RED CEDAR REVIEW
RED CEDAR REVIEW



RED CEDAR REVIEW

Vol. XIV No. 1

Spring 1981


Kelly O'Keefe
Kelly O'Keefe


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Contents

Barbara Somers

Opening, from The Book of Followings........................... 1

Elizabeth Martin

Baptism and the Goat ......................................................... 4

Ken Poyner

Winter Blindness....................................................................13

The Animal.............................................................................14

David James

Settling into the Earth ..........................................................15

January 1.................................................................................17

Albert Drake

Cravings.................................................................................18

Ruby Hoy

Holding Sacred......................................................................30

Marc J. Sheehan

The Domestication of Animals.............................................31

Prelude...................................................................................33

Len Roberts

Making Breakfast.................................................................34

Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Map Poem............................................................................35

Victor M. Depta

The Lieutenant .....................................................................36

Terry J. McKenney

Amputations I and II ...........................................................37

Gene Westervelt

Grapefruit..............................................................................47

John Ditsky

Strategies ..............................................................................49

Charles Hertz

Gena.......................................................................................50

Jan Zerfas

the owls...................................................................................67

willa cather on the moon....................................................68

rites.........................................................................................69

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Lynn Domina

walking across the sea..........................................................70

souvenirs.................................................................................72

Gipsy Moth IV........................................................................75

the twin...................................................................................78

Vince Clemente

A. J. M. Smith: Remembering Ted Roethke....................80

Scott H. Mulrane

Return to Derrynane............................................................96

Contributors' Notes...................................................................98

Editors' Page...............................................................................100

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V


Kathy Manley
Kathy Manley


vi


OPENING, from

THE BOOK OF FOLLOWINGS

Barbara Somers

Before you is a snowfield and a skyscape of leafless trees. 
The sun will not be visible in this story 
and the moon does not exist.

It will remain cold for days and days.

It begins to snow now

because I have drawn snow into the picture.

There will be no heroes in this story

and no animals that talk, tell truths

or do kindly deeds.

It begins to get even colder

so I have thrown some mittens onto the snow.

No one comes for the mittens.

They are blue, woolen mittens 
and lie next to a thimbleberry bush.

These bushes are not native to this setting 
but I have placed one here

because I want it to do magical things.

And people sometimes believe in magic 
where there is a mysterious setting.

I have placed them with the initials 
of whom they belong to face down.

You cannot turn them over, hard as you try 
for they are frozen solid in their place.

I have darkened the sky.

The snow comes faster and faster.

I can stop it but I let it come and come.

The thimbleberry bush does not shake in the wind, 
yet the trees bend and lean,

strain like dark legs bearing down on the earth.

You can hear their barks splitting.

Cracking and splitting apart.

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Something stirs under a tree on the mounded snow ahead. 
It stretches itself from a small center until it is long and dark. 
It moves toward us across the snow on its belly 
seeking each depression in the snow.

From here, it looks exactly like a long black glove 
pulling itself along, looking for something or 
someone.

Yet, it is not a glove, and as you see now 
it is no animal. .

I was going to have it be an animal, 
just because I have already said there are no animals 
in this story.

But the betrayal is yet to come.

This thing long and dark, which is not a glove or 
animal, comes upon the mittens under the bush. 
It is so cold now you feel as if you are sleeveless.

It should be apparent now that this thing long and dark 
has the same bones as you do.

That they are arranged in a different way however, 
is significant, for you are kindred spirits of sorts.

You are the only one shivering in this scene.

The black thing and you both seek possession 
of the blue woolen mittens.

One of you will get them.

One will be able to move them from their immobile state. 
Only one of you is 
real.

The way of course, is through the thimbleberry bush.

The magic evoked from the bush will unthaw the mittens.

They will become limp and turnable, 
and the secret revealed.

Black thing, long thing, you have three chances.

I listen and watch:

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IT SINGS: Hey down, ho down 
derry derry down, 
among the leaves so oh 
green oh.

IT SPEAKS,

TOUCHING THE BUSH: “By the pricking of my thumbs, 
Something wicked this way comes: 
Open, locks, 
Whoever knocks!”

THE LONG BLACK THING

WRITES UNDER THE BUSH IN THE SNOW:

My name is Rumplestiltskin. 
My name is Rumplestiltskin. 
My name is Rumplestiltskin.

The mittens remain blue faced

flat down on the snow.

It is your turn.

Before you is a snowfield and a skyscape of leafless trees.

I lie here completely covered over by the snow.

No wind blows. Though, what sounds like wind 
is you breathing.

I am leaving this setting entirely 
for the opening act.

You can leave the blue mittens

and walk away.

Will you lift them?

Will you lift them?

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BAPTISM & THE GOAT

Elizabeth Martin

She was riding with her father to the goat auction. She 
looked down at her legs stretched across the car seat. They 
seemed a normal size. They were the only legs she had. She 
remembered standing with the others in a shaded corner 
outside of the church, waiting for the photographer to arrive 
and snap some pictures of the baptismal group. The other 
girls were a year or two older than she and were wearing 
new summer dresses with flounces around the hem, or long 
cotton dresses with floral prints, but the sun had seemed to 
wash everything into a bland, egg-yolk color. It was just after 
the service and the noon sun was licking everything in sight; 
trickles of sweat ran down the girls' necks and the boys were 
adjusting their ties and looking scratched and tight in their 
suits. She hadn't thought about her legs then; she was proud 
to be standing with a group that had a very adult ring to its 
name: the Baptised.

It had been easy going down the aisle after her brother 
when the pastor had called for those who desired to have 
their sins forgiven and begin life as a "new creature." She 
had been intending to go forward anyway, because something 
was wrong with her, she knew, but when Dave slid past 
her and jabbed her behind the knee with his thumb, she 
tried to catch her laugh and ended up making a loud snort. 
So she slid onto the floor and crawled between the pews to 
the aisle, biting him in the calf and making him trip over the 
pianist who was seated next to them. She believed in Christ 
all right, but wasn't sure if her sins counted among those that 
could be transformed by the death of Christ: adultery, gambling, 
child-beating—a host of major offenses. She just 
seemed different from the other girls in the church. She 
wondered sometimes if she was made out of the same 
bucket of fiat resources God had dipped his hand into and 
drawn the other girls out of.

At her baptism, the pastor had covered her nose with a 
white handkerchief and tipped her back into the cool water. 

4


She hadn’t taken a bath that morning, and wondered 
whether she should have; the water seemed so pure. She 
could see the pattern on the metal of the bottom of the 
baptismal through the calm water. At communion afterwards, 
Dave had tipped his shot-sized glass of grape-juice to 
his mouth and tilted his head sideways, pretending to burp, 
and slurred, “One more for the new life, shweetheart.” They 
giggled and the pastor glanced at the tittering row of converts; 
Dave tossed his glass in the air and caught it in the cuff 
of his pants. She was impressed. It was wonderful to have a 
brother who could make her laugh and feel as if the world 
might revolve on schedule. She, on the other hand, was 
always a little behind in everything. It was, her mother said, 
because she took everything so seriously. She decided to 
begin being a new person. So when David tipped the shot 
glass to his mouth, she did the same thing and that pastor 
just happened to look over at their pew as the glass slipped 
from her hand and flew over her shoulder at the pianist. 
Trickles of purple juice slid down the large lap of the pianist’s 
orange shift. For that, Esther was made to apologize 
later. She suspected that she was regarded as a faithless one 
from the start.

Dave was much taller than the other boys his age and 
could go into the grocery store with her and see over most 
of the adults’ heads. He’d point out people to avoid, or 
friends to compare tales with. Dave always knew the latest 
story concerning Doris Delavitche’s precocious, 11-year-old 
breasts, or the cars that Hal Sweeting smashed when he was 
learning to do donuts in the school parking lot. Dave was 
always a step ahead in figuring out math and people.

“That’s old lady Perkins,” he’d say as they sauntered 
down the grocery-store aisle. “Keep away from her because 
she has a thorn under her fingernail. She’ll call the cops on 
you for trespassing if you go by her grocery cart.”

So Esther avoided Mrs. Perkins and followed Dave into 
the bean and noodle aisle. He’d tear the corner off of a 
spaghetti bag and pull out a long strand to suck on while 
they walked.

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"Have a stick,” he’d say, holding one up to her face so 
that she was cross-eyed looking at it. "Someone else will do 
it if you don’t. And you don’t want to be the cause of someone 
else stealing, do you?” His logic was loose at best, but 
she adored his freckles and sunburnt nose. That was why she 
ate spaghetti in the grocery store and tossed grape juice on 
the pianist. She wouldn’t be surprised if Dave sprouted 
wings any day now, and turned into a beautiful sky-creature. 
Most boys got baggy and red at puberty; Dave would overnight 
become a Pegasus, completely overtaking the messiness 
of growing up. Now that she was baptized, she hoped it 
would happen to her, too.

But then the matter of her legs. After the baptismal 
group’s pictures returned, there was one girl standing at the 
right of the bright, smiling group. She looked as if someone 
had caught her in the act of something very private; she was 
looking angry and awkward. There were dark shadows 
under her thin, scowling mouth and so many wrinkles across 
her forehead that it looked like the pianist’s, who’s face was 
almost irretrievable behind scrolls of fat that rolled down 
her face and neck. There were skinny arms and legs sticking 
out of that pale-blue dress. Esther recognized the girl in the 
picture as if she were looking at a relative. She had thought 
she looked like a princess or a fairy, but the girl in the picture 
looked like something that had been unearthed and 
was unaccustomed to the light.

One of the older baptized girls had glanced at Esther’s 
dress and asked her when the baby was due. It seemed like a 
hysterical error to imagine that the girl in the blue dress was 
pregnant; Esther’s body felt different from how she thought 
most girls felt about theirs. She didn’t have the shape that 
Doris had, or even the shape of her best friend, Rochelle. 
Rochelle had lots of boy-friends who took her under the 
viaduct after junior-high basketball games. Esther would sit 
beside Rochelle at the games, feeling mature and important 
to be part of the older crowd. When Billy Sauter strutted up 
the bleachers to the top row where they were sitting and 
eyed the two of them, Esther knew he would notice the 
proud and knowledgeable look in her eyes and the straight 

6


line of her thin shoulders under the tight grey sweater of 
Rochelle’s that she had borrowed. He would immediately 
want to sweep her under the bleachers where they would 
kiss passionately.

Billy looked at Esther and twitched the right corner of 
his lips. Then he looked at Rochelle’s breasts. Rochelle pretended 
to be telling Esther something, so Esther tipped her 
head in a secretive manner toward Rochelle and they 
giggled.

“You want to come to a party?” Billy asked.

Esther tried not to look off guard. “Oh, if you mean 
tonight,” she started, but Billy's eyes were still transfixed on 
Rochelle’s chest.

“Where’s it at?” Rochelle asked.

“Oh, just me and some of my buddies are getting 
together at the viaduct after the game,” Billy said. “Thought 
you might want to come. Just for a little while.”

Esther looked down at her legs. “Maybe he doesn’t like 
skinny legs,” she thought. She remembered the girl in the 
picture, protruding from the billowing haze of pale-blue 
like four raw spaghettis with a shriveled turnip setting where 
a mysterious and adult looking face should have been. Did 
Billy think she looked like a sprouted turnip?

Now she was riding in the car, sitting next to her father, 
and looking at her legs. The car was heading for the hairpin 
turn where she was expected to say, “Daddy, watch out! 
There’s a harfing dog in the woods!”

When she was four, she had confused the words hair 
and bark for some reason, and dad had liked this confused 
adjective so well that he egged her on to tease him with this 
silly, mis-spoken fear for seven years in a row.

“Estanne,” he’d chuckle, “it’s only a chained sheep dog. 
Daddy won’t let him come near you. You’re safe in the car.”

She’d been comforted and calmed at four, curling next 
to him on the large seat of the dark-blue ’59 Chevy, but the 
ritual was starting to anger her. They neared the corner.

“Estanne,” daddy said, patting one of her protruding 
kneecaps, “hold on tight, it’s a hairpin curve.” She knew she 
should clutch the door handle and ape four-old-fear, but 

7


was too concerned about the shape of her knees to ask for 
his ritual line.

"What's wrong with my little girl," he said, pushing her 
hair forward from the back of her head, which she hated.

She couldn't answer. If she did, something swelling 
inside her throat might choke her.

"Cat got your tongue, Liberty?" he laughed. She couldn't 
for the life of her figure out why he called her liberty. "Don't 
worry," he was playing the liturgy game alone, "daddy's got 
you safe."

And he started to make up a song about a little girl who 
was afraid of harfing dogs but who could bait a worm on a 
hook just as good as the fishermen in the fishermen's sea. 
The chorus was silly; Esther was tall and gangly, and lumpy 
or stretched out in the wrong places. But daddy sang about a 
"punkin' headed girl, just four-foot-two, yelping 'do, do, 
do, daddy do not let me be et by the harfy, bad, big dog'."

It was true that when he took her fishing, she could bait 
a worm on a hook as easily as she could thread a sewing 
needle, which her mother taught her to do. The reason 
she'd gone to the auction with her dad in the first place was 
because her mother was sewing Esther a new dress, which 
meant her mother would be nervous and chirpy, making 
Esther stand here and stop shifting her weight onto one foot, 
and "for heaven's sake, stop stooping! It makes the hem 
crooked!"

Then she would sew a seam up and inspect it and rip it 
out and Esther would have to hold stone still all over again. 
But since dad was going to a goat auction, Esther could go 
along and climb on the wooden slats of the animal pens. She 
would smell the damp hay and sweaty animal smells of the 
barns and maybe meet a cowboy who would tell her stories 
(she believed them all) about the birth of a baby horse, or 
about breaking a colt, or how to tell if a horse had bad 
tendons. All the local farmers went to the auctions and 
always had good horse stories that they told when they sat in 
the shade of the barns. No one told goat stories. But at 
home, her father was always amusing the family at supper 
over the latest antics of the old Billygoat who would eat 

8


through his grain bin in search of the golden barley-stalk, or 
some other tale.

“If I had a goat’s face,’’ he laughed one night, “I’d hide 
it in an empty stall and never let anyone see the fiasco of a 
computer error God made when He was calculating the 
makings of Pegasus.’’

Esther thought about the goat and then she thought 
about Pegasus and being a grown-up. Women didn’t have to 
worry about skinny legs or pregnant-lady dresses. They 
stood beside clean sinks all day, smiling, having organized 
refrigerators and shiny linoleum countertops. They had parties 
where everybody ate holiday food and said nice things, 
and then they went home to neatly made beds and slept 
soundly all night. Esther, just the opposite, thought that 
everything in her life kept creeping out of the corners where 
she tried to tie them neatly into a bundle. She’d draw the 
strings shut and at the same time, something like a wad of 
snarled hair or broken spaghetti stick would poke out of the 
sack. She’d try to stuff it back and something else would pop 
out. Like the way she kept waking up during the night, or 
couldn’t get to sleep at all, even though she tried to force 
her mind to lie still next to her body and stay quiet for a 
while. But it would jump off somewhere, and she’d have to 
follow, looking for it, and sometimes found herself stuck in 
the branches of a tree, or running through a green maze, or 
chasing someone toward the viaduct, but it kept getting 
farther and farther away and she could never find out who it 
was she was chasing.

One night when she couldn’t sleep, she counted the 
clock downstairs chiming the same note every half-hour 
through a long series of daydreams where she was looking 
up at the continuous spirals of a green maze and searching 
for the face of someone just a little older than herself who 
she knew well, but couldn’t quite identify. After several reruns 
of the maze dream, she crawled stealthily over to 
Dave’s bed where he was snoring like a violin bow on loose 
strings, and whispered his name two or three times.

“What do you want this time,” he asked, and she told 
him there was a goat face in the mirror. He let her scoot 

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under the covers with him so she wouldn’t be afraid, but 
when he started scratching on the loose strings again, she 
crept back to her own bed and had to get the sheets warm 
again. She tried praying, bargaining.

"Dear God,” she said, "please help me get to sleep. I’ll 
weed out the turnips for gramma tomorrow and do the 
dishes.” But when that didn’t work, and the clock chimed 
again while she was looking for a door in a green wall, she 
got out a candle from under the knee socks in her drawer 
and lit it and tried ouija, only without the board.

