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FICTION BY

JOYCE CAROl OATES, CHARLES BAXTER, MEXICAN WRITERS

JESUS GARDEA AND ILAN STAVANS, JAPANESE WRITER

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MIZUNO RURIKO, AND NEW WRITERS

EILEEN CHERRY AND WILLIAM l.

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GIANNOTTI POEMS BY HAYDEN CARRUTH, GARY

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SOTO, DEBRA ALLBERY, GERALD STERN, PATRICIA GOEDICKE, NEW WRITERS HEIDY STEIDlMAYER, PAT MANGAN, MARK SOLOMON, WILLIAM HARPER, AND MORE

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SPECIAL SECTION: VOICES FROM CHIAPAS

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PHOTOS: "THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN,"

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BY DIANE ROSENBLUM

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FALL 1994 BOOKS AND BACKLIST

TRUDYLEWIS Private Correspondences Winner of the 1994 William Goyen Prize for Fiction This moral thunderclap of a novel portrays a teenage girl who, attacked by violent evil, chooses not to flee it but to face it, and then to embrace it.

In prose that swings between lyrical moments of illumination and gritty sexual insight, Lewis explores the dark heart of a misogynist culture.

Lewis's shattering study of sexual violence and individual vulnerability is both timely and universally resonant.

--PUBUSHERS WEEKLY

5 x 8 / 196 pages

$19.95, cloth (0-8101-5033-6)

CYRUS COLTER The Hippodrome Set in a Chicago seething with physical and psychological violence, The Hippodrome is an examination of power and exploitation and their entangle­ ment with sexuality.

In the tradition of his fictional

ancestors, Dostoevsky and Faulkner, [Colter] has produced a work which uses the world ofeveryday reality in a manner beyond the scope of

journalism or sociology--as an entree to the soul.

-James Park Sloan CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

51/2 x 81/2/214 pages

$13.95, paper (0-8101-5036-0)

'-_____

TINO VILLANUEVA Chronicle of My Worst Years I Cronica de mis aiios peores TRANSLATED AND WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JAMES HOGGARD

In this bilingual edition, an

established Chicano poet describes with passion and elegance some of the American realities that remain absent from mainstream poetry.

Villanueva voices complex and compelling historical, literary and cultural questions as urgent

personal utterances.

Tino Villanueva won the 1994

American Book Award for his recent

book, Scene from the Movie GIANT.

") Tin 0 Villa n u eva unuurt UD win AI Al1l1ttOID If JUts 10"'"

51/8 x 7 3/4/96 pages

$29.95, cloth (0-8101-5009-3) $10.95, paper (0-8101-5034-4)

MARC J. STRAUS One Word This first collection of poems by a physician combines poetic craft, medical expertise and a keen sense of human vulnerability to pain and suffering in an uncommon portrayal of the complex and often troubled relations between physician and patient. With directness and power, Straus confronts matters rarely encountered in poetry. These poems are a fine addition to the scant body of imaginative work that speaks with authority from within the

medical world.

51/8 x 73/4/80 pages $29.95, cloth (0-8101-5010-7) $10.95, paper (0-8101-5035-2)

WILLIAM GOYEN Arcadio Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written.

Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walks of life.

Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist of an itinerant circus sideshow, he has escaped from the show and has been wandering in a quest for his lost family. Speaking intimately and secretly to the reader, he tells the bizarre and fantastic tale of his life.

[Arcadio] virtually pulses with life; it is both audacious and wise; a

timeless fable that manages to be boldly contemporary as well.

-Joyce Carol Oates

148 pages

$12.95, paper (0-8101-5006-9)

WILLIAM GOYEN

Half a Look of Cain: A Fantastical Narrative Chris, whose leg is injured, and his lover Stella, with whom he lives in a ruined, abandoned house; Chris's male nurse; Marvello, the circus aerialist; a lighthouse keeper; a

flagpole-sitter in small-town America-these are the creatures of William Goyen's visionary fable of love, lust and loneliness. Because of its central focus on the erotic and its unusual novelistic form, Half a Look of Cain was rejected in the 1950s by Goyen's publisher. The first publication of this novel

Goyen's paramount concern is with the ways in which people connect, commune and create, with the ways they hurt and heal one another and with the capacity of everyone to do good or evil [Half a Look of Cain] is the work of a gifted, intelligent artist.

inaugurates a TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press plan to publish and reprint all of Goyen's out-of-print work.

-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

....

220 pages $22.50, cloth (0-8101-5031-X)

New Writing from Mexico Edited by Reginald Gibbons This large anthology is a carefully chosen and scrupulously translated sampling of the most vigorous and exciting new short fiction, poetry and essays being written in Mexico today.

Gibbons has been guided by a healthy eclecticism and a sense offreshness and authenticity of conception and execution.

...

a

-HARVARD REVIEW

feast of reading enjoyment.

Gibbons's collection gives us people worth caring about and writing not afraid to be at once serious and joyful.

-SMALL PRESS

448 pages

$15, paper (0-916384-13-6)

ANNE CALCAGNO

Pray for Yourself Anne Calcagno vividly captures the textures of women's lives in this

exhilarating collection of short stories.

Her characters grapple with problems ranging from domestic violence to obsessiveness with body weight; the dramatic situations are extreme, edgy and utterly convincing.

Calcagno has the clean voice and sharp unblinking eye of a true storyteller.

-Larry Heinemann Language as maddeningly fascinating as a fifty-car locomotive, perfectly carved, from a single piece of wood.

-Lynda Barry 136 pages

$26.95, cloth (0-8101-5000-X) $12.95, paper (0-8101-5003-4)

Q

+ �

CAROL FROST Pure •

A fierce, passionate series of meditations on experience and consciousness, morals and customs, and on the natural world that surrounds and shapes human life.

Frost's poems bear the stamp of a thoroughly original artistic vision and style-they are discursive yet filled with concrete images; they inquire into moral issues

(responsibility, pleasure, guilt, jealousy) without moralizing; they catch the echoes of western myths in domestic and quotidian events; they sharply diagnose relations '----------------'

between the sexes.

For all poetry collections.

64 pages

$26.95, doth (0-8101-5029-8) $10.95, paper (0-8101-5004-2)

-LIBRARY JOURNAL

PETER READING Ukulele Music • Perduta Gente

Coo"tlhrlldcttHllte)'3r

Im_.., ..... �ct!q8'l<Nog>�<)a:td:.xJd �ro:n... �b:nI<nlobj,ad)O'�.

This double volume of poems is the first U.S. publication of an important English poet. "There is nothing safe about Peter Reading's work," one reviewer has written, and a storm of letters to the London Times and the Times Literary Supplement, attacking and defending Reading's work, has made him the most controversial English poet of the age. Rarely has any poet found a way to address the most appalling and dispiriting aspects of life with such astonishing artistic virtuosity, bitter humor and

disconcerting honesty.

112 pages

$26.95, cloth (0-8101-5030-1) $11.95, paper (0-8101-5005-0)

The Urgency of Identity: Contemporary

English-Language Poetry from Wales EDITED BY DAVID LLOYD

This anthology of poems and interviews is a double revelation for U.S. readers, presenting for the first time in this country the important English-language Welsh poetry of the 1980s and 1990s, and illuminating the complexity, constant flux and political implications of the poet's sense of inherited culture. These superb poems have been rigorously selected to showcase the Welsh poets' skill and seriousness, and the sensuous density of their language, which, like that of contemporary Irish poets, offers the reader memorable expressive riches and a striking depiction of landscape and society.

The featured poets practice their craft amid a lively cultural and political debate: although the number of Welsh citizens who do not speak Welsh has grown substantially in recent decades, cultural nationalists view English as the language of oppression. Thus, like Latino writers working in English in the U.S., the English-language Welsh poets create a divided art. Included in the anthology are John Davies, Gillian Clarke and R S. Thomas, among others.

244 pages

$39.95, cloth (0-8101-5032-8) $14.95, paper (0-8101-5007-7)

ALAN SHAPIRO In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination A collection of passionate, rigorously

argued essays on the situation of poetry in American culture today.

These essays speak forcefully to the literary debates concerning the use of tradition, the openness of American poetry to diverse subjects, and the

teaching of creative writing. This book should be read by any poet who teaches in the United States and by anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry. It will become a benchmark for discussion of contemporary American poetry.

200 pages

$39.95, cloth (0-8101-5025-5) $12.95, paper (0-8101-5028-X)

!

ANGELA JACKSON Dark LeKs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners Winner of the 1993 Chicago Sun-Ttmes Book of the Year Award in Poetry

Angela Jackson brings remarkable gifts to the articulation of African-American

experience. Her poetry features an impressive variety of characters exploring social identity, the rituals of race relations, the female psyche, creativity and spiritual experience.

Angela Jackson is a poet, novelist and playwright who has known, for long, what is rightfor her attention and scrupulous investigation.

-Gwendolyn Brooks 120 pages

$25, cloth (0-8101-5026-3) $10.95, paper (0-8101-5001-8)

TIMOTHY RUSSELL Adversaria Wl .... (�

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Winner of the 1993 Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry Adversaria celebrates the rough beauty of ordinary life and laments its inevitable decline. These poems, titled in Latin, combine colloquial style with a late imperial tone to capture the stark contrasts and contradictions of a life lived between a steel mill and the quiet, graceful natural world.

To read Adversaria is to be in the

presence of a lively and supple and various mind, as tough as it is American.

-Li-Young Lee 104 pages

$25, cloth (0-8101-5027-1) $10.95, paper (0-8101-5002-6)

EVAN ZIMROTH Dead, Dinner, or Naked We hear in these poems a song of

tenderness, anger, intelligence and wit. Evan Zimroth's erotic, intense

poems are rooted in history, myth and everyday life. Her strong, singular voice makes us look where we might not have looked, see what we might have missed, face what we would avoid.

I love the combination of smartness,

pain, and what one might call conscious postmodem trashiness in A profoundly urban book, this book harsh memory and fantasy, set in of -Alicia Ostriker harsher reality. ....

80 pages

$15, cloth (0-916384-10-1) $8.95, paper (0-916384-14-4)

BRUCE WEIGL

In these wrenching, elegant poems Bruce Weigl writes out of uncompromising memory and vision.

From bars and bedrooms, in Ohio and Nicaragua and Vietnam, his voice rises through the noise of history and habit to

reach us with impeccable grace and remarkable invention.

Song of Napalm made almost everything else that has been written about the Vietnam War seem irrelevant.

What Saves Us moves right alongfrom that achievement. Bruce Weigl has become one of the best poets now writing in America. -Denise Levertov 80 pages

$17, cloth (0-916384-08-X) $10.95, paper (0-916384-09-8)

MURIEL RUKEYSER Out of Silence: Selected Poems EDITED BY KATE DANIELS

In a recent article, someone defined the

deplorable state of publishing (and the Republic) by a single fact: Muriel Rukeyser's poetry was out of print.

So this is not just another book: it is a restitution.

-Eleanor Wilner

The publication of Out of Silence is

worthy of celebration.

Finally one of this century's most distinguished, misunderstood and undervalued poets is back in The time for a just estimate of print Rukeyser's contn1JUtions is long an event

...

....

overdue. Out of Silence is a necessary -THE WOMEN'S REVIEW OF BOOKS start.

192 pages

$28, cloth (0-916384-11-X) $14, paper (0-916384-07-1)

LINDA McCARRISTON

Eva-Mary Winner of the Terrence Des Pres

1991 National Book Award Finalist

Prize for Poetry

Ever-Mary

Winner of the 1991 Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry NOW IN A FOURTH PRINTING!

An extended poetic meditation on suffering and change, on cruelty and

innocence, on love and endurance.

An immensely moving book, fearless in

its passion. Linda McCarriston

accomplishes a near miracle, trans­ forming memories of trauma into poems that are luminous and often sacramental, arriving at a hard-won peace.

Linda McCarriston

=-Lisel Mueller

80 pages

$10.95, paper (0-8101-5008-5)

Fiction of the Eighties Edited by Reginald Gibbons and Susan Hahn This landmark anthology honoring TriQuarterly's 25th anniversary includes 47 of the best short stories to have appeared in the magazine over the past decade. The stories range widely over the experience of modem life, and share a high level of artistry.

An incomparable primer of the contemporary possibilities of fiction.

For contemporary fiction [Fiction of the

The Eighties] is a standard-bearer and the depth of fictional multiplicity wisdom lives here are astonishing and wildness of writers too numerous ....

...

to thank.

-PUBUSHERS WEEKLY

592 pages $26.95, cloth (0-916384-05-S)

$16.95, paper (0-916384-06-3)

Writers from South Africa Based on the proceedings of a literary conference hosted by TriQuarterly magazine and Northwestern University in the autumn of 1987, this collection of speeches and dialogues by fourteen

Writers from South Africa CULTURE, POUTICS AND UTERARY THEORY AND ACTIVITY IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY

leading South African writers, poets and intellectuals opens up the world of contemporary South African literary culture to u.s. audiences, outlining such concerns as writing and censorship, worker poetry, the place of poetry in society and many others.

TriQuarlvly Series on Criticism alld CulluN!, No.. 2

128 pages

$6.50, paper (0-916384-03-9)

Stephen Deutch, Photographer: From Paris to Chicago, 1932-1989 A stunning gift book-with photos of Chicago over decades of change, including Deutch's Pulitzer-nominated photos from the Daily News. This collection and analysis of Deutch's work, with plates both in duotone and in color, is the first full record of Deutch's achievement to be published.

144 pages

$45, cloth (0-929968-05-0) $23.50, paper (0-929968-06-9) Send this order form to:

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Fall 1994

Co-Editor

Editor Reginald Gibbons

Susan Hahn

Managing Editor

Executive Editor

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Advisory Editors Hugo Achugar, Michael Anania, Stanislaw Baranczak, Cyrus Colter, Rita Dove, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Michael S. Harper, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Grace Paley, Michael Ryan, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WRITING, ART AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

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accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated.

Copyright © 1994 by TriQuarterly. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any man­ ner without written permission. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore; typeset by TriQuarterly. ISSN: 0041-3097.

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"Theng," a story by Susan Onthank Mates that appeared in Tri­ Quarterly #86, has been included in The Pushcart Prize XIX: Best of the Small Presses (1994/95 edition). The anthology is being published in cloth this fall and in trade paperback in spring 1995.

Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards of $1,000 each have been received by the following poets for works that appeared in TQ #88:

{"The Milkweed Parables"} and Sterling Plumpp {"Thaba Nchu"). TriQuarterly, as publisher, has received matching awards.

Steve Fay

Susan Hahn, co-eduor of TriQuarterly and TriQuarterly Books, has re­

ceived the 1993/94 Award for Poetry from the Society of Midland Authors for her book Incontinence, published in 1993 by the University of Chicago Press. Hahn has also received a 1994 Fellowship in Poetry

from the Illinois Arts Council.

Contents Editor of this issue: Reginald Gibbons FICTION

Super Night

23

Charles Baxter Her Crowning Glory

38

Eileen Cherry Trinitario

46

Jesus Gardea Translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer

Five Prose Poems

56

Mizuno Ruriko Translated from the Japanese by Edwin A. Cranston

The One Handed Pianist ..

66

IUin Stavans Translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales

Sunday After the War

72

William L. Giannotti Christmas Night 1962

78

Joyce Carol Oates

SPECIAL SECTION: VOICES FROM CHIAPAS

Introduction

87

Reginald Gibbons 17

A Letter from Rosario

93

Rosario Castellanos Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

Nobody Lives in My Country Anymore (poetry)

..

95

Juan Banuelos Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Don Chico Who Flies

97

E radio Zepeda Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

X'anton and the Fox

l01

Tziak Tza'pat Tz'it (Diego Mendez Guzman) Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

Like the Night (poetry)

107

Jaime Sabines Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

The Rooster and the Woman

l09

Chavela Waris (IsabeLJuarez Espinosa) Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

Landscape with Dead Anthems (poetry)

115

Ambar Past Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Flood (poetry)

11 7

Efra(n Bartolome Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (1) Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

18

119

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (2)

122

Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (3)

124

Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

From an Interview with Subcommander Marcos

..

127

Vicente Leiiero Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (4)

143

Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

Found in the Armory of a Cyclone (poetry)

146

Raul Garduno Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons and Ambar Past

All the Buried Voices (poetry)

147

Jaime Sabines Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Chamula Carnival, 1994

149

Xunka Utz'utz'ni' Translated into Spanish from the Tzotzil by Jan Rus Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Family Portrait (poetry) ] oaqufn Vcisquez Aguilar

154

Translated by Reginald Gibbons and Ambar Past

POETRY The Brook; What To Do

161

Hayden Carruth 19

Shrine with Flowers

163

w. S. t» Piero

Lamp; Cutlery; Turnstile Heidy Steidlmayer

..........•..•••••••..•••.••••••••

Listening to Jets; The Tuba Player Gary Soto

••••••••••.••••••••••

170

173

Space Life ; Old Things Nancy Eimers

1 76

Fish Crows

183

Don Stap

These Are the Streets

185

Mark Solomon Silence and Dancing

.•....................•.....••....••••..••

186

Lisel Mueller F Train; Calf's Head in the Mountains

Above Mexico City

••••.••••...••••..•••......................

18 7

Pat Mangan

The Blessed Word: A Prologue on Kashmir; The City of Daughters: A Poem About Kashmir 189

Agha Shahid Ali After Vermeer; After the Auction of My Grandmother's Farm

•••••••••..•••••..........•.•••

196

Debra Allbery The Novel

Richard] ones 20

202

211

Land Rover; Teaboy Kate Thompson

Tuxedo (nocturne)

.•...........•••.•..•....•••••••..•.........

213

Charles O. Hartman In the Time of Blithe Astonishments; The Mist Nets

.................•..................••...•........

216

William Olsen The Arrangement

.••.........••....•........•.•.......•.......

220

Greg Kuzma 22 7

Recovery Robert Phillips The Bronx, 1942

................••••........•.....•••••......•

229

Linda Pastan In the Long Run Like Governments; What Love Does ("With Tear-Floods and Sigh,Tempests")

..

230

Patricia Goedicke

Blacker than Eve

•.............................................•

23 8

Gerald Stern

243

Poetry Slam?

William Harper

SPECIAL SECTION: THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN

Introduction and Photographs

.....•.....................

245

Diane Rosenblum

21

CONTRIBUTORS

277

Note: Contributors to the Voices of Chiapas section are

listed at the end of that section, beginning on page 156.

Cover painting, The Watchman's Bird, by Tony Fitzpatrick Cover design by Gini Kondziolka

The Depression-era prints that appear throughout this issue (though not in the Voices of Chiapas section) were part of the exhibit, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, which was on display at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, at Northwest­

University, for two months in spring 1994. Drawn from the gallery's collection of fine arts prints, the ninety-three

ern

pieces in the exhibit illustrated the social and aesthetic issues, ranging from political satire and social realism to modernist experimentation, which printmakers of the 1930s addressed in their work.

22

TRIQUARTERLY

Super Night Charles Baxter

Earlier in the evening, while searching on the bathroom floor for her

reading glasses, Irene Gladfelter had noticed a spidery damp spot on the wall under the sink. She would have to take care of it herself; her hus­ band was out, having a beer a few blocks away in the neighborhood bar, The Shipwreck.

On her hands and knees, she'd worried at the wall-Walt could patch it up later-with a screwdriver and a chisel, making a small neat hole.

Then she had remembered that the maintenance man should be per

�

forming such work, this wasn't her property, and the leak was really none

of her business.

But she had found the pipe, rotted away with rust at one of its con­ nection points. The water was dripping down onto a heap of razor

blades, a small secretive pyramidal scrap yard. Snaggling the flashlight's beam inward, she saw the piles of edges, not all of them lying flat. A few stood propped against each other like sentries. This mound of blue blades had been inserted one by one through the old medicine cabinet's razor slot

by Walt and by the unit's previous renters down through the millennia of shaving. The blades had rusted into a soft metallic brown.

She unsettled herself by just looking at them. You thought something as simple as a morning shave wouldn't leave a trace, but then it did.

She hated the look of the dull blue metal. It made her shy.

She made her way back to the bedroom. She found her reading glasses on the bedside table, inside a green box of tissues. Inanimate things liked to hide. She had noticed this again and again. She undressed, ...

turned on the TV, and got under the covers, spreading her catalogs around her in friendly disarray.

23

TRIQUARTERLY

Thursday was her husband's night out. At around eleven-thirty he returned home from The Shipwreck pleased with himself, ripe with cig­ arette smoke and beer. Knowing his habits, she always left a single breath mint out for him on the kitchen counter, and the fluorescent

light on the stove burning, so he could see his way in.

With the cat snoring at her feet, she sat propped up in bed reading her catalogs and watching the movie on TV with the sound muted. Drawer organizers, peg-and-dowel wood wine racks: a physical pleasure that began at her spine and spread upward toward her forehead like a sun­ flower filled her whenever she gazed at objects she did not need or want.

They were her suitors, and she brushed them away.

She liked these occasional evenings alone, these little shallow pools of rest

and emptiness. Here was a swivel bookstand, there a typewriter

table. The sunflower bloomed again. She glanced at the TV set. When she was in bed, by herself, she had a queenly indifference to the details of the stories. She didn't have to explain the plots to Walter, her usual task whenever they watched television together. Tonight she checked the screen now and then to see, first, a roadster bursting off a cliff into a slow arc of explosive death, and then a teenager putting a black shoe

slowly and sensuously on a woman's foot. Apparently this movie was some sort of violent update of Cinderella. Now a man dressed like an unsuccessful investment broker was inching his way down a back alley.

The walls of the alley were coated with sinister drippings.

She bathed in the movies more satisfactorily when they didn't make any sense. Tomorrow, at work, during her break, she could reconstruct what the sense was, but she usually didn't bother.

When she looked up from her furniture catalog, hearing Walt unlock the front door and trudge toward the bedroom, she knew the night had gone badly, just from the labored slush of his walk. When he stood in the doorway, his gray hair poking through his oil-stained cap, she forgot to ask him if if he'd taken his breath mint. He had a peevish expression.

First he examined the television, then the bedroom window, as if he didn't know what to look at. "Walter," she said. "Now what is it?"

A garage mechanic, now in late middle age having trouble with his

knees and his back, he could no longer stand straight. His upper body seemed to perch out at an angle from his waist, like a permanently bent metal beam. And he had pockmarks on his face from an attack of shin­ gles. His spiky hair was his last spirited feature.

"The guy upstairs," he said. "Burt Mink. It beats anything. The guy upstairs is a damn criminal."

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She didn't ask Walter any questions. Burt Mink? The upholsterer?

Him? The more awful the story, the better. But it could always wait. It would have to. With Walt, a person exercised patience. When you rushed Walt, he lost his thoughts' thread, and he became a meaningless old guy who could not make himself understood. He came from a family

of reluctant speakers: even his mother had never been able to manage more than about twenty words a minute. His father and his two uncles had been laconic farmers in western Michigan, where every word spoken was begrudged, like a mortgage payment. Irene watched as he shambled off irritably into the bathroom.

She understood the slow procession of his moods and knew how to time them. And she was used to his fumes, the oil fumes at least. With their two sons grown and out of the house, the mechanic's smell made her think of her two boys when they'd been younger, teenagers disman­ ding cars in the garage, surly and sweatily handsome grease monkeys.

That was when they'd all been living in the house on Mackenzie Street, before the boys had become men and had left, and she and Walter had moved to this apartment building north of Detroit to save money for their retirement. They hadn't saved any money. Selling that house had been a terrible idea. Once they sold it, she recognized that she had poured her feelings into every floorboard, every ceiling comer.

She heard Walt brushing his teeth and spitting. When he came out of the bathroom he still had his street clothes on. "There's a mess on the floor in there," he said. "Hole in the wall."

"I made it," she said. "I noticed a dampness."

He shrugged the information off with a somewhat alarming indiffer­ ence. "I don't feel like getting into bed," he told her. "I don't feel like sleeping. I don't feel like any of that."

"You have to sleep. You'll have to go to work tomorrow."

He walked over to the wall facing the bed and adjusted a tilted photo,

graph of their younger son in uniform. "I can go to work," he said. "I've done it before. I can work without sleep. I can't sleep thinking about Burt Mink."

"What about Burt Mink?"

He turned, not answering, and went into the living room. She heard him sit down in the reclining chair. It always sighed when people sat down in it. She heard him shuffling a pack of cards.

She fell asleep to the sound of the cards.

At four A.M. she put on her bathrobe. In the living room, playing cards were

scattered on the floor like snow. To get to her chair she had to step

25

TRIQUARTERLY

on

the jack of diamonds, the two of spades and the six of hearts. Walter

sitting there like a sentry, his hands on his knees, eyes wide open.

"So," she said, almost cheerfully, "what did Burt Mink say? What'd he

was

do?" She was a lapsed Jehovah's Witness. She expected things to tum

badly. It used to excite her-how things always turned out badly­ but not now, not anymore. out

"You shouldn't hear," Walter said.

"I shouldn't?"

"Pigeon, you shouldn't hear a story like this," he said. He was trying to sound offhand but wasn't succeeding: his voice growled.

"Tell me anyway," she said.

The guy upstairs, the one down the hall, Burt Mink, said he had killed a

child and was maybe going to do it again.

He had been completely drunk when he had said this. His mouth'd

been open and his words were slurred, and his whole face was a mess,

going every which way. He sounded like a man asleep but still talking, one

of those still-functioning zombies. His head hung down and his nose

got itself to within two inches of the bar.

They'd been talking about fishing, then cars. The guy'd already been drinking too much, and his voice got like a radio that was losing a sta­ tion. The son of a bitch had been muttering about traffic,

then about

school buses, like he was interested in school buses. Nobody is interest­ ed in school buses. But this son of a bitch was. School buses, for chris­

sake. With little kids on them.

Somehow this creep admitted he had lured an eight-year-old boy into his car and then done things to him and buried him out at the edge of

the county near an apple orchard. The kid had been wearing a yellow shirt. He was buried near an apple tree, what was left of him.

It hadn't taken very long.

He didn't say if he had learned the kid's name. The kid looked like an

angel. He actually said that.

Nobody knows who I am, he said. No one ever sees inside anyone else.

Dead drunk but not sorry, this guy, like he'd been discussing the price of nails at the hardware store. Walter got up and left him there on his bars tool at eleven twenty. They'd found themselves at The Shipwreck

before, but this was the first time he'd ever heard anything terrible com­ ing out of him.

He worked upholstering furniture, after all. You'd never guess this

other thing about him.

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TRIQUARTERLY

The living room froze for half a minute, then came to life again. Irene could feel her breath coming back.

"But that's a movie," she said when Walter was finished. "They ran that movie on TV last month. Remember? Maybe you were asleep. This

boy in a yellow shirt was abducted, and the man buried the body in a grove of apple trees. It was the movie-of-the-week. The villain said that no one knew who he really was. Everyone went around saying, 'Yellow shirt, yellow shirt.' I didn't like that movie," she said, almost as an after­ thought. "Dina Merrill was in it. She played a psychologist. Wore a pret­ ty pink scarf. You just heard a plot summary."

"What?"

"It's a movie, Walt," she repeated. "He's telling you about a thing they broadcast last week. You didn't see it. But I did. He's confused."

"No. He told me he did it. He didn't say about movies. He said he

killed an angel. That was our exact conversation."

Walt stood up and walked to the window, where he stood gazing out in a speculative posture, though bent as always. "Somebody's got to right

the balance."

"Don't you do it," she said. "Drop that thought. Burt Mink just thinks

he was a character in a TV show, that's all. He's telling you about the movie. That's his business, what he thinks when he's drunk, I guess.

Nobody got hurt. I'd watch him, maybe, but a plot summary, that's what he was telling you. My God, Walt, people do worse than that, telling you about movies they think they were in."

She stood up to walk to her room and felt on her back that Walt was

staying put, aimlessly thinking.

From the bedroom, she heard Walt say, "I believed him. That's the

bad part."

At seven-thirty she put some bread out on the ledge for the birds and

dropped a peanut or two on the front sidewalk for the chipmunk. A fine fall day, the air so crisp that you could see the Renaissance Center in Detroit if you looked straight south from Mrs. Gladfelter's bus stop. One of her boys worked in Detroit, and she worried about him sometimes, wor­ ried that he'd become part of the daily feast, but he was a big strong kid, a peaceful furry bear, knew his work and didn't go looking for trouble.

She wished she had brought along her new point-and-shoot camera.

She had a particular sugar maple in mind for a picture that she planned to send to Ed Oskins's weather show on Channel Four. They showed a weather picture every day, usually a landscape, and she thought she had

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good chance with this tree right here in Ferndale, growing on the boulevard across from the collision shop. This time of year, the sugar maple looked like a picture more than it looked like a tree. Bright burn­ ing red leaves rose from its branches, stopping traffic. It glorified that a

city block.

You couldn't imagine violent death happening on a day like this. It

had to wait patiently for gloom and shadow, a few hours after dinner­ time. Just like the movies, it had to have darkness, or it didn't happen.

The bus arrived, hesitated in a jovial roar of diesel exhaust, and Mrs. Gladfelter hoisted herself up.

Although the bus was not especially crowded, she sat down next to a pleasantly dressed woman in a light tan overcoat. Her straight brown hair was braided down one side. Her eyes were alert, more the exception than the rule on these buses. Mrs. Gladfelter liked to sit with other women

if she could: less chance of funny business that way.

In the public tone she used with strangers, she said, "They've taken

the flowers out." She pointed to a circular area in the median, the

marigold spot. "Have you noticed how they put them in to form an F? The marigolds? An F for Ferndale?"

The woman in the tan overcoat turned to Mrs. Gladfelter. She said that she had noticed that, yes. They spoke for two more minutes before

they turned back to their own thoughts. Mrs. Gladfelter exhaled.

Normal people were sometimes hard to find on the bus. Frequently all you saw were people in various stages of medication. But today: no lost

souls on either side of the aisle.

Considering the times, she felt pleased to have her job, checking out food; it was steady, and the manager was a kind man, and though the ceiling lights were too bright, like a toothache, and she had to be on her feet all day, the job had its compensations, especially now that manage­ installed laser scanners. She could talk to customers, briefly, if they initiated it, and sometimes she could chat with Shirley, her best ment had

friend among the other checkout girls.

The regularity soothed her. Food, processing, payment, bagging. The

work's rhythms occupied just enough of her mind so that she didn't have to think about anything she didn't want to think about. She kept track of the prices. She wrote down the numbers of the check-cashing cards

the checks. She had no responsibility for judgment calls. It was like being an elevator operator. on

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At two in the afternoon, she saw Burt Mink in her checkout line, two carts back.

Looking hung over, one eye seemingly glazed and the other

with a drooping lid, he was pushing a cart loaded with no-brand frozen dinners, and pre-cut vegetables for salads from the salad bar. He wore a flannel shirt with a hardly noticeable pale white stain. His wet stringy hair was combed over the bald spot at the top of his head, and he had a rodentlike face with protruding teeth, but when he saw Mrs. Gladfelter, he smiled and waved, and the effect was so startling, his face narrow

abruptly transformed like that, a superficially ugly pleasantness, that she felt herself go dizzy for a moment before she waved back and continued bagging the groceries of a very young and very pregnant woman who had paid for her chocolates and eggs and ice cream with cash.

Well, after all, she thought, he's been here before. I've checked him

through before, and we're neighbors. There's that.

"Here you are," she said to the pregnant woman, handing her her

change. "Take care of yourself, honey. You must be due any day now."

"A week," the woman said, tottering out, and Burt Mink advanced in the line. She checked through the woman ahead of him while he scanned the headlines of Weekly World News. Coffee cups had been found orbiting in space. The surface of Mars had been photographed; Graceland, complete with swimming pool, had turned up in the pic­ tures. Earthlings were being teleported to other locales in the galaxy.

This was common knowledge.

"Mr. Mink," she said, smiling. "Good afternoon."

He unloaded his cart with all the frozen dinners in front, and he said

grimly, "Yeah, but I had too much last night. I got to watch that." He smelled unclean.

"Yes," she said, checking his items through. The frozen dinners chilled her fingers. She thought of him eating the food, putting it into his mouth.

"I like to come here," he said. "A familiar face, you know."

"Well, we're neighbors, of course."

"Yeah," he said unpleasantly. "You're downstairs. But I see more of your husband than I do of you."

"Hrnm," she said. "Bars aren't for me. He tells me about it."

Burt Mink nodded. "Not much to see anyway. Not much to do but

drink."

She nodded. "I'm better off at home. He tells me what people say."

Burt Mink did not react, not a twitch or a glimmer, as he wrote his

check. He had dandruff on his ears and another stain on his frayed gray pants. Even for an upholsterer, he was unpresentable. She couldn't

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imagine a woman who would have him. "Time alone, you know. Good for all of us. I'll have to see your check-cashing card."

He extracted his wallet from his trousers and with his scarred fingers

began to flip through it. Next to the check-cashing card, in its plastic divider, was a photograph of a child, a boy, a school photograph, rather worn by now, an amazingly unattractive boy with an overbite and a nar­ row ratlike face, unmistakably Burt Mink himself. Did adults carry their own photos, as children, around with him? This adult did, anyway.

She felt a curious queasy sensation, seeing the rat-faced boy in the photo. She didn't recognize this sensation and wouldn't be able to say what it was. She wrote down his number on the back of the check.

After saying goodbye and hoisting his two bags of groceries, he disap­

peared out of the store like all the other customers.

A harmless and ugly man, she decided, who worked upholstering fur­ niture and who, after hours, imagined himself as a dangerous character in the movies. The movies were getting into everything now. They could spread over everyone, like the flu.

After taking the bus home, she carried her new camera to the corner of the sugar maple and the collision shop. She struggled to frame the tree in the viewfinder properly so that the wisps of vapor trails were visi­ ble against the very dark blue of the background, and after several tries Mrs. Gladfelter believed that she had managed it.

She had a simple dinner planned, beef stew, already in the refrigerator.

She strolled over to the city park, two blocks west of their apartment.

Perched on the last building before the park entrance, a billboard asked HOW TROPICAL CAN YOU BE? The billboard showed tuxe­ doed men and sequined women dancing on the deck of a cruise ship.

Underneath the picture was an 800 number for a travel agency. The and women appeared, to Mrs. Gladfelter, to be imaginary. They possessed impossible honey-colored skin. Somebody had spray-painted the word FIRB over one of the women's faces. men

Carrying her camera, Mrs. Gladfelter strolled into the park.

A man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and army camouflage trousers and flip-flops sat on the first bench, dozing, but still giving off an air of vio­ lence and moonshine. He clutched in his right hand a copy of the Ferndale Shopper's Gazette. She walked past him quietly, wearing her smile-armor.

Kids were kissing on the next bench. They looked about fifteen years old, the two of them, and optimistic, the way people did when they were

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stuck on each other, their tongues in each other's mouths. Making her way to a little rise in the park's center, she placed the camera on a bench for steadiness, pointed it toward the west gate and pressed the super

night button, a feature that held the aperture open for two seconds.

Then she put the camera in her pocket and headed toward home.

Just before she passed the man in flip-flops it occurred to her that if you were flying over this park at just the right altitude, the whole assem­ bly, including the trees and the bearded man and the lovers and herself, might look like something-a face, or a letter, or a symbol like the F arranged in the marigolds in the middle of Woodward Avenue. But it might look like something else, something terrible and perplexing. She put that thought away and scuttled toward her building.

A few days later, when she picked up the developed film, she was

delighted to see that the photograph of the sugar maple was good enough to frame. The super night shot, however, was terribly blurred: streaks of light crossed the sky in it, like meteors, and the west gate of the park had the appearance of fiery brown gelatin.

She put the photograph out on the dining-room table near the place setting for Walt's fork and knife. For the last several days, he had been quieter than usual, losing the thread of conversation, frowning into cor­ ners. She thought the photograph might cheer him up, now that autumn was here, the gray skies and soul gloom of winter.

That night, a Wednesday, he trundled himself in from work, and showered as he usually did, and had his beer and watched the local news, saying very little. She tried not to provoke him. When dinner was served, he sat down and began eating. Then he saw her photograph.

"What's this?" he asked. "This is your picture? You took this?"

She smiled proudly. "I'm sending it in to the weather show."

"It's nice," he said. "Real good. They should appreciate it."

He ate everything. He sopped up the gravy with a piece of white

bread, and when he was finished, he placed his fork carefully in the mid­ dle of the plate and said, "I'm not going to the Shipwreck tomorrow. I believe I'll stay home."

"O.K. with me," she said, although it wasn't. She would miss her cata­ logs and the expressive solitary quiet. "But I'll bet Burt Mink'll expect

you."

"Don't think so. He's had a thing happen to him."

"What thing?"

"Accident. Car accident." Walt rubbed his jaw with his fist. "He's

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banged up. Could have died."

"What?" she asked. "Where? How'd you find this out?"

"I heard," he said, not explaining. He shrugged for her benefit. "Then

I called the hospital. He's in there all right. But they said it wasn't criti­

calor anything of that nature. Just a few bones broken. He wasn't wear,

ing a seat belt. That part didn't surprise me."

"A few bones broken!" She showed her teeth. "Like saying a little fire claimed your house. Walter, what happened exactly?"

"Something went out in his car, brakes I guess. He hit a lamppole, but breakaway kind." He examined his fork carefully. "I heard he was speeding."

"Oh, Walter," she said. From the street a car honked. The chipmunk on the kitchen ledge scrabbled back and forth. "Walter, it was just a story! He never did anything."

"What? What are you saying?" not one of the

"You know what I'm saying. What did you do to his car?"

"Let's wash these dishes," he said. "Let's make some coffee and we'll

clean up here."

She would not move. "I know you," she said. "I know your mind, and don't say I don't. Now answer me, Walter. What did you do, Walter?"

He sat up, as straight as he could with his bent back. He said, "I'm a

mechanic. You can't ask me such a thing as that. Besides, it's technical."

"You could have killed him," she cried out, "and him with his only sin

being ugliness!"

"No." He stood, but he still would not look at her. "No. He was drunk and he admitted his crime, and he got away with it. I couldn't stand

that. I wouldn't tolerate it when I imagined him doing harm like that to our

boys when they were youngsters, and I drew a line."

"What line? He's a crazy man," she said. "Just another damn crazy per' son

like you and I see every day on the job. Ferndale's full of them, and

Detroit's worse. He saw a story on TV. All he did was repeat it! And

who are you to judge, and go and do such a thing to him and his car?"

