68

TriQuarterly wishes to acknowledge the recent and continuing support ofThe Joyce Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The Illinois Arts Council, whose generosity has helped make possible the publication of the magazine, its special projects and its future planning.

Ex.cxatiw Editor

Dob

Paula

TJ£;l1CnCe Des Pres, G., lett, Gerald Grafl, GraV, S. r, David Havman, Bill 1(1tll';1), Elizabeth Poc:hoda, Michael Rvan

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WRITING, ART AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED IN THE FALL, WINTER AND SPRING AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

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Irina Ratushinskaya, a poet who was sentenced in 1983 to seven years' hard labor followed by five years' internal exile for poetry deemed critical of the Soviet Union, was unexpectedly freed recently. Western diplomats viewed Miss Ratushinskaya's release as a gesture by the Kremlin to defuse criticism of its violations of human rights, at a time when arms talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union have reached one of their recurring critical stages. A selection of Miss Ratushinskaya's poems and drawings, smuggled from prison, appeared in TriQuarterly #66.

"The Old Man Tells His Story and Gets It Wrong" by Richard Spilman, a short story that originally appeared in TriQuarterly #62, has been included in The Editor's Choice: New American Short Stories, Volume Ill, a Bantam book compiled by George E. Murphy, jr., and published simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback.

Choice Magazine Listening, the periodic audio anthology for the blind, the visually impaired and the physically handicapped, has selected a short story from TriQuarterly #67 for inclusion in an upcoming issue: "Wolfe County" by Martha Bennett Stiles.

In Proportion

Lynn Grossman

She is small and it is smaller, but it isn't the smallest it has been. The smallest had been when she was three and had started. Then, when she put it under her chin and drew the bow across it, the sound was not like music. Music-to-be, is what I called it.

The teacher had said it was in proportion. Proportion was the thing that counted, the teacher had said.

At three, it was a miniature in complete detail, a tiny version of a perfect thing. She was that, too, when she was three.

At eight it is bigger, but still in proportion, for she is bigger, too.

There is a right way and a wrong way, and I want to do it right for her. For me, it is hard to tell, right and wrong. Proportion, I mean. When I carry it for her, it is too small in my hand. Out of my hand it looks even smaller to me, but I think it might look bigger to her. Proportion is easier to see when you are eight.

In the taxi she is too small for the seat belt. She is looking out the window, but it looks to me like she cannot see the street. It looks to me like she can see sky and tops of buildings. When you are her size, up is where you are always looking.

There is no partition in the taxi. The driver points to the case and asks if it's a small machine gun. Everyone asks that question, but I laugh anyway, to be polite. She doesn't laugh. She has only learned polite up to Please and Thank You.

She snaps the snaps on the case with her index finger and her thumb. When she was born, I spread her fingers and traced her hand. When she got older, she traced my hand next to hers. Last year, both our hands

could not fit on the same piece of paper. This year, she would not let me trace her hand at all.

The driver drums the steering wheel. His hands are big, bigger than hers and mine put together. He guesses her age, eight. Right, I say.

Eight and a quarter, she says. She seems to know the value of time. We are in the park when I see them. We are at the place in between where you can't see the buildings on the East Side and you can't see the buildings on the West Side. That is an unlucky place in the middle, I think. That place in the park is like being lost. I don't like being in between, and I have always felt relieved to be past it, to know what side of the city I am on. But that is where we are.

She can balance it under her chin without holding on. Her small face fits perfectly on the ebony cup. When I play it to show her how, my face does not fit at all. My face hides the bridge and the tuning pins. When it was the smallest it had been, I would try to show her on the strings. I would press one string, but two would go down. Myhand was too big. It was an impossibility, for me, anyway, like wearing a mitten and picking up a dime.

She had to show me. She would put her fingers on the strings and I would talk them into position. I would talk and they would move. We could do this so quickly we were like one person, really, half-big and half-small.

They are attached to the visor with rubber bands stretched so tight over the vinyl they are as thin as violin strings. They start small and go big, bigger, biggest in steps, like nesting dolls. Only these are not identical, even though they seem to be the same child, even though the backgrounds are identical-light blue and mottled the way paper looks when you crumple it and spread it out again. These are different poses. These pictures are in special frames under the rubber bands, special plastic frames with fancy edges.

The boy in the pictures has big, dark eyes, like my kid's eyes. The smallest is when he is a baby. The biggest looks about my kid's age. The other one is someplace in between.

The driver talks to my kid, but she does not answer him. She is not a friendly kid, and that is all right with me. But I do not want to be rude to him, at least not in front of her. Everything you do in front of them is a lesson, I think, and I want to do it right for her.

So I talk to him. Small talk. I say, Is that your kid? and I see her eyes

look up in the direction of the visor. So what comes next is my fault. My fault for asking.

That is my son, he says. He is eight. He is dead, is what the driver says to us.

We get off at Fifth and walk the big block. I do not speak because I cannot do it right for her. This is one I cannot do right for me. I think death is not out of proportion, it has just always seemed that way to me. I am as small as she is when it comes to this, but I would rather she not know, so I do not talk at all.

She walks close to my leg and the violin hits the small place behind my knee. She looks like she is thinking. I can see her index finger on the handle of the case picking the cuticle on her thumb. That is what she does when she thinks, picks.

Here are the deaths I think she knows about: death by ray gun, death by meteor shower, death by pricking a finger on a bobbin, death by poisoned apple.

The deaths I know about, I don't want to say.

Maybe she is thinking of her deaths. I know I am thinking of mine. I know I am thinking of the child he kept in the present tense.

Why do they put machine guns in violin cases? is the question she asks when she crosses our silence, but she doesn't wait for the answer. She drops my hand and walks on ahead of me, and she swings the violin against her own leg.

We walk the two flights when we get there, and I cannot catch my breath. It is not the stairs, I think, but because she is in the present tense, too.

The day she was born, when she was the smallest she had been, I could not imagine a time when I would not be bigger than she was.

I am too slow for her now. She takes the stairs two at a time, and beats me to the top. She looks big on the landing when I am looking up.

Two Stories

Robert Coover

A Sudden Story

Once upon a time, suddenly, while it still could, the story began. For the hero, setting forth, there was of course nothing sudden about it, neither about the setting forth, which he'd spent his entire lifetime anticipating, nor about any conceivable endings, which seemed, like the horizon, to be always somewhere else. For the dragon, however, who was stupid, everything was sudden. He was suddenly hungry and then he was suddenly eating something. Always, it was like the first time. Then, all of a sudden, he'd remember having eaten something like that before: a certain familiar sourness And, just as suddenly, he'd forget. The hero, coming suddenly upon the dragon (he'd been trekking for years through enchanted forests, endless deserts, cities carbonized by dragonbreath, for him "suddenly" was not exactly the word), found himself envying, as he drew his sword (a possible ending had just loomed up before him, as though the horizon had, with the desperate illusion of suddenness, tipped), the dragon's tenseless freedom. Freedom? the dragon might have asked, had he not been so stupid, chewing over meanwhile the sudden familiar sourness (a memory ?) on his breath. From what? (Forgotten.)

Cartoon

The cartoon man drives his cartoon car into the cartoon town and runs over a real man. The real man is not badly hurt, the cartoon car is virtually weightless after all, it's hardly any worse than getting a cut lip from licking an envelope, but the real man feels that a wrong has nevertheless been done him, so he goes in search of a policeman. There are no real policemen around, so he takes his complaint to a cartoon policeman. The cartoon policeman salutes him briskly and, almost with, out turning around, darts off in the direction of the accident, but the real man is disconcerted by the way the policeman hurries along about four inches above the pavement, taking five or six airy steps for every one of his own, and blowing his whistle ceaselessly. It's as though they were walking side by side down two different streets. The cartoon town, meanwhile, slides past silently, more or less on its own.

At the scene of the accident, they find the cartoon man with a real policeman. The cartoon car is resting on its roof, looking ill and abused. "Is this the one?" demands the real policeman, pointing with his night, stick. The cartoon man jumps up and down and makes high-pitched incriminating noises, the car snorting and whimpering pathetically in the background. When the cartoon policeman blows his whistle in protest, or perhaps just out of habit, a huge cartoon dog, larger than the cartoon car, bounds onto the scene and chases him off. "You'll have to come with me," announces the real policeman severely, collaring the real man, and he can hear the cartoon car snickering wickedly. "There are procedural matters involved here!"

As though in enactment of this pronouncement, the huge cartoon dog comes lumbering through again from the opposite direction, chased now by a real cat, the cat in turn chased by a cartoon woman. The woman pulls up short upon spying the real policeman, who has meanwhile shot the cat (this is both probable and confounding), and, winking at the real man, bares her breasts for the policeman. These breasts are nearly as large as the woman herself, and they have nipples on them which turn sequentially into pursed lips, dripping spigots, traffic lights, beckoning fingers, then lit,up pinball bumpers. The real policeman is not com' pletely real, after all. He has cartoon eyes that stretch out of their sockets like paired erections, locking on the cartoon woman's breasts with their fanciful nipples. She takes her breasts off and gives them to the real policeman, and he creeps furtively away, clutching the gift

closely like a fearful secret, his eyes retracting deep into his skull as though to empty it of its own realness, what's left of it.

"Thank you," says the real man. "You have probably saved my life." He can hear the cartoon car sniggering and wheezing at this, but the cartoon woman simply shrugs and remarks enigmatically: "Plenty more where those came from." She snuggles up to the huge cartoon dog who has returned and is pawing curiously at the cadaver of the real cat. "I feel somehow," murmurs the dog, sniffing the eat's private parts, "a certain inexplicable anxiety." The cartoon car hoots and wheezes mockingly again, and the dog, annoyed, lifts its leg over it. There is a violent hissing and popping, and then the car is silent. The cartoon man is infuriated at this, squeaking and yipping and beating his fists on the cartoon dog and the cartoon woman. They ignore him, cuddling up once more, the dog panting heavily after exerting himself, both mentally and physically, the woman erotically touching the dog's huge floppy tongue with the tip of her own (she has a real mouth, the real man notices, and the touch of her tiny round tongue against the vast pink landscape of the dog's flat one for some reason makes him want to cry), so the cartoon man scurries over to beat on the real man. It is not so much painful as vaguely unnerving, as though he were being nagged to remember something he had managed to forget.

The cartoon woman drifts off with the cartoon dog ("When," the dog is musing, scratching philosophically behind his ear, "is a flea not a flea?"), and the cartoon man, his rage spent, walks over to pick up the dead cat. As the cartoon man walks away, he seems to grow, and when he returns, dragging the dead cat by its tail, he seems to shrink again. He gives the real man a huge cartoon knife, produced as if from nowhere, then dashes off, returning almost instantly with a cartoon table, tablecloth, napkins, plates and silverware, a candelabra, and two cartoon chairs - before these things can even be counted, they are already set in place. His voice makes shrill little speeded-up noises once more, which seem to suggest he wants the real man to cut the cat up for dinner. He zips away again, returning with cartoon salad, steak sauce and cartoon wine, then streaks off to a cartoon bakery.

Who knows, thinks the real man, tucking in his napkin, all this may be in fulfillment of yet another local ordinance, so, more out of respect than appetite, he prepares to cut up the dead cat. When he lays the cat out on the cartoon table, however, all the cartoon plates and silverware, condiments and candelabra leap offthe table and run away shrieking, or else laughing, it's hard to tell, and though the table looks horizontal, the cat slides right off it. Oh well, the real man sighs to himself, dropping

the knife disconsolately on the table as though paying the check, they can't say I didn't try. He goes over to the cartoon car and sets it on its wheels again and, after a puddle has formed beneath it, gets inside and starts up the motor. Or rather, the motor starts up by itself, choking and sputtering at first and making loud flatulent noises out its exhaust pipes, then clearing its throat and revving up, eventually humming along smoothly. The cartoon town meanwhile slides by as before.

When they reach the real town, or when the real town, the one where the real man lives, reaches them, the cartoon car doesn't seem to work anymore. The man finds he has to push his feet through the floor and walk it home, much to the apparent amusement of all the real or mostly real passersby. He is reminded of the time when, as a boy, he found himself looking up at his teacher, hovering over him with a humorless smile, wielding a wooden ruler (he thinks of her in retrospect as a cartoon teacher, but he could be mistaken about this-certainly the ruler was real), and accusing him, somewhat mysteriously, of "failing his interpolations." "What?" he'd asked, much to his immediate regret, a regret he strangely feels again now, as if he were suffering some kind of spontaneous reenactment, and it suddenly occurs to him, as he walks his cartoon car miserably down the middle of the street through all the roaring real ones, that, yes, the teacher was almost certainly real-but her accusation was a cartoon.

At home he shows his wife, lying listlessly on the sofa, the cartoon car, now no bigger than the palm of his hand, and tells her about his adventures. "It's like being the butt of a joke without a teller or some' thing," he says, casting about for explanations, when, in reality, there probably are none. "I know," she replies with a certain weary bitterness. She lifts her skirts and shows him the cartoon man. "He's been there all day." The cartoon man smirks up at him over his shoulder, making exaggerated undercranked thrusts with his tiny cartoon buttocks, powder-white with red spots like a clown's cheeks. "Is he he hurting you?" the real man gasps. "No, it just makes me jittery. It's sort of like cutting your lip on the edge of an envelope," she adds with a grimace, letting her skirt drop, "if you know what I mean."

"Ah " He too feels a stinging somewhere, though perhaps only in his reflections. Distantly, he hears a policeman's whistle, momentarily persuasive, but he knows this is no solution, real or otherwise. It would be like scratching an itch with legislation or an analogy - something that cartoon dog might have said, and perhaps did, he wasn't listening all the time. No, one tries, but it's never enough. With a heavy heart (what a universe!), he goes into the bathroom to flush the cartoon car down the

toilet and discovers, glancing in the mirror, that, above the cartoon napkin still tucked into his collar like a lolling tongue, he seems to have grown a pair of cartoon ears. They stick out from the sides of his head like butterfly wings. Well, well, he thinks, wagging his new ears animatedly, or perhaps being wagged by them, there's hope for me yet

Old Francis

]ames Kelman

He wiped the bench dry enough to sit down, thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and hunched his shoulders, his chin coming down onto his chest. It was cold now and it hadnt been earlier, unless he just wasnt feeling it earlier. And he started shivering immediately, as if the thought had induced it. This was the worst yet. No question about it. If care wasnt taken things would degenerate even further. If that was possible. But of course it was possible. Anything was possible. Everything was possible. Every last thing in the world. A man in a training suit was approaching at a jog, a fastish sort of jog. The noise of his breathing, audible from a long way off. Frank stared at him, not caring in the slightest when it became obvious the jogger had noticed and was now a wee bit self-conscious in his run, as if his elbows were rotating in an unnatural manner. It was something to smile about. Joggers were always supposed to be so self-absorbed but here it seemed like they were just the same as the rut, the common rut, of whom Francis was definitely one. But then as he passed by the bench the jogger muttered something which ended in an "sk" sound, perhaps "brisk." Could he have said something like "brisk"? Brisk this morning. That was a fair probability, in reference to the weather. Autumn. The path by the side of the burn was deep in slimy leaves, decaying leaves, approaching that physical state where they were set to be reclaimed by the earth, unless perhaps along came the midgie men and they shoveled it all up and dumped it into the midgie motor then on to the rubbish dump where they would sprinkle aboard paraffin and so on and so forth till the day ofjudgment. And where was the jogger! Vanished. Without breaking stride he must have carried straight on and up the slow winding incline towards the

bridge, where to vanish was the only outcome, leaving Francis alone with his thoughts.

These thoughts of Francis's were diabolical.

The sound of laughter. Laughter! Muffled, yes, but still, laughter. Could this be the case!! Truly? Or was it a form of eternal high jinks!!

Hearty stuff as well. Three blokes coming along the path from the same direction the jogger had appeared from. They noticed Francis. 0 yes, they soon spotted him. They couldnt miss him. It was not possible. If they had wanted to miss him they couldnt have. And they were taking stock of him and how the situation was in toto. They were going to get money off of him, off of. One of them had strolled on a little bit ahead; he was wearing a coat that must have belonged to somebody else altogether, it was really outlandish. Francis shook his head. The bloke halted at the bench and looked at him:

You got twenty pence there jim, for the busfare home?

Francis was frowning at the bloke's outfit. Sorry, he said, but that's some coat you're wearing!

What?

Francis smiled.

Funny man.

Sorry, I'm no being sarcastic.

A funny man! he called to his two companions. He's cracking funnies about my coat!

Surely no! said this one who was holding a bottle by its neck.

Aye.

That's cheeky! He swigged from the bottle and handed it on to the third man. Then he added: Maybe he likes its style!

The first bloke nodded, he smiled briefly.

And he wants to buy it! Heh, maybe he wants to buy it! Eh, d'you want to buy it?

Frank coughed and cleared his throat, and he stared at the grass by his shoes, sparish clumps of it amid the muddiness, many feets have stood and so on. He raised his head and gazed at the second man; he was dangerous as well, every bit as dangerous. He noticed his pulse slowing now. Definitely, slowing. Therefore it must have been galloping. That's what Francis's pulse does, it gallops. Other cunts' pulses they just fucking stroll along at a safe distance from one's death's possibility. What was he on about now! Old Francis here! His death's possibility! Death: and/or its possibility. Was he about to get a stroke? Perhaps. He shook his head and smiled, then glanced at the first bloke who was gazing at him, and said: I didnt mean you to take it badly.

What?

Your coat. Frank shrugged, his hands still in his pockets. My comment he shrugged again.

Your comment?

Aye, I didnt mean you to take it badly. I never took it badly. Frank nodded.

The second bloke laughed suddenly. Heh by the way, he said, when you come to think about it, the guy's right, your fucking coat, eh! Fucking comic cuts! Look at it!

And then he turned and sat down heavily, right next to him on the bench; and he stared straight into his eyes. Somebody whose body was saturated with alcohol. He was literally smelling. Literally actually smelling. Just like Francis right enough, he was smelling as well. Birds of a feather flock together. And what do they do when they are together? A word for booze ending in "er." Frank smiled, shaking his head. I'm skint, he said, I'm out the game. No point looking for dough off of me.

Off of. There it had come out again. It was peculiar the way such things happened.

The two blokes were watching him. So was the third. This third was holding the bottle now. And a sorry sight he was too, this third fellow, a poor-looking cratur. His trousers were somebody else's; and that was for fucking definite. My my my. Frank shook his head and he called: Eh look, I'm no being sarcastic but that pair of trousers you're wearing I mean for God sake surely you could do a wee bit better, eh?

He glanced at the other two: Eh? surely yous could do a wee bit better than that?

What you talking about? asked the first bloke.

Your mate's trousers, they're fucking falling to bits. I mean look at his arse, his arse is fucking poking out!

And so it was, you could see part of the man's shirt tail poking out! Frank shook his head, but didnt smile. He gestured at the trousers. He is a funny man right enough! said the second bloke.

Instead of answering him the first bloke just watched Frank, not showing much emotion at all, just in a very sort of cold manner, passionless. If he had been unsure of his ground at any time he was definitely not unsure now. It was him that was dangerous. Of the trio, it was him. Best just to humor him. Frank muttered, I'm skint. He shrugged and gazed over the path towards the burn.

You're skint.

Frank continued gazing over the path.

It's just a couple of bob we're looking for.

Sorry, I really am skint but.

The second bloke leaned closer and said: Snout?

Frank shook his head.

You've got no snout! The bloke didnt believe him. He just didnt believe him. He turned and gave an exaggerated look to his mates. It was as if he was just not able to believe it possible. Frank was taken aback. It was actually irritating. It really was. He was frowning at the fellow, then quickly he checked what the other one was doing. You never know, he might have been sneaking up behind him at the back of the bloody bench! It was downright fucking nonsensical. And yet it was the sort of incident you could credit. You were sitting down in an attempt to recover a certain inner equilibrium when suddenly there appear certain forces, seemingly arbitrary forces, as if they had been called up by a positive evil. Perhaps Augustine was right after all? Before he left the Manichaeans.

Twenty pence just, said the first.

Frank shook his head. He glanced at the bloke. Look, I'm telling you the truth, I'm skint.

You've got a watch.

Whatyou kidding! Frank stared at him for a moment; then he sniffed and cleared his throat, gazed back over the path.

He has got a watch, said the second bloke.

And now the third stepped across to the bench, and he handed the bottle to the first. Frank had his hands out of his pockets and placed them onto his kneecaps, gripping them, his knuckles showing white.

Did you miss your bus? asked the first.

Did you miss your bus! laughed the second.

And the third bloke just stared. Frank stared back at him. Was he the leader after all? Perhaps he was the one he would have to go for first, boot him in the balls and then face the other pair. Fucking bastards. Because if they thought he was going to give them the watch just like that then they had another think coming. Bastards. One thing he was never was a coward. Bastards, he was never fucking a coward. He flexed his fingers then closed them over his kneecaps again, and he sighed, his shoulders drooping a bit. He stared over the path. It was as if they were aspects of the same person. That was what really was the dangerous thing.

The second bloke was speaking; he was saying, I dont think he even goes on public transport, this yin, I think he's car-owner.

A car-owner! Frank grinned. I'm actually a train-owner! A train-

owner! That was really funny. One of his better witticisms. A train, owner. Ha ha. Frank smiled. He would have to watch himself though, such comments, so unfunny as to approach the borderline.

What borderline? One of irrationality perhaps. A nonsensicality. A plain whimsy. Whimsy. There was a bird whistling in a tree nearby. D d d dooie. D d d dooie. Wee fucking bird, its own wee fucking heart and soul. D d d dooie. What was it looking for? It was looking for a mate. A wee female. A wee chookie. Aw the sin. My my my. My my my. And yet it was quite upsetting. It brought tears to the eye. If Frank could just heave a brick at the tree so it would get to fuck away out of this, this vale of misery. God. I need a drink, said Frank to the first bloke. He gestured at the bottle: D'you mind?

The man handed him the bottle.

The second looked at him, biding his time, waiting to see the out' come.

And the third bloke put his hands into his trouser pockets and strolled across the path, down to the small fence at the burn, where he leant his elbows.

The noise of the water, the current not being too strong, a gush more than anything, a continuous gushing sound, and quite reassuring. This freshness as well, it was good. The whole scene in fact, was very peaceful, very very peaceful; a deep tranquility. Not yet 10 o'clock in the morning but so incredibly calm.

There was no label on the bottle. Francis frowned at this. What happened to the label? he asked.

It fell off.

Is it hair lacquer or something?

Hair lacquer! laughed the second bloke.

It looks like it to me, replied Francis.

You dont have to fucking drink it you know!

Francis nodded; he studied the bottle. The liquid looked fine-as much as it was possible to tell from looking; but what was there could be told about a drink by looking at the outside of its bottle? He couldnt even tell what color it was, although the actual glass was dark brownish. He raised the neck of the bottle, tilted his head and tasted a mouthful: Christ it was fiery stuff! He shook his head at the two blokes, he seemed to be frowning but he wasnt. WWhhh! Fucking hot stuff this! he said.

Aye.

Francis had another go. Really fiery but warming, a good drink. He wiped his mouth and returned the bottle. Ta, he said.

I told you it was the mccoy, said the second bloke.

Did you?

Aye.

Mm. It's fucking hot, I'll say that!

Know what we call it?

Naw.

Sherry vindaloo!

Francis smiled. That was a good yin, sherry vindaloo. He'd remember it.

The first bloke nodded and repeated it: Sherry vindaloo.

The second bloke laughed and swigged some, he walked to hand it to the third who did a slightly peculiar thing, it was a full examination; he studied the bottle all round before taking a sip which must have finished it because the next thing he was leaning over the fence and dropping the bottle into the burn. Francis glanced at the first bloke but didnt say anything. Then he shivered. It was still quite cold. High time that sun put in an appearance, else all would be lost! Francis grinned. The world was really a predictable place to live in. Augustine was right but wasnt right though obviously he wasnt wrong. He was a good strong man. If Francis had been like him he would have been quite happy.

The first bloke was looking at him. You'll do for me, he said.

What was that?

1 said you'll do for me.

Francis nodded. Thanks. As long as you didnt take offense about that comment.

Och naw, fuck.

Francis nodded. And thanks for the drink.

Ye kidding? It's just a drink.

Aye well

The bloke shrugged. That's how we were wanting to get a few bob, so's we could get a refill.

Mm, aye.

See your watch, we could get no bad for it.

Frank nodded. There was no chance, no fucking chance. Down by the fence the second bloke was gazing at him and he shifted on his seat immediately so that when he was looking straight ahead he was looking away from the three men. He didnt want to see them at the moment. There was something about them that was frightening. He was recognizing in himself fear. He was scared, he was frightened; it was the three men who were frightening him, something in them together that was making him scared, the sum of the parts, it was an evil force. If he just stared straight ahead. If he stayed calm. He was on a bench in the park

and it was 10 a.m. There was a jogger somewhere. All it needed was somebody to touch him perhaps. If that happened he would die. His heart would stop beating. If that happened he would die and revelation. But if he just got up. If he was to just get up off of the bench and start walking slowly and deliberately along in the opposite direction, to from where they had come. That would be fine if he could just do that. But he couldnt, he couldnt do it; his hands gripped his kneecaps, the knuckles pure white. Did he want to die? What had his life been like? Had it been worth living? His boyhood, what like was his boyhood? Had that been okay? It hadnt been too bad he hadnt been too bad, he'd just been okay normal, normal, the same as anybody else. He'd just fallen into bad ways. But he wasnt evil. Nobody could call him evil. He was not evil. He was just an ordinary person who was on hard times who was not doing as well as he used to and who would be getting better soon once things picked up, he would be fine again and able to be just the same, he was all right, he was fine, it was just to be staring ahead.

Yarrow

]oyce Carol Oates

He was afraid to borrow the money from a bank.

It was a Saturday morning in early April, still winter, soft wet snow falling, clumps the size of blossoms.

A messy season, flu season, dirt-raddled snow drifted against the edges of things, mud thawing on the roads. A cavernous-clouded sky and blinding sunshine and it was the longest drive he'd made in his truck in memory, three miles to his cousin Tyrone Clayton's house.

Tyrone saw it in his face. Asked him inside, asked him did he want an ale? - Irene and the children were in town shopping.

The radio was turned up loud: Fats Domino singing "Blueberry Hill."

Mud on [ody's boots, so he said he wouldn't come all the way into the house, he'd talk from the doorway. Didn't want to track up Irene's clean floor.

He could only stay a minute, he said. He had a favor to ask.

"Sure," Tyrone said. Laying his cigarette carefully in an ashtray.

"I need to borrow some money."

"How much?"

"Five hundred dollars."

jodv spoke in a low quick voice just loud enough for Tyrone to hear. Then exhaled as if he'd been holding his breath in for a long time.

Tyrone said, keeping his voice level and easy, "Guess I can manage that."

"I'll pay you back as soon as I can," jody said. "By June at the latest."

"No hurry," Tyrone said.

Then they were silent. Breathing hard. Excited, deeply embarrassed. Tyrone knew that jodv needed more than five hundred dollars-much more than five hundred dollars-but the way things were right now he

couldn't afford to lend him more. He just couldn't afford it and even five hundred dollars was going to be hard. He knew that [odv knew all this but jodv had had to come to him anyway, knowing it, asking the favor, knowing that Tyrone would say yes but knowing that Tyrone could barely afford it either. Because Jody was desperate and if Tyrone hadn't quite wanted to understand that until this minute he had to understand it now.

His cousin's young, aggrieved, handsome face inside that sallow face blurred and pocked by fatigue. Three days' growth of whiskers on his chin and he wouldn't meet Tyrone's eyes- he was that ashamed.

Tyrone said he could get to the bank Monday noon, would that be soon enough?

jodv said as if he hadn't been listening that he wanted to pay the going rate of interest on the loan. "Ask them at the bank, will you?-and we'll work it out."

"Hell no," Tyrone said, laughing, surprised. "I don't want any interest."

"Just find out," [odv said, an edge to his voice, "and we'll work it out."

Tyrone asked how was Brenda these days, he'd heard from Irene she was getting better? But his voice came out weak and faltering.

[odv said she was getting better, she rested a lot during the day, the stitches from the surgery had come out but she still had a lot of pain and the doctor warned them about rushing things, so she had to take it slow.

He did the grocery shopping, for instance. All the shopping. Not that he minded-he didn't-he was damned glad Brenda was alive-but it took time and he only had Saturdays really.

Then this afternoon if the snow didn't get worse he was hoping to put in a shift at the quarry, three or four hours. Shoveling mainly, some clean-up-

He was speaking faster, with more feeling. A raw baffled voice new to him and his eyes puffy and red-rimmed as if he'd been rubbing at them.

All this while [odv's truck was idling in the driveway, spewing out clouds of exhaust. He'd left the key in the ignition, which Tyrone thought was a strange thing to do, almost rude.

Snowflakes were falling thicker now, blown in delicate skeins by the wind. Twisting and turning and looping like narrowing your eyes to shift your vision out of focus so that it's your own nerve-endings you see out there.

Wet air, colder than the temperature suggested. Flu season and everybody was passing it around to everybody else.

Something more needed to be said before [odv left but Tyrone couldn't think what it was.

He stood in the doorway watching [odv maneuver the truck out onto the road. It was a heavv-dutv dump truck, [odv's own truck, a '49 Ford he'd have to be replacing soon. Tyrone was thinking they should have shaken hands or something but it wasn't a gesture that came naturally or easily to them. He couldn't remember when he had last shaken hands with somebody close to him as [odv and this morning wasn't the time to start.

He watched [odv drive away. He hadn't gotten around to shaving yet that morning himself and he stood vague and dazed, rubbing his stub, bled jaw, thinking how much it had cost [odv Mclllvanney to ask for that five hundred dollars, and how much it would cost him.

For the past year or more [ody's wife Brenda had been sick. Twenty, eight years old, thin, nervous, red-haired, pretty, she'd had four children now ranging in age from Dawn, who was thirteen years old and said to be troublesome, to the baby boy, who was only eighteen months. In between were two more boys, ten years and six years. Brenda had never quite recovered from the last pregnancy, came down with a bladder infection, had to have an operation just after Christmas-at a city hospital forty miles away, which meant people in Yarrow had to drive eighty miles round-trip to see her. Which meant, too, more medical bills the McIllvanneys couldn't afford.

The day before she was scheduled to enter the hospital, Brenda spoke with Irene Clayton on the phone and said she was frightened she was going to die.

