red cedar 
review

7east 
lansing 
poets

spring 1972


red cedar 
review 

spring

1972

Volume 8 Number 1

Copyright by Red Cedar Review, April, 1972


7 east lansing poets

DARYL JONES

MARY DAVIS

DOUGLAS LAWDER

BARBARA DRAKE

ROGER MEINERS

LINDA WAGNER

D.M. ROSENBERG


daryl jones

Figure without caption.
DARYL JONES was born in Washington, D.C., in 1946, raised in Rockville, Md., and has 
lived in Michigan since 1964. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at MSU, and is 
now working on his Ph.D. He has published poetry in West Coast Review, Western 
Humanities Review, and other magazines.


MOLLUSKS

Their history is the sea’s: a slow stirring 
in darkness; a silence 
hardening to lime.

Clenched like lonely women’s fists, 
they languish in dark chambers, tossing 
on the sea’s unsettled bed.

Some, like the blood clam, 
bivalved,

or pearl-bellied oyster, 
muscle into sand to thwart the moon.

It pulls at them like starfish, 
pries them loose.

Others, like the periwinkle, 
storied,

or spined queen conch, 
hide in spirals to outwit the sea.

Its rhythmic urge, loosening, 
courses deep in jellied vitals.

Sometimes, after storms, we find them 
drying on the lip of a barren beach 
like delicate pink cloisters, upturned faces 
shining like a spinster’s ear- 
in each of them, something murmuring; 
in each of them, something of the sea.

Jones/5


WAXING THE CAR IN LATE FALL

It wipes on clear, then turns opaque and dries. 
I rub it off, buff circles round the sun 
gleaming beneath my hand. The bottle says 
“ It gives a diamond luster that will last. ” 
I wipe it on. It turns opaque and dries.

Each year the same old ritual: hoping 
the snow’ll hold off till I’ve waxed the car, 
then buying wax and gathering soft rags, 
and buffing, buffing till my arm goes numb.

Still, tiny stars of rust form in the chrome. 
The bumpers flake like snow. Even the wax 
itself turns white and powdery in time. 
Already, something dulls the finish, clouds 
the dark and swimming face the surface holds.

Jones/6


THE MINES

i.

All day the inexhaustible blue vein 
runs before his headlamp’s narrow shining 
down into the black depths falling away 
from his feet. Teeth and eyes 
glance yellow, disappear, and muscled picks 
bite and ring through the glistening shaft. 
Soon, a weary figure cut from anthracite, 
he will rise to the light - the red sun 
resting on the slag heaps -- heading home.

ii.

The earth, laid open like a scalp, 
receives him, gives him back each night 
to the woman framed in the pale light 
spilling from the porch, cave-ins 
deepening her eyes. It does not change. 
Soon she will kneel on the kitchen floor 
behind the steaming tub, his lean body 
soaking slowly white, and gently touch 
the throbbing blue vein in his temple.

Jones/7


CARP

We know them as logs, 
shadows drifting under slabs 
of darkness. They are large, 
and weave through hanging cables 
of sunlight, sunken cars, 
and broken bottles-slowly, 
a life among sharp edges.

Often, in roiled water, 
we mistake a sunstruck can 
for their dull flash. We seldom 
really see them. They live deep, 
almost beyond our seeing, 
armored with the green-gold 
fingernails of drowned men.

Jones/8


SECOND THOUGHTS FROM THE OCEAN BED

It’s said men live for days beneath the sea 
in great air bubbles trapped between the decks. 
Close air, and damp shirts clinging to their backs, 
they do not speak. Some weep, some silently 
resent the measured breathing at their sides. 
But all, dreaming, picture far horizons, 
sunlight on blue water. They would rise up 
from many fathoms, swim to future lives, 
had not their separate deaths at some far place 
crossed here, and tangled like sheets round their legs.

Jones/9


mary davis

Figure without caption.
MARY DAVIS grew up in New York and Philadelphia and has lived in Ingham County 
for a long time. She wrote one poem in highschool, one as an undergraduate, three when 
she was in love with somebody who couldn’t talk, and dozens after being turned on by 
Carl Hartman when he taught in the English Department at MSU.


WEDNESDAY

We would go to the City

Early in the morning

Watching gulls dip 
Flowering the sky

Surprised that they had beaks 
Had solid eyes, had pitches 
Harboring their throats

Harboring our boat

Droning its machinery.

