RED CEDAR REVIEW

Figure without caption.

RED CEDAR REVIEW

Vol. XIII No. 2


Contents

Nancy Nowak

Augeries.......... ...................................................................1

John Lehman

Autobiography.....................................................................2

Margaret Kaminski

#3709 Postcard Poem..........................................................4

Bob Brooks

Turtles Move Slowly............................................................5

Judith McCombs

Untitled Stone Poem..........................................................20

Hollis M. Ryder

My Mother's China............................................................22

Leonora Smith

The Morning News............................................................24

Janet Samuelson

Michigan in Winter............................................................35

Janet Samuelson

A Morning of Divers..........................................................37

Janet Samuelson

Letter to Binx Bolling........................................................39

Carolyn Cigan

david, who always liked cats 
for their independence......................................................40

Deborah Route

Name Dropping...................................................................41

Paul Shuttleworth 
Nine: Anonymous/Amnesia..............................................42

James C. Dawson

Nancy and Sluggo Go to Easter Island...........................46

Paul Witherington 
Whores, Fours, and One-Eyed Jacks...............................48

Michael Lauchlin 
Boundaries............................................................................57

William D. Elliott

Ahna Andersen.....................................................................58

Dan Lawless 
arrival of evening...............................................................72

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Deborah Pye

Fiesta de Santa Catarina....................................................73

Richard Thomas

Review of One Summer....................................................74

Contributor's Notes.....................................................................77

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Pete Jones
Pete Jones


IV


AUGURIES

Nancy Nowak

Like a child who freezes

at the shadow

of a truck parked by the curb,

or points at the mealy claws of a pigeon 
and screams as the bird struts 
anxiously, both of them anxious, 
I know anything can be twice- 
seen. Of course ridged clouds 
are a sign of our meeting again, 
and the man selling turquoise rings 
on a blanket outside the bank 
is telling me what we will tell one another. 
Watching two women

cross the street against traffic I see 
what you meant, then; what we'll mean.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY

John Lehman

On the wall at my brother's after dinner

I uncover myself in a daguerrotype 
of my grandfather with his first grade class 
before a painted backdrop of a railroad bridge 
and recall that as an old man

he always wore a hat when photographed.

I remember Union Station as my father waited 
to step to the platform from a pullman car 
after the trip up north when grandfather died 
and screeches and the clap of coupler clash 
that echoed like a crack of polar ice 
and how the locomotive starting up again

sighed--

and now, and now, and now

...and the numbness of the Christmas 
the year my sister's baby died.

You curl between your mother and me.

When I was in first grade and my sister in 
eighth

I divided our room with a string

and now I was in eighth and how vacant she sat 
and asked about a model train station as I 
peeled a scab of glue from the side of a thumbnail 
specked with yellow paint groping over the roof 
for a foothold

...and the night ride in a coach from Frankfort 
to Paris when your mother was pregnant with you 
and couldn't sleep, and then as we waited outside 
at a table in a neighborhood cafe for our room

to be made,

splashed in morning sun, how we ate croissants 
that melted like snowflakes on our tongues.

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Today your mother and you give me an Irish 
fisherman's hat.

One morning years from now

your daughter or your son will see it in a picture 
on a bureau

with wonder.

3


#3709 POSTCARD POEM

Margaret Kaminski

Still haven't seen this bust of Queen Nefertiti and must go 
back to Cairo Museum to again see the young Pharoah's 
treasures, the most beautiful art objects on earth, I think.

Problems are far away as I walk in a haze of insence and 
essence of lotus and jasmine in Bazaar. Tomorrow perhaps 
will get some kohl and amber paint for eyes. Today bought 
some brass and copper (mosque lamp and water pipes) 
from a man with 2 wives. He said his father has 4. Also 
obligatory camel ride which I enjoyed to no end. I can't 
begin to say what has been most extraordinary here!

4


TURTLES MOVE SLOWLY

Ben Brooks

but they move. What I saw knotted at the base of the oak 
tree where the creek takes its westward turn was not moving 
at all. It was as still as the big tree itself.

I was below the tree, washing dishes in the creek. I was 
belly-down over the bank. I looked up and noticed the 
hump beneath the tree. I watched while my hands scrubbed. 
I watched while I dried. It seems thicker than a turtle, I 
thought, rising from the ground up the base of the tree. I 
was looking along the ridge of the bank, my eyes down over 
the edge. There were roots, ragged leaves, stones and 
acorns. My armpits ached high in the hollows, though I had 
my elbows wedged into the bank for support. It could be 
resting on a mound, I thought. It could even be propped 
against the tree, blown there by an insistent wind. It was 
covered with brown leaves, whatever it was. Spots of green 
showed through the leaves.

I fit my dishes one inside the next and closed the messkit. 
I stuck the kit into my pack, left it at the top--handy. I 
will investigate, I thought, on my leisurely way out of 
camp.

The hump was still still. I shouldered my pack, smoothed 
over my bed of leaves, breathed deep into the wind. This 
was my first time out of the city in eight months. I keep a 
calendar at home, recording events as they happen. Eight 
months, since a hike in the mountains to the east. That time 
I thought I saw a wolf. Now a leaf blew off the hump, peeling 
up like old paint curled with moisture. Another patch of 
green was exposed. It shone like the back of a fly in 
sunlight.

I touched the buckles of my pack. This was my first 
time ever camping alone. I ripped eight pages from my 
calendar before I left. I left the city for adventure. There, I 
set type, bind books. Real adventure scared me, the 
thought of it. But I wanted to expose myself to the possibility 
of it, the aura. There, you get nothing. I remembered the 
yellow-eyed wolf I had seen once, watching me. I had my 

5


arms bound in straps. I hoisted my shoulders to get the 
pack in place. I lifted the stick I used for walking, tapped it 
to my shoe. The stick was thin and weak--it looked like a 
long broken finger, knotted like gnarled knuckles, crooked 
like mangled bone--but it felt right in my hand. But if I 
chance upon Little John in the forest, I thought, I will do 
best to go for his eye with the sharp end. Or let him cross 
the bridge first.

I approached the tree. I walked along the bank of the 
creek, where stones were laid in rows, set into the dirt as if 
by an ancient civilization determined to leave a heritage- 
two long rows with space between. Or maybe animals 
nudged them into line, I thought. Now it seemed much too 
large to be a turtle. Besides, it still did not move. Won't a 
turtle, even the worst, walk off when approached by 
strangers in the woods? Rise up in your shell and drift away 
on liquid legs, turtle, on cold padded feet. What else is 
humped? I wondered.

I let my stick pick at dead leaves, impale them, whisk 
them away. I looked about me. My head beat. Ahead there 
was a humped something, greenish. I sat on the bank of the 
creek. I let my feet dangle over the water.

Across the way strong patches of sun broke through 
the cover of red- and- yellow- leaved trees. They formed 
bright patterns on the ground that danced as the wind blew. 
It was late morning. A few birds flew from one tree to 
another. They called to each other as they swept through 
the air. They came sudden from roosts hidden among 
leaves, then disappeared into similar roosts, scudding 
across my vision like slowed, fat bullets. I imagined one, 
plump, brown-bellied, in a pan in the fire, beak down, eyes 
closed. It was surrounded by onions, and a runny sauce 
that sizzled when I poked the bird with my stick.

The days are beautiful, I thought. The sun is well on its 
way across the sky. I am in no hurry. The first night a 
spider'd crawled up my side, from my ankle to my armpit. 
It left a ragged string of raised red bites that itched the next 
day. It ate all night, that spider-taking its time. I would be 
that spider.

Then too, one morning I woke to a trapped gnat skit


6


tering in my ear. My dream was of machines, saws, whining 
through wood. My mouth was sticky and hot. And the wolf 
too, I remembered. A small, thread-legged animal walks 
leisurely along my skin, I thought. It picks spots and nips 
my flesh to live. But I have no such way of being-and then I 
am sad.

In the city I dream of adventure. I dream of sunlight 
and the wind, wild animals lazy but ready, who look at me 
with hard bright eyes and flex their legs. There are rocks, 
large and sharp-cornered, cold, and there are low bushes 
with branches that snap back and prickly leaves that 
scratch. In the city it is all a dream. I set tiny letters in rows, 
catching them sometimes in my fingers when I am impatient, 
beneath my fingernails. I ride a bus littered with gray 
advertisements, work in a large room gray with soot, spotted 
black with spilled ink. In the woods I am alone, finally, 
there is no hurry.

It could easily have rained every day, I thought. Some 
falls it does. I could have been spending my days searching 
for caves, my nights in puddles black with mud. It is 
careless to have brought no tent. There are trees, of course-
tall and short, red and orange and yellow. But I might have 
been rained on, or frozen even, the way I came. I brought 
no sleeping bag. I sought reduction to the merest, most 
basic, most minimum of necessities. Then I lay down to 
sleep, and there were no walls suddenly, no roof, no bed, 
no thermostat. The sun was bright that first day but weak. 
The wind was clean, but the night was cold.

I brought only cooking utensils, food, matches, a few 
changes of clothing. I slept in my coat. I considered omitting 
the matches but I did not. The slightest drizzle and I 
was miserable, and if the wind gusted my coat flapped on 
my thigh all night. At home my walls were so tight that the 
air in my apartment seemed to beat. It screamed with 
wanting to get out, and it rang in my ears.

I looked up at the hump under the tree. It seemed 
larger than when I had been washing my dishes. But of 
course, I was closer. Green spots shone up from the shadow 
of the oak, leaves around it were dead and sodden. It cannot 
be a rock, I thought. No rock outside China is so green.

7


It is not moss, it is too solid. I was below it still, and could 
see only the mass. Occasionally a leaf flaked off in the 
wind, showing more green. I had my hands together in my 
lap, and my feet kicked out and back over the water. I had 
said to them two weeks, I will be gone two weeks. And now 
time had loosened, it was as loose as air, and it seemed I 
could sit all morning to guess about a green thing humped 
under a tree. My heels dug holes in the yielding dirt. I 
imagined: An enormous green slug. A fat, squat snake. A 
truncated crocodile, lying exhausted hundreds of miles 
north of its swamp. Anything green, I thought. A suitcase 
full of money. A plastic wheel-hub, a green-painted mound 
of metal. What might I tell them when I returned? The sun 
winked at me between leaves of a tree, an eye bright and 
strong as fire, sly as a child. It would be nice if it were 
something there, I thought, and not just a mound of slime.

I stood up. I walked toward the hump. I kept my eyes 
to the ground, so as not to see too soon what this was. I 
kicked brown moist leaves over the edge of the creek's 
bank. They settled gently in the water, then swirled away. I 
kicked at small stones laid out in rows. And I stabbed a 
long dark worm with my stick. I winced at the pop of death, 
the spurt of its insides. I thought, anyway I will get some 
nature. I will get some nature in the grandest way. I shed all 
my city things-except the matches, the tins of food, the 
changes of clothing. And drove to the hills. I will clean out 
my whole system, I thought. You get tired of inky letters, 
sharp and metallic, of damp papers, machines with buttons 
that need oil. I will walk through the woods, hike in the 
hills, and even climb the mountains. Two weeks ought to 
do it, I thought, remembering my yellow-eyed wolf: ears 
curled inward, legs tensed and I could see its chest bump as 
its warm little heart beat inside, watching me. Two weeks 
alone ought to do it.

I stopped near the tree. You cannot will adventure, I 
thought. I looked around. I raised my head and looked at 
the sky through the leaves above me. The sun was high. I 
touched the mess-kit in my pack. Adventure is an event, I 
thought, a circumstance. It will happen to me only if it 
does.

8


Then I looked down. Immediately I knew. Something 
in my stomach stung, bled, ran to my heart. It had legs. 
There were pants. It had shoes. My mouth began to open 
but I shut it. I looked away again. I felt with my stick for the 
ground. I took a few small steps back, then stopped. I 
returned, I looked. No, it did not move.

I tried to turn it with my stick. But my stick could not 
raise it. It got caught in the coat. I touched it with my toe 
but pulled back. The green was the coat. Wool. Might I 
leave? I wondered. Of course I will miss the ending, I 
thought, if I leave. Leaves climbed up the side of the face 
past the ears. The shoes were half buried in dirt. I once had 
First-Aid, at the Y. I was curious, I was nosy and neat. If I 
left, I would miss the ending. I would never know.

Gingerly I removed my stick from the coat. Only the 
tips of two fingers touched it. I wiped them on my pants. 
The body was curled around the tree, face down. The feet 
pointed uphill. The first step was to flip the body. I poked 
at it again with my stick, but my stick only bent. It wilted. It 
folded.

I will have to touch it, I thought. I am not afraid to 
touch dead bodies, but I do not especially like to. My 
fingers itch then. I once touched a friend in his coffin, dead 
from blood trouble. My legs wobbled that time. But afraid? 
No.

I bent down and sunk my hands under an arm. Moist 
dirt clung in the webbing of my fingers. Quickly I rolled it; 
it was heavy. I sprang away. But first, or already as I 
jumped, I had a smell of dead clam-it came slamming into 
my face. An old smell from town--a bad meal once from a 
fish market.

I turned my face and sought a fresh wind. My eyes 
teared. I turned back but the body was rolling, slowly 
toward the bank. I'd flipped too hard. I reached for it, I saw 
the face for one moment as it made its last turn. The eyes 
were open, wild. The mouth was open-teeth showed. Flies 
swarmed up from where the body had been resting, from 
one hot knot they buzzed away-some through the tree, 
others over the creek. The body rolled over the edge. I 
heard it splat in the water. It might have broken 10 bones 

9


twisting first on the bank. I looked. A line was stretched 
very tight between my ears, and I shook my head on it. It 
lay in the stream, face down. It was too heavy for the slow 
current, the shallow water, but an arm floated to the side. 
The body wavered, then settled. I leaned against the oak. Is 
this adventure? I thought.

