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cedar
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Volume 8 Number 2/3

Copyright by Red Cedar Review, December, 1973
con=-
teats

FICTION
Andrew Scheiber

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POETRY
George Oppen

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Jim Harkness

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David Gitin

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Carl Thayler

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FRC TAME iia iiss ovens a oie eons cnn ig bina iss (> ni oe 65
Tomas Transtromer

Traffic (Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly) ........csssccssseceseccseecssecesecesseceseseees 62

A Few Moments (Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly) .........csssscecseceesseeceneceees 89
Jim Harrison

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Peter Nye

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Rus Myers

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Michael Hamberger

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Dan Gerber
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Thomas Vandenberg
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Robert Vas Dias _
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COVER: Untitled / Drawing by David Kirkpatrick
boden’s
ground

short story by

Andrew
Scheiber
 
(Lucas)

The grandfather clock is broken. I just asked him where the tool box is but he can’t
remember. “‘Look out there by the barn,” he says. “I used it yesterday to change them
washers on the pump.”

He shouldn’t of done that because I did it myself only three weeks ago and it won’t
need a new set for a while yet. “Pa,” I tell him, ‘‘why the hell did you take them
washers out? They were just new three weeks ago.”’

‘The water got brackish again,”’ he says. ‘‘Just plain damn rotten. Been that way
three days now.”

He rocks quietly and looks out the window the way he always does. His eyes follow
the cars on the interstate as they zoom by the window and past where he can see them.

I bend down by the glass plate on the clock where it is cracked and dusty, trying to
see up inside the works, but it is nothing but dark up in there and I give up. “I can’t
fix it, Pa,’ I say. ‘“You’ll have to abide radio time for awhile.”’

He munches his glob of Mail Pouch and hocks. ‘“‘Goddamn,”’ he says, and a car
zips past his vision, his eyes still tracking it through the walls when he can’t see it any
longer. ‘‘Another one of them little Hitler scooters. Pink to boot. Too many of them
goddamned things on the road.”

‘‘T hear tell they make pretty fair mileage,”’ I say.

He pushes the wad to one side of his mouth and raises his bottle of pop for a long
swallow. ‘‘Course they do,”’ he says. ‘“They make the A-frames out of old Jew bones.
That’s how them German jobbies make up their duty loss.”’ And he laughs, throwing
his head back and shaking till he starts to feel his stomach burn, and he settles down
in the rocker and curses.

‘‘Damn that old gizzard,” he says. ‘When you gonna cook them fish for supper?”’

‘‘T ain't got ’em cleaned yet,’’ I say. ‘““They’re still all wrapped up.”

‘Well hep to it,’’ he says. “‘Daylight savings don’t change suppertime none you
know.”’ His eyes flash past me to the clock, darting down the crack in the glass. “‘I
can’t figure that sucking clock’’ he says, and chews.

I go to the kitchen and unroll the fish from the towel. They are white-silver and still
glistening with wetness. Their eyes and mouths stand open and blank like on crazy
people, and I take the knife and begin to slice down under the skin, carving around
the stiff spary of fins. The towel stains red where the blood, thin and watery, drains
from the long smooth cut (

RCR/5
/ David Kirkpatrick

from the sequence Harvest 1865)

(

tled

1

Unt

 

 

 

 
 

Matthew

If you take a left three blocks down from the diner and drive on into the country
until you come to where the new interstate crosses the old gravel road, you will see it.
The house and barn are across the way, beyond the four lanes of concrete and its
flanking bobwire fence, but still you can see it where the interrupted gravel road
continues on into the patchwork of corn, alfalfa, and wheat fields. And if you’ll look
close enough, you’ll see a tall thin man in farmer’s bid overalls, carrying the
aluminum milk cannisters from the barn to the back of the house. That will be me
brother Lucas. If you have binoculars you can see the brass buttons and blue
suspenders where his overall bib is fastened up across the chest.

And, if by chance you can see through the window that now faces the turnpike, you
will see another man, this one a little smaller and a little bent in an armchair, looking
out on those four lanes of shining concrete. That is my father. If you watch close
enough, you will probably see my brother Lucas bring him a Coke or a Seven-Up,
even though is stomach is bad. Then they will both sit by the window, looking out,
watching the autos and semi-trucks buzz past on the interstate. And maybe they will
see you, standing there by the barricade on the old gravel road that once ran straight
into town—you with your binoculars, or whatever you have taken with you down that
dead-end road to help you look across at them—and they will roll their chaws and
hock into the spittoon on the sill, as if that little hollow of brass were your own pretty
face.

RCR/7
They have been there for over half a century now—rather, my father has, since
Lucas is only thirty-five. My grandfather Boden settled it in 1912, a short time before
they stopped selling land to Germans and started burning dachshunds and effigies of
the Kaiser on their front porches. But Grandfather Boden never swore enough in the
old tongue or met enough people from town to get them or the Muncie D.A.R.
chapter on his back; so when he died he left some four hundred acres of good soil, as
free from mortgage foreclosure as any spread could have been in 1930. This plot was
my father’s inheritance, and apparently he had some foresight with regards to it—he_
had married five years before the old patriarch died, and begun praying for some
sons. He got the first of them in me a couple of years before the Depression hit and
offspring got to be an economically delicate subject. There were two more of us during
the New Deal even though things hadn’t gotten much better, but that was all. The last
time around Mother hemorraged, and my father roared bitter indignation over the
fact that there wouldn’t be any more to help him string bobwire and do the milking.

I left in ’43, first for Fort Knox and then the European Theater. My father had
warned me to hedge around and get an agricultural deferment, but I told him that I
could think for myself now, and he laughed and said that was right, that now I had a
diploma to prove it. I said that finishing high school didn’t have that much to do with
it, and besides it wouldn’t have looked good for me to keep at home. He himself had
told me enough about flaming dachshunds that I knew better than that.

Mother died two years later, with me in Germany and brothers Lucas and Frank,
by now aged fourteen and eleven, respectively, down on the farm with her and my
father. I never knew until I got home, and she was already three months in the ground
by then. ‘It was awful sudden,” my father told me. I didn’t understand why he
couldn’t have written and let me know, but I never held it against him.

It was September when I got back, with harvest-time getting near, the tall yellow
cornstalks standing crowded and stark like straw soldiers in the field. That very
afternoon he took me, still in my uniform, through the long tall rows out to the grave.
They had buried her. to the grove in the south, the one they would later level for the
highway, with a crude half-hewn slab of marble bearing the name Sarah Jacobs
Boden and the dates 1906-1945, thrust cockeyed into the ground as if it had been
dropped there. He told me he had scripted the stone himself, and then he said how
good it was to have the oldest son home in time for harvest. I replied I had been
meaning to talk to him about that. ‘‘I feel like I got to get away for awhile,” I told
him. He was digging his heel solemnly into the young grass in front of the stone. “Get
away?’’ He said. ‘‘What the hell you mean by that?”’

I told him college, and his leathery forehead wrinkled up beneath the brim of his
hat. ‘‘They’ll be some jack coming in from the government,” I said. “It won’t cost you
nothing.”

He scowled and turned away from the grave to spit. “Nothing but a son,’ he said.
He was facing away from me and jamming his hands down in his pockets the way he
always did when he started to get angry. I remember him spitting once or twice more
before he wheeled back to face me, saying, ‘‘So you’re a big soldier man now!” and
knotting his fist he knocked me to my knees in front of the stone. I tried to get up but
he grabbed me by the hair and pushed my face down, rubbing it in the baby grass

RCR/8
over the grave. ‘Some big soldier boy!’ he spat. ‘Now wouldn’t your ma be proud of
you—why you're even too good for the farm! Twenty years old and you’re too good to
work the earth you’re made of!”’ And he twisted the crop of my crown like he was
screwing my face down into the ground. I swore at him and he let me up, not even
looking me straight in the face, and I walked behind him to the house with grass-stain
on my forehead and my khakis.

If you look east from the barricade down the turnpike you will see, just before the
twin bridges across the creek, a small slash of backwater ferns rising along the
median out of the incline from the creekbed. That is where Mother was buried, before
we had to move her because of the interstate. That ground was part of the reason my
father was so stubborn about selling that oblong strip of acreage to the government;
but the caterpillars would have come and turned the stone and the box anyway, so I
had her moved to the cemetery in town before he gave them the chance,

But moving her wasn’t the only time I had to do something first and tell him about
it later; it was like that long before even that first autumn after the war, when I ap-

plied for the business school in Muncie. After the first forms were in the mail I would
always have to be the first back from the noon feeding so I could check the RFD box.
I was afraid if he beat me to it he might find their letter of acceptance waiting there
and tear it up before I ever had a chance to see it.

The note came just six weeks after I got home, in plenty of time for me to start the
January semester. I took care of the initial fees with the back pay I had saved up
because the government checks hadn’t begun yet and I didn’t want to ask my father
for money. But I never thought they would actually mail a receipt, so when he found it
in the RFD after I had stopped checking it was out.

He waited until dinner, with Lucas and Frank looking on, to tear into me about it.
“Boys,” he said, looking at them and holding the envelope above his plate, ‘Matthew
here is leaving us for the big world outside. he’s going off to col-ledge.”’

They set their glasses down and stared at me in the fuzzy lamplight of the kitchen.
Frank laughed at the pronunciation of college, a thin crescent of milk mustached on
his upper lip, but Lucas sensed what was happening and stayed quiet.

‘Look at your brother here. Now damned if he don’t look just like the rest of us
with them big overalls and that old barn smell stuck on him like glue. But down
underneath he tells me he’s different, he can’t get held down by the likes of us.’’ He
puts the envelope down on his plate where the hash was and laughed as if to himself.
‘You see boys, when you been to France and Germany and blowed folks to pieces the
way Matt has--”’ |

I threw my fork down in the hash and looked across at him angrily. ‘I done what I
had to over there,” I said, but that grin of his had wrinkled to a scowl and he kept on
talking.

‘Like I say boys: when you done all that, a skip up to Muncie ain’t really nothing to
speak of—especially for a college boy like your brother Matt here.’’ He settled back in
his chair, not even like he expected me to come back at him but just for a pause, and
then he said, “‘Now ain’t that right?’’

I picked up my fork and began scooping hash again with my head bowed down over
my plate. ‘Whatever you say,’ I answered.

RCR/9
‘‘Whatever I say hell!’’ he shouted. I didn’t look up but I heard the paper ripping
and the clank of his coffee cup just as the liquid stung me and spattered steaming
across my forehead and into my eyes. I set my fork down and wiped the hot coffee
away with my bandanna, my eyes smart and watering, and by the time I could see
again he had refilled his cup and was forking away at a fresh plate of hash. Frank
started to giggle but Lucas took him by the shoulder and said hush.

We didn’t talk anymore about it that night, or any night after that, and I went on to
school in January. I still lived down on the farm, partly to pacify my father a little and
mostly to see to it that Lucas and Frank stayed in school enough to keep from
flunking. I drove the milk to the distributor every morning on my way out to Muncie,
picking up the empty cannisters on the return trip every evening. Once in a while I
would get home around suppertime and find Lucas putting the tractor in the shed
when he should have been on his way home from school, and I would cuss at my
father until he swore back at me or simply spit and said, ‘““That fence needed mending
bad,”’ and dropped it cold. I did some cooking too, and the milking on weekends, and
most nights I got home just in time to help him tote the cannisters from the stalls to
the cooler at the back of the house.

But one day that April I didn’t get back in time for it, and he came running down
from the barn and yanked me out of the truck as soon as the motor had stopped.
‘You goddamned bastard,” he cried, ‘‘where the hell you been?” He grabbed my
collar and shook me, trying to smash my head against the engine head. I cupped my
hands across his mouth, trying to push him away from me but I heard him hiss you
good-for-nothing bastard as his lips sputtered tobacco against my palms. He was still
trying to bang my head against the truck and I caught a good one on the windshield
before Frank came bolting out of the house crying pa and he let go of me.

He stepped back, wiping his hands on his overalls as if they were bloody or soiled or
something, and spit into the gravel at the edge of the drive. ‘Get the hell on up to the
house,” he said to me, ‘‘and keep those goddamn books outen my sight.’’ Then he
turned and walked away from me into the barn. Frank looked up at me from where he
was standing beside the truck and his eyes were getting moist and weepy. “The cow
died, Matt,’’ he said. He crumpled his hat and pulled it on and ran out to the barn
after my father. |

In the house Lucas was at the sink cleaning up the supper dishes. I poured myself a
cup of coffee and sat down at the table, touching my fingers to where my neck was
bruised from my father’s greeting. Without turning to face me Lucas said that the
prize cow had calved that afternoon. ‘‘She started to bleed and we couldn’t get her
stopped,” he said. Then he turned away from the sink to look at me, those hollow eyes
of his glowing with a dim fierceness in the dim kitchen. “‘We couldn’t get the doctor in
time and she died. Pa said if the truck would of been here we wouldn’t a lost her.”’

‘The hell,” I said. ‘‘Even if that damn radiator hadn’t blown I wouldn’t of had the
truck back till suppertime. It’s his own damn fault that cow died. I told him we ought
to have a phone put in.”

Lucas went back to doing the dishes, and I told him I was plumb beat and went to
bed. I was waiting for my father to come back, to hear Lucas tell him what I had said
about getting a telephone, but he never did before I was asleep, and he wasn’t at

RCR/10
 

Boy and Dog (from the sequence Harvest 1865) / David Kirkpatrick
breakfast when I got downstairs in the morning. “‘He was gone when I came down,”
Frank said, looking up from his bow! of oatmeal.

I started looking around the kitchen to get ready to go to Muncie, but something
didn’t add up and an odd, half-angry feeling began to creep upwards from my spine.
‘Not only that,” I said to Frank, “but where’s my books?”’

‘‘Dunno,”’ Frank said, and went back to his oatmeal. ‘““They was on the table when
I came in last night.”

“God damn it,” I said, throwing the door open and heading for the truck shed. The
garage was empty, but there were little shreds of paper strewn in the wheelmarks
down the drive to the road, all crumpled and mashed into the mud, as if they had
been chewed by the cows and trampled there in the path.

I ran back to the house, thinking that god damned fool, that idiot old man, with my
heart pumping furiously blood burning through my veins. Frank was just leaving the
kitchen with his schoolbooks and I almost ran over him through the door. He said
Matt as I brushed past him muttering that son of a bitch I’ll fix him good that father
of mine, into the front room where he kept the shotgun.

I grabbed it and rushed back out to the barn thinking that’s it, I'll blast his stud,
with Frank yelling for Lucas behind me. I had the barrel up against the skull of the
big bull when Lucas came up from behind me and laid one of his hobnail boots up
between my legs as hard as he could.

‘“‘“Goddammit,” he said, “‘if pa seen you try that you’d be as good as dead yourself.”’

‘You little son of a bitch,’’ I said, leveling the gun at him. He stood stock still,
trying to draw himself up taller than he really was. ““You get on out of here before I
shoot you too. I done it in Germany and I can do it here.”’

He spit at me, and before I knew it the gun went off, and he was half-spinning on
one leg, like a top coming to a standstill, the other leg bent backwards further than it
ever should have been, and a red splotch sprayed across his overalls, as if someone
had hit him in the knee with an everripe tomato. I dropped the gun and ran to him
thinking Jesus Christ I’ve shot him, but I heard Frank yelling pa and I ran out of the
barn, cutting across the yard and into the road towards town.

If you drive down that road to the barricade, you can see how hard it must have
been running flat out down that gravel three and a half miles, balls smarting all the
way. If you could just draw a beeline coming out of the barn and cutting across four
lanes of traffic and through that bobwire fence, all the way to town, you’d get the
picture. I never once looked back, never dared, for fear I would see that truck of my
father’s, returned from wherever it was that morning and now heading hell-bent after
me with my brother Lucas screaming and bleeding all the way.

With that behind me, you can see there was no question of what to do once I got to
town. But the bank wasn’t open yet so I hid myself in the corner booth at Spenze’s
and ordered a cup of coffee. The wait was all right since it wouldn’t have looked too
good my withdrawing every penny of a five-hundred-dollar bank account out of
breath and my hair full of gravel dust as if I’d just come in off a hard day’s ride to say,
stick ’em up there Sherman, and ride off into the sunset. So I washed my face and got
a comb there at Spenze’s before I went to the bank, and with that five hundred
nestling pretty in my wallet I caught a ride thumbing down old 38 and landed in

RCR/12
Muncie that afternoon.

I'd missed all my classes but I didn’t have books or notes anyway so I put my money
in the Muncie First Federal and found myself a room at a place called Rooker’s. It
was a boarding-house run by a kind but gossipy old nag named Lydia Rooker, and
she had set it up just for men attending the local college on GI Bill. She had a par-
ticular fondness for the men who'd been delayed overlong with the occupation armies,
and her motto was ‘“‘Make a Home for the Boys Coming Home.”’ It hung on a placard
above the trellised front porch, and at the beginning of May she hung a ribbed chain
swing down underneath the eaves. This was to encourage summer romances, and as
an observer she took great pleasure and interest in them.

Mr. Blackford at the First Federal had given me a job when school let out that
June; he was a kind and decent man who, like my father, had driven his wife to an
early grave, and when old Lydia learned that I had been seeing his daughter in earnest
she felt obliged to ask if we had set a date. I told her no, that we hadn’t even con-
sidered engagement for sure yet, but by December it was certain; old Lydia had a
special dinner for Monica and me on Christmas, when all the other boarders were
home on vacation, and she even took photographs of Monica stretching across the
table to kiss me after I gave her the ring.

