Hawaiʻi Review Issue 29: 1990

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Issue 29

Vol. 14, No. 2

Cover Design by Shane Kaneshiro Lillian Robinson's "What Culture Should Mean" was published in The Nation magazine/ The Nation Company, Inc. (September 25, 1989).

Student subscription rate: $24.00/ year (47 issues). Send check to The Nation , Box P-2, 72 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10011 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.

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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 Writers Market.

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

ISSN: 0093-9625.

Staff Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Fiction Editor

Elizabeth Lovell Priscilla Billig Stewart G . W. Anderson

Poetry Editor Non-Fiction Editors

John Gesang Paige Aranda Tracy Ellig

Thanks to: Wes Calvert Eric Folk Ian MacMillan John McDermott Jim Reis Cathy Song

Contents What Culture Should Mean Miriam On Unrequited Love When I Think . ..

By Now Of Course You Will Have Heard Alligator And Then, Her Mother's Dresses Torn Out of the Closet Scrapbook Roadkill The Cinderella Theme My High Heels Patience Croakers Drought The Long Grief The Tandem None Are Madder The Brides Winter Palace Tour Terrace View Polaris An Invitation Wirephoto Passing Through the Papago Reservation Yielding Lament The Subtlest and Liveliest of Bodies Loss Fatal Response Yellow Backstreets

iv

1 6 7

Lillian Robinson

8

Douglas Michael Massing

9

12 14 16 17 18 20 27 28 29 30 31 39 40 40 41 42 42

Carole Bernstein Martha Vertreace Donna Salli Helen Pilibosian Kim Edwards Jeff Schiff Lynn Domina judith Hiott George Smyth ]ames Doyle Gregory A. Ryan William John Watkins

43 44 45

Marjorie Power Eric Ho rsting

46 55 62 63 67

Steven Goldsberry Luiz Vilela A. M. Friedson Rafael Alberti Jeffery Allen

' Tattoos, Suit Changing The Wash House The Broker Finding Your Job Dream People Prayer Before Killing a Doe Studies Duende The Unclaimed Corpse Jack-o'-Lantern Fifth Grade Famine in Valhalla Levitation On Contemplating My Wife's Bed Holding Pattern Deconstructions When I Feel Your Soul, I Reach for You with These Arms Basically Troubled in the Heat Artificial Intelligence Afflatus Check-Out Counter Vignettes Untitled Untitled Healing Act I Round Up Treatise Untitled To the Reader Contributor's Notes

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73 81 83 84 84 85 88 90 91 92 94 107 109 110 111 113 114 116 118 119 120 121 122 122 123 131 133 134 136

Mark Taksa Pamela Walker

Donnell Hunter David Chorlton Jay Griswold Leona Yamada Ian MacMillan Carl Phillips

Jay A. Blumenthal Michael J. Bugeja Edward Kleinschmidt Charles Edward Eaton Miko Suzuki Simon Perchik David Sumner D . N. Baldwin

Casey Finch

v

Lillian S. Robinson

What Culture Should Mean Once upon a time the introduction of writings by women a~d people of color, both American and Third World, was called "politicizing the curriculum." Only we had politics, you see (and its nasty litter-mate, ideology), whereas they had standards. But nowadays, former Education Secretary William Bennett equates the modification of Stanford's Western Civilization (the required course) with the destruction of Western civilization (the social phenomenon); Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, sneers at universities that require students to take ethnic literature seriously; and the outgoing President devotes his last moments in office to excoriating the present approach to teaching history, with its trendy preference for critical thinking over mindless nationalism. Meanwhile, Christopher Clausen, head of the Pennsylvania State University English department, deplores the (dubious) fact that more undergraduates are required to read The Color Purple than the works of Shakespeare. And a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature inquires rhetorically about the whereabouts of "the African Proust," apparently determined to bypass all African novelists until that one materializes.

Moreover- and notwithstanding elective and appointive offices, Nobel Prizes and university chairs- these assaults are couched in a discourse of marginality to some perceived radical hegemony. It is this claim to outsider, even guerrilla, status that underlies the aggressiveness of the attack . Now that those on the other side have so blatantly revealed that they have politics, dare we hope they'll recognize that we have standards? Apparently not, for we continue to be accused of adopting "sociological" criteria while they defend "universal values," the rhetorical weapons of choice being the compound verb "to throw out" and the pseudo-explanatory "simply because."

That is, those of use who want to expand (though I prefer to say enrich) the canon of great books and the curriculum based on it are accused of wanting to throw out the classics and replace them with works chosen simply because their authors are female, nonwhite or nonWestern. The debate might be more effectively engaged if there were in fact a tendency in the reformist camp that proposed throwing out the entire received tradition. But as far as I know, the furthest we've gone is to propose adding to it and reading the whole tradition from a perspec-

1

tive informed by our sense of what is usually omitted and what that omission itself teaches.

"Throwing out" is, in any event, a rather abstract notion when it comes to the canon, which has no prescribed number of places within it.

The curriculum, however, is indeed susceptible to "throwing out"; there, adding new material does entail squeezing or even eliminating other material. Well, isn't this "throwing out" the great books? I think not, because the real challenge is to their nature as required reading, and hence to the view that "every educated person" must be familiar with a certain set of texts in preference to other .texts.

Accompanying the accusation of abandoning the great works is the charge that we are practicing a kind of literary affirmative action, a policy understood in this context to mean hiring or promoting the un- and underqualified . The application of the affirmative action concept and its concomitant "quotas" to this debate is apparently based on the assumption that no claim is being made for the new material as literature, and that certainly none could be sustained. We are said to be proposing the addition of new voices "simply because" of their gender, race or nationality, with no regard for the aesthetic values that had hitherto defined and (as it happens) closed the curriculum. A different aesthetic is presumed to be no aesthetic. And the female, black, working-class or homosexual experience is uncritically assumed to be, at best, an unlikely candidate for canonization, precisely because it is the marked variant, whereas the experience of straight white men has a unique claim to universality.

In fact, however, we have always maintained that the new material has literary resonance, acknowledging the power of literature to move, stimulate and transform human consciousness. So the actual difference between our respective positions is that we assume such literary power can come from a wide range of places in the culture and a wide set of social experiences, whereas they assume we are evoking values and power external to the workings of literature.

Meanwhile, can Saul Bellow really be waiting for the African Proust to materialize before he reads African fiction? If so, he's going to have to wait a lot longer and he'll be missing a great deal of wonderful writing. In the process, he denies to the African writer the very privilege he arrogates to himself of selecting a literary form and model appropriate to the enterprise. Despite all Moses Herzog's letters to the great male thinkers of Europe, Bellow's representation of the accumulation of the past in the individual consciousness is very different from that found in A Iii recherche du temps perdu. And surely (surely!) he knows that and believes its acceptable. Or does he secretly think he's the Chicago Proustl Even leaving Bellow's own fiction out of the equation, one might argue that Proust dealt with certain issues quite familiar to the contemporary

2

African writer-the operation, for instance, of modernization upon an essentially tribal society. And it is as natural for an African writer to center a narrative on the installation or the aftermath of colonization as it was for Proust to focus on the Dreyfus affair. If it made sense for Proust as a Jew and a homosexual to dissect the invented Swann and the historical Dreyfus or the various inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, it also makes sense for Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Ngugi wa . Thiong'o, Mariama Ba, Amos Tutuola or Buchi Emecheta to tell us abo~t the range of economic, cultural and sexual confrontations between the native peoples and Europeans. As with opening up the American tradition, it is not because we owe it to the poor benighted Africans to give them some representation in an expanded definition of the literary tradition. Rather, we owe it to literature.

Well, maybe Bellow doesn't want to know from colonialism and neocolonialism and Third World debt peonage, even filtered through the inner life and sensibility of a single tormented individual. Arguably, he doesn't want to know about this stuff any more than the denizens of the Guermantes' drawing room or even the Verdurins' wanted to hear about Captain Dreyfus. But if Bellow grants French literature the right to have had a Zola as well as a Proust- and how can he fail in this retroactive courtesy?-it seems strange, to say the least, to deny an equivalent range to the emerging literatures of Africa. An equivalent range, but not an indentical one. Africa doesn't necessarily need its Proust.

In the early 1960s, during the struggle over a national language for Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere translated The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar into Swahili. Critic Stephen Arnold maintains that Nyerere's translations assisted "the meteoric rise of literature in Swahili to its stature as a national literature today [while) ... cautiously asserting that some things in the colonialist's culture might be of value in the formation of Tanzanian national culture." But most educated Westerners would smile rather than gasp at Arnold's notion of a "meteoric rise," and Bellow would remind us that there has certainly been no Tanzanian Shakespeare anyway, and that life is too short to bother with anything else, which is automatically understood as anything less.

Moreover, when a Third World writer does make use of symbols, myths and imagery from the dominant Western tradition, the variations are as important as the theme. It seems to me, for instance, that the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka may be seen as the African Brecht, although in the process of reinventing the filiation from John Gay to Brecht to himself, Soyinka proves a rather more refractory son of his literary father than Brecht was. A greater degree of deviation is required by his condition as a Western-educated black man in neocolonial Africa.

As someone with a grounding in the literary tradition, I confess I think the story about Nyerere translating Shakespeare into Swahili is rather

3

charming. (Although I wish there were an audience for English translations of the Swahili literature his gesture inspired.) But I am also convinced that it is dangerous to proceed from there to fetishizing Shakespeare's purported universality at the expense of what might come from a black speaker of Swahili or English. There is no reason to assume that Shakespeare was any less grounded in his own history, with its particular opportunities and limits, than today's writers are. And we know that his history included not only the class, national and cultural experience of Elizabethan England but also his membership in the male sex. For ginia Woolf has told us what would have happened to that brilliant poet, his sister.

Some argue that Shakespeare is so universal we don't need the with their gender, race and national blinders. The professor who plained about The Color Purple being taught in more required than Shakespeare thinks it's a shame because the Bard shows us a human range than Walker does. I am not prepared to concede even but if it were so, is.there no value in being exposed to what ShakE!S~~ leaves out of the range7 Is there no point on the register of human ence where his approach is less than adequate7 After all, his ex]pto,rat:lOI of domestic violence, one of Walker's central themes, is The Taming the Shrew. His victim of colonialism is the monster Caliban. His man is the Prince of Morocco or Othello. His black woman, aside from single nasty remark in Love's Labour's Lost, is nonexistent. Doesn't Walker have something to tell us about "incestuous sheets" that hasn't already covered7 The problem is, the universality argument is not usually made in of the range of human types and experiences the gentleman from State invoked. The universality claimed for the classics is more thought to reside in their general themes-where states of mind and are understood as more universal than physical commonality-and broad sympathy they express. This is the approach Lynne Cheney in her 1988 report Humanities in America. At one point, Cheney cites passage in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the memoirist describes her childhood feelings about Shakespeare. was eager to memorize one of his poems to recite at a church but she knew that her grandmother, with whom she was living in a Arkansas town, would insist her piece be something by Langston or Countee 'Cullen, poets who spoke from the black experience. words Angelou wished she could use to explain it to her tn• ..,.,,......... grandmother derive from this notion of universal sympathy. The writer, looking back, wishes she had been able to plead, "But I know William Shakespeare was a black woman!"

I am not sure if this quotation from Angelou-the report's only ence to a noncanonical text-is a monumental misreading or an stunning example of bad faith. For the story as Angelou tells it 4

begins with her rape at age 8 by her mother's lover. At the man's trial, she tells a lie to cover her sense of complicity in a previous incident of sexual molestation. As a result, the rapist is acquitted, and then murdered by the child's vengeful male relatives. Maya, packed off to stay with her grandmother in the South, learns the distorted lesson that her speech could bring about a death. So she remains silent for a year, talking only to her brother, until a sympathetic older woman lends her some poems of Shakespeare. The sonnet beginning "When in disgrace with'fortune and men's eyes" speaks to the condition of the abused, aphonic 9-year-old.

That's what she feels she is, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. The recognition of herself in those words makes her want to speak again and recite the words of this man who'd understood her. But she knows her grandmother will never understand wherein Shakespeare, too, was a black woman.

This story certainly has multiple meanings. It does not seem to me that one of them is that Shakespeare the great writer could read the heart of this black child, but rather that Maya Angelou, at 9 and through all her pain, was an extraordinary reader. The incident hardly lends itself to the use to which it was put by the N .E.H. chair, which was to suggest that, although reading Shakespeare helped make the scarred child a speaker and eventually a poet herself, it is superfluous for us or our students to read Angelou-except to pick out specious morals about the timeless, placeless, personless value of the great books.

If we have to read black women's literature for moral lessons, I prefer the scene in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place in which a community organizer takes a single mother and her too-many children to the park to see an all-black production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As they walk home after the enchanting event, one of the children asks, "Mama .. . Shakespeare's black?" And she replies, "Not yet." It's a nice idea, a black theater group performing Shakespeare for the children of Brewster Place, and it's also fitting that the militant organizer, who has adopted the African name Kiswana and whose boyfriend directs the troupe, is the one who encourages them to go. But Naylor is hardly telling us that exposing those kids to Shakespeare is the beginning or the end of what "culture" should mean to them. Shakespeare's not black yet. And when he is, it will not be because of the protean universality of a single white male born in Stratford-on-Avon 425 years ago, but because we all understand that although Shakespeare is dead, great poetry can still be written.

Most students will not tum out to be Shakespeare, whatever reading list their institutions enshrine. But the educational event we call empowerment is the same for both readers and writers. It is one that replaces a fetishized respect for culture as a stagnant secular religion with respect for culture as a living historical process, in which one's own experience is seen as an authentic part.

5

Douglas Michael Massing

Miriam on Unrequited Love You're taken in at first she said by what seems a multitude of charms. Later you wonder how you could even in this very ordinary person. have imagined any magic she added It's not a question of substance versus surface and when Miriam makes distinctions I listen: and linguists fall she conjugates to their knees: she declines and grown men weep.

But if you continue she went on any kind of relationship - the word precisely as vague in her mouth as she wishedif you still leave yourself as it were exposed that would never annoy in the first a host of little things tends in time to confirm flush we call love the unwanted rejection as a good choice even our own the choice we should have surely would have made.

Am I going too fast she asked are you getting this down.

Don't worry I told her I'm making most of it up.

That's the trick she said it takes imagination you're home free . but once you get that far

6

.. . I see you on the street and someone turns a callower or harder face and I am disappointed and relieved like the time you threatened promised LA and took my map and sleeping bag and my father's watch or hearing noises in the night I click the light and check the locks or watering the violets I think

dirt's too high in the pot this one you planted or sun catches the little glass bird I thought you'd stolen till sun in it caught my eye reminded me of your gift for finding the perfect spot or when I wonder where my sex has gone: why I've become this shuttered deadbolt house while you are in the street the fog you lean against some mottled musky wall or wish you warm I don't wish you back or want another chance another day: at the things I used to do only wonder when you came sniffling at my privates like a stray

7

By Now of Course You Will Have Heard the war is over.

How you ever won I'll never know.

The only one of us you captured you let go.

Perhaps now I can resume the study of foreign tongues maybe even take up the tuba.

(Is the idiom in your eyes the same?)

It will be pleasant to have Tuesday evenings free .

I may write or walk along the ridge count the stars or city lights count the times we've had to learn how good it is to say the war is over.

8

Carole Bernstein

Alligator "Did he smile his work to see?"

"Handbag, here handbag," the smart-alec salesman from Dorset croons, bending over the rail toward the gray-green arrow skimming boatward fast, hungry. Its eye's lit on a marshmallow the Cajun steersman's thrown so we can watch the mouth- a long wavy zipperopen to a voodoo purse with stitched-in teeth.

It whomps the innocent buoy, on cue. "Here's one on the payroll," the guide banters. "Nine feet ."

Dog-paddling leisurely near, waiting for more, he's the slimiest thing I've ever seen.

The green-flecked black bayou water pours off his sides like oil as the short submarine torso sinks, lifts, head floating flat on the surface .

Duckweed plasters the mud-mosaic face, settles in the long eye-furrows .... Is it a face?

Those eyeballs look like the clouded vaseline glass we saw this morning at the Beauregard-Keyes Mansion.

But he's alive, all right: thin froggy legs, stunted arms with their pointed webbed hands paddle- tail snaking, and as we speed ahead, the whole length of it stretched behind the torpedo body waves upward at us, roller-coasters down.

The path he cut to meet us, obsidian through the clotted plants, still pulses: diamond shapes

9

in shrinking order, left by sharp-knived tail scales.

A pair of big dragonflies, red and orange, cruise by; a horsefly creeps blackly over the rail.

Well . Now we've seen one. A small excited boy, hair razor-cropped, says, "I wonder how it feels.

As for me, it's my latest worst-way-to-die, old jungle-film scenes paling before the real: those glistening flat heads fanned out at eyelevel, surround me, a bobbing morsel to be clawed apart, wolfed down; the fungial stink of webby jaws; no earthly reason in the eye light passes through to nothing I can recognize-not even hate, fear, or insanity.

Knowing it sees, but what, and how? Opaque to me as the black river. Our guide boasts he "knows gators"; grew up among the winding ways of the bayou. What is it he can confide in his French-Bronx-Southern accent? "Y'know, crocs

will go for ya right off, hear? But gators, why, a gator'll only attack when he's provoked."

What constitutes provoking, no one asks.

Now cypress swamps, dense-bearded, loom on our right, patrolled by a lone blue heron. And basking on fallen trunks, more, smaller, gators in sight .

The marshmallows sail out, but they won't try, maybe thinking our offering's a buried hook . ...

While his folks, I overhear, talk leather il'}dustry, the little boy, mouth open, looks and looks.

10

I wonder how it feels. Or how they do, since one minute we smilingly pitch candies, next, string them up for purses, belts and shoes.

Something grabs my arm . The salesman. "Here,

love, you're next. A bit glory towards the end ."

He presses a book in my hands. Some kind of old album, well thumbed, covered in reptile skin, that crackles in my fingers like the yellow Scotch tape that frames each peeling Polaroid: BAITED. HOOKED. HUNG UP. And finally lying on an outdoor table, lean, longer than the proud four flanking hunters, who grimace into the sun .

With a bright knife one's stripped the skin right off along one whole side: a wall of white-pink flesh.

The alligator smiles too, the length of his jaws, head thrown back as if swallowing a fish .

This squinting clan of men. How brave they've been, yes, and the sunshine hurts them. Though they've thrown the barb to its mark, maybe dressed to the hilt in skins, and I've just stopped, been struck, and smoothly own I own none of this, not the green heart, not the least root of a cypress that grows back up to shatter the water, we are part of how these came to be, and where they go.

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And Then, Her Mother's Dresses Torn Out of the Closet While she watched. Pig hands gripped, four fists stripped black hangers that clanged, banged empty, fell on the clothes heap, old fur coat with the hole, the good green linen, big dresses all, arms waving, severed stalks, blue-flowered for work, pleated plaid from Thanksgiving, some she'd sewn for herself, belts clanked, dress pads scattered down, it all came out. The larger hands, pig-uncle's, slung over his shoulder a silk one her aunt had described, her mother needs only this. And the matching pumps ... grabbed open drawers, old Playtex girdle shivered in hands, the shape of her, big sad bloomers, heaped on heap, stuffed into plastic garbage bags, jammed down with workboot to make room, bottomless bags .

From the bed, sitting, she saw their backs, or sides of red faces sweat as they worked, shirts stuck, green plastic sucked at palms, it would always be August, hot as hell, and uncle and cousin would always be pigs, and, later, thick-lipped, hooting soldiers out of certain Renaissance paintings, and fat Poles pointing the finger at someone who hid in the cellar; lumbering away, their broad slow-shifting backs unscarred by the eyes upon them,

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never a man and his son, color rising in overheated faces, ham-handed, hating what brushed close, rustle of women's things, cheap fabric, closet dust, mothballs, their eyes burned, teared; unable to tum, the small daughter behind them, huddled on the bed, that bit of black ripped ribbon pinned to her shirt, her imagined face a magnet.

The cousin, sixteen, is telling himself he's a man with a job to do, and somebody has to do this, to stop for a second is useless, but never, in twenty years, in a hundred, could she change them back from animals, even if you sat on the bed and smoothed her hair and murmured the truth in her pounding ear, and never did the men, in bed that night, dream dreams they redden to think of, in which they tore their hair and rent their clothes and wept.

13

Martha M. Vertreace

Scrapbook Sitting with me on the sofa, thumbing through Life we spread across our laps, my aunt remembers her father was a blacksmith.

Horse sweat, smoke of molten iron clung to his overalls; in his hair, dust raised by skittish hooves.

Each Sunday visit we look for pictures of blacksmiths, Currier and lves reveries she pastes on blue construction paper.

Beneath a gauze head shot in sepia, her finger traces the caption under her magnifying glass: "While cleaning a tomb near the great pyramid of Cheops earlier this year, inspectors unearthed a 22-year-old noblewoman buried 4600 years ago."

Plastic from the dry cleaners crackles with each page, sticks to my hand. I wonder why she wraps furniture like the closed wing of an old house.

Armchair outlines soften into the ghost my face resembles through cataracts.

"One of the oldest mummies ever discovered, she was interred with pottery, flint, jewelry, and a clove of garlic."

Her hand flits to my cheek, bids me pay attention as she reads with rhythm she slips into with nurses, ~rderlies, laundry ladies, when she tells about the ocean voyage he seldom mentioned , terms of indenture he hated. Thinking no one listens, she blurs the line between what he said, what she adds to fill in the blanks.

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"Much to the astonishment of Egyptologists, her teeth had been pulled and placed beside her."

Nothing left to make one think: female.

Her straight nose, sealed eyes could be those of any man who died before firm skin gave way to age. X-rays reveal her pelvic cradle, no bone grooves to show she gave live birth .

She opens windows to blow away vapors. Wind lifts the page, snow sifts through screens.

Wearing two dresses, a cardigan, pull-on polyester slacks underneath, she protects herself, calling me "Lena," her sister.

15

Donna Salli

Roadkill Don't ask me the color of the car, or the name of the bar it was leaving. The driver's face seemed somehow out of place; so don't ask me if his eyes were green or brown. It didn't matter then, and doesn't now: his lids shut down like Sunday in some Mormon town.

Don't ask me if I heard my mother cry out in her sleep, or if my father sought the window, dawn unfolding promises across his lawn.

Don't ask me if the shimmer in my head surprised me, when the fine sled that was my bones upended.

These are things that can't be mended.

Don't ask me if I thought to run, or if I tried- or, rather, stunned and tired of moving, simply stood doe-like in the headlights, in the woods.

16

Helene Pilibosian

The Cinderella Theme Cinderella visits me in a dream. Perhaps it is the ballet score that haunts my sleep.

Prokofiev's notes are lovely, deep.

The coach races toward midnight or the taxi races toward home. The telephone moans or a wolf howls at the hesitant night.

The dream is daring, has the cool breath of a cave where mineral snow glitters on a green fir tree.

The window is open to dark breezes that blow on me.

I lean completely upon the fairy tale, upon the nature of dreams that seem the waking state.

And I would stay but there is speaking to be done, and visiting the thousand observations of my way. Night has been dark and the day is brighter for that.

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My High Heels High heels are too loud, clicking a comment of some kind.

