Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

2002

January

Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, January 2002

I, for one (and others probably) at different times of day didnt even know that I was there, having gone to the Cedar Street for talks with charlatan poets and editors, beers with fellow NYU medivalists; and we were all unaware

late breakfasts with a crazy and bizarre Australian pornographer, of action-painting, spilling and swirling around.

John Burnett Payne, Sometimes a Name

WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream

Volume 23 Number 1 Designed, Edited and Published by Richard Spiegel & Barbara Fisher Thomas Perry, Admirable Factotum January, 2002

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 2002, Ten Penny Players Inc. http://www.tenpennyplayers.org

Sylvia Manning Joan Payne Kincaid Joy Hewitt Mann Gertrude Morris Bill Roberts M. M. Nichols

c o n t e n t s
4-6 7 8 9-11 12 13

Ida Fasel Herman Slotkin Lyn Lifshin Albert Huffstickler Richard Spiegel

14-16 17-18 19-20 21-26 3,27

Questions for the Poet Who Also Paints Sylvia Manning

Your painting of the woman dressed for town as they once did, if they could, our countrywomen certainly never doubting if they should, for it was a code to dress for town, at least in near best (even after I was grown and certainly in her time, all her time) even before we needed more reference frame for culture, back when culture was what you got at opera or fancy lectures, if you were rich then and there, those kind of women. . .
for Albert Huffstickler

This woman in some synthetic blue-green, maybe aquamarine, in her so called costume jewelry and made-up pretty-if-she-weren't-so-plump face beneath a do of curls she scrimped to afford to have done to be presentable, as was said, to make herself presentable
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She's not just anybody's mother come to town now turned itself to city undone, not nice, not a place to do your best to dress for, no. She's mine. She breaks my heart. She makes me wonder if when Mama got to Heaventown it was after all just a place God let get rundown, interstitial, probably gone to video stores, second-hand porn, all polystyrene littered.

Your woman with her handbag matching black patent shoes, hopefully there before winds chilled, as we were not to wear black patent after Labor Day, holding it with both hands in front of her, clutching primly the little that protected that place where babies came from, even if none would be coming again from her With look in her eye as she waits for the Promise, the masculine Divine, suggesting a subliminal worry behind the best she can do to be pretty that He'll say, after all, "She's too fat. I told her that a million times if I told her once,"
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and she'll be sent back, to where she can't even window shop or stop for a nice cup of coffee, to where between the cleaning and the worrying she sobs, to where the town kids never go, across the river, across from the mill,

Your woman in her blue green street length three-quarter sleeved dress And hat (not to forget) there in the decade, one guesses, of the lost dreams, the '70s Who did you think she might be when she emerged from nothing, having done her dead level best, as people said, to be presentable, as was always called for, even if she couldn't help looking very scared and a little too fat? Did she speak to say why she'd come to town? Did she ask for me?

First published in Parting Gifts, winter 2001

At First Joan Payne Kincaid

It was great fun exciting to live in quaint new/ old surroundings of winding streets and two story houses a small town sort of scale and tiny apartment that could barely accommodate a studio piano and pull-out daybed + kitchen. The cats would sunbathe on the ground floor window boxes.

We had guests in and took them on tours to Washington Square and back to Ten Gay Street. Our two rooms were small but large enough to practice and prepare operatic roles.

It was an ubiquitous wandering at first fun ramble through the protean aspects of life in the Village apartment giving tours for relatives and friends and singing at Amato's every opening night; sadly art eventually turned into an endless money pit.

He's at that barely past sixty stage when denial sits like a patron at the bar (like himself) and holds forth on all the zillion things he knows nothing about, the wisdom sixty years has loaded (as he is) and the equally bombed crowd (under thirty) hangs on his every word ('course he's bought them a round) 'bout the editors & publishers &

Unpublished Poet at the Black Rose Piano Bar Joy Hewitt Mann
all the other world warpers 'specially that young "dirty long-haired hippie" poet who lives next door

and he knows every word that Longfellow ever wrote swears all the "pervert goddamn poets" of today "ain't worth an effin' damn."

