SPRING 1976 David Wagoner

POET RY g + NORTHWEST VOLUME SEVENTEEN NUMBER QNE EDITOR SPRING 1976 David Wagoner

JOHN S. FLAGG

. . . Six Poems...... EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS GWEN HEAD Nelson Bentley, William H. Matchett Four Poems . JACK BUTLER Two Poems. . . . 12 COVER DESIGN CAROLYN HINCKLEY

Allen Auvil For the Journey . . DAN IVHNOCK Four Poems. . . 14 FREDRICK ZYDEK Cover Pom a photo of Crescent Lake Stoamp near the Monroe T he Death of Plccostomus.. . . . 17 (Washington) Reformatory's Honor Farm. BARBARA L. GREENBERG The She-Magician at thc Cistern . 18 EDWARD I IIRSCH

Unspeakable Things. . . . JOAN WEBBER Prime of Life ...... BOARD OF ADVISERS EDWARD LUEDERS Leonie Adams, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert B. Heilman, Every Year the River Floods — . 21 Stanley Kunitz,Jackson Mathews, Arnold Stein RICHARD DANKLEFF Two Poems . KATHRYN TERRILL Two Poems. . . POETRY NORTHWEST SP RING 1976 VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 1 MARY OLIVER

Published quarterly by the University of Washington. Subscriptions and manu Two Poems . . 26 scripts should be sent to Poetry Northteest, 4045 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Univer PAUL ZIMMER sity of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195. Not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts; all submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed Zimmer's Lament for Lester . 27 envelope. Subscription rate, $4.50 per year; single copies, $1.25. DAVID DAYTON Two Poems . . 28 © 1976 by the University of Washington M ICHAEL MA G E E Five Poems . 31 Distributed by B. DeBoer, 188 High Street, Nutley, N.J. 07110; and in the West by L-S Distributors, 1161 Post Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94109. ADRIANNE MARCUS The Apprentice . JOSEPH DI PRISCO Alienated Poem .. DAVID McELROY For Kevin . 35 P O E T R Y N O R T H W E S T S. J. MARKS SPRIN G 1 9 7 6

Reading Charlie's Poems . . PHYLLIS JANOWITZ

Two Poems...... 37 JIM PARLETT The Death of the Bomber . 40 THOMAS JOHNSON Two Poems 41 HAROLD WITT John S. Flagg Six Poems Two Poems 43 JOHN WOODS Three Poems 45 ENVY OF OTHER ARENAS

The moment digs its spurs into me and I'm off, putting what I' ve got into a credible rampage, trying to buck time off my back, knowing it will climb back on again like a bad habit.

0 how much briefer the blood anger, the blurred hate, the victimization of the murderous, the suicidal charges of my mad brothers

and how much fatter the comparative life of smashing the diminutive, the exquisitely fragile, and incontrovertible presence, unstoppably out of place.

CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1975

In very little wind a minister atones for by a prolonged quote of Emerson unquote (still the only mind audible) flags sag, listless with early spring this time Change of Address last month having served breezier the march of costume, Notify us promptly when you change your mailing address. Send both the old address and the new — and the ZIP code numbers. cliche, and manure from Allow us at least six weeks for processing the change. Da-Glo red rain-slickered mounted cops' horses, all FORMALISTS, YOU ARE over which the football president presides, Yes-men of the letter, instant helicopter old wineskin collectors deposit not unlike teetotalling up, a plot solution lowered squaring accounts from a Greek tragic machine. with the circle, the dropped stone's widening wave Whew, the speech has died animating the still though the foursquare face pool the algae of which still seems pissed from the boos you figure forth. honor invoked to foist threats obscenely veiled (the aluminum fist TO A CAN OF SLICED CARROTS in the vinyl glove being wound up for the groin punch), 0 wonderful bright orange and yellow can got. that puts my eyes out Rapidly he heads of their supermarket trance for a moment the wedge of politicians with your cylindrical still life and protectors of politicians entitled "Sliced Carrots," prophetic stepping down an avenue fiery wheels of orange, coals of crowd to dark machines, for the tongue hearse-havens, limousines that pull out with ruling-class class. 0 honest politic can with your fine ciphers detailing preservatives And now the masquerade tramples and pollutes 0 tactile can that fits my grip with empty musketry with a pleasure like a pistol's! but enough noise to keep the infamous long-gone 0 can I choose over all other cans!! farmers this mimicry is predicated on Somewhere in a remote locale of my head underground, you dreamily sail through the largest pane Their comrades ever to tempt the mind into a supermarket in our distant present and a thousand jagged reflections stick struggle to unyoke your purveyors like backwards assembled porcupines. the remaining earth.

We indistinctly hear the shots and shouts from here.

POETRY NORTHWEST HALEAKALA, IDES the sun's house, where you stand, It's the season of no season: lies up the road through cumulus blinds shut sight of the wind out for the night; not out of mind, a two-hour drive. Eucalyptus, not out of hearing, however a fog ofcloud, then blue. And blue. and the chair under the window where You climb from the car. A high the child stood leaning wind takes your breath. You also into the window, the wind beyond the window, the chair gasp at the pacific pasturing recalls the child there hundreds of clouds you stand where daylight was framed, wind watched but not touched, in the sky looking down on, trees signalling, frantic, feet on the volcano, broken the wind is at your house cracking it, ghost shoulder fever of earth. the east leans into your kitchen, Where you are, Maui wind with a wish to once roped the sun to slow it harvest a house, whisk away window, child for man. (Think of the cane (part of the wind then, parcel smoldering in magmatic fields its errand would be never to deliver ) over which the rock you ride mad wind, witch wind, March wind. is breaking — sugar harvest smoke

detectable for miles, sharp and delicious, but not there Gu en Head Four Poems

in the heaven where you stand. ) THE WO M A N IN THE MIDDLE And down from the rubbish of rock Begin with the heroine standing on a staircase, partly man-piled, look at that other three yards of tapered rose point slung from her shoulders, world, the color of the living mars in mandatory pearls, stephanotis, and baby' s-breath, poised like a white bat. of fiction, its red-ochre cones washed by faded green, cupped Above her silken knees, the satin hem hangs like a blade. It's nineteen twenty-nine. in the palm of the great crater like a gift. In steamer trunks beneath the porte-cochere,