We were pipers

Every wave we forced

Slapped our sides, we drummed 
Our course, we shook small shakes 
Each nautic inch, we moved 
Between one island

And another

Licking spray from faces 
In the summer, in the winter 
We wore coats. We shopped 
For gloves, our necks were wrapped, 
Our feet not bare into the canyons 
Streets when we were there 
Edging our own progress

In the salted air.

Each holiday

We shared. We moved,

We walked in the last field 
Of our own island, you told 
Stories, did I hold your hand,

We often sat together, we saw 
Everything in front of us, opera 
Through our glasses, the woman

In a spasm on the floor

Turn your head away, 
She is sick.

Davis/11


We always started out together, 
We never met ourselves. We met 
Who waited lively over dinner 
For the heat, the color 
Of the food upon the plate, 
The clinking clattering

Of restaurant noise, 
Strange people.

Where were you on Christmas 
Quiet in your chair

By that time blinking 
Holding your own face 
Against the popping bottles 
No taste for drinking 
“I am tired,” you would say.

You fasted. For lunch I ate 
A pear, a plum, an apple

The omelet I practiced 
While you watched. One day 
You do believe in God you said 
Into my laughing, no smile 
On your own face. We had 
Whispered together often

Patriotic songs, Schumann 
Managing the Marseillaise.

Was it France you gave me, 
Dates in the Iranian Pavillion, 
Guavas in the north, the Scottish 
Plaid I wore, the green suede vest, 
The Indians I saw myself 
Regenerating, did you never 
Smile but at old histories, were we 
No more than adult 
Saying Sweetheart, 
And a child.

Davis/12


1949-1971

Red hair, red hair,

Hanging from a head,

You were here, you were there

You were in your bed

The way you lay when you were small,

When your pajamas pale as cream

Were all that set you off

From rubies on your birthday

In a velvet case.

Red hair, red hair,

Swinging on your face,

I heard you sing, I heard you play,

I heard the wind, the race

You blew while you were running

Where you’d lie when you were grown, 
When your red hair hot as the sun

Was all that set you off

From cold white on your birthday

In a velvet case.

Davis/13


PART OF A MASS

What shall we do this morning 
In our middle. Have we risen

To the terror of supply, is this

The gait within, without ourselves, 
Our hair the dress, and we 
Organic in our matter.

Six times this morning in an alphabet 
I sang, the mute of stars a rigor 
In the space of our inordinate 
Conclusion. I knew differences, 
Forgot validities, the aftermath 
Of kisses in a well.

There are crowds

Whose every stomach

Is performance of digestion.

Extraordinary friend, do you return. 
It is ourselves, the formidable distance 
Of some message we have never heard 
Begins to move its energies, 
Reminders of the present

In the past.

Davis/14


RECEIPT

The coffee warms my throat

As much as you did,

But I’m older now,

The lines that cross the paper

Are the paper as the bones

I never saw until a friend died 
Are the friend. There are no pockets 
For the body and the sounds 
To hide in, we are not 
In symbiosis, there is not

A laughter in our walk, our dreams

Go burying before we wake, and in the morning 
What we know is little words,

Sometimes audible, and sometimes not.

This is hair, this is eye,

This is nose, this is mouth,

This is chin, the hand

To hold it spinning in the air

That everybody breathes as if he knew

Us when we walked the way an ordinary 
Person walks without adoring what himself 
Displaces in the pleasure of exchange.

That day I saw many pictures,

Every movement in the crotchet

Of a note yelled “I am here,

I am an electricity, there is

No interruption, any shelf to house

Its object

As we lavished

Where we looked, our images

The bursting of the kernel

Of a shell, our knuckles cracking

Their impatience to each other, felling

In the light we knew

Obstruction of ourselves.

Davis/15


I have lost my sense

Of where you are.

I do not smile

In distant places,

Never chant myself

In reaches, probabilities,

Surprises. When I eat,

The food is not the spoon.

I have grown

Into a woman on the table

Twitting gynecologists.

Yesterday a child tore to my room, 
her Indian eyes largesse

Of her own terror while her mouth 
Obscured my safety, and her color 
For too long a time was simply pleasure 
To my eye.

Davis/16


RIGOR MORTIS

I doubt that we will play again,

The way the wind blows and we shiver 
Up against the glasses of our windowsills, 
Remembering not daylight but ourselves 
In all our tremor, isolate as fruit 
Within the sugar of its glaze 
On holidays, but not so stiff.

