Hawaiʻi Review Number 7: 1977 by Hawaiʻi Review Archive

HAWAil REVIEW

T...t'e~e

3 17 83 43 45

D.L . Adams Eve Shelnutt George Gersaba Maxine Hong Kingston John Givens

DririJac OYer To The eoa.t One

Earl Cooper

35 38 37

Peter Ruben Morales Ann Yonezaki Kristi Felton Tateo Imamura Garrett Kaoru Hongo Doren Robbins Louis Jenkins Charles Barasch Hilda Wry George MacBeth

C..venatioa with Georce llacBeth

Anthony Friedson

About the Authon

Rabbit'â&#x20AC;˘ Luck Feet Short UJUientaadtnc Ilea

Nicht DruDk oa Port Wine lin. Fieher Poem llaple and KukuJ ThreePoeme TwoPoeme Separation SbPoeme TwoPoeme A Matter of Dreame TwoPoeme

38 41 58 57 82 84

Clover Pboto: " Hawaiian Schoolairl, " &om a 11 poMoard publlabed by Ialand Curio Co.. oourlaly the antiquitiee ooiJectjoo of Brian Furer. P hotographer and dale un.lmown. Pboto of Oeorp YaobeU>: Anita Porich

EDlT()R .. ..... .. ........... . ... gary kiaaiok .MANAGING EDITOR .. .. .. . ..... Gayle .Kanemoto FICTION EDITOR .......... . ... .Anita Povich FICTION READER ... . . ..... . .. .Jerry Moriarity POETRY EDITORS . . . . .. . ....... Elizabeth Shincv:ta & Eric Chock f!lriJT . . ... .......... . . ... ......Puanani Burgeee, Jody Ma.nabe, BW Miyasato, Plamandon, Terry Taylor, Debbie Thomas ADVISORS ... . .... . ...... . . . .... Philip Damon & Tony Friedson SPIRITUAL ADVISOR . ... ... . ... Marl Nakamura

Hawaii Review is published by the Board of Publications, University of Subscriptions and manuscripts should be addressed to Hawaii Review, 246:> Road, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. Manuscripts should be panied by stamped, seir-addreseed envelope. Subcription rates, $6.00 per year; copies $3.00.

C 1977 by the University of Hawaii,

Board of Publications

Lorraine waits nervously but happily sitting on her hands in the car, 'scar, an oxidized garish orange '56 Chevy hardtop, its once-sleek left rear fender creased and scarred, assorted minor scrapes and here and there, chrome strips chipped and rusting, powder-blue wheel wearing three slightly battered chrome moon hubcaps, exhaust rauand rattling, creaks and rattles in every panel and joint except when the is absolutely stopped as it is now, Gordon's car Lorraine thinks is ju8t all as she waits while Gordon talks with the man in the motel office, the •uu~!!:""·'·· Gordon's back turned away from her, arms gesticulating like a • •ther-c:liJ:>PE!d seagull to the bald pudgy motel manager several inches than Gordon, the manager behind the desk taking a short step now, his marble-round eyes shining in the weird flourescent light, the red MOTEL sign outside flashing disturbingly in Lorraine's splashing her fine-boned features with ugly red , a red she knows -~~n1~mLte's her complexion, her unpleasant complexion, pimples raising she knows because she is thinking about them, sit• glaring nastily, nasty little volcanoes of pus collecting subdermally even as she to watch, blinking rapidly, nervous yes almost goosepimpled but really afraid just excited wondering why she agreed to spend the _ ....,....., ..u with Gordon, she Lorraine Thomlin, actually Roberta qh Loractually alone with a man, an adventure, this weekend her parents of town visiting relatives in California having allowed her to stay home with herself, just herself, she pleading home work and of course the (she insisted to them this very morning, hwtsted, l)'inc) - o.Lu•n..,... v Night Dance At The Armory, her mother relenting first then her saying OK we should be able to trust you by n ow you 're a woman 't you after all, trusting her to be alone for three days, relying on her t-tlur:nea~n~:meen conscience, relying on her wisdom, relying on her to out of trouble, trouble whose nature is alluded to but n e ver made • lplliCJLt by her parents, trouble Lorraine knows what kind of trouble they so why is she here, why did she agree to come to the coast with Gordon hundred miles away from warm safe home with a man she has dated only weeks though she has known him almost two months, Gordon who is •rea.ay a sophomore in city college majoring in land surveying or somelike that, he isn 't sure just yet ... why has she knowiDclJ' violated

her parents ' trust yes why has she violated her own better Juqement, gone asking, be&ciDc for trouble, trouble, now to have to wait nervously like thia in the murky interior of this battered rusting old car, Gordon's car a hundred miles from home, her c heeks warm, too warm, the horrid red flashing sign in her ey es- It No Vacancy, Gordon! That'• jut rw people who don't already have re•ervatio~. don't worry-Lorraine, Roberta Lorraine feeling . .. feeling a little cheap yes you have to admit it a little cheap and unpretty in this awful light but happy yes miraculously happy .. . why? whywhywhywhy?

••Y•

Beoauae I wanted to! But what is this, Gordon turning abruptly away from the manager'l

desk, the bald man retreating into the door to the side, what has happened, why is Gordon 's faoe red, really red, his jaw working forethrust showing line of aawing ragged teeth as he recklessly kicks the door out of his the metal frame bangs against its extreme stop, the glass rattles like the motel manager's faoe snapping about, slapped crimson into the shape surprise, shock, dismay, pique; and where is the room key Gordon have in his hand, the red plastic rectangular fob dangling with its imp:nll88111 logo HARRAHS RENO IF LOST DROP IN MAIL GUARANTEED . .. ? Gordon's hand is wondrously empty of key alarmingly full of knuckle, slams powerfully onto the flat orange hood Chevy producing a depression in the metal and a loud booming uoo•:..,u.-.u startling Lorraine inside making her jump instantly, involuntarily the passenger's door from the middle of the broad dingy black vinyl seat; her eyes lock on Gordon striding, three, four strides massive furiously powerful around the front of the car to the door he wrenches sucking the air from the compartment in a whoosh leaving Lorraine breath sucking vacuum almost; he slams the door, a tremendous cl.ll~n'lltrlll bang that slaps painfully Lorraine's eardrums, rocks her senses, .... ,.uu.111111 brain sparkling electricity~h she was afraid of this, motel manager questions, their ages, were the y married, he ought to call their parents, police, refusing them lodging, any number of things gone wrong, she more nervous than ever and no longer very happy .... Gordon twists key, the engine pops and bellows and rips, now screams as he cracks throttle full open, drops off the clutch, tires ssssz! screech for bite loose gravel fifty feet behind and into the glass door swinging shut, the rubber when it finally catches hard asphalt, barking, wailing off into weird flashing flourescent starless night, headlights leap, grab ahead, the glistening black pavement and y ellow caterpillar centerline out of swirling grey chill steam of the day 's last sunless hour, almost uu''""'llll leading into tomorrow and nowhere for certain. Becau. . I wanted to! Lorraine realizes, surprised, shot with wonder, that her heart so velously small is rapping sharply, painfully, desperately, perhaps dangerously against the thin flat ribs of her shallow breast; she covel'll throat with her right hand but is afraid to touch the flesh, to feel galloping pulse in her carotids engorged with heated blood,

life that may be running away from her at this very minute ... no, unthinkable, it can't be so extreme . .. but what is really happening? .. unthinkable, unknowable, she's too frightened to know the extent of her to look to see if there's reason, from tingling almost pleasureable DtiCiJ)8.tor:y waves in her stomach in the passage of half a minute to this by some overwhelming unseen force, unexpected inexplicable fear tDJJ:e-EIOiil'ea blossom in her viscera, whirling, mushrooming .. . she knows that she bas never seen Gordon like this, other boys yes foolish cruel be trusted but Gordon! She knows only the kind sweet gentle yes considerate Gordon who walks long with her by the green trouted river below her home, Gordon who sings with his .-uu:~'" guitar in the sweet grass of smoldering summer evening, Gordon plucks the delicate wildflowers with the fragile devotion of an ethereal .......~uuc of twilight, spirit of sweet summer love bending, mmmmmming, with just one small blue meadow flower for her hair, another tiny ' " ".....u .........."' rosy-petaled wonder of May 's creation for her band, her hand he kissed ever so gently, so tenderly, her band to him the most -mnna and dainty of flowers, be said, yes dalDty. fracile. so fragile he his lips might bruise, he said laughing but sincere, following with a , sincere ... he said, Gordon who for his manly bass laughter, his launted male strength that lifted her so facilely and carried her safely above slow river, set her in the tree swing behind her home, Gordon who for all glorious triumphant finesse on the soccer field, this man who to her is the poet, the romantic, different from the other insensitive rough w-:msm~1ei"e<1 young men, boys really, Gordon really a man, and yes the crier the thin and J)8.le notes of summer joy that resonate in her frail heart like love-lute's faintest languorous pastel memories ... she is qrifting ouâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘-u that Gordon, f"mding him again, that Gordon who is not this Gordon yet ia Gordon, it's just that something 's gone wrong, terribly wrong: Gordon, what is it? Hunched over the wheel, his sucked cheeks and creased forehead glow the green dash lights, his eyes glint emerald fur:y from orbits black, be 't reply for twenty seconds, by force of will cooling in that time, sighs hel~ovillv, exhausting his lungs and causing the sawdust-stuffed chenille hung from the rearview mirror to spin, speaks in controlled, terntones: No vacancy. But we hadThey held it open until ten, figured we weren 't going to show, gave our reservation to somebody else. They can do that? They expected us earlier, Lorraine; a lot earlier. I told the man on the phone four this afternoon, maybe a Uttlelater. Guess they held it as long as should, didn 't want the room to go empty, lose money. Well, I don't see why Damn it, Lorraine, I'm piaeed off, too, but we uould have been here hours ago. Bounl

You don 't have to use swear words, it isn 't my fault. No? No. If we hadn't stayed so long at your aunts. Gordon. I had to stop ift to say hi at least. It wouldn't look right, and Dad out of town, I don 't stop for a few minutes. A few minutes? I couldn 't say no to dinner. Four houn, Lorraine! Aunt Gracie's alone. I feel sorry for her. But after dinner. We could have left. I'm supposed to be staying at home, Gordon. We shouldn 't have to be such a hurry to get anywhere, Aunt Gracie knows the movie doesn 't until eight. It wouldn 't look right, rushing off. It wouldn 't look right, it wouldD't look richt. Well it wouldn't! Lorraine, listen. Don 't be so stuck on your parents. One of these you've got to start making your own decisions. Don 't worry what they Do what you want to do. I am: I 'm here with you. But I don 't want to be rude to Aunt You could have made up an excuse to leave. Something we wanted to before the movie. Nothing so important. Oh Christ! What 's the big deal anyway? ... None, I guess; for you . Whatsamatter, Lorraine? Afraid to be away from mommy'? Lorraine 's face and c hest s t ing with heat. She presses her hands to cheeks. Her palms are sticky. h e r fingertips cool to her prickling skin. curled lip from Gordon. So little Lorrie 's afraid mommy wouldn't like it if she knew what baby daughter 's doing and Aunt Gracie might say something to that would give the wrong impression and boom! it 's all over for . naughty, naughty! Stop it, Gordon. You make me feel ... dirty. Or something. Gordon tiptoes his fingers across the rumpled black vinyl seat Lorraine 's exposed taut thigh - nauchty, nauchty- she draws grimacing, making tiny squeaks between her compressed lipsnauchty-Gordon teases, his fingers following Lorraine 's r e treat along, then at once making the jump to her thigh- naucht!- he an''""""'hard it jolts pain the length of her leg - teet - Lorraine jumpshrieks, at Gordon's hand. Right? You 're afraid, right? Don 't ! she screams. Don 't ! Aren 't afraid of the dirty old man Gordon, are you ? What are you doing? Please, why are you doing this to me? Gordon, aren 't like this! Gordon! When he sees that she is crying, small scrambling tear. nostrils

removes his hand from Lorraine 'a leg and grasps the steering wheel.

bead shakes slowly side to side. I'm sorry, jesus, I don 't know what got into me. She looks at him sidelong, tearfully, auspicious but clearly wanting to him. I'm sorry, Lorraine, please . . . . She hangs there for a few seconds between doubt and belief, afraid to wanting to forgive but not being able to understand, knowing only that in forgiving him she willloee the power to force an e:~:planaÂ to take her beyond fear or to take her . .. home. doesn 't want to go home. Not that, not bome. She is not brave but it's 8&ld he'â&#x20AC;˘ f10rr7, twloe - versus the ordinary, the undaring, the ~iatilllg . .. the boring .... All at onoe the tension relinquishes her body and she slumps against the her temple contacting the cold solid glass that separates her- ..tethe ~ht out of which the road continues endlessly, dazz!ingly to reel. Are you all right, he asks reedily. Curiously his voioe seems distant to her but it 's the Gordon she knows. lifts her bNd and nods and is relieved at his concern, at her own ability ~1pond positively, the world just beyond her body's surface softening, letting go, feeling her body lighten .. . . Come on, Lorraine, slide over here beside me .... Ah, that 'a better, now it . ... Look, I'm sorry I lost my temper. I was so bored at your 's-well not so much bored as . .. anxious, you know .. . wanting to going, get on with a beautiful weekend alone with you . . . I was eager, llaiWlt . . . then to find our room taken by someone .. . . That 'a OK, I guess . ... Hey, can't we get a room someplace else? He shrugs, bobbing his head. Maybe. I don 't know. Nothing so.isolated. as this, on the beach. Maybe in nell:t town. How far is that? Not far, I don 't think. Don 't have much gas left and I doubt there'll be a open this late. Keep your fingers crossed, huh? Don't worry, she says, brightening. I've got my rabbits foot. She scrounges e:~:citedly in her purse and brings it out into the hoary light. A worn scruffy lump of fur. Gordon eyes it and smacks his lips Didn't do much for the r abbit, now did it? Lorraine looks at him quizzically-rabbit?- it must be a little joke, a joke rathe r crude, obscure to her, but she smiles tentatively- rabbit? to say nothing, though, yes better to stay quiet, let things ride, 's all right again, let it ride . . .. But in the nell:t town, nothing more than a quarter mile Monopoly board motels green and red and white, low modern automobile-stuffed motels, NO VACANCY signs beaming, flashing, blinking, spelling it out in of suooessively-illuminated. tiny bulbs, NO VACANCY, the NO's con-

trasting in color with the VACANCY'S, green NO red VACANCY, blue orange yellow purplewhitevioletvermillion . . . NO VACANCY VACANCYNOVACANCY NO NO NONONO ... all they see are NO's, refusals, rejections, and Gordon pushes the rattling quivering Chevy the car is floating between the shoulder and centerline, it's craziness, building up again, Lorraine clutches her rabbits foot, blood and speed rising with each successive negative slap, ghastly shivering neon past them, warping in the curved corners of the windshield, stealing with their voices, thoughts, control ... the whistle of wind through wingwindows rises, shrills, cold mist hisses inside, Lorraine trembles, her arms briskly, Gordon is really bending into the wheel, accelerating, face bunching up in that compressed ugly mask of anger. angry this new terrifying Gordon twisting his fingers white around the serrated steering wheel, changed ... changed .... M-must be a convention or something, Lorraine offers timidly, ~:~u&~~......_ uncontrolla.bly now. her feet braced against the firewall, gripping the edge of the seat, clenching her fingersWhat're you doing? Hey! Lorraine's long fingernails painted silverish green are dug into cigarette burn holes in the vinyl upholstery tearing it open little by until her whole finger penetrates into the crumbly yellow foam ion ... hey!, she starts, realizes what she is doing, jerks her hand clasps them over her heaving chest: Oh jeez I'm sorry! I'm sorry! If this dump isn't in bad enough shape already! I 'm sorry. Gordon. I said I was sorry. Yeah, you 're aorryl lam! Yeah, well so am I. Real sorry. Lorraine is afraid to ask how he means that - is he sorry he brought along? is he sorry he even knows her?- she's afraid she knows how sorry, she daren't ask but: S-sorry I'm with you? Gordon? Wbat?-Oh ... no, no I guess not. I'm just sorry ... that it had to out this way, you know. Gordon, but we've still got the whole weekend ahead of us. Not much going for us tonight, huh? Gordon? He 's leaning forward, eyes narrowed, concentrating, watching sides of the road even though most of the town is already past and they shot into the fog and dark again, headlights straining dirty yellow feeble against the dense grey swirls coming in from the right, from ocean a hundred yards out there in the dark, in the fog , it could be they were going slower, the car not roaring, clattering, Lorraine heard, too, but Gordon doesn 't answer, doesn't h ear the strained Lorraine's voice so thin and tremulous, and the Chevy plunges

still picking up speed. Gordon? Could you . .. please? slow down? He glances to the right, almost directly at her but still doesn 't hear, 'tease off the accelerator, leans into it again as if his hawkish gaze away the fog. Gordon? she raises her voice bravely against the whine of the engine, the of wind, the rattles, creaks, rumbles , the smell of hot oil and rubber. please! He turns his head sharply toward her, stern blind perplexity on his face. What. His features are so strange ... distorted, shadowed . . . his eyes black ting sharp as shattered o bsidian cutting into her, so weird the green J~WWI<II.u.ug half his face horribly, the rest dark, unseeable .. . she has to away but she is acutely aware of his eyes still firing at her m

But he doesn 't slow and even though he ·s watching she can 't help it, the 's foot is in her hand her hand raises automatically to h e r mouth, the lip in dumb response protruding to meet the soft fur ... it ·s her old of childhood never lost, rubbing the soft trim of her pink bunny-print on her lower lip, rubbing anything soft on her lips, nylon slips, fuzzy, soft, soothing, she does it almost unconsciously even at her though she is careful not to do it when her friends are around , they 'd her, call her a baby .. . but she can 't help herself, she doesn 't want to it, she needs the soothing feel of something soft ... maybe Gordon ·s talking to her as if she were a baby, maybe she still is, it doesn 't she 's afraid , she begins to rub the rabbits foot lightly against her protruded lower lip, rubs it rapidly back and forth, even though he ·s her, she rubs and rubs . . . Gordon snorts-he is watching - h e 's with her, proved right-she 's ashamed but she rubs, already it ·s to soothe, to allay her nerves, to becalm , rubbing and rubbing

Out of the yellow-rimed blackness at the s ide of t he glistening hard black of rushing asphalt there emerges suddenly a dark shape e xpanding · into human form, a man, a black man his negroid feature s looming of bland surpri.s e then the mouth twisting open the arms rising reaching quickly desperately toward something between himself the onrushing hood of the charging Chevy a thud , the right front wheel bumping roughly, followed by the back wheel, Gordon wrests the wheel left , swerving,

but it 's too late too late, he doesn 't think of the brakes, he tries to see in the rearview but whatever is to see is rapidly receding into the dense redness left by taillights, blackness now beyond them, but Lorraine is twisted in her mouth open as if to scream but no sound coming only all the air in her she has seen the black man jump back from the Chevy as it passed then forward to the roadside where a black lump lay unmoving, she couldn't what it was, could've been anything, a sack, a dog ... a child ... . She seizes Gordon 's fisted upper arm but he shakes her roughly orr, not going to stop, not going to stop but actually going faster, aocJelEtra1WII abruptly, the car lights, drifting in speed, swaying from one side of the to the other, tires singing, the night now leaping upon them, rocketing into it, so fast the headlights are no use, have no reach, no to prevail upon the blackness that is swallowing them now, sucking into its chill, its fathomless deathly embrace, too late, Gordon ian 't goma stop, too late to stop, too late for anything but to continue, crazily, lessly.... The road twines sickeningly up a mountainside, dropa down again whiplash curves, returns to the salty breath of the ocean, on outward the headlights reflect off dingy sprays of wavecrests, water spits in windgusts sometimes spattering on the windshield, streaming to the corners blurring vision, and yet the steaming orange metal hulk grinda carrying the two of them deeper into silence, yes madness, sheer IWaGJ:ilolllll the front end of the car caSting right, then left, rebounding back to the hard, again, again, something's damaged, the suspension, ........................, going to break, send them off the road diving into the cold cold ocean, cart wheeling automobile first gouging a fender into the wet sand, metal tear away, glass shatter, lacerate, leaving a trail of slaughter, of outrageous, washed away before mourning by the relentless wavee, the taking them away, far away,_jnto the deep, no trace, too late Without warning, Gordon yanks the wheel right and the Chevy lunk.s off the road, skids sideways in the sandy road there, .. ~L-....~ruw11111 again, roars toward the ocean, around dunes and piles of ancient toward a tangled forest of gnarled strange trees and shrub, into the water in puddles lying shallowly about, splashing wide and white in thin sheets, flaring wings from under the wheels, they pull up now dry spot, a clearing grown over with scrub trees lashed into 2J'l:>teiiCI'I mannikins by virulent storms, they slow, finally creak to a stop, killed; and silence, silence silence huddles around them, dark overbearing limbs of uncanny headlights extinguished now, everything black except the slightly outlines of those trees, trees like human arms and legs aged and arthritic, reaching, enfolding . .. smothering .... Lorraine determines she must not think like this; trying to catch

she only gasps hoarsely. She is aware that Gordon is again watching his obsidian eyes staring, as if he could see, as if there really were some coming from somewhere, some light in this world, it 's all black, all -she is s till rubbing the rabbit 's foot on he r lo we r lip, realizes this, her hand into her small lap.

