POETRY + NORTHWEST VOLUME SIXTEEN NUMBER FOUR EDITOR David Wagoner WINTER 1975-76 THOMAS BRUSH EDITQRIAL CQNsULTANTs Four Poems Nelson Bentley, William Matchett JOHN ALLMAN Three Poems, CovER DEsIGN ALBERT GOLDBARTH Allen Auvil The Chariots /The Gods . KIM STAFFORD historic marker . I l JACK ANDERSON I Faith 12 Cover from a photograph of a Weyerhaeuser Company clear-cut in the W; R. MOSES foothills of the Cascade Mountains by James 0. Sneddon. Three Poems . DONALD A. PETESCH Isadora and the Head from the Feet Manuscript . 1 7 / I G. E. MURRAY Shopping for Midnight. 18 ARTHUR VOGELSANG BOARD OF ADVISERS ,I Another Fake Love Poem Leonie Adams, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert B. Heilman, 19 Stanley Kunitz,Jackson Mathews, Arnold Stein CHARLES VANDERSEE Sculpture 20 ROBERT PACK POETRY NORTHWEST W I N TER 1975-76 VOLUME XVI, NUMBER 4 Advice to the Traveler . 21 Published quarterly by the University of Washington. Subscriptions and manu­ G. S. SHARAT CHANDRA scripts should be sent to poetry Northwest, 4045 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Univer­ Two Poems. sit y of Washington Seattle Washington,98195. Not responsible for unsolicited 22 manuscripts;all submissions must be accompanied by a stampeded self-addressed JOHN ENGMAN envelope.Subscription rate $4.50 per year; single copies, $1.50. Two Poems. 26 © 1976 bythe University of Washington HENRY CARLILE Butchering Crabs . 27 Distributed by B. DeBoer, 188 High Street, Nutley, N J 07110 and m the NAOMI CLARK West by L-S Distributors, 1161 Post Street, San Francisco, Calif. 9410 Cygnus XI . 29 MARC HUDSON POETRY Village. N ORTH~ E S T ANDREW GROSSBARDT W IN T E R 1 9 7 5 - 7 6 No One Has Done That Before 32 JOHN TAYLOR Fog at the Windows. ROSS TALARICO The Answer SANDRA M. GILBERT Thomas Brush Four Poems Two Poems. E. G. BURROWS THE ONE SONG The Pond RICHARD JACKSON You must have been here a long time sleeping 40 Adrift oA' Wight: Annotation s from a Life of Keats While your lungs performed their windy miracle JAMES RICHARDSON Over and overin the heart Two Poems. 41 Of a moonlessnight or hiding in the ashen room SEAN BENTLEY Of boredom, the small closet of death, not to notice Slideshow 44 The one song drifting through the gray D IANA 0 H E H I R Folds of winter, over the slowly melting Night Train 46 Edge of the earth, which, like these words Or the leaves rotting beneath your still feet, JANE AUGUSTINE 47 Wakes you tothe last white room, Two Poems. Morning and the open mouth THOMAS REITER Of love. Two Poems. 50 HAYDEN CARRUTH 51 Two Poems. B ELIEVING IN DR EAM S GREG KUZMA Three Poems . 52 For everything that has lost Everything, for the derelict's mad smile and the broken shoes In the continual rain Of the alley, for the broken Hips of all my fathers lying alone In the forgotten hotels, for the fresh initials Change of Address On the wandering walls, for the shot and dying Wolves and their last splintered vision Notify us promptly when you change your mailing address. O f the onecold moon, for the first Send both theold address and the new — and the ZIP code numbers. Allow us atleast six weeks for processing the change. Blue fog entering my daughter' s POETRY NORTHWEST Still lungs, for the burnt and blackened John Allman Three Poems Sides of the sun, for this place And now, I stay THE WEEPER Where I am, believing In dreams. I'm doing it openly at a formica table in Bickford's the waitress gives me hankies the Puerto Rican family is waving & nodding AGAIN my father is the counterman scraping his shoes poor man he steps in everything Though the war has been over for years and my mother the immigrant woman mopping nothing is dropping out the floor I weep into her bucket's milky Of the stone side of the sky to send you back across water 0 look it's never too late mother the nearest border but thebouncer in tuxedo's coming at me Except thebroken promise of snow, slowly filling the square yard In front of you, and the old lies as familiar as books cry he says keep crying out you go you or the weather, drifter who let you in unshaven your feet You stillwon't understand. You see the doors broken open again, poking through sneakerssit up straight The waterblacken and go bad, and children crouched like old men I see my daughter outside dancing for pennies Under treesand bridges. You imagine women in the last sad act I'm knocking onthe window hey you hey you Of war, wandering through the ruins of their lives, my father says close your eyes we' re counting carrying blankets the receipts go to sleep your mother is tired