waterways: poetry in the mainstream vol 21 no 10

8/8/2019 Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream Vol 21 no 10

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2000

Nove

Waterways:Poetry in the Mainstream


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WATERWAYS: Poetry in the MainstreamVolume 21 Number 10 November, 2000Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara FisherThomas Perry, Admirable Factotum

c o n t e n t s

Waterways is published 11 times a year. Subscriptions -- $25 a year. Sample issues -$2.60 (incpostage). Submissions will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self addressed envelWaterways, 393 St. Pauls Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10304-2127

2000, Ten Penny Players Inc.

Will Inman 4-5

Kit Knight 6

Gerald Zipper 7

John Grey 8-9

Randy Phillis 10-12

Lyn Lifshin 13-15

M M Nichols 16

Joan Payne Kincaid 17-19

Richard Denner 20

Ida Fasel 21

Susan Snowden

Gertrude Morris 2

Terry Thomas 25-

Joanne Seltzer

Albert Huffstickler


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William Blakes illustration for Mary Wollstonecrafts ORIGINAL STORIES FROM REAL LIF


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Bottom Line - Will Inman

Market wayspit us against each other

and, worse, against our own real selves.The Bottom Line between two lovers is loveof money

not because money is what eitheris about

but because it is at leastwhat one of them feels driven to.

I want you, I want you, I'll give you anything, but you don't approve all I'mdoing for you.

Yes, I do, but so muchof your time is spent getting and too littlebeing. You give me everything except yourself.

But how can I give you more or mthan getting allows? It's a War out tThe only closeness I can know with my

competitive comrades is when I havepowerover them.

Yes, but now that poweris what you have with me. I won't setfor being kept. Maybe I'll have an afwith your chauffeur maybe he won'

to dominate me. You just don't get itdon't know what it's like Out There.

I know what it's like In Here.

7 September 1999,

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Careful Distances - Will Inman

In a civilization of God-eat-dog-eat-God, we orbit ourselves and each other

with careful distances. Closeness comesmore often with a static of forcedembraces than with intervolving mindsand bodies.

We are hunters and gatherers:you hunt money via commodities: I gatherbillets-doux from my vapid friends. Few

women are strong enough to endureinanities, and that few turn themselvesinto Female Patriarchs, indomitablecreatures.

Some ride on surfboards oftheir men's power, giving birth

to soires and gala balls,while others

work fingers and feet in mills, banks,bars, cafs, and at typewriters. Somewhat other women's men buy as side dto dull dinners.

Desperate need engen

heroic sisters Sojourner Truth, MoJones, Rosa Parks women do not havebattered moths around barren lamps.

7 September 1999,

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Maria Tyson, 1940Kit Knight

It's been 77 year since

I watchedbreathless,hands to my throatmy uncle Hampson playdead. Dozens of dead menlimbs twistedlike licoricewere sprawledin family gardens. My unclelay next to the burning hotel;if he'd flinchedone of Quantrill's Raiderswould have shot him. Over100 men died that day; mostwere shot in the streets,but some were roasted alive

in their shops and flaminghomes. Wives and children

screamed. I was gratefulmy own father had diedbefore I was born. Thiswasn't a civil war, butthe Raiders were Confederatesand fightingifa sneak attack on civilians

could be called fightingfor a cause. And nowHollywood has made a movieabout the Lawrence Massacre.John Wayne stars and strutsas the Kansas marshal who savesthe town and hunts down

Quantrill. In their veonly two men die. Off s

I was there. There wany heroes, just chaosanguish. My aunt beggto save her deceased daushoes from her blazinghome. She called them"Little souvenirs of a

treasure." A raider sn"Damn your dead baby." the one armed peddler'explode. His baby waicradled in the limp armMy 16th birthday was aw

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The Cup Cake Girl - Gerald Zipper

Written red across the front pages"CUP CAKE HEIRESS DIES"

victim of her fearsinvaded herself with a rusty wire hangerher blood streaming awaysoaking the mattress with her life-to-comehuddled in a dark and dirty roombludgeoned by the tyranny of the self-righteousmaking tragic payment

for the insolence of being.

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That Thursday - John Grey

Where did you put Thursday?I'm searching these roomsfor the day of too little sun,of gray clouds, thick, and rufflinglike upside down meadows,of crows circling and cawing,of a streak of lightningunstitching the sky.

I have the old newspapers.I have the fruit sealed

with plastic.There's stuff from before Thursdayin the drawers, on the shelves,so I know it hasn'tfallen off the edge,replaced by this dayin the days we stack up behind us.

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There was a kiss in it I remember.There was a touch that seemedto come from nowhere,that settled on my bare arm

like a butterfly.There was a sudden stillnessthat belied the derivationof that day's namethough Thor was definitely outsidehammering the thunder.You had some words, jonquil soft,

to go with it . . . Thursday's words.You stood beside me at the window,pressing against me, pore for pore,as if to move into me,as if to tell meall the other yous were ghosts,as if all that had gone before

was your sorry death,and this was Thursday,the first day of your life.