A dog, Gordon answers sullenly, too quickly, unconvincingly. I thought it might be aA dog; it was just a dog. I was so afraid, it could've beenA dog, Lorraine, that 's all. A dog, got it? Please don't be angry with me, Gordon. I know you think I 'm acting like . .. immature ... but I'm scared. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Gordon, please. Don 't start that again. Can't take a little kidding, huh? I hate it when you do that. Oh, gee, her hate. it when GordonDou'tl

Lorraine flails at Gordon with the side of her small fists, he grabs her and pulls her hard against him, she recoils, fabric tears, panic rips Lorraine 's ribcage, she struggles in a whirlwind of enervating , tries to fend off Gordon's hands, he 's going too far, he's hurting her, ~ ..........' I!S her so tightly she can't move, can't breathe, she 's trapped in his ......,nâ&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘uc. crushing under his weight pitching forward on her. What are you doing? Gordon, don't! Don't! Gordon don 't, Gordon don't - you sound like a windup doll, kid. Gordon, pl. . .e. Gordon please Gordon pleaseGonion, pl....r Lorraine is weeping spasmically, Gordon has torn her blouse, her rrana:ro1L1Dd leather skirt is bunched beneath her, she can 't get a hold on it, gropes but it 's impossible, Gordon 's hands paw everything out of the her panties, her favorites, the ones her mother gave her for her last t.tt"'t""'â&#x20AC;˘ it's amazing she's remembering the scene even while she's fightalmost blacking out, the panties with embroidered kittens on the left initials on kitten's sweaters for the days of the week, these panties with F on them, torn away, gone she thinks frantically but no, here they are, below her knee, stretching, binding her, if only she could reach . . . Gordon's pushing her legs apart, she can't move, struggles in a tiny 11mnn!!8BI8d j;~phere, her body, tears fling from her cheeks, her mouth open, flat in the tortured bloodless oval, can't scream, can't make a sound. 's pressing his mouth on hers, she's drowning, can't get air, she on saliva--his? her own?--his body against hers pressing her down, a one way, another high the other way, she's lost awareness of where her are, they 're like the strange trees outside ... her shoulder is

rhythmically po~ded into the door handle, her neck bent square the door, an impossible angle, impossible to breathe, to scream to move, anything but let Gordon move on her, his heavy body pounding hers . . . Lorraine is trying to push her long tapered fingernails Gordon's flesh, his coarse hairy flesh, thick ribs, he shakes her off, heavily, a hiss in his massive breathing, she can't get her hands free, get at his eyes, instinctively the eyes she wants so badly to tear out . . . too late, he's not going to stop, trouble, too late, trouble .... Gordon finishes with a groan animal, almost mournful, finishes and thrusts himself immediately away, sits upright behind wheel again, fumbles with his clothes. Lorraine slowly, cautiously, in her groin, her shoulder, heart, everywhere, draws herself shuddering heap and huddles against the door. From the dark figure behind the wheel comes a sound like a sniffle and a whimper, the opens for a moment then bangs shut. Lorraine is alone in the car, no so intensely afraid, she can breathe and begins to cry softly with her . over her face rocking gently forward and back. After a time she pulll hands away and tries in the impossible darkness to see them, she can his blood under her nails, his flesh , cells of his flesh dug out of his under her nails, yes even inside her now. now, trouble inside her. where she touches her belly not for the last time, trouble .... There is a scraping sound from the front of the car. She knows looking that it is Gordon rubbing sand on the fender, on the tire, water, washing blood ... the sound ceases, his vague form moves the woods off to the left ... Lorraine manages, summoning what she has, to push her door open and stumble out onto the puddled ground of the clearing. She sucks air between her teeth as water her shoes, low white patent pumps, shoes meant for a party, a Saturday Night Dance At The Armory ... ruined now, ruined . .. a her breast, an arm extended in front of her, she pushes blindly ""''v~oaâ&#x20AC;˘ cold steam of night, tripping over unseen obstacles, low roots and scrub grass, until her outthrust hand contacts one of the misshapen She feels her way around behind a clump of bushes there and shuddering, a tremor passing through her hips and shoulders, feels panties which are hung on one calf, almost not there, sticky, his them . . . she rips them off, clenching her teeth at the pain bolting her thighs and knees, the finality of tearing cloth ... and crying, and tries to urinate, desperately to force the water to flow, wash everything, every cell, all the trouble in her . . . but she knows it 'a she stands and leans on crossed forearms against the tree, chill flopping through the long tear in the front of her blouse, and she almost naked, waits until the world inside becomes less fluid, swirling, not so dizzying ... then she scuffles back to the Chevy, car, yes Gordon's car now colorless and dead. She touches the door it 's cold, icy, Gordon's inside, doesn 't matter that he's there, doesn't that she's naked, what matters now is sleep, she is so sleepy she could standing up ... she's in the car and Gordon's saying lD uae bull aod

her head no .... Get in the back, damn it. Lorraine chokes back a cry. It's OK. I'm sorry, I am, damn it. Nothing will happen, I promise. You in back, I'll sleep up here. I g o t a blanket out of the trunk, you use it. Go in the back. Obedient now, wanting sleep so terribly, she climbs over the seat and into the back. The blanket is there; she pulls it around h e rself and lies , legs curled, head bent against the door, she tucks the blanket her naked thighs growing sore, around the soreness of the shoulder it was struck against the door handle, sore, sorry ... but it 's all away now, the pain diffuses, glows through her body, flows out, flows in, absorbing the hurt, the fright, sleep soaking it all up, the , the slime, the cold, she's floating, drifting off, away . . . . From a dreamless cramped immobile sleep Lorraine is brought violently startled by a hand shaking her shoulder, the sore shoulder, pain into the joint ....it's Gordon ... her eyes are turgid and gritty the lids, her vision is dim, as if veiled and milky~. He doesn't or even look at her. She trembles in the cold but pulls herself up. It is dark and bleak outside, but the ebony trees of night are taking a shade and life; the sun is rising; thick clouds are rolling inland from the IUJL--tn some time last night the sky must have been clear, she'd thought seen the moon, the moon past the full and waning-and toward the inland, where the highway is, Lorraine surmises, a bank of grey mist lies low upon the clusters of manzanita and blackberry vines grown thick. What 's this ... Gordon tosses her skirt into her lap and the car, disappearing around a thicket of willows. Under the blanket draws the skirt over her knees, opens the blanket heavy and smelling of and mildew, and fastens the clasp of the skirt over her hip. She feels naked n ow than before, acu~ly exposed ... some whe re beyond the of the clearing are her panties.. . . rent and useless. She has a change 'C!CltiJLes in the trunk of the Chevy but Gordon is n ot here and she doesn 't to have to ask him to open it for her. She wonders abstractly where h e what he is doing- burying something? rags?-but she doesn 't really it doesn 't matter ... she shivers but it 's only cold, she's not afraid, 's nothing really to hurt her now, she has to look at it that way because true, she 's changed somehow . .. somehow she has gained not a know but a HDae . . . a sense of her world and herself, tells her without -"'u.1ua effort or expansion that the crisis is past ... all crises are past, all are transient, one must only wait, patience, until it 's ove r , this crisis, life .... With this she knows she has an advantage ... something that a part of her yesterday's waking morning has now been spent; today she accept the consequences of her d ecisions, and tomorrow . . . no one to on, shoulder the responsi bility, her life is her own from now on. Toward Gordon she feels nothing; no resentment, no fear , no t r ust; but nothJ.Dc.

She is in her place in the front seat when he returns, slides wheel and inserts the key in the ignition but doesn 't start the car, sits with his hand on the key, staring at the chenille skunk rotaq on its gold string tied to the rearview mirror ... Lorraine seee features the lines of a man aged twice his years . . . she sees this nothing, somethin~ of the same has happened to her as well, an metamorphosis has taken place in them both, but she feels nothing either; caught up together in that critical vortex, spun out of their and returned, naked, they are ultimately strangers, nothing to nothing to regret . . . . It wouldn 't make any difference if I apologized, would it, Gordon dully, his words clipped, flat, true. I want to go home, Lorraine replies without feeling it n~oesiU' supply the message implicit in that request: I will not ••• you acalJa. not reoocntse your e:d•tence, I am done with you u you are done Gordon nods and grinds over the engine. On the highway he Chevy up to the speed limit but no further. Mysteriously there is no the sheenless orange hood plows through bright fog, tires hum on asphalt ... rain begins to fall, tires sizzle, water drops plunk on the and vanish into steampuffs, the wipers slash the asterisk plops to the the windshield where they bluster into rain troughs, spit through the in the window beside Lorraine who sits hands in lap, empty of unbothered by the water spattering on her, experiencing time as nAi,th•IP' nor slow but merely as real, passing, something to be reckoned demanding infinite ease, patience, grace, hopelessness, impossible to wait, passing away with the instantaneous bits of her nascent life in creation within the calculus of the serpent in the original garden . Beoau.e I wanted to.

At the gas station, in the washroom mirror, Lorraine ex.~un:inea l bruises on her shoulder and legs . . . she will refuse to explain them parents, to anybody . . . . Nigh of ten gallons, ethyl, that 's five dollars worth, young man Yeh, jus ' right, thankya. Oh an ' careful drivin ' in this fog, son. accidents last night. Accidents? Where? Up th ' road aways, don't rooolloot essactly. What, what happened? Can 't say as I know for sure, my radio 's all buzz-noise. Ah, cars inter telephone poles, runnin · inter each other, fences, inter folks walkin ', 'salways something, y 'know, in th ' fog , dark an ' slick an· all. be careful anyhow, y'hear? Young spats speedin ·. think y 'got it all control fine and dandy ... . sssft! bang! deader 'n a doorchock, jus ' like that. Easy, hey, son. You 's got a real pretty wife there, wouldn 't have nothin' happen, y 'know.

Without word or outward sign exchanged, Gordon and Lorraine are aware of each other and this dilating anxiety .... they are 1111'018Chllng the scene of last night's collision, collision with whatever it breathing falls into cadence shallow and quick, their heads _..., â&#x20AC;˘.,.,.:r drawn toward the left side of the road . . . realizing he's slowing does not want to slow, Gordon gives it more gas, the Chevy chugs and rate ... watching again, apprehensive, his foot cramping unconoff the gas, the car slows ... they are past the curves, at the of the pass, the comforting safe miles of pavement left behind, PJ'Oi&Cltlintg the scene, THE SCENE they can see it in large block letters, SCENE replaying in their minds, the man, his panic, jumping forward back then forward again ... the soft thud , right wheel thumping then rear, hard swerve to the left . . . that uncanny thud .... causing goosnow, the town coming up, a mileage marker, 2 MILES, a long way though, too long, not long enough ... coming up now on THE ... dread fills the car, heating the air, blood pumping hard in the arteries hard as sticks, passing the spot, the exactGordon pulls his eyes away, toward Lorraine who is straining, risen up the seat, her eyes dilated and dark and scared, she looks sharply at casting fear deep into him, he writhes, he has seen it, too, they avert eyes from each other, but . . . . They have both seen it, seen and undeniable, the small figure four' traced in thick white chalk, chalk blurred by rain , white seeping toward the edge of the road, pink trickling where chalk has mixed with dark brown splattered thickly, now dissolving in the rain, streaming the asphalt into the ditch where the black man leapt back while they thud , leapt forward , too late, leaping again and again, leaping again leaping . . . too late, they have both seen it, the chalk shape of a human , yes a child . . . . From somewhere in the corner of Gordon's vision runs a lean black man, hand pointing, he 's shouting, stopping, running back toward a Gordon hadn 't seen before . . . Gordon floors the accelerator, the bumps and growls recalcitrant then surges forward once and once grabbing for the shining black strip receding ahead, forever receding, Chevy 's only purpose to consume it as fast as possible, as much as endlessly ... . Lorraine is rubbing her rabbits foot on her lip, she is rubbing desper.. . Gordon studies her in profile, his eyes harden .... Ob!

Lorraine stares in surprise, uncomprehending at the furry object in her Âˇ with the middle and index fingers of her right hand she tenderly her pouched stinging lower lip ... the fur has worn from the foot exposing a long c urved sharp object she has not seen before . . . bas hooked her lip, actually punctured her lip, she tastes blood, real blood, own blood on her lips, and its the rabbits foot , the silly little furry thing

she has carried so long, soothing, comforti ng, turned against her, it punctured her lip, brought blood, pain, surprise, why Why, it 's a rabbit 's foot! Gordon screws up his brow. Sure, what'd you expect? A rabbit 's foot is a rabbit 's foot. A rabbit 's foot? Rabbit apostrophes, possessive. A rabbit hopped on that foot once, know. A rabbit'• foot . . . . . . . uch, a rabbit's foot! She dangles the thing by two fingers at arm 's length, rolls down window, tosses it away . . . rid of it! ... she rolls up the window, Gordon I• lauchiiJ.c. cruelly lauchinc, mooldq her, lauchinc at iguoranoe, her lnnooeuoe, if •he bad a cun rtcht now •he'd put a throuch his bead, abe promi... herself abe would if abe bad a cun now . .. but she is laughing h erself, yes laughing at herself, her ity ... what did she expect, a rabbit 's foot, ridiculous how she could stupid, dumb, innocent .. . she laughs until it hurts, Gordon 's Ia~.;tuntu. too, both of them are laughing so hard they're crying, their eyee watering and yet they laugh , blinded by tears they laugh and laugh, so goddamned insanely hard they don 't see the police sedan until it's behind them, twin red lights flashing starkly, suddenly stripping them their laughter leaving only stupid grins on their faces, and they 're pended forever like that, frozen with lips pulled back over teeth, brimming with salt water, water on their cheeks , water dripping off c hins, they 're caught in the twilight of madness and joy, and lucidity terror, drea.ms and futures shot absolutely, irretrievably to the far vortez infinite parallel lines ... tonight 'a dance, yesterday's dance, lost to age, another life, another conception of salvation, gone .. . .

During the months of the Korean War, a mother of 39, and Josie eleven-year old daughter, lived in Pelzer, South Carolina. Across from railroad tracks, mill children waited on their porches at dusk for their to oome home. Lined up, their heads made steps. Until the mill closed after the war was over, this scene was recurrent. Nothing appeared to but because the two service station owners built almost identical homes during that time, Louise and Josie would come to the pale shades of green and pink belonged to war-time. The mother and the child did not keep track of the number of men the .....m..._r.... r reported were falling in the war. There was no way to tell how of those who had wanted to die had died, or how many of those who not wanted to die had died, or how many who had shot off their own toes their back yards with shotguns were sick to death of not wanting to die. Still, there was consolation in the field of daisies across from the house. later, when Louise and Josie would happen to go as tourists to the MnAt..,.rv in Arlington, Virginia, they would feel betrayed by white crosses so much like a field of daisies. But now, the mother, who slept on a day bed in the living room, woke morning to spend five minutes looking out the window to the field the slightest wind moved a thousand heads. And Josie, from her , was looking too-the single eyes of yellow. blinking. In winter, they apparitions, in memory, all white.

In the space Louise's husband once occupied were piles of ladies ' of underwear, boxes, and an empty space on the day bed where second pillow used to be. The odor of woman was like a third person . knew he would hate the house arrested in this mess, and their IIMJ.wl.edaoe of his hatred was another odor. Often over meals Louise said to Josie of their oousill four times removed, Harry gets back without getting himself blown to smitherines, we'll

11111,.,........,,.,., ,

clean this place up and throw him a whambam party, whatcha say?" Josie nodded. And Harry did get home much later and they did clean up and throw him a party. but he had lost too much sense to notice and sat in m armchair, waving. Saturdays, to make time meet, Louise gave violin lessons to a girl ahe said was hopeless. Louise made Josie take lessons with the girl. "You plaJ decent, " she said. " Keep my interest up." Between Josie and the girl, tbeJ made Louise oonoentrate, all songs in three-quarter time. Sundays they went to church and liked each other in the pews better than they liked each other in the house because in church they sang, soprano, one alto, and there was no question who would sing which ainoe nature had sealed in each a particular range. Afterwards they ate chicken, and it was fortunate that Louise liked the breast and Josie liked tbe inner part of the wing. On Sundays, too, Charlie, Harry's father, came visiting, even though be did not present him.self but parked his car below the rise in the road or behind the cluster of trees, and when he oould hear Louise and Josie ooaiJUr, in the kitchen or pulling the shades for their naps, he wrote meesagee in dirt of their drive with a stick One Sunday he would write: I WAS The next he would follow with WHERE ARE YOU? Or he would ask, YOU LADIES EVER STAY HOME? And follow that with GOD IS Josie waited to see HARRY DIED, even though Charlie was a farmer and would never think to write a mesaage like that. Other days of the week, Louise taught music in the Anderson Public Schools, aohools clustered on the map in the kitchen like shoes a bed. When Louise first began to teach, she got lost on the oountry and came home crying, her autoharp vibrating on the kitchen table she dropped it. Now she knew where to go. Every child in the oounty play a song on the autoharp. They sang along. "Whispering hope, o weloome thy voioe," and when they had the whole song straight, Louise the autoharp down on the table so gently not a string moved, and said was bored to tears. Would he ever OOJDe baokf No. Louise grew a layer of fat almost as tranaluoent as a batiste oat>w~m. dress on a girl who has waited too long to be saved under the mi.nUitelr' hands and under the minister 's robe: water. a 路 prophecy: the body is so it falls in time from the bone. Josie refused to get saved. She took walks in the woods and n..,llcl:ll!llll being a ballerina who does not need toe shoes. Harry wrote almost everyo ne was dead. _" P .S .. " he added, "Not me," Charlie drove all the way up their drive to say "Thank God" in hearing range. Charlie learned, in time, to oelebrate by playing c.ut:ICJI.AU11 1 the silenoe Harry afterwards required, and went ahead and invested automatic milking machines, oontributing to the war boom. Louise rented. While her husband would not oome back, there was a

the outside chance. Women who bought their own homes did not IDdenrtand men. Relatives at the Easter reunion said she would be a renter her life and they said she would have to stop pretending to be so young if was going to look like that: legs toned and eyes toned down. Because it was a custom, Louise and Josie took to the reunion a cake they baked for the oldest living relation, who said she would not die, yellow orumbe sticking to her lips like pollen, her insides, they said, absolutely shreds.

she think she 1•? " Louise asked, and they forgave her When he waa alive, what did he dof A little of Ull• and that; 1D bed, the other.

