Cascando

simple to touch

simpler

        if not knowing

or caring not caring

but this cascando tonight

is no answer

there are white stars

& beyond them

a dawn

a brightness

there are black stars

& beyond them

an absence

an emptiness

        if we knew again

again we can't

there is only this

a nakedness

a nakedness words won't clothe

if we grow thin grow gaunt

they'll tell us we are in love

we grow thin grow gaunt

we have no love

Dick Russell
First published in Littack, 1974, edited by William Oxley

Pendants

Long ago   

I gave her earrings    silver pendants

she has not worn them

does she keep those earrings

will she wear them?

perhaps she'll wear them to a party
perhaps she'll look a little arty

or will she wear them
and nothing else?

if she wears them

she may keep them handy
 in her drawer
with several scarves

only put back     never selected

has she worn them?

if she wears them
would I notice?

Dick Russell
copyright (C) 2017

In Memoriam: Basil Bunting

            1

some images claw to light

from dark   climbing hand over hand

up from a cave to appear near a spring

surrounded by willows

while others grow like sycamore seeds

sown by trees

in an aerie eaglets shudder

while images claw

wingbeats shatter cold air

sunlight slanting through willows

shading horses standing in water

chestnuts and bays   Anglo Arabians

with a colt watching a stallion

mares standing deepest

conscious of a colt

that will toughen with time

an eagle circling the sun

up in the vega   eagles soar

where troubadours wandered

solitary men   that many might have helped

had had less pride

           2

And whose horses are these?

a stallion spurred away

by a black booted Spaniard in Andalusia

spooked by a muse swimming naked

in a pool under the falls

where sun boiled pebbles

make potatoes for a poet

    

and poetry wants to be naked with you...

bold words if spoken boldly

else pathetic   whispered by that sensitive

youth we grow tired of

grooming mares in imaginary fields

there are ways of working

like turning words on a wheel

in a spiral towards meaning

and there are ways of laying down tools

signifying    completion

                    

            3

  

Then owlet flew with slow wingbeats

from fence post to barn roof

rust dusted her talons

moon rose over Stonehaugh

yellow bloom in purple leaves

above black edge

                      (written near Ronda, Spain 1985

                      and at Roughside near Tarset

                     part 3 published in The Hexham Courant about 1971)

Jim McDermott on Justice 2008     

Well it’s been interesting

 It’s been a long time since I went to Baghdad and Basra.

Hey look at that eagle!

I often see eagles from this window.

Baghdad Jim I am, and will forever be, since then.

The media has stopped calling

I’ve been blacked out  

No more TV

No interviews.  You would have thought…

Why’s that?

What did I say to cause such offence?

I said there’d be no WMD, well they didn’t find any, and

I said Bush would make up a story to justify Iraq, and

I was right, going into Iraq was based on, oh well, let’s no go there.

It doesn’t pay to be right it seems.

That picture is out of true.

Lopsided. I’ll straighten it.

See that bamboo picture over there.

Bamboo bends: “the Buddhist ideal of a public servant”

Someone with strong ideals who can compromise without

Betrayal

Of course if the media would accept that our trip to Iraq was legit

There would be consequences, maybe, just maybe!?

Over 4,000 dead in the military shows there

Have been consequences, right?

I was born and raised in Chicago.

Some say I’m an Irish politician with the gift of the gab.

I think I’m a typical American with American values.

In politics I’m flexible, up to a point. 

I’ve always spoken up for freedom, ironic isn’t it?

Now it comes out that my trip was paid for by Saddam.

This Al-Hanooti guy they indicted, why now?

Seems like he spread his money around, gave some to

Bush, was photographed with Hillary.

What’s going on?

 This comes out now?

Could it be to hang around Hillary’s neck if she’s the Candidate?

But I don’t regret going. 

As the majority now agree, that war

Was a mistake and if I could have done more to stop it

I would have.

