Spring 1986 Number 19

Cover art by lmaikalani Kalahele

Hawaii Review is a semi-annual publication of the Board of Publications, Univer­sity of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are solely responsible for its content. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Hawaii Review, Department of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. The editors invite submissions of fic­tion , poetry, translations, reviews and literary essays. Manuscripts must be accom­panied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subscription rates: one year (two issues) $6 .00; single copies, $3 .00.

Hawati Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is indexed by the Amen'can Humanities Index and by the Index of American Period­ical Verse.

© 1987 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. ISSN: 0093- 9625

Rodney Morales

Margaret Russo

Holly Yamada Zdenek Kluzak

Editors:

Editor in Chief

Managing Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor

Readers:

Jackie Kunning

Roberta Young Nancy Mower

Diana Moore

Jill Widner

CONTENTS

FICTION

JANUARY THAW 11 Karlton Keirn THE ARTIST'S MODEL 31 Lynn C. Miller

from 11-lE HERMIT 48 Jack Driscoll jOURNALS

THE INVISIBLE SNOWMAN 63 Cun Fukumoto

POETRY 1WOPOEMS 1 Norman Hindley

TRAVELLER 3 Michael McPherson BODY SURFER 4 Mitchell LesCarbeau

COMING HOME 6 Wendy Wilder Larsen SEPTEMBER AGAIN 8 David James

BUCKETS 10 Michael Miller WHY WE NEED KITES 20 Steven Curry

OLD PAPERS 21 Erland Anderson OBER BIOGRAPHIEN 24 Karl Krolow

(On Biographies) translated by Stuart Friebert

1WOPOEMS 26 Paul Ramsey AT A PARTY 28 Nicholas Kolumban

THE LOVE BOAT 30 Charles Edward Eaton DESERT RAIN 37 Peter Gorham

FORJONATHAN GRIFFIN 38 Jorge de Sena translated by Alexis Le11itin

THE MOON 42 WingTekLum MOON 44 Susan Komo

THAT MOMENT 45 Debra Thomas MATIHEW ARNOLD ON

MARS 46 David Kirby

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MOUNTING SUSPICION 47 Richard Raleigh JUMPING GALLEY 53 Tony Friedson

WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN 54 Joseph P. Balaz SMOKE RINGS 56 Leona Yamada

UNTITLED 57 Michael Darnay Among THE OLD WOMAN

MEDITATES 58 Marjorie Sinclair TWO POEMS 59 John Unterecker

INCISION 69 T. M. Goto FISH 71 Meredith Carson

TWO POEMS 72 Kathryn Takara I DIDN'T GET YOUR VIOLIN

BACK TO YOU I'VE 74 Lyn Lifshin

ART 62 Laura Ruby 70 Laura Ruby

REVIEW

HAWAI'I HAWAI'I 76 Tony Quagliano

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 78

v

The specialist said listen, so, Windows down, drawn blinds on Sundays We piled into bed, (Pa had it down, organized, Like an outing), We listened. Your hean had a murmur And an irregular beat. Dangerous. Head on your chest I listened harder Even than Ma did, The specialist said " arrhythmia," I copied it onto papers, spoke it outside , And the word became a woman Who'd repair yQu. Arrhythmia, a dress, the dark hair. I heard her work, tune the syllables, The hobbled step of your heart, Heal the hole where the blood hissed . . . Mter church for three years. Healthy, Interest in you had peaked. You'd Go to the room anyway, sun blazing the bed, Wait around, smooth the familiar chenille. Sunday drives began-, We sat in the back like pot roast And died by the mile, by silence. We died By arguments. Pa called you a lemon And believed it, lemon stuck. "You lemon." Second born, shattered. How was this allowed? You living 2nd hand for 30 years. I listen, say the word, Hear the dark hair, Her hands like running water Turning over your hean, The chiming, in tune And time.

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GOOD NIGHT, OCTOBER for Shawhan

These are the hours of industry, No smokes, no percodan, no days Peed away with t.v., World Series, no iced Riesling Like snow drifting, no time For screw books, letters home, No M&M's with peanuts either, But target hean rate, salads, Red Zinger and lime, The season of reserve, a time to be model. And I'm gagging. So come, pour The big gin drinks like Amoco, drain them, Make more, climb four stories To the roof, stand, take in the evening Like a whiff of paint, Sun tumbling the comfoning sky, Colors of codeine. And then the parrots! A hundred Winging it in from the zoo, Bluntheaded, like flying deadends, Crapping on cars, ready to roost, Plunging for seats in the crown of the tree. Look! They screw in flight, They screw in the trees, squawking, Gaudy birds, their song's an atrocity, Liberaces, But sing with them, faster and louder Until neighbors complain And the manager comes, orders us off, Doesn ' t know we fly, Misses the flight feathers Pushing Right out Of our arms.

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Wind blows open his wooden half a door, the handle rattles again and like before he can't be sure what's shut. He's sanded edges off the old pon for so long a hinge breaks loose and it won 't be reglued. So now he's outside working on his tan, and in the far he sees new islands, beaches where languid fronds breathe greenly down to blinding canvases and the azure sea wiggles in the heat. Yes the South Pacific (have you heard?), where men his age come to render sunset colors more vivid than uranium and to break the code of long silence. Here he sends secret messages which wash ashore worn smooth and shiny.

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Mitchell LesCarbeau

BODY SURFER

Poised in the sucking shallows like a runner at his gate he scans the glassy rollers building out of nothing for their doom and times his leap into the surf . . .

but not too soon (for he would be tossed like an over-anxious suitor, arc of ankles to the surge and head thumped against the rocks)

and not too late (for he would be lost and awkward in the dull after-wash of regret as the hesitant or slow of heart in the midst of deep passion)

but at that uncoiled instant of grace: taken in and clasped to glide in wet curls with wingless flight above the absuact sand, time-stopped, his joy a lover's joy, heedless of rocks, heedless of the inflexible ways of others in his path,

until the dying swash repels him panting onto the actual beachface with scrubbed chest and belly, the water dripping off his body in the sun like pearls,

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until he gallops back again through spray, poised in the sucking shallows like a runner at his gate. . .

All afternoon he does this, like one frenzied and insatiable for the sea's inexhaustible embrace, or else to hammer home some stubborn parable ,

so painful in the learning it must be acted out again and again until the sun sputters out below the horizon, until the raw skin learns, until even the bones, bruised and heavy with salt, absorb the hard, astringent truth.

Wendy Wilder Larsen

COMING HOME

In glacier gray streams salmon are jumping home from the wide salt sea from the free swim of silver childhood brothers and sisters spangles under the surface like moon-melt eager to swim any ocean.

Now fighting upstream alone jaws growing longer and longer skin greener for the reunion. Closer now his inner map winds him up the river road . "Mother," he calls. He can smell her calling him in where the Russian flows into the Kenai.

Twisting toward home, he rounds the bend curls through the shallows. Crooked Creek. On course no turning back, nowhere to hide, his body half-in half-out of the water.

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Gulping for air too tired to move he lies in the log of his tattered skin. Big-bellied, he waits near his ancestor's pools. Lidless eyes see only the bank. What is this that holds him now? He's come home as far as he can.

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David James

SEPTEMBER AGAIN

Across the road, where the path weaves a slow walk to the old swing, five sheep graze, puffs a shade darker than the field . Small blackbirds perch on their backs, resting, up for a free ride, pecking through wool.

It's September again and I stare at the willow leaves floating down, thin , yellow. They appear out of nowhere, catching the eye, twirling it to the ground.

And winter will come just as fast. One glance and it'll be here, everything gray and white , and then spring and then summer. Trees take the brunt of it, shedding, freezing, blossoming.

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We step up to the window to see where we are, which season, which life, and the sheep are gone, blackbirds lost in the evening. The old trees empty, branches moving together in the wind like lips . They are saying one thing: this can't go on forever.

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Michael Miller

BUCKETS

When the blackberry bush Refuses to fatten I search for buckets That hang on the trunks Of sugar maples. For days, for years, My body remembers: the distance Stretching between uees, The fences of snow. But when darkness thickens Like a pool of sap, When the rootless dead push Toward the path in the eye Of all blossoms, I hurry Until my scarred paws Reach toward the buckets. Nobody knows how much I eat To keep alive.

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JANUARY THAW

This is northern Wisconsin back a ways. It's a long cold drive out to the Peters farm , and Pop and I wouldn't have been taking it on a January night except for that queer call from Bart on the rural exchange. "This you, Shurf?" That's how "Sheriff" sounded, the way he said it. "Well, Shurf, my boy didn't kill hisself like you figgered . No, Shurf, he was mur­dered." "What makes you think so, Bart?" Pop asks real easy-like, and Ban says, "Because I murdered him."

I can see the back of Pop 's neck get red, but he don' t show his feelings none, just clears his throat and says, "Well , Bart, expect I'll be comin' out to see yuh."

There's a high and small cold moon, and the air is so clear and still you can hear the telephone wires humming along the road . The heat from the engine don't count at all, and I have to keep wiggling my toes to keep them from freezing in my boots. Pop don't say a word, and I know better than to start asking questions. The one I did ask: "Why ain't you taking a deputy along?" he near bit my head off for, so I guess he'd be coming even without me if he wasn't so unhandy at driving on slippery roads, always sliding in a ditch and half-freezing to death before someone comes along to pull him out.

Everything, even the stars, hangs sort of helpless in the cold, and as I settle down to my driving, I think about that queer phone call from Bart Peters. I say "queer" because everything pointed so clear to suicide when it happened a month ago. Everyone knew how despondent Len was ever since his rna died, and more than one heard him say he wished he was with her. You could hardly blame him, in a way, crippled like he was and never &etting nowhere except to church on Sunday when Bart strapped his wheelchair on the wagon and hauled him into town. Bart wasn't a church­goer himself, so he just hung around the pool hall or general store till church was out. I heard him tell some of the boys he hadn' t been inside a church since he was married, but maybe that was stretching it a bit.

Len's death was as clear a case of suicide as you'd find: his fingerprints on the gun , powder burns, and the way the bullet went straight through

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his head, indicating how he must've held that pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger. Right there in his pa's bedroom, one of the bureau drawers left open. No signs of a struggle or anything, and if there had been, or even an argument , the hired man would've heard right above in the room Bart had fixed for him in the garret. He'd have heard because he heard Nancy calling to her cat out in the kitchen when the shot was fired . There was no reason to think anyone killed Len Peters, least of all his own pa who'd always been so easy with him. Cramer, the hired man, was a harmless old duffer, a bit retarded, and stuck to himself. That left only Nancy Hooks, the housekeeper, but if she was with her cat in the kitch­en-? Anyway, their nearest neighbors, the Shanks, testified that she pam­pered Len even more than his rna had . It was true he hadn't approved of her coming there to begin with, thought she was too young, but when he seen how well she took hold, how clean she kept the house, baked even better than his rna, and above all, knew how to keep her place, as " Ma" would've put it, he not only made the best of the situation, but took full advantage of it by letting himself share in the companionship she offered while his pa and Cramer were out in the fields. He read the Bible to her while she baked cookies or put up vegetables for the winter, and no one ever heard of them quarreling, though it was generally known Len lit into his pa regular on religion. Only a one-sided fight, though, because Bart never talked back, just sat there chewing on something, or whittling, actu­ally proud of how much his son knew about a subject he admitted was beyond him, as if that excused him from ever having to discuss it.

As we bump along, in and out of the frozen snow ruts, all I can think is that Bart must be proper mixed up about the whole thing. Of course you'd have to know him to see how impossible it'd be for Bart Peters to kill anybody, never mention his own son. Nancy couldn' t even get him to chop a chicken's head off, he'd just get red as a beet and say, " Well, Nancy, Myrtle always done it when she was here, so reckon you'll have to now."