"Don't talk that way," Irene said sharply.

Brenda was crying as if her heart were broken and Irene was afraid she too would start to cry.

"I just don't think [odv could manage without me," Brenda was saying. "Him and the children-and all the bills we owe-I just don't think he could keep going."

"You know better than to talk that way," Irene said. "That's a terrible thing to say." She listened to Brenda crying and felt helpless and fright, ened herself. She said, "You hadn't better let Jody hear you going on like that."

The Mclllvanneys lived in Brenda's parents' old farmhouse, which wasn't by choice but all they could afford. Some years ago Jody had started building his own house at the edge of town but he ran out of money shortly after the basement was finished-[odv was a trucker, self, employed; his work tended to be local, seasonal, not very reliable-and for more than a year the family lived in the basement, below-ground,

(The roof was tar-papered over and there were windows but still the big single room was damp, chilly, depressing-the children were always com' ing down with colds. Dawn called it a damn dumb place to live, no wonder the kids on the school bus laughed at them all. Living like rats in a hole!) After Brenda's mother died they moved into the old farm' house, which was free and clear, no mortgage, except it had been built in the 1880's and was termite-ridden and needed repairs constantly. Rot, ring shingles-leaky roof-earthen cellar that flooded when it rained: you name it. Bad as the Titanic, [odv said. He wished the damn thing would sink.

When Brenda got pregnant for the fourth time jodv began working part-time at the limestone quarry in Yarrow Falls: hard, filthy, back, breaking work he hated but it paid better than anything else he could find and he didn't have to join a union. [odv handled a shovel, he climbed ladders, he operated drills and tractors and wire-saws; when it rained he stood in the pit water to his knees. Coughing up phlegm, his feet aching as if they were on fire. Just temporary work he hoped wouldn't kill him.

Worse yet, he told Tyrone, he might develop a taste for the quarry. Like most of the quarriers. The limestone, the open fresh air, the weird machines that were so noisy and dangerous-it was work not just any' body could do. You had to have a strong back and the guts for it and anything like that, it tended to get under your skin if you weren't careful. It brought some pride with it after all.

The Clayton children janice and Bobby were fond of their Uncle jody-as they were taught to call him: janice knew he was really a cousin of theirs, just as he was a cousin of their father's-except when he was in one of his bad moods. Then he wouldn't really look at them, he'd just mutter hello without smiling. He had a worse temper than their father and he was a bigger man than their father-muscled arms and shoulders that looked as if they were pumped up and that the flesh would hurt, ropy veins and skin stretched tight. But he could be funny=loudlaughing as a kid - with a broad side-slanting grin and a way of teasing that left you breathless and excited as if you'd been tickled with quick hard fingers. Their own father was lean and hard and soft-spoken; an inch or two shorter than his cousin. He worked at the Allis-Chalmers plant in town and never had anything interesting to say about it-just that it was work, and it paid-while jodv had all sorts of tales, some believable and some not, about driving his truck. Never a dull minute

with [odv around! Irene always said. Tyrone said that was true but"You know how he exaggerates."

One summer when Janice was a small child her Uncle [odv came over to the house with a half-dozen guinea chicks in a cardboard box, a present for them, and Janice had loved the chicks tiny enough to stand in the palm of her hand-they didn't weigh anything! No feathers like the adults, just fuzzy blond down, stubby wings and legs disproportionately long for their bodies. They were fearless, unlike the adults that were so suspicious and nerved-up all the time.

"They're pretty birds," jody said. "I like seeing them around the placeyou get kind of used to them."

The Claytons tried to raise the guinea fowl according to Jody's instructions but they died off one by one and in the end even Janice lost her enthusiasm for them. She'd given them special names-Freckles, Peewee, Queenie, Bathsheba - but they disappointed her because all they wanted to do was eat.

They only liked her, she said, because she fed them.

After jodv borrowed the five hundred dollars from Tyrone he didn't drop by the house for a long time. And Tyrone didn't seek him out, feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable: he didn't want Jody to think he was waiting to be paid back or even that he was thinking about the money.

(Was he thinking about it? Only occasionally, when it hit him like a blow to the gut.)

Irene didn't hear from Brenda very often either, which was strange, she said, and sad, and she hoped the money wouldn't come between them because Brenda was so sweet and such a good friend and needed somebody to talk to, what with [odv and [odv's moods-and that Dawn was a handful too, judging from what Janice said. (Dawn was a year older than Janice but in her class at school.) Irene said, "Why don't we invite them over here for supper or something? - we haven't done that in a long time." But Tyrone thought the Mclllvanneys might misunderstand. "He'll think I'm worried about that money," Tyrone said.

It wasn't until midsummer that Jody made what he called the first payment on the loan, one hundred and seventy-five dollars he gave Tyrone in an envelope, and Tyrone was relieved, and embarrassed, and tried to tell him why not keep it for a while since probably he needed itdidn't he need it? - and there wasn't any hurry anyway. But [odv insisted. [odv said it was the least he could do.

Then: word got back to Tyrone that Jody had borrowed money from a mutual friend of theirs at about the time he'd borrowed the five hundred dollars from Tyrone and he had paid all of it back. Three hun, dred and fifty dollars and he'd paid all of it back in a lump sum and Tyrone was damned mad to hear about it and Irene tried to tell him it didn't mean anything, only that [odv knew Tyrone better, was closer to Tyrone, like a brother; also if he'd only borrowed three hundred and fifty dollars from the other man it was easier to pay it all back and close out the debt. Sure, said Tyrone. That makes me the chump.

But he didn't mean it and when a few days later, or a week later, Irene brought the subject up again, wondering when jodv was going to pay the rest of the money, he cut her off short saying it was his money, not hers, and it was between him and [odv and hadn't anything to do with her, did she understand that?

Janice didn't want to tell her mother but: when they went back to school in the fall Dawn McIllvanney began to behave mean to her. And Dawn could be really mean when she wanted to be.

She was a chunky, thickset girl, swarthy skin like her father's, sly eyes, a habit of grinning so it went through you like a sliver of glass-not a bit of friendliness in it. Called Janice "}an,y" in a sliding whine and shoved her on the school bus or when they were waiting in the cafeteria line, "Oh excuse me, }an,y!" she'd say, making anyone who was listening laugh. Dawn was the center of a circle of four or five girls who were rough and pushy and loud, belligerent as boys; she got poor grades in school not because she was stupid - though she might have been a little slow - but because she made a show of not trying, not handing in home, work, wising off in class and angering her teachers. Janice thought it was unfair that Dawn Mclllvanney had such a pretty red-haired mother while she had a mother who was like anybody's mother-plain and pleasant and boring. She'd always thought, before the trouble started, that Brenda Mclllvanney would rather have had her for a daughter than Dawn.

Janice soon understood that Dawn hated her and she'd better keep her distance from her but it happened that in gym class she couldn't and that was where Dawn got her revenge: threw a basketball right into Janice's face one time, broke Janice's pink plastic glasses, claimed after, ward it was an accident - "}an,y" got in her way. Another time, when the girls were doing gymnastics, Dawn stuck her big, sneakered foot out in front of Janice as Janice-who was wiry and quick, one of the best

gymnasts in the class-did a series of cartwheels the full length of the mat, and naturally Janice fell, fell sideways, fell hard, seeing as she fell her cousin's face pinched with hatred, the rat-glittering little eyes. Pain shot like a knife, like many knives, through Janice's body and for a long time she couldn't move-just lay there sobbing, hearing Dawn Mclllvanney's mock-incredulous voice as the gym instructor reprimanded her, Hey I didn't do anything, what the hell are you saying, look it was her, she's the one, it was her own damn fault, the little crybaby-

Janice never told her mother about the incident. She tried not to think that Dawn, who was her cousin after all, had wanted to hurt her really - break her neck or her backbone, cripple her for life. She tried not to think that.

One warm autumn day Irene Clayton met Brenda Mclllvanney in the A&P in town - Brenda whom she hadn't seen in months - Brenda who was thin, almost gaunt, but wearing a flowery print dress - red lipsticked lips and hard red nails and a steely look that went through Irene like a razor. And Irene just stood there staring as if the earth had opened at her feet.

In her parked car in the lot Irene leaned her forehead against the steering wheel and began to cry. She made baffled sobbing sounds that astonished and deeply embarrassed the children-Janice and Bobby had never seen their mother cry in such a public place, and for so little reason they could understand. She usually wept in a rage at them!

Bobby threw himself against the back seat, pressing his hands over his ears. Janice, in the passenger's seat, looked out the window and said, "Momma, you're making a fool of yourself," in the coldest voice possible.

Tyrone wasn't accustomed to thinking about such things, poking into his own motives, or other people's. But he'd known, he said. As soon as he'd handed Jody the money, that was it.

Irene said she didn't believe it.

She knew Brenda, and she knew jody, and she didn't believe it.

Jody had thanked him but he hadn't wanted to look at him, Tyrone said. Took the money 'cause he couldn't not take it but that was that.

"I don't believe it really," Irene said, wiping at her eyes.

Tyrone said nothing, lighting up a cigarette, shaking out the match. His movements were jerky and angry these days, these many days. Often it looked as if he was quarreling with someone under his breath. Irene said, "I don't believe it really."

[odv sold his truck, gave up trucking for good, worked full-time now at the limestone quarry, still in debt, and that old house of theirs looked worse than ever-chickens and guinea fowl picking in the grassless front yard amid tossed-out trash, Brenda's peony beds overgrown with weeds as if no woman lived in the house at all-but still-somehow-[odv managed to buy a '53 Chevrolet up in Yarrow Falls; and he and Brenda were going out places together again, roadhouses and taverns miles away where no one knew them. Sometimes they were alone and sometimes they were with another couple. Their old friends rarely saw them now.

Tyrone was always hearing from relatives that the McIllvanneys couldn't seem to climb out of their bad luck though [odv was working ten, twelve hours a day at the quarry, etcetera; poor Brenda had some kind of thyroid condition now and had to take medicine so expensive you couldn't believe it, etcetera; and Tyrone listened ironically to all this and said, "O.K. but what about me? -what about me?" And there never seemed to be any answer to that.

If Tyrone ran into [odv in town it was sheerly by accident. And damned clumsy and embarrassing: jodv pretended he didn't see Tyrone, turned nonchalantly away, whistling, hands in his pockets, turned a corner and walked fast and disappeared.

Asshole. As if Tyrone didn't see him.

Tyrone complained freely of his cousin to anyone who would listen. old friends, mutual acquaintances, strangers. He was baffled and bitter and hurt and furious, wondering aloud when he'd get his money back. And would he get it with interest as [odv had promised.

When he'd been drinking a bit Tyrone said that nobody had ever thought Jody Mclllvanney would turn out the way he had - a man whose word wasn't worth shit-not much better than a common crook - a man who couldn't even support his wife and children. "Any, body that bad off, he might as well hang himself," Tyrone would say. "Stick a shotgun barrel into his mouth and pull the trigger."

He had to stop thinking about [odv all the time, Irene said. She was getting scared he'd make himself sick.

She'd lain awake too many nights herself thinking about the Mclllvanneys-Brenda in particular-and she wasn't going to think about them any longer. "It isn't healthy," she said, pleaded. "TY?-it eats away at your heart."

But Tyrone ignored her, he was calculating (sitting at the kitchen table, a sheet of paper before him, pencil in hand, bottle of Molson's Ale at his elbow) how much jodv was probably earning a week up at the

Falls now that he'd been promoted from shoveler to drill-runner. It made him sick to think that - subtracting union dues, Social Security and the rest-[odv was probably making a few more dollars a week than he made at Allis-Chalmers. And if [odv could get an extra shift timeand-a-half on Saturdays he'd be making a damn sight more.

When Tyrone stood he felt dizzy and panicky, as if the floor was tilting beneath his feet.

Most people in Yarrow were on Tyrone's side but he sensed there were some on Jody's side and lately he'd begun to hear that Jody was saying things about him-bad-mouthing him so you'd almost think it was Tyrone Clayton who owed jodv McIllvanney money and not the other way around. Hadn't Jody helped him put asbestos siding on his house when he and Irene had first moved in-? (Yes but he, Tyrone, had helped Jody with that would-be house of his, helping to put in the concrete, lay the beams for the basement ceiling, tar-paper the goddamned roof in the middle of the summer.) Tyrone went out drinking to the places he'd always gone and there were the men he'd been seeing for years, men he'd gone to school with, but jodv wasn't there, there was a queer sort of authority in [odv's absence, as if, the more he said, the more his listeners were inclined to believe lod». "I know things are still bad for [odv and Brenda," he'd say, speaking passionately, conscious of the significance of his words-which might be repeated after all to jody - "and I don't even want the fucking money back but I do want respect. I do want respect from that son of a bitch."

(Though in fact he did want the money back: every penny of it.)

(And he tended to think [odv still owed him five hundred dollars, the original sum, plus interest, no matter he'd insisted at the time of the loan that he didn't want "interest" from any blood relation.)

There were nights he came home drunk, other nights he was so agitated he couldn't sit still to eat his supper because he'd heard something at work that day reported to him and Irene tried to comfort him, Irene said he was frightening the children, Irene said in a pleading voice, Why not try to forget?-forgive?-like in the Bible?-wasn't that real wisdom? - and just not lend anybody any money ever again in his life. "What the hell was I supposed to do?" Tyrone would say, turning on her furiously. "Tell my own cousin that I grew up with that I wouldn't help him out? Tell him to get out of that doorway there?" Irene backed off saying, "Ty, I don't know what you were supposed to do but it turned out a mistake, didn't it?" And Tyrone said, his face contorted with rage and his voice shaking, "It wasn't a mistake at the time, you stupid bitch. It wasn't a mistake at the time."

One night that fall the telephone rang at nine p.m. and Irene answered and it was [odv McllIvanney, whose voice she hadn't heard in a long time, drunk and belligerent, demanding to speak to Tyrone-who luckily wasn't home. So Jody told Irene to tell him he'd been hearing certain things that Tyrone was saying behind his back and he didn't like what he'd heard and if Tyrone had something to say to him why not come over to the house and tell it to his face and ifTyrone was afraid to do that he'd better keep his mouth shut or he'd come over there and beat the shit out of Tyrone.

[odv was shouting, saying he'd pay back the goddamn money when he could, that was the best he could do, he hadn't asked to be born, that was the best he could do, goddamn it- And Irene, speechless, terrified, slammed down the receiver.

Afterward she said she'd never heard anyone anywhere sounding so crazy. Like he'd have killed her if he'd been able to get hold of her

A chilly breezy November day but there was jody McllIvanney in coveralls and a T-shirt, no jacket, bareheaded, striding along the sidewalk, not looking where he was going: and Janice Clayton stared at him, shocked at how he'd changed-my God he was big now! almost what you'd call fatl-weighing maybe two hundred sixty pounds, barrelchested, bigjiggly stomach pressing against the fabric ofhis coveralls, his face bloated too and his skin lumpy. It was said that stone quarriers ate and drank like hogs, got enormous, and there was jody the shape of a human hog, even his hair long and shaggy, greasy, like a high-school kid or a Hell's Angel. Janice stood frozen on the sidewalk, her schoolbooks pressed against her chest, hoping, praying, her Uncle [odv wouldn't glance up and see her or if he did he wouldn't recognize her though her heart kicked and she thought I don't hate him like I'm supposed to.

But he looked up. He saw her. Saw how she was shrinking out toward the curb to avoid him and so he let her go, just mumbled a greeting she couldn't hear, and the moment was past, she was safe, she pushed her glasses up her nose and half-ran up the street to escape. She remembered how he used to call out "How's it going?" to her and Bobby instead of saying hello-winking to show that it was a joke (what did any adult man care about how things were going for children) but serious in a way too. And she'd never known how to answer, nor had Bobby. "O.K.," they'd say, embarrassed, blushing, flattered. "All right I guess."

(Janice had no anticipation, not the mildest of premonitions, that that would be the last time she'd see her Uncle [odv but long afterward the

sight of him would remain vivid in her memory, powerful, reproachful, and the November day too of gusty winds and the smell of snow in the air, a texture like grit. Waiting for the bus she was dreamy and melan' choly watching how the town's south-side mills gave off smoke that rose into the air like mist. Powdery, almost iridescent, those subtle shifting colors of the backs of pigeons-iridescent gray, blue, purple shading into black.

The guinea fowl had long since died off but Janice had snapshots of her favorites, their names carefully recorded.)

Shortly after the New Year Tyrone was driving to town when he saw a man hitchhiking by the side of the road, and sure enough it was jodv McIllvanney-jody in his sheepskin jacket, a wool cap pulled low over his forehead, thumb uplifted. His face looked closed-in as a fist; he might have recognized Tyrone but gave no sign just as Tyrone, speeding past, gave no sign of recognizing him. It had all happened so swiftly Tyrone hadn't time to react. He wondered if Jody's new car had broken down and he laughed aloud harshly, thinking, Good. Serve him right. Serve them all right.

He watched his cousin's figure in the rearview mirror, diminishing with distance.

Then: for some reason he'd never be able to explain he decided to turn his car around, drive back to jodv; maybe he'd slow down and shout something out the window, or maybe-just maybe-he'd give the son of a bitch a ride if it looked like that might be a good idea. But as he approached Jody it was clear that jodv intended to stand his ground, didn't want any favors from him, you could see from his arrogant stance that he'd rather freeze his ass off than beg a ride from Tyrone: he'd lowered his arm and stood there in the road, legs apart, waiting. A big beefy glowering man you could tell wanted a fight even without know, ing who he was.

Tyrone's heart swelled with fury and righteousness. Tyrone hit the horn with the palm of his hand to scare the son of a bitch off the road.

He was laughing, shouting, thief! liar! lying betraying bastard! What did he do then but call [odv's bluff, aim the car straight at him, fifty miles an hour and he'd lost control even before he hit a patch of cobbled ridged ice and began to skid - hardly had time before the impact to turn the wheel, pump desperately at the brakes-and he saw his

cousin's look of absolute disbelief, not even fear or surprise, as the left fender slammed into him, the chassis plowed into his body and threw it aside and out of Tyrone's sight.

The steering wheel caught Tyrone in the chest. But he was all right. He was coughing, choking, but he was all right, gripping the wheel tight and pumping the brakes as the car leveled out of its wild swerve and came to a bumpy rest in a ditch. Scrub trees and tall grasses clawing at the windshield and Jesus his nose was bleeding and he couldn't see anything in the rearview mirror but he knew Jody was dead: that sicken, ing thud, that enormous impact like a man-sized boulder flung against the car, that's what it meant.

"Jesus

Tyrone sat panting in his car, the motor racing, clouds of exhaust lifting behind; he was terrified, his bladder contracted, heart pumping like crazy and it couldn't have happened, could it?-that quickly?hairline cracks on his windshield and his nose clogged with blood?except he'd felt the body snapping beneath the car, it wasn't something you were likely to mistake as anything but death.

He didn't have to drive back another time. Didn't have to see the bright blood on the snow.

He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel. A terrible hammer' ing in his chest he'd have to wait out.

"Damn you fuck you Jody

He'd done it on purpose, hadn't he!

Tyrone busied himself maneuvering his car out of the ditch, rocking the chassis, concentrating on the effort which involved his entire physical being; he was panting, grunting, whispering C'mon baby c'mon for Christ's sweet sake, then he was free and clear and back on the road and no one knew.

He'd begun to shiver convulsively. Though he was sweating too inside his clothes. And his bladder pinched in terror as he hadn't felt it in a long, long time.

But he was all right, wasn't he? And the car was operating.

That was the main thing.

He drove on, slowly at first, then panic hit him in a fresh wave and he began to drive faster, thinking he was going in the wrong direction but had had to get somewhere-where?-had to get help.

Police, ambulance. He'd go home and telephone.

There's a man dead on the road. Hitchhiker and he'd stepped in front of the car and it was over in an instant.

Blood dripping from his nose onto his fucking jacket and those hair,

line cracks in the windshield, like cracks in his own skull. He was crying, couldn't stop.

He'd tell Irene to make the call. Wouldn't tell her who it was he'd hit. Then he'd drive back to [odv, Hey you know I didn't mean it why the hell didn't you get out of the way I was just kidding around then the ice, why the hell didn't you get out of the way goddamn you you did it on purpose didn't you-

But maybe it would be better if he stopped at the first house, a neighbor's house.

Police, or the ambulance? Or both? There was an emergency number he'd never memorized the way you were supposed to

His mind was shifting out of focus, going blank in patches empty and white-glaring as the snowy fields.

Those fields you could lose yourself in at this time of year. Staring and dreaming, stubbled with grass and grain and tracked over with animal prints but you couldn't see that at a distance-everything clean and clear, dazzling blinding white. At a distance.

It was a secret no one knew: Jody Mclllvanney was dead.

Bleeding his life out in a ditch. In the snow.

He hadn't survived the impact of the car, Tyrone knew that. No chance of it, plowing into a human being like that full in the chest and the gut, he'd felt the bones being crushed, the backbone snapped-felt it.

He'd feel it all his life!

He'd seen bodies crumpled, Jesus he'd seen more than his fair share. Kids his own age, Americans, japs, in uniform, near'naked, bleeding, broken bones, eyes rolled up into their skulls. But mostly he'd been lucky enough to come upon them after death had come and gone and only the body was left.

No witnesses.

No one on the road this time of day.

He had to get help but help was a long way off.

His foot pressing down hard on the accelerator then letting up when the tires began to spin, it was dangerous driving in the winter along these roads, dangerous driving any time the roads were likely to be slippery, now approaching a single-lane bridge crashing over the bridge the floorboards bouncing and kicking and the car trembling, Oh sweet Jesus help me.

Explaining to someone, a patrolman on the highway, how it wasn't his fault. The hitchhiker standing flat-footed in the road not dodging out of the way even when the car began to skid.

He'd lost control of the car. But then he'd regained it.

No witnesses.

How could he be held to blame?

If Jody had paid in installments for instance twenty-five dollars, even ten dollars every month or so. Paring back on the debt just to show his good faith. His gratitude.

He couldn't be held responsible. He'd kill himself if they came to arrest him.

Except: no witnesses.

Except: his car was damaged.

The fender crushed, the bumper, part of the hood-that's how they would know. Blood splashed on the grill. That's how they would find him.

That's how they would arrest him.

He and [odv used to go deer hunting farther north; you sling the carcass over the fender unless it's too big-then you tie it to the roof of the car. Twine tied tight as you can tie it.

He'd known without having to look.

Asshole. Bleeding his life out back in a ditch.

But who would know? If he kept going.

If he drove on past his house-just kept driving as if it weren't any house he knew, any connection to him-drive and drive up into the northern part of the state until something happened to stop him. Until his gas gave out.

Sure I Will

Dan Chaon

Here in the heart of the country, the trees are all in lines and patterns. There were no trees here before the pioneers came, I'm told, and when the cottonwoods and elms and spruce were finally brought in, they were planted so that they conformed to the edge of a road or a field; they were put in order and organized into regiments to protect houses from the sun, or land from erosion. It seems to me that people must have forgotten how trees grew in forests, or even that trees were a natural phenomenon, not something that they could erect like sod houses or barbed-wire fences. They were hypnotized by the flatness of their land, scape, by the unyielding conformity of everything in their lives.

My paternal grandmother's house was a perfectly symmetrical place, set in the middle of miles of wheat fields, and lined on either side with elm trees. When I was small, there had been a tire swing in one of the trees. One day, while I was playing on it, the rope had broken and I had been dropped to the ground and had gotten a concussion. My grand, mother had never put the tire swing back up, but on one of the highest branches, the knotted rope that held the tire remained. Years later, when I came to live with my grandmother, I found the rope there, with the tree trying to grow over it. The rope had cut deeply into the tree, and in the summer, the tree would bleed brown, sour-smelling juice from the place where the rope wounded it.

My grandmother had been on a slow, erratic decline for some months, when my parents suggested that she go to a rest home. It was the unpredictability of it all that they worried about. They wouldn't hear of her staying in that big house all alone, where anything could happen. Somehow, to them, it was as iffiling her away in a home could somehow

stabilize things. But my grandmother didn't want to leave. The compromise was that I would go to stay with her.

It was the summer after I'd graduated from high school, and my parents, I think, were looking for some way to get me out of the house. They were happy people, and had found it hard to understand me when, in the months following commencement, I had become distant, introverted; I was easily obsessed with things. For a while, I had become interested in genealogy. I spent a full week poring over family trees, old Bibles, obituaries. At one point, I'd written down the ages at which all my relatives for the last four or five generations had died, and averaged them; from that, I had been able to predict that I would be most likely to die sometime in March 2050. I had also thought for a while that I might want to be a doctor, so I went to the library and checked out several books for medical students.

In one of the books I had checked out, it showed a cadaver that students were dissecting. I hadn't been able to help turning back, again and again, to stare at it. It was an old woman, but there was something inhuman about her: the clay-like, immobile face; the yellow-gray flaps of skin pulled back, the uterus, the womb divided. I'd been amazed and sickened to imagine that an infant had once come from that place. But I hadn't been able to help looking, looking again.

My parents had wanted to know what had made me so morbid, but I couldn't tell them. I'd always thought that they read me better than I read myself. Once, my mother had called me into her room and asked me to sit on her bed. "Do you," she wanted to know, and then she kept hesitating, repeating herself. "Do you ever think about bad things?"

"What do you mean?" They had never given me the how-babies-aremade talk, and I had always been expecting it. "Do you mean sex?"

"No-o," she said, and she stopped and closed her eyes as if she were trying very hard to remember something. "I mean do you ever think about death? About doing yourself in?"

"Not really."

"Well, you know that is the worst thing, the most evil thing a person can do."

"Is it?"

"I hope that you would never do that to your father and me. And you should know that if you ever have thoughts like that. Bad thoughts.

We are always here to talk to. We are always wanting and willing to help."

It is terrible to realize that your parents think you are insane. That is why I agreed to go, and why it was so easy to put on a show of happiness when they were around.

I sometimes wondered whether I really was insane. There was a path I'd been on, a very easy path that had started when I was born, and then moved along nicely - taking my first step, saying my first sentence, going to kindergarten, knowing that I had to keep moving up grade levels; then I turned sixteen and I was able to drive, and then high school ended. The path ended there too, and there was a big chasm where the path should have been. That was the worst thing. And everyone thought I was crazy when I told them this. Maybe I was.

I guess that, without really thinking about it, I had begun to expect that I would die any day. It wasn't a suicidal impulse at all. It was just that it had become impossible to imagine myself as I would be in the future, at thirty, or forty -I couldn't believe that I could ever reach those ages. Even twenty was obscure and cloudy enough to seem like a dream.

So, I expected it. The day before I moved my belongings to my grandmother's house, I cut the grass at horne, and I couldn't help thinking of the story I'd heard, how one of my friend's cousins had had a long stick thrown at him by a mower, and how it had pierced him right through the belly. Thinking of this, I put a hand to my stomach, imagining my own look of shocked surprise, the green, sweet smell that bleeds off each blade of cut grass all around me as I fall to the ground, and then my mother and father running to me, their voices and cries swimming in the roar of the mower-my mother's hand across my forehead, her voice: "Honey, it'll be all right n I took off my clothes that night and I couldn't help but notice that there was a small lump on my inner leg, and wonder what it could be. And lay awake, just breathing.

The room I was to stay in still had that sweet, dusty smell that seems to hang over old people and their belongings, but besides that, it was empty. She brought in her old roll-away bed, and the rest, she said, was up to me.

She was an enormous woman, and apparently had been for many years-when I was small I called her the "big grandma," to distinguish her from my mother's mother. She had always had loose, fat upper arms.

As a child, I would ask to hit them, lightly, because they would wobble. "Those are my muscles," she would say, and grab me. I was always surprised by her strength.

It was hard to imagine that I was supposed to care for my big grandma. She still looked strong enough to arm-wrestle with me, like we used to do. After I'd gotten the few things I'd brought unpacked, she came in, moving slowly, precisely, carrying bedding for the roll-away.

"I know this must be a burden on you," she said. "Having to live with some old woman." She said it in that loud, ironic, self-deprecatory voice, the one she would always use for witty comments- "Call me 'Bubbles' she used to say when introduced to my father's friends. But her voice had less of an edge now; it was more wistful.

"No, Grandma, I don't care," I said. "It'll be fun staying. Like a sleepover."

"Yes," she said. "But you know it may be longer than a sleep-over. Maybe."

I shrugged. "I'm glad to stay," I said.

"I just want you to know that I don't care what you do while you're here. I know about boys your age. You can come and go as you please, I don't care. Come in as late as you want or as early as you want, and don't mind me."

I nodded, smiling. "O.K.," I said. But I couldn't help but think that she was wrong about boys my age, or at least me-there wasn't much likelihood of me going carousing, anymore. I hadn't really spoken to my friends since graduation-they were all different now, headed off to college or the army or jobs or marriage-and I just let them go. It would never be the same.

"Would you like a beer?" my grandmother asked.

"Sure:' I said.

I was working nights at the St. Bonaventure radio station, from six to midnight. Every night, I would sign off the air at twelve, saying the last words of the night with my clearest, most noncommital voice: "This is Kip Reed, in behalf of the entire staff and management of KBOV, wishing you a happy tomorrow and a very pleasant goodnight."

I would just sit there, sometimes, in my swivel chair, staring at the microphone. There was such a silence. I could imagine all those radios out there, the click of stillness and then the steady brush of static, and it was as if I was presiding over a suddenly empty world. Outside the

window everything was dark, none of the houses had lights, there weren't any cars on the streets. It made me feel like I was the last person on earth.

And then I would get into my car and drive home to my grandmother. Sometimes she would be waiting up for me, the radio static still whispering out of the little red transistor by her bed. "Your voice sounded good tonight," she would tell me, or she would ask me a question about the news. I would always go to her room and stand by the foot of her bed, even if she was asleep, just to check on her. "I'm home, Grandma," I'd whisper, and if she was still awake she would open her eyes. Otherwise, I'd stand for a while, until she rustled or mumbled or sighed-that would reassure me, and I would go to bed.

My grandmother moved with exaggerated slowness, and in the mornings, with her big housecoat billowing around her, she seemed like an aquatic being, moving through water rather than air. She made huge, hearty breakfasts-eggs, toast, bacon, hash browns, apple sauce-as if they could somehow fill the atmosphere with robustness and good health. Neither one of us ate much.

We never talked about the future. She never asked me about my plans, and, of course, I couldn't ask about hers.

