Hawaiʻi Review Issue 30: 1990

Fall1990

Issue 30

Vol. 14, No. 3

Cover Art, "Moonlight Maiden," by S . Naomi Tome Frontispiece, "Maui Surfing," by Dietrich Varez "Saint Erkenwald" is from The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, translated by Casey Finch. Copyright by the University of Press. Used by permission.

Hawai'i Review is a tri-annual publication of the Board of University of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its and writers, who are solely responsible for its content. and subscriptions should be addressed to Hawai'i Review, of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Donaghho Road, Hawaii 96822. The editors invite submissions of art, drama, interviews, poetry, translations, reviews and literary essays. scripts must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed Pn'vPt•ODI Subscription rates: one year (three issues), $12.00; two years issues), $20.00; single copies, $5.00. Advertising rates are upon request.

Hawai'i Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Magazines, is indexed by the American Humanities Index, the Inde;r American Periodical Verse, and Writers Market.

Š 1990 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at ISSN : 0093-9625.

Staff Elizabeth Lovell Priscilla Billig Stewart G. W. Anderson John Gesang Tracy Ellig

Special Thanks to: Paige Aranda Eric Folk Patti Killelea-Almonte Manoa John McDermott Jim Reis Cathy Song Meg Sutton Jeannie Thompson

Contents Pit Blind Love, Hate: The Life We Learn Thaw I'm scared of shampoo Jimmy Keenan The Girl from Morbisch The Timekeeper The Hours The-Crossing of Legs Don't Get A Gun, Get a Big Dog Sky Class Untitled Sam Pigeons Because The Fire Caught Calling Up Excitement Extensions The Morning Paper His Royal Highness The Poem Called Liver Essays in Divinity Saint Erkenwald Untitled The Iliad Ethics and the Courtly Lady The Bat's Rebellion The Celtic Cross Jaliscan Sestina

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1 6 8

10

Anthony Bukoski Michael]. Bugeja Karen Chase

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12 13 14 14 15 17 18 19 29 30 31 33 34 36 38 40 42 56 58 60 69 70 72

80 81 83

Randall A. Watson ]ames Doyle Kristopher Saknussemm

S. Naomi Tome Miriam Levine Jeff Schiff Carole Bernstein Edward Kleinschmidt ]ames A. Miller Jeff Worley Robert Huber David Lunde Richard Alan Bunch Anonymous S. Naomi Tome Casey Finch William Burgwinkle David Chorlton Martha Vertreace

May Nineteenth October in Glimpses The Clay Pot Season of Fire Monday After School Coming From School Ballpoint Paper Untitled Wishes I've Got a Warm Middle Spot Achromatic Sketches Feh The Two Who Jumped Maybe This Story's About Dogs Working For American Motors The North Road The Hotel Arawak Aboard the Friendship Rose, Bequia Channel Sailing The Collection Blue Dancers Words and the Lighted Blanket Blue Benina Telescoped Astronomy Lesson Nemesis Genesis A Clown's Clown Contributor's Notes

85 85 86 87 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 95 96 97 99 101 101 102 104 106 107 108 109 113 115 116 117 118 120 126

Marjorie Power

Janet Steele Lois-Ann Yamanaka Thomas Kretz Mira Ku5 Miko Suzuki

Randy Brieger Sandra Nelson Richard Morris Dey

Naomi Clark S. Naomi Tome Charles Edward Eaton Mark Taksa Rafael Alberti A. M. Friedson Carol Hamilton A skold Melnyczuk Jay A. Blumenthal Martin Sherman

v

Anthony Bukoski

Pit Blind When it was twelve below zero open water stood in the bog, though the Left-Handed River was frozen . There was no way of putting out the peat fires short of digging down into Tomorrow Bog, and the fires smoldered very deep. How frightening, he thought.

"Shelby," he said to his wife.

It was only her hair when he bent down, but it looked like weeds on the pillows of their marriage bed. Mr. DuVair was a year shy of fifty.

After a quarter century of love and marriage, he'd never figured on weeds. He'd come home and Shelby would say, "''m tired. Going upstairs."

He'd give anything for a night's sleep. He'd take a couple years off of her age and add them to his if he could get a good night. That's what put him in mind of a pit blind where sounds were muffled. If it was really slow hunting, you could nap down in the earth. You couldn't do this in a tree stand where you could fall out, your rifle, your .30-30, discharge.

Lots of guys had trouble at home, thought Mr. DuVair. Some of them knew who it was had started trouble at his home. Some of them knew it was Hooty Hunter who kept Mrs. DuVair out late while he, Jack Du Vair, was sweeping floors on the swing shift at the King Midas. He thought he'd have to spray for weeds when they first told him. How did they know? Some of them, he guessed, had been hinting about it all along.

Guys like Vernon Nordmark, Jim Skoviera, Benny Vermouth. The Indian Joe Bluebird had those weeds too. It was the Indian said once in the boiler room where they ate lunch, "I think your ol' lady." These were probably the only weeds-or words- Joe Bluebird said that month.

"My ol' lady what-?" he, Mr. DuVair, had asked.

Gee-zus, Mr. DuVair thought, Hooty is a short little fat man with gray hair. He bartends his place from eight to four, then his sister takes over.

Hooty Hunter lives in a trailer, has strong arms, has a dog. Hooty has nothing like I do, who have a fifty-one-year old wife, a home in town, and ten country acres, which no one can hunt. What is this gray-haired bartender Hooty? I have an acreage and am not gray. It is the semolina from the mill colors my hair. I am not gray, Mr. DuVair thought. Some plantain has just come into my yard, that's all.

He'd been digging. When the guys in the boiler room told him, he went

1

out with the shovel. Out on the edge of the Tomorrow Bog, he dug. He couldn't sleep when Shelby was sleeping and the ground was so soft.

Now by mid-November he could just do touch-up on the hole. This year he'd received a "hunter's choice." He had authority to hunt doe or buck. The permit stood on the dresser of the weedy room. The hole he'd been working digging was deep enough. Hooty Hunter couldn't see out of it, but a guy like Mr. DuVair was, sure could. He had cut brush away from before the pit. He'd piled it in front of the hole. He covered the frozen dirt with brush, rearranged the dirt, had good firing lanes. Behind him was Tomorrow weeping into Left-Handed and behind that, Lake Superior.

In a pit blind near a bog you can get your sleep, thought Mr. DuVair.

Down in the earth like he was, sounds were muffled, scents were not likely to spook a deer. Pit blinds were good.

When he crawled out and brought the shovel home, he asked, "Who called?"

"No one," his wife said. "I got up late. It's noon. I don't know what's wrong with me getting up late."

She had the Duluth newspaper.

"You need sleep?" she said, working with the crossword.

"I told you never to cheat with a dictionary," he said.

"Have your coffee," she said.

"Gimme the crossword. I'll work it."

'Tm not finished," she said. "Did you have a bad night at the mill7 somebody fill in your hole on the bog? Look at you. Did you wash semolina off? The way you're acting-."

"It's really dusty," he said.

He never hit his wife.

He asked her for the crossword. Shelby had filled in some words. through," she said. He filled in the empty spaces.

'Who called? Who'd you talk to this morning?" he said.

"No one. You look like you're dying. You're all gray. Go wash. trying to start a fight," she said.

"I told you, never cheat with the dictionary."

"I do."

"You look up this word then: W-E-E-D-S. I've got a word to go yet your crossword. What's 'a plant occurring obtrusively in Lutuv..... ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop'?"

"I don't know," she said. "Crabgrass is a pest in lawns, I know."

He went on," '-to free from weeds: to weed a garden ; to root out remove (a weed).' " He drew the washrag carefully over his face . In the mirror Mr. Du saw a swing-shift husband with a tired face. Aour dust etched a

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along his hair. Jack DuVair had flour in his eyebrows and flour in his eyes. Over the years the circles under his eyes had turned white. Under them grew small, spidery veins that were purple all along and down his face. Hooty is older. Hooty has stronger arms. Hooty owns a bar. But what does he have that is so special? wondered Mr. DuVair. Who is Hooty Hunter?

In the middle of the day, Shelby had gone to bed again.

"You're getting old, Shel."

"Not too old, I hope."

What'd she mean not too old-to make hooty with Hooty7 he wondered.

"I wanna talk. I hate when I can't sleep. That's why I dug a pit blind.

Don't go to sleep, Shel."

He knelt, brushed the weeds off the bed.

"Nothin' to talk," she said, barely awake. "God, I'm sleepy, Jack. What time is it7 Two in the afternoon? Don't know why-" "Out too late7" "Nah, I'm old. Where am I gonna go with you working7" "Telephone call keep you up late7 Somebody callin' you7" "Nah, who's gonna call an old woman, Jack7 What is it with you7" "Think I'm going to the hole," he said.

'Why not take a nap7" said Shelby.

Hooty is eighty years old. Hooty is gray, Mr. DuVair thought, has arms. Hooty is seventy-eight.

"Maybe," Shelby sighed before falling asleep, "you should get out a little."

He rolled off the bed. He'd never hit her before. He could see things growing in bed. If Mr. DuVair slapped her, he might hurt her ear that was against the pillow. Hooty. Hooty. Why do they call Hooty "Pokey?"

It might cause her to crack her eardrum or something. He couldn't get a clean slap. Twenty-five years they'd been married. It was OK for her to go and make hooty when he worked the swing shift. That was alright, but he couldn't hit her. People frowned on that. It was OK for her to dance hoo-hooty, but not for him, Mr. DuVair, to slap his wife.

He was in a hooty when the phone rang. He was just going to do it and the phone-, "Hello," he said.

He heard a bar in the background. He heard noises. Nobody spoke, no Hooty- just a bar, noises, then the phone hung up by a man.

Jack DuVair would do it, would hit it out of her, if he could see through the gloom.

"Telephone for you," he said, though so as not to interrupt her dream .

He looked at the crossword in the kitchen. Throwing on his macki3

naw, he went out in the frozen yard where he followed the network of plantain. The grass lay withered under the sun which shined, blade-like, through the elms along 4th Street. What good is a yard? he thought.

He drove out. The doe watched, then when Jack DuVair got near, bounded into the firs. He had his permit, his hunter's choice. He was dressed for hoo-hoot- for hunting. He crawled into the earth, right into the smoke below the surface, wishing he could keep on going. He had his shovel, and by three he'd gone deeper than a foot.

The hole was deep. He was tall. The hole would swallow him. What'd he done to his wife that'd cause her to grow weedy? He'd worked and struggled to get her that house on the edge and these ten acres.

He didn't understand the weeds that grew in life. They had roots you never guessed at deep in the soil. Spraying killed only the top ones in married life. What about the opportunities of the soil still below? he wondered. He was here now himself, strong. When he poked his head out of the earth, he saw the doe, but all he had was the shovel.

It was hurt ... wild, he could see. When it spotted him, in two great bounds it was in the firs of DuVair's Acreage on the Tomorrow. Blood lay nearby. It was Mrs. DuVair's, the house's. He thought, this deer has been to my house.

He found broken windows, the twenty-five-year anger when he got home. Hooty. He knew what it was. Hoo-hooty. In one place on the broken windows the fur had caught. The fur had been ripped from the deer's hide. The doe had been trapped inside the house. Things happened like that every season. Especially during rut, deer crashed through store fronts, ran into cars, were trapped in the houses of twenty-five-year marriages . It'd been frighted, the doe, confused by the strange house. Frantic, Jack knew, it would have jumped over things, slipped, tried one way, then another, gotten out finally, made its way into the deep forest where a man with arms waited. It'd taken twenty-five years. "You must've known Jack," she'd written on the scrap of paper she'd clipped to his deer permit on the dresser, "must've seen and known."

He'd bought a house. He'd worked on it. He'd never hit her. They'd taken trips.

He looked for signs of what he possibly could have done wrong in twenty-five years. The pain of the house made his body hurt. The doe must've been trapped, frightened. It'd eaten from the weeds of his marriage bed. Now Jack, too, sat on the tangled sheets. He had a crust for supper. The salt he poured on his bread spilled off onto his hands and was absorbed into the weedy, overgrown room.

Jack crawled into the earth again later. It was five o'clock in the hunting season. There were no weeds in his pit blind. Maybe we both have

4

been hunting and can still dig out, he thought, build a house, watch the lawn.

In the gray afternoon, he put down his rifle, removed his gloves, and ran his hands over the frozen earth inside the pit. It was no place to be for a married man. Maybe he could make it up to her, he thought. He had tears in his eyes when he heard rustling in the woods, the snapping and rustling of something trying to get out and down the firing lanes. It was the hurt doe. He saw it through his tears, the hurt doe coming at him with tears in its own weedy eyes from twenty-five years of living in captivity.

5

Michael /. Bugeja

Love, Hate: The Life We Learn We come here to be alone, to complain As lovers complain with a little longing, Silvery words that rise and spark The mist of a Panhandle night. The city Put new benches in, so we try one out And pretend the low-rent panorama Shadowed and sheltered by maple Is an enclave abroad where we wintered.

It could be worse, you say, when I doubt Love and work: lighten up. I could lose myself In the gathering fog, a half-fog that cuts The silhouettes of an oncoming someone And his dog . The haze hovers enough To hide us. But the animal senses us there, And the person approaches: a boy In middle school maybe, the chew he spits A giveaway. You ask the dog's name, Max, And I think how important that is, Name of the Doberman nuzzling your hand .

The boy, whose name we do not want To become too familiar, hunkers In the mud. He brags in a marbly drawl The dog is new and trained for the pit .

Max, meanwhile, has slithered to sleep.

Doberman'll attack anybody. Cops, mailmenThe sputum flies from the crook of his mouthAnybody. What about teachers? I ask, Lightening up. If you want to kill a teacher, He says, serious as one, get yourself a suit With patches like they wear, and stuff it Best you can for the bite. Then you beat that dog, You cuss it. He spits again. It'll work.

6

He is getting friendly now, familiar.

He is in a park with his own kind, Folk who want to kill . Got me a pit bull Home hates blacks, and a nigger-boy I know wasn't scared none by that bark.

So I said he might learn the easy way By listening or the hard way- spit, I can almost predict it now-by running.

We hear enough. We talk to each other As if the boy who has figured us out Left long ago. We ignore him like teachers Sometimes do, and he becomes another object In the mud. A stump, a block of wood.

We link arms and leave, suddenly unsettled Again. A silence descends as it does here Before a thunderclap, and you stop. You feel A little sadness for the boy. Maybe we should Go back and keep company with him awhile, You say, the goodness I usually admire Welling up like an aura in the haze And healing him somehow. I want to Believe that. But I am in love tonight With my own problems, darker than the hate Some of us learn the hard way, living this life.

7

Thaw I had better begin with the horse Nobody wanted to break Long ago. You did, and you speak of him Lovingly as you might speak of me In that Northern nasal twang I obey like an animal. Alone, Atop the massive swayback of Appaloosa, You barrel on a butte of snow That spews in late spring like slush In my city. But this is Dakota And you are a girl, so thoroughly one Youcircle and stop, dismount to inspect A purple patch of flower That glistens in the white. To this day Purple is your favorite color And what happens next, the only rule You enforce. Naturally, you pluck it.

The horse beside you is beautiful As a hyacinth is beautiful in the snow, And you are a friend to beauty, even then Obsessed with it as snow is with white, A color that kills on the tundra.

And it wilts, the flower That may have been thankful For the warmth of your palm,

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Willing to leave the limbo Of weather. You don't see it This way. Beauty, you say, is a moment .

I give you plenty of those But no flowers, though I want to Blossom too early in a season That only feels like spring And is barren, deadly, white.

I should end now with the horse Whose only role in this was to run.

9

Karen Chase

I'm scared of shampoo, scared to stop in the drugstore for coughdrops, I'm scared of hairbrushes, handlotion .

The slowest walker in New York, I slink near a newstand, eye the headline.

I'm scared to buy a paper and stop.

I'm scared of paths in the woods that bend, when you can't tell where you've walked from.

I'm scared of roads that dead-end.

I'm afraid of the library, the rows of shelves, the cubbies, the tables laid with magazines.

I'm afraid of the bookstore, maybe the book I ordered came in .

I lie in bed and listen.

The furnace goes on and off.

Every twitch of wood and wall animates the dark.

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Jimmy Keenan Jimmy Keenan and I took off Our shoes, walked between tomato rows got dirt on our feet .

So what, about planes overhead

1946 a war was faraway.

For the first time I noticed that beets grew and peas on a vine.

Jimmy and I played through that afternoon then went to the roofs by the lake emptied our pockets and jumped down.

Buttercups filled the fields.

I picked some for my mother so she'd feel better, held them under my chin to prove I liked butter.

It must have gotten late.

Faraway the war was on, lights were turned low.

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The Girl from Morbisch "My Little Firebug" whispered her father when she was small, "My Smudgepot." He taught her how to load the coal stove; she'd wait to feel him bend above her. Together, they burned brush in the nearby lot. She gathered sticks.

When first she heard the word pyrotechnics her pink little body thrilled .

She was intent on objects. She'd notice a table's shape, muse over how it was made, rub her palms over its surface. Her eyes would be drawn by a billowing shirt, "Silk" she'd think, "is it flammable?"

A wooden barrel once called, 'Td be hard to ignite, but once done, I would burn."

Out in the woods one time, she came on a couple who had shed their clothes, clothes on the ground, would they ignite?

She stood, she stared, saw the man's flesh and the woman's too, blind to their shape, thought, would they burn?

Shoes in the grass, would they ignite?

The trees enlarged, pointed to her sex.

She lowered her hands over her front, "My Little Firebug" in unison, the trunks began.

12

Randall A . Watson

The Timekeeper I had always been in love with numbers-entranced by their reliability, their predictable, orderly natures, their constant affection. I used to count the days- for distraction. I made lists of the square roots, enumerated their multiplications, subtracted them, researched their divisions, measured the columns of their accumulations. There was no figure they could not add up to. So then I decided to arrange the hours too, alphabetically, in reverse order, skipping Q , repeating the process on the second hour of the second day, and the fourth hour of the third day, and so on, until I was through sorting them categorically, for clarity. But something was lacking. I hadn't bathed . I wasn't eating well. My work was suffering. Finally, I started to classify the minutes, hierarchically, according to the duration of the impact they sustain on people's lives, their equivalent presence in the memory, their influence on behavior. I produced voluminous stacks of figures bound like newspaper and had to store most of them in a large closet with my herringbone jacket and my leather shoes, but I kept the primary numbers in suitcases I could take anywhere in case of fire. But they kept getting away from me. I could never quite finish, I could never catch up, nothing seemed to be going right. Everytime I finished evaluating the possibilities of one minute, two more had passed. They overwhelmed me. I fell further and further behind. All my attentions were exclusively devoted to that accounting, nothing could dissuade me. My wife moved out of the house. I was fired from my job. I missed my mother's funeral, my child's open house at school. No matter how fast and hard I struggled the minutes loomed before me like an immeasurable, impassable universe. Soon the stacks of paper stood throughout the house, 10ft. tall, like ancient Doric columns.

The refrigerator door was blocked. The bed was covered . They formed a wall around my desk. I started to hate them, to despise them. I thought of ways to destroy them. Burning them in huge atomic squalls. Tossing them in immense vats of acid . But hopelessness chided me. Resignation set in. I realized the gravity of my impotence. Now I like to think of them as though they are a pair of trousers, too small to fit in, but not small enough to throw away. When I sleep, I dream I go out in the evening, (to a grocery store) or for the weekend, (skiing with a pretty woman) my hope always of returning, clean shaven, twenty pounds lighter, carefree.

13

/ames Doyle

The Hours dance in the middle of Texas where the parents of no-one plant crosses for the slaying of the dust.

The black douds hover over docks but the hands have already consecrated the estates in Roman numerals and the harvest is thicker than the blood that bends twenty centuries of the spear in homage to the lamb.

The Crossing of Legs is not the subject of this poem. If she re-arranges her skirt or gets up and walks away, I will then think about this poem .

If we care anymore. If I am not too excited.

She did all of these things just five minutes ago. Where were we? You say you aren't excited by all this? Conjure up your own legs.

14

Kristopher Saknussemm

Don't Get a Gun, Get a Big Dog "Mir-iam? Is that you?" my mother asked.

She knew that the shadow almost out of sight on the second flight of our staircase was not my grandmother.

She knew but she was obliged to ask out of some misguided middle-class faith in the normality of afternoon sunlight.

I was playing on the floor with a plastic fire truck and my sister's black patent-leather shoes. Not for long.

My mother bundled us up without a word- me still clutching at the hot red plasticmy sister aware of an "emergency," mature in spite of herself.

We went straight to the Pages', the big Catholic family next door.

Soon, Sandy Page was telephoning the police and we were hiding at the window, waiting.

I watched him scale our backyard fence, a vindication of all the invisible evils I had warned my parents about, only to be dismissed as a child with a wild imagination .

But there he was. At last, a monster of sortsdisappearing, yes, but finally after others had seen him too.

And what a monster for a sunny afternoon.

He'd been there the whole time.

He'd heard our pet names for ourselves.

He knew what we were having for dinner. He even knew of my impending birthday. And we knew nothing of him, except that he could stand very still

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and that when we believed we were alone togetherhappy and sure of the familiarity of our lives, he was waiting on our back stairs.

