Poetry Hawaii: A Contemporary Anthology 9780824887568

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Poetry Hawaii

Poetry Hawaii A Contemporary Anthology

edited, by

Frank Stewart John Unterecker

® University of Hawaii Press Honolulu

Copyright © 1979 by T h e University Press of Hawaii All rights reserved. N o part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. See pages 155-156 for copyright information on previously published poems. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalogue Card N u m b e r 79-63338 International Standard Book Number 0 - 8 2 4 8 - 0 6 4 2 - 5 First printing 1979 Second printing 1982

Preface

Statistics, though not as interesting as poems, are of some value. For example, just under one-third of the poets represented in this anthology were born in Hawaii— though half of that third now live somewhere else. Just over two-thirds of the poets between these covers are currently residents of Hawaii—though considerably more than half of them were born somewhere else. And about a tenth of the poets with work in this book were born somewhere else and now live somewhere else—though all of that tenth at one time or another lived and worked in Hawaii, many of them for a large part of their lives. What this proves is what we all know: Hawaii is a crossroads. If this did not prove it, however, the varied ethnic backgrounds of the poets included in this book would give the fact away. Or, for that matter, the subjects they write about. For the poets range from those born here and of Hawaiian ancestry to those whose ancestry can be traced to every continent except (so far as we have been able to discover) South America and Antarctica. Though it is only a consequence of alphabetization, it may be an accidental key to this book that the first poem is about a grave-

yard on the north shore of Oahu and the last poem is about bringing back "something useless" from classical Greece, literally halfway around the world. The reputations of these poets range just about as widely as their ethnic origins or the places they have lived. Perhaps a seventh of them are internationally recognized; about a third are nationally known either through their own books or through widely distributed anthologies. Almost all of the rest have published work in national or local magazines. A dozen have edited anthologies and more than a dozen have edited, at one time or another, literary magazines. Just under a dozen have been honored with major literary awards, while another dozen or so have won local literary awards. They range in age from college students to senior citizens. Perhaps most important, the poems and the lives of all of these poets have in important ways been shaped by their experiences in Hawaii. Consequently, though many of these poems are not "about" Hawaii, certain attitudes toward the world seem to show up in poem after poem: island attitudes toward nature, for instance, or an acknowledgment of the special value that islanders almost

automatically assign mountain, sea, and sky. You cannot reduce such attitudes to simplistic terms: you cannot say that the poets in this anthology all share a "reverence for life"; but perhaps you can say that many of them find a source of strength in the natural world and that certain of them are troubled when man's intrusions make that world inharmonious. One other characteristic seems to me to show up in a number of these poems: a kind of tentativeness, as if the poet does not have all the answers. A world without seasons invites a different response, perhaps a more contemplative one, than does a harsher landscape. If I were to search for the underlying, echoing structure of this anthology, I would look for sea, mountain, and sky; I would look for hesitations: motifs that recur in a body of work that acknowledges a very large world beyond the limits of a scat-

tering of islands a little north of the equator. This anthology of contemporary poets of Hawaii reflects at least in part the nature of an amalgam, a blending of differences in a locale that is very special to each of us. Hawaii is both what it has been and what it now is. Like every other force that shapes it—wave, wind, or warfare—its poetry contributes to a definition of something that can never be defined: the spirit of place that makes Hawaii and the products of its artists different from the people and the arts of any other place in the world. Both local and cosmopolitan, the poetry of contemporary Hawaii listens to the long echoes of an island past while it speaks in the living voice of tomorrow. JOHN UNTERECKER

Contents

Preface

v

Introduction

xi

N E L L ALTIZER Haleiwa Churchyard The Death of Sappho Hunger

3 4 5

WAYNE ANDREWS On Looking into the Spilled Ink on the Porcelain

6

STEFAN BACIU Jean Chariot

7

CHARLES S. BOUSLOG The Result of Our Investigation Biographical Sketch

8 9

T I M BURKE Visions of You Poem for the 10th Year F R E D CAPAROSO private places LABAN C H A N G 9/3/76 Driving Up to Kokee Park in the Summer

10 11 13

14 15

ERIC C H O C K Waolani Stream, 1955/1975

16

K E R M I T COAD The Success Sudden Obscurity

17 18

SHERYL DARE Spring Cleaning For Tom (1945-1975)

19 20

R E U E L DENNEY A Chiffonier with Glass Flowers

21

FAY ENOS Waiting A Question of Balance

22 23

TANYA FELIX Red Flowers

24

LORRAINE FLANDERS When You Blow on Dog

25

CALVIN FORBES For You Hand Me Down Blues

27

T O N Y FRIEDSON The Rushes of Radnor Pond

28

26

CAROLINE GARRETT Guts STEVEN GOLDSBERRY I Have Two Hands The First Enemy Translation of an Unwritten Spanish Poem GEOF HEWITT Letter ELIZABETH B. HOLMES Pänini o ka Punahou

LI

29

LEONARD KUBO Drumming Lightly

47

31 32

MARI KUBO A Long Time Apart Green Apple

48 49

34

JOHN LOGAN Dawn and a Woman Middle Aged Midwesterner at Waikiki Again

36

JIM LONG Twin Sister

55

WING TEK LUM Grateful Here What I Want

56 58

33

50 53

MICHAEL S. HOWDEN through the shadow

37

DON JOHNSON Tick Picking in the Quetico

38

GLENN JOHN KIM Room

JODY MANABE Hadaka De Hanasu

59

39

GARY KISSICK rain quietude

40

RON McCURDY Starring Role Snapshots

60 61

ALFONS KORN Two: Long After

41

MICHAEL MCPHERSON Summit The Lightkeeper

63 64

JIM KRAUS A Cycle of Tears Church with Long Steeple The Incident

42 45 46

WILLIAM MEREDITH Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii A Korean Woman Seated by a Wall

65 66

W. S. M E R W I N The Windows June Rain Mountain Day The Hosts The Next Moon

68 69 70 71 72

DANA NAONE The Old Photograph Long Distance The Men Whose Tongues Sunday Service Tzoo The House of Light

73 74 74 75 75 76

PAUL NELSON The Average Night Shaman

78 79

PETER NELSON Pin Ball Angel Sharktooth Creek Quai de I'Horloge A Graveyard in Oberammergau, 1960 Family Reunion

80 82 83 85 86

KATHLEEN NORRIS The Middle of the World

87

TONY QUAGLIANO A Cold Rain Obscures L. A. Tonight To the Author of "To My Brother Miguel" Hawk and Rock ix

ELIZABETH SHINODA What We Have A Revisit

92 93

STEPHEN SHRADER Public Utterance Pantoum Request What We Move Thru Easter

95 96 97 98 98

MARJORIE SINCLAIR Waterlilies The Bom bing of Kaho 'olawe

99 100

CATHY SONG Remnants

101

FRANK STEWART Consolation Train Window Orphee at Rest The Sea Breathes Quietly, Menelaus New England: Driving Back in Early April

104 105 106 107 108

MEL TAKAHARA November's Lesson The Waiting Child

109 112

REUBEN TAM Falling Among Mountains

113 114

88 89 91

ROLAND T H A R P Colding Nights X PHYLLIS HOGE The Promise The River The Truth Daphne

x

115 115

THOMPSON 120 121 123 125

JOHN UNTERECKER Swan Lake August 22 Lava Tubes Falling

127 128 129 132

MARTHA WEBB Any time

133

Looking Glass Bird Cry My Brother Hannu and the Poison Pool Cloud Taking and Losing SUSAN WESTON Seedlings RALPH TABOR Searching

134 135 136 137 138

139 WILLIAMS 140

CONSTANCE WRIGHT I'm Bringing You Back

141

Contributors

143

Introduction i When Charles Eugene Banks died in 1932, his friends in Honolulu decided to find some way to create a lasting memorial to him. Since Banks had been a playwright, novelist, poet, critic, and the literary editor for the Honolulu Advertiser, it was fitting that their decision was to establish an annual memorial contest "to encourage an interest in creative writing" among students at the University of Hawaii. Actually, their first choice, it should be said, was to construct a drinking fountain in a public park or in the patio of a public library, and to name the fountain after Banks; but the principals could not agree on where or how to build the fountain, and the local librarians bridled at the idea; so a literary prize was eventually agreed upon, which was to be administered by the local chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, a literary fraternity. In this way one of Hawaii's first and most longlived literary competitions in English began, modest though it was. In April 1934 the premier Banks Prize was awarded: $20 to a poet, Richard Fujii. It must have come as a surprise to the sophomore from Hilo that his 22-line poem could take the grand prize in a contest open to literary compositions of any genre. His poem, "Caravan," was a dark, Hopkinsesque depiction of the human race:

I see shadows, moving, grotesque Human shadows, dark and vague. I hear sounds of wandering feet, Trudging in uncertainty the poem began. On an equally dark note it ended: "Eternal moving, eternal suffering, / Endlessly the human caravan—." But greater surprises were still to come for Fujii. The publication of his winning poem in the Advertiser immediately brought a storm of protest from the townspeople. Typical was the reaction found in a letter from a reader who signed him/herself "Psychiatrist." "Here is stupid stuff indeed," said Psychiatrist, "without one inspiring thought, merely a dead level of foetid pessimism. . . . And not even a sweet jingle of rhyme to tickle the ear." After indicting the university for not only producing such a poet but also rewarding him, Psychiatrist closed the letter with this question: "In what direction are we now leading our youth, in whose hands lies the future destiny of the world?" The controversy in the newspapers in the weeks that followed went back and forth: some contributors to the "Letters from the People" column railed at "Caravan," others defended it. Before long the

damage had been done. The next year, there were only half as many entries in the Banks contest, and, of those, according to the judges, none was worthy of any award at all. Therefore, the prize was doubled for the third year of the contest, and in 19361937 the prize was given not to a poet but to a playwright. In fact, poems did not win first prize in the competition again until there was a total overhauling of the contest rules thirty-six years later, in 1972. The solution then was to divide the contest into two categories: one prize to be awarded for fiction, and a separate one for poetry. Of course, the reception that Hawaii gave modern poetry in 1934 does not entirely account for poetry's status here in the years that followed. However, what happened with the Banks contest illustrates how certain attitudes prevalent in the Islands for the last thirty years may have influenced that status: we live in a small state where the memory of public censure persists, and where the way one uses language is especially important for finding one's place in the community. Obviously there were many reasons for poetry remaining in the shadows during this time, and in some respects Hawaii's situation was not much different from the mainland's. In Hawaii, however, there has historically been a linking of the English language with colonialism in the minds of many people (a notion which one still hears expressed) and, in addition, the long-standing presence in the

population of a large community for whom English was not a first language. Both of these factors have contributed to the lack of emphasis which English literature in general and English poetry in particular have received in the past. (There has long, of course, been a strong interest in both the reading and the writing and translating of Hawaiian and Oriental poetry.) It is interesting, moreover, that even the university, until 1964, did not offer courses that taught students to write poems, although such courses did exist to teach students to write fiction. And not until 1966 did an organized effort to look for poetry in the community at large, and to encourage it, begin. In that year, Phyllis Hoge Thompson began a volunteer program of writers called Haku Mele ("weaver of songs"), a Poets-in-the-Schools program that predated by several years a similar program existing now on the mainland. Through Haku Mele, poets were sent into public schools, mainly on Oahu, to talk to students about poetry and to help kindle their enthusiasm. Thus, for a host of reasons, in the mid-1960s a change came; a kind of momentum began in the community and the university; a new interest developed in the art of poetry. Writers of national stature were finally invited by the university to teach poetry writing. And, by slow degrees, into a state that in the early sixties had been isolated from the revolution in poetry occurring on the mainland came a new "caravan" of America's celebrated poets: to teach, to read, and to encourage. Among the well-

known poets who recently have stayed for upward of several years in Hawaii are John Logan, Milton Kessler, W. S. Merwin, James Wright, and Galway Kinnell. The list of those who have stayed for shorter periods to give readings is very long. What this history has meant for Hawaii is that many of its best poets are either fairly young, or else have only recently begun to acquire national exposure. Generally, they have grown up as artists in a special isolation that has protected them from the pressures and enticements of short-lived stylistic fads often encountered on the mainland; they have worked within their own environment, frequently turning to the traditions and languages of Polynesia and Asia rather than to those of America and Europe. A few of these writers have already published books; many are anthologized or have appeared widely in literary magazines. But probably never before has the time been right to bring together in a single book the new literature of these poets, and the new poetic consciousness of Hawaii as a distinct region. II The literary test for regionalism has been whether the geographical references, the diction, the images, the "ambience" of a work could be altered to reflect another region without causing major distortion of that work. But regionalism has come to include much more: it is no longer merely a matter of "provincialism" or "local color." Robinson JefFers re-

ferred to the landscape as the "seed-plot" from which all else springs in his poetry. One thinks of Yeats and the use he made of Ireland in his poetry, or Southern poets such as Warren and Ransom, or Frost in New England. In each case the particular aspects of the locale are used to illuminate the human condition of people everywhere. And something greater accretes to the works as well, precisely because one is forced to understand the larger dilemmas and concerns of humanity as they are manifested in local events. This understanding is possible partly because no distinct region consists only of space. Robert Creeley, in his introduction to The New Writing in the USA, said, " . . . space, as physical ground, not sky, I feel to be once again politically active—as it has always been for the American from the outset." That a certain "space" represents a particular perspective is even more true today than it was in the sixties. We cannot mention a place such as China, or South Africa, or Quebec, or the Philippines without evoking more than geography and rpore than history. A "place" is clearly not limited to its landscape in the same way that a map, in Korzybiski's words, is not equivalent to the terrain that it represents. When one has lived in and learned about a place, one knows how greatly it differs from every representation of it designed for the casual traveler—the transient, the tourist, the person who wishes only to go through but not live in a particular region. This special identification with one's locale, "re-

gionalism," has always been fierce in America, and it remains so despite economic forces that demand a homogeneity favorable to the increasing use of standardized parts in our culture—whether they be hamburger stands, schoolbooks, tax and census forms, or language. This attempt to make America a homogeneous unit has been late in including Hawaii, as much a cause as a result of our being the last state admitted into the Union ("one-ness"). In fact, a two-hundred-years war has been fought between those forces for and those against Hawaii's becoming another "standardized part." For a good many years after annexation in 1897, Hawaii was able to resist further Americanization because of its remoteness. But as this remoteness has broken down since World War II, and particularly since statehood, Hawaii has been plunged with increasing velocity into a process aimed at incorporating this independent region by suppressing its most characteristic features. For in no other area of the United States do such diverse and vigorous linguistic and cultural elements coexist in the complexion of every level of social, political, and artistic life. What has poetry to do with all of this? Gregory Bateson, who came to Hawaii in 1963 to work on animal-human communication, once paraphrased Aldous Huxley by calling art "a part of man's quest for grace; sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure." By grace Bateson meant the achievement of "integration" of the multiple levels of the mind—"especially those

multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious.' " "For the attainment of grace," Bateson added, paraphrasing Pascal, "the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason"; and the final attainment of grace through art almost certainly requires the integration of the mind with the poet's physical context. Outside and inside, we know, are not simple opposites. They are instead parts of a dialectic, a vast circuit, a single wide field from which poetic images emerge. And it's against this whole "felicitous landscape" that the quest takes place. In Hawaii, where the multiplicity of cultures and languages makes one every day aware of, and sometimes almost proficient in, cultural integration, poetry of a particular sort is developing. If it is especially sensitive to the individual's integration with his or her physical and social as well as psychic environments, then one might argue that this poetry is attempting to achieve what all of us must learn to value—a renewed sense of grace in a profoundly disharmonious world. Ill Given the variety of people in the Islands, the problem of representing them all in this anthology of contemporary poetry was difficult. First, we were forced to decide that the scope of the book should be limited to poems written in English. Translations, particularly of the nuances and highly complex conventions used in the poetry of the Hawaiian lan-

guage, and of the Asian languages spoken here, would have required accompanying scholarly paraphernalia beyond the intent of this introductory anthology. Next, we were faced with having to define who, for the purposes of the book, was a resident of the region. We therefore decided to give preference to the poems of poets who were born here, and to the poems of those who we felt had been in Hawaii long enough to understand this particular environment. Over the past two years we read about 4,000 poems from 350 poets living all over the United States. From the outset we decided not to judge poems on their theme or style, or to select poets on a quota system: so there is no artificial "balance" here based on race, national origin, gender, or age. Each poem was judged on its own merits as a poem. And although the two editors did not agree with each

other on every inclusion or omission, or on the space allotted to each poet, it was understood from the beginning that there would be cordial disagreement. The result could not be an entirely inclusive anthology, mainly because this is a region far too varied to be contained in a single volume of poetry. Yet here the reader will find Words from the splendor, green chambers Of that heavy inward forest Whose thick roots soak in warm rain and traces of that power from the land, the aloha 'aina of Hawaii which embraces all of us who live here and changes our common lives—when we have most nearly "attained grace"—into distinctly Hawaiian ones. FRANK STEWART

Poetry Hawaii

Haleiwa Churchyard The common hands of a girl and woman I love as well as grass on this good field lay their inquisitions like flowers over the years of the narrow dead.

