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~I~RTHAEST,gP® '5 POETRY g+ NORTHWEST

VOLUME SEVENTEEN NUMBER THREE

AUTUMN 1976 EDITOR David Wagoner JOHN TAYLOR. Three Poems .. STEPHEN DUNN EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS Three Poems .. Nelson Bentley, William H. Matchett ROBERT HERSHON T wo Poems. . . . . ARTHUR OBERG COVER DESIGN T wo Poems. . . Allen Auvil RICH IVES The Old Woodcarver . 10 JANE HAGE Coverfrom a photograph of thistles, Target Practice . Union Bay Garbage Fill, Seattle. HARRY HUMES Snakeskin in June. 13 RON SLATE The Call 14 PAULA RANKIN To the Ox-cart Driver 15 BOARD OF ADVISERS CARL DENNIS Leonie Adams, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert B. Heilman, Two Poems. . . . . 16 Stanley Kunitz, Jackson Mathews, Arnold Stein ANDREW GLAZE Alphabet Soup .. 17 KATHLEENE WEST POETRY NORTHWEST AUTUMN 1976 VOl . UME XVll, NUMBER 3 Two Poems...... 18 WILLIAM JOYCE Published quarterly by the University of Washington. Subscriptions and manu­ scripts should be sent to Poetry Northtuest, 4045 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Univ«­ Post-mortem for a Car 20 sity of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105. Not responsible for unsolicited SANDRA M. GILBERT manuscripts; all submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed Daguerrotype: Widow.. . envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of the University of Washington. Subscription rate, $4.50 per year; single copies, $1.25. COLLEEN J. McELROY From Memoirs of American Speech 23 © 1976 by the University of Washington MARK HOWELL Where Fire Has Been 24 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. BARBARA RAS T wo Poems...... LEWIS TURCO Two Poems . P O E T R Y N O R T H W E S T BRENDA HILLMAN AU T U M N 1 9 76

Two Poems. . . 28 ANITA ENDREZZE Seven: Leaving Home . . 29 BETH BENTLEY T wo Poems. . . 30 MARK McCLOSKEY

T wo Poems...... 32 John Taylor Three Poems MICHAEL HEFFERNAN How the Writer in Residence Rescued His Liberty . THE WOUND KURT BEATTIE Two Poems . 34 No matter what you say or do MILI VE McNIECE You cannot healthe wound you make the world.

Waiting When You Don't Come...... Untrue, untrue, DAVID BARTON I n the Heron's Sleep...... 37 You call the gap: All things to all men! STUART DYBEK Brass Knuckles...... The black bullseye that the snow comes from Is silent, foreign GIBBONS RUARK Aubade to the Governor. . . 39 Over your headlights, knows the best STUART SILVERMAN The Four Canonical Fits Fitted to Defense is no defense, and never answers. "The Day the Martians Landed in the Fields" 40 Your unrest JOSEPH DI PRISCO No More Bleeding Hearts 41 Will last forever, or at least BRENDAN GALVIN Will last as long as you will last. Not long. The world's black yeast ...... , , . . . . . Two Poems...... SHARON BRYAN Three Poems .. 45 Was here before the bread, and will Be here when every crumb is swept away. Galaxies spill Notice to Subscribers

Beginning with the Spring 1977 issue (Vol. XVIII, No. I), the subscription price Out of gray Ginnungagap for Poetry Northtoest will be U.S.A., $5.00 a year, single copies $1.50; Canada, To fall until they dwindle in the black $6.00 a year, single copies $1.75 Unfostering lap, Change of Address All your complaining is no use, Notify us promptly when you change your mailing address. Lost in the mothernight. So make your peace Send both the old address and the new — and the ZIP code numbers. Allow us at least six weeks for processing the change. Or truce. "IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL Even Palm Beach. INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD" Masked like owls or thrushes, Birds who live in the money tree out of harm's reach, Never to fall is worse. Nested in dollars dense as deep plushes, Or to fall out, or fall into safe hands, That is the curse. They twitter, dropping Each other's names on sight Never be savaged by joy, Of gems familiar as faces, diamonds and emeralds popping Immensity shaking us in beast jaws Like eggs ledged on billowing bosoms, tight­ That can destroy Corseted trunks Or bless, no guarantee Bulging with bonds. Nearer Which until too late. Never to open, To Fortune's warmer parts, they cling in their cosy ranks Never to see Loving as gilded crablice, but dearer, dearer. Again for the first time When nothing was explained, nothing explained away, Stephee DuNN That fearful prime Three Poems

When one's foot and the sun THE MAGICIAN'S DREAM Were the same size, equally wondrous, equally strange, And all one. I pull this from nowhere, from out of the hips of roses, from the scar BAL DE MASQUES AT THE POINCIANA CLUB in the sky. It is this, Old artifex, what I'm holding, what you can't see, Arm me with multiple curses, this lovely piece Hornet-winged, hornet-stinged, venomous to vex, Arrow-sharp, arrow-straight verses of thisness, this body of wild claim I'd like you to care about. So I can skewer Imagine this, for example. This puffpaste of popinjays, This covey of Beautiful People ripe for the connoisseur Or imagine this: earthlight bottled Of the Late Late Potlatch and other such folkways in a factory near Newark and sold to the stars. What I have here All masked and balled Up in fine feathers for a good reason. is the commodity of our time, none Never ask what. The only answer, or so I' ve been told of the above, that which always follows Is that for everything there is a season, simple A, B, C, like cruelty.

