Hawaiʻi Review Number 9: 1979 by Hawaiʻi Review Archive

HAWAil REVIEW NUMBER 9

FALL 1979

EDITOR Anita Povich POETRY EDITORS Laurie K~ribayashi Steven Nimtz

FICTION EDITOR Valentino Ramirez

MANAGING EDITOR Elizabeth Lee

FICTION STAFF Mary Pat Chubb, Sohail Inayatullah, Kimberly McKeever, Roger Milliken, John Mitchell, Bill Teter POETRY STAFF Jane Anderson, Puanani Burgess, Andrew Resnick, Elizabeth Scheuer, Gary Tachiyama ~VISORS

fan MacMillan Rob Wilson

PRODUCTION STAFF Barbara Ho, Wayne Kawamoto, Chris Kodama, Joy Komo, Avis Lam, Ann Nanamori, James Reis, Randy Tamashiro, Patricia Yoshimura Photograph of Diane Wakoski by Robert Tumey. Cover design by Harry Choy. HAWAil REVIEW is a student publication of the Board of Publications. University of Hawaii at Manoa. Subscriptions and manuscripts should be addressed to HA WAil REVIEW, University of Hawaii, Depa.rtment of English, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu. HI. 96822. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a self~addressed. stamped envelope. Single copies. $3. 00.

ÂŠ 1979 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

CONTENTS

INTERVIEW Conversation with DIANE WAKOSKI

FICTION 4

from Communion A Raging Thirst for the National Drink of Hawaii Elmo Gets Energized Five Stories Dear Valerie Next Summer

35 44

93 108 112

GRAEME GIBSON TIMOTHY S. GOINS LESLIE BOONE WILLIAM D. STEINHOFF CHRISTI SHIGENAGA LOIS HUDSON

POETRY PORTFOUO Seven Poems Nine Poems

121 134

NORMAN HINDLEY NELL ALTIZER

POETRY 30 48 54

Two Poems Two Poems Island

DIANE WAKOSKI MARGARET ATWOOD JOSEPHINE MILES

Honolulu Two Poems Here I Am 'Awapuhi Two Poems A Trade for Daydreams Two Poems Two Poems Cheyenne Plain Three Poems The Act of Love Two Poems Four Poems Unsent Birthday Card Neighbor Lady My Family in the Country Out of the Desert, Into the Rain Poems from Ye llow C reek Spring Journal

Notes on Contributors

146

ROBERT MAZZOCCO VALENTINO RAMIREZ GARY TACHIYAMA PUANANI BURGESS JANE ANDERSON SANDRA AKAMINE JOSEPH BRUCHAC LEONARD NATHAN PATTI PATTON MERYL SIEGAL STEPHEN THOMAS SHERI MAE AKAMINE UN UFSHIN GARY SANGE STEVEN LAUTERMILCH LEE UPTON SE RA HIRASUNA MESSING

JUDITH MINTY

57 59 61 62 64 66 68 70 71 74 75 78 82 83 84

GRAEME GIBSON

from Communion

Davisville, past the cemetery, into the tunnel and then St. Clair. Felix on his feet before the train has stopped, even before they've entered the station: he's first to the door and out, he races up the stairs, through the turnstile and into the street. He sprints across St. Clair and heads north on Yongc. Time is passing. He darts among window shoppers in the sun. Although his body seems awkward, his passage uncontrolled, he threads among them expertly, he never contacts, never touches or is touched: it's almost as if he wasn't there at all. She's there though, that woman again, perhaps still leaning at the corner. Enveloped in a huge scarf, she pulls it about her head and shoulders: she watches from the other side of the street. Nobody has ever spoken to her, no one has followed her home .. . Felix walking more freely because the shops are behind him and there are few people near the Church. Some old men, that's all: crouching on benches they examine their hands, their bodies in the sun. The journey is interminable. He's only now at the gate, it takes him forever to pass the office and he has to follow the drive for thirty yards up the hill before it curves to the left. Felix leaves it here, he continues straight ahead, he walks on the graves, their headstones cut with names, beloved father, strange names lost in memory. At the crest of the hill he barely pauses, he knows his route; this is where the ravine begins. There are no graves here, no trees: a shallow valley from the north to the south, it tumbles to dead elms, underbrush at the cemetery's southern edge; and there the stream, foul smelling, issues from the ground. He reaches the bottom, running to maintain balance, and crosses quickly. Often he has walked here almost for pleasure. One summer afternoon he watched a ground hog there, yes there, he could see the mound if he'd only look. But he does not look. And to his left a pile of broke n monuments. Fragments of a wing, a face: the scattered headstones, chunks of marble as he passes. Earth sticks to his boots as he climbs to rejoin the road: ice clings in the roots of trees. He's out of breath, he slides, his heart is pounding, but he's almost there.

Mausoleums through the trees above him, he knows them: he's stared barred windows in metal doors at luminous angels and virgins, at at ivy frozen in the glass. He'$ tasted chemical smells that once Eatons, Wycliffes, men and women, their children: he's seen them in the light of memorial windows. The gross man in the hockey sweater is leaning on a shovel and He's incredibly fat and standing very still. Yellow mud from the adheres to his feet, they appear enormous, as if wrapped in dirty He's looking the other way and doesn't see Felix: or if he has him, he makes no sign. Perhaps he pointedly turned away, perhaps doesn't want to acknowledge Felix Oswald for some reason known only himself People can be like that. For example, even though Felix has the man before, it's impossible to mistake him because of his IUIIteru;e size, he must weigh three hundred pounds, even though he has him with his shovel, his blue construction helmet, in all seasons and all times of the day, and even though the man has seen Felix, neither them has given any indication that the other exists. Despite this and some time now, Felix has wanted to speak to him, to walk up to him say "Excuse me" or "Good day sir". It would be pleasant to smoke a larP.tite with him, perhaps he has a bottle of wine in his suitcase and would sit on the steps of the mausoleum, talking or perhaps not perhaps just eating their sandwiches, smiling occasionally, passing back and forth and if everything worked out, Felix might IDodiJce him to the stone ladies. And there they are. He begins to run. Twin sisters, he's sure they're and they're waiting for him. Sitting at either end of the stone each resting a cheek agaist the back, staring at each other, they their outside arms are raised, identically, with the inside wrist the forehead, the elbows up and back, lifting their breasts. They each other. They reach with their other arms, their opening hands the stone and will never touch. They're so beautiful. He pauses them, he glances from one to the other as if for a sign, from to profile. They're bigger than he is, probably six and a half feet if stood up: they've got good tough bodies naked to the waist. He their breasts, the muscles of their beJlies, the strong thighs under stone draperies gathered about them as they sit. Very close to them now, he pauses: still looking from one to the other comes to sit between them on the bench, right in the middle. That's One day at the beginning he measured the full length of the It's fourteen feet long. Then he found the exact centre by walking feet from the end: with a white-washed rock from the flower bed, certain he was unobserved, he scratched his mark into the stone. still there. And he's come to sit precisely on it, every lunch hour

Felix sitting with a buttock on either side of the exact centre of the bench; reaching into the bag for his lunch. Perhaps they don't care: he can't believe that. Biting into a meat sandwich, he knows it's important that when he first arrives, he sits in the dead centre like this. He mustn't show any preference until he's finished eating. In the same way, they continue staring through him, at each other, as if he wasn't there. Methodically he eats. He chews his food well and washes down the wads of bread and meat with orange juice. Afterwards, when he's finished , when they've got this stasis to support the m, he can, and usually does nestle up close to either one or the other: he can spend all his time talking to one of them, with nothing more than mere courtesy for the other, and sometimes not even that; sometimes he becomes so preoccupied with one, with the intimacy they have, the excitement, that he ignores her sister completely, and still there's no awkwardness. Even when he leans to circle a nipple with his mouth, or when he fondles the breasts, the belly, rubs his hands longingly over her thighs, even when he kneels on the bench beside her and takes the stone face in both his hands and covers it with kisses, poking his tongue in at the mouth , her eyes, licking he r jaw greedily to the ear, even with all this, there's never a hint of jealously. It's worked out very well. The limousine, black and official, the sun glinting from its polished surface, slips through the trees before he sees it: next, and close behind, comes the hearse. They make no sound and Felix, eating his apple, is at first unaware of them. When he does look down, when he sees them, more cars have come over the hill, big rented cars with important mourners, and the procession, in slow motion, glides among the headstones. For a moment he believes they'll go to their left, follow the road that swings away to his right and into the cemetery's heart. But they don't, they take the other fork. One after the other. In complete silence: they pass from right to left in front of him. He can hear them now, can see faces looking at that young man sitting between two stone figures on a memorial bench eating an apple. The first car stops at the public mausoleum, then the others, the line contracts: figures clamber from the black limousines at the front and he suddenly remembers the chapel, sort of a chapel inside, a vacant-smelling room, like a courtroom, with pews and an altar for the body. He understands. Behind the screens on either side run halls, four to the north and four to the south, high-ceilinged halls, their only light from frosted windows at the end; he's walked the m often, he's read the names, peered into cells at plastic wreaths, at mouldering flowers, he's breathed the dead air and stared at corpses Sled in drawers to the roof. Voices suddenly, doors slamming and Felix averts his eyes as people, singly and in groups, march from their cars: soberly dressed, they straggle to the steps, to the hearse brilliant in the sun ahead of them.

are children too; in little hats and ties, with tiny purses and shoes, they trot beside the adults, their pinched faces him as they go. Violent cries indistinct with . . . there's shouting near the coffin, it's at the door now: .....,......"'!!> feet of mourners at the rear, sensing drama they quicken their literally dragging their children to the bottom steps, the edge of crowd; impatient they struggle and crane to discover the source of all shouting, these accusations. Felix is drawn unwillingly. Leaving his they understand, he approaches the crowd: it surges on the IDaUSCIJetlm's steps, something violent is happening at the door, the crowd Everyone strains to see. Felix can't be sure but apparently two at least two people, although others are taking sides, two women, thinks are at the centre, they're shouting hysterically, he can't make what they're saying, he can't even be sure that the two of them are IIDI:K>nents, perhaps they're taking on everyone else, perhaps there's more one centre to this. Apart from it all, hands down by his side, he A child, a little girl in blue velvet and patent leather shoes, a child with brass buttons and long hair, growing tired of the crowd she can't see anything, or maybe she's not bored at all, maybe afraid for even Felix is uncertain, yes, something violent is building, s probably afraid, she wanders away from her mother in the direction Felix. He can't know if she sees him or whether it's only chance. The shines in her hair, the wet earth sticks to her shoes as she comes. mother, greedy to see, clawing into the crowd, hasn't missed her Felix is transfixed. Turning he sees his friends, the one staring past sister into his face, and behind them, the gravedigger in his hocky standing by a blue tree. He's left his shovel somewhere and the scene intently. The crowd still boils about 'the coffin, the still shout with more and more of them protesting. The child is piteously. She totters aimlessly among the ornamental bushes, the hedges by the road. Felix doesn't know what to do. He should do Should he try to find the mother? It would be better if he to console the child; but how do you do that? Stories and songs, tell them stories, dandle them on your knee . . . Felix remembers a long time ago, there was someone, a man, a woman, it doesn't now, perhaps it was a maid, a housekeeper, someone told him and that's the important thing. He remembers liking them; now, her cheeks are smeared with tears, with dirt from her little he remembers a lap, a heart beating inside someone else's body; remembers a voice, or is this all imagination, has he made it all up? a telling him of wolves with glittering eyes, they encircle the of a traveller far from home, in winter, an especially deep so that food is scarce everywhere and the wolves, desperate with

hunger, shift closer as the fire dies: shuddering awake he sees their shadows nearly on him, he can smell their bodies! frantically he throws wood on the coals, sparks fly in the towering night, he shouts but they've grown accustomed to his noise and fear him no longer. He has only the fire. It's a good story, but it would only work if he knew the child, if they had time, only if she trusted him. Watching the blue velvet jacket, seeing her uncertain body, Felix realizes you can't force the kind of intimacy necessary for a good story, certainly not with this sad long-haired little girl. He'll have to think of something else. Perhaps a trick of some kind would divert her. Years ago there was a person who could eat light bulbs. Felix thinks he's in New York now. And once he'd seen a man sterilize the point of a safety pin in the flame of his lighter, grasp some of the loose flesh at his throat, just above the Adam's apple, and push it through. Kids would love that, he's sure they would, he'd cheer her up alright, if only he could do something like that . . . It's definitely too late to turn away now. She's so close, the dejection in the fall of her shoulders, the despair, yes it's almost despair he sees in her face, she's so obviously in pain that he can't ignore her. The gravedigger, still standing by the evergreen, must see, must know; so there's no turning away. She's less than twenty feet from him when her mother calls, she's finally noticed, the shrill voice carries clearly, and if she continues in the same way she'll pass within a couple of yards of him. She doesn't hear her mother and she doesn't appear to have noticed Felix, or if at some point she did see him, perhaps for some reason she. actually set off in his direction at the beginning, it's fairly clear she doesn't see him now. He understands that. Partially concealed by her hair, her eyes are empty. She doesn't respond to her mother, although the woman is rapidly gaining ground on her. It's a big woman and obviously very upset, worried about her baby, she runs awkwardly, and although the voice is clear and strong, he can't make out the words. Felix takes a half step, he says: "Your mother. Little girl your mother." How best to continue? "Your mommy's calling you. " The only response, and he's not sure of this either, is an imperceptible quickening of her pace. Surely she must hear the familiar voice calling her name, surely that's what she wants? But weeping she continues toward him, so Felix takes another step. "Little girl" he says again. He's getting involved despite himself: he raises an arm, his right arm, he points at the woman who's stopped shouting now, is slowing down, has stopped calling the child's name because she's out of breath, her face is swollen, red, her eyes harsh with unaccustomed effort. But the child will not be warned. Felix has tried, he's pointed, he didn't tum .away, he's even spoken to her. It's not his fault the woman is closing in, is reaching, it's not his fault the child

late: she dodges, tries to slip away, to free herself from the band on her blue velvet shoulder, accusing voice, voice and the sudden blow, in the face, she hits the child with her open hand, she hits again, be hears the dead sound of flesh on flesh .

reacts too

••• On her street for the first time in daylight, he walks past her house, there's no sign of her: a stark tree on the lawn, the windows are clean, there are bright curtains; he stops as if to light a cigarette. He doesn't know her name. He will tell her, he'll say: "I've never encountered a situation in my own life where I could have behaved differently, everything that has happened, or not hlppened to me, because of me, all of it has been inescapable." She watches him. Does she understand? her hands are curled in her lap, he's drinking her ICOtch, smoking her cigarettes: sitting across from her, pale eyes, she doesn't move, he believes she stopped him when he tried to leave, listening to

her records. He will say: "I've never encountered a situation, in the lives of my friends, when they made any kind ofchoice, when they could have done anything other than what they did do. Choice" he will say, "describes what might have been." 'That's a useless idea. " "I believe it." 'That isn't good enough." They listen to the music, she doesn't understand. , believe all kinds of things but I don't let them make any difference . . . I hardly know you . . . Why do you make everything so difficult for yourself?" Her street in daylight, he walks to her door: a stark tree on the lawn, the windows are clean, there are bright curtains, everything is clean; it's the kind of llpUtment that will have fresh cut flowers, it will smell of wax, of furniture polish. He steps into the vestibule, her name is printed beneath her doorbell. Urquhart. Mr. and Mrs. D. Urquhart, he rings the bell. He's forgotten his role, what he was going to say, she'll know, she'll cry out, protesting .. . She's taller than he thought, her hair is almost black, she looks at him Impersonally, her black hair over her shoulders. "Yes?" Her voice is clear and open, he cannot meet her eyes, surely she suspects . . . "May I help you?" He must answer, he hears his voice: "Are there any, do you have any odd jobs, you know . . . work around the bouser' He manages to glance into her face, he doesn't know where that idea came from, certainly she'll refuse him. "Please . . . I'll do anything . . . " c-.lculating, she stares at him easily, there is sunlight in the room behind her, 1M Oesh in the opening of her shirt is white, his mouth and throat, even his teeth are dry, he's seen her breasts, they're even bigger than he thought, she aut know, surely she suspects, she's opening the door! it never happens this .aly, is she alone? he listens intently, but there's no sound from the apartment

behind her. She's alone and she's opening the door, she's stepping backwards . . . "Come in. I'm sure there's something." Trembling violently he closes the door, he follows her in the hall, her hair comes right down to her ass, his sneakers make tiny kissing noises on the hardwood. Everything is clean, the rooms are clean, they smell of furniture polish, soap, perfumes and powders, wax, there are fresh cut flowers by the piano and a bowl of fruit on an ornate stand by the window. There is an enormous black brassiere drying on a radiator in the bathroom. Several women at a table by the window, they're laughing richly. They appraise him in the doorway, it's disconcerting. The table is covered with open beer bottles: she leaves him to drink from her glass, he watches the life in her throat as she swallows. " He wonders if there's anything he can do around the house." Dragging deeply on her cigarette, their buoyant voices overlap; it's as if she's devouring the smoke. "Well he should begin with a beer." "For strength." "He says he'll do anything. " Langorous, they're superbly Hushed with drink, their bare arms and throats in sunlight; they confidently reach and drink, they cross their thighs and stretch. He can only grin foolishly and take a beer. 'They watch him drinking. "What do you do best?" She speaks to him from a chair beside the stove, he doesn't know what to say. Her hair is short, curled about her ears and her smile is gently mocking. There are pearls around her neck, they rest on her small bosom and for some incredible reason he is able to say: "I don't know." 'There must be something." Although they're observing him in such a way that he knows they must have some understanding amongst themselves, it's almost a plot, certainly some pre-arranged agreement, and although the nature of his response is obviously very important, it will certainly determine how they are going to deal with him, despite all this they aren't hostile, they aren't baiting him, on the contrary, encouragement emanates from them like perspiration, like the odour of their bodies. It makes it possible for him to continue. "Well. There is one thing, I guess . . . " "What is it?" " Well. " They wait patiently, he really must try, he doesn't want to disappoint them. Sun shining on the brown bottles, the women, small green plants, the whole scene in sunlight, there is dust and smoke in the air; Urquhart reaches to the ashtray, her black hair covers her face, she isn't wearing a brassiere, she taps her cigarette and straightens, she flounces her hair back from her face, he hears a bird outside, he knows what he will say: "When the time comes, when it's absolutely essential, I can walk from here to there." He raises his arm and points, he sees his hand in the room. "To the back door there."

It is Urquhart who says: " Not everybody knows that" They prepare a chair

b- him between her and the woman with the pearls. He sits in it. His bottle is so they give him another. He notices that the blond girl, obviously the youngest of them, she isn't much more than twenty, she only has one ann; the sleeve of her black sweater has been removed and the ann hole cleverly mended. She's very pretty by the window, she smiles at him and the smile remains: she watches him drinking and talking. Later, when she is naked, her breasts marbled with miniature blue veins, he sees that the shoulder curves smoothly, uninterrupted into her side, there's no sign she ever had an ann. He stands in front of her, he cups his hand where her arm should begin, her body is cool, her eyes are closed, she puts her hand on his and speaks his name. Urquhart has taken the necklace, they're not pearls at all, they're tropical seeds of some kind strung on elastic, she puts it over his head and bending her face close to his, her anns are around him, her hair, she grins wickedly . . . No she doesn't, she rests her face wearily against his throat. He is standing by the sink. She returns to her chair. There is a silence and then she says: "I don't know. I'm overwhelmed with a sense of exhaustion. It happens every time, I'm sitting with a man and I suddenly realize, there's nothing here lOr me, he doesn't know who he is, the poor baslard's hardly alive . . . " He ps to stand by the window. Shadows at the end of her garden, the sound of a train on the bridge. Everything is dirty, seedy from winter. His hands have no ltrength. Her voice is matter-of-fact: "Why am I always attracted to empty menr路 They sway with her words like branches. "Impotent men, not aecessarily sexually, it's a question of manhood." He turns from the window, raises his hand as if he has something to say and discovers that he doesn't. He stops in mid-gesture. Immediately it's clear that she's seen him, she expects him to continue, she almost shouts: "It's not me you know, it's not us!" Her dark mouth remains slightly parted as she waits, he can see her teeth. It's not that the's angry, on the contrary; the one-anned girl is weeping without noise as she lights a cigarette. He understands, he wishes there was something he could say. He can't think of anything. "What in hell's happening to you guys?" A yellow cat appears in the window behind her; standing on its hind legs it ICI'atches on the glass to get in.

*** The icy road against his face, he doesn't know where he is at first, he can't remember: he feels the coarse hair of its cold body in his anns, he's deathly cold tpinst the earth. He finds it almost impossible to move, he doesn't know why be should try to get up. It isn't painful. He's been dreaming, there are voices, is be dreaming still? Lying on his side with the husky in his anns he can see the lhell of a building beside the road, an abandoned schoolhouse, perhaps it's a

deconsecrated church: a wall has crumbled away, the roof has gone, the windows are empty. The easiest thing would be to sleep again, he doesn't know why he struggles to get up, but he does, he wrestles free of its stiffbody and the pain begins, he's on all fours, his body's possessed with systematic shudders that almost cast him to the ground. Felix on his knees, sobbing, he can hear his noise, he gathers himself, he rises to sway above the dog, the snow is black . . .

â&#x20AC;˘

Conversation With Diane W akoski

Diane Wakoski was born in 1937 in Whittier, California, growing up among

the "glowing smudge pots" and "golden finally-ripe oranges" of Southern California. She majored in English at the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied poetry with Thorn Gunn and Thomas Parkinson. She then moved east to New Yorlr City, fOrging her own broodingly personal brand o~ poetry full offictive identities. She now lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she teaches poetry at Michigan State University. During the fall semester of 1978, she was the visiting writer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, commuting between Molokai and Honolulu to teach. Wakoski, astonishingly enough, has published 30 collections of poetry between 1962 and 1978. Her most famous is T'M Motorcycle BetrGfl(ll P~ (1971), her most recent, TM Man Who Shoolc Hands (Doubleday, 1978). Hayden Carruth. poetry editor of Harper'â&#x20AC;˘Âˇ calls her one of the three or fOur most important poets in the United States today. She is known for her ruthless honesty in person and in her poetry, her persistent sense that "Justice is reason enough for anything ugly. It balances the beauty in the world." The &ctive masks she wears in her poetry, however, make Diane, the person, hard to locate except in some psychic, archetypal region where a birthday party is ipt to be converted into a visit with .Kore in hell. In the fOllowing interview, conducted in December of 1978 near Waikiki Beach off Diamond Head, Diane talks with Anita Povich and Rob Wilson about the craft and quests of her poetry.

