Elisavietta Ritchie   IN TRANSIT Coming from somewhere else at any age, even in utero, you're never sure your feet touch the soil. Your whole life you hover-- hawk, helicopter or fat dirigible, fearful someone might poke a hole, light a match-- You hang in there, up there, wondering will they finally grant permission to land or forever challenge your passport, check your fingerprints, discount your money, question could you survive as a stranger? Best stay suspended, forget the keys to the town. Here, the air is dangerous, cold, wind currents tricky, but God, what a view.   INUA "The Eskimos believed that the inua of an animal enjoyed being hunted with a beautiful implement." --William W. Fitzhugh, National Geographic, Vol. 163, No. 2, February 1983 The spirit of the walrus yearned for the flung harpoon to bear the finest carver's mark his own father's tusk incised with lines and eyes to hold the blade the beauty of the tool made pursuit itself an art death a pleasure his inua would find inside an unborn animal a future home       Martha Tabor Swing Low curly willow, hickory, poplar, found netting, 48" x I44"x 36 (I996) see more work by Martha Tabor   AFTERMATH After the black snake slithers into the bluebird house, swallows his prize, bursts out the roof, wrecks the box, he leaves on the lawn the nest woven of moss, grass, down plucked from the mother's breast, and, glistening in the sun, his shed skin. I have known men like this.   QUESTIONS, ASSUMPTIONS Who knows if she's sweet or mean, that wrinkled woman in shapeless black stirring soup for the child, if she was a general's widow, or mistress, whether she lost her virginity with tenderness or by force to a dashing lad in a flowering grove or a whole platoon in the mud. Or if the old man nodding over his bowl was the one or one of the ones, if he marched on to raze a village or home to tend his chickens and cows. Was this house in his family for generations or just occupied when its owners fled or died in the yard? The town was destroyed. What lies under fields beyond? The child spoons the soup. "But where did I come from?" "You were a gift of God," they respond. "Or, the gods. An elf found you under a berry bush." They quiz him on sums and saints, complain the storm is prying the shutters off, then, mulling their own recollections without speaking, finish the soup. Is he foundling, or grandchild, of the clan or alien blood? War weaves shrouds of silence around corpses and quick alike. We back away from the window, refasten the shutter, disappear into the storm. The fragrance of soup and blood clings to our clothes.   APPEARANCES, PATUXENT RIVER You'd say, they are real: the child digging clams in wet sand at low tide, the boat in the cove, two canvasbacks overhead. The man fires from the boat, ducks fall into their shadows. The glint of a winch makes the boat seem substantial but the sun will climb into a cloud, the boat spiral in waves and sink. The child, who dreamed herself somewhere and someone else, also may vanish, perhaps in the tide, or she will go home, where they will dress the ducks, undress her, and whether she eats the ducks or the fish eat her, one or the other disappears.     Elisavietta Ritchie's new manuscript Awaiting Permission to Land won the 2001 Anamnesis Poetry Award. In Haste I Write You This Note: Stories & Half-Stories was a winner in the Washington Writers' Publishing House's premiere fiction competition (2000). Flying Time: Stories & Half-Stories (1992 & 1996) includes four PEN Syndicated Fiction winners. Among her poetry collections are: The Arc of the Storm; Elegy for the Other Woman: New and Selected Terribly Female Poems; Tightening the Circle Over Eel Country (which won Great Lakes Colleges Association's 1975-76 "New Writer's Award"); Raking the Snow (which won the Washington Writers Publishing House 1981-82 competition); and two small novellas-in-verse: Timbot and Wild Garlic, and Wild Garlic: The Journal of Maria X. She edited The Dolphin's Arc: Endangered Creatures of the Sea. Published in Volume 3, Number 4, Fall 2002.   To read more by this author: Ritchie on Betty Parry: Memorial Issue Ritchie on John Pauker: Forebears Issue