<<

~©~«E >+~i " ':~UM~'.:4',":--+:@e TBe:,.".tev1-7a

C 0

',.' z>i

4

' 8k

.'"Agf' '"

„,) „"p;44M

P POET RY g + NORTHWEST

VOLUME EIGHTEEN NUMBER FOUR

EDITOR WINTER 1977-78 David Wagoner JANIs LUI.I. T hree Poems...... 3 EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS CAROLE OLES Nelson Bentley, William H. Matchett Four Poems CONRAD HILBERBY Script for a Cold Chris tmas. .. JOHN UNTERECKEB COVER DESIGN Two Poems Allen Auvil 10 VICTOR TRELAwNY What the Land Offers . FRED MURATORI Confessional Poem Coverfrom a photograph of an osprey's nest RONALD WALLACE near the Snoqttatmie River in Washington State. Three Poems 13 CAROLYNE W R IGH T 613 15 CABoL McCoBMMAGH Rough Drafts 16 ALVIN GREENBERG BOARD OF ADvISERS poem beginning with 'b eginning' and ending with 'ending' Leonie Adams, , Robert B. Heilman, MARK ABMAN Stanley Kunitz, J Jackson Mathews, Arnold Stein Writing for Nora 18 RON SLATE Pastorale...... 19 JOHN C. WITTE WI N TER 1977-78 VOL UME XVIII, NUMBER 4 Two Poems 20 Published quarterly by the . Subscriptions and manu­ WILL WELLS scripts should be sent to Poetry Northwest, 4045 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Univer­ Two Poems 21 sity of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105. Not responsible for unsolicited MARJORIE HAWKSWORTH manuscripts; all submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed I Never Clean It. . . . envelope. Subscription rates: U.S., $5.00 per year, single copies $1.50; Canada, $6.00 per year, single copies $1.75. VASSAR MILLER Two Poems © 1978 by the University of Washington SANDRA MCPHERSON Two Poems . 24 Distributed by B. DeBoer, 188 High Street, Nutley, N.J. 07110; and in the West RICHARD GROSSMAN by L-S Distributors, 1161 Post Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94109. Torture MILLER WI L LIAMS Husband...... , . . . . PAUI.A RANKIN P O E T R Y N O R T H W E S T The Man Who Invented Fireworks 28 JOAN LABOMBARD W I N T E R 1 9 7 7 - 7 8 Marbles LINDA ALLARDT Two Poems . 30 RICHARD FROST Two Poems 31 KATHERINE SONIAT In Another Mold 33 CHRISTOPHER HOWELL Three Poems . 34 JACK CRAWFORD>JR. Jaeis Lull Three Poems

Brushing Away Gnats...... 36 SUSAN STEWART Two Poems . 37 THERE ARE FIVE GREAT THEMES DICK HAMBY Two Poems . 39 The question is: are they Nurture, HOLLIS SUMMERS Sin, Reconciliation, Desire and Death: Two Poems . 41 Or are they Innocence, Interdependence, Wandering, SHERRY RIND Enlightenment, and the rhythm of heart and breathP Who's Harley-DavidsonP Or Birth, Ingratitude, Renewal, Mutability and Love, Or none of the aboveP Why the Dead Return . 43 EDWARD HIRSCH A Letter . 45 MARK McCLosKEY TO HERSELF REFLECTED Three Poems . 46 This breath is you if you could face It; the old one-two each time Expresses all, and each time new. Just so you saw yourself escape As vapor on the winter afternoon You turned five. Years later, it was you Returning as rasp and gulp the day They pulled you from the spilled canoe. Your cough Change of Address Kept you alive, and kills you now Notify us promptly when you change your mailing address. You like to say and laugh and smoke Send both the old address and the new — and the ZIP code numbers. One more. This song, this sigh, this arching rate Allow us at least six weeks for processing the change. W on't change;could change, but won' t This breath predicts the next and when Carole Oles Four Poems We take the air we take it as We used to. The one surprise is That there are no surprises; no Cave OLD TEXT Of Self, no secret alveolus where Three things are too wonderful for me; A treasure's locked of air so pure four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, Its whisper would crack glass. The mirror the way of a serpent on a rock, Fogs and clears and keeps still the way of a ship on the high seas, Its fascination. What you will and theway of a man with a maiden. Means nothing in the mirror: what you think or might I' ll tell you. — Proverbs,30:18, 19 Think is never there. Yet this is you The way of a man W hen you canface it;all you do with a maiden That counts here is breathe and shine in the borrowed light. is the way of all three wonders.

DREAM MAN He soars and tuinbles drawing loops in the air He only drives night loads which she flies into Skin won't hold scars and he cinches He gets kicks snapping chains, shaving skulls, smashing cars. pulling her down He wears his electrodes to the pfle of sticks Down to his ass on the ledge. Eats naked babies on buttered glass. It begins.

He smells of excess thought­ He's all muscle. Ozone or sulphur­ How can she resistP He's got an extra mouth on the top of his head She knows that dance. For sucking the sky. Even the rock squirms under it. He hardly sees her. Don't you know this is a job for MoonwomanP If she doesn't fight back she's female. If he don't get what he needs, He has no shadow You' re gonna see some shreds. until he's erect. Just give me an hour with him Then, even the trees applaud. In the cab of his pickup truck Oh brother, Only those on the shore He' ll be licking me all over call the sea Mother. For the salt. The maiden's the ship made to dip and rise with his moods. He's dark-eyed

POETRY NORTHWEST a roaring drunk RESPONSE TO A. J. DALY, a batterer. SPECIALIST IN 'PERMANIZING', Remorseful in the morning. POSTMARKED PROVINCETOWN Rolling the sun off his tongue. Dear Mr. Daly, Thanks for your offer to 'permanize' this clipping about me. THE UNTEACHING But I'm writing to tell you about noon on the beach. A social worker was sent into the 3rd grade class that had witnessed its teacher shot and killed The bodies. From the splayed by her estranged husband. She was sent to assure legs and surrendered feet the class that school is a safe place. — UPI you can tell they' re goners. No blood, but poisonous quiet She talks about the law under the sun's drumming. of averages. How many storms it would take Even the sea's tongue cut out, before lightning struck one of them. no water until the Point, How often they would have to fly. a period on the horizon. As she speaks, they glance at the door he came in by, they trace Over the flats, more bodies. the stain on the hardwood floor. Crabs belly-up, squid with ten useless arms, flies drinking She does not mention the law of opposites, their eyes. And mill-ends: love and hate for example. How they cohabit. the lower jaw of a bluefish Or the law of gravity, demonstrated biting on air, scales dried by the teacher's falling. Or the law of to fingernails, bones too small conservation of matter: that nothing is lost, to extrapolate from. And shells, the teacher lives in another form. whole city blocks of rooms where no one makes love. She talks about sick people, says they need help. Mr. Daly, for a dollar-fifty A girl with braids is yawning­ with your sparkling clear she has slept fitfully — a red-headed boy plastic and special equipment sits rigid, as if he hears her through water. can you protect me forever His study habits will not improve. against moisture, soiling and the wear due to handlingP The children are not stupid. Mr. Daly, at night here As she talks on and on the foghorn persists in its two wornout notes, question they do not relinquish the one priceless and answer. The sea, that reformer, picture of their teacher crumbling before a blackboard spattered with lessons. works its dark industry. Free.

