Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

20th Anniversary
1999

December
Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream
December 1999

The fingers weighed on the triggers. December bit

into the bone, into the tight skulls, creaking one word.

from The Structure of the Plane

THEORY OF FLIGHT (1935)
Muriel Rukeyser
 WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 20 Number 11 December, 1999
Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher
Thomas Perry, Assistant
c o n t e n t s
Joy Hewitt Mann 4-5 Ida Fasel 17
Lyn Lifshin 6-8 Joanne Seltzer 18
Herman Slotkin 9 Arthur Winfield Knight 19
Will Inman 10-11 Donald Judson 20
Pearl May Wilshaw 12 Robert Cooperman 21-22
Gerald Zipper 13 Albert Huffstickler 23-24
R. Yurman 14-16
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.

Da Vinci drawing
Takeover Bid - Joy Hewitt Mann

Wild-eyed winter roars

under eaves and hats and skirts
caresses thighs
with frigid fingers
grins at crowds
with snowflake teeth
“Crawl away you sickly worms
seek warmth in hissing stoves
and Scotch
manipulate your bodies
in the heat of lust —
just stay out of my way.

These streets are

mine.”

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 Expiring in Yiddish - Joy Hewitt Mann

Lying with her on the bed

I breathed in Mother’s voice
full of her brilliantly false British accent
waited for the catch in her voice, the quantum leap in years
click her tongue caught on a consonant
flashed like light through a vowel and the breath I took
was pickled and spiced with alien sound.
I sucked in to drown in the taste of her past
while Aunt, clicking and flashing her needles by the bed
stopped as fast as Mother travelled on:
her bottom lip, hung over the memories
like the shiny rim of a pewter jug,
drew up in anger as she stood
scattering her knitting, leaning over me
to smother with her lilac mask.
“Out!”
and I watched as Mother’s backward journey was aborted
with pills placed gently
on a white tongue. from The Dalhouse Review, Spring ‘98

5
14 Days Before She’s Dying - Lyn Lifshin
my mother, 70 lbs, taken
in mist out to the ambulance’s
stretcher is grinning, wants
to see daisies, black eyed
susans, is wild to get to the
ferry, laughs, wants Dunkin
Do Nuts, coffee, three kinds
of muffins. “Honey can you be
ok sitting sideways,” she
wonders as the ambulance
slips down hills. With so little
of her left, she’s packed the
6
bank books she wants out of
my sister’s, packed her winter
coat, her warmest wools. She
doesn’t want another winter
in cold snow, wants me to have
what she has, wants me with
her even in the same grave
she laughed four years before
saying of course she’d be buried
with a telephone. She wanted me
to be with her, not wanting her
to live so badly, but not to leave
until she does
War - Lyn Lifshin

A woman walks all night

with a husband with a
brain tumor and failing
kidneys, wanders like
people with nothing,
no place to go, no
place to lie down
and then, the rain,
then the world
of mud

7
 At the Vietnam Wall She looked out the
This Father’s Day window and saw a dark
Lyn Lifshin sedan with 3 men in it
come to a stop at the curb.
grand children touch They watched the men
a name of a grandfather step out of the car in their
they’ll never know. Her black uniforms and stand
mother says she can’t for a moment in the sun
remember what day of shine. One carried an
the week it was, just a American flag creased in a
regular day. It was in triangle. Another a folder
the afternoon. It was with papers in it. Just a
bright on a side street regular day in October,
in Chula Vista. She and 1966. Just the twins, her
her twin brother were older brother and mother
playing near the kitchen. in the house, their father,
gone to fight in Nam. They
knocked on a door. My
8
brother and I started
laughing and giggling.
Some important men were
coming to our house and
we laughed, got silly, hid
under our bunk beds, still
giggling. They didn’t stay
long. Then we saw our mother
in the living room. She was
broken down and we
were afraid. In the photo
graph he was always holding
us. I think of you, of one obit
mentioning two grandchildren,
wondering if you ever took
them to the pool, if you
held them
 Hand and Name - Herman Slotkin
I say the Holocaust is history,
but It is always my ghastly guest.