POETRY NORTHWEST It is none of your business either. T HE GAMBLER AT HOM E That's why there's a possibility you' ll care about it, this shadow Everyone s asleep The heat is off for the time bemg Horses run wearing a cloak in a grey world, this the walls of his house, always self-cancelling mandrake root coming from behind. He pronounces that will not produce their names until they become pure meaningless sound like a prayer a single birth. I hold it up to you now spoken since youth. His information so that you won't see it. is inside. His needs are secrets Look, it's gone he can only share with crowds. And now he feels it again and all this time you haven't left somewhere in his stomach­ your seat. Confess, All you ever cared about that absence, growing palpable. was me. Ragged zeroes when he smokes.

How can his family know THE MAN W H O N E VER LOSES HIS BALANCE when he says the unlit room he means the moment before loss. He walks the high wire in his sleep. Or when he puts his arms around them The tent is blue, it is perpetual he's thinking one less empty space. afternoon. He is walking between It's late and cold and part of him the open legs of his mother knows the world is gorgeous and the grave. Always. The audience knows this in its disregard, but cruel enough is out of their hands. The audience to kiss you now and then. is fathers whose kites are lost, children That part of him would take the kiss who want to be terrified into joy. and run. Never bet again. He is so high above them, so capable That'sa promise, he says, halfway to sleep. (with a single, calculated move ) In the morning he remembers of making them care for him he knows a man that he's sick of the risks who knows a man. he never really takes. The tent is blue. Outside is a world that is blue. Inside him a blueness that could crack like china if he ever hit bottom. Every performance, deep down, he tries one real plunge off to the side, where the net ends. But it never ends.

POETRY NORTHWEST Arthur Oberg Two Poems Robert Hershort Two Poems

A FTER THE ROYAL PALMS WERE BROUGHT D O W N S ARAH, DO YO U T H I N K I ' M C R A Z YP la high school note) The fishing boats shift their nets, "Sarah pick up and head for better grounds. do you think I'm crazy You ache to be wise, ache because or do you think Jack is a hunkP Nod twice the dark tells you nothing is what if you think I'm crazy all is about; even the child knows Snap your fingers the stone planter of frogs goes if you agree with me" empty one night, for the whole year. Written in a book of There are more idiots upon the town Hemingway short stories than it can hide. Don't mention where the women have no names it, the bank teller cries, the large notes counted out twice. His green THE GREAT BELL RINGS AND eyes, white walls of this house, THE TORTOISES HEAD FOR THE SEA the intricate, dark roses you cut Nobody likes my Quasimodo at dark, all say nada, nada is: i mitation T hat i s they admire it as an art form some of the morning boats come in, but they pull away from fish float in, swim against the tide my tongue's ruined kiss the questions pouring from ELEGY FOR CATHY m y hump I lim p to the bathroom mirror Not oranges or stones, words refuse to bob to watch myself come back until we bow to them, take them up. Simplicities of the kitchen hum for us. You brew java in My lizard is more popular cups, grind the strongest beans, butter the The hot sun melts the sand best holiday bread, share it against the time in your eyes and my tongue we will have to talk, and of her death. Last darts in and out so fast night, before taking off your dress, you cried you think there may yet be for all that blonde hair in a mood box. The something to rely on island ferry was again late, and I was out But my head turns so slowly looking for other ways of scoring a song for you could go crazy death, wasteful because by water and so young. waiting for it to come around

NORTHWEST POETRY Rich Ives Surrender comes quietly, a monk with a sharp bone T HE OLD W O O D C A R V E R and many books in his cave.

1. Gliding into himself, each victim A hunter carves out a hollow answers the same question. in the split, steaming carcass of a legend. 4. Sleep and the moon The perfection of brown, in the bellies of wolves racked in bone-velvet, moving down the canyons rises like a cedar ghost. like the lost words of shadows passing into their own darkness. The old man calls and the heartwood opens. Sleep and the nocturnal carnivore, The animal enters. shadow turned talon and gone, a pierced tendon, the thick wet trail 2. of the more fortunate, and again, Bear rises from stump. the deep, steady pumping Bear is family. Bear is old. of a dark organ. Bear is the stumble of winter. 5. Bear is a maternal grandfather The bladeof the knife rooting in thick sleep. passes through water. Bear is a hole in the mountain. Sullen, well-fed bass drift in the hollows Bear is log-beater, bark-grubber, of sunken trees. Turtles claw, tooth, and hump. glide back into green water. Bear is rumbling into father. Wall-eyed pike in the eelgrass, Redwings in the cattails. 3. Long shadows on the mud. If hollow had a name it could be owl. In the black grass the faint outlines of a robe. The snail prince Eyes like black caves dreaming in the green night. where night The bladeof the knife tears at pieces of the day. passes through sleep.

10 POETRY NORTHWEST Jane Hage m the back pages you used for the fire to warm your hands and burn the woods down. TARGET PRACTICE In the end you' re almost shy about showing how close you came Showers of light to bullseye. fall between you and the target, fall on the target, full of wild eyes that could be shut, full of how men walk around after Harry Humes with half a brain. Those stories are written in tom papers SNAKESKIN IN JUNE blowing around the campsite. A year ago I found a black snake's skin That truck full of drums Stretched among some rocks, with its tail barreled down the freeway Hooked to a stick. It was over six feet long, toward the Bay Bridge, labeled: Poison. And delicate as the face of the dead. I placed it on my wall, Your hand shakes. And watched it change all summer long. The sights won't come up. You' re hitting low, By October it hung scarcely three inches drumming them into the bank. From its nail; cats and the room's dry heat Had broken it, and my own need Remember how the sun froze in the trees, To feel its brittle surface near my skin. how your fingers got cold I tried to get back, get back loading the clip, To the early muscles of the year the way you pointed the pistol into the woods . . . Stretching themselves inside out, Exchanging one system of dying You stand sideways, For another way of lying blue-black line up your eyes with your arm. The target flickers. Near warm rocks. Oh in December, There's a wind through the campsite. On a day hard with loss, with faces Now you' re hitting. Coiled against my eyes, I buried it