Then there’s the $1.1M I’ve had to pay off Congressman Boehner to wrap

Up that ten-year vendetta.  One point one

Million dollars in judgment

Boehner’s legal fees!

They were twice what I paid.  Was

I short changed by my legal team?!

Makes you think?

A million is a cheap price to pay for a

principle: freedom of speech.

I didn’t bend like bamboo that time. 

So Newt and Boehner were morally wrong; but

I pay a fine.  That’s interesting isn’t it?

If I’d had that tape read into the Congressional Record, all would have been fine.

But giving it to the press, who would have thought?

So what’s next for Baghdad Jim.

I want to get Healthcare sorted out next year.

Obama? Hillary? How will I vote?

I’ll do what I think’s best for the country.

Dick Russell, based on a fund-raising event at Rick Steve's Europe Through The Back Door in Edmonds, WA

Avoiding Saint Peter

and when I arrive at Saint Peter's gate

will I have to recite

            wevver the weather be fine

or whether the weather be not

            we'll weather the wevver

whatever the wevver

            whether we like it or not

to assess my social class and subsequent disposition

full fledged and flying free

from thicket to thicket

like a finch

I'll skirt Saint Peter's gate and fly

straight to the rafters of Heaven

where my feathers will gleam in the radiance

of fires far below

© Dick Russell

For Absent Friends

                  

    wine glasses

                                                                   remain   

                                                                                     amongst

                                                                         other objects   

                                                                            bereft

                                                                               of

                                                                            hands

                                                                       leave takings

                                                                     fond farewells

           

                                                        more urgent now to return

                                                            to that table

                                                                                those chairs

                                                                         those

                                                                              bottles

                                                                                of

                                                                             myth

                                                                       each return

                                                                   is another life

                                                               our myth is enriched

                                                         that table    those chairs

                                                        these glasses

                                                                     the touching of hands

                                                                           lips

                                                                         yet

                                                                      that place

                                                                does not detain us

                                                                        our eyes

                                                               carry it weightlessly

                                                                      recreate it

                                                                   in another time

                                                                     another place.

                                             copyright Richard Michael Friend Russell, 2014

                                                     an early version first published in

                                                     Lines Review 64, Midlothian,  1978
                                                               Editor: Robert R Calder

Beijing Taxis and How Business is really done in China

Nigel had sent me a Google map with directions to the hotel.  The Beijing taxi driver was a virtuoso performer.  I passed him the map.  He looked at it in a noncommittal way, shrugged, and handed it back to me.  As we went through the tollbooth to get onto the main highway he made a pantomime of paying the 10 Yuan toll with a 100-Yuan note and palming the excess change to make it look as if he had only been given a 50-Yuan note in return.  He made a point of waving that around so that I could see it.  Then he sped straight to the hotel, a fairly long drive on a surprisingly beautiful for Beijing, blue-sky day, without further comment.  So, when we arrived at the hotel and he pointed to the meter and passed back a convenient 50-Yuan receipt that he must keep on hand for these occasions I knew he was trying it on.  Even if I had not noticed the tollbooth performance his indignant, loud, “Wah?” when I asked him to make change for a 100-Yuan note would have alerted me.  Luckily, in Beijing there is always a policeman close by when you need one.  The one loitering in the courtyard took notice of the fracas and began to move towards us.  Beijing hotels used by foreigners always maintain uniformed guards and porters out in front to assist arriving guests and perhaps to help them pay off their taxis.  Two of these quickly intervened and straightened out the fare.  I ended up paying the correct 75 Yuan instead of 115, a saving of about six dollars.  Welcome to Beijing!