POETRY NORTHWEST A MANIFESTO FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED Conrad Hilberry Don't curse your hands, the tangle of lines SCRIPT FOR A COLD CHRISTMAS there. L ook how in the deepening snow These reds and greens, of course, are all wrong­ your feet make blue fish the blazing log, the star like a sunflower no one can catch. almost toppling the tree. All fall, the colors Don't take personally have been diminishing. L o ok: the beech tree breathes twigs of vapor against the grey sky, the defection of leaves. icicles drop their spindly light in a long beard You can't be abandoned by what you never owned. from eaves to bush to ground. My promises Spring will give back more have cracked and dropped away like old bark. green than you can bear. I am a winter stick, a flagpole clanging a hollow note in the wind. There is nothing Don't rest by the hearth dramatic here, neither jubilation when all you' re worth nor despair, but rather a kind of exile tells you Run! as when in a foreign country you shrink If the fires within into yourself, unable to speak. strangle, not even suns will comfort your bones. Our rituals exaggerate. T h e star You' re not so special. was no Catherine Wheel spinning and hissing The jungle's full of animals over the stable. I t was a star, a point of no dimension, one match flaring across whose guts invert a frozen lake. The shepherds, hearing the angels' when a stronger one parts the camouflage, peers through song, thought it the wheeze of a cold sheep as they climb a tree. it had so thin a sound. They heard but hardly spoke, saving their words like a last handful Don't think you' re different. of grain. And the child — one child, not a creche The world's full of runts, in every park. This one was different, but stutterers like yourself not now, not yet. Now it was a small jug who'd save all they have of flesh with a candle glimmering inside. not to lose it. They lose it. It is almost cold enough. The year is shrinking Leave trails, be separate, toward a small festival, a saturnalia dress warm, travel light. that will fit in the cavity of a tooth. Eat fear to grow muscle, We may gather up our deaths and make even Olympic champs fall. of them a twig fire, hold our hands Store advice to it and sing for the cold seed. in a cool, dry place.

POETRY NORTHWEST A MANIFESTO FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED Coerad Hilberry Don't curse your hands, the tangle of lines SCRIPT FOR A COLD CHRISTMAS there. L o ok how in the deepening snow These reds and greens, of course, are all wrong­ your feet make blue fish the blazing log, the star like a sunflower no one can catch. almost toppling the tree. All fall, the colors have been diminishing. L o ok: the beech tree Don't take personally breathes twigs of vapor against the grey sky, the defection of leaves. icicles drop their spindly light in a long beard You can't be abandoned from eaves to bush to ground. My promises by what you never owned. have cracked and dropped away like old bark. Spring will give back more I am a winter stick, a flagpole clanging green than you can bear. a hollow note in the wind. There is nothing Don't rest by the hearth dramatic here, neither jubilation when all you' re worth nor despair, but rather a kind of exile tells you Run! as when in a foreign country you shrink If the fires within into yourself, unable to speak. strangle, not even suns will comfort your bones. Our rituals exaggerate. The star was no Catherine Wheel spinning and hissing You' re not so special. over the stable. I t was a star, a point The jungle's full of animals of no dimension, one match flaring across whose guts invert a frozen lake. The shepherds, hearing the angels' when a stronger one parts song, thought it the wheeze of a cold sheep the camouflage, peers through it had so thin a sound. They heard but hardly as they climb a tree. spoke, saving their words like a last handful Don't think you' re different. of grain. And the child — one child, not a creche The world's full of runts, in every park. This one was different, but stutterers like yourself not now, not yet. Now it was a small jug who'd save all they have of flesh with a candle glimmering inside. not to lose it. They lose it. It is almost cold enough. The year is shrinking toward a small festival, a saturnalia Leave trails, be separate, that will fit in the cavity of a tooth. dress warm, travel light. We may gather up our deaths and make Eat fear to grow muscle, of them a twig fire, hold our hands even Olympic champs fall. to it and sing for the cold seed. Store advice in a cool, dry place.

POETRY NORTHWEST Two Poems cn Jobe Urtterecker v 0 NOTHING SOFT, NOTHING LOVED 4cd 0 — Cape Breton, Nova Scotia cd .g cn tn V Fat swells coil on a headland I' ve never seen, V cn its seagull-crested tongue of rock and light cd rammed into ocean. We walk to cliff's edge. 0 cd bO 0 If there were a path, it would be a precarious path, cd o cd and I turn to you wanting to say, "Stop. 0 co cd 4J This is an edge. There is no path down." 8 cd ~ cd co bO Far out at sea, the long swells round toward shore, co ocd o '6 Below us, waves flake into salty dust cd and the hard rattle of pebble on stone. 4J 74 0 v cd I have never been to this place. bO bO g cd g I have never talked to you at the edge of this cliff co nor watched these tom rocks feather into air. o bO o 0 v IO o • ~ Cl bO v cd ln 0cd 0 0 cn 0 Q '0 Victor Trelaseny o f4 0 0' .0 ~4' o 0 5v WHAT THE LAND OFFERS rn 0 cd o 0cd bO Ck cd The fence goes on to great length o o 0 0 g Like an answer to a difficult question 0 0 In I In co rn 4J The farms pose. Because of hunger cd 0 K v 0 bO~ We believe the abundant bough only so far. cd But here the wheatfields combine 9 2 0 In 0 >> 0 With what the land offers, rise as with yeast 0 g 0 g co In cd In the fall sun between barns, and become b O v 0 g g cd The immense tables of the world­ 0 0 0 Q Peaceful plentiful !5 8 cn 0 0 co The silos like salt shakers, cn In 0 T he almost circular lazy Susan towns . . . ~O + 0v 0o 0 In E dl o 0 8 0 0 .g So we drive along the empty roadway, 0 0co UQz cd v 4J "0 cd cdo Unaware of the silence CJ I Entering through the lowered windows 2 8 0 0 CQ 0 cd 94 O' cn Like an unseasonable heat