None of this adds up. Beneath the shag-bark hickory, The story continues Beneath the grass brittle with frost. I buried it as totem to the year,

12 POETRY NORTHWEST To the shapes of all dormant life, of my flesh; I was the only parent To the warm ends of roots, to water who really mattered. Passing easily through the deep limestone. But one mght there was a howl Now summer climbs its blue racing skies, far across the meadow of thorns. Climbs the bright ledges, enters the grass, It beckoned beyond affection. The minnow's eye, heats the hickory. With suspicious eyes, my hardened face, their lowered heads, I think of the skin somewhere beneath me. each waited for the other I think of January, of one more shape to charge across that distance. Behind me, a season turned inside out

And hooked to the year's oldest barb. Paula Raekie

Roe Slate TO THE OX-CART DRIVER

Stropping oxen, you nudge through town THE CALL with bedsprings, bottles, chimney bricks, riding the rumor that there are always men I trained the wolves who' ll try anything on. to love me, cut off a piece of my meat I stare into ox eyes and taught them to swallow that scald me with their dumbness, without having to kill. their blank recognition of road and burden, their disregard They were the close friends for the changing directions of wind. I was not destined to have: Grey Throat, Devil's Ash, You hold up your collections Shadow-of-a-Low-Cloud. of drained sleeves, pants, shoes, telling me how washing will shrink During the days them to fit. I do not say I think they patrolled the edges of the settlements and roads how it is ox I want to barter for, trying again to be wolves. how I need to try on hide blunt-nosing its way But by evening through the dark without questioning, my fire was the world's brightest light. until yokes press as lightly on skin as a shirt passed down I played with their pups from hand to hand tohand. and let them know the taste

14 POETRY NORTH +'EST One little flare as they sailed over. Carl Dennis Two Poems He could never have been sofirm. It would have been too lonely even for him ARRIVALS With the earth small and far below. Dumb with awe, he never understood Only one mood has not grown old Why others hoped that the stars would fall, And still returns, reaching me at my window Why they asked him to stay inside Sometimes as I watch in the late light. With the blinds drawn. "Hermit," they said, Just a moment before the huddled houses "You only encourage the stars to be proud. Seemed anxious to depart but held back, They would lose their confidence if you stayed hid. Their roofs crushed by the weight of snow. Then they would fall, and the clear sky, Now the porches, blue, red and gold, Descending closer, might touch our roofs." Snow-blown and frosted, But the hermit kept watch unmoved. Appear like weathered flags of a fleet Therefore the stars, coasting above us, Newly arrived, at anchor in the yards. Keep their distance still.

Can I ask how far they have traveled, How long they intend to stayP I deserve to be told. Aedrese Glaze If only I could show them something I made Or something I at least improved. ALPHABET SOUP Then I notice lights in the rooms. I can see that no one over there Thirteen years old, preparing to go onstage Bothers to wonder if he lives for the first time at the Spring of everything Too much for others, too much for himself. as though it ought always to have been like this­ Why should they care, these pilgrims, what I have read and seen, heard and imagined Beached in the safe harbor of the street, is only the rough bulk Grateful they' ve made it all this way. out of which this is to be melted and poured sizzling and smoking. WHY THE STARS KEEP THEIR DISTANCE Adventure wants to come out of my head. No one lives there now, but once Lakeview, den of dirty brick and sparse green — it's a wizard's blasted mountain circle! In a cabin hanging on that hill A hermit swept the floor, a wizard, Skilled in the habits of the stars. I will be Franklin Roosevelt In summer he dragged his mattress to the roof giving them alphabet soup. And kept watch, between naps, all night. Come out NIRA, TVA, WPA, REA! Of all their beauties he admired most I hop around, curdling the pot, my name is Doctor Brains, Their austere refusal to make one sign, I am a warlock, wreathed in pepper and fog.

16 pOETRY NORTHWEST Round my head revolve erratic armies in Gran Chaco, drenched with age, sprayed with the essence Floyds and Dillingers chew bravado like gum. of the women you will become Mothers of quints and triplets, veteran marchers, We do not understand their warning Byrd at the pole, Wiley Post falling in Alaska, and walk in the garden, touching George Norris stopping rivers with his breath, the rosebay with our fragrance. they buzz, like flies attacking a carcass. Tonight, in our separate homes, I scratch them brusquely out of the air, we plot gardens for our daughters stir them in, shout the charms. and write letters we will hold, undelivered, Whatever I constructed that day, conjure-talking, for years. We have no warning, demon ofsquawking and face-making, only each other and the warm smell of love. is all I am still.

