Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

2001

September
Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream
September 2001

Winds of autumn, as I walk'd the woods at dusk I heard

your long-stretch'd sighs up above so mournful.

— Walt Whitman "Children of Adam"

 WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 22 Number 8 September, 2001
Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher
Thomas Perry, Admirable Factotum

c o n t e n t s
Will Inman 4-6 Charles Pierre 12 Susanne Olson 19
Fredrick Zydek 7 Herman Slotkin 13 Arthur Winfield Knight 20
James Penha 8 John Grey 14-16 Kit Knight 21-22
Geoff Stevens 9 Ida Fasel 17 Albert Huffstickler 23-27
Lyn Lifshin 10-11 Joanne Seltzer 18

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Walt Whitman (1881)
Feinberg-Whitman Collection
Library of Congress).
sometimes a breath — will inman

sometimes a breath of wind can reach

dark to winter or down a million years

to the end of earth.

sometimes a poet

or a postman can look up and know

down his spine what wind foretells:

being told doesn't always take words

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what's known in me i cannot prove — will inman

the brown electric blanket i sleep under napping

or, deeper, at night — when flung aside, becomes
a sleeping bear, snout extended toward my
pillow, she
sleeps soundless. when i return to bed,
i pull her stretched skin over me, her dugs trembling with
original warmth, which i suck through my pores
like mother-milk.
she does not growl nor threaten.
our old enmity turns close and calm when i lie under her
wrapped in brief recall of her winter sleep,
snowed in and cubs-companioned.
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 a casually folded
towel takes on features of an old shaman, with hooded
eyes, wide mouth skin drawn high over cheekbones.
shaman watches with father-keen eyes, harkens with
mother ears. she does not warn me of the bear, but he
cautions me about tricky eyes, that i see with a dark
growing from in. but i
know what i seem to see:
earlier days accompany my ancestral memories
that lurk in me where i remain wary of denying
what's known in me i cannot prove.

First published in The Lucid Stone #26, summer 2001

6
 A Chill to the Bones
Fredrick Zydek
It's been raining since early autumn.
The slate tiles on the roof
glisten like polished ebony, have
endured, too long, the dark pursuits
of rain that chills the bones.
There are bloated earthworms
in every puddle and pond,
pink testaments to what drowns
when the rain keeps talking until
it has no more secrets.
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I stare into the fire, wait for shadows
to warm my bones, to sluff off
the pose of another long wet winter.
There were no leaves to shuffle
through this year. The rain turned
them to pus - slick dangers for anyone
dumb enough to be out walking.
Odd how a single drop of rain makes
the same noise as the backdoor
when it clicks shut for the night.
 Without You I — James Penha

Without you I Even this poem had to wait

expect the worst: until you returned.
loss of contact,
abduction, car wreck, plane crash, I am not myself
heart attack, without you.
(yours then mine),
a reheated frankfurter on white toast
at suppertime.
Later an abundance of microwave popcorn
for a Shakespeare video
when I keep missing the dialogue and so stop
at web sites tangling
with other liars avoiding dreams
that come to bed.

8
Hark No More — Geoff Stevens

Hark, no more the mournful sighs

of autumnal winds above the woods,
but the continuous hissing of rain.
Through global warming,
the crisp, dry breezes are no more
and Whitman's children of Adam
once more wait the Ark.

9
Missing Blues Panic — Lyn Lifshin

'breaking' up a
woman with raven but the dark wood
hair writes her holding me,
from the west exchanging it for
a flesh cove
coast. She says
living alone is without the blue
terror, shaking stain of mulberries,
as I'm dazed in the musk of darkness
that drifts up, braids
the east, terrified
too but not of the house's skin
living alone, of to my skin
leaving not arms

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Flu — Lyn Lifshin paws sprinted over
my face, rubbed my
sneaks in like throat and skin to
in thru the smallest roses. The colder
chink. You never outside, the deeper
notice the moment in me he burrowed,
it starts to next kissing my forehead,
in your blood, tears
bits of energy into rumpling the pillow.
its own quilt, steals When I pretend to sleep
any grain of oomph. it sits on my nose,
I couldn't run, it spreads a tent of
Kleenex as if, confined
skittered faster. I with each other
was half dead. When I could love this
I tried to sleep,

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 House — Charles Pierre

The attic is emptied of past attachments,

even of dust that lent a smoothness to the touch.

Nothing now but naked space: unplaned rafters

slanting downward, splintered planking underfoot,

the rooms below completely stripped

of anything to lean upon,

my family gone beneath the waves—

beyond the touch of any hand.