HGWaii Review: I'd like to ask you something about writing in Hawaii. What happens when you are isolated by 2,500 miles from the mainland? Diane Wakoski: There's something that goes with the isolation that you can't Ignore when you talk about writing in Hawaii. This has become more and more ~pparent to me. I don't think it's healthy for people to try self-consciously to ereate regional poetry. When I was in Washington recently, I was quite appalled at a number of poets who were most ambitious to convince the world b t there is a Northwest School of Poetry. I kept saying, "Why do you want to do that? The movement away from localism , regionalism in American literature, is what allowed twentieth-century American literature to be great. Why do you want to do this?" In Michigan, somebody did an anthology called ""'lbe Third Coast Poets," and I hear people trying to pick up on that term and -.y, "We're really the Third Coast Poets. " Well, it's aPR gimmick more than .-yt:hing, to let people get to know you. The only actual group of poets that we dUnk about critically in the last twenty years that took on an original ldEmtiltiClilti<m is the so-called New York School of Poets. What that really meant was that these are all people connected with the Madison Avenue art gallery world, and it didn't really have anything to do with New York, per se. It was the at world. And saying, "This is what New York, the real New York is, " had IIOtbing to do with regionalism. So this is all around Robin Hood's bam to say the minute one gets in Hawaii, you hear people talking about what is Hawaiian, whether it's truly Hawaiian, whether this can be Hawaiian poetry, is a Mole (ed. note: Caucasian), can haole poetry be Hawaiian? You get into the whole discussion, which is a serious political problem of has the language been tll!!ltn'tve!l. is pidgin the real language, etc. But what it leads to is a kind of provincialism that artists and intellectuals cannot afford. No matter how attached you are to Gloucester, Massachusetts or whatever, if you think of Gloucester, Massachusetts as the best place in the world, which in no way Charles Olson did in the Maximus Poems, but rather as a typical place, you use the specificity for the possibility of creating the typical. The biggest problem that anyone writing in Hawaii has to come to terms with is everybody trying to $ him into whether he is or he isn't a Hawaiian writer. If you were living in uw~iiiCJiu:~eu:~, Mississippi or Texas, that wouldn't be an issue. You would create your landscape out of what was a combination of your experiences and

your imagination. Some people do not get turned on to the landscape where they grow up, other people do. I know many people who grew up in one place, and say, at age twenty, move to another place and adopt that place. lbat's the landscape that comes through their poems. But the assumption here is that if you live in Hawaii, it must be Hawaii all the way. It just introduces some ofthe worst aspects of what should be politics, and not aesthetics, into every writer's life.

HR: Maxine Hong Kingston has urged people to leave so that their life will get some kind of adventure and consciousness. DW: That's what I've told students and the Hawaii Poets in the Schools program. I didn't urge them, because I don't believe in being prescriptive, but I said that until you have the sense of this place that a person gets from living her~not necessarily growing up, but living here and accepting it-as filtered through someone who's gone away and then sees it with new eyes, there's no way that even the landscape can be yours. It's going to be plumeria blossoms and sand and soft winds, or hard ones, depending, and I think it's an awful thing. One of the reasons that I admire NeD Altizer's poetry is that she has in no way even acknowledged that her poems take place in Hawaii. Because it doesn't matter to her. Hawaii is where she lives, but it has nothing to do with the landscape of her imagination. One of the things I admire about Norman Hindley is that even though he's a man who writes out of the physical worldhunting, fishing, the sense of things-and he had to transfer his physical sense of the world from New England to Hawaii, his poems have no landscape, except the landscape of water, of woods. It doesn't even matter that the water is in New England in one poem and in Hawaii in another poem. There is no way that Norman Hindley, even when he divides his poems into the Mololcai poems and the Prudence Island poems, is writing poetry dominated by the geography. They're dominated by the geographical concept ofan island, but that becomes a fonnal construct in the way that the map of Gloucester is a fOrmal construct in the Maximus Poems. People are very confused about that here. In some way, you're lucky to be a person who comes here, loves it, finds it beautiful, and works it into your own mythology. But anybody who's trying to be a Hawaiian poet is in deep trouble, no matter how talented he is right now. I'm not even saying it's not possible. But what it does is introduce that provincial element into your own thinJdng, or tries to limit it instead oftrying to make it big. I don't mean 'limit' in the sense of having a specific image instead of a cosmic one. I simply think that it makes you think small instead of thinking big.

HR: How does the concept of geographical location influence writing? DW: Some people create their poetic landscape out of their geography much more than other people. That has a lot to do with subject matter and the degree of abstraction in the poetry. To the degree that a poet is abstract. it's very hard to pin down his landscape other than as a tone. For instance, in the Muimus Poems, the landscape is very definitely pinned down to a geographic ~

~·"".. ,

Massachusetts-and that whole concept of geography is used both and symbolically. To know the map of Gloucester is important to read the poem. Yet, in an odd way, although the poem is so much landscape and so much uses that specific landscape, one doesn't really a sense of New England from the poems. His poetry is so abstract that he's the landscape but he isn't the least bit interested in it I mean, he's using &r more than almost anybody's ever used landscape, to say that your reader to know the map of an obscure city in Massachusetts in order to read the That's certainly asking for a certain kind ofconcentration on geography, yet, it's not so that you will know Gloucester. Would you say the same thing about William Carlos Williams? Is there a of abstraction in relation to landscape?

Certainly. In Paterson, the city of Paterson is an abstraction. Even knowing something about the history and geography of Paterson will you read the poem, it's not so that you will get to know Paterson. In that if my poems do come out of a geographic landscape, in an odd way, abstract enough so that it doesn't really matter. People have asked me IIMttn•~r I think I'm a "Western" poet or an "Eastern" poet. Even though I up in California, as soon as I graduated from college, I moved toN ew York My whole early adult life was lived in New York City, that's when my as a poet began, and a lot of my best poetry is written in New York City. fact, people are often shocked, or used to be, when they hear that I've of myselfas a Western writer, because they thought of me as an urban York City writer. The simple fact is that neither landscape is in my poems. am find a lot ofaspects about my poems that fit in with generalizations you want to make about West Coast writers. · Do you identify with the West Coast sense of being outside a for-

mainstream? Yes, I do. But New York City was the first place that I ever lived in that I I liked Berkeley, but the whole harrassment of being a student was so that I didn't even think twice when I left for New York. It was simply a to go because the man I lived with was going there. Of course, I fell in not with New York, but with beinginacityforthefirsttimein my life. Yet 't think that I'm typical of what you would call an urban poet. In some geography is almost irrelevant to me. Until I got old and crotchety. I enjoyed every place that I went, but each year now when I travel I'm less being away from my bed, my books, my kitchen with all of its 11UIOD:ten1t, my car, etc. It's not that I want to go back to East Lansing, lticbig~. because that means nothing to me, but I want to go back to my life, is the objects and the people in it back there. Wherever that would be, I be fairly comfortable. I don't even hate the Midwest anymore, because subsumed it into my life. I thought I would be much happier here in because I've always loved the beach landscape, but I've been very

unhappy here, landscape and geography-wise. I've hated the weather. As much as everything is beautiful, I have not felt as though it's my natural environment I'm sure that ten years ago, some of the things wouldn't have bothered me-l certainly don't like the primitive, and every year that I get older, I realize that my childhood dream of spending my life reading was really my adult dream as well. To be in a place where there's so much primitive violence and so little regard for the traditions ofWestem civilization, is for me an unnatural landscape. No matter how beautiful it is, and how much the palm trees remind me of my childhood, and how many flowers there are which I dearly love, it feels unnatural to me.

HR:

Is art the space where you live?

DW: It really is. Wherever I could have my books and a certain amount of music. I've always said that I don't like traveling in foreign countries, even when the traveling itself is pleasant and I have money and can stay in nice hotels, because there's nobody to talk to in English, and I really don't care about learning another language. That's a typical American trait I have. I'm a real isolationist. I hate being in a place, just in the abstract sense. When I go to a restaurant, I don't think, "Has anybody in here read my poems," in any overt sense. But when I'm in Paris, I feel fairly sure that no one, wherever I am, has read my poems. I hate that, because what I like about being an artist is that, in some way, there's an accumulative reality to your experience. That is, poems get published, they go out in the world, people read them, you give readings, and you spend your life talking about poetry. Any place that you go where that language is spoken, potentially, someone has had some communication with you. Even if they haven't, you could give them a book of poems and by the next day, they could have that communication. But I can't do that in Paris, or Bucharest, or Tokyo. I'm just confessing the terrible narcissism of poetry and the isolationism of an American. Why couldn't I learn French, which I studied in college, or Japanese? Because I don't want to. And I don't have to, because of the political circumstances of our time. That's one of my indulgences. I want to stay where my language is the authoritative one.

HR:

Who do you read? And when do you have time to read?

DW: Well, I'll answer your second question first. My dream as a child was to be a millionaire or a princess, or whatever a child's dream ofpower is, and to be able to read all the time. To never have to set the table, or (laughs) wash the dishes. When I was in the sixth grade, we had to write essays on what we were going to be when we grew up. I said that I was going to be a millionaire-my dream of the perfect life. My reason was that I could lie in bed all day, eat chocolates, and read books. Now I don't lie in bed and eat chocolates-but I do lie in bed the majority of every day that I can and read. I began to earn my living on the lecture circuit giving poetry readings. This meant that I had more time to read and write. My work is poetry, which is a kind of luxury for everybody, so I feel perfectly justified in reading all day if I want to, because I

and I teach. 11lese are the two things which you can legitimately say is a preparation fOr. Now I am an obsessive murder mystery reader, it's very hard to justify this in terms ofwriting poetry. But every few years, I in and teach a course in detective fiction, so that I can think of it as I'm very good at giving arguments for why I should have total time. You once spoke of Louise Gliick as a gothic writer. Are there genres that over into poetry-gothic, detective? Are these useful ways of talking poetry? I think they could be. It hadn't really occurred to me to think of poetry way. 11link of all the criteria for a gothic novel-a large, somewhat !WJteriotas house in which something occurs that's going to affect the fortunes love life of the single woman who lives there, and the implication of great -.anc:e and great wealth. In gothic novels, this has to be physical wealth. but - ....u.v one could be metaphorical about it. Louise Gluck's House on Marshis, in many ways, a poetry version of all those ladies' afternoon fantasies a gothic novel has. And you know that I'm not a reader of gothics, so for me was not an accolade. It's entirely possible that with my obsession for aecu\re fiction that I put the element of trying to solve a puzzle into poetry. Who is the King of Spain? Right, who is he? I do think that the way you seriously read a detective is a paradigm for the way a critic, especially a New Critic, can read a 11le puzzle at the center of the poem is almost always an emotional that's being presented. To the degree that you understand this probwhether it's through psychoanalytic criticism, or biographical cribwhatever, the reader or critic is a detective solving the puzzle. Do you read mostly male poets? I really don't think about men or women when I read. I grew up reading some poetry, and fantasy literature. I'd still say that my reading is very to what it was when I was a child. I read a lot of novels, some poetry, and fantasy literature, although my fantasy literature, which is mostly llltfllrh"'"' fiction, has far outstripped anything else. It's taken over in a way that worries me. Every interviewer asks me who my favorite poets from the are and I will tell every interviewer Wallace Stevens, William Butler and Garcia Lorca. In high school, Eliot had been important to me. On own, I discovered Shakespeare's sonnets and fell in love with them. That's I started seriously writing poetry. When I was a sophomore in high I decided to write love sonnets to express all those sexual feelings that Was Whibnan ever important to you? Never. And neither was William Carlos Williams, although those are

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two writers in whose tradition I overtly belong, much more than Stevens, Yeats and Lorca. Although I think the simple fact is that you're not going to imitate the people that most influence you in a genuine intellectual way. You're going to use whatever is powerful about their work in your own work. To the degree that you're an original poet, it won't look like that person's work. Gertrude Stein was an important influence for me when I was in college, but it was her prose, not her poetry, that influenced me. I've said this a million times before, but I'll say it again because I believe it-reading The Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas made me suddenly understand what free verse was. I had not really understood that before, except in a mechanical way. Suddenly, I was reading language that leaped off the page as language. I think that her poetry would have been too abstract and too much language-for-the-sake-of language for me. Also, The Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas is the story of Paris in the 'teens and 'twenties, a fascinating story for me about writing, about living the interesting life, Ia vie boheme, as an artist. The language was remarkable enough so that you would also notice the language. That was the most profound experience that I had in terms of my own work, because I still want my poetry to be exciting as language in the way that Gertrude Stein's language is the number one aspect of her work. But I'm not the least bit satisfied with it unless it also is full of interesting material. I move away from somebody like Ashbery, with his concern for language, becaus路e I'm still not getting an interesting story or fiction or character or sense of the world from that poetry. I'm not saying it's not there. But I want that combination. I want the content ofwhat you're reading about to be as apparent as the expe rie nce with language itself. That's the combination that makes my poetry slightly unusual. As a matte r of fact, many people see my e mphasis on content and refuse to acknowledge the experiment with language. As my work evolves, it becomes harde r and harder to ignore that experimenting with language. As for instance. in the poem/lecture that begins The Man Who Shook Hands. At the same time, that work functions as a piece of fiction in the way the story functions . H R: One of your central ideas is that the poet has a personal mythology which each poem discovers from different angles. And yet the three masters you mentioned-Lorca, Stevens, Yeats-especially Stevens, don't seem to have a personal mythology. How did you derive your idea of poetry having an overall, personal mythology?

A personal mythology doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be a personality in it. In that sense, the myth that runs through Stevens from beginning to end is the search for the Muse who is the feminine part of the self. I think of''The Idea of Order at Key West" as the poem that best explores that. But there's no poem that doesn't explore that myth. I don't mean by personal mythology creating a personality. That's only one aspect of it. There are other, more abstract possibilities. In one sense, my theory is tautological. By definition , if you're writing poetry, you're creating a personal mythology. There is also a personal mythology in a poet like Charles Bukowski, who creates DW:

a personality, a fictive character, the dirty old man, who is in every one of his poems, and is, in &ct, the main character in all ofhis fiction , Hank Chenowski. Or variations of Hank Chenowski. The reason I've talked so much about that kind of poetry is that many abstract critics, who would be perfectly willing to look for this mythic search in an abstract poet like Stevens, will say that Bukowski's writing his autobiography. Bukowski's no more writing his autobiography than Stevens is. They both are and they both aren't. But Hank Chenowski, the dirty old man, is every bit as mythic as that feminine voice for Stevens is.

HR:

Do you have some concept of a "harmonium" to your work? Does your

work cohere in more than just the single-poem unit, but in terms of an overall harmony in some way? DW:

I do, but I don't try to dictate it. The more you try to dictate it, the more

you start repeating yourself For instance, I think that Anne Sexton is a very

JOOd poet. But at a certain point, because she was a very intellectual woman ~

md quite intelligent, she perceived the myth that she was creating, and became a slave to it. She had to keep repeating because she was afraid to go on

md do something new for fear that she wouldn't be writing her own poetry. Except for her posthumous book, 45 Mercy Street, the last couple of books are Anne Sexton imitating Anne Sexton. What I always do, being a formalist-a bmalist/anarchist at heart-is make a rule for myself to break rules. That's what I did in writing Greed, my long poems. I invented Greed because I found that I had locked myself into some rules of what a Diane Wakoski poem had to be. I wanted to break them. So I said, "I will write a poem in which I break my own rules." Now in retrospect, they look exactly like what I was doing. But I bad to give myself formal permission in order to become anarchic again.

HR: Do you identify that formal aspect with what is academic, and had you become academic? "Academic" seems to be one of your best curse words. DW:

Well, I'm a true student of the '50's with some of the habits of the '50's.

In the '50's, the word "academic," to any serious intellectual or artist, was aathema-it was a curse word. I'm afraid that I've carried that habit of mine with me, even though I owe my whole life to the academic world, and IC8demia, and 路~e Academy" at large. In one sense, I'm very happy to be a put of it. When I want to use the term derogatively I shouldn't refer to 10111eone as an "academic" poet. I should refer him as an "acanemic" poet, because he's caught the disease of weak blood, of following his own rules to the degree that there's no life energy, no wholesome blood there. As a formalist, I believe in rules, and I believe that the world is better for the rules that we create, and that, in a sense, I've come out of our own orderly existence, or searches for order, to triumph over chaos. But as soon as those rules start oppressing us instead of giving us strength (I mean when they give us strength, that's what they're for), then they have to be broken. They're not broken for the

purpose of chaos or anarchy, they're broken to create that free state where new supportive rules can be made. HR: You seem to present two aspects of yourself: the mimetic, or formal, and the anarchistic, or anti-conventional. I wonder if you identify those with masculine and feminine? DW: I do, and just to be perverse, I'd say that the archaic, the anarchistic, intuitive side is what I consider my masculine side. The orderly side is my feminine side. Although, in archetypical distinctions, it would be the opposite. What's important is the idea of balance and having separate elements that are both in contradiction to each other and, at the same time, opposites that become part of one.

H R: In your review of Coils, Clayton Eshleman's book, you said that what you especially liked was his working through the fact that he was desensitized in some way. As a male, he had to go back to find his feminine origin or feminine self. Out of this grew his own mythology. What could you say about American women in their search for a deeper self? DW: Let me amend what you've paraphrased. I also said that he grew up in a world where he was desensitized, not just because he was a male, but because he was a middle-class American male. He had to both de-educate himself and re-educate himself. He began to write poetry, which in itself is an act of opposition to that middle-class business world that he was brought up in. I have often said that if Coils had been written by a woman, it would have been a best-selling book, because it is so much a chronicle of that feminine search for self and feminine search for a means of asserting one's self while living in society. In some ways, Clayton, in Coils and in later books, has demonstrated that he's not just interested in being a man, but in being a sensitive person in society. What he discovered was that he had to first find out what his masculinity was, and then reject that fonn of masculinity that is a put-down of femininity- not a put-down of women, a put-down of femininity itself. He had to find the complete self that is yin and yang, masculine and feminine, and let it function together. But his whole education and family indoctrination had been in terms of cutting that out of the self. Perhaps women have a parallel journey to make in learning how to sensitize themselves to the masculine in the self and the n letting it become an equal part. Many women in consciousness-raising groups feel that they've been so deprived of the masculine side of life that they then go over to the other side and become what you might refer to as militant feminists. The balance is still not there. The feminine side of the self is the side that writes poetry- not the woman, the feminine. Poets are often stereotyped as faggoty, pansy-like characters, a parody of the fact that it's the feminine side of the self that's writing poems. The feminine side of the self in Western society has been, traditionally, suppressed, even in women. In fact, in many women, the feminine side of the self has been caricaturized. In the Victorian sense, you can

think ofwomen painting, playing the piano, or writing poetry, but you think of them as painting miniatures or playing pretty things on the piano in order to entertain people or having that charm that women cultivated in order to have husbands. You think of them as writing a sentimental kind oflove poetry, again an effete version of the feminine self Part of what the twentieth century is all about is coming to terms with that balance of male and female in the self, and then trying to make society recreate itself so that there's not a jarring reality, but a harmonious reality. I think of Clayton as a pioneer in talking about this in a completely poetic way. Is this something you had to do to arrive at your own mythology? Did you have a buried self?

HR:

DW: I don't think I had a buried selfas much as a confused self. When I began to try to find myself, I discovered that I really had a confused self. What I had to

do was re-create a self. Maybe that's the same thing that Clayton did. But in my case I grew up in Southern California, where the most bourgeois people are mavericks, too. Forty years ago in Southern California, there were health food stores and strange religious cults, not so much strange as simply not middle-class. So I grew up with a confused sense of the bourgeois, which maybe is very fortunate. Because built into my sense of the bourgeois--all those people that had nice houses, nice cars, expensive clothes, and comfortable lives with a barbecue on the patio-were characteristics which you would not describe as middle-American. They read their fortunes in cards, or belonged to a yoga group, or ate health food. There was always a funny little streak of the individual being displayed around you. While I regard that now as a kind of richness, it was then a confusion; there was no sense that over here were individuals who did things in a different way, and over there were the patio steak-cookers. They were streaked together. So my rebellions could not be as clear-cut as Clayton's. You seem to be moving toward a larger definition of what poetic form is, in which one poem will refer to another poem, and your prefaces will refer to poems. You also seem to be experimenting with how to narrate what poetry is. Is this conscious on you part?

HR:

Oh, I like the way you've described it. I hope that's true. Actually, I like your idea so much that I'd be interested in your obse rvation of how you think the form is working.

DW:

You seem to have some overall fiction that you're narrating, and you come at it from different angles. The poems refer back and forward. You're not so much interested in the perfect poem, there's something larger which you are seeking. DW: I'm interested in the perfect poem in exactly the same way that I'm mterested in the perfect man. Some incredible fairy tale part of myself believes that they both exist, but that other person- the pragmatic Diane who grew up HR:

very poor and has managed to survive and change her state in the world-really knows they do not exist. I'm not the kind of realist that says if it doesn't exist, let's forget looking for it. I'm still on my holy quest, for both the perfect man, who becomes more and more a symbol, and the perfect poem, without any intention, or even feeling of disappointment, at not finding them. I can't believe that most of King Arthur's knights really believed that the cup that Jesus drank out of existed. But it was a good excuse for their adventures and it created a whole code of behavior. You get the sense that they went out to look for the grail in order to come back and narrate the things that happened to them when they almost found it. The dream book ofcriticism about my poems would be written by a medievalist who showed that all my poems were working out of the Arthurian mythology.

HR:

I find you constantly to be a seducer-very beguiling in all of your poems. Yet I've heard you refer in class to this being your cantankerous period. Could you talk about that? I'm curious about how you see yourself these days.

DW: I do see myself as very cantankerous, and hard to get along with. I'm sure that a lot of people would agree with me. Although, the other day, I referred to myself as being very cantankerous, and Robert Tumey, the photographer I live with, said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Don't you think I'm pretty cantankerous?" And he said no. He said, "Difficult. " So I guess it's a matter of emphasis. It does seem to me that the task of the artist, or part of his craft, is to be so seductive that he draws the reader into his imagination, at which point he's still somewhat mesmerized, so that you can talk about the banal, the cliche, or the obscure, and still have the reader enthralled. Even though I have always rejected in the real world the premise that a woman has to make herself look a certain way or act a certain way in order to achieve a man's making love to her, I have accepted seduction in the world of poetry. But I still believe that if you want to be cantankerously yourself, you simply have to accept the fact that you'll have less lovers. If you are going to be Louie Zukofsky, you cannot expect as many readers as if you were going to be Galway Kinnell. Yes? HR: Can you keep yourself to some poetic form?