IN MEMORY OF MRS. GERBER

Kathleeee West Two Poems I remember the gloss of the dresses in peacock colors, the nylons with hearts and butterflies flourishing up the seams, the hunks A CAUTION of rhinestone bedecking wrist and ears. "Please do not smell the flowers. They have been sprayed." Six feet tall in her patent spikes, she towered — Sign at the Carl S. English Memorial Gardens, Ballard Locks, Seattle. above the study hall, the basketball team, the coach, topping them all In these memorial gardens, flowers aren' t with a triumphant frizz of cinnamon hair. for smelling. Mindful of breath, we move toward the Locks and try Splendid in satin and velveteen, to sniff the salty difference between the Sound she confided to our class the glamour and Lake Union. Most of our lunch of her feather boa. "Lana Lobell!" my mother sniffed we fling to the gulls, bits of bread at the gaudy clothes, selected from that brassy that bloom between the sun and water, flashing mail-order catalogue of frivolous apparel. pink as blossoms. We are the children The town was used to neutral women who stuffed beans in their ears, listened who tinted their hair beige or brown to the crone's advice to follow your nose. to match their sensible plaids. Around us, the banned flower grows, in the green-leaf water, the gulls plunging after the bread Mrs. Gerber stilled our wriggling rows with her command for immaculate like late summer petals. calhgraphy. We copied the footnotes to Julius Caesar, the directions In Mother's bedroom, we sprinkled perfume in our grammars. A misplaced conjunction behind ears and knees, drew moist circles in a diagram, a smear on the page, around each wrist to create her smell would send us crumpling and tearing on our bodies. Do not smell the flowers, to the wastebasket, to begin again

18 POETRY NORTHWEST on unmarred paper. Up hills only to find She sat for an hour on a tack Like Sisyphus more hills, without feeling it. Who could challenge She revenged herself that confidence of height, that surety of jawP By backfiring on solemn occasions Out the ass-end of her cracked exhaust. Dad always said those out-of-town schoolteachers She died amidst the stalled drove like the devil. Dreaming trafFic on a thruway Smug in black dresses, At the end of a tunnel. Joanie Flaherty and I went to the funeral. Her legacy was this: Sitting in the basement of the Monroe Methodist Church, with the non-relations, we stared at a loudspeaker One headlightangled cockeyed or each other, our stomachs gurgling. By the last hymn, we shook with pent giggles. Upward into the trees her last Only by holding our breath Night. No doubt this was meant To shake perversity out of branches could we escape pastthe open coffin. Bare as tuning forks, Or give the lie of eternity William Joyce From constellations' trumped designs To her steering's limp ball-joint. If nature was in alignment POST-MORTEM FOR A CAR With a weather report Issued from a snapped antenna This car that was Predicting through static My rusted other skin Flurries and eminent rot Is dead. Her legacy I was not inclined to stop Is not the girls who rocked To admire her downfloating flakes On her broken shocks Made gracious by a negligent headlight. In deserted lots nor space She would coat me and mine Sequestered in a dazed speedometer. On an abandoned street corner Styled like a turtle, Like genteel beggars And like those whose best defense Before our time. Is a shell, she covered herself Let this carcass flatter itself With fluids front and rear, At having run so long Urging herself forward with the delusion On suspicion and a nervous piston. Of laboring thankless under water, Me, I have somewhere to go. Neither pretty nor noble For this I need whiskey, She raged in her manifold. A good woman to oil my rusted parts, Her idling was frenetic. A new car to carry us Bored with the lot To the liquor store and back Of those who suffer To this life's fluid signs

20 POETRY NORTHWEST Sandra M. Gilbert Colleen J. McElroy

DAGUERROTYPE: WIDOW From MEMOIRS OF AMERICAN SPEECH

For thirty years now she's lived VI. in the little village of Extremity, Stimulus-Response that dull village where the language is Hanging On, when flames dressed the music store a language of silence, small wheels, ruts in the road, in a gaudy cabaret of colors and smoke a language heavy with shutters and ruined walls, I thought of news reports nigh t r i ders each noun a bottomless dry well. bats and dancing bigots how p a nic needs the courage of sound the h e r o's scream Back from her walk in the mountains, caped before the charge the f ear of silent men in the smell of the sour grass she gathers daily, I remembered speechless children she stares at us, her chin fixed the hours of painful sibilants and square as patience, her lips the shape piercing narrow clinic rooms of a dried fruit that was once a smile. remembered how I hissed sha r p and direct Over one arm she carries a basket of pebbles: between perfectly articulated teeth these grow like mushrooms in her garden, I listened for guitars singing in the blaze these are her livelihood: each night their strings stretching and popping she sorts them by color and weight, like petals of deadly red flowers and fashions them into talisman rings piano strings twanging in chorus for the women in the soft valleys, harmonicas screaming toward the melody the children, the mourners. the wind drafts add riffs but I c a nnot hear I am glued to the sibilant crowd At dawn, she tells us, she paces we grind our teeth on the acrid air the small square in the center of her village, alert as any sentry. w e are drawn to the fire awed The bells stutter their reveille as any Neanderthal its p r i mal sounds and she paces, paces, corner to corner. t riggering our ancient ears a sig n al It's so hot in this town, so dusty, confusing the magic of words remin d ing us that death is the absence of sound even the mountains are flaking away. entranced by the flames And what if the pebble harvest should vanish w e are dumb as deaf mutes tomor r o w like the windows, the acorns, the silkP we' ll play with coughs and grunts The leaves have long since flown from the trees; groping for speech the chickens leap toward the teeth of the fox; understanding less and less the cow lies down and weeps in her milk.