10 POETRY NORTHWEST Tightening our throats. Anything we might say I want you to skirt me widely, as you would a rabid goat or cripple, Would overwhelm us, slam the brakes To the floorboard and send the car skidding and pretend that I don't matter. I want your poems to stand Into the ditch. If at length for everything I think is funny. The fence repeats itself, we listen I want you to look away. As the fine wire of the argument returns again What I do is better left to shadow To the rain-blackened stakes, the premises and grey-green landscapes Every few feet. that would not support the barest life. In the backseat The pears glimmer in their deep crate. Our children sleep in the seat ahead Rortald Wallace Three Poems Of us. As the light dims, we can almost See them through the windshield, ART WORK Reflected in our reflected faces, wrapped In each other's arms, waking My daughter is drawing a picture Up into the world we leave them. of me, comical figure: m y h air a spike of asparagus, my face a round tomato, fat and red, my eyes two curvy worms Fred Muratori tugging at their hole, my mouth. She is bending over this garden, CONFESSIONAL POEM tending it carefully, absorbed in her own small making. The moon is sludge grey, pin-striped I smile, and return to my larger work in places like a patchwork suit. where, later, I find myself My blood is the color of Colby cheese scratching my thick green hair, and each night, after dinner gets cold, squeezing my ripe plump cheeks, I open my veins with a potato peeler. my old eyes squirming away from me, tugging at my blind mouth. Never in my life have I practiced before mirrors. Both parents loved me dearly. SPRING I got A's in school. 5A.M. We are safe My car has fantastic gas mileage. inside our house, sleeping, There's nothing in my dresser drawers when, suddenly, the sun anyone would be afraid to touch. reaches in through the window, grabs us, shakes us awake. I tell you these things The thin sky cracks open because I long for your resentment.

NORTHWEST POETRY to a clatter of birds: Carolyee Wright waxwing, towhee, junco, jay; the plum tree erupts with blossoms; 613 the bloodroot and toothwort, scylla and trout lily fester. Never bring your elbows to this class. Even the tulips open their mouths, There's barely room to duck the dean's eye and the moss uncloses its fist. coming at you like a clammy funhouse hand. Spring. We lie awake listening You wake up at dawn, love nailed high as the sparrows and warblers clatter on your list of intentions, remind yourself at the windows, the wild to hold your blood's calls in abeyance flowers nudge toward the house. till the right bells ring, get to class And down in the basement, on time. This time, we learn how dark and voracious, to manipulate the inside views — words the carpenter ants slowly that have heard of each other, continue their work. ridden up elevators together, I hold my wife closer. never yet been introduced. You try We do not go back to sleep. to remember what comes after how are you. But it's a damp fuse, and the omniscient CONVERSATION WITH THE MAKER OF CLICHES author's prose monotonous as the barroom conquests in the late late shows. Up here above the treetops: You doze; lovers drift side-by-side in your thoughts like leaves on a river. green heads, you say, green hair. Why not green water waving? You peel off superlatives like clothes; A thousand locusts hoveringP Green airP the dream stands up to repeated readings; there's not one adjective to edit out. The branches, now, the bark. You say: You start; it's over. The class falls out like a regiment — the same show of feet, the long arms of dark ioomen, mossy skin. meters winding down in all the faces, Why not the hard scars of barnaclesP Dead husksP Stuck wings moltingP briefcases tight with thoughts too stuffy to admit they' ve met. Left out, like a student from one Now the roots and trunk. You say: of those small, angry countries, you see the long body, crossed thighs, soft toes. Why not a sunken Spanish galleonP your best harangues have dwindled, sunk Dead cicada dreaming toward the sunP to footnotes in some rival text; even old lovers, whose best moans quote yours, keep the credit. A secret zero But now the leaves like fingers open in the poem, combing their starts its slow growth in your heart. green hair, green arms holding my throat. It will look for allies everywhere. They love me; won't let go.

14 POETRY NORTHWEST Carol McCormmach 6 F r om the calendar's stiff hinge the untried days ROUGH D RAFTS at a time pressed for resolution dangle December1975 And while your peremptory arms enclose me The tree of dreams burns too long I am wary in a windy alcove nursed on air by wistful ascetics grey and balding But this is where we meet ourselves ready for the splintered alley in this house We neglect that knowledge in such a season eking frail harvests from our separate crust There is no mantel a sock falls and crops up lost alvin greeeberg

Five o' clock poem beginmng with begmmng A flock of lights and ending with 'ending' blown to stars in the fraying branches beginning on the wrong note's everything: Where your fingers graze you cannot sing your way from there fine nerves sing and scatter to where you wanted: you can't begin sparks in a tilled, implacable landscape again: back where you started simply is Christmas was stillborn no more, even though it flaps in the wind cards mailed late at you like an american flag raised upside the unrevealing ink smeared not by a tear or snow but drizzle down. so beginnings signify distress and It was dusk all day middles fill up quickly with the stuff you' re distressed about — beginnings, mostly — and in the chinked room the lamplight struck like fire from flint endings! let night come even more quickly the hush a bruise and save us from the endings, save us from having to reel the flag back down We wait listening in the sheets the rain pocks mud in this damned wind where even the wrong Or cut our rum with apple juice notes won't carry and the flag's as big as pronounce it wine when we are thirsty a parking lot: just try folding it yourself shadows on the white curtain fabricating snowdrifts ifyou think you can manage an ending.