“Give me an answer, Aunt Tonya,” she said. She tried 
for her Russian aunt because there was something more 
mysterious, and therefore spiritual, about foreigners. But 
when no one answered, she crawled back into bed and 
wondered what it was Aunt Tonya would be able to tell her 
anyway. She wasn’t much interested in the life of the dead; 
streets paved with jewels, or a hugh rocky vat full of bubbling 
fire didn’t seem as interesting to her as the woods 
behind the house, or the glimpse she’d had of Chicago. 
She’d rather stay here after she was dead, if God didn’t 
mind. She decided that Aunt Tonya hadn’t answered because 
God hadn’t let her; then she got confused about God, Aunt 
Tonya and the ouija and decided she’d have to believe 
harder next time. Maybe God was hard of hearing and you 
really had to shout up at him with your soul. So she pushed 
the candle through the air-vent below the storm window 
and heard it plop into the snow covered bush below.

All these things were racing through her mind as the 
blue Chevy sped toward the hairpin curve. And then it really 
happened for the first time. Esther hadn’t even asked for it, 
though daddy always wanted her to think something fearful 
was at the corner. There was a cattle truck full of goats just 
around the other side of the curve. It had been invisible 
because of the trees that slunk farther and farther toward 
the road from the woods each year. The tires of the Chevy 
licked the pavement, making a dry, scraping sound like 
teeth on gravel. There was a thud and Esther grabbed for the 
door handle, almost expecting daddy to say, "That’s a good 
girl. Daddy will save you.”

10


Her feet were above her and there were ferns and twigs 
rolling against her body and the next thing she knew, she 
was examining the face of a goat who was extending his nose 
within close range of her own. A large, wet looking eye 
contemplated her where she had landed in the cool stream 
of a ravine. The goat bent down to take a drink. Esther had 
never been on the same side of a fence with a goat, but had 
heard stories of sharp, goat horns pressed into rib-cages, or 
goat hoofs thumped against bony shins and jaws. The goat 
had thin horns that curled and twisted like branches of a 
dagwood tree, complete with an outer layer of scaley, bark 
looking bone. The horns looked even more like thick fingernails, 
she thought, twisting off of a freak thumb and 
pointing toward some presence settled in the tops of the 
trees or the barley field just above the ravine. The goat, 
refusing to move, established the stream as his territory. It 
was Esther against him on his ground. She imagined that the 
goat was one of the girls in the baptismal class; she would 
finally know their secret—they were goats at night in their 
sleep, but transformed themselves in the morning by some 
secret chant, no, by a drink from a magic cup of wine, and 
their long, angry faces became smooth and brown, or white, 
and their knotted, goat heads turned into yellow curls or 
long black hair.

"So this is your secret/' she said out loud, getting ready 
to argue with the goat. She wasn't sure whether she should 
have talked to him, or whether she might even have thought 
he would reply. While the goat contemplated her, Esther 
saw that he had very crooked legs and his knees were off 
center. She looked at her own knees, spread at an angle she 
hadn't known she could put them, but was afraid to move 
from the position she had fallen into.

She noticed that her nose was bleeding; she must have 
hit it against the door handle when she tumbled out of the 
car. She slowly lowered her face to the water and let her 
nose submerge. The water, surprisingly, smelled like a clean, 
damp woods. She had seen the woods when dew had 
beaded everything into strands of green and brown and yellow, 
transforming trees and ferns and weeds into colored 

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drapes and webs like a huge prism made of millions of the 
tiniest blobs of water and stretched thin as a spider web. She 
looked at the goat feet submerged next to her, then back up 
to his face. He seemed to be grinning at her; his grey lips 
were drawn back and a contorted brey like a chuckle 
tumbled out.

She thought he might have known her from an auction. 
Suddenly Esther laughed; she was glad to be sitting there in 
the stream with her friend the goat. Then she scrambled 
onto all four feet and let out a ripple of jagged brays that 
sounded like little bells ringing up from under the leafy 
surface of the stream. So this is what it’s like to be baptised, 
she thought. She trotted up the ravine after the laughing 
goat who was headed for the large field of barley. It looked 
like a street of gold in the August sun.

12


WINTER BLINDNESS

Ken Poyner

Everything becomes a predator:

The wood pile, the back porch,

The noises of stray dogs,

A cat cold on your windowsill.

Even the flames huddled in the fire place

Seem to be waiting your one mistake,

One thoughtless instant, a second to trap you with.

Any motion may lead you into hopelessness. Your feet 
Dragging about the comfortless cold of the wooden floor 
Await betrayal from the legs. Your hands in mastery 
Shift the shawl on your shoulders.

Exhibitionists. The quiet of the house

Pulls against your skin like a gutter's knife.

In the next breath

The desire to push open the door,

To run for the wild safety of the forest,

Will freeze on your chin.

Your calves, gathering anger from the snow about you, 
Cast revolt towards the hips still loyal to warmth—

And you bend into attack, lusting for the kill, 
Summoning all the force left in your jaw.

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THE ANIMAL

Ken Poyner

The boy could not sleep through winter.

Hands full of snow he has worn himself to spring.

The crows have taken shelter in the barn;

Our cows, huddled in one corner,

Will not come out to graze. Even the chickens

As garroulous as ever do not appear at the back door.

Last night, our collie left to run with wolves:

The boy stood at his window, pointing—

The woods, the stream, the free territory.

You've got to go to him.

He grows weed in his window box.

Already the corn has begun to show silk

And I cannot have it.

Each night he calls to the mice;

By day he has taken the place

Of the scarecrow. Naked, bent

By the fence, he has caught birds 
Alive in his mouth. His brown body 
Coils power like a snake's. Hunting bear

I have come down almost too soon on the trigger

And found him dodging from the brush into my sights. 
Go to him.

I will stand by the door with the axe.

The music of him four-footed, mocking

The rabbit and the wolf timorous in snow

Is too much for a man to carry 
And still pull food out of earth.

We shall have our son back from this season,

Or the memory.

14


Settling into the Earth

David James

rain in your eyes 
like clear mercury 
steaming with the heat 
of your body 
as you move 
through the downpour 
in this morning of invisible birds 
you head into the wheat field 
out back 
your bare feet 
sinking in dirt

& up through the clouds 
the moon is still burning 
to find its other half 
for the first time in your life 
you feel alive

just to be walking in the rain 
for no reason at all 
the sheaths of wheat 
brushing drunk in wakes 
but then you remember your awkward house 
your fattening wife

your blood in the bodies of two children 
and you have never felt so good 
so right to keep walking 
away from them 
your face pointed up to the sky 
with faucets of rain 
soaking you 
filling your pores 
it is here alone 
where you finally see

that you are a part of this rain 
this field

15


that even your arms and legs 
have sprouted out of the flesh 
of this wet body

16


January 1

David James

It snowed all night again, hard. The radio says there’s 
thirteen inches but I don’t really care, I’ve got no place to go 
& sitting at the table here, I feel warm. Out the kitchen 
window a pine tree stands buried in snow. It looks like a 
statue but moves slightly as crosswinds spray the white 
powder against the shed, kennel. Then I see a clump of snow 
crumble off and a branch pop out, bouncing & waving. 
More snow falls & each time, a branch springs up & down, 
causing tiny avalanches on the branches below until the 
spray finally settles on the ground. Behind & to the right of 
the tree, the dog sticks his head out of the kennel, an inch 
of snow piled on his nose, & then pulls it back in. I should go 
out & give him some food but I’m too lazy, too warm. I sit 
here, drinking tea, rubbing my feet together. I spend the 
whole morning wondering why I feel so happy watching this 
pine tree wake up & climb out of the snow.

17


CRAVINGS

Albert Drake

Throughout the day rain fell, gusting against the house, 
blurring the outline of Mt. Scott until he thought the fog- 
shrouded dark figure resembled something out of his 
mother’s fears.

Kneeling on the davenport, he watched rain fall against 
the screen, filling the small holes. The drainpipe gurgled like 
a frog. He and his mother had been in the house for two 
days, since his father had left for work.

“Oh, give me a nail and a hammer," his mother sang, 
sliding the iron across the fabric in slow, sure motions. The 
smell of slightly scorched fabric filled the frontroom, and 
reminded him of the taste of the metal window screen on his 
tongue.

“And a picture to hang on the wall.” As she sang and 
folded the wool work shirt he imagined what the song was 
about: a thin woman with short wavey hair and a flowered 
dress stood on a step-ladder to hang a picture of his father. 
He wished that his father would return. He thought of the 
woods where his father worked, tall trees in a forest unbroken 
by roads from Portland to the ocean, and that made 
him think of other songs his mother sang: a sweet little nest 
way out in the west, rainbows, a small hotel, California here I 
come.

Often there was a rainbow to the east, but today the sky 
was gray, and around the top of Mt. Scott floated thin white 
clouds which scattered before the wind. Beyond those were 
dark gray clouds, and beyond those black thunderheads. 
White smoke came from the chimney of the house across 
the street, and as he watched it drift upward he wondered 
whether house smoke made the sky gray. His mother had 
said that the cloudy weather was due to the bombings in 
Manchuria and Europe: he imagined rows of cannon firing 
into the air and smoke rising to form dark, ominous clouds. 
He had mixed feelings about the rain; it kept him inside 
when he wanted to play in the sandbox, but being indoors 

18


during a storm was cozy. They had had tomato soup and 
crackers for lunch; he liked the smell of food and the hot 
odor of ironed clothes and the sound of his mother's singing. 
They didn't need to go out. Later he would listen to the 
radio. He wished that his father would come home.

When he tired of watching the rain fall like bullets in the 
mudpuddles, churning up little umbrellas of water, he 
turned to the table beside the davenport and picked up the 
writing tablet. Real Irish Linen. Aeroplane tablet. There was 
a drawing of a monoplane flying through heavy clouds like 
those around Mt. Scott. On the lined paper was her familiar 
handwriting. He took a clean sheet and tried to print Real 
Irish Linen with the stubby pencil.

"Uh un, mustn't mess," she said, taking the tablet away. 
She held it while she went back and unplugged the iron, 
tapping the hot metal with a finger she had moistened 
against her tongue. She was always afraid of fire.

" 'Dear Bertha,' " she read aloud, as if to double-check 
what she had written. " 'We are all fine, hope you are too. 
Have had lots of rain but that makes things green (ha ha). 
Chris is getting bigger and soon he will have a baby sister. (In 
April.) Calvin has a real good job working on the road crew. 
That's WPA, they're camped at Wolf Creek.." When her 
voice caught, dropped, he thought she was crying and he 
wanted to run and hug her but he felt confused and continued 
to look out the window where rain fell in sheets. 
Later he would listen to the radio. He wished his father was 
home. " 'How's everything on the farm? Real pretty this 
time of year I'll bet. Is Pa and the boys busy with...' "

She continued to read the letter but so softly he couldn't 
hear the words. He pictured the clouds collecting from the 
war in Manchuria, rolling across the ocean, passing over the 
mountains where his father worked, and skirting Mt. Scott 
on their way to the Cascades. Eventually they would travel to 
where his mother and father had come from; he could not 
picture that place except that it was like a big farm, and 
peopled with relatives that his mother longed to see. He 
imagined it smooth and level and safe; a place where, in his 
mother's opinion, there was nothing to fear. His father had 

19


said that he didn't ever want to go back—he loved the 
mountains and tall trees and, yes, even the rain.

The tall, brown grass in the field across the street had 
been beaten flat by the rain. He remembered a morning 
when he had gone outside to play after breakfast and had 
looked up to see an older boy running across the field in 
long strides. A leg parted the high grass and extended; the 
boy bounced high in the air. He got closer and closer and 
ran past without looking at Chris. On his head was a cloth 
flyer's cap, and the chin straps flew up and down at every 
step. He wondered if the boy was a flyer; he wondered 
where he had come from, and what was beyond the field.

"Where did he come from?" he asked.

"Where did we come from?" his mother said, misunderstanding 
the question. "Don't you remember I told 
you?" She folded the letter, placed it in the envelope, and 
licked the edge with her tongue. "Don't you remember I 
told you about the train trip, and how long we were on the 
train, and the mountains we came across, I'd never seen 
mountains and we went up so high, gosh I was scared. I 
thought we'd fall right down." She laughed, and plugged 
the iron into the extension cord which came from bare lightbulb 
overhead; she continued to talk while the iron heated. 
"When we got here we didn't have any place to stay, we 
stayed in a hotel one night and then your father bought a 
tent and we found a place in North Portland, off Albina, 
where we put it up. That was real nice, it was summer and 
the weather was real nice. It was near a dump and there was 
always fire coming out of this crack in the ground and we 
cooked our food there. It was like camping out."

When the iron was hot she laid another workshirt on 
the ironing board and began to smooth the hard, wrinkled 
material, working with practiced movements. "One day the 
police chief came past and asked if he could inspect the 
tent. He said it was the best tent he'd ever seen—it was so 
clean. He said he envied young people who had a sense of 
adventure. The police chief said that! It was fun, but of 
course it wasn't all fun. We were so poor all we had to eat 
was beans, and we didn't even have salt for them. That first 

20


Christmas your father found a Christmas tree that had fallen 
off a truck and he carried it home; for decorations we cut up 
tinfoil from cigarette packages he found along the street/'

Chris thought about that tree and decided it must have 
been ugly with only tinfoil decorations. His mother had 
stopped ironing and was looking out the window. "That 
summer, in the evenings, we'd walk to the top of the bluff 
and look out over the Willamette River and watch the boats. 
At the bottom of the bluff was the railroad tracks, and every 
evening the City of Roses went past. I used to think about 
those people, and wonder where they were going. That was 
a real new and streamlined train, and we could see the people 
in the dining cars at their tables. Sometimes I used to 
wonder what they were eating."

Chris looked out the window; gray clouds filled the sky, 
blotting out Mt. Scott, and the wind whipped the neighbor's 
trees, which were like black brushstrokes against the dark 
gray sky.

For dinner they had fried potatoes and Beenee-Wee- 
nees, which they ate in the front room near the radio. Before 
his father had left for the woods he had gone to the new 
Fred Meyer store and had bought a case of tomato soup and 
a case of Beenee-Weenees; the boxes sat on the back porch 
and they ate one of each every day. The smells of cooking 
filled the small house with a friendly warmth, and as he 
huddled around the radio's familiar yellow dial he had a 
feeling of contentment.

His mother paced the small frontroom, shoes clacking 
against the faded linoleum; finally she opened the door and 
stood for a long time looking out at the gathering darkness. 
The man on the radio kept talking about "straight-shooters." 
"Be a Straight-Shooter," he said. Chris imagined a straightshooter 
was someone who could throw a rock and have it 
maintain a straight course without flipping over. Earlier he 
and his mother had tried without success to decipher the 
Captain Midnight Secret Code; you needed a special ring to 
understand the secret message given at the end of each 
program, but his mother thought that they could figure it 
out. She substituted a letter for their numbers—a one was an 

21


A, two was a B, etc., but the message remained garbled. 
Chris wondered if you had to be a Tom Mix Straight-shooter 
to understand Captain Midnight’s secret messages.

Finally she shut the door and locked it, double-checking 
the lock. "Let’s walk to Lents,” she said, picking up their 
dishes and carrying them into the kitchen.

He was surprised that she would want to leave the 
warmth of the house. Usually she was afraid to go out in the 
evening—there were strange men and crazy drivers and dark 
streets and people in taverns. These were the dangers of the 
city. Even if nothing happened to you, you had to worry 
about high prices and being cheated by a slick sales clerk 
and that the house might burn down while you were gone.

"Why?” he said.

"Come on,” she said, "I got this craving. And I have to 
mail this letter.”

"Awwwww,” he said, making movements against the 
radio casing with his feet. A program about an aviator had 
just started.

"Get your boots and jacket,” she said, putting the letter 
in her purse. "I can’t stand being cooped up. I got a craving 
to get out.”

"Buy me a comic?” he asked, and when she agreed he 
stirred from the spot before the radio where his body had 
warmed the linoleum. He put on his rain gear; the yellow 
rubber had a slick smell, like the red and white oil cloth on 
the kitchen table. He waited beside the door while she put 
on her coat, and he saw her expression of impatience as she 
tried to button it over her stomach. That was the baby sister.