POETRY NORTHWEST the trousseau purchased on her grand tour. AT THE PIANO Patou: a blue brocade with silver lace, its bugle beads like regimented rain. I Embroidered black and white Chinese pajamas Hunchback to wear in the evenings playing dominoes. minotaur Teddies and step-ins; ostrich fans; to read, squared off Tristram and Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady. on black goat feet To flirt with, a long cigarette holder of tight-lipped, eyeless, mute the first green plastic made to look like jade. you are cornered. His gifts; by which we know across the years Now that the groom is poor, but has a good heart. I will fold you back like a quilt. You will grin Twenty-five years later his heart has given out. like a glad foolish hound. Their daughter (a menopausal accident) At my touch is old enough to count him up the stairs. your hollow flank In steel-rimmed glasses, braces on her teeth, will buzz like a great golden hive her busy cranium's wired like a champagne cork. and the stinging swarms rush out One, two, three. . . at ten, another step. singing their unknown language. Her scrawny shoulder blades protrude like wings. II The heroine listens, rises — no, it can't be! The keys rise to my fingers Hose at the knees, flesh at the waist, hair like diving boards at the nape all rolled and tied or netted down, like the pliant stems of flowers and all an anonymous, shabby package color, like necks bared to the axe all with the slack sway and thump of the sleeper berth. like the stairways of crumbling cities Can't be, but is. like masses of candelabra like the pits of ripe fruit. This is her dressing table: desk calendar with six weeks left unturned, They frohc hke mtnnows. rings of spilt powder, piles of unanswered letters, They lie down like mild lambs. and a sealed bottle of Je Reoiens. They arch their necks like zebras. Stabbing the pins into her hair, she goes They snap their beaks like macaws. to thread a needle for her dragon mother. They are ponderous as the elephant delicate as the garter snake What happens in the middleP Mother, tell me! furious as the black swan. I'm in the middle now. Why wasn't there a lover and a train to throw herself under, I rejoice in their many lives. in a last display of her pyrotechnic hairP We are one, well-knit as a barrel stave Or is this the train, this slow freight of years, the perfect, gravity-defying round and the sodden comforts of the hobo jungleP through which the sun leaps.

POETRY NORTHWEST THE LINGUISTIC COMMISSION SLUG REPORTS FROM THE INTERIOR How can he dare to cross me, Unlike our country, where the words this oozing footless tube, are small, succulent and docile lifting his alert pronged head theirs, wiry and mean, in the cuckold's gestureP must be cornered and battered with rocks. Even then they may break loose, snapping and foaming. Long ago his nation Their least bite can fester. cast off the security of shells and now go proudly naked The adverbs are especially menacing. relying for safety They circle the tents at night, on the realpolitik making sleep impossible of sheer slug numbers. though hammocks help a little. Clearly he glories The nouns, nocturnal and clumsy, in each nuance of slug calligraphy, are sluggish by day, hence those sly paths of silver easily ambushed. In that chronicle the progress captivity they breed copiously: of appetite, and answer five hundred variants of "want," the urgent appeals of the rain. a thousand nuances of "hunger," each stringy, foul-tasting. Perhaps he incarnates the slug king of legend Small wonder the natives chew air who lay for seven days and seven nights constantly to numb the pain, besotted in a saucer of beer washing it down with a brew of stinging but did not drown nettles that resembles pulque; and who, by this test or that they cruelly cast out to die won his dappled queen old orations, epigrams, homilies and with her dangled upside down — even the small-beer mutterings on a glittering rope and yelps of love of commingled slime, though they might, with care, have lasted centuries; convulsed and tranquil as a hypnotist's pendulum. or that their most sacred object is a blank piece of paper, Then together they passed their epic poem through the exorcist's circles seventeen hours of silence, of slug bait unharmed their highest virtue panic and will feast forever in the face of hyperbole. on trilliums and tulips

10 POETRY NORTHWEST if I choose to stay my foot. His father's differential gaze almost, almost Undid the final lucid veil: I don' t, but stand a moment musing, So we' ll recall it till the yarn goes stale. Would it have been the blazing focus of that Ghost, their sticky deaths the mucilage holding me earthbound Too terrible to fade or failP by all that is at once Or pools of zero, like the little virtual o's Swirls breed in puddles at noonday, most vulnerable That swarm, and freckle, and seem almost to play, most destructive. False pupils on wrinkled sandP How should we suppose, Who hardly know enough to say

Jack Butler Two Poems How two skeins of meat can connect us to the sunP — Light crawls down sewers to the brain But keeps a cleanliness that none explain. ELECTRICITY He proved nothing, but brought, watery, trembling, one Frail field to almost total gain. Because the floor and air were cold, she waited until the covers warmed her to undress, God bless his son, who shaped no legend for himself, then slipped naked in a rustling lightlessness But made himself useful, and gave except for a blue shimmer that palpitated Plain counsel on the sunken limestone cave, The running wave rumpled on the continental shelf, like an especially hesitant firefly And the wave standing off the wave. over her glimmering skin. A stroked cat's ear, touched in a properly crackling atmosphere, will so illumine its gesture. But why Carolye Hseckley insist on classification of the sparkP What does having a name for it changeP Thinking of it is still wild and sweet and strange. FOR THE JOURNEY She sat there flashing softly in the dark. Night after night we enter blind, stumbling through kind pastures, NOT QUITE LIKE SON wondering at our luck.