More sensual than practical, he had left Louise house-poor. This one sat the front of a field . Far back were the railroad tracks, trains keeping so to a schedule that Louise felt it as an affront. He had taught her to be at any time, and then, in those days, if two small boys had put their to her chest, between the breasts on the flat bone, they would have heard bumming; they would have jumped back as if they might get run over. two boys who were almost men came over on Saturdays to out the grass, they wouldn't have thought, looking at her, of whistling. No one knew flat bone had once almost split like a tie. And then, at the height of summer, when Louise 's teeth itched, the .wi.Llu•n~ showed up. It was his house, his doors and windows and clustered And, in a way, it was his music trying to float from the house and not it at all because Louise, in a fit, had said Josie and the girl would, if it her, learn to play Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and the girl's , who waited in the oar in the drive, sent in $2 .1>0 instead of the usual not hearing in Louise 's lessons the tremolo of hope. New fat on Louise's upper arms quivered; she rubbed too much rosin on bow and still, in the heat, it dried out. Josie got slapped on her bare legs many times so softly that Louise's hand on her legs was a counterlandlord came, and he wasn't anything like the Waa he, in hla da7, what the7 oall a 'Daiaral'f LoaiH had put the pillow at the foot of the bed and hooked her toe. on headboard. That helped.

The landlord knocked one Saturday during a music lesson. The external

9lew would have made the neighbors think of a Jehovah 'a Witness without a •

suit, the arranged hair, the valise. Josie and the girl who did everything a second too late rested their on the metal music stand. They heard mumbling and their own white blouses rubbing on their shoulders, then Louise crying out, "You're

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He wasn't. He walked past the space heater and through the space where french doors once hung and past Josie and the girl, Louise running behiDd him, one hand at her neck as if she were closing a robe. She rolled her eyes a Josie who was not looking, transfi,xed instead by his suit, which seemed apart from his motion -containing his fat and possibly a million tiny broken veins such as the ones the afternoon sun caught in his eyes-a suit at herring-bone and leg creases and grey pearl buttons to go with his eyes-' too close together like "o 's " in the word " look. " Then they were past them and into the hall and Josie heard Louise puab aside the chenille bedspread which hung over the entrance to the connecting hall. Beyond the curtain was the closed room. Josie imagined that tbe peacock, whose tail feathers splayed the bedspread, had folded like an

aooordian. "See what I mean!" Louise said. In the hall leading to the one room they did not rent, Louise had stored her husband 's goods- everything he had owned, even though none of it wu worth saving, and so she had saved it all. It took up the whole hallway, stacked and piled, uneven shapes in the half-light from the dining room.

a..-- pme.-

Bow did he die aad what w- LoalM'â&#x20AC;˘ reaoUon' CoaHqaeD~ to ~ had . .~Âˇ~. . . . Loai8e, oa ...IDe hila aad U.. eola' of Ilia blood poarblc from a hole a .,.. made, Uch&eaed her mDMlM unW ~7 held aad ezploded. Her bod7 roelled. .............. ~IDNIVN, henoe her earnll~ la7er offM, ........ neh a u... Ia &117 fnhl'e.

............

"It can't be helped," the landlord said. "I need to see to things," and he moved aside and went past Josie in the doorway and sat in a chair, filing bia nails and waiting. " Well for Christ's sake, help me," Louise said, and Josie, followed by uie girl, put down her violin and began to carry boxes and suits and hunting gear out of the hallway and into the dining room. As they piled his thi.nga around the piano, the landlord watched and hardly moved, sweating in the heat of his still weight. Louise cursed, she said, ''My back is killing me." When she looked at her watch, she said, " Oh my God," and scooted the girl out to her father. ''Tell him we did theory,' ' she called, ''and nevermind the money.' ' When everything he had owned was out in the bright light of the c:iininC room, Louise pushed back her hair and said to the landlord, " Whatever it ia, I hope it's worth it. " He got up from the chair and disappeared behind the door and didn't come out until it was almost dark. Louise and Josie were eating when be came back through. All the time he had been in the room, he had not made a sound, and now, Louise and Josie, tired from listening to nothj.ng, had almost forgotten their own voices. The food tasted like nothing. Then, at the front door, he turned to say to Louise, looking at her without moving bia head or his eyes, " My wife died in that room, " and then their mouths tasted

he drove away, Louise sat at the table, beating on it with a spoon,

to herself, ''My God, My God.' ' Josie, by herself, moved the beback to the hallway and pulled the bedspread straight again, the in the muted light. came all summer and into fall, except that some Saturdays he did not and the Saturdays he stayed away had no pattern to them. He did not was coming again or anything about when he would stop coming. thought each time was the last and put her husband 's belongings and pulled the curtain. Each time she moved them out again she said to -..•.unJJ·u "I can't do this much longer." girl who took violin lessons decided to stop taking them and Josie, no job to do now that the girl was gone, put up her own violin and the by Mendelssohn. and Josie bad little to say to each other about the landlord, about What they thouaht about, they thought about alone in bed. Harry came home and Charlie stayed with him on Sundays and did not any mesaages. But what Charlie did was expected and even Harry, like uuoornJKLJl of himself, was not a surprise. was little things Josie noticed. The landlord 's grey suit seemed each to contain more cloth. And Louise covered her arms because she was her fat. They were growing thin together. Indian summer day, the landlord took off his suit coat, and once it helped Louise move her husband's things to the dining room around One other night when Louise was hungry before she and Josie had to move the things back to the hallway, they ate with his belongings and it seemed he had come to dinner. landlord always brought the valise, and both Louise and Josie that, after a time, it began to looked stuffed when he left. The first that it seemed to Louise he had something in the valise, she called to from the oouch, "So what did she die of?" because now his silence was a quarrel between them. •'Of suffering," he said. "Foot!," cried Louise, " My foot!" And he slammed the door as he left. "I don 't like him," said Josie. " Like! Like! " Louise's voice had thinned with her body; it was one Then, when even he could see she was tired, the landlord consented one to try to walk over and around the husband 's things and get in without moving them. And that evening, he stayed for dinner. Louise said such as, "I get tired of all that driving around," and "There's just so much can do with kids, and then that 's it." And he said, "I can imagine," and bad," of the food, and "I could help you niove all that stuff out to the

What alsea had the huaband worn'! Coat: 48; ahoea: USA.; aooka: atretohable; llhirt: 181At; tee-llhirt: larp;

bJ.a favorite food wullteak; he liked to .t.Dc ba' wun'' cood at it; M LouiN and .Joaie; he never did di.oover wh7, ezactl7, he'd been bcln; when it ended, he had one minute in which to be •urprlHd, and M that minute tn.teacl to notloe the •hape or LouiN'• hipe, boDH inward, ae •he ran up to him.

That night they moved everything to the garage, and when they all arranged, Louise noticed that it had begun to rain, and she took one

husband's coats off a hanger and gave it to the landlord to wear, and be it home. With the hallway empty, Josie kept the light on, and for the first she looked through the keyhole of the locked door. In morning light, she saw was bright , even with the shade drawn. Nothing left in the all but a pair of shoes, blue and painted, with carved toes curved up and low, wooden, aligned on the wood floor, pointed toward a corner. "Look! " she called, and when Louise came, they both tried to once, and then they looked at each other. After a time, Louise took Josie's room and Josie slept on the day And when the landlord came on Saturdays, Louise gave Josie money movies, and when Josie came home, she found them talking in the room, and Josie went to look in her old room, at the pillow down at the the bed. The room smelled to her like all the weight they had lost. When he went, he took the shoes, and he never came back. Louise, days, would wrap her arms around herself and, while passing by a wall. herself into it. She said one day, "Let's go see what Florida is They moved and they took all of the husband's belongings and them in the new house Louise rented. She taught in a city school and have to drive far. Josie began to get the shape of a woman, and Louise fatter. Only sometimes then did she run her body against a wall passing by. And Josie and Louise both had beds of their own. Charlie died, but only after Harry died. " Of wha,? " Louise Charlie. But he didn 't answer. and Louise dreamed once that Harry had while dancing, his feet of painted wood. And Josie, who had never seen her father 's body undressed in life death, asked: Would he ever come back? Of courN be would.

crew is sitting around the hootch. It is hot in there, but at least it's The radio is playing a Jimi Hendrix song. "Castles In the Sand," and crewmen of the track, ONE-TWO (US Army MI591A1 Armored Carrier or APC), are pleasantly stoned on beer and some very tlne while cleaning their weapons. The machine-guns and rifles lie in either in tube of diesel fuel or on OD green towels, drying. sits in the doorway, looking out at the mountains, bobbing to the music and working the bolt on his M-16. Supersport is the of the platoon; he can drive through a minefield with absolute impunity. laPllaii1ed it once by saying, "it always happens to the other guy." He is Bupersport or "SS" because his real name sounds like " Chevelle. " PariA-fi&Il , a slow moving Oak.ie, is up to his elbows in diesel, searching He rarely has anything to say and prefers not to have his fatigues Extremely dependable and gullible, he can be persuaded to keep you on your guard shift while you fall asleep. driver, Captain Nice, AKA Frank Frick, is looking through a " magazine, reading up on hollow-point bullets. He is always and greasy. He got his name because the platoon already has a tanker "Pigpen. " Nice claims he was a hit-man for the Post Office in real life. walk into the Poet Office at Ft. Sills, •• he would say. ''rip a poster off and walk out. •• When someone gets angry at him, he is called by his Dame, Frick. Pineapple, AKA Larry Kai, ex-SDS, ex-Resistance, ex-student in ilalnitiies, University of Hawaii, took a long drink out of his warm Schlitz •annn1t1no~ that he was getting out of the 'Nam in 6 months, 3 days and a He hates himself for liking that Tom Jones song about the "green grass of home. " "All power to the Cripples! " he yells. then, Paz, giving the traditional Black Power salute to Supersport aleps over him, announces that he has found a punji-pit just outside the and very soon he will stick his foot in it and get out of this Army. Paz is from the ONE-THREE and is Kai 's chief competitor getting-out sweepstakes. No one in the crew has seen a real punji-pit, traps being uncommon on the DMZ, so they press him for details.

''I ain't telling you sorry muthas a damn thing," he says, "it's my out of here, and I'm going to take it. " "Is is filthy?" Kai asks. "If it is, I'd like to step in it myaelf. "Step in it?" SS says. "Shit, man, they'll probably put some green on your foot and send you right back with a note telling the C.O. you should walk it off! ' • ''Or, your foot will swell up. get gangrene in about 2 seoonds, and it'll too late to save you and the next thing we know, we're listening to a Chaplllll telling us that we'll have to keep on with the job of living. " This last is a slow drawl by Papa-san, who, on occassion, will make the little "Just let me see the pit, Paz, " Pineapple says, just a litUe irrllt.atlllll The 12th Cavalry is the only Cavalry unit on the DMA. One troop~ APC's and Tanks. The M-48 Tanks have one 90MM cannon, one My machine-gun, and one M-60 Q,axial machine-gun under the turret. APC's have one My caliber up front and two M-60 machine-guns on side. Metal on the Move. The net firepower obtainable is akin to the first minutes of the Apocalyse. The extravagance of the US in waging war mind-boggling. Someone figured that it took $500 to kill one NVA or soldier and only 87~ for them to kill an American. The NVA is the orinala foe of the 12th Cavalry and they meet largely by aooident in the summer spring months on the plains and hills of Con Thien. Neither'side has any victories. In 1969, the War on the DMZ is at a lull because the have pulled out. Bayonets have not been issued to the 12th. The strength of the US despite the pullouts is about 800,000 men, not the Data Processing Center personnel in Saigon. Ho Chi Minh dies in summer of '69 and the troops brace for an invasion from the North that make the '68 Tet Offensive look like a boy soout nature hike. Meanwhile, and squad think of ways to get out of the Army with some "Well, here it is. " The "pit" was about the size and depth of a shoe-box. About bamboo stakes, sharp, but very old and brown, lined the bottom. This wu first punji-pit Kai had seen since Basic Training and it did look sinister. hole was half-covered with twigs and long decayed brush. They were rioe paddy dike just outside the barbed wire. "It looks kind of old," Kai said. Sgt. Stiles called to them from perimeter. Kai waved back. "Well. Paz? You 20nna steo in?" "Hell yes, just watch me." He stood looking at the foot-deep hole high diver at Acapulco. ' 'Should I take my boots off?" Paz asked. "No, its too obvious; besides, Stiles is watching us now, don'\ suspicious." Stiles shouted again, waving his arms. The sun bore down them. Pineapple was feeling queasy, Paz was breathing hard. Freeze "Hey man, I'm going to see what the fucka wants. I'll walk away, you can ·s tep into the pit. " Pineapple turned. ''This is INSANE, •• Paz aaid. He lifted his right foot and jammed it into the earthen shoe-box. Paz followed Kai back to the perimeter, shaking his head. A

the wire was made by putting a two by four over it. Stiles watched, on hips and feet apart. Classic D .I. Stance, the four-in-the-morning -'""'"'• used when a trainee's shit was weak. " Mutha-fucking-damn! It crumbled." "The punji-pit was probably here when the French were, Paz." "Cheap, no workmanship ... no PRIDE." ''They just don 't make punji stakes like they used to," Kai said. ' 'That WAS how they used to make them! " Paz laughed, balanced on the and croeaed. the wire. "Hey... what's going on, Sgt. Stiles! " Paz said, taking the initiative. "You two just stepped on your dicks." Handa behind his back now, rocked on his heels. •'What?' ' Kai said, ignoring Stiles as he and Paz picked the board up and the Concertina wire with their boots. They walked toward the hootch, board between them, passing Stiles. "No one will believe this shit, Kai. " "I saw it and I can't believe it." "You'd think the only Punji-Pit in I Corps would ... " "Yeah." They chucked the board into the trench next to the hootch and past Stiles. " Hey, shitbirds, you two just showed every gook in Vietnam the way this place!" Stiles shouted. •'They already know, Sarge,'' Kai pointed at the Mam rna-san standing in doorway of the senior NCO hootch. They kept walking, with Stiles llllll",..nnu, to the mess-tent. " Hey man," Paz said to Stiles, " don't hassle me, this has been a really . ,•.--. ..nn day. I don't think I can take any lifer bullahit. " "He's crazy, Sarge," Kai explained, "I'll take him away, I'm the only who can oontrol him. " "0-r-r-r-r" growled Paz, a look of true unbalance crossing his face. " Heel, boy, heel." Kai oommanded. They walked into the mess-tent, was ready. 8tatt Sgt. Stephen B. Stiles knew his duty. He knew the hippies called "pig" and he didn 't care. This was his battle. The jelly-asaed dope freaks Uut Army had to be dealt with. He wore the Drilllnatructor patch on all of uniforms; he felt that it forced a certain desirable aocial distance. The was falling apart. Hippie shit was all over this 'Nam: the beads, the glaseee, the peace symbols painted on everything, and the crazy It was time to oome down hard on that shit. A man oouldn 't give an any more without someone asking "Why?" Stiles was a 28 year old man from South Carolina. Paz and Kai paused in their quest for the magic medical discharge and , one day, to freak Stiles out so badly that he'd leave them alone. Kai disarmed a fragmentation grenade by exploding the tuae and then ..,,..UIM: the entire asaembly back together again. The bomb looked like any grenade, but was a dud. Kai, Paz and two people from the walked into Stiles ' hootch with the pin pulled and bent at a

wierd angle. They pretended to be analyzing the problem. "Hey Sarge, can you help us put this pin back in the grenade" asked, showing Stiles the pin and the grenade, the spoon-safety de1ore-d. Stiles said, "Give it here. " Kai opened his palm and the spoon flew off, the grenade clicked armed itself. Paz yelled, the two from the ONE-THREE made a sudden towards the rear door. Stiles BOLTED for the front door and was nearly before the spoon hit the floor. At the threshold, he stopped, with ears shoulders hunched, eyes closed, and dove flat into the powdery red Counting to three, he waited. Suppressed giggles came first, then uUiu.wiiUIII laughter from the hootch. Stiles got up and looked inside; they were The oolumn of tracks moved swiftly through the flatlands of "Market Place " on a road about 4 kilometers from the DMZ. Long and overgrown, it was miraculously unmined and provided the pleasure of straight and level riding; soon, they would have to go back the terraced paddies and suffer the jolting ride again. Stiles, in the vehicle, waved the oolumn to a herringbone-formation stop. The C.O. a map bearing. The purpose of these "missions" was a mystery to Kai. Being a oog the machinery of War, he never did know exactly what the machine doing. That was one of his major gripes and it bothered him that the never told his track oommanders anything more than the route and ' 'to their eyes open. " It was rumored that the Cav was not on any status in Battalion Headquarters, therefore, no one thought of them as an eff1sctitll force. They were never used for assaults or as support for infantry than to give them a ride once in a while. In Da Nang a few months ago a looked at his shoulder patch and asked if he was in the Army Band. The did nothing but patrol all day and sit all night. Paz dismounted from ONE-THREE and walked over to Kai 's track, throwing him a C&Jo.teen.; "Have some water, " Paz said, "guaranteed dysentery or better hepatitis. I got this from LZ Sharon and they tell me everyone has Y Jaundice." Kai drank eagerly from the canteen and saw himself on the good HOPE, anchored in Da Nang Harbor, being tended to by a red-headed Ah! he oould say some carefully rehearsed things in his delirium, stuff "They got Joe!" "Take that you Oinks! " " More Ammo! " " I don't care myaelfl" Kai and Paz wanted to oontract some disease, and, if possible, serious enough to put them in a hospital and maybe all the way over to Zama, Japan. They believed that medicine and rest oould cure anâ&#x20AC;˘lrlhinâ&#x20AC;˘ short of cancer and they were willing to take their chances. Stiles signalled to start up. Kai dropped back into the cupola and grimly waited the oonvulsions to oome. It was dark now, and the oolumn pulled around into a huge circle "laager. " The NDP (Night Defensive Position) was reached and the settled in for the night, digging machine-gun emplacements, setting up RPG screens (Rocket Propelled Grenades), putting out trip flares

and assigning guard watches. With night came the mosquitoes. Kai and Paz had long ago quit taking Malaria pills, in a half-enthusiastic bid for the d.iaeaae, but it was too :.-•~•-o.u.fS and terrifying to have the mosquitoes have their way with them. Vietnamese mosquitoes weren't your regular street-punk variety, were the strong arm boys of the insect Maf"1a whose bites raised large CIIL.VIltlOlre&

Kai detailed Supersport to go to Cam Lo each morning with the troop to get ice. This was strange-looking ice with tunny dark spots.

