CANTO XXI-The Inferno of Dante Algierhi - Columbia: A Journal of ...

ROBERT PINSKY
CANTO XXI-The Inferno of
Dante Algierhi
1 And so we went from bridge to bridge, and spoke
2 Of matters the singing of which does not pertain
3 To my Comedia. At the peak we stopped to look
4 At the next fissure of Malebolge, and bain
5 Lamenting that was next—and what I beheld
6 Was an astounding darkness. As is done
7 In winter when the sticky pitch is boiled
8 In the Venetian Arsenal, to caulk
9 Their unsound vessels while no ship can be sailed
10 So instead one man uses the time to make
11 His ship anew, another one repairs
12 Much-voyaged ribs, and some with hammers strike
13 The prow, and some the stern; and this one makes
oars
14 While that one might twist rope, another patch
15 The jib and mainsail—so, not by any fires
16 But by some art of Heaven, a heavy pitch
17 Was boiling there below, which overglued
18 The banks on every side. I saw that much,

8 I CANTO XXI-The Inferno of Dante Algierhi
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20
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22
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26
27
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29
30
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34
35
36
37
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42
But could see nothing in it but the flood
Of bubbles the boiling raised, and the whole mass
Swelling and settling. While I stared down, my
guide,
Crying, "Watch out!—watch out!" pulled me across
Toward him from where I stood. I turned my head
Like someone eager to find out what it is
He must avoid, and who finds himself dismayed
By sudden fear, and while still turning back
Does not delay his flight; what I beheld
Hurrying from behind us up the rock
Was a black demon. Ah, in looks a brute,
How fierce he seemed in action, running the track
With his wings held outspread, and light of foot:
Over one high sharp shoulder he had thrown
A sinner, carrying both haunches' weight
On the one side, with one hand holding on
To both the ankles. Reaching our bridge, he spoke:
"O Malebranche, here is another one
Of Santa Zita's elders! While I go back
To bring more from his homeland, thrust him
below.
His city gives us an abundant stock:
Every citizen there except Bonturo
Practices barratry: and given cash
They can contrive ayes from any no.
43 He hurled the sinner down, then turned to rush
44 Back down the rocky crag, and no mastiff
45 Was ever more impatient to shake the leash
46 And run his fastest after a fleeing thief.
47 The sinner sank below, only to rise
48 Rump up—but demons under the bridge's shelf
49 Cried, "Here's no place to show your Sacred Face!
50 You're not out in the Serchio for a swim!
51 If you don't want to feel our hooks—like this!—
52 Then stay beneath the pitch." They struck at him
53 With over a hundred hooks, and said, "You'll need
54 To dance in secret, in this place you've come,
55 And grab at things covertly." Then they did
56 Just as cooks have their scullions do, to steep
57 The meat well into the cauldron with a prod
58 From their forks keeping it from floating up.
59 My good guide said, "So it will not be seen
60 That you are here, find some jagged outcrop
61 And crouch behind it to give yourself a screen.
62 No matter what offenses they offer me,
63 Do not be frightened: I know how things are done
64 Here in this place, and was in such a fray
65 Another time." Then, passing the bridge's head
66 And coming to the sixth bank, suddenly
67 He needed to keep a steady front. They bayed
68 And rushed at him with all the rage and uproar
69 Of dogs that charge some wretched vagabond
Pinsky I 9

10 I CANTO XXl-The Inferno of Dante Algierhi
70 Who suddenly is forced to plead—they tore
71 From under the bridge and raised their hooks at
him,
72 But he cried, "Not so savage!—before you dare
73 To touch me with your hooks, choose one to come
74 Forward to hear me; and then you can decide
75 To hook me, or not." Then they all cried one name,
76 "Let Malacoda go." So the others stood
77 While one strode forward to him, sneering, "What
78 Good will it do him?" So my master said,
79 "Do you, O Malacoda, think I could get
80 Through all of your defenses safely as this
81 Except by heaven's will and happy fate?
82 Now let us pass—for Heaven also decrees
83 That I should show another this savage road."
84 Then his pride fell so much that he let loose
85 His hook, which fell down at his feet, and said,
86 "Now no one may strike him." To me, my leader
called,
87 "Now you may come back safely to my side.
88 You who crouch squatting behind the splintered
shield
89 Of stone upon the bridge." And so I stirred
90 And quickly joined him; and the devils milled
91 Toward us, pressing forward so that I feared
92 They might not keep the pact. So I once saw
93 The soldiers frightened, when they removed their
guard.
£
94 From Camprona under pledge, as they withdrew
95 Passing through such a host of enemies,
96 I kept as close by my guide as I could go.
97 And all the while I did not take my eyes
98 From their expressions—which were not good.
99 They lowered their hooks, and I heard one give
voice:
100 "Should I touch him on the rump?" Replied
101 Another, "Yes—do give him a little cut."
102 But the demon who was talking with my guide
103 Turned around instantly hearing that,
104 Saying "Hold—hold, Scarmiglione!" To us,
105 He said, "You can't go farther by this route,
106 Because along this ridge the sixth arch lies
107 All shattered on the bottom. But if you still
108 Wish to go forward, a ridge not far from this
109 Does have a place where you can cross at will.
110 It was on yesterday, five hours later than now,
111 That the twelve hundred and sixty-sixth year fell
112 Since the road here was ruined. I'm sending a crew
113 Out of my company in that direction
114 To see if sinners are taking the air. You go
115 With them, for they'll not harm you in any fashion
116 Come Alichino and Calcabrina," he cried,
117 "And you, Cognazzo; and to be the captain
118 Of all ten, Barbariccia. And in the squad,
119 Take Libicocco and Draghignazzo, too,
120 And Ciriatto with his tusky head,
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12 I CANTO XXI-The Inferno of Dante Algierhi
121 And also Graffiacane and Farfarello,
122 And crazy Rubicante. Search all around
123 The pools of boiling tar. And see these two
124 Get safely over to where the dens are spanned
125 By the next ridge, whose arc is undestroyed."
126 "O me, O master, what do I see," I groaned,
127 "We need no escort if you know the road—
128 As for me I want none. If you are cautious,
129 As is your custom, then how can you avoid
130 Seeing them grind their teeth, and with ferocious
131 Brows threaten to do us harm?" And he returned
132 "I tell you to have no fear; it is the wretches
133 Who boil here that they menace: so let them grind
134 As fiercely as they like, and scowl their worst."
135 And then the company of devils turned,
136 Wheeling along the left hand bank. But first,
137 Each signaled their leader through the same grimace,
138 Baring their teeth, through which the tongue was
pressed,
139 And the leader made a trumpet of his ass.
A Translator's Notes
If there is a comic section of the Inferno, it is in Canto XXI and
Canto XXII, in which the demons of the Malebranche, with their invented
names—the equivalent of Meandog, Tanglehead, Badtail, Pig-
T Pinsky I 13
face—torment barrators, the sellers of public office: the crime of which
Dante was accused by his own enemies. Athletic, winged, coarsely menacing,
communicating occasionally by farting, these demons have an exaggerated,
George Lucas vividness.
The translator's task with this material includes moving the adventure
narrative along while maintaining the gravity of both Dante the
writer's moral and intellectual scheme, and Dante the pilgrim's quest. In
the Italian, this kind of balance is provided in part by terza rima the
linked rhyme scheme Of aba bcb cdc, etc which Dante invented for his
poem.
In English, which is more poor in rhyme than Italian, the triple
rhymes of terza rima can threaten to distort the order of the words and
even the selection of the words. Successful translations of the poem into
English have either abandoned rhyme altogether, or sacrificed the natural
order and vocabulary of English. Convinced that the form of terza rima
uniquely conclusive yet propulsive, is integral to the poem, I have tried to
find another way to go about rendering it in English.
This translation lets the sentences run over the ends of lines and tercets,
and defines rhyme more liberally than the hard, "perfect" rhyme of,
say, "spoke/broke." Instead, the translation treats those words as
rhyming which have the same terminal consonant, regardless of how
much the vowel may vary. Thus, the opening lines of XXI contain the
pair "spoke I look" and such triplets as "pertain/vain/done" and "beheld/boiled/sailed."
These consonantal rhymes, in a sense, rhyme for
English—with its immense, diverse vocabulary and its poverty of
rhymes—as much as "campo/scampo" stand out in the different fabric of
Italian.
The action of this Canto does seem to have a comic or deflating element,
from its teasing first line about what will not be included, through
the digressive simile of the Venetian shipyard and Dante's fearful walk
through the gauntlet of demons. One gesture within that action reaches
for proportion or fitness, including the dispelling of fear—with the object
of terror dwindled at last to be laughable, to the grotesque, to mere wind.

MADISON SMARTT BELL
Confession
In August of 1791, a large number of the black slaves of the French
colony of Sainte Domingue met at the LeNormand Plantation on
the borders of the forest called Bois Cayman, to organize a revolt
against their white masters. The slave uprising, which broke out a
couple of weeks later, lasted for ten years and finally resulted in the
independence of Haiti.
Arnaud rode up the river valley from the ford, followed by
his negre chasseur Orion. The trail he'd been told of did exist
but was hard to follow in its twistings along the mountain
escarpments, going up and further up the gorge. Below, out of
his sight, he could hear the noise of some tributary stream,
rushing to join the Massacre River. They went slowly, their
mounts picking their way, Arnaud's horse less easily than the
mule ridden by his slave, though oftentimes both men had to
dismount to lead them. Twice they found their way barred by
obstructions they must clear: a slide of muddy rock and a fallen
tree trunk half-rotted over the trail. Arnaud had no choice
but to put his own hand to the work and at those moments he
wished he had brought more niggers along to help, although
in other ways they would have hindered his journey.
A cloud brooded over the mountain top above and ahead
of them, and the jungle grew denser and damper, edging its
way onto the trail. As the sun passed its zenith Arnaud began
to grow uneasy. There was no sign of the men he expected to
meet and he dearly wished to complete his return from the
mountains before night. Across the gorge from where they
Hell I 15
made their way was the vestige of a clearing with banana
suckers sprouting from what might have been terraces cut into
the nearly sheer slope. As if someone had tried to carve a
dwelling place and since abandoned it. It put Arnaud in mind
of the maroon bands who very likely traveled these hills. He
shook his head dourly and pressed on, following Orion, who
had now taken the lead. The black stopped short and wrinkled
his nose.
"Qu'est-ce qu'ily a?" Arnaud said.
"Fume'e." Orion swept a hand widely around the area and
surveyed the gorge with a slow rotation of his head. Arnaud
imitated the movement, hoping to catch a glimpse of something
in the corner of his eye. He saw nothing, but a ghostly
odor seemed to waft his way, not smoke so much as a surreal
unlikely smell of roasting meat. He and Orion exchanged a
. shrug and continued. Some fifty yards further on the trail
Orion stopped again and stared into the thickness of the
jungle.
"La, Id," he muttered.
Still Arnaud could not see anything at first. Then at last
his eye discerned another clearing within the thick bush above
them and at its edge three figures waiting, posed almost as still
as the trees, two blacks and what he took to be a Spaniard
dressed in the kilt and boots of a boucanier of half a century
gone, his face shaded out of view by the wide brim of his hat.
There seemed nowhere on earth this party might have come
from but there they were.
"De donde viene?" Arnaud called out half believingly.
"Donde va?"
The Spaniard's voice came from nowhere, or out of the
whole jungle all around. Arnaud left Orion holding the horses
on the trail and began to climb the slope dividing them. So
high on the mountain the jungle was always very wet and his
footing was so uncertain in the mud he had to haul himself up
by clutching at the trunks of trees. The meat smell blew in his
face again. When he reached the others he saw that they had

16 I Confession
spitted a shoulder of wild pig and were roasting it over a
muddy pit. The Spaniard crouched at the fire's edge companionably
with the two blacks who were pulling off strips of the
loosening meat as it cooked and eating it with their fingers.
"Ah, Michel," the Spaniard said, standing again as
Arnaud came level with him. "1 didn't know it would be
you." He took off his hat, and with a start Arnaud recognized
Xavier Tocquet, a long mass of hair tied back with a greasy
bit of black ribbon, and a short pointed Spaniard's beard he'd
grown.
"Nor I you," Arnaud said, trying to conceal his breathlessness.
In climbing the grade he'd broken into a clammy
sweat, though it was quite cool in the jungle shade.
"Have you yet dined?" Tocquet inquired.
Arnaud looked distastefully at the shreds of meat and
roasted plantains still in their skins, spread on a glossy banana
leaf. It was not the plainness of the provender which displeased
him so much as the casual way Tocquet partook of it
alongside the blacks.
"Merci, mais non," he said. "I haven't time."
"Of course." Tocquet's deep-set eyes were glittering; perhaps
his beard concealed a smile. He was a head taller than
Arnaud, big-boned but lean in his loose clothing. His hands
were huge; he raised one and waved it further on. "Allez,
voyez," he said.
Arnaud climbed a little higher. From the far side of the fire
pit he could see the clearing better: another abandoned cultivation,
with the plantains running wild. Here six pack mules
in a train were foraging on the jungle floor. Arnaud turned
back the canvas from the back of one; beneath, the blunt muskets
were bundled like firewood. He went on examining load
after load, roughly calculating as he went along. As he went
from mule to mule he looked all around the jungle and the
borders of the clearing but there was no track or any other
sign to show how the pack train might have reached this
place.
T Bell I 17
"Satisfactory?" Tocquet called to him, from where he hunkered
over the fire pit.
"Ouais, bien sur," Arnaud said. He walked back to the lead
mule and slipped a finger through its halter. All the mules
were harnessed in a line and the whole string came behind
him docilely, stopping when he stopped and nosing again at
the jungle floor.
"You're welcome to eat," Tocquet said. "Gall your man
up if you like." The two blacks had stopped eating; they sat
back on their haunches and watched Arnaud with a quiet animal
concentration. Above, invisibly, a cloud drifted over the
forest ceiling, and the space where they gathered grew darker.
"I want to be off the mountain before night," Arnaud said.
One of the blacks relaxed himself to lift a fresh whole pepper
pod from the banana leaf and begin eating it
"You've become altogether a Spaniard, Xavier?" Arnaud
said. On the plain or in the coast towns he would not have addressed
Tocquet by his first name, but it was difficult to muster
any formality now.
"What does it matter here?" Tocquet tossed his head
back. His neck swelled against the mass of his hair. Arnaud
saw the uneven curls of beard sparse on his throat.
"This place was here before our nations," Tocquet said.
"I'll trade you for your horse." He jerked his head at three
saddled mules which where tethered to thorny saplings at a
brief distance from the fire pit. Arnaud stared at them for a
moment and then burst out laughing.
"It's harder going down than up," Tocquet said.
"Vous etes gentille," Arnaud said. He peered down toward
the trail. Orion, holding the horse and mule, had pressed himself
partly into the trees for shelter from the light spatter of
rain that was now tapping down on the leaves overhead. "I
think not, however...."
"As it pleases you," Tocquet said, gazing neutrally at the
fat dripping onto the coals from the spitted shank, whose
white bone glistened through tears in the flesh.

18 I Confession
Arnaud tugged on the lead mule's halter, meaning to
guide the pack train down the steep slope to the trail. He had
not gone more than twenty paces before his feet shot from under
him in the mud and leafmold. An arm crooked over a
branch stopped him from falling altogether and saved a portion
of his dignity. Tocquet, expressionless, snapped his fingers,
and the two blacks rose from their meal and completed
the task of guiding the pack train down. Arnaud heard Orion
speak to them and heard that they answered, but he could not
make out if they were speaking Creole or some African Tongue;
it irked him not to understand what they said. His boots were
clubs of mud, and when he slipped he'd strained a muscle, his
legs splaying in opposite directions. He used the branch to
straighten himself and took his weight shyly on both legs.
"Go with God, Michel!" Tocquet had risen to bid him
good-bye, his huge hands paddling before him like flounder.
"la rencontre...." Arnaud smiled at him speechlessly over his
shoulder. With care he made his way back to the trail.
At first he took the lead on the way down, while Orion
brought up the rear of the pack train. The cloud that had been
raining on them detached itself from the mass that clung to
the mountain peak, drifted away and dissipated. The sun began
to redden, westering over the hills. Making the best haste
he could, Arnaud thought of Xavier Tocquet, the times they'd
ridden together after runaways in the marechaussee. When the
going grew too rough for horses, Tocquet would always shed
his boots and go up with mulattos and the black slavecatchers,
quick as a land crab over the rocks, on those occasions
Arnaud had sneered at him, along with other whites who
remained with their mounts. Now he wondered, if Orion had
not seen them, whether Tocquet would have let them pass and
climb the mountain endlessly.... It had been more than
strange to hear Tocquet mention the name of God.
More sure-footed, the lead mule kept nosing into the hindquarters
of Arnaud's horse. Yet he was too stubborn to dismount,
until at last the horse's footing failed it on the muddy
w Bell
*L
I 19
shale and it fell spraddled across the ledge, dumping Arnaud
into the bush. He picked himself up, wiped a hand at the
slick of mud on his shirt sleeve. The horse lay with its neck
stretched, flanks pumping air, a foreleg broken. The lead mule
overlooked the disaster with a supercilious expression, as it
seemed. Arnaud backhanded it across the muzzle with all his
strength but the mule scarcely bothered to draw back its head.
"Well, kill it then," Arnaud told Orion, as the black made
his way to the head of the train. He turned his back, and
waited for the horse's final sigh of expiration before he looked
again. The tendons stretched tight across Orion's back as he
squatted, straining to shove the dead horse off the trail into
the gorge. Arnaud watched from where he stood. He felt a revulsion
against touching the animal's dead hide. Orion gave
an enormous heave and the horse tumbled over the edge with
limp legs flailing at the air and slid down the damp slope,
crushing saplings and tearing away vines. A few yards down,
the carcass snagged on a cylindrical duster of bamboo and
hung there. Orion stood up, gasping from his effort. He looked
over the edge and clicked his tongue.
They went on, Orion leading the pack train afoot, while
Arnaud listlessly sat the uncomfortable mule saddle. Orion's
mount required little guidance and Arnaud let it pick its own
way without interference. Still their progress was slow. They
made their way around a deep involution of the gorge, from
which the trail wrapped around another outcropping. At this
vantage they could again see the horse's carcass rucked up
into the bamboo, but the sight of it was fading in the quickly
thickening dusk.
Arnaud saw that they would spend the night on the mountain
after all. They camped, if one could call it that, across the
trail itself out of the dark came a smell of corruption, and
Arnaud thought of the horse, though it hardly could have decayed
so soon. At last he realized it was the birds Orion had
shot, deliquescent in the saddlebag. He scooped them out and
pitched them into the ravine. They had not water enough for

20 I Confession
him to rinse his hands; he scrabbled his fingers in the damp
leaves and brushed them off but a vague odor of rot still clung
to them. He interrupted Orion's effort to start a fire; there was
nothing to cook and he did not want to show a light. They
were not provisioned for an overnight stay but there were
some cooked yams in a saddlebag. Arnaud ate one of these
without interest and left the rest for his slave.
The rain forest clouds sealed off the sky, raining on them
fitfully. Arnaud huddled in his thin clothes. It was unpleasantly
chilly, and remained so even when the rain stopped and
a rent opened in the clouds so that the stars again appeared.
The mules were restless on their short tethers and often Orion
had to rise to quiet them. His mind wandered. He rehearsed
the journey ahead of him, three days across the northern plain
and through the mountains into the western province, where
the mulattos and his royalist co-conspirators would be waiting
for him at Croix les Bouquets. He thought of Choufleur and
Maltrot and what they might be doing at this moment (they'd
be more pleasantly sheltered than he, undoubtedly), and he
wondered when the insurrection they were stage-managing in
the north was likely to begin. He did not think he slept at all,
but when his eyes opened onto daylight he felt that he had
been dreaming something which left him with a strange sense
of dread. He thought his wife had somehow figured in the
dream, though he could not remember it, and though he almost
never dreamed of her.
His leg had stiffened in the night and was so sore he had to
bite back a groan when he mounted the mule. Up the ravine,
the dead horse's belly had swelled and its legs stuck out rigidly
from it. Arnaud ground his teeth and started down the trail.
The day was fair and clear, and the sun and the saddle's
movement seemed to soften his injury. As they descended, the
undergrowth above and below the trail grew dryer. Also there
was a smell of smoke which Arnaud could not place and so far
there was no sign of where it came from.
Before noon they reached the ragged edge of the outmost
Bell I 21
hill where the plain and the Massacre River could be seen.
Orion stopped so shortly that the mule he was leading
bumped him with its shoulder. He turned and looked back at
Arnaud, aghast. Arnaud had cupped a hand over his mouth;
he removed it, briefly, to speak.
"C'est rien," he said. "Vas-y, vas-y...."
Orion faced forward and moved off along the trail. Arnaud
felt a vague stirring of nausea, perhaps from the mule's unfamiliar
motion. Beyond the Massacre the cane fields were blanketed
with a heavy black smoke. Apart from that it was eerily
quiet and there was nothing whatsoever to be seen. It had
started then, already. Though the spectacle was not unexpected,
it troubled Arnaud to know that the rich cane was
burning, and he did not feel as fully master of the situation as
he would have liked.
At last they came to the river ford and crossed it. Even
muleback, Arnaud was wet to his knees, but his trousers had
dried by the time they reached the priest's compound. Here
they halted the pack train and Arnaud called out but there
was no answer. He dismounted with less pain than he'd expected
and looked into the ajoupa, then limped to the church.
Both houses were unoccupied but seemed in good order; there
was no sign of looting or violence, though the fires had burnt
up to the edge of the clearing where they stood.
He climbed back onto the mule and they continued in the
direction of ouanaminthe at a much more rapid pace than before.
Still it was twilight again by the time they entered the
city, coming along the Dahabon road and crossing the levee
that had been raised along the riverbank. The levee was lined
with men standing almost in military postures, though they
did not seem to be soldiers. It was already too dark to distinguish
their faces at a distance but Arnaud thought it strange
that no one hailed them.
In the lead again, he rode up the street in the direction of
the government house. Before he could reach it a throng of
men surged across the street to bar his way. Many were armed

22 I Confession
with muskets similar to the ones his mules were bearing, and
they were all mulattos. Arnaud realized that he had not seen a
white man since entering the town.
"What's the meaning of this?" he shouted at a man who
had caught his mule's bridle and so held him arrested. In answer
another mulatto poked a bayonet toward his belly, and
for the first time he felt a twinge of fear. He looked over his
shoulder, but Orion was gone.
Then someone called out a command and the bayonet was
lowered from his ribs. A man was striding across from the
houses with an air of authority, and the other mulattos turned
expectantly to face him. Arnaud squinted in the dusk and
with a flush of relief he recognized the freckled features of
Choufleur.
"You've come in good time," Choufleur informed him.
"Yes," Arnaud said. He looked over his shoulder again;
some men were unloading the first two mules in the train and
handing out the muskets to other, unarmed mulattos who
were coming out of the side streets in increasing numbers.
"But this must stop at once!" Arnaud called out, and looking
at Ghoufleur, "You must stop them."
Choufleur said nothing. In the dimness, the patterns of his
freckles were swimming on his face, though his green eyes
were steady and sharp on Arnaud as he lifted his hand.
Arnaud wondered if the half-breed expected a handshake. As
he was thinking this, Choufleur caught his wrist and tugged
him rudely down from the saddle. Arnaud shouted incoherently,
more from the insult than the pain of his wrenched leg.
He would have slapped Choufleur but two other men had
pinned his arms behind him.
"What do you mean by it?" he said. "Where is my servant?"
He could feel that his wrists were being tied together
with a prickly length of sisal cord.
"You have no servant," Choufleur said. "You have nothing
at all."
Arnaud spat at him, but Choufleur stepped aside and let
the gob fall in the dust, one of the men behind him gave him
Bell I 23
a rough shove and tripped him so he fell onto his knees.
Choufleur closed a hand on the back of Arnaud's neck and
pressed his head into the dirt, scrubbing his face across his
own spittle. Then he jerked him to his feet by his hair.
The two other men hustled him forward, one leading him
and the other behind. All down the pack train, mulattos were
shouting with pleasure as they received the new weapons.
Arnaud caught sight of Pere Bonne-chance beyond this
throng, standing beside the buildings in his black robes, the
sole still point in the confusion swirling around him. Arnaud
stared wildly and the priest seemed to look back at him, but
with no reaction—as if Arnaud had been rendered invisible. A
prod of a bayonet sent him hurrying on.
He was brought to the cellar of a private house which
might have been used to store wine, but was empty now except
for another white man who had been badly beaten about
the face. The faint light that drifted in from a grating near the
ceiling was scarcely enough to reveal his battered features, but
he raised himself on his elbows and called Arnaud by name.
Coming nearer, Arnaud recognized a Ouanaminthe planter
named Robin eau, some ten years his senior and a slight acquaintance.
"What's happened?" he asked. What's happened here?"
Robineau's front teeth had been smashed out so his reply
was indistinct. "The mulattos...." he muttered, and did not
go on.
"Evidemrnent" Arnaud said. Where did they get the guns?"
"Oge," Robineau mouthed. "I heard that. The guns were
hidden from the Oge rising."
Arnaud grunted and walked toward the grating. By standing
on tiptoe he could obtain an ankle-level view of the street,
full of men hurrying to and fro, calling out to one another in
Creole, some carrying torches now. It was awkward to keep
his balance without the use of his hands. He crossed the cellar
to where Robineau was propped against the wall and lowered
himself into a squat.
"Would you be so kind as to get this rope off me?" He wig-

