someone who felt free to see. Within those few years I was unlike the person I’d been there; I had become a poet, I thought, and had launched myself into a new life. I began to have intense, intuitive flashes that the way I viewed the world was incomplete and twisted; it was the view through your eyes, not mine. Ventures out of the city became more frequent as my addiction to urban ways waned with the reduction of adrenalin, and I began to see the beliefs that destroyed you and raised me. ■ ■ ■ h e way that I was taught to live was the same as my ■ father’s way, and he got it from his father who got it from H working in your factories and your factories thrived on those who thought they were meant to work and die there; they thought that getting out was impossible and anyone who didn’t think it was a fool. They were all of peasant stock, immigrants, folks with the stature of a stump, transplanted by the forces of history and made to slave in factories the way they once slaved in the fields of feudal Europe. Now it’s too late for most of them because time and the forces of history have again blown rot into the nation’s industrial foundations, high-tech has made you obsolete, and all that is left is the belief that the future will bring more of the same and so there isn’t any hope, none goddammit, and that is that. Maybe it’s finally true for you Hammond; maybe there finally isn’t any hope. But I did get out, and it was easy. I got in my car and drove west until I couldn’t drive any further, and when I got here and my heart stopped racing my beliefs began to change, the mists of the Northwest began to sooth my pitted soul, and I began to make friends who weren’t jumpy or weary or depression addicts; they didn’t have the nervous systems of combat vets. When they spoke of their city they seemed to virtually glow, and when they talked of the future, communal or personal, it was with a nearly adolescent buoyancy, a sense of hope and grand destiny riding on daily visions of the power of the Earth itself. I almost couldn’t handle it; such confidence seemed to reek with smugness. Didn’t they know the world was falling apart? Didn’t they know there wasn’t any hope, none goddammit, and that should be that? No, they didn’t know; and as my heart began to heal I myself forgot the pall of oily black thunder that blankets the emotions of my heritage. Now when I think of you, a giant contradiction of Place squats on my shoulders and speaks to me about dualities; you are in the least a duality. You possess poetry, both sacred and profane, and it is as worthy as the poetry in any cottage-by- the-bay or animal of the heart; it is the poetry of carnivals and of fairy tale frogs who most surely need a prince to kiss them. I am no prince, but I can bestow just such a kiss old pal, and when I do, what I would like to see is a Hammond in its unnamed youth, a land pure and vibrant, a land that could match the rain forest with its earthy secrets. I see our inland rivers rimmed with reeds and cattails; deer and fox, beavers, raccoons, and black bears roam the forests of oaks and elms and willows; swarms of monarch butterflies dance in a weave with the soul of the swamps, while the people of the Calumet launch their canoes from shoreline hills of glittering white sand. . . . You will never be this way again dear friend, but should the glaciers once again pave you over with ice instead of cement and layer you over with that magic mud, you might once again flex life and health into the scars of your flesh. Perhaps. . . perhaps. For now you are my friend and my home, proud worker of the world and bearer of impossible burdens. You deserve more than time and men have given you, and so of thee I sing. . . . Sincerely, Richard Alishio Writer Richard Alishio lives in Seattle. This is his first story in CSQ. Artist Jessica Dodge lives in Seattle. 16 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987
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