Einstein's son is dead, who studied sediment, Grunting just beyond the ferns, God bless his courage. He knew more the monsters lie on every hand, About the way the water met the shore amazing us by turning Or buckled off some derelict impediment into sheepdogs shaped like dragons, Than anyone had known before. or marmosets in winter dress.

12 POETRY NORTHWEST We hardly falter. the full winter sunlight, What rivets us is needing to go on. and the birds and ammals seen in the dr earns of men: What terrifies is wanting to go back. go far, and when they follow, go farther We' ve hardly started. Bless the trail dwindling, the rock that juts up. It won't be light for hours. Come back when red pines grow in the crossroads — Until then, hold this hand I' ve brought along, years and years. pocketsized, blue with use. You can keep it if you want. I have another, somewhere, ORION'S BOYHOOD for emergencies. He wanted to be so still the quail would whistle from his knee. He wanted, when a tree fell and no one was there, Dass Mieock Four Poems to be there (he was sure there would be no noise). He wanted to watch the fallen log inched down through its old leaves. MUHA M M A D SPEAKS TO THE PLANTS AND ANIMALS Later he thought of girls. House sparrows, change your name. He wanted to move his hands slowly on their bodies. Robins, stay in the wintering swamps, A week to tug a blouse loose at the waist, Starlings, go screech on a fallen tree. a month of rubbing a stomach and kissing Beings accepting human arrangements, listen. bones of the throat. Eagle in a stupendous nest, leave your thin-shelled They must not say no, no, don' t eggs. until they had fallen to a place beside Moths, close your eyed wings to electric lights. the pile their clothes must make at night Rabbits low in the weeds, cuffs undone, coiled pleats. break the circle of your fiight. He wanted to believe in that mushroom world Trees, leave, forget your trunks and a way to it without heartbeat thudding his hand. and your still brothers the phone poles. And you, tulips that return like orioles, Once a girl held his fingers on her knee. begonias and ferns waiting for tap water, That was all. Enough. More than he'd hoped for. go out the open door, the amazed gate, The girl could lose her tan, creep out on sore roots, send seeds, go blue-veined back into night: tendrils, your narrowest chance into a hard wind. His hand would be on her, moving. I say this to all of you, not yet human products, Nothing could stop it. to pigeons moving like ratchet toys around an old Not if she sat with sisters. man with white bread, Not if she moved into brightest light. raccoons coming single file into suburbs on four His hand could not be shaken off or hurt off. human hands, Not by fire, knives, salt. ivy leaning on brick, mallards nudging pretzels in

14 POETRY NORTHWEST THE SUN AND THE NORTH WIND A halfback breaks loose, no one can touch him. He slams the ball down in the end zone. The students come bundled up, It skitters away. In the last minute ordered to learn, are sat in circles. the other team wins. Someone else They keep scarves across their mouths slams the same ball down. Again while I temper my ravings it skitters. Jack Benny has died! a little, smile at them like a sun Jack Benny, Jack Benny, come sit on the other side of me. in a child's book. Meet my mother, she's seen you plenty of times. She's glad you didn't know about the end until the end. Most of them sweat their way through the books, the talking, Darkness piles up. I have headaches the long silence after questions from jello, from thinking, from sweet red wine. when the only sound's the cold stutter So many packagesto take back! of chalk on the other side of a wall, An orange-faced man is caught in quicksand. making more questions. "He' ll get out," my mother tells me as she gets up to let me leave. Between slush and drift, unprepared, I meet one again. Her name, the class are gone. We both say "How are youF' Fredrick Zydek Then hurried along by wind, we let the question stand. T HE DEATH OF PLECOSTOM U S

VISITING MOTHER' S For years he lived in the tank, watching the filters darken, These Sundays are stacked like plates, nibbling plastic weeds, performing magic for snails, clap-grass, the brother home from college, the dinner up from childhood. and one porcelain mermaid blossom-deep in grains of sand. But there are things new, things gone. New shelves, a fireplace that rolls. He knew the tank like the Eagle Do I like themP Fine. Fiercely to myself: fine! knows the field, and he could swim with such simple grace that sometimes truth grew a newer name. Mother is not a person only, I once caught him watching me, but a place she knows. Before I' ve done washing, she's wiped away the husband who left her, wooing me back tothe germ of man. and put up a picture of storm-struck trees I gave a single pellet, a garland from Kresge's. In the center of the rug for the skinny victory between us. is a timid orange dog,

16 POETRY NORTHWEST He took it as though to scratch its soul. Later you' ll swear it was nothing, only a sleight-of-hand; For one minute I almost believed only a blizzard of cinders, a blot of cloud. in the last mineral agony The She-Magician will have disappeared. of an all mineral thing. You' ll limp your way toward Pittsburgh, bankrupt and bowed Then, one night he swam too far. under that false umbrella for which you' ve paid in rainbow.s

