Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

2001

November

Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream November 2001

With broken hands Bind the poppied sheath And bear it homeward To the harvest tune Of winds that rock A bloody moon.

Robert Hayden from "Autumnal"

WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream

Richard Alan Spiegel 4 James Henry Brennan 5-6 Will Inman 7-10 Geoff Stevens 11 Robert Cooperman 12 Joan Payne Kincaid 13 James Penha 14 Aimee Record 14-16
Volume 22 Number 10 Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher Thomas Perry, Admirable Factotum November, 2001

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

Bill Roberts 17 Terry Thomas 18-19 William Boden 20 Nelson James Dunford 21 Fred Ostrander 22-23 David Napolin 24 Paula Alida Roy 25-26 Ida Fasel 27

c o n t e n t s

Herman Slotkin 28 Robert L. Brimm 29 Gerald Zipper 30-31 Kit Knight 32-35 Joanne Seltzer 36 Lyn Lifshin 37 Albert Huffstickler 38-40

so if Nostradamus knew he knew only the words and now words dissolve into silence all the world has blown into the open window the seers looked out

Richard Alan Spiegel

so if Einstein knew energy equates with matter in motion and peace equals the square root of war in their speed these machines have grounded our summer dreams have crashed into morning's mist

in our stunned silence a stubborn music has taken root and shall give breath, shall bear fruit.
4

Those Towers live with us now, as never before, (like ghost limbs, someone said); we feel them in our being/see them in our hearts.

Terra Sanctorum James Henry Brennan

Never a loss like this, never so much condensed death: not in Dresden, or Hiroshima... or even in Auschwitz, have so many been lost at once! In so small a place. A great rush of souls flew up, like flushed doves, flew up to God, flew up to us, and we greeted them, in dread and devotion, received them in Love, with honor... and suffered grief.
5

Thus is this Place made hallow, a graveyard like no other, reaching out to us, holding us, holding us, overwhelming us in ways beyond comprehension.

This place this New York City place is now Sacred Ground, consecrated... for them...and for us: A little piece of the Earth, made Holy forever, forever and always touching Heaven.
Anamnesis, 9/11/01

To sit in the presence of a younger man with vision. He can look on a scene or into a situation and see. His eyes and his hands make concert: he sees what is possible, what is needed. He can set energies moving in and among. He cares. He not only cares, He perceives what can be. He makes friends with disparate elements: he breathes on broken configurations until they dance together. Choreographer and dancers make each other Be.
7

To Sit in the Presence Will Inman

To know him, to listen to him is to see a new world shaping whole out of lostness. He can show multitudes what can wake under their skins, what can erupt glad from under the skins of their eyes. In joyous fury of witness and weigh and wield, he exults finding new ways through. To sit in his presence helps me not be afraid to let go, nor fear the unfinish of dying.

from Red Owl, number XIII, 2001

gravity scans wordless dictionaries of pull and shove. every step you take is grounded between fly and hold. blood orbits within us. between drag and lift, all things occur. leap modes tongue's active silence. shoulders shake with tide-surge of tears' returning. hear drums thud and tick under crash of breakers. hear sweet flute lift dune-shapes into swelling waves. trust your body's carrying star-pulls. what space-stems rouse in every human cell.
9

Grounding Will Inman

heartbeat sounds the voice of all-out-there steep in-here. ground speaks. grounding discovers what infinite down twist and spin and roll, throb weighs round turns down back of the throat. you cannot walk out of step with god no matter you stumble strut or stagger no matter you scan or skip, you cannot walk out of step with grounding you walk in walks you, wordless on or off the path whole ground speaks in every step
10

from The Lucid Stone, #26, Summer 20001

The moon stems darkness for the lonely, When gone to seed the dandelion sun.

Geoff Stevens

And those whose ceiling is the sky See its bare-button as their bedside light.

11

I lived high, not like Daddy, cringing in the shadow of "Don't upset no one," all his days.

"All of my friends come to see me last night I was laying in my bed and dying." Robert Hunter, "Black Peter"

Peter Robert Cooperman

Me, I was all devilment, like slicing the mayor's wife's clothesline when I was a kid, her sheets flying like gulls. Or when I was older, drinking for pure whiskey pleasure.

My friends come and go, men fiddle with their hat brims and talk over old times; women dab their eyes, maybe seeing their own ends in mine.

I whisper a joke, And their tears flow harder, As they bend to kiss me. Whenever I close my eyes I think it's for the last time.
12

But I keep waking, my breaths like sandpaper, so I wouldn't mind the long sleep beyond my door, wind rushing under it like a pack of younguns sniffing a pie cooling on a low window sill.

Tangibles Joan Payne Kincaid

a change is felt in the song of squally clouds; time to focus on the silent season of falling leaves in rain, it is after all, the end of Summer and the moon stretches like taffy.