Instead, she told me that they really did call her "Bubbles" when she was young, but she couldn't remember why, and she felt funny about it. She told me that she was once at a bus stop and hit a man over the head with her high-heeled shoe. She didn't remember who he was, or what he had said. But it did knock him out. She could see that clearly, her hitting him and he keeling over. In a quiet voice, she told me that the cruelest thing she ever did was to my father. Once, he had taken a dollar from her purse, and she had caught him. As punishment, she had pinned an index card onto his shirt that said "I STEAL FROM MY OWN MarHER." Now, she was sorry, and she wondered whether he had ever really forgiven her. She told me that she didn't have her first beer until she was fifty, when her husband died. She bought a case of Miller and sat there, alone in the house, and drank it. It was the type of beer that my grandfather had liked.

"I still like the taste of beer," she said.

"That's really funny," I told her. That's the kind of thing I'd say when I first moved in with her. I didn't tell her anything personal about myself. Her stories seemed as disembodied as trivia - the nickname without any

reason behind it, the drinking of the beer alone in the house, told with irony but no pain. I couldn't rattle things off so easily. Once, I wanted to tell her about the graduation party I'd been to with my high-school friends. I'd been drunk, and I walked into the room where they were all dancing. They were dancing around and shouting, not for any particular reason, but just because the beat of the music made them happy. Alice was imitating the way janice flapped her arms, and janice, in turn, was moving her feet in the clumsy, abandoned way that jim did. I will just lie down here for a moment, I thought, and they will all think I passed out, and then they will all come over and pick me up and care for me. But when I lay there, they just kept dancing. So I got up again, and stumbled over and fell face down on the floor where they were dancing. Then, they finally dragged me up to the bedroom.

Another time, I was tempted to tell my grandmother about the discussion about suicide my mother and I had had. But I couldn't tell such things so easily. So I just smiled and listened; it was embarrassing hearing myself repeat over and over- "That's really funny," or "That's really cool" - in my cheerful radio voice, empty-headed, as if I wasn't even in the same room with her.

I went home once or twice during the week, and my parents' first question was always, "How is she?" I didn't want them to worry. I didn't tell them that she was drinking beer, because that would trouble them. I didn't tell them that she washed a whole bottle of pills down the toilet because they hurt her throat when she tried to swallow them. I felt as if she was a disreputable friend I had to cover up for.

Then they asked about me. Had I thought about what I wanted to do in the fall? My father wanted me to talk to a friend of his, an army recruiter.

"You may not believe me," he said. "But I think the army would be very good for you."

"You never know," I said.

I told them I liked my job at the radio station. Then my father told me that he would look into some communications colleges for me.

"We just want you to do something you like. It doesn't matter how much money you make, just so long as you're happy."

"Yeah, I know," I said. "I know."

Looking out to where the trees lined the yard, I smiled for them. "I'm working on it," I said. "Believe me."

"We're here to help you," my mother said. "Use us as a source of information. We can advise you."

"I will," I said.

* * *

Jim called me on the phone the day before he left for college. "But what are you going to do?" he kept saying, and then he would pause and wait for me to say something. When I didn't answer, he'd come up with another inane idea. "Why don't you Finally, I just told him.

"Look, Jim," I said. "I guess I really don't give a shit about anything, anyway."

He was pretty quiet. He didn't call back.

I asked myself: Why does everybody care so much about the future? I could never understand what made them think that it would be better. How long would it be before they all forgot me, I wondered, how long before the house, and my mom and dad and my grandmother grew distant and faded in my mind's eye. I wished things could stay the same; I hated the future.

* * *

We sat in my grandmother's living room one afternoon, and drank beer out of cups, because she didn't like to drink from cans and there were no clean glasses. It reminded me of a tea party, except for all the Miller cans on the coffee table. We closed the shades, and watched soap operas for a while.

"All the beautiful women on these programs smoke cigarettes," she said. "Do you smoke?"

"No," I said. "I tried once, but it made me cough."

"I could never smoke," she said. "I tried many times. I wished I could. I used to think it looked so sophisticated. But I suppose it's not so much in fashion anymore." She looked at me for a moment, pouting her lips a little, and then laughed.

"I also wanted to be a WAVE or a WAC or something in World War Two. I can't even count the number of soldier's hearts I broke before I woke up from that little fantasy." She looked at me again, and laughed. "I was married, so I couldn't go, of course. Your grandfather was already too old to go at the time. I married such an old man, you know." She finished her beer and then bent down to pour more into her cup. She kept her head down, not looking at me this time, not laughing at all.

After the soap opera was over, we listened to records. Whenever I played a song on the radio that my grandmother liked, she asked me to bring it home, and she recorded it. She liked an Aretha Franklin song. It reminded her of the blues, like in Chicago.

She got out her photo album to show me pictures of herself in Chicago. It was as if she wanted to prove that she wasn't lying, that she really did go there, that once she really was a thin young career girl. There was a picture of her standing in front of Union Station with a suitcase by her feet and a round, dainty overnight bag in her hand. She said it was taken by an old man that she stopped as he was passing. She looked like Barbara Stanwyck, I told her.

"How come people don't look like that anymore?" I asked her.

"Because they all look like me now," she said, and laughed.

When I came home from work that night, all the lights were on. She'd usually go to bed long before I got home, and lie and listen to the radio until I came in. Maybe, I thought, there was something she wanted to watch on TV or she'd fallen asleep in front of the Evening News, or someone had come for a late visit unexpectedly.

But when I walked in the house, I heard her voice, loud and angry, and I was afraid she was arguing with someone.

"Goddamn itl" she was yelling. "Goddarnn it!"

I took a tentative step, walking slowly toward her voice.

"Grandma ?" I said, and then called out, hesitantly. "Grandma?"

She was lying on the floor of the bathroom, in her floral nightgown, the one with little Victorian networks of vines and roses. She was on her stomach, and the nightgown was pulled up, revealing her bare legs and her panties. She looked up at me, and there were tears running down her face. Her eyes were raw-looking and red from it. "Kipper," she said. "God damn I slipped when I was getting ready for bed and I couldn't get up. I been trying and I can't."

I didn't know what to say. I opened my mouth and shook my head. "Do you want me to call an ambulance?" I said, weakly. "No!" she cried, and her voice was ragged from crying. "Just help me up. Please."

I bent down and pulled the nightgown so that it covered her legs again. "How do you want me to do this?" I said softly. I grasped her under the arms and she flailed, struggling.

"It hurts!" she cried, as frightened and desperate as a little girl. "It hurts!"

I was able to get her to a sitting position, and we rested for a moment. She was breathing hard, tears dropping off her chin and onto the lace around her neck. "What am I going to do?" she said, stuttering because of the small sobs that kept pushing into her words. "What am I going to do? What is going to happen to me?" I touched her hair. I didn't know how to help her, what to say. "Some nights she whispered, "some nights I wake and I can't get up and one night I wet and I couldn't get up to change but then I was better in the morning I was all right but what's going to happen to me when I can't?" Her voice was drifting off, and then, slowly, the sobbing drifted off as well. She bowed her head, and the whole house was quiet.

"I think I can make it now," she said at last. She grasped my arm tightly, leaning, pulling, and then, with terrible slowness, and with my arm supporting her around the waist, she was able to stand up.

"Will you be all right?" I asked. "Should I call a doctor?"

"Let's go to bed," she said quietly. *

I dreamed that I got out of the car when my grandmother and I stopped along the road; we were going on a long trip, she and 1-passing through miles and miles of wheat fields on a dirt road. Something had fallen out of the car and I had to retrieve it. I waded knee-deep in grass, hearing it hiss and whisper around me, and then I turned to see that the car was gone, just a red blur through the waves of heat. I ran after it, waving my arms, but the weeds were thick as water, and I couldn't move fast enough. And then I was running along the highway after the car, which always seemed on the verge of disappearing over a hill-I was in the middle of the highway, and the shadow of an airplane passed over me. I looked up, and that was when the car came rushing forward, blaring its horn. I tried to cover my face with my hands and then the car hit me with a dull thump. I was thrown in the air-I could see my own shadow arcing over the gray asphalt highway, and then I landed on the ground. My grandmother was bending over me, but I could feel my spine moving around, grinding together. I wanted to tell her not to move me, and I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

When I woke up, the sheets were knotted around my lower legs, and I kicked at them, and then finally had to reach down and untangle them

with my hands. The house was dark, and I sat and listened to my grandmother breathing heavily from her room.

I got up and walked in the dark to the bathroom. When I came out, I stood for a moment on the edge of the living room. Through the window, the moon gave the room a pale glow.

The photo book was lying on the coffee table where she'd left it in the afternoon. I turned on the light, and picked the book up.

All those pictures, pictures of people waiting. I shook my head. When I looked up, my grandmother was standing there, with her housecoat billowing around her, her hand moving like something gently swaying in an underwater current. "Kip?"

I turned to look at her. "You'll be all right," I said softly, "won't you, Grandma?"

"Sure I will," she said.

I sat there for a long time, looking at the trees outside the window, then, down at the rows of photographs in the book. For that night, anyway, everything was still in order.

Dwarf Stories

Bruce Lawder

Saturn

Saturn sat down at his desk and looked at the white wall opposite him. He had worked too hard at the office recently, the days of leisure were far behind him now, he had actually come to like working at the office, tired as he was, and yet no one seemed to recognize the work for what it was, tired as they, too, must be. True, some people were aware of the old gods still, but this was of no importance at the office, even Saturn himself seemed no longer to take his own godhead seriously, or to understand fully the purpose of his work. How could you have invented the office? people say to him, at least those who recognize him for what he was. Why? Saturn himself cannot understand this, cannot even grasp as he once did the tone of reproach, if reproach it really is, with which these words are expressed. Clearly someone must have invented the office, since after all here it is, the place where we are today in our human history, divine as it may be, and nothing will come of nothing, but Saturn himself seems to prefer not to think of such things. He looks out of the window, one of the rewards he has received for his work, that gap in the concrete, and sees the city where the old chaos still reigns, out of which he once shaped the world, bathed in the underwater blue of aerial perspective like Atlantis drowned. Order and disorder, the office and the street: they are divided now, separated by a pane of glass, an invisible pane hermetically sealed. This absolute division still troubles the old god, whenever he remembers the days and nights of real creation, and troubled at his desk he lifts his pen among the white spaces and places a word on the page.

Personal Objects

"Why has everything been destroyed?" I asked, new to the office and unable to understand how everyone could take everything so routinely. "Everything has not been destroyed," my secretary answered, not without bitterness, it seemed to me. "Everything cannot be destroyed. Only personal objects." I looked around me and saw that indeed this was the case: plants, photographs and even books had been stripped from the desks and walls and thrown onto the floor. But th� machines were in order. The surfaces of the desks were empty and clean. "It is the Maintenance Department," she said. "It is only a matter ofform, pure form, and nothing but form. The Corporation does not own the air space, and there are the insurance regulations to satisfy, that is the problem. At least, that is what I have been told. But I don't understand these things," she admitted, as if this, too, were of no interest to her, and began putting her things back in place. I turned to my own space, expecting chaos there, but found everything exactly as it had always been. "That's because you have no personal objects," my secretary said. "That is the only way to defeat them. But then, of course, they have already won."

The New Laws

The old stone tablets still exist. The new laws, however, in that country are no longer written in those tablets, which are now blank, or rather defaced, but on scraps of paper, so great is the country's respect for the new, which can be changed at a moment's notice, for the people pride themselves on their adaptability, and the law is thought to reflect the will of the community - the people do not like to speak of the majoritywhich is always changing. The stone tablets are a reminder of another time. Out of reverence for tradition these stone tablets have been preserved, disfigured though they are, and less by time than by people, it is said, criminals or lawyers, for the difference between them is itself a matter of law and thus in the hands of the lawyers and therefore always changing, so that the scraps preserved between them might have the authority at least in appearance of the old code. So great is the people's reverence for tradition that strong men are employed only to shift the stones; so great is the people's love of the moment that messengers are kept only to bring in new scraps so that all trials can be conducted according to the latest ideas of the community and the sentence called modern. The immediate beneficiaries of this system are the lawyers, of course, who alone know the law on which it is said the country is founded. Their power and wealth have increased accordingly, but so has the time necessary to study the law, itself out of date by the time it has been mastered. Thus, for all their love of the new, the interpreters of the law themselves recede necessarily further and further into the past, and no doubt as a rite of recognition as well as of humility it has become a custom in the trade to begin the morning by striking one's head against the stone.

"This Will Be Yours"

"This will be yours," the old man said.

The young man looked into the white rectangular space and saw that it had what he needed: a bed, a reading chair, and a desk to write on. There was also a wall that was only a window. "You have a very nice girl friend," the old man said. "She is not my girl friend," the young man replied. "But she is very nice." "And a very good friend," the old man said, "to find you a room." A dark bright look crossed the young man's eyes, and he smiled at the owner.

"You can use the kitchen whenever you want, in the morning, too, and don't bother about disturbing me," the old man went on. "I'm used to being disturbed," he added, gaily. He was a short old man, with a gray unhealthy face, and a bald red scalp which was disintegrating into transparent wafer-like white flakes. He spoke with a Polish accent, and this also pleased the young man, as if he had turned the city block back into his own ancestry and could now listen again to the alien sounds, frail as they were, of his own childhood.

"Thank you! Thank you very much," he said, and then shut the door and looked out the window.

There was nothing in the window but the night. That was the way he liked it. At his last apartment there had been an office building opposite him and in the one before that a wall that had been white once but that had with time turned black. Now there was nothing but the darkness and the lights in the darkness. Even the noise of the city must be bearable at this height. Now only the uniform passage of traffic could be heard far below like a humming, nothing of individual sounds. At his last apartment he had had to rise every morning to the sound of repairs, as to the national anthem, and it had been so impossible to listen to his thoughts that he had stopped thinking, or so he thought. He could see the river now, a sparkling absence flowing under the city lights, dark and dirty as it was in the day, and he imagined that he would be able to see the far hills in the morning, blue and furred like wolves as they moved west, and if he pressed his nose to the glass and looked to the right he could even see the bridge, its twin triangles of light shaped like the sails of a schooner, or the outline the sun leaves in summer on a woman's breasts.

"That is a good sign," he thought, as he folded his clothes onto the reading chair and thrust his body into the narrow bed. "A person who

can think of woman, voyage and bridge together in light and darkness still has a future."

In the morning he unfolded his clothes, put them on again, and tiptoed into the living room. There were pictures of childhood and only of childhood on the tables, and there was a bed against each wall, instead of a couch or a chair, as if making it possible to collapse anywhere and at any moment. But each bed was empty, and when he opened the kitchen door he saw that the old man was there, asleep in the bed that had been placed between table and wall. Against the stove leaned a pink wooden leg. There was a hand hanging over the bed frame, and on the old man's wrist he could see in blue the number that had been burnt into the flesh. How stupid he had been, he thought, how stupid and how selfish, and closed the door, and tiptoed back through the living room, past the photographs, into the room that was now his, and got back into bed.

A knocking disturbed him, and he went to the door. "You wanted to see me," the old man said. "I heard you at the door. Or you didn't want to see me." "I didn't want to disturb you," the young man said. "Not in the least," the old man replied. "Nothing can disturb me anymore." "I didn't want to wake you up." "Nothing can wake me up. 1 don't sleep anymore, I just lie there and wait for the light, and then I get up again. But you don't have to worry about disturbing me anymore," the old man added. "I'm going away. You're a lucky man! You don't know how lucky you are! You'll have the whole place to yourself, and you thought you would have only a single room! Lucky, lucky! More than you can know! I'm going away, for three months, perhaps more, the whole winter, to Florida, and no one will disturb you! You're going to be alone! You won't have to see me in the morning, when you make your coffee, or worry about me when you cook something late at night, or have a guest over." "I don't object to seeing you at all," the young man said. "Don't say that," the other replied. "It's no pleasure, for a young man - and I snore. I know." "Not at all," the young man protested. "Not at all!" "And I'm not charging you anymore than for the room."

They came in the afternoon to take him away, two people of his generation, a man and a woman, each also with a number on the wrist.

In the window, through the polluted air, beyond the factories and refineries, the far blue hills could actually be seen.

The Competition

From his sounds I know he is there, on the other side of the wall; all day I can hear him writing or talking, calling or being called, doing exactly what I do, even as I do it, but without complaint, for nothing appears to interrupt him, even the sounds of the city he pays no attention to, sounds I cannot bear, in particular the sounds of repairs, for me some, thing like our national anthem, construction or deconstruction in an incessant if discontinuous single assault on our lives.

He is there, simply there, an immigrant, a man of my age, as my grandfather was, a foreigner who has not even mastered the language, from what I can hear, yet language is not important today, and he knows enough to listen his way into my space, to hear what happens in my office, who comes and who goes, and alII promise and do not promise. He is always there, there is no escaping him, and if I changed offices he would be there, too, or someone like him. He is there in the mornings when I arrive, he is still there in the evenings when I leave for the day. No doubt he lives in the city, he has squeezed his whole family into an apartment smaller than an office, he is not chasing by train the gentle, man's dream of a country house that in this ungentlemanly age recedes further and further from us, as the city expands and the suburbs with, draw, until one can no longer reach one's house in the light, only in darkness, in darkness where there is nothing to see; the children are tired, too, they do not want to talk about their day even face to face, my wife, too, is like a stranger to me, maid of the house, we eat, watch a program, and then it is time to sleep, to sleep and to wake early if not refreshed for another day of the same. For he is there, he is always there, that is what distinguishes him. He does not commute between two worlds; perhaps for him these two worlds do not even exist, perhaps there is nothing to balance, everything goes out from him as from a single center, as noise does, and so of course the sounds of repairs do not bother him, they are his repairs, as my sounds, too, are his now.

At lunch his family arrives: his wife brings coffee and sandwiches, the children carry their own chairs, two boys bear a folding table past my office; each day I see them file through the corridor of our office build, ing like avatars of a lost world, content as ducks, or Indians, with their given order, and wait then for the other side of the wall to explode into laughter, crying or shouting, or the human sound of talk-sounds I am no longer used to on my side of the wall, sounds a man of my position simply cannot make: my children are at private school, they cannot

visit; my wife is in the suburbs, and when she comes to the city it is not to bring me sandwiches; I myself cannot bear the idea of having lunch at my desk-it contradicts everything for which I have worked; my image is not that of an immigrant with a paper bag in the center of a large noisy family. When I go out to lunch, my competitor remains at work, he is always at work, all that is gentlemanly concerns him not at all; even now he is no doubt on the other side listening to me, deciphering what I do even as I perform it, and if not my competitor then someone else, one of his family, while he himself even now while I complain to myself is running over the concrete, his hand outstretched, a contract in his hand, about to overtake one of my clients.

Two Stories

Leon Rooke

The Blue Baby

There was a time down in North Carolina when nothing ever hap' pened.

There was the time up north in the Yukon when a man I knew locked up another man I knew inside a freezer and the man froze.

There were those times and there were other times.

I don't know which times to tell you about.

There was the time when I was twelve and riding a bicycle around and around a small shrub in the backyard and the front tire hit a brick and the bicycle crumpled beneath me and I broke a tooth and she did not care.

I am convinced she did not care.

So there was that time too.

There were the times she would bounce me on her knees and ask, Who do you love most, him or me? You didn't remember him or any, thing about him, but there were those times she asked that. He was like your nickel which rolled between the floorboards into the utter, unreachable darkness of the world. He was like that. Who do you love most, him or me? And though you knew the answer you never said a word, not one. You would only hang your head and wait for the knee, ride to begin again. She would stop the ride to take your face in her hands and ask that. And though you knew the answer, knew it to the innermost ache of your heart, you never said a word, not one.

You couldn't say, Ride me, Mama. You could only squint at the thin darkness between the floorboards and wonder what else over the long years had fallen between those cracks.

Him or me?

For years and years she asked this and you always knew but never answered, and now you are here by her bedside and still you can't.

So there were those times. Some of the times were good times, but they do not belong here. I don't know where they belong.

Here is another one. Sometimes on a dark night you could stand under a tree in front of your house and see two naked fat people in the upstairs room in the house across the street.

I thought, If only they knew how ugly they are.

I thought, Why do they do that?

I thought, Why don't they turn off that light?

The fat man up there lived in another place, lived across the river, and I thought he should stay in the place he came from.

My friends on that street would gather under that tree and they would say, Oh baby, look at them go, and you never could get your friends away from that tree. Shut up, they would say, what's eating you?

My mother was a friend of this woman. She was to be seen in this woman's company, in this fat woman's company, she was to be seen with them. I wondered whether my mother knew what went on up there with this fat couple, and why, when she went out on double dates, she had to go out with people like this.

He had a car, that's why.

On Saturday nights they went to dances together in a place called Edgewater, Virginia.

I stand corrected on this one small matter. I said "car" but it was not a car. His was a stingy little truck, dusty and black, with narrow, balding tires and corncobs and empty fertilizer sacks in the rear. When they went out to these dances the fat woman would sit up under the fat man's arms and my mother would sit in the cab on her date's lap, her head folded up against the ceiling, and all four would be hooting with laughter.

That was one time.

There was that time I broke a tooth falling against a brick while riding my bicycle around and around this little shrub and my mother said, Now no girl will ever marry you, but I knew she didn't care. She hardly even looked, scarcely even glanced at me, because I wasn't bleeding.

I got hit in the jaw once with a baseball, there was that time.

I pulled long worms out of my behind, there were those times, and I didn't tell her.

There was the time a dentist, my first dentist, took out an aching tooth, the wrong tooth, with a pair of garage pliers and charged two dollars.

You could see those worms up in white circles on my cheeks and

across my shoulders and people would look at you, they'd say, Look at that boy, he has worms.

You took a folded note to the store one time which you were not supposed to read, but you read it and it said, Give him head lice powder, I will pay you later.

You stole a nickel from her purse one time and it rolled between the floorboards and you have not yet confessed that.

You were such a nice little boy, so sweet and good.

You had to sit on a board when you got a haircut. You'd see the barber pick up the board and sling it up over the arms of the chair and you wanted to hit him.

You put a penny in the weight machine in front of the drugstore and got your fortune told. You would put in the penny or one of your friends would, and then that friend would step up on the scale with you or you would step up beside him, step up carefully, not to jiggle or the red cover would slam down over the numbers, and then one of you would step off, step carefully off, not to jiggle, and the numbers would roll back to reveal your own true weight, although both of you had the same fortune.

For two years I never weighed more or less than eighty-seven pounds. There was that time.

Women-young girls, ladies-would come to the door and they would ask, Is So-and-So here? Where is So-and-So? But you weren't supposed to tell them, even if you knew, because So-and-So had washed his hands ofthese women, was done with them, yet they wouldn't leave him alone.

Policemen knocked on the door, too, they too wanted to know where So-and-So was.

So-and-So was in trouble with women, with the law, with the family and with everyone else, and what you heard was he was no good, he was mean, he cared about no one, he would as soon hit you as look at you, but he was my mother's brother and she was ever defending him and hiding him and if anyone didn't like it they could go climb a pole.

You had to go to the store to buy your mother's Kotex, because no one else would or no one else was around, and that was terrible. The storekeeper would say, Speak up, boy, and you would again grumble the word. He would put the Kotex up on the counter and everyone would stare at it, would say this or that, they'd look at me, look me over closely, then the storekeeper would wrap the box in brown paper like a slab of meat and take your money and go away rubbing it between his fingers.

Sometimes a strange dog would corne up and follow you for a bit,

follow you home even, even stand scratching at the door, but you never knew whose dog it was or what name you could call it except Dog or what means you could devise to make it stay.

Mrs. Whitfield next door refused to return any hit ball which landed in her yard.

The one pecan tree in this place I am talking about was surrounded by a high fence and you could not reach the limbs even with poles and no matter how hard or long you tried.

At night you threw rocks at the light hanging from a cable supported by poles at either side of the gravel street and when you hit it you ran, because Mrs. Whitfield would be calling the law.

The policemen patrolled these streets like beings from another side of the world.

A boy my age jumped or fell from the water tower at the edge of town, there was that time.

There was the time a car was parked in the same alley that ran behind our house, with a hose hooked up from the exhaust to a window, but only the woman died. The man with her had awakened in the night, had changed his mind and fled. She was some other man's wife and her blouse was open and below the waist she had nothing on except her green shoes. My mother said to us all, she said, What kind of scum would leave her like that?

The town smelled. It smelled because of the paper mills and sometimes a black haze would cover the sky and you would have to hold your nose. Those fat, naked people in the room upstairs, you would see them drink from a bottle sometimes. You would see them with their arms around each other and then a hand would reach down to the windowsill and pick up the bottle.

You would see the light bulb hanging from their ceiling and a fly strip dangling to catch the flies.

A body was discovered one summer in a stream called the Dye Ditch, the stream you had to cross to reach grammar school, but you went down to look at that place in the ditch where the body was discovered but no one was there, no corpse was there, and after a while you didn't hear anyone speak of it and you never knew who it was had been stabbed in that ditch. The ditch was deep, with steep clay walls, the walls always wet, wet and smooth and perfect, but clay was not a thing you knew to do anything with. You found a shoe in the woods just up from the bank, a shoe with the tongue missing, and you said, This was the stabbed man's shoe and you asked yourselfwhy So-and-So had done it, because of some woman, most likely.

Some days the ditch water was one color, some days another color, vile colors, and at other times it was a mix of many.

You couldn't dam up that stream although you spent endless days trying, and you put your bare foot in the stabbed man's shoes but you still didn't know why or how it had happened.

You were such a nice little boy. You were so nice. You tried making biscuits once, as a surprise for your mother when she came in from work, but you forgot to mix lard in, and the salt and baking powder, and the biscuits didn't rise, and when she came in you'd forgotten to wipe up the flour from the table and floor.

She would sit you on her knees and hold your shoulders as she bounced you up and down and she would say, Which do you love best, him or me?

You were swinging on a tree-rope by the Dye Ditch, swinging high, into the limbs, and you let go and flew and when you landed a rusty nail came up all the way through your foot and as you hobbled the half-mile home you were amazed that it hurt so little and bled so little, and when you got home your brother pulled out the nail with pliers and your mother rubbed burning iodine over the wound and said, Be sure you wear clean socks for the next little while.

Three streets were paved, all others were gravel, and all of the streets were named after U.S. presidents. There was an uptown called Rosemary and a downtown called Downtown, and uptown was bigger, while Downtown was dying, was dead, but was the place you had to go through if you wanted for whatever reason to cross the river.

Across the river was nothing, it was death across the river. The fat man had come from across the river, so had my mother when she was fourteen and fleeing death, which was exactly how she spoke of it. Oh, honey, it was death on that farm.

He was down between the cracks, my father was, that's where he was. There was another time, an early time, when I walked with my grandfather across the fields and when he stopped to pick up soil and crumble it and let it sift between his fingers I would pick up soil and do the same.

Your grandfather let you walk down the rows with him, he let you hold the plow, and he said, Just let the mule do the work, but you couldn't hold the plow handles and the reins at the same time and the plow blade kept riding up out of the ground. When you came to the end of a row the mule would stop and your grandfather would look at both of you, look and flap his hat against his leg, and say, Now let's see which of you have the better sense. You stood behind your grandfather's chair in the evenings and combed his balding head, but your grandmother

said, I've got enough plates to get to the table, why should I get theirs? Why can't she come and take away these that are hers and leave me with those that are mine?

No one asked her to marry that drinker. Didn't we tell her sixteen was too young?

She made her own bed. There ain't one on their daddy's side ever had pot to pee in or knew what pot was for.

So there was the time she came and packed your goods, your brother and sister's goods, in a paper sack, and took you to town for the first time. The town was only seven miles away, but it was the first time and it was quite a town. It had a downtown called Downtown and an uptown called Rosemary, and she had two upstairs rooms downtown on Monroe Street, and you had to be very quiet up there because the woman who lived below lived alone below and she was so stupid she thought every sound meant a thief was coming to steal her money.

She had a blue baby, this baby with an enormous blue head, and all of the light bulbs in her rooms were blue so that you wouldn't know she had a blue baby.

Every day for five days in the week, sometimes six, your mother left for work before daylight, you would hear the car out on the street honk for her, you would hear the car door slam, hear the engine, the roll of tires, and she would be gone. You would hear her moving softly about you, you would feel her tucking you in, then she would be gone. You went to school that first week and for five days stood in the woods watching the children at play outside, then the bell would ring and they would go inside, and when the yard had cleared you would tramp through the woods back home, you would dawdle at the Dye Ditch and check where you could and could not jump it and be amazed at all the vile colors, you would sit on the bank and grieve and tell yourself that tomorrow you would go inside with them. Then you would sneak up the stairs and never make a sound all day, just you and the blue baby and the baby's mother in that silent house. You would sit at the table drawing rings of water on the yellow top. At the end of the day your mother would come in with a bag of groceries, come in with a sweater looped over one arm, come in with cotton fuzz in her hair, and she would say, How do you like your new school, is it a nice school? How do you like your new friends?

She would sit you on her knees and bounce you and say, How is my handsome man today?

You were such a good little boy.

On Fridays you got up early to deliver the local paper and the people

would not pay, they would say, It is not worth my nickel, and you kept returning but they rarely would pay, although they did not tell you to stop delivering their paper and if you did stop they would call the editor, they would say, Where's my paper?

There was the time I knocked on one door and my Uncle So-and-So answered without his clothes on and he said, You haven't seen me, you don't know where I am, and he gave me a dollar.

The blue baby died and went to heaven, but the woman downstairs did not change her light bulbs.

On Mondays you would take your mother's white blouse and black skirt to the cleaners and on Saturdays you would see her wearing these. You would see her in heels, her legs in nice stockings, her mouth red, and she would say, How do I look?

She would say, Say Hello to Monty, but you wouldn't.

She would say, He's so cute when he's pouting, and that would make you grin.

She would say, I'll be home early, but you stayed up late with your head pressed against the window and she never came, no, she never.

There was the time she said, You smell like four dead cats in a trunk, why don't you wash? And she flung your clothes off and scraped at your knees, elbows and heels, she twisted a cloth up in your ears, she said, This crust will never come off, and when she had your skin pink and burning she said, Your father is coming, you want to look nice for him, don't you?

But he didn't come, and I put back on my dirty clothes and hid under the house until past bedtime, until past the time she'd stopped walking the street and calling my name, and then I went in and would talk to no one.