I found him mute as a sponge, bruised as an invalid plum lying on the cold plastic Eduard Hirsch of the kitchen floor. Had he bumped and gagged through four rooms to find meP UNSPEAKABLE THINGS I knew the sting of fear along his bones "Tell the Angel about our world, not about the unspeakable." Rilke and rushed him back to his fifty-gallon dream of escape. He tried, once, to escape again, then moored You must speak about what you can, himself beneath some plastic kelp. what can be spoken of. And yet the world, In the morning, he was belly up, the mind, too, is unspeakable, nightmares and the one-eyed Swordtail so terrible you can't remember them, had eaten most of his left fin. emotions so dark they' re impossible to locate behind the even darker smokescreen you cover them with, these things cry out to you and 8ar hara L. Greersberg demand to be spoken of.Speak of them. Testify to the unnameable guilt that racks you, the promise you made THE SHE-MAGICIAN AT THE CISTERN that you would never leave a promise unkept, this promise, that someday If you gallop bareback on your expectations you will find her there you would speak about unspeakable things, forging your signature on the dark water. voiceless things, things so nameless She' ll wear a mother's face yours never wore. they had never been named, so invisible Merlin will guide her fingers when she combs your hair. they had never been seen or touched. But you, you would speak about them She' ll pluck your future from your eyes in knotted handkerchiefs; in a grand way they had never been they' ll fly away. spoken of before, reveal them in a way Silk partridges will flood your sky. they had never dreamt of being revealed. You' ll see the wings dissolving and the partridge eyes You would water them like flowers, expanding into painted chemistries. nourish them in your own body Confetti-light will riot on your arched horizons. until your body understood them and became their body, until your voice

18 POETRY NORTHWEST trembled with the sounds of their voice, Joal Webber your tongue clicked as if it was their tongue, and then, when you were both ready, when they were sure you understood them, PRIME OF LIFE and that you were worthy, they would break out of their dark soil into the light. After forty-four years I'm chary of my flesh, And rich enough to conjure with myself. Stern How astonished they would be Wizard of loneliness, I walk to look around them! And how strange Through tawny heartlands of the past, and elated they would feel to be Infinite blue reflections of today. back in the world again, a world of parks and flowers, angels and men, Who would have thought of such kaleidoscopes, a world that had changed so much Such cornucopias of mangoes, plums, cool since they had first known it Pomegranates of the soul, breath that now it was unrecognizable; Of old Ganges' source, where people lived the world they had been away from By inhalation of the breath of fl o wers so long it had almost managed to forget them, they who were always there, Solitude's a long unguarded reach. Seasons speechless and indispensable. How glad Rain down on me and nothing hurts. they would be to be recognized again, Autumn already. So, early or not, to be flattered and finally understood, I won't be cheated of that well of grace. to be treated with the respect due Every day new transparencies, the northwest sky to the darkest inspirations of men. In rapid violent change, and God This was the promise you made Closer, a rush of dark rippling the bone. but could never keep for them; not because you were unwilling Forty-four years and I love my numbing flesh but becausethey defied you, That burns with frost like a tree reaching toward flame. appalled at your unspeakable vanity, Halfway shut of the past, my roots grow bare. they who were as silent and speechless My branches seed the frosty noon, and sigh. as needles, and who never forgave you. You know now that you are not here to reveal, or to testify, or even to praise them, but simply to follow Edu ard LNeders them as far back as you can remember, to pursue them beyond language EVERY YEAR THE RIVER FLOODS into the voiceless terror. And there, in a place darker than all imagining, dissolving away you are called on to witness them. the crumbling clay banks, drowning flat lowland stubblefields, seizing unguarded town and country contraband,

20 POETRY NORTHWEST things growing Walking past the rocks along with things made, where he keeps odd slugs, floating them all away, filling I wave hello-goodbye. the sliding brown current with whatever Sandy scowls, or nods, but saves his talk moves; all goes for the slugs. like severed history, the loose, bobbing artifacts of lives, Tonight he sits in the weeds of liquidated deeds and dreams, floating fragments and watches: birthday children silly with their party of the ten thousand are prancing across the street. things done and things When they go in, Sandy undone, tumbling on the swollen surface leaps, capers stiff-legged or carried unseen, sunken, waterlogged, below onto the lawn and dances. Spinning washing us all wild circles, he dances. downstream with the rolling go of the river, adrift in the heedless surge of rising waters, the seamless flow. TRAILER TO ALASKA

Like the fallen angels endlessly talking in hell Richard Duekleg Two Poems we might debate free will, fixed fate, chance, ifyou were here. And find no end. If we had bought a trailer, say, NEXT DOOR or gone off to Alaska, leaped in the dark, or held each other loosely, or else closer, All morning Sandy or shouted names. . . I f we had made even a few has been digging a hole less foolish choices, we would be unlike at the edge of the garden. we are — two fools no doubt, but other fools. His aunt knows Your face would grin in my wallet, in your brooch he is not retarded my frown would rub small breasts I would not change. she had him tested. We'd cut each other's hair. The bed would fit. Sandy rubs his head and Dear damned fool, you that once held me dear, wedges it back in the hole. if we had taken that trailer to Alaska. . .

Other days he sits still as a stump, so long even the bluejays ignore him. The aunt laments: "He stays so still."

22 POETRY NORTHWEST 23 Kuthryn Terri ll Two Poems 4 I know which wood the fire takes first: white sticks split from fir TO MY DAUGHTER with the cold ardor of your father's ax, then whole logs of hemlock, alder; 1. for this work I wear your father's shirt I still sweep your father's hair from corners. as I spilled his body from the box, Against my face, hair starved on medicine passed my fingers through his shards and sand. and falling loose. I find his brush, a clot of roots. Boots lean crooked I danceyou offto bed, bone-wracked. on the heels, creased where his feet broke the leather. In the dark you look like me — charred eyes, moonface I smell his hair inside the pillow tick whittled down to chalk. I reach to find a light. and see, above the bed, oil halos Mama, isanybody thereP on a floral print — smears of pain. No one but the ghost I build a fire every night. of each old breath. Though these are just the practice In this house sometimes we are afraid. steps, I build a fire every night. 2. Signs everywhere: in the grass dogs crack LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE the rings from steak, last meat in dirty strings; I slip a knife point in a chicken breast I own my own automobile. and pull the slats. Friends tell me I' ve lost weight. My child is blonde, my lawyer admires me: No fat to ease my ribs — I say the pattern I keep my records straight. of my fate grows clear inside my skin. At the gym the ladies think it's wonderful At the crematorium they gave me all your father I can fall back on a career the furnace could not eat: a box of fire-bruised bones. and I' ve never had a problem with my weight.