"The only judge he has," Walter said to her, gazing into her face at last. She raised her hand to cover up the wrinkles. "Hell, I'll do it again.

He shouldn't have talked that way. It was so ugly, it kept me awake.

Imagine saying those things. I went and thought about it. It stayed with me, Irene. Stayed and stayed. Replacing brake pads, changing oil, there's in my head that boy in the yellow shirt. What kind of story is that, and him wanting to be in it, as the star?"

"You kept it going, Walter. It could've ended with him."

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Picking up his plate and taking it into the kitchen, Walter said,"Wasn't meant to kill him, exactly, what I did. Paralyze him, maybe. That was all.

Put him out of that hobby of his." He rinsed the plates in the sink. "I'm not a vigilante. One night while you were asleep, I fiddled with his Chevy. I'm a good mechanic. I know what to do. Anyway," he said, smiling now, "I wasn't sleeping, thanks to him, and now I am."

"It was just a story!" she said, lifting her hands involuntarily. "Like that's just a photograph!" She pointed toward the sugar maple.

"Some stories you shouldn't tell," Walter said, "if you're in them. From where I sat, he had guilt all over him. True or not, I wouldn't abide it."

Suddenly Irene said, "Why do you people do these things to each other? Why do you?"

"What people are you talking about, Irene?"

"You" she said. "You guys. You gibber and jabber and then you just go after each other, fists and guns out, all because of the tales you tell, to make yourselves so big."

"No, we don't," he said. "Where did you ever hear it before?"

He walked past her, apparently at ease with himself for now, and headed toward the reclining chair, to finish the sports page. The chair

sighed when he sat in it.

"I shouldn't have said anything," he muttered. "I should have kept you in the dark. It would've been better all around, that way."

That night she stood at the window in her bathrobe and slippers, sip­

ping tap water from a glass with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, for her nerves. She was thinking of Burt Mink in the hospital, and of how, years ago, she herself had left the Jehovah's Witnesses, "defellow­ shipped," as they called it, after she had met Walter.

She had encountered Walter in all his salty early handsomeness when she and her father had been going door-to-door with copies of The Watchtower and Awake! Walter had been up on a ladder, cleaning gut­ ters, and somehow found out her name before she'd reached the end of the block. He called her that night.

He talked her out of Armageddon. He replaced the wild beast 666 in

her imagination with four-barrel carburetors and timing lights. Before Walter had come in her life, she could gaze at the bedroom ceiling and

Armageddon happening right up there, all the panic and terror. The truth had been explained. God was hungry for vengeance, thirsty for it.

see

The clouds on Irene's ceiling boiled blood. She felt herself uplifted and

groomed in all this bedlam.

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Then Walter took her for rides in his reconditioned Olds convertible.

He showed her how to clean fish and how to swing a baseball bat. He said he loved her and repeated it so often she had to believe him.

After three months of Walter, Armageddon lost interest for her.

Could an angel turn into a demon, out of jealousy? No. Did angels kill other angels? Probably not. Someone had made it all up.

And after her boys were born, she just didn't care to imagine the death of anything. All that prized calamity was just another story.

Men often puzzled her. A world war wasn't big enough for them. No,

they had to have a universe war, and give it a fancy name that most adults couldn't even spell. This end-of-the-world story they could recount until they were blue in the face, going onto strangers' front porches, all dressed up for the sake of the bloodshed to come.

A strange appetite, like something in the Weekly World News, and she had once shared it. You certainly have to believe a lot of things to get through a lifetime.

She stood at the window and sipped her tap water and ice cream.

The soul calms down in middle age, she thought, but it does take some doing, getting it there.

"Pigeon, honey," Walter called from the bedroom. His voice faded and swelled as if someone were manipulating a volume control. "Where are

you?"

"Here," she said. "I'll be back in a minute."

She was thinking that she'd call the hospital tomorrow and find out how Burt Mink was, maybe even talk to him. Just because he had a smile that made babies wail and cry didn't mean you couldn't ask after him. As she was toying with these courtesies, she saw a taxi pull up to the curb in front of the building, and there he was, the subject of her

thinking, getting to his feet behind the opened car door, as if her mind had given birth to him-Burt Mink--coming out, wrapped in a raincoat and up on crutches. He looked like a bat in splints.

The cabbie carried his overnight bag to the door, and Burt Mink hob­ bled his way forward. He glanced up, gave Irene a smile that would freeze dogs and cats to stone, and then was gone, upstairs. After he'd dis­ appeared from view, she waved at him.

Two days later around sunset she put a cooked chicken on a tray and walked upstairs. She knocked at Burt Mink's door, and for the longest duration she heard the sound of crutches being gathered and slippers

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whispering along the carpeting. After the door opened, and she saw the full distemper of his face, she wanted, rather desperately, to run away.

Instead she said, "Hi. I brought you this." She handed the tray toward him.

"Can't take it," he grumbled. "I got my crutches."

"Well, maybe I can take it inside."

"Guess so," he said. When he exhaled, he sounded as if he were quiet,

ly gargling. "Thank you." The words came out dutifully. "I'm much appreciative. You can put that in the kitchen there."

The apartment smelled of burnt lamb shank and curdled milk. The kitchen had few cleared areas: a careless convalescent man's eating space, marked by food spillage and catastrophe. She laughed to let the tensions loose. Then she peered into the living room. "Anywhere here?"

"Anywhere," he said. "I gotta sit down. My bones is all broken."

She tiptoed nervously into the living room. Burt Mink sat in a chair in front of a TV set tuned to a news station. The maladjusted color made the announcers appear to be greenish-purple. She heard the bub,

bling of a tropical aquarium and turned to look at it. The aquarium rest' ed on an aluminum stand near a large ashtray filled with chewing-gum wrappers. At the bottom of the tank, a small metal deep' sea diver pro' duced air bubbles that rose to the surface. The diver's arms were thrust if in self-defense. Only two or three fish swam back and forth in the water, their eyes perpetually staring, astonished and frightened. out as

They made panic-striken veerings around the stones and seaweed.

"Sit down if you want," he said. "The news is on."

"Everybody's mixed-up," she told him. "The color needs adjusting."

"Not for me," he said. He pointed at his eyes. "Color-blind. Rare form, the blues and the golds." Just then the screen flashed on her weather photo, the sugar maple she had taken such care to photograph. On the screen, the autumn leaves were a lush purple.

"I wanted to say something." Irene held herself against the living' wall. "I wanted to say how sorry I was. How sorry I was and am about all of this. I'm sorry about your accident. I'm just so sorry. I'm

room

sorry. I can't stop saying it."

"Well, thank you." He examined her with the fixed gaze of someone who may be making some sort of plan, or is considering an idea he has intention of articulating publicly. With repellent politeness, Burt Mink said, "Go over there and look at those fish. You might like them. I no

got some neon tetras in there that're still alive."

She walked closer to the fishtank and was pretending to be interested in them when she heard Burt Mink say, "Jesus has a plan for me."

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"He has a plan for all of us," she said, on the other side of the tank.

Through the water, fish darting in front of it, Burt Mink's face had a vis­ cous, shimmering irregularity.

"That's not what I meant," Burt Mink said. "He told me I should

despair."

"That can't be right," Mrs. Gladfelter said, as the air in the room sud­

denly took on the smell of the aquarium water.

"You arguing with Jesus?" Burt Mink asked. "That'd be something."

Mrs. Gladfelter noticed some dusty plastic flowers in a chipped vase top of the TV set. Next to the vase was a bright red apple made out

on

of glass. "I have to go now," she said. "I hope you're feeling better soon, Mr. Mink."

He shrugged from his chair. "I'm in Hell," he said. "That's a certainty. I

could make you a map. But thank you for the chicken. I'm much appre­ ciative."

"Oh," she said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. Even as she did it, she saw how pointless gestures of kindness were in this room­ how they went nowhere, and stopped right where they happened. Then a thought occurred to her. "You're color-blind? You've never seen a yellow

shirt, have you? You've only heard about them. They're just news to you."

He didn't even bother to shrug. He gazed at her for moment with a

face so emptied of expression that it seemed like one of those contempo­ rary sculptures she'd seen in museums, so blandly abstract that it didn't stand for anything. He seemed completely absorbed in the TV set again, studying it, as if for a test.

Walking out, her skin puckering from an icy, airy chill that might have originated in the room or might have been in her own mind, Mrs. Gladfelter turned around for a quick last glance. The room looked like a cell inside someone's head, not her own, but someone else's, someone who had never thought of a pleasantry but who sat at the bottom of the

feeling the crushing pressure of the water. An ocean god had thought up this room and this man. That was an odd idea, the sort of idea she had never had before, and it wasn't her own thought, she real­

ocean,

ized, but Burt Mink's.

She closed the door behind her, imagining the pile of razor blades behind her bathroom wall, maybe behind Burt Mink's, her own good intentions piled up,

rusting, somewhere behind a wall, and she had to

stop in the hallway for a moment to get her breath.

But in her mind's eye the boy in the yellow shirt appeared before her.

His brown hair uncombed, child-debris all over him, a real kid stinking

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of sweat and mud, maybe a real brat, nobody's close friend. Who would trust him? What d'you want, lady? he asks her. Some respect, she said.

O.K., he muttered, O.K., Mrs. Gladfelter, not so sarcastic now, sorry.

What're you do in' here?

Just run now, she said, past that apple tree, do it, someone's after you, and she pointed, and the boy took off, arms and legs pumping, scabby knees and all, past the grove until he was a small vanishing point near the horizon, alive this time, free of murder, and she inhaled fully, taking the stairs one by one, thinking: he's gone now, I saved him.

Charles Turzak, Grant Park (woodcut / 1931)

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Her Crowning Glory Eileen Cherry

The day I was baptized was like any other Sunday when I'd help Ma Dear with her bathing and dressing. I was to wait at her dusty dressing table until I was called. When I heard my name at last I had to rise and enter the moist enclosure of her barren bathroom to find her dripping hand extended, her shiny fingers seeking my shoulder. Her palm dug into my small muscles as I steadied myself. While she elevated her soapy

body, rivulets trickled from its valleys and folds. The water in the tub sloshed, coughed and gurgled. She paused to make sure her feet were secure-then carefully-she pulled one shaky leg from the water. At one point her weight was totally on me as her dribbling foot jerked then lowered itself to the dry white towel I had placed on the cool floor.

Secured. She moved her second foot.

She fussed under her breath. Her breath was landing on my face. She said that I could never move fast enough for her-or anticipate her

thoughts. She hated giving directions and I hated concentrating on her needs just as much. I hated having to find things she had hidden in that room of hers, the one that smelled of camphor and rose petals.

I rubbed a towel across her back and she claimed I did it too hard. She

snatched the towel and pushed me aside as she staggered into her room and plopped her wide behind on the side of her bed. I stood by and

watched her finish toweling her spindly legs and swollen hips. She rolled on her side to wipe her lower back. I reached forward to help her.

"Naw-don't help me, silly girl!" she said. "Just get me my powder from over there!"

She leaned back on the bed and, lifting both legs, she toweled under her butt. Then, rolling up, she tugged at the flabby mound cresting her

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belly, dabbing and buffing the crevices under the great pouch. Her midriff looked like a brown buttoned pillow mounted by long sloping breasts, mutton-chop arms adorned with a half-moon scar where she had once been burned, and assorted pits and dimples. I had turned to the dressing table and couldn't distinguish the powder container from the morass of fancy clutter in the half light. She had all the brown win­ dow shades drawn, blocking out the morning brightness.

"Don't you see it?" she insisted. "It's there!"

I didn't see it. But I reached for it, pretending to know where it was.

Just to silence her. My eyes, my heart raced. Just to silence her.

"Not there, stupid. There! There!"

I looked back at her, my hands reaching and fumbling over things on

the dressing table.

"What are you looking at me for?!" Her eyes widened. "Oh I'm sick of you!" She slung the towel around and cracked me on the arm. "Get out of the way. Get me those things over there-on the chair!"

I went over to the chair and gathered her underthings. I held them as

she searched the dressing table for the container of powder. Not finding it there, she sat back in disgust on the bed and studied me for a moment.

Then she shifted her left foot and tipped a container of pale pink dust­ ing powder over on the floor. As she bent to pick it up, I wanted to kick her square in the butt. Once she had retrieved it, she did not look at me, but began systematically sprinkling her limbs, her underarms and bald­

ing pubic area. She kept her eyes away from mine as she examined the clothing in my arms and snatched off the broad cotton panties. She rolled on her back and thrust her legs through them, carefully fitting the

band around her swollen waist. Then she unraveled the bra, standing and bending forward like a Japanese sumo; she poured her ample brown breasts like coffee into the great white cups.

"Go get my uniform," she said, plopping once more on the bed to roll her beige stockings on. Carefully I placed her silk slip beside her and walked around the bed to the gaping darkness of the closet. The air in the closet smelled like tobacco, overripe grapes and allspice. Her white church uniform was secured under a protective plastic garment bag

pinned to the wire and cardboard hanger by tiny gold safety pins. She wore it every Sunday she sat on the Mothers' Board and for first Sunday baptisms. I reached under the plastic and removed each pin, closed one, and put it in my mouth. I pinched the metal with my teeth. I remem­ bered Ma Dear and I did this whenever we peeled onions to prevent tears. Feeling the cool clicking of the pin between my clenching teeth, I

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swooped the uniform into my arms like it was Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. I swirled around and around, enjoying the freshness I stirred in the purple air of the room, a room so groggy and full of sleep, sweat and the light rose perfume of her dusting powder. As I whirled around in that very small space, feeling the warm, delicate cling of the plastic gar­ ment bag, I struck my toe against the base of the bed. I anticipated the pain.

"What in the world are you doing!" said Ma Dear. "My dress is not a plaything. You crazy as Deenie MacDaniel! Come here and help me fas­ ten my bra.

Why aren't you dressed?"

But I was dressed. She just couldn't see under the housecoat I was

wearing. Ma Dear always had me put my dress on last so that I wouldn't mess

it up. I had everything on but my dress. The housecoat was pink

with a round lacy collar and covered with white hearts. My hair was pressed, pulled and rubberbanded into a little black pigtail cinched on the end by a white barrette. Wavy bobby pins kept the sides of my hair from jutting out like blades of black grass. My breasts were not impres­ sive yet, so I wore a white undershirt, white slip and tights and my black patent leather dress shoes with the Minnie Mouse bows.

I draped the dress carefully on the bed and forgot about dancing with

fairy-tale beauties. Ma Dear hunched over while I fastened the little metal claws on the back of her bra. The safety pin clicked against my teeth.

"Get that thing out of your mouth. You don't need that pin in your mouth."

I slipped it into my pocket.

"Come round here," she ordered. She leaned forward and began sniff­ ing me to make sure I wasn't musty. Then she sat back and studied me some more.

"Thought I caught a whiff of somethin'."

My cheeks tingled and my head raced. Then she spun me around when I finally met her approval.

"I just want to make sure. I'm not havin' you embarrassin' me. Now go put your dress on."

As I ran to my room, I

thought about the notorious Deenie MacDaniel who was our neighbor and a sister in our church. Ma Dear detested crazy people. She was never fond of surprises and Deenie MacDaniel was always full of them. First testing Ma Dear's Christian patience when they sang in the Pastor's Choir, Deenie MacDaniel was a bundle of contradictions. Ma Dear was forced to stand next to her in the soprano section. To Ma Dear, Deenie MacDaniel bumped against her

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needlessly. Or sometimes she'd recoil violently from the most innocent touch, accusing Ma Dear of trying to be sexual with her. It got worse during one choir rehearsal following an argument mediated by the choir director: quickly spinning out of control, Deenie MacDaniel marched to the end of the center, consecrated aisle, bent over, lifted her skirt and

patted her naked behind at Ma Dear and the other members in the choir stand. Ma Dear threatened to change churches. Pastor Ware coun­ seled patience.

Deenie Mac Daniel could have been a tall, bronze showgirl, but she

the mother of nine children and the wife of a dreamer, musician and handyman. She was under heavy strain. The strain meant people putting her in hospitals, having nappy-headed children with no shoes, was

episodes of walking outside naked, sometimes balancing one of her small babies on the top of her head like an African urn. Those were moments I thought she looked so bizarre, but so beautiful. She would be smiling as if she were in touch with some great vital force that had pulled her out of her clothes and made her walk before the world so we could see her great brown primeval beauty. She walked. Everybody gawked and Ma Dear called the police. Ma Dear's eyes would be transfixed on her, but unlike the other mothers of the church, not one modicum of pity could

be found in them. Ma Dear's eyes would freeze over, watering and blink­ ing only when she turned away.

Once my white dress was on, I returned to Ma Dear's room to find her fully clothed and primping in the mirror. She had yet to raise the shades in her room so she was grooming herself by the dim glow of a little angel

lamp on her dresser. "

she said, noting my return. "Get me my new hat."

With excitement I reached for a large hatbox she had positioned on

"Now,

top of the chest of drawers. I placed it on the bed and opened the great oval top.

"Have you washed your hands?" she snapped.

"Yes m'am," I lied, scooping the large lovely bonnet into my tainted

hands. It was a cornucopia of weaved whiteness, a flying swan, orna­ mental blossoms and grape leaves whirled into a crown with a brim like a

ship's bow. I tugged the ball of paper tissue that held the crown's shape

and let it drop into the box with the price tag. I assumed my station behind Ma Dear as she gazed upon her own face which looked suspend­ ed in the mirror. Like a royal lady in waiting, I held the great white hat.

Raising the hat in my hands, I noticed I was only a dim silhouette in her reflecting glass, her little angel lamp not illuminating me at all. Her

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TRIQUARTERL Y

newly powdered face and great white shoulders filled the dark mirror like an evening moon. She raised her hands and I placed her crowning glory on her fingertips, then she lowered it to her head with the slow and serious precision of a coronation. I watched all this while trying to discern the whites of my eyes in her mirror, with little success. Once Ma Dear's portrait was sufficient in her own eyes, she adjusted her hat with a

tap of her finger and sighed.

Cousin Claude was coming to pick us up. I waited in the living room with a three-day-old sheet cake and Ma Dear's large-print Bible. I had wanted a taste of that cake so badly when it was first made. But Ma Dear

allowed it. I was told not to touch that cake until the proper time.

So there it sat, under transparent wrap on the milk-white surface of the never

kitchen table smelling of lemon and cane sugar, gathering dust on the surface of the cellophane. I was always wiping around it with the

dishrag, pressing and tucking in the loose ends. Now here it sat, next to me with an added blanket of aluminum foil, with no fragrance at all and hardened icing. The smells of bacon and bath soap were still heavy in the air and the windows frosted lightly from the humidity. Ma Dear told jump around because I tended to give off an odor if I got sweaty. I sat and meditated on Jesus and all the things that were planned for this most important day in my life. me not to

Ma Dear entered the room, studied me for a moment then disappeared into her bedroom. She reappeared holding a white ribbon between her

fingers. It was the one that had decorated the hatbox. She smoothed my unruly strands of hair. Then I felt her fingers working and designing a bow for my lone pigtail. She had roses in her skin and peppermint rolling around in her mouth. When money was short, she used vanilla extract and citrus peelings. But on this day, instead of a smooth store­ bought mint, she offered me the natural bitters of an orange skin to sanctify my mouth. She turned me around and brushed the comers of my lips.

"Smile," she said. I showed her my teeth. She smiled back then

pressed her warm, dry lips into my left cheek.

"Ma Dear, you look so pretty," I said. She had added a corsage of silk flowers, rouge and a set of pearl earrings.

"So do you," she answered. "God bless you this morning, child."

"Wow," said Claude, soaking in Ma Dear's noble appearance. "Whose baptism is it today? You look like you going to see the king."

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"Don't walk your Auntie up to heaven so soon," she warned. From the front seat, she reached into her purse and handed me a starburst of pep­

permint. I was in the backseat of Claude's Chevrolet with the sheet cake. I was happy because something special was going to happen to me.

It would be a long Sunday: first Sunday School, then morning service, then dinner, then baptism in the late afternoon. All that mattered to Ma Dear was that I meet the setting sun as a full-fledged Christian and member of the Greater Nicodemus' Rest Missionary Baptist Church.

But it was more important to me that something was actually happening to me

and that there was a real possibility that some great secret of my

heart would rear her head-and make herself known.

Would the world have new colors when I came out of the water?

Would I, like some, be seized by the spirit while I was submerged and be driven up from the depths like a holy missile? I smiled to myself think­

ing once again about Deenie MacDaniel. About how Pastor Ware in his

big fishing boots had dipped her down in the water and how she claimed to have become filled with the holy spirit and bucked and breached like a whale. She almost emptied the baptismal pool, drenching the choir beneath it.

I pews laughed to myself. Deenie MacDaniel tickled me.

Outside the car window, I could see we were approaching the little On This Rock Holiness Church. I had asked Ma Dear if I could go to that church with my friend LaNell. LaNell was in that church all day long

Sunday and into the evening. If 1 was going by, I would see her enter the storefront temple where it was warm and bright inside with driving on

rhythms. She was swallowed into a school of clapping hands and tarn­ bourines. Memphis blues chords dangled like rainbows.

"I don't want you hanging out over there," said Ma Dear. "You can't serve two masters."

Looking in 1 could see the place heating up for a praise dance. I imag­ ined LaN ell's feet thumping the floor with all the others, doing steps. I wanted to join the sanctified church. I wanted to dance. When the

Holy Ghost touched me, I wanted to do more than the Missionary Baptist could. They could fall out, stretch out, clear out and run out­ but not dance. There was no dancing at the Greater Nicodemus' Rest Missionary Baptist Church. That was for "those holy sanctified folk" just to keep up noise, Ma Dear told me. But there was a part of me that was happy in the presence of the drum, in the presence of holy dancers whose bodies stiffened in elegant contortions, searching out steps, unique steps, steps all their own. With rapid sticks and cymbals bashing

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the air, I had watched some throw their heads back while others dipped

fluidly, arching their bodies, pumping their legs forward to the beat.

"Oh Lord, have mercy!" Ma Dear's sigh was seasoned with anger.

Claude was pulling up to Greater Nicodemus' Rest. He seemed to catch what Ma Dear was looking at. His eyes jutted to the backseat and cap­ tured mine. Ma Dear was grinding her teeth.

"Sometimes I wish that I could just go crazy! Go stark, raving crazy!"

A chattering flock of church members was hanging outside and gradu­

ally entering the red brick structure. There was the usual traffic conges­ tion, honking horns and huddles of the freshly groomed greeting one another. We saw Deenie MacDaniel surrounded by her brood of restless children, squatting on the church steps, adjusting the dress of one of her smallest, who was wedged between her knees. She was smiling, oblivious to the condescending stares of the church members stepping around her.

She wore a full gypsy skirt, a graying white blouse and a hat that looked

exactly like Ma Dear's.

That was the beginning of our long day. Deenie MacDaniel's hat seemed to knock the wind out of Ma Dear and, as I helped her from the car, she gripped my arm so tight I almost screamed with pain. Deenie MacDaniel's kids were loud, and eager to point out the similarities.

Deenie MacDaniel beamed with flattery. Ma Dear was boiling with rage, but she maintained her Christian aplomb and walked through the crowd the best way she could. She had invested too much in that hat to take it off. Then her second indignity arrived during the meal that followed the morning service. The sisters in the basement kitchen found that the great sheet cake she had so carefully prepared three days before was rid­ dled with green mold.

Well, I thought, as Ma Dear's fingers prepared me for baptism, I guess I'm the only pair of eyes around here that she thinks are not laughing at

her. She sought them, she needed them without an ounce of mockery.

And so I gave them to her. I brushed my fingers, pressed their cool tips to

the tender socket around each white eyeball, pressed and pulled. It

was my

ultimate act of love.

I had to be helped into the baptismal pool, though. Until my spiritual eyes grew I had to rely on what other people told me. They told me I

wearing white socks, a white gown and a white swimming cap. They told me the spirit was so high that Deenie MacDaniel broke into a was

dance and almost tore off all her clothes. They had to tell me because I couldn't remember the cold climb of chlorine water against my skin, the

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rubber smell of Pastor Ware's boots, my going down and being raised up through the water. Ma Dear had to tell me because I couldn't remember.

There are only these little marks on my forehead-little scratches that remain from the clawed feet of some descending dove.

"Hart" (real name unknown), [Untitled] (woodcut / 1930s or 1940s)

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Trinitario Jesus Gardea

Translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer

They arrived on a Saturday morning. A woman opened the door for them. They went in, one after another, removing their hats and then replacing them on their heads. The woman closed the door, extinguish­ ing the light that was peacefully entering from the street. The men stood there in a line, waiting for her to go ahead. As she passed them in the half-light of the room, she caressed them with a perfume of orange blossoms. They openly inhaled the perfume and prepared to follow her.

From the room in which they stood, a tiny living room with wooden furniture and an old linoleum floor, as they could see, they went into another room with a window full of sun, the source of the woman's per­

fume. In this room there was nothing but a big bed with blue trim around the silk bedspread. The woman noticeably increased her pace, as if she were a guide showing an historic dwelling to tourists. But the

having already seen all there was to see as soon as they had entered the room, put their gazes to better use by looking at the bright image of the woman, submerged and as if sailing through the light that men,

filtered in from the outside. The bare nape of her neck and the golden down on her earlobes were the two things that captivated the men

immediately. A draft of cool air passed among the three of them like a terrible summer harassing a field. And the one at the head of the line made a gesture of appropriation with his hand but then regretted it.

But by then they were already entering a third room and the charms of ...

the woman had been eclipsed. A semi-dark room, like the tiny living

And cold. The men simultaneously wrapped themselves in their and looked to either side. In that room, which looked to them like capes room.

a

storeroom, they discerned high piles of sacks whose crests were lost in

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TRIQUARTERLY

the pitch darkness at the ceiling, and boxes, also tightly stacked, and other objects scattered on the floor. To ease their souls, they turned their inner eyes as one man toward the splendor they had just contem­

plated. The woman, knowing the route, had the advantage of them, so that while they were taking stock of the room, she was already waiting for them in the following doorway, her back turned. Another bedroom, with as much light as the first one but terribly neglected: a bare, makeshift bed, a coatrack made of two nails in the wall, and a dusty floor. The men thought that no one could be sleeping there, but then, as they looked closer, they noticed the recent signs of a body on the dirty sheet. Once again they practically trod on the woman's heels and drank in her perfume and image: they felt themselves protected from the squalor of the place, as if safe from the powers that swarmed in its atmosphere. The bedroom was roughly as big as the other rooms, but to the men it seemed much bigger. And when at last they entered the yard and regained the sky and air, they let out such a noisy sigh that the woman turned around to look at them. In the yard, the men walked ahead without hesitation. The woman then fell behind. She wished to observe the red capes of the visitors as she pleased, which, from the time they entered, had attracted her attention. Although there wasn't the

slightest breeze blowing, nor were the men walking quickly, nevertheless their capes rippled like banners, like flags going into war. The yard was large, walled in, and the woman walked for a good stretch behind the capes, like a child following the parade of a circus coming to town. At the back of the yard was an automobile, and it was framed by a large gateway with a high lintel. As the men got closer to the car, they closed ranks. By the time they were walking shoulder to shoulder, their capes had gotten in each other's way and had ceased tossing about. The look of contentment on the woman's face vanished like smoke and she began to

walk more slowly. She held her gaze high, fixed in space. The men

stopped a few yards from the car to wait for her. The woman arrived and walked over to the trunk.

"Trinitario

" .

.

.

she said, leaning over slightly. The seconds passed

slowly without any reply. The men watched her. They thought she was fetching and very, very young. But there was something within the domain of the yard that did not hesitate to rise up to tarnish and surpass her. The men looked at the stone wall. And the woman called again: "Trinitario: There's someone here for you."

A noise under the car and a second later the greasy face of an old man

looking up.

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TRIQUARTERLY

"At your service," he said to the men. And then he got out from

under the car.

He was short. Stout build. Only his face didn't fit him. With a vigor'

of his broad hands he brushed the dirt from his lower back and buttocks. Meanwhile, he looked at the woman, still standing

ous movement

in front of the trunk, but the puffs of dust rolling off his back and to the

right enveloped him in a cloud. Then he looked at the chest of his over­ alls. Squinting, he went to work examining the recently discovered stains. So the men saw the crown of his head without having to strain: a sunken, pale circle, hairless beneath the light of the sun. The old man must have sensed the indiscreet eyes, for he immediately lifted his head and passed one hand over it. Then, with the same hand, he signaled to the woman to come over to him. The woman obeyed instantly.

Standing between the old man and themselves, the men observed, she no longer smelled of anything. She had her back turned to them and the old man barely reached her breasts, so that when he spoke it seemed to them that his voice crashed and broke up just as it rose. Like the walls of a ravine. They couldn't pick out a word he said. The woman, after hear­

ing his final words, left right away for the house. Leaning against one of the car doors, the heel of his shoe on the running board, the old man stood there waiting for her. His face was slightly turned toward the house and his eyes were half-closed and spawning wrinkles; the sun was

bathing him from head to toe. The men felt uncomfortable. They didn't know what to think. And they didn't particularly want to be the ones to break the prolonged silence if the old man wasn't first genuinely paying to them. The woman returned with a rag and a bottle. The old man moved away from the car. Then, solemnly, he opened his large hands without restraint, as if he were prepared to receive a gift from

attention

heaven on this pleasant morning. But the woman was already putting the rag in his hands and getting ready to pour the liquid from the bottle.

It gushed clear as water and soaked the rag. The woman pulled her face back slightly, as if to avoid the gasoline fumes, the stink. She had unplugged the bottle with her mouth and between her teeth was the dark cork: the men stood there in admiration of her teeth, so white and even, and imagined in place of the cork, their own secret flesh, sweetly

bitten. With a sort of grunt, the old man indicated that the woman should raise the neck of the bottle and plug it again. The woman did so and then watched how he began to rub his hands and forearms furiously.

The rag exuded gasoline and reeked unbearably. Without a fuss, modest­

ly, the men covered their mouths and noses and then the sun's reflec-

48

TRIQUARTERLY tion on their capes turned the woman and man red. She smiled and

there was a lightning bolt of happiness in her face, as if love had entered her body at sunset. The arms of the old man, like the pistons of a machine, stopped in the middle of a snort. The woman put the bottle the ground. The men lowered their capes. The old man looked at the morning air with the eyes of a drunk; the sweat on his forehead was on

black from the grease. Without the possibility of any prior command, the men watched the woman take a step forward and clean the old man's face with her apron while he obediently closed his eyes. As she

finished, the men took a closer look at the yard, what was in it. When

they could encompass no more and their necks were twisted as far as they could go, they began turning where they stood. In the silent morn­ ing, they emitted a sound of gears meshing, like dolls, each mounted on his own mechanical platform. In their turning, with the sun pinned to their silk capes, they ignited with a mute red fire the dim area of the yard: the back of the house. The woman was picking the bottle up from the ground when they returned to their starting point. They removed their hats again-tracing a flourish in the air-as if to send her off. And

the woman went back to the house.

The old man looked the three men up and down. "I like shrewd peo­

ple," he told them. "There are matters that will not tolerate the pres­ ence

of the world, and women are the world. So tell me."

The men moistened their lips with their tongues. They checked to see that the cords that held their capes were still tied in little bows, and

then they said: "The automobile. How much are you selling it for?"

The old man began to rub his forearm, as if he were petting an animal in the sunlight. The men moistened their lips again. They noticed that

the old man was beginning to smell of gasoline once more. They looked at each other and insisted:

"What do you say?"

The old man finished rubbing and said, with poorly disguised mockery: "You don't know much about doing business. Come with me to the shade. A few words, or many, before we get to the pesos; it's a rule."

The men followed him to one comer of the yard.

"Here," the old man indicated. "Neither the world nor an indiscreet breeze. So, you're interested in the car "

...

"Yes."

"Of course you'll need to try it out first."

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"That's what we were going to ask yOU

" ...

"You asked me about the price."

"Not at all

" ...

The old man looked up at them, into their eyes.

"O.K. Back we go," he said.

The four of them went back into the sun, the old man in the lead,

shouting out to the woman: "Get out here! Come open the gate for us!"

The three men reached the car before the old man, who had made a

detour to call the woman from the doorway. They took a look at the interior, flattening their noses against the closed windows. The elegance of the dashboard and the seats surprised them: plush everywhere, white and immaculate. Without taking their eyes off the interior, they started

revolving around the car, rapping the matte-green metal with their knuckles. But they didn't do it with the least intention of testing the material's hardness; they rapped for rapping's sake, out of nervousness.

Perhaps that's why the tapping grew quiet and then died on the hot metal like words born into the world lacking the power and clear-sight­ edness of the will. The inspection over, the men leaned against a fender to wait for the old man. The old man came out of the house with the woman, who left his side a few steps from the house. The men could see

the old man was spotless. Wearing a blue pair of overalls with a radiant

zipper that split it down the middle; sneakers, blue as well.

"Please excuse me," he said when he joined them, "but I'd forgotten "

that I had to change my clothes. You've had a look at the upholstery The old man opened the driver's side door, got in the car, and slid ...

over to

unlock the other doors.

"Get in," he bade the men as he quickly rolled his window down.

The men got in and got comfortable: one in the front, the other two They wrapped their legs in their capes and sat there

in the back.

absolutely silent. The whiteness surrounded them; they were intimidat­ ed, like adolescents facing a lustful woman. The old man on the other hand moved with total ease, pulling out and pushing in knobs on the dashboard panel. He was indicating to his solemn passengers, without success, what everything was for. His monkey eyes shone with pleasure.

From his wrinkled mouth a light of enthusiasm seeped and spread throughout his face, annulling the wretched thickness of time. Finally he showed them the glove compartment. Then they heard the gate. The

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creaking of reluctant hinges made the three men turn their heads to the right and look. The woman was opening the gate. With much effort, as if, along with the door, she were pushing the immense, blue sky that spread out in the distance. The three men felt pity for the woman and hated the old man. When the way was clear and the plain bare as far as they could see, the old man put the car in gear. First in reverse, until he had it pointing into the emptiness outside, and then forward. They grazed the woman as they passed. The three men saw her again, unex­ pected and fleeting, as they had the first time: gold on her downy ear, lobes. The car entered the plain in search of a manageable route.

Slowly, lazily, like a green beetle dazed by the sun. The steering wheel was large for the old man. To maneuver it, he hung from the wheel, sweating and contracting his whole face like a soul undergoing the tor' ments of hell. The men looked at him mockingly and girded themselves more tightly with their capes. But they didn't feel like laughing. It was the hate that was growing inside them. At last the car began rolling down a local road, straight and made of packed earth. The old man, relieved, took a breath and rested his damp brow on a sleeve of his over, alls.

"This has never happened to me," he complained to the men. "The

contraption reared like a horse. Like it wanted to go back to the yard.

You can't imagine how numb my arms are now."

The three men remained silent. The sun entered through the back

window; the capes of the two men seated there were set afire around their shoulders, creating a blaze about their heads. The car engine could

barely be heard. The tires could: a whispering that rose from the road and just barely broke the silence of the morning. The old man had just hand on the wheel. The other hand, stuck out the window in the wind, was coming back to life, waking up, starting with his fingers. The men thought of a harp player. Then the old man, his eyes on the road, asked them why didn't they roll down their windows.

"No need," they said. "The weather is mild this morning. Springlike.

Such excellent weather, sir, that even your exhausted hand is reviving."

The old man smiled, glanced at his hand, and said:

one

"So. What do you think of the car?" The man in front turned around to look at the two

in back, illuminated like saints in their niches; then he looked at their hats lying on the white seat: like a pair of elephant

tracks in the snow.

"Ostentatious," the men replied, "for this town."

The old man pulled his hand in, warm from the sun, its circulation

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returned, and gripped the steering wheel. His small monkey eyes sank inwards, pierced by a thousand wrinkles. His words came out flat as knives from between his locked jaws, joined by powerful muscles: "I don't like frankness from the mouths of strangers. I don't like it. I am

asking you about the vehicle, what you think about it

" ...

The men scowled in annoyance. a

"We don't know about cars," they said, "but this one' seems to run like charm."

The old man slowed the car down. Nearby a group of houses lined both sides of the road. The old man pulled off to the right and parked next to a few small trees in front of a house painted blue: a store. He hadn't yet brought the car to a full stop when the three men were

already ducking their heads below the windows, like fearful turtles in the green body of the car. But the old man didn't even notice; he opened the door forcefully and got out. Standing on the ground, he announced to the wind that he was thirsty, very thirsty. The men heard him. Anger still quivered in his voice. The old man walked around the back of the car and went into the store. Despite his slight body, he moved the branches of the small trees with a current of air as he passed among them. The old man felt the draft and turned to look at the trees whose branches continued to sway and rain dust, and he felt afraid. The

empty; on the countertop a few flies strolled along a hunk of cheese and perched on the knife half buried in it. Other flies had store was

plunged into the abysses of several empty bottles to meet their death.

The man observed them for a moment. Then he looked around for the icebox and took out a soda. He popped the cap and began to drink it,

examining the shelf compartments from where he stood. The desolation was even worse there: the boards, painted blue like the storefront, were deserted and had become dusty terraces where more flies went to take a walk. The old man closed his eyes; he finished the soda and put the bot, tle on the counter. Then, looking again at the desolation of the terraces, he asked if there wasn't anyone in the store to wait on him. A fly flew from the cheese to the new bottle, to the mouth. It swung over, drawn

by the sweet, yellow bottom, by the tranquil liquid remains. The old man had seen it, and then, shooting out his hand, he covered the mouth of the bottle, sending the fly headlong. The fly fell into the yellow liq­ uid. It moved about for a few seconds, to no appreciable effect But like an impatient god, the old man wanted to bring an end to the fly's vicissitudes of fortune, and he held the bottle by the neck again and ....

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began vigorously shaking the remaining liquid. He heard a voice behind him. He put the bottle down and turned around: it was the storeowner. the old man said.

"How's it going?

"Fine," the other man said. "What are you doing around here? I saw "

...

your car parked on the street."

The owner walked right over to the cheese to swat at the flies.

"Nothing in particular," the old man replied. "I was just passing by, that's all. But I was thirsty."

The flies flew up to the shelves. The owner looked at the empty bottles.

"Did you drink something?" he asked.

"An orange soda. But orange isn't my favorite flavor. Strawberry is. Do you have any?" "

"I don't know. In the icebox

...

"Nope. There was nothing but orange. Some other place, maybe, even at room temperature."

"No. It's been days upon days since the last delivery. You were in luck."

