HAW All REVIEW - ScholarSpace

HAW All REVIEW SPRING 1982

The staff of Hawaii Review would like to express their appreciation to Professor William Huntsberry, who is retiring from the Department of English this year. Since the early 1950's; Professor Huntsberry has supported and acted as an advisor for literary publications at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Beginning in 1973 when Hawaii Review published its first issue, and throughout the history of the Review, he has provided a much needed stability and continuity, wisdom and wit. Essentially, he has_atways been there to help. Thanks.

BARBARA FULKERSON Editor

LIZABETH BALL Fiction Editor

WINITERADA Poetry Editor

DONNABAIR Managing Editor

VICTORIA EMERY RONETTE KAWAKAMI

CHARLES MILLER MEENA SACHDEVA JENNIE WATSON

Fiction Readers

NANCY CASTLE ZDENEK KLUZAK WENDY TSUTSUI PATRICE WILSON

Poetry Readers

IAN MACMILLAN FRANK STEW ART

Advisors

BEAU PRESS Production

HAW All REVIEW is a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines.

HAW All REVIEW is a. student publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Subscriptions and manuscripts should be addressed to HAW All REVIEW, c/o Department of English, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, m 96822. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Single copies, $3.00.

e 1982 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

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CONTENTS

Halawa Valley Slide Show 5 VICTORIA NELSON

Four Oahu Tales 8 Hunters in the Fields 10 LAURA KALPAKIAN

of August Stealing from 21 DAVID JAMES

My Grandmother Three Short Poems Having 23 JOHN UNTERECKER

to Do with Darkness My Love Brings Flowers 24 WANDA COLEMAN

Northern Blue 26 ZDENEK M. KLUZAK

Melchior 28 PATRICE WILSON Two Poems 29 CATHY SONG Two Poems 33 WIN! TERADA

Two Poems 37 CINDY SETO

Brueghel's "Triumph of 38 JOSEPH STANTON Death"

Shell Beach 40 JEANNE LOHMANN Wood rose 41 DEBRA THOMAS

Tsunami 42 BILL MIYASATO Amateur Photographers 44 JULIETKONO

Cambodia: Invitation to an 45 MICHAEL HIGGINS Itinerant Reaper

Let's Bring Faith to the 46 FOROOGHFARROKHZAAD Onset of the Cold Season

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A Conversation with 56 TOM HILGERS Marvin Bell

Correspondence 64 MARVIN BELL and WILLIAM STAFFORD

A Small Obligation 71 SUSAN NUNES Monsoon Notebooks 80 MICHAEL ONDAA TJE

The Moiliili Bag Man 84 DARRELL H.Y. LUM Clouds, Trees & Ocean, 88 MICHAEL MCPHERSON

North Kauai Two Poems 89 HARRIET SUSSKIND

Pharaoh 91 PAULGENEGA The Moon is a Streetlamp 92 BILL REISNER

Feelings on Faye 93 CINDY S. IKENAGA Poem 94 TONY QUAGLIANO elegy 95 EDWARD FALCO

Five Sisters 96 ARCHIBALD HENDERSON Dream Leakage 97 PETER LASALLE

Going to a Funeral 98 WINGTEKLUM OhWow 99 MARLA HAMABATA

Prove It To Me 105 WILLIAM D. STEINHOFF from Exiles into Fire 111 MATIAS MONTES-

HUIDOBRO Contributor's Notes 122

Cover lettering by john Bain

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VICTORIA NELSON

• Halawa Valley Slide Show

Down through the clouds, deep blue ocean turns to green where the coral reef breaks. The island of Molokai. Green cliffs drop to sandy beaches and deserted coves. This is Halawa Valley. Narrow in the mountains, wide at the shore. And a small harbor at the mouth. The Kahalewai family has their summer camp here. They fish and pick opihi, the salt-water limpet. Mrs. Kahalewai is shelling opihi. Mr. Kahalewai is having a beer. Russell and big sister Armine watch their uncle Eli climb on the rocks under the cliffs. Opihi picking can be dangerous. Uncle has a full bag already. Russell and Armine play in the surf with their cousins. Watch out! Dio the dog gets in the swim. Russell calls to Armine. Let's go exploring! Down the dirt road into Halawa Valley. Past the abandoned church, past the empty houses. No one has lived here in forty years. Their great aunt Tutu Ann's bungalow. Let's peek. Russell, don't go in! Look what I found. A Sunday school diploma from long ago .

. There is something behind the cardboard.

Narration to be read aloud with numbered slides.

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28. A photo of Auntie Tutu Ann as a young girl. 29. Oh, so pretty! 30. Come, don't hang around. 31. For they know Auntie Tutu Ann's grave is in the back yard. 32. Close the gate behind you. 33. The diploma left on the porch steps. 34. Now Russell and Armine are at the end of the road. 35. The old trail follows the stream back into the mountains. 36. Old terrace walls where Russell's ancestors cultivated the taro plant. 37. Ilio chases a mongoose. 38. A wild orchid for Armine's hair. 39. Russell teases Armine. 40. I saw you here with Kaipo. 41. Shut up, silly boy. 42. Patches of sun and shadow under the java plum trees. 43. Look, soft pili grass to sit in. 44. From here you can see down the whole valley to the ocean. 45. There is Moa Ula waterfall. 46. And this is Makaeleele. 47. Mountain apples, ripe and tasty. 48. What a pleasure to sit and eat. 49. The beauty of the afternoon. 50. A big black dog attacks! 51. But it is only a dream. 52. Armine was asleep. 53. Now there are long shadows everywhere. 54. Time to go back to the beach. 55. Ilio, go slow! 56. Let's take a different trail. 57. The darkness of the forest. 58. Like a giant spider web, the tangled roots of the hau tree. 59. Armine is frightened. 60. Pick a ti leaf for protection. 61. What's that big pile of lava rocks around the bend? 62. The ruin of a heiau. 63. Here their forefathers worshipped the god of sharks. 64. Russell trips over a root. 65. His leg is hurt. 66. And the shadow across his face. 67. Is it an accident? 68. Armine has a thought. 69. Her brother is marked for an early death. 70. Past the heiau, into the sunshine! 71. See the family waving from the beach. 72. Papa has made a toy boat for Russell.

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How come you limping, son? Russell and his boat darken the mouth of the stream. Armine helps her mother cook the rice. Time for dinner, everyone! There is always plenty to eat. And coconut haupia for desert. The glow of a brilliant sunset. The Kahalewai family watches from the beach .

. Gentle surf laps the shore. Armine sits deep in thought.

;83. What of the future? 84. And her brother so silent.

Her family is talking and laughing. And it is already dark.

~. Then you must say goodbye to unhappy thoughts. 88. Tonight all will lie down well fed and at peace.

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Four Oahu Tales

Old Woman and the Cat

Japanese family fumigates their home for island termites. Big gaily striped tent goes over the house, family stays overnight in a Waikiki hotel. Move back to their immaculate ranch house all free of termites for another five years, something is wrong. Ugly sweet odor rises from the floors and hangs in the air. clings to Daughter's pretty clothes in her closet. Finally someone says: "Dead animal under the house," and he is right. Look under the porch, what a smell! Stray cat hid there when the tent went over the house. Now he is dead and rotting.

No one wants to go get that cat under the house, not after a week. Too much stink, disgusting. Then someone brings old wrinkled four-foot grand­mother. Mama-san looks under the porch, grunts, crawls in with kerchief over her face and mango bag in her hand. Everybody waits. Very soon she comes backing out on hands and knees. Oho, they all think. But Mama-san only says, "You bring me one shovel and bucket. All his skin come off in one piece when I lift it." Daughter and friends squeal. Daddy brings the bucket and shovel. Mama-san crawls under the house again. Sound of shovel hitting rim of pail. Mama-san comes out from under the house. Everybody backs off.

"Here," she says to her son. "You go bury." "Yes, Mama," says Daddy with a nervous laugh. He holds the bucket with one hand and his nose with the other. Daughter asks, "What kind of cat, Grandma?" Mama-san declines to answer.

The Pig that Knew the Trick

Out in the country, blonde youngjohn finds a lost baby pig, takes it back to blonde Susan to raise in their tin-roof shack. They feed garbage to the little black pig and keep him tied to the mango tree out in front. That pig grows and grows until he is as high as Susan's waist and weighs 500 lbs. He stands like a statue in the dust under the mango tree. Fruit flies boil around him like shoals of fish. But Susan taught him a trick when he was little and he still can do it. She reaches down and scratches his hairy gray belly. That is the signal. Grunting and wheezing, the big pig drops to his knees and rolls over like a steam boat capsizing. Four horn hooves hang in the air. The cloud of fruit flies regroups over his new position. Slowly the great pig rubs his back in the dead leaves and smashed mangoes. The air is full of country noises. Imprisoned in the giant head the little pig eyes look up.

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The Dog that Hung Himself

Peanuts, uptightest dog in Niu Valley. His Chinese owners keep him leashed inside a cage in their fenced back yard. Peanuts throws himself in a frenzy against the side of the cage whenever a face appears in the kitchen window fifteen feet away. Tries to scale the chain link wall in sheer excitement till the leash yanks him back and he falls to the ground choking in fits. His little white body races like a hummingbird's. "How come your dog so nervous?" the neighbors say to the Chinos. "How come you no pet him, take him for walk?" The Chinos don't like other people butting into their business and they go on just like always.

Once Peanuts was the Chinn family dog, beloved pet of Brother and Sister. But no more. Brother and Sister are in high school, their friends come over to play records. They don't want Peanuts, they put him in the cage because he was a nuisance. Sometimes Sister comes to coo baby talk through the wire to the little dog. When he gets too excited, she slaps him and leaves.

All day and night Peanuts screams like a human. Teenage girl across the street crawls through the fence one night to let Peanuts go. But Peanuts won't go. Body shaking all over in fits, he crawls to the kitchen door to cry and moan.

Other people in the neighborhood have different ideas about what to do. Haole schoolteacher wants to call the S.P.C.A., Hawaiian telephone lines· man wants to poison his food, hippies want to kidnap him and take him to a commune on the North Shore. In the end nobody has to do anything. Brother and Sister go out in the back yard one morning, find Peanuts dangling dead from his leash on the side of the cage. (Leash caught on the chain links during one of his frenzied charges.) His swollen tongue hangs out, his little eyes pop, doo-doo lies all over the ground and in his bowl. Disgusting.

Faceless Woman and the Dog-Faced Man

You get in a taxi in Waikiki-says Kaipo-you tell the driver take you home. But he don't go that way, he take you to the back of Manoa valley to the graveyard. Then he turn around in the seat and you see under the little hat he got the face of a white dog. And he smile at you with his big yellow teeth, 'cause he going to tear your heart right out of your living body.

You a girl, you go to da movies, you go Waialae Drive-In in Kaimuki, watch out. You walk into the woman's room at thetopofthe hill, it's over a burial ground. You see an old Chinese lady standing at the mirror with a long Chinese dress slit up the side and gray hair in a bun. That's what you see from the back. She just standing there. Then you look in the mirror and you see the lady got no face. You see her once, she casts a spell on you. And that's no lie. She don't have to tear your heart out to ruin your life for good.

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LAURA KALPAKIAN

Hunters in the Fields of August

She always claimed to have left Italy with only the clothes on her back: a sturdy black dress, a light woolen coat, cotton underwear, cotton stockings, black leather shoes and a small neat scarf for her head. She left with more than that; she had a husband and five-year-old son, but they were-in some ways-less important than the clothes on her back and the babe in her arms who was no babe at all, only a silk pillow cut down to infant shape and swathed in coarse woolen blankets with a shawl covering its featureless face. The clothes on her back were not what they appeared to be either. She had carefully sewn little silk bags inside and in these she placed nothing so flimsy and unreliable as paper money. She sewed every jewel the Zacatos possessed and what was too big to be carried in a silken bag she broke down or traded for more portable pieces. She was a woman in a black dress, sitting on a ransom, cradling a mythical infant with tangible assets for innards.

She got out smOQthly, easily, early, before the boot of Italy was itself booted and spurred, before politics determined one's worth and survival, when she might still rely on the Italians' weakness for bambinos. This is not to say that she left with honor. She greased every sweating palm she could find. She cherished no misguided affection for the money itself and foresaw the time when the money would not only fail to protect them, but mark them indelibly as undesirables. She always said she could see the writing on the wall.

They were literally merchants of Venice, these rich Jews. Their palazzo had a garden, that most treasured of Venetian luxuries, where wisteria hung down like hothouse grapes. Humble geraniums and basil scented the air, but even so, the smell of the canal sometimes wafted over the wall.

The Zacatos were people of consequence and tradition in Venice. Syl· vana' s husband, Solomon, scoffed at II Duce. "My family has been great for four hundred years," Solomon Zacato said, "Mussolini's ancestors were dogs. The Facists will pass like sewage."

Sylvana said: "In five years we won't be able to cross the canal, let alone the Atlantic. They will kill us. They will kill our son and then what will become of the great Zacatos? Dogs will live here and pee on your father's portrait."

Solomon cut his father's portrait from the frame and rolled it up to take with him under his coat. He also stashed his family's Menorah and Kiddush

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cup. Sylvana threw these things to the parquet floor. She told him to take nothing without value. "They have value," Solomon replied. "They are irreplaceable. They have more value than all the-"

" They'll kill your son," she reminded him. "They'll kill us. Hide these things and we'll come back for them after the war."

"What war? There is no war." There was a war and they followed it closely in the American news·

papers they had delivered to their home in Beverly Hills. The garden in Beverly Hills also had a wisteria vine, but the flowers paled and died young. ''You see," she reminded him over cups of thin American coffee, "they would have killed us."

"What's the use of living anyway when everything you know is gone?" said Solomon.

"Are you crazy? Your son isn't gone, is he? You know him." But in truth Solomon hardly knew Paolo at all. Not after he became Paul

and played baseball and particularly not after he went to Beverly Hills High School arid then USC and dated girls with red fingernails and spoke in a fast, cryptic lingo. Paul grew tall and thin and tanned in Beverly Hills. So did Sylvana, who became Sylvie to her friends. But Solomon's skin blanched and mottled like that of a dappled fish. He hated the ubiquitous sunlight and the sounds of the traffic. He stayed as much as possible with his books in the living room, drapes closed, windows shut. Sounds of wheels-whooshing, grinding, screeching-accosted him continually. Always the brakes and horns, never the sounds of bells and water. No sound of water anywhere in Beverly Hills except twice yearly when the rain gutters gurgled for a week. Then Solomon opened the drapes and watched the rain make tiny canals through the garden. Once Sylvie found him squatting in the rain, fashioning an annada of leaf-boats.

The writing on the wall told Sylvie that Solomon was going soft in the brain like the oranges in their yard that fell from the trees and rotted to a powdery green. The Zacato's jewelry business fell more and more into Sylvie's hands; it had been hers all along. She conceived it and brought it forth just as surely as she carried the make-believe bambino third class on the train from Venice to Genoa. They left the city of bells and water and stone and sat on wooden benches in the third class carriages as the train rattled over dry land. Sylvana soothed and sang to the silk pillow. Opposite her, Paolo sat, frightened into silence, having heard many times how they would kill him-presumably first. Solomon stared at his own reflection in the black windows as the train rumbled westward over the fields of August.

The train made frequent stops. Sometimes soldiers got on; sometimes they got off. They never did anything singly.Just after dawn they stopped at a village where four old women with muscular calves and knotted hands got on. The train started again, but slowly, wheezing as if the old women had infected it.

Dawn deprived Solomon of his own reflection. He looked out across the

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fields. Poplars stood as sentinels against the morning and sunflowers hung their heads for sadness. In the ochre uncertain light Solomon saw three hunters, men in black shirts with guns and dead rabbits hanging from their shoulders. He shook his son gently. "Come here." Solomon pulled Paolo into his arms. "Wake up. Look." He pointed to the hunters in the fields. "You won't see that again."

"Who knows what they'll hunt next," Sylvana muttered, clutching her silken bambino to her breast.

Sylvana clung to the pillow-baby even as the family stuffed themselves into the narrow, airless, third-class berth of the ship that would take them across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. She took the baby with her even to the toilet. When she waited in line she overheard women whisper she was the crazy one.

"Me! The crazy one!" Sylvie shouted, flushed by the rich dinner and the wine and the Beverly Hills heat. She leaned toward her four-year-old granddaughter and shouted again as if Caraleah was very far away and not at the same table at all. "The ones who stayed behind, they were the crazy ones. Me, I could see the writing on the wall."

"It's almost time for Gunsmoke," Solomon announced. "Can't you ever miss Gunsmoke?" Sylvie snapped. "I'm telling a story." "I've heard it," said Solomon. Dwarfed by her grandmother's massive table, Cara clutched her doll

with the golden hair that resembled her own. She peered at her mother over her plate.

"You must put the doll down at meals," her mother chided her. "You must not hang on to it at meals."

"Let the child alone," Sylvie said to her daughter-in-law, Lorraine. "Believe me, Cara, you would not be sitting here today, not you or your father or your mother or your baby brother Steven, sleeping in the next room, if I hadn't held on to my doll. Paul's little brother we called him." Sylvie's bosom shook with her laughter.

Solomon rose and shut the dining room windows. The breeze and the sounds of the traffic died on the rug. Lorraine turned to Paul, "Tell Cara she must put the doll down. She must do as I tell her."

Paul shrugged. Lorraine knotted her fingers in her lap and studied her long red nails and

the diamond the size of a walnut on her right hand. The ring was a present from her mother-in-law at Caraleah's birth.

"Thirty years ago when I married your grandfather, Cara," Sylvie said, addressing them all, "we had to fight his family. His father said-not her Solomon, she's not good enough for our family." Sylvie poured herself another glass of wine. "The Zacatos wouldn't have a family now if it hadn't been for me."

"Time for Gunsmoke," said Solomon, leaving the room. Lorraine bit her lip. She said she thought she heard the baby Steven

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crying in the next room and left. Cara held on to her doll while Paul lit another cigarette and flipped the

match into the ash tray. He missed; the match burned a hole in the lace tablecloth and he left it where it lay.

• • • For the two weeks of the Atlantic crossing, Sylvana and Solomon and

five-year-old Paolo shared the third-class berth with one another and the third-class toilet with many others. They lived in the serviceable clothes they wore. They did not bathe and they changed only their underwear. "We stink like peasants," Solomon said. "I have never been a peasant. I have never stunk."

When they arrived in New York, Sylvana's cousin met them at the gate. They told the official they were only there to visit. The official had red hair and blue eyes and a face the color of polenta. Sylvana recognized him for a peasant and that's when she took the silent swaddled baby who had outlived his usefulness into the bathroom, opened his seams with her hatpin and left a small perfect emerald in the official's meaty hand on her way out of customs.

Sylvana's cousin and his family lived above their grocery store and always the smell of brine and vegetables from the store and oil from the street rose up into the room where the Zacatos stayed for a month. "They make me sick, your cousins," Solomon told her. "They live like rabbits."

"They have a radio though," Sylvana offered hopefully. She refused however to help her cousin's wife peel onions. She spent her

days "making arrangements," exchanging some of the infant's golden innards for papers with signs and seals, for space at the top of waiting lists and names on documents.

Although Paolo's little brother no longer needed to live, Sylvana said better to be the fox than the rabbit. For the next journey she insisted they wear their same serviceable black clothing (after it had been washed; Sylvana attended to that herself, would not allow her cousin's wife to throw their clothes into the wringer washing machine she so proudly displayed on the back porch). They might still look like peasants, but the Zacatos did not travel third class on the train that took them still further west to Los Angeles and their future-the jewelry store and the house with the pale wisteria. They had only one son this trip and the American train took Paolo toward Beverly Hills High and USC and Lorraine and Caraleah and Steven.

When Paul wanted to marry Lorraine, Solomon said she was not good enough. for the Zacatos. Her father did not attend synagogue and cared nothing for his religion. Lorraine's father even allowed his children to have a Christmas tree. "What do we care about that?" Sylvie said. "Her father can afford to send her to USC, can't he?"

Paul met Lorraine at USC in a Dante class. He majored in business, but his grades were woeful. He did very well however in Dante and always claimed that his first words to Lorraine were in Italian and that she fell in

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love with his accent. She fell in love, that much was true. They were quite beautiful . when

they married in August 1952. Paul, slender and graceful, danced the "Anniversary Waltz" with his bride who had a pixie's face and curling hair of dark gold. Her blue eyes matched her sapphire ring in depth and luster and her white lace dress cinched in at the waist and flared out at the breasts and hips. They looked like the bride and groom on the top of their cake.

Lorraine's parents rented a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel for the occasion and the guests danced over the cold tiles. Solomon sat beside Lorraine's mother on the bridal dais while Sylvie danced with Lorraine's father. Solomon sniffed the flower arrangement in front of him. "You chose a good place," he said to Lorraine's mother, "you cannot hear the traffic in here. You cannot hear the fountains either, but at least you cannot hear the traffic."

When the bride and the groom were about to leave, Sylvie enveloped Lorraine in her arms and drew from the folds of her voluminous gown a small silken bag. "I've been saving this for seventeen years," she said. The diamond in the pendant was brilliant and cold and perfect and fiery.

"All the way from Venice," Solomon added, "from my family's palazzo. "This-" he waved his arm around the Ambassador's gilded ballroom, "this is nothing. Not every American girl can marry into a family that has been great for four hundred years."

"Before the war," Sylvie said" to Lorraine's mother, "we left Italy with nothing but the clothes on our backs. I could see the writing on the wall."

She could see the writing on Paul's wall too. He cared nothing for the jewelry business. It was not in him. He cared nothing for Sylvie's sacrifices, nothing for his family; he thought only of himself. "Leave him alone," said Solomon, "he'll find what he wants to do."

He might have left, except that Solomon conveniently died. "It broke your father's heart," Sylvie wept into her handkerchief. "The thought of you leaving the store. It killed him. Think of your father's memory. Think of your children, think of your wife. Who will pay you as well as I do? Think of that." Paul thought. He stayed in the family business in a manner of speaking. ·He stayed on the payroll, but he spent much of his time at the track and the library and often played cards. When he did appear at the jewelry store, he drank coffee and read the newspapers in the back room while Sylvie berated him for his heartlessness: he cared nothing for his mother who had given him everything and who was getting old and infirm. Then she blew her nose and went out front to negotiate shrewdly with a diamond broker from South Africa, a goldsmith from Peru and a movie mogul who wanted something sparkling for a starlet.

Sylvie aged as only successful women can age. Perfectly powdered and coiffed, she wore silk suits in summer and fur coats in winter. Her hair retained its original color against the dictates of time and with the help of a discreet, well-paid beautician. She ate well, drank modestly, swam almost

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daily in her turquoise blue pool and laughed off offers of marriage. "What do I want a husband for?" she said, raising both penciled eyebrows. "At my age!"