Nell Altizer

Under us are oceans of birds and spring roots and the long sound of rain. One after one tonight, while we lie miles from these travellers, the stars will wash the stone calendars with silver water. So that our sleep is no more difficult than this, the old earth sails again toward its appearances.

The Death of Sappho There is no weapon like a woman's weeping in this house where the Muse presides. Look how I go into the wilderness with a veil of bright venom and the bridal torch of my hair. Walk down the corridors of my voice as long as you can go. These boulevards, these processions are my body and the words it leaves. They will light the way. The gods are not as dark at last as their great doors have us believe. Close them behind me, marble and savage, Cleis, as a woman's passage.

4

Hunger I have opened every drawer and cupboard I can lay my hands on to find something of yours that is not there, nothing but spindles of brown thread the recluse spiders leave behind them when they go. No letters. No provisions. It is always this way with want— the palms flat as meal on the shelves and too worn out with scarcity to make a fist. On days when the allowances of words draw the rooms we walk in down and your slow hands fold a sheet of paper to make a window box of blank air I have listened—and when an animal rattles the dark out of its skeleton and the wind shakes.

5

On Looking into the Spilled Ink on the Porcelain Without oars, without a compass to set a course with, his slow face drifts on that ship. Even you can see the sails lay limp, lazy after all that wind. Was there a storm or have sirens brought him here? There are no skeletons, no black bones, and the treasures were torn out years ago. What would you do with such a world, your island any shore?

Wayne Andrews

6

Jean Chariot With an eye in the heart and another in the neck he saw everything loose pages of Apollinaire carried in a pocket to Mexico where he put on a wall the first mural as he would leave the fingerprints on a passport dialogues with Indians engravings in books with cities smashed between the pages

? p v

Stefan Baciu

murals in Fiji and Hawaii on walls of prayer like melody made from weaving for tired shoulders of so much light warriors for the combat with the fire in which there is no truce neither blood

7

with a heart under his forehead a soul carried as a standard opens doors for cities which today do not live in a path that ascends in time.

The Result of Our Investigation

Charles S. Bouslog

The umbra is the thing itself that can be little known; the shadow of the umbra contains the message, the signs; these move through wet dust along thready lines of force. Beyond the shadow and the umbra is the ghost, the mixer of dust and water in whose pathways the lightning comes.

Biographical Sketch AS HOOSIER born in nineteen and eleven sequester'd till four issued forth (with Model T) (& drove it at ten!) too young for World War one, too old for the next (but taken anyhow) read & read till prints all woozy came then glasses, college (grades 13 thru 21). AS HAWAIIAN reborn in nineteen thirty-nine sequester'd at the university (Manoa kind) until issued forth once more in nineteen seventy-four when blessed by earth & folk commenced as poet.

9

Visions of You for Julia The other night as you sat on your bed to write me in the dim then suddenly bright again flickering gloom and glow of the candle in your room at home, did you once lean your head over the unlined lightly colored paper of that letter and let your long brown feminine hair fall and brush across those words calling in the dark? From the start I read them aloud breathing you in and out of myself as a lifeguard labors after those who would otherwise drown.

Tim Burke

10

Your breath became my own. It lingered on these lips like the taste of our own tears once when a strand of hair or two were caught in one corner of your woman's mouth. Were we close again I would brush back those strays like the sea does so delicately, so without warning, as it swells into tidepools on the sayso of the moon and sends home all its precious stranded children and their God.

Poem for the 10th Year for Peter Manchee I wonder if you ever knew the Freemans, Peter. Few of us did though counting lunches we Linden kids living south of school passed the fence guarding their yard and garden four times every day for years. Once (was it once a day?) we scaled that sheer fall of honeysuckle vine hung like fragrant wine-stained rugs drying in the sun. We jumped from the top and landed nervous as thieves among flowers below a dry fountain—perhaps the one you sit at the edge of today with your son, quick with fish in my vision of this reunion. He wears green corduroy overalls, jeans stained in the knees like faces; a blue longsleeve Fruit-of-the-Loom t-shirt clings to his not yet lean young body and his hair is the same fine streaked straight blond yours was when we were boys. Sitting beside him you watch his face reflected as your own in the shallow glass. He pokes the flashes of gold; the surface breaks; the cautious fish have turned

and gone under lilies. He looks up to you from the vacated pool—questions in his eyes. In silence the swimmers return drifting back into light like sunbathers after an afternoon shower or old friends home to visit children we never really knew.

12

private places in my garden, she said, is a private place: some ferns, a shell from niihau, a bush with leaves that are only partially g r e e n mostly white, turning pink near the tips, the stems are veinlike, deep red, and delicate. she calls the corner "daughter." I told her I used to fall asleep to the bells in my parents' garden. I would dream of the hollow knees of the great buddha in kamakura, pushing myself into the bronze darkness to feel the sound of rain on its face.

Fred Caparoso

the bells no longer hang from the mango tree, but at certain times I still hear them, in the year the tree first bore fruit the leather gave, and the bells fell with the white mango flowers. we were silent then, watching the evening push through the trees, come, she said, let's go in.

13

9/3/76 Tonight, a cricket sings in the dark grass near the edge of my hand. A blue hand sweeps over the dial dividing t i m e stirring the dead air above the luminous face.

Laban Chang

The pine floor sighs under the feet of those awake. Footsteps treading over my body, down the long silence of a hallway. Cricket, my thoughts walk out to you where you sing softly to yourself.

Driving Up to Kokee Park in the Summer Driving up the steep winding road to Kokee Park, we stop to see Waimea Canyon. From the windy lookout, we see the thin bands of colored rock, washed out rainbows frozen in sediment. Three goats laze in the hot sun. We watch them wind their way around a rocky shelf. As we continue up the steep road, Rick down shifts to second and our van strains to climb the mountain, coasting in neutral through the flats and downhill stretches to save gas. The van makes so much noise, it frightens a pheasant which flies startled and iridescent across the road.

15

Ahead we see a truck full of boys from the Job Corps camp. Shirtless in the hot sun, and covered with road dust, their strong brown bodies are dull as the earth except for the clean lines on their backs and chests where glistening beads of sweat make their skin shine like brown seaweed.

Waolani Stream, 1955/1975 When I was a small boy I looked into a pool and saw the sky passing through. When the glare passed, I saw snails and mud. Leaning forward, my face appeared at the edge, straight dry bangs fringing my forehead. But snails seemed to be crawling out of my eyes, so I collected the biggest black shells and corralled them with rocks, blanketed them with moss, threatened them with crayfish. The snails stayed in their cones, waiting. I pretended to be part of the sky, blue air, hovering above the surface. The snails and crayfish must have been afraid of the breaking of their sky, for everytime my hands shattered that glass, they'd look for darkness to hide in. But my hands moved quickly in their world. Tired of waiting, I tried to bait them out with flesh from other shells I crushed, and they would risk the breaking of the sky to taste it. With the odds so high against them! What game is it they played, what love of risk they lived, what hunger under a breaking sky!

Eric Chock

I've not grown older than snails or crayfish, but there is some flesh out there I seek. These hands grasp air, grasp mud, pass through like water moving through water, like blue air through sky, these hands reaching through my body out of my flesh.

16

The Success You have made a success of beauty. Your eyes are perfect, like the shadows that spring from cradles and dreams. I pass through them, a smokeheap of tattered books & rags and am lost inside.

Kermit Coad

17

Sudden Obscurity The wind sucks downward like a gong. Flatterers, said Dante, burn. 1. 2. 3. 4.

A face marketplace. Anthology. Wings sighing. Skin.

There are more ways than one, said, feeling religious, to lie in the sun.

Spring Cleaning I think I have done this beforebegun over, gathered the charred signatures from the bed, picked up the clothes, the spent veins and arteries, the skin I'm acquiring such a talent for sloughing off. I think I must be doing it again, because I have just closed the door behind you and can hear already the sounds I should know by heart:

Sheryl Dare

the sounds of my body rising and breathing with your invisible words, the sounds of a room where the stillness comes back too soon.

19

For Tom (1945-1975) Afterward, long after we have taken the bits of spine and skin and burnt hair and woven them together and thrown them into the sea, I will pick a shell from the foam. And I will hold it to the light to see its thin white armature coiled around the dry piece of flesh once known as the animal. Animal: because it once quivered, and resisted, and submitted to the probing of hands. And I will hold it against my lips, because it is cool, and has the same shape of breath when released into sound; and then to my ears, because the sound will be the faraway humming of your own tiny bones in my hand. 20

A Chiffonier with Glass Flowers What I have been is somewhere in this room Under the bed perhaps like my lost glasses Or my cold years, fastened in flowers That top the mirror like muscles of meat or candy. Here everything that hurts is most convenient Under a bare bulb burlesquing a central sun And threatening a threadbare counterpane: A closet I stand empty in, with news, And on my desk my pen, my watch, my knife, My keys, my memoes, my matches and my wife. A wallet is unstitched and the room is larger Than all Grand Central or the architecture That joins to stars the dying soldier's plan. Love in this room, I suppose, was a Puerto Rican Who left me, with her stocking, scents of her. She under the cathedral of her date-book Was rubbled rock more permanent than man Because her strength was filtered from the moon. Having filled this room to the walls with her dead children She left the family of her thighs, unborn, To be the victim of such wild caresses A lonely man brings to a rented room. I toss among these babes, blue seraphim, As if they were not hers, but mine, but mine.

Reuel Denney

21

Waiting

Fay Enos

The long morning covered in fog breathes with the fields, lifting trees at the hedgerow, covering the stones. Wires are obscured in cloud. I can't see across the pasture where huge holsteins are standing near mounds of hay. The barn is caped, the sidehill misted and blurred. Only the tip of the silo disturbs the white sky.

A Question of Balance Slipping on snow, we go out into cold. The others are asleep in the house. Leaves dampen on drifts pulled upon stones, swept beside fencing. We do not touch as we are learning still to walk this slick field's surface. It could be another time, speaking love to winter. But it is this time. I've forgotten my cap. My hands grip the seams of my pockets. It could be the end of everything. We speak into snow that covers our boots in patches. I cannot tell again what love does. The last storm broke branches from this tree. They lie beneath snow now, partly; they keep cold. Uphill, going back, we don't hold hands. The air stings our ears. We come trailing a tree of red berries, shining with ice on a frozen morning. And it could be the end of everything. But it is not.

23

Red Flowers The silence will continue for the whale has gushed the first Red Flower to the surface of the waves only his moans for the harpoon in his side smooth the eternal rope beneath the Atlantic his speed lonely his strength ebbs in his blood blossoms to the shore of the Portuguese island

Tanya Felix

Wind embalms the beach now in a failing memory red waves cleanse themselves in sea water daylight will seize the rumors coming up for air in a wake of Red Flowers 24

When You Blow on Dog

«I \

Lorraine Flanders

Hello mut, how long you been solving the problem:

My dreams are packed in waterthe test is in the book— we are inheriting cancellation.

dog got out through hole in scream how many minutes did he steal?

You'd be interested at these answers: when you blow on wish it goes right out,

Your difficulty down on a rope-ladder in an open Chinese robe is next.

when you blow on dog he comes round to see who you are.

Whose deer are my old women can you hear me now? Last night I closed the sob, but someone shoved me back. Half our skin gone we start to water all our skin gone we dry out completely.

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For You

Calvin Forbes

26

Going to bed I bump into the dark, I stumble to the west and to the east. Sugar the train is gone And I fall on the beach of sister night.

You better go back to the ghetto, back To where you belong; no more honey In your tea; you better Take two lumps of sugar and be glad you're

Come away from the streets where you Claw your childhood out of the Sidewalk and come see About me, about the way I used to be . .

My only one: and so be kind to me before It rises again, before I'm dripping And running wild through The layers of secrets trying to drown you.

Last night I knew I wasn't about to be Delivered so I went to church And I went to court and so Once more I rode you past the final stop.

Going to bed I bump into the dark. My feelings are memories I lean on; they're Lines I follow back to you. You pull me up towards your soft shadow.

Hand Me Down Blues for my brother George 1933-1971 Though I look like you I never knew you very well. You always confuse my slow shadow And mock my fate. I wear your defeats, limp or strut, Even lie like you. And I grow to fit your fears: The carnivorous marriage, And you swallowing a soft poison Prescribed for healing Only minor wounds. I inherit new and old scars, Dimples and warts; I am the residue Of your black waste, its sin. I am what remains Beyond hunger or repair, Your dead-ringer. The worst lie is to say good-bye. Where are you going that I won't follow? My best is full of holes. 27

The Rushes of Radnor Pond The sly ducks were surprised in their setting. The pond waved your flown hair. M y fingers fit your w a i s t slats of the green bench under me— I feel a slow cat on the world's quick skin. Time and moonlight; the birds' careful eyes watch our form through the shorn weeds. The lake is slack gold.

Tony Friedson

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Guts On those chill days, the lumped, steaming satin ropes were beautiful in the white enamel bowl with its dark blue edge like a vein running clear around. My eyes were eager as the cats' who waited for their share. (And I wondered if they'd sit with that same unblinking gaze, if the skinned and gutted form were a cat and not a hare.)

Caroline Garrett

The skin was turned fur-in and stretched like a glove over a flat wire frame, while the rapidly cooling flesh hung headless down, to bleed. Then father carried the pelt and meat through the snow to the house. And my small footprints, and the cats', danced alongside still fresh from the celebration of the kill.