3. Though my psychiatrist might wish I'd dream A gown of baby fat provides no shelter. more vividly, no nightmares to report. Your blue eyes flinch at sparks, Pain helps us to the deepest things we know guessing already how we take a chance for instance, this stopped being fun sometime ago. every night you ask if we can dance. Partner, our difficult routine requires two: But I' ve cleaned out all the closets, Mama, I can copy you! started radishes on the windowsill; Across the big east window mention needle, I think stitch. I waltz you on my hip until your nightdress blooms with air. I may remarry. Who are we dancing forP Is it the man who phones when I'm asleep and vows, Meantime on the dancefloor couples hug. when he can catch me, what he' ll doP Wind rises and the fir trees drop Is it the boy across the street, or your scraps of fatherP I turn the music low and close the drape.

24 POETRY NORTHWEST seventy years of litter. THE END OF WINTER In spring I hire a man to clear the grass. Last night the ice along the shore Look on the bright side: I' ll take some new lover Rose, in the dark that will never tell how, like a cello propped between my knees. And flew, like a huge ghost-bird, As my accountant says, young widows Back to the fields of the north. make a conversation piece, at least. This morning, as I passed the dry-goods store, Near the front window where the light shines in, The clerk was tumbling open, yard after yard, Nury Olio er Two Poems A bolt of yellow cloth across a brown table. SIX MONTHS AFTER THE PROPHET OF CLARKSVILLE PREDICTED THE END OF THE WORLD Paul Zimmer

Red, blue, yellow the leaves drift down, The birds cruise south, you and I ZIMMER'S LAMENT FOR LESTER Are still in love, and the prophet of Clarksville Sleeps in the asylum. Lester went last week. He could not wipe the sun Sweat popping from his brow, he said Spots from his eyes. We would be gone, be nowhere by now. He staggered out of The world, poured onto a plate, The field into shade, Would be consumed in half an hour But before he could sit By the black mouth of oblivion. Down he was gone.

Now the lake chills at its edges, making The news slammed in Small mysterious windows of ice; clouds Like an axe into oak Race by like dark horses, as we walk And my losses cannot Cheerfully into winter. Be counted. Only moon, The silent, sullen bitch, But the prophet, whom we will not hear of again, Remembers all the things Touches us sometimes with a dry paw, That Lester knew. I think of Crying out in a dream we do not tell, The great stones we stood in the fields, In which all that is sweet and rational Of questions I had meant to ask him: Burns like straw. Woods, ploughland, weather, seeds, The things he kept so easily That I had always craved.

26 POETRY NORTHWEST 27 Now the moonlight loves neither agreeing nor objecting The things he has become. but merely offering up another morsel for thought She takes him as her due: as they smoke and drink beer Woods, ploughland, weather, seeds; in wistful silence. And I am left as Successor of nothing. The nose is an enigma a Chinese butler always there aloof as he is dependable. Who can tell what he secretly desiresP David Dayton Two Poems One can only guess from his passion for arranging flowers T HE LOST BODY OF CHILDHO O D the way he lingers over a cluster of lilac or a sprig of jasmine. What the ears want most Genitals are the royalty of flesh. is to drop off the sides of the head The penis a courtly monarch like ripened fruit and lie on a beach among shells leaps up at the barest thought. echoing music by favorite composers Vagina the queen wears a purple cape with intermissions adorned with a single priceless pearl. silent as a drawn bow. They are suited perfectly to each other. Desire is their magic lamp. The eyes too dream of escape. Each night millions kneel in obeisance. They long to flutter their lashes like butterflies shedding cocoons There is a sixth sense and take off perceived through the others following the seasons across continents existing before them seeing everything like children a presence like air. for the first time, And yet a person who takes off his face When they grew old in the privacy of his own mind they'd retire to a peak in the Himalayas may gasp like an asthmatic terrified. overlooking a valley and a lake envisioned now when they close He will return to his senses bored to tears by the geography of walls. if he returns like the newborn Petit bourgeois every nerve blossoming. the tongue and palate are pretty much content two old partners with steady business. Evenings they sit back of the shop discussing what would be the tastiest meal

