Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

20th Anniversary
1999

February
Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream
February 1999

Centrifugal power, expanding universe

within expanding universe, what stillnesses
lie at your center resting among motion?

from The Gyroscope

THEORY OF FLIGHT (1935)
Muriel Rukeyser
 WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 20 Number 2 February, 1999
Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher
Thomas Perry, Assistant
contents
Joy Hewitt Mann 4-7 David Michael Nixon 17
Will Inman 8-9 Pearl Mary Wilshaw 18
Geoff Stevens 10-11 Veva Dianne Lawson 19-20
Barbara Sax 12-13 Lyn Lifshin 21-23
Terry Thomas 14 Albert Huffstickler 24-28
Kristin Berkey-Abbott 15-16

Waterways is published 11 times a year. Subscriptions -- $25 a year. Sample issues -$2.60 (includes
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© 1999, Ten Penny Players Inc.
I Have Heard the Screaming of the Wind
Joy Hewitt Mann

I have come to soundless streets

to escape him, wary, knowing the hundred
wrong ways I can turn; standing mannikin
to mannikin as he floats up the glass.
The wind grasps the awnings; potted saplings
twist away. I tell her to be quiet.
The most important thing is quiet,
knowing that neighbours are eyeless, ears
in their feet. Rising, I flow through the pane,
enter that silent window-woman.
There is no hurt if I am not involved,
though the air may scream.

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 In Search of Libra
Joy Hewitt Mann
The smell of last night’s perfume and must
on the sheets;
hair sings absonant and eyes
crease with puzzled agony.
I have promised myself, not this time;
I have promised myself, every time.
But the limbs line up
so nicely
and the eyes are so
blue
and the night has a way of sucking you hollow,
letting in aloneness --
space sans stars.
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Looking for the Madstone
Joy Hewitt Mann

The incense of her burning hair

rises like a potent genie.
Pulling more grey strands from the linty brush
she lays them in the tray to save
for tomorrow. Her nails
are dark with imbedded dirt
and she laughs
comparing them to the yellowed ones
bedded in the garden.
Under her pillow is a scrap of paper.
She irons it each Thursday, knowing
a name will be written there
one day. And if
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she stares in the mirror long enough
his face
will appear. It
will be round like hers,
the hair a distinguished gray,
the eyes scored with lines, the jaw
rigid
and the cheeks a little
tear-stained.

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light speeds almost as swift
will inman
light speeds almost as swift as ultimate
stillness, that infinite calm is fastest of all,
waking in every center at once.
listen to those
furthest reaches, hark steep to your own center
where far hurtling rims of universes are at home,
laying their eggs down you, rife
with black holes, sunbursts, foetuses of galaxies
and great random swirls of dust and meteors
charged fertile with god’s chaos.
it’s all in you,
how much a stranger are you to your own benevolent
distances? fly
those hungry closenesses, surf
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those beyond-fathomings with the divine poise
of laughter, god is enemy only to glib
expectations: you be the one who rainbows your
necessary death with knowing all one being
can receive naked and delve in this infinite
arm-reach of one lifetime.
we cannot blame god
for our one-time mortality: god dies and dies
and dies and keeps coming alive again screaming
out of fresh mothers, creating her around her pain
and her child’s shaping. we, each of us, incarnation
of that waking awakener, we look in to one another’s
faces and see all of time shining in our eyes

how that wave mounts us we mount that wave

7 October 1998 Tucson

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Earth
Geoff Stevens

We are clinging on
in the hope that you may cease
to whirl upon your axis,
stay the passage of time
before our hair has gone grey,
our bones brittle, breath bad,
our brain churned of all reason.
We hold onto a hope for miracles.

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 Spin Doctor Wanted
Geoff Stevens

Centrifugal power, acting on

a universe of diverse matter,
spinning in interactive orbits,
while at its very center,
one lone sock is motionless,
as pants, towels, bras,
blouses and skirts, tangle
in an orbit of asteroids,
caught up in a washday turmoil,
like the rings of Saturn.

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Maytag
Barbara Sax

so the big investment today

a washing machine
let me tell you this isn’t just any washer
this is the new state of the art
maytag
neptune
comes with a video narrated by
the TV maytag man
what is most exciting
it washes it rinses it drains
that’s best
it drains
the old whirlpool refused the draining part
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this new machine is a landmark for energy saving
saves water detergent electricity
sounds like a 747 picking up speed on the runway
takes humungous loads
the dryer next to it just chuckled
won’t even try to keep up with its new young mate
possibly
this washer will outlive me

13
Possibilities
Terry Thomas
and a fan could be a gyrator,
When she said,
an expectorator
“Keep the elbow away from the fan,”
or a spectator to
I thought,
an event which is constituted
I’ll put it any damn place I want!
to entertain and generate (or)
Then I thought:
a profit--
You don’t know who she is --
(I don’t either);
(I’m a believer.)
elbow could be me or macaroni --
(it’s neither);

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 Darwinian Conundrums
Kristin Berkey Abbott
What mad impulse
drove that first prehistoric cow
to ignore
evolution,
to lumber
back into the sea?

Maybe it grew tired

of land based gravity.
Maybe it missed the sensation
of grace provided
by salt water.
Maybe it could sense
its bovine destiny.
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Faced with chewing cud,
being milked,
and ending up as hamburger,
the choice makes sense.
To leave the weight of the land behind,
to return to aquatic life,
cuddled by the tides,
surrounded by the bright wallpaper
of tropical fish -
what animal wouldn’t crave
these sleek, sensual surroundings?
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Two separate existences.
The dull domesticity of the cow,
the bright intelligence of the dolphin.
That first cow who turned its back
on its evolutionary duty
deserves accolades.
What foresight.
How would our world be changed
if a prehistoric chimp
had waded back into the water?
 Diver
David Michael Nixon

To leap
above the pool
and fall through air that shines
as bright as water in hard sun:
no splash!

