William Heath has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, Alms for Oblivion; three chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio, Leaving Seville, Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, Blacksnake’s Path; a history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); a book of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram College. He lives in Annapolis. visit: www.williamheathbooks.com

Jimmie and Sook: A Romance

          for William W. Warner

 

New Yorkers talk of The City as if it were 

the only one in the country as we Marylanders 

do of The Bay for similar reasons; when we 

speak of crabs we mean the blue kind that thrive 

in the marshlands on the Eastern Shore.

 

To grow large a crab sheds its hard exo-

skeleton made of the same stuff as a fingernail, 

this is called molting, which leaves behind 

a very soft shell for a brief period to time. 

To mate: males must be hard, females soft.

 

When the time is at hand a randy Jimmie 

rises on his tippy toes, extends his arms out 

in a straight line, and starts to wave them 

before he snaps his body back and kicks up 

a multi-legged storm in the sand.

 

A female, or sook, fresh from molting gets 

the message, waves her red-tipped claws in 

and out and begins to back her prime body 

toward her mate, lures him into position on 

top of her. Next comes “the grab”: he seizes

 

her, pulls her up into a cradle carry under him. 

Some sooks wave helpless arms as if in protest, 

yet soon settle down into a compliant posture. 

Then the loving pair, or doubler, faces forward,

sets off for a week-long honeymoon in the rich

 

eelgrass plentiful near the Eastern Shore where 

the deed is done. For hours he inserts two 

tiny prongs or appendages into her genital pores. 

Afterwards the happy couple do not lie back

and smoke a post-nuptial cigarette. Rather 

 

Jimmie will still cling to his sook for several 

days until her soft shell is sufficiently hardened. 

He then wanders off for another tryst while she 

will take her sweet time to deposit her spawn

in some suitable marsh the following spring.

——–

 

Green Haven

 

My friend Frank teaches creative writing

at Green Haven, the maximum security prison

half-way up the Hudson from New York.

I come with him sometimes to help

with poetry. Five-hundred of the inmates, 

mostly Black, are convicted murderers.

 

Frank tells his class concrete detail is

essential for good writing. One large

brooding guy sitting in the back breaks in:

“Excuse me, excuse me, if I took a shiv

and slit you from your gut to your throat

would that be concrete enough for you?”

 

It’d be concrete Frank concedes, keeping

his cool, but it wouldn’t be good writing.

I give a talk about alliteration, assonance,

consonance, metrical forms, and so forth,

collect their drafts to read at home.

 

The next class Frank returns the pages

marked in red pen with my suggestions 

to make the poems shorter and tighter.

“When is that guy and his knife coming back?”

an inmate asks after extensive revision.

 “That man sure can cut.” This reminds me 

 

of Lotte Lenya in The Threepenny Opera:

Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear / And he 

keeps it out of sight…. / Fancy gloves, though, 

wears Macheath, dear / And there’s not a trace 

of red. Yet I dread to know what the guy 

sitting in the back feels about his cuts.

 

Our Vassar colleague Susan asks if she

can come with us, would she be safe?

One inmate, aka Money, offers protection.

Frank asks him what he’s in for: “I saw

three cops beating up on my good buddy,”

Money explains. “I had to disable them.”

 

For my course on Crime in America

I combine sociology and literature, focus

on criminal careers. Pickpockets and embezzlers 

never commit rapes or muggings, and vice versa. 

After Susan’s successful visit I bring

my class, mostly women, to Green Haven.

 

We meet in a large hall and I give a brief talk, 

ask and answer a few questions, then students

and inmates are free to mingle for discussions.

One Vassar coed is surrounded by men who

ask what “career” she’s studying. “Rapists,” she

replies. It seems they all are doing time for rape.

 

Later I learn that Green Haven is even more 

dangerous than I assumed: endemic corruption, 

a system of “favors” involving sex and drugs 

lets inmates set terms, move about more freely. 

In 1981, a few years after our class, a recently 

hired female guard is lured to the office

 

of the chaplain and strangled by an inmate 

doing three life sentences for raping and

murdering women. Her body wrapped 

in trash bags is found in a landfill. She is 

the first female corrections officer killed 

on duty in United States history.

 

Her memorial headstone now visible to all

who pass through Green Haven’s iron gates.