She paid for her grandchildren's music lessons, their dancing lessons, their tennis lessons and with particular relish for their equestrian lessons and the expensive tack and saddles, the trim tailored riding habits they outgrew each year. Cara especially had the athletic grace, the seat and natural command of a born jumper. Sylvie attended all their equestrian events and put a trophy case in her front hall for their ribbons and medals. She said she was entitled to the medals; she was paying for the lessons.

Steven and Cara brought her unending pleasure. They were lovely. Lithe like their father, blonde and blue eyed like their mother, they had Lorraine's petite features and Paul's serious charm. They were expensively clothed and well mannered. "They are very American," she told Mr. Cohen, her accountant. "They go to the beach, they eat hot dogs, they drink Coca Cola, they watch TV, but they are smart, Mr. Cohen. Cara wants to be a doctor. Now, what do you think of that?"

Mr. Cohen thought it was admirable. • • •

Steven's Bar Mitzvah was held in the same Ambassador ballroom of his parents' wedding reception. Paul drank too much and Lorraine said IODlething politically offensive to a diamond broker from South Africa. "I'm the hostess," Lorraine defended herself to Sylvie in the women's lounge. "I'll say whatever I damn want." In the beveled mirrors and softened lighting, Lorraine looked mushy and insubstantial.

"I'm paying for this and you'll say whatever I damn want," Sylvie retorted.

Lorraine went into a stall and sagged, weeping against the toilet paper bolder. Sylvie went back to join the guests. She watched Paul lead Cara on the dance floor. At fifteen Cara had shed her childhood shyness and the odd, silent bookishness that sometimes reminded Sylvie of Solomon. The only thing that stood between Cara and young womanhood was the expensive orthodontic work gleaming across her teeth. She was a straight-A student, ICCOIDplished at ballet and piano and an excellent equestrienne. For her sixteenth birthday the following month, Sylvie had promised her her heart's desire: a horse, a magnificent jumper of her own.

Sylvie regarded her son, the angular middle-aging Paul. He seemed too dark, too hunched, too coarse to be Cara' s father. Cara was spun from the finer cloth of dreams, the dreams Sylvana cherished as she rode across the fields of August in the third-class carriage, the dreams that sustained her through theoceancrossingwhen the other black-clad mothers thought the child she cradled was already dead.

When"TheFoolontheHill"ended,Paulkissedhisdaughter'sforehead. Be escorted her back to their table and signalled the waitress for another drink. Lorraine returned restored, but still shaky. Cara asked if she could

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have some champagne. "Of course," said Sylvie. "No," said Lorraine. The band struck up "The Sounds of Silence" and a young man asked

Cara to dance. Mr. Cohen came to their table and asked Sylvie for the honor of a dance. Mr. Cohen danced with the yeasty, decorous tread of the aged while nearby Cara and her partner glided by them. Midway through the song Sylvie and Mr. Cohen returned to the table where Paul leaned protectively over his drink. The martini shone like mercury impacting a jade olive. Without looking up, Paul muttered an unmistakable oath to Lorraine.

"You can shove it, you spineless sonofabitch," Lorraine said. She left without a word to anyone.

The band played "Here Comes the Sun." Mr. Cohen turned to Paul jovially, "Well Paul, when you were a boy leaving Italy in the middle of the night, you probably never thought you'd see this day, did you? What a day! What a fine son and what a lovely daughter. Who could ask for more. Such a lucky man you are, Paul."

"We didn't leave in the middle of the night," Paul said. "We left with the clothes on our back, Mr. Cohen," said Sylvie, rearrang·

ing the orchids at her wrist so they did not conceal her gold bracelets. "That's all."

"Not quite," said Paul. His lips twisted as if speech were painful and difficult. "I had a little brother then. An uncrying, uncomplaining baby brother. Don't you remember, Mother?"

Sylvie flushed an unbecoming rose. She did not usually include the silken bambino in her accounts. It seemed an unappealing appendage to the story, though it was necessary to the truth.

"We crawled out ofltaly like lice off a dead dog." Paul finished his drink. Mr. Cohen offered cigarettes all around. "Those were terrible times for

Jews." "My mother sold everything but the masonry, traded it for jewels that

she sewed into her clothes so that she couldn't sit down but she got bit on the ass by a Cardinal's ring, and everytime she bent over that baby she got a Doge's ransom pressed against her heart."

"I didn't know you had another son, Mrs. Zacato," Mr. Cohen said. "He died young." "She disembowelled him," Paul said cooly. "I think I would like to dance, Mr. Cohen." "She made a baby out of a pillow and stuffed it with the plunder of

Venice. She sang to him like he was the new Messiah, isn't that right, Mama mia? You never let him go. Even to go to the toilet, Mr. Cohen, she would not be parted from him. Such devotion. Don't you think that's devotion?"

"Mr. Cohen doesn't want to hear this nonsense, Paul. You're drunk."

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Mr. Cohen stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. "Perhaps we should "

But the song had ended and people stood around the dance floor awaiting music like it was the last train out.

"He was her real son, Mr. Cohen." Paul stood up. "The one with the guts. I am the make-believe son. He was the real one." Paul lurched

and pinched the bottom of a young waitress on his way out of the

• • • For a week after the Bar Mitzvah Sylvie was sick. For the first time since Hong Kong flu two years before, she was too weak, too dispirited to go to

She wandered her house like a madwoman, alternately taking to wake up and potions to go to sleep. She had missed the writing

this wall. It was being writ underneath her nose and she missed it . She called the jewelry store daily. She did not ask after Paul, but Mr.

always mentioned obliquely that Paul had not come in, nor had he He had not been seen. Sylvie summoned all her courage and called

son's house. He was not there, the maid said, neither was Mrs. Zacato had taken tlle children and.left for an unexpected holiday.

"Holiday! In the middle of the school year! Is she crazy? Cara is riding Saturday."

"I'm sure I don't know," said the maid. The following Monday Sylvie went to the jewelry store. She thought it

take her mind from Paul and she was right. On Wednesday just noon she saw him on the other side of the display window staring at

tasteful, extravagant array like any other window-worshipper. He was , sallow and waxy; his eyes were shrouded behind dark

He waited for Sylvie to notice him, then he walked to the curb but not cross with the light. Sylvie excused herself to Mr. Cohen; she took purse and left. This interview-she was certain-was best conducted

the store. "Shall we get some lunch?" she said to her son. They sat in the shadows of an umbrella-dappled patio. "I wish you would take those glasses off so I could see your face," she

nibbling her shrimp salad. "You don't look at all well." "You don't look so hot yourself." "How are Cara and Steven?" "Screwed. Hadn't you heard? Lorraine has left me. She says she won't

back to the house as long as I'm in it, so I'm leaving." "What is this little trouble between you and Lorraine, Paul? I'm sure it be patched up."

''With money? Shall we bind up our wounds with greenback salve?" "Don't be ridiculous. I'm trying to help." "Forgive me. Another drink here, honey," he called out to a passing

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"Forgive me again." "Sometimes you disgust me." "Forgive me and thank you. That's all I seem to be able to say to you

today, isn't it? All I've ever said to you. All you've ever heard." "Don't push these things off on me, Paul." Sylvie bit an asparagus spear

neatly in half. "If you've made a mess of your life and your marriage, it's your own fault. Not mine. I gave you every opportunity to make good. I gave you everything."

"You did. You gave me everything." He jumped to his feet and bowed from the waist. "And I salute you, D Duce Mama!"

"Stop it you fool. Sit down." The waitress handed him a fresh martini as he dropPed back into his

chair. "You're right. I have made a mess of everything. Of everYthing you gave me. Forgive me. Thank you. Forgive me."

"Shut up Paul. I'm willing to help." "Excellent, 11 Duce Mama, then you won't mind it when my lawyer calls

you. I'm starting divorce proceedings." "You can't divorce your own mother." Paul choked on his olive. ''Always thinking of others, aren't you? I'm

divorcing Lorraine. That's what she wants and that's what she'll get. She'll get everything she wants. I've told the lawyer to give her the house, free and clear. I told him you would make the support payments and the alimony and whatever else Lorraine wants."

"Me! Why should I? They're your children." "Yes and I hate to lose them." Without lifting his glasses he wiped his

eyes. "But you won't mind paying them off. It will give you a stick to beat Lorraine with."

"Lorraine has always hated me." "Yes." "She'll never let me see Cara and Steven." "Probably not." Sylvie tapped her nails on the table. She studied her rings. "If you leave I

won't buy Caraher horse. You stay or no horse for Cara and I won't pay for any more lessons."

"You wouldn't do that to her. She might have a chance at the Olympics." "I would." Paul drank his martini in one gulp. "Well it will be on your head then,

won't it? I'm leaviok. I have my ticket." He patted his jacket pocket. "Going back to old Italia."

"Italy!" "Yes, with nothing but the clothes on my back. Going back to see if there

are still hunters in the fields and bells ringing and water in the canals." "Don't be a fool. You can't go back. That's nothing but the past. The

past can't be changed or-" "Bought off?"

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"Leave it alone, Paul." "Ah Mother, you've become so American." She reached across the table for his hand, but he withdrew it. "Paul,"

she pleaded, "don't do this. Go back to Lorraine. Take a vacation for a few weeks, a few months if you want. You and Lorraine take a second honeymoon-my present to you."

"It's over." "Paul, please. Those children are my life. My breath. You can't do this to

me." "It'suptoLorrainenow.ldon'tcareifyouneverseethemagain.Atleast

you won't have the chance to buy the world out from under them and give it back on a silver platter. At least they won't spend their lives saying forgive me and thank you. Forgive me. Thank you, thank you, grazie mille, Mama -from the bottom of my heart. And now, you'll forgive me if I leave you with the bill. I have a plane to catch."

Sylvana finished her shrimp salad without unseemly haste. She watched her son's thin figure weave through the Rodeo Drive crowds and vanish into the glare of the traffic and the glittering asphalt. A woman who has crossed the fields of August with nothing but the clothes on her back and a make-believe baby in her arms cannot be expected to go running after a ne'er-do-well, ingrate son or beg the forgiveness of his fur-brained wife. · She called Lorraine and suggested they have lunch one day. Lorraine hung up on her. She called back and said no horse for Cara. Lorraine hung up on her. She instructed her lawyer to call Lorraine and threaten to withhold support payments if Lorraine refused to let her see the children. Lorraine said fine. Sylvie instructed the lawyer to pay the support, but the checks were to be made out to Cara so that Lorraine would have to ask for the money. The first check came back unendorsed, as did the second, but the third check showed up in Sylvie's bank statement for the month of]uly. Sylvie smiled.

• • • The day that Caraleah Zacato graduated from high school, her grand·

mother had a new car delivered to her door. Her mother, who worked at the lingerie counter at Saks, said she could keep the car only because.she would be commuting daily to the local state university. Cara called her grand· mother and said thank you for the car. She did not say she would rather have had the horse or that she still rode jumping horses in her dreams. She said thank you for the car and forgive me for not calling sooner.

Cara saw her grandmother frequently after that. They went shopping and out for lunch or sometimes to plays, sometimes they had lunch in Sylvie's patio. Cara noticed that the display case and the medals and trophies were gone. She did not ask after. them. She mentioned, instead, that her father invited her to join him in Italy the following summer. Sylvie's face did not register so much as a tremor; she asked after Cara's studies. Cara said she would never be a doctor.

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Sylvie called Lorraine and invited her and Steven to come to lunch with Cara. They were punctual and had no sooner sat down in the patio than it started to rain. They waited in the living room, talking over the babbling rain gutters, while the maid cleared the lunch and re-set it in the dining room. Sylvie complimented Lorraine on her hairstyle and her clothes and her job and made no reference to her shaking hands or her habit of perpetually rubbing the deepening furrow between her brows. Pixies as a rule do not age well.

They had a lovely lunch; Sylvie had broken out the best for them: crystal so thin it looked like threads of carmelized sugar, hand-painted plates, heavy sterling, and pale wisteria drooping in a silver bowl. She had ordered Steven's favorite napoleons for dessert and said she hoped she could come to one of his baseball games one day. Steven said any time. Lorraine dug her fingernail into a tiny brown burn hole in the lace tablecloth.

Cara writhed. She wondered if her grandmother's innards were made out of gold like the now-famous doll she had cradled out of 11 Duce's Italy. She wondered if the day would come when Sylvie would demand and exact a measure of Cara's dignity. If perhaps she already had. Could Cara-could any of them-muster enough out of their own innards to resist Sylvie's expensive charm, or her stubborn claims to rightness, or her respect for what money could buy, if not happiness, something perilously close and sometimes indistinguishable.

Cara received a strange letter from her father. He said there was still water in the canals. He said he never heard the sound of traffic, only bells and water. He said there were still hunters in the fields of August and they still shot rabbits.

20

D,AVIDJAMES

Stealing from My Grandmother

My grandmother and I had a peculiar relationship. It all started about twenty years ago when she used to baby-sit us. My brothers and sisters would climb the walls or bang the piano with a baseball bat. My youngest brother, Fred, often locked himself in the bathroom for hours, refusing to open the door. So we always had to go outside behind the willow tree. Even in the winter.

This was when I first learned how to steal. While my grandmother ran through the house trying to tie up my brothers and sisters, I rummaged through her purse, keeping anything that was shiny. Before I was seven, I made off with twelve pairs of earrings, ten gold watches, fifteen cigarette lighters, and a large assortment of bracelets, chains, and keys. She blamed the other kids, obviously prime suspects for such thefts. I was the innocent bystander, the cute face, the hug.

In my teens, I considered a life devoted to crime. I tried stealing toilet paper from the school bathrooms, stuffing rolls under my sweater. But I was always caught and suspended. So I tried stealing cars. That might have worked, but most of the time I forgot my driver's license at home and had to push the car away. After a few blocks, a police car usually came screeching around the corner and they'd nab me.

After several hard years in juvenile homes, !got out and started working at a supermarket. I had plenty of opportunities to steal but there was no sense of challenge. I'd slip a pack of gum or cigarettes in my pocket and leave through the back door, grabbing a twelve-pack of Stroh's beer and a jar of peanuts on the way out . It was too easy. I was depressed.

I must tell you how my grandmother saved my life. My idea of becoming a master thief had failed . On my days off, I just walked up and down Main Street, blank, looking for nothing in particular. I was moody and angry. I was a nobody.

I moved that same year into a one-room apartment on the east side of Kalamazoo. My grandmother lived a couple of blocks away. On my first visit over to her house in years, I noticed a painting in her kitchen that matched the colors of my room perfectly. I had the compulsion to steal again. While she made tea for us, I crammed the picture down tny shirt. She didn't suspect a thing and I got it all the way home. You wouldn't believe how wonderful it felt to pluck that painting right from under her eyes. I was

21

in all my glory. I even went out that night, stole a bottle of wine and drank it all by morning.

On the following weekend, my grandmother came over to visit and saw the picture hanging above my bed. She didn't say a word. We drank tea and talked about old times and then she left. Eating dinner later that night, I noticed that my salt and pepper shakers were missing. I searchea everywhere and couldn't find them.

That was the day the beautiful friendship with my grandmother began. From then on, we had a give and take rapport that we considered quite valuable. We never talked about the stealing, and we limited ourselves to small items such as spoons, magazines, ashtrays, toothbrushes, soap, com, bottles, glasses. Our visits became more and more frequent. Before I knew it, I was restealing the articles that my grandmother had stolen from me.

I want you to understand that I considered myself the better thief. Grandmothers and old ladies, in general, look bulky and raggy, which makes it extremely hard to know just what they have stolen. They can stick something in any pocket and nobody notices. Because I was in my early twenties, I had very little hiding space at my disposal. For instance, when I stole her pink flower vase, still full of water and roses, I had to slip it under my top hat and balance it there until I was out of her house and down the street. I've always been proud of that.

The worst day of my life was when my grandmother died. I felt as if some part of me had been lifted and taken away to be pawned. I had dreams of stealing her casket right out of the hands of the pallbearers. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and swear I could hear my grandmother shuffling through my silverware drawer, picking out clean forks and knives.

At the funeral, I pilfered her necklace and ring, for memory's sake, and left without talking to any of my relatives.

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JOHN UNTERECKER

Three Short Poems Having to Do with Darkness

1. Midnight Telephone

are no betrayals so gray as these betrayals of silence: llbes and dust, a taste of ash in the mouth, and the distances widening:

DOthing like death-only a gray silence of powdered ash.

2. Age 12

In W'illiamsport, on the front porch swing, the still air on fire with fireflies and stars, I tried to belong to the night-

or to be grown up, a man in a black car driving darkness, the abrupt eyes of cattle and lovers flared suddenly wide in the car's cold headlights.

3. Accept

Good·bye, small talk. bushes, scrub trees, pine.

I pick up a stone, knowing why. Or push back a long branch-holding.

You stand there, back to a tree, the conversation gone.

Take these valleys, these ridges:-

I held a tree in my arms once, hard, chest to lichen: ,rea the breathe."

No more small talk. The moon is a white demand among branches.

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WANDA COLEMAN

My Love Brings Flowers

a bouquet for all the reasons he does not have to give

it's material things make married so hard

i make one chicken feed five make clothes ten years old fashionable rejuvenate one fake sable coat

poverty endows one with magic

(how to do without turns garden to weed)

basil and blackthorn my voice i have no thing

henbane and wild thyme i scrape bottom

nettle and rye i sweep out dead dreams

plum buds and tamaris i promise the kids

moss and china asters i borrow from friends

ivy yucca and wild rue dark empty arms

money be as mad as you can afford

poor demands be alert, on the dime, sane clumsy moment a week's pay gone. too heavy a foot $70 in brake repairs. a forgotten pill is $400 to abort. soon they'll comer the market on air i'll gasp and curse my skin unable to breathe

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(ganja takes the stiff out, wine cuts the knot)

he comes in with a bouquet of smiles i love him for the first time again down to dirty sheets and stinky socks down to unpaid bills and beans 4 times a week to the bone to the blood rose

25

ZDENEK M. KLUZAK

Northern Blue

My best friend here, he runs guns to the lower forty eight. He writes man's verse, rough like this wilderness. "No plumeria sickness here!"

They ride in their Indian trucks thick blond arms hanging out, hair and beards trailing their gun rack. In slow traffic, they curse and spit and pass a joint from truck to truck.

It's time for a slow ride through Anchorage. I shiver at the figures of natives in the ditch through the glass. I want to climb the hills and shoot the sunrise.

There's still time to get my Alaska Independence bumper sticker at the John Birch society on Main Street. It is manned by a young girl. She sells me a wallsize Alaska Flag, bright blue like the white night sky.

On our right, the Klondike, a rock and roll bar, the owner held hostage at gun point last week. The club run by the outlaws all night. Nobody cared who poured the drinks. The Police arrived the next day. Around the corner, I buy a four inch barrelled Ruger. I sign Zelmo Zaviski with a straight face.

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A longhaired air marshal waves me by. The DC Ten engines scream directly below me. To the north, a bluish mountain range stretches like my crumpled satin sheet back at home.

27

PATRICE WILSON

Melchior

My eyes have been fingers feeling for some wall, some table edge that will tell me this room has not just made itself around me.

When I was a child, I lived with a blind man, and so I closed my eyes and wandered about the street; when I opened my eyes the blind man was gone.

My fingers fumble through these charts of stars. I have only to glance out this window, feel this chill wind against my cheeks, and wonder what night will bring some unusual light to follow.

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CATHY SONG

Ikebana

To prepare the body, aim for the translucent perfection you find in the sliced shavings of a pickled turnip. In order for this to happen, you must avoid the sun, protect the face under a paper parasol until it is bruised white like the skin of lilies. Use white soap from a blue porcelain dish for this.

Restrict yourself. Eat the whites of things: tender bamboo shoots, the veins of the young iris, the clouded eye of a fish.

Then wrap the body as if it were a perfumed gift in pieces of silk held together with invisible threads like a kite, weighing no more than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums. Light enough to float in the wind. You want the effect of koi moving through water.

When the light leaves the bedroom, twist lilacs into the lacquered hair piled high like a complicated shrine. There should be tiny bells inserted somewhere

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in the web of hair to imitate crickets singing in a hidden grove.

Reveal the nape of the neck, your beauty spot. Hold the arrangement. If your spine slacks and you feel faint, remember the hand-picked flower set in the front alcove, which, just this morning, you so skillfully wired into place. How poised it is! Petal and leaf curving like a fan , the stem snipped and wedged into the metal base: to appear like a spontaneous accident.

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Beauty and Sadness

He drew hundreds of women in studies unfolding like flowers from a fan. Teahouse waitresses, actresses, geishas, courtesans and maids. They arranged themselves before this quick nimble man whose invisible presence one feels in these prints is as delicate as the skin-like paper he used to transfer

for Kitagawa Utamaro

and retain their fleeting loveliness.

Crouching like cats, they purred amid the layers of kimono swirling around them as though they were bathing in a mountain pool with irises growing in the silken sunlit water. Or poised like porcelain vases, slender, erect and tall; their heavy brocaded hair was piled high with sandalwood combs and blossom sprigs poking out like antennae. They resembled beautiful iridescent insects, creatures from a floating world.

Utamaro absorbed these women of Edo in their moments of melancholy as well as of beauty. He captured the wisp of shadows, the half-draped body emerging from a bath; whatever skin was exposed

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was bruised white as snow. A private space invaded. Portraying another girl catching a glimpse of her own vulnerable face in the mirror; he transposed the trembling dark plum lips like a drop of blood soaking up the white expanse of paper.

At times, indifferent to his inconsolable eye, the women drifted through the soft gray feathered light, maintaining stillness, the moments inbetween. Like the dusty ash-winged moths that cling to the screens in summer whom the Japanese venerate as ancestors reincarnated; Utamaro graced these women with immortality in the thousand sheaves of prints still fluttering in the awed hands of the world.

32

WINITERADA

Wa'ahila

In Manoa a hawksbill turtle leaves the imprint of its shell on the soft underside of a cloud. I can't sleep. Your dark eyes favor the turning sky. I move to touch you and i break your lei string. Polished kukui nuts rattle, scattering across your bed. I get up and walk out the door. I fold over and over the ashes in the warm hibachi on the ground next to the washing machine. The fire is out. You stand next to me. I slip my goodbye into the silence between your lips.

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Manoa Jazz (tamure, tempo ad lib.)

These are quiet mutterings of one restless Manoa night spent far off the shores of Tahiti. I told myself when i lay in my bed at five in the morning,

i'll have a nap and i'll wake before the sun so i can go fishing down Sandy Beach side.

That song we whistle, i know a few verses, you from Hilo town know a few more. And these buds of six close petals are from plants that grow close to the ocean. Look the petals, thick, and the stem, strong, 'cause the 'ehukailocean spray, salty. So this beach plant evolved this way rna kai. Tiare. Whenever i see Tahitian gardenia growing in somebody's yard, i go pluck a few buds and i walk away with an implied "much mahalo." It was fun and it was unique. Wine and beer were hours past and still i smiled and grinned when you did the tamure-tamure-tamure. Hapapai ike kikala kau i ka wekiu on top the pillow.

