Leonard Wallace Robinson was the author of two novels: The Assassin (World, 1968; New American Library, 1970) and The Man Who Loved Beauty (Harper and Row, 1976; New American Library, 1977). His short stories were published in Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, New Letters, and many other magazines, and in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Martha Foley's annual collections of Best Short Stories, and other anthologies. He served as reporter and writer for The New Yorker, Managing Editor of Esquire, and Executive Editor for Holt, Rinehart, Winston (formerly Holt and Company).

Title poem:

In The Whale

In my turquoise sweater, disgruntled
that I was so late, I left my house
in Mexico this morning and stepped
into a crystal light and was caught
like a blue plum in bright sugar
water, caught in open sunlight, but
down the street under the shade of
that great tree by the underground
water, the river that feeds our town,
was a boy much farther along toward
total saturation than me; he was in
a sharp brown-green condition, the
razor light limning him (God alone
knows how through all that shade)
still as a stone against the cheviot
wall, his back and right foot up,
supporting him, his peaked cap in
that actinic rain drenched in mottled
clarities. And just behind him in
full sun, like me, a Mexican woman in
a blue rebozo, with a basket of tomatoes
on her head, overfull, plunges down
the hilly path full tilt right into
the shade and turns into slow-motion
damson-blue with light coming through
and strawberry top, and then a white
dog is sucked into the emulsion, gives
up, lies down, and now I, electrified,
magnetic, am drawn over into the jellied
shade, plunge in, and sun surrounds and
shade engulfs all four and now we hang
all motionless together in this morning
miracle, leviathan, force field of grace.

Many thanks.