Pelican Scavengers

Sanderlings at the water’s edge,
greater and lesser—stilt-run
after the retreating, sinking
scuds, peck molecules, watch me
like hawks, keep their distance. Seagulls
—far up the beach, aloft, afloat—
are equally aware, this proved
when I reach over my shoulder
into the knapsack for a stale
Ritz cracker. At the get-go, all
are here from everywhere, wheeling,
cartwheeling, shrieking, awaiting
the cracker, and, in the flurry,
there’s no telling which gull nabs it
in midair. More, more, they implore.

II
A plump, a clop, two pelicans
land, motionless. One faces me,
its head cocked so as to better
limn me with an eye, grave and brown.
The other, sideways, looks sideways.

III
Talking sticks, they click their beaks
at the crackers, but, helpless—
like pigeons vying with sparrows—
they can’t catch or reach a jot,
giving a semblance with clicking.
The gulls get it all. Even when
a pelican spears a crumb, what
to do? It’s not a hummingbird
raising its bill to the sky for
gravity to flow water down.
They can’t do this yet. Soon, maybe.
What to do? Nothing. The gulls
winkle every crumb from their beaks.

IV
Why are they here, not patrolling
in platoons brushing the water,
heads up, beaks punched forward,
the lower bill at the ready
for subsurface movement? Why scrounge,
especially to no avail?
The poor birds. Are the depths fishless?
Are they about to disappear
from life of any sort? Who’s next?

ISBN 1-59661-009-3
45 pages $9

The patterns here are the patterns of the sea, what a person might overhear walking or living along the beach. These are honest forms, the images and rhythms a little rough for the weather. And they show the effort of the poet, the way a canvas holds a brushstroke of the painter, or a beach the imprint of the tide. Outer Banks Sonata deepens with time and draws the reader in, the way a current of water will work upon a shore or a channel or a person coming there. Chris Waters has the right name. He’s been listening, and the sea has spoken to him. —Steve Lautermilch

In Outer Banks Sonata, Chris Waters shows us a world stripped to essentials of wind, sky, sand and sea. He knows that shadows lurk even in the full noon sun on a beach, and nails details with a precision of craft and fineness of structure that demonstrate the full range of his writerly gifts. Most of us will only get to dream of beachcombing on the Outer Banks. These hand-hewn poems, easy on the ear and eye, are surely the next best thing. —Tom Chandler, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island

“Thanks for what I’ve got”: This plainspoken phrase could describe, body and soul, Chris Waters’ observant poems in Outer Banks Sonata. The ocean horizon is where the spirit of America meets an infinite horizon, with troubled regard or carefree disregard. It is where “Things happen,/don’t happen, it doesn’t matter,/it does matter. Poems get done.” Here are poems that got done well and do matter. Indispensable! —Fred Chappell, Poet Laureate of North Carolina

What is in a poem?

Poetry can be a stream of conscious pattern that ebbs and flows like tides, feelings, and wind. It can curve into rhyming lines that tickle the tongue and relax the mind.

Not all poetry is pretty. Some poems rail about politics. Others weep over lost cats. There are gritty poems about bad smells and, thankfully, wondrous odes to seashells. Poems can educate through erudite references. Or capture the reader by awakening the senses.

All the above describe the collection of poems in Outer Banks Sonata, the latest chapbook by Chris Waters. A retired professor from the University of Rhode Island, Waters, 78, splits his residence between Buxton and Rhode Island. He writes poems daily and sends out beaucoup batches to publishers.

At his Outer Banks beach house perched atop a wooded hill, he talks about the challenges in getting published. Generally he writes five to six consecutive poems over a period of months. That constitutes a batch that's then shipped off. If the work is not accepted by one publisher, he sends it right back out to another.

His 2005 Poet's Market already is dog-eared. The paperwork involved in getting published is dizzying. But Waters keeps careful notes for each submission, in stark contrast to the subconscious act of creating poetry.

Waters' style borrows freedom from the Surrealist poets who express the actual functioning of thought.

"Thanks to Surrealism I can float and apparently get off the subject," he said.

Just as he drifts within a single poem, he includes diverse subjects under one book title. A recent collection features poems inspired by stained glass and what he calls the paranoid poetry of the modern American poet Charles Wright.

"I want to share whatever I experience or think with other people," he said.

In Outer Banks Sonata, stream-of-conscious words commune like wave and shell with musings on the human condition witnessing sky, land, and sea.

A stanza from Waters' poem "Edens Lost" speaks of change:

"The island's children, they belong to others, the accent's all gone, boiled drum is so forgot they wonder how to fry it. This is the way, there can't be any other. Nature can change a shape, human nature's lines turn into shapelessness."

Waters has been writing poetry most of his life. His firs poem titled "When I Go Shooting!" was published by the New London Day when he was seven.

His father, Harold Waters, was a self-educated Australian who left home at age 11. Waters' parents divorced when he was born. He didn't meet his father until he was a teen. The elder Waters authored several books about his experience in the Coast Guard. Waters goes by his father's name on scholarly publications.

Talent is on both sides of the family. Waters' maternal grandfather was the half brother of the poet Sabine Baring Gould, the author of "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Chris Waters' daghter is the well-known author and punk icon Jennifer Blowdryer.

Over the past 50-plus years Waters has published three scholarly books, co-authored another and published three chapbooks. His name is on numerous articles, reviews, speeches, poems, and several short stories. As far as he knows, in 1970 while at the University of Rhode Island, he was the first person to teach a course in black French-language theater.

This is only part of his lengthy curriculum vitae, which also features honors, awards, grants, and fellowships, and myriad associations and committees he's served on or formed, including co-founding the African Literature Association.

On the Buxton porch, far from the halls of academia, Waters relaxes. His tanned legs stretch out in the summer heat. There is no air conditioning inside to tempt him from his porch chair. Before him, cardinals, mourning doves, grackles, and bluejays feed on a repast the poet has sprinkled on boards placed atop evenly sawed tree trunks.

The poet's eyes move from the birds and alight on two green tendrils sprouting from a vine. They arc toward one another as if in intimate conversation. Like a boy with a butterfly net, Waters savors the moment.