They are a shoestore, a be-good-to-cobblestones week, a freak on sand, a kick for the barefoot blues.

My heels have a Cambridge and Boston ring.

They sputter, try to tell a story that is too long, too edgy for feet that want to be free to cross the boundaries for a social pun or two. My feet have eaten too many shoes to be conceited or modest or anything like that.

They have met the Museum, Symphony HalL the wide pavement of new and old, the people who parade their personalities.

(What else to ~o?)

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Finally I kick off the high heels and walk barefoot upon the soft grass of tranquility, not needing the little bit of height they might lend, not heeding their wit, their stores, their compensations.

19

Kim Edwards

Patience The feeling to stay here is powerful. To stay here sitting in this tv chair with the screen on and not watching the show in the small viewer. To stay here looking at the larger screen, watching this little movie of the world.

For hours I sit and look and smell and hear. I do not taste much. The food in this place is bad news, not to be delivered to the tongue. I am looking for something new, familiar, close at hand. I see the guy when he first gets off the bus. He looks like he is from somewhere flat, I can tell by the way he walks and looks around himself openly. Corn stalks still between his toes. The boy is fresh.

So, I see him go up to the ticket counter and he probably is asking when he can get a bus out of this smelly joint in a quick way. He talks to the dude behind the window and shakes his head a lot and the guy is probably telling Cornboy that there are not any buses for a while. He is here.

Cornboy walks away from the window and checks out his immediate environment. He does not look unhappy, which interests me, I thought he would be pissed. He walks over to the vending machines and gets himself a candy bar. It is a Milky Way, I know because that machine has only Milky Ways to serve.

I settle in to watch. Cornboy takes a seat against the wall which is a good move because then he does not have to worry about covering his back . He finishes the candy bar and goes to the end of the row of seats he is in and throws the wrapper in a trash can. Points for neatness. I am keeping score.

Comboy is doing okay for ten minutes or so, then Charlie Man comes in to sell him some gold. Charlie Man the big black guy with lots of gold and prices not to be resisted. Not to be. Charlie Man wants to make a sale and Charlie Man figures Comboy is a good hit because Cornboy is new and wfll succumb to pressure. Charlie Man has his boy with him.

Charlie Man's boy stands guard with crossed arms and shades in place and he is letting Comboy know for real sure that any deal Charlie Man offers tonight is a one time special buy and should be grabbed up like right on this spot.

Comboy is not buying. Cornboy is shaking his head no but laughing with Charlie Man when Charlie Man laughs and Cornboy does not know

20

that Charlie Man only laughs as a prelude to setting his boy on a client who does not realize the incredible potential of the offered deal. Cornboy is saying no .

The boys in blue come out of the piss room where they have probably been checking under stall doors for the telltale signs of unnatural sex in action. Homeboys looking for homos and they do not like the color on Charlie Man's cheeks the way it is, so they tell Charlie Man to take it outside. , Hassle ensues. Fuck you . Fuck you. Outside boy. Pulling of billy clubs and Charlie Man says, No, babe, you the nigger, and takes his boy and his chains and moves out to avoid the fagbashers pissed off for lack of quarry.

The night is young.

Something is happening, but I do not know what it is. Cornboy, he is cooling, but not grooving. Cornboy does not find the theater as funny or scary as a field fresh white boy should. But, the thing is, Cornboy, he is looking too.

I see him watching. He does not even bother with the small screen . He puts his legs out in front of him. Long legs and he is comfortable with that. He is not worried about some nasty boy using his legs to trip on and then starting up a thing. Cornboy, he is just fine.

I have decided that he is from a place with pavement. Lawns, yeah, but pavement too and some alleys with big buildings. Cornboy went to school with some of this somewhere. Cornboy is just okay, he is breathing well.

Cornboy is young, so he attracts some sweet attention with his suitcase by his side. Lots of warm beds for Cornboy tonight. He has that fresh face look so appealing to the older generation of gentlemen who frequent the toilets. Cornboy is pretty appealing all the way around in this arena. I watch him make new friends.

The first guy is small, in a business suit. The first guy has told his wife that he has late business meetings and then come here looking for some nice thing just like Cornboy. Cornboy is going to say no a lot tonight.

Cornboy he talks and smiles and shakes peoples' hands and maybe he could grow up to be a politician but he has made no move yet to go kiss the baby that the Mexican lady has bundled up on a chair across the room next to her bag full of clothes and her toaster sticking out on top.

Cornboy has not kissed the baby yet, so maybe he does not want to be a politician, maybe he is just going to be a movie star.

The second guy is a sailor which I think is pretty funny. Where you going sailor? Going to the toilet. Want to come? Naw, sailor, I'm busy sitting here being a part of some girl's movie. And that is when I notice that Cornboy knows who I am.

Cornboy looks at me and smiles. I look at the little screen. Cornboy,

21

hell of a dude. Bitchin dude, that Comboy. I watch the little screen and then I look up and Comboy smiles again, but then he just leans his head back against that wall that has been painted with the grease of millions of heads of hair, none of which have ever looked at me with eyes like Comboy's eyes. Blue. And I pout the word and my lower lip sticks out because his eyes are blue and he sees me and he knows who I am. I am the one who is watching him.

Comboy attracts a lady or two. Ladies who think he might like to tour the asphalt on the side of the station where the streetlights are not so bright. Blow job, Comboy, go for it. But Comboy just smiles and shakes his head no and his hands make movements like they are stroking goodbye, not a push away, not a shove away, not even a go away. Comboy is saying, no thank you.

I am from a flat place. I am maybe from where Comboy learned how to pee standing up, from where Comboy's mom makes brownies for afterschool kids and gives them milk. My house had a lawn. I am from a place with lawns and shrubs and geraniums in planters in the summer when the air feels as warm as blood, inside and out.

I scratch behind my ear and think about leaving. About leaving there, not here. I look over to Comboy and his blue eyes are shut and I wonder if maybe he is going to get his stuff taken away. I wonder if maybe while Comboy keeps those blue eyes that make my lip pout blue eyes shut, someone is going to go shopping for his bags. I watch while the blue eyes are closed. I decide to happen to Comboy, to be his eyes while he keeps the blues shut. I watch for Comboy to keep him safe.

So I get up from where I am and I move. I move closer over to where Comboy is stealing some sleepy time and I sit in a chair not so far away as I was from Comboy a short few steps ago. I pull my leg up inside under me in the plastic mold seat and lean against the plastic mold arm, to the right so that I can keep Comboy in the big screen on the left.

What is it? I think to myself. What is he? He is sleeping in this station with a suitcase and a case for carrying a guitar or two big horns or some guns or fifty thousand Tootsy Rolls packed real tight. Corn boy.

I bet he smiles a lot. I bet someone loves him, a lot. I bet he gets along good with his dad and his mom and maybe he has a sister that he watches out for when he is back at home. He finished high school, for certain. He reads bookS:. There is one stuck in the side pocket of his bag. He reads books and he likes words because he talks to people. I saw him talk to people-Charlie Man and the blue boys and the suit and sailor and another night prowler or two looking for relief and to the nasty girls more than once. Comboy listens to them and then he talks and then listens again and smiles and that is the thing. Cornboy listens. That is the thing about Cornboy. Some kind of sweet cruel miracle just waiting to happen and I decide to let Comboy happen to me.

22

But, I will wait a while first. Maybe if he leaves, I will follow him.

Maybe I will want to know where he is going, which bus he is taking or where he is walking or who he might be waiting for here in this movie place placed in the middle of the world.

I want to touch him. I want to feel the skin on the hands that stroke the air no thank you. Thank you, but no. I want to touch the hand and make it say yes.

This Comboy is nice. I have only heard his voice low from across the room, a sound in the noise from everywhere else, but the voice was nice, like the smile and the eyes and the head asleep against the wall and the hair that falls against the cheek is soft and brown and I could hide there and it would be quiet inside. I like the way Comboy feels from across a room. Comboy feels just right.

Comboy feels, just right. He feels things like when someone wants to talk to him. This is the thing I can tell about Comboy: he can feel when someone wants to talk. He feels them just right .

Comboy opens the blues and with one hand touches for his bags and with the other pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lights the cigarette and leans forward, elbows on his knees hands hanging down but head held up eyes looking out. Comboy is still watching and I have a feeling he was even watching with his eyes closed.

Pretty pictures on the Comboy's eyelids. He dreams movies of where he was and is and will be. Comboy needed some time to get away. So, Comboy came here.

He scratches his head and rubs the space between his eyes. The blue boys walk by and look at him and talk about vagrants kind of loud and Comboy squeezes the back of his neck and I lean my head back to feel what Comboy feels and place my hand on me where his hand is on him.

He is tired and he is growing tired of being in this place. I can tell; he is restless. Comboy lights another cigarette and shifts his bag around with his foot. He reaches down and looks at the book in his bag's side pocket, he touches the book, but leaves it where it is stowed. Later for reading.

Two guys with knapsacks come in and they are laughing and pushing one another and talking in a talk that I hear but cannot understand . They look like the guy behind the counter of the 7-11 down the street. They talk real fast and they go to the row of chairs where Comboy sits.

The two guys are giggling like they have been doing drugs with wonderful inhibition lifting qualities. They call to Comboy, Hey cowboy.

Comboy has on cowboy boots. Hey cowboy, they call, Where's your cow? Where's your cow? They laugh and giggle and sputter and one hits the other on the back.

Comboy smiles. He just smiles. I want to touch his teeth. I want to open the smile on his face and touch his teeth so I know if his parents spent money on braces. I want to know if Cornboy ever had braces.

23

One of the knapsacks walks over to Cornboy. Knapsack says, You got a cow, cowboy? I want to see your cow. Knapsack looks back at his friend and his friend is laughing. Cornboy says, Sorry, no cow. Why not? Where is your cow, cowboy? I ate the cow, says Cornboy. Cow all gone. Knapsack and his friend love this. Cow all gone. Cowboy ate the cow. All gone. Knapsacks are happy, so they go away, to the ticket window, out the door, they say Hello Mr. Policemans on the way out and the blue boys scowl and say, Fucking Iranians, too loud.

Cornboy is alone again. He is watching me. He smiles his closed-lip smile.

I walk to the vending machine and look at the junk inside. I think about buying a Milky Way. I walk over to Cornboy and say, Could I borrow a quarter, please? He pulls a quarter from his pocket and gives it to me. The quarter is warm. I walk back to the machine and put his quarter in my pocket, then use my own quarters to buy the candy bar.

I sit down one chair away from Comboy, almost next to him. I can smell him now. He smells like cigarettes and bus guts and just a little bit like soap. Like he is clean under the smell of this place. I open the wrapper to the candy bar and ask, Would you like some? Cornboy smiles and says, No thanks. You waiting for a bus? I ask. I want to know. What are you waiting for, Cornboy7 No, Cornboy says. He says, No, I was waiting for a friend, but he seems to not be showing his face.

I want to know where he is from. I want to know his friend's name and where his friend is from and where his friend will take him. I want to touch one of the small white buttons on the front of his clean white shirt.

I want to put my hand between his arm and his body to feel for wetness.

Cornboy, do you sweat? I want to ask him if he sweats.

I can do this, sit here near him and just do this, leaning back against the wall and sometimes chewing on the Milky Way and just being here near Comboy. This is something I can do . I do not have to think about leaving here. I can stay here now and just wait for Comboy to make a move. I do not have to make the decision to leave, Comboy will do that forme .

He smokes slow. He smokes long slow inhales and exhales and plays with the smoke sometimes letting it slide from his mouth up through his nose or blowing rings or puffs or long slow exhales. His arm moves from hanging at his side to h~s mouth then down again. The cigarette, the light at the tip of his hand moving across the sky in front of him showing stray ships where they are.

I put my hand in my pocket and feel for the quarter. There it is, a loner at the bottom of this pocket, the one that was empty with no other change until I put Cornboy's quarter there. I feel the quarter at the bottom of my pocket and hold it there and rub it in place through the of my jeans against my thigh.

24

I rub the quarter and think about it like it is a magic lamp and I rub it Comboy appears. He is a genie and must grant me three wishes and I would wish for is this: See me, Comboy, know I am here. Hear Comboy, know I am breathing. Touch me, Comboy, feel I am The blue boys are walking back around this way again. Comboy says me, Are these guys real nasty? Are they looking for a fighn They like to see boys in bracelets, I say. "' Comboy smiles, he likes the way I talk .

Yeah, he says, I thought maybe it was something like that.

As long as you're quiet, they don't bother you too much, I say. But you're new, so they might want to hassle you some just for the sport.

They like their sport.

I'll be good, Cornboy says. Mind watching my stuff while I go to the mtroom7 I say to Cornboy, Aren't you afraid I'll take off with something?

He uses the blues, direct shot to my soul and says, No. Comboy goes to the toilet and I watch his stuff. I touch the book with its yellow-topped pages and run my fingers along the bag's zipper. I put my hand through the handle to the case full of Tootsie Rolls and close my fingers around it. I am touching Comboy's stuff. These are the things he keeps close to him and I am touching them with my hands.

I lean back in my seat then forward again to check out the title on Comboy's book. JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT. It is a thick one. Comboy has a marker in it, about half way through. I decide I will go to the library and get the book. I will read this book of Cornboy's to see what he is thinking about.

He sits down again and pulls out his pack of cigarettes. He holds one out to me, but I shake my head no. I do not smoke. He smokes Marlboros and I can not help but think that these are the right cigarettes for him to smoke and if I were going to smoke, I would smoke them too .

Then I remember Comboy's boots and how Marlboro men wear cowboy boots and ride horses and I wonder if Comboy ever rides horses. He does not walk with bowed legs. I wonder if his mom took him for pony rides when he was little. I wonder when he was little. How many years ago7 Not many, I decide, not too long ago.

We sit there, Comboy and I, almost together, almost right next to each other and I think that the thing about Comboy is that not only does he know when people want to talk to him, but he knows when they just want to sit there too . So he just sits there almost right next to me and stretches out his legs and I lean back comfortable where I am almost next toComboy.

A bus unloads and people walk through but not too many because it is getting toward those hours of the day when it is too late to be up late and too early to be up early and most people really are at home in bed . So the 25

bus empties and that is the big action for a half an hour or so because Charlie Man has split for the night long ago and now that I am sitting so close to Cornboy, the toilet men figure he is taken and do not bother to check him out too close up although they still do those big long looks from a few feet away, and the ladies who make a living are out of here by now because they know how few passengers will be around this time of night and that the better money is out on the street. So it is a quiet time on the movie screen and this is one of those places where the composer fills in with proper scoring and the music here would be nice. Nice and cool and quiet and soothing. It would be a lullaby.

The only thing that happens is that the Mexican lady's baby wakes up.

The baby wakes up and makes a lot of crying sounds and the noise is big because all the other noises in this place are gone or muffled now so the baby is the big noise here. But that does not last long because she picks up the baby and cuddles it and coos at it and then the PA says something about a bus and the lady gets up and lines up to board with the two knapsacks who are not so giggly anymore and some old dude with a beard down to his waist and a waitress who still has her Denney's uniform on. They line up for the bus and get on and then the bus makes its leaving noises and pulls out of its loading place and it is gone.

So, now the place is even more empty and Cornboy sits up. He stretches his arms and looks at the clock on the wall and it says 4:U. Cornboy rubs his eyes and looks to me and offers a smile and then he says, You waiting for a bus?

No, I say, just looking.

Cornboy does not ask. He knows what I mean.

You have beautiful eyes, he says.

I want to hide my face and blush because I think that maybe that is what I should do, but I do not. I look into the blues.

Yeah, he says, real pretty eyes.

Cornboy holds out his hand and says, My name's Johnny.

I touch his hand, I hold it in mine and say, I'm Elizabeth .

Well, Elizabeth, he says, glad to meet you. I guess I ought to be now since my friend must just be expecting me at his place. Can you tell me how to get to the RTD? I'll show you, I say.

I walk him outside and we smile at each other and he says, Do you it here?

Yeah, I say, it's almost flat.

26

Jeff Schiff

ers my brother's, we play all night their tune from a half mile off: spent cello, on the mend, latex reverie. the years, I've learned little. living in town, as I do now, miss them, leaping ignorance, frogness in the face of white humanity overhead. summer camp, would test the small ones for distance, sand wedge a duffer's sense of how high the moon.

Lord's musty reminder that we are slimy inches both inception and demise, they each seem to lust after a different prince.

What I admit about croakers, I admit about the rest

or in the continuing past have often relished walking erect and left it at that .

It's hard to sleep in a strange bed, the world thrumming its green late into the watery dark.

27

Drought The radio is all warning this June/ July: water in advance of all things, as if at other times that counsel differed.

Simple to mistake thirst for need, under pressure.

My neighbor soaks his lawn at dusk, the county patrol a divining rod, a sanction on wheels upholding the local ban.

Living at the lake as we do, parched is ten less strokes to shore, is tide not often enough and carp in the shallows.

But why not wash your car on the sly or hose down your walk when you can't see Michigan for the whitecaps across fifty miles of inland surf?

Drought is downpour elsewhere.

I figure what happens out on my block is reversed in Santo Domingo, Aswanthe planet of possibility an acre of sod on the moon, green till it bursts, lichenous, the great tale of moss and wet slumber told over and over.

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Lynn Domina

Long Grief Ann Marie Halubschock hands are buried dishsoap and stroke the plates leisurely I would smooth a child's back couldn't sleep. We women have gathered traditional way in the kitchen. Balancing equality privacy, I half-listen until my grandmother petltlcms she had a first daughter died well before there was thought of another. her face stiffens against her grief, wish my body were porous enough absorb each of the sixty anniversaries their lurching solitude. But I remember this family I've returned to from need shamefully as my mother turned away I asked how I would know was finished with being a child. the darkness past our kitchen window, a strange familiar face stares into our company. grown into it as if the woman daughter would be couldn't be wasted. Surely, had been chosen to bring tenderness our lives. I've called myself the absent one, but tonight I can't IUI''""'vc:' which woman I'm supposed to be, whose expression must bear into the world. night in a different darkness, man who would be my husband my face against the rise and fall his chest. I glance from my reflected eyes my submerged hands, wondering I will say harbor grief enough already.

29

The Tandem Though you've ridden once before You let me steer, giving The rhythmnic push To set us going. In front Afraid to stop for fear We cannot start again, I tighten my grip On the handlebars When we wobble, And approaching intersections, Slow till the light Turns green or crane my neck To check left and right Before gliding through The STOP I make a YIELD. Seated in back With handlebars That will not budge I notice the smell of lumber, and I hear boards Being hammered to homes Enduring renovation.

Pedalling, I learn We do not split the weight.

As a master, towed By too large an animal Must trust that it knows The right path, I can only pedal When you pedal and lean The way you lean Or wreck this thing.

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George W. Smyth

Are Madder at last for him, after unique and maddening but unfelt violence his continental journey, all flairs and provocations met and '"''uuc:u for, all patterns of behavior, to his hate and likeness disesall extremist inside and outside influences conquered, their and amazing pattern and manner duly noted for their and his conscience if not vision, all his bills in and added, his accounting but not valued or charged, at last now comes his latest urgent What kind of homecoming citizen will he develop into and place in the world can he hold? Will he be a winner or a loser in visand invisible races? He examines, pries deeply into his values and wants to be an honest and mature man, a solid and true citizen, tasted vehemence and gustiness and put aside a tendency for revenge, sign, healthy, he thinks. He is no longer, on the other hand, a for sentiment, another good sign, healthy, he thinks. Believing is being made on the path to his fulfillment as a human being, he he will somehow become a winner, trusts and regards his strengths, they will show him a way to a calling, new or old, hopes he will be to cope and answer and do anything, anything at all.

Up from a dripping and peppery coastal zone, full of pith and bounce a measure of cheer, transformed after minor but shifty manipulation a pudgy little profiteer resulting from speculation, informed, in of pearls and salt, he is glad to be out of the mixed-up strident with six rush hours every day. Fortunate he is to have escaped ink other explosives, oblong ossified butterflies and large onyx owls his way after objecting to a notice in a cocktail bar, "Dogs and Blue Peccary and the Black Watch and Wild and Comely Women Not . And now he is wondering in his place of birth exactly what to do, what first to do, to become some sort of entirely whole perbut is the slightest bit disenchanted. People desire his money. Faunpester him. The various governments undermine and challenge complicated tax structures and status. Youth organizations claim him one of their own, praise his oriented and erudite brain leanings to his and request endorsements and announcements and, mostly, checks, their causes, money not forthcoming because he feels he is, while not his prime, into closely-and-stealthily-approaching young middle is, after all, after a very great deal, many deals, thirty-four and .. .

31

And counting, he does an amount of counting, not just his money, which is half paper anyway, counts his decisive female conquests and number disturbs him, as no other numbers do, wonders mdleci.SlVeiY about other men his age, in a normal way, wonders what they do ... normal wondering. He is full of good signs, mostly about himself. but he does possess, in spite of his healthy insights, a normal amount uncertainty, normal, he hopes and is beginning to believe, for the He has been out of the country seven years, and he counts this time well-spent, productive in its, his, way, but just a little unreal and ting for the nece.ssary, he thinks, current adjustment to the ways, means, of his country. All the things. All the many things he didn't about, or think about, before. Everything. Anything. All callings and answers. All answers and no callings. Everything. Nothing. But he hopes. Anything. Anything at all.

And count, he does count. He counts real and imagined wrongs, rights, from his family, dead and alive, but quickly puts this . . . ....'"'"'"'"' behind him, out of sight, in his mind. He wishes to bestow kindness love upon those who would and could help him come to terms with . . everything, anything, all things rediscovered and uncovered, but counts ... only two friends. One is complex and sensitive but lessly naive and full of anxiety and tension. The other is energetic receptive but endlessly boring and full of anxiety and tension. One vocal, one is auditory, and neither says much nor listens well. Their cial instincts, in the past seven or eight years, seem to have been forever by some vital and primitive but accustomed evil, not ""'.'"'• ...... understood, not under wide or narrow control, not yet labeled or by drug companies, anyone, anything. But counting, but by counting, counts agitation over his friends' plights as his only stimulation, needed now, in a world of conducted meanings and forgotten aims feels he has returned to. He yearns, in a way, for a return to ink and multiplied rush hours and absurd notices in bars. But he feels he being tested in some quirky way, and he wishes to use his senses, ever positive or negative tentacles he can summon or command, assuage his guilt and their sickness which he would not like to see He feels oddly responsible for his unfortunate friends. He keeps played ear, loaned, to the ground, his peeled eye, out, to the wanting to be alert and open to nuances and reverberations which convince him he is a whole and reasonable man and belongs to a and conceived world and can help someone, something, anyone, thing calling him, calling him more than once.

And more and more he senses things are not going right for him, anyone. He thinks he fights a losing battle, does not exactly, even actly, know the enemy, someone, anything, to answer. But he counts battle, vague thing it is, as just one more loss on the road to rn~•hn,.,tvl

32

he wishes to reclassify his losses. Gains, he tells himself, it is gains . . . count, and he adds them daily, but they confuse him, and conis not to his liking. Gains, too many of the things that should be now seem sadly mad, or madly sad, he thinks, perhaps the same Gains confuse him, in the sense that they sadden and madden him, he thinks, perhaps it's all the same to me, with me. But I should for certain. Something. Anything.