——–

Big Jim

 

“I am an artist. I make the truth.”                                                                                                 —James Dickey

 

He says he is a fighter pilot,

that the thrill of dogfights with

his Japanese counterparts is

better than sex. In truth, after

failing pre-flight tests he flies

combat missions as a radar man, 

receives a few Bronze Stars not

Purple Hearts or the Congressional

Medal of Honor as he claims,

nor is he in the air over Nagasaki

when the A-bomb is dropped

or part of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s

horrific fire-bombing of Tokyo.

He writes some powerful poems

about World War II, but none, 

as he implies, true to his life.

 

Home from the war he attends

Vanderbilt on the G. I. Bill, not

athletic scholarships; he does sub

in football, is a decent high 

hurdler, not an all-Southern

tailback nor a setter of records

yet to be broken in the 100-yard dash,

the high hurdles, or the broad jump.

Nor is he an archery champion

as he often boasts. He tells these

tales to impress his fellow poets, 

especially James Wright.

 

Novelist Pat Conroy, a young man

at the time, believes that Big Jim has 

a rendezvous with destiny involving

a huge black bear on an island off 

the South Carolina coast, in single 

combat, with a bow and arrows,

he will confront the beast and

only one of them will survive.

 

At lunch with Robert Lowell,

Dickey pulls up his shirt to show

a bandage on his back. Stooping

to drink in a mountain stream,

he says a bear bit him from behind

before he shoots it with an arrow.

“But the bear wasn’t dead, Jim,”

Lowell replies bemusedly. “If you

return to your office you will find 

Robert Bly sitting on your desk.”

 

On the set of Deliverance he confides 

to each key member of the cast 

in turn that everything in the novel 

is true, which of course is false.

He and some friends did go on 

a few canoe trips, never a treacherous

white-water river and any encounters

with local hillbillies are friendly.

 

He claims to be of good mountain stock,

a log cabin up in the holler, taught to hunt

and fish and play the banjo by his pa, 

yet he grows up on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street

and Buckhorn, a posh enclave. Not the scion 

of the Coca Cola fortune, instead an ad man 

for the company and Lay’s potato chips.

 

Dickey lieds with such conviction

his fellow writers believe him,

critics cite his shamelessly inflated 

resume, take him at his word 

that he dined with T. S. Eliot,

that in his extensive correspondence

with Pound the famous poet tells him 

his poems are the best he’d read 

since he discovered Robert Frost.

 

These tall tales are also his way 

to bed as many women as possible,

preferably naïve coeds picked up

during his frequent campus readings. 

Women are fair game, a perk to add 

to his extravagant fees. His opening line:

“Are you fucking anyone regular?”

——–

 

Curmudgeon’s Lament 

 

1

I speak for the NQDWG community—

aka Not Quite Dead White Guy— 

Don’t think I’m more bitter than 

circumstances call for, but I do 

prescribe a daily supplement of irony 

as a last defense against the creeping 

meatballism of our absurd world.  

 

Our nation, and much of the planet, 

is now, thanks to Covid, living 

a posthumous life. We don’t want 

to mourn all the dead, yet our false 

sense of gaiety belies our dazed state 

as if we’re all walking around half-

stunned and cannot admit our pain.  

 

2

What literary reputation I have

                   is in remission. If you are 

                   a serious writer in America

                   seek a goal within reach—neglect.

 

                   I’ve been to Greece, hiked the slopes

                   of Mount Parnassus—they are

                   littered with sheep droppings. 

                   I will die the death of a curmudgeon—

 

                   sour grapes caught in my craw.

                   Fame is a game of musical chairs, 

                   who sits or lacks a seat at the table 

                   is willy-nilly a whim of fashion.

 

                   As a poet I have cultivated 

                   the art of going unnoticed.  

                   Sometimes in the morning 

I forget my own name. 

——–

 

Drive-in Dreams

 

I use a chamois, the most

exotic word I know, to polish

the hood, its touch different

from any other texture.

 

Under a hot sun, some slick wax,

it seems to promise my eager

fingers all the delights of a night

at the drive-in where I don’t

 

go to see the movie. In those 

high school days I often try

to stretch a double into a triple 

with vague thoughts of reaching 

 

home plate, but the lovely girls 

I date are too quick for me, 

somehow they sense where my 

hands are headed and set up 

 

a roadblock before arrival, 

and as much as we enjoy 

the kissing part each fears

heavy petting could lead to 

 

deep trouble, and at least in 

my case they realize that 

this boy is in too much of 

a rush to be serious.  

——–