Whiting Award Winners

A military truck speeds through the intersection, children

                                     shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

          through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                     lies panting in the road. Its hind legs

                                                                         crushed into the shine

                                            of a white Christmas.

On the bedstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                   for the first time.

You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide.

You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.

People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims.

But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love.

You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.

“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

     I wanted for her sake to undo it,

I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be

time for us since I was married. I’d made her want

another time, when, whole, impossibly together,

we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.

Though I asked her not to, she went on

waiting for that time and, by the tree where I

couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting

undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.