I think my mother cried the first time I searched for a trace of his shadow.

I admit I was standing at the window with the others when we watched him hop our fence.

But having seen his shadow on the wall where my height was measured with pencil marks each birthday-! couldn't be sure if he was gone for good.

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Sky Class We lay like a little tribe, five or six of us, boys and girls. We never did anything blatantly childish like pointing out the animal shapes in the clouds, unless there was a flagrant ostrich or rhino, or dragon, or whale. We just lay very close, the warm pale grass worn to soft dirt beneath us.

Sometimes Sims O'Driscoll would lie about how his father had beaten him up the night before. We'd listen and nod, and go back to studying. Nobody knew where to find us.

Nobody ever really thought to look, all of us lying out in the open, in what might've been a small field.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Miriam Levine

Sam My uncle Sam, my mother's brother, was blind. When I asked her how it happened, she vaguely answered, "In the war." She and I were in the dark back kitchen overlooking a courtyard, which let in muted gray light. The light was not dreary; although a visitor might believe the room was always one dull gray, I was used to watching white light very slowly darken, as the day went on, to shade after shade of gray. The light came down into the brick funnel of the courtyard, and through the two windows from such a great height that it seemed a small wonder that, without turning on the electric light, I could see the sink, the big set-tub, the green and pale brown stove on legs, the metal-topped table, my plate, my mother at the stove. "What war7" I persisted. At seven I was already a righteous interrogator, and like all righteous interrogators, I enjoyed my victim's discomfort. She hesitated. 'The First," she finally replied, as if she had trouble remembering.

Her answer seemed to make sense. We still saw wounded veterans from the First War begging on the streets near our house: a man with one leg, a man with no legs. Before every Saturday matinee we watched news of the current war. There were white and gold satin banners hanging in the windows of Gold Star Mothers; their sons had died in the war, and they had been made mothers in perpetuity, symbols of grief and sacrifice.

There was no doubt : war meant maiming and death.

For a period after my conversation with my mother, everytime I saw my uncle, I would search his head for scars. I could stare and stare without any risk of offending, yet although unchallenged, I felt like a sneak and a spy. I would examine his temples. In war movies it was always a wound to the temples that caused blindness. Uncle's were perfectly smooth, incurved, unmarked. I had also heard of veterans with steel plates in their skulls. Maybe that's what Uncle had. If I could find the secret door, which I thought had to be concealed under the scalp, I might, I believed, touch this damaged place, put my fingers over the cool metal conductor, and feel some deep vibration from within, which would strangely reassure me. But Uncle's grizzled, close-cropped hair grew smoothly in undisturbed whorls. There was no sign of a wound.

Perhaps, it wasn't a scar from a stitched-up wound, I began to think, but a half-moon-shaped dent like the kind you're likely to leave in wood, if you hammer a nail in too far. I knew a boy with such a dent in his forehead. Uncle's forehead was lined, not dented.

19

I was a small girl, not more than seven or eight. He must have been dose to fifty. His head seemed enormous, perhaps, because so nakedly unprotected. He would tum and raise his head to the sound of my voice, and although he would not smile, or frown, or look sulky in response to anything anyone did or said, he was not expressionless. He could look angry, but mostly his face had the appearance of raw, still weariness.

His eyes were somewhat sunken, the lids slightly sore-looking. When I called to him, the lids would raise, and I could see his clouded eyes.

Sometimes there seemed to be movement in the pupils. He would close his eyes almost immediately, as if the light hurt him. Because he looked, at such times, like an ordinary person blinking at a sudden harsh light, I would begin to imagine he could see-a beam of light was somehow getting in! But at the same time I realized that the movement I thought I saw was only reflected light, a yellowish marbly gleam, and the opening and dosing of his eyes, only a reflex that went with the turning of his head.

This reflex gripped me more than if he had stared into my eyes. His eyes became-weirdly-like ears, a second set of blind cockles turned on me.

Unlike my fine-featured, smooth-faced Levine relatives-my father's side of the family-he had rough grayish skin like a frozen potato. His features were deeply cut, angular, yet drooping. There were deep lines on either side of his mouth; his cheeks sagged. The upper part of his face, the sensitive eyes, the large domed Jacobs forehead, just barely lifted his face to grandeur. I contemplated a wrecked colossus, but he wasn't completely broken.

He had a harsh resonating laugh with an edge of irony, and an undercurrent of joy. It was a laugh in conflict with itself. Whenever I heard it, I felt as if I were being taught something, but I didn't know what. Listening to Uncle's laugh was not like watching grownups as they lowered their voices so I wouldn't hear them talking about sex. Their eyebrows would be lifted, their fingers raised to their mouths, their mouths opened as if for the dentist, their eyes wide: a slow-motion pantomime for fools. I became contemptuous. I made believe that I knew everything about sex, and about everything else in the world. I was afraid of appearing stupid.

I didn't find out what had caused Uncle's blindness all at once: I pieced it together over the years. As a small child I noticed how my relatives always lowered their voices when they mentioned my mother's family.

Once-and once was all it took to hook me-l saw one of my aunts make the crazy sign to punctuate a whispered conversation with her siT ter-in-law. She raised her left hand to hide the gesture from me, but I saw her twirl her right index finger at her temple as if she were winding up string. In the way of all children, I felt afraid and ashamed, as if somehow I was at fault along with the rest of the Jacobs, but at the same time her gesture had galvanized me: 'There is a secret," I thought, "and I'm going to find out what it is."

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One afternoon, while my parents were at work, and the house was silent, I searched through their drawers. Most of their things-my mother's seemingly immense pink bloomers, my fathers ironed-flat boxer shorts-gave off the heavy seriousness of middle-age in the post-war years, the mystery of concealed sex . There was hardly anything new or fresh. The top drawer smelled of bitter lavender from a bottle of Yardley's, which was so old that the few remaining drops of scent had turned brown as whiskey. Next to the round box of loose floury face powder, were pairs of sad unused gloves like pressed and shrunken corsages. Among my mother's costume jewelry was a brassy bristling brooch-and-earring set with life-saver-green stones. I fingered my father's cheap "Swank" tie-pin shaped like a fish, his worn Liberty Head dollar-1902, the year of his birth, almost obliterated. I found his gray suede dress gloves. They were still clean and soft, and their backs were stitched with black lines, which looked like eat's whiskers. He never wore the long white silk scarf, which I unfolded from its slippery layers, and kept wrapped around my neck as I worked .

Pushed in the back of the middle drawer was a black wooden box, which I knew had belonged to my grandfather. Finally-! don't know whether it was on this day or one soon after-1 found the cold stubby key. In the box were my grandparent's immigration papers worn thin and separated at the folds. There were other documents concerning my mother's sister Rose, and her brother Meyer. They had been put in Greystone Mental Hospital. The papers said "committed." In the space after "diagnosis" were the words "hereditary syphillis." I got out the dictionary and looked up syphillis. Then I had to look up more words-venereal, spirochete. It was confusing. I didn't completely understand, but at least I learned there was a disease. The meaning of venereal wasn't interesting. I wasn't exactly sure what sexual meant. I couldn't picture intercourse.

There was the male sex, and the female sex: I knew about that. But the word hereditary with which I was already familiar, was important, mysterious- a fate.

Eventually, certainly by the time I was ten or eleven, I understood completely, and somehow, though I don't remember any one scene of dramatic revelation, my parents came to understand that I knew. My mother, with a look of calm but eager distinction, told me the family story. My grandfather had become infected in a brothel in Poland, in Lodz, and had unwittingly passed on the disease to my grandmother.

Three of their children-Rose, Sam and Meyer-had been born incurably infected. By the time my mother and Louie were born the family illness had been diagnosed and my grandparents treated. My mother and Louie were examined and pronounced free of disease. (Ironically, in one of nature's odd reversals, the ill children were large, and for a time robust-looking, while my mother and Louie were tiny, under five feet.)

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Meyer and Rose went mad, and were put in Greystone Mental Hospital in New Jersey. Sam's eyes were damaged at birth. He eventually went blind, my mother said, "When he became a man." Puberty had never sounded so biblical. This was something to rival the Bar Mitzvah's celebration, a blow which descended with more force than the little bags of candy we threw down at the Bar Mitzvah boy from the women's gallery of the shul.

If knowledge is sanity, Uncle was sane. In a terrible scene he accused his father; he lifted his head, and turned it toward the old man's pleading voice: "You did this to mel" My mother said that her father ran from the room, his hands pressed to his ears. His face was lit up with tragic light, lifted also like his son's, but to heaven.

Much later in college I found myself bored with discussions about whether or not Willie Loman was a tragic hero. I was a ferocious snobworse than any Yankee with her family's export china. The Lomans simply did not measure up to the Jacobs, whose frequent bread was pity and fear.

After my parents married, they lived with Sam and Rose (Meyer was already in Greystone) in the family house in Paterson~ Sam and Rose had the attic apartment. Rose, once a tireless weaver who worked with manic energy, was fired from her job at the silk mill; she was becoming more and more violent. At home she would creep down the stairs, sneak up on my mother, and with a ghastly shriek-Bertha in Jane Eyre-hit her from behind .

My mother was not strong enough to fight her. She had just given birth to me, and she was worn out from Rose's outbursts. She would have to get up during the night to feed me, and Rose would not let her nap during the day. Only my uncle could control Rose. She was afraid of him . His voice meant business. Perhaps he had caught her and hit her. I don't know. He was strong enough to stop her; he wasn't afraid; he did what had to be done. He protected us, my mother and me-my father worked long hours-but eventually it was too much for all of them. My mother broke down. Rose was finally committed, a life sentence.

When I knew Uncle, he spoke about people with tough authority in the third person, his voice rough, either with affection or sarcasm, or both.

Everyone in his world was lifted out of his or her given name to an appellative, which rang with the truth of a fable: The Kid, The Sister, The Old Lady, The Dope, The Big Mouth, The Big Shot, The Thief. I was The Kid. He would defend me. "Leave The Kid alone," he would say when my stubborness would madden my parents.

Like all the Jacobs he loved to give away money. He'd thrust bills at my mother, "Here, get The Kid an ice-cream ... . Here, get yourself a coat, a good one." I heard just recently that he used to give money to my

22

grandmother Molly, and that years before, after her husband died and she had very little, he had given her a bundle of army surplus underwear, which he had probably gotten from some charity for the blind. They were her first underpants: soldiers' drawers! Before that she had worn only peasant petticoats under her skirts.

He was a gambler. He lived off his pension, and what he could make playing the numbers and the horses. He bought the solid maple threequarter bed I slept in with money from a big hit. I don't know exactly how much he gave my parents, but in our unlucky household one big hit made you a winner-forever. I realize now that my mother needed to create Sam for herself, and for me, tore-imagine him: she had the ability to select a person's gift-or flaw-and make it count in the telling of a story. What do I know? He won at least once. I slept on his winnings. A three-quarter bed was a good one-better than a single.

All of my relatives were judges of a good thing, especially of fruits and vegetables. They could discuss the provenance of an apple the way a collector traced the origin of a painting. They would note the differences between California oranges, and Florida oranges; between California carrots and Florida carrots; between local Jersey cultivated "True Blues," and wild blueberries; between Long Island potatoes, and Maine potatoes. They waited for Freestone peaches, for Winesap apples, for the first spinach, for sweet corn, for greengage plums, for black bing cherriesthe big ones . A ripe melon would be an occasion for celebration. As they would bite into the orange meat, a look of almost nasty triumph would come over their faces: "Look at this small thing we've managed-can you believe it! " They would bite into a whole tomato, as if it were a hardboiled egg, adding a small pinch of salt before each bite. "Good tuhmayta," my uncle Louie, who was in the fruit and produce business, would say, "Jersey." And they would all nod. I thought of America as a country of gardens, pockets of good stuff, linked by roads which brought the harvest to us.

Most other supposedly good things in the forties were disappointing, ugly, and sometimes frightening. The Dionne Quintuplets were kept in a nursery which was supposed to be happy, but which looked to me on the newsreels like a hospital, a prison. The Quints themselves were supposed to be cute; but in their identical ruffled dresses, and identical lavish hairbows, they looked like freaks, although I couldn't have used that word then. Instead my face would bum with shock, and embarassment. I don't know where a child like me got an idea of beauty at five years old, but I had one. I knew there had to be something better. The women's rough boxy suits literally rubbed me the wrong way; their stiff pointed hats, like lifted visors, poked against my forehead when they tried to kiss me.

The sickening smell of gas seeped into the prickly dark car interior and

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made me sick. The square overstuffed furniture hulked against the wall.

It was an underlit world, as if an air-raid darkness still hung over us.

Many names, during those times, particularly the names of institutions, sounded unconsciously satiric. I puzzled over Lighthouse, the name of a foundation for the blind, which sounded like a lie, a trick. It also sounded like a product name. Lighthouse: Lifebuoy Soap. Advertising, not metaphor. When I heard of a theater called the Palace, I became uneasy. I never figured out The Church of Christ Scientist, which I passed as I walked up Passaic Avenue. Einstein was a scientist, so was Robert Oppenheimer. They had made the bomb, but Christ! How could he be a scientist. My confusion was not caused by anything peculiar to those times. The literal-mindedness of children makes them tum a word over and over, as they try to match it to an actual thing. However, the enormous number of project names which came flooding out of the radio was new. Some words didn't seem to mean anything, like the names of dead and forgotten gods: Lux, Oxydol, Clorox.

But the most disturbing name had nothing to do with the radio: Camp Happiness, a retreat for the blind where my uncle spent part of the summer. My parents took me to Camp Happiness, and to Greystone Mental Hospital without, I guess, a thought to my nerves. My friends talk being terrified by Walt Disney's Bambi. After visits to Greystone, Happiness, I watched Bambi calmly, and not just because I knew it an illusion. Bambi's fate-his loosing his mother-wasn't as bad as knew things could be.

At Camp Happiness my father took Sam and me out in a boat. father rowed. My uncle stiffly held on to the gunnels. I must have sitting between my father's knees, facing my uncle. As my father lessly pulled on the oars, as effortlessly as he swam with me on his I gazed into my uncle's face-this was before my mother's lie about war wound-and was frightened by its heavy blind weariness above me .

All day among these pale sensitive-fingered men and women, I felt innocent, too seeing, too quick, too alive. The lake on which we was too blue, the sun too golden, the grass too green, like the grass grew at Greystone, and on this green, under this green, broken of the blind and mad walked with their rushing gait. Later when I about the Greek heroes' descent into the underworld, I thought of Happiness.

When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, my uncle came to live us in Passaic. He had had a heart attack. He also had diabetes. brought with him a heavy suitcase of strange black bumpy leather. It "textured" to look like rhinoceros hide. Like my father's heavy gray mouth, it seemed to come from a distant world where things were

24

for eternity. The suitcase, and all of Uncle's things, smelled of Lifebuoy soap: sharp and medicinally sweet. The radio ads for Lifebuoy mentioned B.O. When I thought that Uncle was afraid of having B.O., I felt a stab of pity. Why else would anyone use a soap that smelled like medicine?

My mother devoted herself to making Sam well. I watched her put slices of white meat of chicken into the shallow cup of the newly-bought kitchen scale. She weighed his bread. She steamed his vegetables. She would lean down to her low worktable, and scrutinize the numbers on the scale, once, twice, just to make sure. I sensed it was already too late. I had never seen her so concentrated.

She wore a cotton housedress. Her slightly bowed chunky legs were bare-she had rolled her stockings down to her ankles. As usual she wore high wedgees. Of course, I've always known my mother was small, but only recently when I watched a nurse measure her height, did I learn how small. It was then that I realized that for as long as I've known her she had slipped on her heels as she got out of bed. Even at the lake she would wear heels-those with ankle straps. I had no recollections of ever having seen her barefoot, except in that brief moment when she swung her legs out of bed. My trooper of a mother keeping it up.

Uncle had lost weight, and his pants rode loosely around his waist. I thought of the pictures I had seen of clowns wearing barrels held up by suspenders. Uncle was soft and wasted; he had never worked. Everyone else in my family-except for uncle Louie-was hard, carved by work.

When they got old or sick, they got scrawny. My father's hands looked as if they had been broken and put back together; his forearms bulged; my mother's arms were sinewy from scrubbing clothes. She also worked as a salesperson. She was brilliant and cunning in her job. Her mobile mouth was shaped by the passion of her intention : she would make that sale.

Her customers did not "walk." My aunt, my father's sister, had a crooked shoulder from sewing ties for thirty years. She would lead the fabric through the machine with her right hand, and the repeated motion had knotted and raised her right shoulder. She led like a boxer. If my relatives were ruined, they were hard and ruined.

My mother liked to tell me about Sam . She was proud that he had always had friends. I know he had a girlfriend. My mother told me that when they had all lived together in Paterson, she had hired a woman to help her with the housework. Her name was Jessie. One day my mother came back early from her trip to store-she would usually leave Jessie to her work and be gone for a few hours. She paused on the porch realizing that something looked different, but not quite sure what it was. Then she realized that the livingroom shades were pulled down. ''They were having a party," my mother said.

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Sam was a talker, a storyteller-who won, who lost, who hit it big, who lived, who died. I imagined him as a young man on the downtown Paterson streets, in the delicatessens and cafeterias where he loved to eat corned beef sandwiches and apple pie with ice cream. I imagined his swiftly lifting face, his thick brown wavy hair, which rose from his high forehead in one dense smooth mass, his white cane, like beacons. When he came to live with us, he was forbidden the rich heavy food he loved.

He didn't know the Passaic streets, and the kind of friends he had-storekeepers, waiters, newsmen, bookies, gamblers, hustlers-could not find their way to him. He was cut off, left with women.

My grandmother Molly would sometimes visit him in the afternoons, if my mother went out. She liked to use our bathroom because hers was so cold . When she told me this I saw her bare shivering behind on the toilet seat.

Every nice day that spring, on my way back to school after lunch, I would take him to the park. First I would help him with his shoes, slipping them on, and tying the black laces. The shoes were heavy and black, and always well-polished. He got them from the Army Navy Store. My mother had instructed me: "Never lead a blind person; let them take your arm." So with Uncle's cool light hand on my elbow I would adjust my step, and we would walk together down Madison Street, and across busy Myrtle Avenue.

Unlike most other adults, he was very careful of me; he did not clutch or grab, or press his lips in big smacking greedy kisses against my cheeks.

He had the practiced finesse of a long-time patient who must court his caretaker. He was a graceful seducer. But he could not hide his body. He was naked; his blindness, his frailty. All the old and the sick were pleading, exposed. They were like the lover who uncovers his stiff penis, and asks, except they did not uncover, did not ask. Their infirmity did it them .

On hot days I like walking in his shadow. I barely came to his der. I would lead him to a bench under the trees. Once seated, he reach deep into his pants pocket and finger the loose change, reading coins. When he found a dime, he would press it into my palm. Each he gave me had weight and heat; each coin had been read.

I wasn't a particularly brave child, although I talked big. Mostly wanted to be liked. Yet somehow I was never ashamed of walking him, or worried about what my friends would say. Anyway, we have been a sight to shut all mouths. When I remember this slow walk, see the two of us alone; there was a space around us, as if we were on mound of a baseball field, with all the people far away at the edges of field. No one came close to us.

I would leave Uncle to play wild games of ring-a-lareo in the short left before the bell rang. Only a few girls played- Carol, the

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Polish kid with piss-off eyes, Camille, whose parents told her they'd break her legs, if they ever saw her with a boy. She didn't listen. We'd careen around the yard in a swirling pack, which looked as if it was blown and separated by the wind. A tingling heat would shoot into my legs and arms, right out to the tips of my fingers and toes. I felt as if I were flying. We'd run until we were breathless, then we'd run again. If you were caught, you went to "prison" to wait for the next round.

When the bell rang, we straggled to the doors, boys on one side, girls on the other. My braids were undone, my socks muddy, my oxfords scuffed. My blouse was usually pulled out of my skirt, and my face flushed. The teachers disapproved. I was wild; I talked too much.

At three-thirty I gathered up my books, and went to pick up Uncle. I would watch his face for the first sign of recognition. He knew who it was before I spoke. I loved that look. Everyone in my family had this kind of lit-up look of recognition. I went for it; I go for it still. Most of them were so pure in their modesty, they took any sign of love as an unheard of gift, and so they beamed. And Uncle's look was the best, because his joy-because The Kid had not forgotten-was tethered to an inescapable harsh gravity.

As always, I felt a kind of distinction, which he, the giver, conferred on me. Uncle, through his gifts of money, and my mother, by her instructions, were training me, perhaps too well. My mother was proud of her ability to be natural with afflicted people. She certainly had had enough practice. Only recently she told me about a relative, who had stopped calling a deaf cousin, because she was tired of yelling into the phone. "I still call her," my mother said without a trace of self-irony, "I know how to talk to deaf people."

Uncle slept on a day bed in the small doorless foyer where he was on view to anyone who passed through. Leaning slightly foward, his shoulders hunched, he would sit on the edge of the bed, his long-fingered graceful hands curved over the mattress edge. He would be in shirtsleeves, pants, and suspenders. In the evenings, as he sat there on his bed in the middle of our apartment, he'd listen to the radio. His favorite program was "Gangbusters."