Sometimes I see slender-fingered Franz

who Zyklon-strangled Sophie and Max among others;

or Otto who, with practiced, blackened fingers,

sorted gold and silver teeth and tossed the dross;

or Friedrich the philosopher who organized starvation.

Sometimes It is just The Plan-

a business-wise erasure of people:
goals, resources, criteria for success clearly set;
costs and benefits envisioned, analyzed.

At worst, I see Winston and Charles,

Franklin and me averting our eyes.

9
 after Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘ ‘The Structure of the Plane’
and while listening to Beethoven’s 13th Quartet
with Cavatina and Grosse Fuge

today’s bliss - will inman

today's bliss is a porcelain flower

in a tyger’s mouth. what the tyger cannot
taste, he might crunch between his paradoxic
jaws.
bliss
cannot last long in frozen shape,
but such joy was always at risk. let the tyger
approach, let him lick out his galactic tongue
and offer you the flower.
reach
fingers
into his mouth and recover your bliss. let

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your hot hand soften porcelain, let the blown
shape resume tenderness to petals. breathe
deep from the blossom, suck nectar from the tip
while your other hand scratches the tyger’s ears.

he
may lick your neck, he may bite your breast,
he may mount your wonder with a sky of dark
resolve, he may impregnate you with godfury
and a tempest of butterflies,
his hunger is truer
than all the cannibal greed of patriarchs
and priests. he
will transform your glacial
purity to a veil behind which your eyes will open
and see the rage and the tenderness of woken love

14 October 1998, Tucson

11
 Circumstance in Experience
Pearl Mary Wilshaw

Entrapped
amid the river of time,
whirling, flat,
platter of starlight
emitting
radiation from poles
snatched
when a nearby black hole,
rare specter
concealing the point

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where time and space meet,
dances the ballet,
of death in darkness
invisible as a gusty breeze
except through
actions of surroundings
seized to swallow,
a companion star
drawn in,
sucked up,
consumed by brute force,
my universe to follow.
 The Whispering Road - Gerald Zipper

In the trembling twilight

mountains shivering beneath the frail fog
skies swarmed the velvet darkness
I drove the whispering road
fearing a backward glance at a disintegrating city
branches sweeping the shoulders
leaves waving their black-and-green penants
I observed the animals upended
fallen in stunned nakedness
sightless people sitting bewildered
beside their empty houses
breathing coldness of time
salt streaming down my cheeks
I watched the vacant moments fall away
waiting for the dream to come and save me.

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 Treed - R. Yurman

each paw striking soft earth I scramble up that long stick

I stretch my tail
and run
The baying at my heels—
air tears my lungs
inside my ears
the dizzy aching grows
spit flies
from my tongue
their hot breath
sears my sides
the teeth
that filled my dreams
snap at my flanks
this deeper shadow bursts the dark
leave them yapping sudden flash
at its roots so bright
circling their eyes are lost
crying for blood then shattering sound
their eyes then pain
yellow points— a quick fierce tear
the slow upright one then the yellow points again—
strides among them the air takes me
stick gripped ground calls
before him— and the sharp fangs
without a yelp from my dreams
the pack settles on its haunches close over my fall

14
 911 - R. Yurman

“Gimme your wallet, muthafucka,

or I’ll blow your head off.”

Paperbag covered hand thrust toward me

in the dark he’s dark

inside the bag

could be a gun.

No headlights slash the evening street

the curbside trees wider than a man

the tall hedges he’s backed me against.

He pokes the bagged hand at my face.

I smell oil taste metal.

“Your wallet,” he snaps.

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“Show me the gun.” I struggle to rise.
His face closes on mine, He looks back.

“Your wallet, muthafucka..” Even in the dark his eyes

“Let me see the gun.” lock into mine,

The pressure of his body “Are you crazy?” He pulls out the bills,
his thick strange hands waves them at me,

paperbag cast aside “This worth dying for?”

rifling my pockets He tosses the flat brown leather aside,

forcing me down and not even running as I stumble after

I’m caught between hedge and ground. disappears down an alley.

