Hawaiʻi Review Number 22: 1987

Number22

Cover photograph by Marla Musick.

"Mr. Charmer" Š 1988 by Laureen Kwock.

The Hawaii Review editors would like to thank Alicia C. Davies and Marjorie Sinclair Edel for their generous support.

Hawaii Review is a semi-annual publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are solely responsible for its content. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Hawaii Review, Department of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. The editors invite submissions of art, drama, fiction, interviews, poetry, translations, reviews and literary essays. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subscription rates: one year (two issues), $6.00; single copies, $4.00 . Advenising rates are available upon request.

Hawaii Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is indexed by the Amencan Humanities Index and by the Index ofAmencan Penotlical Verse.

Š 1988 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. ISSN: 0093-9625 .

Staff for this Issue Jeannie Thompson Margaret Russo Barbara Gearen Zdenek Kluzak Nancy Castle and Shirley Lee

Editor in Chief Managing Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Reviews and Essays Editors

CONTENTS

FICTION

ESTA NINA IRA AL CIELO THIS CHILD WILL GO TO HEAVEN MR. CHARMER TOES, THE REED, & MRS. THE REED PROOFS OF LOVE DRIVING ONE MORNING IN APRIL

1

Rodolfo Torres

4 27

translation by Sesshu Foster Laureen Kwock

36 47 66 74

Floyd Skloot Sandra Nelson Charles Kuschinslci Brady T. Brady

7 8

Tony Quagliano Jonathan London

14 17 18

Donnell Hunter Kathleen Andrasick David James

20 22 24 26

Leona Yamada Meredith S. Carson Gethsemane Swann J. Kates

32

Robert F. Whisler

33 34 42 43

Stuart Friebert Robert Funge Judith Slcillman R. T. Smith

POETRY

RECOLLECTIONS OF A COOT THREE POEMS THE YEAR OF THE BROTHERS DISHWASHER FEARS THE AIR YOU LEFT BEHIND MOTHER AND DAUGHTER SUMMER: MAPLE LEAVES BROUGHT TO HAWAII TWO POEMS A CYMICAL MARRIAGE DOMESTIC ARCHAEOLOGY TURNING WITHOUT A SIGNAL I DON'T QUITE UNDERSTAND YOU TWO POEMS WEEPING FIG THIS INVASION

IV

SURVIVING THE SEDUCTION OF NATURE'S BEAUTY EVOLUTION 1WOPOEMS SANCTUARY 路1WOPOEMS 1WOPOEMS 1WOPOEMS THE VILLAGE CONSTABLE DUBLIN REVISITED GOSSIPY POEM AFFINITY WITH SEASON AS SURE AS CELEBRATION SUNRISE 1WOPOEMS A TRUE STORY 1WOPOEMS

44 46 50 52 53 56 59 62 63 64 70 71 73 75 82 84

Robert Bowie Greg Boyd Norma Gorst Jay Griswold Robert R. Ward Susan Kelly-DeWitt Maurya Simon John Woods T. S. Kerrigan David Ray T. M. Goto Ralph Salisbury J. J. McKenna James Gurley Robert Wexelblatt Douglas Stanton Louis Phillips

86

T. M. Goto

PROPERTY AND FANTASY IN THE AMERICAN BACKYARD

95

Howard Wolf

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

102

72

REVIEW CADENA DE AMOR: A REVIEW OF THE PAPER 'S FAREWELL ISSUE , " NIGHT SUITES"

ESSAY

v

ESTA

NINA IRA AL CIELO

Un muchacho llego corriendo y dijo que la hija del cocinero habfa muerto.

Saltamos la cerca que rodea nuestro campamento y caminamos por la callecita de tierra, ,entre las casas de madera y zinc. El medico entro delante y se agacho allado de la cama. Luego se irguio y salio de la habitacion .

-No hay nada que hacer -dijo.

-(De que fue , medico? -pregunto un cubano llamado Felipe.

-Nose -contesto el medico- . Raquitismo, malaria, gastroenteritis, hambre, mala vida . .. Todo eso junto -y salio hacia el campamento.

Los otros nos quedamos mirando. Prepararon un caldero de funji con pescado frito y repartieron caporroto en pomitos y en laticas sin decir una palabra. El padre de la nina, que habfa empezado a trabajar en nuestro campamento hacia dos dias, espantaba las moscas posadas en el rostro de la hija. La madre emitfa un lamento continuo sin abrir la boca mientras balanceaba su cuerpo.

AI otro dia fuimos a la pequena casa para saber en que los podfamos ayudar y vimos el cadaver en Ia cama. Pensamos que las costumbres eran diferentes y el ritual seguirfa por algunas horas. Me acerque a una mujer.

-(Cuando es el entierro?

-No tienen en que enterraria -dijo una mujer sin levantar su rostro.

Quedamos en silencio mirando a Ia gente y escuchando el murmullo monotono de Ia madre.

-Deben compar una caja -dijo Felipe.

El padre de la nina salio de Ia habitacion, paso a nuestro !ado con la cabeza gacha y me parecio mas bajito. Bebi6 medio vaso de caporroto, se limplolos labios y dijo sin mirarnos.

-No tenemos dinero .

Felipe no dio tiempo a que quedaramos en silencio. Hizo varios movimientos con las manos y camino de un !ado a otro.

-Nos la robamos , no tenga pena por eso. Vamos y la robamos -dijo poniendo una mano en el hombro del cocinero.

-No inventes - protesto el teniente-. 1U no vas a llegar a una funeraria asf como asf a llevarte una caja de muertos.

1

Felipe qued6 pensativo y volvi6 al paseo. De pronto se liev6 una mano ala frente y sonri6. Mir6 al padre de la nina y se puso serio.

-jYa lo tengo! Vamos a resolver esto de otra manera. Las cajas de proyectiles de las antlaereas ka-treinta son largas. -dio varios pasos hacia la puena y se volvi6- . Ya veran ...

Nadie dijo absolutamente nada y Felipe salio corriendo.

La madre de la nina segura moviendo su cuerpo y produciendo aquel extrano murmulio sin abrir la boca. Todos hablaban en voz baja y bebian caporroto. Como ala hora, Felipe y un soldado angolano, se aparecieron con una pequena caja rectangular forrada con una sabana blanca por denteo y por fuera.

-Me dio tremendo trabajo -dijo Felipe y se frot61as manos.

Llevo el ataud a la habitacion y lo coloco sobre la mesa, allado del cadaver. Volvio a nuestro lado y dijo: -Dame un poco de caporroto ahf que tengo la cabeza hecha agua -y bebio avidamente del porno que le entregue.

Cuando otro de los cubanos pregunto donde estaba el cementerio, respondieron que se encontraba a mas de cuarenta kilometros. Podramos lievarlos hasta alia en uno de nuestros carros, pero casi seguro que nos hacfan una emboscada al regreso y quien sabe si alguno dejaba e1 peliejo en esos trajines. De todos modos elios mismos se encargaron de decir que no habra necesidad de llevarla tan lejos pues querran enterrarla cerca de la casa.

-iVamos a acompanarlos? -dijo Felipe. Entonces vimos como dos hombres del caserro cargaron el ataud. El padre senalo un inmenso arbol y hacia alia fuimos. Abrimos una fosa debajo del arbol y depositamos el sarc6fago. Despues de echar la tiera nos miramos en silencio. Pense que todo habra terminado, pero el padre de la nina dijo que faltaba la cruz.

- Bueno, que la hagen elios - dije muy bajito a otro compafiero, pero Felipe se adelanto acercandose al padre.

- iC6mo se liamaba ella? Digame ei nombre y el dra del nacimiento - anoto en un papelito y fue corriendo al campamento. Nosotros estabamos conversando de las cosas que tiene la vida en cualquier sitio. AI fin, Felipe aparecio con la cruz que era de madera y en su centro un carton clavado con el nombre de la nina y las fechas del nacimiento y la muene.

-Tomen -dijo alargando la cruz. Uno de los angolanos la cogi6 y fue hacia e1 montrculo de tierra, parandose en uno de sus extremos.

- Aqur -senal6 empujando la madera.

-jNo, camarada, ahr no! La cabeza de la nina esta para alia, hay que ponerla para alia -asegur6 otro.

El que tenra la cruz dijo: 2

-Ella esta emerrada asf -y extendi6 su brazo a lo largo de la sepultura-. Su cabeza esta aquf. La cruz debe ir aquf.

-jAhr escan los pies, camarada! Si pone la cruz en los pies la nina no ira al cielo. La cruz debe ponerse en la cabeza -argument6 otro angolano.

-jUsted se equivocal Cuando la pusieron en la caja su cabeza estaba hacia ad y la emerramos con la cabeza para este lado -a:firm6 e1 que tenfa la cruz.

-No, no, camarada, c:vamos a sacarla para que usted vea que la cabeza esta para aca? -dijo e1 otro-. Si pone la cruz en los pies su alma quedara mucho tiempo en la tierra.

Los demas aprobaron. Solo e1 padre de la nina hizo un imperceptible movimiemo de negaci6n con la cabeza.

Nosotros no imervenramos. Pense que era un problema de los angolanos y solo ellos padran resolverlo. Habramos comprendido que era una situacion especial, importance, aunque no pusieramos cruces a nuestros muertos. De todas formas era incomodo para todos que sacaran d ataud.

Empufiaron las palas de zapadores que habramos usado para cavar y las a:fincaron en la tierra removida . Algunos nos volvimos.

-jCamaradas . . . ! -dijo Felipe levantando una mano. Todos hicieron silencio. Otro de los cubanos le apreto un brazo y dijo rapido, bajito: -No jodas mas, cofio.

Felipe hizo un brusco movimiemo con el brazo y se solt6. Se coloco en medio del grupo y dijo: -jCamaradas, esta menina era un angelito. Nunca habra bebido giiigua o caporroto o cerveza ni nada de eso. No habra fumado, solo tomaba leche. Ella no habra robado, no habfa matado a nadie ... Esta menina era pura, no tenfa manchas . . . Empezaba a vivir cuando murio ... -todos asemran con movimiemos de cabeza y las manos tomadas en el regazo- . Esta menina ira al cielo de codas formas, asr que vamos a poner la cruz aquf.

Se acerco al que tenra la cruz y se la quito. Fue ala sepultura y clavola puma de la madera en el mismo centro del montfculo. Mire los rostros de los angolanos y los vi satisfechos.

El cocinero se acerco a Felipe, mirandolo a sus ojos y le estrecho la mano.

-A minha filha vai para o ceu, temos seguraca -dijo-. 0 brigado, camarada.

Luanda, septiembre de 1976

3

Rodolfo Torres

THIS CHILD WILL GO TO HEAVEN translated by Sesshu Foster

A boy ran up saying that the cook's daughter had died. We jumped the fence around our camp and walked through the narrow, unpaved street between the house of wood and zinc. The doctor entered ahead of us and kneeled beside the bed. After a moment he stood and left the dwelling.

"There's nothing to be done," he said.

"What was it, doctor?" asked a Cuban named Felipe.

"I don't know," the doctor answered, "Rickets, malaria, gastroenteritis, hunger, a hard life ... all of it together." He departed for the camp.

The rest of us remaining looked at each other. They prepared a kettle offoon-hee soup with fried fish for us, and handed out the fermented barley mash called capo"oto in cups and cans without saying a word. The girl's father, who began working in our camp two days earlier, brushed the flies away from his daughter's face . The mother emitted a continuous lament, rocking her body back and forth without opening her mouth.

A day or so later we went to the little house to find out if we could do anything to help and saw the corpse on the bed. We thought that perhaps local customs were different and that a ceremony would take place within a few hours. I approached a woman.

"When is the burial?"

"They don't have anything to bury her in," the woman said without looking up.

We stood looking at the people in silence, listening to the monotonous keening of the mother.

"They ought to buy her a box," Felipe said.

The girl 's father left the room, passing by with his head downcast, seeming to me to be more stooped. He drank half a cup of capo"oto, wiped off his lips and said, without looking our way, "We don't have any money."

Felipe didn't waste any time on the rest of us, who remained standing in silence. He gestured with his hands, walking back and forth. "We'll get it somehow, don't you worry. We will get it," he said, placing his hand on the cook's shoulder.

4

" Come off it ," the lieutenant protested. "You can't just show up at the undertaker's like this and carry off a coffin ."

Felipe became thoughtful and began pacing. Quickly he raised his hand to his forehead and smiled. He looked at the girl 's father and became solemn.

"I have it! We can handle this another way. The K-30 anti-aircraft missile boxes are good and long." He took a few steps toward the door and glanced back , "You'll see . .."

No one said anything at all and Felipe ran off.

The girl's mother continued moving her body, producing that strange keening without opening her mouth. Everyone spoke in a low tone of voice, drinking the barley mash . About an hour later, Felipe and an Angolan soldier appeared with a small rectangular box lined and covered with a whited sheet.

"This took quite a bit of doing," Felipe said, rubbing his hands together.

He carried the coffin into the room and placed it on the table , beside the corpse. He stepped up to us and said, "Give me some of that caporroto, I've sweat my brains out." He thirstily drank from the jug he was g1ven .

When one of the other Cubans asked where the cemetary was, they responded that it was more than forty kilometers away. We could ride there in one of our cars, but it was almost a sure thing that the enemy would try to ambush us on our return. No one knew who'd lose their skin getting this chore done . Everyone took it upon themselves to think of every possible reason why it wasn't necessary to take her so far away, and that what they really wanted to do was to bury her nearby her home .

"Shall we go with them?" Felipe asked. We saw then two men of the hamlet carrying the coffin. The father pointed at an immense tree and they went toward it. We helped dig the grave below the tree and lowered in the coffin . After replacing the earth, we looked on in silence. I thought everything was finished , but the girl's father said that the cross was mlSSlflg.

" All right. Let them make one," one comrade muttered, but Felipe stepped forward, going up to the father. " What was her name? Tell me the name and the date of birth." He noted it on a piece of paper and went running off to the camp. We remained discussing the things necessary in life where ever one may be.

Finally, Felipe appeared with a wooden cross with a piece of cardboard with the girl's name and dates of birth and death nailed onto it . " Take it," he said , holding it out. One of the Angolans took it and went up to the mound of earth, stopping at one end.

s

"Here," he pointed with the plank.

"No comrade , not there! The girl's head is down there, you have to put it there," another cautioned.

The one with the cross said, "She's buried like this ," extending his arm the length of the grave. " Her head is here. The cross should go here."

"Her feet are down there, comrade! If you put the cross at her feet the child won 't go to heaven . The cross must be put at her head ," another Angolan argued.

"You're mistaken! When they put her in the box her head was down here and we buried her with her head right here ," repeated the one holding the cross.

"No, no , comrade. Should we take her out so that you can see that her head is down here?" the other asked. "If you put the cross at her feet her soul will remain on earth for a long time."

The rest agreed. Only the girl's father made an imperceptible movement of negation with his head.

We did not intervene. I thought it was an Angolan problem, which only they could resolve. We understood it was a special situation, a very important one , although we did not put crosses on our graves. However, it would be inconvenient for everyone to dig up the coffin.

They took up the trenching shovels we used to dig with where they were stuck in the disturbed ground. A few of us stood together.

"Comrades!" Felipe said, lifting his hand. Everyone was silent.

Another Cuban grabbed his arm and whispered, rapidly, " Don't fuck around anymore, man."

Felipe brushed him off brusquely, releasing his arm. He placed himself at the center of the group and said, "Comrades, this menina, this child was a little angel. She never had a chance to drink guigua, or capoTToto, or beer or anything. She did not smoke, she only drank milk. She never stole anything, she never killed anyone ... She had only begun to live when she died ."

Everyone agreed, nodding their heads, their hands clasped before them.