Water swirled gently around the body, accomodating, 
as if it had always been there. Hair streamed back from the 
head on the surface. I knelt and filled my hands with dirt, 
scrubbed the fingers that had touched the arm. My eyes 
teared. I'd had one dumb look at a wild anxious face, then 
it was gone. I picked up my stick and threw it in. That green 
back. The stick flew, glided, then settled in the water--and 
slowly made its way downstream, rotating in gentle currents.


I abandoned my itinerary and set up camp under the 
oak tree. I would wait to see if anyone chanced along. If 
not, I thought, I will report this on my way out of the 
woods.

I found it expedient to have a permanent camp. One 
campfire for every meal, one spot of ground for each night. 
I dug a pit under the tree and cooked breakfast, lunch, and 
dinner on fires built in it. I left my pack in the crook of the 
tree when I went for walks. I slept and rested on one spot, 
which I covered with pine needles, and laid over with fallen 
leaves.

There were long hours spent sitting with my back to 
the tree, considering this event. I listened for the sound of 
tramping feet, but I heard only birds and crickets, and the 
occasional scuttling of a small ground animal. I drew 
figures in the dirt with my fingers, and rearranged the 
stones laid out along the creek's bank. I looked at the body 
in the water. Could the features of its face be washed away 
in the stream? I wondered. The bark of the tree, rough as 
barren ground tracked by old rains, imprinted itself on my 
back. I had already lost the face.

I tried to recall its look, its wild eyes, its brow, but 
already was not sure. Could the body be filled by water, the 
flow continuous through its open mouth? What do those 

10


teeth do to the soft river bed? And will skin, which must by 
then, I thought, be quite wrinkled, rot and dissolve, or 
might the body bloat?

My weather was cooling. One day it rained. The first 
drops fell and I did not move, but when I was wet, and all 
my things were, I looked for cover. I ran a wide arc about 
my tree. I found no shelter at all.

I huddled under the oak, most of its leaves gone, and I 
pulled the collar of my coat over the top of my head. The 
coat smelled from rain. It pulled tight along my shoulders 
and back; it tugged at my arms. I sat constricted, hunched, 
stupid. The creek rose and the body wavered in the water. 
Only the back, the green jacket, bulged out.

The brown scum that joined water to wool rose with 
the creek's tide. It ringed the patch of exposed cloth. I sat 
above it, smelled nothing. The open belly was lost to me.

Rain dripped down my face, soaked through my coat, 
through my pants and shoes. I could hear worms, I thought, 
sliding through mud, and bugs digging through the wet bark 
of the tree. Nothing else though. I could hear nothing else 
but the rain.

I began to shiver and could not stop. My feet slid like 
fish inside my shoes. There was nowhere to go. Rain dropped 
like waterfalls. I remained under the tree waiting for it 
to stop. When I go camping again, I thought, I must bring a 
poncho and galoshes. It seemed the body would rise with 
the water and float, but it did not. Days, and there had 
been no progress since I'd rolled it into the creek. How 
could I ever have omitted my galoshes? I thought. There 
was nothing for it but to sit in the mud and watch.

All about the body rain entered the creek. Ripples and 
counter-ripples mingled and spread. The creek was shaking 
like jelly. The tiny island of wool absorbed rain without 
splashing it. Beneath the surface of the creek the side of 
the head, the brown pants encasing the legs, the hands at 
the very bottom, all wavered and swayed. Maybe the rain 
penetrates, I thought, slicing through secretly to skin, or 
beneath, preserving like an Egyptian unguent.

The water rose. Even less wool lay uncovered. Some of 
the brown scum washed downstream, catching in ripples, 

11


swirling. I was soaked, shivering. But before me was only 
beauty. The ripples, the current, the form submerged and 
distorted, the little island of green, the white hands at the 
bottom that seemed to teeter back and forth like delicate 
shells under the wash of waves. No sound but the rain. Here 
is death, its ugly smell trapped, now purged and serene. 
Clouds lay low over trees, whose branches poked into them 
like fingers into full bags.

Rain stopped before nightfall. I ate cold hash from a 
can, because wet leaves and sticks, in a puddled pit, would 
not burn. I drank water gathered upstream from the body. 
The last of my cookies was dessert. I changed into clothes 
damp in my pack. I slung my coat, everything, over the 
oak's branches to dry. The ground was spotted with puddles. 
My bed of leaves and pine needles was floating. I 
spread underclothes, worn and dirty, wet, along the bed as 
sponges. Then I slept--in my dreams I shivered.

For food there were acrons, shells cracking in teeth. I 
ground juice from leaves, pulling them through sticks that 
lay attached like a clothes wringer, my foot holding them 
tight. The juice was for vitamins. I saved a tin of meat, a 
few grounds of coffee, some shreds of tea. No one had 
come.

One morning I gathered worms and insect larvae and 
threw them into my pan. I turned my head. The bugs fried 
to charcoal. I remembered pretzels, beef jerky, eating eyes 
shut.

I began to tire of watching that body in the creek. It 
did not move. The rain left a ring of glistening, exposed 
green around the island. Below that the scum formed 
again--a kind of beach. My mind strayed. I remembered my 
job. When were two weeks past? The weather was cold. I 
must have lost my job. Had my apartment been forcibly 
vacated, too?

Here is death: beautiful but it stinks in its first move, 
impersonal but I am caught, mysterious. The other side of 
the body, the face, the look--what were they now, through 
time and water and change?

I passed out once. Momentarily. Another time I fell. 
My interest began to dwindle, like an ebbing tide. Then it 

12


flowed back. I resolved to stir. To take action. Action was 
the problem. I stood up. I hailed the body, called good-bye, 
said I would return with help. I tried to leave. But. What if it 
suddenly began to flow downstream, swollen, ripping 
chunks of dirt from the sides of the creek? I would miss it. 
Or its decomposition--what if that reached the surface, and 
the hair on the back of its head, the green jacket, the white 
hands deep down on the bottom, turned gray from the inside, 
began to flake? I would miss that. And what if I 
retrieved help, but lost my way returning? What might happen 
might happen at any time. I could miss it. The finale. 
Or what if someone came while I was gone, strode boldly 
to my tree, did something-prodded the body loose? I 
resolved to stay.

I ate the last tin of meat. Still I did not go. Cold was 
with me, and I sat huddled under the tree, swathed in layers 
of clothing, my eyes fixed to the creek. I sucked my fingers 
to stay alive. Upstream I dipped my cup into the creek, lying 
on the hardening ground. I licked the salt of occasional 
sweat from my lips, and the palms of my hands.

The ground began to freeze. Snow came. I dug out the 
frozen ground with a spoon from my mess-kit, and my 
fingers. A big hole. It was deep enough to sit in, it was long 
enough to lie in and wide enough to turn in.

I covered the hole with sticks. I covered the sticks with 
wet, decaying leaves. I moved from the spot under the tree 
to the hole. I was careful not to let any snow spill in. I laid a 
fresh bed of leaves and pine needles in the hole. If I stood, 
raising to my toes, I could see over the edge of the bank 
and to the body in the water. That is, until the water froze 
and the body was covered with snow. Then I could only see 
the hump of snow that signified the body. A hump again, I 
thought. Like the initial, behumped stage of this adventure, 
of seeing.

In my hole there was time to think. My brain, cold as 
ice, became sharp and alert. I rarely moved. There were the 
seasons, the woods and the city, the event that did not want 
to transpire. But I could resolve no issues. I could not even 
answer the question, what shall I have for breakfast this 

13


fine morning? Or, did it really snow again last night, or am I 
only seeing yesterday's snow--fresh, bottomless, glittery in 
the morning and so new-looking. My brain prickled like dry 
ice, and sat.

Then the weather warmed again. The snow in the creek 
melted, the level of the water rose. It seemed at first the 
body would be swept away. For a few days it was completely 
submerged. When the wind blew, and parted the water, 
the tiniest tip of green poked above the surface. The body 
seemed to tremble in the spring current. It seemed to sway. 
I climbed out of my hole daily to watch. Interest was 
renewed. I stood at the edge of the bank peering over.

But the body would not be dislodged. Gradually the 
water subsided. I went back to grinding old acorns and 
picking buds. It trembled and swayed with winds, the tip of 
green poked out again, scum formed in descending rings. I 
brought my bed out of my hole, handful by handful. Under 
water the sun iced to the bottom, there was movement in 
the pants, the shoes, the fingers. I fetched my pack and my 
clothes. I placed them under the oak tree. I sat, drew my 
knees to my chin. My spine pressed into the cool, rough 
bark. I watched. The water had crested, the big spring 
flood. I stood up and stretched my limbs. I touched my 
toes, I shook my fingers like short whips. Nothing. The level 
of the water in the creek was receding-I could see it—as if 
somewhere now was an opened drain.

I walked about the camp. Small bushes, shots and 
tangles of undergrowth had re-emerged. I heard the cries of 
a few birds. The last spots of snow were glistening wetly, 
ready to give. I counted off another season.

Summer. The green coat ringed like the cross-section 
of a tree, different shades, than dead and fermenting sections 
of scum. The current was slowed; the body was still.

The tip of an ear emerged, dried and wrinkled like a 
bleached prune. The white hands at the bottom of the 
creek were the underbellies of fish turned up, dead and unmoving. 
Perhaps they had even dug in. The hair was knotted 
and dry. Summer, more waiting.

I knew summer would not move the body. It does not 
rain much in summer. The current was slowed. Maybe 

14


even, by now, the fingers of the hands were clutching the 
bed of the creek. I could not see. Perhaps summer would 
lower the level of the water more, exposing the body. 
Perhaps summer would heat it up, and cause it to finally 
stink to my nose. Perhaps summer would hasten its decomposition. 
But I knew summer would not move the body. It 
would not finally swirl it down the creek like a bloated, rotting 
battering ram--into a bank where it would stick head 
first, or to the sea miles away.

So I relaxed my vigil. I brought my thoughts back from 
the hole. Spring is the time to watch. I got to know the 
placement of every loose stick on the ground in my camp, 
the angle of each tree's shadow as the sun passed. I found 
berries and ate them. I watched the creek for minnows, and 
caught succulent water spiders with quick scoops of an 
outstretched arm, my hand closing on them like a trap. I exercised. 
I chased squirrels, swatting at them with a new 
stick. I even stood on my head several times a day, resting 
my spine and my legs along the trunk of my tree.

No, summer did not dislodge the body. I was free to 
relax. A patch of hair glistened above the surface, an ear, 
the heel of a shoe. The water swirled around instead of 
over. There are some possibilities, I thought. An autumn 
rainstorm. A cold winter, and the body will freeze, rise, 
float off as a block of ice when the creek begins to melt. Or 
next spring's thaw. I thought of my station, the city, 
seasons. But thoughts do not force action. Patience is not 
always rewarded. An event will occur, perhaps unexpected, 
and only then will a series progress. It cannot be predicted 
when this will happen. I imagined the body loosening, turning 
up to me with its eyes opened and sad, its rubbery lips 
struggling to move. I imagined the creek arching, rising into 
a powerful river, running madly off with its loot. I imagined 
courage, strength, wading into the creek, hooking an arm 
and a fattened leg, pulling it to the bank. I sat, now I stood, 
now patient, now impatient, watching, waiting. It did not 
seem to me at all that I had aged a year.

15


2

They thought I was sick. They. They came with their 
tents, their long staffs and bug-spray, their hiking boots, 
their hats to keep away the sun, their radios and bag lunches. 
They came as the squirrel spiralled up the side of the 
tree, its tiny claws forcing openings in the bark, its brown 
eyes bulging, heavenward.

I did not see them. I beat at the tree with my stick, as 
the squirrel jumped from limb to limb. I pushed at the tree 
with both hands. I saw the squirrel in my pan, fur greased 
down in sauce, mouth open, little sharp teeth charred 
black. I did not hear them. I did not hear them until one of 
them said, my first voice in a year, dry scraping voice sugar- 
coated with mucous, "What the hell is he doing? Jesus 
Christ, what the hell is he doing?"

They drew toward me and circled me. I watched. Four, 
five, six. They might have sprouted from the ground. I held 
my stick slack at my side, a fresh ripe branch from the oak, 
peeled at the tip by my fingers. It was slack, tapping my 
ankle, but I was quite ready to jam it in an eye, thrust it up 
a nose. They closed. "Are you from the city?" I said.

One laughed. "From the city," he mimicked. He had 
long arms that swung like willow branches, a face whose 
mouth stuck out like a horse's, whose eyes were cold like 
hard candy. "From the city." The tip of my stick opened a 
sudden slit along his brow that issued blood like a newstruck 
well spills water. Only because he moved his head at 
the last moment did it not impale an eye. Only because he 
moved his head.

They thought I killed the body. They held me. Four, 
five, six. They stood on my bed. They kicked it apart, ripping 
my leaves, scattering my pine needles. They all bled 
from the head. Maybe they thought I stuck it with my stick. 
Maybe they thought I beat it out of a tree.

They led me away. "Cod damn you," the one with the 
horse mouth said. I left my acorns. I left my clothes, my 
pack. I went with them, without choice. I left my place, my 
body, my hole, my oak tree, even my creek. I felt like I was 
being sucked away from my insides, or my insides from me.

16


Leaves of trees glistened above me, green, moist. Little 
purple flowers grew close to the ground. We walked along 
a hidden path spread with sticks. Birds, squirrels, insects 
watched me. I felt the body back in the drying creek pull. 
Don't leave, it said. It turned in the water, rolled over and 
over, wrapped itself like a mummy in the thick rope that 
connected us, but I did not come back to it. I stayed on the 
path.