It was not as if we were on a mission to stamp out corruption in Asia; but, on most evenings when Nigel, Angie, and I were taking stock of that day’s meetings with one of the several resellers we were recruiting, the conversation would always come back to this topic.  Perhaps Nigel’s recent experience with winning a very large deal in South Korea had made him overly sensitive.  Government procurements in Korea are overseen by the Public Procurement Service (PPS).  PPS had made Nigel’s life a misery in the last few months.  They demanded justification for each line item’s pricing.  There were pages and pages of line items.  They adopted a guilty of corruption till proven innocent attitude towards all parties involved in this deal, worth more than $30M.  Five years earlier, I had won an even larger deal from the same customer with the aid of a Korean consultant.  It went through reasonably smoothly.  Perhaps times had changed in Korea.  A former Korean President had recently committed suicide by jumping off a bridge after being impugned by corruption charges.  Nigel wanted to be cautious.  Angie and I helped to keep him in a high state of alarm.

Angie was Nigel’s assistant.  Angie hated corrupt business practices and spoke about such matters with vehemence. Her father was an official in the Chinese government who was working to stamp out corruption in Xinjiang Province.  This was the province where conflicts between the Han Chinese emigrants and the local Muslim people had lately been in the news.  From the news stories, it appeared that the Chinese authorities were quite heavy handed in Xinjiang.  Nigel did not understand Chinese.  So it was Angie, who after listening closely to the Chinese business people talking among themselves during the day would usually peach on them later that evening.   The common theme was that they thought we Westerners had no idea of how business was really done in China.  Although she was raised in Shanghai she now had an offshore perspective on China and viewed Chinese business ethics through an objective lens that has been sharpened by life experiences in the U.S.  As for me, well let’s just say that I’m an old timer who handed over the territory to Nigel to manage.  I had done well in India and Korea winning some very large deals and fair to middling in Singapore and Malaysia but I never had any success in China.  It was interesting to see how Nigel was going about getting things going in China.

I got a sense of how business was really done when I went along with two of the Shanghai reseller’s young sales staff, Henry and James, one Friday afternoon to visit a prospective customer, an aeronautical design organization. When we arrived at the design center, a building that had once stood next to an airstrip, now being built over as part of Shanghai’s expansive urban development, we waited at the security gate for some time in order to be escorted inside.  It was hot.  I shed my tie while we waited.  My companions were informally dressed.  Henry needed no badge to enter this secure site being well known to guards and staff.  James and I both needed visitor’s badges.  Once admitted, Henry introduced me to the Director of the Computer Center, Yang Wu.  He called her the beautiful Director Yang in English to her face and she smiled.  She was indeed attractive, a tall young woman wearing grey slacks and a light green blouse.  Her handshake was firm and her intelligent brown eyes sparkled as she welcomed me to the Center.  She was responsible for providing all of the computer resources needed by the aeronautical design engineers who were engaged in designing commercial, not military, aircraft.  Apparently, funding existed to hire another 500 engineers and they were planning to move to expansive new quarters that were being built for them.  In the U.S. it is now unusual to flirt with women in the office, but a different ethic, more 1960s pre-feminist, seemed to prevail in China.  It was not clear, as Henry and the Lady Yang spoke together in Chinese, who was flirting with whom.  They kept their eyes on each other and looked as if they were more used to meeting socially out of the office than in this business environment.  Later, James, a young bachelor who complained of having no girlfriend, and was facing a long lonely weekend, seemed to hint that Henry had a way with the ladies and that he also had a habit of making presents to his customers.  She certainly seemed to have bought whatever Henry was offering although her interest in my sales pitch seemed academic.   As we left, I was struck by Henry’s badge-less jaunty passage through the facility as if he owned the place and by the respectful approach to the Lady Yang of a well dressed Chinese man, possibly an architect or visiting official, who was waiting to see her.