Gains, he asks his secretary, a large and jolly woman who comes in hours every morning to his home on a hill, what are today's gains7 she says, laughing, is no object, how about that7 Oh, but it is the he feels, but doesn't say. He has already opened the day's mail thrown out nine requests and five pleas for money. Money solves he feels. It only brings ... everything. Everything is not what wants. He has taken care of the mail because his secretary has a soft and a light hand and he doesn't wish to burden her. She has her full answering the telephone, which almost never stops ringing. He he should have the instrument removed, but he doesn' t wish to touch, and his secretary needs something to do. Oh, she says the price of salt is holding steady, but it will never come up to or snuff, for all that, and laughs. A gain, perhaps, he thinks, and her frivolous comment, her teasing laugh. A gain, yes, he thinks, still he wonders, with some feeling of injustice, why one, common salt, is so cheap, and one, common table sugar, is so expensive. Are both vital substances from the earth7 But he explains once more to secretary, who listens now like a child, that salt is found, sugar is and, he says, this is as simple as I can make it. Once more, like a she frowns in confusion, and he wishes he could share her inner convey his inner and outer resentment. But he is, he feels first and foremost a business person, and he must present a case at all times, conceal his indignation, albeit, perhaps, he thinks, some cost, past or future. Somewhere in there.

But all that aside for now, salt and sugar, he thinks, why cannot they in the market, churn around a bit, one on top, then the other, more that way, if less money. Why did he have to pick such a common item salt7 Pearls, he knows, though from the earth and sea, in their way, are only a hedge. It's salt .. . that counts, very large amounts of it. The intricacies of the salt situation are too much for his secretary, he knows, lhe seems all too completely amazed at the business, its size, and he thinks he should let her go for their common good, but she is a widow five growing children, who must all, like their mother, eat a tremendous amount. Now pearls, he tells her, trying to make her feel better, pearls, many of them, are from the great seas, but they, too, are grown, but they are also found, which factors, plus some other delicate matters, tend to keep the price steady and high, much higher than sugar. Listening

33

intently, she completely breaks down and sobs uncontrollably. Now, wait, he says, what have I done now? He tries to smile and makes a weak joke about snuff, worse than hers. She dries her tears and laughs. She says she understands now about pearls, and salt, too, and sugar, certainly, much better than before. She smiles, and there is a gain, he thinks.

You, he tells her, are the salt of the earth, you really are, and she breaks down again and nearly goes into convulsions. But, he says quickly into her ear, bending over her, fearing a loss and a hospitalization, you are also and more valuably the pearl of the seas, priceless, almost, and now she recovers completely and smiles very sweetly, demurely. He thinks, should she be a conquest? She is panting and batting her eyelashes at him. He wonders. He decides. No, she would be . .. indecisive. I, he thinks, must stop being a slave to passion and its pitiless and stiff offshoots. Sex, he figures, and can only smile to himself, is bad for the business . . . at hand, in hand. Salt . Pearls . That's my line, my place in the relentless world, and besides she has a belly on her that's bigger than mine. But, to do something to please her? Deal in snuff? Does that belong in my line? No, no, he thinks, I am not thinking clearly, straight does it.

My adrenalin is not out of whack, my thyroid gland is enlarged but in place, my liver is hard but holding, all is right for the moment, I believe.

I am happy enough, my secretary is calmed, is still smiling. I wish I could smile so nicely, I wish she could give me her smile and her giddiness, not her body. I wish I could smile without looking like a complete, or incomplete, idiot, a fat and mad fool. I know I could never, never laugh. No penchant for that inborn release. Me, laughing! Total and complete absurdity! But I should smile, I should try. I should practice. Perhaps .. . a mirror?

His secretary is now staring at him, her smile gone, and he turns and looks out the window to a green field. And in his place of birth, he thinks, his mind wandering again, he knows he should contact or visit the remnant of his family. He has changed his mind about his brother, decides now, back on the track, that his closest relative may hold some key to his position in the present circumstance in which he finds himself.

His older brother had been his idol, years ago . Recently, he has been an apparition, a ghostly admonishing presence. Out, he believes, that image must go. He asks his secretary, who is now doing finger exercises on the typewriter; to call his brother, forget salt and pearls and money and love and snuff 路and stuff, and call his brother. She doesn't laugh or break down and he wonders about her. He was half expecting one or the other.

She stares at him, her fingers frozen on the keyboard. Call my brother, he repeats. Remember, after all, love and gains, he tells her. Count your blessings, he tells her, and she removes her hand from the typewriter, now she smiles and he is relieved. She holds up her splayed hand. blessings, she says. Five, she says, five, count 'em, five. Then she

34

she can't hardly wait to go in the grandmother business, and now he wonders even more, but he counts slowly to himself and then says, my brother, call him. Call him? she inquires. Call him? Call him what? She is unaware of her triteness, is not fazed, and continues: he has already been called, she informs, called in this sort of way. Didn't you know? Don't you care? Have you no feeling? I care, he says, and I feel, but I don't know, didn't know, and what do you mean? Coldly she advises: while teaching a course in the relationship between the police state and the advertising industry in some kind of school, he was yanked out of this sort of class, questioned by some kind of authority, fired from his kind of job, hired by a public relations firm, sort of, and then dismissed definitely when he was quoted in some kind of newspaper as saying, "The only people I know who aren't dizzy are deaf-mutes." Didn' t you never know, sir? Don't you care, sort of, a little, don't you? She is not smiling.

He wishes she would smile, or laugh, or have a fit, or something, but she only stares blankly.

Call him, call him, call him anything, call him anyway, especially now, he orders, call my brother, he may need me, and she says grimly that his request will have to be handled through channels. I'll swim them, through them, around them, over them and under them if you can't and won't, he says, and knows that saliva is dripping all too slowly from his mouth and wonders what has come over him, his secretary, his brother.

He says something, he doesn't know what, and she picks up the telephone and dials and says she is calling his brother. I am dialing the, er, rehabilitation center, this kind of place, she says. He vaguely hears her make a request on the telephone. She sounds strangely efficient. Her personality seems to have changed, altered by-She turns and says softly to him, only living relative? Yes, he tells her, watching the odd movement of one of her eyebrows, and just what place are you calling? Don't you really even know after all this time? she says. No, he shouts, after all this time I don't, really, and she tells him that his brother has, among other things, broken a pattern, a set sort of thing, and has been declared, among other things, a ward of the county. Not even, he says, the state?

No, she says, just the county, it's easier that way, don't you know? Yes, he says, it must be. He closes his eyes and thinks, my eyes close but my ears don't, and neither does my . .. past. Let me speak to the doctor, some official, he says. What doctor, his secretary says, didn't you know there was a shortage? Didn't you even know that? Everyone knows that.

Who, he asks, are you speaking to on that telephone? Some kind of nurse, she says, with this sort of funny voice. Funny, he says, funny? He grabs the telephone and she lowers her eyebrow back in place. Get my big brother, he says into the instrument. We've probably got him, sir, a voice answers, but just let me check and make sure he hasn't scooted off to the circus or some kind of show or something, some little show we

35

don't have around here all the time. He screams, get him, get him or else!

Or else what, sweetie-puss? the voice asks. Want to come see us about some problem, talk yourself over to us or something? He looks at the telephone, then hands the instrument to his secretary, now smiling, clucking her tongue, now frowning, making chirping noises.

You did it to him, she says. What they're doing to him, you did it.

Didn't you know that? He just couldn't stand your little bit of success down there south in that there foreign country, and then there were some other things, but you started it, you did it all right. You, his little baby brother, with your salt and your pearls. But I did nothing, he moans, and then, too, I did everything. For- my mother, my father, my-They .. . are dead, and-You killed them, she says. Didn't you know, or guess, or wonder, or ... nothing? You left the fold, they called it, and you killed them, in your way, because, your brother said, they were . . . in your way. You broke their poor hearts. You killed them in that sort of way.

They were good, simple people who couldn't understand the awful ways of the world, your awful ways with men and women and, I believe your brother said, society and its awful ingrown-nailed ways. Your grasp of the world, your brother said, was beyond your parents, his parents, and you killed them. Awful. You killed them both, she says. Didn't you know that? You don't know anything, do you, sir? I mean, nothing. Do you, sir? You're crazy, he shouts to his secretary, you're crazy in all sorts of ways, you sound like my sister before she-Yes, his secretary says, and you also caused her poor heart to stop. You did, yes you did, you and your awful designs, and now your poor brother isHe picks up a very heavy paperweight and crushes his secretary's head with it. She slumps to the carpet. He turns and stares out the window to the green field. Five children she has, he thinks, my God, five. What will I do with them? What will they do with me? And what will they do with me? What will I do with them? None could be madder. And so .. . rightly so. Two parents and now three, and one brother and one sister, he thinks. I count five, he thinks, and then I count five .. . more. I count ten. Dead and alive and dead and- I count losses, I count only those now, and I cannot, I shall not count anything more that is real, ever again. There are no gains anywhere. None to be seen, or felt, or heard, or touched, or thought about. Nothing. My two anxious and tense friends are 路probably dead, long dead. Gains are mad, one or ten . Losses are madder, ten, or twelve, or eleven, five . . . or six. One or none.

None are madder.

Then, like an animal, he smells, tastes danger, and he knows, unlike an animal, it is all inside him, all in his past come back to him in a sad and present rush. But he sees ahead, nothing but dead bedlam ahead, other unavoidable catastrophes ahead surging blindly toward him. He wishes he could scream like an animal, but he cannot make a sound. He picks up

36

the paperweight and places it on a sheaf of papers reporting the current price trends in salt and pearls around the world, and does not see, only smells blood that has smeared the papers, that has come from his secretary's smashed head, that has stained his hand.

A beeping sound bothers him and he looks at the telephone on the desk and puts it together. How nicely it fits, he thinks. How neatly the two parts go together, or is it- ? The speaking part, the hearing part, and then there is the ... useless part? He stares at the instrument, doesn't care to think about it anymore. Only how quiet and orderly it is in its present state, how right. And, he thinks suddenly, how right the world is, after all, in its way. And actually how secure his place in it is, after all.

How nearly mature and complete his life and citizenship and manhood is, after all, in some way. How fulfilled everything is, afterThe telephone rings and he is not surprised, does not move in fear or astonishment. He has expected it to ring and is not upset at the intrusion .

Certain intrusions have never disturbed him all that much . They are, he knows, a part of living. He lets the telephone ring ten times, he counts the rings and the pauses, he counts one more ring, one more pause, and when the sound stops, and then, after seconds, resumes, he stops counting the noise and the silence and takes a pair of scissors off the desk. He opens them and looks at the telephone cord. Then he closes the scissors and grasps them in his fist. He will not cut anything into pieces. An invisible race has already been lost. He will let the telephone die a natural and temporary death. He will kill nothing else but-When the ringing stops, the holding pattern gone, no good sign, he will grip the scissors more firmly in his fist and he will plunge the closed blades into his chest and only then will he know that he has been called, and he, only then, will answer with final questions. Strongly he will be called, perhaps again, he thinks, and strongly will he answer, certainly again, he feels, by asking his questions. He knows that very well, now he knows.

But he knows that, in his way, in the world's way, he will answer to no one, to nothing, nothing that he does not care to answer. He knows that all are mad though right, everything is mad though wrong, even when right, but nothing . . . none are madder, though right or wrong, then he, at this moment, and he loses nothing by counting himself. He believes he is something more than a completely fulfilled person and citizen, his own human being, his very own created thing, right and wrong. He is at a certain measure of peace with himself and a noisy world, the world within himself and without. He smiles now, knows he is smiling and begins to count the rings, only the rings, of the telephone again . It must have rung thirty times by now. No, he thinks, forty, maybe sixty times, off and ... on. No one but a crazy person would do that. A crazy person calling another ... crazy person? No, he thinks, that couldn't, shouldn't, be right. But can it be wrong? None are madder than37

The telephone keeps ringing and he keeps smiling, counts twenty more rings, forgets the pauses, and then he stops counting and starts laughing, knows he is laughing. The sound is not a surprise. He believes it is the very first time he has ever laughed. He knows he should be surprised and pleased, but he is not, but he laughs. The ringing and the laughing, their mingling, their delirious connection, no one but a crazy person . . . one, or two, would .. . wouldHe closes out the ringing from his mind and welcomes the silence.

Silence, he thinks, silence called, nothing called, everything called ... and recalled, all, none, just too much and nothing at all, called, held, touched for good at last. Called too late. Known too late. None are madder, none are happier, nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Now. He laughs, he keeps on laughing. He thinks, I am a winner, in this way, nothing if not honest and solid, and now he remembers his silent and lost childhood, his alarmed and disappeared family, and he counts . . . faces, visible and invisible. He counts himself. I, he thinks, am one of those . . . invisible, at some first but final edge with vision, and then he holds the scissors up above him with his tightened fists, stops laughing, knows it, starts crying, does not know it, and just within the moment before he brings the blades down into his throat, he answers before he questions and says, brother, oh my brother, my lost soul, my matured and blooded facsimile, you don't need to call me, I hear your ringing now, I see you clearly, there's nothing you can do, I've done it all. Something must teD you that. I've done it all, for you, for them, everything and now nntrn•r•• but this fitting end. Don't you know, don't you see? Just this now, you do see, at first and at last, this final thrust and last hurt, first offering me, for them, for you . Yes, you . Don't you know that? Don't you know would join you there in your place of confinement and contact the side world if I could? Doesn't seeing me now at last tell you anything all about the living? About you?

38

]ames Doyle

The Brides gather for the descent from the cross, eager with prayer, scented oils stripped raw from the household budget, wooden rings and anklets, veins taut with unborn children, heads bent over a seamless linen.

This is love, the pale olive of the wedding aisle, the splayed nails, flint catching like candles, the altar stone adorned in bright bouquets of red, a white processional of shrouds woven like lining into the darkened air.

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Gregory A. Ryan

Winter Palace Tour With white bones beneath his feet he counts skulls, turning them into steps that lead to rooms of red marble and thick motifs, of slippery silver floors with click like twigs after freezing rains. Then, with Lenin's photo in his pocket, he takes a peasant by the sleeve and places him into the palace for eternity, listening to the pronouncements of clocks, of history donning a black hood and gloves.

Terrace View You stand at the bedroom window, letting sun warm your skin. It is May, and below a man and woman weigh a last word before the pounding of workers obscures their parting.

At your feet, you drop petals from dried bouquets, which carpet the floor, sky and clay.

You talk of hiding stones found in streams the night before, when the air was swollen with lilies, and the water kept us cool.

You held me there, wishing the grass would ignite into music, spinning around us a cocoon of sound, voiceless within that reticule.

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William John Watkins

is a spider the moon a silk thread. moon is a fly, wrapped. you look close, can see him in there, squirming an old man's face

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An Invitation Where a mountain rises too high for trees, the wind relaxes into its native tongue.

Say what you like above timberline: your words are homeless, immigrants even you don't comprehend .

What grass takes root shakes till snow buries it.

Wirephoto The structure across the street and to his left might be an office building or a garage.

Behind him, a wall looms, blocking the light .

His profile is from the Old Testament and handsome. I can't see his lips; he's taking aim. A picture of the Madonna decorates the handle of his gun. Perhaps he believes she'll help.

The smooth skin of his curved fingers makes me want to run mine down into the little hollows where his hand joins his wrist.

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Passing Through the Papago Reservation lam wind.

I skirt this lone grave, its cross wreathed in flame red plastic flowers.

Here is a saguaro, pocked from much pecking.

Beside it I find broken glass; a discarded wreath; a child; his mother with a rental car and a camera.

The mother wants to ask questions, out loud, of the sky, but she is a white person with only so much time here.

Besides, she worries, this child might think his mother had lost her mind.

I can see that when she grows old enough, she'll change into a desert wind; she'll spend that life discussing life with the blue. She lets me play against her skin all day

till she believes this.

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Yielding Wind in a fir, wind in a field, sky blown bare between storms.

Wind on the heels of wind in the fir.

Winter light- mere, blue, and real, from sky blown bare in November.

Fir shadows feel the wind in the fir; bough shapes veer in a gust's great zeal.

Sky just bare prepares to pour, while a maple yields to wind, to a fir, to the word "bare."

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Eric Horsting

Lament Deb leaves the room.

She doesn't say why.

The room turns blue.

We all start to cry.

We all start to cry.

The room turns blue .

Deb leaves the room.

She doesn't know why.

The room knows why.

We all leave the room .

We all start to cry.

The room turns blue.

Deb starts to cry.

We all know why.

The room starts to cry.

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Steven Goldsberry

The Subtlest and Liveliest of Bodies

Neoplatonic Aesthetics and Waves

The First Wave Along the horizon, the morning sun breaks the clouds, stippling the dark ocean swells with gold. The first wave of the set rises over the reef.

A surfer paddles toward it. The water slips along his board. Whorls of current tum in the smooth green wake behind him.

He has chosen a dangerous spot to surf. Today the waves run in straight ten-foot peaks, the take-offs like jumping a cliff. Where the waves break, the reef comes up shallow, with coral heads sharp as knives. Below there are ledges and caves, pockets a plunging wave could stuff a surfer into like a shank of meat for mollusks and eels to feed on.

From the surfer's low perspective the rising water looks tall enough for the wave to curl above the white day-moon and tear it out of the sky. His fear nearly chokes him, but when he flips the board around and the wave lifts, he can tell he'll make the ride. The drop is radical, the air hushed.

Because this is the first wave of the set, the only sound is the surfboard cutting the water. The surfer drops straight, knowing that an angle will pop the skegs and throw him into a skimming, slamming wipeout. He leans back all the way down. As soon as he reaches the base and levels out, the wave booms like a thunderburst behind him. Water sprays along the rails of the board.

The turn is easy, but his speed surprises him and he nearly loses the board at the top of the wall. He's climbed an almost vertical ascent back into the wave, and has to carom off the lip to stay on the face. The board shoots out a plume of spray, and he heads back down.

From the contour of the water, the way the crest starts its scooped pitch, the surfer can tell the wave will tube.

Sometimes he loses himself during a good ride, becomes entranced by speed and balance and the rhythms of the surging water. At other times

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the extraordinary will occur: he'll smash backside into the curl and come sliding down with the whitewater for another bottom tum, or the wave will throw over and lock him deep inside the tube, and for an instant the realization of what he's doing snaps clear. So he finds himself on this wave, gliding over the smooth, rain-cool water, watching it steepen until the wall arches over into a narrow ceiling. He is inside, surrounded now by moving water. The deep whirling roar of the tube, the intensifying cone of light, startles him into complete awareness. He wants to reach into the wave, somehow test the pulse of motion, but instead he crouches lower on his board and is content just to observe the shape and movement of the water.

The wave steepens more as the reef shallows, and the tube widens into a roaring tunnel of glass . It seems the surfer is no longer riding on water, but on some better substance, something water could become if given the chance. He thinks he might shift his weight to the back of the board and thus stall deeper into the tube, getting as far inside as he can . But he sees the wave bowl ahead and knows that soon the whole wall will collapse.

He leans forward instinctively into speed, powers the board out of the tube and up the face of the wave, and kicks out just as the crest peels over. The thrust of the climb fires the board out from under his feet, into the air. It flutters up high- a bright chip of wood flying from the ax.

The beauty of the long tube ride, the clarity of it, sings. Long after the wave has passed, the surfer is still shouting. To no one. This early in the morning he is alone in the water, yelling and babbling. The only language for the joy he's just experienced is sound, as primal and basic as the ocean itself.

Fire vs. The Wave In his first Ennead, Plotinus explores the qualities of beauty and concludes that the most beautiful thing, "splendid beyond all material bodies," is fire . "Fire," he says, "holds the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and liveliest of bodies, as very near to the unembodied."

If there is any physical representation of the Plotinian "splendour that belongs to the Idea," fire must be it . Fire is at once both palpable and evanescent, appearing and disappearing at the same time. "Near to the unembodied," it creates, destroys and recreates its forms in a litany of suggested perfection.

But on the ocean there is a more profound kind of beauty. A tubing wave shares with fire the "splendour that belongs to the Idea ." It, too, is

47

subtle and lively. But the wave is controlled in a way that suggests it is the emanation of some more exact principle, rather than of the abstract and unknowable ideal Plotinus popularized. A wave moves not only ever upwards, like fire, but ever down, ever forward. If the tube it forms is large enough, a surfer may appreciate the wave's beauty from within, the blue water thinning through its arch toward the luminous fall, the final roar of its expression. The curling wave is clarity of force, energy creating shape, substance giving energy grace.

The Best Wave Perfection is not only approachable, as waves approach perfection.

You have to believe, ultimately, that it can be reached. But it's difficult even to imagine a perfect wave. The best wave is hollow, nearly symmetrical, according to the simplest laws of mathematics. A wave is a curve rising toward completion.

Ask a surfer to imagine a perfect wave and he'll think of a swell lifting to a crest above him, a slight off-shore breeze smoothing the wave face to translucent blue, spray feathering off the lip. The wave will arch, the water throw clear as it falls from a sharp, identifiable peak, and the wall will line up to create a long pipe. The best riding wave is also the most beautiful, a lesson in aesthetics.

But for the surfer, unused to detaching himself from the physical world, the imagined wave only approaches perfection, then fails. Its tube bends into the usual teardrop shape, a shape which is flawed. It reaches the ultimate realization of energy, which is its point of change, its destruction.

A perfect wave, you see, would break in a circle.

The360 If a perfect wave is one that breaks in a circle, then the perfect maneuver riding a wave is also a circle. Every surfer knows about the 360, but no one has ever done it. Not truly; although with the right wave-steep enough for a clean drop to accelerate, and then rounder at the shoulder for a turning surface- a surfer could angle his take-off and get far enough ahead of the breaking wave to come back. Two deep turns, at the bottom and top, would make the circle complete. But it would have to be a full loop, the surfboard carving a wake 360 degrees in circumference,

48

with no backward cuts off the lip. Around the gauge rather than up and down the dials.

Once in a while you see surfers make the attempt, spinning into waves, trying to surf in circles. Sometimes an ace shredder will aim his bottomturn out of the trough in such a way that the nose of his board hits the curl, and he comes around in a sort of ellipse we want to call a 360.

That's as close as anyone gets. But it isn't a 360.

On the North Shore of O 'ahu there are stories about the Moon Rider, a legendary surfer who rides waves only on nights of the full moon, turning 360's on a wave face as easily as you would trace a string of cursive o's on a sheet of paper. The surfers who live at Rocky Point swear they saw him out one night, cutting loops on the dark water. Some of them paddled their boards out for a closer look, but after they had made it through the inside breakers, there was no one, only the moonlight gleaming like metal on the rising swells.

Clues are everywhere. The rain falls, the rain goes away. Surfing in a rain squall challenges the surfer to make sense of the water. He tries to read the waves, the rain, and again the waves. The storm textures the surface of the bay like burlap, yet when he lies belly down on his board and watches the raindrops splash into the water close to his face, he sees the little crowns jump up like crystal and then disappear. Everywhere within the limits of the squall, these small rings of water leap and settle.

It is a cycle. From as far back as the tradewinds' farthest arc, the douds form and move through their circuit to this place, and move on again.

The sun comes out and the waves glass.