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We peeled our sweaters at the door to enter the polished, china-closet world where mother would simmer and refine our rabbit for two days until it became stafatho Greek stew Sunday night supper. Downstairs, in the winter window light, we hung the curing pelt from a nail in the rafters. The older hides, dry and brittle, showed maps of hard veins and smelled musk. Sometimes I would come alone fascinated by the furs and cellar dark to slide my arm elbow deep into the soft pockets remembering the blood and snow, the marvelous bowl, the waiting cats . . . then, blinking, would turn my skin right side out again.

30

I Have Two Hands

Steven Goldsberry

I have two hands. One for the green fish lying cleaned on the counter; the other for the window latch. There is nothing in the sink now. Not blood, not water.

The fish would swell then and burn rich green on the wood. The house would groan like a boat down forever under the north current, black coral filling her hull.

The trees are purple this evening. Each leaf seems to fill with darkness as the wind comes in from the sea. I close the window because of the fish. The latch clicks.

This is not some story to scare your children with. It will never happen. I have fished too long, and always there has been the tiller locked firmly to harbor,

Even in this light the knife blades are blue. The floor is blue. If I turned off the lights and opened the windows, my eyes would stream black tears

the crust of phosphorescence in the wake as I sail home. I am happy inside this house, and when I sleep I am nothing. Not blood, not water.

like the sea turtle. Then the wind would rise higher, a dark wave coming back to fill the house with deep shadows and the long moans of the storm wales.

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The First Enemy Every day Xenoc stood by the city gate with the same question: "What is the first enemy?" he shouted. "War!" they shouted back. The women always knew the answer.

There was never a need to question how they knew, or what brought conviction to their brief catechism. They understood how in wooden the floors creaked or how wind made the heat sing over the bald metal in the factory cooling yard; how every place they looked there was barbed wire or goats hiding near the trestles or a field of corn stubble parched beyond gleaning.

32

All night in the quiet square women carried lanterns from body to body. Three sisters followed a path down to the road and sang to a passing wagon.

Translation of an Unwritten Spanish Poem Santa Clara Hail Mary, this is not my body, full of grace, but another drunken fisherman on his way home, trying to genuflect before the cathedral doorway, before the other drunken fishermen.

Sitting in a brown pew a slender woman weeps, and her body is in her tears. She catches her tears carefully; she is crying into her open hands.

In the cathedral there is a smell of oranges and the bad cigarettes the old fruit vendors smoke.

The rectory is upstairs. Its white wall crumbles like chalk. The paintings are really windows of clear, thin glass.

This troubles my soul for it is not a religious smell. My soul is the clear glass of the flask, my body is the wine. It has never been the other way around.

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There are certain acts, once done, that make you a prophet. I have no way of knowing what they are.

Letter for Kit

Hathaway

Here in Honolulu a p.a. system squawks directions to Waikiki and tourists bear news on pink faces, tremble their money on bad rum drinks. Dixie would love the beach and the kid would go apeshit over all the sand and the almost tame gulls, but you'd sniff the mendacity from the soul of Aloha Spirit, a motto someone wished were true. The maidens don't swim to your boat, but are still bare-titted in the nightclubs; the beachboys walk silently past one another and treasures, as advertised in the brochure, wash up on the sand after big storms.

Geof Hewitt

Tonight the clouds moved in on Oahu and the palm trees nod like old men waiting. Tonight I watch the lightning and wonder where Linda is. She took everything when she left, everything but the raincoat: everyday she moves farther from my life, I watch the storm move in, everyday I forget a little more about her

34

good and bad habits. Forgetting is a death invited, candles to follow the storm. Moving changes people, I want back the joy of storms climbing into Enosburg over West Hill. My heart and stomach grunt in Honolulu, my soul has married to a coin, I thought that words were important, I had forgotten speechlessness.

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Panini o ka Punahou Here is the mirrored image of another time and I may look at the new flowering of the night-blooming cereus seeing in the deep chalice the image of another chalice the stamens quivering with a mobile loveliness. Thus I recall an earlier flowering dating a time of singular perfection— the symbol of an event that might have happened.

Elizabeth B. Holmes

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through the shadow which turns like flesh in the feet of the broken water out of the belly of flesh a singing taking the stream back upon itself

Michael S. Hozvden

limbs of your name the body my sound makes rivervoice veinstream the trees the trees sing thin river i cross cry i make my own, turning

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Tick Picking in the Quetico In that dark world the only light for sixteen miles played slowly over each of us standing stripped, shivering in the middle of the tent. Four times six eyes examined armpits, crotches, cracks, for ticks, swelling in those spots that even lovers never see. Clinging there by our life's blood, they disregard the light, but with the match's application squirm, kick, let go.

Don Johnson

I recall long strings of largemouths caught on poppers just past dawn, the full-grown bream still whole inside the northern's gut; there are snapshots. But in my mind the nights remain most vivid: inspections done, I lay there, hearing the loons on Lake Aroo, waiting for the beaver slaps to start, waiting for night to crawl into folds and crevices, haired cracks, to stay.

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Room for Adrian there is, finally, a design of sorts in the piles of books and closed windows, the clock next to the radio next to the bed; blue walls, of course, and the faded print of Dante and his spheres, Purgatory Mount slightly left of center, Hell on the far left, soft sound of rain on a good day, or bright heat in the afternoon, in any event, out of my control, a place, perhaps indicative of character, a picture, a language, like any other a search for the adequate gesture.

Glenn John Kim

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rain quietude In sleep made of sleep & remembrance, a few raindrops sound in the dark. Like a chieftain, the wind moves through leaves, and then the raindrops fall. But I am deceived by other nights & desires; these are only small hands shaken from the sky. N o rainfall follows the path through the woods, the night is clear of its sounds, and I can hear the ocean open like a palm among small rocks. I think of days when some ghost undulation moved through stillborn rain on the ocean.

gory kissick

I have seen that same movement of rain in the changing tones of sea seen from a great height on clear days; and in clouds paled by wind on the pali; and in a woman's distraction when love has carried her to awkward hours and the light in the room is strange; when she is exhausted, wet, suspirant with desire, and things are still moving, but moving less, and she wonders what of love will remain when she has handed it down to herself through the years and her hands have changed it, when even now it is strangely unapproachable like something in perfect balance, and, offhandedly, she says, " I think it's going to rain."

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Two: Long After II

Look up, old stranger, look where the village loses itself in sea-mist. Not out to heavy ocean, not down slant shingle of shore, but up, up where wilderness-cries pierce a reddening sky.

Alfons Korn

Mali'o a boy strolled into a noonday grove during a stale hour. So two were caught by one, all three by surprise, stringing petals, tieing and untieing love-knots. Yes, in the cool of a cave the winds still range and change, shift again: bind and unbind. In Puna she was called, for a while, Dawnlight. Mali'o moved on. So did the other—and the other.

Outdoors, indoors, never be afraid, don't be shy. The house is yours.

Author's note: The verses are intended neither as translations nor as "imitations," but nevertheless owe much to the suggestions of Hawaiian texts in Nathaniel B. Emerson's Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle & Co., 1965), pp. 60, 70.

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A Cycle of Tears 1. Black Coral When I cry the silent tears an angel comes in the form of a white bull and puts them in a wine bottle. In time we know no difference, all the little pains forgotten, the needles in the back, the spear through the cheek, scars on top of scars, each pain a death.

Jim Kraus

No light bursts through the crystal at the end of the black rainbow. The water is on fire! The longing for darkness brings on this rage. In words I barely understand you say, "I am midnight, and I will be wearing a red cape." It is so simple. My eyes sting, now I am blind. Last night's dream—the sea again: swallowing long red waves, clinging to a grey stone the size of a human. 42

What is heard? The manta rises in the mid-day sun; the giant shadow lingers beneath the boat. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. The sound of pebbles rolling in the streambed. The roadsign flashes in the sunlight: nearby several cars wait, and the children, dressed in black, walk toward them. The cars have wings and painted stars on their doors. When I arrive a sheet is being draped over the statue in the plaza, and the white bull, that playground wanderer, stands quiet and alone in his pen. 2. Swimming to the Rock The ocean's surface is a ceiling of glare. A friend approaches first, perhaps ten yards away from Through my mask I watch a wave break on the rock. The white water runs off, and for an instant the friend is silhouetted against the white effervescence with the cetacean rock behind. He is floating—completely still. Then the scene changes—white gives way to blue, and I raise my head for air.

3. Goodbye to the Jeweled Curtain You twist the handkerchief into ashes of rose. My arms are weightless in the w i n d like the kisses which eventually settle near a deep bay in a distant land. There are white flowers floating in the wine, but the glass changes colors as I lift it. In the other hand is the silent gem which begins to glow when my eyes close. You walk into the room with an empty basket, and say, "Let's pick berries." I know they are on the path to the reflecting pool. The next room is called night vision— all its lights are red. 4. Reunion The angled rays of light seem to pierce the stained glass. You ask why the windows are grey. The hoarse sound of a car charging up a h i l l dead end. I sit in a pew and watch the lonely women. You talk about a canoe filled with fish you caught but could not give away. I pass through the crowd holding a white ring.

So it is we all come back to this: after three estranged years we have found our separate ways to this place: the cross on the tower aligned just to the right of the old house. Of course it is daylight. Outside, you embrace your son as if for the first time.

Church with Long Steeple At the edge of the marsh is a church, Its floor is a litter of black-tipped matches and empty wine bottles. There are three pews and a photograph of Father D. on the altar. The mass of the steeple is greater than the body of the church itself. In a corner is a cot piled high with dusty pillows. Beyond the church acrobats are building pyramids. At the count of three the marsh gas ignites; it is early evening. The wine bottles explode. I shake the bread crumbs from the sheets. When the bell rings it will be midnight, and the pews will fill with mice.

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The Incident From a steep driveway the car rolls backward bumps into another car then twists into a cement wall. The wheel spins in my hands and all the neighbors run out. Acid from the battery splashes onto my pants we lay flares in an arc several stars glimmer through a cloud the neighbors recede into the shadows. I tell the man in the tow truck, take me home. The battery acid begins to sting. I look at the burns on my hand and feel the blue ashes moving in my shoes.

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Drumming Lightly I rob you gently while you sleep like filaments of light raking through a summer-forest and you, with a coyness even in a dream hold dark rubies, sapphires and the glitter of bones deep in your chest. But I have everything I've wanted. Now, passing over you, I feel an urgent freedom /

Leonard Kubo

You lift your head from a sudden thunder a sudden silence and a dream of black crocodiles.

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A Long Time Apart I have become a man to please you. We meet, clasping shoulders as if after a long parting. Moving toward each other, we are not lost for things to say. We shall be brothers, you and I, and share this table as if we had always shared it, talking of women late into the night.

Mari Kubo

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Green Apple I am so close to the skin that a thin blade cannot separate us cleanly. I am not like the flesh of an animal, hidden beneath a heavy fur. You pierce the green surface, and we both cry. When the skin falls from the knife in spirals, a cry rises from a child's throat. Two girls are playing hopscotch on the sidewalk before you, and one of them is the woman you will love.

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Dawn and a Woman The morning island light begins to grow and now the cocks cry at giving birth to the colors of our day. Their feathers make the dawn blue and red and green and they will strongly brighten up their combs, as in the cold lodges our women drop naked to their haunches poking at the tepid fires. Why, they will go out bare to bring in another log before coming back to bed! The flames they build as they squat and hug their chilling breasts form halos in their pubic hair for they are hunched in the ancient shape of hope.

John Logan

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The fire place with its fine wisps of smoke suddenly fills with peace opening like the great, God-wide canyons of Kauai that drop clean from the clouds into the sea, their distant threads of waterfall like darts of light playing on the wall and on the body. The woman will give us what she can. We men will take what we are able. (Painted blue the Sibyl inside ourselves is also writhing t h e r e some kind of dance about the same, uncertain fire— I do not know what for). These early women, wives, lovers, leave their dawning chores and coming back needing to be held will hold us too. They already see we do not know our fathers

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and cannot learn to love our brothers. But they will do what they can once again to warm our gut and heart and also that secret, incomparable cold that grows upward from the groin when we learn we can lose a son.

Middle Aged Midwesterner at Waikiki Again The surfers beautiful as men can be ride the warm blue green swells and the white sand is alive with girls. Outriggers (double boats) ride the waves back in as the native warriors did. I tried to swim and tried to look, but ended up just going back: a huge, perfect black man at the beach somehow drove me away a block to St. Augustine's Church. The bodies were giving me a fit and I have come to seek the momentary calm we find sometimes in the musk of Christ (when he was awake and sweating blood as other slept, or like a furious bouncer hustling out the money changers.) The bodies of Mary and Christ both still live, we're told. They're alive and thus

must have dealt with the stress of that long time of turning on to being young. I speak of teens. Fifteen and ten years ago when I first confessed, it was in this same church built then as a gigantic shed where the strange Hawaiian birds (I forgot their names—no matter) flew in and out of the high wooden rafters like the whimsical winds of grace, and grace gives back to sight what beauty is— as that loveliness at the beach. Now the church has been rebuilt in pointed stone across the street from a much higher new hotel where at lunch I almost spilled and found I could not eat the purple orchid in my drink.

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Twin Sister for Jo, in her 6th month you ask of love? there is no love except in silence an' silence doesn't say a word —Dylan

There is no language of the natural heart. We've shared a long silence, though the blood's voice, the slow lovethrob sang to us in our sleep.

Jim

It has always been you I sleep with. In the deep silence of my lover's hair, it was your heart I heard, it was your yellow hair my fingers curled upon. And there is something still familiar about this crossed position, the press of small hands and knees, the slow rocking together in this dim light. That first cradle was the one body we shared. 55

Our language has no word for this. And this speaking, this longing grasping at a form, is still a being of no substance, the disembodied voice a slight disturbance in the unborn air. li Tonight I see you across five thousand miles, and your moony fullness seduces me finally back to that whole world you carry within yourself, to this new place simply beyond words, where thought and speech are stilled, and the body is the embrace of two hearts beating together in the warm dark.

Grateful Here

Wing Tek Lum

l Emerging from the subway station, then lost among the orange signs on Nedicks snackbars, I could smell the thick rice soup and dumplings 1 would order in that basement lunchroom already beckoning me. I thought: like a salmon returning to its spawning ground —and, bemused, followed my Chinese nose. 2 Early one Sunday morning each spring, our family would visit my grandparents' graves, Offering gifts of tea and suckling pig, burning colored paper, incense, and loud firecrackers. Later, my mother would take me to church. I sang in the choir and would carry, that day, fragile lilies to the altar of my risen Lord. 3 When walking with a Caucasian girl, holding hands, I would pass by teenage hangouts, overhearing insults. They would always pick on the girl, as though she were a lesbian. 56

Separately, I guess, we would pretend not to have noticed—avoiding embarrassment for the other, tightening our grips. 4 Observing two gay Negroes, powdered gray, and strutting regally in their high-heeled boots, I followed them half-enviously with my eyes, understanding, for the first time, that dark allure of nighttime caresses. I was in rural Pennsylvania, and found housewives at the grocer's brought their children with small, craning necks to whisper about me. 5 After a sit-in at the Pentagon, the arresting marshall misspelt my name. Actually, though, I know I should feel grateful here. In fact, just last week on the radio, I heard that the Red Guards had broken the wrists of a most promising young pianist. Among other things, he once journeyed to Manila for a recital of Brahms.

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What I Want All I need is a long table, smooth and level, laminated if possible, and sturdy enough to type on. Ilike a lot of lights, the directional kind that I can swivel around, the kind that go P I N G at the flick of my finger. I need a bed, too, and use of an icebox perhaps, where I can store juice and tangerines and the yogurt mixed by myself, ready to eat in the mornings.