Funny and it wasn't hard at the appropriate times to think was funny. The stars take to the wings when it's showtime for the sun. I am good at lighting the hibachi.

\ 34

for Bijei

I have learned to laugh.

You too. Dope diminishes the driving ability. That's not the reason tonight. I am looking too hard towards the sunrise and i have not learned to cry. All i can say is "oh ye?" and "ne!" to bald statements and "me too" and "you too" to tender confessions.

The question is . ... I don't have much to say except "here i come" and nobody asks questions and no definitions are shared but for a discussion on western guilt/ sin and polynesian/asian shame and fine long hair and high forehead. What am i supposed to say to Japan and Hilo town and Tahiti and Manoa? The 'aina, that's you. The 'aina, that's me. Aroha is an ocean's time away to the south, to the east.

I know some, maybe you know little bit more wisdom. The 'aina knows everything and we don't pretend to god-consciousness. So, i don't say much except when i babble/namunamu, free-style wala'au about nothing. That might bother some but you no need listen. My left wrist aches when i kiatsu-massage the 'olu'olu curves of your back.

You walk your way 'cause you have chosen your slippers. Me, not yet, 'though i tried on a lot and have plenty at home

35

to pick from when i decide what i going wear when i go out. Would you smile too if i howl in the night instead of just grit my teeth when our time comes? I gotta grin

about Merwin and the ali'i about secret codes and xerographies about the human body and the human body about the long time and the soft part about the geography and the geometry.

Ella Fitz sings a ballad to the 'ami'ami 'oni'oni ·e. Get home early in the morning, put away the hibachi stuff, and go take one nap till the afternoon. I wash car in the sun and my sweat smells of you still. Tiare Tahiti, tamure, grinning, had fun, and didn't go fishing down Sandy Beach side before the sun. So what. I have learned to laugh. Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana and the song is listened to about the restless Manoa night spent far off the shores of Tahiti.

I can't see to the east with the sun in my eyes and tiare in my hair and you don't forget those verses you have learned from small-kid time.

36

CINDYSETO

For William Stafford

He looks like he'd eat the bark right off of a tree, or with the twist of wrists and fingers make new wood out of mud and grass.

The Anger

A fist pulls the flesh and fat of my abdomen inward I can feel how flesh and fat are forced through the fingers till nothing is left in the grip

37

JOSEPH STANTON

Brueghel's "Triumph of Death"

There is no escape. At sea ships split and crumble like rotted eggs. Above me on the hilltop wheels of no chance tum in the wind's agony, taking crucifixion for a spin. The turrets of our harbor fortress are already tightly packed with our impossible enemy, the unstoppable battalions of bones.

It is as if they had always been here, as if we were not, a few minutes past, enjoying a casual meal of crusty bread, dark savory porridge, and tart red wine on the edge of town near the ruined cathedral with Hans and his new friends, elegant all in the slickest of silks, when all this erupted from the ground.

Now these instant apocalyptic gardeners are clattering determinedly from door to door. They reap us routinely, like so much overripe grain.

They, they! But they are us: reversed, turned inside-out, and reduced to the core; rough-drafts for a rebirth we can have no confidence in; grim satires on our fragile desires who put on our clothes, clutch our gold, spill our stone-cold wine.

38

Hans, ever the pale poet, sings what must be his last love song to a woman who still wants to be his inspiration. Behind him with skull-wide grin his death accompanies on mandolin.

Across the field our King lies sprawled in a fatal stupor of disbelief, attended by a skeleton staff. To the north the horizon blazes, a backdrop for a smoke-blackened, knockerless bell slung from a blasted tree by a thin, grim kneller, our final silhouette of silence.

There must be a design to all this. I lean against it with the frail "'eft of my body, clutching the hilt of my sword. The terrible tide laps backwards, as if I had a chance.

In a moment my bones will stride out of the glimmer of my living, and into this absolute gluttony of dusk. I can feel it coming, like the darkness at the end of an idea.

39

JEANNE WHMANN

Shell Beach

It was a day she would not choose to keep, remembering how long he looked at young bronzed women on the sand. His eyes were deep evasions of her own. A shallow tide ran strong

where all things moved to grace the swimmer's day. The seagulls soared and shone in light that held so close its warm bright fierceness kept away the shadow, cold beneath the perfect shell

he stumbled over, then dropped into her hand. When it was time to go they left the beach and climbed the path that led across the stone. There was an open space she hoped to reach.

Clear in the light she walked ahead of him. He watched the drops of water run and break on her bare back. His eyes returned again where invitation was, and did not speak.

She smiled to find the summer trees were where they'd been, and put the towel inside a ring of logs. Her welcome met his backward stare. Her body tightened to a changing thing

he would not want. Too many thoughts were true, and disappearing light was only one. Her fingers caught upon the shell and knew the shape of coldness going from the sun.

40

DEBRA THOMAS

Woodrose

I stay by the hau tree and watch rain seep in to the trunk. Underneath, fungi spread orange, fans of airdancers. When someone dreams of me entwined in the tree, · I sit stiller in the rain. My seeds open, brown, to the river Naniupo.

41

BILL MIYASATO

Tsunami

I. Awakenings May 23, 1960

A scream pierces the night, repeatedly. Four children awaken.

"Pack only what you need," the mother says. He ponders:

library card the orange shirt (with red fish, drowning) the bed some food-

The night is suddenly hot and restless, a movie-like adventure. A courageous uncle races through the hysterical, frightened town. Four children huddle in the back seat.

II. They sleep in strange beds. Winds throw ghost shadows on the walls. They call to him, hauntingly. Somewhere a man and woman hold hands.

III. Funeral While the girls weep, the baby sleeps peacefully. Flies buzz incessantly,

42

and the boy stares ahead. His cousin protects him with great, gentle hands.

IV. Adaptation

"I am your new mommy," she says. "He is your dad." The boy whispers under his breath, "Liar. "

V. Flag 1963

From the corner of a drawer, he takes the flag. He remembers the soldiers folding it, careful and precise. As it unfolds the smell of mothballs fills the air, triangular creases as permanent as knife slashes criss-cross each other while stars and lifeless rainbows flow from his hands.

VI. Leavetaking 1972

At seventeen he leaves to find home. They come to him, a band of soldiers breaking down doors. Shadows do not leave.

VII. Orphan 1980

We visit you not often enough. Do you hear? Your daughters have children now, I swim in these words, remembering you.

43

JULIETKONO

Amateur Photographers

The air is serrated by the sea-birds' cry. It comes in on the wind.

Below us, sea kelp dance loosely in wide shifting currents.

Surgeon crabs on the Point scatter at the sound of our approaching feet.

And colorful sea-shells devoid of life litter the break-front.

The low sun that sparkles on the water, follows the curve of your body

like a sadness, as we move toward the water's edge

in search of perfect light.

44

MICHAEL HIGGINS

Cambodia: Invitation to an Itinerant Reaper

Come in then, come in: the scythe lies in the unattended field. The plowshare rusts, the harness cracks, the ox has long been eaten, the hunger feeds on the sowers' limbs. Under conical hats and under monsoon the plowboys hide in paddies, dying under the bloodred sunset under the porcelain moon under the stolid shadows of the cloudless noon.

\

45

FOROOGHFARROKHZAAD

Let's Bring Faith to the Onset of the Cold Season

and this is me a lone and lonely woman at the threshold of a cold season at the beginning of understanding earth's stained being

and of understanding

time passed

pure and simple despair and of understanding the sky's overcast and cloudy melancholy and these cement hands' impotence

time passed and the clock struck four, struck four, struck four, struck four today's date is December 21st, the first day of winter I know the secret of the seasons and I comprehend the speech of moments the savior has gone to sleep in the grave and the earth, the accepting receiving earth is a sign of his peace

time passed and the clock struck four.

wind blows cold down the alley wind blows cold down the alley and I am thinking about the love-mating,

trellis-making of flowers­about buds with anemic stalks and about this consumptive wasted age and a man passing between damp trees­a man whose blue cords of veins have crawled up both sides of his throat like dead snakes. on the disturbed temples of his head that bloody scorning syllable is repeated: "peace"

46

"peace" 1 and I am thinking about the love-mating,

trellis-making of flowers

at the threshold of a cold season and where mirrors assemble to mourn and where the society of pale experiences and mourners gathers at this sunset pregnant with silent knowledge how can that person keep on going this way: patiently heavily confused and aimlessly wandering? the command was given to: "halt!" how can it be said of a man that he isn't alive, he has never been alive?

wind blows cold down the alley. in old languid gardens, individual crows were circling, solitary and aloof, and the ladder's height is so trifling

they plundered the entire simplicity of a heart and carried it off with them to the castle of fables. and now, how will a body ever again be able to rise to dance? and how will she ever again be able to dangle her childish hair in flowing waters? and now, how will she ever again be able to stomp underfoot the apple which has finally been picked and smelled?

my love, 0 my most matchless love! how black are the clouds waiting for the feast day of the sun!

perhaps it was by embodying flight that that bird appeared one day on the wing in the airlanes perhaps those fresh leaves which breathed in the lust of the breeze-perhaps they emerged from dream's green lines

47

perhaps that violet flame which burned in the windows' clear mind was just an innocent fancy of the lamp

wind blows cold down the alley this is the beginning of utter ruin the wind was also blowing on that day when your hands were laid waste when dear stars, dear pasteboard stars are in the sky, lies begin to blow in the wind how can she ever again take refuge in the disgraced sooras of the prophets? 2 we will be thrown together like the millions of millenia! dead and then the sun will cast judgment upon the corruption of our corpses I'm cold I'm cold and perhaps I'll never be warm again my love, 0 my most matchless love!-"How old was that wine? It really did a job on us, didn't it?" look how heavy time weighs on us! and look how fish chew my flesh! why do you always hold me down

on the ocean floor? I'm cold and I've had it with pearl earrings-1 loathe pearl earrings!

I'm cold and I know that nothing will remain of the entirety of red surd dreads of one wild anemone except several blood drops in red I'll free all the lines from their rigid tracks likewise I'll liberate the counting of numbers I'll take refuge from the circumscribed limits of closed geometrical figures and seek asylum in the wide open spaces of a feeling of vastness bare I am, bare, bare, I am bare like the silences between words of love

I am stripped bare and all my wounds bleed freely from love

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from love, love, love. I have passed beyond this wandering confused island by way of ocean's roiling turmoil

and by volcanic eruption and shattering fragmentation: disintegration

and the secret of that integrated existence was that the sun was born from its most insignificant atom

hello innocent night! peace! peace to you 0 night which converts the eyes of desert wolves to bone marrows of faith and open trust beside your water channels, 0 innocent night the spirits of willows smell the spirits of kind axes I come from the world where thoughts, letters, and sounds are

undifferentiated and this world is like· a nest of vipers and this world is full of sound's of people's moving hurrying footsteps, people who weave your hanging noose while they kiss you

hello, innocent night! peace!

there's always some distance, an interval, between window and seeing. why didn't I look?-like that time when a man passed between damp trees I didn't look

why didn' t I look? perhaps my mother was crying that night that night I arrived to pain and conceived that night I was brided to acacia clusters that night Isfahan was filled with the tinkling of blue tiles, and that person who was half of me had come back inside

my foetus I would see him in the mirror he was bright clean clear like a mirror suddenly he called me

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and I was wedded to acacia clusters ... perhaps my mother was crying that night. what a futile useless brightness that was which rebelled in the closed confines of this opening­this opening which was really a plugged-up hole. wHy didn't I look? all the happy moments knew all along that your hands would be wrecked and I didn't look until the moment when the window of time opened and that sad cuckoo chirped four, announcing the hour of four o'clock

struck struck struck struck and I ran into that little woman whose eyes were like empty nests of simorghs 3 and she used to move her thighs like so-really getting into moving and letting go with the flow­perhaps she carried off my glorious virgin dream with her to night's bed

will I ever comb my hair again? will I ever plant violet gardens again? and will I ever set up geraniums in the sky behind the window? will I ever dance on glasses again? will the doorbell ever carry me away again

in expectation?

t told my mother: "it's all over now." I said: "you always thought it would happen. we must send an obituary notice to the paper."

hollow people trusting, hollow people-their emptiness filled with confidence look how their teeth sing anthems when they chew and look how their eyes rip and devour when they open up wide and how she passes between damp trees:

patiently heavily confused and aimlessly wandering

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at four o'clock in moments during which the blue cords of his veins crawled up both sides of his throat like dead snakes and on the disturbed temples of his head that bloody scorning syllable is repeated:

"peace!" "peace!" 1

have you never smelled that blue Marvel of Peru, that Flower of Four O'Clock

time passed time passed and night fell upon the bar acacia branches night slipped behind the window panes and sipped in the last dregs of the day

already passed away with its cold tongue

where do I come from? where do I come from? .. . that I be so smeared with night's smell? the earth is still fresh over his grave-l mean the grave of those two

young green hands . ..

how radiantly kind you were, my love, 0 my most matchless love! how kind you were when you lied! how kind you were when you closed the eyelids of mirrors, and when you uprooted lustrous candles from silver candelabra and when you carried me to love's pasture in the oppressive murky dark, carried me until that dizzy and curling smouldering smoke, which was all that was left of thirst's blaze, would lie down in sleep's meadow

and those pasteboard stars endlessly circle around infinity. why did they speak out loud? why did they invite a glance

to the guest house where sight lodges while it visits?

why did they carry away her caresses

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to the shame of her maidenhood's tresses? look how that person's life is hung and executed

up on the pole of dread fear and suspicion!­that person who spoke with words

who caressed with a look who soothed terror-struck shock with a caress

look how the marks of the five branches of your fingers that were like five letters of truth remain on his cheek!

what? what is silence, my matchless love? what is silence but unspoken words? I have to stick to words, but the speech of sparrows is the live language of flowing sentences in nature's festival the language of sparrows means: spring, leaves, spring the language of sparrows means: breeze, scent, breeze the language of sparrows is dying in factories

who is this who wends her way on eternity's highway towards moments of unity? and she winds her eternal watch with the mathematical logic of differentiations who is this who doesn't know the cock's crow for the start of the day's heart?-who knows it rather for the smell of breakfast cooking? who is this who wears love's crown?-and who has rotted away amidst wedding gowns?

so then finally the sun in one single instant of time didn't shine on either pole of arctic despair you were emptied by the tinkle of blue glazed tiles

and I, I am so full that they pray when they hear the call in my lines

happy funerals sad funerals quiet meditative funerals dressy funerals with pleasant encounters and good food. how upset people get-in spots where bounded and defined time stops, and in uncertain areas of fleeting lights

and buying-lust for spoiled fruits of pointlessness-

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ah! how upset people get at accidents at intersections and at shrills of whistles suddenly broken off in moments during which a man must be, must be, must be squashed under the wheels of time-a man who passed between damp trees ...

where do I come from?

I told my mother: "it's all over now." I said: "you always thought it would happen. we must send an obituary notice to the paper."

hello 0 lonely alienation I surrender

the room to you why are dark clouds always prophets of fresh signs and new sacred verses

of purification and sanctification? and in the martyrdom of a candle there is a brilliant mystery which that last and most drawn-out flame knows, well knows.

let's bring faith let's bring faith to the onset of the cold

season let's bring faith to the ruins of dream

gardens-to idle sickles carelessly laid aside­and to prison grains and prison seeds

look how it snows . ..

perhaps those two young hands were the truth, those two hands of the youth which were buried under their load of snow, snow which wouldn't let up. and next year, when spring makes love to the sky behind the window, throbbing and pulsing in its vernal body bubbling and boiling merrily away, green fountains of light-weight stems will gush and bloom into flower, my love, 0 my most matchless love

let's bring faith to the onset of the cold

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* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1 peace: also, "hello"

2 soora: chapter of the Koran

3 simorgh: This enormous mythical bird of Iran is never seen except in symbolic contexts or heroic stories such as in epic or mystical episodes in Persian Literature. This "Bird of Knowledge" symbolizes both wisdom and Divine Unity. Generally it inhabits the upper reaches~ Mount Qaaf, the mythical World Mountain joining earth and sky, and lying at the center of the (flat) world of the ancient Arabic and Islamic Cultures. The one exception to this geographic location of the simtorgb 1 is the simorgh which made its home on the upper slopes of Damavand (near contemporary Tehran). To this simorgh trusted the orphaned Zal for education and upbringing <~rl''"'rt•na Ferdowsi's Epic of the Kings (Shah Nameh). Zal was the father hero Rostam. In another epic episode, Rostam was mortally urnuno1NI

in battle by Esfandiyar, who like Achilles was invulnerable save one part of his body, his eyes. The simorgh rescued Rostam, licked wounds clean, curing him with his magic tongue, and in instructed him in means of slaying Esfandiyar.

In Shihabuddin Yahya Sorhrawardi's mystical recital, Mind" (Aql·e Sorkh)-"L'Archange Empoupree" in Henri translation of Sohrawardi's mystical recitals under the same the Simorgh is Divine Light or Universal Intelligence, the Emanation from the Whole (following Neo-platonic Philosophy). Simorgh was put to flight by the coming of the night (its incompatible with darkness) and nightly thus abandoned "'""-"'• who in this version was first abandoned by his parents because hair was pure white at birth. They took this as a sign that Zal not of this world so they ostracized him in fear. Rostam Esfandiyar in this version by wearing polished armor in a 1ocama' where Esfandiyar had to see a reflection of the Simorgh off of n.v;o•a,•u

armor. Esfandiyar was dazzled to immobility by the sight of Simorgh (Pure Light or Clear Light) thus becoming vulnerable Rostam 's sword. The mystical intent of this passage is that · was annihilated (infanaa) in God by Sight of God ("Sea of Light

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In the Conference of the Birds (Mantiq ut-Tair), 'Attaar symbolizes Divine Unity (towheed) with the Simorgh. Normally in other stories of the simorgh, beholders of it see innumerable beautiful images and scenes on its feathers. However, for 'Attaar, the thirty birds that finally attain to the vision of the Simorgh , see only themselves as the Simorgh (si: thirty; morgh: bird, birds).

Translated by David Martin

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A CONVERSATION WITH MARVIN BELL

Interviewer: Tom Hilgers

TH: Can you talk a little bit about your own beginnings as a poet? Do you recall that first poem you wrote and what got you going into it? BELL: I don't think I do recall one moment. I had experience in other art forms and other forms of writing. I'd been a musician from when I was little. I was a photographer for many years. I was a potter for a short while. I was a journalist. And somewhere along the way, I gave up those otherforms of expression and stayed with poetry. I didn't write serious poetry, or I should say I didn't write seriously, until I was out of college. TH: What do you think was the drawing-power of poetry? BELL: At first, the form itself. I'd always been interested in any art form for the peculiarities of the form itself. Really, I was interested in the play aspect of it, you know. It was my way of educating myself. I came from a small town halfway out on the south shore of Long Island, a town of farmers, fishermen, and duck farmers . People didn't, as a rule, go to ... v••""''"" So when I discovered forms of art, they were so strange-they were interesting just for the forms themselves-that I was caught up in playful aspects. When I first began to write poetry, I thought I was a experimental poet-I knew I was an experimental poet because my didn't make sense! TH: Is that the definition of experimental poetry? BELL: Well, I'm being a little frivolous about it, but it took me a long to draw back from that first interest in the materials that overwhelmed me. TH: So you were playing with words. BELL: Very much so. TH: Do you still do that? BELL: Yes, to a certain extent. You know, if you don't love words, you probably have no business writing. TH: You say you were very much taken by the form of poetry; were also taken by any particular poet? BELL: No. My list of influences is not helpful because it contains so many At any one time, I've liked almost everyone. The great mammas and ue1uu1~~:~~ of American poetry were influences, of course. Such poets as ...,u, .... ,, • .,., ....

Whitman, Stevens, and pre-eminently William Carlos Williams. TH: I notice imagistic influences in some of your poems.

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BELL: Well, imagism as a movement has not faded very much, and never A graphic vividness is required of poems nowadays, though not

absolutely. The one thing about writing that's true, as you well know, is that there are no rules. One is free in art, in a way in which one will never be free in life. TH: Perhaps, before we go on, you could read a little something for us. Then we will have something more concrete to talk about. BELL: Okay. I mentioned Emily Dickinson, so why don't I read a poem which mentions her again? This is called "The Mystery of Emily Dick­inson." Emily Dickinson, as many people know, was a great American poet, one of our best-perhaps the very best. Certainly, no one was ever better. She became more and more reclusive as her life went on, and finally she became absolutely reclusive and took to wearing only white. She also wrote a great many poems-over 1700-all of which are short and most of which are very short. I was once shown her home in Amherst, and the man who was taking me around led me into her bedroom studio. He reached into the closet and suddenly thrust into my hands one of the white dresses she had worn. TH: Oh, really, they still have them? BELL: Oh, yes, and if I'd been smart, of course, I'd have grabbed it and run out the door and kept going. That was the moment, and this poem begins there and then goes back to Iowa City where I live.

THE MYSTERY OF EMILY DICKINSON

Sometimes the weather goes on for days but you were different. You were divine. While the others wrote more and longer, you wrote much more and much shorter. I held your white dress once: 12 buttons. In the cupola, the wasps struck glass as hard to escape as you hit your sound again and again asking Welcome. No one.

Except for you, it were a trifle: This morning, not much after dawn, in level country, not New England's, through leftovers of summer rain I went out rag-tag to the curb, only a sleepy householder at his routine bending to trash, when a young girl in a white dress your size passed,

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so softly!, carrying her shoes. It must be she surprised me-her barefoot quick·step and the earliness of the hour, your dress­or surely I'd have spoken of it sooner. I should have called to her, but a neighbor wore that look you see against happiness. I won't say anything would have happened unless there was time, and eternity's plenty.

TH: Thank you. You know, your talking about your visit to the Emily Dickinson home leads me to a question about the mystery of creativity: for you, where does a poem come from? BELL: That's a good question. There are probably different answers to it for different poems. I think poetry is a great permission; art in general is a great permission we give ourselves. As I said before, one is freer in art than one will ever be in life. I think poetry gives us several kinds of permission. It gives us permission to play, of course. It gives us permission to feel things for people for whom we might not be expected to feel such things. Even perhaps to get away with saying them. But just as poetry grants the writer a great permission of sorts-a permission which, I should add, is dangerous- one has to restore virtue to play somehow. Otherwise, one's only a child and children are no joy without virtue. Finally, the aritst has a kind of moral sense of things if he or she is any good. That moral sense of things has more to do with consciousness than with any particular moral legislation-the last thing in the would any artist world ask for. Now, in that little poem of mine, "The Mystery of Emily Dickinson," the permission afforded me was simply to feel something for that young girl who walked by early in the morning carrying her shoes on the wet sidewalk while I was sleepily stumbling around putting out the garbage. TH: Do you recall that moment? BELL: In fact, I do. TH: What happened? Did Emily Dickinson just flash across your mind as this was happening? BELL: Oh yes. Well, I'd better not say yes. I'd better say that there was a distinct emotion which I apprehended in some form. Sometime later, probably not that day, maybe not even that week, while trying to write, which is to say trying to let things come to the surface, somehow that girl passing at that hour in that way and some sense I had of my visit to the Dickinson house came together. I once bought. a hundred of those Emily Dickinson stamps, and I still have them. I was going to write a hundred poems to Emily Dickinson-each one incorporating one of her lines-and, of course, stick a stamp on each poem. That proved to be difficult, and I ended up writing only one of them.