The surfer stays in the line-up until dark, still contemplating the movement of the water. Once he notices the effect of the lowering sun: a dear crust of light along the top of a breaking wave. He paddles slowly, the other surfers gliding past him and up over the swells, and he thinks about that ridge of light breaking with the breaking wave.

The Butterfly The 360, because it is clearly impossible to accomplish, is like the butterfly, the swimming stroke that could be, in some superior state of refinement, the fastest stroke. Many surfers have swum on competitive 49

teams. And there have always been those who believe they can beat swimmers, whose skills match their own, who swim freestyle while they do the butterfly.

The butterfly is potentially the fastest stroke. With both arms plunging through the water at once, and both legs kicking together, the propulsion is much greater than the alternating motion of the crawl. (When a surfer trying to catch a wave needs real speed he uses the double-arm pull .) But the potential of the butterfly is never reached. The powerful thrust of the arms and legs is offset by the drag and arch of the body. Actually, the swimmer moves forward like a breaking wave. He makes a sigmoid line, """, in the water, and although the grace and curve of the sigmoid is beautiful, it is not as functional as a straight line. A freestyler can beat the butterfly anytime, simply by maintaining a smooth stroke, head down in the water, body stretched and flat .

The potential is unrealized, and yet instinctively anyone who swims the butterfly, or watches it being swum, knows what might happen. He can sense the possibilities of its nearly limitless power.

Back in the 'SO's, when the butterfly was being refined, there was a story that swimming coaches used to tell about a swimmer who had perfected the butterfly by working out in a glacial lake in the Canadian wilderness. The coaches wanted their butterflies to take shallow strokes.

They could build speed, the coaches said, if they didn't "dive" into their armpull, if they flattened out more. The Canadian butterflier had perfected the stroke by confining himself to the warmest part of the lake, the thin film of light water that floats on top of the cold. In fact, the Canadian was now the fastest swimmer in the world, and waited only for the next Olympics to shatter all the record times, even those of the freestyle, wi~h the butterfly. And why not? Dolphins speed through the water at twenty-five knots, using that same undulatory motion.

Failure The famous Canadian never showed up at the Olympics. No one has come close enough to the Moon Rider to be sure what they have seen isn't a trick of light on the black waves. No surfer has done a 360, just as no one has gotten all the way back into the core of a tubing wave, to its deepest point. No one has perfected the butterfly. What would happen?

If a surfer completed a perfect 360, or faded far enough back into the tube, would he disappear? If a swimmer perfected the butterfly would the water still contain him?

Perhaps the value of attempting a 360 or swimming the butterfly is

so

the final failure, rather }t is reaching for what seems impossible. are more than just extraordinarily difficult movements, they are Beautiful because difficult. And what is beauty but a suggesof the perfect? A beautiful thing fails, but that failure suggests the Still there is no trouble imagining a swimmer doing the butterfly so that none of the undulations are discernible, only the appearance of movement. No trouble imagining the white wake of a surfboard a circle on a wave. And if these things can be imagined, compreand understood in thought, can't they be accomplished? Are they in one sense accomplished already by being thought of?

If a surfer focuses on something other than a wave, he can imagine a wave . He must remember that a wave is a force, and not the composing it. Force has shape.

If the surfer focuses on a circle, one large waterbead on the waxed deck his board, for instance, instead of the ocean the wave will pass he'll be able to see a perfect wave. Around the circumference of waterbead he can see a wave breaking. It will follow the shape a full circle.

Shape, then, precedes content. The difficulty in imagining the perfect comes because a surfer will see the wave first and then the shape it take. But as soon as he reverses his thinking, and makes the material Mn路esr1ond to the shape, thinks shape of wave then water, he will see a break in a perfect circle. This is why it is easy to imagine a surfer a 360, because the path he would follow is primary. The butterfly stroke is imagined easily, as well, because the swimmer set out following a preconceived pattern.

What a surfer holds beautiful has the curved line as common denomiPlotinus defined beauty as "joy in symmetry." And it is plain that a natural symmetry is its beauty. No matter how short or how the curve will retain its symmetry; and it will imply a greater symlike the fragment of a ring or the crescent of a moon.

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When the sigmoid line of the butterfly stroke is extended into a continuum, it looks like a standard oceanographic wave swell representation:

This is how a set of waves appears in midocean, approaching shore. An oceanographer will plot these waves with a series of circles. Each circle represents the orbit a particle of water makes as a wave crest passes over it:

When the wave reaches shore, the circles flatten out, the amplitude steepens, and the wave breaks. In one sense the wave, because it rises as though it will break in the shape of a circle, compensates for the flattening orbits of the water molecules underneath:

The circles travel all the way to the reef, therefore, and the wave that finally breaks is matter imperfectly expressing the shape of the last circle in the series.

When a surfer drops into the wave he becomes part of this series of circles. The closer the wave gets to breaking in a perfect circle, the more beauty it possesses, and the more the surfer is happy about being there.

The exhilaration he feels is precisely the phenomenon Plotinus was referring to when he defined beauty as "joy in symmetry." The surfer contemplates and moves in harmony with the most amazing manifestation energy on the planet: a wave.

The connection between the surfer and the wave is elemental, basic, primal, atavistic, ancient, and mathematical. Underlying the nnVCir211• universe is the form of the curved line. Everything is a product of curve. Einstein proved that even the properties of light are based on curve. His theory that light bends into a field of gravity has affected ence as did the discovery that the earth is round rather than flat. notion of relativity brings speculation about space travel that sounds Columbus' declaration: if a space ship sails due west it will return, time, to its point of departure. The universe is round, like an orange.

It was once believed that light, like energy in water, moved in But Einstein and Max Plank modified this theory. They deduced light is not physical waves, but tiny, fast-moving bundles of

52

which exhibit wave-like characteristics. The quality of light is not derived from the bundles themselves but from their wave-like essence, a non-material base. For that matter, nothing in the material cosmos is built from substance. The deeper physicists probe the more they discover that form, not anything solid, is the source of every tangible object.

Werner Heisenberg tells us that "the ultimate root of appearances is not matter but mathematical law." What he means is that form or "Idea" takes precedence over matter or substance.

Light is not waves but quanta (the energy bundles), and yet at their source the quanta are still waves, although abstract ones. Ocean waves are circles, not water. To study waves then, or anything in the material universe, scientists must examine not the material but the equation that accounts for the material. Heisenberg clarifies his meaning by saying that he is talking of "a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior."

Apparently a thing must exist in the mind, as abstraction or Idea, "the ultimate root of appearance," before it becomes physical. Knowledge precedes matter. God's power is His intelligence.

A person is moved by beauty because at the moment he sees something beautiful, like a breaking wave, he is participating in divine reason.

Beauty is not just symmetry, Plotinus reminds us, it is joy in symmetrya dynamic communication, a 路feeling of the soul in perception of that which is akin to the soul, a delight in the Idea . The surfer's origins are the same as those of the breaking wave, and to see that rendering of the basic form, the curve approaching perfection, reminds him that he too is an act of grace.

The Ninth Wave If a perfect wave were ever to break, it would be at the Banzai Pipeline. Pipeline gets its name from the shape of its waves. They pitch over into hollow tubes so long that surfers riding inside have disappeared from view for several seconds, and emerged at the end just as the tube collapses with a spit behind them.

If a perfect wave were ever to break it would be on a day that scared the hell out of everyone. The waves would be big, storm-generated, awesome in a way that would make no one dare to go out.

Except maybe one surfer who seemed hypnotized by the scooping surf, maybe one who would paddle out. Alone. He would watch several sets.

He would concentrate on the water. Hours would pass before he caught his wave, and by then the morning sun would clear the ridges and the

53

ironwood trees along shore, and fill the blue water with light. He would paddle his board quickly up the steep waves, smack down into the troughs and paddle again, as the first eight waves of the set he wanted moved toward shore. The ninth wave would crest at nearly twenty feet, but he would have no fear of it. He would sit up on his board and watch it approach, a huge ledge of blue crystal. Just inside the rising water a school of ahole hole fish would glitter in a silver bow, and dart deeper when the wave peaked. He would turn his board, paddle hard-with double-arm pulls- and feel the wave lift him . The board would start planing, hissing with the drop, and he would stand and plunge through the rushing air to the bottom . The top of the wave already throwing over, he would turn so quickly out of the base, set the rails of the board at such a perfectly smooth angle in the water, that he would be up and through his 360 before the crest had fallen to the bottom.

At the moment the circle was complete, and he had crossed over his own wake, the wave would crack down, forming a roaring tube that he would ride toward the center of. The sunlight would sparkle through the curtain of cascading water, and the whole tube would illuminate. Cool fire, the subtlest and liveliest of bodies. He would look ahead of him, at the core of the tube. It would be a circle of light, as round as the full moon, and so bright that it would seem he was heading outward into open daylight, instead of in.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Luiz Vilela

'You can't imagine how happy she'll be to see you, your little girlfriend . . ." he said.

"Yeah, my little girlfriend ..." I answered, remembering that day on the beach when my friend and I were talking, lying on the sand, and she rose up out of the waves and came walking toward us. She stopped in front of me, in a tiny bikini, bronzed by the sun and wet from the seastill a child, but already with the curves of a woman. It was then that she looked at me so deeply it made my heart pound; then her lips began to open in a smile that turned into a mischievous laugh, and with that she took off running again, like a filly, free and happy, towards the sea, and, diving into a wave, she disappeared into the blue horizon.

I remembered other days as well, but it was that one, with its enigmatic beauty, that wouldn't leave my head as I walked along beside my on that late afternoon in Ipanema. And I felt a lump in my throat I wanted to turn right around and not go on. I was afraid, afraid of I would find. My heart felt constricted. I tried to find a pretext I make for not going- but we covered another block and I saw that I go after all, that there was no way out.

I knew it was cowardice: I don't like to see people who have been in acor1nPnro<: and remain scarred. But it wasn't just that, you see, I was could it be she would really be happy to see me7 I didn't know. she would prefer not to see me-why not? I suspected that those had not disappeared-but that's exactly why, that's exactly why might not want to see me. Whew, I felt lousy with all that going in my head. I would never have gone if I hadn't bumped into my on the street, but now it was impossible, impossible not to go, as clearer and clearer the closer we got to the building where he The problem was I had been taken by surprise; shocked by the news, it occur to me to put off the visit to another day, and thus avoid Luciano had just left work when I met him. He had been heading and he said I would be going with him and he dragged me along even giving me a chance to object. And now here we were, the of us, walking down the street in the late afternoon, I silent and torhe with his usual expansiveness. I admired him for it-he had let himself get down. I even reached the point of wondering

55

whether the event had not affected him mentally. But no, he had always been like that. It was I, after all, who was suffering rather ridiculously.

"If you had seen her the day of the accident, Carmo, you wouldn't have believed it was her. No one thought she could survive. The condition she was in when she arrived at the hospital. .. ." He shook his head disconsolately, as if it were all happening at that very moment. ''You looked and all you could see was a mass of blood .. . . Frankly, when I saw her in that shape I thought, no, it's impossible, she can't be alive. But she was, she was and she is. My friend," he said, and looked at me with deep conviction, "modem medicine produced a miracle, it's the only explanation I can find; to manage to keep her alive, not to mention everything else they managed to do .... It's true that she didn't come out of it perfect, but how could she. How could she?" He looked at me as if expecting an answer, but what could I say? "Only someone who saw her the day of the accident could say," he himself said a moment later and shook his head: "A miracle, that's the only word, a miracle."

We crossed the street-and passed another block, I silent, he still talking: "Unfortunately, she hasn't been able to walk again; the spine, you know? The spine was affected. But there's still hope, there's still hope.

We've tried everything possible, all the doctors and treatments, we've tried them all. They haven't succeeded yet, but who knows if .. . . After what medicine has already done . . . with the phenomenal progress that science is undergoing . .. ."

He put his arm around me and gave me a happy smile: "You've got to see, Carmo, you've got to see what an angel she is, the calmness with which she takes it all. . . . You remember her pretty well, Carmo .. . 7" "Of course," I answered, with an emphasis that came out too sharply because of my nervousness, and this seemed to disturb him a bit.

"Yes, indeed," he said, "now see if you .. . . I have a few questions . . . . Let's have a cup of coffee?" he proposed suddenly, as we were passing a cafe.

I accepted . Maybe that was my chance to get out of it. He started putting sugar in our cups, without asking me if that was how much I wanted or not.

"The coffee here is excellent," he said, "it's one of the best in Rio." I took a sip, using the pause to think up what excuse I would give-but the pause was very brief.

"You're going to notice a difference," he said.

"I already am." ''You are?" He looked at me without understanding; "I'm talking about my daughter."

"Oh, I thought you were talking about the coffee."

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"No, I'm talking about my daughter."

"I know," I said, nodding my head.

"You're going to notice a difference."

I nodded my head .

"The accident left its mark, you understand?"

I nodded my head .

"It had to," he said, "obviously, an accident in which two people are and the car is totalled, what can you expect? To escape alive was more than one could ask for. To wish that nothing had happened that everything might go on just like before... . That would be, I know; that would be to defy divine mercy. God was already more good to keep our daughter alive and to allow her to recover as she Plenty good enough .... What's your opinion?"

"Of course, without doubt," I said.

"The coffee?"

"Coffee? What do you mean?"

"The coffee," he said.

"Oh," I laughed awkwardly, "I thought . .. . It's great, really good."

"It's one of the best coffees in town," he said with a kind of pride, as if owned the cafe or as if he had some connection with it (maybe just by in the same neighborhood as the cafe, or better, because the cafe in the same neighborhood where he lived). "Did you hear that7" He to the waitress who had served the coffees, a pretty brunette. "''m publicity for your coffee. I tell everybody that it's one of the best in town. I think I'll charge a commission, or else you can let me my coffee forfree . . . ."

The girl laughed .

"Do you use some special process? When you're roasting the beans or ....,路nm1no them ..." ''No," said the girl, "we do it just like everyone else. There's no secret all."

'Well, then, how come other coffees aren't as good7" "I don' t know."

"Is it a special kind?" ''No," said the girl, laughing. She had pretty teeth.

"Young lady, you just don't want to tell me .. . ."

"I swear there's nothing . ..."

'There's got to be something, it isn't possible; the aroma alone ...." held out his cup so I could smell it. "Isn't it a delight, Carma ... 7" I said it was.

'There's something different about this coffee, I'm sure of it. I don't if it's the grade or the way it's prepared ... I know it has ..."

The girl smiled and went on to serve a customer who had asked for an orangeade.

57

Luciano put some change on the counter, said "see ya" to the girl, and we left.

"Well, isn't it delicious, that coffee, Carmo?''

"Very good," I said.

"Or don't you think so?"

"I do. I think it's great."

"I think it's fantastic. I'm sure it's the best coffee in Rio." He took a deep breath, "I love this hour of the day.... You know, old pal, I'm crazy about this city ... crazy about it...."

We walked a few minutes in silence.

"But you realize ..." he began again. "You'll see that she isn't the same, she couldn't be. It was a terrible accident, Carmo. The car was totalled. Her two friends, a boy and a girl. ... It's better not to talk about it .... She was very lucky. All three of them could have been killed. It was a miracle: a miracle that she survived and a miracle what the doctors did with her afterwards. And then there's ... ah, that's what I was telling you about: her understanding, it's really unbelievable. You have to see it. A kid of fifteen .. .. She doesn't show any anger or any sadness ... and I'm telling you, to face what she's had to face, operations-she lost her spleen and a kidney-exercises, massages....

Again he shook his head: "It's really unbelievable... ."

He paused.

"And the expenses?" he said. "How much do you think it all cost?"

I made the expression of one who couldn't have the foggiest idea.

"Guess," he said.

I made the same expression again.

"You know what?" he said, "even I don't know anymore, I just one thing: it was astronomical-as-tro-nomical! I tell you, I never out so much dough in my life, never. It was incredible, But I'm not complaining, no, I'm not complaining," he said, and his head firmly. "Absolutely not. It was with pleasure, with pleasure I spent all that money. She's my daughter, Carmo! My daughter!" stopped in the middle of the busy sidewalk saying all that to me in a voice, while I looked hopelessly to either side. "What wouldn't you for a daughter? What! Even steal, if you had to, even steal. Wouldn't do the same if it were your daughter?"

I nodded, though I had no daughter and wasn't even married.

"Anyone would," he said, starting to walk again, "anyone! " Luciano had spoken of the business of stealing with such rnâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘vu-t,. that I began to wonder if in fact something like that hadn't occurred.

"The only thing I want is my daughter's well-being, my adorable girl; that's what I live for now, Carmo, just for that. My greatest when I arrive home at this time of day and find her there in the room waiting for me, my beautiful little daughter... ." He had a

58

on his face, and I again remembered that day, the girl with her body coming out of the sea and stopping in front of me, offerto my eyes her budding beauty, and then throwing me that deep, look.

"Luciano" - I stopped: my God, I was feeling horrible. I shouldn't have I shouldn't have!

'What's the matter?" he asked, surprised.

"Don't you think it's a bad time to visit? You'll want to take a bath, eat ... . I'll come by tomorrow."

'Tomorrow?" he said, and continued to drag me along with an arm my shoulder (Luciano wasn't just fat, he was immense, he was my size), "Now that we're so close.... Always full of scruples, You won't interfere with anything. I'll take my bath when I go to bed I'll have supper around eight, when Nilza gets back, no trouble at Not to mention that we're already practically there . It's just up there, the next block. Wow! What a surprise when little Tina sees you ... . been three years ... and you didn't even send a little note once in a eh, you lazy bum?" He squeezed me tight and I forced a smile.

"Here we are," he said- and my heart plunged.

We entered the building and went up the stairs to the third floor.

"It'll be a real surprise," he said again, smiling.

He opened the door. A young woman in a wheelchair was in the midof the room.

"Hi, baby!" said Luciano .

It was she, it was Tina, that girl I had seen for the last time three years who had risen up out of the waves and stood in front of me, in a bikini, bronzed by the sun and wet from the sea. It was she who was in that wheelchair in the middle of the room, staring at me with a and curious expression, while I stopped in the entrance and ..,,.trh..•t1 her, waiting for her to recognize me.

"Don't you recognize him, honey?" Luciano said in a loud voice, "It's Then there was a timid smile on her face, and she half blushed. I went her and held out my hand. She, with difficulty, held out her left I noticed that her right, which she was trying to hide, was "Hiya, Tina," I said, almost in a murmur, "how's it going?"

"Her hearing was a bit affected," Luciano explained from behind, "you to speak louder."

I was going to say "How's it going" again, in a louder voice, but I jlto·p~!d myself in time. Instead of speaking, I simply stood there with her in mine, and we watched each other's eyes. I tried to have mine nothing but a simple tenderness, without shock or compassion. I her hand gently and let go.

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"Wasn't that a surprise?" said Luciano, almost shouting, and I thought that it wasn't really necessary to speak that loudly, that it would only make her feel deafer than it seemed to me she actually was. "You didn't recognize him, did you?" he shouted again, with his ever joyous face, and she timidly shook her head no.

Her feet, I noticed with a glance, in white stockings, were hanging soft and inert like the feet of a rag-doll- her legs must have been completely paralyzed. I also noted-feeling a kind of guilt at doing so-her breasts, that showed through her light blouse: how they had grown, how full they were-how marvelous they must be. There they were, showing themselves proudly and defiantly, indifferent to that ruined and motionless body, as if they had nothing to do with it, young and fresh, clearly eager to be touched, kissed, loved, aggressive within the clothing, as if they were trying in some way to escape the prison to which the rest of the body condemned them. She must be suffering, I thought, she must have suffered much more than I imagined, even more than her father imagined.

"Let's sit down," said Luciano, gesturing toward the sofa.

"No, Luciano, this was just a quick visit, just to see little Tina . . ." I said, and smiled at her. She smiled back, though perhaps without having heard what I had said.

It was the only thing we did-smile. But maybe, in fact, it was the only thing we could do, for there was nothing I could say to her, or she to Our communication was through the eyes-a veiled dialogue, pulsing, painful and irremediable.

"Maybe I'll come back the day after tomorrow," I said to Luciano. call you at the office."

"You could have stayed to have supper with us," he chided, a bit at the brevity of my visit.

"Maybe next time I'll stay," I said, "we'll work it out."

I had no intention of returning and even less of dining with indeed that would have been impossible for me. But Luciano understand such a thing- no, he couldn't, Luciano didn't anything. Could it be he didn't see how things were, could it be didn't see?

"The day after tomorrow he'll come back and have supper with Luciano said to his daughter.

She looked at me. I made a happy face, but I don't think I fooled her.

She must have discerned the truth in the depths of my eyes. She nothing, but she looked at me, when once again I took her hand rn>t~wâ&#x20AC;˘-¡ mine, like someone who looks at someone else whom they know won't be seeing, perhaps ever again. But I don't think that was so sad for her. It wasn't sadness that I saw in her eyes, but a distancing and a fading, like a swoon.

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I went down the stairs, came out on the street, and started walking . It was rush hour, and I let the noise of the cars and the horns flow my ears and fill my head and stop me from thinking of anything all.

61

A. M. Friedson

Fatal Response Has he gone And did he went And leave I all alone.

Oh cruel fate You is unkind To take he first, Leave I behind.

(Popular Torchsong) Yes he has gone And he did went And leave ye all alone.

But he beg me Please be kind, Take he first, Leave thee behin' Cross my heart And hope to die Stick a needle In my eye.

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â&#x20AC;˘-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Rafael Alberti

Yellow 1 I am Light's partner, active accomplice of Light against Shadow.

2

She calls me "Brother," but at the slightest alarm blots me out, whitening me.

3

.. . But it's my privilege to be green and undress- Autumn- in yellow.

4

In my purest state: cheerful, smiling -Goethe-tender, gay.

5

The sun's dye- paintings- at Pompey.

6

Gold in the old saints' halos.

Gold of the Middle Ages: naive, figured.

7

I sing in the spikes of grain and when, as bread, I'm set off by the smooth egg-whiteness of the tablecloth .

8 To you, attained to pure transparency, faint, ethereal yellow of the rose.

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9

Golden shoulders, breasts -Titian-fine-bossed bucklers of pure gold.

10 I saw gold gild itself, become old wine in cloaks - Veronese-spilling from the shoulders.

11

I cleave to curl, to long hair down the bare curve of the back.

12 I knead myself with light, and with the flesh's pink am lastingly united.

13 A wrinkled parchment's dried-up skin.

14 Lividness: numbed, laid out, cadaveric, lifeless.

15 Death's pallor.

16 Ivory, hid within the flesh .

17 Somnambulant, phantasmal, eerie, turbid-El Greco-swampy, warm, bilious, vomited, pit-cold, rained down, diluted, disappeared, deceased, corrupted, dried, resurrected, alive . . .

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18 yin the storm.

19 bone whirled to dust, sleepless ~路-路-路~~of death in motion.

20 or shining sonorous those piano keys?

21

22 revealed by Rembrandt.

23 monks, Zurbaranlrithmlt me, what would have become their "serge in ecstacy"?

24

afraid of Blue because it makes me Green.

25 oranges on the comer call out as I pass: yellow!

If only everyone could be yellow as you!"

26

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27 When I break into flight, and my throat lets go the gold of flutes repeating, they give to my happiness a particular hue: canary yellow.