The jokes we played.

Were you the voice, the resonance 
Of chamber out of muscle, out of milk 
Thick with the fatness of itself, its cycle 
Tourniquet to arms, to legs flailing their function 
To the trunk, its laughing

In the sunlight

Unrelated to the leaves.

Shut, you say, up,

I grieve my own experiment, 
Dispatch myself with wardens 
Where the diver carries air.

I bend myself with bubbles, 
With the sugars of the blood

In currents of the water where the mountains 
Thrust their meeting

While the rest of us

Just wait.

Davis/17


douglas lawder

Figure without caption.
DOUGLAS LAWDER is Assistant Professor of English at MSU. A graduate of Kenyon 
College, he received the M.F.A. degree, with honors, from the University of Oregon. His 
poems have been published in The Nation, Poetry (Chicago), Perspective, Chelsea Review, 
West Coast Review, and many others; poems are forthcoming in Southwest Review. He 
has also published translations of the Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo. He has been managing 
editor of the Northwest Review and associate editor of Northwest Folklore. In 1968 he 
received a $2000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, and he has also 
received a Carnegie Foundation grant.


POEM INSIDE A POEM

(For T.)

Night beetles thumped against glass 
and tried to get in: red candlesticks, 
wine and the crushed red beasts, 
their rattle of armour 
on the plate, but first, 
you said, a poem like a prayer 
before dinner, 
so we wrote for your daughter,

... black sea tanks clang 
their heavy limbs on 
edges of the zinc pool. 
Red antenae investigate the air 
above listening to why they’re 
where they are after coasting down 
10 million years inside the same 
black case hearing the tide’s 
scratch and draw of sand outside. ..

And outside the black light 
lacquered your dark-green battered car 
that crouched on the bluff for the kill, 
that later crumpled you up, but 
-mirabile dictu-alive in its broken shell, 
the moon swinging bright as a scale 
eased back awhile on the crush 
of all that weight which listens under the sea.

Lawder/19


AIR AND BLOOD

Between us on the earth 
and the sun it’s an x-ray 
-a few pieces of bone, 
sockets joined by quicklight 
drifting,

All the rest of him

a nimbus of light filling each 
filament of feather a halo 
of arrows around bone light 
keeping him high 
in the upper air,

But for the shadow

thrown down thick as a manta 
cruising dark over fields, 
preying over the land 
hungry anguished his cry 
is a pin scratching 
the sky’s blue glass.

Coming down to earth he skates 
at a cant through a tunnel of air, 
light goes out from 
the clicking rush of feathers, 
the beak is snapping for blood.

Then the body and the shadow 
are joined on the arcing beast’s back, 
talons and wings together 
finding the heart for a moment 
forever.

Lawder/20


TROLLING

(Through the blue jelly of the eye 
the ocean twists inland again.)

Always out on the gulf on a half-busted skiff 
even when rain lashes the water dark and waves 
rear up to whack the old ribs of the boat

I troll waiting for a thick tug, 
the thing to lean its weight against the line, 
feeling the strength of it, the wit down below 
and begin to pull a dark dripping shape into sight;

Or bring up dead lines head back to shore 
drink out the night with wine 
caught up in a slow-motion pitch 
of long swells riding them into sleep 
then into dreams of silver bass halibut 
and the red pompano that swim every night 
in slow rainbow circles just under the bed.

Lawder/21


THE FIELD

Somewhere in the field 
we have broken open a hornet’s nest.

A cloud of them rises from the earth, 
anger growing darker.

I feel the horse tighten 
and step crab-wise. Her summer 
coat has mellowed from its sheen 
to a thick mat. She knows the carcass, 
a dead deer the hunter never found 
tangled in barbed wire at the woods’ edge: 
She panics and won’t go near.

A cold wind springs like a whip 
and snaps leaves off 
and she leaps in fear.

Growing islands of lather 
whiten her thoroughbred’s coat 
and her white breath clouds 
the field which is growing smaller 
smaller.