JDe~S~M'lll!~r

it melted, they filled their canteens. Nothing happened. The water did ,_,,WJJLUK to their health; it anything, they got better. They were as healthy as

Stiles called a meeting at the Tank, ONE-SIX. SS and Kai went over. "We're going to get hit tonight, " Stiles said. "I want My percent ,. .~J:les and one man from every squad for an ambush patrol. •• "Christ! Where'd you get this information? Intelligence hasn't been light once in the eight months I've been here. I ain't pulling no A.P. or My percent watch tonight, we 're short-handed on my track as it is, ·· Kai said. ''The tuck you won't, I'll take SS and Sgt. Cooper will take the patrol out. I'd better see two men on guard tonight, Pineapple, or its LBJ tomorrow. " "LBJ " is Long Binh Jail. "Fuck-it. I ain't doing it." Kai said quieUy. " Hey man, its no hassle, " Supersport interrupted. " I need the field time, love A.P 's ... they're so . . . uh . . . you know ... REALISTIC." "Meet at my track at 2100 hours, SS, you're carrying the M-60, " Stiles aid, barely able to keep calm. "What time is that?" SS asked. "Nine o 'fuckin clock!" Stiles yelled. He walked toward the C.O. 's track in the center of the laager. "So realistic," Kai said, feeling some sadness, but moeUy anger. "He's going to turn you in again man," Paz said, " and this time he ain't ~going to the L .T. " " Fucking pig, all out to get some medals. Aas-kisaing bastard, never aw anything more serious than a week-old dead gook and he 's telling us we're going to get hit tonight. Ahhh ... we gotta get out of this Army. man, •• Jtai said. "Think you would have shot yourself like the Indian did?" Paz asked, banding Kai a can of 7-UP. "No man, " Kai answered, " I wouldn 't have the guts, a man oould get killed it he shot himself. · · " Yeah, I can't understand it, " SS said, ' 'That was a shitty thing to do. I wonder if they're gonna keep him in the Army. " "Probably not, SS, " Kai said, "he'll get an Undesirable Discharge, you Jmow, mental reasons. · · "Hell, right now, a Discharge would be very desirable, " Paz said, "any kind of discharge. " "He didn't see any action, not like we did. You think he was scared when

he done it?" SS said. Kai sipped the soda, throwing the metal tab toSS who was making hatband, " no, not scared, " he said, "just lonely because no one paid attention to him, too gung ho." "You put him on point more times than anyone else, " Paz said, â&#x20AC;˘ wanted him to get hurt?" " No, he always volunteered, even begged me, guess he wanted to point man for the Universe. I want to get out of this Army, bad." " Me too. I'm slowly losing my interest in this job," Paz said. "Your INTEREST? " Kai raved, " the Army fucked all of us over, are we now? A pack of ANI-mals! We can't pass a bush without wanting piss on it, or say two words without saying "fuck. " Fuck goddamn shit. the fucking pigs that will survive. The difference between Lifers and ua that we smoke and they juice. " "There it is, beer is survival, " Paz said, looking at a bush and wanting piss. "I rest my case. Think, man, think, We gotta get out! " Kai looked Supersport closely; SS felt he had to answer fast. " You know, " Supersport mused, " when I left the States in L.A., the person I saw was Jimmy Durante, he was in a wheelchair and looked prune. Wot a bummer. " Kai and Paz looked at one another, then at Supersport, who weakly. " Do me a favor, " Kai said to Supersport, " on your way home, forget to jaywalk. " Kai, who was sleeping in the cargo hold directly behind the driver's and under the command cupola, woke up to chaos. The f"lfty-caliber firing insanely with no breaks to cool off. He sat up, head unclear and ringing painfully, pushed the cargo hatch open. He saw Papasan wildly swinging the barrel in a wide arc. To the right, he saw Stiles doing same thing. The perimeter's guns opened up just about the time mastered his bewilderment. Papa-san suddenly stopped f"lring. Kai, who already out of the track and running to the machine-gun position to the stopped and turned. Papa-san had jumped off and was running with " Where the hell are you going?" Kai yelled. " With you, the fifty 's jammed," Papa-san answered, voice on the edge

pani?;FIX IT, you FUCKER!! '' Kai screamed, terrified and feeling the whizz by and hearing ric hochets. ''I don 't know how!' ' Papa-san cried. Kai grabbed him by the shirt pulled him to the track. They climbed quickly into the cupola. Kai oounted five both to calm down and also to guard against a cookoff round in chamber of the big gun. He opened the ammo feed. Empty. No &mLIDlmi'Uoll The gun had stopped simply because it ran out of bullets. A rocket scJ1'88iabl over their heads and exploded behind them. Kai shivered, his trembled. Very slowly, ignoring the noise around him, he broke open a

ammunition and loaded the fifty. "There, you fucker, it 's fixed, start firing this bastard and don't oome down until you fire up our whole supply. '' Kai jumped off the track and to the emplacement. Captain Nice had disappeared. Kai looked around as pulled the bolt back on his machine-gun. A riot of lethal tracer rounds, ones going out and green ones ooming in. He jumped in surprise as he clods of dirt spray in his faoe. He opened fire at once. Muzzle flashes to right so he let a long burst go. Parachute flares lit up the landscape in a dreamy white light. Was it his imagination or was he seeing people IIAJÂŤHr>JG his position three at a time? The sensation he felt was hypnotic, would fJ.re at the three men, carefully oontrolling the rate of fire, they fall, then stand up again. He would fire and it would start again. His hurt from the smoke that was beginning to blow towards him. Before ooming to Vietnam, someone had told Kai that firefights rarely more than two minutes and you never know where the shots are ooming until the last moment, when one is in your body and you 're fiying He had fought in several of these fights, but this was different. It like the Korean War; he told himself that if he heard bugles, he would and run. After firing about 2,000 rounds, Kai decided he had had enough. The figures were no longer standing up, yet the bullets came just the same. felt no one was REALLY shooting at him. The machine-gun was red hot now oooling. The hole was oomfortable and maybe, if he stopped being a nothing more would happen. The firing was still going on in the sections of the perimeter as intensely as in the beginning; RPG's into the laager, ripping the night. Bullets make at least two kinds of sounds when they pass overhead. To they sounded like someone snapping his fingers or like bees. He made oomfortable, looking at the black, starless sky. He locked and loaded M- 16. No sense being foolish, he thought, he'll just blow away anyone showed his leering faoe over his hole. Stiles called over from his track, for more ammo. No one answered. Kai yelled back, "Get yer own Suddenly, a scream. So loud, so filled with human suffering that the stopped. It was an eerie time, like the shattering of expensive glass in The ripples of silence shot through the marrow.For an instant or a minute, both sides stopped firing. Branoo, the Mexican on the ..~:r~''.u.''"'"'"' was about to drop a shell in the .81 mortar tube. When the came, he froze, poised with the shell at the mouth of the tube. A .ar~thBI!Lt . He dropped the shell, unintentionally, but it broke the spell. I Whoosh! Everyone heard it whistle. Bleeeeem! The battle was Papa-san was hit by a richochet. He yelled to Kai. Kai peeked over the top hole, saw Papa-san climb out of the cupola, ducked back in. The firing slacking off. "Pineapple, I'm hit!" Papasan screamed. Kai paused before answering, looking out.

"Where?" Kai yelled, not wanting to know. "My leg! " "Get over here! " Kai ordered. Papa-san painfully crawled to the edge the track and dove to the ground. He ran, limping, to the hole, then •rnun•...... let himself in. Kai hoped the wound wasn't to gory. He rolled the p&lliJelr There appeared to be a deep gouge in his left calf, but no blood was Rntuti~~ ' 'Where's your bandage?'' Kai asked. Papasan searched his pocketa. had forgotten to keep one in his uniform. Kai swore and took out his f"lrst aid kit. It was bad policy to use your bandage on someone " I need some morphine. " Papa-san stated as Kai dreeaed the "Pain that bad, huh, " Kai answered, not believing him. " Where's Doc Parker?" Papa-san asked. " Busy. " Kai aaid, wondering if it was too late to change foxholes. " relax, don't you have a joint somewhere? I really don 't think you're die just yet." Papasan smiled and made himself oomtortable. ''I do believe this time tomorrow, I '11 be drinking oold milk in Da Papa-san aaid happily. "Hey listen, man, " Kai aaid disgustedly, "you sound delirioua, going to check on the rest of the platoon and if I find Doc Parker, I'll him over, just don't make any noiae. " Kai crawled out. Inooming tire stopped about the same time Kai was bandaging Papa-san, but the neJ!'llll.was still sending out rounds. He saw Supersport walking towarda position. Kai stood up and met him behind the ONE-TWO. Kai asked what happened to the ambush patrol and the rest of the platoon. "We've had the shit kicked out of us. " " I know, I know, but is anyone dead?" "Yeah, the L.T. in the second platoon. Maggot's hurt, so is Cooper. ONE-FOUR took three R.P.G. 's, I think everyone's dead there. .. I know what else and we never did go on the "What are you doing walking around? " ··visiting. ,, " It's a good time, everybody 's home. Where's your rifle? " "Barrel's bent, Millard run over it with the ONE-EIGHT, just me.' ' " Where the hell is Capt. Nioe?" "I saw him running back and forth earlier with ammo cans, I think

with the C.O. 's track now." ''Sounds crazy, well, I'm going to see for myself. Keep your aas and your head up and look in on Papa-san, will you? He's over there morphine." Kai noted that both he and SS were drenched in sweat. "Right, see you. " SS ambled over to the machinegun position, and smelled the marijuana smoke. "O.K., you hippie creep . . . "Stiles suddenly appeared, his .45 piatol his hand. " Are you planning to shoot me, Pig?" Kai aaid, slowly turning and flicking the selector on his M-16 to "auto." They looked at one

the darkneea. Stiles pondered the poeaibility o! getting a round in Kai 'a be!ore Kai could ft.re. Kai watched SWee ' gun hand and smiled, not wondering it he could blow Stiles away and jump. A parachute flare ilalppMI, they could h-.r the tunny whoop-whoop eound it made. Kai spoke angrily, " I only have to pull this trigger onoe to empty this clip. " " I could blow you away with one shot," SWes snarled. He stood loosely, to jump to Kai 'a left. The light !rom the flare swayed like a search" I'll put you on chargee o! insubordination and cowardice." " Why don't we just have it out now, Stephen, don't need no paperwork,'' -.id. The t1&re deeoended, sputtering noisily. the light nearly gone. Kai IIW:kUmlY wiahed he waa wearing a poncho and chewing on a stubby cigar. standoff waa over; Kai knew they weren't going to kill each other. " Well?" Kai said, "can't dance. " Kai and SWes relazed. Kai turned and -~u away, not afraid. SWee watched him leave and considered a ehot, but decided against it. perimeter waa quiet now, all he could hear were OOO&Bional moana o! the IWOIWiided and the urgent criee o! men giving orders. The next morning, My-six bodies were counted around the perimeter. Cav had tu'teen oaaualties, !our deed and eleven wounded. Numbers are important in a War with no front or reaaon. The eeotion that the Firat flatoo,n covered was hit moderately hard, twenty-six bodies littered the !llllklli• in their attit udes of violent death. Nine 8&ppers lay deed in front of track. Before seven a .m ., the souvenier hunters had stripped the bodies nine a.m., SWee put the chargee on the C.O. 'a mapbook. A neatly

piece of paper outlining the oowardice of track ONE-TWO and o! all, ita commander. Insubordination and Cowardice, the paternal of oourt martiala. Kai, he charged, had retu.aed to get ammo under deeerted his post, and retu.aed to aid one o! his own men. Papa-aan and had deserted their posts. The C.O . told him he waa crazy. He was about ...._..•..., the crew o! the ONE-TWO Bronze Stare and had already taken it up Battalion; the Deputy Commander of I Corpe waa to tly in later that day band out the metala. No way waa he go1na> to put thoee chargee through llbuull8ls, and beeidee, he waa too short. SWes would not withdraw the iiiMLnZ'M. he mentioned the lnapector General's omce. The C.O. canoelled the ......tt ...MI"'t·tan

Paz waa to be medivaoed with Papa-aan; he had a tiny shrapnel wound in back. They waved happily at Kai in the morning, as the chopper lifted otf. watchin8' the medivao, eat down, l"88tin8' on his elbows. The morning bea'innin8' to heat up, preeeed on him like a fat balloon. Hie heed began to by ~. He wu lyin8' down when the noi8e o! the chopper had The next day, the Cav was pulled t.ck into LZ Beth for a stand-down. Kai SW. were oal1ed into the Orderly room where Kai heard the chargee ~him in the preeenoe of Shadow. the platoon IJ.eutenant, and the He railed at SWee and the C.O. , then leveled hia counter-chargee. He ahaken and depreeaed when he left the orderly room.

Several men from the platoon met him outside and assured him Stiles dido 't have anything o n him, that he was backed up all the way to C.O ., but Kai was inconsolable. This, he t hought, was like being for路IIUIIlhl accused of being a bug fucker, the proof was on him to show he wu The Cav was cele brating their survival; for everyone, it was their major battle and " victory. " It would be a long night of war stories, flicks, booze, and grass. Kai could not join in. He drove the ONE-TWO out the motor pool and went to the f"l.fty foot observation tower near the This was his favorite place; from the tower, Vie t nam was beautiful. In tower, there was a cot, various boxes of ammunit ion, and the remaina what Paz used to call " Silent Majority Care Package, " filled with paper, soap, pens, old paperback westerns and various other inE1881,ntiall Looking outside, he saw a South Vietnamese compound, the and rickety old boats overloaded with people and produce passing pai.nft:ll slow with smoking engines. The ruins of a bombed-out Buddhist were directly beneath the tower just outside the wire. He could still make the writing on the entrance and flowers, the f"lrst time he had noticed grew in and around the building. Holding on to one of the posts, he outside the tower and inched his way cautiously around the ledge. A time ago, while sitting on the roof at Bachman Hall, someone from ths told him he dido 't give a shit about the Vietnamese people and only .........- ... avoid the draft because he was yellow. The bastard is probably watcb.in4r Superbowl today while I'm over here, he thought. He lightened his grip the pole and balanced on the ledge, a slight movement was all it would for him to pitch forward and land fifty feet below. He looked down at orange dirt and saw the conoertina wire and tanglefoot of the perimeter noticed that it went completely around the tower except for a tiny entraooe the rear. No sense getting cut up too, he thought, as he grabbed the beam. Kai laughed and went back down the ladder and drove the track to the celebration. It was already dark. Captain Nioe, knowing he had lost his Bronze Star because of Stilee, quietly drunk as he slipped his . 38 and holster on. Gunslinger-style, he the carousel and knew wit h satisfaction that six hollow-point bullet8 bedded in. He had carved them all with a Marine bayonet. Stiles, he was going to have to be hit. Wasted. He set his greasy jungle hat at a angle and walked silently out into the night. All death is of natural causes. For Stiles, it was perfectly natural to bullet wounds to the neck and head. Capt. Nice, in a suddenly mood, surrendered in the Vietnamese language to a drunk and oompany clerk. If Papa-san had been around, he probably would have that it was a hollow point. He will make the small joke on

In order to trim the numbers of men down in t he Armed " Early Out" program was initiated in the beginning of 1970. The offered an early out to any soldier that had six months of duty or Je. upon completion of his regular one-year tour in Vietnam. The plan wu

.aldier had the option of EXTENDING his tour for sixty days and getting DEROS (drop from roster) and discharge in Saigon instead of the States. advantage was that a soldier could get a discharge four months early at JD&lrimum. The kicker was (there always is) that the soldier had to give sixty days before the tour was up in order to extend. The prospect of the four months instead of two on the counting-down process did not the plan an immediate suooess in the line companies. Pushing one's was bad news. SFC Kai and new buck sargeant Chabiel (88), after a day gulping bottled speed, booze, smoking the best " Dong Ha 100's " (100mm . . . -JLU.IJLODU joints sold in Dong Ha) and numerous false starts, extended their on the 61st day before their regular DEROS. They are sitting around the hootch. The eight-track stereo is playing the " When the Music 's Over." It is cold in there, the monaoons have Only two NCO's are in the hootch. SS and Kai are stoned on the and some very fine grass. " Let's not take our boots off for the rest of the War, man," SS says. Kai why. " So we get jungle rot and get out of the field. " "I'm too short to be here," Kai says, " only sixty days left. " Sgt. Reasoner, in the ONE-TWO's hootch, announces to his crew that he getting out in 11 months, 2 days, and a wake-up. "Lifer! " Someone yells.

Earl Cooper

DRIVING OVER TO TBB COAST ONB NIGHT DRUNK ON WINE

The headlights of my car strike the eyes of deer along the highway. They flash from the dark, instances of light , from the shoulders of the road, From stubble fields , clumps of brush , from light years away. It felt good to please my father,

knowing he knew when he heard the one shot, Knowing it was my shot and a heart or a backbone that shattered. Somewhere in my lungs is a deep pool of unborn things; I drive on toward the coast counting the eyes of deer along the highway.

Ruben lloraiH

FICBBR

She has legs that all the weekday men dream nylon dreams about pulling apart and sliding treeh between. They want to warm themselves on her soft soft belly. She never speaks.

Only one man has her legs and soft soft belly. He lives with her on Lincoln avenue and makes love to her every night beneath a dark window open to the snow. She has a small smile.

Every morning, except Sunday, she rises from their bed on cold legs and teaches deaf children to speak with their hands. She has small hands.

ADD YOJtrâ&#x20AC;˘kt

The aea is creased like a fortune teller's hand, the sun falling into this ancestral palm. Following one of those blue lines of fate, we could sail far away. becoming fiction on a shrinking map. Like those lean sailors of Spain we are eager for that fall at the edge of the world. Beyond the horizon the nights are older, preserved with saltings of stars. We could then pull in the long mooring lines of our dreams.

AND KUKUI

In this light forest a woman is walking with me. Her hands clasped behind her back, she points out leaves and plants threaded with sunlight.

She is in Maine now, walking as I walk, always beside me in light of woods. Her shuffle is through maple and birch. My feet f'md guava and kukui. They are yellow like maple and similar in shape. The aeeds of kukui are cast in hard dark shells, blue-black when polished, gray-white when on this path. Under my feet they roll strong. Only the weight of memory can crack and smash them into blonde streaked in gray and brown. Open palms to touch feet that are near and hands that are forests away.

TU.O Jmamura

A SILENT FLY

On my white wall, a fly rested its wings motionless. Finally I found it had been dead

for a long time. I was lying on a fresh-white-sheet. I touched my hands, my faoe, my body.

February is a bloesom of a plum tree. Il I have a tine morning, here, an icicle is hanging beside a red-booted gir l.

a letter from my parents: We are counting day by day I received

until you come back. You '11 be here this June? June is lavender rain with a wind bell in my old room; here, slender legs run acroea the field under the sun.

Go back home?

