More of the Gadfly

Read more poems from past issues of Walla Walla College’s literary journal, including the full text of two excerpted in the print edition of Westwind.

There’s really nothing
holding the world together
(if you think about it)
except
dotted lines
    and Scotch tape
    and satellites
    and garters
and thumbtacks
and power lines
and safety pins
and kite strings
    and screws
    and hairspray
    and leather belts
    and paid vacations
and freeways
and paper clips
and bubble gum
and rivets
    and rivers
    and promises
    and Band-Aids
    and Love.
That’s a lot of nothing,
isn’t it?
By Sheila Lawson (1970, page 5)

Eleven Million Dollar Jackpot
7:25
“We have five minutes to get to 7-Eleven before the drawing”
Girded in boots, coats, and gloves we tramp
Off in quest of fortune
Graduate school bills, Paris
A car for my sister, stock
in Ben & Jerrry’s Ice Cream Company,
A weekend jaunt to Milan to hear Pavarotti
Sing in Aïda, an end to hunger,
World peace...
“Well, you won four bucks”
the clerk shoves four stingy bills
Across the counter.
“Four bucks is four bucks” you take my hand
And we walk home rulers
Of a dynasty of dark night, soft snow, four bucks.
by Lisa Roberton (1993, page 45)

Omnibus
-a collection of short, short stories

One
    At seven a.m. a few suited men, some uniformed women and many women in cheap office clothes drop noisy, busy coins into the busdriver’s collection box.
    At 10 a.m. old women drop lonely dimes into the box.
    These situations are repeated at three and five p.m.

Two
    The old man boards the bus, rocks back and lunges forward as he grabs each vertical pole like a child playing on the monkey bars. He will be tired when he gets to his seat.

Three
    The young woman sits on the front seat across from the busdriver, who ignores her loud and very friendly talking which she directs at him. She is mentally deficient, and he will tell her where her stop is.

Four
    One sunny midmorning in spring, a busdriver pulled over to the side of the road because he was minutes ahead of his schedule. He stood up in the aisle and sang and danced “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” At the time he was in Portland, Oregon, on a bridge.
by Owen Kinne (1978, page 12)

America
    I am a Russian boy. I once heard a broadcast about America. My cousins had a radio they shared with two other men who had met the Americans in Berlin at the end of the war. They like Americans. Rather, they did like Americans. They were both shot because they said Americans were not barbarians.
    I have dreamed of America. I have dreamed that you have only one family in each room of big size and that your children work but nine hours a day. I have dreamed that a man can own some land if he works hard and is a good countryman always.
    I would like to speak for Democracy here if I dared. Sometimes to think of Democracy scares me. I feel my mind pictures it too great a thing and I would be disappointed if I would see it. But I dream. It is good.
    I would say to my people, “In America your mother works only six days a week and has one day to spend where you may see her. In America, your father comes home from the Army once each year for a whole week and there are tears and dancing and laughing. In America, there is more laughing than crying. In America, the wrinkles are at the eyes’ corners and not at the mouth’s.”
    All this I would say but as I told you I dream too much and America could not be all this.
by William L. Kelly (1951, page 23)

Scene at the Airport
    ”Thank you, friends, thank you.”
    He took a step backward so that his shoulder blades touched the wall.
Eyeing the group, he shifted so that the heel of his foot touched the wall
also, and put his hand nervously into his pocket, then took it out again--his suit seemed rather uncomfortable.
    The small airport was almost full of well-wishers come to see off this
newly elected U.S. Representative. Looking over what seemed to him a sea of faces, he was careful to smile back at the winks and grins of the nodding faces in the crowd. Many of these faces had known him since his boyhood.
    There was a movement in the crowd, and a small delegation forged to the front. The members looked at each other self-consciously, and produced a small package. Handing it to him, they paused for an awkward moment, then returned to the crowd. Opening the package, the recipient found a desk pen set with a brass plaque bearing the words “Representative Jerry Schafer.” Representative Schafer beamed and repeated the words “Thank you, friends, thank you.”
    ”Well, I suppose this calls for a speech,” he said. Everyone applauded and nodded some more.
    ”I really don’t know what to say, but I do know that while I’m in
Washington I’ll try to represent you faithfully and uphold our democratic
ideals. As far as the war goes, I’m not sure how I’ll vote in Congress, but
my constant goal will be the preservation of our way of life. Above all, our way of life must be preserved.”
    There was applause, and nodding faces pushed forward to shake his hand and wish him good luck.
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw a young soldier push his way through the swinging doors and the crowd and make his way to the ticket booth. He flopped his duffel bag on the scale and bought his ticket. Moving over to one of the long couches, he sat down, his back to the crowd. He was bound for Vietnam.
    Speaking above the crowd, the Representative said, “Let me introduce my family to you.” The noise subsided, and the crowd moved back to reveal a woman in her thirties and two small girls, Carolyn and Janet. He continued, “We’ve found a wonderful house just outside of Washington, and also a lovely school nearby where the girls can go. I’m hoping that Marjorie will be able to get a job in my office, because I know that she can do a better job than anyone else that I could hire.” The crowd continued to nod and smile approvingly.
    Over a loudspeaker came the announcement that flights 742 and 758 had arrived, and would be ready to load passengers immediately.
    ”Well, I guess it’s about time for us to leave,” he said. “While I’m away, I will constantly keep our priceless heritage of freedom uppermost in my mind and will try to order my life after the precepts laid down in my two favorite quotations. The first is by Stephen Decatur: ‘My country, may it always be in the right, but right or wrong, my country.’ The second is by our late President Kennedy: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.’ With your help and suggestions, I hope that I really can do something for my country. Within the year, I hope to be able to fly to Vietnam in order to better assess our role there, and also to better inform myself on the exact situation.”
    Once again the crowd rushed forward to congratulate him and his family and wish them good luck. Following them out to the plane, there were incessant chirps of “We’re proud of you, Jerry,” and “Good luck.”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the solitary soldier walk to the other plane and board. In three months he would be dead.
by Gary E. Baker (1969, pages 32-34)