Lawder/22


DEAD RACCOONS 

in the morning they

are amazed 
as when the lights 
found them 
in a well-meaning gesture 
lifting a spidery and black paw 
from the road

the quizzical smile a little drunk 
from so much light in the head 
the sudden blazing up 
of a double sun

then struck 
by knowing finally 
they are not alone 
in the dark

they thought they knew: 
the distant whining 
engines of the night 
the thin and drunken lurch 
of flashlights and the white 
cry of dogs that circle 
their first few thoughts 
of sleep

pebbles grass trees stars 
spin in an arc 
all shouting something new 
. . .to remember. . .

Lawder/23


barbara drake

Figure without caption.
BARBARA DRAKE has published poetry, fiction, and reviews in many little magazines 
and quarterlies. She has received a National Arts and Humanities grant for poetry, and is 
one of the co-authors of a series of literature textbooks published by Holt Rinehart & 
Winston. Her work appears in the current anthology, Best Poems of 1970, Borestone 
Mountain Poetry Awards 1971.


YEAR TURNING

“Happy New Year, host.

That thing’s not real.”

For the marlin arched

Upon the gameroom wall,

A mildewed kiss.

Captain, our captain, eat your photographic proof. 
That thing’s not real. Oh host, who’s at the wheel? 
This boat rocks. Who’s responsible?

Adrift and submarine, the sempiternal partners whirl.

There’s always one to kiss, and one to cry,

And one to mourn, with her eyes on upside-down,

And one in black to bid us eat,

And one in white to urge us all to ping-pong.

This is an old boat. It won’t float dear.

But happy New Year anyhow.

That thing’s not real.

There’s one to doze, and one to dance,

And one to fall and wet his pants,

And one to whisper in your ear,

You are an olive in a glass and not the globe;

You are an ass as sure as they.

That thing’s not real.

But soon, we fell asleep.

It was an honest sleep and short.

We dreamed ourselves at home in bed and warm,

Each one an innocent among drunks,

Each one a world, vaporous, atilt among stars.

We dreamed ourselves at sea,

And then we woke, pursuing fish.

Drake/25


Figure without caption.

Figure without caption.

BOARDERS IN OUR LIVES

I see Joe’s girlfriend

Who used to sit at our table 
Drinking her interminable tea, 
While he grew ruder and ruder

To her-she pedals by

On an American bicycle,

She and the bicycle, heavy & slow; 
She’s due any day now, married 
To another. Joe’s moved.

Table’s bigger.

Drake/28


THE DAY THE MOVERS CAME

The dreams we fenced last night are gone. 
Usurpers dally on the lawn.

A broken lamp, a wicker chair-are these 
The dreams we fenced? Last night is gone 
My love-we cannot please

Our demons with the chairs we sit upon 
Or, on a floating carpet, take our ease 
In dreams. We-fenced last night-are gone. 
Usurpers dally on the lawn.

Drake/29


CLOCKWORK

Father, father, 
you invented me. 
Here in the 
tick-tock dark 
of your workshop 
my brother and 
sisters shine. 
They have 
golden faces, 
mahogany cases; 
they chime. 
I am your 
cuckoo clock, 
your first spring 
at life.

Among the rest 
I keep your time.

Drake/30


THE FIRST PLACE

Marrying you

Was a short move upstairs.

There were other rooms, 
But I moved there.

The building caved in

When we left,

Emptied by workmen 
And life.

But some nights

I see those starred

And ugly walls,

Lit by cherry blooms

And left-over paint,

Rise shimmering

Like a mirage

In heated rooms.

Drake/31


ESPOUSERY

Admit it, husband, 
today is dull- 
Winter, the world’s corpse, 
has been bled dry 
and color fled the air.

Do me a favor. Rise 
before me tomorrow, 
take a jet to-say, 
Greenland, call 
and say, love, I’ll be 
home for dinner, 
in a week or two.

I want to see 
what I’ll do.

Or tonight 
when I greet you at 
the door, hand ready 
for your non-existent hat, 
extending a non-existent 
martini, say,

Love, I brought home 
my entire English 409 class 
to live with us, 
sleep, eat in our 
moldy basement, reading 
Thoreau and living 
likewise.

Drake/32


That failing, 
tonight let us write 
names and addresses on envelopes, 
sending here a spoonful of jam 
wrapped in 8½ x 11 Eaton Bond, 
there, a fried egg (to some editor). 
To one old girlfriend 
of yours, a lock 
of your pubic hair, 
an obscenity or two 
cunningly put together 
with newspaper headlines.

