. That worked too, at least as well as Robert Young, sincerely, selling drugs with "I'm not a real doctor, but I play one on TV." You can see the show any time on Channel 16, now known as the James Broughton McClainne channel.

And the channel is now owned by the Gallery Director who is James Broughton McClainne's head promoter- or so the director jokes, and the joke is understood, because he points out that buying all the time is actually cheaper than owning the channel. Besides an active sense of humor, the Gallery Director has a market instinct he hones daily. In a bold stroke, he froze activity on all James Broughton McClainne prints for a month. Then he raised print prices a thousand dollars each across the board. Then he sent urgent congratulations to all previous buyers on the equity they'd gained. He sent further notices to many almost-buyers that

2

supply was falling woefully short of demand; hurry. Print prices then soared, methodically, monthly. Business boomed. Cost per print: ten dollars. Markup: 10,000%. Of course the prints were signed and numbered.

And so spiraled upward the marketeers' return: efficiency, growth, and profit . One local gallery made news on all the channels when it aimed too high for profit and was indicted on 93 counts of fraud. Busted for selling counterfeit Dalis, among other things, the two arrested directors said, Your Honor, there must be some mistake. They said they didn't know. They said they could hardly expect a fair trial too, with all the media exposure, whose flame was fanned by the sexual harrassment charge against Tony Curtis brought by a gallery saleswoman. Several local galleries have by now discovered another source of sizzle: movie stars. You can now buy an original Anthony Quinn or Red Skelton or Tony Curtis. Tony Curtis says his heart has always been here. Anthony Quinn bought time on TV. Red Skelton sold over two million dollars in clowns in a single season.

Primarily important to the market from the fake Dali bust, however, was the quantum leap . A local industry, known locally as vacation art, had applied a successful format to non-local artists as well. The pump is first primed, then made to gush. Even at a thousand or ten thousand or forty thousand dollars, a painting is still cheaper than a condominium, with far less maintenance. In most cases the work of art is the superior view, considering the trees, the breeze, the waves, the fish, the whales, the smiles, the beauty. And think of the investment.

A resort island has the parochial society of a small town on the back side, in the hills, away from the beaches, the anonymity, the urban hoardes. You can spend years among a permanent population of fifty thousand and still meet people for the first time who've lived there as long as you, hidden in the traffic of two million tourists per year.

It could have been another ten years before Penny Early and I met. But a mutual friend, Jeannie Rosen, came over from the mainland, and arranged a meeting at Penny's. Then we would go to lunch.

Everyone was late-Jeannie's flight, Penny's arrival, my last appointment. Lateness lead to hurry, so it was a pleasant syncopation after hugs and how-do-you-dos at Penny's house, to wander briefly but slowly among her art collection. No junk here, Penny's collection reflected a taste consistent with history's and with an art market far wider than the confines of a small island in the middle of the deep blue sea. She had three Jacolet's. 'These two are only fakes," she said ruefully. "But this one is real." She discounted the fakes with a wave of her hand. The real one was in a far corner of her living room, and she was there in heart and mind standing in front of it, even as we walked the thirty feet or so to where it hung. She supplied a brief history of the French-Japanese Paul

3

Jacolet, who had mastered the innately Japanese technique of woodblock printing, then used the technique with a French modern flair.

"You didn't get these here," I declared, hoping I was wrong.

"No," she allowed. "I didn't. But we have two Jacolet's now in the gallery." Penny sold art in a gallery. She'd collected for years, so it was a natural calling, here, especially after her last divorce and move from Southern California, especially in a gallery where she could be close to this kind of art.

"Have you heard of the Yoshidas?" I asked. Of course she had. Hiroshi Yoshida's woodblock prints are on a rapid ascent, she said. Hiroshi died in 1950. She said son Toshi now venerates his father with a book of Hiroshi's prints, with shows and promotions, and mostly with a woodblock print artistry of his own incorporating much of his father's style and technique.

"Yes," I agreed. Then I related my ignorance of the Yoshidas until a recent trip to the mainland, when on a walk up a street in San Francisco I passed a small, nondescript gallery with at least enough mystique to stop me, turn my head and draw me inside. I was in fact familiar with none of the artists displayed at Kirikashi. All were Japanese. Most of the prints were a hundred or two hundred years old. But though the place was small, the inventory was thorough, and another kind of feeling came over me, another dimension in art exposed itself to me. I picked out eight prints, just for fun, from the five or six hundred shown.

The eight prints represented impulse, foolishness perhaps, credit reality at month's end. So in the next memorable hour I compared and contrasted, looked inside the past each print for the feeling it would give hanging on my wall. And in a sweet, painful process of elimination, I got down to two. Once home, framed and hung, they exuded a radiant tranquility. Their color, form, and light were unlike any I'd seen.

Penny waited. "I got Toshi's 'Heirinji Temple Bell'. It's a stone bell tower, open on all sides with a monk on the clapper. He's swinging down with it, a heartbeat from impact, and the whole scene is veiled in the foreground by cherry blossoms."

"Yes," she said. "I know the temple bell. I think it's my favorite Toshi."

"The other one was Hiroshi's. I can't remember the name, but it had two boats on calm water with sunlight reflecting from the surface. It's a simple composition, but I was amazed once it was framed . It's like a painting of light with some boats thrown in, and-" " 'Glittering Sea' ."

"Yes. That's it. Glittering Sea." I finished my sentiment on simplicity and light. Penny changed, tilting her head like a curious pup, as if the light was suddenly on me, and she saw it for the first time.

"He made a series, actually." She stepped into the next room, the annex of her little gallery, and fetched a book. 'Toshi compiled all of his father's

4

work here." She leafed through it. "Here. Here's the 'Glittering Sea' series."

And there it was. 'This one," I said. 'This is it."

"You bought a . . . print of 'Glittering Sea'?''

I repeated yes, I had, curious now myself. ''I'm sure it's real too. It has Japanese characters handwritten in the margin, and it's signed in English at the bottom." A knowing smile broke on her face. "And it has the imprimature-the red ink stamp."

She nodded now. 'The kanji," she said. "But it's missing the tejuri mark."

"You mean the squiggly line above the imprimature?"

The smile faded. The nod stopped. "Yes." "No, it has that. It looks like a lopsided arrowhead on top and a sideways eight with a small slash at the bottom."

"What's the name of the gallery?"

"I can't remember. It'll come back to me in a minute."

Penny closed the book and returned it to its little parlor, gaining a distance to match the new space between us, and to compose herself as well for her next question. "Do you mind?" she asked. "What did you pay?"

Anybody who's lived in a small town knows the social inconvenience of separation-separation from those who cannot impulsively buy art, that is. A small town in the tropics is no different. Rich people, poor people, and middle-of-the-road people, drive pick-up trucks, wave to each other and blend as best they can for the harmony that can bless small town life.

"It was an impulse," I said. ''I'd had a Bloody Mary or two for breakfast, vacation and all. Two hundred."

Distance closed. Intensity and truth took over. 'Two hundred?"

"Is that high or low?"

Now it was Penny's tum to camouflage her chagrin. She handled it with another smile, a weak one, and a movement that sent her lower body one way, her upper body another. Squirm is such a connotative word. "We sold one last month for four thousand," she said. "I could have sold two more. We can't find any more."

Gross potential, gross profits swooped into Penny's house like spring trades. Penny informed Jeannie, "They don't have to numb~r their prints in Japan." She turned to me. "Nobody knows how many were made."

I wondered aloud how a gallery near Union Square in San Francisco could not know the value of its prints. Penny asked how long the gallery had been there. About thirty years, I guessed. That explains it, she said .

They bought the prints maybe twenty years ago and haven't kept up with auction prices. They don't know, she said, about Hiroshi's soaring popularity. And it was unusual, I said, that they gave me brief mimeo-

5

graph biographies of the Yoshidas. "Nobody uses mimeograph anymore." They really were behind the times.

Everyone was nodding, smiling, thinking, but subtly, subtly. Unspoken was the question: What do we do next? When was obvious: immediately. Jeannie Rosen saved the day for poise and style. ''I'm hungry," she said. "Let's get lunch."

Lunch was pleasant with champagne and good humored response to Jeannie's first question on the local art scene: "Who is this James Broughton McCiainne?" Penny and I laughed as one and took turns embroidering the answer. We all laughed when Jeannie assured us we weren't simply fatigued by the television promotion, the grateful wife, the overwhelming meaning and the overexposure; James Broughton McCiainne is bad, very bad.

We were tipsy, happy, superior, and refreshed.

The next morning early I found my receipt and called Kirikashi. wanted two more prints, one each of "Heirinji Temple Bell" and "Glittering Sea ." A Japanese-speaking woman at the gallery conveyed that she would check her inventory if I would hold on please. She came back in a few more minutes and said no problem. I asked if the ten percent discount for duplicate orders was still in effect, and she said yes, yes.

I called Penny, pleased but uncertain. She too said yes, all at once and perfectly timed with my amazement-"Yes ... What's their number?"

What's their number? The question lit soft as a butterfly. I gave her the number, wondering all at once why I was giving her the number. I suggested we keep this to ourselves, and she said of course, she only wanted to check it out.

If I'd considered the value of the situation, it was in terms of a private supplier of beautiful prints at low low prices to hang on my walls-or to give as gifts. I hadn't thought of resale, honest. But now a spector loomed, and I dreamed of the family Kirikashi, whose pure life would now be separated, unwittingly, from great treasure. Two days later I drove down to the gallery where Penny sold art. It was in a hotel, right next to the Marine Art Expo.

I browsed The Expo and was intrigued by an entire wall of identical prints. Rows upon rows of the same wave crashed mistily over the same rock. Regular $2500, reduced for quick sale, like green meat, today only, half off! Only $1250. A woman asked about the differences between this painting and another, this artist and another. A sales clerk answered as best she could on comparative styles, ages, appreciation, speculation and what looked like an unbelievable deal. The sales clerk closed it. I drifted off feeling queasy, and queasier still at the array of galloping sea horses, flying sea turtles, dolphins orbiting the earth, some cute baby whales

6

cuddling up to their mommies, and some radiant reef fish looking right at the camera, smiling. Sales were brisk.

I retired to the gallery and there was Penny, dressed like the Queen in a full length gown with shoulder pads, makeup and jewelry. She moved now like Loretta Young coming down the stairs, all grace and flourish.

She flowed with hello, lead me to the Japanese woodblock section and showed me the display. Three prints, a mountain scene by Hiroshi Yoshida, and two snow scenes, day and night, by Haku Maki were spotlit softly from three angles . The prints were quadruple matted, giltframed, and six feet up, on handmade koa wood easels. I'd seen the Haku Maki prints in San Francisco too, but this was a far cry from stacks of samples in plastic holders. These were priced just under four thousand unframed. Framed was just over, give or take a few. Queasy turned giddy.

A man emerged from a back office. He was introduced as the gallery owner. I was the one who'd found all the Yoshidas dirt cheap in San Francisco. He grabbed my hand, shook it gratefully and said, "I am ever indebted to you." Giddy got nauseous.

I kept it down. "Did you call?" ''Not yet," he said. 'The Expo is keeping me crazy right now."

"You're running The Expo?"

He nodded vigorously and scrinched his nose. "Sixth big year," he said.

"Business looks good," I said.

"Oh it's never been better," he said. "You know I could have sold all the TOllhi<1as I could get my hands on, but I couldn't get any. Maybe now we I said nothing; maybe Penny had not disclosed the price. "Boy oh he said. "Two hundred dollars. Unbelievable."

'What were you paying?"

'1 don't remember, really," he said.

"Fifteen hundred," Penny said. "Fifteen hundred and it sold for four -.nu~oncf "

"No," he said. "Not that much."

Then driven to the root of the matter, Penny made a grand flourish flowed gracefully to the front counter. She looked it up in a book. hundred," she confirmed. She opened another book, receipts. was my customer. She spent fourteen thousand, and four of it was 'Glittering Sea.' She wanted more too. Here it is. Thirty-eight hundred four-fifty for framing." She closed the book, all the cards on the

"Well," I said. "I have to be going. Just stopped in to say hello. Let me if you wouldn't mind, what you find out. I'd be interested to

7

"''m very interested myself," the owner said . "You know at that kind of savings, I should fly over this afternoon-and stay at the Ritz! " ''Yes," I chuckled too.

He told of his last great coup, with wine, in which he'd taken three cases of an obscure Bordeaux off a wine dealer's hands for eight dollars a bottle, knowing they sold elsewhere for nearly a hundred. 'They were dusty. Been there a long time. Oh we love to find deals like that." The we stuck in my craw, but I was committed to a greater scheme of things. The foodchain was us, unwitting as the family Kirikashi, merciless as the beast. "No I plan to check it out but like I say this Expo thing has me all tied up. I got a guy in Monterey I guess I'll call tonight. He knows what he's looking at. I guess I'll just have him drive up and buy 'em out."

"Yes," I said. "Well let me know." I left quickly. They were blind to my disgust, but then they were blind. I moved quickly through The Expo and out. I breathed deep, drove slow, wondered what I had done.

I headed toward my place but changed course. I would consult my friend, Pete. I'd met Pete at a two-night course on sushi preparation at the University extension. Not a modem Japanophile, Pete is nonetheless a Samurai aficionado. Department store swords sit in a position of reverence on his living room mantle . Closer to ground level are boxes lining the perimeter, filled with martial arts magazines. He was the only sushi prep student who applied his training at once, with a party, and though it became boisterous and drunk on sake and beer, it began with tea, formally. Pete lived alone in a two bedroom place. One bedroom was stark empty except for a small rug in the center.

So he came to mind. Maybe Pete would know what to do.

I caught him heading out, just on a few errands, he said, nothing urgent. Sure he'd take time for a beer or two. We took my car, and I remembered on the way why I valued Pete's company; because he was comfortable with silence; because chit-chat wasn't necessary; because he could let me wait until we arrived and settled in over a beer for my story to begin. We passed an over-the-hill wind-surfer cumma contemporary local artist who'd zeroed in successfully on a motif only a few had hitherto toyed with: whales in space. Outer space, that is. The successful artist drove an exotic roadster shaped like a ground-to-air missile, fireengine red. I laughed at the reality of it all. Pete also laughed and said that he too moved in a car like that. I wondered if I'd sought proper counseling.

Two rounds later I'd finished my story. Pete ordered another round and said it's easy. I could either perceive Kirikashi's karma for what it was, which was good, because he would soon sell all the inventory he'd been dusting and tripping over for years, and he'd get the price he asked.

Or I could intercede and make Kirikashi's karma better, maybe.

8

"Maybe you'll call him and tell him his prints are worth a ton of money, and the buyer will come up and say no bargain here, and the old guy will have to sit on his prints another twenty years."

We drank and pondered. Finally I said, "You think I should do nothing."

"I think you'll do the right thing." The right thing was, to him, evident.

Finally I asked. "What do you think that is?"

"It's obvious to me what I'd do." He drank, as if clarity surrounded us.

Then he shrugged, it was so simple. "The guy's about to get robbed."

"You mean you think I should call him up and tell him his Yoshidas are worth a ton of money?"

"Yes. That's what I mean."

An hour after that I was on the phone, too late really for gallery hours on the mainland. But I called anyway, maybe for practice, maybe to ease the burden. Kirikashi answered. I told him I'd ordered two prints a few days ago, Toshi and Hiroshi Yoshida. He told me my name and my address, apologized and promised they would be shipped tomorrow.

Yes that's fine, I said. But I'm curious. I was yelling, the connection was poor and he was hardly fluent in English.

"Curious?"

"Yes! Curious!" I told him I wandered into a gallery just today and saw a "Glittering Sea" for much more money than he was charging.

"Oh yes! More money! Price up!" He said the price was up everywhere, some places three hundred, some places three fifty: "New York price 'Glittering Sea' four hundred!"

"But it was much more than that," I said. "Much more."

"How much?"

"Thirty-eight hundred! .. . " "Aaaaiiiil Too much! Thirty-eight hundred 'Glittering Sea' too much!

Even if self-print, too much!" He explained that he bought his prints from Toshi in the '60s, long after Hiroshi's death. Toshi reprinted "Glittering Sea," a hundred prints. The characters in the margin and the signature on the bottom were added to the block and printed in a special ink that looks like pencil. "Toshi very smart." Only possible way tell difference is last character in column, represent year print. Otherwise identical.

But still too much, even if self print, he said. "I have Hiroshi self print -'Temple at Kamakura at Night.' Four, maybe five times bigger than 'Glittering Sea.' Only two thousand."

He seemed confident. I felt relieved. "I guess that explains it," I said.

'1t's . .. too much."

"You know, I have many customers from there. They all tell me same thing: too much."

"What do they say about the local art?" His answer was a hardy laugh.

9

"I think a man may come to see you," I said. "He may want all of your Yoshidas."

"Ahgoodl" "You could probably ask for a thousand or fifteen hundred each and he'd be happy," I said.

"Yes!" he said, laughing hardy again.

10

Nathan Whiting

White, Gray and Rinse At Whirlpool Beauty Bonanza cuttings being swept explode electrically.

Across an endless Brooklyn street shattering into Queens lightwaves practice physics on Creamy Linen Service's blackening windows.

Dust reflects into shadows where Trout Herring is in charge of 80 hair dryers.

Noisy nerves fire his machines.

Last year's styles, framed for reference, have turned blue. Trout watches cases of dry skin exema flip pages showing eyes made to hide death or create the effect. This morning lady #317 told him vertigo is caused by drinking heavy water. Trout wonders as a bus argues with lightning squad gas company commandos about the light stuff his customers consume.

For the first time in weeks he does something significant.

He takes a comb and begins to study what he looks like: all these mirrors, all his having become lost around the profitable smile.

11

Dream Scales Snell in a fish catching contest looks down at clouds wondering how so many sights can contradict the same place.

Pondweed seems needlessly nervous. Little snails combine characteristics of balloons and rocks.

After days and days a bell rings.

Snell has ten fish fewer than the winner.

For weeks he wakes up reaching leaf to leaf through naiads and dives to catch more.

He pulls a string and yanks each toe from his feet.

12

Molecular Lung Blue grays ocean kerosene smooth. Trucks.

Constable Hook. An Exxon landscape is an old radio ripped open. A bearded polycarbon man sits on the last grass. Rigid worlds flatten nervous flags. His hobo bag's a door. He speaks educated .

In distilled age wind meanders through fumes .

Nothing moves. Cellophane sprouts from a baseball field. They're planting more. Barrels grow centipede legs. Semis yell. Emotionally they're stadiums. A cab enters a paint plant.

Men in suits step out to begin a 1930 movie .

The man on his perfectcut grass stands, stares and shouts you 're 60 years too ltlte. They look through their watches and march into a yellow ftd-lit door seriously a the cab waits.

13

Tony Quagliano

The Mercy Winds First installment: The Girl with Sea-Blue Eyes

I

didn't want the job in the first place. On the jukebox, oldies but goodies, some guy whining "it isn't very pretty what a town without pity can do." It was cool and dark here and all I wanted was a few beers and a little time. Outside, the noon sun burned Honolulu down. No trades today, those mercy winds from across the Ko'olau mountains. None for eight days and everyone's nerves were on edge. Mine, anyway.

I could go to the beach, but sooner or later you have to get off the beach.

I sat watching Hotel Street, and when Bobbie came in I turned away to the Chinese girl by the cash register. She was new at The Cove, brought in from Hong Kong. She had on a bright red Suzie Wong dress cut on the side to the hip. And a candy-apple mouth . Behind her right ear was a full red flower. Red is lucky to the Chinese.

Usually a barmaid at The Cove is working outside within a year, giving head to drunk, limp sailors in a parking lot on Maunakea. Candy smile, and earnest eyes like her job mattered. She put a new beer in front of me and I hoped all that red worked.

Bobbie saw me and came over. She considered me a friend ever since she worked pushing drinks here herself, years ago, and in a way I was.

"Johnny."

She sat next to me at the bar. Noon was early for Bobbie, though time matters less here than most places. No seasons in Hawai'i, some clocks, but few look at them, and if you add benzedrine like I know Bobbie does, time can slip away altogether.

"Johnny, for Christ's sake they've got Suzanne. I just know it. Rayder."

She looked very serious, very concerned, which was rare for Bobbie.

Whatever was going on with her kid sister was probably real, and soon she'd be telling me about it. And soon I'd be in it. Which was exactly what I didn't want.

An investigator needs jobs, but I'd just come off one and didn't need money. For a while. On the last one, I'd tracked some chump who embezzled a quarter million fro m a group of condominium developers on Kauai. The Garden Isle. I didn't care much for the land dealers who hired

14

Locusts, stripping the Garden Isle down to the lava rock. Soon there be enough flowers there for a gangster's funeral. But the embezwas one of their own, plus a thief and double-crosser, so I found him brought him in. The realtor boys gushed with gratitude and money. I the money.

"Johnny, I haven't seen her for days. Nobody has. That's not like "She's probably gone to Maui for a few days. Maybe she is at Rayder's . She's a big girl now, Bobbie."

When I mentioned Rayder's name, her eyes flashed with anger. "That "she spat. "Suzanne wouldn't go with him on her own. You know "

I didn't know that, but I didn't say so. Suzanne had been running with R...,...t......, crowd for some time. Bobbie knew that too, but it seemed she want to admit it. Bobbie had a lot of street savvy-she'd been the streets for two years . Both Hotel and Waikiki. I figured she few illusions left. But she's always been protective of her kid sister. wanted to picture Suzanne a certain way, and maybe she was right. any case, I liked to see this concern in Bobbie.

"You know more about who Suzanne knows, where she goes, than I HI said. "Have you talked to Soldier?"

'1 talked to everyone I could think of. Nobody's seen her. Soldier is He's gone looking for her, but he's liable to do something stupid just get himself hurt.

"You know people, Johnny. You can talk to them, including some I talk to at all." She meant the cops. "You and I always got along Will you find Suzanne for me, Johnny?" motioned to the Chinese girl, who had gone to the far end of the and ordered a gin on the rocks. in the dark of The Cove I could see Bobbie had kept her good Long sun-blond hair, enough tan over the nerves- a surfer-girl for sailors on leave or Japanese businessmen in town for a few days the exotic. A white girl. She had sea-blue eyes, a blue that with the light. And often a modest ankle-length mu'u . In heat she had on white shorts and a white top. was the way her eyes darted about and left a restless, startled expresthat told you about the benzedrine. If you looked for it.

15

Peter Robinson

The News While the snow slipped in and out of the railings on the White House lawn and the anchorman for NBC turned to stone and back again, and waited, I played the TV like a Steinway, so-fa-la, skittering down the channels.

The Russian Embassy in Washington had been newly decorated. Maestoso, larghetto .

Much was being made of Raisa's hemline which seemed to have settled around her knees.

Allegro vivace. The muddy birthmark on Gorbachev's brow was roughly the shape of Afghanistan.

Andante, andante: I struck an advert on Mexican beer till it rattled like the lost chord; snow kept scudding across the screen in brief electric flurries before vanishing into the atmosphere.

Then someone came in with a plateful of Nachos and ring-pulled a can of Herr's "new" Jalapena Cheddar Cheese dip.

I could see it was rotten with glutamate and annatto color but feeling hungry and lean, I took a few and just dug for gold, scooping chip after chip.

