Going Places

Paperback, 163 pages
ISBN-10: 1639802819
ISBN-13: 978-1639802814

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Going Places, set abroad, is the companion volume to Steel Valley Elegy.  The first section is inspired by two years as a Fulbright professor at the University of Seville; the second draws on lengthy stays in Barcelona, birthplace of his wife Roser; the third features their travels in Europe; and the fourth tours the world, including some places the author has only visited vicariously. The extensive collection ranges from sophisticated European pleasures to the miseries suffered by people in remote countries.  All the poems display memorable narratives enriched by telling details, a lucid sensibility that combines grim wit with thoughtful commentary; his craft is marked by a love of sonorous words, a knack for the poetic line, and a deft way of moving the poem down the page.  Going Places is the mature work of an impressive writer.

William Heath is a master at describing his journeys to fascinating, exotic, and challenging places in the world, where people, history, art, and natural beauty inspire his poetry. He weaves unforgettable poems with humor, skill, intelligence, and compassion, for he is a poet who loves the world and celebrates it, while accepting that its beauty is often fragile, tainted by human greed and imperfection. “Travel is the saddest/ pleasure in the world…” Heath writes, thus capturing the traveler’s pleasure of discovery and the pain caused by witnessing the suffering of others, the ravages of war, oppression, and ignorance. The speaker in Going Places is a chronicler and an artist who observes, a tourist taking photographs in Andorra, East Berlin, Pisa, Teba, and writing lines that capture people and places, the passing of time, life’s brevity. His travels, not limited to geographic destinations, include journeys of the heart and of the imagination. He writes about Nefertiti’s tomb and about unforgettable meals and wine tastings in exquisite detail; both form part of his interest in the human experience. Half of these poems are devoted to Spain, Andalusia and Cataluña in particular. The reader encounters a young poet discovering the world beyond where he was born. “Like any Ohio boy, the first time/ a gypsy holds out her hand/ I shake it. Watch your wallet,/ I learn…” he writes in “Barrio de Santa Cruz.” Heath’s book also contains poems about other countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Because he cares deeply about humanity, he searches the past for lessons we should have learned but didn’t. Thus, his view of the future is grim. In “Fossil Time” he writes, “We’ve known for decades/ global warming is a lethal threat/ but we refuse to listen/ and we refuse to act—/ midnight is nigh, my friends…” Few poets understand the fragility of our world as deeply as Heath does. “Our hold on this world,/” he states, “is a thin thread.” We have much to learn from him and from his poetry.


—Esperanza Hope Snyder, author of Esperanza and Hope

William Heath, Hiram College graduate ‘64, has just published Going Places (Kelsay Books, 2023), a companion volume to his earlier collection Steel Valley Elegy (Kelsay Books, 2022). The poems in his recent collection are all set abroad—including Seville, where he served as Fulbright professor of American literature for two years (U of Seville); Barcelona, home of his wife, Roser; travels throughout Europe and tours of the world. If you loved the poems about the Steel Valley, you will also love these because they’re seen through the same observing eye. On the cover, by the way, is a photo of Bill, Roser, and Roser’s mother.

—Joyce Dyer, author of Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist

Hiram College graduate, longtime professor of history and literature, exemplary tennis player, and good friend, Bill Heath has published a remarkable, enjoyable, insightful and delectable book of poems, poems of delight and insight. They are delicious poems with place names that ask to be pronounced aloud. Many of these poems are not only churches and markets, the roofs, spires, but also the serious and most often the sad historical times. Those familiar with Bill’s adventures will recognize many of the episodes. And will recognize the constant presence of his equally talented wife, Roser Caminals-Heath, herself an award-winning author. Finally, Going Places demonstrates the poet’s supreme skills of language. A poet like Bill Heath helps us understand and focus our concentration on the intersection of places, times, a poet’s imagination, and our own sensibilities and perceptions. The ultimate gift of great poetry.

—Jim Vincent

The poems in this book offer literary depth—and what is unique in poetry today, a great deal of fun. Going Places is a sequel to Steel Valley Elegy, published last year. The title describes the collection well, since these poems are all based on travel and destination, including mental voyages into the lives of a wide variety of personalities. It’s a book for world travelers as well as for those who haven’t had the chance to venture far beyond the front door.