22 POETRY NORTHWEST 23 Mark How ell V I am pleased with this house WHERE FIRE HAS BEEN And this feeling will pass. Those things that have mattered will matter again. after a line by Roethke They will not last forever, these afternoons I Of sitting, of sunburn, of the fusty veils of whiskey. I return, I won't always watch the smog burn the hillsides A little seared, a little weary, Nor the morning ruin of last night's moon. Blistered a couple of fingers, ready To see what must be done. Ashes puff from each step on the lawn. The house has had it­ Barbara Ras Two Poems I kick around for little things. WITH OR WITHOUT OARS II Outside I watched as neighbors gathered. The way is the same. Smokebulled up; its belly reddened; The stream follows you, Flames cracked the roof, popped shingles different waters surge the same rocks, And ran like wind over wheat. rush into white, or in shallows collect All of the wails in the walls a dark brooding. Escaped, and the furniture howled For the shadow dance. Dragonflies shivering in air are possibilities of music, III and your head fills with sounds The firemen came, and their chaos of water, rain, snowmelt Roar of high pressure, redundant red strobe. blurred tongues that gossip Steam billowed, hissing, lost us in fog. only about themselves. I returned next morning, thoughtless on coffee, Not wanting the sleep I'd lost, just looking, You listen for news of yourself, Trying to see the house that had been a time of arrival, In something gutted and dripping. but the footprints you left at the soggy edge are silent IV and loosen grain by grain A whisper'? wind in the back of the mind? as marshgrass springs back Rustle of dead leaves? distant wavesP­ and forgets. I put my book down,climb to look; Upstairs I find no flames This could be pleasant­ Searching my room like the tongues of snakes the raft giddy and you Or the blind hands of adolescence. weightless on water. No photographs vanish like steam from mirrors.

24 POETRY NORTHWEST 25 WHEN THE AIR LURCHES INTO SPRING dimmed by the spider's cataract sunlight wanes into goldenrod. You lie naked under the redbud tree, pink petals sift down The stumps of the two great elms thousands of trembling eyelids, covering you have colored themselves in the barn s refiection. with their last shuttings. The road passes. Under the bank the brown river ebbs. You dream geese Hying crazily in circles. THE TOLLHOUSE Wings, their only symmetry, fill the sky with dry sounds, (Maine, 18th century) gate-creakings, ingress, egress. The bell rings once and then the woods are still. You glide on their balance Something startles and rustles in the shed. of echoes. In the dooryard the pump has not been primed. The axe stands rusting in its cleft. Trust. From such sleep out of the shadows of branches The mortar in the chimney turns to lime. cast over you netlike, The fence is down beside the meadow; green will grow, will weave a shade, nearby an apple tree stands knotted, tender and cool as pelts of moss. a woodchuck hole opening in its root.

A catbird's gray patrols the field from limb to stump to lilac bush in bloom. Lewis Turbo Two Poems The wooden plow bleaches in a patch of herbs and weeds: alumroot THE BARN and larkspur, thistle, trailing vetch. Behind the locked doors The sun is warm and curling, warping shakes swallows stitch shadow to make and shingles, the cord of peeling wood a sampler of perpetual dusk. that musts to lichen near the gate. Summer's hull tilts against the wall. Toadstools like coins are spent beneath the elm. A gray car looms into rust, The windowglass is dusty, dusty webs its doors closed against silence. travel the breeze and catch in every gust. A rain of motes slants to fall The forest listens at the door, upon an iron stove cast in hay. The road moves west through trees toward the river, Wind leans through the window the crossing barge, the pier, toward the sun from the fields beyond where, beginning now to fall beyond the current. The bell rings twice and then the woods are still.

26 POETRY NORTHWEST 27 to boil and slip to the bottom. Breeda HilLmae Two Poems There's a chance of dissolution;

HISTORY I' ve done this before in another place, sat for hours by a huge bowl, The cats of Rome don't suffer much. Howling in the dead calm of two p.m., digging the eyes out of these strangers, All so publicly crazy. these tuberous gods.

Gently the gulls from the Tiber This is why my fathers came from Ireland. Watch over them, rising and falling Another one, a moon, snagged in the stark Like so many leaders. night trees, just rising. Now they' re rocks The cats are peaceful among themselves. washed up on the beach, They slouch As if the ruins were cashmere, raw as America, blanched and wet as a man walks out of the bath Unfazed by even thedeath of death In the arena, the smell to me, naked in his strategies of peace. Where the lion stalked out.

How well they continue, stretching, Dragging the light in Artita Endrezze Like a fat fish. SEVEN: LEAVING HOM E We have heard their continuous joy At the pity of strangers; Father hides in a dark room. A woman in red robes The cat on Keats' grave, for instance, Though he was missing a leg, is bejeweled with semen. My hair is black as a burnt moon. Purred as he ate the red carnation. We all listen at the key hole.

It isn't easy to sleep POTATOES when they' re here. Father shakes his head in the fireplace, A man is bathing in the other room. arguing her lips into the ashes. She won't give it up. Off the coast of the wide I won't turn my bed into a school. blade, I'm dropping white ships in the sea

28 POETRY NORTHWEST 29 I won't drag my ears on the floor. Her body curls in the shell I won't kiss his fingers, dripping with soup. of the Chevy; she' s I won't light his cigarettes. her own wind, her own moon. I won't cough into her hands. Outside, the street hardens I' ve had enough of living here. to morning's factual glitter. His stomping at night drives me crazy. When she leaves her dirty underwear Sarah's clothes heap closer: under my pillow, I tear my hair out. they' ve memorized the story I'm thinking of leaving. of the princess: seven summers I'm thinking of going far away. and seven winters banished, unraveling the old hag's spell. Most kids tie all they need in a bandana. But I'm thinking The tin cans flash glances at the apple cores; If I had all my woman's parts, rinds and wrappers settle; I wouldn't have to worry about eating. the thawing windows mew.

The Chevy drowses in the stone forest, weather-wise, Beth Berttley Two Poems a crusty cabin, a cloud of spore.