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Is this the one? · No, it's not this one; that's another poem. Do you have any particular theory about creativity in art?

BELL: All theories, I think, are both right and wrong. It is an interesting · It 's a fascinating subject.

TH: On our university faculty is an emeritus professor, Leon Edel, who is quite fascinated by psychoanalytic theories of creativity. At the other end of

continuum, we have the problem-solving notion of creativity. I remember interviewing a choreographer a couple of months ago. When I asked him about creativity in dance, he said to me, "There's no such thing as creativity. There are problems and you solve them, and some people call it creative and some people don't. All I'm interested in is solving the problems." I'm wondering where you stand with respect to that continuum. BELL: Both things seem right but only partly right. The problem with psychoanalytic criticism is that it has no floor. The subconscious is the subconscious because it is the subconscious. TH: It's a delightful quandary, isn't it? You can't disprove it or prove it. BELL: That's right, and there's no bottom so that one doesn't know where to stop. The problem-solving aspect, on the other hand, makes the effect of art out to be more superficial than it is, but is a useful way to talk about things. In any gathering of artists, the artists will more likely be talking in terms of problem-solving than in terms of psychoanalytic readings of their work. Where poems come from is a great mystery. One writes for all the little reasons as well as all the big reasons. One writes to change one's mood, to effect an equilibrium, to articulate something because it feels good. As the proverbial "little old lady" at the writers' conference supposedly said, "How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" You know, we do that in conversation all the time-as you and I are doing it here, dog-paddling along, not knowing quite what we're going to say, hoping to stumble on something we didn't know we knew. The writer is doing the same thing and indeed throwing away a lot, just as we launch many efforts that we're going to discard in conversation. TH: You gave me a nice litany of various reasons why a person might write and, I imagine, why you write; but you didn' t mention writing for an audience. Do you have an audience in mind when you write? BELL: I think probably everyone does, but we're not sure who that audience is. I heard another poet answer this question once to the effect that he thought we each had, somewhere in the backs of our heads, a sense of someone who would overhear the poems. Not necessarily someone to whom the poems would be addressed, nor about whom the poems might be, nor a person who would show up in any poems, but someone whose own sense of life and of language would dictate what we could say without explaining, what we would have to explain, what second thoughts we would have to add, and so forth. Now I thought about that for a long time and decided that that person was right. At that time, I think it was probably my father, who

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was no longer living, who was overhearing my poems. I think that's longer true. I'm not sure who's overhearing my poems now. TH: But there's someone there-an "other self" or some such thing? BELL: Or maybe just a great tree somewhere. TH: How does your thinking on creativity and your own work with carry over into your teaching? BELL: I like to teach, and I have wonderful, talented, absolutely bonkered students. They're just delightful, and they're variou.,-·•u•=y amazingly various. They form a community-a community of great and energy. But I try not to influence my students to write like me. I think that's the best kind of teaching. TH: So you don't teach through your own poems? BELL: Never. I bring in others' poems, I try to get them reading more than just each other's work. I will use examples of my own work I'm asked to, but I don't want them writing like me. They have to be own people. I try to find what is unusual, excessive, against the grain their work and say, "Why don't you do some more of this?" TH: Do you teach separate courses in the reading and the writing poetry? BELL: I teach seminars which are reading courses, and I teach poetry workshops and sometimes undergraduate workshops which writing courses. TH: I would think it would be very difficult. BELL: I try to create a little friendliness. Poetry suffers when the begins to think of the poem as too important. A particular poem may be important sometime, someday, in some place, for some reader; but in writing, something else has to go on-something smaller, meaner, more particular. The class I just taught in Iowa City-I had a class-wanted to do some "assignments" and we did one. It came out well, and they wanted to do another. So we put our names in a hat passed it around. The assignment called for us to parody one another. I part, too. Those students wrote brilliant parodies of one another. TH: Were they that aware of each other's styles? BELL: They were terrific, and it was even better when we gathered night for a potluck supper to read these poems. The poems had been s by the people who were supposed to have written them but, of course, not. So each person was asked to read his or her poem, which they of had not written. The students were just wonderful. They would begin explaining how they wrote the poem, why they wrote the poem, and was in their minds when they wrote the poem. Of course, they were about a poem that had actually been written by a parodist. TH: Sounds like an excellent exercise. You began our discussion today talking about the importance of form. I've long felt that the best way discover your own form, your own style, is to try somebody else's experience the difficulties of having to put yourself into that other

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of poetry involves that sort of thing-that's part of the play of poetry­but it's difficult to get across in the classroom.

· Absolutely. You see, the secret to learning to write is learning to You learn to write not just by writing, but by reading. That's the real

You mentioned that you don't want to make your students into clones of yourself. Who are you as an American poet? How would you characterize yourself?

· I'm part of a hidden generation. I'm 42 years old, and I'm still part of a group of poets who are classified as "young poets." That's because the generation ahead of ours, the generation that includes Galway Kinnell, the late James Wright, the late Anne Sexton, the late Sylvia Plath, and so many other great poets, was such a big and glorious generation in American poetry. They're still very much the dominant generation in American poetry; they fill the anthologies, and they have the attention of the critics, and for good reason. Beneath them comes my generation, and we're in the shadows somewhere, probably just coming into our own, just emerging from those shadows. I think it's my generation that has discovered the outside world again. There has been a lot of talk about psychoanalytic sources and responses in literature. There has been a lot of loose talk, even in American poetry, about the unconsciouc:. or the subconscious, if you prefer. There has been a lot of wonderful, courageous experiment with styles, and the development of many unique voices. That generation ahead of mine did that again and again. Then we came along behind them. And I think what we have discovered-or rediscovered, I should say-is that the inside world, the inner life, is always out there. That's how you hold it, finally. So there's a difference in the poems of my generation, but it's very hard to say yet just what that difference is. TH: Among the poets you mentioned as belonging to the "big generation'' are a number known for what's come to be called confessional poetry. Do you find that your generation is moving away from that and moving back toward the universals, away from this super-subjectivism that makes, say, Sylvia Plath very difficult at times? BELL: Those poets in that generation who could be called confessional could also be called hysterical. They could also be called, in some cases, mostly neurotic-not wise, but neurotic. They could be called, in some cases, not just personal, but private. They could be called, in some cases, self-pitying. That aspect of what is called "confessional verse" is not lovable or instructive, finally. Then there are poets such as Galway Kinnell and James Wright who have gone in the direction of personal excess in a wonderful way. I shouldn't even say "personal excess." There is something excessive, but it's truth-telling. James Wright's new books are just wonderful. The critics, however, have clobbered him for them, of course. And Galway Kinnell's new book is an amazing, wonderful, visionary work of art. Those people are very personal. James Wright begins a poem from

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two books ago-a poem called "The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio"-by saying, "I am almost afraid to write down this thing." How personal that is! You can almost hear some creative writing teacher saying, "Oh, cut it out and just begin the poem,Jim," but that's the tone. I'm notgoingtotell you the story in that poem, but it's very moving. At the end he talks about a little girl who came up to him when he had come up out of the swimming hole in Martins Ferry, Ohio when he was a kid. A little girl with a face thin and haunted, he says. She puts her hand on his shoulder and says, "Take care now, be patient, and live." It's a place where the Ohio River is dying, and the people, the miners, are poor. At the end of this poem, he says, "I have loved you all this time and didn't even know I am alive." Now that's very personal. It has as much personal intensity, as much intimacy, as any of the so-called confessional verses that Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, or John Berryman wrote. Yet, it's different in some crucial way, and I think it's less self-pitying. American poets are awfully good at complaining. But that Wright poem is not complaint, it's something else. TH: How do you feel after you have written a poem? BELL: I think the poet sometimes suffers post-partum blues-with the publication of a book more than with the publication of a poem. And I think some craziness must be working that way in me because I delay and and delay sending poems to magazines. I haven't done it for three right now, and I'm just getting ready to do it again. I delay, as many poets do, putting poems together for a book. You know, it's much better to have half a new book done when a book appears than to have to be starting over at that time. There is a sense of blankness about the new page in typewriter after a poem, and that sense of blankness is magnified when poems have been collected in a book. I've heard poets say many times after they write a poem, they're not sure there will ever be another one. I have that feeling myself a couple of times. Particularly after I put t~eth'er books, I was not sure there would ever be another book-not a good anyway. TH: Are you generally pleased with the new awareness that comes to you as a result of writing a poem, or does it frighten you? BELL: No, it doesn't frighten me. You know, a friend of mine was talking about fear the other day and he was saying, "Why aren't there any about fear-poems that actually express fear?" Although I was able to think of some I might show him, I realized at once that he was more or right. It's tough to be writing something down with that feeling in the pit your stomach. But I have to be thankful for poetry. Poetry has ............. ~ me-other people's poems and my own. I've discovered a lot about world, and finally I've discovered a lot about myself. It's taken me years to approach what I regard as one kind of mature style. I probably found it · Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See. Two books before that, I together a book-length sequence of poems called The Escape into You, were intense, tough, and sometimes convoluted, which were the .. vn,r.a.

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sions of a struggle to see through to a particular subject. In Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, there's a fuller, easier sense of things. Of course, as soon as I put that book together, I felt I wanted to start over, change, build on it. And the poems I'm writing now are less pretty and tell stories. They tell stories about little things that have happened to me here and there, and they sound very different. So I have no idea what they're worth. They may be worth very little to others. TH: That's where your poetry's leading you now? BELL: For now, yes. I have in mind the personal intensity and the reporting in poems like James Wright's "The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio." There are other poets, too. I'm doing another thing I should add here, and I'd like to kind of put it on the record. A wonderful poet in his sixties named William Stafford, who lives in Oregon, and I are writing poems back and forth to one another, almost as if they were letters. We're putting together a book of those. Now I must say he gets his poems back in the mail within the day, I think, while I get mine back within the month. So he's getting the short end of this, in a way, but we're building up a very interesting book. TH: If poetry disappeared from the face of the earth today, how would the world be poorer? BELL: Well, I can think of two oppos'nt ~n .wers right off the bat. A novelist from India spoke this morning at the EC1 ... v West Center Conference, and he pointed out that there is a sense in India that, while it is good to write, it is better not to write at all. It's a play, of course, on that old saw that it's good to have been born, but it's better never to have been born at all. One might possess a wisdom which would preclude or n . .tke unnecessary the kind of expression that's in poetry. That's quite possible-that o 1e could come to a point where one has learned all there is to learn from the writing of poetry. I certainly felt that way about photography when 1 was a photographer years ago. Finally, I felt that I had leam ed all I could, and I began to take the camera out without film. Pretty S<•on I didn't need the camera anymore. However, in the immediate sense of things, poetry does a lot. There are acts of the imagination that cannot be articulated or apprehended except in poetry and they have to do with the deepest emotions and the greatest mysteries.

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MARVIN BELL and WILLIAM STAFFORD:

Correspondence

Dear Marvin, I merge with your message "Wherever

You Are." I learn what it is like to have soft ears that compose whatever comes into a symphony, to hear as a silver sound the whole imminent world. You wake up my instinct for puppyhood and bring that summer bubble around me: forgiveness everywhere, a yearning, a grace coming out of awkwardness to capture us, a touch from the beginning of things.

These beings that call each other "Prince" or "Queenie" or "Duke," they can fetch history along with reminders, nothing ever quite ending-even a rose twining out a tapering faintness toward other seasons; and all things coming are announced by a computer chip of sense that embodies where they are from and how long on the way.

For awhile, reading your lines, I ran on your trail so well I could never be lost. And sometimes when you turned I was already there, your very best friend

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-Bill

About Our Series

And you, Bill, remind me that poetry is something that isn't poetry, what non-poets mean when they say, "That's poetry."

The world's a wheel, all right, a little knowing and presence and a long build-up that sends up our long ideas of what is natural, while we tum through "excess" that is only being, trees that are only treeful awaiting our seeing, and a silence around to receive whatever's . . . I was going to say "good."

One man's lack of feeling is another man's edge of night. One woman's dried leaf is another's tablet. And still the official question seems to be, "What's pretty?" I want to say, "Pretty is as pretty does," and offer instead, "What's ugly?" I think the brain is superior to any idea! (No such thing as interruption.)

One of your mountains has erupted-more than Pompeii! For some, salvation was living elsewhere. I try to be there from here by looking hard at the pictures, the tiny fallen firs the newspaper means to stand for trees, the wash of ink that covers seven inches of ash, the aerial cast of the camera that looks at the mud-floods for what is underneath, the new word "lava-dam" that holds up its worst promise. And I know this distance is crucial, that none know the particulars of others, each fleeing the lava in his own way, the lucky-for-now ones choosing or choosing not to make up a life of the spirit-each person's choice, the place we can know. So I'll give you this local beginning of mine, for we've no mountain here:

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The Iowa River

To be as much of oneself as possible.

To accept (&complete), rather than revise.

To fill the form (organic, human) when it appears.

A passion for philosophy, for following a path, for crossing a river, walking an embankment, for circling the whole, for bridging the river.

The wish to return, which is to go on living in what was and also is still-but for backward notions of time and the trendy, love of the crane and wrecker.

To live in. To move toward silence. To go along in such a way that one cannot be missed.

To be selfless. To be the time it took to be, nor any moment.

To be the indistinct many. Always to be accorded a place. Limitless goal for a wish.

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-Marvin Bell

Living Far Enough Away

"it was a film I saw in my own home of the severed wings"

At the shop in my brain where everything happens-at the gunsel edge, or caught in the wind-people scream, and I don't want to know how they die.

Where murders are canceled, at the shop in my brain that forges my deeds, a terrible flash almost reaches out for the help of my hands-but then is contained.

And a storm in the mountains-only soft clouds to you­is killing: avalanche, the vise of cold, a wrenching death, too near-I tum away.

If you lived here, buffeted, right where everything happened, you would be sorry. And sometimes I think nothing is far enough, and there are things that shouldn't happen at all.

But maybe they do.

-William Stafford

67

At the Writing Conference

The bindweed I put on our table the last time, Bill, drank up slowly its air-tailored, light-lined soft goblet of self, all the while we were getting ideas from you and us and him and them, and coffee in paper cups stood there like portions of winter and all around the room warming up to just being.

The bindweed was closing. It lay on its heaviest part

as if on a kernel of density unimaginable in an open flower so held by its silken shape, its parachute, its being as it was. I put it on our table-this goblet, parachute, this flower pulling together its dresses-and there inside an hour it took on weight, which once was light and nipped the air with impunity.

Sometimes we happen where the bindweed closes up and prying fails and scissors find no life anywhere. Where words go into the past and we can't help it or each other. But sometimes we happen where the bindweed is open, weightless; where, heedless, it becomes something-almost leaving its ground, twining, gathering.

Trouble is always asking. Flowers are always answering.

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For an OK Writer

You make it happen-the world out there jumps at us through windows and unfolds what didn't happen all around outside. Part of our gift of time wanders those infra-red, ultra-violet scenes acted through unlimited corridors in limbo.

And other selves crowd forward-they lift the old neighborhood call, "We are here waiting for you to come out to play." These walls become nothing. Only artificial glass ever held us inside a room. We shatter into that palace called outdoors. You open it. You make it happen.

-William Stafford

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Seeing that Things Happen

A mothballed fleet offshore fell out of war and now when you see them there off the highway their boat-forms merge with a grey· industrial sky in New Haven, Connecticut, and they look like clay destroyers, unopposed, beautiful and happy.

In Arizorta, the sand shifted and spread out, absorbing the green at the far edges of waving golden air, and the goldenness of the heat, and the whites and blues of flame and sore reds, and now it's the Painted Desert no one believes.

Even things that happened hav.e to happen when we're up to being amazed, undeprived, speechless; and there's room for dedication in this and pilgrimming, back-packing of letters, diminished real voices lost at sea or crowned by thirst,

restated in a wind-across neutral planes.

-Marvin Bell

©1981 by Marvin Bell and William Stafford

70

SUSAN NUNES

A Small Obligation

"You know what she did yesterday?" my mother asks. She puts her coffee cup on the counter. She has been nursing it while I fix myself breakfast in her kitchen amidst the leavings of an earlier meal.

"I can't find the tobasco," I say from the refrigerator. "What do you want it for?" "The eggs." "Let me do that," she says. My mother finds it extremely difficult to

watch idly while someone else works. "Don't you want bacon? There's bacon in the chiller."

"No," I answer firmly. When I turn arnund she is standing proprietarily over the eggs, spatula in hand. "Mother,·· I .,,. n the patronizing way we acquire in adolescence when speaking to our p ... ~nts, "I can cook eggs." I nod toward the dining room. "Sit down and drink your coffee. I'll be out in a minute. Then we can talk."

Still she hesitates. "Don't you want some coffee?" I look at her with ill-disguised exasperation. 'T ti iove some. Now will

you please sit down?" When I join her with a placemat and my eggs, she has cleared a ~ 1ace for

me to eat. My coffee is there, the cream already in it. "I'm sorry for the mess, she says. She looks about her.

My mother uses the dining room table as a makeshift desk, explaining when we visit that she is going to convert the spare bedroom into a proper office, and apologizing for the mess. But the clutter remains: two diction­aries, thick file folders with wooden clothes pins protruding from the sides, legal pads filled with her crabbed script, old New Yorkers, a large bottle of aspirin, blue mimeo paper, number one pencils, cap less Faber-Castell pens, and her ancient Smith-Corona.

"You know what she did?" she asks again. "Toast?" "No, thank you," she says. "I can barely manage a half piece in the

morning." "What did she do this time?" My mother gives a great sigh. "She does the strangest things, Amy. In

the paper yesterday, you know, her paper, was a picture of some women demonstrating for the Equal Rights Amendment. There were these

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placards in the foreground," she gestures with her hands, "large oval things on poles. The words 'Support ERA Now' were written in big block letters. They leapt out at you. Graphically very effective. Anyway, Grand­ma had been studying the picture all morning-you know the way she does-the paper three inches from her face. Totally absorbed."

I remark on how intense Grandma's actions can be. My mother takes a sip of coffee and agrees. "After her nap it was the same thing. I stopped writing at one point and asked if she wanted some tea, or a cookie, she gets so hungry in the afternoon. No. No. She was all right, she said. So I asked her again, just to be sure, because she so often refuses out of politeness, then acts as if I've taken the food out of her mouth."

My mother is tapping the edge of the table with the fingers of her right hand. It began some time ago, the tapping. "I hate it, the obliqueness," she says vehemently. "Anyway," she continues, " it must have been around 4:00, shortly before I planned to prepare dinner. I heard her. The walker. Clunk. Then her slippers. I don't know why, but I can always tell when she has something she wants to tell me. The urgency of those little footsteps. So I stopped working and waited."

"I know," I say, "it takes forever." "She sat down, there, right where you're sitting. The newspaper-how

she managed to hold on to it I don't know-was tightly rolled up. She put it there, right where your mat is, while she made herself comfortable. Then she slowly and deliberately unrolled it. Amy, she proceeded to tell me the most incredible story. It's so strange where she gets these things. I ask myself, where do they come from?"

Mother's stories often have long prefaces, her telling slipping into familiar cadences. In many ways her stories were the most affectionate connection we had after my sister was born. Long car trips, the hours she spent ironing my father's starched shirts, Friday nights after dinner, family gatherings, all were occasions for telling. When measured against each other, her tales far outweigh our battles. I can forgive her almost everything.

She was born in Hilea, a plantation town which no longer exists. It was located in the foothills of Mauna Loa south of Pahala in the Kau district of the Big Island. She was the second, the brightest, of four children, and the only daughter. Following her father's wishes, she became a teacher. But just before the war, in what I believe was a fit rebellion, she married my father, who was not Japanese. Later, Grandfather's language school was shut down after Pearl Harbor, and she dutifully handed over her paycheck to her parents.

Obligation runs terribly strong in some families. Perhaps it is an individual guilt: her oldest brother did not have the same energy to fulfill unarticulated debts. Even as a child hearing the story of the paycheck, I felt it unfair that she and Dad were the ones who had to support her parents during a time when everyone was hard-pressed. Upon Grandfather's

72

release from the relocation camp, he was able to earn a small living blockprinting Hawaiian designs on shirts, muumuus and other souveniers purchased by servicemen stationed in Hilo. Grandma sewed khaki pants for the Army and taught shishu, Japanese embroidery, which was not consid­ered a dangerous art. I loved my grandparents, but $120 seemed an enormous s sum. Would I have to do that one day?

My mother is not looking at me. Her eyes are fixed somewhere above my head, and her right hand is tapping the edge of the table. After a while, she says: "Her hands were black with newsprint. 'You remember Japan, Miho?' she asked me. 'No, Mama, I have never been to Japan.' 'Well,' she said in her schoolmarm 'Voice, ' they are honoring the turtle. These women, see? They are expressing their feelings about the turtle, which in Japan is a sacred and auspicious creature. Minasai.' She pointed to the picture. 'Look, the t-urtle shells are painted many colors. They are holding· them on poles, and the crowds will bow with respect as they go by.' "

My mother pauses to clear her throat before continuing. "I said, 'Mama, why don't you read it. It is not about turtles, it is not even about]apan.' I didn't tell her the picture was black and white, or that the women were Americans and not Japanese. I told her they're not marching in honor of the turtle, but in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. 'So?' she said, as if presented with the most surprising of facts."

My mother's hand is still tapping. She is staring at my chair. "You're thinking it was cruel of me, Amy, to insist, because she knows nothing about such things. But she's clever, you know. 'Oh,' she said, 'I don't know about that.' "

"What happened then?" I ask. "She sat there for a few minutes looking at the picture, and then she

asked my why I didn't send her to her mother in Japan. She was a burden, but her mother would take care of her. 'Mama!' I said, 'your mother has been dead for almost seventy years!' 'Is that so?' she replied."