Then, at our wit’s end, 
let us prick 
our fingers and become 
blood one. Hang up a sign, 
HIDEOUT, and then hide.

Drake/33


roger meiners

Figure without caption.
ROGER MEINERS is Professor of English at MSU. His poems and essays have appeared 
in such journals as Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Twentieth Century Literature. 
He has also published two books, The Last Alternatives, a study of Allen Tate, and 
Everything to Be Endured, an essay on Robert Lowell and modern poetry.


ONLY I AM LEFT TO TELL THE STORY 
(written in the margin of W. S. Merwin’s “The Last One”)

Well, then they began to press in on me. 
And I began to look around for someone. 
And I saw only my shadow.

So when I had discovered my shadow

It said to me, Come.

I scraped a hole in its head 
and eased one foot through.

Not enough, so I scraped some more.

This time I got caught at the hips.

So I hacked away at the shadow

Until I cut everything away but the cortex

(and two ears stuck to the edges: 
flowers trying to fly).

And then I stepped into the hole

And vanished through my head.

But I pulled my secret shadow on through. 
All that’s left is the shadow:

The bright shadow, with a hole in its head.

Meiners/35


MY DAUGHTER, SLEEPING

Now after all these years

I know indeed that there are moments 
when the Presence comes through 
and tells the endless tale of origins.

The music begins.

The musician bends over his instrument

and, singing, a different face looks 
through his eyes.

And there, on the pillow,

the face of my child in repose.

I can read there

the confirmation of reality, 
word after word.

Now I can see the testimony

that in the depths 
all is as it must be 
and that all shall be well.

Can anything be disastrous

as my child turns aside into sleep

and, turning outward into the wide cone of reality, 
brings back the news that all is well?

I must change my life.

Meiners/36


TWO PRELIMINARY REPORTS FROM THE BOOK OF EIKAMPF

EIKAMPF WEARS STRANGE DISGUISES

No one there could say what inner need 
brought Eikampf to spend his time pacing the hall, 
or why he’d decked himself in hat and tweed 
and peered closely at every door along the wall.

“I am checking patterns of egress,” 
says Eikampf, to stifle their dismay, 
while he, secretly, searches for a witness 
who can testify that he (Eikampf) came in the usual way.

Now shifty Eikampf comes down the steps 
wearing a cap and pushing a broom.

He looks to the right, looks to the left, 
and hurriedly backs into the first room.

Eikampf opens the top drawer of the file; 
he will get to the bottom of this game.

Now he reads the “E” folder from the pile.

“Eikampf: there is no one by that name.”

To Eikampf's mind conclusions swarm: 
if he has vanished, he must be free.

He goes to the desk, takes out a form, 
and requisitions a new identity.

Smiling, Eikampf leaves the room, 
walks smartly out with bowler and cane;

and one carrying dustpan, mop, and broom, 
says “Good evening. Eikampf is my name.”

Meiners/37


EIKAMPF BROODS ON DEA TH

Eikampf has conceived the thought 
that when man is bom he begins to die. 
This so unnerves him that he is brought 
to wonder on fate, and life, and destiny.

Eikampf takes to inventing puzzles, 
arranging words to pass the time, 
feeding caramels to dogs wearing muzzles, 
inventing perversities, meditating crime.

Eikampf falls into deep despair, 
ponders the cruelty of being bom, 
sees madness floating through the air, 
accepts with grace his fate forlorn.

Learned Eikampf deals in wit, 
takes pleasure in mocking the sublime, 
proclaims the deep beauty of common shit, 
finds no paradox too hard to climb.

Late one awful Thursday evening

God calls in drunken Eikampf's mind, 
and worlds on worlds go their own way, spinning 
out beyond the stars, leaving him behind.

Meiners/38


THINGS TO DO AROUND BUFFALO CREEK, COLORADO 
(for Bud Drake)

Read Gary Snyder and write friendly poems.

Transplant fir trees from where the bulldozer’s been 
working over the mountain.

Plant crested wheat, nodding brome, and flax around the cabin.

Stare at Sagittarius from the hill and wonder how I 
ever came by my name.

Watch the swallows fly in and out of the holes in the 
loose stones at the top of the J. W. Green Mercantile Co.

Read Rudolf Steiner.

Feed dog food to tufted-ear squirrels.

Pet the stomachs of humming-birds if they’ll let you.

Shovel ten years of shit out of the privy.