Nigel did not come with me on that visit that afternoon making the excuse that he had to be very careful which organizations he met because much of our company's technology required an export license and he was wary of the U.S. deemed export regulations.  Under deemed export rules just giving a technical presentation on product technology that would potentially need an export license is a deemed export!  However, everything that I saw that afternoon indicated that this customer had no trouble buying equipment from other U.S. companies like Dell, IBM, and HP.  I sensed potential business to be had there in the future when they moved into their new quarters and bought new hardware to outfit the place.  The key would be to leverage Henry’s relationship with the beautiful Lady Yang.  I took to calling her that when I wrote up my notes.   I remembered the legend of the Lady Yang from the Tang Dynasty who featured in a long poem by Po-Chu-Yi.  I once helped a Chinese friend of mine translate Po-Chu-Yi long ago.  In the legend, Lady Yang came to a sad end as troops revolted against the Emperor and hung her, his favorite concubine, from a tree.  Was post-Maoist China, enjoying its current economic boom, similar to the glories of the Confucian Tang Dynasty?  Was the massive construction that had transformed Shanghai’s skyline in the last ten years the stuff of future legend?

Nigel avoided dinner that evening as well.  James had arranged for me to meet with an official of the agency that designed spacecraft for China’s manned space program.   Anything to do with rockets that might launch weapons of mass destruction is taboo when dealing with a country like China that has not signed the nuclear disarmament treaty.  Nigel was concerned that even by talking to this official he might somehow blot his copybook.  This was a plausible excuse but I suspected the real reason was that he had wanted to make other arrangements that evening, a meeting he wanted to keep private.  And so it was, that James and I had a most enjoyable meal with teetotal but cigarette smoking Dr. Chung. 

Once, in the early days of, now defunct, Cray Research when it was a small startup company in Minneapolis, I had been instructed to give a visiting delegation from China a presentation on the Cray-1 vector supercomputer.  This was back in 1977 when the state-of-the–art in presentations was to use view foils, transparencies made using a photocopier or developed from camera film.  The next day I was visited by a Federal agent who wanted to know exactly what I had told and shown the Chinese.  I explained that the visitors had been most attentive to the details of each picture I put up that showed individual parts of the computer, like the back-panel wiring, and the modules that made up the computational section of the system.  What were those handles for?  Is that hole for airflow?  Questions like that.  I explained that they had such good technical knowledge that they were able to have an in-depth discussion with me about how the abstruse technique of vector processing worked, in contrast to a technique called pipelining that was used in another powerful machine made by IBM.  It had seemed curious to me that they knew so much about the IBM system because presumably IBM would not have been allowed to sell them a supercomputer, or would they? Had the Chinese gained access to the IBM supercomputer in some way?  When they left, the delegation gave me a gift, a small silk covered booklet that when opened displayed four, foldout pages of colorful Chinese stamps, depicting historic artifacts, personages and palaces.  The Federal agent listened attentively to all of this and went away.   I am not sure if I told him about the book of stamps!  I still have that stamp collection!  Some years later the Chinese announced that they had made a Chinese supercomputer, a system they called Galaxy.  Dr. Chung chuckled when he heard this story.  Had I kept their name cards, he asked?  He probably knew all of those guys I had talked to who then returned to China and built the Galaxy machine, a Chinese copy of the Cray-1.

We concluded the meal with Dr. Chung seeming to have agreed with James that he would soon start the wheels turning to justify buying one of our systems rather than one of the domestic systems that his agency typically used.  Once again, future business would seem to depend on the relationship between sales person and customer.  Chung was clearly coaching James on what steps must be taken to get this planned acquisition past the bean counters.

Had I kept the name cards of those Chinese visitors from thirty years ago it was likely those contacts would have been quite influential by now.  Nigel would no doubt object, fearing that if he just so much as talked to them he would be transacting a deemed export; but, as I saw it, a sales guy’s job is to get orders.  It is up to the company and export control authorities whether or not orders are accepted.  It is human nature that people will always find ways to get around the rules.  Or to help get rules made that will be to their advantage.

