Whiting Award Winners

Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there. 

One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too. 

“I want to go where it’s cold,” Lourdes told her husband. They began to drive. “Colder,” she said as they passed the low salt marshes of Georgia, as if the word were a whip driving them north. “Colder,” she said through the withered fields of a Carolina winter. “Colder,” she said again in Washington, D.C., despite the cherry-blossom promises, despite the white stone monuments hoarding winter light. “This is cold enough,” she finally said when they reached New York.

A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,

Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-

In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.

This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople

Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,

While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds

The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run

Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular

Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles

Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.

The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked

As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.

Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed

Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-

Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”

Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;

Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size

Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”

I know snow as soap opera, the comedy
of white heap shovelled into strophe
and anti-strophe for long blocks – snow
as envy, a shaken blanket making a lasting
echo over clean avenues.

We do not mean to complain. We know how it is.

In older, even sadder cultures the worst possible sorts

have been playing hot and cold with people’s lives

for much longer. Like Perrow says,

We’ll all have baboon hearts one of these days.

We wintered with ample fuel and real tomatoes.

We were allowed to roam, sniffing and chewing

at the tufted crust. We were let to breathe.

That is, we respirated. Now the soft clocks

have gorged themselves on our time. Yet

as our hair blanches and comes out

in hanks, we can tell it is nearly spring –

the students shed their black coats

on the green; we begin to see shade.

Lo, this is the breastbone’s embraceable light.

We are here. Still breathing and constellated.

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.