The path widened, then ended. We'd come to an 
asphalt lot for cars. I had not seen a car for a long time. 
One of them, bright orange, stung my eyes like direct 
sunlight. Another was green, with great brown gashes in its 
side. I turned my head.

We got into the orange car. Inside it was cool and 
dark. It did not tear my eyes, as its shell had. The plastic of 
the seat was like wet bark, the floor a coating of pine 
needles. The engine was the wind through leaves, and our 
movement was steady like the current of a stream.

They drove me to the city. They took me to a tall 
building with wide steps leading to a columned entranceway. 
A woman with a yellow pencil behind her ear 
greeted me. She told me to talk. The others, and more, 
stood around me in a circle. Talk. Talk. As if the world were 
words, and death, time, a body in a creek or a hole in the 
ground, could be explained.

I sat alone in a room. I slapped my hand on a table. I 
slapped it again and again, until I could no longer feel the 
slaps. The body in the creek lay face up, wrapped in rope, 
one loop loose about its throat. Its belly was hollow, eaten 
out. Its mouth was open, twisted, silent. An arm, 
greensleeved, was being tugged by water, stretching. It 
made as if to go, surge downstream. The eyes were all 
white. The mouth, twisted, called to me. Deep in its throat 
it was black. An arm made as if to stretch away from a 
shoulder. I kept hitting the table.

I never saw the face--just that one rolling glimpse. It 
was wild, impossible to recall. I thought of acorn meats, 
curved and intricate like the inside of my head. I thought of 
a worm I could twist around my finger. An oak leaf wrung 
into a tin of melted snow.

17


I would not see how it turned out. I would not see the 
decomposition, the washing away of the features, the battering 
ram ride down the swollen current. Would the white 
fingers have mud from the creek bottom thick under their 
nails? Would there be nails? I would not see the face.

I thought: the adventure is probably already over; 
how did it end? It was supposed to have been my adventure, 
wasn't it? I got up from the table. My feet no longer 
took to linoleum floors. I did not like walls. The air I breathed 
was old. It beat against the walls, crying. Once in my 
lungs it beat harder. I circled the room. I sat down. My legs 
ached and I felt empty. Like a balloon, I was all skin and 
stale air.

Now the face. Its eyes were wild, but what color? Blue? 
Red? Purple? What shape? An open mouth--but what of the 
teeth? the lips? It must have looked like something. I 
remembered the hump I had first seen, green and distant, 
covered with leaves. I imagined a face with thick green 
eyelids, large black eyes blinking slowly. No. A curved 
beak. There were fingerless reptilian paws bleached white. I 
imagined the wool jacket a hard protective shell. I got up 
from the table. The slick floor felt to my feet like the slippery 
deck of a tipping ship. I made it to the door, but I 
could not go past. I beat on it. The door was locked.

18


Tim Keefe
Tim Keefe


19


UNTITLED STONE POEM

Judith McCombs

I




There are places where the earth's cliffs stumble & break, 
where the boulders have gathered & the sea waves abide, 
places where stone clambers on stone, 
skull-shape & slab, tumbling & mauling

There the animals retreat & go inland for water 
There the humans retreat, no harbor, no paths

The grasses retreat, unable to seed

in the moving grey stones There cedar roots grope, 
feeding on stone, cramped & retreating

What light inhabits these barrens of stone 
older than humans, borne across waters 
no human beholds What silence inhabits 
these slow-heaving stones, & under that silence 
what murmuring, learned from the ridges of water 
falling into the land, mounting & falling

II




If you had the patience of God you could wait 
for the fossils hidden in stone to awaken 
for the scoured hollows of boulders to rise 
for the fractures veining the granite to open 
as thistle & flower, creeper & wing

Or, with the lesser patience of death you could wait 
for the breath to subside & the flesh settle back 
in the thickening mantle, mould among mould, 
unspecified shards where the soft bones broke

Or, while the light on the water wavers

& the grey gelid sea drifts towards winter, 
if you wait without speaking, without hours or maps, 

20


the stones will begin to forget you are there 
The cedars will rouse & turn to each other, 
frond among frond, gravely embracing

& the light on the water will gather in fullness, 
long barrows of light sliding into your eyes 
as the sea slides into the stones & garners 
slimecell & bubble, bright furrows of life

& the stones will speak, stone among stone

& stone among water, in a tongue that is known 
to the skin of your eyes, a breath remembered 
in the pit of your breath, a hymn of grey stone 
that will enter the shining furrows of brain

& never translate into words for the humans

21


MY MOTHER’S CHINA

Hollis M. Ryder

My mother's china 
resided quite properly 
displayed 
in a hutch

that was made 
by hand.

The plates, upheld 
by small silver stands, 
set stoically 
in a somber space 
known only to royalty 
and jesus christ 
himself erect

but shoulders leaning 
like Sunday 
in a pew:

brown-hard and 
back-to-back.

Across the room 
a window played 
and danced the day 
away like a lover 
caught in color settling 
gently as dust collecting 
in the cups. Caught

captured lost 
ghost of a prism 
lurking rainbow hue 
in a glass pane prison.

22


A small boy wondering 
approaches silently; 
divides the light, 
disintegrates the space 
by reaching for a plate . . .

He caresses the heavy-held 
like a thousand loves and 
cries oh!

if life could be as cool 
and smooth

as mother's china.

23


THE MORNING NEWS:

THE EVENING NEWS

Leonora Smith

Ralph circled through the Rollo-Rama parking lot 
three times before he got a place right in front of the door. 
"Cripes, Dad, we can walk a little way. We're not helpless," 
Will muttered from the back seat. Monica just squirmed.

There were crowds of kids in front of the rink—some 
older. They didn't seem to be kids at all. They had on silky 
jackets in red and yellow. The back of one boy's jacket— 
the boy looked very tall and thin, even taller than Ralph 
himself—had a dragon that breathed fire on it. Huge red 
flames. Maybe these were Viet Nam vets. But what were 
they doing hanging around a place for children like Will, 
fourteen, and Monica, only twelve.

"These people are older. Are you sure it's the right 
place?"

"God, Dad, I've been skating here for years. My 
teacher's even here. Stop being so weird.” Will pushed 
open the back door and Monica opened the front, pulling 
down her bright pink blouse to cover the roll of baby fat 
around her middle. "We'll call you," Will went on.

"No, don't call. Nine. I'll be here right at nine. And 
wait inside the door." They got out of the car and Monica 
stopped to talk to some girls who were standing there, 
sleazy looking girls with hair that separated in strands, girls 
wearing boys' jackets. Were these the people that his 
children saw everyday at school? He was noticing all these 
things now, things he had never really thought about or 
seen before his wife died.

When Monica, who still looked like a child, almost a 
baby, turned with the others and went in the square door, 
which looked like the opening to a bar, the boy with dragon 
on his jacket turned and stared at her. And she stopped and 
stood there for a moment and stared back at him. Ralph 
couldn't see the expression on her face but he wanted to 
get out of the car and grab her and shake her and take her 
home. Will, too, but especially Monica. Before he could 

24


move, though, she shook her head a little, like a twitch or a 
shrug, and went inside. Ralph could hear the organ music 
playing as he drove away.

When he got home, he sat down to read the 
newspaper. Girl 10, Raped Murdered. Jesus. Was the news 
getting worse all the time, or was it true what Will said, that 
he was getting weird? Before Mary sickened, at first slowly 
and then faster and faster, he would have read the headline 
and made a comment about Detroit going to hell in a handcart. 
Good thing they lived in the suburbs. You wouldn't 
catch him going down on the Cass Corridor to see the second 
coming. Now his hand shook at the sight of the 
headline, and he pushed his weight, which seemed these 
days so heavy he could barely move himself from place to 
place, back from the table. Where were the car keys? He'd 
just had them a minute ago. He pushed his hand into his 
jacket pockets, but they were empty.

There were murderers out there, sick people, crazy 
people. He tried to block what the paper had said out of his 
mind. Girl missing two days, found naked....even worse was 
what they hadn't said, like flimsy pieces of gauze over the 
pictures of naked women in magazines, so the distended 
flesh and bristling hair became much more vivid than it 
could possibly be uncovered. Where were those keys? Not 
on the kitchen table. Not on the mantle. He rushed out to 
the car to look for them. Not there.

What about the girl, some strange man doing things to 
her that could not be imagined by a sane person...his huge 
hands? He put his hands over his ears to block out what 
seemed to him to be the sound of his daughter's voice. He 
had to find the keys.

There they were, in his pant's pocket. But he'd already 
looked there. He ran back to the car and got in, the ripped 
place on the upholstery catching his knit pants, and drove 
back to the skating rink.

A few people were still standing outside, smoking 
cigarettes or marijuana, he couldn't tell from this distance. 
He parked as close as he could and as he pushed past the 
people at the door, he could tell it was marijuana. Why had 
he let his children come here?

25


The noise of the organ music and the loud hum of the 
skates of so many people over the wood floor was deafening. 
The music was rock and roll—disco, and people were 
skating in pairs. The black kids, more than the white ones, 
were doing amazing dips and then moving away from each 
other, and then back together again, in some complicated 
and physically improbable dance. Ralph first just looked 
through the crowd for white faces. He saw Will over in the 
corner with some other boys—the Johnson boy and some 
others he didn't recognize, but he didn't see Monica.

At the door of the skate booth, a fat man in a tee-shirt, 
who seemed to be about Ralph's age or older, was leaning 
on the shelf of the divided door, looking at the skaters. "I'm 
looking for my daughter," Ralph said. The man looked at 
him, turning up his eyes and shaking his head. "She's..." The 
man rolled his eyes and shrugged. Ralph wanted to grab the 
front of his dirty t-shirt and twist it until the man's eyes popped.


Just then, Monica skated by him, on the inside of the 
oval, staring straight ahead of her. There were so many 
other faces that Ralph was not at first certain it was 
Monica. Yes, he could see now that it was. She was alright. 
There she was. She was alright.

He watched her go around several times, persistently, 
her arms stiff as if holding her up from falling, an intent, 
almost sullen look on her round face. As if she were 
waiting, asking, for something to happen.

Ralph went out to the car and sat there, hands on the 
wheel, staring at the open door of the rink, at the square 
patch of light and noise his children would walk through. 
Papers and old popcorn boxes littered the broken cement 
outside, shifting slightly in the mild wind. He could not stop 
his children's lives but he could be there to watch them. To 
save them, if he paid attention to the signs that he had missed 
before. Poison in the air, tainted bacon, insecticides, the 
very air and soil and food in his wife's mouth rotting away 
at her. They had told him. He read it in the papers everyday, 
more and more warnings. But he had done nothing.

At the end, he almost had. He used to lie on the couch 
at night, which was made up with the army blankets his

26


mother had sent to college with him. His mother---he 
couldn't even remember her face now---what was her 
maiden name? And he would imagine taking those blankets 
and folding them up into a kind of pad and putting them 
over his wife's face, over the zombie's face, cutting off the 
explosions of sick dead breath into the air of the house 
where he and his children were trying to live. He would imagine 
this every night but he knew he could never do it, 
even though he was sure that once it was done he could 
reestablish the connection in his mind between his wife 
and the girl he had taken, fifteen or so years before, to the 
Ten Eyck hotel in Albany, with whom he had sunk into a 
haze of the senses.

The papers had told him that if he didn't take care of 
her, protect her from these vile poisons, these putrid but 
hidden dangers all around them every day, this horrible 
transformation would happen. But he hadn't paid attention. 
He hadn't believed.

As soon as he saw other cars pulling into the Rollo- 
Rama lot, he pulled right in front of the door, so that he 
could see Monica and Will before they came out. By nine, 
there were crowds outside, people pushing each other and 
one girl screaming out in a high thin voice and then lunging 
at a boy who had taken her purse. He was so tall he just 
held it over her head, and when she tried to grab it, he pushed 
her away.

Then Monica came out. He could see her pink top in 
the headlights. They should have more lights in a place like 
this, he thought. Then he saw her stop just outside the door. 
There was the tall thin boy, the one with his hair pushed 
back behind his ears, in the silk jacket, and he had his hand 
on Monica's arm. Before Ralph could move, the boy---he 
looked old enough to be a man—reached in his pocket and 
took something out. Was it a knife? Then Monica ran over 
to the car, and Will, too.

"Who was that guy? What was he doing?"

"What guy?" asked Will.

"Monica. The guy who gave something to Monica.

What was he giving you?"

"Nothing. Just a joke," said Monica, leaning against 

27


the car window.

"Tell me. Who he is and what did he give to you?" 
Ralph had both hands tight on the steering wheel and people 
behind were beginning to honk.

"Come on, Dad. We're holding up traffic," said Will.

"It was just a joke." Monica opened up her hand, 
which was dirty as if she'd been eating something pink and 
sticky. In it were two dimes. "That's Betty's brother 
Chuck." She looked out the window, her words reflected 
off the glass. "He gave me these dimes and told me...to call 
him in a couple years."

"You, heh," said Will. "You're just a kid."

"I am not."

"That's enough. You two have to stop this. You just 
have to help. Without your mother..." He started the car, 
not saying any more, not wanting to say any more, knowing 
it was hopeless. How could just one person, a man, protect 
his children?