24 I Confession
gled his fingers, which were beginning to swell from the pressure
on his wrists, and waited, but the touch he expected did
not come. He glanced over his shoulder.
"I don't think. . . I shouldn't...." Robineau looked uneasily
toward the door. "Mieux que vous restez comme qa."
Arnaud deflated, rolling off his heels to sit down on the
cold flagstones, which were thinly covered with dampish
straw. In Robineau's tone and fearful expression he recognized
that mood of abject helplessness he'd always sought to
inspire in his own slaves, and he felt it would be a matter of
minutes or hours at most before he sank into this state himself.
The grated window slowly glazed over into total darkness.
Arnaud lowered his head. His shoulders ached and he could
do nothing to ease them. The mixture of dirt and spit was drying
on his cheek and he was unable to wipe it. With his boot
he shuffled the straw in front of him into a little mound.
Presently the door opened and Choufleur entered, carrying
a candle. "Get up" he said, pointing to Arnaud.
Arnaud squinted at him, blinking at the candle's flame.
Robineau had twisted his face away from the light. Arnaud
raised himself again into a squat and when he saw that
Choufleur made no move to help him rise he pushed himself
all the way up unassisted, scraping his shoulder along the wall
for balance.
At Choufleur's gesture, he preceded him out of the room
and mounted the stairs, the freckled mulatto coming behind
with the candle. When they reached the street Choufleur
clamped his arm above the elbow and guided him toward another
building, nearer the government house. By now there
was less commotion in the street, but Arnaud could hear musket
shots from the edge of town, along with shouts that suggested
celebration more than battle.
"I want to show you something," Choufleur said.
They entered the second house and Choufleur conducted
him to a ground-floor room, furnished as an office. There were
many mulattos gathered round the desk but no one took note
Bell I 25
of their entry, and they remained standing in the shadows by
the doorway. The others were all drinking wine from the necks
of various bottles which they held. Arnaud's eye was reluctantly
drawn to a large light-skinned man dressed in elaborate
military uniform, raising a wine bottle and bubbling it with its
butt thrust at the roof.
"Candi," Choufleur muttered. "Vous n'avez pas fait son connaissance?"
Arnaud said nothing. The group around the desk parted
and now he could see, seated behind it, a white man with
graying hair who must have occupied a post of authority
there, though now his arms were bound to the chair and he
was so tightly gagged that the corners of his mouth were
bleeding. His eyes were round and watery in the light of the oil
lamp that stood on the desk. Candi set the wine bottle down
and picked up the corkscrew that lay beside the lamp.
Choufleur's hand tightened on Arnaud's arm. "Regardez,"
he said. "Attention."
Candi wound the old cork meticulously from the screw,
and lightly tried the point of the instrument against the ball of
his left thumb. He stooped, smiling, and placed the screw
gently against the white man's eyeball and with a slow precision
began to turn it in. The white man went rigid against the
chair back, and from behind the gag came a strangulated
retching sound. Arnaud's eyes squeezed shut and he bit into
his lip. He heard Choufleur's voice in the dark, rapturously
tonguing an English phrase.
"Out, vile jelly," and in French again, "Does it not remind
you of the blinding of Gloucester?" He noticed Arnaud then,
and slapped him so that his eyes popped open. "Watch, or
you will take his place. You must see."
Arnaud obeyed, his lids pinned back. He was having difficulty
with his breathing.
"Take out the gag," Candi said, and one of the others
quickly did so. What came from the white man's mouth was a
kind of sigh, an aaahhhhh one eyelid sagged over the bloody

26 I Confession Bell I 27
socket while the other eye rolled evasively. Gandi sighted
down the length of the corkscrew. The white man's howl was
deafening when he drove it in, with a delicate gradual rotation
that finally brought his knuckles flush against the other's
cheek. Candi's teeth clenched, his forearm tensed: he yanked.
There was a sucking plop, followed by a shout of appreciation
all around the room. The eyeball was larger than Arnaud
would have thought possible, and pudgy, like a dumpling. It
depended from a number of white twisting tentacle-like cords,
till someone reached with a knife to cut it completely free.
Candi held the eyeball high on the screw and grinned and
laughed at it. He did a little dance step, boot heels clicking on
the floor. Arnaud's bowels will-lessly released and he felt that
he was soiling his trousers. Choufleur turned and inspected
him with an extraordinary satisfaction.
"But probably you have not read Shakespeare at all,"
Choufleur said. "You see that my education is superior to
yours."
Without saying anything more, Choufleur returned him to
the cellar across the street, and went away closing the door silently
behind him. Robineau had disappeared. The clump of
straw was wetter than it had been, dripping actually, when
Arnaud stirred it with his foot. It reeked of blood. Arnaud was
loathe to sit down anywhere. He was aware of the stench and
clinging damp of the feces that coated the insides of his legs.
The white man's scream still buzzed, distorted, in his inner
ear. In his mind's eye the dead horse appeared, bloated with
its necrid gasses. He stood below the grating, straining to see
out; there was a column of men tramping along the street. In
the aureole of their torch light the face of Pere Bonne-chance
materialized.
"I will hear your confession, my child, if you desire it," the
priest said.
Arnaud wondered if he might not be hallucinating. "Yes,"
he said. "Yes." The priest vanished from beyond the grating,
and a moment later the door swung open.
I
"But how did you get in?" Arnaud said.
"It wasn't locked," the priest said. "There's no lock on it,
but you've been distracted. Hurry, you must go in front."
When they reached the street the priest pushed Arnaud's
head down so it was bowed and went along half a pace behind
him, chanting a paternoster in Latin. The column continued to
pass in the opposite direction alongside them, most of the men
now blacks dressed as fieldhands, but carrying the muskets
Arnaud had inadvertently provided. Some glanced at them
curiously as they went by, but took no further notice.
Pere Bonne-chance led Arnaud down another street toward
the levee and thence out onto the Dajabon road. There
were bonfires lit on the levee's height and men were crying out
to the stars and firing off their muskets at the sky and pouring
rum from broken barrels onto the flames to make them leap.
They had not got very far along the road from these festivities
before they heard a party of horsemen approaching from the
opposite direction.
"Quickly," the priest said, and hauled Arnaud down the
steep bank into the river. The water was suddenly, surprisingly
deep. Arnaud felt the priest's hand cupped under his
chin, supporting him, till his flailing boot found footing on a
rock. He could hear the jingle of harness as the horses passed,
though he could not see them. The priest's hands worked
around his wrists and as he gratefully fanned his fingers over
the surface of the water he saw the length of sisal rope go drifting
downriver, twisting palely in the current like a snake.
"They would have killed you," Arnaud said. "Did you not
see what inhuman monsters they are?"
"It may be that they follow the old dispensation," the
priest said. The skirts of his habit came floating up around
him. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
"They might have done worse than kill you, indeed,"
Arnaud said, scarcely listening to his own words. With delight
he felt the river purging the filth from between his legs.
"Oh, the ones who are superstitious would fear to harm

28 I Confession
me," the priest said. "Those who are educated would dislike
to offend the Church." He clambered up onto the bank and
peeled out of his robes and wrung them out. Arnaud followed
him, pulling off his own wet things, scrubbing his trousers on
a stone as he had seen slave women do.
"But you are not really even a priest." he said.
"Because I am not chaste, you say this," Pere Bonnechance
said. Arnaud could see his bullet head thrusting about
in the strange light. The stars were mostly obscured by persistent
smoke and they were now well away from the fires on the
levee, but the sky gave off a weird red glow reflected from the
burning cane fields.
"But I must believe that God approves of love," Pere
Bonne-chance said. He bundled his wet robe on his shoulder
and began walking barefoot and naked along the roadside.
Arnaud followed, naked himself but for his boots, which he
was too tenderfooted to go without.
The priest looked back once over his pale and hairy shoulder.
"No love is wasted," he said, with a faint smile. Arnaud
nodded, though he did not understand. Boots squelching, he
kept on following the priest into the dark.
HEATHER McHUGH
Unbroken Water
It took time to calm, but when
the surfaces had stilled the face,
that one lit lens—
her head shone the deepest and farthest away,
its long hair dripping needlepoints
up toward her eyes. All was outside
down or topside in: in broken Rosettas
was one still intelligible? Used to
partnerships, two breasts (implacable) drank
quite comanionly there at the pool, tip to tip,
each with others, a practical
endlessness, poured from the pair. . .
This was mesmer to terrify mortals: she rose
from the tubworld of calm and corrobors
in order to carry her own weight again,
into this, the mundanest emergency:
the world at large, a land
a land of separations hefted,
oppositions borne. And as she did,
her lightness fell from her; it wound away
in a coilwork and threadwork of time,
it swept in shining down and
fell behind (in the sense of eventual).
Now it was clear who was blind.

30 I Close to Yclept
Close To Yclept
I came damn near some funny John Hancocks.
My husband's, for one: in the native,
it's priest, but translated
it's comical, pop-off; his daughter's
pop-over (her fresh parts
deserve it). My own
now unshakable moniker's mostly
a flower and sneeze. Take my mother:
nicknamed for a spice-bread. My ex's
is Lelyveld—that's inex-
plicably risible (he
never laughed); as for Biss—it's about
as distinguished as Shid—he was thinking of
naming his latest kid April (like showers)
or Bertha, my God—And then
Mirskin (a peace-nik? a hairpiece?)—I ask you what makes
me
attracted to men with such names? A desire to live
dangerously? What's a wunderkind doing in
worlds so yclept? What's a Wang's product code, what's that
chicken-store called, on the Ave in Seattle—Proud
I
Bird! Jesus Christ! it's a hard
row to hoe, being raised
in a name, being bred
in a bone, being
beings, in
short and
in sum.
McHugh I 31

A. MANETTE ANSAY
Risk
Michael leans over the sink to lift the frilly orange curtain;
he stares out at a sky that simmers with clouds.
For the past few months, he's been worried about the garbage
skittering along the curbs and collecting under the shrubs in
shapes like small, huddled animals. Garbage incubates germs,
germs carry disease, and people die of diseases every day. Michael
is fourteen, but he intends to live a long time. Now, there
is a new threat: the first snow of the year. The clouds weigh on
his chest like pneumonia, thick, unyielding.
The kitchen is small, crowded with dishes and grey, stiffened
dishtowels, magazines, old newspapers. On the counter,
two goldfish bump noses in an egg-shaped bowl. Michael lets
the curtain fall and turns to his sister Melanie. "I am not going
to school until spring," he says. "It's just too dangerous."
Melanie is at the table, finishing her cereal. She is one year
older than Michael. A cracked white bowl filled with rotting
apples crowds her elbow, and the smell of the apples sticks to
Michael's teeth. He desperately wants to throw the apples
away, but he's afraid of getting rotten apple on his hands. The
risk would be too great: apple germs burrowing into his pores,
swimming through his veins.
"So what are you afraid of now?" Melanie says. She drinks
juice straight from the carton, ignoring Michael's wince. Melanie
isn't bothered by other people's germs or the rotten apples
on the table. She doesn't notice the bags of bottles stacked
along the kitchen walls, the dead spider plants in the window,
the crescents of mud beneath the table. Michael notices all
these things; he carefully avoids touching them, for if he does,
Ansay I 33
no matter how hard he scrubs his hands, he still will not feel
clean.
"It's going to snow."
"So now you're afraid of snow." Melanie's voice is flat; she
is not afraid of anything. If it snows, she'll smuggle a tray from
the cafeteria and sled with the littler kids on Bone Hill after
school. She'll wait in line up top, bulky in her winter coat with
the sleeves that come just past her elbows and the underarms
ripped out on both sides. When her turn comes, she'll scrunch
onto the tray and jolt down the hill, not bailing out when she
hits the river bank, but shooting high over the ice until she
lands hard enough to pop her jaw.
"What if it snows so hard I get lost on the way home like
that kid last year? They amputated both his feet."
"That was in Minnesota."
"You should stay home, too."
"That kid lived two miles from school. We live three
blocks away."
"If you stay home, I'll make hot chocolate. I'll fix you
lunch. Anything you want."
"Be real," Melanie says.
Michael tucks his face into his hands. "It will be like when
we were kids."
Melanie gets up and grabs her coat from the back of her
chair. On her way out the door, she sprinkles fish food into the
egg-shaped bowl, watches AJ and Sammy snap the grey flakes
from the surface. She has named them after the two lovers she
has had; she intends to fill many fish bowls by the time she
graduates from high school. The fish hover along the water's
surface, greedily, rippling their plumes.
As Melanie bikes down the driveway, she doesn't look over
her shoulder at Michael, who watches from the window, wistful
and pale, with the curtain like a brilliant orange landscape
behind him. If she looks back, they'll spend the day watching
TV, eating bowls of popcorn, and reading fashion magazines.
They'll curl up together on the broken-backed couch beneath

34 I Risk
their mother's Afghan, and while Melanie pretends to sleep,
Michael will cuddle closer, closer still, until his arms pinch
around Melanie's shoulders and he matches each breath she
takes with his own.
School lets out at three-fifteen; it's snowing, a crisp light
beautiful snow. Melanie gets Michael's assignments and then
bikes home, weaving no-handed through traffic until she
reaches their pale green A-frame. A rabbit wearing trousers
and holding a lantern sits beside the porch, one ear pointing
at the ground. She locks her bike to the lilac bush and licks
snow from the head of the rabbit. Then she tiptoes up the
front steps, eases into the kitchen. The smell of pine-scented
cleanser narrows her eyes; beneath it lingers the muffled odor
of apples. Michael is sitting at the kitchen table, cutting pictures
of women from a fashion magazine. When Melanie lets
the door slam, he jumps up, lunges with the scissors. Melanie
yells.
"Sorry," Michael says, his face gaunt with relief. "I didn't
hear you come in."
"I made enough noise for an elephant," Melanie says. The
linoleum glitters with a pale gold liquid. The counter and the
dirty dishes shine, too, as well as the apples in the cracked
white bowl.
"What reeks?" Melanie says.
Michael points to a plastic bottle. "I found it under the
bathroom sink. It kills fourteen leading household germs."
In the egg-shaped bowl on the counter, AJ and Sammy
float between oily bubbles of pine cleanser, their bellies the
color of the whites of an eye. Melanie's nostrils fill with the
roar of a thousand angry pines. She takes off her coat and
throws it down. Michael's women flutter away.
"Thanks a lot," Michael wails. "Look what you just did!"
Melanie washes pine cleanser out of a pan that has last
night's tomato soup scorched to the bottom. She puts water on
the stove to boil, staring at Michael's narrow rear end as he
Ansay I 35
bends over to pick up the women. Michael is shaped like a
frog, with a round belly and spindly legs that poke out to the
sides when he sits. His nose is upturned and his mouth toored,
thin-lipped, and always curving down.
"Wash your hands," he says. "You can pick up all kinds of
germs at that place." He means school. Melanie ignores him
and fixes a cup of instant coffee in a mug she finds on the window
sill. She adds powdered milk and brown sugar. Then she
gropes beneath the sink and brings up a bottle of their father's
Jack Daniels.
"Jack, my darling, my love," Melanie says.
"You're going to become an alcoholic." Michael is reorganizing
his cuttings into two neat piles. One is for women
who are beautiful; one is for women that are extraordinarily
beautiful. He picks up a picture from the extraordinary pile
and says, "Look, doesn't she look like Sidona?"
Neither of them can remember ever calling Sidona
"Mom." Sidona is supposed to be in California with a man
she met hitch-hiking, but three weeks ago she called from
Mexico. She had dysentery, she was miserable, she would be
coming home soon. Then a postcard came from England. Having
fun, it said. The writing looked whimsical, uncertain, the
way Sidona's handwriting always looks just after she's met another
man.
Melanie adds Jack Daniels to her coffee, swallows the
whole cupful in six steaming gulps. "Sidona doesn't look anything
like her," she says. "Sidona doesn't look like anyone in
the world."
"Dad's home this weekend, remember?" Michael says.
"He'll kill you for messing with his Jack."
"Next weekend, you mean."
"No, it's this weekend."
He gets up to check the calendar pinned to the back of the
bathroom door. The calendar has a picture of a very small
puppy chewing a very large shoe, with Hartwick Fertilizers
scrawled across the bottom in bold, spiky print. Their father,

36 I Risk
Gordon, works for Hartwick as a Traveling Sales Representative.
He comes home every other weekend, and then his snores
drift through the house. When he wakes up, he takes Melanie
and Michael downtown where they do the marketing for the
next two weeks. They all take turns pushing the loaded cart as
Gordon asks timid questions about Sidona. Usually, Melanie
and Michael haven't heard much either. Sometimes Melanie
makes up things so he won't think they're holding back.
"It is this weekend," Michael says. He giggles. "You're in
trouble, Mel!"
"What about you?" Melanie says, and she does not giggle.
"Killing my fish. Skipping school." She pulls off her sweater
and untucks her tee-shirt. Goose bumps come up on her arms.
She drags her fingernails over them and stares out the window.
Beyond it the world looks bleak, white, enchanting.
"You can tell him I drank some, too," Michael offers.
"Hey, you mad about your fish?"
Melanie walks past him and opens the door to the porch.
"You can tell him I drank all the Jack," he pleads.
She steps outside, swings herself off the edge of the porch
and lies on her back in the snow. The snowflakes are hard,
driving pellets. She feels the frozen grass beneath her and
imagines each faint prickle is a man's stinging kiss. She thinks
about Sidona and all of Sidona's men, and she pretends she
understands why Sidona doesn't want to come home.
"C'mon!" Michael screams from the house.
Melanie opens her mouth to the snow. She listens to the
sound of her clattering teeth, a sound that is its own beautiful
language until she realizes what she hears are sobs, Michael's,
choked and terrible. She stands up, then, and climbs up the
porch steps into his waiting hands, which wander over her
hair, her cheeks, her body, as if to collect the cold.
Melanie and Michael sleep in a room divided into sides by
one of Gordon's belts. Their beds have matching headboards,
with bears tippy-toeing across the tops. In the morning, Michael
takes his clothes into the bathroom to dress. But Mela-
Ansay I 37
nie is immodest, almost cruel, in the way she will strip down
to nothing, laughing at Michael's crimson face as he hurries
from the room.
At night, while Michael sings softly in his sleep, Melanie
lies awake imagining herself with an incurable disease. Sores
break out across her forehead and cheeks; bone erupts
through her skin. She is on her death bed. She opens her eyes
to tell her many lovers good-bye. But lately, no matter how
hard she tries to see it differently, she finds only Michael is
there, his red frog mouth torn with grief.
It's Thursday night. They've just climbed into bed when
the phone rings. Melanie clicks on the light, grabs the receiver
from the nightstand. It's Sidona. She's just gotten engaged to
a man in London. His name is a harsh, throaty sound like a
cough.
"I left a message for Gordon with the company," she says.
"He'll divorce me, now, he'll meet a nice girl. He'll forget all
about me."
She tells Melanie to have a happy birthday, and before
Melanie can say it isn't her birthday, Sidona sends her loud,
wet kisses and hangs up. Michael props himself on his elbows,
eyes wrinkled against the light.
"Who was it?"
"A crank."
Michael climbs out of his bed, turns off the light, and gets
in beside Melanie. "Can't I sleep here?" he says. His breath is
like a cat's, mossy and sour.
"No!" Melanie says. She tries to shove him away. But his
body settles itself into the hollows and curves of her back
and legs. His breathing deepens. The darkness settles around
them. When Melanie imagines her death, all she can see is a
room filled with beautiful flowers. She walks into that room,
deeper and deeper, until the flower petals close like a thousand
doors behind her. She drifts into their scent.
Melanie meets Donovan at his apartment, one block over
from school. Donovan is the older brother of Melanie's ex-

38 I Risk
boyfriend, AJ. Melanie has heard that older men are better
and she desperately hopes this is true.
Donovan has a face that's knotted as a pine board. He
wears his hair in a stubby pony tail. When he kisses Melanie
hello, she reaches behind his head and yanks that pony tail,
hard.
"Jesus Christ, you are strange," Donovan says.
This is their second date. For their first date, Donovan
took Melanie riding through the backroads, looking for road
kills. Donovan is working on a photo collection of road kills divided
into four chapters: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.
So far, his Winter chapter includes cats, raccoons, deer, opossum,
rabbits, and one splattered skunk. But Donovan is hoping
for something unusual; a cow, maybe, or a beaver. Donovan
says deep meaning can be found in violent death. Melanie
agrees.
Donovan sits on the couch and talks, but Melanie gets
bored with that quickly. She takes off her sweater and shirt.
She cups her breasts in her hands, letting her nipples peek
through her fingers.
"I'd like something to drink," she says. "Jack, if you got
it."
"Jack?"
"Jack Daniels."
"Oh," says Donovan. He looks embarrassed. "I have carrot
juice, fresh-squeezed orange juice or sparkling water."
"Forget it," Melanie says. She puts on her shirt, though
she has no intention of leaving.
"Okay, okay," he says quickly. "I have cooking sherry in
the cupboard."
"Whatever," Melanie says, and he gets up to fix it for her.
But even with the sherry, sex is awkward, disappointing. Donovan
rolls off her quickly.
"You act so tough," he tells her smugly, "but you're really
just a little girl."
Melanie goes into the bathroom and locks the door. She
Ansay I 39
digs through the medicine cabinet, spilling everything onto
the linoleum.
"What are you doing?" Donovan says. He knocks on the
door, shaue-and-a haircut.
Melanie runs warm water into the sink. She opens a package
of disposable razors, pries the shield off of one with her
thumb.
Donovan says, "What, are you having a crisis? Beautiful.
Have a crisis. I'll be in bed when you're through."
Melanie sits naked on the toilet. She runs her hands under
the warm water for a long, long time. Then she uses the razor
to chip small bits of skin from her wrists. By the time Donovan
picks the lock, her palms are bright with blood.
"Jesus," Donovan says. "Stay right there. Don't move."
He comes back with his camera. He photographs her over
and over, the flash popping, brilliant. "Wow," he keeps saying.
"Savage." When he runs out of film, he puts iodine on
Melanie's wrists and bandages them tightly. Melanie stomps
his foot as hard as she can and then walks home because she
can think of nowhere else to go. There, Michael takes one look
at her and cries.
"We have to get you to a hospital," he says. "You'll get
gangrene. We've got to find Gordon and Sidona."
"Sidona's getting married in London," Melanie says.
Melanie lies on the broken-backed couch in the living
room beneath three blankets, the Afghan, and all the pillows
Michael can find. She has a fever of one hundred and three.
Michael is terrified of catching it, and he keeps a bandanna
tied over his mouth and nose. Between bringing her aspirin
and Vitamin C, he scours everything with pine scented
cleanser.
Gordon hasn't come home. It's Sunday afternoon, and
he's always home by Saturday. Melanie turns her face away
when Michael comes in with another vitamin.
"You need fluids," he says. "Fluids bring a fever down."

40 I Risk
"Go away," Melanie says, and she sleeps for a long time.
When she wakes up, it is night. The lamp from the bedroom
burns in the window. Michael is watching her.
"I feel better," she says.
His voice seems to come from far away. "I wish Dad
would come home," he says. "They'd call us, wouldn't they, if
he was dead? They'd find our number in his wallet." Melanie
coughs and he leans away. "This is all your fault, lying out in
the snow like that."
"No, it's your fault," Melanie says, "because you are driving
me crazy."
But she feels a wonderful calm inside. Michael puts his
hand over hers. He holds it there, not moving, his love winding
around her like a cocoon from which she will never
emerge, but, instead, grow deeper into, spiraling down until
she reaches the beating core of his heart.
"I know you want to die," Michael says, "but I'm not going
to let you."
He pulls off the bandanna and gulps deep breaths of air as
though he's drinking water instead of the terrible, invisible
germs of Melanie's fever. Then his face descends, hovering
larger, paler, until it blurs into a bump of nose, a warm
breath, the rough scent of pine and the taste of vitamin as he
kisses her on the mouth.
RICHARD BECKER
Lagoon On The James
Cloaked in leafage, a cat-eyed
crescent inhales bottom spoon-fry
with each playful thrust.
Heron sport him
in shallows that lap
against shoal rock like young girls' babble
on the quick nights' porch. One strikes him through,
eases the wriggling load lengthwise,
and smoothes its passage with mezzo-lingual
jolts. Far cry from home, and a boathouse away,
fishermen suck six packs and piss on the wall,
dream of diamonds found in a pickerel.
Lonely men put out in pick-ups, empty handed
at day's end, hearts and fishheads
pinned on snap-swiveled stringers.
At night frogs blurt thick sauced sounds.
A lagoon sized white haired beast rises
in their growl, is stabbed to pieces
by moonstalks. Ooze bubbles up in its milky wake
to feed banana slugs.
Leopard gar unload
a year's length of ribboned fog in cloak
of fatherhood, that populates gar cradles
with gar fry.