I have to keep making rules to break rules. I think I'm a free-verse poet because the iambs were so heavy in my head that I had to liberate myself from da-Da-da-Da-da-Da. Because I couldn't write gracefully and I am a person who embraces law and order so much that it's even uncomfortable to me. I have to constantly break out. I'm not a rebel in any sense. I'm an adorer, a worshipper of order. I'm almost a fanatic about order, but I'm also sane, so I recognize when it's getting out of hand and do something to break it myself. I almost deliberately make myself a villain in the classroom in order to show students that the academic system is not a place where you have to be imprisoned and go along with easy things, but a place where active intellectual battle should go on. Right now, every person who teaches in a university has to engage in an DW:

battle with the bureaucracy that runs the university. The •eatacr.ltic ideas that make a so-called successful teacher can completely be tQtuate:d with someone who entertains the students rather than someone who ...,... u ....,, , 1 tries to make them think for themselves or work very hard. One of proverbs that I so resented when I had to teach junior high school was, "You more flies with honey than with vinegar. " I always resented this because I it was an attitude that students are flies and flies to me are the lowest form of !eliiste~noe, except for mosquitos. I kept saying, "But I don't want to catch flies. is not my purpose." I do think that we are experiencing an extremely ~tiate:d academic system on every level which is particularly appalling in the ~m"•ivF•rci·tv, because that's one place that should still preserve a tmdition of terious intellectual activity and scholarship.

HR: How do you write so much? DW: I have always written a lot, but about three years ago, I started slowing

down. I fought that for the last few years, just as I fought aging. I think I've &nally come to terms with the fact that I have slowed down. I used to write an average of a poem a week. I don't have any answer to why I wrote so much, acept that I felt like writing, and I just simply did it. I had to write, it was obsessing me, it was important to me. I wrote because I had things to say, and I didn't think I had said them yet.

HR: Do you write in a state of exaltation, outrage, or any domioaot emotion? DW: There's one dominant mood, and it really is described best by Wordsworth: emotion reflected in tranquility. I can't write when I'm very excited, or when I'm very depressed. I can't write about something too close to me when I'm having an emotional experience, and I find it very hard to write about something for the first time. If it's a whole new experience, it really takes a long time to digest.

HR: Your poetry assignments in workshops stress experiences more than forms in some ways: eating, walking, cursing. DW: I do think that form is an extension ofcontent, that until you have a good grasp on what you want to say, you will not be able to find an efficient way of saying it. By the time a good poem emerges, it may be impossible to extract form from content-but at their best, they're inextricable. Since we do learn in a linear way, and we aren't born full out of Jupiter's thigh or forehead, whichever you choose to pick as the place, fully formed, I think that one of the things that you do have to work with in teaching is process-helping people to 6nd beginnings, middles, and ends.

HR: How do MFA progmms affect the writing of poetry? DW:

I'll mention this briefly because I seem to be one of the few detractors of

the whole process. It's a little bit like biting the hand that feeds me. Even when very fine writers teach in the MFA programs, the program itself is an attempt to

institutionalize art, or poetry, and an attempt to co-opt it, so that it becomes something acceptable in society instead of something that's slightly apart and fairly critical of society. HR:

What would you suggest in place of the MFA program?

DW: Every person in the Western world who has any intelligence deserves a liberal arts education and a college education, and the simple fact is that even people who are intellectually unqualified go to college these days. A really serious writer is serious by the time he's eighteen or nineteen, although he doesn't know how to articulate that seriousness. I would offer much more active undergraduate writing programs, so that an undergraduate could take many writing courses if he were really interested. One who already knew how interested he was could be a major in writing, which would be different from being a major in English. At that point, his education would be completed unless he needs vocational training, which is what graduate school has become. But I don't think we should give vocational training in writing poetry. What we're doing is giving vocational training in teaching poetry, and so far that's been very unsuccessful, because it hasn't made people better teachers. And it certainly hasn't made better poets. If a student had a chance to get as much education as he could while an undergraduate in writing, he would feel free to go out in the world and get his first job, whether it's as a baby social worker or in a factory. He could also spend most of his spare time writing and perfecting his craft, which he shouldn't have too much time or luxury to do, or it becomes indolent, and the writing gets luxurious. I think everybody should work real hard when they're in their twenties, at everything, because you have energy, and that's the way you discover yourself. The way you get real authority in the world is to have gone from the bottom up to the top. I think that not having MFA programs would relieve the oppressive notion for non-scholarly but serious writers that the only thing a writer can do is teach. It would relieve the burden ofpeople who want to spend all their time writing from having to go into the academic world and narrowing their experiences. It would prevent them from becoming so-called "acanemic" poets, where they haven't even got the sturdiness of years in the library for discipline, but simply the experience of taking a lot of courses and vitiating their real sense of what life activities are about. HR: You're usually involved in workshop situations with writing students. What's good and what's bad about workshops? Is anything good being written by students in workshops? DW: Let me talk about what's bad about workshops first. I think it's easier to see the problems than the pleasures at this point. There's a lot of very good writing going on. To indulge in historic speculation, the last 50 years of American poetry have been an extremely original and interesting, as well as prolific, period ofwriting. It's entirely possible that this period is still going on, whether or not there are as many original writers now as there were 30 years

Not all ofit will last, but that doesn't really matter because it's exciting to us the time in which we live. Who knows, ever, what lasts or why. You can see in workshops. The fact that there are so many workshops is a symptom of much is going on. The workshop should be like any school situation where good mind can be improved by the discipline of education. A good creative can be improved by the discipline of the workshop as long as the ~_..rlc,â&#x20AC;˘ho,n is used as an educational system. As soon as the students are not educated, but are using the workshop as an indulgence for getting peoto listen to their poetry, and refusing to listen to people's reactions, then should not be there. The workshops are a big waste of time. They're either therapy sessions or social sessions. I'm not against either one of those, it stops being education at that point. The workshop system produces what I call workshop junkies: people who do not become original writers because continue to be encouraged for everything they do. They get so used to and 10 needful of that encouragement that they never want to go out in the world and struggle with that feeling of aloneness. "No one ever reads me. What does my work mean? I've written for 50 years and it hasn't done anything to change the world." Or, "I've spent all my time doing this and I'm not even satisfied with it." Those are all the feelings that even a great writer has. The workshop is someone who refuses to experience those feelings from the very ...,.;;;""""'""~"" so he always stays insulated. As a result, he probably never writes meaningful. It's kind of sad. The other bad aspect ofa workshop is that lot of the beginning teaching isn't done because workshops were designed for who were no longer beginners but were still students. In other words, who didn'treally have a firm enough sense of themselves to go out in the world and struggle with all these feelings and ideas, and yet people who were beginning to articulate their originality, to fight with the past. Part ofcoming to with yourself is fighting off the influences that have made you as good as are. The workshop, to me, neglects the student at the beginning stages and lllows him to think that he's already a poet before he's even written 15 or 50 or 150 poems. Another bad thing is that people who themselves are not "master poets"-if the workshop is based on the notion of the master teaching his craft to the disciple-are teaching. That creates very false psychological situations. whole premise of the master is an uncomfortable one, and when you have a ID&Ster who aesthetically is not a master, you've created a new slavery system. 'Ibat's very bad. The good side of the workshop is another aspect of education which I believe in. You have to start someplace. You should start with your own In the case of a literary art, you can start with your own reading and response to the reading. The next response is to find out what other people reading, and then what you should have read in order to be educated, what people have responded to, and how your own response clashes or meshes. What is that except a genuine process of education? Your teaching method is very direct in terms of yes and no. You don't

hold back any punches. Did you have to work through some rejections in workshop situations?

DW: Unless my memory is one ofthose adjusting memories, I've been ve ry lucky--or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it-in that whe never I was in a workshop, I was the star. That can be both bad and good. Not because the teacher was trying to make me into a star or that I was a perfect little disciple. I've always had an extrememly powerful way of presenting my poetry and insisting that people come to terms with my imagination. I've always been fairly articulate in describing or defending what I was trying to do. So even if there were negative responses to it, I felt as though I was responded to on a kind of autonomous level. Perhaps I was lucky-I didn't take a lot of workshops. In a sense, I've always been one of those people who tried to make the world come to terms with my definition and my rules. I had a wonderful education at Berkeley, with people like Tom Parkinson, who, though he wasn't a poet in a published sense, wrote poetry, was greatly sensitive to poetry, and had the best taste in poetry; Josephine Miles, who in no way tried to make me into her kind of poet, and in every way encouraged me to be the original person I was; and Thorn Gunn, who only asked me to try to create formal structures in my poems, but allowed me to be as inventive and far out as I could be. Maybe I simply was insensitive to negative criticism. Not insensitive in the sense it didn't hurt me, I just didn't listen to it. I knew there was something right about what I was doing. And that's a very arrogant thing to say, but one aspect of being a poet is that extreme arrogance of being absolutely convinced that what you're doing is right. I don't see any point as a teacher of poetry in being wishy-washy or patronizing and saying something that's nice. I don't think you're doing your students any kind of service by pretending that you have a positive response when everybody out in the world's going to have a negative response.

HR: Is the situation of unrequited love, of some sort of unhappiness or incompletion , necessary to the creation of poetry? Can you write when you' re happy?

DW: I'd like to clarify the language here. I do not equate a sense of loss or incompleteness with unhappiness. 'Happy' and 'unhappy' are two words that I'd like to eliminate from my aesthetic, intellectual, and philosophical vocabulary, and perhaps even my psychological vocabulary. They're victimization words in our culture: I will not use them because my concept of poetry, or any art, is that it's created out of a person's sense that something is missing in the world. That's what makes people create art, tum to religion, become intellectuals or philosophers. It's the sense that no matter how much you have, there's something missing. The way you create it is by something spiritual, abstract, or aesthetic. Until you have that sense, you would not be interested in writing a poem. The one thing you can never satisfy for another person is intellectual curiosity, emotional discontent, any of those things. In fact, it's those feelings of loss, lack of completion, discontent, whatever, that have created civilization. Why does a person need a cathedral if he's perfectly

to make a pile of stones and worship his god there? Because that pile of does not satisfy him aesthetically. It can perfectly well satisfy him lelistic,uslv, because it's spiritual. Who cares whether it's a pile of stones or the â&#x20AC;˘nec:JraJ of Chartres? And he's not building the cathedral of Chartres for God, satisfy his spiritual needs, except as they are aesthetic needs. There's some llitlt'nlntl'â&#x20AC;˘n that makes him reject the pile of stones, build the cathedral and tpend those centuries doing it.

DIANE W AKOSKI

Washing & Ironing

They were hanging clothes out on the line I said to myself, 'I never want to live this way again.' Waking up in California at 7 a.m. in December when it is dark. My mother is ironing in the kitchen. She irons white lacy blouses, long-sleeved blue business shirts, linen pillow cases. The room is filled with cotton and line n, smelling new and fresh; her iron has smoothed everything till it is like paper. There are stacks and hangers. She has been ironing since 4:30 a.m. and she gets dressed to go to work at the wate r company where she is a bookkeeper. The ironing she will deliver to the woman who employs he r for $10 a week to iron. And I hate this, locked into my helpless child-life, knowing my mother works all

day as a bookkeeper, then irons at night simply to pay our rent. And I am angry and say I will never learn to keep accurate records, never type, and never iron clothes when I am an adult.

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ Humiliation. The pain of helplessly watching someone else suffer. An anger at the old servitudes.

*** Waking up to see morning glories in the window and to see the early morning sunshine coming in the door, hearing the morning doves making their throaty noises and my mother standing in our small living room ironing the sundresses covered with carnations my sister and I will wear this summer Southern California morning. I smell the hot wet cotton and feel the luxury of being in bed with a whole fresh summer day stretching ahead of me like a newly baked loaf of bread.

*** Wondering about Helen who comes to our two-room shack in the orange grove, with the sagging screened porch. She and my mother slept on the couch which was made into a bed at night. Innocent children. Innocent women. My anger at the poor life and this woman who crowded our house.

*** We have a washing machine with an electric wringer. How I hate those rollers flattening out the clothes into scraps each wash day. Most of all, I hate hanging the clothes on the line. And I hate the feel of the stiff clothes when they are dry, and I hate taking off the clothespins which thunk into the clothespin bag, the smell of pasture in the board-stiff cloth.

How I love electric dryers which have liberated me from the clothesline. Poor housemaid, hanging out the clothes, poor woman, along comes a blackbird and snips off her nose.

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ And I want to tell everyone in these primitive Sandwich Islands how much I detest seeing clothes hanging on a line how unsuitable to the 20th century it seems that women should hang out clothes over the wet red clay mud and bring them in stiff and reddish. The deliberate refusal to use electricity when it is there to make life more convenient. Deliberately choosing the drab afternoons hanging wet clothes on a line, and the unsatisfactory feel and smell of the clothes hanging out in muddy, windy, smokey yards. The fact that a seven year old boy who had to hang the washing out on the line was taunted by an eight year old boy for doing women's work and the seven year old boy went into the house and got his father's automatic pistol and shot the taunting eight year old to death seemed

hideously in keeping with my feelings about that awful anachronism: the deliberate refusal to own an electric dryer, and the clinging to that hideous practice, hanging the washing out on a clothesline. Oh, how glad I am to sit with my book or pen and paper at the laundromat, while the wann air gushes around the fabrics, rotating them smooth, airing them, drying them wann and supple. How I embrace the 20th century and its technology freeing me from centuries of drudgery, relieving a little the memory of my mother's early morning ironing which she did as uselessly as they still hang out the washing on Molokai/ an act of will, plus the acknowledgment of ingenious brains; and we do have a choice now: we can leave savage customs behind.

Aging

it is the light in January, thin as a beautiful woman's stocking which I love. it comes through my yellow curtains in the morning like clean underwear and I, wann and lazy under the down comforter can only wonder why there is such a general rejection of winter. I'm not talking now about freezing, starving soldiers in the snow; but the simplicity of suburban snow that is experienced by an ordinary man or woman in East Lansing, Michigan. This winter is so beautiful to me.

TIMOTHY S. GOINS A Raging Thint For The National Drink Of Hawaii

"When March was overseas," Melody began, "he lived in a little house a grass roof and an adobe floor. He shared this house with a man who a tattoo of the Twenty-lhird Psalm on his arm and two of Our Lord's ~mulandmtents tattooed on his back. There was a brickyard nearby and an llnl11nn,nus kiln where two tiny streams came together in the jungle. The kiln an oven with an iron door and a tall brick chimney, and then one day-" We met in Honolulu. I came out of the Royal Hawaiian looking for a You were standing by the curb beneath a transparent umbrella. The was warm and it was raining. Mist hid the black teeth of the mountains. palms nodded in the hot, gray drizzle. I stood f>eside you in Nelson's shirt which was two sizes too large for me and covered with all his and ribbons of valor so that I looked like some foolish cartoon of a American strong man instead of some poor guy soaked to the skin. 1ben you turned and offered me a little of your umbrella. Oh your root beer-colored hair disappearing beneath the collar of your raincoat. Your hot 110eD of carnations and gluttering wax. Your amber eyes that I pretended had been crying. I said: It wouldn't do me any good now, I'm wet as a rat. But I stood beside you anyway, like a fool, the sleeve of your raincoat just touching my arm, the toes of your galoshes jutting beyond the edge rl the curb, your bare knees, the hem of your lavender skirt falling below the line of your raincoat. When I finally glanced up I saw the gray shadow of the sky, blurry through the wet plastic. Then, almost as though you'd planned it that way, our eyes met. And I felt like such a fool in that shirt covered with .0 Nelson's ribbons of valor, an idiot for having the audacity to examine ,our left hand for rings, for trying to conceal my own. I ought to have known better, after all those bitter weeks in the jungle. "-they caught a bunch of little yellow people trying to slip across one

rl those narrow jungle streams. It was dark and they lured them into an â&#x20AC;˘hush. March, you see, was in charge of the vanguard and he issued the orders to open fire. When the shooting was over he discovered that they hadn't managed to kiD them all. There were eight girls left alive in

the boats and an old man with a broken arm. March made the girls take off their clothes and then he marched them through the jungle. Why they weren't much more than children, those girls. Their breasts were so small and there wasn't a bit of hair on their you-know-whats-" I took your arm and we stepped off the curb. There was the beautiful lonely sound of cars passing in the rain. The warm smell of the damp earth. The way it made me feel inside when you touched me. The gray reflection of the sky on the wet asphalt. You said: What is your wife's name, honey? I watched your galoshes leaving dull footprints on the sidewalk. I trembled inside. Melody, I said. You held my arm and I felt myself against the wet skin of your raincoat. You whispered in my ear: You may call me Melody too if it makes you feel any better. We passed a man in a Palm Beach suit wrestling with his umbrella. A dreary phone booth. A row of parked cars with fogged windows and rain-beaded skin. What did you do, honey, when you were overseas? I fingered the garish lei coiled around my neck. The petals were limp 路 and soggy. I breathed great gulps of their sweet, sickening perfume. Your hand tucked through the crook of my arm soothed me. You see, I began, it couldn't have happened any other way. You nodded solemnly and blinked your amber eyes. My heart began to flutter. After I made them take off their clothes I marched them naked through the jungle. I didn't care if they stepped on thorns. I didn't care if the underbrush tore at their skin and made them fall. When we reached the brickyard I marched them past the mess tent and then made them stand at attention before the colonel's trailer. You see, when we came up-river from the South China Sea, the colonel brought a little blue house trailer. He had even been featured in the magazines. A swaggering, cut-rate Patton living in a powder blue ovemighter. We caUed him Colonel Custer because he was such an asshole. The magazines called us Colonel Custer's Commandos because, well, we were assholes too. I stood the women in formation and ordered the old man with the broken arm to sit on the ground at their feet. Stand at attention, goddamnitl These bitches don't understand a word I'm saying. But, you asked, wasn't it cold for them without their clothes? We walked along the sidewalk away from the Royal Hawaiian. The rain had stopped falling and you had folded your umbrella. I wondered if Nelson's shirt smelled moldy. We passed a shop where you could have an entire coconut, husk and all, mailed home like a letter. Other coconuts were carved to resemble human heads. Through the rain streaked glass I

a customer silently trying to decide between Groucho Marx and 10111ething that looked like Charlton Heston as the Prophet Moses. No, I said, it was never cold in the jungle. "-and you paraded them before the colonel who lived in a little blue trailer. You called him Colonel Custer. But that wasn't his real name, of course. He was Colonel Brown, and you acted very brave because the old man with the broken arm concealed a-" nine millimeter automatic which I had taken from him after the ambush. Colonel Brown-Custer asked to see it. I took the pistol from my pocket and handed it up to him. "-because he was a shortish man, don't you see, and therefore, he always spoke to you from the steps of his little blue trailer-" This is a baretta, he said. The women shifted nervously at the rasping tone in his voice. I menaced them with my rifle. And darling, they were so ugly, their faces twisted by a sort of general fury, perhaps at being separated from their clothes, perhaps because of the thirty-two dead men we'd left to rot in the shade of the jungle. Colonel Brown-Custer pulled back the slide of the baretta and ejected an unfired round. It fell to the ground, gleaming brassily in the dust between us. Then he left the step of the house trailer and stood above the old man. Are you the enemy? the colonel asked. The old man nodded his head rapidly, just as he had been doing nonstop since I'd brought him in from the jungle. His mouth began to crack open in a toothless grin. The colonel smiled too. Stupid old bastard, he said. The baretta bucked in his hand and the sharp report roared across the brickyard. The old man fell over backwards and lay in the dust, his legs slowly straightening, his neck turned so that I could see the dark hole in the base of his skull where the bullet had come out. That old man lay there, I said, looking like a drawing by Jean Cocteau, on his back with his head twisted around so that it seemed as though he were trying to see behind him into the impenetrable dust of the past. Piss on him, Colonel Brown-Custer said, and for a moment I thought it was an order. A kind of slow, creeping terror overcame me. I had already urinated in the jungle. I don't like Cocteau, you said, shaking the rain from the folds of your umbrella, he was an alcoholic and a homosexual. Then you put your small, pale hand on my arm. I saw the bluish

veins. Your frail wrist and delicate fingers. I wanted you so bad. In my mind I saw you slowly undressing for me, again and again. What did you say your wife's name was? Melody, I said, but I've forgotten what she looks like. She's just a memory with an odor of damp ashes. Not with your root beer hair. Your amber eyes. Or your hand touching me casually on my arm. It was snowing in El Paso, I continued, and her plane has been delayed. And then you said: You may call me Melody too if it makes you feel any better. "- and when I finally arrived in Hawaii I found you shacked up, I beg your pardon, I mean consorting with a filthy little street walker. I was so mortified I wanted-" you so bad I found myself on the verge of something drastic, like dragging you off into the bushes beside the road, when you said: Wouldn't you like to have a drink? Why you're still wet as a rat. There was a bar with a nautical sounding name. It had a marquee, like an old-time movie house or a roller rink, hanging out over the sidewalk. The lette rs wanted to spell the name of a jazz band but they were hopelessly jumbled. But there was this profound sounding comment on Happy Hour: 1WO FOR ONE. I took your arm. No, you said, I've got an apartment. So we walked together through the streets of Honolulu. The sun had emerged from behind a squall and vapor rose quickly from the drying pavement. You'd put your hand on my arm again so it would look to everyone that we'd known each other for a long, long time. I felt your fingers moving gently on my skin. Oh Melody, I cried, I think I'm going to fall in love with you all over again. Yes, you murmured, call me Melody if it makes you feel any better. Then Colonel Brown-Custe r handed me back the baretta. The barrel had stopped smoking but I could still smell the nauseating odor of burnt carbide. Whe re are their clothes? I pointed across the brickyard toward the gray wall of the jungle. You should have fucked them when you had the chance, the colonel told me sadly, now you're going to have to put them in the brick kiln with Baby Face Nelson. "-because you weren't at the airport to meet me I had to catch a cab. Do you know what that's like, March? It's like death. A wellmannered officer took me to the Royal Hawaiian. He was a First Lie utenant. How do you say it, a First Looie? There weren't any

.messa;ges waiting at the desk and both keys were hanging in the box. I up in the elevator to our room. It was on the thirty-first floor. alandJIIlg on the balcony I thought I could have seen all the way to China for the clouds and showers of rain. Your uniform trousers were across the foot of the bed. Do you know what I did then, March? I sat on the floor and cried. And do you know why I was crying? I was because I was so goddamned happy-" marched them across the brickyard. The stay-backs and the guys came out of their tents and stood gawking. Captured nurses, I roared, as naked as the day they were born. I found Francine sitting on a crumbling pile of bricks. He was cleaning rifle. I'm going to put them in the kiln, I said. He slipped to the ground and silently counted them. There were I had already counted. I don't think you're going to be able to get them all in there at once, observed, shaking his head slowly, and what about Baby Face Nelson? Orders from the colonel. And then Francine saw the butt of the baretta tucked into the band of trousers. Does it fire? I nodded my head. 111 give you twenty bucks. Never, I said, this is a bonafide souvenir.

