Editors' Comment:
These compelling poems seek to have the reader identify with that most elusive of creatures, the changeling. The persona of this work is caught in limbo between countries, between cultures, even, seemingly, between selves. Everything is in flux, and the poet wonders how much he can reveal, and to whom. He tries on masks and marriages, discarding them as insufficient, seeks totems and tribes, but is left unfulfilled. Ultimately, who is it he tells? Us, the anonymous reader, though perhaps that is more accident than device, and what really has been revealed is nothing more than ink-stains, scattered like bats in the near-night.
Featured Haiku:
from one dream
to another . . .
butterfly
fortune cookies
on my New Year dinner plate
don’t ask, don’t tell
to tell or not to tell the secret day moon
Milky Way . . .
bit by bit I put myself
out of my mind
the bat
flitting here and there . . .
Chen-ou or Eric
after Fitzcarraldo . . .
I go around for hours wearing
the actor’s face
the distance between
my attic and the moon --
April rain
slowly I eat up a spring day quickly dissolving
mother and I
stand on Pacific coasts --
the same bright moon
these piles
of falling plum petals
no new messages
snow geese
cross the gray sky --
her wrist scars
peeling my pear
in a thin, unbroken spiral . . .
hometown memories
single married single again a rushing river
pressed roses
in The Art of Loving . . .
summer ’68
bats swirling
across the prairie—
ink-stained desk