42 I Driving To Santa Fe
Driving To Santa Fe
I hitch a ride with a Vegas showgirl.
While she drives, we play lap-top chess.
A storm withdraws from its wet skin.
Her driving glides the mesas
on the big board, in the big room,
no dice thrown. A nice doe rides
across the shadow of a butte, that looms tall,
traveling on its own steam. She calls for her pawns
to do-si-do, en passant beneath the clearing sky.
My king allemandes a two-step with his rook.
We speed past roadside armadillo carcasses,
hot bloated skin cracking. Buzzards arch
like bishops swooping down diagonals, tally
dead, suspicious of our hundred horses. Any
flesh they find they grab in their quick talons.
Stopping at a vista point, we look,
we breathe, we see pink masonry
and drink the air like vino sangiaveto.
Night animals' voices rise cantabile falsetto
in mock solemnity. She cranes her neck,
her pretty silhouette, to cipher poetry
from dark skies' flicker. I fear the portent
of her mood, wolf-whistle her return. I press
my thumb inside her palm, and we drive on.
R. E. MILLER
Epiphanies
In Memory of Helen Joyce
1
T he sea was steady, grey as calm. Gulls drifted soundlessly;
at her window the woman could only imagine she
heard their cries—sullen squalling demanding attention, a
petulance of children in a vast unsupervised yard.
The sea, or rather the bay, was her yard. It was a few minutes
stroll from her home, the house she had lived in for forty
years and her mother before her, and going back beyond the
mother, the grand dame herself, that kitchen and drawing
room matriarch with her nest of pallid boarders, young gentlemen
from Dublin and environs.
Ghosts still tittered in corners and moved shyly among the
parlor chairs. No one changes after death, she mused, only
talks less, that is if the soul sticks around for some reason only
a priest might hazard. Why was she thinking all this? Her
duster brushed an invisible hand, the muted sound of her
grandmother's nagging stirred tea things left on a table and a
calendar that had not moved forward for years.
And upstairs her mother's spirit haunted the morning by a
snatch of song or laughter, a girlish lilt that started and broke
off, as if a man had entered the room. Once this house was of
the spirited, the boarders who would joke at the breakfast
table; even the shy ones would join in. Time, frail and sad,
was the dust on a book of browned photographs that a breath
might stir. The handsome young men were long gone and

44 / Epiphanies
their delicate girls with them. She came close to tears thinking
about it on this lonely day, and then almost laughed at herself,
for these were memories of life before her own, when her
mother was young and in love with a man her daughter hardly
remembered. It seemed odd to the woman that no picture of
her father was anywhere in the house, and even odder now
that she had not thought of this before.
She felt that the windows kept in all this heavy pastness;
the house should have been quieter. She went into the front
yard and gazed at the sea that was as drab as the weather.
Small, curling waves were as predictable as ending to days:
with a white-crested rise a woman somewhere dropped, and
did the sea ever agonize for us?
She heard, or thought she heard, the branch of a tree stir
in the subtlest turn of the wind. The branch was silver-grey
and on it a little bird perched. She listened to hear it sing but
it was nearly still and shivering a bit. He's come early, she
thought, a day before spring when the earth has hardly begun
to thaw.
If she stood here long enough she would feel the warm
tremors under her feet, she would see small buds appear on
the branch and the bark glisten in the lively wind. But the
sea and its cloud-blurred horizon and the stolid house itself
seemed so eternal, so fixed, that even a bright weather seemed
but a rumor of happier days.
Like her grandmother and mother, the woman ran a clean
and orderly house. The boarders now, however, existed in
terms of transience. They were all tourists and forgettable.
They were clean sheets and fresh ashtrays, large breakfasts
and four o'clock tea for the older ones who returned for their
pre-evening naps.
Miller I 45
She did not mind the daily work. At breakfast they were
merry and talkative, with their Dublin maps open, and in the
hands of those determined to walk the five wet miles to the
Martello Tower, copies of Ulysses. She had never read Joyce
although her grandmother had known his wife, and she recalled
some words from her childhood. "Whatever became of
Nora Barnacle? She married a writer and left Ireland to live in
reckless poverty, and what kind of life is that for a well-reared
girl? Oh, I remember that one well, he'd sit on the beach and
sulk as your own father did," she'd say to the girl. Then her
grandmother would slide neatly into their family's despair,
their men.
Her father had vanished one night, had probably drowned
in the dark waters off the coast, though they never found the
body washed ashore. The woman sometimes fantasized that
• he, too, had gone off to the continent to become a writer, and
that passing the shops in Dublin she would see his picture and
name on a volume of romantic fiction. Always his was grander
than others in the window.
The woman's husband of twenty years spent three nights a
week in the house. The others, including Saturday, he dined
and probably danced and surely made love to the women he
met at concerts or in bars. She often saw him with younger,
prettier girls. She would sit in her room and look over the roofs
to the grey beach and imagine he was there, walking arm in
arm with one, a Beatrice, Vanessa, Sally. She saw him embrace
the girl who would laugh and pull him closer, and they
would fall to the wet sand and make love, and he would look
up and see her at the window and say nothing.
The woman saw this often and other love scenes and she
tingled with excitement. She became rich in a sensuality of the
spirit.. . . But one afternoon the imagined lovemaking became
so intense she began to feel herself drawn into the other's
body. She felt her husband's hands and mouth, and almost

46 I Epiphanies
yielded, but at that moment heard footsteps in the hallway
outside her room. She rose nervously and opened the door and
peered into the dull hall and then into the darker stairwell.
A young man stood there with a candle. She knew he was
not a boarder because of his out-of-fashion clothes, the accountant's
dark suit, the rigid white collar. Neither spoke a
word but simply stood transfixed, as if posing for a camera.
His face glowed in the candlelight and he smiled at her, and
she smiled back. Then she heard a name being called insistently
from downstairs and she shuddered, on the verge of
fainting. The young man disappeared but she heard no footsteps
on the stairs, only a voice, a woman's, rich and firm and
demanding. She guessed it was her grandmother's. "Come
down at once. At once," called the voice. The woman went
down to an empty parlor.
At four o'clock the boarders returned from Dublin and she
forced herself to leave her bed and go to the kitchen to make
tea. She sat with them at the table while they were talking excitedly
of what they had seen, St. Patrick's where great Swift
lay with his Vanessa, Howth Castle, Phoenix Park, and the
Abbey Theatre, but she listened for other voices and looked
intently about her. But there were no ghostly presences now,
perhaps they had fled when the tourists entered like gusts of
wind to a place of delicate cobwebs.
The woman then believed she had only dreamed such visions,
the lovemaking on the beach, the apparition; and the
voices from the parlor were simply the vivid final moments of
her sleep. Still she was deeply disturbed and perhaps this was
because she did not understand the extent of the most recent
sexual fantasy. Did she no longer want any man? Any comfort
beside her? Her mother was dead and her father gone off to a
strange land, and that matriarchal lady, that strong face staring
out from an Edwardian photograph, had not laid down
Miller I 47
the law for thirty years in this house—damn her stubborn soul
for its restlessness. Let the past be dead, and all nostalgia kept
under glass in a museum, where only the tourists will enter
with curiosity. The woman nearly laughed at the force of her
outrage.
The next day she went into town to escape the house and
the oppressive silence of the calm and heavy sea. She would
trade this dreariness for another, Dublin's: the rain-muted
traffic floated through McConnell Street and over the green
cesspool of the Liffey. There Trinity College spawned bars
where scholars and their abject clones gabbed mightily of
Erasmus and Tolkien, and noises from embattled Belfast entered
their conversation like dark, whispered asides. With
her coffee turning cool, she sat by the wall and thought of
the clean 18th century when Goldsmith the playwright had
walked this street in elegance. And Dean Swift, she'd heard,
went mad watching the ladies flash by in their carriages, each
lovelier, each with a delicate laughter one now rarely heard.
Had she married her husband for his love of the dear past,
his fancy retellings of Irish history to the girls? The man
knew every street in Dublin, each square where the poets and
heroes were honored in the awesome deadness of stone. But he
moved about the city with an energy that would not be confined
by house or tradition. Nostalgia to him was glamorous
elaboration and heady gossip over a pint of stout. At least he
wasn't listless like so many others, she had to say that for her
husband.
Well, what else can you do with time, she'd heard him say,
not so much a question as a quiet statement of fact. Sit by the
wall and leave it to ghosts?
Still, how could he not realize her life? She'd never been
anywhere to speak of outside of this city, this grimy pride of
monuments, this small province of dark-mirrored bars and

48 I Epiphanies
sad-faced men who looked like their grandfathers. The world
beyond Dublin was a misty romance of lakes and autumn
trees in a travel poster, a bold, picturesque Greek island, all
sun.. . . Hardly startling anymore, she shrugged. She finished
her coffee and left the dull pub.
On the street she thought she caught a glimpse of her husband,
and her heart quickened, but it was not his face.. . . She
became deeply agitated as she recognized the man who stood
in the stairwell in her dream. He smiled faintly at her and entered
a bookshop. She hesitated, then followed, but he was nowhere
in the store. She began to tremble badly and the clerk
offered her a chair and a glass of water. She could feel tears
coming on, but she willed herself to be calm, to think only of
the bus trip back to the house and the boarders waiting there.
What she would then most remember about her life was
the ride back from central Dublin, the drab, tedious scenery,
hardly varying, brown housefronts and shabby stores. On the
bus she considered the numberless days that would come to
nothing more than the memories of such landscapes. Couples
passing on the pavement hand-in-hand and parting for moments,
their hands still touching or seeming to touch, even
apart.
The woman thought of the moment when she had felt herself
nearly entering the body of another. Is it possible, she
wondered, that we still touch even when apart? Is it possible
in time as in space? Fingers meet in the air, thoughts traverse
an ocean, and apparitions are our own auras extended
through the years.
But why I in another's body? Why the young man who
smiled at me in reality as in the dream? But there were no answers
to such questions, and gradually she lapsed again into a
dull, despairing reverie. She thought of the fears her mother
and her grandmother had taught her, the dread of spinster-
I
Miller I 49
hood and of what she might become. She thought of the fitful
reliance on the Church.
Her mother had once confessed to her about the man neither
had known so well, her father: We lived together and
rarely talked. Was this as it should be? A hymned amen and
the Virgin's chaste smile, the accepted weariness of faith, the
passions silenced by the angels. And she knew that life was
this, a fleeting touching and parting of hands. The wildest disclaimers
of the women today were fictions, vulgar soliloquies,
all celebrating the woman who walked and brooded alone.
Well, right they are, she said out loud, holding back the tears.
The bus passed a church, Our Lady of Annulments, she
thought scornfully. A lean, black-shawled woman came out
carrying a bunch of violets and dumped them in the ash can.
She laughed, Amen, I'm bored with the rituals, and she
sensed people were staring at her, at the crazy smile she did
not bother to hide. What more am I to them, to any of them,
to my father? As in a suspension of grief, she began to feel
better and somehow raised above all that which stood in the
street.
Then, surprisingly, the sun came out, without warning, at
last. Well, bless the bastard, she said aloud, and the drunk
snoozer across from her made the sign of the cross, and an old
lady silently cursed her.
Outside the dirty bus window, the wide sea glinted beneath
the light, and the sun fell squarely on a funeral parlor's
front, a sight so stark and vivid she thought of the flash of an
atom bomb, an instant before annihilation, the swift illumination
of the immediate brief life, the walking, strutting bones
and flesh of every passerby, banishing nostalgia and anything
else not rooted in the primal. Then she saw a priest bending to
help a boy who had fallen from his bicycle. The wheels kept
spinning and the handlebars gave off a dull silver glow.
Through the open windows of the lurching bus, she could discern
the boy's cries and the priest trying to comfort him,
There now, you're a big lad.

50 I Epiphanies
All the people walking in the street, she noticed now, were
alone, whether they were holding hands or not, and there was
neither jostling nor coming together except at accidental moments,
and these were merely variations of other moments.
The window front of the funeral parlor shone intensely as the
noon sea on fire, and the entire street of housefronts and
people walking was a great panorama in the sun's moment,
but nobody else seemed to notice. She thought precisely and
with a bit of self-satisfaction that a town's history, all of its
dim, persistent past, culminated here in this light, just as it
had begun, when our ancestors awoke to a bright and promising
sky, and shielded their eyes from the brilliant sun.
LISE GOETT
Donna De Casa
The forest in the distance
is gently alive with their breathing,
in the powdery monarchs.
I am sick, Carlos.
I wish I could say
this malaise were only cancer—
the spine stripped to the core like a palm tree
and eaten.
Lung, breath, rot of lily
beg for love, but nothing can save a fool.
In the Avenida Atlantica
whores bloom in doorways, their magenta petals spread
like camellias suckling bees
while the world the proclaims
belts-trusses-electric socks.
I lie here in the dark, trying to remember
what my life has brought me.
I hold myself like a dark lantern,
hoping for the life inside, the light of evening—
like the girl you first met, holding up love in my heart
like ajar of fireflies to the night.
I try to remember my loves
who no longer move me.
Speak, speak, speak.

52 I Donna De Casa
I will die in my communion dress,
contracting around no one,
no better than a cold fire remembering heat.
In September, the monarchs flock to die in these groves
like birds coming to nest.
Blinded to sing more sweetly,
I quivered and fluttered when a man put me to his breast,
fell silent with the cloth sleep.
Now I am like these beings
who pulse to the rhythm
of living lungs
preparing for transformation.
KERRY HUDSON
Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
N ever write about writers. This is an absolute, a rule, and
one not to be trifled with no. If you absolutely must, then
at least make your writer a painter. But really, don't even do
that. There is a great prejudice against it and besides, solid
prose need not be so self-indulgently clever. It is art in which
we traffic, not cuteness, not trickery.
There were a number of rules, and sometimes there were
no rules at all, but this one, the writer thing, was paramount.
Its source, a fount of wisdom whom we loved and hated both,
was a large intimidating man, prone to grumbling and outbursts.
With a big finger he would stab his glasses back to his
face and then flail at those pieces that needed a final ding bat
to announce their close, just so you knew. Turn the page, Dearliearts,
and you are facing a fine looking young man astride a
fine looking young horse suspended midair over a fence, touting,
the lot of it, a prep school. Or a gin. This is what he hated.
He was not one for hippie-dippy post-narrative self-reflexive
forays into the new. Critics were wont to call him Southern
Gothic. "What has happened to craft?" he would cry.
This is something I do not know. My attention is elsewhere
and the championing of some declining popular aesthetic
is beyond me, busy fumbling with mechanics. I fight an
unfortunate romantic leaning. Starting with a deft alliteration,
a flourish of bubbly rhetoric, I soon putter to a halt, dip down
into maudlin, into soft and gooey and warm and fuzzy, and
this will not do. I have been called on this. ("Son, you sure
have a lot of sweet words here. What is it that you were hoping
to do?") Stalled in a quagmire of my own making, mud to the

54 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
axles and Kansas way over the horizon, the dishes cry out to
be washed.
Of course, as Tracy—my real-life partner, my significant
other, my beloved—has pointed out, all this means is that I am
up to the point where it is no longer fun. (Oh, I said to this
once, Yes I see.) But this was supposed to be the year of great
accomplishment, the year of living seriously, and so it was
foolish to expect ease. We moved out here with a plan: Tracy
to pound out the last third of law school and clear the bar, and
I to find a means and a voice, to learn to navigate. Hoop-la
and glory-be.
But matters have gone astray. Some ineffable quality has
shifted from center. Love is not altogether gone, but it is no
longer the pervasive magic that cut the air, no longer the motivator
that seemed to render everything, at the very least, OK.
(Professor once asked of me what kind of story it was that I had
deposited in front of him. It is a love story, I had said, leaning
over the desk toward him, daring to look him steady in the
eye. Is t\\aX fine? Is it enough? I was afforded such affronts because
I had been around, which allowed me to be as weary of
his shtick as he.) We are now relegated to occasional glimpses
of passion interspersed amongst spells of funk. Lines of communication
have become tenuous, and I wonder, where does
love go? How does it piddle to nothing?
The thing is this: Tracy, with her determination and her
fortitude and her blue eyes, Tracy says that, by God, when
you set out to do something, then just do it. And this is what
she does, laughing and kissing me (at such moments I wonder
that we are beautiful people, living cigarette-ad lives), she's off
to the library for eight hours, with two fifteen minute breaks
for coffee, like she was on the clock and earning by the hour.
But while she is tucking her chin and plowing on through,
I am riding out measurable twangs of the heart at skillfully
produced Pepsi commercials. She will be a lawyer, defending
burglars, rapists and due process. But I have been accused,
Dearhearts, of suffering from the pop 'n fresh exuberance of
youth and good intentions.
Hudson I 55
So here we are. She has a week of finals looming and is really
being a bitch, and I have nine months trailing behind me and
nothing much at all to show. I am lost in crumpled balls of paper,
she in torts.
It is not as black and white as all that actually. Professor
has duly warned us against such one dimensional reductionism.
Reaching back to Parker or Chekhov or Faulkner, he will
offer us some insightful dollop of wisdom apropos to the subject
at hand: The page must be darkened with the shadows of
the things you create. And these things must perform to their
own bidding. You must come away wondering of them, walk
about with them for a week, wondering if they moved to Philadelphia,
or what became of the harvest. Or if she ever went
back to him. You traffic in flesh and blood and bone. So the truth
is that Tracy is not without some of my faults. Note her true
motive for sloughing through three years of curriculum dry
as tumbleweeds: hats. She hopes to open, with the moneys accrued
through lawyering, her very own millinery. This she
will call, forgive her, Top It Off or Head's Up. She pictures it
with a 1920's ambiance, flapper's pearls and fringe, tucked off
some side street in Boston. She will live in a flat above it.
And I, in turn, am not utterly without accomplishment.
But I had hoped that by now we would have found more
middle ground. When we first moved out here we had plans
and goals of lofty height. The little house had only three rooms
and was forty minutes from school, but it was cheap and there
were acres for Suffolk to run on. A glass front looked out
across the lake and in the mornings we'd squeeze a space between
scurrying, and cradle mugs of tea and look out at the
fog hanging on the water. We made a point of this.
"Look. Look out there," I said once in the beginning,
pointing out to the far shore, the front of trees owned by the
paper mill. I figured it for a metaphor, something about space
and potential and all that lay before us. Tracy did not respond
except to rest her head on my shoulder. It was a moment.
These days I see the same space, the same expanse hanging
and the same distant tiny trees as a vast obligation, a great

56 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece Hudson I 57
expanse of nothing quietly speaking to failure.
Ours was the only house on this side of the lake, the sole
construction of an ambitious but failed development, a lakeside
community, Pleasantsville or such, whose designers had
envisioned great things: a Laundromat and pizza palace and
Magik Market and everything one could want, or at least
need. But the big town had grown the other way and Pleasantsville
was left dry, just me and Tracy and Suffolk and the
trees.
Beginnings are delicate times. A time to take care the balances
are just so. We moved in what furniture we had, bought
lots of plants of every shape and size and put them everywhere,
and made love constantly. (Professor had this to say on
beginnings: Spare us the three pages of preparatory rhetoric,
of lovingly laid background. Such things fall out of lines of action
or not at all. Begin, he would say, at the beginning. If
you're on page four and nothing's happened yet, you've wasted
everyone's time. These things are, really, very simple.)
But I don't know. I tried this and I just don't know. Truly.
While Tracy settled into the routine of law school, I sat down
and did nothing more, for many weeks it seems, than explore
roads that led nowhere. I tried beginning in the middle, tried
to just jump in and move, in any direction, but before long I
was spending more afternoons than not sitting with Suffolk
out on our rickety little dock. Here we would read, or fish. The
lake was well stocked and in the shadows I could see minnows
and small brim darting about. But if we watched the depths
where the light began to fail, we could sometimes catch a
glimpse of something larger, a shadow, or a flash of silver.
Here, Dearhearts, was the saddest metaphor of all.
Eventually what came to me was this: I, it was clear, was a
great font of good intentions, buoyed in an existential flux, all
flash and verve and signifying little. Those were the very words
that came to me. Shooting for some 1940's melodrama full of
rainy streets and broken dreams and half-smoked cigarettes
jabbed out against rust-brick walls, I pled for a modicum of
saccharine and trust that I had not earned.
Meanwhile Tracy wrote briefs, made Law Review, pulled
in a 3.7 and started to stay in town drinking with her mates,
winding down with those who understood.
But when home she was a mixed help. Relax, she would
say, and rub my shoulders. You must quit trying so hard, she
would say. (Of course, by this time I already had.) And then
she would kiss me. And then she would screw me up and tamp
me down and say that if I didn't believe in me then how the
hell could she. I fear that she saw me as some quivering thing
in danger of imploding from uselessness, and the distance between
us widened.
Reportedly Professor had suffered many a spell of writer's
block. This is what he claims to have done: He rented a small
studio apartment in an old house downtown and placed in it a
typewriter, paper, desk and chair. He told us he would then go
in and use handcuffs to secure his ankle to the desk. A symbolic
act only, for the key was always in his pocket, but he
would not release himself until the set numbers of hours had
passed. He held himself to no set requirement of output, only
that he not unshackle himself for the time. That was the only
rule. Of course, what else was there to do?
The short version of this was more to the point. He would
raise his head slowly and grumble wearily.
"Put your ass on the chair."
"Oh, is that it," I said back once.
But then it was four in the morning and my eyes opened
up wide. I untangled myself from Tracy and padded away
from her mumbles. In the dark I tripped over the dog, cursed
silently, and stumbled out.
The waitress at Dave's Deli Depot stole Jordan's heart away.
It was not much, but I was pleased, and in the light of
day it seemed to hold. No treacly glop this. Here was something
that began at the beginning. Not the pedestrian drivel
of pitter-patter and adolescent stutter. Something else altogether.
Something flip, irreverent, archly tripping on the allit-

58 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece 1 Hudson I 59
eration. But something else in behind, something good nestled
up close.
And what was it about this waitress that she could steal a
heart away. And what did that mean, steal a heart? And who
was Jordan? And why had his parents named him so? What,
now smitten, would he do? I saw his stolid brown tweed, saw
the waitress' wear-black-and-pout. Would they go no-wave to
New Order, or would they turn out the lights and listen to his
Miles Davis? This was the crux of things: some attraction, at
odds with some grating of fundamental world views, of ontological
orientation, of the writing on the wall.
// was an unlikely romance conceived over a chili-dog. A movie clip
run frame by frame, definite and punctuated, this is what he saw: she
backed through the double doors, banging them aside, and turned about,
tray with dog and coke in hand. She bop-bop-bopped down the isle toward
him. She deposited his food before him and straightened and looked
at him and smiled. And that, he knew immediately, was that. Her eyes
crinkled and she was all sparkle and his heart leapt and he remembered a
book he had read wherein a man fell in love with a woman just from the
way she hung her hand over the edge of a chair, the languid way it hung
there in space. She bopped away.
He had fallen in love at first sight before, plenty of times. But this
was different.
He ate dinner at Dave's Deli Depot four times that week, spacing
some days between so he would not be obvious. But the first time was her
day off and the second time he sat at the wrong station and so the third
time he watched through the plate glass window from the parking lot till
he was sure which tables were hers. He discovered from the boxy, almost
child-like script, that her name was Meryl.
This—Meryl—was fine, was well suited. She wore one short studded
ear ring and a long dangly one made of something he couldn't figure.
She wore black leather shoes that came to tiny points on her tiny feet. She
wore silver studs and chartreuse and turquoise stripped socks that came
to her calves and a short skirt and tee from which the collar had been
ripped, and which proclaimed, along with a line drawing of a little man
with a phallic nose, the virtues of 'Dr. Zog's Sex Wax.' Her full brown
hair fell over her shoulders to her breasts, leaving behind little wing-tips
at her ears, ersatz sideburns. She had a nose too large for her face, except
that it made her look a central-European peasant woman and this was
somehow sexier then he could bear and the whole of this made for a kind
of elfish S&M. A leather pixie with dark skin and bounce, she was not
of this world, or at least not of his.
She was impish, she was delightful, she was the pop 'n fresh exuberance
of youth and in a fit of bravado and self-possessed confidence that
emanated from he knew not where, he asked her out.
Although his hair was neither long enough to touch his shoulders,
nor short enough to stand straight and bristle (neither retro nor institutional),
and although he was almost dressed-for-success and although
there was something slow and deliberate about him, far from the thrash
and abandon she knew—or perhaps because of these things—he was not
unattractive to her. But she said no.
"Gee, I'm flattered. Really. But, the thing is, I can't. You see, well
it's very complicated. I mean, well," and here she looked off, debating
what was appropriate, "wellyou see when I was sixteen I moved in with
my boyfriend and we lived together for four years but then we split up but
we didn't really. Not totally. You know. But then he moved away, to a
different city and so we really did split up and so I started seeing a friend
of his who didn't, move away that is, but then he, the first guy, moved
back and now I'm seeing him too and it's all very complicated. So you
see, I couldn't."
"Oh," said Jordan, "Yes, of course. I see."
Many years ago I read "The Rocking Horse Winner." It
had a certain number of principal characters, of secondary
characters, of distinct shifts between scene and summary, the
lot of which I made due note of, reading it over and over to be
sure, graphing it out like a pulse. Also it had a line in the
opening paragraph which read, "Only she herself knew that
at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could not
feel love, no, not for anybody," which you either bought or
you didn't but which carried some mighty weight either way.

60 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
So yes. I wrote "The Hissing of Winter Skies" with a certain
number of principle and secondary characters and shifts between
scene and summary and a line which read, "She would
spend her afternoons by the fire drinking cinnamon tea and
reading three-year-old magazines left by the former tenants."
It was about a woman living a life of quiet desperation on the
edge of the city. I figured this would do it. It did not seem so
hard.
But the more I came to know, the farther away this ease
faded, until I found I knew almost everything and could do almost
nothing. My problem, according to Professor, who had a
bead on most everybody's problem, was that I brought into
the process of creation far more than was necessary. What he
said was that writing is a self-correcting, self-perpetuating
process that needs an engine, but not a pilot. This struck me
as good and fine and true.
I attempted to discard any preconceptions I had concerning
the course of things. This pair would have something together
and from their differences—Jordan's logic and Meryl's
joie de vivre—a narrative would unfold. And love, in the end,
would prevail. Or it wouldn't.
But this I could see: In the course of becoming a couple,
they would find themselves in bed, and this would somehow
be pivotal. There could be no panning to shoes by the fireplace
here, no clouds wisping across a full moon. It would be
there without apology. I saw a tumbling prose, words cascading
as they go, gaining momentum and speed till they peak
with passion and decisiveness. Professor's thoughts on this
were definite and rigid. Such scenes must advance the narrative
line, be a part of the organic whole. Gratuitous sex was
sophomoric, he would growl, stabbing his finger on the table.
He was a prude by no measure, but had a devout devotion to
tradition and craft and a vision as to how it should be. Besides,
he himself wrote great fuck scenes.
I looked and I tried and I pushed and, knowing better, did
all that I could to get this. But I could not see to it without it
being plainly contrived. Like petulant children Meryl and Jor-
Hudson I 61
dan resisted. I had made them up, and yet they exerted a will and
the more they resisted the more I pushed. I grew frustrated
and tired and petulant myself and I gave up and took a hike
through the woods with the dog.
"You get lots done?" Tracy asked between bites of spaghetti.
I wondered what she meant by this, what she was driving
at.
"My characters won't climb under the quilt together," I
said cautiously.
"How come?"
"Because I want them to too badly," I said.
"Well maybe they shouldn't," she said.
"Maybe so."
And then in bed, down for the night, when I wanted to do
nothing more than sleep and forget, she wanted, for the first
time in memory, for me to read to her. I hemmed and hawed.
I had, in my enthusiasm for my initial success, perhaps inadvertently
misrepresented the extent of my progress. This was a
bad thing, but it had made for a lessening of the tensions between
us.
"Oh, I'd love to, really, but it's been a long day. And besides,
it's just not a good idea."
"Oh, come," she said. "Read to me. I'd like that. Something
easy and mindless would be perfect right now."
Lovely. I looked up at the ceiling, wondering what to do.
"All right, but just a little. Just a little bit. Really." I went
out to the front room to fetch my manuscript. I grabbed some
extra for bulk, hunched my jammies and read her the two
pages.
"...well?"
"Well what?"
"Go on."
"I think that should be all for now. The rest I'm not so
sure of. It hasn't solidified yet." And here I rattled the sheaf of
papers to underscore my point. "And if I read more right now
it might screw everything up. These things, beginnings, are
very delicate you know. Balances must be just so."