So where did you put that day?So cold the way

you watch me searchamong these current hours.Like everything missing,I don't look where we lost it,

just where it would be easiest to fin

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Losing It - Randy Phillis

When the duster disappearsDeb thinks she's going crazy.

I was right in here the whole time,she says, and she means it.

I see it, I say, it's right inhere on the bed. But I haven't beenin there all day. It couldn't be.

And her eyes seem a little wetfor such a little thing, and I knowshe's thinking of her grandmother,and worried. Poor Olive, lost now

for years, not recognizing a face at the table,not knowing what holiday it is,not knowing where she's at orwhy she's praying.

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Cruel genetics, Deb is thinking, andit's hitting me already. For whatever reason,I don't try to make it better,don't tell her I find myself in the kitchen

with the drawer open, no idea whatsoeverwhy I'm there. What'll it be this time,I ask myself, a fork or a screwdriver,plastic bag or kleenex? Cooking dinner I findmyself frozen before the fridge, runningthe recipe over and over in my head, wonderingwhat I could possibly need.

No, she's got enough to worry about already,those cruel genetics, and she lectures me aboutthe ways I play into fate's hand. I smoke and smokeand eat and eat, though my father's dead twenty years nowfrom a bad heart and my mother lies in the hospitalthis very day with the same problem.

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My mind's all here, I want to say, just like Mom's.

Maybe I think about it all a little too much, I decide,so I tell Deb, Maybe you think about it all a little too much.

It's sure to get you if you fix on it.As if we have a choice.I think we should go out, forget about cleaning the house,have some dark good beer and fatty meat,spend the time we have together.

I make this proposal, and though I seeshe's still a little shaken, Deb agrees.We leave the rags and cans where they sit,and as I'm putting on my shoes I see the catflash past, the duster in his mouth.

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Insomnia - Lyn Lifshin

sleep waits,wanted on a

poster in alocked PostOffice, deafto my whispersand lures, anypromises tolet him go if

he lets meescape

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Boston Common at Twilight - Lyn LifshinFrederick Childe Hassam

Because everyone who

could be us in this paintingis either dead or not withme, and it's so long agothe same hats would seemodd, hardly matters: I'msure the mother with thetwo girls is mine, with meand my sister. No matter

we fed swans in this park,huge birds the color ofthis snow and later she heldus in her wings on the swanboat so tightly I'm amazedour bodies and arms weren'tstunted, clipped. She looked

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to us to be what when shelived in this city, blocksfrom here, she dreamed ofbecoming: an actress or dancer.

Or of being as happy as shewas with the man she could notmarry who took her boating onthe Charles River and walkedunder these same trees laughingand feeling a light almost thislemony only it wold be atdawn after dancing all night.

In her day dreams, he doesn'thave to leave Harvard, his motheron the farm doesn't scowl at mymother's last name and my grandfather doesn't say he forbids her,shreds the mail, wants to lock herin the small bedroom over yellow

roses. She can't bear to say anothersummer in a house where she hurts,longs for the man who wrote on aphotograph across from these same

row houses when the branches wereflowering, "to my dearest angel." Butshe packed a small suitcase with stickfrom Simmons and B.U. on it to be witelope before she has time to think anchange her mind, leaves with the manhere who looks so much like my fatherwho she turns her back on, no longer

believing the Lipmans make goodhusbands and sure if she wasn't in suchigh heels4 inchesthat she will weclimbing Beacon Hill faster than I canshe would escape back to her past

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Earth's Turn - M. M. Nichols

September bliss: a sky pure blue, pure white.Slow and tender the long clouds kiss

buildings, change shape the higher they climb,becoming lazy, lightweight alligators,

chickens, migrant geese forgetting their legs;maybe the ghost of a Mutt & Pet paraderaised with hope for far-out crowds to please.My neighbor, coming from work with a friend

to help

carry her birthday bouquets, on the elevatorhanded me a spray of crimson lilies.Then, white orchids. Then a deep red rose.She could melt icebergs! I celebrate her,

forget my life for scents; for red, for wfor blush of speckled stripes when lilies understand that nothing arrayed in the boothey stand on now can teach me what they

And nothing keeps moving like the skymute, ragged driftersdecades from Sailors! leaving me in port content

with rose . orchid . speckled lily . brea

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November Fifteenth - Joan Payne Kincaid

Crickets continue to hang-out in the yarddark last light glows yellow leaves

woman down at the hardware store recallsthe last several Thanksgivings.

The raccoons have fattened on robins' eggsand stolen squirrels' caches; colored leavesgloat in sun-Sound . . . shape-shifter rays.

He tantrums "Get out. I don't need to be toldwhat is "his newly weeded bride staggersfor a few minutes, mostly memory; how oddto live on a reservation concernedwith the next seven generations all doomedshe's dressed for a Nobel prize with archaicsmile like ancient Greek smashed statues.

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She travels miles to be told she's not famousfor a pitcher of water and is handed an empty cupuntil he whispers for a stage through everyone'spoems but his own.