LIVING IN THE CHEVY ' FRUIT/ Now, it is November in the Chevy. STONE I watch you swim towards me, Elizabeth, The toadstools, little pets, peek up fish or eye, tearing from the carpet, tender as blanched toes. the watered silk of dreams, Sarah feels them in her shoes, a sterling bride magazined white and safe, shyly nudging. in maternal grievances, a possession. Frost furs the windows, and her breath signals hellos across the cushions: My hand plunges past your birch-white egg-smooth legs: hello, old steering soheel, you' re someone else's vision, old ioindshield ioipers, hello sanctified and varnished, silent radio I sang ioith, with the horrible poise musical sister, my lost ear. of a machine. Your steel breasts She salutes the dead batteries, curve, indestructible fenders; the frozen brake, the tires. there's no place your body

30 POETRY NORTHWEST hasn't succeeded, repulsing GRANDMA'S FUNERAL damage like a submarine. I wasn't there but I got wind of it­ You are nuclear in my mother' s the bunched hanky ofher face in the deathbox, imagination, perfect girl, the black upholsteries of mope, my exwife seamless as an apple-pip, arriving like an ambulance at the wrong address, sister I should have been, my children sprinkling the grave, my brother in pearl sinking in the thick without his breakdown, aunty's cancer arrested, soup of my menstrual sleep. mother breathing easy in the old house for a change, the will splitting it down the middle, Thwarted twin, miscarried ending the baby pictures, the Flexible Fliers, the smells past the flood-gates of a sabotaged that gave us our real names. I wasn't there, dam, your thin, slippery but laid up in far off 's refrigerator arms like tangled seaweed with my capital misdemeanors, my bad dreams tighten around my neck. where I take the rap for cancer and breakdowns, and the old witch has me cold and hands me over t o my children when they push her toward the oven. . . Mark McCloskey Two Poems and the blank place on the headstone is all mine.

UNDER THE KNIFE

You dump your cargo of weather, color, clocks. Michael Heffernan Like someone you haven't seen since grade school night comes. Do they do it then — shave your privates, HOW THE WRITER IN RESIDENCE slide you on their meatboardP You shiver, but sleep RESCUED HIS LIBERTY drips in the tube into your wrist. Later you sway inside yourself like a toy boat in a warm tub: He had this bitter business to dispose of. you' re waking up . . . th ose who knew you are there He wrote the Head of his Department: "Dear Chuck, pink as sailors lined up for shoreleave. Tell the Dean he can eat his sabbatical. You look like putty yourself, and rib them I won't spend one year tramping in Tuscany, their flowers smell like a dead uncle. soaking up Sweetness and Light, if my sweet balls You give them the creeps, they flutter goodbye. have to be kept in mothballs the year after. After that you take yourself for walks, I trust the two of you will share my feeling." or gawk out the window at the weeddrift. Of course this memo never made the mailbox. If only you could tell how hot or cold the wind is! It made him feel good just to have written it, If only you could tell whose mouth it is, so he sat back and read it aloud and thought now you' re eating with it! So: y o ur body the better part of freedom was composure. is coming back, and the moment they cut it loose it He felt composed. He rattled the keys some more: yaws and shudders griefstruck in the huge air. "Dear Dean, I' ve always meant to tell you: your face

32 POETRY NORTHWEST reminds me of a tomcat's face on the prowl. that terrible denial Mozart wrote The rats are all of us in our little holes. for every laboring artisan, The Magic Flute, I wish you could see yourself the way I do. whose temple has no paint or stone. I'm the sick rat with one eye and half a tail." Making rats is fun, so he felt much better. Between their floors, in the study s He teetered back in his chair and made more rats, stale light and tall packed shelves all sizes, colors, and denominations, bending with the weight of children's books, rats of the wallboard, rats of the landfill, rats you labor to be born in spite of them. of the alleyway, roadway, hallway, doorway, Through floor and ceiling they recite giddy and gr

Kurt Bertie Two Poems The shallow paintings on the walls of caves where the ibex and bison dance with the spear don't unman me. The monkey WHERE YOU SLEPT crouched on a woman's chest under a horse's flaring red nostrils hardly makes my eyelids flutter. Rabid bats Upstairs your mother stays up half the night yanking my hair out or starved rats sniffing my crotch ravaging the huge Sunday Times have never unsettled me. The vampire paralyzing my throat for the essential facts. She reads with his breath or Grendel tearing apart the smudges of many hands, the grey hairs my ribcage and clutching my heart like a poor sparrow's grown like lies through the decaying atmosphere have never stirred me from darkness. Not even my parents of politics and sex. slapping my bottom or shouting through me would disturb my coma. I have survived the Arctic winters, In the basement, escaping noise, the snowy owls that hunted my shadow like a following blizzard your father builds a model set to scale to leave me a frozen red smear on the tundra, the enormous bears on which a masterpiece will play, who stripped off my masks to reveal the terrible grin

34 POETRY NORTHWEST of a man. The eagle, goatsucker, the shrike diving David Bartoe on my broken skull disturb me no more than a nit. I have evaded the martens, the fishers, the mink and otter IN THE HERON'S SLEEP by swimming into their jaws before they can feast on my eyes. And in rivers that drown me, deserts that dry me, mountains In the heron's sleep that crush me, valleys that hold me, forests that trap me and the white crow's stare into the dream I hold before me with a broken hand near houses built and a cry, I sleep without caring, on the breakneck strand, alive in the soul of the soul surrendering. in tidal froth and garden ditch, in earthly fires and the terrors of the air, Mili Ve AfeNieee in heavens holier than the sea-cresting moon that undermines the sky, WAITING WHEN YOU DON'T COME

straw stalks and towers fall, An accident the cove life crumbles surely. You sprawled on some street, and the furry-eared owls senses pinched shut, rolled like a stone turn their eyes into the tomb of white nurses on Wellfleet's trembling tide, who can'thear you callmy name. while in the back yards Love in its hearse, rabbit clans hew and whisk, when I'm waiting and you don't come, fog burns off, is slowly up and down the streets to bring you like dark luggage old bees throng the goldenrod and these white buds glow back to me. Try to divide like risen souls, fierce, you from you in love with me. Just once sharp as harvest tines, in that trick mirror to see your eyes their tips not reflecting me. an intricate sea-sucked hue, Try to separate their stem-feathers slanting finding you in time from finding you out, higher than the stem, maybe mouth to mouth with some girl their roots washed clean who's saving your life. as any earthly daughter could be, Or, to understand their smallest cells turning bright when we meet next time, why we will both and blonde with praise. have lies to tell.