28 Trembling-yellow, the tense fever-yellow of dementia.

29 I sound, I resound, I scream until I thrust myself into the core -Van Gogh- of the retina, ripping it.

30 Ochre toasts me. Red excites me, hangs me at the orange tip of the flame.

31 Chrome-yellow: satin's lustre.

32 Arranged & spherical -still-life.

33 I've come back, an arc of simple yellow, vibrating in position in the rainbow, bent to geometric law.

Translated from Spanish by Carolyn Tipton

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - Jeffery Renard Allen

i.

northbound, down his tracks through fields and

67

left strange fruit rotting in the sippi sunshine beans were his birthstone ii.

delta drained that woman's insides: she birthed a prune river water rusted her tambourine boll weevils ate the dried corn in her pallet hounddogs chased her through cotton, their red eyes igniting white fields eyes tired from chasing niggers through georgia, louisiana, kentucky, sippi red the color of bloodfields for

68

hounddogs chased her through alleys, topaz the color of their teeth, enamel yellowed from slaves and sharecroppers she took tracks tracks that slipped their trail

fluorescent chitown streets, orange the color of the proverbial carrot of hope on city pavement hope snatched by sippi winds she walked those alleys, rows of garbage cans walked, trying to fertilize banana peels, orange rinds, apple cores hoping to

69

revive a dusty infant cradled in a steel lid searching for clearwater blues was her birthstone

70

Mark Taksa

attoos, Suit Changing tattooed banker in a gazebo. wife jokes about billiards. pool hall boss laughs. sky is yellow as wine their glasses. The man with flames his bicep walks into his closet, barbells, joggs around the rack suits, soaks in the sauna, in a safari jacket. Their son

gone snow skiing, the wife the man with Saturn on his chest

crystal sherry to bed. banker, eagle inside his lip, his jungle coat. son of the tattooed man at breakfast how he plays guitar, surrounded by a chorus girls in naked shirts at the boy's command, or touch toes. The banker, on his wrist, having heard wife discuss diamond collecting the garbage collector, his shirt. Throwing football which drops a feather to arms on a goal line, son studies geometry.

71

The phone is feminine with voices begging to be tutored in Egyptian logic.

Garter wrapped scholarships littering his desk, the son's grades dance like diamonds in the eyes of the father who stops changing his clothes.

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Pamela Walker

my line of work you meet all kinds from the low to the high on social ladder of our Catskills town. At The Wash House I do the .-n'n-t1ott" and oversee self-service, selling detergent to transients, makchange and cleaning lint filters, which may not sound like much it's good, steady work that occupies my hands while freeing my I have my speculations on the regulars-from the clothes they bring, course, workmen's dark twills with Amerigas or Getty patched above pocket, a doctor's dress shirts monogrammed at the cuffs in with coats-but I get the whole picture, the cars they drive, the way walk. I size up each face as its owner walks through the door, heftbags of dirty laundry. This is why I'm accused of staring. Faces are but they're not everything. A tall girl hunching her shoulders me she wishes she were shorter, or the way pretty girls whisper when don't believe in their beauty. You have to be ready for the contradic. That's what I like, devising a life for a character only to have it ~¡~~..râ&#x20AC;˘..-i by simple truth.

For instance, I surmised this one with the curly black hair and hornglasses was a college professor as I shook out his chinos and shirts after the dry. I'd never seen him, but that was September everyone's back for school, so it was the obvious guess.

"Haven't I seen you on campus?" I asked when he came back late afterfor pick-up. "'doubt it," he tells me, pushing his glasses up his broad nose. "I'm just through."

"On business?" I ask sweetly.

"Ah, yes," he had a quiet way as if to apologize, "explosives."

"Excuse me7" "Explosives."

"That's what I thought you said . What do you explode?" I was getting "Buildings, mostly."

"'h, yeah, I've seen it on TV. The way a whole building sucks in and there must be quite an art to that." " he nods. handed him his laundry and his eyes lit up . "Hey, no ironing." He

73

took the shirts and slacks on hangers covered with plastic. "Most services don't do it so nice. Thanks;' he said as if I gave him special treatment, which I didn't.

I give everyone my best work. A cold water wash-I swear by cold water with powdered bleach to get at the dirt, it's cheaper with no shrinkage-a perma-press dry and timing are my tricks, knowing when to take out shirts, then pants before wrinkles set in . You have to get them right for a good hand press and they're ready to wear. That's my method. It brings me constant compliments from my customers. We're on first names and they know my schedule, eight to six, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Wednesdays, Harry's bowling night, I take the late shift, closing up at ten-thirty.

Harry's my husband . Harry Ganakis. I call him Hare because I don't find Harry an appealing name, not that I ever told him. Hare's Greek and he's proud. I was an Allegretti until Hare and I married. My father said no but he couldn't stop us.

"Marry a Greek and live in a trailer?"

"It's a brand new trailer on our own piece of land."

"In the middle a nowhere!"

"Nine miles out of town."

Hare's dad runs the luncheonette, mine owns a pizza parlor. My father, you can't reason with him, but I lived to see him eat his words. Not a peep from him when he sees Hare and me owning the trailer outright, our fields leased to a farmer for hay- that pays the taxes. Hare has the knack. Granted, his father-all generosity, Hare's dad is-gave us ten acres, but we did our share. For my part flowers bloom all over the yard.

You ought to see my daffodils poking through fresh snow in yellow clumps of little horns, a sight to break the hardest heart in spring. Hare and his dad laid down railroad ties three-foot high for the garden, trucked in rich topsoil so black it looks charred, and layered manure with compost. There's an art to everything.

Our space is raw, no shade trees yet, just the four baby poplars Hare gave me for Mother's Day the past two years. I was pregnant. Hare planted with an eye to the future, placing them at the beginning of our drive, which will curve back to the house we'll build someday near the tree grove. Most Mother's Days are wintry affairs, but we bundled up and Hare dug holes, the trees on the ground, their roots tangled in big dirt balls. Hare told me his plan.

"Every year, Roseanna, we'll plant two poplars on Mother's Day until they line our drive."

That's how sweet my Harry is and it doesn't embarrass him like it does most guys. "When our baby is grown;' he dreamed, stepping the shovel into the earth with a muddy clodhopper, "these trees will stand tall and we'll be old."

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"Oh, Hare, we'll still be young." I stomped my feet to keep them warm. "When our kids are grown, we can travel."

'Well, that's true," Hare admitted but I could see he liked the idea of growing old as he shovelled dirt out of the hole.

As we head into winter, the trees stand bare and spindly. We live on a hill exposed to the wind from the north and I fear for the trees. Though Hare chose Berlin poplars, a hardy variety, there's always a gamble. We meant to name them for the babies, but we didn't get the chance to settle on our choices.

I don't know what went wrong and neither do the doctors.

"You must understand," the bald doctor said, "this baby was not meant to be born." He was a hefty man with the smooth, pudgy face of a farm boy who watched his father drown the lambs born maimed. I didn't need him to tell me the obvious. "You're young, try again."

This was after my second. One, you accept. Hare's mom and his sister lost one apiece. With one I grew closer to true womanhood. My baby lived and died inside me. But two at my age? I'm twenty-three and strong though small and fine-boned like my mom. I couldn't face the world. I didn't want its pity and couldn't bear the thought of babies in their mothers' arms at The Wash House.

The other girls took my shifts and called with messages from my regulars. Mrs. Craver had her baby. The dentist Dr. Grogan was leaving town. Their names sounded strange as if I never cared who they were or where they went between drop-off and pick-up. This never happened to me before. As a little kid bringing silverware wrapped in napkins to Daddy's customers, I eavesdropped on conversations. Even then I had my speculations. I always wanted to know.

It was June. I let the weeds take my garden. The groundhogs ate our lettuce. Hare picked bushels of tomatoes and peppers but I couldn't stand them, ripe and shiny in the baskets. I made Hare give them away. I didn't pick flowers and I never split the bulbs.

Sometimes I sat out front in a lawn chair and watched cars pass, a blur of speed and purpose. If they honked, I waved but I didn't look at faces.

Our trailer sits at the edge of fields that border the old highway to Cooperstown. Across the road green hills rolled one into another like gently pregnant bellies. Sometimes I had myself a cry when I was small before the mountains, beneath a sky too big. I never saw Hare cry, though he told me how he sobbed himself for hours the night we lost the first when he had to leave me at the hospital. Still, Hare awoke each morning at the crack of dawn like a farmer. He works the eight-to-four at Deltown and he has a forty-minute drive. Every night he worked his other job-splitting timber for the sideline firewood business he and his uncle run- till darkness drove him home to me, resentful of his will to keep on going.

75

"Rosie," Hare reached across the table as we were drinking morning coffee and he touched my hand, shy as if we barely knew each other anymore. "It would've been worse if they'd been born. It's going to work, Rosie. We'll have children."

I squinted at the summer sun resting in a pale sky as though it were a face softened by a gauzy curtain and we were in some childish contest I was determined to win. When I looked back at the table, bright flecks danced red and green across Hare's hand and the room grew darker. My head throbbed and Hare's fingers were rough against my skin.

"Hare, my children died and I couldn't bury them."

I didn't know I meant to hurt Hare until my words hung cold between us, and Hare pulled his hand away.

"They were my babies too." I heard a tremble in his voice that made me glad even as I wished to swallow back my words.

Hare sighed and slapped his knee before standing and trudging into the bedroom. His bare feet pounded the floor, his butt tight and his jockey shorts like he was sucking in his cheeks. He slammed drawers and banged the closet door, emerging in his Deltown blues. The trailer shook with each step of his work boots. He took his lunch box from the fridge and I followed to the door. I hooked little fingers with him, but I couldn't look into his eyes.

"I won't be home for dinner. It's bowling night." Hare pecked my forehead and walked to his truck.

As he drove off, I waved, clutching my flimsy nightgown to my naked body. The air tickled my neck and the sun warmed my arms. Our little trees quivered in the slightest breeze, leaves like whispering hearts, the first two pert and taller teens leading the babies.

I came in and called my boss .

"Rosie, how ya feelin?"

"Okay, Gary."

"It's not the same without ya, Rosie. When ya comin' back?"

"How about tonight?"

"You'll close up?"

"Sure, it's Hare's bowling night."

"Oh, that'd be fine. I was gonna stay, but with you here I'm clearing out."

"Okay, Gary."

"See you at five."

'Til be early."

I arrived at The Wash House at four on the dot. The day girls had hung a sign on the door, "Welcome back, Rosie! " and Gary gave me a hardy hug, lifting my feet off the floor. My back eased beneath the strength of his arms. Gary has the body of a wrestler, squat but powerful with thighs that strain his jeans and forearms rippled with muscle.

76

Patty ran to the Dairy Queen, bringing back an ice cream cake which we shared with self-service. I was glad to be home in a way I had not felt with Hare. No one mentioned the baby. At five Patty and Angela left for the day, and Gary showed me the drop-offs due the next morning, six orders of two to three bags each. I'd had it worse. I claimed machines before the evening traffic started. After my first washes came out, I noticed dryer one in the comer was full and unclaimed.

"Gary, whose clothes are in number one?"

Gary came out of the office. "I hadn't noticed them. Someone must've left them. They'll be back."

I started my dries with machine number two. Gary left at seven and I was on my own with a full house. I was busy and no one asked to use dryer one, so I didn't think a thing about it until nine-thirty when last washes go in. The morning pick-ups were bagged and I was sweeping.

I wondered what kind of person would leave a load all day. It looked like linens, sheets and towels expensive to replace. Some kind of fool , the type to scream high heaven when they find their load missing though they're asking for trouble to leave in the first place. Or it could have been a woman hassled with kids and too much to do in town for the day, who thought she could dovetail the laundry with shopping, only to forget her last stop at The Wash House when the baby was screaming and the older kids arguing. She had a headache, all she could think of was getting home, where the baby would sleep and the big ones run wild in the woods. Still, you'd think she would've called to claim her load, unless of course she didn't have a phone. I finished the clean-up, wiping out each washer and emptying filters. About ten-fifteen I locked the door after the last customers, a couple of students with books and looseleafs on top of sheets in their baskets.

I rolled a cart to dryer one, planning to leave the load in the office with a note for the morning girls. I'd be out before ten-thirty and I'd stop for a quart of Hare's favorite chocolate swirl as a peace offering.

The clothes were wet. You idiot! I cursed, leaving me to finish up your chores. I dug into my pocket for some quarters. A heavy load of towels could take three-quarters of an hour. I couldn't wait. I'd have to leave the dryer running, something Gary told us never do. It wasn't safe. I thrust the quarters in the slot, turned the knob and was heading to the office to write a note to Angela when the dryer started tumbling. Clunk-clunk it went, clunk-clunk. I thought, she has shoes in the load. Gary will not hear of drying sneakers. They dent the drums. I opened the door, the tumbling stopped with one last clunk and I started tearing out tangled sheets and towels in fistfuls, heaping them into the cart. She had me in a fury now.

My hand fell on something rounded like a ham, wrapped inside a clammy sheet, and I drew in my breath the way you do when you come

77

upon an animal, newly dead in the woods. You stop against your will, avert your eyes, then keep on moving. Yet I held tight, I couldn't walk away. I grabbed a plastic basket, then gently picked the bundle out of the dryer, its weight solid in my hands. I untied the knot and the sheet fell away on a tiny hand, blue-veined and clenched except the thumb extended toward a hidden mouth. The perfect nail was paper-thin. I read when I was pregnant the fingernails grow last. This baby went full term.

I looked out the huge windows at the front. Exposed beneath fluorescent lights, I feared the mother's return. Full of guilt and loss, she would claim her baby to bury. But Chestnut Street was calm. Cars passed slow and steady, the drivers knowing who they were and where they headed at the end of a long June day. The tires whirred a lullaby. The house across Chestnut was dark.

I switched off the lights from the office and picked up the basket. The lone blue light we left on all night at the back of the shop guided me to the front . I held the basket on my hip and locked the door with my free hand like any night I close up, my own laundry done, the basket no heavier.

My heart beat hard as the night I lost my first. I set the basket in front beside me. My first had gone a full twelve weeks, too small to hold but not to see in my blood on the bed, soft and crescent like baby moles the cat leaves dead on our front step. I wanted to touch it, to place it in the palm of my hand and know that it was mine, but this was at the hospital.

The aide swooped down and took away the bloody pad before I could protest.

After bowling the guys go for beer. Hare's not a big drinker but tonight he'd go the extra round. I took the Interstate and stayed in the middle lane, the needle hovering on red fifty-five. I signaled for my exit and took my left onto the county road, blackness deep to either side. The moon was small and useless but the car traveled through its own lighted tunnel.

I pumped the brake before the curves, bringing the speed down gently and my car hugged the road. The wind was mild. I turned in our drive and coasted into the ruts my tires made in spring when I got stuck in mud.

Hare was not home. I turned the key and the engine puttered off. The spot Hare hung from a telephone pole lights our yard behind the trailer with one large yellow circle. I stepped out of the car and for a moment watched the poplars sleeping, dreamy forms that swayed in balmy shadows.

I knew exactly what I needed, though I hadn't thought this out. I ran into the trailer for a blanket in the trunk beside our sofa. It was my baby blanket Mom gave me the night we told her I was pregnant. Warm in my arms, it smelled of cedar. I hurried to the tool shed, the basket pressed against my chest, the sheets damp through my shirt. I lighted the Cole-

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man and I was ready, matches in my pocket, lantern in hand, the basket hefted on my hip, shovel upright like a sword.

I walked through the field toward our tree grove, the grasses stubby beneath my sneakers. I could not make great time though my feet quickened each time I was bathed in the brights of oncoming cars. A slow, steady pace would take me to the place among our trees more than halfway, yet not too close to the marshy earth above the springs that feed our well.

Within the trees the air was close and musty. I hadn't stepped into our woods since an early spring Sunday when I was pregnant. Hare was chopping wood and I was keeping up my exercise. I'd never walked our woods at night and yet I feared nothing. The black enveloped me, my feet moved sure. I knew the roots that rose in loops. The lantern light was white and hot as if it beamed from a picnic table at camping grounds. Hare and I load up his truck with gear and take our KOA guide.

We've camped all over New England and as far south as the Outer Banks. We hiked the White Mountains and next we want to see the Everglades.

We're going to do things different than our folks. Hare and I have had our share of the food business. We'll take our kids on trips, not just Howe Caverns and the Baseball Hall of Fame. We're going to show our kids their heritage. We'll take them on our backs to Greece and Italy.

I reached the spot where an oak stood tall and set the lantern on the ground. Lowering the basket, I smoothed my blanket, tucking its edges.

Though I wished to look and see it whole, its sex, its skin, I could no more raise the cover than I could touch my grandma's hands clasping her rosary as she lay dead and powdered.

I began to dig. My foot drove the shovel into the earth. The ground was soft and the pull felt good between my shoulder blades as I hefted and dumped each scoop. I dug deep, a good three feet or more. My breath came in gasps and sweat tickled down my face. Another couple shovelfuls and I'd have the depth to keep it safe from animals. I would return to this spot, covering it with dirt and leaves as soil settled. I knelt beside the basket, wanting to tell this baby something, but even in our grove alone with the arms of grandpa trees reaching to hold me, words stuck in my throat, throbbing silently.

I touched the mound beneath my blanket, then lowered the basket into its sorry little grave, no tight pine box. I shoveled dirt back in the hole, rocks grating against metal. One huge scoop soiled my blanket, then I began to heap the dirt in fury, suddenly afraid of time and Hare. Had I heard a voice, distorted by the wind and distance, from our field? Were those Hare's feet scuffling through the brambles?

I snuffed out the lantern and crouched behind the oak. Hare's flashlight beamed in the dark. "Rosel " The panic in his voice made me want to

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yell his name but I was frozen to the tree. Branches broke and leaves crunched beneath his boots. He had circled the field and was coming up behind me. I could not run. I could not hide. I had to let him find me.

Hare's light fell on my face and I turned away.

"Rosie!" He ran to me and touched my shoulder. 'What happened?"

"Nothing, Hare."

I was still hunkered on the ground . Hare's body towered above me, his jaw set tight. Dark eyes darting, they settled on the new turned earth at my feet.

"Rosie, what is that?"

"A grave, Hare."

"You buried an animal?"

"No, Hare."

"What, then?"

Stuck between the truth and a lie I could not fabricate, I said, "It's mine, Hare."

"What, Roseanna7 What's yours?"

"This." I patted the dirt, tidying the edges as best I could.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Donnell Hunter

can't decide which to prefer: warm form or his worm farmprice of fish gone up of late, Jones splitting to an all time high. cold nights his body betrays him. remembers coils of red hair summer snow. Easy to forget portfolios, Wf'J"Ioctk that sheaf of undiscovered Shakespeare, one, five, nine. He lifts the telephone. dial tone thrums against his brain. the background a girl blows Saint-Saens a double reed. He imagines fat on Silver Creek rising to slurp a Mayfly under an August moon.

listens to the evening hum the voice she's known since she was ten. it the oboe's song? The click of the firefly? stripes of her knitted dress ...... u ...,â&#x20AC;˘ ., each breath. The stars are all place tonight. She counts her losses, stares the silent telephone, recreates glories- the Excelsis Beauty Salon Park Street where she enrolled seventeen: Save your money. Go to school.

'11 have something to fall back on. estate-the safe tax shelter balanced an IRA. That was his name: Ira. Smooth tongue.

A thousand moth wings quiver her skin.

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3.

The telephone waits.

Somewhere the swish swish of a tapered line aims its royal coachman into Cinderella's dreams.

The snow was deep last winter. Mice carved their homes in fallow pumpkins- crude jack-o' -lanterns safe from the great owl's eye.

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Your Job

didn't say much. I knew his silence meant, but just couldn't throw them away. he left town in disgrace . He took words and a neighbor's stray dog. learned to speak for ourselves again. then it was too late. I wanted to be him. I wanted to say to some boy, 're clever," watch him believe, him do all those things I might have done I learned to listen, learned not to talk myself each time night tugged at my sleeve.

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Dream People Our tribe began when we fell asleep and no one bothered to wake us up.

We sleep in different places, after many days realize we are dreaming the same dream.

Our mountains are not real mountains.

The river splits four ways downhill.

When an animal talks, we listen: the donkey, the lion in winter, the fox.

A few-you can tell by the way they open their eyes real wide- spend hours trying to wake up. They don't succeed.

Or if someone does, it's a long time before we notice he's gone. We pick up his clothes, some implement he might have loved, tie a small bundle to bury in the hill. That way we can forget about him and get on with our dream.

Prayer Before Killing a Doe 0 tuft of moss, the split hoof turns the stone.

Her skin warms my skin, heartbeat quickens my own.

Let nothing be wasted: antler, sinew, bone.

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David Chorlton

invisible lines beneath the thyme, quiet man isolates the nerves land,

mountain becomes his second face. goes home to a skull delights in the passion of bone. fingers through the eyeholes, wishes for eyes to know and colors at once.

broken stones contain a wilder soul human skin. a surface of chaos,

85

a splash of blue is stolen.

There will be hours of staring to choose the single shade that tips the earth back into harmony.

II

A peasant is the sum of all his shadows, a stern face in a mesh of nervous lines with smudges where the eyes should be.

He has no use for the spaces in landscape or the breathing clouds behind a mountain.

For him, stone is the enemy and wind is a flag without color.

He swears allegiance to his coffee and his scythe, dry grass and the sand on which he plays boules.

Art leaves him hungry.

He believes in his pipe and the cheese that catches in his teeth.

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III Infinity steers itself between the stars, leaving small worlds to themselves.

Underneath a skylight, Cezanne crumples a tablecloth to match creases in the land.

His country is without people.

He arranges space, creating a sanctuary for shade and reason.

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Jay

Duende In those days when death was very dose to me, constant companion in my great isolation, when words were the language of beasts ready to leap at the throat of anything, when I was gathering my dictionary of pain for the long journey into the darkness, when I had lost hope, and felt betrayed even by my own soul, you returned, tiny body of smoke, like a match struck beside an irrigation ditch, like flame coupled to flame until the fields became a conflagration and the dead were heard shouting on all sides of an insipid little river called the Rio Grande.

Let me say this. When life had become its own burden of stones, when poverty had deprived me of everything, when my worker's hands couldn't unclench themselves and I felt totally alone in the world, you returned to me like an angry coal that seethes, like the hard light that looks out of the laborer's eyes at dawn when the immigration police are searching the fields for those who can't identify themselves.

I too had no identity, nothing in common with the blood on the freeways, nothing but a howl that comes from the gut's pit when it's empty.

You returned to me, it was easy to love your dark child's face that remained half-hidden behind the fragments of an outcast's life.

Come closer, and let me tell you other things,

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Griswold

of mirrors shattered because they couldn't stand their own reflections, of small, provincial towns where our ancestors conceived and died like salmon, unable to navigate the final riffle. I think of Hudson locked into ice on the Great Bay, his crew belligerent, close to mutiny, and ready to tum the helm over to anyone with a good idea . Each night he plots their position, the same dull computation From particles of light. Something guides us.

We are not lost in the way of words that fizzle out in the darkness.

My love, it's the Fourth of July again.

Explosions blossom over the reservoir and the boat drifts, cutting the quiet water that heals itself. A fish hurls itself into the dryness of the air, and you are very close now, like the word love scrawled on a windowpane by a child on a snowy evening . He breathes. He exists.