"This m enina, this child will go to heaven no matter what we do, so we shall put the cross here." He stepped up to the Angolan holding the cross and took it. He went to the grave and dug the pointed plank into the center of the mound. I looked at the Angolans' expressions and saw that they were satisfied.

The cook stepped up to Felipe, looking into his eyes, and reached out his hand .

"We are sure my daughter will go to heaven," he said. "Thank you comrade."

6

Tony Quagliano

RECOLLECTIONS OF A COOT

I recollect Old Whitey Bupkis, the hoariest new voice in America prospecting for a golden slowdown in paradise plumb deracinated he was Bronx Angeleno cowboy took to writing , damn good too but then you know the fear that starts to build around a man he took to writing paeans to personnel managers, "I sure admire the way you handle death" he told a feller and he died right there just dropped, cold and hollow though he was later seen back in cowboy country drifting over the low hills like smoke when all the time all he wanted was room and board in paradise

7

Jonathan London

SEMANA SANTA IN ANTINGUA GUATEMALA

Night birds fall from your mouth.

You remember the laminated air of incense glued to the enormous cross by the sweat of the bent campesinos tortured by guilt and poverty.

Red-brown men made of twisted roots, gnarled bark, and coco leaves.

Eyes dark as burnt beans. Hands rolled into warm tortillas, thick slabs of ground corn, salt, lime.

The endless procession drags by shouldering giant caskets of Christ carved out of rosewood trunks and polished by years of sacrifice. You know they had to pay tithe for the privilege of bearing the burden Christ once bore. Their bare feet scrape dust and their teeth grind ash.

8

There's thunder in the mountains and lightning packs solid the bones of the dead littering the country like sticks of dynamite.

But you know the Lord is their Saviour. Yet they suffer and rend your heart like rocks in the mouths of the dark brooding volcanos surrounding the city like gods .

9

TWO WIDOWS AND A WIDOWER

Old Al, 84 or S, pushes through his screen door and does his slow shuffle down his gravel drive.

Groping, half-blind, toward his mailbox, mounted in a row at the top of the hill: his daily grind winding down to just this: the bills, and ads, and news from far family, his friends long dead and gone. He leans upon the row of mailboxes to chat with his old neighbor, Lorraine.

Lives alone in her yellow house with her Bible and her 1V. And here comes Margaret. Who loves more than anythingexcept perhaps reading-to talk.

(Forty years a librarian: a walking encyclopedia of ailments.) Moving turtle-slow up the curve in the road to check her box too (as if the money she lost when her marriage house was torn down to make room for a freeway might now miraculously appear, spewed up at last by the computer which eats people.) There they stand, the three of them, living out their last years, or days: Al propped up between the two women as if supported by their strength, gained by one from her Bible, and by the other 10

from the books she can still devour through glasses so thick her eyes seem to be drowning in glass . (Lorraine would be horrified at the sex in the books that Margaret thrives on .)

Their laughter flutters around AI on fragile wings, but they're bound together by their loneliness, ameliorated only in Lorraine's case by untold flocks of grand- and great-grandchildren over the Holidays, and in Margaret's case by a house full of cats. Poor AI has only his backyard pigeons and his middle aged son (at whom he yells so loud over the phone all the neighbors can hear.) Half-blind , the Bible does him no good, nor do the books which provide Margaret gossip from the world , nor do the cats which in their feline wiles , drive him, and his pigeons, wild.

11

APPROACHING INFINITY for Maureen

And again, these multiple blessings, these rocks and waves, this sun and an expanse of clarity approaching infinity and you not here, but here, your absence only transitory. Your presence unique, as are all memories , no two people's alike. It was your birthday and your slip of a body was wrapped around mine, curled in this cave of the wind, this cove, where sheer cliffs shoulder the sky, and the sun filled us with a fullness only youth celebrating itself could lay claim to. You were turning twenty-two and when you lifted from me like a butterfly on an updraft-your wings outstretched-I thought nothing could be so beautiful, and translucent

12

as your dance of pure light on the bright stones.

And when you staned to build that castle of sand , I thought nothing, no great wall of water, could ever ruin it.

When you yelled "Renovations! " and moved the castle up the beach, scoop by scoop, adjusting to the tide- you did it And I was right!

Adding rooms for the two who grew inside you, and for us who needed more. And now that you ' re turning thirty- two, and you think the tide of years is catching up with you, and you laugh less, you wonder where your youth has gone. And I say it is in these rocks and waves, in this sun, in this expanse of clarity approaching infinityin this wind .

13

Donnell Hunter

THE YEAR OF THE BROTHERS

1.

The old ones remember how many snows. They know the right dance for the year of the brothers: one chosen god, the other goes mad, becomes a devil driven off by the tribe.

They paint a new canoe with faces of fish , of mink, otter, and fox just to be safeno one knows who makes the choice.

They gather jerky, dried fruit, acorns, and seeds, seal them tight in waterproof baskets dipped in pitch.

Two brothers, if possible twins, are clothed in new leggings, in buckskin shirts never worn, high moccasins lined with fur. They learn old ritessacred songs, the proper dance.

The whole village follows them down to the river, watches them load their canoe and set it adrift.

2.

Somewhere a mother looks to the sky. Each night she counts stars. She sings to herself, and fondles a cradleboard, waters with tears her rows of corn.

14

3.

How far the brothers paddle no one can say: A log jam looms, a whirlpool sings. The canoe spills and both swim for shore. One finds the willows friendly. He pulls himself free, builds fire , and calls: "Over here! Over here!"

An island fringed with ice touches the broken canoe as it slides by into a deep pool.

The gods of the river- marten, sculpin , trout-know what to do. They dance from the shallows , each claiming his portion of the sacrifice, leaving the face and hair for the sky.

4.

Tonight our sky is friendly, the moon a thin curve you can barely see .

When I drove past the bridge this afternoon, blue lights whirled, an ambulance screamed.

The late news tells how a boat capsized, one man escaped, his brother still missing.

5.

I write this poem for the mother: A shaman will tell you, "Bill has been chosen.

Don't fear. Clouds will

15

make room for your son, for his face, a new star floating west, long hair leading the way. This is the ninety-first year, the year of the brothers, when a new god rises out of the sea. A river can still remember long after a tribe moves away."

16

1\.SHER FEARS

peace, in cool morning light, come to my trivial task y.

1\Cl't::~.lu~ the latch, I stanle.

shit smears a dinner plate; are violated. listen to the gentle persuasions my Buddhist friends. understand Darwin. remain unconvinced. Such intrusion is not to be met with logic or faith.

Roaches are primitive , with a knack for survival.

After the bombs they will rise, new as poets, to chant deceit and the nasty places of emptied houses.

17

David James

THE Am YOU LEFT BEHIND for Gay nelljames

Think of the visions that come to her, dancing on air, floating against the immaculate walls .

They rise up into creatures, beautiful and grotesque, mimicking the years.

Think of her fear as she can no longer control parts of her body, the excess mass going numb and stupid.

She points but nothing happens.

Think of this old woman lying in bed, no one in sight, the sun barely enough to reach her, and imagine the day or hour or minute when she suddenly feels the entire family circle around, chanting , lifting her toward heaven.

She sees every particle in the sky, every molecule of water bouncing oval and blue.

All of the secrets of this life flash inside her and she believes

18

this is the moment : she lets go of her body so that we may remain here to breathe whatever air she left behind.

19

Leona Yamada MOTHER AND DAUGHTER SUMMER: MAPLE LEAVES BROUGHT TO HAWAII

This summer is a freak, blowing red and orange leaves from maple trees to the ground too soon.

When we return to our valley the only changes will be whether or not it rains and if the sun will shine. The wind may be Kona. There will be change of life.

Daughter, was your birth my fall, or yours? When you leave will I be menopausal? Can I prevent your changing colors and my own?

These leaves drop prematurely. This branch is low; we can keep the leaves under our blouses during our flight home.

It should have been no surprise that the leaves turned from bright to brown, hanging on our memo board, pinned in sunlight.

They fell, leaving themselves with small, perfect holes caused by the red and blue tacks still in the cork.

20

Under the tacks little circles of maple leaves, shielded from change, retain their fall colors.

These pierced cutouts: mean reminders of your fmal glances and the palm of your hand wavmg.

21

Meredith S. Carson

JELLYFISH

Medusa of the benign curls, cut short and fringed round your limp plate, dessert of the sea turtle with cream gonad sitting in your center like a decoration, you cannot hurt me.

I drift with your smooth languor into Greek waters of a legendary mind, full of monsters, whirlpools and sirens , which are but dreams.

You pulse like a heart in the sea's breast.

Within the water you ride in simple perfection.

I look into your milky mirror and see myself.

I drip of you; your cells are mme as once within my mother's womb.

22

WINDOWS

To the bird which enters the house and flies against glass, the window lies .

His truth is the sky.

When I am halted by such hard shining, with vision selected of eanh, framed in the sun or rain , prismatic, wonderful, I can have insight into what is without, outfly the bird to what the bird knows .

23

Gethsemane Swann

A CYMICAL MARRIAGE

Oh, for a gypsy to steal this night to bow my cosmic strings with fever while the fig-leaf of darkness hides my thirst forty days I've wandered after you in my bridal f~ery under dog-day stars not one vision and if I could seduce a dream my way it might relate that God died without a will and what morning-after pill should be prescribed? the sun will lift the black silks and I, with morning breath and thin film in eye corners be struck mad and dead with vision is that my head across the meadow all cross-eyed and idiot-grinned or would I simply survive and have need for wine daily and a vow of silence? or perhaps become a nun hiding frump under habit

24

while lowering my eyes to the young priest's daily wine and should I take a vow of silence? aw man, it's better we should marry and walk on something solid bequeathing quests on reckless children for I've lain for Cain and Abel but you've crawled for an apple

25

). Kates

DOMESTIC ARCHAEOLOGY

Wide , garish roses promised nothing, but where they peeled, revealing buried classical blue ruins underneath, I made a start, stripping out urns and pilasters, shadowy temples highlighted in white.

Here and there I'd scraped through to something different, a less sophisticated culture-glimmers of bronze dulled now to indifferent brown but still suggestive-and so continued until I'd laid all bare, a dry antique skin somebody once loved and somebody else buried. Oh, I confess, I lifted that layer carefully, imagining a young couple in their new house making a start, beginning a civilization with nothing to build on or scrape off, nothing but lathed ribbing and horsehair, the clean, dusty plaster of these walls and a tin bucket of home-made paste.

26

We were on the Great Highway headed toward dinner in Chinatown.

Rod's father had called in the morning on his way back to Baltimore from Hong Kong.

"My old man wants to see us," Rod said , coming into my workroom . I reached for another three-penny nail and hammered it in. See me, the old man meant . His son's lover.

Rod went outside to shoot some baskets. I knew he was thinking about his father. His aim was off. The ball skimmed the rim, never quite making it in more than twice. He cursed and threw it up. I put down my hammer and went outside. Taking the rebound out of his hands, I dribbled to the top of an imaginary key and let my one-handed shot fly. I did it four more times, tying the old record between us. Rod whooped and pounded me on the back. Maybe everything was going to be all right.

Rod's father mailed him five hundred dollars each month , enough to cover half of our rent and utilities. An allowance, Rod called it, from a family trust. Sometimes I imagined his family lined up in a black and white still, a generation of east coast bankers who knew the ins and outs of codicils and escrow. I covered my half of the rent building cabinets.

Sand blew across the windshield now. I switched on the wipers. The evening fog began its slow roll inland, the reverse to the slow burn it did each morning in Daly City. Rod's fingers cakewalked on the buttons of the radio, switching stations. Not giving a song a chance to get under his skin before he'd moved on to somewhere else.

Hang gliders landed in the clearing between the wind-sculpted mounds of sand. The huge red and gold wings hovered in the gray sky, tilting back and forth. The rider, helmeted and gloved, clung to the metal rod, screamtng. The sea gulls picked up the cry and carried it down the coast. I pressed down the clutch and let a station wagon ea.se into the lane in front of me and thought of the hang glider and the lone passenger screaming all the way to Chinatown.

I'd forgotten the parking hassle and had to circle four times before anything opened up, curbing the wheels finally five blocks away from the 27

restaurant. We walked uphill together. I had on a silk shin and flannel pants. Rod wore a gravy-stained tie and brown corduroys. Our shoulders rubbed together slightly as we walked .

"It's just my father."

Rod took my arm, the two of us tilting slightly because of the hill, the wind , and his father.

"You wait over there," a waiter told us when we arrived. He waved in a bus-load of tourists on a night tour of Chinatown.

"I've got a reservation."

"Just the same, you must wait."

Rod shoved the tassled menu back at the waiter. "No, you wait." His fists were balled.

I pulled him back. "Keep cool."

Another bus-load of tourists squeezed past and then Rod's father strolled through the door, looking dapper and jaunty, an exact though shrunken replica of Rod in thiny years.

"Well, Rod." He cleared his throat .

"Father."

They touched hands briefly, like boxers just making contact.

"And you must be Sunny." Rod's father shook my hand. His palm was cool, his fingers long and bony, like Rod's.

"Rod's told me a lot about you, Dr-" "Call me Mel." Rod's father slipped the waiter ten bucks, and we were seated. Over the hot and sour soup he chatted about his Hong Kong business trip. Rod pushed his soup away.

"Not hot enough?" his father asked.

"Not sour enough."

His father laughed. "Like women should be. I always say. Hot and sweet, eh, Rod?" He looked at me deliberately.

I chased a peanut in the broth with my spoon until I had it cornered, then chewed it carefully.

Over the smoked tea duck his father remembered the presents in his pocket. He doled them out, matching Seiko watches.

"I can't take this." I pushed it back across the table. I didn't want anything from this man . Except maybe his son.

"Sure you can," Rod's father said. "Even a carpenter likes to be on time."

Rod picked up the watch and slipped it over my fingers. He held my wrist lightly then placed it gently back down on the table .

"The oyster roll is good;' he told me.

28

I took a bite to please him. " Are you a good cook , Sunny?" his father asked .

"I like to cook."

"Rod's mother never could cook. We'd always find those lumps of cornstarch in the food when we ate. Remember, son?"

Rod nodded, chewing the crusty oyster roll.

"Remember Bobby from down the street? He's a thoracic surgeon now."

"Good for him ."

"He always was good with his hands." " Rod's good with his hands too ," I bluned out. Rod's father laughed, sounding like Rod .

"Your friend has a sense of humor. I like that."

I checked the time on my Seiko while Rod and his father hashed over neighborhood stories. I wondered what Bobby from down the street with the skillful hands looked like and if Rod thought of him at all. I told myself that was stupid as I watched Rod begin to mimic his father's gestures, the way his hands curved on the glass of water, and the urgent way he had of speaking.

We'd been together a year. The longest any of Rod's lovers had lasted.

He couldn't seem to hang on to anyone long. He'd told me that from the stan.

Rod 's father paid for the dinner, and we went out onto the sidewalk.

Tourists passed with canons of roast duck.

"The night's still young. Let's have a drink," Rod's father said. ''I'm not dressed for that," Rod said.

"I know a place, a private club. It's not that fancy. Be a sport, Rod." Rod looked at me. I shrugged. A drink wouldn' t do us any harm.

"Your father 's not too bad," I said in the car. The dial of my watch glowed in the dark like the old radium dials an obese uncle of mine used to wear. " He's Mister Charmer, isn't he? " "Don't look a free watch in the mouth."

Rod laughed. We'd had a lot of laughs in the year we'd been together. Maybe tonight would be just another one of them. I found the dub and recognized it as one frequented by the FBI's. Foreign Born Irish.

Rod's father stood by the door, talking to the doorman . We slipped in together. It was early and quiet . We could get a drink and split.