I want a place where I don't have to put on my pants to go piss, where I can scratch my ass whenever I want to, and take a shower everyday without feeling guilty about monopolizing the hot water or the bathroom time. I would like to stay up at all hours of the night, wander barefoot about, maybe read some book, or else listen to the trucks going by, and to the radiators' clank, while I wait, unshaven, without you.

Hadaka De Hanasu (talking nakedly) for Kiyoko Tell me, water, Of this power you have over me. The sound of your voice fills my mouth with honey my throat with a difficult roar. Is it ours, Lioness, This madness we share so deep in our blood that we speak of babies As if they could hear?

Jody Manabe

Filament breath of you, Tell me how they cling to the sides of your womb pink eyeless things that steal your blood while I lie here breathing beside you easily your bulk, your water, Is it ours? I have gathered the cloth together in both hands I have made an octopus out of air! Listen to the sound of it Against your lips.

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Starring Role This is my body It brings my lines into focus my fine tuning knob my adjustment When my skies are clear my body reflects this as long as my horizontal and vertical will hold Behind this the directions of my mind, my blood, a single cell are solar systems gone wild. Who can focus this hall of mirrors? All my stars are bright Count them and you lose track Now we must estimate

Ron McCurdy

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I guess you like my body The wet trace your tongue draws on my chest sparkles so fine But my constellations of thieves and rapists are angry. They loom towards you in closeup Their bad complexions fill the screen They send messages in my blood Beware Your tongue goes dry I guess you think my body isn't mine My blue lines are lost in your horizon all my stars go out

Snapshots Miranda: 0 wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here. How beauteous mankind is. 0 brave new world That has such people in't! Prospero: 'Tis new to thee. The Tempest Act 5 Scene I

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1

2

A photograph of Miranda her eyes an invitation body lines hazy speaking dreams My flesh feathers want to capture your aloneness St. Louie pigeon You the last of a line "Another heaven and another earth" Our only chance nothing I can say could alter that

Hsu Yi at the train station We just said good-bye You were going to Ohio words I couldn't say Your high collared dress fit good eyes like coffee dark liquid They kept me up at night, too Legs embrace emptiness Yours mine I dream in distances only silence can make

3

4

A young blond kid standing knee deep in Wisconsin snow His smile frozen eyelids closed against the glare Dreams fermenting in gray silos Sad pricks dressed in white Can I reach that boy trapped in another body or hold his hand inside mine

Picture possibilities resurrections Moving on? moving Miranda Hsu Yi and the blond kid dancing over a field of yellow light stretching from horizon to horizon The mind whispering through wild grass in an ancient tongue or the buzz of hornets, black wasps scraping the dark side of the wind.

Author's note: In 1914 the last North American passenger pigeon died in the St. Louis zoo. It was last seen in the wild in 1906. The pigeon's name was in fact Martha, not Miranda.

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Summit We climb the flat stones We carry our reasons To be redeemed for stones

At this altitude even Lizards are slow Below the high fields turn In salt wind

Michael McPherson

And burning brown and gold Afford us A clear view of nothing across the channel

The names of the stones fall From our tongues like stones Stones of the others Our reasons

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The Lightkeeper M y flashlight sends its message and some of it returns from the glass where the other sits on his hunches and some of it passes was it short long short or the other way over the gulch and into the eucalyptus over the calf white where she is white not ofFwhite like her mother born last night tonight she learns to return to night and into eucalyptus and the tall pines where the owl is not watching and some of it can be seen at the lighthouse on the coast where there's no harbor and some of it remains in my flashlight

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Lines Written but Never Mailed from Hawaii No one is snug against the heart's disasters, Not the men and women that I know; (The learned and the loved that went along Ate their knowledge and their beauty like a drug) And of disasters, absence may not be the worst; But the things I could tell you about sunrise in the islands, About the sense of summer troubling the cane, Of flight as smooth as love above the sea at night —I have looked at the ocean in moonlight for a long time, But no more than death's meaning can I say what it means— The things I could tell you while the sun declines Of the gentle play of mountains on the mind;

William Meredith

For absent lover ever and be certain that for me, These seasons were disasters, these times of day.

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A Korean Woman Seated by a Wall Suffering has settled like a sly disguise On her cheerful old face. If she dreams beyond Rice and a roof, now toward the end of winter, Is it of four sons gone, the cries she has heard, A square farm in the south, soured by tents? Some alien and untranslatable loss Is a mask she smiles through at the weak sun That is moving north to invade the city again. A poet penetrates a dark disguise After his own conception, little or large. Crossing the scaleless asia of trouble Where it seems no one could give himself away, He gives himself away, he sets a scale. Hunger and pain and death, the sorts of loss, Dispute our comforts like peninsulas Of no particular value, places to fight. And what it is in suffering dismays us more: The capriciousness with which it is dispensed Or the unflinching way we see it borne?

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She may be dreaming of her wedding gift; A celadon bowl of a good dynasty With cloud and heron cut in its green paste, It sleeps in a hollow bed of pale blue silk. The rice it bought was eaten the second winter. And by what happier stove is it unwrapped In the evening now and passed around like a meat, Making a foliage in the firelight? She shifts the crate she sits on as the March Wind mounts from the sea. The sun moves down the sky Perceptibly, like the hand of a public clock, In increments of darkness though ablaze. Ah, now she looks at me. We are unmasked And exchange what roles we guess at for an instant. The questions Who comes next and Why not me Rage at and founder my philosophy. Guilt beyond my error and a grace past her grief Alter the coins I tender cowardly, Shiver the porcelain fable to green shards.

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The Windows Here is a child who presses his head to the ground his eyes are open he sees through one window the flat gray ocean upside down with an arbor of islands hanging from it all the way to the horizon and he himself is hanging from nothing he might step down and walk on the old sky far down there out to the clouds in the far islands he might step on the clouds where they have worn shiny he might jump from cloud to cloud he watches lights flash on and off along the dark shores and the lights moving among the overhead islands he feels his head like a boat on a beach he heard the waves break around his ears he stands up and listens he turns to a room full of his elders and the lights on blue day in the far empty windows and without moving he flies

w. s. Merzvin

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June Rain The rain of the white valley the clear rain the rain holding the whole valley while it falls the mountain rain the high rain onto the mountain as it rained on the mountain on the night we met the many days' rain shadowless rain blowing from the long eaves to go on falling the rain whose ancestors with no names made the valley the nameless shining rain whose past lives made all the valleys the author of the rivers with unchanged and final voice the rain that falls in the new open streams running down the dirt roads on the mountain the rain falling hour after hour into summer the unexpected rain the long surprise the rain we both watch at the same window the rain we lie and listen to together the rain we hear returning through the night the rain we do not hear the open rain

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Mountain Day With one dear friend we go up the highest mountain thousands of feet into the birdless snow and listen to our breaths in the still air for a long time beside the observatories later we stretch out on the dark crumbled lava slope looking west at the sun yellowing the clouds below then go down past the wild cows to the cabin getting there just before sunset and eat by the fire laughing at what we have forgotten to bring afterwards we come out and lie braided together looking up at Cassiopeia over the foothill

The Hosts You asked what were the names of those two old people who lived under the big tree and gods in disguise visited them though they were poor they offered the best they had to eat and opened the oldest wine in the house the gods went on pouring out pouring out wine and then promised that it would flow till the ends of their lives when the shining guests were out of sight he turned to her by the table and said this bottle has been in the cave all the time we have been together

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The Next Moon A month to the hour since the last ear on earth heard your voice even then on the phone I know the words about rest and how you would say them as though I myself had heard them not long ago but for a month I have heard nothing and in the evening after the moon of deafness I set foot in the proud waters of iron and misfortune it is a month to the hour since you died and it was only dusk to the east in the garden now it is a night street with another moon seen for the first time but no longer new and faces from the backs of mirrors

The Old Photograph A girl who has seen herself in a mirror many times, passes one near the bottom of a staircase and can't see herself. She climbs into the mirror to find the image she thinks must be caught inside. Behind her the light of the mirror's surface becomes a pinpoint at the end of a tunneling darkness, the black color of keyholes. As when glass sings, she hears the sound of something close to light and follows it until she finds her image sitting in the dark with the sound that lights up its makers. The girl's image can't stop looking at transparent birds trilling their silver tongues. The girl made of flesh thinks the birds are beautiful, but it's cold this far down in the mirror where the black and silver light drains every other color. So she covers the eyes of her image and leads it back, through the soundless night. From then on, whenever the girl looked in the mirror, she saw herself as in an old photograph, the colors muted and gray.

Dana Naone

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74

Long Distance

The Men Whose Tongues

I had been sitting for days trying to bite off my right breast in hope of becoming an Amazon. You appeared as a repairman and went straight to the switchboard behind my stomach. A strange orange bird had been pecking through all the wires. You killed the bird and used its feathers to make new connections. My first call was to Egypt. All the cobras came to the phone flaring and hissing.

The men whose tongues have turned to iron would say water tastes like rust to them if they did not find it so hard to speak. Words pile up. They go through each day, their mouths full of unsaid words. In dreams they hang upside down and ring like bells.

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Sunday Service

Two

The hymns we sing today go straight into the ears of the tiger lilies. A shaft of sunlight strikes the bare wood floor halfway between the altar and the first pew. Everyone taking communion will pass through transformed by the blood and the light. Clothing, dry as bird wings, rustles when we settle in our seats. Someone knocks at the door, but I do not get up to answer. It is my father waiting on the steps. I look down the aisle of black shoes, the book of tears in our hands.

My dreams come to me in pairs, I expect it, like two cakes arriving for a birthday, only it's no one's birthday. Or a coyote shot in front of its mate, for no reason and the bitch gets into the house, time and again to steal what shines and leave it in a treeless place. Another day, a widow's life yawns as she looks across the courtyard to a gate sealed shut by trees grown up on either side. In the same town, a man about to take a bath in a strange house, finds an earring, in the shape of a bird, thinks of the breasts of the girl he will meet.

The House of Light

76

I

II

Here is a man with a lamp growing out of his head. When he looks behind him the beam of his light shines on where he has been, the past receding like a tail drawing back into itself. Ahead of him the future dissolves as he goes toward it. He disappears from this moment as though he had come to a turn in the road, taking with him our father the light.

Lying on our bed of dreams, the sheets rolled back in waves. You have been swimming toward me all night determined to reach shore by morning. Legs in sight. I feel you pull yourself up my body slapping your fish belly against mine, while the light leaves its desert and sets a root down in us.

77

Ill

IV

Two years gone by. My mother is sitting near the open window when I come in the room. By the light of the moon she shows me growing from the palm of her hand a tree she can't cut down.

The light gone out in the nests, the damp leaves hide the sleeping birds. Under the arm of night I hear the sound of a key that won't turn in the lock. I rise from my bed to open the door, thinking it is you: a star has fallen on the doorstep, I follow its broken light into the street.

The Average Night Outside, ponies pound near the cliff. The wind. Around me, in corners, friends snore at the dark, exhorting me to sleep. I have known them for years. They struggle wonderfully in their mummy bags, cry softly for open land, booze, new shoes.

Paul Nelson

When they are not near, when I cannot hear them striving, they are the apprehensive horses in the field.

78

Shaman I believed in Schmidt's piss-ridden trousers, his slavering before the three-foot plaster Mary in the rhubarb. When I asked the dirty question, he said all children rise like steam from the body of a beast. The time he tipped his walking stick in fire and wove an animal in air, kicking against the dark of trees; I went home to our mum house and dreamed a clash of amber horns, moonlight on something like papayas. I started by peeking at my mother. His children made him sleep in the garage with a pile of coal. I bed a woman half my size, watch Spring loosen her features. Our passport shows a different couple going somewhere every generation, this time returning to the Islands where centipedes are blue and geckos leave their eggs to hatch in matchboxes.

79

Pin Ball Angel At the bowling alley I pass a young man playing pin ball. In his caramel-colored leather jacket He is watching the machine with a soft, Intent expression, as if bent Over a ship's compass — and a girl With blond hair and white shorts Stands next to him, holding a malt In one hand, the other arm Around his neck. She is draped around him Like an S, and their hips overlap. Well, Maybe she is like a vine on a trellis; roses. When I come back they are still there. She is sipping from the straw; She holds the paper cup near his chest, And her other arm is still thrown Over his far shoulder, and he is still smiling, Shyly. He is talking to her About the pin balls and their progress, About what's happening there beneath their faces Lit up by the flashing lights; And she is following him. She is his Pin Ball Angel. She holds him defiantly,

Peter Nelson

80

As if at any second someone might Come to get him — and her eyes Take in quickly every face that passes. But he is gone, And she, even in her vigilance — This is the miracle Of her devotion — is with him, on this Their faces glowing softly, The shiny steel balls Ringing the lights of their pin ball sky. He wants to keep them going for her Always. "Spanish Beauty." "1000 for each lit star."

Sharktooth Creek I rinse pine soap from my father with water from the canteen, then strip and wash quickly in the chill wind. I go down to the spring. My father is in first. How strange, approaching naked, like this . . . the pale, delicate green pool lying open in the earth. It looks very deep. I sink in; we sit up to our necks in the hot water, bubbles rising from the sandy bottom, our arms and legs floating out like seaweed. Today in the trees I came upon a white mule, peering at me, nostrils wide — after a moment he turned and ran madly up the slope. More mules loose from somewhere, copulating in the clearing. Here we're enclosed by ragged pines leaning inward, their branches bare where the steam goes up, and long, heavy grass bending down to touch the pool. A spider pokes at a string of his web that is suspended inches above the water. Warmth seeps in, past my eyes and skin back in to the bone. I watch my father get out — how white he is, his hair, skin, taut legs and the sack of his genitals all white as he rises dripping to the clear meadow.

82

Quai de l'Horloge The river does not move. It lies like a plain of black glass, A few discs of light embedded in its surface. We didn't speak Last night, and cramped together so close, We couldn't leave Each other, or sleep. Mountain passes lined with snow in the south Slipped away by morning. At evening We left the train under taut Girders of blackened steel And walked the city; weary, We ate what we could pay for. Now, still hungry, we go to settle in a bed again What we can. It was no different When we had half the earth Between us. Yet I was glad Walking here with you in the shadows Along the paved bank, toward the gold And blue clock on the Avenue of the Palace With its high, measured windows — The flood-lit cathedral rising like a great 83

Gull, or ship, from black water To a blacker sky of pure depth — Walking past trees more massive and sheltering even Than the oaks we saw last summer Where I was born — I was glad That we had come this distance. We stand in the mist of our breath. At midnight on this bridge, Where we almost touch, The white and pale red lights frozen before us: This is all we shall be In this life. Something floats on the water — Like an uncarved face, Luminous, bare. I can't tell if it's sliding away Or nearer.

84

A Graveyard in Oberammergau, 1960 The rows of stones are fenced with intricate ironwork, like an elves' post office, wound with summer vines and small dark leaves, cool dust on the floor. Some of the graves hold pictures faded under glass — on this one a boy wears an army cap that is too big. It comes down almost to his eyes. There is grave after grave marked 1917, 1918, and this one, 1944. In the village I have spoken to no one. When I woke this morning upstairs a heavy woman was in the room with me, laying biscuits and black tea on the table, the white curtains drawing softly out of the window in the early light.