—David Salner in, The Arlington Literary Journal Full Review

Our Lady of Flamenco

I hear talk about flamenco—
how the woman knows when
to lift her skirt, how to let
her hands come alive in the air,
fingers spiraling and snapping,
uplifted arms swaying slowly—
a woman maybe in her forties,
full breasted, wide-hipped,
dancing with two men half her age
and filling them with a foot-
stamping desire everyone
in the audience can feel,
while the hands smack out
an intricate rhythm—clapping
faster and louder than any
music mere hands could make,
yet did, filling the whole room
with it—until all were drawn
to their feet to be dancers, too,
fingers snapping, feet beating
on the floor an insistent lust
for life itself. All this one woman,
with swirling skirts, sure steps,
and head held as high as pride
and passion would allow, all this
one woman accomplished by
mastering the voluptuous
movements of her turning,
unfurling, duende dance.

In Spain the rain falls mainly
in the mountains and the pain
is on display in the streets.
Like any Ohio boy, the first time
a gypsy holds out her hand
I shake it. Watch your wallet,
I learn. Never look a beggar
in the eye. The mother gives
her child a cardboard sign,
soy una pobre niña, shows
how to expose one bare foot
beneath a shawl full of holes,
slaps her to make her cry.
The child is quick to sort
the tossed coins, gathering
the larger ones out of sight
then resuming the lost look
her mother taught her
works best, but today she is
shivering in the cold,
a more effective look
her skin will not forget
nor her freezing bones
when she is a woman grown,
teaching her poor daughter
how to beg in the street.

We men sit on hot planks
at the sauna and talk
of how hard it is here
in Andalusía to find work.
Where are you from they ask
and when I tell them
they rub their sweaty
fingers together to show
how rich they think I am.
I am not a rich man
and the sweat runs down
into my eyes until I weep
and the men shift positions
as someone tosses more
water on the hot rocks
and the sweat pours down
all our bodies. There is no work
in Andalusía and the water
in the shower is always cold.
As I shiver on the cold boards
in the drying room and watch
the steam rise from my body
I think of a woman who will
never come to Andalusía
and as the men keep on talking
I know for certain that I
am not a rich man.

I should be suspicious
when I see the empty streets
and an eerie silence pervades
old Seville, but I’m not alarmed
until I see that the university—
a building that fills a city block,
where I teach my classes,
where two centuries ago real
Carmens rolled tobacco leaves on
their inner thighs to make cigars—
is completely dark.

At my local
bar I am greeted with “Adiós,
democracia,” due to a coup.
Rebellious soldiers have taken
the Congress in Madrid hostage
and tanks invade the heart
of Valencia. Back in my room
the radio plays marching music
and at nine, instead of the news,
The Princess and the Pirate, a Bob
Hope comedy, is on television.
Imagine how horrifying that is.
They, whoever they are, now
control the national media.

What will come next? Several
anxious hours later King Juan Carlos,
in full military regalia, appears
on television, demands loyalty
from the army, and stops the coup,
which has been caught on camera.
The next day we watch a pistol-
waving Colonel Tejero’s civil guards
burst in on a session of parliament
voting for prime minister. When Tejero
orders the deputies to hit the floor,
he is resisted by a few brave men
of opposing parties. A submachine gun
is fired at the ceiling, an elderly deputy
is affronted, the duped troops
drain a liquor cabinet, bail out
back windows.

After the surrender
Spaniards agree that the failed coup
hasn’t been done properly, there must
be a better way to do such things.
That evening the bartender offers me
a “Tejerito”—holding up a bottle
whose cork is elaborately carved
into the face of a man, topped by
the tricorn cap of a civil guard,
featuring a massive mustache beneath
the droopy eyes of a bandito who
botched his big chance.

1
Every day the sea is a different
shade of blue—turquoise becoming indigo,
aquamarine, cobalt, navy, azure.
At crack of dawn perturbed roosters cry,
clacking cloven hooves of bleating sheep,
gray coats the color of local stones,
and goats—a long rope trailing from a foreleg,
low-slung udders tolling from side to side—
led to pasture in the nearby mountains.
Each morning a different woman in black,
(one bucket, one brush in town) whitewashes
the walls of her house, while another (broom
of straw, plastic dustpan) sweeps the street.
A lean bare-chested man shovels manure
from mat baskets drooping down the back
of his horse, who farts loud and often,
then spreads it across his planted fields.
By afternoon it is too hot to work
or walk the streets. People stay inside,
take a nap or gather at El Guapo,
the town bar. The good-looking owner,
calls me “Señor Tinto.” “You will notice
people here have similar faces,”
he tells me, “because we’re related:
Todo el mundo son parientes.