The owner stood there staring at the old man's face. Several flies returned to the cheese and the knife handle. And the owner said: "What a look you have on your face this morning! "

...

"What about it?"

"It's half devil, half desperation."

"I'm going. What do lowe you?" "

"Nothing. See you later "O.K. Thanks and goodbye." ...

The old man climbed into the car. He thought to look in the rearview mirror but regretted it immediately. He started the engine. But instead

of putting it in gear he leaned on the steering wheel to look at the road; the limpid sky and the road, joined in the distance, merged in the sun's

glaze. The land there knew nothing of mountains, nothing that might interrupt the loneliness, the wind, the silence. The sun always lay down to die right on the plain, like an exhausted beast; the grass received its body and there was no cultivation of the refreshing, merciful shady spots that precede the end of other suns in other lands. The old man bit his lips; grief took the rest of his face. He released the clutch and pulled away. On the road and far from the houses, the three men emerged. The old man sensed them, above all the reflection of their capes, which the

sunlight was wounding again. He looked at the one seated beside him, his small eyes grown hard. Bitterly the old man said to him:

53

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"So you don't know about cars."

"We don't know beans, sir," they replied.

The old man began accelerating.

"I'll drive a little, a few miles, and then we'll go back," he said, the words as if split in half, like the rent soul that had offered them up. The

repeated their gesture of annoyance and planted their feet on the floor of the car. After the drive, the men had the feeling of not having moved an inch but only of having swaddled the monotonous landscape men

in a dense cloud of dust.

When the old man let up on the accelerator pedal and turned around to go

home, the men loosened up and looked at each other again. The

old man coughed.

"So what do you know?" he said.

"We're actors."

The old man mocked them, mean as he'd been to the fly: "Is that why you have on those ridiculous clothes and you laugh like

dead leaves? a

...

Is that why you talk like someone's asking you to recite

lesson: all at the same time, like three simpleminded boys?"

"Precisely, sir. We were rehearsing when we were asked to go to your house to look at the car. Our boss. We always rehearse like this, in full costume, according to our roles

" ....

"Years ago, I had problems with a circus master," the old man said,

cutting them off. "What's the name of your boss?"

"We don't belong to a circus. It's a theater company. Our boss's name is Santiago."

"Then it's not him. This guy was Martin."

"This one's Santiago."

"Yes, I heard you the first time. He mustn't know about cars either, seeing how he trusts the three of you."

The car passed again between the houses, by.the store and the trees.

The three men just bent their heads over to hide them. The old man mocked them. don't go overboard," they warned him, turning their "Enough, sir ...

tiny mouths upward, toward the region of brightest light, which started at the base of the windows.

"Sitting like that, you remind me of fish: with your little snouts open like flowers in the water of a river."

The old man drove slowly, as in the beginning. The men had leaned up against the car doors, their heads resting on the closed windows, a

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look of insuperable boredom on their faces, of tiredness. The one seated beside the old man, lifting his head from the window, said: "Would you mind stopping for a bit, sir? We want to stretch our legs.

Sitting still isn't good, and especially for us. A moment. A few steps."

The old man didn't say a word but stopped the car. Then the men opened the car doors and got out. But rather than walking off together they divided up the horizon: one to the north, along the edge of the dirt road, as if the hood of the car had pointed him in that direction, anoth­ er to the west, and the third to the east: the latter two on the plain. The old man followed with his eyes only what his sight framed naturally and without strain, and for a moment he was tempted to run them over.

Five minutes hadn't passed and the three men were back already. The old man put his hand on the stick shift, ready to throw the car in gear.

"So quick!" he thought.

The man from the north stood still in front of the car and called to the other two; and then, with a voice full of alarm, he called to the old man with one hand: "Sir! Come! Look!

The men were looking at something under the body of the car and were gripping the edges of their capes as if they were afraid of slipping and falling. The old man walked over to them gesticulating, all his wrinkles worked up. He walked to the center of the group of men, his overalls bluer from the sunlight that was bouncing off the abundant chrome of the car. He turned to the one who had called him over and said: "What? What is it?"

The other man told him: "There. Take a look the water, the radiator The old man bent over. But then the men, without letting go of the edge of their capes, spread their arms like wings and covered him. ?" was all the old man was able to say under the "What's this tent red shadow before the bullets hit.

The men dragged him westward onto the plain without unwrapping "

...

"

...

...

...

him; they carried him the way a spider takes its prey.

On the way back, one of them let his lone voice be heard: "And 'Trinitario'

what could that be? His first or last name?"

"Who knows," said the others. "You'd have to ask don Martin."

"And the woman

...

...

I" the lone voice asked again.

Note: Mark Schafer completed this translation as part of a project for which

funding was received from the U.s.-Mexico Fund for Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.

55

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Five Prose Poems Mizuno Ruriko

Translated from the Japanese by Edwin A. Cranston

Hansel and Gretel's Island There was a summer when the two of us lived together on an island. An X was affixed to the small gate so that our house could not be distin­

guished from the others. I climbed narrow stairs and went into the room, thrusting a flower in my hair. In the room there was an elephant.

The elephant faced away and was lost in dreams of the sea. Waves kept breaking over its back, until finally it began to be an island. Before long the island, with its little lamp lit, put us on its back and sank toward the sea night after night.

At night my brother talked on and on about the island: When still in its infancy, the island was captured by people, stripped naked, and even

marked with a zoological distribution chart. (We two were very ashamed.) Even now the old symbolic markings survive faintly on the island, here and there. They look like the marks left by a rope. A track remains of a kind of amphibian that crawled

across

the island in the

Devonian epoch, but nothing is known of the creature beyond the fact

that it passed this way. The lonesome island has been waiting for us qui, etly ever since in the form of an elephant. To take us to the sky and the shade of the bright fern forest.

During the day we faced each other across a round dining table and thought only of where the elephant and the island had gone. Music for

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the bon dance reached us faintly on the breeze; we had an inkling we had come to some country of the East. I gave the elephant the name

Dora; my brother gave the island the name Dora. I made a poem about the creepers the elephant-handler uses to make his whip, and mean­ while my brother was writing a long article about the island's geology and the measurements of one remaining enormous footprint. Circling the table, the two of us drew closer and closer to the spot from which the elephant and island could be seen.

In lots of different places fathers and mothers began to die. War had

started among the grownups. We were somehow aware of the presence of a strange fish that had mounted the stairs and was listening at the door. When I bent over and picked up the fish, I severed its legs. All the legs were short. Outside the window we could smell the legs and the old

entrails. In the belly of the pregnant fish was a map of something blind, all red and folded up. My brother unfolded the map onto an oval, dark platter. It was of a fecund region. The two of us lay down like innocent wounds and studied for the first time in our lives the recipe for preparing a strange fish. We learned that fishes and people both eventually need to be healed. That was the secret of the grownups.

Deep in the forest there was a sound of fern spores spilling in golden color. In the oven the witch was starting to come back to life. The boy had no more bread crumbs and pebbles in his pocket. And at the end of the brief summer he died. It was a summer like a small, transparent cup.

But I had the feeling that that kind of summer was what people call love.

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Dora's Island "Let's go look for Dora," my brother said.

Dora was an island elephant. The island was close to where the sun set.

In the very center of the island was a day's worth of sky. The sky hid

the town. The town hid the window. My brother gazed from the sick­ room window after Dora, who had gone off toward the shadows of the forest. Dora was being pursued.

My brother said: Dora is the infant prototype of the world. From ele­ phant to bird, from bird to lizard, from lizard to shellfish, from shellfish to man, you can see a spiral musical scale passed on without a break.

Sent out from Dora, an endless series of green vowels circles back again to Dora's ear.

Dora is listening. The slow vowel rhythms set to humming

the basso aa inside us, they draw out our quavering ee, they circle the

spherical sky.

The island flowed on toward the end of summer. The elephants were

gradually hunted out, became stiff, turned into bread, became whips, became chairs. It was the memory of Dora alone that made the two of us

conspirators. We secretly set out walking between the round hands and feet that had been left behind. The elephants, overtaken by night,

changed into knobbly plants at the top of a cliff. Out on a V-shaped headland one of the parched elephant trees lay on its side. Half-buried in dry gravel, the tree had neither tree rings nor fruit. It looked just like mineral. Dark-winded days, the beach was filled with the elephants' intermittent screams.

The grownups forecast my brother's death. In mid-sky over the island the world resounded like a broken organ. During the summer my broth­ er and I, searching for Dora, little by little drew near the location of the gray ear with its sparse hair. The road ended in a cold,

moss-covered

of hearing. Fragments of all the accustomed words and sounds became a torrent of sand and were sucked down to the depths of the comer

great funnel-shaped ear. The world became soundless, and Dora's trail broke off.

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In the vacuum there was only the sound of my heart beating. That was the sole rhythm circling the sky. Like drifting into dream while

waking from another dream, the side of death was dark. My brother's eyes were fixed on me. He was looking through me at the window behind. In the sunset window the sea foamed, and Dora's island sank into it.

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The Sky Where the Moas Were When I was little we often had windy days. When the wind had blown away all the piled-up material in the sky, the footprints of birds became

visible. My sister and I enjoyed a game we had of following a set of foot,

prints to see if we could find the bird. My sister drew all kinds of birds­ she filled entire sheets of sky-blue art paper with their shapes. Thick legs and long necks, and again thick legs and long necks. Of all the birds my sister drew, not one had wings.

When night came, the birds slipped away from the square surfaces of their drawings and stole into our dreams. The lines of their serenely

majestic backs fitted precisely the silhouette of a giant moa. Many times a moa

took me with it into my sister's dream. Inside the dream was a

wide-open space where many sand-colored children were wan, dering about. Every child was exactly like my sister. They had large eyes and the legs of birds. vague,

We often talked about moas. The moa, a bird whose wings had atro­

phied. The moa, a bird that had lost the sky. The land where the moas went must be the most precious, the loneliest place on earth. Fire and hunters and winged eagles gradually drove them into the marshes. One day fifty thousand years ago a mother moa with her young left a set of footprints in sandstone. After that day what serpentine track did they make as they headed into bottomless mud pits on the way to extinction?

We took our position midway between marsh and moa and played at

joining the sporadic footprints with lines. I laid down fire, ice, and the bow and arrows of desire in the moas' field of vision. My sister was gaz­ ing up from a transparent map at a sky where the wind had died. In the recesses

of her eyes the sky deepened to indigo. Fragments of torn

insects turned into little flames and blazed up. At that moment my sister

drew a line, sharp and clear, in the direction of the brief sunset at the bottom of her eyes.

The grownups drove the useless children downstairs. The children clustered in the dark, pale as white crayons. They lifted their large eyes and gazed where the sky had been. One night I saw it: Many children,

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half turned into birds, mounted the stairs and in single file entered the sky through the opposite window. And after that I never saw my sister

again. *

*

*

When I was little, I had only to open the window to see the inside of the sky. At the bottom of the sky the bones of extinct moas were piled like stars. Dawn and dusk whipped past each other, and the sharp stars

of the day bore wounds. And we too, tumbling in small circles, slowly moved along above the orbit of the invisible birds.

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On the Island of Elephant Trees The shape of the island changed from day to day. Depending on the

quantity of clouds, the angle at which the window was open, the posi­ tion in which the chair was placed, it would open out like a starfish, or

scroll up like a snail, or sometimes be as tiny as a grain of sand.

The room was up stairs. While I mounted the innumerable stairs, day drew on to dusk, and the room was left alone, orphaned in the midst of dark. My brother had the tall, narrow window closed and the lamp lit and was peering into the interior of the island.

An enormous elephant tree stood alone in the moonlight.

(The pur­

sued elephants stopped and stood still on the island; little by little they

became trees.) The tree sucked up memory of the distant past from under the sand-colored rocks and told the two of us its story. As its big, gray leaves rustled in the sandy wind, the tree became an elephant

named Rangu. Rangu stood tense and still, and the wind blowing between his ribs created strand after strand of a lonely winter scale. This music brought to mind the voices of far-off living things, voices lost

before they became speech. Rangu hung his head and spoke.

Once there was an age that opened facing the sea. A creature was

born then, before tusks began to grow. It was born of a desire to pass on a body that was large and abundantly endowed. Secreted away inside it

particle from the boundless sky. That creature could submerge in the ocean and not be wet, yet drown in a drop of water. It flew through the wind toward the sun, its full length exuding orange-colored odors. It was like an elephant of the sea, it was like a whale of the sky; no one had yet called out its name. It was a creature of a single instance, a was a

species that existed in one specimen. If the sun shone for a thousand

days, that creature could breathe a thousand ways and one. In those days the world was hot.

And Rangu spoke: of a long, dry age on land; of the various shapes of flesh and blood hung parching in the empty sky; of many voices chained together to make a circus sideshow; of ears plucked off and cast away like great leaves; of tongues teased out and exposed to view; of countless footprints buried in Biology's concrete; of the inside of an invisible cage

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big as the world. His voice became the wind and rattled windows on the island night after night. Stones, grasses and animals crossed their

as

frontiers and cowered close to each other.

The island began to cool. The grownups moved in herds near the ele­

phant trees. Every night huge four-cornered shadows jostled at the win' dow. On the island candles and firewood were in short supply. Rangu's bark was stripped off and burned; the fire brightened our window for an instant. The bole was chopped off close to the root; before long it became a wrinkled lump. Then it became a gray bench. In the dusk at evening children sat on it. They too became part of the wood.

The island fell silent, and the little room grew numb with cold.

Starving birds crossed the island at the height of the window. Their

wings beginning to freeze, the birds were crossing the sand dike, carrying tiny eggs toward the sea. My brother and I, huddled together in the dark, sent down numberless aerial roots toward the gray layer of earth where Rangu had stood. An ice age that had started from some indeter­ minate place was beginning to seal the memory of all living things once more

in darkness.

We too will someday become a tree, my brother said. The tree will be cut down and become a chair and become fire.

Both chair and fire can

carry the story of the elephant tree to faraway places. Snow came down

inside the frozen window. We hugged each other close. The snow began to

deepen over us.

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The Tree House The children alone had been left behind in a large, shadow less noonday.

Who had abandoned the tree house? Was it the children? The

grownups? As if it means nothing to them, the grownups open any win, dow near at hand and point toward the old tree house. Immediately the tree house floats up like a memory on the outskirts of the afternoon, fine-stemmed plants grow over its walls, and insects are humming softly.

Every time my brother and I stepped to the window, we too gazed at the tree house.

*

*

*

My brother said: "That thing over there is not the tree house. Our tree house is decaying on a yellowing map of the night. No one pushes open its rusty door. No one even passes by. The walls inside are sunken into moisture, laden depths as dark as the night sky. I can see them-the lit,

tle starlike stains left on the walls. Try joining the marks-those are the figures of the wondrous animals we drew on nights when we were small.

"The eyeless crocodile looking up at us even now from the depths of darkness; the legless elephant that followed us; the birds that fell to the

ground calling out to us-where did they come from, those creatures our hands kept drawing unawares? The tree house is filled with their pant' ing. All that is needed to lead them out into the light may be one more

line, the addition of a single mark. But I no longer have enough time."

Every night when I was alone I saw on the scarred plain of my dreams the head of the crocodile that was pursuing me. I bumped into the legs of an elephant that wandered through ruinous cities. I saw birds that sank into the sea. The swollen tails and heads of these creatures stuck out

from my dreams. They bled silently. This hurt me like an open

wound.

Every night my brother set out toward the tree house, match in hand.

My brother now prayed that he might burn all those voiceless creatures off the face of the earth. But he always drifted back to me at dawn smelling of death like a wounded fish. With his long, wet hair over his

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forehead, my feverish brother looked like some strange girl. In the end my brother's single, minded expeditions failed to reach the animals. *

*

*

For me, no memory remains of whether the dark pictures in the tree

house are the scribblings of early childhood or not. But, I thought, I must set out to see the tree house once again before it rots away, before its wooden walls collapse. I must connect the fading starlike marks, must

discover the location of the abandoned crocodiles' eyes and legs. And, to

accomplish that end, I prayed that I might have, not a match, but a

strong artist's brush.

Translator's Notes In the prose poem "Hansel and Gretel's Island," the answer to why an X makes

the house of the brother and sister indistinguishable from the others can be found in the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." Mizuno's childhood

reading is evident.

In the same work, the word bon, from uraban, the Japanese rendering of a

Sanskrit word, refers to the festival at which the spirits of the dead are wel­ comed back for a visit to their family. Among many other observations con­ nected with this old festival is a dance known as bon adori, the bon dance. The

religious significance of it has been largely diluted, and it is more of a neighbor­ hood social occasion now-in pre-disco times a good chance for young men and women to meet. The dancing is in a group, going around in a circle. There is a characteristic music to the dance, one which I hear over loudspeakers on warm evenings every August when visiting my mother-in-law. Bon was in the seventh month by the old calendar, now observed in August, which the old seventh month pretty much corresponds to. Pretty appropriate, too, as the month of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I go to Japan then because the Zen priest will be coming to the house to lead my wife's family in the bon service for her late father.

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The One Handed Pianist ...

llan S tavans to Danilo Kis,

teacher R.I.P.

Translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales

As she woke up yesterday, she knew God was in the kitchen. It was one

of those indescribable insights that would take possession of her, and

which, somehow or other, she had gotten used to shaking off. Her intu­ ition told her, indeed, that this time God was there to be found. That if she were to get out of bed to look for him she would find Him. Not in

human form, though. She would sense His presence in a scent, in the strong scent of an olive tree. Should she get up? How many times would she wake up in pain and later realize that the pain didn't actually exist?

How many times had her own insights lied to her? At least now her bed­ clothes were protecting her. To go or not to go. She couldn't decide.

Sure, she could go downstairs and verify that it was all a hoax, that such a smell didn't exist. Or, she could remain in bed.

"God doesn't exist." Esdras said that God doesn't exist. At least not the omnipotent, merciless God of violent religions, the Almighty that

gives and takes away without any explanation. "There's another one," he affirmed, "that exists in objects, in details, in the things that no one pays attention to. For example, the smell of an olive tree

" ...

And

Malvina had been waiting for weeks, perhaps even months, for Him to appear. Her God.

She knew the feeling of waking up and knowing that He was reach­ able in the kitchen. It was a rainy morning in October, months before the accident involving her mother and stepfather, Esdras. She was alone, as always. Was there ever a time when she hadn't been? She knew God was waiting for her, that He would be there until she met Him face-to-face. It was 4:30 in the morning, or close to it. The noise

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the raindrops were making on the window frames was scaring Malvina-poor thing!, a young woman like her, so alone in such an empty house. She turned on the lights and remained silent. She

couldn't decide what to do then, either. She didn't want to go down­ stairs in vain, nor did she want to miss a chance.

She missed it because she was careless. It had taken her too long to put on her robe and slippers, and by the time she reached the kitchen, it was already too late. The only thing she smelled was the strong scent of

dishwashing liquid. She was furious *

....

*

It should never happen again.

*

Malvina was a stutterer and had difficulty concealing the problem. She would trip over syllables that contained t's and r's, c's and r's, or p's and r's. She couldn't pronounce words like "t-t-triangle," "c-c-r-redit," "c-c­

crater," or "p-p-procreation." Everyone laughed at her and she felt ridiculed, embarrassed, inadequate, and hated to talk because, even

though she didn't intend to, she always came across one of those tricky words that announced her verbal disability.

Every six months or so, she would hear another theory explaining her defect. She would hear them from specialists and doctors she visited.

One of them attributed the problem to the fact that in her mother's uterus, a genetic code had determined that the embryo was going to be left-handed and at the last minute there had been a change, a hesita­ tion. Why? One of Nature's mysteries, perhaps. In any event, the result was her slowness in communicating. But only in talking, not in singing.

Because when Malvina sang she never stuttered. She sang without

impediment, as if music injected a supreme power into her syllables.

Another doctor considered the stuttering a minor, insignificant hand­ icap. That's the word he used, "insignificant." It's a defect many babies are born with, even though their mothers aren't aware of it. He said it was possible to correct the condition through intensive speech therapy and exercises, and recommended a teacher who would improve

Malvina's public speaking, with whom Malvina began private classes the following week that put her in a terrible mood. The therapist would force her to take a deep breath every time she began to stumble with a difficult word and made her think about the grammatical and syntactic structure of sentences. One of her

requirements was that Malvina buy a thesaurus and read it every night before going to sleep. Whenever she

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would come across words that contained t's and r's, p's and r's, or c's and

r's, she would have to memorize an alternative for each. This way, when

speaking, she could avoid difficult words.

Malvina took speech classes for three or four years. Her mother forced her to, even though she hated them. She hated to talk, she hated to memorize new vocabulary. She only liked to converse with herself, inwardly. When it was necessary to interact with others, she did it by playing music on a Yamaha piano her father had bought for her when she was a little girl and which she loved. As soon as the speech teacher would leave, Malvina would lock herself in the room to study melodies.

An uncle had given her an instruction manual to help her learn how to move her fingers on the piano keys. Pieces by Bartok, Chopin and Beethoven were her refuge.

Everything changed with the accident, a horrible experience that left her defeated. She could remember (how could she not) each and every detail of that fateful July morning when Esdras and her mother packed their suitcases and got into the car. They were going to take a ten-day vacation near a swimming pool in Tapabalazo. Her mother never liked to leave her

daughter alone, regardless of her age. They were very close,

and had been ever since her husband, Malvina's father, had deserted them. But the young woman didn't like Tapabalazo because there were

people there with whom she had to be sociable. Esdras, whom she adored, tried to convince her to go, but it was to no avail. Malvina pre­ ferred to stay home. She felt no urge to do anything. She had graduated from high school two weeks before and had been playing piano day and night ever since. Her Yamaha piano had been exchanged for a Steinway grand and Malvina dreamed of becoming a concert pianist.

The news of the accident was unbearable. Esdras's car had gone out of

control, slid, and crashed into a brick wall. Her mother died instantly and Esdras only made it as far as an ambulance. It was too much for Malvina to handle. She felt all the world was crashing down upon her.

What would she do, alone and isolated, without anyone to keep her

company? Her stuttering had made her impenetrably introverted. She loved them. They were her only contact with the world. How would she go on living now? Alone, and no one's daughter. Brave and decisive, she eventually decided to discontinue the speech classes. If she stood out like she wanted to, it would be as a pianist. People would talk to her and she would reply with music

...

her music.

*

68

*

*

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Strange physiological symptoms began to emerge. Malvina would wake up with an intense pain in her left ovary, as if someone had pulled on it while she was sleeping-an intermittent pain that made her cry. She

doctor for a checkup, but nothing was found. The pain stopped for a few days after she took some aspirin, but returned with the same intensity-as if someone were hurting her on the inside with a went to a

screwdriver.

Next, it wasn't her ovary but her left eardrum. Or her left leg, or her left lung

...

always on her left side. Malvina would scream and double

up in tears. Esdras, who had been fond of Zen and oriental philosophy,

had many books in his library that dealt with the mind/body duality.

Malvina found one about the counterbalance of opposites. It was writ,

by a Hindu shaman and it said if our fragile internal balance is bro­ ken, complications set in: troubling dreams, anxiety, lack of appetite, and pain in the left side of the body. Malvina, then, was sick; one side of her was heavier than the other. The solution, according to the author, consisted of a series of gymnastic exercises, like crawling around in cir­ cles on all fours. Even though they looked comical, she still tried these ten

and other exercises. She tried them all.

*

*

*

Exactly two years later came the worst of her anatomical upheavals.

It either happened while she was walking to the bank or returning from the market, Malvina couldn't quite remember. Suddenly and with, out warning, she felt she was losing one of her hands, the left one. First she had it, then she didn't. The first thing she did was calm down and try not to pay too much attention to the entire incident. Fear could take possession of her, which was dangerous and could make her condition worse.

Malvina took a deep breath. She didn't look around her because

she thought people would be making fun of her. Her, a lonely young

staring at her hand and at other people in the middle of the sidewalk, how ridiculous! They might think she was still in high school, woman,

immature, incomplete woman-a lunatic.

She walked a few blocks feeling nervous until she stopped at a comer, near a pharmacy. Then, once again, she took a deep breath. With her an

right hand she felt around for the hand that was missing. Malvina could see it. She pinched it but it didn't hurt. She caressed it. Her right hand had feeling, but the left didn't. She then concluded she had actually lost

69

TRIQUARTERL Y

her left hand and what she was seeing was an optical illusion. The terror that came over her was indescribable. She was scheduled to give perfor­ mances in the Haulcoyotl Auditorium and the Palace of Fine Arts. She would have to cancel them and live with the disgrace of being a one­

handed pianist.

*

*

*

The left hand, her hand, returned a few days later. It was there, as much a part

of her body as any other organ. Malvina canceled only one of the

concerts and

performed the rest. But the agony of knowing that it could happen again would not leave her in peace. What if she lost feeling in her hand while playing Bach in public? What excuse could she give, knowing the hand would be there but not really? She was terrified. She would wake up early in the morning thinking she had an insufferable pain in her uterus and a few minutes later realize it was only her imagi­ nation. Or she would dream she was being cut vertically in half.

Malvina and Malvina's ghost.

The feeling she had on that rainy October morning when she felt sure God (the smell of olive trees) was in the kitchen, was only the most recent evidence of those frightening pockets of anguish. And tomor­ row-not tonight but tomorrow-she would get another identical feel­ ing. She would wake up early in the morning and slowly put on her robe and slippers. With her nostrils wide open, she would walk down the stairs to the kitchen, longing to find, once and for all, the redeeming smell. But it would be a false alarm, of course. A smell of God? Malvina would see her own left hand on the kitchen table and start to cry

uncontrollably. She would then lower her eyes, hoping the authentic hand, her hand, would be in its place. But no. She would swallow her saliva, sigh, and approach the table to touch her left hand with her right one. The entire incident would make her laugh quite a bit, as her tears would dry on her cheeks. Only then would Malvina begin to give ...

off a foul smell of olive t-t-crces.

70

Albert Potter, Supervalues (linocut / 1933�36)

TRIQUARTERLY

Sunday After the War William L. Giannotti

The old man shook as he poured the drinks. It took him

nearly an hour complete the goddamn task. We didn't really care though; it was the cheapest place around and we could walk back to the barracks from there. Zack grabbed me by the arm and nodded toward the stage with that big, raucous smirk of his. They were having strippers perform tonight. It was always some guy's ugly wife who would take off her cloth­ ing and reveal the gelatinous, lunar landscape of her flesh. You had to go into town to see the pretty strippers, but as I said, this place was cheap and we could walk back to the barracks from there. Zack hadn't served with me during the war, he was in the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division. They were a good deal closer to the front line and he said his platoon was hit pretty badly. We paid the bartender, tipped him and sal­ to

lied back to the table where the rest of the group was.

It was the most extensive air campaign in world

history.

I saw him come out, white flag raised in the air, and then heard the

tremendous spray-fire of the machine gun. He was not injured. He got up and started advancing toward our perimeter. This time we shot him dead. After, the rest of them got up and we followed proper POW proce­ dures.

Upon our arrival stateside we started growing our hair out long and con­ suming cheap booze. Kennedy said he had trouble sleeping at night so he started going to a Stress Management Therapist. Soldiers would go to one

72

in order to shirk their responsibilities to the

company. It was not

TRIQUARTERLY

considered a corrupt practice among the lower enlistees. Kennedy had been the first sergeant's driver during the war. The first sergeant had

already been in the controversial Vietnam War. The bars on-post became our regular hangouts because they proved very convenient. Our conversations revolved around art, literature, how much we hated the Army, but never failed to gravitate toward our sexu­ al exploits with the loose women in town. After lack had gotten out (I was

still in) some people were shot in one of the on-post bars so they

started keeping tight control over who went into the bars.

Some of us gave up the tradition of wearing rank.

Many of us wanted to kill our company commander during the war. We inscribed bullet jackets with his name after the ammunition was finally issued to us. Some even had devised a code word with which to signal to everyone else that he would be shot. After he caught wind of the plot he had a twenty-four-hour watch put on himself. He lasted through the entire war. After we got back he was quickly transferred to the Pentagon.

One night of drunken debauchery Aaron, lack and I tried to call up our

old friend SPC Trent. His family answered and explained that they were very disappointed in him. He had apparently fled to Mexico with no

word of his departure. lack and I both believe he died down there on a

surfing expedition and will never return.

Aaron arrived in the desert in the middle of the war. He was given an

unaccounted-for weapon by division and told to report to Second Brigade headquarters. When he reached his unit he was immediately

assigned to become a Bradley driver. It turned out that he almost got his gunner and track commander killed during a test drive so they took him out of the driver's hatch and kicked him up to the back.

When he came back the command was supposed to make him a cor­

poral. He told his platoon leader that he wanted out of the army so he barely made it beyond the rank of private first class. After Aaron was released from active duty he returned to the prestigious St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Our division was to create a diversionary attack and lure the Iraqi forces into a huge kill zone. It was successful and we won the war.

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Because of the threat of chemical and biological warfare we had many

NBC-Nuclear, Biological, Chemical--drills where we would have to don our protective masks and other chemical repellant clothing. I remember one of the soldiers crying without any of the equipment on.

He was paralyzed with fear when the alarm sounded. He didn't know whether it was the real thing or just a drill and neither did we. He was

given a hard time for the rest of the war because of that incident.

No American forces were hit with live, toxic agents during the war.

SPC Trent had served with the famous Third Infantry Division during

the war. It is the same division Audie Murphy (the most decorated sol­ dier during WWII) served in. He said the only thing that was hit in his

brigade was a support truck. It was a fueler. He also said it was the worst unit he had ever seen in the Army.

Every once in a while we would come back from the front and set up a low-security perimeter. They would have us dig a communal latrine for the company. This would periodically have to be cleaned out and the

would be burned in huge, foul smelling fires. One of my good friends who was constantly put on this detail wrote a poem of the expe­ waste

rience. It went like this:

Jack be nimble Jack be quick Jack jump over The burning bucket of shit.

I remember hearing of the "war trophies" being brought back from over­

Severed heads, hands and arms were stuffed into duffle bags for the trip home. They weren't allowed to keep these. The division from Hawaii did this as they swept across, killing everything not taken out by the air campaign. We brought back photographs of the charred bodies and captured AK 47 rifles, most of which were confiscated at the airport. seas:

The first man in our unit to receive a Purple Heart was an enlisted man.

He crashed into a tank's ditch during a practice maneuver for the long

trip toward the Kuwait border. The ground war hadn't even begun yet.

He was shipped to the Army hospital in Frankfort, Germany.

Our whole division stood in formation for two hours in the middle of

the combat zone. We were waiting for the then-Defense-Secretary,

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TRIQUARTERLY

Honorable Dick Cheney. He never showed up and we resumed the daily routine.

Corporal Randazzo was getting out a week after the war started. He was involuntarily extended and sent overseas. He ended up getting hit with a Tn's tank round and dying. Our battalion classroom was named in honor of him when we got back.

Audie Murphy became a movie star when he got back. He was featured in the film version of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage.

Taulong had captured the highest ranking Iraqi officers in the entire division. Once back in the states he was discharged dishonorably for some sort of drunk-and-disorderly violation.

The trucks would roll down the dusty roads with children trailing behind them. The children were starving and wanted some food. We threw our

Meals-Ready-To-Eat at them. They were very grateful.

The women would sometimes try to sell bodies for food. I never saw my fellow soldiers take advantage of this proposition. I did, however, see

female soldiers caught in the airport with duffle bags full with money.

They had been prostituting themselves. Our company never saw females during the war, only the two times we were in the airport.

Aaron was clearing an abandoned bunker one time and when he

emerged somebody was standing there with a grenade, the pin of which had been pulled. The thing was, he wasn't even an infantryman, just a supply runner. After that we used anti-tank weapons to clear bunkers, which we called pillboxes.

During the tedium of awaiting war our platoon would stage scorpion fights in the sand. Sometimes we would even pair the desert beetle in a match to the death with the arachnid.

SPC Trent was the only one of us to volunteer to go to war. He was sta­

tioned in Germany-his original brigade never left.

In his famous book, General H. Norman Schwartzkopf said he was con­

sidering relieving our corps commander of his command. After reflec­ tion he decided there were multiple styles of fighting wars.

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General Schwartzkopf was Allied Commander of Forces in Southwest Asia. He had already served two tours in the controversial Vietnam

War, once as a battalion commander. He also had been the army's top advisor during the Grenada invasion.

Zack said that when the ramp came down to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle the inside was all covered with blood. His friend was in there somewhere.

The Army used the vehicle so that the infantry could keep pace with the armor on the modem-day battlefield. It was named after General Omar Bradley, who had been a five-star general.

When we first arrived at the desert all the stewardesses cried as we got off the plane. They thought we were all going to die like in the contro­ versial Vietnam War. We didn't know what to think.

While sitting around waiting for war somebody mentioned that the

infantry soldier had a life expectancy of seven seconds on the modem, day battlefield. We did not know where this information came from.

The tip of Zack's cigarette flared in a ruddy, molten glow. Tendrils of smoke journeyed heavenward along invisible pathways. He raised his

glass and toasted with the phrase, "To the disenchanted."

Aaron got out of the army with an honorable discharge and was married in a lovely church just outside of EI Paso, Texas. I received an invitation

both formally and informally to attend but was not able to make it. I later visited him in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and met his wife, Letty. As far as I know, they are still married.

When we got back most of us hated the Army. Everyone was getting out; bailing ship, as it were. I was one of the last ones to get out. Not many of the newcomers were alcoholics. I was. Not much was left of the war:

it was as forgotten as the oil we were fighting for. Now that we are

both civilians I do not talk to Zack as often anymore. When we do talk we rarely mention the war but instead talk about when we were in garri­ son. We both admit that we do not miss the army so much as each

other. During Zack's impending separation we would drive to the west' em hills where the sun was descending in central Texas-open sky, pur, ple and red hue.

76

john ]. A. Murphy, Chaos (woodcut/ 1921)

TRIQUARTERLY

Christmas Night 1962 Joyce Carol Oates

Come on then! he said. Goddamn you I'll take you.

My mother was in the back bedroom crying. Christmas night, you wouldn't think it could still be the same day. She'd been crying seeing the raggedy doll thrown across the room. She'd been drinking too, except with her, unlike the men, it made the freckles come out in her face, and the skin beneath like skim milk. It made her walk strange like

the floor was tilted and laugh when nothing was funny and rub her knuckles into her eyes like she was trying to wake up and not succeed­ ing. Her hair red-frizzed like mine except it was coarser than mine which was so fine I'd squirm and whimper when she ran the hairbrush

through, then the steel comb. Frantic to get every last one of the snarls out she said, Damn you hush! Don't be a baby.

It started after we got home from Grandpa's. He was on the sofa watching the same TV football they'd had on at the other house then he said something making her laugh that sharp laugh like scraping your finger on a blackboard and that was the mistake. For always there was a mistake you could point to. First he slapped her with his open hand and she screamed and turned over the table where some of the presents were from that morning, and his beer, and somehow it happened the raggedy doll that was Grandma's present for me went flying across the room hit­

ting the doorframe banging its head crack!

She'd tried to stop him but she'd run into his fist-more than his fist.

When it happens it happens fast. Like the boxing he took us to in Port Oriskany, the men up in the ring in the lights coming at each other slow and wary so you think nothing's going to happen you could shut your

78

TRIQUARTERLY eyes seeing something far away but suddenly people are yelling and it's happening faster than you can see so you have to invent what it was to

of the boxers down on the canvas, blood leaking from his mouth. Just like that, that fast, in the living room with the TV on account for one

high and the Christmas tree in the comer knocked now on its side and some of the glass bulbs shattered.

I cried, I wasn't to blame. I knew I would be blamed.

The red,swirled glass bulbs shaped like pears, that Grandma gave us, the ones that were so beautiful. And the frosted white ones with the

glitter dust. Home by myself I'd drag the cardboard box of ornaments out of the closet just to look through them, touch them. The tinsel for looping over the tree branches, the colored lights in the shape of can' dles, the angel for the top of the tree with her pretty painted-on face and gold halo like the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in church.

Where the tree was fallen over, the angel hung upside down like some' thing in a cartoon.

Come on, Honey, he said, wiping his mouth, squatting over where the raggedy doll was broken on the floor. You know you're O.K. If you'd stop that goddamn fucking crying, he said. His face going white like the blood was being squeezed out of it.

My mother came out of the back bedroom running with towels and a blanket and she screamed at him to get away, she was going to take me to

Yewville to the hospital and he shoved at her saying she was too

pissed to drive and she screamed he was too pissed, he was the crazy one, if he took me out of the house she'd call the police. He said, You call the police and I'll rip you apart, go for that phone to call anybody you'll wish you were never born, nor her either. She was trying to wrap the towel around my head where I was bleeding and they both pulled at me, he was going to take me he said, he guessed my leg might be broken, and my mother ran back into the bedroom then returned with the gun wav­

ing it at him, holding it in both hands waving it at him, You think I won't? You bastard, you think I won't?

This pistol he'd brought home last summer, he'd won playing poker.

My mother was scared to have it in the house but later on, back in the woods, he'd target-practice shooting bottles and got my mother to try too, giggling and nervous and I'd crouch behind them pressing my hands against my ears as he held her with his right arm around her to steady her, helping her aim, pull the trigger, absorb the kick. And her hiding her face in his neck afterward, breathless from what she'd done.

Now my mother in a velour shirt the color of crushed strawberries

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ripped off the shoulder from where he'd grabbed her and her black slacks glistening with blood holding that pistol trembling in her hands.

Screaming and waving it, her eyes wild, so he backed off on his haunch­ es, O.K. Anna, O.K., just don't pull that trigger, you're crazy enough to do it, and she said, That's right! I am! Just try me, mister, I am!

So she lifted me and wrapped me in the blanket holding him off with the gun. The blood soaked into the gray wool making it wet. I was cry­ ing, I couldn't stop, like hiccups when you can't stop. She was sobbing too saying, Don't fight me, Honey, you're going to be all right but it hurt so

when she lifted me I had to scream.

That Christmas night. Snow blowing gritty as sand. She had to carry

me, I couldn't walk where the bone was cracked. My left leg below the knee where I'd hit against the doorframe, and my forehead bleeding and

swollen already to the size of a hen's egg. And my mouth, there was

something wrong with my mouth Mommy was trying to hold the towel against slipping and sliding out to the car, Oh! oh! oh! our breaths were steaming, she'd grabbed her coat but hadn't time to put on boots.

Saying, Honey don't cry Mommy has you safe now O.K.? trying to fit me in the front seat but I screamed with the pain so she had to put me in back laying me out flat wrapped in the blanket. I screamed and held onto her not

wanting to let go.