When the children were in bed, he got his rifle out of 
the cupboard on the back porch where it hung with the 
skates he had had in high school and his old hunting jacket. 
He hadn't been hunting in three—four years. His mother 
had given it to him for his sixteenth birthday, so he could go 
up North with his Uncle Jack for deer season, but he had 
only gone two years before he went away to college, and 
after that he had hunted only four or five times. He took 
the gun and laid it out on its oily cloth on the table, and 
poured himself a glass of Jack Daniels. At first, he couldn't 
remember what to do with the gun, but drinking the bourbon 
seemed to remind him. He picked it up off the table 
and rubbed the barrel down with the cloth, and by the time 
he poured his second drink, he had the gun taken entirely 
apart. And by the time he finished his third, he had it oiled 
and put back together. And then he loaded it. He had to be 
prepared to take care of his children.

He looked in at Monica, having to step over piles of 
old clothes, underwear, books, that she left lying on the 
floor. Will was the neat one. Ralph had never noticed how 
messy Monica was until Mary got sick. Got cancer. She 
must have hidden it, cleaning up before he could notice.

28


Monica's face was pale, her nose stubbed, the freckles 
showing more in the dark than they did in the light. She was 
solid, heavy, with a lower lip which made her look as if she 
were pouting, even in her sleep. Ralph could see what that 
boy at the roller rink had been looking at---the pouting 
mouth, the smudged eyes. The boy in the silk jacket with 
the dragon on it and the flames looked, Ralph remembered, 
more like a knife than a human being, tall, thin, dark, like a 
blade. And he had been watching Monica, the blank expression 
on her face, the bottom lip sticking out too far, the 
almost roll of fat around her middle between the short top 
she wore and her jeans just noticable. What he could see 
was what, in her, was attracting this knife-person. There 
was something about her softness, the flatness of her 
eyelids, her soft, enveloping voice that attracted him and 
others like him, as if he were a fox or wild dog and she a 
stunned fat summer rabbit, eyes fixed, body still with invitation.


Ralph looked at her short hair, not washed often 
enough, and wanted to crawl into bed with her, to hold on 
to the roll of fat around her middle, to put his face against 
his daughter's small separated breasts, but he just shut the 
bedroom door and watched an old Humphery Bogart 
movie until he fell asleep under his old army blanket on the 
couch. Everything would work out alright, he thought as he 
fell asleep, the familiar sound of the movie reassuring. He 
was learning how to read the signs, to interpret them, and 
he would make everything work out.

In the morning, he woke late, just in time to watch Will 
and Monica finish breakfast. Will had a rip in the leg of his 
pants, and as he put on his levi jacket, he looked like a 
stranger to Ralph. Monica was silly this morning, like a little 
child, reading the jokes off the cereal box and banging on 
the table with laughter.

"Shut up," Will told her. "Shut up, you loud mouth. 
You sound like a pig."

Will, who now played baseball, had left the paper 
open to the sports page. The Tigers had won their third 
straight game. Ralph waited until he no longer heard the 
children's steps, and then went out and watched them walk 

29


down the street, Will ahead and Monica behind, and continued 
to watch even after they were out of sight. Then he 
went back to the newspaper. The sports page looked 
alright. And then the business page. The economy was in an 
upswing. More new housing starts. Maybe he was just imagining. 
Maybe he was just going off the deep end with 
work, the house, everything getting lost and not being 
where it was supposed to be, not knowing what to do next. 
That was the worst of it.

Maybe the sickening fear he felt last night was just his 
imagination, overwork, too much to worry about. All these 
things that seemed to be happening, maybe they were an 
accident. Or maybe...maybe these things were not really 
happening. People in the newsrooms could be making them 
up, just to sell papers to people who liked to read about 
things like that. There were people who really liked to be 
frightened. Look at Jaws. Ralph couldn't imagine it, but he 
did know there were people who liked to be frightened.

He remembered that when the astronauts landed on 
the moon, some old country fellow said that it was all make 
believe, staged like a movie; nobody could really go to the 
moon. He had laughed a lot at that, but maybe the old guy 
was right. Not about landing on the moon---that must have 
happened, but maybe other things—maybe they were just 
exaggerated, so that a person would think they were much 
worse, much more amazing, than they really were. After all, 
he had never seen or known anyone whose children had 
been murdered. And the earthquakes, and the accidents— 
sometimes he saw accidents, but he never saw anyone killed 
or even seriously hurt. It would seem as if he would have 
actually seen or heard some of these things himself, if they 
were really happening. And his wife, well, maybe it was 
something else, not the air or water or food, but something 
she was born with that no one could help.

He looked at the second front page, the local news. 
Burglaries. Robberies. But he had his gun, and he knew the 
locks on the house were good. But when he saw the rest of 
the story about the girl killed, the same one he read last 
night, he knew that the stories must be real. They couldn't 
be making it up. It was too crazy. People couldn't, 

30


shouldn't, think about things like that. Three girls now had 
disappeared. One's name was Janet. She was only eight 
and they had found parts of her body...she was on the way 
home from school. Another one was going to the store to 
buy butter for her mother. Butter.

Hands shaking, Ralph dialed the number of Central 
school. It was written in the book in his wife's handwriting. 
Even after a year, she was everywhere in the house; her 
pain was everywhere and the moaning sound of her voice 
seemed to rise around him from the floor and walls of the 
house. When the secretary answered, Ralph said he thought 
his daughter, Monica Conklin, had left her lunch money. 
Would they check and call him back? He was concerned, 
call him one way or the other. He would have to leave for 
work soon.

He stood by the phone, waiting, the paper still in his 
hand. Of course she would be alright. She had to be. It was 
the paper, scaring him, making him do strange things like 
this. It had to stop.

Just as the phone rang, he looked down at the paper, 
which he had folded now so that he could see the front 
page. Father Kills, it said. Father Kills Self, Children. Stunned, 
he picked up the phone. At first he was unable to 
remember who it was calling, but the school secretary said, 
"Mr. Conklin, Mr. Conklin," until he said, "Yes."

Still staring at the paper, Father Kills, he listened to the 
secretary tell him that Monica had her lunch money. She 
had already said good-bye when Ralph told her to wait. 
"Tell the children," he said, "tell Monica and Will that they 
are not to come home after school. Tell them to go to their 
aunt's house and wait until I call. Unexpected business 
trip." Then he hung up the phone, still staring at the 
newspaper.

All of this was too much. It had to be stopped. Father 
Kills Self, Children. Father Kills. All this time, when they 
were having children, when he went from sales to management, 
when he went to college, he thought that he was 
planning things and carrying them out, that what happened 
to him was a result of the choices he made, but it was clear 
now that these signs were warnings, explanations, of what 

31


he was being made to do.

He lit the edge of the newspaper with his lighter and 
held it up so the flames rose toward his hand. It lit quickly, 
the Father dissolving first in the flames. Then he threw the 
burning paper in the fireplace. It had to be stopped. He was 
going to stop it.

He went to the kitchen and got the bottle of Jack 
Daniels, a box of Ritz crackers and a quart jar he filled with 
water. Then he went into the living room and turned the 
arm chair so that it faced out the front window. He stood 
and looked around the living room for a few minutes, at the 
couch, at the TV, then picked the blanket off the couch 
and hung it over the back of the chair. When the paper in 
the fireplace had gone out, he went over and kicked the 
ashes and then went out on the back porch and got his rifle 
and his hunting jacket, which he put on.

He opened the front window, and even though the 
cold was blowing on him, he sat down to wait, the muzzle 
of the gun on the window sill pointing out to the place 
where the sidewalk met his front walk. The familiar feeling 
of the gun in his hand—for it had become, suddenly, very 
familiar—gave him a sense of control. For the first time 
since his wife got so sick, he felt alive. He felt as if he were 
in control of things again. He felt like a man.

He sat there most of the day, watching out the front 
window, the muzzle of the gun on the sill, waiting for the 
evening news. Twice, the phone range while he sat there, 
but he just listened as it rang, the urgency of phone calls 
gone. He drank most of the rest of the Jack Daniels and ate 
a few of the crackers. Sometimes he sat up straighter as he 
heard footsteps coming up the walk, but he had his pocketwatch 
on the sill beside the muzzle of the gun, and he 
would check it and then lean back in the chair.

Then, about four, he pushed the chair back out of the 
way and crouched down on the floor by the window. He 
heard footsteps on the walk. He put his finger on the trigger, 
waiting for the steps to turn up the walk but they 
didn't. It was a high school boy and girl, both wearing shiny 
clothes—jogging clothes. It was time. He knew it was time 
for the paper to come.

32


He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window 
sill, but in a minute steps came again, clunking steps 
like someone in boots. He lifted the gun and took the safety 
off and aimed at the space someone would fill when they 
stopped to throw a paper on the steps, the space between 
the two maples at the end of the walk. And as the boots 
came into view, first, the body hidden by the leaves, he 
began to pull back the excess in the trigger, his mind blank 
and automatic. But it was not the paper boy standing there, 
staring at his house. It was a tall thin man with long stringy 
hair, wearing a sport coat. Someone he had never seen 
before. The man turned up the walk.

Ralph's hand on the gun began to shake. This was not 
how he had planned it. What was this man doing here? Was 
he someone else trying to make Ralph do things, trying to 
frighten him? He aimed the gun again, just as the man stepped 
on the porch, carrying a black book in his hand and 
some papers.

He aimed at the place on the sport coat, threadbare 
tweed, where the too narrow lapels buttoned together in 
front. The collar of the jacket was turned up, against the 
wind. As he saw the man's arm lift toward the door bell, his 
finger tightened on the trigger.

Then he looked up toward the man's face, beige, his 
almost colorless hair and pale eyes and he stared for a moment, 
his finger feeling the resistance of the trigger, just a 
push away from giving. He realized that the man was looking 
right at him, as the door bell's echo reverberated over 
his head. He could feel it in his elbows against the sill 
vibrating through the wood of the house. The man was 
looking him right in the eye, smiling faintly, looking puzzled 
to see a man crouched down on the floor by the livingroom 
window. Could he see the gun? Ralph couldn't tell, 
but the man just stood there, shifting his weight to the left, 
looking at Ralph, waiting for him to open the door. This was 
not what Ralph had expected. He didn't know what to do.

"Hello," said the man through the window. "Good 
afternoon."

Ralph just crouched there, the gun in his hands.

"Can I talk to you a moment?" asked the man through 

33


the window, coming closer. "Can I tell you about the news? 
The good news?"

Just as Ralph pulled the trigger, there was a thunk on 
the porch at the feet of the man's boots. It was the newsboy 
who called the police, but by then the pamphlets the man 
had been offering, which began, "Hear my prayer, Oh 
Lord/Let me cry unto thee," were mingled with the loose 
pages of newspaper, all covered in blood red as flames.

34


MICHIGAN IN WINTER

Janet Samuelson

I am bad at winter: 
these sweaters & hats

& mittens are skins

I do not need.

I am forced to whisper to friends, 
"Does the scarf go 
on the inside or the out?"

Back home in Texas

Jim is baking coconut cakes 
while Lynn sleeps 
in a room of mimosa 
or trims the rose bushes, 
the scent still sweet 
on her fingertips 
as she helps slice the avocados 
and tomatoes for dinner.

Lauren is dreaming 
and dreaming her way 
to Santa Cruz

as the last notes of some 
country and western song 
hang in the evening air.

Here in Michigan 
my Basque coloring 
is bleached into old snow.

I look softly at the landscape, 
and the world spits back 
the bleak cliche 
of winter.

This perpetual excuse 
cloys at me 
like a room full of unwanted cats, 
fits too conveniently 

35


into conversations that should 
mean more, follows me 
eagerly to bed.

For $200 I can leave, 
but won't.

The curse of Yankee parentage 
is perseverance. But more: 
in this mid-February stumbling 
of wind and sun-less skies, 
in this slow, alabaster land 
each sleeper's dream 
deepens, sharpens on the edge 
of all we hope for 
and do not have.

36


A MORNING OF DIVERS

Janet Samuelson

They break the water in one 
brief gesture, as though sinking 
is all they care for or know.

From shore we watch them 
all morning, pretend they are 
our amusement, say nothing 
is happening, nothing 
but the breath we hold 
as they plunge into water, 
the sudden turn of our heads 
as though we see coral, 
the brackish afterthought 
of unfamiliar fish. At these, 
eyes close, lips mouthe prayers, 
the dreams of pearls 
light in our lungs.

37


Michael Shattuck
Michael Shattuck


38


LETTER TO BINX BOLLING

Janet Samuelson

Dear Binx -- Here I sit in the heart 
of oblivion, a land I cannot even call 
the South. There's no Lake Pontchartrain, 
no catfish to eat or suck heads off of.

Instead, I pine away at life, think of 
the family, the Kate I have been.

How do I tell you the search is up?

The sky is as murky as water on the Gulf, 
the direction all the same.

I call for your mobility, Binx, 
the center that sees you through 
land, time, and decay.

Look me in the eye as you would William Holden, 
whisper me the truth in some train station 
before this search ends wholly in despair.

Last night I dreamed my hometown had burned.

I could not find the city and woke 
in an easy sleep. Now I hear voices 
of my family talking about how the Almanac 
predicts a hard winter, how their youngest child 
seven states away thinks she is drowning 
in a land of desert and plains.

I smile at this. I am onto something

Binx, New Orleans or not, and will write 
when the smoke and tidal waves clear.

39


david, who always liked cats 
for their independence

Carolyn Cigan

i have taken in a few stray cats in my time

but never one that was faithful or came 
when i called it.

mother said cats were always on their way somewhere else, 
but despite her gentle scolding

i lovingly dished out tunafish and chunks of bologna, 
thinking perhaps i could make them stay.

i liked their quiet ways,

and waking up with one stretched heavy and warm over my 
ankles.

but eventually all the bowls of warm milk

in the kitchen on neat squares of newspaper

were forgotten

they each moved on, or got run over, or went home

and pretty soon i didn't name them anymore 
and pretty soon i didn't take them in at all.

when i met david he said he liked cats because they were 
independent.

he slips in

and out of my life,

another stray squeezing through a door left carelessly ajar 
there is a wedge just wide enough

for his sleek haunches to brush through quietly

i smile in the dark, feigning sleep

as i picture his round eyes surveying the bed unblinkingly 
his brown beard ruffled intelligently.

as he circles the room on soft feet

i worry about stray cats that have come and gone 
about independence 
about doors left carelessly ajar.