"Do you see that man?" Rod's father asked us at the table. "He smuggles guns for the IRA." Rod sipped his bourbon while his father told us more about the

29

gunrunner. It was all bull. The gunrunner was probably an insurance salesman from Dubuque.

Music drifted over from the old juke box against the wall. " Why don 't the two of you dance." " It's not that kind of club," Rod said.

"Go on. Nobody here really cares."

"No thanks."

"I don't know how to waltz," I said and looked the father in the eye.

Rod 's father grinned. He drank his bourbon , then got up and crossed the room toward a woman seated by herself. He led her onto the dance floor and like another Arthur Murray he dipped and weaved and whirled.

The woman smiled and laughed, following his lead from one end of the club to the other, while the IRA gunrunner kept time.

"That old man can dance," he said.

"Yes." "Better than men half his age ."

Rod didn't answer, but his eyes never left his father. He picked up the gunrunner's matches and lit a cigarette as his father led the woman back to her table. " She's your age, Rod," he said, when he came back to ours .

I took a drag from the cigarette Rod had lit . " She thinks you're cute and wants to dance with you."

Rod looked from his father to me and back to his father. " It 's just one dance , come on. Sunny won't mind, will you, Sunny?"

"Sunny?"

His voice was hoarse. When had it happened? Over the soup or the oyster roll? Or maybe when his father had started dancing, the figure of the woman and the man so right together. The right kind of right. Rod's father smiled. A winner's smile.

"Be a good sport , Sunny," he said. "Let Rod dance with her once."

Rod danced with the woman awkardly at first . Out of practice. He wasn' t much of a dancer, he used to complain. She said something that made him laugh and then his tension eased, their bodies blending together more comfortably.

Along the Great Highway the fog had thickened, and voices trailed in the wind . The sea gulls and the hang gliders screamed through a glimmer of coast and colorful wings. Rod's father had gone back to his hotel. Out of our lives .

I turned the car into a parking lot by the beach and got out.

"What are you doing?" Rod asked.

30

I ran to the top of a sand dune, stripping off my Seiko watch.

"Sunny!"

Rod's voice blended with the screams from the gulls.

I hurled that watch into the fog and night. Maybe a real gunrunner fish it out and take it back to Ireland. I didn' t need it anymore. I what time it was.

31

Robert F. Whisler TURNING WITHOUT A SIGNAL

After the exit I slow down to forty-five and roll to a comfortable stop before I look both ways and pull out to a residential thirty-five, braking before the blue bubble flashing on the side of the road, a ticket for thirty-five or forty. How do you turn into yourself without a signal?

At fifty every fifteen is a pill in the morning, a flash in the night, grease for the squeaking wheel. At court I pay my fine and promise never to turn without a signal or cross the median strip, double park or exceed my limit, set now at fifty-five. Returning to my car I find the meter's red flag up and a ticket on the windshield , my time expired .

32

DON'T QUITE UNDERSTAND YOU

inced I'm a spy, are you? the children think so too? telling their schoolmates? the back stairs, I'm met and u"'"'L•v••<::u by the milkman-he's so sure. My mother calls, What's lunch, she says, And what's this hear about your work for the CIA. thought it was just business in Budapest. , mom, I'm a socialist, take after gramps, that's all. Besides, we ' t need the money. Dad's on the line now: you never did pay for our garbage disposal repair. Don 't you remember?

I pick up the candlestick, but it's along time till I find a match. My voice turns husky, I'd been so pleased with what I've been up to latelyhaven' t shed blood, lost my own or anyone else 's arms or legs. And there's this to it, Kate-I shut the blinds to mute the windowsIf it turns out to be a fine night, I was thinking of taking you too.

33

Robert Funge

RUNES

. . . don't call up and ask what's the matter.

It's always been this way.

Walter Lowenfels

To An Imaginary Daughter I am the blackt out man. I Nothing's the matter.

John Berryman

Dream Songs 22 & 242

I couldn't sleep and stayed in bed too long.

I didn 't dream and my head is too full.

I should get the car repaired and buy some new shirts.

My mail is piling up and I haven't paid my bills.

By the time I get everything done there won't be time to do anything.

My son and daughter need me.

All of my poems and most of my socks have holes in them.

All of my work is out and no one 's answered .

Fony-one people have been laid-off and they want me to work overtime.

I am getting angry at most things instead of some things.

I look forward all week to my weekends then waste them.

I can't do enough for my children and I don't.

Nothing I feel pertains to anything.

When the wind blows through the trees it doesn't remind me of anything.

I try to pay attention but keep forgetting.

All of my bridges are on fire and all my butterflies are moths.

My daughter and my son no longer need me.

If you know exactly what I mean I haven't said it clearly enough.

34

The lines on her face faded out, the drawn skin softened.

What other miracles took place were lost in the effect, her years were halved, and she, a woman of my age , was twenty-five.

Bending over me, the plump slow gray dental assistant with the dour look uansmogrified and the face of a trim and trig young lady of twenty was tending me .

These I can only testify, good reader, happened on the same morning. What if anything it augurs I don't know, and what strange grace awaits me next I'm dying to find out.

35

Floyd Skloot

TOES, THE REED, & MRS. THE REED

It was the year of razor blades in the Girl Scout cookie boxes. When they heard about it, the guys in the House couldn 't believe what the world was commg to .

News about a summit conference or the price of the yen doesn't capture a con's attention . He wants stories about a corrupt politician getting sent up, or the farmer who blows the manager's head off when his bank forecloses . He grabs the story about Girl Scout cookies.

Early November, I got a call from Gus the Reed. Gus wanted to talk about how the guys inside felt.

Having done time twice with the Reed, I heard right away that he was troubled. He sounded like a beagle on scent.

"We've got to do something for the Girl Scouts," he finally said. Gus has two daughters, both Girl Scouts.

"Like what?" I laughed. "You guys can't even score a box of cookies anymore. They're full of contraband." ''I'm not kidding around, Toes."

They called me Toes when I started running. For Twinkle Toes . My name's actually Thomas Wraw, so I've been called worse. I didn't mind Toes because the running helped me get out and keep straight since I've been out.

I took up jogging during my last time in prison. Drew five years because there was a knife in my hand when I suggested that the 7- 11 clerk give me bus fare .

My jogging started with four laps around the prison track. Then I moved up to eight. Soon, twelve.

In two months, I was running instead of jogging. When they let me off the track and gave me permission to go around the perimeter of the prison, I could do seven or eight miles a day.

But once a week, I'd still hit the track. You need speed as well as strength in this world.

That's when the Reed got a game organized and we became friends.

36

The guys would bet on how fast I'd run my best lap and the one who got it right won. If there was no winner, the pot was held for next week.

Once I told them about carbo-loading, guys would bring me extra noodles the night before my track workouts. I could always count on rolls, a ponion of fruit, some body's brownie.

Toward the end of my time, I got to race on the outside. A lot of cash changed hands then , based on my times, my place in the race, or the number of women who might beat me.

"I didn't think you were kidding," I told the Reed. It would be better to sit on a running chain saw than to mess with his daughters. "But what can we do, catch who's doing the boxes? You know better than that."

"What about money, Toes? Say we kick in what the girls lose when the creep puts Wilkinsons in their chocolate mints?"

"Take up a collection."

"What's gotten into you? I'm trying to do something wonhwhile and you're playing Groucho Marx."

I couldn't see what the Reed was getting at. He wasn't the type to brainstorm on the telephone.

"A fund raiser," I offered. " Something organized inside and put on outside. How's that? " "Better."

"A race? " "Better still."

"Is that why you called me, Reed? You want me to put on a race for you?" " I never would have thought of that myself."

To put on a race, you've got to work with the cops. You've got to see cops voluntarily. I wasn't ready to do that.

You've also got to work with the city permit people, with an upstanding sponsor, with the lady who does coming events for The Herald.

"Reed, I've got a problem," I said the next evening when he called back.

"Who doesn' t?" " I'll help you, I'll race in the thing, but somebody with better character references should work with the powers that be. I could be your liaison ."

"Ok, you can be our liaison. I never got to use the word liaison before. But who do you liaison with?"

"Give me the name of the lady who runs your kids' troop . I could ask her to organize the race.''

37

" Ok, Toes. Her name's Barbara. Sometimes it's Babs. When you see her, you should think of her as Mrs. Gus the Reed."

"I'll work with her." " You do that."

Mrs. the Reed was hard to reach . She worked in a school cafeteria, then cleaned homes in the afternoons. And she refused to be interrupted at dinner with her daughters.

I finally reached her at 8:00 a few nights later. The cheer in her greeting astounded me.

"I remember him talking about you," she said. "How you were really going to make it this time. Sure, come on over."

Both girls looked exactly like the Reed. They even spoke with his breathy whisper. I decided to avoid getting into a fight with them in case they could also throw a right hook like their old man.

I sat on the porch with a sharp-looking,leggy redhead. I forced myself to think of her as Mrs. the Reed , not Babs. I was trying to raise funds, not the devil.

"Come to the next troop meeting," she said after hearing me out.

"Explain to the mothers what you're doing and why. They buy it, we'll handle everything."

"Don't you like the idea?" " It doesn't matter ifl like the idea. August likes the idea."

"So you'll do it."

"Probably. It keeps August in the girls' lives ."

"Gus means well." " He does. But his sense of how the world works was never very good ."

The troop meeting was in the basement of an elementary school. I've spent more time in prisons than I've spent in schools.

Maybe that's why walking into the building felt like going back to the House . I was anxious to leave and leave quickly.

On a table by the door were paper cups filled with cherry Hi-C and strips of foil lined with home-baked cookies. Even the rank and file was steering clear of Girl Scout cookies this year.

Small folding chairs were set up in a ring around the circle where the girls sat. They were filled with grown women who looked like they could never get up.

"This is Mr. Wraw," said Mrs. the Reed. "He's here to discuss a fund raising project with us."

The mothers applauded and the girls stood up. I wanted to vanish.

38

"Good evening Mr. Wraw ," the girls said in unison.

"He looks pretty cooked to me," one whispered.

They were shushed and told to sit. I explained, without stopping for breath, that the race would make up for lost funds, that the men in the State Penitentiary were behind it, and that I would run hard.

"It's a good cause, and if you all help put on this race, it will do everybody a lot of good."

There was more applause. I knocked back a cup of Hi-C and dashed out as if a starter's gun had gone off.

"You were very persuasive,'' Mrs. the Reed told me the next night.

"Everyone's agreed."

"How can I thank you? " "You still don' t see who this thing is for, do you, Toes?"

"Little girls." " No , cons. The guys who think criminals shouldn't mix up the world of little girls. Look, just be sure your running friends show up. And don 't embarrass all your fans by finishing last."

After I hung up and went out to run, Mrs. the Reed's voice lingered. I ran into the park.

It was like being in the Yard again, surrounded by other cons, but hearing only my ex-wife's voice whispering to me. When it would get that way, I'd run a little harder so my breathing would cover up her voice. If that didn't work, I'd sprint until she went away.

When I became a con, my wife became my ex-wife fast. When I became an ex-con, she was gone.

The way it turned out, nobody I knew knew anybody she knew. This was a surprise since we'd grown up together. Gus the Reed later explained it to me as The Way of the World.

Now Mrs. the Reed was turning into Babs while I ran. I made myself think about racing and about breaking 38:00 for the lOK. Then, alas, I was thinking about what Babs would say when I crossed the finish line.

The morning was thickened by fog. From the shopping mall parking lot where the race began, all I could see was soft light from the entrance sign dispersed above me.

The bypass we would be running on was invisible from the start. The weather was cool, a good morning to run, but mellow because of the fog .

There were three-hundred-ten runners registered. At $7 each, the Scouts would get almost S1, 600 after expenses.

Mrs. the Reed was elated. Everything had gone smoothly and the

39

police were there to control traffic where the course crossed a mam thoroughfare.

The only thing that worried her was putting Girl Scouts on the course to guide the runners. Part of the course went through a residential neighborhood, which was laid out with semi-circular streets and curves. It was too easy to lose sight of people in there.

Since she couldn 't get enough volunteers to stand with them, Mrs. the Reed decided to post little signs painted with fingers pointing the right direction for runners to turn. She hoped they wouldn't be difficult to see.

We lined up. Three-hundred-ten stopwatches beeped as the runners got set.

From within the fog , behind a table stacked with cookies, came a voice through a bullhorn. It was the Mayor.

"I want to commend you for the spirit of service to others which your participation in this event shows. That was only twenty words, runners, two for each kilometer. Ready, set, go."

Inspired by his speech, I took off as if the race were a dash. As we turned onto the bypass, I began to slow down because my breath was already coming hard .

All I could see was the road beneath my feet and the white stripe painted on its shoulder. Runners would loom beside me going past or getting passed.

Lights from the cop car at the intersection were the only way I knew cops were there. It should always be like that, I thought.

Running blind wasn 't a problem on the bypass. But when we got into the neighborhood , we all went astray.

Nobody knew which way to turn. The roads curved around themselves like legal jargon. I couldn't see anyone to follow.

Someone had stolen the signs which pointed the way. Without them there was no hope of following the course.

I passed a man wearing a pink bicycling cap. He seemed to be chuckling as he ran. " You're off course," he said.

About thirty seconds later, he passed me going the other way. Within another thirty, I passed him from behind again.

Without being able to see them, I could hear people yelling instructions, calling names, or cursing the Girl Scouts of America. Then, suddenly, I was running past the cop car again.

That meant I was on the bypass and headed back toward the shopping mall. The light from its sign became visible and I ran toward it at a sprint .

40

Judging by how long it took to reach the finish , I'd begun my sprint a mile out. That nearly killed me.

My watch said 34:06. Since it was more than three minutes faster than I'd ever run before, that wouldn't have been a bad time if I had run the fulliO kilometers .

No one had, unless by accident. The race was a shambles.

Prizes couldn't be awarded fairly. The third place finisher claimed to have passed the winner at four miles .

None of it mattered to me , though . Mrs. the Reed hugged me and her daughters kissed my cheek. The girls from the troop were screaming "Go Mr. Wraw!" when I emerged from the fog and headed toward the finish .

"Not bad," the Reed said when he called a week later. "That's a lot of cookie boxes." " It was a strange race. Did your wife tell you about it?"

"What wife? Barbara's just part of the past. I guess you'd say we've lost touch ."

"But the kids? They look just like you ."

"I should hope so ," was all he said.

41

Judith Skillman WEEPING FIG It has become rootbound in the night, but no one suspects this, so it goes on throwing out tangents of tear- shaped leaves which catch stray bits of sunlight strewn about the room like children's clothing.

It holds the unmistakable shape of a woman grieving, the rounded shoulders and fallen breasts.

When I peer into the dark around it, I see that it has grown through this knowledge of its own exile, its lack of space.

A gnarled stem thrusts into peat, and days are spent above a pot which displeased the potter.

I see that its capacity for sorrow knows no bounds , though there is a color green becomes in darkness, a hue which the eye recogmzes as green long after the sun has dropped like a foreign coin over the horizon, and the houseplants have drunk their last vestiges of filtered light.

42

R. T. Smith

THIS INVASION All the shrill needlework of late summer cicadas cannot stitch these cut leaves back into the branches.

The pear trees, the dogwoods, the few sugar maples, oaks of different species-all have suffered from the mass of crazed locusts that shed their husks and rose, storm clouds toward the sun, their chirr and hunger then settling in the greenery to cheat us of harvest, autumn fire, our dwindling dreams.

Satisfied, they swarmed northward, a column of smoke , scriptural and fevered, a migrant catastrophe darkening the morning sky.