16 POETRY NORTHWEST Murk Jurmue And you will twist me everywhere to find, at least, WRITING FOR NORA one way to tell how you died the way you would tell it, digressions turning I should be pleasing myself, you know, and twisting till I fall old woman,though I owe as you fell in your fit, myself to you. Through the hospital window Grandmother, ghost, epileptic, edged with ferns, the trucks and birds appear, caught, sick of it. gearing up hill, up air. Should they be includedP They havenot been informed you are here. Roe Slut'e Or that I, waiting with you for your last seizure, can' t PASTORALE stand to listen again as your dictaphone winds through An afternoon that demands the summer of the first: appreciation, plenty the buckets of sweet water, of reasons to take that drive. the sponges stroking and stroking Pulling off the road, you want your wrists and ankles cinched to feel a part of all this. because your prone dancing tore The book says it's meadowlarks too many sheets... Each time I' ve almost on the phone lines, that'sQueen Anne's got it, the plastic lace beside the fence, that's mint. red recording tape ticks off You don'tknow him but a boy and again you accuse me, leans his rusty bicycle thinking me one of the brothers who sent you to fetch on the car and says "Them's red foxfire in the woods, and followed, and watched poll Herefords," and all this time laughing when you fell down. they' ve been staring at the Ford, I can't convince you they are gone. the glint of your belt buckle. Bold as the girl They' re not planning anything, you think you are you twirl not apprehensive, just fixed around in bed, and thrust your knees the way you are fixed on them. in my face, When they go back to the grass pointing to scars as fresh cuts, it's only you and this one to the shine of the loose skin. cow, eyes locked, your bodies dead weight and attracting horseflies, Desperate story-teller, until a red-winged bird flies those words of yours that wore me out between, and the cow lets go sworn on tapes crammed in a box for no reason, and you let will be lost. go to save the day from dread. You know I owe you them.

18 POETRY NORTHWEST Jobe C. Witte Two Poems Doors slammed, cups springing from their saucers. Now the tomatoes. Now POWER FAILURE the sunflowers looking down. Their only child, what with the war In darkness someone returns and thepayments, and then he was gone. his glass to the table with a soft tick. We question the roof. She is dreaming on the dark porch, A huge oak has not toppled water rumbling in the hose. over the wires. We reach out Flowers grow lush our hands at the ends of our arms. grasping her hem and hand — and now the roses, now vegetables sprawled on the soil. Flames appear gliding up the stairs. Her beauty is still inside, Lovers rise and paddle in a summer dress wandering through the air over Pennsylvania. back and forth through the weedy field. The farmer drifts over his fields, in moonlight admiring the pattern: alfalfa, drainage, sweet corn. Now the police are playing their sirens. Will Wells Two Poems Night surges over the buildings, against the picture window with a few stars. TROY, OHIO

The city has vanished. My father built dream The children have shut their eyes. houses on scratch pads, How will we find our way back. piled high on his desk.

Mother hated a mess. MY NEIGHBOR HOSING HER LAW N She must have been Greek. IN THE DARK She burned his secret city.

And now the roses — arcing cool rain He sold shoes that year. into the garden, the dry loam talks almost. It was only a job, Heavy blossoms rock on their stems. but he gave his customer All afternoon bending her rake, white oak leaves catching on her a good fit:enough room dizzy head, she rolled brittle piles into the fire. for the toes, arch support, "a home foreach foot." Where is her husband? From the stoop she can reach the whole lawn, Who is ever that luckyP swishing spray over the grass. I carry him with me. What did their impossible son shout at himP I am my father's house.

20 POETRY NORTHWEST FARMING THE RIVER Vassar. Miller Two Poems

He seeded the slow current A RESIGNATION with stones, and watched his broken face compose itself They sit, attended by a yes from which the world's no falls away time after time, barely unheeded like the dogs that press transparent, dark so soon. It would rain, enough to grow upon my heels day after day. deeper gullies, new stones Although I pass their secret door to bear him down, like sons and feel the shadows of their song, that drifted off, weary I try to enter there no more as once, where I do not belong, of working a family farm. He'd meant to plow straight tracking the carpets everywhere, to Colorado, but always veered staining their sofas with my sweat, my pause, the best part of my prayer, at the property line: drawn makes angels happy I forget to the river, murky-eyed, angry at all of his planting. until at long last I have crept to that same door I could not win by pain or other right except Marjorie Hau ksseorth a tired child's to be taken in.

I NEVER CLEAN IT OBSTINATE The oven is black. Like Adam I amflushed out nude A charcoal potato Though Ihave hidden in the wood: and puffballs of carbon I cannot bless my solitude. from the sweet juice of pies lie at the back of the cave. Like Cain I will not pour out blood Their substance is like the dry As much too cruel, much too crude yet faintly shiny tissue of snakes To my hell of solitude. that emerged from pills ignited on Fourth of July morning Oh Lord, You are a hard man, shrewd when pyromaniacs And cautious, miserly with good: sat on the front porch steps I cannot bless my solitude. at ten o' clock in the morning because they could not wait Yet I believe that if I could, in their burning At its dark root I might find God, until the time of sparklers. Whose other name is solitude.

22 POETRY NORTHWEST Saedra McPbersors Two Poems THE BLUE SKY

Air, light blue, the shot: T O MY MOT H E R light's blue the frozen after Amichai its nut breath, bird songs: sneezing, the deft transmission Night, the blackness of the telephone, its fixtures of a sound you on the hook purple locust pods, for practice. hold down all other voices. hollow root Breathe quick, Mother, I say, Mother why don't you write a buried the goose the story of your life' ? bushel basket, wedge out its wings, — Oh, if everyone did that­ its sounds the tree top soft swats look straight up. Though children are raised from breasts, those halves at tennis balls, Where is the targetP as clean as cereal bowls, whale-like I look. those bowls are modestly put away snorting of bison, Assembling hawks, when not in use, storm puddles a web raised a pear or peach behind time, like the frame of a barn, painted in the center depth of each. its clouding, and people being solitary smoking up, fire lookouts, Mother sat on the beach and out of her knitting bag grew a red sweater. its blowing clean. each reads the sky Sand knitted into the purl, Every day, every day for an alternative. sand for eggs and long distance calls, it's clear, But it is sand such as wore down the teeth of ancestors who ate the river dropping, the blue dried fish. the hill too dry that keeps on falling And she gave it to her granddaughter. for mushrooms, in and around Secretly a moth gave it also to her newest born. dinners the spent shell, meaty with fat the blue One's history should be blank poured into cans, that tumbles to show you didn't use yourself and stolen suet doubling up for selfish ends. drags a nuthatch above the autumn Once you heldyour baby by a palm tree. to the ground. stockpiles. Your hands itched in the humidity. So formal You smile toward the camera, but the truth I don't expect

is you are gazing out to sea.