Then she took him by the hand and made him go with 
her while she checked the house. That was what she called 
it, “checking the house,” and they did it not only when they 
went out but before they went to bed. He was forced to 
follow her through each room as she checked to see if one 
was on fire; she opened closets and pulled back curtains to 
see if someone was hiding there. She unplugged light cords, 
unplugged the radio and iron, and double-checked everything. 
"Bathroom, bathroom,” she said, as if doubling the 
size of their small bathroom, "I pee-peed and ah-ahed. Bed


22


room, bedroom, closet, closet" She locked the back door, 
and slid a heavy kitchen knife into the jamb of the back 
porch door so it could not be forced open. She was afraid of 
fire, burglars, strangers, salesmen, neighbors. Had she been 
afraid of these things on the farm? he wondered. In the city 
every day new fears materialized—an airplane might fall, a 
car could go out of control, and there were always the 
dangers associated with high buildings, the maze of streets, 
crooked clerks, running out of money, going on the dole.

"Kitchen, no fires on, front room, front room, radio's 
unplugged, no fire here. Got my key, money."

He waited impatiently by the front door, remembering 
how his father always laughed at this ritual of checking the 
house or when she hid the butcher knife each night. "If a 
guy wanted to kill us," his father had said, laughing, "he'd 
bring his own knife!"

"Got my key, money," she said, and then she bent to 
pull the plug on the light near the door. They stood in sudden 
darkness and he felt her hand lead him onto the porch 
and down the front steps.

Against all her fears, he sensed, there was this terrific 
craving—for something—and so she was willing to enter the 
maze of dark streets. They walked slowly, and Chris listened 
to the rain falling softly on his rubber rain hat. The streets 
were empty of traffic and lacked any kind of lighting, and 
sometimes the night was so dark he could barely see his 
mother. Sometimes the light from a house window would 
show them the way, and whenever they passed a house with 
a big window with the lights on and curtains drawn his 
mother would stop and from the darkness watch the people 
inside. "Look how fat that woman is," she'd say or "Fish, I 
wouldn't walk around in old pajamas like that." But usually 
she commented on the house and furnishings in a neutral 
voice which suggested that she was checking a stranger's 
possessions: "Table, chairs, lamp, mirror." Sometimes she'd 
comment on a particular detail, or rearrange the furniture. 
He got the idea that she was pretending to own these 
houses, and was always comparing them to the house she 
lived in, a house she didn't like.

23


They walked up Ramona, the only street nearby that 
had a sidewalk, and when they finally turned a corner the 
lights of Lents burned brightly. The street was glazed black, 
with ribbons of reflected neon. Chris grew excited by the 
sight of the stores, and began to walk faster.

Music came from the open door of the tavern, and a 
neon sign burned in the window: Acme Beer. Dim lights 
showed in the fruit market, Safeway, and Butterfield's grocery. 
The Rexall drug store glowed in the night, lights on in 
the windows and on the ceiling, and although the street was 
empty, people sat at the fountain counter.

His mother dropped the letter in the mailbox, and they 
went into the Rexall. He hurried to the magazine rack, to 
look through the comic books, and was immediately overwhelmed 
by the covers: Sensational, The Blue Beetle, Funny 
Animals. The characters, semi-human, semi-animal, projected 
a life so different from his own, a life of adventure 
and action like that he heard over the radio. Finally he 
decided on one and when he turned to look for her she was 
standing, pale and nervous, at the prescription counter.

“Can we buy this one?" he asked, holding up the Action 
comic.

She took it but handed it back without reading the 
cover. The man put the bottle of pills in the brown sack and 
she paid him and put the sack in her purse.

“God," she said, “I crave a soda, or something." He 
followed her to the fountain, where she shook the rain from 
his raincoat and laid it and his hat under the counter. When 
he climbed onto the high stool he felt light and unencumbered. 
The counter was swirly marble, and the sides were 
faced with blue and white tiles. When the woman came, his 
mother ordered two chocolate sodas, and while they waited 
she held her hand against the side of her face, peering 
around or through her fingers at the couple who sat on the 
stools near the door. They were young, and reminded Chris 
of the people in the Coke posters over the counter: both 
had blonde hair, were smiling, the man had a maroon 
sweater with a large F on the front, the woman wore a plaid 
wool dress and saddle shoes. They were happy, and seemed

24


unaware that they were being watched.

He kept the comic book on his lap, refusing to read it 
until they were back home when he could study each page. 
In the ash tray were wavy slips of paper each containing a 
person's name; they had come from the punch boards on 
the counter. He played with these, enjoying the warmth and 
the smells of the drug store.

The sodas came in tall glasses, the tops covered with 
chocolate-colored bubbles; the combination of ice cream 
and soda was so airy and delicious it seemed to be gone in 
only a few minutes. With a long spoon he dug out the last 
bits of ice cream and scraped the foam from the glass. He 
held the comic book beneath the counter, wanting to read it 
but knowing that if he did that it, like the soda, would be 
gone and the pleasure dissolved.

"Thirty cents for the sodas," the woman said, and when 
his mother had placed the coins on the counter, she added, 
"And ten cents for the comic the boy has."

His mother looked embarrassed and with two fingers 
reached around in her coin purse, finally finding a dime. "I 
wasn't...," she said, but never finished the sentence.

Quickly she got him into his raincoat and hat, and as 
they went out on the sidewalk, slick with rain, Chris heard 
the boy and girl laugh, a pleasant sound against the dark 
night. He put the comic book under his raincoat to keep it 
dry. A few stores away the lights ended and the darkness 
began. As if reluctant to enter the darkness, his mother hesitated 
outside Menashe's fruit store. The old man was closing 
up, carrying the wooden boxes of apples and peaches to the 
rear of the narrow building where a single light burned. The 
air smelled of ripe fruit and cedar boxes.

"I crave something," she said, picking up a peach and 
squeezing it. She smelled the furry surface. "These peaches, 
are they good and ripe?" She always felt that everyone was 
trying to cheat her.

"Very ripe, very good," the old man said, tilting his hat 
brim back so that she could see his face and know that he was 
telling the truth. "Very ripe."

Oh, I'll get six, I guess," she said, debating over the 
purchase even while she looked into her purse. When 

25


Menashe went into the store to get a sack she said, "They're 
way too expensive."

She paid, and held the bag before her, as if she intended 
to eat one here on the sidewalk. But she stopped before the 
next building, Reilly's Tavern, and stared through the open 
door. Chris listened to the excited sounds of a juke box and 
laughter, and breathed the air which had a salty smell, like 
the ocean. He knew what went on in there—his mother had 
told him repeatedly how bums wasted their lives in taverns, 
rotted their brains, picked up diseases, and met bad women.

He was amazed when she handed him the bag of 
peaches and said, "Wait here—I'll be right out."

He expected her to say that she had this craving—for 
sodas, peaches, beer, for music and talk and companionship 
—but she walked into the tavern, the place she had always 
hated, and stood at the end of the bar and reached once 
again into her purse. The man came toward her with a glass 
of beer. As she drank, the purple and red neon glowed in 
her hair and on the plain brown coat pulled tightly around 
the bulge that was his sister. The juke box played a lonesome 
song about memories, and above the telephone pole the 
moon broke through a hole in the clouds. The stop light 
pulsed like a small red heart at the intersection. Menashe's 
dim light went out. A man emerged from the tavern, a 
logger, wearing knee-high boots and a plaid jacket, and 
walked up the sidewalk into the darkness without even looking 
at Chris.

He took a step toward the open door. He felt more 
lonesome than he ever had as he stood on the sidewalk, 
water beading around the rim of his hat, his clothes damp, 
the bag of peaches growing heavier. He wanted to go home 
where it was warm. He wanted to lie on the floor and read 
his comic book and listen to the radio. He wanted his father 
to come home.

His mother drank a second glass of beer quickly and left 
the tavern without talking to anyone. She took his hand and 
guided him down the sidewalk into the darkness. They 
passed two darkened stores, and when they reached the 
dark mouth of the alley his mother said, "Oh god," and 

26


released his hand. She walked quickly into the alley and he 
heard her gasp, gag, and vomit—the soda, the beer, the 
things she thought she had craved.

All week the peaches remained in the yellow bowl on 
the kitchen table, getting so ripe that brown bruises appeared, 
and on Friday, when his father returned from working 
in the woods, they sagged under their red, furry skins. 
All week he and his mother had eaten tomato soup and 
Beenee-Weenees, but the peaches had been ignored, as if 
after their splurge they had decided to repudiate rich food 
and luxuries.

Toward dusk he heard his father’s car pull into the 
driveway, and he ran to the back door to meet him. At the 
kitchen table his mother sat, unmoving, a scowl on her face. 
He jerked open the door to the back porch and his father 
appeared, grinning, wearing a battered snapbrim hat, leather 
jacket, twill shirt and pants, and knee-high laced boots 
topped with red socks. Chris ran to him and grabbed his legs.

“Hiya, twerp,” he said, lifting Chris high into the air. 
Chris caught the smell of woods, fir trees, fern, smoke. "You 
been a good boy? You been taking care of the house?”

“Yep,” he said, nodding. Now they would be able to 
figure out the Captain Midnight secret code. He could play 
with the boards while his father worked on the garage, or 
help him work on the old car. He would wake on Sunday to 
the sound of whistling in the kitchen.

His father put him down and turned to his wife. "Hiya, 
kiddo,” he said, smiling, leaning over to kiss her, but she 
pushed him away.

"Go on.”

"Hey, is that any way? What’s the matter, didn’t you 
guys have a..

The peach skimmed his hat brim and splattered against 
the wall behind him.

His father looked surprised, and then he began to grin. 
This made her madder, and she reached into the bowl and 
grabbed another peach, richly brown, which she threw 
overhand. His father jumped sideways, an unnecessary move 
since the peach hit the wall near the ceiling; it split from its 

27


skin and like a snail it slowly slid down the wall, leaving a 
slick trail behind.

His father jumped wildly like a dancer, laughing, waving 
his sweat-streaked hat.

“Damn you,” she said, throwing another peach from 
where she sat. She threw awkwardly but Chris wondered 
how she could miss, the room was so small; that she did 
miss, and that his father danced before her, laughing, taunting 
her, made her even madder and anger ruined her aim.

“Damn, damn,” she said, throwing again.

"Yah, yah,” his father said, thumbs in his ears, fingers 
waving.

Chris began to laugh as the last two peaches beat sloppily 
against the wall, and his mother began to cry, great sobs 
which began deep in her chest, somewhere near the bulk 
which was the baby.

His father was bent double with laughter, and when he 
was able to straighten up he took two steps forward and 
grabbed her, holding her tightly, and almost without a hitch 
her crying shifted to laughter and then they were both 
laughing.

Chris watched the peaches slide down the wall, freed of 
their skins, the yellow-brown meat already drying in the air. 
They would remain there for weeks, until well after his sister 
was born, because his mother refused to clean them up. 
After they were removed, by his father, and the wall 
scrubbed, and finally repainted, the brown splotches of the 
peaches would be evident for years, like violent stains.

28


Phil Pollard
Phil Pollard


29


HOLDING SACRED

Ruby Hoy

I see the relentless fall of snow 
in November, its soft hammering, 
feel something the earth will not yield.

I imagine you snug in the farmhouse 
with that goodwoman, your wife, 
your love of simple comforts— 
fresh biscuits, coffee in the morning. 
Days shorten towards the solstice, 
it seems we live as we are willing 
lives lost before us, 
as winter snow covers only what we see 
and we see so little.

We have yielded to this life 
a part of us which does not long 
for comfort or warmth, but belongs 
in the cleansing cold 
checking trap lines, reading signs 
in the snow and the sky, 
and what have we kept?

What shall we hold sacred 
through these long winters of the blood?

Tonight I hold only bourbon 
and walk alone as the Great Bear 
tilts crazily overhead.

I curse comfort, warmth, and whiskey 
feel the past move too clearly 
across the fine ridges of my bones, 
and wish that I did not love 
that goodwoman, your wife.

30


THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS

Marc J. Sheehan

First, their images 
angular and harsh scratched 
and painted on the walls of caves;

an intimacy

that will survive only as shadow:

now something of their spirit, by entering dreams, 
is lost.

And after many children have eclipsed their parents 
and gone dark behind their's, 
by animals wounded or caught 
hands come to know the rapid 
heart-beat of fear slowing foolishly 
under them.

First only for fur, meat, eggs, milk, cheese; 
then as companions

who must be fed, kept warm and clean.

Rilke refused to care for a friend's dog 
knowing it would fawn and lick at his hand 
wanting a soul

and that he would care for it constantly.

And the kittens of a pregnant cat dropped off 
at night near our house

made their home, as winter came on, in 
the wood-pile under my bedroom window 
where at night

I could hear them settling in for sleep and could 
not sleep myself until they were silent.

Nor did I bury them under a cross

as I might have as a child, 
but spaded them into the earth 
near the swamp where the ground is soft.

I don't know how much longer the milk 
left out for them kept them alive 
than if the mother had been left to shift for them alone 
slowly going feral in the first snow of the year;

31


but with the still bits of fur stiff

in my hand I knew then we would never again quite 
be blameless. •

32


PRELUDE

Marc J. Sheehan

1

A four bottomed plow turns dirt over 
as if the earth could think that closely 
about itself.

Wild perennial flowers

are blooming 
around a house going to ruin;

a slice of moon still hangs over the dawn.

2

The farmer thinks only that his Ford 
tractor is old

and will not last much longer.

He knows nothing

of almost, and all-too-

human hands;

hands that knew only tools of chipped flint 
and how to lay flowers

with a dead child in a grave.

When unearthed it held barely 
traceable spores

of pollen mixed

with bones gone to stone.

3

His wife takes an old knife

and with a whetstone again 
sharpens the blade close to nothingness.

Their lives are becoming smaller, 
already thin

as a last sliver of moon 
cutting its way into dawn.

33


MAKING BREAKFAST

ten Roberts

Now, after four days, there is no fog on the window, 
the sun a warm white-yellow on the empty field, 
no wind but your hand stirring the distant ends 
of my sleep. Something in the room asks if I remember 
the house in Pennsylvania burning and I nod my head into 
the pillow

as you ask if I am comfortable.

An hour later the strong smell of coffee rises alone 
and I realize you’ve been gone, out into the house, 
our house, turning things off and on, 
letting me be alone, yet stretching your hands across 
the rooms

as you put plates down and rattle spoons

with the brilliant flame of yourself telling me you’re gone, 
but not gone, bending your head to the broken eggs, 
warming me back to this iron bed, out of the dream where

Bill and Jess

die many nights in fire out of control, there,

where my eyes burned and the Quakers’ band of metal 
angels

turned red hot, then cold.

34


MAP POEM

Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Where is my grandfather’s arm?

Fife Lake 
curled as if asleep 
a tree snail 
a spiralling fern.

Shake hands?

Impossible.

After fifty years 
handshakes change.

An arm buried in the north woods 
hasn’t city savvy, knows 
no Hiroshima or styrofoam.

His fingers twitch underground 
remembering ragtime

And I

replaced the buried hand 
thumping bass for his reversible melody.

There was never a more loyal or taller arm.

I walked in the shadow of his shoulder 
wearing his empty sleeve like a sunbonnet.

I stood in for his severed arm. 
We sailed Half Moon Lake 
letting line whistle out 
from between his teeth 
stub squat on the rudder.

When he died

and they buried him south of the arm, 
the hand began tunnelling downstate for him 
mole marks longside the highway.

And I was freed to replace another family part 
perhaps my father’s conscience 
or my sister's heart.

35


THE LIEUTENANT

Victor M. Depta

The men after dinner on Sunday the men sit in my grandfather’s 
library and talk about black people and divorces 
and petroleum as if the sunlight filtering through 
the oaks and the window panes lifts the room up somewhere 
beyond gasoline.

I listen to them and think what a little hole the mouth is, and 
so rubbery. Soldiers march out of it and change clothes. 
They have nothing to eat but crumbs. They don’t go 
back to a bird house but to a car wreck in a pond where 
a lily pad roots through the windshield. They’re afraid 
mostly.

I watch a lieutenant they serve under—in fact he’s my cousin 
Charles—unscrew the clamps around his eyes. He 
unhinges his square jaw, and handsome lips and nose. 
He loosens up his face.

A terrible wind flaps it. The soldiers and countries and himself, 
and all the planets, roar down the small holes of his 
eyes.

36


AMPUTATIONS I AND II

Terry J. McKenney

I.

I stopped him as he was going down.

"You won't like it," I said, hoping my tone of weary 
experience would serve as warning.

"I'd like to," he said, rising up so his pale skin looked 
faintly ghostlike in the winter darkness. "Would you mind?"