There was the time she said, I want the three of you out of this house, I want you out this minute, if I don't get a minute's peace I will stab myself with these scissors. So she dressed you and your brother in identical Little Boy Blue short-pant suits with straps that came over the shoulder, and she washed your faces and necks and ears and slicked your hair down with water. She gave your sister thirty-six cents from her red purse and she said, Take them to see the moving picture show at the Peoples Theater and don't you dare come back until the picture is over. My sister said, Mama, how will we know when the picture is over? and my mother said, When the rest of the audience gets up to leave that's when you leave, and not a second before. So we trouped down to the movie, hurrying to get there because we couldn't imagine what it might be like to see a moving picture show. We entered in the dark and sat in seats at

the very rear, while up on the screen you saw the back of a man's head and a woman with her head thrown back and they were kissing. We sat on the edge of our seats, holding hands, my sister in the middle and telling us not to kick our legs, as the man got into a jeep and drove off, not returning the wave of the woman who was running after him, and he got smaller and smaller in his jeep as the music got louder, and then we saw tears slide down the woman's face and she collapsed to her knees in the muddy road and in the next second the theater lights were rising and everyone was getting up. They were getting up, they were all leaving.

On the way home the three of us bawled and my sister said it wasn't worth thirty six cents, it wasn't worth nothing and Mama must be crazy. So that was that time and that is why I have hated movies to this day.

You weighed eighty-seven pounds for so many of those years.

You wore socks so stiff with filth you could barely work your feet into them in the morning. Your nose ran, always ran, and you wiped the snot on your sleeves until they turned stiff also, from cuff to elbow.

You would feel this tickling movement, this wriggling motion, while you sat on the toilet, and you'd stand up and wrench yourself over and there would be this long worm coming out of your behind. You couldn't believe it that first time, but here it was, proof that worms were living inside you, and it made you ache with the shame that if worms did, lived inside you, then what else could?

You will tell no one. You would be walking down the street and you'd feel it, feel the worm, and you'd reach a hand inside your britches and pull the worm all the way out and you'd think it never was going to stop coming.

Who do you love best, him or me?

There was the time all this ended, but you never knew when it was that time was, so it was as though that time never ended, which is one reason to think about it. I think about it because it ended, but never really ended, that is why I think about it.

They were always washing your ears.

They were always saying, Tie your shoelaces.

You were always being shoved one way or another by one person or another and you never gained an ounce through so many years.

We got home from the moving picture show fifteen minutes after we left and our mother was sitting in her slip in the kitchen chair, with her eyes closed and both wrists up white in her lap and her feet in a pan of water.

Cotton fluff was in her hair.

One year you asked your mother whatever happened to that fat old guy with the truck who went with that woman across the street, and she didn't know who you meant. Some days later, while washing her hair over a white bowl, she suddenly clapped her hands and said, Oh him, they are not going together any longer, it was never serious anyhow. It's just that he treated her decently and he wasn't a tightwad, and he liked good fun. Why are you asking about something like that?

Why are you? Sometimes I find myselfthinking you are a strange little boy.

You're odd. That's how you strike me sometimes.

I think about it now because now she lies in this bed with tubes up her nose and tubes attached to her shaved head and she's holding my hand, or rather her hand is limp in mine and you can't hear her breathe. You can't see her chest rise and her lids never move. Her fingers are silent in mine.

You think of the man you knew who was locked up in the freezer in the Yukon and how he froze.

You think of the freezer and ofopening the door, but when the door is opened after all of these years all you see is the freezer empty and the frosty tumble of air.

You think of these things and of those times.

She has been this way for an hour or more, not moving, and so have I, the two of us here, neither of us moving and nothing happening, her hand cold in mine and the night darkening and I still haven't answered.

Pretty Pictures

There are pretty pictures and not-so-pretty pictures. You know that. We would probably agree which is which. There is the not-so-pretty picture of my wife kissing another man. But that's looking at it from my side. From her side it is no doubt a very pretty picture. We know how it feels, don't we, to kiss someone we are attracted to, illicit or otherwise. The picture isn't the same, illicit, but the feeling is. You go up on your toes with a feeling like that. You kiss, and you go up on your toes, illicit or otherwise; you go off into orbit. That's what the kissing does, and maybe the prettiness or the not-so-prettiness of the moment is somehow beside the point, and ought to be, somehow, not a thing that we dwell upon. We've all been deprived of too many kisses and that is one reason we do it. Let's say that is one reason. There are other reasons, of course, but let's not dwell upon it.

I did not set out to tell you about my wife kissing another man. It was not a picture, at the start, I even had in mind telling you. It was an ugly picture, to my mind, which just jumped in. It got in front and momentarily dislodged the pretty picture I was contemplating telling you about. Here it is, that pretty picture. My father and I are passing along the street and the sights I see seem very strange and unfamiliar to me. All the angles are screwy; they are screwy and cockeyed. People look short, very short, and dogs and cats are practically foreign creatures, so small are they in their appearance. Children, other children, they are the smallest beings yet. You can look over fences you've never looked over before. You can see into certain windows, into houses, you've never looked into before.

It comes to me, in this picture, that I am riding my father's shoulders. That is where I am, up there on his shoulders, my legs around his neck, his hands gripping my ankles, my head above his head. My chin, at times, rests in his hair. I am laughing, I am at times waving my arms, so fond I am of being up there. I am delighted with this view of the world.

That is the pretty part. Here is the not-so-pretty part. We go through a doorway, and we both crouch. I do not know which doorway it is. Maybe we have circled the block and returned home and that is the doorway we are entering. The picture dissolves at this point. I know we are passing through a door, but what awaits us inside is not a picture I can see. It is not even out-of-focus, that picture. It is blank; it does not exist.

Here is an even prettier picture, a picture prettier than the first part of

that picture was. I am again riding my father's shoulders. We are out on the street once again, but here is why this picture is prettier. I am eating an ice-cream cone. I am smiling, eating that cone. My father is also eating an ice-cream cone and he too is smiling. I have two scoops on mine, one chocolate and one vanilla, with the chocolate on top, and have just begun my licks. I have an entire double-scoop cone to look forward to. My father has a single cone, vanilla, I think, and he has not yet touched his. One of his hands grips my ankle. I have my free hand across his brow, to hold on, and sometimes I jiggle and that hand slides down to cover his eyes. He walks with one foot in the gutter, the other on the sidewalk, and up on his shoulders I weave from side to side. He says, How do you like your ice cream? and I say, How do you like yours? And we laugh, as though we have said the funniest thing in the world.

The ice cream melts and oozes over my fingers and it drops into his hair. It's a hot day, he says. Where do you want to go now?

Here that picture becomes not-so-pretty, what little there is of it, because I don't know where I want to go now. I want the ride to start back over; I want him to lift me to his shoulders, to hold my ankle, to walk again to wherever it was we bought that ice cream. I want him to walk on and off the curb as he has done, I want to slip and slide up there, and for my ice cream to drip into his hair. When he asks, Where do you want to go next? already that picture is closing down, the picture is dissolving, and a second later I will no longer be riding on his shoulders. The picture will vanish and I will not know where I have gone next.

This is what I felt when I saw my wife kissing another man. It is what I felt when I saw her coming out of his bedroom. I did not know where my world had gone or if I had a place within it. The door to that bedroom rattled as it closed, which was precisely what I felt inside, that rattling, and I could not say what was beyond that door or any other door. I think what I felt was that she had left her love behind that closed door and the only picture I had left was of that closed door.

So that is the picture I have now, of that door, and it is the only picture. It is the picture which keeps jumping in; it dislodges all other pictures. It is not a pretty picture, from my point of view, and I do not know what to do with it. I do not know where I can go next. It will not dissolve, that picture won't, and it will go with me wherever it is I choose, or don't choose, to go.

The door is not a part of her picture. Her picture is composed only of whatever it was that went on while she was inside. She has that picture, of what went on inside, and the next picture, as she closed the door, of

my stunned face. The man inside the room, the man she kissed, he has his pictures too. I expect my father, for that matter, has his own pictures and that these do not include his riding his son upon his shoulders or of their eating ice cream and the ice cream dripping into his hair. It is a fact that I never in real life rode his shoulders, or even saw him once I had reached the age of two. Possibly he rode another kid on his shoulders; more likely, he didn't. I have never imagined that children were a part of this earth that my father cared for.

So the picture I have of me riding my father's shoulders is one born out of the rides I have given my own child, together with those sights I have witnessed of other men and women riding their sons and daughters. It is the picture I had in mind to tell you when I began telling you this, before I saw her kissing him and that door closing, because this, her kissing him and emerging from his bedroom and that door rattling shut with its full awful power, is not a picture I would, in the normal course of events, have mentioned. It is the one true picture, the one picture drawn from real life, but it is not a picture that will do any of us any good.

ROMANESQUE: BEVAGNA

Chiesa Di San Silvestro 1195

Poems by Donald Davie

Photographs by Doreen Davie

Here, left alone among Masses columnar

Or stepped, and lit by a cleft Of splayed and angled stone,

We make atonement with Such etiolated, clean Gratifications as The camera can purvey.

Chill on a sunny day Unimaginable hands And wills, co-working, made Not this that stands

Around and over us, but Something more bloody, more Believed in, and from where We stand and focus, not

Worth reaching for.

Bent back and upwards, over A roll of earth or stone, The penitential ladder

Terminates in light;

But cruelly it conceals

The stumbling-block, the test, The tall obstruction not At the altar but Before it, and suppressed:

The dancing-floor, the dark Blood-saturated air

Now whistle-clean although Unseen, atop the hump And arc of the rising stair.

The way out. How they must have Wished for it, over their shoulders: So near, the peopled piazza, The fountain playing there!

Ah but it was as long, That short nave all a humble Community could afford, As the stretch from above the moon To under its wheel of fortune.

The way back, way out! How Far is it? If you think so, It is as far as no Christian man has traveled.

The foliate capital: all Their humility dared to imagine, Or intimate, of the springing Splendor of Christ in glory.

Behind it the light moves round; One flank is illumined and then, Hours later, another: the sun is Harnessed to their devotions.

Implacable! Alas,

Despite the spring of the arch, the Discreetly pregnant swell

Of the column, the altar refuses; Four-square, it is not placated.

It is all a transposition Of air and light, those Spiritual dimensions, Into these corporeal ones: Solids, and voids. And the altar Is not to be placated. Of course not; who Gave license for its non­

Negotiable terms to be Fudged and translated?

Enlightenment comes, it falls From the left at this time of day; As the day burns round, the ray Will slant from the opposite quarter.

What one remarks, what the plate Cannot help but register is That, fall as it may from whichever Angle, it burns, it consumes The mysteries.

So what it consumes is Faith? Enlightened man is alone? What we see burned away is No frayed delicious fringe But the edge, and volume, of stone.

Three Poems

Thomas McGrath

The Citizen Dreaming

In the blue hour

When the houses fall asleep in their shadows

(Before the impersonal light in the hungry streets Glamors one more evening)

Then, in one of the mean rooms, The Citizen makes soup. On the forbidden hot-plate, Or, on the forbidden electric fry-pan (The gift of a grandchild)

Fabricates a sandwich from prefabricated Processed cheese-type food-type - American-type - cheeseOr opens the innocent-looking can of beans. The Citizen is dining at home alone in the blue hour.

And now as the darkness distributes crime Unequally in the streets of the rich and the poor, The Citizen reviews the day and the days: The excitements and astonishments of the new age! The excitement of another rent raise on the room! The enlightening cutback in social benefits By the Presidential thief the Citizen elected! And the one bar the Citizen could walk to: closing;

The store that once gave credit: Gone out of business;

The last movie house the Citizen could get to:

Bankrupt.

And everyone, it seems, Disappearing: The children gone impossible distances the grandchildren Unknown, unseen

In the blue hour a little light enters.

What was hidden becomes almost Visable

The opaque Clears a little

Now that the Citizen has stopped voting for those frauds (Great heroes once!) Who have put the Citizen here(What was it that a father or mother said?) Now that it is too late And the Citizen is as abandoned As those the Citizen abandoned

Once Despised

For class or colorNow all can be seen at last clearly!

Now, in the blue hour the Citizen indulges In criminal dreams: A warm place, good food, sex, freedomNow that all desires could end only In the choice of illegal means.

Something human is elected out of the light In the blue hour. And the lucky dead on all the roads that led from home to here!

Mediterranean

I passed you many times as I went down the cliff walk, Little Olivetree, all stunted and stiffened, as you climbed From the blue cove where the cold sea comes in and dies.

I never saw you. My eyes were fixed: stunned By the brutal light dancing in the fields of the insane blue. The entrancing sea - indeed! I crowhopped and balked at seeing-

At seeing you, Comrade Olive. I had too much seaing. And what were you pointing to or away from-your arthritic hands

Pinned in their tattered gray-green gloves, the fineries of former days?

2

But finally I had to see you: old, fruitless, lame. Were you climbing toward fire to bake the bread of the drowned fisherman's widow?

Or be crosscut to bed the village lovers fucking themselves insane

And back again while peasants, donkeys, women and kids Listening applauded, sniggered or looked unappeasably sad? Was it for this you shook all night in the cold salt fogs of the sea?

I don't understand you - thanks be to all gods, goddesses and godlets!

You are not human - and thanks be again for that! You are just there-unnoticed except for scent-posting dogs

Who piss on your gnarly roots each morning and twice on Sunday.

Relentless as the sea that rages daily in the shattered lightOld guerilla: charging slow motion to take high ground!

You seem to want to be helpful to those up there in the village

Ergo my fancy of fireyour sacrificial death. Such fancies can breed theologies; baroque and green as pond-scum.

3

Nothing like bad Greek beer to clear the weary mind! It looks, Comrade Olive, that you have got where we all Will get. And I salute you, old fellow-traveler!

I halt, take a spray of your leaves and stride to a bar at the cove.

The sky is blessing the sea and the sea is blessing the sky! Ho hum. Sycophants. Mutually co-admiring. But the beer is cold.

And I love this spray of olive leaves: gray and crazing With frosty filigree of salt. I suck them. And the beer tastes fine.

So there is a grace from the halt by the tree; though not amazing. May be: best thing: endure: face front: get back on the line.

Even Song

Sundown in the Western Lands!

On Ninth Street South in Minnepimp, (The nihilipolitan double parochial Capitol

Of the Strategic Province of central American emptiness

One of the several United States of the many Americas.)

This village (pronounced UGH) that lies between The hamlets of Y'KNOW and WHO:ME?

On a once-great river (sweet Afton flow gently)

On Ninth Street South I sit overlooking the slaveway, Highway 94, and into the wide Penthouse of the city

Burning in the fallen light.

Below, the cars, bound to their lanes, rush east, rush west Interchangeable: powered by the mainstream mysteries Of money, hydrocarbons and high anxiety

Take this hammer, HUH!

Take it to the Captain, HUH!

Tell him I'm gone, boy

Tell him I'm gone

Twilight of lutefisk on the Cloaca-Maximal

Don't knock it, Mac, Three hundred miles from where you were born? You didn't get far either.

Three Poems

Linda Pastan

Root Pruning

Years before you moved that holly from the woods into the place that waited at the garden's edge, you dug your shovel in around its roots every time we took a walk that way. Root pruning, you said. The garden waited. Seasons came and went and layers of leaves like old linoleum accumulated every year. I'd even forget just what it was we waited for, although you used your shovel like a walking stick, carrying it with you almost every day.

Years have gone by, the holly shades our daughter's window now. Sometimes I believe if I had done anyone thing in some other way

everything would be fine, and we would be happy the way families are whose innocence goes with them to the grave, who mourn each other, when they must, with no regrets. If you had root pruned me, if I had known some cutting edge during all those years, maybe I wouldn't feel now as if the ground had simply disappeared.

The Descent

My mother grows smaller before my eyes, receding into the past tense slowly. It feels like an escalator down, she whispers, half asleep. I lean over the rail and there are vistas, whole histories spread out: my own father in a landscape where each blade of grass cuts like an eyelash caught in the eye, making a sharp edge between what is known and what is merely guessed. Is it her childhood or mine that glows with that light only pain remembered can throw? Fear is using up the oxygen. I must get used to the change in the air, how thin it grows and how strange it is that beauty can become the ache in the bone that proves you are alive. Now evening leaches the color from her face, and in the leftover light it is hard to see where the descent will end, hard to believe it is death holding her elbow with such care, guiding her all the way down.

The Accident

For a time after the accident everything seemed washed in light, and ordinary things were like lost objects unexpectedly retrieved which have to be claimed again one by one: yes, to the bentwood chair, to the birch by the door, yes, to the scarred door itself, to its knob which had the secret glow of an apple in a Flemish painting. It would have been an almost perfect ending, swift and unblemished, for who could have guessed that the road was veneered in ice and led to the lamppost; or that the lamppost could be a hidden exit, a place where the past and the future collide in one barbarous flash and only the body is nothing, disappearing at last into certainty.

The weather welcomes me back with its camellias

blasted to the roots last winter yet still surviving in their shrouds of color, flimsy but alive for another season.

Two Poems

Robert A. Fink

Foot Reflexologist, Farmers and Christmas

For twenty bucks an hour, the old and lame remove their shoes and line up at the LA-Z-BOY recliner to wait their turn at Sister Thelma's fingers realigning withered feet. Their looks confess no doubts about this mobile home, double-wide, parked among the scrub oak just beyond the city limits. They know the cost of specialists: the crisp receptionist, the chromium waiting room reflecting everything but pain. So they gladly queue up at the trailer in Big Mac overalls and gingham dresses to swap testimonials and sip the herbal tea Sister Thelma's agile daughter serves with last year's bumper crop of sweet potatoes.

Their children, who took degrees in agriculture, shake their heads at old folk sowing cold hard cash to every prevailing wind that skims the topsoil from farmed-out land. They put their faith in two-story tractors

and meteorologists dependable as the six o'clock news. They've learned better than to argue with parents who profess the enigma of a family farm, still holding to the garden and a few chickens.

Yet every Christmas, the kids and grandkids gather at the kitchen table smoothed by elbows of three generations, to feast again on stories only the oldest and the youngest can believe: How on December 24, 1943, an angel stepped into a foxhole outside Taranto, Italy, where a farm boy fresh from the States prayed softly, bleeding, counting stars through broken limbs of winter trees. And the angel laid his hands upon the wound and prophesied good news: Peace. A slight limp. A hundred-acre farm in Oklahoma.

West Texas Interlude

Nine years I've jogged this stretch of unpaved road at least four days a week and never looked straight at the house somebody took the time to piece together out of rock hauled in from God knows where. Nothing here but tumbleweeds and scrub mesquite. A farmer has to be religious or a fool.

The man who built this house had no choice about the sand, the only foundation, but he must have figured rock would settle into place; all he had to do was look around to know it'd never wash away.

I've heard old timers swear they came here for the view. Nothing stops the eye. "Ain't nothing gonna sneak up on you" except this stone house the color of sand, an old woman hugging the railing, her voice almost lost in the wind: "He's dead! Help me, Daddy's dead!"

I didn't want to stop. At my age, it's hard to break the pace, momentum my only motivation. But out here you can't ignore a cry for help. No way to rationalize it was meant for someone else.

She was fat and she stank. What was she doing on this porch crying for her Daddy? "Ma'am, what's wrong?"

"Oh, God, he's dead! Help me. I'll pay you money." She pointed past the screen door to the clutter I expected: dime-store figurines, photographs of soldiers, doilies yellowed with sweat. A Naugahyde couch. A corpse, open eyes and mouth. "Is he dead? Daddy, get up! I'll pay you money."

It was not the first time I had looked into this face, laid my ear against the chest, heard nothing but my heart.

Asian jungles convince you everyone will wear this grin, and funeral parlors lie; so who was I to tell somebody's great grandma after she'd dragged her body along a trail of furniture to the porch to flag me down when any other day I'd have passed this house an hour earlier; who was I to be the one to say: Your Husband's Dead!

So we hugged each other to the kitchen table, stumbling through a slippery dance to the cold meat peeking from the Styrofoam containers Meals On Wheels had left a hundred years ago when I was loosening up, and she was lighter, and her husband had just come in from the garden for a nap.

Two Poems

Robert Morgan

The Road from Elmira

The road through Saluda Gap and down the Winding Stairs was the one he took with hams and walnuts, mink and ginseng, every year in the wagon to Augusta, the same road drovers across the mountains from Kentucky used, negotiating the steep turns below Panther, tying back their wheels with hickory withes for the worst grades. Leaving before light he passed two nights in the fields, avoiding taverns, and stations for the drovers pushing hogs and cattle, even turkeys, to the markets in the low country. Rifle under the seat he prayed not to be overtaken or waylaid. A cousin disappeared who'd been a mason on the statehouse in Columbia, coming home with six months' pay. When grocers on the riverfront bargained down too low or hard, he peddled door to door. That was his only chance for Christmas cash, for coffee for the backporch mill, for sugar, cloth, boots, rifle

cartridges. Any surplus would go for dictionaries, books, a long auger for drilling pumplogs to lead springwater into the yard.

In the battle near Petersburg the instant a bullet almost nudged his temple, he saw the sniper on a chestnut bough and, deaf with fear, shot quick as at a squirrel. But never saw the Yankee fall for smoke from cannon screened the field and when it cleared he found the cold muzzles staring him down with grapeshot. That's when he prayed the hardest yet, and promised not to fire on anyone again. Rumors during Reconstruction had him shouting to a friend, "Let's go." Crawling to the woods they threw their weapons in the brush and ran with raised arms behind the lines. He wintered in the prison sheds near the river at Elmira where three thousand Tarheels would die of exposure, where guards called him "Johnny" when they brought the corncob soup. In the blizzards he trapped rodents and birds for meat. A rat brought four cents for a blanket. It was the gospel singing and prayer that warmed them through the new year. Wrapped in rags the soldiers sang Old Harp numbers by the Chemung. His throat swelled with diphtheria once and he couldn't swallow or pronounce his name. April with the snow just rancid carcasses and the slush in ditches pecked by blowing rain, they put the survivors on trains for the long ride south through greening hills, ruined towns. Let out at Greenville

he saw on the distant mountains sarvis and redbud in bloom. On the first of May he walked past the wasted city toward foothill mist. The Lindsays in Traveler's Rest gave him supper and their guest bedroom. At home his boxer barked all night, and they said Frank must be back, though they hadn't heard in a year, neither a telegram nor letter. Next day he climbed the wagon track and walked into the yard ghost,like at milking time, scaring everyone under the full spring planting moon.

When He Spoke Out of the Dark

When he spoke out of the dark I had not seen him sitting there in a lawn chair on the grass resting in his white painter's overalls and gray sweatshirt and cap, gray hands, easing after the long workday. For the milking was over, and weeds pulled for the hog, kindling had been cut and the painting done, the masonry and carpentry, the holes had been dug, the corn hoed, beans carried out of mud, the ditch opened, the corn gathered and heaved into the barnloft and shelled and carried to mill. And there he sat, tired, where I had not seen him, looming to my dark-adjusting eyes white and smoke-like out of the depths of night, and spoke close as anyone in the after-supper darkness, rest-happy from the long workday.

Two Poems

]oseph Gastiger

For Whoever Drops By at The Mai Kai, The Derby or Pete's

Whichever its lights say, Whatever new sham, Hawaiian palms bossed on matchbooks Or leprechauns tacked above boothsWalk in, the dark smells the same

Musante snatches another glass, Swats down a ten. Didn't you hear, Gary got killed, he tells me, Slammed this lightpole on the Wantagh Coming from work. His little girl Made Communion, Sunday before

I sip and listen how Mittenberg Manages auto parts, Calabrese welds ribs of F,14's, Curry, he got caught for pills Someplace down south.

Since when have we made friends?

Tough girls who fuck-you'd me, Preening in study hall, now ask how 'Bout a dance-Roseanne and Gina and Diane.

Since when would Ed Musante buy me

Drinks all night, or Gina

Work her hip into my table

Where beer bounces to the song

You bounced me good, MusanteBy the bleachers sixteen years ago, I hardly blocked a punch. I spat a tooth, you split my nose And steadied me for more.

The slogans on my jacket, you said, Lost your brother's war

Tall Roseanne, married to Gary. Gina's still married to Curry. Diane, he shrugs, such a sob story, Picks through the crowd of lean Pool players half her age.

Half of my yearbook moved home

To a corner tap, same stretch Of trash-blown road all your life, Same run of billboards from graveyard

To water tank - cheapest rooms, Easy rates, bargains every day

Men on their instinctive cruise

To a highway crash clap my back; Women with some fatal radar That picks up the prettiest hood On the dance floor elbow and flirt

Myoid street accent creeps up like An ache in the arm, before rain

And Roseanne swings me around, into This glittery whirlpool at last call­

Let's rip like we're eighteen And drunk, till the juke goes dead. Gina shakes loose of a quick grab, Sweaty Musante wiseasses away

Through Aretha's wails. We'll rock The house that Jack built, A hoarse chain of fools.

Blood enemies, dregs of Salisbury Gangs out of breath, money and time, We reel like some tribe gawked over By tourists, dancing the way Open to raise our dead.

For Kimiko

A light snowfall at dusk. Ovals of snow Close around windowpanes of the school.

I think of walking with you, Shy and flushed, up a slanted bridge When you paused to wipe snow from my neck, So I ineptly kissed your hat. Then you nipped my throat, caught my lips And you led us home.

A stripped Christmas tree rolls at the curb, And its branches have broomed a path Like snowprints skirred by wrens overnight, Or the faint press of print On a notebook page from a page before.

Someone thought he saw you In a concert line six years ago, Tugging a tall man's arm, fanning Your tickets. Why should you remember?

Car's Cradle

Andrew Glaze

The land, pack on its back, is up cap-a-pie in green, striding away whistling rustling miles with a single smoke. What's crippled and bent and caught unready drips from its new boots, mossy spawn.

Roads weave their way like diamondbacks hissing counties of fervent baskingblackbirds, a red army of shoulderboards, quiver overhead shouting-

aspens breathless, turn coat over and overonly an instant to cross the river, (blue coat dripping stags) it swims, running off field-mice and crickets.

Foolishness limps behind, scattering a flux of wild seed secretly placed here and there in the darkest groves to steal up music.

The sky seesaws like a eat's cradle. Over the hill, darkening, comes the sun to talk. Ahead, sleep beckons, enormous shadows booming both ways at once on the perilous throughway.

Two Poems

Maurya Simon

Rothko's Black

Each of us pools into shadows as the painting glows savagely, calmly, and the world floats off in a square, flat discus, then reappears as a thunderstorm viewed from a canvas window.

Such darkness calls to us from beyond the body's ocean.

For here's a blackness of sound deep as a baritone's silence and tuned to the key of Self. We're black boats now, black sails, oars. We begin to row back and forth from lighthouse to lighthouse.

Les Fleurs du Printemps

Looking slightly kitsch, the birds of paradise stretch their long necks over the flagstone step. I prefer cymbidium, with their open mouths and tiny tongues feathering the air. If flowers could talk, these orchids would lisp in French, unlike the roses which, no doubt, have mastered Sanskrit. There by the rusty faucet the stamens of the calla lilies seem grotesquely yellow, yet the bees drop-stitch into them nonetheless, as if the jaundiced fingers beckoned. High above the flat-thumbed jade, there, a passion flower crowns the arbor slats with splendid nonchalance. Here is the martyr on the cross: mute, painfully beautiful, its purple-tipped filaments stabbing heavenward, its 'Thinged anthers splaying out beneath that single, bold altarthe stigma-its shape a human heart.

The Hotstrip

Daryl E. Jones

Calling you "kid," the foreman of the hotstrip motions you to stay back behind the waist-high cinderblock wall

opposite the conveyor, its cylindrical steel rollers roaring and clattering the whole length of the building, huge as an airplane hangar. The reference to "kid" stings you, for already you are imagining how gangly you look in the hardhat and oversize gloves, in the heavy steel-toed boots you can barely walk in; how green you must seem to this man of perhaps sixty who is now your boss, whose face is so cruelly disfigured. So you try to pay attention, try not to stare, as he waves his glove and shouts, straining to tell you all you must know to survive your first day in the mill. He tells you each steel slab weighs six tons, is fired by torches from below until it glows white-orange at 14000, then free-falls thirteen feet and comes rolling like thunder toward you on the conveyor.

Abruptly he pauses, eyeing you, and you realize already the heat and noise are making you lightheaded. And though you try to watch where his glove is pointing, though you don't want to stare, your eyes keep rolling to his gaunt face and the small, perfectly circular hole in his cheek, a mauve 0 just below the cheekbone, where teeth show through. But he is telling you the slabs roll by three minutes apart, and when

a slab slams into the grinders, sparks fly, and invisible slivers of red-hot steel, and that, by God, is what the wall is for so you better get down. Slapping the wall with his glove he glares at you, and you see how smooth the welt of scar tissue is, unnaturally smooth, cauterized. And wondering how one cheek could be struck and not both, you speculate that he must have been caught with his mouth wide open, perhaps while he was laughing, or shouting instructions, or perhaps, near the end of a long day, yawning; in any case, the angle of trajectory through his cheek and open mouth a perfect paradox of randomness and surgical precision; and in any case, the parting and closing of flesh instantaneous, probably not even felt, not then.

You try to put it out of your mind. But later, when the foreman leaves you sweeping the aisle, you imagine the sharp sidelong glances of strangers in bars, a house without family portraits, a wife whose eyes never quite meet yours. And always that same mauve hole burns back and stays with you. Stays with you when you sweep the aisle clear of shards, when you crouch while a hot slab rumbles by. Stays with you all day and even after work when you leave the semi-gloom of the mill and walk to the parking lot, shading your eyes and squinting against the sun glinting off grilles and mirrors, a world of flying slivers.

Good Cheer

John Skoyles

My mother called all street vendors by one name: the little men. And preferred stopping there to Woolworth's or Schrafft's.

"How about some chestnuts from the little man!" she'd say, after a gruesome round of holiday crowds at Macy's. That phrase first struck me odd ten years after I heard it: my father in the hospital, I came home from college to comfort my mother.