16

Scott Lasser

The Summer After the Summer of Love The day we moved to a smaller apartment my grandfather told my mother to have an affair. I was eight. My father had left years before, though he continued to send cashier checks-always from different states -till my eighth birthday. Then my mother got a check for five hundred dollars, a good sum in those days, and on the back my father had written, "FINAL PAYMENT." He also sent a baseball glove, but I couldn't use it. The glove was for right handers, and I'm a lefty.

We moved in June. My grandfather arrived after dinner in a pickup he'd borrowed from a friend. My grandfather was a tall, thin man with wavy dark hair like my mother's. My hair was straight, "your father's hair," my mother called it. My grandfather loved to joke. He'd say, "Hold still. What's this?" and pull a nickel out of my ear. He juggledbaseballs, oranges, even matzoh balls one Passover. My mother was outraged. "What are you doing? You're going to ruin them."

"Not your matzoh balls, Shirl," he said, but he stopped. He always knew just how far to push her.

It wasn't far to our new apartment. We loaded the truck and drove slowly through the warm twilight . Over my mother's objections my grandfather let me ride with the furniture. The wind swirled around, fluttering my shirt the way it did on workmen who rode in the back of trucks. Good things happened when my grandfather was around. We moved in three trips because we didn't own much, just a few pieces of furniture and a bunch of boxes. My grandfather directed both the removal and installation of the furniture, and this impressed me. He had only to say, "For God's sake, Shirley," and my mother obeyed. My grandfather was the only person I ever saw my mother take orders from .

Our new apartment was part of a large complex, instead of a half of a house like our old one. We lived at number 38, in the middle of a long red brick building, two stories high. On the first floor we had a small kitchen and a long area that served as a living and dining room. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom. I got the small bedroom, in which my grandfather quickly set up my trundle bed, having first wrestled it up the stairs with shouts of "C'mon, Shirley," as my mother strained above him. The apartment also had a small basement which flooded any time a thunderstorm rolled through suburban Detroit.

It was late when we finished. While my grandfather returned the truck my mother and I went bargain shopping at the all-night stores on

17

Woodward. Lower price was the reason behind everything we did. My mother drove a Dodge Dart because it was the cheapest car on the road.

She bought my clothes on sale and a size too big, lest I grow out of them too quickly. Next to the silverware in the top kitchen drawer she kept a stack of coupons, and now we were driving from store to store, buying our allowed limits, slaves to an advertiser's whim. ''What's next?" she asked.

"Great Scott's, for butter, eggs, and soss pads."

'That's S.O.S," she said.

After we'd returned and put away the groceries and cleansers I went up to my new room. From my window I saw my grandfather return in his own car, a Chrysler when Chryslers were very big cars. He was a thin man to drive a Chrysler. He had a box with him; it said RCA on the side and it didn't look worn and soft like the boxes we had been moving all day. He hurried inside so I ran out of my room and down the carpeted stairs, but I slipped half way and bounced down on my butt. When I landed I saw my mother and grandfather standing over a new TV. "What's this? We can't afford a TV," my mother said.

"It's a gift, Shirl," said my grandfather. He opened his pocket knife and cut the packing tape. The staples popped as he pulled up the box flaps.

"Gift? There are a million things we need."

"You need a TV. How else are you going to know what's going on in the world?" He wrested the TV from its box.

"Don't take it out of the box." She moved to stop him, but he was already setting it up on a pair of unpacked boxes . Then he went to work hooking up the antenna.

"I want to watch the news," he said.

"I'll get the radio if you want news."

My mother began to search through our boxes. She was in a hurry, as though she could stop my grandfather if she found the radio before my grandfather got the television working. Frustrated, she ended up opening each box and dumping its contents out on the floor.

My grandfather seemed to understand there was a race. He found an outlet and plugged in the television. It faded in and out. He toyed with the knobs, but there was no picture. We could almost hear a voice through the static. The news was out there, in our new living room, if we could only tune it in . The word "California" leapt out of the TV before it drowned back in the static.

"We don't need a television," my mother said.

My grandfather squatted in a catcher's position in front of the screen.

The back of his shirt was wet with sweat, as if his spine were leaking.

"Christ," he said, more than once. My mother kept emptying boxes but the radio didn' t tum up. Finally she knelt on her knees and then sat back on her feet, the way she did when she laid her bulletin board designs on the floor during the school year. She was a teacher. I went back upstairs

18

and lay down on my bed . I wondered how long we'd stay in this apartment, if our new life would always be like this.

I woke just ahead of the morning. Out my window I could see my grandfather's Chrysler still in the parking lot. It was in the shade but the sun hit the building across the lot and made the bricks look yellow and warm and the windows glow with the new light. That building would always look best on the edge of the day.

I heard voices and the hum of the television with its volume off. I snuck down the stairs as quietly as I could, but one of the stairs creaked anyway.

"Jack?" my mother called.

I eased my way down.

"Maybe it was next door," said my grandfather.

My mother spoke too quietly for me to hear. I reached the bottom of the stairs and peered around the corner. My grandfather was on the couch with his feet up. My mother sat among the clothing piles. The television was on, but the station wasn't broadcasting. Instead there were shaded stripes running down the screen so you could check the color on your set. Ours was a black and white.

"A single woman like you, you need to get out more," said my grandfather. "Have ... Have an affair."

"Daddy!"

"What7" my grandfather answered. "You want to spend your nights in this apartment?"

'What about Jack7 Sitters are expensive."

'Til pay for the sitter-just don't tell your mother," he said. He stared at her; he wanted an answer.

"Oh, Daddy, I'm getting too old to date." She was choking up.

"Don't be ridiculous. You're thirty-one years old and a very attractive woman. Make yourself available."

I could see tears on my mother's face, on the side. She was crying.

"Have fun, Shirl," said my grandfather. He sat up and reached forward to catch a tear before it rolled off her jaw. "Fool around. You're so serious."

"Like my mother?"

"Christ, just like your mother." They both laughed, my mother's a aoss between a laugh and a cry. Then they stopped, and it was silent in the room, except for the hum of the TV and my mother's sniffles.

A moment later she crawled toward the couch, past the tipped-over boxes. Clothing, books, pots and pans-everything we owned was strewn across the floor. She stopped at my grandfather's feet, then stared back at the lined screen. "A television," she said. "I can't believe it."

There had been a curfew the summer before, when "tensions boiled over after years of frustration." That's what my second grade teacher,

19

Mrs. Sloan, had said about the riots. We didn't exactly know what this meant, but we understood that it was bad and it happened in the black neighborhoods, and we knew that Jews didn't do that sort of thing. Jews planted trees. I looked around the room, at Bobby Kranowicz and Brenda Schwartz, even at Tom Barnes, whom I counted as a friend even though he was a Christian, one of the few in the class. I tried to imagine their parents, even my mother, breaking windows and burning buildings, fighting with policemen . I thought of the time I saw my mother leave the milk too long on the stove, but I couldn't imagine "tensions boiling over."

Now there was no curfew and people stayed out more, and later. My mother no longer made me go to bed before dark, and usually I met Jon Goldman after dinner. He lived in number 42, and he was to be in my third grade class. We played catch on the grass between our building and the identical one on the other side of the yard. There was an enormous maple in the middle, its branches heavy with leaves, its roots thick and spreading from the trunk like spokes from an axle. Jon and I pretended to be different Tiger players. My favorite was AI Kaline. Jon threw me flies, which I tried to catch and throw on a line back to Jon, the way Kaline roamed right field at Tiger Stadium, striking fear in the hearts of base runners . "Kaline throws a lot better than that," Jon told me when I first instituted this game of make believe. "He's got a rifle. And he's right handed."

"This is make believe," I said.

"But still," Jon said.

"Just throw the ball."

When I caught it I threw it as hard as I could and this time it cleared Jon by three or four feet. He threw his glove down and chased it. Had he not wanted to be Denny McLain our friendship would have ended then.

For Jon I pretended to be Bill Freehan, the catcher, while Jon pitched fiery McLain fastballs and unhittable sliders into my glove, a gift from my grandfather. When the light became too dim we sat beneath the maple and talked about the baseball cards we hoped to acquire, a Mickey Lolich or Willie Horton, or a Dick McAuliffe in his unusual batting stance. Eventually one of our mothers, usually mine, would call us in.

"My little Hank Greenberg," my mother liked to say. By this she meant that Jews could be athletes, too. Still, if cards had been traded in our house, five Hank Greenbergs would have equalled three David BenGurions, which in tum would have equalled one Jascha Heifitz or Albert Einstein. My mother had already decided I would start violin in the fall, having determined from her fellow teachers the unlikelihood of my ever vying for a Nobel Prize.

That summer my mother spent time with Joseph Stevlowski. He was an enormous man, with a head the size of a melon and big, beefy hands

20

he used to toss me in the air. "How 'bout them Tigers, Jack," he said as I floated above him, like an astronaut. "How 'bout 'em."

"They're the best," I said, touching down on land, like the Russians.

"You bet they are. We're gonna have to go down to a game."

"Yeah? Really?"

"Sure. This could be the year," he said. It was true. After years of our football team finishing second to Minnesota and the baseball team placing behind Baltimore, it looked as if Detroit might actually have a winner. 'This yours?" Mr. Stevlowski asked. He picked my glove off the kitchen counter. It was roughly the size of his hand.

"Yeah."

"How 'bout a game of catch?"

"You don't have a glove," I said.

"C'mon, I'll play without one."

"What about my mother?"

"I know how this works," he said. "She needs time to get ready."

Mr. Stevlowski took off his sport jacket and draped it over a chair at our dining table. The chair disappeared. He removed his tie, and we went out the back door. It was early evening and the sun threw long shadows across the grass; the maple rustled in the warm breeze. Jon was standing next to it, throwing himself pop flies .

"Jon," I called. He stopped playing and waited for Mr. Stevlowski and me to reach him. Jon and I devised a game in which Jon pretended to be Denny Mclain, who pitched to Mr. Stevlowski, who pretended to be both Bill Freehan and the opposing batter, who hit the ball to me, AI Kaline, who threw the runner out at home.

"You sure you don't need a glove?'' Jon asked Mr. Stevlowski before the first pitch.

'Tm sure. Give me all you got." Then he pulled up his pant legs and squatted like a catcher, his huge frame as wide as a backstop. He caught the first pitch and threw it to me. I missed it, amazed that he could catch Jon's throw without a glove. It didn't seem to hurt him. He had naturally padded hands.

A few innings later my mother called from the back door. "Joe?" She wore a fancy red dress and carried a small red handbag. She had done her hair so it looked fuller than normal, like the pictures in women's magazines.

"Hang on," Mr. Stevlowski said. "Denny McLain's about to wrap it up. Okay," he said to us, "it's the bottom of the ninth, two outs, seventh game of the World Series. The Tigers are one out away from the Championship. Here's the pitch." Jon threw the ball. Mr. Stevlowski caught it and threw me a fly. "It's a fly to Kaline in right," he announced. 'This could be it, folks."

I waited for the ball, prayed I would catch it. It fell out of the sky like a rock, into my glove. My arm bent with the impact.

21

"It's all over!" cried Mr. Stevlowski. "The Tigers win it!" He looked at us. "Well, c'mon, it's time for the celebration. Run in here. Celebrate."

We ran in, jumped up and down around Mr. Stevlowski, who was almost as thick as the maple; we threw our gloves up in the air. "Okay, boys," said Mr. Stevlowski, "to the locker room, to the Champagne! " "Yeah!" we yelled, and ran to my mother at the back door. Mr. Stevlowski came behind us. He was sweating. We could see beads of water on his face and wet spots beneath his arms.

"You didn't have to do that, Joe," my mother said. I got the feeling she'd have said, "You shouldn't have done that," had she been talking to me. Mr. Stevlowski smiled and shrugged. "Okay, you little Hank Greenbergs," my mother said. "Time to go home. Carol's here." Carol was the baby-sitter. She didn't like baseball.

"Can't we stay out longer, Mom. Please. " She said yes mostly because Mr. Stevlowski was there-it seemed I could get my way when there were men around. After she kissed me goodbye Jon and I walked back and sat beneath the maple.

"I wish my dad was like that," Jon said.

"Yeah."

"Is that man gonna be your dad?" Jon asked.

"I don't know."

"Just think-if he was, we could play like that every night. We'd have it made."

We sat there while the sun set, looked out past the dark maple leaves to the sky, which was still blue, a ripe blue like one of the Great Lakes.

"Yeah," I said. "We would."

Some nights, before dinner, my grandfather would pull up in his Chrysler. He'd be wearing his work clothes, a business suit, and, just like Mr. Stevlowski, he'd take off his jacket and tie.

"Hi, all-star," he said to me one day. "Where's your mother?"

"Upstairs. She's going out with Mr. Stevlowski."

"Is she? Well." He seemed pleased. "Oh, what's this?" he stuck his hand behind my ear and pulled out a nickel.

"How do you do that?" I asked.

"How do you do it? How do you keep nickels in your ears?"

"I don't."

"Then where do they come from 7" "Grampa," I whined.

"How 'bout a game of catch?"

"It's okay," I said. "Mr. Stevlowski usually plays with me when he gets here."

"He does? Well." He walked to the base of the stairs. I felt bad then, like I should have offered to play catch with him. "Shirley," he called.

22

"Hi, Daddy," my mother yelled from her room . My grandfather and I knew she was putting on makeup . Spackling, he called it.

"Shirley, I'm going to take my grandson for a drive ."

"Don't let him eat anything. He hasn't had dinner yet."

"C'mon," my grandfather said. He took me to McDonalds.

On the drive home we pulled up to a stop sign and I saw a small flag with two gold stars. Those stars hung in windows all over the neighborhood. I asked what they were.

"They mean that family has lost two sons in the war," he said. "In Vietnam ."

"Where's that?"

"Very far away."

We didn't say anything else the rest of the ride home, and I felt sad as we drove through streets of small houses and apartment complexes. It was hard to believe that all those stars meant what they did. But I also knew that if the war was very far away then it really didn't concern us. It was something other kinds of people were involved in, like the riots of the summer before .

My mother allowed me only an hour of television a day. I protested but she would not compromise, so I skirted the restriction by watching at Jon's. My mother must have known I did this, though she pretended not to notice.

"Educational" shows did not count toward my one hour, so at home I could safely watch the news without sacrificing Bewitched or Flipper. I had little interest in the news, except for sports. The Tigers continued to win and I followed their progress day by day, my spirits low when they lost and high when they won. One night the sportscaster said the Tigers were "idle."

'What's idle mean?" I asked my mother.

"You didn't make your bed this morning," she said. My mother could smell weakness like a shark. She would use anything for leverage.

"Mom," I said, in two syllables.

"Make your bed and I'll tell you."

I raced upstairs, pulled the blanket over my crumpled sheets, straightened the pillow, and slid back down to the TV before the commercials

ended.

My mother eyed me suspiciously. "It means not active," she said. "'They're not playing tonight."

I pondered what it was in mothers that made them unfair, why they on inconvenience. When the newscast came back on they showed retrospective of the year before, starting with the Detroit riots. Blacks running everywhere, some throwing rocks through windows, some policemen . Buildings burned.

23

"My God," my mother said. "I used to live there. That's Woodward.

Grampa and Grandma and me and Aunt Janet, we used to go for walks there on Sundays." A black kid ran up to a store window and threw a rock. The glass dropped like rain.

Then the pictures changed. We saw people with long hair and funny clothes. "Look at those kids," my mother said. She called everyone younger than her a kid, and she clearly disapproved of what she now saw on the screen. The camera zoomed in on one of them, a male. He had long, curly hair, and he smiled and smoked a small cigarette. He held up his hand with two fingers in a V. The newscaster said that in San Francisco they called it The Summer of Love.

"What's that mean?" I asked. "That V." "It means a couple of things," my mother said. "It means peace. Also, it means victory."

"What did that guy mean?"

"He meant peace."

The TV cut to a commercial. Suddenly we were watching cowboys herding cattle, smoking cigarettes like the long-haired man.

"How far is San Francisco 7" I asked.

"Very far away."

School started in September. My teacher was Mrs. Rohrstoff, a portentous woman with high-stacked hair and permanent dark circles beneath her black eyes. It was rumored that Mrs. Rohrstoff was actually a junior high school math teacher, news that could have hardly been worse. I imagined her staying up late with her knowledge of junior high math, depriving herself of sleep, just to devise cruel ways to torment third graders. After we said the Pledge of Allegiance Mrs. Rohrstoff took attendance.

She called off the first few names in a predictable rhythm. After each name a hand shot up and a call of present squeaked in the room. Mrs. Rohrstoff gave a quick look from her attendance book with each squeak, and then continued with mathematical precision.

"Jack Bernstein," she said.

"Present," I said.

Donny Birnkrant, whom I would sit next to in home rooms and student assemblies for years to come, actually raised his hand and squeaked, "Pre-" before he stopped himself. Mrs. Rohrstoff wasn't finished with me.

"Aren't you Shirley Abrahams' boy?" she asked.

This was worse than expected. Because she used her maiden name my friends didn't know my mother taught at the school. You weren't supposed to know any teachers, let alone have one for a mother. I'd be lucky to have a friend by lunch.

'Not really," I said .

24

Bobby Kranowicz, who was sitting in the desk in front of me, whirled around and stared. Even Jon looked amazed; apparently he'd never connected my mother with the sixth grade teacher.

"Not really?" questioned Mrs. Rohrstoff.

'Well, she is my mother, but she's, uh, she's other things, too."

"I know that," said my teacher. "She's a lovely, attractive, intelligent woman. I like your mother very much."

The kiss of death. Now, not only did everyone know my mother was a teacher, but they knew Mrs. Rohrstoff liked her. I lost any friend who might have been inclined to withhold judgment till lunch.

At recess I pulled my glove out of my desk and lined up with the others. We walked in single file till we reached the door and spread like ants across the playground. Though it was cool the boys played baseball, which we would do till the summer was over. That would be whenever the Tigers played their last game. I was picked in the fourth round, my usual spot . I played a pretty good game . I had two hits and I caught a ball in the outfield, the last out. No one said anything about my mother.

Jon walked with me back to the classroom. He'd had a home run and he threw out Donny Bimkrant at third. I was about to tell him he'd played well when I felt Ronny Lieberman coming up from behind. This wasn't hard to do. Ronny should have been in fifth grade had his brain been able to catch up with his age. His body was far past it. He had hair on his arms.

"Bernstein," he said, slapping me on the back and throwing off my stride. "Nice catch."

"Yeah," said Jon, "nice catch."

"You too. I mean, nice game."

He blew on his hands to warm them. "Maybe it's the extra practice," he said. 'With Mr. Stevlowski."

"Yeah," I said. "That's gotta be it."

Up ahead Ronny Lieberman tripped Ralph Schwartz for sport. As I watched them head to the building I realized that the summer was coming to an end, and that it hadn't been that bad. The apartment was fine, my mother seemed happy with Mr. Stevlowski, my grandfather let me keep the nickels he found in my ear. I had friends . It seemed that life was pretty much right.

Sometimes I saw Mr. Stevlowski on television. He owned a car dealership in Royal Oak and he advertised heavily in the late summer when he had to make way for the new fall models. He wore a white suit in his commercials and he wandered around pointing to the prices drawn on the windshields of his cars. On our small black and white set he looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy in a parking lot. "Don't miss out folks," he said. "The deals will never be better at Stevy Chevy."

25

By October we were still playing baseball. After the Tigers won the pennant we took special care to imitate our favorite players. Bobby Kranowicz stood at the plate like Mickey Stanley, while Tommy Cohn, with his stomach and dark, curly hair, was a convincing Mickey Lolich.

Ronny Lieberman never batted without first grabbing his crotch, faithful to the way Willie Horton adjusted his cup on national television. The Tigers fell behind three games to one in the World Series, and we all got pretty depressed. Ronny Lieberman gave Steve Green a black eye just for suggesting that Detroit might not win. When the Tigers won the next two games we all felt that Steve got what he deserved.

Mr. Stevlowski came over to watch the seventh game of the World Series. He didn't arrive till the third inning. I wanted to watch the game at Jon's, but my mother made me wait and let him in. When he finally arrived he walked in without knocking.

'Well," he said, holding me aloft. He had taken off his tie, and I could see a gold pendant, the Star of David, hanging against his undershirt.

"This is the big one, huh?" I landed unsteadily in our living room . "My, you're getting heavy," he added .

My mother appeared in her red dress, with her hair wide and full . Even from across the room she smelled of perfume.

"Mom," I asked, "can I go over to Jon's and watch the game? Please." I had already spent twenty minutes cleaning my room.

"Your room didn't look too good to me."

"Mom, I cleaned it."

"I found Leggo in a pile under a pair of dirty pants in your closet." This was true. I'd assumed she wouldn't look. "Clean it up and you have my permission."

"Let him go, Shirley," said Mr. Stevlowski. "It's the World Series."

With that I was out the door.

"Where were you?" Jon asked when I arrived. The Goldmans' apartment was exactly like ours, except they had a color television.

"It's a long story," I said.

Mrs. Goldman made us grilled cheese sandwiches and gave us Cokes, and we rolled and leaned and grunted with each play, as if our bodies were somehow connected with the players on the field. I jumped and threw to first in the fourth as McAuliffe turned a double play. In the seventh Jon slid halfway under the couch as Jim Northrup crossed the plate.

By the time Bill Freehan caught the last out and the Tigers won, we were exhausted, but we hugged and rolled across the floor like the men on the screen.

"What are you boys doing?" said Mrs. Goldman. She had come down the stairs. She didn't care about baseball.

'The Tigers won!" said Jon. "Well, why don't you go outside to celebrate."

We bolted out into the back yard and rolled around beneath the 26

maple. Jon pretended to be Freehan catching the last out, while I was Mickey Lolich, jumping on him right after he'd done it. A few people started to come out of their apartments. I decided to go get my mother and Mr. Stevlowski.

Our back door was locked and the shades were drawn. I thought I heard screams. Then I was sure. As I ran around the building people really began to come out of their apartments. They were cheering and laughing, shaking beer cans and letting them spray into the air like fountains. A few people, the Pollards and the Schmidts, had champagne. As I passed the corner of the building Mr. Muller got me with a beer stream.

"Hey, watch out, Jack."

I could feel the beer running down my face like sweat. "Sorry."

I reached the parking lot, ran past Mr. Stevlowski's Cadillac to the front door. I could hear shouts, my mother's shouts, coming through the screen door.

"NO, JOE! ... Joe! ... Stop it! Joe!" My mother let out a scream that was suddenly muffled, as though the volume had been turned down.

But I could still feel the scream; it rumbled around inside me like bad, chunky milk.

I ran inside, passed through the kitchen to the living room. Mr. Stevlowski was on top of my mother, who virtually disappeared beneath his bulk. She was squirming to get away like when Ronny Lieberman would hold a kid down and drool on his face. I saw Mr. Stevlowski grab my mother's red dress by the collar and rip it down to her waist. It sounded like the static between radio stations.

"No!" 'What now, Shirley," he grunted. "You're a virgin?" He ripped the dress more.

"Hey," I said. "Cut it out." I could still feel the rumble inside.