"No, of course not," I said and forced myself to think of 
other matters to lessen the nauseous feeling. I wasn't intending 
to go this far.. seems like I can never say no anymore, 
not with any effect. I guess after the first time there isn't 
really a reason to. I hate all this freedom we have today. 
Sometimes I long for those days I never knew, when dorms 
had ten o'clock curfews, and you could be expelled for 
entertaining a gentleman in your room with the door closed. 
Now sex doesn't matter, unless you are too obviously gay 
and it makes the other women on your floor uncomfortable.

He's back up to my level, harsh breathing in my ear. I 
sort of enjoy that, it shows how much I've gotten to him. I'm 
trying to make the right moves, no reason for him to get 
frustrated. I feel like I'm looking in the window at two people 
I've never seen before. For a second I can't even 
remember his name.

"Feeling okay?" I ask, for the thrashing has stopped, and 
I have a sudden hope he's through and I can go wash up. I'm 
always getting teased about my dash for the bathroom but I 
don't like feeling unclean. Funny how they never mention 
the messiness in those romance novels. The hero and 
heroine always float on waves of rapture, plunging and 
moaning in ecstasy. I'm mostly the silent type myself, except 
for the cute comments I rarely can resist making. The whole 
situation is ridiculous, but I seem to be the only one who 
finds any humor about it. Occasionally I laugh out loud at a 
particularly trite line or move, only to provoke a hurt 
"What's so funny?" How can I say you are, and I am, and this 
whole mess is unbelievable.

37


He’s moving again, and my hands stroke automatically. 
“Nice touch,” he says, and I smother a smile. Men are so 
easy to please. No, maybe not all men—I shouldn’t lump half 
the population together in one fell swoop. Maybe it’s just 
the men I choose who are easy to please. Interesting 
thought... do I attract them, or am I attracted to them? Or 
both?

This is so awkward. Tangled sheets, clothes, bodies, 
lives. I should be living in New York, or somewhere where 
one night stands are the norm, instead of this on-campus 
rooming house that is more gossipy than my high school, for 
God’s sake.

My philosophy professor, a very frightening, liberated 
lady, says the only way Woman (with a capital W) can be 
happy is with another Woman, because men are incapable 
of understanding Women. Well, this man, who is currently 
intently sucking on one of my fingers, is a contradiction. 
Sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he knows a great 
deal more about me than I do about myself, and likes me in 
spite of it. I hate it. Women spend so much time trying to get 
their mates to understand them, when really they should 
cultivate misunderstanding. There is so much freedom in 
confusion. Scott, here, is capable of astonishing revelations 
that are damn near impossible to cope with. Like last week, 
we were in about this same position, when he raised up on 
one elbow and said abruptly, “You’re just tolerating me, 
aren’t you?”

I was stunned and flustered. A slow panic began to 
creep up my spine and my voice came out high and false. 
“How can you say that? I love you. I love what you were 
doing. I’m very happy.” He seemed more or less reassured. 
A long sigh escaped me, and he redoubled his efforts. But it 
was just relief. I don’t want to lose him, and get back into 
that oh-my-God-it’s-Friday-night-and-l-don’t-have-a-date- 
yet syndrome. And I really do enjoy his company. He’s 
wonderful to talk to, fun at parties, and misunderstands me 
beautifully, most of the time. It’s just those flashes of insight 
that unnerve me.

He’s playing with my ear, and I want to shake my head 

38


like shooing an irritating fly. It interferes with my thoughts. I 
place his hand elsewhere and kiss his nose so he won’t take 
offense. Like offering a baby a pacifier.

For something that's supposed to be so spontaneous, 
this sure seems mechanical to me. Do this and he does that. 
Move your body this way, and he moves his like that. Push 
his button and hope he finds yours. A couple of my friends 
say that they talk about sex like they would anything else 
they do: "Please touch here, now Don." "I feel very comfortable 
with what you are doing, Sharon." I'd die first. Sometimes 
I think real hard about what I'd like and hope he 
catches on, but usually I just lie back and let the sequence 
happen. After a point there is no need for words anyway.

"Beth and Andy are getting married." Scott has that 
same awed apprehension I hear in my own voice when I 
speak of another couple who are tying the knot. God, it's an 
epidemic, fourth so far this spring.

"I figure I'll buy you an engagement ring this summer if 
things continue the way they have been."

Did I hear correctly? His body is still and tense, the 
words not dropped as casually as he'd like me to believe. 
"Oh? Do I have any say in this matter?" I didn't mean to 
sound so sarcastic. It didn't help. He's on the defensive now.

"Of course. I thought we were in agreement." He's 
speaking so coolly I can almost see icicles hanging from the 
cartoon balloon over the bed.

"Uh, we are. Maybe someday we'll move in together, or 
get married or something. Maybe."

A long silence. I'm hoping he's gotten off the subject. 
His finger traces my necklace. "Pretty. Where'd you get it?"

Pause. I never know how to answer a question like that. 
Maybe the trappings left over from an affair should melt of 
their own accord when the relationship disolves. Maybe you 
shouldn't keep old cards, letters, locks of hair... presents. I 
think I'm a keeper because I'm afraid I won't get them again. 
Confucius say reading old love letters better than not having 
any to read at all. I like this necklace, and I intend to wear it. 
I start to answer defiantly, then notice he isn't listening. It 

39


wasn't important. I make a mental note not to wear it on a 
date again.

He's still lying across me. I study the ceiling over his 
shoulders, warm miniature mountains, faintly freckled.

His voice is loud in the silence. “Mar, we aren't going to 
make it."

Be cautious, don't show any fear. “What makes you say 
that?" I say, my voice tinged with hysteria at the end, which I 
swallow like a bitter capsule. I push on his shoulders until I 
can see his eyes in the gloom.

“You're closed off from me. I can't reach you anymore." 
I laugh. “Is that all? You had me scared. Of course 
you're reaching me. What do you call this?" I hold up a 
trembling hand, my standard reaction to upsetting news. 
“See? You've got me so excited I'm shaking. Let's quit talking 
and do something about it." I kiss him long and hard, 
closing my eyes and moaning whorishly. Scott responds hesitantly 
at first, but my wildness convinces him, and we 
plunge and thrash for quite a while.

Eventually I run out of things to do, and just lie back. 
Scott halts abruptly and looks down at me. “You were faking, 
weren't you?"

“Don't start, I'm not up to this tonight," I say wearily. 
“Just go to sleep." I turn over and close my eyes, more wide 
awake than I have ever been in my life.

“No. We're going to talk, or else I'm leaving."

Since when does he have all this will-power and conviction? 
This is the guy who can't even decide where to meet 
me for lunch. I concentrate on breathing evenly and keep 
my eyes closed tightly. If I don't talk he can't make me say 
something awful.

“Mar? Talk to me." The silence is thick. Our breathing is 
momentarily in rhythm. I can smell the stale scent of our 
earlier love-making, almost touchable in the quiet.

The bed creaks as Scott's feet hit the floor. He gathers 
his clothes and resolutely begins to dress.

“Scott? Don't leave me. We can work it out," I say involuntarily. 
Was that me who whined like that? I press my lips 
together and vow not to beg again. Scott sits on the bed next 
to me. I turn my face to the wall.

40


"I'd talk until I turned blue, but it wouldn't help. You 
just aren't there sometimes, and I can't hack it. Maybe 
someone else can, but I can't. I thought I could... well, do 
something, change you... something, but it's not working." 
He smoothes my hair, and his touch irritates me. "I'm leaving 
now."

When he opens the door, the light from the hallway 
illuminates the bed. It narrows as the door shuts, and is 
extinguished by the muffled click of the lock. I stare at the 
ceiling for perhaps an hour, but the wrinkled bed sheets 
bother me, so I meticulously straighten the covers and tuck 
the corners in neatly. While fluffing the pillow I see it is 
covered with Scott's brown hairs. Carefully I pick up each 
one and put it in an envelope from my desk. The bed is now 
cold, so I switch on the electric blanket.

By now it is clear he isn't coming back. I can't tell how I 
feel about this, and probe each feeling like a tongue at a 
sore tooth. So what if he had stayed? Would it really have 
been that much better? I don't care much either way. I 
mean, well it was something to do.

I like sleeping alone, I don't do it enough. I stretch out 
precisely in the center of the bed, and run my hand down 
the legs I shaved for him this morning. I wait for the blanket 
to warm my chilled body.

II.

At first it was a matter of annoyance that the skirt 
wouldn't zip, and a mental note to cut out that second glass 
of wine I had lately begun to sip with dinner. Then came the 
sneaking suspicion that I had a problem that wouldn't go 
away as easily as cutting down on calories. But I didn't know 
if the sick feeling in my stomach was morning sickness or just 
fear.

So, I made a journey to the drug store, hoping to end 
the uncertainty with one of those home chemistry sets that 
clarifies your swelling belly. You know the type, they're 
advertised in leading women's magazines with quotes from 
happily married housewives who were just delighted to discover 
they had a long-awaited baby in the ol' tum-tum. 

41


Well, I don’t qualify on either of those counts. I’m hardly the 
happy homemaker type. In fact, if this nightmare is true, I 
doubt that dear DaDa will even get a whiff of the news.

Anyway, I drove far from home, to a large, impersonal 
store where a young woman conspicuously lacking a ring 
on her third finger would not look out of place buying a 
home pregnancy test. I roamed the store, dropping little 
essentials into a cart, casually hiding the E.P.T box under a 
magazine and a box of Valentine candy. If I was pregnant, 
then I deserved a little pampering. As a last impulse I tossed 
in a box of contraceptive foam. Talk about locking the barn 
door...

The cashier was the friendly, chatty type, who mercifully 
refrained from comment about the discretely flowered little 
box. I read a magazine to avoid conversation as she totaled 
my purchases. After skimming it, I found a story about a 
young wife’s experience with a false pregnancy. I felt positively 
euphoric—our symptoms were the same.

“Have a nice day,” the cashier bubbled, and I was able 
to answer cheerfully. Of course, all this was probably my 
body’s way to tell me to slow down. I knew I’d been overextending 
myself, what with working, and all those exams. And 
I certainly was under emotional stress, especially after Scott 
walked out. I wondered briefly if he’d want a boy or girl. I’d 
rather have a puppy. Or a kitten... or a canary.

It really hit in the car, and I had to pull off the road and 
light a cigarette to stop the shaking. Shit, if I was pregnant. I 
examined my finances, and found they were not good. I 
wonder what abortions cost? I stubbed out the butt and 
started the car. Would Scott foot the bill? Damn all of my 
independent speeches anyway—what did / know?

By the time I’d parked the car and let myself into my 
apartment, I was brimming over with confidence. I put on a 
pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table to read the literature 
that accompanied the home pregnancy test. First were 
the testimonials from Typical Housewives: “After 17 years of 
hoping for a child, E.P.T. told me I was at last pregnant. 
Thank-you!” Etc., etc. Yeah, but it sure was fun trying, wasn’t 
it, sweetie? At least you wanted your little bundle of joy. And 

42


you weren't carrying the child of some smuck who left you 
for no good reason...

Disgusted by my tears, I drank some coffee so hot it 
burned all the way down. Hope it got you, too, you little 
bastard, I thought, but immediately I reneged... I didn't 
mean it, God.

So, I have to put three drops of the first urine of morning 
into this test tube, swirl it around and let it sit undisturbed 
for two hours. If there is a brown ring around, then 
your problems are just beginning. Well, that sounds just 
charming. I rinsed out the coffee pot and swigged a couple 
of sleeping pills with the remaining residue in the bottom of 
my cup. The swill made me gag, and as I dashed for the 
bathroom I thought murderously of knitting needles and 
Coco-cola douches. Sleep was a long time coming, and my 
restless dreams were fragmented with screaming red wrinkled 
babies and visions of my disapproving parents.

When I woke, my pillow was clammy and wet—I didn't 
know if it was tears or sweat. I called the office and said I had 
bad cramps and wouldn't be in today. The always sympathetic 
secretary told me to stay in bed with a heating 
pad.“Yeah, return to the scene of the crime," I thought as I 
hung up the phone.

The lucite box and test tube were still lying on the table. 
I don't know what I'd expected to happen during the night, 
but the sight of them was enough of a shock to send me 
retching to the bathroom. While in there I checked hopefully 
for some sign of staining on my underwear, but no such 
luck.

I scoured the kitchen for a dixie cup, unwilling to use 
something I'd have to drink from later. I returned to the 
bathroom and sat down. As usual, my shy bladder refused to 
perform at command, so I settled back with my magazine 
and read the account of the false pregnancy. The young wife 
was Catholic. Maybe a couple of Hail Marys would help?

Finally the mission was accomplished, and I made my 
way to the kitchen. If it spilled I'd have to wait until tomorrow, 
and I couldn't stand that. I put three precise drops into 
the test tube, and added the magic fluid, shaking vigorously 

43


as directed. Except that it was my hands that were shaking, 
and not the test tube. I stared at the slim container for a 
moment, but nothing dramatic happened. Well, it was supposed 
to take two hours.

So, I had two hours to kill. And, maybe at the end of the 
two hours I'd have a baby to kill. Even I am shaken by my 
own thoughts.

Since I can't think of anything else to do, I take a long 
shower. The hot water relaxes me, and I examine myself 
critically. Are my breasts fuller than usual? I'd swear things 
are changing, but it could be the product of an overactive 
imagination. I also feel horny, but the thought of sex now is 
ridiculous. "Hey, Scott, could you come over and help me 
kill a couple hours? No, I can't come over there... I have 
something in the oven."

The second hour is worse. I've made the bed, swept, 
dusted, domestic as hell. I even did a couple self-conscious 
push-ups, made an attempt to study, and flipped through 
several magazines—even the article on the false pregnancy 
has lost its appeal. I also have resisted the urge to check the 
test tube. As my one act of willpower I avoid the contents of 
the tube resting on the kitchen table. I eat the entire box of 
valentine candy. Then I throw it up. Junior must not like 
chocolate.

Through the window I see students bundled in ski 
jackets and scarves hurrying to class with their heads bent 
against the wind. I envy them fiercely, but then, they have 
problems too, right?

With fifteen minutes to go, I start edging toward the 
kitchen. The phone rings and saves me from ruining my 
streak of willpower.

"Hi, Mom." Oh shit, not now. "Nothing, I was just 
... uh, leaving for class." She doesn't take the hint, knowing 
full well my class attendance is spotty at best. I talk rapidly, 
one eye on my watch. "Really? Who said that? Yeah... oh, 
hey, Mom, I gotta go—the kitchen timer is ringing. Yeah, 
got something in the oven. Okay, yeah... bye."

Now, with the timer ringing patiently, my feet turn 
leaden. Talk about your moments of truth. I feel like a quiz 

44


show M.C. should be announcing the results: “And now, 
behind door number two...”

In a strange way, the clear fluid is a disappointment. I’ve 
been seeing rings in the air, in the shower, in my dreams 
... everywhere except on my fingers and in that lovely clear 
little test tube. I let out a subdued whoop of relief and put 
on a pot of coffee. So, the Gods are on my side... my system 
is just a tad screwed up, that’s all. But I can’t shake the 
nagging feeling of disappointment, and phone the Woman- 
care center for an appointment this afternoon. I toast the test 
tube with my empty coffee mug. I wash the liquid down the 
drain, but the faint wet-diaper smell lingers through out my 
apartment. So how come I answered the Sixty-four thousand 
dollar question, and still feel like I got the booby prize?

45


Phil Pollard
Phil Pollard


46


GRAPEFRUIT

Gene Westervelt

Before the sun rose

I threw this sun

Into a black lunchbox;

Like hiding the day in darkness 
To keep it to myself.

From six to ten

I looked forward

Down the line past

Prenatal truck bodies,

As if my grapefruit would come 
Swimming to me in this giant womb, 
Fertilize me with citrus.

The point of the knife

Pierces the rind

Which swallows its serrations.

Section and vivisection

Dividing each enough

To be freed by my plastic spoon.

Bits of fruit hide in corners.

I'd ravage further

If I had steel.

Ill-armed,

I squeeze it lovingly, 
Catching each dribble 
As if it held life's meaning.

A moment of sensitive contemplation. 
Refreshed sour mouth;

More subtle than coffee,

Less sweet than an orange.

I dare not exhale 
And lose this taste.

Is this breathless wonder?

47


A pink starfish in a cup.

A pink starfish in a cup.

Seeds ignored.

I have eaten my day

In a single sitting.

Its memories lie on

A sodden paper towel.

Nothing else to look forward to 
But quitting time.