Christmas night, and the morning so long ago. Snowdrifts up to the

windows, taller than a man by the garage, giant icicles glittering like knife blades hanging down from the roof's edge frozen solid in the minus-lO° F cold. That morning the windows were blinding with snow­

light and now it was dark, snowflakes swirling in the car headlights like something you could stare and stare into and lose your way not remem­ bering who you are.

I can't tell this. I don't have the words. I remember everything but I don't have the words. Even when I say them, the words are not the right words.

The raggedy doll sewed by my grandmother, it was big enough for me need both arms to carry it. A floppy head with shiny black button

to

eyes and a button nose and a smile and orange-red pigtails braided out

of yam. Her top was cotton printed in tiny flowers and her bottom was

printed in bright yellow-checks and her legs which had no bones white wool stockings and she was stuffed with something soft like cotton batting. Every year for all the years I could remember Grandma sewed me a Christmas doll, and things to wear. cotton were

I loved Grandma so much. She was his mother so she had to take his

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side. My other grandmother wasn't here they said and when I asked where was she they said with God in Heaven. But I knew what that was-buried in the cemetery that's just a hilly field behind the church.

That morning my mother dressed me for Christmas before she dressed herself. Only a few times a year we'd go to church and Christmas morning was one but he didn't go. Mommy brushed my hair wetting and

shaping the curls into corkscrew-curls around her fingers then tickling blowing in my ear, Pretty girl! who's my pretty girl! Mommy loves you so.

She pulled on over my head the new jumper Grandma had sewed for me for Christmas, soft velour to match Mommy's shirt she'd sewed too with a big patch pocket green like a strawberry leaf. White wooly socks, black patent-leather shoes but the same old scuffed boots to fit over them.

A little velour bow too in my hair. A row of bobby pins, barrettes.

Corkscrew curls to my shoulders so I'd tum my head and feel them mov­

ing, tickling. Before Mommy and I went to church he squatted down in front of me staring at me. Cupped my face in his hands looking at me for

long time his eyes like that kind of marble with a glaze to them so the colors inside look cracked. That way I knew he wasn't seeing me though a

he said, Merry Christmas, sweetheart! The big day's here, eh?

Mommy said in her careful voice, Don't scare her. You scare her look­ ing at her like that.

Like what? he said. Now straightening up, and taking Mommy's chin in his hand, holding her so she had to look at him. Like this?

He used to be Daddy but says not to call him that anymore but some­ times I forget. But after Christmas night I won't forget.

It was at my grandparents' place the drinking started. The big old

farmhouse, the long table for Christmas dinner. So much food at two in the afternoon, your stomach isn't ready for it. The men were playing poker and they were loud and laughing and my father was loud winning a hand but louder losing, red-faced and squinting up his eyes laughing like it was a joke only he got. Uncle Dwight who's married to Aunt Helen, Uncle Marcus who's married to Auntie Irene, Uncle Bud who used to be married but isn't now and you're not to ask why, you never ask why of adults. Grandpa and Uncle Dwight worked in the gypsum

plant on the Jamestown Road where my father did except they were laid off through January. How long after that nobody knew. They'd been laid off, the factory gates chained shut, since before the first snow.

Who can you believe? they said. What anyone of them tells you, or you read in the paper, if it's somebody in a suit and tie for sure he's lying to you because he makes his money off you. And if it's a politician he's

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already lied to get where he is. So fuck it.

Once when I was real little I said that word. My cousins whispered it in my ear and afterward when I said it some people laughed except not

Grandma, and not Mommy. Mommy scolded saying that's not a nice word, nice little girls don't say that word. I giggled saying Yes they do! yes they do! and said the word again running around the table where she couldn't catch me. Except this time the way she looked at me I was sorry so I didn't say it ever again, that Mommy could hear.

My mother was driving our old 1957 Chevy along the Canal Road try­ ing to keep the car's tires in the ruts in the snow made by other cars.

The snowplow had come by in the morning and all day it had been snowing and now in the night the narrow road was drifting over and she was praying Holy Mary Mother of God! Holy Mary Mother of God! and in the backseat the limp sobbing raggedy doll. Leg cracked below the knee, bleeding from a swelling cut above her eye. And vomit, and the stink of vomit, on the gray blanket. No other cars were on the road. The headlights swung and lurched, snowflakes rushed at the windshield, the car's stops and starts and skids and jolts were stabs of pain Oh! oh! oh!

At the steep ramp to the Yewville bridge the drifts are so high the car's

front wheels get stuck. Back up, go forward, back up, go forward rocking the car until momentum carries it onto the ramp. are you all right?-Honey?-your Mommy's going to take care

Honey,

of you. Don't cry! Don't cry!

Then, scared and angry-sounding as the car moves slowly so slowly not five miles an hour across the high windblown shaky plank-floored bridge, Holy Mary Mother of God have mercy on us!

The water tower at the top of Church Street. The steep drop to Memorial Avenue, the ice-slick pavement where the car skids, begins to slide. The front tire jolting against the curb Oh! oh! Seneca Street,

Ontario, Locust. The red-brick Episcopal Church with the high tower, the big stained-glass window. Bell Telephone Company where my moth­

worked as an operator before she fell in love and married the man who would be my father. Before she came to live in the country nine miles north of Yewville where I was born, where she became a woman er

who was a mother and where her life changed and could never return to what it was. And now at Locust near Main there are cars moving with slowness in the blizzard and my mother has no choice but to

painstaking

follow behind them sobbing Holy Mary help us! help us! God help us! like it was a curse.

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TRIQUARTERL Y

At Providence Hospital on Locust and Van Buren there's a Christmas tree blinking red lights over the front entrance and the parking lot is two' thirds empty, drifted over in snow but my mother

parks the car and

carries me through the snow stinging gritty as sand in our faces and into

the brightly lit reception area where there's only a single nurse behind the counter whose eyes swing onto us startled and disapproving. My mother begins to speak and the nurse cuts her off saying there's no emergency room in this hospital you'll have to go to Yewville General don't you know this isn't that kind of hospital, and my mother says, My little girl's hurt, she fell and hurt herself and I think her leg is broken, I

think she's hurt her head bad, please can we see a doctor? please is there a doctor? I'll pay-and another nurse comes out and says in a loud voice like my mother might be hard of hearing, Ma'am? would you like us to call ahead to Yewville General? would you like us to call an ambulance to take you there? the two nurses staring at us, keeping their distance.

My young mother with her windblown red-frizzed hair, her white skin splotched with freckles like tiny rust stains, a purplish bruise swelling the right side of her face. Shivering, swaying with the weight of the child in her arms, a girl of about four years of age, wrapped in a blanket stained with blood and vomit. And my mother asks again for a doctor

raising her voice and again the nurses raising their voices say you'll have to go to Yewville General, there's no doctor on duty here tonight and there are no emergency room facilities in this hospital and my mother says begging will you look at her, then? please help us will you please

help us? coming forward so the nurses speak more sharply saying Sorry ma'am, sorry you'll have to go to Yewville General, we have no emer­ gency-roorn facilities in this hospital ma'am, and my mother begins to shout, Aren't you nurses? what the hell are you if you aren't nurses? my little girl's hurt, my little girl's in pain goddamn you! and the older nurse says angrily, Ma'am, we'll have to ask you to leave these premises, picks up a telephone receiver threatening to call the police. So my mother backs off, sobbing and cursing, carrying me back outside to the car where the headlights are on, the back door's wide open, the backseat

already filling up with snow.

Driving then along Van Buren skidding through a red light then stuck behind a sanding truck moving at five miles an hour all the way to East Avenue where the big hospital Yewville General is. Where Auntie Irene was for her surgery and I was brought to visit one Sunday but we don't go to the front entrance, my mother drives around to the rear where the

parking lot is filled with snow and almost empty of cars too and she

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TRIQUARTERL Y

parks at the curb and carries me half-staggering into another bright-lit reception area larger than the other but there's no one in the waiting room we

and just one woman at the desk saying Yes? What is it? How can

help you? and Mommy says, quick and scared like she knows she's

going to be turned away, It's my little girl, she's hurt, I need to see a doc­

torl--coming forward past the desk toward the double swinging doors NO ADMITTANCE EMERGENCY and the woman calls out, Ma'am!

Stop! and a young man in a white uniform appears to block her way and Mommy is saying, We need a doctor, please help us, my little girl is hurt bad, her head! her leg! I think her leg is broken please help us! her voice shrill and her eyes wild like she's been drinking. There's a nurse too say­ ing, You'll have to check in at reception first, ma'am, ma'am?-you'll have to check in at reception first. My mother is pleading with the young man, Doctor? help us please, will you examine my little girl? she hit her head running, she fell down and I think her leg is broken, please Doctor? her voice rising as if to prevent the young man from interrupt­

ing saying he isn't a doctor, he isn't in charge.

Mommy is a thin woman, you wouldn't think she'd be strong enough to carry me, to hold me like this in her arms. The tight hard muscle tensing in her upper arms and shoulders like it's lifting from the bone.

And everybody in this bright-lit place staring at the limp raggedy doll,

bleeding from a cut above the left eye. Wrapped in a filthy blanket.

Frizzy red corkscrew curls messy as a rat's nest.

The strong smell pierces my nostrils like the dentist's office to make gag. Mommy hugs me, whispering Honey it's all right, Honey you're safe now, but there's a woman's voice running on and on repeating no me

patients can be treated at Yewville General Hospital without first filling out the proper forms at reception, yes and you need insurance identifica­ tion, this is hospital policy, this is New York State law. There's an artifi­ cial silver-tinsel Christmas tree, three feet high, on a table, glittery

sequin-snow sprinkled onto the green cloth beneath. And brightly

wrapped Christmas presents, the kind of presents that if you lift them are just empty boxes. At the reception desk there's a radio playing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." My mother is saying, pleading, I don't know about our insurance, I don't know the name of the insur­ ance,

I came out without my wallet and ID speaking fast so they can't

interrupt, then angry, saying, You're going to take this child! this is a hurt child, an injured child, goddamn you! And a nurse, an older with peach-colored hair and a little fringe of bangs says making her voice steely calm, Ma'am, this is a private hospital and we are not woman

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obliged to accept any patient not adequately covered by hospital and medical insurance so if you will please cooperate-, and my mother says screaming, I told you! I don't have my wallet! There isn't time! This is an emergency! Her arms are weakening and give way and she almost drops me on the floor carrying me to a couch in the waiting room, now the voices are louder, there are more of them and more disapproving and Mommy is saying, furious, You think we're trash, is that it, we're white trash is that it! We're poor, we're from the country, we don't count, we're shit on your shoes is that it! Now there's another, older

wearing a white coat, a doctor this time asking what's going on here, and the nurse tells him, and my mother interrupts, You're not going to let my daughter die, goddamn you, you sons of bitches you're not going to let my daughter die, taking the pistol out of her coat pocket and waving it in their faces her hand trembling and her eyes wild and man

frightened as everybody goes Oh! oh! shrinking back in astonishment and the quick terror of animals you see in their eyes in a car's headlights at night but my mother lets the pistol fall, she's sobbing goddamn you, goddamn you, letting it fall clattering onto the floor and for a long long moment there's no sound except over the radio the tinkly jingly "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" coming to an end.

Then the older man, the doctor, stoops quickly to pick up the pistol.

He hands it to the young man saying call the police, please.

And Mommy is standing there panting like she's been running, tum' ing her head from side to side like she's trying to clear it, to wake up.

And the doctor says, Yes I will examine your little girl but you'll remain out here until the police arrive. Do you understand, ma'am-you will remain out here. And Mommy says her lips moving slow, Yes Doctor.

There's a stretcher brought out to where I'm lying and they lift me onto

it and Mommy wants to help but they make her stand back.

Staring at me seeing the ugly bruised cut on my forehead, the slack wet mouth and the bloody root of a missing front tooth, the blanket falls open showing the surprise of the strawberry, red velour jumper sewed by Grandma who loves me. White wooly socks and shiny patent-leather shoes and the skinny leg hanging limp, swelling below the knee like a giant bee had stung it.

On the radio, a woman's happy voice singing "Walking in a Winter

Wonderland."

This woman who's my mother stands watching as I'm carried into the emergency room of Yewville General Hospital, Yewville, New York,

9:25 P.M. of Christmas night 1962. Standing clenching her fingers into

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fists her head slightly lowered as if to hide her own injuries and her lips

moving and she begins to cry giving herself up to hoarse racking angry sobs, helpless sobs as if, now she's got what she has wanted, now she sees her child taken from her by strangers, now these strangers have yielded as if by magic to her desperate will, bearing me through the doors below NO ADMITTANCE EMERGENCY, she's surrendered me forever. It's over.

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Special Section:

Voices from Chiapas

TRIQUARTERLY

Introduction

The following texts are from the Mexican state of Chiapas, which since January 1, 1994, has been a focus of attention of the Mexican nation and the international press, because of an armed uprising there. The rebels announced that their movement, which had been in preparation for ten years, and was launched partly to oppose the effects of the North

American Free Trade Agreement on the poor, and partly also as a belated

foiling of the celebration elsewhere of the five-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus, is an attempt to secure land, health and self-gov­ ernment for the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. (Like some other regions of Mexico, Chiapas has a large Indian population speaking several languages. When the spokesman for the rebellion, Subcom­ mander Marcos, wrote to the press to say that the indigenous peoples would not accept the terms of what they regarded as an unfair peace with the Mexican government, he cataloged some of the native peoples of Mexico, writing of "the Mazahuas, the Amuzgos, the Tlapanecs, the Nahuatlacas, the Caras, the Huichols, the Yaquis, the Mayos, the Tarahumaras, the Mixtecs, the Zapotecs, the Mayans, the Chontals, the Seris, the Triquis, the Lumiai, the Cucapa, the Paipai, the Cochimi, the Chichimecs, the Otomis, the Mazatecs, the Matlatzincs, the Ocuiltecs, the Popoloca, the Ixcatecs, the Chochopopolaca, the Cuicatecs, the Chatinos, the Chinantecs, the Huaves, the Papagos, the Pima, the Tepehuanos, the Guirijis, the Huastecs, the Chuj, the Jalatecs, the Mixes, the Zoques, the Totonacs, the Kikapoo, the Purepechas and the O'odham of Caborca.")

The rebels say that their movement is modeled on the populist nationalism of Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican people who with

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Pancho Villa led an uprising that became the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Subcommander Marcos, a very prolific correspondent, began to

surprise and sway the Mexican public with his exceptionally eloquent letters to the press on the Zapatista uprising, the negotiations of the Zapatistas with representatives of the Mexican government, and the poverty and suffering of the indigenous peoples in Chiapas. In these let­ ters, Subcommander Marcos has revealed considerable skill as a writer

and considerable literary as well as political education. Noted dramatist

and journalist Vicente Lefiero (b. 1933) secured for the Mexican politi­ cal weekly Proceso an interview, which was for a time perhaps the hottest journalistic commodity around, because of the cool and articu­ late demeanor and concealed true identity of Subcommander Marcos.

We offer a shortened version of that exchange.

But this currently most famous writer of Chiapas is not by any means a rare

voice from the region. Poetry and fiction from this southern state

have already penetrated Mexico City, the literary center of the nation.

What is emphasized in the brief selections that follow is one particular focus of writing from Chiapas-rural life. But to begin with the excep­ tion to this focus-Jaime Sabines

(b. 1926), perhaps the best-known

writer from Chiapas, moved early to Mexico City; yet his work contains

of longing and sadness that seems to reach back to his origins in Chiapas. Eraclio Zepeda (b. 1937) is a well-known fiction writer, poet, raconteur and actor living in Mexico City, who has in fact played the film role of Pancho Villa. His wife, the poet Elva Macias (b. 1944), is also a note

from Chiapas; some of her poems can be found in New Writing from Mexico (TriQuarterly #85). Efrafn Bartolome (b. 1950), whose poetry is typically more effusive than the sonnet translated here, is a poet of the

Chiapaneco landscape (see his poem in New Writing from Mexico). Juan Banuelos (b. 1932), joaquin Vasquez Aguilar (1947 -93) and Raul Garduno (1945-80) are three well-known poets identified with the state of Chiapas, as was Rosario Castellanos (1925-74), a major Mexican writer.

The graphics in these pages are from a remarkable small workshop run

by Ambar Past (b. 1949), a U.S. citizen who some years ago settled in Chiapas and adopted Spanish and also the native language of T zotzil as her own, and who has written poetry and prose focusing on Chiapaneco life. Also, four pages are reproduced from a booklet she produced in 1980 as part of a campaign to encourage the recovery of native tradi­ tions of weaving. Her own work is represented by a poem that draws on

native myths,

including the story that the moon came down to earth

through the branches of a tree, and then rose back into the sky after

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climbing that tree again. The folktales presented here, by Tziak Tza'pat Tz'it and Chavela Waris (Isabel Juarez Espinosa), were translated from Spanish that had already been translated from native languages. The story of this year's carnival in Chamula, by Xunha Utz'utz'ni', is taken from the most recent issue of the literary magazine published by Ambar Past's workshop, La jicara.

None of these works, brief as they are, is more than a token of Chiapas. They are offered here not only for their intrinsic interest but also so that the occasional mention of Chiapas in our newspapers will not be the only word in English from this place of misery and beauty.

Readers interested in reading and seeing the extraordinary handmade issues of La jicara and other graphic materials produced by Ambar Past

and her workshop should write to: Taller Leiiateros

Flavia A. Paniagua #54 San Cristobal de Las Casas

Chiapas 29230 Mexico

Two other Mexican writers-Jesus Gardea and Ilan Stavans-are

included in this issue of TriQuarterly, and we will continue to publish new

writing from Mexico in future issues.

Reginald Gibbons

TRIQUARTERLY

A Letter from Rosario Rosario Castellanos Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

Comitan, Chiapas, August 7,1951 Mr. Ricardo Guerra Mexico City

My Dear Ricardo: This town is completely unrealistic, entirely improbable. The strangest things happen. I was telling you in my last letter that on August 4 they celebrate the feast of Santo Domingo, patron saint of the town. They organize a fair which is the liveliest of the year. (The next liveliest is the fair on February 20, San Caralampio's Day. No, it isn't a joke. That's the saint's name, and they have great reverence and a horrid church for him.) People from all over the state and even Guatemala come here for the celebration; the Guatemalans win respect with their quetzales worth nine pesos each. Not to mention the tourists from small neighboring towns or the Indians from their hamlets. Just imagine those poor "junes" (they're called that because, in their dialect, "jun" means "one"), and their wives-in-a-blanket (that's what they call the Indian women who still wear typical costumes), coming down from the hills where they never see anything, and coming face-to-face with the elements of civi­ lization down here: jukeboxes, the movie theater, merry-go-rounds, and this year, the novelty of the Ferris wheel. The poor things are as stupe­ fied as when they're drunk. That's how they end up squandering their savings and a whole year's wages. And then they go back home, hung over, exploited, tired, but yes, transformed into men of the world. Well, one of those "juries" got onto the Ferris wheel. He hadn't the least idea what it was like or how it felt. And when it started turning, he was so

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frightened that he tried to jump off when it came close to the ground.

He did as planned, but miscalculated the speed and it didn't give him much time. So he was left hanging from that wooden bar that keeps you in the seat. The Ferris wheel kept on turning but the people realized what was happening and started to scream. They slowed down the Ferris wheel and motioned to the Indian to let go, but he didn't budge. When it finally stopped, they had to practically force him to get off. He wanted another turn. But this time not sitting down, because that frightened him; he wanted to ride hanging off the wheel. That seemed more pleas­ ant and comfortable to him. They wouldn't let him, which made him very sad.

But that's not all. A circus also came to town. (You know what those small-town circuses are like. A family goes on vacation. While they're on the road, their money runs out and they decide to start a circus to their home. pay way Overnight the father turns into the strongman who lifts weights; the mother becomes the singer and rumba dancer. The two older daughters are trapeze artists, and they dress the little boy up like a wild animal.) Well, this circus had a ferocious Abyssinian lion named Negus. And they announced the first performance by saying that "Miss X" (since they hadn't found anyone to do it yet) would drink a beer while sitting on the paws of Negus the Lion. Great anticipation and a full house. When the act was about to begin, the entrepreneurs still hadn't found a young lady to perform. So they decided to have a con­ test. They would give a prize to any young lady who agreed to drink a beer in such pleasant Abyssinian company. In the audience there was a gentleman from a nearby town, very natty, accompanied by his family.

He saw a chance to make himself noteworthy and, in the process, win the prize. So he ordered his oldest daughter to climb into the lion's cage.

The daughter, naturally, resisted. But the gentleman insisted. A dutiful daughter, the girl complied. She climbed into the cage, sat down where she was told to, and guzzled down the beer. The lion was so surprised that he didn't do anything. Hearty applause from the audience. The prize was the beer; they didn't charge her for it.

That's enough. Since absurdity is intolerable, I've decided to leave this

place.

Rosario

P.S. I love you.

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Nobody Lives in My Country Anymore ] uan Banuelos Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

A walled-up country

Murky Crying out Lonely It's not the light It's the smoke that awakens with the entrails of the dust in its hands

It's the rust expelled by the disappeared It's the children playing with skulls It's the moon that can tell each victim of torture by his specific fright

And on the shores of our eyelids wounds of hunger

Suddenly language spits out the liquor our

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of the grave diggers

the murderers shout through their asses obsidian winds sweep away the salt-grime fog red fumes of killing the last second before the light Let the sun begin to move

that the firmament not fall again to earth cry the widows as they roof our foreheads over with unfleshed mouths and the dead eye of the moon

From the hummingbird's egg

hatched the aurora borealis There's a faraway country and so far away big

so

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murky

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Don Chico Who Flies E radio Zepeda Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

You stand at the edge of the abyss and see the neighboring town, across

the way, on the side of the hill that towers before your eyes, rising amid low clouds and lofty mists: you can make out the comings and goings of its people, their vocations, their destinies. You know that, as the crow

flies, it's very close. If you walked on air, over a bridge of hammocks sus­ pended between the hills, you could reach it as fast as thought, in an instant.

And yet the actual road, the real road, tumbles you down to the foot of the hill, down over rough stretches of terrain, amid ravines and

waterfalls, amid rocks and steep slopes, until you reach the bottom of the gorge, where the great, foaming river runs, the one you have to cross in order to start the ascent one meter at a time. Many hours later, you arrive exhausted, covered with mud and sweat, and you tum your head to see your own town in the distance, just as you had once seen the plaza where you're standing now.

That's when you think that don Pacifico Munoz is right, don Chico, who can't bear these distances that you have walked, and who says that traveling on foot is useless and traveling on horseback is foolish, that in this country flying is indispensable.

Years ago you heard him describe his first flight and counterflight plans. That's when don Chico, sitting on the edge of the abyss like you are now, looking out at the other town, slapped his knee and said, "It isn't that this country's too shrunken; it's that it's too wrinkled.

One mountain after another, making the distances greater. If they ironed this state out flat, we'd outdo Chihuahua. And once it was turned into a plain, walking would be so much faster! But the way 97

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things are, all we can do is turn into birds and fly."

And that's how the crazy notion of flying first got into don Chico's head, like a hatful of illusions.

Flying was the only passion that propelled him through the day, from

day to the next, from one month to the next, to keep on living another year and yet another. If it weren't for his yearning to fly, he one

would have died of sadness a long time ago, like you commented to me the other day.

Don Chico would climb up-you saw it lots of times-to the highest hill to contemplate the distant, blue mountains lost in the steam rising

from the rain forest. There, sitting on the rock where he wrote his name, you often heard don Chico say:

"From the air, earth is within reach of the hand. Roads are easier

when you're flying. How close the markets and plazas are from a bird's­ eye view. The valleys and rivers and gullies and canyons, the sown

fields, the cattle in far-off pastures, the new cities and the ancient build­ ings lost in the rain forest, and, in the background, the sea."

Don Chico invented a prodigious geography stretched out before eyes in flight, eager eyes trying to make out ranches and hamlets, fords and rivers, roads, towns, lakes and mountains seen from above, from dreams, from the air in a dream.

Don Chico went back to town, with his mouth dry, burning with the

fever of an adventure that made his tongue heavy; you could see him walking into the plaza and taking the fountain between his hands, rins­

ing himself off, splashing water on his face and declaring solemnly: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to fly."

You must remember how we all nodded our heads yes, of course, natu­

rally, don Chico who flies, and inside we could feel the laughter bub­ bling up in our chests and our bellies, and you were trying hard to control yourself.

Don Chico went into his house, grabbed a hen, meticulously weighed it, jotted down the reading on the scales, measured the distance between the tips of its wings, wrote that down too, caressed the hen and put it back in the farmyard.

He invented a complicated calculation to discover the secret relation between the animal's body weight and the breadth of its wings which allows it to overcome gravity and take flight.

Don Chico doubted for an instant whether it was sufficient to base such an experiment on a hen. A long-distance carrier pigeon would have been better. But there were no pigeons in his farmyard.

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Once he had found the formula to explain the relation between the hen's weight and the breadth of its wings, he weighed himself, jotted

down the reading, and, applying the formula he had discovered, calcu­ lated the size of the wings he must build in order to fly. He wrote down the figure in his notebook, rubbed his hands together, and went off to

the park.

The problem was now the design of the wings. He thought the best material was reed, which is light and strong. He paused a moment to sketch the structure in the dirt with a little stick. Satisfied, he erased it with his left foot, and then took it home engraved in his memory.

For covering the skeleton, nothing better than the weave of a petate, that ductile mat made of palm leaves.

Once he had built the wings, he discovered, to his annoyance, that

they were too heavy for him to lift. He remembered the relation between the wings and the hen's weight, and he didn't dare modify it.

He subscribed to a Swedish magazine which published workout exer­ cises, and he devoted a few years to this strict discipline. He felt with satisfaction how his biceps were growing, his triceps were growing, his abdominal muscles were hardening, his back muscles were sticking out, and don Chico could feel a power growing from the center of his body.

In the sixth year of his experiment, he was skillfully moving his wings.

With his arms outstretched, he would flap gracefully in a semblance of flight, not that of a clumsy chicken but that of an agile dove.

The villagers shared his pride. Don Chico promised to fly before Independence Day, and he was showered with invitations to people's patios to simulate the complex art of flying. He always accepted, until he discovered that these invitations were motivated not by admiration for his technique, but merely by a desire to produce strong winds to sweep the patio floor clean of leaves and trash.

A few days before Independence Day, someone looked up. We don't

know whether Ramon or Martin or Jesus was the first one to see him.

What we do know is that right afterward the whole town looked up, and don Chico on top of the bell tower, his wings in place, beginning the cautious flapping that was to carry him to glory. At times he would

we saw

pause, wet his finger with saliva, and check the direction of the wind.

He would spread his wings wide open and rest his head on his shoulder,

just like on our national shield. Suddenly he started flapping again, braced his right leg against the wall of the bell tower to gain momen­ tum, pointed his left foot toward The Future-that was the name of the cantina across from the church-and got ready to launch his epic flight.

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Someone asked him, touching the tip of his left wing: "Are you going to fly, don Chico?"

"Definitely," he responded.

"And will you fly far, don Chico?" ...

"Very, very far."

"And how high, don Chico?"

"Very, very high."

"Will you make it up to Heaven, don Chico?"

"To Heaven itself."

The face of his interrogator lit up: "For the love of God, don Chico, take this cheese up to Heaven and

give it to my mother, who died craving it."

Don Chico rashly accepted the cheese, trying to get rid of the imperti­ without realizing the mistake he had made. We don't know whether Ramon, Martin or Jesus was the first one to ask him to take nent man,

something to the other world. What we do know is that, right afterward, the whole town climbed up to the bell tower and don Chico went right on accepting cheeses and chorizos, candies and liquor, tostadas and hams, all of it Heaven-bound.

Then don Chico braced his right leg, pointing toward The Future, and

opened the grand spectacle of his wings. The whole town heard the crash of reeds breaking and palm mats tearing in the air and cheeses

rolling down the street.

When silence returned, someone said: "He was killed by the excess baggage. If it hadn't been for all the little

gifts for the dead, don Chico would have flown."

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X'anton and the Fox A Tzeltal Legend from Tenejapa, Chiapas

Tziak Tza'pat Tz'it (Diego Mendez Guzman) Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

Once upon a time there was a young man who was a great walker; he

hiked all over the place, climbing up and down the tallest mountains, sometimes looking for fruit or animals to hunt, other times just wander,

ing around to see what he could see.

One day as he was walking around in the woods, he happened across a

little lake at the foot of a tree' covered mountain. All at once he heard someone

shouting for help. He wanted to see what was going on, so he

walked over to the lake to find out where the shouts were coming from.

When he reached the shore he saw that a man was trying to fight his way out of the mouth of an enormous alligator. His legs were already

inside the animal, and the man was struggling desperately to free himself

from its jaws.

This man who was being eaten by the alligator was a Itatik Anjel, Master or Lord of the Mountain. When he saw the boy standing on the

shore, he yelled: "Look here, young man, do me a big favor! You can see that this ani, mal is eating me alive. Please run to my house and bring me my gun, so I kill this animal that's trying to eat me!"

The boy replied that he would gladly bring him his gun, but he didn't know where his house was. The ltatik Anjel told him that it was at the can

foot of the mountain, in a cave covered up by a bundle of hay. There he would find the man's daughter, named X'anton, since she always stood

guard at the mouth of the cave.

"You ask her for a piece of cotton and my shotgun, and you bring them to me quickly, because this animal is going to eat me if I don't get

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something to kill it with."

The boy was horrified by what was happening to the poor man, so he went running to find the cave which was the ]tatik Anjel's house. He found the entrance to the cave and there, indeed, was a bundle of hay, but the woman who guarded the entrance was nowhere in sight, despite what the man had said. All he saw was a multicolored toad crouched there.

Then he went back to where the man was trying to break free of the alligator, to tell him that he hadn't found his daughter. When he reached the lake, he called to the man, who was still struggling against the alligator: "I didn't find your daughter or anyone else, just a toad underneath the soon

hay!"

The man replied:

"That is my daughter! Call her by her name and you'll see, she'll you. But hurry back, because I'm really getting tired of fighting this alligator!" answer

The boy headed back to the cave, and in a few moments he was at the entrance:

"X'anton! X'antonl Wake up, your father's in danger! An enormous

alligator is eating him out there in the lake! He told me to take him his shotgun and a piece of cotton so he can kill the animal, so hurry up and give me the weapon, and I'll take it to him right away!"

He was startled to see the frog all at once turn into a beautiful woman, and even more startled when, by merely waving her hand toward the door, she made it suddenly open, allowing him to peer inside the cave, where there were many things that the boy had never seen. Then the young woman handed him the shotgun and a piece of cotton, and closed the door.

The boy went running back to the lake, remembering how pretty the

girl was and how she had turned from a toad into that beautiful woman, mistress of great powers. When he reached the lake he gave the weapon to

the] tatik Anjelj by now half of his body had already been swallowed

by the alligator.

"I'm truly grateful, young man, for the favor you have done me. But now

you must leave here and look for a hole where you can hide your

head, even if the rest of your body sticks out; if you don't do this, you will die. So you'd better do what I tell you, if you don't want anything bad to happen to you!"

Extremely surprised by this order, the boy went looking for a hole. But

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when he found it, he didn't want to stick his head in, so he did just the opposite; he put his body in it and left his head out, so he could watch how the man freed himself from the alligator.

After a while the Lord of the Mountain flung the cotton into the air with great force, and it quickly turned into a lovely cloud. Then he fired his shotgun, and the report turned into lightning as loud as the thunder,

bolts you hear during thunderstorms.

When the lightning struck, the poor boy fainted inside the hole, and at the same time the Angel of the Mountain managed to free himself from the alligator, which was tom to pieces.

Then he starting calling to the boy, but he didn't answer. So he

thought he hadn't followed his order, and he looked for a mosquito to go sting the boy and suck his blood. When the mosquito came back, hav­ ing stung him many times, he held the boy's blood in his little stomach, since the boy was still alive.

Right away the Lord of the Mountain sent a larger mosquito, the one we call ja in T zeltal, and it went flying off in search of the boy. When it found him it started stinging him all over, until its little stomach was

full, and then it returned to the Jtatik Anjel, who immediately set out for the place where the poor boy lay. When he reached his hiding place, he saw

him lying there unconscious in the hole. After checking to make

sure

he was still alive, he went looking for the branches of a plant we

call tz' eman, and he wrapped the boy in its leaves.

The young man immediately began to stir, as if he were waking from a sleep, and in a moment he was completely recovered. The Angel Lord invited him to his house, and together they walked to the cave. When

they got there, X'anton once again turned from a bug, eyed toad into a pretty girl; once again she lifted her arm and the door of the cave opened by itself. The boy could see that the Lord of the Mountain was very rich, since he stored many treasures inside his cave.

"I'm very grateful to you, young man!" the Angel of the Mountain told him as they walked in. "In exchange for the favor you did me, I

give you a present. Pick out the jewel that you like best out of all my treasures and take it; I'll gladly give it to you in payment for what

want to

you did for me."

The boy wouldn't accept any of the jewels that he sawall around, since he said he didn't need them. Then the Lord of the Mountain

offered him many gifts to take home, like com, beans and fruit, but the young man refused to accept these gifts as well.

Since the Lord of the Mountain felt obliged to the boy and wanted to

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show his gratitude, he had no choice but to offer him his daughter X'anton, whom the young man gladly accepted. The Angel Lord called his daughter and presented her to the young man, and she also accepted

him, since she was grateful to him for saving her father's life. That is how X'anton Ajaw, Princess of the Mountain, took the hand of that fel­ low in marriage.

The next day the two of them went to the young man's house, where

they lived very happily for a few years. But when their first children were born, the young man started to change his ways. Little by little he starting neglecting his obligations at home and at work, to the point where he was no longer providing for his family's most basic needs.

The children would ask their mother to make them sour-corn tamales and other delicacies, but their mother couldn't grant their requests, because her husband had stopped working the fields. Without saying a

word, she waited until sowing time and planted a cornfield all by herself.

And when it was ripe she went out to harvest it, but she only picked one ear

from each corner of the field. Since she was the Angel of the

Mountain's daughter, she turned those four ears of corn into a net full of

corncobs.

She went contentedly back home and started shucking the corn, but at that moment her husband returned. He got angry because he thought his wife had picked too many ears of corn, and he started scolding her and even hit her in the face, giving her a nosebleed. X'anton wiped the blood off with an ear of corn, and it was permanently stained red. That's how the first red corncob was born, stained with the blood of X'anton

Ajaw, Princess of the Mountain, and we still grow it today.

X'anton Ajaw felt very sad and offended by her husband's mistreat­ ment. She decided to go home to her father, the Angel of the Mountain. But she didn't take her two children with her, since they were the fruit of an unholy union, so they couldn't live with their grand­ father, who was an immortal being, considered a god. Before she left home she set out enough food for her children, and told them tearfully: "Children, I have to go home to my father; you can see how your father has beat me. You stay here, because it isn't possible for you to live with us, but I'll bring you food every day Look, children; I'm leaving here to eat your food up here in the loft. When you're hungry climb up that be careful But for when the rest and hide it, you get hungry again. ....

your father doesn't find it, because I wouldn't put it past

him to take all

your food."

The children cried, but they were consoled by the thought of seeing

104

TRIQUARTERLY

their mother every day. That afternoon the father came home and saw that his children had been crying. Instead of comforting them or asking them why they had been crying, he started searching for food. Since he didn't find any, he climbed up into the loft and found the food that his wife had prepared. He ate it all up, not leaving his children any.

The next day the mother came to see her children. She brought them

their food for the day, but it distressed her to see her children once again sobbing with hunger.

"Why are you crying, children? Here I am, just like I said! I've brought you your food; stop crying!"

The children told her that their father had found the hiding place for the food, and that he had eaten it up without giving them a second

thought.

"That's all right, children! Let's think of some other way that your father won't find the food. Listen! Whenever you're hungry, all you have to do is touch this pot, and inside it you'll find beans or whatever you want. And touch the boch, and inside it you'll find pozol. Don't for,

get; by just touching these objects you'll find your food, and your father won't find anything. I have to go now, since your father will be home soon, and it's best if he doesn't find me here."

She affectionately took leave of the children, who were comforted by the thought that their father could no longer steal their food. Then their father came home and started looking for something to eat. He searched the whole house but didn't find anything. He got so mad that

he started breaking all the pots, gourds and jugs, not leaving a single one intact. He stomped angrily out, leaving the little ones without any food

again.

The next day the mother arrived bright and early and found them once

again in tears. They explained what their father had done. The

woman saw

the pot shards scattered over the ground and realized what

had happened.

"Stop crying now, children! So that your father won't be able to take your food away, I'm going to plug your butts with a little corncob; that way you'll never go hungry. I'll be back tomorrow and bring you your food, and I'll think of some solution if your father bothers you again."

She said goodbye to the children and went home. They were comfort, ed by the thought of seeing their mother the next day. All day long they played happily, but as soon as their father arrived, he looked all around for food, to no avail, and then started searching the children. When he found the corncobs that their mother had stuck in their butts, he

105

TRIQUARTERL Y

thought they would tum into food and he took them away, and the chil­ dren immediately burst into tears, since that made them very hungry.

The father, irritated at not finding any food, fell asleep on his cot, and

he was soon snoring like a pig.

The next day X'anton brought them their breakfast, and she found them crying again.

"What happened, children? Don't tell me your father figured out what I did to keep you from starving to death!"

One of them replied,

"Yes, Mother! Daddy searched us all over, and he pulled the cork out of our butts. And then we were of

dying

hunger!"

X'anton Ajaw sat there thinking while her children ate their break­

fast: "I've tried everything to save my children from this evil man, but my husband always figures it out. What shall I do now?"

So, thinking and thinking, she walked out into the yard, where she could see the beauty of the woods. There were so many trees in those hamlets!

"That's it!" she exclaimed, "I know what I'll do!"

She went back inside the house, called her children over, and told them:

"Darling children! So that your father won't bother you again and I can live in peace, I'll tum you into pretty little animals, and you'll live in the woods.

You'll find your food for yourselves, and that way happily

I'll be able to see you more often, since the woods are the property of my father, ltatik Anjel, your grandfather."

As she spoke she held the boy, gently pulled his ears, then his behind, and turned him into a graceful little animal. Then, repeating these movements, she did the same thing to the girl. The two children burst out laughing when they saw their long, fluffy tails.