That was 1946. I had started my second year at the business college, and hadn’t
heard a thing from the farm until it was April again, when Lucas suddenly showed up
at the boarding-house. I happened to look up from my dinner and see him through
the window as he pulled up in the truck. I excused myself from the table and left
before Mrs. Rooker had a chance to go to the door.

I got to the porch just as he was starting up the steps. He didn’t limp as much as I
thought he might, judging from the way he looked that day in the barn. ‘‘Hold on
there,’’ I said. “I don’t recall sending any invites your way.”

‘Don’t fret,’”’ he said, brushing past me onto the porch. “I didn’t bring a gun or
blade or nothing.”’

‘‘So I see,”’ I replied. He leaned up against the porch rail, facing the house, and I
stepped sideways so that I was between him and the door. “So what’s on your mind?”’
I said.

He just stood there, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his bib overalls,
and said, ‘“‘Pa wants to see you.”” Lucas was a shade taller now than when I had seen
him last, but he still had that thin, hollow look about him. He was wearing a flannel
shirt with the no-button collar just like our father always had, but his shoulders were
not yet quite so hunched underneath it.

‘‘He hasn’t seen me for a year,”’ I said, ‘“Why should he want to see me now?”’

“It’s about the farm,’’ Lucas said.

“It’s always about the farm,” I snapped.

‘‘He heard you were gettin’ married. He just thought that you, bein’ the oldest son,
might want a piece of the land, a few acres maybe—’”’

“TI don’t want any part of it,” I answered. “If my blowing your leg halfway off didn’t
satisfy his curiosity about that—bye the bye, how is that leg of yours?”’

Lucas flushed a shade or two, looking down as if he could see that knee through the
overalls. ‘“‘It mended,”’ he said. ‘‘Pa just thought you might need a place—’”’

RCR/13
‘Now where in hell did he find out about my getting married ?”’

‘It was in the local weekly,’’ Lucas said. “‘He wants to talk to you, Matt. I think
maybe you owe him—”’

‘I don’t owe him anything,” I said. ‘‘He still hasn’t paid me back for those books
he put through the stump grinder.”’

Lucas just leaned there now, looking down and muching the lump of tobacco he
was already chewing then at age sixteen. ‘‘Go ahead, then,” he said. ‘““Go ahead and
spend the rest of your life plugging cracks for some city bitch. See if we give a damn.”’

I grabbed him by the collar with one hand, cletching the flannel tighter and tighter
until I could feel the bob of his Adam’s apple. He just stared back at me, that wad of
tobacco bulging incongruously in his beardless cheek. I let him go, and he did not
even slack away, standing there as rigid and straight as when I was holding him. |

‘‘Get out of here Lucas,” I said, trembling. “Get out, before I break that goddamn
leg of yours all over again.”’

He turned and left, not running, not afraid, just calm and sober, as if he had hoped
for better but found pretty much what he expected. Even now it’s hard to scare Lucas
or even surprise him; I suppose when someone’s stood there and watched his leg get
blown off out of the clear blue by his very own brother, it would take quite a turn to
overcome the baptismal grace of that first shock.

So Lucas wasn’t scared at all; in fact, he came back to Rooker’s once more, one
Sunday that July. He drove up in the truck again, this time with brother Frank, who
was just now beginning to look awkward in his churchgoing tweeds and tie. Lucas was
in his Sunday best too, an old suit of my father’s with ragged seams and pockets
misshapen from the constant stuffing of wadded handkerchiefs.

Monica was with me there in the chain swing, and she must have felt me tense when
I saw him because she looked across the street too and asked me who it was. “‘“Some
fool who’s got no business here,’’ I told her, but she closed her elbow so that it
pinched me there where it was folded around my arm. ‘“‘Who is it Matt,’’ she said
again, but he was almost to the porch so I told her to stay put and listen and she’d
find out soon enough.

He had left Frank across the street in the truck. He still limped some, but this time
he walked a little straighter than before, maybe because of the starch in that old
collarless shirt. I got up from the swing when he got near the steps, but he held his
hand out and said stop when he saw me getting ready to speak. ‘‘Now hush up and
listen for a change,”’ he said. He bobbed his head politely at Monica, and then turned
to me. “‘I ain’t here to try and tell you to come back to the farm for good,” he said.
‘“That’s your own business. But pa wants to see you, just for a day. Both of you.”’

“Why Matt—” Monica said, but I told her to sit quiet and she asked what was
wrong with that. “Forget it,’”’ I said, and then turning to Lucas: “‘What for?”

Lucas’ face twisted into a scowl of serene frustration. ‘‘God damn it Matt—”’

‘‘Now don’t you God-damn-it me,” I said. ‘‘I asked you what for!”’

I heard Monica say Matt what’s wrong and she began tugging at my shirtsleeve as if
she wanted me to lay off him and tell her, but I asked him again, this time louder: “‘I
said what for!”’

Lucas’ hands moved nervously in his pockets, as if he were digging for change.

RCR/14
‘God damn it Matt, you already took away his first born heir,” he said. ‘““You gonna
take away his son now too?”

I felt Monica grip my forearm tight as if to hold me closer to her there and away
from Lucas. ‘‘No,” I said. ‘‘I won’t go out there.”’

Monica said Matt again, and this time she was up from the porch swing, moving up _
close beside me and half-facing Lucas down the porch steps. ‘‘Why not,” she cried.
‘‘For the love of God Matt what’s wrong with it? Won’t you tell me anything?”

I pulled away, backing up against the railing away from them both, where I could
look the two of them square in the face.

“You, Lucas, I said, “‘you get on home. I don’t want any more of your sermons on
what I ought to do. And Monica—’’

‘Stop Matt,” she said, with a moistening sternness in her eyes. “‘I want to go out. I
think we should.”’

‘For Christ sakes why?’’ I yelled so that even Mrs. Rooker must have heard.

‘How can you be so cold?’’ she cried. ‘‘How can you snip them out just like that can
you just tell me that much?”

I saw then that there would be no getting around it, but I knew too that I didn’t
dare go except on my own terms. “All right then,” I said. ‘‘I’ll go out there. But right
now.”

“This minute?’’ Lucas said with curious unsurprise.

‘You heard me,’ I answered.

Monica half-smiled through weepy eyes and tried to draw hereself up to kiss me but
I went on down the steps and across the street to the truck. Frank whipped his cap off
and jumped down from the cab when he saw all of us coming, and asked me if he
could ride in the bed, twisting the brim of his cap underneath until what he was
holding was all balled up like a baked roll of triangle dough. I nodded yes, and the
rest of us crammed into the cab with Lucas driving and Monica between the two of us.

It was hot that day, and Lucas started bitching about how if he’d known we were all
coming out today would of driven the Willys and left Frank home. I told him to shut
up, and I never meant to come out in the first place, and Monica tried to hook her
arm up underneath mine the way we had been sitting in the swing, but she kept
having to lift her feet and the hem of her dress so Lucas could get at the shift lever.
When we hit the stop sigh turning on old 38 Lucas rolled his chaw and spit out the
window into the street.

About a mile outside of Muncie Lucas yanked the truck off the highway and
headed down an unfinished county road, the wheels chattering vehemently across the
washboard riffs. The midsummer heat and dust that rose from the gravel made us
itch and sweat in spite of the breeze that tickled the cornstalks, cool and trembling, as
we passed.

“Good year for corn,’ Lucas said.

‘I’m glad,”’ I said dully.

‘Ours was almost belt high by the fourth,” he said.

Monica coughed delicately, the dust in the cab swirling in front of her. Lucas
looked her way, easing up on the accelerator. “I can drive slower if you want,” he
said, ‘““There’d be less dust.”’

RCR/15
 

Ira W. Davis / David Kirkpatrick
“If you’d taken the highway there wouldn’t been any goddamn dust at all,” I said,
passing Monica a handkerchief.

‘This way is shorter,” he answered. “‘I thought you was in a hurry.”’

“Then why don’t you roll up the window?”’ I said.

“We'd have dust anyway. We ain’t airtight in here, and then we’d lose our breeze.”’

This time Monica sneezed, and Frank leaned in the window at the rear of the cab
and said Gesundheit. She blew here nose two or three times before she took the
handkerchief away and then coughed. The dust jumped again, swirling in little eddies
around the cab.

‘Jesus Christ,’’ I said. ‘Where did he learn that word?”

‘“‘He must of picked it up from pa,”’ Lucas said.

‘*Pa says it all the time to the sick cows,’’ Frank added.

Lucas jerked his head around to look cross at Frank. ‘““Then why the hell did you
say it to Miss Blackford?”’ he demanded. The truck hit a chuckhole and lurched
swanchwise on the road until Lucas righted it.

‘‘Why don’t you shut up and drive,”’ I said.

Monica coughed, dropping the handkerchief, and tried to take hold of my arm, but
Lucas started fumbling with the shift lever and she had to pull her dress up out of the
way. I asked Lucas how much farther to the farm and when he said he reckoned a half
hour yet I swore and put my arm around Monica, helping her find the handkerchief
down in the seat between us.

That road is paved now, glossy black and asphalt, until you come to a mile south of
the interstate, where it crosses the road to the farm. There you will find a little sort of
dead-end, a four-way stop like a cross with the lower stem jeweled asphalt and the
arms and upper stem gravel, grey and lusterless in the blazing sun. If you take a right
onto the road to the farm you come to the real dead-end, where the glistening steel
barricade will stop you from taking that route all the way out to my father’s place.
You will see the barricade first, then the gleaming twin lanes silver in the sun, rising
out of the wheat and corn, and by the time you hear the buzz of the cars and the long
white dividers focus where they split the silver, you will see the farm. It seems oddly
close, the way the white stripes of divider is squat and fat in the distance but waxes
longer and clearer the closer you get, the way the house and barn back away from the
interstate when you look at them close enough.

Once the silo would have been the first thing you saw above the untopped corn and
then the rest of the farm rising, not unlike the highway does now, parting the fields
away like waves. And even if you were looking closely because it was the first time you
would probably not notice, not know how to notice, how much or how very little a
place like that could change in a year.

The bobwire along the road had been freshly strung, and I recalled that the field of
corn had been alfalfa the autumn I got home. But the house and barn were the same,
except that the Mail Pouch sign and the Joseph Boden printed in block letters on the
barn had faded and peeled some. Down the back of the house my father was bowing
over a tote of cannisters as he carried them from the barn. He must have seen us,
because when we pulled into the drive he hiked them up a little higher and hurried to
the back of the house where we had the cooler.

RCR/17
Lucas stopped the truck where the walk to the front door met the lane. What had
once been a dirt path was now covered with old slats, like railroad crossties, and there
was a new glass-panel door on the front of the house. Lucas told us to get on out, and I
opened the door, sliding down out of the cab and looking and Monica. “‘Well?”’ I
said. “‘You still want to see the old homestead ?”’

One of her feet, squeezed slender in her Sunday high-heels, flicked out of the cab
and down onto the running board. “‘I came out here to see your father, Matt,’’ she
said with an injured air. “‘] mean to do just that.”

I lifted her to the ground, and Lucas and Frank took the truck on back to the
garage. We had just started up the walkway when my father appeared at the door in
his flannel shirt and bib overalls, the tobacco rolling silently in his mouth.

‘‘Well come on up,”’ he said from behind the screen door. “‘If it ain’t the prodigal
son himself.”’

‘‘I don’t need any of that prodigal son crap,’ I said, Monica drawing closer to me.
She sneezed, and he cracked a toothy grin.

“Well,” he said, “‘come on in out of that country air before Miss Blackford catches
a cold.”’

‘It isn't the air,’”’ I told him angrily. “It’s all that dust on these goddamn country
roads. That fool Lucas—”’

‘Please Matt,’’ Monica said, wiping here eyes with the back of her hand. ‘‘Let’s go
in and talk awhile.”

We sat down in the front room, Monica and I on the couch and my father directly
facing us, rocking silently in his old chair by the window. Lucas and Frank came in
but he nodded at them and they shooed upstairs. He hocked into the spittoon on the
sill, still rocking with a lazy regularity, the sunlight highlighting the fine creases on his
brow and cheeks. Finally he smiled and said to Monica, ““That’s a mighty pretty dress
you got there, Miss Blackford.”’

Monica smiled back at him, gripping my arm. ‘“Thank you Mister Boden, but you
can call me Monica,” she said.

“No, not right yet,” he said. “I don’t think it proper to get familiar with you, like
first names and all, till I learn how to behave. You see I ain’t never had a banker’s
daughter in the house before. Now Matt, he would of turned out just like me, maybe
worse, if he hadn’t took a skip to Muncie and got some manners.”

Monica turned my way, looking distraught and confused. “‘Would you quit,” I said
to him.

‘But look at me,” he want on, “‘here it is Sunday, with all this fine and so-fisticated
company and | ain’t even shaved or scraped the dung offen by boots—”’

‘Would you shut up!” I shouted.

His eyes sparkled with a hollow little fire and he sat forward in the rocking chair,
the long sunlight blazing full on his back and shoulders. “You shut up yourself!”” he
said. “You ain’t spoke or written to me for over a year now—so you come out here on
my invite and want to shoot your own mouth off! If you wanted to get at me you
should of took the initiative yourself!”’

“So that’s it!”’ I said. ““You get me all the way out here so you could take me on
your own terms, your own ground! Well now that’s just dirty, even for you!”’

RCR/18
I thought I had gotten to him then because he receiled a little in his chair, but it
turned out he was just going back to rocking again. His jaws worked silently for a few
moments, then he spit and said, ‘““You’re a mighty pretty woman, Miss Blackford.”’

‘‘Matt thinks so,” she said, sitting nervously erect and tightening her grip on my
arm.

‘And how old are you now, Miss Blackford?”’

“Twenty-one.”

He guffawed, mumbling old enough to know better and young enough not to give a
damn, but he shut up when he saw me stiffening to get up from the couch. He rolled
his chaw and spat, asking where she met me.

‘‘At my father’s bank—last summer. He was clerking part-time.”

He paused in his rocking, peering out the window at the long rows of corn. ‘“Tell me
something Miss Blackford,” he said, chewing intently inside a mocking half-grin,
‘‘did my boy here ask you nice or come right out and feel you up?”’

Monica’s breath caught inhaling I beg your parden and I jumped up and grabbed
him by the suspenders, pulling him up almost out of the rocker. ‘‘I had my fill of your
hem and haw already today,”’ I said. “Now stop your goddamn picking at us and talk
to us straight before I bust your goddamn face! Why the hell was it you had to see us
anyway?” I began to shake him, my fists clenching tigher and crumpling the
Suspender straps until Monica cried for me to stop it and I quit shaking him. He
brought his hands up and grabbed my forearms when my grip slackened.

‘Get your hands offen me and go set down,” he said.

I let go of him and he cleared his throat and spit.

‘Matt will you tell me what’s gotten into you today,’’ Monica said.

‘IT took too much off him before I ever knew you,”’ I said, “‘so lay off me a minute
will you!”’

“Matt, he’s your father—’’

‘So what? What right does that give him to—”’

‘Listen up, Matthew,” he said, rocking and chewing again. ‘“‘Miss Blackford’s
tryin’ to talk sense to you.”

‘‘Now you listen to me old man,” I said, stepping towards him with my fists balled,

“you keep the hell on out of our affairs. You caused enough trouble already today.”’

He leaped up, the sun from the window hitting his body full and lighting up his eyes
like they were newly sparkled coals. ““Trouble!”” he spat. “I made trouble? You’re
telling me that—you the one blew his brother’s leg to pieces over some goddamn
books and a kick in the balls, and left me down here with just a couple of kids to run
the farm—no boy, you made the trouble, puttin’ all your jack into school, never
sendin’ a dime home—and then you get some pretty little rich b—some city kitten
to—”’

“Stop it!’’ Monica screamed. She threw herself sideways, burying her face in the
soft arm of the couch, and began to cry.

He kicked the rocker away and hocked one last time into the spittoon. “‘I’m sorry,
for her sake,” he muttered. ‘‘Go out and see your ma before you leave. I done said my
piece.’’ He hiked his suspenders and began to leave the room. I grabbed the spittoon
and threw it after him, and it hit the doorjamb just as he passed by it, the brass

RCR/19
clanging to the floor leaving the yb dripping and stained with the locust-colored
tobacco rheum.

‘You always was one to leave a mess,” he said, and went to the back porch where
he always cleaned his boots. a

I picked Monica up from the couch and she clung to me crying. “‘Hush it mow,”
said. ‘‘I’m sorry you had to find it out this way but you had to have it.”

She coughed gently and the sobbing began to subside a little. “Matt how ,;could
you,”’ she said, and I told her again, gently, that it was OK. “We'll go out aind see
Mother for a minute and then I’ll get Lucas to take us back,” I said. She locke :d her
hand into mine and tried to press close but I said come on now and we left the hiouse.

It was sunset now, and we walked slowly through the cornfield out to the grove}. The
shadows were long and dim in the furrows, ours bobbing vaguely between the black
lines of the corn. Monica stopped and asked about Mother and I said to forget I
didn’t like to talk much about it. She squeezed close to me between the stalks’ and
said, ““But Matt.”

“I said I don’t want to,’’ I said, bowing my face down to hers so that I felt ihe
breath hot on my cheek. A light breeze from the west was trembling the stalks nat 4
and Monica shivered, the fine lace of her dress still spilling little clouds of dust as she
shook. *‘Come on now,”’ I said.