He will write other words he doesn't know the meaning of yet. Perhaps, like Columbus, he11 discover the New World.

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The Unclaimed Corpse For Delmore Schwartz Being dead wasn't so bad.

After all, it cured one of certain fears and hungers. How easy to slip past the nose of a dog, who before might have followed growling at a distance.

He had known better flophouses than the morgue, but there, at least, the neighbors were quiet.

By night, he wandered the streets unmolested, and hardly noticed the decay that swarmed over still summer evenings. He missed his shadow, of course, and little by little the loves that decomposed in the place where memories are buried. Finally, he even forgot the face that gazed into his own one night when he stopped to examine a stagnant pool of water.

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Leona Yamada

Jack-o'-Lantern The pumpkin's green stem and scalp needled inexperienced fingers pulling out strings and orange-webbed seeds.

His carved face, while seeds roasted on metal trays, reflected in the oven's black glass.

That expression awaits Halloween .

He pulls himself, day by day, deeper into his creases folding into a new shape: ace of spades.

Tonight, costumed children have forgotten the molding head.

Black urchins feed on his cheeks, candle-charred flesh.

Moths wreathe our porch light: the pumpkin leers at the children, a leper in the rain.

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Fifth Grade We called her Mrs. Kinako; every day she ate fried mochi rolled in soybean powder and sugar.

"Nutrition doesn't have to cost," she said.

Her teeth and glasses, gold-rimmed.

She saved empty bottles in the cupboards of her kitchen .

"There might be a day when they are needed."

She taped all the labels.

Flat tin cans filled cardboard boxes on her back porch.

"Countries need metal in a war."

She paid the big boys to move those boxes ten cents each.

The girls got a nickel marking and taping.

Under the house, new stacks of boxes leaned on the old.

Each marked by a 10 year old over twenty years of teaching.

The oldest stacks, no longer identified by year or name.

When the work was done, she pulled a bucket of lime, from under the stairs,

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sprinkling white until a cloud choked us all.

'1f you don't do this, animals come and die."

We signed our names proudly,

red and indelible under the banner: CLASS OF 1960 FOR THE WARS.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ian MacMillan

Famine in Valhalla You remember particularly the smell of rotten chaff and old dung around the bam, and that inside the pastoral quietude of air that seemed amber in the spring sunlight, the tanks of the flame thrower felt heavy on your back, and your fatigue made you curse the uneven ground, the rash on the top inside of your thigh, the blisters on your hands. You sent a heavy spurt of the flaming fuel at the base of the bam wall, and turned.

When you passed the ancient, splintered planking of a root cellar, you smelled them. In the ticklish pause of sudden attention, you stood very still, barely breathing, feeling the rush of strange, hollow anticipation empty your flesh of the sensation of being. You could have walked on, but there was the atmosphere of finishing everything in a strange, empty sphere around you.

You put the tip of your boot under the edge of the door and flipped it up, and then opened the other side with your hand. There was a line of faces staring, in the brightness of the day detailed to a stark, pinpoint lucidity. From the stubble faced father down to the little one in blond braids, six of them. Then there was a pause, a strange, soundless vacuum, and the sensation of a fleshless emptiness which was like a dream.

The airy emptiness was almost like a shock-there was no past and no future, only a kind of perfect perception . You arced the fuel into their faces in a rapid triple sweep- forward, back, forward, and the air was full of the smell of burning hair.

Karl Brandt stared down at the cheese with the thin translucent rings of onion on top. He could not understand his stomach's willful rejection of food, and realized with a shaky exhalation of sour breath that he would not eat now, even though it had been nearly two days. He picked up the little glass of schnapps and downed it in one gulp, hearing shellburst somewhere out on the street. The ragged bunch of women children in the darkest comer of the hall shuffled, and Brandt could moans, whispered questions.

Scharfuhrer Goff snorted, his mouth full of cheese and onion. "A your age shouldn't drink so much," he said.

"You said I was old for my age," Brandt said.

"The oldest nineteen I've ever met," Goff said. "But you drink much anyway, even for a man."

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Brandt stared at the table, then up at Goff, who in the gloomy light of the beer-hall appeared puffy and florid as if deliberately wallowing in gluttonous self indulgence regardless of the destruction around him . He liked Goff, who had been like a father to him. But on his face Brandt could see the calculatedly flippant expression of a man who has given up.

He had seen it before, on the front, but on the face of the older man the expression seemed disappointingly out of place.

"Listen," Brandt said. They could hear it in the lulls of the occasional shelling close by, sounds like faint thunder. It was the main thrust of the Red artillery barrage.

"Ten, twelve kilometers," Goff said. 'This is good. You ought to try some."

Brandt laughed and shook his head. When he and Goff had made their way into the city, leaving their unit slaughtered out there somewhere twenty kilometers to the east, Brandt had been stunned to see the blackened stumps of familiar buildings, and the incredible clutter of useless material, and the corpses, their wallets and papers strewn around them.

Goff had laughed with amazed joviality at everything he saw-''My God, the Gedachtniskirche! It's nothing but a pile of stones!" And he would laugh, as if he had been walking through some strange wonderland. They saw German soldiers hanging from lightposts, their faces bloated and dark, with tongues crowding open mouths. Then, avoiding a surprise barrage of close shelling, they had made their way to a beerhall that occupied the cellar of one of the buildings off the Kurfurstendamm. They had to step over a dying man who had the right half of his body perforated by shrapnel. But nothing could be done for him, and they ran down the stairs to the door and found the place more or less open.

There were around a dozen people cowering in one corner, mostly grandmothers and children, huddled together. There was one man, sitting there with a look of ashen resignation on his face. "We're not security police," Goff had boomed amiably. ''My friend here's just a boy.

Don't fret ."

The ancient proprietor had not been expecting distinguished guests, he said, but because it was only a matter of a day or so before the moujiks took the city, he offered them the cheese and schnapps. Then he said, "Let us drink to the death of that Jew-loving scoundrel Roosevelt.

Brandt now poured himself more schnapps and drank it. "When it gets dark I go," he said.

'Watch out for the maniacs," Goff said. 'They'll kill you. We're deserters technically. That is to say, here we are drinking in a cellar while the rest are out dying heroically a few kilometers away." He laughed. 'Think of it, Valhalla's only a short walk from here."

"They say they know where to take the trucks through, and besides,

95

why would they bother with a bunch of children and a few doddering old nuns?"

"The Russians wouldn't harm her," Goff said. "Why all this? Why risk your life?"

"She's my sister," Brandt said, and then realized the stupidity of the idea. It was completely by chance that he had talked to an old nun on the way into Berlin. She revealed the information about the convoy, and Brandt had been captured by the idea at once. Now he looked over at the motionless people, who were still suspicious. After all they were Waffen SS soldiers. "I don't know what the Russians will do," he said, and felt a familiar swoon of fatigue and discomfort leak through his body. He had never been so dirty in his life. "You know what we did to them."

"Isolated incidents," Goff said.

"Yes, children hanging from tree branches, or lying on the ground their faces blown off. The Americans have less reason to do us harm."

"Are you going to eat that?" Goff asked.

"No, you have it."

Goff continued to eat with such gusto that Brandt became nauseated, and in order to control it he poured more schnapps, his hand shaking badly that he almost chipped the glass. He knew his svrnnt:onts- -evâ&#x20AC;˘en nerve in his body raged with irritation, and his skin frequently strange waves of clammy heat, which would recede into a sort of pitched trembling. And his face had broken out, so that, on the skin, he had grown three painful pustules. It embarrassed him . Before went into the army his face was a scandal. There was a brief period, ing the fighting, when it went away-now it was back. It seemed to him that he would still worry about something that used to ..111,,... " ..,. him at school.

Goff finished the cheese and onion, and sat up straight. He softly and then slapped his knees with finality. "Next I wait for kindly commissar to surrender to, of course after I ditch my Believe me, I will raise my hands high and yell 'tovaritch' ."

"Do you believe all this 'death factory' business?"

"Rumors spread with diminished precision," Goff said, "and if they numbers, they spread with an upward progression. It's a lot of ex<tgg.en~~ tion."

"Do you know why I believe it?" Brandt asked. "Because it what I did seem less important."

Goff sighed and looked with a kind of aggravated sympathy at "Will you stop torturing yourself? In war men do things, that's all. In few years it'll all be forgotten."

The old proprietor shuffled back into the dark hall. "Gentlemen," said, "it is apparent that the Reds are being held back. The sound-"

96

"Only a change in the wind," Goff said, "or they're breaking for supper."

The old man chuckled. "Can I get you anything else?"

"A place to sleep," Goff said, getting up. "And later, if you could help me find some civilian clothes-" "Certainly," the old man said. 'There are some empty rooms upstairs.

Those who were in them have fled west."

Goff thought a moment. "You'd better come up too. The security police can see through those windows."

"No," Brandt said. 'Til stay here."

Goff laughed. "Being suicidal is the mark of a romantic," he said. "I suppose you qualify. Be careful."

"What about them?" Brandt asked, nodding toward the people.

'The Russians won't hurt them. If they survive the shelling, then it's all right for them, all but the man anyway."

Goff left him there. Brandt sat, and then peered once through the little window to the street. He was aware of the people silently watching him.

It was still light. He poured more schnapps, now frightened that it might put him to sleep. He had to wait out the evening awake if possible, and his flesh, suspended in a kind of uncomfortable yawn, seemed to sink with rebellion at the thought.

The older man from the comer rose and approached Brandt. "How close are they?" he asked.

"Ten kilometers," Brandt said. The man looked at the schnapps bottle.

"Here," Brandt said. "Have some." He poured for the man. His hands were steadier now. "I have a question," Brandt said, watching the man drink the schnapps. "I need to take someone to Wilmersdorferstrasse and Bismarck. I mean-" He sighed. "Excuse me. My sister is just east of here .

I'm sending her out with some nuns, in a convoy. I'm getting her soon, out about three kilometers, then taking her to those comers. How-" "Ah, I see," the man said. "Go along the Spree on our side and coming back cut across the Tiergarten, but stay off Bismarckstrasse. Use, what's the parallel one on the south 7" "Schiller."

"Yes, but you've got to be careful. The SS shoot any men they see, even old ones. Or they send them to the front, wherever that is."

"All they'll need to do is tum them around."

'Well, thank you for the drink."

"You're welcome. And don't worry. The Russian armies are soldiers, a rabble, at least most of them. If the rules of war are observed-" He 路1tc1pped. "Well, you know what I mean."

"Are you from here?"

"Yes, I was born in the High Sauerland but I live near here. My grand-

97

mother lives just east of here. She- " He paused again. "I have a sister I haven't seen in a year, just a child actually. I'm going to get her and send her out to the west tonight. My parents are in Hamburg."

"I see," the man said. "I've something you might be able to use. Do you have a battery lamp?" uNo."

The man went back to the group, whispered to them, and returned with the lamp. He tested it by shining it on the floor, illuminating for a moment the ceiling grit shaken loose by the shelling, and Brandt's mudstained boots.

"Thank you," Brandt said. ''I've little to give you-" "No," the man said. "It's what I can do."

When the man left to join the others Brandt felt his throat thicken. The man was actually trying to cheer him up, and he had not expected it from anyone outside his unit, or his army.

He sat up, took a deep breath, and drew out his pistol. He could teiJ by the weight that the clip was full .

He was afraid to use the lamp, and found that he could see dimly by the reflection of the red sky, from the burning buildings in the distance.

As he edged along the buildings, stepping carefully over bricks and ble, he felt weighted down to the point of exhaustion by the Walther the quarter full bottle of schnapps in his cylindrical mess can. because he knew the way, he found himself marching along in a scious stupor, feeling reassured that as he worked his way from the fusion of the city center, the roads he walked became familiar.

Finally he saw the shape of the house against the dully flashing zon. It was perched on a knoll above a small cemetary, beyond Brandt could see a couple of military trucks and a mound of fuel He gasped with fatigue, and the painful rash on the inside top of his thigh had become so aggravated that he had to limp. His were heavy and cold with half-dried sweat.

A dull orange light came from the living room window. n.~,..,~""'''u' she still had oil for the lamps, and he laughed at the preposterousness the idea that she would still be there, Russians or no Russians. He to get his breath, and tried to pull himself together. His grandmother not easy for anyone in his family to get along with. She was proper dignified to the extreme and ran her house with a majestic bitchiness. laughed softly when he saw the damp cloth on the stoop, which always there for visitors to wipe their feet on.

He registered her relieved greeting in a state of semi-conscious ment, feeling paralyzed inside a dream . She appeared to him to be regal and in control of herself as always. "You don't look well," she "Was it bad? The retreat?"

98

''I'm only tired," he said. "D'you have something to drink?"

"Jagermeister7" "That would be fine," he said. She poured him a glass and he drank it in two gulps, and waited while the hot, alcoholic swoon leaked into his body. ''I've come for Inge," he said.

'Why?" ''I'm taking her into the city center and then sending her west, with some nuns, away from the Russians. I need clothes, too."

She stared at him. "What about your unit? You'll be out of uniform."

He sighed and sat down by the lamp. "It's time for everyone to stop.

My unit's dead. The Russians will be all over the city within about twenty-four hours."

"Nonsense, we're beating them back right now. All that noise is our artillery."

"It isn't-it's theirs. We're finished. The city's a mess. There are hundreds of thousands of them."

"So7 These are not men. They are primitive beasts who care nothing for death. Let them come. We have tanks-" "Do you think they're coming wearing leather and bison horns?" he whispered, trying to display his astonishment at her stupidity. "Have you ever seen a T-347 Have you ever seen Stormoviks, Lavotchkin bombers?"

"Nonsense," she said. "These are letters and numbers and silly names, and mean nothing to me. Stop being a whining pessimist. The Yolkssturm-" "Oh my God the Volkssturm! " he said, slapping his forehead in mock amazement. "I forgot all about them! Of course!'' Then he settled back, giggling. "Old men and little boys," he said. "They'll be food for the maggots. I'll bet the world has seen more maggots in the last year than ever in history." He stood up, teetered a little, and then put his hands on her shoulders, and stared directly into her eyes. "It's time to regain our senses, Oma," he said. "It's time-" "You smell terrible. Your face is broken out."

"Correct. I do. I've lost all sense of grooming during the retreat. I forgot to take a bath." He stared above her head. "Oh yes, as I was saying, we need to poke through and realize that we've lost . That's why I'm taking Inge-" 'Then you are a coward and a deserter," she said.

He looked at her, hurt that she would say that. Then he said, "And there you stand, in all your glorious lunacy, believing to the end in our mad housepainter." He shook his head and poured himself more Jagermeister.

"If you think your childish insults make any impression on me, young man, you are sadly mistaken." She drew herself up into a look of almost

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violent dignity, and said, "You should just do your job like a man. Your parents are doing theirs in Hamburg."

"It's probably already overrun by the Americans," he said. "And I have done my job. On the retreat, do you know what I did7 I ended up carrying a flame thrower, and in the confusion of the retreat-" He stopped . "Are you listening."

"Against my will, yes."

"I want you to visualize this now," he said. "I want you to raise the level of your awareness and picture it as if it were real."

"Stop babbling and come to the point."

"During the evacuation of a little town near the border of Poland, in western Russia, I came across a kind of root cellar and found a family hiding in it." He paused and then shook his head with thoughtful wonder.

"I pointed the flame thrower at their faces and incinerated them. I felt nothing, or maybe a strange kind of ugly joy. I remember most studying the way the thing dripped fire after I finished and the family was crackling away. The thrower dripped, so that there was this little dotted line of fire connecting me to them. The air was thick with the smell of burning hair." He looked at her. "You're not amazed?"

"Why should I be7" "I would guess that the children in this family, four of them, ranged in age from two to eight or nine. One was a girl. She was blond ."

"You are trying to shock me, and you have failed," she said. "I don't care who you killed or how you did it. And you can forget trying to be poetic with me."

"Poetic?"

She went into a droning imitation of his story. "-and there was a dotted line-! would guess that- You're talking rot. These people are bolshevik savages, and the only problem is people like you who haven't got the fortitude to do your duty. It's no wonder they're so dose."

Brandt sighed, and dropped his shoulders. He suddenly felt so weary that he had to sit down.

"Don't talk to me any more," she said.

"Fine," he said. 'Til get Inge now. I am surprised that you don't try to stop me."

"Why should 17 Your parents dropped her here . I didn't ask."

"Well, it's going to be too dangerous for either of you to stay."

She came out with a haughty snort. Brandt found another lamp, a small one, and lit it, and climbed the stairs in the shifting globe of dusty orange light.

He was surprised by the child's size. Staring down at her as she slept, he experienced a stab of embarrassment- he didn't know why he was doing this. Goff was right. Why the pointless waste of energy? But image of the line of children came back to him, the look of surprise each one as the bright arc of fuel splashed across their faces .

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When he shook her awake she squinted at him in the lamplight. "Inge, it's your brother."

"Are you a Russian?"

"No, I'm your brother and I'm taking you to the center of the city where you'll be safe."

"Are the Russians here?"

"No, but tomorrow maybe. We need to go."

She went along with this with remarkable maturity, yawning and muttering about what she should take as she packed a small bag.

"Oma doesn't want to come with us," he said.

She stopped and looked up at him, her face a little moon-eyed mask of slow surprise. Then she said, "Oh," in a faint, half-distracted whisper.

When he got back down the stairs, holding Inge's hand, his grandmother came out of the pantry area carrying a lamp and a package.

"Here is food," she said, "and her papers."

He took the package. "Ah, her Aryan pedigree," he said.

'Tell me one thing," his grandmother said. 'Why the Americans?"

'We didn't occupy their country," he said. "People liberated from ----... ---~路路 need to murder for a while."

'They're an evil empire controlled by Jews."

'Well," he said. Then he slumped, wondering if he had the energy to back. "I don't know. All I know is that I've never done an American harm. I want her away from the Russians."

His grandmother seemed to be thinking now, and looked to be posby warmer emotions.

"Come with us," Brandt said.

"No," she said. "I've lived here most of my life. Besides, they'll never this far."

Brandt laughed softly, and poured himself more Jagermeister. Inge sat asleep on the couch.

"You'll never find yourself back there that way," his grandmother said.

"Alcohol has been a staple diet for me for some time now," he said . He shut his eyes and shook his head slowly, and then looked at Inge. you ready?"

She was quickly both scared and physically aggravated by the walk. red glow in the sky, and the distant flash of flames were not new to but walking at night was. Her feet hurt, she was tired, she didn't this was a good idea . ''I'm taking you to safety," he said. "The Ruswill be here, right here, where we're walking, tomorrow or the day ."And then, "No, they won't hurt Oma. They'll let her alone. Let's keep going."

The desire for rest drew him like a powerful magnet, and he looked at hulking silhouette of each standing building, wondering if he could just for an hour or so, and rest . But he knew what would happen.

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He would sleep for a day, sleep until he was awakened by a broad faced moujik pointing a gun at his face. And what then? Would they rape lnge7 The Kazakhs would-he had heard all the stories. No, he had to keep going.

He fell into a half-conscious march, and walked, holding Inge's hand, for what seemed like an eternity, and then realized that in effect he had managed to sleep a little. Gradually she began to slow, and he found himself tugging her, until she stopped and said, "I want to go back-1 don't like this."

"We must go on. It's only another kilometer or so. Please, this is important."

She began to cry. "Please," he said. "Please walk. We have plenty time, but I want to get back in-" There was a shellburst nearby, a hundred meters away. "See7 We need to keep going. This could dangerous ."

They walked on, but after another hundred meters the need for overcame him, and he aimed himself at a building which looked like small apartment house.

The foyer was empty. "Sit here," he said to Inge. She did so, and he next to her and immediately began to doze a little.

He was awakened by the sound of a woman's voice. She talked to him, and gradually he understood that she was inviting him lnge was already there, peeking out the door.

The woman, whose name was Gretchen Frobe, asked all the qwestito~ about how close they were and how soon they would overrun the and all the time Brandt was aware that she was looking at his face. became embarrassed.

"I suggest you get out of here as soon as you can," he said.

"And go where7" she asked. "Come, sit down. They won't hurt Look, your sister's already sleeping."

'They will," he said, sitting down. He opened the mess can and out the schnapps. "Would you like some7" he asked. ''No thanks." He took off the cap and drank a small mouthful. Then was again aware of her watching him, and became embarrassed But the liquor made the embarrassment evolve quickly into anger. are you looking at7" 'Tm sorry," she said. "You look as if you've been through a lot."

He found that he was nearly weeping with fatigue and confusion. lot7 Yes, I have. Do you know what I did7" He stopped. ''I'm sorry," said. ''No, tell me."

'There was a house and a barn and a root cellar in Russia," he Then he laughed until tears filled his eyes. "No, this is not a story. I burned the house and the barn with a flame thrower. Do know how they work7"

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"No ."

'Well, maybe it's irrelevant. I opened the root cellar and this whole family was inside from Mama and Papa down through all the little kids."

He took another swallow of schnapps. "I aimed the flame thrower at them and burned them all up. There they were, all on fire ." He paused, looking at her. "In a strange way I enjoyed it."

She didn't say anything. She continued looking at him. All the embarrassment was gone. He felt like a mindless animal, unconcerned about being watched, like a cow.

Finally she said, "So you're bad too."

'What?"

'Tm bad. I'm loose," she said. "Women become bad when they're loose. Men become bad when they kill."

11

So1"

"If you'd like to have a bad woman, I'm here."

For the first time he looked at her that way. She was attractive . He said, "No." Then he laughed and added, 'Tve never had any woman."

"I could help you feel more inclined," she said, and looked at Inge. He drank another small sip of schnapps. In one deft motion she removed her sweater, revealing a plump, healthy and well endowed torso. She smiled with an uninhibited pride. He stared at her.

"No," he said.

She got a sort of wan, dejected look which was at the same time still uninhibited. Brandt didn't see her as a woman. He saw her as a creature with large mammary glands, like an animal in a zoo. 'Tm sorry," he said.

He had no desire. Even the thought of it was absurd. He felt dry and empty and sour.

She put the sweater back on. "Would you like to sleep?"

"No, I have to go," he said . "You'll probably start hearing tanks tomor." He snorted softly. "They won't refuse your invitation ."

She laughed with a dejected abandon. "Well, Americans, British, Russians. What difference does it make?" The tone of her voice was familiar was that proud and fearless German resignation he had heard from toldiers.

'Well, I hope you'll be all right," he said.

'1 will."

In a short while Brandt was again out on the littered, abandoned dragging Inge along. She walked like someone drunk and beyond any will to complain. He marched along disregarding the rash on inside of his thigh, the fatigue, even the fear he knew he should have The journey was almost done. He would give her over to the nuns find someone to surrender to .

When he found himself approaching the Tiergarten he woke up a little, ....,,.,7,'"" that he would have to be careful.

"Are we almost there?" Inge asked.

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"Yes. You'll be taken care of by some nuns. Then we'll meet later after this is over, with Mama and Papa."

The sky was growing lighter behind him. The ashy, predawn light muted the redness of the reflected firelight ahead . He worked his way toward Schiller, where he would be able to see easily to the point one block off where the trucks would be parked. From there, it would be no more than another fifty meters, and then he could sleep . Then he remembered that he had not taken clothes with him, and was still in uniform.