The scenario that worried Nigel the most was a warning Angie had passed on.   We needed to worry about the resellers hiding the real customers from us by using front companies.  According to Angie, it was likely we would get an order from a supposedly legitimate harmless entity via one of our resellers, only to have the equipment ultimately passed on, or delivered to, the Chinese military without a paper trail.  In fact, on the last day of our trip, we encountered exactly this scenario being proudly described to us by one of our Indian resellers at a meeting in Bangalore. As this reseller described it, the issue was that while the U.S. companies were bound by U.S. technology export laws their Indian-based subsidiaries did not appear to care beans about such laws and were now expert at finding ways around them.   Apparently the same was true in China.

Angie was explaining all this as we drove back to the hotel by taxi from a restaurant one evening.  Perhaps the driver was listing with rapt attention as well.  In any event, the driver had trouble finding our hotel.  Angie began berating the driver for not knowing the way and when we arrived at the hotel she paid him off by giving him only half of what was shown on the meter.  Beijing taxi drivers have a hard life!

END

A Race Against Time

Nigel, far more experienced in the East than I, was rubbing his wooden chopsticks together as if to sharpen their business ends.  Nigel is tall, about six eight, and has put on a lot of weight in the last few years.  He is a visible sign of Australian prosperity.  I’m not sure what the collective gasp I heard signified.  Was it a gasp of delight at an oncoming treat or a gasp of dismay?  Probably delight!  From behind my shoulder the waiter placed a platter on the table.   I looked into the gaping mouth and accusatory eye of another large fish cooked whole and this time served in a thin brown sauce speckled with spring onions.   Mine was a jaded eye.   Fish again!  I enjoy eating fish but it seemed as if every meal for several days  had involved a similar dish served as the centerpiece of the meal in Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and now Hanoi.

In Beijing, Nigel and I had spent one evening on our own and decided to eat in an Italian restaurant not far from the hotel. This had not been a success.  There was a Tibetan restaurant upstairs and when the Tibetan chef started singing some loud, slow, lament, as is apparently typical of homesick Tibetan chefs suffering from angst while preparing yak butter tea, the Italian restaurant responded by putting on a CD of Italian tenors singing famous arias while serving us steak and fries. This cultural war escalated for some time.  A memorable evening during which a main topic of conversation had been corruption, and its prevalence in the countries we were visiting where the common refrain is: “You just don’t understand how business is done.”  It was the same phrase we heard used in Beijing, in Shanghai, and in Bangalore.

They serve a lot of seafood dishes in Vietnam; but, according to Lionel, our host, the Vietnamese food is much better in California, ever since many Vietnamese refugees settled there after fleeing the Communists.   I’d been told that Lionel left Vietnam aged 19 and took three months getting to Hong Kong by small sailboat with three others, often landing at night on the Chinese coast.  He had subsequently made it to the U.S. where he became a U.S. citizen and a prominent scientist.  Now he was back home in Hanoi with big plans to distribute American  computers in Vietnam and improve Vietnam’s scientific computing infrastructure.  I tried to guess his age.  If Lionel had been 19 in the late 1970s at the time of the boat people he must be about 50 years old now.  His black hair was cut short and graying at the temples, but his face was unlined and his physique that of a younger man.

Lionel’s sister and his associates had stayed in Vietnam and not fled the country after North Vietnam conquered the South.  They understood Russian but not English and so the conversation was one-sided.  They had taken us to a local seafood restaurant where we were plied with beer, roasted peanuts, soup, clams, oysters, crab cakes, fish and green vegetables.  If Lionel typified a type of mad scientist prone to making outrageous statements about the veracity of colleagues with competing approaches to computational modeling, his sister beguiled with business acumen.  She spoke only in Vietnamese but probably understood a lot of the conversation in English.  She looked much younger than her brother.  She had a full head of dark hair and fashionable glasses and wore a blouse that showed a hint of cleavage, a knee length skirt and high heels.  She wore a ring on her right hand but no other jewelry.  She sat demurely watching the two foreigners talking to her brother and his business partner.  From time to time she would elegantly reach out with her chopsticks and put a morsel of something onto her plate.  As we got to know them better it became clear that she was the decision maker.  At our final meeting, this became very clear and she seemed to swell in size with our recognition of that fact, thrusting her shoulders back to emphasize her bosom as she commanded attention.  Sitting next to her at dinner that evening was a tall, quiet, mysterious, fellow who turned out to be the financial strength of the proposed venture.  He actually lived in Hong Kong to run his business involving Chinese medical instruments imported from China for sale in Vietnam.   We didn’t see him again after that evening because he flew off to China the next day on business.  It was his large Mercedes car that picked us up outside the restaurant to return us to his hotel.