I stand alone in the cellar,

amid the beams and cinder blocks,

looking about without a plan,

my eyes alive to the vacant air.
12
 Remembrances — Herman Slotkin

I am an old album of remembrances

in which are pictures of Eleanor and Franklin,
and Aunt Ada offering me half an apple,
the sight of Mama sitting doll-dead,
the feel of forced separation from wife and life,
the prides and wounds of work,
births, maturations, marriages.

But I am the last of my family.

When I forget, there is no one to ask.
When I die, who will remember?

13
Our First Version — John Grey

Watching from the bedroom window,

we saw the distant funeral
stumbling toward the cemetery,
coffin in hand.

My mother later related

how she knew the man,
reduced his life
to a few passive-verbed sentences.
She attended with my father,
remarked on the beauty
of the flowers,
and how good it was to see people
she hadn't seen in years.

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From our telescope,
the ribbon of cars
swaying slowly west
was not about lives
or beauty or even human contact.
Death was something more to plot,
to trace to the horizon
where it disappeared through
Oak Hill's rusty gates.
I only know it did not look sad
or terrifying,
more like the spoor of some strange animal
whose food supply ran out here
and that had gone searching for succor
in those far-off shreds of cloud,
the soft red rooftops,
the string of purple mountains
doused in pale, restrained light.

Did dying seem less cruel

from that distance?
Or was it light relief
for small boys
weaned on the potential to amuse
of all strange and moving things?

15
 Pine Grove — John Grey

It was a brand new the trap, flapping pointlessly

development, named for what into their own dark drowning.
was here before it. It was some three weeks after

It was the third house his wife said, they would

on the fourth street, both both be very happy here,
house and street so new the day before he had to

you could still smell drag his son in from the front
the razed forest. yard where the kid was staring at
He was reading an article all the other lightless houses.

about dolphins caught in "Soon you'll have neighbors,"

tuna nets, could imagine he'll say warmly, like
mammals, struggling against that's a good thing.

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 Circling the Seasons — Ida Fasel
Morning air begins to have a bite to it.
Trees widen their arms to let in sky.
We turn lights on earlier, earlier.
Where is the line that precisely
marks off the changing season?
Who saw the first leaf fall?
Nomads roam the flagstones, herd
together under the locust, cove
with cones round rampart evergreens.
A few marigolds resist going under
for shelter, blaze Van Gogh bright
yellows and oranges in the cold.
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Winter slides softly on stage,
dimly visible, fumbling props in place
like an apprentice between scenes
of theater-in-the-round. Air
is flaked with tentative snow.
Six green leaves still hang
on a branch, late, vital, lingering
like me: never the garden over
and done with, always the glimpse
of violet stipends in the wings.
Voices — Joanne Seltzer

After I am dead
you will walk along the street
and feel a sudden gust
of wind against your face
and sighs will stir the trees
on that quietest of days
and you will hear me say,
"I love you Ed."

There are voices of the throat

and voices of the heart
and voices in the heads
of those who are obsessed,

there are voices on the page

that do not age.
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 Hawks — Susanne Olson

Two red-tailed hawks

draw in majestic flight Unreachable and lofty, weightless
effortless arcs around Bee Rock. yet of indomitable strength, the hawks
They soar, one with the gentle wind, are my own silent yearning for boundless
float as part of the sky. liberty, freedom from life's
heavy burden, serene eternity.
A few strong strokes of their wide
wings, and they glide endlessly
above the mortal land. Their flight
paths cross but do not touch.
In double motion separate and free
they weave their lives in one design
but trace each circle on their own.

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 James Dean: The Old Country — Arthur Winfield Knight
I watched her go. She was wearing high heels and a pleated Pendleton skirt and her
burnished hair hung down over her shoulders. It was just before the coming of complete
night. I watched her step down from the curb and get into the Buick that seemed too big
for her. Watched her light a cigarette while the car idled, her hand shaking. The tip of
the cigarette glowed when she inhaled. I wondered if she was still crying. She'd told me
her mother wanted her to date someone respectable. Someone Italian. Someone Catholic.
A nice boy, like Frankie Sinatra. Or Vic Damone. Someone she could have bambinos with.
I hated crooners. Pier's voice had been carried away by the wind as we stood on the porch
in front of my apartment. The sky over the Hollywood Hills was red, but there were
always fires during the summer. Pier had said, “I hate my mother, but I can't disobey her.
It's the way I was raised, Jimmy. Things are different in Italy. You have to understand.”
We were living in the freest place on earth, but we might as well have been in the Old
Country. I waited for her to wave, but she didn't look back as she drove away beneath the
burning sky.

