Waterways:

Poetry in the Mainstream

2000

November
Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream
November 2000

How many women . . . waste life away,

the prey of discontent . . .

from THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN (1792)

Mary Wollstonecraft
 WATERWAYS: Poetry in the Mainstream
Volume 21 Number 10 November, 2000
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 Lyn Lifshin 13-15 Susan Snowden 22
Kit Knight 6 M M Nichols 16 Gertrude Morris 23-24
Gerald Zipper 7 Joan Payne Kincaid 17-19 Terry Thomas 25-26
John Grey 8-9 Richard Denner 20 Joanne Seltzer 27
Randy Phillis 10-12 Ida Fasel 21 Albert Huffstickler 28

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©2000, Ten Penny Players Inc.
William Blake’s illustration for Mary Wollstonecraft’s ORIGINAL STORIES FROM REAL LIFE (1791)
 Bottom Line - Will Inman
Market ways
pit us against each other
and, worse, against our own real selves.
The Bottom Line between two lovers is love
of money
not because money is what either
is about
but because it is at least
what one of them feels driven to.
I want you, I want you, I'll give you any
thing, but you don't approve all I'm
doing for you.
Yes, I do, but so much
of your time is spent getting and too little
being. You give me everything except your
self.
4
But how can I give you more or me
than getting allows? It's a War out there.
The only closeness I can know with my
competitive comrades is when I have
power
over them.
Yes, but now that power over
is what you have with me. I won't settle
for being kept. Maybe I'll have an affair
with your chauffeur — maybe he won't try
to dominate me.
You just don't get it. You
don't know what it's like Out There.
But
I know what it's like In Here.
7 September 1999, Tucson
 Careful Distances - Will Inman
In a civilization of God-eat-dog-eat-
God, we orbit ourselves and each other
with careful distances. Closeness comes
more often with a static of forced
embraces than with intervolving minds
and bodies.
We are hunters and gatherers:
you hunt money via commodities: I gather
billets-doux from my vapid friends. Few
women are strong enough to endure
inanities, and that few turn themselves
into Female Patriarchs, indomitable
creatures.
5
Some ride on surfboards of
their men's power, giving birth
to soirées and gala balls,
while others
work fingers and feet in mills, banks,
bars, cafés, and at typewriters. Some sell
what other women's men buy as side dishes
to dull dinners.
Desperate need engenders
heroic sisters — Sojourner Truth, Mother
Jones, Rosa Parks — women do not have to be
battered moths around barren lamps.
7 September 1999, Tucson
 Maria Tyson, 1940
Kit Knight
It's been 77 year since
I watched—breathless,
hands to my throat—
my uncle Hampson play
dead. Dozens of dead men
—limbs twisted
like licorice—were sprawled
in family gardens. My uncle
lay next to the burning hotel;
if he'd flinched
one of Quantrill's Raiders
would have shot him. Over
100 men died that day; most
were shot in the streets,
but some were roasted alive
in their shops and flaming
homes. Wives and children
screamed. I was grateful
my own father had died
before I was born. This
wasn't a civil war, but
the Raiders were Confederates
and fighting—if
a sneak attack on civilians
could be called fighting—
for a cause. And now
Hollywood has made a movie
about the Lawrence Massacre.
John Wayne stars and struts
as the Kansas marshal who saves
the town and hunts down
6
Quantrill. In their version
only two men die. Off screen,.
I was there. There weren't
any heroes, just chaos,
anguish. My aunt begged
to save her deceased daughter's
shoes from her blazing
home. She called them,
"Little souvenirs of a buried
treasure." A raider snarled,
"Damn your dead baby." I saw
the one armed peddler's head
explode. His baby wailed,
cradled in the limp arm.
My 16th birthday was awesome.
 The Cup Cake Girl - Gerald Zipper

Written red across the front pages

"CUP CAKE HEIRESS DIES"
victim of her fears
invaded herself with a rusty wire hanger
her blood streaming away
soaking the mattress with her life-to-come
huddled in a dark and dirty room
bludgeoned by the tyranny of the self-righteous
making tragic payment
for the insolence of being.