13

In a Van Gogh World

The Gravity of Things James Penha

The moon inhales tonightinspiration in reverse: it sucks the soul from the shore and the field, from the grass, the cypress. This phase, no low high tide, aged Vincent in his own time, yielded Renfield undead forever.

Hold that horizon steady; triangulate all hands!

Tonight the rivers flow upstream, tonight the buds reopen, tonight the seeds yield fruit.

It doesn't touch me, this swirling eddy, millennial adjustment.

Hold the horizon steady. You are the keystone, and I need to think:
14

Somehow you keep me on the road to the horizon still after the storm I remain alone.

It's just a Hummingbird's Song Aimee Record The failure of insight is a clock held by a flying fish playing the violin. I ask questions about sound.

The noise a humming bird, the clock measures wing speed. It is not enough to be amazed. It is too much to know

the shadows of naked women. Too much to know why Atticus frolics in long grass. Step in, hang your shadow from a tree. Straddle the healthiest of these kids and ride. Look down at the splotches of red skin and decide, not that the rash is settling in,
15

but that you have caught on to living off the land, honoring that which hangs. Many people here, the sad eyes are no longer without voice. Take a look at this reflection, it's a spell. A faltering tower falls in this red city,

we must know how to rebuild. This music is a humming bird's wings. The gift these eyes that close for hours have. They open in a different shade of blue. This humming bird looks amazed. He says, "How can you just sit still?"
16

I just attended one of those Memorial services for another friend, This one dying way too young mid-fifties, and learned more about him than I'd known in the twenty-something years we worked together not quite side-by-side but close enough so we exchanged personal anecdotes and trivia, years worth, condensed to a few facts I knew he originally grew up in Wisconsin, married his high school sweetheart, and they had a few kids, two girls. His personal memorabilia

Riding a Bicycle Backwards Bill Roberts

17

was on display at the church: I learned he too was a Coke addict, Coca Cola, that is, loved ice fishing for northern pike, nothing else, had a favorite jacket and ball cap, both embellished with a smiling Cleveland Indian, built most of his house with his own hands, and, biggest surprise of all, he was expert at riding his bicycle backwards him backward on a bike pedaling it forward, just like I did as a kid! So don't wait to learn about your friends at their wake or last remembrance service go up to one now, ask if he knows how to ride a bicycle backwards.

They could all run in Shattertown like the blazes. Pop used to say that was because they were all crooks there but he didn't mention that he was from Shattertown. Night of the killing I was filling tanks at Nestor's, pestering anything pretty under thirty, flirting to pass the time. Pop went by with a few of the boys (well over thirty), dirty flannel flapping like wing-shot birds out of the rusty Chevy, on their way East...toward Shattertown. Poker, I reckon, but I didn't
18

Shattertown Terry Thomas

reckon on that being the last I'd see of him. He wasn't in the busted recliner next morning... nor the next. This was usual, sometimes no crime in sleeping it off somewhere. I didn't care much. Finally, I asked around. Nobody knew anything not even dirty flannels. Guess Pop picked the wrong time to tickle an ace from his cuff. They could all run in Shattertown but not fast enough for a bullet.

19

In an under-exposed photograph taken from the back of the Staten Island Ferry, I wanted the wake of the boat to be a web in the water, pulling Manhattan along. Here in Florida, years later, I found that picture buried under so many other pictures, and tacked it up on my wall at work.

Photograph William Boden

Those that walk by my desk will be reminded, and a lot of people walk by. On September 11th, the ground down here in Pinellas County shook, because our legs shook.
20

Here now, exactly two weeks later, I sit at my desk, winter approaching, and I look out the same window I've always looked out between sentences, But the window and what's out there are not the same. The two tall buildings in the photograph. All those windows. All those people.

Gray tendrils clasp the clouds and draw up sundew dawn whose salmon vortices devour the stars. The root torn loose in tropic turmoil tumbles up horizon's crest of haze to dome the day.

Sunrise at the Perimeter Nelson James Dunford

stringent solidified stretch in black counter-rhythms, blighting the land. Though mounting light distends each pupil, no eye shifts. Rifles, packs ride like wings. of flies on sentinels' backs. And no head stoops. Minutes hours days they stand and wait for war, and wait and wait. Await that dawn when they are meant to fight,
21

Like lichen crusted rock, bare earth bears night's sawn trunk toppled in oblongs westward from tents that muddy fields green yesterday and tomorrow. The ordered ranks

perhaps to die.

The stonetoward which all passion and quests are directed love, it rests, simply, upon a crude ledge within a cave in some immense, unidentified mountain wall a range of violet and light, or rare and adamantine minerals, a Urals of goat trails and sunrises.