"Do you remember the turtle, Mother?" I ask. "What turtle?" "The one I got for a gift when we lived on Piopio Street.' ' Her hand stops tapping. "Piopio Street? Oh, yes,' ' she says, smiling,

"Mr. Naito gave it to you." "Right." "That was a long time ago. You were five." It was a tiny creature which fit in the palm of my hand, with a shell

painted bright red and blue. It looked like a little lacquer jewel box. My grandmother gave me a blue glass bowl. I put water in it and some smooth black pebbles. But all it did was sit on the stones and dirty the water, so after about a week I decided the turtle was bored with its new home. In a fit of generosity, I took it out to the shrimp pond, picked it up by its painted back, and just let it go. lt sank to the bottom until all I could see was its little lacquered back, then I lost sight of it among the reeds. Gone. How I searched

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for that turtle! But I never saw it again. I dreamed about it, imagined it had drowned. Shortly after my grandparents moved to Honolulu I told Grandma about the turtle. She thought the story was hilarious, and when I asked her why, she said that after we moved to Villa Franca she had seen it. Sunning itself on a rock. Yes, she knew it was the same one, because the shell still had traces of red and blue lacquer.

* * *

We don't mean literally in this family. What you have to do is wait for the underlying meaning. It'll come eventually. Sometimes you can ask directly, but you risk making the person lose face. There's a word for it in Japanese which I don't recall, but I know what it describes. Imagine someone in a kitchen. Pans and pots are being thrown around, drawers slammed. Obviously, someone is angry. Now, in the typical American household one would probably go into the kitchen and ask what the matter was. On my father's side, someone would yell, "Eh, shut up!" But not in ours. No, we would know that someone was offended and someone else was responsible, but to ask what the problem was would make the offended party feel they were angry about something not worth your noticing, and they would lose face.

I have always tried to act as if I really knew what had offended. I have had to wait for the proper opening in which to make amends. Eventually, the opening will come, but the signal is usually oblique.

My mother and I are sitting on the patio. It overlooks her garden. The wisteria is in bloom, and purple clusters hang from the ceiling beams. My parents have been eating their meals outside now that Grandma is confined to her room most days. She has been finding it increasingly difficult to walk and complains frequently that her feet are cold, that her back and hips ache.

"I was talking to Ann Conant next door," my mother is saying. "Oh?" I know that what Mother and Ann Conant have in common is the

subject of aging parents. I also know the story. Ann and her husband Ben cared for both their mothers.

"Taking care of two old folks, it must have been terribly difficult," my mother says. Ann Conant's mother was the invalid, and every morning they'd have to leave her lunch in a tray by her bed. She couldn't move. If she wanted to go to the bathroom during the day, she had to do it in her diapers. Mother had told me this more than once so I knew she was bothered by this.

"What about Ben's mother, didn't she help?" "Nope." The no was emphatic. "She hated Ann's mother. Wouldn't

have anything to do with her. Ironically, it was Ben's mother who died first. A few months later, they had Ann's mother declared indigent and put herin a nursing home. It was just too difficult and too expensive."

I realize I am expected to say something. This is the opening, the story an illustration of something else. I point out how she's becoming house-

74

bound, that she will have to make a decision about Grandma herself, and bow difficult that will be, but how necessary, after all she must consider her own health. Mother says nothing while I review the obvious arguments. When I finish there is a long pause.

"That's not the only thing," she says, "I don't mind having to bathe her, lift her, scrub her, listen to her. It's-"

I watch her struggle for the right words. What is it that she is trying to say? It's maddening to listen to her stop short of an explanation which she is at the edge of giving only to spin off another story.

"Last week I found her in the kitchen trying to reach the telephone. She was propped dangerously against her walker and frightened me half to death. When I asked her what she was doing, she demanded that I tell her Megumi's number. I asked why she wanted to call him. Oh, she said, there was something she had to discuss with him, very important. Then I noticed she was holding a postcard and asked her what it was. She held it away from me, saying it was none of my concern, but if I had to know, she had gotten an important card from Japan and had to speak to Megumi about making arrangements for the visit. I asked her what visit she was talking about. She then announced that her nephew and his wife were coming and she had to make arrangements with Megumi. I'm afraid I insisted that she show me the card. Reluctantly, she handed it over to me. Do you know, Amy, that card was written over eight years ago? She had unearthed it from that pile of old letters and photographs she pores through and must have seized on it for some inexplicable reason."

Emotions play on Mother's face. Just as I did as a child, I have the strongest urge to protect her. She continues, "I told her that when Hironaka and his wife visited us, I made the arrangements, I fed them, I took them shopping, entertained them. Megumi did nothing but gift us with his presence at the appropriate, but convenient, moment."

"He's impossible-" "Sometimes I get so angry, 1-" In ourfamily, sentences have a way of petering off. We leave one another

with unfinished thoughts while our minds race elsewhere. Here, take this and keep it until I get back. For a while, Mother and I talk about the wisteria on the other side of the house, the one which doesn't bloom because the cutting was from the mainland. It takes a seasonal cold snap to jar the plant to flower, my mother says. She won't cut it down, however.

Before I leave, Mother tells me one of Grandma's General Nogi stories. Grandmother has a keen sense of history-not so much an interest in chronology or in great events playing one upon the next -but a sense of the great personalities of her past, their idiosyncrasies. General Nogi was one of her favorites, a source of many moral lessons. Mother had been cutting Grandma's nails and commenting on how hard they were and how quickly

grew. As she talked she put the parings in an ashtray. Grandma looked at her hands and said that Nogi-sama revered his mother so much he saved

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her nail parings and hair and kept them until he died. "I suppose," Mother comments wryly, "this was to suggest that I save

her parings. Or that I don't possess the proper proportion of respect." "Don't laugh," I caution her. "It probably was." "I'm not laughing. You know what else she said?" I shake my head.

"Nogi-sama committed suicide with his wife after the Emperor Meiji died."

* * *

At ninety-two, my grandmother's world is terribly circumscribed. Bedroom and bath. Patio only once a day. I drop in unexpectedly late one afternoon and find her in her rocker on the back patio. She is staring intently at a spray of orchids a few feet from her chair. Her newspaper lies folded and unread on the floor. She is almost beautiful, softened in the late afternoon light, her little body tucked neatly into the cushions. When she hears me she turns and calls my name as if she hasn't seen me in years. Then she says, "Look. Pretty, pretty, no? Grandpa before time he make." She points to the pot. "You gimmee, this one." I move it closer to her. Very gently, she touches one of the blooms. "Pretty, no? I like, this one." The patio sits at the base of a terraced hill. Up .the cement stairs and around the corner is where Mother found Grandfather, his limbs collected, but the back of his head split open where it had struck the concrete. He had been fertilizing orchids. Mother is no longer fond of dendrobiums, but Grand­mother still takes pleasure in them.

* * *

The telephone wakens me. "Amy? It's Mother. Grandma's had another stroke. I'm calling from the hospital."

My grandmother has given us all a scare, but she will survive this one, the doctor says, although he cautions that cerebral "accidents" of this sort often result in erratic behavior. She should soon settle down.

So begins a week of nightmares after they bring her home from the hospital. For three nights a fire burns in her room. On the fourth, there's snow in the bamboo grove. On the fifth and sixth she cannot find the furo-at 3:30 in the morning-and on the seventh the fire again burns.

"Miho, Miho!" she calls out, waking both my parents. "What is it, Mama?" "Come, come," she cries, and when my mother comes, she says, "Look.

A fire. There!" "What fire, Mama. There is no fire!" "Mite goran! Look, you foolish girl," she says, pointing to the closet.

"Can't you see it? There is a fire." Her body, according to Mother, was turned around completely in the

bed, her head where her feet should have been. Her kimono was half

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undone, her hair loose and hanging, the pins scattered on the floor. My father thought she was possessed.

"Where is my favorite aunt?" she demanded. "What have you done with her? Did you tell her to go away?" She had managed to pull herself up into a sitting position, and as Mother tried to cover her she cried, "Leave me alone. Where is Shizumi-san? Shizumi! Shizumi! What have they done to you?"

When my mother tried to tum her she snapped, "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

My mother is hurt as she relates this. You would think she might take in stride the rantings of an old woman, crippled with stroke. But the woman is her mother, still a person who commands a measure of feeling.

"Mother, no one is going to blame you." It is late at night and I really should get home. I long for my bed and a junk novel.

"What are you talking about?" she says sharply. She looks at my face and her fingers start tapping the edge of the table. "This place is a mess. I should get all this stuff cleared away into the back room. It's just more than I can handle right now."

I am uncomfortable, as if the clutter on the dining room table represents something I was expected to do but have not done. "Mama," I say, "no one is going to blame you if you put Grandma in a nursing home."

"You girls," she says with conviction, "vou girls will get nothing from Daddy and me. All we have will go into caring for us when we are no longer able to. I will not allow you to be saddled with the responsibility."

Is it my imagination or is she attacking me? I cannot escape the feeling that I, that we, are being punished for something. But what is it, what is it we are supposed to have done? We are a family of unspoken obligations, each of us endowed with both bountiful energy and paralyzing ennui. I don't know why, but I am stung .

• • • When it came, Grandmother's death was a surprise but not a great

tragedy. Shortly after the week of nightmares, Mama walked into the bedroom with her breakfast on a tray and found her curled up and quite dead. She had slipped quietly away in her sleep. I was worried about Mama, how she would take the funeral, the trip to Hilo for the memorial services, the adjustment to a life relatively free of the day to day demands of someone who needed her. But she survived the "ordeal," as my sisters and I had come to call it. In fact, Grandma's death brought the family closer together. For the first time in years Mama and Megumi were on friendly terms. And I visit more often. She seems to look forward to my company.

In the Buddhist tradition there is a series of memorial services following a person's death. The family repairs to the temple and sits through a special ceremony. Prayers recited in japanese are accompanied by gongs and bells. After the one-month anniversary we had dinner at Mama's. We used the

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occasion to go through old photograph albums spanning the almost 70 years of Grandma's life in Hawaii. It is close to midnight, when, with everyone gone, Mama and I begin to clear up the "shards of the past"-my sister's expression-scattered on the living room floor.

I am reminded of the task of cleaning Grandmother's room after the funeral, and of the dread I felt at what Mama's response might be. After all, Grandfather's death was still not that far in the past. That had been terribly difficult for us all, especially my mother, who felt his death more acutely than anyone, even Grandma. Anyway, cleaning Grandmother's room turned out to be an occasion for laughter rather than tears. When Mama lifted up the mattress she uncovered a trove of ferreted-away junk: used paper napkins folded into t iny squares, brown candy wrappers, a half-eaten piece of what we think was dried persimmon, old letters from Japan, pieces of balled-up kleenex, two handkerchiefs, an old wallet, two store receipts, nylon stockings, and a not-so-junk twenty dollar bill. After going through her purses we collected a total of $8.43 in loose change. And the letters! She had saved everything. The photographs filled several boxes, and it was these that received our attention. There were so many.

We sort through the loose photographs, commenting on the more interesting ones before placing them in the shoeboxes. I pick up a color shot of an old man standing in front of a house and holding what looks to be a book in his hands.

"Isn't this Grandma's brother?" I ask. Saburo lives in Japan and I have met him only once. He was an energetic man, close to eighty at the time, who walked around the house with his socks on.

Mother takes the photograph and looks at it. "Yes , that's Saburo, Grandma's last living brother. He's about ten years younger than she. Hironaka's father." Grandmother's other two brothers died of tuberculosis during the war.

I point to the book. "What's he holding there?" "Oh, that," says my mother, smiling. "Didn't I ever tell you about the

poetess?" "What poetess?" "Grandma's great-grandmother was a poet. That's a book of her poems

Saburo's holding. Megumi took that picture when he was last in Japan. He described the book as very old, insect-eaten. The family hadn't preserved it."

"You never told me about a poetess." I take back the picture and study it. The house in the background looks like the farmhouses in a Japanese woodcut. My grandmother was born in that house. Her family has occupied it for generations. "What a shame. What was the book called?" My mother shakes her head. "Damn," I say, "I wish we could make out the script." Saburo looks so formal. I can see the strong family resemblance, the raised brows, the low, hooded eyes. "What do you know about her, Mama?"

"Very little/' my mother replies. "She was a child of promise. Can wo

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kakeru. Gan is a promise. Kakeru, to obligate. Thus, a promise one makes to the gods to fulfill a particular obligation if a certain wish is granted. Her parents had waited a long time for a child and made an oath that should they have one, that child would make a pilgrimage to some shrine. Kami maeri wo shimasu. That was the obligation. Kami, the gods, and maeri, to pray. Shimasu means to perform." ·

"Where was the shrine?" "That's long been forgotten. Grandma didn't remember, and I don't

think Megumi bothered to ask." "Did she make her pilgrimage?" "She tried, Amy. She was a well-educated woman, even by today's

standards, and in her later years was considered somewhat a scholar as well as a poet. Grandma said she wrote many, many songs. She was also very beautiful. Anyway, for one reason or another, it wasn't until she was an old woman, widowed, frail , that she decided to make the journey. Apparently, her sons tried to dissuade her, for it was a long and arduous road. But she would not be moved. So, accompanied by two servants, she set forth. Many weeks later the servants returned with a small box which contained her nails and hair."

"She died on the way?" I ask. "She died on the way," my mother answers. "She never reached the

shrine." There is a terrible finality about the statement. "Kami maeri wo shimasu, " I say quietly. "No wonder-" "What did you say?" she asks. "Nothing. But I wish I had known about her before." Mama laughs. "Oh Amy, there are so many stories." She hands me the

photograph, which I had laid down. "Here, put this away in that box next to you. The one with 'Japan' on it."

79

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Monsoon Notebooks

I

Drought since December.

All across the city men roll carts with ice clothed in sawdust. Later on, when he had fever, the drought still continuing, his nightmare is that trees in the garden send their hard roots underground towards the house climbing through windows so they can drink the sweat off his body, steal the last of the saliva off his tongue.

He snaps on the electricity just before daybreak. For 25 years he has lived in this country, though up to the age of 11 he slept in rooms like this -with no curtains, just delicate bars across the windows so no one can break in. And the floors of red cement polished smooth, cool against bare feet.

Dawn through a garden. Clarity to leaves, fruit, the dark yellow of the King Coconut, thambili. This delicate light is allowed only a brief moment of the day. In 10 minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies.

Half a page-and the morning is already ancient.

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II HARBOUR

He arrived in a plane but loves the harbour. Dusk. And the turning on of electricity in ships, portholes of moon, the blue glide of a tug, the harbour road and its ship chandlers, soap makers, ice on bicycles, the hidden anonymous barber shops behind the pink dirt walls of Reclamation Street.

One frail memory dragged up out of the past- going to the harbour to say goodbye to a sister or mother, dusk. For years he loved the song "I saw the harbour lights ... " and later in his teens danced disgracefully with girls, humming "Sea of Heartbreak."

There is nothing wise about a harbour, but it is real life. It is as sincere as a Singapore cassette. Infinite waters cohabit with flotsam on this side of the breakwater and the luxury liners and Maldive fishing vessels steam out to erase calm sea. Who was he saying goodbye to? Automatically as he travels on the tug with his brother-in-law, a pilot in the harbour, he sings "the lights in the harbour/don't shine for me . .. " but he loves it here, skimming out into the night anonymous among the lazy commerce, his nieces dancing on the breakwater as they wait, this lovely swallowing of thick night air as it carves around him his brain blunt, cleaning itself with nothing but this anonymity, with the magic words. Harbour. Lost ship. Chandler. Estuary.

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III

The bars across the windows did not always work. When bats would invade the house at dusk the beautiful long-haired girls would rush to the corner of rooms and hide their heads under dresses. The bats suddenly drifting like dark squadrons through the house- for never more than two minutes-arcing into the halls over the uncleared dining room table and out along the verandah where the parents would be sitting trying to capture the cricket scores on the BBC with a shortwave radio.

Wildlife stormed or crept into homes this way. The snake either entered through the bathroom drain for remnants of water or, finding the porch doors open, came in like a king and moved in a straight line through the living room, dining room, the kitchen and servants' quarters and out the back, as if taking the most civilized short cut to another street in town. Others moved in permanently; birds nested above the fans, the silver fish slid into steamer trunks and photograph albums-eating their way through portraits and wedding pictures. What images of family life they consumed in their minute jaws and took into their bodies no thicker than the pages they ate.

And the animals also always on the periphery of rooms and porches, their sounds forever at your ear. In the Yalajungle sleeping on the verandah at 3 a.m. night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the niglit.

On the final evening I took the tape recorder to bed with me and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the other noises of the night behind them-inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, neon) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain-nothing more than darkness.

All those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

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IV

A school exercise book. Sit on the desk of tamarind looking out of the windows into dry black night. "Thanikama." "Aloneness." Birdless. The sound of an animal passing through the garden. Midnight and noon and dawn and dusk are the hours of danger, susceptibility to the 'gahas' -planetary spirits of malignant character. Avoid eating certain foods in lonely places, the devils will smell you out. Carry some metal. An iron heart. Do not step on bone or hair or human ash.

Sweat down the back. The fan pauses then begins again. At midnight this hand is the only thing moving. As discreetly and carefully as whatever animals in the garden fold brown leaves into their mouths, visit the drain for water, or scale the broken glass that crowns the walls. Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing.

The garden a few feet away is suddenly under the fist of a downpour. Within half a second an easy dry night is filled with the noise of rain on tin, cement and earth-waking others slowly in the house. But he actually saw it, happened to be looking out into the blackness, saw the white (reflected off his room's light) falling like an object past his window. And now the dust that has been there for months is bounced off the earth and pours, the smell of it, into his room. He gets up, walks to the night, and breathes it in - the dust, the tactile smell of wetness, oxygen now being pounded down into the ground so it is difficult to breathe.

83

DARRELL H.Y. LUM

The Moiliili Bag Man

One time by da Humane Society, had one bummy guy at da drive-in. He was eating from da rubbish can. Yeah. My fren tell, "Ass da Moiliili Bag Man dat. Try look, get any kine plastic bag hanging from his belt. I tink he got urn from Star Market."

Da Bag Man was looking through da rubbish can and eatingda leftovers. Yeah, da throw way awready kine. Mostly he was looking fo da plate 1 unches, fo da extra rice. He no care, da guy. We was looking at him from our table and da girl behind da counter stay shaking her head watching da Bag Man. Little while more, da cook guy wit one dirty apron and one broom and dustpan came outside from da kitchen part fo sweep rubbish. Da cook guy was so stink man, cause he jes go empty da dustpan, all dirt and rubbish la dat, right in da can dat da Bag Man was looking. Da Bag Man no say nutting ... but da cook guy was stink, yeah? He could tell da Bag Man was still yet using da can.

Da Bag Man never know what fo do. He jes went stand dere by da can. Den he went check his bags: cigarette bag wit plenny butts and bus up kine cigarettes, someting else in one nudda one, and look like one half orange, peeled awready in one nudda one.

Russo, das my fren, told me dat people sometimes go give da Bag Man money jes ,so dat he go away from dem. Even if he not boddering dem, dey give urn money. I guess dey no like look at him or someting. Funny yeah?

Anyway, I no can tell if da Bag Man is happy or sad or piss off or anyting l'dat cause he get one moosetash and skinny kine beard wit only little bit strands, stay hide his mout. But his eyes, da Bag Man's eyes, stay always busy ... looking, looking, looking.

I look back at him, and to me, he ack like he little bit shame. We stay da only small kids sitting down at da tables, me and Russo, but da Bag Man ack like he no like know us.

Had one nudda guy in one tee shirt dat was sitting at datable next to us was watching da Bag Man too. He was eating one plate lunch and after.wards he went take his plate over to da Bag Man. Still had little bit everyting on top, even had bar-ba-que meat left.

"Brah," day guy tell, "you like help me finish? I stay full awready." Da Bag Man no tell nutting, only nod his head and take da plate. I

thought he would eat urn real fast ... gobble urn up, you know. But was

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funny, he went put urn down and go to da counter fo get one napkin and make urn nice by his place . .. da fork on top da napkin. Even he took da plate out of da box, made urn jes like real restaurant. I wanted fo give him someting too but I enly had my cup wit little bit ice left. I awready went drink up all da Coke and was chewing da ice. Da Bag Man was looking at me now, not at me, but at my cup. I nevah know what fodocausej 'like I selfish iflkeepmycup but nevah have nutting inside awready, so shame eh if you give somebody someting but stay empty. But I nevah know what fo do cause I had to go awready. I thought I could jes leave da cup on datable or be like da tee shirt guy and tell, "Brah, hea."

So I went get up and walk half way and den turn back like I went foget throw away my cup. I went look at da Bag Man and say, "You like urn?"

Da Bag Man nevah say nutting still yet but I knew he wanted urn so I jes went leave urn on his table. I was curious fo see what he was going do wit urn so I went make like I was fussing around wit someting on my bike. He went get out his hankachief from his front pants pocket and unwrap urn. Had all his coins inside urn and he went take out fifteen cents. Den he went take da cup to da window and point to da sign dat went say, "Refills-15¢"

"Coke," he told da girl. Sly da guy! When I went pass him on my bike, I thought I saw him make one "shaka" sign to me. Wasn't up in da air, was down by his leg, j'like he was saying, "Tanks, eh" to me.

Da next time I went see da Bag Man was by da shave ice place, Goodie Goodie Drive ln. He was jes grinding one plate lunch, man. I dunno if he went buy urn. I doubt it though. I thought I saw his busy eyes recanize me, but I dunno. I jes went nod my head, jes in case he was telling "hi."

Aftah dat, j 'like everyplace I go, he stay. Da Bag Man stay. One time me and my bruddah went Bellows Beach fo bodysurf and da Bag Man vras dere. I heard my bruddah folks calling him Waimanalo Eddie but wa~ 1i111, da Moiliili Bag Man.

Wasjes like I knew him by heart awready. I mean , ·'likewewas frens . I seen him by da Boy Scout camp checking tings out. v ne ting about Boy Scouts, dey get plenny food, dey no run out, dem. But rou know what, dey nevah know how fo cook rice. Dey went jam urn up and had to dump urn cause was too mooshy and wasn't right. Da Bag Man was right dere even befo one scoop rice went inside da rubbish can. Could tell he was happy, boy. ]'like he was dancing. His okole was wiggling and he was holding out his plastic bag fo da throw way rice.

All da small kids, da Cub Scouts, started fo come around da Bag Man and ask him questions. "What you going do wit dat?" "How come you get so much tings in da bags?" One real small kid, wasn't even one Cub Scout, went tell, "You one bum?"

Da Bag Man jes went smile and tell, "Dis fo my cat. He like dis kine rice." Den da scout mastah went try fo get all da kids fogo back by him. "Come ova hea. Daman jes going take da food fo his pigs or someting, buta kaukau. Come. I show you how fo make da fire soda ting no piu," he went tell dem.

85

But of course nolxxly was listening, dey still like hang around da Bag Man. Finally da Bag Man had to tell, "Eh, you fahdah stay calling you guys. Tanks, eh."

Aftah dat, I nevah see da Bag Man fo long time. I nevah see him so I nevaheven tinkabout him until one day, meandRussowentgoAlaMoana beach and we went go fuss around by da end of da canal, by da pond part where sometimes get da guys wit da radio dat control da boats. Dose guys get piss off man, if you blast dey boats wit rocks. Heh, heh, good fun though sometimes.