62 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
"You are kidding, right? Half a novel done and you only
read me two pages. Come on, more. Do more. Author, author,"
she cried. This was not humorous.
"No, I am not kidding. And it's a manuscript. And if I
read more it might ruin everything."
"Then let me read it," she said reaching for it.
"You can't!" I cried. "We've both busy days tomorrow.
And we should sleep now."
"Don't be silly. Just let me ..."
"Tomorrow," I threw in quickly, reaching for the light.
"Tomorrow I'll show you more." And in the dark I put my
arms around her and hurriedly pulled her close so as to forestall
her trying for the light. I stroked the small of her back
and tangled my legs up with hers and that was all, lying there
wide awake and still, breathing in synch. We stayed this way,
and I waited for her to quiet and she did, and I had doubts
about my doubts. Then I bit her neck once lightly and she
moved a little and squeezed and I pulled her tight and kissed
her neck again. She kissed me back and I rolled on top of her
and she giggled and in the dark we were all warmth and the
sound of flesh on flesh and everything was just this stopped
right there then and kissing her and saying her name and we
opened our eyes to see each other. Slow and easy, languid, almost
lazy we went and then fast and abandoned she was
warm and wet and good and then breathless she tensed all of
her tensed sinew and muscle hugging me very tight and let out
a cry which made me cry out and we did and were still.
Breathing and still.
Touching afterwards in the quiet and dark, I was sure that
all my fears were unfounded and that all was very well.
A setback truly, but this was larger than life, and Jordan a man possessed,
a man with a mission. He went home to think. To ask a strange
waitress out to dinner had not been an easy thing, such was not his style.
But for once he had proffered himself before the talons of rejection and
it had not been a no. No, it was ayes-but-situational-givens-prevent-yes
no. That made all the difference.
Hudson I 63
He decided to write her a note. Here was the opportunity to do some
image management under controlled conditions, in the privacy of his own
home. He could display his sensitivity and value, his wit and spontaneity.
He set to work. The final result, after much editing and refining,
pleased him so that he made a copy for the future.
That night Jordan had dinner at Dave's Deli Depot. When she came
with the bill he did nothing more than slide her the folded paper across
the Formica table top. He was cool, he was smooth. She tilted her head
and smiled and put it in her pocket and was off.
Lunch ('lunch) n. 1. the meal between breakfast and dinner; taken
at midday, in broad open daylight. Not to be confused with dinner and a
movie which quite often entails romantic implications, lunch is a light
non-threatening meal specifically designed not to lead to increased complications
in one's interpersonal relationships. Ideally suited for the exchange
of pleasantries such as one's course of study, middle name, favorite
color, etc. it is usually easier to go to lunch than not.
a) Yes, I would love to go to lunch, my phone # is:
b) Well, I don't know, but life is short and moments are long and
each day is as large as the sky. So what the hell.
c) Give this to all the waitresses in town? Slimeball.
d) You bear a distant resemblance to a mullet.
e) Look, I can't make a decision like this based on so little information.
Why don't we discuss it over dinner?
At first it was uncomfortable. For her part because he was an older
man and seemed to be somehow more established or responsible. For his
part because live interaction was fully off the cuff. He could not edit and
consider, but rather had to trust in himself and fly by the seat of his
pants. But after an initial spate of one line questions and answers, none
of which lent themselves to another line or thought (leaving each couplet
of question and response to fall into a vacuum which had to then be filled
again from scratch), and a sinking feeling on his part that all was going
very poorly, they managed to find a groove and relax and topics seemed to
flow one into the next. He learned that she was a vegetarian. (Although
she took dead animals—snakes and lizards and rodents—and placed
them on ant piles, returning after some weeks to collect the small splint-

64 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
ery bones which she fashioned with beads and feathers into delicate earrings.
He decided that this was interesting.) He discovered that she was
in school, that her middle name was Lanier and that she was partial to
black (it being the color of everything and nothing.) She learned that he
worked as an editor, that he was a little to the left of center but not very
far to the left of center (a studied intelligent distance to the left of center),
and that he was funny, although it was a funny that he pulled out and
sent off and gauged, a kind of social sonar. Still they were each pleased.
She learned that he did not know Joy Division. She learned that he did
not know Bauhaus. (He learned that she did not know Bauhaus.)
It was a course on Chaucer in which Tracy and I met. We
were taught to read old English by a kindly professor who
blushed beet red when someone suggested that a reference to
the kissing of a woman's navel truly referred to her genitalia.
It was storming and dark on the first day of class, and she
came in late, found a seat and took off her coat. She was wet,
dripping onto her desk, and breathless, still flushed from the
rush to make it to class. She was in the row next to me and I
thought her so beautiful that when her copy of the syllabus
slipped off her desk and floated to the floor in such a way that
I could easily retrieve it while she could not, in a quick chain
of irrational reasoning, fearing that she would think I helped
only because I found her stunning and was trying to capitalize
on her misfortune to introduce and ingratiate myself, I chose
to ignore the white paper lying fiat by my foot. Go figure.
So she said, "Excuse me, could you hand me that?" pointing
to the paper. And we were off. We smiled and laughed and
soon we were studying together and eating together and sleeping
together and living together and we were both supremely
pleased with everything and everyone and just very happy,
without qualification or reservation. We felt that surely this
was something true and mighty. And maybe it was.
// was somewhere in the middle of their third date when they ran out
of things to say, when their ability to converse faltered. Each, having not
Hudson I 65
only realized an interest of sorts in the other, but having seen that this
was acknowledged and given, had generously offered and greedily devoured
all the other had to offer—anecdotal histories (the thing with her
cousin and the hoola-hoop), world view orientations (his thing on the
selfrejlecting imploding tendencies of the Big Questions) until, all at
once, there was nothing left but an awkward silence.
"You know," she finally said, much to her credit, "we don't really
have much in common."
"That's true," he said cautiously, hesitant to reinforce her point by
disagreeing, "we don't have much in common." Tfiere was anotfier silence
and then they went back to his place, got high and went to bed.
Awkward until it happened, they both seemed to know exactly what
to do, as if practiced. Just to salvage himself about the music, he played
some Philip Glass and told her to blink her mind, to listen as one saw
one of those 3-D drawings of a cube that either extends up and out or
down and away, depending, and it would slow down and jump at her all
at once. "Yeah, yeah I see," she said slowly, seeing better than lie ever
had, and then the smoke kicked in and they were quiet listening and he
could feel the weight of the air between them. He toudied her neck with
one finger, pointedly, as if directing attention to that very spot, wondering
what the hell lie was going to do now, so when she looked at him he
kissed her and their mouths were nicely sour from the beer and the smoke.
He kissed first her upper lip and then her lower lip and had started to
tentatively nip and mouth down her throat, wondering about this, if the
smoke hadn't skewed his judgment on what was appropriate, when she
grabbed his face in both her hands and kissed him hard, digging her
tongue deep in his mouth, and pushed him down on the couch.
He worked his hands under her shirt and rubbed the small of her
back and she kissed his neck and bit him, all of this urgent, frantic. They
rolled around and that was all until he squeezed her tighter and soon they
were all warmth and dark and the music still pulsing and the feel of flesh
on flesh and he was inside her and everything was just that very instant,
nothing else either way, just that and they opened their eyes and looked
right at each other breathless tight, really good, and then fast and abandoned,
holding on and crying out and then still, breathing and breathing
and still.

66 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
"Golly," he said a little later, astonished still, "I wonder if anybody
else knows about this." It was a joke, sure, but at the same time it
seemed to him that surely they had come upon something previously unknown,
something new and mighty.
She was looking up at the ceiling. There was a bead of sweat running
down the side of her forehead and when he saw this he began to stir
again.
"I think I was twelve when I first got high with my sister," she
said.
And then, having done that, I seemed to be quite finished.
What had been engagement and interest abruptly turned into
a silence, and progress, all at once, faltered. And if these
people had taken some form, had begun to cast the beginnings
of shadows, they quickly collapsed, becoming thin as cardboard.
They had done what I had wanted, but what do to
from there was unclear, something I could not guess. Was this
just a love story? Could that be enough?
The harder I worked at it, the thinner the future got, until
finally it disappeared altogether. It was just words, and who
could believe it.
"Son, this ain't davenport checkers we're playing here," is
what Professor had to say about such things. This was art, he
went on, and it was not meant to be easy, and the people who
did this were primary, were the ones who taught the scientists
and politicians and farmers, not what to think, which was
nothing, but how to think, which was everything. At times like
this his voice would rumble and resonate and he would take
on the air of a gospel preacher. And once, I swear, he fished a
harmonica from his pocket; and his son, who was enrolled and
who sometimes attended when it did not interfere with his
band practice, opened up his guitar case, and they started this
blues riff, a punctuated da-da dz-dunt thing, stomping their
feet, the son picking the bass and smashing chords and Professor
blowing and then, in the spaces between, pulling away
from his harp and pelting out lines about believing or moving
Hudson / 67
or something, which sounds inane, but with the music and the
rhythm and the group's shared astonishment that this was
happening at all, worked very well. Still the next day, one of
us, not me, complained to the Dean, and Professor was given
an official reprimand. Not about the music, which was merely
unorthodox, nor about his singing message about the impassioned
source of our art, the font, the muse, and how this
should precede any mechanical considerations or intellectualizing;
but rather the complaint was lodged regarding the performance's
final two stanzas, in which Professor concerned
himself with a certain woman he met on main street in the
heart of the Saturday night, who entreated him to "eat her
pussy"—these being the operative words that were cause for
offense.
There was an older woman with a pinched face whose
work—treacly, swashbuckling historical romance—Professor
would show no mercy. I think it was her. But Professor was
tenured and published, and this sort of thing had happened
before, was in fact expected of him, so nothing came of it.
But his message had been, aside from the particulars of
oral sex, to shoot for the ease of genius, to power through obstacles
with bold sure strokes.
"I have been encountering difficulties," I said.
"Of what sort," Tracy asked, putting down her pen and
reaching for her iced tea.
"Of a motivational nature. I don't really. . . well, care. I
take lots of walks, I sit on the dock." So there it was finally,
plunked down in the open.
"You progress only when it is not easy to do so?" She was
looking directly at me. This was a hard woman.
"Well that's not it at all. It's a matter..."
"Yes it is, I think that is it. You think you can only work
when it's somehow. . . easy. Today / spent two hours reading
about an Ohio horse theft committed in 1899. You think I had
a good time? Do you think it was anything but. . . crap? Tedious,
useless, crap?"

•
68 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece Hudson I 69
This was not what I was after. Across from me was now a
Republican bootstrapper, able to grind through any obstacle
by sheer force of will and there is a place for this. But right
then I was looking for some goddamn empathy.
We were on edge and so this was understandable. Finals of
all sorts were looming. These things happen. That night I
touched her shoulder and she rolled onto her side and went to
sleep. She thought I was a... a weenie. I thought her a bitch.
These are not the fundamentals of a lasting relationship.
I watched her until her breathing became slow and regular.
You don't understand, I said out loud but very quietly to
her back. You don't try. This was childish, getting the last
word in after she'd gone to sleep. But it is what I did.
For a while it was enough that they learned from each other. They
enjoyed a period of thoughtless bliss, a time which moved forward of it's
own accord and did not ask of them their energies or attentions. For a
while it was enough that opposites attract. But then he tried to listen to
Killing Joke but it was just too harsh and he could never hear whatever it
was that she heard and she tried to listen to Bartok, but, well, it was just
too harsh and she could never hear what he hoped he thought he could
hear. For a while she would go to his cocktails and stand about and
mingle, but she always felt uneasy and out of place, and this caused her
to hover near him so that she came to find herself always to be in his
shadow, lending support to his conversations and verification of his stories.
She came to see herself as his lieutenant, and when she first thought
of it in these very terms she was not pleased at all. And for a while he
would go to festivals and sit on the grass passing joints, but this never really
pleased him and left him feeling a bit squarer then he actually was,
especially once he got stoned and found his confidence in his ability to assess
and weigh the import of other's social cues slipping, so that he would
see slight actions and unfinished sentences as pointed barbs making fun of
his appearance, or the simple fact that he did not belong. And for a while
he would go with her to The Spot and watch the boys slam dance. At
first he viewed himself as a kind of anthropologist, bemusedly observing
this strange facet of culture, a practice from the fringe which he was lib-
eral and eclectic enough to observe first hand. But the crush of sweating
bodies smashing against the chain link and the black on black and the
dark music that throbbed and droned at the same time and the attitude
were all things out of his ken and after the second visit he realized that
Meryl did not see herself as an observer at all. He had been fooled at first
by the fact that she did not actually get out and dance herself, had stood
beside him, bobbing with the beat, and mutely looking out onto the floor.
Then he realized that this had only been because she was too slight, and
the frenetic whirling and sheer violence would physically endanger her.
But she was a participant none-the-less and when they would exit from
the tight, cramped, and very hot club out onto the cool air of the street, he
would be grateful for the quiet—although he knew his ears would still be
ringing the next morning—and the sharp sting of the air.
But tlie significance of his discomfort was lost on him, while Meryl
was fully aware of the import of hers, and of the two of them only she
could see that there was a problem.
"I think there comes a point in a relationship,," she said one day after
much pained thought," when you come to a different kind of thing.
And maybe right there, when you're between things like that, is where
you can best see how much it. . . works, how serious it all is. You
think?"
To Jordan this seemed fully unrelated to anything at hand. So much
so that he missed it first time around.
"Yeah, I guess. You want to see a film?"
"Things aren't right here, don't you think? Don't you see?"
Of course he knew this. Or at least he knew it immediately once she
had said it out loud. It was just that if he had maybe known this, he had
at least also thought that this was something she would not know.
"Well, OK, sure," he said, although he knew that it was just then
exactly too late, "that first part, the spontaneous part is passing. So this
is where some of the real work cuts in. Where we ease into something
with substance and permanence. You can't just give up because it's difficult,
because it is no longer easy. We're just trading in some of the fun
and excitement on other things that are fuller and better, really. It only
seems bad. You can't give up on just that." It was a nice try, but Meryl
knew things Jordan chose not to know.

70 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece Hudson I 71
"We just don't look at things the same way."
"This is just a rough spot. A rough patch we can power through.
That's all."
But in the end it wasn't enough. The fact that they were visitors in
each other's lives was really not so difficult for either of them to see. But
it was Meryl who had identified it as what it was and this once done
there was no undoing it, and no other choice. It was that very night that
Meryl bagged Jordan.
Eventually, after much reflection, he decided that the part that was
hardest to take was the ineffable emptiness that stretched before you and
bespoke of how very wrong you were about something you were so consummately
sure was so very right. So right that it made you unqualifiedly
happy and so now you must wonder if that happiness too was false and so
finally your judgment, on a most basic level, becomes suspect.
But right then he was stunned and empty and felt sick with loss. He
wandered idly, sinking and wan, and wondered what happens to love.
Was it not some thing, a thing you could touch and feel, something palpable
that connected the edges of you? And this given, where does it go?
What happens to it? How does it perish?
And then an afternoon had passed and then a week and
then three weeks and I had done no more. I was stuck in some
sort of profoundly subdued state. I felt paralyzed and empty
and a great torpor settled over me such that I did not care that
the time passed without product. I was afraid to go on, I suppose,
happy to rest here at this spot. I seemed to have abandoned
all goals and resolve. I hadn't an idea what I was supposed
to be doing.
But my torpor was false, affected. I wore it, tried to convince
myself of my disdain of effort, but in truth I became
increasingly frustrated at myself, at Tracy, at everything. I
came to know this one day when, after Suffolk had accidentally
gotten underfoot, with a grand sweeping motion of my
leg I slid her across the smooth wood floor and out of my way.
/ had kicked the dog. She yelped when she banged against a coffee
table leg and looked at me with eyes big and hurt, not
knowing what she had done to warrant this.
She slunk over when I called. I held her in my lap and in
great cathartic release I cried into her fur. Suffolk looked up
and began licking my face, granting me forgiveness and exoneration.
This business of kicking the dog had a very powerful
sobering effect, as if, haggard and tired and desperate, someone
had thrust a mirror into my face, revealing to me the
ghastly truth. The right thing to do seemed obvious.
I gathered up my various stacks of papers, consolidated
them into a single great pile, arranged neatly and placed in
what order could be had. I lashed them all together with a
length of twine which I tied with a neat bow. I put the lot in a
plastic trash bag, secured it and went outside and buried it.
After I had flipped over the last spade full of moist soil and
was tamping it down level with my shoe, I said, out loud and
with great ceremony, "That, then, is that." And I slapped the
soil from each of my hands, played with Suffolk, running and
shouting and watching her jump and twist in the air, and went
inside.
In doing this I looked for release, for a sense of freedom
and weight lifted. This was a decision, done without waffling,
reached dispassionately and intelligently. It was obvious.
There is a particular bar where Professor holds court. We
often adjourned to this place after class, sometimes we skipped
the pretext all together and met there in the first place. It is
called Millet's Fish Camp. We students tend to pronounce
this as if it were French, until such time as we overhear
someone, a genuine regular, say it properly. Although a Fish
Gamp, it is not near water nor does it even sport any fish or
fishing decor, with the single exception of one old large bass
mounted up in the shadows.
But it is this place that is the writer's haunt. Perhaps it is
its utter lack of pretension, for pretension is one thing it could
never be accused of. Even its year-round string of Christmas
lights adorning the eves quaintly speaks to a certain depth of
sincerity on someone's part which is at once sad, but also, because
of its self-conscious pathos, funny and inviting. Its fixtures
and interior are fashioned of raw planks of lumber—

72 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
blackened now through the years. I can only think of the proprieties
by recalling her in the act of slapping back the metal
cooler and reaching for bottles of beer. Millets is sparsely populated
as a rule—when not invaded by us—by tired looking
sorts who seem well suited to the musty shadows and sad
country music. It is a genuine honky-tonk and they are real
folk, although they live lives that seem to me somehow distant
and peripheral. I wonder that the regulars do not resent the
invasion of their place by us noisy, mostly middle-class college
youths, who loudly pontificate on the state of the word. I fear
that they are hip to the fact that our forays into their squalor is
just that, a visit, an excursion into this world, not something
we commit to, and when done, we pick up our book packs,
sling them over our shoulders and go home to our CD players
and blonde sex. But this does not seem to be the case, for the
natives are friendly, and of course the proprietress welcomes
us with open arms.
But Professor, who, if anything, is just a dirt farmer who
read a lot, is not a spectator. His visits are to the academy,
whose halls he will lumber down, chagrined and self-conscious.
He keeps a fifth in his desk, and once, through a chain
of events not involving anyone who knew better, campus security
was summoned to escort him out of the building. The fact
that he was somewhat crocked did not mitigate the fact that
they—Cretins all—did not know who he was.
Tracy had accompanied me to Millet's a few times. In part
I had taken her to see the great spectrum of locals I was wont
to associate with, to observe this strange facet of culture, this
bit from the fringe, but while I stood about and let her admire
my eclecticism, she simply joined in, ignoring any barriers
and constraints. She, like Professor, was not a spectator at all.
That had been some time back and I myself had not been to
Millet's Fish Camp in some time, ever since Elinor the bartender,
after listening to some of my woes, had paused to look
at me squarely and said dismissively, "Son, you have to make
your brain right." But when I entered, Professor was there,
tucked in his corner.
Hudson I 73
"Coach," I said.
"Son," he said flatly.
I did not know why I had come, why I had this need to tell
him of my decision. It was not out of some courtesy to my
"mentor" or to seek his approval, for I did not believe he
would give a rat's ass.
He breathed heavily and looked across the room. He was
brooding, although he always seemed to be brooding so I could
never tell.
"What's shaking?" he finally said.
So I told him, told him that I was tired of being a fraud,
that I could not settle for mediocrity, that my decision was a
brave and courageous one and involved commitment of an order
that I had up to then avoided vigorously and that I had
kicked my dog. But even as I spoke, my words rang hollow,
sounded pale and thin, so that by the time I had finished I felt
most thoroughly ridiculous and only wanted to exit and go
home as quickly as possible.
But this is what we did. We got up and went outside. I followed
him across the street to a Seven-Eleven and we went in
and purchased two beers, each hidden in a brown paper bag.
We went back outside and sat on the dirty curb where the
store's neon lights met the empty side lot's darkness. I leaned
against a paper machine. It was not the best of neighborhoods,
but with Professor present we were not to be hassled.
He told me about Mary Jay Axelrod who, once upon a
time, a long time ago, had most thoroughly broken his heart.
She had hair like a golden sea of wheat and cobalt blue eyes
that glowed of their own light like pieces of stained glass. She
had "tremendous tits," and would brook no shit from anybody,
including him.
"But mostly Son, she had skin. It was thin, diaphanous, so
you could see through to the workings of her muscles and
veins underneath."
This did not sound so very appealing to me, but clearly he
was enthralled, and conversational protocol required that I
keep my reservations to myself. Even more importantly, it was

74 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
so unusual for him to speak to me in such a fashion, so personal
and revealing, that I did not wish to interrupt.
"It was milky and translucent, without a single blemish."
He went on, fleshed out a history they had shared. I came to
know that he had loved her and adored her and through her
found all the best parts of himself.
"You'd eat the corn out of her shit?" I asked when he
breathed heavily once and stared off into the black. I was parroting
back a line he'd once said to me. Without skipping a
beat he said that yes, yes he would.
I do not know why he told me these things. I had come to
tell him I was quitting and he in turn was telling me of his romantic
tragedy. Mary Jay Axelrod had left, packed up her red
Mustang and headed north on the interstate to Georgia.
"What did you do?" I asked, wanting to prolong this spell
of intimacy and wanting to atone for my ill-timed corn crack.
"What did you do when she left?"
"I hurt bad. Deep down, and out through my fingertips, so
that I didn't want to do nothing, eat or drink, even. Though
the drink came later."
"But what did you do?" I asked again. "What happened?"
"There was a man I knew. His name was Red and he had
lost his mind. Scrambled his eggs, lived on the street. Panhandle,
bottle hunt, eat at the Salvation Army. I went and I
got him and I bought him a beer and we sat on the curb and I
had him take out his harp. Everyone, even the lowest of bums,
has one thing which they do magnificently, and playing the
blues harp was his one thing and when he played you knew
that it was his thing and that you'd never really heard it done
before.
"So I bought him this beer and asked him to play the absolute
most saddest song he knew, which he commenced without
thinking and it couldn't have been thirty seconds before I
was crying my eyes out, sitting there and crying my eyes out
like a child, great big tears and great big sobs and Red playing
without stopping, blowing and blowing. That is what I did
when Miss Mary Jay Axelrod left me.
Hudson I 75
"And all of this happened right here on this very spot."
This was a writerly thing I suppose. To walk me across the
street so as to be able to tell me this story at the very spot that
it took place, a need to invest the ordinary and everyday with
drama, to contrive for effect.
After some silence I said, "It's all a bit. . . sentimental,
isn't it, Coach?" As inappropriate as it might have been, it
was the only thing I could think to say, for I could not help
but think that if he had made this up it would have been shot
down in a heartbeat. Reality can go where fiction dare not
tread, it is true, but still. . .
He took a swallow of beer and smiled as he took this in and
let out another long slow noisy breath. "Son," he said, "it's
only sentimental if it don't work."
And this—it's only sentimental if it don't work—was about
the. closet thing to wisdom I came away with from that evening.
There were no epiphanies to be had, there were none offered.
Things just piddle away, that's all.
In my litany of chores to be done before I could truly begin
anew, there remained only one. And so what was ending
would also be beginning, calling for a triplet of stately asterisks,
or a solitary august //, signifying the start of the second
half. The voice was still there and the rap on mechanical
breaks, from way back—it being the provenance of beginners
—was this: Mechanical breaks, he would say, are for the lazy
and the inept. (He was agin' them.) The only thing they do is
give the reader, who is fickle at best, a reason to go take a leak
or turn on the TV or fix a sandwich and not return. There are
only two reasons to use them, he would say, you are either unable
or unwilling to write a transition.
II
She stopped when she saw me. It was on my face. She
knew.
"What?"
"I've quit," I said.

76 I Meryl & Me: A Performance Piece
She looked at me steadily and said nothing.
"I've decided this. Mediocrity will not suffice. I cannot
fool enough of the people. It is not a way to live."
"A noble sentiment," she said dryly.
"I don't have as much done as I said."
"I know."
She knew? How could she know this, stealing the thunder
from my confession.
"I have two more finals. Both on Friday. Just two."
"We place value on different things."
"And then the summer and then studying for the bar."
"We have slipped into a different kind of thing."
She was tired, weary. And mean. She was mean and hard
and cruel. Perhaps she was protecting some part of herself the
only way she was able, and this precluded magnanimity, but I
was only searching for a gesture upon which to build. As she
left I was overwhelmed with the task of separating our lives, of
the effort involved in untangling the knit of time and experience
that trailed behind us and buoyed us into the present. If
we had been only visitors in each other's lives, then before us
stood the huge task of gathering some spattering of essentials
into a single valise, into the smallest of beginnings. It came to
me that this was not at all what I had intended. As she left I
tried to think of something ameliorating to say, but it was only
some days later that I came to see what things I too had lost.
By then she was gone and we did not speak of it.
MICHAEL DELP
Hockey
H e was telling the story about playing hockey when he
was twelve or thirteen. Sixty years ago, he was saying.
Just to be sure we'd believe, he held his face to the light and
showed us the scars, said there was a memory in him every
night for years of how the puck seemed to float just above the
ice. He barely glimpsed it, he said, and it came up out of the
frozen lake as if some invisible stick had slapped it hard
against his face.
So he lay there, his face numb and pressed against the ice.
He could see through the layers of bubbles and he thought
how it looked like expensive crystal, or maybe he thought of
the bubbles as planets, he said. But he could see down. Down
into the blackness of the lake and then he saw the entrails.
They were playing on the mill pond below Webster's
Slaughter House in Holyoke. And he remembered seeing
whole cow intestines, bits of hooves, a tail, and even several
eyeballs floating in the lake under the ice.
That was the last time he played. To this day, he says, he
still carries the vision of the insides of animals drifting below
him. It was like staring into the night sky, and then the bits of
bone and blood swirled up against the clear ice.
He won't even watch hockey on TV and sometimes, when
he eats, he is aware of the ice chinking against the side of the
glass and remembers the sound he thought he heard with his
ears pressed to the ice, one eye askew looking down. That
sound he carried into waking dreams all day at school. Hooves
under the ice. The water red with blood. Dreaming once, he
told us, of a whole cow coming back together under the pond,

78 I Hockey
how it tore loose from the cold, leaving a hole big as a shed.
Now, he folds his hands in front of us, meshes his fingers
together like a net and shows us how he tried to stop that final
puck. Behind the thin surface of his eyes there are outlines
shapes, a flash of arms as though seen from far off, the hockey
stick moving against the winter air like a cleaver.
LI HE
translated by JODI VARON
Written Under Mt. Hua
To The Tune: Throwing Off My Sadness
Wind spreads autumn over the earth,
grasses wither.
Mt. Hua is a blue shadow
in evening cold.
At twenty, I should have purpose,
but don't.
My heart has faded like a brown orchid.
Robes airy as quail feathers,
horse like a hound,
where the steep road forks
I wave my sword
and bray like an animal.
At the roadhouse I dismount
and loosen my rags
hoping to use them as collateral
for a jug of Yang-Yi wine.
Half-way through the jug
clouds still do not part.
Idle white days stretch ten thousand miles.

80 I To The Tune: Throwing Off My Sadness Li He I 81
My host advises cultivation of heart and body.
He says there is nothing
but to endure ridicule
and go on.
A Song From Memory
I came to your road,
a deep column of opened gates,
your father's halberd
shadowed by willows.
Behind transparent blinds
bamboo flowers,
dogwood rising.
A flute sighed in the sun.
Your face in the mirror
was surrounded by bees.
Brushing them aside
powdered brows mimed
the spring-green moths.
Sweet daphne
crisscrossed the stairway
clutching at light
before dusk.

82 I The Joys Of Youth
The Joys Of Youth
Fallen petals dust
the earth with thin brocades.
Drunk,
I roam the countryside,
a man of twenty
tangled in a wild
horses' tassels.
Willows scatter
gold along the water
but the Wu beauty
(unfurled blossom)
does not smile.
Hair, emerald-black,
loosens. Orchid clouds rise
and I lunge at her gauze sleevemy
prize a hairpin,
kingfisher of gold.
LISA FETCHKO
The First Blow
L ouise Matko's father startled her as she came out of the
coat closet where she sometimes hid to talk to her boyfriend
Billy Kott, a bone-crushing lineman for the Oil City
Bruisers, a gentle giant who had stolen rather miraculously
into Louise's hard heart.
"I heard that," said her father.
"Heard what?" said Louise.
"You know what I mean," he said as she carefully replaced
the phone in its cradle on the wall and looked him in
the eye. Louise had just said good-bye to her best friend Annie
Fry.
"I don't know what you mean," said Louise evenly, but
from the look on her father's face, she could imagine what they
were about to get into. Today of all days, oh please Daddy,
she thought, not today. But she and her father were both
cursed with a terrible pride. It was always a ferocious battle
between them and even if Louise wasn't sure why it had ever
begun, she was not about to give in now.
"I'll tell you exactly what I mean," he said. "You said you
can't wait until you're alone with him, you said, 'Oh Bill,'
(and Mr. Matko mocked Bill as if he were a two-hundred
pound fairy, and Louise as if she were a flaky coed), 'I can't
wait until we're alone.' " The awful mocking set Louise's
teeth on edge.
"Really," she replied.
"Don't lie to me, Louise."
God, she thought, is he an ugly man when he gets a crazy
idea into his head, and I am issued from these very loins.