Night Walkers Gertrude Morris

He gave me back the night; I told him so, as we sat on a stoop near St. Mark's Church drinking beer disguised in paper bags. While my peers dozed and doted on their grandchildren, I was out late bibbing the sauce with a young poet
to Ed McPhillips

whose skin was too thin for the world his tender body willow slim on Avenue A, a black kid asked for change.
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Eddie gave and gave. Bending to pick up a new penny, I pitched forward and went laughing, soft as feathers, on my knees in sudden prayer, a bibulous bubbe fuddled on a single can of beer, staggering out of gravity

into a youth carnival. Eddie cried: "Gertrude! Are you alright?" The kid cried: "Gertrude! Are you alright?" Mutely I clutched the shiny prize, in a blaze of Bastard Amber lighting a bodega. The street went loop-de-loop, with illusions
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of Starlight Park on summer nights. The moon tapped my shoulder and beamed: "Yo! Momma!" My two dear boys hoisted and stood me puppet-like, on rubber legs. I giggled at the kids, their hair so purpled my teeth felt pink. I wanted to be

one of them, to be them, their dybbuk drinking nectar through their ruby lips to save me for another summer.

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I step cautiously into the house and sense it is full of people, some of them regulars, some new arrivals, some close family,

Roomers Bill Roberts

or rarely eat at all,

some who pay their rent on time, of night, all with worries, some insurmountable, a few I'll cherish,

some who'll sneak out in the dark some who will influence my future, but most I'll eventually forgive.

some family new arrivals,

some drunk, fewer sober, some with stories to tell,

some who fight, some peace-loving, some with secrets they dare not tell some who cook, some who eat out
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none that will be entirely forgotten,

Cedar Bar, September 1989 M. M. Nichols

The Swedish ivy's long green beard almost hides the shy white china bowl suspended rotating below this Sunday's open skylight over poets arriving, fans agog with busy decibels bartering Now for Now, between yesterday and yet-to-be moon.

Leaves go trailing round in a breeze up there between words and sky before the poets begin to say their yesterdays (still fresh and green).
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Reading Proverbs, Chapter 30 - Ida Fasel

Today Solomon's professorial chair in wisdom is occupied by a Dr. Agur, an unknown. He speaks in images that show, metaphors that enrich, lists that build momentum for vital effects. A poetry workshop!

I take off from his four mysterious things. I catch currents of air to soar with the eagle, I slither out of the dark cave, a serpent sun-warming on rock. I lose myself in horizon glimmer on a ship in the midst of the sea.
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The way of a man with a maid . . . I get lyrical. I cross genres, the poet a musician cadencing the pledge of body and soul, the poet a painter picturing eyes constant to the commitment to bear each other up with dignity and tenderness when high-noon happiness becomes more serious than sunny, the poet a poet, every word counting, every line luminous.

The lesson ends on a bonus. The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces. Can I ever sum up the mystery of life in so few words?
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I sent a check from a full heart Knowing it could not reach Deep enough into grief To be the voice of a homecoming step.

I Sent a Check - Ida Fasel

I sent a card of sympathy For I too have suffered loss. But sorrow takes its time to pass From black to charcoal grey to serenity. I sent a teddy bear to a child Who had lost her mother and father. Sometimes she wakes up in the night Screaming wild, and I hear her.
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When Dylan Thomas came to our Village where edgy notions floated free as air, D.T. saw one big boozy bazaar;

Epitaph for a Potted Poet - Herman Slotkin

with fresh-made art alive in every nook, and when he'd drunk and popped and pissed way words not written, it was quite clear he prized the precious, luring, common ecstasies of life and art less than a whiskey shot.
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unnumbered thoughts not thought, feelings not felt,

Greenwich Village - Herman Slotkin

Drifting out of the safe orbit of family, The Village was our big bang.

What mysteries were there unveiled? The hottest art? Titillating sex? The bronco ride of jazz? Theater as close as your skin? Revelation in the second-hand book bins? All of the above, and in them a liberating new notion: passion drives us riskily to the very precipice of permissible, enlarging, enriching our lives.
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In the Apartment - Lyn Lifshin

it was gipsy music. We each had tambourines as long as I remember. When I was still Rosalyn Lipman. My mother loved the Cossack dancers, how they filled Middlebury streets one afternoon. Song of Vilnius, Odessa, swords, red pantaloons swifelled thru dreams a whole week. A red kerchief
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hung in the maples near the school. My mother would hike up her skirts up to a mask to cover her eyes if she could have, leaped over the Congregational Church spires, left her weeping mother and the husband who couldn't talk or dance and the babies gnawing and mewling, do a kick squat over the village green where if you weren't Catholic you had to be Protestant. Anything else was too exotic or strange.

