University of Northern Iowa

Found in the Alley DumpsterAuthor(s): Walter McDonaldSource: The North American Review, Vol. 273, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), p. 45Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124995 .

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N A R

Colette Inez

My saint protected dreamers and fools.

I almost heard her clicking tongue, saw her eyes roll heavenward

when uninvited I left to bathe in the scent

of my mother's roses, smokey violets and ferns.

Those days that led to her

blue-shuttered house were mine to inherit.

Awarded dark purple lilacs

and a stand of cypresses, flame-shaped,

replicating those in the calendar

of Duc de Berry, I came into clouds

of mimosa, hills and twisting roads.

My legacy: cobbled streets, medieval walls

in a town where I stumbled

on angels, unicorns and the Virgin Mother

in perfect stone.

I beseeched the saint of sun-bleached

nightclothes inhabited by airy figures in the wind. I prayed to the angel

of walkways and shrubs, of brooms

and iron furniture to bless the yards of France, to hover over my mother's house.

She was there, frail behind the window.

Lift her from the chair, float her to the door,

I implored, and the door opened to the secret daughter she gave away to the Sisters,

the child named after a martyr and saint, but neither one nor the other,

it opened to me, a woman

offered a cool entreaty into her mother's rooms

and the gift of a crucifix, my bequest.

Walter McDonald

Bury the sack, and let more cats

make kittens. Only a fool

would kill blind kittens

with a stone. But here they are,

carved out of fur and blood,

their teeth like zippers that won't close. Whoever bashed

and dumped them in our dumpster had in mind silence, the fastest

way to fix unwanted cats

simply to beat them with a brick

like crushing ice. Their blood

is crusted, their eyes

shut tight. We're sure

they never saw a human face.

Nance Van Winckel

Spring and fall the groundhog goes everywhere we go, trailing his rank odor

of hard labor beneath the green level.

He listens for our big steps, sudden

across his long night tunnels: spirits of porchlight, deities of dense underbrush.

Damp, subtle evenings he feasts

on our windfall apples, keeps our plastic cast-offs

as relics for his back room, the rear annex.

All winter he wakes to our scraping and shoveling, our little ways out

to the barn, past the small hole

through which he's barely breathing,

through which he hears us as in a dream:

the aimless wondering ones

in thick robes and blue hats, busy at their senseless tasks, calling him

back into the high light world.

September 1988 45

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