Author Unknown
    Japanese airmen had aimed their bombs well that night. Outside our hospital entrance a long line of ambulances, jeeps and trucks were all loaded with the same precious cargo. We unloaded them carefully, placing litters of the wounded side by side on the crowded floor of the hallway. Some of the patients moaned quietly. Others were so still that we knew they would never move again.
    One had kept sticking up the bloody stump of what had once been a wrist. A colored sergeant lay sprawled on a canvas cot. He had made his own tourniquet from a belt and tied off the bleeding where his leg had been shot away. Filipino women wept quietly as they passed between the long rows of wounded.
    The mud was so deep in the driveways that we sometimes sank to our knees in the mire. Across this mud bog was a path leading to the long tent where we kept the Japanese prisoner patients. The more casualties that came in, the more the patients would laugh, sing, and clap their hands.
    The night sky was alive with tracer bullets. We worked frantically to
replace with plasma infusions the lost blood that soaked the litters,
dripped from the blankets and ran in little streams along the floor. Six
surgical teams were working simultaneously but that was not enough.
    Stumbling through the darkness, I gripped firmly the handles of another litter. We hurried to the X-ray tent with a patient, but after seeing him in the light, I knew we had brought him to the wrong place. Most of his head was blown off.
    A feeling of anger and bitterness seeped through me, leaving my mouth dry and my knuckles cold. A few minutes previously, these men had been vibrant with health, full of hope and unafraid of the devil himself. Now their torn flesh was letting out its life blood and the smell of death was everywhere.
    About ten that evening I read one of the saddest stories ever to come my way. Two of us were working with a patient that lay dying of severe burns. Before taking his lifeless body out to the tent we were using for a morgue, I searched his tattered clothes for some means of identification. I could find no clue as to who he was but in his hip pocket I found a large rumpled piece of paper which he must have been using for stationery.
    This was the contents of an unfinished letter written by this “Author
Unknown”:

Somewhere in the Philippines
25 October, 1944
My darling,
    We have been pretty busy today but I must take these few minutes to write and tell you how much I love you and that I expect to see you very soon. The Japs fly over occasionally, but they don’t seem to ever hit anything. I guess they are pretty poor marksmen. It is 8:30 p.m. and I hear the signal for another bombing. I’ll finish this letter after the raid.
by Alfred Riggins (1947, pages 20-21)

Le Misquito
I lay quietly, drifting softly between sleep and wakefulness.  Temporarily sleep tugged me under its toasty coverlet.  Then moments later, consciousness yanked me back.  I held my breath, straining to hear it.  The expectant pounding of my heart drowned out the sound.  I heard it again, only clearer this time.  Like the whine of a microscopic dentist’s drill, it pulsated, darting from one side of my head to the other. My eyes searched the blackness about me, seeing only blackness.  Silence.  I drew a long breath. The air swished into my nose and out again.  Sleep came back to play with my tired mind.  Somewhere in my subconscious, a faint hum wound itself delicately into my mind.  A tiny, fragile nasal whine shook me, ignorant of my need for sleep.  Stealthily, I reached for the aerosol can beside my bed.  T-sh-t.  T-sh-sh-t-sh-sh-sh-sh-s t.  Then like a Victorola unwound, the menacing noise slowed to a stop.
by Andrea Pfeiffer (1969)