85

Family Reunion A large, waxen backyard tomato Sits with beads of water on its thin skin, A wooden-handled paring knife Lying next to it on the edge of the plate. "Your eyes are hazel." "Jim's eyes are blue," Though on the grey side I think, Looking. "Jo's eyes are blue," light as A robin's egg, next to me. Bill's are brown. Helen's eyes are hazel, too. Jim says, "I never look your mother straight in the eye. It's too much for me. You have the same eyes." Jo says, "Your grandmother had those eyes." And then, "When Pete walks in It's his grandfather all over again. The same walk." Fried chicken In the place where I was born. I run my tongue over the new Gold crown on my tooth, So smooth, perfectly fitted. Red tomato on the white plate. I leave it whole.

86

The Middle of the World

Kathleen Norris

The night is cloudy A man with a lot on his mind, A naked woman Sit in the middle of a field, in the middle of the world. It is quiet there. He is like a horse Making friendly gestures, His body unexpectedly silky. Shuddering fast, he reaches up inside her Rocking her Two thousand miles from the sea. He shivers, half-clothed. He will work cattle tomorrow If the weather holds. She is naked, creamy. They give back The waters of the air And the moon, descending, Goes far into the night, their faces And their lives: This night, and the world, unfinished.

87

A Cold Rain Obscures L.A. Tonight A cold rain obscures L.A. tonight. I'm driving the Harbor Freeway where thick ocean mists barely slow us below sixty, rain is more rare and we're stopped up now a mile of us in our cars nosing the sleek road. I've heard this coast attracts the self-destructive, I stylize my caution an extra car-length turn up my radio and move toward an exit in the alien rain. I'm not from here either.

Tony Quagliano

88

To the Author of "To My Brother Miguel" Cesar Vallejo broken, like slow prey in the aftermath of tigers passing the sunlit portion of dead afternoons on the family bench, bricked in victim recollections

can no sooner strike that shadow he noticed on his soul than can Miguel re-enter August or John, November sunlight, night or mustering memoriams reconvene childhood postures to fill the empty places in the playground.

I know this. And how some dead turn to fodder for the poems, and that Miguel's elusive past all art, Cesar and how the sunlight on an empty place is subsequent, and not much help.

But your persistence. Muted lifetime overturning stones in parlors, entrance halls and corridors striking down the mountains to Lima and Paris and familial Spain solitary, stricken with sparrows dealing well not so much with dead Miguel but with the subsequence.

This, I would come to know. And so I join your hide-and-seek and keep to the shadows myself.

90

Hawk and Rock I hate hawks. Dumb bird brain symbols of elemental wisdom. Falcons also starlings, eagles all alike sappy creatures spinning wings and rocks, mute omniscient stone stacked, as rough coast against some storming hokey ocean I hate also. Give me the city and the fierce bright self-regarding poems of Jeffers.

91

What We Have You open and close your eyes on your lives beyond the porch, writing down osprey, fishing hip-deep, or the sound of wu-tung leaves, at the tunnel beyond the stars, what a simple passage! I watch the air around us widen when you spread your arms: in this tunnel, the distance of an arm, you have tried to tell me that we touch the roof, the ground, the sides and are sure of our movement in one direction; but that tunnel outside— what will I do if you, in so unworldly a space, cannot find the sides?

Elizabeth Shinoda

92

A Revisit Woman of West 705th Street, who was forgotten, who has come back as a sketching on my hands, the ocean is not in there. I understood the cold hollow house of the shell. It connected us the way you bent towards me. In the half-waking when even the four footprints dragging beside us did not separate you from someplace you had gone without n it was disheartening that you were bent, and I was straight— your snake nest arms divided to touch my lonesome hands lifting like owl-eyelids— we were not part of each other! It was a wonderful gift, it occupied my hands to imagine the ocean, but the movements you repeatedwords, sweaters, jars of winter food— never satisfied that large lost root house you would not speak of. Your dissatisfaction was a book of myths open before me like a broken bowl: where Daedalus, seeing the wings on the waves, cursed his talents; a mythical child not recognized would move away babbling sounds like Mother! or Father! or Goodbye!

I was certain that the upturned shell, the design of your features, the house of your body, would drown if you tried to show me that the ocean is all around us. I did not want more than the village after the war, or the earth-caked spoon I stole from the kitchen table. The dissatisfied woman tries to visit me the foolish way the human body tries to enter dreams. She does not see the sometimes puzzled look held in the cloister of my face she does not hear the silent break between one person and another. At this point of an abandonment there is the old tidepool garden and in my young, calculating fashion I count the holes. Twelve! Nothing significant!

94

Public Utterance I held a tall stump with one hand Judy with the other. Judy is married to Jimmy. Their son Gabriel, sucking on a lump of potter's clay, has already his man-shape: big blunt, well-muscled. I wish sometimes simply for strength of purpose. To be ruthless—to be dumb enough to follow the path we followed to the waterfall.

Stephen Shrader

I hung by one hand into one world. I hung uphill into another. But when I paint it—what a mess I make of it. Better I leave some slice of my mind behind there. Better than that I mutter it: Judy Waterfall.

95

Pantoum Dream the small silences clearly, thoroughly. The dream gas is clean. Be with me now as I prepare to do this, cleanly and

create it. It came from a small town in Mexico. We'll be arriving there, soon, to buy some. It is such

thoroughly. The dream gas is all around us and we must prepare to do this, cleanly and with efficiency. The gas is

a small town in Mexico! We'll do nothing to swell it, tho we buy some. It is such a tiny price to pay—so

all around us and we must breathe it deeply and with efficiency. The gas is nowhere and we should

do nothing to swell it, tho we dream the small silences. Clearly a tiny price to pay! So clean! Be with me now, as " I " .

breathe it deeply and create it. It came from nowhere and we should be arriving there, soon, to

96

Request for Diane Let it age. I think of you & of things that ride on air. One just went by my window—colossal! like the blueprints for a tomb in which my happiness might be interred. (When I fall, I fall by this deft bit of draftsmanship.) But not this time! Let it age. Let the hands, circling the face, draw time up into something disposable. I ask you, can I meet you regardless of clocks, time, thru time into no burial, or a burial of all that circumscribes our actual free-fall together.

97

What We Move Thru Last night I saw a face riding out on what it did, what only a woman's face can do. So I sang about something like that. I sang and sang till my face opened up like a cupboard—or what I felt like when she said, "Yes. I love the way you do that . . . music."

Easter for

Kathy

The rain fails; the rice birds come out and the pigeons and the bosses who are no longer bosses. The insects, too. There are drops dripping from drops. After so many days—how many was it?—the clouds thinned enough for those below to remember: sky. Clear sky. Sun, the one without progenitor.

98

Waterlilies All night I had been sweeping up broken glass. It was that yellow green which in New England was once called vaseline glass; and brittle, breaking into points. All night, all night, the breaking glass. At dawn we went down to the lake's edge. He took the boat from the shelter and fitted the oars into the locks. The water was calm and fragile as a sheet of glass. The boat cut it, the oars cut in — the only sound. The water was at first gray as sky an hour before the sun. Then blue. He rowed slowly and with a heavy rhythm. The smell of the lake was still of night before sun had warmed the green from pads and rushes. We were going for waterlilies. He had promised for three weekends that we would row across the lake for waterlilies. I could not believe we were going after the night when all those glasses slipped from my fingers. But in half an hour the boat pushed among the lily pads. I carefully pulled at the budding flowers, yellow and white. He held the boat in place with oar motion and warned me not to lean over too far. There were five lilies in the boat, their stems dribbled water and sap. Sunlight now cracked on the water's wind-roughed surface. He had pulled his cap low over his face against the glare. I lay down in the boat next to the lilies. He stroked my back a moment and then started the return. At the boat house I gathered the lilies into my arms. He helped me to step from the swaying boat. He ran his fingers through my hair. "These lilies are softer than glass."

Marjorie Sinclair

99

The Bombing of Kaho'olawe Kaho'olawe! A thrust of land above blue water. Only those who journey under a heavy sky, in a canoe in heavy sea know an island, how it gives leaves and bark for men, reef for coral fish and stone for temple walls. Kaho'olawe! 35 years of bombing! Earth in which blood, roots, claw and scale lie hidden. Sea-surrounded, a red roll of land like a whale's back above water. Only the sea can carry it away. Kaho'olawe — it had a sacred name: Kohe-malamalama, bright genesis. A sacred earth, home of a mo'o goddess, shining lizard. Hooks of Kohe-malamalama lured fish. Men built heiaus, walked quietly; Kohe-malamalama, bright cunt of the sea ceaselessly bombed.

Author's note: The island Kaho'olawe has been used by the navy as a bombing target for 35 years. Kaho'olawe means the carrying away by currents. Kohe-malamalama means bright vagina.

Remnants My father who is my blood and water. Condemned at forty-six, the years in numbers attached to our house, cumbersome in renovations; weary, the surfacing of past mutilations. The old wood rots. The leaky bathtub drips at night. The constant erosion falls like dead stones in his head. He constricts beside my mother in bed, plastering the thin tiles in mirrored wall paper, streaked in gold. The house stands still. Unsold. New families with their bicycled children spring like wildflowers this season. Our neighborhood yards. They gather in our mailboxes, supple and pliant, uprooting our fences. Scents of winter upon our door step;

Cathy Song

101

the eviction notice, a dead bouquet. Our mourning paper glued to the lawn by dew. The house is sagging by the garage. M y sister's side of the view. I look out and breathe, a blue breathed sigh. M y sister's bed needs changing. The guest room now. Or the ghost room, the first menstrual stains blotched upon the mattress. Paris, France stickers and Wellesley invitation mixers. Precipitates with the filtered dust. Her clothes left unhanging, an abrupt departure. Where did the flight go? The destinations splintered us; the unknown pockets of air. The abortion came too soon.

102

My father stays making repairs, still; oiling the machines with his fluids, between the four cars. The children drive off. He is still making adjustments by moonlight. My father who is my blood and water. And my mother who is his daughter. She comes in her leaf green sweater; a flashlight in her hand.

103

Consolation It takes no courage. The little cancers Heal themselves like purple flowers That open once then close. Still, we picked a fine bouquet. The days were chaste blue And summer had the perfect atmosphere. They've become white roses Among the boughs and trenches Watered in a purple urn. And each is like a name Sweet as shovels biting into sand.

Frank

Stewart

104

Train Window You glisten from the dreams in which you bathe, and you are always wet, half-willingly, with the dampness of someone you don't name. You bend under the weight in the dream, stirring in the traveler's sleep through which you sense the rails speeding beneath your bed over the sensuous miles and the uncountable hours. How simple the Canadian landscape is through a window at night; though it is storming, the sound will not reach us behind the glass. Occasionally there is a distant light from a farm, nothing more. Then, out of nowhere the crowded train slashes suddenly into the crossings of the half-illumined streets of a small town, and the spine of those streets aches under the length of it as though it has passed through a wound.

105

You pull the sheets across you slowly the way the brakeman turns the pages of his newspaper in lamplight, oblivious to the rapid wind that rushes by. The town for an instant seems to pause outside the window: the corner gas station steeps in the downpour, the one hotel with a raised hand before its face. I am so much part of you we travel in one piece of luggage. Your loosened hair stretches out behind you. But lie still. Unlike the night, I cannot swallow you to keep us whole, or to keep us forever from arriving.

Orphee at Rest No one wondered that I could love this woman, the wife whose white silk dress would hiss gently saying this is not the unreal of dream, it is the unreal of life, in the dark of your clean bed; but when I lay with my own Death whose face was cruel as shears and who made me choose her strange ways, and lampblack eyes, the rouge, until deceit was like a virtue and a broth, the jealous bore me to a pit, covered me with the dirt of half-despair, the illusions and myths of golden women painted inside the box in which my body turned to mold, and left me there; and in that box I felt myself embraced softly by hundreds of small fingers, an odor as in the lead-white dawn on earth when the beasts had stood in silent ease for me to sing; and here in the still greater silence all that I had been comes true at last by being dead.

106

The Sea Breathes Quietly, Menelaus Behind the bar the plates are stacked like silver. We have been leaning here for hours in semi-dark until the arches of our shoes are numb as the expressions above the rows of hands that hold the glasses and glowing cigarettes. Outside it is dark, too, but with rain and a squall that's lashed Japan, Mindanao, Palau, and the Marshalls. I walk out into it, finally wanting to taste whatever message weather carries when it swabs the brain like the dark, determined sea foaming in the harbor against steel ships. The drunks are going home. The air has done nothing to explain the losses on the face the city turns into this tropic wind. Even the courage we sense on certain nights clouding the eyes of lovers and despisers alike oppresses, and drives us toward separate rooms again where the glass will shiver with rain and the light on thin, immobile curtains. I have grown old with this accidental weather, at home with the lives that were missed by seconds, in some of which you too are changed. But to lie down in the dark together now would mean a pure defeat. I would rather walk, growing cold in the abating storm, imagining Menelaus alive too long, past all illusions in the filtering dirt of Egypt.

New England: Driving Back in Early April Going home. The city is being shed behind me like a sheath of old snake skin, the smoke being stretched back until it will recoil and be restored among warm stones, the sweating pipes in cellars, the fine glass windows behind which shopkeepers ring the hours. They hear the rain being ripped between the awnings; the alleys smolder. And in the over-heated stores enormous moths bump along the panes. But I am going home to gray juncos and quail, to the black snakes which live in the gap where the stone wall has collapsed, and broken glass and leaves mount up together into a kind of Indian burial place. The house has been framed with white king's timber, with boards as wide as a man's waist. I mean to hoe the torn spring garden before the season overtakes me as it seems always to be doing. I mean to clean the mire from the traps and make the water clear again. I am going home with the speed of daylight and the sound of warm tires on pavement, though I know I am already outdistanced by the coming fall, already feeling the ground harden again, and my hands freezing to the wrist in the earth.

108

November's Lesson

"It's a way to go," I say. "Shift fast and trip a notch." Up. Down. Subtle, subtle; settle to a fine focus: bastard amber. Now, stay. " I dare you to love," I say and make you. Sit. Careful. Petulant. Petulant membranes slip into focus and out and into your turning. Sit careful. Believe I come caring. Intent on focus, I slip, catching on grooves. Intent on shifting, I sit, loving the hue your face assumes. This clarity quivers me cold. November says: This warmth is amber, bastard and brittle. Quiver into focus, Love. These edges slip.

Mel Takahara

109

II Dark's the flood that draws

dispersing

headward flown from deep

the common, a desperate run

as drawn breath

of sparrows stalks this morning my brawny

burnt light

pump's primed so sleeping

and suns

cannot drown the paced

snap in light-frames winged

tides and waking

burst to burst through honey

weeps. The dawn's full: your face

colored air settling

grown deeper richer warmer than this light I taste

a moment caught tight now slivering the air lifting

rising. Now.

Now, the latches all are sprung.

Through leaves, through branches high, higher

110

loose they soar from sight

to the doors

roaring their loss roaring.

Ill How crossing fields of fine pahoehoe lava, blue-green flakes like scaling paint, spread: lichen to feast on dark basalt in sunlight. Patches of rock sucked brown and brittle, crunch: the sound of snow giving. Here are faults. Open. Drawn black crevices inhaling for ages the silt of ash and pumice. The way is a leap from edge to slipped edge. "Leap," says salt in the wind from sea, "from flow to flow." Nothing's lost here. Forms, memorized by lava, tell clearly of November when light slivered earth and whole days were fractured, spilling marrow in their rage. A slope of agony, hardened to grooved surfaces, can be walked. The stone furnaces contain amber light. Now, my way's the stone's way to the shore, face to the crusting salt, to an edge where ocean slips, shows a plainer life, packed on bright shalestone. Quivering.