24 POETRY NORTHWEST Richard Grossmae Two Poems In each movement we uncovered new logic and became wiser. TORTURE With every bite and breath The animals were weeping copiously. the world cleared, gained The plants had stolen their mystery in the sovereign presence and rammed it down far beyond their roots. of the senses. Something. The sky had sucked it up and dissipated it. What was itP asked the shepherd. The element The ocean was rolling it long distances. of sightP The source of lightP What was perceivedP It was no longer theirs. It was the clarity itself we saw, They hated themselves. It was hell. the animals sang. Absolutely free and tame. They were now no more than animals.

What they had was on the outside. Peeked at. It had become part of what wasn't quite. Miller Williams

Once we were each king in a world of meaning. HUSBAND Now the world is king. We are meaningless. She's late. He mixes another drink. The shepherd said, No! You are spotless! He turns on the television and watches Guilt is always blameless. Inconsistency a woman kissing the wrong man. He looks at his watch. He feels close is the edge of the shadow. Where can it go to the cat. W e l l Cat, he says. when light fills every corner of the meadowP He feels foolish. He mixes another drink and stands turning the stem of the glass CLARITY back and forth in his fingers. This also makes him feel foolish. There was nothing there. He looks at his watch. Well Cat, he says. Perception justified by itself. Lights turn into the driveway. He slumps into his chair. He Detail taking over the whole. kicks off hi shoes and spreads Depth risen to the surface, alone. the open newspaper peacefully over his face. Over and over we repeated He hears the tiny grating of the key. the name of God, the animals said. His heart knocks to get out.

POETRY NORTHWEST 27 Paula Raekie Perhaps he knew how some nights these collisions of stars, shells, saxons would still be the only holes T HE MAN W H O INVENTED FIREWO R K S worth congregating for,

Once a man withRoman candles gunpowdering how that is all we would own, his head went out at night that, and the shared, humbling aftermath to find sky's inattention of backdrop. resembling too much the ceiling towards which an invalid strains his dimmed eyes. Or perhaps Joae LaBorebard he simply weighed the various acts by which one is remembered MARBLES and chose combustion, the vocation in which whole moments are strung They are his planets, on short fuses, tattooing air with vermilion, his suns and milky spheres, his red Mars. emerald, flumes of white fire. Their clustered fires seethe in his pocket compelling his mind He may have foreseen us, till he must touch them, count them huddled by one shore ofJekyll Island, over and over for luck; awaiting promised flags, chrysanthemums, riders aggie and cat' s-eye, his brilliant clearies, pinwheeling unbuckable stallions; the prized green shooter and if so, predicted a market where all the leaves of all his summers burn. for charcoal, saltpeter flaring from mouths Ambling onto the playground, of medieval statues, while priests he chalks the ring of a universe. uttered prayers on atonement. Other boys drift over to watch a champion set out He may have sensed that the path to attention marbles like pigmy moons, globes of ice would not change much, and crystal, closed worlds that those with strained eyes with miniature rivers in them, would still be around colored like sky or tigers, vivid as blood. drop-mouthed at the trick of ignition, It is Genghis Khan baiting his surly chieftains of getting shows not only off the ground with hope of treasure, but shot through the sky's epidermis who hunches beside the circled suns, and aims and the skins of each other's eyes, that Pearl of Marbles, which obeys a searing of tissue his eye and cunning thumb to last the whole length so wickedly. of its moment. For who gets enough attentionP

28 POETRY NORTHWEST Linda Allardt Two Poems In the matched cases, a handgun. It's been fired. In this flowered hatbox with the Continental labels a perfume bottle is obviously broken. LATECOMERS In the heavy leather, wool shirts, moths, some excellent hunting boots, the smell To all those who have come too late of male sweat and alcoholic urine. and found the doors closed against them, Others I have hesitated to open. I know, the dance hall doors, the music I ought to have called the Salvation Army stolen by talk and distance, long ago, or piled them at the curb­ the gates to the sea, the subway barriers, my ludicrous responsibility! I keep them the license bureau doors so there can be for whoever it is who takes my name to travel, no marriages tonight, though the hall, large as it is, begins to be no barnraisings, no rooftrees lifted up, narrow to walk in, and nights lately no lot lines run, I' ve begun to dream again — the bell rings, no woodlot walked off, I can't get past the baggage to the door, no garden in the flood plain ploughed, the cabbie swears, can't be made to hear me; no key turned in the ignition, sounds: something heavy — trunksP —cratesP­ no border crossed: piled against the door, the cab driving away, strike up! we will dance where we are, someone's fists pounding on leather, latches snapping. live in the open, become the teachers of their children.

Richard Frost Two Poems BAGGAGE IN A FILM W I NDING BACKWARDS The man at the door says it' s lost luggage coming home by cab I come out of my car with the apologies of the line's agent rump first and heel who hopes that I will travel with them again. to my front door, Travel? I can't remember traveling. which opens to a hand Perhaps a former tenantP but then I' ve lived behind this door for twenty years. I reach back blind. GreyhoundP I hazard, UnitedP My wife unhugs me, I fill my raised glass Union Pacific? GraceP but the man is gone. This has happened before. with juice, fork my eggs I' ve opened a few. out of my mouth, That overnighter by the stairs fit them whole on my plate. All as it was. contains a green chiffon, a color I never wear, a flapper style from the twenties, and snapshots My shirt shaken off, folded, my bath up the nozzle, plainly of the traveler's relatives, I muss my bed, sit on it, inscribed in German.

30 POETRY NORTHWEST slip into the covers Katheriee Soniat and hear the alarm set me to sleep. I N ANOTHER MO L D Day before day I return what I have After too much night-staring, taken in until I am cared for, by constellations and carried off cared for, cared for, by underworld heroes, I began walking and all's put away. lines of wet, warm streets in what was to have been November. HEART I'd come for blessings, an earthly shape to support me in this cloudcover I shift my pillow so I won't hear my heart called lowland heat. knock like the mad boy who burned his room. I would leave secret everything inside The asphalt surface winds, the houses that floats in blood, yet in the dark repeat themselves, but belief breathes I rummage in my guts for bad news. easy on scrubbed doorsteps in the sun, ammonia rising proudly from them every day. Again I cheat him out of his comic books. Front yards are built-in squares of belief, I am up to my chin in his funny books. resting under the calm hands and plaster His starved face, his raw picked nose of a little blue Virgin. pressed against his window, he knocks to get me in there. I drag his comics home in my wagon. Slowly I make my ears deaf to the backyard predicament of an old hunting dog He heaps my foreign stamps, my woodcarving set, longing for a last dream of trees, forgetting my new shirt in tissue in its box when it was, if ever, I thrived on grass fields under his bed and puts a match to them. opening with dark deer and stars. When they pull him out the back door, he kicks the air and screams I have cheated him. Now I am ready to live upfront, settle under my own small flat roof, That afternoon I shove him onto his face paint my bedroom brilliant lavender, and sit on him. "You moron, you stink you' re so dumb," shock myself with locked windows hung I set him straight. I educate him. I take with yards of orange organza. his hair in my hands and teach him to eat grass. I would never be touched by the giant Despite all this, he seems to learn nothing. side of seasons so liable to blow in through screens. My deeds knot in my belly like string saved. My blunt, resourceful bloody ghost beating, Only at noon will I trust myself I want sleep! But through the shades behind the house to take pleasure my windows form, and a beam of dust, clearing trees for a fenced field and cars rattle up and down the street.