WOilD(Ie<l

"-I took a shower, of course, and all the time I kept expecting you appear out of the steam, perhaps peeking coyly past the edge of the

curtain, or speaking to me above the splatter of the water beating the coral-colored tile. Afterwards, I dressed and went downstairs. was a bar by the pool from where I could watch. the lobby. I sat in palm cabana and ordered a drink. What sort of drink is this? I asked the waiter. It's a mai tai, ma'am, he told me, it's the national drink of Hawaii. For three hours I sat beside the pool drinking the national drink of It rained and then it stopped raining and then it rained all over The clouds rolled in and hugged the mountains. The sun shone the steam rose from the shell-colored tile around the pool. I was before, of course, but now I was drunk nationally. I took off my and dangled my toes in the water. The rain came crashing down my hair finally collapsed. I felt it clinging to my neck like cold, wet rags. wearing a cotton print dress. The prints were of enormous trumpet with long, lolling tongues. When the material got wet it turned llllllarE~nt. I hadn't put on any underpants, one of those stupid childish you do when you're in love that belongs in cheap magazine romances.

The waiter brought a bathtowel because I was upsetting people in ilie lobby. He wrapped me up in it like a mummy. Is this the national towel of Hawaii? He had handled women like me a million times before. What's your name, ma'am? Melody, I said, if that makes you feel any better. He took me by the hand. Why don't you go up and get changed now, Melody, the hula dancers will soon be performing the national dance of Hawaii- " In the brickyard there was nowhere to put prisoners. So there was an unwritten standing order that we wouldn't take any. I had violated an order that wasn't an order. It was Baby Face Nelson who solved the problem. We we re passing the marina You waved to a young man coiling line in the bow of a sailboat. Like an idiot, I waved too. He watched us as we passed, his elongated shadow lapping in the oily water beneath the wharf. How did he do that? you asked innocently. Oh your lips the color of pale coral. Your eyes cast down watching the slick and splintered timbers of the wharf. I felt a shuddering inside. Because he scrambled his brains, one sunny day back in April, and had to be shut away. We passed the sheds whe re new brick had once been stacked to dry. The thatched roofs caused a pattern of sun and shade that rolled like liquid over their skin. That's far enough! I thought: How in the hell do they understand me? They stopped. We had come to the base of the main chimney where the firebox was. I approached the kiln and pulled the pin from the iron door. The women shifted their bodies in the shade . I opened the door carefully. An odor of brick dust, ashes and urine broke against me like a wave. Baby Face Nelson was not lurking by the door, ready to grab the neck of whoever pulled it open. Instead, I perceived him crouched on the far side of the firebox. A gray, dusty light e ntered through invisible draught vents. Nelson had removed his shirt and was sweating an endless, dirty sweat. "-because after I changed I discovered that I was thirsty again. A raging, insatiable thirst for the national drink of Hawaii. I put on a skirt 路 and cotton blouse. Then I left my key at the desk and walked away from the Royal Hawaiian toward downtown Honolulu. It began to rain. The great d rops came down in a punishing curtain. I passed a shop selling coconuts hideously carved to look like human heads. Up ahead, a movie marquee hung suspended over the sidewalk. A waiter in a white jacket

with gold buttons stood by the door. He showed me to a table by a window that offered a plain, tropical view of the street. There, I drank again and again the national drink of Hawaii. You see, don't you March, that there was no way you could have possibly guessed that I would be only five hours late instead of twenty-four. It was my fault, don't you see? You were as innocent as a lamb-" Stay back, I told Nelson. He only smiled. There was a red crust around his mouth as though he'd been eating ashes. You wouldn't have the guts to kill anyone, he said, his voice a harsh dry sound welling from the darkness. "-but the boy said: Wait ma'am, you've forgotten to pay your bill! I nearly fell Oat on my face trying to get through the door. The air outside was damp and musty. My blouse began to stick to my skin. Oh March, I must have been quite a sight. Wobbling down the sidewalk after a poor little soldier with a woman in a plastic slicker hanging on his arm. I followed you past the marina and through downtown Honolulu, climbing toward the ragged black peaks and boiling sky. She was stealing you away from me, March, don't you see there was nothing else I could have done? You turned down a side street and stopped before a two story bungalow with a huge screened porch and a flight of stairs angling up the side. I saw you climbing, March, she was leading you by the hand-" Melody, I asked, do you live alone? You looked down at me from the landing. So you're going to call me Melody after all. Yes. I reached for your hand and you led me into a short, dark hall. The door wasn't locked. I remember green, overstuffed chairs and shattered sunlight streaming through half-drawn venetian blinds. The bedroom is through there, March. I wandered into an airy kitchen. A pot on the stove. An odor of spaghetti. The soothing drip of a leaky faucet. A pitcher of warm lemonade on the table. Your bedroom was just a closet off the kitchen. A mattress on the ftoor beneath a mountain of woman's clothes. I stood by the kitchen window and stared idly down into the street. A woman in a skirt and cotton blouse had dropped her handbag on the pavement. She was kneeling in the gutter searching in the water for scattered coins. "-and when you lived in the jungle, March, you shared your hut with a man named Nelson. Nelson was your best friend who, when he was taken away to jail, gave you the shirt and ribbons of valor off his

---~-~-

back. You called him Baby Face because he looked so young for his age and because, you know, he was cruel. But he had some admirable qualities. Like he had the Twenty-Third Psalm tattooed on the inside of his forearm and two of Our Lord's Commandments tattooed on his back- " Except that they were in reverse. Thou Shalt instead of Thou Shalt Not. He turned his back to me, disdainful, like a gorilla in a cage. He had found himself a home in the firebox among the dust and ashes. I saw the perverted commandments copiously written in little blue script on his back be neath a film of grime. Thou Shalt Kill. Thou Shalt Commit Adultery. I've brought you some company, I said. He continued to stare at the bare wall. I was his best friend yet I might as well have been talking to myself. I turned and ordered the first woman into the firebox. She hesitated. I fired my rille into the ground at her feet. For a moment her naked buttocks were ludicrously framed in the mouth of the kiln. Then she was through the door, absorbed into the shadows of the oven. The others reluctantly followed. I peered in after them. They were crouched in a half circle facing the door, their small breasts and leathery brown nipples pointing down, their faces blank, their dark eyes squinting in the rust-colored haze. Well shit fire, Nelson said. I clanged shut the iron door and set the pin. "-and then I found myself peering down into my own face reflected in rushing water. I rose and crossed the street. The wooden banister was unsteady and I hugged the wall. Was this the national pastime of Hawaii? Climbing some little hussy's backstairs? A door on the landing stood open. I felt my way down a short, dark hall Then my hand encountered the cold metal of a knob. I turned noiselessly and I stepped into a small parlor full of ugly green furniture. Half open venetian blinds made prison bars of sunlight on the worn carpet. I went into the kitchen. It was cramped and filthy. A pan of dried-up spaghetti rotted on the stove. The sink was full of dishes and the faucet was dripping. A pitcher of warm lemonade stood in the center of the table. Then I heard someone whisper my name. A girl's voice pronounced a nasty word. She moaned. What are you doing to he r, March? I went to the closet door and yanked it open-" Nelson had re moved his trouse rs and he was holding one of the women by the hair. dragging her across the dust of the floor. Shut the door, he bellowed, can't you see I'm busy? The othe r women we re huddled as far away from him as they could get. I said: What in the hell do you think you're doing?

Nelson glanced up at me. He had no expression at all. The woman, beneath him, wrenched her head from side to side as though she choking. The ashes rose in stifling clouds. Look, he said, I can't talk and fuck at the same time. There was the drinking water left for the prisoner. I grabbed the and swung it toward the gaping mouth of the kiln door. "--QJld isn't it a riot. All I could think about was to somehow get apart. I heard my name again and the frantic rustle of clothes. I searched kitchen. 1ltere was the pitcher of warm lemonade. I closed my eyes emptied it into the closet-" Howdy, Nelson roared, fucking underwater. I heard a thin, high-pitched scream. His hands were around her neck. laW that he was going to break her back. The baretta leaped from my into my hand. Don't force me, I said. "-and you looked so sad all wound up in that poor little girl's raincoat, lemonade running everywhere. And do you remember, March, I began apologize. Because it was really my fault, don't you see-" The baretta jolted in my hand. Its sharp report filled the dead cavity the brick kiln and rang in my ears. Nelson's face froze in an expression quiet surprise. The woman, her legs slowly straightening, lay beneath like a drawing by Cocteau. I slumped forward against the sill of the mouth. Goddamnit Nelson, I shouted through the door, don't make me kill

all! "--Qild I saw then and there that his mortality .. . Did I say mortality? morality, of course, was twisted like a pretzel, because of that silly,

LESLIE BOONE Elmo Gets Energi.zea

I don 't know if she wanted me to hold her tight or what, but I didn't. I didn't even say I was sorry. I guess I let her down real bad, man. She is really pissed off this time. She won't even answer her crazy phone. I guess maybe I shouldn't just hang out here all day on account of maybe I'll start thinking about her and that would be really bad news. Just about out of cigarettes. Cotta go out soon, man. In an hour maybe. I'U ge t dressed and go to the bodega. Maybe I should, like, clean this place up. Wow, my place is so filthy. I dig this apartment. It's small but it's pretty funky. I just cannot seem to keep it clean. I would dig it if I had a maid, but I'm on unemployment, man. It's a hassle. Better save the money to fix my stereo. A life with no sound is, like, no life at all. I dig playing my favorite record for Dolores. Eddie Palmieri at Sing Sing. She really goes for that, man. We have a very good thing, Dolores and me. Except we had a fight and now she won't even answer her crazy phone, man. She's really pissed off at me this time. Before I go out maybe I should scarf some breakfast. Wow, my kitchen is really filthy. I got twelve bags of garbage to take out. The bottom's rotted out of all of them. Never make it to the crazy incinerator. I can't handle it. I'm just not energized. I have a lot of space in my kitchen, man. It's very important to have as much space as you need. I get some roaches and I try to kill them but they're real fast, what can you do? I think all my dishes are used. That kills my breakfast, man. Another day of fasting for Elmo Shaver. I can't hassle the dishes. They waste my time. My system is stack them up in the bathtub 'til they're all used and then I can wash them all at once. I sprinkle a whole can of Comet in the tub and then I run the shower over them and they all get washed at the same time. Ingenious, man. I figure it saves me a lot of work. Like, washing my dishes every day would take me ten minutes per day so this way I save ten minutes per day by stacking them in the tub 'til I have enough to do one humongous load. Of course, I get more roaches. I gotta spray the tub with a can of Black Flag and wash them down the drain. Dolores always says my kitchen is really disgusting. She says it gives her the heebie jeebies. I cannot contend with all this garbage, man. All over the counter are all these crazy cans. Elmo Shaver's Gourmet Hall of Fame. Cans of tuna, pried open and half eaten. Cans of soup, man, pried open and one third eaten. Cans of canned

IDuJat(>eS, man. I figure maybe I can take a shower if I stand in the tub with feet on either side of the dishes. It's almost noon, man, time to get out. I really dig an egg cream at this very moment. I try to eat healthy to in a higher vibration. I really dig my neighborhood. 'Olere is a dude who lives outside my door. He resides, man, in a cardboard box that he drags with him over town, but he prefers to live right outside my door. Everyday I him when I hit the street. All the people in my building dig this He is a very friendly dude. I gotta get my shit together. I figure I want to go uptown. Combing my hair, man, I check out my I put on my coat with the secret pockets sewed inside in case I want to lift some groceries. I get my unemployment next week and 'til then I'm a little low, man. I figure I should take some dope with me. Most important, man, I take my radio. I cannot go anywhere without my IOUDd. Leaving, man, I check out the dude in his cardboard box home. I to him and say hey, man, what's happening. He says what it is, man. He motions me to come inside his house. The box is real big IDside. 1be cat definitely has a lot of space. I sit down and he says don't against the wall or we'll tip over. I tell him that I'm Elmo Shaver IDCI I really dig his house. He shows me some of his stuff. He has some ..Uy good stuff in his box. He has, man, an entire bag full of light He says a lot of them don't have little grey spots and that means aren't used up yet. I figure he must have a hundred light bulbs. He if I ever need light bulbs to just ask him. I tell him if he ever needs 10111e sound he can borrow my radio. I turn it on to get us energized. Strolling, man, out on Canal Street, it's a very beautiful, very far out day. I do not hit the street 'til noon, man, 'cause that's when it starts happening. I know I can sleep 'til eleven and still hit the street by noon. I think maybe I'll take the IRT uptown. I dig the ride. I used to take the crazy IRT uptown to see Dolores. Dolores lives in this very far out aeighborhood uptown. Dolores is el numero uno chick in my book, man. She has real crazy blonde hair. And she's real short. I dig that on account fi I'm not a real tall cat myself. She is definitely short. I could eat a bowl fi soup off her head. !16th Street is my stop, man. I go to a bodega to pt my cigarettes. 'Ole bodega smells bad. It smells real bad. It smells, I deduce, like somebody puked. I think it must be from rotted dairy poduce. I like to walk around the bodega and check out the beans. Beans are in very crazy cans, man, especially Goya beans. The cans are 짜ery scenic. Walking on ll6th Street, I cruise this beautiful chick who reminds me of Dolores. She's got blonde hair and a custom designed It makes me think that maybe I should go to talk to Dolores. Her place is just two blocks from here. Dig it, I feel really energized. I think maybe it's, like, time for us to patch things up.

Dig it. I am knocking, man, on her very door. I have definitely got my thing together. I am smiling, but it is not a goony smile. Footsteps are coming toward the door. It's me, Dolores. I say. I need to talk to you, baby. She says go away Elmo, leave me alone. I knock again. She says go away E lmo. I don't want to see you. I say Dolores, honey. you and me gotta talk. She te lls me she's got nothing to say. I say hey, honey, you gotta le t me say I'm sorry. She says no way Elmo, it's over. I ring the buzze r. I knock again for a long time. I kick the door real hard while I lean on the buzzer. but she won't answer. Dolores is really pissed off this time. Man, I hate it when she plays these crazy games. It hassles my head . I'm standing, man, on the sidewalk in front of her building. Dolores. I yell her name real loud. Hey Dolores. I'm not leaving 'til you talk to me. I want to tell you that I love you baby. Somebody on the third floor opens the ir window and looks out at me. Hey man, I holler, I just wanta tell Dolores that I love he r. Dolores, you are my number one chick. Another window goes up. I do not care if these dudes are observing me. Love is not ashamed, man . Christ, baby open your window. I got to talk to you Dolores. Anothe r window opens. Some dude yells get out of he re you fruit. Dolores, you are the possessor of my heart. I want to te ll you how much I dig you, baby. You put me in high orbit. I'm not kidding you. A couple of people are yelling at me from out the ir windows. Wow, I could really dig a little privacy here. I te ll them I'm not leaving. I'm not budging, man, 'til I talk to Dolores. Elmo Shaver is not vacating the pre mises. I'm not leaving 'til you come to the window, Dolores. If you don't come to the window, I gotta do something drastic. Dolores, this is your last chance. Whew, yelling like this is making me very dizzy, man. The re is a little black kid who is watching me . I smile at him and ask if he wants a piece of gum. He says why don't you give up, dude? I tell him no way, not 'til I talk to Dolores. I should have thought ahead . I definitely should have had a plan, man. Foresight, man. I resume hollering. Hey Dolores, listen to me. Lots of people are leaning out their windowsills. A bald guy yells that he's gonna call the cops. H ey Dolores, I scream, hey baby, I dig your black garter belt. It works. Her window flies open. Dolores sticks her crazy head out. She looks beautiful, man. Her hair is in little poofs around her head. She yells down at me, Elmo get lost, I don't love you anymore Elmo, Elmo you fuck like a chinaman. He r window bangs shut. Maybe she isn't ready to forgive me ye t. Let bygones be bygones, man. My head is so bothered. Man, this really brings my head down. I figure that maybe I need to get energized, man. I take the train into Queens. Cotta go to the field and get energized. It's a very far out ride. I'm glad I brought my radio. It sounds good. It sounds very good. It is playing Good Bye Pork Pie Hat. I sing along, good-bye pork pie Dolores. I turn up the sound, I am really grooving now, man. I have

------, got my shit together. Approaching me, in slow motion, man, is very tall black dude. He says hey man, would you tum that fucking down? I say to him , hey man, would you leave me the fuck alone? get off the train two blocks from the field. The walk is ve ry far out I am listening to Smokey Robinson, man. I see the crazy planes in the distance. Delta. United. 1WA. They all take off from here. start here, man, on the ir way to highe r orbit. I lay down in the at the very end of the runway and smoke some dope. Grooving, the are in my blood, man. I got here one day at dawn and them all, man, there we re six-hundred crazy planes. I dig the jet it's very erotic. At night it's scarier than shit, man. Some nights I bottle of Wild Turkey and lie down on the runway and I feel the shave right over me, man, whistling two inches over my head. The ground thunders around me and the grass blows like crazy the air gets blasting hot. Prop jets are definitely crazy, sometimes barely make the runway. I am getting really energized now, man. Maybe I should have brought Dolores a present. Like a box of or something. On account of chicks really go for it when you bring something, especially, man, if you've had a fight. Flowers, candy, You always have to keep putting weenies out for them , stay on good side. She would definitely dig it if I took her some flowers. I a definite plan, man. Dolores is very pissed off. I just wanta wait one more 727 to go over. The heat, man, is unbelievable. The biggest is you know, man, if anything goes wrong you're dead. Toss your Bones. You'd never get away in time. The crazy thing would come right on top of you. Blast you to pieces, man. Whosh. Balls of fire, fumes and gas. I can really dig space migration, man. Maybe I have to check out a florist. Dolores will dig it. Whosh. I'm very lnf~l"lli!Ze(i_ Elmo Shaver is in high gear now, man. Elmo Shaver has lleliinltety got his shit together. Go man, go.

MARGARET ATWOOD Solstice Poem

i) A tree hulks in the livingroom, prickly monster, our hostage from the wilderness, prelude to light in this dark space of the year which turns again toward the sun today, or at least we hope so. Outside, a dead tree swanning with blue and yellow birds; inside, a living one that shimmers with hollow silver planets and wafer faces, salt and flour, with pearl teeth, tin angels, a knitted bear. This is our altar. ii) Beyond the white hill which maroons us, out of sight of the white eye of the pond, geography is crumbling, the nation splits like an iceberg, factions shouting Good riddance from the floes as they all melt south, with politics the usual rats' breakfast. All politicians are amateurs: wars bloom in their heads like flowers on wallpaper, pins strut on their maps. Power is wine with lunch and the right pinstripes.

There are no amateur soldiers. The soldiers grease their holsters, strap on everything they need to strap, gobble their dinners. They travel quickly and light. The fighting will be local, they know, and lethal. Their eyes flick from target to target: window, belly, child. The goal is not to get killed.

iii) As for the women, who did not

want to be involved, they are involved. It's that blood on the snow which turns out to be not some bludgeoned or machine-gunned animal's, but your own that does it. Each has a knitting needle stuck in her abdomen, a red pincushion heart complete with pins, a numbed body with one more entrance than the world finds safe, and not much money. Each fears her children sprout from the killed children of others. Each is right.

Each has a father. Each has a mad mother and a necklace of lightblue tears. Each has a mirror which when asked replies Not you. iv) My daughter crackles paper, blows on the tree to make it live, festoons herself with silver. So far she has no use for gifts. What can I give her, what armour, invincible sword or magic trick, when that year comes? How can I teach her some way of being human that won't destroy her? I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say Find shelter in another skin. I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone's voice, Be / ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it. Iron talismans, and ugly, but more loyal than mirrors.

v) In this house (in a dying orchard, behind it a tributary of the wilderness, in front a road), my daughter dances unsteadily with a knitted bear. Her father, onetime soldier, touches my arm. Worm language clots our throats, making it difficult to say what we mean, making it difficult to see. Instead we sing in the back room, raising our pagan altar of oranges and silver flowers: our fools' picnic, our signal, our flame, our nest, our fragile golden protest against murder.

Outside, the cries of the birds are rumours we hear clearly but can't yet understand. Fresh ice glints on the branches. In this dark space of the year, the earth turns again toward the sun, or we would like to hope so.

The Right Hand Fights The Left

Why should there be a war? Once there was none. The left hand sang the rituals, the right hand answered. Now, the right hand dips down into the chemicals of its own blood and comes up metal. It arranges the nouns it has killed

in plaza windows, it is odourless and dry, it squeezes and apple plasma drips from its fist. It oils itself and makes lists of its enemies, it swivels on the wrist like a spy, a radar, a tentacled silver eye. lbe left hand, you will observe, is soft and smaller. It sleeps during the day when the right hand is marching, but that voice you heard at sunset was the left hand calling: Arise, 0 fingers of the left hand, and outside, in a tangle of liquid roots and the quick sprawl of tendrils over the earth, the forces of the left hand wake to savage life.

An owl strikes, and mouseblood becomes owl

blood, each fur stomach extrudes a mouth, snails rasp against leaves, in the hearts of purple flowers motheggs multiply, the feral darkness flickers with cactus teeth. 'nle right hand turns in in its sleep, moans like a train, like a wrong tum, like a chain. In this furious chase, the war of the body against itself, there is no winner, only joy and no joy. Dawn comes, and the right hand blasts another tree from its burrow. 'nle right hand holds the knife, the left hand dances.