He flaunts the wallet “No gun,” I call,

moves away slowly. “I knew there was no gun.”

16
 Cinquains of an Insomniac
Ida Fasel

1.
It is
good to question 2.
long held beliefs, but you I am
must be ready to question your concerned about 3.
answers. children growing up in Those two
a world where to be infamous who planned so well
brings fame. never knew To create
is greater than created to
destroy

Note: The quotation is from Milton’s

Paradise Lost

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 The Reconciliation Ice The Forecast Thawing out
Life isn’t over. Where else would I be
Ice There are chinks
Wounds fester, but here
that holds you under in my flesh
bones makes the distance reading augeries for you to enter
Blue Fingers - Joanne Seltzer

must be rebroken between us of the future? and reenter

greater but the ice
and healing Look at my fingers:
means growing than ever. will be a block
crimson,
unless you care.
new cells. they are
You reach Do I confuse you?
The Big Chill full of blood again;
for me I am saying
is where you’re at through a chink touching you it is nothing
and you reach out and you speak will turn them if I have blue
your apology blue. fingers
through the ice. this way: as long as we’re
Be warm,
How nice! together.
And I reach back, “I hope you are lover,
a suicidal touch. still there.” you can reenter.

18
 Targets - Arthur Winfield Knight

My daughter gives me The three of us follow

a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun my wife outside, shooting
for my 61st birthday. at beer cans we’ve lined up
Perhaps she knows on the redwood table.
I had one as a child, We take aim carefully,
or perhaps she remembers holding our breath,
I met Fred Harman, bracing ourselves,
who created Red Ryder, as if our lives depend
or Wild Bill Elliott, on hitting the targets.
who portrayed him.
It doesn’t matter.
She’s home from Arkansas
for the winter break
with her boyfriend.
It is their senior year.

19
 Of Hours - Donald Judson

After you had left your room, bags

packed, phone unplugged
and gone—I called
knowing it would ring through, service not yet cut.
Ghost rings.
I called at five
and then again at five-thirty
imagining the window, if I saw it
from the street, and still there pushed up against its screen
your desk.
Yet, everything else now the subtraction of you.

The second call I allowed to count eight rings;

the first, ten.
Both ringing and not—
a voice, and nothing.

20
On the Night of Orson Welles’s Radio Broadcast of
The War of the Worlds, October 30, 1938
Robert Cooperman

While my not-yet grandmother listened

and gripped her chest to keep her heart
from flying away in terror,
my father and mother-to-be
sat in his older brother’s car,
the radio tuned to satiny swing music.

When they returned, holding hands,

my grandmother was screaming,
my grandfather—rolling home
on a barge of beers—
was trying to convince her
the show had been a hoax elaborate
as any in a circus sideshow.

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“Look!” she shrieked,
pointing out the window
to an unnatural glow:
the reflection of street lamps
and billboard lights.

After she downed enough wine

to see the launching pads
of the Martian invasion force,
she fell asleep, my grandfather
winking as if to warn my father,
“Still wanna be her son-in-law?”

I wasn’t conceived that night,

real terrors to first be endured,
Hitler worse than any monster
dreamed up in books or radio.

22
Life--And All That - Albert Huffstickler

Life is what’s sitting in your

lap while you gaze off into the
distance, into an imagined future
that you're certain you can,
by an act of will, grasp and
draw toward you, make you own
(though what you’ll do with
this thing already sitting in
your lap you have no idea). Life
is what’s happening while you
wait for the time to pass before
that assured and inevitable
hour of glory arrives: it’s
what comes before the trumpet
blast that hails your inevitable
triumph in something or other,

23
you’re not sure what. And so
if that’s Life, then Love must
be that person sitting on your
lap next to Life while you gaze
off into the imagined future
where waits that woman who meets
all your needs, makes all your
dreams come true without any
nagging or bad smells. Yes,
that’s the way it is so you
want to be careful: be careful
that you’re not so busy looking
at the water that you miss
the boat.

from ART: MAG 21-A, Las Vegas, NV 1997-98

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ISSN 0197-4777

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