They didn't seem to notice me. The television was on with the volume off; the Tiger players were in the locker room, laughing and dousing each other with champagne. The light of the television blinked on the back of Mr. Stevlowski's white shirt and I knew my mother couldn't win. I ran over and grabbed one of her red shoes, which was under the TV stand. I wound up and threw it at Mr. Stevlowski. At the same time I screamed.

The shoe hit him with a thud.

They both looked over at me, first Mr. Stevlowski, as if he didn't recognize me, and then my mother.

"Oh, Jack," she said; she was crying. "Oh, Jack."

Mr. Stevlowski rolled off her and stood up. Later it would occur to me how agile he had been for such a big man. He'd sweated large circles beneath his arms and half his shirt was untucked. My mother's dress was ruined, and I could see her bra and her slip. There was a red scratch the color of a cherry popsicle running down her stomach. Mr. Stevlowski walked toward the kitchen. "I'll be going," he said. When he got to me he 27

stopped and before I knew it I was floating above him. I wanted to get away but he had me by the armpits and all I could do was squirm in his hands. "Well," he said. "We never got to a game, did we?" Then he set me down, grabbed his coat from the dining room table, and left. I heard the screen door latch.

"Oh, Jack," my mother said. She held out her arms and then tried to cover herself with the torn pieces of red fabric . It didn't work, as if now there were less fabric and she couldn't pull the ends together.

She grabbed me, pulled me to her and cried. She pitched and heaved with each sob, and she held me so tight that I could feel each finger press into my sides, so tight that I knew I could never get away. She felt wet and clammy, and she smelled of perfume and adult smell, like Mr. Stevlowski. "I love you, Jack," she said . "You know that, right? Your mother loves you. More than anything."

A minute passed and she eased her grip. Now they were doing interviews on TV. I ran upstairs and brought down her robe. Then I got a glass of water, the way she did for me whenever I woke up with a nightmare. After that she decided to take a bath.

I followed her upstairs, watched her stocking feet and the dress hanging unevenly behind her knees. My room looked okay, but the closet was a mess. I pulled out all the clothes and began to fold them while the water ran in the bathroom. Soon it stopped. I heard my mother step into the tub, one splash, then another, then the final swish of water as she slid all the way in. I wondered what she was thinking, remembered how it felt to hang in the air above the living room . Maybe I knew but probably I didn't. When I finished with my clothes I picked up the Leggo, straightened my desk and drawers, worked till I'd put the room completely in order. Then I pulled down the shade and lay on my bed.

Later my mother opened the door and slid into the room through the crack of light. "Jack, it smells like beer." ''You had a fight with Mr. Stevlowski," I said. She sniffed around the bed. ''Yes. We won't be friends anymore. He won't come here again." She brushed the hair back from my forehead. From the little bit of light that seeped around my window shade I could see that she was crying and trying to smile at the same time. "Maybe you want to take a bath."

"No, I just want to lie here."

"Well, okay," she said. "Sleep tight."

I tried, but my eyes were open after what seemed like minutes. I lay in my bed and I could hear so much noise from outside . There were firecrackers and explosions, like gunshots. I heard horns. Sirens wailed constantly, fading in and out of the night. It was all quite close.

I got out of bed and went to my window. It was dark. The parking lot was quiet, empty except for cars. My mother's Dodge Dart was fine. I

28

climbed back in bed and pulled my blanket up to my chin, the way my mother always did. But the noise was still close. I thought maybe the riots were coming. Or the Vietnam War. I woke late the next morning, and downstairs my mother was watching television in her bathrobe. "Good morning, dear," she said. She looked happy and normal.

"Mom, why didn't you wake me? I'm gonna miss school."

"I called in sick for us. I thought we might do something together today." I couldn't believe this. This was the woman who said if you're too sick for school you're too sick for television.

"Are you all right, Mom?" "''m fine, dear. Yesterday is over. It won't happen again." She stood up from the couch, and a bare leg scissored out off her robe. I suddenly saw that my grandfather-even Mrs. Rohrstoff-was right. My mother was an attractive woman.

"I'll cook you a hot breakfast. You want pancakes or eggs?"

"Pancakes, but ... but what are we going to do today?"

'We're meeting Grampa downtown for lunch. Before that, I don't know. Maybe the zoo. Maybe we'll go to Tiny Tim's." ''Yeah! Let's do that." Tiny Tim's was a toy race car place on Woodward.

"Okay, but first put on some shoes and your robe and go out to the back yard."

'What for?"

"Just do it," she said. I went to look through the window blinds. "No, no peeking. Go all the way out." I ran to my room and came back down with my shoes and a jacket over my pajamas, which were supposed to look like a baseball uniform. 'The Tigers won, Jack," she said. "They won the World Series." ''Yeah," I said, almost a question. I'd practically forgotten.

"Go outside and see for yourself."

I walked out into the back yard. Before me stood the maple; from its limbs and branches hundreds of strands of toilet paper swayed in the wind. They fluttered like strands of silk. Some of the leaves had started to change colors, from green to red and yellow. A few strands of toilet paper hung from branches so high that only God could have placed them there, thrown down from heaven as if He'd partaken in a ticker tape parade.

As I stood examining the toilet-papered maple a car rolled by. The driver must have seen a small boy in his night clothes, his head thrown back, his stare fixed upward. He must have felt this was a moment to share, one in which strangers could feel the same joy. He began to honk his horn, and he kept honking till finally I looked his way. He raised his arm out the window, his fingers in a V.

29

Dan johnson

Chanticleer Your eyes are bright this morning, though they shed me of my strangeness once . Now tables and chairs we bought together clatter in the street.

You load them like a peddler clearing his throat. This town responds to curious speeches; men will come to hoist their boys aloft. I see the audience forming an expectant circle around you, the enclosure almost perfect. I remember that I listened, long before I woke .

The Camera In a moment it allows the world and its light to edge sideways into a room. Fragments of these days accumulate on the floor and in comers. A fence veers into mist, and the hidden coast further on was once our treasure. Like children we were riders then, piercing the fog when the trail steepened, and not afraid. Only what we said might have fallen away in the tiniest pieces; the rest we carried up to where the headlands were exposed to light.

This picture is retained, and I see its borders bleaching into other days, dust beside the road. Or balancing a camera we held each other breathless before it, and stayed on a balcony forever. The canyon cut deeper below, falling out of sight, and people recoiled from its edges, maintaining their course and commitments.

Now we can return any time to search those faces and find the young bones underneath. Or walk in any town where light again will speak for us and keep us together and in each other's arms.

30

The Bomb Document Some day, when you are the last to leave, the call will come, the calm threat of a learned man with an accent who was once merely a strange boy without a name.

He sounds off so close in your ear there is no hiding the rain in the downspout, the clatter of silverware and crockery, or a voice that slurs with anger when you ask where the bomb will explode, or if you ask for his name.

Some day, safe and clear, not speaking to you anymore, his voice turns back on a daughter or wife when her chair scrapes the floor as if pushed aside for a dance, so she may know the faltering plan and the name that is never a hoax.

31

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mark Grimes

Quo Vadis?

In an instant sifting as anyone who has lived fitfully scattered till now, I walk among my selves before dinner at a friend's farm.

This is the letting loose someone cooking inside brings .

The simple thing of fingersrings removed-kneading dough.

The kids quiet before the TV in a way they do not understand.

Her husband gone twenty miles for good wine. lam so loved I have been refused any use of time beyond the leaves I kick up outside, the notion, barely worded, that my sorrows are enough preparation for dinner.

I collect them from behind the barn and in the strangled corraL one sitting on the hood of Bill's '59 Chevy in the garage.

Wholwas with son, mother, wife.

We laugh, we think, at the wind leaves cover and release. This, time.

Sarah holding up five fingers before the kitchen window.

32

Concurrence Ponte Vecchio . The kind of words you know you've heard before.

The snake I saw yesterday down by the dam. Black with criss-crossed yellow twine up its back. I knew I knew its kind. Remembered dead in a freshman lab.

Just a word will do.

One word, and I will pick it up. Garter.

And I will let it slither up my sleeve.

But it lunges at the dogs and shakes a silent tail. It too may have lost something it would tell me.

Poison is my guess but surprise the fear.

I am home packing when you call to tell me where you are is better for the baby.

My life alone the part you don't say. We have always heard everything before.

Somewhere else. The world is simply waiting to concur.

Like the syllable love, only the first noteand anything after love again. As silence, silence The tongue, the world.

Ponte Vecchio crosses the Arno in Florence.

And I am there a week later looking for the tomb of a Medici pope.

Just a word. And my own history has changed.

33

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Melissa Pritchard

Closed to the Natural World It had not been his beauty in the beginning, fixing, corralling her into this what, this marriage; she had, in truth (he loathed that phrase), fallen, dead weight, to his raw and defiant courting of danger. Puzzling, when she'd preferred intellectuals, academics, with all the arch stops to nature a hyper-extension of the mind implies. She could, easily did leave them whenever irreparable contempt matched here own private failure of nerve.

However opposed their reactions to this natural world, Nadia and Ryan did share a derogatory view of middle-class values, never mind being entrenched with three children, suburban home and two cars in a most bourgeois chase of life. They reassured themselves, agreed and it was sweet, this subtle consolation, a kind of binding refrain to their marriage, that they were ... set apart. They had just come off a convention of Ryan's in Honolulu, both of them drinking more and flirting more than any other time they had attended these hectic, bland meetings. One woman named her a nymphomaniac, inventive retaliation for Nadia's lukewarm flirtation with her husband on board a dinner boat. An alchemy of seasickness, rum punch and Ryan's blatant flirtations turned her weak to the temptation of intriguing this unspecial man on whatever brief or shallow a level. Oh really, it could have been anyone; perhaps this is what the woman sensed by way of calling her a nymphomaniac.

Nadia was not beautiful, debatedly attractive, her chosen term. Her lure, not insubstantial, was wit, a fiercely independent, fertile mind.

With her brain fired up, she could be undeniably, and at certain rarer times, incredibly, attractive.

Cherishing some bohemian ideal, Ryan and Nadia had bought food, wine, candles, carried them down the steep hill, slick with leaf rot, to their cabin. There was neither telephone nor television nor radio; they had three days to be isolated on the north coast of Kauai.

There rises in most marriages a tyrannizing familiarity that assumes intimacy, the路 intimacy grounded in habit, the habit falsely presuming permanence. Nadia and Ryan were comfortable-comfortable within assumptions, their marriage decent because there were no crises, things meshed smoothly including the lower gears of their most pedestrian selves.

Nadia's primary response to the verdant, drippy lushness of this

34

remote spot they had chosen was anxiety. She rushed herself through unpacking food, hanging up clothing, checking light switches, leafing blindly through books, tossing a hyped-up chatter in Ryan's direction.

The silence so unsilent, muggy with the threat and breath of vegetation, the dense pitch of birds, unnerved her. Ryan was instantly home, stripping down to shorts, seizing a walking stick and setting down the rockbordered path to the sea, with Nadia glad he'd gone, irritating pioneer of the two of them, at least geographically. She needed little, vain, calm things to do, fix her makeup, brush her teeth, wander about her new confinement until she felt, however tentatively, like stepping onto the porch.

She was a little hurt he hadn't wanted to make love immediately as he once would have, in a place as exotic as this, that his initial impulse was to explore not her, but the unknown. She had to suspect and forgive this a a predictable result of the too-cushy marriage. Still, she anxiously checked the mirror for offense (several years later she would learn Ryan had been infatuated with another woman, an unrequited, addictive preoccupation, thus his coolness which she wrongly and innocently blamed Gil marital numbing.)

Braver now, she walked down the path, overgrown and thickly frawith yellow and red hibiscus, coconut and banana trees. The earth springy with wet mold; on her right, a stream of fresh water pushed the sea. The path was dark-canopied, humid, crawly-feeling; she with relief the open beach, the hot sun, and at this time of afterthe still-flattened, thinnish sea.

Nadia did not, until shading her eyes, see his figure, a spidery bleakatop some rocky cliffs far down the beach. Around her and scatlike an enormous, stolid tumble of briquets, were pumiced, volrocks. She began to pick her way up a black mountain of them a thing, something, scuttled over her bare foot. She yelped, leaping from a dull black crab. The rocks bulged with them, hundreds in a ~路-路u"': camouflage. Nadia retreated to a shaded area beneath some sat against an overturned, peeled and rotted rowboat, intimiinto her usual, stilted pose before the natural world. Nadia used liked having it as reference to draw analogy from, but shrank its active terror and challenge, sensitive to its peril, her own handireduced before it, her agile mind stilled to insignificance; if she pretend to relax in its presence, never would she lower her mental strode, the one possible word, strode up the soft yellow sand finding her where he'd expected. They sat together, she confided of the awful crabs, he laughed, said he had been playing with hiked the path to the cabin and made love, the setting rendering almost new to one another, though Nadia noted, as she usually did,

35

how Ryan kept his eyes closed tight to her, saying nothing, concentrating on her pleasure which she felt obliged to present him before he would take his own. In this regard, he was a generous, expert lover, yet her mind and emotions remained untouched, a thing he did not know.

They sat on the porch at sunset, drinking wine and discussing whether to go into town for dinner or have a fire on the beach, go to bed early.

They decided on the fire, Ryan having already fashioned one from dry, brittle palm fronds.

Their fire was small between the twin lengths of black, empty beach, the air bathy, tepid. A couple of cats, lank and gray as pipes, materialized banging their sides against them. Ryan wouldn't touch the cats because of fleas, lice, rash, but Nadia did, deliberately scratching their stony, gnarled heads. They talked so little; whenever a gap felt too wide or too scary, she noticed how deftly, convulsively, she brought up the children, that bond between them, so tensile and emotionally loaded.

They were in Honolulu with her parents who lived in a condominium, being well-spoiled with trips to the beach, the swimming pool, MeDonalds.

Nadia sat crosslegged, the fire before her, questioning if there wasn't some transcendent lesson in nature, some moral casting of oneself into Sojourner, some sense of probable catastrophe beneath the symmetry and clarity and vastness; these were her thoughts when Ryan announced that in the morning they would snorkel, out there, he gestured with idiot generosity, to the whole wide cove before and them.

Without a guide? By ourselves? she asked. At the convention, Nadia had tried snorkeling with a group of unpracticed women-she had been the one grabbing onto a rope buoy tied to the instructor's waist, her panic hardly curbed. Ryan and one of the other men, warned of dangerous currents, had swum out to a distant reef to view a nest (was that the term, nest?) of sea turtles. Nadia had taken such inflated pride, going out at all, pelting frozen peas into ravenous swarms of fish, for her this entailed unbearable surrender. That's nice, Ryan head-patted her. Good effort, dear; she hated this belittling of her courage. Now he expected her to accompany him, unguided, into private reefs, deserted seas. She concealed from him her dread of the morning and its ordained activity.

Maybe it would rain or hurricane or she would be ill.

Ryan served breakfast on the damp porch-papaya, banana bread, yogurt, coffee.路 He was darkening to rum color, his eyes by contrast, looking pulp-riovel aquamarine. Oh why did his beauty, set off by filigreed lushness, intimidate her? Why should it? She felt out of her territory altogether, her skin pale, prickling with heat rash. She had given up makeup, feeling vulnerable and exposed, though Ryan reassured her she looked much younger, healthier.

The day was calm, hot. She followed him down to the beach, watched

36

him in the sea, already yards out by the time she spit into her mask, rinsed it in the salt water, tugged it over her head. Water slapped across her belly and legs and shoulders; wide-eyed, face down in marbled, pale green water, her breath harsh as factory machinery. A wedge of silvery, needle-nosed fish, like scores of floating pliers, zipped under her face.

The cartoonish sight shocked her into confidence, she started pushing with her arms through supple water, seeing fish every few feet. Distracted from panic, for whole minutes she imagined herself equal to Ryan, another sort of person, athletic, brave, pioneering. She _trailed him onto a tan-pink shallow reef where black urchins stuck up everywhere, quilled and menacing. She had to steer with her fingertips over sharp coral, sucking her stomach up to her spine to avoid cutting herself or bumping against black quills. They were suspended in a few inches of water, trapped for minutes, crawling with their fingertips, until Ryan found a way to deeper water. He signalled to her, exhilarated. She signalled back, drained. A typical pattern, though he was gracious, never showing disappointment, though how could he not be, just as she regretted his inability to hear poetry without impatience, without wincing.

Afterward, as compensation or balance, they hiked out of the valley, drove into town. They rented bicycles, and Ryan rented a surfboard, trying unsuccessfully to surf as she watched. They had dinner, paid for an exorbitantly expensive view of sea. A little drunkenly, they groped, stumbling, down the steep dirt hill to their cabin, navigating by no moon and a weak aura of stars.

On the last day, Nadia began to enjoy the quiet in her body, levels of civilized tension draining off of her. She felt lovely, in some odd way integrated. Her hair had gone quite wild, bushy with humidity, her face was plain and didn't pertain to the loveliness she felt. Ryan looked more and more, for god's sakes, like a movie star, his indifference to this for some reason paining her. Maybe she needed vanity to flaw him.

They read until noon, then went to the beach to walk. Ryan removed his shorts, walking with Blake's own naked innocence. Nadia was straightening up from retrieving two perfect shells, the first unbroken ones she had found, when she and Ryan saw someone approach, it seemed to her to be a young boy, whose wave she returned tentatively.

It was a young woman with cropped hair, her small, bare breasts as darkly browned as the rest of her. She was wearing the printed bottom half of a bikini. Calmly Ryan pulled on his shorts.

She stood there, dazzling them with good nature and vital health, her breasts present like statements of uninhibited wholeness, psychological well-being. Nadia wanted to look hard at those beautiful warm, tan breasts, instead over-focused politely on the girl's face, and wondered if Ryan was looking. The girl accompanied them up the path to their cabin, drank a glass of orange juice, talking all the while, answering what were

37

Nadia's questions. She had come from Tennessee to be a cook in a Girl Scout camp, ending here on Kauai, camping alone in her tent, exploring the island. She had lived this way for a year and a half. 路she had no other plans.

Oh wow, these shells are pretty. Uhoh .

What?

Did you get them out of the water, off the reef? See, they're still alive.

Nadia looked. Like tiny bluish lobsters, they were winding out of the shells, waving little clenched nippers.

Want me to put them back for you? You wouldn't want them to die, just for souvenirs, right?

I guess. But Nadia was disappointed. She did want souvenirs.

The girl didn't stay long, only a few minutes, but the cabin seemed transformed, she'd left some jolting energy in the room. Their opened books, Ryan's eyeglasses on the table, so carefully placed, their proud attempts to temporarily disown the middle-class seemed so-middleclass- the car up the hilL the house in its suburb, the money in the bank.

Nadia was sure Ryan must be madly stirred on all levels of attraction for such a disturbing, uninhibited vision of woman. Free of attachment, unafraid athletic, (god, she hunted her own fish), surely any man's dream. Or Ryan's.

Did you love her, Nadia burst out, mainly because she had and could not confess it.

Not especially, I thought she was a lesbian. If anything, she loved you.

Nadia was startled, what?

She talked to you the whole time, looked at you. I was invisible, I didn't exist . Look, she forgot to take your shells.

They joked awhile about her, admired things about her, worried over her safety, agreed neither of them could live the way she did (though Nadia did not entirely believe Ryan's disinterest). Ryan wanted to go snorkeling a last time but she could not bear the idea, could not conquer all those fears again. He went off alone, she went to sleep.

When Nadia awoke, the cabin was dark, and Ryan was not back. Oh god, he drowned. I was too much of a coward to go with him, now he's dead, I killed him, my stupid cowardice killed him.

She scrambled and slipped in panic down the path, nicking her ankle on a rock. Oh god. She was furious at his damn confidence in himself.

She would have to raise the children alone, face everything alone. Yet at some cool core of her angry panic, Nadia felt relief. an oasis, as if widowhood were equated with profound release. She could retreat without guilt to her books, not be hauled into nature, its cold waters, depths, extremes, rigor, by this gracefuL fearless Husband.

She wrenched the same ankle she'd nicked, stumbling down to the beach, facing on the sea's hard horizon, a setting sun . She scanned both

38

directions, did not see him. The isolation of the beach, the complacent slap of water enraged her, where was he? She hated the world's beauty as she hated her husband's, knowing both would somehow kill her, though in this way, in collusion, she had overlooked. What had she counted on, what had she married, his courage?

Nadia.

He reclined in an artificial, magazine posture against the overturned boat . Her spot, her place. The treacherous disappointment she felt, seeing him safe, was eclipsed by immense, ordinary gratitude.

She clapped her hands foolishly, like her grandmother, over her chest.

Oh Ryan, god, I really am so stupid. I thought you were dead.

Not quite, he smiled.

This was easily prophetic, true as making love that night, the bluish creatures in still-perfect shells shrivelled in glass beside the bed, and Ryan with Nadia, eyes shut one to the other.

39

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Marin Sorescu

How? The gap between stairs hurts me And the gap between words And between cellsSo much lost space Which will never be plowed.

How can there be any plenty When the world can't grow anymore Because of birds of prey Who keep pecking away at it?

Nothing can fill itself Really well, Not even fright .

How can there be any plenty?

40

He didn't really observe Losing the first letter.

He kept talking, Carefully avoiding Words

And another, Happiness, and love Couldn't understand him now. last letter in a syllable, stuck a tire tooth. he hears, sees, has no more words for life, :t'Vlnnt:u mostly from the letters lost.

41

House Snake The house snake Stays coiled for eight hours And produces venom.

Its venom is reaped mechanically When the snake's made to bite, In an iron flask Which closes automatically.

In any case, it's content to labor In its branch, Because, you see, for a time It had to produce Honey.

And since its honey Proved to be a bit more bitter Than acicia flowers' The house snake Was made a Boa constrictor.

During that period It simply starved, Because it couldn't crawl to Africa For antelopes.

Afterwards it was taken from the boas And entered at crocodiles, Based on a photograph Of an ancient ancestor.

42

Study of Repose look, I don't want to take another step, Here I am, motionless, Next to other pines, As long as there's still room for a pine.

I've already started Taking on moss and lichens, Ants come to me To show them North, I don't feel like it, I've been up there, Why send them on the roads too For nothing.

It's good to fix yourself somewhere, a long journey, after finishing your whole life, to spend another word.

INI1Slnrteafrom the Rumanian, Adriana Varga and Stuart Friebert

43

Robert Kusch

Islands Islands split the stone from the hand, walk their own mile and are always lost.

Piebald, humpbacked, skinny, they outguess all certainties and laugh in all the right places.

They go around and around.

Far our on their thinnest stretch islands know their center and keep a secret until it is a ruin.

A whistle, a cock's crow, they bring the sun in through cypresses and reappear day after day, unclaimed.

Children ride them like sea-horses, hands reach out to touch them, the toughest wave flips over its back, a harlequin pool.

They have no quarrel with their story and loaf exactly as they will.

They are always watched.

44

David Luisi

Zen Garden Outside the wall tigers roar.

Those with more than tiger hearts Rage and roar, Spit their spoils across the jungle floor Unsatisfied, As if their struggle were for petty rations; Prowl other worlds, other constellations .

Seven stones suspended, islands in a bay, Seven bearded shadows elaborate the day, Seven monks tum inward, appetites in hand, Every tum designed to drop a world away.