48


STRATEGIES

John Ditsky 

dialogues in night streets: 
the conversations of young men 
leaning upon cars leaning 
against fenders doors hoods: 
failures losses counted 
despaired of & resolved against

(peeking around street lights) 
the awed stars align 
themselves form & reform

49


GENA

Charles Hertz

Gena used to come into Zook's even before me, back 
when it was almost strictly a gay bar and few others even 
knew it existed, back before the music came there. Once I 
asked her how long she had been coming and she just rolled 
her eyes. “Since forever/' she'd said, put out her cigarette 
and got up to dance.

For a long while she saw me as more a compatriot than 
anything, sharer of some unspoken philosophy that had 
more to do with attitude than anything else. Some nights 
when I had arrived before her I would watch her come in. 
She would stake out a table close to the stage then stand next 
to it and scan the crowd, noting the presence and absence of 
the regulars and mentally checking our names against some 
sort of attendance ledger she must have kept. She would 
finally spot me at the bar and I would tilt my beer to her. 
“Hey Marz," she would shout over the taped music, “you 
live here or what? They let you sleep under the bar? You got 
a home, Marz?" When she shouted like that it meant she 
wanted company. For a long time she did not, and would 
simply grin with her eyes and scan past me, but when she 
shouted I always picked up my beer and let the bar hold 
itself up and spent my time with Gena.

She bought me beers and we talked then, mostly about 
the music at first. I never knew a woman who loved music as 
much as she. She promised an especially good show from 
the band one night, a Friday, said “Marz you'll feel the bass 
drum in your chest like ten megatons. Man you'll want to 
just cry." I thought, if anyone would appreciate the sheer 
loudness of a nuclear holocaust it's Gena. Gena liked music 
monumentally loud, chaotic, anarchically distorted. She never 
said as much; never said the lyrics were mostly unintelligible 
but when you could hear them they were absurd and absolutely 
true, or that drummers sounded more like demolition 
experts than drummers, or that guitarists played the same 
chords so many times that there was real catharsis possible in 

50


the repetition, that revelation increased directly in the proportion 
to volume—never analyzed her passion, it seemed, 
just was passionate. Blood rose in her cheeks then and she 
threw back her head to laugh. “I mean, this music is dangerous 
Marz, and you can dance to it without lessons. I mean, 
something is up here.”

It was still early. Gena was buying me warm Guiness and 
looking exactly like the place itself that night. Zook's is red 
and black of a contemporary sleazy school of interior 
design, with thick red padded booth and chair seats and a 
black ceiling that looks like no ceiling. Picture this: everything 
that can be black is and what’s left is red. Gena was red 
and black too, down to scarlet painted nails and charcoal 
eye shadow, looking vaguely like everyone our mothers at 
one time warn us about. I was having great difficulty keeping 
my eyes from her.

The band was setting up equipment, checking sound, 
and people were lined up outside the door and the noise 
level was beginning its inexorable rise. I could sense Gena 
starting to energize then as if someone had plugged her into 
a socket of low but unmistakable voltage—swaying slightly 
with some inner rhythm and watching people come through 
the door. I swung my chair around as hers was, leaned 
against a floor to ceiling pipe and studied the influx. It was 
quite a procession: leather boys with buttons and chains 
everywhere on their jackets; sophisticates dressed second 
hand chic in suits from other decades; factory toughs, 
freaks, queers. And women. So many women came to 
Zook’s. Wait. There were often many women, but always 
hoards of girls. Gena would turn and say, "Children. I mean, 
these are babies, Marz.” These were. They were girls who 
had never before set foot in a bar alongside girls who had 
washed their first Quaaludes with Southern Comfort before 
they’d been to high school. They were misinformed disco 
souls steered to the wrong place alongside punky chicks 
who knew the drummer’s middle name and what he liked 
for breakfast. They were girls with laser stares whom Gena 
maintained would as soon kill you as smile alongside girls 
with wild or sad or frightened eyes whom Gena assured 

51


would fuck you to your knees just for the kisses. I nodded 
and sipped my beer, enjoying the bitterness on my tongue 
and throat, and we watched them file in and light their 
cigarettes until the lights went down and everyone yelled; 
until the music began.

* * *

At various times she told me: 1) She held an MBA from 
Northwestern University and worked eight to six Monday 
through Friday, alternately riding herd over and placating a 
staff of sixty in the business office of Grosse Pointe's most 
impressive endeavor into public health, Cottage Hospital. 2) 
She had quit high school her senior year, drifted east from 
Wisconsin as far as Detroit until settling comfortably into her 
present day shift at Tough Alloy Welding Metals of Sterling 
Heights, where she band sawed chrome-copper and beryllium 
billets to be transformed presto chango into extruded 
coil of one sixty-fourth inch gradations and shipped "God 
knows where for God only knows what, Marz. Funky work. I 
worry plenty about breathing all that beryllium dust...." To 
substantiate this story she had worn earrings one evening 
made from union solidarity lapel pins. MESA—MECHANIC'S 
EDUCATIONAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA—AFFILIATED AFL- 
CIO, they had read. But her hands were uncallused as a kindergarten 
teacher's and I wondered from which industry 
thug that haunted Zook's she had gotten the blue collar 
gems. And 3) She was daughter to a wealthy Lansing financier—"
Daddy deals for the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, 
the justices. They're all golfing buddies with interest 
in diamond mines in darkest Africa. A real sweet group"— 
who had responded to her rebellious and somewhat latent 
adolescence with an open ended American Express card and 
the acquiescence that she had best get "this capriciousness" 
out of her pretty noggin while she might enjoy it. "Daddy 
says I have until thirty before the longing to bear children 
will completely overwhelm me," she smirked, "and I succumb 
forthwith to domesticity."

The stories varied, but among them I sensed fragments 
of truth like turquoise chips in a museum-front mosaic; also 

52


the just perceptible hankering to be unmasked.

One particular Wednesday Zook’s was a tomb. The 
band was not a band but a shaggy raven haired priestess of 
sorts who chanted morbid and profane space poetry in front 
of the electric guitar noodlings of a sinister youngster 
dressed in white. He did not look like her brother and frequently 
goosed her rump with the neck of his Stratocaster, 
at which time she would yelp and her poetics take on an 
added erotic dimension. We two or three handfuls in the bar 
were emitting a low hum of collective disregard toward the 
stagefront goings on; drinking was being taken fairly seriously 
this Wednesday. Even Gena, who was normally a 
sponge, was looking glazed. I had converted her to Guiness, 
she took to the stuff with a true beginner’s zeal and I lost 
count of how many she bought us each.

“Where was I?” she tried to recall.

“Balise, Central America,” I offered.

“Yes. Great discomfort there, Marz. Open sewers, voracious 
mosquitos. Much illness. Et cetera. But I endured, 
flourished even, teaching those poor Inca descended children 
to speak English as if —”

“Maya.”

“Huh?”

“You must mean Maya descended children.”

“Yes of course. Teaching them their own heritage, how 
Cortez raped their great great great grandmothers and —” 
She signalled to our waiter, Chivas, for more beer. “Where 
was I?”

“Cortez was raping,” I said.

“Yes. But you know. What the fuck’s the use? All the 
little Incas ever asked me about was whether I’d seen 'Star 
Wars’.”

“I don’t believe a word of it Gena.”

“No?” I indicated no with my head and torso. She 
pursed a clove flavored cigarette between unusually unglossed 
lips for me to light and, once torched, the thing 
stank mercilessly. “None of it?” she said.

“Why bother,” I said. If you don’t want me to know 
about you, fine. I will not pursue it.”

53


“Naturally you'll remain curious.”

“Naturally. And for pure entertainment value I won’t 
quell this need you have to fabricate your history. But entertainment 
alone makes ours a... an unbalanced friendship.”

“It lacks...?”

“It lacks... well," I said, “there’s honesty.”

“Ah honesty. Yes.” She turned her lips into a quick 
pout. “I mean, I admit to often being, uh, less than honest. 
Anything else?”

She was wearing a gray sort of wrap around Lauren 
Bacall get up and tossed a green shadowed, somehow 
Oriental glance across her beer glass. It did remind me of 
something else.

“There’s the lack of, say, normal physical contact between 
us. Between friends, you know. We always seem to 
have a table separating us with a dozen bottles and a dirty 
ashtray on it.” I shrugged, indifferently enough I hoped. “I 
couldn’t help noticing. You understand that by normal—”

“Marz.” She gurgled, cackled almost, sliding her chair 
around to mine. “I understand.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said, but her tongue muffled me with a 
probing, wondrously drunken and clove flavored exploration 
of my own.

We propped one another up as far as Gena’s dented 
silver Volkswagen Rabbit, where she bit down with considerable 
force on my left ear just above the lobe. “Marz!” She 
was addressing the assaulted ear at a volume barely below 
the pain threshold. “Marz from now on honesty and... 
friendly physical contact will be the watchwords of our 
friendship, Marz. We will be so repulsively honest and 
lovey-fucking-dovey that acquaintances will think we belong 
on the Newlywed Game. We will instill new values of 
honesty and affection into that den of —” She flailed an arm 
at the west wall of Zooks, upon which a grotesquely handsome 
Marlboro Man stood inhaling deeply just above indecipherable 
tar and nicotine figures and, losing what balance 
had thus far remained hers, fell ass over tea kettle to the 
unpaved parking lot.

My quick inspection turned up only a minor cut on her 

54


right elbow, so I loaded her into the Rabbit and stepped 
beneath the Marlboro Man to urinate. Around me I saw 
broken glass glisten, then blur and glisten again as if mirroring 
the glow from the stars, but when I looked up the sky 
was very cloudy; no stars, and it made me very dizzy to look 
up. Around me Detroit's midnight shift droned dull and 
metallic and I thanked something—I didn't know what, perhaps 
the Marlboro Man—for sparing me that end, however 
temporarily.

Gena snored the entire drive back to my house, where I 
stashed her in my bed and myself sank comatose into the 
sofa. She snored still—me finally coming to terms with the 
expression "sawing logs," which had until then always 
seemed ridiculous—when I left for work that morning over 
an hour late. No one snored when I returned. My bed was 
neatly made, which disoriented me because my bed was 
rarely made at all, and never neatly made. I picked up the 
note on the pillow and bounced down forcefully so as to 
rumple the covers and feel somewhat more in control of my 
own home before whatever comedy the note would reveal. 
Somehow I was sure it would reveal a comedy; after Gena's 
acrobatics the previous night and the incessant throb of my 
day long headache it seemed I deserved some levity. I read:

Marz—just don't you think I need a guardian 
angel 'cause I already have one—just don't you 
pamper me or humor me or even know me 'cause 
I don't need it—I mean, nothing stupid Marz—just 
be my lover 'cause that's not so stupid—and come 
early tonight—

I thought, well sure. Sounds great, just be my lover. 
Especially Gena's lover. Sure. But damned if I didn't already 
know it would not be easy to not be stupid, and then 
damned if I didn't know great apprehension.

* * *

Onstage it was the priestess again. Somehow she had 
weasled a two day stint. Word had gotten round though, and 
the crowd was even sparser than the previous night.

55


Roland Caruthers was tending bar with his usual charm 
and grace. I watched him concoct a Galiano stinger for a 
cinnamon skinned lovely, then proceed to sip alternately 
with her at its stirring straw until she jotted something on a 
cocktail napkin and exited grinning for her friends at a rear 
booth. Roland tossed the napkin into his tip jar and refused 
payment for my first beer. It always made me happy to see 
Roland in good spirits.

"What’s with the, uh, space cadets?” I pointed to the 
stage.

"The owner’s niece,” said Roland. "She wants to be a 
star.”

"Oh. Please tell the owner for me that she hasn’t a rat’s 
ass of a chance.”

Roland thought I was being much too harsh. "A little 
nepotism does no one any harm. Whatdaya think you’d be 
doing if your uncle owned a brewery?”

"Quality control.” I toasted Roland, "Touche,” then 
confided: "I’m waiting on a friend.”

“Yeah. I assumed as much. She didn’t look... healthy 
when you left last night. Had that pallor, you know. Greenish 
hue. Did she make it all right?”

"She had plenty of sleep. Listen, do you know her? Does 
anyone?”

"Know her,” he said. “Don’t you?”

"Well, we drink a good deal. If anything very enlightening 
was ever said, though, I think I would remember. We just 
talk ga ga goo goo, whatever.”

"Know her,” he said again. "Well she’s very entertaining, 
very—”

“Entertainment I know. You’re bailing out, Roland.”

"Marz. Really. I'm on my honor.”

"You’re dying to. Come on. Pour me another one while 
you’re not godawful busy. And talk to me.” On stage the 
priestess let out an amplified hiss reminiscent of fingernails 
scraping chalkboard. Roland glanced up at her and the guitar 
apprentice and said, "Oh, I don’t anticipate being very 
busy tonight.”

Get this: she’s got culture, and not the cheap popular

56


variety with which each of us is bombarded until we either 
succumb and become slaves to it or tune out completely; no 
sir, Gena’s got the authentic kind all right, purchased at a 
premium OUT EAST. Vassar. Phi Beta Kappa. And it’s no 
wonder she’s so familiar with the defacement of beryllium 
billets at Tough Alloy of Sterling Heights. She owns it, down 
to band saws, melting furnaces and the black and white fuck 
magazines which can be found on the stall floors of the 
shop’s two men’s rooms. You might say she’s an industrial 
baron. Slow, slow—I promise I will ease the pace here and 
fill this thing in correctly, just the way Roland told me.

Roland, of course, is in a position to know, as it turns out 
he grew up down the block from her. And if “down the 
block” conjures visions of the old neighborhood and your 
first puppy and the mailman bringing the J.C. Penney 
Christmas catalog, forget it: this block was across town from 
you. It was the block just across Lakeshore Drive and to the 
south of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club. As children Gena and 
Roland were neighbors, not to mention that both their families 
used the same landscaping service or that the Caruthers’ 
family maid was younger sister to Gena's family maid. By 
almost any neighborliness standards then available the two 
clans might even have been considered friends, the two 
children, well, playmates. Until Roland was about thirteen.

“What happened at thirteen.” I said.

“Gena was thirteen too.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well she began to look like she does now. Began to, 
anyway. And we ran out of names for it. Euphemisms. How 
long can you call it ‘playing doctor’ or ‘playing house,’ whichever 
it was? Until you’re about nine if you stretch it. Then 
what was it? ‘Exploring.’ That one’s durable. Exploring was 
legitimate for a solid few years anyway, but we outgrew it 
like you outgrow them all until it was sex, plain and simple, 
and that one wouldn’t do for a name at all. It may not be the 
case today Marz, but thirteen year old princesses like her did 
not fuck back then. It just wasn’t done.”

“Ah. And thirteen year old neighboring princes?”

“I was itching pretty bad to start, you understand, 

57


though it would be a while yet. Gena understood too and 
redefined our relationship to that of the more casual, neighborly, 
wave-over-the-back-hedge type. We drifted apart.”

"Uh huh.” I said. "What about later adolescence, when 
she must have finally gotten itchy herself? High school rituals 
are such breeding grounds for malnourished lust. Ever 
realize the dream, Roland?”

His frown said no. "By then we ran in different crowds. 
She was into her artsy-fartsy scene. Fundamentals of bohemianism, 
whatever you care to call it. And me I picked up the 
first of this trail of irresponsibility and moral dereliction 
that's led to my standing here with you.” He thought a 
moment and said, "Hey I'm not so sure all this probing into 
history is completely harmless.”

"Nonsense,” I assured. "It's good therapy. But we're off 
the track here. Tell some more and try to keep out of Gena's 
spotlight yourself.”

* * *

You might say it was a short hop from artsy-fartsiness in 
Grosse Pointe to Duchess County, New York and Vassar’s 
academic frivolity. Gena majored in music and minored in 
political science. She stayed east during summer vacations to 
teach violin at an arts workshop, and to study. She missed 
exactly five days of school her junior year to fly home for her 
mother’s funeral.

Gena’s mother, Roland explained, was only thirty-eight 
when she died. She had first learned to skydive while a student 
at the University of Michigan in the late 1950’s. Roland 
recalled seeing photos in his neighbors’ den of this unusually 
athletic mother grappling and tumbling with the multicolored 
parachutes. He recalled how for years he saw her on 
Saturday mornings load her gear into the family wagon, 
check things off on clipboard like an Army commander and 
drive away, Roland thought, to fly. He thought it wonderful 
that someone’s mother could do something like that; his 
own mother preferred backyard badminton for sport.