"Stupid," he said. "''m hungry," Inge said .

"They'll feed you, and you have food in your bag. Here we areSchiller."

"I can't carry the bag any more."

"Here," he said. He took the bag, and put it in the hand that held hers, which was so stiff that he could barely straighten the fingers.

As they approached the corner where he would see the trucks, he began feeling a jerky, uncontrollable nervousness. He knew it was because of the extremity of his fatigue, but he felt so weak and shaky that he imagined himself to be like a marionette, loose jointed and out of control.

"Hold it here a moment," he said. He drew out the schnapps, and drank a large mouthful. Just as he swallowed it he nearly vomited, and turned away from her. "''m all right," he said. He waited until he was sure it would stay down, and then grabbed her hand once more.

They reached the corner, and he saw the trucks, and children around the openings at the back ends.

"All right," he said. "Here we are."

At the halfway point he stopped, and said, "Go to them. Make sure you don't lose your bag, because your papers are there." He looked up at two nuns, who waved. He didn't want to go all the way to the trucks.

"All right," he said, "goodbye for now. We'll see each other soon."

He made his way back to Schiller, and then across the corners to a half demolished alley where he could watch the trucks until they left. The sounds of shelling began, now that it was dawn. He sat down on the pavement and leaned against a broken crate.

When he opened his eyes it was bright daylight, the trucks were gone, and a uniformed man was peering down at him. He was cold.

"Get up," the man said. He was a short, older SS man who waâ&#x20AC;˘Keaâ&#x20AC;˘ with a cane. "Where is your unit7" "Dead," he said.

Two younger SS men materialized at his sides, and the lightness at waist told him that he had been disarmed.

"Tell me where the front is and I'll go," he said.

The younger SS men laughed.

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"You are a deserter," the officer said.

Brandt felt himself swoon with a sensation of a strange emptiness, and giggled. One of the younger SS men struck him in the stomach and all air was blasted from his lungs. He writhed on the ground, gasping for air. He struggled to his feet, and the pain evaporated, leaving him feeling tw.'L41''u and hollow, almost gutted. "Then shoot me," he said.

The younger men laughed again .

"You are vermin," he said . "You are shit."

One of the younger ones gasped in mock indignation, and Brandt ...... ohâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘rt. He suddenly felt a forceful, even jaunty exhultation that ballooned over the sour emptiness in his trunk. "You can't hurt me," he said.

"We shall now hang you, deserter," the officer with the cane said.

"Go ahead," Brandt said. "''m not afraid of you."

"It'll certainly help that condition on your face," one of the younger ones said. "You must reduce the blood supply, dry those awful 'bl.,-mic:.hf><:: up."

"I am guilty of having killed innocent people," Brandt said. "One famin Russia I burned to death with a flame thrower. I burned their faces . I did it because they were there."

"Oh you beast!" one of the younger ones squeaked, and then covered face with his hands. "You hun! You barbarian! Oh! Oh!" and he consquealing with prissy indignation.

"I therefore request that I be executed in accordance with-" "Shut up!" the officer snapped. His face had turned almost ashen.

"-in accordance with any law that applies. My name-" The officer whacked him across the face with his cane. Brandt saw flashes of light, but the pain did nothing to the strange sensation of ..,,,.;"''""' and composure. He stooped over and vomited a splash of fluid front of him, making the officer jump back, his face twisted with dis. Getting his breath, Brandt said, "You know, I understand almost now. You've helped me understand."

One of the younger soldiers dug around in the trash and came up with length of electrical cord. "Would this do?" he asked the officer.

"Copper has great tensile strength," Brandt said, and laughed . The watched him in silence. "I know how you are feeling right now," went on. "What a rich few days this has been for you. You're to watch me die and you love it. This is the acting out of your private dream."

The young soldier fumbled with the wire, making a slip knot. Brandt almost no breath, and the space his organs occupied felt lifted, ~~tless and airy, and he could not escape the sensation that there was there.

'We are countrymen," Brandt said. 'T understand. This is a collabora-

105

One young soldier climbed up on the crate and pulled him up while others pushed from behind. Then the soldier tied the cord .,n,.,.,p路wh.,,. above him, leaning against him as he worked. He put the noose Brandt's neck and jerked it tight, and got down. Brandt could feel knot on the noose lightly pinching the skin on the side of his neck. young soldiers held his arms down, by the wrists, so he wouldn't be to use his hands. He drew in his breath and came out with a loud, tone yell whose vibration scalded his throat. When he was out of he drew in air to yell again.

He dropped, and was shocked almost senseless by a powerful stab pain on the side of his neck, from the tightening knot pinching his He groped at the knot with his hands, but felt the cord buried, hard as rock, so deeply under his jaw that he could barely touch it. He felt throat crush, and powerful convulsions heaved his chest inward. He as if his face would explode, and his body began to turn, and he saw littered plane of ground slide before him, until he saw sweeping his vision the space where the trucks had been and beyond that, direction of Inge's escape.

106

Carl Phillips

presumably you flying over fields of wild mustard, 1AJU~1au:: blues and sandstone

spent the days without you and dreaming the traffic our bed. The sheets play the right and elbow rub up against Chinese and blue, outsized that cannot exist, but around under the body that is always to forget about. the light in tight cubes raise itself powers of brightness tauuut~~: all eyes shut, feel the sheets go cinnamon my heel (fretting truant, the last rise),

wait for the conquering dream come, in which the phone and knowing can only be you, I pass from it, into the living room, frame shifting over the magazines, litter old cups, plates, printing the teak-dark floor shadow, my body one lost cloud.

107

Imagine my flesh (leaves waiting to unfurl in blue sheets) conquering the dream of you, as the rooms of my life with you spin to miniatures below me: the pear you didn't finish, your votive shoes, bits you are even now forgetting.

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.........__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Jay A . Blumenthal

Contemplating My Wife's Bed on the bloodshot maps of war, eyes trace the rivalries of the Balkans, move west to where the bedspread swirls Trieste. The underbelly of Tuscansoft, Churchillian, hard to defend, sweet Ophelia lies drunk much farther north, rottenness still the perfect blend quilted country and Baltic port. years she's had no feel for strategy, tactics have left her distant and cold. love, I guess, as in topology, seems to be no simple road. then the theater of the house retire to squeeze the quisling in the dark? on destiny like a desert mouse in my finest hour, find my part turning Denmark upside down?

Europe lies naked upon the sheet. rauâ&#x20AC;˘,uuoc:u by the indecision thought has found, thus into the contours of sleep .

109

Holding Pattern The plane lurches, then descends from the clouds.

The NO POETRY sign flashes, and for the first time in three weeks I think about New Jersey.

Are the commuters at my train station still huddled like witless caribou? Has my lawn finally died in the fierce shadow of Manhattan7 Returning from inside the Arctic Circle, my wife and I argue whether our travel agent should have prepared us for the interior and those long nights of uninterrupted self.

It snowed so hard there was not much to do: watch our diets, play gin rummy, talk about fishing for the big synthesis. Most of the time we hovered over each other's weaknesses. On the last day a pack of wolves fed outside our dining room, and Natalie instinctively slunk toward the window for more snapshots. But what of it?

The trip has failed: we return unchanged.

110

Deconstructions Try getting a poet in August. I tore through the Yellow Pages: Writer's Exchange, Writer's Market, on Wall Street, but found nothing for writer's block (although that wasn't what me exactly) . I tried novelists, half suspecting that, like lawyers, they had foregone their depositions of the soul for the brief pleasures of the Hamptons, , and Moot Point. The one sober voice I connected with-that of a defrocked literary criticwas packing for a nudist colony and could tell me nothing about how to relate Jenny's leaving r\PI"Obably for good) with my paperhanger's disappearance. should have known that beneath each narrative IPI\J•un:ul is bottled-up feeling. All spring, Jenny prepared her case against me, ·uncm1er1n2 one weakness of the spirit after another (my abiding faith in 100-proof rum, for example) while the hanger repapered my house, bequeathing ugly creases on whatever he touched, my poetry to hide the painful beneath a perfectly '""'G'uu~.,., vision. I failed because I saw nothing technical difficulties that, in time, be smoothed out, the lumpiness eventually dissolved in a true marriage of adversaries. crazy as it sounds, I was more adept at reading ,...,....,...,,n the lines than getting my facts straight. the hanger run off with my wife? I still know, even though his bill was postmarked "'"''nr"''"""r, Jenny's favorite port of call. do know I'm left with an empty house, workmanship, and the fear I've become

111

divorced from my feelings; none of this can be argued. In my bedroom the paper has begun to roll up, and I can barely see the handwriting on the wall :

112

.,__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Michael]. Bugeja

I Feel Your Soul, Reach for You with These Arms

know now what you mean by fate, love that makes its own commitment, IH•:'Iw,PvE•rclumsy, and overcomes a woman ....,,~.-~ only vow was to free herself of men, use their bodies as they have used hers, the hell of it. Love takes that woman gives her to a man who feels her soul,

wants the body too. He doesn't want it for ego, or any cocksure ll(e~ascm that she can reject like a lover wears out the night. No, he is after llJiicttes·-t>aclv and soul-that beauty never dreamed could be _._.u, ..L

'-

IN4:>bc,dvunderstands. This man to her when she is high friends, a little melody and smoke forget before bed. She has to An•ow••r the door and dismiss him, only joy: he arrives like clockwork out.of jealousy-another clicheBut because he has felt her soul. is not beauty. This is hell invents for those who risk . ~~.nvt:nntll' in its name. So they step . .......u"'"'' to that light and cannot stop will lose each other. We know that.

113

Basically Troubled in the Heat The wife of the butcher gets it Lean, learns the only way Back home is through the warm Screen door of dreams. And summer Seems to drop casual clothes Off, the sidewalk sales, going Cage to cage at the hot zoo. Even Though it is day outside And alone and even though a bus Hushes up a blood red cardinal, Wiresitting, the rest of the landscape Heaves in the heat, sleeves rolled Up, sleeves off, slips off, bath tub Of cool water, calling on the party Line, the pitcher of beer spilling.

So- my father at the bowling alley, Renting numbered shoes, would change His wet shirt if he had extras, would Bowl if he had the right fingers.

Outside the neighbors' talk litters The localized sunlight, someone Odd walks by in sunglasses, The no-eye kind, but he's Not blind, he's stylized, Dragging his leg, from another Age. So, too, the roosters In the back yard, grabbing a hen's Neck by surprise. Under this hot Scalpel sun, the scrutinizing Cue ball sinking by mistake

114

a table stripped of its dusty blue showing its wooden self. fans buzz, keep the flies away the cakes, and even the sun bring the sugar to the surface.

115

Artificial Intelligence Most things don't breathe Under water without difficulty, Without some help from outside.

So, too, is this machine of ours Unremarkable, so full of daily Life it fairly ruins its health With repetition: too much of The same can kill. We, too, Placation of dinner plates, pleasure In numbers especially large.

Any man-made thing makes men someThing else, and when we find out We will tell all. A hurried call To a telephone in a resthome, A sudden shout picked up by intelligence: Some drifter in Oklahoma will give Up reading minds and run for Public office. Who can predict Predictions, who can refuse not to Believe them. We compute, we Believe, we survive. The trouble Is not with killing our reputations As leaders for the sake of beauty, Or with selling someone's past life On magnetic tape for post-war Processing, it is the same trouble We find in all the books, how to

116

the words through as words, bits of rag, not autographs cement, not as circular reasons for not as underdrive for the overnot simply as something our decidedly told us never to do.

117

Charles Edward

Afflatus He loved his paradise of palms, his suckling pig, his taro root, Liked to think his feet inured to lava crust, A bit of a barbarian perhaps, but not a brute.

You know the sort, nonchalant on burning coals Because he never wore a sandal in his life, And has his own entirely native way with insulated soles.

I like him, I do indeed, admire his peace and calmHe can drink a glass as though he clarified a waterfall; The fan that you turn on for him projects a palm.

This is our Dream Prince in the living room, close byI could not if I took a hundred thousand notes on him Convey how he exudes such sweeping eloquence of earth and sky.

What does it matter if he claims the sun and makes the land seem what overkissedWe have the gunboats and venereal sailors in reserve, The rank perfume of women rising like a river mist.

He will not wear my rigid boot, he will not take your silken gloveWe saw him yesterday through the window of a store, glissando in glass, As if a northern light were promising a picture, images of love.

118

Miko Suzuki

Check-Out Counter Vignettes Okay, you win.

You said it first .

Safe Behind a practiced phone call You said it was over, That maybe all along was never really anything between us. of letters Slanted left, with straight descenders. few photographs of my finger the upper-right comer. _.UPIJea and burned the kitchen garbage. wisps cringed away charred, black flakes of ash fall and cling like breading mealy brown apple cores, -:\rv1rntn~1m meat trays, dripping purple juices, film-sized box from the drugstore, - tNr:>nr...n in layers of newspaper initial shame. silhouette of a couple Against a printed sunset.

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* * *

Until we are hid at last-Death knows our eyes must be lowered first-we don' t see her though the soft stones against our forehead as every mother has kissed her child goodnight covered the crib with centuries and readiness -all our life that darkness almost a scent from trust and who-knows-where.

At last the silence that waits as if it were a place, a majesty washing over us with some irresistible hillside, a quiet fire more and more restful and hugging the warm continents closer-we almost hear their shores their night after night looking for the light we will remember as waves and the hushing rain that held us dose.

120

on this table chance: the loaf grain last Fall was crushed one hand! you could hear Earth breaking open to cool brittle, then bone meat from a lamb, warm winds

it's enough-just Esther slowly, your name just one finger reaching out small breath spelling your name on these still warm crumbs the rickety wood table - . I f......~ in this room: an axle ER:<~LJI.rnt~o~: with straw and salt that one word if all your words and this lamb back, the table whole, fresh growing leaves, filling the room skies and branches reaching everywhere.

121

David

Healing A dirty stream scars our lawn .

Beyond, thick brambles edge the bottom land where starlings dive at other birds that only want to sing.

Robins search: within rusted plum trees. The meadow is divided, but thrives around its wound . . . still running north to south . If I could sing, I would stay above the trees.

Act I By the door, a still-wet raincoat hangs from an empty chair.

Blown clouds pass over trees that bend toward you.

Say your name . Say it twice.

Talk with me.

122

D. N. Baldwin

Round Up It was one of those statements made by people passing from your life.

"Cancel our reservations at The Golden Panda .. ." The voice was that of my wife, but the declaration seemed so imponderable that at first I chuckled and took it to be a prank, some tape splicing engineered by one the many ingenuous junior partners who scurry around with nothing than legal research to occupy them. There were sobs, snatches of a reference to the dog we owned jointly. ". . . Remember, I once only you," she concluded. Rather than ply between two anchorany longer (a deception she claimed was killing her with self' she opted for sanity and absconded with her confessor, one • li:ltho>r K .

When I think on his forced geniality, the awkward placement of the or the forced smile, fading even as it drew your interest, I can, in ..,,.r..,oc:n,prt, begin to see-But never mind that . Blinded by my rapt sense domesticity, I focused elsewhere; and except for the Lady Sodalities met all too often or the half Saturdays burned at confession, we inseparable, Dottie and I. Dual this, dual that; down the road I IY!IItVls;tortea dual headstones.

Seemingly unconnected on the face of it, but that pronouncement folclosely in the wake of what I might term a sartorial episode, which ..,.,m,.,PI'1 into a judicial calamity for me. You see, I was hurrying to court in the day when a button exploded from my blazer as if it were .-uj.l't:u~~ by cordite; it arched through a street grate, sewered and lost. it happens this blazer was no mere tunic, the button more than an -n:nnP1"1~· the jacket was a tailored original. the buttons all brass cameos fox hunts, huntmaster with jagdhorn raised, hounds in full cry, and .._tPn'T'Iir•Prl horsemen, at .£80 a set.

And that loss quickly brought on yet another, for I was obliged to around before the bar like some jurisprudent Quasimodo so as not compromise my obdurate client any further, his leaf-thin purchase on . .!ed,om withering under my lapse of leadership (bellowing, for example, he did at the lone prosecution witness: "You don't know your ass from coconut eye!"). This observation, needless to relate, was followed by a gavel punctuation, and what followed was an all too quick •ooJ~a:n ride down into the dungeons of some state-run facility. Were it for that lost button I believe I might have saved the man.

123

Afterward, I sequestered myself in the office, had something brought in for lunch, and from my state of ennui played back the morning calls.

Dottie's message, once it was authenticated, was enough to stripmine my senses, and I sat there benumbed for a block of time I was incapable of measuring. Eventually I moved around everyone on my afternoon calendar and exited for a palliative, a slow pint at Twink's on Seventh.

Smooth the day's puckers, I naively thought; but I managed more than images of Dottie winging south with her votary and my performance from the interior of a thrift shop blazer. Over and over visions assaulted me until my meager lunch soured and I found turning for home .

This final, and usually routine lap to my quarters drags on bly and without event until I complete my ascent of the stairs that from building vestibule to second floor. Here, abruptly, such a occurs in my chest that it can only be equated to having """."'thi"' beneath my ribs compressed to a sudden state of singularity, the of which bullies me into a sitting position. My ability to draw deserts me. Perspiration sluices out from every pore. My twenty as an MP in Kaiserslautern dart by, the severe faces of forgotten lovers.

Some moments are missing, vandalized from the pages of my for when I surface the day has faded, and I am ignominiously perched the fringe of the carpeted landing when Ms. Gill of 2B and Welsh leashed bound into the hall . Shadowy comings and goings surround the nights especially, with JuJu music percolating through the walls to hours. Voices low and satiny, the recurrent moans.

As they near I rise to essay a greeting, feign a hat tip; but she wide, steering the sniffing dog away, his eye to the pee-stained fibers . face is a function of the distance between us, rather than our nr.nYimil Christmas ball earrings of see-through magenta distort everything their path. Pendulous, they flank the sneer. She is bereft of the sense moment, I suppose, or perhaps still miffed at that incident with killer Dachshund. I am a beggar, a leper. Far from complete, and a overweight, I must admit; but the blackout that she imposes uncalled-for.

Fine tuned though, in her basic jeans and heels, the black netted over affording a glimpse of rose pedal skin so unlike Dottie's . She as she passes, saturating the air around me with scents that quicken pulse. Then she minces downward, her nates alternating like stretched atria of a sprinter in his final ten meters. Smitten with strokes, I balustrade myself and stare. Roommates descending in cert, the dog hardly limbed and waddling ahead, heaving the ter, choked notes of crisis. Smitten herself perhaps, she glances before exiting, a bemused expression anointing her face. At that

124

am almost overcome with the absurd desire to communicate my plight, curb my impulse. Exteriorize it and they shun you. Speak of your and wander in a social landfill.

I loosen my tie and breath easier, oddly energized by this non-encounand tick off the handful of steps necessary to reach lB, where somehas left the door ajar. To calm myself I picture Dottie, reduced in to return for some of her necessities, overlooking security in chaos of that departure. A touch of home in West Palm.

Police-style, I fasten myself to the wall and fire a glance inside. A hallblurred by shadows reveals itself; beyond that, my timed bathroom another in the kitchen. No Dottie or dog in evidence, but I sense a nonetheless. The smells of breakfast still taint the air, and as I back that repast, I can see no signs from the smiling, everyday face of even though that transmission of betrayal was being polished under those graying locks of hers. From the street below the inevitable sounds of encroaching night, the horns, a truck out his lowest gear, a nearby siren; but out of that acoustic one note rises and separates itself from the others, a soft whisper a sound, like the breath of winter through a broken pane or raised Stepping from my shoes, I move inside, then slip from room to room; the windows, functionless for generations, remain secure, sash to welded with rebellious white enamel. A hasty inventory discloses signs of pillage, no burgled stores. My pair of modest Max Beckmans, an earlier less frantic period, bask untouched; ditto for my ancient I recall her references to the library on one Father K. Voyeurs at these priests, and no doubt reflected in his collection. K for kinkco-author of this hollowness. item stands as it did this morning. Her clothes, her shoes, her and furs all carve out spaces of perfect and pronounced stillness. the light plays on the borders of blackness, I stand there nonwondering what they plan to live on down there. But thoughts of lovers give way to the revival of this unnamed sound, the hissing proof some mechanism gone awry perhaps. Since only the kitchen, with vast array of appliances, remains outside my tour, I judge the guess a one, leave the guest room, tum right, and make for the door. my breakfast table's glass I find a comely cowgirl. With deft she twirls a brown riata, playing out the rope. She teases me with circles, garnishing the performance with theme-speak . "Yah," she follows with "Git along!" But I stand transfixed, feasting on the leather chaps, the lazy studded vest and open blouse with its bit of decolletage, the red silk bandana worn askew. Once a year Rose fired my heart with just such an outfit back in the forties,

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down to the same brown Stetson at the same angle to the plaited coif.

"Roll two there, hon," she cracks in whiskey tenor, when I fish shaky Kool.

I transfer the cigarette under the moving loop. She takes it with teeth. I find mooring at the electric range, snap on the exhaust fan. practiced ease she works the rope, smokes, and stares out as if I something she has come across while combing a thicket for strays, enchanting gaze that I've met before. In the heart of Pawnee Bill's West Show, on one of those riders, surely. She's wandered in here an anniversary tour, mistaking my place for a bunkhouse. Frustrated her search for grub and a tin bathtub, she does this routine.

DARING WESTERN GIRLS!! EQUINE SKILLS!! Josh, my father, by account the only Jewish cowboy in all of Laramie, sold his fancy dollar saddle for train fare and journeyed east. Surfacing in he married into Harlem furniture . Never able to shake that dust, he my hand and we subwayed to the Garden annually, his eyes dancing the pulsating light of that train. Then he would lose himself in those cling riders, the Special Sales and the Inventory Overstocks from his face.

"Prairie Rose?" I ask, but she ignores my query. "Melody?" another of those headliners.

The loop glides inward. Head lowered, she skips through the then back, faster, her face pinched in concentration. Twisting, she j sidewise through the rope, much like a boxer in a fight promo. Now positions the coil over her head and does her version of the Ho.?""'n.

Then all the moves are combined into one grand finale, and the stiff are moving at such speed that it lends a sphere-like appearance to rope's geometry, while, from inside that globe, her spurs tap out Star-quality stuff, and far better than any of Josh's vicarious although they performed from moving horses. Privy to my seems, she smiles around the burning smoke. She sends a deep probe my eyes and I grow cold. As if from the center of the earth itself, and distant and brown as her outfit, a message distilled of all follows, then I understand her mission. She nods in sunny the forth blow of this damning day.

The action shifts to the curves behind my knees, where thigh and marry. Hordes of insects seem to congregate and advance headward, hair responding with the assault. "It can't be," I air.

"A new brand," she says, the hypnotic hemp slowing.

"Something's wrong here. Out of synch. I was given no time to pare."

Her smile, like her gaze, is all enchantment. Sun wrinkles form her eyes. Prairie Rose and Melody, both edged with them.

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"It's not what I supposed, I submit." Throwing up my hands, a court gesture I've grown fond of. "I mean, the way this thing is scripted, fits. The frames of my days flitting by," I say, deliberately colorthe Kaiserslautern evidence. "Ah ... the yellow flash. Peering out a Bosch canvas. In their stead- what?-this Twilight Zone slant."

