Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

2001

June
Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, June 2001

A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,

Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
Know'st thou not there is but one theme for everenduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
the making of perfect soldiers.
— Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"
 WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 22 Number 6 June, 2001
Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher
Thomas Perry, Admirable Factotum

c o n t e n t s
Will Inman 4-5 Herman Slotkin 19
Geoff Stevens 6 Ida Fasel 20-21
Joan Payne Kincaid 7 Bill Roberts 22
R. Yurman 8-9 Albert Huffstickler 23-24
David Michael Nixon 10-13 Death of Col Edward D. Baker At the Battle
of Balls Bluff near Leesburg Va. Oct. 21st
Kit Knight 14-17 1861 (Currier & Ives, 1861?)
James Penha 18 Frontispiece

Waterways is published 11 times a year. Subscriptions -- $25 a year. Sample issues -$2.60 (includes
postage). Submissions will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self addressed envelope.
Waterways, 393 St. Pauls Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10304-2127
©2001, Ten Penny Players Inc.
http://www.tenpennyplayers.org cover photo by Barbara Fisher
 tradition sucks at our ribs - will inman

tradition sucks at our ribs

urging us to take sides. we hasten
to become our own enemy.
i was told once
that Krishna came to a young warrior
who questioned war — and told him he
must choose sides and kill.
i knew then
that God, too, can turn us against ourselves
and each other
and that we must conquer
God's hateful wisdom
not by war but by healing
resonance.

4
 it is God, after all, who plants
chaos in cosmos to keep generative process
alive and that cosmos, sown,
turns fury to a lotus bloom.
yet, lotus
roots in darkest mud, so it may be

we must temper love

with wonder.

24 November 2000

5
If Love - Geoff Stevens

If love is a battle
then Walt was right,
poets that write
of romance and its gossip,
all the tittle-tattle
of she-said, he-said,
have an enduring theme.
Love is the scheme
of poetry, of immortality,
is the living memorial of the dead

6
Another Tribe Goes Poof! - Joan Payne Kincaid

They put their children in clay pots

and throw them
over the cliff
mass suicide to save homes
and ancient lands
(how hard people try to convince
corporate manipulators it is evil
to drill away history and lives)
walking backward through art
and dream to reality —
the adults follow
piling up bodies
that stop a river.

7
 Street in Zaragoza - R. Yurman

The children's eyes don't follow me the way

they do the boots and capes and hard triangular
hats of the three Guardia.
I may be Americano, turista, I may have cash
in my pocket — they'd rather dance in the street
and sing to the music of La Fiesta de San Jaime.
Only the sudden footfalls, sharp around the
corner, Guardia Civil, quiet them. Their eyes
get round. They stare. The adults they turn to
have already looked aside — frozen in mid-gesture.
I reach into my inner pocket, lay two fingers
on my passport. The three uniforms pass without
a glance at me or a nod to their countrymen.
They turn the far corner, their boot echoes
fading. The music resumes. The children dance.
It is 3 a.m. Spain, 1961

8
 Victors Are Liars - R. Yurman
(Variation on a theme from Horst Fenske's Song of the Skinny Indian.)

Behind gunmetal gray faces

they carry home their orders.
They swear on their hearthstones
they don't enjoy the killing.

"They spend small change like talking."

"They can whistle through their fingers."
But beggars know they're misers.
They'll never drop a coin into a cup.

9
The Famine - David Michael Nixon

In the famine that followed,

all turned fallow.
The bones protruded
as they walked.

The military
stood on the beaches
to keep the food
from rolling in.

They could not keep

the fruit from rotting,
but chased the starving
from the beach.

10
The sand was silent,
but was shifting,
tolling the number
of the dead:

each grain that moved,

a name.

First published in 'Voices for Peace', April 1988

also in 'Voices for Peace A Poetry Anthology' 1990

11
May We Live This Moment - David Michael Nixon

In the hills, the deer are uneasy

and hunters tramp the fields and woods
with guns that some know how to use.
Possums lie flattened on the roads
and cries of crows decry the invasion
that provides and interrupts dinner.
Tales float in from several counties
of hunters shot by hunters, even
one who tripped and shot himself.

Meanwhile in the cities, the murder count

rises, children shooting children —
disgruntled workers, friends, spouses
settling their quarrels with guns and knives.

12
Wars, feuds and dissings blossom,
spreading red and blackening petals,
and even nature turns on us,
twisters scattering beams and bones.

The quiet of ordinary life

is eating our flesh, a slow dying,
certain as the implacable sun.

This moment, we are here together,

alive with multitudes still dying;
next moment, any may be gone.
May we live this moment while we have it,
loving, helping, at least doing no harm.

13
The General Has Hemorrhoids, 1863 - Kit Knight

A single blade of grass

dangled from Grandpa's mouth
as he watched General Stoneman
ride gawky. As he leaned
on the fence, Grandpa's grass
jiggled in laughter. "Look,"
he said, "Stoneman flaps
his elbows like wings;
he's in charge of 10,000
Federal cavalrymen and
the man can't even ride."
Grandpa shook his head
and winked at me. My dad,
grandpa's oldest son,

14
had gone South to fight
with the rebels. Our farm,
seven miles above
the Mason-Dixon line,
became part of a spy
network. Food, medicines
and notes on troop strengths
got through the lines in
our wagons. Once, I carried
a coded message rolled up
in my hair. My brother
also served in Lee's army
and he said the men
were marching north and
planning to invade
Pennsylvania. Brother Billy
15
hoped for a chance to visit
our Gettysburg farm; he hoped
the peaches would be ripe
then, and would I please
make him a pie. Grandpa
picked up a bucket saying
he'd get some water, then
casually added
he'd heard Stoneman led
an additional 2,000 men
since the Federal defeat at
Chancellorsville. Grandpa
observed, "The general,
he don't rest easy
in the saddle." I said,
"I'm glad the Yankee has piles."
The Bugs Love Him: 1864 - Kit Knight

