Article

Asking Nothing

The words carry themselves as carefully as a muscular woman tricked out in sequins walking a high wire. I ask nothing of them, I only set them in motion, as gently as feathers. Birds exert themselves more than the words do. Hunger compels them, they cannot choose but fly. Words, who seek no food for…

Contributors’ Notes

EDITORIAL BOARD Director Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor & Director DeWitt Henry Editorial Staff Henry Bromell David Gullette Ellen Wilbur Contributing Editors Geoffrey Clark James Randall Barry Spacks Art Director David Omar White CONTRIBUTORS ANDRE DUBUS teaches at Bradford College, has a novel, The Lieutenant, has had many distinguished short stories in The New Yorker, North…

Cadillac Mountain

I had been in love with you three years before. . . Driving from Maine to more Maine friendly — chatty we were both relieved to get as far away                 as possible from your neighbors who had                 spoiled our dinner with all sorts of                 insinuating and unstated                 demands that we resolve…

Estivating (journal)

The reason I am keeping a journal this season of the hearings and the horses is to put down those "bits of the mind's string too short to use," as Joan Didion once said. Things tie themselves together with little quote marks and perhaps the string crosshatches itself into a statement in time, who knows?…

Exile in Japan

On the balcony of the tower I play my flute and watch The Spring rain. I wonder If I ever Will go home and see The tide bore In Chekiang River again. Straw sandals, an old Begging bowl, nobody Knows me. On how many Bridges have I trampled The fallen cherry blossoms?      — Su Man…

Prediction

you will go home it will be cold you will warm some- one your sister your cousin a girl you meet in a park in a bar her elbows red with waiting you will clap your mittens on her ears you will sing songs from the frozen territory you will stir her slowly and the…

Still Life

All your life you have been standing on the edge of a cliff. Below the cliff, a river. Snow the other side. You kneel holding a harvest of roots. You remove your artificial eye. You erase darkness. Light. For the first time you see your feet have turned to stone. You have become part of…

Parity

My uncle believed he had A double in another Universe right here at hand Whose life was the opposite Of his in all things — the man On the other side of zero. Sometimes they would change places. Not in dreams, but for a moment In waking, when my uncle Would smile a certain sly…

Intrusive Withdrawal

Suddenly there she was between us on the bed, the one third party and broken off relation I would least like to see share in our menage. Tight-lipped and glaring, she waits for me to do the introducing, own up to an old association, and with hanging head advise you not to be surprised by…