84 I The First Blow
Louise looked out the window. The house was hidden in a
patch of trees. The road was impossibly far away.
"What time is it, Daddy," she said, looking back at him.
"It doesn't matter what time it is because you sure as hell
are not leaving this house."
"What time is it, Daddy?" said Louise for the second time.
Her father glared at her and then he reached out like a bolt of
lightning to slap her in the face, but Louise was quicker than
he was. She saw what was coming and ran away. At the front
door she turned around, frightened but fascinated to see how
far it would all go.
"It's six o'clock on Friday night, Daddy, and that means
Billy Kott is in the high school locker room getting ready to
warm-up for the game with Punxsutawney. So I could hardly
be talking to him on the phone right now under your damn
nosy nose." Louise hesitated and then she drew a terrible
breath, "So you must be wrong."
Mr. Matko shrugged his shoulders and looked calmly
at his daughter. "Now how about that. But then what do I
know? Maybe you're two-timing that boy with another one
just like him. You could be a slut just like your mother."
Louise picked up her jacket and opened the front door. On
the way out of the house, she saw her mother frozen in the
harsh kitchen light, carefully cutting up a chicken, and she
briefly wondered if anyone would remember to walk the dog.
Outside it was cold and the wind had started to blow. By the
time Louise got to the garage, she was shaking. What a lousy
day, she sighed, what a lousy damn lousy day. Then she got
on her bicycle and rode down the street through the swirling
dead leaves until she got to Annie's house a few blocks away.
Louise Matko and Annie Fry had been friends forever, for
as long as anyone could remember, and although they were as
different as night and day, they were happy when they were
together. Things were a lot rougher at Louise's house than
they were at Annie's and if Annie was a serious young lady
Fetchko 185
who obeyed her parent's wishes and rarely got into trouble,
Louise was brazen and scornful, a peculiar girl who was determined
to escape from where she was and get to where she
wanted to be. But Louise and Annie never seemed to mind
their differences. Louise protected Annie from the vulgar riffraff,
and Annie defended Louise from the snooty cliques of
girls who began forming like clots in the seventh grade. When
Louise started getting straight A's, Annie brought her grades
up too, and when Annie got serious with her boyfriend Tyrone,
Louise began to find things in Billy Kott that she had
never seen before. But Louise hadn't seen much of Annie in
the past few months. It seemed like Annie had found the answer
to the rest of her life in Tyrone Nelson and was preparing
herself to be a slow-witted wife. Louise already knew how it
would eventually be, but she wasn't ready to let Annie slip
away. Not yet, she thought as she rode up Annie's driveway
on her bike, please don't let Annie go away from me just yet.
Annie was getting ready to go to the game when Louise arrived
and while she waited, Louise stretched out on Annie's
bed. She sunk her head back into the fluffy pillows and stared
out the window.
"I've got to ask you a question, Louise," whispered Annie.
A look of panic came over her baby doll face and left a crimson
blush. Annie sat down on the bed and Louise looked at her curiously.
"How come you're whispering?" she said.
"I don't know."
"You can shout, silly, no one else is home." But when
Louise saw Annie's wide-eyed trepidation, she began to take
an interest in what was going on.
"I'm so scared, Louise, you have to help me." Annie hesitated,
then went on, "Sometimes I feel so stupid. You know so
much more than me."
From the grave tone of Annie's confession, Louise immediately
guessed the delicate nature of the matter at hand and she
sat up. "Annie Fry, do you have a sexual question?" Annie

86 I The First Blow
started to giggle and her laughter pleased Louise who forgot
all of her troubles and laughed along with her friend.
"Tell me everything!" said Louise, but Annie's throat suddenly
went dry and she huddled against the wall, small and
uncertain.
"It's me, Louise, me and Tyrone ..." she said, and as Annie
stumbled over her words, Louise thought, what can it be?
Can this be it? Can she have done it when I haven't done it
yet, not even me?
"I thought you were saving yourself for your wedding
day," Louise said, looking around Annie's room as if something
might have changed. Annie looked downcast and she
plucked the bedspread with her fingers.
"It's just that Tyrone's been acting so crazy lately. He
promised we wouldn't go too far and I.... I kind of wanted to
do it too."
"Wanted to do what? What have you two been doing?"
"Well..."
"What?"
"Did you ever, you know ..."
"Did I ever what?"
"Did you ever touch Billy's thing?" whispered Annie under
her breath.
"Oh, and how!" giggled Louise. She loved to hold onto
Billy's thing and he sure had a nice one to hold onto—a
smooth marbly banister, a ticking stick of dynamite, a big bar
of gold. She liked to hold onto it with all of her might like she
was clinging for life to a giant palm tree in a desert island
storm, like a dozen girls swinging around a May pole, like she
was climbing up a big mountain range or shooting down the
river in a fast canoe. And Billy would start to make these little
noises that made her feel like a crazy cat inside and she
wanted to arch her back and hiss and stamp and cry. Then
there were the other things she could do with it that she had
just figured out how to do—take it between her fingers like a
baton, shake it up like a milkshake, roll it around like pizza
dough and wait for the heat to make it grow. She secretly
Fetchko I 87
dreamed of lapping it up like an ice cream cone and once she
tied a white handkerchief around it and Billy yelled, 'I surrender!'
and she pinned him to the ground. You bet she liked it.
After the game on Friday night she could hardly wait for Billy
to come out of the locker room. She would reach down and try
to tickle it, poor thing, tired out from all that strenuous athletic
activity and a whole week without her care. But Billy
would smack her hand away because he only liked it in private,
he had these silly rules. Louise didn't care. If it was dark
outside, she would give a wild howl and grab him until he
gave in. But before they were alone in Billy's father's car up on
the cliffs, they had to go to the Pizzeria to eat with the football
team and it took an awfully long time. First they had to order
the pizza and wait for it to arrive. Then they had to eat the
greasy pizza and listen to the boys congratulate each other on
every little play they made in the whole entire game while the
girls buzzed around them like flies. When they finally finished
eating, Louise would go into the ladies room, some lady she
was, and swish a little water around in her mouth because
sometimes she didn't just hold onto it, sometimes she . . .
"Louise!"
"Huh."
"I'm talking to you, Louise, it's important," said Annie.
What is she whining about now, thought Louise irritably.
She had no patience anymore, her nerves were always on
edge. When she looked up, Annie was crying. Louise saw the
tiny tin Jesus hanging on his wooden cross over the bed and
said, "I think we better get out of here right now. Just tell me
one thing. You're not pregnant, are you?" Annie wiped her
face with her hand and looked down at the ground.
"Answer me," said Louise.
"I don't think so."
"Oh my Lord." Louise pulled Annie up from the bed and
took her by the hand.
Tyrone Nelson was the star running back for the Oil City
Bruisers, and when Annie went to see him play, she always sat

88 I The First Blow
with the other girlfriends of the varsity team. They sat on the
fifty-yard line right below the player's parents and the principal
of the school. The Girlfriends, as they were called—no
matter who they were, and Louise couldn't tell them apart
anyway—bored her to tears. She never sat with them although
Billy Kott was a varsity player too. She always watched the
game with her cousin Jimmy and his wife Ellen drinking beers
with the alumni in the end zone. Jimmy sat with his buddies
from work, hot-headed young railroad men whom Louise had
known her whole life. Until recently she had been ignorant of
the whole purpose of their being although how she could have
overlooked what she now could hardly look away from, she
didn't really know. Now when she sat with Jimmy and Ellen,
she would try to imagine who had what and what he could do
with what he had. It was like a tense game of concentration: If
she turned the card over, would she get a pair. She even wondered
what Jimmy's was like and did Ellen whirl it around
like a magic wand.
As they walked into the stadium, Annie told Louise that
after the last game, when she and Tyrone were parked in his
father's car on the cliffs above town, there had been a long and
arduous battle that she hadn't really understood after which
Tyrone let go into the cold night air with a terrific gushing
stream that stained his father's crushed velvet interior. They
had such a time trying to clean it up and Tyrone looked so
worried and grim that Annie was afraid to ask him what had
happened.
"Is he sick, Louise, what's the matter, did I hurt him?"
said Annie nervously and Louise looked at her in dismay. She
felt like smoking a cigarette although she had hardly ever
smoked one before, she felt like smoking a whole pack of cigarettes,
she felt like leaving town. But there were only five minutes
before the game began, so she told Annie to go sit down
with the other girls.
"Don't worry," she said, "everything's gonna be all right.
We'll talk about it later."
Fetchko I 89
"Oh Louise, I don't know what I'd do without you," said
Annie and she sounded so relieved that Louise regretted having
to tell her anything at all. Then Louise realized what Tyrone
was there for, to wade through the dim darkness with
Annie and take her by the hand. Louise sighed. Somehow she
knew that everything was settled for Annie and she suspected
that things weren't going to be quite so simple for herself.
The Bruisers were supposed to beat the other team by a
couple of touchdowns, so after the first five minutes, Louise
stopped watching the game. She told Jimmy and Ellen about
the fight she had with her father and Jimmy told her that she
could stay with them until her father came to his senses which
might, they joked, never occur. As they were talking, Louise
discovered that every time she looked up at the Scoreboard,
one of Jimmy's buddies, a beefy guy with crooked black
glasses and a sweatshirt from Bowling Green University, was
smiling down at her.
"Who's that?" Louise whispered to Ellen who shrugged
her shoulders and said she didn't know his name. Louise
turned around.
"Hey you, what's your name?"
"Name's Mikey," he said and he held out his hand and
waved to her.
"Mikey who?"
"Mikey Flynn."
"Oh," said Louise. Around town, the Flynns were known
as handsome devils who had turned their backs on God, but
Louise had always found them to be polite and interesting.
Mikey grinned at Louise and shrugged his shoulders. Louise
looked at Ellen and they laughed. Now that she was growing
up, Louise saw that she could be Ellen's ally among all these
beer-sloshed working men and it made her feel good. Half
time came quickly and Louise gulped down a cup. of beer and
waved cheerily to Mike Flynn before she went off to look for
Annie.
"Meet us at the Pizzeria after the game," said Ellen.

90 I The First Blow
"Yeah, maybe," said Louise, blowing on her hands, "I'll
see you later."
As Louise walked up to where Annie was sitting, a whole
line of Girlfriends solemnly passed her by, clapping their
hands over their mouths one after the next like geisha girls.
Behind her, Louise heard their titters.
Women sure can sound like a pack of hens, thought Louise.
The men have that right, silly biddies.
"What's the matter with them?" Louise asked Annie as
she bought a box of caramel corn from a little boy. Annie
grabbed Louise's hand and held it tight, "Oh Louise, you've
got to sit down." Annie had that look on her face like a fly was
buzzing around inside of her head and Louise knew that a
fountain of tears were forthcoming.
"What's the matter, Annie? You look like you've seen a
ghost." Louise could hardly keep a straight face. Poor Annie,
she took everything so seriously.
"Oh Louise," sobbed Annie, "I don't want to grow up, I
don't think I can stand it. People are so mean." Louise put her
arm around Annie and patted her shoulder.
"Annie, Annie, Annie. What do you mean? Who's so
mean?"
"You'll never believe it. Something awful has happened."
"What's the matter?"
"First let me take some deep breaths."
Louise watched as Annie heaved like a heavy woman in labor.
When Annie calmed down, she looked at Louise with big
sorrowful eyes. "When I came up here at the beginning of the
game, the Girlfriends were all talking, but they stopped talking
as soon as I came. I didn't know what to do. I thought
they were talking about me and I was so embarrassed that I
couldn't move. Then Linda Lavinsky came down and said she
wanted me to know that they weren't talking about me and I
said, 'Well, why did you stop talking when I came? I don't
think I believe you," and Linda just stood there like she didn't
know what to say, you know how she can look real stupid
sometimes."
Fetchko I 91
"She is real stupid," interjected Louise.
"Finally Linda said, 'You're going to find out anyway, so
don't get mad at me. I guess everybody knows by now except
you and Louise.' Then she snickered and turned up her nose.
Well, you know how I am, Louise, I might be a little slow to
catch onto things, but when people start talking about my
friends or someone who isn't there to defend himself, well, I
just don't agree with that. So I said, 'You tell me what's going
on right this minute, Linda Lavinsky. It can't be so very
awful.'
'It is pretty awful, at least some people think so,' Linda
said in that snooty way she has as if she never..."
"Never what?"
"Never mind. 'Just let me be the judge of that,' I told her."
" 'It's about Louise,' she said. Well, I swear, I was so mad
by then that I could have whacked her one, but the Girlfriends
were all staring down at us and they looked so serious that I
thought you were dead.
' 'What's the matter with Louise? I just saw her five minutes
ago,' I said to Linda, and she looked up at the Girlfriends
and they all started to laugh and giggle. I asked her again
what was the matter, and she told me, 'Billy Kott is breaking
up with her.'
" 'What are you talking about?' I said."
"Yeah, what are they talking about?" said Louise, turning
around to look for them but they were all gone now, down in
the ladies' room painting their faces. That's why they were all
laughing at me, she thought, they could never stand to see me
with Billy Kott anyway. They thought I was just too weird.
"What do you mean Billy is breaking up with me? I'm
supposed to meet him after the game."
"That's not the worst of it. But I can't tell you anymore."
Annie shut her mouth like she was not going to say another
word and Louise began to feel uneasy.
"What else did she say, Annie? Tell me right now or I'll
tell your mother all about you and Tyrone."
"You wouldn't."

92 I The First Blow Fetchko I 93
"Yes I would. Now tell me what Linda said." Annie took a
deep breath and then she started talking, softly and slowly
and deliberately in a sad hushed tone like she knew it would
change everything.
"Linda said that everyone knows what you did with Billy
when you two went up to the cliffs after the games. He told all
the guys in the locker room. He told them how much you liked
it. He told them you liked it too much. He told them you
couldn't get enough. Now the other boys are telling everyone
you're sex-crazed and almost a slut. That's why the girls were
laughing at you, Louise. They pretend to be shocked, but
they're just laughing for fear someone will say the same thing
about them."
"Well, I'll be damned," said Louise. She sat back against
the cold splintery bleacher with a sigh, Annie's sad eyes upon
her. Louise saw that this was a crucial moment, a mighty day.
The end of fooling around and the beginning of being what
she really was, certainly not a Girlfriend but maybe a sexcrazed
slut, and all of a sudden she felt a whole lot older, and a
terrible calm took hold of her. At the same time, she felt her
stomach turn upside down inside of her. She felt like she could
never go out in public again. Soon everyone would know—her
family, her friends, her teachers, her swim coach. Even her
older brother Nicky would find out on his carrier ship in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe he would even come
home and kill Billy Kott. No, that's impossible, I'm on my
own. Then she thought of Billy and how much she liked him
and how much he liked it that she liked him, the lying bastard.
And as much as she hated to think of giving him up, she imagined
in the back of her mind that there might be others out
there that were equally nice or even better than him.
Annie patted Louise's shoulder. "Tyrone will beat the
crap out of Billy if he says one more word."
"That's real nice of him," said Louise, although she knew
that it was already too late. As she and Annie watched the
marching band leave the field after the half-time show, Louise
tried to think of what to do next. How would she get through
the stares and the giggles, the awkward silences and the pitiful
glances, the whispers behind her back and the way they would
say there had always been something weird about her, just
look at the family from which she came. Louise knew right
away that she would be hounded and besieged until she left
that wicked little town for good.
As the second half began, the Girlfriends brushed by Annie
and Louise. Louise looked straight up at them as they took
their seats. She pierced them through and through, one by
one, with a stern gaze, and the girls shifted uncomfortably in
their seats and turned away. The whole row turned on a dime
just like the Supremes, as if they had rehearsed it down in the
ladies room. Then Louise turned to Annie and they bowed
their heads together while Louise explained things to Annie,
crucial information for a faithful friend. Annie and Louise
were moving far away from each other. Their world was splitting
apart more quickly than either of them had ever imagined
it would. With one sharp blow the happiest friendship of their
school days together was almost over. Annie would always be
a Girlfriend, it was the only thing she could be, and Louise
had just stepped out all alone into the long cold night.
They only raised their heads once during the second half
when it was announced that Billy Kott had been hurt and
taken out of the game. Annie sucked her breath in with alarm,
but Louise felt the Girlfriends' eyes upon her and she let out a
horrible chuckle, like one of her father's sinister laughs. Look
at how the old man had taught her something after all. When
the game was over, Annie had learned her lessons and she
looked pale and uneasy. The secrets of love and romance were
too much for this rosy rural girl.
"Come to the Pizzeria," said Annie, "talk to Billy. Maybe
they're just making it up. Maybe it's not true."
"Forget it, Annie. You have to go alone." Louise ran up to
the very top of the bleachers and sat down. She looked out into

94 I The First Blow
the empty high school practice fields and the neat fallow farms
in the valley that lay beyond them and the cold dark void
made her feel good. This was the season that she loved the
most, heading into winter. Things were clearer than they were
at any other time of the year. Louise sat alone for a long time
in the cold, windy night as the bleachers around her emptied
out and all the people went home. She used to come to the
games with her family when she was much younger and how
her father would hold her on his lap and she would drink sips
of his beer. She remembered the first time she came to the
game with Annie and how silly they had acted and how she
saw her mother and father leaving the stadium at the end of
the game, all alone. She remembered once when Billy Kott
waved to her from the field, and she searched in her mind for
some reason why he would now be trying to get rid of her, but
she didn't have a clue. Sitting up in the bleachers all by herself,
looking out over the simple town that was her world, Louise
felt like she was going to cry and for a little while she actually
did.
After Louise left the stadium, she walked around town,
thoughts piling up one on top of the other and whizzing
around in her head until she was sick of herself. She passed a
lot of couples walking home together after the game and she
felt lonelier than she had ever felt before, but somewhere inside
she didn't mind what had happened because she also felt
a great big liberation. Finally she remembered that she had
nowhere to go. She had to find Jimmy and Ellen. It was getting
cold outside and they would take her home.
When Louise opened the door to the Pizzeria, the first
thing she saw was the screaming table of varsity football players
and their girlfriends. A dramatic chill fell over the table
when they saw that Louise had come in and for the first time,
Louise felt terrible: ruined, unwanted, ignored. Then she saw
Billy Kott sitting at the far end of the table with his arm in a
sling and it was impossible for her to believe it, but she didn't
dislike him at all. She wished with all her might that she was
Fetchko I 95
sitting there beside him. She felt hot tears well up and burn
her eyes and it was a terrible struggle for her not to let them
spill out. At the end of the table, three or four girls were fussing
and fretting over Billy, trying to gain the go-ahead of the
Girlfriends and break into the big leagues.
Louise walked by the table with her eyes fixed in the distance,
a frozen grimace on her face. When she passed Billy,
she could see that he was actually alarmed, but the varsity
team, flushed with victory and goaded on by the giggling
girls, began to laugh as she walked by their table, and Louise
thought that she must be something awful special to get a
bunch of nearly grown-up boys and girls to hoot and holler
with such glee. Then before she knew what was happening,
she had spun around and shoved two or three of the girls away
from Billy. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Annie's eyes
widen and Tyrone's mouth drop and they huddled together
like they were already at the altar and when Billy got up from
the table to protest, Louise gave him a great big kick in the
groin. It pained her to hurt what she had truly loved, but it
was a solid kick and she connected like a prize punter to the
pigskin. Her daddy would have been proud. When Billy went
down, she bent over and whispered in his ear, "I hope it's
broke for good." Then she stood up in the hushed silence and
walked out the door.

JENNIFER O'GRADY
The Miraculous Draft Of Fishes
In one boat, two men are hauling up nets,
the sculpted columns of their arms unceasingly
brightened by the afternoon light.
In another, three haloed figures float
over water so still, it might not exist
but for the pale bodily parts
it reflects. One can only imagine
the fluid red of Christ's robe, its generous folds
now dulled a milky pink, or the heightened coloring
of Peter looking up with pure wonder
at the unmoving face of God,
or Andrew, standing, his arms wide open
and perfect in perspective.
Somehow the skiffs' thick pilings of fish,
frozen mouths aghast, seem to have been there
longer than the hungry crowd
darkening a far shore.
Closer, a trio of cranes strains upward
as if remembering how to fly.
If what we want most is what's forever
lost, then there's something mournful about
this loosening and dissolution of pigments
pressed from once-living things.
If only faith were this easy, its forms
this visible, as Raphael might have believed
they were, believed in the lasting life
of white lead, azurite, red lake, vermilion,
smooth shells of muscle, and the definition
shading lends to light. Not knowing
how quietly his featherstrokes
of birds above the thinning horizon
would fade until they were mere suggestions,
like shadows, or the sudden dying of a wind
before it has fully arisen.
O'Grady I 97

98 I Buster's Last Hand
Buster's Last Hand
He spent die last afternoon of
his life playing bridge.
—Mrs. Buster Keaton
It's 66 and Keaton's playing
bridge with his wife and a young couple
who look like anyone's neighbors, but really
rather famous. Now he's forgotten
their name, and he's tired and bored from so much
coughing that shakes him like laughter.
In the kitchen, his wife makes a kettle scream.
Someone deals. Keaton orders his cards—
a shifting of thumb-work frames from which
the one-eyed jack stares blankly out.
Keaton leads and he lays down a heart,
pretending it's stuck to his palm. Pale
starlets titter politely. His wife smiles.
As usual, Keaton says nothing.
Outside the picture window, the weightless
snow falls, white and useless, creating
a spectacle of itself—ageless
brilliance without color or sound.
But it's California. It won't last.
Small Buds scrape the sky, and already
the boy next door is out there with a shovel.
KELLIE WELLS
Blue Skin
C lancy is watching the Oprah Winfrey show. There is a
woman on who maintains that the male "y" chromosome
is directly responsible for war and high interest rates.
Her lips quiver as she speaks and she shakes clenched, white
fists at the ceiling.
Clancy prefers the sensationalism and sleaze of the Geraldo
Rivera show. He especially likes it when Geraldo gets
down on bended knee and squeezes the thigh of the sobbing
guest. Yesterday on the show, there was a man whose wife had
been slain by a maternally crazed woman. This woman could
not have a child of her own, so she stalked a pregnant woman,
kidnapped her and her unborn fetus, slit her down the middle
like a melon, and stole the baby from her womb, all the while
looking over her shoulder as though she were cracking a safe.
The no-longer-pregnant woman clung to a tree as blood
slipped from her. Someone out for a walk saw the dying victim,
and he leaned close to her lips so she could tell him this
story.
Clancy imagines his family will one day be the focus of an
edition of the Geraldo Rivera show. He sees Geraldo looking
intently into his eyes, caressing his knee.
Clancy grew up watching mostly game shows and cartoons:
The Joker's Wild, Match Game '79, Rocky and Bullwinkle,
Tennessee Tuxedo. He remembers a particular afternoon
when he was nine years old and his all-time favorite
cartoon was on. He sat directly in front of the television set
while in another room, behind a door, his mother and a man
spoke in squeaky, muffled tones like muted trumpets. On the
television, a cartoon frog sang, Hello my baby, hello my

100 I Blue Skin
honey, hello my Ragtime Gal, in an imitation of Al Jolson as
he danced, straw hat in hand, across a tin box.
Clancy remembers tapping on his knee with a plastic hammer
and kicking his leg in the air. He tapped up and down his
legs and began hitting harder. He chipped away at his shins.
He dropped the hammer and ground his fists into his calves.
He bent and bit his feet.
Clancy's mother, Melba, emerged. She rushed up behind
him, dropped to her knees, and wrapped arms mottled with
blue and yellow around him. She grabbed his tiny fists.
"Your arms are colors," Clancy said. "Sky colors."
She shrouded Clancy with her body and rocked back and
forth.
Somewhere in the house a door slammed, and Clancy
broke away, fell on his side. Melba began massaging his legs.
"It's okay now," she said. "The colors will go away."
Clancy sat up. "No," he said. "My name used to be
Clancy." He turned toward the television.
"What is it now?" Melba rested her chin on his shoulder.
"Clem Cadiddlehopper," he said, staring at the television.
Melba wrapped her arms around Clancy again. He traced
the bruises with his finger. "I'll always love you, Clancy," she
said. "But I won't always be here."
On the television, a man picked up the suddenly limp and
malleable frog by the scruff of the neck. He sat him on the
back of his hand and puppeted the frog along the box, kicking
and dancing. The man let go of the frog, who slid off his hand
in a heap. The frog ribited indifferently.
"Neither will I," Clancy said.
It is evening and Clancy is at the Rosebud Bar and Grill.
A charred sled hangs on the wall behind him. His band, Leopold
and the Frontal Loebs, has just played. They covered
songs by Joy Division, Roxy Music, Kurt Weill, the Velvet
Underground, and Patsy Cline. A few people on the dance
floor slammed into one another and there was some half-
Welh I 101
hearted stage-diving but very little bloodshed.
Clancy stands straight and still beside the bar and feels
the house music throb beneath his feet. The layers of rhythm
make him blink and swallow in time. He is only nineteen and
not inflexible, but he prefers the simpler eras and droning
dirges of death and glitter rock.
A tall, emaciated woman has sidled silently up to Clancy.
She appears apparition-like before him. She is clad in all
black. She is so thin that her face and long white hair seem
fleeting. Her skin is almost translucent like the invisibly scaled
body of a neon tetra. Her veins and blood vessels create a pattern
like shattered ice beneath her thin skin.
"Pretty solid tonight," she says. Her wet, red lips look like
two pieces of hot candy.
"Thanks," Clancy says. When he hears the word "solid"
it occurs to him that her appearance is that of liquid, viscous
and mutable. A test tube of flaccid substance. He recalls Mrs.
Shepherd's fifth grade science class. "The body is 83% water,"
she had said, her smoky breath heating his nape.
"My pad?" The woman's voice shakes him by the ears. He
shrugs his shoulders and follows her out. The bouncer grabs
Clancy's face as he's about to pass through the entrance. He
slaps it twice and pinches Clancy's cheek. "Can I see your
I.D.?" he asks then laughs and pushes him out the doorway.
"So, are you Leopold?" The woman and Clancy sit at opposite
ends of a turquoise vinyl couch with six perfectly square
cushions.
"No."
"Who's Leopold?"
"He's a guy who killed someone just to see if he could get
away with it." Clancy feels his heart thumping hard and uneven
within his chest, as though it were trying to reposition itself.
The woman smiles and kicks off her shoes. "Friend of
yours?"