POETRY NORTHWEST 33 of plastic poinsettia. Come fall cleared the flightdeck and went down like a goose, sir." Fifty fath­ I' ll clip their wires, stick them oms. Enough oxygen forhalf an hour. at my blue Virgin's feet, pray Locked in the chill black with his prayers, wondering did the never to see clouds spread marker buoy surfaceP Could divers find him so far down, so cold, with blue openings or remember darkP No time to sing into the squawker, Just that rush of shim- r how the dark made me think mered blue, the steely shadow and the jolt as 41,000 tons steamed with big eyes. over the closed seam that had allowed him in, then darkening stripes of aqua through the thick way down. Black scotch broom pods snapped. A '41 Chevy rolled past four years of NROTC, sacrificed summers, haircuts, harassment Christopher Hou ell Three Poems from fellow students; all for thisP Thirty minutes in a slow-filling memory of lightP Water lapped. The whaleboat came back full of exhausted divers; sun scratching the stanchions, the useless day-glo M EMO RIES OF MESS DUTY AND THE W A R life preservers. And Johnson slept, book over his face; the writing of that next-of-kin letter making a wide, slow approach through the Garbage went over the fantail, boiling into blue dead chainof command. white wake. Among shark snouts rising to sample that sweetness, it rode like the raw stuff of hope. We watched. Our aprons dripping. WATER SCULPTURE Who knew what we, six hundred miles from shore, for Patricia White, 1944 to 1968 thoughtP What we were doing there (the abstract crime afloat) kept glittering Wrecked bits of face and speed phosphor-like in the day to day, unnamed. We didn't guess come back; and the bottle of pills. Such small the sea of harm on which we moved. We smoked. food for breathing, Patricia. When the dead files We missed our women in the glo-bake blackness let you loose, I almost catch the poor star of absence of the crew's compartment, hated brass, cursed in my palms. Bill's dead, too. Cancer our uniforms and thought that was enough. Grinning, flooding him like honey or the lost notes of a drum thoughtless, the cargo burned at Asia. Let the garbage sink buried in sand. And Grandpa, whom you delighted, broke then, let sharks sever bone from scrap his heart on the kitchen floor. So unreasonable and keep on following. Still, on the floor, these departures for the cold other shore. our longings and the spilled blood gathered. Here in the high burnt shadow of Horsetooth, far far from the sea, I murmur only a hollow bone of you and bring this nothing-stitched skin DEAR MRS. TERRY of words. Take it . . . ple a se. I know our lives and the carved sea come Johnson said, "yes sir, Mr. Carney, right away, sir, aye aye," to water. Not even grief will wake you in his sleep. The ship droned in the lead hot Gulf into which Cadet from those phenobarbital arms. Maythey love you senseless Pilot Terry shot his plane, the impact of the catapult socking him and forgive us your penny of sleep, forgive you forward, his gear snagging the stick. "I don't knoto, Captain, he that you dove so deep.

34 POETRY NORTHWEST 35 Jack Crau ford, Jr. i can feel your concentration. you there­ sitting before it: the whole thing. BRUSHING AWAY GNATS bringing it all together. the riot, the pleas, the blood. your quotes from the warden. et cetera. and how I just had a bowl of cornflakes with a to find the lead. i feel your head working! banana sliced over it. good. good. and the milk how you shaped your lead, david, cool going down the throat on a hot night. i don't remember. i'm sure it was good. remembering in a pool hall, years ago, full of your dash and intensity. as you dragged it the clicking of the balls. the lampshade nine times round the trojan walls and smashed it over each green table. the leather pockets. shield on shield and left it ringing. those pockets! the soft the pool hall murmurs with voices. the soft commotion of men. their sliding shoes. commotion of men, their sliding shoes. the positions they assumed to make their shots. pronged fingers propped for the pool stick. the cue stick, smooth, thicker at one end, tapering. good to feel, good to slide over the pronged fingers. how they cranked the tip with chalk, as if it were one of the great pleasures. the fingers Sasae Steu art Two Poems grinding it on. as if it would hold the stick steady. as if the ball wouldn't slip. TERROR and the cue ball riding over the green baize, and the click of collision. and harlan — and david. A man has died in the house next door, were you really there, harlanP and did you marry ciaudiaP rain pours through the open window and did you not write for the morning daily and the curtains flap their wet arms how the ball game went that afternoon and how on the bricks. Upstairs a phone rings people sitting in the bleachers had to four times, for you. There is nothing brush away gnatsP what a touch! so prosaic as terror. Even as I write this, when the riot broke at the penitentiary a lamp is turned over. The debutante's hair you, david, got the assignment. what a catches fire. The heroine breaks her teeth whirl! what a going out of the office! what a on the tracks and hopes that the train thing to be doing: covering the great riot! will loosen the ropes. Wars break out going out — all of us watching. in the subways, and if I pick up the phone, and when you returned, dashing in I know no one will answer, nothing so as if you'd stopped the presses. what a voiceless as terror. A child feels thing it was. with that hat you wore, your the hammering of his mother's heart sharp face. those dark, burning eyes. and swears he will never leave the womb and snatching the notes out of your pockets. alive. Snow drifts slowly on the insides dashing off your jacket. snaring it on the windows like the ponderous moaning 'on the back of your chair. taking your seat of widows. The piano refuses to rhyme. before the machine. staring at your papers. Life as we know it runs out of our reach, even as I write this, police fill the streets, 36 POETRY NORTHWEST 37 their horses limp along like battered children. Louise begins to play her violin, the name There is nothing so deliberate as terror, of the song is "The way their white wings" like a wound that doesn't hurt and won' t and the curtains are throwing lace roses stop bleeding, like a coat lined with guns on her shoulders and her shoulders are aching and razors, terror wounds us with its from holding up the song. There is a room silence and blindness, wounds us with the in the house you haven't found yet, where the ceiling calculated violence of lovers. Strangers leans down to rest on the window and brushes are tearing at your books and letters, the hair from the eyes of a woman, who sits there some are slitting your mattress with knives. all day sewing clouds to her apron. Even as I write this, blood soaks the feathers, She will lend you her needle to take out the splinters, and the dead man stands behind you, terrified but when she tells you it's simple, by this poem. His skin is luminous remember what I' ve said. with rain and weeping, and he carries his voice in his arms like a child.