I remember he had an old crow with a broken wing that wouldn't mend, so he finally had to, what he called, "execute" it. I remember Pop asking how he done it, how he ever got up the nerve, but Bart didn't say. Then that Sunday it happened to Len. When Pop asked how come he had a gun in the house, he said it was there in case one of his critters got bad hurt and had to be put out of its misery. That made me wonder if he'd used it to kill the crow. "Didn't it occur to you Len might get hold of it?" Pop asked him, but Bart said , " He didn't know I had it. Would've raised hell if he did, he was so agio' guns, wars, even huntin ' ." "Then how you figger he found it, Bart?" Pop wanted to know.

Bart couldn't say, but Nancy spoke up. " Len was a great one to

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putter, Mr. Huckins. I'd catch him messing around in my cupboards look­ing for something, but he made such nice little things for the house, I never scolded." "Was he in the habit of going to his pa's room for things?" "Can't say he was, Mr. Huckins. Only that one time I recollect. I can't even remember what he wanted. Anyway, I didn't have it, so I told him to look in his pa's room. I'd have gone myself if I wasn't down on my hands and knees scrubbin' the kitchen floor." "You knew about that gun there?" "Well, I ran across it cleanin' out those drawers, but I never mentioned it to Len. I didn't think Mr. Peters would want me to, knowing how the boy felt about guns. It wasn't that either of us dreamed he'd think of using it on himself." "And how long ago was it he asked for what you can't remember?" At which Nancy's lips trembled and she burst into tears. "Only a few days before he-if only I'd thought about the gun," she sobbed. "If only I'd told Mr. Peters, he could have hid it somewhere else."

Still, the most you could charge her and Bart with was carelessness, which fit right in with their easygoing personalities. Or why hadn 't that pistol been put up on some shelf where Len couldn't reach? As for Cramer, there wasn't anything to pin on him except that he wasn't very bright. All he could say was that Bart Peters was the kindest boss he ever had, Nancy Hooks the nicest lady he ever knew, and he'd never felt anything but sorry forLen.

Now we're approaching the Peters place. A single dull light glows close to the road. The road is higher than the barnyard, down into which we slide, Pop hanging on for dear life. As I pull up at the kitchen door, I can't help wondering if Nancy believes Bart did this thing any more than I do. Everybody likes Nancy, so friendly and good-natured, but when she first come to town there was talk about her running away from her hus­band over in Tomahawk. But after we got to know her, we decided it must've been his fault, because anybody who couldn't get along with Nancy Hooks if Len Peters could, him so crabby and sourpussed like his rna, that person must be plumb ornery. True, she didn 't go to church any more than Bart, but you still ~ouldn't help preferring her to a narrow­minded religious fanatic like Myrtle Peters.

In town, Nancy had a job at the general store. That was where Bart got to know her. It wasn't until months after his wife's death that she came out to the farm to work for him. By then things were in such a mess, even Len agreed they must get a housekeeper, not that anyone could ever take his mother's place. Again there was talk, but Pop says you take any woman, even if she isn't young and pretty, and put her under the same roof with a man-in this case, two men (three, if you counted the half-wit­ted hired man), then there's bound to be gossip. Again it died down,

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because, like Mrs. Shanks said , if there was anything wrong going on, Len would've raised the roof, feeling about his rna like he did.

Nancy must've heard us coming. She's standing in the open door­way, clutching the collar of her pink housedress up around her throat to keep out the cold. Still pretty and plump, she looks worried tonight, which makes her appear older. Grabbing Pop's arm before she lets us in, she says, "You mustn' t believe a word of it . He's been thinking too much is all."

Bart is sitting at the kitchen table, picking at the cracks in the oil­cloth, his graying brown hair mussed up, like he's been running his hands through it . His shirt is off and he's in long-sleeved woolen underwear, his suspenders hanging down over his pants. "Take a chair, Shurf," he says without looking up. " I reckon it ain ' t enough for the Law that a man says he killed someone without sa yin' how and why and everythin' ."

" I reckon not," says Pop, hopping out of his sheep-lined coat. "The Law has to penect a man against himself, too."

"Then I better start right in, account of it'll take a spell." "Okay," says Pop, "but better put somethin' around yuh first. That

old range don't seem to be throwin' much heat." Nancy murmurs something about forgetting it, then goes to add

more wood, poking up a shower of sparks. She brings Ban an old brown sweater to put on. The kerosene lamp on the table blinks. Pop and I sit across the table from Ban. Nancy is in her little rocker back by the stove. An old walnut clock on the wall ticks loudly, hollowly, its pendulum swing­ing lazily back and forth .

"Well, Shurf, it happened that Sunday mornin' like I said. I'd just brung him home from church and was about to unhitch old Nellie when I went to the house to find out if Len wants to visit the Shanks after din­ner. Sunday was always his worst day on account of he wouldn't do any putterin ' for fear of breakin' the Sabbath." Bart pauses to chuckle in a cheerless way. "That's somethin' you should've thought on more, Len's religiousness. If you had, you wouldn' t been so quick to decide he shot hisself."

"Go on, Bart," says Pop, scraping his feet on the soft-wood floor with just a touch of irritation .

"No, Shurf," says Bart , picking away at the oilcloth, "you didn't think enough on Len's bein' so religious. Just like his rna, always quotin' the Bible. What it says about takin' your own life would've give him sec­ond thoughts, even if he had first ones, don't you reckon? Myrtle's pa was one of them barn-stormin' preachers who made her and Len so feared of God, they couldn't forgive me not bein' . I figgered so long as I didn't harm my neighbor none, I wouldn' t fare so bad, even if there come a

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Judgment Day. But to get back to that mornin', Shurf, when I come into the kitchen, Len wasn't there with Nancy. I started for his room, but as I pass my door, I hear one of my bureau drawers bein' jiggled back and forth, like when it sticks. I think it kind of funny, him in my room with the door closed, but after the jigglin' stops I still wait a bit, until I remember the gun. Then I open the door, and look in. So far it's like I told you the first time, ain't it, Shurf?"

"Yep," says Pop, scraping his feet some more. "I told yuh he was settin' there with the gun to his head. I told yuh I

went to him easy-like to take it away, but before I could , it went off." "That's what you said, Bart," says Pop. "In a way, it was the truth, though I wouldn ' t have minded lyin' to

save my neck. Not then, Shurf. But I didn't say it all . I didn't say Len wasn't sittin' up straight , like someone goin' through with somethin'. He was settin' back, just waitin'. Now I'm a slow-thinkin' man, Shurf, and it didn't come to me till tonight that Len mightn't have wanted to die, after all, but only had a reason for lettin' me think he did."

"What reason, Bart? " asks Pop. Nancy stirs in her rocker. "Len did want to die. He even said so ," she

tells Pop. "But why did he say it?" Bart asks without turning to her. "Well , why did he?" Pop asks Bart, and I can see he's gettin' impa­

tient. ''I'm coming to it," says Bart. "Just give me time." "Okay, okay," says Pop, and we wait for Bart to go on, the lamplight

making crazy shadows on the wall, the clock ticking, the cold cracking the house in all its joints like rheumatism.

"You know, Shurf, when I see Len with that pistol to his head, I says to myself, 'Poor kid, poor kid , wants to do it but ain't got the nerve , too scared of God .' It seemed like if he was to sit there forever he'd never be able to pull that trigger. If I didn't mention this before , it's because I wasn ' t spoilin ' things for myself then. Not as long as I figgered what I done was right."

"It was , it was," cries Nancy. "Then say it right out," says Pop, sitting forward . Bart is still in no great hurry. He leans across the table to Pop.

"Remember when I executed that crow with the broken wing, Ansel?" It's the first time since we've come he's addressing Pop like a friend and not as Sheriff. Years ago they went fishing together, before Bart gave up fishing, like he gave up hunting, so as not to kill things. "If I'd told yuh how come I could do it, bein' so chickenhearted, I'd've said I'm just chickenhearted enough to kill anythin ' if goin' on livin' is hurtin ' it more.''

1)

Pop clears his throat loud. " So you're say in'-" ' 'I'm sayin' that's somethin ' else you overlooked in this here case. You

should've knowed I'd do as much for a human bein' as for a animal, a crow."

Pop's neck is getting red again, like when he listened to Ban on the rural exchange. "So say it," he orders.

"No, don 't say it," cries Nancy. "He won't see it your way. He'll only see it like a sheriff."

"It don't matter how he sees it, Nancy. All that really matters now is how I see it."

There is scratching on the outside door, and Nancy gets up to let in her cat, a black-and-white tom that ignores us all and goes straight to his saucer of milk under the old iron sink. Nancy returns to her rocker. Now there's the milk-lapping as well as the clock-ticking and cold-cracking to accompany Bart as he continues: " Whilst I stand there in the doorway, feelin' sorry for Len on account he can't do for hisself what I'm tellin' myself he wants to, a picture of that poor old crow comes to mind. Len hears me, but he don' t jump nor nothin ', just looks at me, the gun still to his head. If you could 've seen his eyes , pleadin '-like, you'd've thought, too, he was beggin' me to do it for him."

Finished with the milk, the cat goes to Nancy and springs into her lap. In a moment he is purring loudly, his fur crackling as she strokes it .

"I reached for the pistol, one part of me thinkin' I'd slip it out of his hand easy, whilst another part thinks, 'Poor kid, don 't I love him enough to- ' That's how that quiet thinkin' was, going so far, then stoppin'. So whilst I'm tellin' myself I'm only taking the gun away from him, I'm fit­tin' my hand to it, right over his skinny one, so in order to get my finger on the trigger, I has to pull his down on it, sendin' that bullet through his head, same as if he done it hisself."

Nancy's cat has stopped purring. It springs from her lap and slinks off to another part of the house, as if frightened. Pop takes out his bandana and blows his nose. Nancy sighs long and heavily.

" I guess you're wonderin ' why I decided to own up to it tonight. I said it was that quiet thin kin' what made me pull the trigger. So it was, but that quiet thinkin' wasn't honest , Shurf. No, it was an alibi for some­thing I refused to think on till tonight."

Pop looks a little befuddled and bites his lips, chapped from the cold, like mine . "Where 's Cramer?" he asks, as if stalling for time while he soaks up what Bart has said.

It's Nancy who answers. "Up in bed, Mr. Huckins. Pure tuckered out. All this has been hard on him, too . Want me to wake him?"

"No, no," says Pop. "Time for him later. If we need him."

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"Let me finish with that morning," Bart is saying. "I told myself I done somethin' good, somethin' a father who wasn't chickenhearted couldn't do. I didn' t expect the Law to understand, so I kept still, but I'd have staked my life on it Nancy would."

"I did, I did ," cries Nancy, coming up to the table. "He didn't tell me about it till tonight, Mr. Huckins. He was getting ready for bed, and I was out here finishing up some mending. I knew what he meant, I just let on I didn't because I was secretly hoping he'd done it for another reason as well. But ifl'd known how he'd take what I said-"

"Hush, Nancy," says Bart, his eyes clear of reproach as he turns back to Pop. "I suppose you've surmised that Nancy and I are-well, good as married."

Pop neither admits nor denies it. " Couldn't help Iovin' her from the start, so puny and full of life,

everything I always wanted Myrtle to be. I reckon she found me a sight bet­ter to live with than that young rapscallion she married when they was both still in high school. Treated her real mean, he did, always drinkin' and tomcattin' around. Refused to give her a divorce when she asked for one, so we had to keep it all secret on account of Len. Couldn't have managed if he was able to get out of bed without one of us helpin ' . Fact is, Nancy and me didn't know what it really was to be happy till he was gone. It didn't seem possible how happy we could be with him barely cold in his grave. I had to tell myself! was so happy because he was now happy with his rna again and no longer crippled. I wanted to tell Nancy the whole thing, so she could be as proud of what I done as I was. But I held off. Didn't know why then, but now I do."

Nancy starts to say something, but Bart stops her. "Then this morning a letter come. Nancy's husband was dead , stabbed to death in a drunken brawl over some other man's wife. So after it was all settled, we could be married. Wasn ' t we felt we needed to be any more than we was, but we wanted our friends and neighbors to know about us, and they was mostly all good Methodists like Len and his rna had been. We planned how we 'd drive to town with the Shanks in their flivver, have the Justice of the Peace tie the knot, then all drive to Tomahawk or somewhere for a good meal and maybe take in a movie. But first I knew I'd have to tell Nancy about Len. It was different now we was going to be man and wife legal-like."