2
Maro at night is another story.
The sun sets prismatically on the sea,
a pink glow lingers, suddenly it is dark,
streetlights come on, women sit in doorways,
a constant commentary with neighbors
in loud, throaty voices; the men return
to the bar, discuss crops, weather, soccer,
raucous cries rising with each toast;
children playing games after midnight
make the most noise of all. No wonder
houses lack glass windows: these ear-
splitting sounds would shatter them.
One young girl toots a horn incessantly,
delighting all save one American
sitting on his balcony, sipping wine,
watching the moon over the mountain
emerge yellow-orange, twice as big as
expected, the face unmistakable:
lopsided grin, tilted Picasso nose,
deep-set eyes, inadequate round forehead
brushed by dark gray clouds, yet casting
enough light to reflect off the water
designing the sea in intricate patterns
of pale illuminations, purple shadows.
A welcome breeze rustles sugarcane stalks
offering an elusive promise of sleep.

Family restaurant with green doors,
fat father yelling at fatter sons
to clear more tables for restive locals
plus a few foreigners like me.
“Wait a minute,” one son tells a group
in three languages. “Qué desastre!”
eyeing piles of dishes higher
than his head. In the kitchen
two even fatter women sweat
over steaming pots the size
of cauldrons. A rooster struts
across the sawdust floor,
cackles an irate commentary.
Father and sons keep shouting,
a beggar’s opera awash in arias.
As the need is sorest food arrives:
tall glass of gazpacho, fried sardines
fresh from the Mediterranean,
sliced kidneys in a sherry sauce,
lamb shanks in a wicked stew,
wine named for a bull’s blood,
pastry for the arm of a gypsy.
A meal worth the wait, a real find,
at a fraction of a fine restaurant
in Seville. For the best eats
look to the girth of the cook—
I learned that in Andalusia.

The palm trees are still there, Paul,
people of all ages pack the stone benches
by the fountain and in the evenings stroll
across the square under the spiky, vaguely
threatening wrought-iron streetlamps
designed by a young Gaudí. Couples
still carry babies in their arms
and long-legged women of the kind
you kept your eye on are often seen,
nowadays from all parts of the world.

Plaça Reial is an enclosed surprise at
the heart of the old city, an arcaded square
accessed by alleys adjacent to the Ramblas,
its high-shuttered apartments on all sides
contain a Parisian flavor. Like Washington Square
in the seventies, it was once the den of drug dealers,
prostitutes, pickpockets, and purse snatchers.
A seedy ambiance adds spice to its charm,
but now the word is Barcelona Posa’t Guapa
and the facades are freshly restored.

It’s no secret from the tourist hordes,
tables from many cafes fill the arcades
and spread into the square. Your favorite bar,
the Glorieta, is long gone, Paul, along with
the organized waddle of the waiter you evoked
in “The Touch” who remembered you after
many years and tapped your shoulder.
When he died you realized you never
knew his name and that we don’t need
to know people’s names to love them.

All I do is reach
across the table
and touch your cheek
to make you smile,
and if I put
my right arm
around your waist
your left circles mine.
This is called
falling in love,
pressed lips
in dark corners
and the promise
of more. Maybe
a shared place
in the summer
a quaint pueblo,
flowered balconies,
whitewashed walls,
nearby mountains,
and an easy
walk to the sea.

Travel is the saddest
pleasure in the world,
moving at whim through
places we will never
return to, faces we
will never see again,
and words we do not
understand. We travel
to say we have traveled,
and as we go we squint
one eye, close the other,
and hold between us
and the thing we have
come to see a contraption
out of Plato’s cave
(complete with its flash
and fire) so that when
we return to the place
we left from and throw
on the living room wall
the shadows of where we
might have been, we say,
“Look, that’s me, with
the Parthenon on my shoulders,”
and, “Look, that’s me again,
holding up that leaning tower
with one hand!”

The impeccably dressed publican
serves my shandy on a silver tray.
The bar’s dark carved mahogany sheen
might inspire a violin-maker’s envy.
The lone discordant note in this highly
civilized place, a drunk in the next booth
singing sailor ditties. “I say, mate,”
the publican softly says, “you’ve had
quite enough today. Time to go home.”
Some soused muttering, followed by
a raucous song. The publican returns,
grabs the man’s jacket, flings him to
the floor, kicks his face, breaks his nose,
leaves him weltering in blood. “Here. Here,”
Harold, my New Zealand friend, declares,
“you don’t kick a man when he’s down.”
A code more honored in the breech by
these vehement regulars who as on
proclaim, “It’s his pub and he can do
what he likes.” Our best response is
to help the man to his feet, wipe blood
off his face, steady him out the door.
We prop him up against a wall,
offer to take him to a hospital—
but he wants no part of that.
Under a streetlamp we leave him,
singing.