Now the shredded foliage browns underfoot, and we dust the augered holes in bark while the cicadas sing as if sweet design could mend the season's raiment rent by invading appetites. But the domestic insects sew no filigree, knit no intricate intarsia. It is a year of remnants, tightening the cinch, memory of the song of ruin , merciless and sudden , the song no local music can vanquish, no frond or blossom can resist, no lament can stitch to plenty.

'

43

Robert Bowie

SURVIVING THE SEDUCTION OF NATURE'S BEAUTY

the pond throws a tantrum and careens from all good humor a crane the color of dirty road-snow hunches into the frozen stance of a thief "caught in the act" its eyes sharp as its bill which can penetrate a man's skull posthaste and render the brain ineffective as the fins of a speared bluegill rain punishes the reedy waterhole briefly survivors inch deeper into the drifty underwater the broken bubble a bass blew widens its waterwreath into the infinity of space and something else of nature's attraction remains to haunt the imaginationon the path back home the limbs of great trees shutter autumn quickly gone from view as a moment's captured subject recoverable only from the deteriorating film of memory

44

a sliver of moon sharpens the undersky like an earring of a beautiful woman I never could get close to twigs snap underfoot like the bones of broken dreams on the dry dock boatmakers test new motors deep in the belly of a wooden fish its slowed propellers sing the song of God 's shining fish being delivered from their enemies

4S

Greg Boyd

EVOLUTION

Somehow a crackpot botanist figures out how to grow a money tree .

When the first bud breaks, Grant's face unfolds. Then the tree doubles in size daily, until it's taller than a redwood, its branches broader than an oak's. And still it grows, cracking sidewalks and toppling buildings as its trunk widens, draining lakes and diverting rivers as its root system stretches, eclipsing the sun as its billions of branches-each bristling with hundred-dollar leaves-bud and sprout. Giant seed coins explode like popcorn, fall to the earth, and blossom overnight. Among men, those best suited for survival grow wings with which to fly to the trees. They dot the leaves like aphids, their tiny mouths tearing at the green.

46

Sandra Nelson PROOFS OF LOVE

My dad was hit once when he hit his cousin over the head with a truck. He didn't say if it was a pick-up or a semi, we figured a semi 'cause he was an only child. Mom said he had a little sister for a minute whose casket was my toy box (that's why it's padded). "No use burying a perfectly good box for a body no one knew." They musta threw her away then, stuffed her under the hen house where the weasels go . Mom said Grandpa hated Grandma and married her 'cause he had to. Mom said that when Dad's sister was born it was an accident and they didn't have enough food so Grandpa held her face closed. He gave me dry pens and broken clocks to ftx and said I was real sman on puzzles. He gave me a quarter if I dug his chair out for him . I would reach under and jiggle the net to hear how much money it had . I'd stick my hand in the crack and feel in the grit for the cool smooth stuff. Grandpa never hit me but he hit Dad once so hard it made Grandma overly protective which turned him spoiled. Dad hits me everyday. Mom says that's because I am rottener than Dad was. She says she wishes when I grow up I have a child as bad as me so I'll know how she feels. Mostly I wish I could go to heaven faster. Mom says I'm the 'Bad Seed ' from this movie where this girl who looks like me kills people. She says , "Everybody thinks this girl is real sweet, like when they meet you, but only her mother knows she's no good." Then she says, "It has a happy ending , she is struck by lightning." I wish I could be struck by lightning and be happy. Once I dreamed I died when I was in the hospital. Dad was carrying me 'cause I couldn't walk and I was sick from falling on my head.

I was in bed with new sheets and afraid I would pee and be hit. Nobody is glad if I come to their party and I get D's for picking my nose. Mom said I was the one who brought the worms home from eating paste. Everybody ate big green mints three times a day 'cause of me. Doctors and money, a hundred dollars a day for a hospital bed , and my fault. I dreamed I could fly backwards and flew to heaven. It was just like the bible school posters except brighter and no trees. I think I knew everything I couldn't learn at school , but I forgot it all. They said, well they didn't really say with their mouths, but I knew to look at this dinky picture of my brother sleeping by

47

himself. I was supposed to go by him, and do some other stuff too later on, but I forgot what it was . I heard the nurse scream at the other nurse 'cause she didn't check me and said it was her fault I was dead. I wasn't dead I was over here by the door. Then I woke up and puked on the old one. She checked my eyes and pumped on my arm and made me squeeze her hand and I was mad to have to live so I squeezed real hard and she said, " Good! " Grandma Hasty did it with a switch. She whipped mostly legs and the palms of the hands with a green tree branch. She says in a man's voice, "Come here." Then she whips and laughs when you cry and says it's good for you. Grandpa Hasty was a drunk school teacher and kept her from switching as long as he lived which wasn't long enough if you ask me. My dad used his belt. He wrapped it around his fist 'till about as long as a chair leg of the buckle-end hung loose . He whipped about ten times on bare butts. It got to be regular and my teachers told on him and he got arrested and reformed a little. My mom was worried in case he got caught again and sent-up (no money) so she said, "Richard, you know what they'll do if they catch you again. Think." So he cut off my sister Sharon's hair one night while she slept and took my mice and put them in a jar of water and shook them dead to make us never tell. He called us by animal names and hit us while we ate if we ate; too much, too little, too fast , too slow, only one thing, or left our chewing sounds out. He smiled when we cried. I wrote my brother Gary who is in the hospital because he tries to kill himself. He wrote back, "When you're in your family you believe, 'This is how being alive is,' you don't know any different. When you get old enough to know different, you're too old to change. You just don't feel at home unless someone beats you a little to prove they love you." Ruby next door wacks her boy on the head with her wooden exercise shoe. When he runs from her into the street and is almost run over she laughs. "See what you get." I used to run and hide up a tree cause he couldn't climb. He had to be nice on the street and put his belt back in his pants. "Sandy, come to Daddy." I dream of fighting a cat. It hunts me and I hide in the oven drawer under the pots. It bites me all over like a billion bees and I still live.

Now I hold it away from my face and it keeps getting loose and jumping for my eyes and I take it by the tail and throw it and it comes back and I beat its head on the table 'till it is a bloody rag or bag of marbles. I wanted a horse to ride west and never come back. I held my hand like a visor and looked across the field thinking, West looks like a field, this must be the way. I took up fort building, in the trees, in empty chicken coops, in holes in the ground. The best one was down by the tracks made out of railroad ties like Abe Lincoln's. Mostly die roofs leaked in the rain or caved in

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except this one was made out of the side of a metal truck. One day I found this old stink man sleeping drunk on my blanket. After that the teenagers took it for smoking and chased me out. I heard Grandma say, "If you don 't live no where and you ain't got any money you go to bums' jail where you pound rocks into gravel." I saved money to run but I couldn't say that's what for so I said , " 'Cause I like to." Mom said, "She's taking after Uncle Leonard the Scrooge." He taught arithmetic at MATC 'cause if you like money you like math. I read Huckleberry Finn and wanted to be his pen pal. I fished from a metal cement trough in the Milwaukee River getting ready. I saved four hundred Bazooka Bubble gum wrappers for a telescope which could come in handy. I learned to swim and start fires. As it turned out, just after my seventeenth birthday, I got in a car and drove away.

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Norma Gorst

'ULILI for Bruce

'Uitfi is the Hawaiian name and cry of the wandering tattler, a shorebird.

'Olili, 'ulili, you tell of a boy come to Pololu From identical rocks you watch one another: a handful of feathers, feeling in blood and bone the force of his closeness as he stalks taut-sinewed, tremulous, then rock-to-rock more sure One moment you share such silence as the sea gives, restless fingering of stone on stone felt in the blood-a threshold (He would hold you as I would him) One more step and the gray bird hunches down, wing-ready leg-braced, head turned sidewise to the boy who dares the solitude , tests the distance with his body Fly 'ulili, cry 'ulili, 'ulili

50

Between breakers and marsh, where my hand seeks yours, the gesture strange as a child's fust step, a stilt pretending a broken wing flutters just out of reach, a truth not yet grasped; and when fingers touch as if it never happened before fear bursts up again stanled by this new transcendence.

The eanh qualcing under foot, we approach the pond edge, harried by the desperate bird but we do not turn back from this place , this time, from water suspended between two ways of being, which harbors what the bird's fright gtves away and what our fingers , paning the screening reeds, uncover and touch.

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Jay Griswold SANCTUARY

It has grown still since summer dissolved and you know all the dark trees, know them all; it would be useless to count them.

Snow will remain here on the ground for a long time now. Nothing else matters, not even the geese: Silent on silent row they descend , and from behind the rust-colored fence of the Carmalite monastery you hear again the last stroke of a bell that signifies something.

Alone, you will say to yourself,

alone like a leafthat resembles a claw caught by the wind. From the far side of the pond you can hear an uproar of wings forcing their way toward open water.

52

Robert R. Ward SHADOWS

Shadows still, sunlight fallen full across his back he sleeps; his toes move slowly, burrow like small animals into sand dark, damp, underlining a brittle, grey crust.

His towel is red, vivid as a wound; hers is white; she is very tan, her hair blonde, or light red. From her right side, she faces him, reads; her eyes move, or not, behind reflective lenses, sunglasses silvered to throw the world back into its own surprised face. Occasionally, she traces the curve of his shoulder, fingers learning muscles' dense complexities.

They are alone , their beach hidden by brush and bramble, a few sycamore, alder hurling shadows that do not reach them. Like an animal between breaths, the air rests, warm and dense, over them, carries sounds out to be lost on the lake, blue patient, deep. A flight of sparrows freckles past, tickling the air with bright voices, clever chatter; their sudden shadows dapple his back, raindrops on dust; he stirs to wake, restless. Gently, mother soothing a child beyond nightmare, a wife or lover closing a wound, she places her hand, flat, on the small of his back. Again, he sleeps in the resting air; the lake moves softly against the shore, never satisfied.

LATE SPRING

Tonight there will be no tulips; the changing seasons have swallowed them, even though the clouds lowering cunains across the glass and steel skyline suggest March or April.

This season has diffused into a vagrant pattern, waxes and wanes. The thin mist that has swallowed the night glows; darkness , although all around us, is not, will not be, complete this evening; half-measures have, for the moment, become the rule . We walk through Volunteer Park, over damp lawns, up the hill from 1Sth Avenue to the Black Sun that circles, even this moist evening, a steady horizon and I want to take your hand, make a connection. Neither delicacy nor disdain restrain me, only the knowledge that some steps, once taken , cannot be retraced: flowers make, but never again become, seeds. Damp as breath, the air settles around us, holds sounds close, cards to be played later. Our conversation ambles along, sheepdogs circling a restless herd. Then we come to a fishpond, smooth-surfaced, untroubled by the mist hanging like a washing between the trees.

What light there is reflects everything as shadows, while, formal as dancers, goldfish swim long circular patterns.

The failing light has painted them all

S4

grey, cats in the night. We watch them swim, wrapping a warm silence around us until one old fish , big as a carp, scrapes the surface clear with one startling flash of bronze , perfect reflection of the day.

Silently we turn and walk back to the truck, our shoulders close although not yet touching. Tomorrow will be fair and hot , a perfect day for flowers, laughter, the holding of hands.

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Susan Kelly-DeWitt MIGRATION

Many birds forming one bird: a child's charcoaled scrawl made of embersflickering afternoons when the eyes flare skyward & imagination cools to memory, a quick graceful stroke released above an intemperate horizon. On a clear day in a bleak January of days, this welcome dissolving arrangement: Something wild & beautiful passes over weaving out of that vast flapping, a direction hope follows past vision, to a South of the mind, a paradise of wishes .

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WOMAN

It is true, what they say, that each seven years I step out of my skin: You empty the vagrant darkness of your palm into my hair, slide your hand along the hollow of my neck , comb the intricate tangles there.

My soul, in its dry womb crowds against you, presses against the grid of your shirt, moves nearer. How light your fingers are!

But the invisible cells slip away. The dust of my body sprinkles the ground at your feet .

At night, ashes of my younger self gleam; my forehead is bright as a woman's during childbirth.

My words are born, small, airy moons made of chalk or brilliant moths drawn by the light of your body.

We turn & dance in a flight, flinging the dust of my body.

The ashes compose themselves into a clear shadow which walks away, which refuses to remember us,

57

following them like a firefly. Beyond the oaks a car engine hums, then the sound is lost.

Now, one by one, the lights go out in distant farmhouses , while the full moon meanders toward the meridian , then pauses.

A falling star dips down suddenly to earth: the streak of fire like a soul returning to someone's body, and uttering a small cry.

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TWILIGHT The first blue moths of evening drift down.

Last dusk the rain fell , the color of frost.

Tonight, a freak show of stellar jays.

From the valley, six-thousand feet below, nothing but haze rises, and from out across the deck's railing the wistful pine forests climb Movie Slope and Telegraph Mountain.

I've slept a long time, longer than death .

And I've dreamt of the city again : of cats' bodies sliding through night, of a moon made of Aegean marble, of apricots browning the tangled lawn.

Freshly angled , Naomi and Leah sit propped against an opal pool of falling light.

They are humming the stars into sight as they press wildflowers-Spanish broom, baby blue eyes, poppies, wallflowers, nightshade, and bleeding hearts .

I am poised between this dream and that.

Beauty blessed and beauty cursed: life a rubbing stone, a hard ache, with its mantra of "nothing lasts."

The canyoned traffic of orioles, swifts, makes the air wheel with wing- flutters.

To awaken in such a world quickens the pulse.

Nothing is more real than the passing clouds, the glance the moon gives the sun going down.

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John Woods THE VILLAGE CONSTABLE

There are towns that turn over and pull up the quilt at ten o'clock.

The barber stands in his curly crop, trimming his earhair. The Schepp Brothers hang on until midnight, if they damn well feel like it, pouring beer and getting down the banjos.

Some cruising near the skating rink, you know, some car posturing, late show over.

Finally Barney comes down to shake the doors.

In my twenty years in Martinsville, no one could find a key to any of the packing crates we lived in, houses with one ceiling fixture from which webbed everything.

Please, somebody, steal the Depression!

But Barskin had the latest fashion, and there was drink, and world-class jewelry and paint and mowers: emirates of oil cans, maybe the wealth of the late Shah!

Barney, heavy as a muddy tractor wheel , would shake the doors.

When he died, I found he had fought in France in 1918, and had come home shaking with peace . Well, bless him and me , the young scrawn-neck he was once.

Today, TV watches the leather coats.

They never mop their foreheads or tip a pint. They never shake.

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S. Kerrigan

UBLIN REVISITED

Facades of grey in Georgian squares

in Dublin, unfamiliar then, when ghosts of fifty years before (MacDonagh and MacBride, et al.) returned to haunt the town again.

And who of them would saviour her?

Another twenty years have passed.

They speak of old betrayals still among the shabby fanlight rows.

A city gone to seed, renewed, her lovers stroll in Stephens Green, her statues ponder grey defeats.

The kindred generations pass along the banks of old canals as darkness falls upon her parks, her bridges, quays and monuments.

Within its freight of swans and filth the ambling Liffey fashions myths .

The poner flows as freely still .

We sit in dim ancestral pubs and contemplate the chronic talk.

The voices from the darkness speak of ancient vengeance, old remorse.

And who of them would saviour her?