Ill

The Waiting Child at first i was not used to taking a green tunnel into a child's heart but by the second day i began to suspect whose heart it really was the third time i went anxious to meet the waiting child who told me of a dream i had bright grinning at my surprise fourth! day green the tunnel no longer weeps the children pull me laughing to an old room wrapped in pastures and the same dark row of trees cows

112

have been gazing at for hours before the arrival we dream of wild ducks and horses blood and water pebbles and five days happen as if nothing suddenly real ends. Now gazing at the dark row how i dream of bursting through wrappings and pastures of unbroken grass frantic to find still a child there waiting.

Falling How many ways there are of falling into the sea! Through speck and glint the whiteness falls. Over curve and edge and glare And past another afternoon The daytime waits for a falling! And the gull falls! And the smallest rain Dragging with it great accumulations of clouds. And the flares of the nighttime: Arcturus, and Jupiter swinging in the spruce, Slipping through several cat's cradles, And the Seven Sisters, fading nightly In their falling.

Reuben Tarn

And down the faulted coastlines The continents with their screes And their grasses with their silver anthers, Oh how they fall.

113

Among Mountains Ultimate in a serrate sky, In a balance of ice planes and peaks, The range of white mountains shone, Signed in parallels for my landscape. But place fell into shields, scattering Contours on an undivided plain. A glacier turned the ridges around, Against the heave of a warm time. And night was ground water seeping Through labyrinths in rock. Terrain Was the stay of sediment After each passing anarchy. Stones of the moraine, what terminal? Crack of quartz, facet of which dark? Taut at my step, the fault Staggers this day I've walked into.

114

Colding Nights I am bound to the bed these colding nights by cords strong as rope: patterns of a grandfather's sleep, his two arms crossed his chest, holding his heart in and warm till Tim the dog would come to warn of dawn. I am on his pillow. Frost falls. My beard comes hoar. The bed snaps: lashed to this sled, borne north northeast the course is for snow. To the source the dogs drive, churning where the pads bled till the ice melts in a southward roar of falls and sun. My neck strains to the rope: the dogs surge and soar and hope.

Roland Tharp

X

We can begin now. This is perhaps the crucial scene for everything she became, 115

though he is burly, moustached— a type to which she never returned. You see a routine kiss: until the hollows of her eyes loosen from the skin she clamps his neck licks his mouth mutters what I believe to be 'I will know you' then like a discovered mask she peels off her face leaving that snubbed, famous profile, the thick, natural brows. ii That scene has been analyzed as archetypal orgasm: an interpretation of consummate vulgarity. She spoke of him as 'ferryman'; carried through the dark in his arms, when she had dried herself on the dawn bank, he was gone. No one could love her both before and after. During the crossing his face is shadowed.

116

Ill There follows a phase of romping: on and off the bed, the floor. There were many partners. Only one was important; the reasons need not concern us. She took to records, stretching herself like a vaulter. All quite lighthearted. She: He: She:

Pull the blind. Let's do more. With Tony it was 17. You're doing arithmetic, dear. This year I'm algebra.

We may view this as the period of great comedies, iv Of the only known sequence with a woman, she said it was not impossible, only difficult. Thus craft is central: observe her as she falls away, alone: the left leg bent at the knee, swaying above the ankle and the hip. The rhythm is slight, open, her face idle. The entire discontent

is at the leg, at the elastic tendon of the leg attachment. But she was never inhospitable. v Something must be said of the marriage. It was not well directed. Critics object to the confusion of theme, the recurrent symbolism. The bondage exchange at the construction site: it over attempts. The lovemaking grows tired. There was one child. vi A period of withdrawal. Spiders in the desert handfuls of hot sand: a broadened sensuality. She stands naked, her hand grips an arm with impersonal intensity. Her body is overfull. Then she disappears.

Vll She apparently planned nothing. After some years, unknown in a railway station she suddenly caught sight of a stranger's disappearing back and this miraculous accident, like an arrest which swarms the ghetto into the streets, ignited her: and she is beyond craft, she is the marathon runner back to the stadium, face undisciplined, passion a question of one leg pulled forward by the fall of the other, every tendon at hard purpose. There were frightful telephone bills. She suppressed everything thereafter. She is said to be still living. In New Hampshire, I believe; or Connecticut.

The Promise

Phyllis Höge Thompson

120

Stand close to me. These words are hard to say alone And they need speaking,

I have known you always. For you An ancient cry shakes me hollow As wind.

Even if it has to be here in a city Worn with snow, rain-pocked At the soggy rim of March

No one who ever was Was like you. But it is too hard to live In promise.

Instead of that height we'll never see again, The light-shifting mountain hold of leaves The moist wind quivered in—

I am trying to say goodbye, to tell you That my mouth will never kiss your hair in sleep, That leaves wither into cold pledges.

Words from the splendor, green chambers Of that heavy inward forest Whose thick roots soak in warm rain.

This is mine: Nowhere and never will we meet again. The last gift. The promise I will keep.

The River John Logan's voice At all times one low sound rides through the waters Of the Susquehanna in its plain g o i n g Louder for the falls at the confluence of the Chenango upstream But strong also under the bridge Where, walking nearby along the flat river path, I could hear it, A noise that is so unremarkably part of The ordinary onwandering way of the river That it can be thought of as common speech. Autumn: the air drizzled, the hills not yet gold shot: The wide waters, slack drawn along the shallow banks, Went steadily, without haste or swagger, Lapped at the shore weeds, And pulled past the thick piers of the bridge. I listened for a dark sound that moves in a fair river. What I heard was a flow of low bells Ringing singly midstream. I heard the plain song of all water That celebrates within itself its own rising And everything it indifferently laves— Railtracks, streets of cities, wheatfields, and turnpikes,

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And how human lives shape themselves to human places, The voice that sings to itself and does not stay anywhere. I heard alone by dusk those undistinguished and beautiful river tones. Later, after three men had drowned, dragged into the mudweighted flood, The Susquehanna still held only its own unheeding song Of the sure course of things as they are. Of all men I know, John, yours is that voice never deranged I can suddenly anywhere out of my deep heart call to mind, The serious and ordinary Plain song that grows out of and beyond weeping and triumph, Diminishes guilt, and can reduce even heroic love or failure To the same unasking simplicity of clear music As of river water lapping weeds of a low shore, So that, if you have ever been away, I have not known it.

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The Truth l We are not in God's hands. You closed your fingers into mine, reached To be held. That was our safety. And now maybe that's not enough. By ourselves We drove as high as we still had space to turn And locked the car, then hand in hand Began hiking up gutted macadam, The city below us a vapor In front of the slab of light the harbor had become. On one side of us, a mountain rising. On one side, a green fall To a wilderness of many-shaded leaves, Their wet breaths roaming up to us. You gave me sweet berries ripening at the road's edge. I gave you bruised guavas to bite open and suck. Higher, the wind roused through poles of bamboo. Higher even, we climbed above the wind To the moist embrace Of the power in the everlasting mountain Who walks in another world And keeps safe whom it will. We came out at the last height

Ringed in white ginger and circled by the mountain In the one place we had chosen to hold. I loved you best last, and that was the last, A final rain wetting my face and spattering your warm back.

2 I've been to the great heiau at Pu'u o Mahuka To lay hold of whatever lives In the death-crusted walls laid Wide on the cliff above Waimea Bay Where the rale of summer rasps in the sun-smeared weeds. I've pulled leaves from a ti stalk And taken a stone To wrap and set back in the wall, My mouth dry with a truth I will not give words to. So our hands close again I gave A stone wrapped in warm leaves. So you come again I will not Stand white-ringed in ginger. So you go with me to the last height I gave the truth. Again and over again I give back the truth.

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3 What I have done is closed. The rain begins. Once more the everlasting power gathers And you will come back to the mountain.

Daphne Winter: hoarse, oracular. The rain stings, suicidally bitter, like desire. Why must my legs be bare All the way up my thighs, cold, And my soles wet? Stench of soft bark. On my fingers the scent of laurel crushed Freshens, but it does not heal The darkness in the mind's Pith. How did the summer fail? He placed mouth Upon my ear. His warm breath Moistened my hair. I heard a god exhale.

But now the haggard wind circling my head Rasps in burned redwood. Plagues spring in his stride. Am I raving? I felt healed. The heavy wind that breathes in these soaked trees Rattles through me. I'm cold. I think I have eaten with the dead. I'm cold. Wrenched against his intelligent body I have seen bay branches with his eyes. They are stripped. They are wet. They shiver a little, stiffly. They do not grow very high. They are darker than all the green around them. The leaves have tiny waves on the edges like A smile of wind. A god might mark them, quiet them, Move in what is open Of these laurel leaves Most tenderly.

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Swan Lake

We are mistaken to call it dancing. The underbrush above the road is impenetrable, and if we find the path, it will be overgrown with brambles; brambles will catch at us as we push toward the clearing: if we pause, silence will question our silence. I explore shadows for white. Whiteness is what I remember, though there are grey voices across a stream and somewhere a landscape of cattle and mowers. I am stone. The moon begins. White thrusts distract the leaves, white as stone falling.

John Unterecker

In mythologies, God is beast in love with man. The great bull mounts Europa to an applause of hooves. What cries craves shapesong come to enormous rest.

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3

But here, where summer is a longitude of prayer, touch, labyrinths of love, a restless song moves on grey leaves. Our gestures are a silence in the music; the painted scene is breath. The lake fills up with light. My dark soul flickers in the leaves. This is the death of love,

the music says. I am empty as bare air.

August 22 Here at the edge of nowhere and the sea you wind a thread of seaweed on your wrist. "Now I belong to this place." Like a coil of sandy hair it loops the blue pulse of stretched skin. Salt tides stretch out into the blue salt darkness of the sea. 128

Lava Tubes —Certain coastal areas of the island of Hawaii are honeycombed by lava tubes that lie just below a surface skin of soil and rock. Wherever the thin crust has given way, whole sunken gardens of trees, grasses, and climbing vines have fallen into the tubes. One can walk the underground darkness of lava tubes from garden to garden. 1 Roots are filament-thin in this grave air, ghost threads bearded with darkness. They brush my face, questioning} they brush my mouth, tasting of questions that are yours for the asking.

2 The lonely world of children playing hide and seek: I climb into the low branches of a crabapple tree; the game swirls into roses, blackberry alleys, my grandfather's corn patch back of the garage. "I'll kill him if he touches her again," Tommy had said, who smoked corn silk back of the garage and whose sister was a saint. "Touch me," I whisper to my pillow night after night. Feathery hair.

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3

We enter darkness too shy to hold each other's hands. Perhaps it is like that when death takes a bride. Threads brush her mouth. Dark rustlings whisper death's cold music through her veins, talking.

4 You toss in sleep, flapping an arm from the blanket. "You know, that's a good . . . " on the wave crest between two worlds, and I stop my answer with a fist, begging you to slide down the privacy of night. The tube is curtained with rootlets. On the walls of the tube great folds of lava, liquid forms, hard to the touch, swell out like wind-blown curtains.

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5 There is a garden, vivid in sunlight: three hala trees, a patch of long grass, philodendron climbing the walls of the cave, the trees, climbing its own looped vines up into sunlight. It hovers at the wrong end of the telescope. The life line, the curving heart line, each of the little broken lines that rut out like country roads nudging the whorled folded-over touch of fingertips.

6 I climb down out of the tree, knowing you are asleep. The children have gone home to bed, and I pick my way by starlight back across the fields.

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Falling Falling chute jammed falling: 40 below. T h e big clouds ascend: Virtue, kiss me good bye. Or in slow motion, as a wave folds onto itself, the slow droplets falling. Easy, and over: slower still: the spark on each wavedrop's turning. Not music slowed down, the soprano gone bass, but a slowed serenade: guitars: sparks of light on the string's long trembling. There is a point of balance when something that is either not-quite-love or that is more than love gives up its pretending and the sounds stop. You slump down in your seat at the movie, forgetting the flicker of words and the gentle voices that speak in strange light. They tell you inaudible truth: What you have is what you can hope for: the pressure of chair on the back of your neck, your arm on the arm-rest. A bad heart teaches you nothing.

The kind words of friends teach you nothing.

What one clings to falling out of the sky is the touch of things. So it is not a surprise, only relief: the trapeze strung from a cloud, the acrobat's feet that lock on your skidding arms and the long swing up into white, the two of you perched for a pulse of the wrist on the high bar before tumbling again through the waves' drum thunder down into the net.

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Any time, any time at all. Tell me a story. These words are slaves, or iron around empty places. The room is still except for the rainbow in my closet, music, and several trains running through bound down different lines. If a story should start with moonlight on a wave, it could end in the brain of a shark or cast up white under the sun. It could be real. Some squeal of brakes on an old rail. Rounding wheels, iron circles pulling wind.

Martha Webb

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Looking Glass All day I hear the mourning doves call around my house. This must be a day in 1947 for the mirror shows my mother's face and her long redbrown hair. We live in Kaumakani, plantation town of wooden buildings stained redbrown, monkeypod trees dust-red too. Sound carries in a town like this. High voices of children, doves, dogs barking. It's very quiet. Now the wind begins to smell like monkeypod sap. It's the pigeonpea bushes outside this window. I remember I remember one year Santa Claus came through Kaumakani in a wheeled sleigh, throwing advertising flyers into the bushes. I gathered them all up. Later that week we went to Lihue. There was a parade (music with a fist: you better not pout, you better not shout) bags of candy, a light rain drifting. My mother stayed home, 134

perhaps pregnant with my brother who would live nine years. He is called Hannu, the boy who loved turtles. There is no way to end this story. Look in the mirror.

Bird Cry Striking like a hammer beat after beat the bird cry gets inside the minutes. Stone walls are crumbling, the echo walls, the courtyard shaking apart grain from grain, second from second. The light too unbinds with every blow. Dark between the light. Dark blooming in day closes so fast some part of me is pinched away, into the wrong world.

My Brother Hannu and the Poison Pool Everything that touched the water died. Birds flying past fell in. The grass withered out like a ringworm. The pool caught planes, too. As each plane touched the shell of the last, it froze into balance and the pilot's bones drooped over his wheel. The stack grew until it snaked to the moon. As we storied, matching plane to plane, we scooped graves for ants. We neatly moulded little rectangles, crossed bits of beach-dross to head each grave and picked naupaka for mourning. The ants always crawled out as if there were great spaces between the grains of sand. Hannu, now I sift the spaces in men, looking for you. You must be housed in a white shell, you must be on the moon.

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Cloud Blue distills white As among us, with night the marchers take form and steal everyone not webbed tight to the ground with old blood. spirits phantoms

pressed out of nothing, out of the color blue.

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the mildweed sap and seed of the dead — here

Taking and Losing I see your father's death in the tilt of your skull. No. I wandered so thin in this life the hands passed through me until you held me still. I awoke to the curve of your mouth. I'm dreaming again, reconciliation with speed, with the swerve of incarnation bone to bone We flow over the hard stone of our fathers' deaths. Hand in the water, you reached me, I struggled in the slow turn to you. Oh I came slowly, afraid of the air. You were there. But we're locked in water like fish I thought you could hold me Can't I let go?

