Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

20th Anniversary
1999

May
Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream
May 1999

“The child will have a hard time to be an American,”

he says slowly, “fathered by a man whose country is air,
who believes there are no heroes to withstand
wind, or a loose bolt, or a tank empty of gas.”

The Tunnel
THEORY OF FLIGHT (1935)
Muriel Rukeyser
 WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 20 Number 5 May, 1999
Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher
Thomas Perry, Assistant
contents
Robert Cooperman 4-7 Joy Hewitt Mann 16-17
Joan Payne Kincaid 8-9 Will Inman 18-20
Ida Fasel 10-11 Kristin Berkey-Abbott 21-23
Terry Thomas 12-13 Albert Huffstickler 24-28
Kit Knight 14-15

Waterways is published 11 times a year. Subscriptions -- $25 a year. Sample issues -$2.60 (includes
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Waterways, 393 St. Pauls Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10304-2127

© 1999, Ten Penny Players Inc.

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Michael Enright, Class President of Central High School, Goes on a Crime Spree
Robert Cooperman

School was too easy,

teachers dumb as mail boxes,
the principal so blind
he couldn’t see I was shagging
his daughter behind his back.
Nothing to look forward to
but more of the same in college
with a full scholarship;
and then what, work? No thanks.

I bought a gun and a ski mask,

and knocked over Mom and Pop
markets so often

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I should’ve given discounts;
the last time,
I had to stick the shooter
behind Pop’s ear
when he turned stubborn.
So I decided to cool it
in Mexico, partying on the beach
until the locals locked me up
on a bogus charge in a jail
any TV hero could’ve busted out of
with a strong rope and a jeep.
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After Dad finally sprung me,
he insisted I had to enroll
in that East Coast college
to get me out of his hair,
and conscience. I’ll case
every bodega in the city.
Classes? Something
to fall back on.
Ellen Smith Remembers Her Terrible Journey to the Oregon Territory, 1843
Robert Cooperman

William’s heart crashed like a tree

splintered by lightening
while he cheered the rest of us on
not to give up, nothing left to eat
but the cattle we’d brought west.
I was too froze and hungry to cry.

But worse was in store: my oldest,

Eliza, pretty as a high-stepper,
took ill with the typhoid.
After she passed like a small wind,
someone said four feet was deep enough.
I swore I’d dig the last two myself.

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Shamed, they put backs to ground
winter-hard as convict stones,
and my young-uns trapped wood mice,
almost the meat of a chicken wing.
But we trudged on through snow
falling sharp as Indian arrows.
After we celebrated Christmas,
I applied for my 640 acres,
like William would’ve wanted.
But it’s hard work without him and Eliza,
hard work and scalding tears.

Finally, the oxen wouldn’t pull,

the men wore churchyard stares;
they stopped, sat, and waited for the end
while I harangued like a peddler.
Then, praise God, the miracle!
a pack train from Fort Salem
with provisions for stragglers.

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How Children Learn - Joan Payne Kincaid

This child says I want to be President

but you will have to
give it a sex manual;
teachers teach the value
of freedom but the head shakes sadly
at a burgeoning prison industry which cages us
according to financial status and color;
we are taught to value life
and see the death penalty
with its various methods of murder
pitting us against each other;
this child sees a world of no rule
other than criminal or corporate
with nuclear secrets sold to the highest bidder;
we are told to value nature
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and habitats of all creatures
while children must witness countries
like Japan continue to kill whales,
buy old growth forest wood,
kill for tusks from those who grow them;
this child sees forests cut down
with all their wealth of plants and
even yet undiscovered beings
for cattle to graze...the cost...extinction,
the eyes of children are not blind
to an infant death row in Iraq imposed by American bombs;
to the aged abandoned in warehouse nursing homes
or homeless children, often prostitutes in every city
in a country that throws away all but the upper class;
this child is watching the lovely blue planet
that once was paradise
being flushed down the toilet.
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Something Is Being Overlooked
Ida Fasel
They wrote the script and staged it.
They supplied the props, themselves
the principals in the drama.
We admire creators, don’t we?
We admire Renaissance types.
They planned, bought, assembled, savored
the makings of their major military operation.
They were younger than Alexander
when they had their first success.
We admire action, don't we?
We admire heroes.
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They were achievers, clearly,
famous before they reached twenty.
They made the cover of Time
and are talked about worldwide.
For they are celebrities, aren’t they?
We admire celebrities.
They took their lives grandly
as befitted great powers.
They will live on, cultified, glorified.
For they are young gods, aren’t they?
Fresh, new gods known by their first names.
Yes, April is the cruelest month
for the handwork of these artisans.
 Hopefully, Next Time Round - Ida Fasel

Our times
are divided
between those who can breathe
bad air of high places and those
who can’t.