Throw the frisbee for the dog.

Look at the stars until they spell my name, 
and muse on the names of God.

Caulk the flashing around the chimney.

Swear at Henry David Thoreau and get drunk on

mad William Blake.

Walk with Lynn and the girls in the evening and try

to see things I haven’t before;

and try to talk gently.

Meiners/39


linda wagner

Figure without caption.
LINDA WAGNER is Professor of English at MSU. She has published essays and poems in 
some eighty critical journals or literary magazines. She has written four books, on W. C. 
Williams, Phyllis McGinley, and Denise Levertov, and a collection of her own poems, 
Intaglios, has been published. Currently she is working on a book on Faulkner and 
Hemingway.


FOR THE MEMORY

OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, MARCH, 1963

Just a little time longer- 
and spring would have come.

Soon you could have walked again 
outdoors: shrubs would have 
flowered for you, trees 
would have bowed.

Steps would have echoed on 
bud-drifted sidewalks, no 
fragment of color escaping 
your eyes, still intent 
on life’s beauty after 
many long winters.

The fog would have lifted 
granting you an open place 
where naked heat could 
drench your back: the sun! 
the sun! A poem 
might have grown from this.

As loving as the youngest 
child, you saw all life in 
lover’s terms. Despair would force 
you in at times to write 
of your own heart.

In spring you could look outward.

Just a little time longer- 
and spring would have come, 
the fog would have lifted. 
Instead, the sky darkens.

Our spring will be late this year.

Our spring will be late.

Wagner/41


TO CHERISH

Sharp, cutting tone of green 
the glass with its square paneled sides 
and heavy base 
catches any light 
and buries it.

It’s a magnificent, austere thing.

I like these words, I’d like 
to describe all the glass and the 
chair and the lockets and the 
pictures-all the heritage 
of my grandmother 
whose stem iron curls 
only heightened her grand eyes.

I want to say 
somehow 
what a sharp mind she had, 
how she loved us with a fierce cutting tone, 
how she lived thirteen years 
alone 
past the man she had loved 
for fifty.

She never reproached him.

She never reproached us

for forgetting her. 
A magnificent, austere thing.

Wagner/42


MORE BELL JARS

Sylvia, I should spend my days 
snitching 
chocolate cake, vying 
with the kids for one man’s 
attention. You found all that 
to be worth exactly

nothing

in the cold London mornings 
as you huddled

alone

to write.

The children sleep.

You watch the rusty clock 
and catch your breath 
when they catch theirs. 
And you resent

being forced 
to work in secret, 
in a life

apart

from any normal life.

The cold London morning 
bites your mind and leaves it 
numb 
so numb 
that any pain 
seems reasonable.

And the cold London morning 
hovers on.

Wagner/43


HO-HUM

I think of Creeley, sharpening his pencils, 
and Hemingway, standing alert in an early 
morning coolness, and I smile. Sharp pen, 
a stack of empty paper, a quiet house. 
We are all of us ritual-mongers, 
waiting for the white goddess 
who doesn’t give a damn 
where we sit 
or how many 
pencils 
we eat.

Wagner/44


CARNIVAL

1.

Lost.

One small white-shirted boy, gone, just a 
breath away, faun-like, now invisible. Face 
after face after face after face-no gap 
in the legs moving steadily ahead. My 
hands clench as head roars-then, he 
whirls toward me, a splinter of direction 
framed in shrieking faces. Hugging him close 
as the crowd collapses, I lead him to his ride, 
the merry-go-round is pure joy, 
a brief floating circle 
of shadowed love.

2.

Slant bodies tip, whirl as 
dark shapes startle. Screams ricochet, 
burst, at the empty tunnel’s edge.

His small hand 
wrenches mine 
shooting thought through me, 
what would he do alone, in 
this God-damned fun house?

Wagner/45


d.m. rosenberg

Figure without caption.
D. M. ROSENBERG is an Associate Professor of English at MSU. He is the author of 
several scholarly studies of John Milton, and he has had poetry published in Epoch, 
Chicago Tribune Magazine, The Midwest Quarterly, and other magazines.


WAXWORKS

With adoring accuracy

The eminent dead are reclaimed.

Lifesize, their gestures are preserved

For our gaze. We are mesmerised

By the incarnation of the literal.

President, astronaut, or killer 
Startles us in tallow likeness.