"There, children! You'll be the squirrels that the woods were missing.

You'll live happily up in the treetops, where you'll find lots of food, and your father won't be able to take it away from you."

She placed them on some branches, told them goodbye, and went home to her father, the Angel Lord, while the children, who were now squirrels, happily hopped from branch to branch, from one end of the forest to the other.

Very early the next day she went to the hut to wait for her husband.

He soon arrived and, seeing how angry she was, he tried to leave, but she stopped him, saying:

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TRIQUARTERLY

"You've mistreated my children and taken away their food. I've saved

I'll tum into another them by turning them into squirrels, but yOU kind of animal. Since you like to steal so much, you'll have to steal to ...

eat.

So, you'll always be in danger of being hunted down with dogs and

killed or at least beaten. And that's how you'll spend the rest of your life: stealing food like you've stolen it from my children."

The man begged her to forgive him, but she paid no attention to his

pleas and turned him into an ugly, clever fox, which had no choice but to become wily in order to find food. That's why, even today, we keep watch over the chicken coop so this little animal won't sneak in and steal our hens, since that was the punishment meted out by his wife, X'anton Ajaw, Princess of the Mountain.

Like the Night Jaime Sabines Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Life was

just like that night of drunkenness.

What did I do? What am I holding in my hands?

Only desiring, desiring, desiring, running after dreams like a blind dog barking at noises.

107

TRIQUARTERLY

The Rooster and the Woman A T zeltal Legend from Aguacatenango, Chiapas

Chavela Waris (Isabel Juarez Espinosa) Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele

Once there was a couple that had been married for a long time, but the

wife couldn't get pregnant. Her husband asked her, "Why aren't we able to have a child?" and she

always answered that perhaps it was the will of

God. Still, they never wanted for anything; bright and early each morn­

ing the husband would go out to work in the fields. But he was suspi­ cious of his wife, because she served him the best cuts of meat for dinner

every day.

One day he could no longer keep quiet and he asked her where she got enough money to buy the meat; she replied that sometimes they sold it to her on credit and sometimes her neighbors and girlfriends gave it to

her. But he wasn't convinced and went on suspecting his wife. The next day he pretended to go to work, and he hid and watched all his wife's movements, against her knowledge. It must have been about noon when

he saw something in the distance: he couldn't quite make it out, but it enormous, multicolored rooster that landed on the roof of his house. The rooster shook itself and crowed to announce its arrival.

was an own

The husband couldn't believe his eyes, but he watched his wife shake herself three times and suddenly turn into a hen. The rooster and hen

stayed there for a while in the nest, which had been built under the eaves

of the house, in the beams. After quite a while the rooster left,

shaking his feathers and crowing, the same way he had arrived. The hen also started shaking herself gently, and little by little she resumed the form of the man's wife. The feathers falling off of her turned into money, which she set about hiding in some earthenware pots which were right there in the nest.

109

TRIQUARTERLY

The husband pretended to have seen nothing, and he came home at

dinnertime, as usual. She called him to the table and they started eating.

"But how do you manage to feed me such good, elegant food?

We're so poor how can we afford to eat meat every day?" he asked .

.

.

...

his wife.

"I've already told you that I buy it on credit and the neighbors give it to me. Why don't you just eat and stop asking questions," she answered, without realizing that he already knew the truth about what was hap­

pening.

Then the husband confessed that he had found her out; that every day at noon he had seen an enormous, multicolored rooster arrive, and that when he arrived, she would shake herself three times and tum into a

hen. That he had seen what they did in the nest under the eaves, while

they thought he was at work. That, because of doing those things behind his back, it was her fault that they couldn't have children, and that they couldn't be a normal, ordinary family.

When she heard that her husband had found out about everything she was

up to, she lost control, turned pale, and fell gravely ill. That very

night the wife died, and the next day, as they were burying her, her hus­ band felt very sad because he had been left all alone. But then he

remembered something that suddenly cheered him up; it occurred to him that the pots were still filled with gold, and that after all was said and done, he was going to end up rich. He climbed up onto the roof of the house and set about examining the nest, where he found the pots.

But he discovered that the pots were empty, that there was no longer anything in them. This made him even sadder and he started feeling sorry for himself, since he felt guilty for bringing on his wife's death by

telling her that he had discovered her secret. And that's how he spent the rest of his life, living in poverty and getting drunk every day, suppos­ edly to forget his sorrows. But in the end the alcohol didn't help him at all, because he drowned in a river.

The following four pages constitute one folded sheet from a booklet entitled Bon Tintes Naturales, produced in Chiapas in 1980 by poet/publisher Ambar Past, in association with a group of native artisans known as "Sna jolobil."

110

JECH TA BONEL 1.

la stekel

8venta

xlok' stekel ik'ubal.

ta

ta

k'ak'al

ta

k'�k'al jot.

Hi

lek

2.

Oy

xa

jot,

Jun

ora

ta

jchuk'tik

xu'

Mu

Slekoj

ta

valte, xa

ta

bali,

jtz'ajtik

ta

xlaki xchi'uk

ta

Mu lekuk ta xbat,

ta

jchuk'tik lek

Lek likel

xavon.

sik ti noe,

lakan ta

3.

ta

Ta

ta

yaial p'in, nibakil p'in ja'

bonel. xa

xieh' lek chuk'el ti noe

ta

Kavon.

jayil tel.

xu'

sventa

x-ik'ub ti noe ti mi

ta

tak'inal p'in.

lakan ve'!!l ta

sp'inal bonob no.

xich' sa'bel sp'inal bonob no.

Beneno

yich'oj.

4.

Sventa

alumbre sbon.

0

Ati

'0 dron.

pitz'otz',

ta

ta

sat

ta ta

batz'i

ta

yich' oj

ti drone.

5.

brasil,

mu

x�

xabon ta k '·an

8akatinta,

ch'uj,

mu

ak',

ta

8ekaro,

ta

xatz'aj

xatz'aj

ti

xlok'

muk'ta fareas!a

ta

ti

no

ta

no

ta

drone

makob, ta

alumbre.

potzol BeneDo

''Dron'' xkalkutik, pero t'biero­

potasio" xalik t. farmas1a.

Nikcso 1ek

a'a1 ta

de

jtz'ajtik ti noe ta

xahon ta sat ch'il te' vet. ta

nichim,

mato

ta

Lek xtun sventa

t7.'ajob no, ta

Jobel.

K'alal

t08

xlok' sbon,

K' alaI

ta

brasil,

mu

ta

te'

aDoe

xk'ak' Ii

noe

xchi'uk k'ucha'al lek parejo

k'alal

x10k' .bon.

17

ta

xa

1akan k'uch­

TE�IR

SUGERENCIAS PARA

Antes de enpezar a tenl r , se debe Lavar cuy bien 1. la lana con agua caliente y jab3n para que 5a1ga toda la suciedad.

La lana debe quedarse remoj�ndo en agua caliente por una hora.

-

Desp�es de que &e enfrre 'bat ea 2.-

nebes

3.-

No es bueno

y

c�da cosa.

4.-

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la comirla.

para

son

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la lana.

en

una

,

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de

para tenir.

peltr�

que use s las 1IIisDI8s ollas para tenir Debe tener diferentes ollas para

algunos de 108 ingredientes

para

tenir

venenosos.

Para que est'n

18 lan3

firm�s los

alumbre

con

buenos para fijar el color. tarmacias grandes.

Cuando

vas

a

teiiir

tintes, h�y que

con

Son muy potasio. pueden comprar en las

Se

"Barba de

Leon", "Zarzamora",

"Palo de la

Mula".·"Seearo", "Sacatinta",

Brasi!".

"Cochinil1a". primero vas a

0

hirviendola

preparar

bicro.�to de

0

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preparar

18 lana

el alumbre.

con

con la fcute de "1.antana". con "Palo de "�'h.r de Muerto" primeTo vas a hervir la lana Este bicromato es venpnoso. bicrogato de potasio.

Cuando tinas

B!'asil" con

0

Nosotros

Ie llamamos

"dron", pero en

la

fa�cia Ie

dice" "Bicromatu de Potasio".

5.-

imp(,Ttante

fs

para que

6.-

no

Cuando

en

1s

en

la olla.

olle,

se

bien 1a lana

con

lana y el color

6£a

l'emov�r

queme la

palito parejo. un

este teiiida la lana, dejala enfriar desp�cio 0

mejor todavia. deiala d�rmir (As! sera mejor.)

toda

1a nochp.

Cuando ya estl fria la lans tenida. hay que l�varla bien, basta que ya no salla el color. Necesita una buena

7.-

Lavada

8.en

con

agus.

pero ain

jabon.

Deapuls de lavada, euelga el sol, para que

se

1a lana

en

la sombra.

no

a.que.

9.- 51 tienes una sbuelita. una ...a, 0 una tia, pregGn­ "Diae para que yo tales "*0 tenian iana antigua.ente. aprends", lea vas a decir, ",COmo hicieron para tejiir lana antes?".

18

6. ta

K'alal tok'on ti sikub ta

p'in, ja'

sp'ina1

ta

8.

lek.

Hi

xa,

mo'oje, ak'o

Ja' lek juchul xchi'uk

aikub.

K'a1al mi isikub

xich' chuk'el Ta

k'alal bonbil

p'in ta k'un k'un.

xvay ta

7.

noel

jOa'

xich' chuk'el

xa

ti bonbi1 noel 1ek ta

to mi mu xa

xlok' sbone.

batz'i jo', mu'

ta

K'alal lek chuk'bil

xa

ta

ti bonbil noel

xa

xjok'i ta yaxinal k'ucha'al mu xlok'

xavonuk. ta

sbon ta

jtotik.

9.

ame',

Ti m1 oy ayaya,

k'usi elan 1a sbonik

"R'usi 18 sbonik

to

'ox.

vo'one"

ta

junme', jak'o ava'i

a

•

.. .

-�

,

� yo.

"Alo

ka'i", xavut,

TRIQUARTERLY

Landscape with Dead Anthems Ambar Past

Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

When the moon came to our village she came down from a tree with big branches.

She climbed up to look at the earth, our earth.

She climbed up, and stuck there with beeswax she saw wide valleys and plains and the smooth fields of the big plantations.

She asked for tortillas and fish, filled our baskets up with steep cornfields.

we

We rent our dignity

and the payments are dead children.

What we're left with is mud and dead children.

We all wear the same clothes,

we'll all from this village, from the same father.

We brought so many stones up from the river that finally they came by themselves.

We built our lime-and-egg-yolk walls.

We can't stay and live in any of these houses and that's why our anthems are the way they are.

115

TRIQUARTERLY

People used to be very strong and now can't even lift a rock or a word. we

Now we're not even people.

-,..

---:::------......:: ------

-

au

116

=

.:

TRIQUARTERLY

Flood E[rain Bartolome

The river carried trees and sexual ferns; the crest buoyed up my sinking memory.

Gray flood. The damp mist swims among the ruins, the ducks and sad debris.

Whole worlds destroyed; and in the river's breast, rank wounds; and boats; and concentrated smells of jungle-an incipient stench; and shouts piled high like com atop the damaged hills.

The pain of centuries is trembling in these impure waters that uprooted things and ate away at graves, drowning both mare and colt, thicket and garden.

Bitterness and psalms lie on the wind; and where the rumbas used to flow with drink

there's suppurating air, and a sodden moan.

117

TRIQUARTERLY

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (1) Proceso, Mexico City, January 18, 1994 Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Sirs: I should begin with an apology ("a bad way to start," my grandmother

used to say). Our Press and Communications Department left out the

weekly national magazine "Proceso" when they sent the January 13 let­ ter. I hope the people at "Proceso" will forgive us for this mistake and receive

the present letter without any rancor or resentment, retcetera

[sic].

I direct myself to you to request the dissemination of the attached

from the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee-General Command of the EZLN*. In them we refer to repeated violations of the cease-fire by federal troops, to the govern­ statements

ment's initiative to apply the Law of Amnesty to the present conflict,

and to Camacho Solis's performance as the one designated to negotiate for peace and reconciliation in Chiapas.

I believe that the documents we sent you on January 13 should have arrived by now. I do not know what response they will provoke or what

the government's response to our proposals will be, and therefore I do

address them. Up to today, January 18, 1994, the only thing we have learned is that the "pardon" which the government is offering to our forces has been made official. What is it that we have to ask forgive­ ness for? What is it that they are going to pardon us for? For not dying of not

*

EZLN are the initials of the Zapatista guerrilla movement.

119

TRIQUARTERLY

hunger? For not accepting our misery in silence? For not humbly accept­ ing an enormous historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For hav­ ing risen up in arms when we found all other paths closed? For not heeding Chiapas's penal code, the most absurd and repressive in history?

For having shown the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists, and is in the hearts of our most impoverished inhabitants?

For having made careful preparations before beginning our fight? For

having brought guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For having learned to fight before actually fighting? For being Mexicans, every one of us? For being mostly indigenous? For calling the Mexican people to fight, with whatever means, for what rightfully belongs to them? For fighting for freedom, democracy, and justice? For not following the lead­ ers of previous uprisings? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves? For not betraying one another?

Who should be asking for forgiveness and who can grant such a par­ don? Those who for years and years sat before a full table and satiated themselves while we sat with death-so daily and familiar to us that we

stopped even fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and souls with declarations and promises? The dead, our dead, who mortally died "nat­ ural" deaths-that is, of measles, whooping cough, dengue [breakbone fever]' cholera, typhoid, mononucleosis, tetanus, bronchitis, malaria, and other gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead-dead in such a clear majority, dead so democratically of grief because nobody did anything to help, because all the dead, our dead, just went on like that, without anyone accepting responsibility for them, without anyone final­ ly saying, "ENOUGH!," which would have given meaning to their death, without anyone asking those who are always dying, our dead, to Those who come back to life again but this time for the sake of living? denied the right of our people to self-government? Those who refused to respect our customs, our color, our language? Those who treat us like foreigners in our own land and ask us to show our papers and to obey a law of whose existence we do not know? Those who tortured, seized, murdered and disappeared us for the great "crime" of wanting a piece of

land, not a big piece, not a little one, just one we could get enough out of to fill our stomachs with?

Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it?

The President of the Republic? The secretaries of state? Senators?

Deputies? Governors? Mayors? The police? The federal army? Powerful

businessmen, bankers, industrialists, and landowners? Political parties?

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TRIQUARTERLY

Intellectuals? Galio and Nexos*? The media? Students? Teachers?

Tenant farmers? Workers? Peasants? Indigenous people? Those who died

pointless deaths?

Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it?

Well, that's all for now.

Best wishes and a warm embrace-and in this cold weather both

things are appreciated (I think), even if they come from a "professional in violence."

Subcommander Marcos

*

The director of Nexos magazine, Hector Aguilar Camfn, published a book

about Mexico's guerrilla movements called La Guerra de Galio.

121

TRIQUARTERL Y

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (2) Tiempo, San Cristobal de Las Casas, February 12, 1994 Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

To the Solidarity Committee at Primary Level Boarding School

Number 4, "BEATRIZ HERNANDEZ"

Guadalajara, [alisco Mexico

Boys and girls: We received your letter dated January 19, 1994, and the poem "PRAYER FOR PEACE" which accompanied it. We are delighted that

boys and girls, who live so far away from our mountains and our misery, are concerned about peace coming to Chiapan soil. Thanks so much for your little letter.

We want you, and the good people who are your teachers, to know that we didn't take up arms because we like killing and dying, and that we didn't go looking to start a war because we don't want peace. Our children are boys and girls just like you, only much poorer. Our boys

and girls don't have schools or medicine; and they don't have clothes or food; we don't even have a decent roof over our poverty. The only things our boys and girls have are work, ignorance and death. The land we have is no good; it's so bad that in order to bring home something for our children, we go out looking for work on other people's land, the powerful people, and they pay us very little for our labor. Our children are

forced to start working at a very young age so that they can have

food, clothing, and medicine. Machetes and hoes are our chil­ dren's toys; they play and suffer while they work. They go out to look for some

122

TRIQUARTERLY

firewood, clear mountain fields, and plant almost as soon as they learn

They eat the same as we do: com, beans and chile. They're not able to go to school and learn Spanish because work kills their whole day and sickness kills their nights. That's how our boys and girls have to walk.

lived and died for 501 years. We, their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, are tired of blaming ourselves for doing nothing on behalf of our

boys and girls. We looked for a peaceful route to obtaining justice and found a mockery, found jail, found beatings, found death, and we found, as always, pain and suffering. We couldn't go on, boys and girls of J alisco, the pain and suffering were too much. So we had to go and find the war road, because what we asked for with our voices was not heard.

Boys and girls of Jalisco, we didn't ask for gifts or charity, we asked for

justice: a fair salary, a tiny piece of good earth, a decent house, a real school, medicine that cures, bread on our tables, respect for what is ours, the freedom to say whatever we think and to open the doors of our

mouths so that our words may unite us with others in peace, and not death. This is what we've always asked for, boys and girls of Jalisco, but

they didn't listen to what our one voice cried out for. So we armed our, selves, turned our work tools into tools of war; and the war that was being waged against us, the war that was killing us without your know, ing it, boys and girls of J alisco, we turned it around, declared war on them, the big people, the important people, those who have everything and deserve nothing.

That's why, boys and girls of Jalisco, we launched our war. That's why the peace that we want is different from the one we had before because what we had before wasn't peace, it was death and contempt, it was

pain and suffering, it was shame. That's why, with respect and affection, we

tell you, boys and girls of Jalisco, to raise your peace flags with pride

and write poems praying for a Life with Dignity, and, above all, to search for Justice, which exists either for everyone or no one.

Greetings boys and girls of J alisco.

Insurgent Subcommander Marcos (signature) From the mountains of southeast Mexico.

The Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee -General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army

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TRIQUARTERLY

Letter from Subcommander Marcos (3) Tiempo, San Cristobal de Las Casas, February 12, 1994

Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

TO THE UNIVERSITY STUDENT COUNCIL.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Mexico City

Male and female comrades: We received your January 29 letter, at the bottom of which appears the

signature of "Angel Gomez c." Thanks for sending your thoughts our way.

Nearly all of us are indigenous, nearly all illiterate and nearly all dis­ criminated against. We never had the chance to get even a primary

school education. We would have liked not only to have finished prima­ ry and secondary school, but to have gone on to university, as well.

It was a pleasure to receive greetings and support from you, men and women, who are fighting, elsewhere and by different means, for the same liberty, democracy and justice that all of us long for. We know that at various times the brave voice of Mexican students has made the

wrongful government tremble and it's true that if you unite your voice with ours, and to that of all dispossessed peoples, nothing of this gigan­ tic lie that they've made us listen to day and night, in death and life, always, would be left standing. For this reason we tum to you, the stu­ dents of Mexico, to ask you, with all due respect, the following: If it's possible for you to organize yourselves, come to our mountains,

Note: Italics are used throughout for words the subcommander wrote in English.

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TRIQUARTERLY

when things have calmed down a bit, to visit and talk with us, and help us with all your technical know-how and learning, and all that stuff got­ ten out of books that don't get to us. We don't want you to come and bend our ears with your politics, or drag us into one political current or another. I think that when it comes to politics, it's you who could learn from us, learn what a truly democratic and participatory organization is.

But you can help us harvest coffee, clear fields, and lend a hand in the community work of our towns. You can help us learn to read and write, improve our health and nutrition, and help us with techniques for increasing crop yields. You can come and teach us and learn something yourselves. Come, even if it's just for a few days so that you can get to know this part of Mexico which existed before the first of January and yet

...

If you decide to accept this invitation, you'll have to send ahead some spokespeople so that through an intermediary we can work out the details. Everything has to be well organized so that spies from the

wrongful government don't infiltrate. If you can't come, student-broth­ ers, don't worry about it, but keep up the fight over where you are on behalf of justice for all Mexicans.

That's all, men and women, students of Mexico, we await your written response.

Insurgent Subcommander Marcos (signature) From the mountains of southeast Mexico

The Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee -General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army

Mexico, February 1994 P.S.-The "Sub's" section: The recurring postscript.

P.S. in response to the P.S. of the Student Council's that said: "To Sub

Marcos: Don't worry, we'll take over the Z6calo* for you."

I, of course, have told the General Command of the Indigenous

Revolutionary Clandestine Committee that Mexico City is on the other side of the world and that we don't have enough dugout canoes to get there. Moreover, as I said to l-don't-remember-who, guerrilla fighters who take over z6calos sooner or later become hamburgeois (As long as we're on the subject, could you pick us up a couple, no onion, no ketchup. Thanks). *

The Zocalo is the main square of Mexico City and the symbolic seat of

power.

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P.P.S.-As long as we're in P.s's, which of all the "University Student

Councils" is the one that wrote us? Because back when I was a stylish young man of 25

(check it out! Put that into the computer at the Attorney General's Office so that they can run some numbersl) there were at least three University Student Councils. Did they merge? in case, oh boy! you do seize the Z6calo, don't be selfish P.P.P.S-Just

pricks. Save me some space where I can at least sell arts and crafts. I may have to choose between being an unemployed "violence profession­ al," and being an underemployed "violence professional," with underde­ velopment wages (the latter being much more marketable under NAFTA, you know).

P.S. to the "nth" degree-Actually these postscripts are a letter dis­

guised as postscripts (because of the Attorney General's Office and built-up etceteras with dark glasses) and, but of course, as such it doesn't need a response, or a "from" or a "to" (undeniable advantages of letters disguised as postscripts).

A nostalgic P.S.-When I was young (Hello? Attorney General's Office? Here come more data) there used to be a place dotted with trees located more or less in the middle of the Main Library, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, the Humanities Tower, Insurgentes Avenue and the interior circuit of University City. We used to call this place, for rea­ sons understood by male and female initiates, the "valley of passions." It was assiduously visited by diverse elements of the fauna that populated the University City after 7:00 P.M. (the time when those with good con­ sciences drink hot chocolate and the ones with bad consciences get hot

and bothered like water for same substance) coming from the areas of

humanities, sciences and other places (are there others"). At that time a Cuban (Hello? Ambassador Jones? Take note. Further proof of pro-Castro tendencies), who used to lecture standing in front of a piano the color of his skin and called himself "snowball," used to say repeatedly: "You can't have both consciousness and heart

" ....

P.S. the "fortissimo finale."-Have you noticed how exquisitely cul­ tured and refined these postscripts are? Are they not worthy of our entrance into the first world? Don't you find it interesting that these "transgressors" are also, thanks to NAFTA, striving for competitiveness?

P.S. "of the happy end." O.k., o.k., o.k., I'm going it's just that I've been on this trip for 7 months now and the night guard, as usual, has ...

fallen asleep and somebody is getting tired of repeating "is anybody out and you all? there?" and I tell myself my country ...

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From an Interview with Subcommander Marcos Proceso, Mexico City, February 21, 1994 Vicente Leiiero Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

"The first military action is in May 1993 when the army accidentally discovers the campsite where the January attack is being planned. So the army proceeds just as an army should: it discovers an enemy, begins to

deploy its forces, and, cutting off the guerrillas, tries to do away with

them. But all of a sudden, in a matter of days, the army leaves. That's

military decision, it's a political decision. In military terms they thought that our group was something that could be wiped out. But the reality of wiping it out, or let's say starting a troop buildup, meant that the federal government would have to acknowledge that there was a guerrilla movement. We thought (here I'm speculating) that with not a

NAITA coming up, this retreat could not have been a mistake on the part of the federal army. I'm sure that it was a political decision from high up. It had to have been no one less than the president himself. "

Subcommander Marcos is talking.

It's three or four in the morning of Thursday, February 17. The weather is cold and wearisome. It's drizzling outside.

The room, spacious but modest, is part of a peasant construction

perched on a hill, God knows where: on the craggy cliffs of "the moun­ tains in southeast Mexico," the return address for all communications from the Zapatista army. A bulb hanging from poles in the roof is the

only light, but it's enough.

On the shelves in the wall is a disorderly

collection of books and notebooks falling apart from use. More than a dozen fighters with ski masks and indigenous men and women without

uniforms, looking drowsy, are gathered on the floor, fighting off sleep in order to listen to the Sub. Some are already asleep, the checked blanket

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pulled up to their heads. They're all in the back, against the walls.

"The Zapatista movement is a wake-up call. When everything in the world was saying no to armed struggle because the communist option had disappeared, we thought that people here were going to say 'forget it' to change, and even more so, to armed struggle. It was logical, the ideological bombardment was strong. But in the communities the reverse happened. That moment was when more people joined us, when more people became members of the Zapatista army's militia, when more villages declared: 'They're not leaving us any other option.'

When on the international level everything is negating armed struggle, the indigenous peasant of Chiapas is saying yes, yes, yes."

Seated on a beam that through the addition of small legs has been turned into a low and backless bench, Marcos responds to the questions of the three reporters he consented to see in his second public meeting with journalists: the New York Times [Tim Golden], El Financiero [Oscar Hinojosa] and Proceso. Only one camera, that of Proceso, has been authorized by the Sub to take pictures, from whichever angle: "No more, wait a second until those comrades in the back put on

their ski masks."

He explains: "They have family members in the communities here

that could be harmed if people identify them." [

...

]

Marcos says he's been a professional journalist, not a student one, and that he never took bribes. He did professional and university studies; he got a bachelor's degree and did graduate studies. "I can't say," he says, in what area, or whether it was at the National Autonomous University of

Mexico. But he denies emphatically, with a long "noooo," that he's the anthropologist that Oscar Hinojosa's question targets him as.

On the other hand he's much more forthcoming when it comes to talking about his experience in 1983 when a group of twelve young

joined by their political views, decided to go to Chiapas to do this, to politicize people.

men,

"We felt invincible. We felt that with our pure conviction we would be able to defeat any army. So we started talking to the communities,

who taught us a very important lesson. The democratic organization or social structure of the indigenous communities is very honest, very clear. It's very difficult for them to pretend that nothing's going on or to be corrupted. What's more, we saw a lot of people, a lot of children, die.

They died in our hands while we were dedicating ourselves to health campaigns that the government wasn't carrying out and that we had to carry out ourselves. Not because we were do-gooders but because they

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people. Campaigns promoting child registration and vaccina­ tion. Our combat troops were doing that for a long time. And people

were our

died on us. There were children like this, four or five years old, who played Zapatistas and said: 'When I grow up I'm going to be a vaccina­ tor.' But when we saw them the next day they were already dead from Before the war, and now even more, the girls used to play grown, ups, and instead of getting married they were going to go into the mountains to begin their lives, learn Spanish, which for an

diarrhea, fevers

....

indigenous woman is almost impossible. From that to learning how to handle weapons is a big jump. So when they decide it's time to launch the war they give us this argument: 'It's our death, what's the problem?

It's just that now we'll get to say how we're going to die. You can come or you can stay,' they told us. And we weren't able to tell them: 'No, wait another five years. Let's see if the new government, the one com,

ing into power in '95, will change anything.' We had no right to say that, because every year that went by we just counted more and more dead. Faced with this kind of logic where death is always the conclu­

sion, we opted for fighting. Our comrades taught us about the moun, tains, taught us to march and carry what we needed with us. And the only way they accept you is when you carry as much as they do, walk as far as they do, when you bust your ass the way they do. Then they accept you."

"And doing that committed you for life, Marcos? Did you think at the

beginning that you would go and come back?"

"I bet everything on the mountain; let the government know once and for all: If they are going to offer a governorship or something: No." Marcos isn't married and doesn't have a partner.

"I'm not a homosexual, either."

He can't say if he's atheist or religious.

"My comrades have forbidden me to use those words. If you say you're religious, they'll say that the movement is religious. If you say you're Catholic, they'll say it's Catholic. If you say Muslim, the same thing.

Whatever you say."

"But the faith of the indigenous people must be contagious."

"There are two faiths. The one in the books and the one in the mountains. When the comrades go into the mountains they learn sto­ ries that come from far away, stories they hear while on guard duty or

around the fire. Stories of apparitions, of magical worlds belonging to more

than one ethnic group; scary stories that the mountain inspires.

How sad the mountain is, right? Well, yes. Yes, it is. There are stories

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that dance around the mountain

...

I don't know if I'm making myself

understood or if I understand what you're asking me."

The topic of magic and faith invokes that of death.

Marcos has already said that he's prepared to die.

"Yes, I'm living on borrowed time, because we thought that the world was going to come down on our heads on the first of January. When

January second came and went, everything else was extra. That's why I'm writing like a madman now, all the things I've never written. And if Petrita writes a letter to Subcommander Marcos, I pour out everything I wanted to say one day and didn't. I send six, seven, eight sheets to Petrita. I have nothing to lose. Of course they're going to criticize my literary style; they have me winging it. I don't give a damn if people like or

don't like my letters."

In his literary days Marcos wrote and published some things under his

real name, "but I won't be doing that again." He says it's literature for

giving to a woman, not for publication.

"Poetry. You're a poet."

"I read an interview with Heberto Padilla in which he says: 'Hey, give

the guy a governorship or publish a book of his. That'll take care of him. You can tell he's a poet. All guerrillas are poets.'"

As a boy, Marcos read Neruda, Leon Felipe, Antonio Machado and

Vallejo. He read Ernesto Cardenal and Borges later on. Of the Mexicans he's read Efrafn Huerta, Rosario Castellanos, Sabines and Montes de Oca. As for Paz, he only likes his essays on poetry.

Even though he's a faithful reader of Carlos Monsivais and remembers that one of the first things he ever read was D{as de guardar, he won't reveal whether or not his mocking style can be traced to Monsi, or

Ibarguengoitia. He just laughs.

He doesn't write his missives on a computer or an electric typewriter, as one might think reading the originals, each page signed "Marcos."

He writes them by hand or dictates them, and then someone types them and copies them onto paper which he has already signed. He used to

have a portable typewriter, mechanical, Olivetti, which he had for issu­ ing orders, but it was the first thing he got rid of when the Zapatistas had to flee Rancho Nuevo.

"Ask Godinez" if he has it. I don't think so."

Miguel Angel Godinez Bravo is the general in the Mexican army who was in charge of operations against the Zapatista army. *

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He's also been getting rid of the many books he used to read.

"I used to carry books in the mountains, and then they would scold

asking me why I was carrying them. It's true, it was suicide. When you first get there you want to carry around a whole library, right? But since they give you the same weight in bullets, food and everything to carry in addition to the books, you end up chucking them because nobody says: 'Well, you're carrying so many books, so I'll take some of I dumped them along the way your bullets.' No, you carry the same at various campsites."

He says they were a lot. Some good stuff. Some Monsivais, some me:

...

Poniatowska, like La noche de Tlatelolco. All of Cortazar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa "when he was still digestible," and Garcia Marquez, "who is something else; or a special case, let's say."

"When we got to the mountains we were very lonely, and then some

official was going around saying, just like in the work of Garda Marquez: 'No one writes to Marcos' because I was going around with a

long face."

Of course he carries a lot of political reading with him, none of which he will specify, except for his very earliest, earliest Los agachados and Los

supermachos by Rius: "In the provinces we got our politics through Rius's comics or we

didn't get them at all. I learned English"-he starts laughing because the question is Tim Golden's-"reading Playboy and Penthouse. I speak

English like Inspector Caltzontzin*: 'Esta table es green,' 'The pencil is O.K.' I only read it because I had to translate Pentagon manuals. I don't speak Russian. I don't speak Chinese, all right already, enough."

This man who makes jokes and laughs every so often like a simple prep-school boy, natural, mischievous, switches just like that from frivo­ lity to, at other points in the conversation, radicalism and utopian political visions which sometimes seem naive, idyllic. That's Marcos, Subcommander of the Zapatista Army, which, at the beginning of the year, flipped the national political scene onto its back, feet in the air.

He doesn't move from the uncomfortable seat on top of the legged beam. The opening in his ski mask looks like a section of a mandarin orange squirting looks.

*

Inspector Caltzontzin is one of Rius's comic-strip characters. He's an Indian who wears a straw mat with an electric cord dangling from it and is always questioning established political wisdom.

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Behind us doze, in ever greater numbers, members of the Zapatista

Army. They started out sitting on the floor, then slid further and further down until they were completely stretched out. They wrap themselves in the blanket and settle into sleeping positions. The weapons are still

leaning against the wall, like broomsticks or farm tools. One might say that Marcos is happy talking to strangers from the city, because even though he now has people who write him heaps of letters, he lives trapped and far from what is commonly called civilization.

He gets nostalgic when he thinks back to the group of twelve who came to Chiapas in '83. They went from twelve to ten in little time; two died; five are elsewhere-he says summarily, but one might suppose that they continue to be radical somewhere, or maybe they've given it up completely-and three remain. The other two must also hold irnpor­ tant Zapatista posts in key areas of Chiapas, but Marcos doesn't refer to them, perhaps for strategic reasons.

He gets emotional when he talks about fear. Fear that the operations

fail or that the combatants don't survive the attacks: as happened in

the takeover of the municipalities of Oxchuc and lxtan. And he was the one responsible for those strikes.

"What about personal fear, Marcos? That fear that lodges deep in the

stomach."

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"Oh, yeah, when they're shooting at you and it feels like everything's Others, like this guy-and he gone limp. Me, it takes my hunger away. room still awake-he gets turns to point out one of the ones in the of responding, and hungrier. But then you settle into the mechanics

you're no longer aware or feel fear. Until

later when you remember

'Fuck! What an asshole I was to go out there alone, in front, without me.' You feel like everything loosens up with fear, flanks

protecting

that's the truth."

He gets rational when he talks about the myth that Subcommander Marcos has turned into.

"Does it bother you?"

"I don't buy it."

"Do you see it as helpful at all?"

"I don't. I don't gain anything from it and we're not sure the organiza­ I don't know. About what's going on. I only either. I tion

will,

guess

just

I inkling of what's going on when a journalist gets angry because don't give him an interview. I say: 'Since when am I so famous that and I me a hard time about being selective, and the lights, get an

they give

don't know what all.' That is pure ideology, as they say up there, no?

We don't have power struggles or ego problems of any kind."

"No?"

"The attention has no effect on us."

"It doesn't create envy or jealousies among your combatants?"

"The moral authority of Marcos"-the subcommander is emphatic, his index and middle fingers bobbing up and down like springs-"didn't arise out of the first of January. He earned it earlier, among the troops. a damn if people on the outside, far from here don't The

people

give

these mountains, are now saying how nice he writes or whatever. Here on they still respect Marcos for what went on before, not for what goes now."

It's starting to get light now. I see this through the door which for a The dark night of moment opens onto the wide space of the mountain. shelter through impos­ the blind travelers, who made it to the guerrilla

sible passes, has ducked away.

I see the sprinkling rain and feel the sudden breeze sifting through the of a room. Green branches hanging from the roof and the splendors slow dawn call out.

Marcos doesn't seem to be cold. Over the many layers of clothes that hint at the guerrilla fighter's torso, falls the heavy black wool pon­

only

cho that in Chiapas is called chuj. And on top of that, in an "X," as

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though holding his soul in place, are the two bandoliers filled with bul­ lets; some are red and very big, for a shotgun, and the others, who knows.

He scratches under the ski mask, around his jaw, in what appears to

be a tic or a relentless itch.

"Is your beard prickly, Marcos?"

Marcos looks at Tim Golden as if to say: "That's a tricky one," and he

jokes: "I don't have a beard. I'm clean-shaven."

He's lying, once again. From a meter away, from the side, one can

catch a glimpse every now and then of some tattletales peeking out,

through the mouth hole of his ski mask, the hairs of his beard that trip up against his lower lip. It's a gray beard, but it looks thick.

From the oval that frames his eyes, near the upper edge where the stitching ends, out peeks a little lock of black hair, not brown, that escapes toward the temple.

"Don't help the Attorney General's Office," protests Marcos when Tim keeps on about his beard.

It's almost his last smile in a discussion during which he shifts back and forth from strictly personal mysteries-the mysteries of a character who for Castillo Peraza recalls the feeble myth of Robin Hood, who for others is an unattainable and gallant leading man along the lines of Kevin Costner, or a Rambo playing a leftist bad guy, or simply a trendy idol-to the serious problems that fueled and continue to fuel the Zapatista revolt.

"We said from the beginning that we didn't want power. We said: 'Salinas de Gortari has to go and be replaced by a provisional govern­ ment.' What I pointed out was that we weren't going to impose on civilian society our willingness to bear arms. We weren't going to turn the people into hostages. The government, yes, but civilian society, no."

"The fundamental point for you," asks Golden "would be, then, the composition of the Federal Electoral Institute, the Electoral Tribunal, and the electoral authorities?"

"There's another option. Let Salinas resign and a transition govern­ ment, organized according to existing electoral laws, be created. What we're saying is that the arbitrator has to be truly impartial. In other

words, there are two options: reform the Electoral Law so that someone impartial exists, or have the federal government resign and a transition government formed, and that government decides."

"And if that doesn't happen?"

"We would continue the uprising. Perhaps fighting, perhaps not."

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"What's your opinion of the candidates, Marcos? Colosio, Cuah­ temoc, Fernandez de Cevallos?"

Marcos lowers his gaze and spends a little bit longer thinking than is his custom. In general he has responded quickly, like someone returning the ball in jai alai. Now he thinks, looks straight ahead, and says apolo­

getically: "These are precisely the kinds of things that I'm still not prepared to talk about. The Committee won't allow me. The Committee tells me that when it comes to the political parties I have to be very careful.

The Committee members are very proud of having maintained their independence, at least up until now. If we begin to give opinions about

thing or another, it's going to look like the EZLN is aligned with a party. Or that it said something just to cause problems for another party.

The Committee people think that as long as we don't fully grasp who's saying what and who's offering what, we're better off saying nothing. In short: they've forbidden me to talk about it."

Tim Golden changes the subject because he's noticed the weapons leaning against the wall, and the carbine of a watchman who's kept his eyes open all night and into the dawn without blinking.

"What are those that look like AK Stoper?"- Tim is an expert-"Are they carbines or "They're AK carbines: donations from the Attorney General's Office one

"

...

and the federal army."

"And what your comrades were carrying earlier, were they Uzis or Mac 1O?" "Mac 10. It's just that we've adapted them."

"How did you get them?"

"In the United States. I think we only bought two. We got them for

around two hundred dollars. But we were only able to buy a few because North American laws are quite strict."

"But if the Mexican police go to Arizona to buy guns

" ...

"We were buying from Mexicans, it was easier. What we never could find was an arms dealer. Had we found one we'd be talking now from

the top of the Ajusco [a mountain on the outskirts of Mexico City]."