I long
to cast my vote
for one who won’t rouse hate
to win, one unaware he is
wholesome

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A Lesson in Anatomical - Terry Thomas

The Devil never kisses on the lips.

He just nuzzles -- puzzles out
distance ‘tween throat
and portal to the heart of despair.
It isn’t fair of him,
but he licks at the pulse,
stubble sticking like pitchforks,
working skin like
a jaded gigolo. I know
he avoids the breath,
like death. Besides, why
would he want to kiss a man
on his sinful lips anyway --
he saves that for the hot embrace later.

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It wasn’t much,
(as round things go) —
didn’t glow, glimmer
or shimmer with a Tinker
Bell brilliance.
Swell. Wasn’t gold —
certainly wasn’t old enough
to qualify as an heirloom;
didn’t even particularly cut
the gloom of adolescence.
Was more brass, brassy,
than anything else.
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The Night Thomas Lost His Halo
Terry Thomas
Seems like it was shelved
most of the time —
unused, almost amused
in neglect.
Pain-in-the-neck passion!
Wasn’t really fashionable or
watch fobby. But
I know it’s gone —
like the sad neglect
of a pull tab
for the soul.
Phoebe - Kit Knight

It’s embarrassing to need

a doctor to lance
a mere abscess on my arm
when there are over
600 ruinously injured men
who really need
that doctor. The wounded
don’t complain and I’m ashamed
when I do. Southern men
never allowed their ladies
to be nurses, but The War
Between the States
has forced us to use all
our resources. The first thing

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I made was a pot of soup,
and I assured everyone
I’d used a chicken and not
a rat. Although two brothers
swore rats basted with
bacon fat were excellent.
I gave one soldier
a haircut, wrote a letter
for another and washed maggots
and teeth fragments
from the mouth
of a third. He’d been shot
twice, weeks ago. Some
patients hadn’t seen
a female face for six
months; one rough Texan
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stared hard enough
to make my nose bleed,
then said I was as pretty as
a pair of red shoes with
green strings. Indeed,
hospitals are both lovely
and unlovely places. Another
of my duties was assisting
the surgeons. I wrote
to my sister, “How courageous
the constant sight
of amputations makes one--
anything less seems trifling.”
Prosthesis - Joy Hewitt Mann

Mother’s ambition for me at ten, ran

across her post-war smile, her too-white,
too-perfect English teeth. I would marry
a rich Canadian; she would eat bananas
everyday. And if I ever needed placements,
they would fit perfectly.
My mother’s ashes
gift Ontario soil and I, unmarried, pack her
hand-made clothes, her Woolworth’s jewels,
her man-made British teeth, to help the
underprivileged.
I see a mother smile, dentures
milk against her butter skin, brown eyes
reflect her infant married to a rich
American. She would eat everyday and
smiling would be natural.
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 Hard Bodies - Joy Hewitt Mann

Scant milk in a flaccid breast Olive skin and eyes black as Hell
and a fistful of rice held up against the day won’t believe
a mother drowns her child in America it may be harder: not speaking
continues to bend, bend, bend the language; living with sirens, screams
calf-deep in the paddies; and silences; avoiding
city children embrace the grave like bullets every day. Hard
a parent, kiss
the fumes of slow poisons to be a child in
or slower still, die and die America?
under the bodies of a hundred foreign men.

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do not make rules for incarnations
will inman
to be an American can be as diverse
as sand, as leaves, as wisps of smoke, as
brookwater, as rain
as alike as stones
in the shoulders of a road, or as shells
along a shore or as trees on the mountain.
never make rules for incarnations, they
will all cry god! from different faces,
they will curse you, bless you, make love
with you, hug you with distance in their
arms and lips, they can be so perverse
there is hope for them.
when they whirl
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like a flight of leaf-cutter ants, they’re
lost. freedom must be watered with
disagreements. freedom’s harmony must
keep fresh with sweat and questions.
dolphins know how to work without
voting booths, but we who mark a page
with our opinions are sometimes too lazy
to work for consensus.
if we could learn
to mark our boundaries wolf-style with golden
piss, then cross and re-cross with laughter,
maybe we could learn to fly, being still,
and love this land by asking why
before we die for her.
8 October 1998 Tucson
 feeding on shadows - will inman

what are those invisible vines crawling

through black space? they’ll come right
down into your bed at night. they’ll
stroke your face with darkness. you’ll
pull a leaf and chew it, and then
you’ll see the vines. their blooms
will be heads of creatures and humans,
coyotes and chimpanzees, and even dolphins.
they can all talk. you’ll understand every
word but not what they mean.
they’ll get
under your fingernails. they’ll crouch
in your navel and under your secret folds.
some critters and some humans will be