45

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - Paul Kennedy Mueller

Reflections at Hanneken Castle

What crumbles bones has here been slow, for ribs and skulls and femurs glow for my torch at the dungeon grate, as though decay, flying to carnage, thought to wait, sow her dust at later date and, detained by wars on other shores, ignored this dank hole's woe.

Of course this can't be so: there's no delaying fate, no rusting of that gate. All bones must settle, smile, and die at the rate we all do go, unadorned humble, unmoumed great.

II

Below the castle's tumbled stones the Rhine unwinds, flashing like honed knives in the heartland's twilight.

Cumulus hordes in the east flare with falling fire, lamps along the cloaked banks struggle against night.

Darkness, a weight in my blood, muscular and thick as guilt, wrestles me into sleep.

My dreams are bruised; the dawn is black and blue.

III Chimneys wreathed in starlings and mist bring back a memory cold as the river around my white feet : in one of my backyards, under such a waking sky, I lied to my brother about my dreams, singing of women and wars, when my head had been filled with towers, toppling, spilling, sprawling across landscapes naked as white feet in black water.

46

Cory Wade

The Woman Who Wanted Two It began with the green sundress. The first few times she_wore it she received compliments from almost everyone who saw it on her. She began to wonder why she hadn't bought a dress like it before. She had always made every effort to be as consistent as possible.

She was momentarily relieved when she realized that the reason she hadn't bought a dress like it before was that she hadn't come across a dress like it before. Consistency wasn't possible if the context didnt't exist.

Then she began to wonder why she hadn't come across a dress like it before. It came to her that it was a rather unusual design and probably wasn't available just anywhere or at just any time. It had probably been a stroke of luck that she'd found it at all.

Then she began to wonder what would happen when it wore out, which it was bound to do, no matter how careful she was with it. There was an inevitable amount of wear and tear associated with even the most careful use. It would be a shame to part any sooner than was absolutely necessary with a dress so well suited to her, so she began to wear it only on selected occasions, saving it for singularly important events.

This approach proved frustrating, however, since there were many unimportant, mundane events at which she would have enjoyed wearing the green sundress. Yet the more often she wore it the faster it would wear out, given the fact that no dress could last forever.

One morning while she was writing notes on the floral stationery which she kept in her bedroom bureau it occurred to her that she was a fool. She was a fool, not for saving the sundress for special occasions, which was prudent, but for not having bought two identical dresses at the same time.

That afternoon she went back to the store where she had purchased the green sundress and looked through the racks. First she looked through the dresses in her size. Then she began to look at the dresses in sizes smaller or larger than her own. Then she looked through the blouses and coats where a dress could have been accidentally placed. There were no sundresses, green or otherwise, and she was chiding herself on her lack of vision when a saleswoman approached her.

She explained to the saleswoman that she had recently seen a dress which she liked but which she had foolishly not bought; she had come

47

back to buy it today. She described the dress in precise detail, omitting only the fact that she owned one just like it.

To her surprise the saleswoman returned in a few minutes holding the green sundress: they had sold out of that particular style, but only today a customer had returned this one in green, and was it the right size?

In astonishment she saw her size on the inside label. This was propitious, she told the saleswoman. She must have been meant to have that green sundress because if she had come in yesterday it wouldn't have been there; but she had come in today and here it was waiting for her.

Now that she had two of them, she wore the first green sundress whenever she wanted. And her white sandals looked just right with it. She wore them together all the time. In fact, no shoes could look better with a dress, she decided.

The more she looked at this ideal combination the more she felt that it would be wrong not to give some thought to the other, brand new, identical sundress hanging in the closet. Could it ever be right not to plan for the future? At some point she would start to wear it and would have to find some kind of shoes to go with it. Since no shoes were better suited to it than the white sandals, the latter were obviously the appropriate choice. But the pair she was wearing would soon be quite worn out, given the fact that no pair of shoes could last forever, and then what would she have? A perfect new sundress, fresh from the hanger, and a wretched pair of dilapidated sandals not fit even to give to the Goodwill.

She needed a second pair of white sandals. When she came to this conclusion she realized how practical and far-sighted she had become. The appearance of the second green sundress in the store that day had been a sign to her, an indication that her approach was a sound one. She had begun to see in earnest how foolish it was not to plan for the future. Now she was planning consistently and experiencing the satisfaction of consistency. Why hadn't she begun doing this much sooner?

Unfortunately, it proved rather difficult to get another pair of white sandals exactly like the ones she had, and this was a significant lesson to her. If she had been more far-sighted to begin with, she simply would have purchased two pairs the same day on the assumption that there would undoubtedly be some dress or other that the second pair of shoes could go with. She reflected on this fact at some length as she drove from store to store trying to locate a second pair of white sandals.

Finally she left her name and phone number with a shoe salesman who seemed interested in her situation. She didn't give him all the details but she indicated that she had a reason for wanting that particular shoe. He showed her several other pairs and suggested that she try on at least some of them. She assured him that there was only one style that would suit her however, and that a significant principle was involved in the selection. He seemed rather curious about her reasons and agreed to try to locate another pair for her.

48

While she was driving home she caught sight of herself several times in the rear-view mirror and was pleased by the way her earrings looked with the sundress. They were 14-karat gold buttons, bright and conspicuous, the perfect complement to the green dress and white shoes. How unthinkable it would be if she ever lost one or both of them . And it would probably prove impossible to locate another pair of earrings like them since she had gotten them some time ago.

She decided to have an identical pair made up. She remembered that there was a goldsmith in one of the shopping centers where she had gone to look for the shoes. She turned the car around, and began to feel a little surge of enthusiasm about her decision.

She laid one of her earrings on the goldsmith's counter and explained that she wanted him to make a pair like it . As he studied the gold button the goldsmith commented on how frustrating, how disappointing, it was to lose one of a pair of earrings. She told him that she hadn't lost the other one and, removing it from her earlobe, put it on the counter next to its twin.

When the goldsmith asked if the duplicate set was to be a gift she told him no, that anything could happen and she didn't want to risk losing something of value. After all, life was full of losses, expected and otherwise, and it was necessary to plan for the future.

When a few days later she left the shop with the second pair of earrings she began to feel that she was putting her life in order. She wondered why it had taken her so long to come to this point. It made such good sense to duplicate anything of real value. That way no matter what happened there was relatively little deprivation.

Duplication was a perfect emotional buffer, not only against the usual wear and tear life took on material things, but also against the greater sense of unhappiness bestowed by an unanticipated loss. One expected a sundress or a pair of sandals to wear out, eventually; but one wouldn't expect gold earrings to wear out. Should they ever be lost or broken or stolen the pain would be all the worse because it was so unanticipated.

She began to feel that she had discovered a vision worth having, worth implementing consistently.

Later in the week the goldsmith took her to dinner. He seemed to enjoy listening to her talk about her theories and either intuited or accepted her ideas readily. She realized that he must have been impressed by her sense of vision and she respected him for wanting to be in the company of a woman who was thinking realistically. He seemed to understand at once how she had come to the conclusion that it was foolish not to plan for the future.

When he came to her house the second time he brought her not one but two bouquets of flowers . Although she was pleased by his recognition of her vision and system and by his generosity, she secretly felt that he had missed the point, since it was impossible to use two bunches of flowers

49

sequentially. They wilted at exactly the same rate and therefore provided no buffer against erosion, material or emotional. Later it did occur to her, however, that two bouquets could be used in two different places at the same time, and this possibility did much to redeem his gesture in her eyes.

The following week the shoe salesman called to say that he had been able to locate a pair of the white sandals. When she picked them up she discovered that she was again wearing her own white sandals as she stood in front of the salesman. He noticed them and asked if her reason for wanting the second pair was to match an outfit with someone else for a special occasion. She made it clear that this was not the case and began to explain her system of duplication and loss. He pointed out that the pair she was wearing was in excellent condition and that she probably needn't have worried about replacing them for a long time. She countered with the fact that even now it had been almost impossible to locate the second pair and that if she had waited any longer it would certainly have become impossible. He couldn't argue with that premise and deferred to her logic in buying the second pair before the first pair had worn out .

When the shoe salesman came to her house for dinner the next night she knew he was struck by the consistency of her system. There was evidence of her vision in every room. In the kitchen one toaster sat forward on the counter, obviously in use, while another identical to it stood in reserve behind it. There was only one VCR and one television display in the living room, but she showed him two large boxes containing duplicate units in the garage. While the bathroom scale with digital readout was on the floor next to the sink, in the cabinet beneath the sink was another bathroom scale with digital readout. Her new lavender AM / FM clock radio stood alone on the nightstand by the bed, but in the top drawer of the nightstand was its as yet unused twin.

He was rather intrigued with her consistency and she found it pleasurable to describe her system in some detail. He seemed genuinely interested in the subtleties and nuances of her vision. By the end of the evening they were enumerating the advantages of having duplicates of anything of value. He agreed that her basic argument had an essential truth in its favor. She began to feel a sense of camaraderie with him based on his understanding of her understanding.

The next night the goldsmith was taking her to dinner. As soon as they had ordered dessert he put a little velvet box on the table in front of her.

When she opened it she discovered not one but two pairs of diamond stud earrings. The goldsmith told her how rare she was, how charming and arousing, how different. He had seen from the first how intense she was, how aesthetically alive. He wanted her to go with him on a buying trip to Italy. He wanted to show her Venice and Rome and Taormina and

so

Capri. He wanted to surround her with grace and beauty. He wanted to revel in her grace and beauty. Provided she found him attractive, he wanted her to be his mistress. He wanted to be with her day and night.

She thought about it all that night and all the next day. She regarded the goldsmith as an intuitive type and she credited him with having grasped her vision quickly and unquestioningly. Moreover, he valued it highly, as was evident from the kinds and numbers of gifts he gave her.

He was emotional and passionate and full of appreciation for her. She found him attractive.

Two days later she had made up her mind to accept the goldsmith's offer. That afternoon the shoe salesman called to say he wished to speak with her about a matter of some importance to them both. He appeared at her door that evening to present what he described as a compelling argument. Sitting in the living room on the uncovered chintz sofa with the new, unused chintz sofa directly behind it draped in sheets, he told her that she had had a profound intellectual effect on him, more so than any woman he had ever known. He had regarded himself as exempt from ordinary emotions but her way of thinking about the world fascinated him and, assuming that she found him agreeable, he thought it might be in their mutual self-interest to become lovers.

After the shoe salesman left that night she thought about his suggestion. There was much to be said for him. He was rational and practical and liked to discuss issues in depth. He obviously appreciated her vision, her planning for the future. He could provide ample mental stimulus. She found him agreeable.

Then she thought about the goldsmith. He was very different from the shoe salesman but she couldn't fault him. In his own way he represented quality, just as the show salesman did in his own way. Yet they were very diffemt. An either-or selection wasn't what she wanted.

What did she want? To implement her vision, of course. She was preoccupied with her system, with planning for the future . There had been so many years in which she had paid no attention to the need to duplicate items of quality that she was now saddled with a lot of catching up to do.

Several days went by, and, as she drove from store to store trying to locate two of everything she valued, she derived little satisfaction from how well the white sandals went with the green sundress or how perthe gold button earrings finished the entire outfit.

The necessity of deciding about the goldsmith and the shoe salesman tainting everything. Why should she be confronted with this kind of ~4muna, this kind of meaningless exclusion, just when she was beginto put her life in a meaningful order? She never felt more purposeful when she was planning for the future in a consistent way; but the ~~'"'" that had to be made was depleting all her enthusiasm for planand implementing her vision.

51

She was hanging up a new cotton kimono-style robe and folding up an identical cotton kimono-style robe in the linen closet when an idea came to her. Perhaps the solution to her problem was close at hand. Perhaps the answer was simply that she hadn't been consistent enough.

Opening her bedroom bureau she removed the box of floral stationery.

Right under the box was a second box, its plastic wrapper not yet broken. She saw with relief that she still had at least half a box to go before she would have to think of getting a replacement for the replacementbox.

She addressed two identical envelopes, one to the goldsmith and one to the shoe salesman. By being consistent in her vision she saw how much alike the two men were. Despite their somewhat different approaches to life, they were both first and foremost items of quality.

Then she wrote identical notes. She accepted the goldsmith as her lover and she accepted the shoe salesman as her lover. Since her system revolved around duplication, no choice that excluded either of them had to be made. The only condition that had to be satisfied was that both men represent quality, and now that she was viewing them as more alike than different, her conscience was clear on that issue.

She signed each note with two hugs and two kisses. With relief and surprise she discovered that some of her former enthusiasm was returning. This was another sign that her approach was sound.

Then she began to wonder if having two lovers would be like having two bouquets of flowers. It might or might not be possible to make use of them sequentially, but it would certainly be possible to make use of them at generally the same time in different places. And then something might always happen to one of them. There was the usual wear and tear, the toll which life inevitably exacted; and then there was also the unexpected, such as car accidents, heart conditions, and so forth. For all she knew, one might have to serve as a buffer for the loss of the other. It was probably best to be as impartial toward them as she could, showing as little favoritism as possible.

She began to feel comfortable about her decision. It was really just an extension of many decisions she had already made, beginning with the sun_dress and the shoes and the earrings. Consistency was always the key to satisfaction, and she began to get a little glimpse of how satisfying life could be.

Before going to bed each night she made out a list of the items she wanted to duplicate the next day. Tonight as she worked on the list she discovered a great sense of contentment coming over her. Everything was falling into place. Both the goldsmith and the shoe salesman would applaud her decision, knowing her vision and consistency as they did.

After all, each was obviously attracted to her realism . They knew that she knew it was foolish not to think about the future.

52

As she started to turn out the light, she remembered one last detail she needed to attend to before she could sleep. Getting out of bed not with annoyance but with the contentment born of consistency and vision, she went again to the bureau drawer. Satisfied, she took out two stamps, exactly alike.

53

Guy Capecelatro III

The Man, the Woman and the Other Man This happened in a bar: There was a man and a woman and another man. The man that was with the woman ordered a couple glasses of beer.

The other man was sitting at a booth, watching. The first man went over to the pinball machine and put in a quarter. The woman stayed where she was, at the bar. The other man stood and walked to the bar. He talked with the woman and occasionally touched her elbow for emphasis.

The man at the pinball machine rocked it slightly as he played, bent over. He was bumping the bumpers and lighting the lights and ringing the bells. Occasionally he looked over at the woman and the other man.

The other man had one arm around the woman's shoulder, while he traced small circles on her leg with his other hand. His face was very close to hers and she was giggling, slightly, as he spoke. The man took a sip from the first man's beer.

The first man walked over to the other man and the woman. The other man moved away from the woman. The first man said, "That's my beer," then punched the other man so hard in the face that he fell down onto the floor. The woman kissed the first man. They left the bar.

54

Movie She walks in time with the music in my ears.

Her hair is blond, etc.

She stops, strikes a pose-hand on hip, hand in hair, then walks again, off the scene.

It was the movie starring her.

Fireflies I remember being seven running at night catching fireflies smearing them on my face glowing

Heaven When I walk through the rain and squint my eyes, it looks more like heaven.

55

Charlotte Gould Warren

Apple Pie I always wanted my own small tree.

Sturdy, full of blossoms, like children.

Leaved and dappling the ground with shade, pippins ripening, the fog-cold nights filling out their forms.

I watched them grow-green to red Septembersfour or five Gravensteins in the grass, mornings, a few pinched and left for the deer.

The knife resists my push.

Pale ivory flesh heaps the bowl.

I have my wish.

I have my wish.

There, through the window the tree itself makes apples year after year on its own.

August. September. Aour is falling. I could dance on the floor, it's that slippery. Children come back.

I pull out-the breadboard- pie plate, knife, f&k, spatula, rolling pin.

56

Chilled and rolled, turning the circle, the circle widens. Thin as paper now, my life.

Folded with care, lifted slowly onto the fruit, unrolled, draped, trimmed with a knife, falling dough is what the cat likes-all that fat!

Now the apples, speckled with cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice, yellow butter chunks, heap against the dough.

It is that heavy.

Reader, can you smell it, plump as your hunger, filling houses everywhere?

Pippins to pie- Mulkilteo, Tillamook, Schenectady, Des Moineshow we gather life, love, over so soon .

57

Paintings For Sharon

I.

"It's eleven-thirty, Mr. Joe. I thought you'd like a bowl of soup."

Celery.

I feel like biting into a head of Manoa lettuce or crisp fern shoots you could pick in your backyard.

Of course it rained a lot a land of volcanos blacksand beaches lush with earthquakes: the stone porch split down the steps and the corrugated roof of the tool shed pattered with rain sharpening the shears sleep the hibiscus and orchid.

We moved a pile of rocks that day and found a family of khaki toadsbig, boy.

Sharon got stung and we watched a spider real fast spin a web lots of work after the rain so fast everything grows.

My beard.

The tidal wave that dashed our house away.

The neighbors, Kaloi, Beverley died.

They took our things, Sharon's nice leather purses.

The mosquitos didn't bite her after the first year.

The bugs, or something's, eating the cabbagea spotless bungalo four rooms with sunlight and trade breeze and the smell of ginger.

58

II.

"Mr. Joe?" Something else gnawed at her nerves pulled at her hair stared traced in her watercolors too delicate for this world bruised fruit a rose in a cut glass a thin lambskin book leaves ferns broken quills rings missing stonesyou see transparencies overlapping wraiths her ghost everywhere in the porcelain walls upon her cheek, her pink knees her hands, fruits, in the flower pattern of the crystal floor in vellum illuminations palimpsests her palms her mind a glass shoe.

III.

"Felt a drop, Joe." The clouds tum charcoal; a black dog chases something through the mist of the soccer field, trees mountain pastures somewhere behind.

Sharon stows her paints; we pack the cooler roll the mats. I try to protect her as we flee the rain in flimsy dress through a large, dark no name canvas in a golden frame.

59

Mantis (The Horror Show) The sound of maple-black, thumb-length roaches gently rattling in a bag of aluminum cans not fire or radioactive rain dripping from eaves: so unnerving I can hear their scratching two rooms away and think ax, baseball bat, outrage, my brain a mandible think of that line from The Fly: "I am an insect who dreamed he was a man and believed the dream" before his bubbling face split open, his body cracking, an aperture from which a mechanical leg like a saw was stepping from the threshold of a dark room.

This is the Egypt of every man's past that haunts like buzzing, the attic of memory: the heaped and dusty carapace from which we hatched: the armor, the haircoat, the silkworm gown the veil like a spider's web-Cocktails at Dachau7 Breakfast in Beirut7 or a thousand rebellious slaves crucified along the Appian Way or crushed like a species of beetle in Tiananmen Square, though a kiln were better for Dresden china, the crockpot of Troy, the fruits fresh from Nagasaki, we spray with spectrocide, the chemistry of My Lai-reel after reel in the Arabian Night.

As a chronicler of darkness (here, you can see my badge) I wonder what Mahfouz, Kundera, or Marquez would say or the suicide, Kawabata, while I know Capote's been working-on the crime for forty years now finding nothing in the Mongolia of our faces nothing in tKe heart of the Congolese dark, no tiger wasp, or discipline of ants. No nada. No metaphors to give it shape, to grasp. Nothing that frightens.

Nothing to kill. But noise in the pantry!

Out of rage, revulsion, disgust-in bloody vengence I tear off their arms like wings and devour people.

Record the chewing.

60

Curt Hagen

Fading inFading out-mostly outIA!Itaz:mg them by coming out the other of a coughing jagHeart tripping Lungs aching'That was a bitch. Thought she me that time."

Weak grin Dim twinkle, small pressure tllnuultt[ was tougher than this but I don't know . . .

Soon, though Damn!

Fish to catch . said he lived longer than he had right to expect-but then everyone knew spent fishing wasn't counted against you" hadn't he spent years in a boat7 even if he wasn't exactly ready to go didn't feel cheated. Not that he looked lft~w;u路rl to it, but then hey, maybe there's White bass and Wall-eyes And no limits a fourteen foot Alum a-craft Ma and the kids . one more cast and we can head home, slow." let's troll

61

Daniel Panger

The Burying Alive of Mason Taylor After twelve days of his refusing to bathe, the group decided to bury Mason Taylor. Buried in the earth up to his neck he might gain an appreciation of cleanliness was the consensus. To this, after much pressuring, Mason finally agreed.

In less than an hour the hole was ready. Then the members lined it with blankets, strips of carpet, and handfuls of dried leaves. Mason joked as he climbed down into the hole and giggled as the earth was shoveled in.

One by one, the group members bent down and whispered a word or two into Mason's ear. It was funny seeing a head sticking up out of the ground . An hour later, as the group was going at it in the meeting room, Mason started screaming.

I started for the door, an image of some hungry animal down from the mountain tearing at the head flashed through my mind. Then I remembered a member had been left in charge. He'd taken up his post about twenty yards behind Mason, although Mason didn't know it.

The screams stopped, and I lowered myself slowly to the floor. Two of the women had been discussing their reactions to one another- how each, during the past weeks, had developed an appreciation of the other's femininity; instead of being threatened by femininity in other women, they could now enjoy it.

Mason's screams froze their exchange. The scene had a cartoon quality about it. When the screaming stopped they went on. Except for a slightly shriller sound to their voices, it was as if nothing had happened. The two women hugged and whispered softly into each other's ears; the rest watched, several smiled and nodded. Then Mason started screaming again.

This time there was scarcely a break in the group's activities. ,-..rn;orâ&#x20AC;˘ for a moment or two a trace of awkwardness, but that was all. Mason continued screaming; the scream was mixed with what sounded words, but they were impossible to make out.

Mason's streams came in short, piercing bursts. Now I was almost certain I could hear the word "please" at the end of each burst .

"If you only knew how much I've suffered because of you." The woman's voice cracked as she spoke . "You're so damn much woman .. .."

There was a break in Mason's screams. The palms of my sweated and I rubbed them on the carpet.

62

Now Mason was making a new sound-it sounded like he might be strangling. I wanted to cover my ears, but instead forced my hands under my thighs, palms up, and dug my fingers into the muscles.

The choking sound died away. I struggled against the image of Mason's head sticking up out of the ground.

Mason started yelling: "Help! Please! Help!" Then the words jumbled into a scream. I dug my nails deeper into my thigh muscles.

After another half an hour of intermittent screams, it was time to dig the man up, we decided. 路 Mason was babbling as we approached. A mud of mucus and saliva had formed around his chin. Some had found its way into his mouth, staining his teeth and tongue brown.

He trembled violently as we lifted him from the hole. He had soiled himself.

Two hours later, as we were finishing lunch, Mason walked into the dining room, scrubbed, showered, combed, wearing fresh clothing. Even his fingernails had been cleaned.

63

David Lunde

First Will and Testament I give my right eye to hunters for it sees the death in everything it touches.

I give my left eye to diamond cutters for it squints at the world through glass.

I give the whirlpools of my ears to the desert which understands their thirst.

I give my heart to the volcano for its fitful burning.

I give the plates of fat on my belly to make a flag for the revolution.

I give my mouth which is already trained to tell the lies of the revolution.

I give my right hand to actors for it knows the art of small gestures.

I give the left one to politicians for it always urged forward the right.

I give my toes to horses for they are fingers without ambition.