Marcos laughs. This time openly, loudly, taken aback by his own bravado. Perhaps he dreams of it but not even he believes it's possible.

The subject of weapons leads to the war. The subject of war takes hold when the pessimists' bad omens raise fears about the failure of the dialogue, which is about to begin. It seems like the dialogue's really

going to take place.

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"Who has the cease-fire helped!"

"This impasse has helped the government, giving it time to get its troops in place, gather additional intelligence, pinpoint where we are so they can hit us without touching the civilian population. All this time

has helped the government do those things."

"Have you all considered the possibility or the risk that they might undertake an extermination offensive!" asks the always formal

Hinojosa.

"Definitely. Every mid-ranking official says in eight days. And they said that four days ago. So I have four days left"-his eyebrows soar up like kites-"the federal army has us surrounded so that they can con­ front us and wipe us out. I don't think that the situation's going to

change. The only thing left is for them to advance in tanks unless something gets in the way of that. The presence of vigilante 'White Guard' forces, maybe. The large landowners who are armed-or better put, who have to re-arm because we've already relieved them of their arms. They could arm themselves again and start lashing out."

Marcos seems ready to fight them. With his crossed bandoliers, his shotgun which he's left somewhere and a strange-looking pistol tied to the right side of his belt, he looks like he's on red-alert. He's got his boots on, so to speak. Covered with mud, of course, from so many oozing, squishy trails in mountain regions and the middle of the Lacandon Jungle.

"You seem pessimistic about the dialogue, Marcos."

"The agenda isn't that important to us because in the end that, too, will be the outcome of a negotiation process. We want to speak with everyone we can. To let them know what it is we want, find out what it

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TRIQUARTERLY is that they want, and then both sides,

while standing on common

ground, will tug in their two different directions. But in the end I say: What's the government going to commit to if some kind of agreement or other is signed? How can they sign an agreement with somebody who doesn't exist?

"Nor does the peace commissioner exist in any legal sense. Who then the agreements that come out of the dialogue?

"If the federal government is really sincere about all this, it should

can guarantee

provide a legal status for the role of commissioner. Or create a commis­ sion that is specifically devoted to that."

"Is that something you would propose during the dialogue?"

"We would say: 'Fine, now what are we going to come away with

based on these agreements? Do you really want to reach an agreement, or did you just shut us in here so you could do what you were going to do anyway? If you really mean what you say, what's going to be the mechanism-for implementing this?' Because, yes, this commissioner doesn't exist."

"It looks like disarming the Zapatista army is a long-term project."

"My comrades say we've spent five hundred years waiting. We can wait another five hundred."

Marcos doesn't seem tired from having talked so much and thought so

much about what he's going to say. He's stayed still without moving

his buttocks, unlike the three journalists who can no longer find a way of being comfortable on the hard seats, and he gives the impression of

being able to keep on talking for the rest of the day, which has just started, and into the next night. His eyelids have drooped a bit, sure, because he, too, has been up all night, but he's still lively: he looks to be a sturdy one, although his face, even with the ski mask and every­ thing, looks as though it might be gaunt.

"What's the most important thing for you in the negotiations?" asks Tim Golden.

"Administrative and political autonomy for the indigenous regions."

"Explain that to us."

"My comrades say that in those communities where the majority is indigenous, they have their own way of governing, which underlies the government's way. They say: 'What the government has to do is acknowledge that our way of governing is what works. They have to respect it and not meddle in our affairs.'"

"On the community level?"

"In entire regions. What my comrades are saying is that where there

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Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Choles, Tojolobales, a system is at work like that used by the cooperative landholders. For example: they elect a per­ son to be in charge and they remove that authority figure and put in a are

whenever they feel like it. They want it to be like that. If somebody breaks the rules, they try to deal with it there, in the commu­ nity, they don't send the person elsewhere. Then the government sends in federal police and that bothers the people of the community. They say: 'Why, if we've already punished him, do you want to take him off to jail? If I have already charged him a fine, why are you guys interven­ new one

ing? You're meddling in my system of social control.'"

"That means, in this case, disregarding police authority."

"Yes, that's right. It means disregarding it. The state police shouldn't interfere.

"

"Never?"

"Only when they're called. When that same community says: 'O.K., this has gotten to be too much and I can't handle it. Take him away.'"

"For those types of changes you'll need constitutional reforms."

"It would mean revising the fourth article of the constitution so that it recognizes the existence of regions in which there are several ethnic

What my comrades are suggesting, in groups with their own system the end, is a collective government at every level. The necessity for the ....

state

governor to co-rule with a group of indigenous governors, one

governor per ethnic group."

"Is that something that's going to be proposed?"

"Yes, it will be."

"To elect a state governor and parallel Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chol,

Tojolobal governors?"

"Yes, the state governor would be the governor, but in everything

having to do with indigenous matters he would have to get the approval of the co-governor, as they're calling it. And everything hav­ ing to do with the state as a whole, would have to be agreed on by all the people."

"I understand that the concept of democracy in indigenous communi­ ties is very different from our own."

"The community agrees to something and everyone is held to it. The person who doesn't carry it out is thrown out. It's not like they say: Marcos is going to win or Felipe is going to win. They say: 'This is what the community has agreed needs to be done, who's going to see that it happens?' That's all, and if he doesn't succeed, out he goes. Every so often they get together and evaluate things: 'Was this resolution met?'

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They don't change the resolutions. They look to see if the resolutions are being carried out or not. This same type of democracy is what even, tually took hold in the Zapatista National Liberation Army. The Zapatista army wasn't born democratic, it was born a political-military organization. But as it's grown, the indigenous people's way of organiz­ ing themselves has permeated it and governs our movement, to such a degree that the leadership of the EZLN has to democratize along indigenous lines. They say: 'There are basic terms, things we've agreed on, that are nonnegotiable, where you have no leeway. Outside those basic agreements, you can try things. One of our important resolutions was to start the war, by 00:00 hours on January 1 at the latest. That, you have to do. You can start on the first of January '94 or on the 31st of December '93, but you have to start no matter what.'" [ ] "What about the human-rights people, aren't they giving you trouble?"

"Of course. Although there have been violations on the part of our comrades. Mostly verbal abuse in some places. That's what the Council on Human Rights denounced, and it was true. Our committee sent peo­ ple to investigate. And, yes. Some were intimidating people, trying to get them to join the Zapatista army. Otherwise when the soldiers came they were going to kill everyone. So our committee found them and arrested four guilty comrades. What's a lie is all that stuff about us breaking and entering and all the other things they pin on us."

All of a sudden an abrupt switch to the subject of liberation theology: "You have downplayed, intentionally or tactically, liberation theology's possible influence on the Zapatista army."

"There are no religious elements or religious structure, or religious hierarchy, either in the leadership or in the ideological orientation of the Zapatista army. That's the truth. What's happened is that in this state [Chiapas]-in short, the Church-has done some very meaningful ...

social work. And my comrades are well aware of this: that such work ran counter to

armed struggle, in spite of the fact that EI Salvador,

Nicaragua and all that were very much the trend. Everyone was saying over there, yes, but in Mexico it's not possible; what's needed is peace' ful change, with open democratic mobilization. All of the local Church's efforts were spent in support of that."

"In one way or another the Church made the communities conscious of their situation."

"No. Ever since we arrived there's been a clash. We say: Armed strug­

gle will be necessary and we have to prepare ourselves for it. They were saying: No, we have to direct our efforts to economic projects, health

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projects, those that fulfill indigenous needs."

"Does that create conflict?"

"Yes, but we let reality do its work. The comrades do their projects, they make an effort, but the State hangs them again and the death toll keeps on rising, rising. When we got here, we found that the people have no illusions about their standard of living. They don't think that

they live well or that they're poor because God wanted it that way.

Politically, the Church paved the way for this open political participa­ tion. We got here and said: you have to prepare yourselves in the other way. But we try not to meet them head on, and instead let time prove

right. Meanwhile we had to get ready, learn, it's not like anyone was giving us military advice or weapons, or anything. We had to start from scratch, learning how to stand at attention, how to salute, and all that."

"They've accused Bishop Samuel Ruiz, saying that the Church creat­ ed a favorable climate for armed struggle." us

"We who've been here know that the diocese's efforts have all been in the exact opposite direction. If no clash occurred it's because we

avoided it. We think that reality, too, educates people. And we had the Mexican state on our side in the sense that it went ahead and showed that peaceful struggle wasn't enough, that another kind was needed."

"The mediator character of the bishop."

"It's like this. The real leaders of the Zapatista army-this isn't propa­ ganda-are indigenous. They recognize that the bishop is not part of

the enemy, and they also know that he's not one of us. So when they

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be in the middle of all this so that we can talk: well, Bishop Samuel Ruiz. He's always been in the middle anyway."

say, O.K., who's going to

"How do you rate throughout this process"-joins in Tim Golden­ "the role the bishop's played? The fact that he made a forceful and immediate call for help enabled people to know the underlying causes of the uprising. Hasn't he had an important role in changing Mexican

society's view of you all?"

"The truth is, and I'm telling you what I think, that what's really changed the way society looks at us is the press. Not television-print journalists, photographers, and all the rest. It's not that the bishop doesn't see things for what they are. It's just that those same journalists and we've seen say: You see? They really are indigenous, not foreign, how they live and all. In reality the ones who brought on this change or this skepticism about what the government says, is the written press.

That's what it was. Not the government, not our weapons, not even the bishop or Peace Commissioner Camacho. It's the press. They dig and dig and start to uncover stuff and more stuff, and one of them says: wait

minute, let's see, something is going on here."

"You do have a beard, Marcos."

"What happens is that the same press, due to its own dialectical ener­ Marcos this, Marcos gy, ends up feeding and turning on itself. First:

a

that, Marcos. And now: Fucking Marcos, fucking Marcos, Marcos, how all we ever hear about is Marcos? The truth is that Marcos said nothing. The ones who made the mess were the press themselves, and come

now

they're all complaining about Marcos being the focal point. I feel

like I'm under interrogation in San Cristobal."

The light of morning is definitely upon us. It's eight o'clock. It's time to wrap this up.

"And the country, Marcos? What do you think about the country's future?"

"I'm going to give you an analogy. There's a guerrilla law having to do with the speed at which a guerrilla column moves. It says that the speed

fast as the slowest man in it. If that's the case, this country should be the same. How fast should it progress eco­ of a guerrilla column

moves as

nomically? As fast as the poorest state. In other words it's not right that one

part of the country enter the First World while another, that's us, is

destroyed."

"There can't be two Mexicos?"

"In this instance there are three because we're in the basement. Bring us Guatemala so we can start the tour."

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The subcommander of the Zapatista army stands up for the first and

only time in the whole interview. Now he does look tired just like everyone else. His knees are a little wobbly and his legs stiff. He shivers but this time it has more to do with having been up all night than the cold, which has now subsided, even outside.

One of the hooded men stretches in a comer. Others get up looking strong and ready to go to work. Oscar Hinojosa checks his tape recorder while Tim Golden hands Marcos photocopies of news articles from the

North American press. He is also given a cassette of rock music, Federico Bonasso and his group EI juguete rabioso (Rabid Toy), and

Miguel Bonasso's outstanding nonfiction book on Argentina's dirty war.

Marcos studies the cover and reads the title: Recuerdos de la muerte

(Recollections of Death). He asks with a smile: "What, are you trying to scare me?"

The three journalists leave the room that is part of a peasant con­ struction and start the difficult journey back to the present.

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Letter from Subcommander Marcos (4) La Jomada, Mexico City, April 17, 1994

Translated from the Spanish by Brandel France de Bravo

April 10, 1994 To: Mariana Moguel [a ten-year-old girl living in Mexico City] From: Insurgent Subcommander Marcos

Subcommander Mariana Moguel:

Respectful greetings and congratulations on the great strides you've made in your drawing. Let me tell you a story that perhaps one day you'll understand. It's the story of ...

TUFFSTUFF I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened to me the

other day. It's the story of a little scarab beetle who wears glasses and smokes a pipe. I met him one day when I was looking for the tobacco so I could have a smoke and couldn't find it. All of a sudden, I noticed next to

my hammock a bit of tobacco that had fallen on the floor and

made a trail. I followed it to find out where my tobacco was, and find out

who the hell had gotten a hold of it and was leaving traces of it

behind. A few meters away, behind a rock, I found a scarab sitting at a little desk, reading some papers and smoking a tiny pipe.

-Ahem, ahem-I said so that he would know I was there but he didn't pay any attention to me.

So I said to him:

-Listen you, that tobacco is mine.

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The scarab removed his glasses, looked me up and down and said

angrily: -Please, Captain, I beg you not to interrupt me. Can't you see I'm studying?

I was a bit surprised and was going to give him a kick, when I calmed down, sat beside him, and waited for him to finish studying. A little while later he gathered up his papers, put them away in his desk and, chewing on his pipe, said to me: -All right, now I'm ready. What can I do for you, Captain?

-My tobacco-I responded.

-Your tobacco?-he said to me-Would you like me to give you a bit?

I started to get pissed off but the little scarab passed me the bag of tobacco using his tiny leg and added: -Don't get angry, Captain. Understand that here you can't get tobacco

and I had to take some of yours.

I calmed down. I liked the scarab and said to him:

-Don't worry about it. I have more somewhere.

-Mmh-he answered.

-And you, what's your name ?-I asked him.

-Nebuchadnezzar-he said and went on-But my friends call me Tuffstuff. You can call me Tuffstuff, Captain.

I thanked him for his kindness and asked him what it was he was

studying.

-I'm studying neoliberalism and how it's going to sweep Latin America-he answered.

-And what's the point of a scarab studying that?-I asked him.

He replied angrily-What do you mean what's the point? I have to know how much time your struggle is going to last and whether or not you're going to win. Moreover, a scarab should make an effort to study the situation of the world in which he lives, don't you think so, Captain?

-I don't know-I told him-But why do you want to know how long our struggle is going to last and whether or not we're going to win?

-I see you haven't understood a word-he said, putting on his spec­ tacles and lighting his pipe. After blowing a mouthful of smoke he con­ tinued: -So we scarabs can know how long we're going to have to be watch­ ing out for ourselves, making sure you don't squash us with your big boots.

-Ah!-I said.

-Mmh-he said.

-And what conclusion have you drawn from your study?-I asked him.

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He took his papers from the desk and began to rifle through them. mmh-he said periodically as he reviewed his papers.

-Mrnh ...

After he finished doing this, he looked me in the eyes and said: -You're going to win.

-I already knew that-I said and added: -But how long will it take?

-A long time-he said, giving a sigh of resignation.

-I knew that, too

...

You don't know how long exactly?-I asked.

-It's impossible to say exactly. One has to take into account many

things: the objective conditions, the ripeness of subjective conditions, the correlation of forces, the crisis of imperialism, the crisis of socialism, et cetera, et cetera.

-Mmh-I said.

-What are you thinking about, Captain?

-Nothing-I answered him-Well, Mister Tuffstuff, I have to go. It's been a pleasure meeting you. Feel free to take all the tobacco you like, whenever you like ...

-Thanks, Captain. If you like, you can use the informal form of address with me-he said.

-Thanks, Tuffstuff. I'm going right this instant to give orders to my comrades that it is forbidden to step on scarabs. I hope that's some help.

-Thanks, Captain, your order would be a big help to us.

No matter what, take care because my boys are very distracted and -

don't always watch where they put their feet.

-I'll be sure to do that, Captain.

-See you later.

-See you later. Corne whenever you feel like it and we'll chat.

-I'll be sure to do that-I said, and left for the base camp offices.

That's all, Mariana, I hope to meet you in person some day and be able to trade ski masks and drawings.

I wish you well and new pens in loud colors, because, with all the ones you used, you must have run out of ink.

Insurgent Subcommander Marcos Mountains of southeast Mexico

April 1994

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Found in the Armory of a Cyclone Raul Garduno

Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons and Ambar Past

They brought the body today.

No one's here, the body said, turning its back, getting used to living.

Someone came with linen, sponge, a

jug of blood.

The wind is beating like nobody's business.

A little girl, who used to soothe cats, away when from behind a door someone coughed.

ran

Our whitish yearnings unriddle gulls in the coffin and lay down things brought by caravan beasts.

Valleys burn.

The wind is beating like nobody's business.

The house, about to tell us it's collapsing.

A vendor going by carries his chigger-silence in the dog under his hat.

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The feastlights open.

The world opens like a phenomenal invisible snout.

All the Buried Voices Jaime Sabines

All the voices buried in the enormous pantheon of the air around the earth this: are suddenly going to corne back to life to say that man is only a

fading sound-laughter, lamentation-

that pierces his own dying, just as it pierced his growing.

The skeleton of a shadow, the structure of a brief flight, the trace of a stone through waterdesire, only desire, and dreams, only dreams.

With my eyes closed I look at what I want and what I want doesn't exist.

147

,

..

.

A-·· .

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Chamula Carnival, 1994 Xunka Utz'utz'ni'

Translated from the Tzotzil into Spanish by Jan Rus Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons

Carnival did not go well this year. It was sad, because the national army had prohibited our fireworks and because they were going around saying that the Zapatistas were going to come to Carnival, the twelfth or thir­ teenth or fourteenth of February. Everybody around here said it-all the religious officials and the church elders-that the Zapatistas were going to come along with the expulsados1 of Hormiga and of Colonia Paraiso.

That they were going to come and kill all of us, at Carnival in Chamula.

That they were going to bomb us the Sunday of Carnival. That we weren't going to live. That it was going to be the end of our story. Then the church elders lit candles in the church and on every mountain, to close the road to the Zapatistas and to be able to hold the festival. They lit candles and prayed on the hill of Milpoleta, Chaklajiin, where the old people have told us there are a lot of arms inside the hill. They say that that's where the soldiers of Obregon and Pineda- went in, a long time ago, we don't know how many years ago. The hill swallowed them up and there they stayed, with their guns. Everybody knows that the hill is full of soldiers. Their flesh, their bodies, the worms finished that off long ago, or the vultures, I don't know, but the spirits are in the cave.

Even today they're there, with their guns. Spirits don't kill, anymore.

When the lightning thunders those are the guns of Obregon and Pineda

that are shooting. The spirits of the soldiers don't do anything anymore,

they don't know how to kill, anymore.

Since January, when the word came down that there were guerrillas in San Cristobal, all the Chamula people said they weren't afraid. A lie­ they were, too. To hide it, everyone said that the one who should really

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be afraid was the mayor. Well, of course, in their hearts they all knew that they too had participated in driving out the evangelicals, everyone was

afraid there would be a settling of accounts. They were also afraid

that the Zapatistas wouldn't waste time talking, that since they had

good weapons, a lot of Chamula people were going to die. What to do?

The Chamula people don't have good weapons, just .22 rifles, pistols and a few old shotguns. Hell, instead of fighting they would hide under their beds. The mayor was so scared of what his expulsado fellow citizens would do to him if they caught him that he went around for a week without being able to get it up. Better than anyone, he know what he had done. But not just him. All the other authorities were also afraid of the Zapatistas' coming. To tell the truth, the whole town was afraid.

So, since there was no other defense, the mayor went to bum candles and incense on the hilltops to ask for the protection of God and the saints. The Chamula sorcerers are strong. And the authorities and elders

of Zinacantan, Amatenango, San Miguel Mitontic and Huixtan came,

They all went to pray in Chamula, on Chaklajun hill. They thought that together they'd have the power to stop the EZLN from too.

entering any of their communities.

This is more or less what they prayed on Chaklajun: Listen, Sacred Lightning-bolt

Listen, Sacred Hill Listen, Sacred Thunder Listen, Sacred Cave We came to awaken your conscience We came to awaken your heart We want to borrow your feet

We want to borrow your hands So you will shoot your rifle So you will shoot your cannon So you will close the road for us To those sons of yours So you will close the road for us To those daughters of yours Even if they come by night Even if they come by day

Even if they come at dusk Even if they come at dawn Even if they come at midnight

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Lord.

Bring us a rifle Bring us a machete Bring us a pistol, Lord.

Don't you see that we are here,

Sacred Lightning-bolt?

Don't you see that we are here,

Sacred Thunder?

Get out your rifle for us Get out your cannon for us Great flowering San Juan Great flowering patron saint.

Sacred guardian of earth Sacred guardian of heaven.

We have come by

Huitepec hill, We have come by

Sakch'enal,

Holy Father We have come by San Cristobal hill,

Holy Mother Let them not enter your land, Great Saint.

Let their rifles grow cold

Let their cannons grow cold, Lord.

Accept this bunch of flowers Accept this offering of leaves, Lord Accept this offering of smoke Sacred Lightning-bolt Sacred Hill Sacred Cave

Holy Father of Chaklajun Holy Mother of Chaklajun So we asked the angel, the lightning bolt, since it is the lord of the cave, to fire its weapons inside the hill to close the road and not let the

Zapatistas enter Chamula during Carnival. The evangelicals of Chamula, the expulsados, let's say, also were afraid of the Zapatistas.

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Since they live in areas just outside San Cristobal, it was they who saw the Zapatistas up close and were frightened. They were afraid of the weapons of the national army, too. So they also prayed: Our Lord Jesus Christ

God Who is in Heaven

They are corning here bearing weapons They are corning bearing machetes, Lord.

Look at us See us

On your road On our path, Lord.

Don't let them hit us Don't let them torture us In our houses In our homes.

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Notes 1

expulsados: Chamula is a town of about 80,000 from which about 30,000

persons have been driven in the last ten years. The political structure involves

the persecution of those who do not support the city bosses allied with the rul­

ing political party, the PRl. Those who are driven out, the expulsados, are more often Protestant than Catholic. (And in Chamula there is both the established Catholic Church and a local splinter Catholic church, as well as protestants.)

The expulsados live in a circle of shantytowns outside the city proper. The entry of the Zapitistas into the town would have brought retaliation from the Mexican government forces, so violence was certain from several quarters.

2. Alvaro Obregon Salido and Alberto Pineda, representing the Mexican Constitutional Army that fought against Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, are

invoked by the people of Chamula as analogs of the present-day Mexican

army that seeks to suppress the EZLN.

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Family Portrait ] oaquzn Vasquez Aguilar

Translated from the Spanish by Reginald Gibbons and Ambar Past

in memory of Old Emetetio, my father

The iguanas in the mangrove swamp asked me about you the tidewater catfish asked me, too the wind and its gulls your canoe your net

Mama asked me about you

and I had to write this note and put it in the beak of the whitest heron to see if it might find you in whiteness and I lashed it to the sadness of the deepest fish to see if it might find you in some far comer of the water and I told it to the rain, to the most secret droplet, and to the most unknowable iodine of the saltflats and to the finest pleat in Mama's and my sisters' black dresses

father we're waiting for some breeze of you in the branches of the mango trees some trace of your name in the dust of the yard

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something that will tell us how you're doing don Emeterio how you're getting along there in that shining darkness on the other side of our tears

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Contributors to Voices of Chiapas

Rosario Castellanos (1925,74) was one of Mexico's foremost contem­ porary authors. A native of Chiapas, she was concerned, in her writing

and her professional work, with improving the living conditions and ethnic relations in her state. The circus and Ferris-wheel incident described in "A Letter from Rosario" inspired scenes for her first novel, The Nine Guardians (Readers International, 1992). Three collections of

Castellanos's work are available in English: A Rosario Castellanos Reader, edited by Maureen Ahern (University of Texas Press, 1988), The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos, translated by Magda Bogin (Graywolf Press, 1988), and Another Way To Be, edited and translated

by Myralyn F. Allgood (University of Georgia Press, 1990). The Spanish version of her letter translated here is published in Cartas a Ricardo, Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994, and the translation is published with the permission of Gabriel Guerra. * * * Juan Banuelos was born in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, in 1932. He has published several collections of poems, and his poetry has been translated into numerous languages. His most recent books are La gui­ azul (1980) and Donde muera la Iluvia (1992). He teaches litera, University. He is well-known as a teacher and mentor to younger poets. * * * In addition to publishing three books of short tarra

ture at Tlaxcala

stories, the Mexican writer Eraclio Zepeda has fought in the Cuban Revolution, taught Mexican literature at universities in the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, and served as a deputy for the

Unified Socialist Party of Mexico. He has also been an actor, playing a Guatemalan in the film EI Norte and twice portraying Pancho Villa.

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Tziak Tza'pat Tz'it (Diego Mendez Guzman), a Tzeltal speaker from Tenejapa, Chiapas, is the president of the Mayan theatrical and writers' collective, Sna [tz'ibajom. "X'anton and the Fox" is one of the folktales he has collected in the community. Sna's new play, By Everyone for Everyone, is a sympathetic treatment of the armed Mayan uprising of

January 1994. * * * Jaime Sabines is one of the most highly regarded poets of Mexico. Born in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, in 1926, he is the author of several books of poems, but very little of his work has been translated into English. The immediacy and emotional power of his poems, which rely heavily on colloquial idioms and terms, have intlu­ enced many younger Mexican poets. * * * Chavela Waris (Isabel Juarez Espinosa), a Tzeltal speaker from Aguacatenango, Chiapas, is one

of Mexico's leading female playwrights. She left her community at

the age of eight to study in San Cristobal, and later married a Chol man who was murdered in the peasant unrest of the 1980s. As a young wid­ owed mother, she defied Mayan tradition by becoming a founding mern­ ber of a Mayan theatrical and writers' collective, and is now the coordinator of La Fomma, a Mayan women's theatrical group based in San Cristobal. She is the author of a play entitled The Family and co­

author of another play, The Suspicious Woman. She has also published folktales and essays about contemporary Mayan women.

Ambar Past was born in the United States in 1949 and is now a Mexican citizen. For several years she worked in rural Mexico and Central America on recovering lost traditions concerning the use of natural fabric dyes, which she also taught to Indians. Past currently pro­

duces the handmade literary magazine La [icata and other graphic works in her San Cristobal de Las Casas workshop, Taller Lefiateros. Her most recent book of poems is Caracol de Tierra

(1994). She is the co-translator,

with Reginald Gibbons, of the poems included in this issue by Raul

Gardufio and Joaquin Vasquez Aguilar. * * * Efrain Bartolome was born in Ocosingo, Chiapas, in 1950. He studied psychology at the

Universidad Nacional Autonorna de Mexico, where he now teaches.

The recipient of several poetry prizes, he has created a notable body of work celebrating the flora and fauna of his native Chiapas, bringing a preservationist fervor not only to the landscape but also to traditional ways of life. His books of poems include Vivir en la cuidad (1981), Ciudad bajo el relampago (1983), Musica solar (1985) and Cuadernos contra el

angel (1987). His poem, "Monkey House," was published in English translation in TQ #85, New Writing from Mexico. * * * Vicente Lefiero was born in Guadalajara in 1933. Dramatist, fiction writer, film

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director, journalist and critic, he is the author of more than thirty works, including his autobiography.

Raul Garduno was born in 1945 in Mexico City and died in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, in 1980. He published his first poems at the age of sixteen, and his collected works were published posthumously. His last book, which he apparently finished only three days before his death, was never found. It was entitled Door About to Close, and he may have, as was his custom, pawned it for drinks in a bar. * * * Xunka Utz'utz'ni' is a Mayan T zotzil Indian. She makes fireworks in Chamula. * * * Joaquin Vasquez Aguilar, born in Cabeza de Toro, Chiapas, in 1947, was the first in his family to attend school. In Tuxtla Gutierrez, he coor­ dinated various literary workshops and collaborated on several journals.

His books include Cuerpo adentro (1978), Vertebras (1982), Cuademo perdido (1989), Erguido a penas (1991) and Antologid personal (1994).

Vasquez Aguilar died in 1993 at age 46.

Translators Cynthia Steele contributed several translations to TQ #85, New Writing from Mexico, and has completed two book-length translations, of Ines Arredondo's Underground River and Other Stories, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, and of Jose Emilio Pacheco's City of Memory. She is also the author of a critical study, Politics, Gender and the Mexican Novel, 1968-88: Beyond the Pyramid (University of Texas Press, 1992). She is currently translating Sergio Pitol's Mephisto Waltz and writing a book about Maya-ladino relations in Chiapas. * * * Brandel France de Bravo is a poet and translator who lives in Mexico City. She is a member of the Tramontane Poetry Group, an English-language writers' collective which recently published an anthology of new poetry in Mexico as selected and translated by its members, Ruido de sueiios / Noise of Dreams (Mexico City: Ediciones EI Tucan de Virginia, 1994) * * * Jan Rus is an anthropologist who lives in Los Angeles. He has been visiting and working in Chiapas for more than twenty years.

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Two Poems Hayden Carruth

The Brook

Murmuring of the brook in late summer darkness, after moonset, as I lay sleepless on the porch cot.

A music extraordinarily variable.

Each passage of water against its stone sounding a different pitch and rhythm.

It was an uncivilized music in the foothills of the mountains, continuing long beyond the endurance of a human singer, almost beyond the endurance of a human listener, syllables of unknown meaning, notes on an unknown scale. A few hazy yellow stars above the northern horizon.

Without art, the song was perfectly artistic. The unmeaning music and the unknowing listener were one in the loneliness of those distant late summer nights in Vermont.

Truly the music meant nothing, no intimation, which was why I liked it so much, my brook murmuring all night in the darkness, and I meant nothing, and I liked that too.

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What To Do Tell your mind and its agony to the white bloom of the blue plum tree, a

responding beauty

irreducible of the one earth and ground, for real.

Once a year in April in this region you may tell

for a little while.

Harry Shokler, Stonn (etching /1938)

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Shrine with Flowers w. S. Di Piero

I She squeezes sideways through the screen door, the small knobby apples slung in her apron bump her knees and thighs, five years of drought but a sort of harvest, a

gift at least, anyway

I feel it to be so when her hands open, the fruit crashing into the sink, and

her apron disappears.

2 After the chemo sessions, my neighbor's wife retreats to bed and

fear,

while across the fence he and I talk above a vagrant cavernous smell of old camphor leaves.

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But he is fingering

the plum tree graft where years ago he sheathed new bud into old stock, wedded, barked over,

toughened every season.

We'll have fruit, real sweet, he says, grinding his thumb at the splice. Really good dark black purple.

3 It's all haywire (her old letter still

sweating in my pocket I double dig a patch as per her command) as

your heart. Can't you

stop working, or "work" at

knowing yourself?

You act as if acting matters. Just stop.

Can't you let yourself not

do, for a change?

House finches doubling

down to a branch mating for life while the grinding orange poppies open

through the rusting chain- link fence that defines this ditch.

4 A sunny wind,

her eyelash

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scraping my cheek.

And familiar words housed in her breath.

Habit and talk,

petals, ice, apples, laughter tilted back

rose

scent of

in her mouth, even when she

back after visiting next door.

What do we hold comes

loosely in common?

Crows in the seedy patch.

Treetops moved by the wind.

The shivering tips of grass. so

5

Cautious, with their dainty wrestler's walk, the raccoons came for Nick's com. They also tore up some lettuce and beans. (If they find pet rabbits, they'll lift the latch, climb into the cage and crouch a while inside the cell before attacking.) So he designed and built traps, wood and steel-mesh crates with handles. The coons mocked the prototype, they stole the bait, sprung the and ran free, then tore up more garden and knocked over trapdoor the garbage. The revised design worked. While Luisa kept records of her painkillers and watched TV, bored to panic by soaps and game shows and all that scripted hilarity and dismay, Nick transported the trapped raccoons fifteen miles up into the redwoods above the skyline road where the hills start to slope down to the ocean. This way, he says, they won't come back, you don't have to kill them.

6 Roses on the table, how many days, drooping

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late March red roses left out too long for our small pleasure.

Smelling of old beer, like my first house, the blurred men home late from the taproom, who pitched like shades across the TV screen, blue men, blue vase, this cloudware cube painted with vague welkin roses, phantom blooms that last longer, rising toward the real flopped red petals, my father's pockets turned inside out.

7 "What's for dinner?" she asks.

Coon tails and tofu tirarnisu alla California. No kidding.

So we tend our cakey garden another hour, pulling weeds we

overspent our water rations

to prime last spring. A chilly fall evening, a shorter day.

The cosmos are blaring.

We sample peppery nasturtiums that melt on the tongue, while morning glories snarl the chain- link.

Why didn't we think to plant cucumbers and squash, or entreat the house finches

bring us cantaloupe?

Why dig and kill our backs to

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to cultivate these so

gauds

unlike our own flesh?

8

Clearing green trash in the backyard, I thought I'd go next door and say something to Luisa, anything, knowing that if I had to I'd just push words around, to testify or console, make small talk, make a sentence. The camphor leaves I grabbed behind the bird­ of-paradise-s-a rain mould pitted the alarmed spiky flowers­ crumbled in my gloves. The leaves were papery and dim, but that chilly odor broke from them, and then I'm in bed with pneumonia, studying the Blue Book reports on UFOs, Sid Caesar purses his lips before station break, somewhere in the house my father is bashfully drunk. Language is falling into senselessness like leaves. It has always felt like accidents of meaning, I'm recalling, the world made over in a casual coincidence of noises that are words. I held them in my crummy gloves, two seasons' leaves from the camphor trees, Luisa's cancer treatments overlapping them.

Now she's getting radiation for the pain, fusses over the wig she never wears around the house, and keeps her walker close, though most days I hear her lovely clear voice hollering out the back door: "N ick, what are you doing now?" I spent a week trying to control the blackberry. ("Do you ever hear yourself? Control.") It shot up and climbed across the pavement, up and through the chain-link, then into the rotten shed, prising under its boards and ribs and around the skinny plum trees. Blackberries so sweet after a rainy season that they hurt your teeth and make children tear their arms and faces on brambles to get at the fruit so that they can eat themselves sick.

9 "Takes one to know one," she says, while the wind grazing our bare backs lifts the roses' scent and blows it through weeds

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we're pulling like mad.

Then the grass shifts

direction, tree shadows jerk across the house, blooms knock heads.

We're looking for something, but what? Shadow of what?

"Gone with the wind, kidde." rose

10

Tonight the grass gets a dusting sort of rain that reminds me of drought.

One night last winter, I walked near the Schuylkill oilworks; the ghoulish streetlights dusted the shaggy boys I heard "G"lve it up, ass h 0 I e.I" before I saw them shuffling under the schoolyard hoop.

Their gray moonlight, tossed shades mixed in with darkness, comes back to me now, sheeting my field of view where sluggy, sun, logged, brief Pacific greens wait for winter, chilled by shadows burnt and burning cold.

-

-

11

Luisa, Italian beauty, emigrant Canada to California (wife of Nicola, union carpenter, called Marchigiani, of the Marches, emigrant 1950) attached to the morphine drip and catheter, in her conscious hours

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wants this room where she will die

spotless, tidy as the garden where the last sweet chard grows.

The mute TV wipes from face to gunfire to White House lawn.

Nick talks over the pied images to himself, stands to greet neighbors who sit an hour or so with her.

Twice he reminds me to take whatever fruit I find out back.

A few apricots past their prime.

The first figs, mostly green or purply blue like vein made flesh.

A few hard young mossy peaches,

plus leathery pomegranates, their seeds forcing through the seams as we force into her bright room crowding at her side to wait.

12 The breeze, our bedroom window, the dark, and her breath

tiding at my ear.

The leaves of the plant whose name I haven't learned stirring at that sound, the pitched lift and fall, while the moon's dense light pebbles through the leaves onto her pillow and face, writing the motion, unselfed.

Wake and tell me, tell me.

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Three Poems Heidy S teidlmayer

Lamp

Dumb lamp, silence Becomes you, muted yellow light And eyes, demure, shaded.

Let yourself be.

Light, after all, Glares. The woman

Lying there will tell you why she Lit into a man she hated.

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Cutlery Midnight, the knives throw Shadows with showy precision Through my hesitant silhouette.

Old umbrage has brought me here, Unharmed, near-missed, where The thrown blade was your own, Untoward and very fast.

Listen, all that is dark, The kiss, the thrown, Forgives each mark gone amiss, The knives notwithstanding.

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Turnstile Turnstiles add, subtract Fractions. A man halved From the hips down turns Out fine. He still feels Her chill arms lock like handlebars At his ordinary touch.

That's why he comes around.

David Bekker, Bronx Express

1930s�early 1940s) 172

(probably linocut / late

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Two Poems Gary Soto

Listening to Jets

My uncle liked the bluish rings from fighter jets And liked the roar, something like water Or his wife-my aunt-in the bathroom, All faucets running hot. I was six, maybe seven, And six or seven jets were lighting up our eyes.

They were scaring the black rags Of birds pecking at the asphalt.

I was pecking at my palm, at the blister From swinging a big-boy bat, The collar of my T-shirt yanked like a noose.

We listened to this roar, And followed the jets on the runway, The purplish lights the most mysterious color That ever splattered my eyes. This was 1961, dusk.

The heat had played with threads of our frayed anger.

Uncle had just beaten my aunt.

He would later take his beating in the driveway, My other uncles fiery as those jets.

He knew this.

He parked at the airstrip to get his strength From the purplish rings and the roar, All faucets running on this summer day When everything would come clean.

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The Tuba Player We knew a pimply suffering, And boredom, that panting dog Chained under the orange Tree. We knew two dirty jokes And a tickling joySand poured through the hour Glass of puny hands.

We knew our own boatloads Of desire. We woke To heat, struck nosebleeds From hot sleeping, Our dolphins flogged Under an anchor print Of bedsheets. Let me Admit it: Annette Funicello Perked up the interest Of even blind boys, And it was possible To peek at a pussy For a grimy quarter And three licks From a Popsicle.

Gourmet was a foreign country, We thought, and Mexico Started at the borders Of your own yard, Hubcaps cemented In our iron grille fenceA nice touch for loud people.

Winos were old clothes Come alive, and, My god, some mother's daughter At the tum of The century cried In a greasy ballroom gown.

I stopped my bike

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And wished her faith.

She was drunk, I remember, Legs splayed in front Of Let Me Out bail bonds And her crying Was so deep, the earth Was already inside her.

As I say, we knew suffering.

Lice arrived in our Hair in winter And left by late spring, Along with migratory birds.

And that spring Of 1968, before the heat Settled more fights, Our one Mexican tuba player In the marching band Threw himself from A billboard. Amigo, My dear reader with a cup of coffee, He wasn't whistling Dixie Through his front teeth When he hit.

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Two Poems Nancy Eimers

Space Life for Lynda Schraufnagel, in memory Back in our Houston neighborhood was a wall of graffiti signed at the bottom,

by Space Life, Low Life, Scared Life, Feeble Life, each poor ghost out there with its whispering spray-paint can while night crept over the firmament of the ceiling lamp and roaches went swarming away into cracks and cabinets, under the drainboard, down the drain as if they didn't want to be wished on.