40


NAME DROPPING

Deb Route

Deborah

is not the name

I would have chosen.

It sounds like women's underwear 
and the dictionary says it means 
Bee.

I know a woman named 
Enid C. Bienstock 
(Enid C. Bienstock) 
Now, there's a name.

Certain names taste good 
Taqui Papasian 
Tanda Boothby

Others conjure

Mowry Skinkle

Wilbur DePew

Sharky Dooda

(dooda dooda)

There were three Deborahs

in my fourth grade class 
but, only one Cassandra.

Cassandra: she who inflames with love 
Deborah: Bee.

Bee: one who annoys,

is industrious 
and fuzzy.

And some names 
are like tags 
sewn in collars of garments 
inspected;

accepted,

and then forgotten.

41


NINE: ANONYMOUS / AMNESIA

Paul Shuttleworth

1/

She comes to this room to drink cool water from the 
blue jug. It is always on the card table that is next to the 
canvas covered wall. First she removes her white hospital 
gown. Happiness. She is there now: in front of the wood 
framed mirror, bare breasted, bare large-bellied, the jug 
held to her closed mouth, then upturned beyond drink. 
There is a cavity that absorbs all the icy pain of water. Like 
a ridge of clay, the scar tissue off to the left side of her nose 
calls to her fingers. Think of coarse dog hairs, grey and 
white, embedded in the ribbing of a mustard colored 
blanket. This is all owned.

2/

Yes, I remember a lake. The photograph you showed 
me last week. The wind is foggily from the north into the 
morning shadows. Giant eucalyptus trees. I want to collect 
the ice cream wrappers on the discarded lawn. But it is too 
early. The lake is still except for a sailboat. No one looks at 
the others. The others sit so as to avoid looking at the dogs 
they have brought with them. One, a black retriever, is sniffing 
a pizza stain on the lawn beside me. The dog's tail is 
bowed. There is a bare spot (actually square) on the left of 
where I am: the blanket inflicted wound. No, I have not 
gone there before, before the first child ran to the nearby 
ducks.

3/

From our side, we watch the sailboat rental shop. On 
the other side, the villagers watch us stroll down the hill, 
past the muddy field, past the stunted crop of pumpkins, to 
the shop. The trees above the village appear to be bushes. 
Rock-bushes rolling to the wooden houses. No one skis here 
in the winter because there is no snow. Snow is the dark 
possibility of death. There is a picture of an avalanche in 
her room across the hall.

42


4/

The same woman is now in the solarium. Wonderful 
white walls. The pink linoleum is still cold, so it must be 
morning.

"Why didn't you dress?"

"I dreamed of snails in a corn field."

Her lustrous tawny hair is sprayed stiff. A writing desk 
is between them. She sags further into the floral patterned 
couch as he questions her. Several purple pillows are on the 
floor below her. Periodically she removes one from 
underneath the six-legged couch and places it over her exposed 
sex. After a few moments, she flips the pillow to the 
floor.

"There's no point in being sullen, is there?"

"Will you bring me a porcelain rabbit?"

"Would you like to dial a random number on the 
phone?"

"I used to have hair on my nipples? Are you sure?"

5/

She has been brought to the visiting room and directed 
to a padded straight-backed chair. The blue water jug is on 
the table beside her and has been filled with red roses. On 
the other side of the table is a chair containing a guitar. She 
is dressed in a long white gown. A mannish wrist watch is on 
her right wrist. It does not have any dials. Behind her, a 
yellow-painted wooden door is without a knob. Three large 
gashes are in the upper right panel. The door also has a mail 
slot in its center. Her forearms have become fleshy.

6/

The doors have curtains across them. The heavy velvet 
curtains. There are numerous scuff marks on the hardwood 

43


floor. Two young girls, probably ten or eleven, are in their 
white Easter dresses. They are racing the distance between 
doors. The taller girl always wins. Say what you will, I hear 
the fog on the lake. It is late until the parents enter the 
room out of the shadows. The taller girl accepts her present 
first. She removes the blue ribbon and ties her wrist to her 
sister's.

7-8/

She has come to visit you again. Once more she wears 
a white veil across her face. Above the veil is a grey flat hat 
with a bluebird feather inserted in the white hatband. She is 
wearing a navy blue cardigan sweater above her pleated 
white skirt. In her right hand, she is holding a cowhide brief 
case.

"Did you bring the weather forecast? If it's nice, you 
could bring me down to the lake."

"I was told not to ask you any specific questions this 
time."

But without weather. In the uterus, the sky is orange. 
The banks of the lake. Keep in mind that the introduction 
was recent. There is never the instant reaction we pray for. 
Let's review our progress. It's embarrassing that you've 
come back.

"Then I won't ask you to remember again. But would 
you like to look at some pictures, post cards really, from 
the museum? They're kind of fun."

My small nose. The small shop with pictures of 
sailboats for sale: the young couples with their wind at 
their backs. At night, the stars clack-clack out of the sky 
like dancers leaving the stage. A portion of my arm is getting 
fat. I keep score with a red plastic ruler. Why is it that I 
don't have to shave my legs anymore? She won't want to go 
to the lake with me.

44


She has come to visit you again. Her hands are 
covered by the gloves. The gloves were made from the 
leather left over from the brief case. Ask her for the 
feather. You want it. The corridor is always kept dark. A 
man has the room across from yours. He wears a tattered 
busman's uniform to the dining hall. He gave me this 
watch.

9/

From my window, I can see a grassy field. A number of 
pure white boulders litter the tall grass. Two brown calves 
have come to graze. They meet here everyday like two 
memories of food. I'm not being clear. They have no way of 
knowing there is a cow skull just this side of the barbed 
wire fence that is between us. I am between them and the 
skull. They are the children of chalk, the smudges on a 
child-size blackboard.

45


NANCY AND SLUGGO GO

TO EASTER ISLAND

James G. Dawson

Nancy has on the same old 
black dress she always does, 
and Sluggo's wearing his cap 
and little blue sports-coat,

and they're on this red boat, see, 
along with Aunt Fritzi for a two- 
week vacation to Easter Island. 
They're pulling into the port, when

all of a sudden Nancy's 
mouth flies open, like 
it always does when she 
does something dumb, and

she says, "Aunt Fritzi! I 
forgot to wear my blessed 
crucifix! The idols will 
revolt and crush us all!"

And Aunt Fritzi, in her India ink 
pumps, slaps Nancy and gives Sluggo 
a big, wet kiss. "The idols are 
active," Nancy pouts.

46


Tim Keefe
Tim Keefe


47


WHORES FOURS AND ONE-EYED JACKS

Paul Witherington

In the corner of my right eye Plumart the rubber man 
lets his chips go unstacked on the blue Air Force blanket, 
pulling them from the center to his side every second or 
third hand so that over the years the alert shack itself has 
begun to tilt toward the West.

The rest of us are busting out over the table in our 
yellow Mae Wests, Philpot or Wheeldrier shuffling for one 
of those silly games where anything goes. Plumart yawns, 
slumps down to half his size, and gets ready to call in the 
cards he'll need from the thatchbacked deck. Say we're 
playing whores fours and one-eyed jacks wild and Plumart 
has a deuce, six, nine and king showing, each in a different 
suit. What will his hole cards be? Whatever, you can bet 
they'll turn into queens by the end of the hand and his last 
hole card will be a four or a one-eyed jack and maybe if 
you don't look too close one of the up cards will change its 
spots.

Not that we lose much money. Plumart stays with 
every hand, and sometimes the rubber fails in the stretch. 
Sometimes he loses track of what's wild and sometimes the 
game itself. When it's his turn to deal, he passes the deck to 
me on his left and Philpot, the Radar Observer opposite 
me, is pissed. But no one challenges Plumart because 
Plumart doesn't care about that either.

When the jet interceptors are scrambled, I ride in 
Plumart's back seat. That's to make it easier for him to turn 
me inside out, I decided almost twenty years ago. We met 
at navigator training school in Texas in the middle Fifties, 
roomed together for a while. Then he passed the exams for 
pilot and I washed out of the belly of B-52's and we came 
together again at a school for pilots and radar observers in 
Georgia where I met and married Shirley. Never mind, he 
assures me when the ride gets rough, the pilot is always the 
first to die. But I know that when the plane hits he'll step 
out of the cockpit like a cartoon character and I'll be the 
only smudge on the ground.

48


Wheeldrier, who is Philpot's pilot, sits across from 
Plumart at the blue table. When he loses his fifteen dollar 
limit he'll go back to reading science fiction in the red vinyl 
reclining chair with his feet propped up so it'll be all 
downhill to his brain, and knowing that we all look the 
other way about every tenth hand and let him win. 
Wheeldrier flies like he's guiding a tube of Preparation H 
up his ass. Half the time he aborts before takeoff and the 
other half it takes him three passes more than anyone else 
to get lined up to land. Philpot once told Wheeldrier if he 
didn't get that thing down on the next round he, Philpot, 
would eject from the back seat and land with at least some 
dignity left.

Assuming of course that the whole idea of air defense 
isn't outmoded and we haven't already been replaced with 
missiles nobody's bothered to tell us about, our alignment 
makes sense. If we changed teams Plumart and Philpot 
would be hanging on a horn of the moon while Wheeldrier 
and I were trying to get our bird out of the alert hanger. 
Assuming the kind of tricks we used to do with the birds, of 
course.

Usually this time of year the New England weather 
deteriorates and the poker gets good. With the field below 
minimums we're not likely to get scrambled unless it's the 
real thing or unless one of the controllers out at NO 
TRUMP, the radar site at the tip of Cape Cod, sets his 
peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the button that blows 
the horn. Usually we've got our boots off and our Mae 
Wests over door knobs, but the last few nights there have 
been some squawks and everyone's a little on edge.

So I laugh at Philpot when he complains about 
Plumart passing me the cards, and to rub it in I take the 
joker out of the deck.

“Stud," I say, beginning the deal. "Plain old everyday 
stud."

There's a story I tell myself when I get too cocky. In 
one of the back rooms of a bar in a place called Boy's 
Town, a suburb of government inspected whorehouses just 
across the Mexican border from the base where we were 

49


stationed in 1955, the girl who had stepped only partway 
out of her dress asked me in quite good English if I was 
clean.

I had slipped away from Plumart at the main drag and 
walked three different directions through narrow streets lit 
only by the cigarettes on low porches. I'd drunk a pale 
drink, carried out the expected under-the-table negotiations, 
and followed her to the room with a bed, one stiff 
chair, a child's dresser, and a crucifix on the far wall. Now 
this three dollar girl was asking if I was clean. I thought of 
the shower I'd had on the other side of the Rio Grande.

A woman in white appeared at the door and told me to 
open my fly. She lifted up my piece with a wooden tongue 
depresser, surveyed it for a few moments while I was 
surveying the crucifix, and let it drop back in place. Three 
dollars for the inspection, she indicated. I remembered how 
many husbands and brothers at the bar I'd have to pass on 
the way out and gave her the money.

Then while the girl and I were finding each other on 
the filthy bed, I noticed that an old cucuracha had crawled 
in and sat on the chair. Sat sideways on the chair and made 
it clear that she was going to watch-unless I paid her (they 
had worked that until it fit) three dollars.

By the time I had backed across the bed with the 
money, the old woman's black wig was off and there was 
guess who in the chair stretching back up to his normal 
height.

“Hey ace," he said, giving me back the other three 
dollars and an extra five, “This one's on me."

Seven card stud. Plumart waits to peek at his hole 
cards until the last down card is dealt and the pot is almost 
full. That pisses Philpot. “You can't bet without looking," 
he says. Wheeldrier doesn't like it either, but he's spoiling 
with control. He'll read a 500-page novel without once turning 
to the last page to see if they get back to earth.

After I've dealt the last card, Plumart picks the three 
of them up and holds them one thatchback behind the 
other, looking at only the one in front. Say it's a nine. Bit by 
bit by bit (Philpot mumbling something about having him 

50


arrested for impersonating a corpse) he fans out the other 
cards until he sees the tip of another nine, and another. We 
can't tell by his eyes, of course, but we know he's brought it 
in. What does he do if the last one's a six? He pulls a card 
wrench from his pocket and twists the six around the way it 
was supposed to be.

Larry, the telephone operator, sits in the adjacent 
room facing the runway and reads about missiles and the 
end of our job. The airmen on the floor below us, 
mechanics and such, have games with six or seven players, 
and there's some really good poker according to Plumart 
who goes down sometimes where the rest of us would feel 
awkward as hell. Larry won't be our fifth. Games give him a 
headache. He watches the cars and chips when we get a 
scramble, though, as soon as he's off the phone to NO 
TRUMP. The watching is a formality. We might cheat in 
war or love, but cards are something else.

Back in Georgia where we became crews, Plumart introduced 
me to jets, the reliable old T-33 which he had 
already domesticated. On our first flight he tried to black 
me out in rolls and things I couldn't even name. Then he 
tried his own version of an outside loop and my eyes went 
out on stems, but I didn't red out either. That stuff was too 
dangerous even for Plumart, so during the training course 
that followed he settled for trying to brown me out in the 
convulsions of ordinary acrobatics. Browning out is where 
you lose control of your bowels and fill your pants.