Nancy is quietly weeping into her apron. "What do you think she said, Shurf, when I tell her?" Bart's lean jaw

isn't quite steady now. "When I tell her what I done, what you think she says? 'Now if you was to say you did it for me, I might believe you did do it.' "

Nancy tries to explain , while Bart gently but firmly puts her aside.

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"Couldn't believe what I heard," he tells Pop. " 'Why for you?' I ask. 'So you and I could be alone together,' she answers. 'We never said that,' I tell her. 'No,' she says, 'but it was on our minds, in our hearts.' Then all of a sudden it was clear to me, and I knowed she was right . I had to laugh that I didn't think of it myself. We couldn't be truly happy so long as Len lived, because we knew if he found out about us, I'd have to give her up. Couldn't give him up, helpless like he was. That's what was starin' us in the face day and night, only I refused to think on it. Then I begun to won­der if Len didn' t know all along. Was that what all his Bible-preachin' was about? To stop me and Nancy? He couldn't come right out and say it, or I'd have to choose between them, and he figgered I'd choose Nancy and he'd be left alone . But then I asked myself would Len want to die if he was so set on breakin' us up? No, but if he pertended he wanted to-He was gettin' nowhere with his preachin' so he had to try somethin' else. He planned the whole thing, down to the pleadin' look, which wasn ' t askin' me to kill him but askin' me to give her up. He planned how I'd find him and take the gun away; he didn ' t plan on my pullin' the trigger so I wouldn't have to give her up." Bart is chuckling again in his cheerless way. "I must've knowed all along I was doin' it for Nancy, I just refused to think on it."

"Then why now?" Nancy asks him, her voice all broken up. "No matter what I said, you knew I believed in you , trusted you.''

"I couldn' t bury them thoughts forever, girl. Better they should come out now than after you're my wife. Then you'd have two bad marriages instead of one."

That makes Pop sit up straight, all attention. "You mean, you ain't going through with the wedding?' '

" For one thing, Shurf, I reckon I'll be in jail ," Bart tells him. "Even if I wasn' t, Len would always be between us. Not for what I done, but for the reason I done it.' '

Nancy comes up to the table. "Then listen to this, Bart Peters. You, too, Sheriff Huckins. I'll free him from his guilt. I'll convince him that Len wanted to die . Not because of loneliness for his rna, but because of his -lust for me."

We all stare at her. "What are you sayin ', girl?" Bart asks, half-rising in his seat. "What craziness is this?"

"No craziness. He was a man, crippled or not. I never wanted to tell you. If he weren 't crippled, I'd have had to. All that Bible readin' didn't reform me, like he intended, but it did change him-our being alone together so much. He wanted me for himself. I was so disgusted, I couldn't even feel sorry for him. When he knew it could never be because I

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loved his pa, he didn't want to be around any longer. Oh, he got his pa to do the dirty work for him, but if anybody really killed him, I did! "

Ban slumps in his chair, shattered, but still not looking too con­vinced. Nancy steps back from the table, her arms hanging loose at her sides, as if relieved of a great burden. "You'll be needin' some hot coffee, Mr. Huckins. You and the boy. I have a potful on the range."

Pop doesn't answer her, like he's doing some mighty powerful think­ing. As Nancy goes for the coffee , Pop comes to life and gets up from the table . So do I. Ban keeps sitting a moment longer, then rises, too . "I'll be ready to go with you, Ansel, soon as I get some clothes on." He goes off to his room. Nancy stands watching Pop. "No coffee, thanks," he tells her, then puts on his heavy coat.' "Tell Bart we couldn' t wait. Tell him I don' t like the way he interferes with the Law. Tell him anything, but you better go farther than Tomahawk for that honeymoon." He pulls me to the door with him.

"Honeymoon,' ' murmurs Nancy. "It would've been nice, but too much has been said, too much thought out. He lived his life, didn' t thi'nk it, Mr. Huckins. Once he started thinkin', it run away with him. You see that , don' t you?"

Pop just squeezes her arm, then hurries out after me. When I look back, Nancy's cat is with her in the doorway, rubbing against her leg. Maybe it's a good omen.

I don ' t say anything until our old Oakland is started up and backed out on the road. Then I can' t keep from asking Pop: "Well, do you?"

"Do I what?" His voice isn't so gruff now. "See that 's how it was? " "Which way is that?" I'm not sure myself now: the way Nancy said, how Bart told it, or like

Pop decided in the first place. Pop don't wait for me to ask again. We start back to town. "Ain't quite so cold as when we come out,'' says Pop. "Milder air

comin' up from the south. Tomorrer, next day, might even get our January thaw."

19

Steven Curry

WHY WE NEED KITES

Because we no longer sit in circles on stones Around fires and have forgotten the dances And chants that healed the wound between eanh and heaven

And because we no longer read the future in The night sky, in a sudden shudder of the land Or in the premature turning of a season

And because we have stopped singing in unison , Or even in solitude, to the power that dreamed Us into being before the naming of gods

And because many people no longer have hearths And countless others have never followed, with sight Or scent, a coil of incense to its vanishing

Because pillars of smoke have lost their power And because clouds cannot hold up the sky all by Themselves (which is why we have rain) and because we

Have never learned how bells ringing carry away Suffering like small birds carry away bits of sticks And string for nests hidden in the safety of trees

So we fly kites , like Tibetan prayer flags , rainbow Mantras, and watch, in leaves of grass and wings, the land's Breath made song by the relentless pull of heaven.

20

Erland Anderson

OLD PAPERS

1 It's time to throw out

old papers On that Peugeot 504

I sold at a corner Gas station

five years ago this summer. It wasn't the car for me

to drive anymore: Leaky sun-roof

-window that kept falling Off its rack with a break-Neck crash.

These things always happened To the passenger

next to me in the front seat.

2 When we bought that car,

a Frenchman Pointing at an F said:

"You say Fahn; We say Fermi!''

A seat belt jammed The front door

the first day out. The second

(October. No ice on the road.) We got rear-ended

In Chamonix by a woman who shouted:

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"Don't call the cops!" inviting us

To flatten out the bumps at her house.

3 Out of gas in Vancouver.

Yellow lights flashed Citations in Blaine.

The longer the trip, The hotter the muffler,

melting the plastic handle Of a Phillips

screwdriver in the trunk. At Safeway

in Aberdeen, Vermae P. Harris

Collided (at an angle)

With the left front side. Rattled , she backed up,

Then hit the gas another time in forward gear.

Her call to the insurance agent , "Floyd, it's me again!" delivered everything

we needed.

4 But in Hawaii

that Peugeot caught

22

Tropical diseases, sticky gears, demanding

Japanese parts to replace the dying French ones.

One day, on its own, it traveled out of a garage,

Down a hill, past the normal Hell of screaming children

Who later flew back to Canada with their

Sunburnt mother. Herx-( to be) took a photograph

Of rear wheels hanging over the edge

Of their driveway, stopped by a metal stake

From colliding into a neighbor's convened carpon.

The local who came to tow the car eyed the engine

Beached on cement and leveled: " Mo ' bettah you sign dis waivah."

I did, and thanks to him, drove away,

The steering wheel shaking.

23

KarlKrolow

UBER BIOGRAPHIEN

Fiir eine Biographie ist es gut, friih zu sterben. Die gestorbenen Dichter sieht man noch eine Weile als Schwane. Sie werden gefiittert . Sie sind nicht aus Kunststoff.

Die hiibschen Straf3en fullen sich weiterhin mit Leuten. Keiner denkt an das Ende von etwas. Das ist gut so. Ein Charakter setzt Staub an , gefuhlvoller Vorgang. Es liegt Schwarmerei in der Luft. Sag mir, wie lebst du?

Keiner merkt meinen Umgang. lch gebe mir Miihe. Ich werde verlegen. Ich hab eine Metamorphose verpaf3t und bin zufallig noch da. Ich lebe ganz gut vom Betrug meiner Sinne.

Ich laf3 mich nicht futtern. Das Schwanenkleid ist zu alt, urn noch Glauben zu finden am Rande von Schwanensee, und Tschaikowskij kam aus der Mode. Die Biographie ist zu lang.

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good for a biography die early. The poets who've died take to be swans for a while.

re fed . They're not made of plastic.

pretty streets keep filling up with people. thinks about the end of something. That's just fine .

character puts on some dust, tender happening. 's ecstacy in the air. Tell me, how're you living?

notices my coming and going. I take pains. embarrassed. I've missed a metamorphosis just happen to still be here. very well off the deceit of my senses.

't be fed . My swan's outfit old for finding some faith

the edge of Swan Lake, and Tschaikowsky's out of fashion. The biography's too long.

25

Paul Ramsey

FIVE O'CLOCK SONG A Love Poem

The railroad shines in the sunburst As the sky steepens toward evening. Allied flames break on the minnows Shallowing in streams, on the tables Of rock, on meadows, on windshields On the crowded highways, and stop On your face for a moment. The wind Knows you , for it comes to you. The sea, In your sweetness now and remembered, Shall dance like a wave of the sea.

26

ELEGY

A tear for the asking. A key for a stone. Sails in the bay sun. Funher, begins .

27

Nicholas Kolumban

AT A PARTY

They want to petition the Hungarian government to intercede for a Czech. This Czech is really a Hunky, an engineer, jailed for pestering households in Prague with a petition. This is how petition sires petition and new schemes are born in exiles. Who drink champagne in America and are out of jail. I listen, praise Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in Eastern Europe after World War I. But "no;' I'm told-they had beaten Hungarians silly in jails and boiler rooms while sipping Asti Spumante. A man turned fifty at the party. His woman's hands slip under his shirt; only his sideburns are gray, though he's pale in May and his face sags. I refill my plastic mug. A woman broods about the soul's refusal to leave the body. In a Brazilian movie I once saw a dead man being fitted with plugs for his ears , nose and anus. What a way to trap the soul! I eat glorious Dobos tone, a flour creation with subversive chocolate. I admire a woman not my age.

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She has a pug nose, fine brown hair. A Renaissance coiffure. Her breasts are modern, small, knitted into the sweater. I leave with her trapped in my memory.

29

Charles Edward Eaton

THE LOVE BOAT

He had heaped it with cushions, wine, grapes, pears: Liquids and luscious shapes-the green canoe. It was like putting a heavy jewel On the water and expecting it to float. Try that with your ring-loaded white hand; The flesh will think itself buoyant, then sink. The drag downward may be voluptuous, Of course, but drowning is not quite the point .

So we toss the cushions, fruit, overboard, Hands flutter like a pair of waterwings; The breasts themselves are a form of ballast­The man with the lean oar pushes off, cuts The river like a dissolved jewel; Naked to the waist , she seems to have tucked Away a melon somewhere. The quick, mixed Situation puts gloss upon some guile .

She learns to sit, uncushioned courtesan, He lets the oar down deeper like a pole. You have seen them come from the river mouth There by the side of the white , gleaming ship With just the fruit of their bodies for sale. What did you expect?-Cleopatra's barge?­The canoe shakes like a bed for barter: The pole, the power, those planetary breasts.

30

C. Miller

ARTIST'S MODEL

The studio stood at the base of the hills. Bone-colored, it rested like the settled remains of the bleached and weather-smoothed rocks around it. In late afternoon the deepening sky swept with crimson flared above its srucco walls, casting the building in a soft, reddish glaze. At midday, the walls shone fiercely bright in the sun, and the girl approaching in her car thought as she always did how the studio resembled a large pottery vessel baking in its own earth-bound kiln. Each week she drove out from the vil­lage, threading her way along the narrow canyon road, across the arroyo, and down the steep incline to the pale structure below.