28 POETRY NORTHWEST 29 WIND AND STRATEGY Michael Magee Five Poems

All day the trees hunch their backs like people waiting in the rain SONG FOR THE BODY W A KING to catch a bus. Sparrows are only a guess. Wake now, deep among pillows, Your eyes light on the vacant sill from the valleys of sheets, the folds of dreams where you slept; or a quivering branch. from the rivers where you drifted without worry, So you are tired of just looking out: from the seven cliffs of care, and the lakes everywhere the dolor of metal boxes beneath them, among the shallows of water and wind. on telephone poles, a mothball fleet anchored in the sky. Let light pour from the breach, this slab of sky Dozing off, you imagine now opening above your head. Stretch, feeling the Sea of Loneliness on the moon all your length, the whole world or the hands of old women sprawling out before you at your knees, lowering shades at dusk this body where you begin. in Grand View, Kansas. You wake in late afternoon to find the buildings across the way CUL-DE-SAC still locked arm-in-arm, their windows black You may lose directions, not knowing the way, except for one amber light windows begin to darken toward evening, glowing in the den of a retired clerk. shadows take root, a hush falls over the trees. You peer closer Light dwindles, every way you turn is wrong, as he examines a rare stamp streets lose themselves, going blind as alleys. through his quizzing glass: the etching of an unknown city, Forget the breath that brought you here, skyscrapers surrounded by apartment flats, the trail of your pulse, your deepening veins. block after block emerging from the fog Until your feet go dead, you wait here still, like the hulls of ships your brain telling you the road toward sleep, till he locates in the space unable to move, your hands hanging like questions. between two dots his own window, smudged with dust, and through it, as you are seeing now, POSTSCRIPTS the lamp above his desk, the book of stamps, but nowhere, I would yearn for fingers no matter how tightly he squints, himself. to touch other than my own, Though you know it's impossible, a mouth to hide the darkness, when he looks up and stares out the window, eyes that would spell light, you have the feeling your eyes have met. a voice speaking to me

30 POETRY NORTHWEST from behind the mirror Adriaerse 1lfarcus saying the years too forget, bones that will not freeze like pipes in winter, THE APPRENTICE a heart holding its own never knocking at the door Doors begging for its supper, are what I dream. these lines in my hands Forget pure thought. refusing to run out, Wheel and wand repeat. still teaching me the words. You would unleash logic into the world. SIX RIDDLES WITH A SINGLE ANSWER I have been waiting for you. Whose bones are these that knock asking my name? We Whose skin is this I wear to warm myself? smile at each other. Whose eyes are these watching from the corners'? Our What hands are these before me I cannot hold? faces are clouded; Whose heart is this that hides a deeper pulse? We Whose mouth is this that asks the answer to itself? have no reflection. I shall invent a face A WARNING TO POETS for you to wear or learn to destroy I will silence you, and leave no trace. with my own cold will Love, that hones itself old enemy, against your broken words, wherever you find holding up a razor me to your mirror, define yourself. disturbing your sleep Under the curved, dismembering until you bleed print moon I apprentice myself and your face to an old art. is white as paper. Do not be deceived Read between these lines, by softness. Black consider this warning a favor: as iron, tempered there is not room enough with blood for more than one I on this page. dream the hunt.

32 POETRY NORTHWEST 33 JosePb di Prisco David McElroy

ALIENATED POEM FOR KEVIN I really do not care. Every now and then You' ll be holding basketballs soon I peek out from the closed drawer one-handed from the top. and you are still waiting, sleepless, impatient, You' re fifteen today and I call you for my anti-heroic non-arrival. For now, my son and (why notP) my countryman. rehearse your acceptance of me, should I come I get that lonely sometimes. the distanced awful acknowledgment of your own pitiable existence. You could build a fortress Technically I know just how good with all the stones which inhabit me, or construct a road out of town, or dazzle yourself with your good dreams are —perhaps worthless little amulets. I am the sad story your rocket wracking through space, an older woman talking you in. of wasted love affairs, of friends who moved to Hawaii, of children who became lonely or But understand my need to advise, who never came, the tale of incomplete dossiers, to give what I never knew. rejected applications, the itemization of your Therefore, before your very eyes manifold addictions — women, God, verse. I am your father breaking open your door, in America, believe in magic: your mother staring eyes shut from the bier, such as this two-pound stone I say your husband andwife not coming home. I'm your analyst tapping your private line. begins existing now as a gray weight between the gray fingers of my hands. I am your meager ambitions hitching down a country road at dawn, your hunger prying I breathe on it once, open the refrigerator door. I am Suicide it burns blue and cool Prevention arranging, next month, a checkup. When you are asleep I leap up from your desk to attract you. and gambol madly on the typewriter keys. I breathe twice, You think you have uncovered me in adream, a green river flows over my shoulders, merely, but you have not. You have just become spirals down my chest what you hoped for,an Alienated Poem. Do not hope. And you could nothope for me. and, looking for a future, roars between my legs. Open up your drawer. There, the blank sheet. Memorize all of the seamy details of this life. I breathe three times, And then proceed to begin to write like this: and it throbs as a warm white dove between your blunt black hands.

34 POETRY NORTHWEST 35 S.J. Afurks Phyllis Jarsomitz Two Poems

READING CHARLIE'S POEMS AT THE CENTER FOR DISPLACED PERSONS for C.K. Williams l. With no common language, it's easy I' ve read what you said again, to pretend that we don't understand slowly, those messages scrawled on thin leaves turning the pages, thinking of you, of paper. They float in the distance thinking of our friendship. between us. Soon the khamsin will blow, I'm sad at the thought of our lives passing and I don't want to sort the ghosts the dark desert wind. We feel it drifting through the pages. in the air, try to avoid the shaft I give up and stare at the sentences of eyes, the attack of invisible ants. of your words, of yourself. The children are throwing flowers Here your dry sight opens that turn to a volley of stones. Tolstoy's dark sack, the roots of doubt, the tiny angers of the teeth, In the hall a fist fight breaks out. fat birds, cannibals, No one will die. We are all survival the secrets of our children's hearts. experts, tramping out fuses before Like a surgeon you' ve dissected a vital explosion. But the acrid nerves of the dead world. smell of smoke remains. I know how you' ve sweated mornings bringing the nightmare 2. facts to life. Hunched over your own We' re waiting guts under the glare of the electric lamp, for our vines and fig trees what you want to say makes your fingers itch, to come by Railway Express. and in the end you tell yourself The mails are slow. it's here. We need toothpaste You cleanse the infection from your eyes Italy with words as clear as the rain cafes that give birth to and curse the earth. Chablis Poland stamps scotch tape France

36 POETRY NORTHWEST 37 We want to dance CHANGING LANES wearing peasant skirts and velvet pants. The summer will be long and hot, Are we asking too muchP your car stalling at intersections. In the heat of traffic, 3. the maddening horns. Overhead the sky You won't want to be alone. begins to wind like a windmill. The slow grind of sand. You dream of people; The coarse grains deform us. belly dancers, file clerks, We look barbers, heads of state, grotesque, all part of the syndicate side show freaks you want to apply to. in the untimely People to touch your body. twilight. People to breathe on your soul.