Gena’s mother, it seemed, was very good. She had in 
the years prior to the accident been engaging in what 

58


jumpers call relative work, that is, high altitude jumping 
involving a good deal of free fall and the making of group 
formations while in free fall with other jumpers; and she 
had, in fact, been a member of the largest relative formation 
ever made in Michigan. It was a fifty-four member, six 
pointed, lotus petal shaped star and Roland’s parents told 
him it got her picture on page three of the Grosse Pointe 
Herald. It also got her fairly addicted to the peculiar nirvana 
skydivers experience during free fall, the soaring moments 
spent quite in limbo at a terminal velocity of one hundred 
twenty miles an hour until the pull at a nylon cord reestablishes 
one as only human after all. Her last jump was a solo 
out of a pleasingly rural airfield near Ann Arbor. PCA investigators 
determined that the free fall must have been particularly 
euphoric that bright blue day, since no attempt 
appeared to have been made to open either of the two 
perfectly packed, functioning chutes she was wearing. 
Among jumpers certified for relative work, the investigators 
also said, hers was a not altogether uncommon death.

Gena handled the whole affair for her father, who simply 
could not bear it, who had indeed always thought his wife 
slightly crazy for jumping out of airplanes, whose own taste 
for thrills ran to a more conventional and infinitely safer 
flirtation with fast cars and speedboats, and whose sudden 
widowhood left him feeling like an uncommunicative zombie. 
Roland’s parents told Roland that Gena held up like an 
oak. It was after she’d been back to school several weeks and 
her father had begun to function again that he realized the 
extent of his daughter’s stoicism and felt grateful, indebted 
even. He dug out her school records then, saw the grades 
and the classes, became aware of her direction, of a drive it 
seemed he barely remembered and which made him proud. 
She really was quite a talent, he guessed. And to his knowledge 
she had stayed off of drugs and not made love to 
anyone of a different race. Certainly that was something.

Roland knew all this because Gena’s father had confided 
it to his attorney, who was Roland's father. As his 
attorney, Roland’s father made the requested changes in 
Gena’s father's will, changes which reflected recent widow


59


hood and the confident approval of a daughter's lifestyle. 
Her father had experienced the sudden realization not that 
Gena might turn out to be okay, but that indeed she already 
had, and he'd almost let it escape him.

Vassar offered her graduate courses midway through 
her senior year and sent her home two years later MFA in 
hand, the Vassar woman; bring on the world. It was 1976 and 
the world around Detroit was busy making auto related 
whatnots and all the money it could before God only knew 
what socio-economic calamity. Roland's parents told him 
that Gena worked on her tan for exactly eleven days until it 
was just so, and went to see Angelo Morincini, then the 
conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. As it happened, 
he encouraged her to hang around rehearsals. She 
very nearly made him cry at the emotional apex of her performance 
of the second movement, Mozart's Violin Concerto 
Number 4, and when she stopped he said he could 
offer her eighth chair for the upcoming season. Gena had 
a job.

"Jesus. Her taste in music is, uh..."

"Eclectic," Roland said.

"Yes. At least." I was disoriented again and stepped the 
wrong way toward the john. Zook's holds one john for all, 
very large and very mirrored with an adjacent "lounge" 
where recreational drugs are traded and abused. I stepped 
over a young lady napping near the urinals and she woke 
and brushed off her vest and jeans as if I might have in some 
way defiled them. I wondered what the impact from an 
eleven thousand foot fall does to a person's body. I wondered 
how closely the mutilation resembles, say, that of a 
massive cerebral hemorrhage or a shotgun wound. I thought 
of Gena in the gowned and tuxedoed splendor of Ford Auditorium 
on Symphony opening night; the incongruity of this 
image with that of the woman I had lifted in a heap from the 
parking lot the night before started my head to pounding 
just behind my eyes.

"Roland," I said once back safely, "what kinda shit you 
handing me? If she's eighth chair violin with the DSO I'm an 
offensive tackle."

60


"Oh she never actually played" he said.

"What?"

“Never got the chance. Daddy died early that September 
when his yacht exploded taking fuel. The man had owned a 
boat most of his adult life, but he forgot to turn on the bilge 
fans before the ignition. It was so careless it almost seemed 
deliberate. Gena had him cremated, what was left of him, 
and scattered the ashes around an azalea in their back yard. 
My parents told me some of the neighbors thought it macabre, 
especially considering the house was up for sale within 
a week. They also told me she held up like an oak, but 
certain acquaintances in the retail, ah, pharmaceutical trade 
tell me it was touch and go for a few months there."

"What was she doing?"

"Whatever they had. It's gotten better since. Anyway, 
she scattered him around that azalea, then spent a couple 
months learning about alloys. Opted for a weekly check 
and, I guess," he nodded toward the stage, "the more 
aggressive side of the musical spectrum."

I said, "Jesus. You know what Roland?"

"You're almost sorry you asked?"

* * *

I got in my car and drove, Woodward Avenue I think 
because there was neon gloating ALL MALE MOVIES and 
south I think because at one point an embankment of concrete 
and marble and glass loomed and I had to turn around 
completely. Drove anyway, and considered the ritual in 
general and Gena burying one and strewing the other's 
remains around a tree, until I could only think of her as a 
child, like an orphan. I wondered how old she would need 
to be for me to think otherwise, at what point she or anyone 
else is not a child, then, wiping grave dirt or ashes from 
fingers like so much spilt milk. She held up like an oak. 
There are those among us who do. There are those among 
us who run the whole fucking circus. Clean up the mess. 
Speak in whispers to the tall benevolent man with as many 
black suits as we have socks: “We'll need more chairs in 
here for the eulogy." Obtain and retain for our records 

61


receipts from places with names like Eternal Peace and Mt. 
Olivet Lawns. Offer parched handerkerchiefs to those wet- 
faced and tissueless. Fool with our cufflinks or an unlit 
cigarette beside aunts and siblings who fool with rosaries. 
Become very angry and think, well that’s something. Maybe 
we cry five weeks later or five years, maybe as soon as we 
have the time. I didn’t know.

. * *

I don’t remember making any turns off Woodward but I 
was suddenly on Trumbull and not terrifically certain which 
way was up, nor north. I cut off a Checker cabbie without a 
fare who had no sense of humor and had seen “The French 
Connection” too many times, but I lost him by sneaking the 
wrong way up Howard with my lights off. I crept into the 
parking lot of a building that I decided was evil, determined 
to piss on and shatter its clean glass door, but I just sat looking 
at its window display. It was a hub and rotor. A hub and 
rotor for a Cadillac Seville no less. What sort of flashlight 
batteries do cops use, plutonium?

“Must that be shined in my eyes?"

“I.D.”

I compiled. He had a voice like Merv Griffin on sedatives, 
said “How many drinks you had tonight?”

“Drinks? Lemme ask you this you you you you civil servant 
you: Can you sing the third verse of OUR NATIONAL 
ANTHEM? Can you? Well I can, any tempo you choose and 
on key and I’ll do it right here too if there’s a single doubt in 
your head about my sobriety!”

Fucker had a doubt. He said, “Adagio,” but I did not 
make a mistake. He handed back my I.D. at

“No refuge could save

the hereling and slave”

and disappeared down Howard Street to keep the night safe.

I found Woodward again. It had an Italian funeral parlor 
on the corner and I thought: there’s no hope for WASPs in 
the mortician business, then: Christ I hope Gena waited at 
Zook’s.

* * *

62


I sat down and she started in.

"My name is Gena Carroll. I was born in Detroit on 
February 12, 1956, the only child of Martin and Helen Carroll. 
When I was five we moved—are you getting all this?—we 
moved from our small unpretentious brick bungalow on 
Detroit's near east side to the large, very pretentious estate 
on Lakeshore Drive where I grew up. There—"

"Gena," I said.

"There," she scowled, "I attended school, first at Chittenden 
Elementary—"

"Gena I'm sorry."

"Later in life, much later, I underwent surveillance by a 
snooping amateur social worker and professional bar fly 
whom I was silly enough to befriend. Now that you know so 
much about me—" the look she shot at Roland behind the 
bar was venomous, but Roland was busy washing glasses 
which were already very clean—"maybe you can tell me if I 
meet your approval. I mean, will I do for you, Marz? My 
family background surely merits some distinction. Or is the 
money too new? And I meet the educational requirements, 
don't I Marz? I mean, I've watched you walk out of here with 
teen queens who struggle to speak in complete sentences, 
so obviously a brain like me will be a nice change of pace. 
Yeah, you're maturing, Marz."

"Look," I said, "I've done nothing to warrant this kind 
of abuse. I was only trying—"

"Shut up!" she said. "I've saved the best. I'm special 
because I'm a sympathy fuck, right? You're going to take the 
poor little orphan to bed and under your wing because her 
mommy died and her daddy blew himself away just as surely 
as if he'd put a pistol to his temple. Am I your first or do you 
specialize in sympathy fucking?"

It was almost two o'clock and there were probably ten 
or twelve people in Zook's besides us. The priestess was 
celebrating the end of her first big engagement at a stagefront 
table with her guitar player and a Black roadie. They 
seemed, from their gaiety, convinced of her impending stardom; 
they were alone in this respect. Bodies in varying 
stages of consciousness were scattered at tables, and a gay 

63


couple flirted near the door, one man anxious to leave, the 
other dawdling. The anxious one seemed intent on wearing 
down the dawdler's resistance. All's fair.

Gena produced a joint from her pocketed green tee 
shirt. She was dressed down and vaguely militarily. She 
exhaled in my face, would not pass me the joint, smoked 
half of it without a word, then put it out carefully in the 
ashtray. She seemed calm; she was very quiet and was staring 
through me.

I said, "Your note. I don't know how not to be stupid."

She said, "Really."

I said, "Was your mother—"

"My mother's dead."

“Okay."

"I know, you seem to think I'm not dealing with all this 
mortality in a healthy way."

"I never said that."

"Oh stop."

"Stop what?"

"Stop assuming so much."

Roland turned the lights off and on one time and everyone 
else straggled out. He wiped off the tables around us, 
then brought us two large glasses of ice water. He didn't say 
anything, just went behind the bar to cash out. Gena reignited 
the half joint from the ashtray. She got it burning pretty 
good, poked at it absently. Then she put it out again, this 
time in my left arm just above the wrist. The burn smelled. 
Hurt too.

"Lots of anger," I said.

"There's more."

"Do you want me to ask Roland to get you something 
sharp?"

"Don't need anything sharp."

She relit the joint again. It smelled like my left forearm. I 
figured I'd be able to stand two more burns; after that I 
would probably break her jaw. I was hoping it would not 
come to that, but I was not confident.

She put out the joint again, this time in her left forearm.

64


Her teeth clenched noticeably and she took a swig of ice 
water.

I could hear two things very distinctly: Roland cashing 
out and my heartbeat. Roland cashing out sounded very 
loud, as if he were doing it right on our table instead of 
across the deserted club. My heartbeat on the other hand 
sounded very faint, though my being able to hear it at all 
attested to its considerable volume.

"I think," I said, "Roland wants to close up."

"Roland will let us sit here all night."

"Yeah of course he will." I looked at my arm and at hers. 
My burn hole was uglier. "But I'm not sure I want to."

"I'll tell you what I want to do, Marz." She sounded very 
assertive and I felt anything but. The flesh just below my 
right eye was doing a rapid fire and, I hoped, imperceptible 
twitch; it must have been the nervous after effect of my 
relief that I would not be burned again, that Gena's lovely 
angular jaw would remain whole. Whatever it was, I felt she 
could have said almost anything then and I would have accepted 
it. What she did say was, "I want you to give me a ride 
back to your house where I can sleep in your wonderful bed 
again. You have a wonderful bed."

I see.

"Maybe not, because you Marz I want you to sleep on 
that wonderful couch again."

"Oh, Okay." The couch was not so wonderful.

She said, "I feel this need to convalesce."

"Sure," I said.

Roland did not make eye contact with either of us as we 
left. He was turning chairs over on top of tables, setting the 
place up for the next day's thorough cleaning.

65


Tim Keefe
Tim Keefe


66


the owls

Jan Zerfas

Her breathing was like an owl's breathing; her body 
wanting to be mute.

She thought of the owls in the nature center: one's 
talons burned by the farmer's electric wire, and the way the 
animal kept its food, bones and shells, in a cocoon in its 
mouth until satisfied. The unsettling while distributing the 
frozen, small prey of those who were hungry, weakened by 
their displacement. The owls were miniature Jews without 
numbers in small tiger cages. Sometimes she saw their features 
in ovals around their eyes, transparent moons, felt 
their desolation and animal loss. Her sadness was ovular also, 
a transparent moon around the eyelids, luminous and 
exposed.

67


willa cather on the moon

Jan Zerfas

Most of the women in Utah were divorced. They 
believed in cowboys, lassoes, the great plains, and wore 
their blue jeans in imitation of their cowboys. The small, 
neighborhood bars where their children waited outside in 
dense, unpainted cars were an escape from the profit- 
crashed towns, an escape where one could wonder what 
was mimetic about their lives. A gesture of their lives: the 
drive to the mountains in an area that was no longer pure, 
the way they were no longer vulnerable. Their Indian sisters 
attempted to keep the mountains self-contained, as their 
lives were. But the women saw no future, their relationships 
were like the clouds overhead reflected in the rear-view 
mirrors that seemed to extend the mountains into nebraska, 
a state that sheltered only one woman artist, who standing 
outside her tent in her self-portrait holding mulberries and a 
rose embossed opera program, was held only by her desire.

68


rites

Jan Zerfas

A dream, a dream vision within me?

An image of roses, petals of china, ceramic;

Straited her veins, a vulva, a vase.

A death, a dream of death within me?

A globe of women in a circular rite

Aborting the male fetus; a globe, a globe, 
the moon, the pearled moon;

they want their mouths of bloodroot and lily.

A woman, an image of a woman within me? 
the bloodroot, the bloodroot.

69


walking across the sea

Lynn Domina

it is not far 
from a small village 
outside Kiel 
to the southernmost tip 
of Sweden,

unless you are a small boy, 
unless your red wool jacket 
has grown a little thin 
and tight at the shoulders, 
unless this is the year 
the Baltic Sea 
has frozen 
all the way across.

you could not know 
that by next winter 
every cousin 
would be at the front. 
you could not know 
that you would have no children 
in your own country, 
that when a second great war 
erupted, 
you would grow silent, 
and ache 
from snowballs 
hurled at your accent.

you could only know 
the roughness of your father's mitten, 
wind scratching your cheeks, 
the size of your footprint 
each time you turned around 
to see how far you had come. 

70


the ice felt like earth 
beneath your boots, 
but there were no empty hay lofts 
to crawl into 
when you grew too tired. 
you played at being eskimo 
the way your grandchildren 
would play at being indian, 
and you studied geography 
in the snow, 
each drift

a new continent, 
a new country.

you still remember the names

you gave them 
in that language 
you invented, 
each word 
composed of three syllables, 
english, german, dutch.

but you don't remember 
the dutch words 
for ocean, ship, this country. 
unused languages 
fade like photographs, 
and your german relatives have been dead for years. 
you must rely 
on english

to tell me how it was, 
until snow soaks through your boots, 
until you see a small boy 
with a sled, 
a red wool jacket, 
when something tugs 
at your tongue 
like a boy's excitement, 
a mute son's desire.

71


souvenirs

Lynn Domina

in twenty-five years, 
when you climb the steps to your attic, 
looking for a china plate 
your mother gave you, 
or the quilt 
that has been in the family 
for five generations,

you may come across these frogs,

this family,

a mother and children.

they will be in the same box

as the old love letters

and trinkets

from every city 
each of your friends has ever visited. 
will you wipe the dust 
from their backs, 
wondering which of us 
gave them to you?

will you realize

how i carried them next to my body,

protected them from customs officials and border police 
through five countries,

wishing, finally, that i had bought something steel, 
something neither of us

could break?

but there is nothing quite so delicate

as blown glass,

as tiny animals

either of us could crush

under our thumb, 
though i have been told 
thinking of delicacy

72


and me together 
is like getting lost 
in a house of mirrors, 
a thousand images, 
and not one of them accurate.

but i have never seen frogs this small, 
although when i was fifteen 
our back yard was invaded 
by tiny toads.

every evening, these toads crept to me, 
and i cupped them singly in my right palm, 
like i would cup a daughter, 
if she could ever be so small.

when you are not as large as anyone else, 
when a raindrop is as big as your knuckle, 
anything could be delicate.

the night after i bought these frogs,

i sat with two women, 
beside the canale della guidecca, 
our feet in the water, 
the canal patterned with light, 
rain trickling under our collars. 
we'd seen san marco, 
and photographs 
of the whole place flooded in winter.

men leaned against the bridges, 
"gondola, gondola," seductively, 
their blue and white striped shirts, 
their straw hats, 
trying to sound american.

for all americans go to venice 
for the canals, san marco, 
for the murano glass.

yet, i bought only one small 
delicate family,

73


to slip in my pocket,

to carry next to my skin,

to bring to you and say, here, 
close your eyes, 
hold this family

in your right palm.