I would usually be in the small crowded living room just off the foyer doing my homework. Memorial School was "progressive." We were studying Greek myths by turning them into plays. As I wrote the dialogue-the story of Ariadne was one of the myths I used-the strident sounds of "Gangbusters" and the clatter of dishes would disappear. I was completely inside my head. I couldn't hear my father's loud snoring. He usually fell asleep in his chair after dinner with the newspaper in his lap; he wore only his pajama bottoms, which he would put on as soon as he got home from work. He would have one leg slung over the arm of the

27

chair, a toothpick in the comer of his mouth, and one arm raised and curled over his head in the gesture of the orangutan. (It must be inherited. I sleep with my arm raised in the same way.)

One night, after I had finished my homework early, Uncle and I argued. He was listening to "Gangbusters," and I wanted another program. His voice rose and cracked with all the bitterness of his life: "The kid wants.... I want one lousy program." I hope I eventually gave in.

I'm not sure I did, at least not without a struggle. For a moment, only a moment, it was exhilarating, like grabbing something I wasn't supposed to eat, and quickly biting into it.

The day after our scene over the radio program, he did not give me the usual dime when I took him to the park. Once I backed him up to his favorite bench, he just sat down abruptly, and said nothing. I felt terrible. As usual I picked him up at three-thirty on my way home from school. Later I wished him good night. The next day we walked together to the park again, and without any reproach he gave me the dime.

It was my grandmother who found him. I was due home from school on the afternoon my uncle died. If my grandmother had not come in, I would have found him, since my mother was away at work. When I recently thought about Uncle's death, I was sure that, when I got home, the ambulance was just pulling away. I remembered a crowd of people, but now I realize that I'm not sure about what I saw, so there are two versions. I also remember him lying on the bathroom floor in the narrow space between the tub and the radiator. I could see the shape of his frail legs through his pants. The long black shoelaces were untied and lay loosely across his white cotton socks like wilted stems.

At the funeral I bent over to kiss him in his coffin. He was wrapped in a white shroud with a blue Star of David stamped on the forehead. shroud came down almost to his brows like a Greek priest's headdress.

His face was completely relaxed, and arranged in a faint, somewhat smile. A thin layer of rouge gave him a pink tinge. They had coJmp>O!i4!d him: I hated it. I don't remember one word the rabbi said. Why would What could he have possibly said7 I was The Kid, the brat who found out the truth. I knew "What was what." I could say along with Jacobs relatives, "I have news for you," shrugging my shoulders laughing with their characteristic rough cackle, and the news would bad and glorious.

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Jeff Schiff

Pigeons Look carefully: they're the real geriatric crisis.

Grandmothered around a fountain, they bitch about cost of living and direct deposits.

Raise a hand, though don't expect a show.

Depression treats, their flocks diminished during the Great Crash.

Even the vanquished could pull them from the sky without much effort.

A crow grows old with valor, pure unction decapitated in the fields.

A hawk requires no further validation, what you need sits between theHandK. Go ahead, mouth it a couple of times.

But pigeons, pigeons are disability, medicare, the boardwalk at Miami Beach dogged with goiter patients preening for a flight-given their druthersthey'd rather not take.路

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Because even my suffering is sabotaged too quickly in this cluttered world because I've twice this hour been mesmerized by our leaky kitchen faucet because my wife slips into an oceanic hate of women bequeathed all the work because of the word burn and the word burn used as noun because acquired nature roosts on my shoulders and will not fathom change because I am foolish enough to buy without first testing the merchandise or querying the salesforce I go on resembling my history.

I cannot embrace soft air.

I must sit with my feet dangling out an open door.

30

Carole Bernstein

Rush hour. Dead on the track part way to 23rd.

A blared, distorted, half-human voice is heard, then cut off. Smokea faint smell-seems to hang in the packed car, tinges the air.

Groans, a cough from somewhere, a smoker's hack.

Its owner in a suit bleats something to his pal, who snorts. Dressed to the teeth, the women stand in harness: sling-backs, lacquered hair, pinch pleats; sweat-dotted necks dripping cheap beads .

They grasp the sticky metal poles like spears.

Hasidic businessmen, thick coats and hats, beards, stand, swaying-I want to scream, rip it all off, for God's sake!

But the eyes, most of them, completely blank: Who , me? I am not uncomfortable, thanks .

In fact, I'm barely awake, breathing almost into another's nose, mouth, armpit, or if sitting, into a rumbling doubleknit crotch. A man spits, or does what, in a damp hankie, God only knows.

A shadow on the black door, glasses glinting, I lean to my reflection, which dissolves to the pocked, crumbling wall of the tunnel we're stuck in,

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that grips the train like a huge stone case.

Sarcophagus, with my face. With all these faces .

Dim light is shed on a long dark stain of water seeking entrance where water should never go.

As if anything could grow.

Like fire. That smell . . . I glance around, above the heads. Smoke pours in, fills the narrow car, metal doors superheat, glow, a stink of tar and hair, no safe haven, no not in the mind, mouth like theirs drops open, eyes wide, wide as theirs in dumb belief, I scream with these people, the loudmouthed, the proud, another lump of flesh thrown into the bargain .. .

No, not mel This can't be my reason for being here.

My reflection frowns, looks grimI rearrange its idiot calm while everyone else yawns or shifts their legs.

A tiny old woman adjusts her blond wig with a trembling, tentative arm .

What a long time we've been in this place ..

A rumble. A whirr. We lurch forward; glide.

Does everyone else feel lighter for the ground moving again1 A space is made in the aisle. I step away from the doors, taking my shadow with me, reach to hold on, struck blind for a few seconds when the lights flicker, like everyone here riding home.

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Caught The 1920s film star's breastsnipples poking through the sheerest gossamer wrap-seem oddly modem, as though people of the past's bodies aren't supposed to look like ours. The photo dates, explains the film book, from before movies are made "more suitable for family viewing," and even the actress's strands and strands of pearls hide nothing, like the pearls I wore last night as I hung over my lover and dragged them down the dark field of his body, slowly let them comb the delicate hairs until they roped and held him, and as we smiled, suddenly I remembered the necklace had been my grandmother's.

I was quiet for a moment, like a child listening at a locked door who tenses for a cry-againthen nothing, nothing out of them, as if they've gone to sleep. And the cry recalled, beyond belief, soon flies out the window.

When they pose for me it's always in their kitchen, her paisley apron strains around her middle, his back brace squeaks, he leans with a glass to enlarge a column of Yiddishe Zeitung.

And the creased family photos glaze over like a fish's eye in the sun: something caught, that turns to resemble abalone, mother-of-pearl.

So cloudy, and so clear.

33

Edward Kleinschmidt

Calling Up Space doesn't allow me The time to do this right, Which is: taking little oyster Steps, deep breathing at every Stop. Ten years ago I had Time, why did I waste it.

Who would guess now, who Would rally their brains.

Time was a backfire that Never gave off heat. It Had a problem and it had A solution and no one could Tell the difference. What it Was: a blue nose getting bluer, Prehensile feet, knee caps, skin Like jade. If I could call Up other things, like a river Going backwards, or lips Kissing wet cement, or having Parents magically. No regrets, Though. In fact, what I believe Is peeling an orange slowly or Watching Pablo Neruda eating a Peach from Chile. He would do

34

It so well. His time was There, in the orchards, on some Waves of fire in the Indian grass.

What he called up he could make Appear and disappear, as if on Schedule, the right schedule.

We didn't know what was going by us, But we felt it was right to wave.

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Excitement Too loose, your clothing, dear, Head of ivory, hands of Italian marble, veined and Cool. It's the wool itch, The thrust of the engine Around the comers, on our Way to hot sand, sweating On the beach. Your arms like Snakes around my neck, my wrists.

The steering wheel rotating like The dial on the telephone-you know Where to reach me-at home, When to reach me-at all times, How to reach me-with your heart, With your lips, with your eyes.

You're capable of it always, The great it of love. Like is A tree easily climbed, we'll Stay up for a while or keep Climbing. Love is the channel We cut when the drifting down together Takes its own unusual course.

Will the ocean take our clothes Away like we take each other, The steady beating wave, the curl, The foam? The fresh and the salt, The chair for making love in, The bed for resting afterwards, The hummingbird's tongue longer than Its body, the bee's stinger, the wet Sticky loamy spume of leaves, of Hay, of making hay, of love.

We trust the truest tongue will

36

Circle its mark, will lap up Around the rim, will not hesitate To delay the best words Spoken, touching the right spot.

Not too much to ask, to Scream and beg for, to coyly Intimate, to flatly say yes.

37

James A. Miller

Extensions In the Cleveland Museum of Art

In the din of ages so quiet only the squeak of charcoal sneakers and the stentorian tutelage of living masses obtrude-goddess with a breast exposed, Mary drawing blood from fingers brushing thornsoverhead the tapestry of knights and daysin glass enclosed, breastplates, armor....

The old and the young contemplate themselves distractedly-why this and this-not something else?-why this standing for man; preservedwhy does this speak to who lam?

Only the rich of course had these things, no 1 The poor had nothing like this in their homes, the earnest middle ager asks. (The art of the poor was staying alive; their lives enriched by viewing their betters' legacies, now, the wiseacre guide replies, wisely.)

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Crossbows; helmets; chainmail. "Laban searching for his household idols.

Filipino and Chinese, black schoolchildren and matrons, each one finger of a hand reaching back to the center of the earth floating through the heavens.

39

The Morning Paper A man tried to strangle a mime last night in Philadelphia.

They had to pry his fingers loose, two passersby who asked the crowd what they thought they were doing, calmly pitching dimes and quarters onto the blanket.

He had to do it, the manthat white face was his mother's, the silence the silence his father wielded like a hammer swung underwater . .. I won't talk myself, not even to my wife, until I've had two coffees and traded the sports and funnies for the front-page news: The Delta flight that dropped through winter and shattered like a glass paperweight, the sheriff in Idaho who can't explain what he was doing with two neighborhood boys, naked in the Whispering Pines Motel.

Sometimes I think reading the paper is like flying 50 miles inside a cloud, something always on the edge of striking us without warning.

40

Years ago I was reading something, Delta's Sky perhaps, when my tray pitched into the aisle above Tampa. I was strapped in and circling because of bad weather, Because I wanted a woman down there to love me.

I thought I could ride the storm down, knock on her door, that it would be that ecstatically simple . ..

When she saw me standing there, 6:15a.m., the morning paper under my ann, she smiled at the image, reached out, and took the world from me again.

41

Robert Huber

His Royal Highness Things were screwed up, when I met the King, and that is the reason I got to know him. He was short and fat . He dressed rough, in old t-shirts and jeans. He was going bald. He had a round kind of face with marks on it like it got hailed on, and little hands. His eyes bulged. But his eyes were real bright blue.

It was really something, seeing those eyes, they put you in a trance, kind of. I have to think about the way he looked to get a picture of it. I mean besides the eyes. The way he would look at you and you were right there with him, like nothing else in the world was going on, clear and direct, right at you. I don't have to think about that. I believed it. That was the thing. Those eyes were something.

It was when Carol left to go live with her mother 150 miles away. She said I had a drinking problem. There are two things about that . I like to have a few drinks sometimes. Who doesn't? And the other thing is, I've heard it said by even the AA that drinking can't be cured. Why cure it7 I'm not trying to be funny. She was sick of the fights. Did I like them7 Even if she wasn't drinking at all I noticed she got into these fights pretty good . But she had her answer. I drank.

That was when the King was hired at the cab company as a dispatcher.

I drive. We called him by his real name at first, Kent. I hardly noticed him because we didn't work the same shifts. He worked graveyard, and he came in when I was counting up, getting off. He drove a Cadillac, a light yellow '69 Eldorado, in mint condition. Later he sold it and I'd see it parked in town, all muddy from one of the big farms in the valley. The King himself always wore heavy boots. I say that because I remember riding so quiet in his car and hearing the tap of that boot on the pedal.

These Cadillacs are big. He always kept it clean. It was a real light tap.

It's hard to remember what it was like when you saw somebody but didn't know them yet. I remember he talked to Nancy Swank, the dispatcher on my shift who'd be getting off when he came on. I'd be counting up my fares . They talked about local people, even though he'd living in New York City the last few years. This is a small town, enough for a cab company, but if you're a cab driver you know place. The King would just say people's names, hardly more than but he had a strange way of doing it. "Oh yes, Ronald P. Dugan," he'd saying, and Nancy Swank, half out the door, couldn't go the whole

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with somebody else to hear about. 'The automobile mechanic. I've known Ronald a long time . Of course." Ron? The big guy who pumps gas and never says anything? Nancy Swank shut the door, coming back in. She has four kids and works two jobs, and her husband hasn't worked since God knows when, but I guess she had to know if Ron's been keeping something big to himself all these years. What did I care? I gave her my chair. Count up, get out, go downtown.

H Carol thought I had a drinking problem, I might as well have some fun. But downtown's a joke. Three bars is what it boils down to. That's it. Somebody new comes in and you practically stand in line.

Late one night a couple weeks after the King started at the cab company, I brought a six-pack back to the office. The overhead lights were off. The King was sitting at the tiny dispatcher desk, and there was a small lamp on the desk I never saw before. He was drinking Coke from a bottle. He must have brought it from home. The cab office is in a comer of the bus station where there's a soda machine but it's cans. I asked him if he minded that I drink my beer there. The King looked at me very serious and held up his bottle of Coke, like one thing's the same as the other. I sat down. I asked him if he always drank Coke out of bottles.

"Oh yes," he said, looking at me like we agreed. "Of course. I never drink it out of cans."

"Why not?"

He turned away, then when he looks back at me direct all he says is, "It's not the same thing."

"You mean it's different Coke?"

"No. It's not the same."

I laughed . "You can taste the can, or what is it?"

He was still looking at me. "I don' t drink it out of cans." He picked up the bottle and took a drink and set the bottle back on his desk. I guess I saw what he meant. I opened a beer.

Tim came in then. He's the graveyard shift driver.

"Dinner for the King," he says like he's telling a lot of people. That was the first time I heard him called that, the King. Tim gives him two cheese dogs.

Then Tim starts laughing and says, "Didn't you know this was the King?"

Why would 17 The King (Kent, I thought he was) is looking at me again, his eyes blue as hell but he didn't say anything, like it was true he was the King but he didn't say it, and I could think what I wanted. I didn't think anything. Tim pulls a card from a pocket and shows meKing Nebuchadnezzar Ruler of Ancient Babylon

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I still don't think anything. Tim says, "Did you know that the King worked for the Rockefellers in New York?"

"Now Timothy," the King says.

The phone rang. As the King takes the call Tim is saying he knew right away they would be good friends, him and the King. You can't tell about Tim. Something's so good he's about to break out laughing, like I have something to find out. We don't think the same anything-the regular cab customers who can't shut up are the ones he likes. He tells me before the King hangs up that I should ask him about the Rockefellers.

The King sent Tim out on a call .

So I asked him. He was making a note on the call-in log, writing lefthanded with a fountain pen with his wrist curled up . I saw on later nights that his handwriting is perfect. He didn't even look up as he told me what the deal was.

When he was visiting a friend one weekend in New York City somebody this friend knew knew about this job, working for the Rockefellers on their computer. The King didn't go to college, but he went to computer school. They hired him. The computer the King ran had to do with money they gave to charities, no big part of"What are you writing?" I interrupted him.

"Oh," he says, like he didn't even know he was doing it. He looks up.

"Nothing." He puts the cap on the pen.

"So what are the Rockefellers like7" "I don't know, I never met them ."

"What was it like working there7" He sighs. "It's like this: you put on the monkey suit, go up to the 44th floor, stare at a computer screen . . .."

"How much money do they have7" The King laughs a little, and then looks at me, turning and sitting back, and his round face is shiny. "It's not like that. It's not like all the money's right there."

"You mean they don't tell you."

"Well, you don't see it."

"It's in the computer."

"Well ... yes." He laughs a little again and looks away. 'That's about it . It's in the computer."

It turns out the King got addicted to Quaaludes when he was in York City, working for the Rockefellers. He was taking 25 a day. that is a shitload. It got so bad he came back here to live with his""'"""'"'" then got busted for writing phony prescriptions . The King is a rn'""'"tM felon. He spent a month in jail. I asked him what that was like. Plenty time to think, he says. He was clean now, for almost a year.

"Is there any chance you can go back to the Rockefellers7" The King shook his head, and I said that it was too bad.

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He shook his head again, and didn't say anything because he was eating one of the cheese dogs, but he was looking down at his desk and I thought I said the wrong thing, that he blew it with the Rockefellers and didn't need to be reminded. But then he's holding his cheese dog like he's going to take another bite and he's just looking at me instead, staring at me. He's still looking at me as he takes a bite of that cheese dog and he's looking at me while he's chewing it. I had it wrong. He didn't have any problem about that job. I felt like he was thinking I had something to say.

I didn't. I told him about my wife being gone though. He finished his dinner.

It was a bad time. Carol didn't like it when I drank but her mother was even worse. Her mother wouldn't let me come see her, she wouldn't even put Carol on the phone. "You've been drinking," she'd say before I'd said two words. Hell yes I've been drinking. What was I supposed to be doing? I'd say let me talk to Carol, and that was all it took. "You've been drinking." Hell yes. It bugged her that I didn't lie. She hung up .

I told the King about Carol that same night, while I drank beer and he drank Coke . "It sounds bad for you," he said. He seemed like he was thinking, careful to think what it was, but he didn't say any more than that.

He was right. It was very bad. I couldn't even talk to my wife.

When I got home late that night, I thought of something-that that's the way those people, the Rockefellers, do things. Hire somebody like the King. Isn't that the way it works? He didn't even care. Here he was now, and that was it.

I started going back to the cab office late at night after having a few beers downtown, because nothing broke my way.

I must have talked about Carol those nights, when the King and I were alone. I don't remember what I said so much but I remember after talking about her, real late at night, and just sitting there with the King, not talking because I'd said it already, half lit. It had to be Carol. And the King would look at me like I could keep talking if I wanted, like he wasn't going anyplace. That was the thing about the King.

It got pretty easy and friendly. When I came in the King would look up from his tiny desk where he'd be doing crossword puzzles and eating, or reading computer magazines or what have you and say, 'Weill Camille!''

He started saying that every time I came in late at night. "Weill Camille!

Have a seat." My name is not Camille and if somebody else said it you would get mad or think they were stupid . The King was different. I'd open a beer.

The King would make Tim dinner at one in the morning in the little micro-wave that was in the office. The owner of the cab company had the idea to sell food and magazines to bus riders. Except late at night

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there wasn't any. Tim and the King ate these cheese-covered dinners from Styrofoam. That's one of the reasons the King was so fat.

One night the King brought in a little tv but Tim wouldn't have it in the office. He said that tv made everyone the same. That people in the South now were the same as New England people. So what? He had this big rap. The King thought it was funny as hell, and he kept saying 'Well all right then, Timothy, if you say so, then all right." He looked at me with those bright eyes, like he thought everything was really pretty funny.

One night Tim had the flu and the King kept trying to make chicken soup in the microwave. He told me, "You've got to take over for Timothy," so I did it. One night I was pretty drunk and picked up the big trash can and turned it over. I remember it only because the King thought it was pretty bad. I wasn't trying to do anything or be funny and I cleaned it up right away. Kevin was there that night. He's the owner's son and he was training with Tim-not all night because he was only 17. The King stood up from his desk when I turned the trash over, and didn't say anything or do anything or even look at anybody until I cleaned up the mess and Tim and Kevin left on a call. Then he sits down. We didn't say anything. Kevin says over the radio they're clear and the King sends them before it's time to the trailer park, where we pick up this guy every night and take him to his security guard job downtown-he lost his license, drunk driving. I pointed out to the King that he was sending them kind of early.

'They can sit in the cab." The King stood up with his arms folded like I'm supposed to do something.

I never saw the King like this. So I tell him then that Tim bugs me, and ask him what he thinks.

The King looks down at me. "I love Timothy."

He didn't see what I meant. Tim and I don' t agree about anything. He plays guitar, and writes songs about depressing stuff he thinks when he's driving cab. Like it's so bad driving around and getting paid to do it.

Sometimes he'd play late at night in the office. The King would sit back with his hands folded on his stomach and his eyes closed.

While the King was still standing there, looking at the wall or something, I left. When I did it I didn't say a word.

I had off the next three days, and I stayed away from the cab office.

Then on the third night I went there real late.

When I went in the King says, 'Well. Camille. Is Camille going behave himself tonight?" But I could tell right away, the way the face was shiny and sour at the same time, that he wasn't mad. I call it fish look, his cheeks sucked in and his lips sticking out sort of like waiter in a restaurant. Tim and Kevin were out on a call. I cracked a and sat down.

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The King asked me one night about going places. What did I care? I didn't have anything to do. He had things to do around the county, it seemed like. One morning when I was too tired to drive home he gave me a ride in his Cadillac. Then we would just ride sometimes, during the day. Once we drove all the way to Placerville to check on a used refrigerator for his parents. He didn't buy it. The King and I would lie back and we'd cruise. He wouldn't let me drink beer in the car, but hell, we went all over the county. We didn't have to say a word. Telephone poles, wires, houses, trees, piles of dirty hard snow-all of it flying by.