102 I Blue Skin
"No," he says.
"So what is your name? Something like Johnny Sinew or
Dash Riprock?"
"Clancy." He takes off his glasses. Things blur and his
heartbeat slows. He runs his fingers through a cowlick of
brown hair.
"Clancy? That sounds like a clown's name." The woman
moves onto the cushion next to Clancy and pulls her legs under
her.
"It was. It was the name of a guy my mom knew in Florida.
He went to clown college there." Clancy begins focusing
on small molecules of light that swim across his gaze.
"Wow. Vuja de. Synchronicity, hunh?" The woman
laughs, puts her hand on Clancy's neck, and squeezes. "I
didn't even know you could go to college for that. Wonder if
it's Pass/Fail. My name's Dora."
Clancy reaches behind his neck and brings Dora's hand
over his head. He shakes it. "Charmed," he says, staring at
the small, green lizard tattoo on her hand.
"Yeah, right," she says. She notices Clancy staring at the
tattoo and says, "Green is the most painful." Dora stands up.
"I have an eating disorder, but I'm getting counseling." She
puts her hands on her hips and swivels. "Do you think I'm
overweight?"
Clancy shakes his head. Dora raises her eyebrows and
leans forward as if to ask No what?
"No, ma'am, " Clancy says. "If you stuck your tongue out
in profile, you'd look like a zipper."
Dora does not laugh. She nods her head vaguely and says,
"Yes. Thank you." She grabs Clancy's wrists and turns them
over. "No scars," she says. "You could almost have been a
girl, you know? You have slender fingers and you move like
you're just an instant replay of something."
"You'd look like a zipper."
Dora smiles and sits. She scoots close to Clancy. She leans
over and licks his cheek. "Mmm. No stubble," she says. "Do
you want to fuck?" She moves his shirt up and puts her finger
in his navel.
"No," he says.
"Didn't think so. You're an insy." She begins to maneuver
her fingers beneath his jeans. He grabs her wrist. "You do
have a cock, don't you?"
"I have a cock."
"Just not led around by it?"
"Blind leading the blind," Clancy says.
Dora runs her fingers along the white, t-patch of scalp that
glares through the closely shorn hair on the side of his head.
"Why a cross?" she asks.
"A St. Christopher's Medal was too involved."
She gets up and walks into the kitchen. Clancy puts his
glasses back on. He notices a copy of National Geographic lying
on the lacquered, petrified wood coffee table. On the cover
there is an aerial shot of a spotty rain forest with an inset of its
native inhabitants. They have long, black and gray hair and
weather-worn faces deeply incised with dark furrows like relief
maps. Round plates thrust their lower lips forward pleadingly,
as if asking to be filled with food, relief.
Clancy traces the Indian's lips with his finger. "We're destroying
the earth's lungs," he says. "We are our own cancer."
"I don't smoke," Dora calls from the kitchen. "I only put
sugarless Sorbee hard candies in my ashtrays." She returns
carrying a bowl of bean dip and a bag of pork rinds. She sits
on the couch and says, "You know, you should really do more
Joy Division covers. I could really get into a good Ian Curtis
imitation."
Clancy feels his heart begin to knock against his chest
again. "He committed suicide," he says.
"Yeah," she says, smiling at the bean dip.
Clancy stands up. "Good-bye," he says.
Dora raises one side of her shirt, exposing a breast as small
and fragile as a teacup. "Good-bye."
Wells 1103

104 I Blue Skin Wells I 105
Clancy thinks his younger sister, Willa, looks like her
name: delicate and windblown, though she's actually quite
sturdy. Clancy once watched as her black patent leather shoe
met the step toe to edge and she fell backwards down a flight
of wooden stairs. She had on a ruffled, white dress and looked
like a pressed carnation spread out on the floor. She picked
herself up and walked back up the stairs, patting the banister
gently, saying, "nice stairs," as though they were a horse that
had just bucked her. She never screamed, and she didn't
bleed. She eats a lot of fruit.
Clancy teases Willa about the amount of fruit she consumes.
It seems strange to him that a ten-year-old child would
voluntarily choose apples over Ho-Hos. Yesterday Willa ate
three peaches in a single sitting, and Clancy said, "Crimany,
Willa. You think those things grow on trees?" Willa kicked
him as she reached for a banana.
Clancy and Willa live with their stepfather, Buddy. Eight
months ago their mother disappeared. She just didn't come
home from work one morning. She worked graveyard at a convenience
store called Gitty-Up-And-Go. Her purse was found
lying in the parking lot of a Denny's' downtown Kansas City,
Missouri. Her keys, billfold, lucky squirrel's foot and sunglasses
were still in it, and also two ticket stubs from the
American Royal and half-eaten Cherry Mash. In her billfold
there were three five dollar bills, two Susan B. Anthony silver
dollars, a newspaper clipping about a child born allergic to
her own skin, and the paper picture that came with the wallet
of a grinning family of four.
Clancy and Willa and Buddy were invited to appear on
Unsolved Mysteries. They ate lunch with Robert Stack and
the television crew at the Denny's where Melba's purse had
been found. The producer of the show, a tall, thin man with
long sideburns and three gold teeth, asked Clancy to tell him
everything he could think of that might be revealing.
Clancy leaned close to the producer's ear and spoke in a
confidential tone. "Once, when we were painting Easter eggs,
she told me there were people who lived in the Appalachians
that had light blue skin, the color of robin's eggs, as the result
of inbreeding."
"Good. Very good," the producer said. "Now we're getting
somewhere."
Buddy was the only one who was interviewed on camera.
He began to sob and said, "Melba honey, if you're out there
watchin', darlin', please." He lowered his face into his hands.
"Cut," someone yelled. Buddy pulled out from under the divan
a ceramic plaque that read When the smoke alarm goes
off, dinner's ready. On top of it were four neat lines of white
powder, and Buddy rubbed some on his gums. He inhaled two
of the lines through a tightly rolled dollar bill. "Shit fire," he
said.. "Robert Stack's in my living room. My living room in
the middle of fucking Kansas, man." He squeezed his nose
and sniffed. "Fuck Judy Garland, man. She's dead. I got Robert
Stack."
"On the edge," one of the cameramen said. "On the edge
of fucking Kansas."
The woman who portrayed Melba in the reenactment
scenes gave Clancy an eight by ten glossy photograph of herself
and her agent's card in case he ever decided to pursue an
acting career. "You got the jaw for it," she said. "And those
hands."
She gave Willa a bag of oranges, a Sea Monkey kit, and a
kiss. "I'm going to plant one right there," she said, pointing to
Willa's cheek. She scratched it with her fingernail, kissed the
spot, then patted it down. "There. Maybe it'll grow."
Willa and Clancy watched as she left in a rented car. The
car had a bumper sticker that said, If Today Were a Fish, I'd
Throw it Back.
Now, two months later, Willa wants to activate the Sea
Monkeys. "I think I'm ready," she says to Clancy.

106 I Blue Skin Wells I 107
"All we have to do is add water and presto, dancing
brine."
"What if they don't wake up?"
Clancy looks at the animated pictures of Sea Monkeys on
the package. One is grinning and waving and another is flexing
its biceps. "It says here that they're developing heartier
strains of Sea Monkeys all the time." Clancy knows they
won't last long and wishes he hadn't said this. He knows Willa
will name them and look for distinguishing characteristics.
She will claim that one has green eyes and that one can sing.
She will give them occupations. She will say, "If he were human,
I think he'd make a fine math teacher."
"I don't think I know enough yet," Willa says. "What if
they want to know where babies come from?"
Clancy pulls Willa's shirt up, presses his lips against her
stomach, and blows hard. Willa laughs then says, "I'm really
much too old for that now, you know. But you can do it if it
makes you feel better."
Clancy and Willa decide to let the Sea Monkeys remain
dormant a little longer so they will all have something to look
forward to. "We'll give them nine months to get ready," Willa
says.
Willa wants desperately to go to the Rosebud to watch
Clancy play. "Please, please, please?"
"You wouldn't like it, Willa. People smoke and wear
spiked bracelets."
"A woman named Dora called today. She asked me if I
was yours, and I said 'yes'."
"Good."
"She said she has an eating disorder but she's getting
counseling. I told her I'd make her a French Silk pie if she
came over, and she hung up."
"We can go to the river now," Clancy says.
At the river, Clancy and Willa wait for land-roving catfish
to appear on the banks. Clancy read about them in an issue
of Omni magazine. These catfish have developed semiprehensile
fins and tails and hearty lungs. They have been
spotted perching in banyan and palmetto trees in southern
Florida. They have also been seen meandering along the highways.
Clancy told Willa about them and she wants to see
them, wants to ask them where they're going. Willa is certain
they will travel to Kansas. She believes they will be attracted,
like the rats of Hamlin, to the soothing hum of tires against the
woven metal of the ASB bridge, the "singing bridge." She
feels certain they will become mesmerized during rush hour.
Clancy pokes a long branch at unidentifiable objects bobbing
in the murky water.
"Do you think they call this the Kaw because crows live
here?" Willa asks.
"Maybe. Maybe it's the snoring sound the river makes
late at night when the fish are sleeping."
"Yes. I bet that's it." Willa throws popcorn onto the water.
Gray-green snouts surface and make the popcorn disappear.
"The world according to gar," Clancy says.
"One of the catfish will surely want to take a walk," Willa
says. "Maybe he will have seen Mama."
Clancy drops Willa off at home. They saw no strolling catfish.
Clancy knows Willa is nervous and curious. She looks
for things to connect with. "My friend Emma Perkins has a
Petunia Pig watch," she says. "I have a Petunia Pig watch."
"Smitty, Mrs. Baumgartner's dog, has curly brown hair," she
says. "I have curly brown hair." "The front of the Buick has
two big eyes and a smile like me," she says. "Seek and ye shall
find. Seek and ye shall find," she says every night before bed
like a prayer.
Clancy imagines she is calling the number that connects
her with an endless, measured thump, thump—the number
for Frankenstein's heartbeat. Clancy used to call it when he
was a child, and he would listen to it for hours on end. If

108 I Blue Skin
Frankenstein ever expired, Clancy was going to be there to
hear it. He imagines Willa listening to it at this very moment.
"Frankenstein has a heartbeat," she is saying.
Clancy wishes he could take Willa to Bagnell Dam where
the friendly, fat catfish swarm for the tourists, whose hands
are full of Cornuts and Milk Duds. He knows she would love
the big paddle boat and the free-standing faucet of running
water suspended magically in midair. He also knows she
would be distressed by the glassed-in chickens that peck at toy
pianos for a handful of feed. He knows he would buy her a
goldstone necklace, a pair of Minnetonka moccasins, and that
she would look deeply into every face of every stranger.
Clancy is at the Pierson Park Tower. He climbs over the
tall fence despite the warning to KEEP OUT. The tower has
been off limits for many years, ever since a little girl climbed
it, unsupervised, and fell from the top. Clancy climbs up the
six stories and looks out over the city. He thinks he can see the
blue and yellow lights of the Southwestern Bell building flickering
on. He looks down and sees a girl climbing the fence.
She waves at him. She climbs the tower stairs and stands next
to Clancy.
"My name's Zooey," she says breathlessly.
"Clancy." Clancy's palms begin to itch.
"Too cool," the girl says. "In numerology z's and o's are
totally sacred, so like maybe I'm the Messiah." Zooey laughs.
"Unless you know someone named Zozo."
Clancy shakes his head. "You must be it," he says.
"I'm sorry. Am I being way too forward? You look kind of
familiar."
"It's the hands," Clancy says and turns his hands palmsup
for her inspection. He looks at her hands clenching the railing.
She has the letters H-A-T-E written in blue ink on the fingers
of her left hand and L-O-V-E on the fingers of her right.
"Do you go to Pierson?"
"No."
"Wherever you go, there you are," Zooey says. "Or is it
wherever you are, there you go? I saw it on a coffee mug in
Macy's."
"Can I put my hand on your breast?" Clancy asks. "To
see if I can feel?" Clancy removes his glasses and puts them in
his pocket.
"What do you mean?"
"I think I've lost the feeling in my hands," he says.
Clancy's mouth begins to water, and he vomits over the railing.
He lays his head down on his leaning arm.
Zooey takes his free hand and places it on her breast. It
feels to Clancy like a knee or a hat or a bagel.
"Fuck," he says.
Wells I 109
Clancy dreams of Melba. She sits in Willa's plastic wading
pool. Her skin is translucent and tinted blue. Under her skin
she is filled with white liquid, like milk in a blue glass. She
holds her thin arms out to Clancy. He walks toward the pool,
careful to step around the chalk outlines of fish that float in the
grass.
Clancy hears the telephone ringing. Or is it wind chimes,
he wonders. Or is it the pulse in his ear? The grass, the chalk
outline have disappeared. There is only the black of the undersides
of his eyelids. He opens his eyes. It is the telephone
ringing. Clancy rises and walks into the living room. He feels a
smooth, weighted dangle of genitals brush against his inner
thighs like clay bell clappers. He hears the click and rumble of
the answering machine. Howdy, the machine says.
"Melba?" Clancy says. "Mama?"
You've reached the home of Melba, Buddy, Clancy, and
Willa, but we're not in it. Leave a message, and one of us will
get back to you as soon as we can. Oh, and if this is Sheldon,
your pony's fine. Eats like a damn horse. Wait for the beep.
"Hey, dudescicle. What's shakin'? The scenery is here,

110 / Blue Skin
etc. Oh, by the way, fuck you. In the words of the inimitable
Frank Tovey: 'I choke on the gag, but I don't get the joke.'
Hey Leopold, I don't give a rat's ass if you don't have a prick.
Really. Call me anyway. See you. Ignite. Burst into flames."
Clancy takes the small cassette out of the machine. Buddy
only recently turned the answering machine back on. Willa insisted
he leave the old recorded message intact. She was convinced
that if Melba ever called and heard her own words, she
would be drawn magically back to them by her former life at
the other end of the phone line. Willa believed Melba would
be transfixed by the sound of her own voice, that her mind
would walk along the miles of underground cable until it
reached their front door. Clancy puts the cassette in a shoe
box on which Buddy has scrawled the words "Personal Effects."
Clancy does not want Buddy to have the last word concerning
Melba. Using a pencil with an eraser in the shape of
Fred Flintstone, Clancy inserts the word "Side."
Clancy remembers the origin of the Fred Flintstone eraser.
Willa had gotten it at the Ice Capades that featured largerthan-life
sized versions of the Flintstones characters cavorting
on ice skates. Fred Flintstone fell down repeatedly, often taking
his sidekick, Barney, with him. Wilma and Betty were
graceful, with their big heads cocked to the side, and looked
like sleek animals as their spotted dresses waved.
Melba knew one of the ticket sellers and got fifth row seats
on the bottom tier of Municipal Auditorium. Every now and
then when the skaters came near, slicing to a stop, they could
feel a spray of ice prickle against their cheeks. Once Barn-Bam
leaned over the railing and shook the hand of the little boy in
front of Willa. Willa shrank into her chair at the sight of the
big, cushioned palm reaching out.
Suddenly the lights began to dim, and Dino swished to a
halt, center rink. A voice announced that it was time to determine
who the two lucky ticket holders were. The children with
the winning tickets were going to ride on Dino's tail as he
wound around the rink, looping and curving. The numbers
1
Wells I 111
were called, and Melba raised Willa up by the waist, shaking
her in the air like a protest sign. Clancy stood and pulled on
his mother's sleeve. "No," he said. "She'll get hurt. Please."
Melba smiled and ignored the tug on her arm. Willa hung
silent and limp. Dino picked up the first winner on the other
side of the auditorium then swung around and backed up near
Willa. An usher took Willa from Melba's arms and placed her
on a cushioned indentation in Dino's tail. She placed Willa's
arms around the stomach of the little boy in front of her, who
held on to one of the pointed plates that ran down Dino's back
and tail. Clancy remembers thinking that the animated Dino
didn't have armored plates running down his spine, that they
must only be there so that small children can ride on his tail.
Willa looked back over her shoulder as Dino's four legs skated
away, the tip of his tail swatting the air behind him. The song
"Dizzy" played over the speakers. Children clapped and bit
the heels of their hands. They waved fluorescent pinwheels in
the air.
Clancy saw Willa release. He watched as her arms let go of
the boy in front of her. As she tried to clap, she toppled backwards
off Dino's tail. She lay sprawled on the ice. All the
people in the auditorium cooed "Oh" at the same time like a
canned sitcom response. People dressed in white skated out
and scooped her up off the ice like debris. They took her to an
office where a sleepy medical student waited for just this sort
of calamity. The medical student looked somewhat disappointed
to discover that only Merthiolate and Band-Aids were
called for but forced a smile as he handed her a kazoo and a
Fred Flintstone eraser.
That night Clancy rubbed Willa's feet as Melba rocked
her back and forth in her arms. They fed her mint chocolate
chip ice cream and bright pink marshmallow rabbits. Clancy
colored in Willa's toenails with her turquoise blue magic
marker.
Dry sobs bent Melba's body, and she kissed Willa's
bruised knees and scabbed shins. Melba laid her head on

112 I Blue Skin
Willa's knees and petted her thighs. "Your knees aren't speaking
to me," Melba said. "I'm sorry, chicken," she said. "I'm
so sorry."
"It's only blue skin," Willa said, patting her mother's
cheek.
Clancy rummages through the shoe box. He touches all
the objects: crocheted gloves, a tarnished Eastern Star ring,
photographs, a mermaid shaped shoe horn, baby teeth, a gold
brocade coin purse. He looks at a picture of Melba. Her face is
blurred into the landscape behind her. She is clutching her
arms. Her grayish skin seems too big for her, as though she
were getting ready to shed.
Clancy sets the photograph down and slips his hands into
the stretchy gloves, taut as new skin. He walks outside and
digs a hole in the dry soil. He places Melba's picture in the
hollow and smoothes the earth over it.
Back inside, Clancy clutches the Fred Flintstone eraser in
his dirty gloved hand as he walks to Willa's room. With blue
chalk, he draws the outline of a fish on her chalkboard. He
sits down beside her and kisses her knees. Willa's eyes open.
Clancy lays his head on her chest. "And you have a heartbeat,"
he says.
KARL TIERNEY
Mission Dolores
Thank God I wasn't a sexpot.
All of them are dead, or about to be.
Myrna Loy
Of course, there was a scene from Vertigo filmed there
when Kim Novak comes and stands in the garden and is
Kim Novak who's had an obsessed Jimmy Stewart
following her, which is not too comfortable, but at least
she's in a Jaguar while being followed, so it could be worse
like having to say / can't afford that
or Hitchcock obsessing on what's for lunch after the cut
and the interminable trudging out of young blondes
for meddling under porticos or rose-covered pergolas
with no dialogue just the visual
and the making of fantasy as part of history
never mind that the Indian-killer Father Serra
laid the first stone in 1776
what a fucking year
which is much like everyone today saying
/ was first exposed to the virus in 1980
and now Serra's verging on canonization, which only means
that to get into the garden during hours, one continuously
deals with tourists in shorts and cheap cameras
perpetually embarrassing themselves and unconscious
because what really happened here was that
the world was allowed to worship a Goddess of Vanity
which was the truth Hitchcock brought here one morning
in the midst of a mass Denial that continues

114 I Mission Dolores
with this tremendous erasure
no plaque, no photo, no mention
of Miss Novak's career before her recent
The Mirror Cracked and "Falcon Crest" comeback
is something like confusing starlets of the '50s
with blonde Protestant singers of the '60s
such as Miss Dusty "Son of a Preacher Man"
but is taken off the shelf like a new discovery with no prior
history
when at 47 she records a song with the Pet Shop Boys
that goes all the way to No. 2
or believing that the good ones are ones like Brigitte Bardot
who go away to nurse calves for an eternity
in the South of France near Avignon.
The mythology derived from the symbol might be an illusion
but not the reality in the fact that Thank God and thank you
General Motors Cadillacs are getting bigger again
so that this dreadful era becomes reminiscent of the '50s
as if escape were indeed possible
as I walk by the Mission's garden and all at once a stiff breeze
affects even my pompadour stiff with pomade
and from out of the fog a long black Cadillac passes me by
and I needn't wonder if inside the body is still alive.
San Francisco, 1989
KEN KALFUS
(£ £ City of Spies'
C hristoph Czarnecki loves Z., this city of cafes, tuxedoed
waiters, wide boulevards and medieval walls, and he envies
Darryl Davidson his permanent position here. He suspects
Davidson of biasing his reports—perhaps by raising
doubts about Ephraim Ettinger—in order to maintain his
post, and wonders if he himself would be capable of the same
duplicity, for the same reason. He could make a strong case
against Davidson. After all, Davidson was seen in a cafe with
Fingerman just the other day. Ettinger is assigned to watch
Fingerman; Czarnecki might reasonably claim that the purpose
of Davidson's rendezvous with Fingerman was to compromise
Ettinger's operation. Of course, the meeting may
have been entirely innocent, but Czarnecki could emphasize
its impropriety, thereby demonstrating that his own presence
in the city was critical.
On the other hand, Czarnecki must suspect the ease with
which his operatives learned of the meeting and the wealth of
details in the report. The two men took a window table: during
the long interview, according to the report, Fingerman
had a beer, a sausage, three espressos, part of a strudel and
then a cognac. Czarnecki wonders if he's being tested, to determine
which interpretation he will place on the meeting.
Someone acting in concert with Davidson and Fingerman
may be hoping to maximize his own importance by undermining
confidence in Czarnecki's credibility.
Czarnecki paces the faded carpet in his hotel suite, relights
his pipe and gazes through the thick, leaded window into a
tangle of trolley cables wrapped in a gauze of dusk. On his

116 I "'City of Spies'"
desk lies Davidson's skeptical evaluation of Ettinger's accusations
against Fingerman. Czarnecki recalls Godel's Theorem:
a mathematical system cannot be fully described within the
terms of the system. Every set of premises generates a paradox,
which can be resolved only by another set of premises
which also generates a paradox. There is a corollary applicable
to espionage. An agent's loyalty cannot be proven
merely on the basis of his reports. You must make a judgment
based on surveillance of the agent, compiling intelligence that
will go into a report that in turn must be evaluated by someone
else, who will require surveillance of you.
According to Ettinger's report, Davidson says, Fingerman
claims that Goldinski is loyal. Ettinger, however, charges that
Fingerman has destroyed the evidence against Goldinski. Davidson
says that Ettinger is lying; that Ettinger has, in fact, attempted
to compromise Goldinski. But if Davidson knows
that Czarnecki knows he's met with Fingerman, he must assume
that Czarnecki will use that information to support Ettinger.
Davidson, Czarnecki reasons, must know then that
Goldinski is indeed loyal, and expects that Czarnecki will be
discredited by backing Ettinger, thereby undermining any
charges against Davidson himself.
Czarnecki leaves the hotel and from a callbox at the outskirts
of the city telephones Goldinski. Without identifying
himself, Czarnecki offers him conclusive evidence against
Hibberd that, he tells Goldinski, is actually false. He then
posts a recording of the conversation to Fingerman. Ettinger,
he knows, will intercept the tape, preventing Fingerman from
protecting Goldinski, if Goldinski accuses Hibberd. Davidson
will continue to discount Ettinger's charges, and will be discredited
when the charges are confirmed. But Hibberd's
phone is tapped; Goldinski's suite has been searched; Fingerman's
secretary has betrayed him; Ettinger's wife has been
indiscreet; Davidson's files have been stolen; Czarnecki has
been followed from the hotel by a busboy. Documentation is
enclosed. Christoph Czarnecki returns to his writing table in
his hotel suite and stares through thick, leaded windows out
Kalfus 1117
into the city, where other spies sit at their writing tables in
their hotel suites, staring through thick, leaded windows out
into the city.
"Done?"
Annette looked up at Bob, who had been watching her
from the other end of the couch. She returned her gaze to the
three-page manuscript in her lap. "Let me read it again."
"No, I want your immediate reaction."
He always said that. She cautiously told him, "It's
strange."
Bob grinned, taking it as a compliment.
She said, "But it's tough to follow."
"What don't you follow?"
She sighed and looked back at the manuscript. "You
know, who they're working for, who's watching whom ..."
"I thought I made it pretty clear," he said. "In any case, it
doesn't matter."
"I suppose it doesn't."
Now it was Bob's turn to be cautious. "You know why it
doesn't matter."
"Sure."
"Why?" he asked abruptly.
She stared into the manuscript looking for an answer, and
then across the room and then back at him. "Tell me."
"It really isn't a spy story. It's more about Godel's Theorem,
the idea that every description, or judgment, of a system
exists at a level higher than the system itself, and for that level
to be described, or judged, you need yet another system, at an
even higher level."
"I got that," she said.
"Really?"
"Sure."
"And the narrator of the story," Bob went on, "is himself a
spy, working at this even higher level, writing a report about
Czarnecki to be read by his superior."
"About Czarnecki?"

118 I "'City of Spies'"
"The next-to-last sentence: 'Documentation is enclosed.'
That's the tip-off."
"I missed that."
Bob threw up his hands. "But how could you 'get' the
story if you missed the most important part of it?" He paced
the living room. He was wasting his time. If he couldn't communicate
his ideas even to Annette, what made him think he
had any talent at all? Would anyone ever understand his
work? Did he himself understand it? For whom was he writing?
For whom was he thinking these thoughts?
Annette said, "I told you I wanted to read it again."
"No comment."
"Why not."
"Anything I say may be used against me."
"No, really. What do you think?"
"She's supposed to be me, right?"
"It's fiction."
"But she's based on me, and it reads like a conversation
we'd have about one of your stories. It makes me sound
dumb."
"Not at all. Actually, it's the writer who comes off as
dumb. He insists on getting her immediate reaction, and then
he hardly lets her speak. He asks her what she thinks of the
story, and before she can answer he tells her what it means."
"Do you admit you do that?"
"Not so blatantly, I hope. What do you think of the rest of
it?"
"Don't quote me."
"I won't."
"The first part is okay. The business with the spies is
clever. I like the part where it turns out they're all being
watched. You know, one guy's being tapped, the other guy's
being followed, etcetera. But I don't think you need this stuff
about the writer. It doesn't have anything to do with the
story."
Kalfus 1119
"But of course it does! In fact, the part about the writer
was the first part of the story that I wrote."
"I'm not sure—stop pacing, will you?—I'm not sure I understand
why the second part's so important."
"You see, in the opening scene these spies are watching
each other, making judgments about spies at lower levels of
the espionage system. But the situation of them doing so—the
first part of the story—is itself a system, and someone else is
making a judgment about it. Annette is reading Bob's story
about Czarnecki, like Czarnecki is reading Davidson's report
on Ettinger."
"Czarnecki. Is that how you pronounce his name?"
"Yes. You see, like the writer Bob, I wanted to dramatize
the idea of reality as a hierarchy of systems, each dependent
on the one below it. But on his level, Bob can't be aware that
he too is part of this hierarchy."
"Don't you think there's something wrong with your story
if you need to explain it to me after I read it? Shouldn't it
stand on its own?"
"No, that's the whole idea. Any explanation of the story
within the story cannot completely explain the story. The fact
that we need to talk about it is one of the elements of the plot."
"So our comments about the story become part of the
story?"
"And so on."

