Kim Stafford

What Ever Happened to Gypsy Slim

who camped under bare library elms
with his saxophone and little stove:
"Excuse me, mam.  I have a question
for your time.  You see, I am about
to saute' my onion for the evening
and I wonder what herbs you recommend."

Shopping cart man who stretched plastic
over that bench carved Laurence Sterne,
eccentric danger from another time,
spoke:  "I don't care if it's family, friend,
house, job, creed, ethnic group, country,
institution or sex -- they all try to stifle
what you can be."

But they got him.  Pigeons settle
where his cart kept city pavement dry
a few months, and clean citizens
are not afraid to walk on that side
where his raving once made them stop.
 

Jennifer Egan

From "Sacred Heart"

        We had a new girl in class that year whose name was Amanda.  She had short red hair and wore thin synthetic kneesocks, tinted different colors from the wash.  She wore silver bracelets embedded with chunks of turquoise, and would cross her legs and stare into space in a way that gave the impression she lived a dark and troubled life.  We had this in common, I thought, though no one else knew it.
        During mass I once saw her scrape something onto the pew with the sharp end of a pin she was wearing.  Later I sneaked back when the chapel was empty to see what it was, and found her first single initial, "A.":  To leave one's mark on a church pew seemed a wondrous and terrible thing, and I found myself watching Amanda more often after that.  I tried talking to her once, but she twirled her pen against her cheek and fixed her gaze somewhere to my left.  Close up her eyes looked cracked and oddly lifeless, like mosaics I'd seen pictures of in our religion class.
 

Chris Offut

From "Sawdust"

        [Delmer's] boots hit the porch and the front door slammed.  He walked in our old room.  "What do you know, Junior?  All on your ownself and afraid to tell it."
        I grinned and shook my head.  After Dad died, Delmer went all out to make people like him.  I went the other way.
        "Hear you're eat up with the smart bug," he said.  "And taking that school test in town."
        "Thinking on it."
        "You ought to let up on that and try working.  Then you can wear alligator-hide boots like these."
        He pulled a pantleg up.
        "Where'd you get them from?" I asked.
        "Down to Lex.  They got a mall big as two pastures laid end to end.  I bought these here boots right out of the window.  Paid the man cash, too."
        "He saw you coming, Delmer.  They ain't made no alligator nothing in nigh ten years.  Government's got them took care of."
        "What makes you know so much?"
        "Read it in a magazine."
        Delmer frowned.  He doesn't put much store in anything but tv.  Commercials are real people to him.  I knew he was getting made by a neck vein that popped up big as a nightcrawler.
 

Ed Lahey

Gimp O'Leary's Iron Works
for Big Ed

You hear a lot of lies about O'Leary
but he could seal a crack in steel
no matter what the size.
His arc welder would strike
white fire and a bead
of blue-black rod would slide
along between cherry streaks,
and acrid smoke would curl away
to leave clean married steel,
not too frail, or buttered up
but straight and strong
hard as mill forged rail.
Of course you might say,
"Don't use that example
as a metaphor for poetry."
"Welding is a matter of utility."
And you'd be right.  Still,
I remember the look on his face
when he'd lift his great helmet
and sneak up on the finished
job with his unprotected eyes.
It was always between him
and the piece of steel --
a struggle of molecules and will.

Often others would say to him,
"Damn good job or some such thing."
If it was, he'd grin, and look again,
as if he thought the natural light
would show a flaw, or bridge
that didn't fuse -- convinced, I guess,
that in his struggle with the steel
he could seldom really win.
He knew perfection could
conceal the wound
beneath the arc of his art.
I liked him for that.
 

Ralph Beer

From "The Harder They Come"

        When he hit the second wind-slabbed drift on Cutler Grade, Gregor MacIvers knew he wouldn't make it home that night without his chains.  A spume of fine snow lofted from the hood and misted his windshield, and as the engine stalled, the truck shuddered to a stop.  Spindrift sluiced off the plow berm at the west edge of the road, rising in tight vortices beyond the reach of his lights.  And for an instant in the swirling space at the edge of darkness, MacIvers saw or imagined a woman standing in a light summer dress, her coiling black hair tracing the currents of wind behind her.  He started his engine and rubbed the windshield with the flat of his hand; even with the lights switched to high beam, he saw nothing ahead but a ground-blizzard at night.
        MacIvers backed a few yards down his tracks, and watched as grooves cut by his truck's undercarriage began again to fill with snow.  He snapped on the dome light and reached for his insulated coveralls.  He'd known all day he would have to feed when he got home, yet he had lingered in town over a solitary dinner, celebrating again, as he had for the past four Friday nights, the torment of his divorce.  It was an expensive ritual that seemed to do him no good.
        As he opened his door and began to step out, MacIvers saw in the confusion of tools and winter clothes crowding the bright cab, that he'd forgotten his felt-lined winter overshoes.  He wiggled his toes in the hand-tooled Mexican riding boots he wore and said without heat, "Real pretty."