My grief is like an inward

bleeding. I've received
one letter from my son
since the Rebels captured
him. I hadn't wanted
Robby to fight in America's
Civil War; my son was born
in Nova Scotia and didn't
come to New York until
he was 18. But Robert loved
this country and wanted
to atone for my grandfather
who'd remained loyal
to the British and fled
the American Revolution.
16
"Please don't worry," my Robby
wrote in 1863. I've read and
reread that letter for
over a year. Other men
who've been prisoners of
the Confederacy all speak
of harsh treatment and
worse food. Sometimes,
only a teacup of cornmeal
a day. And the thousands
of mosquitoes that never light
on dying men. They talk of
scurvy, rheumatism, constant
diarrhea and typhoid. My son
writes, "Don't worry, Ma."
My Robby went to college;
17
he surveyed and drew maps for
the Union Army. A former
prisoner tells me that ought
to be a comfort because
the educated class stands the
severe privations of
prison life better than
the rougher sort. Sometimes,
comfort comes from strange
sources. In the final line
of Robby's letter, he wrote,
"The bugs love me."
Those four words are practically
rubbed off because I've
touched them again and
again and again.
The Dying Slave to Michelangelo - James Penha

I hear your whistle keening in the air.

Or is the whistle mine? It mustered me
once, manacled in my own potential,
to feel your finely-tooled explosions tear
my skin from Earth's own womb of earth that He
with only Word created. Essential
loss! but Self I found in your placental
hands shaping, smoothing, causing mine to be.
So why sing you the dies irae now?
as your conception finally is free
to stand? I am no half-imagined heir
of Onan, seed whom you may disavow.
I live. From you. Pallas of Zeus's brow.
New fingers loving me will feel your care.

18
 D-Day Newsreel - Herman Slotkin

I hide in Post Theater's anonymous blind

and watch with eyes withdrawn to blend.

The screen assaults:

Four rifled G.I.'s, burdened, lumber out of the sea.
The last drops at water's edge.
The heedless picture swings to wicked, lethal blasts—
clods, clumps, shards, shreds.

In the sheltering dark I run to him.

"Medic! Is he dead?"
"He is dead."

His burdens, which I can never name or escape,

are now mine.

19
 He - Ida Fasel
Who lost/ What you lost goes nowhere
— Nietzsche, Vereinsamt
Round the
1. Election Day
clock, round the world
Sieg Heil! people still pick up his
Voices stretch hands arrows, old when he passed on the
to victory: Sieg Heil! poison.
New beginnings, halcyon days
horror. Even
2. Outcome
Satan himself
at the judgment wicket
When he
will find him over-qualified
stretched out his arms
for hell.
he blessed roaring thousands.
His hate made havoc of live and
let live. Note: The day was January 30, 1933
20
Vincent Van Gogh: Any Self-Portrait
Ida Fasel
'A terrible beauty is born' W.B. Yeats

Face like His brush

a kicked-in door, swirls under force
eyes tense and watchful as of anxiety and
if a gun were pointed at them, will, the clear great want of his life
demon holding.

within
always present,
his expectable dread
darkening the thousand skies of
turquoise.

21
 Terrorist - Bill Roberts
My palms were sweating again
when I met Pete some forty years later.
I used to sweat all over back then
when we were in school and he,
an ugly bully,
was my one and only reason
for being late so often mornings:
I didn't want to confront him
and go through the humiliating ritual
of being grabbed by my shirt front
and shaken down,
having to expose the contents
of my pockets and lunchbag.
The years hadn't been overly kind
to Pete, though his flower business,
I'd heard, had made him wealthy:
he was entirely bald —
22
not a pleasant prospect in combination
with his menacing, pockmarked face —
and the scars from various invasions
of his brain coursed wildly
over his yellowish skull.
He slammed down the receiver,
after eyeing me through the several minutes
of his vituperative conversation,
stood, lurched toward me,
grabbed my hand and shook it nearly off.
We spoke of old times,
even joked about the money I had contributed
to the purchase of his business.
We spoke as friends —
he not apologizing for his teenaged terrorism,
me not mentioning I knew he was dying.
Published in The Raintown Review, Vol. 1, No. 2,
June 1998 (as Bartlett Boswell)
The Old Indian Said - Albert Huffstickler

How could there be

any understanding?
They called it a wilderness.
We called it home . . .

From: Poetry Depth Quarterly, North Highlands CA 2001

23
 Down There where death and birth It's not a place that
Albert Huffstickler have the same meaning you go to for love but
and magic is the rule a place, to find love.
It's not charted down of the day. It's not You must have been to
there. You can go down a place you come to and returned. It's
to the same place a understand but a place not a place where you
dozen times and nothing where you go to have go to find the goddess
will be the same. It's our understanding but if you do find her
not a place you learn destroyed. It's a there, she'll devour
but a place you endure. place where a hero is you. It's the place
It's not a place you someone who emerges where a hunchbacked
conquer but a place sane and goes on with dragon mated with a
you enter to be changed what he is doing — dying star which eons
and leave not knowing though there are dark later gave birth to
if you've changed or spots in his eyes that you.
not. It's a place were not there before. From Crimson Leer 2nd issue
1996, Fabius NY
24
ISSN 0197-4777

published 11 times a year since 1979

very limited printing
by Ten Penny Players, Inc.
(a 501c3 not for profit corporation)

$2.50 an issue