SMALLTIUNG

small is the wild flower in her white hand; she asks the name of it in the dim light of the setting sun afterglow lights on the flower. reflecting the sky on its petals. yes, it is purple-flower now, it is red-flower no, it is black-flower she smells it and says this is sensual flower the night comes still she holds the nameless flower in her bed she says look at this this is pure white flower like me yes, it is yes. it is a pure white flower like you

" Everything we eat needs rice." Laweon Fusao Inada

When I eat rice, I don 't mesa around. Lifting the bowl cloee to my mouth, I breathe in a sweet steam The sweat of a million laborers. Piled high in a mound, The grains are the bod.iee of my anoeators: Farmers, fishermen, fteld hands, fornicators, Gardeners, cooke, waitreaees, ahopclerka, drunks. I eat and feel their voioee Grumbling and laughing in my belly. It makea me want to join in; Add my voice to theirs in a eong.

THE HONGO STORE 29 MD.ES VOLCANO HILO, HAWAII

My parents felt those rumblings Coming deep from the earth 's belly. Thudding like the bell of the Buddhist Church. Echoes in the ground swayed the ba.sinette Where I lay squalling in soapy water. My mother carried me around the house, Back through the orchids, ferns, and plumeria Of that greenhouse world behind the store And jumped between gas pumps into the car. My father gave it the gun And aaid 路'Be quiet' ' as he searched The frequencies flipping for the right station, The radio squealing more loudly than I could cry. And then even the echoes stopped The only sound the Edsel's grinding And the bark and crackle of radio n e ws Saying stay home or go to church. "Dees time she no blow! " My father aaid driving back Over the red ash covering the road. " I worried she went go foa broke awreddy!"

So in this photograph the size of a matchbook, The dark skinny man, shirtless and grinning, A toothpick in the oorner of his smile, Lifts a naked baby above his head, Behind him the plate glass of the store o nly c racked.

following vignettes are meant to serve as a transition between Woauua Warrior and Gold lloUDiaba IliaD. a work in progress.)

My mother tells both boys and girls a story first told by Li Ju-chen, who just after Jonathan Swift. Li taught that men must understand women that women suffer. He wrote about T'ang Ao, a man who traveled to the of Women. There, not on guard against lovely women, he was IIIU"""·•u•·""'Y caught and imprisoned. He had followed his captors when they him to come along; if he had had male companions he would have ,..........,u over his shoulder. " We have to prepare you to meet the Queen, " his jailers said. They him in a canopied apartment, obviously a woman 's, pots of make-up front of the mirror. closets filled with a woman's clothes. ''Let us help you with your armor and boots,' ' said the women. He extended his arms; they his coat down and shackled his wrists. The woman who kneeled to off his shoes chained his ankles together. A door opened slowly, and he expected to meet his match, but it was only old women with sewing boxes in their hands. "The less you struggle, the it will hurt," said one old woman, squinting a bright eye as she threaded needle. Two jailers sat on him while another held his head. He felt an old 's dry fingers trace his ear; the long nail on her little finger scraped neck. " What are you doing? " he asked. " Sewing your lips together, " she , blackening her needle in an orange flame. The ones who sat on him 11111\Wl:eu with laughter. But the old women did not sew his lips together. pulled his earlobes taught and jabbed a needle through each of them. had to poke and probe before the needle punctured the layers of skin IIDr~ttlv, the hole in the front of the lobe in line with the one in back, the of skin sliding about so. They worked the needle through - a last jerk the needle's thick eye ("needle's nose" in Chinese). They strung his raw with silk threads; he could feel the fibers. The women who sat on him turned around to direct their attention to his The old ladies, much stronger than they appeared, bent his toes so far ward that his arched foot cracked. They squeezed each foot and broke little bones along the sides. They gathered his toes together, toes over under one another, and bandaged them against the foot . T 'ang Ao wept

with pain. During the months of one season, they fed him on women's foodchrysanthemum tea to stir the cold winds inside his body, chicken wings to make his hair thick and shiny, vinegar soup to improve his womb. They drew the string loops through the scabs and skin that would daily grow over the holes in his earlobes. One day they inserted gold hoops. Every night they unbound his feet. He expected relief when the bandages came off, but the blood rushing back inside the shrunken veins hurt so much he cried to have his feet wrapped tighter. The women foroed him to wash his used bandages, which smelled of rot and cheese. He hung the bandages up to dry. drooping streamers that draped from wall to wall. He felt embarassed; they were like underwear, and they were his. The smell was his. One day they strapped his feet to little shoes shaped like round bridges and changed his gold hoops to emerald studs. They plucked out each hair on his face, powdered his faoe and neck white, painted his eyebrows like moth 'a wings, painted his cheeks and lips red. Walking on his dainty feet, he served a meal at the Queen's court. His hips swayed and his shoulders swiveled . because of his shaped feet. " She's pretty, don't you think? " the diners said, smacking their lips at the food and at his swaying hips as he put dishee before them. What tortures might this author have chosen for a woman who could understand men?

â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;˘ One twilight, while swinging on the gate, waiting for our father to come home from work, my five sisters and brothers and I saw~ man appear hurriedly around the corner. He strode quickly toward us. Father! "Father!" " Father! " We new off the gate; we leapt off the fence. " Father!" We surrounded him, took his hands, reached into his pockets for the candy in the gold foil. We buried our noses against him to smell the tobaooo and male smell of him. The littlest ones clung to his legs for a ride on his shoee. And he laugheQ. a startled laugh. "But I'm not your father, " he kept sayinc. And pushing us gently away. "But I'm not your father. You've made mistake. " He took the little hands out of his pockets. " But I'm not your father. " Looking closely, we saw that he probably was not. We went back inside the yard as this man continued his walk down our street, from the back certainly looking like our father, the one hand in his pocket. Tall and thin, he was wearing our father's two hundred dollar suit that fit him juG right. He was walking fast in his good leather shoes with the pointed toee. Our mother came out of the house, and we hung on to her while abe explained, " No, that wasn't your father. He did look like your father. though, didn't he? From the back, almost exactly." We got out on sidewalk and watched his back recede. A moment later, our own father come toward us from the other direction, the one finger touching his hat salute us. We ran to meet him.

...

Those nights when I was losing her now all seem the same. I couldn't go so I'd finally get up and sit at the window waiting for it to be light to go out and look for her. When the sky was finally grey against the rim of mountains surrounding the city I'd start my search. It was then, the rainy season in Kyoto, so I'd always be careful to carry an I don't know if she ever realized that I was looking for her or not. But now a friend has told me that he thinks he might have seen her, in a wines hop in one of the poorer quarters of the city. Of course he be sure; it's been twenty years since any of us last saw her. But the he saw had the same serene, almost luminous face. And she had the eyes, not quite mischievous, but surprisingly inappropriate to that angelic face. She'd be thirty-four now, almost thirty-five. I've been frozen in Kyoto all years, do I really want to believe that she 's the cause of it? Another thing, he said, is that she's become fastidious. She must've her hands a dozen times in the hour that I was there, and she was IIR'IIoU'~lY straightening her clothes, picking little invisible specks of lint her sleeves, checking her make-up in a small mirror. That's what made think it was her in the first place. And also, nobody tried to pick her up, of the Japanese customers even tried to talk to her, they knew she was Those mornings back in 1955 are as fresh as yesterday. Kyoto's streets only those who needed to be there: old people unable or afraid to sleep, survivors of last battles wound in wool kimonos and still long underwear against the damp spring chill. They stalked the tottering on wooden clogs, a stick clutched firmly in one bony claw to away the wild dogs that could occasionally be found in the city at that Their eyes would follow me and seem afraid, even though I 'd long since the army. Probably there were unpleasant memories still painful. I continue to prowl the alleys early in the morning, mostly out of habit, I and no one seems afraid of me anymore. But why should they? I 'm

415

old myself now, my face sags from its skull, I wear thick glasses, and need warm winter clothes as late as April. I used to wander through the empty bar quarters, half expecting to aee her broken body disposed among the piles of empty whiskey bottles stuffed in one of the clear plastic garbage bags, twisted among the snapped chopsticks, torn wads of paper, cigarette butts floating in the sauce of their own orange drool. I looked through all the dark corners, trying to avoid the JXX>ls of vomit, stinking of sake and scumbled with flecks of rice or the undigested tag ends of noodles. I searched the riverbank, always conscioua of the usual salad of cracked fish heads, used condoms, severed radiab stumps, ripped underpants, melon rinds and greasy wads of newspaper used to wipe up last night's misunderstandings. Once looking for her I fell and ran splinters of glass into my palma. I curled under the pain, hunched beneath the wet bark of a wooden fence sucked the slivers out one by one, my poor hands trembling like ter'I'itiad. birds. Later I showed her the ruins, swollen and lipped with gashes. She too drunk, was I yelling at her that much then? She clawed the air in front her face like a person snarled in spiderwebs, why? I let her go to sleep, dido 't things work out? Why did I always let her go to sleep? She was such a child. She should have been attending high instead of working in a wineshop. Sometimes she'd get home while I was looking for her. I'd find her asleep on the bed I'd abandoned, still clothed and snoring through her open mouth and smelling faintly of and cigarettes. I'd bang through our empty rooms clattering my against the walls and windows then finally settle somewhere to gaze out the grey rain. It was then that I was most reasonable, and most hopeless. I could myself why shouldn't she do what she wanted to? There was a lacquered box I picked at, plucking away chips of its glossy finish, the dull wood beneath. She seemed so small and innocent, how could protect herself? The streets at night were filled with punks and thugs, I sure. The reconstructed Japanese economy was underway at last, but must've been thousands of outcasts who had nothing but the degenerates searching for any kind of diversion. Staring into my ceiling I would see juvenile delinquents drag her into dark alleys and and rape her repeatedly. The younger juvenile delinquents would be certain how to proceed, would listen to their elders ' advice We don 't understand who holds the wrists? The guy who's next in line always holds the wrists. OK if we take another crack at it? Sure. I'd lie there and embellish the plots until there was enough to get downstairs and out into the streets. The finest agony's always a pnxhllolt the details: the imagination licking its rat-bites in order to recall the shiny eyes poised in a corner of the night. Later I felt almost nostalgic for those last weeks. The mornings I

for her were like another aspect of the rainy season, an extension the translucent green skin the tatami mats grow or the fluffy molds iiprout from the bindings of books. One morning late in June, when the bad briefly li.fted and the streets were steaming, I came back and found all her clothes were gone. I made myself a big breakfast, I felt relieved. that it was out in the open like that, I could act. I resolved to find her, I tell her I forgave her and bring her back. I would apologize for not sooner. I would explain everything. my dawn ceremonies, moving methodically through the ...IUU~<'"" quarters, hoping that she might still be in the same patterns Of course she'd quit at her wineshop, but there were hundreds down in center of the city, any one of which would have hired her, she was so A week or so after she left I saw a girl shoved out of a moving car, into a gutter just as the summer sun began to show above the rim of eastern mountains. I chased her for blocks, sometimes losing her and swinging back and forth in a wide arc until I found her again. It was so in the morning that nothing was open, there was no place for her to At last I ran her down in the Pontocho bar district and trapped her in of a kabuki theater. My hand was tangled in her hair as I forced her to her face, but I was disappointed, the girl was a stranger, her face ugly deformed with terror. I stared at her as she plucked weakly at my fist, to work her hair free. Then I realized why she was so hysterical and her head around so I could see more clearly. Someone had crushed a of lipstick into her ear, hammering it down hard so the lip of the metal had cut smiles into the delicate flutings of the portal and her hair was with blood and peach colored globs of grease. I became aware of the tolling of the huge bell at Chion-in Buddhist temple, sounding matins. hand sunk open and she ducked under my arm and jerked free. I let her and stood in the grey light. I listened to the sound of her running feet .......u .oc against the pavement, and felt vaguely frustrated . And now my friend has told me that he might have found her. An time, since we're on the edge of April, about to be tumbled into . Soon the cherry blossoms will fold open. They are the most highly flower in Japan, partly because they are so fragile. Their beauty is a ll&a)~hC)r for human life, for its evanescence. The slightest wind sends them - . ....-~u.r, and at the mildest rain they are gone. Today small businessmen in the sidestreets drape their storefronts with versions, cherry blossoms assembled out of pink plastic discs, -t1"Viint11A to weather. These fall only to the hands of clowning vandals, or lltbnerltal drunks .... I met her in the autumn of 1954. Her village was so poor the government 't even bothered to build a good road into it, just a dirt track too narrow car. From the mountain pass I could see the whole thing, thirty or forty houses hunched around a weedy pond. Farther down the valley were the mn:Jnr"JAt;e

ghosts of cultivated fields, edges blurred into the mountains by the ling green coils of kudzu vine. The village lanes were empty. silent, there weren't even any parties of barking dogs. I thought the village must be deserted, and considered looking through the ruined houses for forgotten swords. All around me the steep mountain wall.e were covered with green atanda of Japaneee cedar trees, the combing fingers of a flat sliding through them like the rippling flesh of running horses. The made me feel lonely. The houses were abandoned, everything cloeed up, wooden shutters fastened over the sliding paper doors. Many of the ings had already begun to collapse, crumbling back, the mud walls thatch roofs breaking up and sliding relentlessly back into the I was just about ready to hike out of the village when I realized wasn't alone. Perched on the erect granite stalk of a broken stone was a wizened old man, his wispy beard and long hair flowing in the He was made of nothing but layer upon layer of coats and rags, mauves and tans with an occasional indigo mixed in, and 80 was nnlCtiiCIIII the color of the mud wall he leaned against. He was smoking a ,USJ,â&#x20AC;˘ux~ cigarette that kept going out and at his feet were burnt matches and black scars of ashes where the butts had been carefully stubbed out being put back in his pocket. The young people get jobs in the new factories in Osaka and Nagoya, said. They never come back to the village. Only the old people stay. We keep up the houses and the land, but it 's hard. Every year we farm leaa the kudzu takes more. Someday our children will want the land, 80 we to take care of it. And if they don't? Then our grandchildren will. And the ruined houses, uncle? They are the dead. There's nothing to be done. The headman notifiee families but usually no one comes. We send a letter to the Records Office and they only say everything is fine. We write to tell that the houses and fields are in ruins and they thank us for our say everything is fine. I could see then that there were more people, old and bent and in gray cloths against the autumn wind. They were 80 still they blended the landscape, and I wondered if that was why I hadn 't noticed them, or they been hiding from me? So only old people, uncle? The cigarette burned with a greasy blue smoke up between the bark of his fingers. His face was seamed and webbed with complicated patterns cracked around his eyes like messages meant for hints that I couldn't quite read. He told me how to find her house, and think he chuckled, although it was hard to tell, he was 80 old he might been senile. In the fields the delicate heads of pampas grass flowed in the wind, the silvery stems tall and the filaments of seedpods like

with the fiery glow of sunlight. It's an old house with a garden, the man said, in bad condition. To get to it you have to go across a small mc~as-cclVEtred bridge. Her father was killed in the battle for Okinawa and her died in the firebombing of Tokyo when she was only a baby. She lives alone? There was a grandmother until last winter. He watched me walk out of the village toward her house. I stopped and back from a bend in the road . Why was he laughing at me? I follow through my lost evenings, trace around their outlines like a

man in familiar rooms, fingertips touching through to a lamp, a vase, the small thrill of accurate recollection, toe knowing where the hole the carpet is, always is. I spent almost a year actually searching for her. I tried the bars and ~â&#x20AC;˘wo.â&#x20AC;˘..u ~uu~ and wineshops in Kyoto, and even some in Kobe and Osaka, -.ocrunJI. ever turning anything up. And even after the search has long since llleconte no more than ritual, I still find hints of her in the laughing faces of strolling in groups downtown or hanging over icecream sundaes K'I!UÂ§''u'K at each other. I never do anything about it. That night before the morning she finally took her clothes and left is an friend I keep meeting, someone with plans for me. It 's odd how the events UHIIIliBelves no longer please me as much as the recollection of them does. ----,------, . I'm back in that bar in Pontocho and my boots are smeared blood. I drink pot after pot of sake, but the match I hold to my cigarette trembles. On the stool next to me is a drunk , telling me how . . . JrUJn ........ he is that I can speak Japanese. I signal to one of the girls behind counter to bring me another pot of sake. There's a thousand yen on the and I'm not even going to consider moving until I've drunk it. A couple of hours earlier she and I were eating dinner in a small when a group of noisy university students came clattering in, bony wrists and ankles sticking out of their faded black uniforms. One them seemed to know her and she nodded back to him. Where did you meet him? I don't know him. I saw you nod to him. A lot of students come into my wineshop, maybe he saw me there. What's his name? I don 't know. Are you sure? What's his name? I don 't know. I don 't . I went to the bathroom and when I got back I suspected they'd been to each other. The students were starting to get louder, made braver sake they'd bEISn drinking, and one finally mumbled something in ""'""'~'uau to the others and they all laughed. Then the one she knew got up and came over and said in English, do you me the cigarette please? and I gave him one and he said, I thank you

very much, then swaggered back over to his pals who were red-faoed wine and laughter . . . . The drunk next to me teeters on his high stool, his feet hooked on rungs, slurring the end of some stupid speech about friendship. Two off-duty geisha in gaudy kimonos mince in and sit near us, coyly glancing around the room. The drunk 's asking me if I fish and I 'm saying yeah, I like fish and the two geisha are listening and older one's repeating everything I say to the younger one. I notice my has stopped shaking and toss down my cup of wine and the drunk filla it right away from his own pot. I wonder about my boots, but don 't want to at the m yet. The drunk orders a plate of broiled eel and the younger asks the older one something like what do Americans eat? but her friend shakes her head, she has no idea. We finished dinner with the students still sprawled at the bar. She go to work. She would never let me walk with her as far as her wineshop. said it would be bad for her if the owner or any of the customers saw her a foreigner. I told her to come straight home a.fter work and she just at me, clutching her bag to her chest. You understand what I'm telling you? She just nodded, yes. At the door one of the students said something she stopped and laughed and answered something back then elid the open and he laughed and said something and she nodded and turned the doorway. Then she stopped and looked back at me. Under the lightglobe her make-up turned her face into a blank, shiny mask. I see beyond the black ropes of eye-liner she'd drawn around her forming them into two zeros. She thought make-up would make her sophisticated. She said she wanted to work in that wineshop so she learn about the world, and also so she could get money for us. You 'll get tired of me, she used to say, I've never been to a city, I know anything. I'll never get tired of you, I like you just as you are. Nobody 's like I am. She stood looking at me and the shape was still there, I guess, the of the face I'd met eight months befor e, but too much had accumulated e verything was too complicated by uncertainty. She turned and walked the door. And about five minutes later the students left too, stuffing mouths with the remains of their dinner. Good-bye , t hey said in good-bye, and then the last o ne out, the one that knew her, stopped in doorway in almost exactly the same way she had, his face suroJrl.Bllllll resembling hers, and said: good-bye foreigner .... The drunk 's asking me if I like girls, if I like geisha. He balls a li8t grinning slides the stiffened forefinger of his other hand in and out it fucking motion. The two geisha collapse on each other in laughter, covering their mouths but their ey es o n me. Then I look down at my and see the rust red stains. Lodged between the sole and t he toe is a chip that I pluck out and realize is a tooth, a cuspid, whole except that very tip of the root is broke n off.