I give my feet to the highway; they also have gone two directions at once.

I take my vices to the orphanage; they will be adopted by others.

I give my work habits to the oyster whose pain is a pretty rationalization .

64

I give the rock of my voice to water that it may be smoothed into song.

I take my tongue with me for it wishes its tastes to remain secret.

I give my words to the poem which runs off to make its fortune.

65

Mark Taksa

Baby Key in the Mechanical Forest My camouflage hair sticks out like a bush in wind. Hiding behind my glasses, I am a sharpshooter, enjoy being dirty in a mechanical forest, love my beard unrazored .

The diaper on my shoulder is a hero's medal. I grip the baby as if he were the key to a temple where any parent can eat at tables served by invisible hands.

I ask my wife to put on a robe, crawl under the window so the street lamp will not reveal her. I hand her the baby and she blushes.

Parenting past midnight, community reduced to a stucco bunker, we hide from factory eyes, should be under a blanket, resting for the wrestling with machines.

66

Living Room in The Park Practicing jump shots until my hands are machines, I am free from walls dying my face dormitory green, marking me as a government child without TV, parents, a living room.

The park bench is my family chair.

Here kids do not drop cans of broccoli into a school's charity box, observe if my smile is thankful.

I am free from clean girls, perfect pens questioning how police took me from an icy apartment, rent due notices in the pancake mix, deposited me, like a stolen letter, at the smudged opening of a state home, the counselor's grin wearing compassion like a shackle .

The waffles were sour.

67

T. M. Goto

For Nell

God forgives volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, unavoidable floods.

I cried the first time, unprepared for the weakness of my womb (the pathology showed it was only four weeks).

The second time I cried when my boyfriend, driving me home, announced what a favor he was doing.

I cried the third time a man said he wouldn't make me and did; I'm still alive.

The churches of my childhood provide refuge; the priests still rap my hands with rulers.

68

Deviirati Mitra

Flowers Born Blind Once, just before dawn, from your attic room, you looked into the distance through the eastern windowinvisible clouds on the horizon, shadows at the bottom of the lake, the dawn sky like curdled milk.

Is anybody there, nearby?

Life a bridge in the wind, not even a stake driven anywhere into the planet, a country like a man's breath; it's the light of your heartbeateven grief is so salutary!

Liquid white weeds extend their antennae into the river.

Standing on the bank, I look into the eyes of flowers born blind.

Easing up the spinal column like a quiet black snail, a birth seems imminent this morning, with no regard for human wombs.

69

Amnesiac River The horse sacrifice is held with clouds in the western sky.

The crooked sword of angry red light Butchers me instead of the animal's mane-covered neckStill-throbbing blood spurts out, its drops spattering.

Who acts, who faces the consequences?

Only pitch darkness like a horse's weary neigh As nothingness swells all the way up to the Vindhyas.

Who understands what I'm saying?

Everyone avoids responsibility, saying it's all luck.

If someone else enters the blazing fire, I will be burnt to deathWhat kind of a cruel fate is this?

Let the severed head roll on the ground; Still, dissolving what's written on the forehead, let liquid lightning appear.

Rolling down from failure Let tears go to another land, Another altitude, up to the Great Birth.

I know it's useless, to say it is useless.

Once a stream begins to flow in the wrong course Its path's amnesiac, lost in Stygian depths forever.

70

No, No, and No There's no hurry, it isn't time yet; I'm ready to wait if you ask me to .

The mirror is finishedIt's inside you that the opaque curtain trembles.

The fairy-shaped candle With her little lighted tongue Licks up the dark.

Alone in the garden, I notice That the cricket's song Goes for a stroH on the balcony.

Nobody, I'm nobody I know.

Still, I wait In case I hear the sound of your hands Throwing a window openIn case that face of white clouds Falls into my sea as waves.

I merely notice A few distant stars like toenail clippings, Their light a long ways from this sky.

There's no fear. No hope either?

There are still so many birthsLives of insects, birds, trees, sand and stone.

I object to nothing.

I'd like to move in your shadow Just to find out how many times you say no.

How many times you can say no.

71

The Green Stigma In the long-stagnant pond you've been submerged, stone, but there was no green stigma on you, so blameless you are!

The moss's roots, bunches of kalmi flowers, and water drops blurting suddenly from fishes' lips, are they afraid of you?

I look on bemused: white, stark white, like desert sand or the cold white complexion of the moonno shadow anywhere.

Eyelashes are burning, there's gasping on all sides; all the tears of my body, the last drop of water in my blood, dash against you.

Like you, I'm also stiff, inert now, but in a different way: over my whole body the dogstar's lovely cold blue gleams and grows gradually darker.

I'm no longer the same as water, traces_of moss, and hyacinth tendrils.

Seeing you change, I've also changed my color.

Translated from Bengali by Paramita Banerjee and Carolyne Wright

72

]. Thompson

The First to Go Andrea opened the door to the broom closet and handed a ~路late of cake to the pudgy young man hunkered down amid mops, brooms, and old underwear tom up for dust cloths. She closed the door again, brushed away the tiny beads of perspiration from the edge of her hairline, and stared back into the crowded living room. It looked as if a flock of great, black birds had come to roost and were perched on every available chair and windowsill. She shook her head in slight dismay as she peered through the open doorway from the kitchen at the sea of her relatives.

It was one of the last dog-days of summer, perfect for tall frosty glasses of lemonade from which only a half-dozen swallows could be drawn before they turned lukewarm in the glass. Andrea took a deep breath of the warm, heavy air. What an inappropriate day for a funeral. She plucked free the black crepe puckered against the damp flesh in her armpit, straightened the tight, heavy girdle beneath her dress, and picked up the cake-laden tray to take it in to the mourners.

Aimlessly, she wandered the three rooms and back yard crowded with members of the MacCullough clan. Her mother's family. With all of them dressed for Uncle Horace's funeral Andrea felt as if she were moving through an ocean of shadow which occasionally whimpered and sighed around her. Every once in a while she heard someone mention Jesse's name, saw a sad, sometimes angry shake of a head and she would remember the man crouched in the stuffy broom closet out in the kitchen. If the family knew Jesse was right there in the house ....

Andrea shuddered at the thought.

Jesse was not one of the family's favorites. Neither was she, which was Drn1b.alblv why she and Jesse had always been such good friends and allies through their childhood, all their lives really, even though they were years apart. Besides mutual exclusion there was something else that always drawn Andrea to him. Although she could never quite put it words Andrea had associated feelings of largess with any thoughts to Jesse. It was not a material expressiveness-Jesse was broke-it was more in the way he seemed at every moment be taking a flying leap toward anything and everything that felt or of fresh air and freedom . In her mind's eye, Andrea saw Jesse through swirling breezes, buffeted here and there by a particustrong gust, necktie waving like a banner over his shoulder, the

73

lapels of his jacket flapping wildly, and smiling, singing and glad. A far cry from the pinched solemnity which characterized the rest of their clan.

Andrea smiled and remembered one particular Christmas about twenty years ago. A group of the younger MacCulloughs had been herded down to the shopping center for a visit with Santa Claus. Jesse disappeared from the group early on and even though the adults who had given up their Saturday afternoon for the excursion were annoyed with him they were not very concerned . Jesse was fourteen years old at the time and they had assumed that he could take care of himself and not get into trouble. He had not been expected to have his picture taken with Santa. They only brought him along to help watch over his younger cousins. When they did notice his absence they assumed that he had gotten tired or bored and had gone home on his own until they realized that the description of the "lost child" being read over the public address system was Jesse. The center's security guards had found him curled up around the manger in the nativity display. Beside him was an empty box of Hershey's Kisses, two drained Coke bottles, and a couple of hamburger cartons. Under questioning, all Jesse would do was marvel over the pretty Christmas decorations and the Baby Jesus he had found in the manger. Horace responded to all of this by taking his son home and beating him.

When the rest of the family had learned of the incident, they shook their heads in sympathy for Uncle Horace and Aunt Nora, and they thanked their lucky stars that Jesse was not their son. The younger members of the clan had not been as sedate or discreet in their reactions, they teased him for days. Andrea had had a good laugh over the adventure too, but secretly she enjoyed the spectacle Jesse created wherever he went, the rather voluptuous appetite for the emotional as well as the physical which punctuated his physique and his manner.

As Andrea bent down to place a plate of cake in front of one woman, she was caught by the arm with one arthritic old hand as the other hand continued to hold a little white hanky to a thin, formless mouth. It was Aunt Alita, the eldest of the thirteen children born to Charlie and Maggie MacCullough, and Horace's senior by six years, which made her seventyeight years old. She expressed the view that Horace had been much too young to die, and the hope that the cake was not cinnamon.

Andrea had to think about that one for a moment. In a way it was true . The MacCulloughs rarely gave up the ghost before they were at least ninety. She glanced back at Alita. Between bites the fuzzy, gray head bent to blow the long, skinny nose into the small hanky.

Andrea set the tray down on the kitchen table, unboxed a fresh cake, and began cutting it into neat squares. From where she stood she could see Aunt Nora, Uncle Horace's widow, sitting quietly in a large wingback easy chair across the room. Her small white hands were folded and

74

resting in her lap and she had a gentle-no-placid expression on her face. It seemed to Andrea that Nora was experienceing almost as much peace as Horace was in his box down at the funeral parlor.

"Quite a turnout for the old man, isn't it?"

The jarring voice behind her made Andrea jerk around with a suddenness that toppled the piece of cake she was holding from saucer to floor.

She hurriedly, shut the door to the living room and then turned to glare at the speaker. 路.

"Dammit Jesse," she said as she fought to keep her whispering voice from rising to a nervous screech. "I thought I told you you could stay only if you stayed in the closet until we were gone."

Jesse shifted uneasily as he stared down at the cake and its scattered crumbs. "It's got to be a hundred and ten degrees in that stuffy little closet," he groused. ''Never mind that. Get back in there," she ordered.

"And it smells," he complained.

"I don't care," she told him. She got down on her knees in front of him to gather up the fragments of fallen cake. He too bent down to help. "I told you you could stay if you kept out of sight. Now get back in there."

She got up and held the closet door open for him. He opened his mouth to protest. "No 'buts', Jesse. I do not want to hear any 'buts'. What I want to hear is the sound of your footsteps as you get back in here." She pointed to the small dark hole she had stuffed him into earlier. ''Now get!"

"Andrea-" he began.

"Jesse! Closet! In! In now!" Her hand fell limp at her side . She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to calm herself. "For heaven's sake, be reasonable," she went on. "Everyone has been here for half an hour."

Jesse shrugged. "If you went in there now you'd be late and you know how this family feels about punctuality."

Jesse's face brightened. "Never mind," he told her as he carefully emptied a handful of crumbs into her open palm . "If you count the time I spent in the broom closet, I have been here for a half hour- longer."

"Lower your voice," she hissed. ''Your mother is right out there in the living room ." He shrugged again. "She might hear you ."

Since it was obvious that Jesse was not going to cooperate, Andrea gave up and went back to putting cake on saucers. As she did this she studied her cousin. She could not help thinking that Uncle Horace and Aunt Nora had probably expected a totally different man from the one who stood with her now. To have given him such a tender, even feminine name as "Jesse" they had to have been expecting a sensitive, gentle featured son, a brooding young noble plucked from a Titian painting.

Jesse was a completely filled balloon with sallow, puffy cheeks and Coke-bottle glasses. Unlike the fiery red hair of his youth, the same hair

75

of the majority of his clan, Uncle Horace's only child had limp, black hair which he burdened even further with pomade and kept swept off to one side aIa Adolph Hitler. The only thing he had inherited from either of his parents was his hands. They were Nora's. And he had developed a habit of making them flutter before his face like a pair of badly distracted white doves when he spoke.

Andrea finished cutting up half the cake and putting it on saucers, then turned again to watch her cousin. He seemed to be deep in thought as he gazed through a sliver of space he had made by pulling the door just slightly ajar. Nora was still sitting alone in the comer of the living room.

The large black wings of the chair appeared to embrace and frame her pale, narrow face and body. At last, Jesse was ready to speak. The hands came up and he delicately touched the fingertips of one of them to his lips.

"I guess you didn't think I would come to Dad's funeral," he said.

"No," she quietly admitted.

"Why7" he asked turning the dense round plates of his glasses on her.

Andrea felt the blood rise and warm her cheeks. She had not meant to reproach him but there was something she thought she should mention.

"He was sick for several weeks, Jesse. You never came to see him then. I just didn't think . . .."

"I never thought he'd die." The hands fluttered, a portrait of surprise and wonder.

"Everybody dies."

"Do they7" he mused. 'Til bet it was a surprise to Dad. He was beginning to think that the MacCulloughs were exempt. He was beginning to convince me too . Remember about five years ago7 Brother! The funerals we went to then . Remember? My God! " "The in-laws," Andrea said with a thoughtful nod.

"Yes," he said. The hands came up to ruffle the thick black hair only to smooth it down again. "The in-laws," he repeated. 'They started dropping like flies. Four funerals in one winter." The hands folded themselves over his heart. "Do you remember the MacCulloughs at this sorry time7'' Andrea sadly smiled and nodded. "I remember," she said. She cleared her throat and stood a little straighter. 'The MacCulloughs would greet each death with intestinal fortitude . It was their great pride. They'd mourn with just as much emotion as they thought appropriate-not one jot more th!fu that, you understand-and then, as if dying were some kind of lapse in moral fortitude, they'd whisper 'Amen,' straighten their backs, and remain adamantly alive." She sighed. "Until today."

"Until today,'' he agreed. He picked up the tray of cake and started into the living room. "Well come on, let's finish feeding the rabble so we can get on with the funeral."

"Hey, wait a minute,'' Andrea protested as she followed him. "There isn't enough there for the rest of them."

76

"It'll be enough," he told her over his shoulder. ''They'll be too busy gawking at me to think of anything else."

From the first shout of "Jesse," as the assembled family registered surprise, to the last cake crumbs and cigarette ashes hastily brushed from their clothing to the carpet as they went out to their cars about half an hour later, to go down to the funeral parlor, the clan did little more than buzz about Jesse's return. To his face they were filled with polite smiles of welcome and gentle words of condolence. Behind their hands they whispered and scolded about his long absence from the family. circle. And they wondered at Andrea for letting him through the door. Andrea wondered about that herself.

As she sat in the back seat of Aunt Nora's little compact sedan wedged between Jesse and the door, she wondered how, after producing generations of fair, ruddy MacCulloughs, nature could be so random as to spew forth this chubby, swarthy cousin. And herself.

For six years after Jesse had been born the family had teased Nora and Horace with remarks such as, "Must have been the milkman (wink, wink)," or "You sure they gave you the right baby at the hospital"?

And then Andrea had been born, and she had the same thick, dark hair, and the family shook their heads and said, "My God, another Jesse." But she had fooled them, at least for a while, by showing definite signs of having the family nose, the family forehead, and the slender body frame and dour countenance which also belonged to the family.

Their concern abated. At least she was not going to be the little butterball that Jesse was. They did not know that this was because Andrea's mother had given her only half-portions at every meal since infancy to keep her slender and that the serious expression was due to unsatisfied hunger.

Soon, even the deviant swarthiness began to grow less important as the other physical features grew more prominent. But even though her mother kept a careful watch over her meals, Andrea began to grow plump. Then one day when she was fourteen her mother found four boxes of Cracker Jacks stuffed into a pair of cowgirl boots and colored jelly beans scattered among the Junior Miss bras in her underwear drawer. She had even hollowed out a super-deluxe illustrated edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and crammed it with strips of beef jerky and a plastic tube of cheese spread. Andrea was embarrassed, and then she was unhappier than before because her mother not only made her throw out the entire cache, she started her on a strict diet that included an hour of exercise every morning.

The car came to a stop. Andrea quickly got out and followed the crowd up the steps of one of the three chapels belonging to the funeral grounds. The Baptist Chapel was a quaint little structure with hard wood

77

pews and high, arched windows filled with mosaics of colored glass.

Andrea sat down in the very last row. Jesse was unable to detach himself from his mother and her sisters-in-law and was made to sit up front with them. From where she sat she could see the backs of the heads of the entire clan; two, now three generations of MacCulloughs and their remaining spouses.

Anyone watching from up front would have been able to pick out the blood members of the MacCulloughs. They were the proud, sedate lot with the pencil thin noses, and the equally skinny lips, fingers, and ankles. This frugality of the flesh extended to their habits in life. They did not over-eat. They did not over-spend. They did not give themselves over to grief in any large measure. True, one of their own had died and this was a great shock to them. But their pride quickly brought their grief into hand and held their necks stiff with attention, their eyes dried of any tears, and their concentration focused on the preacher they had hired to deliver the prayers for the soul of their brother, Horace P. MacCullough.

It was at times like these when the family was all together that Andrea found herself the most confused about the MacCulloughs and their monumental pride. After all, none of them had made a huge mark on American society, none had acquired fame or large fortunes. Perhaps at one time in the distant, misty past they had been a race of pedigreed Irish princes, members of the landed gentry. Andrea did not know. Perhaps the fall had come with one of the famines she had read about in history books as a child. After the capricious weather had choked their potato crops and broken their fortunes, after they had immigrated to this country only to find themselves little more than peasants, perhaps this parched dignity and the proclivity for simply living a long time was all that remained in the rubble of their withered greatness. Perhaps their craniums were too small for their brains; perhaps they were all a bit looney.

Andrea had never managed to figure that out but either explanation seemed possible.

The preacher droned on. Andrea watched as Jesse's head began to tilt slowly back then suddenly snap forward. It happened several times. He was nodding off. It happened twice more before Aunt Alita dug her bony elbqw into his soft, cushy side. Jesse jumped a little in his seat then broke into a monstrous fit of coughing. The preacher leaned forward in his pulpit and scowled at Jesse. At last, Jesse got up. Still coughing and with his hand clampecJ路over his mouth, he made his way out of the chapel.

Andrea smiled. She had not seen him do his coughing act since they were kids. Back then, he would be sent out into the vestibule where he would take off his shoes and slide across the polished hardwood floors in his socks until the service was over. She wondered what he was doing now. Suddenly, she felt someone lightly pinch the back of her leg. She turned around in her seat to find Jesse crouched down behind the pew.

He motioned for her to be quiet and to come away from the service with

78

him. Andrea took a look around to see if anyone was watching, then she gathered up her purse and gloves and went out.

Jesse was sitting on the steps outside. She sat down beside him.

Together they listened to the voices of their family inside as they rose up to sing, "Rock of Ages." Andrea was glad to be out with Jesse. He was like a familiar, an attendant spirit, for her. Still, she did not feel that she would have been unhappy to have been inside among the assembled MacCulloughs blending her voice with theirs for the pleasure of Uncle Horace's eternal soul. He was family. 路 Jesse stood up. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

"What? Go where?" she asked. "Aren't you going to stay and watch them put him in the ground?"

Jesse shook his head. The hands came up, palms facing the chapel door as if to prevent someone from coming forward. "Let the dead bury the dead," he told her, then he turned and started off the grounds. He moved so quickly that Andrea had to run to catch up with him. She looped her arm through his and they marched across the lawns, through the gates, and back out to the sidewalk.

Jesse insisted on stopping at the first restaurant they came to and all through the huge meal he ordered he sipped from a flat bottle which he drew from his hip pocket. When the check came he found he had only thirty-six cents. Andrea, as she pretty much suspected from the beginning that she would have to, paid the bill.

Back outside, evening was beginning to darken the streets and this made Jesse sad. "Poor Daddy," he said with a frown. "Poor old man."

Andrea was still a little put out about the restaurant bill. "Isn't it a little late for that?" she asked him. There was a slight edge of irritation in her voice; the meal had left her feeling stuffed and drained, all at the same time. She took a breath of the cooling air and went on. "You could have come home earlier. You could have come home two weeks ago . You could have made amends. You could have said good-bye."

"Maybe," he admitted. "I don't know. I didn't want to disturb him. I thought he would prefer to have his real family around."

He plopped himself dejectedly down on a bus stop bench and took a long pull at the flat bottle. A passing car stopped, backed up until it was even with the bench, and stopped again. The driver flashed a badge.

"Hey you," he said as he leaned over the passenger seat and out the window. "You can't drink right out on the street like that. Put it away.

Get yourself home or into a bar, but you can't do that on the city streets."

Andrea snatched the bottle away from Jesse, pulled him to his feet, and jammed it into his back pocket. "It's all right officer," she said. "We were just about to leave." She pointed down the street to an approaching bus. "See? There's our bus. We'll be going now officer. Thank you!

Good-bye now."

The bus stopped a few feet behind the policeman's car. Andrea guided 79

Jesse toward the open door. He stumbled and half collapsed on the stairway. She dug her shoulder into his rump and heaved him up into the front of the bus, then she dropped a few coins into the fare box, and settled the two of them into a seat.

Jesse sat passively beside his cousin letting great wet tears dribble down his cheeks, under his chin, and down his neck . Every once in a while he would whimper softly and then emit a loud snorting sound as he sniffed back the mucus that was beginning to run from his nose. Andrea alternately glanced out the window to make sure that the policeman was not following them in his car, and tried to hush Jesse.

Jesse's extra-wide bottom all but squeezed Andrea off the seat, but by kneading and elbowing him up against the window she was able to find a small amount of space, if not comfort, for herself. As the bus bumped along the rapidly darkening road Andrea found herself being lulled into a sense of calm she had not felt for all of the days since Horace's death. She slid her arm around Jesse's shoulders and let her head fall confidingly against him. Jesse drifted off to sleep beside her. His breathing was slow, deep, labored. It was as if each breath he took had to fight its way to freedom. After a few moments, Andrea began to be aware of a gurgling sound in his throat. She turned her face toward his to find that his eyelids were twitching as the eyeballs beneath rolled back and forth beneath them. He was dreaming. The stink of the whiskey he had been sipping blew out stale and sour from his slightly parted lips. Andrea turned from him and began to edge her way off the seat to the empty one behind but before she could move too far he grabbed her arm in his sleep. A smaD whimper escaped him as if imploring her not to leave him.

Andrea sat back down beside him feeling trapped. His arm was still oa her arm. She glanced down at it and was reminded of Aunt Nora's and the serene expression on her face . And suddenly it occurred Andrea that with all of the events of the past week-the funeral ""路"n"'.... ments, the family gathering, the death itself- she had not given thought to Nora and her grief. It occurred to Andrea, too, that there been very little grief in Nora's expression.

Andrea felt a well of emotion for Nora open up deep within her as a thought grew in her mind. She knew. She understood. Much as had loved and respected him as her husband, Horace's death had been release. It was hope. The MacCullough chain had succumbed, it been broken f~r good with the passing of her husband. Without the strength of th~ unbending family pride, which for Jesse and Nora centralized in Horace, Jesse was free. He need not live in failing hope anyone else's aspirations. Andrea sighed and said a silent prayer. hoped it would be that easy.

Jesse awoke with a jolt that nearly pushed Andrea off into the She screwed up her face into a threat and directed it at him. He gave

80

an apologetic look consisting of the slackening of his jaws, and a wrinkling of his forehead . But this was lost on Andrea who saw only his redrimmed eyes and his snot-smeared upper lip . She could not bear to look at him so she concentrated on the view out the window across the aisle.