The sightseers file past to view

Declamatory idols aloof

Within the vacuum of their pageant.

A comfort for the covetous,

This peepshow of fallen angels.

Time locked the vault in mock judgment, 
And the constant assassin

Grips his gun to fire once more 
At the dying anointed prince.

We behold the precise tableau

Without pleading for entropy.

Rosenberg/47


IN PRAISE OF SABA TINO RODIA’S WATTS TOWERS

Atoms twinkle and draw him to the yard

Of broken cups. Crouching, he gathers fragments 
From slagheaps, and by the nervous thoroughfares 
In exhaust and aridity, he collects

The smithereens of a restless world

That would give up halfway through. From rubble 
Along the shore, this Noah stoops again

To save and piece together shell, and tiles,

And tinted glass, chromosomes for his towers.

Three towers, begotten, rise in Watts,

Out of mud they rise, luminous sightings—

The refuse, loss, and castoffs of last days

Ordered, recreated into scaffoldings

Spun with intricate filaments in space.

Towers, transformed, soar to gong and windchimes:

The benedictions of the interim

Calm and intense, with cadences even more sweet 
Than the all-clear signals of the millennium.

Rosenberg/48


TABLEAU AT THE BEACH

The figures on the shore do not see me 
But looking down collect shells underfoot. 
Waves roll in, inaudible, dragging with them 
The flora of the sea, fibers streaming out 
On the gleaming mud.

When shorebirds take flight,

The wandering gatherers do not stare up

Under their clangorous wings, but bent, 
Devote themselves to sift out, gingerly, from sand 
Piecemeal iridescence.

They pause, motionless, knee-deep in the shallows 
Of the sea, or squat on caked heels to sort 
And appraise the gritty shells near at hand.

They stand about, barefoot on unsure dunes 
And, to mitigate their loss, will not forgo 
The mementos of their father’s estate.

Though I leave them scattered on the beach 
In the heat lightning and faint evening light, 
I must return searching at the edge

In patient sorrow, myself cast ashore 
In these pastures of mutability.

Rosenberg/49


LET THIS BE A ZEN GARDEN

Take the pathway of flat stones to the garden 
And its matter of fact way gathers you in. 
Bestow yourself once there

And you cannot be excluded.

If the bare stones are there, attend them

And let them, viewer, be 
Containing as they are 
In the incompleted garden. 
Likewise obey them.

Give accord to the given of the garden’s rocks. 
Then each of them

The greater and the less

On the white gravel

Will, in its primacy, chasten you.

These, then, are immediate instances of stone: 
In the middle distance is the basin stone,

And to the back the candle stone

On which to place a candle at night,

And on the right a pail stone

To place a pail of hot water on in winter. 
Hence, each given point,

Each angle,

Each stone,

In its extremity is now here,

In the calmness of a garden completed,

In this moment of your acquiescence.

Rosenberg/50


SILENT COMEDIES: EDENDALE, CALIFORNIA

I do not know where that town is 
In downpour of snowy light 
Where the bumpkin lifts his derby 
& tends our country innocence 
Like lambs, while the town rocks 
On the sun porch wicker chair 
Dowdy with her bleached flower beds: 
Along the scorched boulevard 
Of palmettos the flivvers 
Careen as bustling dogs 
& constables chug behind 
A goggling high-rumped Herod 
Soused from the village pond 
Chasing our simpleton

Who sprints ahead with out-turned feet. 
The hand crank gallops awry 
Through summer’s midnight light 
And the Holy Family hears 
In the electric theater 
The hallelujahs of laughter.

Rosenberg/51


RED CEDAR REVIEW STAFF

Editor: Alan VerPlanck

Managing Editor: Lauri Comito

Assistant Editors: Dennis Pace

Michael McCormick

Lawrence Lucifer

Graphic Design: Dennis Pace

Production: Margie Jones

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Daryl Jones: “Carp” first appeared in Happiness Holding Tank 
Douglas Lawder: “Trolling” first appeared in December 
Photographics: all photographs by Dennis Pace with exception 
of centerfold by Roger Hill

RED CEDAR REVIEW is a quarterly magazine of the arts published at Michigan State 
University. Manuscripts may be submitted to 325 Morrill Hall, Michigan State University, 
East Lansing, Michigan, 48823. Please include return postage and contributor data.

DISTRIBUTOR: B. DeBoer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110.

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