The girl herself blended with the muted tan and rust colors of the eanh and rocks that made up the canyon. Her hair and eyes were a warm brown, her skin as smooth and polished as sand-scrubbed pebbles. Each week she arrived just after noon, when the heat began to rise out of the pound in waves. And each week she scrambled out of her car eagerly, squinting up at the sky as if to measure some distance. Always she carried a camera and a large bag, fitted compactly with lenses, a tripod, filters. Often she would walk slowly around the studio, inquisitive, searching, pausing in the slim shadow of a young cedar to fit a lens onto her camera. Then suddenly she would crouch, aiming the camera and clicking the shutter in rapid succession, as if shooting at a target. Sometimes, as she did this day, she set up her tripod at the point where she got out of her car, only moving when some inner summons reluctantly called her into the building.

Garden boxes of brightly flowering vinca and portulaca softened the stark walls near the entrance. Inside, cool damp air seeping from the tiles and thick walls hit her sun-flushed skin. Breathing deeply, she moved from the dark foyer into the light of the small kitchen. A tea kettle hissed softly on a small gas stove.

"Emma?" she called hesitantly. The hissing turned shrill and cutting the flame on the stove, she measured two scoops from a large jar on the counter into a ceramic pot and poured the steaming water into it. She lifted two plain brown cups from their pegs on the wall and set them

31

beside the pot. Then she leaned back against the counter, one hand lifting the hair from her neck and letting it drift back down around her face and shoulders. Dreamily, she stared at a small figurine in the center of the table. It was no more than a lump of clay, but the few strong strokes of the artist had already shaped its attitude. Heavy eyebrows and sharp cheek­bones on the otherwise blank clay gave the figure a brooding quality. The girl stepped in front of it and traced the protruding eyebrows with one finger.

"Do you like it?" A short, strongly-built woman in her late fifties came into the room, her full lips stretching into a smile at the sight of the girl.

The girl, also smiling, shrugged. "I thought maybe you had gone out , or forgotten."

The woman shook her head, motioned for the girl to sit . " Sometimes I wish I could forget-not you, but other things. You'll see. The worst thing about getting older is the clutter." She laughed, bringing the teapot and cups to the table . "You don't think that 's funny, Adele?"

The girl shook her head. "I don't know." " Well, how could you? You're young. Your head is clear." "I can't imagine clutter here, that's all. It's so clean, so simple." " The worst kind of clutter never shows. But come, did you bring me

anything today?" Adele reached inside a shoulder bag and brought out a folder. Inside

were photographs, all of the studio shot from varying perspectives of the canyon and the mountains beyond.

Emma slipped through the stack quickly, and then studied each pic­ture, moving on to the next only reluctantly. When she was done, she laid the photographs in a neat pile.

"Always the studio, always this canyon. You must photograph other things."

"No. Not until I get this right. See it the way it is." "What is missing?" Adele picked up the top photograph in the stack and tapped a finger­

nail on the studio. "This." " But, Adele, that is the figure least likely to change. The light, the

shadow, yes, but not the studio." But as the woman said this, she looked shrewdly at the girl.

"You know that's not true,' ' the girl said . Emma laughed. " Yes , of course. Because the ground always changes

in relation to the figure, just like the studio changes in relation to the light."

32

They sipped their tea in silence. "So, shall we begin?" The girl nodded and they walked out of the kitchen, into a hall . On

the walls were many pictures similar to the ones they had just looked at in the kitchen. It was right that her photographs should be here, inside this studio.

Without turning to see Adele staring at the pictures mounted on the wall, Emma said: "I do want one of those you brought today, the one of the foothills shadowed by the mountain."

"I think I took a better one today." "I want the one you showed me." The two women climbed the stairs that led to the room that covered

the whole second story of the building. The afternoon light shone into the room softly from the windows on the west wall, the wall that faced the hills. On the walls were a few landscapes done in watercolors. Glancing around the room, as if to see if the pictures had changed, Adele asked, "Emma, when can I see the paintings you've been doing of me?" Adele walked to one corner, which was bare except for a stool and a wooden coat­rack.

Emma looked up from straightening the easel and sketch pads, char­coal and crayons. "When I get what I'm trying to draw on the canvas. When I get it right."

Adele smiled slightly and began to undress. Her body, clothed, appeared loose-limbed and slender. But as she pulled off a large cotton shirt and full-cut pants, her nude body emerged stronger and more rounded. Her breasts, spaced wide apart, were full, her thighs and but­tocks well-developed and muscled. Soft skin stretched tightly across the flat belly and tender ridges of hipbone.

"You should have been a dancer, Adele," Emma spoke from behind her easel. She looked approvingly at the girl's supple body in its setting. The room was high-ceilinged, and with its lack of furnishings and white walls, almost severe. The stark surroundings were a perfect and unobtru­sive complement to the girl's sleek, warm-skinned loveliness. "Or an ath­lete," she continued.

Adele seemed almost not to have heard her. She stared out beyond the hills to the tallest mountain , in her own mind marvelling at the purity and simplicity of its massive rocky bulk cutting through the sky. "It's so beautiful ," she said softly.

And Emma, still staring at Adele, repeated, "Yes, so beautiful." "Turn around for me," Emma abruptly commanded. Then, "Move

for me slowly, as if you were going to throw something . . . now reach up

33

. . . yes, with that hand raised . . . ." She continued to direct Adele until finally she said, "Yes, that's it. Hold that position please."

Emma began to sketch with charcoal, gesturing with the stick in rapid bursts. Adele continued to stare out the window, although she no longer saw the landscape. She had learned in posing to turn her mind inward, away from the visible world and even away from consciousness of her own body's discomfort in holding a pose so long. Instead, she tried to imagine looking at herself as Emma did, imagined photographing the figure that was her own body. She felt a cenain power in this, in creating the ideal background for her pose , in performing simultaneously the roles of artist and model. Just as she had mentally adjusted the quality and degree of light in her photograph, Emma spoke.

"Now sit down, Adele, relax. Find a position that's comfortable, and hold it for about fifteen minutes. Can you do that? Good."

When Emma was engrossed, she talked in this way, absently, dis­tractedly. At such times, Adele imagined, she forgot who it was that sat for her. Even though she saw her model , in order to paint her, she really did not recognize her, could not place her out of the context of her own imagi­nation. And after a time, Adele felt the same way. Once again, she placed herself out of her body, and began to take pictures, until really she no longer saw Emma in front of her, only saw herself in the viewfinder of her own imagination.

She placed herself in a sitting position, on a rock, halfway up the mountain that shimmered in the heat outside of Emma's window. She sat, clothed only in a large, pale blue scarf that wrapped around her neck and floated gently in the wind, alternately covering and revealing her naked body. Rapidly, she calculated light and angles, trying to capture one com­bination of body posture, flowing hair, and sun highlight before the sheer material once again shifted to create a new attitude. Adele found that the scarf emphasized not what it concealed but the portions of the body it revealed.

Then for one satisfying moment the wind seemed to sustain one long breath , the clouds stayed clear of the sun. The figure was poised with slim arms outstretched from the outcropping of rock, the blue fabric gently brushing the breasts, belly, and thighs of the figure , its color making the brown tones of the skin richer, warmer. The whole effect was one of incipi­ent flight, and Adele found herself frantically circling the woman, aiming and shooting, fearful that the nude would take wing from its precipice before she could capture it .

"There ... that's good, We can break now, Adele." The girl looked at Emma, surprised that she was still there. She

34

watched the older woman chew her lip as she stared at the paper in front of her. Adele blinked. For a moment out of the corner of her eye she thought she had seen a silky blue patch of doth swirl from the mountain 's face and out of sight .

Adele stretched, her limbs suddenly heavy and cramped. Slowly, clumsily, she pulled on her clothes. She sat back down on the stool. She felt utterly relaxed and tired, so weary that she could not imagine having the strength to walk to her car.

"Emma, would you mind if I rested before I leave? I'm too tired to drive."

Emma still stared at her easel. "Of course, of course. Use my room­the one to the right at the bottom of the stairs . Do lie down, sleep a while."

The room, at the end of the long hall leading from the entrance, was dark and cool. Stumbling into the bed, the girl thought how little she really knew about Emma's life outside of the studio with its stacks of stretched canvas resting against the dean white walls. As she slipped slowly into sleep, she thought also of how little of the woman's work she had seen, only the few watercolors scattered on the stark studio walls.

She dreamed she drove down to the studio on the familiar canyon road. But around her, instead of outcroppings of rock and jagged cactus, the land had the smooth texture and broad colors of Emma's watercolors. Adele slowed her vehicle, marvelling at the rain-washed sparkle of the can­yon, the pure, bright colors, the transparency of the landscape. She couldn't tell how far she had gone, the rocks, hills and curves in the road lacked depth or perspective. She wanted to photograph them but she ........... · t gauge the distance between herself and the figures around her. She imagined her photographs coming out blank, overexposed in the bright sun.

Gradually the land faded to colorlessness and Adele woke. The room was even darker than before. At the window the cloudy sky showed a last tinge of purple where the sun had been.

"Emma?" she called. When there was no answer, Adele reached for the light by the bed and switched it on. The room was much bigger than she had realized hours earlier in her drowsy falling into bed. The walls were high and white, like the studio upstairs, but not nearly as bare. Where the studio had a few isolated drawings, the bedroom walls were lined with pictures, and all of one figure. Adele walked slowly around the room, staring at the nude figure prominently featured in each. The posi­tions would change, as did the background, the skin tones and light, but always the body was the same. Adele saw that it was her own body, recog-

35

nized the postures of all these weeks. She regarded the pictures and the figure curiously, intently.

It was not quite like the body she had been photographing in her mind during the afternoons with Emma. No, it was her shape, her long, curved limbs and widely-spaced breasts, but it wasn't really her, not Adele as only Adele knew herself. But most curious, most fascinating about each study was the head. The face was not Adele's face, but Emma's. Emma younger, more idealized, but definitely Emma. Adele felt an inner warmth , the heat of a sudden thrill.

She began to circle the room more quickly. The pictures, so many of them packed so tightly together, leapt out at her, began to acquire a move­ment of their own. The legs, planted firmly apart in one frame, bent slightly in the next, and finally lifted off the ground, the hips and shoul­ders swaying rhythmically as the legs beneath them broke into a run. Adele's quickening pace mirrored the extending and releasing of the limbs on the walls.

The room was filled , stampeded, with motion. And above the swirl­ing figures were the series of faces, blending together, but always serene. While the bodies moved forward, always straining to arrive, the faces remained calm with the peace of having found something, somewhere to rest.

Adele, breathless, exhilarated, ran from the room and out of the building. Outside the night was cooling, the moon beginning to rise. Adele slowed her pace, and reaching the car, looked up at the brightening stars. She turned to see the studio, lit from the garden by floodlights and from above by the night sky. The studio was no longer stark and still as it was under the heat of the sun, but softer, translucent, rising out of the night with the ghosts of many possibilities.

36

DESERT RAIN Mt. Hf?pkins, An'zona, 1984

There is too much glory here . In the wide pan of this barren valley the clouds have knit themselves to the eanh with fire and a gray cunain drawn with nobody's permission. Already the red-tailed hawk, circling slowly among the eastern mountains, has seen the silver glint filling the creek bed where she hunted yesterday, and she calls out her understanding to the wind.

This rain has fallen here before ten times a thousand , and it has fallen on the back of a green turtle in the blue ocean, and it has fallen in a jungle, and it has fallen softly on the face of someone I love . Yet today it will search out the face of the unloved desert, and smooth this hard brow, and be born again into the veins of the chapparal rising like strong wine to the high song of the midsummer stars .

37

Jorge De Sena

FORJONATHAN GRIFFIN

You who have known chidden kings:., who have sung once and again of «the rebirth of pride:., you who in anguish have counted your lines cin time of crowding:., now amid the trees of yours cin the transparent forest:. have put aside for me some clines of most resistance:.. Tens-me traduzido (e bern e muito mais do que eu a ti)-tu sabes que linhas sao de minha engenharia, «escondida ouma arte necessaria dentro dos ossos a escuta:. . Yes, this is true, I feel it now how true it is.