As her attention was drawn away from him, Jesse took the opportunity to try to sneak the flask from his pocket. His twisting contortions to retrieve the bottle forced Andrea to concern herself with him again.

When she looked, Jesse was raising the bottle to his lips. Ther_e was about a quarter bottle of the amber fluid left, which Jesse drained off in four quick gulps before Andrea could grab it away from him. The last of the whiskey seemed to act as a booster shot to the alcohol already in his blood. He was immediately bleary-eyed and his movements became ponderous, exaggerated, and morosely slow. He reached for the empty bottle Andrea had taken from him but she managed to fend him off with one arm. The liquor and his frustrated struggle with her greatly saddened him. He began to cry softly, drunkenly, to himself.

The bus driver had been watching them in his rear-view mirror since they got on. "Is he okay7" he asked.

"Yes. Yes, thank you," Andrea told him. "He's fine." Jesse snorted a sob. "A death in the family. We're just coming back from the funeral.

He's a little unhappy, that's all."

At the sound of the words "death" and "family," Jesse began to cry in ~~~.-...,._ His large, full belly began to shake, his hands fluttered up to his and his shoulders twitched. His whimpers turned into loud gulping and he paid no attention to Andrea who hissed into his ear that he creating a scene.

'That's it," said the bus driver. "Either shut him up or take it off my "And he pulled over to the side of the road.

Again Andrea managed to propel Jesse through the bus door and out to the sidewalk. He sank down on the curb and continued to cry while looked around to see where they were.

'Where are we, Andy7" asked Jesse in a small voice . He had not called "Andy" since they were children. The memory made her feel a bit kindly toward him.

"We're at the shopping center," she told him.

The tears stopped and his face brightened. "We are7" He looked spotted the doors to the main entrance, and struggled to his feet.

Sum'm I gotta get." He started a tipsy trot down the sidewalk.

1essel" uGotta go to the bathroom," he shouted over his shoulder and he into a run. "Want to get sum'm to drink."

1essel" Andrea screamed after him. "Hey, wait a minute. Jesse, it's they're closed. Jesse!" She dashed off after him but in his eagerto get to wherever he was going he managed to scramble down the

81

sidewalk, through the doors, and up a motionless escalator far ahead of his cousin. By the time Andrea got to the top, Jesse was nowhere in sight.

She wandered through the silent promenade of darkened shops softly calling Jesse's name and trying not to stare back at the wide-eyed mannequins in the windows. She finally found him sitting on the edge of a water fountain someone had forgotten to turn off. The wind swept through the sprays of water arching behind him, sending light showers against his back and head. He gave himself a little shake and looked up at Andrea who now stood beside him.

"There's nobody here, Andy," he told her sadly.

"I tried to tell you that." She sat down beside him. "What's wrong with you, Jesse?" The hands fluttered a picture of dismay. Going to the funeral was your own choice," she reminded him. "And if you didn't want to be there at home with your family, where did you want to be7" "Home? Family?" he said. The hands rolled themselves into fists.

"What are those?"

Andrea shifted her weight from one buttock to the other and thought about it for a moment. "They're our family, our past. They're our cause, and we are their effect."

"No," said Jesse in a firm, suddenly sober voice. "Our past? The past is 'a bucket of ashes.' No. Not for me. Not them." He turned and slapped at the water to punctuate his point.

"Stop that," Andrea snapped. "You're getting me wet." She brushed beads of water from the sleeve of her dress. "Cause and effect, ]esse, cause and effect. Maggie, Charlie, Nora, Horace, and all of the rest of them. The MacCulloughs. They're our family. We belong to them."

"Well, I don't," Jesse said with resolution. "And neither do you."

Andrea took her wallet out of her purse. "Look at that, Jesse," she demanded as she pointed to her credit cards and driver's license. "What does that say right there? It says Andrea E. Peterson. Every last one of them, every piece of identification I have on me, it all says Andrea E. Peterson. The initial 'E' stands for Erin, and I live at 222 Jasper Place with my mother Kelley Kathleen MacCullough-Peterson who is the fourth daughter and seventh child of Charlie and Maggie MacCullough. You are ]esse Burton MacCullough the son of Horace Patrick MacCullough who is the eldest son and second child of Maggie and Charlie . They are our family. They are where we come from."

"I don't ~w them," Jesse said sorrowfully. He took Andrea's wallet to study it closer.

"That doesn't change anything," she said curtly. "You seem to think that if you could just get to some other place everything would be aD right. If you could just convince yourself that you have no past, then the future is going to be sweet and rosy, the air will be cleaner, the whole damned world a little less dirty. Listen to me, Jesse, there is no such

82

place. There never is. All anyone gets is the here and now, and all of the moments which have come before it to make it that way."

She stopped, a little out of breath. It was as if saying the words out loud had made them truer than she ever thought possible. She again became aware of the girdle squeezing her around the middle like a sausage in a casing. A lump of cold, hard bitterness formed in her throat and she began to cry.

"Andy," said Jesse as a new thought occurred to him. He put his arm around her and held the wallet out in front of her. "Who would you be without all of these cards that tell you who you are?"

"What?" she said through her tears. "Make sense, Jesse."

"If somebody took these from you, who would you be? Where would your family be? Where, how would you live? If I threw this into the fountain-" "Jesse," Andrea cried and grabbed at her wallet. "Give that back!"

Jesse held the wallet as far away from her as he could from his sitting position on the edge of the fountain. Andrea leaned far out over the water still snatching at the wallet. "Give it back, Jesse. Give it back to me this minute." Andrea shoved herself hard against her cousin sending them both tumbling into the water.

Jesse was the first to set himself upright. He sat there in the water with his hands resting on his stomach, his legs spread out in front of him gently bobbing in the water. Directly beneath him was an underwater lamp which cast fuzzy beams of light up the length of his face. Andrea was on all fours feeling the bottom of the fountain for her lost credit cards and I.D.s, and swearing at the water, and feeling chilly breezes which buffetted her soaked clothing, and Jesse's. Jesse took her by both arms.

'Who are you now, Andy?" he asked her.

"Let go of me, you moron," she hissed at him.

"Andy, let's be family. You and I, let's be each other's family," he implored.

'What are you talking about?" she screamed. She pulled herself from his grip and fell back in to the water. Jesse shifted his weight from one side to the other. There was something under him. He pulled Andrea's wallet from beneath him rump. Andrea emitted a cry of joy and lunged at him.

"Give that to mel" she screeched as she splashed toward him.

Jesse reached the side of the fountain ahead of her but Andrea caught foot as he stood up on the side. Weaving back and forth, off-balance, swung his arms out from his sides like a tightrope walker.

"Let go," he shouted. He shook her off and she fell back into the water but he dropped her wallet. Andrea scrambled over and scooped it Jesse still had his arms out to steady himself, and as he stood there above her looking like a pudgy flamingo , she saw him close his

83

eyes and with a bliss-filled grin he let himself fall forward into the water again.

Just then, they heard the sound of running footsteps. 'Who's there?" called a voice from the darkness. With their walkie-talkies and nightsticks drawn, two guards approached the fountain . "Hey, what the hell are you two doing in there?" they demanded. Andrea stood up clinging to her wallet. She pointed a finger at Jesse.

"He tried to drown me," she stammered. "He lured me up here and he tried to drown me."

Jesse sat up in the water, his hair matted across his forehead and his glasses hanging from one ear. He reached toward his cousin. "Andy," he said sadly. "Andy."

The two security guards looked at them . "You two know each other?" one asked.

"No," Andrea said quickly, firmly. "He lured me up here. He tried to drown me. He tried to kill me."

"Andy, oh Andy."

"I don't know him!"

The guards pulled Jesse from the fountain. He began to struggle. They hit him alongside the head with their clubs. Andrea's head jerked to one side as if she too had felt the blow.

"You'll have to come with us, Miss," one of the guards told her as they continued to hold on to the now limp Jesse. "There'll be some questions and forms."

Andrea backed up still clinging to her wallet. She shook her head. '1 can't," she said. "I've got to get home to my family. I've got to get home."

Still dragging Jesse, the guards advanced toward her. "''ve got to go home," she whispered. She splashed her way out of the fountain and ran to the escalator. As she got to the bottom she could hear Jesse's voice as it echoed up and down the rows of empty shops. She clamped her hands over her ears and ran into the darkness toward home.

84

Gregg Shapiro

Patand]oe Pat, the landlord, takes stairs two at a time. He is at the door faster than sound. I move too slowly, let my eyes follow, then lose him. I am afraid to blink. He measures walls with his fingers, then sniffs them.

The previous tenant left a couple pairs of shoes behind. Pat crawls to them like a snake with legs, flicks the blue pumps with his thin tongue.

He stands, humps the wall. Left-handed Joe is in the kitchen. Fat little paws cupped, brimming with steaming, hot coffee. He doesn't budge, doesn't want to spill a drop. Pat fills his mouth with sugar, sucks Joe's right thumb, swallows the brew in one gulp.

Joe thinks the circus is in town, kicks Pat in the seat of his baggy, plaid trousers. Pat holds Joe's head under water in the bathtub. I discover moldy pizza in the oven. Joe isn't hungry, but Pat hasn't had breakfast yet. I dangle the keys in front of my eyes, drop kick them into my back pocket. I must practice stillness, find a better hiding place.

85

Fowl Play Chicken crosses his eyes, his heart, crosses the street . He looks both ways without turning his head, does his best bird walk. Peddles sweet vanilla meat to the butchers, bakers, candle-stick suckers. Takes his feathers home to the rooster. Plucks himself until he bleeds. Out on the street again, in traffic, scratching, flapping flightless wings. Chicken would lay an egg if he only had the chance to crow.

Miss You Blue These thousand miles. I talk to you on the phone. Sounds like you're in the next room. I open the door and check . The radio only plays songs about us.

I always see couples and sad movies. The calendar is my archenemy, time, its accomplice.

If Jiminy CriEket showed me the star, I'd ~sh for you.

86

From the Air From the air, I'm just a speck. In a car I'm a dot. One in a million.

Up close, there are tears snaking, dropping, dangling under the frames of my sunglasses.

Time stood still for a few hours this morning, as I tried to remember how to breathe, walk upright, climb stairs. His hair, his eyes, his arms, couch, bed, car; they were temporarily mine.

I tried to swallow his mouth, his voice, so I could hear it echo in my stomach like hunger.

Instead it rings in my ears.

From the air, I'm almost invisible. Up close, I'm a shadow collecting dust.

87

One of the Boys For Linda

A photograph surfaced after you were gone Black and white, early sixties We stood: you and me and Terry and Papa in the mammoth backyard of your parents' co-op Must've been summer Lilacs weren't on the bushes though the leaves were My chest was bare, ribs prominent through the skin Terry's chest was bare, so was Papa's You were a girl Terry was my brother, Papa was my grandfather You weren't my sister You lived upstairs, you were their daughter and they beat you always We played together House, school, jump rope, baseball, tag You always chased and caught me I was weak, you were one of the boys I used to run inside the house when your father came home from work, afraid of his booming voice In the house, I would sit by a vent, listening, laughing when your mother sang her pretend operas We moved away We moved bcick, on the next block You had already moved away, then you died They say you fell or jumped from the hospital window Your parents weren't there, but I think they pushed you

88

Patrick B. Mikulec

Ice Lake The trail is not difficultbut far. Miles of granite switchbacks and stunted pine.

Wild gorges that take control of sound where the Wallowa splits and walks back upon itself to glaciers.

Early June and the trail disappears under snow. No tracks, no trail, just the eye-corner vision of ancient hikers leading me on.

Here where no one has left a track

Finally, the lake is high enough to find me. A rim of white peaks.

Water frozen except for a dozen feet where the lake spills into a canyon and tunnels under snow. A fly this piece of lake from being sky until a trout takes it. what is there to do but sit rest? My head tilts to the sound wind and I remember how a deaf girl to tilt her head as if listening something to happen. lake is a long way from roads.

89

Kenneth Frost

Did you ever drift like smoke from the will's cremation in a cigarette?

If I were anywhere to be found I would think something through the universe grinning like skidmarks from a tire.

Somewhere beyond my centipede of echoes someone insists, "Climb higher, take a circus dive into a cell like a bathtub to soak cold feet."

I am a saint.

Every cell holding my pain is someone else.

90

Something is stolen or disappears from this room every day, at least one thing-

..

a side table, a paper, a glass have no way out but the one window.

I watch a table or a glass of water stand on the wall, nothing falls, nothing gets there by itself or someone else.

The room rounds its comers.

I am inside a globe for days and then four walls again.

Outer space in a brick canyon?

It is the daily loss that shakes things up .

91

A dog digs like a madman in the carpet of my brain as a cop saunters past me down the street.

His .38 bulges someone's broken hip on mine.

A walkie-talkie is hoarse with tragedies on a wavelength of sighs.

Questions.

They return late at night to live in a phone booth ringing to itself.

Voices. Why should I ask the wrinkled forehead of my palms what are all these voices?

My eyes lift up their struck dumbbells, two worlds, an iron passage in between.

92

A. M. Friedson

Holy Orders Your house is a zoo Joan knew what Janet meant Last week her friend, Jack caged in the spare room gaily threatening alcoholic suicide his buddy Bob brought over a minitribe of Navaho dancers (boomba Boomba BOOMBA: 2 A.M.) Ed's jeans and stuff still littered her private enclosure (he'd moved back in with his mother when the war dances began and the neighbors' ringing set the Indians' Chinese teepeemother whirling her sufidances).

Ed was getting difficult anyway-a trivial scene, e.g. , when her puppy crapped on his prostration board.

Janet had dropped over a week before, plomp into the big party just as the Fujimotos next door called the cops because they smelled the Mauiwowee and someone had littered their lawn with a few chipped cups and all that stuff It was a bit untidy.

Janet was tom; Her premises were Fujimoto clean and spare.

Since Darrel left five years ago, nothing had raped her quarters.

93

Once a month she "threw" a discreetparty selected friends for a Kyotodinner at 6- at 6.05, Janet neatly executed late entrants with father's kendosword which hangs three feet above the custom Koa dresser, two feet three left of the Shakahara print .

Or thereabouts.

"Somewhere between the chaotic and the barren there is intelligent order." God has spoken!

But God, they both knew, is a dull Aristotelian in a golf cap who arranges tablets scrolls stars according to a relentless list of ultimate abstractions.

94

Edith Goldenhar

Comedy with Gulkis: A Craft Interview "To stand in front of strangers and make them laugh1 It's like you're in the mines. You mine the culture for laughs-that's my favorite kind, my 'A' material. Others do what I would call the extremes.

Fantasy. You stick an arrow in your head, what's that? a realist thinks, a realist talks about his mother: greatest joy, to get things on sale. As a kid all my clothes were irregulars. I once had a shirt a crotch, incredibly irregular. And poultry. bought chickens afflicted by chromosomal damage, with tusks. You never know what's funny. think you know and you can know what you think know, but you can never be sure. You better a trade. I trained in engineering, my name means tool. got a job, another. Three years, jobs later, I'm fired . The girl who gives out checks to me, 'You're funny around the coffeepot. the engineers say you louse up their designs . . Good luck.' So I am familiar with real life concerns. first time up, my father's union hall, sixteen hundred people.

Not one laugh . None. Zip! Number Two time out, ditto Number Three. Which brings me the Chansonette, warming up for Rita Dimitri. a laugh. Then another, adding them on, at a time. Now I get them. Once I got Carson, Griffin, Douglas, I got Dinah Shore. it's good to be back in New York: Jewish humor. just been down in the Carolinas, Myrtle Beach.

Jews down in Myrtle Beach. I asked audience, 'Where do all the Jews hang out?' the trees,' someone yelled. I'm not ~oJo,gic:al Jew, but I love Jewish humor. But not going to do it in Indiana. I don't want controversial. Lenny Bruce is not my mentor. "'"""'

0

' . .'

95

Who wants to be dead of heroin at forty-five?

Whatever my political feelings are, I want them to be private. I want to be tasteful, to be clean, classy. I want to be neutral, and I never like to get more than one level away from reality.

Do you agree, everybody would like attention?

Everyone would like to perform, be a successful person7 But not everyone has it severe, bad enough to risk what they can lose. Eating is natural.

Comedy is not. Most people are eliminated."

96

Hearing a Poem the First Time Let's say you've hailed a cab .

Ten seconds in, you get lucky.

You hardly know what's gone on, except a phrase syncopated your breath, stopped traffic. You've got a life on your hands.

Time jumps the street, grows firm between you.

The driver turns his life over like it's a piece of cake, serving it up, his dream.

You could be sad, knowing how people have to tell their stories.

Sometimes the driver's a woman. Then she's always worn, beautiful, wears a Chinese blouse, married to a German, drunk at home. let's say it's a man tonight, meter on, clicking.

He lets it slip he the Eastern bloc in a car, dangerous ride, now lives well in Astoria, never sees guy or woman he ran with. may be in Sweden. been watching him in the mirrorhair, high shoulders, an earring, pretty face, even bland. plays drums, a man w ithout ~Y"'-â&#x20AC;˘auâ&#x20AC;˘lJu. The streets

97

are wet, the sky is black, you pass the museum and this time you look at it.

You didn't plan to listen, but before you know it, you might start talking, tell stories, find yourself speaking French.

In the other cab, your Chinese woman flips her licence over.

Her husband's drunk, but famous and doesn't know she drives.

He might have friends on the avenue, and your Roumanian asks youcould you help him make a movie7 Once you had a man who worked the door to the Copa, twenty-five years, photo album balanced on the dash.

Dropped his tux in the ashcan one day to become a hack like the guy next door, a guy with a smile, he says, "big as a banana."

You know this taxi is just an automobile, that nobody bakes cake with words. Still, you've tasted some stories and hope he goes the long way. You settle in the back seat, feel your neck on the leather. It's not leather, but your neck sticks, and you listen.

98

Michael Barrett

Yellowstone

I

wanted a thunderstorm, but the radio said it was going to stay the same all weekend, ninety-three degrees. I poured a glass of water and drank it over the sink, curved air shimmering outside the window.

Down in the basement I sat in the cool dampness for a moment, tried the TV-Edge of Night and a Brady Bunch rerun-then picked up the phone and called Angle Steel, the siding factory where Wilmers worked.

I pretended to be his neighbor, like he told me.

"Is there a Bill Wilmers down there?"

"Yeah ..."

"Well, this is his neighbor," I said, "Mr. Spink. You tell him his dog's all tangled up out on his front lawn over here, out in the sun. He's got maybe two feet of rope. You tell him to get over here and untie it, and tell him next time he leaves him like that I'm calling the Humane Society." I hung up. Wilmers raised a mallard in his apartment one winter, but he didn't have a dog.

I sat out on the patio with the radio in the kitchen blasting.

In about twenty minutes, here comes Wilmers, walking up the driveway in the sun.

"Well, Scotty-boy," he says, standing there in his cowboy boots, "you got me out of work, what do you want to do?"

I saw myself in his mirrored sunglasses.

Maybe we could go over to Jim LeBlond's and have a war in the basement with fire extinguishers from the highschool? No. Fuck Jim LeBlond.

Well, it was all I could think of.

I had expected he would have something in mind.

"Want to go shooting?" he said finally.

This meant taking shotguns out to the tree farm property and throwing gravel into the pond so that the baby bluegills would come to the surface, fooled that the pebbles were feed. It was fun, blowing fountains and fish into the air, but the last time we'd been out Wilmers shot a goldfinch trying to land on a thistle six feet away, and I have been seeing it turn into spray over and over in my mind for days.

"It's too hot out," I said.

He lit a Marlboro and exhaled dry smoke. "Let's hitch-hike to Chicago," he said. "We can go to the Museum of Science and Industry." He took off his glasses, wincing. " . .. see the coal mine and the submarine."

99

I imagined us hitching. I imagined getting a ride in a semitruck, sitting up in the cab, our hair tossed by the breeze as the highway and landscape rolled by, the driver letting me blast the hom. Then I pictured Lake Michigan, stretched out cool and blue along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

'We can sleep right there on the beach," Wilmers said.

"OK." We rode from Battle Creek to Michigan City, Indiana, in a fully loaded navy blue Lincoln Continental. We shared its air-conditioned, tan leather back seat with a black and white Pug who ran around the whole time or stood on our knees, panting, or ate dog food from a china plate on the floor. The driver called it "Petey" when he let us out.

We sat on our rolled up sleeping bags alongside the entrance ramp to I94. The road was hot. Velvet lines of black rubber smeared into the pavement . Tire treads, thrown from blow-outs, lay twisted like carcasses on the sides of the highway. Our thumbs were out.

"Sleeping People," Wilmers said.

It was another name for an imaginary rock bank he had been coming up with all summer-"You know, like Rolling Stones?" he explained the first time.

I tried to think of one, too.

"That's a good one," I said .

Traffic poured by, it roared by, pushing the heat. A truck driver yelled something at us from the cab.

"Bite me," said Wilmers. He flicked a Marlboro butt into the traffic after the truck. It blew around the highway and disappeared .

We waited twenty minutes, t-shirts clinging to our backs with sweat.

A faded '67 Impala, its hubcaps and trim long since gone, shot past. Then it swerved over, right away. Then it stalled.

"Fuck," we heard the driver say, a kid our age. We got in.

The kid pulled into traffic, but the Impala stayed in second all the way up to sixty and wouldn't shift, even though he accelerated carefully. He had to let off the gas and coast down to about forty-five before the transmission finally dropped into gear, gently, like a sigh .

"Ahh, " the kid said when it shifted. "Cruising speed ." He gave the Impala some gas then. Hot wind whipped around inside, swirling Wilmers' Marlboro ashes up front, out the windows, or into our eyes. I felt excited. We were going somewhere.

The kid had a bag of Switzer's Licorice Bites on the seat next to him with an unopened bag beneath it. He was popping them into his mouth one after the other like a chainsmoker.

"We're going to the Museum of Science and Industry," I said .

"Never heard of it."

"It's in Chicago," Wilmers said from the back .

"Chicago, no problem," said the kid.

100

The Michigan City industrial landscape rolled by outside in brown carbon monoxide.

'We're from Battle Creek," I said.

The kid looked at me and said he was from the Cape. After that, he hunched over the wheel, chewing, and nobody saying anything. We rode along with the traffic on I-94 in the hot sun.

I felt drowsy in the moving car. A silver Ford cruised by, a sleeping woman's head bumping against the sunny window inside as it passed. A metallic green sedan came alongside and held position in the passing lane ahead of us for a while, then sped up, disappearing into the vanishing point. "''m going to Yellowstone to see my girlfriend," the kid said. He looked at me. "You guys help drive, you can ride along."

Wilmers and I had seven dollars between us to get to Chicago.

"Sure," said Wilmers, cowboy boots propped up on the seatback behind me. It was quiet in the car then. We came down a curve, past a barn and outbuildings throwing scattered trapezoids of shadow in the dry grass . Blank, white billboards on the right side of the road made as much sense as the black backs of them on the left, I noticed. A string of green and orange-and-white barrels separated us from the east-bound side of the highway and was gone.

"OK," I said.

The kid turned on the radio . It played static on every station its buttons were programmed to select. He shut it off and turned on the CB. "You goddamned rinky-dink little bastard," one trucker was telling another.