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Waltz of a Point
Pearl Mary Wilshaw
A point, planar,
moved,
displayed a trail
became linear.
Heedless of constraint
it bounded about,
veered off course, went
askew to continue along
a curvilinear path.
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Challenged at a
turning point,
the line segment
abandoned its goal
to remain rectilinear
and adapted itself
to edging about
in circular orb, past
the hemicyclic stage,
back to its point of
origin becoming
a closed curve,
configured, a basic
geometric shape...
the sacred symbol of
perfection.
 Uncertainty
Veva Dianne Lawson

At any point in time, an electron’s

speed or its location can be measured,
but not both.
Merely observing the infinitesimal
object causes it to change its behavior.
Scientists are not even sure how to
explain if it actually exists
since it seems to come into being
only upon careful observation.
The principle is uncertainty.

I draw my words with sharp pen and dull knife

to carve out and explain an infini-
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tesimal piece of existence, to describe
with some accuracy, a feeling,
an exquisite pain, even joy. And just
when I think I have it, it whirls out of reach.
It is truth, but only for a moment,
certainly not the whole truth. It is real
to me, but I fear it is not even
close to reality.

So I grit my teeth and try.

I can give you its location or its speed,
but not both.

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 Now She’s on Monet’s Lane
Lyn Lifshin

She pictured a yard of poppies, saw the house at night and it

was ok, it was the name of the street that got her, even if
arthritis twisted her fingers, even if it hardly made sense to
unpack her pallets and easel she’d have a street on her card
she could live with. Forget the illustrators, the so cute designs
she made money doing, waiting for the time when she could paint

what she wanted to. Maybe she thought, packing up the photo
graphs and pottery, for the 7th move in 11 years, in a state less
humid and wet her joints wouldn’t swell like her husband’s rage
at the last daughter, the one they’d paid so for a private high
school and then she drops out of college and takes up with the
first boy, another drop out with a job that won’t go anywhere
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and they’re sure is on drugs, bad enough for any father but
for one in the FBI. My neighbor had had it, never sure each house
won’t be pulled from under her, but things will be different now.
On Monet’s Lane the light will be perfect, the stillness of flowers,
nothing louder than the purr of a cat. Someone tells her of a town
named for the painter that isn’t anything like what she’s supposed,

an abandoned mine town surrounded by dying farms. No poppies,

no women with parasols, no green blue water, no regatta, no
Argenteuil, just a diner, Monet’s Diner. And some trucks with
the name in red letters. But on her Monet’s Lane, my old neighbor is
expecting shimmery afternoons, none the same but all luminous
as the dazzle of light on the cathedral at Rouen or the garden

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of Tuileries and if she doesn’t paint, she’ll be surrounded by a
beauty better than paintings. Everything will be new, like a honey
moon again. Everything will be light on Monet’s Lane, the haystacks,
the poplars and of course the lilies, soothing pastels, her greying
hair will suck in brightness and then, the news: the baby daughter has
her own baby daughter, decides not to give the girl away but to come

with the man and baby back to live. The daughter’s had colorless days,
can’t take any more, needs light, some comfort needs to drift gently
into a Monet riverscape where there is plenty of food pretty people
flirting and playing, lured to the calm

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Inheritance
Albert Huffstickler

In a sense, you could say

that I learned to write from
my father--even though he
never wrote anything. But
what he did do, very often,
was sit at the dining room
table over coffee, cigarette
in hand, and his eyes would
grow distant, very distant,
till everything around him
was lost in that distance.
And he would sit that way
while the coffee grew cold
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and his cigarette burned you could say the writing
down . . . and I would sit by is easy--once you know where
him, mimicking him, trying to go. And I know where to
to gain that same distance, go, you see, because
go where he went. Years my father taught me
later, when I finally knew
I would be a poet and was
struggling to find that
place inside myself that
the writing came from, I
found myself sitting over
coffee, cigarette in hand,
going to the same place.
Somewhere I have a sketch
that Jan made of me in that
very pose, writing. In a way from Pitchfork #1, Austin TX 1999

25
St. Francis Was a Flower Child
Albert Huffstickler

Here’s how it is:

there’s one part of us
that stays innocent no matter what.
Now, that innocent part of us
takes everything as it sees it.
You meet a cheerful guy,
you think he’s cheerful all the way through.
But then gradually you get to know him
and he starts telling you how depressed he really is.
Bummer.
Or you meet a guy that’s all together
and you think that all-together
holds to the very core of his being.
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Then gradually
he starts tell you his fears, doubts, confusions
and the next thing you know
he’s just like you.
What you learn and forget over and over is:
that perfect face you see on first encounter
is flawed - just like yours.
Everybody is hanging on.
I tell my therapist almost everything
but I don’t ask too many questions.
I need that all knowingness.
I need for her to have it together.
We all need for somebody to have it together
even if it’s only God.
That way we can maintain
that innocence that we need so desperately

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to survive in a world
where the sharks outnumber the minnows,
where mercy is considered a weakness
and a loving heart deformity.
In our hearts,
we all need desperately to be flower children
because when the flower dies,
we go with it.

from Simple Vows, #2, 1999, San Antonio TX

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ISSN 0197-4777

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