After one visit, when we left in early evening, and limousines and sports cars from New Jersey headed toward the east side bars, she said "Should we go home, or stop for something from the little man!" I loved her for bringing back that old routine, freshly heard, just as we verged on permanent change. r worried so much about my father's heart, my mother's false good cheer, that every commonplace seemed significant, and every significance, absurd. We stood under a loud umbrella signed Sabrecc's in a whirling script

and I ordered. It was the first time, too, I really looked at my mother: all smiles in a full-length fake fur coat with a real fur collar. And myself: the jacket and tie chosen for a style imitating the ivy league. The little man, pleased to serve us, made a serious production above the mustard well, and with a delicate flourish snapped the tissue from the straw. Then we returned to our apartment in Queens, to a street where women always seemed to be sweeping, and no one shook when glass and metal crashed, as if they expected it.

Two Poems

Michael Dennis Browne

Peter and Thunder

Your face when you heard it. How you looked up. How, crouched over toy parts, suddenly you stiffened. How then you turned, how you stared up in the direction of the thunder. They zzre at the gates. How then you looked at me, as if I might send them away, as if with a few low-toned, well-chosen words I could send the thunder-gangs scuttling back through all the holes in the sky. As if there were no thunder deep down in my own bones, no thunder in yours, little son.

What He Says

"Abe, Abe," weeping, for no reason I know, for nothing we've done, and "Abe" again, howling, as we buckle him into the car seat.

Then "Aja!" as he grabs the ring of shiny colored keys, and "Dattu!" as he crawls toward the small giraffe fallen to the floor.

At the funeral for a young man killed, "Gaa!" he yelled as the mourners rushed by, "Gaa! Gaa!"

Maison des Jeunes

Alan Shapiro

Nuit sans ewiles, nuit obscure -

Baudelaire

After the woman I was visiting had gone in to bed some nights I would see a woman undress on a balcony. The long playground below us, which our buildings fronted, would already be deserted by everyone but the men at their game of boule far at the other end. Their pitch, the only strip of dull light cut in the darkness made duller by the slow twining of cigar smoke over and around them, the quiet made more quiet by the random click of the balls, by the laugh or groan that would rise for a moment above the constant murmuring and then fall back.

All through the twilight I would look out toward her building and never know, for certain, who she was among the countless mothers on balcony after balcony hanging up and taking down the day's wash. The same clothes always in different places, a sluggish eddying of orange and blue, white, pink or olive blouses, pants, slips, socks and dresses up and down each bleak facade. Her voice, somewhere among the voices, would have been calling from time to time down to the playground loud with children, a mesh of excited cries, shrill bits of singing, from which each magnetic call, weary or cross, or both, would pull in one reluctant child, and then another.

When the dark thickened, always the same two remained: a fat boy dribbling a soccer ball in one place fluidly from knee to knee to forehead back to knee, while a friend bicycled around him, veering as close as he could to swipe the ball away, and always missing, because the boy, clairvoyant in his own finesse, would take one half-step back or forward, quicken or slow his pace and, never looking, shift the ball so tauntingly beyond the other's reach the other, jittery with hope, would have to go on playing.

Each night

the longer she would keep me waiting, the more unexpected was her white shirt's fluorescent glow against the dark, down which her vague hand moved from button, I imagined, down to button until her shoulders arching back a little let the loose shirt slip as smoothly as water down her bare arms. Her dark skin now so merged with darkness that the sudden black flare of breast was like a gift the late hour gave and took away, so as to urge from me a more intense stare that would later make her memory keener than sense.

Maybe her husband was among the men she could have watched passing in and out of small groups now, to and from their turns, a bottle drifting languidly from hand to hand; slower and slower, as though to prolong each other's reverie of these after hours, postponing each waiting bed, each getting up tomorrow. Maybe she could have heard her husband among their voices, the seamy, intimate, male exchange of secrets they (their scant wages already portioned to their wives) had earned the right to keep. If only one of them had seen her she would have been another secret in the smoke-slurred light of their little freedoms. She would have been in his mind, later, as he lay down beside his wife.

As I lay down, she was the woman I would need to wake, those nights, waking my friend. Hers, the darkness that would open up for me, draw me down deeper, and never deep enough. Beyond me, always, the promise of her unseeable face, the mild dreamy argot of her moaning what could have almost been a name.

Three Poems

Roberto ]uarroz

Yes, there is a back of things.

But there is also a beyond the back of things, a place made of faces turned backwards.

And in that place there are footfalls, footfalls or at least the waiting for footfalls, the reading of a blind man who no longer needs braille and reads from the smoothness, or maybe a deaf man's reading from a dead man's lips.

Yes, there is a back of things.

But it is the place where the other side begins, symmetrical with this one, maybe this one repeated, maybe this one and its double, maybe this one.

Things imitate us. A paper caught by the wind acts like a stumbling human. Noises learn to talk like us. Clothes take on our shapes.

Things imitate us but we will end up imitating them.

Every silence is a magic space with a hidden rite, the womb of a summoning word, and an essential detail of antisilence.

The hidden rite may be for example a death in winter. The word in the womb may be simply the word "forget." And the detail of antisilence may be the sound of a few clods striking the earth.

Or the rite the rocking of a tenderness in the night, the word a proper name drowning, and the indispensable detail of antisilence a little water flowing through the dream of the world.

Or the rite may be the solitude of a poem, the word the sign that every poem hides, and the point of antisilence the sound of the hand calling from inside the poem.

Silence is a temple that needs no god.

Translated by W. S. Merwin

Two Poems

David Galler

The Pickup, 1951

He and I perched at opposite ends Of the dim bar, loud with clinks and chatter, Contemplating our self-conscious prey. I doubt greatly he was aware of me. I'd always had much trouble with the matter, Not knowing how to act or what to say, So, when he walked to her table casually, I did so, too, as if he and I were friends.

He was too smooth, of course, to question it, Proceeding with his artillery of talkHer name, her job, her likes, why she spent time Drinking alone {such smiles! so curious!}While, as I wondered at his need to stalk Who sat now comfortably, they seemed sublimeMy ripostes of silence-making him furious, Though he was too cool to think to admit.

"I think I'd like to get some air," she said, When she and I had gazed at each other for Several minutes (it must have been his line That sanctioned it, so, when he got the bill, I let him pay, although I held the door). Out in the street, as by some grand design, He draped his arm on her shoulder. I kept still, Since that, so far, had seemed to put me ahead.

Or not behind at least. The vacant, warm, Somehow indecent night remorselessly Closed round us, as we faltered down the street. She pointed out facades. Knowing a bit Of architecture, I said it might prove lively To see her place. She nodded. Indiscreet, For the first time (by silence), his brow was knit. I imagined the strange combinations form-

One woman and two men!or, rather, since I imagined little workable, with at least Equal aversion to what he seemed to have, I gladly regained silence. In no time now, We entered her apartment. Filthy beast, Both doubtless thought me now, though it might save The night for her (I thought), as she asked how We'd like to spend the time. I saw him wince.

She put on Guy Lombardo. Poured us scotch, Which he downed in one gulp (I let mine sit). She left the room, and came back in a gown She removed promptly. All that beauty shone; That she not grow self-conscious because of it, I stripped quickly, whereat I saw him frown. But, not to be outdone, he stood alone Soon in boxer shorts, and touched her crotch-

Whereat, like a swerving fish, she fell into My arms to dance, that had just strength enough To manage it. Meanwhile, my erection proved Somewhat a problem to progress across the rug, No doubt shredding his patience with our stuff: "Let's get this on the road!" - whereat we moved As one to the wide bed, where she lay snug Between us, and I got my great corkscrew

Of an idea: just as he gave her pecks Across the face, and doused the light expertly,

I moved one arm over her head to where I stroked his neck. He jumped up, snorting, "Good God, A queer!" He dressed, muttering, and left shortly. The rest of the night I had a good time there, But hovered too much next day, which turned it bad. I wondered whom (and how) I'd pick up next.

Meyer Levine

We placed this gentle, witty eighty-fourYear-old, the leader of our family, Whose mental journeys into the clouded past And jeopardy of his security

So taxed his wife we feared she might not last, Into the best old-age facility

That we could find, not many weeks ago, And have come since often to let him know We care for him, and more.

Still, what he knows exactly we cannot tell, Not yet at any rate, for the reports From personnel vary from "sweet" or "mild" To "hard to handle" or obscene retorts

To the old man who shares his room, whose wild Faces, he tells us, put him out of sorts At mealtime (both have trouble chewing), directed To mock him, he insists, and is he expected To put up with this hell?

We're quite confused, each one of us is torn, Trying to answer that (though the answer's Yes), For reasons like what happened yesterday: Strapped to his chair, of which he'd made a mess (One broken leg), shoving it toward a fray With the roommate, he then caught sight of us On our way in, and named each with a smile; Then begged carfare to go to his job for a while. He looked angry, forlorn,

As one of us murmured No, that surely he Recalled that he could scarcely get around, And asked a nurse to make a diaper-change. When this was done, he told us he had found A new line of hats, which, though a trifle strange, He thought women would buy, but pressing down

The switch to turn his radio off, so we Could hear better, proved too much for him; Again his eyes grew dim-

This time with tears, as he sighed lucidly That he wished his green suit for burial, Told whom we should invite. Another day, Following many visitors, we all Wheeled him out in the sun to an out-of-the-way Corner of the garden, where we fell (Maybe because of all the talk) quite dumb, And, piercing the silence, he wept, "I am overcome By all my family."

Jazz and Letters: A Colloquy-

Al Young, Larry Kart, Michael S. Harper

YOUNG: My father was a professional jazz musician in the 1930's, back in the days when the tuba held down the rhythm section, along with the drums in the jazz aggregations. It wasn't until a man named Jimmy Blanton came along with the Duke Ellington orchestra that the string bass, the acoustical string bass, became the bottomizing element in swing and jazz music. I grew up in a household where records abounded. In fact, my mother used to get very upset with my father, who worked as an auto mechanic, because when he got his paycheck, he would stop by the record shop and pick up a bunch of records before he ever got to the house.

So I grew up with all these records and later played tuba and baritone horn myself and trumpet in junior high and high-school bands and took music as just a very natural part of life. Because I had been interested in writing from the age of six, the two always went together for me. I never made those distinctions between the arts that a lot of people make, despite the differences in practical approaches to various media. As a teenager I would go to the Detroit Institute of Arts to look at paintings and sculpture, visual and plastic arts. I always carried that same idea about all art with me into that experience. I would look at paintings as a form of music, poetry and literature. I would learn an awful lot of things from the painters when I'd go to museums, and bring it back into my writing, and project those things into the music that I'd listen to. And I think I was very fortunate to grow up in the late forties and during the fifties when there was sort of a ferment in American culture that eventually rose from subterranean level to become a very evident public factor

*Presented as a panel at the annual meeting of the Associated Writing Programs, in Chicago, April 12, 1986.

in shaping, I'd say, even the art that we find around today in all media. In the 1950's, when I was at the University of Michigan, the phenomenon of poetry and jazz became very bankable, as they would say out in Hollywood. And you had people like Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen and others. Langston Hughes even got into the act, although Langston had been doing the poetry-and-jazz thing way back in the thirties. But they were making national tours with jazz bands and making records and everybody would go and experience this synthesis, myself included.

That was also the period, you have to remember, when abstract expressionism was king. Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and all these people were holding court and, if you can recall the New York poetry scene at that time - "San Francisco East" - as somebody called it once, you would note that the painters were actually running the show. All the other artists, the musicians and the poets, all looked to the painters, circa 1954-55, for cues as to how to proceed. So that if you talked with somebody like Robert Creeley or LeRoi Jones (as he's calling himself again) they would tell you that they checked out the painters first, before they went on and wrote their poems. And if you look at, say, the poetry of Frank O'Hara, who was very powerful in those days and held a position at the Museum of Modern Art, you'll see that it was very jazzconscious and very painterly-conscious, and it was a very exciting period when all of these people's ideas were flowing together.

I was a kid then and I was paying attention to this in a very intense way, as you can only do when you're about fifteen, sixteen years old. You're much more serious then than at thirty-five or forty because, like Jan Carew was saying yesterday, those are the days when you can sit up in the treehouse and go through five or six books in a day, or certainly in a week, and really think about them and absorb them. Well, I was doing all that. I was absorbing everything at once. Now the writer who emerged on the scene nationally and internationally and turned everybody around - and I find people in English Departments still don't understand how this happened-was Jack Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac came out with On the Road in 1957. There had been excerpts from it in New Directions as early as 1956. There was a lot of noise about the Beat Generation and Kenneth Rexroth was writing all these long manifestos and there was a very exciting groundswell taking place. Everybody I knew in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was reading On the Road. Copies were dogeared, and people didn't want to lend you a copy because they were afraid they wouldn't get it back or it would come back with beer stains on it and jelly and bacon grease and all that. And it

Jack Kerouac, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1967. Photo by Stanley Twardowicz, courtesy of Gerald Nicosia.

wasn't so much that the writing was "good," whatever that was supposed to be, but it represented an alternative to what we'd been getting. I think that one of the things that the Beat Generation did was to take art out from under glass. I had been brought up in grade schools and middle schools and high schools where we were taught that art was something that was unapproachable. It really didn't have much to do with your life. It was something you had to learn in order to become a more expanded person, acquire good taste and all that. And one of the things that the Beat Generation did was to restore poetry and literature to the people. The people went out and attended poetry readings. Dylan Thomas had come through town-there were a lot of factors in this-had come through in two or three national tours and given people the idea that you could actually get up and read this stuff aloud and people would respond to it, instead of sitting around underlining it late at night in dormitory rooms. So that all of that excitement seemed to coalesce in the pages of On the Road.

Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Mr. Kerouac's techniques of writing. But he published a very influential manifesto of his own in the pages of Evergreen Review in 1958, which is called "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," in which he attempts to articulate the way in which he himself worked. He proposed, for example, that you not think about what you're going to say, just picture in your mind what your objective is going to be on the page. And then just blow. That kind of thing, like a jazz musician. You've got to remember that he, as much as anybody else, was under the influence of things like abstract expressionism. I mean those canvases that Jackson Pollock achieved by getting up on a scaffolding and just taking the paint and just - to the uninformed eye or to the people who didn't know the vocabulary of modern art and all that, it would look as if-like if my Uncle Billy saw it, he'd say, "That man is just splashing paint on the canvas. You call that paintin'? 1 can do that!"

But there was a very elaborate, articulated esthetic that accompanied it that said that process to the abstract expressionist was more important than product. Those painters themselves were highly influenced by jazz. If you went down to the - what's the name of that place they used to hang out? Tenth Street-aren't there any old-timers around here?

VOICE: The Cedar Bar.

YOUNG: Cedar Bar. If you went to the Cedar Bar, they were all talking about Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and whatever was going

on in the jazz world at that time and they were trying to recapture the spirit of jazz, the spontaneous spirit of jazz in their work. When the Zen Buddhists turned up during that period, because people like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts were also publishing in the pages of Evergreen Review, they brought that spirit of Zen spontaneity which enhanced this whole idea that art was supposed to be something that came from the spirit, that for all too long, certainly in the West, it had been dominated by what somebody in those days called the "form freaks," people who were more involved with product and form than they were with content and spirit. Now as a kid I got the idea that still persists with me, that when we look at any painting or piece of writing or listen to any piece of music, what we are actually doing is searching for the human spirit. There's a spirit that accompanies a piece of art that we're usually not aware of except perhaps in a subliminal way. But if it isn't there, it can be the most clever work, it can be perhaps a masterpiece formally and all that, but if it does not have that spirit, if it doesn't swing, as they used to say in antique jazz parlance-what was it that Duke wrote?-"lt don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." So I got the idea that it was better to sacrifice form if necessary for content.

I was also reading people like William Saroyan, who would sit down and knock out three and four stories in a day and publish all of them. As a kid, you admire this kind of stuff. You think that this is the way it should be. That it should be fun above all else. And jazz always represented this for me, as I think it did for the majority of Americans who were looking beyond everyday, quotidian American values for some meaning to life. I think that jazz mythology has always affected American intellectuals and artists when they were looking for a way out of what Artaud once called "the bourgeoisification" of everything in life. You see these guys who lead odd lives, quite often they have odious habits, personal habits. They stayed up all night, died young. They bared their souls and gave us some pleasure and some insights into a way of life that can be very interesting. When you look at jazz itself, you see some interesting divisions historically. The early jazz musicians, for example-this is very rough-the early jazz musicians of the New Orleans school, if you want to call them that, the Dixieland people, were heavy drinkers. You go into, even now, a Dixieland bar, it's very difficult to be depressed because they're stomp-

Charlie Parker. Photo by Howard Morehead, courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

ing that stuff out, and they're drinking that juice, and rum ta da ta da da dum, and it engenders a kind of spiritedness that, I don't know, may he artificial, hut it's kind of a happy music, happily oriented music. This persisted on over into swing, which was a dance music, and people forget that during the thirties and early forties certainly-I'd say from the mid-twenties up until World War II-jazz was the popular music of the United States because people didn't say, "Oh, I like jazz," they just liked Benny Goodman, they liked Count Basie-they danced to this music, it was a social music.

It wasn't until the advent of World War II and the postwar years that musicians tended to switch from alcohol into heavy pharmaceuticals, and became very introspective. Among Afro-American musicians you had this intense awareness of themselves as artists and they took themselves very seriously. Those of you who followed mythologized jazz history would get the stripped-down idea that jazz was invented in one night in Minton's up in Harlem when Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker decided to corne up with a music that white musicians couldn't steal because they wouldn't be able to play it.

Much is made of that, but of course that's very distorted. You talk to people who were around and you see that this music evolved over a long period of time. But the jazz spirit has always been solidly grounded in technical ability and in the spirit to soar. In a book called The Interpretation of Music, Thurston Dart, who's a musical historian, points out that in western European music prior to the middle-to-lare nineteenth century, room was always left for the soloist to express himself or herself. Composers would leave whole sections open for a gifted soloist to come out and improvise, and that was regarded as the apex of a musical performance - somebody not reading the notes, just standing up there playing from the heart. That went out of western European music when inexpensive ways of reproducing musical scores were arrived at-so that what Mr. Dart calls "the tyranny of the composer" set in. Every note, every speck, every sound, every silence was written down on the page. And the drummer Max Roach, who's a professor ofjazz these days at the University of Massachusetts, has said, "I wouldn't be in a classical orchestra for anything, because that's like working at the post office. Go there and sort that mail, you get no chance to do anything on your own.

People always gravitate towards where the spirit is. And when jazz in the late fifties and early sixties got to taking itself so seriously, sealed itself off by being available only in clubs where a lot of the young people couldn't get in because they didn't have money or they weren't of drink-

ing age, whatever, then of course rock drew them over. They always go where that beat is and where there's the freedom to say something on your own. Sure, learn your instrument, be firmly grounded in what's gone on before, but have an opportunity to contribute something of your own.

How does this function in writing? It functions for me in a very interesting way. Whenever I sit down to write these days, I always begin by free writing. That is to say, a typical morning for me is to get up and to record remnants of dreams, if there's anything that's taken place in my dream-life. I sit there and I just put some paper in the typewriter and I pay no attention to what's being written, whether it's good, bad or whatever. I have no idea how long it's going to run, and I just start going! And I put all these things in a notebook, and that notebook has become one of the most interesting books in my library, because all this writing hasn't been consciously done, but over the years you've been writing for so long it's hard for you to really write anything bad at a certain point, the same way that it's very difficult for an improvising musician to play anything bad. You might catch a musician on a night when she or he is not so inspired, but their professional level is such that they can be proficient even when they're not feeling well. It's rather like those old Zen painters, who used to look at a tree for fifteen years and meditate upon it and in thirty seconds they'd sit and with pen and ink and just go brrrrrrr and get the whole spirit of that tree. I think this is attractive to people the world over. It's no wonder that jazz has been called the music of the twentieth century. We're probably less aware of that in this country than people would be in a lot of-abroad. Whenever I travel abroad, I'm always amazed at how aware people are of American music.

In conclusion, I thought I would read something from a series ofbooks that I've been doing, something very short. There are two volumes of this that have been published so far, and there's one more coming out next year. They're called Musical Memoirs. The first volume was called Bodies & Soul. The second volume was called Kinds of Blue. And the third will be called Things Ain't What They Used to Be, which is an old Mercer Ellington title. What I tried to do in these books was to take a piece of music and conjure in prose in one form or another what the music meant to me. It's a difficult thing to do because even though music is powerfully evocative, sometimes it's so private, the experience that it evokes can be so private, that it's difficult to communicate this to anyone else. And so the problem here-and you need a problem when you play jazz-people aren't just up there blowin'. They know the

chords, they know sixteen different versions on record of what everybody else has done to this and they know it's going to count if they can do something that's original, that hasn't been stated before. That's the problem for me. How can I say this so that everybody will understand what I'm talking about and at the same time make it, keep it meaningful? And I experiment each time I write one of these things. Probably the most experimental I've been, and with this one I really let go. It's a form that I'm inventing as I go along, so to speak. And so each time I sit down to do it, I say, "Wait a minute, you know, I've already done that. Do I want to do that all over again? Let's try something new." So I depend a lot on intuition. In the sixties, later sixties, Herbie Hancock, a very different Herbie Hancock, wrote something called "Maiden Voyage," which was one of those milestones in contemporary American musicin fact, one critic says that everything that's been produced since "Maiden Voyage," every original sounds like "Maiden Voyage." And I was so taken with this that even though Herbie Hancock came out with it in 1969, I used it as a metaphor for an actual maiden voyage, my first ocean trip that I took in 1963 when I sailed from Brooklyn Harbor to the Azores and to Portugal on an off-season freighter. And this is how that piece begins. I'll just read a page of it and get out of here. But I tried tothe music was playing in the background as I was writing, and it sort of fired my thoughts as I went along:

Maiden Voyage/Herbie Hancock, 1969

Shhh. Listen. Can you hear it? Listen, listen. Shhh. It's like a soft whispery splashing sound. Symbolic. Cyrnbalic. It's a cymbal tap. The sound of wood barely touching a cymbal. The drummer's poised and ready to slip up on it and the moment Herbie Hancock drops his fingers to the keyboards. Reeeal pianissimo. To sound that lovely dark chord and four bass notes in tricky off-accent time. We'll be on our way. It's still astonishing, isn't it? What is time? I'm laying this down, you're picking it up. Everything happens at the same time. Ask any quantum physicist the kind of dancing that goes on inside atoms, if you get my drift. This time we'll be drifting over and across the Atlantic, sailing away from the Brooklyn pier like an easygoing recreational blimp in an amazing, if not exactly good, year. It just happens to be the very year they shot Medgar Evers in the back, the year they bombed that church in Birmingham and killed those little girls, the Russians put a woman in Herbie Hancock. Photo by Sulaiman Ellison, courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

space, the year they marched 20,000 strong on Washington, D.C. and Martin Luther King and other black leaders met with the President, the year Defense Secretary McNamara and Diem started taking over the headlines, the year they were singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody/turn me round,lturn me round,lturn me round.!Ain't gonna let nobody/turn me round/in Selma, Alabama." The Governor was shouting, "Segregation forever." It was the year they shot Kennedy down like a dog in Dallas and when they started beating those little white kids, especially the girls, beating them with those billy clubs the way they've always done colored people, you knew the American century was coming home to roost. Shhh. Herbie's just mashed down on the go-forward pedal. George Coleman is sounding the ship whistle. The waves are churning all around us and if you look closely, you'll see me, a little brown speck of a speck in eternity, standing on the deck of a freighter pushing off from the Brooklyn pier. It's the twenty-eighth of August, sunny and hot. Standing on the deck waving at the workers on a ship from India docked next to ours, I'm growing a little bit sad and joyous at the same time as I picture myself atop the timeless ocean pondering the vastness of my animal-wrapped soul and vision which I know I must cleanse of false learning before I can go the infinite way of Atlantics and Pacifies, Indian Oceans and Bering Seas. I stand there watching the Statue of Liberty grow greener and tinier in the fog beginning to roll in now. "Roll with the boat," I'm remembering hearing somebody say. "Roll with the boat, don't fight it and that way you won't get seasick." We'll rolling along right now with the beat, which isn't easy to pin down and measure, and all the ghosts outside our porthole ears seem to be portholed ears carrying on in Portuguese. Timelessness, meanwhile, is enfolding me and washing me clean on this maiden voyage. Who am I? What am I doing? Where are we going?

KART: That's a tough solo to follow. I'd like to begin by bouncing off one of the first points you made, which was how you came to the music and, in effect, how Americans manage to decide that something that has the label "art" is theirs. My circumstances were a little different, but I think the process was similar, similar enough that I think there's a general principle involved here. Music was a little bit around me as I grew up, but not jazz. Because the music around me and the literature around me were clearly, at least as I felt, not mine, I was looking without being aware of it, for some way to find something that had the qualities that I knew art had, so that I could say, "This is mine." And it hit me in about adolescence. I think it hits a lot of people in adolescence, and

Jackie McLean. Photo courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

that's another interesting point. Jazz is a music that includes the world. And not until you're an adolescent do you begin to think of yourself as a being moving through a society. Before that, it's the family, or you don't even know that there are other people. But when it hit me, I was about age twelve, which is thirty-one years ago. I think it was maybe a recording by Jackie McLean. I'd heard some jazz before that, but something about Jackie McLean, who's a wonderful alto saxophonist, spoke directly to me, and when that happened, it was like a covenant had been made, a bond that he wasn't of course a direct participant in, but I thought I had made a bond, and thirty-one further years have con-

vinced me that it was for real. The process of making that bond and coming into contact with all the music I readily identified as jazz, all the qualities that it had, enabled me to come into contact with, and make mine, or believe that I could make mine, all kinds of other art. And I think that's one of the basic problems that any young American, black or white, has. How do you deal with this culture which, when you're born into it, seems more or less alien to you, and how to say, "Yeah, I have a role to play in here"? Maybe as a responder only, maybe as a fulltime participant, either with a horn or with a pen. I'm convinced that the notion of covenant is crucial to it, and I was reading something last night about Moses in Egypt, which was where the covenant was first formed, and then was renewed when the Ten Commandments came down. This guy explained, very interestingly I thought, that the word "exodus" in Hebrew has the meaning of liberation and covenant and that because of the story of the exodus from Egypt, the idea of liberation takes precedence. But they're one thing. The point I'm trying to make is that, in one way or another, and I think it can be fairly specific a lot of times, jazz is a music of liberation, spiritual liberation. There's a wonderful book that Sidney Becher wrote, his autobiography. Treat It Gentle. And there's no doubt on his part-I can't remember exactly how he puts it. I didn't think to bring that with me.

YOUNG: He says at the beginning of that book that things were-you had this tension in New Orleans between the blacks, the Creoles and the whites, and it was a fixed race, and he said about some other musician they were talking about, "You know, if we developed this music right, it'll be something that'll slip in on these people."

KART: Do you remember the part where he says that the music arose after an actual physical liberation, the Emancipation Proclamation and all that followed in its wake, but that the music had the role, whether or not the people who made it and the people who were on the receiving end were conscious of it, of teaching the people what to do with the freedom they now had, that they didn't have before. I think that strain in the music has been prominent all the way through, and it can be felt, since a certain kind of liberation is what we're all striving for. It can be felt down through the whole history of it. And I knew that when I listened to Jackie McLean and lots of other people and responded to them the way I did, that I was using that music in an attempt to define myself.

Another point, to switch horses a bit, about the literal connection

Robert Creeley, Mallorca, 1955. Photo courtesy of Gerald Nicosia. between jazz and specific writers. You demonstrated how vital the connection is between the music and your writing, and it runs all through Michael Harper's work. But I remember once listening to Charles Olson read on a TV program. I'd always been fascinated by what I thought his rhythms were, as I read them on the page. When I heard him read them live, or live on TV, I said, "He sounds just like Sonny Rollins." He swung in just the same way. It was frightening. And then sometime later, I ran across this collection of letters that Robert Creeley and Charles Olson

Charles Olson. Photo by Johnathan Williams, courtesy of New Directions Publishing Corp.

exchanged. Creeley, who was very much involved in jazz in Boston in the late forties, was trying to sell Olson on listening to the people that Creeley was interested in. In this one letter he quotes what became one of Creeley's most important poems: ULe Fou," which is, I believe, the breath. I guess I'll try to read it:

Le Fou*

for Charles

who plots, then, the lines talking, taking, always the beat from the breath (moving slowly at first the breath which is slow-

I mean, graces come slowly, it is that way.

So slowly (they are waving we are moving away from (the trees the usual (go by which is slower than this. is (we are moving! goodbye

And then in the letter Creeley has in parentheses added in pencil, "Thank you, Charles Parker. Et tu, Thelonious Bach." It was so natural. I mean, you get the lists of the guys he's trying to tell Olson to listen to. It's Bud Powell, it's Dizzy Gillespie, it's Al Haig, it's Monk-I mean, it was natural to them. They knew it.

A third point that intrigues me is that the connection between jazz and literature might be that jazz has more or less spontaneously developed in the course of its life musical parallels to preexisting literary forms. I've always thought of the typical good jazz solo as being more or less a lyric poem. It's a way of stating and elaborating your personal identity, as they say in show business, "in one." You're up there, you are you. You don't have a costume on, you're not playing a role. If it's going to be any good, it's your story. I mean, it's almost a truism of jazz that when somebody gets up there and plays well, the reaction of a fan who

*From The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).

responds in kind is, "He's a good storyteller." The literal storytelling, the personal lyrical storytelling, just goes without saying.

There's also a sense that orchestral jazz particularly is dramatic. A typical Duke Ellington piece, like "Harlem Airshaft" or "Sepia Panorama:' is a play. And the soloists function both as people who are expressing themselves and as actors who have specific roles to play. Ellington casts them in those roles because he knows who they are and what they have to say and he gives them this framework. He says, "O.K., Johnny Hodges, I know what you can do and you're going to be-oh let's say, the lover-in this play. And Cootie Williams or Tricky Sam Nanton, you're going to be maybe the sarcastic commenter on it. And then Ben Webster, you're going to be another kind of romantic lover, maybe one who's a little rougher than Johnny Hodges-maybe it's the male and female principle going on there." But a definite dramatic context, one that includes the lyrical element.

Then there's a way in which over the course of his career the accomplished jazz musician is either compiling an historical account or writing a novel, because there's no doubt that jazz takes place in a specific society in a specific chunk of historical time and it is about, to some extent, being a person in that world over that period of time. John Coltrane would be a perfect example, or Dexter Gordon. Any great player, their music changes over the years, and it changes because of inner musical impulses and psychological impulses, but it's also an accumulated body of knowledge about what it means to have been that person over that period of time. And I think that's not a bad definition of what a novel is. Another way to look at it is that it's autobiographical. But the interesting thing to me-and Kerouac comes in here-is that as jazz musicians have, without necessarily thinking about it, made those literary-musical forms their own, put their own spin on them, they also have affected certain kinds of literary artists. There are techniques about the way jazz musicians state things, state the self, the way they incorporate their history in what they're doing, in response to which various writers have shrewdly or innocently said, "I can use that." I mean, you just did.

