Home
Gallery Events
Workshops
Newsletter
Poetry Events
Info for Artists
About Northwind
Contact us

Regional
• Arts Calendar
• Artists
• Arts Links

2409 Jefferson Street
Port Townsend, WA
360-379-1086

Sandy Diamond

Three Poems

The Clearing                         

When days went by without the dogs

finding anyone to rescue,

their eyes were beggars,

their proud coats clotted with silt.

They'd become like the firemen.

Who thought of it first,

got the idea to raise their spirits,

let them smell something alive?

A fireman dug a shallow hole,

lay down in it

and covered himself with rubble

so that a dog could find him.

 Its nose quivering at last,

its ears triangles of alertness--

the trained ecstatic heart of the hunter!

Then other firemen lay down

and buried themselves.

Dogs, unearthing them, licked the men's faces

and the men, rising from their phony graves,

hugged the dogs who'd found them.

And when I heard this story, I said to myself

What space--be it fake or in disguise--

can we clear for love?

The Ladies Room, 1944

                    Squinting through the crack

                                    in the door of the toilet stall, I'd watch 

 the ladies reflected in the mirror.

             With tiny brushes unscrewed

from golden tubes, they drew

lips and eyes and lashes, puffed powder

from their gleamy compacts, rolled

the handtowel machine to a clean spot

and kissed it.

They reached under their skirts

and yanked their girdles down, ran

their fingers up the backs of their legs until

their seams were straight.

Some plucked

 atomizers from their purses, 

squeezed the bulb, releasing a mist 

near their earringed ears,

humming "Pistol Packin' Mama"

and "This Is the Army, Mr. Jones."

 There was always one who bent

her leg at the knee like a horse being shoed,

spit on two fingers and rubbed

a scuff from her sling back platform pump.

Then she'd snap her feet together

like troops on parade, scatting

"Beat Me, Daddy (Eight To The Bar)."

Oh ladies meeting by chance who

 primped each other's hair--

 netted in a bun,

twisted in braids

or pinned on top of the head.

If one lady's hairdo slipped,

someone else gave a hairpin or bobby,

despite the rationing of metal.

They were all Betty Grable to me,

their snapshots taped

to lockers Over There--

the chesty and the flat

the mousy and the vamps

 the freckled and the rouged--

they all looked in the mirror and

made themselves better.

MOSQUITOS

                        The best, cheapest BLT in town is at Don's Pharmacy's Lunch Counter & Soda Fountain. Reflected in the wall length mirror behind six coffee pots, Italian syrups and hand-lettered specials--(promising the "works")-- a mural of downtown a hundred years ago evokes a different world.

                        The man sitting on the stool next to me -- baseball cap, flannel shirt, geezer kind of guy--was scratching his arm and talking to a similar looking fellow next to him:

                        "Something bit me and I don't know what it is."

                        "A bug."

                        "It must be a kind of bug."

                        "A mosquito, probably."

                        Hot dog, I thought. This is how Raymond Carver gets his dialogue. I fished out a pencil, held my sandwich in my left hand and took dictation on the napkin.                     

                        "Itches like hell. Damn bug."

                        "Now you got to worry if it was carrying something."

                        "Lyme Disease."

                        "Or West Nile Virus--you heard of that."

                        "It better not be."

                        "Normally there's not a lot of mosquitos around here."

                        "You want mosquitos, go to Peru. Lima, a big dirty city."

                        "You don't say."

                        "Tons of mosquitos. And everything else. Then I went to Jakarta."

                        "Another big dirty city."

                        Good as it was, I was beginning to lose my appetite for the B in my BLT.                    

"Machu Pichu. We took precautions. You take medicine before you go,

while you're there and after you get home. Didn't get sick. The hard part is taking it when you're home because you think I'm not even there anymore."

                        "You shouldn't scratch it so much."

                        "Malaria's the thing to worry about."

                        "You said it. Quinëine. Or Deet."

                        "Africa's where my wife wants to go next."

                        "Oh I don't know about that."

                        "Her girlfriend went, so she wants to go."

                        "Africa's got more mosquitos than South America put together."

                        "She just wants her girlfriend to stop lording it over her."

                        "Well, let her go-- don't have to go."

                        "Oh I can't let her go alone."

                        Right when he said that, I bit down on my BLT and a slice of T shot out  and fell in my lap. Suddenly I was crying. Not because mayo was riding on the tomato, but because that man would brave all the filth and insects in the world to follow his wife. Because he loved her that much.

                        Then the waitress came with a coffeepot and said, "Want more?" 

                        And we all said, "Oh yes, please".