Walking from the landing you hear the cricketscontinuing past their forbears in the inky nightthough the monarchs fattened on sugar have leftfor 2,000 miles; so warm we opened the windowsthought of eating turkey on the porch.

at the upstairs landing she finds herself gonewith those answering tremolos out in the easy dark.

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More and More Lonely Your Path Struggles On - Joan Payne Kincaid(quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke)

The snowy owl glidessilently to kill

could besomethingsomething

youngthat has been cast from

nestwho can't copewith being victim . . .

first one forced to kill the second;

bloodied and pushed out-social Darwinismsurvival of mewithout warning from skywave climbscream of prey . . .your hysterical words in the dark.

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Cord Cutting - Richard Denner

Yes he asks me to be her surrogate father

Lloyd, born 1917 in Arkansas.Shirsten will play the part of Emmathe mother, born in Peru.

We meet at the sweat lodge.Yes he is wearing peasant clothing,a long skirt, a white blouse.Sparky Shooting Star and Tsultrimstand to one side to guide us.

The three of us form a triangle

with a ribbon around our waists,and Emma and I speak to our daughtehow she has lived up to our expectatiotime, now, for her to be on her own.

As she wrestles with this separation,we cut the cord of one too long in our sand her tears fling aside the pretence of tand hammer home the meaning of being g

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Scary Jack-O-Lantern - Ida Fasel

Peel apumpkin before

carving. It will shrivel.In 3 or 4 daysthe face inold age,

Why can'twe grow old liketrees always young of crown?Don't we too seek distances fromour roots?

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Belle Keeps Ringing - Susan Snowden(for L.R.B.S. 1881-1962)

Soft pink, a procession of onegliding down King Street,parasol shading porcelain shoulders.

Miss Lolly, the last Charleston ladyto go afternoon callingin white gloves on Sundays.

Finding dames away or napping,

she clucks in disapproval,plunks cards on Sheffield silver trays.

"She won't give it up,"whisper blue-haired widows,tipping sherry from crystal thimbles.

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Out of Time - Gertrude Morris

All the yearsremembering

the silence after he died.You clean,deal with dust.What will you do today?Eat. Sleep. Live.

All those ordinary thingsto tell time by:turn the leaves of an old albumthe child became a photograph,the baby in a wicker carriage,the little girlpicking berries for mother's pie.

Another death and another,another time:

the smell of burning,ashes piled on snow,stores of hair teeth skin.How practical they were.How clean.

Another ordinary dayyou boil an egg,put the coffee on.If it doesn't rain

you rake the leaves for burning.You gather windfall apples,bake a pie.

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Dry Clay - Gertrude Morris

All year I think they wait for me.Do they know that mourning doves

rose in a whisper of silk at my coming?

Do they know I tamp down prayersto their nest of stained shrouds and boneswhere nothing else will grow?

Or having quite the arid sack of earthwe gave them to they are long gone,like migrant birds, to other latitudes.

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Coral Lightner - Terry Thomas

You could say she lived up to her name.She went from the womb,

a spherical object,saw light one night in April '25,was alive as anyonetil '47 when something heaven-dropped, propped like a pie plate,late, caught her Coral attention.Did I mention UFO? No?Well it was, and she was toobefore she was through (in '88)she founded, wrote and did emotewhenever about some thingsthat escape from heaven.

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A Dis on the State of the World - Terry Thomas

Here's the deal:the world is getting flat.Larry, Curly and Moeare pounding from three different sides.Tides are turning surlygirly-girls looking more likeboys, and boys holding handswith Galileo.Don't know what will comeof all the boink-boink-oink,

but I can see somecelestial dude hoggingas like a battered frisby,some Paul downing us,(last big flapjack),or another coming . . .and we're taken as a brittle wafer.

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Crybaby's Life Cycle - Joanne Seltzer

I cried because I was born.I cried because my mother

let me cry myself to sleep.I cried because my father died.I cried because I wanderedlost and sunburnt at Rouge Park,Orphan Annie without a dog.I cried because my uncle died.I cried because bloodstained pantiesproved me a ten-year-old woman.

I cried because I couldn'tcarry a tune or jitterbug.I cried because I contractedchicken pox on my honeymoon.I cried because my babies cried.

I cried because identitywas exiled by my thirties.

I cried because life doesn'tbegin at forty.I cried because my menses died.I cried myself an old woman.I cried until I sighed.

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George Segal'sBlue Woman in Black Chair

Albert Huffstickler

Who in her nakednesshas knownall that is to

be knownof what love

cannot giveor bring backand is resigned

but does not forgetno not one instantand, in her resignationand her non-forgetting,builds of her body

a monument

to that which aboveall other thingsmust, if only through

its absence,be remembered.So she sits there,

eyes closed,not sleeping,

pensive above hersmall blue breasts,

so shawled,so quiescent,so non-forgetting,

so blue in her blackchair thatshe gives us back

our daysjust knowingthat something so

completecan still be mortal.

first published in FennPhoenix

Wint

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ISSN 0197-4777

published 11 times a year since 1979very limited printingby Ten Penny Players, Inc.(a 501c3 not for profit corporation)

$2.50 an issue

waterways: poetry in the mainstream vol 21 no 10

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