YOUNG: Old tunes, man.

KART: In Kerouac's case, I think there's a lot of doubt about how honestly such things were done. I admire his work sometimes, but did he know enough about the materials to use them as high-handedlv as he did sometimes; was he a tourist? I think that's one of the problems the

music poses to anybody who either writes about it or just comes to it for pleasure or personal enlightenment. Are you part of it, or are you a tourist? Because being a tourist with it doesn't feel good. And it doesn't feel good if you suspect you are a tourist; and if you are one and don't know it, then you're making a big mistake. 1 wrote a piece about Kerouac and jazz that 1 brought along, thinking 1 was going to quote from it, and 1 guess 1 am. But 1 don't know now if 1 can find a chunk of it that will work. Kerouac tried to do it in two ways. One, he consciously said, "I'm going to try to imitate in my prose and in my verse" - and 1 think it worked better in his prose than in his verse-what he felt to be the core structure of a jazz solo. "I'm going to get up there and improvise." What was the name of that essay again?

YOUNG: "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose."

KART: 1 think there's a fair amount of evidence that he rarely, if ever, followed those principles, that what really counts is just the work on the page. Does it feel, does it have the joy of spontaneity? Whether he actually labored over it or not. 1 think he did a lot of laboring over things. Which is fine, as long as it works. And the other thing was that a lot of the furniture of his life was jazz. Some of it got a little creepy, for my tastes. I'll quote some things, if 1 can find them, that will make anybody's hair curl. Let's see. Here's a line from Visions of Cody: "I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero." Or he refers elsewhere to "good oldfashioned oldtime jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls." And he also refers to "wishing 1 could exchange worlds with the happy" - oh man - "the happy, truehearted, ecstatic Negroes of America." I mean, you just go, "Wait a minute, Jack." Although you could say in some of these cases, that's a narrative voice, maybe that narrator is supposed to be a little bit of a fool at that point in the book. But a lot of times that doesn't work. He was going all the way with it.

YOUNG: But he's speaking-ifl could intrude on your time Black readers were always aware of that tendency in Kerouac, but it was no different than when I would go with white friends at college to see a Marx Brothers movie and you'd have a sequence where Harpo would go down into Niggertown and everybody'd be dancing and singing and he'd be playing the harp and all that. And my friends would say, "Are you embarrassed?" And I said, "No, I'm not embarrassed, because I know who's making this movie."

KART: It's a good point, because I guess the person, or kind of person, who would be most embarrassed by that would be somebody in my shoes. But also in the back of my mind I'd be thinking, when he's doing something like that, what would his contact with the music be, compared with someone like Al Cohn or Zoot Sims or Bunny Berigan or whatever? Measure it that way. I mean, there's something, there's a strength in the one kind of contact and something presumptuous or weak in the other.

YOUNG: Remember-I haven't talked about this-he was in the hipster tradition, the tradition of the white hipster, which attempted in large degree to turn middle-class white America on its head. If his folks didn't like it, then he liked it, you know.

KART: I'll end with that passage from my piece on Kerouac and jazz, which begins with a quote from his Book of Dreams: "I wish [tenor saxophonist] Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct, but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of volume, his 'quietness.''' (Eager, by the way, was an excellent white disciple of Lester Young, and his music and his example obviously meant a great deal to Kerouac.)

Then, after the quote, I go on to say [reading]:

Listening to Allen Eager or Brew Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, inward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation-as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy "Ah, me," which would border on passivity if it weren't for the need to move on, to keep the line going.

Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman's long line and Wolfe's garrulous flow. And I wouldn't insist that Kerouac's prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn't the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching-his "holy flowers floating in the dawn of Jazz America" and "great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns" - Kerouac's desire to be part of what he called the "jazz century" led to a prose that at its best was jazzlike from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground [as in much of Visions of Cody) or nowhere to be seen [as in Big Sur). And perhaps none of this could have come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac's vision.

"These are men!" wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson's band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschmacher for that matter- a sense of loss in the

act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside, that is an essential part of their grace. When he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that too.

HARPER: I have been internalizing this dialogue between these two gentlemen, and I'm going to try and respond. I come out of a very strange background culturally, and I think that's very important in the way in which we define ourselves as Americans. The whole question of self-definition is the American problem, and the way in which you locate yourself in this very strange terrain is a question, of course, of voice. And I've had some considerable difficulty communicating with my peers on many levels, mostly at the level of assumption. So I'm going to be rather tedious for a moment and go through a few principles of my own way of approaching this self-definition process.

Everybody begins with a notion of autobiography that sometimes expresses itself as sensibility, sometimes in terms of the constructions of what I call "work," which is to say the way in which one gets inducted into the culture. Oftentimes this happens by accident, sometimes it happens by geography-the notion of black people in particular being forced to migrate because of all kinds of economic concerns. And something which doesn't get talked about very much but which I'm going to bring up, and that is the notion of terror. Black people in this country have been under a continuous assault, and the response to that assault has a great deal to do with the vibrancy, not to mention the rigor, of the artistic expression.

I'm reminded of a review which I recently wrote for the New York Times of Count Basie's autobiography, as told to Albert Murray. A man called me up on the phone and I said, "Well, send it to me," and he did. I looked at it and I wrote this review. And then I saw the review in the New York Times on Sunday, and I was amazed at what they'd done to it. They had cut out all of the illustrations of how the tradition gets extended through people, through circumstances and events, particularly events having to do with economics and war, and the kind of continuity which was necessary to understand something about Count Basie's minimalism, his refusal to overplay, and the way in which he developed his "charts," particularly after he got some exposure on the radio. I'm a little bit tired - and I don't want to start throwing stones here - but I'm a little bit tired of people assuming that John Hammond discovered Count Basie. The question is, who did John Hammond bring Count Basie to? And the answer is, to the job market of New York City, publishing and the control of the markets which brought that music to a wider audience. Now this is typical American technological commercial-

Count Basie. Photo by Bill Mark, courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

ism. But Count Basie was already somebody in his various communities, and the Blue Devils band was wonderful.

I began my review by talking about an incident which took place and seemed to be of no significance. Basie is in Tulsa in 1925 and he's got "a head," which is to say he's drunk himself into sleep. He's a young man and he hears this music, which he assumes can only be Louis Armstrong, the quality of the playing being such. And he wakes up and he says, "I gotta find out who that guy is that's playing. You know, it's gotta be an album. Somebody in here's playing a record." And he wakes up and stumbles downstairs and he runs into some people who are advertising on the back of a wagon and it is the nucleus of the Blue Devils band, including Hot Lips Page, and a number of other people. This is Basie's introduction into the standard of what he has to live with, in terms of artistic excellence. And the narrative begins with this little episode and then it goes back to a kind of chronology, that is, in Albert Murray's handling of the story of Count Basie.

Now it's important that we understand something about the Tulsa riot, because I thought I was just making a kind of aside, but a woman from the Philadelphia Inquirer called me on the telephone and said, "By the way, what are your sources to the Tulsa riot?" And I said, "Well, why are you asking me these questions?" And she said, "I'm just interested, because you said it was the first instance of aerial bombardment on any community in the modern world." And 1 said, "Yeah, well, that's true." She says, "Well, I'd like to know about your sources." So 1 said, "Well, you know, one of the sources is the New York Times," and 1 gave her the date. 1 got the sense that she was trying to solve political problems, because those of us who know anything about Philadelphia and MOVE, for example, know that that community was decimated by a certain kind of technological temper tantrum which burned down a whole city block and ruined a neighborhood, a community. And that attitude, 1 think, is as American as apple pie.

I want to take you back to Tulsa for a minute because it is there that the beginning of the story of Count Basie is framed. Tulsa was a place which had a very burgeoning middle class. The black community was right next to the train station and the community was full of entrepreneurs. The white community was very angry about this because it seemed to be that with the discovery of oil, black people just had too much. They had too much of a frontier enterprising spirit, and they'd gone out to Oklahoma and carved out, among other things, a way of existing with the Indians. And you could oftentimes go into all-black communities or all-Indian communities very much as you do in Narra-

gansett in Rhode Island now. But when the Indians get together-they have a big powwow-and they all look like bloods. I mean, you'd be looking around saying, "These all look like brothers!" And they call themselves Indians, and they are Indians. And so the amount of interchange at the cultural level, not to mention the bloodline level, is long and extensive. The reason why I tell you this is because Basie came to have a standard of playing simply because he ran into some musicians who taught some things that he could have never believed were being done. So the first question I would ask is, Who taught these people how to play like that? I'm talking about the Ben Websters and so on. Somebody taught them, and the people who taught them were people who were invisible-the people who came out of communities and believed in discipline, who knew something about the arts, who knew something about expression and who knew something about living, how one had to make a life. And the communities out of which these people came were black communities, they weren't white communities-and it was kind of a surprise to John Hammond, among other people, that this kind of music had been in existence for a long time.

Now all you have to do is get the albums and listen to the Blue Devils band and you'll know what I'm talking about. That became the nucleus of Count Basie's band. I tell you that because it seems to me that we have this ongoing dialogue-I think that Ellison said it best in an essay where he corrected Irving Howe for approaching his particular novel (that is, Invisible Man) in the wrong way. He said that he was in "a continuous antagonistic cooperation" with Mr. Howe and others. I think that that is a good expression for our use here - "antagonistic cooperation," which is the willingness to disagree about the way in which we see what we call reality.

Which brings to me to some compositional questions. I as an academic - I characterize myself as an academic because I've spent too many years in American universities explaining-oftentimes to people who don't deserve the kinds ofexplanations-the complexities of what it is to live one's life, and saying that one does not live one's life exclusively out of books and that one has to have some experience and background. This is a visceral question and has to do with one's attitude about all kinds of things. It has to do with my attitude about composition when I was too stupid to know any better. Which is to say that when I was taken through my paces in courses, literature courses, I was critiquing my teachers at the same time that they were evaluating me.

I'll give you a couple of examples. I remember when we were studying O'Neill. I had seen, because I was a kid who would go to the library and

just read randomly, that, for example, in the undergraduate school that I went to, the novels of Richard Wright had never been taken out of the library. Never. No one had to read the books. No one had read Native Son. Nobody had read Black Power. Nobody had taken these books out. So I was the first one to do this. I mean, the books were there, but one had to read them. I tell you this because when we got to talking about All God's Chillun Got Wings, one of O'Neill's plays, we found Eliot had done a review of it. I was amazed at the way in which Eliot could be so much "on time" when he was talking about Dante, when he was talking about tradition and the individual talent. But the minute he started talking about brothers, his whole expertise, his formal training, just went to hell. I asked myself, How come? What happened all of a sudden with T. S. Eliot? At that time, Eliot was the high priest. He's still that, but there are some other voices now. But at that time everybody was hung up on the New Criticism and so on. I just listened to these white folks and let them say anything they wanted to tell me and I did what they asked, which included writing villanelles and sestinas and Petrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets and Miltonic sonnets. And they always assumed that you were doing this by accident, you were kind of stealing this. What they didn't know is, they didn't know anything about my life.

I left school and went to the post office. I heard this riff about the post office and I ran into many young men and women who were advanced people, who had gotten an academic degree, who knew more about Melville and Shakespeare, not to mention the Russians! Now, take Gaines. Mr. Ernest Gaines writes about his rural community of Louisiana, has used the framing devices he has learned from other people who have studied peasant communities, like those Russians, so that he could exalt his own and give the speech rhythms, the modes of discussion, the communal interests and values, a kind of relief which hasn't been seen before. People just think that Gaines is somebody who's got a good ear, walking around with a tape recorder, you know. I mean, this is madness. At that same time, there are people walking around with their biases, their attitudes. I was taking a course from Christopher Isherwood, who would come to class sometimes and not say anything, he would just walk in and say, "We're going to have my colleague read to us." And I would look over-I was the only black person in the class-I'd say, "Damn, that looks like Auden." He would read for about forty-five minutes and then he'd stop and say, "Well, are there any questions?" and I'd raise my hand and say, "Well, I wonder if you'd read the memorial poem for W. B. Yeats?" And he'd recite that, and then I'd ask him to read other things.

w. H. Auden, 1958. Photo courtesy of Poetry magazine.

Langston Hughes, 1923. Photo by Nickolas Muray, courtesy of Oxford University Press.

And when we'd walk out of the class, the girl who sat next to me would say, "How did you know that that was Auden?" And I'd say, "Well, I'd seen his picture on the cover of a poetry book, you know." She thought it was kind of magical that anybody black knew anything about anything else.

And she always used to talk to me about Langston Hughes. "Well, are you going to be the next Langston Hughes?" I don't want to be mean now, but I'm kind of reminiscing now, and it's interesting to know about how people develop. She used to drive a bread truck to school and she'd pull this damn bread truck up, and you know, it had a lot of charisma. She'd get out of this bread truck - it didn't say "Wonder Bread," but it said something like that on the side-and she'd come into these seminars, and she assumed that I was a black person and that the best way to get in touch with me was to talk about black people. Well, I didn't share with her my great love for Langston Hughes. I grew up in a household where Langston Hughes's poems were framed and were on the steps going down into the basement which, as you know, is the real solid part of the house.

All right. So that gives you some sense of the kind of antagonistic cooperation that goes on in this long dialogue in this country, which begins even before the Declaration of Independence, over the American tongue and who's going to control it. The American tongue is something which I think is extraordinarily important and we owe musicians a great debt because musicians were always at the frontier of what we call "parlance," the way in which they express themselves to other people. And by the time the hipsters, the Kerouacs and others, caught on to what black musicians had been talking about, black musicians had gone on to other things. The language was revivified and revitalized as the result of these particular men and women living their lives at literally the margin of destruction from one time to another.

I tell you that because I think we have to have a respect for the historiography of this culture and the lack of memory. There are terrific losses in America that are taking place. And many people don't even know they're there, because nobody took the time to write them down. Or much of the memory is in black periodicals. I'm talking about things like the Chicago Defender or the Pittsburgh Courier or whatever. And who reads them? I mean, where are the archives on these newspapers? There aren't many, but there are a few. And out of that memory and out of that loss comes a kind of ritual content, which is to say the framing of the experience and the presentation of the experience, which I've spent some time dealing with.

Lester Young, 1957. Photo courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

Now I've been asked to tell a few tales. I'm glad to do that, but I want to say a few things first about the interrelationship of the arts. I would speak to you about Romare Bearden, for example, who, in the process of putting together a theory of collage, can manage to give a social context, a social feel and an artistic expression simultaneously. This is something which he learned as a result of studying the technical innovations of collage and modern painting. But his heart and soul lives in the black community and the black community has never been looked upon as a resource for art at the level of cosmetics, of decorating appeal-which is to say black figures which hang on the walls of people's homes. Richard Yard told me a wonderful story one day. He said, "You know, Michael, people love my paintings, but they don't want them hanging on their walls. Too many black faces in there." And I thought he was making a little joke.

Then later on we came to do a little project together, and he had done something on the Savoy Ballroom, making these figures which are about four feet tall in the attitudes of dance as one would run into them playing in front of Chick Webb's band in 1938. This looks like a dance hall of some sort, and in its better days it probably was. If you went to the other end of it, you could just imagine these dancers spread out in various ways, and they were painted in the attitudes of dance. And the musicians up on the bandstand were responding to the dancers-you could imagine Lester Young, for example, who was getting his energy from watching somebody do the Lindy. This is important cultural iconography, and I tried to capture it in an essay.

Now Sterling Brown wrote a poem called "Cabaret 1927, Chicago." It was about the era of Prohibition and it was probably Fletcher Henderson's band playing to a segregated audience. In it, Sterling Brown, in the manipulation of voice, criticizes the lyrics of Irving Berlin, and he has as a backdrop the lyrics of Bessie Smith singing about the Mississippi Flood of 1927, with James P. Johnson on piano. It was James Baldwin who talked about taking that record to a small village in Switzerland so that he could write Go Tell lt on the Mountain. Now I think that we owe Bessie Smith and James P. Johnson a debt, and the way in which I pay it back is just to say what happened. And maybe to say in either one of their idioms, maybe both combined, that the business of making a poem is a complicated matter.

I ran into Hayden Carruth recently and he was just sitting in the audience and I was there to give a concert with two musicians, a man who plays cello named Abdul Wadud [Ron DeVaughn]-some of you who follow contemporary music might know him - and the other Julius

Hayden Carruth. Photo by Cynthia Day, courtesy of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Hemphill, who plays with the World Saxophone Quartet. We were playing to a small library in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is a depressed area, and we got up and we put together this program in two parts. It was a wonderful evening and it was right next to a church and the acoustics were terrific and we were glad to see one another and to talk about all kinds of things, old times, and there's Hayden Carruth sitting in the back. So he comes up to me at the break, and he says, "You know, Michael, you ought to write a book on jazz." And I said, "Well, there's some people that are writing books on jazz." And I mentioned Al Young's name, because I've known him for years, and other people. And he says, "No, your stories are just as important as their stories."

He says, "If you don't write them, they'll never be down. The poems are fine."

He says, "But nobodv's going to read the poems."

He says, "You and I know that."

He says, "Poets only read one another's work."

He says, "And by the way, I liked your book."

He says, "Ialways do this when I go to people to find out whether they got any heart. I read the last poem in the book, turn to the last page."

He says, "In your recent book, Peace on Earth [which is a takeoff on Coltrane's great song, 'Peace on Earth'], I read that poem and I knew I wanted to read the whole book."

Hayden Carruth knows a good deal about jazz and has written about it wonderfully. He's a fine poet, and he's also an eccentric. He knows that you carry the legacy and the resonance of your experience with you no matter where you are. Certainly musicians do this, and this is why they're all my heroes. I can't imagine a greater tribute than a person who is tired corning into a town and getting up on a bandstand and singing about "love, oh careless love, oh aggravatin' love." And making those particular people who are either on the dance floor or in the audience transformed. That's the hardest work I know, and for people who do it day after day is just beyond me. And so I think we owe them a tribute.

Now, I'm trying to write a poem for the ear as well as for the eye. The New Criticism and postmodernism has forced us away from the ear in large part. I don't think that we can get along without our eyes, but we still need aural quality of poetry. And I remember when Etheridge Knight was talking the other night, when he was talking about his belief that no matter what, as long as he could say a poem to somebody that somebody could hear it, that was pre-technological and pre'textual in the written sense. That that aural quality was very important. And for him to stand up on the bandstand and sing gives me some idea ofwhat it

means to be terrorized in a real sense and at the same time to not be totally inarticulate.

Which brings me to a few of my notes in conclusion. My education was rather scattered and what I would call in the vernacular "habit" of putting together disparate things to make a kind of collage. That's certainly my education and it continues to be that way. I have to go back to the University of Iowa in about a month, and I have to lie. I have to say to Paul Engle and others that they helped me become the poet that I am. I have to say it helped me to be a student of Philip Roth, who accused me of writing a pornographic novella. This is Philip Roth in 1961 accusing me of writing a pornographic novella! I've got to lie when [Donald] Justice, who's a friend of mine and whom I love and who's a very decent man, told me in private, "You know, Michael, when I write this letter of recommendation I can't say how angry you are." I was considered angry because I would speak up. I would say things to Paul Engle like, "Don't you think it's important that the next time you have a black person come here, maybe from a foreign country like Nigeria, that you better check and find out whether you can get an apartment for him, because he'll be walking around here in Iowa City, maybe being run over by some farmers who are not used to seeing Nigerians walking around downtown?" He thought I was making a kind of accusation. I wasn't making any accusation. I was telling him about the world he lived in but didn't know about at the level of race relations.

So I've got to go back and be nice. Be euphemistic, forget memory. Forget loss and forget ritual.

Now here are my notes:

Notions of Prosody

Because one does not deliberately echo European conventions for pros' ody does not mean that one is not aware of them. One oftentimes, in a kind of counterpoint, is referencing them.

Notions of personality. How do you get the attributes of a personality into a poem at the level of phrase or the level of diction or the level of meter even, or rhyme? That's a poetic question. It's an artistic question. The analogies, the logic of vocabulary, the shaping of vocabulary - how do you make these choices so as to elicit the time, the time frame, what I call the "mode of expression"? How do you control that? The whole business of the telling of people's dreams. We in this country have nothing but nightmare to record when we talk about this "antagonistic cooperation" because we are actually at war, even now.

There are other people, this panel and people in the audience and people who've got private record collections and people who don't write in newspapers, who buy records, dance to them and tell their daughters and sons that Coltrane's the greatest musician that ever played. But let me play for you Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul." Let me tell you something about how he learned to play "Body and Soul" in that way. After being in Europe all those years, trying to escape racism and trying at the same time to live his imaginative life, he heard Herschel Evans's "Blue and Sentimental" on a recording, and he just said, "I just gotta go home." So he went home, and he was met by musicians, four or five hundred of them, and everybody was saying, "Man, how was Europe?" He said, "Man, where is Herschel?" Herschel had died and nobody could tell Coleman that Herschel was dead. So finally they went to a joint and he found out that Herschel was dead and he went into seclusion for a couple of days and the next thing you know, here comes "Body and Soul."

Now that little riff, that little story, was cut out of the New York Times review that I gave. I was furious, because I think that that kind oflinkage is important for people who could never hear the musicians play in person. They ought to know that story. It's important to know that when Count Basie was a youngster and went to Cleveland, Basie was on Art Tatum's turf and didn't know it. He walked into the place and started playing and thought he was the baddest dude in the world because he'd been traveling around. He sat down and talked to the waitress and the waitress said to him, "You know, there's a local musician that'll be in here in a little while. Why don't you wait, have a drink and listen to him?" Basie was walking around and talking about "I'm going to cut and blow this cat away." And he was downstairs, he was away, and all of a sudden he hears on the piano somebody he ain't never heard before, named Art Tatum. So he goes up to the waitress and he says, "Who is that guy in there?" She says, "Oh, that's Art Tatum." Basie says to her, "Why didn't somebody tell me I was on his territory? Why do I have to have my hands cut off by that hatchet?" And Tatum later on sat Basie down and said, "Show me a few things. What are you doing here, man?" And Tatum gave him some instruction. These kinds of things were cut out of my review.

Two other things in conclusion. The titles of my books are important. I was accused of being a sentimentalist because of Dear John, Dear Coltrane. But I've got that "blue and sentimental" in my background, that music going around in my head. And so the word "sentiment" is not a bad word for me. The other thing is that the titles of songs are also

Coleman Hawkins. Photo courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

Tatum. Photo courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

Art

important, and Al Young knows some great songs. "All the Things You Are." You've got to hear Charlie Parker play that before you understand all of the residue that is in the mechanics of just assigning a title to a song. There are reservoirs and resonances.

And the last thing I have to say is that it's an honor to give testimony to people who got me through terrible times. When I was in graduate school at Iowa, the only thing that saved me was a record [album] called Kind of Blue [by Miles Davis]. A friend of mine, Lawson Inada, who's a [apanese-American, also had a great collection. We had apartments right next to each other, and the w�lls were so damn thin that if he turned his record player on first I didn't have to turn mine on. And if I turned mine on first, he'd say, "Man"-I mean, he'd do things like this: I'd meet him at the mailbox and he'd say, "Man, you played Kind of Blue forty-eight times this morning, Jack." And I'd say, "Really?" He'd say, "Yeah, let me tell you a story." He says, "You know, I bought Kind of Blue and I played it and wore out one side, and this morning you turned over Kind of Blue and it's the first time I'd ever heard the other side of Kind of Blue. I fell out! A two-sided record!" Nowadays you listen to a record and you find your favorite tunes then you decide you're going to tape and if you don't like all of the thing you take little excerpts from here and there and you put that together and then you play that over and over again. But this was before we could make cassettes. We would just play one side, or we'd play one cut! We'd play that over and over again. We didn't want to be bothered going through the entire side. And he said to me, "Kiss my ass-a two-sided jam!"

That was wonderful to me, because I understood exactly what he meant. He meant he'd been playing Kind of Blue on one side for a year and a half, and had no idea that there was this mystery on the other side. And to be given this at four o'clock in the morning or whatever time it was, to actually hear a tune he'd never heard before on a record that he'd been carrying around with him all over the country and hadn't had the nerve to turn over because he didn't want to be disappointed! You know, he didn't want to be let down after listening to side one of Kind of Blue.

The fact that Al Young's second memoir in his three collections of memoirs is called Kinds of Blue speaks volumes to me because I memorized many, many records to the point that I don't have to play them. I know the tunes. They're running around in my head. So when I sit down in the compositional sense these things impact on me. In the process of making up a kind of commentary or an investigation into any one of a number of poetic subjects, I've got those tunes in my head.

Louis Armstrong. Photo by Bill Smith.

They're blessings to me and they wouldn't be there if those musicians hadn't played.

And many of them are nor on record. Most people don't understand that musicians weren't concerned about records. Musicians that I know are not buying too many records. They've got eighty references or a hundred or a thousand. They've played "Body and Soul" eight hundred times. But I'm playing just one version on the record. It matters a great deal to me as a non-musician. Doesn't matter much to them.

Process and performance are important. Music for black musicians is almost never entertainment. Almost never entertainment. So for you to approach Armstrong through a film with Bing Crosby in it is a way of not understanding Louis Armstrong. If you want to understand Louis Armstrong, listen to "Potato Head Blues" or "What did I do to be so black and blue?" Or look at Mr. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and ask yourself why is it that he frames his particular tale around the story of a musician [Louis Armstrong] who was perhaps the greatest innovator in music in the twentieth century. Certainly right up there with Stravinsky

and all the others that you might bring to mind in talking about twentieth-century culture.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: A given jazz piece can lose a lot ofpeople real quickly because of the nature of it. People know words, but they don't know tonalities. Is jazz dying?

YOUNG: What you're talking about is life. Life doesn't die. It took the forms that we talked about up here today, but there's always a continuum. Life continues to flow. And I think that what jazz is really about, like I said before, is human spirit and life itself. I remember something that William Carlos Williams said in some of his letters. He said he thought that when society became too staid and static, the artist should throw herself or himself on the side of a little bit of chaos. When it would get too chaotic, he would seesaw a little over on the side of order. And the idea was to keep a balance. I think that people will just naturally always gravitate to whatever is life-giving and life-restoring.

KART: Regarding my saying that jazz is dying. I have some questions, which I could briefly go into, about what I think the future or the present problems of jazz are. I don't think-if I understand what postmodernism is in art - that jazz can be a postmodern art. It's an essentially humanistic art. To the degree that play with the codes, in a distant way, is what a lot of arts are up to these days, jazz can't do that. Let me quote from a piece I wrote recently about this problem:

It seems logical to assume that jazz is a music that can and should be played con amore, that is because jazz is this century's most humanistic art, a music whose goal, the discovery and expression of one's personal identity, can be reached only when musicians speak openly and honestly to those who are willing to respond in kind. But the belief that such transactions can take place rests on the faith that individual human beings still care to make that kind of response, a faith that is seldom found in the elaborately coded messages of this century's highbrow art and is even less prevalent in the mass-market products of our popular art. So the jazz musician, whose rebelliousness has ranged from bold cultural pioneering to romantic despair, now finds himself cast in the role of the loneliest rebel of them all, an artist who is unable to speak without evasion or artifice in an age which seems to demand little else.

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the problem that the music in general is facing today. Many of those who can and must still speak in that way, and their names are legion, don't seem to be abroad in a culture that is losing its ability to respond to that kind of speech. There are other

William Carlos Williams. Photo by John D. Schiff, courtesy of New Directions Publishing Corp.

people, many ofthem very well-intentioned, who are beginning to playa music that certainly derives from what I would think of as being the jazz tradition, but who are speaking behind masks, where before that was known not to be the way it could be done. And I think still is the way it cannot be done.

HARPER: I'm going to go back to what I said earlier about American speech and the American tongue. I have great belief that people as makers are never going to be mechanized in any final sense. And I think that one has to believe in the process of improvisation at every level. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples here.

I'm reading from the Collected Prose of Robert Hayden. "Not too long ago, he [he the persona - in this case, Hayden as he remembers himself as a youngster] decided to include as part of the design of a new series of poems, words and phrases remembered from childhood and youth. Under the title of Gumbo Ya Ya - Creole patois for 'Everybody talks' - he wrote down several pages, hoping of course, to make use of them in poems later on. Here are a few selections:

1. God don't like ugly and cares damn little for beauty.

2. She looks like a picture done fell out the frame.

3. Goodbye. Sweet potato, plant you now and dig you later.

4. Every shut-eye ain't sleep and every goodbye ain't gone.

5. Married? The man ain't born and his mother's dead.

6. He's a bigger liar than old Tom Culpepper and you know the devil kicked him out of hell nine times before breakfast for lying.

7. Yez, Lawd, I got me three changes a day-in rags, outa rags, and no damn rags a-tall.

S. I promised God and nine other men I wouldn't do that again.

9. Gonna hit you so hard your coattail will fly up like a window shade.

10. To be a good liar you got to have a good remembrance.

Ain't that the bad one! "To be a good liar you've got to have a good remembrance." Which is to say, you've got to be able to tell stories, you have to be able to tell stories in a true idiom, the true idiom that comes out of life. And that the kind of call-response business, which has been highlighted in black American churches, in dramaturgy, in street plays, in bars, in the kind of hopeless, soporific exchange that goes on at academic conferences - that can become distilled by a great poet into something which will be a commentary on our age and our culture. And I think that a phrase will sum that up. You know, musicians are terribly economic. I remember when Stevie Wonder came out with a song called "Up Tight, Out of Sight." You remember when the term was appropri-

ated and everybody took "up tight" to mean"psychologically duressed"? You know? And I remember black folks just saying, "What is wrong with them? Don't they understand?" They'd say, "Well I guess we'll just let them have that. You can have that. Take that and we'll come up with something else."