When we got to the grove the shadows were beginning to deepen into evening, and
the sunset fell past us into the trees with a reddish angry glow. I showed Monica the
Sarah Jacobs Boden: 1906-1945 that my father had hacked out on the stone. I knelt
down and Monica fell to her knees beside me and started to pray out loud. I looked
her way, moving my head no, and she quit. The patch of grass in front of the stone
had sprung thick and untrimmed this month the third year Mother had lain beneath
it.

Monica started to cry again, the drops making little glistening spots on her dress
where the whiteness was melting red with the sunset. I bent down towards her and she
tried to lean against me looking away. ‘“What’s wrong?”’ I said.

She stood up and moved away from me, seeming strangely virginal in the redness
that was paling the grove. I got off my knees and started towards her as she stood still
again, looking down into the creek. I asked her again what was wrong, and she shook
her had, closing her eyes and sobbing again. The silence closed over her except for the
cool, screeching chirrup of the first evening crickets.

I pulled her around to face me and she tried to turn her head the other way. She
was crying hard now, her chest heaving and trembling silently. ‘I don’t want you to be
so cold,’ she said, her voice faltering with sobs. ““‘How could you be that way with
them, that way with me?”

I took one hand and grabbed her by the chin so she could not look away. Moving
my face down to hers as if to kiss her I asked her what the hell she meant.

‘What is it,” she sobbed, shaking, ‘‘that you can’t let me share anything inside
what is it Matt?”

I tensed and yanked her up hard against me. “‘Look here,’’ I said. ‘‘What I don’t
tell is for a good reason. You saw why today.”’

‘‘But how can you be so cruel, to your own father even—”’

RCR/20
‘‘“God damn my father!” I shouted, shaking her so the sound of her crying came
and went in my ears like the throbbing of the locusts. She went to slap me but I
pushed her chin back and threw her away from me. She fell down the bank in a flurry
of dust, then got up and stumbled splashing across the creek and up inside the weeds
beyond. I ran down the bank, shouting for her to come back, but she kept on going,
and when I got to the opposite lip of the bank I could barely see her with the shadows
thick and red there in the trees.

I called her name again, but already her crying was fading into the screech and
whine of the insects. The pleats of her dress thrashed as she ran, ducking limbs with a
clumsy kind of speed and grace. I started running after her, the twigs and brambles
cracking underneath my feet, and here and there an insect would make a sound like
crying and I turned before I realized what it was until turning I caught a hanging limb
full force in the side of the head. I stopped and put my hand to my temple, drawing it
away red licking it salty and hot, shouting God damn it and Monica as it throbbed,
but there was nothing but the wheeping scream of the crickets and locusts feeding my
ears like a pulsing drum. Then I got a glimpse of her, her dress billowing and flaring
as she went. through the violet smell of the woods. I put my hand up where the tree
had cut me and ran after her.

She stopped running then and I caught her out of breath and sobbing as she leaned
up against a tree, still now except for the heavy motion of her throat and chest. When
she saw me she tried to scramble away again, but I caught her and forced her to the
ground. “Please Matt,”’ she gasped, the tears running in steady streams across the
side of her face. I fell on top of her, holding her arm wide of her body as she struggled
so I could feel the hot rise and fall of her breath coming in little spurts of air inside
where the dress swelled up below me and before I knew it her arms fell limp and I
pushed up underneath the hem of her dress weeping the cricket sound full and dead
in my ears I pushed up underneath and she gave out a little gasp of air like a punc-
tured balloon. I froze, the hard sound of her breath wheeping hot ringing with the
crickets in my ears and me thinking jesus god i have i shuddered, rolling away from
her, and she let out a long sigh and began crying again—softly this time, calmly and
serenely. ““God help me,”’ she choked, and I went to her and tried to hold her but she
would not go limp in my arms. We walked back to the creek, she stumbling in my
arms, and when she slipped on one of the crossing-stones and fell in the water I
helped her up again, feeling her muddy, wet, and sobbing in the steepening darkness.

From the other side of the creek a spear of flashlite beam fell on me and Monica
where we stood, wet and hot and trembling, in the stream. “It’s Frank,” a voice came.
‘Lucas says to tell you he wants to leave for Muncie now.”’

‘You tell him we’ll be along,’ I said. ‘‘Monica fell in the creek and hurt herself.”

‘‘Need any help?”’ the voice said as the flashlight bobbed around us.

‘Tell Lucas we’ll be along,” I said again. The flashlight beam zipped away, and
there was nothing but the gurgle of the creek and dark loom of the woods, and
Monica went limp in my arms.

If you look east from the barricade, across those twin bridges on the creek, you can
see where it was once all trees, standing erect and tall and casting long proud
shadows. But the ground, in spite of those four lanes that shine like crimson ribbons

RCR/21
in the sunset, is naked now, stark and bare but still inviolate, even when night has
chased the last trace of sun. Then the only thing you can see is the silver of the
barricade, shining above all else in the cool serene moonlight, and the soft snuff of
lights in the windows across the way.

RCR/22
 

Monica

 

Virginity and my father said monica has he no father he respects me with the sickly
feeling deep down in me saying how can you say that how can you lie to him like that
when you are monica he says keep it that way it’s good collateral no man wants a flirt
or a chippy and or a whore gerald says and shut up i tell him that’s no way to talk
either of you and but father he called me a he did not father says and gerald you can
leave i want to talk with monica and alone down inside me he spoke of the sickly
feeling cried all my goodness my virginity it’s good collateral because every man wants
a virgin but my purity i lied and yes father he respects me yes matt is a good man and i
will be happy yes and he takes my hand i feel his knuckles strong and big and rough
crying he smiles i want to kiss him forever and cry papa i have forgive me but i lie to
you love him and i lied yes i do and then the flowers and lace i do so many odors i was
ill from the flowers and i doi lied and matt took my hand when i turned the virgin of
my i heard my train it rustled and silk scraping like metal the organ swelling the
carpet and along the aisle white the back my slender fingers one glistening gold used
to play the faces turning and smiling virgin but i lied yes through the stinging rice and
matt pushed the veil away trying i not to kiss him and when he saw me naked he said
that’s a good girl come on to bed now and i shut the light when i went with him i
would not put my arms my palms to his back even when his weight above me was
rocking me dizzy and not because of the ring i hurt because it was too small when i

RCR/23
felt him like a sword with my heart throbbing against the point from underneath
piercing to my very soul and i screamed please matt no he groaned rolling away sign
there in the dark trembling i was so afraid pulling the sheets tight around me i never
thought he might get cold i said i good night matt but he had gone downstairs and 1
slept without him that time and others reaching god damn it monica as i roll away in
the white stained sheets virgin in the dark and no please matt i say locking my thighs
safe in the tight stretch of sheets and angry no matt he tears them open as his knee
first forcing up between and no his face bending chest over me i try not to i try to say
no smothering he my mouth my lips but he does and it catches like a spear balling to
fists as it rises to my throat now tingling numb my knees in my elbows spread and he
lets me go lets me and i cry no matt scream devil gathering the torn sheets about me
and crouch together thighs and cry my god papa my purity i am but not crying at all
because matt is asleep naked beside me in the bed with no sheet soaking the sweat
stands on him like oil in the dark trying i to kiss him good night but i see in the other
place the bed my stain then feel it virgin seeping my blood away i can’t and i touch cry
can’t look at him even in the dark where i my blook like sap i feel the shrivel inside me
the way it spreads growing older through me like glass the way i was virgin and
breasts like gentle swells above my heart throbbing full my ribs delicate and un-
touched all and transparent when my father drew me close holding me his monica my
little girl because i had a ring and now he was going to lose me to a hick says gerald
he’s just tired of cows and he wants a little class and gerald knew at the wedding when
i was sick from the flowers it had begun to wrinkle and starve me deep down inside
when matt came for us to go i kissed goodbye papa and never wanted to go i felt his
heart right through me lace and gown and all until i thought i would shatter like glass
and your mother would be proud of he began to cry pushing me away to matt my your
husband matt when he saw me naked he said good girl and my father deep down
inside me the hollow sick feeling between my breasts screaming him kissing me my
mouth to his tongue screaming in silence like a child caught dreaming in a run with
legs that would not move i cried when he was done and the rise and fall of his flat
nippled chest deep and alabaster in the night and how i wanted him to love me to say
you have ravished my heart or some such silly kindness that would speak more than it
meant and not climb be as if i were some bitch in heat or a tree he were groping for
fruit in but i may as well have been in the upstairs of that wretched place where the
summer heat pasted me cool to the damp sheets when he finally stopped all but just
sleeping beside me and nights when the moon was up and shone across the highway
through our window i would trace the outline of his body in the moon because it was
good and strong and i loved him then when he slept and was still would i bend over
him and i like a wall my shadow fell across his chest and my breasts full and firm like
towers in the moonlight and i brought him but not matt stillness and peace as he my
lover might bring flowers until morning when he woke and without saying your breath
is wine to me or even talk with me awhile the way my lover would if he could talk
grumbling for eggs and toast the waking slants of sunlight through the window gone
downstairs and open up the jukebox rasping out that horrid caterwaul of music the
aromic crackle of fresh eggs in the pay i would hear him hum along with the slow
groan of the trucks and voices laughing jokes and eggs as they chew combing over the

RCR/24
bed tangles out of my hair until it was smooth and fine and frank i would say to him
asking to reach that little hook in back to see if his hands would be kind or like
matthew’s and he turning from the cash register a moment to help and combed all
fine and lovely why would a young man like you i said hoping for him to tell me why
he left college to come here and share it like a morsel with me his hands were kind and
i was starving for them any of them to notice the way they did when i cried and frank
could say nothing but matt said get upstairs until matt was gone and i let one of them
in the back door so frank would not see but worse than matt he shoved a chair up
under the doorknob and said in case that boy comes prowling i don’t worry i said and
he spit looking at me naked even before i was undressed but i never said a word never
screamed help because i thought he still might be kind and whisper to be like a lover
but all he said was what an engine and laughed with the smell of oil in the sheets until
i felt my stomach ache and double and thought i would have to vomit but i couldn’t
when he kissed me i thought you ugly man but he leered grinning with teeth black at
the roots and breathed like gasoline on me and said you’re some pumper baby and i
slapped him beginning to cry and god damn bitch he said but never hit me getting up
and taking the chair away he spit again and opened the door with his bandanna
hanging on the knob outside and when he saw it there he looked at me and swore
furiously calling me a cheap whore and when he had gone i got up and put my robe on
to wait for frank to come back who never told but could not see that i was shrivelling
inside curled and hot like burning bacon until one day it was matt who found the door
closed when he came back and burst in nailing the man naked to the wall with his
arms outstretched screaming you son of a bitch you god damn bastard 1 no matt
crying you'll kill him with his hanging limp from fear inside his thighs until matt let
him go because he knew then he knew all of them once he knew one and knew them
from the diner the way they would look over their coffee they always looked but never
said your eyes are like doves but waving their fingers straight in the air to tell me yes
they would and i took them waiting for one to whisper secrets saying your lips are
lovely but when they rolled down beside me and muttered you throw a mean fuck
sweetheart the words would strike me like swords between my breasts thinking my
purity how gerald said or a whore since no man wants a whore so 1 must not be weary
and shrivelling where my body i was once a virgin raped not loved so i am i still 1 was i
was thinking virgin inviolate with my lover untouching beside me in the moon
remembering his hands were kind and once or twice i said frank to hear the sound of
it there in the moon but matt stirred at the sound vanishing my lover fleeing his body
like a ghost and i never said frank once again so that he would sleep and i could keep
the lover there in the strong sprawl of his body until morning when he was matt again
and he would touch me his hands on my shoulders not gentle like a lover’s and say i
bought a house in town and frank is going to quit i said frank wanting him one last
time to touch me gently the way he would hook my dress at the register to say it hurts
me to go or anything for his face to say virgin so 1 could answer yes and not a
truckstop whore pure and clean of heart for none but my lover shall have me so he
went to muncie without saying so much as an adieu or i will think of you the way a
lover would see me across the miles the blind distances and say yes i know her face her
breasts as if they were yesterday but i never saw him so i could not know and when

RCR/25
matt said now that we have a house there is a room just for you when i wanted him so
to say let me be tender now i will be lover to you instead he showed me the room and
said i figured you'd like it there’s a private bath and everything but then i could not
love him even the way i did when he slept and was no longer matt but his shoulders
basking strong and silent in the moonlight i thinking i will not touch you feeling virgin
and nodding yes since you are my lover and how good and strong you are but set me as
a seal in your mind and now there was not even that because he was two rooms down
the hall and he slept with me alone and took the lover in him away from me so that i
was solitary and could no longer look upon him shining strong in the moon and say to
myself virgin nodding yes because i am for him only i am a garden locked for him to
enter nodding virgin as he slept but alone feeling the wrinkles like wet skin spreading
inside me virgin saying no wrinkling never again childless through my loins unloved
and crying naked at the creases where i virgin once was smooth and silence now
beneath me through the floor when matt had gone to work there were no cups
clacking nervous to the raw music jangle above the roar of the trucks now all through
breakfast i would hear them the way i could at the diner they would tremble the house
rumbling virgin so i would think of them saying you throw a mean one and bob my
head crying as they pass downtown where i would dress up and walk sometimes just to
wave or smile so the faces would say it and i could answer them yes peeking over a
counter of cheap cosmetics thinking my hands would drip with myrrh for him if only
he would come to loving me and i tried some but only the finest for him i would not be
cheap or smelling like a foolish chippy when i asked him his hands his speech was
gentle and kind the way he wiped his hands on his apron when i asked him to sniff the
scent i felt rising from me like love and do you like it i said would you like it if my
myrrh my body were sweet and smooth like it you could be lover to me but he backed
away and frank i said but he was gone and not frank ran swinging through the door to
the kitchen when i saw it was not frank at all not anyone my lover could have been his
hands were kind walking back to the house the trucks along the street whipping wind
through my skirt and i held it down with my hands like little girls and their dresses in
the wind so the boys will not look i cried when one did from my not being careful and
papa said it was all right monica you couldn’t help it and i couldn’t monica my little
girl and i couldn’t either when i cried matt in the woods or they finished with me like
an old pan and said a sweet little engine or even the night i made frank my lover
saying will you sleep with me because his hands were kind even saying no monica but i
took him dripping my hands dripping white with myrrh and i was sick from love
saying frank i am so afraid of him he has saying stolen my virginity crying virginity the
way he had slain my lover in the night taking him from my very bed the lover in him
he had beaten and killed suffocating alone in his room as i cried by the window and
frank don’t go because i’m afraid thinking how can i be virgin if he goes and there is
no one but matt to never love me because he has killed beaten him already my lover in
the night saying here is your room monica not even saying dear or i’ll be down the hall
not asking anything but breakfast or new socks with his fists balled crushing the
paper over coffee always as if he were going to roll it and hit me or worse with it i
would scream and say please matt with my robe gathering down between my thighs so
he could not and he always left without touching me so i would shiver no virgin feeling

RCR/26
that roll of newspaper thrusting when the house falling silent alone hearing him dare
me to take them like before to give myself to lovers false who would mock me and say
nice fuck lady grinning with lumps of tobacco and dropping not bad for free rolling
them in the grease and gasoline odor coming off them like trickles of perspiration but
if one of them had loved me it would be enough the way i would have sighed cuddling
down close to him in the sheets and kiss softly his neck but it was always different with
the creases clogged grime to their shoulders like tar patches on the street where the
pavement will crack and bend when the tires roll flattening them i thought frank felt
the clog wrinkle in my breasts and down inside where they would come into me my
body shrinking around them like melting wax showing naked the black twisted taper
inside me where i could think virgin before but was now a lie cold and black
shrivelling when i could not be loved did they respect no me lying yes father they he
respects me the way his teeth glittered all white and ivory when i lied yes to him and he
hugged me tight his monica little his little girl telling me it’s good collateral the only
way he knew how so he would buy me sunday dresses decked in lace not the money
but the hands that loved me with the big roughswollen knuckles when he put them at
the foot of my bed saying i’m not as wise on things like this as your mother was so tell
me if you don’t really like them and papa i would say you really shouldn't do this
meaning thank you papa but it is not the dresses at all just your arms would be
enough like the times my dress blew up in the wind and you just held me not even
saying let’s get a soda or her’s a balloon but to say monica my little monica the way
you held me against the warm spot deep in your chest i could hear your heartbeat and
monica you said it’s OK and almost reaching through your shirt starch and all feeling
the hum and throb of your life with my very fingers i know you through and through
my father the way i tried to with matt when i could nod yes to virgin and not lie or
need a lover for the yes before we were married the way i chose him to know to feel like
that piercing the distance as a lever should to unball those fists from crushing the bills
across the counter in a clench of coins and miss blackford would you bending he
would say gently to bow to me and nod i would yes i’d like that or what time since we
always walked though i could have asked papa what about the convertible since matt
was a good driver but that would not have been as good as the dusking sidewalks for
him to walk for me to smooth those knotted fingers long and bony into kindness from
crumpling those bills the way i saw him at the bank and sometimes whispering my
secrets as a lover should when i was a little girl and the wind caught my skirt thinking
he would smile and say when i was a boy but he was always just walking or rocking the
porch swing with his head back the way he did at rookers’ pursing his lips soundlessly
until i would whisper i love you thinking that would draw it out of him some secret of
his soul like a token drop shed of blood for me from his heart pumping his lover he
took me and kissed me until i would try to say matt drawing away i feel the pressure of
his hand trembling where he held me the back of my neck smooth and white under
the porch eaves saying matt but never do you love me since that was for him to say
hoping i could reach into him and find it there hiding with the rest of his secrets that
grain of seed deep inside him that said i love you the way a lover might say it
spreading through him until those rough bony hands would loosen and become gentle
like my father’s but i never found it even after we were married when he rolled to me