But something bugged me. The King was into Jesus Christ. I knew it started in jail. Then Tim got into it. It bugged me because they talked about people and everything like anyone else would. Even worse than that. The cab company gets a lot of weird calls. "From all walks," the King would say. He meant it might be somebody drunk from the bars, or just as likely the wife of the guy who built the mall. The King called her Dotty. She wore a mink stole no matter if it was warm or snowing or what. "Go get Dotty," the King would tell Tim over the radio, and he might say it when Tim still had someone else in his cab, just before he dropped them off. Sometimes Dotty went to the diner at two in the morning. Then when Tim dropped her off he'd call in something like, "She missed with the lipstick again." He meant that she got lipstick on her teeth or cheek or something, and the King would write that right into the cab log, something funny like, "Dotty, 2 a.m., looking for company." He made notes in his handwriting that was perfect on calls that were strange, and every call from Dotty got a note. I told the King that I didn't get it, it was like he and Tim could talk that way because they were better, they had something special.

"No," the King says, kind of hard.

"Can Dotty help it if she's nuts?"

"You don't understand. We love her."

Did he think I would believe that? Maybe they loved how strange she is. There was other stuff. He had a big interest in plane crashes, and he had all these books. He would ask me like it was a test how much lumber a certain seven-four-seven took down when it crashed in some forest. Do I know? Does he think I know? So he tells me-it's a mile or ten miles or whatever it is, right there in this book with pictures, like the trees are matchsticks, and it takes you a minute to get it straight that everybody died. The King even knows the board feet of wood.

Then Kevin, the owner's son, started driving regular hours. He drove partly on my shift and partly on Tim's, and he was bad, he didn't know the town and couldn't understand directions and kept cutting himself off when he'd talk over the radio. But he was only 17 and the boss' son. One

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night when I'm in the office with the King, Kevin says over the radio that he can't hear him. "Kee-ing," he keeps calling. "Where's my King?" The King tells him to adjust the radio. "I don't know which knob it is." So the King tells him to drive in, and when he gets there the King bolts out of the office. I never saw the King move so fast. He goes flying out there, which is pretty funny because the King has a tiny butt that moves like it is crazy but the rest of him hardly keeps up. He comes running back inside, and says very nice over the radio while he's looking at me, "Is that better, Kevin?" "It's much better, King." Then the King says, and you can guess he wasn't keying the mike now, "Jesus he's dumb ." The King is sweating. He takes out a plaid hankerchief and wipes his face .

I couldn't figure the King . I remember asking him what he was going to do, I mean do instead of work all night at the cab company like that. He never said anything. He'd fold his hands on his stomach and give me the fish look. He thinks it's pretty funny. One night he says he doesn't care at all, that he was happy doing anything, and he says you never know what path opens up for you, and now he's looking at me with those bug eyes to see if I get it. ''There's a plan for you too, Camille." That was all. Well some plan he had. He just didn't have any ambition.

So I started hanging out downtown again at night, late that winter. I hadn't talked to Carol for two months. I met a girl in one of the bars. She was with a friend. I sat down at their table. They said they were college students, but even though there's a college near here that was way off.

First of all one was a lot older, maybe in her thirties, and when she said they were college students she turned and they laughed just with each other but not like there was any point in hiding it. You know what I mean. But I'm a sucker. I pointed out that the college was on semester break, and the younger one said that they didn't go here, but someplace else, and it was on semester break. The older one turned to her and laughed the same way as before.

The younger one was sort of fat and wore too much make-up. But there was something about the older one. It's hard to say. She was small, and dark around the eyes and laughed too hard, and kept smoking, but the strange thing was the way she was sitting, leaning at a funny angle close to her friend but the rest of her, from the table down, was the same as somebody sitting there reading the newspaper would be. She was wearing a short skirt with her legs crossed but it was like she didn't know anything about that.

I got a weird idea. I told them I was a baseball player. It's not impossible. I've always stayed light and quick . "But it's winter," the younger one said, and they were laughing again. There isn't any team here, of course not, but I told them I played Triple A in upstate New York and the manager lived down here and I was training with him. The younger one was

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laughing again, but the older one was looking at me now. Every day the manager and I went to the Y, I said. They were trying to make me into a catcher. What else? I told them about life in the minors. The older one acted like she never heard anything so interesting, the other one was looking around. I handled it beautiful. I acted like I was tired of telling about it (it was my life, wasn't it?). Let her think where that was coming from .

I'm not saying it works like this most of the time but she was back the next night alone, and as soon as we looked at each other I knew. After a couple drinks (I didn't say anything about baseball), I said I was going to the bathroom and instead I ran two doors down to the hotel where I had told her I was staying, got a room, ran back to the bar. Why piss around?

Inside of another half-hour we were in the room.

Then I saw her every night but it got funny. We didn't talk much. If I was living in that room where was my stuff? I did live there, for a week straight. I had to go feed my dog while I was working, and I brought some gym stuff, even my baseball glove and some balls, to the room.

We'd meet at the bar, have three or four drinks right away, and go up.

She stuck to her student story. It wasn't much of a story. She said she had a month.

She was taking a cab home every night late. I called for it, disguising my voice to the King. He didn't know. He doesn't give anybody the time of day on the phone, because so many jerks call at night. "And what is the destination?" the King asked me, like I was just anyone. She had me tell him a street comer, Allen and Pugh, and she didn't tell me any better either. She went down to get the cab alone.

I was easy with her. Sometimes she would lie in my arms and I'd tell her baseball stories. Why not? She wanted to know what it was like playing in front of people. That's easy. It's a rush, I told her. Not so different.

It's just like fucking.

She did something funny then, when I said that. She put her finger on my lips. What? She didn't say anything, but she moved even closer, half lying on me, trying to get as close as she can get and not wanting me to do anything. This was afterwards. I never was with a woman that got off so quick. Then she'd kind of hold me there, not letting me up like she couldn't bear leaving me, then after a long time, telling me I was holding her too tight, I was crushing her, and pushing off. We dressed fast. Who could figure?

But it didn't seem right. After a few days she was telling me what day she had to leave, to go back to school, like we were going to spend every night together until then. I asked her one night what school was like, but instead, like it didn't matter now or she doesn't hear me, she tells me what her son is like. She sounds like she's half asleep. She says he's seven, and she talks about him like I knew all along. I didn't know. We fell

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asleep. We woke up and got dressed and I didn't feel like asking her anything.

I was getting edgy. I was spending all my tip money on this room . But I didn't care about that. She had a soft body. The night after she was talking about her son, after we got dressed I told her that I was going back to New York. They decided not to make me a catcher. Too hard on my knees.

She laughed . She says, "Don't you think I know you're not a baseball player?" I don't know, I say. She says, "Are you married?" I tell her the truth. She's still laughing. It's like when she was laughing with her friend.

"I am, too. But my husband's just like you." I guess that was pretty funny.

I walked out. It was two miles to the cab office and I walked it. It was dead cold. "Well, look who's here," is all the King said, when I came in.

Tim was there too. I hadn't seen the King at all for a long time-business was so slow I was getting off early, and once or twice I'd be pulling out, heading downtown, when the King was getting out of his Cadillac, carrying some books and his desk lamp in for another night. I'd toot and wave and he'd just look at me.

Tim had just taken her from my hotel to "Allen and Pugh." Right on the King's log. There's nothing at all in the space where the King writes things about people who call in. I asked Tim, Where does she go7 He shrugs and says, "Allen and Pugh. Do you know her7" He doesn't even watch which way she walks. He said, though, this last time she wouldn't stop laughing, and he asked her if she was all right, and she just laughed.

It took a while before another call came in, and Tim's looking at me like I'm drunk. But not the King. He's reading. Tim asks me again if I know her. I don't say anything. When Tim goes out on another call I tell the King everything. The King puts the book down and listens.

For the next week I went to a different bar after work. I knew she wouldn't go there . When it dosed I went to the cab office. The King didn't seem to mind what happened with her. Why should he7 It wasn't his business. He was staring at me with those eyes when I was telling him about her, and his hands were folded on his fat stomach. But we only talked about it the one night when I told him, and he didn't say anything then. I asked him what he thought about her, whether he could make sense of her. He shrugs. But that made me feel better. What the King meant was that it wasn't worth worrying about.

Then Carol called me. She said she didn't want to come back but she wanted to talk to me. All right, I said, talk. That wasn't what she meant.

Did she mean that we should get together? No. She didn't know what she meant. I told her she should call me when she had some idea.

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I told the King about it and he asked me if I wanted to talk to her. I'd already told him about her mother, so he knew I couldn't call her. He said, "That's not what I'm asking you."

'What, then?" "''masking you if you want to see her."

Carol was my wife, I told him, but he gives me that fish look, like there's something behind it that he knows and I don't. What? If Carol has something to say she should say it. What's so funny about that?

Carol called me again and told me how fucked up her mother is. Yeah, like I don't know. I listened for a while and then just told her I had to go, like I had something to do. Just like that.

There was another time. I was driving with the King way up in the boondocks when he just stops. Right in the road. I was talking. There weren't any cars. I was talking about Carol. She called the night before, crying about how bad things were with her mother. It was like she forgot that she was the one who left. Why was I supposed to listen to that when she screwed things up? The King looks at me, holding the Cadillac at a dead stop, and says, "Why don't you stop drinking?" What? "Do you understand why she left?" Drinking, she said. "Maybe she has a point.

Maybe you should consider forgiving her." I never saw the King like this .

He's still staring at me but lets the car start moving . He wasn't making sense. She left, and she wasn't saying she wanted to come back. Plus, she didn't know one way or the other what I was doing. And the fact that if it mattered I was cold sober. Did she know? No. She probably thought I was drunk right then.

It was quiet coming back down the county until the King says, like he's trying to make up to me, "Maybe you should forgive yourself, Camille.

Maybe you should let yourself off the hook ." That wasn' t worth saying anything to. Forgive myself for what? I knew if I said anything and we got into what it really meant he would finally hit Jesus Christ this or that.

I didn't need it.

It was the only time the King gave me any crap about my drinking, or tried to tell me what to do.

Then the weather broke. I remember one night, a warm night with stars out, the first warm night of the year when there was still snow on the ground. The King had the office door open. You could see out along the railroad tracks-the bus station used to be a railroad station. The air was warm, and it was wet, picking up the snow. I didn't even go to the bars after my shift that night, I just stayed and sat with the King when he came in. I had beer there anyway, in the King's cooler that he had brought from home. Tim took somebody sixty miles up the valley. It's usually women who have to go halfway up the county in the middle of the night, for a reason you'd never know really.

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We were playing cards. I started asking the King about what he was going to do. I just couldn't figure that he was going to do anything except work at the cab company like he was then, but I guess the thing that bugged me was that he didn't care. I guess I got mad. I said, if he believed in Jesus Christ and all this, what was he doing at the cab company? "It's not important." What's not? "This." Why not? "Because it doesn't matter what you do." I didn't get it. It didn't seem like he wanted to do anything.

I knew he'd told me before but I asked him again. Didn't he want to do anything else? He said, "Well, I've done different things. Probably other things will come along." He didn't see what I meant. I told him that he used to live in New York City and work for the Rockefellers. Didn't he miss it? The King answered in a funny way. He shook his head back and forth with his eyes closed like a little kid when you're trying to make them eat something or give them medicine, like that keeps it away.

Then Tim's voice came through on the radio, weak and far off. "Is that you, Timothy?" the King calls. "Are you coming back down ?"

Now it was static.

"Come on home, Timothy. " The King and I played cards. When Tim got back, he had a story. The woman was drunk and wanted to do it in the back seat. Not Tim, though, he's too good for that. He'd probably rather write a song about it. The King shook his head like he's disgusted, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking, whether it was about Tim or the girl.

The cab office door was open all night, and Tim stayed busy. We always get a lot of calls when it gets warm quick like that. The King and I went out and checked the night. The moon hit small clouds that flew by, and we stood out on the old railroad loading dock a long time. The air was nice and when I looked at the King he was looking over some trees toward downtown, where it seemed like there could be a fire, almost, the way the light was bright just above the trees and faded up into the sky.

Then a minute later he was looking out over the golf courSe where wasn't anything, maybe a couple of stars. I didn't know what he doing, and I almost asked him. The air had that sort of heavy smell it gets when it dries out places that are covered by snow for a time. But it's really a sweet smell, and compared to winter, it's warm, I guess that's what he was doing, just looking any way he felt like, the air. The breeze scraped trash around the parking lot. We just around and didn't think about anything.

I wanted to tell the King, then, that I knew what. he meant, that doing anything at all was all right. I remembered when I wasn't talking Carol at all, before she started calling me, and that seemed better. hanging out with the King was better than all the crap with her. almost told him that, when he turned and looked at me, just before went in. Why do anything? Why does it matter? It doesn't, I wanted

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say. For some reason I was quiet. We stood there a minute. He was standing across the dock, pretty far away. Then he turned back in, where we could talk.

But when we were inside I told the King that Tim bugged me, that he couldn't do it with this girl in his cab because he was too good for that. I don't know why I said that. The King just sat back and didn't say what he thought. We played cards all night. The King is a lousy card player.

Then there was trouble. The King was fired from the cab company.

The owner, Mr. Kenfield, had a meeting of the drivers and the other dispatchers and said that the King had stolen money from the company.

Tim and I stuck up for him. Kenfield said we better believe it was true, and the King (he calls him Mr. Donaldson, not even Kent) admitted it.

We didn't believe him. Nancy Swank was sitting next to Kenfield, looking at him funny like she knew, like she didn't have any problem. Tim was pretty upset .

A couple days went by. Things were screwed up. Even though Kenfield said the King was fired, I was surprised he wasn't at work. I felt like I didn't have anyplace to go . Kenfield was training this new girl. One night I got a room in the hotel and went down to the bar and got tanked. The maid woke me up at noon. I hadn't even undressed.

I went out to see the King that afternoon at his parents' place. It was raining. It was spring now. He looked out the window wearing a bathrobe and waved for me to come in, but I waited for him-there on the porch were his dogs, two pretty old and mangy Afghan hounds. He had told me about them, they had old women names, something like Lucy and Claire, and I thought when he talked about them they were quiet and happy dogs. They were quiet but real nervous, like if you moved wrong, too quick or too slow, that'd be enough for them. Part of them looked shaved.

The King's bathrobe was silk. He said the dogs wouldn't bother me if I wasn't afraid they would.

We sat in his parents' living room. It was a dark wood room with all the chairs and sofa back along the walls, and a big round braided rug, with nothing at all on it. He sat in an armchair and I took the couch across the room.

This is what he tells me. Mr. Kenfield's problem was that he, the King, gave Kevin a ride home in the King's Cadillac. Kevin? Kevin hadn't even worked at the cab company since the winter, because his own father fired him.

"When 7" I asked him.

The King didn't say. I guess I was supposed to figure it out. But I had a terrible hangover. He never told me he was friends with Kevin. I thought he hated Kevin. I told the King that I knew he didn't steal from Kenfield,

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but the King's just sitting there. "Just because you gave him a ride?" I say, but the King doesn' t say anything. His hands are folded on his stomach, waiting.

Riding in the King's Cadillac, I'm saying to myself. I rode in it. I never liked Cadillacs before, big tuna boats for fat-ass old men, until I rode in the King's. It was so smooth and easy. You had to like it. It was exactly what it was supposed to be. Ride along and watch everything go by.

That silk robe of the King's was catching light; when he moved a little it was sort of like the way water gathers up light at night. I looked up at his face suddenly, and I thought then that maybe I got it wrong. The King's face is dark but I can see his eyes. They're shining. It doesn't seem like anything is wrong. The King is waiting. I forgot what else I came to say to him.

He's looking at me, and I see now that he's got the fish look, like he's waiting for me to say something. He's looked at me like that a hundred times, like he's sure about things and it's my problem and I can tell him whatever I want. Something about myself, what's happening with me.

But what was happening? Nothing. I had a bad headache. The King's hands are folded on his stomach, watching me. The thing is, it isn't like the King is in bad straits at all. He looks all right. He looks happy exactly where he is.

I couldn't look at him . The King wasn't going to tell me nothing.

I wanted to leave then. I was thinking about going back through that porch. It was rainy and raw there, and those dogs couldn't have been too happy.

We were standing at the kitchen door. The King talked quick and sharp to the dogs, and I didn't even look, didn't give'em the time of day, and I was through. Then when I was outside, when those dogs were sniffing and jumping at the King, he says, "It can only get better, Camille."

His eyes were blue as hell. "That's the thing you should always remember. It will get better."

There he was, standing in the doorway in that silk robe, looking out at me. He looked like he knew everything. I got in my car, backed down the driveway past his Cadillac ("canary yellow" he told me the color was) and I never saw him again. The thing I forgot to tell him was that I was sorry he got fired .

Did he think if he didn't say exactly I wouldn't know what Kenfield's problem was? Did he think I couldn't have figured that out a long time ago? Why should I care what the King was like, that way. I rode with him myself, didn't 17 But I never knew about Kevin. If it was Kevin the King did a pretty good job on everybody. But it was hard to Kevin was so ... dumb.

I got home and called Carol. I wasn't thinking about her mother. answered the phone. I didn't even know what I was going to say, but

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said I was coming. It was the same afternoon. Hangover and all, I drove 150 miles. It rained the whole way. She was standing on her mother's porch with a suitcase when I pulled up. We looked at each other, and she was crying.

I couldn't wait. We stopped at a motel. It was no different than before, like we did it yesterday, and then we came home. There are other ways without even stopping but Carol would never go for that. I don't blame her. We're married. Twenty-seven bucks because I couldn't wait an hour.

So the reason I thought of the King is this. It's really two reasons.

Everything's different. He was right. It's better. I remember what the King said about forgiving. We've been seeing this marriage counselor.

She wanted me to talk about drinking. When do I drink? Who do I drink with? I thought of the King. I called him Kent. I used to drink in the cab office with him. I told her what he looked like, that he used to be addicted to downers, that he didn't care what he did. I told her about the Jesus Christ stuff. Why not? I told her he stole money from the cab company. Who was going to say about the King? She sucked it up. I didn't have to say anything else. She said, "You sound ... unhappy with Kent.

Do you think spending time with him is making your problem wors.e7" I told her it wasn't a problem, since I didn't see him anymore.

Carol took a job, three nights a week. She said she needed to get out a little, and the shrink thought it was a good idea. No problem. It gives me a little room anyway. Things are getting better. Carol agreed to stop going to this woman, who looks like if she smiled it would break her face. So she doesn't try it. Anyway, that's what he told me, that things with Carol would get better. I make sure I get home before her.

I ran into Tim downtown last week and he told me the King went back to New York City. It's the other reason I thought of the King. I thought that was good, he could work the Rockefellers' computer again, count their money way up in their big building. Tim says he doesn't think so.

Why not? Who would notice if the accounts were a little one way or the other? Never mind, he says, and he walks off like he's mad. That's fine with me. Tim quit the cab company because the King was fired, so I don't have to deal with his crap anymore. He drives school bus now and plays his songs in a bar that lets anybody try it.

It doesn't matter what you do, the King said. I'm sure he's doing fine.

New York City seems like a place where one thing doesn't follow another. You can do whatever you want.

I've never been there.

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David Lunde

The Poem Called Liver For Charles Willoughby Smith

The poem is a liver of poisonous dreams: memories culled from the black bloodstream clog there: scraps of meals, jobs, lovers, we've devoured, exhausted, consumed.

Touch them, our fingers turn black, so we hunch over gas-station porcelain wringing our hands not to stain the next thing touched, the next scene we see, have seen, or might on this weary throughway journey from one life to one similar: splitsecond frames clipped from an epic but unspectacular movie about America today (this is a poem called "Coming Attractions" for Walt Whitman) and everyday: the hose leading from tailpipe to vent window and in that smoky aquarium Bob swimming deeper and deeper; the third-story window open to frame an acid dream of heaven, and Charlie taking the step; Susan's bone-china face, her recognitions, the spidering pink lines on her hesitant wrists;

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the urgent requests like billboards we have driven past, which remain marked on the map: still studies shot of the interior split-level white stucco daydream (this poem is called "Cinemascope" for Allen Ginsberg) that awaits you and awaits me, and awaits each of us at each blank exit which waits like a liver to collect our poisonous dreams and bodies which collect our poisonous dreams (this is a poem called "Wishing on a Star" for Hart Crane) and days which collect our poisonous dreams and collect and collect and collect in this poem called "Liver" that lives inside of us.

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Richard Alan Bunch

Essays in Divinity Cherish in yourself the birth of God. - Meister Eckhart What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

-Wallace Stevens

My last poem lying here in the dark; the nurse has left.

I feel my breathing heavy, my chest covered with white hair.

Upon me has fallen the hermeneutic wonder of dreams. In them, I dance like Zorba the Greek and love wenches only God's love can mystically fashion.

Evenings discover me gazing at lines etched at the Moulin Rouge by my friend, Lautrec .