Come evening, somewhere in Iowa, the sky went orange, all dark above with stars in it. Then the darkness sank down and the road emptied until driving through Iowa was like being blind. We stopped on the other side of Des Moines, at a Stuckey's, for dinner. The restaurant was yellow inside. I knew I was a ways from home.

Wilmers and I had hamburgers. The kid had a box of pecan pralines.

While we ate, Wilmers threw a butter patty into the ceiling fan. It stuck to one of the blades and went around and around, then flew into an Elvis picture on the wall.

When we got in the car Wilmers said he had locked all the bathroom stalls and crawled out underneath the doors.

'Why7" said the kid. He told Wilmers to go back in and unlock them.

After we rode for a while the kid stopped at a rest area and lay down in the back seat.

Wilmers drove. Yellowstone was going to be like a foreign country, he . Boy, our friends would be surprised. And they have hot baths . And bears. Wah hoo.

101

He stared ahead as he talked, face pale green in the dashboard lights.

Eventually he quieted down.

I drove.

The night was cold, and the windows were up, except for mine, barely open, whistling. Dividing lines in the patch of headlight in front of me pulsed with the steady, warm sound from the motor.

On the side of the road, a new-car dealership went by, a field of shiny cars lit up in the darkness like jewelry under the bright lights.

Then we were in the dark again, the only car in it. Darkness and quiet.

I was nearly asleep .

"Neon Dream Machine," Wilmers said, lit by the glow of a Marlboro.

When I woke up, we were in Wyoming, driving on dusty roads, through red stone hills, by pitted towers of rock. There were cactuses, and magpies. The heat was up again. It was hotter. It was burning.

"That's a tumbleweed," the kid said, mouth crammed with Licorice Bites.

"Wyoming, Scotty-boy," Wilmers said, having a cigarette.

I watched the side of the road. Scrubby ground rushed next to the car while the hills far away held still. A girl with silver hair in the air drove by in a pink convertible Volkswagen.

Late that morning we stopped for gas at a place where the attendants are real Indians, then spent the rest of the day under the sky, climbing the Wyoming hills to Yellowstone. We stopped twice for pop, drinking the cans straight down in the heat. Wilmers picked scabs at the edge of his fingernails with a penknife for a while in the afternoon, and then, about four o'clock, we arrived.

Check Yellowstone on a map . It could be a state with its own little highway system, complete with exits. The place was bumper to bumper with cars. We rode the jam out, an hour to the main lodge, then to Old Faithful. They sell campsites and rubber tomahawks and groceries.

Wilmers and I bought a campsite over on the other side of the park, a six pack of beer, and a loaf of bread, which left us with eighty-four cents. We went out to the parking lot looking for the kid, but he was gone.

We decided to watch Old Faithful, which was going to go off in twenty minutes.

Wilmers wanted to stuff trash into the hole.

"No," I told him. "We might get kicked out."

"Lightweight," he said .

"No," I said. "It's a stupid idea." ''Lightweight," he said.

I walked to a phone booth and called my dad. I wanted to tell him I was a thousand miles away, but he wasn't home. I went back and waited on a bench for the geyser. Wilmers had a cigarette.

102

Old Faithful did go off, exactly when they had the hands set on a clock in front of it. Even though it's just gray steam, it's exciting, like fireworks. It shoots way up and makes a lot of noise.

Our campsite was in a pine forest, on a huge smooth patch packed with campers, vans, and tents. We sat at our table and ate bread slices and drank the beers, and when the beer was gone we unrolled our sleeping bags on the ground.

Wilmers produced a pistol from his, an air pistol we shot porch lights with when we were kids. I fired lead pellets. You pumped it like a shotgun to fill it with air. If you pumped it enough, it could shoot through a two-by-four.

"I brought this for Chicago," he said. "But we can have some fun with it here, too." He pumped it up and fired it at a beer can. The can jumped off the table. "''m going to shoot a bear if I see one. Want to shoot it?"

"No thanks."

He stuck it in the front of this pants and we walked up a nature trail.

We saw people sitting naked in steaming pools of clear water. We stuck our hands in. The water was hot, hotter than the air outside. We planned to gather firewood on the way back, but there wasn't a stick in sight.

That night a man and a woman in a Winnebago on our left gave us potato salad and carrot sticks. His name was Reuben Atlas and he worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the water department; she worked in a uniform store. We talked the rest of the night with a guy on our right, from New York, who had quit a twelve-year job in .advertising to drive around the country in a van. He showed us inside it. Everything was neat as a pin. It had a spice rack. He kept stressing how much happier he was this way.

The next morning Wilmers asked me what I wanted to do and I said go home, we only have eighty cents, and he said that was OK by him. We walked out of the campground, leaving the bread and beer cans and my shoes. The sole of one of them had started flapping, and I was tying it up with the shoelace, but when the lace broke that morning I just decided to leave them behind.

Sun was already heating the quiet campground. We walked. Out on the main park road we got a ride from an old couple in a motorhome. We sat in the back with the woman while her husband drove, scenery going by out the window like a train. She tried to get us to take Jesus into our hearts right there over the little Formica dinette. She had forms for us to sign, and we were supposed to say a pledge. I said I wasn't sure about it, and Wilmers said she could take her forms and shove them. She closed her bible then, and they dropped us off by the entrance.

They could have taken us farther. They gave us a lot of little pamphlets instead. Wilmers lit them on fire by the side of the road, and we watched them burn, but for a while, I wondered if there was anything in what they said. I wondered, was it a sin to go barefoot?

103

All the rest of that day, it was one short ride after another, rides separated by long waits in the sun, Wilmers smoking and sucking his teeth.

We rode in a station wagon full of college students who were singing songs together. "Puff the Magic Dragon ." "I Wanna Hold Your Hand ."

They let us out and we waited in front of a Pancake House. We got a ride in a Ford full of overweight people eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. They made us sit between them, me up front, Wilmers in back, everybody with their own bucket. "What are you folks up to today?" I finally asked, against the sounds of their smacking. One of them told me, "Eating chicken." They let us out at a gas station, and we waited.

"Obesity," Wilmers said.

We got a ride with a Navajo guy and his wife, in a brand-new, creamy green Electra with white leather seats. They had been drinking. We went weaving down the mountain roads in high style. The man was drunk . He kept slapping his wife's arm, calling her a bitch, and a whore. They owned a carnival, they said, set up in Ozone. They wanted us to go to work for them. There was pot and lots of money in working for the carny, they said. The guy was smashed. They stopped and bought icecold Budweisers and we all drank in the car, riding around the little town of Ozone, Wyoming, with nothing to do . Later, when they let us out, the man gave us ten dollars and a carton of Salems each, even though I didn't smoke.

They dropped us off beneath an overpass bridge and we waited there for four hours in the dry heat, traffic racing by fifteen feet away. Wilmers was out of matches, so he chainsmoked Salems to keep them lit. I helped, holding lit ones when he couldn't take it anymore.

We started feeling stranded. He wanted to climb up the bridge and drop pebbles into traffic . Too dangerous, I said.

Late in the day a girl in a red Barracuda stopped. I got in first , the Wilmers, by the window.

She was a little older. She had some lines in her face . She was wearing shorts and sandals that showed she had beautiful legs.

"Where you boys going?" she asked.

"Battle Creek,'' I told her. "It's in Michigan. They make cereal there.

The Cereal City."

"The Best to You Each Morning," she said.

'That's the place,'' I said.

'Tm going to Rock River,'' she said. 'To a picnic."

The sun was high but the air in the moving car cooled me.

She smelled good.

"Where you boys been 7" "Yellowstone,'' I said.

"Lucky you. I've never been there, and I've lived in Wyoming all my life. What do you think of that?"

104

She smiled. So did I. I wanted to stay with her then . That was what I would do with my life, I decided. Go with this woman, right now, to a picnic in Rock River, Wyoming, get to know this woman, listen to her, stay with her, someday take her to Yellowstone.

"You smell nice," I told her.

"Jesus Christ," Wilmers said. He elbowed me.

'Well you're nice," she said.

I felt good as we rode along, passing places I'd never been before.

"You know," she said, "you Battle Creek guys are cute."

I said, "So are you Rock River girls."

We came to a Tin the road where she was going north, Wilmers and I south. We sat there.

"Take us with you to your picnic," I said, and she said, "You're welcome to come along."

"OK," I said, nodding forward . "Let's go."

"Not me," Wilmers said. He pulled the door handle.

I grabbed his arm. "Come on," I said to him . He shrugged.

On the way, I imagined the picnic. Some doctor or movie producer or drug dealer's place. There would be beautiful women, motorcycles, marijuana, beer kegs. There would be a fancy bar set up under an awning and 1950s cars parked on the lawns, their hoods and trunks replaced with charcoal grills, broiling fat T-bones and lobster. But it was just a promotional event, paper plates and lemonade and big tinfoil tubs of baked beans, com on the cob, and chicken, all at a farm out in the middle of the fields, cars parked every which way, some guy announcing the winners of toasters with a bull hom all the while. They were selling the ranchers Purina cattle feed, paper checkerboard banners stapled everywhere. The Rock River girl helped her boss hand out pamphlets.

When they ran out, she and I sat in a com shed under a slab of shade ate watermelon . Wilmers waited in her car. She told me she was livwith her parents, after a relationship in Cody went bad and she had a ...... v"'"' breakdown, crying every day for a month. Being a secretary what she liked, she said, something just for a while, something to do didn't have her making decisions. We talked until the sun started out on the horizon. Just before we left, I won a toaster. I gave it She drove us to a rest area on a small road. She pulled the car over. We say anything to each other except thanks and you're welcome. I to stay, but could only get out and stand in the gravel by the side the road, and then she was gone.

We waited for another ride. No cars came by for fifteen, twenty minat a time. We sat on a picnic table. Wilmers shot pellets at a sign. us, in the fading light, the deep green rest area posts and tables

lOS

looked slick, covered with carved initials, some in pairs. I kept thinking about the Rock River girl. I wondered whether I would always be lonely, afraid that no matter what, deep down, I would.

I went into the outhouse. It was hot inside, hot as an attic. I thought of her. The smell of her. Her face. My clothes stuck to me in the heat. I began panting. I tried to be quiet.

Outside, Wilmers' shooting stopped. I could see him moving, prowling around, his shadow blocking the light between the boards one by one.

As I climaxed into my grimy hand, he froze.

When I came out he was sitting on the picnic table again.

He didn't say anything then or way into the dark.

Late that night, we got picked up by two guys driving to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, in a red, white, and blue Spirit of America Boss 302 Mustang.

They were going to race it on the streets there . The driver had bought it new, that afternoon. We rode across Nebraska, cramped silently in the back seat, jagged light-lines of west-bound traffic streaking by. At three or four a.m. they dropped us on a hill overlooking a Scottsbluff boulevard, then drove down into the town, where the cars ran up and down the strip, a grid of moving colored lights, all the rest of the night. Some came out as far as where we were, to turn around. Wilmers stayed up and watched. I fell asleep in the ditch.

Next morning I woke to the sound of Wilmers compressing air into his pistol. He struggled with the last strokes. He pulled the bolt back, put a pellet in the firing chamber. He looked at me in the hazy sun. It was hot out. He raised the gun to my face. Gripping the handle, his finger on the trigger, he held it and straightened his bent elbow, pushing the barrel a few inches from my forehead. There next to me, a bee hovered over a blossom of Queen Anne's lace. Wilmers swung the barrel, held the tip on the bee. He fired . It dropped.

He rolled the gun up in his sleeping bag and went into the weeds to pee. I stuck my hand in the rolled-up bag and pulled out the gun. I pumped it up and loaded it. I took the safety off. I gripped it, my finger on the trigger. When he got back he stood over me.

"Time to go now, Scotty-boy," he said. "Chop-chop." He clapped his hands. I stood and raised the gun and held it straight-armed, aimed in his face.

"How do you like it?" I asked .

He looked at the gun, at me. He reached out and grabbed the barrel, pushed the gun down and away. He smiled . I let go.

We got picked up by a guy hauling dirt bikes to Sterling, Illinois, in a van. I lay between the bikes, looking out the back at the parched road and the places we'd been. Wilmers and the guy sat up front, talking and smoking cigarettes.

106

That afternoon the dirt-biker dropped us off. We got a ride into Michigan in the back of a pickup. There was another hitchhiker back there already, a guy about thirty who didn't say anything and then told us just before we got out that he had robbed a liquor store in Arkansas and was on his way to Detroit. The police had caught him in Kentucky, he said, but he ran away with his hands cuffed behind his back.

"Let me run with you guys," he said. "Put me up tonight. Drive me to Detroit tomorrow, I'll give you a hundred bucks."

"No car," I kept telling him .

At Battle Creek the sky turned green, the storm following us down the highway. We watched it snapping lightning, rolling dark over the lanes of traffic, sucking the heat away.

Clumsy rain spattered us as we climbed out at the Battle Creek exit. As the truck pulled away the state police arrived and put us in their car.

They wrote us forty-dollar tickets for hitchhiking.

"I can tell you this," one of them said. "You won't be able to get in our line of work with tickets like these on your record."

"Aw, that's a pity," Wilmers said, gesturing obscenities behind their seatbacks. The lights from oncoming traffic came through the rain on the windshield and threw a pattern on Wilmers' face. If not for the unlit cigarette in his mouth, he would have looked like he was crying.

107

Marjorie Power

Sand Poem A single grain, you lie on your beach.

The ocean crawls in, takes you on its tongue, swallows all night and then slips home.

You dry between a log you recognize and a rock you don't.

Between translucent green shards of glass, and seaweed.

Here comes the old woman who brings her dog. It circles you, sniffs, digs a hole elsewhere.

The woman's heel eclipses all.

Kids come.

Castles rise.

The sun takes charge of the hour as though light were the last word.

Now a fragment of turret, you have real vistas: horizon, fog, fog rolling in, a couple finding the tide.

The dark opens its library doors.

Between rock and log the wino curls, dreams parapet, seaweed, no one, pearl.

108

Season Tickets Blouse repeats blouse, and boots, boots. Ten smiling singers shout.

Each sex lines up to face the other.

Men circle women. Women clap. The whole stage stamps, the audience applauds; everything gets louder. My husband tells me, it's like a bad dream, but this doesn't mean we leave.

He walks out of nothing until the house lights go on.

In such darkness I sit quietly, on the lookout for lost things: white aprons embroidered with roses and pieces of straw from cold barns and kettles hurled from their fires toward the end of time. These I gather for the old old woman who restores each to its rightful use. In such darkness as my husband abides, she works.

109

Nightmare: Afterwards Mouth dry as thunder.

Force open your eyes.

Up. You must get up, get water.

Cool of the floor under bare feet.

Snap a light on.

Find paper and pen.

Hear the dream scuttle away, clicking its system of locks? Be quick.

As parts of other dreams this one's run through you before; whole, it throbs like the floor of a gym as though death were a basketball game.

Write, don't listen for help.

Look for nothing to redeem and the dream will forget you.

110

The Rose Garden Remember the rose garden no one ever promised us7 Someone called to say it needs tending, to ask for a look at my hands.

He told me its paths go unwalked, and asked to see my feet. Its only gate has a troublesome lock; he'd heard I was clever with keys.

Remember the rose garden no one ever promised us7 I'd almost forgotten, pruning fruit trees and setting mole traps and picking up trash flung from cars, trucks .

My thoughts had left roses for lupines, wild sweet peas, joyous survivors of traffic.

Remember the rose garden no one ever promised us7 A stranger called to say maybe, and if. Would I be open? Would I be free?

He has a few others to contact, of course. He's just now begun his search, which, naturally, will require some timeas much as the roses request.

111

David Starkey

Joseph of Nazareth It's heresy I know, to curse Him, even in my qualified way, but I am a cantankerous man.

To be cuckolded is the worst pain of marriage-and by such a onel To whom does a husband appeal for judgment? The honor, I was told, should stanch my wounded pride, but no man likes the rake who steals his bridealthough he may bow down his head when prudence warrants. Come, tell me, was I unworthy of a girl scarcely fourteen, with no dowry and a scolding mother to boot? Well?

I, who trace my line back to David, Jacob, Isaac, Noah, to Himself? Why me? I was honest, upright and true-the Book says so .

What did I do? No father, proud as he may be of his son, would care to hear that son declare such wild allegiance to another man.

We lived enshrouded by a mist.

The girl grew older, vainer, but so lovely in her love for him.

I miss her cheeks, her sunburnt arms.

She left, of course; we were strangers.

The boy was always a mystery: headstrong but blessed, he never knew the disgrace of coerced compromise. Autumn eves like this one, I miss him, too.

Myself, head of a broken home, I wait, amid these buzzing flies, to die. The wind scrapes clean the sky.

The dim stars change from night to night.

Trembling, I pray there was a plan .

112

The Career of Mungo Park

At twenty-two, I left my father's farm, My twelve brothers and sisters, and shook hands With Sir James, who "hoped that I would brook no harm In Africa." I hoped not, too, but sands Covered my path, mosquitoes swarmed my eyes, And sheets of rain wrapped me in high fever.

In sham "palaces" of mud and straw, my prized Tobacco was pinched. "Bow, filthy disbeliever," King after unwashed king enjoined. I smiled.

They'd killed Houghton before me-I'd no wish To follow. Kow-towing all the way, I reached The Niger. I could go no further. Wild With sickness, living on roots and boiled fish, I turned back for Britain's dull but sheltered beach.

II

In ten years' time, my fame declined. An illPaid doctor in Scotland, father to four, Husband to a shrew, I snatched the chance to steal Away, liking the hiss and spit of Moors Better than her harangues. Impressed sailors And convicts kept me company. All died But three, and they became jaundiced, frailer Than the shoddiest native urn. Weak but clear-eyed, I pushed them on to Jenne, to Timbuktu, Vowing that we would find the Niger's mouth .

One night, came ghostly the hyena's howl.

The next day showered arrows on our canoe.

I leapt-into the river flowing south To the sea I'd gain in some form, fair or foul.

113

Donnell Hunter

Raven Considers Great Books Better Genesis than Poe. Better tote bread to a starving prophet in his stinking cave than perch in the midst of Academe surrounded by books with a one-word theme for the sake of rhyme. Do you see why I never went back to the ark?

Nine months in the hold of a swaying ship, anything solid looks good: mountain tops, crags (the only things visible) and after that I called them home.

114

Thomas F. Lannin, Jr.

placent Fervor: The Confused Role of Critical Theorist in America the deluge upon the marketplace of fresh critical texts seeking to the authority of earlier critical texts, it is no wonder that many IIIUCators today grimace whenever they hear the name of a new theoretiwork rolling off the press into bookstore shelves. The booming litertheory industry, a genre unto itself, is forcing thousands of scholars teachers to speculate about its impact on the future implementation pedagogical ethics and values. Close scrutiny of the Literary Theory of Tokyo's Maruzen London's Dillon's, Berkeley's Cody's, or any of major American university bookstores will indicate that too paper is being devoted to modem criticism, and college undergradshould not be amazed to learn that "metacriticism" is creeping into professors' lectures on Milton, Blake, Browning, and Plath.

American critics such as Rene Wellek, E. D . Hirsch, Jr., Robert Sandra M . Gilbert, Susan D. Gubar, J. Hillis Miller, Edward W. and Wayne C. Booth have devoted (and are devoting) much effort exploring how and why we codify a literary tradition, given the presof so many emerging areas of criticism subsumed under the heading Literary Theory. In his most recent full-length publication, The ComWe Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Booth argues that a defined system has, does, and should exist if readers are to avoid total confuin determining the richness of the world's literary tradition. The We Keep resumes an earlier argument, masterfully reasoned supported in Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluthat too much shouting and bewilderment pervades academic cirJudging the worth of a literary object is possible, he thinks, but calls sensitivity to a complex array of historical and textual determisurrounding both the author and his work. In essence, what he and â&#x20AC;˘mandarins" (as Paul Bove and others delight in labelling them) in power are proposing is a return to appreciating either an indipoem or an entire body of literature along guidelines grounded in -..tiiva1ted appreciation of literature .1 difficulty Booth and his fellow theorists face, though, is one of for institutional consumption the categories and limits of texts '1iterary." The "Great Tradition" has all but excluded works out-

115

side the canon established by mainly Anglo-American critics. The rapidly changing weather in academia dictates that a new internationalist approach is required to escape the cultural restrictions imposed by predetermined theories of inclusion and exclusion. The great rift separating literary theorists from their students, their fellow academics, and the masses, rests along the meridian of intellectual snobbery. The general assumption pervading the higher circles of criticism is that the masses read for pleasure, the critics read in order to dictate to the masses how and what they should read, and the student, who is at once part of the masses and part of the ivory tower, is caught in the middle.

Any approach to literature reveals something about the critic's tastes and his academic training, learning, and predilections. In America, from roughly the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt to the staid New Criticism of W. K. Wimsatt, critics presumed a certain amount of rhetorical authority in judging poetry, drama, or fiction based on a kind of merit system. "Great" literature, as opposed to merely "good," followed specific classical Greco-Roman models of purpose, form, development, style, and subject matter. In "What Is a Classic7" T. S. Eliot equates Virgil's "comprehensiveness," "universality" of manner, and "maturity of mind" as constituent parts of a "classic" author able to generate "classic" texts. Eliot writes, "In our several literatures, we have much wealth of which to boast, to which Latin has nothing to compare; but each literature has its greatness, not in isolation, but because of its place in a larger pattern, a pattern set in Rome." 2 Eliot's audience at the time (1944) was The Virgil Society, so it is no wonder that he glorifies the Roman poet when he codifies "classic."

But what relevance do such distinctions have for a more sophisticated reading audience, one sensitive to the importance of a non-Western literary tradition1 In light of the emerging importance of gender studies and the New Historicism, what happens to these predominantly male notions about the rank and prestige of a literary text7 What is the educator's role in communicating these relatively new studies to students7 Rather than paint myself into a corner by asseverating that there is an easy group of answers to the above questions, let me just say that the territory of a poem, novel, or play is mapped by each individual reader.

What that reader brings to the text, how he defines its value or quality, and how he finally judges its merits fully depend on his knowledge of the territory. It should be obvious that a reader unfamiliar with Celtic mythology will have trouble recognizing Yeats' allusions to the Immortals, the Seven Hazel Trees, and the sword of Manannan in The Wanderings of Oisin. He may not enjoy them as much as an "enlightened reader," one trained in explication and analysis, but that does not preclude him from taking pleasure in its story line or its lyricism.

The principal reason the American critic has removed himself from the

116

mainstream is that he senses his difference-a "superiority of taste" -and feels compelled to impose a sense of refined order, cultivating from long hours devoted to study, upon a group concerning itself with mainstream or "philistine" values. The American critic therefore personifies the intellectual (whom the French callle clerc), under whose banner he fights on paper to get people to read for knowledge. The intellectual wishes to couple reading for pleasure with reading for knowledge. Thus pleasure remains the reason most people read. A traditionalist familiar with Nabokov's beliefs about cultivating a refined taste for literature may assert, "Only a philistine reads strictly for pleasure." Ideally, reading requires active interpretation, not passive acceptance of the words as they rest on the page. Active readers must be capable of enjoying the material as they absorb its content for the purpose of accumulating and utilizing knowledge. Passive or accepting readers, oftentimes students forced to read literature in a mandatory composition and literature course, usually read for "practical" reasons unrelated to "pleasure" as such. In the last instance, knowledge is never absorbed into a student's mind, at least not to any noticeable degree. These kinds of readers create great difficulties for educators who believe that texts should be read for humanistic enrichment and enjoyment.