JOSEPHINE MILES Island

On the island each figure Moves to become its island, Down to the shore, enters The surrounding sea, Is surrounded By the waves of its waters Crowding its beaches. A fringe of palms, or pines maybe, Touches Some outlying strand, The center tingles Toward opposite reaches. Each figure Wades fully into the waters of his island, saying I am land.

ROBERT MAZZOCCO Honolulu

For Anita Povich There are quays here That disappear into the black water 'nte way the old sailor Once imagined the world To split at its farthest point Lost in the deepest mist . . .

*** Occasionally the people stroll alone In moonlight Bare feet at home in bits of surf The echoes of black other days Mingle with the obscure black shapes Of picnic tables or banyan trees 'nte outriggers left side by side On clumps of sand or the surlboards Kept in strict and measured rows While the two yachts SHANGRI LA And NY NY seem to grope one another At a boat basin near the parking lot

*** In the lobbies of the dream museums The carpets wear the designs of jonquil Sun beasts fathomless roots and maps At an after hours spot in a "ship's bar" 'nte porthole or the captain's wheel Recall no suitable refrain or harbor

••• Yet to resign oneself to what Is missing or to what is found Are these the new beginnings Those galleries of stars that choose A snowy sky and mountain those spyglasses Of sleep that meet a distant forest The three strange figures on a balcony With the toys piled high in caneback chairs Or that boy and girl who'll look down now Past a dim courtyard as an old woman In plumeria leaves and red chiffon Waves a farewell and a huge black taxi departs

VALENTINO RAMIREZ

Shorebreak

I wonder, too, about how it's going to tum out.

Of course, I want it simple, like those first words We exchanged at Wahiawa Theater last year Before they tore it all down. Something of you Is stuck with me, and as the rumble of surf drifts Across the empty lot tonight, I find myself humming Arcane tunes of regret: how we both knew enough To know the Koolaus can offer a view of both sides, And how one evening we hiked up anyway To a resting place above the windward coast Where ridge lines arc down to sea for what seemed A pleasant walk of just a few more hours. But before Our first steps feU and we could choose which strip Of beach to aim for, the wind shifted due west, Booming like groundsweUs in the trees behind us. I remember looking up next day At midaftemoon and the salt haze floating Above an ocean so agitated in that rip of events, My eyes burned looking at it. Premonitions rose In the tears, and when the beaches were washed out Back to the treeline, I knew it had already Been too late. And though neither one of us Will ever say what happened, the waves have a knack For sorting themselves out. Go ahead and pick one. The sand rising in its face will testify That tomorrow is not hidden, but suspended, Floating in view for a long moment Before it falls on shore.

Fishin' Blues

It was strange that morning, How the wind blew from an unusual direction, Making the ocean clean, wide open and blue Like sky, like a dream of my own.

Mom and Dad wished me luck, Hoping that I'd catch a big one. Then they sat on the bay's edge and talked About life; why the small, worn stones were mixed in With boulders too large for this world of sky And water meeting. I still remember how she turned, Directing her argument toward the mountain Across the water, saying how indiscreet it was To expect more for an answer. For a while Each thing there became glassy and quiet, And they smiled, watching the rising chop And tide cover each rock, as kelp drifted Into a sky about to rain. Pristine waterfalls, rockslides Dismantling the mountain, and the summit Crowned orange after each storm Like a wing of epiphany, such was the source And estuary of a time long out of my hands. I'm waking up now, many hours after the incident, After everyone has had their say and moved on, Leaving their cups on the table, and me Trying to sort out what I heard 'nlrough the bedroom wall as sunlight Streams into the kitchen.

GARY TACHIYAMA Here I Am

Looking back not to Dwight D. Benny Harrison or some foreign notion of independence but to an empty purple kimono ripping and tearing thread by thread in the wind over a Big Island plantation town My heritage But here I am wearing jeans and T -shirts with a crystal Seiko analog on my wrist eating rice on a plate with a fork sometimes in a bowl with chili rapping with my Sansei brothers all in their twenties sitting in class beginning to learn the language and about World War II the plantation and Issei ancestors cause there ain't much of the cloth leftcouple of threads and no way to see the plum blossoms

and I thought we came just to cut cane and I thought we'd go home dancing and I thought we'd go the same as we came like Japan just like Japan

PUANANI BURGESS 'Awapuhi

Mama loved the scent of the wild yellow ginger, growing thick on the slopes of Tantalus. In its blooming season, she would walk up that steep, curvy road to pick two or three. These she would weave into a brooch, to be pinned to the inside of her blouse - hidden, but for that wann perfume. On the day she was buried, she wore a lei of wild yellow ginger, freshly picked from the slopes of Tantalus, And.left for me, in a blue shoe box, a thousand, neatly-woven, dry, fragrant brooches.

JANE ANDERSON Tortoise

a child leans on the fence of the tortoise cage at the Rochester Zoo . . . Dragging his shell through centuries now caged in wire he walks his allotment of ground the fence is not high I stick my hand over hoping he will bite off my fingers I want to feel inside his stomach and touch what does not seep through

I Wear A Rock Around My Neck

After emptying all the drawers old suitcases and hidden closets I have found what we have all been searching for something you can throw at people something you can hang around your neck a rock - nothing but a rock everything a rock should be when you feel it it feels you when you ignore it it ignores you On my chest it hangs like a universe

SANDRA AKAMINE

A Trade For Daydreams

I wish I had learned to make lace. As a child my mother learned tatting and crochet. She tried to teach me. I tried to learn but it was tightening to try to make tactile beauty. My standards were high. To learn it right I'd have had to give up reading and daydreaming. I see myself like a Flemish old lady in a starched lace cap and collar

with perfect spaced ruflles, threads and holes bent over my loom in the conservatory. I see myself dancing a hula. My arms lift as if they were a gentle stream of wind. They reach out and my hand plucks a star out of the night. My hips sway. My fingers close around the star the way a blossom gently closes with the night. My feet bend up and down to make my hips sway.

My heart opens and the star slips from the heart of the blossom into mine, the star beams fill my heart and it floats toward the sky. It swells with light. It joins the sky of stars above the sea and I repeat, my feet following, stirring circles in the sand.

JOSEPH BRUCHAC A Laguna Man

As painted by Otto Plaug

Pedro Saracino, your ranch on that great plain between two mesas is there in your eyes which saw, in Oklahoma, the Buffalo run beside your horse as you thrust the spear, two handed, to its heart. Grey hair falls almost to your shoulders about your face, which flows like stone below eyebrows arching stonn clouds over those black eyes intense with memory. The red blanket of a cacique, patterned with blue lines and green, is wrapped about you, your shadow vibrant as the echo of years in your eyes looking forward from that day in 1921, looking back across the strength of uncounted centuries.

Morning Song

My Grandfather always rose with the sun, his oldest friend. The front door of the General Store he ran faced towards the east and he'd sit there in a blue painted chair he'd made of pine cut from his woods, waiting for the first rays to touch his face. He grew stronger each day as the light lifted higher, his hands moving the way chilled crickets do coming back to life among grass blades frosted overnight. Then, just before he'd stand to begin his long day's work, he'd lift his palms and hold them there, just long enough to cup the silence, his welcoming song.

LEONARD NATHAN The Chosen

One morning a whole people can wake up with nothing to do. They look around fulfilled and utterly without interest at the promised land. They stand listening before bushes or incredulously tap rocks, but the answer is always an echo of their own making or plain thirst. Someone remembers to shout a command. The women slowly get breakfast, the men face outward, searching the far dust, looking for trouble.

Rites Of Passage

This boy, no man until he's speared his lion, cannot believe that in some lands there are no lions, only boys wandering over the world hunting their fathers.

PATII PATTON Cheyenne Plain

The cattle in the field are stopped and covered by the snow. Senseless piles of bones. But when they die they send ghosts to haunt the wann lit house. In the form of wind.

* She works fast pulling down bright shirts and white sheets from the line. Streams of sweat on her thighs pull her weight to the ground. The men will be home soon and she is not done.

MERYL SIEGAL Rain on the outside of a black car

Our grandparents planned the rain that hinged on their coffin latches, that stooped our already grief-stricken postures to coffin level. Dark cedar wood and smudged skies and wet windows sucked clean by oval drops. June and February, both unlikely times for planting that which will grow to view, a plot dug too deeply, a coffin lowered too hastily by silver chains. The cousins huddle by a nearby stone. Chaya reads art, Devorah tends children, we look for lines to share and are left with space and schnapps that warms wet raw bones in June. Before entering back into the house, we rub our hands with water, tap water, riot alcohol or peroxide, though we want to destroy any clinging infection. The full bottle sits outside the door. At midnight I spill the remains.

She

She is at the comer holding a wickerbasket, On top of the woven tan frame lie roses, red and pink. She is dressed in black, waiting. She lights a cigarette to illuminate the drunks in couples, after midnight and bar closings. A black limousine fills the street, A dark man sits at the wheel. He is smiling and pointing to the passengers in the seat behind him. Four legs kick up and down. She drops her cigarette as foam leaps from the window. Champagne.

Who shall live and who shall die?

What's that smell? That seething odor lurking in the country. Not pine, maybe cedars grow here. I'll ask the fox, whose eyes roll and bead and deny me, (and then ask to be pacified this night). Oh, he's dumb for a country fox, and then and there lures me into a pretend hovel, full of percolators and cracked open with two-by-fours. He forgot the question. Sometimes I do lose my footing. It's so dark in the country and solutions are hard to come by. Once I slipped on your softwom flannel shirt and was shielded from the black knives. But that was a single time, and gave me no answers to any questions. Watching the swells of caribou on the ice patch seems odd in summer clothes. They are just there, batting mosquitos and winning at the game. They are smart in aloof etiquette. August is a reminder month. The land lies flat from here to twenty miles, From there the hill up by Ester rises to retrieve the country lost in a fastfood oasis. I'm glad I played the fox's game. Now I am pinning his tail on my mantle. Now I am outside hovels at night. August is picking up the dark hours rushing to complete the summer, kill the mosquitos, and head south. And at last there were lights above, squeezing the blackness into strands of green and red, racing from the hills to the town, flat and silent at midnight.

STEPHEN THOMAS

The act of love

He speaks slowly the woman admires his deliberateness it smacks of the serious she says two walk together almost as easily as one I am lonely he says her eyes are wide open his eyes are wide open life he says is a sweatshirt graceless and wann fill it as you will it is always of its own cloth men are assholes she says but when they speak of life it excites me

SHERI MAE AKAMINE Sleeping Cousin

I won't wake you I know that the dreams you have are too big to expose to the open air yet they twirl like cellophane underwater paper fishes with a life of their own and you sleep hair floating and your earrings flash like an air bubble or two

Summer

The bees are buzzing in yellow coats with black stripes. White butterflies palpitate above the blossoms. Children sit in white cotton shorts scatching their anns waiting for a summer breeze. Summer. They play in the empty lot stamping down the tall weeds to make a flat place to sit. They tear out sections to make rooms for an air-walled house. There is a whine in the air, children whining "There's nothing to do . Puppies whining from the heat in the yard. Grass whining as kids play with the stalks, squeaking their fingers on the moisture of the stem. Someone sits in .the shade in the tree house with a lime popsicle, watching the pile of sticks grow as the weeks in July pass. There will be ten to twelve grudge matches on the grounds beneath the tree and " NO TRESPASSING!" will be shouted a thousand times from the tree house walls. A small boy sits in the California grass with his elbow propped up on his knee, waiting to be found, his eyes getting drowsy from the drone of summer sounds, kept awake by the strawberries scattered along his arm. Far down the street the notes of the ice cream truck are fading.

The music, metallic and warping, plays like a slinky down the stepsthe momentum just a little too slow.

LYN LIFSHIN Naked Charm

smash the smallest things together he said you get more than the pieces like sparklers the whole becomes more quarks physicists like names like that like to think of themselves as poets quarks from a line in Ulysses 3 quarks for Mr. Man How do you find them so small noprotons or neutrons up and down and strange quarks quarks in colors or flavors mostly quarks stayed coupled the quarks don't want to be pried apart

for a long time no one knew if charm existed but yesterday they found one a naked charm very hard to get to

Lipchitz

1916 I was carving the stone a bright cubist sculpture and a friend came and said you're spoiling the gift he spat on my sculpture that's the kind every one wants today I could sell 15 of them to what r m doing today

Lipchitz

Carrara all white noise of wheels like giant bees, marble like ice that stays

Workaholic Madonna

she vacuums the cat's hair before it's off the cat writes 14 poems in the backyard on a day when nobody phones types them up slaps stamps on them they're in the mail the same day If she can't sleep she tracks down ants and hair and lashes when the ribbon on her typewriter goes and it's sunday nothing can help

GARYSANGE U nsent Birthday Card

Dad. I'm not doing much about you these days. For your birthday I only called: only sang. the old song. I was trying the way you used to sing it to methe way you'd kid your own tenderness with : 路路youooooooooooo . . . When I had finished you said "Gary that was good," and couldn't remember the name of my son. But Dad even in your deepest amnesia you always remember my name. It seems to come back to you vivid as you first bannered it across my birthday's newspaper" IT'S A BOY! ITS A BOY!" you shouted with the headline to anyone passing by. Now I hear of you: "getting skinnier ... still wants to go home ... stutters . . . shakes. " I hear of you from mom whose voice quivers when I ask, who wants to protect me from what you've become. Relentless, least presence, I've tried to only recall you already. But today your nurse tells me how she woke up to a patter of footsteps on the hardwood floor, ran into a darkened hall to find you helplessly dancing.

STEVEN LAUTERMILCH Neighbor Lady

Five hundred miles that late summer evening And our truck stalled at the foot of your drive. Inside, The best part of my green life-wife, son, and three-month-old child. You took such time to cross the rug In your ballooning shift and tiny steps I thought you had to be drunk. Forgive me. The gossips don't know what they say: How you greet the mailman in your birthday suit And hang out your clothes on the line the same way. Each morning the hitch in your gait the catch in your voice The steel glare in your eyes speaks only too plain. Uncurable teach me to live with your grace.

LEE UPTON

Visiting My Family In The Country

From a distance you know he's a farm boy the dark skin lit with dust thrown all day turning tractor in the field his open blue shirt the chest muscled in small practical plates I sit on the lawn in an old housedress its blue flowers taken from another age I could be a woman who lived he re twenty years ago Seeing him I don't know why I become the shy daughter dignity or old habits Perhaps it's knowing whoever comes up the road often stops here There are so few reasons to take this way At my own home in the city I sit on the porch careless settling in a green shift So many pass I never walk inside because of them Here this boy approaches and I can't bear it but leave the span of grass I am not intimidated but these people keep their curiousity If you watch them they watch back And the house inside will be cool as the bed the dogs dug under their tree packed hard and shadowed I can feel my own urgency the body with its almost visible ash And the way any of these boys walkit's not like in the cityhere they never suspect their own beauty.

SERA MESSING Out Of The Desert, Into The Rain

To Kit Because I live in a rainforest, it's natural that sometimes I think of you in your desert. Today, nothing dries : not Danny's work jeans, not Matty's gauze diapers, not even ink carved into onion-skin. Today, my skin draws water from heavy air. I bloat past saturation like cereal left too long in milk, left too long alone. Once in the Vegas desert under a lightheaded sky-4 a.m. , the last show over-we walk home, taking the short cut through Caesar's Palace. In the desert we hear the dawning silence between us. I tum to you whispering: I want a hedge of mock orange a low, black lacquer table tatami mats a clothesline a coffee pot full of rooting ti-leaf a mortgage a child

You quote Alan Watts on the "ecstasy of nothingness" and sit rocking in the lap of a dark sage bush. You crawl into your white tequila bottle; hide behind a peyote bloom smokescreen; jiggle your rainbowcolored pills. White sprouts already trail from my feet, grow between my toes, between us. You can see the roots will die without water. Rain beats down the mountain towards my rooting bamboo. Once you have lived in a desert, you can wait out simple rainstorms.

JUDITH MINTY Yellow Dog Journal- Spring

10. All winter, my poems were thin and icy, my head 6.lled with other people's words. Those dark months, I lived in the comers of failure. Now, here by the river, the hermit thrush opens his throat, lines flow over the page, the afternoon sun warms my shoulders, my back in its slow circle.

11. Oh my friend, I wish you here with me. This evening I walked upstream where I have never been, planning to find the source of Bushey Creek. But the woods were thick and I could see many bends above me still. It was not that I was afraid of losing my way or that night would come before I found the spring. It was that there would be no one to share the mystery, how water can bubble up out of earth, then flow into this delicate stream. So instead, I sat among moss and lichen, studied the hill on the opposite bank, then turned back and headed downstream toward the thunder of the falls.

13. Beaver lodge begun below where I dip for water. Twigs and leaves bending out from the bank, the river so clear I can see down to where the log holds below the surface. I track him up to the woods, the drag mark of his flat tail.

19. After dinner, near the beaver lodge, I watch an osprey follow the flow downstream, glide, then lift its wings. It floats the path of clouds. Upstream, around the next bend, bats hang in the saplings waiting for twilight.

20. nus water flows, then catches in little eddies, almost trying to run upstream again. Then it hurries on, tu~ at the bush next to me, nods the twig at the bend. It plays the same at the falls, only louder, with a certain fury. Here, by my father's sandy beach, the river is surely a contented woman.

24. Again, frogs courting. First one starts, a violinist trying his bow across the string, then two or three more tune up. Then a symphony, along the riverbank, out of ponds. And the birds, hidden in a thousand trees, join in through the dusky haze.

WIL.UAM D. STEINHOFF

My Life Can Kill Me

Nick knew he had made a serious mistake. He began to sleep during the day and stay awake from ten o'clock at night until early morning. He kept his shotgun with him all the time. Christina slept by the telephone and learned to find the light switches in the dark. If the phone went out, she was to switch the lights off and on. They watched the laughing young men walk by the house and knew it was only a question of time. Nicholas Draganov, fonner sergeant in the Royal Bulgarian Army and veteran of the Balkan War of 1911-1912, had wanted to leave some memorial to himself and his wife. He had wanted to leave something behind so that America would remember him, and to say thank you for all the years of success he and his wife had enjoyed. They had no children, and they were growing old. One morning he had read in the newspaper that the local community college was holding a fund raising drive. "Christina," he said to his wife, "Do you know the mall at the community college, where all the granite plaques arer' 'The ones with the General Motors' heads and doctors' names on them she asked, still concentrating on her knitting. "Yes, those are the ones. It says here that if you give $25, 000 to the college, they will put up a plaque with your name. Maybe that's what we should do for our memorial." Christina stared at the wall as if she were visualizing her name on a plaque already. "If our baby had lived, he would have gone to college. Yes, I think that would be a fine idea." Nick had already decided there should be two plaques. "Nicholas Alexi Draganov. Christina Chungo Draganov." He sent the check off that same day. A few days later, Nick had found another story in the newspaper. Christina did not read English very well, so he always read her the paper as she worked, adding his comments and interpretations. "Christina, look! Here is a list of the people who have donated $25,000 to the community college. Mr. and Mrs. James Wilson, General Motors executive; Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Manning, physician; Mr. Henry Z. Spigelburg, attorney; Mr. Nicholas A. Draganov, former owner of

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Nick's Coney Island; and Mrs. Christina Draganov, housewife." How Christina had beamed. She had just gone to get the scissors to cut out the story when a reporter called, wanting to do a story about them for the Sunday Journal. Nick felt a little uneasy. He had always made it a point never to talk about his private life, but he felt proud of what he had accomplished. Nick and Christina were very excited. She cleaned the house until it was spotless, and he cleaned up the outside, making sure the chickens were locked up and would not get on the reporter's car. The reporter arrived at the appointed time. He was a tall young man, and seemed very friendly. They greeted him at the door, warning him to duck as he came through the low doorway. He sat down on the small sofa and Christina served him cake and coffee. He looked enormous in the tiny house, which had been built to scale for five-foot tall Nick and his even smaller wife. "This house seems to be just your size," the reporter remarked to break the ice. " Oh, I built it that way on purpose," said Nick proudly. "I picked out all the wood myself at the sawmill. Fifty-seven years ago I built this house. I wanted it to last us a lifetime, and it has. " "This was all farmland, then," he continued. "Now, I sold off most of the land and I just have five acres left for my garden." Nick watched the young man and knew he was thinking about the fast food stores and allnight gas stations in the neighborhood, and trying to imagine it as peaceful farmland. "It's not so safe around here anymore, since they built the public housing project, but we don't want to leave our house. Christina says she won't leave until she can't walk anymore. There are too many young people with nothing to do. I see them sitting in front of the store. Their eyes are strange like they know the devil. " " Mr. Draganov," the reporter began. Nick interrupted him. "Please, call me Nick. Everybody does. When I owned the Original Coney Island, everyone starts calling me Nick the Greek. Americans know about Greece, but not Bulgaria. We all go to the same Greek Orthodox Church, so they call me Nick the Greek. My wife likes to be called Christina. She comes from Romania, near Ploesti. " The reporter began again. "Nick, then. Tell me, Mr. Draganov, . . Nick, how did you happen to come to Flint, Michigan?" Nick told him the whole story, interspersed with coughs as he smoked his black Balkan cigarettes. He told about fighting the Turks and winning a medal from King Boris, and how he left when he knew the big war was coming. He took a ship to America and worked on the railroad, cutting ties. Christina had worked in a candy company and then as a maid for a rich family. He told him how they met at a church picnic in Flint and got married, and saved their money so he could open a little restaurant

called Nick's Original Coney Island. And how he saved his money and always bought land. ''I've heard you developed a secret sauce for your Coney Island hot dogs, " the reporter offered. Nick laughed and pointed out the back window toward his garden. "You see out there, I grow peppers. All kinds of peppers. I experiment like a chemist with sauces, using different kinds of peppers. In the old country there is no refrigeration. We use peppers to make the food last longer and not taste so bad. So I make up the secret sauce. But lots of Greeks and Macedonians work in my restaurant. They save their money like me, and then they open their own Coney Islands. Now all of them use my secret sauce. Not such a big secret anymore. You ask any of them. Branoff, Papalazarou, Karaynis, Giannouris, they all got the formula for the secret sauce from me." "But you don't run the Coney Island any more, do you?" the reporter asked. " No, no," Nick replied, shaking his small, grey head. "I sold it forty, maybe fifty years ago. I used to have terrible he~daches. The doctor says I'm allergic to grease and oil, so I shouldn't work in the restaurant any more. I sold it to Branoff. I had to put a wood furnace in this house, too. I talk to the men who cut down trees, and they give me the wood. I pick it up in my truck and split it myself." The reporter asked what Nick had done after he sold his Coney Island, and listened incredulously to a tale of land sold to General Motors for a spark plug factory, and to K-mart for a shopping center, of partnerships with real estate companies for subdivisions, houses bought and sold, and always the garden out back. He heard about truck loads of pepper plants sold to all the Greeks, Bulgars, Macedonians and Serbs. There were chickens and eggs, and pheasants shot from the kitchen door with a twelve gauge, double barrelled shotgun. " Don't put it in about the pheasants," requested Nick, his eyes twinkling behind his round glasses. "Sometimes I shoot them when hunting season is closed." Nick told how Christina always made sure they had a year's supply of home-canned food. She made Kurnots sausage and sold it to the stores. She even canned the chickens. There was home-canned grape juice and homemade wine. Christina brought them each a tiny glass of plum brandy. Nick tossed his down in one swallow and laughed when the reporter coughed just from breathing the strong alcohol fumes. "My grandfather always said it starts a fire in the stomach on cold days. I feel the cold more now, so I always have some in the morning. Please, take a bottle home with you."

