Dhalgren

Three staples on the bottom of the

above page hold a creased rectangle

of newsprint. The end of the column

has either been ripped off or (the bottom

is torn on a second crease) handled

so frequently it had come away:

BRASS ORCHIDS

BLOOM BENEATH

A CLOUDED SKY

This handsome book, or rather booklet, has already become a Bellona commonplace, on night-tables by the reading lamp, in the back pockets of youngsters in the park, or tucked, along with the Times, under the arms of people going about the city. This reviewer only wonders how our anonymous author achieved such vivid visualizations with such simple language. Before subject matter so violent and so personal, yet so clearly and wittily voiced, few familiar with Bellona’s landscape will be able to avoid strong reactions, negative or positive. If the poet’s own emotions seem disjointed or strange, they are still expressed pointedly, incisively, and in an intensely human mode.

True anonymity in a situation such as we have here is, of course, impossible. Since the interview with the author we published a while back, many have simply held it an open secret that the cultivator of these brazen blooms is actual—

This morning I climbed out of the loft soon as I woke up. When I’d gone to bed, they’d been laid out neatly on Raven’s sleeping bag he’d opened up full for them by the couch:

Woodard was curled on his side a yard off the edge. Rose had two fingers threat through a tear in the plaid lining. A tuft of stuffing that had come /half/ out shook with her sleeping breath. Sammy, Marceline, and Stevie were banked against Copperhead’s back. who For some reason /he/ had gone to sleep on the floor beside them.

I got them the kids up noisily (when we were ready to leave, Copperhead had rolled the bag around himself, head out one end, boots out the other, and wedged under the couch; there was a tuft of stuffing caught on his beard) and took them to the school.

I pushed the door open and herded them inside. Lanya was doing something with the tape-recorder and looked up, more startled than I’d thought she’d be.

“Nobody else here, yet?” I asked.

“Christ, you surprised me.” She pushed the fast (forward? reverse?) button. Things clacked, crackled, and spun.

“I brought the kids.”

Rose went and immediately sat on a chair in the corner. Woodard wandered toward the table.

Marceline said to Stevie, “You cut that out,” only I wasn’t sure /at/ what [he’d done].

“The other kids will be in soon,” Lanya said.

I said: “Good. What you have to do is when the parents come for the kids in the afternoon, you have to farm these here out to them.”

Lanya stood up fully and faced me. “God damn!”

“I can’t keep them,” I said. “I told you that.”

She pulled her lips thin and looked angry.

I was surprised that I had been expecting her to be just that way about it.

“What am I going to do with—Yeah, I know what you said.”

Stevie said sharply: “You better keep your hands off that, nigger!”

Woodard turned off the from the tape recorder, holding a spool of tape gingerly, blinking apple green eyes below his brush of mustard wool. He smiled uncertainly.

Rose began to cry. The knuckles of her fist pressed together. Her chin bobbed, sobbing, and tears tracked from the i

Sammy, move/ standing by the far wall, moved/turned/ the toe of his sneaker over /on/ the floor and blinked.

The following letter is paperclipped

to the top and side of the page on

which the next entry begins. The envelope,

stuck beneath, has left its outline

on the stationery:

How absurd—

—to apologize for an uncommitted injury. But I shall not have been at your party tonight—if Lansang delivers this. There is nothing less sympathetic than the vulgar pleading extenuating circumstances for their vulgarity. There is nothing more distressing to a man who admires formal honesty than to discover he can only offer “personal reasons” as honest explanation for his breach of form.

But, for personal reasons, I will not have attended your party when you read this. I am distressed.

I have been rude.

And I have often imagined that to be the most terrible admission I might ever have to make.

Forgive me.

It is not much consolation that the powerful are most successful as patrons when least in evidence. I am concerned with what I presumptuously consider my City. I have always felt every society must have its art; and for that art to have ultimate use, it must be free of intimidation from the centers of power.

Therefore I have not read your poems. Nor will I.

Were I less gregarious, or Bellona more populous, I could be content to read them and never meet you. But I am a very social being, and Bellona is the social size it is.

We will meet.

And I eagerly await your second collection, whenever it should be ready. Its publication, hopefully, will be as expeditious as publication of your first.

My friend, I am fascinated by the mechanics of power. Who in his right mind would want the problems and responsibilities of the nation’s president? Lord, I would! I would! But one ca

Shall I twist the knife?

A degree in corporate law from Yale is one thing; one in patents from N.Y.U. (cum laude, 1960, and still two tries at the New York bar. Personal reasons again…? The pain!) is something else again.

I ramble.

More than likely I shall not be at the house for a while.

Until we do meet, I remain yours,

Sincerely,

Roger Calkins

RC;wd

too dark to see.

I heard De

I opened one eye against my arm. The other stared With the other I could see the top of the doorway. Then her Then steps below / and somebody moving something to get by / were Lanya[’s]. I lay waiting for the circle of her hair to dawn at the loft’s edge.

“You aren’t sleeping.” She gri

“Good,” I said. “Why were you so pissed off at me when I brought them in that morning?”

“What?”

I raised my head out of my arm and asked again.

“Oh.” She turned around on the edge and slid her butt against my side. “I’m just lazy—almost, but not quite, as lazy as you. And I don’t like imposing on people.” She put her hand in the sleeve hole of my vest. “Besides, I thought you should have kept them.” Her fingers, cool, were touched the chain.

“You did?”

She nodded.

That upset me. “I really misunderstood you.”

“I know you did. I read what you wrote I said about it in the kitchen / about / when D-t brought in the article.”

“And that’s not what you said at all, huh?”

“What I said was: What are you going to do about them? What arrangements were you going to make about getting them over to the school, if any; getting a couple of changes of clothes for them; maybe a permanent mattress that was theirs—things like that.”

“You really think they’d be better off here?”

“Where you found them, somebody was trying to burn them alive. I could always pack them off with the Richards—”

“What about some of the black families of the kids you’ve got?”