So true que desde que a (como se diz) asa da morte me tocou ha urn aoo ( oh nao esse toque doce e previo como joelhos ou dedos de amantes, ou como teta redonda e r6sea ou greta rubra e funda materna ou nao-materna, ou como a visao subita de negritude em pai de que brancura pende, mas como esse golpe sangrento que se diz de faca de ponta de asas de aguias, raras, quase extimas -talvez a que raptou Ganimedes- , ou de alguns cisnes-aquele que Leda conheceu, quisesse ou nao-, desde que, tocado assim, descia lentamente pela treva, de cabe~a para baixo e com os pes para cima, sem nada em mim, por dentro nem por fora), a poesia me abandonara silenciosa e cauta. Ela que sabia tanto e que falava tanto-atraves de mim, usando a minha vida-do amor e da morte. Calou-se, creio que sem susto, mas como se, porque voltei , nao haja

38

Jorge De Sena

FORJONATHAN GRIFFIN translated by Alexis Levitin

l'Ou who have known "hidden kings ", who have sung once and again of"the rebirth of pride", you who in anguish have counted your lines "in time ofcrowdings", now amid the trees of your "in the transparent forest" have put aside for me some "lines of most resistance." You've translated me (and well and much more than I have you)-you know which lines are of my engineering, "hidden in a necessary art within the bones, listening." ~s, this is true, /feel it now how true it is.

So true that ever since the (as it 's called) wing of death touched me a year ago (oh, not that sweet preliminary touch like a lover's knees or fingers , or like a rounded rosy nipple or the ruddy deep fissure, maternal or non-maternal, or like the sudden vision of blackness in a father dripping white, but with that bloody thrust, as we say of knives, of the wingtips of eagles, rare, almost extinct -perhaps the one who ravished Ganymedes-or of some swans-the one that Leda knew, like it or not- , ever since, touched thus, I've slowly descended into the shadows, head down, feet in the air, with nothing in or on me , neither inside nor out), poetry, silent and prudent, had abandoned me. She who knew so much and spoke so much-through me, using my life-oflove and death. She turned to silence, not, I think, from fear, but as if, since I'd returned, there was

39

mais nada que dizer. But I read your poem. cFibrous grace», yes (in me the grace, in me my own God's?), «a man's question is known», oh yes, e tu me deste uma outra vez a minha voz. cLinhas de maior resistencia», sim, nao tanto a morte, nem mesmo a vida que se escapa a ser possuida ou entendida: linhas de resistir a tudo , aquelas que restituem ao silencio a sua mesma voz.

Santa Barbara, Mar~o, 27/77

40

nothing more to say. But I read ,our poem. "Fibrous grace", yes (in me the grace, in me my own God's?) , "A man 's question is known ", oh yes, and you gave me once again my voice. "Linhas de maior resistencia", yes, not so much against death, nor even against life that escapes in being possessed or understood: but lines that resist everything, rttUrning to silence its very voice .

41

WingTekLum

THE MOON

Some say the moon is made of cheese.

Others swear a disgruntled wife lives there , all alone, regretting her theft of that potion of immortality.

At school our teachers recited dreams of high-jumping cows.

My mother encouraged me to look hard at the shadows for a rabbit and that old woodsman cutting cassia trees.

Many books state that she is a chaste huntress riding her chariot around this earth.

Does anyone believe that the moon, and not the sun, is the true center of our universe?

There are television clips showing spacemen playing golf on its pockmarked surface.

I have heard another claim that the moon itself is a golfball of the gods.

Fishermen respect its influence on the tides.

Not a few women nonetheless curse their lots each month by raising fists to its cold light.

Lovers have likened their perfect match to the moon's full shape.

A philosopher avers its inconstant state is an apt paradigm for our tenuous lives.

42

It has been rumored that the werewolf tracks every waxing with anticipation.

Farmers likewise watch for its halo foretelling rain.

At our museum I've seen a painting by a one-eared man who was bedazzled by its madding glow.

Scientists remind me though that in fact the moon has no illumination of its own.

Under this vast, dark sky we yearn for universal symbols to guide us through our private nights.

But the moon, like all things, is merely a reflection of what each of us would wish it to be .

43

SusanKomo

MOON

She waits-circle of light . Night beneath her. She buries it , pinches it, watches its dark , kimono sleeves qutver, undo a few stars­until she undresses , lets her robe fall : bright , luminous body.

44

Debra Thomas

THAT MOMENT

That last night before I had to leave as I washed the dishes you stood by the fridge wiping them and putting them away. You knew where everything belonged, it was your house . After I had done the last plate I turned and over my shoulder looked at you as we spoke ofl don't remember what but something of mild humor was in your eyes and I felt sheepish yet calm next to you and could not stop staring as my hands scrubbed the forks busily. In the yellow kitchen light you stood tanned and lean glowing like a sea of brown touramalines and I wished very hard the moment would not pass. You did not look away or blink so you must have been wishing too as you gazed smiling slightly. Here, an ocean and a continent away, I am still calm and it is still summer on this island but the yearning in me has stretched back and never wavered or stopped, to that moment.

45

David Kirby

MATTHEW ARNOLD ON MARS

Big Joe is the name of a rock on Mars. Big Joe is as long as a conference table and as high as a human being. BigJoe was there when the Viking landing craft came down in 1976. The landing craft missed Big joe by about twenty-five feet. Good thing it missed. If it had not, the landing craft would have been destroyed. Now it can sit there and do its job.

When it finishes, the landing craft will simply fall to pieces. It will have done its job well. Big Joe has a job, too. Big Joe builds character. Big Joe will never fall to pieces . Big Joe has many names . Hold me tight, dear, for one of them is " love ."

46

MOUNTING SUSPICION

I have reason to suspect they are making love in their rooms. I am in charge. I must do something. The other night in 207 the guys stripped naked and got into the beds in the adjoining room and when the girls got back they made such a racket they woke me up and I had to give them a lecture at 2 a.m . how this was a study abroad program that this was not spring break in Ft . Lauderdale. I thought it was all clean fun or they would have been more careful not to wake me. But I am increasingly unsure. Perhaps it was a diversionary measure, a clever contrivance to calm my fears. One said at breakfast this morning "I was rocking it last night" and I am not sure what that means. In other times you could tell by the looks on their faces in the morning, the faces of dogs who had crapped on the carpet during the night. But they are different now: their tails wag as if you had just offered them a ride in the car. I must do something.

47

Jack Driscoll

from THE HERMIT JOURNALS

The best place to find nightcrawlers was on the practice green at Wycoff Country Club. Mark hated fishing , but some nights he would bike over with me, his putter held across his handlebars. He owned a fancy black and silver Schwinn with a generator powered from the speed of the rear tire . The faster he pedalled, the brighter the red glow of the tail-light. Mostly it was a dull pulse, and going up Maple Hill it flickered out com­pletely as he came to a halt, puffing and calling, "Wait up. Hold it a minute."

On the flat stretches of road he would hold out the putter for me to grab and tow him while he caught his breath and started in on fishing and golf. He despised the obstructions of any sport , the snags and tangles of fishing , the thick lily pads, the weedless lures that dredged up clumps of pickerel grass. But what he hated most was the waiting when fishing with live bait, the crawler gobbing and twisting under the red and white plastic bobber. He would rarely hold onto his pole for more than a few minutes. Instead, he would find a "Y" stick, sharpen the other end and wedge it into the soft mud of the shoreline, click open his bail and rest the rod on the ground, the tip angled up and over the water. " Yell if I get a bite," he would say, then wander off to skip flat stones across the glassy surface of the reservoir. Returning bored and wet to the knees, he would sit on the cush­ion of pine needles, open my tackle box, and lifting out a large plug ask, "What the hell is this for? Sharks?" Then he would tie a short leader to a jitterbug or rubber frog and drag it back and forth in the shallows to see the different actions. Nothing looked real enough to him so he would shake his head and ask, " How much they soak you for this beaut?" When he caught a small perch or bluegill he would lift it out of the water and let it dangle there , barraging it with insults. If the fish was hooked in the gul­let, Mark would sometimes yank up on the stout line , ripping guts right through the fish's silky mouth . Or worse, using both hands, he would cast the fish back out as far as he could, and just before it hit the water he would begin to reel, jerking the fish violently towards him from the air. "Gimmeee a fight," he would threaten between his clenched teeth as he

48

set the hook again and again. I would tell him, "Cut it out," and he would say, "Let's get out of here. This sucks!"

But he would have stayed all night on the practice green , patient and putting in the dark. It was the only pan of the game he liked. No roughs or sandtraps or water hazards . At home he had designed a mini-golf through the carpeted rooms of his father's huge house. Each hole was a brandy glass turned on its side. When the ball pinged square on the bot­tom, it would roll slowly back out. No need to ever bend over. Mark used scorecards he had stolen from a mini-golf downstate, and unless he broke his own record, he would erase his score and begin again, night after night, perfecting his delicate touch . When he grew up he wanted to own a chain of Mark's Mini-Golfs in Florida and California where the money poured in year round. "No overhead," he would say. "Just flick on the floodlights and wait to collect the putters and balls at the 18th." A driving range was trash , he would explain, dangerous and low class. Guys always drunk and teeing-off backwards over the crowded Riverdale Road. All those lawsuits and lost balls.

Whenever we came to the green at night, I would get down on my knees on the damp, shon-cropped turf and turn on my flashlight and begin searching. Mark would always remove the pin and lower in a thick, white candle, the flame making a kind of halo above the hole. Then he would walk to the fanhest fringe and line up five or six shiny new Top Flights , stroking each only after his feet were perfectly planted, his concen­tration absolute . The game was to sink the longest possible shot and extin­guish the tiny flame. He went silent then, except for the "pok" of the ball, each of us drifting slowly into our separate lives.

I knew what Mark meant about the driving range, especially after what my father did there one Friday night the first summer we moved from the farm. He had bought me three pails of balls , most of them gouged and each with a red stripe around the middle, then led me to the last flat stall where a fat, rubber tee stuck up a couple inches through the mat. He gave me no tips and at first I missed the ball completely or dubbed it so it bounced a few times into the grass in front of me. When my pails were empty, I wanted to retrieve the close balls, get real low and streak out to collect a few before anyone could blast away. I glanced over at my father who was drinking a beer in the pickup, the door open, and he just shrugged like , what the hell, and yelled, "Be careful," and returned to fidgeting with the radio. There were at least a dozen balls within ten feet of me, so I grabbed a pail and snatched up each ball as though it was change spilled from someone's pocket. But when I hustled back to my tee,

49

a guy gripped my arm, shook me hard and pointed with his club at the sign on the lightpost: DANGER-KEEP OFF THE FAIRWAY! He was not the man from the rental shack, and I could tell right away from the pol­ished grain of the three-wood that he carried his own club. That was the way you could tell the serious players, like the older kids in school who owned their pool cues. "You want to get killed?" he scolded, glancing around as though this civic reprimand deserved a volley of support. But the others did not seem to notice, more interested in showing off the good form of their swings, hoping to launch just one ball through the harsh expanse of the bright lights. Right next to me were some double daters, and farther down the row of tees, two stocky mechanics in SUNOCO jack­ets, each letter bright yellow like the sun. They were belly laughing, bend­ing over and leaning on each other's shoulder in hilarious appreciation of their identical slices, the balls disappearing over the huge fence of chicken wire and into the drive-in movie theater beyond a row of willows.

"Don't ever go out there again," the guy warned. "Why not?" It was my father speaking, calm and quiet. He had come up from

behind, the beer bottle held upside down by the long neck as though he intended to crown the guy square on his high forehead . The guy sensed real trouble and let go of me, his hand left open in front of him as though he were showing us a tiny bird's egg, something so fragile he could not even trust it between his thumb and finger. Nervous and pale he stepped back, surrendered by saying, " I just didn't want to see the kid hurt . Sorry." Then he backed up a few steps, turned and walked away. We both watched him, and when he teed-up and swung, the ball seemed to lift from its straight line , hesitate, then gain speed, lifting again out of sight beyond all that green, mocking those clumsy weekend hackers .