She'd dance, slide away in the night like those gipsies everyone watched in the store, especially the one who even with 20 eyes on them filched shoes, like a cat with a rabbit and then came back to flaunt the lace up white leather, said you thought I couldn't do it. Well I can but now they're yours. She left as quickly as the July night she eloped, slid over the state line only now, she dreams of dancing
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Anniversary (The Month of August) - Albert Huffstickler

I got back to Austin August 1, 1973. Janie brought me up from Brownwood where I'd been staying, for no apparent reason. I had twenty dollars in my pocket. Bob Bryant put me up and I went to work for a place called Texas Temporary Placement day labor. It was hot. It was dirty. It was un inspiring. I was forty five. I was on the verge of becoming a nobody. Haunted by my failures, sweating out my bodily fluids on construction sites, Mayflower vans, delivery trucks, I pondered my future again. Sweating
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and stinking, I told myself over and over, "I'm too old for this shit!" Maybe I was too old for anything. I had one skill language. I'd never understood how to parlay this into a living. I had a gene missing. It was a gene called How to Find a Decent Job and Stick to It. The August sun bore down on me like doom. I was incompetent. I was ashamed. Looking back along the road of my life, I beheld a line of corpses, all of them me. I worked hard. I was desperate. Woodward Furniture hired me away from the day labor office. I had a job. It was as hot inside the factory as outside. All my workmates were
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Mexican Americans. We loved each other. They thought I was funny. My mother died. I flew back to Florida for the funeral and came back more depressed than ever, my last refuge gone. My sister gave me $500. I quit the furniture factory, wandered around lost, looking at the ground. All this time I'd been trying to write. I was always trying to write. It was the only identity point I had in my whole chaotic world. I met Valerie. I went broke again. Back to day labor. My friend Cogswell told me, "If you want to keep your writing going, you've got to get away from the pressure. To get away from
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the pressure, you've got to get away from the profit motive. Get a job with the state, the feds or the university. The university's best."

I narrowed my focus, kept applying at the university till I got a job. I told them I was a writer. That meant I could type. Clerk Typist. The rest is history: I stayed at the university with a couple of long sabbaticals and I wrote and narrowed my focus to poetry, spent my vacations in New Mexico and dreamed of moving there, escaping to those wide, haunted spaces but always came back. I had a job here. I had an identity. I
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kept writing, had back surgery, emerged crippled, struggled on. I learned what I'd always dreaded learning: how to do the same thing every day over and over and over. I hit depressions, spaced out, I kept writing, I kept working. Some days I didn't know who I was. It didn't matter. I was at work. Everybody else knew who I was. One day, to my surprise and everyone else's I retired with full benefits. Today, this very day, at 71, I sit on the bench in front of the bakery, idle, content. It's hot. I don't have to work day labor. I don't have much but I couldn't work if I wanted
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to Thank God. But I'm writing. I'm writing because that's what I've become, a writer, a poet. It's enough. It's all I can do. But a part of me is still back there somewhere, sweating it out on a construction site in the August sun as lost as any human can be. He looks up, sees me watching. He nods wipes his forehead and, face contorted with anguish, says, "Don't ever forget me. I'm always here, always a part of you. Forget me and you die."
from Nerve Cowboy, Number 11, spring 2001, Austin TX 26

In my neighborhood, they know me. I'm the Poet. I give it away small favors: free coffee, a and in return receive certain discount here, a nod and wave of the hand: take it, no charge. I smile and accept this tribute as poets have done since the beginning of time. They honor me as I try in my small way to
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Poetry As Commodity Albert Huffstickler

honor them with words of hope lamenting the woes we have in common. I follow an ancient tradition. I don't have much bearer of light, Prometheus, the fire-bearer, still doing his thing.

or understanding or maybe just

but get by as poets have done

down the ages. I'm the ragtag

from Iodine, fall 2001, Charlotte, NC

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