The Stone Fred Ostrander

Hideous to many, it will resemble the bag of black leather left behind in his bewilderment by the gentle physician whose eyes as he departs fill and glisten, who lowers his head, raising his arm to his forehead.
22

And in the great hall, delicately ceilinged, where the rain-light shimmers through the many panes of the windows like Isadora floating among the scarves, it is the unmoving alabaster of the Roman brow. It is the seventh of the difficult encounters. And where the archer of the legends lives alonein a doorframe, in the pine mountainsaged now, wizened and amusedit is the shadow of a fish moving upon the luminous pebbles. . . It is the luminous shadow moving upon the deep pebbles.

23

Trinity ParkWinter David Napolin

Benches in a graveyard where workmen view the gliding pigeons and the pinnacles of workman's hands; brown tombstones thin with the years bequeath of a rustic time when sunlight trickled trees. Now the stones stand slim and toppling, past monuments of grass; while a city rises round with elevated steel and gleaming glass and rumbling wheels beneath the ground. And on the benches sits the refuse of the city's dark and shadow workless figures, clutching warmth in pockets and life in humped-up shoulders.
24

Up to his hips in surf, back arched, he jerks to set the hook, reels hard against the curling waves.

Grandson Fishing Paula Alida Roy

For hours he'll stand in roiling foam or on a boat, a dock, rocks at a river's edge, arcing the filament into ancient water. Sometimes the hook barbs a fish, spotted, striped, counter-shaded, glints of purple, turquoise, red:

bass, pike, mullet, flounder, crappie, bullhead, sunny, muskie he recites a litany of their names.

It's serious, luring life up from deep water, choosing to release or kill, spilling guts and scraping glittering scales.
25

On the beach behind him now a huge sea turtle pimpled with black flies where its head and flippers soften in the sun.

The old sadness comes on me like slow sunburn. I cold draw a geometer's line from turtle to boy out into the sweat where his hook hangs

waiting to lure the flounder or silver mullet. At nine how he knows how each fish fights, the tension of its spine slapping against the boat, the line of blood a fin draws across a finger, how the glistening eye clouds and fixes, the dark guts the diamond scales and blood.

how he loves the moment the fish flails cool and lovely as he works the hook free, holds it, slippery, gasping, in his own two hands.
26

Great steel skins crash. Fires rage outside and in. Blood blossoms in concrete. Once I thought all wars are civil wars because all men are brothers, are they not?

In America, September, 2001 Ida Fasel

Once I thought worldwide peace would give people freedom to choose from the infinite possibilities of life; freedom from hate absorbed in the womb, taught since birth; freedom to pledge themselves to good's way instead of harm's.

I saw both sides of the street in spring join under a lofty canopy of green, and thought Why can't every soul make its way beneath in the vital need to live in each other's worth?

I pull the curtain ropes to morning, hands lifted in prayer, head bowed in worship, foot pointed to the mark.

What prayer? What worship? What mark?

27

In the last moments, I will remember: at sunset, snow-slicked Moran enthroned above the Snake; at night, the jeweled streets of Manhattan; at dawn, our Lady in the bay; the drunken rush of learning; the subtle pulse of teaching; the heart tremble on turning a book cover; and, near dark, I will remember all the urgent voices of beloved.
28

Last Moments Herman Slotkin

On Waking Robert Brimm The dense gray fog, that silent stalker of valleys, crept in like a dream while we slept, lingers, defying the sun's efforts to take back this place where the sassafras shares a hillock with honeysuckle, outdoing the dew itself, globules riding a coolness that speaks of changes coming, a shift of seasons a briskness that will make the covers more precious in the morning, gentle fire like a warm embrace when evening brings us home.
29

In a past era the world was holiday eggshell stars sang in the heavens snow flakes danced gleeful medleys the universe boasted its endless diversity of couplings a plenitude of savory thighs we raced through the downpour of years reaching mystery lands relishing their elegant delights luxuriating in the music of the woods

Rebirth Gerald Zipper

30

the white-haired diva flashed her enigmatic smile gripped her roulette made a good-measure spin promising the wonder of rebirth the hope of neverending but stillness descended night shadows claimed their victory disposing the final star in its canopied heaven the ultimate medley the last silence.