My father said to me, "Watch out," and took my club and bent over to balance the beer bottle on the tee. Then he yelled, "Four," and brought the club face powerfully through the brown glass. It made a hollow, pop­ping sound, the dark slivers splashing in a hoop around him. "Jesus Christ," one of the high school kids next to us hollered , ducking out of the way with his date, and I knew it had started.

A stiff breeze slapped the colored streamers overhead, so loud and obvious in this sudden quiet, and below, the scene stopped in a still frame, except for my father moving out , a silhouette swinging the club like a scythe, as though he were clearing a path to return by. He stopped and turned to face us from in front of the 75- yard marker, wound up and cracked a line drive, the ball wizzing above our heads. I imagined it with a red taillike a tracer bullet, a warning shot . And sure enough, the next one

50

closer, ricocheting off the shingled overhang of the rental shack, the inside taking cover on the floor and yelling back into the heavy air,

the fuck! " Then one of the floodlights exploded behind me, sparks -~~~.~ ... .::in a blue fist of smoke. The next two balls skidded by waist high,

behind the other into the darkness of the parking lot. The guy who held me dropped to one knee , his back to my father, and picked up a

sock and slipped it with two hands over his expensive club head. In retreat he grabbed the handle of his black leather golf bag and

ara;~gc:a it as he might a wounded soldier to safer lodgements. One of the SUNOCO mechanics snatched two abandoned pails of

and swinging one pail to his buddy, said, "Here. Clobber the bas­!" They seemed stunned into accuracy by this unprovoked attack, and live target made all the difference, their blood pumping with revenge.

seemed so suddenly patriotic, their smeared uniforms evidence of the ""u'·""''t:: man's retaliation against madness. And I was with them, not side

side flailing an angry club, but walking straight out into the skirmish, .1ca1veng.·m£ balls and pegging them as hard as I could at my father, feature­

and insubstantial, a shadow man, blinded not so much by the harsh as by these excursions he took into the blizzard of himself, white and of surprise or purpose or a single landmark to resume his life by.

were no cows grazing in this field , no barn to enter for safety against a storm. There was only the whap, whap of the clubs behind me and the dangerous balls whistling to a stop beyond us in the thick grass of this hos­tile range my father cursed with defenseless outrage, desperate and insane. And I was terrified they would take him away, strait-jacketed and silent, his eyes fulminating with hate.

Nobody carne, and when the floodlights blinked off, a cease fire, I was standing only ten feet from him, my arm cocked and ready to release this tiny wrecking ball through the nightmare of his distoned vision of the world. It was quiet now except for my father crying and the sounds of traf­fic on the highway. He seemed to wake, revived in this sudden blackout, nocturnal and at home in the dark privacy a farmer knows. I imagined him at that moment in the pasture under the patterns of stars, omniscient and unaltered by the simple lives people betrayed, not by the soil and failed aops and dry wells for summer irrigation, but by the human obligation to suffer hope long after it withers, the spirit broken down.

I dropped the ball and my father held my hand all the way back to the pickup which always started, even on the coldest nights of winter on the farm , a victory we now celebrated by nodding our heads in the same slow rhythm of fathers and sons who remember working the land together, the long hours of belonging. And I did not glance back from the parking lot,

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though I could see the glow of the lights switched on and I knew those SUNOCO guys were exaggerating their search for my father by holding their clubs on their shoulders and marching back and forth, lookouts who would scare anyone with their sober account of how they flushed a crazy from the fairway and would stay a while longer with a few free pails of balls, making certain we did not return.

We never did, and after that my father remained more and more in the apartment, watching T.V. on the weekends. If "Wide World Of Sports" was covering the PGA Tour, he would snap off the set, the tee shots so mnemonic to his breakdown at the driving range. Except to go to work, he almost never ventured outside, taciturn and brooding in so soli­tary a life. He even gave up fishing, though he let me stay out late after the evening rains when nightcrawlers would be thick on the green. Like Mark, he wanted to modulate his life , not towards pure harmony, but towards a predictable calm that came by putting alone in the dark or by getting down on all fours to ease these fat worms from the moist ground, not only for what they might catch in the morning, but for how we all knew that they would really be there in the expensive sod, giving each of us an hour alone to practice whatever it was we loved.

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G GALLEY

my dear stroking neigh-

wormfood, scurvy, footrot , scuttling rats who know too well the sluiced scuppers of the slanted deck

see on land kicking the sun-

rich sand, children my brothers celebrate.

In their mountain huts the stock prophets are not in their wisdom

yesterday's storm grained planks bobbing correctly up the inlets.

On the welcome beach, we drink brave wine among the burrowing sandcrabs and fly in the night.

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Joseph P. Balaz

WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN

when i get to heaven

tfi get to heaven

they're going to give me a pair of wings.

when i have them attached

i'll soon find myself in front of a sapphire podium

where a seraph with a lawyer's necktie

will begin to present all of my devilish deeds.

on each reference

a bald-headed cherub smoking a cigar

ts gomg to come up behind me

and pluck out a feather.

no doubt when my session

ts over

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i'IJ find myself stUck on some isolated cloud

with aerial nubs

watching everyone else fly around in everlasting bliss.

to make matters worse

even my harp strings will be broken.

with such anticipated goodfonune

i' d be better off in hell

shooting craps for a glass of water.

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Leona Yamada

SMOKE RINGS

Gran'ma smoked Camels day and night in her small room, dark and still. She blew thick clouds between us. She pulled her left eye out at lunch, eating steamed whole fish

with a squint. After cracked seed and tea she picked the eye off the plate rim and put it back in.

She played cards and drank sake and beer with the widowers of her friends. The four old men and Gran' rna smoked Camels , cigars, and

p1pes, sitting in brown smoke in a closed room.

Sometimes, the men brought CrackerJacks and gave me the peanuts and the toys. When they gave me dollar bills my mother gave them back.

My mother served them salted squid, bright red and whole, on black lacquerware from Japan, and poured beer and sake for them until she went to bed.

Drinking warm beer and eating sweet peanuts ended whenever Gran' rna pinched me off her bony lap.

One night, she could not say my name. She dropped her cards. The ashtray fell , spilling all the butts and ashes, leaving a black hole in the rug.

At the funeral, red sparks from the chimney­fireworks with no sound-and someone crying.

Michael Darnay Among

Taking a chance at night

Like they say you know at night you can see Yourself not as the moon But as the Ginseng plant

They say you have to shoot an arrow To mark the spot

Then in early morning the Ginseng Will disappear from sight

They say you must shoot an arrow Into the brightest star

I see her shine at night They say you must gather love at night

Put your arms around it As if you were holding a river

Sometimes it wiggles Sometimes it just flows so steady

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Marjorie Sinclair

THE OLD WOMAN MEDITATES

All the years of seeds she had walked on the years of small insects and leaves, the cracks in rock and cement, the grains of earth and grass-all of these, walking on them, not thinking.

Going her way through hours, no longer hours making days as they ought but just moments starting with a small stain of light and ending at the entrance of dark.

Walking through space no longer remembered­that's the awful thing not remembering, and the years becoming a kind of cold gray soup in an old iron pot in an old wooden house of dusty rooms, cracked windows and the wind still humming­or maybe it's the sea rising and falling on a shore until the earth itself is smashed by huge footsteps striding and striding.

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John U nterecker

My jaw tightens , eyes harden, worrying the missing lower jaw of the skull. The coral skull stares back, eye sockets drilled by tube works, the bruised nose-frame widening under my stare.

Not skull, but mask of skull squared and discolored: abrasions.

Let me construct an ideal scene: yellow lantana growing by the sea, the sun-scorched stem purple on sunside , pale green over dark lava. HI search down into this fallen sun, searching for stone , I change life :

Rock fish escape my fingers; green forms caress an ocean skull.

Today, a small cavern houses deity hardened into coral, a little porous cheekbone hungry for red blood.

I press hard on my cheek, trying for bone, thinking how coral bleaches out to white.

White bone masked under any skin: under a skin of gold lantana blossoms, under the wrinkled blue skin of the sea, under the skin my fingers bruise.

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FLIGHT LETTER

Sailboats, white illusions in the bay: a geometry of dancers, white on blue , caught in an attitude: shuddering, out of focus, gone.

We lift out of the bay, circling lost dancers, gestures in bent fog .

• • • • • • I think of you: 3,000 miles 30 miles

• • • • • • 2,360 miles distances.

These clouds! At Wellfleet, we built a wall of clamshells on wet sand while clouds piled up until they were the bay. Toward Boston, rivets bonded sky to sea, black hammerings. Sparrow tombstones fenced us from each other. We plant the last shell dead white in a hollow wave, then race the yelling wave toward shore, drowning in thunder .

• • • • • • Or at the airport: abstracted, studying a kaleidoscope of shoes and ankles as in a dream once: "tried ... tried ... " your voice blurred by dream speech. "No one can try enough," catches my throat.

Brontosauri clear the burned- out land, short-winged black beetles tumbling from upended stumps .

. . . like a wound catching fire.

Torches . . . passageways .. .. Side caverns' silent- movie voices flicker, flames wavering the cave wall.

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At the far end of the wound, we are in a valley, the hillside roughened by bracken. A child swings shut the pasture gate. He leans on it a second, candid , his eyes unflinching. "You wanted truth," he says, his voice full of the dark of a voice dreaming .

• • • • • Waterfall, river, bay soft/hard from 2,000 feet up-breathing. It is as if the island is a body that the air remembers , as the sea remembers every swimmer's flesh.

Not that easy, of course.

And yet we slide down out of air as gently as the feather touch of seaweed undersea.

I think of swimmers, their bodies silhouetted in a breathing wave or, striding from the sea, wet with light-sheeted in lightning.

What wzll we say, I wonder. The plane taxies in, arrogant , shouldering aside the forgiving air.

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A Hundred Steps at Diamond Head Laura Ruby

Curt Fukumoto

THE INVISIBLE SNOWMAN

The pictures tell stories, each one a chapter that seems to have been written either in the rain or under the profane heat of August. The boy usually draws in his bedroom, next to the lamp that lights up the curtains his mother decorated with delicate gold inlay.

His mother died when he was born. She died with her legs spread open for the doctor's hands and her breasts swollen, full with milk, during a noon in August so hot the roads felt like fire to those who walked them. That night the child's grandfather called it a rebirth. But the child's father disagreed . He announced that he had a new son in the nursery and a dead wife. His father showed him the way he thought boys should do things. His sister was almost old enough to care for him and tried hard . On Sun­days she took him to the big, white Buddhist church that stood beside the highway that led to town. The priest in the church who wore a robe embel­lished with golden designs reminded the child of his grandfather. The boy thought it was because they both talked in a foreign language. He also saw that they moved as though they were always on the moon with nothing pulling them to the ground. The child was brought up listening to voices that seemed heavy moving through the ethereal air.

One Sunday after church , she asked him, " Are you listening during service?"

"Yes ," he said. He looked down at the beads of his white rosary that looked like a circle of moons in his hands.

"Do you understand?" she asked. "Sometimes, but I don't understand the priest who speaks in Japa­

nese. Do you?" His sister looked down as they descended , watching her white shoes

and the church steps. He waited for a response, but heard only the rhythm of her steps.

"Did you hear me?" he asked. "Yes," she said . She looked at him and almost tripped down the

stairs. "No. I don't understand all the Japanese words, but I still listen ."

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"Why?" "Just because. And you should, too . You should always listen to the

priest or the Buddha, no matter what anybody says." He tugged at the pink sleeves of her dress. "What about Daddy?" he

asked. "Even him," she said. That same Sunday his father took him hunting. As they were about to

leave in the truck with their guns, he saw his sister looking at them from the kitchen. She came out running and screaming with the screen door open behind her. "He's too young to be hunting and carrying a gun."