The reporter politely declined. He thanked them for their time and left, promising to come back and visit them again sometime. On Sunday morning Nick began to read the story aloud to Christina As he came to the part about how he had fought the Turks in the Balkan War of 1911, he knew he had made a serious mistake. My life can kill me, he thought to himself When I was a young man I could run away from war, but now I cannot. My pride has blinded me. He laid the paper down and looked at Christina ''I've made a mistake. We should never have told our story to the newspaper. Now we are in danger. Now the thieves and robbers know, too." "We could sell our land and go to a retirement home," he told Christina "What kind of a life is that? Sitting around and being waited on until you die." He nodded. "I don't want to give up my land because of bandits. My grandfather used to tell me about how they fought the bandits in the village." Nick chuckled. "You know, Christina, I am probably the only man from my village who still owns land. The Communists took all the land in the village. A government I could not fight, but bandits! I fought the Turks and I'm not afraid." Christina agreed. She was afraid, but she did not want to give up her house as long as she could still walk. Nick thought of the first Turk he had killed, running out of a doorway. He had shot him in the stomach, close enough that he could see the pain. It was necessary, he told himself firmly, to make the picture go out of his mind. And now maybe it will be necessary again, he thought. The next morning, the clerk at the 7-11 store recognized him by name. Before he had been just another old man. Now the clerk smiled and called him Mr. Draganov. "I read your story. My parents showed it to me," he said. "They thought it was great. Did you really fight the Turks?" Nick nodded, keeping his eyes on the laughing young men in front of the store. They stared at him as he walked by. Their eyes met. Yes, we know. Yes, I know. Nick knew they did not have jobs. He saw that their eyes were glazed from drugs. He had seen the Turks smoke hashish and knew it was the devil's work. He felt their stares as he pulled out of the parking lot in his truck. He drove straight to the hardware store and bought a box of buckshot. The owner joked, "Going hunting for bigger game, Nick? Those pheasants getting too tame for you?" Nick half-smiled and rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, bigger game. Maybe it will come to me. I'm too old to look for it."

The owner looked a little puzzled. ''Sure , Nick. Find a comfortable spot and sit and wait. That's the way I get my deer every year. Just sit and wait. " Nick nodded. "Yeah, I sit and wait ... And so he began to sleep during the day and keep watch at night, while Christina slept beside the telephone. One night, as Nick sat pe tting his tom cat in the dark, he heard the m. The cat stirred. He whispered, "Yes, I hear them, " put the cat down. and reached for his shotgun. The door creaked several times in succession, so slightly that someone sleeping would never hear it. Ever so slowly the door came open. Nick tensed as the bolt cutters came through the ope ning and cut the chain with a small click. Slowly the door swung open. Nothing moved. Pe rhaps ten seconds passed before a man stepped into the doorway. Aiming at the man's stomach, Nick pulled the triggers. He heard a scream. "Mother Fucke r! ", and the man fell down the basement stairs. Through the open doorway he saw a blur of movement across the yard. "Christina. they're he re! Christina!" "I hear you, Nick. The phone is out. " The lights began to flash on and oH' as Nick quickly re loaded his shotgun.

Super Scrambled Eggs

It was 2 a. m. on 1-94 and Jim Gallagher was three hours from Detroit, driving his truck with the lights out. He liked the feeling of hurtling down the highway in complete darkness, prolonging the danger until fear made him tum his lights back on. The cab smelled of leather, unwashed clothes, salami sandwiches and coffee. Jim had been driving trucks for twelve years, ever since he got out of the Marines after the Korean War. He'd been married for awhile, but she divorced him after he broke her jaw. Now he lived with his parents. qnce in a while on nights like this he thought about their daughter, and wondered if he would ever see he r again. He turned the radio on and listened to the music for awhile. When he got back to Detroit he would check at the recruiting office and see if his papers had come through yet. If the Marines would not take him, maybe he would go to Alaska. He flipped on the headlights. There was a deer standing in the road, not fifty yards ahead of him. He tried to hit it, but it ran off into the woods beside the highway. He thought about the last time he had gone deer hunting with his new 300 Weatherby Magnum with a variable power scope. There was a game he liked to play when he went hunting. He would sometimes see a hunte r on a hillside , or sitting out in the open three or four hundred yards away, where he could not see Jim. He would sight in on the hunter through his scope, picking out the details of his face, the color of his hair or clothing, what kind of rifle he had, how old he was. Then sometimes he would fire a shot to see how close he could come. Once he put a hole through the stock of a hunter's rifle as it leaned against a tree. Another time he shot a we t wool sock that a man was drying over a fire. Jim would quie tly slip away. He was never seen. No one knew. It was stiJl only 5 a. m. when he reached Detroit. He could not deliver the load until six, so he decided to stop by his pare nts' house. There was a le tter on the kitchen table from the recruiter. H e opened it hurrie dly and read, " Dear Sir, Congratulations! You have been accepted for enlistment . . . . " Jim grinned. He took a pint bottle of Jack Daniels out of the cupboard and drank a couple of swallows.

Taking the bottle with him, he left the house and drove to the loading dock at the Kroger Store. A high school boy was waiting to help him unload. lle worked for two hours every morning until the regular workers came on at 8 o'clock. No one else was the re. Jim opened the door and looked at the crates of eggs. He pulled out the pint of Jack Daniels and took a big swallow. "Last fuckin' time I have to do this shit. " The boy moved toward the truck to start helping him unload, but Jim stopped him. " Naw, kid, you set down and take a break. I'll unload it. Here, have a drink. " The boy looked puzzled. " Here, take it. Sit down on that box over there and have a drink. " The boy took a drink and started to hand the bottle back. " Naw, kid, you keep it. Have yourself a party." He took a crate of eggs from the truck, raised it over his head, and threw it on the dock. The sides and top burst, spilling out smashed eggs and pieces of shell mixed with unbroken eggs. The boy moved back, startled. "Don't worry kid. It's my ass, not yours, and they can't touch mine. Have another belt. " The boy laughed. "Okay, it's your party ... He lifted the bottle in a toast. "Have a ball. Knock yourself out. .. He giggled. One by one, Jim picked up the egg crates and smashed them onto the dock. Broken eggs began to spill over the edge of the dock like a yellow waterfall. He watched the yellow cascade slide down the concrete and splatter onto the driveway. " How about that? Super scrambled eggs!" He dumped the last two crates of eggs inside the cab of the truck. They broke and splashed over the seat and onto the floor. He picked out a few unbroken ones and threw them against the windows. They slid down the glass like huge yellow bird droppings. When he had finished, he left the truck, the eggs, and the boy drinking his whiskey, and walked to the recruiting office. He sat on the steps and waited for it to open.

It Ain't Right To Beat White Men

For three nights we had been driven out to the airfield at Da Nang, and for three nights it had rained. We stood in the rain each night until someone told us to get back on the trucks. By the fourth night we were at the breaking point as we waited for daylight, so we could board the helicopters. After a month of patrols and sleeping on the ground, the men were coughing with fatigue and tension. Some squatted and vomited on the rough, water-soaked concrete. Then one man broke. He rolled on the ground, crying, "I can't stand it. I just can't take it anymore." His voice broke with deep sobbing. All of us wanted to break down and run away. We were tired of it. We had been at it for months. And now we could feel the sense of flight spreading out from the sobbing man. Before we could respond with movement or words, Gunny Sergeant Gallagher moved savagely on the man, his face red with anger. "Get up, you son of a bitch! I ain't quittin' and you ain't quittin'. " He began kicking him. "Get up, you goddamn chicken-shit coward." All of us "felt deep pity toward the man on the ground. Next to me, PFC Thompson began to move toward the Gunny Sergeant, muttering, "That ain't right." The lieutenant and I grabbed his shoulders and held him back. "Stay cool, Thompson," the lieutenant said softly. "But that ain't right." Thompson was a tall, big-boned, red-faced farm boy from Mississippi. He read his Bible regularly and even prayed before eating C-rations. We kidded him about it sometimes, saying "Here we are out in the middle of this fuckin' mess, killing each other over something none of us gives a damn about, and Thompson is doing his Christian trip. " Thompson would smile amiably and reply, "Christ ain't against killing, he's just against bad killing. It's up to us to choose the right way." Later in the day, we were firing from the top of a large dike to provide covering fire for other Marines attempting to assault a tree line about three-hundred yards away. We watched them move as we fired into the trees. They would run until they came to the intersecting smaller dikes, throw themselves down to wait for our fire to build up

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again, and then rush toward the next dike. We could see Gunny Gallagher running and yelling, "Let's go, Marines! Move! Move! Get those bastards!" Out of the comer of my eye, I saw Thompson stop firing. I started to say something. He gripped his rille as if he were on the rifle range, hesitated, and fired. I saw Gallagher fall backwards. Thompson looked at me. No one else had noticed his movements. "It ain't right to beat white men," he said, and ca.lmly went back to firing his rifle into the tree line.

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The Cow Ate Baby Jesus

Don and I crouched in our holes, watching the lieutenant and the radio, knowing the order for the third assault would come, but hoping it would not. The trees and bamboo groves had been shredded by gunfire of all types. From where we sat, we could see some of the dead Marines draped over the shattered limbs. The North Vietnamese fire was still too intense to try to retrieve them. A leg stuck up over a splintered tree stump. The foot had been blown off. The stump was black with dried blood and flies. The heat had drained us and we would get no more water until dark. We nursed our partially-filled canteens. Don looked at me with wide, fear-filled eyes. "I wish I could pray, but I don't believe anymore. I want to believe, but I saw the sign." "Aw, forget about that, Don. It was just something somebody wrote on the wall. It doesn't mean anything. " " No, it was a sign from the Devil. There ain't nothin' left. I'm finished. I had told the lieutenant that Don was ready to crack, but he had shrugged his shoulders in irritation. "What do you want me to do about it? If he isn't wounded, we can't medevac him out. If he cracks, maybe we can do something." Don was small, dark and good-looking. He had joined the Marines after killing somebody in a gang fight. For awhile, he thought he was queer because a whore had given him a blow job in Tijuana. Once when he was drunk he shouted out, 'There are only two people I hate in the world, Jesus Christ and my father." When I first met Don he talked a lot about religion, and carried a small Bible in his pack. Just before we started into the Khe Sanh valley, he threw it away. Suddenly the lieutenant shouted, " On line! On line! We're going up!" We heard the machine guns begin to chatter and we started trotting up hill 881N, our packs and entrenching tools bouncing on our backs. We were almost to the top and had not received any return fire from the North Vietnamese. Then, almost in unison, we heard the NVA automatic rifles and machine guns open up. They had let us get to the top of the hill, and now they began to fire from hidden bunkers and spider holes. We were shooting at the piles of broken trees and brush, and at each other.

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~re~na.des

were flying and exploding every which way, Marines were falling around us. Someone shouted, "Get back down the hill." We panicked ran. More Marines were hit as they ran. Don and I ran together. Another Marine running in front of us was in the leg. Don took one of his arms and I took the other, and we to drag him behind us like a heavy sled. But then a rocket lrelrlaclle exploded near us and we let go. As we ran, we could hear him "Don't leave! For God's sake, don't leave mel" His voice was out by the noise and our pounding hearts. We ran until we lflall!bed the bottom and collapsed into our holes. Only then did the colonel decide to call in air strikes and artillery. pounded the hill for the rest of the day as we lay in our holes and to sleep. Don curled into a ball, clenching his knees with his arms, rocked back and forth. No one paid any attention. In the morning, after more artillery and air strikes, we went back up. was silence on the devastated hill. Nothing moved. Marine bodies everywhere. Hanging from broken trees, splattered over brush that been chopped and rechopped by gunfire, were arms, legs and llte~tilrles. One body was propped up in a sitting position by some limbs. Both arms had been ripped off below the elbow. The right was bent up in an unnatural position, the foot almost touching the of the naked stomach. Flies buzzed and the sickly sweet smell of flesh hung in the air. We found only one dead NVA, sticking up of a collapsed bunker. They had pulled out the minute we had the bottom of the hill. We began to pick up the dead bodies and pieces of dead bodies, them in ponchos and carrying them down the hill. At the bottom, officer made us line them up, and asked us if we recognized anyone. dropped his poncho-load, looked down at the shattered bodies, and to cry. He ran in circles, crying and screaming the same words, and over. An officer yelled, "Grab that man and hold him." I grabbed Don and did a couple of others. He collapsed, but continued to babble over and , 'The cow ate Baby Jesus." The officer looked at him with disgust and puzzlement. "What the s he saying?" "He saw something written on the wall of the head, just before we for here. It upset him," I told the officer. "What the hell are you talking about?" "We were standing there pissing and we looked up. There it was in block letters. THEY LAID THE BABY IN A MANGER AND THE ATE IT. " The officer shook his head. "Jesus Fucking Christ, that set him off? you better tag him with the dead. Let somebody else deal with him."

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Make Yourself Right With God

The soldiers were in a hurry to get back to their families, or they would have been more careful. The hunte r, especially, usually checked everything, but he was thinking of his daughte r. Besides, nothing had happened in such a long time that the reason for their patrolling had almost become an abstraction. The lieutenant was the only one who was not married. It was almost an afte rthought that he decided to check out the ragged refugee tents on his own. The othe rs tried to talk him out of it. They wanted to stop and pick some fruit from a few old trees that had survived the war. The lie utenant motioned toward the trees. "Look, wait for me there. I'll just take a quick walk through to let them know we're still patrolling. That way I'll have something to report. It'll only take fifteen minutes." The soldie rs filled their packs with fruit and sprawled on the ground. They we re eating the fruit, watching the tents fade in the dusk, when they heard the shot. Fear flashed across the ir faces and turned to anger. They got up and ran toward the te nts. They found the lie utenant lying on the dirt path with one foot submerged in the muddy ditch at the side. He looked ve ry peaceful, as if he we re sunning his back at the beach. There was a small hole through his upper back. He had died instantly. They searched the tents with their rifles ready, but found only women and children. They knew there must be men somewhere. The hunter shouted in disgust, "They've gone. Quick! Head for the rocks. If they get up there beyond the trees, we could chase the m for miles and not catch the m." They all began to run. The hunter called out, "Be careful! Watch for trip wires. We've got to catch the m before dark. " As the hard path e nded, the soldiers could see the tracks of the fleeing men in the soft sand, leading toward the jumbled rocks which stre tched for several miles to the border. They knew it would be real luck if they saw anyone in the re. The hunter led, alternately looking at the tracks and at the rocks up ahead. Suddenly he motioned for the others to stop. His eyes, trained by

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years of observing, told him something was wrong. He squinted at a few scraggly bushes and muttered, "Something is not right here." The n he realized that the bushes, which should have been fully green after the recent rainy season, were almost brown, with only a few shriveled leaves. He walked closer and looked at them very carefully. "Spread out and be ready." The other soldiers did what he said, but without comprehending. They were city boys. Two of them started to talk, but the hunter growled, "Shut up! Keep your eyes open and your mouths shut. " He scanned the ground with great concentration. "Stay alert or you might 6nd a grenade going off in your face. Just stand still while I look around." Slowly he walked around the clump of bushes until he noticed the natural-looking cover. He had to admire its ingenuity. He knew he would not have noticed it unless he had been looking very carefully. That scared him a little. How many times had he walked by places like this when he had been dreaming about his family? "I must discipline myself better," be whispered. He pointed the barrel of his rifle at the spot and motioned to the others to be ready. Then he laid his rifle down and pulled out his automatic pistol. Slowly he brushed the sand away with his left hand to make sure there were no hidden trip wires. The comer of a piece of canvas emerged from the sand. He motioned for the others to lie down, and did so himself. If there was a hidden mine, he knew they would be safer lying down, because most were designed to explode at waist level. He brushed the sand from the edge of the canvas, which roughly encircled the bushes, about half as big as a man and the same color as the sand. Raising his body slightly, he gripped one comer of the canvas with his left hand and yanked. It peeled back without any resistance. Slowly he rose to his knees, keeping his pistol aimed. In a shallow hole, a man lay curled almost into a ball, wrapped around the roots of the bushes. The hunter was amazed at the simplicity of the hiding place. He spoke to the man , who still had not moved. "Come out with your fingers spread far apart or I will kill you." The man in the hole hesitated, then rolled over and slowly crawled out. The hunter watched him closely as he stood up, holding out his smaJI, gnarled hands. "One of you search the hole, but be careful. He may have it booby-trapped. " Carefully, a soldier ran his hand over the sand and under the roots. "There's something under the roots. I'll have to get closer to see what it is."

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The hunter cautioned him. "Do it slowly. Feel all around whatever it is to make sure there aren't any wires. " Slowly, one by one, the soldier handed out the hidden items, three knives and a canteen of water. "That's all. No guns. " Angrily, the hunter questioned the man. "Why did you do it? We have not shamed your women. The lieutenant was a good man. He was just making a routine inspection. " The man fell to his knees. "I did not do it. I am not the one." But the hunter knew he was guilty. If he had not been the killer, he was at least an accomplice. He behaved like a trapped animal, and the hunter knew the look well. "Stop all this lying. Where did the rest go?" The man nodded toward the rocks. Both he and the hunter knew the soldiers could not catch them now. The hunter's eyes flashed with hatred. "Why didn't you run, too? Why did you try to hide?" The man began to cry. "I have a family in the tents. I want to go back to them." The hunter knew the man had not yet resigned himself to being killed. The man began to babble. "For the love of God, spare me. Aren't you fathers, too? Don't you have families? The hunter stared at him and kept the pistol pointed at his head. "Where was your love of God when you shot my friend? He has parents who will mourn him. We will not torture or mutilate you. " The man pleaded, "For God's sake, I have a family." But the hunter shook his head. The hunter made circles in the air as he pointed his pistol at the man. "Pray if you like. Make yourself right with God." At that moment the man realized he would die, and regained his dignity. He let out his breath and stared back at the hunter. "I hope Jl)Y friends kill all of you someday, and cut you to pieces, so your mothers will cry in shame at your graves. " He spat. The hunter fired. The soldiers watched as the man's blood began to soak into the sand. The soldiers walked back to the tents. The hunter ordered the women and children out. They looked at the soldiers with fear, hate, resignation. They tried to hide the hate in their eyes, in the hope that the soldiers might be lenient, but their hate was too strong. The soldiers fingered the triggers on their rifles as they moved the women and children away from the tents. Some of the women knelt and cried as the soldiers began to bum the tents. The children clung to their mothers, some too frightened to cry. The soldiers hoped that some of the women would scream insults so they could shoot them, but the women just stared or cried, sensing what the soldiers wanted to do. After the flames were out, the soldiers went through the remains and smashed everything that had any value. Then the soldiers, smudged with soot, looked at the women. Most of

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them were worn and tired from living in the tents, but there was one attractive girl of fourteen or fifteen. One of the soldiers motioned to her to follow him. She did not protest. She had already been told by the women to expect it. The hunter started to restrain him, but changed his mind. He sat down on the ground and ate some of the fruit from his pack while the soldier raped the girl where everyone could see. He did it matter-of-factly, like an animal breeding. Then the girl rejoined the other women and children. The hunter addressed the women. "Tell your men when they come back that we are through being nice. Next time we will be harsher. And more so the time after that. It is up to you. " The soldiers carried the lieutenant's body away from the camp on a makeshift litter. They had radioed their headquarters and a truck would meet them at the road. The soldier who had raped the girl stared at the women as he passed by carrying one end of the litter. They lowered their eyes as he passed. That evening the hunter watched his wife set the bowl of fruit on the table. He smiled contentedly as she encouraged their son to say the evening prayers. After supper the hunter picked up his daughter. "How's my beautiful little girl? Does she love her Daddy?" He kissed her on the cheek. "Now, off to bed with you. Be sure to say your prayers. "

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CHRISTI SHIGENAGA Dear Valerie

June 26 I have been to the library and my arms are full of books: Mitotic Poisons, The Biology of Cancer, The Savage Cell. The children rush out of the car and into your yard. They head directly for the swings. I call out to them to come back. "Let them stay," you shout. "They're no bother. " I shake my head and shout some lame excuse. I cannot bear to see them in your yard. I take the books into the house and start work on dinner. I can hear you calling to me. I peer through the curtains. You are leaning over the fence, motioning me out. I step out the door to ask what you want, but cannot make out the words. It would be so much easier to go to the fence. but I do not. Instead, we continue to strain and shout to each other. I am scared. I have never known anyone who was dying. June 29 You have come to haunt me at night. Your face, like slow, mitotic cells, cleaves and cleaves until it fills the room. There is nowhere to run and I am devoured by you. I wake up trembling. Next to me, I can hear the steady breathing of my husband. I rise to check on the children. They are sleeping soundly and I fight the urge to wake them to see if they are all right. I make myself a cup of coffee and sit in the darkened kitchen, listening to the low hum of the clock. The books are stacked neatly on the coffee table. What I need to know, they cannot tell me. They are only interested in the changes that occur in your body. My husband finds me alseep at the kitchen table, the cup of coffee untouched. June 30 I scan the newspapers daily for articles on cancer. There are so many brilliant people involved in cancer research. I find it hard to believe that no one really understands the disease. The re are so many theories, so many causes, but the cure continues to elude them. I dutifully mail my check to the American Cancer Society.