Our images melt in the heat, You leap towards them. voodoo dolls bleeding At each leap you land drops of wax. It's a curse on another traffic island that makes us bend in the wind alone. Are you a leperP adapt Where is everyoneP blend Have their bodies been integrate shredded like recordsP easily. How did the bones This is also our talent. go through the machinesP

We mix with sand, You shower frequently, but with each other try to wash away we are cryptic, aloof. the nightmare disease of the city, the grime under your nails. With no common language, The soap you use is Ivory with the interpreter gone, That makes you remember the elephants. gathered in heaps rootless as tumbleweed Trunk after tail they slowly cross the veldt. we are lost, The great patience of enormous weight. too far from what we remember In the mornings when they tread to want to be close to anyone here. down to the muddy water hole to drink, to bathe together, the cool jungle will be theirs, the sweet, wet leaves.

38 POETRY NORTHWEST Jsm Parlett Things break down. Breathless, you hurried Home to build more bombs. Your hands Trembled when, atdawn, you'd finished THE DEATH OF THE BOMBER A dozen of them, arranged in neat rows After you lost your job, you began to see Before you like shiny loaves of bread. The order in the destruction of objects. Then, exhausted and gasping with joy, You woke from each dream with the memory Only of windows blowing outward, and You slid foil around the smallest bomb; A bomb meant to lie quietly in the center, The dust of ruined bricks settling across Beating softly like a perfect silver heart. The sunlit wreck of a public building. But you slipped, your hands shaking Giggling, you witness the smooth crystal Of a dropped glass dissolved in a pattern With the love you felt for your bombs. The instant rising force of its burst Of chips on the floor: the reduction Shook even the fragile marrow of your bones, Of intricate designs to the simple purity Like the sudden clap of a bell swelling The air around you, pushing it against Of their components. You wanted to help, And stayed up late each night for a week, Your skin for a clear moment only, until Winding the stiff wires about each other Like threads, bending your ear down close The pressure pried your veins and tissues To the ticking face of the clock you stole. Away from each other, and you lay agreeably Dying, reduced to simplest flesh and blood, Finished, that first bomb lay on the table, Finally at peace in your very purest form. Glistening silently in its silver foil Like a fish. Smiling, you cradled it deep In your coat pocket and drove downtown, Hiding that surprising gift in a drawer Thomas Johnson Two Poems Of your old desk. The sound of the burst Thrilled you with its logic as you curled, Small as a rustling scrap of paper, ATTIC In a doorway down the block, imagining Lush balls of flame startling the stiff Written in the margins Of an old grammar Walls into collapse, the people reduced The name To clots of blood and shattered bone Of that girl By a single bloom of beauty and pain. Two seats over, her slip That night, you wandered past the scene, At the kneecap Astonished at your ability to help Like a tidal wash Falling back into itself.

40 POETRY NORTHWEST Your heart raced Each thing to the next, Or was it Letting us believe The swallow All is in its place, Returned defiant to the flue Unbreakable For all the fires And profound. You' ve fanned From her father's trucksold oak/ But on a far slope, the ghnt Of shovels. She stares through you now, It is that one mght a year Eyes deep-set, Which seems to beg Blank as mothballs. For a small dance, a candle, As if, more than the others, it trembled Opening her palm, you see With some echoless depth It is a map That would not pass Of where you followed her, Unless assuaged. Lost sight When she turned the wind' s And so the curt ring of shovels Hard corner Breaking ground. Behind the sawmill, Not that the hole Giving you the slip Much matters, nor the men gathered, Whose edge shone whiter Than any beneath a ridden-up dress. It is something else Stark and answerless You came down the hill, a fist In that bone-covering sound. Of wood chips. It is the third hand you have Never opened,

The attic forever safe from silverfish. Harold Witt Two Poems

WINGS THE GROUN D B R EAKING Wmgs flicker by all day The town slept into a single, sprawled body, on errands of seed and nest Every window aching while I stay, I stay With such clarity, sparrows passed Unscathed through the panes, wings of sparrow and jay Lined their nests or birds with a topknot or crest With that thread which, by day, holds wings flicker by all day

42 POETRY NORTHWEST 43 stop, then flicker away, she'd do anything for attention fly without respite or rest moan OM OM with bells on her toes while I stay, I stay use words truckdrivers mention strip off her clothes thinking of what to say, bent at this desk obsessed Finally she OD'd and died wings flicker by all day, so people thought if they thought of her at all some of them garish, some grey, which most did not all with that airborne zest while I stay, I stay But all she'd done as she had more than once, but no more imprisoned than they was undergone birds, too, are locked in their quest a metamorphosis wings flicker by all day while I stay, I stay. and here she comes beautiful, versatile, clever, back on her feet again, THE DEATH OF POETRY memorable as ever.