The man grabbed his rifle and aimed it at her breast. "Get in the house." The boy tried the radio in the truck, but it was broken. He wanted

something to help him forget about the heat that came through its win­dow. To the boy, the windows seemed as though they would melt into pure water.

"Your sister doesn't know any better. Maybe too much of those ideas she gets in church are in her head. Don't worry. I'll make her see straight."

"What are you going to do?" "What I used to do to your mother. What all men should do to

women once in a while." "Will you hurt her?" The man grabbed his son hard on the arm with one hand. The boy

was scared because the man touched him only when he was angry. "I don't want you going church no more. You listening to me?" The boy looked down at his shoes. With his fingernails he tried to

scrape off the dirt that was stuck to the bottom. "Yes." That afternoon they killed four white birds while the boy remem­

bered what the Sunday School teacher said : "The Buddha says animals are not to be killed." Each time they killed a bird, the boy watched the white feathers that fell like snowflakes.

His father came in the house that night, bringing with him the rain that soaked his clothes. The boy watched as his father approached his sis­ter. She was ironing the white shirt the boy always wore to church. The man came up close to his daughter. He pulled the hot iron out of her hand and laid it flat on the white shirt . When the girl looked up , the man's fist struck her face. She was lying on the carpet with her legs spread open and blood all over her white dress when the boy shut his eyes. He saw nothing now. But he did smell the white shirt burning; it burned like his face was burning.

64

He only heard his father's voice now. "You wanna pray? All your prayers won't stop it from getting inside you."

The boy reopened his eyes to see his father's body on his sister. He ran for his room, where he stood with his face pressed against the curtains his mother had made, while he listened to the rain that sounded like it would never let up. It was dark in the room when the boy dropped to his knees with his head touching the floor. On his knees he prayed. He prayed for his sister, his mother, and snow. He prayed to the Buddha there in his room until he slept.

He woke up to the sound of his own name and the light from the lamp. He looked up at his sister who had on a different dress, the one she wore to church.

"I'm leaving on the earliest bus,' ' she said. The boy looked at her face that had no blood on it now.

Before he could say anything he cried. He felt her lips on his fore­head, then down the side of his face, cooling it. "I want you to come with me,'' she said. "It will be better for us there. We could use the extra room, the one with the pink curtains in it."

"He'll come for us, you know." "Yeah, but you don't have to listen to him," she said. "I don't want

you being like him. Nobody should." She ran her fingers over his arm softly. "I can't force you into running away with me, but I just hope you see what's inside him before it gets to you, too."

When she left his room he thought of his grandfather's house and the way it reminded him of church because it was painted white. Once on a hot August afternoon, he and his sister tried painting their house white with brushes and buckets of white paint they bought from the home improvement store. They had almost finished the side of the house that faced the street when their father came home. He pulled up into the drive­way with his truck that had tires covered with a thick crust of dirt. The paint on the hood was dull from neglect. The engine was loud, and it roared like a pack of wild lions in the sun. The boy stopped painting, but the girl kept covering the walls as though she didn't hear the engine. Their father opened the front door of his truck, then in a second it was closed hard. He started slowly toward his son, cursing the color they were using. The boy could tell his father wanted to hit something just by the way he looked. He wanted to run, but it was as though his shoes were stuck to the cement he stood on. He thought that the sun might have melted them like that. His father came up close to him, and his shadow fell over the boy's face. The man picked up the bucket of paint that stood next to the boy's feet. He carried the paint as if it were poison, being very careful not to let

65

any of it spill on his clothes or shoes. The boy watched his father walk over to his sister's flowers, which grew right next to the big picture window. At night sometimes, he and his sister would look out from that window at the moon. One night when the moon was almost full they stood there and watched until it disappeared.

"Do you think it ever snows up there?" he asked. The boy looked up at the moon.

"Sometimes, maybe," his sister replied. "I wish it could snow here. It would be nice to watch it falling and

covering the street." "Maybe it's always been falling here except we can't see it because it's

invisible," she said. "But I still want to see real snow. Maybe we could move somewhere to

a place where it snowed all the time." She looked at him. "Yeah, we could build snowmen shaped like the Buddha," he said.

They both laughed. But when he looked out he only saw the streetlight on the corner,

which barely lit the street. He couldn't even see the moon anymore. He wondered what real snow was like. He remembered thinking it was like shaved ice that the old Chinese man with the gold-rimmed glasses sold on days when everything felt as if it would melt. The old man drove a shiny white truck with old, bald tires. The boy would just sit there in the sun, picturing his house and the street covered with the flavor strawberry. He thought about snow and the first man walking on the moon as he sat in the sun with his pink shaved ice, watching the truck until it turned up the hill.

The boy didn' t realize he was dripping paint with the brush he held until he looked down at white shoes. It was the same white that dripped from his sister's flowers.

The white paint made him think of the pigeons his grandfather kept in his backyard. The boy always thought their white wings would touch the clouds when they were in the sky. He would always wonder what brought all those birds back to the white house and what foreign words his grandfa­ther spoke to them. He also remembered the Sunday they made snow­flakes out of paper and how they both watched them falling in circles in the air.

The boy did not sleep that night, the night the rain never stopped falling. He drew a picture. The picture was filled with snow. The snow came down pink and it buried a man who stood on the bare ground. He walked over to a corner in his room and thought about what he had said about making Buddhas out of snow. The moon had swung itself behind

66

· the mountain when he listened to the rain again and heard his sister knocking on his bedroom door.

He kept listening to the rain while they waited for the five o'clock bus that went into town. They waited at the bus stop without talking, but just looking into the blackness of the morning. He didn't take his eyes off the bend of the road until the headlights swung around toward them.

The bus was dry and empty, and he felt good to be moving. He felt like drawing a picture as he looked out of the windows.

"I think it stopped raining," he said. With her hand, she wiped off the din that covered the window.

"You're right. I can see the moon now." The boy looked at the moon that was not full. But he knew the rest of

the moon was there even though he couldn't see it. When they got to the corner of the street their grandfather lived on,

the sky had lost some of its darkness. They walked on the stones that their grandfather had carefully placed that led to the house. When his grandfa­ther swung the door open, the golden doorknob caught a reflected light as the boy listened to the foreign words of his kind voice. The boy saw that the doorknob was made the same gold as the delicate patterns the priest wore on his robe and invisible snowflakes began to fall. .

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T. M. Goto

INCISION

Each night when I brushed the silver mane smooth, a thick eighty-eight years would hang hip-length along the back of her wheelchair. Her eyes sparkled like crystal as she described in detail the many ways she used to wear it: puffed in a broad bouffant, braided like a wreath on top, curled in delicate ringlets . . . . "But," she'd repeat every evening, "for an old woman a tight bun is best."

There, in the nursing home, amid the mingled odors of urine and disinfectant, her hair was her only treasure. I, on the Night Shift, took pleasure in watching the locks tumble and grace her shoulders before I pinned each strand neatly back in place.

That one Friday: I'll never forget the bewildered glaze of Anna's eyes, her drooping bottom lip, the furrow between her brows­all that before seeing her head like a bowl had been clamped down and a razor whipped around-all the length was gone.

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"The Day Shift cut it." Anna followed her short speech with a brave, trembling smile. "They said it was too long to wash."

I wanted to lift my hand and touch that shorn skull. I reached but my fingers slid only along her cheek. The other hand rose by reflex to stroke my own long, brown braid­tightened hair a working regulation.

She slid gently into the steel-frame bed. And, tucking her in, I pressed my face against that thin, soft silver, kissed her goodnight, and turned out the light.

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Tunnel at Diamond Head Laura Ruby

Meredith Carson

FISH

When they are fed by swimmers they move around reaching fingers , fearing our strange limbs.

But in the fish market, hands they rejected

touch them. Water has been drained from around them like birth fluid , and they have been dropped into air.

On their sides in death they become as if new life forms, backs measured along the land. Each slides differently from their life's schooling; they turn every which way and bounce , dry and stiff when weighed.

Sometimes when our limbs hang heavy, we reenter their world and follow them innocently as if in an earlier time , and when breath insists , leave them with longing.

Then we fashion with our fingers the paper carp which flow in the tides of wind .

with ceremonial hands .

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Kathryn Takara

PAYMENT

I hang on the ragged edge of fatigue Somehow savouring it as payment After sensitive caresses and sweet kisses Under the half moon, lying in your arms.

Engulfed in your warmth, in your tenderness I feel like a fresh blooming puakenikeni Waiting to be plucked again and laid by your loving Oblivious to the cooling fragrant breeze.

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I push my pain down Compost covered by rich earth Surprise fruits later.

73

Lyn Lifshin

I DIDN'T GET YOUR VIOLIN BACK TO YOU I'VE

taken a leave of absence from Sears I'm afraid to drive even, every piece of furniture I touch I ruin-my father's dying-but it's the way my brothers and sisters are picking what he has apart. He lies there, in and out of a coma and they're talking about how much some thing's wonh. When he comes to he says I was his only joy. He hears them, stans crying. I want him to die, not thinking his family's a pack of ravenous scavengers . They talk about what the piano's wonh, their words claws. They say he should sell the '42 Lincoln. It's all money. I never saw them this way before they're like the teacher's strike: my father

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taught 38 years in the roughest section , taught industrial arts . They came in with knives and guns but he only had 3 days of absence. These new teachers, what do they want they 've got a house good clean water comes out of the faucet. You don' t have that in Italy. There's no dedication , except to get big bucks. It's his heart . He goes in and out of stories one Sunday he sang a song he taught me when I was 12. You can' t buy what matters, someone to be there and hold you when the room gets dark .

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HAWAI'I HAWAI'I

Rick Golt Designed by Clemente Lagundimao, Jr. University ofHawazi"Press

In a candid cautionary note just before the endpapers of Hawai'i Hawai'i, photographer Rick Golt sets forth his intention in this book: "I tried to make photographs of people and situations at precise moments in their everyday lives, exactly as they existed. Whenever I was recognized as a 'photographer,' the natural reality would change, and I would direct my cameras elsewhere. I was obsessed by an effort to express these moments on film and yet remain apart and unobserved." This goal of scientific objectiv­ity strikes me as elusive as the intangible "spirit of the place" he was trying to observe and express, and for me, Golt's photographs are as successful and poignant as they are precisely because dispassionate detachment is not achieved.

"Art,'' said Zola, " is a corner of nature seen through a temperament," and it is Golt's apparent personal, compassionate vision of Hawaii which infuses his collection and provides its tone . His personal vision is seen not only in the composition of the images, but in the selection process as well, wherein thousands of photographs taken over a 13-year span were win­nowed to the 112 duotone pictures in this book.

By personal vision I don't mean entirely private, for it's an attitude toward Hawaii-as a benign and pacific natural and human environment -that most everyone can share at least part of the time.

Golt's collection has a forebear in Edward Steichen's famous The Family of Man exhibition put together for the Museum of Modern Art in 195 S. For Golt, the people of Hawaii comprise a truly unique community wherein "people were just themselves. They enjoyed who they were, and were at peace with their existence .... It made the world feel a very com­fortable place to live." His pictures specifically reflect his hope that in Hawaii "here still lies the key to living in harmony with our existence."

The book-carefully designed by artist and professor of design, Cle­mente Lagundimao-opens after Golt's introduction with some purely " natural" scenes: "Koko Crater shoreline ,' ' "Lava tidal pool. Makena, Maku," and others which show the influence of one of Golt's teachers, nat­uralist photographer Ansel Adams. One picture in this section, showing a

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shoreline with Chinaman's Hat in the background, is composed as aus­terely as a Zen rock garden. The absence of people in this early group reminds me of the way many " nature lovers" prefer nature-not cluttered and corrupted with human natures or their traces. The caption of another, however, reveals the non-objective, human perspective-even to the point of personification- which pervades this book: "The old church above Napo'opo'o watches a tiny boat trolling down the South Kona coast, Hawaii."