I could almost hear roaches multiplying inside the walls, I could almost hear the fuzzy stars and the yellow sawhorse light blinking all night in the street to slow night down.

I'd stand in the dark and run the COLD tap never very cold, tunnel of water erasing the glass in my hand, erasing my mouth one morning I found a syringe dropped in the grass and bent to look, and not even touching it left a rubbing ...

sensation

between my finger and thumb, invisible envelope addressed to time or light or whatever dark the windows shrugged off busily between supper and midnight, one after another. I was so bad, you'd saya way you spoke, an emphasis so droll I hear it now, exactly, how you stress the so­ and I'd envy you who always got there first, envy you all the way back to a moment I cradled

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a 60s op-art

notebook, trying to figure out

if the rippling squares on the cover were coming or going while you were already doing both, you were a high-school girl already wild somewhere, each day, briefly, you were a bank teller with middle-aged women nice to you in spite of your lips' unearthly whitish gloss and the nipples budding hard beneath your limegreen minidress.

And later, in Paris, you with a lover, half,awake over coffee, lifting the cup, knowing just enough to say encore to the waitress. On the canceled ticket of that word I'd travel down our street to the steps of the Houston apartment house where I lived with my boyfriend in student-poverty, I can feel the windows across the street reserving their judgment, "Gimme Shelter" drifting out of one or maybe all of them. I remember they wouldn't quite stare at a pasty-faced man in pajama top and jeans who dragged his hips along, pushing a grocery cart of empties that rattled together like all of his bones.

When he lifted a bottle-shaped bag to his mouth I had to look away, oh lips and tongue the doors of breath and saliva­ enough! enough! a radio blares and you are gone from a Houston spring already hot as summer, each last chaste magnolia blossom is doddering open and nothing is more or less than a breath.

By the time I traveled to the broken metropolis of a Paris graveyard and saw the grave of Jim Morrison, it was only a concrete slab with Jim scratched everywhere with a scissors or bobby pin.

I swear a teenaged boy was perched there drinking wine, messenger angel bored with his immaculate message: he is not here.

The painted marble head on the tombstone was gone, toostolen.

So this boy holds out the jug; then my fingers are reaching to cradle it there in the formal wreckage, yes, this is it all right, just this, to disappear for a second between my fingers and his.

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Sometimes your voice drifts over an otherwise still afternoon, and it is the voice of J im Morrison like a droopy voluptuous flower, opening to find out if there's breath or sleep at the end of the line.

I can't even tell which window it's corning from, or which flower, I can't even scream at it to shut it up, I don't live on that street anymore.

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Old Things Each newborn pink adobe house believes its summer moon has been dead for weeks. It sends its cold light mercifully down to us in the oven-dark so each house lives until morning on a puff of refrigerated air.

Then the scorpions crawl back into their holes and the black widow spiders lay their red spots down in the dust.

My mother's knuckles used to thicken and ache when it rained but now she lives where it never rains: she and my father sit on their patio wistfully, watching for clouds to rise like cartoon thought, bubbles above the golf course.

Clouds hover over the mountains ringing the greater Phoenix,and,Scottsdale metropolitan area but don't stray much from the cities or spawn of the cities: houses backing away from an epicenter of skyscrapers, outlying cul-de-sacs, swimming pools like a handful of magic beans.

Jellied colonies lopsiding out toward Buckeye and Carefree, Squaw Peak and the Superstitions, toward the tenth year of my life and the two sprawled bodies found near the Eye of the Needle: two young men fallen out of the pockets of death on their search for the Lost Dutchman's Mine.

The evening news, I remember, got the story wrong at first­ the men were found hungry but alive, reported the anchorman, and the wives in front of their televisions heard the news.

For how many minutes, those lost men powered on joy and

reproach, oh my god you gave us such a scare! until the ringing of telephones followed us out of the past, until silence on the other end of the line was the absence of

hunger.

Until a voice spoke out of each dead mouth and told the waiting houses there is nothing out there that won't keep company with spider mites and dust. *

Was history never a series of wistful afternoons,

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figure eights and petal-stitch on curtains passing one shade on to another?

The time it takes to lick my forefinger and turn a page is almost enough for the page to have yellowed and passed from "collectible" to "antique"to have traveled the distance from what makes me feel old to what makes my parents feel old.

No distance at all from the striped barber's pole on the corner of childhood to the thought what a quaint old town!

And see how I can't help but simplify all our childhoods to a

single past?

The book I'm paging through is San Francisco's Great Disaster: A Full Account of the Recent and Terrible Destruction of Life and Property, 1906,

bought in an antique shop along with a fold-out paper fan with a two-digit phone number printed on the back under ROYAL AMBULANCE AND FUNERAL SERVICE­ let's call that bored little town that dreamed up fires and earthquakes and injury and death and warn it: save us a street here and there for the smaller

tragedies, the street signs that tell us where we are, the wooden numbers nailed to the trees and a few clapboard houses to sway like willows in the aftershock. save

save

*

Time is starting to bloom at the knuckle, this arthritic index finger of mine, this ache, this humid, used-up, gray midwestern town.

I live in a house that's older than my parents are but my grown, up brother and sister and I will be children as long as parents stand at the door of a house on the golf course edging the suburbs of anywhere.

They wave us back into the past

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where our Beatles Flip Your Wig game is new in its box and marbles bulge from a knotted argyle sock darned at heel and toe.

My favorite marble is still the blue one swirled with white

like the planet earth, my favorite toy a china JFK perched on a saltshaker chair, three holes for pepper drilled between his shoulder blades like an awful joke on time and kitsch.

My mother picks him up and shakes him over a peeled hardboiled egg then sets him back on his throne, too early, or is it already too late?

He isn't born yet and he isn't dead, tiny king of a town I barely remember. *

Once I watched a non, event on filma sticky afternoon, a black-and-white New Jersey afternoon in 1953. A child slowly pedaled his tricycle down a sidewalk

that square by square renewed itself he never got where we thought he was going.

A woman bent her body right down to the end of the world and poured an impure quiet out of a watering can.

Twice that evening, time would stop being anyone's father and mother, time would be so hungry it

so

would gorge itself the bodies of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, carve them out and leave their children dark and ravening inside.

Nothing happened to that dead New Jersey hour but a child's wondering as he pedaled nowherewhat were the ancient stains hidden under the antimacassar on on

the sofa at home, what was the darkness leaking out of every eye of the eyelet tablecloth draping the drop-leaf mahogany dining, room table.

Who'd bring a wood that dark into the world?

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Childhood must have started sometime before his parents' births and centuries after mine.

Out of its quiet streets came the end of its history.

My parents live on the edge of the desert without a past except the one they make by switching lights on and off.

Their lights are set on timers when nobody's home.

And isn't this a kind of history barging around in the dark, their dark or anyone's, made of burnt matches, dead batteries and used-up bulbs, trying, preposterously, to come up with a lighted window?

As a child, I lived in a house on a cul-de-sac with my mother and father and sister and brother.

My mother used to tell us she was sweet sixteen and I thought how sweet and long a teenage life could be.

On weekends she and my father would shop for furniture and drag us kids along to Ethan Allen or Sears.

We trailed through phony bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms and thought ourselves inside a house with invisible walls, a house so big we might never see each other again and after an hour we hoped we never would.

We'd stand at the wall of glowing doorbells wired to ring, and we'd ring and ring them with our prodding imperious fingers and drive our parents mad: boredom demanding a thousand doors to let it out.

If the doors had opened, wouldn't the neighborhoods we've invented look like the shiny pages of San Francisco's Great Disaster, the twisted streetcar tracks and the birdcage city hall and the rain of brick and plaster mingled with bone?

And the streets deserted.

Whoever it was played there before us still sleeps through town after town as the earth like an old tin locomotive rides us all down mangled tracks, past rocking skyscrapers and clapboard bungalows, the golf course and the outpost Circle K until there is no town and no jumping off.

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Fish Crows Don Stap

Another afternoon over and done with, I look up and find where nothing has been all day a

crow-rippled sky.

In the hour before dusk thousands cross to the northeast.

A few

here and there bunch up then fall apart like old anarchists

dismayed at their own

complaints,

and now and then three or four

spill away to circle unevenly

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the lake, rising and falling like charred scraps of paper above a fire. over

In the end I watch

the stragglers hard against their own self-doubt

row

which will be the final brushstroke. never sure

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These Are the Streets

Mark Solomon

These are the streets where I used to walk my rage once it woke from the kick I gave the scrap-paper bucket underneath The Big Boss Desk I had to sit behind in those days. Leaping

down the back stairs two, three at a time it pulled me, eight stories,

just to yank me back and forth between the hydrant and the lamppost.

Over there was old Police Headquarters, pistol shops out back

selling handcuffs, ammo, weighted billy clubs. Across the street, first Krasilovskv's Safes, next Karl Otto's Tool and Die, and finally Zeke the Machinist, wheels within wheels in the window spinning dizzy combinations driven by thick belts, toothed gears, all off the single, central, endless worm-screw. And there's the window on Grand and Elizabeth where I'd always find myself, no jacket in the winter drizzle, staring at the Tvshirts=-one of Mussolini, another of Sophia-staring at the long-spouted bright tin olive-oil cans, at the hand-painted cheap espresso cups, staring into the gloomy eyes of San Gennaro, the blood in its phial gone liquid again, blaspheming black Vesuvius bubbling over behind him. At the bar of The Villa Pensa I would lean on my elbows, sipping bitter coffee. I would study the twig of sugar-crystals growing in the golden Fior d'Alpi. I would bite into one of those twisted black cigars you had to cut in half, smoke circling my eyes and nostrils, shrouding my anger just enough, Montovani from the hi-fi washing up like warm surf over

soft breasts of white beaches somewhere in my mind. Jo-Jo Favale

knew how to take good care of me. The pot of coffee finished, cigar chewed through, his sweetest waiter, Pepe from Trieste, would show me to the comer table­

flowers, cold glass of water, fresh bread in a basket, cold pats of butter in a dish of ice, a steaming soup, thick with white beans and pastina.

"Just like Mama make at home," he always said. "Come, take your place, Signore.

I'll go bring some wine." I would smooth the heavy linen napkin open on my lap and bring my chair in close against the table.

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Silence and Dancing (Elektra's imperative at the end of the opera by Richard Strauss) Lisel Mueller

Silence and dancing, that's what it comes down to in the end for them, as they struggle from wheelchair to bed,

knowing nothing changes, that the poor will become even poorer and the fatuous voices on the screen will go on gabbling about another war they cannot do without.

What defense against this except silence and dancing the memory of dancing-

0, but they danced, did they ever; she danced like a devil, she'll tell you,

recalling a dress the color of sunrise, hair fluffed to seafoam, some

man's, some boy's

damp hand on her back under the music's sweet, hot assault and wildness erupting inside her like a suppressed language insisting on speaking itself through her eloquent body, a far cry from the well-groomed words on her lips.

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Two Poems Pat Mangan

F Train

several pairs of handcuffs all on chains and a staggering collection of keys his black leather jacket: that all swinging from as she glances across the aisleI'll hurt you look make her smile they touch her somehow she is now surprised to see though looking the greasy hooked, he has a flaw hand left dangling from his sleeve together and which in tiny jerks and jabs spasms in peeling back moves now to help his other the cellophane of an enormous wrapped cookie first chocolate so that she sees crumbs then vanilla crumbling under his hands whole chunks of cookie flaking onto the leather locked and stiff and the claw corning along flicking it off touching the sweet stuff

Miniature chrome tools

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Calf's Head in the Mountains Above Mexico City You strange matted thing, I parted the grass a little while ago and found you.

Your head is still wet, syruped with blood

and those green juices

thing in you is still intent on making.

some inner

There are some flies but not many, which I brush away.

They hover, now, a little ways off, watching.

Part of your tongue is gone,

and one brown beautiful eye,

half-eaten,

hangs from its socket.

A vulture hops up and down up and down

like an angry old woman.

What does he want that has not already been taken?

What do I want?

What do these ants want who leave the grass, trooping single file along the tatters of your broken windpipe?

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Prologue and Poem Agha Shahid Ali

The Blessed Word: A Prologue on Kashmir We shall meet again, in Petersburg.

-Osip Mandelstam

for Irfan

I From an untitled poem, that opening line announces heartbreak its craft: a promise like that already holds its own breaking: "We shall meet again, in Petersburg / as though we had buried the sun there." as

From Kashmir, that Vale where the Titans sought refuge, where,

just before Saturn began to speak to Thea, "There was a listening fear in her regard / As if calamity had but begun," from there: "When you leave home in the morning, you never know if you'll return." "We shall meet again, in Srinagar," I want to answer Irfan. But such a promise? I make it in Mandelstam's velvet dark, in the black velvet Void.

Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. I write on that void:

Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire, Kashmere, Cachemire, Cushmeer, Cachmiere, Casmir. Or Cauchemar in a sea of stories.

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He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar), an imaginary homeland,

filling it, closing it, shutting himself (myself) in it. For there is the blessed word with no meaning, there are flowers that will never die, roses that will never fall, a night in which Mandelstam is not afraid and needs no pass. The blessed women are still singing.

A patrol is stationed on the bridge and a car hoots like a cuckoo.

Maybe the ages will die away and the loved hands of blessed women will brush the light ashes together.

II And the night's sun there in Srinagar? Guns shoot stars into the sky, the storm of constellations night after night, the infinite that rages on. It was Id-uz-Zuha: a record of God's inability, for even He must melt sometimes, to let Ishmael be executed by the hand of his father. Srinagar was under curfew. The identity pass mayor may not have helped in the crackdown. Son after son-many never to return from the night of torture-was taken away.

III And will the blessed women rub the ashes together? Each fall they gather chinar leaves, singing what the hills have re-echoed for four hundred years, the songs of Habba Khatun, the peasant girl who became the queen. When her husband was exiled from the Valley by the Mughal king Akbar, she went among the people with her sorrow. Her grief, alive to this day, roused the people into frenzied opposition to Mughal rule. And since then Kashmir has never been free.

And will the blessed women rub the ashes together? Each fall, they sing her songs. They create their rustic fuel for winter: they set fire to the leaves, sprinkle water on them as they bum, and transform them into fragile coals.

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But the reports are true, and without song: the mass rapes in the villages, towns left in cinders, neighborhoods torched. "Power is hideous !like a barber's hands." The rubble of downtown Srinagar stares at me from the Times.

Maybe the ages will die away-we will pray in Mandelstam's night-and the loved hands of blessed women will brush the light ashes together?

IV And that blessed word with no meaning-who will utter it? What is it? Will the women pronounce it-as if scripturing the air-for the first time? Or the last?

Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city's bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out like travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void. ...

What is the blessed word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.

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The City of Daughters: A Poem About Kashmir God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

(1990) Who has flown in, pitiless, from the plains with a crystal goblet in which=-rum-darkl-che sees the world? He drinks. And cold, the rains come down. Now who will save Noah? The Ark is set aflame, launched. And God? Here,

again, why I believe in Him: He put His lips to my ear and said Nothing. Share,

then, my heart-anyone! Say farewell, cut my heart loose, row its boat without

me­

for I am leaving my world forever.

Say farewell, say farewell to the city (0 Sarajevo! 0 Srinagar!),

the Alexandria that is forever leaving.

I am running towards a barbed-wire fence and someone's running after me, shouting, Take your name away, leave us in suspense: whether you vanished? or survived? Garlands replace the twisted wires, and I break free bullets fall, roses!, off me, and in my hands, without a thread of blood, thorns bury

...

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(1991) their secrets. No, Dream, remain with the waters.

Troops pour into the City of Daughters (his goblet is taken off the mantel shelf),

and I must row the heart all by myself, I must row the heart (the world is rum-darkl), I'll row it, but not by the rainbow's arc ...

He sees the world; I'll row it by stardust, I will sink it to find you, if I must, for in this world below zero Fahrenheit it is over, the Festival of Light: From the shore through her hair blown black a

mother sees a fleet depart to sack

a

city (a drum mimes the sunset-wind:

in Iphigenia it's night and THE END

...

Will you watch as her blood soaks the altar? o too-late wind that did not save a daughter!)

...

In the mosques of the city that is leaving forever-suspended in lamps, with floating wicks of oil-vessels flare, go out. The years have come (Promise me, love, you will be there?)

(1993) when I must spend my time on every street in Hell. The Governor in his mansion rings the crystal. It is refilled. The songs in Sacredhair go out. An imperial fleet of trucks-No more water!-enters the Square.

The shops are set afire. Where are you, my love, in this world dyed orange-in one stroke mauve?

("God's secret: He put His lips to my ear

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and didn't say a thing."-Jaime Sabines), "Dear Shahid, they burned the Palladium."

There, the kiss each weekend at 7 :00 P.M. was enshrined, and we tried it, merciless to ourselves-we pulled the kiss off the screen.

Then the Angel forced us to shut our eyes when his wings red-darkened those epic skies: In A Tale of Two Cities the guillotine

did not stop falling It is a far, far better thing that I do But when the martyr went ("Why wasn't he afraid to die?" cried Caesar), smiling with each step to death, his lips ajar-

(1994) targets for a kiss!-our eyes were open.

Now when bullets vine-scatter their petals

wall, what's left but the horizon and a flame's bruised sulfur? After INTERVAL, on our

before walls burgeoned petal by petal, a cigarette was alive in a finished world.

I again smell it, the struck matchstick. It's INTERVAL: in a mansion rum-dark waters are swirled.

A cigarette was alive, and it's a finished world­ in autumn we planted its final embers.

The Ark rocked. The waters were swirled.

Troops poured into the City of Daughters.

No more water!-We again plant embers.

What's left to abolish in Lal Chowk?

Troops burn down the City of Daughters, and a tree bursts into branches of smoke.

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In his waters it's THE END. In Lal Chowk, what's left to abolish? There's no horizon now. From the tree we tear flowers of smoke, no longer targets for a kiss, but our lips open.

Note: "Interval" is the term commonly used for "Intermission" in India.

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Two Poems Debra Allbery

After Vermeer

1. Woman Holding a Balance

Still the map surprises. What's near now, what's newly distant. Nothing finds me here, no letters, none of my usual dreams.

Overcast warps through the leaded glass of our bedroom window, the morning light presses into a porcelain cup on the sill.

My husband's eyes move beneath his lids as if he were reading. Last night I dreamed him standing on a ladder in the rain, trying to clear out some leaf-clogged gutters, while below, his father muttered advice toward the ground, hand raised in an irritated benediction.

Then my husband lifted a small doll by one heel

from the eaves, brackish water draining from its joints, its open eyes.

Is it ever how we've imagined? I wake up lost, then watch the dawn's dim shadows take on weight, and the room becomes every other room where I have lived, the window any window I've looked through. Outside, the threadbare browns

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of early winter, the frost-stunned grass, tiny tremors of wind. The inanimate take on life for a moment, then are revealed: a scrap of writing paper, a discarded glove.

Sympathy-the word hung in a glass charm from a gold bracelet I wore when I was a girl.

What is mine now is only what I keep to myself­ a clutch of secrets like the tightened mass of another life inside me, a phantom fullness I can never name, a quickening.

And yet in marriage what isn't given away?

Without looking back I can see his sleep, the way the worn light finds him, darkness folding itself away like a heavy drape.

And in his dream, perhaps, is my own hand resting on the clean edge of a table.

2. Girl Asleep at a Table The inside-out of waking, my blue, lipped dream just breaking up: a banquet, your late entrance.

The guests' eyes lifting, turning a question toward me.

I saw your shadow leaning in the doorway.

You bowed to me with an absurd flourish.

Something wrong with your smile, the shape of your teeth.

This morning in Greyfriars churchyard an old man limped toward me, apologizing for his outstretched hand.

"See my head keeps bleeding," he said, "and my hands. My hands are broke."

He turned them over and over as if in wonder, his wet-dog smell roping itself around me, and I backed away-

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frightened of him, just angry

I mumbled sorry and hurried out the gates. His scent ghosting around me, rising from the cobbles. at my own wants.

I lost myself in the market, all the damp vendors and their cold flowers.

A blind man took my wrist-"You're happy today," and I couldn't answer, held by his unfixed stare.

Home now, by this fire, I can't get warm.

Still it's enough to be inside, to just sit still here at this table and lean my head against my hand, feel how it feels to lean, to rest

against something. As sleep hovers

touches, enters. Always, always, it murmurs, breath from your grave. You used to palm the word, play shell games with it. a

Now, love, it's no mystery. Close your eyes.

The room is the same inside me, then falls away.

Crosshatch, spindle. Just blind lost light.

Only my own hands holding me up.

3. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter The calm passes overhead like cloud shadow, darkens the eggshell walls.

Outside, spring's rainlight, the pale new medallions of leaves

caught in the wind's strumming.

The closer I come to my confinement the more I shawl my past around me.

Three months now he's sailed. I pull old boxes

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down, finger trinkets from my childhood­ a tiny pin shaped like a beetle, a twig in a sealed jar once filled with river water.

Its green still dusts the glass.

And in a box of letters, one stamped and addressed to my grandmother, labeled To be opened when I am grown up.

How strange to deliver this to myself

twenty-five years later-how strange to me, my own young hand. The letters

curled back into themselves, small fists, ferns still furled.

I write of a flood. Simple descriptions: The streets are like rivers. Our water isn't safe.

I can't remember why I chose to save this.

I remember the flood. Seeing my father out in it.

And the smell. The waterlogged bricks in our cellar, crumbling to the touch.

Sometimes I dream our child is buried alive.

I know where she is, but still I choose to ignore her and she's furious, down in her little pocket of earth, angry enough to claw her own escape.

Who would I tell this to. If I stand still enough the room's silence and mine create a sound

between them, the round note of a cello, a generated third.

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After the Auction of

My Grandmother's Farm My father has secretly taken up whittling.

He's hollowed a piece of pine into a box and inside I find tiny, unfinished toys­ lopsided tops, and snowflakes, small as jacks, with missing points. The wood is so soft I could press my thumbprint into it.

A long winter is coming. You can tell by the way the hogs huddle silent in their pen.

I stand on a bowed gray slat of their fence and they don't even look, their curved white backs

lined up like dim eggs in the failing

light.

In my grandmother's farmhouse an artist is at his easel. His canvases are everywhere­ all larger than himself, and all the same: paintings of a doorframe open to darkness.

The room is only doors. I walk out

past the swaybacked barn, past the mailbox.

A moonlit dog trots toward me-silvered

dust,

his eyes the color of water. And then a man

appears, my grandfather. I know him from dreams­ his smile, his slouch hat. He opens the pasture gate.

The dog bounds ahead of us, into the woods.

posted

200

�

•

• "

Harry Shokler, The Road (etching and drypoint /1935,43)

TRIQUARTERLY

The Novel Richard]ones

I For two days I've been crying, from Paris to Rome, from Rome to Palermo, weeping and sobbing here on the train over a nineteenth-century novel.

Some paragraphs are so beautiful I lean my head against the window while villages fly past like books I'll never open.

When I come to the last few sentences of an exquisitely painful chapter, I drop the novel in my lap or crush it to my chest and cover my face with my hands, trembling and shaking.

People on the train don't know what to do with me or why I rock back and forth clutching my book and sniffling.

From Paris to Rome, the French hated me for crying.

They blew smoke in my face and cursed me in their beautiful language.

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But now, along the Amalfi Coast, beside blue waters and grottos, the great hearts of the Italians

take pitythey offer me water, offer me wine.

We open the window and smoke together until I compose myself.

These are my five angelsa baker from Napoli, a nun,

young Rafael the fisherman,

and an old married couple, young lovers once, now shrunk to the size of children.

The baker from Napoli speaks for them all, asking what troubles me.

The five Italians lean forward.

For a long moment I'm silent,

looking down at the novel that is the story of my life, a secret between the author and me.

I am the hero, and though I am brave,

indefatigable, loyal, intrepid, I cannot bear to hear it all again.

My story is blessed with moments of joy, but they are brief and flicker like distant stars.

The author knows truth is always tragic.

Relentless, tireless, devoid of sympathy, he talks and talks like the heartbeat of time while I grow weaker and weaker, no

longer a hero,

but a boy again, weeping when my mother falls ill in the castle, weeping when Fabiana, my little sister, is abducted by thieves and gypsies

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and forced to dance naked before a fire in the camp of the Hussars.

The Italians are waiting.

I look up at the luggage rack, suitcases and plastic bags piled precariously over their heads.

I look out the window at blue doors and green doors of whitewashed houses built on the edges of cliffs here at the foot of the famous volcano.

When I finally lean forward, I whisper, slowly, so they will understand, "My wife died, and my child,

horribly, in an accident, in America, America,

accident in America, my wife and child, marta, marta."

The Italians lean back, an

overcome,

delighted,

crossing themselves, everyone talking at once.

My confession makes them happy, makes them hungry.

They bring out sandwiches, pears, olives, and cheese.

We feast all afternoon until sated and sleepy, until they all lean back in their worn red seats and the baker, with his hands, asks, "And now?"

I tell them I'll retreat to an island to rest,

recover, to renew my life over

again. I tell this

in broken Italian

and simple French, using only the present tense and infinitives.

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I employ words I remember from German and Spanish, I speak English when the story becomes complex and difficult though the words themselves are plain and simple.

My five angels understand best when I make wild and mysterious gestures with my hands, when I beat my fist against the coffin of my heart

fall silent, and they have only to look in my face to see how far I've corne, to see my heart is broken.

or

II As the sun goes down,

I tell them a story, make them swear never to repeat it, telling the story only in English to emphasize feeling over fact.

"I saw something very strange today in Rome," I tell them.

"I was passing the time between trains in the gardens of the Villa Borghese,

sitting on a bench, eating ice cream.

A man walked toward me down the gravel path near the stalls of the carabinieri.

Smartly dressed, handsome, he seemed carefree, tossing keys in his left hand and humming under the linden trees.

A moment later a woman rushed through the gate, running toward him, awkwardly carrying her coat as her shoulder bag bounced and knocked against her.

She was screaming; he ignored her and kept walking.

I thought perhaps that he had said something to her

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the street before entering the garden or had been forward on a crowded bus, that she came now for revenge,

on

to defend her

honor,

that he would feign innocence, swear he'd never touched her.

When the woman caught the man, she dropped her coat and bag, spun him around and beat him with her fists,

scratching his face, clawing his eyes.

And the man did nothing except close his eyes

and hold onto his broken glasses, absorbing the blows like a saint, like a martyr.

It was then I realized he loved her, she was his wife, that she too must have loved him very much to attack him this way in a public park.

She beat him until there was no good in it, until he turned away and, his back to her, began to weep.

She stepped back, yelling, hurling questions at the wall of his back.

He turned. Unable to meet her eyes,

he said something so softly only she could hear.

Then she took a step forward, wanting to hit him again, raised her fists, but fury had left her and the man walked away down the path in sorrow.

She followed, but not before she bent to pick up the keys he had dropped in the dirt,

the keys he would have forgotten

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and lost had she not been there."

I ask the Italians if they understand.

No one says a word.

Now, I tell them I will finish the story, this parable, this little novel, reminding them of their vow never to repeat it.

"The man and woman walked to the stables where they studied the horses of the carabinieri.

The proud horses-usually aloof and haughty­ returned the lovers' gaze with patient brown eyes, tossing their heads sympathetically like priests.

And though I had no right to follow the lovers with my ice cream and notebook, though the lovers' novel was written in Italian, I eavesdropped as the horses spoke, as horses in Italian novels sometimes do, forgiving the man his infidelity, the woman her inability to forgive.

The horse-priests said, La passione e difficile, and offered themselves as models of discipline.

The horses said their lives were a novel full of grain and wind and sweat.

They told of men in blue uniforms who arrive with the light each dawn to wash and brush them, bringing fresh straw.

The horses said they love each day, galloping through the woods or walking slowly by the villa's open windows so their riders can admire the lovely sculptures, the horrible Rape of Persephone, the terrible Apollo and Daphne.

The horses said they don't understand

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the human love of stories in marble and bronze.

They understand only that each day as they enter the woods with light falling through trees, with leaves under their hooves, their hearts become so full they think if they don't die right then they will surely live forever.

And when the horses fell silent and bent their heads to the sweet water flowing fresh down the long wooden trough, the lovers turned away, perhaps toward home, where they would make love, touching each other gently and with respect, then with increasing passion and need, healing one another simply with their love."

In the compartment,

the baker, nun, fisherman, and tiny old couple listen to each word, leaning forward when I whisper, nodding at a word they understand­ carabinieri, Bernini.

But I am finished talking; I will say nothing more in English.

But they don't know that yet, and watch me and wait to see if the story continues.

When I finally lower my head, open my book and continue reading, they don't wait for my tears; they argue over the meaning of my story,

yelling at one another, waving hands, interpreting, translating, revising, editing, embellishing,

digressing

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into the mystery

of lives they have observed, adding their own emotions and personal histories

if they've comprehended everything I've said and no longer need to consult me, talking among themselves now

as

as

if I had disappeared.

III

Just before midnight, take turns in the we with our toothbrushes and our washcloths.

When the coach lights go out, the nun vows to watch over me we

as I finish my book by flashlight, but she's a tired angel and falls asleep in a minute.

The old couple curl on their seats like two cats­ they're that small.

The baker snorts and snores, hands on his belly, face white as flour in the moonlight.

But Rafael, the fisherman,

is too young to sleep.

He stands outside in the corridor, admiring the moon and moonlit water,

thinking, I will tell my friends

what I heard and saw on my journey.

I will sit in my uncle's cafe and my cousin will bring wine and glasses.

We'll drink to the moon bathing the rocky coast of our village and to spells the moon casts on fish we catch in our nets at dawn.

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I will tell my friends about the strange American

and how fine it is to stay up all night admiring the moon, admiring the moonlit water.

And I will tell them how, when the entire train was dreaming except for the American hidden behind his book and flashlight I saw an old man in the next compartment sitting across from his daughter, admiring her as she slept,

tenderly, secretly watching her, biting his knuckle now and then, so astonished was he by her beauty.

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Two Poems Kate Thompson

Land Rover

I don't know where the old beast Found a spark this morning To kick her into life, But she did.

Opened her great old heart To bring us purring over Gray-velvet roads.

The land is crisp with rime, And above it A sweeping kestrel Boasts her own small warmth With all the roundness she can bring To her narrow breast.

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Teaboy It's all coming back to me, All that once mattered, The boy by the roadside Who sang at the dawn, The herring gulls taking

The crusts from my hand, A climb up a mountain, A brewing of tea, The once that was you And the once that was me.

The boy at the tea-shop Who sang at the dawn, Before I was tom Into tatters And scattered abroad At the top of a mountain, Crusts for the herring gulls,

Skyfaring scavengers, Snapping up All that you mattered, It's all coming back now, The once that was shattered And thrown from the mountain For rats which grew wings, And where is the teaboy Who sings Of a brew by the roadside Before we were born into All that was tom into Tatters and scattered And all that once mattered Is falling back down to me now.

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Tuxedo (nocturne) Charles o. Hartman

sleek light make black car body open a pool a

pearl

downtown fool anent sulfur corridor one avenue dessous that deft umbrageous moon a half kilo uncut opprobrium razor dressed cough up a waiting game simper and hunk mien a man with a mictive countenance amen and two legs a

tux

tuxedo eat lux

deluxe want a flow go easy down past a hi time stream

easy down korean uzbek mississippi shoe repair and novelty market down a tendon a brick armpit a high press bridge a bardic white gilt apse of grime go hotel glass so clean gigantic a car roll in whole glean class down block so chock with radio flock it wake cock and shake frock around you dress-a-rama fancy one video conception sweet

concepci6n 213

TRIQUARTERLY

live in a drum subscribe that dada beat in a dream go down way you undawn bundle of city news anon go down mama

tux

tuxedo eat lux

deluxe mister fist twister sit a bumper cop pose atop fender nose up a goldenest curb this urb presente hands on a chromous or chromic bastion aghast in a honte

night you trade war fancyboy and general cream idiom stand in patent skin for significant american experiment music suffisant to be felt up earlobe dotted line endwise suicide under you hood american experience par none you cagey grille cut loose a cat lick smilette

hey rat hey maze master gambado and falcade curvet and capriole up a countryside thy flank s'amuse tux

tuxedo eat lux

deluxe

quick identify one right front valve lifter from cylinder five heat up say eat up say caseload casserole he dont know dick about overhead cam he dont have clem cluelet he manque a rambunctious perspective he shine elsewhere if he shine at all he built on a sandbar he tilt-a-whirl on a handlebar he fail bail and trail one aileron

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he a main mess all piss and shoelaces he chevy nova chevy nova chop shop stoolie you say it say officer my

officer

breath offspeed knave in a blue shoot you bum diminutive of test is testicle say

tux

tuxedo eat lux

deluxe

quicksilver give us dog replevin give roach hypothecation take off this neck brick and wang warrant make us a morsel parcel cunctation a cummerbundle with no that lunch apropos a long umbilic road

timely

lex loci and his bandy boys hand sign we riding a line on a shot cuff and a shirttails mama studs and

we sense

send us to college

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TRIQUARTERLY

Two Poems William Olsen

In the Time of Blithe Astonishments

An Eastern rattler stopped its swallowing­ my tin-cut shadow abiding over its pleasantly shiny scales so close no evening vapor

could corne between them. In the pink shed of an open mouth a field mouse with its two showing paws curled up to the spiraled end of the fiddle ferns in their orchestral settlementsits rib cage a miniature bellows at work, the wind that ate the prophets stumbling through the trees draped with the huge snowflakes of spiderwebsmy teeth couldn't look away. Frogs stranded in their ring of scum,

all but their eyes hiding, letting in strawpiles of threshing-floor light, Dante's flatterers up to their teeth in shit.

I had been taking in a blue-flag, the jawbone

of a cherubthe horizon sinking upwards had clouds thrown like spittle against it.

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everything had doused the moon with gasoline and set a match to it. For the smile of the highway.

The trucks have become bottomfeeders these evenings,

snapping up the mayflies in their headlights.

I couldn't look away until

the mouse actually gripped the teeth of its punisher for its foothold in this vast instant.

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The Mist Nets In the recurrent dream I tell you in the withdrawn beeches

hurt me, our dead friend, laid out on the steel table, her breasts blue from the light of the electrocardiogram, has her sternum sawed open again and again, a gaping bear trap, the surgeon's gloved hands cradling her lungs-she'd never know her masked deliverers.

Their shadows writhe and twist upon tiled walls, as in a net.

When I stop talking about her, and I can and I can't and I can, suddenly it's summer all summer long and we're watching the scum pond where the green frogs twang, engines stamped with little red tattoos, their turret heads encased by chloroplasts, noosed tight by duckweed -that microscopic lily too small to houseboat a family of gnats­ up to their visionary eyes in scum, they have to see what they are hiding from, they have to see the faint mosquitoes.

I'm sure singular grief's like that, the starved cesspool of it, its blood-gorged prey, the way on summer nights it fucks itself into an elegiac frenzy.

And each new moment blows against the mist nets leaves and birds caught upside down or sideways for whom the world goes awry and trees leaf downward into blue-three cedar waxwings, three toffee-colored shuttlecocks so staid they seem dreamed up along with this net too close to being nothing.

There in the hammock of invention slung across eternity, in the shifting yet not shifting veil of want weaved of strands of forgetfulness, their wings won't open, they creak a little, like stuck doors-next to nothing in you puts a hand to the marges of a pool and now you have no face down there below our feet, below our sleep and our insomnia.

I don't believe in angels, trying to write about the underworld is like trying to write about writinghow can you when it shouldn't be this way, this isn't the morning the faithful dreamed of, rubbish sunlight piled up everywhere, so it can't

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this isn't heaven and these aren't cherubs but three wedge-head waxwings their heads because

cocking

every unintelligible and every awkward gaff and miscalculation strains against made more fast

entanglement

consenting to nothing, not even the snares of our

by hope,

unfathomable care.

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The Arrangement Greg Kuzma

We had to do it only this way.

Somehow it came to pass, somehow I was in the room, where the crib in the corner sat. This is my one strong memory of him as a child. And it was Friday night, or Saturday. I had this infatuation, for Pepsi or Coke and Wise potato chips in a bowl, which carried still, even at 9:30, the smell of onions and the smell of vinegar. Why did I not object? I didn't. Nobody did.

We were like zombies, or robots, like the robot on TV I watched on a

Saturday morning that kept coming on, and could not be called back,

the hero pressed against the bars.

It was the fifties, 1954 or '55.

Out in the back drive we had my Dad's green '49 Chevy, with the visor and the wide whitewalls Dad scrubbed every week to make them shine. The arrangement was simple. We would both go to bed at the same time, I remember the

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hall light being turned off, and then I would begin my vigil.

Lying there in the dark, my brother in his crib, lying there, not speaking-Did he even know how to

speak?-lying there, calming

my breathing so I might hear

sound of it the sound of his. I could not go down, stairs until he was asleep--could not watch TV with Mom and Dad until Jeff was out for the night.

And every second waiting in the dark was missing somethingmy heart pounded in nervousness.

My favorite shows were Paladin and Gunsmoke. I think Paladin was on first. I remember the loud drumbeat or sudden crash of music when he presented his card-"Wire PaladinSan Francisco"-I think it said, and wondered if his first name was Wire. Did we ever hear his name? He had an imperious air. A cultivated style.

Among the gangsters of the cowboy towns he seemed the only gentleman, the only one who had been to school, and could quote famous authors, as I was learning to do, and was kindly toward women when all the bad guys grabbed them and carried them off screaming. He had a black horse, I think, and was dressed all in black, with a hard black hat with a cord under his chin. Did he wear it back on his shoulders some time?I cannot remember, and carried over the

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a

tiny derringer which always

saved the day. I think I got a cap-gun model of it-did we sell it at my Dad's auction last summer ?-was that what it was-and why it looked familiar ?-and he always won.

To draw on the bad guys, no matter how many, and shoot them all, while drums pounded, announcing the finality of it all, and how it was right, as if the heavens themselves thundered, then say goodbye to the innocent and true school teacher, and the fresh-faced kid I knew I was like, in a town that did not exist. He was always leaving at the end of the show, to get back and be ready for the next grand foray, the next episode, in a West that never existed. Spouting poetry, on a set that always looked the same but different too, how I never tired of his eloquence. And sat there in the dark with my eloquent father, eating greasy and salty chips, staring at the screen. We never argued with the show, never disagreed with the outcome.