RCR/27
in the night saying god damn it monica and hurting hard through the sheets my
thighs i felt the seed that said it withering in me too so that i could no longer nod
virgin but when he slept i saw it and made him not matt my lover untouching so i
could be pure again like a child but wiser and ravishing he my lover’s heart so i could
whisper yes because his hands unknotted when he slept until he would awaken and
the lover in him shattered like wraps crumbling from a statue but not that more like a
crude rock because he would never be gentle but like a chiseler sharp jabbing at my
loins my heart and finally casting me off myself like a rock beaten and misshapen the
way his mother’s first stone where it lay across the creek from the place he took me the
first time he did it he raped me there pinning me to the ground i spit dust and leaves
working down inside my dress where the buttonholes pulled empty and loose i felt the
pushing and jab like a pole or what i knew must have been as a churn handle or a
blade twisting in me crying matt until i could not walk and i fell in the water cooling
me there in the creek fresh and damp when it spilled from my dress the muddied lace
wet down inside me thinking my virginity monica my virgin little girl and it’s frank i
heard the voice say never asking virgin when i couldn’t answer without nodding crying
no but i felt it when i fell on the grass beyond my knees trembling weakly through the
trees the stars hot and white the moon when matt helped me up i saw the stone
thinking he never told me he never told me anything sarah where boden the grass was
thick and caught in the heels of my shoes so that i tripped again in the flashlite silent
never said a word or asking virgin when matt said come on digging his fingers into the
damp hollows of my arms feeling sharp and tense above where my breasts sagged wet
and loose and piercing like a thousand tiny needles he says let’s go get you home i cry
and the night smell of corn and hay clogs in me choking virgin virgin and i think in
screams thinking monica virgin his breath hot where my dress is open was undone
open to him cutting my ears like a throb of knives screaming my father monica your
little girl and his fingers blades cold in my armpits ripping me like teeth to shreds
inside he helps me to the truck my blood churning runs wild inside me gashes like
rivers inside spilling my soul my heart my purity virgin i cry as the stars shadows begin
to move where i rest my cheek along the glass the constellations blur to dust sleeping 1
cry sleep i crying sleep i sleeping my love in wait your embrace my head is wet with
dew and touching me virgin for my love i had put off my dress so how could i put it
back on as i had bathed my feet and could not soil them sleeping my lover put his
hand to the latch and i awaken my heart thrilling within me and my hands drip with
myrrh for him my love and he kisses me opening the door and falling to me virgin on
the bed you have ravished my heart and terrible as an army of banners he conquers
me he my prince conquers me virgin and monica he asks and i nod yes virgin yes for
he is my lover and his hands are kind and soft like dreams.

RCR/28
 

Frank

(Ahead the highway shimmers, the patches of quicksilver mirage melting away as
we approach; the tarred roadbed joints, black and steaming, and the stubby white
lines that grow taller with proximity go spinning beneath us. On either side the
bobwire flies by, climbing and dipping with the crest of the embankment. We pass the
old house and barn twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and I nod—Lucas, pa—as we
go by) it doesn’t matter what you call it—I-69 or U.S. 30 or I-94 or what—it’s all the
same in the end, that great white swath of superlane spraying across the countryside
with the bobwire whizzing by at either hand. Five years in the cab and I still don’t
know all of it, but I do know enough to tell you that it doesn’t make any difference
how you number it. It’s all part of the network, an organism that somehow set itself
down and levelled those breaks through the hills and shored up the approaches and
causeways for the swamps and rivers, axing those old gravel roads in two to make way
for the garish parade of progress.

The truck driver loves it too, and don’t let him tell you otherwise. It gives him a feel
of power—all that tonnage and momentum at his back, those chest-high tires singing
down a hundred miles of concrete and clicking over the tarry joints without so much
as a rattle in the cab. Once in a while he’ll catch a stray deer or something and it will
give him a good jolt, and he’ll mutter Jesus Christ and pull over to the side to stop and
look at the carcass. He’ll take a gander at some big buck’s blood where it’s splattered
across that wide ribbon of expressway they built just for him and the rest like him,
and you know that even when he says Jesus Christ at the shattered buck that he’s got
to be loving every minute of it, deep down inside.

RCR/29
The organism has its leeches and parasites too, but aside from a few official an-
tibodies in Indianapolis most of them are more symbient than parasite, especially the
truck stops. These are something else the driver loves no matter how much he says he
hates them. You may hear him bitch about the watered Cokes and the carburetor
taste in the hamburgers, but all he’s telling you there is that the grub is not the main
attraction—and it may not really be that bad anyway because he still eats there no
matter how much he complains. The important thing is usually the waitress—who, at
the classy stops, is probably the most beautiful thing he’s seen all day, with her
breasts and buttocks smoothed over firmly by the short, tight-fitting uniform; but at
the lesser grubhouses she’s usually some fat old bag with no teeth who reeks of
gasoline even more than the hamburgers do and looks like she belongs under the head
of a Mack truck herself—and the driver’s get to love her too, even if it’s only in the
way he loves that semi-tractor she so reminds him of. He loves them all really, because
whether it’s the Howard Johnson complex on the interstate or the grubby two-pump
meal shack down some secondary highway, it’s all part of the road, part of the
organism, part of him

(three illuminated
sign-towers rise above the hump of the overpass ahead, beyond where the two sym-
metrical ramps form the norther half of the interstate diamond. We angle gently
into the exit, muse over the black scream of tire-marks where someone almost missed
the turnoff; the folds of infield grass, thick and green in the sun, slope down the
embankments to the open V of the drainage ditch. The ramp comes to a T with the
other highway below where the red octagon of the sign speaks silently, boldly. We jerk
with the grind of downshift) my brother Matt has a diner down there, down old 38,
on the east edge of town. It isn’t all white brick, spick and shiny, like the steps on the
interstate; it’s more like old 38 herself, a little too small for comfort and pocked with a
long history of repairs and refurbishings. There isn’t much business anymore, either
for 38 or for Matt’s diner, so once in a while when I get some time ahead of schedule I
drop down the old way and pick up a soda.

If he’s happy to see us he rams a quarter in the juke-box and lets the country-rock
jingle and twang in the background. He tells us how bad business is and how he was

_ screwed when he couldn’t get the capital to pick up on the franchise at the 38 in-
terchange. He is forty-two now, fat and slightly graying, with small mahogany eyes
and a face that lights up like cherry Kool-Aid every time he gets agitated. The un-
familiar trucker is not sure at first that he likes Matt, because of the way he kept
telling our old man to sell to the government and then God damned the interstate
when he didn’t get the franchise. ,

But what the trucker doesn’t know, what he couldn’t possibly know, is that my
brother had that franchise deal in his lap when someone pulled the rug out from
under his rocker. In fact, you might say he had it in his very pocket, except that he
woke up one morning to discover that some whore named Fortune had stolen his
pants. Sometimes Matt gets to name-calling, with words like prick and bastard and
whore, and when he gets around to that last one and we see a bitter gleam in his eye,
we know the pressure’s building up again in that steam-kettle skull of his and he
needs an excuse to blow. So we ask him something like, ‘“‘Bye the bye Matt, how’s

RCR/30
Monica lately?’’

It’s then that he slides back away from the counter, hooks his thumbs in his belt-
loops, and shakes his head, his eyebrows drawing into a tight line across the bridge of
his forehead. “‘She’s back up at the hospital for a spell,” he says. ‘I think it ought to
be okay after this time.” And if he says that, we know it’s happened again: that she’s
held her hands down on a kitchen burner til the flesh smoked, that she’s put a bullet
through the plaster in the bedroom because she decided at the last minute not to put
it through her head; or maybe this time she wasn’t trying to hurt herself at all, but he
just came home from the diner one day and found her standing in the shower fully
clothed with the water turned on as cold as it would go.

‘Hope it works out okay this time Matt,’’ we say, sipping discreetly at the soda.

‘It will—this time,’’ he says, meaning this time it better, this time he’s got just
enough to cover the bills she’s accumulated down there at Richmond and after this
time there won’t be any more jack left in the old cookie jar. He mops the counter with
a damp rag, stabbing at the beads of water where we set the soda glass down between
sips. He tires to talk, but the thoughts seem to evaporate before he can make them
into words. “Fuck it,’’ he says, and chucks the rag into the sink. “It must be time for
you to get moving

(moving lazily through tree-lined streets, the lawns square and prim like
cloverleaf grass, the trellised houses, sharply and gracefully eaved, close and warm,
with windows framed by drapes: the trucker loves them too, the sleepy streets and
sidewalks diagrammed with hopscotch squares, the downtown traffic signals that he
has to hit just right to make it through without a stop or downshift. Beyond the
downtown, the humble rush of activity, is a cemetery, spreading where the houses thin
out into what was once all cornfield and fallow. There are no trees, and the marble
basks and shimmers in proud formation among the flowers and grass. There is one
with the name Boden on it, a stone newer and shinier than its dates would indicate.
The slab is purplish marble gleaming like a jewel from the level of the grass) I had it
picked out,’’ Matt says, looking me straight and hard in the face. “I had it picked out
in my mind the day I got home and saw that hunk of rock he’d given her. But now I’m
not sure I like it anymore.”

I nod over coffee, and he brings the pot to the counter and refills my cup. “‘I
thought it might happen this way when you first got him to sell,’’ I say without ac-
cusation. He turns back the burners and lifts a Twinkie down from the Snak-Rak.
‘“‘Here’s one for the road,” he says. ‘“‘On the house.”’

“Obliged,’’ I say.

The jukebox arm slicks and drops on the second of three, and Matt paces, running
his fingers through his hair. “It’s that goddamn lawyer’s mess. He should have told
the truth instead of lying to him like that.”” Matt leans down on the counter, wringing
his hands and looking at me in earnest. “I knew it was going across the creek, but I
never thought—well Christ Frank, how the hell was I to know they were putting it
smack dab through her ground?”’

“You couldn’t of,’ I say, and put the Twinkie in my coat pocket along with the oily
rags and unopened packs of chewing gum. ‘‘You want me to bring the pickup next
week?”’

RCR/31
‘T already got the stone bought,” he nods. ““Damn that man. If he wouldn’t act like
such a bastard—”’

‘‘He wouldn’t be the old man,”’ I say, finishing the coffee. Matt is right about his
being a bastard. He was the last one to sign over land for the right-of-way, and he
would have gone to jail before he sold, except the lawyer Matt hired told him the grove
wasn’t part of the deal. It wasn’t until the papers were all drawn up and in front of
him to sign that he realized what the parallels and slash diagonals on the map really
meant—and he ripped the deeds up, swearing at the lawyer until they told him it
wouldn’t make any difference whether he signed or not, that the road was going
through and he might as well give them his John Hancock and take the money.

‘Yeah he sure was a sonofabitch about signing over that ground,’’ Matt says.

““Can’t say as I blame him,”’ I say.

Matt laughs to himself as I push the cup away and begin to leave.

‘““What’s that?’’ I say. |

‘Blood money,”’ he laughs, with an unfunny despair. ‘he still calls it blood money

(the way he called it that when Matt gave me jack for college and I dropped out
after two years of Wolfe and Faulkner trying to tell me what I already knew too well.
‘‘Matt,”’ I said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” and when I told the old man he said
that’s more like it you should of had more sense in the first place, so I told him I was
going to work for Matt at the diner and he screamed, ‘‘More blood money!”’ “‘Blood
of what?” I asked him and he said it was blood of his that that was two of us now and)
what the hell you mean, that makes three?’’ Matt says, peering into the old man’s
wrinkled beehive scowl. He wrings his hands tightly; they gleam with sweat by the
light of the kitchen lamp. Lucas looks on, his jaw set firmly as he stands behind the
chair where the old man sits.

‘IT know, I know, you got it all thought and figured out,’ the old man mutters.
‘You took yourself and went to Muncie, and that was one you stole from me. I can
abide that, now. But then when you done and took Frank, first college when he didn’t
have need or inclination for it—then when he was ruint there you get him to sling
hash in that there diner of yours. Now that un I can’t abide cause you didn’t give no
say—”’

‘‘Now wait a minute!’’ The hands clench, not together like prayer, but apart in fists.
The old man flicks a moth off the table, settling back in his chair without resignation.

‘“T’m waitin’,” he says.

The fists whip upwards and poise trembling above the tabletop. “‘I thought it would
be good for him to—to have a chance, to get away,”’ he says. “I thought he could do
good—’’ Silence.

A mock-patient huff of breath. “I’m still waitin’.”’

‘Well what the hell you want me to say, that I was wrong, that it was no good for
him and I’m a goddamned bastard that I ever put him there in the first place?’’ The
fists flutter helplessly.

The toothless mouth across the table contracts and then reams a rust-colored glob
into the brass spittoon. ‘““You guess it about right, city boy,’’ the mouth sputters,
forming a bitter grin. ““You just about got it.”’

‘‘God”’ one of the fists sails “damn you!”’ through the pool of light around the

RCR/32
table, burying itself dully in the whisk-cropped, toothless lips. It makes no more
sound then a man fluffing his pillow.

The old man wipes the blood off with the back of his hand, then reaching back and
takes Lucas by the wrist. ‘““Get me a Coke,”’ he says, and Lucas goes to the back porch.

Matthew is sitting now, with his head bowed down between his knees and his hands
locking at the back of his neck. “‘I did it for her,”’ he sobs. ‘““You made me do it! You
made me!”

Lucas comes back with the Coke fizzing bubbles where it narrows at the top and
the old man sets it on the table, mopping his bloody lips with the corner of the
tablecloth. ‘‘You and then Frank and now her. That’s three you done stole from me.
You took Sarah now too.”

‘I wouldn’t of had to, if you weren’t—”’ Faltering now, sobbing from inside the
shadows of his knees and elbows.

The old man bolts and kicks up into the huddle of head and limbs, and Matt jerks
upright in his chair, his hands grabbing to his lips moistening with blood and
bootblack. ““You wouldn’t of had to hell! You wouldn’t of had to get her a narrow-
sized plot neither! You think I’m a goddamn immortal you think I’m God or
something that I ain’t ever going to need a place too? Or maybe you think I ain't good
enough to lay with her!’’ He spits tobacco and blood and grabs Matt by the hair,
holding his face up so that the lips glow trickling red in the lamplight. “‘Is that it? Is
that what you been thinking? Cause if it is you ain’t really been thinking at all, city
boy. Just who laying with who made you in the first place? Or maybe you still think we
found you under a goddamn cabbage!”’ He snickers savagely at the thought.

And Matt, crying now with blood and tears: ‘“‘No I never thought—’”’

The old man releasing him with angry finality: ““Take him home now. I done said
my piece.’’ He grabs the Coke from the table and whips it to his mouth without even
removing his chaw.

“You'd best go now,”’ Lucas said solemnly.

Matt sits in the right of the cab and I drive. I stop and let the pickup idle where the
upheaval of the expressway spills diagonally across the gravel road. The two furrows
of earth angle into the distance beyond the creek, the thrust of felled trees and the
naked roots of the grove casting sleepless lopsided shadows in the moon. From the
upturned trees to the mud-clogged wash of the creek the line of caterpillars glints
faintly.

Matt pressed his forehead against the window, sagging against the door blubbering
god damn god damn it all let’s get moving”’ (back at the house: Monica with her long
hair piled untidily, with a hint of craziness in its disarray: “‘Did it go badly Frank?”’
Matt brushing quickly past her to the stairway, and I: ‘Look at his lip and see for
yourself” and ‘‘Frank”’ she says will you sleep with me tonight and I no Monica and I
alone she pulling me frank down on the couch and i frank no monica no and she
please frank just like saying please matt her husband my brother no monica no more
no) and I knew even the first of them, knew them all along before he did, before I
moved down to Muncie, when she and Matt moved to the big house in town. The
upstairs at the diner was a little apartment then, and I slept on the couch in the living
room. Monica didn’t work at the diner, since that was one of the conditions old man

RCR/33
 

Three Women (from the sequence Harvest 1865) / David Kirkpatrick
Blackford had laid down when he helped Matt finance the business. But she foiled
whatever aims he had with that stipulation, the way she sat behind me at the cash
box, watching the flux of customers with a glazed, sad-eyed uninterest. Sometimes
she would talk to me for short spells, asking about college and why I came to work for
Matt in the first place. But she never really sounded like she expected an answer, even
when her eyes started to moisten and the crying, noiseless and placid, began again. I
saw it coming even then, and knew them: the truck drivers, most of whom hadn’t
been home for a good screw in days, watching her above the horizons of each other’s
faces flashing big eyes and upturned fingers in their expressions of cab-driven lust.
Matt knew it some, but not enough, because even when he shouted from the grill and
told her to get the hell on upstairs he only sharpened their cutting-edge. The truckers
would never have treated such a tasty bitch that rudely, and they vowed to soften
Matt’s abuses with their own peculiar brand of kindness.

