Two
poems from Belle Randall's The Faithful Lover
followed
by a note on the author
The
Beautiful Informer
When the beautiful informer talks
in an inner room
on the blind side
of a two-way moon,
everything the hidden camera sees
and hidden mike records
is on the evening news.
And though our heroine
is relocated and given
a clutch purse full
of plastic and coin,
the story from Central
Intelligence is full of holes.
If you want her again,
Look under your boot-soles.
Las Vegas
Betrayal is the trail
from brothel to betrothed,
The heart a door,
which can open, which can close,
As now her eyelids,
heavy, bored; her hand
Over her eyelids, tanned
as only those with leisure can
Afford. She does not
love you anymore. You have
No power to hurt her now,
only – glancing at her watch –
To bore her by prolonging this,
who lounges on the Hollywood
Blond-modern couch
spike heels on the floor –
You bungled it, you bungler.
You fumble for the door.
Hasta
luego,
twelve-zero-zero thirty-three-and-a half
Buena Vista Drive.
Hasta luego, little white
Bungalows galore.
Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred
Crazily overdriving their headlights
across white desert sands you hear
A cacophony of distant horns.
For miles and miles
The stipple of white stucco casts
the shadow of its thorns.
©
Belle Randall was born in Ellensburg, Washington
in 1940, and was educated at the University of California, Berkeley,
Stanford University and the University of Washington, where
she obtained a BA, an MA in Poetry Writing and an MA in English
Literature, respectively. A resident of Seattle, Washington,
since 1980, Belle has taught for 23 years at Cornish College
of the Arts, and in the University of Washington extension writers'
program. She is Poetry Editor of Common Knowledge, an
interdisciplinary journal (from Duke University Press) based
in Jerusalem, and devoted to seeking peaceful means of resolving
conflicts, intellectual and political. Belle has one previous
book, 101 Different Ways of Playing Solitaire and Other Poems
(University of Pittsburg Press, 1973), and her most recent chapbooks
are Drop Dead Beautiful and True Love (Wood Works
Press, 1997, 2002). She has received the Inez Boulton Award
from Poetry Magazine (1961), a Wallace Stegner Fellowship
from Stanford University (1969), and a National Endowment of
the Arts grant in Poetry (2005-2007), and she was Jones Lecturer
in Creative Writing at Stanford University (1972).