36 POETRY NORTHWEST 37 Stuart Dybek burglar alarm bouncing out of doorways, BRASS KNUCKLES we cut down a gangway of warm bread, Kruger sets his feet boots echoing before Ventura Furniture's plate glass window. through the dimlit viaduct on Rockwell We' re where I see his hand outlined in streetlights, flinging red streaks off the concrete walls, reflected across jumbled livingrooms, bedrooms, diningrooms, blood behind us smelling fresh bread splattered like footprints, from the flapping ventilator down the alley spoor for cops, behind Cross's Bakery. in a red haze of switches boxcars couple, His fist keeps clenching we jump the electric rail (our jaws grinding on bennies) knowing we' re already caught. through the four thick rings of the knuckles he made me in shop the day after I got stomped outside St. Sabina's. Gibboes Ruark

"The idea is to strike like a cobra. Don' t AUBADE TO THE GOVERNOR folloto through. Focusfull extension of potoer at the moment of impact." A statute of medieval Florence forbade lovers to make dawn serenades under pain of a fine or forfeiture of His fist uncoils the lute, viol, or other offending instrument. the brass whipped back a centimeter from Dear Death, it is nearly dawn nine hundred smashing out my teeth, Feet or years above your fearful city, the force waves And I am lying with her full of dread snapping my head back. I' ll start to sing, for which you have no pity. "See'?" he says. Forgive me, will you, if I hum a little Under my breath, I am so criminally glad Breathes deep three times, staring through himself To wake up prickly as a blooming nettle into the leopard skin sofa, Beside this rose of sleep in her own bed. I step back, thinking Besides, high up as we are, the sun itself how a diamond ring cuts glass, Cracks down on darkness with an early stealth, his fist explodes. We' re running And I start humming, I can't help myself, as the window cracks for half a block So ifby chance she should awaken, Death, and the knees drop out I pray you take it for an accident of our reflections, And let me off, with my offending instrument.

38 POETRY NORTHWEST 39 Stuart SileerrNars IV In the middle distance, the cows find the ground, THE FOUR CANONICAL FITS FITTED TO vaster than emperies, a little slough. "THE DAY THE MARTIANS LANDED Brittle boys prod Helios to an end. IN THE FIELDS" The frogs are still, awaiting the princess, The cows grazed in the meadows. who is to bear one away for pillow talk The boys fishe in the streams. when cats and crows have spraddled into sleep. The frogsfeasted in the bogs. Battening down the day, the floccose skies twist a lid on tight, The Martlans landed in the fields. angle savvy, good at pugging loopholes. Fred West, The Way of Language (An illustration of varying content morphemes On a shelf in the pantry, the cheese talks it over. substituted in a skeletal morphemic structure: The cheese talks it over, but the skeptic mice swagger off, "The .. . s . . .e d in the. . . s .") puffs of being vanishing down the night. I The cows grazed in the meadows considering whether it were the Day. JosePb Di Prisco The boys fished feverishly among the streams certain everything was a dream NO MORE BLEEDING HEARTS (e.g., frogs feasting in bogs, cows munching in placid disbelief, It is with heartfelt regret the Gracesen pointe again in the failing sedge). we announce the heart as a metaphor Where the fence chugged along the hilly ground, has suffered cardiac arrest. the cat with the cropped tail Let everyone take intensive care. tipped forward following a mouse. Inform the teenager in Topeka, lamenting her sweetheart's goodbye, II she may be heartbroken no longer. The crows, in the dumps, gazed blackly at the middens. Let the doctors get down to work once more, The bogs flushed royally, wasting the streams. transplanting cerebral cortex or libido. Fogs peeked in at the maidens, At the theatre the heartthrobbing chase pecked at the window panes, sniffing for cracks. has to be cancelled. The heartwarming call The dreams had been going on longer than recall; from Florida — the line is disconnected, longer than warranties; than guarantees; past recall Let Uncle Mort know — the bald one who or the remembrance of recall; endless as a point. devoured all of the anchovies­ he can forego his bout with heartburn III tonight. Hale the heartiest sailors, A winter stillness spent the summery heat. their heartlonging loves wait at port. Crows and cows grubbed in minny rows, Farewell, too, to fires at the hearth though the boys fished on, fitful, frantic for clues. where Spike, our mongrel with heartworm, Pooped, faintheart frogs could never fair maiden win has come back from the vet, cured. where the middle ways stretched naked as a jay. School becomes simpler (nothing to get down by heart), everything harder —nothing 40 POETRY NORTHWEST at all to set your heart upon. That Aunt Agnes, beautiful couple in Vienna, of course, for all the chance you had you know, at the cafe, they can't be ravished of marrying, you might as well I'm afraid at heart, their unplucked have been a tree. Your bathing cap heartstrings must remain in their place, patterned like tripe, the rubber still. Even those deaths that left us slippers stamped with moons and stars, heavy of heart, all winter heartwearied, you sit at Indian Neck and stare are, thank God, averted for now. And for now out of the picture, as if down there the heartless villain in a stovepipe hat a whale was dying finds himself out of a job. May he suffer in time of its stink. You threw Lolita a change of heart. No longer will he be out of my bedroom, tore tracked down by our hero in the Yukon. the salacious cover off Lord Jim. And looking out on the vast frozen ground, Paying you back, I picked a gone epoch's heartland, the hero is the one who your suitcase lock with bent takes heart, totally bereft of metaphor. hairpins, tapping and watering your private stock. The nephew closest to a son, I lived with you ten years,but you don't know me Brendan Guluin Two Poems from my brothers. You walk too near the traffic, dressed in Peck R Peck, WEAVE A CIRCLE ROUND ME TH RICE your mind still on that treadmill greased by forty years of Standard Oil. Before you filled the dark eye of my uncle You' re in this too, Aunt Delia, and he taught you to sip oysters reciting my report cards to off their shells, confess, my friends, and reading nieces' Aunt Eleanore, in your bellies like steamed mail. red-headed daysyou played the floozy. It doesn't matter now More than a whiff of scandal who bought the Fords with cash still attaches to a black dress and never drove them over thirty-five; wild with flowers unnatural to which claimed another stole the buttons Massachusetts. Later the Quaker off he clothes and took her radio. Oats pantry and Ma Perkins One is senile, two are dead. seed offers, the breast scar like One thought a sailor stood outside a burn that wouldn't heal. i' her window every night, the moon You' re the reason I expect riding his shoulder like my hand slapped to this day a cockatoo. One neversaid "Goodbye," if I take more than one always "Watch out!" Her blessing piece of candy. and a prophecy.