After they left I sat in that restaurant, trying to stay calm, but finally to run out on the riverbank. They were nowhere in sight. The rain had and the sky had cleared into a deep indigo. I followed the riverbank the bar quarters and just as I crossed under the Sanjo Bridge I saw student coming down the ramp that leads up into Pontocho. I hit him just he reached the riverbank and dragged him back under the bridge, the he was carrying blowing out over the riverbank in a flutter of white I asked him why he knew her, where he 'd met her, but he only IN"\£Ktcu:u to escape so I knocked him down. He was on his hands and knees ..-...uu..... sideways trying to get away so I kicked him once low under the ribs then kicked him again and told him not to see her anymore. I'm not a violent person but sometimes disappointments can make me He rolled over and was up on his knees again, shaking his head. His lll.l.l•u•.•u had a sickly green tinge to it from the grotesque neon lights up us and I remember thinking how that was like the dull phosphoj181:Jer.tce of o ld corpse skin. He raised his head to say something and just as I my boot crashing into his mouth I realized again how much he looked her, how they could have been brother and sister ... . The drunk's lips are oily from the eel. He wants to share the platter with but I pretend not to understand. I hold out the tooth but he doesn't realize it is so I drop it into his winecup. A delicate wisp of pink blood curls up h the warm rice wine. He looks at it and then looks at me puzzled and almost plaintively, don 't you want to sleep with the geisha? I don 't so he thinks maybe I don't understand and says, listen, if you meet geisha outside her house and she likes you, maybe you don 't have to pay, you can get it for free. He smiles hopefully. I put my hand against his chest and push. He goes so surprised he doesn't even yell, just one hand jerking out scrabbling the slippery counter top and finally grabbing the plate of half-eaten pieces eel and clasping the whole greasy mess to his chest as he slams into the I don't say anything. It 's very quiet. I get up and walk out, I don 't pay, I 't look back. And of course she doesn 't come home that night nor the next night nor next, and my final search is launched at last. Sometimes I wonder if it would have made any difference if I could have her?, or at least adopted her legally as my daughter? Perhaps the implicit in our relationship is what troubled her? For my part I know I really loved her, love her still, and so am reduced to through every crowd for the slightest hint of her, knowing that in group of silly schoolgirls there will always be at least one who has a of her as she was when I first met her. And in that accidental face I my imagination like a thumbnail cracking up the edges of a scab to sure the wound's still there, still ticking.

Of course I 'm not going to see if it 's her at that wineshop. Or maybe will. But even if it actually is her, would there be any connection at

between the woman my friend has seen and the girl twenty years earlier in that dying village? That day she was waiting in the shadows of the sienna entryway of old farmhouse. She was wearing a white middy blouse and blue shorta. stood in the sunlight, she didn 't invite me in. Two crows flew down trough of the valley cawing at each other, riding their exaggerated uaJI'}JIIâ&#x20AC;˘ into the hazy blue shaded area of mountains at the far west end. What has that woman my friend has found to do with this? I 'm standing in her garden and she still doesn 't know what she is supposed to and so doesn't do anything. I linger in that afternoon like a man trailing hand through moving water. Against one mud wall of that courtyard are the discarded traps of farming: long grey wooden naJ[lQJIIIIII polished smooth by years of sweating hands; odd pieces of metal, bladee hooks and clasps all rusted to the color of dried blood; stiff black straps like flayed strips curled from the hides of mummified oxen. I there, but there is something I have to do or say, something very simple, protect the scene, and it almost comes to me then. The pale tendrila morning-glory vine wind through the abandoned pile of gear, and larger pieces, in the JX>Ckets of shadows, are the pearly nets and skeins of the common garden spider. I pull the handle of a hoe to me and the female coolness of its moist underside against my palm. But the hoe 's rusty, how can you cut down the weeds, my little How can you cut down the kudzu vine? The girl waits quietly. now kneeling in the gloomy shadows of the entryway. Behind her in the silent house the rooms are filled with loope ceremonial white cloths webbed from wall to wall and drying. A pattern white flowers has been printed in wax down the spine of each I see. You dye it and the parts you 've printed with wax remain white. bet you're going to dye it indigo, aren't you? I notice how vague her face seems in the shadows, a smooth dark shape that has been waiting here in these mountains for me while I my way toward it. I can see the glitter of moisture on her forehead and lip and imagine on my tongue how salty it would taste. She had her hair beck in a white rag but unwinds it to wipe her face and hands, shaking the long black flow of hair that reaches below her waist. Don 't you get lonely living out here by yourselr? Yes, she shrugs. Why do you do it? We walk single file along the narrow paths that turn through her fields, our progress laced together by the foolish springing arcs frightened crickets. The girl turns occasionally to smile at me and make I'm still coming. We stop to laugh at the crucified remains of a solit&II'JI scarecrow, one cotton gloved hand held up indicating heaven in some sort ludicrous reminder. Grandmother and I made that together when I was about ten. She said

my husband, and I believed her. I brush the back of my hand against her hip but she laughs as the straw of the scarecrow shudders with the antic play of baby rats. She doesn 't to notice that the faded face's painted round eyes and huge nose are meant to be a comic caricature of the stock foreign devil. Back in her house we explore the musty rooms she closed when her ,-&rldinothl~r died. She tells me how the village will disappear when the last old people dies. The prefectural government wants to take the village 's away, to remove it from the map. The closets are full of moldy kimonos and rotten sleeping quilts that apart in my hands. A mosquito net unfolds like a musty green sail and the girl in it. She giggles, trying to duck under the rotten wings of net, her voice playing against the tinkling little brass hooks and clasps. tells me that the census taker won't come to the village anymore, she in 1960 no one in the village will be counted. It 's cold in the house so we slide open the wooden shutters in the room and the sunlight streams in, tumbling golden motes of 1C819traw dust in the clear autumn air. She stands looking out toward the mountains, watching them as if there was something there she was IIIUttri~JWIUUlllilg, some message hidden in the shimmering green motion of trees. Above the highest peak I see the ghostly hook of a daytime moon wonder if that 's what she's watching.

I go back into the kitchen to find something to use as an ashtray. Her was a poet. She was imprisoned in 1939 for advocating at a time when the government was becoming very anti-western. was imprisoned during the course of the war and released when the first ~.lpi:Lti<on troops arrived. Tokyo was chaos at that time, nothing but ruins, seems impossible that she could have found her baby granddaughter. Standing in that dark kitchen with a small plate in my fist I feel a sudden The beams, shelves, even the doors and window frames all sag as if were about to collapse on me. The moist mud walls of the dark kitchen swollen with a sort of soft finality, like the deoomposing flanks of a rtgamtitc drowned buffalo. In winter they wrapped themselves in quilts and wound heavy strips of around their legs. Her grandmother would wander through the snow boards off empty buildings to burn in their little brazier. She used to up late into the night reciting poems to herself and sometimes weeping. girl says sometimes her grandmother would mix p~:~.rts of one poem into , but it never seemed to bother her, as if they were all simply pieces of same thing. The girl would be bundled in the corner of the dark room and go to sleep with the musical sound of her grandmother's chanting. One morning she woke up and her grandmother was still sitting llUilCI'ltecl over her tiny brazier except this time the fire was nothing but of frozen white ashes. The old lady 's face was smooth and silvery and

hard as porcelain and her ears and mouth were filled with crystal.line filaments of rime and her open eyes were glazed with lenses of milky blue ice. I touch the girl 's cheek with my fingertips and she turns toward calm and grave. I unfasten the five white plastic buttons and peel back soft white skin of her modest schoolgirl's blouse and touch my face to dark brown nipple. Her chest is hard and flat and there 's no sign of breast yet. I put my palm against her chest and she lies back on sun-warmed dry tatami. It's right here that whatever it is I have to do would 've been happenma. It's always with me, I peer under bushes to meet the troll and find myself, reflected in toads' eyes, irrelevant, comic. Her hair 's spread out around her like a halo. I touch my lips acroea face and down, tongue tickling into an ear, then pull back to look at There never should have been a garden, anything else is acceptable but And look at her and she doesn 't do anything so I tug down her jeans and arches her back to let them slide by but they get hooked up on her heel she giggles. I still have the crumpled nylon tissue of her underpants, stolen aftsr had moved in with me and pressed between the pages of my Ja]p&Il8111!'J English dictionary like a flower. Are you afraid? You aren 't afraid, are you? Then later I sit on the sun-drenched porch and watch her wash herself the stream that runs through the desolate garden, feeling the strength of sun and still tasting her intricate juices on my saliva. And since it is here that she is mine, I enfold her, I enfold her awkwardly squatting over stream with her knees bent out and reaching down with one skinny arm dip up splashes of water and rub it on her reddened crotch, laughter because it is so cold and looking at me watching, alive, her chest pumping air, each rib distinct, the ends of her long black hair together wet from the stream, alive, the flat child 's belly and ):x>ny curve all wet and shiny from the stream water, her alive under my autumn sun, splashing across the slimy muddy bank and coming toward me with a single decayed leaf, the bundle of its pulpy veins stuck her long red foot like the flower of a leech's kiss, and then finally shy, at the maiden 's long delicate fingers coyly masking the mound of .,..,,..,;tJ!lM:! somehow not exactly a child anymore, somehow already lost to me. I dress her in her best kimono and place her on her porch. That's I say. What's Venus? That star, the evening star, you make a wish. A wish? Sure, anything, what do you want? But she can't understand. I guess some things just don 't translate. pale mist rides low over the dwindling stream and moves up into the grass turning the pale silver filaments into the ephemeral sails of ships.

Do you feel bad? Bad? About doing it? No, but you 're too big, it hurt a little. And then she asks me if she 's going to have a baby and I say I certainly not. Down the length of the valley I detect the angular flapping dashing of hunting bats, and beyond them pale columns of smoke from the 's evening fires. From somewhere lost in the sinking gloom of the comes the single sharp and lonely cry of a solitary deer. She says she she isn 't going to have a baby too because if she had a baby the Kyoto Board of Education wouldn 't allow her to attend high school. But wouldn 't you like to come and stay with me in Kyoto? Sure, she says, and I assume she 's smiling, although it 's too dark to see face.

So I live alone now, there 's nothing let\ to tell. My friend 's a fool if he I'm going to go out sucking after some broken-down floozy . I don 't her. I 've got my walking stick, and the mornings when the city reveals wounds. I 've got my tapping searches, rituals that give me a measure of , if not joy. I'm getting old, but I don 't really mind being by myself. I a cat for a few months, but I had to get rid of i t. I couldn 't sleep at night. kept me awake with its incessant tramping up and down the stairs, up and the stairs.

Doren Robbins

SBPABATION

Coming out from the bath I look into the cupboard for a towel And find a small blouse she liked to wear so often Standing there Holding it in my hand I wonder how someone so much in pain Could fit into something As delicate and Yellow

her age a fall oould have meant a serious injury, a sprained ankle or a hip. Luckily there was only a bruise and the terrible emt..rrasament. pulled away from the young man who helped her to her feet, said, you, I'm all right, " and went on her way as quickly as she oould looking be.ck. But she oouldn 't forget about it. The face of the young became like one in a photograph on the piano, a face that was young, , unchanging. "All that ooncern, " she thought. " What did be â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ It began to seem as though he 'd caused the bruises, actually pushed down. She didn 't net!d him. She was old now. A lifetime of love wasted.

MOTORCYCLE

He climbs on, turns on the ignition, kicks the starter; once, twice, three, four, five times-nothing. He tries a dozen more times-it won't go. checks the gas in the tank. Got gas. He switches the key off and on, again. It still won't go. He climbs off the bike and squats down to look at engine-check the carburetor, check the wires-seems okay. He takee wrench from his jacket pocket and removes the spark plug. He examinee blows on it, wipes it on his jeans, replaces the plug, climbs back on the and tries again. Nothing. He is getting really angry now. There is ablil01111teilJ no reason why the thing shouldn't start. He gets off the bike and stands stares at it. Then he gets back on and kicks the starter really hard halt dozen times. Now he is furious. He gets off and throws the wrench he is holding as far as he can. He watches it bounce on the gravel down the and skid into the weeds in the ditch. Then he turns and kicks the SOil~:.tl bitch motorcycle over on its side and walks away. He walks a short diiJtalllGI then thinks better of it and returns to the motorcycle. It ian 't sotmttr quietly. It doesn't say " I don't want to play with you any more" or "I don love you any more" or "I have my own life to live" or "I have the children think of. " It only lies there leaking oil and gas. He picks the motorcycle ca.refu.lly he wipes off the dust, carefully climbs on and carefully triee starter. And even now it won't start. He climbs off and sits down in the beside the broken motorcycle with his feet stretched out in front of

share a cueetick. He breaks, makes the four ball and miseee a shot on He puts the cue down carefully, like an archbishop surrendering the -.J:nDI:JUI of the church. He offers a few words of advice on her first shot. She up the cue aa it it were the Olympic torch and starts otr around the She puts away the 9 , the 15 and the 11. Bam. Bam. Bam. And this is for Pow. The 10. He sits at the bar, 80 bored. He's been playing for 80 many She thinks the game has possibilities, just needs a little work, a little up. She misses a shot on the 12. He gets up slowly. She is trying to lug large cement statue of St. Francis into the back yard by herself or she is to remove the kitchen sink. He goes to help. Secretly though, it makes mad. The Japs are attacking Pearl Harbor again. But he's such an old . Wearily he picks up his weapon and goes to knock off the deuce and tray.

TBB LIGBTBOUSB

The light flashes across the water and is gone, the way the headlights of a car turning the corner cross the walls of a dark room where someone is awake all night. It all happens so quickly, no way to take back the thinga that were aaid. Your son drove headlong into a train. Your daughter is in a Mexican jail. The flash of light is like a house passed at 80 miles per hour. Did anyone live there? Were they asleep? The night, the sea, the wind and tbe rocks. The terrible current off shore. It is so good to see the light across tbe water. It is a warning: this is the place where the water ends and the laod begins or the land ends and the water begins. Either way is dangerowt.

FIRST SNOW

By dusk the snow is already partially melted. There are dark patches when the grass shows through like islands in the sea seen from an airplane. Whioll one is home? The one I left as a child? They all seem the same now. Wba& became of my parents? What about all Uaoee UW.C. I .urted uu:l anw ftntâ&#x20AC;˘bedf What were they? As we get older we become more alone. The and his wife share this gift. It is their breakfast, coffee and silence, mo,rniiD&' sunlight. They make love or they quarrel. They move through the day, on the black squares, he on the white. At night they sit by the fire, reading his book, she knitting. The fire is agitated. The wind hoots in chimney like a child blowing in a bottle, happily.

true that the best part of a trip is the part that lies between the starting and the destination. The fun is in the getting there. And it 's not what see along the way but what you can 't see or can just barely see. The place the spruce and hemlock fade into the mist and smoke rises from some cabin. The man who has lived there twenty-five years, winter and twl[lD]ter alone, comes out carrying a shotgun when you approach. Not , just cautious. But he has nothing to hide. He talks about county He doesn't keep a dog . . . dogs run the deer in the spring when 's a crust on the snow. And doesn 't take a big dog to bring down a deer . He says he's shot maybe thirty, thirty-five dogs since he 'slived here. he talks, mosquitoes land on his face and neck, but he no longer bothers brush them away. I think he doesn 't regret not wasting his youth in --..-路路-- love. Probably he never thinks of it. Or if he does, only absently. way you'd notice cars passing on the county highway a mile from here.

LB DB.JB1J.NBB SUB L"IIBRIIB

It i8 a time abe keepe oalli.ng backhow abe was bored by the bread and the rotten cherriee;

Manet exclaiming about exquisite, eternal momenta, photography, poaing her &IDOJl4r the olothee and fruit, her blue dreee, her favorite pettiooat; and the eweat ohanneltng down her thighe making her want to run, to cartwheel, to flaunt her eex to the ooaohman aleepine under the eyoamol'88.

Why, when Carlton Fisk hit the home run, did the man in section 22, down the third base line, raise his hands for joy, forgetting his fat wife at home with the teenage daughter, and driving home why did he remember his wedding night, and even the first night parked by the river, which is why he married her in the first place?

A IIATTBB OF DRBAIQJ

Leaky claimed he dreamt in Kikuyu.

Born in Kabete, eight miles from Nairobi, more African than English, it's reasonable and yet-

Birds dream two percent of their sleeping time, I'm told, which means they think; they know; they birdly reason.

Would one say this bird dreams in warbles, that bird dreams in tweets, and the other, that one who perches on the scarecrow 's shoulder and pecks the straw heart outhe dreams in caws? He slips into sleep and has no vision but his own raucous crys fouling the cool night air?

What of images? Do they have a lingo? How do you dream in a tongue, for instance, if you dream a yellow poplar with its poplar tulips blooming hugely? Or aspen jeweling leaves? Or a Spruce and Hemlock forest wafting forth like a blend of smoking tobacco from the pipe of a man who dreams by day? Or the lion that I dream rests his head upon my knee in August, purring like the core of earth can purr he purrs in English? He purrs in French? He has a Hopi tongue? He speak Kikuyu?