Lionel explained that the fish were not as good as they used to be in his childhood when there were fish in the rice paddies and every farmer could be self sufficient year round with rice and fish from his own farm.   I got the impression that Lionel remembered his childhood before the American bombing of Hanoi as an idyllic time.  Now all of those organic rice paddies were poisoned with fertilizer that had killed the fish.  Yet from our spanking new hotel situated on the edge of a lake I saw somebody catch a fish from the bank and reel it in.   A lot of anglers had lines out into the water and so, even there, in the middle of Hanoi in September 2009, fresh fish were still to be had.  That first evening I enjoyed the clams the most.   Some deftness with chopsticks is required to ease a clam from a steamed-open shell, touch it to a little salt in a saucer and then raise it into the mouth.   This is also true when eating peanuts, often served as a side dish in Vietnam.  Etiquette dictates, I learned later, after leaving Vietnam, that food should not be taken from a serving bowl such as a bowl for clams, or peanuts, and put straight into one’s mouth; nor, and this was given especial importance, should you rub your chopsticks together as if to sharpen them.  I think on reflection that when my dining companions were complimenting me on my use of chopsticks and my rapid consumption of food, they were actually covering up their embarrassment at my poor display of table manners.

At least the Vietnamese chopsticks were wooden and much easier to manipulate than the stainless steel chopsticks used in South Korea.  My host in Seoul had been another self-made businessman, Mr. Kim.  I had concluded Kim was an honest, if a difficult, even cantankerous, individual.  As the days passed it seemed there was something fishy about our prospective Vietnamese partners.  Comments made during our visit indicated that they had paid money to arrange the most important meeting with Government officials that we were to have.   Lionel let this slip on the last morning and was rewarded with some sharp sentences in Vietnamese addressed to him by his sister.  There was also the unexplained reason why we had been driven out to a new business park outside Hanoi in order to be briefed by a senior Government official on the attractions of investment in the park.  We were visiting Hanoi to set up Lionel and his colleagues as a reseller for an American company’s products.  By what stretch of the imagination was he going to succeed at such a rate that we would be leasing prime development land outside Hanoi for a factory?  It could be that our hosts misunderstood the size of our company.  The exchange rate of dollars into Vietnamese currency quickly produced hotel bills in the millions of dong.  Perhaps we had been mistakenly given the attributes of a company 10 or 100 times bigger than we were.  When one dollar equals roughly 5.6 times ten to the minus 5^th power Vietnamese currency, mathematical mistakes are easy to make.

We knew we were having an important meeting two days later when we were conducted into an imposing building that had big rooms.  The standard building size in Hanoi appears to be a narrow, tall, building with rooms that measure three meters from side to side.  It is a healthy country where climbing upstairs to the top or fourth or fifth floor of a building is normal.  Lionel’s office was on the fourth floor of such a building.  Now, we found ourselves in a large conference room with a table that easily accommodated ten people on each side sitting with lots of elbow-room.  This shiny wooden table had a central, sunken well that ran almost its full length.  Five large bouquets of fresh flowers spaced well apart had been placed in the well in beautiful pots.  They were large bouquets, but because of the tables’ design, they did not interfere with eye contact between parties on either side of the table.  Instead, they contributed almost to a feeling of sitting around a small, intimate garden.