74


Gipsy Moth IV

Lynn Domina

you puzzle me with that name,

Sir Francis,

for gipsies, even gipsy moths, 
usually wander in bands, 
and, in fact, you didn't wander so much as race.

had i known,

i would have stowed 
beneath one of your sails, 
until we were too far out to turn back, 
until we were secure in the water 
wrinkling against our yacht.

but in 1966, i merely wrote a class report 
on Magellan, didn't realize explorers 
had relinquished 
new worlds for new times,

or that some made it all the way back.

travelling alone,

that is the darkest mystery,

and there was no haze

of foreign tongues

to sink into

when the night grew too black.

yet, what security

can there be

when constellations 
hang in such unfamiliar places? 
did you curl around the motor, 
feeling its purr 
like a heartbeat?

or did you switch frequencies

at regular intervals, 
waiting for dolphins?

75


neither i

nor any pilot i know 
flew over the ocean that year, 
so i cannot say for sure

whether when that first small craft 
emerged from the clouds, 
you waved slightly, 
whether you flicked a sail, 
whether, recognizing you, 
the plane circled 
once, twice, 
though i am certain 
its reflection hovered in your eyes, 
for perhaps it was similar 
to the reflection of Gipsy Moth I, 
that tiny seaplane 
you landed safely on Sydney Harbor 
before sputtering over Japan, 
before abandoning air 
for water.

when the sun grew too hot, 
did you wipe the sweat 
from your eyes 
with a red bandana 
your wife had stuck into your back pocket, 
and think of her sleeping

on the other side of the world? 
or did you forget what it is like 
to know anything except water 
even you could not drink?

did you remember 
geography, biology, 
did you know 
that over one-half of the earth's surface, 
over one-half of your body, 
is water?

anything filled with so much liquid

76


could not take long

to dissolve,

once your helm suffered one large crack, 
once you were thrown overboard.

do you have visions, even now, 
of marlin resting against your ribs, 
of your skeleton 
increasing that fraction of the ocean 
which is calcium?

77


the twin

Lynn Domina

my father 
rubs the dice 
between his palms, 
breathes heavily.

i dread this story, 
dread the double ones, 
these snake eyes, 
which promise 
his pregnant wife 
twins, 
one boy, one girl 
identical 
in every other way.

father, father

this place makes a strange casino. 
no dim lights, no crowds, no smoke. 
no svelte women 
handing you 
drink after drink.

and aren't there usually people 
to keep people like me 
out of sight, 
strange cripple, 
one limb amputated, 
though my nerves say otherwise. 
still, you nearly beat the odds, 
twenty-two years ago.

one boy, one girl.

i touch that place in back of my knee 
scarred permanently smooth as a mirror 
which says you are beautiful. 

78


one boy, one girl. 
yes, i robbed 
my brother 
of his birthright, 
twisted as i was, 
squirming out first, 
my umbilical cord 
clenched in my right fist 
like a jump rope 
i would later refuse.

one boy, one girl 
identical, 
except that i wasn't 
already dead.

tonight i will drink to him,

toasting this anniversary of our conception, 
and within these next few hours, 
i will choose his name, 
abel, esau, joseph, 
for i can no longer call him 
simply, your son.

though i will not apologize 
for beating the odds, 
for not being more siamese, 
not growing with the skin 
of a man, 
not letting the others 
decide which should survive, 
for instead wrapping my leg 
around his throat, 
pulling him out behind me.

79


A. J. M. SMITH: REMEMBERING

TED ROETHKE

Vince Clemente

Theodore Roethke was much on my mind that spring, 
teaching The Far Field to my contemporary lit class. I 
enjoyed, then, Peter Smith’s anecdotes about the “lumbering 
bear.” Peter, a colleague in the English Department, is 
also son of the Canadian poet, A. J. M. Smith.

When I learned his father “Art” was to visit, I asked if it 
would be possible to speak to him about his old Saginaw 
friend. I must add—Smith’s poetry is little known to me. He 
emerges essentially as a figure in Roethke’s life—in the 
Seager biography, The Glass House, and as correspondent in 
the Selected Letters, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. But he 
stands in high relief, figure in a friendship Roethke valued, 
one that was to last for twenty-eight years. Theirs is a strange 
relationship, for we have at work antithetical temperaments. 
Smith, the classicist, tells me in our conversation: “Dryden 
and Pope are my heroes, not Blake; and so I think Ted felt as 
though I didn’t appreciate his poetry as I ought to—and I 
probably didn’t.” Roethke insists: “We think by feeling. 
What is there to know?”

What follows, then, is an hour’s conversation with 
A.J.M. Smith—Peter is with us—about his friend Ted, “The 
Catch of Back Bay.” The talk a vivid presence with me, for I 
can see Art, glass in his hand, the Long Island sun through 
the glass into the eyes darting over those lost years. Yet I will 
remember him as he speaks in “The Archer,” final poem in 
his latest book, The Classic Shade:

So for a moment, motionless, serene,

Fixed between time and time, I aim and wait; 
Nothing remains for breath now but to waive

His prior claim and let the barb fly clean 
Into the heart of what I know and hate— 
That central black, the ringed and targeted grave.

Setauket, Long Island 
April 1980

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CLEMENTE: Had Roethke lived, he would be seventy next 
week, on May 25th. Where would he have gone after The 
Far Field? Was he still growing as a poet?

A.J.M. SMITH: I would think so, and I think he believed he 
was. He was writing steadily and keeping notebooks, and 
after his marriage—I think he had a kind of renewal of 
power. I don't know exactly in what direction, but I think it 
would have been more of the same following The Far Field, 
which is possibly his greatest book.

CLEMENTE: Repeatedly the notion that he felt The Far Field 
was his last book—do you believe that to be so, that he felt 
he was writing his last book?

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, I had no direct contact with him at that 
time, and so I really can't say. I didn't hear him ever say 
anything like that.

CLEMENTE: Art, let's go back many, many years; according 
to the Seager biography, The Glass House, you first met 
Roethke in September, 1935 at Michigan State. You, John 
Clark, Peter De Vries were young teachers together. What 
was Roethke like then?

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, he wrote to me, and we really got 
together to go to a literary conference at Olivet College, 
which was a small religious school, near East Lansing, twenty 
miles away. The President was named Joseph Brewer, a 
former Chicago publisher, and he got together a really quite 
outstanding group for a literary conference—Ford Madox 
Ford, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate and his wife 
Caroline Gordon—those are the ones I remember, we were 
all planning to go down to the conference when I got a 
letter from Ted Roethke, saying he was a young poet, who 
had published a few poems in good magazines, and would it 
be all right if he came with us. He admired my poetry, he 
said, and so he came too. Another person at the conference 
was a young poet and student of Allen Tate's, Robert Lowell, 
a very modest fellow, and we met him too. Roethke got a job 
at Michigan State soon after that. He was quite rather unstable: 
he was drinking a good deal. I think he had been before 
coming to Michigan State.

A.J.M. SMITH: We had a horrible man as Dean at the time, 
Dean Emmons. Ted stayed with the De Vrieses for a while— 

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he had a breakdown. Well, he was a great lumbering bear of 
a fellow, you know, but he was very easily upset. He had a 
very, very good idea of himself and great ambition, which he 
always had, and was working on his career. Perhaps it was a 
little early to talk about his career as yet—it hadn’t started— 
but all through, towards the end of his life, after his success 
of several books published, he thought he ought to get the 
Nobel Prize.

PETER SMITH: Was he at the time, poetically self-confident, 
knowing he had a great deal of talent?

A.J.M. SMITH: I don’t know if he was self-confident at this 
time; I don’t think he was. That’s partly why he was drinking 
so much. When he was in a good mood—I think he was 
schizophrenic, he was up and he was down. When he was 
up, just fine, a charming fellow, very witty, amusing, a great 
person at parties, chase the girls around, tell them he was 
the Catch of Back Bay. He wasn’t at Michigan State too long, 
for he got so unmanageable from the point of view of the 
administration that Dean Emmons fired him. He later seized 
the excuse to fire Peter De Vries, who refused to take a Ph.D. 
Emmons said he could get English teachers a dime a dozen, 
he didn’t care. And when Ted was fired—Emmons had 
taught summer school at Harvard—Ted called him a Harvard 
son of a bitch. He often said afterwards it flattered the Dean 
so much; he was really pleased!

One time when Ted was teaching a freshman class of 
girls, on top floor of the home ec. building, he came down 
for an 8 o’clock class in bedroom slippers and dressing 
gown. He then climbed out a window, and onto a ledge four 
stories up. He then returned through a second window, asking 
them to record—give their impressions—just what they 
had witnessed.

CLEMENTE: About your relationship, I gather from the 
Seager biography and from the letters, that Roethke had an 
enormous respect for you as well as for your work. In a letter 
to Leonie Adams, in 1943, outlining his course in Verse Form, 
he wrote that the course would give him a “chance to deal 
with writers... for whom I have real enthusiasm... introduce 
little known people like Kunitz and Smith...." In fact, Art, 
you would be taught the sixth week, along with Blake and 
Yeats, dealing with the problems of revision. How would 

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you describe this friendship? Was he one to value friendship—
say unlike Frost?

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, I think he valued friendship very much. 
At Michigan State he was staying with the De Vrieses, Peter 
and Katherine. They really looked after him. Katherine knew 
how to handle him. And they went out walking in the woods 
one morning and Roethke said, “You know, I could just take 
you in the woods here, and drop you like this, and bury you 
under leaves.” She didn’t turn a hair. She just said, “Oh, go 
ahead, you sick thing.” She might have been scared, but she 
wasn’t.

And we had some wonderful parties at the De Vries’ 
house with a great deal of drinking going on. Dean Emmons, 
who disliked the English Department anyway because they 
were all radicals and leftwing types and what not....

CLEMENTE: Here’s another quote about Art Smith, from 
one of Roethke’s letters: “Smith, a very bright and amusing 
guy, but somehow I think his verse a bit nutty... but some 
very good.” But for the life of me—there are few things as 
“nutty” as his nonsense verse—what do you think he meant 
by that?

A.J.M. SMITH: “Nutty!” I don't know. I was going to tell 
you of a verse I wrote about Dean Emmons. He had a secretary 
named Mrs. Palm, who lived right next door to the De 
Vrieses. She’d see the parties going on, people running 
around in the back yard, drinks in their hands. Then she’d 
report to Emmons. Morrill Hall was the old building where 
the English Department offices were. So I made up this 
rhyme, which Ted liked. He used to make up this kind of 
stuff too:

It was uptails all

In Morrill Hall

And the Dean was well-nigh drunk.

And Madam Palm

With a grand salon 
Cried Screw me 
I’m a punk 
But the Dean was too damn drunk!

And we used to recite this.

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CLEMENTE: Again, about this enormous respect he had for 
you, as seen in the letters, he wrote to Princess Marguerite 
Caetani, in 1941, about “Last Class,” from On The Poet and 
His Craft, that “Smith says it brings back into language that 
violent energy of the Elizabethan Pamphleteers.” He placed 
enormous value on your judgment. Was he, however, like 
most of us, an ambivalent man? He didn’t, like Frost, keep an 
“enemies list”—he wasn’t paranoidal about competition was 
he?

A.J.M. SMITH: No I don’t think so, although he was always 
trying to triumph over Richard Wilbur, whom I guess he 
respected and therefore feared a little as a rival.

CLEMENTE: Did he feel that way about Lowell also?

A.J.M. SMITH: No, I don’t think he cared for Lowell or paid 
much attention to him.

CLEMENTE: He also said Lowell had “a tin ear”—but Wilbur 
you feel was the...

A.J.M. SMITH: But I don’t think there was anything serious: 
half of this was kidding, you know.

CLEMENTE: Nothing malicious, the way Frost became 
malicious.

A.J.M. SMITH: No, no! I don’t think he was ever malicious. 
CLEMENTE: Art, I'm thinking of the Bread Loaf story: as 
MacLeish was reading, Frost set a match to the program— 
just out of spite! None of that in Roethke?

A.J.M. SMITH: No, no! He was very good-natured. As a 
matter of fact, when he was teaching at the University of 
Washington, he had a course with graduate students, a 
seminar in poetry writing. It was a very good course, indeed. 
And one summer, he was supposed to be away and he got 
me...

CLEMENTE: Art, you anticipate the next question. I understand 
you even substituted for him at Washington, during 
his leaves—what kind of teacher was he?

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A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, he was a great teacher of poetry 
writing—just as good or better than Paul Engle. He was in 
that class. He and Engle, I think, were generally regarded as 
the two best teachers.

CLEMENTE: Here’s a list of some of his former students—all 
fine poets: Wright, Wagoner, Kizer, Hugo. Why did he 
touch his students so? What was his special quality as a 
teacher?

A.J.M. SMITH: He was a very, very vivid personality and 
very amusing too. Sort of a big, lumbering elephant with a 
great sense of wit and humor, and he would tell stories....

CLEMENTE: May one use the word inspirational to describe 
him as a teacher?

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, if you mean literally, inspired students 
—I would say that is very true. But he was so personal and 
intimate, you know. He would bring steaks and cook them 
for them—and all this kind of stuff.

PETER SMITH: Say what you were about to, when you did 
substitute for him.

A.J.M. SMITH: Summer school, couple of months. Bob 
Heilman was Head of the Department and he handled Ted— 
it was quite difficult at times—and with great skill. He 
defended him against people in the Administration, who 
were trying to get rid of “this clown," as they thought Ted to 
be. And the year that I went out to teach there, he was 
supposed to go away. And he didn’t go away: he stayed 
there too. And he lived with us. He was great, fancied himself 
a gourmet cook—steak and all, sauces and all....

CLEMENTE: Was he?

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, he was, though he never cleaned up. 
And I really had a very brilliant class, not a big one, eight or 
nine graduate students and talented poets. I still have a few 
of their poems somewhere, if I can find them in my files. 
And Ted would come in occasionally, not every meeting, 
and they all worshiped him, and they were very good too.

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And then, it must have been about this time, that he had 
a sort of breakdown and Heilman handled it with a lovely 
letter in defense of academic freedom.

CLEMENTE: I recall a very sad moment in The Glass House. 
He broke down during a teaching day, and two of his former 
students, now his colleagues in the English Department, 
David Wagoner and Carolyn Kizer were forced to call the 
police, and as the police were leading Ted away, the Secretary 
of the English Department, Mrs. Dorothy Bowie said, 
“This is a very distinguished man and he is ill. All we want 
you to do is to take him to a sanitarium. No rough stuff.” 
And this was one of Roethke’s primal terrors: that they 
would take him to a mental institution—and forget about 
him.

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, I know; he kept appealing to his sister 
not to commit him.

CLEMENTE: He really feared being committed.

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, yes, he did. And I think at some affair in 
Heilman’s house, I think they had to get the police, and 
Heilman handled that with great skill. He was always a 
defender of Ted Roethke, and still is. I met Heilman a couple 
of years ago in Vancouver. I was giving a poetry reading at 
U.B.C. and I was surprised to get a call from Bob Heilman, 
who was lecturing there, and he had seen the notice on the 
board and he knew I was there. So I went out to spend an 
evening with him. That was long after Ted's death.

CLEMENTE: If we may, Art, again, back to the Seager book, 
about Ted’s father’s death, Seager insists that, “His father’s 
death was the most important thing that ever happened to 
him.” Has this been exaggerated—was his father’s death, 
indeed, a lifetime preoccupation?

A.J.M. SMITH: I don’t know—when did his father die; he 
never talked to me about it.

CLEMENTE: Roethke was only thirteen and Seager insists, 
“His father’s death was....”

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A.J.M. SMITH: Well, from his poetry you might find that to 
be so, but he never mentioned it to me, which might mean it 
was very important.