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Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I can hear you crying out in pain. It terrifies me. I lie in bed, waiting for the next scream. I have ceased to breathe. My husband reaches for me in his sleep. I clutch at his hand, and lay my head against his chest. Listening to the muffled beating of his heart calms me. My heart slows until both are beating in unison. My head rises and falls with the rhythm of his breath. There will be no more outbursts tonight. You have gained control of yourself once more. I wonder if you cling to your husband as I do now. Does it ease the pain to know that he is there? Do the children help? Does anything? August 1 I watch the children carefully, making sure their limbs remain strong and healthy, and curse myself for acting so foolishly. I have read so many accounts of death. Why haven't they prepared me? Our children come and go between the two yards, but we still remain on our respective sides of the fence. I am grateful for that. I still need the fence. You wave me over. I swallow my fear and approach you. Handing over a brown paper bag, you state matter of factly, "Oranges." You are so proud of that tree. I remember when you planted it, tamping the ground lovingly. I have always envied your ability to make things grow. I take the package from your earth-stained hands. We stand there watching the children play, the fence between us. The oranges are still warm from the sun. I gaze at the tree laden with fruit and ask how long it takes to bear. There is silence. Without turning to look at me, you finally answer, "A lifetime, I think. " I blush. There is an awkward silence as you realize that that is not what I meant. I mumble something and run. It begins to rain, but I do not care. I cannot stop myself. I run and run until I no longer know where I am. The rain is falling harder now, and I spot an old baseball dugout at the end of a field. I run towards it. Brushing the rain from my face, I sit down. I can feel the back of my shirt catching on the splintered wood. I look out through the tattered chicken wire that stretches limply across the face of the structure. The dugout is painted a muddy green, similar to the color of army fatigues and military jeeps. The paint is curling in several places. I scratch at it with my nail and another layer emerges. I keep scratching away the paint, revealing still more and more layers. I wonder if I will ever reach the wood. The dugout smells of the comfortably familiar odor of musty rotting wood and greenery and the rising heat of the earth, like the treehouse in your backyard. Remember when we stole up there one afternoon when

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the children were in school? It felt so safe there, as if nothing could ever touch us. We believed we were invincible then. The children must be wondering what has happened to me. I know I should be going back, but I do not. Instead, I tear off my shoes and socks and nestle my bare feet in the overgrown grass and wild clover. The dugout begins to sway and tremble under the growing power of the wind. It whistles through the cracks and knotholes in the back. I wrap my arms tightly around myself. I close my eyes and feel strangely safe. Your disease cannot touch me here. I throw my head back and watch the water seep through the swollen wood just above my head. It gathers itself together, growing bigger and bigger, until it can no longer support its own weight and splatters in my face. I move over to the other side of the dugout and tuck my feet under myself. The center slat sags a little under my weight. The rain has let up some, and a jogger in a bright yellow sweatsuit appears. Hypnotized, I watch him as he travels around and around the track, never altering his stride. I know I can no longer stay here. I pull on my shoes and head for home. August 5 I am in your yard. We sit in the shade and watch the children run past us. Their brown limbs pump incessantly. They fly on the swing, challenging each other to go higher, to pump until their feet touch the tops of the trees. We laugh. The children, we say, and snatch at them as they run past. You hug the strongest and the brownest one to your breast, as if you are drawing strength from his strength. I notice how thin you are. September 23 Today there is an eagerness in your voice when I speak to you over the phone. You tell me you have bought a new wig and ask me over to see it. I am surprised to see old newspapers lying around the house and the breakfast dishes still in the sink. I expected the clinical sanitized appearance of a hospital. You apologize for the mess and mumble something about tiri~g easily. Self-consciously, you remove the scarf. A light brown fuzz covers your head. "Radiation/' you say, and I nod knowingly. You slip the wig on and begin fluffing it out. I wonder if you will wear it to bed at night We go into the kitchen for some coffee and talk of all the things we would like to do. We say "some day" but we mean never. Your illness colors everything. We are laughing over something your youngest girl said and suddenly you stop. A faraway look comes into your eyes. "The children," you say. "They'll grow up without me. " And then you begin to cry.

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Your tears scare me. You have always been so strong. I reach my arm hesitantly around your shoulders. You turn and cling to me. The fence between us tumbles to the ground. September 27 We are at the supermarket, scrutinizing rows of canned soup, when your legs give out. I see the terror in your face. All around us, people stMe curiously. I help you to your feet and we make it to the car, you leaning on the grocery cart. Once in the car, you begin to speak. A mountain, you say, a mountain with a clear cool stream. If you can just reach the top, refresh yourself in the waters, it will be all right. I promise to help you, and you smile. We embrace in the car in the Safeway parking lot. September 30 My husband fondles my breasts. His breath is hot on my neck. He wallows in the sweat of my belly. There is a sucking sound as our bodies pull apart for a moment. A soft breeze blows across my naked body, and I feel refreshed. Then my husband returns to loll between my thighs. As I run my fingers through his hair, I wonder what it feels like making love to you. I imagine pulling the wig from your head and caressing the soft down on it. My husband comes. A low moan escapes my lips. The Elizabethans called this a dying.

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LOIS PHD.I.IPS HUDSON Next Summer

We both know that it will not be next summer, or the summer after that. I must go back home, fifteen hundred miles away, but even if I can come back next summer, Alice will not be here. We stand beside her silver trailer, high above the mouth of the river, so high that I have that upside down feeling I sometimes get when I see birds sailing far below me, as the gulls and pelicans do now, fishing the incoming tide-so high that the roar of the freshening surf at the base of the headland sounds no more like ocean breakers than the steady hum of your own ear held against a clam shell. The Klamath fills the deep lagoon with warm late-summer water, and over its wide bar the warmth meeting the cold Pacific is already making a cloud that dims the tiny fishermen and the people making fires on the beach. It is past six o'clock, and I have stayed much longer than !.expected. The tall sea stacks, homes of mussels, sea lions, spirits--those who save people and those who cause them to drown-loom and vanish in the moving mist. Up here the heat of the sun still draws the strong smell from resin-filled cliff shrubs. We look west, to the line of light at the edge of this world where the sky's dome rocks, eternally slapping the sea, making the waves that come to strike the earth. Beyond that line of light is the next world, and if you paddle a canoe all the way out the re, and you have courage enough, you can wait while the sky slaps the sea eleven times, and the twelfth time, when the sky lifts itself a little higher, you can scoot under it and paddle into the world where the sun goes to sleep. It is the first time, though I have been visiting her for four years, that Alice and I have ever been alone together. I have just climbed down the two high steps from her trailer, assuming that she would give me a last wave from her kitchen. I know, not because Alice would ever say so, but because Ruth and Joe have told me, that in this last year it is a misery for Alice to get in and out of the trailer, but she has followed me out. I remember that the Yurok word for knee means "the knot in the leg." I am thirty-two and she is in her eighties. I put out my right hand, but she does not shake it. She takes it in he r left-so small-and reaches for my other hand. We stand here, looking out to the line of light. From this

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height we have no sense of the waves the sky is sending against us; we look across the flat pewter shimmer to the thread of brilliance at the edge. Tomorrow, Alice will go up the Klamath, stopping at each of the remaining settlements, taking her trunks full of things for the last White Deerskin Dance. Long ago, the One who made the river said, "People will be well off in this world, because of this river." First He made one mouth for it, but that one was not right. No sea lions came, and that meant that no salmon would come. So He opened another mouth for it between two other cliffs, and soon the people heard the sea lions barking. lbat meant that there would be salmon and eels, and sea lions to spear from the great rocks in the sea. Oregos lives in the tallest stack, and he tells the salmon when to come up the river, when the rains have flooded the creeks and washed away the debris, when the water up there is deep enough to swim in, and cleared of silt so the female will find clean gravel in which to bury her eggs. If you are in a canoe, trying to come .into the river mouth, and you pray to him, Oregos will quiet the breakers long enough for you to paddle across the bar. We stand here holding each other's hands, she looking up at me, I looking down. It is not right, that I should be looking down this way. I am not that tall. I think about the picture I took of her and Joe several weeks ago. Joe is six-three, and, at eighty-seven, only slightly stooped. She arranged them so that she is standing on a large rock behind a bush, and he is standing a step behind her on the ground, downhill. When I showed her the photograph, she was pleased. Usually when I have come to see Alice, Joe has come along. He is the son of one of the first Sheriffs of Del Norte County-a man who, in 1887, began enforcing laws that had not always been previously enforced. He also decided that his sons should spend most of their time with the Indian children. So Joe grew up speaking Yurok, Tolowa, and pidgin, fishing and hunting the Indian way, making a redwood canoe the Indian way. He has a Cher-wer-ner rolled and stored in a deerskin case, safe in mothballs. It belonged to his best friend. They made a pact, sixty years ago, that it should stay on with the one who outlived the other, and then be buried with him. It is a ceremonial headdress which hangs down the back from a buckskin headband. It is woven of fibers from the wild iris, painted in diamonds, triangles and a star with blue from the salal berry and red from alder bark and stone. It is trimmed with the tail feathers of pheasants, doves, hawks, and the crests of red-headed woodpeckers. "I know I should give it to the museum," Joe tells me, his cheeks wet. "It's the finest I've ever seen, and it must be nearly a hundred years old. Look at this perfect weaving, this perfect matching of the feathers, even the tiny red crests are exactly the same size. Feel how soft

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this band is, how splendidly the skin has been worked and tanned." He talks of how he and Billy camped and hunted, made the canoe together. "I know I should give it to Ruth for the museum," he says, "but it's in my will. When I go, I will be holding it in my hands." When he was eighteen, Joe went down to the City to study engineering. In March he was finally so homesick that he rode a bicycle, in 1896, the three-hundred and seventy miles north to Crescent City. Most of the way he rode on trails. He swam the bicycle across flooding creeks, ferried across the Klamath, sometimes found a man with a canoe to take him across the widest creeks. And he had a number of mechanical breakdowns. But he made it. After he finished school in San Francisco be went another five hundred miles south and bought an orange grove not far from Los Angeles. He made it there, too. But he came back to the chilly fog of Crescent City, thirty miles north of where Alice lives, to retire. He and Alice have been friends for eighty years. One day we were sitting in her trailer, Joe and Alice on her short couch and I across from them, on a pillow covering one of her trunks. I asked Alice how old she was. That question was my way to get to another. There is a great sea arch nearly a mile from the shore through which the waves boil. The test for a young Yurok, man or woman, was taking a canoe out into the sea and bringing it back through the arch. I had heard that people stopped doing that at a certain time, and I wanted to know if Alice had seen this, perhaps done this. She seemed not to understand my question. Joe leaned toward her, in the way a person who has loved another person for eighty years will lean, and said, "Alice, how old you are?" Alice has a spirit at once light and deep, and more often than not her smiles, free and warm though they always are, will be edged by contemplation. She looked up at him with a boundless grin and said, "Bout sebenty, bout eighty." She wouldn't say this to me. Yet here we stand, holding each other's hands, looking out to the edge of this world. Joe is not supposed to drive any more, and when I come to see Alice I pick him up, and Ruth, when she can get away. Ruth has told me about how her grandfather came to San Francisco on the first train to cross this continent. He came from Boston, one of the men invited to ride in the first coach to pass over the linking of the rails moments after Leland Stanford drove in the golden spike. Came wrapped in a buf&lo robe against the winds of the plains and the cold of the Sierra Nevadas and stayed. His granddaughter graduated from Mills College and shortly thereafter found herself removed from the Edwardian whirl of the Bay Area and transplanted three hundred miles north, where her new husband had a job as an accountant for a salmon cannery at the mouth of the Klamath. She was indescribably lonely. Harry worked sixteen-hour days. The other

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wives, Ruth has told me, wanted to sit and talk all day about clothes and

each other's husbands. Then Ruth met Alice. Every summer Alice took her up the Klamath, the two of them paddling the heavy redwood canoe against the current, stopping for long visits at each Yurok and Klamath settlement. After a few years, Ruth and Harry stayed on, did not go back to Berkeley for the winter. They stayed in Crescent City and Ruth founded the Del Norte County Historical Society Museum. She has spent the rest of her life, and all of her inheritance, working with the Anthropology Department at Berkeley, preserving vanishing thin~ven saving them from the tidal wave that swept through the little museum house after the Alaska earthquake last year. She heard on the radio that the wave was on its way, knew that she would have a few hours. She used the last of her month's pension, desperately hiring people to pack and move the treasures. They were all safe on higher ground when the wave swept into the crescent bay, carrying two-ton blocks of the jetty more than half a mile inland. This summer, the one after the "year of the floods," she tells me the happiest moment in her life came when Del Norte County deeded the old court house to the Historical Society-a stone building with marble columns, fire-proof, standing on the highest hill in the city. One day last summer, before the flood, I picked up Ruth and Joe. Joe's wife of sixty years fusses. It's not that she dislikes me-in fact, I can see that she wishes. she could. It would make things simpler. Instead she worries over me like my own grandmother, insists on feeding me, feels that a young woman like me takes a great risk in traveling about alone. But she does not want Joe to make these trips. Then I pick up Ruth. She has cataracts that have not matured enough to be operable, and though she reads constantly, with a powerful magnifying glass, she cannot drive. Harry has had a stroke, and he can sit in a chair and get up and walk if someone takes his elbow, but Ruth tries not to leave him for very long. A bit of money has come from somewhere to hire a museum assistant who is also authorized to help the Director in her home when she must leave to do museum business, but Ruth suffers over leaving Harry for the whole afternoon. On this day it is very warm for this part of the country, and Joe decides that we should have a party. He is treating. By the time we have ground up and down the cliffs between Crescent City and Klamath, my old car is already heating up. As we crawl up the hairpin turns of the gravel road to the top of the cliff, I can see the needle on the temperature gauge move, like the minute hand on a huge clock. If I have to stop before we reach the top, there will be nothing to do except wait until it will start again. There is no place to tum around on this dusty one-lane trail cut through the towering aromatic thicket. We will just have to sit here in this heat-Joe with a bad heart and Ruth's face

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flushed with the mortal pressur~ of her constricted veins. I could walk back down and call for help. But we have written to Alice and told her we were coming today. We get here, to the end of the road, at what seems to me the very last second before the radiator explodes. Alice's trailer on this summit is stifling. I sit on the trunk pillow while Joe and Ruth persuade her to go back down to Klamath with us. Alice wants to know where Joe proposes to take us. Joe says anywhere she wants to go. In that case, she will go, and we will go to Crivelli's, because the kitchen is clean there. She has two young friends who work there and they have told her that it is clean. On this day she has been working in her garden-short rows of tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, onions, a second growth of spinach crosswise of the cliff-a patch surrounded by the wiry brush covering the earth against the gales from the sea She goes to the back of the trailer and puts on fresh overalls, a plaid jacket, and her good stocking cap. When she was young, growing up, a Yurok woman after marriage 路always covered her hair under a small light basket made of slender strips peeled from dried reeds and woven with the proper design of the jet-black spines of maidenhair ferns. Alice no longer wore the basket, but she has always worn a white-mao stocking cap. I have never seen her without a ca.P路 I sit here wondering if I can get the car started. Joe and Ruth have no reason to think about it. They trust me. How many times have I picked them up and then returned them safely after a visit with Alice? We sit for a long time after Alice has changed her clothes. She and Ruth and Joe talk. They do not seem to feel the heat, even Alice in her jacket. Nor do they seem concerned, on this day, to help me understand. I catch as much as I can. Sometimes they speak Yurok, sometimes pidgin, sometimes the King's English. I wonder if- if I can get the car started, if, even when I do get it started, we can make it back up here from Crivelli's, if, once having brought Alice home, the car will make it back up the coast to take Ruth and Joe home. On this day the leisurely pace of three old people nearly drives me wild. I want to get back out to the car. I have to know if it will start. But I know that if I get up and go down the trailer steps, just for a moment to turn the ignition key, I will be doing a thing I simply must not do. I cannot even pretend I left something in the car. I don't know how I know that they will know, but they will. They will know that I have gone out to the car to see if it will start, and that will spoil everything, spoil the whole visit. It is nearly five o'clock by the time we coast down to Crivelli's. Alice orders a cheeseburger. Joe tries to talk her into ordering a dinner. Crivelli's is the hub of Klamath-a fishing-hunting lodge, bar, restaurant where you once could get a dinner any time from eleven am. on.

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Alice will not order a dinner. There is no reason for Joe to pay for four dinners. It is hot and none of us is that hungry. Alice knows that Joe is wealthy enough to buy two hundred dinners at Crivelli's this afternoon and not even wince. It is not money pride that keeps her from yielding. It is just not right to have a waitress keep bringing you plates of things that you eat only bits of. Yuroks do not throw away food. Alice's pride _is the pride of a person who does not have to waste in order to feel important We all order cheeseburgers. We four sit in the booth, Joe and Alice on one side, Ruth and I on the other. The top of Alice's cap does not come to Joe's shoulder. On our side, I come about to Ruth's cheek, Ruth being a long-legged dolicocephalic descendant of aristocratic Teutonic New Englanders, I being a brachycephalic short descendant of Irish potato-famine immigrants. Alice eats slowly and delicately, the Yurok way, the cheeseburger, the pickles, the potato chips. Her head comes about as high above the booth table as the head of my own nine-year-old half-Teutonic daughter would come. After we take her back up the cliff and we are on the way home, Ruth talks of how Alice's arthritis is suddenly very bad. There she is on top of that cliff, on an isolated speck of the Requa Reservation the Government keeps taking pieces of. Once every ten days or so Alice walks down to the gas-station-grocery-store for supplies. Then she walks back up. She will never let anyone drive her. She says that she must take care of herself. Sometimes we have gotten together with some of the other old friends. Lulu and Nellie lived in houses on another piece of the reservation just beside the river. In the Christmas floods of 1964, the river, wild with water _that clear-cut mountainsides could not hold, rose up ninety feet, smashed out every bridge across it, including the famous Douglass Memorial span near its mouth, flanked by two golden California grizzly bears, built in 1926. Took the houses on that reservation out to sea. Crivelli's went, too, along with almost aU of the rest of Klamath. The first time we visited Lulu I smelled a smell I was not used to. She was cooking seaweed. She caught the look of bewilderment that for one micro-second I had not been able to stop, and she laughed. She said, "Well, I live in a white-man house, but I still cook seaweed." She showed me aU the photographs on the top of her piano and mounted on the walls of the house where she lived alone. All of he r dear people, always around her. It was as though the house was built of pictures of her descendants who were succeeding in this world. This one had a degree from San Jose State, that one from Haywood Community College, this daughte r has married a white man who is working on his Ph. D. at

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Berkeley-look at this first baby of theirs. All of the wives and husbands and children, they all went out to sea with Lulu's house. This summer, the year after the tidal wave at Crescent City and the flood at Klamath, Joe and Ruth and I visit Lulu again, in a little trailer the Red Cross has given her. We all sit around the table, talking. Lulu and Nellie laugh about how crazy it is for white people to build houses where every sign should tell them that sooner or later a flood will surely come. Then they shrug and say, "This here the place they give us. Might as well taket. " They talk about a friend in that flood. They speak the King's when they feel like it, but they prefer Yurok or pidgin. Refusing to use the King's seems to me to be a gentle way to refuse to be conquered. They particularly refuse to use the King's pronouns. "There was Maggie, floating in that living room. He said, T m staying with the house.路 And he floated around awhile, and then he said, 'I'm tired of swimming around in this living room.' So she climbed up out there to the roof, and it came over with that helicopter and took him away." I am standing here, looking at the line around the edge of this world, Alice holding my hands. I look down at the mist thickening over the mouth of the river that would make people well off in this world, and I remember how Lulu told of going to gather seaweed one day, all alone, and suddenly getting that feeling that somebody was looking at her. She knew that Oregos would be watching her, and the other spirits. But this was different. "I sat down and I looked out there. I looked and looked. Finally I saw him. There was a periscope sticking out of the water, looking at me. I looked straight at him and he looked straight at me. I thought, 'Probably this is a Japanese submarine. Why would an American submarine be out there looking at me?' And then I thought, 'It's none of my business. This is not my war. ' He stayed there a long time, looking lit me. I just gathered my seaweed and left." I have never doubted that it was the Japanese Navy looking at Lulu that day. After the war was over we learned that the Japanese successfully launched a few small planes from submarines only a few miles from the coast. The strategic objective was to drop incendiary bombs and start massive forest fires which would divert manpower from war industries and frighten the American populace. At least one pilot succeeded, and dropped a bomb in the redwoods on Mount Emily, about sixty miles north of the place where the periscope studied Lulu that day. What the Japanese did not know was that it is almost impossible to get a redwood forest to bum. A half-dozen members of the Volunteer Fire Department of Brookings, Oregon, extinguished the blaze within an hour. One of the men who fought the fire has taken me out to see the small charred area, not more than a city block in diameter, where the

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bomb landed. They found bits of the bomb. But the jungle understory of a virgin redwood forest, made of ancient ferns and vines twenty or thirty feet high, drips with condensation from the fog caught by the tree tops three-hundred feet above. There are places on the floor of a dense forest that have not been visited by a singl芦: ray of the sun in the last 6ve-hundred years. And redwood does not ooze a torch of pitch, like pine or 6r. Often, if a fire at the base of the redwood is hot enough, the heart of the tree will burn, but the foot-thick bark, bearing no pitch and always wet, will not burn. So, in the forest, one sometimes comes upon a lone tree which has been burned hundreds of years ago, when lightning struck. Sequoia sempervirens lives forever, the tree continuing to draw its nourishment from the earth through its outside layers while there may be a black hollow, still smelling of smoke, ten or fifteen feet in diameter, on the ground just above its roots. It is as though the one tree took all the fire into itself and saved the rest of the forest. The Yurok say that long ago, when the great flood came and there was nowhere for the people to go, the One who made everything said that He would save all their souls forever, and He put each person's soul into a redwood tree. And the Yurok will never use the wood of this tree ~r burninJ.?;. I stand here, Alice holding my hands, and I look out at the edge of this world and think of how that periscope that watched Lulu came here from way over on the other side. On this last afternoon we stand here above the river made to help people be well off in this world. Alice could go down there and be close to the grocery store, like Lulu and Nellie. She could have her trailer moved down there. She still has her pension. Last year she had to sell her five acres of virgin redwoods along the Klamath. They came to her by treaty between her grandfather and the Government. But last year the Government said that Alice could not continue to receive her pension while she still owned property. The Government has now sold the acres to a logging company. When I came up to Crescent City this morning, neither Ruth nor Joe rould come. I couldn't even see Joe; his wife told 路me that he had had another heart seizure two days before, that he was all right, but must not be disturbed. He wanted me to give Alice his love. Harry has had a very bad night; Ruth cannot leave him. The thought has crossed my mind, as I have driven back down the coast, up the cliff, that maybe they got together and decided that it would be all right if I came to see Alice by myself this time, this last time. Maybe they thought they could finally trust me? Today I have thought that Alice would be wonderfully polite and soon let me know that it was time for me to leave. This has not happened. Hours and hours have gone by. We have talked, but I can't really

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remember what we talked about. I do not have any notes. Alice has opened the boxes and trunks, shown me the priceless red-headed woodpecker headdresses, the necklaces of dentalia, and finally, the albino deerskin, the true white deerskin that people capture only once in many generations. All these things are packed in white-man moth balls and in bay leaves, California laurel, the leaves the Yurok always used to tum away fleas and other vermin. Alice has used both. She took no chances. For four years we have been here smiling at each other from our comers. Today Joe and Ruth have not been here, but Alice has shown me the White Deerskin. Tomorrow she will go up the river, carrying all the correct vestments. She will see the Dance done properly, and she ~11 choose not to come back down the river. I know this, and she knows this. Why has she given me one of the last afternoons of her life? Why has she come down these high steps and why does she stand here holding my hands, looking up at me and asking, "When I see you again?" I am the one who says it first. "Next summer, Alice." "Nex' summer, " she says. She le ts go of my hands, reaches up and hugs me. This is how she tells me she knows, knows that we both know that there are so few times when one human being says to another, "I love you," and so many times when we look out to that line of light around the edge of this world and know that it will not ever be next summer.