Poetry wasn't feeling well she had a lot of bad lines from staying out too late Johl Woods Three Poems with the wrong kind of guys

She talked in a flat monotonous voice HOW THE HAND BECAM E A GLOVE she was losing her figure she could hardly breathe sometimes How long does the pillow hold she began to get irregular the shape of two heads? When does the hand become But she made the best of it a glove of skin'? went on fixingher face Why does the clothing rise It wasn't the same, though from abandon she could no longer move with grace and assume the street? The clock slows, but who She didn't even remember she'd forgotten is there when the hands loosen almost everything she knew she was a shell of herself and wouldn't admit she was through

44 POETRY NORTHWEST 45 and the face goes blankP T HE WO M A N W H O IS ONE W O M A N The stirred pool clarifies and in the flowerbeds The woman who is one woman Spring and Winter lie so close remembers the egg time, the time who can say why the wind of the blind fish. goes bitter one moment She remembers and moistly urges the nextP herself as one, long body The eye picks the rose, rising from the beginning. which is the body in delight, But who can tell us why, But the woman who is two women now, its fire is frozenP will keep pressed flowers, fossil cake, a motel key. The neuter angel, glorying at the womb THE MOTHER OF YEAST of Eden, will press a gold ring on her hand. One will stay Where is the mother of dreamsP in the dying forest, and one I have shaken all I can from bushes, will set forth, and they from running, running, two feet shall be apart forever. behind the loose arc of my senses.

The Song for Two Mouths is over, mother, have I drunk my fill with the grazers of algae and cloverP The windgrass hardens to braille.

Where are my hands going, tipped with dead starsP The lowest stone stirs in the shade, mother of homing birds, sister of yeast.

The young ones dance in my shadow. My wrist is snarled with blue veins. So I have dressed a bed for the mother of memory and the child of pain,

46 POETRY NORTHWEST 47 Poetry Northwest Prize Awards, 1976 About ONr Corslrsbutors JORN S. FLAGG lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. These are his first published HELEN BULLIS PRIZE: $100 poems. John Allman for Three Poems (Winter 1975-76) GwzN HEAD's first book of poems, Special Effects, was published by Univer Greg Kuzma for Four Poems (Spring 1975) sity of Pittsburgh Press. She lives in Seattle. and Three Poems (Winter 1975 — 76) JAGK BUTI.ERteaches in the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program in Arkadelphia, Arkan sas, and is writer-in-residence at Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson Previous Winners State College. Hayden Carruth (1962) CARoLYN HINGKLEY is a graduate student in the Writing Program of the Uni John Logan (1963) versity of Washington. Donald Finkel (1964) DAN MINocK teaches at Wayne State University. Mona Van Duyn (1965) FREDRICK ZYDEKis the pastor of a community church in Omaha. Richard Hugo (1966) Winfield Townley Scott and Katie Louchheim BARBARA L. GREENBERG lives in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, and has pub (1967) lished widely. Sandra McPherson and Gwen Head (1968) EnwARD HIRscH lives in Philadelphia, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish Eugene Ruggles (1969) his first novel shortly. Will Stubbs (1970) Jo~ Wzzzzz teaches at the University of Washington. Her work has appeared Kenneth O. Hanson and Jack Tootell (1971) in numerous magazines. Lewis Turco and Tom Wayman (1972) EnwARD LUEDERs teaches at the University of Utah. Scott, Foresman recently Richard Hugo (1973) published his anthology (with Primus St. John) titled Zero Makes Me Hungry. Adrien Stoutenburg and Lisel Mueller (1974) RIcRARD D~KLEFF teaches at Oregon State University. Dan Masterson and Paul Zimmer (1975) KATHRYN TERRILL teaches at Mt. Hood Community College, Gresham, Oregon. THEODORE ROETHKE PRIZE: $50 M~Y OI.IvzR's second book of poems,The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems, Gary Gildner for Four Poems (Summer 1975) was published in 1972 by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. She lives in Province town, Massachusetts. Previous Winners PAUL ZIMMER edits the University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series and has published in numerous magazines. Carol Hall (1963) Richard Hugo and Kenneth O. Hanson (1964) DAYID DAYToN lives in Santa Cruz, California. Kenneth O. Hanson (1965) MIcRAEL MAGEE teaches in the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program in W e stern William Stafford (1966) Washington and lives in Seattle. Carolyn Stoloff (1967) ADRIANNE MARcUS's latest book is The Photojournalist: Mark and Leibovttz John Woods (1968) (T.Y. Crowell, 1974). She lives in San Rafael, California. ThomasJames (1969) JOSEFR DI PRIsco's first book of poems won last year's Devins Award from Philip Booth (1970) University of Missouri Press. Dave Etter (1971) DAvID McEI.RoY's first book of poems, Making It Simple, has just been pub Albert Goldbarth (1972) lished by Ecco Press. He lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Mark McCloskey (1973) S. J. MARKs is the family and group psychotherapist at the Philadelphia Psy Greg Kuzma (1974) chiatric Center. Joseph di Prisco (1975) PHYLLIs JANowITz teaches a poetry workshop at the Radcliffe Institute. JIM PARLETT is a senior at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. YOUNG POET S PRIZE: $25 THoMAs JoHNsoN is a graduate student at Cornell University. He edits Sttnk Judith Small for "Dexter People" (Autumn 1975) tree, both the magazine and the press. HAROLD WITT's most recent book is Surprised By Others at Fort C ronkhite Previous Wi nners (Sparrow Magazine/Vagrom Chapbooks, 1975). Greg Kuzma (1973) JORN Woons's most recent book is Turning to Look Back (Indiana University Joseph di Prisco (1974) Press, 1972). He will publish another book this spring. He teaches at. Western Thomas Brush (1975) Michigan University.