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David Ray GOSSIPY POEM: HONOLULU, 1/29/87

"In dialogues with oneselfone is more sincere than in conversation with others." - T. REIK For sure. For example, just this morning I was discoursing with myself on how, ironically, the coffee in Manoa Garden is a better deal by far than that in the Student Center, though the Garden charges 85¢ which seems like quite a lot for one styrofoam cup. But they have half-and-half free, so if you split it that's 42'/z¢ a cup for us, my love. In the Student Center the coffee's cheaper but all you get for cream is that palm oil and chalk stuff which ruins coffee. So you pay 45¢ for the little cup or 65 for the big, enough for two, but then you either foul it up with creamer or have to buy a whole half pint of milk just for coffee cream, and you know how the milk lobby's done, keeping up their prices, a benefit from Nixon's day that still extends far out here, into the Pacific. It's almost as amazing as the way Dole keeps the pineapple prices up. I mean, you 've surely noticed how we can buy a pineapple just as cheap at home in Kansas City as here, just dow'n the slopes from where they're grown. We saw those fields on the drive Tony took us on around the island, saw those miles of green swordblades crammed together, piercing black plastic stretched across the fields as some cost-saving trick. In any case the polyvinyl shreds and blows until it's dust, no doubt a hazard to the workers who to pick the fruit must wear protective clothing like armor, not too different from the stuff the Pentagon is clothing our marines with. I've read about those suits that make men crawling look like ants with goggle eyes and breathing tubes. In the first hour of a crisis, meaning they would have to wear the stuff, they'd lose . The Pentagon admits a casualty rate of 70%-just from body heat and breathing problems. They've still got a few kinks to work out in making men perform as well as ants in battle. Meanwhile I suggest McDonald 's as they have tiny cartons of half-and- half. Burger King has nice chairs, a good office away from home, but only the chemicals for coffee-you know what I mean, "Non-Dairy Creamer;· made up of all those goodies: Corn Syrup Solids, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut, palm kernel 64

or palm), sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, mono and diglycerides, sodium silico aluminate, sodium tripolyphosphate, anificial flavors, anificial colors. All that stuff is free, which is what the Doc talks about when he says to cut your di- and triglycerides down and of course you want to avoid aluminum in all forms since that's what causes Alzheimer's, which I've had since the age of three. Reik says, by the way, that " we often find in ourselves feelings that seem strange and we're quite amazed over actions and inhibitions we did not suspect in ourselves. Such opponunities occur much more frequently than one might think." He also says that you should not "say to yourself that you believe the worst of everybody including yourself and have rarely been mistaken." One thing for sure is that I believe quite faithfully in dolphins. Any fool could see they are quite perfect, God's peerless creatures, and we'd be quite wise to go away and let them run the show.

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Charles Kuschinski DRIVING

I used to walk all over the city. I liked the feeling in my hips and shoulders and the soles of my feet. I wasn't afraid to go anywhere. I wore out several pairs of sneakers. I wasn't afraid of where I lived , either. I just got the cheapest place that was convenient. That was until my apartment under the overhead subway station in Spanish Harlem was robbed for the f.tfth time. After that, I found a place that was almost for free in the lower East Side, and it was broken into less, but I got held up on the corner of Ninth Street and Avenue C. A guy stuck a gun in my face and stole the little money I had. That taught me to be more careful. But really there isn't any way to be careful if you' re not rich. One time my girlfriend talked me into riding around the city on a bike. I never really liked it that much. I kept getting stuck behind smelly trucks, and people in cars never watched before they threw open their passenger side doors right in front of me. I was turning from Eighth Avenue onto Twenty-Third Street one afternoon when a car pulled in front of me and stopped and a guy got out and punched me in the face for no reason I was aware of. Knocked me off my bike, which skidded in front of a truck that crunched it into scrap metal. I had a black eye for a week.

When I f.trst got in the cab, I was terrified someone would kill me before the end of the f.trst week. I drove it because I needed the money to pay for a new apanment in a less obviously dangerous part of town. I hoped some other work would come up before I got hurt. The f.trst day I made seventy dollars over what the garage charged me. I know the city pretty well. After a week, I realized that I was going to do all right. There wasn't the slightest suggestion of trouble, and I liked driving. The best money was at night. I've always been a terrible sleeper; I stay up most of the night, anyway. I found out I could stay in bed until three or four o'clock and then go to the garage and get a cab. I returned it after about twelve hours.

Once I got experienced, I found I met the best people around three or four in the morning. They were looking for somebody, and so was I. The city is mostly empty then; I got to recognize the same people on the same streets at about the same time of night, got to know the people in all-night 66

coffee shops and late hours bars. The people I picked up sometimes didn't really want to go anywhere . There were just lonely. We'd talk. Some people are more comfortable talking to a rear view mirror than a real person.

And I met some women I wouldn't have been able to meet otherwise.

I didn't have to make any overtures. My name's on my medallion on the passenger side; they can look me up in the phone book if they don't want to start anything in the cab. I had strange adventures. I hadn't been driving very long when a woman got in the cab and asked me to take her to New Jersey. She asked if I wanted to stop at her house for a drink. She was a good-looking woman, expensively dressed, not the kind I thought would be interested in me normally. I said maybe I would. She asked if I turned on, and then we shared a joint in the cab. She directed me to a park on the Jersey side and said she'd get out for a little while and take a walk. I could join her, she said. When I got out she ran ahead . I'd lose her for a little while, then she'd laugh and call me, and I'd go after her. She must have known the park pretty well, because she managed to stay ahead of me. I couldn't decide if she was playing a sex game or if she was luring me to a mugging. Mter a while I got very frightened and ran back to the cab. I was about to drive off-I didn't care about losing the fare-when she came back and got in the cab again. She was angry I wouldn't play with her longer in the park . I took her to her place, but we didn't feel friendly any longer, and I didn 't go upstairs with her.

Another time I picked up Yuki, aJapanese woman, very beautiful and crazy, who insisted on going right to my apartment with me. We were lovers for two or three months. She took me to meet her aunt and uncle who she was living with . Neither they nor she spoke very much English. She said she loved me desperately, though I could never understand why. Then they moved back to Japan . A couple of weeks after that the phone rang and it was Yuki, in Tokyo. She said she couldn't live without me. She was coming back and we would live together. Maybe if we were both very unhappy, we could kill ourselves together. I tried to talk to her about it, but we couldn't communicate all that well. We tried to talk to each other for more than an hour- I can imagine the phone bill her uncle or somebody would have to pay- but I never actually said she should come back to New York, and when we hung up, I didn't know if she'd said she was going to come or not . She called up again a few months later and talked for maybe rwenty minutes , but I could hardly make out anything she said.

Just last week I got a call from a woman . Her voice sounded very cultivated, and she said she 'd been in my cab and described herself, but I couldn't remember who she was. She said she wanted to make love with strangers but was afraid of AIDS. She wanted to talk dirty to me. She knew

67

how I looked, and though she was sorry I didn't remember her, she thought we could still get off with each other. At that moment I was about ready for something like that. She started saying things, and then I did, but I must have said something that upset her because when I paused for awhile there was a silence. I asked her if she was still there. There was nothing but a little sobbing or choking sound and then she hung up .

That's the trouble with me. There's something that isn't quite right and people can tell. She could tell over the phone. I frightened her.

There's a kind of dereliction about me. I attract women, but then I scare them off. I told that to my friend Charley, and he only laughed. He said I was good-looking and all I needed was more self-confidence. It was he who got me involved with the girl some years ago who talked me into riding a bike in the city. We were together for maybe a year and a half, then she went to Brooklyn and I hear she got married. Everybody recognizes the dereliction after awhile. Maybe not Charley; he seems insensitive to things like that. He hangs around with people even weirder dian me.

Women are especially sensitive to dereliction. Also to drugs. I've noticed that when I have a woman in the cab for a little while she's likely to ask, "Are you on drugs?" I've been taking a lot of cocaine lately. More than I should, really. It makes me feel good in several ways, especially sexually, but I'm not strictly speaking addicted. I don't miss it when I don't have it. I don' t even think about it if I'm not around it, but when I'm on Eighth Avenue between Fourteenth and Twenty-Third at certain hours of the night, I'm going to get fares who deal it, and I'll always buy. I love the way it makes me feel. I love the driving, too, really. When I get up in the morning-actually the afternoon-I feel a rush of excitement when I know I'm going to start driving. I get the cab from the dispatcher's, and the car rises up over a bump at the exit of the garage and then it rides down onto the street like a boat being launched. I make money through the afternoon and evening and in the late night I just ride. I pick up people for the pleasure of the company. I'd do it if they didn't pay me . It's possible that some fares don't pay late at night and I forget to remind them.

I remember how I was originally afraid of being mugged, maybe killed. I'm not afraid at all anymore . I go everywhere. The South Bronx doesn't even phase me. I think I have antennae for danger, and I know how to avoid it. If I do have any trouble, I turn over my money in a hurry and I'm even pleasant about it. I got mugged a couple months ago. They took my cigar box with the day's receipts and the little cough medicine container I used for change. I hadn't had that cough for over a year by the time I was robbed, but I bought the same medicine anyway for the container for my change. I'm getting ftxed in my ways . An old timer.

68

The trouble I did get into in the South Bronx was with the police. I got pulled over for going through a red light on an empty street at threethirty in the morning. It was my third citation this year: a $350 fine. Then a little later the same night, the same cops pulled me over for doing it again: $450. I've got to lay off the drugs. I'm still driving the cab, but I've had to hire a lawyer to save my license at the court hearing coming up. He wants to save my license so I'll make the money to pay his fee. I'm driving longer hours now, but sometimes I'm so exhausted, I sleep the whole next day away and never get the cab out, so I'm not really making more money.

I know it's a rut. Right now I'm in the hole. And I've been doing it for so long by now, I'm one of the longest term drivers at the garage. They stick by me, but it isn't something I want to keep doing all my life. I think I'm starting to look old. There are lines in my face that didn't used to be there. Charley, who never notices anything, had been out of the city for a few years, and when he came back he said he was surprised how good I looked . I borrowed some money from him to pay my lawyer. We went to my place, which I didn't want him to see, because it's such a mess. There's only one stick of furniture left in the place. I confessed to him that I had already sold the bed to pay for a half an ounce of cocaine. I had to rent a dolly and run down the street with the bed on it. He said I'd have to stop using the stuff, and of course, I will . It eats up too much money, too much of my life. As soon as I get back on top of things, I'll clean up the apartment, too . I'll have to hire professional cleaners to do the place from top to bottom, and then I'll start over. Then it will be a place I can take a woman to again. I say the cocaine makes me feel good sexually, and it does, but the truth is, I haven ' t had a woman who is a friend , too, in more than three years. And I don 't do anything else, either. I don't even read. It isn't as if I'm stupid, or at least I didn 't use to be. I graduated from school with honors and was offered scholarships. But I knew even then about my dereliction.

I ought to stop kidding myself. It isn't the cocaine. What I'm addicted to is the cab. I take it out as a cure for loneliness-mine and other people's-and I can't do without it. It isn 't the money, even though I make more money driving than I ever have doing anything else. In fact, I'm in debt to the garage. Because I've been working so long , they're indulgent with me. One time I went to get a cab, and while I was waiting for the dispatcher I passed out in an empty back seat and slept most of the day. They found me and had to wake me and told me I was in no shape to drive, I should go home . But I stayed, and I took out the cab. I still know that the most consistent human companionship I ever get in my life is through the rear view mirror.

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T. M. Goto

AFFINITY WITH SEASON for Dean

Icecube on the tongue, December's gone, bottles overturned, confetti underfoot.

A paper hat caught by a gust bumps along the dock.

Tonight no moon just a haze of blue clouds encloses the lake.

I breathe the frosted mist, the year hollow as turning back.

You've measured the ice against slip and drift.

Now, flutter of first snow, a woman's fingers enter a pocket.

I desire thaw, the green door and yellow roses bordering the lake .

I've tasted defeat's embrace, winter's kiss, the bite of iced rum .

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Ralph Salisbury AS SURE AS

First Western Tanager's justFrom-the-forge's glowing Red head and body of freshBuffed brass a lone Christmas bauble Amid April's lingering bright New pine-needles, glowing Like yellow candles, still, This near to June, This April Fool's Day Ripped from a gray calendar-pageSky in May Is Christmas-I've opened my gift, My present, my token of Somebody's love, as sure as you're born, As sure as the world .

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J. J.

McKenna

CELEBRATION

If you are called to witness a celebration, select your gifts with care.

Choose only the simplest elements: earth and water wrapped in firea water jug of simplest sinuous design; ignore those on which vaporous lambs dance to mellow tunes in a shimmering blue glaze or those on which the red-flag mouthed dragon pursues a concubine wide-eyed in worldly wonderment.

Admit concern over your mode of travel; select a silent ship that's tall and comfortable in her lines, in her lanes .

Reject the sun, the moon, the burgeoning supernova burning like a mercury vapor lamp over the barn, and fasten on a steadfast star.

Recognize the decision to pluck it out of a constellation, the need to keep it keenly in mind, and while praising the act of the mind travel with all deliberate speed.

Have faith in your eventual arrival.

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James Gurley

SUNRISE

Rising from sleep I expect no small miracles, only what rises with us, our breath on icy days.

I lie beside you, think of our failures and offer mine up like a prayer, the radio whispering its own sad news.

Would I prefer this wind taunting our wood chimes to another? A prairie gust is all , you'd say, like so many others we rise to : it rushes over the land pursuing us, our lives.

I could be rising years ago, outside my window a crisp wind unfurling all the leaves.

I put on my clothes then and look around at the nightstand, the oak chest of drawers, the oval mirror reflecting sun.

It's so easy floating out into the yard, daybreak, wash hung on a line , the grass and flowers smeared with dew, overhead a cloudless sun.

Something I can hardly make up, this pleasure .

When you stir, the simple movement of you turning to face me brings me back , your presence close as breathing, the silhouette of our house on the lawn.

ll I

73 I

Brady T. Brady ONE MORNING IN APRIL

"You're a good guy. You know that? " He shouted it over the noise of the barracks. I remember it like yesterday, though somehow I can't remember his name . He was blond, from New Jersey. A nice kid who joined the army because it seemed like the right thing to do . He thought I was a good guy. It made me happy, proud almost, and if that sounds simple or stupid, I can't help it.

It was spring, we were waiting for orders to VietNam. Men came and went in the night. Orders would come, men would go. Mornings, sergeants came through blowing whistles, banging bunks, yelling the things sergeants have yelled every morning for thousands of mornings. Men and boys, many of us away from home for the first time, dealt with those waking moments in different ways. My habit was to get up, light a cigarette and dress without saying a word. Those few minutes before everyone was up, before the grabass and shouting began, were my grip on myself, my reminder that it was me standing there smoking in the darkness.

When I finished my cigarette, I'd pick up my shaving gear and head for the showers. On the way, I'd rap on the end of his bunk. He 'd look up and smile. It never varied: the cigarette, the smile, and all in between were a charm to me, a talisman, a touchstone against going down in that great, green sea that was the army.

On that morning in April, with the smoke from my cigarette still hanging over the butt can , I turned and rapped my knuckles on an empty bunk. The mattress was folded, the springs bare, the locker door hung open.

They don't give you much time to think in the army, they know their business , know that thinking will slow you down, cause you to fall out of step, cause problems. I don 't suppose I hesitated more than a minute there by his bunk. The showers would be filling up, there'd be lines at the sinks.

Towel over my shoulder, I padded away in my shower shoes.

We all grow up at different times . I'd like to be able to say I grew up the first time I fell in love or the first time someone shot at me. something dramatic like that. I think the truth is I grew up that morning walking the cold floor to the latrine. He was gone , I was there . There were no goodbyes, no promises to write. Just the echo of some shouted words and an empty bunk.

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Robert Wexelblatt

CLOTHESPINS

Where my sister lives it is illegal to hang your shorts out in the sun . It would, she explained to me, look tacky. It is tacky where I live, but at least I get to dry my shins without government intervention, which somewhat compensates for nights sliced by motorcycles' red screams.

Where my sister lives people do not cut their lawns, change their tires, scrub their own toilets-nor anybody else's either.

Silent migrants dispatch such tasks while land owners practice their complicated hobbies, smiling all the while like porpoises.