I
LES A. MURRAY
Crankshaft
Buildings, like all made things
that can't be taken back
into the creating mind,
persist as reefs of the story
which made them, and which someone
will try to drive out of fashion.
On a brown serpentine road,
cornice around a contour
into steep kikuyu country,
the Silver Farm appears
hard-edged on its scarp of green
long-ago rainforest mountain.
All its verandahs walled in,
the house, four-square to a pyramid
point, like an unhit spike head
bulks white above the road
and the dairy and cowyard
are terraced above, to let
all liquid waste good spill down
around windowless small sheds, iron
or board, alike metallised with silverfrost,
to studded orange trees, hen-coops,
wire netting smoky with peas,
perched lettuce, tomato balconies.
The story that gathers into
such pauses of shape isn't often
told to outsiders, or in words.
It might be poisoned by your hearing it,
thinking it just a story.
It is for its own characters
and is itself a character.
The Silver Farm has always been
self-sufficient, ordering little in.
Two brothers and respective wives
and children, once, live there quietly
in the one house. At dawn,
the milking done, the standing wife
knits by the roadside, watching
small spacey-eyed caramel Jersey
cows graze the heavy verges,
and the sitting wife, on a folding stool,
hidden by her blanket, reads
two turns of the road further on.
Men, glimpsed above in the dairy,
flit through the python fig tree.
A siphoned dam, a mesh room—
and the Silver Farm closes
behind a steep escutcheon pasture
charged with red deer. New people:
unknown story. Past there
is where the lightning struggled
all over the night sky like bared Fact
ripping free of its embodiments, and
pronged the hillside, turning
a rider on his numbed horse
to speechless, for minutes, rubber.
Murray I 121

122 I Crankshaft
Above is a shrine house, kept
in memory of deep childhood
whitewash-raw, as it always was
despite prosperity. No stories
cling to the mother, many
to the irascible yeoman heir
blown by a huff, it seems his own,
a lifetime's leap from Devonshire:
Quiet, woman, I am master here!
No high school for our boys:
it would make them restless.
Children of this regimen,
touchy well-informed cattlemen
and their shrine-tending sister
remember their father's pride
in knowing all of Pope by heart:
Recited those poems till he died!
The proper study of mankind
is weakness. If good were not
the weaker side, how would
we know to choose it?
I leave their real story
up its private road, where
it abrades and is master.
I'm glad to be not much deeper
than old gossip in it. Say fiction-deep
A reverence for closed boxes is returning
and those can brick up to a pattern
molecular as Surmise City
or the paved cell-combs of dot painting,
while boxes death has emptied
but left standing, still grouped readably
in the countryside, with trees,
may be living communities.
How does the house of the man
who won his lands in a card game
come to have the only slate roof
in all these hills? Was it
in hopes of such arrived style
that when the cards' headlight smile
brightened, his way, his drawl didn't
waver, under iron and tongue-and-groove?
No one knows. He attracted no yarns.
Since all stories are of law, any
about him might have rebounded,
like bad whisky, inside the beloved losers.
Keenly as I read detective fiction
I've never cared who done it.
I read it for the ambiances:
David Small reasoning rabbinically,
Jim Chee playing tapes in his tribal
patrol car to learn the Blessing Way,
or the tweed antiquaries of London,
for from the midriff down,
discoursing with lanthorn and laudanum.
I read it, then, for the stretches
of presence. And to watch analysis
and see how far author and sleuth
can transcend that, submitting
to the denied whole mind, and admit it,
since the culprit's always the same:
the poetry. Someone's poem did it.
This further hill throws another
riffle of cuttings, and a vista
sewn with fences, chinked with dams
and the shed-free, oddly placed
brick houses of the urban people
who will be stories if they stay.
Murray I 123

124 I Crankshaft
There's a house that was dying
of moss, sun-bleach and piety—
probate and guitar tunes revived it.
Down the other way, seawards, dawn's way,
a house that was long alive
is sealed. Nailgunned shut
since the morning after its last day.
And it was such an open house:
You stepped from the kitchen table's
cards and beer, or a meal of ingredients
in the old unmixed style, straight
off lino into the gaze of cattle
and sentimental dogs, and beloved
tall horses, never bet on. This was
a Turf house: that is, it bet on men.
Men sincere and dressy as detectives
who could make Time itself run dead.
Gaunt posthumous wood that supported
the rind-life of trees still stands
on that property. The house is walled
in such afterlife sawn. Inside it
are the afterlives of clothes, of plates,
equestrienne blue ribbons, painted photos,
of childlessness and privacy.
Beef-dark tools and chain out in the sheds
are being pilfered back into the present.
Plaintive with those she could
make into children, and shrewd
with those she couldn't, the lady
sits beautifully, in the pride
of her underlip, shy of naming names
as that other lot, the Irish, and canters
mustering on Timoshenko with a twig of leaves.
When urban dollars were already
raining on any country acre, her husband
with the trickle of smoke to his wall eye
from his lip-screw of tobacco
sold paddocks to a couple of nephews.
The arm a truck had shattered
to a crankshaft long ago trembled
signing. He charged a fifth of what
he could have. A family price,
and used the grazing rights
we had thrown in to make sure
we didn't too greatly alter
their parents' landscape till he
and she were finished with it.
Now they, who were cool midday East
to my childhood, have moved on into
the poem that can't be read
till you yourself are in it.
Murray I 125

ELIZABETH LOGAN HARRISS
Curing
Every fall after the second killing frost, the curing began.
The same men had been curing hams with Bill Snead for
close to twenty years when, in August of '65, old man Patterson
died and left room for five hams in the smokehouse. Snead
invited Simon Quincey to join the group.
Snead told Simon to look for signs of cold weather—that's
when they would give him a call. October came and went.
The sky grew paler and the ground got hard. The men
planned to meet at Snead's orchard on the second Saturday in
November. Gull Aiken was to pick up Simon at eight that
morning.
Simon waited for Gull on the front porch. He was bundled
up like a schoolboy in a heavy plaid jacket and a new tweed
hat that Millie said would keep in seventy percent of his body
heat. His fingers, stiff from the cold and mottled with years of
wood stain, were stretched around a fistful of roasted peanuts
that he had grabbed on his way out of the house. He could
hear Millie and Braid inside, still fussing over the breakfast
dishes. Millie was on top of Braid about her calories—"How
many milks that doctor told you to have? I haven't seen you
drink a glass since Tuesday." Simon had left the table in the
middle of his eggs, tired of hearing about prenatal vitamins.
No matter what Millie said about having ham for Christmas,
Simon was reluctant to get involved in the curing group.
He couldn't shake his early impression of hogs: a lot of mess
and trouble. He remembered, as a boy in the hills of eastern
Tennessee, watching the men across the road from his grandmother's
house set up for the hog killing. Before they began
Harriss I 127
the actual slaughter Simon always went around to the back of
the house. Oh, but he heard them. The squeals and yelps and
the men hollering to one another above it all. And later, when
he dared come back up to the road, the row of fat carcasses,
hanging by their hooves from a line, slit wide open. Up until
bedtime the night before, Simon had considered calling Gull
and declining the invitation. At one point, he was actually
reaching out for the telephone, when Braid started in about
her placenta (even going so far as to mention something about
spotting), and his hand—seemingly of its own accord—recoiled
from the receiver, and sank back into his lap.
Walking toward the curb, Simon aimed his peanut shells
at the gutter—two, three. He came to the end of the flagstone
walk and stood beside the sign that read "Quinceys' Antiques
and Collectibles" in tall black letters. That was Millie's domain.
Selling was what she did best. At the bottom of the signboard
in smaller letters Millie had added "Furniture Repair,
Restoration, Upholstery." Write what you like on the sign,
he'd told her, as long as it has to do with wood. Wood was
Simon's love; the tiny lines of color, the twisted oval knots, the
burly grains whose surfaces looked like rippling water but had
no depth, no murky bottom, just a smooth, and infinitely patterned
plane.
Since Braid had come home, he had spent even more time
in his work shed out back, lost whole days and nights, his
hands on the finely scarred top of an old cedar chest, on the
curved backs of dining room chairs, rubbing until the wood
shined, until he brought light out of the dark finish.
Four, five. Another miss. Six shells for eight down the
sewer. "Hop in," Gull hollered out his truck window as he
drove by Simon and rounded the circle at the dead-end of the
street.
Coming back up the street, Gull stopped long enough for
Simon to catch hold of the cab door. He yanked, but the door
refused to open. "Just give it a good pull, would ya?" Gull

128 / Curing
said, scowling. The truck inched forward and then slipped
backward; Gull was riding the clutch. Simon tugged at the
moving handle.
The door finally gave. "Peanut?"
Gull shook his head.
They drove toward the mountains, leaving the town behind.
Out the window, Simon saw patches of bare limbs that
dotted the woods where bright leaves had shone the week before.
"Another winter," Gull said. "Seems like we just finished
smoking the last batch."
"Goes fast," Simon said, thinking how brief this particular
year had been. He envied Gull's ability to measure the year by
the cycle of the hams. With the approach of his grandchild,
Simon's view of time had collapsed first into monthly, and
now, weekly increments.
"Well I don't look forward to this old stiffness," Gull said,
shifting his hips around in the seat. "Feels like it settles in earlier
each year and stays in the bones clear through April."
"Yeah, that stiffness. That'll get you." Simon mumbled.
"Could snow," Gull said, his blue wool cap shaking from
side to side. "No, I wouldn't be the least surprised if we saw
some snow."
"As long as the street doesn't ice over and keep me from
getting out."
"Little ice, shit. If ya had any sense you'd get a four-wheel
drive and quit worrying about it." Gull shifted again, pulling
his coattail out from under him. He went on to tell Simon
about a group of "goddamned rapscallions" that had torn up
his side yard with their jeep on Halloween night. But Simon
couldn't get the phrase, "if you had any sense," out of his
head. Might be just a figure of speech, but it had a sting to it,
he thought, pitching his last peanut shell out the window.
"Gonna have hell to pay for that," Gull was still talking
about Halloween. Simon zipped and unzipped his jacket a
couple of times, tucking his lower lip underneath his upper
Harriss I 129
row of teeth as if he were bracing himself for physical pain.
Gull's manner grew coarser. He threw a curse word into every
sentence, regarding Simon from the corner of his eye. Simon
longed for his quiet shed.
Snead's place lay in a cluster of steep foothills just below
the Blue Ridge. The higher into the hills they drove, the more
firmly winter took hold. With the undergrowth stripped away,
the bareness of the rise, leading up the thin, bony ridges and
into the heavens, made Simon think of knuckles on the hand of
God.
He had been out to Snead's before, when Braid was small.
Millie and Braid had a big time picking those apples; he
carted home a bushel basket that lasted all fall. He had forgotten
that the road to Snead's barn led straight through a rushing
creek. Just before they crossed the water, he turned to
Gull. "I forgot about the stream. Ah, do you think we
should—ah—that's a lot of water—"
"Higher than usual. All that rain." Gull stepped on the accelerator
and they barreled through the water. Feeling sure
Gull meant to scare him, Simon refused to hold on. He folded
his arms across his chest and kept himself from bouncing over
to Gull's side by pressing his feet firmly on the floor of the cab.
All along, Simon had suspected that Gull didn't want him
in the ham group. Snead, who owned the smokehouse and the
recipe, had been the one to call. Snead's cousin, Gladys,
brought them over a plate of ham every Christmas. Every year
Millie went on about Gladys' ham. "Fry a piece of that for
breakfast and you won't be hungry till noontime," she would
say to anyone who would listen.
Simon imagined Gull was disappointed with Snead's
choice; he probably wanted to bring one of his own crowd in
on the hams. Gull and his cronies were mixed up in everything
from gas stations to dairy freezes. Always taking bus trips up
to Atlantic City. At the last Jaycee barbecue, all the wives and
kids were over by the bingo game on the screened-in porch
and Gull called a "meeting of officials" by the big beech tree.

130 I Curing
Passing around girlie pictures turned out to be the official
business and Simon walked away, disgusted. But before he
was out of earshot, he had heard Gull's throaty laugh, followed
by "damned old bluenose."
Talking to Millie, Simon described Gull's bunch as
wheeler-dealers, but dishonest was what he meant. All that
borrowing and gambling and cursing and spitting had to lead
to something crooked. Not that he had anything particular on
Gull; it was more of a sneaky feeling like the one he'd had
about his own daughter's loose ways. And he'd been proved
right about that.
It started when she went to high school—was it only five
years ago? He had tried hard not to notice her. But everywhere
he looked, he saw Braid—a new, sassy, lip-curling, hipswaying
Braid—declaring herself. She did things, things like
leaving her bedroom door open when she got dressed, like
wearing pants, tight pants, or sitting in a dress with her legs
parted. The first one to shower in the morning—and she knew
he was the first—he had to contend with her damp underthings
slung over the shower rod, slapping him in the face
when he bent to open the faucet. That was before she started
coming in at all hours, before she drove off to Virginia Beach
in a beat-up Oldsmobile with less than fifty dollars to her
name.
Now it was too late. Too goddamn late, he told himself, borrowing
some of Gull's vulgarity. By now, the whole neighborhood
was ablaze with his daughter's predicament. For a while
after Braid's hurry-up wedding in May, Millie had talked of a
big baby, of premature this and that. But he had fingers to
count on, just like the rest of the street. June to December
didn't add up to nine anyway you looked at it. And what with
Braid home since August and no signs of returning to her husband,
Simon feared folks might be taking pity on his family.
As they neared Snead's barn, it occurred to Simon that something
like pity might have motivated Snead to include him in
the ham group.
Harris* I 131
They pulled up beside the barn. Byron Ward, the fourth
member of the group, jumped down from the pasture fence
and introduced himself to Simon. Snead put everyone to work.
Gull and Simon laid a tarp over the ground. Byron rolled the
salting tubs out of the barn. Then Snead and Byron dragged
out the curing trough and hosed off nearly a year's worth of
dirt. "Don't we miss old Pat," Byron said and Snead nodded
sadly.
The men stood on the cold gravel, stomping their feet and
looking up the road for the meat truck. While they waited,
Snead accepted a cigar from Gull and the two men stood by
the fence, pulling hard on their stogies. Snead leaned back,
bent his arms, and rested his elbows against the rails. Neck
collapsed into his shoulders, chin pointing skyward, Snead's
upper body resembled an underfed chicken perching on a
fenc* post. Gull, wide through the shoulders and thick in the
middle, seemed all the stouter next to Snead's gangling frame.
The moon was still a faint, milky disk and there was no
sun. Wisps of cigar smoke vanished quickly into the air. As if
to pass the time Gull began teasing Simon.
"What you got on there, Simon? You going to ruin those
wool trousers with ham juice. Best get you an apron or a pair
of hunting ducks for next time. It can get kind of nasty when
we get into the molasses. All that blood and red juice," Gull
chuckled and looked at the sky.
Simon mumbled, "Oh yeah," as if he dealt with raw meat
all the time. He picked up a stick from the ground and began
peeling off the bark.
"Wife tells me you're playing Santa Claus in the Jaycee
Christmas parade, Gull. You could wear that suit for the curing.
Bet it wouldn't show any stains." Byron was shouting
from over by the barn where he had sat down on a tub.
Simon didn't know whether Byron meant him or Gull as
far as wearing the red suit was concerned. He laughed just in
case.
Gull ignored the others and kept looking up. "They're

132 I Curing
calling for snow. Better than rain now with the river as high as
it is." Gull looked over at Simon as he said this. "That would
be in your neck of the woods, Simon. The river might rise
down below y'all—won't reach up to your house, but it might
flood those shit-kickers out of their houseboats and trailers.
They're a sorry sight. Living five, six to a room down there.
Ever see them in the woods? They ever crawl up the creek behind
your house? Ask Millie. Or Braid. She might've seen
'em. River rats. Yesirree, one more rain like we had last week
and it'll flood them out. On second thought, maybe a little
rain'd do us good. Huh, Simon? Clean up your neighborhood,
wouldn't it?"
Simon smoothed back his white hair and rubbed the heel
of his hand over his high forehead. Watching another mischievous
smile creep into Gull's face, he thought how if you didn't
know any better, Gull's sagging features—the chin that
slouched over the collar of his plaid shirt and the fleshy
pouches that hung beneath his eyes—might give you the idea
that his insides were just as soft.
Snead threw Gull a look that told him to straighten up.
"All kidding aside," Gull went on. "My son John, the one
in real estate, says it's time to get those shit-kickers out of
there. Says that land could be worth a bundle."
The meat truck came bumping up the road, turned
around, and backed up toward the barn. "Better put your
gloves on, Simon," Byron called as he leapt onto the back of
the truck. A short, limber man with fuzzy red hair poking out
the sides of his baseball cap, Byron had a boyish excitement
about the hams. "He likes to be the first one to inspect the
meat," Snead told Simon. "Rarely meets his standards," Gull
added, coming up behind the truck.
After a quick perusal, Byron said, "Well boys, I reckon
theseil have to do. Here you go, Simon, my man."
Simon hadn't known what to expect. Stooping with the
weight of the first, he was surprised at the size of the hams and
the smell of the blood. He straightened up and fought back a
Harris: I 133
growing nausea as Byron handed down another one, wrapped
loosely in clear plastic. One by one, he accepted the hams
from Byron and passed them to Gull who passed them to
Snead who laid them on the tarp.
"Last week's frost was the end of the line for them hogs.
When that temperature drops hard, it's killing time." Gull
merrily explained this to Simon between puffs of cigar and
armfuls of ham. Simon tried not to think about his stomach.
"Colder than it was last year," Byron said. "Hope it's not
too cold to make a difference."
"What difference does it make?" Simon asked, immediately
regretting the question.
"Timing is everything," Gull said. "Got to be just cold
enough, but not too. Too cold and the hams will freeze, won't
take the salt. Not cold enough and the meat will spoil. And
your pigs have got to be freshly slaughtered. The sooner you
get the salt on the meat, the better."
They had only been getting the pigs from the meat market
for five years—Gull kept talking, passing one slippery hindpart
after another. "We used to buy the pigs and pay a guy in
the mountains to raise them for a year or so. Byron was in
charge of the slaughtering. He insisted—still does—that hams
raised in the mountains taste better. But five years ago, the
government bought up more land around the Parkway and
the pig farmer—now a rich son of a bitch—moved into town.
Byron wanted to find another place in Nelson County that
would raise our pigs, but Pat and I talked him out of it. I arranged
to get them from the meat house with my wholesaler's
license. No more trips to the mountains. It's cheaper. And a
damn sight easier."
"Well, that sounds right," Simon said, realizing how long
it had been since he'd seen more than just the small parts of an
animal. He grown used to it: a bit of ground beef here, a rib
roast there, a few pork chops, rolled in white paper and
slipped noiselessly over the stainless steel counter at the back
of Winn Dixie.

134 I Curing
"Course, we used to castrate 'em before we let 'em loose in
the mountains, makes 'em get fat faster," Gull said, grinning
at Simon.
"Pay the man, Gull," Byron called after he handed down
the last ham. Gull slipped the driver a few bills and Byron
jumped off the back of the truck.
"Pat would've had a fit over these prices," Snead said.
"Go up every year," Gull said.
They were ready for the salting. Next time they would
pour on the molasses, then would come the smoking, one hundred
hours of smoking from December to March. Snead
spelled out the process for Simon. The whole thing took a year
and each man had a different job. Byron cut the green hickory
from off his land. Snead tended the smokehouse. Gull contributed
the curing ingredients from the wholesale grocery:
Cayenne and black pepper to keep off the flies; molasses to
sweeten the meat; salt for the cure; saltpeter to rub on the
bones. Patterson had been responsible for the box. The one
they were using was the third one he'd built, refining its original
square to a long trough. Patterson had also kept the books,
figuring out how much money each one owned and how much
the price of ham had gone up. Snead hadn't said as much but
Simon knew he'd be called upon to build the next trough.
Meanwhile, he would keep the books—or Millie would—and
tell everybody how much to chip in. They'd settle up around
Easter when the smoking was done and the hams were taken
home for hanging.
Snead took Simon to the first set of tubs and showed him
how to slip saltpeter down between the ham hock and the
meat. Gull came up behind them, saying, "I wouldn't get too
close to that stuff if I were you, Simon."
Snead shook his head. "You can't believe a word Gull
says."
"I still say saltpeter cuts back on the sex. That's what I
was raised knowing. I bet Simon knows that, don't you,
Harriss I 135
Simon?" Gull was hunched over a wash tub, rubbing salt into
a ham.
Simon stopped working and looked up. He opened his
mouth to speak, but no words came out.
"My daddy sold the stuff to the boarding school. He told
me they mixed it right in with the boys' food. Supposed to
keep them in line. Have you ever tried that Simon? They sure
ain't buying any saltpeter from me these days." Gull threw
Simon another look. "Times is changed, haven't they?"
Simon's cheeks burned. "Oh, go on, Gull," Snead said,
snickering and turning to Simon. "Every year, Gull has some
wise-ass thing to say about the saltpeter."
"Yessiree, Simon old man," Gull kept talking with a smile
on his face. "One morning, the day after Christmas or Easter
Monday, after you've been eating this ham all day, you gonna
wonder why you can't get it up. You gonna think: Shit. The
change of life has come over me. And it's gonna be that damn
saltpeter. Mark my words. Why do you think they call it saltpeter?"
Damn that Gull. "Damn you," Simon said, barely aloud.
The middle of his throat was working itself into a big lump of
hate. He let go of the ham he was holding. With a loud clank it
fell against the side of the salting tub. "You've got no, no—"
"I didn't notice it stopped you from eating any ham,
Gull," Snead cut in quickly.
"Me? It would take a lot more than a little saltpeter to stop
me."
With that, Byron and Snead laughed in spite of themselves.
"But now, Simon—" Gull continued, "Simon—no shit—
you might could use some of this saltpeter at your house."
Simon stood up. "Damn you, you foul-mouthed scoundrel."
His voice came out raspy and weak. He grew stronger
and madder as he talked, looking first at the ground and then
straight at Gull. "I'd like to know the half of what you've,
you've pulled off, you slippery bastard—"

136 I Curing
Gull stood up. He took off his cap and slowly unbuttoned
his coat. "That's enough talking to me like that."
"What would you know about it? Huh? Huh?" Simon was
shouting now. "What would you have me do? Throw her out?
That's probably what you'd do. You—"
"All right now, boys." Byron moved toward them.
Simon's head shook violently as he stepped toward Gull. His
face was hot, red hot. He would fight the bastard if he had to.
Gull was moving closer. "If you want this to come to—
to-"
"Lookahere now, calm down," Snead said, coming between
Simon and Gull.
"Goddamn Simon. Can't take a simple joke," said Gull.
"Settle down." Snead said. "Gull was just being his usual
big-mouth self."
"No," Simon said fiercely. " 'Bout some things—I don't
reckon I can take a joke."
"We've got salting to do," Byron said, sitting down and
turning his attention back to the ham.
Simon gave his salting tub a swift kick and marched off toward
the fence, muttering to himself: "Think I like it, huh?
Think I like it?"
After while, Snead wandered over by Simon and took a
ring of keys out of his pocket. Turning through the keys, he
said to Simon, "Come on, I'll show you the smokehouse. It's
just the other side of the tenant place."
Simon followed Snead a hundred yards or so down the
gravel road and behind a two-story clapboard house in need of
repair.
The smokehouse, a shack of wide boards with a slanted
roof, stood between two fat briar bushes. A potbelly stove
squatted beside the weather-beaten house. "This is it, built it
myself. Should say rebuilt. Burnt down twice before we got it
like we wanted it." Snead turned the key in the padlock and
swung open the door. The musty, sugar-laden scent of ham
and hickory smoke overpowered them.
Harriss I 137
"Whew—wee!" Snead half-whistled. "This place smells
good enough to eat. I think sometimes we might as well forget
the hams. We could cut down the smokehouse and eat it."
"Might as well." Simon said, cracking a half smile. "You
hang 'em from those hooks, then, and smoke 'em like that?"
"That's right. See here," Snead pointed to the pipe that
ran up from the stove, crooked at a right angle and disappeared
inside the house through a hole in the wall. "Smoke
goes in through this and gets trapped inside there. 'Course it
gradually escapes through the cracks in the walls—that's why
you want to smoke on damp, rainy days. Then the smoke'll
stay low longer. Hover, see, around the meat." Snead
crouched down and moved his hands around to imitate the
hovering smoke. Then, kneeling on one knee, he opened the
stove.
As he peered inside the stove, Snead spoke in a low voice.
"After all's said and done, your girl's doing what's right. The
main thing is she's not going to end up like my baby sister. If
she had just told us, you know, in the end—in the end, even
my father, we would've kept it. Helped her raise it. Even with
my mother gone, we would've helped her." Snead kept fiddling
with something on the inside of the stove that rattled
now and again. "Sure, she would have had some hard times,
sure, a rough word or two, but now, what's that compared to
dying?"
Simon took in a deep breath of chilly air. "Emm, emm,"
he sighed, shaking his head.
"She never did tell us about the baby. I suppose we
might've guessed but a bunch of boys, hell, that's the last
thing you're thinking about, your sister being. . . Well, she
didn't tell, just tried to get rid of it by herself. Goddamned stupid
notion. And both of 'em died." Snead cleared his throat
and gave the old stove door another firm jiggle. "Not even sixteen."
"Shame," Simon whispered. "Real shame." From where
he stood, Simon had a good view of the orchard.
Rows of stark apple trees rolled and dipped across the hoi-

138 I Curing
low and into the far hills; they seemed to be crawling slowly
away, leaving behind a string of stale, indoor days that stood
between him and the colors of spring. He thought again of
little Braid perched on a wobbly ladder up against one of
those trees. Her light brown hair, pulled up in pigtails—he
had forgotten those pigtails—the ones she used to sit at the
breakfast table and twist until the ends curled round her finger
like she wanted. And weren't there also ribbons? Wisps of
blue—and yellow?—trailing down her dove-soft neck. She was
tossing Red Delicious to him, calling to her mother, "We got
enough for a pie yet?"
Snead finally shut the stove door and stood up. "Takes
about ten, oh, fifteen fires to get the smoking done. I come out
here around dawn on wet days and get them going. The other
guys don't know this, but I usually start the fires with the
sports page. Way I figure, if you smoke 'em with the sports
page, it makes for better eating on football Sundays. I like to
think it gives the 'Skins an edge, but they might not agree after
the season they had last year." Snead laughed and slapped Simon
on the back. "Let's get back before Gull makes ofT with
our meat."
"That son of a bitch," Simon said with dismissive shake of
his head. "I should've known better than to get in a pissing
contest with a skunk."
The salting continued. Simon took up a ham and rubbed a
fistful of salt into the meat. The smell didn't seem as bad now,
maybe he was getting used to it. He doused another with salt
and rubbed the flesh. By his fifth, he was feeling more confident.
As the last hams were salted, Byron stacked them, skin
side-up in the curing trough. The men stared down at the
meat and talked about hunting season. Byron liked to hunt
deer. Snead preferred to stalk grouse in the mountains. Gull
said he was getting too old for such foolishness, but if they
twisted his arm, he'd like another shot at a wild turkey.
Harriss I 139
Simon considered the trough of ham. White and red, muscle
and leg bone, tough blubbery skin, all tossed together under
a blanket of salt, impossible to distinguish one ham from
another, or tell which ones would end up on his table. But
they would taste good. Simon reminded himself of that. They
were bound to taste good.
Byron covered the box with its lid and all four men shoved
it into the barn, where the hams would stay for a month while
the salt leeched the water out and sank into the meat, preserving
it.
Before they left, Snead took out a piece of torn and yellowed
paper splattered with years of molasses. "The recipe.
Came from my mother's people," he said to Simon, and began
counting aloud, figuring when they ought to get together next.
"I'd say a couple days after Christmas, suit ya'll?"
"Why don't you copy that thing over, Snead? Looks like
it's in pretty bad shape," Gull stepped toward Snead and
looked over his shoulder. "I could have Evelyn down at the office
type it up for you."
Snead held the paper closer to his chest and said: "Yeah,
yeah, we could copy it but then it just wouldn't be the same.
Wouldn't be my mama's handwriting, might take the history
out of it, you know, hams might not taste so good. I'm superstitious
that way." Snead chuckled and gave Simon a wink.
"Anyway, I've about got it memorized now."
When they had set a date, Snead said quietly to Simon,
"I'm going into the hardware store in an hour or two. If you
don't mind waiting, I'd be happy to take you—"
"Appreciate it, but I ought to get on home," Simon answered
under his breath. "Got some work to do."
"Simon, bring you an apron for next time. No kidding,
things can get sticky," Byron called out as Simon and Gull
headed for the truck.
When Gull pulled up in front of Simon's house after a
long, silent ride, Braid was on the front porch. Her arms
stretched up over her tight, round belly, she was hanging a