It was in this ambience that we began Nigel’s presentation.  Lionel had requested we give a strong product presentation about our computers being the best for weather forecasting and about our dominant market position worldwide.  In particular, he wanted Nigel to stress why we were so much better than IBM!  Instead, Nigel recycled a talk he had given before.  Its theme could be summarized as: “It’s About Staying in Front! – Every R&D Project is a Race against Time.”  He would speak a few sentences and a translator would then summarize what he had said in Vietnamese.  The audience’s attention quickly waned.   These were bureaucrats, hydrologists, and meteorologists.  They were not interested in R&D.  They wanted to know how to better track the typhoon that was currently ravaging the Philippines and was even now headed towards Vietnam.  Perhaps this was why Lionel interjected himself in the midst of Nigel’s oratory, when Nigel was still up at geosynchronous weather satellite level giving a high level global overview and had yet to descend to mundane specifics.  Once started, Lionel hogged the floor for a good ten minutes and we had little idea of what he was saying.  I assumed it was all of the things, not necessarily true, that Lionel had hoped Nigel would say.  When Nigel was finally allowed to proceed, he continued with the interrupted talk full of generalities leading to the point that: “it’s a race against time!”

I sat quietly, noting the bad signs evident from body language and the occasional remarks being thrown at the speaker.  A group at my end of the table far from the screen had started to make disparaging comments.  They were the mostly young, computer experts who had been especially invited to the meeting.   The Director smiled benevolently at them.  It appeared to me that they had taken umbrage with Lionel’s remarks and were now getting ready to send out for rotten fruit to throw at Nigel and Lionel.  They were the proud users of a recently acquired IBM computer. 

Finally, a woman scientist, the head of the meteorology applications group, could stand it no longer.  She stood up and asked a specific question in excellent English: “Please tell us: What size system would be able to run a 5 kilometer regional weather model with 60 levels, 37 time-steps and a 20 minute time to completion?”  In other words, how can you solve our problem?  If a typhoon is headed towards Vietnam and you want to forecast its likely track and where and when it will hit the coast you need to quickly run many instances of the type of model she had just described.  I felt chagrined.  This was a real race against time and what we were talking about was irrelevant.  Lionel was furious about the question.  Next day when we were wrapping up in our final meeting before heading for the airport, he let slip having paid for the meeting and told us that we should not worry about her question.  “She is an unimportant person.   You just don’t understand how business is done in Vietnam.  The decision will be made above her and you don’t need to worry about it at all.” 

Nigel far more experienced in the East than I sighed wearily at this and tried to explain how even if what Lionel said was true, the users could ensure any new system coming in was a failure if they were not supportive and inclined to be antagonistic.  It would be much better to deal with the distinguished lady scientist’s objections and win her over.  In fact, Nigel knew how to do this.  He had checked and found that she was working on a PhD from a university in Australia and that her advisor was somebody that Nigel knew well.  “Yes,” said Nigel, sitting back in his chair, “that guy owes me a big favor.  I’ll get him to put her straight.”

Love Poet: Neo-Latent

                                   

                                    Putting pennies on a railway line

                        got a bigger thinner penny

                                                molded to the rail

                        made a necklace I love you

            an ivory necklace so white

                        & so white

your smile & chimerical

            grottoes & pearl light ending the night

            O all your lures

of mind & matter but nothing reward           

            as your loose pile of flesh

                        so modern & complex

            on along the stone is rolling

leaving phrases flattened on the tar

            macadam

            at this spot said             I am

                        (an orange, falling

                                    purple, green & vivid black)

            here I said            I live

                        I lie            I lay             I loll

tension:            champagne & cork

            I have no money

                        echoes from the vault

                                    the stone rolls back

leave the sepulchre

            come to America

                        where going each day to the

                                    abominable office of foxy & poxy...

            statisticians

make a fortune

            a white cardboard sky

                        trimmed perfectly to match the jagged horizon

made love in the kitchen

            a metronome ticking

                        you make up good stories

                                                she said

Dick Russell

(from Wolfprints)