I live among landscapers with green trucks.

Where my sister lives there are divorces, legal separations, holy tantrums, fears and tremblings about the kids' grades and virginities. As for discount shoppers, we exist like minor peasants in a vast Russian novel assigned my sister long ago in some required course.

Where my sister lives land costs so much no one ever worries that my neighborseven sturdier than Russian novels, just as real as Count Tolstoy-might one night crash the town, motorcycles vermillion, bashed green trucks rattling on rusted springs, to hang out row on row of illicit socks.

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IN THE DAYS OF THE KALDA RAILROAD

Part One I

In the days of the Kalda Railroad I would sit beside the window of my room and gaze out towards the empty white expanse.

In those deep noons my brain and eyes would strain in hopes to see the palest thread of smoke, betokening my duty with the lamps, and that phantom come so slow and smooth across the city's steppes, from far away.

A sighing cold would pierce the caulking while a pricking wind danced tumults in white dust ; the sun, white as ice, rolled faint-hearted in a brittle metal bowl.

From time to time some visitor would come: a merchant in a sleigh with bells; a student goggle- faced and deferential to my blinking eyes; twice the inspector, bundled and harassed, come to ~ee my books. But they were few, and soon I lost the art to talk or to believe. These were, at times.â&#x20AC;˘ only my dreamsNot quite, not quite my only dreams, only the least disputable in face of such immense distance, in point of that flat world.

Quite other dreams would stop without any benefit of bells or compassionate leers, of tight- fisted or suspicious glance:

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tiny beasts circumspectly stalking around my walls, peering sidelong through the glass, who nosed so boldly that they breached my door.

One tunnelled underneath the floor and spent three days in moaning and lament. Another took the form of an enormous rat and challenged me to duel him for my bread.

II

The way in which one treats of sacred textsrespectful, recondite, and bent-will serve to illustrate the quality of work brought to perform like circus beasts by you, scraping ringmaster in make-up of a down.

There lacked the bare- back rider in her tutu, making as to dance on some great black stallion's back: instead there were your books, your rats, and all your dreams.

All such you would direct of habitude, marshalling your wit to propound the stuff of empty exorcisms, plain 's center.

Thus you'd sit and see the figures sit, heart clutched by long forgotten threads that tended over infinite steppes without once knotting; these rank dreams were mere child 's bogus loops-unsure , potential , and false .

So would one sit to crack a nut, or to be pinioned in between the raw infinitude of a double- mirror, vain of mirrors-mercurial, but dry and halt.

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III Even here, turned to this belated pasture, we circumnavigate the vortex in the humus; on this greenish ocean too we euphemize our course , anxious of the maelstrom; prudent, though at a loss and shamed.

Certainly it came in time, in time and not in time . Can we see a thing too soon and not feel it too late ? here, we touch our tissues to our eyes , but our sorrow, that was not in time-too late, quite monthless.

The perfect sphere is just a bubble which, bursting, sticks to our wrestling limbs, scourging two angels with its film and soothing two demons with its glue . So, holds last and do not last: the perfect bubble bursts in time.

Part Two I

I made my garden in Kalda days and planted seven seeds: and all around I built a maze to confound avid weeds.

For so I had been told to do by the instruction book tossed by the stoker as he flew by, without even a look .

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My seven seeds had been a gift from one who'd spent the night, after I 'd found him in a drift and warmed him at my light.

My spade was from the engineer, who said he'd a new one; my hoe was from an old muleteer, said I'd been kind to his son.

The garden I made in Kalda days grew very well at first; the hardy sprouts stuck through my maze watered with my thirst.

Two of the seeds grew into trees, a cypress and a yew; the one all black against the breeze, the other thick and blue.

Two were bushes, lush and green; they made a pleasant moundsweetest of hedges ever seen, growing in the ground.

Two bloomed into flower- heads, pale violets that wither, remembrances in common beds , conspiring together.

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But the last seed never grew at all, though I took especial care; not in the spring, summer or fallyet the other six were fair.

One dark cold day a wind arose, the worst day of the year; no cunning maze can wind oppose, and it left my garden sere.

The trees were torn up by the root; my bushes lay in shreds; the flowers snapped beneath my boot beside thei.r deranged beds.

Now when I think ofKalda days I recall there were seven: the six I did my best to raise, one relegate to heaven.

II The winters came: look and see their marks; acid-white they were, just regard your face .

What might you care, you, such seasons to recall, so in the end your winter-long accounts should tally, satisfactory to all?

Those late frigid hours, when so gently mounts the moon, you wrote to please your bright city on the rock; you summed and thought it witty.

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Farewell to splayed stark ink and speckled snow, the cold light enchased in the window-frost: more desolation in that paper's row of ciphers , where you totalled what you lost, than in all the degrees of silver rime picked out on the glass pane , marking time.

And yet you add and yet, the season trims its spell; the time subsists, and even now can lap you where you sit, circling your limbs in those old purblind vistas of wind and snow.

Yourself taught me that charm's a thing antique; and charm, you know, outlasts a fit of pique .

III

And what's the sense of angst among these stones?

Do we all conjure up one fleshless face that by profound approval in our bones ridicules each little tear, each embrace?

Every season steals into our eye with its sincerity; the last we must obscure with pious phrase, with eulogy, blow words into the wind that chills this dust.

Autumn outstrips the summer; summer spring, then winter's frost the fall's jewelled leaves; successive is the fate of everything that roots, ripens, rots, that greens, grows, grieves.

It's cold . We shiver, anguished for an hour: a marble angel , a frozen flower.

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Douglas Stanton

A TRUE STORY

When the phone rings , I remember the summer I watched the sea bird Mother Carries Chicken never fly ashore but open the water with its wmgs.

" Is this Douglas Stanton?"

Other voices in the distance moan faintly the way snow falls on a lake in October. I remember fishing the deep pools outside Shushan, New York when I knew my marriage was failing. I remember falling asleep alone in the popple leaves with my father's rifle outside Luther, Michigan. "Yes, it is." What privacy opens its black eyes inside this distance?

"Hello? This is Lynn!" Had Lynn called to tell me she'd fallen asleep on my shoulder before dark on the train in Saskatchewan, Canada? Was she the woman I met underwater while snorkeling for clams off Provincetown, Massachusetts? Lynn says, ''I'm from the International Survey Society." Oddly, I think of snow falling in Sweden and the fainting moans are mysterious because they are Swedish. Just then the red oak scrapes my bedroom window in the house I was born in , and I think Lynn is beautiful in her fur coat, calling me from a red phone in Sweden. " Do you work fulltime, Mr. Stanton?"

A woman with bearing! "Why, yes. I do." I lie, but for Lynn I'll do anything. "As a matter of fact ..." I begin. I want to tell her I own one of the distant moons, and ask if she knew this.

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"Do you read," Lynn asks me, " a television or sports guide?" The uick question! How should I answer? Already I know Lynn wants a man with little use for guides. Lynn wants a man whose face , finely etched at the eyes, tans in the sun breaking open.

" Lynn," I say, " I haven' t the time for such things ."

" Then thank you very much," Lynn says. Her voice disappears through a little hole in the sky over the Atlantic . Down below, whitesided porpoises leap into the moonlight with silver eels in their mouths.

" Lynn ," I say. Then the dial tone rings in my ear.

I imagine I'll think about that bird often. Somewhere, just about now, someone you 've known all your life is playing with her hair, dialing your number, remembering your name, and waiting in that silence before calling you to the world.

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Louis Phillips DA LOCUM MELIORIBUS

All about me are my betters.

Outdanced by flecks That shrive the wind, Outdistanced by the Marsh Wren, Its Cut- Cut-Tunmmm ur.

I cannot flesh The surfaces of streams, Nor stride with water spiders Gone wild, Like delipidated saints, Over ripples .

I am not cut from the same web, Not decked to the same Being, As spider or bird.

Terence sd: "Da locum melioribus," Give place to your betters, But Time's Feed Apron Accumulates Genius & dolt alike, & Blind worms gulp In some damn island- hopping conversation.

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THE HUMAN MIND

This poem has been made possible by a generous grant from the Muse Foundation , Santa Monica , California.

The paper this poem is primed upon has been made possible by a generous gram from the Polymorphous Perverse Tree Foundation , Winnipeg, Canada.

The poet was made possible by a generous grant from Louis and Dorothy Phillips, Hollywood , Florida.

The memory of this poem was made possible by the generous donation of time and thought by you , the Reader.

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T. M. GOTO

Cadena de Amor: A Review of The Paper's Farewell Issue, "Night Suites"

ALONE IN mE DARK are the first words of the essay on film opening The Paper's initial issue in November 1980. Six years and thirteen issues later, editor Pat Matsueda carries that image to a logical conclusion in "Night Suites," labeled the "farewell issue." Originally, the little magazine was devoted to reviews, critical essays, photography, art, fiction, and poetry; this last issue, however, is comprised of only five illustrations and thirty-four poems. The poems were created, to quote Ronn Ronck, "in response to sadness, endings, and death" (Literary Arts Hawati', Jan. 1987).

The twelve poets whose work is collected in "Night Suites" write from voices that are infinitely personal, agonizingly human, and-ultimatelyalone . Confession as a rhetorical device is nothing new in poetry, but Matsueda has succeeded in capturing the mortified voices under a common theme.

At night, when headlights and fluorescent overtake the brightness of the stars, in every city a few solitary artists always band together to makealmost inevitably- pained beauty. In "Night Suites" (as the double meaning of the title's second word implies) the poets make more than music: each voice becomes a link in a chain of morality, which asserts that in the confusion of technology and modern alienation there is little we can do but stop for a moment, recall the past, and try to make amends for our alltoo-human foibles.

The editor acknowledges in her title-page epigraph quoted from John Gardner that "art is in one sense fascistic"; that is, it claims "on good authority" what is good and healthy for society. But unlike the "fascist in uniform" the artist does not enforce his views on anyone- "He merely makes his case, the strongest case possible" (to the world). And so it is that the issue "Night Suites" becomes an intricately threaded rope of confessional voices asking that, if not the world, then their friends bear witness to the small tragedies of inadequacy and psychic impotence.

The four poems by Barbara Gearen best capture, I think, the true gestural tone of "Night Suites": reaching out and begging forgiveness for the speaker's failure to recognize earlier the pain and stoic loneliness of others.

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"Letter and Gift, from Oahu in February" and "War Bride" are written for her mother. Transcending Electral rivalry, Gearen mirrors contemporary feminist theory in her desire to merge empathetically with her mother, whether by recalling the death of a son/brother: Last year it was a conch shell.

I sent it polished and boxed as if there were value beyond my offer of comfort or the consolation of my life on a warm island .

Although you'd never say so, when you pressed your ear toward the hollow I know it's not the sea you heard, but the rush of air, the watery chorus of machines by the bed where your grown son lay, beribboned-his hands restrained with linen strips, his timing of death as flawless as the first moment, the morning of your 26th birthday, when you held him new in your lap. ("Letter and Gift" ) Or by lamenting the vagaries of male promises: I cross forty years to meet this stranger, to share the easy grace so quietly buried before her children grow old enough to recognize its loss.

I could befriend her, gain her confidence to talk, woman to woman, about the distance , the misleading charm of khaki and leather, the heartlessly blue eyes of the man, so simple to fall into, but so common, really, in the States- not worth the rough passage over, I might say, or the risk . ("War Bride") But it is in her next poem that Gearen achieves the pinnacle of feminist vision : sisterhood. Dedicated simply, " for Patty," sisterly love shines through the night:路

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"Here's peach," I say at the party tonight, "and there's mauve behind the cloud," then sink down next to you uninvited , upsetting your unfinished meal of tempura and Russian chicken .

You forgive my lack of grace . ... ("Simple Friendship, the Empress Theatre , and Pastel Sky" ) Gearen carries the personal drama beyond confession into the "created" reality of fortune cookies, and into an offer of comfort: " 'Stop searching,' both scraps suggest,/ 'happiness is right next to you .' " And she successfully sums up the essential bond of female friendship : carefully made beds, two hearts soothingly indolent at the absence of love's exercises. we' re ladies again , in a drawing room anywhere , dropping handkerchiefs to the floor.

In 1977 Sandra M. Gilbert in her essay, " 'My Name is Darkness': The Poetry of Self-Definition," sought to classify and explain the "recurrem self-defining statements" of female writers such as Plath , Sexton, Levertov, Wakoski, and Rich . Gearen has, in my opinion, moved beyond self-definition toward synthesis within the realm of female experience.

"We're ladies again," expresses both the pain and the futility of entrapment in a male mythos while simultaneously laying claim to the powerful force of sisterhood.

Friendship is not reserved exclusively for females, Gearen insists in her final poem dedicated "for Frank and Adele." In terms bordering on overdelicacy, "Still Life with Late-Blooming Christmas Cactus and Wineglasses, Turned" overflows with images of such sensory acuity that the reader forgives anything in the clean light of pastel wonder: The light at 3pm, a sucked lemon slice , the half-full bottle of white chianti, a copy of a poem you've written , mosquito repellent, an edition of Keats ' letters-debris from a thirty-minute conversation between friends.

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Gearen bears the images of "blue berries," "popsicles ," "chopsticks," "gold/and pink depression ware," and "blossoms/on the Mexican vine" through to an ending at once stoic and uplifting: not the line from Keats" I will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness!" not the tough stemmed groundcoverwhose name I've saved until now, cadena de amor-chain of love.

The chain metaphor, to me, symbolizes both the strength and the weakness of "Night Suites." In 1959 in his Concise Dictionary ofAmerican Literature, Robert Fulton Richards identified that the major problem facing poetry in mid-century America is that poets, "under the pressures of ... practical materialism ... [have] become the audience for one another, and tend to write for one another, so that hopes of reclaiming the public attention are limited." The Paper, like many little magazines, was essentially a closed system that could only have led to entropy and the "farewell issue." This is suggested in Matsueda's statement to Ronn Ronck: "I did hope for broader support and that never materialized" (LAH Jan .

1987). Yet, Ronck paraphrases, she "actively solicited work from her favorite local writers." And it is clear that the poems in "Night Suites" were written, if not for other writers then at least for other writers to read.

Nonetheless, the cadena de amor, the dark love of Lorca's "duende" (discussed in The Paper III , 2, [1984] by Gene Frumpkin in an essay tided "Two Positions of Death in American Poetry"), is the central bond connecting all the works in The Paper's farewell issue. Fully half the poems deal with the subjects of death, dying, and the regret of lost love- and the confessional voices cry out to be heard .

Nell Altizer's "Elegy," opposite a black-and-gray drawing of a bent female figure by Jay Moon, opens " Night Suites" and captures the love that is simultaneously comforting and deadly: Goodnight , dear heart .

The skeleton which was a dream wakes up and whispers.

Nothing between us and the covers now but morning.

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Similarly, Gene Frumpkin speaks of "life's deathly grip" ("Before the Meeting in the World Below"). And Chris Taniguchi, in a boldly experimental work of biographical poetry entitled " His Hat (Cesar Vallejo)," sums up the inexplicably sad and stoic forces that keep us going: Today I happen to be tired of being a man, my hat grows heavy on my head, and my shoes keep slipping off, I'm dying in a foreign city and I used to write for a living.

Once more the duende appears in "Matsukaze" by Joseph Stanton: "So cold, so clear/ this long night./ How shall we pass through it?" John Unterecker, too, refers to "the dark landscapes of my heart" ("Landscapes"), and Michael McPherson confesses, "I forget so much . ... whisper of starlight/ over black ocean" ("Better Than No Rose").