Seedlings Walking with the baby through the garden, his fat legs straddled, his weight back, I spoke low, to myself: "See there, Nat, how the seedling comes: arched taut to heave against the heavy earth. See, there." Arched backward, he followed birds. Bent, I unearthed grubs, fingered foliage, poked the dry dirt down the lean row. Toward the warty stems I stopped. "There, Nat, fungus on the squash. And there, the ginger." Back from birds, he lunged at the black-clothed leaves, fuzz on the ginger, fingers in the mouth: a grey delightful stain, a prize for his brother mightily pouncing toward the corn. "Stephanie taught me a word," his brother teased, pausing—for effect—

Susan Weston

"Fuck." He leaps squashes at my grin and aggravation, ambles off with Nat and me to get the bug-spray, pulling weeds on the way.

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Searching In Feng Shan There is a doctor of hemorrhoids. I have never seen the doctor, But I have seen his patients. Not their faces, but their piles Fixed by the camera's clinical stare, Displayed in a gallery on main street, A plethora of rectums, artfully arranged As a spectrum of suffering anuses. On a back street in Feng Shan, I am told, There is a doctor of hearts.

Ralph Tabor Williams

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I'm Bringing You Back I'm bringing you back something completely useless from Mycenae They built palaces and walls here with massive blocks of stone and marble Three thousand years later a German who believed Homer came and dug them up The guard at the gate gave me two oranges on a twig and a rock from Agamemnon's tomb The Armenian bishop gave me a chip of agate he picked up in a tomb at Luxor You haven't given me any cold stones and you are believable enough for me A peasant woman in a black shawl brought these elegant little straw things with tassels to the tour bus One of the Americans in the group asked what they were used for I was happy to learn they have no use at all I'm bringing one back to you from Mycenae

Constance Wright

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Contributors N E L L A L T I Z E R was bora in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1936. She was educated at St. Louis University and at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She taught there and at the University of California at Berkeley before she came to Hawaii to teach at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is coauthor of the D. C. Heath Handbook of English Composition and the author of the workbook associated with it. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as San Marcos Review, Hanai, and The Little Magazine. WAYNE A N D R E W S was born in Baltimore in 1946. In 1969 he moved to Hawaii where he studied analytic ethics and wrote poetry. He received an M.A. in philosophy, then went to Montana where he worked with Richard Hugo and earned an M.F.A. in creative writing. He has since returned to Hawaii to teach in the English department of the University of Hawaii. S T E F A N BACIU was born in 1918 in Rumania. His first book of poetry won the National Poetry Award in 1935 when he was still in high school. He has had ten books of poetry published in his native country. From 1949 to 1962 he worked as an editor 143

and lecturer in South America. From 1962 until 1964 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Since then, he has been a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Hawaii, where, in 1965, he began publication of MELE, the "International Poetry Letter." He has published more than fifty books. His most recent was published in Madrid and presents a selection of his Rumanian poetry from 1935 until today. CHARLES S. BOUSLOG's "Biographical Sketch" is printed as a poem in the text of this book. T I M B U R K E was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1947. He studied at Providence College and the University of Colorado before entering the State University of New York at Buffalo to take a master of arts degree in literature. Before moving to Hawaii, he worked as a textbook salesman, legal aid assistant, rose pruner, and waiter. In Hawaii he has been deep-sea fisherman, university lecturer, writing teacher to children and senior citizens, and a member of the faculty of Punahou School. He was a founding editor of the mainland poetry journal Rapport and of the local arts publication Hanai. His work has appeared both in mainland and local magazines.

F R E D CAPAROSO was born in Hawaii but spent most of his early years in Japan. His undergraduate work was done at the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the University of Hawaii while he worked on his master of arts degree in poetry. His work has been published in local poetry magazines and on the mainland in such journals as Poetry Northwesi LABAN C H A N G was born and educated in Hawaii. His poetry has appeared in both local and mainland publications. He writes, "The two men who have taught me the most are John Logan and James Wright and to them I am most grateful."

ERIC C H O C K was born in Honolulu and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Hawaii (M.A. with creative thesis in poetry). He has been active in the Poets-in-the-Schools program for several years and in 1977-1978 acted as its coordinator. His work is published in San Marcos Review, Hawaii Review, and other local magazines. In 1976 he was winner of poetry contests sponsored by the East-West Center and the City and County of Honolulu. K E R M I T COAD was born in 1945 in Willows, California, and educated at San Francisco State University. After completing an M.A. in English, he moved with his family to Maui, where he has been 144

teaching at Maui Community College since 1969 and where he served as local coordinator for the Poets-in-the-Schools program. His poetry has appeared in Blue Lick Review, Stooge, The World, Tantalus, The Spirit That Moves Us, and other publications.

SHERYL DARE moved to Honolulu with her parents when she was five, attended Punahou School, and was graduated from it in 1966. She then studied at Mills College in California and at Columbia University, where she worked on an M.F.A. in poetry under such writers as Carolyn Kizer, Mark Strand, and Galway Kinnell. She now lives in New York City where she is on the staff of a prominent literary agency.

R E U E L D E N N E Y has had a distinguished career as poet, sociologist, and literary critic. His bestknown books include The Connecticut River, The Lonely Crowd (with David Riesman and Nathan Glazer), The Astonished Muse, In Praise of Adam, and Conrad Aiken. Born in Manhattan in 1913 and graduated from Dartmouth cum laude in 1932, he taught high school in Buffalo until 1941. In that year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Later he was contributing editor to Time magazine before moving on to become associate editor of Fortune. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1947 until 1961, when he moved to Hawaii to join

the Department of American Studies. He is currently senior researcher at the East-West Center in Honolulu. FAY E N O S was born in Hawaii and educated at the University of Hawaii, where she earned her B.A. degree. In the mid-1970s she lived in rural Pennsylvania where she and her husband built a house entirely with their own labor. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Choice, Hawaii Review, Shitashi, and The Fountain.

TANYA F E L I X is a member of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council and served on its first board of directors. Her work has appeared in several periodicals including Tantalus, Poet and Critic, and Ocean Mountain. Her most recent publications are a poem and a critical evaluation of religious poetry for Desert Call (Spring 1977), the theme of the issue being "Dance and Poetry as Prayer."

L O R R A I N E F L A N D E R S was born in Honolulu in 1950. After her graduation from Punahou School, she earned an associate's degree from Pine Manor Junior College in Boston and a B.A. from Goddard College in Vermont. Since 1973 she has lived on the Big Island. She has been the Big Island's resident poet for the Poets-in-the-Schools program since 1974 and was a contributor to its Haku Meie O Hawaii, volume 1. 145

CALVIN FORBES was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. He lived in Hawaii in 1967 and 1968 and after that in California, Boston, New York, and Europe. He now lives in Newark, where he is writing a novel and completing his second book of poetry, to be called The Book of Shine. His first book of poetry, Blue Monday, was published in 1974 by Wesleyan University Press. He has taught at Emerson College and at Tufts University. T O N Y F R I E D SON came from England to the United States to do graduate work and stayed on to teach in the United States and Canada. He has been in Hawaii for fifteen years and considers himself "ultimately Hawaiian." In 1977 he was director of the writing program at the University of Hawaii and president of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council. Before his arrival in Hawaii, he was an occasional critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. C A R O L I N E G A R R E T T arrived in Honolulu in 1965, planning to spend "a few months seeing the islands." Since that time, she has taught high school English and history, taken graduate courses in English, art history, and psychology, and begun to publish her poems. From 1971 to 1976 she was a teacher and coordinator for Hawaii's Poets-in-theSchools program. In 1975 she edited Haku Mele O Hawaii, volume 1, an anthology of work by poets and students in the program. At present, she is with the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

S T E V E N G O L D S B E R R Y has taught at Brigham Young University and the University of Hawaii. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in the creative writing program of the University of Iowa. He has been active in the Poets-in-the-Schools program, writing about his experiences for Honolulu magazine and the American Poetry Review. His poems have appeared locally as well as in the Iowa Review and The New Yorker. G E O F H E W I T T was born in New Jersey in 1943. •In 1969 he first visited the Islands to teach English for a year at the University of Hawaii. Since that time he has lived in Enosburg, Vermont, with a return visit to Oahu and Maui in 1976. His poetry and prose are very widely published. His book Stone Soitp is available from Ithaca House. E L I Z A B E T H B. H O L M E S was born in Oklahoma and earned a B.A. and an M.A.from the University of Oklahoma; her Ph.D. is from Louisiana State University. She is married to Captain W. J. Holmes, Dean Emeritus in Engineering at the University of Hawaii. She was on the facility of the University of Hawaii for twenty-five years, first as an instructor, then as professor, and finally as chairman of the Department of Speech. As a member of the Navy's Advisory Committee on Education in Guam and the Trust Territory, she made three trips to Micronesia. She also taught for two years at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. As Eliza146

beth B. Carr, she published Da Kine Talk: From Pidgin to Standard English in Hawaii (University Press of Hawaii, 1972). M I C H A E L H O W D E N was born in 1943 and educated at Middlebury College and Johns Hopkins University. In 1965 and 1967 he held scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and in 19671968 was Gilman Fellow at Johns Hopkins. At present he is a farmer at Kaupo, Hana, Maui, and a teacher of tai chi chuan at Maui Community College as well as a teacher of Sufi dancing for the Maui County Department of Human Concerns. D O N J O H N S O N was born in Poca, West Virginia, in 1942. After spending the first eighteen years of his life moving from West Virginia to Germany and back to West Virginia, he moved to Hawaii to take a football scholarship at the university in 1960. He lived in the Islands for seven years before going to the University of Wisconsin for Ph.D. work. He now lives in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with his wife and two hapa-haole children, and teaches at Bridgewater State College. He has been writing seriously for the past half-dozen years and has published, among other places, in Wind, The Little Review, sad Appalachian Journal. G L E N N J O H N K I M was born and brought up in Honolulu. He is a third-generation KoreanAmerican, both his maternal and paternal grandpa-

rents having come to Hawaii from Korea in the early 1900s. He attended public schools in Honolulu, served in the army, and then returned to the University of Hawaii, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English. He is now doing graduate work in English at Harvard University. GARY KISSICK was born in Iowa City in 1946. He attended Miami University for two years before going on to Iowa, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. From 1969 to 1972 he taught English at the University of Hawaii. He resigned to write and photograph a tribute to Hawaii, if stone were rain, as well as two surveys of Hawaiian plant lift—Hawaii in Bloom and Tropic Garden—all forthcoming from Hawaiian Isles Publishing. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, Rolling Stone, several local anthologies, and many literary journals. ALFONS K O R N was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1906, but spent his boyhood in Oregon and California; he arrived in Hawaii in 1942 with the army. He was a student at the University of Oregon, a Rhodes Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, and a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1944 he became a member of the English department of the University of Hawaii and remained there until his retirement in 1966. He is well known for such significant publications as The Victorian Visitors (1957 Award of Merit from the American 147

Association for State and Local History), The Echo of Our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians (with Mary Kawena Pukui), and News from Molokai. In 1975 he received the Hawaii Award for Literature. J I M K R A U S was born in Florida and moved to Hawaii during his high school years. He served in the navy during the Vietnam War and after three years was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. His B.A. and M.A. are from the University of Hawaii, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. From 1975 through 1977 he was editor of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council Newsletter. His poetry has been published in such periodicals as Greenfield Review, Pequod, San Marcos Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is active in the Poets-in-the-Schools program and a member of the faculty of Chaminade University. L E O N A R D K U B O has spent most of his life on islands. Born on Maui, he has lived on Oahu, Wake Island, and Guam. He has been a student at the University of Hawaii, at Maharishi International University, and at San Francisco State University, where he is enrolled in the writing program. With his wife, he is coeditor of Haleakala Poetry Journal. M A R I K U B O was born in Tokyo and moved to Hawaii when she was three. She spent her child-

hood in Hilo, then later moved to Honolulu. She attended the University of Hawaii (B.A. in English) and in 1975 received an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. She has taught at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. Her publications (as Mari Nakamura) include poems and stories in Hawaii Review, Great Pacific Gazette, Ironwood, and The Seventies. She is coeditor of Haleakala Poetry Journal.

Junior College before coming to Honolulu to attend the University of Hawaii in 1968. He received his B.A. in English in 1973. He edited poetry for Hawaii Review, numbers 5 and 6, has been listed with poems in Who's Who in Poetry in American Colleges and Universities, and has won several prizes locally for his work. He received his M.A. from the University of Hawaii in 1977 for a collection of poems entitled Falling into Paradise.

J O H N L O G A N was born in 1923 in Red Oak, Iowa. Married in 1945, he is the father of nine children. He took his B.A. degree magna cum laude in biology from Coe College in Iowa and his M.A. in English from the State University of Iowa. He has been a frequent resident of Hawaii, most recently as visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. His books of poetry include Cycle for Mother Cabrini, Ghosts of the Heart, Spring of the Thief, The Zigzag Walk, The Anonymous Lover, and Poem in Progress. He has been honored with the Helen Bullis Prize, the Miles Modern Poetry Prize, a Rockefeller Grant, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He is founder and coeditor of Choice, a magazine of poetry, and in the past has served as poetry editor for The Nation and The Critic.

W I N G T E K LUM has requested that biographical information be withheld.

J I M L O N G was born on January 26, 1948, and grew up in Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus and Chicago City 148

JODY MASAKO M A N ABE was born on July 29, 1954, in Lihue, Kauai, and was raised in Kilipaki Camp, Kauai, and Palolo Valley, Oahu. She has published her poetry locally in Hanai and elsewhere and has been active in the Poets-in-theSchools program. She majored in English at the University of Hawaii.

RON Mc CURDY was born in Cook County, Illinois, in 1945 but was raised and educated in a small town in Wisconsin. After three years of military experience during the Vietnam War, serving as a Mandarin Chinese linguist in Taiwan, he came to Hawaii to attend the University of Hawaii. He has been active in the Poets-in-the-Schools program for several years. His poetry has been published in Ocean Mountain and Impulse.

M I C H A E L M c P H E R S O N is Scottish-Hawaiian and was born in Hilo in 1947. He has a master's degree in English from the University of Hawaii and has taught writing at the university and at Maui Community College. He has lived on Hawaii, Kauai, and Oahu, and is now living on Maui. His poems have appeared locally in The Maui Sun. W I L L I A M M E R E D I T H is a poet whose six volumes of poetry have won national recognition. His most recent book is Hazard, the Painter. The National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him its Loines Award for poetry in 1966; in 1968 he was inducted as a member of the institute. Since 1964 he has served as one of twelve chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. His first book, Love Letters from an Impossible Land, appeared in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1944. Ships and Other Figures appeared four years later and, like The Open Sea and Other Poems (1958), included work that reflected his experiences in Hawaii. The Wreck of the Thresher was nominated for the 1965 National Book Award. W. S. M E R W I N was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. For several years he lived in France, Portugal, and Majorca, and has since earned a part of his living by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese. His books of poetry are A Mask of Janus, The Dancing Bears,

Green with Beasts, The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, and The Compass Flower. His prose includes The Miner's Pale Children and Houses and Travellers. In 1974 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. During recent years he has spent part of each year on Maui or Oahu.