In Athens I discuss particulars of beauty with Plato who hankers for souls anchored in stars.

On Lesbos, Sappho takes her girls gently by the arm and teaches them poetry deeper than thigh .

Chaplain motored here this afternoon espousing Christ and his mystic tide.

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She also likes the Buddha's flower sermon that cuts diamonds made of silk. I would like to take tea with the lady. She does not wear her badge like the Pharisees: her Zen is far too seeing. Her prayers Om. There is no room for her love of God. Dreaming, I see life in other universes and hear restaurants on the moon within constellations of light years nearest, a rainbow's genesis surpassing civilization.

Light stabs as curtains part. Physician opens my eyes galloping dream, another pulse.

Dreams have become more real in this last testament. What we have called reality can become a supremely fictive will, Madame. A door softly opens: I hear Neruda in the next age savoring a breast of his final rose eternally in flight.

And Tu Fu's brush concentrates: sunsets magenta as plums inspire each stroke higher than a man: ageless ways words mother the fathered heart.

Nearness of end: even here dreams clarify this orange evening when the sun rises in the shape of Mexico.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - Anonymous, 14th century

Saint Erkenwald Once in London, not long since our Lord, Jesus Christ, Very cruelly was crucified-Christendom since Had been built-lived a bishop most blessed and pure.

I have heard he was hailed as Saint Erkenwald there.

At that time in that town was a temple of old, Which to rubble was razed to erect a new church.

It was held by the heathens in Hengist's dark times (For that Saxon was sent there to share Britain's wars, But he soon beat the Britons far back into Wales).

In that place, though, the people, apostate and false, Came to love false beliefs many long, sinful years, Till Saint Augustine answered an order from Rome; He was sent into Sandwich to set them aright, Reconvert them to value the virtue of Christ.

At that time all the temples he turned from false gods, And he cleansed them as churches in Christ's mighty name.

Therefore Augustine ousted the idols therein, And he chiefly rechristened each church under God. Where Apollo was prayed to, now Peter got lauds; Where Mahomet once, Magdalen, Margaret now reigned; What was set to the Sun now was seized fo r our Lady; What was Jupiter's, Juno's, turned Jesus's, James'.

What was pagan, impious, he pledged to the Lord Or assigned to His saints, whom the Saxons ignored.

And "New Troy" at the time was retitled itself; Now it's lauded as "London," the land's finest town.

In that township the tallest of temples of all Had been deigned as the devil's own dark, evil houseFor the greatest of gods he was granted to be; To him Saxons would solemnly sacrifice in What was thought to be third of the three pagan sees.

(There were only two others in England's whole realm .)

Now Saint Erkenwald's bishop of Augustine's see; And in London the law of the land he upholds, And he sits in the seat of the see of Saint Paul, In its temple (now turned in that town to a church).

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Then that temple was torn down and turned to new ends, Became known as the New Work, both noble and good.

On that minster were many good masons employed.

Many hacked and hewed at the hardest of stones; Many gripped at the ground and the gravel with picksAll to dig a foundation of depth for the church.

As they made their way, mining, a marvel they found, As the chronicles clearly record to this day.

When they'd dug to the depths of the dark, hardened earth, The men found on a floor at their feet a great tomb.

Its four sides were of stone very skillfully carved.

In the gray marble, gargoyles grimaced and crouched.

And the lid, which was locked with a long, bolted spar, Was quite masterfully made out of marble of gray, With a border embellished with bright, golden words, Which were runelike, unreadable, rare, and obscure.

What they meant-although masterfully made and intactNo one knew; they could never pronounce them aloud.

And at length many learned men looked on those words; But they failed to find what those figures there meant.

And when word of the wonder had wafted through town, There came numerous nobles from near and from far; From the borough's ends burghers and beadles approached.

And from manors came masters in multitudes then.

And young lads dropped their loads and came leaping to see; In a rout they rapidly ran, making noise.

Every sort came so swiftly it seemed all the world At that site in a second assembled to watch.

Then the mayor and his men, once they'd made their way there, With the sexton's assent, had the site cordoned off, Bid the lid be unlocked and then laid to the sideThey would look on what lay in that long-buried tomb.

Then strong workmen came wielding thick wedges and bars, Which as levers they laid at the lid of the tomb; And with crowbars they clawed at its corners so that, Though the top weighed a ton, they'd have taken it off.

Then all standing there saw an unsettling thing, Just as much of a marvel as man could withstand!

There were golden sides, glistening, gleaming within; At the bottom a beautiful body reposed, All arrayed in the richest, most royal attire!

And with glistening gold was his gown filigreed .

Many pearls, fine and precious, appeared on his robe.

And a girdle, all golden, was girt round his waist.

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And a mantle, well made, trimmed with miniver, hung From his shoulders-it shone with a shimmering cloth!

On his coif stood a crown which was costly and fine; And a sumptuous scepter was set in his hand.

All his clothes were quite clean; there clung there no spot.

Neither mold nor moth-holes had marred what he wore.

All the colors had kept, uncorrupted and bright, As though dyed by the dyer the day before last!

All his features were fresh and as fine as could be; For the flesh of his face and his fine, exposed hands Was as ruddy and red as a rose. The man seemed To have suddenly slipped into sleep in full health!

Then all asked without answer the others around Just whose body there buried they'd brought to the light.

And how long had he lain there, his limbs thus intact, With his clothes thus so clean and unclotted with dirt?

"Such a man must remain within memory's grasp; He was clearly once king of this kingdom!" they said.

"It can't be that nobody who bides in this town Ever saw him. There's someone who's seen this great king! " But their protests were pointless; no person was found Who could tell them in truth what those tokens there meant, Or could tell them his tale. Nor could tomes be brought forth In that city that spoke of the stranger they'd found.

To that borough's high bishop was broken the news Of the buried man's body, unblemished and fresh.

With his prelates that primate was presently gone To an abbey in Essex. Saint Erkenwald thus Was soon told all the tale of disturbances there, Of the clamouring crowd and the corpse it had seen.

Then the bishop sent beadles to bring about calm, And he set out himself to that city on horse, Till he came to the cherished, famed church of Saint Paul, Where the many who met him the marvel explained.

Then he passed to his palace. There peace he decreed (He'd not been to the body) and bolted the door.

And the darkness drew down till the day bells were heardBut Saint Erkenwald, up almost all of the night, Had again and again humbly given out prayers, Had beseeched his great Sovereign to send down His grace, And to vouchsafe a vision, advise him at last.

"Though I'm weak and unworthy," he weepingly said, "In Your goodness yet grant me the grace to do right.

In confirming Christ's faith, now unfold to me, Lord,

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What this marvelous mystery means in Your plan!"

And the Holy Ghost heard his behest and his prayers; Before day finally dawned he'd been deigned his request!

And at matins the minster's doors moved to reveal The great saint there, inside, set to sing the high mass.

There the prelate appeared in his priestly attire.

By that man, as is mannerly, mass is begun; And the service-the Spiritus Domini-starts, With the song of the singers who sit in the choir.

Many lords and their ladies were listening there (For the best of the borough's nobility came).

Till the service and singing were ceased at the end, And the mass's high ministers moved from the font.

When the prelate approached, all the people then bowed.

And in rich, sumptuous robes, he arrived at the tomb.

Men unclosed the great cloister with keys on long chains.

He approached; and the press of the people felt awe.

Then the bishop, with barons, the buried man neared, With the mayor, his men, and the mace-bearers next.

When they came to the coffin the canon's head told Of the marvelous miracle men had unearthed: "Lords and ladies, now look! Here is laying a corpse.

It has lain here, well locked up-how long is unknown.

Yet his color and clothes haven't come, through the years, To decay; and his coffin is comely and new!

But no man here among us remembers his reign; None has lived here a long enough life to recall!

There is nothing announcing the name of this man; Yet our long, well-kept lists of those laid to their rest Record many a man who was much less than he!

Though we've seven days scoured our scrolls and our books, Not one mention is made of this man, this great king!

From his looks, he's not lain very long in this grave; It's a marvel he'd melt out of memory thus!"

Then the saint very solemnly said, "Though that's true, What to men is a marvel amounts to a trifle When compared with the power the Prince can unlock When He wishes to wield His wonders on earth.

When the might and the minds of mere men are undone, When their faculties fail, and they find themselves lost, Then the Lord can unloose with a light finger's touch, What all hands under heaven can't hold up in place!

When a creatures' wise counselling comes thus to naught It behooves him to heed then the high, mighty Lord.

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Let us work the Lord's will, then, and wonder no more l All alone, we are lost, cannot locate the truth .

Let us pray to the Prince; let us plead for His grace; For He comforts our cares and sends counsel to men By confirming their faltering faith in the truth.

I'll unveil His various virtues to you; And at length you'll believe He's the Lord of the sky; If you've faith He's your friend, He fulfills all your needs!"

Then he turns to the tomb, and he talks to the corpse, While he leans down to lift up the lids of its eyes: "In this sepulcher stay in your silence no more!

Our Lord destined this day to display His deep joy; And you're bound to abide Jesus' bidding at once (On a cross He was crucified cruelly for us, As you know, and we heartily, wholly believe).

Thus respond to my speech! Don't conceal the truth!

We would learn of your life; therefore let us all know.

In this world what were you? We wish now to learn Your beliefs and how long you have lain in this spot.

Are you headed for heaven or hell? Let us know! " This was said by the saint; and he sighed at the end.

And the man through a miracle moved in his tomb!

And with sounds that were solemn he spoke before all, For some great, holy ghost had then granted him help.

Thus the body said, "Bishop, your bidding is dear!

I must bow to this bidding and bend to His will .

For the name that just now you have named is supreme; His behest all of heaven and hell must obey!

First what life I have lived I will let you all know.

The least fortunate fellow who fared on the earth, I was neither a knight nor a nobly born king; I was merely a man who administered law, Who was made here a master of men in their suits.

In the city's disputes I presided as judge; For the prince of the pagans appointed me thus (All his subjects then swore to the same pagan faith).

But how long I have lain here none living can know; It's too much for a mortal to make out the years!

After Brutus had built this great borough at first, I lived four-hundred, four score, and fully two years Before Christ, by all Christian accounts, was first born (1 mean fifty plus four plus a thousand years hence).

In the oyer and eyre courts I everywhere judged In the reign of the rich king who ruled this place,

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The bold Breton, Sir Belin. Sir Brennin, who was The king's brother, with Belin would bitterly feud .

And those brothers' fierce battles were bloody and long!

I was judge, then, enjoined to bring justice and law."

As he talked from his tomb, all the townspeople stood Fully silent and solemn and stricken with awe; Each one stayed just as still as a stone in the earth.

Many wondered at what they had witnessed, and cried.

But the bishop just bids then the body: "Say next, Since no king, why you carry a crown on your head, Why you hold up the scepter so high in your hand, If no lands and no liege men as lord you controlled?"

He replied, "Gentle prelate, I plan to respond.

Never once were my wishes to wear such a crown!

Through the duke I was deputy, destined to serve; And this place in my power was put by decree.

When I judged here I jealously justice upheld, And I followed good faith over forty years' time.

Though the folk were felonious, false to the laws, My great task many times was to teach them the good.

Not for profit, or power, or pleasure, or gain, Nor for mastery, money, or malice's sake, Would I tum from the truth, or to taking of bribes.

All my judgments were just, never jealously made.

And my conscience was clear, without covetousness; Never once did I win any wealth from a case, Or show bias for barons, men born with great wealth, Or submit to a menacing man, hurling threats.

Never once did I wander from what I thought right, As confirmed by the faith that I felt in my heart.

Though my father' d been felled, I'd be fair at the trial; I'd be fair though my father were facing his death.

As a judge I was just in each judgment I made.

On the day of my death all were doleful in Troy; Every man started mourning, both mighty and poor; And in bounty they buried my body in gold.

And they clad me in clothes that were courtly to praise The most merciful, moderate man on the bench.

Thus they gave me this governor's garb from respect.

For my faith they put fine, courtly fur in my coat.

And to honor my honesty, equalled by none, They then crowned me as king, in the courts the most fair, The most honest of arbiters ever to judge.

And this scepter you see here they set in my hand."

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Then the anguished Sir Erkenwald asks him to tell How, though cast in a cold, buried coffin for years, All his clothes are so clean: "From decay, I'd have thought, They'd be torn; they'd be tattered and turned into rot!

If your body's embalmed, it abashes me not That it's run not to rot or to rank, gnawing worms; But your color and clothes! I am quite at a loss!

By what learning or lore have they lasted so long?"

Then the body said, "Bishop, embalmed I was not .

And my clothes remain clean by the craft of no man.

No, the Ruler of right was responsible here, For He loves every law that belongs to the truth!

And He honors whoever is upright and just, As He values those virtuous, valiant, and true.

And if men for my merits have made thus my grave, For my love of the law He has left me intact."

Then the saint said, "Yet speak of your soul to us now.

As you acted with honor, I ask, where is she?

He who pays every person who's pious and true Couldn't grudge you the gift of His grace and His joy!

That is certain! He says in His psalm in these words: 'All the righteous will reap their reward by My side.'

Therefore say where your soul is residing in bliss; Of the grace she's been granted by God let us know."

And the corpse in the coffin then cast up his eyes; Then he gave out a groan, and to God said these words; "Awesome Maker of men, You are mighty and great!

Could Your mild, endless mercy to me now descend?

Unexposed to Your plan, as a pagan I died; And I lived without learning Your loving, mild ways, Without gleaning the grace that You give to the soul, Nor the law You are loved for! Alas, the hard times!

I was separate from souls You saved when You died, When the bounteous blood of Your body was spilled.

When You harrowed all hell, I was held back from grace.

Souls in limbo You led off, but left me to stay!

There my soul still sits, without sight of Your grace; There it dwells, every doomed to the death Adam brought, Our forefather who first ate the fruit, bringing woe.

Our first parent thus poisoned his progeny all.

Though you, too, became touched with his teeth's poisoned slime, You were mended with medicine, made as if new, And to baptism's bounty were brought, and belief; While myself and my soul haven't seen the Lord's grace.

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Therefore what did we win with good works we performed, When we're damned thus to drown in the deep, burning lake, And shut out from that supper, both solemn and glad, Where who sought the Lord's sweetness are served in the end?

Here my soul may sigh in her sorrow, and pine In a dark, chilly death where the dawn never comes, Pine in hell, ever hungry for heaven's great feast Before seeing the supper the saved all enjoy!"

Thus he spoke of his sufferings, sorrows, and pains.

And all wept out of woe at the words of the corpse.

First Saint Erkenwald's eyes at the edges grew wet; He was speechless, both sighing and sobbing aloud, As he paused at that place till composure returned.

Toward the body he bowed, then, and bathed it in tears, As he let out, "0 Lord, sustain life in this man!

For this corpse I would quickly acquire Your pure, Holy water, with which I would wet him, and say, 'You are born again, baptized, and brought to new life By the Trinity's truth; although truant, you're cleansed!'

Though he dropped into death, I'd have done thus Your will!"

And the while he'd wept, as he worded his prayer; And his tears to the tomb had been tumbling in streams.

When one fell on its face, the corpse faintly then sighed.

Then it solemnly said: "0 great Savior of all, With Your mother, the maiden, for mercy be praised!

Let us praise, too, Your precious, unparalleled birth!

And good bishop, you've blessed me and brought me from gloom, And have saved thus my soul from suffering death!

Through the water you wept and the words that you used, You have bathed me in baptism, brought me new life; For your tears thus have touched me, and tendered relief.

At that supper my soul is seated right now!

With the words and the water that wash away sin You have lit up a lamp in the lightless abyss!

In a second my spirit was stricken with joy, And went forth to the feast where the faithful are served!

By a guard she was greeted, and guided along To a stall set aside, where she'll stay evermore!

For your gift and the goodness of God I give thanks; For the bliss you have brought me, be blessed in turn!"

Then he slipped into silence; no sound could be heard.

Of his visage all vestiges vanished at once.

And his body turned black as the blistering dirt, Just as dry as the dust when it's driven in swirls.

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For as soon as his soul had settled in peace, Then the corpse that had clothed her decayed, and was gone.

For the life everlasting, that lives beyond time, Leaves behind every hindrance that held it to earth .

All who looked on gave lauds to our Lord, feeling awe; There was mourning and mirth as though melted, and praise!

When the laymen and laity left on that day, All the bells in the borough then beckoned and rang.

Translated from Middle-English by Casey Finch

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The Iliad Everything is difficult to see in New York, precisely because it is so visible. You can be standing before one of the largest and ugliest buildings in the world and fail to notice. For meanwhile the taxis continue to weave their infinite web of usefulness around you; mailmen drag the afternoon along on endless ropes; and in the evening, the locked-up stores throw trapezoids of light along the streets. Though everything unfolds in its bright uniqueness, meanwhile, as always, one fails to notice. But this is how it is on earth: half the time you dream about dreaming; the other half, as Richard Rorty says, "you dream about claiming to be awake." Even in the Iliad, for instance, no one notices the gods anymore, because noticing is unhelpful and too sagacious. The women walk along the streets of Troy, under the orange glow of the streetlights, past the boarded-up department stores, staring vacantly at their sandals. Beyond the walls, along the stretchedout battlefield, the men push to and fro all night; and the movement is gloomy and sexual and wears a kind of cape. And unrecognizably, like the first, distant strokes of lightning above a darkening wheatfield near Omaha, once in a while their tiny voices are raised: the exchange of family names, insults, traces of identity. Each sound

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sparkles in the vast Nebraska air. No one remembers the words of Agamemnon before the ships. No one thinks of anything, but dragging in the frighteneq cows and the last of the sheets stretching back the laundry line like a great bowstring about to snap.

Meanwhile, with the clouds, the vastness and inexhaustibility of the ordinary gather on the horizon. And when the rain begins delicately to sparkle on the shop windows along Madison Avenue, Homer himself shoves an old woman aside and, just as her brightly colored packages burst open in the curb, hails one of the last available taxis, the news of it tucked under his thin and ancient arm.

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William Burgwinkle

Ethics and the Courtly Lady The traditional sexual mores of Western cultures are generally said to have had their roots in early Christianity and the European Middle Ages.

From early Christianity would have come the injunctions against bigamy, adultery, same-sex relations and sex-for-pleasure; from the Middle Ages, the rhetoric and structure of the male-female relation. Both views have, however, been shown to be vastly over-simplified, and, in some cases, overtly false. John Boswell and Elaine Pagel, among others, have studied the evolution of early Biblical interpretations of passages dealing with sexual mores from the early church into the Middle Ages (and beyond) and have shown just how far many current attitudinal stances have moved from earlier Christian interpretations, which in turn often have little to do with Scripture. Key figures in Church history, such as Saint Augustine, were at times able to lead early Christian doctrine into new directions by virtue of their authority, but these shifts were never definitive or accepted without resistance. Augustine's condemnation of sexual desire may have laid the groundwork for increased Church intervention in matters of sexual mores, but many of these interventions, in the form of ecclesiastical control over marriage and private confession, did not gain full acceptance until the twelfth century, fully a uuuo::J.uu,uua1 after the triumph of Christianity in its various forms. Similarly, the eval phenomenon of "courtly love," which is often credited with "invented love" and introduced into Western culture the recurring of passion as death, woman as sovereign symbol, and man as devoted servant, takes shape during that same twelfth century. That a new secular code of sexual ethics would arise during the same century that astical control over the body began to tighten is not in itself "Courtly love" does not, however, provide a presciptive code for ity in the same sense that an ecclesiastical penitential does. It is, rather, literary phenomenon which developed in certain cosmopolitan French courts and whose precepts were diffused throughout ""·~•a­ Europe by traveling entertainers performing a body of songs which brated a very limited and precise set of literary topoi. In the Southern French form, these topoi include the unidentified referred to as a "Lady" (damna), a struggling poet who commits his vice to this Lady/ power-figure without reservation, and a courtly in which the psychic drama of subjugation and mastery takes place.

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Even on the literary level, and even at its inception, courtly love is hardly more stable an edifice than early Christian doctrine on sexuality.

The comparison between the two is, in fact, quite apt, since both pretend to offer models of comportment for relations between the sexes. Courtly poets, specifically the early troubadours, clearly modeled much of their rhetoric of devotion and service on examples taken from liturgical rhetorical models, and even took as melodies for their songs some of the most well-known musical settings of liturgical texts. Courtly love must therefore be seen, at least in part, as parodic of religious discourse rather than as the quite separate and sincerely idealistic record of a group of humble poets' aspirations. Courtly rhetoric has passed into literary history, largely through the efforts of romantic critics of the nineteenth century, as the model for civilized behavior between the sexes, a grid on which to position the sexes in relation to one another. Women as "Ladies," men as "gentle," God as "our Lord": these are metaphorical impositions, categories rather than essences, "genders" constructed over sexual difference. The continued usage of this courtly, feudal imagery, even into contemporary twentieth-century speech, has encouraged the notion that such a structure is as "natural" and "self-evident" as traditional injunctions against transgressing nature, masking the fact that such concepts as nature and gender are, in fact, socially constructed.