Dean Honma, perhaps less successfully in "Offseason" and "Queenie" because of his too-obvious indictments of female power-"an attraction thin as helpless beauty, I fired in the warm lure/ of ignorance" and "L.A. slides by I like a dark bitch" -also captures the dark love: Not many survive this great leap to death; such a leap, in all fairness, should offer consequence, not in reprieve, but as a reward, a commitment of contempt.

And those who live were surely free of fear, to touch the Bay beneath in conscious failure.

("Over Golden Gate" )

But Honma loses the confessional tone at the end, again in indictment: "and drink to indifference/ among friends." And the ending of "Paddling Frank's Canoe" reaches for the unattainable male ideal of "grace that delivers us" while successfully expressing the bond of male friendship : " to know the simplicity I in reaching the other side."

Similarly, Adele Dumaran's "Drinking Harvey's Bristol Cream With Barbara December 26" is a poem about female friendship, and the difficulty of maintaining its intricate balance:

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We lean back , relieved , and drink sherry, balancing the bottle as we do our friendship , our rivalry, the limits of our generosity.

Tonight we are content, the exchange like these variations of Chopin on the same delicate measure few would attend enough to notice.

And in "Annabelle's" Dumaran's persona stalks the night in search of love, walking a fine line between moral accusation and sympathetic understanding of a man who is trying to pick her up in a bar. She quotes the man's hatred hidden in a mask of admiration: God, you're a beauty, he says.

Men kill themselves for a woman like you, they do. Everyday. Bust their asses so they can give a woman like you everything you could want. You know?

The simplicity with which she renders his working-class voice reveals that she understands his pain, even if she cannot sympathize.

The poems of Wing Tek Lum and Frank Stewart also intermingle love and death. Lum's single poem , which takes place in the aftermath of a mother's death, captures the implicit struggle for power between father and sons over whether or not the family store should remain open: Business as usual is what she would want the father said.

Her sons replied she lived for more than just the store.

The next morning , as a compromise , the door was opened, but less than halfway. (''The Door Was Opened'') Stewart's "A Night Drinking Song" cries out: "I want to go home and find my lost/ brother there, to comfort my few loves with/ what little evidence I have." And Stewart again hammers in the death theme in "My Friend, the Chinese Contortionist is Dead": "I am neither him nor myself, the grief/ is bent into a circle." Christina Bacchilega characterizes Stewart's next work , "Song," as springing from the dark force of the duende, a

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piece of "writing in-between narrative and lyric , on the edge of some wound that cannot, will not, be healed" (LAH, Jan. 1987): They stayed all one winter there, stayed and kissed on the woven spread as familiar now as the other's body and warm habits formed on use and re-use and drank each other like wishes , ....

"Home," too, is a love poem for someone who has been ill. The final lines which end not only the poem but the volume of "Night Suites" are-like Altizer 's "Elegy" -both comforting and steeped in death: the small boats lit and tethered dose in the oily foam of their slips, The Luna, The Madrt"gal, The Healing Kingdom, our old charters afloat, in port, and still for us.

I've saved discussion of one writer- Norman Hindley- for last because his work, oftentimes demanding and cruelly biting, strikes me as more boldly experimental than the others and offers a counterpoint to the sometimes overly sentimental confessional voices. "Martha" is hard and biting from the opening line: " One legged, then dead." And the framework-repeating the word "say" and the phrase " I see" -is theatrical and tromc: I see things ... say the moon, And I remember when it poured Like a martini over the lawn, the leaves, Over your arms, Say moon again And I see it like a pinball Through the walnut trees, through the window, Rebounding in the silver bowl , Standing when it found your finger.

Say the sun I see it touch you, see you walk, Your hair falling like Sauternes. Say October.

I see your shoulder, see your autumn dress.

Say evening, And I see your home open, crowded.

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The poem ends cruelly, demanding attention: "Now fast say stop. I It's how I'll have you/ And here I'll hold." The author takes charge of the subject of the poem , the reader, even of his own ego. "Landlady" is just as ironic-even indicting, but revels in the accusations: Old blonde kiss, insomniac , Sister of grief, Consider me, your boarder, my sleep, You never go down. You rehearse walking In spikes for Sundays, the hall by my room your runway.

I think murder.

You wore the gaudy wall-hanging of Christ Through town like a trench coat.

Lived on vodka , sardines and Ativan. Spent thousands On cosmetic surgery, hairdos, red underwear.

And you are undeniably odd , Please consider me, my sleep, Tonight , before you begin.

He transcends the mythically evil, the dark love, and hollers indignantly: bungling stupidity will be the end of us.

Yet, Hindley has more in him than irony. The lengthy title of "It Was Wine and Hallucination Those Left Behind Insist, Not a Mountain Lion by the Lighthouse at Inverness, Marin County" startles the reader into expecting a humorous poem; but it is actually a tender song and ends on an uplifting note: "And a burst of light/ Breaks whole the crest of the hill."

The shortest poem in "Night Suites," Hindley's "Hoolehua, A.M. ," explores and plays with erotic images: Wind off the stone, an o.

The lizard, his alarm, And long alleys of light.

In my window, this young woman, Echo Laeona, Waving hello.

More cryptic than the volume's other works, "Hoolehua, A.M." appears over one ofMatsueda's three photos of the city at night.

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A fourth night photo wraps around the cover of the farewell issue, one in which there are no stars, only a haze of lights like fast traffic viewed from a height by a bleary-eyed photographer. But my favorite photograph, credited to Frank Stewart, accompanies Honma's "Over Golden Gate." Titled "Man With 21 Shrimp Dinner," the picture shows a man in winter jacket lounging against a neon-lit restaurant window that boasts a woven blind and two Thanksgiving decorations (a pumpkin and a turkey).

Underneath the cardboard cutouts, in bold lettering at the bottom of the window, one reads: "21 SHRIMP DINNER 495." The photograph is oddly surreal, much like the illustrations in earlier issues of The Paper.

"The final issue makes a statement," Matsueda tells Ronck, "and that statement is made more powerful by the fact that it is the final issue." I believe "Night Suites" reaches out with love and friendship to the reader.

We are drawn into the comraderie between poets, and to the morality expressed about the importance of recognizing past mistakes and admitting to failure.

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Howard Wolf PROPERTY AND FANTASY IN THE AMERICAN BACKYARD

"There's an in the American backyard."

Jorge Guitart, The Foreigner's Notebook " ... backyard research."

Lyle Glazier, Letter, 23 November 1984 Who was Wagner, and what was in his yard? Was it possible that someone so ornery and obsessive could teach me anything about America at this late date in the 20th century? Did it make any sense to think that " old man Wagner" -as the neighbors called him-could tell me anything I didn't already know about my life and country? America was, after all, in its fourth period of exploration: the discovery of the land, Westward expansion, the discovery of self, and now Space travel. What could Wagner add?

It seemed unlikely that old man Wagner, a chip off the strata of the Niagara Escarpment, octogenarian shard, could help me uncover any new truths. But I was interested in him. He was an old bird, and I became a bird watcher from the moment I rented a renovated carriage house on Richmond Avenue near Buffalo's lower West Side: a melting pot of Old Wasp , emergent Italian middle-class, blue-collar, and falling (if not quite fallen) academic.

I became fascinated with Wagner-and his hobbyhorse of trash collecting-when I noticed the fortifications and parapets of debris built along the line of the fence joining his house and mine. I didn't understand how he could so brazenly let the weight of his wood and metal hoard push against the fence and begin to cave it in. Wagner was violating several codes-official and unofficial, legal and social-and was getting away with it in rural America where property lines and boundaries are clearer than in the big city.

It didn't make any sense, and I was determined to find out what Wagner was up to. I would try to get him to haul his stuff off the fence and

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away from the side of the house, whert: his junk works and rusting SunBeam bread signs whistled, hummed, and flapped in the windy night like musical saws.

But first I wanted to find out what Wagner was about. He was a survivor of one sort or another, I surmised, and I might learn something from him. If nothing else, he had made it through more than a half century of Buffalo winters and had come through two wars in which he might have served. He had outlived aloneness and, doubtless , loneliness. He was a man without family, cut off from the family of man.

It might have been easier just to ask Wagner about himself and get it over with. But, even though there weren't many manners left in America to which people subscribed uniformly, it still wasn't quite permissible to walk up to someone and ask, flat out, "Why are you nuts?"

Americans had gotten used to doing just about everything in public in the aftermath of the 1960's; we had been extending the claims ofEmersonian self-expression for a century and a half (with technology and communication systems making the exposing of the psyche easier all the time).

But there were still a few residual decencies and cordial echoes that held me back from telling the intrusive truth about a man to his face .

At first Wagner's movements and collection habits seemed random, even though I suspected they weren 't. If he seemed to others always to be doing the same thing-collecting his assortment of trash as he walked stoop-shouldered through the neighborhood with his hobnailed stick-1 could see that he was involved in a careful sorting process. It was as if he were keeping the trash kosher: separating ordinary discards from special items.

These special items included: broken toys, especially wooden ones; pre-Second World War tin signs; latticework and hitching-post rings from the turn of the century; lead glass sections; carved ornamental filigree from one or another abandoned 19th century mansion in the neighborhood; oak plank and beams; marbles and polished stone. It was a collection, not just an assortment of dead objects. He seemed as driven to collect his things as the investment crowd to accumulate wealth or the new entrepreneurs to outfit a sailboat. And it soon became clear that Wagner surveyed his nocturnal acquisitions during the day as he made the rounds of his dilapidated house, trimming an odd hedge here or there.

Wagner parodied the urge to acquire and fortify, to amass and store.

He didn 't so much have the Midas Touch as he had a few Midas mufflers; but, as I looked at things, his things, him , over the fence, he didn't seem to be so different from, or more unpleasant than, the upper crust and would- be pretenders to the privileged life.

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Wagner worked furtively in much the same way that the great American enuepreneurs of the 19th century had operated: grabbing everything in sight when no one was looking. As R. H. Tawney says in The Acquisitive Society, "The lords of the jungle do not hunt by daylight."

For all I knew, Wagner had been to the manor born (maybe he even had been born in the Birge mansion across the street) and was serving the aspirations and tastes-however meretricious-of a better and more coherent past. Who knew who he was really? Maybe he was a Fargo, Fillmore, or Ketchum, a fossil record of one of Buffalo's original families.

It might make as much sense to apply social and economic categories to Wagner as it would to study Bethlehem Steel. It was possible to look at Wagner as a microcosm and analogue of larger forces of accumulation.

From this point of view, Wagner's movements were as mysterious as the fluctuations of the stock market and ebb and flow of MI. But he did more than merely pile and hoard like a miser and precious metal speculator. He concealed and arranged, and , in this way, he could be thought of as a jewel-maker, archaeologist, and paleontologist. I could see that he used junk as a decoy, that he hid, as it were, in the blind of his own debris. Closer observation revealed that Wagner had built something like a miniature city of earthworks-possibly a network of cities, possibly a civilization-whose meaning was obscure, but whose icons, shrines, and crossroads were there for anyone-for anyone who cared about such obscurities -to observe.

If these comparisons didn't fit exactly, they at least gave Wagner a hearing and served as a counterbalance to the more obvious charges that I was likely to bring against him. As I took stock of my life, and wondered about America, on the verge of leaving the country for a year on a Fulbright, I became more attentive to the daily activities of my countryman and native land. Wagner was giving me a chance, without knowing it, to find out more about myself and this mysterious homeland where fact and fantasy vex the imagination.

It wasn't clear if Wagner was building an alternate world out of the discards and wreckage of his life as an act of homage , sacrilege, or even as his own defense against an imagined thermonuclear attack; but he certainly had been at work for decades. I wanted to understand what Wagner was building. I even thought of taking photographs of his work with a Minolta, or some other trick camera; but I was wary of the possible uses of his hobnailed stick, and I didn't want to drive him indoors permanently. I feared his potential threat to himself and me .

People, even some I knew, might choose to be "electronic shut-ins," as I called them, but I didn't want to drive another nail into Wagner's

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already largely boarded-up house . So , I had to snoop cautiously and choose the monthly reading of the gas meter as the most opponune time to investigate his ruins. I saw on these monthly occasions, or when I took out the trash and garbage and peered through the slate of Wagner's rear fence, that he had scoured the neighborhood for talismanic coHectibles, that he had gathered bits and pieces of the city's discards and begun to rework them after Joseph CorneH into an anti-world . He worked as a coHagist or assemblagist to reconstruct the past, to construct the present out of the past.

In the American provinces, far from the centers of contemporary taste , Wagner had managed , somehow, to take on the leading attitudes of Modernism. Doubtless ignorant ofT. S. Eliot, Freud, and Picasso, he had felt in his old bones the need to preserve the past by finding the objective equivalents of feeling and hammering them into some kind of permanent form of nostalgia. He differed from the modern masters mainly in his failure of self-consciousness.

But he was an artist of sorts, or we could say that the symptomatic expression of his inner life, the objective terms in which he revealed himself and showed himself to the world , went beyond the usual array of tics and mannerisms that usuaHy characterize most people who can 't express themselves as weH as artists.

His world, if I may call it that, presented itself concretely as a midpoint between art and pathology. His mounds and burrows seemed to be publicly meaningful, but weren't; they seemed to be aestheticaHy pleasing, but added up seemingly to nothing. Neither a grotesque nor an artist, he moved through his own hidden designs.

I needed to shed more light on the subject, though, so I rigged up a makeshift light on the side of my rented house. It was possible , of course, that the light might drive Wagner out of the corners of the night, but I was racing against the dock to find out something important about America and the West before my departure. Wagner's shed might hold some clues.

Was it possible, for instance, that Wagner could teach me how and why family bonds and tribal compassion could be displaced by the desire and need to acquire matter and money?

I didn't change my habits and routines, but I listened carefully and attentively as I read at night and hoped that I would hear Wagner's footsteps, the scraping or crackling of some object , and catch him in the middle of bagging a fragment. But the nocturnal shuffling had stopped. I seemed to have put an end to Wagner's wanderings . I wondered if I had been wise, even if I had been cruel , if I had destroyed the very evidence that! wanted.

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I had pretty much given up the hope of discovering any more about him when I heard a tapping and hammering on the side of the house one morning a few days later. I thought at first that a family of woodpeckers had joined the cardinals in the backyard I now thought of as a bower; but even I-a city boy-realized instantly that no woodpecker could make that kind of assault upon the house. I drew aside the curtain. It was old man Wagner on a stepladder, whacking away at the clapboard.

I stared in disbelief as Wagner-the embodiment of property and property values, of proprietary relationships-struck the metal plate of the floodlight. If he had stood for anything, it was hoarding and privacy. What did he think he was doing attacking the side of my house?

"Wagner! What are you doing?"

"Just fixing this light for you," he said, tremulously.

"Hell you are," I growled. "You're destroying my property. Get the hell off the side of my house."

"Just trying to be helpful ," Wagner said. "Just trying to put the light at a better angle."

"Some chance. Get off my house."

"Isn't your house anyway," he said.

"You just take care of your junk, I'll take care of mine."

"Isn't junk."

"Whatever."

"Just being neighborly."

"First time ," I said.

"Just wanted to get you a better angle to the back. You never know who's out there at night."

"Put a light on the side of your house."

"Just being neighborly," he said, as he stepped off the ladder, folded it, and slumped towards the shed where he apparently kept the tools he used for collecting, arranging, and storing his hoard.

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe I had missed an opportunity to decipher the Rosetta stone and Linear A & B of Wagner's life; but I didn 't think so. I would have bet anything that the old man was lying to me , as well as to himself, but it didn't make a difference. Wagner hadn 't earned the right to come onto my property. If he had made a life out of the difference between his material world and the world of others, if his house and property defined the distinction between self and other, then I couldn 't just let him cross the line without some ritualistic and compensatory gestures.