DANA NAONE was born in 1949 in Kaneohe on the island of Oahu and has lived there most of her life. She is of Hawaiian, English, Chinese, and Portuguese ancestry. A 1974 graduate of the University of Hawaii, she has taught in the Poets-in-theSchools program since its inception. She served for several years as editor of the Hawaii Review. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Kayak, Ironwood, and The Nation. It is anthologized in Carriers of the Dream Wheel, a collection of contemporary Native American poetry published in 1975 by Harper & Row.

PAUL N E L S O N , born in New England and educated at Dartmouth and Colgate, had his first teaching position at Punahou School in Honolulu. His wife, Judith, a printmaker and painter, taught at the University of Hawaii. They lived in the Islands for five years and return frequently for visits with friends. A member of the faculty of Goddard Col-

lege in Vermont, Nelson published his first book, Cargo, in 1972; Ice was published in 1974, and Average Nights in 1977. P E T E R N E L S O N was born in St. Louis in 1940 and grew up in Missouri and southern California. He attended Occidental College and the University of California at Irvine. He worked in public relations and advertising in California and Hawaii, and also as editorial consultant and then as media director for the Pasadena Art Museum. He has lived for various periods in Rome, in Japan, and in Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Much of the time since 1968, he has taught at the University of Hawaii. In 1974 he became a teacher at the Transcendental Meditation program in Belgium and recently spent a year and a half teaching literature and creative writing at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, and giving readings and lectures across the country. His chapbook, Between Lives, was published by Ironwood Press in 1974. He is currently completing three books, including a collection of Hawaii poems that experiment with spoken, rather than written, composition.

K A T H L E E N N O R R I S lived in Hawaii from 1959 until 1965, during which time she attended and was graduated from Punahou School. Except for brief visits to her family, who are Hawaii residents, she has returned only once: during a nonresident term at Bennington College when she worked 150

in the library at the Bishop Museum. After Bennington, she moved to New York and stayed for about five years. Now she is the president of Leaves of Grass, Inc., a family-farm corporation in South Dakota. A book of poems entitled Falling Off was published by Follett/Big Table in 1971. Her work has been widely published in magazines and is represented in such anthologies as Another World, I Hear My Sisters Saying, and Capstan. T O N Y Q U A G L I A N O was born in Brooklyn, New York, and was graduated from the University of Chicago. He now lives in the Kapahulu district of Honolulu and teaches in the American Studies department at the University of Hawaii. He was a frequent contributor to the Hawaii Observer, often on the subject of jazz. Two recent anthologies include his work: The Living Underground: The Prose and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. The poem entitled " T o the Author of 'To My Brother Miguel' " received an Academy of American Poets Award. His work has been widely published in mainland literary magazines. E L I Z A B E T H S H I N O D A was born in New York City and moved to Hawaii when she was twelve. She attended Kalani High School and the University of Hawaii, where she was winner of both the Clark and the Hemingway awards for excellence in writing. Her poems have appeared in Hawaii Review, The San Marcos Review, and Hanai.

S T E P H E N S H R A D E R was bom in New York City on September 18, 1944, but grew up in East Cleveland, Ohio. His bachelor of arts degree was obtained in studio art at Oberlin College in 1966. In 1969 he took a master of fine arts degree at the Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa. He moved to Hawaii for a one-year stint as an instructor of English at the University of Hawaii, then spent a year and a half traveling on the mainland and in Europe. He returned to Hawaii, worked as a lecturer at the university, and joined the staff of the Hawaii Observer. From 1973 through 1978 he was that publication's production manager and then its managing editor. He is a resident of Waimanalo. M A R J O R I E S I N C L A I R was born in South Dakota, grew up in California, and lives in Hawaii. She was educated at Mills College, California, and the University of Hawaii. She worked in the San Francisco Museum of Art and has done research for the government on Southeast Asia and Japan. Among her publications are a biography, Nahi'ena'ena, Sacred Daughter of Hawaii, and two novels, Kona and The Wild Wind. She collaborated on the translation of two volumes of Chinese and Japanese poetry. She is at present professor of English at the University of Hawaii.

C A T H Y S O N G was born in Hawaii and educated at the University of Hawaii and Wellesley College, where she majored in English and dance. At the uni151

versity, she was a winner of the 1975 Clark Award. In the same year, she was listed and published in Who's Who in Poetry in American Colleges and Universities. In addition, her short story "Beginnings," which had been published in Hawaii Review (no. 6), was listed among the "Distinctive Short Stories of 1976" by Martha Foley in the 1977 edition of The Best American Short Stories. Her poetry can be found in Hyacinths and Biscuits, Midwest Poetry Review, and Hawaii Review. F R A N K S T E W A R T was born in 1946 and attended the University of New Mexico, American University, Harvard University, and the University of Hawaii, where he was graduated with a master of arts degree. He has lived in Hawaii for twelve years. During that time he has been a teacher at the university as well as a printer and publisher of fine books. His poetry and translations have appeared in The Little Magazine, Loon, Paintbrush, Poetry NO W and other journals; his poem " T h e Sea Breathes Quietly, Menelaus" won a 1978 Triton "All Nations" award. Besides teaching writing, he is an art columnist for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin & Advertiser. M E L T A K A H A R A is a thirty-five-year-old writer of Korean and Japanese ancestry who was born on Oahu. His wife, Barbara, is a former cloistered nun of the Order of St. Francis. Together with their son, Mark, they live and work on the Waianae coast of Oahu. " I was 'bom again' at the age of 32," he

writes, "and have sought as a Christian to continue a career of teaching and counselling." As director of The Lord's School in Waianae, he now applies language in therapy with youthful law violators. He has published poems in such magazines as San Marcos Review, Cimarron Review, and Poetry Northwest. R E U B E N T A M was bom in 1916 in Kapaa, Kauai. He is a graduate of the University of Hawaii, where he served as editor of Ka Leo, the campus newspaper, and won several prizes for poetry, including the Jane Comstock Prize. After teaching art and English on Kauai and Oahu, he left for New York City, did graduate work at Columbia University and The New School, and embarked on a career as a painter. He has held numerous one-man shows, and his work is in the collections of many museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. He has taught at Brooklyn Museum Art School, Queens College, and Oregon State University. He lives with his wife, also an artist, in New York City and on Monhegan Island, Maine. His poetry has appeared in mainland poetry journals. R O L A N D T H A R P has studied poetry with William Meredith, Anthony Hecht, and Donald Justice. He has won several notable literary awards, including the Atlantic Monthly's grand prize for college student writing, a Robert Frost Fellowship from the Bread Loaf School of English, the Hop152

wood Award in poetry from the University of Michigan, and Best Fiction of the Year awards from Voices and the Arizona Quarterly. He is professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and is prolific in social science writing, having published over forty articles, a scholarly monograph, and a major textbook. His new book of poems, Highland Station, was published in 1977 by Poetry Texas Press. P H Y L L I S HÖGE T H O M P S O N was bom in Elizabeth, New Jersey, raised in New England, and educated at Connecticut College, Duke University, and the University of Wisconsin, where she earned her Ph.D. with a dissertation on Yeats's dramatic lyrics. Before coming to the University of Hawaii in 1964, she was on the faculty of Milton College. She has been visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Binghamton as well as at San Francisco State. She is the mother of three sons and one daughter. Her books of poetry include Artichoke, The Creation Frame, and The Serpent of the White Rose. Her poetry has been widely published in magazines such as the Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Harpers, and Ironwood. J O H N U N T E R E C K E R was bom in Buffalo, New York, and educated at Middlebury College and Columbia University. His best-known book is probably Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, which was a 1970 nominee for the National Book Award. His

book for children, The Dreaming Zoo, a long poem with drawings by George Weinheimer, was published in 1965. His poetry appears frequently in such publications as The New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, Kayak, and Shenandoah. Some of it is collected in Dance Sequence and Stone. He has taught courses in poetry and the writing of poetry at Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Hawaii, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1974. M A R T H A WEBB was born in Hilo, Hawaii, and was educated at the Kaumakani School on Kauai, Kaunoa School on Maui, Hilo High School on Hawaii, and Carleton College in Minnesota. She has done postgraduate work at the University of Hawaii in the Hawaiian language and in poetry. She has taught for several years in the Poets-in-the-Schools program, and served during two of them as a coordinator. Her poems have appeared in such periodicals as Ironwood, Seaweeds and Constructions, and the Hawaii Review. SUSAN W E S T O N , born in Pennsylvania in 1943, came to Hawaii from New York City in 1971. She received her doctorate from Columbia University and is the author of Wallace Stevens: An Introduc-

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tion to the Poetry. She lives in Honolulu with her husband and two children and teaches in the English department of the University of Hawaii. R A L P H TABOR W I L L I A M S , a commander in the U.S. Navy, entered the naval service as an apprentice seaman over thirty years ago. He has written poetry and articles for many years. His poem "Searching" developed from travels in Taiwan. He lives with his wife, Marilynne, and daughter, Laura, near Kailua. There are three other children: Dan, a pilot in the air force; Scott, a medical student at Boston University; and Pam, married to an airline pilot and living in Mound, Minnesota. C O N S T A N C E W R I G H T is a professional writer who works primarily in the field of public relations and operates her own agency in Honolulu. She was previously on the Hawaii editorial staff of Sunset Magazine. Born in New York City, she grew up in Connecticut and Vermont, was graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with an A.B. in Classics, worked for Doubleday and Co. in San Francisco, and in 1962 moved to Honolulu. Locally, her poetry has been published in Beacon and Honolulu magazines, and in the 1975 edition of Poetry East- West.

Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following poems: Nell Altizer: "Haleiwa Churchyard" from Hawaii Review; "Hunger" from Hanai. Tim Burke: "Poem for the 10th Year" from Hawaii Review. Eric Chock: "Waolani Stream, 1955/1975" from Ten Thousand Wishes, published by Bamboo Ridge Press, 1978. Reuel Denney: "A Chiffonier with Glass Flowers" from In Praise of Adam, copyright © 1961 by The University of Chicago Press. Fay Enos: "Waiting" from Shitashi. Calvin Forbes: "For You" and "Hand Me Down Blues," copyright © 1972, 1974 by Calvin Forbes, reprinted from Blue Monday by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Caroline Garrett: "Guts" from San Marcos Review. Steven Goldsberry: "Translation of an Unwritten Spanish Poem" from The Iowa Review; "The First Enemy" from San Marcos Review. Geof Hewitt: "Letter" from Stone Soup, published by Ithaca House in 1974. Michael Howden: "through the shadow" from Origin. Don Johnson: "Tick Picking in the Quetico" appeared in The Little Review. Gary Kissick: "rain quietude" was first published in Bamboo Ridge. Jim Kraus: "Church with Long Steeple" from Bird Effort; "A Cycle of Tears" from Virginia Quarterly Review. Mari Kubo: "A Long Time Apart" and "Green Apple" from Hawaii Review. John Logan: "Dawn and a Woman" and "Middle Aged Midwesterner at Waikiki Again" reprinted, by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation, from The Anonymous Lover, copyright © 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 by John Logan. Wing Tek Lum: "Grateful Here," copyright © 1972 by Wing Tek Lum; "What I Want," copyright © 1977 by Wing Tek Lum. Jody Manabe: "Hadaka De Hanasu" from Hanai. Michael McPherson: "Summit" from The Maui Sun. William Meredith: "Lines Written But Never Mailed from 155

Hawaii" from Ships and Other Figures, copyright © 1948 by William Meredith; "A Korean Woman Seated by a Wall," copyright © 1956 by William Meredith. Reprinted from The Open Sea and Other Poems by William Meredith, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. W. S. Merwin: "The Windows," "June Rain," "Mountain Day," "The Hosts," and "The Next Moon" from The Compass Flower by W. S. Merwin. Copyright © 1977 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of the author and Atheneum Publishers. Dana Naone: "The Old Photograph" and "The Men Whose Tongues" from Kayak; "Sunday Service" from Ironwood; "Two" with permission The Nation Copyright 1976; "House of Light" from San Marcos Review; "Long Distance" from Carriers of the Dream Wheel, Harper & Row, 1975. Paul Nelson: "The Average Night" from The Carleton Miscellany; "Shaman" from Ice, published by Blue Mountain Press, copyright © 1974 by Paul Nelson. Peter Nelson: "Sharktooth Creek," "Quai de l'Horloge," and "A Graveyard" from Between Lives, copyright © 1974 by Ironwood Press. Kathleen Norris: "The Middle of the World" from Oakwood. Tony Quagliano: "A Cold Rain Obscures L.A. Tonight" from Schist: A Journal of Poetry and Graphics; " T o the Author of 'To My Brother Miguel' " from Pan American Review. Elizabeth Shinoda: "A Revisit" from Hanai. Marjorie Sinclair: "Waterlilies" from Ironwood. Cathy Song: "Remnants" from Hawaii Review. Frank Stewart: "Consolation" from Northeast; "New England: Driving Back in Early April" from Road Apple Review; "Orphee at Rest" from The Little Magazine; "The Sea Breathes Quietly, Menelaus" from Passage V, published by Triton College, 1979. Mel Takahara: "November's Lesson" from Poetry Northwest; "The Waiting Child" from Hawaii Review. Reuben Tam: "Among Mountains," copyright by Friends of the Earth, from A Sense of Place, 1970.

Roland Tharp: " X , " copyright © 1976 by Washington and Lee University, reprinted from Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review; "Colding Nights" reprinted from Prairie Schooner by permission of University of Nebraska Press. Phyllis Hoge Thompson: "The River" from Ironwood; "The T r u t h " from Rapport; "Daphne," copyright © 1973 by the University of Illinois Press, reprinted from The Creation Frame.

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John Unterecker: "Swan Lake" from Dance Sequence, published by Kayak Books, 1975; "August 22" from Stone, published by The University Press of Hawaii, 1977; "Lava Tubes" from Poetry Now; "Falling" from Pequod. Martha Webb: "Looking Glass" from Hawaii Review. Ralph Tabor Williams: "Searching" from Cedar Rock.

Photo Credits

Nell Altizer: T h e o Tusler Stephan Baciu: Arnold Kishi T i m Burke: Mike Ward Fred Caparoso: John Unterecker Laban Chang: Mazie Hirono Eric Chock: Jody Manabe Kermit Coad: Lafayette Young Sheryl Dare: John Unterecker Tanya Felix: John Unterecker Lorraine Flanders: Caroline Garrett Caroline Garrett: Bill Soares Steven Goldsberry: John Unterecker G e o f Hewitt: Richard Carr Elizabeth B . Holmes: Irving Rosen Photography Glenn John K i m : Greg Mau Jim Kraus: Alexis Higdon Leonard Kubo: Mari Kubo John Logan: R o b Swigart

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Jim Long: Michael Maynard Jody Manabe: Ric Arakaki Ron McCurdy: Susan Sowle William Meredith: News Office, Connecticut College W . S. Merwin: T o m Victor Dana Naone: John Unterecker Peter Nelson: Jack Bodger Elizabeth Shinoda: Earl Cooper Stephen Shrader: Alexis Higdon Marjorie Sinclair: Arnold Mann Frank Stewart: T . Matsueda Mel Takahara: John Unterecker Reuben T a m : Geraldine King T a m Phyllis Hoge Thompson: Fritz Senn John Unterecker: Alexis Higdon Martha Webb: John Unterecker Ralph Tabor Williams: Marilynne Williams

X Production Notes This book was designed by Roger J. Eggers and Janet Heavenridge and was typeset on the Unified Composing System by the design and production staff of The University Press of Hawaii. The text typeface is Plantin and the display is Goudy Bold.