Dick Humby Two Poems THE WAY THE MILKWEED PODS G OING HOME W ITH THE DR O W N E D M A N No, the way a chicken watches his wings lug his heart toward the woodpile and the great There is a moment in the air when the sky red tear swells on his throat, nothing falls away like a rising, blue balloon ever dies simply. Your right hand tom with splinters and you think that what must splash and your left hand freckled with blood, the way will be your life. The cold water you walk so slowly toward the woodpile and fold closes around you and there is nothing the wings into the basin, no, nothing so simply, in the swirl of the sea to hold on to, each foot dragging a world behind the other. no hand or word to say you are not alone. Remember this, the way the milkweed pods So, you begin calmly to move your arms, fly open with a shout, the way their white undulate, flatten your hands like fins wings sail out into the meadow with the sureness and you find it is so easy, swimming, of some immortal animal, sail out this new feeling of being at home, on the stillest, most windless day of summer everything decided, necessary. Soon when the crickets burn up with static you learn to love the taste of brine and and a single hair sticks wetly to your cheek. small fish, the smell of your new mate, There is a little money beneath the carpet, her nudge and bump, the slide of her a little milk still cold in the bucket, thick body against yours, her gentle song. there are two blue letters in the mailbox Rising and falling in waves or sounding deep, that think they are patches of sky. you glide in a wide current where time is This very minute the bread is rising on the table the distance between leaving and returning with the unworried brow of a wise man. to places that are nc.. ".." 'ost The cows are out on the road again and in the parlor in the net of the past.

38 POETRY NORTHWEST 39 RUNNING BACK Hollis Sunsmess Two Poems

It is late afternoon and he PETROGLYPHS Waits for the snap. This will be the last play. The nieces and nephews of lieutenant governors He' ll break up the middle, Compose the roadside signs for tourists: Put on all the moves, be free Historic Marker, Item of Interest, Landmark­ At mid-field, running for the score. They are full of words.

The crowd goes wild. Take Indian rocks; They cheer as he leaps The writers like to say the Indians wrote, Over linemen, speeds When, in fact, they drew, I know Past the Safety, sprints Having drawn at a poem. Into the end-zone, turns Up the runway, leaves Are these marks a form of magicP The stadium behind. The writers ask the sweating travelers. Are these marks religious, ceremonious, Bus drivers, huddled Or are they simply funP Over schooners in the First and Ten, Watch dumbly as he strides by. The answer is yes, He cuts into the street, sidesteps Foolish nieces and nephews. Honking cars, zig-zags by people Who stop to stare. Steaming, Panting, thumping the pavement, THE PENITENT He startles shopkeepers closing up, Lovers pressed against the bricks Yes, his In dead-end alleys. Families, Double breasted Eterna-Wear Saying grace at firelight dinners, Shirt of hair Hesitate, listen to what seems Is The thud of footsteps across their lawns. Lined Out in the fields, it is cold and dark. With violet and vermilion His breath puffs out before him Ribboned Dacron; Like a ghost. The sweet smell of hay The design Hangs in the brittle air. Each step Sinks into the marshy turf; he pushes off, Of orchid Rises, soars past stands of trees. Nylon flosses Lights of towns float by in silence. Embosses The sky is so wide Quid He could be a star falling into it.

40 POETRY NORTHWEST Est He said you could lose your balance leaning wrong; you must go And Quid Pro Quo with it As the inside motto even if, as his did, the bike leans into the pavement and leaves you Of his chest. fifty yards away with your face scraped clean and a hole in your lip you smoke your cigarette through. His face made the girls cry. Guarantees I said, love should be better than that. Notwithstanding, a hair shirt He said, you'd go farther with a Harley. Attracts dirt. Laundries

Demand Arthar Miller Outrageous fees For specialities. Washing by hand WHY THE DEAD RETURN

Is only impossible. I He, loathing poseurs, Boredom. H e aven the white hole Provident, endures is managed by idiots. His gospel. Hell is smaller than they imagined:

Devout, composed of whips and alarm clocks He wears his shirt, a sweater stuck on Monday morning Of fur, like a broken recording. Inside out. II Each Spring they flop out of trees. Playing hooky they gloat, Sherry Rind cruise for another hot time

WHO'S HARLEY-DAVIDSONP among the living: snaking onto supermarket lines I had to slide my fingers down that long silver run of exhaust pipe­ gobbling fast food with French fries and burned them. On my first ride the boy called me a natural. and rejoicing as if they Said I leaned well, rode light. too were ahve. Rituals replace feast days and the last Years later, my lover rode a bike all winter. A foot-rest fell off and I learned to balance with one foot, cling with my knees. I arrived at parties frozen into a bow-legged walk, brushing shreds rites for the dead. They request of his long blond hair from my mouth and eyes. We steamed like the colonel to cater their brief escapes from the casket. horses.

42 POETRY NORTHWEST 43 III Edu urd Hirsch Curiosity. They peer eyes bloated, staggering behind blimp-like bellies. They regard A LETTER

Come home. I don't want to sound frightened, with total recall the hum before that inopportune but this morning when I got back from work I couldn't scrub the grease off my hand; quiet, but the first return

is the detective pruning space it had settled into my skin like a deep film, the veins were black, and the barges between there and here. His nose were blurred on the flayed rivers in my palm. mashed to the pavement detects

The warehouses were empty. The streets were jumbled, the criminal, an odor and the canals tunneled out in all directions carving smoke into footprints none ofthem homeward, though somehow vivid as the dead, vivid they all funneled back into an open basin, as the final smell, foolish a blank sea, like a tree gathering in one that never died. He stalks the villain, sniffing clues its last branches, or a map smudged with dirt. I don't want to sound desperate, but all night and rounding up the usual suspects, but wonders if he overlooked I could hear my feet opening narrow graves in the sawdust, the rats crawling through a maze some obvious aroma.