But nevah have boats dis time so me and Russo was playing try-come, try-come. Ass when you try fo get da uddah guy come by you fo look at someting, but only stay bullshet like, "Try come, try come look dis doo-doo stay look like one hairy hot dog." And you try jazz urn up so dat da uddah guy like come by you instead of him trying fo make you go by him.

So Russo went tell, "Try come, try come. Get one ma-ke man stay in da bushes. He stay ma-ke on anykine/ood, la dat!"

Shet. I knew no can be. Dat Russo, he such a bull-lair. Soiwasgoingtell him some interesting stuff about doo-doo but Russo went tell real scared, "Da ma-ke man leg went move!" So I went by him.

"He only sleeping, stupit," I went tell Russo real soft, jes in case da guy was really sleeping.

"No, he ma-ke die dead," Russo went say. "How you know?" "I know. Maybe somelxxly went murder him!" By now Russo was making up any kine stories and talking mo loud and I

knew wasn't ma-ke man cause da legs was moving somemore and could hear somlxxly talking from inside da bushes.

"Sucka. Sucking kids, beat it befo I smash your face." Was da Bag Man. He was blinking his eyes real plenny and den he went

look at us, stink eye. Russo was getting chicken and was backing up little by little, but I jes went stay.

"Howsit," da Bag Man went tell me. Den he went check his bags, jes making sure was all still dere.

We J·:s went look at each udda but dis timedaBagMan'seyes wasn't so busy. He jes started fo rip up one coconut leaf. Was sharp, man., He had one super Umg fingernail on his thumb dat was jes right fo rip da coconut leaf into skinny strips yeah, and little while mo he went make one bird out of da coconut leaf. He nevah say nutting. He jes went stick urn behind his ear. He went look at me, den at Russo, den at me again. I thought he was going scold us or someting but he jes went start making one nudda bird~Only dis time he nevah go so fast. In fack, he went real slow, j'like he was teaching me how. When he was pau he went give urn to me and den he jes went split, even befo I went tell urn tanks.

When I went home, I went put da Bag Man's bird on top my bureau and even if I nevah see him long time aftah dat Ala Moana park time, I went tink

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of him everytime I saw da bird dere on top da bureau. Sometimes I try practice make birds but I couldn't do urn like da Bag Man. I could almost do urn but mines came out funny kine. I used to wonder if da Bag Man was in Waimanalo or if he was grinding food at da drive-in or if he was making birds too at Ala Moana.

And den one day I was fussing around wit his bird, was all brown and coming had-it. Nevah have nutting fo do so I went try make da bird again. I kept lookingatdaBagMan's bird and den back at mines one. Back and fort. Back and fort. I had to laugh cause must've been funny. Must've looked like da Bag Man's busy eyes . . .looking, looking, looking.

Den, shet, was so easy. I went make urn! Came out perfeck! I went make my bird look exact like his one. I went get somemore coconut leaf and try one mo time cause even I nevah believe. Da stuff came out again! ·

I wanted fogo Waimanalo or Ala Moana or drive-in right away ... but I nevah see him aftah dat time at Ala Moana park. And everyplace I go, I stay looking, looking, looking. But if I was to see him, I would make one bird fo him and den hold my hand down wit da shaka sign and make, "Tanks, eh."

© 1982 by Darrell H.Y. Lum. Printed by permission of the author.

87

MICHAEL MCPHERSON

Clouds, Trees & Ocean, North Kauai

In Haena's cerulean sky today the cirrus clouds converge upon a point beyond the summer horizon, all hurtling backward: time drawn from this world as our master inhales.

The ironwoods lean down their hard needles to the beach, long strings of broken white coral and shells that ebb to the north and west, and east dreaming the bent blue backs of waves.

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forC.K.C

HARRIET SUSSKIND

In a Wheat Field Mapped Like Kansas

October. Coveys of leaves cross the road. You run the first length hard and fast until the edges of breath. The spiked teeth of the hedge row snares the tail of my jersey. We climb over logs stacked in a pile into the clearing in a wheat field mapped like Kansas. We've gone far past the three mile limit. You take me slowly back to the road. Truckers inside their silver cabs yell something, a flack of syllables: Alta girl honey, burn the bum up, then they spin off and down the gulley. Their cries carry me beyond pain

. and this necklace of sweat. My limbs move in some familiar joy as I cover the miles with you. We've come back to our rectangular field with its orchards: bramble meant to keep trespassers out. I know this field. Early spring trillia thrive, and bells of the sweet peas climb. Spindles of wheat shiver in the first catch of sun. I want us to begin and end like this­a field coming through the seasons bearing urgency like flowers-a harvest that gives everything to winter in absolute light.

89

Consider This House

The fact is, "and why, my dear, I love you," can't be added to any poem. Consider this house. At five in the afternoon, not in Lorca country, the late reflection of Autumn promises a heavier winter, and the house is so still not even the floor boards creak. The loudest thing is my heart after a run, or the little whine of a watch. And how I wanted this!

I wanted to keep you, too, in a box like a charmed root smelling faintly of erotic perfumes. I wanted to fill vases with afternoon light of the Moyen Corniche when a little white Fiat once flew on tires thin as linnet wings into that painter's sun, and poplars stood like feathers above the red crests of roofs.

You live too far from the sea. Inland, the wind pours a sheet over the winter crops. Out of the study window the moon, too, is alone. All the little lights come on in the valley houses. There are no letters opening like flowers. Tonight as I prepare the salad . I tear at leaves as though they were the heart, petals that fell open between us.

90

PAULGENEGA

Pharaoh

The beads at his bedside are precious: Heart, tongue, liver, lungs and spleen, Polished carmine, glistening and cold, As if the sea had smoothed them. For millenia, he has used them.

Sometimes he awakens into bad dreams Of dark, close, musty places, Sand and burning air. He takes the beads and twists them. Worrying abrades

But also it preserves him With little else to keep him Till the day he resumes life. Life! The word alone sets the red stones Spinning. Someday, he kl'\Ows,

Sun-blind and dumb, He will lumber from these chambers Swaddled in fear, then limp Into the dunes. The man who was A god turned ridiculous and horrid,

Forced to flee lost pilgrims Who might ask him for directions, Flee those who might notice Underneath the gauze There is nothing much at all.

91

BILL REISNER

The Moon is a Streetlamp

Just when I could swear you came back The moon is a streetlamp and the beer runs out. Without you these moths are snow flurries in August. Love looks easy on the faces of others. Like lines of pain in the looks of those who lose with time. Romance once glorious, dead and gone with Armstrong on the moon. Too easy to lose you Memories seal these years Pointing like streetlamps in a strange town.

92

CINDY S. IKENAGA

Feelings on Faye

Every week the creaking wheels turned Faster, faster as I pushed you to the garden. Your weight pulled me forward, I had to struggle to keep from losing you. In that garden the sun always shone for us. Do you remember the gnarled mango tree and your favorite green bench? It looked so free and yet I felt invisible walls all around. I could get out, you couldn't. I was afraid of you, Faye, You, who couldn't even leave that chair. I was afraid because you looked eighteen But you were that plus twenty years more. How is it that you held the secret of eternal youth You, who couldn't even use it. One week I gave you something It was so small but you hugged me so hard I thought my neck would break. It was then I knew I had to get out. You needed someone, But it couldn't be me.

93

TONY QUAGLIANO

On the ambulance run the red scream always startles liquescent light a pulse throbbing the hotel walls the cool surface of the Ala Wai

On the ambulance run six or eight prowl cars crowd a driveway an apartment lights up, the ambulance ebbs away and for hours figures on the seventh floor move from room to room

On the ambulance run the night never blackens and the brackish air stings the mind alert Later on television the woman whose husband startled a burglar says yes I'd return there's murder in Alberta too

94

EDWARD FALCO

elegy

When gas, and rock heated to gas, sealed the streets of Pompeii, the village was taken by surprise.

Karen, the look on their faces, molded into rock, staring at the flaming sky,

is the look on your father's face as you float away

pillowed in a casket of dream.

12/ 19n6

95

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON

Five Sisters

Originally five sisters flourished in the stronghold of a petty giant. A radius of lilies echoed their scent incandescently, like a million moons

positioned about a goodly blaze of sun. Blown scandalous in that breeze, the night-hawk preys on dewy morsels weird to the taste and eyes but inviolably rich to inhale.

A whistling kettle was the 12 o'clock of that place: insistently aboil, it relented only at their buxom touch. Swans dying sailed out of its reluctance.

Improve on that scream who would, each high note faltered in the extreme to which its urgency drove it. Not once till that giant expired as suddenly as long he throve, did it yield.

Stout harmony it made even afterwards, for a time screened off intrusion. Bled of steam, it whimpered and hushed. Its aroma fled on wings that flew like yesterday.

96

PETER LASALLE

Dream Leakage

One can suffer dream leakage On these humming, cross-country Greyhounds; Interstate 80 West in Iowa, fully night. Outside, the frosted, com-stubbled fields; Inside, in his sleep, The nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican Marine Beside me is spilling some. He sees himself in Sunnyvale Driving his Mustang II, sky-blue, which Dropped its transmission in the Utah desert. He abandoned it there on his way East, on special leave To see his mother, who didn't die after all. And in the dream she is saying how warm and wonderful California is, riding in the Mustang too, Though she could have since died while We unwrapped the cellophane from cold sandwiches Bought from a vending machine in Chicago at dawn, Die before we reach Omaha or sad Cheyenne.

In the tinted windows of the bus There are two identical full moons; One on each side, One real, the other reflected and looking Just as real; I have no idea at all which is which.

97

WINGTEKLUM

Going to a Funeral

Betty's mother died this week and I ;lm all solemn and dignified in my rep tie and dark pin stripe suit I had custom made in Hong Kong two months ago. And as I edge out of our condominium's driveway I recall all of my father's cautions: do not give too much kzi see, never smile, only shake hands with the men of the family. You are not going to a party, he said.

All of a sudden, as I begin to accelerate on Prospect Street I spy Greg in short pants, on my left, walking on the sidewalk. And without thinking, I lean out the window and with my right hand show him an Easy, Brah! sign with my thumb and little finger thrust out. I grin when he sees me and drive on by, and then remember where I am going and how I am suppo~ to behave feeling embarrassed at what I just did -and yet also wondering why I used my right hand, and not my left.

©1982 by Wing Tek Lum. Printed by permission of the author.

98

MARLA HAMABATA

OhWow

"Japanese guys too slow, man," Fran said, " take' em months for hold your hand. Haole guys go straight for french kiss first chance they get."

"What dat, french kiss?" Gail asked. · "Oh wow, you dunno? They stick their tongue in your mouth." "Eeeeeee!" Gail made a face. "What you mean, eeee? No make ugly face. Wait till you try 'em." "Fran, you mean you let Tim do dat, stick his tongue in your mouth?" "Of course, and I dig it." Fran smiled. "Oh wow," was all Gail could say. She lay back in her bunk and pulled a blanket up over her. Oh wow, she

thought to herself. She wasn't sure if she could dig it like Fran, but she was willing to take her word for it. Mter all, Fran was one of the few freshman girls going steady, and with an upperclassman at that-Tim was a junior. She was also the only Japanese girl in the wftole school even dating a haole boy.

But then Fran was " hapa," half Japanese and half haole. She looked more Japanese, though. She had long black hair and brown hapa·kine eyes that didn't need scotch tape to make them look beautiful. Most of Gail's classmates-the local Japanese girls-used scotch tape on their eyelids to double them over. "Double eyes" they called it. The scotch tape made their eyes look larger and rounder, not so slant, more like the haole girls in the glamour magazines.

Like Gail, Fran was also born and raised on Maui. That made her local to Gail, more Japanese than haole. Even though they weren't from the same school or town, they were both Maui girls, and this made them friends. Besides, they were roommates at their new school, Honolulu Pacific Academy, one of the few boarding schools in Hawaii.

All of Gail's classes were required: Freshman English, Algebra, German, History of Western Civilization, and Bible Studies. She didn't have to take Speech, though. She had passed the tests. As soon as freshmen arrived at HPA they had to go through a series of interviews. Half the students were from the outer islands, and it would be the first time they'd talk to so many haoles.

Gail was scared the day of her tests. She had moved into the dorms the same day, and everything made her scared and nervous. Fran had already

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passed her tests and they waited outside the classroom for Gail's turn with the teacher.

"Eh, no be scared," Fran said. "Easy for pass. Just put on your good English, smile, and 'speak well.' "

Easy for you, Fran, Gail thought. She said, "You mean, 'Talk Good,' eh." They laughed and poked each other in the ribs. But Gail still felt scared.

She thought it was easy for Fran because she was hapa, her Morn was haole, so of course she could pass easily. Your Morn always talk good English at horne, not like my house, she thought.

Gail tried to remember what her sister had taught her the summer before. Carol had graduated from HPA and was horne from her mainland college. All summer long Carol coached her in English and corrected her pidgin constantly. At the time, Carol drove Gail nuts and she hated it, but now she tried to remember.

"Not bed-droorn! You sound like one rnotocycle,'' Carol said. "It's bedroom."

"Not tree! It's three." "Not did-dent! It's didn't." "Eh, fuck-it , CaroH" Gail finally said. "You sound like one dumb haole." "Watch your rnout, girl! You sound like one dumb local. You like take

Speech? You like be like your cousin Bobby? When the teacher asked him where he live, he said, 'by the reevah.' When he said 'reevah' instead of 'river,' he knew he nevah pass. And he got stuck in Speech class until senior year. And if you no pass Speech, you no graduate. And Bobby nevah graduate.''

" I know,'' Gail said. "Yeah, you know everything." Carol continued, "You know how shame

Aunty folks was.' ' "Yeah, I know, I know.'' "You know Bobby stay one hippie}apaney in Kona now, living in one

broken down shack on Grandma's empty lot. Growing coffee beans, he says. Coffee beans, my eye! He growingpaka/olo! Now no can mention his name in front of Aunty, burnbai she cry, then Uncle get all mad and start yelling at Aunty-'What you cry for that good for nothing son of yours for, spend all that money for send him good school and for what, no even graduate, too smart for learn to talk, too smart for work, too smart for be in business like me. ' Uncle keep going on and on forevah like that, especially when he drink, even at parties, make Aunty cry, make everybody shame. You like be like that, make everybody shame? You better learn for 'speak well' girl.' '

"Okay, okay, enough already .. .'' "River." "Bedroom." "Three." "Didn't,' ' Gail said out loud. "Didn't what?" Fran asked.

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"Oh, nevah mind," Gail said. "Time for go take my tests. See you la-ter." She went in smiling, leaving Fran pointing thumbs up behind her.

She passed, classes started, and boys became her favorite subject. She was hot on boys. She did well in all her classes though she was bored by them, but somehow boys seemed much more difficult. Gail looked around the room. It was a sunny, well-kept classroom. Fifteen freshmen sat in neat rows facing Rev. Harris and not listening. All the boys sat on one side of the

· room and all the girls on the other. Gail surveyed the block of boys, pretending she was looking at the cat walking outside the window. All the boys were Japanese, except for one Filipino and two haoles, Dwayne and Mark, twin brothers. They weren't identical. Dwayne was a red head, fat and freckled; Mark was dark haired, a brunette, like the models in the hair color commercials. He was skinny and had a big nose. They weren't any more attractive than the rest of the boys, except that Mark was a star basketball player. And they didn't seem to act any differently either. But Gail knew the twins were from the mainland, and they were definitely haole, so maybe they were fast.

She noticed one of the local boys looking at her; it was Clayton Shintani, a Molokai boy. She turned quickly and looked out the window again. The cat was sneaking around the corner of the next building.

At Maui Intermediate School, Gail had been voted Miss Most Likely to Succeed. She was president of this, chairm.m nf that, star of her drama class, winner of the school spelling bee, but with boys she was a failure. "I'm too fat and too smart for Maui guys," she told herself. She was glad to leave the nothing social life. So that summer she not only corrected her pidgin but also her figure. From a ten and a half sub-teen dress size, she slipped easily into a junior petite size seven by September. She even learned how to use eye shadow and mascara to dazzle the HP A boys. She was going to go to a private school where the boys would be cuter and smarter and crazy to take out a beautiful, intelligent girl like Gail Kawamura.

Shit, she thought, looking back at the boys in the classroom. Look at those turkeys, they don't look any cuter, smarter, orfaster than the guys at Maui High-Japanese, Filipino, or haole. I wonder which one of' em is gonna ask me to dance tonight.

That evening, Gail borrowed Fran's long muumuu for the Frosh Dance. The muumuu was backless and had a plunging neckline. She looked at herself in the mirror and smiled. Not bad, she thought, pretty daring for a Maui girl. She applied a last touch of lip gloss, licking her lips and looking again in the mirror. Fran was putting on a backless dress, too. She wasn't wearing any underwear.

Since living with Fran, Gail was less embarassed about her own body. Fran, unlike all the locaiJapanesegirls, was completely unashamed of hers. She'd walk naked down the hall from her shower like she was walking down a high diving board, full of grace and confidence. When she had her period, you could see her tampon string between her thighs. She was quite a

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sight then, bath towel wrapped around her long washed hair, her beautiful straight, soft back, round athletic ass, and tampon string swinging to her confident step. The sight of Fran walking down the hall like that made some girls step back quickly into their rooms or stare at their feet while she passed them. Some girls would glare at her in disgust. When Gail caught sight of her it made her smile and think what a neat roommate she had. .

When Tim saw the two of them at the dorm entrance, he lifted his eyebrows, shook his shaggy blond hair, and let out a "wow!" Gail blushed and bristled at the same time. But she relished his 'wow.' Tim wore expensive jeans tight enough to show off his nice ass and long muscular legs, a cream-colored golf shirt that hugged his arms and chest and fell loosely to his waist, and of course, a pair of worn-out rubber slippers. Gail watched him take Fran's hand and start across the campus. Fran yelled, "Be good, girl!" Gail yelled back, "You too," as they turned the comer ofthe building.

Gail waited for the rest of the girls, then walked with them across the campus towards the boys' dorm social hall where the dance was being held. She liked the excited talk about clothes and boys. Every girl's love life was speculation at this point, and they all teased each other happily. She felt like "wow" tonight.

They laughed and talked until they neared the entrance of the social hall, then they shut up and walked in quietly. Inside it was dark. There was crepe paper everywhere and Christmas lights along the walls. A shaky, mirrored ball hanging from the ceiling weakly reflected the colored lights. Clumps of girls and clumps of boys avoided the empty space in the mt·~ ~a•~em the room meant for dancing. A band from another high school played

Everyone tried to eye each other in the dark. Gail couldn't figure out was who beyond her dump of girls, so she sat on the floor. The music and she watched the gradual movement of boys and girls from their .... u ... l" ....

A boy or two would leave their clump, go over to a girl clump, and ask for dance. They'd dance, then quickly return to their original clump. noticed a boy walking towards her. It was Mark, one of the haole twins. tapped her on the shoulder.

"Would you like to dance?" "Sure," she said, suddenly feeling unsure. Mark asked her to dance several times that night, and both of

clumps began to notice and talk. Clayton Shintani, the Molokai boy, her to dance several times, too.

"You like dance?" he asked. She nodded shyly and followed him out to the dance floor. He danced

away from her, barely looking at her, unlike Mark who danced very and looked at her all the time. Gail wouldn't look at either of them.

Back and forth like that she danced. Gail's clump was squirming speculation by the end of the night.

"Gail, Clayton like you, eh?"

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"Not," Gail said, shaking her head. "Eh Gail, Mark like you, eh?" "Nah, nah." "Eh, Gail, you like Mark, eh?" "Nah." On and on all night long. Mter much prodding from his clump, Clayton

finally asked Gail if he could walk her back to the dorm. They walked parallel to each other, three feet apart, and said good night from the same distance.

"Well, what happened?" Fran asked, as Gail came into the room. "I danced with Mark and Clayton, and then Clayton walked me back.

Big deal, he nevah even hold my hand. What did you and Tim do?" "Well," Fran paused, a slow grin coming over her face. "Well what," Gail said, "quit teasing." "He finger fucked me." "What!" "He finger fucked me. He stuck his finger up my ching ching and taught

me how to jerk him off at the same time. Talk about one big boto!" "Where'd you do it?" "At the park, in the clump of trees behind the bathroom. Man, you

wouldn't believe how many guys were out there. We got high with some of 'em before we did our own thing."

"Got high?" "Yeah, you know, smoke dope. Tim got plenty pakalolo." "Oh." "You wanna get high with us sometime?" "Maybe, we better go sleep, it's getting late." Gail didn't have a chance to be with Fran the next day. She and Tim

were together every chance they got, and Gail saw them disappearing into the park at every break between classes. Gail didn't eat all day.

That evening after dinner, in the dining hall shared by both the boys and girls, Mark asked Gail if he could walk her up to the dorm. This was the traditional beginning of coupling at HPA. Boys met their girlfriends after dinner and walked them up to ·the girls' dorm.

Mark took her hand and led her toward the trees just below the dorm. Her hand felt sweaty and numb. They had fifteen minutes before check-in. Mark chose a spot further away from the other couples and they sat down.

"So ... how's basketball Mark?" "We're still in pre-season practice." "Urn ... where are you from?" "L.A." "L.A. ... oh, really .. . what part?" "L.A." "Oh." "Why don't you lie down here, Gail."

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"Urn . . . urn," Gail muttered. She reclined underthepressureofhis on her shoulder. "Uh, what kind of classes do you have?" Gail asked. jolted up, quickly grabbing a piece of grass to chew on to keep his away from hers.

"English, Algebra, Bible ... "he answered. He looked at his watch, stood up, and brushed off his clothes. " Looks like it's time to go in," he told her. The other couples appeared and began walking to the dorm. Mark helped Gail up, then put his arm around her like the other couples. They were the only freshmen, but they tried to act like the older students. When they were almost at the door, Gail turned to say good night. Mark pulled her towards him and pressed his lips against hers, his eyes closed, her eyes open. She felt his tongue pushing between her lips against her teeth, and she could see the other couples walking by them to the door and taking a quick look. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth and let his tongue in, pretending bliss for the two seconds it was in her mouth before she pulled away. She didn't dig it.

Gail rushed into the dorm. A senior girl who had just left her boyfriend smiled knowingly at her. Gail smiled back and ran up to her room. She wanted to tell Fran what had happened, but she wasn't there. She hadn't come in for check -in after dinner; the dorm heads were looking for her. Gail fell asleep waiting. In the middle of the night, she woke to squeakina springs from the top bunk where Fran slept. Quickly she got out of her bunk and stood up, dazed. She saw Fran and Tim fucking. She was about to scream when something silenced her.

Once when she was small, she had felt the same horror at seeing cats mating and had run back to the house yelling for her sister to help her stop them: "Carol! Carol! They eating each other! They going die!" Smiling and turning away without looking at her, Carol had said, "Nah, they just mating." Gail had gone back into the house feeling ashamed and trying not to hear the cat cries.