That old watchful church belongs to the second informal grouping in the book, which contains two panicularly riveting pictures: the facade of a Congregational church on the Big Island which is a Walker Evans-like com­position in flat light; and a barbershop in Hanapepe , with two barberpoles painted on the walls , flanking a mysterious and placid interior, a curious time-out zone.

The next informal section of the book contains portraits of individuals -a little girl in Kapiolani Park, a net fisherman in South Kona, a stately woman in Hilo , a man shooting pool in Kahului, and others.

Then comes a section generally composed of duos: a couple wearily waiting for a bus in Waikiki, two children adjusting swings in a schoolyard, duets singing, talking or working together-"precise moments in everyday lives."

The final section contains small clusters or large groups of people, and is generally more narrative. Kids playing ball or roller skating or swim­ming; men at rodeos or fishing; kids buying shave ice or eating cotton candy at the Punahou Carnival. There are five separate images of cleaning, cooking, and preparing pig for the imu. I think Golt intends these images of collaborative groups in cooperative actions to illustrate the harmony and the mutuality of interest people can achieve .

If there's one thing I miss in these photos, it's a sense of the less­benign aspects of our nature and the social manifestations of those aspects . Not that prisons , hospital wards , and urban or rural squalor are more real than the Hawaii expressed in these pages, but they are as real. The family of man includes the Manson family, and in Hawaii, as everywhere, no one is entirely free from some capacity for inhumanity.

But that would be another book, with another vision. This book is a beautifully and sensitively realized expression of Rick Golt's vision, and I find it rewarding to look carefully at these pictures and think about their world .

Tony Quagliano University of Hawaii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Darnay Among is "the poet oflao." Erland Anderson teaches at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland where he

also participates in the Poet-in-the-Schools program and hosts a weekly radio show. A translator of Swedish and Spanish poetry, he is currently seeking a pub­lisher for SEARCHING FOR MODESTO, his third collection of poems.

Joseph P. BaJaz is of Czechoslovak, Irish, and Hawaiian ancestry. His father, born in Czechoslovakia, immigrated to Buffalo, New York, then came to Hawaii in the Army. His maternal grandfather, born in Ireland and raised in Boston , came to Hawaii as a college student , and was later disowned and disinherited by his family for marrying "a Sandwich Island native ," born on the island ofMaui.

Meredith Carson, born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, began writing poetry as a student at Sarah Lawrence College and at Washington University, St. Louis, Mis­souri . After moving to Honolulu in 1970, she has renewed her interest in writ­ing and has won awards, including First Prize in a category of the Arizona State Poetry Society Contest (1983 and 1984). Her work has been included in CATS MAGAZINE, POETRY EAST-WEST, and GETTING THE GOOD OF IT.

Steven Curry teaches English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Jorge de Sena, Portugal's leading man of letters at the time of his premature death

in 1977, spent his last thirteen years in the U .S.A., where he was Chairman of the Department of Comparative: Literature:, University of California at Santa Barbara. Equally well-known for his poetry, criticism, drama, and anthologies, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. A book of his poetry is about to enter a second edition in the U.S.A.

Jack Driscoll 's recent fiction has been awarded three consecutive PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. His work has appeared in the: CHICAGO TRIBUNE, KANSAS CITY STAR, NEWSDAY, HARTFORD COURANT, and OREGONIAN. He teaches at the: Interlochen Am Academy in northern Michigan.

Charles Edward Eaton's poetry has appeared in over 100 magazines, including HARPER'S, AUANTIC MONTHLY, KENYON REVIEW, YALE REVIEW, GEORGIA REVIEW, and SOUTHERN REVIEW. He has published three vol­umes of short stories, a book of art criticism, and , recently, his ninth collection of poetry, THE WORK OF THE WRENCH (Cornwall Books, 1985 ).

Stuart Friebert's most recent volumes of translations arc: Karl Krolow's ON ACCOUNT OF: SELECTED POEMS (FIELD Translation Series) and Giovanni Raboni's THE COLDEST YEAR OF GRACE: SELECTED POEMS (with Vinio Rossi; Weslc:yan University Press). He is director of the: writing program at Oberlin College .

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Tony Friedson is Literary Editor of BIOGRAPHY. "Jumping Galley," one of his autobiographical poems, is a wary celebration of his recent retirement from the University of Hawaii, where he rode for many years on the creative writing fac­ulty of the English Department.

Curt Fukumoto is a student at the University of Hawaii. He has lived in Hawaii all his life and hopes he never has to leave.

Peter Gorham is a researcher in Astrophysics and, as a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, teaches as well .

T. M. Goto is at work on her first novel. Norman Hindley's collection of poems, WINTER EEL, was published in 1984 by

Petronium Press. DavidJames, born in 1955, is Director of Admissions at Siena Heights College.

His book, A HEART OUT OF THIS WORLD , was published by Carnegie-Mel­lon University in 1984. He is married and the owner of three children, all under six years old.

Imaikalani Kalahele is a Hawaiian artist. Karlton Kelm was born in Wisconsin, educated in Iowa where he edited his own

short story magazine, DUBUQUE DIAL. He has published two novels and has sold three plays for Broadway. His work has been published in literary maga­zines, including NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, ASCENT, WIND , SOUTH DAKOTA REVIEW, MENDOCINO REVIEW, THE SUN, and RE:AL. He is at work on a third novel.

David Kirby was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985. His most recent collection of poems is SARAH BERNHARDT'S LEG (Cleveland State University, 1983 ).

Nicholas Kolumban, a native of Hungary, teaches English to foreign students in public school. His poems and translations have appeared in ANTIOCH REVIEW, CHARITON REVIEW, EPOCH, HAWAII REVIEW, NEW LETTERS, POETRY REVIEW, and elsewhere ; his recent collection of poems and transla­tions, RECEPTION AT THE MONGOLIAN EMBASSY, was published in 1987 by New Rivers Press.

Susan Komo says "People don't know how much they get into my poems." Karl Krolow is the author of SCHONEN DANK UND VOR0BER. Wendy Wilder Larsen is a poet who lives in New York City, but more often is on

the road to somewhere else. Random House recently published her and Tran Thi Nga's book SHALLOW GRAVES about two women in Vietnam.

Mitchell LesCarbeau's work has recently appeared in NEW ENGLAND REVIEW I BREAD LOAF QUARTERLY, GRAHAM HOUSE REVIEW, and THE NEW RENAISSANCE. He spent the summer of 1985 in Yaddo and the summer of 1986 in California's Dorland Mountain Colony. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Rhode Island .

Alexis Levitin's translations, primarily of Portuguese and Brazilian poetry and short fiction, have appeared in over 90 magazines and in anthologies such as LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE TODAY and WOMEN POETS OF THE

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WORLD. His book, INHABITED HEART: THE SELECTED POEMS OF EUGENIO DE ANDRADE, appeared in 1985 and a co-translation of Carmen Conde's WOMEN WITHOUT EDEN from the Spanish was published in 1986. At the moment, he is completing work on his translation of short stories by Clarice Lispector, to be titled THE STATIONS OF THE BODY.

Lyn Lifshin is the author of NAKED CHARM, UPSTATE MADONNA, BLACK APPLES, READING LIPS , MAD GIRL POEMS, WANT ADS, HOTEL LIF­SHIN, and KISS THE SUN OFF, winner of the 1984Jack Kerouac Award.

Wing Tek Lum's poem, "The Moon," was inspired by an unpublished anicle by Eric Chock; this article formed the basis of Eric's interview in HAWAII REVIEW's Fall1983 Special Supplement tabloid.

Michael McPherson went south. Lynn C. Miller is an associate professor in the Speech Communication Depanment

at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches performance of litera­ture . She recently "scripted" and staged a production of the works of Genrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson called THREE AMERI­CANS IN PARIS.

Michael Miller's poems have appeared in magazines, including THE SEWANEE RIVER, THE KENYON REVIEW, THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY, and COM­MONWEAL. His play, TRANSPLANTS, won a contest for New England play­wrights and was produced by the Oldcastle Theatre Company, the regional the­ater of Vermon in Berrington.

Tony Quagliano is a poet and teacher of American Studies in Hawaii. He has poems in ROLLING STONE and in NEW LETTERS.

Richard Raleigh's poems appear in issues of CINCINNATI POETRY REVIEW, CUMBERLAND POETRY REVIEW, PACIFIC REVIEW, PIEDMONT LITER­ARY REVIEW, and WASCANA REVIEW.

Paul Ramsey is currently Poet-in-Residence and Guerry Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His recent works include a collection of poems, THE KEEPERS (Irvington Publishers, 1985), a book of criticism, THE TRUTH OF VALUE: A DEFENCE OF MORAL AND LITERARY JUDGMENT (Humanities Press, 1985), and a recording of his poetry, THE POEMS OF PAUL RAMSEY (Spoken Arts, 1983).

Laura Ruby is a Honolulu artist whose works have appeared in national exhibitions in such places as the Utah Museum of Natural History, the Erie An Museum, and the Columbus Museum of Arts and Sciences. Her recent one-person exhi­bition of prints entitled " Diamond Head Series" was shown in Spring 1986 at Gallery EAS in Honolulu. Her art work is also included in the " Poetry on the Bus" Project for the City and County of Honolulu . She teaches sculpture and printmaking at the University of Hawaii.

Marjorie Sinclair's book of poems, THE PLACE YOUR BODY IS, was published by Petronium Press, 1984.

Kathryn Takara, nee Waddell, teaches French at Windward Community College, and Black History, Culture, and Literature at the University of Hawaii. She is

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working on her doctoral dissertation on Doris Lessing at the University's Politi­cal Science Department and writing poetry. She enjoys traveling to France, Africa, and Tahiti .

Debra Thomas lived in Manoa; she recently moved to New Zealand. John Unterecker is the author of DANCE SEQUENCE and STONE. His poems

have appeared in such mainland publications as THE NEW YORKER, SOUTH­ERN REVIEW, and POETRY.

Leona Yamada lives in a valley on Oahu with her husband, daughter, six cats, and two dogs.

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Legends of Hawaii Padraic Col urn

This classic retelling of nineteen bright and charming tales of Hawaii is now available in a newly designed paperbound edition.

" A selection of native stories such as this, so skillfully retold by a gifted storyteller, is perhaps . .. the best approach to the actual cultural background of the Hawaiian people . . . . Altogether a notable selection . . . . delightfully told." -Martha Beckwith, The New York Times

" Padraic Colum .. . has never combined charm and delicate adventure more effectively than in this set of nineteen Hawaiian tales. They are powerfully imagined, rich in character and atmosphere." -Charles J. Finger, New York Herald Tribune

Now Baek in Print

"Those who know Colum's retelling of old stories need not be told here that this is a beautiful book. His most distinctive gift as a man of letters is his feeling for the folk mind, his ability not to put it on, but to be it. In prose lovely, simple, vocal, he tells these stories, enabling you to feel the symbolism for yourself." -Horace Reynolds, Christian Science Monitor

"This is a fine book for children, because the stories are so entertain­ing; and it is a good book for anybody, because one learns so much of the folklore of these loveliest of gardens."-William Lyon Phelps

Available in cloth ($ 30.00) and paper ($9.95)

Yale University Press Dept 56J, 92.A Yale Station New Haven, CT o6 5 2.0

Fiction by:

Jack Driscoll \

Curt Fukumoto Karlton Keirn Lynn C. Miller

Poetry by:

Michael Darnay Among Erland Anderson Joseph P. Balaz Meredith Carson Steven Curry Jorge de Sena Charles Edward Eaton Stuart Friebert Tony Friedson Peter Gorham T. M. Goto Norman Hindley David James David Kirby Nicholas Kolumban SusanKomo Karl Krolow Wendy Wilder Larsen Mitchell LesCarbeau Alexis Levitin LynLifshin WingTekLum Michael McPherson Michael Miller Richard Raleigh Paul Ramsey Marjorie Sinclair Kathryn Takara Debra Thomas John Unterecker Leona Yamada

Art by:

Imaikalani Kalahele Laura Ruby

Review by:

Tony Quagliano

ISSN: 0093-9625