TION WITH OBOROB IIACBBTB

MacBeth is known as one of the most convivial and adroit of the literati, a forceful conversationalist who has read well but never -.;o:;u.uo to pedantry. With over 20 published books to his credit, he is completing his third novel while in residence at Yaddo. Hawaii Anthony Friedson talked to MacBeth during the 1976 fall semester University of Hawaii, where MacBeth was a visiting professor of

jalbo:ny Frieclson: George MacBeth - the name 's a start. I suppose the

who introduce your readings have exhausted the Shakespearian I'm more interested in dualisms inherent in the name - the very .,wlulâ&#x20AC;˘'-'u English " George " and the impeccably royal Scots " MacBeth." As English-educated Scot, does it occur to you that, like your name, you might be a symptom of British union? .lllacBeth: Well, I was born in Scotland. Both my parents were , but I was brought up in England. My father moved to England I was about four years old, although every year subsequently, until I twenty . I spent about two months in Scotland. So I think it 's fair to say by blood, and to some extent by upbringing, I'm purely Scottish, the larger part of my upbringing was English. When I began to poetry, I was, I suppose, trying to be an English poet. I didn 't see any nnnrT-Rnt distinction between Scottish poets and English ones. But in recent I've begun to see this much more clearly, and I've become faintly about it. I regard myself now as a Scottish writer, partly I note a number of deep e mo tional drives in what I try to d o that seem Scottish than English. For example, the r e's a te ndency among Scottish to combine intense, almost puritanical, e motions about the ir c hildand their parents on the one hand - a drive towar ds a ve ry honest kind poetry- with a very mad, c razy, imaginative tende n cy on the othe r . I see particularly in a write r such as Stevenson , who seems to me to be """''u"' .. " on his father , and on his feelings about Edinburgh, for example, he was in the Pacific , but equally excelle nt on pure fantasy, suc h as Dr. and Mr. Hyde. In my second book , The Broken Places, when I s aid the poems fell into the tradition of Hogg and Stevenson, it was tha t sort distinc tion that I had in m ind. Your music is very insis tent; it has a bagpipe skirl t o it. It 's t r u e that English poets h a ve wild, rushing rhythms , but one notices this in the Scottish poets. One notices, too, that an extraordinary of narrative poetry has been writte n by Scotsmen, from the border through people like Dunbar and Henryson on up to Scott, Burns and

the moderns. And although some English poets have gone this way, English poets, especially recently, have tended to prefer the lyric. Finally, I'm sure it has been pointed out to you that you have preoccupations-- one with sex and violence, for example. Here again, there are English writers who are obsessed with sex and violence, but the Calvinist sense of rigor would seem to account partly for these themes; or don't you agree? GM: Although I 've had a very good press for a lot of my work in England, and I'm grateful for that, what people don 't like is sometimes connected with a Scottish tendency to go too far, a certain extremism. As a writer, I have a very low opinion of tact, and many of the greatest English writers are very good on tact. A writer like Hardy, who is in many ways cautiously extreme, seems peculiarly English. AF: Or Philip Larkin, to go to a modern one? Gil: Or Philip Larkin, a writer I greatly admire, but whom I wouldn't want to be. And I do think there's an important distinction here, that particularly in recent times, English writers have felt they must be a little careful. One reason I admire a great deal of American writing is that it hasn 't been marred by that defect. It may have been marred by other defects, but not by that one. American writers have been willing to go right to the end of the line, to take up some characteristic and push it almost to the point of the ridiculous. I would like to suggest, though, that there is a sort of half-Scottish, half-English tradition that perhaps isn 't enough talked about. The Scottish writers I particularly admire are not people like Dunbar, Burns, and MacDiarmid. They are people like Scott and Stevenson and, of course, Byron. Now Byron does seem to be a classic case of the half-Scotsman, brought up in Scotland until he was ten - Scottish mother - and a great deal of his work is Scottish in the way I've already defined: a mixture of the honestly intense and personal with the bizarre and flamboyant. AF: What struck me as I learned the facts of your life was the mixture of deprivation on the one hand and privilege on the other. You were born into a war which cost you the stability of your family life, and you had a number of disagreeable family circumstances, which marked your first poems. On the other hand, I suppose no more than two or three percent of Englishmen must have your excellent education. After Oxford, you waltzed into the BBC, a rather closed enclave, and then you were recognized very quickly. You didn't endure years of neglect in the way Berryman did. Gil: That is not quite true, actually. I published my first book when I twenty-two at Oxford, in a limited edition. It was adversely reviewed nothing more emerged for nine years. When my second book, The BJ'GII:.Plaoe., came out, it did get wide - not altogether favorable, partly hostile press, but nevertheless, the kind of press that one likes because it extensive and quite helpful. But I suppose I'm not a writer of protest. By and large I accept the even when I'm writing about violence and disease, and this is one thin&'

think people dislike about my poems. I write about them as if they are a state not only to be accepted but to be enjoyed, and this people find intolerable, because most writing about extreme situations in modern times has come out of protest, a feeling that this must be put a stop to. Now, my whole approach to life is that this ultimately cannot be put a stop to, that the war is always on, and it always will be. And this gives me a lot of sympathy with writers currently unfashionable, like Kipling, for example, to choose a recent case, or Homer, to choose a rather more acceptable and older one. AF: If your acceptiveness turns some people off, there must be a number of readers who find this admirable. I'm thinking now of neurosis. There's a great deal of neurosis in your poems, a neurosis sometimes made likeable , as in "A Light in Winter." 011: Yes, that poem seems to be about a successful man, with a career and a wife, who becomes obsessed with a younger woman who is pretty mad. This theme has been treated frequently by other poets in a directly autobiographical way. The way it 's handled in " A Light In Winter" is in a traditional narrative fashion with characters who may or may not be related to the author of the poem. I'm in favor of a mixture of autobiography and fiction. I prefer autobiographical emotions in fictional situations to autobiographical emotions in autobiographical situations. In other words, the important thing is the author's feelings. The mask or structure he employs to handle those can frequently be one far removed from his own life. This again is something I don 't see used as widely as it might be, certainly not in American poetry which has gone very far along the line towards direct autobiography. AF: Anybody who 's involved autobiographical elements in what he is writing must have come across this awkward situation whereby his friends refuse to believe that the character concerned is not him or her. Do you think that it takes skill to free your mask from autobiography? 011: Any writer who's really good can disguise this. I remember once having a conversation with Anne Sexton about this. Anne Sexton, for most people, would be an extremely autobiographical writer. But she has a poem in one of her early books about a character, killed in the second world war, who seems to be her brother. I assumed that this was autobiographical- the poem is handled in such a way as to make you believe that it is - but she told me in conversation that this was a purely fictional poem deliberately written to make people think that it was autobiographical, and in a way she was actually playing with the conventions of the confessional genre. I liked that enormously; I greatly admired that; and I felt afterwards that one could never be too sure, however confessional a poem seemed, that it was so, unless you had direct, extra-biographical evidence to tell you. AF: Yes, your poem "Drop, " for example; I remember when I first talked to a Canadian admirer of yours, he discussed you as a paratrooper who had written a terrific poem about the paratrooping experience. You weren't a paratrooper, were you? 011: Let me answer that question by saying, ''That's very interesting. ''

There are poems of mine which suggest that I 've been a guard in a GermaD concentration camp, and this is possible; I suppose there are people goi.DC about the world saying, " Oh, there's a man called MacBeth, you know, wbo actually worked for the Nazis. He was in the SS, and he's written eome wonderful poems about it. " There was another poem of mine about a womaD having an abortion, and I suppose one could meet somebody and say, ''Goeb, you know, George MacBeth he used to be a woman, and he had an abortioa; he wrote a wonderful poem about it, but he's now a man. " In other warda. one can adopt personae or masques which may be far removed from one'1 experience or quite cloee to it. I'm very careful to muddle things up here. I'm fascinated by the whole business of sometimes writing poems which may no& seem to be true, which I know are, and sometimes writing poems which seem to be true but which I know are not. It seems to me that the lust for biograpbJ is too strong amongst readers. I have some sympathy with Eliot saying he never wanted a biography to be written. My view's a bit different from hia; want to write my own biography and create my own myth in my own W&J. And I don 't feel that I'm in any way obligated to tell my public the truth. don 't believe in ''the truth. '' I believe, as I was saying to somebody yesterdq, "Beauty is power, power beauty. That is all we know on earth and all we to know." AF: Do you f"md yourself moving recently towards circumstances have an obvious literal referent to facts of your own life? I'm thinking now some of your recent poems which concern break-ups of marriages. Gil: Well, I was divorced about two ysars ago. I 'm releasing one piece autobiographical information and I have written poems about this, but might not be that the ones which seem moet true are so. I'm very resistant this attempt of people to judge the success of the poem by the exter!W experience. They say: "The poor guy 's divorced; it must have been..,•••,_ the poems make me feel it was terrible. Therefore it really was terrible." that interests me is: are the poems good? If it turned out that I'd never divorced - and that I'd been perfectly happy - and they were still poems, then they'd still be good poems. That I absolutely believe. In words it 's the imagination which is the c rucial poetic thing- that power the pure imagination to get inside a situation which I believe that, ,....,~"·· more than anyone else in the English tradition, Shakespeare had, and later Tennyson had, and which Browning had, and Byron had - poets lives seem to me unimportant, but whose imagination seems u.r:lfe·tterecll AF: This is not necessarily much to do with quality, I suppoee. It's to partly with a tradition- which Walter Allen, you may remember, C1escr1lll as the Protean tradition. Some great writers are not Protean - Keats example . ... Gil: .DOn't much like Keats. He's the kind of writer I can see is a writer .. .I have a kind of love-hate thing with him. I've written parodies . . . . AF: Yes, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where you pose " Miss Timeless Greek bird . . . with the cold-as-marble look" against her

with swollen eyes, morning sickness and Alka-Seltzer. Two birds one stone. Keats is just the kind of poet we have too much of, it seems to me, the of poet people are endlessly fascinated by. A lot of people try to be Keats they end up less interesting writers then if they'd tried to be Browning if they'd tried to be Tennyson. I think Keats is a bad poet to try to be. I Donne is a bad poet to try to be. I think Wilfred Owen is a bad poet to to be. I think Sylvia Plath is a bad poet to try to be. I'm putting this quite And of course one would need a lot of argument and qualification to llll'.'.n:t.'""'• but clearly here is a kind of autobiographical tradition in English more and more is fashionable. On the other hand, there's fictive and •rtnl&tltve tradition which is less fashionable, but which I believe is much valuable to a writer in finding his own feet. There are, however, poems which are Keatsil&n in your canon. And _..,m..nn"'" You may not feel these to be your best works. But you read in which you are emotionally involved and which are very definitely in the camp of Protean distance. Well, it would be wonderful to achieve something that reminded IIIU'"U0..1U:J of Keats. I suspect, though, that it 's the later nineteenth century ~IAIJ. ~J.:.; figures rather than the earlier ones that I have an affinity with: more Romantic side of Tennyson, for example, and some of the poets of nineties: poets like Dowson, whom I greatly admire; Arthur Symons . . . Yes. As I remember it, your notion of the " mainstream " of English -if one may go Leavis for a bit - is very eccentric. That is because I don 't believe in the "canon" except one which is ~.w..~au.eu by the individual for his own purposes. I have no sympathy with Leavisil&n attempt to isolate a handful of major writers and to c reate a A " great tradition " .... . . .I just don 't believe that can work. Eliot, even more than Leavis, English literature in his own image. Now I want every poet to Eliot and to rewrite English literature in his own image, but I don 't everybody else to believe that his rewrite is necessarily "the truth." trouble with the list is that a large number of 'major-minor ' writers completely disregarded. Who reads Praed nowadays? Praed is one of greatest major-minor poets in English, yet many students go through an literature course having never heard of Praed, much less read him. I get more out of Praed than out of Wordsworth. I've no doubt that IJOII"d.EIW<>rth's a far greater poet, but he's not available to me. I think the must be true for many people. You must have studied Leavis; you must have been at Oxford at about the he was•writing. Do you think you owe him ... I was reading Classics of course at this time, and not English. Reading , you read everything there is, because not too much has survived; isn't the temptation to say, "Shall we read so-and-so or notf" I mean,

you read them all. AF: I noticed as I went through your books that few of your poems involved the stuff of Greece and Rome. GM: That 's very true. Curiously I had to do a lecture not long ago for the Classical Association about being a poet with a classical education, and I thought that I could probably make out quite a good case for myself as a classical poet, but the more I read the poems, the more I realized how little I seemed to be deploying the classical virtures. I certainly don 't use mythology, and I don't use particularly classical vocabulary. I do feel that in my obsession with form and structure there is something very classical, though; much more than most contemporary poets. I'm interested in forms that have been used before, throughout the centuries, and I have used forms employed by classical poets and not often found in English. I've occasionally written hexameters and sapphics. On the whole, I've concentrated on English meters. But I have, for example, one long poem in a sonnet sequence from the Hungarian, which had never, to my knowledge, been attempted before in English. And I encouraged other poets to use it and got one, John Fuller, to do so; and that seemed to me to be a small achievement, to import a new form - however badly you use it - into English. Inventing forms, of course, is a much trickier business because the run of the times is against you anyway; people on the whole don't like form aa such, and they may find it hard to pick up exactly where your new form ia going. AF: Is this as true in England as it is in the United States? I mean, right now in the United States, anybody who starts babbling about form is likely to see the distant eye flaking off and going milky. GM: No, in England there is still a greater respect for traditional forms. I don 't think there's much more respect for invented forms, though. I thin& one would probably have to turn to the continent, perhaps to France, and I do feel a close affinity with a Frenc h tradition in my experimental wing; I often think of myself as being more akin to certain French writers - Raymond Queneau, for example - in that area. There was a time in America - notably the 1950's - when poets Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and the early Louis Simpson and Howard Nemerov were much praised for the skillful way in which they deployed traditional forms. Robert Lowell himself, when he first emerged, was highly praised for just these qualities . It 's only twenty years ago- well within lifetime of even our middle-aged readers - and yet it 's as if it had never been. I find that organic form or " naked poetry " - whatever that term may meanhas absolutely swept the board. And I think this is a pity for ~~~:..,c路IL:JII.n poetry - Robert Bly and Galway Kinnell, for example - but too middle-rank poets are in danger of becoming too like each other. In 1920's I think the real greatness of American poetry lay in the fact perhaps a dozen major figures each had a. totally distinctive style de_pe1t1di..D,I on a different approach to form. If you took, for example, Jeffers, Marianne Moore, H . D . Stevens, Eliot- one could extend the list.

all poles apart, and yet they're all major figures. Yee, of oourae, this is cyclical, isn't it? It's cyclical in England as well; too, we've had periods when the traditional forms were not highly -~del:l . The sonnet, of oourae. .. . Indeed! Yee. It'll go for half a century being a dirty form, as it tends to be now. Then DI118CIIl8 brings it out, duste it otf, and for a moment it '11 be the rage again; it goes back into retirement after it beoomee used by too many D18-1181'1nnll sonneteers. It's hard, though, to get a sense of historical perspective. The twentieth - h ....., has been an age of col0888l development. Up until 1900 only a few used free verse. I don't know what the widespread use of free verse means here, and whether or not in time free verse will begin to tighten I suspect it will, that we'll get into a situation in which new forms will out of the apparently total current freedom of free verse. There's a very important point to be made here, I think. You can write or badly in a traditional form. It doesn't follow from the fact that you written a sonnet, which is metrically perfect and rhymes perfectly, that have written a good poem, but it does follow that you have written a -"'"''•· Now free verse does not contain repetitions and regularities such you can say, " This is an 'x ,' even if it 's a bad 'x. "'The important thing traditional form is that you can produce something which adheres to rules and is still good or bad. The evaluation of it as an art object follows teet of whether or not it is in a particular form. Now that has disap·- ..~~ - and that seems to me to be absolutely crucial because it tends to tJdlmtify the idea of a poem with a good poem. I think that 's fatal. I think it's 111n1rvn-t.a1~t that poems are a category of works which we can approach and "Ah, these are poems," and then we can go on to say, " But are they ones or bad ones?" At the moment, we tend to have said, "If these are then they are good. If they're not poems, then they're bad." This leiiO,res one whole level of the traditional arsenal of assessment. This brings up an interesting matter. Many of your poems are written in nurAF!rv rhyme mode, you've written children's literature and edited books animal poems. You would, in fact, be vulnerable to the comment by one of llg la18 American critics that the thing he disliked about most contemporary ~_-uau poetry was that it was children's poetry written for adults. Yes, of course. However, having said that, the question still remains. John Logan, for waalpl•e, does not like end rhyme because- citing David and Liaa- he feels end rhyme and, I think, accentual-syllabic metrics, are symptomatic of n.u·c.u..uc and immature reach which tends to substitute empty formalism of wperfical sort of genuine and profound emotional feeling. I'm probably his position, but this is roughly, as I remember it, what be had eay. He said that when he was David and Ll•a, and realized the basis of 's neurosis, h e understood why he was dissatisfied with end rhyme. Now written a large nu~ber of poems without end rhyme, and you've

written an equally large number in standard scansion with end rhyme. A. you write these days, do you find yourself more or less inclined to the l..ogaD position? GJI: I'm not at all inclined to the Logan position. I have no sympathy with it. I suppose that what would be meant by it would be that nowadays it'a immature. I mean, clearly, if applied historically, nobody could take tbe thesis seriously. since most of the great poetry in English employs rhyme, or if not rhyme, at least meter. If he extended the theory to cover meter u well, we would have to throw out "Paradise Lost" and the whole of Shakespeare as well as - well, I was confining myself to English, but if one went to other literatures, of course - everything! So it must be a thesis about the present day somehow: that now that free verse is available such conventional forms are immature. AF: Yes, because Logan himself has written in conventional forms .. . GJI: When younger, yes, and written well. I'm not sympathetic to thia position and it would be difficult to get into an argument about it in detail without somebody here who enthusiastically supported it, as I know you don 't . But I 'll return to this point about my own poetry seeming like children poetry written for adults. Undoubtedly. I do write a lot in what I hope ia childlike way. I write for the perpetual child as I think he exists in all and I've a1ways been moved in my vestigially Christian way by the â&#x20AC;˘ 'Thou shalt not enter the kingdom of heaven, but as a litUe child. â&#x20AC;˘' I that a lyrical response to the world in modern times is easiest through eyes of a child. Far greater poets than I have thought that in the Wordsworth, I suppose . ... AJI': Well, it 's a fundamental belief of Romanticism, isn't it? "Trailing of glory .. . . " Gil: It is; I suppose the argumt:lnt about the kind of children's poetry I is that it 's sort of coy and twee and cozy rather than childlike, childlike poetry is, as you say, at the heart of the Romantic tradition. Say Blake for example. I personally find it impossible to handle optimistic material except in a childlike way. I want to have one wing of what writing which is not entirely obsessed with disease and decay and death horror , and the only way I can get into it is through this childlike I think of English literature at the moment as an old man, and American literature as an adolescent. It's easier for the old man to pathize with the child and to return to childhood then for the adolescent become childlike. Adolescents usually have no sympathy with ~,;u.uu.uUI;11111 they ' re too c lose to it themselves. I think this is why American poets really tolerate this "childish " quality in English poets, because they they're still too close, as it were, to a c hildishness in their own literature. England, our literature is so old n o w, I think we feel we can turn back in playful way and handle childlike material. Undoubtedly, there is very good childlike poetry c urrently being written in America; and there's a good childlike poetry - Hughes is only one e xample - being written

But if one carries that analogy through, why is it there has been very good childlike poetry written in America at any time , and the English bave always been extremely good at it? Maybe because we hadn't gotten to be good at it until the literature r ua~wc old. You see, I think the good childlike poetry in England really does 8tart with Blake- it's a product of the late nineteenth century. The child was invented in England in the late nineteenth century; there weren 't any children before, and probably there have never been children in America in that same way. American children are adults much more quickly than children in England are. AI': You have called your novel The Samurai "an entertainment," and your critics, whether they admired your work or not, have termed it "enter&aing." I see in you a poet who is at once extremely entertaining, but whose entertainment is also conducted on a sophisticated level, and with a strange demand. In some of your poems I understand perfectly well what is going on on the literal level - I'm thinking now of a poem like " Early Warning "- but it's not quite clear what is going on underneath. None of your poetry that I bave read is obscure, except some of the experiments, and yet some of it is def"mitely puzzling. Is that an aspect of your work that you 've realized, and which makes you happy? Or is it something that was just thrust on you, like it or not? Or is it something you try to achieve from the beginning? OM: I 'll take the entertainment point first: I am pleased to be called "entertaining." I think this is a great tribute, and as far as the novel is concerned, this was a trick picked up from Graham Greene, of course, who called some of his books "entertainments" and some " novels." And I never thought it was meant to denigrate the entertainments; it was simply meant to show the reader how to approach them. At the same time, I think poetry should be entertaining, because after all, there are a lot of things competing for people's attention, and none of us need to be told how difficult it is to get people to read poetry. I think it ought to be something that really drags you away from the television set, ideally; and nobody ought to be forced to read poetry because it's good for them, uplifting or elevating only. I don't think that any of the greatest poetry really is like that. Whatever great poet you take, there is a powerful element of entertainment in what he's doing. I like the notion that the joker is the strongest card in the pack, you know; and if somebody calls me a joker, I think, well, tremendous, because it implies power. And humor is one of the most powerful weapons a writer has in engaging the attention of his readers. He can deal with diffic ult or unpleasant material more conveniently if he's prepared to handle the whole range of humor from belly laughter to the macabre to whatever. Contemporary poetry is a little too sparing in its use of these possibilities, I think. Now there 's a second point you were making about â&#x20AC;˘'puzzling a nd obscure'' qualities. AI': I would, rather than " puzzling, " use the term " mysterious." It 's the feeling that the writer wishes you to understand that " there are certain things, Horatio," which are a little bit - and always will be - unclear.