Miles Davis: The Loss of Lyricism

Peter Schwendener

Lyricism is intimate self-disclosure. Master lyricists of modern jazz include the saxophonists Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, the trumpeter Miles Davis and the pianist Bud Powell. There's no need to call them the greatest modernists in jazz (though they may be), because lyricism is not the only musical value, but if the word "lyricism" has any meaning, theirs is the music that is the most intimately personal. Musical personality is the presence in a musical phrase, or for that matter a single musical note, of a real person, a man or woman with a name and a personal history, whose essence is audible in that note. This immediacy of expression is achievable only in music: a writer's or painter's signature can't declare itself in a single word or brush stroke, but a musician's can in a single note, and one tell if the note belongs to a Casals, Rubenstein, Heifetz (I'm sticking to instrumentalists so as not to confuse the issue), Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Ben Webster.

The scope of lyricism is by no means confined to soloists: ensembles can achieve the lyrical power of a master soloist, as in the case of the Basie and Ellington bands. It's customary among jazz writers to refer to the Basie and Ellington bands as the "instruments" of their leaders, and the reference seems valid: the two leaders turned their bands into lyrical outlets by dominating them with their personalities. Both were capable pianists, and Basie was even a major jazz stylist, but their primary identifications were always with their bands, not their own instruments. As a leader, Miles Davis's ability to dominate the playing of other musicians with his own conception is comparable to Ellington's and Basie's, yet his own trumpet playing, at its best, is as lyrical as the playing of Young, Armstrong, Hodges and the other premodern masters. This

Miles Davis. Photo by Sulaiman Ellison, courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

dual force of his personality, that of a master leader and a master soloist, is probably unique.

If a personal mystique is lyricism's source, the source of the power in the music that compels the listener, then Miles Davis's mystique, for a large number of his listeners, lost its connection with his music sometime in the sixties. Depending on whom you talk to, Davis's curtailment of the lyrical phase of his career began either in the early sixties, in his pioneering quintet of that time, or (more people, I think, would say) in the late sixties, when he started using electric instruments in his groups.

The thing about electricity in music is that it hits lyricism right where it lives, in the immediate connection between the musician and his instrument. The nature of electricity is to drastically complicate, if not subvert entirely, the simple relationship of man to musical means, whether those means be trumpet, piano or guitar. The electric current is to musical expression what alcohol is to speech, a grave challenge to clarity. Some musical minds are adapted to the challenge. I recently heard, on the radio, the Kronos Quartet, a classical string quartet, play an arrangement ofjimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze," and was struck by how well it worked. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it worked in that the translation of an electrically-conceived work into an acoustic setting sounded logical, because Hendrix's natural lyrical outlet happened, oddly enough, to be the electric guitar, and scoring his music for acoustic instruments seemed, in a way, a restoration of lyricism to its natural acoustic province.

All the roars, slurs, distortions and echoes in Hendrix's music are lyrical in that they sound inhabited by a real person, someone speaking to us honestly. It's not an inclusive, expansive lyricism like Louis Armstrong's, one that invites everyone to participate in it, but it's honest lyricism nonetheless, the expression of a personality, and one can take it or leave it, as people take or leave Parker, Coltrane, Powell and other troubling lyricists in jazz.

Clarity is, I think, the defining quality of great art, the artistic value that subsumes all others; but not clarity in the sense of the opposite of obscurity. The opposite of clarity is not obscurity; the opposite of clarity is bullshit. Obscurity is never valuable in itself, but can be usefully deployed as a rhetorical device, the artist's temporary clouding of his materials to enhance their ultimate clear presentation, this clear presentation being the whole of his duty as an artist. The difference is between obscurity as a consciously deployed artistic strategy and a hapless obscurity, the obscurity of the inept, of the bullshitter.

The problem of lyricism is closely related to the problem of accessibil-

ity. By accessibility I don't mean "likeability," I mean adequacy of expression. John Coltrane made his personality perfectly accessible to the listening public, and large numbers of the public chose not to enjoy access to it. The point, to repeat it again, is musical personality, the presence in the musical phrase of a real person. It's nothing less than a mystical thing, the way a person somehow gets into a musical phrase, but it happens, and there are records to prove it. It's a miracle, really. It's also, as far as criticism is concerned, a matter of degrees. The measure of greatness is the degree to which the performer manages, by whatever means, to inhabit the music he plays. As James Lincoln Collier says of Louis Armstrong, his genius was that in his best performances "He was present to us all the time. There was nothing opaque between us and his deepest self." This absence of opacity defines great jazz playing, and opacity, the blurring of musical personality, is what electricity all but forces on a musician, unless it's someone like Hendrix. I'd distinguish, by the way, between degrees of electricity, the electricity that made possible Miles Davis's 1956 recording of "If I Were a Bell" as distinguished from electricity for its own sake, electricity as a disembodied musical instrument represented by the Berlin Wall-like stacks of amplifiers at rock concerts, which are as much performers on the stage as the musicians plugged into them. In the late sixties, when he first started playing at places like the Fillmore West, Davis started using this kind of electricity, threatening to drown himself in his own electric current and to make his music accessible, from that time up to now-he shows no signs of ever returning to an acoustic format-only to those willing to plunge in with him.

Miles Davis's public life as a musician has never been less than interesting, simply because there has never been anyone like him in jazz. "Miles Davis is the only superstar that jazz has," says drummer Chico Hamilton, quoted in Jack Chambers's monumental two-volume biography, * "not Mr. Basie, not Mr. Buddy Rich, not Mr. Kenton, none of these. Miles is the only superstar we've got. There are musicians who have made as much or more money but they weren't superstars. Jazz people need superstars just like rock people."

Superstardom has a lot to do with money. Talent doesn't, but it tends to wither unless it's watered by money, and Davis, whose natural talent was prodigious, was extremely fortunate in this regard. Born in 1926, he

*Milestones 1: The music and times of Miles Davis to 1960 and Milestones II: The music and times of Miles Davis since 1960 (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1983, 1985), $17.95 each.

grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, where his father, an ambitious, successful dentist who also owned a 200-acre farm, made sure he had every available advantage. According to trumpeter Clark Terry, who knew the family, "Doc Davis was the type of guy who believed his son could do no wrong." A father who believes this, and who is also wealthy, is the best kind any artist could hope for. The supreme self-confidence that is part of the Davis mystique came, I think, from his father. When he started on the trumpet as an adolescent, his father saved him from the monotony of uninspiring lessons with local schoolteachers by getting him private lessons with one of his dental patients, a trumpeter with a professional dance band, who got him listening to jazz trumpeters like Bobby Hackett and Harold "Shorty" Baker. Jazz, as Chambers says, is "an art form that, of necessity, has had to improvise its own apprentice system," and Davis, it seems, was blessed almost from the beginning with a sure instinct for knowing how to make the most of what little system there was. He knew, for example, that the most important thing a young musician can do is play professionally with older, established musicians, so he promptly started doing this and soon was making good money with a St. Louis band called Eddie Randle's Blue Devils, a band that significantly, as Davis remembers, "played the blues, all the time." (Davis, next to Charlie Parker, is the greatest bluesman in modern jazz.) Davis's sense of practical values, particularly those necessary not just to getting along but to thriving in the music business, is a large part of his legend among musicians, and it began before he was out of his teens. As another drummer, also quoted in Chambers's book, says, "A lot of things fall into place with Miles. Brilliant musician, coupled with hipness, his image. That's why he's a culture hero. For his work and the way he's handled the system."

Dismissing the cars, clothes, stage manner and other superficial aspects of the image, Chambers says that Davis's mystique "begins with a talent for making music that is at once self-communing and perfectly articulate, introverted yet highly accessible." The fact that, for many listeners, this statement describes only some of his music, has led some of his admirers to compare his career as a whole to that of Picasso, in that both artists refused to capitalize on the styles that first made their names - in Davis's case the "self-communing" style well-described by Chambers. Instead, both artists, in the words of critic Ralph Gleason, "made change into style." Davis's popularity, says another critic, Gary Giddins, "probably accounts for the frequent omission of [his] name from discussions of jazz radicals. We associate the avant-garde with privation, which Davis has never known, and with a specific approach

to improvisational freedom, which he rejects. Still, he is a terribly conscientious avant-gardist, continuously remaking jazz in his own image, and often remaking himself in the process."

I confess I have a hard time following this "change as style" analysis of Davis's, or any artist's, work. The two things, change and style, seem to consume each other, leaving nothing. Isn't a style something that by definition opposes change, takes account of the fact of change but nonetheless perfects itself in opposition to it? Change, the message of time, is what an artist's style is ultimately up against: change is the enemy. Change, in the sense of a desperate reaching for novelty, was the quality that first entered and eventually dominated Davis's work in the late sixties. Up to that time, his work was impressively varied-small group, big band, nonet, "All Star" sessions-but "change" was not his style; his style was his style. His later music seems to reflect, if anything, the disintegration of this style, the dissipation of its amazing energy in the search for new effects.

The articles of the "Davis creed," Chambers writes, are "the refusal to look back, to pay any homage at all to the past or even to waste much time deploring it, and the utter absence of nostalgia. It is a creed that Davis professes consistently, so that from a distance his life and career seem suffused by a Heraclitan obsession with change and flux." Chambers's two-volume attempt to understand the man concludes that the essence of the Davis mystique is a principled arrogance. The creed of change and flux, he says, "has less to do with Heraclitus than with Charlie Parker, and it is less a philosophical stance than a gut reaction to growing up black in mid-century America. It is middle-aged hipsterism, more articulate and reasoned than in the hip youth of the bebop revolutionaries, when it meant merely mumbling and turning away, but its highest values remain much the same - a cool, detached, unfeeling, impersonal response to the vagaries of life, whether good or bad." The arrogance is, as Chambers sees it, "a wellspring of his art," a function of his artistic courage, his refusal to be bullied, by nostalgic fans, for example, who at his high-tech concerts might shout at him to turn down the volume and play "My Funny Valentine"; or by musical colleagues such as Clark Terry, who, when he first heard Bitches Brew, said, "To me jazz has to stimulate [and] this is not necessarily stimulating. It's something to listen to as far as new sounds are concerned, but it could just as easily have been background for a scene in a jungle movie an Australian setting with the foo birds running around and the kangaroos making love to each other."

Following his apprenticeship in the forties with Charlie Parker, his

historic but rather boring 1949 Birth ofthe Cool recordings, and his other early achievements, Davis's first great group under his own name was the quintet he formed in 1955 with pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones, and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. It became a sextet in 1958, when he added alto saxophonistJulian "Cannonball" Adderley, and its shifting personnel during the rest of the fifties included pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley.

Nothing else in his career, including "Walkin'" and the Gil Evans collaborations, is as satisfying as the music he achieved with this group, and the reason for its greatness is musical personality, or rather, a cornpound of personalities, those of master musicians interacting with each other through the medium of sound. The sheer sense of personality in this music, of a group of distinct individuals speaking collectively in their music, is ecstatic. One's immediate response is to shout their names: Philly Joe, Miles, Wynton, Paul, Coltrane. How, one wonders, can people give themselves this completely? Is it safe? They don't sound as if they care whether it's safe or not. And since they give themselves completely, they also give themselves subtly: the personalities come through in the music as highly nuanced, and thus there's an almost infinite complexity, of interaction between personalities and between all the nuances of those personalities.

It's highly significant, I think, that in this first great quintet of Davis's, all other aspects of the group-repertoire, instrumentation and formatwere utterly subordinate to this idea of musical personality. The format was two or three horns and a rhythm section, the repertoire popular and jazz themes, and the blues. The unoriginality, even banality, of the material-"Surrey with the Fringe on Top," "Bye Bye Blackbird"heightens one's sense of the originality of the personalities. There was (other than on the brilliant 1959 album Kind of Blue) little if any formal innovation: they just played.

They just played. They just played on Bitches Brew and the other electric albums that followed it, but it was never really clear, in a way, who "they" were. From the early seventies on, Davis got into the habit of not listing the names of his sidemen (mostly young, unknown studio musicians) on his albums, insisting, as he always had, that the music spoke for itself, that the music, not the names of the players, was the only thing that mattered. The music is the only thing that matters, but compared to his earlier work Davis's new electric music didn't speak, or spoke incoherently. Personality, Davis's in particular, had receded from the music, leaving it to be dominated by its new exotic instrumentation

(electrified Indian instruments, among others) and formal elements (or lack of them-the disconnected variations on unpromising rock themes that on the records sometimes went on for thirty minutes at a stretch). The extreme length of the "compositions" on such albums as Bitches Brew, On the Comer and Big Fun is a result, we learn from Chambers's book, of Davis's method of recording hours of continuous music, as opposed to individual pieces, then cutting the recorded mass into segments and splicing them, somewhat like William S. Burroughs in his Cut-Up Method.

What happened? Nothing, according to those who, using the "change as style" theory, see in Davis's career an organic progression from "My Funny Valentine" to Bitches Brew and beyond. The "change as style" theory can perhaps usefully account for any number of otherwise unaccountable things, may even, in some cases, be valid, but it strikes me as a theory that has to be taken on faith alone, or not at all. Those who see Davis's career of roughly the past twenty years as a decline, a falling away with no real compensating gains in other directions, from the peak of lyricism he achieved in his early work, can speculate. Electricity was not itself to blame, given the example of Hendrix and a handful of other artists whose egos are electricity-resistant, even electricity-dominating. Maybe Davis was simply not musically adapted to make the switch: his lyricism couldn't survive the electronic onslaught. Maybe it was more economic than Davis has admitted, in that after the breakup in 1967 of his second quintet (Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, George Coleman/Wayne Shorter), which was good but not as good as his first one, he couldn't afford to hire musicians of the caliber he had worked with up to then. Chambers's book suggests it might have something to do with the fact that for most of the seventies Davis, who has sickle-cell anemia, was in more or less constant physical pain, at times to the point of agony. The thing one wants to account for is not the switch to electric instruments, use of rock themes, exotic instrumentation, formal experimentation and other elements harmless in themselves but highly susceptible to artistic abuse, but the loss of lyricism, of musical personality. Not that it's not there at all-that's saying far too muchbut compared to the best performances of the first quintet, it's all but inaudible. If his switch to an electric format was (as some thought, but which he denies and I highly doubt) forced on him by his bosses at Columbia Records to make him appeal to a younger audience, and he tried to resist this, then it's tragic; if this was not the case, it's just profoundly depressing and suggests two possibilities, those of a failure of

the will to communicate himself in his music, or the failure of his ability to do so.

Chambers's biography takes us up to the crowdingly recent past, 1983, with Davis responding to the question of what he would have done with his life if he hadn't been a musician: "If I didn't play trumpet, I don't know what I would have done. I couldn't stay in an office. I'd do some kind of research. That W-H-Y is always my first word, you know I like to see why things are how they are, the shape and flesh and everything. I'm one of them motherfuckers." Like that of any artist, the shape of Davis's best work is his own shape, the shape of a man, with no contours blurred. We have the records that reveal this shape, and should be satisfied with them, yet some of us, who see Davis's career as that of a miraculously gifted lyricist who kept making records long after he stopped singing, are far from satisfied.

"I Met History Once, But He Ain't Recognize Me":

The Poetry of Derek Walcott

Paul Breslin

The publication of Derek Walcott's Collected Poems 1948-1984* offers an occasion to reflect on the career of a poet widely (and justly) recognized as among the best writing in English. Although reviewers have praised Walcott lavishly, his work has attracted surprisingly little sustained criticism, and general studies of contemporary poetry seldom mention him. The North American critic, lacking detailed knowledge of Caribbean literature and history, is tempted to romanticize Walcott as an exotic, a bird of tropical splendor who shames, by his brilliant plumage, the drab language of his colleagues to the north. Although I have been unable, for the occasion of this review, to acquire such detailed knowledge either, I have found that taking a first step toward such knowledge helps enormously in understanding Walcott's poetry and in assessing his achievement.

One is not surprised to learn that from its outset, Caribbean literature has had to contend with the myths constructed by Europeans, with the colonial's fate of being defined by others, as the object of their thought. The first poem written in the West Indies to attract any attention elsewhere (mainly in the form of ridicule from Johnson, Reynolds and Boswell) was "Sugar Cane" (1764), by James Grainger, a Scottish physician. Lloyd W. Brown, in his West Indian Poetry, describes this work as the prototype of a sentimental genre, "Caribbean pastoral," which expresses a European fantasy of escape from the conflicts of history:

Like countless expatriate and locally born poets since his time Grainger perceives the West Indies as mere landscape, an exotic landscape rich in "picturesque"

*Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, 516 pages, hardback, $25.00.

images. In keeping with his superficially pastoral mode he can see the plantation only as a species of Utopia, with its slaves as happy swains, "all-jocund, o'er the long-hoed land."

The slaves are gone, their descendants employed by a hotel, but otherwise the idealization is still familiar, from TV ad and travel poster, as the image of the Caribbean in popular culture. (When I browsed the public library for books on the region, I noticed at least three titles containing the word "escape.")

West Indian writers have read Shakespeare's The Tempest and DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe as fables revealing the European attitude toward the islands of the New World. From the European point of view, the West Indian's island home is an a historical void, the nowhere on which Robinson Crusoe is beached, the "uninhabited island" (Caliban and Ariel notwithstanding) that exists, in Shakespeare's imagination, only as long as Prospero remains upon it, drawing the nobility of Milan and Naples to his cell. When the reconciled courtiers depart for the mainland, the island will recede into silence, once again devoid of history or language. Through fables such as these, the West Indian writer looks as if through the wrong end of a telescope: he is not Prospero but Caliban, not Crusoe but Friday. "You have no history," the European says; in the West Indies, wrote A. J. Froude in a passage that has haunted Walcott, "there are no people in the true sense of the word, with a character and a purpose of their own." And Y. S. Naipaul (whom Walcott calls "Y. S. Nightfall" in "The Spoiler's Return") accepted this verdict when he declared that "History was built around achievement and creation and nothing was created in the West Indies." In the last forty years, the West Indies have experienced a cultural flowering roughly analogous to that of Ireland in the early part of the century, but when Walcott began writing there was little sense of West Indian literature, or even West Indian regional identity, to support him.

There are of course regional traditions, but these vary enormously from one place to another, even at the level of language itself. In St. Lucia, where Walcott was born, the official language is English, but the vernacular is a French creole. In Trinidad, Walcott's current home in the Caribbean, the official language is also English, but the majority vernacular, a post-creole English moving toward standardization, coexists with French creole, Spanish and Bhojpuri. Elsewhere in the region, one also encounters Dutch, Hindi, Amerindian and javanese.' Moreover, the choice ofdialect or official forms may be loaded with social implications, especially in those countries where there is a continuum ofdialects based

on the official language, ranging from most to least formal. In such places, one constantly engages in what the sociologists of language call "code-switching":

a schoolteacher conducts his class in Standard English (the acrolect), uses a mesolectal [middle] variety in the staff room when speaking informally to his colleagues, switches to the acrolect if the conversation moves to a serious subject, and, on returning home in the evening, calls upon his basilectal [low] variety when talking to his male gardener about the work that he had earlier assigned to him for the day. He interacts with his wife in the mesolect but is careful to use a variety close to the acrolect when speaking to the maid because any usage approximating the basilect would suggest familiarity �

The poet's relationship to language is inherently self-conscious, but it becomes more so amid the linguistic pluralism of the West Indies. Moreover, to the extent that the poet asserts his regional culture by writing in the basilect, he risks limiting himself to a provincial audience; yet to the extent that he writes in standard English, he risks cutting himself off from his own auditory imagination, and from his own culture. As Walcott remarks in his essay, "What the Twilight Says: An Overture":

Listen, one kind of writer, generally the entertainer, says: "I will write in the language of the people however gross or incomprehensible"; another says: "Nobody else go' understand this, you hear, so le' me write English"; while the third is dedicated to purifying the language ofthe tribe, and it is he who is jumped on by both sides for pretentiousness or playing white. He is the mulatto of style. The traitor.'

Interestingly, Walcott makes the first writer commit himself to dialect (rather squeamishly) in standard English, while the second couches his argument for Standard English in dialect - as if to suggest that each is incomplete without the other, and that only the third way, which is Walcott's, can suffice the serious artist.

Just as Walcott is suspicious of total linguistic assimilation on the one hand and regional chauvinism on the other, he also objects to defining Caribbean identity negatively, through a common victimization. In "The Muse of History" (1974), he hopes to build a poetry, and a sense of regional identity, on something other than embittered memory of the "common experience of the New World colonialism." For "In the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters." But "the great poets of the New World, from Whitman to

Neruda, reject this sense of history. Their vision of man in the New World is Adamic." To deny the need for historical "revenge" or "remorse" is to open the heritage of European literature for use by relieving it of its historical symbolism; no longer must one see "the 'classic style' as historical degradation, rejecting it as the language of the master." Tradition, the use of the past in the present, replaces history, the compulsive urge to reopen old wounds.

Like all manifestos, "The Muse of History" must be regarded with suspicion; it tells, as we shall see, a potentially misleading half-truth about Walcott's poetry. For the moment, what I would point out is that, paradoxically, in asserting the Adamic independence of the New World writer, it is most un-Adamically haunted by the precedent of other voices, not only those of the New World poets "from Whitman to Neruda" and the New World scholars who have described their writing as Adamic, but of the Anglicized American T. S. Eliot, whose "Tradition and the Individual Talent" echoes in Walcott's description of "tradition" as "alert, alive, simultaneous."

The postwar period represented an opportunity for Caribbean writing not only because England at last began to yield to colonial demands for independence, but also because of the change that had occurred since 1920 or so in the dominant tradition of English and American litera' ture, as one can readily see by comparing the tradition available to the young Walcott, reaching manhood at the end of the 1940's, with that available to Claude McKay, the most substantial Caribbean poet before the postwar cultural renaissance.

McKay, born in 1889, encountered the late Victorian version of the dominant tradition: it meant Kipling shouldering the "white man's bur, den," it meant Tennyson praising the Light Brigade or packing the distraught speaker of Maud off to the Crimea. The late Victorian version of "tradition" had no quarrel with the British Empire, and indeed much of it glorified empire. Modernism was just beginning when McKay published his first book of poems in 1912. For Walcott, born in 1930, the dominant literary tradition in English meant Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Lawrence, Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane. he also became aware, early in his career, of Rimbaud and St-john Perse, and of Latin American writers such as Neruda and Vallejo. Of course, it took remarkable acuity on Walcott's part to see what these writers had to offer him. As George Odium observes, "It is in itself surprising that Walcott was aware of the movements taking place in the mainstream of 20th Century European literature at a time when most of his colleagues in the sixth form of St. Mary's College were desperately grappling

with 19th Century Romanticism." Modernism offered the West Indian writer a way into the dominant tradition, because it was already an adversary literature, critical of the style-and to some extent the substance-of European imperialism.

Did the Caribbean writer reject colonialism? So did joseph Conrad, so did D. H. Lawrence and so, emphatically, did Neruda and Vallejo. Was the Caribbean writer culturally insecure? Yeats and joyce had shown that a colonial culture could produce writers of international stature." Was the Caribbean writer confronted with linguistic and cultural fragmentation? So, on the testimony of their poetry, were Eliot and Pound. Whereas late Victorian taste had demanded (despite the counter-example of Browning) a uniformly elevated poetic diction, the moderns delighted in their own version of "code-switching": Eliot could move, in the second section of The Waste Land, from the acrolect of his Antony and Cleopatra imitation to the mesolect of"My nerves are bad tonight" to the basilect of "When Lil's husband got demobbed." Did the Caribbean writer feel exiled to the margins of the dominant culture, yet exiled, by his vocation as writer, from his regional culture as well? So did the Pound of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"; so did joyce, following his own counsel of "silence, exile, cunning." Was the Caribbean writer tired of insipid idealizations of the tropical landscape? So was Hart Crane, whose "0 Carib Isle!" depicts not a tourist's paradise, but a landscape charged with elemental violence, where a seashell becomes a "carbonic amulet/Sere of the sun exploded in the sea." There was Stevens's Florida of the "green vine angering for life"; there was Lawrence's Mexico, ruled by pre-Columbian dark gods.

Walcott's Collected Poems opens with "Prelude," written in 1948, when he was eighteen years old. In retrospect, its title seems more appropriate than he could possibly have known when he chose it, for this poem not only hints at themes that reverberate through much of his work, it shows him already aware of an intersection between characteristic modernist attitudes and his own experience. The first three lines seem consciously aimed at the genre of Caribbean pastoral:

I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watch The variegated fists of clouds that gather over The uncouth features of this, my prone island.

By a Cranean logic of metaphor, the island lies "prone" on its face, its "uncouth features" turned down; if it tries to get up, it will be knocked down again by those "fists of clouds." This imagery insists on the power-

lessness, rather than the beauty or vitality, of the place, despite the tourists with binoculars who "think us here happy."

The diffidence of the last three stanzas reflects not only the poet's youth, but also his sense ofbelonging to a "lost" culture, "Found onlylIn tourist booklets," or "in the blue reflection of eyes/That have known cities." The poet who must become imagining subject belongs to a culture that has been defined only as the object of European perceptions, European intentions. And yet the language by which he registers this diffidence comes straight from the dominant literary tradition: "I go, of course, through all the isolated acts/Make a holiday of situations/ Straighten my tie and fix important jaws." This is Prufrock speaking, or the Crane of "Chaplinesque," Crane and Eliot (and Laforgue, whom they were imitating) felt shy and isolated for different reasons, but the similarity of mood hinted at the possibility of assimilating their ironic style to Caribbean occasions. Such re-contextualizing ofexisting styles is itself a modernist technique: think of Eliot's pseudo-Jacobean rhetoric in "Gerontion"; Pound's translations from Li Po that amount to an invention of Chinese poetry for English readers; Stravinsky's re-irnaginings of Pergolesi and Tchaikovsky in "Pulcinella" and "The Fairy's Kiss."

At eighteen, Walcott was still borrowing more than he was reimagining, but he progressed rapidly. In "A Far Cry From Africa," one hears a momentary echo of Auden ("Statistics justify and scholars seize/ The salients of colonial policy"), but the poem has an unmistakable unity of style. It confronts a language of moral statement, reminiscent of nee-Augustan satire, with the metaphorical daring and elided logic of modern symbolism. Thus it can accommodate lines such as "The violence of beast on beast is read/As natural law, but upright man/Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain" alongside its animistic opening: "A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt/Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies/Batten upon the bloodstream of the veldt." Thematically, too, the poem concerns the confrontation of opposites: Walcott, "divided to the vein," cannot bring himself to condone the terrorism of the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau rebellion, even though he condemns the British colonialism against which the Kikuyu fight. The precedent of modernist primitivism, which rummaged The Golden Bough for vanished gods in order to restore contact with the elemental forces of the earth, gives Walcott his language for the African and tribal side of the dilemma; the nee-Augustan language of moral statement gives him a language for his distance from this part of his heritage.

In such poems as "Tales of the Islands," Walcott experimented with juxtapositions of dialect and standard English. We have been listening

to "college boys" talking pretentiously about art and politics, and witnessing a "fete" at which "savage rites" are re-enacted "For the approval of some anthropologist," when Walcott slips into the vernacular:

Poopa, da' was a fete! I mean it had Free rum whisky and some fellars beating Pan from one of them band in Trinidad.

Even one of the literary types gets drunk enough to descend from the acrolect while "quoting Shelley with 'Each/Generation has its angst, but we has none.' The vernacular ironically corrects the stuffiness of the "college boys" and the self-consciousness of the anthropologist: to reconstruct the rites of the past is to serve "history," but to turn from the anthropologists to the steel band from Trinidad is to enter the living present of "tradition," for which the vernacular provides a language. But for Walcott, the choice between acrolect and basilect is not narrowly allegorical: there is a living present to be found in the great English poets as well as in the regional life. In "Orient and Immortal Wheat," one finds a subtler juxtaposition:

So heaven is revealed to fevered eyes, So sin is born, and innocence made wise, By intimations of hot galvanize.

The first two lines, with their lofty language of generalization, aim at moral universality. They recall the tradition of meditative verse in English, extending back to Marvell and beyond, and it is hard to hear "intimations" in the third line without thinking of Wordsworth's Ode.

But with "hot galvanize," we are back in the landscape as well as the idiom of the islands: Walcott has before him, as material for his spiritual analogies, the cheap metal roofs of the village houses. Here, the juxtaposition does not undercut the loftiness of the previous lines, but rather confers dignity on the local landscape.

These early poems, and others such as "Goats and Monkeys," "Lavenrille" (dedicated to V. S. Naipaul) and "The Glory Trumpeter" force us to complicate the distinction between the Adamic and the historical that Walcott would later make in "The Muse of History." In these, the path to Adamic disencumberment must be cleared by recognition and exorcism of history. In order to become Adamic, the poet must first become historical. So in "Goats and Monkeys," Walcott must first see Othello as a fantasy spun out of racial fear: kissing Desdemona, Othello "is Africa, a vast sidling shadow/that halves your world with doubt"; their union

mates "Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor." In order to claim, at the end of the poem, that Othello is "no more/monstrous for being black," Walcott must first disentangle our perception of him from the historical burden of racial stereotype: Othello's "fury was not his racial, panther-black revenge/ but horror of the moon's change,!of the corruption of an absolute." Othello is monstrous in his unforgiving horror of mutability - which is essentially Platonic idealism, a Greek rather than Moorish idea.

In "The Muse of History," Walcott claims that "it is not the pressure of the past that torments great poets but the weight of the present'l"; in "Laventille," however, one cannot look at the present without recognizing that the pressure of the past has shaped it:

The middle passage never guessed its end. This is the height of poverty for the desperate and black; climbing, we could look back with widening memory on the hot, corrugated-iron sea whose horrors we all shared. [ J

The poem ends with an ambiguous image of simultaneous death and birth, as if to suggest that only through escape from this crippling past, that "withheld/us from that world below us and beyond" can the poet recover a lost Adamic freedom: "We left/somewhere a life we never found." Until then, the poet must struggle toward a difficult emergence, still wrapped in the "swaddling cerements" of a colonial history.

In most of his early poems (by which I mean those included in the Selected Poems of 1964), Walcott writes exclusively from a Caribbean perspective. The plane that takes him toward "the final north" at the end of "Tales of the Islands" heads into the unknown; there is a poem called "Return to D'Ennery: Rain," but it says nothing of the place from which the poet has returned. "Bleecker Street, Summer" treats Greenwich village as pastoral, as if to requite the great world for its pastoral idealization of the Caribbean. And "A Letter from Brooklyn" turns out to be about a letter written to the poet by a woman in Brooklyn who once knew his father. "The Glory Trumpeter," one of the finest early lyrics, reveals Walcott no longer entirely "withheld," as in

"Laventille," from the world "beyond" the Caribbean. In the closing stanza, Eddie, the trumpeter of the title, has

turned his back

On our young crowd out feting, swilling liquor, And blew, eyes closed, one foot up, out to sea, His horn aimed at those cities of the Gulf, Mobile and Galveston, and sweetly meted Their horn of plenty through his bitter cup, In lonely exaltation blaming me

For all whom race and exile have defeated, For my own uncle in America, That living there I never could look up.