"What's that stink back there Jackson?" he'd say over 
the speaker in a soft Georgia accent that fooled almost 
everyone who didn't know he was from Minnesota and had 
learned rubber during blizzards when it was impractical to 
be more than three feet tall.

"You must have puked in your mask," I'd say, glaring 
at the back of his helmet around my scope, but he'd sing 
about the most God-awful Southern food you could imagine: 
pickled okra, sweet and sour jowl, dressing with candied 
mountain oysters, all to the tune of "Camptown 
Races." Over and under the clouds, the horizon going like a 
dipstick after water. That summer, I invented the boxes.

51


I put a part of my body in each one and wrapped it and 
tied it and watched myself putting it on the shelf in a closet 
in a strange, empty apartment, then locking the doors. 
Kidneys in one box, throat in another, stomach, bowels, 
and so on. Nothing left in the radar operator's seat but a 
pair of thumbs and a talking head. Someday I might crash, 
buy the farm as they say, but I was damned if I'd finish out 
my career wondering when I was going to lose my 
breakfast.

Back then we all intended to get out early and go into 
business, but pretty soon we had more career years put 
away than we had left. Shirley calls it playing war, but the 
play war is the thing that has happened with computers and 
electronic boards. Sometimes I think we're the last four left 
on alert in the Western World, spreading our thatchback 
cards on a blanket blue enough for even the real kings and 
queens.

Oh yes, I took the money Plumart offered me that 
night south of Texas. He always paid for his tricks, he said. I 
weighed the insult but accepted the cash. That was before I 
had taken up permanent residence in the back seat. 
Besides, I had gotten to see through one Plumart disguise, 
and even then I knew that put me a step ahead of your ordinary 
fool.

We walked out together, Plumart stooping under the 
outer door. He was one of those guys who goes through the 
ceiling when he stands too suddenly. He was really too tall 
to be a pilot, but he was probably holding himself in when 
he took his physical.

"I guess I'm lucky you weren't the whore too," I said in 
the dark of the center of the dirt street that led back to the 
well lighted bars.

He laughed a rubber laugh. "How do you know I 
wasn't."

If it is a cosmic principle, Plumart before Jackson, I 
want to know. If he is fated to be Livingston to my Stanley, 
Erickson to my Columbus, so be it. At least I got to Shirley 
first, though I was half expecting Plumart to bounce into 

52


the marriage ceremony that day in Georgia and announce 
that he was married too, that somewhere in that bachelor 
apartment, chained, walled in, galvanized, there was every 
madness I could ever hope to discover or avoid.

Although he stood up with me at our wedding, I never 
invited him to the house and we never visited him. After we 
were transferred to Massachusetts we got different 
schedules, for a while, and nights when I was on alert I 
began to imagine, purely to imagine, the two of them on 
my couch halfway across the Cape, his arm wrapped loosely 
three times around Shirley, not even trying to be intimate 
and therefore succeeding. Of course he would have given 
her back before he had even had her, somewhere between 
knowing he could and her knowing it. Like the little ways he 
made up for winning at poker: buying rounds of drinks at 
the club, furnishing the alert shack with cards and 
Playboy magazines he never read himself, making 
accessories of us all.

One day at the alert shack I told Philpot my secret 
while Plumart was down flexing lies with the mechanics. 
Maybe I figured to get at the rubber man that way, now 
that we were back together. Philpot was complaining as 
usual about Wheeldrier, how he was so careful he peeled 
marshmallows.

"You're really lucky," he said. I'd never seen him so 
candid. "Jesus, you're lucky. That guy could fly the balls 
off a brass monkey."

"Lucky I'm not a brass monkey."

"How about trading off?"

"Plumart likes to torture me," I said, and then I told 
him about the boxes.

"Christ, you're a real lover," he said, narrowing. But he 
added, "Plumart's the one. He won't trade. He says he likes 
you, of all things."

Now it's Philpot's deal and of course it's his favorite, 
whores fours and one-eyed jacks wild. This after 
Wheeldrier's round of spit in the ocean or something equally 
subtle. I moan.

"Get out, then, that'll improve the odds."

53


Philpot has dealt the first three cards to each of us, 
two of them down. Showing are Plumart's usual queen of 
spades, an ace of hearts for me, ace of diamonds for 
Wheeldrier, and seven of spades for the dealer.

Wheeldrier folds his cards without even looking. I'm 
thinking it's just a reflex from the last round but Philpot 
damns him for going out of turn.

After three rounds of bets the pot is filling up. I have 
two kings in the hole and two on the board but in this game 
a natural winner can end up, as Philpot puts it, sucking hind 
tit. Plumart has two queens up as usual and I've got to 
allow for two more in the hole, but he's pulled in only a five 
of hearts and an eight of spades from the deal and he's not 
raising my bets. Philpot's got nothing showing-seven of 
spades, six of diamonds, six of hearts, nine of spades-and 
he's got to be staying just because it's his game. Ordinarily I 
would be in control, with my kings, but something's missing.


Wheeldrier is over milking the milk machine and 
unscrewing a large tin of Air Force peanut butter. He 
always asks if anybody wants anything right in the middle 
of the game and Philpot grinds his teeth. Larry is reading in 
the control room, his stocking feet up on the desk. I watch 
the center of Plumart's eyes and then look away selfconsciously 
as if I have seen reflected his cards. In my 
mind, I go through the steps of a scramble. It's absurdly 
simple. Everything's laced, and I need only my hat over on 
the reclining chair, the gold major's leaf up. With all this 
preparation, with all our experience and all the rubber up 
Plumart's sleeve, how can something not happen?

The day ten years ago when I found out that Plumart 
had found out about the boxes was the first and last time I 
got sick in a plane.

"That place of yours is like one I had once upon a 
time," he said through the intercom as we were flying over 
the Hyannis beaches picking out patterns of sunbathers. 
"Only I was piss poor. If I'd found any boxes I'd have used 
them for chairs."

"What the hell are you talking about, I was never in

54


your place."

"That's quite the trick you've got."

"It works," I said, but I was thinking about Shirley and 
the kids.

He began a series of turns over the waves just off the 
beach, faster and tighter and faster. The green of the water 
turned brown and bathers went through each other like 
sand and the canopy veined with my breath. He pulled up 
sharply. I closed my eyes.

What I said had to be quick. "Philpot says you won't 
fly with him. I think he likes being turned inside out."

"You don't care much for flying, do you?"

"I don't know," I said, imagining I was still being rubbered. 
"I've never tried it."

He took one more turn, the worst of all, and leveled 
off while I clawed at the oxygen mask fastened to my 
helmet and cupped, a little too late, the hat I carried on my 
knee.

Since than I haven't imagined the boxes and Plumart 
hasn't made me wish I had. These days the planes don't 
take to acrobatics. They're too big and too fast, and they 
make a straight line out of any joke.

The horn doesn't blow. We don't get the scrambles we 
got in the Sixties, and it's soft duty, no more involved than 
driving home on the freeway. We're called up mostly to 
guide in lost aircraft, some Wheeldrier bringing home eggs 
in his lap and blinded by the moon on the white fog. One of 
these days I'll be the last one down the steps and then 
maybe I'll peek at Plumart's cards while Larry is still on the 
phone--not so 1 can fold or advance my own hand, but so 
I'll know if he can really call them in. Fate owes me that.

We get our seventh cards, down, and my seven of 
clubs is no help. With four natural kings I come in third. 
Philpot has a one-eyed jack and a four and a six in the hole 
for five sixes. Plumart has a three and two eights in the 
hole, five eights in all, and I figure he had them on the 
sixth round.

"Why the hell didn't you raise me," I ask him. "Can't 
you bet unless you have all the whores?"

55


"Someone told me five kings beat five eights."

"You know I don't bluff in wild card games. I don't 
even get wild cards in wild card games."

"Maybe he was just sucking you in," Philpot says to 
me. "That's the game. It's called poker. Don't think you're 
so goddamned unique. I lost as much as you did."

"Oh well," I sigh. "Lucky at cards, unlucky at love."

Philpot shoves the cards at Plumart and then at me 
over Plumart's new mound of chips.

I ask what the big winner wants to play.

He stands up. "Deal me out." He stands over the table, 
only ceiling high, and pushes his loose chips across to 
Wheeldrier, our cashier.

"You can't bust up the game now," Philpot says. "We 
can't play without four. Come on, one more round."

He says something like he's thinking about taking up 
something more enjoyable, like bouncing his head against 
the wall.

No big deal, Plumart quitting. He'll be back Thursday 
night, winning a little more. I figure we've furnished and 
refurnished his apartment every two or three years. What I 
can't understand is why all of us are so eager to fill up a 
place we've never seen.

A while later Wheeldrier is attacking his newest sci fi 
syllable by syllable. Larry is sprawled with a magazine over 
his face. The Mae Wests are off and hanging over the edges 
of chairs. NO TRUMP has put us to bed for the night. The 
blue blanket is back on a bunk in the adjoining room and 
the bare table reflects the glare of the big lights that are 
never turned off. Philpot and I are playing gin rummy, a 
penny a point. Sleep is something you can do at home, with 
your wife.

The rubber man will stretch out eventually, but now 
he's down telling war stories to the mechanics, or trading 
card wrenches. I've heard that he does a hell of an imitation 
of Wheeldrier radioing the tower for someone to send 
up a basket so he get back on the ground.

"Your turn," Philpot reminds me from across the table, 
not very gently.

56


BOUNDARIES

Michael Lauchlan

The herd moves or the mist 
clears on the upper slope, 
white with white cows 
lowing into the silence.

The first red fingers 
probe the horizon, 
draw the hulking mountains in 
like great blue hips.

The first of them, 
candle still wavering 
in a quart jar, 
is hauled off for tresspass.

Unwilling, drawn from sleep,

I shift under a jacket 
on the unheated train.

"I am tired of the weight," 
you shouted over the steam, 
"my body like armor." 
And you raised your face, 
stretched your open hands, 
and leapt and leapt across 
the billowing platform.

We have seen the great blue heron 
together. Once from a canoe.

A blue wave from water to air— 
soundless--what made me look?

Now we approach separate morning. 
Our skins part, we breathe together, 
a little blood staining the clouds. 
Above the black wood 
the heron is turning, beating 
slowly into obscurity.

57


AHNA ANDERSEN

William D. Elliott

I cannot describe....feelings which perhaps no other 
scene could awaken.

In this remote and central wilderness, my heart and 
mind are filled with the most delightful emotions.

Giacomo Constantiono Beltrami 
"Poet in a Pack of Engineers" 
1817

i.

Ahna Andersen smiles, her head thrown back in the 
late afternoon sun that settles against the birches, and says:

"Andy, it's a nice day. Let's have some cookies and 
milk." Since I have written this, she has died and I have 
forgotten to go to the funeral. I often forget connections at 
the most important times. I am getting better at it.

I nod at her in what she takes to be a "yes."

I wait as she motions for me to take one of the lawn 
chairs that split houses, my boyhood house and hers, both 
still there but like a melting candle, while she goes in 
for the cookies.

She comes back smiling. She carries a decorative plate 
of cookies made just that afternoon, with two tall glasses 
of milk. She has forgotten I am twenty-nine.

"You look hot, dear," she says. "This will cool you off 
and be just right before supper."

I nod and lift myself off the chair slightly. Each time I 
change position the chair becomes more uncomfortable. I 
am quite sure she hasn't seen me as a grown man.

I take the milk first and drink half of it down quickly, 
gulping so regularly and rapidly I hear the sound of my 
throat.

58


She comes over to sit beside me on the lawn chair. 
"You must be thirsty after such hard playing, but take it 
down easily. You see, like this."

She demonstrates by drinking the first quarter of her 
glass in delicate sips. A much better method, I have to admit, 
but it doesn't seem to matter to me either way. I am 
getting sick.

"Don't worry, Andy, it's pasteurized. Remember when 
your father fought the Blue River Dairy Association over 
unpasteurized milk?"

"No."

She puts her face down close to mine.

Your eyes don't look good, Andy. Have you been getting 
enough sleep?"

"Yes, Mrs. Andersen. I'm sure I have." I have the impulse 
to run, simply run back to my house, where unknown 
to Ahna, I am years older.

Her eyes go up to the sky and she begins to dream 
aloud. The birches sway behind her hair. The lake glistens 
blue; the sun cracks between the pines.

"It must be exciting to be a little boy in this beautiful 
summer," she dreams.

Her hand goes around to the top of my chair and her 
eyes shift to the trees that sweep down in rows toward the 
lake.

"It must be a mystery for you, Andy," she says, "how a 
summer goes and winter comes."

God, how I have to clean myself up, inside and out. 
Her head lifts up again and stops and begins to turn.

I remember her now as a lady who always used to keep 
a bottle of wine filled as she went around, at parties and 
parties and years and years ago, asking people if they 
wanted more. The wine is on her breath as she leans down 
to me now. She drinks wine all times of the day and night. I 
understand why, living here most of her life.

"Would you like some more, my boy?"

"No." I am squirming uncomfortably on the chair. I 
take half of my milk, and then don't want any more.

She looks at me for a moment, and then begins smelling 
the air. "The milk will quench your thirst." She smells 

59


my guilt and frustration again and again, as if it is a rare 
odor, like a polluted lake.

"I'm sorry, of course it will. I was just thinking 
now...how thirsty I am."

She leans down again and I smell clear blue water on 
her breath as a child, out in a yard somewhere.

"Is there something the matter dear?"

"No." My bowels - they move and rumble.

She arranges for my fifth birthday party out on the 
lawn and I am dressed up in a sailor suit - a blue one that itches 
because it is pure wool from World War II, but the 
latest. Her face twists, turns - there is some terror in it. She 
is aware like a dream the summer has turned into fall.