Sometimes a poem - I'm thinking of two that have struck me: " Early Warning'' and ''The Killing,' ' both of which are very plain poems, and yetiD both of which, I'm not always sure what 's going on.... 011: What's going on in "Early Warning" is that an Eskimo is dying ol radiation sickness which he's contracted from the bones of a ,.....,... h,...t: American bomber somewhere in the Arctic. It 's fantastical, but not unreal. One imagines the plane crashing on an Arctic patrol, the EsikiJIDO. stealing the pilot's bones as a talisman in some way, and his oe<::OD[lllll/t. mysteriously infected with the "disease" which he regards as a curse God. This is a science fiction plot, as it were, which is not explicitly ....,,_J...t in the poem. It exists as a frame for the poem and it has to be inferred from i1. I'm not sure if I've set up an adequate mechanism for the inference to place. I think the poem needs a note, but with a note it's clear. AF: Even without a note it's absolutely clear in terms of its archetypal you know: the fear we have for disturbing bones. It doesn't really matter it's an American aircraft conveying radiation disease, does it? 011: Well, that's interesting. I've said before to people about my bizarrely situated poems, the plot does matter to me. I thought the plot the main thing. But people would say: "What it's really doing is telling something about your marriage, George; or what you think about the or something psychological. '' That may be true. But I always feel that side of the poem is not for the poet to be too interested in. The reader be properly interested in that, but it's up to the poet to control the controllable element - which is the plot. AF: Your poems have been increasingly occupied with the "negative" "destructive" element- with blood, with disease. At the same time, you also very tenderly invested in these poems so that something like ''The shows a combination of sensitivity and happy blood-lust. You couldn't written that poem unless there was something in you which enjoyed the bird. And the same is true, on the humorous level, of, say. ' Crippen's Elimination Kit. " That's a funny poem, but part of its comic is its malice. 011: I know what you're saying there, and others have remarked on There is an element of what has been called "sheer sadism" in such an enjoyment of violence and cruelty for its own sake. I don't think myself, mind you, as a violent or cruel person, but it's not for me to say. I'm sometimes surprised at the degree to which people fasten on to elements in the poems to the exclusion of others. Violence and horror worry me too much 1n other people's poems. A good deal of it........t.nl'll employs this atmosphere. I think it may have to do with this ' alizing. " In "The Bird, " for example, it may be shocking because the appears not to be fictionalized. And that does become more horrifying say, a concentration camp guard poem, where, perhaps, people are ready to accept it as an historical excursion. AF: Do you think that the war and the concentration camps produced people who are willing to accept these sadistic and nui.BOcni.IHI

of the human personality? I don 't know that the war had any more to do with it than any previous . I think all centuries have been violent. I certainly wouldn't accept the that the twentieth century has been any more violent than any other. I that life's a lot less dangerous to civilized people now than it was in the 路.atriueei:un century. You can certainly get mugged easily in New York now; could have been beaten up, raped and killed much more easily in London In the 17~0's . Rochester hired some thugs to beat up Dryden because he didn't like him. I never heard of any modern poet who was beaten up by thugs hired by another one. D: True. I was thinking, though, of the phenomenon whereby intelligent, and, in a sense, sensitive people today have organized a systematic and large machine of human elimination. That's not been tried much before, has it? GM: No, the Nazis were unique in recent history for their attempt at genocide. Yes, I think that is a specific horror, and I may have written about that a lot for this very reason: I do find the concentration camps bizarre and mysterious, as well as horrifying, because of their logical attempt to do an atreme kind of thing. That's a special issue, but I don 't think it's quite the laDle as thinking that the twentieth century is more violent. In fact, the extermination machine was not aimed at being particularly violent. It was efficient partly because of its attempt to exclude certain kinds of violence. And the horror of it is that the Nazis were able to fwmel people to concentration camps very quickly; whereas, if they 'd attempted just to strangle, or break their arms, or kick them to death, it would have taken longer. Of course, they did that, too; but the really horrifying thing is the gas chambers. AF: About a year ago you were fairly well resolved that you were more interested in prose and in writing novels. Since then you've written a lot of poetry. Do you foresee - in terms of your immediate progress - which way you'd be likely to go, or do you feel that your prose and poetry are richly interdependent? Gil: Well, I was never in a position where I was more interested in writing proee in the sense that I thought of prose as more important. At a particular point in time, prose may have been my immediate concern, but since I started writing prose about four years ago, I have never wavered from the view that poetry is still more important to me. Nonetheless prose has got more important. I 've come - having written a certain amount of it - to take it more eeriously than I used to, though I'm still slightly bemused and surprised by the kinds of suocees I 've had with prose and the kinds of things I 've been able to do. I don't quite know what I'm doing in that area yet. I've been writing poetry so long, and thought about it so much, that I'm at ease, to some extent, with the role of a poet and the goals of a poet. I 'm not at all at ease with the role and the goals of a prose writer; it's too early for me. AF: It seems to me that in your poetry, and in your prose, you seem to be a pa.rodist. It's a very rare faculty today, to write good parody, but your poetry has a lot of parody. I'm thinking now of the Keats poem, which is a deliberate

attempt at parody. Surely, a novel like The Samurai is very much a parody of Fleming, although with a more profound art than Fleming was invested in.

011: Well, in a wider sense of the word " parody," I wholly accept this as a very subtle and interesting comment. I admire greatly Pope as a writer, and I think of Pope as the supreme parodist in English. His whole relationship to the classical writers he admired is one of parody, and yet for me, Pope is the third greatest of all English poets after Shakespeare and Tennyson, a writer one cannot neglect without cutting out one whole area of the body of Engliah poetry; so I am very proud to feel that I was operating in a tradition of Parody on the grand scale, and certainly the novels I've 80 far attempted have all been in certain ways extensions of things I've done in poetry, with the same defects, probably: obsession with form, and the arbitrary, and a kind of extremism. Certainly, too The Samurai is, on the surface, a kind of thriller, but when examined more closely might be seen as oddly not 80. Now I greatly admire Ian Fleming, and I suppose one part of me wants to ssy I'm trying to write a book just as good as one of his. But if I'm totally honest with myself, I realize that his approach was probably quite different from mine. He hadn't spent a long career writing poetry; he was less sophisticated about literat\ll"8 as such. He was probably much more capable of writing a straight thriller than I am. Therefore, my book must relate to his in a rather weird way perhaps in the way that some of Betjeman's poetry relates to theVictoriana, whom he admires. He wouldn't think of himself as quite parodying them, but in a way he 's more sophisticated than they are, and his act of hoiJ1818 comes out in a queer relationship to them. Certainly, The Samura1 is an act of homage to Ian Fleming, an attempt to, as it were, evaluate his work and show its great strengths. If one regarded The Samura1 almost as a footnote which encouraged a more serious reading of Ian Fleming, it would not have failed in its purpose. AF: My own feeling about that one is that Ian Fleming is probably like a child -your child. There seems to be an investment in his own sex scenes, for example, and in his own scenes of violence- a neurotic investment of the author which is not preeent at all in your work. Now I don't know whetber you think of that as an insult. 011: I do think of his books as really much more serious than they have beaD treated as, and I would generalize that popular literature must be treated more seriously in a period when mainstream literature has lost the ~ market. The vestigial elements which enabled Homer and Byron to obtain a huge audience, and to be simple and direct as well as complex, are still there in Fleming. And it's tragic that mainstream writers can no longer retain thia ability to press the buttons of the man in the street. James Bond is an epio hero in modern terms, in the way Sherlock Holmes is an epic hero in modern terms; and it 's a terrible comment on the mainstream novel of the Jut hundred years that Sherlock Holmes is by far our most famous .u~,;,~ulllll " character, closely followed by James Bond. No straight novelist has been able to produce a figure with a command on the popular imagination that th-

ftguree have. But part of that is because both of them were, surely, square. The man in lltreet would, I think, be quite &hooked at the idea ofÂˇwatching Cadbu.ry, beroine of The Samurai. being laid by a Borzoi. I think the man in the street will lap it up. The man in the street is a very pbiatitcated chap. I regard myself as very like the man in the street, , and always feel a close affinity with him. The people I don't feel an with are academic critics. The man in the street and I see eye-to-eye. 1 what we want is fame, power, money, a good read, a warm fire, nice in the sun, plenty to drink, beautiful women, fast cars. I like all these and so does the man in the street. It may be I also happen to like , which he doesn 't yet, but this is simply a matter of time, I tell myself. I would have thought, though, that the people who would buy The and certainly those who would appreciate it best, are probably the critics you despise, rather than the man in the street. I wake up screaming sometimes when I fear that, Tony. That's one of Dia'htmaree. I certainly shan 't sell as many copies as I want to if that out to be true. They'll all borrow the book from their university No, I think it has a happy hold. Many of the men on the street will read like your more commonplace critics, as simply a good porn novel. it does seem to tragically misestimate the novel to think of it as that. I do want to say a quick word here about pornography as such because I it as a serious genre. I think that all the genres are interesting, and . .......-.â&#x20AC;˘.,_ for example, science fiction as a genre has been taken up and by writers like J .G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom have major fiction while adhering very closely to the conventions of fiction. It can be possible to write major fiction while adhering to the .-ntic>ns of pornography. I believe this has been done in the case of The ol 0. It's the only case I know of in which a book I regard as a major of literature is also a piece of straight pornography. What about Miller? I don 't think that Miller is pornography. I think he 's an eroticist; that 's , I think he 's attempting to be healthy all the time. The interesting about pornography is that it never bothers to try to have something in that will compel Dr. Leavis to like it. It 's uninhibitedly an attempt to Pornography reminds us that we would really like all literature to be this. I mean we really want all literature to grapple with the total man. The only branch of literature, really, which attempts to do this any embarrassment is pornography, and it has a simple test: if you erection, it works; if you don 't, it doesn 't . And would that we had some test for other forms of literature. Does it disturb you, then, if a reader finds Cad bury 's little animaline ml'llrinrtA intensely amusing? Mm. That 's a tricky area. I'd say that finding the book amusing all the would ultimately be an evasive response. I would say that you can

regard the whole book as in a sense parodic and amusing, while at the time responding individually to scenes in the way I do. Now that is what mean by revivifying genre fic tion. I suppose that's what's been done science fiction by writers I'm thinking of. They adhere to all the corlvalloi tional desire for space ships, mysterious diseases and so on, but, at the time, use these for other things. AF: Well of course, you can say much the same about eighteenth cerltUJrl novelists, Fielding especially. Suddenly the smile goes off your face as realize that some matter being treated comically is also being seriously - Tom Jones ' quasi-incestuous seduction.... Gil: Yes, I don't think it 's the case that laughter is a total inhibitor of desire. We're in a difficult area here, but I think you can have a fwmy which is also an arousing book. AF: Well, The Samurai leads us naturally to where you are now. interested to know whether your willingness to come here and enjoy Hawaiian ethos has anything to do with the e normous amount of Ori~>nt.Alll which have pervaded your work from quite early poems on. The first thing noticed when I picked up your collected poems some years ago was that number of your experiments at the end owed something to Chinese GM: I have had a fascination with Japan, specifically. I thought at first I interested in China, but the more I investigated, the more I realized it really China. It was Japan. Frequently, of course, there are Chinese,,..,..~"""'"! in Japanese culture. But I was responding to them as transformed by I can 't account for this at all. But it 's become clear to me that I respond Japanese culture more than to any other culture in the world. I've interested in the Spartans, the Aztecs. I've been interested in all sorts cultures. But the Japanese culture combines qualities of extremism with concern for beauty which I don 't find anywhere else. And I regard Ja]parl881 art as the greatest art produced by any nation in the world. I first largely through collecting Japanese swords. I'm absorbed by any opportunity to learn anything more about J a panese cult ure, and, I've already produced two novels which are partly con cerned with d espite the fact that I've neve r , until I ca me h ere, kno wn any .Ji:LJpi:Llll:lllllll people. I must say that those I've met here haven 't changed my " '"'J.ll'IIP about Japan. But it 's mostly been a response to the history and the AF: Well, I suppose there's a certain way in which you can look on Japanese as the British of the Pacific. GM: The Scots . . .. AF: Well, yes. But I said " the Britis h " because that covers the English, who, like the Japanese, a re an Island people - ver y jealous of their pri Gil: The English think about t h e Scots as mos t Japanese think a bout Ainu - a barbarous people in the far n orth. One of the tragedies of the world war is tha t the people in En g land who g ot t o kno w the Japanese got to know t h e m in prisone r of war camps. Hardly the best way. I'd that through tourism and expanding trade we will be able to know better, because I can 't h elp feeling that a country off the coast of Europe

a great deal to learn from a country off the coast of China. AF: Well, you're going there to learn next, I gather, and when you return, let 's hope it's with more good novels about Japan and a few poems to boot.

TOWBBP

I ask the night sky, I ask the stars to weep. I ask the hanging jackets in the bedroom cupboard to weep. I ask the filing cabinets in the little bedroom. I ask the pot the fish is oooked in in the kitchen to weep. I ask the bowl of the lavatory. I ask the poroelain of the hand-basin to weep. II

I ask the remote dials in the dashboard of the car to weep. I ask the gutter. I ask the snails in the long grass in the park to weep. I ask the black rabbit eloping with her own shadow in the garden to weep. I ask the toad.

m I ask the darkness creeping out of the ground to weep. I ask the light. I ask the pepper hinting at its own annihilation in the sweet la.rder to weep. I ask the sweating cheese. I ask the spoons to weep. I ask the delivered bottles of Glenfiddich still wrapped in their Christmas cellophane. I ask the milk to weep.

IV I ask the sheets, I ask the pillow to weep. I ask the spider below the skirting-board. I ask the chamber-pot to weep. I ask the ceiling. I ask the spectacles in their case to weep. I ask the boots with their broken zip.

v I ask the wilderness in the mind of the pony going to the slaughterhouse to weep. I ask the blood raging. I ask the solicitor with his gavel. I ask the auctioneer on the chopping-block to weep. I ask the hangman selling knuckle-bones to the proper authorities to weep. I ask the skull.

BADGER'S POEM

The badger ran rapidly down the thick walk, snuffling. Eee, eee, eee, he cried, when he stopped. He was a good badger. Very sleek were his incurved paws, and his lean snout. His belly, very commodious. He W'lS a good eater, was this badger . Worms, worms, and more worms. His stomach was a veritable cauldron of worms. Anyway. apart from that. Why are you writing a poem about this little furry obnoxious badger? He isn 't obnoxious. 0? Well, they say he is. Out West, they 're killing him in hundreds. With guns. With poison gas. With vicious dogs. And (for all I know) with trained weasels. Poor badger. I wouldn 't like to be him. Even if I was as bad as they say he is. I should expect a better deal.

So I'm putting this particular badger in a poem. To commemorate his glossy appearance, and his neat nocturnal habits.

Very like in fact those of an English gentleman on his way to a dinner party. The sort of English gentleman who is presently massacring his kind with dogs etc. Eee, eee, eee, he cried, when he stopped. And I 'll bet you would, too.

About t.be aatbon . . .

D.L. ADAMS, a recent well-published graduate of the University of Hawaii, won first place in Kapa'â&#x20AC;˘ Spring, 1972 fiction contest and i8 currently in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa.

, CBARI.B8 BARASCH has graduated from teaching physical education at Sarah :r_,awrenoe College to working in the Vel'IDODi Poets-in-the-Schools Program. We felt that we had to have at least baseball poem by him after reading his "Curveb&ll" in the fall, 1975 issue of . . . . . . EARL COOPBR, creative writing student at the University of Hawaii, is currently wayfaring along the West Coast. KBISTII'BLTON is a student majoring in English at the University of Hawaii. TONY PRJBD80N is head of the creative writing program at tb8 University of Hawaii and President of the Hawaii Literary Council. He has long been a c1oee friend of George MacBeth. GBOBGB GBRSABA., born thirty years ago in Mindanao, interrupted his studies at the University of Hawaii to serve as an infantry scout Vietnam, 1969-70. He now works in the Communications Division of the Honolulu Police Department and is trying to complete his aenicl' year at UH ' 'as schedule permits.'' JOHN GIVBNS-born, raised, and educated in California-spent years in the Peace Corps teaching English in Pusan, South ~~~Âˇ and four years studying classical Asian painting and calligraphy Kyoto, Japan. He is a member of the Sho-O Shodo Juku school calligraphy. A recent graduate of the University of Iowa Workshop, he currently teaches English at Chinatown ColtniiiLu College, San Fancisoo. He explains that his story was originally "An Imaginary Garden Reflected In The Eyes Of Its Toads, " reference to Marianne Moore's celebrated definition of what

should be.

KAORU BONGO grew up in or around the Big Island's Hongo Store. We refer you to his poem in this issue.

JBNKIN8 owns and operates the Knife River Press, which small books of poetry. His poems have appeared in Parla , Bpoeb. and llearilaDd U: Poet. of the llidw..t, an antholtrom Northern illinois University. He is the author of the ~boo·k The Well Dtcpr'• Wile (Minnesota Writers' Publishing

IIIIILJLilllt:ra

_o.&A. ..- BONG KINGSTON is the author of The WomaD Warrior: llaiOb~

of a Glrlbood Amcmc Gbo8b (Knopf, 1976), winner of the award for 1976. Born, raised, educated in California, she now resides in Honolulu where she at Mid-Pacific Institute. We 're honored to print these exfrom her seoond novel in progress, Gold llowatabl llan .

latiiOlllr&l Book Critics Circle nonfiction

• ,84tJB IIACBBTB was born in Scotland and raised in England. He "''u~ for many years in the BBC as a producer of poetry programs, is now freelancing as a writer and teacher. He is the author of 12 , _..uuo:7G of poetry, including collected poems 1958-1970 (Atheneum), two novels, including the pornographic thriller The Samurai ~rBlEI.

IIORAI.BS is an English major at the University of Hawaii studying at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

IIIPII'Ant:Jv

ROBBINS ex>-ed.its the exciting Third Rail and is the author a first book of poems, Detooatecl Vella. His poem "Separation" appeared in Poeb7 Ba8t-W..t Alltbol~. copyrighted by of the East West Center, to whom we are grateful for IIIJI"I.Il.UIIllu•u to reprint. He is aooepting fan mail and orders for his and magazine at this address: THIRD RAn. PRESS 9721 Monte Mar Dr. Los Angeles 90035

"'JIUit.EW

8BBLNUTI' is currently teaching creative writing at Western University. Other stories have appeared in The VtrpDla ....t.rlY Review, Sben•ndoab, .&JDerioaD Review and the 1975 0. Awanla. She has been a recipient of the Mademoiselle Fiction and the Randa.Jl Jarrell Fellowship at the University of North ~illnlA at Greensboro.

. . .&.I.II!JI,ou

IDLDA WRY-"an early day roamer, the daughter of would-be gyp-

sies, fed on a kind of ethereal hedgehog stew"-writes of u~~lll11J• . dreams, and "pretty little reasons for having hope." Her work appeared in the California Poetry Review. the Christian ScJLealll Monitor, The Saturday Evening Post. and many other publica Mother of four, grandmother of two, she resides with her husband Santa Rosa, California. ANN YONEZAKI is a student in English and Dance at the of Hawaii.

Uni··~·~a

Congratulations to: GUY DAVENPORT, whose "The Richard Nixon Freischutz (Hawaii Review #5) was chosen for inclusion in Priae St.orlia 1978, The 0. HeD17 Awarda. PIDLIP DAMON, whose "Growing UP" In No Time" (Hawaii .......,..#6) has been chosen for inclusion in The Best American Stories, 1977, Edited by Martha Foley.