And then, one day when Matt had gone to Muncie, one of them finally made good
on that promise. I had come upstairs after the noonday rush to stretch out for awhile
and found an unfamiliar pair of dungarees draped over the couch. I pulled a ban-
danna out of one of the pockets and read the initials on it, wondering if the J in the
middle stood for John or Jesse or what. Then I tied it to the knob on the bedroom door
and went back down the stairs, out of the diner, and down the highway towards town.
It was on the way back I saw the semi tanker that had been in our lot, stopped on old
38 at the first traffic signal. The driver was mopping sweat off the back of his neck,
and I squinted to see if the kerchief was familiar. It was.

‘You heard didn’t you?”’ she said when I got back.

“No, I just saw,” I told her, stretching out on the couch. “He left his pants on my
bed.”’

And she moved to where my feet are crossed over the arm rest and looking at me
along the length of the couch: ‘‘Are you going to tell him?’’ she says quietly, fearfully.
And then, in a sudden rush of words: ‘“‘Don’t Frank I’m so afraid he’II—”’

I sit up on the couch. “Afraid of Matt? For Christ sakes why?”’

She drops down beside me on the sofa, tightening the belt of her robe. ‘‘Don’t you
see?’’ she says, the tears beginning to form in the glaze of the irises. ““Two years and
you still don’t see it?’’ She rises and runs to the bedroom, the door crashing shut
behind her and I muttering Jesus Christ what is I don’t see now (thinking the fluff of
her robe soft on the outside but the lining must have been silk and it scraped against
her body when she moved, scraped singing like a woods full of crickets smelling the oil
of the dungarees on the back of the couch the musky tar smell of the highway rolling
off the cushions like the barnyard odor of the sofa at home the farm then school the
diner not home the house in town anymore

(Later, in the soft hush of
the big house in town the trees rattling in the gurgling eaves she stirs beneath me on
the couch

“It’s raining,” she says (and ‘“‘monica’’ i say “‘i’ve got to go i have a run and what if
matt”’

‘“‘Matt knew,’’ she says, “he knew about all of them one more won’t hurt.” (and i
‘‘iesus don’t you see i’m his brother it’s different that way and what if he”

RCR/35
(and she again her throat working in the dry swallows before the tears come) “Matt
knew, Frank” (tearfully insistent) ““he knew all of them.”’

(she reaches for her robe where it is crumpled on the floor, spattered with the
shadows of rain on the windows) i grab her by the wrist and kneel above her on the
couch she no longer reaching for the robe she crosses her arm letting the fingers arch
delicately to the shoulders (the way you see them in paintings of women caught
bathing :

(“i should never of come in”’ i say ‘‘i wouldn’t even have gone to the farm except i
was the one helped move her and oh jesus what if matt wakes up now’”’

‘Don’t worry,”’ she cries (trying to cling to me now), “‘please Frank don’t worry
about Matt don’t go now—’”’ (i rise and go to the window where the narrow whisper of
a breeze is tickling the drapes the cool air sends shivers rising from my calves and
along my spine) she reaches over the back of the couch (touching her finger to my
backbone

‘‘Frank,”’ she says, ‘‘I want you to stay please.’’ (and wheeling away from her “‘how
many times have you said that before not to me but others why don’t you ball matt for
a change after all he is your’’

‘‘No that’s not right’’ (sobbing) “don’t you see yet I can’t he won’t ever I’m afraid I
tell you I can’t!” (and i why monica why not

‘Why do you think we bought a home with so many bedrooms and don’t say in case
we had children” she jumps and jerks her robe a moist fire welling up in her eyes you
mean he can’t get it up i say and she hurling a lamp crash to the floor ‘“‘no no no that’s
not it at all how can I make you understand I’m afraid’”’ afraid i say you mean he
beats you “I mean he raped me”’ she screams ‘‘and I couldn’t ever help it”’ but he’s
your husband “‘not then he wasn’t” then why did you marry ‘‘my virginity I was afraid
I would have to because”’ you could have divorced ‘‘but” him ‘‘it doesn’t matter he
knew them all” so he loves you ‘‘no” he does ‘“‘don’t tell me that he’”’ you ‘‘never’’
mean “‘did”’ he “before’’ you mean he never “I never let him’’ you mean “‘a few times’’
you “‘when he”’ but “he made me” he’s your husband ‘‘can’t I make you understand it
doesn’t matter I hate him so he has stolen all he knew all of them has stolen my life
my virginity I tried to let him love me but he but it never but i

could
never

let him’’)))))))) she runs screaming to the
kitchen i frank collapse on the couch the sheets dank and gray in the rainy light i head
in hands thighs trembling strange and shame i thinking jesus poor matt sixteen poor
matt years monica poor wife matt and me frank and she (the back door slams i wrap
tangle wisp of clammy sheet and from the door rain streaking the glass she is like a
dancer there in the yard like a puppet dancer she opens her robe to the rain god damn
i mutter god help her god love us all) and behind me, finally, trembling with calmness,
the voice of Matt, awake and knowing, ‘‘you better get on back to Muncie Frank
you'll miss your run.”’

I clutch the sheets tight around me and stare wordlessly at him. He sits down at the
table and pours two cups of coffee. “Drink up,’’ he says. ‘“You’ll want to be wide
awake. The roads are bad this morning.”

RCR/36
“‘T’m sorry Matt,” I say feebly.

‘Well you never know,” he says, sparking a cigarette and looking out at Monica
through the rain-mottlled window. She is standing still now, her robe fastened tightly
about her as she faces away from us across the alley-way. The rain has clotted her hair
and pasted it down across the collar of the robe. ““Take a good look out there,
brother,’’ Matt says. ‘Someday you may want one of your own.” He buries his chin in
his robe, drawing on the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, away from where the
lips are split in a crease of dried blood. The smoke makes his eyes water, and I go to
the front room and gather my clothes from the couch.

When I am dressed I open the door without speaking and begin to leave. He calls
my name from the kitchen.

‘‘Obliged for you going out there with me last night,”’ he says.

“Sure,” I say.

“And Frank—’”’

“Yeah?”

“You're still welcome here any time, Frank.”’

“Obliged,”’ I say. I step out into the rain and listen as the door clicks shut behind
me

(it is U.S. 40 that stretches now before the cab, shining with distertion; the
twin windshield blades bob uselessly across the glass as new blobs and thin eddies of
rain spawn in their wake. I check the canvased load of quarrystone, its image pocked
by rain in the panel mirror to the left of the cab. 55 is the limit here but they let the
semis do 60 on the downgrade because they need the momentum to make the next
crest. I watch the needle tremble between the six and the zero, glancing ahead to the
crossroads at the bottom of the grade and the twin bridges beyond, thinking they
didn’t have to do it here like they did for the interstate they didn’t axe this one in two
the way they did the road to the farm and suddenly the road cross son of a) sheen of
right of way son of a bitch blocked i gasp through the wipers bob in the rain god damn
car broadside it in my vision from the side of the road at the foot brakes screaming
hill ram clutch stop turn anything god forget the damn bridge past clear of the car
jagged weight trailer buckle skid turn crashing guardrail hold sideways sounds of roar
canvas shredding loose quarrystone on the road jumping sideways rolling bridge past
behind rolling trees crashing limbs through the window wipers still and shatters and
bent glass my arm and jesus my eye lunging for the cab door god damn help it won’t
rain open dribbling my scalp my back the window jagged through limbs glass against
a splintered trunk in my eyes my back the door son of a bitch curling my face out of
the rain body balled lunging the door won’t open |

(then voices sirens
bawling through the rain got to he’s get hhim all out scrunched up in there i never saw
him coming and how he skidded long on the bridge before the sherriff can we’ve got
get here an ambulance on the way see if you can get him he’s out all scrunched up he
must be hurt bad more voices and glass shattering arms ropes dangling to my
shoulders chin jerking wait goddammit you trying to yank his head off get that rope
out of there just arms pulling now lifting feeling headfirst rain scalp and shoulders
cool and damp frank boden someone says his name is frank boden sheriff on my back

RCR/37
below numb shoulders ringing sirens hands pressing numb pain you'll be all right my
eye cool that’s better) waking now and again thinking haze of voices sirens gone now
someone asking can i see no him out of the but question my name is i’m sorry black
sir ford you can’t see him no he’s still in i shock must see him immediately i told you
it’s ican’t family let business you see him my name is i don’t care geared what your
black name ford is and i gradually fading now sounds and lights focusing white and
pain my eye bandaged not my eye above it skin clotting cool and moist and nurse
white focusing smile has my brother matt hands come gently yet on my forehead no
any ouch messages jesus that no hurts is it broken where’s the fading cast fading now
returning again each time more in focus my shoulder not broken too low the pain in
the back of my lung, sharp and hard when I breathe, the morning baths cool and
unembarrassing on my stomach where I cannot watch her, see the nurse’s face clearer
now, the day-nurse with the oversized ass and the gentle manner telling me everything
will be okay, the ribs and the cut above my eye will heal but I will have to be patient
with that jab of pain in the back of my lung. I try to roll off my stomach but get as far
as my rib cage down hard on the matress and I feel the pain as a tunnel of fire
spearing down from below my shoulder. The nurse says I caught a hunk of limb there
and I was lucky it didn’t poke into anything more than a corner of the lobe. She says
to straighten up Mister Boden there’s a visitor outside, and i nod and roll back down.
I start to say Matt but when the door opens for her to leave I hear the scrape of
overalls and I say Lucas instead.

‘‘Howdy Frank,”’ he says, taking off his hat as he comes in the door. He brushed it
off and hooks it on the knob. “Sorry I couldn’t get up here no sooner but you know
how things—”’ he quits talking and settles stiffly into the chair by the lampstand. *‘]
brought a book for you to read,’’ he says. ‘“‘Some O. Henry stories. I kind of like ’em.”
Lucas fidgets, and from what I can tell he is not chewing tobacco today.

‘“‘Whatsa matter,” I say, craning my neck sideways to look at him when I talk.
‘Wouldn’t that pinkie let you chew in the room?”

He doesn’t answer the question, and the air goes silent for a long moment.
‘“Frank,’’ he says, “‘where you goin’ when you get out of here?”’

“Back to work,” I say.

‘‘Pa thought you might come down to the farm for a spell.’’ The heel of his boot is
scraping along his overall leg the way he shooes flies, making a sound like a whittling
knife.

‘IT don’t think so,” I say. “I got my rent in Muncie all paid up through July so I
might as well go back there.” He is still making that little whittling sound with his
shoe. I roll my head down so that I can only see part of him now, that starched strip of
blue that pulls across the shoulders to the round brass buttons. His jaw is motionless
but I can see his knee bobbing above where his foot is making the knife sound against
his pants. “I just don’t think so, Lucas. Besides, what if the old man sees me reading
OQ. Henry? He might put the goddamn thing through the stump grinder.” I start to
laugh, and Lucas pats his overall knee and says rock salt, but I can’t keep laughing
and Lucas can’t either. The air close to the sheets is stale, and I turn my head back his
way so I can see him better.

That noise by his foot stops, and he nods. “‘I told pa you probly wouldn’t care to but

RCR/38
he wanted me to ask just the same.”

“Obliged,”’ I say. “For O, Henry too.”’

“Yup,” he says. There is another stretch of dead silence, and that scraping noise
with his foot starts up again. My neck begins to get stiff and I turn my face down, but
he stops his foot and says, ““You heard about Matt’s Monica yet?”’

I try to roll back to face him, but the pain in my shoulder drives me back down. “‘I
haven’t heard from him since I been here. What happened?”’

‘‘Now I ain’t heard anything from him direct,’’ Lucas says, “but the other day I
drove down to the diner because pa wanted to see him about the plot again—and
Matt was gone but the girl there told me he had to take Monica down to Richmond.”’

“Richmond?” I say. ‘““You mean to the crazy farm?”’

I turn just my head so it does not hurt as much as when I try to roll and see him. He
scratches his scalp with his bony fingers. The nails are trimmed and clean, even
underneath. ‘‘Well I asked her why and she said she had a friend told her that Monica
gave some kid in a restaurant the big eye—’”’

He stops, looks down at his lap where the starchy overalls are crumpled from sitting
in the truck. A grimace crosses his face, as quickly as he might flick an insect off his
nose. ‘This kid was cleanin’ tables, and according to this girl I talked to she just
looked up from her coffee and give it to him straight.”’

“Give what to him straight?”’

‘That she wanted him to lay her,’’ Lucas says, wiping his brow with the cuff of his
flannel shirt.

“Jesus Christ.”’

‘The kid got scared and told the proprieter, and the proprieter knew who she was
so he called Matt and told him he was going to prosecute Monica for soliciting—”’

‘‘Soliciting!’’ I shout. ‘‘God damn him! How long ago was this?’’

‘‘A week or so. Right after you had the crackup.” Lucas dips his finger in the water
pitcher to test the coolness, then pours himself some to drink. “But that ain’t all the
news,” he says somberly, without excitement. ‘“‘Monica’s brother—that scaly banker
son of a bitch who tried to buy pa off when he found out about our land and the in-
terstate—he was in town today. He came all the way from his father’s bank here in
Muncie to tell Sherman Oliver at the First National that Matt’s credit was no good.”’

A sensation of strangeness starts to spread like cold water across my chest, a feeling
of knowing but not wanting to. ‘‘What else?”’ I say.

‘From what I can tell he must of heard about that proprieter and Monica,” Lucas
says. ‘‘I reckon he wanted to keep the family name clean so he must of made a deal. I
talked to the girl down at Matt’s and she said she had a friend worked at the other
spot and she told her the proprieter had dropped charges. So I figure there was a
deal—Blackford balled up Matt’s credit so that he can’t lay his hands on any capital,
then promised to finance the other son of a bitch into the new franchise at the 38
interchange. That’s why the other son of a bitch dropped charges, so the Blackford
name is still as clean as new snow.”

I try to shift up over the hump of my pillow to look Lucas straight in the face. ‘‘Son
of a bitch is right,’’ I say. “‘What did you say his name was?”’

“The proprieter?”’

RCR/39
‘No, that Blackford bastard.”’

‘““Gerald,’’ Lucas says.

‘Yeah, that’s right. Gerald. You tell him when I get out of here his ass is burned
good. You tell him—”’

‘It won’t do no good,”’ Lucas says. “‘He’ll ball you up too, Frank.”’

I pitch on the bed, trying painfully to raise up enough to see his face squarely, and
the pain comes like a rocket tunneling white and hot from below my shoulder blades.
I fall back down face first on the bed, my head feeling suddenly light and hot and
spinning and a whirr of pain spiraling down inside me.

‘I better fetch the nurse,”’ he says. His heels click on the linoleum as he gets up
from the chair.

I wheeze and sweat, sliding off the hump of the pillow and into the soft center of the
bed. ‘‘No,”’ I say, “‘I’ll be okay,”’ but the cramp pain spreads down into the small of
my back and I put my arms straight along my sides the way the nurse told me to. I
hear the heavy clack of her footsteps, hard and hurried, and Lucas telling her to come
here she better have a look awful quick. She throws the sheets back, the air like a cool
breath on me, and says good boy Mister Boden when she sees where I have put my
arms. I hear the swish of the door closing as she massages my spine and the scrape of
overalls with footsteps in the hall, and her big hands are gentle and cool

(and now the pain closing to a ticklish numbness so that I can walk drive again
sometimes even sleep on my back but Lucas never came back to see me in the hospital
or afterwards when I went back to Muncie; but Matt sometimes catches me on a
Wednesday between runs, taking the elbow route back from Richmond to say she
ought to be okay after this time. I tell him about Lucas’ gift of O. Henry stories and he
smiles wanly, saying how long it has been since he had the time for a good book, and
then apologizes for missing me when I was in the hospital. I tell him not to worry
about it, and he nods yes I guess you know why.

I go into the kitchen and whip out a couple of beers, and we sit on the front porch
with our feet up on the rail and our chairs tilted back like old men watching the
sunset. When I do that I feel the soft spot in my back tunneling in like a little well of
skin working its way down, and I drink the beer fast so that it tingles and dances
inside my T-shirt like a charged rod. I began to laugh and Matt says what’s that and I
tell him blood money, I’ve got to be earning blood money for a breeze the way I have it
because I love the driving, especially with the snub-nose cabs that are all glass for 180
degrees and you actually have to turn your head to find a spot where your vision is
blocked.

He raises his can of beer, tilting his head back to drain that last sip of grace in-
toxicant from the monstrance, and says you’re a lucky boy Frank. He sets his empty
can down on the porch railing and walks out to his car. Take it easy, I say, they were
asphalting 38 when I came in last night, and he says goddamn 38 I’ll take the back
way then, even though the last leg of that route is gravel and his car looks freshly
washed. He revs the engine and pulls away slowly. The car blinks with the sun’s
reflection through the trees along the street and I settle back closing my eyes with that
tingling buzz down below my shoulder blades mumbling blood money whose blood
this time I wonder) while the ramp speed say 30 our speedometer struggles at half that

RCR/40
 

Josiah Kirkpatrick David Kirk patrick
father of Jacob K
grandfather of Henry, Willis & Mary
as we labor up the lane where it stems to a V with the expressway. We urge over the
crest, already beginning to downgrade where the interstate coasts away from the
overpass, and the sleek cars scurrying like beetles zip by on the right even as we pick
up speed. Those brilliant four lanes are straight as far as we can see, and the sun
pastes them melting white and hot into the fields, the green trees, without consonance
or contradiction. The heat rises in waves like a slender spirit from the glimmering
Slabs, and we slice through it, leaving swirls of convection in our wake where the
uncut grass billows away, and the tires hum beneath us, droning with the long
procession of trees and whizzing bobwire.