After teaching literary analysis to mainly non-literature majors during the last seven years, I can confirm what most of my colleagues have been complaining about for decades: these students have no intention of reading for pleasure, nor really learning anything unless it has a causal relation to their major field of study. The majority only want to get the class and the coursework behind them. In essence, they do reflect a philistine mentality endemic to a popular culture which believes that literature per se is either the pursuit of the leisured classes or an impediment towards completion of work in a major unrelated to the humanities.

Literary theorists, then, are faced with the dilemma of whether or not they must attempt increasingly more difficult readings of texts for their colleagues only or for their students also. They must also decide whether or not succeeding generations of students will be able to appreciate their efforts. The quandary over how they should resolve these differences brings us to the crux of the matter: how do we define levels of reading and interpretation?

Determining levels of reading and interpreting a particular text, whether it is the epic of Gilgamesh, George Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, or a short story by Ursula K. LeGuin, necessitates a judgment based on what Jonathan Culler terms "literary competency." Literary competency "carries the presumption that we can distinguish between competent and incompetent readers."3 Culler feels we as theorists should be less complacent, less secure, concerning our criteria for shaping opinions about a text's intelligiblity or its incoherence. He advocates a reading strategy

117

that might allow for danger, insecurity, mystery, foreignness, and error.

At the time he was writing (1975), his "structuralist" belief that "Reading is not an innocent activity" antedates similar pronouncements by Barthes and Wolfgang lser.4 Culler's suggested methodology favors transcendence of formalist strictures and relies on New Critical definitions of presence, closure, wholeness, and elements traditionally construed as necessary components of a unified literary work. Interpreting a passage from William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, Culler upholds some of the basic tenets of formalism, still the primary mode of critical analysis practiced in English classes throughout the United States and Great Britain: . . . reading poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it. In this case the most obvious feature of literary competence is the intent at totality of the interpretive process: poems are supposed to cohere, and one must therefore discover a semantic level at which the two lines can be related to one another.5

On the other hand, a major part of the ongoing debate (some would call it a dialogue) among theorists encompasses the problem of coming up with definitions as to what constitutes the literary "text." Semioticians still seem to be at the forefront of the controversy, which many poststructuralists think is destined to remain inconclusive due to the openendedness of language. In her pioneering work on novelistic structure, Julia Kristeva confronts the issues of form and type via a semiotic perspective differing from the more orthodox structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, whom many perceive as the father of lingusitics: One of the problems of semiology lies in replacing the old rhetorical division of genres with a TYPOLOGY OF TEXTS, otherwise said to define the specificity of different textual organizations in situating them within the general text (culture) in which they take part and which takes part within them [my translation]. 6

Even though Kristeva published this work almsot twenty years ago, "old news" by the skeptical standards of trendier critics, it still appears vital to me. The best place to decide the validity of a text as literature is within the boundaries of the culture helping to define it as it (the text) helps to define that culture. Kristeva's healthy attitude contributes toward eliminating the foggy aestheticism generated by New Critical doctrines and historically prejudicial or culturally biased readings.

As noted, scholars are constantly arguing about the priority of one definition over another. It is a major aspect of their job, and it is not something to be disparaged unless it becomes self-aggrandizing, narcis-

118

sistic, or uninformative. With the primary exception being Kenneth Burke, the pioneering American author of A Grammar of Motives, the confrontational role of metacriticism rose out of the skepticism of late 19th century European thought. Beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche, continuing with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, then following Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, a radical reinterpretation of established, or historically canonized, teleologies has greatly upset l'ordre des chases (which was, incidentally, the title Foucault originally desired for Les Mots et les choses). Nietzsche has proven very popular with literary theorists because of his subjective, reinterpetation of norms ("transvaluation of values") and his marked rejection of what he considered a hypocritical social order governed by bourgeois values and superstitious beliefs. Wittgenstein's fragmented notebook, compiled and translated as On Certainty offers a profound series of postulations about the centrality of meaning, and echoes the earlier Tractatus in its attempts to coordinate a science of meanings.

Despite Derrida's and other's arguments to the contrary, Heidegger's attempt to construct a totally objective language for defining ontologies broke away from the Western metaphysical tradition which substantiated many of its suppositions and truths with Judea-Christian systems of belief. Regarding Bataille's influence on the current lines of thinking, Foucault credits him with exploring the "experience of finitude and being, of the limit of transgression," more thoroughly in this century than anyone since Kant and Sade. 7 Barthes needs little introduction; Mythologies, L'Empire des signes, Le Degre zero de l'ecriture, Le Plaisir du texte, and S/ Z have all contributed to freeing the critic and his text from puritanical conventions and _restrictions. Originally a Saussurean-influenced semiotician, he delighted in playing with the interaction between langue and parole, the sign, signifier, and the signified. Published in 1957, Mythologies demonstrated how a profound knowledge of political science, linguistics, literature, past and present history, and psychology could revolutionize the way readers explore the overall text. Finally, perhaps the most controversial and influential philosopher-critic of the last thirty years, Derrida has opted to dispense with the old philosophical truths by formulating an "anti-logocentric" (e.g., anti-Cartesian) stance towards questioning the ontological underpinnings of a diverse array of authors and texts, from Rousseau and Poe, to Husser! and Ponge.

The above summary demonstrates by virtue of its severe limitations that arriving at a conclusive, authoritative definition of the text is no longer the most important task of poststructuralists, nor should the more experimental educators and intellectuals worry so much about locating meaning and form. Poststructuralism denies "standardized" or "authoritative" codes and readings of the literary canon. It calls our attention to

119

the significance of re-exammmg and redefining textual boundaries, broadening the range of "acceptable" works to include genres once considered outside of literature, such as pulp fiction, commercials, children's stories, and film. Once can see why so many academics feel threatened by what they view as an influx of nihilism or amoralism, promulgated by the deconstructionists, into the Humanities. Leading practitioners of deconstruction, specifically J. Hillis Miller, have decreed that an "ethics of reading" is vital for an informed interpretation of any text.

Again, depending on which ideology one follows, locating the absence of meaning within a paragraph of Madame Bovary, a text many have presumed as a model of comprehensibility and completion, can prove just as useful and legitimate a reading strategy as explicating a line from Finnegan's Wake , a text Joyce wrote in order to keep the critics busy for centuries. Which field is the most dynamic in its revisionism, whether it be feminism, neo-Marxism, deconstructionism, or some other "ism" of the poststructuralist movement, remains a rather arbitrary issue, one of social taste or political conviction more than anything else.

Much of the destructive in-fighting occurring within academic circles arises primarily because of the elitism, overspecialization, and political factionalism of intellectuals committing themselves to an all too restrictive line of thinking. If anything, the Humanities has lost much of its intellectual driving force because it lacks pluralists, generalists with interdisciplinary, inter-cultural tastes. For too many decades, it has been the tool of politicians, administrators, and educators more interested in acquiring greater rank, prestige, and capital rather than generating productive, intellectually powerful, and culturally well-rounded students.

Humanities divisions, in many universities, have distanced themselves from the concerns of the real world (the surrounding city and culture) by playing in the rarified atmosphere of the sequestered classroom or the fictive world of the literary text .

The principal question, then, is how much of a sociopolitical or anthropological activist should constitute the makeup of a professor of literary theory who deals with sociopolitical and anthropological subjects in the abstract? If a literary theorist can only commit himself to a cause in the fairly safe and smug world of academia, with its hundreds of specialized journals for intellectuals, how can he be a "valid" intellectual, along the lines of a Voltaire, if he remains noncommittal to active participation in the cause he espouses on paper7 As Said has convincingly argued, ". . . Literary critics, by virue of their studious indifference to the world they live in and to the values by which their work engages history, do not see themselves as a threat to anything, except possibly to each other."â&#x20AC;˘ As a result, many critics have transmogrified from humanists into what one English professor at the University of California, Riverside, has termed "moral and intellectual cowards." Their students have

120

become the proverbial "Other," what they once were, having leaped ahead into the heady arena of tenure-tracks, research grants, international conferences, faculty exchanges, and publishing. Ironically, professors continue to live under the pretense that the majority of their students come away from their discussion and lectures enriched and enlightened about the "great ideas" revealed to them in literary texts. Yet it comes as no revelation that many students share an unhappy intellectual view of the world, especially graduate students faced with the reality of competing in one of the most viciously contested professions in America. These same graduate students, if they are fortunate to find a satisfactory appointment, become the instructors of equally disillusioned future generations.

The chaos in literary theory circles is thus a reflection of the confusion within Humanities divisions throughout the United States. Historically, American universities have credited themselves with creating and implementing guidelines for judging the value of a critical work based on classical Greek and Roman models. From Dr. Johnson to Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot and his formalist successors, the authority of the critic's voice, and by extension the classroom instructor's, has held an impressive amount of rhetorical power. In fact, the present debates about various crises in criticism revolve around the notion of rhetorical potency.

The intellectual's role in shaping general reader appreciation of texts corresponds to the scholar's, even though both types are not always synonymous. Both Bernard-Henri Levy, in Eloge des intellectuals and Edward W. Said, in The World, the Text, and the Critic refer to Julien Benda's belief that the intellectual has sold himself short (Ia trahison des clercs), to an unappreciative, philistine culture I have described above. 9 The modem intellectual's predicament is fundamental to one of the basic philosophic dilemmas of this century. His alienation, his marginality within societies considering themselves "free," mirrors the literary theorist's. Neither one is conceived as being a genuine threat unless he enters the political spectrum, serving as a force toward changing society (presumably for the better). At least in democratic, "free" countries, we have few people willing to take the kinds of risks undertaken by Chinese, Russian, Eastern European, and Latin American intellectuals. It is from these ideological danger zones that we still get men and women willing to risk their reputations and lives while struggling against political and spiritual freedom . The myth of the intellectual is dying, as Foucault and his interpreters, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, would have us believe: In more recent times, our model of the intellectual has been the writer-jurist who claims to be outside of partisan interest, to speak in the universal voice, to represent either God's law or that of the state, to make known the universal dictates of reason. The exemplary figure in the Classical Age was perhaps Vol-

121

taire-proclaiming the rights of humanity, unveiling deceit and hypocrisy, attacking despotism and false hierarchies, combating injustices and inequalities. The function of the modern intellectual is to bring truth to articulate clarity.â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ Unfortunately, many modem intellectuals have no intention of conveying this "function" to the public. In place of Voltaire, what we have are high-profile, jet-setting self-promoters of the breed parodied by novelistcritic David Lodge in his works, Changing Places and Small World. With few exceptions, the only intellectuals in America berating despots and exposing "false hierarchies" are already powerful educators, writers, and editors of liberal literary journals or magazines who are protected by constitutional law. They are hardly in the same position as Sakharov, Rushdie, and their counterparts in other countries.

It would be easy for me to propose that critical theorists should escape the hollow voicelessness of many modem intellectuals who cling to fashionable or safe ideologies and trends. But I doubt if very many would take effective action. Fighting against apathy brought about by materialism and its rewards, against a breakdown in the total structure of things, whether it is a growing sociopathy, bourgeois smugness, or academic pretentiousness has been a task carried out in vacuo. I firmly believe, though, that a random criterion of values and ethics, once it goes beyond theoretical language, transforms into a political and moral issue in need of serious debate between the intellectual and the non-academic community. With typical foresight, Said has recognized that the critic cannot remove himself from public responsibility: Criticism cannot assume that its province is merely the text, not even the great literary text. It must see itself, with other discourse, inhabiting a much contested cultural space, in which what has counted in the continuity and transmission of knowledge has been the signifier, as an event that has left lasting traces upon the human subject. Once we take that view, then literature as an isolated paddock in the broad cultural field disappears, and with it too the harmless rhetoric of self-delighting humanism. Instead we will be able, I think, to read and write with a sense of the greater stake in historical and political effectiveness that literary as well as all other texts have had."

One of the reasons Said's words are so trenchant is that he recognizes the legitimacy of literary criticism's role in shaping the world exterior to the scholar's limited world or that of his specialized audience. Said also "practices what he preaches." In numerous books, newspapers, magazines, and journals, he has championed the rights of all men, not just those falling under an ethnocentric, Westernized perspective which has pretty much refused equal representation for "Eastern" or Oriental texts.

He has persistently demonstrated that such dichotomies contribute to a playing field for the literary elite who wish to continue promoting a nar-

122

row-minded Weltansicht about the need for "great books" or "great ideas" of their own predilection. He has also taken a great deal of abuse from cynical, partisan, and anti-Palestinian editors of political magazins like The New Republic.

A certain schizophrenia exists in American academia wherein the literary theorist assumes an authority he can never possess, yet must pretend he does, for whatever reason. His semantical power struggles, his lexical pyrotechnics, and his desire to infuse his text with some order all mirror a repressed or even impotent apoliticism unless he can actively contribute to social, and not just hypothetical, change. In order to escape the continuous crises of thought they enjoy manufacturing on paper to a restricted audience, literary theorists must infuse a broad interdisciplinary training with direct participation among the global community.

Otherwise, their self-perpetuating "Crisis in Criticism" (to borrow the title of William E. Cain's work on this subject) will remain another issue restricted to discussion among the most privileged intelligentsia. As I reread the following lines from Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," I cannot help but substitute "critical theory" for "poetry": For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

In North America and Western Europe, at least, the most socially efficacious contributions to literary topics this century have come from people like Edmund Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Simone de Beauvoir, Lionel Trilling, George Steiner, and Susan Sontag. These people unite profound learning with wide-ranging, ingenuous, and non-parochial interests.

They share strong convictions and practice them, either as educators who actually believe they should enjoy teaching (rather than feeling it is an imposition on their research time), or writers supporting humanitarian or civil rights causes.

As I have tried to make clear, shouting matches on paper between literary theorists ultimately contribute little to either the academic or the non-academic world. If the reader thinks this statement sounds unwarranted, I advise him to read PMLA's March 1989 Forum, the Editorial Notes section of Critical Inquiry's Autumn 1988 edition, or articles about Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida authored by their theoretical opponents. Indeed, my Japanese colleagues are nonplussed that American critics are so nasty toward one another. One associate of mine here in Japan, a scholar of sociolinguistics, noted that if critical theorists want to extinguish the cliche that they are men of words rather than action, they

123

must put aside their own selfish interests and behave more diplomatically, but not hypocritically polite, with one another. He had just read an epistolary defense and retaliation by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., published in the Spring 1989 newsletter of the Modem Language Association, to ad hominem comments written by Robert Scholes. Hirsch and Scholes, similar to debaters in the forum and response sections of Critical Inquiry, savagely lashed back and forth at one another in a manner representing the norm rather than the exception to academic conduct these days. I answered him by saying that any literature department worth its salt, or one pretending to be an intellectual nirvana, should mention direct participation with the "global text" as one of its job requirements for critical theorists.

NOTES 1. For a general discussion of his hermeneutical intentions, see Wayne C. Booth's introduction to his The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Univ. of California Press, 1988) and Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979).1n Critical Understanding, Booth points to the danger of critical adherence to a too prophetic voice about the future of criticism or "the function of criticism at the present time": 'Thus, in a curious way, those who call for a multiplication oE voices often insist that there is only one right way of multiplying" (5).

2 . T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961} 73.

3. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and tlw Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975} 120.

4 . Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 129. Culler continues in the same paragraph, "It [Reading) is charged with artifice, and to refuse to study one's modes of reading is to neglect a principal source of information about literary activity." At the time his work was published, American intellectuals who had finally opened themselves up to French structuralism and Russian formalism (as well as the Prague, Frankfurt, and Geneva schools of criticism} now encountered a new, eva more demanding form, deconstruction. In a style which defies dassificatiOil under anything narrower than the very broad term, "poststructuralism, Roland Barthes writes:

How can we read criticism? Only one way: since I am here a second-degree reader, I must shift my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of thit critical pleasure-a sure way to miss it-1 can make myself its voyeur: observe clandestinely the pleasure of others, I enter perversion; the cornm~ , tary then becomes in my eyes a test, a fiction, a fissured envelope."

See The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and 1975} 17. Also refer to Wolfgang Iser's chapter, 'The Reading Process: A

menological Appraoch," in The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974} 274- 94.

124

5. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 126.

6. Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du Roman: Approche semiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle (The Hague: 1970; rpt. , 1979) 12.

7. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. , Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.

Press, 1977) 40.

8. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983) 177.

9. See both Henri Bernard-Levy, {loge des intellectuals (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1987) 43, and Said, The World, the Text, the Critic, 14-15.

10. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, second edition, 1983) 202.

11. Said, The World, the Text, the Critic, 225.

125

Contributor's Notes Paramita Banerjee was born in Calcutta in 1958 and is completing her doctoral dissertation in Philosophy at Calcutta University. She has published work in literary magazines such as SHABDA, JUKTI, TAKKO and GOPPO, and has poems forthcoming in DESH. She is a lecturer in Social Philosophy at Muralidhar Girls College, and lives with her husband and two young daughters in South Calcutta.

Michael Barrett has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he won the Hopwood Contest. He is working on a novel, and hoping to publish a collection of stories. He writes fiction not for people who like to read it but for people who ought to.

Guy Copacelatro III is 22 years old and currently living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He has work forthcoming in the QUARTERLY and QUARTERLY WEST. He can hold one foot with his hand and jump through with the other foot.

-his girlfriend Stuart Friebert directs the Writing Program at Oberlin and has published many volumes of poems and translations. With Adriana Varda, he is preparing a Selected Sorescu.

A. M. Friedson publishes poetry and prose in Hawaii and on the other mainlands. "Holy Orders" is a recent attempt to make nonsense of it all. He is emeritus professor of English at the University of Hawaii, literary editor of Biography, and co-editor of Literary Arts Hawaii.

Kenneth Frost has poems which have appeared in SALMAGUNDI, SOUTHWEST REVIEW, THE SEWANEE REVIEW, CONFRONTATION, THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, THE BERKELEY MONTHLY, and many others.

Edith Goldenhar lives in New York City and teaches at City College. Her poems have recently appeared in THE INDIANA REVIEW and CALIBAN. T. M. Goto teaches composition at the University of Hawaii. Her poems have appeared in BAMBOO RIDGE, CAPRICE, CHAMINADE LITERARY REVIEW, HAWAI'I REVIEW, PLEIADES, RAINBIRD, RAMROD, and SCRAWLING WALL. She was poetry editor for Hawai'i Review during 1988-89. In 1988, she won an honorable mention in the Academy of American Poets competition at UH. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Theatre at UH.

126

Mark Grimes lives in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where he teaches English in the county prisons. He is working on his first collection of poetry, Nomad's Home.

Curt Hagen teaches at Punahou School.

Donnell Hunter has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana and teaches English at Ricks College, Rexburg, Idaho. He has published poetry in 100 magazines in 41 states. He is the proprietor of Honeybrook Press, which has published chapbooks of William Stafford, Marvin Bell, Leslie Norris, and others, including his latest, Songs of the River, 1988.

Dan Johnson has written two books of poems, Suggestions from the Border was published in 1983 and Glance West , which is forthcoming in a hand-bound, hardcover edition. His poems have appeared in FOLIO, WASHINGTON REVIEW, GARGOYLE, LIP SERVICE, ANTIETAM, and other journals. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife Susan and works part time as a typesetter.

Robert Kusch teaches English at Rutgers University. His recent work has appeared in SEWANEE REVIEW, WASHINGTIN REVIEW, and POETRY KANTO. Thomas F. Lannin is Visiting Professor of English and Researcher at the Center for Inter-Cultural Studies and Education, Josai University, Japan. He is Guest Editor of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society. His current research projects involve studies of Yeats, Mishima, and post-feminism.

Scott Lasser was born and raised in Detroit. He received degrees from Dartmouth College and the MFA program at the University of Michigan.

David Luisi lives in San Diego. He has published critical articles on literature and art. Previous poems have appeared in the ROANOKE REVIEW and the PLAINS POETRY JOURNAL. David Lunde was born in 1941 in Berkeley, California and grew up in Saudi Arabia. He has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and won the Academy of Poets Prize there. Since 1967, he has been Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York College at Fredonia. He is Editor and Publisher of The Basilisk Press, and had published two collections of poetry, Sludge Gulper 1 and Calibrations. His poems and translations have appeared in 150 periodicals and anthologies.

Takeo Miji is a first year graduate student in Painting at the University of Hawaii. "The summer of '89 I rediscovered charcoal and the painting was a series of figurative works with oils on primed canvas."

Patrick Mikulec was born in Honolulu and now lives in Aloha, Oregon with his wife and son. He works as a high school English teacher and as a commercial crayfisherman. His poetry has appeared in many publications, including

127

Twice yearly from University ofHawaii Press Fiction, poetry, commentary from outstanding U.S. writers, along withguest-editedfeatures ofexciting new works from Asia and the PacifJC

John Updike, Fran~ois Camoin, Ai, Joyce Carol Oates, Ron Carlson, Alberto Rios, Jonathan Penner, Pat Matsueda, Jack Marshall, Sandra Alcosser, Frederick Busch, Michael Hannon, Gene Frumkin, Bob Shacochis, Charles Baxter, Michelle Carter, David Michael Kaplan, Gladys Swan, Fred Chappell, Lee K. Abbott, James D. Houston, Gary Pak, Ursule Molinaro, Stuart Dybek, Ian MacMillan, Lynda Sexson, John L'Heureux

*

*

Corresponding Editors For Korea, Kim Uchang For Japan, Masao Miyoshi For China, Howard Goldblatt, Ding Zuxin For The For South Asia, WirnaJ Dissanayake Philippines, Alfred A. Yuson For New Zealand and South Pacific, Norman Simms For Pacific Latin America, H . E. Francis For North America, Fred Chappell, T . R. Hummer, Charles Johnson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Ondaatje, Alberto Rfos, Tobias Wolff

*

*

* *

* *

Subscriptions, one year $12, two years $21 .60, three years $28.80.

Single issue $8, except inaugural double issue $10.

To order: Send check or money order (drawn on aU .S. bank and payable to University ofHawaii Press) . VISA or MasterCard aJso accepted (include acct . no., exp. date, and signature).

U Diversity of Hawaii Press Journals Department 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822 (808) 948-8833

Work by Michael Barrett Guy Capecelatro III A. M. Friedson Kenneth Frost Edith Goldenhar T. M. Goto Mark Grimes Curt Hagen Donnell Hunter Dan Johnson Robert Kusch Thomas F. Lannin, Jr. Scott Lasser David Luisi David Lunde Patrick B. Mikulec Devarati Mitra Paul Kennedy Mueller Daniel Panger Marjorie Power Melissa Pritchard Tony Quagliano Peter Robinson Gregg Shapiro Marin Sorescu David Starkey Mark Taksa ]. Thomson Joe Tsujimoto Cory Wade Charlotte Gould Warren Nathan Whiting Robert Wintner Cover Art Takeo Miji $5.00

ISSN: 0093-9625