She disappears inside and returns quickly with another 
plate. Children gather around, making gurgling laughter 
-there is Margaret, my love of five years whom I promised 
to marry on my tenth birthday. "Kiss me here," Marg says. 
She holds up one cheek. "Now kiss me here." She holds up 
the other cheek. I kiss her on both cheeks as she wants. She 
grows, and I am alone again, and there is Ahna. This must 
be the dream she has been dreaming since I arrived.

The cookie plate renews itself, and is never empty 
again. Ahna says, her voice sudden and hard and proud - "I 
was once wonderful in these North Woods, wonderful." 
She was once beautiful, too. I write two poems to her, in 
my mind, a little frantically. I love her. I am sorry she will 
die.

WHAT JACK PINES DO

Pines grow

as branched

poles they

like to cover

roots

and take away

SWOOP WHISH

a sun to

make

browned

60


grass

look like

it was

dying all the time

it wasn't.

WHAT THE JACK PINES SAY

I




I am a Jack Pine

I can grow anywhere 
See the way my roots 
clutter up a sky?

II




I am a scavenger

my pollen cuts like wind

the grass

it is even on the blades 
of scissors as they open

III




I cry from starvation of the limbs; 
my branches are short, far up, thin 
I crowd myself.

IV




I am in a country of thin men.

I am a bamboo stalk

Rods among poles, clustered: 
a body with a branch, here

Can you see my arm 
split the sun?

Canoeing when young, she comes around to a clump 
of trees that separate two beaches and Dad is there, with 
the cutter, cleaning the weeds from the sandy spot in front 
of our beach. She paddles deep into the water. She swings 
around until the water and the reeds flash. My own oar 
rows, rows, around in a circle. Tippy, my Spaniel, is in the 
boat beside me and the warm sun comes out. I hear the 
echo of someone chopping wood down on the next beach 

61


and the swish swish of birches as my mother leans out over 
the birches and her weight makes them hit the water.

In the water, warm sand comes up pretty and bright. 
Far out in the lake, beyond her house, new sailboats go 
back and forth, back and forth, before the college beach. It 
is a new generation taking the easy way on her lake. 
"Sailboats! On the lake! Is this the sea?" she asks.

The Blue River Belle comes with its paddle wheel churning, 
turning over water and reeds. On my beach is the raft 
I had built that summer of '43, two sets of small logs 
holding it up. The plate of cookies comes around again and 
I see suddenly, as if behind a screen, the silver decanter of 
wine on the plate.

She is drunk.

"You must have some more dear, you must," she 
threatens, old and angry. I am aging as she is. I feel drunk.

I cry a little desperately: "I have to leave now for 
home."

She holds up a jug of milk once more.

"Here - there's plenty of milk for you."

The wind goes down smoothly. I feel younger. There is 
no clear reason for this.

It is a command and I give her my empty glass and she 
takes it and fills it again. "You're grown up," she says, and 
then, "a toast to a man grown up. A Blue River professor 
soon to be tenured." I laugh. The wine turned from milk 
makes me think of her thighs.

"Do you swim in the lake after dark?" I ask her.

She laughs and sniffs the air. It is a cold afternoon. 
Tonight will be cold. It will be too cold to swim.

"When I was little. Bare naked." She giggles, her hair 
waving. I feel my hands reaching for her breasts, but then 
stop.

E.J., her husband, nods and then, his hands shaking, 
goes to light his pipe. He has some president's disease of 
the hands that never lets them stop their rhythm of shaking. 
He has been retired from Blue River College. The new 
society has grasped the stopped time left between us 
-Ahna, E.J., I. It is the president from Texas. Or Leonard 
Nordahl. Or something, some new authority.

62


Ahna bends forward.

"I don't know,' she says, "why the wine tastes sour."

It is the bad autumn getting on her, with longer days in 
bed. If my father were here, had come back as I had come 
back, he would have known how to put life in her again. My 
hands lie helpless. She snaps and adjusts her winter face. 
"The cookies are all gone. Why don't you go now?"

E.J.'s hands shake.

"Andy. ANDY!" I imagine Mother calling from the 
house next door, the house I was born in. I wonder where I 
am, where I will go, where I have been.

Ahna's blonde hair flashes in the sun. She smiles again 
as if laughing at a joke of her own, a joke about nobody, 
about everybody, about the summer passing by. E.J. stands 
beside her, his mouth smiling, his head now beginning a 
shake to equal his hands.

I go down the stone steps past the crumbling house, 
and to my old house next door, and uncertainly up these 
stairs and into the bathroom where Mother stands but fails, 
as Ahna did, to see I am grown up.

"Here - let me wash that milk off your face."

I nod, embarrassed.

"What could possibly be the matter?" Mother laughs, 
like the cutter on the lake taking down reeds.

"Ahna - what did she die from?" I ask, puzzled.

Mother laughs again, as she finishes washing me.

"Ahna, dear? Ahna isn't dead. She won't die for 
years!"

From the bathroom window I see Ahna, hair against 
the Norway pine, head back laughing in music by the lake. 
Yet a few Jack Pines stand ugly in her yard.

I laugh with Mother.

"Yes," I say. "I've been silly about it."

Ahna's voice lifts through the trees. She is my lover, 
my mother, my childhood, my coffin.

"What a beautiful, beautiful summer for a boy to be 
alive!"

I leave. Mother seems content and follows me down 
the stairway to begin supper. I let the door slam shut and 
she keeps on fixing supper and sings now, like Ahna sings, 

63


like Anne sings, like Sharon talks, happily. I walk all the 
way down Birchmont, all the way I walked as a child. I 
reach the downtown of Blue River. I walk through the town 
to the carnival. Gradually I grow excited about the ferris 
wheel. I take a ride. I laugh now, my shirt still sticky with 
pasteurized milk. It is like the fourth of July is Blue River, 
years and years ago and remembering, I write a poem:

Cycles rush us down

streets, small

floats, fat girls in blue 
dresses, town clowns on 
stilts throw candies big 
wrappers when I was two, one 
root beer drop came 
into my hand;

in the end eating it I

crossed those two year hopes in

bad sky rides as I

came down made me fear

simple falling, a spray of a fire

cracker, falling.

The lake came up to meet me

I slipped under a bar

of a ferris wheel and watched

the people, saw the world

falling, falling.

II.

I am visiting Ahna today. She is down by the lake, getting 
ready for a canoe ride. E.J.'s hands are shaking as he 
puts the pillows in. He stops to light his pipe, and his whole 
body shakes, he is concentrating so much. He succeeds in 
lighting one corner of the bowl, and is satisfied. He throws 
one paddle in, then the other, commandingly now. He unties 
the bow rope as if about to take a week's trip. He feels 
better.

Ahna puts the lunch in. She says to me: "Come along, 
Andy." Her voice is so light and lyrical, it seems possible. I 

64


have been just downtown, to get some things for Anne I've 
only stopped by, really, and have to get back.

“If I can bring Anne over to meet you after we come 
back," I answer.

“We would be delighted," E.J. says.

We get in the canoe. Ahna sits in the bow, and takes 
up a paddle. E.J. motions for me to sit in the middle, on a 
cushion, by the lunch. I feel I must help him shove off. No, 
he wants to do it himself. I sit down. He pushes just once, 
then slides in as the canoe sails out into the lake. It is 
almost magic how he can handle the canoe, how he can 
handle himself when he is out here, away from land. He 
starts paddling short, neat strokes. I wonder if he goes up to 
the college, anymore, just to say “hello". I guess he 
doesn't. It is all behind him. When he paddles, when he 
concentrates, he doesn't shake at all.

"Ahna, let's go down to the point," he says. Ahna nods 
and her back to us, paddles even, long strokes. It is a bright 
sun today and doesn't seem like October. I am sitting, my 
arms against my knees, the lunch on the right, watching the 
leaves swirl under the canoe as the curved bow meets 
them.

“There's your old house, Andy," Ahna says.

I look at it now, for the first time from the lake. The 
dock is new. It has a wheel at the end, painted white, with a 
frame underneath the great wheel and the boat with an inboard 
motor on the frame. When the wheel turns, the 
frame must go down, and the boat must slip off into the 
water. When the wheel is up, as it is now, the boat rests out 
of the water. There is an awning above the wheel to protect 
the boat when it rains. The seats in the boat are red leather. 
I am amazed when I think of our little plywood fishing 
boat, and our oars, and the beach and the sand and the 
reeds barely cut all the long summers and falls we lived in 
the house.

“The bank manager owns it, Andy," E.J. says at my 
back. "Is it the way you remember?"

His voice has turned from a professional, telling tone 
to the soft lyrices of Ahna.

“No," I say. “Not at all." There is disappointment in 

65


my voice, but the housefront looks different from the road 
too. Not older; different, like the back.

Beyond the dock there is grass running to a hill of terraced 
rock and flowers, and up stone steps there is a second 
terrace, and then the back door of the large walk-out 
basement rooms. There is my father's study. And the room 
where my sister practiced her piano. Behind it, the shop 
runs around the oil tank and the furnace and the wood pile. 
Last, there is the bedroom where my cousin slept when she 
took care of us.

"They did a nice job with the back yard," E.J. says.

He is puffing on his pipe now, and the smoke drops 
down and passes my nose and I smell some kind of walnut. 
It smells like a mixture of everything.

Yes, I see it now. I remember the backyard grass as 
wilderness. A swamp; a small duck pond; a narrow path, 
put down with boards to keep our feet dry, and the frogs 
croaking all summer and the egg cases Dad showed us and 
the ferns and the swamp grass. We kept it natural and lived 
it natural, all the way up to the back door. If I didn't hear 
the frogs from my bedroom, I couldn't sleep. There were 
days swinging on trees leaning out over the lake that made 
me feel I would stay there forever.

Ahna thumps her paddle against the gunnel. Her arms 
look tired, and form V's down to her sides. Her voice is a little 
different.

"Your Dad built a nice fireplace on the beach, I 
remember. I loved the way he could build out of brick."

I can only see her back; and want to see her face. She 
seems unhappy.

"I remember that," I say. "It must be here 
somewhere."

We are almost past the house. I turn quickly to look 
for it on the grassy beach. It was all light brick and very 
high and had a funnelled chimney and a built-in oven and 
stood by the Indian path knifing past our property. Past the 
Andersen's and the Axvig's. All around the lake to the sea 
plane base and the state park and the lumber mill, and the 
camp where Chief Blue River lived when the town was named 
after him.

66


I remember picnics late into the fall. Dad built a 
wooden picnic table, built with legs from live trees and he 
hand-hew the top. It was so cold I was allowed to drink coffee 
on those picnics. When it got cold Ahna or Mother put 
more hot from the fireplace in my cup. I was secretly glad 
because my sister didn't have as much and she was older.

"It's gone," E.J. says, in his professional tone again. 
"Yes, they took it out at least fifteen years ago. It was falling 
apart."

Ahna's arms are forming V's again.

"No it wasn't E.J. They just didn't take care of it," she 
protests, in her light, wavering voice.

"No, Ahna, it was shot."

E.J.'s paddle bumps against the gunnel, and then plays 
a rat-tat-tat on the wood. His hands are shaking.

"No - I'm sure they just didn't give it a chance."

Ahna and E.J. are having an argument they've had 
before. I remember a picture of Ahna my Dad took in the 
Fall, almost forty years ago. It was after church, by the college 
somewhere. Ahna was standing in front of a birch. The 
leaves spilled out yellow to match the gold of her dress. It 
was the first roll of colored film Dad ever took. I remember 
because he still has that picture on his study wall in 
Michigan. It is by the window wall looking out to the back 
fence and the row of birches he planted when we moved 
there from Minnesota. He planted those birches, even 
though he was glad to be in Michigan. I think I am learning 
something about my past but I'm not sure what it is. We 
have passed five more beaches and five more houses. I am 
getting hungry. I hear guns shooting.

"What's that, E.J.?" Ahna asks. She is breathless, and 
nervous.

E.J.'s paddle rat-atats against the gunnel again.

"On the other side of the lake. Hunting."

We look over the flat, blue water toward the Mississippi 
inlet. It is over five miles away. We expect to see the 
trees shake and two hunters or three or four emerge to the 
shoreline, and look at us. But it's too far, way too far. All 
we can hear are the guns going off. We can see two flocks 
of tiny specks in the sky above the inlet, veering off to the 

67


left and right in a V and disappearing high above the 
shoreline.

"They shouldn't hunt on the other side of the lake," 
E.J. says. It is his professional tone again, but shaded with 
disappointment and hurt. "Let's go eat." He splashes the 
paddle in the water as he digs it in.

All the houses and beaches and trees we have passed 
are new to me. They are frame houses, built long after the 
war, with large docks and wheels and frames for boats and 
inboard engines and Johnson eighty-five and one-tens. They 
have grass backyards and three-sectioned picture windows 
looking out toward the lake like holes in trees. There are 
brown canoes laying over the ends of the docks or on the 
mown grass or on racks, built into the sides of boathouses.

"Almost there," Ahna says, her light voice returning.

We pass a space of student apartments, build from 
sections of an old house, and then get a view of the new 
high rise student dormitory, the highest building in town 
now. E.J. splashes water again. We hear shots once more. 
The water from E.J.'s paddle touches my back and neck, 
and the picnic basket, and dribbles down the side of the 
basket webbing like it is raining.