Gail took her blanket and went to the dorm TV room. She turned on the set, turned off the sound, and lay down on the couch with the blanket wrapped around her. There was an old movie on. " Oh wow," she mumbled, and she laughed at the love scenes until she fell asleep.

104

WILLIAM D. STEINHOFF

Prove It To Me

PFC Bob Browner opened and closed his mouth with slight gasping sounds. Gritty sweat soaked his jungle fatigues and irritated his eyes. He blinked rapidly. His infantry company was spread out over several hundred yards of the scrub covered Ke Sanh valley, waiting for the command to move out. In the distance, hazy reddish-brown mountains shimmered in the sweltering heat of Vietnamese August. Everything was covered with red dust.

A re-supply helicopter roared overhead, but Browner barely heard it. He no longer saw the mountains or the tired movements of the men around him. Browner had escaped to the back seat of the Reverend Hansen's '65 Buick Roadmaster, where he was making love with the Reverend's blonde daughter, Deborah Anne. His gasps were a blend of the 110 degree heat and the memory of Deborah's warm, passionate body. Her soft voice murmuring "Oh, Bob! Oh, Bob!" had drowned out the noise of the chopper. His whispered reply of "Oh, yeah!" synchronized with the movements of his parched mouth.

Browner wanted desperately to drink his last canteen of water, but he fought off the urge because the company might not be resupplied until just before dark. His mind focused on a big, golden pitcher of cold San Miguel beer. The foam overflowed a bit down the side of the pitcher and onto the red-lacquered fingernails of the naked Chinese girl carrying it. His image of the scene expanded. Naked women were swirling around the room carrying pitchers of cold beer. He was naked. They were laughing. He was laughing. He heard the sound of the soldier beside him having an attack of diarrhea and the image disappeared. His stomach churned as the stench wafted by.

Browner wiped the sweat off his forehead, smearing the back of his hand with a paste of red dust. His tall frame was slightly hunched over by the combined weight of his pack, rifle, flak vest, and two snake-like belts of machine-gun ammunition. He had never been so tired in all his nineteen years, not even after putting up hay all day at home. His mind drifted to the· first time he had made love to Deborah Anne, when he was fifteen. They had been playing around in the barn, throwing hay at each other and play-wrestling. He was covered with sweat and she sneezed from the dust asthey made love in the hot barn loft. Below them, the cows wandered into the barn seeking shelter from the sun and added their smells to the heat and

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hay. Browner shifted the weight of his pack and reflected dully that even dumb animals had enough sense to find shade when it was too hot.

Browner had discovered that sexual memories and fantasies helped him forget the miseries of Vietnam. The more he wandered t)le Vietnamese countryside, the more elaborate and intense his fantasies became. Now they were like his own private stock of horne movies that he could run whenever he wanted. Lately he had begun to exercise a director's' control, beginning a new fantasy with a mental command and editing the scene in his mind.

Today he was running "Taipei Rand R." He counted out one hundred and fifty dollars into the hand of a Chinese man with gold teeth. They shook hands. "Okay, Mr. Charlie Chan. Five days with everything paid-the booze, the broads, the chow, the bed." The man grinned his gold-toothed smile and nodded vigorously. The scene cut to an air-conditioned bedroom. He lay on clean, white sheets looking up at a green lizard on the ornately painted ceiling. He heard a knock over the buzz of the air conditioner. Three teenaged girls entered the room, nude and giggling. They lined up in front« him and the tallest asked, "Which one you want?"

He sprang up and danced around them, singing a refrain. "Which one does he want? Which one do I want? Which one will do the job?" Mter three circles around the girls, he raised his arms as if to quiet them. "After

• considerable thought and consultation with my lawyer, my minister, and the Ladies' Aid Society-for this is a decision that requires lengthy deliberation-! choose you all!"

The girls laughed, leaning their naked bodies against one another. "No can do. Your heart too weak," giggled the smallest.

"Plenty trouble MP's if you die," added the tall one. He raised his arms for silence again. "I will take full responsibility for

my physical and moral well-being. This is a matter of such heavy horniness that it is equivalent to leveling the Rocky Mountains. So, my black-haired beauties, let us not delay, for I only have five days before I return to Hell." He swept up all three of them and they fell onto the cool, clean bed, laughing.

Browner felt a growing erection and rubbed it through the wetness« his fatigues. He heard the command to move out. Reluctantly forcing himself out of the fantasy, he flexed his shoulders to settle his pack and took three steps forward in the dusty brush.

Just as the erection began to soften, an explosion lifted him upward. He felt a tremendous shock and a tearing pain just above his knees. He landed on liis pack, screaming "Medic! Medic!" He looked down toward his legs and saw blood squirting up like miniature fountains.

Lieutenant Johnson and Lichstein, the medic, ran up. Lieutenant Johnson was his platoon leader. He had only been in Vietnam for two weeks. He looked down at Browner and his pale blond head jerked violently as he softly recited, "Hail Mary, full of .... " Suddenly he turned his head away and splattered the red dust with vomit. Wiping his mouth, he turned to

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Lichstein. "Looks like he tripped a one-five-five round. Lichstein, take care of him first. I'll see if anybody else got hit."

The peace symbol hanging on a chain around Lichstein's neck swung back and forth as he looked down at Browner. He knelt down, taking off his helmet to reveal a shock of curly black hair made limp by sweat. Browner looked at the helmet that Lichstein had set on the ground beside him. "Fuck Vietnam" was written across the front in crude black letters.

With his long, bony fingers Lichstein immediately began to tie off the severed arteries. His flat New York accent was calm and reassuring. "You'll be okay, Browner. Just hang in there with me."

Browner rolled his head in the red dust. It stuck to his face as if he had applied some heavy, thick cosmetic. "Oh, God, my legs," he moaned. "I'm fucked. They're gone, aren't they?" He closed his eyes and suddenly imagined himself clutching frantically at a woman's long, smooth legs like a pathetic midget. He begged her to let him make love to her. The woman laughed incredulously. "But that's impossible. There's nothing there."

"Oh my God!" he moaned. "I'd rather be dead." Lichstein talked to him in a calm voice as he c;ontinued to work on the

arteries and apply pressure packs. "Do you want to live, Browner? Because if you do, make up your mind now. Your legs are gone. If you want to live, you can live. But if you don't, the shock will kill you."

Browner began to cry. "Nothing there, there's nothing there. Oh God, my balls are gone."

He heard Lichstein's flat nasal voice again. "No sweat, man, your balls are hanging tough." He opened his eyes. Lichstein looked up for an instant and smiled at him, setting the peace symbol in motion on its chain.

"You ain't shitting me, are you?" Browner asked. When he talked he could feel the mask of caked dirt on his face and the warm lines where his tears had softened it.

' 'I'm not shitting you, Browner. But you gotta make up your mind now. Anybody who wants to live will make it to the evac hospital. Those who don't, die in the chopper."

Browner stared blankly at the blue sky. He saw Deborah Anne standing naked in her small upstairs bedroom, rubbing lotion over her firm body. She smiled provocatively at him.

"Hell, yes, I want to live! Your goddam mother-fucking ass I want to live!" Wincing with pain, he chanted, "I want to live! I want to live!" His hands opened and closed rhythmically in the red dust.

Lichstein looked at him and smiled. "That's my man. You just hang in there. Dust Off is on the way. I'm going to give you a shot of morphine. You'll be a little goofy for a while, but you're gonna make it."

"Thanks man, thanks. I'm gonna live. I've got to live. I was going to Taipei on Rand R. Clean sheets. Easy humpin'."

Lichstein glanced up. "I hear Dust Off coming now. You '11 be in surgery in fifteen minutes. In a few days you '11 be stateside. You just hang in there,

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Browner Now we got to cover you up to keep out the dust." Browner shut his eyes tightly as the wind from the helicopter blades

swirled red dust over him. He couldn't feel the pain in his legs anymore, but he dimly realized that they were carrying him toward the helicopter in a makeshift stretcher. His hand brushed against Lichstein, who ran alongside him holding up the LV. plasma bag. He had the curious sensation of being one of the stretcher bearers. Spence was on the stretcher, screaming that his balls were gone. A mortar round had castrated him.

Browner felt the helicopter lift off the ground, swaying. He was rubbing Deborah Anne's leg. "Spence! Oh, my God!" Spence had shot himself at the evac hospital. He felt a surge of fear. What if Lichstein had lied to him? The last sound he heard was the engine roaring as it flew in a straight line to the hospital.

Browner woke up in a dark room. His body felt washed and cool against the soft, clean sheets. He thought he heard an air conditioner and muffled voices.

"Oh God! Oh Baby!" "Uh, uh, uh." Taipei! The Promised Land! Browner turned his head on the pillow and

closed his eyes, waiting for the girls to knock on the door. His legs felt numb, as if he were in a dream.

He heard a man groan deeply, very close to him. Farther away, from the other direction, he heard a short shriek of pain. Drowsily, he wondered if he were in a hospital. For an instant he thought perhaps he was in Taipei having a bad dream. He started to turn over, and the I.V. taped to his arm brought back the memory of the explosion. He felt himself clutching at a woman's legs again, holding on as if his life depended on it. He heard a soft voice murmuring, "Oh Baby. Oh Baby." The legs were Deborah Anne's and he was rubbing them slowly, working his way up between her thighs.

"Oh Baby." "Uh, uh, uh. Easy there, gal." A male voice jarred him out of his fantasy.

The sharp smell of antiseptic assaulted him, and he realized that he was in the evacuation hospital. Awkwardly, he raised himself up a little with his hands and turned toward the sounds. They came from behind a cloth partition near the end of the ward.

Browner tried to call out, but his mouth was dry at first. Mter a few tries he got out a raspy, "Nurse! Nurse! Medic! Somebody!"

The voices stopped. He watched the dim, pulsating light of flares outside the screened upper half of the hospital's walls. Outgoing artillery fire thundered dully in the distance. He tried again.

"Somebody come! I need help. Nurse! Anybody." He heard rustling, then low voices. Footsteps. He blinked as a nurse

shined a flashlight into his eyes and asked softly, "What's wrong? Are you in pain? What can I do?"

Browner couldn't really make out the nurse's features behind the glare

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of the flashlight, but he liked the sound of her voice. She bent over his bed and touched his face. "What's wrong, are you in pain? I can give you a shot if you need it."

"I want some too." She drew her hand back. "You want what?" She had frizzy red hair that needed combing. He read the name tag

riding on the curve of her breast. "Carter. Hey, L.T. Carter, I want some too."

She frowned. "What are you talking about?" "Somebody's fucking, and I want some too," Browner insisted. Carter straightened up, still shining the light on him. She laughed

gently and said in a tone of mock denial, "You don't know what you're talking about."

Browner felt very silly and free, as if whatever came into his mind was the absolute truth. "Like hell I don't! I want' some too."

The man in the next bed stirred in his sleep and suddenly let out a long groan of pain. Carter put her hand gently across Browner's mouth. It smelled of antiseptic. "Now be quiet and stop talking dirty. I'll get you a shot."

"Dirty my ass," he persisted. "I've got to know if my gun's okay. I can live with the rest, but not that. I've got to know."

Carter reached under the sheet. "Can you feel that?" Browner felt her hand in his crotch and quivered. "Oh yeah." Carter removed her hand. "See, there's nothing wrong in that depart­

ment," she said briskly. "You may have a slight problem chasing women, but you're a good-looking guy, so they'll chase you instead." She switched off the flashlight and turned to leave.

Browner raised his hand as if to stop her. "Hey, how about proving it?" Carter turned the flashlight back on. "Now be quiet and go to sleep. You

need to rest so your body can fight off infection. I'll get you something to help you sleep."

Browner's voice tensed and he tried unsuccessfully to raise himself up. "Sleep my ass. I need to know. Prove it to me!"

Carter suppressed a laugh. "Okay, okay. If I prove it to you , will you go to sleep?"

Browner suddenly felt very light and mellow. 'I'll go to hell on roller skates for you. Just prove it!"

She switched the flashlight off and told him to wait a minute. He watched the outline of her small, round hips as she walked away in the darkness. He was afraid to reach down and touch himself. His hands opened and closed against the smooth cotton sheet. He listened to the steady whir of the hospital's electrical generator and the occasional groans and shrieks of the wounded. Then she was back. He could see the outline of her right arm, bent at the elbow, but he couldn't tell if she were holding a hypodermic.

"I don't want a shot," he began.

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Carter did not turn the flashlight back on. She slipped her hand under the sheet. "Now be still," she whispered. "I shouldn't do this .. . " She shook her frizzy red hair. "You're so weak."

Browner felt her fingernails brush his thigh. Something cool and slippery touched his penis. Her fingers moved around and he felt her hand sliding up and down on his penis, opening and closing in a pulsing pressure. He closed his eyes. He thought he smelled the leather of the back seat ti Reverend Hansen's Buick. "Oh Deborah Anne. Oh Baby," he murmured. He opened his eyes and saw Nurse Carter's pale freckled face smiling at him.

"Who was screwing?" he asked. "Me," she whispered. "I do it with the MP's who guard the VC

wounded." Carter shrugged her shoulders. "You have to do something to keep your sanity in this place."

Browner chuckled wryly. "I could have been an MP. But I chose fame and glory in the infantry."

Carter bent down and brushed against his ear. "Look, if you begin to feel weak, let me know. You've been through enough."

Browner let his head sink back into the pillow. "Don't worry about me. I took a full shot from a one-five-five. I can survive anything. Is it okay?"

"Is it what?" "Is it hard, like anyone else's? Is it the same?" Carter laughed a soft, earthy laugh. "Yes, it's the same as anyone else's.

You haven't lost that." Browner felt his body relax. His eyes closed and he fell asleep dreaming

of Deborah Anne's smooth, naked body. She had frizzy red hair and smelled of antiseptic.

110

MATIAS MONTES-HUIDOBRO

from Exiles into Fire No sabemos exactamente . ..

We don't know exactly at what point in our travels we began to experience those peculiar changes. Amanda always said that it all started when we left our home without taking our belongings. The government had strict regulations and no one could take more than three changes of clothing. At first it was a difficult decision to make because we were going to have to content ourselves with these few possessions for quite some time in a foreign land. The decision had to be made with utmost care, and since there was little else for us to do until the government might deign to grant us an exit permit (which sometimes took years), we spent long hours looking over our wardrobe trying to decide what to take. We would have to leave many things behind.

Really, we gave little importance to all this. v ur home was a modest one and the government would not inherit a great fortune from it. Consequently, more than the material value of our loss, it was the sentimental value that truly caused us special grief. There were two things that we hated to leave behind: Amanda's wedding gown and my typewriter.

When we married we resolved neve~ to part with that brida P gown. Many young couples, particularly of the middle class, either rent a ' ·edding gown or sell their own right after the ceremony. We were determint.d not to do either; we attributed a spiritual value to that gown. Unfortunately, we couldn't foresee the political changes and so it also had to be left behind. The typewriter, of course, had far less sentimental value, but since it was intellectually tied to my ambition of being a writer this separation was also quite painful.

In spite of everything, we made a last-ditch effort to salvage these two especially significant things from strange hands. We sent them to a town in the western province where my mother lived so that she might keep them for us. Someone, however, discovered and reported the arrival of suspicious­looking baggage, and they were confiscated. My mother requested their return, and after awhile a suitcase, without the gown, was returned to her. The typewriter was not. Even at this very moment it is probably still functioning in some obscure little comer, banging out consignments or, who knows, perhaps some distressing denouncements. I doubt that it has lived up to its literary expectations. As for the wedding gown, we don't know what became of it. Sometimes we speculate that it must have been

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severely altered, although we doubt that it was ever used again at any other wedding.

Everything else that we left behind had far less importance for us. Amanda complained for a time about losing the bedroom set (in which she had intended to die, according to our best traditions) and deluded herself by locking the doors of the dresser and taking the keys with her, thus making it necessary for those who might get hold of it to force the lock. No doubt they did. The keys, which we still have somewhere, have wandered about enough, possibly with as little use as we have. The fate of the bedroom set has ceased to concern us, and knowing that neither Amanda nor I will die in that bed gives us a special peace of mind. We hoped that such losses would not have any special siginificance in our lives. But this would only be seen later on.

Although the decision regarding the three changes of clothing seemed of little importance, it did cause us some concern. It occurred to me that the type of clothing we would take with us would determine the place we would live. If we decided on winter clothing we would probably go toward the north where we would have the opportunity to wear them; whereas if we took only summer clothing we would have to stay in the south, a warm climate similar to ours and generally preferred by emigrants.

Amanda, irritated by such an absurd idea, insisted that I had gone completely insane. She said that you do not settle in an area because of the clothes you have; rather, the area determines how you dress. Whether we would take one type of clothing or another would not affect our final decision to go to the north or to the south. Besides, we could acquire suitable cold-weather clothing if we decided iri. favor of our tropical wardrobe.

I disagreed, arguing that since we wouldn't have any money (we were unable to take a single penny out of the country) it was going to be impossible to buy anything. Amanda refuted this. We could earn money by working, she said. It was obvious that her explanations were logical, but nevertheless I couldn't help feeling uneasy. I thought that the least we could do was to take along some kind of sweater. But eventually I got to thinking that maybe Amanda was right after all.

In any event, all this seemed a trifling matter. What difference did a mere change of clothing make when it was life itself which was at stake? Besides, even those who stayed behind would have to endure sacrifices (as has been proven with the passing of time), and they would have to content themselves with what was left behind by those who had gone. According to Amanda this was not particularly consoling. Those people would have considerable advantage, acquiring things that they would never have been able to afford were it not for the exodus. I told her that it was impossible for humble peasants (from Bejucal, for example) even to begin to feel at home in an ancient residence of people of good standing. The upheaval would cause misery and unhappiness. Amanda again ridiculed me, saying that I was right about the upheaval but not the unhappiness. The upheaval was going

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to be something of an monstrosity, an anachronism, but our peasants would finally come to believe that they had inherited the earth.

These conversations took hours on end. In those days they still didn't put people who were trying to escape the country into forced labor camps. We had to do something to pass the time or else we would have gone stark raving mad in the midst of such desperation and tedium. The whole business began to make my head spin, and had it not been for the unfortunate loss of my typewriter it's possible that I might have written a novel. This indicated, I thought, how a simple little circumstance (the absence of a typewriter) could deny me a niche in the hall of fame. How was it possible for Amanda to be so certain that we would migrate north if we were only taking a light summer wardrobe? But in general everything seemed natural, as if it were part of the historical process in which we found ourselves living.

The fact of the matter was that those three changes of clothing which we took with us were not of much use. In the first place, they were not sufficient, and they were totally out of style. This latter fact was a minor detail (like everything else) but from the outset it isolated us in a special, contradictory way. At the same time that it intergrated us with the group, it also uprooted us from all other values. We became part of the group, but we no longer had anything in common with the cream of the crop, which was more significant. Basically, we were excluded. This identification with the group (to be specific, the group of recent arrivals who were in worse circumstances) was fundamentally negative, because there was a growing awareness among the exiles that all were not equal. Our obsolete way of dressing made us appear a little odd, as if we had landed from an alien planet.

It's only fair to say that we weren't the only ones. There were many in the same boat. The ones like us felt particularly good when they saw us dressed the same way they were. They thought we were like them when they saw Amanda's faded cotton print dress, ironed and reironed, and the equally faded blue shirt that I always wore and which at times seemed an integral part of me.

This intimacy with my shirt aroused in me an ever-increasing pleasure in filth that I had not previously experienced. I had always been moderately well groomed, without ever reaching the extremes of exaggerated neatness or of disagreeable filthiness. I took care of my personal hygiene properly, albeit without enthusiasm. I bathed daily (except on an occasional wintry day when I might decide to skip it). I brushed my teeth when I got up and after each meal, I used a deodorant, and I changed clothing regularly, especially underwear and socks. These latter items reeked with an especially disagreeable odor if I did not change them on time. My relatives on my mother's side, motivated by an exaggerated feeling of nationalism,

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used to say that the stench was an Hispanic trait. Consequently, the blame fell on my father's shoulders. This tendency didn't particularly bother me, but it did cause others understandable inconvenience. Amanda, who was the epitome of fastidiousness, was very conscious of such an organic deficiency and always had the appropriate medical tales on hand. Although I had been slightly careless about my dressing habits, after our marriage Amanda became so determined to modify this distressing trait in my character that the improvement in my appearance gave birth to some undeserved words of praise from our most refined friends.

My shoes, however, never benefited from this favorable influence. Only rarely did I approach a shoeshine boy. It was completely out of the question for me to go and sit in one of those ostentatious armchairs (a kind of grotesque throne inside a dirty tropical arcade) where the bootblack performed his rituals and where our most typical citizens gloried in the lustre of their shines. The cult for lustrous, shiny leather or the delicate filigree designs of two· tone shoes (which I never wore) was never my cup of tea. On rare occasions, curbing my spirit and forced by the pressures of my environment, I would timidly decide to seek the services of some humble little black shoeshine boy from those who abounded in Central Park. Accepting the functional modesty of his wandering shinebox, I would prepare myself for the ultimate sacrifice and console myself by thinking that I was committing an act of public service.

* * *

One of Amanda's greatest crises prior to our exile took place when, fearing the lack of toilet soap was an inevitable certainty and its rationing imminent, she began to hide bars of soap in the opaque ceiling fixtures in our living and dining rooms. The obsession (very similar to Ray Milland's in The Last Weekend, a title that I'm not quite sure of) led to no less traumatic and tragic catastrophes, especially the night we discovered that the bars of soap caused pantomime reflections to dance around on the flat ceiling. For reasons of both public and private sanitation, our departure from our native land had become an urgent necessity.

This brings us (thank God) once again to our exile. I have already stated that our clothing created a bond of understanding and familiarity with those who lived under the same conditions (the minority within the minority) and produced a no less rapid rejection among those who, having cast aside their faded garments, acquired others more in line with prevailing styles. The effects were multiple. On the one hand we were socially acceptable among the less fortunate ones, although we were in no way respected by them. In our hearts, each one of us aspired to break the barriers of the group to which he belonged so that he could get to rub elbows with those who had succeeded in advancing their station. We feigned disdain for them, but at the same time there was never any doubt that we

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would have preferred to be in their places. I make these affirmations myself, because it would be discourtesy, vanity, and petulance to exclude myself. Undoubtedly it would also be unethical.

* * * Both Amanda and I felt uncomfortable in the midst of an environment in

which the rancor of the emigrants increased day by day and in which vanity was a close second to the mania for cleanliness. The best thing, we decided, would be to leave, to stay the shortest time possible. We had started our pilgrimage and we didn't want to stop. Maybe our uprooting would lead to a constant pilgramage, a search for lost baggage, changes of residence. But I began to think that it would be better to make our home in the happy company of the airports and the obsequious smiles of the stewardesses.