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talking to you out of openings in yourself.
they’ll be you being not-you. being more
than you. being who you are you didn’t
know was part of you.
about then, you’ll
eat another leaf. you’ll feel a brick wall
rising in your chestbone, separating you
from who you thought you were with who
you never were not.
hanh! now that’s a trip
you didn’t have to take a single step
to travel on. and a further distance than maps
can carry or telescopes can scan.
the vines
will creep down your blood vessels, coil
around your rib bones, lie listening
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along the curves of your ears. you’ll hear
everything and things that are not even
there. it’ll be too late then: you can't
back out. can’t run away. can’t lie your
way out of it.
you will sing the vines
and the vines will sound you. and shadows
of those dark leaves will curl around you
and swallow you whole. if you wake up real,
will you know who you are?
7 November 1996 Tucson
 Season of Migration - Kristen Berkey-Abbott

As I sink my roots into the soil

of this job and this house, I ponder
this century of human migration.
Spring, the season of movement.
Shad and salmon swim to new water, swallows
and butterflies flood the air. Even the trees
in my backyard try to move elsewhere;
with each shiver of wind, seeds sift
through the air.

I buy more plants than I have earth

to offer. I haul them around the yard
in my wheelbarrow, looking for any blank
spots in the yard where I can stuff

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them. Transplanted, they flourish in this alien soil.
I’m afraid we won’t be able to say
the same thing about this current crop
of refugees. Marched through the mountains,
herded from their homes,
the very old and very young and the most sickly
carted along in wheelbarrows.
A human line stretches
back from the border for six miles,
yet still they arrive, fleeing the ferocity
of soldiers, fierce as a spring storm,
cold fronts meeting warm air.

Thousands of miles away, I participate in the spring rituals.

I buy matching Easter outfits for my daughter
and me; I shuttle my son

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to baseball practice and think of refugee children
playing soccer with a coke bottle, playing
in the muck that comes from too many humans
with too little sanitation. Earthly atrocities
make me hover, but I try to swallow my instinct
to smother my own children with my motherly
wing, to hide them from angels of death
who might forget to pass
over our house.

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Celestial Beings - Albert Huffstickler

Jimmy Durante and the

Dalai Lama swapped jokes
and did a softshoe
accompanied by Ray Charles
singing and Louis
Armstrong’s trumpet and
I’d never seen so much
joy in one place. And
I thought about this many times later,
laughing every time, and
decided that even if I never reached enlightenment,
at least now, I
knew what I was looking for.
July 7, 1993 from zzz zine XXII, Arcadia FL, 1999

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 On the Trail of the Silver Kid - Albert Huffstickler

I can remember when I lost it.

I was eight.
That was the summer I have my appendicitis operation
and died --
or so I thought since they put this thing over my face
and I couldn’t breathe and they held me down till I lost consciousness.
That was also the year I skipped a grade in the school
and my peers were no longer my peers but giants
that I peered at from below
and, at recess, tossed me around like a handball.
My teacher hated me because I couldn’t do Palmer Method.
I started staying home after school and reading Wild West Weekly.
I knew when I wasn’t wanted.
My favorite hero was Solo Strant, the Silver Kid.

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He was small too but he dressed all in black with silver conchos on his chaps.
And he had a silver skull on his black stetson
and nobody--I mean nobody-- messed with him.
He was Death in a silver wrapping with two six-guns
and he went where he wanted to, all over the West,
and nobody messed with him.
It’s a funny feeling, losing it like that—
not something you bring up at the dinner table
since it’s obviously your fault.
There was something you didn’t do or didn’t do right
only you haven’t figured out what yet so you keep quiet;
you lay low and wait, hoping it will come to you and you can set
it straight.
Meanwhile, you’re a target for every sadistic hunter in the schoolyard
and you don’t know why.
So you stay home and lie on the bed and read the Silver Kid,

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recalling your mother’s favorite remedy, heard since infancy,
“If you be nice to them, they’ll be nice to you,”
wondering where she grew up.
Or your father’s, which was to take on every comer,
but to do that, you have to have a win once in a while.
So you know you’re wrong and you don’t know why
and it’s not a thing you talk about so you read the Silver Kid
and wait and dream a lot and just keep to yourself.
If that’s good enough for Solo Strant, it’s good enough for you.
He didn’t need anybody.
So I didn’t need anybody either but I did.
Only there wasn’t anybody.
Time was a burden and death imminent and I was eight years old.
Things have been different ever since.
The fragility never completely vanished
because once you’ve lost it, you know it can be lost again.

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The good things become more precious though less safe:
they can be gone in a minute.
But most of all: you’re alone and know deep in your heart
that you’ll never quite be un-alone again.
And you’re not the Silver Kid but just a kid—
a kid who’s not a kid anymore though not adult
as now, adult, I remain
that kid who’s not a kid anymore and will never be again.

March 3, 1984, from Heeltap, No.5, 1999, St. Paul MN

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ISSN 0197-4777

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