We can begin to see bottom. Reeds and weed wave in 
the water below us and for a minute we pass over a stretch 
of perfect yellow sand reflected by the sun, as clean as the 
sand gathered on our beaches when we were children. Then 
a few rocks show up. Then a Coke can, its sign, COCA 
COLA, still clear on the aluminum side. Minnows are running 
in and out of the opened top as if rushing up and down 
a river channel. E.J. notices and says, "Nobody takes care 
of anything anymore. People ought to clean up their trash." 
It is his professional voice, but threaded with anger.

An old snow tire lies half-buried in mud, its tread gone. 
We pass quickly over a clot of three beer cans, smashed in 
the middle like a picnicer had hit them with his boot and 
tossed them out in the same spot, one, then two, then three. 
E.J. doesn't look anymore. "We'll touch bottom in a 
minute. Almost there!" Ahna says. She has ignored the 
trash on the bottom, yet she knows it is there, and there is a 
waver in her voice as if in another fragile moment we will 

68


either touch sand or our forward thrusting canoe will roll 
over in a drop-off. E.J. and Ahna and I wait for the bow to 
hit first sand. I remember the summer we returned to Blue 
River, just a year after moving out. We talked and talked to 
Ahna and E.J. the whole evening long.

I was eleven. I stood by their tiny picture window and 
watched the lake grow dark. I was impatient to get away. I 
pleaded with my parents to come. I moved from one window 
to another, all along the water side, like an acrobat 
looking for the right position, the sure way to see the string 
of air. E.J.'s hands were just beginning to shake that summer. 
He had trouble lighting his pipe the whole evening, 
and tried at least five times. It seemed like twenty, it looked 
so painful, and then gave it up, and put it away just as 
Ahna brought out the wine. She returned to the kitchen 
again and again, refilling the bottle so her abundance and 
her pain would fill our one last evening back in Blue River 
before our next twenty years away. I went to the next window. 
Ahna put two cookies into my hand. I went to the next 
window. I was frantic to get away, to find the right view. 
Ahna put a glass of milk into my hand. Dad was talking 
about how much warmer it was in Michigan. Mother was 
remembering the trees around the old house and calling in 
the shops and the new faculty wives group in the large 
Michigan university until they came into the Andersen living 
room and blocked out the windows like smoke and suffocation. 
Dad was talking about his better job, his bigger 
department, his better laboratory equipment, and in the 
short, silent minutes between his speaking, E.J. talked 
about the new president and slow budgets and his shaking 
hands. I moved to another window. The crashing dark 
about me spread like waves into the room. I was too hot. It 
was a long summer. I was cold. It was a long, cold winter to 
imagine, but we would be away. I finally settled in a chair 
by the empty fireplace and drank another glass of milk and 
shoveled down cookie after cookie after cookie. At eleven 
o'clock, it was time to go. Mother stood by the door 
holding Ahna's hand and telling her to come South, there 
was plenty of room, tears in a loud voice to cover up. Dad 
was almost out the door before saying goodby. Ahna said, 

69


"Can't you stay until tomorrow." We had already said we 
were leaving tomorrow. E.J. stood by the door in pain. I ran 
up to Ahna and hugged her, then kissed her; then went 
away before she could do anything back. I was all 
negatives and positives. I was all confused. I wanted to get 
away. I needed to stay, to look at the windows some more, 
to feel the sure, steady boards of the oak floor. I shook 
E.J.'s hand. I walked around the room. I left. The bow of the 
canoe touched sand.

"We're ready now," Ahna said. She stepped lightly 
from the front, and pulled the canoe on shore. I got up and 
carried the lunch basket. It was only about a fourth on 
sand. The bottom was still shaky. I tilted the canoe back 
and forth as I walked forward, holding the lunch high as if it 
might drop in the water. The canoe swung from one side to 
the other. Then I was out. I gave the lunch to Ahna and 
pulled the canoe up half way, for E.J. to get out. I held out 
an arm for him. After a struggle, he hit sand. I pulled the 
canoe all the way up then, and tied it. We walked up the 
beach to the end of the point. We found a table and 
gathered around it. There was no need for a fire. We could 
still hear shots from the inlet. Ahna set out the food.

"We just eat light lunches now, Andy. Do you mind?" 
Ahna said to me, a little sharp.

"I do too."

She set out small tuna sandwiches with the crusts cut 
off, neatly sliced in quarters. She set out paper cups, and 
lifted out a thermos jug and poured us each juice. 
Elderberry wine.

"Such a lovely day," she said. "Andy, do you 
remember how you used to come down to this park to 
swing?"

I nodded.

"This park must have been here for years."

"Forty-five years," E.J. said in his professional voice.

"It looks as if they've put up new swings this year," I 
said.

"Yes, the Lion's Club did that."

I went over and tried the nearest one. It felt good 
-sturdy and strong - with the large wood seat and the chairs.

70


I began to push a little with my feet. It went out wide. There 
was plenty of leg room. My daughter would love to swing 
here. Ahna came over and sat down in the one next to mine, 
and E.J. watched, smiling and shaking. I pushed her, and 
she laughed and pumped with her legs. She went up just 
about as far as a person her age could go.

“It's a beautiful Fall, Andy," she said, as she moved by 
me.

“We haven't had a better one," E.J. said from the picnic 
table. He cleared his throat.

I got in the swing beside hers. I began to pump.

“How's this?"

We were about even, and looked at each other, and 
laughed. We went back to the picnic table and finished our 
lunch. Then we packed up the basket, and walked way out 
on the point, as far as you could go before the sand fell off 
to water and a drop off. The wind was blowing. We wrapped 
ourselves in our arms. Anne will be wondering where I 
am, I thought. The wind was getting cold. As we turned 
back to the canoe, we could see the high-rise dormitory 
across Birchmont Drive.

“You can see the whole lake they say, from the top 
story," E.J. said.

We reached the canoe, and got in as we had entered it 
a mile or so back on Andersen's beach.

“They'll be doing some more with this park for the Diamond 
Jubilee," E.J. said. “After all, it's called Diamond 
Point Park." He laughed at the coming together of the two 
words.

Ahna pushed us away from the shoreline. The wind 
was still blowing hard from the point. It will be a tailwind 
all the way back. We could almost drift. I heard E.J.'s paddle 
in the water straightening the stern around. I put my 
head back against the picnic basket and closed my eyes. 
Diamond Point. I had played there for years and years 
when I was a child.

71


arrival of evening

Dan Lawless

in the square a child's laughter 
a delicate glass falling to the floor 
in another room

darkness gathers beneath the trees 
the dogs are pink 
on the steps of the hall 
with fire-colored windows 
a weary groom retreats 
for a moment 
from the festivities

raising a cigarette to his lips 
one can see 
in this last light 
his future sons 
three fine threads 
trailing from the sleeve 
of an ancient 
a sumptuous 
wedding-jacket

72


FIESTA DE SANTA CATARINA

Deborah Pye

We wove the eve of her burial out, 
drinking, picking our stray bits of thread 
from the earth, 
our bowl of black grief.

Squatting, our bodies made one 
with the loom, supporting 
the column of color that rose 
striped like the day 
in our hands.

73


ONE SUMMER

Albert Drake. The White Ewe Press, P.O. Box 996, Adelphi, MD 20783. 
$4.00

by F. Richard Thomas

For the past four or five years, as I begin to 
acknowledge middle age, I have found myself trying to 
come to terms with my childhood. Who was I? Who am I 
now? What did I do, then, to make me who I am now? In the 
fever of this search, I get anxious, because I can't 
remember what I need to remember to discover who I am.

Albert Drake's One Summer has taken some of the 
heat off. Reading this novel is like reading about my own 
transition from childhood to adolescence. The place in his 
novel is not the same, nor are all of the events that occur, in 
the summer when Chris (the main character) is thirteen 
years old. But Chris's feelings about his environment are 
similar. I know now how I perceived the world, how I felt 
about it; and this has been a revelation to me.

Perhaps it helps to be close to forty years old to appreciate 
a novel that creates the world of a thirteen year 
old around 1950. The stack of morning papers bundled with 
wire, the smell of dust burning on the radio tubes, the 
special threat of the A-Bomb, electric-eye doors, the steady 
strokes of a pushmower, the foot X-ray machine, dry ice, 
phosphates-details like these bring the novel close to my 
childhood home.

But l think any reader will be caught up in Chris's 
summer-the summer that marks a radical change in his life- 
-for Drake's writing is captivating. It is not captivating in 
the way a good novel usually is. It does not have a clear, 
strong narrative that builds toward a denouement. Rather, 
the reader is drawn into Chris's world through a series of 
short, interrelated, but not logically connected, vignettes. 
The reader comes away knowing Chris, and knowing the 
necessary, and difficult, decisions he must make under the 
pressure of various influences from all directions.

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The method of this experimental novel is delightful 
because it works. The "chapters"--or vignettes--vary in 
length from one paragraph to several pages. I had the sense 
of reading a series of prose poems. And, indeed, it is not 
surprising that Drake is also a poet. Each chapter is clean, 
tight, rich in detail, emotional, and highly suggestive. 
Unlike the ordinary novel, the effect is not that of watching 
a motion picture of the high points of a young boy's last 
summer as a child, but more like the emotion that might be 
elicited from looking over a family photo album.

Talking of his approach to One Summer, Drake says, 
"Was it possible, I wondered, to write a novel that lacked 
conflict, cause-effect relationships, and certain unities." 
I'm not sure if it is ultimately possible. At least I'm not sure 
that Drake has achieved this here. Chris's place, Chris's environment, 
is his conflict. This is what Drake captures. The 
re-creation of that environment and Chris's responses to it 
make it possible for me to quit brooding on my past, for I 
can learn more about me by reading Drake. That's what we 
hope for in the best fiction.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Ben Brooks is writer-in-residence in the Massachusetts 
schools. He has published in Epoch, Story Quarterly, 
and Shankpainter.

Carolyn Cigan received her B.A. from MSU in 1979. She won 
2nd place in poetry in the annual RCR creative writing 
contest.

lames C. Dawson is an undergraduate in English at MSU.

William D. Elliott edits Loonfeather: Minnesota North 
Country Writing, is director of the Upper Midwest Arts 
Conference and the University Poets' Exchange of 
Minnesota. “Ahna Andersen" is taken from his novel, 
Blue River.

Pete Jones is a marketing student at MSU. He is a former 
editor of MarketLine, which has also featured his 
photography.

Margaret Kaminski is editor of Moving Out and is 
owner/operator of Class Bell Press. She has published 
in University of Windsor Review, Waves, Off Our 
Backs, Mainline, and others.

Tim Keefe, totally overwhelmed by the progress of human 
civilization has spent the last several years in 
unfunded death research and is a member of the 
Veterans of Future Wars.

Michael Lauchlan is in the MFA program at Goddard. He 
has published in The Beliot Poetry Journal and 
Corridors.

Dan Lawless is a graduate student in English at the 
University of Louisville. He has published in Collage, 
White Mule, Encore, and Approaches.

John Lehman is a cartoonist living in Madison, Wisconsin. 
He has published in Poet Lore, Oyez Review, Green's 
Magazine, and others.

Judith McCombs has just had AGAINST NATURE: 
Wilderness Poems published by Dustbooks. "Untitled 
Stone Poem" is part of the collection.

Nancy Nowak attended Thomas Jefferson College and now 
lives in New York City.

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Deborah Pye lives in Duxbury, MA.

Deborah Route received her M.S. in English education at 
MSU and is now teaching at Lansing Community 
College. She won 3rd place in poetry in the annual 
RCR creative writing contest.

Hollis M. Ryder is an English student at MSU. Her work has 
appeared in Labyris, and her first chapbook is 
Definitions.

Michael Shattuck is an East Lansing resident. He says, “Life 
is a subtle song; one should strain to even hear, lest 
that subtle song be blotted out by other noise that's 
near."

Paul Shuttleworth teaches English and physical education 
and coaches varsity basketball at Southeast Community 
College at Fairbury, Nebraska. He has published in 
Kansas Quarterly, Poetry Now, Southwest Review, 
and others.

Leonora Smith teaches at Lansing Community College and 
won first prize in fiction in the annual RCR creative 
writing contest.

Richard Thomas is an associate professor of American 
Thought and Language at MSU. He is editor of 
Centering and his most recent book is Frog Praises 
Night.

Paul Witherington has been published in Kansas Quarterly, 
Wisconsin Review, and Cimmarron Review.

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RED CEDAR REVIEW EDITORS

Lynn Domina

Rebecca Manery

Steve O'Keefe

Jeana White

Liz Kella

Paul Murphy

Jeanette Opalski

RED CEDAR REVIEW is a biannual magazine of the literary arts 
published at Michigan State University. Manuscripts may be submitted 
to 325 Morrill Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 
Ml 48824. Please include return postage.

Our Thanks to MSU College of Arts and Letters, English Department, 
Student Media Appropriations Board, George Kooistra and 
University Publications, Albert Drake, Jim Cash, and other 
friends.

Back Issues of RCR..........................................................................$1.00

One Issue of RCR..............................................................................$2.50

One Year Subscription of RCR.......................................................$4.00

Postcard Mysteries, fiction by Albert Drake...............................$2.50

Love at the Egyptian Theatre, poetry by Barbara Drake........$2.50

Enclosed is my check or money order for____________________

payable to Red Cedar Review, 325 Morrill Hall, Department of 
English, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Ml 48824

Please mail to:

Name_______________________________________________________

Address_____________________________________________________

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In This Issue

Poems by:

Nowak

Lehman

Kaminski

McCombs

Ryder

Samuelson

Cigan

Route

Dawson

Lauchlin

Lawless

Pye

Fiction by:

Brooks

Smith

Shuttleworth

Witherington

Elliott

Graphics by:

Jones

Keefe

Shattuck

Review:

Thomas on Drake

Vol. XIII No. 2

Pete Jones
Pete Jones