20
Not True at All, 1919 — Kit Knight

I'm 90 and not the least bit

silly. The fool was right
when he wrote that Lincoln
as a young lawyer rented a room
in our house. Of course
Abe knew my sister; he knew
me, our dad, the neighbors, and
he knew Ann's fiance. And
everyone mourned
when Ann died. But,
there was no romance
—ever—between Abe
and my sister. I remember
Abe calling steps

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for a barn dance. “Now
swing your pardner,
skin the coon and
turn him wrong side out!”
And he never even danced
with Ann. Years passed;
he was elected President.
Steadily, Lincoln led
this country through
four of the worst years
in history; over 600,000 men
died in The Civil War.
They wore blue and gray
and blood. Lincoln was shot
in 1865 and several books
22
were rushed into print
defining the leader who said,
"I shall do nothing in malice;
what I deal with is
too vast for malice."
Lincoln's old law partner
was the fool who insisted
Lincoln had been in love
with Ann and remained
heart broken. The fool
told the world
Lincoln's mournful face
was because of my sister's
death. It's not true.
It's not true at all.
Woman in Long Dress — Albert Huffstickler

I imagine my head
beneath her skirt,
the warmth
the briney sweetness
of her smell.

First published in Twisted Savage, issues 3&4 Tampa FL 1996

23
The Passing of Our Days — Albert Huffstickler

The day Jack, my younger brother,

came to tell me he was leaving
I was living on Singer Island
in Florida in a motel room
writing a dirty book. At the
time I was still hoping that
something would happen with
JoAnn but it never did. I was
drawing a lot then too. My
mother lived across the peninsular
in Ft. Myers. Jack, who lived in
Alabama, had had a cerebral hemorrhage
and was lying in the hospital
while the doctors decided whether
to risk an operation or not.
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I'd called the day before and
they thought he was doing better.
Then that day about noon with
the huge high Florida sun above
and the palm trees swaying just
the way they should and everything
doing exactly what it was supposed
to be doing, I came out of the
Ranch House café where I had
had a hamburger and was going
back to my motel room to type
my daily 15 pages and I had
just opened the car door when
I felt him. It was like when
you sense someone standing
behind you and you know who it
25
is before you turn around. He
was there. And he said "Well,
I'm leaving. You'll have to
take care of Pearl." Pearl
was my mother. And he
lingered another moment or
two and then he was gone and
I stood there shaken. It was
like someone had reached through
all my walls and touched my
living heart. Later, I’d
remember how much love there
was around me at that moment
but only later. At the time,
it was all I could do to pull
myself together and drive back
to my room and, for want of
anything better to do, type
my fifteen pages. You see,
it was too nebulous to follow
up on. And what could I do —
call home, and freak everyone
out by asking if he's died?
No, there was nothing to do
so I typed my fifteen pages and
drew some and later went out
to supper and came home and went
to bed. I wasn't sure what I
was doing on Singer Island in
the first place besides waiting
for JoAnn who wasn't coming
and writing a dirty book which
26
was how I made my living then.
So I went to bed and drifted off
to sleep wondering what to do
next. It seemed that a great
deal of my life had been spent
like that — wondering what to do
next. And then about three
in the morning, just as I knew
it would, the phone rang and it
was my brother-in-law telling
me that Jack had died in the
night. So the next day, I got
up, packed everything and moved
back across the island to my
mother's and stayed with her
while my sister and brother-
in-law drove up to Alabama
for the funeral. And so I
stayed there at my mother's
for a couple of months till I
was sure she was O.K., finished
the dirty book I was working on
and then one day, for no
apparent reason except that I
never could handle Ft. Myers
for very long, I packed my
car and moved back to Austin
where I met a new bunch of
people and a whole lot of things
happened that are not germaine
to this particular narrative.
And it was only years later that
27
I saw JoAnn again and by then
everything had cooled down. She
was mostly fantasy anyway, kind
of a dream that had risen
there in Florida sunlight
backed by swaying palms and
a medley of those Hawaiian-type
songs that you don't remember
long enough to learn the words
except that all of them have
Aloha in them somewhere, usually
several times.
First published in Parting Gifts
Greensboro NC, V.9 No. 1, Summer '96
 For 2002’s monthly themes, we look at lines excerpted from poems which appeared in Waterways,
February, 1983 (vol. 4, no. 2) when we published a celebration of Greenwich Village.

January, 2002 (deadline December 1, 2001):

I, for one (and others probably)
didn’t even know that I was there,
having gone to the Cedar Street
at different times of day
for talks with charlatan poets and editors,
late breakfasts with a crazy and bizarre Australian pornographer,
beers with fellow NYU mediævalists;
and we were all unaware
of action-painting, spilling and swirling around.

— John Burnett Payne, Sometimes a Name

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