RCR/42
(Lucas)

) where the knife glides silently down along the back seam and over the bony ribbings.
Out in the front room he has the radio turned on to his favorite, ‘Revival Fires.’’ The
fish squirms wet and lifeless under my hands.

‘I thought that come on at nine,”’ I say.

‘Still does,”’ he says. ‘“Goddamn daylight savings screws it up though.”’

‘That's right,” I say. “I forget dusk comes an hour later now.”’

A gospel quartet starts into ‘‘Lonesome Valley,” and I hear him hock. “‘What’s the
holdup on them fish?’ he says, impatiently.

“It’s that one that swallowed the barb,”’ I say. ‘Damn sucker’s hooked clear up
into the gill flap.”’

I hear the chair creak as he gets up, and he comes into the kitchen. He watches me
try to take the hook out without tearing up the fish.

‘It don’t really matter,’ he says, chewing over my shoulder. ““That part ain’t no
good to eat anyhow.”

‘Yeah I know,” I say, “but I hate to rip ’em up too bad.’’ My hands are wet and
sticky and I catch my finger trying to twist the hook. ‘“‘God damn it,’’ I say, watching
the rise of blood.

‘You shouldn’t of wrapped ’em up so tight in that there towel,’’ he says.

I hold my finger over the sink and squeeze it so that it turns red and the blood rises
in a little glassy bump before it falls in the basin.

‘Looks like it hooked deep,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. ‘‘That sucker was old too.”’

‘“‘Wasn’t rusty was it?’’ he asks.

‘“T ain’t-sure,” I say. “It wasn’t a store bought one. One of those old tacky jobs.”’

‘‘Squeeze her good,”’ he says, going back into the front room. ‘“‘That lockjaw’s a
mean old sucker.”

“Yup,” I say, watching the top of my finger gleam red over the sink. In the front
room he is rocking, humming “‘Lonesome Valley” to himself as the quartet pauses
and starts into a new number.

RCR/43
a

 

Notebook Page Number 29 / David Kirkpatrick
 
 
FROM A PHRASE OF SIMONE WEIL’S
AND SOME WORDS OF HEGEL'S

In back deep the jewel

The treasure |

No The immediate

Pride of the living life’s liquid

Pride in the sandspit wind this ether this other this element all
It is I or I believe

We are the beaks of the ragged birds

Tune of the ragged birds’ beaks

In the tune of the winds |

Ob via_ the obvious

Like a fire of straws

Aflame in the world or else poor people hide

Yourselves together Place

Place Where desire

Lust of the eyes the pride of life and foremost of the storm’s
Multitude moves the wave belly-lovely

Glass of the glass sea shadow of water

On the open water no other way

To come here the outer

Limit of the ego

—George Oppen

RCR/47.
TOURING

I spend four days in Lisbon

in hotels and restaurants. | am

not seeing much of the city.

There is probably a great deal

I’m missing. Monday everyone

goes for cocktails and I slip

away through the noon sun and
make for broken alleys and beaches.
It’s a successful escape and I walk

a little drunkenly past clotheslines
and patched villas. Old women
scream at children. Some of the
hanging sausages are spoiled. | begin
to realize grief is everywhere. |
reach the town barriers and am
about to turn back when I hear
metallic chords floating across the dunes
that line the committed azure sea.
Searching for allegory I investigate.

I top a ridge and gaze downward.
Six Iberian guitarists are doing
somersaults from clay cliffsides

to the slow accordion accompaniment
of the ocean below. They smile,
sing, and toss each other sadly

onto the necessary earth. They pay
no attention to me. I spend hours
watching them tumble, unto

the evening when I turn

to leave. A bearded one in pantaloons
raises himself on his elbows and yells
obscenities at me and accuses me

of a lack of depth. I do not

deign to answer him and he

is overcome with remorse. He

runs to overtake me and grasps

my American hand in apology.

RCR/48
He gives me rose wine and tries

to sell me dirty photographs. I

tell him my life lacks direction.

He doesn’t understand why this
disturbs me. We drink more wine
and sing Portugese folk songs.

He says his name is Robespierre
and begins to grow teary in the sunset.
He screams a few curses

at Cervantes but his heart

is not in it. I say

I have to go. He tells me

there is a party at his place

and makes me promise to attend.

I start back to town. Over

my shoulder he and his friends
begin juggling capos and debating
the merits of the minor-seventh scale.
li.

The party turns out to be

a secret communist cell meeting.
Some of the guests are suspicious
of me. Robespierre rages at

them. Everyone patronizes the
servants. I wander about the villa
eating mushrooms and taking notes
in hieroglyphics. People who read
over my shoulder resent this and

I am on the brink of getting in
trouble when my host reappears
distributing handbills for the local
tatoo parlor. He hides these behind
a stucco column and grabs me by
the arm. I don’t get a chance

to say much. We tiptoe up a
marble staircase and into the bridal
suite. There is a canopy bed and

a girl in a blue gown gazing

across the orange groves. She

turns around and smiles at us.

RCR/49
- She is the most beautiful girl
in Lisbon. I want to marry
her eyes, which are brown and green
in the shifting light. The laundry
mark on her gown says Elena.
Robespierre leaves and she comes
into my arms like art. We kiss
and give each other language lessons.
The party breaks up downstairs.
The guests leave in oxcarts and on
motorcycles. I barely notice.
Elena has promised me a treasure.
I get very excited. She teases me.
I grab her hand but she dances
away. This goes on for a while and
I begin to get tired. | sit
on the bed and frown. Elena
relents. She caresses my cheek
and reaches into her bosom, with-
drawing a package wrapped in
silk and tied with roses. It
falls open at my touch. I
fumble with the contents and
lift them out. It’s the same
dirty pictures Robespierre tried
to sell me on the beach.

iii.

I am a little disappointed. Elena
wants me to pay her forty
centimes but I shake my head.
She is quietly furious. I pretend
not to notice. She goes to the
dresser and prepares a goblet

of wine. She brings it to me.

I know it is poisoned but I

drink it anyway. It tastes

fine though somewhat chalky. I look |
out the window and wait for
pain, which is not long

in arriving. I try for dignity.

RCR/50
The room darkens and suburbia
flashes in front of my eyes. I

lean on the window ledge. My
knees begin to sag. My breath

grows short. I raise my head

and stare into the orchard. I breathe
fruit and olives and listen, listen.

I hear the stars go out

and the ocean, drying up.

—Jim Harkness

RCR/51
what do we see

who flee the domestic
for splendor

in the wild

a range of magnitudes

deer
mingle with light

shadows
among the ponderosas

flutter of wings
tall branches
two eyes

across the pond

—David Gitin

RCR/52
   
 
   
 

exported for t
cities a paper
toppled in t
like flesh

edge of ther
joined by three birds ~
wind chimes

dance dance

to see you are spinning
for there is a pillar of salt
evidence of ache

etched upon the sky

roots of my eyes
the crust of pain or joy
desire

the sun the moon

refrain 4
to death fierce

meadowlark

—David Gitin

RCR/53
clockwise
Robert Vas Dias,
Andy Scheiber, Davic
David Kirkp

 
ing above
ers, Carl Thayler,
Michael Hamberger,
Jim Harrison

 

 
UPSTATE

wood. old village quilted on hills.
a bridge, Hudson River

my friend demands learning

new shelves in the house collection
: panic of time. nerves slap
giddy-up to the muddy wave,

talk of the best Monk on record

among the shanty Irish
above a petshop with his wife and two sons
we drown in sharp tea

—David Gitin

RCR/56
 

Notebook Page Number 33 / David Kirkpatrick
GOODRICH

Thistles. Burn. Up the canyon walls. Deposit ash. Flare Arctic.
Hosannas. But,

the black girl fourteen days in the river

when they peeled off the sexy stockings

her thighs in cramped disregard

she might have been the missing Danish beauty queen,

the disastrous white coast of Anchorage.

He earned his Keep at sixteen

when the gymnasium closed, collecting
off floors and benches

strewn towels and love notes

enter the steam at tide
the light disc moon-graceful, pitched
a green fern like a cat’s tail high
and waving

Over scummy tiers,

the consolation
of half-absorbed
winter’s light

RCR/58
a penchant
for shit

the acceleration
of those figures their
cautious sodomy
in steam

not nearly enough
left him stranded
a planting
of more than cock

demanded,

a meadow not wholly of spring, but
holding here&there green shoots upright

as in Bambi the butterflies
in the amber of his mind forever embedded.

RCR/59
November month of fires
in California

canyons bevelled with Rosemary
the birds such decisions
as soft rustlings

the shufflings of alliances
the reforming envy
love is.

Old men wander

rows of girlie magazines, those

harsh fabrications corner

of Cherokee and Hollywood Blvd. the
classic measure of this world, static.
To absolve what gallantries?

The bruised eyes. The restoration
denied flesh

the stubborn mechanics,

who have lost the stain

of women

RCR/60
a Judas goat
bevies of fags led into
Goodrich’s steamroom, darkened alleys
the wooden stairwells of Santa Monica
the impact
to ribs and groins and once a thin, flat wedge
cut from a man’s palm
succession of flesh to bone
briefly intractable muscle
grey to off-white
the circumstances
of the moon

his Puritan insistence
risking the height he feared
robbing lovers in a pack on Mulholland
then back down the canyon
red and fleshy, sliding
in haste shy and irreconcilable
over the escarpment
as the moon accords
the intervening air
a grace and later anchored
drunk to the
ice foul-mouthed
at the skating rink
lungs resisting, afraid
in Long Beach under
the yellow legs
of high school girls.

RCR/61
The darkness
he thinks congenial
tho her ass

moves to the
sounds of an imploding tongue,

transient

she needs a ride,
will not be
similarly used now
it is morning,

the light is what she dresses in.

RCR/62
a preliminary to sunrise
the detention of eyes
on her cunt

the credibility her breasts provide
her spine, too
the concurrent hollows

surcease
of light, the
two large bones of the hip

the authority
of her grievances
the hesitant advance of light

merciless
as Ming pale linen
and oxblood

Pinto hair and
exhausted she
grimaces into morning

past Fresno, Angel’s Camp.
is tattooed

cross of the Mexicans
three rays awkward
at the top

who would protect her
aurora

aurora

—Carl Thayler

RCR/63
ae eee
oS. .

ECE SRST 4 ee Se: ahs SORE Se SNR CE Sete NHS.

 

 

Notebook Page Number 14 / David Kirkpatrick
THE HAGGARD ODE

When the surf’s up

love is a term of aesthetics

in this city of palm trees, the specific apparel
of a corroding southern light

James Dean

Frank Wolfe
Richard Hartunian
Tom Pitman

Carl Thayler

Tom Gilson

Peter Duel

on film, those
homesteads of loss we stake out
to fill a wall

and the coast

comes up to the house

like the 19th. Century those
four-hundred bay windows
my grandfather might have had
a postcard of, minus

the skinny-dippers, no

surf no clot

of sun,

a perfunctory blue,

stone quais encountered
where the sky falls

from that light
I would have only her

smile down from. A restive zone

and temperate.

RCR/65
His apartment off Wilcox

across a wide street the studio

proceeds as analogy for

the arm on the table, the

fluttering of awnings

above windows our dreams are solicited from,
the veins commemorated by

tracks opened

under the hooked tip

of a walnut pick, without

that blood on the pearl grey shirt

what would I have lain her against in anger?
That specific effect

the coasts roll to our distress,

distance, distance it

drains our faces, inaccessible

behind walls selected for

some chichi reason like

a fucking pair of white trousers.

It blows your mind
and commonly yellow
the ricks of hay my grandparents

wrapped in bedclothes
and if under this storm

you die they will let you lie
where you roll, commonly
yellow as Abraham’s

vest the hay is hugged to,
yellow, yellow, yellow

the hair of their first daughter.

RCR/66

The acquisition of testimony
segments and ellipses

the wormed black walnuts
falling about Toby’s father, how
the light varied traveling west
the disparities

what we concede to

a warm climate

of walnut trees

and whatever else can’t resist
axes or analogies. Dante

made a major industry of pain tho
there are no scapegoats in Hell,
the stakes our fathers

laid down for filling

stations and granaries, walnuts
what is left

against misunderstanding.

Wall of our relinquished blood.
A triviality of style / the imposed bellies
the pier
relinquishes gulls to
that other shore
of neglect.

—Carl Thayler

RCR/67
TRAFFIC
(Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly)

The semi-trailer crawls through the fog.
It is the lengthened shadow of a dragonfly larva
crawling over the murky lakebottom.

Headlights cross among dripping branches.
You can’t see the other driver’s face.
Light overflows through the pines.

We have come shadows chassis from all directions
in failing light, we go in tandem after each other,
past each other, sweep on in a modest roar

into the open where the industries are brooding,
and every year the factory buildings go down another
eighth of an inch—the earth is gulping them slowly.

Paws no one can identify leave a print
on the glossiest artifacts dreamed up here.
Pollen is determined to live in asphalt.

But the horsechestnut trees loom up first, melancholy
as if they intended to produce clusters of iron gloves
rather than white flowers, and past them

the reception room—a fluorescent light out of order

blinks off and on. Some magic door is around here!
Open!

and look downward, through the reversed periscope,

down to the great mouths, the huge buried pipes
where algae is growing like the beards on dead men
and the Cleaner swims on in his overcoat of slime

his strokes weaker and weaker, he will be choked soon.

And no one knows what will take place, we only know
the cabin breaks and grows back together all the time.

—Tomas Transtromer

RCR/68
 

Notebook Page Number 50 / David Kirkpatrick
SERGEI YESENIN 1895-1925
to D.G.

This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin

bought at a Leningrad newstand—permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me

he stares at nothing; the difference between

a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.

And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both

of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing

and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved

in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge
near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity

this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light year away.

So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose which came

to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!

a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart

it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat
as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose

—Jim Harrison

RCR/70
THE SAN DIEGO AUTORAMA

I always try to do something a
little different every time....

-Ed Roth

From deep down in the wicker creel he
always carries, sly Big Daddy whips out an enormous spitwad
and flips it
into the sink
and right before the children’s eyes
it surges out
multicolored
The Great Japanese Flower!

instant giant water-lily
their tender faces gape
confronting the ultimate souvenir
this sudden blossom, while-u-wait
on the spot
a custom job
if ever was.

(after Jaques Prevert,
L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts)

—Peter Nye

RCR/71
ONE FATHER

One father
Set, as steel
against steel,
Train wheels
grinding rails,
straight as a ribbon
across a thousand
miles where
ninety stone throw
ahead they seem
to meet as one;
far beyond the sight
of your lidded eye,
shining painfully
under a scorching sun;
What sight he has
is choked with intense
blindness, knowing
not the fragrance
of deep woods,
or the lightness
of wind after
a spring rain.

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You are a trainer of children
for the army;

your home of hardwood and
stainless steel,

a concentrated camp
of discipline and

fury. Furrowed brain,
it grooves the alcoholed

juice of petty anger.
What shall we do

with you?
Lave you with

love? Humor your
lemoned brain?

Pour honey on your head?
You’d attack our

honey with fingernails,
rip skin getting

rid of it.

—Rys Myers

RCR/73
ESTELLE

Even in sleep
she seems awake
splendidly aware of things;
curved leg tucked easily
under her chin,
arms aimed in all directions,
relaxed as her curled hair
on one moist cheek.

My little candy stick baby

panther in the night,
you claim to Know all the routes;

your exclusive copyright
on worthwhile plans;

“Oh, I know the way”
well, so you say;

but I’ve learned the vagaries
of women;

I know their succulent soil,
where nettles and daffodils

grow so well.

I’ve been having a dream,
one that puts me there
in some wind whipped graveyard
in the Arizona desert.
Shallow sand graves
uncovered by hard winds
where whitened faces stare
straight up; ignoring me
in the night,
set rigid,
returning the terrible stillness
of that deathly light.

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Lady, with your bright scarves
your lovely legs,

your quarrels and laughter,
oh, take this dream away.

—Rus Myers

RCR/75
LOVE

It ought to make mystics of us,

This concentration of all that we are and have

On nothing.

But I can’t talk. Though my life flowed out to you
In words, while you lay

With another, at peace, happy,

What’s ink compared to the juice

Which, more promptly undeceived, I might have spilt
For nothing.

If we must fall into it, for it,

No man was luckier than the near-mystic
Who at eighty-two years

Poured his love out in pints of blood
From the heart, lungs, mouth,

And died on his mistress, in bed,

Before she could leave him

With nothing.

You I write, even now, as though

Having words left, tenderness, folly unspent,

I owed them to you still

And hadn’t given enough

To nothing

When happy, at peace in your presence I couldn’t know

That had my blood splotched your body, soured the half-lies on your lips
Within hours you’d have washed it off, clean and new for another-
Another way of losing yourself

In nothing.

—Michael Hamberger

RCR/76
 

Notebook Page Number 7 / David Kirkpatrick
THE GLADE

l.

All day in the glare, on the salt lake’s beaches,
All night in a fever, shaking.

That’s done with. My travels are over.
Somehow I’m here: glade in a dense wood.
Leafage makes lace. The shadows are of it, in it,
The season is everymonth.