I saw the tree drop a leaf today,
Quite by accident, of course,
You know I would not mean to watch.
Cautiously it waited till the time was right;
No one was around
(except that student on the grass, and he
so deep in World War One he’d never notice)
then quickly, shyly, let it go
and I, just rounding the corner,
surprised it in mid-fall.
We stood embarrassed
And the tree
Blushed to find that anyone had seen.
by Shelia Dunlop (1975)

Requiem
I am she who was once a slayer of dragons.
Who laid them
   end
      to
         end
for the world to rejoice.
And it did.
       Rejoice.
But now I am old (twenty-three)
And the wrinkles of my being
Belay my chasing dragons
(no, belay my even seeing them).
Youth is a time of dragons.
by Gwen Burt (1977)

Underfoot  
Sitting in class
I saw
An obscure gray bug
Crossing the dull beige tile.
Venturing
Into the hall
He met his end
Under the foot of
An obscure gray student
Crossing the dull beige tile
Venturing out
To another class.
by Denny Roenfeldt (1981)

Forgetting  
“Hssst. . .I love you!”
Call the cavalleros from the streetside bar,
Old men grinning,
Young men with their shirts rolled up?
They’re all obsessed.
I wish to hide my blond hair.
Am I amused
    annoyed
    revolted?
I learn to ignore.
From the train I see
Dark-skinned women hanging shirts
On paint-peeled railings
While hammocked sleepers dream
To the sound of reggae
Or babbling TV.
Scrawny chickens scuttle under stilted houses
Defended from the tropical sun
By dark palms.
We stop in town.
I see the laughing children
    with skinny legs
    and grimy faces,
The toothless old women
    with varicose veins
   and white-hardened feet,
And the voiceless beggars
    with no naïve expectancy
    and no future.
I learn to ignore.
I pass them
On my way to perfect white beaches
With palm trees bending over
Warm Caribbean water.
“This is heaven!” I think,
Forgetting.
by Krista Thompson (1991)

Lord Supper
The glasses clink like nails.
A bead of sweaty juice rolls
down my throat.
The mashing of your body
echoes in my head for a moment,
staggering feet on gravel.
Then I swallow you as smoothly
as I killed you.
My trousers grate across the pew
the sound of a curtain ripping.
by Donald Carson (1993)

A Close Shave
I gave him his last shave two days before he died.  I can’t seem to forget.  Every morning I see his tired gray eyes staring out of the mirror at me. I try to avoid his gaze.  I focus on the water, the hair floating on its surface and clinging to the porcelain sink.  I focus on the lather, its smooth creamy appearance, the way it dissolves into the water, the hair that hides in its edges.  I focus on my face in the mirror, the angle of my chin, the curve of my neck, the stubborn crease under my lip that hides from the razor.  I still see him in the corners of my eye.
His eyes plead for my help and so I gently support him.  It’s not hard, really.  There isn’t much left to him.  With one bony wrist wrapped around my neck, I grasp his waist and walk him to the bathroom.  His ribs poke sharply into my sides and his hip bone rest in my hand.  He droops in the chair, sagging like a doll.  He can’t hold his head upright anymore; it thumps to his chest or back or shoulder.
    I turn the faucet onto hot.  I hold a towel a towel under the streaming water, getting it wet, burning my hands.  With one hand I cradle his head as I tip it back to work up a lather in the mug that holds his shaving bar and brush.  It is an old brush, its handle is wood, its bristles are stiff, but soft.
    His face is pink when I remove the towel; it is the first color his skin has produced in weeks.  Cradling his head, I lather his beard in small circles with the brush.  Left, then right. Left, then right.  I douse the razor in water and give it a good shake.  Pulling the skin taunt across his cheek bone, I begin my downward stroke,
    The razor slides smoothly over his face.  His eyes are closed; he seems to relax.  Gray, white, and black whiskers build up in a layer across the water and along the sides of the dingy green sink.  My wrists aches, my thumb is tense.  I pull back his nose to reach the hairs on his lip.  I save the neck for last.  I hate the neck, I always cut myself.  There is so much skin; it doesn’t pull tight.  Adam’s-apple catches the blade, nicking the skin.  The blood begins to pool into a droplet, but I catch it with a towel before it escapes down his neck.  I rinse the sink and get the hand towel wet again.  I wipe the shaving cream from the edges of his cheeks and neck and ears.
    I help him back to his bed.  I see him staring at me, as I tuck the covers around the frame of his body.  My voice sticks in my throat.  I try to let the words rise.  I can’t.  A tear forms in his eye.  ”I love you,” I finally whisper.  ”I know,” he barely replies.  Did he?  I pull the plug and the water swirls out.  All that is left are the whiskers lining the white porcelain.
by Bryan David Smith (1994)

 

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