Both the actual practice of courtly poetry and the genesis of the supposed spontaneous celebration of love as a tension between mastery and submission are generally overlooked in scenarios that trace Western mores to the Southern French courts. Arabic poetry had for some time dealt with very similar themes of masochism and passion-as-death, and these themes had also been cultivated in the Hispanic-Arabic courts with which the French courts were in constant contact, both economically and politically. However, since no direct links have ever been established on the formal level between the two models, none of the Arabic songs exist in Spanish, and many of the Arabic songs deal with love of one man for another, the obvious thematic connections between the French and Arabic songs have consistently been discounted by scholars. That many of the learned poets of the South must have known Arabic, the language of their neighbors and always potential adversaries, is, of course, far from unthinkable; and simply because one cannot find similarities in form between the two types of song does not mean that the Proven~al poets were necessarily original in their choice of form and content. Originality is hardly the hallmark of troubadour poetry at any rate. Poets frequently re-use melodies, and references to others' works and the reworking of poetic conceits were foolproof means used by troubadours to practice their skills and establish their reputations.

The influence of Celtic imagery has been similarly neglected in discussions of the construction of the courtly love lyric. Celtic mythology

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establishes woman as goddess and sexual aggressor. In countless tales, including the one that served as the inspiration for the very popular medieval versions of Tristan and Yseut, the woman/ goddess/ fairy casts a spell (a geis) on the lover of her choice and then leads the now subservient male either to her home in the other world or on a long journey in flight from the forces of her vengeful husband. Much of the early troubadour poetry was composed in the Aquitaine, for patrons directly responsible to the court of Henry II and Alienore of Aquitaine, the same court at which the Breton lais were being translated and adapted into French, and at which romance and history were taking written form in the vernacular.

Finally, the troubadour songs, and the prose commentaries that explain them (the razos), make it quite clear that there was more on a poet's mind than idealistic love and altruistic service. The literary scenario which requires that a Lady be high-born, implacable and unnamed, and that a poet be submissive and suffering, provides a convenient structure within which the poet works but which he also manipulates to fit the circumstances of his composition. Much of traditional scholarship on the troubadours has been concerned with establishing identities for these Ladies and patrons, deciding whether the poet's desires are chaste, and determining whether the poet ever received any sexual fulfillment. The poet's own strategies of secrecy and indeterminacy have been viewed as attempts to hide the Lady's identity for fear of reprisals from her husband or to protect her reputation. Such a view is far too literaL and is even contradicted by the prose commentaries, which tell us that women recruited poets to sing of them precisely in order to enhance their reputations as noble Ladies and make of them the center of the largest possible circle of interest. The poet may portray himself as timid and amorous, and the Lady as terrible in her perfect beauty, but from within that posture the poet frequently seizes upon any occasion to establish his mastery over that Lady through his mastery of the word. In many of the bestknown love songs, the poet turns on the Lady, or on Ladies in generaL to denounce their faithlessness or intransigence. In so doing, he makes it clear that it is he who holds the key to their good reputation and that he can destroy them with just one of his widely-diffused songs. The subtext of the courtly song is economic. Poets are recruited and retained with promises of reward by patrons anxious to establish their reputations, forge political alliances, flatter existing allies or seek out new ones. poet acts to fulfill these goals by composing and transmitting songs love and satire, all the while operating within the formal constraints the courtly song. Thus, in many of the famous political songs of a such as Bertran de Born, one of Ezra Pound's favorite literary there is a Lady mentioned only at the very end of the song, a Lady seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the song.

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reading these songs, one realizes that the figure of the Lady is one that can be conflated with any power-figure, male or female. The service offered by the poet is proffered in exchange for the gift of mercy or honor, both terms that are etymologically linked with money and goods.

The love that he demands "in the name of the rights of love" and which he considers a gift he deserves for services rendered, is a metaphor that encompasses the economic within the erotic . Just as Marie de France, in the Northern Norman courts, used the word "surplus" to refer both to "meaning" and "sexual intercourse," thereby conjoining the erotic and the literary, the troubadour poet was at the same moment conflating the ideas of reward and legal fulfillment of a bargain with the metaphorical conferral of sexual favors. The stylization of the troubadour song, i.e. the repetition of conventional metaphors of sexual and economic exchange, ultimately leads to a state in which the words and figures become transparent signifiers. Within one song these conventional motifs could be used to establish the poet's own economic dependency on the patron, to threaten that patron with retribution if the exchange were not completed to his satisfaction, and then to enlarge this figure of exchange to include relations between the patron and an ally at another court. Beneath it all lie the vestiges of a gift economy which is undergoing subtle changes in the nascent mercantilism of the troubadour vocabulary.

Thus it is, that on the basis of this deliberately ambiguous literary conceit, Western man is said to have "invented" romantic love. The figures of Lady and poet are said to be natural and good, metonymic figures of genre differences, fundamental to our heritage. But where does this leave the Lady? Due to the literary tradition within which he composed, the male poet's advancement at court depended upon the existence of an allpowerful but silent Lady who would not respond, and who must be implored for mercy. Only by situating himself before such a figure could the poet establish his persona and skills. It was therefore in his best interest to construct a scenario which would allow him to use his full repertoire of poetic techniques in such a way that they would resound throughout the largest possible area. What has often been referred to as woman's finest hour in literature and as a lost Eden of female power, is no more than a poetic device which allowed the poet to display his tricks and which only coincidentally referred to women. Woman as synechdoche for patron, court and land is no different from Woman as Liberty, or Woman as personification of any other virtue or vice. Woman as symbol requires woman as silent. The poetic construction of the Lady of Courtly Love makes of woman an empty signifier in opposition to which masculinity can be defined. Gender is defined by silencing or freezing the other. Just as the Greeks believed the sight of the Medusa would fix Man forever as he was at the moment that his eye met hers, the courtly poet's

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gaze freezes Woman and makes of her a Lady, a convenient other against which males can become Men. The silence of medieval women, at least in the sphere of writing, is, unfortunately, attested to in the paucity of texts that have survived . This is not so surprising when one considers that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were still primarily oriented toward the oral transmission of culture, rather than the written. Vernacular composition may have been going on for some centuries (at least in the spheres of popular song, saints' lives and the epic), but it is only during the eleventh century, and particularly in the twelfth, that writing began to function alongside orality as an alternative to public performance and as the sign of a new interest in history and preservation. That women participated in song and composition is without doubt. The number of anonymous chansons de toile (sewing songs) and alba (morning songs of parting from the lover) in medieval French and Occitan attest to the fact that women were at least accorded fictional status as narrators. Several mentions within the troubadour corpus and the prose commentaries prove that women also composed songs and even occasionally performed them. There are few such songs extant when compared with the complete number of examples of medieval poetry which have survived. Most of the troubadours were men, as I have implied throughout this paper, and it is clearly men who set up the courtly motif in poetry. Some women, nonetheless, managed to get through, by working within this same structure and modifying it.

Two are worth citing in this context. Both are represented by dialogue songs in the manuscripts that have survived. Such dialogue songs were extremely popular in the Southern courts and seem to have appealed to a definite taste for discussion, and even argument, as a way of examining all aspects of a question. Dialectic was one of the seven liberal arts and an important part of any cleric's education, and the poets, many of whom were clerics, show that they learned their lessons well . They often engaged each other in poetic contests or entertainments (tensos) which involved stating a problem and composing alternate stanzas in which to argue their differing views. Love casuistry is a popular theme, especially when the partner is a woman. I am going to cite two examples of the latter which offer that rarest of medieval phenomena, a woman's response to her own literary symbolization.

The first is taken from a tenso composed by Gui d'Uisel, a fairly prolific poet, one of several in his family, and Maria de Ventadorn, one of the noble women most frequently named as a patron and love interest by the poets. Gui has retired from singing and Maria, in order to make him exercise his talent once again, addresses to him the question: "Tell me, if when a lover sincerely asks her to do so, should a lady do as much for her lover as he does for her in matters in love, according to the rights he enjoys as her lover?" Gui responds that she must; that lovers must love equality, even when such equality is merely feigned. Maria, no "n'""r·,••·

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of free and equal love, disagrees. She recognizes that no exchange between two agents is ever truly reciprocal and in her stanza reminds Gui of the impossibility of moving from the structure of superiority/ inferiority within which the poet first addressed her to a new structure that is ostensibly equal: Gui: Lady, over here it is said amongst us That if a lady wants to love someone She must love that lover equally Since they are equally in love.

If it happens that she loves him more intensely Then she should make that clear through her words and actions; And if her heart is deceitful and cheating She should hide her folly behind a lovely exterior.

Maria: Gui d'Uisel, never with such reasoning Do lovers argue at the beginning!

Instead, when they want something, They fall to their knees with their hands joined, and say: "Lady, if only you would agree to let me give you my undivided service As your Hegeman," and so she takes him on.

In the name of justice, I consider anyone who pretends to be a servant, Then claims to be an equal, to be a traitor!

Maria and Gui's discussion, though couched in the language of a lovers' tiff, is a good deal more profound. She denounces the troubadour strategy of working within the system and then expecting more than what was implicitly agreed upon. Gui is for lip-service devotion, the maintenance of a symbolic system, diplomacy as a social code whose only function is to keep the system running and screen the harsh realities of motivation. Theirs is a negotiation in which the pulls and tugs resound beyond the arena of sex.

The second example is one of the wonders of troubadour poetry. The traditional metaphor of Lady as mirror of perfection had been used by countless poets before Bemart Arnaut used it in addressing Na Lombarda. Bemart de Ventadom, in the most famous of troubadour songs, had already compared his Lady to a mirror in which he saw his own image, and himself to a Narcissus-like lover who lost himself forever with that fateful glance. Bemart, in two complex stanzas, manages to appropriate both the name and land of Lady Lombarda. Saying that he would like to take on her name and be called henceforth "Lombards," he then addressed another male, a Sir Jordan, to whom he offers Germany, France, Poitou, Normandy and Brittany, in exchange for allowing him to 77

keep Lombardy, Liverno, and Lomagno. The conflation of the Lady's name with a political domain, and indirectly with the whole process of money-lending {Lombard also meant money-lender at that time, a reference to Northern Italian wealth) is extended in his final stanza to include her transformation into a mirror: Bernart: Mirror of Merit, You offer consolation.

May this love in which you hold me Never be broken for the sake of someone unworthy.

Maria responds by saying that she would rather take on either of Bernart's names than allow him to take on hers. In so doing, she reclaims her own name and all that Bernart has associated with it. She then goes on to answer his final metaphor with one of the most stunning displays of word-play in the troubadour corpus: Maria: I want you to tell me Which lady you like better Without keeping anything covered or hidden And all about this mirror in which you see yourself.

For this mirror and state of non-seeing bring such discord To my accord (togetherness) that it's a wonder I don't disaccord (come apart) completely!

Yet when I record (remember) what my name records (signifies) It is with full accord that my thoughts re-accord.

Maria's witty proprietary defense strikes the courtly fiction at its heart.

For what would happen to the courtly edifice, to its moral stature and neat symbolization of gender, if more Lombardas had broken those rors? What would remain of the poets' devotion and from what could he speak without the symbolic space in which to place his Other? remains to be determined to what extent Western cultures will be by the abandonment of the symbolic Lady, if such an idea is even ceivable at a time when that vessel called "the feminine" still sells thing from cars to cigarettes. Courtly love and the symbolization woman are no more fundamental to Western culture than any other 路 ology that has been overthrown when it ceased to fulfill a When any expression of ambiguity of gender is still met with hostility a populace we cannot reasonably assume that that day is soon to The figure of the troubadour ranks among the most important of ern archetypes not because he invented romantic love but because he it to use to get what he wanted. He is the "self-fashioned" man avant lettre, a keen analyst of image and meaning, a prototype for our times.

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PERTINENT TITLES Bemart de Ventadom , The Songs of. Eds. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. and John A. Galm. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.

Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours. New York, London: Paddington Press, 1976.

Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Goldin, Frederick. The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1980.

Gui d'Uisel. Les poesies des quatre troubadours d'Ussel. Ed. Jean Audiau. Paris: Delagrave, 1922.

Marie de France. Lais. Ed. E. Ewert. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976.

Marrou, Henri-Irenee. Les Troubadours. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

Menocal. Maria Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

Pagels, Elain. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988.

Tristan et Yseut. Ed. J. C. Payen. Paris: Gamier, 1974.

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David Chorlton

The Bats' Rebellion We unhook ourselves from the shadows and spill from our caves as the sun blinks.

We are the membrane of a nightmare, folded like umbrellas.

We are coming to bathe in your hair and press our faces of pigskin and fire next to yours. Our features will blind you. Our voices are pitched where you cannot hear us while we circle and wrap you in our wings.

We will colonise your clothes while you are sleeping and reclaim darkness for our own.

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Martha Vertreace

The Celtic Cross II Quiet as a coracle, English sails unfurl in Dingle Bay. Lances ready, pennons float in the salt-sea air while the shepherd warns his father of ships which hide in the cove from doubting townsmen; insists he overheard Cromwell's Protestants plan to take Castlemaine.

In Killarney Hills, the boy's hom unsettles wild mountain goats which charge through the army jolted awake, firing at its bleating enemy.

Puck Goat abdicates his throne, bolts red-eyed with fear into the village as the men believe, prepare.

II/ One kid robed as unblemished goat-king marches in procession through narrow streets which bind the hills to Killorglin; in the town square, reigns over unbridled days of harvest feasting.

Puck Fair- conquering Crom Dubh, the Black Claw, Lugh the Many Skilled keeps his end of the bargain: com tassles without blight, tum dries into poetry. The moon rises on the strength of memory alone.

III/ The Ring shrouded in mist-turned-drizzle, fuchsia tolls the wind drift.

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Branded with patch-dyes, mountain goats stand in skein clumps along the road; bell heather springs from the rocks, blurs purple as the tour bus bypasses a cloud tunnel at the Kerry rest stopan overpriced snack of stale scones, white coffee. Drizzle thickens to showers, half-day weather. Dressed as as leprechaun, a man dances for tourists; his green face dwindles to a smile as shutters click, pound notes fall into a golden pot.

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Jaliscan Sestina Like trapped wings, waiting sours. Rain bears no likeness to mourning doves whose whistling wings rattle my Van Gogh calendar like crickets trapped in a bamboo cage. Lightning bugs still sour morning like memory caught in humid waiting as students scatter off the quadrangle. Rain as if it were the first- or last-rain, then thunder smacks tower bells which cannot bear rough handling. Through storms in Guadalajara I waited at Mercado Libertad, whose canvas roof grew wings, then lifted curtains of straw baskets. Sour beef changed patio tiendas into tourist traps, like church bells in Sector Hidalgo, trapped in gusts. My Spanish, broken in several places, rained on anyone who listened in spite of sour turista. I watched clouds knot the horizon, bear verb tenses over chipped marble tile. Wings of vowels soaked midmorning as I waited for letters in forbidden English, waited for an untrilled "r." Above his dry well, trapped on a wooden stand, my uncle's water pump wings its way over an underground stream, rainfed in Spring. I wonder if he could bear the thought of bicycles as water carts, sour but clean water sloshing in gallon jugs, sour songs from midnight mariachis? In Watson, his wait for rain brings more drought than farmers can bear.

His barn bell no longer rings, its clapper trapped in old-age rust. Nothing I learned makes rainwhether my accent sounds Castilian or Latin. Wings

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soar between fallow uncle, feckless niece, wings of mythic birds whose stories sour.

While feathers darken skies, beaks scoop up rain, his midwest chokes on dust. Sierra Madre waits to rob them of their prize, sets rainbow traps for birds, students, farmers, all who bear wings, bear being trapped- the sour wait for rain.

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Marjorie Power

May Nineteenth How quickly these lambs plump up, how broadly this chestnut's leaves fan out.

Look at the fields. Green breathes its deepest.

Our neighbors' bam represents the bam period of some budding artist; their laundry parades in the air, a celebration of long, long days.

October in Glimpses In a cloudless sky the sun sets, utterly. Night unlocks the year's cold.

A swallow plunges toward the rest of its flock into the first frost .

A walnut leaf falls.

A walnut follows. Nothing fills in for them, fast.

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The Clay Pot A child stops running and sits on the ground, leans over a pot shaped like a large pear. She peers in . The bright cloth wrapped around her loosens, slips down almost to her nipples.

Where its edges overlap they slide apart, revealing one bronze knee .

Her black hair and the black glaze touch. In midday light they gleam. She peers in, a woman who loves what is hollow, rounded and dark for bringing the spirits close.

She chants softly, to her favorite.

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Janet Steele

Season of Fire The cane burning started this morning; black tears drift through my clouding car windows.

The passive curves of Farrington become fantasy in the unrelenting haze.

Held at bay by the vigilant roadside workers, the flames chant, laughing up into the defenseless air.

A sudden wind lifts hundreds of black fragile birds, the spiritless flock rising without a destination; children of the slowly cremating fields .

I struggle to breathe against the pungent fists of smoke that command the road almost to Helemano, but the air begins to clear approaching Wahiawa.

You live in a town blessed by gods; you never escape the rain.

I reach you with the perfume of ashes in my clothes.

To be with you, from March to November I breathe fire . I want to shout it at you; but the cooling air creates nebulous clouds that shift and take shape between us, growing wider, encompassing the charred earth gold of the fields, moving slowly to the summit of impassive Mount Ka'ala .

You are as unreachable.

Guilty, enthralled, you light the fires

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then leave them unattended, running for your stronghold in the heights.

The mist gives you sanctuary but not your dreams: they are filled with the acrid smoke of a thousand acres blazing out of control, yet silent, and far too close to home.

The cane bums til nightfall; the weaponless hills give way.

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Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Monday After School You know what?

Boy wen' beef wid Keoni by the Farrington pool an' you know what he did?

He'n say, "C'mon Keoni, you fucka, right hea . ..."

Den Boy wen' take off his shirt an' fly urn on the fence.

Den he wen' take off his pants!

I no joke you. Den he wen' beef Keoni bare balls.

After that, I wen' tell Boy, "Eh cool head, boo. Why you'n take off yo pants? Everybody was laughingall the cheerleaders and jv players, boo."

'N Boy'n tell me all mad, " 'Cause that's how my fadda fight my uncle them when they all drunk.

They no like their clothes come rip so they fight bare balls, I no joke you-no bee-ba-dees 'n all, my fadda them."

Den after that, I'n treat Boy hot dog an' Big Gulp at 7-11 cause he neva have no money.

'N all the way home, I no could stop thinking about how Boy could've beef all na-ked. "Suckin guy," I wen tell him, "all the girls seen yo grapes."

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Thomas Kretz

Coming from School away with unripened bananas put lips on the rosemary trees to make christmas everyday climb out of stained shrouds push back the sealing rocks to let easter have its way john ashbery et al could hardly understand a city that transcends the new york that surrounds them even in colorado where liffey empties into thames but they would love it and wallow in the tradition essence cannot hope to match.

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Ballpoint Paper Don't throw away those scribbled notes though your telephone never rings before a football game or dance and the only loving touches are spitballs and snowballs that hurt.

Someday he will be a marine coming back without glory but stories of wild womanizing and then you can show him how once he was only a paper flirt .

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mira Kus

*

*

*

The most acute of all are objects . Especially the objects in my room. It is I who gives this sharpness to them or to the stones and trees I meet on the road . So much so that I often stumble on a stone keener than I. Translated from Polish by Daniel Bourne

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Miko Suzuki

Wishes She felt certain things Were too intense to describe With single words Light.

The sky.

Grief.

She closed her eyes Waiting for a dream To get her out of here Out of here Out of her Who was she?

A hybrid of woman And cadaver She felt life Was unintentional A tragic mistake And wished it had happened To someone else

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I've Got a Warm Middle Spot I sift through the garbage And talk to the air But I know I was nice I can smell it Exhaust fumes permeate this street too The homemade amulets worn on my arms Mosquito bite dots Imprinted with X's from my thumbnail A fleshy braille chanting red mantras To still the flow of traffic When the fire hydrant stumbled Like a drunk from the curb The fumes are wrapped diagonally In thin strips of urine-scented shade Gathered under branches That reach above park restrooms I've got a warm middle spot Folded in my coat pocket To smooth beneath newsprint patchworks at night And help defrost margarine containers Filled with blurs That are too late to distinguish Out of the corner of my eye

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Achromatic Sketches Gnats in spiny armour Buzzing in a grudge Past a dog's moist nose Raisins In a manhole cover labyrinth A tom snorkel Nestled on a seaweed bed

Feh Frozen in a cringe Beside the curb Creased bumper And crumpled hood Sucked too quickly Through the windshield Accenting dented paint With scraped metal Cracked glints of glass Spit on impact By broken headlights Dangling from shallow chrome bowls The way soft orbs Gently prodded By a single tine Slip from the hollow stare Of a steamed fish

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Randy Brieger

The Two Who Jumped How did they look when they hit?

Were they separated, their arms and legs spread and angled like Egyptian art, two brave swastikas flattened on pavement?

Or did the knot hold them to each other as fetus to womb, or some renaissance sculpture of Mary bent over the corpse in her arms?

Were they still as if sleeping, their necks loose like silk, the soft penises of dreaming men7 Do some still walk around that spot like it was a dent, the sagging place in a mattress?