CLEMENTE: Art, let’s talk about Roethke’s poetry—maybe 
an assessment. Just off the top of your head—what do you 
feel are his finest poems, those you love most, those that will 
survive?

A.J.M. SMITH: I think The Far Field is by far the best.

CLEMENTE: What of the poems in The Lost Son—the Greenhouse 
poems—has their power been exaggerated?

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, they’re not my kind of poetry. I’m a 
classicist; I’m a satirist, you know. Dryden and Pope are my 
heroes, not Blake, and so I think Ted felt as though I didn’t 
appreciate his poetry as I ought to—and I probably didn’t. 
But he liked the kind of poetry I wrote.

CLEMENTE: Why do you think he liked the kind of poetry 
you wrote?

A.J.M. SMITH: Because it was formally very—you don’t 
know it, I suppose.

CLEMENTE: Art, I confess, I am not that familiar with it— 
Roethke felt you were doing things he couldn’t do as a poet?

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, I wouldn’t say that—I guess they were 
things he didn’t want to do. But when he was at Michigan 
State, he was just beginning, you know. We would show 
each other poems we were writing then. And I remember 
after the De Vrieses had left Michigan State, and were living 
in an apartment in Washington, where Peter was working 
with the Department of Agriculture, we were there visiting—
Ted too. I think it was an MLA meeting that year, and 
we were at a party, and Ted had just made this breakthrough 
and written these very fine, original, new-type poems—not 
the Greenhouse poems—anyway, he was there, reading 
them in manuscript, saying how great they were. Now I was 
very doubtful about them because they didn’t make sense. 
He got my wife, took her into the bedroom and piled all the 

87


furniture at the door so nobody would enter. He read them 
to her.

CLEMENTE: Did he convince her of their greatness?

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh yes, surely!

CLEMENTE: Art, if we can get back to an assessment of his 
poetry. In looking over the body of Roethke's work, Karl 
Malkoff, in his long Roethke study concludes:

The poetry of Theodore Roethke constitutes a 
kind of spiritual autobiography. Partly because of 
the nature of the poet's illness, the main concerns 
of this autobiography are the struggles, first to 
form the self, then to preserve it from the threat of 
imminent nonbeing. Following the manic-depressive 
patterns of his own behavior, the poems 
alternate between extreme joy at the miracle of 
his existence and unendurable anxiety at the 
thought of its tenuousness. However, using the 
depths and heights of his emotional states creatively, 
he was able to make them an intensification 
rather than a distortion of the human condition; 
the agony of his finest works is existential rather 
than pathological.

He's much more than just a "confessional" poet?

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, yes, I agree with all this so far—and 
that's the source of their value, actually, and power.

CLEMENTE: What do you feel were his greatest shortcomings 
as a poet?

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, judging from the kind of poetry he was 
writing, and the experiences that gave rise to them, I don't 
think he had any notable shortcomings and defects. I don't 
think there is anything sloppy about his technique at all.

CLEMENTE: He is attacked for being derivative. We read 
this in one of his essays from On the Poet and His Craft, 
"How to Write Like Somebody Else." Maybe he had too 
good an ear—too much like Yeats or Leonie Adams!

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A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, yes, though they may have been models, 
the poems are expressions of his own original personality— 
there's no doubt about that. I wouldn't call him a derivative 
poet at all.

CLEMENTE: Would you call him a major American poet—as 
major, say, as Frost or Eliot or Stevens?

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, not as major as them, certainly. But he 
is such a romantic poet, and I don't have any enthusiasm for 
romanticism at all. And if you call him a major American 
poet—you're kind of running down American poetry in 
general. I think he is a very excellent and original poet, but 
he is perhaps too personal to be really a major poet. I can 
imagine arguing with him.

CLEMENTE: Yes! Were he alive, how do you think he would 
assess his own career?

A.J.M. SMITH: He would affirm vividly, LOUDLY, that he 
was a major American poet. But half the time, they'd be just 
a sort of twinkle in his eye, you know, and a touch of ironic 
self-criticism. He was really, in spite of a lot of bragging and 
so on, a very modest fellow.

CLEMENTE: Are there any Roethke lines you'd like to 
quote—lines that stay with you?

A.J.M. SMITH: I can't. I have no memory—can't quote my 
own lines even.

CLEMENTE: He's been called, "King of the One-Liners": 
"Running from God's the longest race of all," "The 
Redeemer comes with a dark face," "From me to Thee's a 
long and terrible way," on and on and on. One reason for 
the critical barbs is that he does not hold up after the good 
line or two. I do think they've been overly severe with him 
here.

A.J.M. SMITH: I would think that too. I think most of his 
best poems—don't ask me to name them—are good as a 
whole, not in pieces here and there.

CLEMENTE: Do you remember much of "The North American 
Sequence"?

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A.J.M. SMITH: No I can't—frankly, I don’t read Roethke, 
not the kind of poetry I read.

CLEMENTE: This astounds me—the contradiction here of 
the classical and the romantic temperaments—yet such 
a long and abiding friendship. What sustained such a 
friendship?

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, his personality, his person. He was 
friendly and very amusing. He was a great person to have 
around—the life of every party.

CLEMENTE: Peter, what have you to add?

PETER SMITH: In spite of the fact that you didn’t live in clear 
proximity to him, you’d see him quite regularly, it seemed, 
over the years.

A.J.M. SMITH: Sure, he lived in Saginaw, not very far away, 
and during the summer he was free, and he brought his wife 
Beatrice to see us and stay with us, very soon after his marriage. 
And Jeannie, my wife, and Beatrice got along beautifully 
together. But before his marriage, as I've said, he’d 
come for parties, sometimes. I remember one time; he was 
chasing one of the secretaries at the party. He got quite 
drunk and wanted to take her home. He was staying with us, 
and my wife wouldn’t let him take her. She was afraid what 
would happen to her, and so we drove her home, my wife 
and I. And when we got back, Ted had flown the coop— 
gone back to Saginaw. And a few days later, we got a letter, 
Ted apologizing and saying, “Great God! I left my pants 
behind.” He didn’t mean the pants he was wearing, so we 
had to bundle them up and send them to him.

CLEMENTE: Peter, some of your Roethke anecdotes....

PETER SMITH: As a person growing up, as a teenager or 
younger, I would see him every now and then. I remember 
driving from Ann Arbor to East Lansing—this was right after 
he was married. I picked them up in Ann Arbor: Beatrice 
was in the front seat of the little car, and Ted was in the back. 
It was a nice spring day; we were driving along and Ted was 
musing. “Oh, the sky, the clouds, the sun, the trees, the 

90


beautiful farms, and all the cows lying in their shit.” Then we 
got to a gas station; he gets out, takes me aside and whispers 
that he “didn't mind of course,” but that his wife wished I 
would “slow down a bit.”

CLEMENTE: What kind of woman was Beatrice?

A.J.M. SMITH: She was a beautiful girl.

CLEMENTE: Is it true that she pursued Roethke?

A.J.M. SMITH: I never knew her until after they were 
married.

CLEMENTE: It was a good marriage, wasn’t it? I mean, she 
nurtured him, propped him up.

A.J.M. SMITH: I would think so. She helped him a great 
deal. And he was careless about money—checks and that 
kind of thing. He’d get checks from The New Yorker and 
magazines for his poems, and they’d be just lying around, all 
over the place. She got hold of that and organized it.

CLEMENTE: Were you interviewed at all for the Seager 
book, the biography?

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, Allan Seager came up and interviewed 
me and John Clark. I had quite a lot of letters connected 
with Ted’s hiring and firing at Michigan State. The Head of 
the English Department, when he was retiring, threw all the 
letters out, in a box—out in the hall! A graduate student 
picked them all up. These were the letters of application; for 
when he was applying for a job, he’d get letters of recommendation 
from hundreds of people—fire them all in. And 
so this graduate student brought them all to me. I got them 
all. I was going to give them to the Library at Washington— 
but I think they have copies from somewhere.

CLEMENTE: Art, why is it you haven’t written critically 
about Roethke—even a memoir?

A.J.M. SMITH: Because he isn’t my kind of poet. I’m too 
busy writing about Canadian poets.

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CLEMENTE: Are there any contemporary American poets 
you are really fond of?

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, Lowell—and the poets I really liked too 
were Leonie Adams, Robert Fitzgerald, Rolfe Humphries. I 
met Rolfe Humphries once.

CLEMENTE: Did you know Stanley Kunitz?

A.J.M. SMITH: No, I didn’t know him. I do think that Stanley 
Kunitz, Rolfe Humphries, and Louise Bogan really admired 
Ted and helped him. I think they are the people who 
actually made his career a success when he needed it.

CLEMENTE: He certainly made it a point of expressing his 
indebtedness to them too—this is what I so admire in 
Roethke, unlike Frost, who often turned on those who 
helped him most. Yes, I think Roethke was deeply appreciative.


A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, he admired and liked these people and 
their poetry because they all valued craftsmanship and 
taught him to value craftsmanship. And he certainly worked 
very hard as a craftsman. They had an immense influence for 
good on his work, and they also helped his career. They 
were influential people.

CLEMENTE: Did Roethke have a critical sense—revisions 
and such?

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, oh yes, he certainly did. I don’t know if 
his notebooks have been published....

CLEMENTE: Yes, Wagoner edited Straw for the Fire—one 
volume at least.

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, yes, he worked very hard at revisions.

CLEMENTE: When did you see him last—remember your 
final meeting with him?

A.J.M. SMITH: I don’t remember... it was after his marriage. 
He and Beatrice came and stayed with us.

PETER SMITH: This was in ’61 or ’62.

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A.J.M. SMITH: That would be true, I guess.

CLEMENTE: Well, we are talking about a friendship that 
spanned, what, almost twenty-eight years—it's a long 
friendship.

A.J.M. SMITH: In the latter part, it was more or less at a 
distance. He was up in Washington.

CLEMENTE: You kept in touch with him though.

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh yes, sure.

PETER SMITH: And you did see him, every now and then.

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, if he came to Saginaw, he usually came 
down to East Lansing.

CLEMENTE: Art, what are the fruits of such a friendship— 
these fruits ever translate into your work, into his work?

A.J.M. SMITH: I doubt it—maybe encouragement.

CLEMENTE: Were you always honest with him—when he 
came to you, say, with a poem you felt just wasn't right— 
would you tell him so?

A.J.M. SMITH: Yes, but not really very seriously, because he 
wrote the kind of poetry that I didn't. He'd say, "I've written 
a great poem." And I'd say, "Ah, come on now."

CLEMENTE: Do you ever think of Roethke—ever come to 
you in your musings, in your dreams?

A.J.M. SMITH: Oh, I have memories of his good spirits, his 
friendship. I regret much his death.

CLEMENTE: How did you learn of his death?

A.J.M. SMITH: I read it in the paper, the summer we were in 
Canada.

CLEMENTE: Do you remember, Peter?

PETER SMITH: Yes, in the paper.

A.J.M. SMITH: After that, I got a few letters from friends, 
from Kathleen De Vries. I really didn't hear any details from 

93


anybody over in Seattle. He had a heart attack, I think, while 
he was in the swimming pool. Did anybody try to suggest it 
was suicide?

CLEMENTE: No, God no!

A.J.M. SMITH: It certainly wasn't!

CLEMENTE: No, just at the time, people who knew him— 
that he really felt that The Far Field was his last book.

A.J.M. SMITH: I didn’t have any letters about it from him— 
so that I never heard he thought it was to be his last book. I 
find it hard to believe that. I feel that after his marriage and 
so on, he felt he’d go on until he got the Nobel Prize.

PETER SMITH: He certainly seemed happy and very optimistic 
at that time—the drive from Ann Arbor.

A.J.M. SMITH: Well, he’d just had an honor given him there 
at Ann Arbor and just married to Beatrice. Auden was a great 
friend of his and lent him his villa at Ischia for their honeymoon. 
And the Irish poet, Murphy, came and gave a reading 
at Michigan State and stayed with us. He had met Roethke 
and Beatrice in Ireland, and Roethke, apparently, had been 
a very fine fellow there. There was very much of the Irish 
spirit—although he was German, of course—in Ted. Wit and 
good humor. I’m sure Roethke would have liked to have a 
big wake, with all his friends drinking themselves into a sentimental 
stupor.

Stony Brook, Long Island 
21 May 1978

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Kelly O'Keefe
Kelly O'Keefe


95


Return to Derrynane

Scott H. Mulrane

This bourbon on ice 
is an honest route 
to crisp sheets 
near an open window 
through which the wind 
in the early morning 
has entered welcome 
having wandered the mile 
from the Kerry coast 
like a boy from crabbing.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Vince Clemente is founding editor of West Hills Review: A 
Walt Whitman Journal. His books include Songs From 
Puccini, From This Book of Praise: Conversation With 
William Heyen, and Paumanok Rising.

Victor M. Depta is Assistant Professor of English at the University 
of Tennessee at Martin. Often published in journals 
across the country, his books of poetry are The 
Creek and The House.

John Ditsky teaches U.S. Literature at the University of 
Windsor. His poetry has been widely published, including 
a recent collection, Scar Tissue.

Lynn Domina has a B.A. in English from MSU and for the last 
four years was an editor on the RCR staff. Her work won 
2nd place in poetry in the 1980 RCR creative writing 
contest.

Albert Drake is Professor of English at MSU. His recent 
novel, One Summer, is now in its second printing. Other 
books are Postcard Mysteries and Tillamook Burn.

Charles Hertz is an undergraduate in English at MSU and 
won 1st place in fiction in the 1980 RCR creative writing 
contest.

Ruby Hoy has published in many literary journals, including 
a previous issue of RCR. She also gives numerous readings 
across Michigan.

David James counsels for the Youth Service Bureau and 
directs the creative writing program at the Juvenile Detention 
Center in Port Huron.

Tim Keefe is a local artist, working here in East Lansing. His 
photography has appeared in RCR before.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske is a graduate assistant in English at 
WMU and scholarship recipient to the Cranbrook Writers’ 
Conference for the past two years. She also edits the 
magazines Currents and Celery.

Kathy Manley has a B.A. in Fine Arts from EMU and currently 
works as a free lance artist at ArtWorlds in Ann Arbor, 
Ml.

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Elizabeth Martin has a B.A. in English from MSU and won 3rd 
place in fiction in the 1980 RCR creative writing contest. 
Terry McKenney is currently attending Washington and Lee 
Law School in Lexington, Va. Her work won 2nd place in 
fiction in the 1980 RCR creative writing contest.

Scott Mulrane has published in Esquire, and will soon have 
work in Poetry Now and Wind.

Kelly O'Keefe is a free lance artist and fine arts student at 
Cooper Union in New York City.

Phil Pollard is a student in the liberal arts at WMU. The work 
in this issue is his first published.

Ken Poyner works as a security guard in Norfolk, Va. and has 
recently been published in Cedar Rock, West Branch, 
Poet Lore, and Attention Please.

Len Roberts has published in Poetry Now, Massachusetts 
Review, Northwest Review, and Poetry Miscellany.

Marc J. Sheehan has an M.A. in English from CMU and currently 
works as a Misc. Machinist at Blackmer Pump 
Company in Grand Rapids, Ml. He has previously published 
in RCR.

Barbara Somers has a B.A. in English from MSU and now 
lives in Stevens Point, Wis. She was recently published in 
the book Rapunzel, Rapunzel.

Gene Westervelt won 3rd place in poetry in the 1980 RCR 
creative writing contest.

Jan Zerfas is a graduate assistant in English at MSU. Her work 
won 1st place in poetry in the 1980 RCR creative writing 
contest.

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RED CEDAR REVIEW EDITORS

Lynn Domina 
Paul Murphy

Rebecca Manery

Jeanette Opalski

Stephen O'Keefe

Madelaine Dusseau 
Bob Lyons

Karen Brown

Brenda Miller

Kathy Lumpkin

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, 
George Kooistra and University Publications, Albert Drake, 
and other friends. A special thanks to Jim Cash who funded our 
annual creative writing contest. Red Cedar Review is partially 
funded by the ASMSU Student Media Appropriations Board.

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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

100


In This Issue

Poems by:

Somers 
Poyner 
James

Hoy 
Sheehan 
Roberts 
Kerlikowske

Depta 
Westervelt 
Ditsky

Zerfas

Domina 
Mulrane

Fiction by:

Martin

Drake 
McKenney 
Hertz

Graphics by:

O'Keefe

Manley 
Pollard

Keefe

Interview:

Clemente

Vol. XIV No. 1

Kelly O'Keefe