Never wasted a bit of sympathy on anybody shot. If you were shot you were out, one bullet off in your direction and you sprawled off your horse and went down in the dust. There was no blood. Nobody was ever grievously wounded or twitching. The dead

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died quick and went numb, like putting nails into boards in my father's shop, a neatness, a completion, without remorse, without error. Paladin never shot the wrong man, or overreacted, or failed to see the extent of the problem. Whatever needed to be done, he was there, a great abundance of intelligence and justice. Upstairs, in the dark of my brother's room, it was not so easy. We lay there together like two men playing dead, trying to outsmart the other.

Hoping the upstairs clock would move fast, and he-with nothing in his head-he was only two or three-would fade out quickly, while I with my wild plan, could lie there half the night holding my breath. And then, gently, as if almost in time with my breathing, I would draw back the covers and slip out.

I would stand by the bed, afraid he had heard me, then tiptoe out the door and down the hall.

Emboldened if he did not call, I would pick up the pace, to meet the stair

top and their

treachery. Each step on the way down bore unseen terrors.

Each one was loose and creaked, but you could walk on them if you could land just right, or if releasing a creak, stand there a minute or two, to represent the natural settling of the house, night sounds we

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all gloss over. Did I ever make it down without Jeff calling?

Hearing the TV sounds, so busy in the living room, though there was only Mom and Dad, it seemed a wondrous party was taking place.

Poised as I was between two worlds, drawn on by the promise of gunplay and music, while also asleep in that room with my

brother, blending my breathing with his. Trying to imagine what I would do if he called out, how I would make my way back, what I would say. My usual story was something like I had to go to the bathroom, and I would make a great to-do of rattling doorknobs, peeing and flushing loudly, so that he might be reassured. Then, to return to my bed, to begin over. On nights when I was almost down, sometimes I'd hear the music of my shows, and know they were on, would lie there in exquisite pain, feeling them slip away, their whole vast logic and mission, which I was now missing. And would have to do without them for another week. A whole long week to be gotten throughand was it possible?-before I would have another chance.

Sometimes I made it all the way down, and would be welcomed, like some hero for my exploits, hogging the chips in the salad bowl, hearing the fizz of my Pepsi pour over ice, and pull

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my feet in slipper socks or

feet pajamas up with me together on the couch, before Jeff would appear in his sleeper with feet, rubbing his eyes.

What a wonderful blend of emotions that was-surprise, and joy to see the

sleeping son, emergent from the dark-I see him grabbed by my father and hugged to him, embarrassment mixed in, to be so caught, with me among the adults, and would have to go back with the tips of my fingers greasy, back to the ruse again, the long struggle. I don't remember it well, cannot remember how the process changed, how the terms evolved. He had only to catch me once, downstairs, in the living room, to puncture the myth, and so would lie there coiled and cocked all night like the hammer of a gun, waiting for me to make my move. And so it came to pass that Father installed a lid on Jeff's crib.

How then he could not get out, even though he knew, and so could lie there half the night and kick the lid with all his might.

I don't remember it, and I am ashamed to talk of it, but it was the fifties, and we were without help. No Wire Paladin or Matt Dillon came to our rescue.

Our nights were just as dark, problems just as tough to solve. My father found it easy to cut the board, a big

our

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piece of paneling, which slipped inside the crib, and leather

thongs put through holes he drilled, to tie on the slatted sides.

Maybe he even installed grommets to keep the thongs from breaking How it took to through. long us bring to this point I never knew. Or whether I ever pretended again. I think I did-to lie down with Jeff in his roomand hope he would go to sleep, but then arising to sneak out.

Did it ever matter that he might suppose I was still there?

Or did I just gather myself up and walk out, maybe even telling him "Good luck." And then the kicking would start. He would lie on his back and kick the lid.

His feet could just reach the panel if he stretched. I never saw him do it. Presumably he kicked and cried until, cried out, exhausted, he fell asleep.

Maybe father or mother would go up later and remove the lid, brush his wet hair from his face.

It was just this week I thought of this. It came to me suddenly driving to school. I don't know why. Jeff died. At twenty-five.

It's fifteen years now since his death. He lies on his back in a cemetery a few miles from our house. If he cries out, no one can hear. Our father lies beside him in the dark.

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Recovery Robert Phillips

I looked for it in fusty antique shops­

perhaps it lay on some dust-covered shelf between the Delft and a Waterford shoe?

I looked for it at garage and bam sales­ among Kelvinators, black-velvet Elvises,

lava lamps, condensed books, and Tupperware.

Looked into "Personals" and "Romance" columns of local tabloids-all those heart-cries, the lost begging to be found. No connection.

Each February I looked in Hallmark stores­ among red racks of disheartening filigree, serious and not-so-funny valentines.

I looked in flea markets, The Salvation Army,

"Gentlemen's Resale," orthopedic centers with prosthetic devices and spare parts.

I looked in hospitals, morgues, in stainless,

steel drawers on silent casters. I held its doll-size brothers and sisters-never it.

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Now I cruise butcher shops-heavy gobbets of meat on hooks-livers, kidneys, lungs, all dripping blood like so many rabid dogs.

I gave it away to you-but like an unwanted C.O.D. package you refused to accept.

It was only my heart, my heart, my heart ...

Harry Francis Mack, Arc Welder (etching and aquatint /

228

1935�43)

TRIQUARTERLY

The Bronx, 1942 Linda Pastan

When I told him to "shut up," my father slammed the brakes and left me like a parcel in the car

punish me he said for lack of respect, though what he always feared was lack of love.

I know now just how long on a strange street, to

forgiveness can take and that it can be harder than respect, or even love. My father stayed angry for a week. But I still remember the gritty color of the sky through that windshield and how, like a parcel, I started to come apart.

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Two Poems Patricia Goedicke

In the Long Run Like Governments

Flattened,

in thin snow spread out

before us

the field cracks of photographs

like a book black on white

the two women walking where it opens up the spine

the path

slashed either side stands of pine, deep on

rifles whistling their black songs

the wind's

bayonets at the women's backs Someone should cry out to them Stop

Be careful where you step

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TRIQUARTERL Y

but who listens not chipmunks from the trees screeching at them not

eagles

imperial

murderers on their columns of tall air

wavering in the long run collapsing like governments who cares

who tracks up which field the glass footprints of deer like human beings

flung out over vast wastes of snow like stars

wind rakes through their fur and our hair

the black letters of geese like pages of typescript

disappear

where the women walk the valley

everywhere saying to each other what who speaks

bald

eagles vanishing or trees

on

either side

once thick

firs now

fallen

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TR1QUARTERLY

ranks broken, crumpled armies lying in the snow

cigarettes spilled from a pack no one can or put

232

back

pick up

TRIQUARTERLY

What Love Does ("With Tear Floods and Sigh Tempests") ..

..

Fused together. After years and years of it, mostly the two legs of the one couple move easily, the rickety stick figure teeters on its tall stilts giraffe-like, gracefully gangling almost without thinking about it but sometimes Out of nowhere, at cross-eyed "dull sublunary purposes" or just for no reason, suddenly

the opposite legs begin walking straight into it, Ambush first one yells then the other, black expletives staccato, explode across the room like bullets, 0, 0, it's your fault,

all I did was, I can't stand it, hoarsely the one shouts, red-faced, then the other's knees crumple in the blast, screaming

straight fall to a floor bristling with fangs, hackles, flames it always feels like, though there's nothing physical about it but emotional

blows, bags of salt, thieves' blackjacks pounding over and over, sock, sock on the shoulders, on the head, but how, * * *

This is all so tiny and so Huge:

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Holocaust, egg of the world smashed in one person's gut, listen all I want is Justice, pure and simple, that's Right, isn't it? So now, trembles. Roars. Water

like toilets from red eyes. Wail. Wail.

Where no one can see.

In the closet, the clotted stomach of the most private, personal stone mansion or

duplex

crammed with nightmares, behind blinds in muffled television sets muttering is where it happens,

what, is this adult behavior or is it war is the only question worth asking, here balancing on the brink * * *

disgusting! Because each of us knows finally not to betray, kick the props out from under anyone, least of all hope's

double-jointed, stiff tall clown with legs and toes we know not to step on

but do anyway, all over each other's most intimate territory, don't hurt me! o when did this first begin? Slow, seeping how could we not notice it, the rot

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TRIQUARTERLY

in every faucet, urine green, suffocating

the whole household, yes of course we noticed them, the snide barbs, the lies, the sullen omissions

but never spoke of them, it's possible some of us even wanted it, now, here Definitive!

The bomb sharp! at the end of the world going off, the monster bear reared up on its hind legs with claws, with red slavering tongue over the entire city, refrigerator in one paw, in skyscraper the other, with swollen outraged cheeks stomps out the back door, good, good, 0 sweet * * *

riddance, parting is such delicious sorrow, at last finally I can give up, fall down in the shambles I really am, as misery sweeps us away

helpless, I swear it, blameless before that beast I live beside, hating

what I used to love, 0 but it's so terrifying to be two, first one then the other weeps, shivers, then both run back into their own forested

kitchen, bedroom, caged circus animals that cower, snarling

and furiously whimpering, rivers pour down the face as the house

quakes, jackhammers apart into two poles staring across chasms,

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TRIQUARTERLY

the bridge between them ruptures, heaves upwards in great concrete slabs, jagged

thoughts, wishes, legs broken like match sticks!

Sob, groan, snivel, * * *

behind closed doors they wallow but still need someone to listen to them, just see how you made me suffer!

Each wants to say, now you're through with me I'm nothing but a hole in the side of the house left by a crashed airplane, chairs, tables, even the cradle crushed .

into blackened bread crumbs but next, churning among the ashes, in charred emptiness dead-ended, first one of them, then the other starts to wonder is it possible the other's pain is as bad as mine is? Out here in the cinders shivering,

red-nosed, on one foot about to topple-O let it not be too late, everyone needs two legs at least, Please, come back* * *

and slowly, heavily, the other one does! at Literally, the very door of the getaway car heads homeward, over the collapsing bridge, with humble soft feet on the stairs, what's this

gentle knocking, I'll pretend not to notice, why should I,

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TRIQUARTERLY

here huddled with my own wrinkled sour

apples I tell you

Get Out of Here but you won't,

give you an inch and it's Love me Love my camel, with sly

curly eyelashes sneaking through the clogged familiar keyhole, with tender breath, with whispers stroking across deserts, smoothly the bare bones of justice, what's Right chewed like an old shoe and useless but who cares, over

* * *

What happens now unfolds,

expands among the rubble as the squeezed bud unfurls, scraps of petaled red flesh, heartspring, begin to breathe again beneath guard hairs bristled

only to protect the hungry pet, the wild animal inside everyone the raving irreducible I that finally wants -see

now-only the hushing hand, the heat of it, how like the thick fur of a coat in winter the I'm Sorries, the tame bear, the Please

let me bring you water, dry your eyes by the one fire relax once more in the soft, soon-to-be-pulling-apart rough arms and straining legs of the other.

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TRIQUARTERLY

Blacker than Ever Gerald Stern

You should know this, who live in your own decade, I never darkened mine nor took excessive pity on my own life even though it was as black as one of yours, and loved its Kathe Kollwitz and its Paula Modersohn- Becker with a dead tulip in one hand and a piece of cracked porcelain in the other.

I didn't sleep through the fifties-nobody did; I lived on a hall in New York City and ate from two white plates; I listened to Ralph Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn's Fourth and all of Vivaldi; I traveled three times, I think, from Hoboken to Antwerp and read my Auden and read my Roethke and stood on the comer of Twelfth and Market in Philadelphia in 1956 and pleaded for Stevenson and studied medieval Latin-you should try that combination, or one of your own.

For the record I'll say that I was standing inside the front door of the Tyler Art School in 1961 when Ad Reinhardt walked through to

spread a little bitterness. He was wearing

a black beret, as I recall, and a black 'Tshirt and a black gabardine suit coat.

I was in exile at Tyler for wearing corduroys

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TRIQUARTERLY

and for comparing Creon to Kennedy.

I was the one-man English department and railed freely from my Beckett and Stein. I taught the Downfall and I taught the Jubilation.

I loved the smell of turpentine above all things; I ate with the models and helped one buy a 1953 Studebaker. We kissed behind the malachite gearshift and we ate foot, long poisonous hoagies. I sleepwalked in front of City Hall against the president during the little war with Cuba and stared in agony at my few humiliated friends shuffling back and forth on the mayor's sidewalk.

As far as the WPA, I was too young by ten years for the eighty-seven dollars a month, but I was not too young to wander between the two great schools of Union and Columbus, nor was I too young to walk down Fourth Street buying bags of books. My grandmother's husband Jacobson died on his knees in Homestead climbing a hill

with herring and chicken in his arms; the arteries were still in darkness then. My uncle Simon lived-after his attack-for twenty-seven years; he was so small, my uncle, he wore boy's clothing. He was rich in the twenties, he drove a Pierce, Arrow-I remember the headlights rested on the fenders like breasts-but he was a failure most of his life, and bitter. In the thirties, the bitter thirties, he went from door to door collecting dimes for Metropolitan Life or sat in his living room reading Emerson. Late in his life-in his sixties I think-he worked as a salesman for Robert Hall, in downtown Detroit. I think it was Cadillac Square. He was vice president of the local. In his eighties we sat on a sofa in Miami Beach looking at the scrapbook of photos and clippings, he and Soapy Williams, he and Humphrey-in Atlantic City-at the annual meeting; he was the smallest of the small

239

TRIQUARTERL Y at the head

table, and smiling the hardest. He sat

beside me in Beth Raphael crying, because we were strangers there, because he was dying, because we were mayflies, because we burst from the water.

Reinhardt died in his studio, he dropped down beside a wooden easel; he was painting something blacker than black-I wish I knew the history better. I was probably swimming the day he died. If it was in the morning I could have been on the way to the pond; if it was late afternoon I could have been half-sleeping either inside the cabin or in the grass half-listening to a song. I grieve for his death as if I just discovered it; he would be seventy, nine if he were still living; on Christmas he would be eighty. Christmas Eve. There is a flattened spider in my book, between the color plates and the chronology-there would be of course; her legs are facing left; her body is shaped like a bow tie; she is more brown than black, maybe it is the blood. I'm sure she thought Reinhardt was like a brother, I'm sure she thought that I would love it, but Reinhardt is more like a bee than a spider, more like a wasp. Imagine him eating away at his own nest, just imagine a huge broom, his soul like five hundred insects fighting the broom. Reinhardt believed, I think, in annihilation-he was ruthless-his blackness was and was not a blackness; I know that myself; but I have different rules; for example, I do love color, I do love light, I have a yearning for form, I love to sketch, that is, I love the hand as well as the mind; and I can't remain aloof, and I can't disappear, and I can't absolve myself by draining my life of oil the way he did; and I am opposed to monotony and timelessness-and even detachment; at least I am a little worried. I guess his purity is what I resist. But we were heartless the same way,

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TRIQUARTERLY

and we were thorns, and we loved gloom and believed in clarity. I wish we could sit and talk.

In 1967, the year he died, I reversed my life; there had to be some wandering there and if not I'll claim it anyhow: I'll sit at my dining-room table invoking his touchy spirit. There is a quail I use, a painted clay, with startled eyes, and there is a fish named I van Carp who reads my poems and criticizes them; he is a fish beyond all fishes and he swims passionately at my table, beside the quail, a carved pine with cones glued on for scales, made by a sculptor in Pennsylvania-he put a touch of red in the tail-it actually swims; and when it comes to my journey he knows it so well I can consult with him on the turns I took inside the muddy roots and through the grasses, although he is loth to talk about the future or give me much advice. "We are swimming," he says, "into the ocean, be careful, the water is clean here, you are exposed, you will starve." It is a paltry allegory, he is crude and simple, being made of wood. I think Paula Modersohn was a carp and Reinhardt was a kind of carp although for the one the agony of her life slipped into the art, or was the art; and for the other he hated that kind of agony-"Art comes only from art," is what he said. "Any meaning demeans the beauty"; and above all else he hated images. The place of his agonyI think I could describe it if I had to, if I were going to do it. For my own the carp says, "quiet, root in the mud, feed yourself at the bottom, lie in the sun, swim, just swim." For me it wasn't his blackness and it wasn't hers; I had my own just sitting beside my uncle or leading my students down the steps of the gallery at Tyler. While I was singing,

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TRIQUARTERLY

while I was being heartless, I also was doing something else, the thing I try to explain as I am sitting in an armchair or standing in front of a birch tree. I do it constantly, and understand it-as I should. I'll say at least this much: the quail, when she whistles, and when she looks at the chandelier with one eye and the red carp with the other she understands too. My uncle Simon, named for God knows what, named for a high priest, named for a slave; poor Simon, who carried a cross, who shone in the Beth Raphael, he understood. It was his knowledge. Waking up, drinking my tea, haranguing, that was mine.

Blanche Grambs, Mill (aquatint and roulette / 1935,43)

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TRIQUARTERLY

Poetry Slam?

William Harper

I got the poems baby!

they're not real poems

...

I got poems about spacemen

coffee shops that young cliche that turns tricks on the Harold Washington Library up top I got poems on gun control on

gangbangin' fisting a black man for coke money

on

on

South Miami Beach

I got raped poems I got away poems

they didn't bust me when I was holdin' poems I got dreams of opium poems I got dirty AIDS

needle-swapping death of a junkie-poet poems I got up and wrote one down when we found it on my futon with Coltrane and all that LSD but you burned that one so I wrote it back to life-poems?

I got my poems I got you poems I got French existential dementia let's all whine till the end of time poems

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TRIQUARTERLY

poems about famine poems about hieroglyphs poems without purpose

that rhyme ones that make you wretch ones that make you scratch your head,lice metaphor poems about people that barely exist ones

beyond poems I sometimes read poems not for the sake of poetry poems but to fill us all up narcissistic poems need to be heard poems need to be loved poems need to get off poems need to quit writing poems need to get a real job poems that could actually change things poems about giving up all the things that are

dying poems crying poems if I could just write the one that hasn't been written yet poems fuck this poem fuck you poems I know you like it when I make you do it poems blame it all on me poems escape from your problems poems I told your mother I'd be writing all about it poems or your dominant father made you do it poems you better wipe that idea off your page and don't tell a soul poems cuz I saw it all poems I know it all poems I got the poems baby, every one

plagiarized memorized

baptized circumcised close your eyes baby it only takes ten minutes to write one trust me, who's next?

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TRIQUARTERLY

The Naked Truth About Women Diane Rosenblum

The Naked Truth About Women is a critique of the visual portrayal of women are

in our culture. In contrast to a history of images of women that

about the creation of desire, The Naked Truth aims to present women

they see themselves. In these photographs, no attempt is made to fit into a standard of beauty. Instead, the range of American women is represented, along with their views in the accompanying as

women

texts.

Photographs are irrefutable. Susan Sontag wrote, "Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality." Photographs define standards of female appearance and behavior. If power is the abil­

ity to define reality, and make others act in accordance with your defini­ tion, then the visual media of America wield great power. The Naked Truth takes that power back.

A woman's flesh is mutable. Flesh is sliced and tucked, firmed up, trimmed down, or let go. Female bodies are shaped to look like pho­ tographs. Photographs of fashion models and movie stars, being

irrefutable, define a norm for the female body which has nothing to do with the realities of the female body. Yet this false norm has a huge

impact on the ways women perceive themselves. Eating disorders, cos' metic surgery, and the billion, dollar beauty industry reveal the toll these images take.

The subjects in The Naked Truth About Women are the women around me-my friends, my colleagues, the women in the locker room at the

swimming pool, the women I pass as I walk down the street. They are

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TRIQUARTERLY

the range of American women, in their various colors, ages and sizes, and they are particular individuals, photographed in their own environ­ ments, speaking in their own voices. The statements which accompany

the photographs are excerpts from taped interviews with the women on issues surrounding beauty and body image. I ask such questions as: What would you like to change about your body?

What is a beautiful woman?

Why did you want to be photographed?

What sorts of bodies do you admire?

These photographs are portraits. While shooting, I give the subject very little direction. I try to let the subject be herself. I listen more than

talk. I am not the glamor photographer who says, "Yes, baby, oh, that's beautiful, that's it, now tum you head a little to the left, gorgeous." The more

I listen to the subjects, the better the pictures tum out.

When I photographed Elizabeth Lesley, I insisted that she sit still for many long exposures. I worked hard to make a picture I had in mind. I ignored her comments about being a dancer and defining herself in motion. When there were only four sheets of film left, I asked if there any shots she wanted to take. The final four frames of her jumping the best. I had wrongly forced her into my concept of her portrait.

I'm interested to know what women look like under their clothes, what they think about, how they construct meaning in their lives. The

were

were

camera

is an excuse, a passport inside their lives.

Most of the women were concerned about their weight. The older have come to terms with their bodies more than the younger

women

women.

They have grown more comfortable in their own skins.

Many women I asked refused to participate in The Naked Truth, even though they agreed with the premise of the project. Their reasons for refusing were shyness, discomfort with their bodies, and fear of what others might think.

Some of the subjects told me that they found participating in The Naked Truth liberating. Giggy said it was hard to do, although it shouldn't be. Many of them, when they saw their photographs, said, "That's me."

Some viewers have strong reactions to The Naked Truth About Women.

During an exhibition at Duke University, the following comments were written in the blank book in the gallery:

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TRIQUARTERLY

Thank you! These women expressed what 1 find so difficult to myself pride, dignity, a self respect that is taken away by constant objectifica­ tion and degradation-like 1 was standing here and an older man came by and said, "I like Playboy a lot better"-I almost hit him. Someday 1 would like to feel the kind of self-awareness that these women have expressed. Your photographs make me look forward to growing old.

Incredible!-D.S. 1 only hope you would have the decency as an artist to restrain from showing these pictures in public and further contributing to the moral

degeneration of the university students, who look to you as their libera­ tor (see comments by other students) and spokeswoman.-Timothy Stoneman, Class of 1982 This is an issue that troubles me every time 1 stand in line in a super' market and see the magazines on display. What are we, as men, expect,

ing? It's no wonder that underhanded misogyny is still alive and well.

Men expect something that doesn't exist from women. And when they don't get it, they're pissed. Thanks, and well done.-David E. McCarty, Duke Med '97

The Naked Truth About Women presents the reality of the female form, and in doing so refutes many commonly held assumptions. The pho­

tographs and interviews open up dialogues about issues of representation and the meaning behind the cultural emphasis on female beauty.

247

Christine White

I'm not particularly happy with the body I have. I would very much like to

have the body I had twelve years ago. But I have what I have now,

and it's not that big of an issue for me to change what I have now. I know I can get back there, but it's not that big of an issue. It's not in the forefront. There's other things that I want to deal with right now, as

opposed to my physical attributes. Which are all in perfectly good work­ ing order, there's just a lot of them.

I told Diane that the reason why she made me feel comfortable was

because I knew she wasn't taking pictures of me because she wanted to fuck me.

248

Julie Swenson Petras

I feel that I'm less intelligent in this project or somehow less deep because I accept my body and I've never really had a major problem

with it. You know it just seems like it would be far more interesting if I

had, you know, a real problem that had obsessed or haunted me my whole life.

250

·

...

.

"'.. ..

Angela

I've never hated my body, I've just hated what I've done to my body.

I've been overweight and attracted quite a few guys. I used to go out par­

tying with my friends, and they were all skinny, but a lot of it was per­

sonality too. You can walk into a room and if you don't light up, nobody is going to notice you, whether you're thin or not. It's just how you view life and your confidence level, you know, it's as simple as that.

252

•

_-

Hilary Hanft

Generally speaking I think that we live in a society that is way over­ obsessed with physical beauty, and I think that bodies are pretty beauti­ ful in and of themselves, but they are not the be-all and end-all of the world. I think the idea that you have to have a certain body type in order to be accepted or loved or even liked is a disgusting idea, a disgust­ ing concept. I think I'm too heavy, although I try not to dwell on it. My attitude is that either I should do something about it, or forget about it, one of the two, and not denigrate myself for being something, for not liking something about myself.

I just think of myself as being a normal woman, this is what one is, with­ out any

pretensions, without any major obsessions, or major psychologi­

cal problems.

254

Patricia

When it got near the end of our marriage I finally got to the point where I told him, "I don't want to sleep with you anymore, at all." He told me, "I have a piece of paper that says that you have to sleep with

me," and I said, "You can relieve yourself." And he told me that was against his religion. I said, "Well if it's against your religion to do that, I find it amazing that it's O.K. for you to use my body to masturbate, and that's O.K. with your religion. If I'm not willing, all you're doing is mas'

turbating on my body."

Finding out that I can be happy with another person in bed was a great experience for me, because all my life I thought there was something wrong with me. I was really afraid the first time I made love with some' body besides my husband, because if it would have been an awful experi­ ence, I don't think I would have ever made love to anybody again.

Well, the problem turned out to be my husband's. It was always felt like going to war and then at the end being very alone

.

.

.

...

it

feeling

very lonely afterwards just lying there and not really feeling like we did

something together.

256

, ,

roo

'

, ,,,., J

.,... '*

Jane Andrews, Jessie Morss and Grace Huffman

Sometimes it seems that the physical beauty of other humans is not as

important as that intangible attraction, a glow, a serenity that exudes

...

Just like Mother Teresa. She certainly hasn't ever been a pretty woman.

I've seen pictures of her. What is coming out of her is so extraordinary.

So you think she's beautiful?

It's a different kind of beautiful. It's not just

...

You mean it is the spirit.

Yes it is the spirit. Yes it is the spirit coming through.

258

•

•

Anne Curo

I am fifty-four years old, and my image of my body has been

changing along with the physical changes that have taken place over the years. I no longer look upon it as an object, but rather as a process. When I was the young, process was growth, maturation and reproduction. Now it is deterioration and decay, with death as the natural outcome. The task, at this stage of my life, is to come to terms with the mortality of the body.

260

Robin Thorne

Beauty and black women. I think those of us who constantly want to assimilate or compare with other races-mainly with white women­ that you just can't do that. When we were brought here as slaves, we were told that we were worthless, that we were ugly, that we were too dark, our lips were too big, our butts were too big, our hips were too big, and our hair was too kinky. That whole attitude was reinforced through­ out generations to the point where you have hairstyles like the "konk" and pressing your hair to take that kink out. But if we just look at our­

selves and stop comparing ourselves to other people, then just really,

really, look at our skin, our hair, at everything, then we will really begin to appreciate. We should not look through someone else's eyes for beauty, we should look through our own.

262

Giggy

I've always felt kind of casual about my body, never anxious about it. I think that was largely due to the fact that my husband loved me very

much.

I'm always grateful to my body for having been mostly healthy, and for

having not given out when the cancer hit me. And I was very grateful for the techniques of my surgeons, both the first one and the reconstruc­ tion surgeon, for giving me back a sense of myself, although it's differ­ ent, of course. I didn't feel like a complete weirdo, which I had when I first wore a prosthesis. It kept falling out in the swimming pool and on the yoga-class floor, and so forth, with a constant backache.

So far I'm able to work still very hard; I have a lot of fun. I'm doing

Scottish dancing. I garden a great deal, and can work hours at a desk or the piano, so it's not bad. I'm very grateful to this creation. I know the metaphor of God is not popular these days, so we won't bring that in, but however it happens, I feel good. at

264

Elizabeth Fix

Some husbands, or men in general, seem to look at women in a purely sexual way, and they don't see women in a natural way as being sexy.

There really is beauty in truth.

I am starting, after three kids, to be comfortable with my body, to realize

that it is a beautiful thing. I can look at myself in the mirror now and say, "She's pretty." That's what I want to be able to do, to look at the

photograph and say, "That woman is beautiful, and that woman is me."

Although I love men, I appreciate men, I love being with men, we need to start liking each other. Not very many women like other women.

After all, who mothers mothers but mothers?

266

Elizabeth Lesley

men were always looking at you.

Getting into film work very young There were male directors, male agents, male producers, male choreog­ raphers. You were constantly under scrutiny by the male populace. And that's not even saying anything about the high, school crap, and all of the being objectified constantly. You're always looked at, and you're never quite good enough. ...

I've passed through this objectification of myself pretty well, not all the way

...

I mean I know I'm a woman and I know I'm attractive and I'm

very sexy, and I know all this stuff about me; it's a given now. I didn't

know my worth for so many years.

268

·7

.

•,

Inad

I used to be very heavy but pretty, and now I'm very thin, and still pretty.

I have been fat all my life; as far as I can remember I've been a big girl. I got tired of being fat, so I had a surgery when I was nineteen years old.

They stapled my stomach, and I lost weight. Then I gained the weight

back. Not all of it, but enough of it. I had the surgery redone, but a dif­ ferent type, a bypass. I eat like a bird.

I'm still the same person, fat or thin. That's something I'm realizing to

this day, that it doesn't change me. Nothing has changed, I'm still the exact same more

person I was when I was heavier. I thought I would have

friends, that I would have guys chasing after me, that money

would come my way, and it hasn't. But I haven't done anything about it.

I'm not afraid to go to self-service at the gas station anymore. At the gas station I would pull into the full-service so I would not have to get out of

the car. Now, I get out of the car at the drop of a hat. I always want to be seen.

But when I was heavy, I didn't want anybody to see me, not at all.

I still don't like looking in magazines. In the beginning, it was because I

knew I could never fit anything in the magazine. And then it became I

couldn't afford anything in the magazine.

About being fat, the big thing is letting people see you eat. If you were

heavy, people automatically thought you ate like a cow. I didn't eat a lot. I didn't go to the supermarket-people seeing what kind of food you buy-how much food you buy. It shows your fatness, it's embarrassing.

270

Sandy Voorhies

I wanted to show my breasts to ladies who might have the problem with

breast diseases and to show that you don't have to be so deformed look­ ing if you choose to have reconstruction after a mastectomy.

I did care about my breasts. I loved my breasts. I love to be touched on my breasts,

so

it it was a shock to think that you wouldn't have that

anymore, but of course the alternative or the downside is

...

so

that it

didn't matter. I always knew I wanted to try reconstruction. It's not for

everybody. It's a very painful process. It doesn't always work. There is that recurring tape in your mind that maybe this will happen again, and indeed it might, because the statistics are proving that there are recur­ rences ten, twelve, fifteen years later. I do feel, therefore, that you have to look at what created your cancer and take responsibility for it. Look at the stress level. Look at the lifestyle. Look at the diet. Look at the environment and take that responsibility, and that's very hard. Many women have the pity party and say why me, or they get so angry. You go through all of those emotions-don't misunderstand-but I think if you don't look at your lifestyle that you can for sure get it back again.

272

Diana Morris

I'd like to be one of those smashing old women that I've very often met on

the tops of mountains with great walking sticks, beautiful complex­

ions, looking incredibly healthy, their brains very much alive and their eyes all sparkling.

They're usually museum curators or pianists or

schoolteachers, and they're nearly always very smart, and very interest­ ed, and very excited, and they're often seventy or so, and healthy. This is a kind of crone-type beauty which I want very much, and I hope to

achieve it.

274

Bernard P. Schardt, Women's Court, }effersonMarket (wood engraving/ 193543)

TRIQUARTERLY

Contributors

Charles Baxter is the author of three books of stories, including A Relative Stranger (W. W. Norton, 1990; Viking Penguin, paperback, 1991) and two novels, the most recent of which is Sfuuiow Play (W. W.

Norton, 1993, and Viking Penguin, paperback, 1994). His story,

"Weights," appeared in TQ #56. He teaches at the University of Michigan. * * * Eileen Cherry has published short stories in Nommo and in the anthology, West Side Stories, edited by George Bailey (City Stoop Press, 1992). Her poems have appeared in Callaloo and Black World and in the anthology, The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Women of Color, edited by D. Soyini Madison (St. Martin's, 1993). She lives in Chicago. * * * Jesus Gardea is one of the most prolific and influential writers of Mexico's provinces. He has published six novels, of which El sol que estds mirando (1981) was the first and El

ojo del diablo the most recent (1989). His books of short stories include Las luces del mundo (1986) and De alba sombtia (1985). Gardea teaches at

the Universidad de Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua. His story, "The

Guitar," appeared in TQ #85, New Writing from Mexico.

Mark Schafer has translated Virgilio Pifiera's Cold Tales and Rene's

Flesh (Eridanos Press, 1988 and 1989) and Alberto Ruy Sanchez's Mog. (City Lights Press, 1993). He is preparing a collection of short stories by Jesus Gardea, from which "Trinitario" is taken and for which he was awarded a Translator's Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. Some of his translations appeared in TQ #85, New Writing from Mexico. * * * Mizuno Ruriko is one of Japan's most distin­ guished modem poets. Her books include Rapuntseru no Uma /Rapunzel's

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TRIQUARTERLY

Horse (Shinchosha, 1987) and Henzeru to Greteru no Shima / Hansel and

Gretel's Island (Gendai Kikakushitsu, 1983). The latter volume received the prestigious Mr. H. Prize. She is also the editor of Bokei no Onnatachi

/ To Women of the Maternal Line (Gendai Kikakushitsu, 1992). * * * Edwin A. Cranston teaches Japanese literature at Harvard University. e

His most recent book is A Waka Anthology, Volume One: The Gem,

Glistening Cup (Stanford University Press, 1993). * * * Ilan Stavans, a Mexican novelist and critic, teaches at Amherst College. His books include Tropical Synagogues (Holmes & Meier, 1994), Growing Up Latino (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), and The Hispanic Condition (HarperCollins, 1994). The winner of the Latino Literature Prize in 1992, he is currently editing The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. * * * Harry Morales has translated works by Reinaldo Arenas and Mario Benedetti.

He lives in New York City.

William L. Giannotti lives in Asheville, North Carolina. "Sunday After the War" is his first published story. * * * Joyce Carol Oates's most recent

books are a novel, What I Lived For (New American

Library/Dutton, 1994), and a book of stories, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Dutton, 1994). Her story in this issue will appear in her next collection, Will You Always Love Me? Her most recent publication in TriQuarterly was the story, "You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home," which appeared in #88. * * * Hayden Carruth's most recent books are Suicides and [arrers (University of Michigan Press, 1992), The Collected Shorter Poems, 1946,1991 (Copper Canyon Press, 1992), Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands (New Directions, 1989) and Collected Longer Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1994). Three of Mr. Carruth's poems appeared in TQ #61. * * * W. S. Di Piero's new book of poems, Shadows Burning, and a collection of essays, Shooting the Works, will be published by TriQuarterly Books and Northwestern University Press in 1995. His most recent book of poems is The Restorers (University of Chicago Press, 1992). His book of essays on modern art, Out of Eden, was published by the University of California Press in 1991. An essay by Mr. Di Piero appeared in TQ #88 and several of his poems in #79 and #83; a special section of TQ #67 was devoted to his poems and essays. * * * Heidy Steidlmayer's poems have appeared in Humanitas.

New and Selected Poems by Gary Soto will be published by Chronicle

Books in spring 1995. His most recent novel is Jesse (Harcourt Brace, 1994). * * * Nancy Eimers is the author of a book of poems, Destroy,

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TRIQUARTERLY

ing Angel (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). She teaches in the M.F.A. writing program at Western Michigan University. * * * Don Stap has published a volume of poems, Letter at the End of Winter (University Press of Florida, 1987) and a nonfiction book, A Parrot Without a Name (Knopf, 1990). He teaches at the University of Central Florida. * * * Mark Solomon's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Snake Nation Review, Abiko Quarterly and Bomb and will appear in the anthology What's Become of Eden: Poems of Family at Century's End, which is edited by Stephanie Strickland and will be published by Slapering HoI Press in late 1994. * * * The most recent of Lisel Mueller's five volumes of poems is Waving from Shore (Louisiana State University Press, 1989) and her most recent book of translations is Circe's Mountain, a collection of short stories by the German writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Milkweed Editions, 1990). Two of Mueller's poems appeared in TQ #76.

Pat Mangan's poems have appeared in the Iowa Review and New York

Quarterly. He teaches at the Writers Studio in New York City. Four of his poems appeared in TQ #90. * * * Agha Shahid Ali's six books of poems include The HalrInch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (SUN/Gemini Press, 1987), A Nostalgist's Map of America (W. W. Norton, 1991) and The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (Viking Penguin, 1992). He is also the translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems (Peregrine Smith, 1991), a revised edition of which will be published by the Uni­ versity of Massachusetts Press in 1995. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. * * * Debra Allbery is the author of a book of poems, Walking Distance (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991).

Formerly writer-in-residence at Dickinson College, she now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. * * * Richard Jones is the author of three books of poems, including the forthcoming collection, Garden of the World, all published by Copper Canyon Press. Three of his poems appeared in TQ #86.

Kate Thompson lives in County Clare, Ireland. She has published a collection of poems, There Is Something (Signpost Press, 1992), and a novel for young adults, Switchers (Dublin: Aran Books, 1994). * * * Charles O. Hartman's third book of poems, Glass Enclosure, will be

published next spring by Wesleyan University Press. Princeton University Press published Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody in 1981 and Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz and Song in 1991.

Hartman, who teaches at Connecticut College, was represented by

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TRIQUARTERLY

three poems in TQ #80. * * * William Olsen's first book of poems,

The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (University of Illinois Press,

1988), was a National Poetry Series selection and the winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Award. His second collection, Visions of a Storm Cloud, will be published in fall 1995 by TriQuarterly Books and Northwestern University Press. He teaches at Western Michigan University. * * * Greg Kuzma's recent poems have appeared or soon will appear in the Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner and other journals. * * * Robert Phillips's fifth collection of poems, Breakdown Lane, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994. He is a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

Linda Pastan's ninth book of poems, An Early Afterlife, will be pub­ lished by W. W. Norton in January 1995. * * * Patricia Goedicke's most recent volume of poems is Paul Bunyan's Bearskin (Milkweed Editions, 1992). A recent holder of a Rockefeller residency in Bellagio, Italy, she is a distinguished professor at the University of Montana. Her latest poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review and other journals. * * * Gerald Stern's most recent books of poems are Bread Without Sugar (W. W. Norton, 1992) and Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (Harper & Row, 1990). His next collection will appear in 1995. * * * William Harper has presented his poems at readings in Boulder, Colorado, and in Chicago. "Poetry Slam?" is his first major appearance in print.

Diane Rosenblum's exhibit The Naked Truth About Women has been

shown at Duke University, Grinnell College, and the Parnas Gallery in Santa Monica, California. Her earlier series of photographs, Painted

People, was exhibited at the Tamura Gallery and the Striped House Museum, in Tokyo. She lives in Los Angeles.

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