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Sandra Nelson

Maybe This Story's About Dogs Petie was in love with Rocky Padovano because Rocky turned into his mom at the birthday party. Rocky's mom told Rocky, "From now on, you're Petie's new mom so you have to feed him and give him a bath and watch him all the time."

It sounded like murder and it wasn' t the TV which sounds like murder for a minute and then sounds like thumping around. At the worst part of the night there was screaming and it didn't stop for a commercial. You could tell it was real and we stood together, Gary, Sharon and me, by the window listening and sniffing so we could know something.

Butch had tried to kill our mother when Grandma was in the hospital for a poison leg. Butch broke off his house and came over one night.

Chains were clinking around and around the house so mom kissed him and walked him home through the apple orchard. She yelled, "Richard, Richard, Help Me." We saw the dog try to pull her arm off and Dad locked the door on her.

We stood together in our jammies crying and he hit at us and made us go to bed. We stood by the window drying our faces off waiting to see if she was dead. She came home crying and then we heard them fight so we knew it was okay to go to sleep.

Mrs. Padovano cries the loudest of anyone and Mom says that's because she's Italian. Petie cried the loudest and the longest on the birthday party night because he had no mom and didn't know Rocky was his new mom yet. Mom slept with Butch when he was her birthday dog.

"Black hairball," she said. He grew big. He ate hickory nuts and apples by the sauna and he ate the door off his house.

Mom was going to see Dr. Witt for a baby and she wore a wide gold bracelet so he couldn't see how Butch bit her and try to fix it for money.

Police drove up the drive looking for Butch. He jumped on one of the cops and they got back in their car. They stepped out again pointing guns and killed Butch six times.

Grandma was in her hospital bed and dreamed it "perfect" like the time she dreamed, "stuck wheels on Uncle Bud's airplane." She knew I took the bark off her box elder tree with a knife and she could dream where something was if you gave her five minutes. Grandma told us the whole dream about Butch. We didn't have to tell her it was true either. She cried, "Oh Butch, if only I was there this woulda never happened."

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The priests Grandma worked for gave her time off for her poison leg and sent her post cards with Mary on them who prayed for her. Father Skelba was going to Pope School in Italy and knew I collected stamps so when he wrote Grandma, he put on extra picture stamps for me. He was so nice, just like God. He gave me a handsome picture of himself before he left and also gave me his snail.

When they let Grandma out she stayed with us. She laid on the couch with her leg on pillows and said, "I ain't nothing, except maybe a witch."

When we carried her out in the sun to air her off, Petie came to lick her blue leg and she called him Butch on her fever days. Petie visited us too to play ball and get food.

Me and my brother Gary, Pam, and Rocky and his brother Joe, caught the bus together. Joe was the oldest and he always looked the other way.

The rest of us picked at each other and fooled around. Petie was there too getting his licks in. Mrs. Padovano had to hold Petie cause he chased the bus to school to be with us.

I was sometimes called Barbara and she was called Sandy. We were blond and roundish and had our hair cut Dutch. We sat in the hen house, hot and itchy, with the rooster changing his eye size at us. We felt under the hot hens for eggs for Uncle Belke. Some had blood, stuck on the hay.

When we found the orange hen under the fence, flat on one side and wooden, we put her in a box with flowers and a piece of glass over the top to keep out the flies.

Barbara is dead, her head squashed under the seat when a hay truck tipped over on their car. They put her in a box with no glass top and said she had no head left to see. She's in the house still because I heard her talking in there. When I called for her, her mom yelled at me and cried and told my mom I did bad things. If I whispered her name by the screen, her brother came instead and told me, "GET THE HELL OUT! " Elmer was driving the Joy Farm bus when the back went up and doWil over Petie. Petie screamed louder and longer than Mrs. Padovano who was screaming too. He had popped his guts out like pink hoses. stopped and Mrs. Padovano said everything to him and he drove away.

She told Joe to take Rocky in the house and she wrapped Petie in a and put him in the ditch.

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Working For American Motors Einer worked for American Motors as a tool and die man. "First you tool, then you die," was Terry's motto. He was a smart little shit who thought he would never die. Obviously, he's no one to dwell on.

Einer never bought a car of any kind because his brother Clarence was a bus driver and gave him free rides. They talked cars: Rambler, the Mighty Midget, the amazing boat-car. Clarence turned redder and redder with the excitement of electric windows and real leather seats.

"I heard of this Caddy. I think it's that Elvis guy who owns it. Well, it has real (not fake) REAL mink seats."

"No shit."

"Yeah, and he's got a different colored one for each day of the weekblue, pink, white, green-honest."

"I wonder which one is for Sunday?"

"Probably the white, they say he's a church boy."

"With all them cars-probably a Catholic."

"Ha ha ha ha...."

Ethel, Clarence's wife, pulled deep on her fifth cigarette, twitching and picking the strings on the backs of her hands.

"Oh Eleanor, Sylvia, how about a game of Hearts; the boys are on cars again?"

She is small and has the shape of an ant. As she walks she is a puppet in the hands of an amateur-she snaps, and jerks, and ticks on her high heels. If she were a car, she'd need a tune-up (maybe even her engine steamed and her pipes blowed out).

"You hear of them army surplus jeeps? For two hundred bucks, you get a whole car in a box just like a toy."

"Yeah, but who wants a jeep?"

"Yeah, that's true, there ain't nothing uglier than a jeep."

"Yeah, but maybe if you lived up-north, then it would be okay."

"Yeah, did you hear that Fred died?"

"No?" "Yeah, a stroke路."

"And he worked so hard on that car. Milly got it now?"

"I don't know. She's so stupid she probably sold it."

"Yeah, Stupid!"

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Einer and Clarence both lean back. Einer lays his thick muscular hand on the recliner's arm. His nails, hard as a dogs, are stained with oil. It looks just like the hand on the chapel ceiling that misses God by a quarter of an inch.

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Richard Morris Dey

The North Road So much about this place is mute, unfinished, like the north road leading up from the harbor and the hotel it was supposed to lead to, work put aside for a fresh start, the right day.

There's so much land in view but undeveloped, and dates without the right achievement or play, so many years unaccounted for-unfinished .

Is there some flaw in the nature of an island?

Experts don't get the time it takes on an island to build a road and keep it from the bush always reclaiming it, in all this heat; how the sun cracks it, leaves it looking depressed, abandoned even as it's being worked on.

0 for the smooth surface, nights of rest.

The Hotel Arawak The hilltop proved too high, too far from the bay, in too much wind, and too hard to walk up to .

And where would the water for the pool and drink-tray have come from 7 Things get started out here in the blue latitudes, all the time, before the white heat of day.

But the brochures were nice, and the view.

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Aboard the Friendship Rose, Bequia Channel The wind, out of the east, has weight in it and the Rose, burdened after the holiday only with cases of empties, is motorsailing.

I'm spent, myself, as if in leaving Bequia I've left a jealous muse unsatisfied .

As she sails out from under the headland lee, I watch her three sails- staysail first, then fore and main- absorb the sunlight, fill and lift.

The tradewind presses, strains each handsewn stitch at panel seam and patch. Her spars are creaking.

I wonder how, despite her empty hold and load of people, she sails so well, is dry?

"Is that Moonhole?" I ask. "Where's L' Ance Chemin?"

The Rose dips, takes each sea west-running and funneled by the islands against her keel.

"Fort Charlotte? Any flying fish? Whaleboats? Whales?"

I sit amidships on a worn bench beneath the foresail, to leeward, holding my two boys.

One's settled in my lap, and one's up against my shoulder. I'm pinned and cannot see a thing.

"Balliceaux?" I ask. "Mustique? New Jersey?"

But what I feel are their warm lifting bodies flinching in the salt spray, unflinched. Am I, if only for this crossing's lull, not less alone? I taste the spray, savoring it, and look aloft and aft, as at my father; then down and forward, at my sons laughing: over the tide-shoved, cold and roiled waters the three sails pull like links in a paper chain.

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And in the empty hold of the Friendship Rose, suddenly, as if the hatch were opened, I see the ballast stones sea-smooth and spread among the frame bays, like this lifting warmth that's spread in me and is the burden of love, see the stones spread over the keel that lifts against the current, across the channel seas.

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Naomi Clark

Sailing When she lies on a hard bench on the deck of the A-frame with jutting eaves, under the tip of the prow she sees clay jugsclosely piled, overlapped, bulboustheir mouths dark holes like the hunger of bald chicks .

Adult barn swallows, purple feathers shining, enter, emerge, fly off. Sky, tall windows: cirrus clouds scud across bright seas of space.

The whole tall ship runs into the wind through images of all the waters she's seen reflect her life, the waves she's heard whisper her secrets. Feet thud on the deck and the deck shakes, her life shakes with the tug of muscle as a bay stallion, torment and joy of her desire, arches his neck, plunges, rears through the cold boil of deep upwellings.

She closes her eyes.

Porpoises plunge through the bow waves of the boat her grown sons sailed beyond Deception Pass, through the Straits, across Desolation Sound. They carried

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their parents into a discarded dream: voyage before the wind.

She opens her eyes. The deck quivers.

The whole tall building lifts, moves off over the lifting water.

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Charles Edward Eaton

Blue Dancers In the midst of crises, the insolence of fortune and appetite, One tends to summon something that moves freely on its own: Dry your tears. There are blue dancers in a soft blue light.

Love has made you this once more a plaything and a fool: Hot palms, hot feet, dry tongue, the parched lips of longingApply the poultice of a picture, dancers in blue tulle .

I know it pulls away even from your magnifying glass, Devolves into the very vortex you despiseDrama is jealous of pictures, and pictures say: This, too, will pass.

What have we here?-The world withdrawn, the world is moving faster.

The day destroys philosophy as hard as you can tug the scene: Blue clown, admit that you must be a dupe before you are a master.

I have these scumbled pictures on my handsOne would think that I had dipped them in a vat of blue, But, in fact, I have stacked them up against-how many days' demands?

It is a powerful sensuous surge, another taking overMaster, tap your cane, tell them how and where to move: Blue dancers educate the fool and elevate the lover.

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Mark Taksa

Words and the Lighted Blanket Sun takes night from our blanket .

I am reminded of dusty light on church stone, lovers buried in the wall.

Too happy to know what to ask of clocks, we promised each other hugs permanent as the lovers' likenesses over their crypt.

The connection of our eyes created a wafer tourists watched, stole to their hotel. Light reaches your half of the blanket.

Our shoulders rub.

I'm telling you love is a sentence thieves crush while stealing words .

We're tasting each syllable, chewing the last paragraph .

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Rafael Alberti

Blue 1 Blue arrived in time to paint its coming.

2 How many blues has the Mediterranean conjured?

3 Venus, mother of the sea of blues.

4

Blue of Greece, leaning like a god against the columns.

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Delicate, medieval blue.

6 The Virgin's contribution: Mary-blue, the pale blue of Our Lady.

7 It descended to his palette from above.

Heaven's secret blue: when he used this blue, he painted on his knees.

Angels came to baptize him with blue: Blessed Blue Angelico, they called him.

8 Palette of celestial blue: swoop of a wing white with the clouds.

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Blues of France, blues of Spain, blues of Italy . . .

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10 Raphael had wings.

Perugino, too, had wings, scattering blue like feathers as he painted.

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Blue indigo, your dye turns brushes into pens.

12 Venice of Titian blue in gold.

13 Rome, blues of Poussin between the pines.

14 Tainted by Tintoretto blues.

15 Sulfur blue phosphor galena El Greco.

Greco blue poisonous verdigris.

16 On the palette of Valazquez I've another name: Sierra Guadarrama.

17 Winding within mother-of-pearl flesh as a blissful vein in Rubens.

18 And cross the early morning of the lakes: a light created out of blue, repeated by the echoes of the grove-Patiner.

19 Immaculate Murillo blue: gaudy on the glossy holy-cards.

20 Tiepolo, too, donated a blue to his epoch .

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21 I am a sash in Goya, a ribbon of light blue, diluted, pale.

22 A compliment for you: -You're as beautiful as the blue of the frescoed ceilings.

23 In the allegories: bursts of blue.

24 Manet's blue, where the echoes sing of a Spanish blue in the distance.

25

I'm also called Renoir. They shout at me.

But mainly I respond with a blue voicestream-dear and running into lilac.

26 Blue shadow, plainly outlining your body: for old eyes, a scandal in itself!

27 A gift to Painting from the Islands: Balearic blue.

28 Sometimes, the sea invades the palette, setting there the blue sky it can only bring in secret.

29 A shadow: bluest when the body casting it has already vanished.

30 Static blue feels nostalgia for a time when it was pure blue in motion.

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31 A given painting may contain no blue, and yet blue hovers round it like a bell-glass.

32 Blue said one day, - 1have a new name now: my name is Pablo Blue Ruiz Picasso.

Translated from Spanish by Carolyn Tipton

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--------------------------------A. A1. Friedson

Benina They spoke it on the headline Libyan news, that distant name.

My distance, forty years, near Bengazi when Quadafi was a baby.

We were building roads over two hundred prisoners of war-"select non-Nazi Jerries from Hitler's Vermucked" said the commanding officer over his leering desk.

Der commandant was eine Sandhurstman my gentle Munich student told me as we sat on old tires; kicked sand; struggled for and against his language while the Oberfeldwebel harried clearing in the desert.

My corporal student teacher told me how our Sandhurst victor would summon the defeated Wehrmacht to the hall indict the war criminals for lazy cowardice under the 120 degree Libyan sun and take away their weekly soccer game.

Dismiss.

Hell, I said, I suppose we are all war criminals. We exchanged 21 yr. old smiles of rue.

My sandscraping teacher hadn't seen his Munchenfamily in three years. Nor I mine.

I was lucky. A week before our faulty Liberator bomber landed me on this overseeing scive, my friendly young enemy told me, a war criminal who hadn't seen

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his family in four years drowned himself in the toilet bowl.

He was lucky, but it was a waste.

We were short of water.

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Carol Hamilton

Telescoped At dawn the Pleiades are overhead.

I count the sisters as they cross the sky, Try to think of how the seasons run, Weigh days now past and those until I die.

The patterned swirl is one I've learned to read With charts and almanacs and men Who take my hand and help me to the glass To seek within time's curve a "there" and "then."

But I am blinded by the light, Self-illuminating, distant, all absorbed In its own birth and catapulted life.

Against dissolution we all have warred.

By day, light's presence is intense, And I cannot search out paths Switchblading trails across obscurity.

I press my face against the glass.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Askold Melnyczvk

Astronomy Lesson Adrift through the flagrant galaxy of your hair I decide with all the lucid gravity of twenty, there is no such thing as death.

I am less sure what happens to breath Or that matchless fire translating an eye into a lesson for astronomers and eclipsing the constellation of lips, cheeks, and odd, shining bones.

Elementary.

Details.

I know.

Still they worry me when you rise with a sigh and tum to the window, refining the light .

Seeing you clearly, things seem less clear.

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Jay A . Blumenthal

Nemesis My dreams are always dreams of summer. At night, when my mind heats up, I surface in my hometown as a great but obscure tennis player. The local shopkeepers, lawyers, and hucksters- my former high school classmates who still revile me for my prolonged childhood-stream toward the confluence of Market and Flood Streets, where a new stadium has washed up into consciousness.

In every version of the dream, the world champion, Axel Klotz, arrives early to prepare his groundstrokes, confident his methodical accountant's game will eventually wear down my wild and, thus from his point of view, hard-to-fathom style.

The stands are filled to capacity when I roar in 20 minutes late, having trained the night before at the Hug 'n' Mug, a saloon famous for stirring the lower emotions.

I can hardly see out of my left eye, the result of a fight over a woman (or maybe with a woman), and as I'm led toward center court by Klotz's German shepherd, my rumpled white outfit absorbs the disdain of the spectators, many of them, like my father, screaming I'll never amount to anything.

Their derision turns to boos when I announce I'll quit in an hour.

Then, without warming up, I give Klotz a severe lesson in the rudiments of serve-and-volley tennis-all this despite the fact that the courts are slow dismal clay and my opponent has played as well as he could .

After the match I comfort him, trying to explain that his ten hours of sleep each night are bound to pay off and that sipping only warm tea is still a wonderful idea, but he weeps uncontrollably. When the gates are opened, the crowd rushes toward me, threatening to drown me in adulation. Fortunately, I am saved by the dog, who knows a way out. I follow him blindly, and when we reach the parking lot, I race for my beat-up Chevy, which contains a bottle of chilled Dom Perignon, enough for the two of us. Once behind the wheel, I waste no time finding the first road out of town.

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Genesis The world of seders is alien to me, as inhospitable to my vision as the methane clouds of Jupiter.

This year was no different, especially after I forgot the last three questions and my relatives took turns jumping on me as if I were a stupid schoolboy.

I felt no better when Cousin Seymour cast me into the darkness, not only remembering them and the significance of their order but threatening to resurrect last year's lecture on the Old Testament.

Seeing this, my wife tried to save the evening by bringing up integrity-the kind a good photograph has. (The last two years she did photo-essays qn gardens, both of which I loathed .) "A picture has integrity," she said, "if the details remain sharp after it's been blown up." To prove her point, she dragged out her 20 x 30's from last summer's vacation and showed the family why an enlarged crucifix in Newfoundland had integrity while an oversized puffin from Halifax looked blurry and clearly out of focus.

(Frankly, I thought the bird was fine.)

I fumed about her pictures of bridges, statues, and trees, not to mention the obligatory moose, but when she got to a clump of tourists I exploded about good dots and bad dots and how, on the micro level, God couldn't possibly care whether we were one or the other but that we had plenty to worry about if there was a big picture. "Who among us," I asked, "could hope to survive divine scrutiny?"

I wanted to make a related point about astronomyhow it often appears fuzzy, more bird than icon, when it's compared with art- but everyone was tired of my sermon, my father most of all, so I removed the dishes and brought out the traditional macaroons and herbal tea and some fresh Colombian coffee brewed in a wonderfully noisy urn and, though not remotely kosher,

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butterscotch ice cream sprinked with chocolate frills and showered with large pecans that I said were from Morocco, and before long I began to plot each star's magnitude: Aunt Olive dunking her "macs," as she called them, into the coffee and greedily taking more and, when nobody was looking, sticking them into her purse; my father methodically disposing of his double portion with an accountant's shrewd efficiency; my mother, the eternal malcontent, studying her scoops with a poisonous eye; Zelda, Blanche, and Seymour, my cousins from Scarsdale, hardly aware of dessert, arguing about the soul's appetites; my wife, the only Gentile, scolding me for wanting to slip into a running outfit; Uncle Jack wanting to sit and wait, possibly for Elijah; and some assorted children filling out the group portrait in their dim way.

There was no flash of understanding, nor any need for one. I simply cleared the table in my suit and tie and then sat by myself out on the patio, making sure I got the details right, especially Uncle Jack's shudder when I told him Elijah had got caught in traffic.

Then I loosened my tie and took a deep breath as I closed my eyes, knowing somewhere among the orbits of the mind another world was forming, one that would culminate my long years of development and, once it had all its elements, including atmosphere, would be on a collision course with Earth.

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Martin Sherman

A Clown's Clown Clowns are pegs, used to hang circuses on.

P. T. Barnum Circuses are pegs from which clowns hang themselves. from Psychopathology and Slapstick

Who's that man with the scarf stuck to him?

Stuck to his hand?

Yes. What's he doing?

Trying to shake it off, I suppose.

And? It's off his hand . . .

And stuck to his clothes?

Yes. Bust my gut.

Sorry?

Steal my breath .

Why? I can't look. I'd laugh to death . Whew! Clown can go crazy with a fella like him. Deep breath . Settle down.

That's ... 7 Stumpy Columbo, clown to clowns .

That's him?

You sound incredulous. Say, mind me asking you a question, Boss?

You a member of the Fifth Estate?

No. A Psych Professor from up there at State?

Yes! Perhaps you've read my work. Psychopathology and Slapstick? I must confess, I've never actually met any circus clowns before. So when I read the piece about Stumpy Columbo in the Times Op Ed Section and saw you were actually in town . . .

Damn! I messed that one up but good. Struck my paydirt before I should. Pardon, Doc. Cotta punch the clock . Hey Stumpy! How's about a couple lessons? C'mere and show me how to work these questions.

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Direct your attention if you will to the little man with the scarf now stuck to his rump. At the sound of his name he stops whirling around and stumbles across the room, a bag of bones in a cloud of dust, a man whose misery cracks your heart like an eggshell. He strides down the centre of clown alley, blithely tromping through the foam rubber props that litter the floor. With a crash and a clatter and one foot in a bucket, Stumpy bowls down the aisle, clowns peeling away in fits of convulsive laughter. He spins about, startled at the commotion, puzzled at the explosions of mirth, seeking their source.

Stump?

Step clatter, step clatter, bump, crash, clatter, screech.

Well, Doc, shall we run it again? Want I should start or'll you begin?

I don't know what you . . .

Stump, I'm rolling, the rhythm's fine. He does his lines and I do mine.

So I figure he's a local clown just up to crowd the scene and I start right into the Who-Are-You Routine. Well, the first question's fine, the bit is going great, but the second question bombs. He really does teach up at State.

That's right. You see, I'm here to invite you .. .