42 POETRY NORTHWEST a glitter like thin ice, You triple agents, nudged and browsed among once I saw you in your denim skirts the continents. and matching red sneakers, peeking into vacant shops along Prehensile, pudendous, Commercial Street. gesturing with black, retractable fingers, That's why, one of them whispered, the night you sneaked up on biding time, at the my first record hop, threshold of an ear. I was in a movie seven miles away.

SLUGS Sharon Bryan Three Poems

In the beginning RUNNING earth was already collapsed, molten, She turns so the wind is behind her. pocked with fumaroles, A mile gone, she tries to breathe slow enough older than it would be for another. She tightens her fists. again. We' re good at walking because we started young, Before the moon don't often kick our own ankles, hummed in mud and the stones She ran everywhere as a child. unhinged, cracking And fell, and held a scraped knee like dry pods, or elbow out of the bathwater and the sledge heads every night until she was ten. of tortoises for the What's the hurryP Can't you walkP first time lifted, Now she sprains her ankles. Some problems we solve over and over. slugs mused under leaves in the drowning Some people can stop their hearts sulfur light. They and start them. But not rode down grassblades while they' re runnmg. with the conviction of original envy, Her thigh muscles ache. Pump, reamed the wild her father would say cucumbers, leaving as she sat on the swing. husks smeared with Pump. She bent and straightened her legs.

NORTHWEST 45 44 POETRY Pump, she said to herself, and after hours he might take lessons. Twenty miles out the swing lifted. The air she's set in motion he has a flat, left front, blows in her face. and drives home on the rim.

The first time she ran a mile Something is wrong, everyone's up she coughed all night. in the night. The grandmother is holding the girl, There's always a residue of air, there's nothing to see but pink flowers we never breathe deep as we can. on dark wallpaper. People are standing Until we die — pictures of the soul too close together. One strange sharp face flying up out of the mouth. leans in. No one has turned on the lights. Here is your father they whisper, The first example of reflex action here is your father. is a hand pulled back from a stove. But if a child running falls hands out the hands are burned THE GREAT DIVIDE BASIN, WYOMING before the child thinks to cry. Later the scars bewilder palmists, You can see the rain coming for hours. the lifeline in and out of sight. Further south mountains send all the water downhill, some to each ocean. But here the divide Now her mouth tastes of blood is level and open, the only sign close to the surface. She breathes faster was put up by a road crew. to lose enough heat. Easier to keep going Most of the rain that falls is used. than it is to stop. For an hour the sagebrush is silver, birds are reflected in the standing water just before it rises in the sun. GOING BACK It is another hour before dust begins to rise and move toward us, He thinks, someone tips the jar the wake of a herd of wild horses. and we all slide to the other side. They will miss us by a hundred yards. War's over, go on home. There's nothing magic We leap to our pickup about flying, you still have to cross and without shutting the doors every mile you come to. He watches the sky run with them over the hazed ground. and forgets to blink. A wife and child, Our noise is lost in theirs he has their pictures, and a record though our mouths are wide open. they made in a booth — say hello, say hello. They turn and disappear down an arroyo. Local time it's the middle of the night, Our truck rocks in place, our faces but he buys a car for fifty dollars. are blank with dust. No sound He ignores all the hitchhikers comes back from the horses. so he can be alone. He loves to sing,

46 POETRY NORTHWEST 47 About Our Contributors

JOHN TaYLGR teaches at Washington and Jefferson College. His pamphlet, The London Poems, will be published soon by Fort Necessity Press. STEFHEN DUNN's second book of poems, Full of Lust and Good Usage, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. He teaches at Stockton State College in New Jersey. RoBERT HERsuoN's most recent book is Rocks and Chairs (Hanging Loose Press). He lives in Brooklyn. ARTHUR OBERGs critical study, Modern American Lyric, has just been published by Rutgers University Press. He teaches at the University of Washington. Rrcu Ivzs, the editor of Cutbank, lives in Missoula, Montana. J~E HAGE lives in Portland, Oregon. H

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