White sorrel around me, and white anemone,
Foxglove purple, strawberry red.

Apple shapes, pear shapes have lasted all winter.
And the snow gleams above dry moss.

You don’t see it, you cannot see it,

Travelling still to a town the guidebook foretells:
How it is to have gone and returned and gone
And returned and forgotten to go

And forgotten the route and the place

And be there again, and be everywhere.

Stay with me, love, till my fingers have traced the landscape
On your body and into your mind.

RCR/78
a

May we lie there, you ask; and how long.
By the hour, for ever, on a bed leased
From the turning trees and the conifers.
Leaving again and again,

Again and again left

To the dark and the whorled light.

Can you bear the silence between us?
You're of it, love, you are in it.

When I touch you I touch the silence,
When I’ve lost you it turns to me.

So late, nothing can part us:
We belong to the glade.

—Michael Hamberger

RCR/79
ROSES, CHR YSANTHEMUMS

It’s late in the day, in the year,

The frost holding off, just.

In the garden you pick dry stalks, hardly looking.
Time to come in,

Time to pick flowers, only now,

And carry them in, summer and autumn bunched,
Toward winter, even the full roses’ petals

In no hurry to fall.

It is a slow music we hear

Behind the wind. And the chrysanthemums
Are a Slow fire,

A red so dark it glimmers and would go out
But for the yellow that radiates from the core.
Ruffled flutterings here, a harsh odour

As of wood-smoke, and there

Flesh colour, silky, taut in its bland breathing,
Linger and mingle.

Now. Only now.

—Michael Hamberger

RCR/80
THE CYCLE OF WATERS

There are no property rights

this matter flows through and around us
no deed toa lake a river

to the roots of trees to wells

to a stagnant pool become cloud

What we can hold we can put side

the field we walk through the past

the stones we hold in our hands and skip
on the surface of water

the weeks without rain

the boundries we look for

where becks become burns and tarns
lochs

The relief from August and the boundries
of skin

our world circumscribed by water

The bodies of women

flow from the moon

Water runs under the sea

What we allow for virtue

a cat that sleeps in the wind
We look for direction

drink and be whole again
water from a cup we can hold

—Dan Gerber

RCR/81
NOVEMBER

I open the door
the first cold air
and behind me

whatever I leave

In November

the first snow

the first change from color
this new stillness

A dark haired girl
I wanted to touch
to enter her to believe
as our minds jerked together
she was all
though doomed
it would have been
once
and could never be cancelled

Night

whisper my grief

that slinks against the cold
dreams

and the silence behind them
the ringing silence

in whatever space we are

—Dan Gerber

RCR/82
ANEURYSM

In the side of my head
a vessel
expands and obscures my sight
‘T reel and reach for the wall
The world is a flashbulb
triggered by rage
a part that refuses to function
I’ve planted a thought
the bastard part of me
acts and reacts and reacts

All I desire is sacred

—Dan Gerber

RCR/83
 

irkpatrick

K

1

Notebook Page Number 41 / Dav
HOMECOMING

The light on the river was green
and cast our reflections back at us.

We returned to the house.
We kept the curtains drawn.
All day, forgetting it was October.

*

Your dream. My dream.
The clock in the cupboard ticks
and would like to explode.

What time is it by the sea?
How many hours before which wave?

**

If only we could read our death in sand,
on the shifting page of the world.

—Thomas Vandenberg

RCR/85
The one who loves to accuse,

who stares across the room and says
she had a rotten time, that you

made it rotten from beginning to end.

Surging down the highway,
speeding past the neon signs
whose words cry out: why not
why why not why

Love is what you felt

for the girl in the bar, the one
who counted out your change
with distant hands.

Headlights flare in the dark.
Grow. Pass. And are gone.

I'll have to write that song again.
The melody I stole
from the voice in the water

and gave to a fool to sing.

—Thomas Vandenberg

RCR/86
I declare bankrupt
_ the purse of my emotions
and let coins fall where they will.

Trees, too, have spent their green.
Knowledge of loss,
knowledge also of gain.

That was not my voice in your ear,
that was not my moon
in your window last night.

Don’t imagine

Pll drink more of your wine,
my cup overflows

with the wine of departure.

—Thomas Vandenberg

RCR/87
 

ick

kpatr

1r

id K

Notebook Page Number 26 / Dav
AFEWMOMENTS
(Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly)

The dwarf pine on marsh ground holds its head up: a dark rag.
But what you see is nothing compared to the roots,

the widening, secretly groping, deathless or half-

deathless root-system.

I you she he also put roots out,
outside our common will,
outside the City.

Rain drifts down from the summer sky that’s pale as milk.
It is as if my five senses were hooked up to some other spirit
that moves with the same stubborn flow

as the runners in white circling the track as the night comes misting in.

—Tomas TranstrOmer

RCR/89
YOUR VOICE FALLS ON

Your voice falls on
us Over a distance
of 10 years; it is SO
years ago & it is spring,
outside a fine snow continuously
falls, there is no sound
out there, students in boots,
jackets, hoods, scarves suddenly
flower in the narrow, floor-to-ceiling
window for an instant, it is spring
& all! the yellow, yellow, yellow
sings in your crackling old man’s
voice like snow underfoot today,
William Carlos Williams.

—Robert Vas Dias

RCR/90
A RETREAT THAT IS AN ADVANCE
for Gregg

Two A.M. & you say—

what’s wrong with these chicks,

don’t know where

they’re going—: into the fields

next day where disporting

themselves they’re saying:

daffodil! buffalo! & other such
Dionysiac butterflies around

a red-bannered pole:

that’s Greek or medieval &

in this brassiere-less age is

still the same: you have your mind on
somewhat other ends than the theater, though
let her have her ritual & she may

be ready for the game.

—Robert Vas Dias

RCR/91
THE FOOD GAME

The name of the game probably

stems from the now-defunct

Frisbie Baking Co. of Bridgeport,

Conn., where employees evidently took note
of the aviational abilities of

the tin pie-plate. In any case,

game or dance, the name

is the game of tossing a species of plate

with food to each other, probably

the game of giving preferences away (am I
throwing to her too often just to see her jump
up, arms wild, nipples printed on her

jersey & always she misses?), the wishing

game of trying hard to disturb

the young man who stands indolently

recycling frisbees as they arrive without moving
his feet, a game stemming from the shape pies
make in the air between us, the desire to connect
with surprises causing pratfalls: evidently

it stems from our extreme hatred, or love

of mankind-in any case, I take note

of my partners’ aviational abilities & hungry, wait
to throw, to be thrown to.

—Robert Vas Dias

RCR/92
It’s a world of an egg
shaped perfectly as
a disembodied head asking

--what am I / what are you

doing here?

or here, here, some chicken-headed
thing having dropped it on
me coughing in a yellow pea soup
effluent called an atmosphere-—
occasionally at clear mements
I notice the clouds licking this
place voluptuously for all the world,
tongue caressing the fertile
place: my head swims,
my mouth an O.

—Robert Vas Dias

RCR/93
 

Notebook Page Number 10 / David Kirkpatrick
 
 

articies

and
reviews

and

 

 

 
   
3 FIRST NOVELS

Benjamin Grabbed His Glicken and Ran: An Autobiography, Fred Gordon,
Harper & Row (New York, 1971), unpaged. $6.95.

The Broken Places, Joseph Dionne, Harper & Row (New York, 1972), 239 pp.
$6.95.

Shedding Skin, Robert Ward, Harper & Row (New York, 1972), 244 pp. $6.95.

These three novels have several things in common. Each is a first novel by a
young writer; not surprisingly, each has a young male protagonist. These are all
novels about growing, learning, where the experiences cause the protagonist to
better understand himself and, perhaps, the world; one uses the bildungsroman
format, and the other two focus on more limited time periods. All use, or attempt
to use, humor to some degree. In each the narrative is fragmented, episodic, or
otherwise noncontinuous.

Shedding Skin (a title which must have been used before) is the story of Bobby
Ward growing up—in Baltimore, on the road, in Aspen and San Francisco, in “the
psychic battlefields of the 1950s and 60s” as the jacket-blurb puts it. Bobby's
problem is that he cannot separate imaginary ideals from what is real, and his trip,
like all odysseys, is a learning experience which forces him to see that distinction.

Growing up in Baltimore means horsing around with Kirk and Walter, dating
Susan, joining Baba Looie’s gang the Five Aces, robbing a watchman of his watch,
being at odds with his parents, etc. But what is important to him is what he is able
to imagine: a friend named Warren and The Town of Thatched Rooves (both travel
with him throughout the book; the one a kind of conscience, the other an Ideal).
“Here am |... playing with my battery of imagined friends in the Town of Thatched
Rooves. A warm town with kettles of stew, and big bulky men with red noses and

. orange weather- chapped cheeks. A town like Dicken’s England, and all of them
love me.” This is pretty much the opposite of his surroundings, and the world into
which he goes. After graduation from high school, he marries Susan on Warren’s
advice, and takes a job ina record store. His records have represented “the Real
World” and, after three years of marriage (badly compressed into two pages),
records, or their covers, influence him to cut out. “ ‘I am going on the road,’ I say.
‘Like the singers on folk and rock albums. There is something new happening all
over America. Everyplace but here.’ ”

On the road he meets The Singing Stump Family, the Phantom, a variety of
girls; he travels to Aspen, to San Francisco, and to Taurus (Morningstar?), a com-
mune. He experiences sex, pot, acid, group consciousness, etc. What does he learn?

[ have hit upon a magical law of the Universe, and that is: everything hap-
pens to you, and you have no way of stopping it, but if you just go along with
it, you will see that you controlled it all along, and if you didn’t control it, then
what difference does it make?

But, ironically, only when he returns home (to report to his draft board!) is
true understanding possible. Susan has shucked off her old life, and is now living
with his friends, Walter and Kirk—it’s Haight-Ashbury in Baltimore—and during a
heavy discussion Bobby realizes that his father “is a person, just like myself, with

RCR/96
his own feelings, thoughts and misery . .. How much have I shut out? How much
have I killed off other people in fear, in vanity?”’ His realizations may not be earth-
shaking, but we understand that he had to make the trip before even these minor
epiphanies could be possible.

The jacket-blurb describes this novel as being “in the best picaresque tradition”
and as being a “fantastically funny book (which) is also a serious novel about the
youth culture. As the author says, “You will laugh yourself sick.’ ” Actually, it’s
avery loose book which takes advantage of the picaresque tradition; whole sections
could easily have been edited out (the part entitled “Collecting Payment”, for
example). The humor is slapstick-absurd- black humor, but seems pretty unfunny.
As for it being a “‘serious novel” it’s difficult to know when the author is being
serious or when he’s satirizing.

Most of all, the book lacks any “reality”. | don’t mean literalness—I believe that
Bobby could, for example, travel without any income (but where’s he get the money
to fly home?). I don’t mean realism, for it obviously doesn’t operate on that level.
Rather, what’s missing is something between verisimilitude and conviction. The
characters and events do not need to be made “real”, but I would like to get the
sense that they matter to the author, that he believes in them. Besides cardboard
characters, the “unreality”’ is created by cartoon situations, paper backdrops, and
perhaps even by a lack of research regarding the times. This novel depends in large
part on our getting a sense of what it was like to grow up during the 1950’s and
1960's; details are thrown in to create a background, names and events have been
sprinkled like decorations over the surface. But these are often inaccurate (a minor
example: “The Heap” was then in Airboy, not D.C., comics) or misplaced in time.
As for Aspen, Haight-Ashbury, etc., we would get more of a sense of place if we
looked at a road map. The sum of this is that I tend to not believe the book, nor
in Bobby, and therefore I’m not really concerned what it is he learns or how it
affects his life.

In Shedding Skin the author and the main character share the same name, a
narrative stance that might seem more autobiographical than fictional. Benjamin
Grabbed His Glicken and Ran, by Fred Gordon, is subtitled “An Autobiography ”,
for no apparent reason. Benjamin Hackett, the book’s central character, is a young
man who is isolated, alienated, paranoid, homocidal, and, at times, literary; he
resembles Bobby Ward, but lacks Bobby’s curiosity and enthusiasm for travel.
Hackett is living Bobby’s magical law of the Universe. He asks only one question:
How is he alive? and attempts to answer it by getting “into someone else’s skin”

(a variation of “shedding skin’’’).

Like Bobby, he doesn’t have to work, and since he has no special interests in
life he spends most of his time in a characterless rooming house or at his uncle’s
gym (neither place figures in the novel in any way). Otherwise he is busy reading
a novel entitled Glicken On, Baby, It’s Now, by Vince Baxter, or writing a dull
introspective piece called ““Benjamin’s Mysteries”, or reading letters from a friend,
Poose Kirk, or copying pages from a text dealing with the brain. We are given
lengthy portions of each; what’s left is the novel, and much of it is devoted to
our watching Benjamin do simple tasks:

He watched. He tongued his lips. He whimpered. He put his head into the
sink letting the rust water tickle over him and stayed crouched as the water
became less rusty, then clear, and then hot. The water fell on his hair and he

RCR/97
felt cooled. Benjamin unbent, stood up and soaped his face watching himself
in the mirror. He smiled. The soap curled around and almost into his mouth.
He soaped his lips, opened them, and tongued some of the soap which dry
stung him. His whole body warmed. His eyes were moist.

It’s generally a relief to switch from that to the book Benjamin is reading, a
futuristic novel written in pseudo-Clockwork Orange language:

Lex Baker bowed his mock, ever so lightly, and left. It was Acapulco on his
mind and if Sally could travel with him, they could flack together. So what if
Burney knew. “Good aged Burney,” thought Lex. “Always sticking his pigidin
darkly. Ah, truly, but he’s a terrific sort, mostways.”

He zipped down elevator to his Coup and rammed over to Sally who wrappled
her arms over him hotly as she kissed his smackers sweetly as he zipped out.

Things pick up, 4 bit, when he meets Reeva Langlois; it turns out that she, not
Vince Baxter, is the author of Glicken On, Baby. (“ “Ah,’ he said, “how'd you write
in that language?’ “By not knowing English.’ ”) Benjamin develops simultaneous
affairs with Reeva and another girl he’s just met, Sara, which, interspersed with the
numerous secondary materials, manages to expand the “autobiography ”’.

The relationship between these various writing is tenuous, if it exists. Benjamin,
of course, is interested in the brain, his own and as Theory; when, during sexual
climax, he strangles Reeva, he is reading about Operation Suffocate in her novel;
Poose mentions he is pursuing a man named Drigger across Europe, and the police
officer who questions Benjamin happens to have that same name. But the con-
nections or parallels that we expect don’t materialize. Fred Gordon is apparently
demonstrating that Truth that Poose states in a letter: “There is no such thing as
form in life.” 7

Or perhaps he’s following Benjamin in this matter, when Benjamin talks of
“trying to New York the New Yokers. .. .”

Frankly, I’m at a loss to know how this novel got published—I can see that a
publisher might be interested in Shedding Skin, because of its topical subject, but
what Benjamin Grabbed His Glicken has to recommend it is beyond me.

The Broken Places isa fine novel; compared with the other two novels it is
brilliant piece of writing. It has complexity, texture, developed characters, beautiful
descriptive passages, some fine sex scenes, a sense of place, plot, movement, di-
rection, and excellent writing—things that the other two novels, for the most part,
lack. While those novels deal with cliches, Dionne is working with unique subject
matter, setting, and characters. Justin St. Clair, in the peacetime army in Normandy,
falls in love with a French girl, Chantelle. There are authority figures—her father,
his commanding officers—who try to terminate this romance, but two people in
love find ways to overcome obstacles. The novel, then, is a love story—and a beau-
tiful one.

But Justin’s love for Chantelle extends beyond the girl. His love is also for
France, for what he believes is his heritage; and for his father, and his father’s father.
Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that his grandfather came to Ohio from
France, and lives in exile with the dream that his sons will someday return to France.
Justin’s father did return: he died there in World War II, and is buried in a huge
U.S. military cemetery a few miles from where J ustin is stationed. Justin feels an
intense love for his grandfather, for France, and for the father he never knew, and

RCR/98
he has promised that he will somehow provide a fitting headstone for the father’s
grave. This obsession becomes a sub-plot which links the several kinds of love, and
which precipitates J ustin’s downfall. To get money for the marker, Justin turns

to crime.

The tone shifts at this point—it is a difficult shift, handled with skill. In the
first half of the novel Justin larks around with his army buddies, goes on picnics
with Chantelle into the idyllic countryside, and in general enjoys life; the mood
is light, the material often comic (and funny). Even the crimes are comic, at first;
their gun is fake, and as bandits Justin and his French Friend, Serge, are not taken
seriously by their intended victims. Then, when they commit a daytime robbery
in a brothel, the novel turns: the crime is incredible, then absurd, then tragic—
Serge is shot. J ustin’s minor pranks have snowballed into a serious offense; his
solution to one problem has created a much larger one. He has shifted his responsi-
bilities away from the military, his country—away from Chantelle, to some degree—
and, in his devotion to those people who really matter, he has got beyond the point
of turning back.

Justin, like Benjamin Hackett and, in some ways, like Bobby Ward, is outside
the law; the difference is the nature of the crime and the motive. Bobb’s trans-
gressions are minor, almost casual; Benjamin’s killing of Reeva is of course serious,
but is also absurd and senseless. J ustin’s crimes are perhaps foolish but they are
motivated by love, concern, caring. Moreover, he is able to act, while the other
two protagonists drift into their situations (recall the magical law of the Universe).
Justin has substance, energy, vitality, emotions, and because of this he not only
comes alive as a character but gives the book direction and purpose, pulling all of
the elements together.