* * * Once again there arose the unpleasant problem of our clothes. I had

always been afraid of it. Comments began immediately. Everyone had an opinion to give and no solution to offer. "I wanted to leave, but I didn't have anything to wear," said some, content with that simple justification. "If you don't take a good overcoat and a whole winter outfit, you'll wind up catching pneumonia," said others with a logic that seemed more realistic. "It's absolute madness! Where do you expect to settle? You'll never get there, many have died enroute," said those with the most fantastic mentalities. "The cold is brutal. Can't you understand that it's like living in Siberia? Many have come back. They're the lucky ones, because those who haven' t have died from pneumonia in hospitals and are rotting away in frozen cemetaries." This was from the most tragic and metaphoric ones. All the opinions were macabre. "It's strange," said a little old man, who sat each morning enjoying the sun in the Park of Doves. "Here in exile many people have become paralyzed. This includes some who have crossed the sea in boats, defying coast guard patrols and truly risking their lives. They left everything behind. They made a tremendous decision, but now they're afraid to move away."

Amanda agreed that this was the worst of all-paralysis. If it was terrible to die of pneumonia in one of those impersonal, gloomy brick hospitals under the gray immensity of a sunless sky where no relatives could keep us company, then it was even worse to remain in a little cubby hole of a slum in the south, completely forgotten by all, listening to the incessant sounds of rats through the holes in the walls and waiting for your heart to become completely paralyzed. Delayed letters, unpaid bills, the stench penetrating walls and windows would finally cause some pitiful soul to call the police. They would fulfill the demands of an efficient society by throwing us into a common grave of some southern cemetary. In any event, I insisted that we didn't have the necessary clothing. Getting it was the first

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step we had to take if we wanted to start our trip. Truthfully, it wasn't that difficult to make our departure. The alarming

stories underlined the beginnings of paralysis-the paralysis to which some had succumbed. One older man, a professional with something of a reputation, told us: "Really, I'm afraid of trips, and only the terrible events happening in our country forced me to come so far. For me these ninety miles are almost the end of the world. Travel terrifies me-especially by sea-because these days there's no guarantee we'll get to our destination. I don 't believe in the existence of a world beyond. I'm sure that the news in the papers is an invention to make us think that the world is big and to force us to go far from where we are. What guarantee do we have that beyond the horizon there isn't a vast abyss where ships sink? Or that the land ends in a precipice wrapped in flames that will devour us?"

"But some people do return and they never mention anything like that," I suggested.

"I don't trust any of them! They are agents. I will not move from here!" Amanda and I looked at each other in amazement, not because of what

the man was telling us but just because he was saying it. It was essential that we persist in our plans. The paperwork was relatively simple, and the government (which had an office to help the refugees) was in favor of relocation. They paid for our trip, and they supplied the necessary wardrobe which would help us conquer winter.

As we expected, the clothes they gave us were not in the latest style. A Protestant agency took care of supply~ng clothing to the refugees, and a kindly woman, somewhat impersonal, took care of us. She looked as if she also got her clothing there. She wore a straight gray dress with long sleeves and a belt sewn on at the waist that concealed the outline of her hips like the covering on an ironing board.

There was an abundance of clothing, but it was difficult to find anything that was even moderately acceptable. It seemed that the clothing was deliberately selected to look bad on every body. The overcoats were of good quality, solid wool, dark-colored, but they showed evidence of the passage of time. We felt as if we were in the days of the Charleston. While trying them on Amanda seemed to lose her strength. A great weakness took hold of her, slowly but surely. Courageously, she was determined to depart-and die of pneumonia if necessary, but not of paralysis, which was something Amanda saw as notably different. But she felt herself bending under the weight of those woolen overcoats, which in the foul atmosphere of the warehouse produced a kind of asphyxia.

The woman, somewhat upset because we couldn't make up our minds, hinted at how nicely this or that overcoat looked on us. "Just like they were custom made," she said, so frequently and so irrationally that we began to think that she was being sarcastic. This was not so. She simply wanted to put an end to the matter and go home. She knew that try as we might we would wind up looking the same no matter what we selected. After all, the clothing agency had been created to this end.

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Another couple our age, an attractive, elegant young woman and a skinny, ungraceful man, were looking at themselves in the mirror. They had tried on worn-out rabbit skin coats that fit extremely poorly. Nonethe­less they selected them and smiled at us from the mirror as if they had made the wisest possible choice. Perhaps this was why we finally made our own decision (we had to do it sooner or later), although I'm afraid that we picked the worst of the lot. Amanda chose a shapeless black overcoat that was too big for her and so long it almost reached her ankles. "At least," she said to console herself, "it will protect me from the cold." I picked one that must have been first rate in its prime, although such memories seemed prehistoric. A cockroach had eaten away the cuff of o,ne sleeve, and the collar, once a pretentious and grotesque velvet, now had bare oval spaces.

When we returned to our impoverished quarters we hung up our overcoats in a closet that we never used, with the intention of not looking at them again until the very moment of our departure. Immediately Amanda became depressed. She began telling me that it would be better to stay where we were and wait for sorm! political change that would permit us to return to our country. The only argument she failed to use was the theory of oceanic abyss ... or devouring sea serpents.

But I knew that Amanda was saying all this because of the coat. She had a real sense of elegance that I lacked, and although I wasn't at all convinced myself, I told her that we shouldn't let ourselves get upset by the first disappointment.

"What do you call our first disappointment?" she asked me, although she knew perfectly well what I had in mind.

"The overcoat." "You mean the overcoats," corrected Amanda. "That's what it 's really

all about." When she faced the situation she understood that it was ridiculous.

Were we going to let ourselves be manipulated by a couple of overcoats? Were we going to let those overcoats determine the course our lives would take? Whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing? Amanda was carrying on in such an exaggerated fashion because she was trying to convince herself; according to her we had to be strong and overcome adversity. Hadn't we left behind really important things? Possibly she was thinking of the bridal gown or of the bedroom set-much more intimate than a strange hospital bed.

I didn't say anything. Actually, Amanda had been the one who had put the problem in such a negative light. We ought to confront the issue, she said, and she went to the closet and brought out the coats. She returned with the two hangers in her hands. Her appearance made a terrible impression on me, as if she had two black wings. Fortunately there were no mirrors in the room; otherwise Amanda would have fainted dead away.

She then insisted that we try on the coats: we had to get used to seeing ourselves with them on. I tried to avoid doing so, but she insisted. The room was locked tight and the atmosphere was heavy. Amanda put on her coat

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and I mine. Suddenly she was looking right through me. "Move, move," she said. "Don't stand there in the doorway. You'll

freeze." I turned around. I felt she wasn't talking to me, but evidently she was. Then she added, in what I felt was a vulgar tone: "We have to get hot."

She went on as if someone had said something to her: "And how should I know? I'm going to make a cup of coffee."

She went to the small stove concealed in a corner of the room that I, naturally, had never noticed. She turned on the faucet of the sink next to it and filled a small pan with water. After lighting the range with a rnatch she turned to face me.

Needless to say, all this was happening on an imaginary plane, because our miserable room was arranged entirely differently. However, when she turned to face me the situation changed completely. She looked as though she feared I would take out a dagger and stab her to death. Did she see me as a stranger whom she'd met in the park and foolishly invited to her room? But this thought was completely out of the question.

I had not taken off my overcoat; I was still wearing it despite the asphyxiating atmosphere of the room. She was sure that the man she was staring at had a dagger hidden in his coat pocket. Actually, my hand was paralyzed in the pocket of my coat; I didn't know what I wasgoingtodowith it-weren't the rapes and stabbings of women the daily bread of the newspapers? All this happened in an instant. I knew that I might do something drastic, but I didn't. Amanda looked at me, terrified, and I couldn't get myself to move or speak to her, to calm or assure her that it was me. My own name reverberated hollowly in my head. Then, unable to contain herself, she hurled herself at me, grabbed my arm and ripped it out of my coat pocket to make sure that I didn't have a dagger in my hand. She was at the point of collapsing to the floor.

As fast as I could I took off the overcoat and threw it on an armchair and dragged her onto the bed. She was extremely pale, her pallor accentuated by the black overcoat. Her eyes were glassy, her face contorted, her mouth contracted, as if all her life had passed before her in a single moment. With much effort I took off her coat. Slowly she regained consciousness and opened her eyes. She seemed to be returning from afar but couldn't remember from where. She smiled at me-could it be that she finally recognized me?-then said that she was very drowsy and wanted to sleep. She fell asleep immediately, tranquilly, restfully, but profoundly.

I kept thinking about the incident, and despite what had happened I told myself that it was necessary to rise above my apprehensions; that is, above the overcoats. I would like to make it clear, since I'm afraid that the reader's attention may have been diverted to a completely erroneous point, that this was not one of those instances somewhere between the realms of realism and fantasy in which some articles of clothing are victims of a curse which is inflicted upon whoever might wear them. Surely something very strange

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had taken place, although perhaps not as strange as some of the other things that were happening to us. At that point I realized that the faded cotton shirt, Amanda's print dress, the overcoats-they all amounted to the same thing. If we stayed where we were, we would end up paralyzed; the real danger of the overcoats was our own fear, our cowardice in refusing to face up to the situation before us.

However, this logic weakened when I looked at the overcoats. I was alone before them. One of them lay on the armchair, the other on the floor. I ought to touch them, pick them up, put them away. No, I told myself, they wouldn't come to life. Gathering courgae, I picked them up, put them on their respective hangers, and hung them in the closet. Fully dressed, I threw myself down upon the bed and fell fast asleep.

The next morning I made the decision: buy the tickets, keep the few possessions we had, put on the overcoats, and get away from there as quickly as possible. And that's what we did. We left to make our reservations and returned to pack our baggage. After everything was ready, the moment came-we had to face the overcoats head on.

Amanda seemed to have forgotten what had happened last night. I didn't remind her of it, but it was necessary to keep something similar from happening again. I took Amanda by the hand and tuld her that we must be brave because we were going to undertal< " rt lon · journey. No matter what happened, we had to be closer now than ever be1-. . .::. My manner of speaking seemed strange to Amanda-a didactic, discursive tone I didn't often use. She told me she couldn't understand why I was telling her all this; I should know better than anyone that her love for me surmounted all possible dangers. That was true, I said, but it was equally t rur that there were also unfathomable dangers threatening us. "What dangers?" she asked I didn't know quite what to say. The only answer that occurred to me v. ts "the overcoats."

"Don't be ridiculous," was her immediate reaction . "No, I'm not being ridiculous," I said. "Something very strange

happened last night involving the overcoats, and I don't want it to happen again."

"I don't believe you," Amanda said. "You're saying it to frighten me." "No, on the contrary. Look, if we're conscious of the danger we'll be

able to conquer it. Last night, after you put on your coat, you started shout­ing and then you fainted dead away. Obviously we're afraid of the over­coats."

"Don't be silly," she said. She went to the closet door and began to open it.

"No!" I said. "Don't open it yet." It was like a mystery movie, one of those mediocre ones where a closet

door is opened and out falls a corpse. Or a comedy where the same thing happens. But I took it seriously.

"I want to be completely certain that the overcoats aren't dangerous," I

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said, "that we're not going to be afraid of them. You know that they're not really ours. I mean, they used to belong to other people."

"You're not going to tell me that they have a curse on them," Amanda said.

"I don't know. They simply don't fit us well. We look very bad with them on."

"So what does that have to do with it?" "It must have something to do with it. But how much we can't really

tell. If you and I stand against them together they won't be able to do a thing to us. But we can't be too certain, because that would be our downfall."

Amanda regarded me thoughtfully, as if she understocxl at least some of my reasoning. There was something absurd on the surface, but at the core there was something extremely logical. She also knew that there was truth in what I said, albeit confused, but a truth after all. "You're right," she said, "but I know that we'll have to open the door sooner or later."

Actually, we were standing motionless in front of the closet door. I opened it slowly, cautiously, as if expecting that a wild beast would jump out. But nothing happened. There they were, the overcoats in quiet slumber.

"Let's touch them without being afraid," I said, and I extended my hand toward them. I said it in a loud voice-to ward off the shadow of an ill omen, like when you walk through a lonely field in the middle of the night and whistle so as not to feel so alone. I thought that verbalizing my fear would help me conquer the danger.

Although Amanda concealed a similar fear, she assumed an entirely different attitude. "It looks like they don't bite," she said.

I took out her overcoat with some foreboding and held it out to her. "Feel it, but don't.put it on. It's too hot. We'd be uncomfortable wearing them." The excuse seemed logical. Amanda took the coat and moved her hand over it, as if petting a savage beast to pacify it and avoid being severely scratched by its claw. I couldn't resist making the comparison.

"It's pure wool," she said. She caressed the satin lining, searching for a pleasant intimacy.

"I guess you'll never feel cold in it," I said. "Now let's see yours." Amanda grabbed it fearlessly-at least she didn't look afraid. She handed it tome.

"Take it, don't be afraid." She feigned a smile. "I'm sure this one doesn't bite either."

It was heavy and in worse condition than hers, although in its prime it must have been a better one. Together we verified that it really didn't bite.

-translated by Edith and Milton Kuttner

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CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTES

MARVIN BELL's newest book of poems, These Green-Going-to Yellow, was published by Atheneum in November. Old Snow just Melting: Essays and Interviews will be published by Michigan in the summer of 1982, and William Stafford and Marvin Bell: A Correspondence in Poetry will be published in the fall of 1982 by David R. Godine. Last fall , he was Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii.

WANDA COLEMAN, a native of Los Angeles, is a mother/ worker/ writer/ poet. She has published poems in Partisan Review, Look Quick, the Los Angeles Times, Obsidian, Gasolin-23 (Germany) and others. Her chapbook of poems, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, and book of poems, Mad Dog Black Lady, appear via Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, California.

EDWARD FALCO lives in New York. He writes both poetry and fiction, and is a part-time instructor at Syracuse University.

FOROOGH FARROKHZAAD was, at her untimely death at age 37, the leading Iranian poet of this century; with the present suppresion of poetry in Iran, her stature-though challenged by the clergy-has not been overshadowed by any other.

PAUL GENEGA's work has appeared in such publications as North America11 Review, Akros Review, K(lnsas Quarterly, and New York Quarterly. He is presently teaching at Pace University in New York.

MARLA HAMABATA is an art student at the University of Hawaii. She is working in ceramics and glass.

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON has published two collections of poems, Omphak's Wheel (1966) and The Puzzled Picture (1971). His work has also appeared in many tabloids, quarterlies, and little magazines, most recently in The Cresset, Antigonisll Review, and Poetry Scope.

MICHAEL HIGGINS is a native of Gretna, a suburb of New Orleans. He is presently a psychology graduate student at Louisiana State University where he is also an English instructor.

THOMAS HILGERS is an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is also involved in the production of a weekly talk show, "Island Views," on Hawaii Public Radio.

CINDY S. IKENAGA, a recipient of one of the Myrle Clark Creative Writing Awards for the year 1977-78, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in May 1979. She is currently a third-year graduate student in psychology. "Feelings on Faye" is her first publication.

DAVID JAMES received his M.A. in Creative Writing from Central Michigan University. Presently, he is an administrator for Siena Heights College's degree completion program in Southfield, Michigan. Although he has poetry forthcoming in Quarterly West, Kansas Quarterly, Abraxas, and Hiram Poetry Review, "Stealing From My Grandmother" is his first published short story.

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LAURA KALPAKIAN is the author of two novels (Beggars and Choosers and These lAtter Days), assorted short stories, articles and book reviews for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times. She is currently at work on a new book, Fair Augusto: Three Novellas and a Story.

JULIET S. KONO is the mother of two, "Chicken George" and others.

ZDENEK KLUZAK was born in Europe in 1955 and moved to Hawaii when he was thirteen. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Hawaii.

PETER LASALLE is the author of a book of stories, The Graves of Famous Writers (University of Missouri Press). He has new poetry appearing in Akros, Minnesota Review, and South Carolina Review, and he currently teaches creative writipg at the University of Texas at Austin.

JEANNE LOHMANN has published two collections of poetry. A third book, Steadying the lAndscape, will be published in the Spring of 1982. "Shell Beach" was first prize winner at the Napa Valley Poetry Conference in 1981.

DARRELL H.Y. LUM is co-editor of Bamboo Ridge, The Hawaii Writers' Quarterly and works at the University of Hawaii as an academic advisor. He published a collection of work, Sun, short stories and drama in 1980. He is a lousy fisherman, hates yardwork, despises solar salesmen and drinks entirely too much beer.

WING TEK LUM has published what for him is a major poem in the special Hawaii issue of Amerasia journal (Vol. 7, No. 2).

DAVID MARTIN lives in Los Angeles. He is a poet who has also been working on translating contemporary Persian poetry. ·

MICHAEL MCPHERSON is one among few poets of Hawaiian ancestry writing in E·nglish. He completed an M.A. in English at the University of Hawaii in 1976 and founded Xenophobia Press on Maui in 1980. His first collection of poems, Singing With the Owls, is scheduled for publication in 1982 in Honolulu.

BILL MIYASATO is a resident of Honolulu, Hawaii.

MATIAS MONTES-HUIDOBRO is a professor of Spanish in the Department of European Languages at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Exiles into Fire won the best novel award for 1974 from Fondo de Cultura Economica.

VICTORIA NELSON is a writer who taught in the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa from 1969 to 1973. Excerpts from her novel, The Great Barrier Reef, have appeared in Hawai'i Review and Malahat Review. "The Pig That Knew the Trick," from "Four Oahu Tales," was featured in Painted/Read, an artist-writer collaborative show held in Honolulu in 1979.

SUSAN NUNES is a staff writer with the Curriculum Research and Development Group at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her fiction has appeared in the Hawaii Review and Bamboo Ridge, The Hawaii Writers ' Quarterly. She is currently putting together a collection of her Hilo stories.

MICHAEL ONDAA TJE, author of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Norton, 1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (Norton, 1976), is a Canadian writer whose latest

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book is The Long Poem Anthology (Coach House Press of T oronto, 1979). "Monsoon Notebooks" is from a forthcoming work, Running in the Family.

TONY QUAGLIANO teaches in the Department of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. His poems have appeared in The Pushcart Prize: Best of tht Small Presses (Avon,1976) and Poetry Hawaii: A Contemporary Anthology (University Press of Hawaii, 1979). His latest collection is Fierce Meadows, from Petronium Press.

BILL REISNER is a graduate student in English at the University of Hawaii·Manoa.

CINDY SETO was born in 1957 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but has spent most of her life in Hawaii. She is a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, and works as a nurse in Honolulu.

CATHY SONG recently received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. InJanuary, she plans to work privately with the poet Kathleen Spivack. Though originally from Hawaii, she continues to make her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

WILLIAM STAFFORD's newest book of poems, A Glass Face in the Rain, was published by Harper & Row in the fall. Michigan published his book of essays, Writing the Australian Crawl. He lives in Oregon, where he taught for many years at Lewis and Clark College.

JOSEPH STANTON is working on a series of essays on poems about paintings. Poems of his have appeared recently in The Paper, Hapa, Pulpsmith, and Wind.

WILLIAM D . .STEINHOFF is a graduate student in English at the University ~ Hawaii. He is currently working on a collection of stories based on his childhood and on Vietnam, to be called Nightmare Reality. Some of his stories were published in the Fall1979 Hawaii Review.

HARRIET SUSSKIND is a runner, skier, and a professor at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. In 1980 she spent the summer in Hawaii as a fellow ina National Endowment for the Humanities poetry seminar. Her work has appeared in The Connecticut Quarterly, Mid·American Review, Primavera, Beyond Baroqw, Water Mark Press broadsides, and in anthologies. She is also a critic, and has recently completed a novel.

WINI TERADA is a student of English literature and Hawaiian language. In 1980 he was the recipient of a Myrle Clark Award for creative writing. And in 1981, he won the Hemingway Award for excellence in writing. His work has appeared in Bamboo Ridge and Poetry Now.

DEBRA THOMAS has an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. Her poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Ironwood, and Bamboo Ridge.

PATRICE WILSON is a graduate assistant in the English Department at the University of Hawaii. She has studied both at Yale University and the University~ Maryland, where she received her B.A. in 1976. She has published poetry in Nimrod and The Calvert.

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JOHN UNTERECKER was recently awarded a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for work in poetry. The poems in this issue were among those written while he held the fellowship. He is also at work on a book about the New York City Ballet Company.

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- ridge

Bamboo Ridge. The Hawaii Writers' Quarter­ly has featured Hawaii's writers for the past three years reflecting the multi-ethnic diversity of the islands.

Special issues have included: -excerpts from unpublished novels. -excerpts from p lays -a collection of short stories and drama by

Darrell H. Y. Lu m. -a collection of children's poetry,

as well as hundreds of pages of poems and prose about Hawaii and what makes it special.

Poems. fiction, drama, criticism and articles every three months from Hawaii's finest write rs.

Subscriptions, 1 year (4 issues) ........ .. SlO.OO special novels issue (Bamboo Ridge #2) .. S2.00 Sun. short stories and drama by Darrell Lum (Bamboo Ridge #8) ........ ,. $4.00 Special drama issue (Bamboo Ridge # 1 O) ••••••••••••••••••• • •• S2.50 Special children's poetry issue (Bamboo Ridge # 1 2) ...................... S5.00

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.. "I think HAPA is the liveliest, most promising literary journal in Hawaii." LEON .EDEL

" ... what is impressive is the way the writer establishes the fact that the way he or she perceives natural beauty, the way the writer describes an image, the way particular experiences and memories are held more dear than others are all touched, . even shaped by, living in the islands. . . . . HAPA, a seriously important contribution to the literary community ... "

HLAC NEWSLETTER

HAPA, Number 2, is scheduled for publication Aprill, 1982 , and will include: • fiction by Ian MacMillan, Susan Nunes, Robert Onopa,

Marjorie Sinclair and Frank Stewart; • poetry by Nell Altizer, Benjamin Andres, A . A. Attanasio,

Steven Curry, Sheryl Dare, Gene Frumkin, Bob Green, Jim Kraus, Wing Tek Lum, Pat Matsueda, Barbara Noda, Loretta Petrie, Tony Quagliano, Cathy Song, William Stafford, Joseph Stanton, Wini Terada, Debra Thomas, Kent Uchiyama, John Unterecker, Martha Webb and John W. White;

• graphics by Karen Anna, Tonia Baney, Cynthia Conrad, Don Dugal, Anne Miura, Darrell Orwig, Laura Ruby and Donna Stoner; ... and more.

Deadline for submissions to HAPA, Number 3 , is December 31 , 1982.

HAPA, Number 1, is available in Hawaii bookstores and from the publisher, XENOPHOBIA PRESS, at $3 .50 per copy. Subscriptions arc $6.00 for two issues, checks payable to the publisher.

xenophobia press 95 Mission Street

Wailuku, Maui, HI 96793