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Norman Hindley teaches high school English on the island of Molokai, approximately 22 miles from Honolulu, where he lives with his wife and son . Islands are familiar places to Hindley, who spent his childhood years on Prudence Island in Rhode Island. He is an avid hunter and fisherman, often spending days in Molokai's remote valleys in search of deer and wild boar. His poetry has appeared in Bamboo Ridge and Prairie Schooner.

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NORMAN HINDLEY PORTFOUO Home Movies

La Paz, Casablanca, Manila I remember the mail from these cities You left us for. You were often abroad Building roads or dams, chasing wages. The money was sent home, shown around, Handled like china, then banked. Hi-Fi's and cameras came. At Christmas we shipped a carton of head cheese And your favorite tinned pudding. Your homecomings were holidays. The elegant liner With "Cunard Lines" embossed on white stacks, A glimpse of your stateroom, Greeting your steward. Then into Manhattan, The hotel, streets, breezing cars all night. And gifts you'd found for us. Leathers, rums, Rockets, wool for Mama and film, Lenny, Miles of 8mm you'd shot.

The family was fooled. Believing that a sense of adventure and a little greed Fueled your need for foreign jobs, But I know better. I spent days going Through the zinc tins of film. With arrivals, Departures, cities, ordinary zoos. And suddenly a pattern, The eerie footage . . . reel after reel of your crews Gathered for beer in the motor pool. And on each job One person is singled out and continually appears. Never the subject of a frame But there, as if in passing. The Filipino in bloused Spanish pants, His arms like rubbed mahogany, A house boy in the Arab sun, his fingernails Scatter light. The Bolivian in a silvered window.

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1ben Galway, on a beach a boy, a luminous child Enters left and is barely recorded, But reappears in footage of museums and trams 1broughout Britain. A theatre of lovers concealed but accessible, To be savored during dry times home And the tedium of family showings. Traveling is over. You sold the trunks And moved. Unconfessed, Alive on the far coast, breathing behind a projector. But little else. Except for padding the L.A. parks, Going down on it And the occasional complaining letter.

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Blackballed

You, at least, being dead deserved better. But in July when relatives gathered For the clambake and beer You'd be exhumed, stretched out on the picnic bench Uke a hide and scraped, A growth on the family organ. Your life frightened them. Your booming solos, The Dylan Thomas you intoned at Christmas, The collection of Asian swords, one of which You detoured traffic with on St. Patrick's Day. They ridiculed your looks, the cumulus white hair, The eyes like flakes of anthracite, the nose That flickered on with the first sip of whiskey. That you never missed a day of work And fed your family and some of theirs in the 30's Was forgotten. I learn from letters and calls (having moved long since) That I'm filling in for you, that I'm a holiday Regular, that they're holding to their past appraisal . A freak seed that bears watching. I confess some of it is earned. drunk on ale, my devout aunt with the unreliable heart one Sunday pissed herself in my rocker, the pillow had to be buried. I tried twice to scare her to death in the back entry with the potatoes And the fresh indictments. The dirty mouth, The interest in pistols, my sex suspect.

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I never met him, my mother's father. He died in a Home with a brain Full of paint fumes. And though it's me they hound now at happy hour And I'm honored, it won't last. It's Edward McKee they'll return to target. The Irish housepainter whose little swimmer Cracked the noble British line.

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Kathleen Like A Zebra

Though the rooms upstairs were like bakeries That night of no wind off the bay You slept easily, hardly turning. I know, because I listened From one door down To the rise and fall, the sparkle of your summer breathing. And when I 路stopped in passing To look at you 'Ole moon came through the wooden louvers Of your window, throwing bright bars Beside shadows Across your sleeping body. Later, when the wind came And the air turned like a slow fan Through the house I slept and dreamed we were zebras Meeting alone and perfectly In the wilderness of an August night, On the gold beach of islands.

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Keyboard

(for Adele Heyman)

Piano was important to your mother, She wanted you on stage, dressed for a Steinway. And for a time it went her way, though you didn't Look like a pianist. Your hands were already Enormous, for anyone. Big head, your arms Hung out of your gown like axe handles. At 12 You lumbered. But you could make the notes, Acquired Italian, blew the doors off The recital hall rendering Beethoven. You hated it, like shit in bed. You wanted To paint and went to the Boston Museum (when you were supposedly rehearsing) Copying lines and colors, Sargent and Copley. Your eyes alive as Revere's silver. Piano and mother's sad hope went to hell. She turned on you, her heart folded in Like a dog's behind. It was bad. So for the first time You went to your father, the shadow in the parlor, Russian as the cold. He sold wool, Gave you your prominent bones, farmer's foot. His one child, he saw you through art school, The siege at each meal home. Your figures Hung on his eyes like icons. When you left Your mother took up the brush, Painted the satin wood of the piano, The set, even teeth of the keyboard, The bushy head of a dead composer. Flat Black.

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We were living in opposite rat holes When we met You'd been married 3 or 4 times, Carried one sorry bastard for years. Buried or out-willed the rest. Built a house stone by stone At the edge of a lake. The light was wrong So you never lived in it. But you painted. Always. Experimenting. Making do. I've seen The buckets of Dutch Boy, a painting Framed with the stainless steel trim From your sink. When there was no paint You screwed and glued. Feathers, scrap material, Jewelry, wire and wood Your lamp shade weighed 60 pounds. You knew the street, where to eat cheap, Hell on vitamins. When the studio was cold you wore gloves With half the fingers gone, monster mitts, And fur from the 30's. You didn't get sick either. Once I'd been 104 For a week, afraid of doctors. You came in, stripped me and poured on alcohol, Saved me with those Frankenstein-blue-hands And blood soup. Your mother is still alive, 200, And light as a johnny. She brings out the brown program From your first recital when you visit. Doesn't know that you've been an instrument For 50 years, a violin of lines and form, She doesn't give a goddamn that you will go on always, Covering canvas after canvas with exquisite women Alone in powerful, warm rooms.

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Wood Butcher

After the Navy and war You drafted big prints and started a summer house In Bay Springs. I was your helper, and that first year We worked weekends through most of the winter. The wind, your cold immaculate tools, the hole In the floor of the Ford we traveled in . . . I hated it all. Especially my carpentry. I ruined doors, My tape never returned, I couldn't saw for shit. "Measure twice, cut once. " You said it a hundred times. I tried everything to please you, You my ex-flyboy, the perfectionist. Even your smile was mitered. Your hands cool and silky On the tools, brown as the lining Of your flight jacket. Mine were white, Mitts of a wood butcher. You never said that, But when you came across the scarred paneling, The wrong nail, the split grain, Doughnut grease on the new glass, I'd watch your eyes, the drained bluebirds That flew your face. I fucked some screens up once, Wrinkles, wavy frames, You broke them out with a chair. My best day I spent hauling dry wall, Holding while you fitted and tacked. For years I would devote myself To carrying and fetching. Strong, good with mortar, but squirrely. A world class gofer.

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I want you to know That today I finished a boat, designed it, 22 feet, foredeck, wheel, A transom you could hang a Pratt &: Whitney on. But none of this is challenge or revenge, The boat is a way of speaking, a tongue Saying I still want to please you That it's your disappointment that drives me.

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Land's End

It was a time for Latin. The morning dark as monks, The feudal sadness of the organ. We waited for Mass, For the priest to greet you, Your brothers to shoulder you in. It was to be three days on the Cape, You said Provincetown, A break in the winter routine. Your favorite Boarding house was empty Except for one young man, A carpenter whose hair, when he walked, Slipped by the sides of his face like a cowl, And whose eyes were blue as a Luger. Anton liked wine, was out of work, And well read. And you, I bet, fell for him, Asked him into your room maybe, and after Into your car for a drive. Detectives say you made it tough for him. That he had to shoot you Before he tied you stripped to a tree, Fucked your finally dead body everywhere, Watching your winter-olive skin Change to the translucent blue Of raw fish. Then with his tools He dismantled you like an outhouse And buried the parts.

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Sand hills, whole beaches shift in winter. It took months, a hundred men and a dentist to find you, Get you bagged and tagged. Your skin and bones were famous. Locals sold baggies of grave sand To the sudden, off-season guests. A belief carried us Through the service and cemetery, It wasn't you Freezer burned and labeled In the locked box. That you Pat went whole, strong always Out, ahead of the echo Of the gun's one report.

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Eleven Lorraine Street

The digging that day was easy. In a morning's time We'd gone into the hill like miners And dug out a cave. It was cool, flint blue inside And the patted clay gleamed like fat. We made two stairs and a seat From flat stone. And rested. Late in the afternoon I left, And soon after it all came down, With you inside, alone, finished, Pressed into the clay Like a prehistoric fish. When the firemen came to find you They ran long rods, like antennas Into the hill and listened. I stood with my father Behind the hot lamps, shovels shining In the polishing sand. And long after your last air was lost A back-hoe was brought in and you Were soon found, the bucket lifting Off the very top of your head. They pulled the rest of you out Like a pizza. And since, In every garden, In every load of ground I lift I hear the break in your breathing, Philip, Feel the kick of that Your brief resistance.

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Nell Altizer spent her early years in Charleston, West Virginia. Educated at St. Louis University and at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, she taught there and at the University of California at Berkeley before moving to Hawaii to teach at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is coauthor of the D. C. Heath Handbook of English Composition and the author of the workbook associated with it. Her poetry has appeared in The Little Magazine and Prai-

rie Schooner.

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NELL ALTIZER PORTFOLIO Demeter's Lament

She lifts the pomegranate to her lips. I gouge pits in the sink to build a winter corridor of jars.

The white skulk of her teeth lifts a strip of hide raw as skin from the rosy bulge and her eyes lock so hard on blue I look over my shoulder at the kitchen clock to find if like the sour color of milk it tells hazard as well as time. Tricky as silk her tongue stalks the yellow membrane until it breaks llke dawn or parchment over the tight

red beads and I shout You know pomegranate juice stains the counters. Take that damn thing out of here and eat it in the yard!

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Her white shorts in the wake of my attack

sail such a sullen tilt of languor like a vanishing ship of war that I can rinse my anger

under the running water and rock squat apricot butts in the hammocks of spoons before I think of how it cleave

and the burgeoning

happens the seeds

apples and onions split like thunder in the larder and a god lays his great darkness at her feet. From my hands blade, scald, preservative, the bruised fruit sunlight over the earthquake of her going cracks like wheat.

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fall

Workshop

Muffie says, word

Brisk as air, that sucks

wham!

and

we're all back in business. bombs

Sometimes I feel there are on the verges of poems here but I don't know what that word

sucks means, Muffie, nor why I pin your name there like pointing the head of an angel.

So I go down on my knees to the poem again is all I can gather of you or

which

anyone as if words and the spaces within them like a hang glider's lenient valley buffet our fall into history; I could as if grasp that these lines will be all that is left of you in time, rag content last ing longer than rage.

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Break that pencil yelling for the right

in your fist word, Muffie,

all the words suck these salt matters down to the bone's solution, while your dark letters bear original and

swift as birds the windfall of our death

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St. Christina the Astonishing

Affiicted with sainthood and able to smell out grief in the dying animal, spending the rest of her little life in flight from the rank evidence of Godshe who climbed out of the ripe thirteenth century air of green wounds and graves far too frequent and shallow for fragrance (pigs in the kitchen along with the sprouts and the tripe) into the haven of an oven for the fresh breath of prayer, took God's gift of dying young with good grace. But what He kept back in His teasing wisdomthe odor of sanctity-pitched her, rapt and offended, out of her coffin. The celebrant, turning away from the Dies Irae to see her wailing like a common wench against the ceiling" ! cannot stand (she cried) the rancor of my stench!"commanded her back to her box for the end of the requiem. No saints visited with blistering hands or burned sheer through the heart with the coals of His terrible love match the ardor of that fair and fastidious soul descending out of the air again and down to its stinking dust. Oh astonishing Christina, pray for us!

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Six Sonnets

Ute man who died en route. Trying that imposture gingerly, he huddles under the blue blankets of United. And in lieu of chicken soup, the chipped-nose flight attendant's demure palm on his forehead, me feeding (as I've nurtured kids with spoons) him smokes. Out of what friendly skies do guys come from with your briefcases and needs askew on planes? Why, like our gear, do I still tilt and slur the safe landing? Twice his eyes scale the fence of his glasses to glimpse my biography of L. M. Alcott Twice again. Like a tired friend who has read for years in bed with me. The glance strikes. Tires (not he) expire and clench that first collision where the heart, stopping, bends.

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"Perhaps you11 write a sonnet about the man who dies en route," he says, pouring alkaseltzer into his coffee not to cool but blah it down. Perhaps I'll write a hundred god-damned sonnets about the men who die, I can say (don't). Two fortifying vodka bottles castle my tray. Check and mate. He, later, to the stew" "Uh, we're not together, but 111 order the Princess Chicken for her little girl who's on economy. " The man who might-when he's discovered by his ticket to be flying economicallyhave died of shame (and doesn't) hands Sarah the cheese sandwich that's our lot. Saving and just as these words, the man en route sighs deeply like the dead.

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My mind, a sign painter, lines up the door: Altizer, Blaustein, and Butterick: a firm of dactyls. Or, as the man who still might die en route, says when we skid: "three epitaphs." More bolt upright in our seats than tombstones for the surprised-to-be-judged dead, we confirm the halter of prayer, of wording. When the bum of rubber ("Don't worry," he says, "I'm here.") lowers the white flag of my face fo half mast: ('Dear, I surrender'}, who am I talking to? We are all here, hearing. It's the night watch man I'm after: the squint eye cast on glass and notching the names. 'Otat God, paint-splattered, slow to dissolve the partnership and make the door clear.

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Suppose the man died en route to Maui, his last breath curled like a heartworm in the orchid of his mai tai? Suppose, without hibiscus red blankets or body bags woven from ti leaves or a burial cave for the debris, Aloha Airlines had to dispose of a dead haole? How? Surely, a chute. Whoosh! Down go his clothed plain skin and bones through a shaft to the sea. We are all well disposed in Paradise. Bird and flower, one. Makai or mauka, the ocean's blue envelopes open and close our directions. Whale bone and wisdom teeth rise from the waves and fall, equal and queer as snow now on the silverswords of Haleakala.

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Crisp as coconuts and just as hairy with the news, the operator's voice said from the Royal Hawaiian: "Blaustein's been cancelled." 1be passive voice-God, that's how it's donel-airs out the room, winds up the sheets of our bare habits, transfers the key. Maybe he never existed. 1be route he's travelling into now is words. Dead on the firmament by day, Arthur, the bear, rises at night. And cancel is canceUi, a jail or lattice, the old double-cross. What we see through crossed fingers are the chilling cancellations: flights, arrivals, phonings. My hand, these rhymed lines, wave them goodbye, linking like death and life, crossing him off.

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Bites like a shrewd and eager air the telephone's expensive weather-"Call himf"-as I stroll the ramparts where ghosts of things past call for what? Revenge or recognition? Wake up the kingdom, haul back the garden from weeds! Beat the waves wide between us shoaled with whale, porpoise, shark, with sound that rolls the music we heard back. And say to him: "I love the falcon in my wrist, the curled oyster itch, beasts in the wind, birds of the air, and the halloo!" Blow it and the world apart. Bite shrewdly. Tell him the dancing bear lies down with doves in the fierce wind that twirls and twirls the weathercock of a proud woman's heart.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

SANDRA AKAMINE's fint published poetry appears in this issue. A fonner student at the University of Hawaii, she resumes her undergraduate education this year at Maharishi International University in Iowa SHERI MAEA.KAMINEgraduatedfrom the University of Hawaii in May, 1979, with a B.A. in English. She is currently a graduate fellow in the University of California at Irvine's writing program. NELL ALTIZER is on leave from the University of Hawaii Department of English where she teaches in the creative writing program. She is currently a visting professor at California State University at Hayward. Her poems have recently appeared in TM Little Magazine and Prarie Schooner. JANE ANDERSON, a graduate student in English at the University of Hawaii, teaches in the Poets in the Schools program, and is completing work on an epic family poem. MARGARET A1WOOD's most recent novel is Life Befon Man (Simon and Schuster). One of Canada's most widely respected writers, she is the author of seven books of poetry, four novels, short stories, criticism, radio and television plays, and books for children. LESUE BOONE is writing a novel about High Orbital Mini Earths. She lives in Irvine, California. JOSEPH BRUCHAC's poems and stories have appeared in over 200 magazines in the past eight years. His recent books are The Good Me11age of Hand&ome Lake (Unicorn Press 1979) and Stone Giont1 and Flfling Head., lroq1U>U Folk Tale1 (The Crossing Press 1979). He and his wife Carol edit The Greenfield Review. PUANANI BURGESS graduated from the University of Hawaii in May 1979 with a B. A. in English. GRA.E ME GIBSON's Communion (copyright ÂŠ 1971 Graeme Gibson) will be re-issued in a dual edition this year with his earlier novel, Five Leg1, by House of Anansi Press, distributed In the United States by the University of Toronto Press (33 East Tupper Street, Buffalo, New York, N.Y. 14203). Gibson is fonner Chainnan of the Writen Union of Canada and has taught English for many years. This is his first appearance In an American magazine. TIMOTHY S. GOINS received his B.A. in Latin American Literature from the National University in Mexico and has published fiction in The North American Review and RetMto/Review lnteramericana. He is a Vietnam veteran.

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NORMAN HINQLEY teaches high school English in Hawaii. He has poetry forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. WIS HUDSON teaches English at the University of Washington in Seattle. STEVEN LAUTERMILCH teaches English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he is translating Hilke's Sonnets to Orpheus and completing work on his first collection of poetry. LYN LIFSHIN is currently soliciting diaries and journals from women for a forthcoming book. Widely published, her most recent publication is Tangled Vines: a Collection of Mother and Daughter Poems (Beacon Press). ROBERT MAZZOCCO's first book, Trader, is one of the first two selections in the Knopf Poetry Series, scheduled to appear in the fall of 1979. His poems and essays appear regularly in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. SERA HIRASUNA MESSING is a graduate student"in English at the University of Hawaii. JOSEPHINE MILES is Professor EmeritusofEnglishatthe University of California at Berkeley. In 1978, she received The Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University. JUDITH MINTY's first book, IAlce Songund Other Fean, received the U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum. Her long poem, Yellow Dog journal, whose Spring sequence appears in this issue, will be published by Sumac Press in the fall of 1979. These poems emerge from her hermitages on the Yellow Dog River at an old fishing camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. A Michigan native, she is currently spending the fall semester teaching at Syracuse University. LEONARD NATHAN's recent books include Returning Your Call (Princeton), which received a National Book Award nomination; The Teachings of Grandfather Fen (Ithaca); and a chapbook, The Lost Distance, printed by Ron Slate in the Chowder Chapbook Series. His next book, Dear Blood, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in January, 1980. PATTI PATTON graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with Josephine Miles. She is currently attending San Francisco State University. VALENTINO RAMIREZ will graduate from the University of Hawaii in December with a B.A. in English. In the spring of 1979, he was awarded first prize for his poems in the U. H. writing contest. He is Fiction Editor for Hawaii Review's special East-West issue (Spring, 1980). GARY SANGE's poems have appeared in numerous little magazines, including Quarterly Review of Literature, Shenandoah, and Poetry Now. He lives in Richmond, Virginia. CHRISTI SHIGENAGA, a 1979 recipient of the Myrle Clark Creative Writing Award at the University of Hawaii, is a recent graduate in English. This is her first publication. MERYL SIEGAL is a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Hawaii. WILLIAM D . STEINHOFF is a graduate student in English at the University of Hawaii. He has travelled extensively with the U.S. military, as a student on a Carnegie grant, and as a free lance reporter in Asia. This is his first publication.

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GARY TACHIYAMA is a student in English at the University of Hawaii and Poetry Editor for Hawaii Review's special East-West issue. STEPHEN THOMAS recently completed his M. F.A. in poetry at the University of California at Irvine. He lives in Eureka, Illinois. LEE UPTON is completing his third chapbook, which will appear in 1980 from Fallen Angel Press (Detroit). His poems have appeared in The Chicago Review, The California Quarterly, The Denver Quarterly, and The Uttle Magazine. DIANE WAKOSKI lives in East Lansing where she is Michigan State University's resident writer. She wrote her first poem when she was seven years old, continued to write poetry in high school, and decided, while in college, to spend her life as a poel She has since published more than 30 collections of poetry, including the acclaimed Motorcycle Betrayal Poe1113 (Simon and Schuster 1971). She spent the fall semester, 1978, at the University of Hawaii as a visiting writer in the Department of English.

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