The Broken Places is written in an episodic form; the fragments accumulate,
building upon one another in an impressionistic way until the several threads of
the story begin to interweave. Dionne does this with skill, and with reason. The
novel is written primarily in flashback, as Justin travels from Toledo, Ohio to
Quebec—a substitute for the France he loves. Ostensibly he is writing (or somehow
narrating) the novel as he travels through the night; therefore it is disjointed,
episodic, dependent upon the associations and mirrors of memory.

The endings of these three novels indicate a great deal about the books, and the
authors’ abilities. Bobby Ward, unable to face the future, jumps to a probably
death; Benjamin tips off the police, then goes to meet them with a gun, and is
shot to death. Justin St. Clair, who has served three years in a French prison for
his crimes, goes to Canada to begin again—with hope, optimism, a future. I’m not
talking about moral justice—I don’t think that anyone, except Hollywood, would
require that of a work of art today; I do however think that an easy way to end
any piece of writing is to kill off the character. In art, and in life, it’s a lot tougher
to stick around for the next chapter.

—A.D.D.

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THE PROGRESS OF A SMALL PRESS

The Ashland Poetry Press
Ashland College
Ashland, Ohio 44805

The Ashland Poetry Press is essentially a regional press; is publishes Ohio poets,
and looks to Ohio readers for an audience. In some ways this might seem limiting,
even provincial; that larger world does exist out there. Yet, there are advantages
to working within a region: poets grow out of a place, and their poetry often re-
flects this sense of place; a readership can be established, and the poets can be
reached by their readers—this kind of rapport is very important to the life-blood
of poetry. There are commercial reasons also: books of poetry can be easily dis-
tributed to bookstores over a limited (state-wide) area, and libraries, who are
reluectant to purchase poetry books unless they are somehow recommended, are
usually eager to get books which reflect their region. Finally, in the case of the
Ashland Poetry Press, they have the financial backing of the Ohio Arts Council.

These are valid reasons for working with the poets and people of the area.
Small presses spring up daily, publish a book or two, and die—for lack of readers,
outlets, funds. The Ashland Poetry Press, now in its third year, is operating in
“ black, and going strong. During 1971, it published six books and four pam-
phlets.

The book which established the press was A Consort of Poets (1969), which
emerged from the Voice and Word Poetry Festival held that year on the Ashland
Campus. The festival was sponsored by the Ohio Poets’ Association whose directors,
Robert McGovern and Richard Snyder, soon founded The Ashland Poetry Press.
Included in the book are poems by Judson Jerome, Jack Matthews, Hale Chatfield,
and dozen other Ohio poets-teachers; “the arrangement of this book remains
what it was for that occasion: A Consort of Poets reading on seven general themes
with musical interludes.”

The second book published was 60 on the 60’s: A Decade’s History in Verse.
This was an ambitious undertaking; it has a forward by Eugene McCarthy, and
poems by well-known poets like Robert Bly, Daniel Berrigan, W. D. Snodgrass,
Philip Levine, Richard Wilbur, and many others. The book has received wide dis-
tribution, and is now in its second printing.

The editors are interested in promoting the regional pot’s voice, orally and in
books. They have, with the support of the Ohio Poets’ Association and the Ohio
Arts Council, continued the Voice and Word Poetry Festival, and they have pub-
lished two more books which grew out of those festivals: Poets on the Platform
(1970) and Read Out Read-In (1971). Poets included in those volumes are Hollis
Summers, Hale Chatfield, Alberta Turner, Brace Butcher, WArren Slesinger, and
others. They have also brought poetry to the high schools of the region, and two
small pamphlets have been published which reflect the role of poet-teacher in the
high school: Building An Audience for Poetry, by Hale Chatfield, and Poet to
Teacher to Student, by Richard Snyder.

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Recent books from the Ashland Poetry Press are: Rumors of Ecstasy, Rumors
of Death, by Grace Butcher, who has been a United States Champion in track
as well as a poet-teacher; At Home, by Hale Chatfield; A Time of Black Devotion,
by James C. Kilgore; Need, by Alberta Turner; A Keeping in Touch, by Richard
_ Snyder, and A Flesh.of Feast & Other Occasions, by Robert McGovern. All are
good-looking books, and reasonably priced at $4.95.

—Lawrence Lucifer

RCR/101
 

Notebook Page Number 27 / David Kirkpatrick
DREAMING OF GARDENS

Fruits and Vegetables, by Erica Jong, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 86 pp.,
$5.95 cloth, $2.95 paper.

A Perfect Circle of Sun, by Linda Pastan, The Swallow Press, 56 pp., $5.00 cloth.

Of the already limited number of first books of poetry that, like seedlings, spring
up each year, only a few find their way to the light, and still fewer show promise of
lasting the season. Two of this year’s more flourishing products are, strangely
enough, rooted in the same fertile subject matter: both examine the disparity
between dream and reality; both demonstrate a concern with the dynamics of inno-
cence and experience; and, both emphasize creative sensibility as a means of enduring
a harsh reality.

In Fruits and Vegetables, Erica Jong cultivates the implications of two statements
by Norman O. Brown: “Poetry, the creative act, the archetypal sexual act. Sexua-
lity is poetry;” and, “We must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to fall into
innocence.” Using these statements as springboards, Erica Jong portrays the poet as
one condemned to a Dantesque fate of endlessly re-enacting The Fall. Victim of a
nameless and insatiable hunger, the poet persistently reaches for the sweet fruit
hanging in his dreams, only to find again and again that he has been seduced, that
every attainable apple has a worm in it, that experience leaves a bitter aftertaste.

And yet, paradoxically, this process is itself ultimately creative, for it gives birth to
poems, the fruit of both pain and pleasure. The poetic process is thus a kind of
ritual self-sacrifice, an act which Erica Jong couches in metaphors of cooking and
coitus: the poetess is sometimes an onion, “flaying itself away, layer on layer, in
search of its heart (“Fruits and Vegetables”);” and sometimes, as in the humoous
‘‘Arse Poetica,” a lusty woman offering herself to the muse.

Though it taps a rich vein of traditional theme.and metaphor, the strong point of
Fruits and Vegetables is not its thematic depth but rather its range of tone. On the
one hand, Erica Jong can be the serious and sensitive poetess whose work is perhaps
best exemplified by “Narcissus, Photographer,” or by “The Man Under The Bed,” in

which she speaks of an imaginary lover:

We waltz through the street like death & the maiden
We float through the wall of the wall of my room

If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body

His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks
I wrap myself around him like the darkness

I breathe into his mouth

& make him real

On the other hand, she can be the witty and bawdy satirist who, in “Here Comes (a
flip through Bride’s),” playfully sketches the typical Bride’s magazine reader's image

of the ideal newlywed couple:

she stepped into
the valentine-shaped bathtub,
& slid her perfect bubbles

RCR/103
in between
the perfect bubbles.

* *% %

Oh well. Here’s he:

part copy pajamas,

part mothered underwear
& of course

an enormous prick

full of money.

Fond of sprawling, prosy lines, repetition and cataloguing, Erica Jong attacks lan-
guage with an infectious but sometimes blind energy. Like our best poets, she dis-
plays a willingness to take risks. But too often in her work the risks appear uncalcu-
lated, ungoverned by that finer sense which tells the accomplished poet precisely
when to be incautious. Too often, Erica Jong’s poems die in a clatter of gimmickry:
we are exhorted, in “The Teacher,” to “Eat this poem;”’ we are subjected to the self-
defeating punctuation of ““Seven,” where colons and semi-colons either begin lines
or float somewhere in the white space between them. Such cleverness no doubt
adds to the fun of poetry, and in this sense may be justifiable, but it seems care
should be taken not to allow the means to obscure the end.

In A Perfect Circle of Sun, Linda Pastan portrays a world in which we are all, like
Sherwood Anderson’s George Willard, wide-eyed travelers on the train of life.
Strapped down, rushing through the barren wastes of the turning year, we are
haunted all the while by shattered visions of a flowering Eden only dimly remem-
bered and forever lost. And, in spite of our idealistic attempts to recapture that
youthful innocence—along with its concomitant detachment and security—the train
moves relentlessly onward, propelling us on a one-way ride toward involvement,
experience, disillusionment and death. Both the paradoxical nature of this journey
and the inexorability of the ultimate destination find expression in the succinct
“Journey’s End:”

How hard we try to reach death safely,

luggage intact, each child accounted for,

the wounds of passage quickly bandaged up.

We treat the years like stops along the way

of a long flight from the catastrophe

we move to, thinking: home free all at last.

Wave, wave your hanky towards journey’s end;
avert your eyes from windows grimed with twilight
where landscapes rush by, terrible and lovely.

The landscapes “‘terrible and lovely” are not only, as the title of the book itself sug-
gests, the changing landscapes of the seasonal cycle, but those of the mind as well.
More particularly, they represent the varied emotional terrain by means of which the
consciousness of the poet is developed, his vision formed. For the movement of the
book is not only onward but outward, away from self-centered isolation toward the
increased awareness born of artistic perception. Like hibernating bears whose “hol-

RCR/104
low logs pinch them awake/like outgrown shoes,” the poet emerges from the narrow
confines of the self and enters the world hungry, inquisitive. And though he finds
that “summer is only camouflage,” its foliage merely a disguise worn by the bare
and wintery truths of existence, he has at least come to terms with his world— terms
uniquely artistic, for they rely upon creative sensibility: “the chameleon turns from
simile/to metaphor and back to lizard.”

Coming from a poet so obviously concerned with the mechanics of the poetic
process, it is not surprising that Linda Pastan’s poems demonstrate an equivalent
concern with the technical aspects of poetry. Almost without exception, these
poems are marked by compression and precision. Lines are trim, rhythms controlled
and—contrary to so much of what one sees these days—refreshingly purposeful.
Witness, for example, the manner in which the rhythm of “January, 7 A.M.” rein-
forces content by creating an unusual special effect:

Albino morning.
Windows like milk glass.
Pale sun, pink-eyed;
paler moon frozen

fast to the flagpole’s

tip, like the boy’s tongue
in the old winter

story.

This technical dexterity is seldom abused, and it is to Linda Pastan’s credit that only
one poem, “At Bingham Falls, Vermont,” succumbs to overwriting. Instead, the
failures and triumphs of A Perfect Circle of Sun distinguish themselves according to
the suitability to individual poems of what is at once both Linda Pastan’s greatest
strength and her most obvious weakness—the use of elevated statement which, if not
overt, is at least so diaphanous as to render the poem immediately accessible and, in
too many cases, vulnerable as well. At worst, poems already flawed by a lack of den-
sity prove too insubstantial to endure the light: like “Evening on the B&O,” they
fade to shallow pastels; like “Penelope,” they become uncolored sentiment. At best,
however, such undisguised statement is spellbinding. Properly directed, it is capable
of evoking the irony of “Dirge,” the controlled tenderness of “Passover,” or the
haunting and haunted beauty of the languorous “Evening At Bird Island.” Such
poems are the rule rather than the exception. Despite, here and there, a slight poem
which might better have been left out altogether, A Perfect Circle of Sun is an
accomplished, well-conceived first book. It leads us to expect much from Linda
Pastan in the future.

—Daryl] Jones

RCR/105
Speech Acts & Happenings, by Robert Vas Dias, Bobbs-Merrill, $4.95 cloth, $2.45 paper.

Speech acts. As Vas Dias’ title indicates, his poems stem at least partly from the
oldest of strains in the modernist tradition—the poem as prose, as living language, as
idiom. Pound (and Ford) had early emphasized speech rhythms; Olson spoke of
“breath measure’’; Williams rested his career as poet on the re-creation of natural
speech rhythms.

Vas Dias’ works the tradition well. His lyric poems—whether loving or bitter—are
always idomatically phrased. His language helps in creating the persona, the J, we
readers expect to come to know, in the course of reading a good collection.

It’s the end of day and

my son and I begin to set

sail in someone else’s fishing boat
for Africa...

Although he is dealing with family and home in many of these poems, Vas Dias
writes genuinely fanciful poems. Sometimes they are amazingly funny (the electri-
cian poem, “Ars Amatoria’’), again only tinged with comedy. More usually, the
fantasy infuses the lyric with a punch that the straight confessional poem does not
have. For example, Vas Dias gives us a sequence of astronaut/space poems (“I have
waited for this chance, all my life/my name was on the list to go”’) that imply the
man-out-of-tune-with-his-time theme, but the humor saves the sequence from the
expected triteness.

There are many poems in Speech Acts & Happenings about wife, father, son,
friends—Vas Dias lets us glimpse his life through such poems, but he also writes a
great deal about such cultural themes as ecology, the urban dilemmas, and social
questions. And his mentors (Whitman, Williams) appear in the poems frequently,
to help the poet meet his unruly audience, and down them with the oldest of poetic
justifications: the poet as maker, the poem as artifact, the process as craft.

Poem as speech, speech as act of touching (or not touching, as Vas Dias laments
in “As Though Poem for Susan”)—this part of the book’s title seems legitimate;
seems, indeed, to fit nearly all the poems in the collection. For me, the happenings
are less apparent. Happening in the kicky, McLuhanesque sense implies speed, bulk,
collision. There are very few big poems here—either in length or in width of focus.
Perhaps my quibbling over the title is a compliment, because the sense of diffusion
that I connect with happening is the opposite of the control that characterizes these
poems. Vas Dias is always in charge; every line, every stanza break is calculated.
For this reason, the group of 15 sijo (the Korean 43 syllable poem) included here
seems to parallel even his freer poems: everything is restrained, careful. For Vas
Dias is a modern poet in that he is a craftsman. The impact of his writing comes
from that paring down, that edging which is one mark of the twentieth century poet.
As he says facetiously in “Dump Poem,”

This is a genuine used poem

last-year’s model poem
shirt off someone’s back poem

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chair minus a leg poem
scrap husk and rind poem
steakbone poem...

A book of steakbone poems might be, in the long run, even better to have on hand
than a book of speech acts and happenings.

—Linda Wagner
Michigan State University

RCR/107
 

con-
tribu-
tors

Robert Bly—poet, editor, translator—is today, according to Kenneth Rexroth, “one
of the leaders of a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world
community.”

Dan Gerber has published poems in The New Yorker, The Nation, and others. He has
one book of poetry out called The Revenant, and one novel tentatively entitled
American Atlas. He lives in Fremont, Michigan.

 

David Gitin has appeared in two recent anthologies, Mark in Time and The San Francisco
Bark. A book entitled Guitar Against the Wall will appear later this year. He is currently
working on a Ph.D. in English and lives in Madison Wisconsin.

Jim Harkness has bounced between the west coast and East Lansing—first as a student,
now as an editorial consultant to the office of the President at Michigan State. He has
been published in a number of small mags and has been known to sell a science fiction
story or two under pseudonyms.

Michael Hamberger is an English poet, critic, and translator. He is the author of over
twenty books and will shortly publish an anthology of his collected work. He recently
returned to London after a tour of readings in this country. He admires the flowers of
America

Jim Harrison is the author of three books of poetry and a novel entitled Wolf. He
maintains his vigil at Lake Leelanau, Michigan.

David Kirkpatrick has recently been employed in a commercial silk screen firm and as
the sanitary supervisor of a dog kennel. He lives with his wife, two greyhounds, six cats,
and two angelfish in a house full of drawings and paintings in Lansing, Michigan.

Rus Myers has really been around. A one-time student at Michigan State University,
Rus has lived in Lansing but recently embarked for New York City to pick up a job
painting fire escapes. He has walked some mean Lansing streets with Jim Harrison:
Peter Nye is the MFA Program at Bowling Green State University, and has published
poems in several mags. He is also interested in rock/electronic music, film, and spends
his summers racing his Formula I car around the country.

George Oppen won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his book Of Being Numerous. He has a
book forthcoming from Sumac Press.

Andy Scheiber was born in the final year of the Truman Administration in Fort Wayne,
Indiana. Since then, he has become a senior English major at Michigan State and won
first prize in the MSU Creative Writing Contest for the short story which appears in this
issue.

Carl Thayler is the author of Mariposa Suite and The Providings. He has been published
in a number of magazines. At present he is working on a novel, getting over food poisoning,
and thinking about England. He lives with his wife in Wisconson.

Tomas Transtromer is a Swedish poet, who works as a psychologist at a boys’ prison

at Vasteras. He has had several books of poetry published in Sweden, and recently two
books have been published in the US—Twenty Poems (Seventies Press) and Night Vision
(Lillabulero Press).

Thomas Vandenberg wrote Orphan in the Sun, a novel, published by Houghton Mifflin.
He has published poetry in several mags, taught at Thomas Jefferson College, and is
currently working on a new novel. He lives in Saugatuck, Michigan.

Robert Vas Dias is the founding director of the Aspen Writers’ Workshop and is now
teaching at Thomas Jefferson College. He has edited the poetry anthology Inside
Outer Space and has recently published a book—Speech Acts & Happenings. He lives
in Grand Haven, Michigan with his wife, son, and Norwegian Elkhound puppy.
RED CEDAR REVIEW STAFF

Editor: Dennis Pace

Assistant Editors: Jeff Domanico
Lawrence Lucifer
Michael McCormick
Paul K. Sanchez

RED CEDAR REVIEW is a tri-annual 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.

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