Whiting Award Winners

        The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails

        as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of

        this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know

        close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.

My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”

These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.

What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
 

The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,

the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.

This is like that, that is like this, oh,

let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:

nothing is like anything else.

Even the parrot and the apish ape

mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.

To begin:  algae, abalone, alewife —

each the spitting image of itself.

Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)

Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,

nothing is more original than a bog,

more rare than the cougar and crane —

save all the above named.

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,

deer, the descent of man and estuaries,

flakes of snow (no two like) fire,

flax, gannets and gulls.

Honeybees and the Hoover Dam

are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.

Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,

joshua trees, lagoons and the law

that to liken a lichen is tautological.

Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds

that all of these are idiosyncracies:

the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —

not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.

This is the world of plenitude and power —

every bit of it out of this world:

the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.

As now we inch toward an end — vectors

and a winter that figures to be like no other,

say the selfsame earth is to your liking,

and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,

all things like, beyond compare.

He sent this key from Florida.

I think. A key to what?

I tried the car, the trucks,

tried every door – nothing fit.

My wife thought it was his idea

of a joke. I never got his jokes.

Not a word from him, just things:

a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;

a snapshot of himself from Aspen,

arm in arm with somebody, but

both faces had been scissored out.

A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.

Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,

collect, and I knew it was him,

though he always used a different name.

At times enough to make you laugh:

Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,

will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.