'Scuse us, Doc, but Stumpy here is cooking. Yes he is, Stump, but how'd you tell just looking? Yeah, blue socks, brown shoes, tweed with leather elbow patches, frayed yellow shirt collar and nothing quite matches. Doc, show me your hands. Damned if those aren't ink stains.

Deadperfect. I tell you, Doc, Stump'll find a man out deeper than he knows himself. And just look at that puss . Oh mercy. Shatter my kneecaps with slaps. Yessir, a clown's clown. Break your heart like a pressed rose petal. Doc, Stumpy. Stumpy, Doc. I'm honored, Mr. Columbo.

Mr. Columbo . . .

A gale of laughter, bumps and thuds as clowns roll off their stools and onto the floor, clutching their sides, wincing with breathlessness.

Doc rolls a nervous eye, whispers: I read about you, Mr. ... er .. . Stumpy. I thought it would be a great honour for us and most instructive if you could spare an afternoon to visit and demonstrate to my classes at the university just what exactly forms the Core of Comedy.

Whoa, Doc. Stumpy don't give no lectures. He works for us exclusive.

Hear that, boys? Doc here wants Stump to lecture on the Heart of Humour.

Watch closely as the gust of exhaled guffaws sweeps dust down clown alley and wraps around Stumpy. He smiles weakly, his eyes widening as he rocks up onto his toes and totters unsteadily as though spun about by that dust storm. To a clown, they all turn away from him, wheezing with laughter, paralyzed, pulverized, unable to stand that sweet stupid grin.

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Clowns pinch each other, slap one another, some hold pictures of their dead relatives brought especially for such an instance, to sadden them into mere euphoria.

Thirty seconds, someone calls and the sea of clowns divides. They dive for props and wigs while someone swings the curtain wide.

They scatter to the entrance, yanking up their baggy pants, joking with each other while they gather in a clump.

The professor from State, looking on while they wait, asks, Everybody's going out, what about Stump7 Please, gentlemen, there is a circus going on out there. Someone, anyone, have the sense to close the curtain while you double over. Thank you. You may proceed.

You heard the man, fellas. Whaddaya say7 How's about Stump does a public display7 Now that old Stump has got world reknown, let's show Doc here a real clown's clown.

You can flush that crap right down the tubes. It's us is paying him, not them rubes.

Aw, g'wan, forget it. Don't be a jerk. Let's let the Doctor see him work.

Hat and cane! Hat and cane! Solo, Stumpy!

The curtain parts. The music starts. His props are jammed into his hands. He shrugs, resigned, and like a blind man, taps his cane out toward the stands. Like a wine bottle emptied with one last attempted snoot. Bag man, rag man, muscles gone sag man, out goes Stumpy to entertain the troops.

Down the stretch of hippodrome, Stumpy struts in all alone, cane swinging smartly to the rhythm of his trot. Stupid grin upon his face, the tiny man with snail's pace seems to grow to fill the space. Centre ring.

Single spot.

Though the ring is filled with sawdust, Stumpy finds a speck of dirt.

With great distaste he drops it in the pocket of his shirt. He tosses his cane upwards with a slow deliberate spin; he grabs his hat and throws it, too. The cane lands balanced on his chin; the hat, still twirling from the quick wrist flick, rattles down sharply on the top end of the stick. The crowd applauds him loudly at completion of the trick. Startled by the noise, Stumpy panics, loses poise and twists his neck to check upon the sources of the sound. The hat and cane both plummet off his chin and toward the ground. But wait, the cane has landed balanced on his foot instead; the hat's rotated once and landed squarely on his head. Startled by the clapping sounds, Stumpy quickly whirls around, squints his eyes and gives the blackness of the crowd a mighty stare. He cocks his head then shrugs, satisfied that no one's there.

He thinks for a second of another trick to do and reaches out to grab the cane that's perched upon his shoe. But somehow when he reaches, the

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cane's no longer there. It's to his right, he grabs again, again he's grasping air. As though it were alive, the cane dances, dodges, dives and even seems to sneer at Stumpy's clumsy lunging stabs. It tempts him, taunts and teases, lets him come dose as he pleases but manages to get away when Stumpy makes a grab. With one mighty reach, in vain, Stumpy lunges at the cane and, as he does, he stumbles, skids and trips. The air is full of Stump and cane and sawdust showers down like rain but Stumpy has the cane in hand when he completes the flip. But Stumpy's problems aren't through, for now the hat is on his shoe. The crowd groans loudly as it notices his plight. Stumpy shrugs, swings his foot and sends the hat in flight. The topper settles neatly high atop his brow. A tiny smirk, a braggart's wink, and Stumpy takes a bow.

With the air of a striptease, he shrugs his coat off of his sleeves and drapes it over top the cane. It's dear there's something planned. Stumpy nods his head just slightly. Down his arm the hat glides lightly; with a flip it rotates and lands gently in his hand. He lifts the cane up once again and balances it on his chin. He throws the hat. It seems to float and softly settles on his coat. Stumpy wiggles in anticipation, hitches up his baggy pants. The crowd looks on in fascination as Stumpy sets and takes his stance. Now, at last, they understand the cane will fall into his hands, the hat upon his head and the coat upon his back. Crowd and Stumpy draw a breath; the air is silent, still as death, and, at that fateful moment, the centre ring goes black.

The spotlight has gone out.

From backstage there's a shout.

My god! it's Dr. Whatsisname from State.

As though trapped in a bad dream that goes on despite their screams, the audience can merely sit and wait.

The lights go on, the music blares. There stands Stumpy. The crowd just stares. His cane has dropped, his hat lies crushed and propped up on his jacket that is crumpled in the dust. Stumpy picks his things up and begins the slow walk back, fading into nothing as he's passed along the track by a sequined troupe of aerialists heading for finale.

Through the curtain stumbles Stumpy, back into the alley.

Amid the trunks the old down ambles, make-up wrecked, his clothes in shambles, backs turn toward him as he passes by. No one dares to face him should their witnessing disgrace him as if pain and pity were an issue of the eye.

The professor reaches out for Stumpy but a hand restrains his touch.

Time, says a voice.

And time again.

That was heartless,

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says the Prof.

Our lot, chorus voices.

But to be so callous . .

We're a thick-skinned lot. Comes from always being rubbed the wrong way.

You mean this happens all the time?

Reaching epidermic proportions.

But it's my fault, cries the good doctor.

Why didn't you stop me?

Shhh, the voices murmur.

Watch, the voices purr.

Expectantly they wait for whatever to occur.

From the back end of the alley, home to Stumpy's slapstick schemes, comes a tape-recorded melody, East Indian in theme. Homemade floodlights. Taped applause. Stumpy steps out draped in gauze, a turban on his head, a white doth diaper 'round his rump, carrying a basket that he sets down with a thump. He steps behind the prop box and emerges with a flute, experimentally blows on it, evokes a paltry toot. Stumpy, though, seems satisfied and puts the flute down by his side. He seats himself and, painfully, assumes the lotus pose. With the tape, he plays along, a tortuous strain of snake-charm song, then glares in anger at the basket from which nothing rose. He gets up, goes behind the prop box. Clatter, crash. Out Stumpy walks clutching a dilapidated, battered old trombone. He sits himself down once again and when the taped refrain begins, he plays along in lovely, furry tones. Nothing. Not a stirring yet there's something odd occurring. Stumpy seeks the source of this odd elusive feeling. One hand above his head has found his turban's somehow come unwound and the filament of gauze rises slowly toward the ceiling.

The basket remains unperturbed. Stumpy stands, now quite unnerved.

Into the open lid he blares the melody in riot. From within there is a stirring, rustling noises, sounds of whirring. A sign arises from the basket reading simply "Quiet!" Stumpy's clearly come unstrung. He makes a savage headlong lunge, grabbing at the rope and shaking it with rage. He struggles with the strand, wraps it firmly round his hand, yanks it from the basket and half across the stage. He's won! But as he celebrates, the rope starts to retaliate pulling Stumpy headlong into the open basket.

Stumpy's trapped there upside down. Legs wave airborne as the down struggles hard to free himself from his wicker casket. Stumpy battles his way free and lifts his arms triumphantly flourishing the limp rope coiled in a tangled heap. He flings it on the ground, stamps on it, bends down

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and puts his ear above it as though checking for a heartbeat. Stump at last is satisfied the hated coil of rope has died. He flings it 'cross his shoulders with a gesture of disdain. Mustering his self-respect, the dead rope wound around his neck, Stumpy gathers props while the music starts again. But wait, the rope's alive! It twists and sinuously writhes, twining against clawing fingers, deadly and relentless, the rope snakes skyward with its prize, the sorcerer's apprentice. Enchanter trapped by his enchantment, hoist upon his own petard, the noose about his neck tightens, cinches firmly, yanks him hard. Blackout.

Titters, laughs, guffaws. A shout of "Bravo!" Wild applause.

Is everyone here mad? says Doc. Hoots. Catcalls. One-liners hopscotch disembodied in the darkened crowd.

Surely, cries the good Professor, you can't mean to applaud suicide?

It wasn't our applause killed him- he died by his own hand.

And don't call me Shirley.

A voice sings out joined by a chorus of downs: He lived down in the sewer. And by the sewer he died. They didn't know what to call it so they called it sewerside.

A clown's clown, someone says.

Bust your gut, break your ribs, crush your heart like a Christmas toy.

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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.

Carole Bernstein's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, ANTIOCH REVIEW, YALE REVIEW, and other magazines. She received an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1988, and works as a promotions manager for a New York book publisher.

Jay A. Blumenthal holds a doctorate in English from Drew University and is Director of Marketing Services for McGraw-Hill in New York City. His poetry has appeared in CAROLINA QUARTERLY, CUMBERLAND POETRY REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, and SEATTLE REVIEW, among others. Old Ways and Former Gods, his first book of poetry, is forthcoming from Heliotrope Press.

Daniel Bourne spent 1985-87 in Poland on a Fulbright Scholarship translating work by younger Polish writers, and returned there for more translation work during the summer of 1989. He teaches creative writing at the College of Wooser, where he edits ARTFUL DODGE. A chapbook of his own poetry, Boys Who Go Aloft, has been published by Sparrow Press, and he has had work published by AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, SHENANDOAH, FIELD, and other magazines.

Randy Brieger, a Mississippian , now resides in Houston, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of Houston. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has previously appeared in Hawai'i Review, Brieger has poems forthcoming in the winter issues of Evergreen Chronicles and West Branch. He prefers writing about life's perverse moments- humorous or tragic-which seem, at first, to lie outside, but, in fact, redefine the realm of tha t we consider "poetic."

"The Two Who Jumped" is based on the double-suicide of a young gay couple who, upon learning they had contracted AIDS, tied themselves together and leapt from the bedroom window of their high-rise apartment.

Michael}. Bugeja has two poetry collections out this year : The Visionary (Taxus Press, Exeter, England) and What We Do for Music (Amelia Press, Bakersfield,

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California). His poetry has appeared in such journals as GEORGIA REVIEW, KENYON REVIEW, NER / BLQ, and ANTIOCH REVIEW. He teaches magazine writing at Ohio University and was a recipient this year of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in fiction .

Anthony Bukoski, who teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, has had stories in NEW LETTERS, CIMARRON REVIEW, and elsewhere. His collection of stories, Twelve Below Zero, was published in 1986.

Richard Alan Bunch is a native of Honolulu . He was raised in Napa, California, and educated at Stanford, Arizona, and Vanderbilt. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry in 1989, and has recently had poetry published in NEXUS and RED CEDAR REVIEW. He teaches philosophy at Solano College in Fairfield, California.

William Burgwinkle is an assistant professor of French in the Department of European Languages and Literature at the University of Hawai'i.

Karen Chase lives in Lenox, Massachusetts. She is poet-in-residence at the New York Hospitai-Cornall Medical Center in White Plains, New York. She has poems in SHENANDOAH, CALIBAN, and EXQUISITE CORPSE. David Chorlton is an eleven-year resident of Phoenix, Arizona, who moved 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 to see life from animals' points of view. He is also a visual artist and has a chapbook just out from Adastra Press.

Naomi Clarke's second book of poems, When I Kept Silence, appeared in 1988 from Cleveland State University Press. She held an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing in 1987-88. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in POETRY NORTHWEST, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, INDIANA REVIEW, BERLOIT POETRY JOURNAL, and ASPECT (Australia), among others. She taught at San Jose State University, directed San Jose Poetry Center for a number of years, and now lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Richard Morris Dey's Bequia Poems was published in 1988 by MacMilla n, Caribbean . He is currently finishing a sea novel, and has started work on a new collection of Bequia poems. He has also published a short biography of John Caldwell, author of Desperate Voyage and hotelier of Palm Island, near the island of Bequia in the Grenadines, where Dey lives for a good portion of the year. His work has been published in POETRY and SAIL, among other magazines.

James Doyle teaches English at the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley.

His book of poems, The Sixth Day, was published by Pygmy Forest Press, Albia n, California, in 1988. His writing has appeared in BERLOIT POETRY JOURNAL, BITTERROOT, BOTTOMFISH, CHAMINADE LITERARY REVIEW, OXFORD MAGAZINE, STUDIA MYSTICA, BOUNDARY 2, OHIO REVIEW, and many others.

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Charles Edward Eaton's poetry and prose have appeared in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, THE NATION, YALE REVIEW, KENYON REVIEW, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, SEWANEE REVIEW, and many other magazines. He has published ten volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a book of art criticism. New and Selected Stories, 1959-1989, Eaton's fourth volume of short stories, has just been published. In 1988, he was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state's highest honor by the Governor.

Casey Finch lives and writes in New York city. A collection of the complete poems of the Pearl-poet, translated into contemporary English verse, is being published by the University of California Press. Finch's own poetry and his scholarly non-fiction has appeared in ROLLING STONE, QUARTERLY WEST, OHIO REVIEW, PLOUGHSHARES, REPRESENTATIONS, MILTON STUDIES and GREENFIELD REVIEW, among others.

A. M. Friedson publishes poetry and prose in Hawai'i and the other mainland.

"Benina" and "Fatal Response" (HR #29) try to reconcile scepticism and humanity. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hawai'i, literary editor of Biography, and co-editor of Kaimana: Literary Arts Hawai路i.

Carol Hamilton teaches humanities in a public school for gifted children and also teaches in the English Department of Rose State college. Her children's novel, The Dawn Seekers, received a 1988 Southwest Book Award. Her work has been published recently in NEW YORK QUARTERLY, ASTRONOMY, STONE COUNTRY, CHRISTIAN CENTURY, BITTERROOT, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR. and POET LORE, among others.

Robert Huber's first published story, "His Royal Highness," is part of the collection Love Is A Personal Problem. He's worked as an auto body mechanic, pizza cook, cab driver, landscaper, apartment manager, waiter, laborer, and night receptionist in a women's dorm. He is currently writing a novel.

Edward Kleinschmidt's second collection of poems, First Language, the winner of the 1989 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press, was published earlier this year. His poems have appeared in the NEW YORKER. AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, POETRY, POET &: CRITIC and DENVER QUARTERLY, among others. He teaches creative writing at Santa Clara University.

Tom Kretz has published seven books of poetry, and his poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in more than six hundred publications throughout the world. He is currently writing a two-volume history of the Jesuit Brothers.

Mira Kus is the author of two books of poems, That Oasis Is Around Here Somewhere (1981) and The World Beckons to Me in Its Secret Code (1989). She lives in Krakow with her son. Her work also appears in English in CROSSCURRENTS. Miriam levine's most recent book is A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.

Her poems have been widely published. "Sam" is from a collection of memoirs and essays.

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David Lunde was born in 1941 in Berkeley, California and grew up in Saudi Arabia. He has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and won the Academy of Poets Prize there. Since 1967, he has been Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York College at Fredonia. He is editor and publisher of The Basilisk Press, and has published two collections of poetry, Sludge Gulper 1 and Calibrations. His poems and translations have appeared in 150 periodicals and anthologies.

Askold Melnyczuk has published poetry, fiction, and reviews in POETRY, PARTISAN REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, GRAND STREET, and elsewhere. His poetry is represented in Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, edited by Nicholas Christopher (Doubleday/ Anchor). He is the editor of AGNI REVIEW. James A. MiUer has published work in POEM, COMMONWEAL, GAMUT, MANHATTAN POETRY REVIEW, and several other journals.

Sandra Nelson writes poetry and fiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 1989. Her work has appeared in Womensong: A Decade of Women s Poetry and Prose, as well as in NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, IOWA REVIEW, POET & CRITIC, BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE FORUM, POETRY EAST, HAWAI'I REVIEW, and many others.

Marjorie Power's poems have appeared in numerous journals, including POET & CRITIC, CREAM CITY REVIEW, and PLAINSONG. Her book, Living With It, was published in 1983 by Wampeter Press.

Kristopher Saknussemm was born in Nevada and lives in Australia. He has published over 200 poems and stories in fifteen countries, including NER/ BLQ, SOUTHWEST REVIEW, GARGOYLE, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, CALIBAN, and SMALL POND. Saknussemm's book of poems, In the Name of the Father, was published by Frontier Press in 1988. Sinister Miniatures, a collection of short stories was published in 1989.

Jeff Schiff has published poems and criticism in over five dozen periodicals, including OHIO REVIEW, SOUTHWEST REVIEW, POET & CRITIC, TENDRIL, and HAWAI'I REVIEW. His chapbook, Anywhere in This Country, was published by Mammoth Press in 1980. He directs the Composition Program at Columbia College in Chicago and lives with his wife and son in Evanston, Illinois.

Martin Sherman, a former Ringling Brothers Circus clown, was once arrested for clowning in Chicago. He gave up felonious fire-eating for fiction writing. He currently has stories coming out in THE QUARTERLY, ANTIOCH REVIEW, THREE PENNY REVIEW, and CANADIAN FICTION MAGAZINE. This is his second appearance in HAWAI'I REVIEW. He lives in Calgary, Alberta with his wife and three children.

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Janet Steele came to Hawai'i from the East Coast four years ago. She lives in Waialua, on Oahu, with three cats. Inspired by the poetry of Cathy Song, Steele has been published recently in CHAMINADE LITERARY REVIEW. Miko Suzuki works as a graphic designer in Honolulu. This set of poems was generated for a class taught by Cathy Song at the University of Hawaii.

Mark Taksa has poems appearing in ARTFUL DODGE, THE CAPE ROCK, and WRITER'S FORUM. He is the author of Truant Bather (Berkeley Poets workshop and Press). He teaches high school.

Carolyn Tipton, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Hawaii (1989- 90) recently received an NEH grant to work with Rafael Alberti in Spain completing her translation of A Ia pintura, from which "Blue" and "Yellow" (HR #29) are taken.

S. Naomi Tome was born in Honolulu. She received a B.F.A. from the University of Hawaii and a Certificate of Illustration from the Art Institute of Boston. As a freelance illustrator, her artwork has been published in HONOLULU, RSVP, EASTWEST (Honolulu and Boston), and STUFF magazines. She resides in Stoughton, Massachusetts with her husband and miniature pinscher, Horeen.

Dietrich Varez is an artist living on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Martha M. Vertreace teaches English and is poet-in-residence at Kennedy-King College, Chicago. Her first book, Second House from the Corner, was published in 1986. A collection of her poems appeared in Benchmark: An Anthology of Contemporary Illinois Poetry. Vertreace was featured as the Spoon River Illinois Poet in SPOON RIVER QUARTERLY in 1988. She has won three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for published poetry. Her article, "Toni Cade Bambara: The Dance of Character and Community," appears in American Women Writing Fiction, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 1989.

Randall H. Watson is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Houston. His work has appeared in CUTBANK, BERKELEY POETS COOPERATIVE, and FLORIDA REVIEW. New work is forthcoming in GEORGIA REVIEW. Jeff Worley recently won the Seaton Award First Prize from KANSAS QUARTERLY and first prize from the CINCINNATI POETRY REVIEW. His poems have appeared recently in CHICAGO REVIEW, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, HAWAI'I REVIEW, and the 1989 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. lois-Ann Yamanaka was born in Ho'olehua, Molokai, and grew up in Hilo, Pahala, and Kona on the island of Hawaii. She teaches as Kalakaua Intermediate School to pay the mortgage and vet bills for her chronically ill cocker spaniel.

Her work was recently published in BAMBOO RIDGE.

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Work by Rafael Alberti Anonymous Carole Bernstein Jay A. Blumenthal Randy Brieger Michael J. Bugeja Anthony Bukoski Richard Alan Bunch William Burgwinkle Karen Chase David Chorlton Naomi Oark Richard Morris Dey James Doyle Charles Edward Eaton Casey Finch A. M . Friedson Carol Hamilton Robert Huber Edward Kleinschmidt Thomas Kretz Mira Kus Miriam Levine David Lunde Askold Melnyczuk James A . Miller Sandra Nelson Marjorie Power Kristopher Saknussemm Jeff Schiff Martin Sherman Janet Steele Miko Suzuki Mark Taksa Martha Vertreace Randall A. Watson Jeff Worley Lois-Ann Yamanaka Art by S. Naomi Tome Dietrich Varez $5.00

ISSN: 0093-9625