7
 That Thursday - John Grey
Where did you put Thursday?
I'm searching these rooms
for the day of too little sun,
of gray clouds, thick, and ruffling
like upside down meadows,
of crows circling and cawing,
of a streak of lightning
unstitching the sky.
I have the old newspapers.
I have the fruit sealed
with plastic.
There's stuff from before Thursday
in the drawers, on the shelves,
so I know it hasn't
fallen off the edge,
replaced by this day
in the days we stack up behind us.
8
There was a kiss in it I remember. was your sorry death,
There was a touch that seemed and this was Thursday,
to come from nowhere, the first day of your life.
that settled on my bare arm
like a butterfly. So where did you put that day?
There was a sudden stillness So cold the way
that belied the derivation you watch me search
of that day's name among these current hours.
though Thor was definitely outside Like everything missing,
hammering the thunder. I don't look where we lost it,
You had some words, jonquil soft, just where it would be easiest to find.
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 me
all the other yous were ghosts,
as if all that had gone before
9
 Losing It - Randy Phillis

When the duster disappears

Deb 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 in

here on the bed. But I haven't been
in there all day. It couldn't be.

And her eyes seem a little wet

for such a little thing, and I know
she'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 or
why she's praying.
10
Cruel genetics, Deb is thinking, and
it'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 whatsoever

why I'm there. What'll it be this time,
I ask myself, a fork or a screwdriver,
plastic bag or kleenex? Cooking dinner I find
myself frozen before the fridge, running
the recipe over and over in my head, wondering
what I could possibly need.

No, she's got enough to worry about already,

those cruel genetics, and she lectures me about
the ways I play into fate's hand. I smoke and smoke
and eat and eat, though my father's dead twenty years now
from a bad heart and my mother lies in the hospital
this very day with the same problem.
11
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 see

she'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 cat
flash past, the duster in his mouth.

12
Insomnia - Lyn Lifshin

sleep waits,
wanted on a
poster in a
locked Post
Office, deaf
to my whispers
and lures, any
promises to
let him go if
he lets me
escape

13
Boston Common at Twilight - Lyn Lifshin
Frederick Childe Hassam

Because everyone who

could be us in this painting
is either dead or not with
me, and it's so long ago
the same hats would seem
odd, hardly matters: I'm
sure the mother with the
two girls is mine, with me
and my sister. No matter
we fed swans in this park,
huge birds the color of
this snow and later she held
us in her wings on the swan
boat so tightly I'm amazed
our bodies and arms weren't
stunted, clipped. She looked
14
to us to be what when she
lived in this city, blocks
from here, she dreamed of
becoming: an actress or dancer.
Or of being as happy as she
was with the man she could not
marry who took her boating on
the Charles River and walked
under these same trees laughing
and feeling a light almost this
lemony only it wold be at
dawn after dancing all night.
In her day dreams, he doesn't
have to leave Harvard, his mother
on the farm doesn't scowl at my
mother's last name and my grand
father doesn't say he forbids her,
shreds the mail, wants to lock her
in the small bedroom over yellow
15
roses. She can't bear to say another
summer in a house where she hurts,
longs for the man who wrote on a
photograph across from these same
row houses when the branches were
flowering, "to my dearest angel." But
she packed a small suitcase with stickers
from Simmons and B.U. on it to be with,
elope before she has time to think and
change her mind, leaves with the man
here who looks so much like my father
who she turns her back on, no longer
believing the Lipmans make good
husbands and sure if she wasn't in such
high heels—4 inches—that she will wear
climbing Beacon Hill faster than I can
she would escape back to her past
 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, forget my life for scents; for red, for white;
becoming lazy, lightweight alligators, for blush of speckled stripes when lilies open;
understand that nothing arrayed in the bookcase
chickens, migrant geese forgetting their legs; they stand on now can teach me what they know.
maybe the ghost of a Mutt & Pet parade
raised with hope for far-out crowds to please. And nothing keeps moving like the sky's
My neighbor, coming from work with a friend mute, ragged drifters—decades from home.
to help Sailors! leaving me in port content
with rose . orchid . speckled lily . breathing.
carry her birthday bouquets, on the elevator
handed me a spray of crimson lilies.
Then, white orchids. Then a deep red rose.
She could melt icebergs! I celebrate her,

16
November Fifteenth - Joan Payne Kincaid

Crickets continue to hang-out in the yard

dark last light glows yellow leaves
woman down at the hardware store recalls
the last several Thanksgivings.

The raccoons have fattened on robins' eggs

and stolen squirrels' caches; colored leaves
gloat in sun-Sound . . . shape-shifter rays.

He tantrums "Get out.” I don't need to be told

what is "his newly weeded bride” staggers
for a few minutes, mostly memory; how odd
to live on a reservation concerned
with the next seven generations all doomed
she's dressed for a Nobel prize with archaic
smile like ancient Greek smashed statues.
17
She travels miles to be told she's not famous
for a pitcher of water and is handed an empty cup
until he whispers for a stage through everyone's
poems but his own.