Like the poet, Eddie inhabits two cultures, but is at ease within neither. He has turned his back on his West Indian compatriots to aim his horn across a literal and figurative Gulf, toward North American cities too far away to hear him; and yet the jazz he plays comes from the part ofNorth America where Mobile and Galveston are; it is their horn of plenty. It is as foreign to the "young crowd" as Walcott's complex and allusive style must be to many West Indian readers. Back from America, the poet feels guilty for having become relatively assimilated, but in America he remains an outsider, the unwelcome relative ofthe uncle he "never could look up."

By the time he wrote "The Gulf," Walcott's sense of dual citizenship had been much extended. As in the conclusion of "Tales of the Islands," the poet is in an airplane, but this time he is leaving the United States, not the Caribbean. As it begins its flight, "friends diminish"; the poet is attached to the United States, as he is to the Caribbean, though still he has "no home." If the poem shows Walcott still further assimilated into the English-speaking world outside the islands, it also shows him work, ing, in a more particularized way than previously, from the historically concrete toward the universally symbolic. "The Gulf," which is literally the Gulf of Mexico beneath the airplane, becomes the vehicle for a set of parallel metaphors. It is also the detachment, further depicted in the plane's departure from the earth, of the soul in meditation: "So, to be aware/of the divine union the soul detaches/itself from created things." It is the poet's sense of a lingering "gulf" between himself and both the island culture from which he came and the larger world into which he has ventured. And finally, it turns out that in the United States, too, there is a gulf: the poem was published in 1969, when the nation appeared to be coming apart at the seams:

The Gulf, your gulf, is daily widening, each blood-red rose warns of that coming night when there's no rock cleft to go hidin' in and all the rocks catch fire, when that black might, their stalking, moonless panthers turn from Him whose voice they can no more believe, when the black X's mark their passover with slain seraphim.

The apocalyptic language of this passage may seem dated, but in other respects, this poem wears well. I find most fascinating its implication that the dream of transcendence-of "divine union," a universality encompassing the divisions of black and white, Caribbean and cosmopolitan identities-arises precisely when the pressure of history becomes most acute, and seems to drive toward an impasse. Only after confronting his historical predicament and finding no way out of it can he turn from history altogether and recover, unexpectedly, the lost Adamic identity:

Yet, somehow, at this height,

above this cauldron boiling with its wars, our old earth, breaking to familiar light, that cloud-bound mummy with self-healing scars

peeled of her cerements again looks new.

One is reminded of the "swaddling cerements" in the last line of "Laventille."

Perhaps this is the time for me to say that, much as I admire Walcott's poetry, I am uncomfortable with claims to Adamic transcendence of history, to claims of elemental kinship to the earth that circumvent cultural mediation. To be sure, no poet could go on writing without the faith that poetry finally transcends the historical pressures that impinge on its making; but that "finally" is an important qualification. To skip the intervening steps is to invite the faults ofbombast and bardic pretentiousness into one's poetry, and it must be admitted that they often visit Walcott's. There is a thin line between magniloquence and grandiloquence, and if "A Far Cry from Africa," "The Glory Trumpeter," and most of "The Gulf" manage to stay on the right side of it, a great many poems, early and late, do not, or do so only intermittently. Walcott's chiefgift (like Robert Lowell's) is for the brilliant phrase, the mighty line,

the heart-stopping passage; the architectural virtues have come less easily to him.

All this is by way of preface to my reservations concerning Another Life, an autobiographical sequence in twenty-three verse "chapters" that occupied Walcott from 1965 to 1972 and takes up some thirty percent of the space in his Collected Poems. It tells the story of Walcott's life from childhood to his first successes as a poet and departures into the wider world. It begins promisingly, with evocative descriptions of the setting. The third chapter seems to launch the narrative proper when it describes a cast of village characters, with names from A to Z, as "the stars of my mythology," and likens them to figures in Homer. But only a few of these ever reappear in the poem, and only to take marginal roles. Instead of narrating, Walcott becomes fixated on landscape, on the sacredness of the artist's vocation, and on the intensity of his own feelings. The poem does indeed have a structure, as Edward Baugh demonstrates in his fine monograph study of it. But it is not a narrative structure: the poem is knit together by continuities of imagery, and it progresses not by narration but by a sequence of tableaux.

Another Life is a long, ambitious poem, and I can only sketch, on this occasion, my reasons for considering it on the whole a failure, albeit a noble and interesting one. To begin with, it lacks any hierarchy of intensity; reading Another Life is rather like listening to an organist who leaves the diapason stop on for the whole recital. Baugh compares Another Life with Wordworth's Prelude,l! and the comparison is instructive. The Prelude opens very intensely, with the inspiration of the gentle breeze, but the rest of Book One is a finely-modulated decrescendo, as the initial inspiration fades and Wordsworth returns to quotidian reality, balked in his first attempts to write the poem. Wordsworth has one language for the visionary experience of Mount Snowden in Book XIV, another for the clear-sighted description of the country fair on Mt. Helvellyn in Book VIII. Walcott, in contrast, drives unrelentingly at the sublime. As a result, foreground is hard to distinguish from background, key points of arrival from incidental detail. When the young Walcott encounters the First Poems of the Jamaican poet George Campbell, he tells us that it is an important moment, from which "another life it seemed would start again"; it is the first time that he, who had wished to shed his own blackness, finds a literary depiction of black people as "sacred" rather than brutish beings. But Walcott-as-autobiographer has already been hammering away for a hundred lines or so with language like this:

The groves were sawn symmetry and contour crumbled, down the arched barrack balconies where colonels in the whisky-coloured light had watched the green flash,'z like a lizard's tongue catch the last sail, tonight row after row of orange stamps repeated the villas of promoted civil servants.

However dazzling such passages may be in isolation, they leave Walcott with nowhere to go when he wants to intensify his language to meet a special intensity in his experience. The fire that destroyed Castries in 1948, the mystical epiphany of his fourteenth year described in Chapter 7, even the suicide of Harold Simmons, art-teacher and father-figure of Walcott's youth, ought to stand out as moments of crisis, but they are all but lost in the general furor of Walcott's language.

My second difficulty with Another Life, related to the first, concerns its thinness of incident. One can understand that Walcott, unwilling to surrender to the "muse of history," wants to distill the essential and universally-resonant from the particulars of experience. But I am not asking for confessional detail. Even though one can barely discover, by reading The Prelude, that Wordsworth lost both his parents by the age of thirteen, the milieu is solidly present: one can see his Cambridge and his London, and one can at least glimpse the village life of the Lake Country. In Another Life, everything seems ready to turn into myth or metaphor before it is first solidly there; whereas Joyce plays the mythical against the quotidian in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses, Walcott seems impatient with the literal. Autobiography can be highly selective in what it includes; it can fictionalize and distort; it can be disingenuous as the day is long. But it cannot afford an essential blankness of incident, and that is what troubles me in Another Life. The style has been asked to do all the work; the intense excitement that the style claims to feel has been severed from its occasion, for the characterization of the authorial "I" and of his first love Anna is so abstract as to prevent the tracing of emotion to motive. The passages concerning the friendship with Gregorias (Walcott's name for the painter Dunstan St. Orner) are the ones that wear best; although Gregorias has been quite consciously treated as a figure worthy of legend, we see the man at work, in despair and in triumph, and the characterization seems rooted in experience as no other in the book really is.

But I do not wish to dwell on the flaws of Another Life; Walcott has given us four volumes of poetry since, and I would like to close by

considering two of the finest poems from these: "The Schooner Flight" and the well-nigh perfect lyric, "The Season of Phantasmal Peace." The first (along with the equally fine "The Star-Apple Kingdom") shows Walcott able to write a long poem that sustains the level of his finest shorter works. The second was assumed bodily into the Norton Anthology of Poetry soon after its appearance in The Fortunate Traveller, and the editors, not always judicious in their canonization of new work, are to be congratulated for recognizing this poem at once.

"The Schooner Flight" is Walcott's most inspired experiment in dialect mixed with the Marlovian "mighty line." This time Walcott attempts autobiography at a remove, through the obviously fictional character of Shabine, smuggler, sailor and poet. Like Walcott, Shabine feels himself to be an exile: "I had no nation now," he says, "but the imagination." And yet he remains attached to the islands he leaves: "if loving these islands must be my load,!out of corruption my soul takes wings." Shabine, no less than Walcott, seeks to be purged of history; his voyage becomes a baptismal "sea-bath," a return to the primal relation of Adamic man and the history-less elements. But like Walcott also, Shabine cannot be purged of history other than by re-experiencing it. He encounters a phantom slave ship; passing Dominica, he cannot help recalling the fate of the Carib Indians: "Progress is something to ask Caribs about," he tells his friend Vince. "They kill them by millions, some in war,!some by forced labour dying in the mines." And finally, like Walcott, Shabine feels caught between white and black, between the cynicism of the colonial governments and the cynicism of the new governments that have replaced them. Racially mixed, he carries the contradictions of the region within himself: "I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,!and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

Whereas Another Life, undecided whether to tell what happened or to condense narration into iconic symbols, thrashes and sprawls, "The Schooner Flight, deciding in favor of the iconic, has admirable compression. The purgational voyage of the Flight tests Shabine, first by the painful recollection of history and then by the climactic storm in which the captain becomes a black Christ: "crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast/to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,!and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us." The voyage sustains narrative movement, building toward the ending when Shabine, having accomplished his seachange, is finally at peace: "I wanted nothing after that day."

The economy of means afforded by the convention of spiritual voyage is one strength of "The Schooner Flight"; another is the marvelously

inventive satirical wit that Walcott unleashes here. One had seen only brief flashes of this comic talent in earlier poems; here it is fully evident:

I met History once, but he ain't recognize me, a parchment Creole, with warts like an old sea-bottle, crawling like a crab through the holes of shadow cast by the net of a grille balcony; cream linen, white hat. I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine! They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma, your black cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat. A spit like that worth any number of words.

If Walcott can stick it to the colonialists, he can also be hard on cant about revolution: "In the 12:30 movies the projectors best/not break down, or you go see revolution." So much for revolutionary fervor, if it can be quieted by an afternoon movie.

"The Season of Phantasmal Peace" contains not a word of dialect; if "The Schooner Flight" stands as Walcott's most successful incorporation of the vernacular, the shorter poem is the finest expression of his aspiration to universality, to being a poet of the world rather than of a particular region of it. The poem's ravishingly lofty language risks Walcott's familiar faults of bombast and overreaching, but this time, with perfect tact, the poem recognizes the limits of its own yearnings for the sublime and pulls back from the brink of excess. As the title itself tells us, the poet knows that the gorgeous vision he is about to show us is at best a transitory glimpse of an unattainable transcendence, and perhaps even a glimpse of an illusory transcendence that exists nowhere at all. The poem subtly sustains this awareness:

Then all the nations of birds lifted together

The huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill-

The grandeur of scale immediately conveyed by "all" and "huge" may tempt us to envision the net dragging the massive skyscrapers and pines free of the earth and raising them into the air, but it is only their shadows that the net can hold, not their substance.

If the revelation is ethereal, leaving the things and ourselves, "the wingless ones," still earthbound, it is also obscure:

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight

"Drew" has the primary meaning of "pulled"; it is parallel with "trailed." But it also has a secondary meaning: whatever figure the geese "drew" in their movement through the sky, we were unable to see it; if they were trying to give us a sign from the transcendent realm they inhabit, we, from our earthly vantage point, could not read it. The net is protective, "covering this world/like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing/ the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes/of a child fluttering to sleep." This simile prompts the recollection that, first of all, the net's protection cannot be imagined except in analogies of earthly, fallible protection; and, second, that if the protection turns out to be illusory, the "net" takes on a different meaning, more akin to its literal use: no fish wants to be caught in a net, just as no one wants to be taken in by an illusion. To be sure, the poem affirms the epiphanic moment as valuable, however brief: "for such as our earth is now, it lasted long." But it does not encourage sentimental illusions, especially if read in the context of other poems from The Fortunate Traveller such as "North and South" and "The Spoiler's Revenge," which depict earthly conflicts still very far from reconciliation.

By concentrating on these two poems, I mean only to show the range of Walcott's recent accomplishment; there is much else in the last four volumes that is nearly as good. Despite the fact that he has sometimes been overpraised and idealized, and despite his chronic temptation to the grandiose and overwrought, sometimes more is more. His best poems use the full resources of English in a way that most contemporary work-clipped, prosy, and understated-does not even attempt to do. He deserves his reputation as one of the best poets writing in English, but our praise would be more sincere if it extended to imitation. Despite the gulf between Walcott's Caribbean and our workshop-ridden literary culture, he can teach us that we do not have to starve our language in the name of authenticity; he can remind us, with Blake, that you do not know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

1. Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (Boston: G. K. Hall [Twavne], 1978), pp. 19-20.

2. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 29.

3. Mervyn C. Alleyne, "A Linguistic Perspective on the Caribbean,' in Caribbean Contours, Sidney W. Mintz and Sally Price, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 178-79.

4. Ibid., pp. 168-69.

5. Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 9.

6. Walcott, "The Muse of History"; excerpt rpt. in ed. Edward Baugh, Critics on Caribbean Literature, Edward Baugh, ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), p. 39.

7. Ibid., p. 42.

8. Quoted in Edward Baugh, Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision: Another Life (London: Longman Group, 1978), p. 10.

9. Walcott is quite conscious of this parallel; see Baugh, Derek Walcott, p. 8, and Robert D. Hamner, Derek Walcott (Boston: G. K. Hall [Twavne], 1981), p. 22.

10. Walcott, "The Muse of History," p. 40.

11. Baugh, Derek Walcott, p. 47.

12. "There is a popular belief, well known in St. Lucia, that if you watch the sun setting over the sea, just at the moment when it disappears you will see a flash of green light." Baugh, Derek Walcott, p. 25.

FRIDAY - NOVEMBER 14, 1952 - FRIDAY

Illustration from Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker by Gary Giddins. Photo by Bruce Jaffe, courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Black Studies. ("Yardbird" was a less common alternative to the nickname "Bird"; another, even rarer, was "Yard,")

Review

Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, Beech Tree BookslWilliam Morrow, 1987, 128 pages; hardback, $15.95

Reviewed by Bob Perlongo

The birth of Charles Parker, [r., on August 29, 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas, roughly coincided with the enactment of the Volsted Act-the beginning of Prohibition. It was a portentous coincidence, indeed, as biographer Gary Giddins notes: "No other minority group would ever get so generous a boost from Congress as organized crime received from Senator Volsted, and no community would plunge into the trough more extravagantly than Kansas City, Missouri, just across the Kaw River from Charlie Parker's birthplace."

Charles Parker, Sr., was born in Mississippi and raised in Tennessee; he drifted to Kansas while touring as a dancer/singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit, "a substandard chain of theaters which maintained a harsh dominion over black vaudeville. (The acronym stood for Theater Owners Booking Association, but performers considered it Tough on Black Asses.)" A heavy drinker, the elder Parker did most of his imbibing away from home, because his strong-willed, part-Choctaw wife Addie would not permit it there; eventually his alcoholism led to a separation, by which time he had begun employment as a chef on the Pullman line. He left home for good in the late twenties, taking with him an older son, John or "Ikey," the offspring of a previous liaison with an Italian woman. Soon after this final break, Addie-with Charles Junior in towrelocated across the river, in a traditional two-story frame house in the

black district of Kansas City, Missouri; in her adopted community she worked as a charwoman. for Western Union, did house-cleaning and laundry, rented the top floor of her house to boarders andsignificantly-"spoiled the boy utterly, dressing him in made-to-order suits {short pants, of course} and refusing to let him deliver papers or do any other kind of work."

Biographers and fellow musicians, while disagreeing on many facets of Parker's life, are virtually unanimous on the major role Addie Parker played - for good and bad. Without doubt, she provided her sensitive son with much-needed stability, but her well-meaning and welldocumented doting turned him into a frequently undisciplined mama's boy who soon grew used to having things his own way. Parker's adult penchant for living outside the law is often traced to the twin influences of Addie Parker and the general lawlessness associated with Prohibition, though of course there were other factors involved. As for musical aptitude, none was displayed until he was fifteen, when he was encouraged to join his high school's marching band by its locally renowned bandmaster, Alonzo Lewis, several of whose students had gone on to become professional musicians. Charlie at first opted for baritone saxophone instead of alto but "quickly realized the limitations of the cumbersome brass instrument and grew bored with the stilted parts written for it. Addie thought it looked 'heavy and funny coiled around him with just his head sticking out.' Yet the baritone served the purpose of bringing him into contact with the older kids who played music and were charmed by his questions and enthusiasm."

It wasn't long before Parker switched to alto and began to frequent the many clubs and dance halls that were then flourishing under the benign eye of Kansas City councilman and political kingmaker Tom Pendergast. As Giddins puts it, K. C. was "the Las Vegas of its day," and among the dozens of gifted musicians who passed through were Andy Kirk, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, Hot Lips Page, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Herschel Evans, Charlie Christian and Buster Smith. It was not surprising that in such a place at such a time-and given his innate musical gifts and determinationCharlie Parker started to become Charlie Parker. Along the way, while still in his teens, he lost what many people believe was the closest friend he ever had - a trombonist named Robert Simpson who had implicit faith in Parker's future greatness and who died of pneumonia and a heart ailment at the age of twenty-one. Giddins notes: "Charlie was inconsolable, and the tragedy may have contributed to his sudden appetite for benzedrine inhalers, pot, and liquor."

He then quotes Bird himself, by way of writer Robert Reisner: "I don't let anyone get too close to me Once in Kansas City I had a friend who I liked very much, and a sorrowful thing happened He died."

Charlie Parker developed into one of the greatest musicians who ever lived - jazz, pop, classical or otherwise. He was also one of the most notorious and pathetic heroin addicts of all time, so in thrall to his need that he once signed away half of all future royalties of a record contract to an L.A. pusher. Parker was sweet, generous and considerate. And cruel, selfish and uncaring. He played his instrument brilliantly, with dazzling inventiveness and totally open emotion. But there were times when he played incoherently, or could not play at all. * According to some accounts, when he died-at the age of thirty-four-he was on the threshold of realizing a number of lofty "third stream" musical goals involving the merging of jazz with classical forms. Yet there were also indications that he had largely exhausted the blues and ballad forms into which, in the forties and early fifties, he and Dizzy Gillespie and a few other kindred musical spirits had breathed new life.

These are the contradictions that continue to fascinate and baffle, some thirty years after Parker's death, and they form the central interest in Gary Giddins's recently-published "coffee table" biography, its glossy, beautifully printed 9 x 12-inch pages profusely supplied with revealing and often rare photographs, as well as reproductions of documents and memorabilia. Using a spare and straightforward style, and giving special emphasis to Parker's apprenticeship years, Giddins adopts a role faintly reminiscent ofthe reporter in Citizen Kane, that of prober after the "real" Bird, the human being behind the many masks-public and privatethat he used in his intense love/hate relationship with the world.

Although Giddins's is not an exhaustive life-study by any means, most

*One of the few recorded instances of Bird at his worst-at least by his own standardstook place in Hollywood on July 29, 1946, the day he suffered a nervous breakdown that would result in a half-year confinement to Camarillo State Hospital. In a recording studio, at a date arranged by Dial Records owner Ross Russell, Bird had to be held to keep from spinning off mike during his performance of several tracks, including "Lover Man" and "The Gypsy" - although he had swallowed six benzadrine tablets before the session, he had insisted he was ready to play. As Giddins reports: "That night at the Civic Hotel he twice wandered into the lobby naked. Later he fell asleep smoking a cigarette, which ignited his mattress. Despite billowing smoke and braying sirens, the fire fighters had to roust him from sleep. When he protested, the police blackjacked and handcuffed him." Although Parker never forgave Russell for releasing "Lover Man," Giddins describes it as an "oddly moving," if flawed, performance-and there are many who would agree.

of the significant highlights of the brief and frequently bizarre Parker saga are recounted here in an even-handed, eminently readable manner: the early practice of staying out all night; the beginning of his heroin addiction at age sixteen or so*; the rough-and-tumble musical apprenticeship, highlighted by the famous cymbal-throwing episode by which drummer JoJones, in Pre-Gong Show fashion, indicated that Parker was not yet ready to share the stage with other jazz soloists; the subsequent intensive practice-or "woodshedding"-that saw him working through such important early influences as tenor saxists Lester "Pres" Young and Leon "Chu" Berry to forge the beginnings of his own peculiarly sweet/ sour, smooth/rough jazz style; the pilgrimmage to New York City, where he would help change the entire course of jazz, while giving birth to a fresh new facet of it - "bop" or "bebop" or "rebop," terms, by the way, that he himself never liked, preferring instead to simply call it "the new music."

That music, as Giddins makes clear, was a perfect reflection of the chaos and excitement of the times. It was the forties, and times, then too, were a-changing; in the sphere of jazz, the big band era was at its peak: the age of the combo, better suited to small venues and focussed on individual virtuosi, was at hand - and Bird was leading the way, playing his brilliantly original music and living his life in the fast and rocky lane of drug addiction. As Giddins observes:

The usual tale of the exceptionally gifted and sensitive young artist who is emboldened by despair and suffering, and ultimately overcomes self-doubt and public indifference, is too conventional, too perfunctory (perhaps too European) to suit Charlie Parker. Parker achieved his hipster sainthood in part by transcending, in word if not in deed, a full measure of Augustinian vices. If Parker's career was a frantic quest for musical fulfillment, it was continuously detoured by selfdestructive impulses so gargantuan that they also became the stuff of legend. The bop king had another, by no means secret, identity as the junkie king, and many votaries unable to get close to him musically were eager to share the communion of drugs

Disconcerted commentators can be forgiven the inclination to link Parker's gluttonies to racism and an absent father. Still, something basic in Parker's individuality resists the familiar simplifications of fast-Freud analyses. The hugeness, majesty, and authority of this man are diminished when the culpability for his downfall is removed from his shoulders and placed on those of an uncomprehending commonality. Racist and philistine societies are all alike; every artist is unique.

*Giddins reports that Parker's first wife, Rebecca Ruffin, "insists" that his addiction began in 1937 - in other words, at age sixteen or seventeen. Others have said it began at fourteen or fifteen.

The shift in blame from Parker to the mass tethers him to the very prosaicness his art so unequivocally counters. Always one step ahead of the mob, he cut himself down before they could. Still, it must be emphasized that as a black man in midtwentieth-century America, Parker suffered more than personal injustices. He also endured a constant debilitating slander against his art By all accounts, Parker could not be cowed by the insanity of white supremacism. But the frustration he experienced on behalf of his music was lifelong and stifling.

When Bird died, while laughing at bumbling jugglers on the Tommy Dorsey television show, in the apartment of wealthy jazz enthusiast Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the doctor who completed the death certificate estimated his age as fiftv-rhree=nearlv two decades older than he really was. He had peptic ulcers, a bad liver and-the apparent last straw-lobar pneumonia. The early demise had been foreshadowed by at least two nervous breakdowns and all the physical, psychic and monetary expense of his seventeen-odd years of heroin addiction. "Perhaps," as Giddins concludes, "his life is what his music overcame. And overcomes."

To sum up, Celebrating Bird is a perfect "first primer" for those who are relatively unacquainted with Parker's life and works. Although Giddins's text is not as detailed as many might wish, it is well-crafted, and the wealth of photographic material accompanying it more than makes up for its occasional skimpiness. (There is a particularly haunting series of three photographs taken at Chicago's Bee Hive lounge two weeks before Parker's death, showing him puffy-faced and glassy-eyed in two shots and, in the other, standing with his back to the camera, his arms folded against the wall, his head buried in his arms.)

Readers eager for more details are urged to proceed to Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert Reisner (Citadel Press, 1973) or Bird Lives! by Ross Russell (Charterhouse, 1973), the latter volume being the closest thing we have to a truly comprehensive biography. Giddins's more cornpact study does include a select discography and bibliography, certainly sufficient for general purposes, and giving us - together with the text and graphics-an excellent overview of the life and times of one of the half-dozen or so all-time jazz giants.

Publisher of book reviewed:

Beech Tree Books/William Morrow

105 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

Contributors

Lynn Grossman lives in New York City. "In Proportion" is the second story she has written; the first appeared recently in Story Quarterly.

* * * Robert Coover's book, A Night at the Movies, has been published this winter by Linden Press, which will also release his forthcoming novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

* * * James Kelman lives in Glasgow, Northern Ireland, where he was born. "Old Francis" is the first story in his collection, Greyhound for Breakfast, published in London by Seeker & Warburg (1986). Two stories of his appeared in TQ #62. * * * Joyce Carol Oates's most recent books are a collection of stories, Raven's Wing (Dutton, 1986) and a book-length essay, On Boxing, to be published by Doubleday. Two of her prose poems appeared in TQ #64. * * * "Sure I Will" is the first story to be published in a national magazine by Dan Chaon, a recent graduate of Northwestern. He works as a technical writer in Chicago. Bruce Lawder is currently an instructor of English at the University of Zurich. Dwarf Stories is the title of his work-in-progress. * * * Leon Rooke's novels include Fat Woman (1981) and Shakespeare's Dog (1983), both originally published by Knopf and reissued in 1986 by Ecco Press. His story collections include Sing Me No Love Songs, I'll Say You No Prayers (1984) and A Bolt of White Cloth (1985), also from Ecco Press. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia. * * * A noted poet of England and one of its most important critics, Donald Davie is the author, most recently, of Collected Poems, 1971-83 (Carcanet Press, 1983); an anthology which he edited, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford, 1981); and a critical study, Czeslaw Milosz & the Insufficiency of Lyric, which was published in September 1986 by University of Tennessee Press. Three of his poems appeared in TQ #64. * * * Doreen Davie

trained as a photographer at Foothill College in Los Altos, California. She has exhibited her work in Nashville, Tennessee, and illustrated her husband's book, These The Companions (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Thomas McGrath, one of the most important American poets of his time, is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and fiction, including Passages Toward the Dark (Copper Canyon, 1982) and Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts One-Two (Swallow, 1969) and Three-Four (Copper Canyon Press, 1985). A portion of Part Three first appeared in TQ #55. He has also written more than twenty film scripts and was founder and editor, with Eugenia McGrath, of the literary magazine Crazy Horse. His many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Rhodes Scholarship. He currently lives in Minneapolis. * * * Linda Pastan's sixth book of poems, A Fraction of Darkness, was published by W. W. Norton in 1985. It won the Maurice English Award. Three of her poems appeared in TQ #61. * * * Robert A. Fink directs the creative writing workshops at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He has published poems in such journals as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review and Southwest Review. His chapbook, Azimuth Points, was the Texas Review Poetry Award Chapbook in 1981.

Robert Morgan's seventh book of poetry, At the Edge of the Orchard Country, will be published by Wesleyan University Press early in 1987. He recently was awarded a fellowship by the New Foundation for the Arts and was Hawthornden Fellow last spring at the International Writ, ers Retreat in Scotland. He is presently the acting chairman of the English Department at Cornell. * * * Joseph Gastiger is an instructor of remedial writing and reading at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb. His work has appeared in several journals, including Carleton Miscellany, Cincinnati Poetry Review and Spoon River Quarterly. Two of his poems were in TQ #61. * * * Andrew Glaze, a Southern poet who has lived in Manhattan for many years, has published four volumes of poems. A book about his work, Earth That Sings, was edited by William Doreski and published in the American Poets in Profile series (Ford Brown, 1986). Several of his plays have been produced in the United States and London. * * * Maurya Simon's first book of poems, The Enchanted Room, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 1986. Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Poetry and the MississiPPi Review. She teaches creative writing at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and has completed her second book of poems.

Daryl E. Jones is a professor of English and Dean of the College of

Arts and Sciences at Boise State University in Idaho. His poems have appeared in such journals as Black Warrior Review, Descant and Sewanee Review. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant in 1985. * * * John Skovles is currently the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

* * * Michael Dennis Browne's most recent book is Smoke from the Fires (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1985). He is finishing a fourth collection of poems. * * * Alan Shapiro's books of poems are After the Digging (Elpenor, 1982), The Courtesy (University of Chicago, 1984) and Happy Hour (University of Chicago, 1987). A poem of his appeared in TQ #64. * * * The Argentinean poet Roberto juarroz has published nine volumes of poems, each entitled Vertical Poetry and numbered in sequence. The translations published here will appear in an edition of his work forthcoming from North Point Press. [uarroz works as a librarian in Buenos Aires. * * * W. S. Merwin, the noted American poet, is the author of several books including Finding the Islands (North Point Press, 1982) and Opening the Hand (Atheneum, 1983).

David Galler is the author of three collections of poems, Walls and Distances (1959) and Leopards in the Temple (1968), both published by Macmillan; and Third Poems: 1965-1978 (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, 1979).

* * * Al Young's books include the novel, Ask Me Now (McGraw-Hill, 1980), The Blues Don't Change: New & Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1982) and Bodies & Soul: Musical Memoirs (Creative Arts Books, 1981). He has been a screenwriter for Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier and Richard Pryor, and has recently completed Seduction by Light, a novel set in Hollywood, to be published by Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence. Two of his poems appeared in TQ #58.

* * * Larry Kart is a critic of the arts with the Chicago Tribune. His translation of Eugenio Montale's Mottetti was published by the Grabhom-Hovern Press in 1973. He also wrote the text for a photographic history of the early days of baseball, That Old Ball Game (Henry Regnery, 1973).

* * * Michael S. Harper is the l. J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. He is working on two books, including one on the photographs of Ralph Ndawo, the South African photojournalist who died recently under suspicious circumstances. Harper obtained the photographs in 1977 when he toured eight African countries. Five poems, an essay and an interview with Harper appeared in The Writer in Our World, TQ #65.

Peter Schwendener is a jazz pianist in Chicago and a staff writer for the weekly Chicago Reader. His articles and reviews have also appeared in the American Scholar and other publications. * * * Paul Breslin is

the author of The Psycho�Politica1 Muse, to be published by the University ofChicago Press in 1987. He is a member of the English Department faculty at Northwestern. A poem of his appeared in TQ #67.

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