140 I Curing
cluster of Indian corn above the door knocker. For a moment
Simon sat in the truck and watched his daughter. Then he
reached for the handle, gave the door a hard shove. It
squeaked open. Leaning back inside the truck, he looked Gull
square in the eye. "Molasses next, huh?"
Gull nodded.
"I'll be there," Simon said and slammed the door behind
him. As he headed up the front walk, Braid stepped back from
the door to see if the corn was centered.
"That look all right?" she asked without turning around.
"Does to me," Simon said, but he was thinking how pretty
her long hair looked, falling down her back the way it did.
1
ALFRED CORN
Canto XXX
The time when Juno, told of Semele,
became enraged (as she had more than once)
against the Theban royal family,
King Athamas went mad, and in that plight,
5 seeing his wife approached burdened with one
son on her left arm and one one her right,
Shouted: "Cast forth the nets so I may catch
the lioness and her cubs as they go by."
He reached with merciless talons to snatch
10 The first, whose name was Learchus, then spun
him in the air and dashed him against a rock.
His wife drowned herself with the other son.
And after Fortune's turning wheel brought low
the majesty of Troy, which risked its all,
15 king and kingdom crushed with the same blow,
Hecuba—captive, grieving all the more
after she saw Polyxena was dead
and heard that Polydorus, cast ashore
By the waves, was another loss to mourn—
20 began to bark as though she were a dog
her mind undone by the sufferings she had borne.
But Furies whether Theban or from Troy
were never seen to strike dumb beasts or human
limbs so hard as those I saw deploy
25 Their skills in two souls there, stripped naked, pale,
who ran and tore the others' flesh like swine
set loose from pigsties that had been their jail
One reached Capocchio and sank sharp teeth

142 I Canto XXX
into his nape, then dragged him forward so
30 his belly scraped the hard-packed earth beneath.
The man from Arezzo remained, and, trembling, said,
"That goblin's Gianni Schicchi; he runs about
like a mad dog and 'grooms' the other dead."
"O," I said, "may the second one not tear
35 your back with his fangs, but will you kindly tell me
who it is, before it speeds from here."
"That is the old spirit," he said to me,
"of scandalous Myrrha, one whose love for her
father defied the bounds of decency.
40 She got to sin with him as she wanted to
by taking on the appearance of someone else—
just like that first one going off now, who,
Coveting the best of the old man's mules,
dared to impersonate Buoso Donati
45 and draft his will according to the rules."
As soon as those two mad dogs left, the ones
I had been staring at intently, I turned
around to look at other ill-starred sons.
I saw one sho, had his thin legs been cut
50 off at the groin, where limbs meet in a fork,
would be the very image of a lute.
Dropsy, which puts awry the human body
because of fluids it cannot absorb
(so that the head's too small to match the belly),
55 Forced his mouth to gape, as though he burned
with fever and a thirst that made one lip
stretch downward, while the other upward turned.
He said to us, "You men who though in Hell
seem not to suffer punishment (I don't
60 know how) behold then, and consider well,
Master Adam's downfall. When alive
I mostly got what I wanted: now, alas!
A single drop of water's all I crave.
From the Casentino's verdant hill
65 country, brooklets flow down into the Arno,
making their winding channels moist and chill:
I'm forced to see them now, in this grim place,
because their image sears me even more
than the affliction that distorts my face.
70 Unyielding Justice who chastises me
uses the very spot where I once sinned
to make me sigh and groan more frequently.
There is Romena, where I managed to fake
the seal of John the Baptist on a coin,
75 for which, up there, they burned me at the stake.
Were I to see the sad ghosts here tonight
of Guido, Alessandro, or their brother—
for Branda Springs I'd not exchange the sight.
These spirits milling around like stirred-up dregs
80 pretend that one of them's already here.
But does that help a man with useless legs?
I would already, were my body no
more agile than to crawl each hundred years
an inch, have started on the path; I'd go
85 Looking for him among those marred with loss
of limbs, though the trench curves eleven miles
around and measures fully half across.
Because of them I'm added to this family:
they had me counterfeit a florin cast
90 with about three carats of impurity."
Then I asked, "Who are those two foolish souls
that steam like wet hands bared to winter cold
and lie together next your right-hand walls?"
He said, "I found them here—and not since then
95 have they stirred—when I first rained into this ditch,
nor do I think they'll ever move again.
The first is she who slandered Joseph, the other,
lying Sinon, the Trojan Greek: their high
fever gives off that stench in which we smother."
100 One of them, enraged at being dismissed
Corn I 143

144 I Canto XXX
in such a dim description, reached to strike
the speaker's swollen belly with his fist.
The tight skin boomed as though it were a drum:
then Master Adam hit him in the face,
105 using what looked like quite a hard forearm,
And said to him: "Although mobility
has been taken from my heavy limbs,
for jobs like this I still have an arm free."
To which he answered: "The day you went to join
110 the flames, your arm was not as swift, but it
was that and more when you were forging coin."
The man with dropsy said, "That much is true,
but as a witness you were not so truthful
when those at Troy requested truth from you."
115 "If I spoke falsely, you still counterfeited,"
said Sinon, "and I'm here fon one sin only.
You, for more than any fiend's committed!"
The one who had the swollen belly said,
"Perjurer! May the memory of the horse and
120 that all men know your crime fill you with dread."
"May thirst filljoM with dread," the Greek replies,
"as your tongue cracks and filthy water bloats
your paunch into a hedge before your eyes."
And then the coiner: "As usual, your mouth
125 hangs open because you're sick; but even though
I suffer thirst and dropsy puffs me out,
Your head aches, and your body is on fire,
so that, to go and lick Narcissus' mirror,
two words of invitation's all you'd require."
130 Intent on them, I stood there like a stone
until my master said, "I'm going to
be harsh with you if this does not end soon!"
But when I felt his wrath addressed to me,
I turned to him with shame so great that even
135 now it revolves within my memory.
Like one who dreams his own misfortune, who
while dreaming wishes he were only dreaming
and craves what is as though it were not so,
Thus I became aware I'd lost the use
140 of speech from trying to excuse myself,
not seeing muteness made its own excuse.
The master said, "Much less shame might atone
for greater misdeeds than yours was, therefore,
whatever remorse you feel you may disown.
145 Remember, I am always there with you
should circumstances ever send you among
people engaged in like disputes, for to
Give them your attention is base and wrong."
Corn I 145

We wanted to create an overview of reading, writing, and publishing
in New York City. We asked people involved in the "literary
community" a group of questions with the object of inspiring one or
two answers. Many of the responses are gathered here. We hope that you
can peruse these interviews to address your own interests.
THE NON FICTION EDITORS
James Sherry's most recent book is Our Nuclear Heritage, published
by Sun and Moon Press. He is an editor at Roof Books.
Here are some responses to your questionnaire. I can only answer
with some assurance about poetry, since I am not acquainted
with current prose fiction. All my answers will be
about poetry which I consider to be at the core of American
art today anyway. And as usual I am less interested in responding
to the particular questions than to the type of question
and the questions' net response.
You ask in sum what is the effect of today on poetry and how
does poetry fit in today. You are not asking about the writer,
her place in America, the effect of past literature on today's
writer. You ask no technical questions, no moral questions, no
formal questions, although, I could turn your questions into
political, moral, technical or formal answers. The answers require
that I isolate today from yesterday, the day before, and
the day before that and that I can't do without causing more
problems than I can solve.
I am being asked to evaluate poetry by locating the merits of
today's poetry in America. This caricature of a Baudelearian
geography stems it seems to me from an anxiety about exposure,
a typical one for new writers. And I am not about to
offer any reassurances about our place in English language
writing.
Our today in poetry begins with the end of W.W.II and the
domination of the world by America, the refusal of many
writers to deal with it and the failure of most writers who
could deal with it to do so independently or even with a clear
idea of who and what was influencing them. American domination
has taken the form of pointing to other countries as a
threat when we have been the threat and other forms of art,
film for instance, as the real dominant force. We have been

148 I Interviews
wrong in pointing to the Soviets as the real threat. The fights
for academic appointments, publisher's attention, and grants
and prizes among these schools and between all other schools
and the academic mainstream have caused the marginalization
of writing.
In poetry there have been four major movements since
W.W.II. Black Mountain, Beat, NY School, and Language
Poetry. The last is the most current and has the largest following
writing today. And true to its American origins it denies
its own existence and is composed of poets whose work is more
radically different from each other than all of the other groups
put together.
All of these groups' writing will endure. What will be read in
the future depends on how the politics of the ruling classes and
intellectuals evolves. What will be chosen as exemplary will
have technical excellence, ease of comprehension, exemplary
manifestations of current events and current concepts, but
most of all it will be teachable.
Poetry in America has this characteristic. The best poets get
corralled into teaching, sooner or later almost every one. Of
the living elder statesmen, for example: Greeley at Buffalo,
Ashbery at Bard and Brooklyn, Ginsberg at his own school
Naropa, all have railed against the limitations of academies
and all are now supported by those academies. (Only Mac
Low of that generation has been exempted from a sinecure.)
And their students are not the next great poets, because teaching
poetry flattens it by repetitious hammering on the same
few ideas. None of these poets themselves got to be poets from
their schools, but all of them learned from their peers, and
their exchanges created the possibility of the poetry that
America has to offer. Of the younger generation all of the
poets with big followings are in or near the academy. Perhaps
their students make them famous by buying more books than
non-students.
Non-Fiction I 149
The world looks to America for poetry today. I have traveled
to England, France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, and China as
a poet and publisher and they all find great interest in what
we do here. Whether that means our work is as great as our
weaponry in the world is another question that can't be answered
from here. I can say with some certainty that our poetry
is heir to 150 years of European experimentalism, 700 years
of English language writing, and 3000 years of Western rationalism.
We are not starting major new tendencies, but we are
where those legacies have come to.
And we are making new now two approaches. One is an increased
awareness of the variety of poetries as opposed to the
evaluation of poetic hierarchies for the purposes of dominating
the aesthetic values of the readership. Each culture has a great
poetry. In Hispanic poetry, gay and lesbian poetry, Native
American poetry, Chicano poetry, cowboy poetry, rap songs,
country songs, are only a few of the other cultures that are
part of our poetic culture in America.
Another new approach is our tendency to integrate the various
disciplines of writing and knowledge and to redraw the
boundaries of what and how writing can mean. We have made
criticism part of the poem and science and politics part of the
poetry. Contemporary politics, our awareness of a larger
world, has given us a larger poetry. The only danger is to
focus on poetry that is only poetry and denies the varieties of
human activity. Even though the threats of the outside world
make poetry seem like a safe place to be, poetry is not a safe
place to stay.
Elise Paschen is the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of
America. She received her D.Phil, degree in English Literature
from Oxford University and her chapbook, Houses; Coasts was
published in 1985 by the Sycamore Press in England.

150 I Interviews
Can you Isolate any current literary movements or trends?
Several years ago, there were two trends which dominated
the contemporary poetry scene; those being, "Language Poetry"
and "The New Formalism," which also included a resurgence
of poets writing narrative poems. Although I am not
an expert in "Language Poetry," one may conjecture that this
aesthetic comes out of the Modernist Movement. One of
Pound's influences on Modernism entailed his championing of
Imagism and Vorticism, and the ideogrammic method which
lies at the root of America's post-modernist movements as evidenced
in the work of Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson. With
regard to "New Formalists," I have heard many question the
term because, as far as we know, formal poetry has never disappeared,
as evidenced in the stunning work of James Merrill,
John Hollander, Mona Van Duyn, Richard Wilbur, Donald
Justice, etc.
A continuing trend in American poetry is the autobiographical
poem. The aim is to dig deeply into one's inner
psyche and unearth the unmentionable, the most intimate of
insights and memories, thus exposing the self. This process diverges
from that of a poet such as Yeats, who would begin a
poem with a personal emotion and then revise and revise until
the final version seems utterly divorced from that initial impulse.
The current trend in writing from the personal opens
up new terrain to writers, allowing them to explore subject
matter formerly taboo. This is an incredibly exciting time for
the poet to be writing, especially for women poets who still are
creating their tradition.
Another development stems from oral poetry, with today's
writers reclaiming beat and rap poetry. Poetry, in this regard,
is becoming more poetry, and the American public is taking
notice. We are witnessing a resuscitation of the speaking voice
in poetry. Back to the Masses!
What is the impact of graduate writing programs on writers and
readers?
••
Non-Fiction I 151
The impact as a whole is in that, these programs employ
poets as teachers. After all, book sales alone cannot support
poets. The schools also produce many gifted poets who have
learned their craft. On the other hand, if you are planning to
teach students how to write poetry, I feel it is essential that
traditional prosody be taught as well. How can you instruct
someone to play the piano without teaching them the scales. A
young poet should learn the metrical properties of the line as
well as syntax, the craft of the language, etc. It seems that
many poets graduating from these programs tend to write free
verse, which is fine, but they should be given the opportunity
to learn prosody in order to depart from it, or abandon it altogether.
Creative writing programs should also offer students seminars
on poets in addition to writing workshops based solely on
the contemporary poets as well as poets throughout the centuries
and around the world. These are the types of courses we
offer at the Poetry Society of America. For instance, Joseph
Brodsky recently taught a course entitled "The Elegy in Classical
and Modern Literature" and Richard Howard conducted
a seminar called "Enjambment and Other Strategies"
I wish more programs offered courses where students could
examine the technical aspects of both contemporary and traditional
poems; it is essential to learn about the language in
order to write from it.
Jeff Wright is publisher and editor of Cover magazine and he is
also a poet. Madeline Virbasius is one of Cover'.? assistant editors.
She also writes poetry and is a graduate student at Hunter
College.
Can you isolate any current literary movements or trends?
There are a number of current literary movements, many
of them based in New York City. In the late I980's, the gritty
realism of writers like Catherine Texier, Dennis Cooper and

152 I Interviews
David Wojnarowicz led many others to follow in their "urban"
footsteps. Today, writers like Andrei Codrescu and
Patrick McGrath (with his new "gothic") have begun to
achieve much critical fame. There seems a trend towards a
more personalized style, not necessarily tied to any preconceived
notions of what writing should be.
How would you place NYC, specifically, or America more generally, in
an historical literary context?
America, being a troubled, yet democratic country, has always
been a location for a kind of free and honest writing.
However, in this modern age most major countries are "free"
and the voice of the American writer has become less distinguishable.
Problems and life circumstances of the English or
French, for example, are not so different from our own. Modern
America fits more specifically into a historical literary context
with writers such as Toni Morrison or Maxine Hong
Kingston, who tell a story that speaks about their identity as a
whole, including race and country.
How do contemporary political issues affect contemporary writing?
Contemporary issues affect contemporary writing only as
they relate to the writer as an individual. Writing is no longer
a sort of time capsule that reveals the era in which it was done.
Issues are relevant to different people in different ways and
politics are often not the concern.
Daniel Pinchbeck is a writer and Co-Editor of Open City magazine.
Can you isolate any current literary movements or trends?
Literary fiction seems to be following poetry down the
sinkhole towards an increasingly marginalized, increasingly
Non-Fiction I 153
academicized audience. In an effort to counter this trend,
publishers have blurred the line between commercial product
and literary fiction. Knopf, for instance, now packages essentially
commercial novels such as The Secret History and Damage
as though they were works of high art. Sensing this development,
young writers seem to be orienting themselves towards
writing based on artificial, melodramatic situations and
stylistic polish rather than deep content.
What is the impact of graduate writing programs on writers and
readers?
The graduate writing programs also seem to be fostering
an approach to writing more concerned with style than content.
It is easier to teach someone to saturate their stories with
personal details and correct use of the semicolon than to help
them find something original to say. Perhaps the programs
should broaden their definition of what literature is, and teach
stuff outside of the basic English Major's canon, such as pulp
fiction, science fiction and works by the Enlightenment Philosophers.
In this way, they could expand the student's notion of
what a creative text could be. Too much of the work published
by MFA graduates seems to be thinly veiled autobiography
slightly over dramatized through fictional license. I don't
know if this kind of writing has the potential to reveal our contemporary
world in a profound manner. I would like to see
writers expand the scope of their 'mythomaniacaP ambitions.
Josephine Meckseper is the Co-Editor and New York corespondent
of Berlin based 241 magazine.
How do contemporary political issues affect contemporary writing?
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germany's
political and economic separation ended abruptly. The cultural
differences, however, were not as suddenly reunified.

154 I Interviews
Although many writers, like Sarah Kirsch, Wolf Bierman
Helga Novak, and Walter Kempowky, had left East Germany
already, before 1989, a large part of Germany's post-war writing
has still derived from the eastern part of the country
Beginning with Bertolt Brecht in the early years of the
democratic republic, to Heiner Mueller who, although he has
had the opportunity to leave, decided to stay in East Berlin
writing.
Compared to Bertolt Brecht and his contemporaries, who
were still very supportive of their communist country, the
later generations of writers became more politically polarized
splitting into either conformist or oppositional groups. In spite
of this, the quality of East German literature has never been
questioned. Through literature, writers compensated for their
seclusion and isolation from western culture. They retrieved a
certain amount of pleasure from creating a semi-secret language
that would still reach their specifically addressed audience,
bypassing the restrictions of censorship.
Since the reunification, this Eastern German tension has
disappeared and it is a rather paralyzing moment for German
literature as a whole. Poet Christa Wolf, among other East
German writers, is now even shunned for her former involvement
with the "Stasi" (East Germany's former Secret Service).
And as Theodor Adorno suggested, wasn't it perverted for
Germans to produce poetry after the Holocaust anyhow? Or,
as Guenther Grass posed the question in his May 1985 speech
at the Berlin Academy, wasn't most art in post-war Germany
trying to neutralize the terror of Nazi Germany?
Attempts of most recent writing that react to political
change in Germany are somehow too impatient to reflect on a
history that should be more profoundly understood. The irrelevance
of Peter Handke's poetry is obvious. And even a
book published (by progressive Western German publisher
Klaus Wagenbach) in 1991 called "Deutsche Orte" (German
Sights) which includes work attempting to create a fictitious
Non-Fiction I 155
space based on German history as so-called "Gedaechtnissorte"
by writers like Erich Fried Thomas Bernhard, Hans
Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Mueller, borders on nationalistic
sentiments rather than critical ones.
Now that the era of Marxist socialism and realism has terminated,
a young Austrian writer and philosopher at the University
of Vienna, Konrad Paul Liessman presented a surprising
new interpretation of Marxism in his most recent book:
"Karl Marx—Man stirbt nur zwcimal" (Karl Marx—one can
only die twice). He understands Marx's writing as great
prose, or scientific poetry and places him among writers like
Balzac, Flaubert, Keller, Fontane and Dostoyevski.
Twenty five years earlier a group of one hundred people in
Moscow and East Berlin initiated a complete edition on Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, consisting of what would eventually
be 320 volumes. This edition, which started as a project
well supported by the former communist governments, is now
in danger of not being published at all. West Germany is going
to decide on the future of this elaborate edition and there is
quite a lot of reactionary skepticism concerning its necessity.
As if there weren't still many unanswered questions about the
work of Marx and Engels, especially after the collapse of
socialism. Isn't this the moment for a less ideological research
on their theories?
The history of the former GDR and USSR is still to be
written; which is hard to imagine without a precise analysis of
Marx and Engels. The two have changed history more than
any other writer and after decades of dogmatic interpretation
and idealization of their theories, their re-entry as great philosophers
and writers should be exciting.

hat follows are two poems which appeared in Issue #20 unfor
Innately, with errors. Both Rita Gabis' "Waskine Bear,, "
and George Keithlefs "Dusk" are fine poems which deserve to 'be
reprinted in then original and intended forms. We deeply regret the over
sights in the last issue, and apologize to writer and reader alike for mis
representing these two works.
CHRISTINA THOMPSON
HEATHER WINTERER
RITA GABIS
Washing Beans
How beautiful the beans are in the colander, bright
as stones after low tide is over and the salt wash rises
and covers the sides they show to the moon.
I love the feel of beans in water. The skins split
from the red ones and wrinkle, the round black ones
have fallen from a star. I pray to the white ones,
they are so ordinary. I think of each bean as a life,
we were born in the same field, between two poles,
two extremities of cold. I live for simple things,
the lump under one arm that is nothing;
oil from sweat the doctor said, life isn't meant
to be easy. I stand at the sink, my hands covered with
three kinds of beans. This is the anniversary
of my friend's death, death that wouldn't listen to me.
I remember the last haircut he had on earth. He didn't feel
the universe resting on his shoulder, the seed
start to split, the skin pull back from the bones
until the soul wandered out. I don't have the heart to say
beans have no meaning. They will not be lost to me.
They are eyes of wind, they are my kidneys.
They have no ghosts, but they have shadows, and come back,
as roots or the gourd's armor or stone.

GEORGE KEITHLEY
Dusk
[for Carol]
The path below the cabin breaks through brush, rubble.
Across the clearing ponderosa and lodgepole pine
(twilight caught in the crowns of the trees)
as we start downhill to the lake. You dreamed
last night of another girl growing up
in Nevada. It was her turn to prop bottles
along the low fence. Unflinching, you braced
the rifle against your shoulder. Sighted.
Fired—glass exploding! The shards sparkling!
Delight dancing in your blue eyes. Hiking
through the leaning shadows I think of the boy
I shagged flies for; then jogged across the field
to take my swings. Every warm evening
until that summer night his brother Jack
racing his black bike on the new highway
out of town sped into twilight, the swift
onrushing truck.
At the 4th of July picnic
we played Capture-the-Flag. Jeannie dodging
fireflies. Was she eleven? Her thin voice
rising: "I can run! I'm in remission."
How many more, remembered, mute? Children
forever in your memory or mine. No
loss that can't be lost again if we whisper
their names. Where the path narrows red needles
yield that resin scent. We pause stock-still.
Then slip out to the shore together and alone.
Where did they go? The others? Wings muffled,
a horned owl glides over searching, searching.
Dusk lifts the last light from the pines,
the night wind ripples the water. Listen—
All the souls in the lake are eager to speak.
Keithley I 159

Contributors
A. MANETTE ANSAY's first novel, Vinegar Hill, is forthcoming
from Viking. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in
Story, North American Review, and Northwest Review, among many
others. She has won first prize in the Nelson Algren Awards
and is the recipient of an NEA grant. She is an Assistant Professor
at Vanderbilt University.
RICHARD BECKER'S poetry has been published in America,
Bottomfah, and fuel. He teaches piano performance at the University
of Richmond and maintains a career as a concert
pianist and composer.
MADISON SMARTT BELL is the author of seven novels,
including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the
End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence
(1987), and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lilian Smith
Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short
stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). His seventh
novel, Save Me, Joe Louis, was published by Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich in 1993. He has taught in various creative writing
programs, including the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the
Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Since 1984 he
has taught at Goucher College, where he is currently Writer
In Residence, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires.
ALFRED CORN is the author of five books of poetry all published
by Viking Penguin. His most recent book, Autobiographies,
appeared last year. He has taught workshops in poetry
at Yale, University of Cincinnati, UCLA and Columbia.
MICHAEL DELP's work has appeared in numerous anthologies
and magazines, including Poetry Northwest, Hawaii Review,
South Dakota Review, and Playboy. His most recent books are
Contributors I 161
Under the Influence of Water (poems, stories, essays) and Graves of
Horses (poems), both from W.S.U. Press. He is currently the
Chairman of Creative Writing at Interlochen Arts Academy.
LISA FETCHKO is originally from central Pennsylvania.
She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a
novel, Birds of a Feather.
LISE GOETT received the James D. Phelan award for literature
from the San Francisco Foundation in 1988 as well as an
Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship from the University
of Wisconsin at Madison. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares,
PB, and Passages North.
ELIZABETH LOGAN HARRISS has published stories in
New England Review and Mid-American Review. She attended the
University of Virginia and now lives in Cincinnati.
KERRY HUDSON was born in 1961 and grew up in Miami,
was schooled in the Dade County Public School System and
eventually went to University of Florida where he received a
degree, then another—both in English. He has lived and
worked in Japan and is currently at work on a long manuscript.
He has a story in the current issue of the 25th Anniversary
edition of Confrontation, and received an honorable mention
in the Playboy Fiction Contest of a few years passed.
KEN KALFUS lives in Philadelphia, city of hoagies. His fiction
has appeared previously in the Village Voice Literary Supplement,
Boulevard and North American Review.
HEATHER McHUGH teaches in the MFA program at the
University of Washington, Seattle. Her recent books include
Shades, To the Quick, and two volumes of translation, Beacause
the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova and D'apre's Tout: Poems
of Jean Follain.
F

162 I Contributors
R. E. MILLER, a longtime resident of New York City,
attended Columbia University, taught in New York City
schools, and worked as an industrial writer and editor. He has
published poetry in various magazines and is currently writing
an essay on the art of Corot.
LES A. MURRAY was born in 1938 and grew up on a dairy
farm in Bunyah, Australia. He is widely published and read in
the United States.
JENNIFER O'GRADY has been published in Harpers, The
Southern Review, Poetry, and other magazines. Her manuscript,
Singular Constructions, is seeking a publisher. She lives in New
York City.
ROBERT PINSKY is a poet and critic. He has taught at
Wellesley, Berkeley, and is now a professor at Boston University.
His latest book of poetry, The Want Bone, was published
by the Ecco Press in 1990.
KARL TIERNEY, 37, is a graduate of Emory University and
of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas. He has
published poems in The American Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse,
Contact II, The Berkeley Poetry Review among others. He is also a
frequent contributor to the James White Review and has a poem
forthcoming in Crazyquilt Quarterly. His collection, The Blue
Muse, was a finalist for the 1992 Walt Whitman Award.
JODI VARON has just completed a manuscript of translations,
Dancing in the Merman's Cloak: The Selected Poems of Li He.
Her translations appear in Cat's Tongue, Colorado Review, Sequoia,
and Translation. Also a fiction writer, her most recent
story appears in The High Plains Literary Review. She presently
teaches at Eastern Oregon State College. She lives with her
family in La Grande, Oregon.
Contributors I 163
KELLIE WELLS is from Kansas. She has published work in
Carolina Quarterly, Cutbank, and has a story forthcoming in
ACM. She is currently in the MFA program at the University
of Pittsburgh where she is also teaching workshops in Fiction.