31

Mrs. Dallman, 1880 Kit Knight It's been 20 years since Lincoln was murdered. History hails him. But his widow is laughed at and scorned. Poor Mary. And much of it is Herndon's fault; people believe what that drunken fool says. Before he was elected, the Lincolns were my Illinois neighbors for 16 years. Herndon was Lincoln's law partner and for 16 years Herndon never put his toe
32

in the Lincoln home. Herndon knew nothing of their home life; yet He wrote, "Mary was as cold as ice." He couldn't tell how Mary nursed my baby for dayswhile I bled. The best thing that ever happened to Herndon was Lincoln's death. Suddenly, people were desperate to read about the lost leader and Mary was too stricken to talk. Abe's hand had been folded around her own when his body

33

jerked and fell. Newspapers hadn't criticized Mary for grieving when she buried her son, but those same papers howled when she grieved the loss of two brothers who died in the Confederate Army. Southern papers called Mary a traitor and northern papers said she was a rebel spy. This abuse, Herndon was happy to add to. I remember Mary standing in light, watching me, her heart beating behind her eyes.

The Indian Grabbed Little Betty Kit Knight Seventy-five years ago, I was 12 when Pa left our frontier home to fight for the Confederacy. Families in Texas faced a threat unimagined by other Southern families. That morning in 1863, Ma sent us to gather punkins for dinner, warning us Indians had stolen a neighbor's horse. We were half a mile from the cabin and little Betty lagged behind, peeking into
34

ant hills. We could see Ma hanging clothes. I heard the war whoops of the Comanches before I saw them. So did Ma and she screamed, "My baby!" as she ran back. Three arrows brought Ma down a foot from the door. Rushing, I led the way to hide us in the brush like Ma repeatedly showed me. But Betty stood still, staring, breathing, "Ma, get up!" I started to go back, calling,

35

reaching, pleading, when a howling Indian grabbed little Betty and slung her across his horse. I turned again, shepherding the five children. But Sarah darted past me, running To her twin. Sarah was shot and turned, wide-eyed. I carried her. Two days passed and little Sarah never spoke or cried; then, she died. No one ever saw little Betty again. Today, I made a cake and lit four candles. They'd be 67.

My destiny brings me to the moon,. Fewer snakes are there than by the Nile, fewer insects and fewer people. I will go with Ed or go alone. The year 2000 was once tomorrow. And yesterday I came from the cave to talk with Socrates about love and harmony. It seems long ago that the moon was something to wish on: now it's an object to walk upon and the man in the moon shines no more having been upstaged by the woman who makes the Cosmos her theater.

Moon Songs Joanne Seltzer

first appeared in The Cerulean Press Anthology of Sci-Fi/Outer Space/Fantasy

36

And moonbeams are shafts of silver hair.

Red Sky in the Morning Lyn Lifshin after pink marble water and sky, pewter sets in dark as smoker's lungs. Heavy, smoky, unrolling

exhausted in a rain that glues lips and door into glass in rooms the clocks tick too loudly, no longer the right time

like a fast forward of the weeks ahead. In the last frame we stagger back

37

The Sexuality of Death Albert Huffstickler

What if the same force that brought us here took us away the force of loins meeting loins, pounding against each other, the shrill cry, the flash of lightning, a blazing leap into a new unknown? What if that last moment was a climax, a summation of all you had been even as you became something else, something new, some strange new being that

you had felt from the beginning was there but only now knew? What if this last moment was your real holiness and what your life was about? What if that final anguish was your deepest truth? What if all history and the future as well were embodied in that last shill cry?
38

from Heeltap #8, St. Paul MN 2001

A sharp stone sealed the fate of the Nickel Detective. He lay in the shaft with a bloody burnoose round his head. His wide eyes quizzed the masonry for news of the cosmos but received no discernible answers. Such was the Nickel Detective's fate to lie undetected like a bag of garbage flung by a flatulent janitor or minor deity into this darkened recess of the building's bowels. No more corner cafeteria suppers in the greylight rooms at dusk with the city loneliness blowing at your back like a wind. No more wisecracking the wizened waitress over a thirty-cent drugstore breakfast with the sunlight swirling through bacon grease and coffee steam and all the day before you. No more stakeouts in the dark alley with cats as wild as jungle creatures and far above, the window of the cheap hotel room lit by a brown-orange bulb silhouetting the high-breasted, bobbed-hair form leaned out to leaf the pages of the night. His pistol gleaming by his hand in the pale darkness, the Nickel Detective lies,
39

Pulp Detective Albert Huffstickler

nicely laid out and ready to enter the next scene. He knows his lines. They all end with "Baby" and narrowed eyes. He's a pro. He'll do what he has to do to make it go. Peace to him. Let him lie, there among the ash cans and the orange peels and the kotex rolled and neatly tied like bandages. Let him be, I say. He's getting a night's sleep out of the rain and he's sober; no Sen Sen needed to cover his breath. Let him rest. We want him ready on that great day when the windows fly open and the car horns sound to leap to his feet in the cosmic morning and swing from the floor, with all the force of his lithe young body, a powerful left that arcs across the universe like a rainbow and with a loud, cacophonous crunch, drops death.

40

from The Chaffin Journal, Richmond KY 1999

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