IV of pipes inside my chest; and I spent So they come, unlike their birth: so many hours stacking crates inside of crates this time they are well prepared inside of crates, like paper cups, so many crates, dragging hindsight to guide them. so many other places. . . . C o m e home. Their umbrellas stuck open This morning when I pressed my hand to the glass expecting prophecies or I saw a black sun buried in sludge visitors from Uranus and a thousand rivers clogged with waste they bring sketch pads, cameras, running into the basin of a single map and cages to capture life, muddied with features, so many features, their first obituary. so many faces, but none of them yours.

44 POETRY NORTHWEST 45 Mrs' McCloskey Three Poems her nightgown around all day sometimes, pushes up her nose and rolls her eyes back. Her farts pop her out of her chair, she laughs IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT like the roof of the jungle at moonrise. Mother calls. My sisters aren't happy. One of them is so heavy she's tipping over This is where she goes: south into diabetes, another is going blind, to the little cheerleader pleats she jumped another is flying home to escape her brats. for the sky in, the Salvation Army to try on hats, my house to play dead, This time she doesn't mention my dead brothers, Oz to come back north like a wedding ring. or the one who stays abroad like a war crime­ only theone who had his head cut open; And this is what she knows: A Munchkin he's drifted into another drunk collision. was her babysitter, Garland blew it, the Witch is in commercials, the future For once I' ve got good news to leave her: churns the flats of sleep up like a twister, I have a girlfriend now who's broken records all her pictures of herself are in the air. where I'm concerned; I'm almost getting younger. But mother says she has to get a scraping, MY DAUGH TER ENTERS HIGH SCHOOL so I report the black she's used to hearing­ Maybe the nuns will like her, but I don't think so. that child support still bites me like a watchdog, They' ll know the Devil comes to her in person and I can't know what my children look like by her frosty lips, her blue eyelids, the streaks if no one sends me pictures, no one writes. his fingers leave in her limp hair, I leave the best news to her; she says the bells about her ankle which drive them crazy. the old housekeeper got drunk at the last shower, They' ll fix her good: her breasts my grown-up lover and she herself and father's big successor thinks outdo her own by a full size, will rendezvous at a swim-meet in the Midwest. they' ll flatten in starch, and drag down her backside Mother waits for me to round her call off in wool pleats, pack her feet in Oxfords. by telling her I'm going to live forever They' ll stick her head in a white hood and teach her in spite of headaches and having no more children. decline and conjugate for Jesus' sake, The false news chokes the bad down like cold peas. knee-in-the-Devil' s-groin, thumb-in-his-eye, give her homework to fall asleep on in her clothes, HER PICTURES while her boyfriend — nine feet tall and growing­ These are the pictures in her room: whines on the ladder against her window. Cary Grant supporting her mother's hand in his, grinning at her engagement ring; This fall it starts. Maybe it's good for her; Ophelia in a storm of posies, her eyes don't take to shadow as it is. lakefronts with nothing on them but ellipses. But damn the nuns — the same who schooled her mother to be the personal secretary of the Lord­ And this is what she does: she wears if they cut short h'er career as an outcast.

46 POETRY NORTHWEST 47 About Our Coetributors J~xs LDLL lives in Brooklyn. CAROLz OLzs was recently poet-in-residence for the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation. CDNBAD HILRRRRYteaches at Kalamazoo College. JDHN UNTRRzcxzR's two most recent books areDance Sequence (Kayak Books) and Stone (University Press of Hawaii). Vxc Toz TRzx,AwNY is a graduate student at the University of Arizona. FRzn MvxvITDBI teaches at Syracuse University. RQNALD WALLAGEteaches at the University of Wisconsin. C~RDLYNz WBIDHT's first book, Stealing the Children, will be published in 1978 by the Asahta Press. She teaches at Syracuse University. CAROLMcCOBMMAGH lives in Seattle. News for Contributors ALvxN GBzzNRRRo's novel, The Invention of the West (Avon/Equinox), ap­ peared in 1976. He teaches at Macalester College. to Poetry Northwest's Donors' Fund MARKJ~xLuu lives in Evansville, Indiana. RON SLATE, editor of Chowder Review, teaches at the University of Wisconsin. PozTBY NOBTHwzsT reminds its readers that it is the recipient of a $1830 JDHN C. WITTz is currently a Fellow at t he Provincetown Fine Arts Work grant from the federally sponsored Coordinating Council of Literary Mag­ Center. azines. Since that amount has been given to us in the form of matching WILL Wzx.x.s is a recent M.A. graduate from Ohio University. funds, every tax deductible contribution in support of Poetry Northwest MARJQRIEHAwzswoRTH teaches creative writing in Santa Barbara. from you, our readers, will be doubled until we reach that figure. The VAssARMILLRB s sixth book, Small Change (Wings Press), appeared in 1976. CCLM rules stipulate that you should say you intend your gift to apply to SANDILI McPxxzzsoN's third book, The Year of Our Birth, will be published by the matching-funds grant. We hope for your help. Ecco Press in the spring of 1978. Rxcaazn GRossxLIN's book on business, Tycoon Boy, was published by Kayak Books. MILLER WILLIAlvls spent last year in Rome as winner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Prix de Rome. His newest book, Why God Permits Evil (LSU Press), appeared in 1977. PAULA RANKIN s first book, By the Wreckmasters Cottage, was published in 1977 by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. Jo~ L+ BDMR~ re c eived the Celiea Wagner Memorial Award and the Con­ suelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1977. LIND> ALLOT teaches at the University of Rochester. RxcxIABD FRosT teaches at Oneonta State College in State. K>THRBINz SDNIAT lives in Metairie, Louisiana. CHBISTOPHRRHowzx.x. has published three books of poems, directs Lynx House Press, and is poet-in-residence at Colorado State University. Jacx CBawzoRD,JR., teaches at SUNY in New Paltz, N.Y. SUsAN STzwABT is a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsyl­ vania. DIGK HAMBYteaches high school in Kent, Washington. Hox.x.xs SDMMRBs teaches at Ohio University. SxxzBBYRIND is a teaching fellow at the University of Washington. ABTIIIIB Mxx.x.za teaches.a workshop at Home Base, an alternative high school in Watertown, Mass. Enw~ H m scu lives in and has published widely. Mazx McCLoszzY teaches at Occidental College.