Walking from the landing you hear the crickets

continuing past their forbears in the inky night
though the monarchs fattened on sugar have left
for 2,000 miles; so warm we opened the windows
thought of eating turkey on the porch.

at the upstairs landing she finds herself gone

with those answering tremolos out in the easy dark.

18
More and More Lonely Your Path Struggles On - Joan Payne Kincaid
(quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke)
The snowy owl glides
silently to kill
could be
something
something
young
that has been cast from
nest
who can't cope
with being victim . . .
first one forced to kill the second;
bloodied and pushed out-
social Darwinism
survival of me
without warning from sky
wave climb
scream of prey . . .
your hysterical words in the dark.

19
 Cord Cutting - Richard Denner
Yes he asks me to be her surrogate father
Lloyd, born 1917 in Arkansas.
Shirsten will play the part of Emma
the 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 Tsultrim
stand to one side to guide us.
20
The three of us form a triangle
with a ribbon around our waists,
and Emma and I speak to our daughter,
how she has lived up to our expectations,
time, now, for her to be on her own.
As she wrestles with this separation,
we cut the cord of one too long in our service,
and her tears fling aside the pretence of the rite
and hammer home the meaning of being grown.
Scary Jack-O-Lantern - Ida Fasel

Peel a
pumpkin before
carving. It will shrivel.
In 3 or 4 days—the face in
old age,

Why can't
we grow old like
trees always young of crown?
Don't we too seek distances from
our roots?

21
Belle Keeps Ringing - Susan Snowden
(for L.R.B.S. 1881-1962)

Soft pink, a procession of one

gliding down King Street,
parasol shading porcelain shoulders.

Miss Lolly, the last Charleston lady

to go afternoon calling
in 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.

22
 Out of Time - Gertrude Morris

All the years Another death and another,

remembering another time:
the silence after he died. the smell of burning,
You clean, ashes piled on snow,
deal with dust. stores of hair teeth skin.
What will you do today? How practical they were.
Eat. Sleep. Live. How clean.

All those ordinary things Another ordinary day

to tell time by: you boil an egg,
turn the leaves of an old album put the coffee on.
the child became a photograph, If it doesn't rain
the baby in a wicker carriage, you rake the leaves for burning.
the little girl You gather windfall apples,
picking berries for mother's pie. bake a pie.

23
 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 prayers

to their nest of stained shrouds and bones
where nothing else will grow?

Or having quite the arid sack of earth

we gave them to they are long gone,
like migrant birds, to other latitudes.

24
 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 anyone
til '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 too—
before she was through (in '88)
she founded, wrote and did emote
whenever about some things
that escape from heaven.

25
A Dis on the State of the World - Terry Thomas

Here's the deal:

the world is getting flat.
Larry, Curly and Moe
are pounding from three different sides.
Tides are turning surly—
girly-girls looking more like
boys, and boys holding hands
with Galileo.
Don't know what will come
of all the boink-boink-oink,
but I can see some
celestial dude hogging
as like a battered frisby,
some Paul downing us,
(last big flapjack),
or another coming . . .
and we're taken as a brittle wafer.
26
 Crybaby's Life Cycle - Joanne Seltzer

I cried because I was born. I cried because identity

I cried because my mother was exiled by my thirties.
let me cry myself to sleep. I cried because life doesn't
I cried because my father died. begin at forty.
I cried because I wandered I cried because my menses died.
lost and sunburnt at Rouge Park, I cried myself an old woman.
Orphan Annie without a dog. I cried until I sighed.
I cried because my uncle died.
I cried because bloodstained panties
proved me a ten-year-old woman.
I cried because I couldn't
carry a tune or jitterbug.
I cried because I contracted
chicken pox on my honeymoon.
I cried because my babies cried.

27
 George Segal's
Blue Woman in Black Chair
Albert Huffstickler

Who in her nakedness to that which above so blue in her black

has known all other things chair that
all that is to must, if only through she gives us back
be known its absence, our days
of what love be remembered. just knowing
cannot give So she sits there, that something so
or bring back eyes closed, complete
and is resigned not sleeping, can still be mortal.
but does not forget pensive above her
no not one instant small blue breasts,
and, in her resignation so shawled,
and her non-forgetting, so quiescent, first published in Fennel Stalk
Phoenix Arizona
builds of her body so non-forgetting,
Winter 1987
a monument
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