These were hard lessons to learn, hard words to live by, auguries of even harder decisions ahead of me : the story of a parsimonious older

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brother, of some self-serving, guarded, and ungenerous colleague, that I would have to tell some day. Wagner had turned out, among other things, to be a training ground for the struggle between my sense of self-worth and fraternity. It wasn't easy to forgive the Accumulators if you wanted to survive under market conditions.

Then Wagner's lights went out, and he disappeared. I thought that I would never see him again or come to see the inside of his mind and house before I left for Central Anatolia. I felt some sadness about this, but thought we probably had come through the floodlight incident with as little mayhem as possible. So far as he knew, I was just annoyed with him.

He knew nothing about my inner drama as I knew really nothing about his. He was probably sulking, nothing worse.

I was ready to accept responsibility for what I had done as I left the house a few nights later to wait for a taxi to take me to the airport for an evening flight to New York, the first leg of my journey to Turkey. I sat on the stoop of my carriage house facing the street and tried to imagine the inside of Wagner's house. A taxi approached, its lights flooding me.

It was as if the frame of his house-shrouded in darkness, illumined by the occasional glimmer of a low-wattage bulb or chalky flicker of an ancient black-and-white T.V. set (doubtless one he had picked off the street)-were suddenly ignited in flame , casting a glow inwards, so that all the levels, like a dollhouse, were visible.

I saw, in this incandescent moment, that the rooms were filled with scraps and pieces of wood and metal, except for the gabled attic which was elegantly decorated and appointed in something like the style of the Regency Period. I thought I could see what looked like an escritoire, hutch, and spinet of the period just after the American Revolution.

I saw, in my mind's eye, that Wagner's Walpurgisnacht, the flame of his life, would reveal the remnant of a late neoclassic dream. He was trying, perhaps , to build a dream of a more civilized America out of the broken pieces, as he took it, of the present. It was, of course , a task that could only lead to one sort of ruin or another; or, if it did not lead to ruin, his kind of nocturnal salvage act could only lead to an inability to live in the present, an unwillingness to reach across a fence to lend a helping hand to a neighbor.

Still, as the fire raged in my mind, I couldn't help feeling a kind of grudging respect for Wagner and what he may have taught me about my country in its desperate effort to replace history with fantasy, in the absence of family coherence. He had taught me something about the risk of not living with others in the present. " Call a cab, mister?"

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As I saw his house outlined against the sky, I thought I saw him, too, standing on his porch conducting some unheard music. He seemed, in that instant, less threatened by flames than he did transfigured by light.

"Cab? " I thought I heard a Sousa march and some measures of an Ives symphony. Wagner was possibly trying, as I imagined him, to tell me something about the difficulty of being alone in America in the electronic era, or maybe he was just confused again, trying to put together pieces that couldn' t be joined.

"Just wait a few weeks," he seemed to mouth. "You'll learn something about the pain of old and new, then you'll have more respect for old man Wagner. Wait until Ankara. Wait until Jerusalem. You'll see. You'll learn something about family and history."

The light faded. The house was dark again.

"Okay, cabbie."

It was time to go.

I thought of Wagner in Turkey months later when I came across a passage in a letter from Edmund Wilson to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Portable Wtlson, 5July 1921): America seems to be actually beginning to express herself in something like an idiom of her own. But, believe me, she has a long way to go. The commercialism and industrialism, with no older and more civilized civilization behind except one layer of eighteenth-century on the East Coast, impose a terrific handicap . . . .

Wagner and I were brothers of sorts, as it turned out , as I came to see.

We both had lost touch with our family origins. In the absence of family, we each had turned to versions of history that had become fantasy: his as a collection of broken objects, mine as an attempt to make a story out of his and my life.

We would have done better to become good neighbors and build from there, but too much came between us- city-country, Jew-Gentile , general differences, and the phobic property line. Still, I vowed to myself that when I returned from Anatolia I would "buy" - what else could I do in a country where reality and real estate were almost equivalent terms?and try nonetheless to cross the fence , to reach out and try to know a neighbor.

If the family were in chaos and history running amok, it made sense to get to know a neighbor instead of making up a story about him. At least I would give it a try one day.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Kathleen Andrasick teaches writing and literature at Iolani School. She is a codirector of the Hawaii Writing Program and is currently a graduate student in English at the University of Hawaii. She has won the Lorin Tarr Gill poetry contest sponsored by the National League of American Pen Women in both poetry and non-fiction.

Robert Bowie's collection of poetry, Hearing The Light, was published in 1985 by University Editions; his poetry manuscript, Wintermost, recently won the SCOP Publications Poetry Competition. On May 1, 1987, Bowie and eleven other Maryland poets were honored at the Folger Shak~speare Library in Washington, D.C. His poetry has appeared in over 200 newspapers and magazines of six countries.

Greg Boyd's latest collection of poems is The Masked Ball (Unicorn Press, 1987).

Brady T. Brady lives and writes in Sonoma, California, and dreams of hitting the Lotto.

Meredith S. Carson, born in Brooklyn, New York, has published a book of poetry, The Secretary Bird, and is working on another book of poems. A perrenial student of poetry writing, she often attends classes at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Sesshu Foster's first book of poems, Angry Days, was published in 1987 by West End Press. Foster's translations have appeared in publications such as Alcatraz 3, Compages, Dalmo 'ma 7, Fiction International, and River Styx; in late 1987, Alcatraz Editions published her translation of Akrilica, a book of poems by Juan Felipe Herrera. Along with writers and publishers from 43 other countries, Foster, representing West End Press, attended the first International Book Fair in Managua, Nicaragua in 1987.

Stuart Friebert co-edits Field. Along with David Young, he is preparing a second edition of the Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Frieben has recent poems in Antioch Review, Iowa Review, and a Czech magazine, Svetova Literatura.

Robert Funge is co-recipient, with Simon Perchik, of the 1986 South Dakota Review Poetry Award . His work currently appears in Ball State Forum, Chanto11 Review, Cima"on Review, Hollins Cn'tic, New York Quarterly, and other publications.

Norma Gorst, as a "sometime" student in English at the University of Hawaii, has twice won the Mynle Clark Award for Creative Writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines such as Aloha, Bamboo Ridge, Cottonwood, and Rain Bird.

T. M. Goto teaches English at the University of Hawaii. Her poems have appeared in Chaminade Literary Review, Hawaii Review, Rain Bird, and Ramrod. She writes for life.

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Jay Griswold, who earned a Master's in Creative Writing from Colorado State {1979), has worked since 1981 as a seasonal employee for the Colorado Division of Parks. He spends the winter months traveling and working on his manuscripts. Griswold has recent poems in Gryphon, North Dakota Quarterly, Quixote, and others.

James Gurley currently lives in Seattle after receiving his MFA from the University of Montana. His poems have appeared in several literary journals, including Bloomsbury Review, Greenfield Review, and Pembroke Magazine. "Sunrise" is from a collection of poems he is now completing.

Donnell Hunter teaches English and Creative Writing at Ricks College, Rexburg, Idaho, and is the proprietor and sole laborer ofHoneybrook Press. He received a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana {1982) under the direction of Richard Hugo. He has published three chapbooks of his own, the latest of which is At Fort Worden {1986); he has also published ~bout 200 poems in 34 states and in about 80 magazines, including The Cape Rock, Christian Science Monitor, College English, CutBank, Inten路m, jam To-Day, Manna, Permafrost, and Willow Spn'ngs. From 1964 to 1966, Hunter was an assistant professor of English at Church College of Hawaii in Laie.

David James works as Director of Admissions at the University of Michigan-Flint.

His most recent book is A Heart Out of This World, published by CarnegieMellon University Press. He and his wife have three children .

J. Kates's most recent publications include poems and translations in The Flon'da Review, The MacGuffin, The New York Quarterly, and Red Bass-and poems in translation (Ukrainian) in Vsyesvit.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt grew up in Hawaii. As a California Poet in the Schools and editor of Quercus, she Jives now in Sacramento with her husband and two children.

T. S. Kerrigan's poems have appeared in the anthologies New Wn'ting II (New York, 1980) and Celebration (Los Angeles, 1982), as well as magazines such as Aspect, Bitte"oot, Calzfornia State Poetry Quarterly, Ceidlidh, Cottonwood Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Northstone Review, Poet (India), Sequoia, Small Pond, Trapani Nuova (Italy) and Wisconsin Review. In addition to writing poems, Kerrigan writes for the theater. Branches Among the Stars, a play about James Joyce, was produced in February 1988 at the Ensemble Srudio Theatre in Los Angeles.

Charles Kuschinski has moved to a small town in Mexico that has several good cafes.

Laureen Kwock is a novelist who is at work on a coming-of-age novel set in the Hawaii of the 1960's. An exerpt from this work appeared recently in AszAm. Jonathan London's work appeared recently in Crosscurents, Gargoyle, The Greenfield Review, and elsewhere . His founh chapbook will be published by Man Root Press in 1988. London lives in Graton, California, with his wife and two young boys.

J. J. McKenna's poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines. Recently he has given readings at Michigan State, Texas Christian University and the

103

University of Louisville. He teaches contemporary literature at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he is an associate professor of English.

Marla Musick is an art major at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. In the spring of 1988 she will be attending classes in England.

Sandra Nelson's poems and stories have appeared recently in magazines such as Amherst Review, Bad Henry Review, Black Ice, Black Mountain II Review, Mississippi Mud, Passages North, Salt Lick, and others, as well as in the anthology Fiction '86. She teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and works, also, as a portrait artist and consultant.

Louis Phillips' collection of poems-The Time, The Hour, The Solitariness ofthe Place-was published by Swallow's Tale Press, 1984. His full-length plays include The Last ofthe Marx Brothers' Writers and The Ballroom in St. Patn"ck 's Cathedral; his story, "The Man Who was Struck By Lightning," received a PEN Fiction Syndication Award. He teaches creative writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Tony Quagliano's poems have been in New Letters, The New York Quarterly, The Pushcart Pnze: Best of the Small Presses, Ramrod, Rolling Stone, and, with Joseph Stanton, in the collections Creativity and Science and Perceiving Nature.

His article, "Signs and Symbols," is in the Encyclopedia of Psychology, published by John Wiley and Sons, New York.

David Ray has taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and, in 1987, was an exchange professor at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He is founding editor of New Letters, as well as the creator of New Letters, a National Public Radio Program devoted to poetry. His awards include an NEA fellowship, several P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Awards, and the William Carlos Williams Prize for The Tramp's Cup. He has published twelve books of poettyincluding Sam's Book, a collection of elegies and other poems for his son-and one of shon stories. "I am a firm believer in zen," says Ray. "I live in the present and respond to the now."

Ralph Salisbury lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Maurya Simon teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Riverside. Her first book of poems, The Enchanted Room, was recently published by Copper Canyon Press. She lives with her husband and two daughters 7,000 feet up atop Mount Baldy in southern California.

Judith Skillman's work has appeared in Light }ear, Northwest Review, Poetry, Seneca Review, and other magazines and anthologies. Her collection of poems, The Worship ofthe Visible Spectrum, is fonhcoming from Breitenbush Books.

She lives in Bellevue, Washington, where her three children continually push her to the limit, and teaches writing and communications courses at Bellevue Community College.

Floyd Skloot lives in Ponland, Oregon. His work is forthcoming in Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, and Northwest Review.

R. T. Smith teaches in the Depanment of English, Auburn University.

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Douglas Stanton is a student at the Writers' Workshop at the University oflowa.

Gethsemane Swann lives and writes near Point Roberts, Washington.

Rodolfo Torres, along with other Cuban volunteers, fought in the 1976 war between Angola and South Mrica; he served as soldier and medic. He is currently a journalist with Cuban Radio and Television Institute. The book from which "This Child Goes to Heaven" is taken, Mis Hermanos en Ia Guerra (My Brothers at Wflr), won the Short Story Prize of the Ministry of Armed Forces in 1981. Torres is 37 years old.

Robert R. Ward is a student of English and other disciplines outside the classroom .

His work appears in The Fiddlehead, Kansas Quarterly, Plains Poetry journal, Seattle Review, TAR River Poetry, Yellow Silk, and others. He is editor of Bellowing Ark. Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of Humanities at Boston University's College of Basic Studies, where he teaches literature , philosophy, film, and art history. He has published over 60 stories, essays, and poems in a variety of journals, and has received prizes for fiction, essays, and poetry-even one for teaching. Although he had two poems published in Hawaii Review 16, Wexelblatt has yet to see the Pacific Ocean .

Robert F. Whisler holds a Master's degree in liberal arts from John Hopkins University and has taught at Loyola College in Baltimore , Maryland . His poetry is published internationally in such periodicals as Christian Science Monitor, Coe Review, Georgia Review, Hollins Critic, Kansas Quarterly, New Mexico Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, and others .

Howard Wolf is Professor of English at SUNY / Buffalo, where he has taught since 1967. He is the author of three books, mostly recently The Eduction of a Teacher, Essays on American Culture (Prometheus Books, 1987). He has written, all together, over a hundred and fifty literary and cultural essays, short stories, poems, humorous sketches, and a variety of commentaries, reviews, and opinions. A fellow of both the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Wolf was selected as a Fulbright Lecturer in Turkey (1983-84).

John Woods was born and reared in southern Indiana and was educated at Indiana University. He served in the Air Force in World War II. Since 1955, he has taught at Western Michigan University, where he was appointed Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Michigan Artist in 1978. He was an N.E.A. Fellow in 1982 . Woods is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent , The Salt Stone: Selected Poems, from Dragon Gate. Phyllis Hoge Thompson , David Wagoner, W. D . Snodgrass, and Woods composed the first Poetry Quartet, which toured the Hawaiian Islands in the winter of 1967 (along the way, Woods survived the Chicago blizzard at O'Hare, a scene glorified in the film Airport).

Leona Yamada is pursuing a M.A. in English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

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Passages to the Dream Shore SHORT STORIES OF CONTEMPORARY HAWAII

Frank Stewart, editor $12 .95, paper

''Passages to the Dream Shore is an incredible col-

lection of 24 short stories about life in Hawaii today, written f?y 20 local authors, all of them living, many of whom are born in the islands . It is 'an incredible collection ' because these are, without exception, poignant stories, compelling stories. They are about real people in real places in the times that we know, and they're not easily forgotten, or put aside with the book. ' '- Honolulu Star-Bulletin Contributors to Passages to the Dream Shore include Asa Baber, John Heckathorn , Steve Heller, John Domin is Holt, Christine Kirk-Kuwaye, Michael LaGory, Lanning Lee, Darrell H. Y Lum, Craig Howes, fan MacMillan, Michael McPherson, Ralph Anthony Misitano, Victoria Nelson, Susan Nunes, Robert Onopa, Patsy S. Saiki, Marjorie Sinclair, Mary Wakayama , Sylvia Watanabe , and Cedric Yamanaka .

UAWAII

University of Hawaii Press

l!l!!!!J Available in fine bookstores throughout Hawaii

Poetry by

Kathleen Andrasick Robert Bowie Greg Boyd Meredith S. Carson Stuart Friebert Robert Funge Norma Gorst T. M. Goto Jay Griswold James Gurley Donnell Hunter David James J . .Kates Susan Kelly-DeWitt T. S. Kerrigan Jonathan London J. J. McKenna Louis Phillips Tony Quagliano David Ray Ralph Salisbury Maurya Simon Judith Skillman R. T. Smith Douglas Stanton Gethsemane Swann Robert R. Ward Robert Wexelblatt Robert F. Whisler John Woods Leona Yamada Fiction by

Brady T. Brady Sesshu Foster Charles Kuschinski Laureen Kwock Sandra Nelson Floyd Skloot Rodolfo Torres Essay by

Howard Wolf Review by

T. M. Goto Photograph by

Marla Musick ISSN: 0093- 9625