She demurs, beckons for the ashtray instead, and I comply, dashing my own cigarette along with hers, then lighting another.

"But, say, what about the near death experiences? The spirals, the a tunnel with a beacon to bring me in."

"They're just that. Nothing more than near death. Merely a portion of parietal lobe, I think, running amok."

Maneuvering to gain time, I begin to pace . "A drink then. Pearl? Lone I ask. "The store is only a short block away. Fifty calories. That's Dottie and I came to measure effort. All domestics at Dominick's.

She wags her head, gesturing with open hand toward the liquor cabiWhereupon I throw together something of Lost Weekend propordispatch half.

Even in the face of certain defeat, I'm trained to circumvent. Against evidence, I shout. Incriminating witnesses I intimidate. EmIOJclened, I agitate my glass. "What is the nature of this stuff we term I mean, are you real? Something with dimensions? Or merely an 7 'Some bit of undigested pork.' " She motions me to her and slaps my face. "Feel that?" ''Yes. Yes I did," I report, hand to the ruby glow. "You're human then."

"Transitionally."

"But I feel aces," I claim, the mettle gone from my voice. "Work Nauti" Throwing up my hands again, this time soaking my blazer with the drink half. "Racquetball," I continue, seemingly unruffled, again with the summation. "The high fiber. The walks. The rest

"Okay. Okay, fairness doesn't enter in here. I can surmise that . But I very well just drop everything. What about my practices? My eliSome jailed at this very moment with stuff pending. And what of wife? She'll be devastated."

The laugh that follows jolts me, a cachination actually. She fights for the rope going limp. "Fat chance," she manages, eventually.

"Another chance?"

"At what?"

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"I should have known. When I lost that button ..." Fingering frayed thread. "When Dottie ran off .. .. But, wait, what's to become of my assets? Dottie?"

"Who else?"

"All my real estate holdings? My high yield triple bond hybrids? very condo? All in their smoldering hands?"

"After probate." Holding the Stetson in place, she bends to coil rope.

"They'll live handsomely."

Looking up from her chore, she shrugs. "Not for a while. Besides, take a different view of tangibles."

"But wait. She paved a wide path of betrayal, and she's to be , ...,...n,_. for it. And him. What of him? Shattering canon law with a degree of impunity. It doesn't fly in my part of town. None of it . No." "Careful, bucko," she says, righting herself.

"Well, I just feel a fool at the moment. Powerless and insignificant. dollop even."

"You're in select company. Billionaires have felt worse. Ford.

Can't measure this life in poker chips, you know. And your own father-God rest his soul-think how he felt. Worse, I can tell you. nizing that his only son thought more of money than love. Turning law rather than riding."

"Agonizing over that ? I thought it was the business."

'The business too, but the other was in his eyes."

"But I've done well for myself. And kept a social conscience as That should count for-" "Look at you," she cries. "Always trying for that advantage. late. Manipulate! Cheated your way through law school. Fostered rice in the system. Beyond. Debasing the helpless your idea of a conscience? Guffaw. What stands before me now is one who is handy at fashioning adversarial bull patties for anyone with the and there's no way you're going to use that verbal grease of yours to out. If you'd spent your life on a horse, you wouldn't be sweating now.

"I never trusted horses."

"You never trusted anything but greed. " Sanding her thumb opposing fingers. "''ll change."

"I know."

"I have pap ... no, tumbleweed for brains."

"Immaterial at this time," she says, thrusting her head toward "Over here lamenting the loss of Dottie to the voyeur, as you call You fraud. Dare I mention the unmentionables with one Edna Hipps?,.

"Hobbs."

"Where I could go with that one ... 7 That paging service for posed clients. Lawyers never carry pagers. That's common ~rn."UT'""' 128

says, belting the rope and sidevaulting to the Italian tile. "You're due comeuppance, you know. Maybe several. And I have friends who owe favors ."

"No, not that," I beg. "Not those warrens, The Inferno, Canto one and hope."

"Minor leagues," she announces, dosing on me. "We can do better."

"The heat, the fumes, the suffering."

"You've got all that just outside your window." She gives her chaps an hitch, and, leaving her thumbs hooked in the leather, sends eyes ceilingward. "I was thinking more along the lines of a return trip some place beyond New York's reach, this time with some odd lug. Another form, unfinished maybe."

'1f I'm to be held accountable for these minor infractions, I plead for "It's not up to me."

"A petition for more time then."

"From now on, time carries about as much meaning as justice formerdid."

"May I notify someone? Scribble a message?"

"To whom? Your law partners? It can wait til Monday. Sign painters work weekends anyway."

"That's not very funny."

'Who then? The people who attempted to share in your life are all . Even this Hipps was entertaining second thoughts. And you have children . Sometimes we make an exception there."

'1 wanted kids. A name to pass on. Dottie and I never. . . . One of us She squints to read my stove dock through the hazy plastic, then faces again. She raises an eyebrow. "I really shouldn't be telling you this, Hipps .. .. You in absentia, of course."

"No! It wasn't me then."

"Right," she says, shaking her head. "As if that makes a difference. if you can see your way dear, I've got two more pickups to make, for both."

'1 can't begin to tell you . . . . With that bit of news, the fear and my have diverged. A part of me will live on."

"Swell," she says absently.

"Guess I'm ready then." Drowning my cigarette in the glass and setting "What can I bring?"

"Bring?" she asks, perplexed. "Like what?"

'1 really don't know, a memento perhaps ."

She centers the Stetson, taps at its apex to make a snug fit , and raises slide to her chin. "Everything stays. Even that racquetball-playing you've left at the top of the stairs." this then?"

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"Same as this," she says, pointing toward herself.

"A final query, please."

"As long as it's not something inane, like how'd I get started. They ask that one."

"You see, it's all a surprise to me. Like finding a mouse in a soft as one of my clients recently experienced."

"Of course it is."

"I mean ... . Well, we humans are consumed with notions of wards, but we rarely dwell on the means by which we depart, unlike cleanly documented entrance; and although I find the idea of an escort be an excellent one indeed, at the rare times I gave that gem ation, well, frankly, I pictured a man."

"You don't think women capable?" she asks sharply, expressing a of incredulous concern.

"No, it's not that at all. Don't get me wrong. I guess .... Well, times when I pondered it. . . . It seemed logical. Women bring you 'That's right, bucko. And we take you out. We act as snorkels, ing men to range in other mediums. Lead you in-suckle you for years or so-then take you out."

"Evocateurs."

"That too. But, hey, if you're about set here, we can close."

"But what's ahead?"

"Don't panic on me."

"I won't. I just wanted-" 'They all get nervous about now."

"I know the circumstances. The jury foreman unfolds his square paper. My client sweats kernals of Silver Queen. Now it's come "Open your eyes for heaven's sake. You want to watch this." As I ply, she says, "Hold me like we're fixin' to do a two step," nearing our flanks brush. The leather creaks. She perfumes the air with essence of open places, greens and blues. "Tight now," she scolds. ing her, the hat brim catches my neck, so she has me tuck my between shoulder and Stetson. 'There, that's it." Then, as she sound akin to the cries heard when those great shows opened, a overtakes me, as it did then. A roar finds a home in my ears and me with some new species of clarity. As the kitchen slips to low tion, we float through the window. Beyond the wall, forms lose lines and soften, distances fuzz and scenery churns until the Island houses the new Garden is no more than a smudge now.

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Casey Finch

For Susie on her birthday

There are apple trees in New York City.

I have seen them, swaying their heads like paper in the recent air, trying to look graceful by showing their crowns in the imperfect light. Clouds gather above them to applaud and flirt with one another. Clouds gather above them on trapeze wires, doing handstands in the sunlight, backflops, somersaults, reaching down for the blossoms which they take in their hands and juggle, madly, and then grow tired of, and throw down to the floor of the apple forests.

I wish all this could somehow rearrange itself for your birthday. I wish the city itself could get up off its back for once and be prodigal and entertaining. But after all New York has its vast selfappointment to keep; and everything continues as if it were not your birthday, as if it had other business to attend, the wear and tear of its own life to consider.

The grammar of time is a terrible thing. The people it drags under its canopy, like you and me, were only trying to help, to account for the thousand words we bring like gifts to one another. It is sad,

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this colorful, blindfolded parade of birthdays, this business of gathering years in your arms and then throwing them away, one by one, as if they were bad poems. But you are stronger than all of this. My guess is that you stack like newspapers the crowded, diminishing, unserious days, their fingers blackened with ink, only to recycle them, only to write, years later, long unsentimental letters to their editors, because they, too, have birthdays, because they, too, are transient.

I hope you see the apple trees before the season moves off and leaves them hanging like curtains in the blank and ruined air. They are more informative than beautiful. They sway all night like lanterns on an endless string, signs at last of how hard it is to be graceful, to watch the clouds reach down into the apple boughs and then move off with their arms full of blossoms.

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Ann on her birthday "Puppets are a way we have of talking to one another, as we get older."

-Jim Henson

I have given up on birthdays, and have instead, to wandering up and down the sad, ......6 .. ,,6 avenues of growing up, to stopping in at the department stores, because of the poised, ' nnlnr,lru promises their windows hold out like brightly colored birthday presents. I suppose I've grown afraid of the doomed, rickety architecture that birthdays build; afraid the soaring scaffolding would collapse one year under the wear and tear of making empty promises, under the sheer weight of the ordinary and the boring. But I imagine you are somehow more fearless and relaxed. I imagine you calling up a birthday on the telephone and giving it advice. I imagine you shaping it in your image, they way you would make a dance or a point in a conversation you no longer believed in, even though it is late at night, and the March wind as it moves through your window carries with it the iciness and broken branches of the unspeakable, even though each birthday confronts you with the shitty, unmodulated rhythm of self-recognition. You are far better at birthdays than most of us. You hail them like taxis in a rush-hour rain. And they pull up at the curb, obediently, one by one, forever eager to take you where you wish, because they, too, are aging, because they, too, are poised and strong.

133

To the Reader 1) It was an awful day. All morning I thought of a dream I was anxious to remember-not because it was an interesting dream, but because I wanted to retell it to its main character: someone I didn't know very well, but whom I wanted to get to know by telling her the dream. Will it make you jealous that I say this7 There is no object of jealousy except words. Besides, you were the object of my dream, that is, I should say, of my desire.

2) There was about you a holiness, an ability to read that made me afraid. And I found you very beautiful and longed for you very much. I could not stop longing for you, even when you were in the same roomwhere I could stare at your legs-or when you were in the same town, so that I could phone.

3) Once I saw my neighbor, Frank, sniffing his daughter's underwear as he hung it out on a line and understood and did not think it strange. How much I have come to depend on your good opinion of me!

4) One day I called because I had something urgent to tell you. But when

you answered, I could not think of the word for it . At the center of the word was desire, this much I could tell. At the center of the word was holy ground, silly, no doubt, and useless. But precisely what the word was I felt lost to imagine.

5) Once, in the laundromat, I became hypnotized by the shapes and colors and circularity of my underwear in the dryer. I had loved you for so long!

6) Pretty soon, we stopped calling one another. Maybe, later, you thought of the word. But if you did, you never called me. Or if you had thought of it, and had called me, perhaps we would not have been able to share it, or understand at all .

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7) Therefore I thought of writing you this poem; not to dedicate it to you (so that you would have to read it out of vanity), nor to substitute for the pleasure I imagine kissing you would bring. I am writing, instead, because my desire has nowhere else to go . This poem is tangled around an unavailable center, trying to cover up for its failures. This poem is tangled around the missing word.

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Contributor's Notes Rafael Alberti, born in southern Spain in 1902, moved to Madrid at 15 where he studied painting and wrote poetry. In 1925, he won the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and became a part of the circle of poets known as the "Generation of '27," who helped to bring about a second Renaissance of Spanish poetry in the late 1920s. He published several books of poetry before 1936, when the Civil War broke out. He fought for the Republic, and when Franco defeated the Republicans in 1939, he fled into exile, first to France, then Argentina, and finally to Italy. He returned to Spain after Franco's death, where he continues to write.

Alberti received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1965 and Spain's prestigious Premio Cervantes in 1983.

Jeffery Renard Allen is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has had poems published in CHRISTIAN CENTURY, SEQUOIA, CALIBAN, WASHINGTON REVIEW, LIVING STONES, COOL RUNNING, and HANGING LOOSE. Douglas Baldwin spent his early years in Honolulu, attending St. Patrick's and St. Louis College. He then attended college and taught on the mainland. He divides his time between Basye, Va., and the Bavarian city of Rosenheim and writes full-time. His stories have appeared in THE WASHINGTON REVIEW and CUBE LITERARY MAGAZINE, and he is currently working on the very last rewrite of a novel set in Washington, D.C. Carole Bernstein's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, ANTIOCH REVIEW, YALE REVIEW, and other magazines. She received an M .A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1988 and works as a promotion manager for a New York book publisher.

Michael Bugeja has two poetry collections due out in 1990: The Visionary (Taxus Press, Exeter, England) and What We Do For Music (Amelia Press, Bakersfield, California). His poetry has appeared in such journals as THE GEORGIA REVIEW, THE KENYON REVIEW, NER/ BLQ, and ANTIOCH REVIEW. He teaches magazine writing at Ohio University and this year is a recipient of an NEA creative writing fellowship in fiction.

David Chorlton is an eleven-year resident of Phoenix, moving there from Europe, headlong from the old world into one that is still forming. Recently he has become interested in animal rights and using poetry on occasion to see life from animals' points of view. His other work is as a visual artist, and he expects a chapbook in 1990 to be published by Adastra Press.

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Jay Blumenthal, who holds a doctorate in English from Drew University, is director of marketing services for McGraw-Hill in New York City. His poetry has appeared in THE CAROLINA QUARTERLY, THE CUMBERLAND POETRY REVIEW, THE DENVER QUARTERLY, and THE SEATTLE REVIEW, among others. Old Ways and Former Gods, his first book of poetry, is forthcoming from Heliotrope Press.

Lynn Domina's poems have appeared in INDIANA REVIEW, NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, NORTHWEST REVIEW, OXFORD MAGAZINE, and several others. She teaches at Lewis University, near Chicago .

James Doyle teaches English at the University of Northern Colorado. His book, The Sixth Day, was published in 1988. He has been anthologized in SOTHEBY'S INTERNATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION: 1982 ANTHOLOGY and WINGBONE: POETRY FROM COLORADO (1986) . He has work in over so publications and has one chapbook, The Governor's Office (1986).

Charles Edward Eaton's work in poetry and prose has appeared in HARPER'S, THE NATION, YALE REVIEW, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, SEWANEE REVIEW, and many other magazines, and he has published ten volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a book of art criticism. His fourth volume of short stories, New and Selected Stories, 1959-1989, has just been published. In 1988, he was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state's highest honor by the Governor.

Kim Edwards lives in the Midwest and is at work on her first novel.

Casey Finch has poems in PLOUGHSHARES, THE IOWA REVIEW, QUARTERLY WEST, ROLLING STONE, and many others, and scholarly articles in REPRESENTATIONS and MILTON STUDIES. A verse translation of the complete works of the Pearl-poet will be published within the next year. The Forbidden Book, a chapbook, was published in 1981.

A. M. Friedson publishes poetry and prose in Hawai'i and the other mainland.

"Fatal Response" tries to reconcile scepticism and humanity. He is emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Hawai'i, Literary Editor of Biography, and co~ditor of Kaimana: Literary Arts Hawaii.

Steven Goldsberry has been surfing the North Shore since 1968.

Jay Griswold has an M .A. in creative writing from Colorado State University, and has worked for the past eight years as a Ranger with the Colorado Division of Parks. He has new poems forthcoming in THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, and THE SOUTHERN POETRY REVIEW, among others. The two poems in this issue are from a recently completed manuscript, The Book of Life and Death .

Judith Hiott is a graduate of the University of Montana writing program. She lives in Houston and is a librarian for the Houston Public Library.

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Eric Horsting teaches at Antioch College in Ohio. He was editor of THE ANTIOCH REVIEW for five years, and his poems have appeared in AGNI REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, and NEW LETTERS. In 1989, he received an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.

Donnell Hunter received his M.F.A. from the University of Montana in 1982. He is the proprietor of Honeybrook Press, and teaches English at Ricks College in Rexburg, Indiana. He has been published in 100 magazines, including CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NORTHWEST, and RIO GRANDE REVIEW. He has six chapbooks, the latest is titled Annals of Natural History.

Shane Kaneshiro is a design student at the University of Hawai'i.

Edward Kleinschmidt's second collection of poems, First Language, was the winner of this year's Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. His first book, Magnetism , published in 1987, won the 1988 Poetry Award from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association. He has had poems in THE NEW YORKER, THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, POETRY, THE GETTISBURG REVIEW, and DENVER QUARTERLY. He teaches creative writing at Santa Clara University.

Alexis Levitin's translations have appeared in the NAL anthology, Latin American Literature Today, and in numerous literary magazines such as CONFRONTATION, THE LITERARY REVIEW, NIMROD, EPOCH, STAND, and CITY. He has published five books of translations, four from the Portuguese. His most recent is Clarice Lispector's Sou/storm, published by New Directions in 1989.

Two more books are forthcoming next year.

Ian MacMillan is the author of three books, the latest of which is Proud Monster (North Point Press, 1987; the Bodley Head, London, 1988). "Famine in Valhalla" is from a novel-in-progress entitled Orbit of Darkness. Similar excerpts have appeared or will appear in CAROLINA QUARTERLY, MANOA, and the PARIS REVIEW. Douglas Michael Massing thanks R.].E., in Managua, for inspiring "By Now of Course You Will Have Heard." He thanks "Miriam" for providing him with several poems and arranging publication of one of them路 in the forthcoming The Knowledge Explosion. (Other poems have appeared in the anthologies A Bell Curve of Reasons and Peace is Our Profession, and as a broadside published by the University of Hawai'i's Cheap Broadside Press.) He is also indebted to "Miriam" for bringing him to O'ahu, and presenting him with the hopeless task of being as good and generous to Hawai'i as Hawai'i has been to him.

Simon Perchik has published six books of poetry and individual poems in THE NATION, MONKS POND, TEXAS QUARTERLY, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, HARVARD MAGAZINE, and many more. He is in private legal practice, and was Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County. He lives in East Hampton.

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Carl Phillips was the winner of Stone Country's 1989 poetry competition, and has work appearing in CREEPING BENT, NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, and others. He teaches Latin on Cape Cod. Helene Pilibosian lives in and writes from Watertown, Massachusetts. She has worked as an editor and has published a book, Carvings from an Heirloom, Oral History Poems. Her poetry has recently appeared in KANSAS QUARTERLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN MENTOR MAGAZINE, HIGH PLAINS LITERARY REVIEW, and HAMPDEN-SYDNEY POETRY REVIEW. Marjorie Power has poems in 40 literary journals. Her book, Living With It, appeared in 1983 from Wampeter Press.

Ullian Robinson, Citizen's Chair Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, is the author of Sex, Class, and Culture (1978, reissued in 1986) and Monstrous Regiment (1985), and co-author of Feminist Scholarship (1985).

Gregory A. Ryan has published poetry and short stories in many journals, including the SENECA REVIEW, THE LITERARY REVIEW, THE MIDWEST Y, THE MADISON REVIEW, CENTRAL PARK, THE ROANOKE SEPIA, and THE GLEN FALLS REVIEW. He holds a B.A. in English Boston College and an M .A . in English from Columbia University in New

Salli teaches at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Her poems appeared in QUARTERLY WEST, KANSAS QUARTERLY, PRIMAVERA, THE LITTLE MAGAZINE, among others.

Schiff has published over 115 poems and essay-reviews in dozens of periodiincluding THE CHICAGO REVIEW, THE OHIO REVIEW, THE INDIANA , and THE HAWAI'I REVIEW. He had a chapbook published in 1980, Anywhere in this Country. He directs the composition program at ColumCollege in Chicago and lives with his wife and son in Evanston, Illinois.

Smyth lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he writes and from where he travels. Recent stories have appeared in STORY QUARTERLY, GLEN FALLS REVIEW, and WRIT (Canada).

nPCI'liPrmv

Sumner was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has an M .A. from University. His poetry has been published in the BLUE LIGHT REVIEW, PACIFIC REVIEW, and PUERTO DEL SOL. Suzuki works as a graphic designer in Honolulu. This set of poems was for a class taught by Cathy Song, Visiting Creative Writer at the Uniof Hawai'i at Manoa, in the Fall1989 semester.

l!fle~ratE~

Taksa has poems appearing in ARTFUL DODGE, THE CAPE ROCK. and 'S FORUM. He is the author of Truant Bather (Berkeley Poets Workand Press) . He teaches high school.

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Carolyn Tipton has published poems and translations in many ~~,..;~r~: •.~•· including THE ATAVIST, TRANSLATION, THE BERKELEY POETRY VIEW, and CHAMINADE LITERARY REVIEW. She was named in the standing Writers" section of The Pushcart Prize IV: Best of the Small Presses. has an M.A. in creative writing from Stanford and a Ph.D. in comparative ture from U.C. Berkeley, where she taught for four years. After receiving degree, she went to Spain to work with Rafael Alberti on a translation of book of poems, A Ia pintura. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of English at the University of Hawai'i.

Martha Vertreace is assistant professor of English and poet-in-residence at nedy College, Chicago. Her first book Second House from the Corner, published in 1986. Collections of her poems have appeared in Benchmark: Anthology of Contemporary Illinois Poetry and SPOON RIVER Her article, 'Toni Cade Bambara: The Dance of Character and LClm:m\llnn:v. appears in American Women Writing Fiction from the University Press of tucky, 1989.

Luiz Vilela won Brazil's highest award for fiction in 1967. He has gone on become one of his country's major contemporary fiction writers. published over a dozen collections of short stories and novellas.

Pamela Walker, a native Iowan, graduated from the University of Iowa Workshop before settling in Manhattan, where she lives with her husband baby daughter. In addition to writing, she makes her living as a private specialist at the secondary through adult levels, working primarily with disabled students. Her novel, Twyla , tells the story of a learning disabled unrequited love for a rock and roll singer.

William John Watkins has published 14 books, over 100 poems, and 25 stories. He recently became full professor at Brookdale Community College, a national competition for educational software sponsored by IBM and League for Innovation, and was elected to the Neshaminy H.S. Football Hall Fame.

Leona Yamada is completing her M.A. thesis in poetry, titled Gallows Humor, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

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Work by Rafael Alberti Jeffery Renard Allen D. N. Baldwin Carole Bernstein Jay Blumenthal Michael Bugeja David Chorlton Lynn Domina James Doyle Charles Edward Eaton Kim Edwards Casey Finch A . M. Friedson Steven Goldsberry Jay Griswold Judith Hiott Eric Horsting Donnell Hunter Edward Kleinschmidt Ian MacMillin Douglas Michael Massing Simon Perchik Carl Phillips Helene Pilibosian Marjorie Power Lillian Robinson Gregory A. Ryan Donna Salli Jeff Schiff _.

George Smyth David Sumner Miko Suzuki Mark Taksa Martha Vertreace Luiz Vilela Pamela Walker William John Watkins Leona Yamada Cover Art by Shane Kaneshiro $5.00

ISSN: 0093-9625