And sacks offood, the men gone, and the tom sheets of flame leaning on the mop 0 it's my sister 0 lucky Over everything. brother don't stuff napkins in your mouth quick a menu waitress where am I listen here PRAYER I am below theSaturday blue special baked fool with hash-browns & week-old lettuce It is the terrible silence and waiting bring me death & pancakes bring me something For the voicesof storm and wind, hoping beforeit's too late I can weep for at 25c For the lesson of lightning, the shaggy roar it's my wife blowing her nose it's good she says Of squallto be known again, but the weather's animals 0 lucky husband no one but you weeps so well Are more carefulnow. And the day crawls through the grass, come to bed inthe ice days of January in the A dead calm and nothinghappens. Now, you must evening beneath the quilt you can cry into my hair Kneel in the round light Of earth, and the soft light coming down From the longriver of clouds and thunderheads, crossing Miles of open sky, leaving the sharp green stillness Of the dyingstars, coming to You like the season that repeats Itself around you: hope silence a face in the water POETRY NORTHWEST THE SOUL GROWN LAZY THE KNUCKLER Dressed in black & We knew your stooped figure in Astoria Park, overweight,her voice damp: knuckle-bailer, your hand slow & disdainful she sighs, telling me of father on the diamond beneath the TriBoro Bridge, ofF on a big job overseas, fingers forking behind your back. Whatever you papa & his brothers. threw wobbled in the air like a soap bubble. I'm showing her the night city, Your mother was the nicest woman in a yard frowsy shops in alleys. fullof cukes & tomatoes. She bought you aquariums, Little boys pick my pockets little oxygen pumps, a Schwinn, blow-ups of father. & signs hang in windows She thought youtoo thin. She bought you huge of restaurants: Credit Good. mittens, big-shoulder coats, while the McDonald No aunts behind us, brothers spit on the metal doors of grocery cellars no Registrar,no mayor dozing where you slipped. Anyone at all could find beneath a floppy hat, just you in Mendel's, at the magazine rack, slipping her loneliness, huge & flabby, girlies between the pages of Sports Illustrated. leaning against me. I feelsweet. I kiss All those years, you waited for a fast sign: the fourth fold of her neck, a wave from theblonde divorcee in her bedroom my hand travels the ring acrossthe driveway. Through Woolworth binoculars, of her waist, I find webbing of blinds, you learned the moles & fine the many paths toher breasts. track of her spine, the rayon slide of her buttocks: She's worrying:what ifwe' re her hands behind her back unhooking a fullness caught what if the police in your head,behind your eyes, in your throwing hand come screaming red-faced that had only a knuckler, only an odd way of holding on. into this alley what if We couldn't hit you at all in those days, she'sreally no good eating the gray & muggy afternoons when the ball should pizza & doughnuts drinking have carriedinto the East River. We popped up, vanilla malteds watching we grounded out,the boys from Seymour's Hardware, TV all day sleeping waking & Baker's Garage, & Queeco's Beer, we whiffed in up eating the blankets filling sunlight, or under cumulus, in the shadow of a long bridge. the tub with ice cream her lips always caked with But she died suddenly, thirty-eight, a bad heart: chocolate frosting will I released from your grip, writhing in a midnight glare. love her will I love her? It was obviouslyyour fault.You stopped going to Mendel' s. Sold your Schwinn. Gave up fishing for minnows inthe bay near La Guardia: that airport built on garbage, carriage wheels, father's shoes. POETRY NORTHWEST 2. You stopped catching killies in bent window-screens, ***/*** Reports stopped bringingthem home alive in tomatoe cans, & pouring them into the tank with your tropical fish, ***/*** reports their activities like common children among angels, while your guppies include digging, making with thebulbous eyes gave birth & ate their young aggressiveaction among themselves, beneath the25c pink plaster bridges. You took apart marking territory. He posits the pumps. You began to focus on empty windows, sparrows. they may be ourinsides-out All morning, all afternoon, we hit you, 0 we hit you. as indicated by their damp-palmed stroking our snouts, or their kilnwork's accenting our manes, while they have clearly not seen Albert Goldbarth within, how our brains are ethereal gray clouds over sparse landscape THE CHARIOTS/THE GODS and: theirown inverted 1.