A trompe l-oeil of dead game birds,
colorful plumage slightly fading,
eyes glazed over. A sunbeam
on the rim of a glass, ruby-red wine
glows from within as if radioactive.
The Dutch masters knew all the shades
of black, dark on dark defined an ultimate
penumbra with a golden hint of light
infiltrating the window in the corner
giving two ripe apples on a plate
of pewter a buttery-yellow hue.
Look closer: a small black speck
proves to be a fly symbolizing
the fact that in real life all of this
soon will rot, but in the painting
not yet—with luck, not ever.

1 A Trip to Flanders
In Flanders the poppies bloom
blood-red, the cornflowers blue,
fields of wheat and barley
cover the hills where farmers
in season harvest their crops,
and milk cows graze on grass.

True, sometimes a plow exposes
bones of long-lost soldiers, a buried
dud explodes, on rainy days the smell
of rusty iron is strong, and we can see
remnants of zigzagging trench lines,
scattered ponds of old bomb craters.

Near a brick bunker by a canal
where doctor-poet John McCrae
did his life-or-death work,
identical white stone crosses
in neat rows honor the fallen
by name and date—when they can.

One is dedicated to a boy who
lied about his age, lived to fifteen,
but most repeat the same words:
A Soldier in the Great War.
The body, like thousands of
other war dead, has no name.

In the walled old weaving town
of Ypres, we walk beneath
a large marble arch carved
with the names of some
fifty-five thousand British troops
whose bodies are never found.

Names without bodies,
bodies without names,
this is what it meant to be
a soldier in the Great War.

2 Passchendaele
Passchendaele is a pretty town
with red-tile roofs and bright flowers
in window boxes. The paved
streets dry quickly after rain.

The battle plan is clear enough,
drive the enemy from the little village
on a nearby hill, until a steady
downpour transforms the ground

into a soggy morass where pressing
forward is out of the question.
Men bog down in thigh-high mud
and cannot move or be rescued.

Some die standing in place,
many of the wounded crawl
into shell holes for safety’s sake
to slowly drown in rising water.

This battle in the mud slogs on
for months, corpses blown to bits
are hit again, spewing a putrid mist,
rain within rain, of human flesh.

Here in a flooded crater a flotilla
of bloated bodies, an empty helmet,
a boot that isn’t, a medley of dead
soldiers from both doomed sides.

Several hundred thousand men die
to take, and lose, and take again
this village with a name the soldiers
cannot pronounce. Ypres they call
“Wipers,” Passchendaele is simply
known as “Hell.”

3 The General
He believes the Germans can not
withstand a thundering frontal assault
by a hard-charging line of cavalry,
each man brandishing a gleaming saber,
supported by shoulder-to-shoulder ranks
of troops advancing with fixed bayonets.

The moral force of such splendid courage
will unnerve the enemy, deflect his aim,
and cause a pell-mell retreat, a total rout.
Instead the foe keeps a steady pull
on machine-gun triggers, mows
his brave boys down in swaths.

The general is elated: how inspiring
it is to watch his gallant lads
maintain perfect discipline all the way
to the coiled barbed-wire entanglements
where like unstrung puppets they throw
frantic hands in the air and fall in heaps.

After losing half his force, not one
man reaches the German trenches,
the general describes the action as brisk.

4 No Man’s Land
The notorious Ypres Salient creates
a bulge of several miles into German lines,
leaving the Allies exposed on three sides
to relentless artillery shelling. Soldiers

dig their own graves, the deeper the better,
and call them trenches. No safe place exists.
The two opposing forces are divided by
No Man’s Land, an expanse of stinking mud

protected by barbed-wire entanglements
on both sides. All hardwood trees are
reduced to splinters, what then are the chances
in this forlorn waste space of a man’s flesh?

When the troops are asked (ordered actually)
to up ladder and over the top into the thick
of it, they do as they are told. Not much
is required in the way of rehearsals.

All a man has to do is slog forward,
slip by some barbed-wire brambles,
and take out a cement block emplacement
harboring an enemy machine-gun nest.

Worse yet, at Ypres the Germans
first use chlorine gas, men foam
at the mouth, collapse in convulsions.
Livestock fall in the fields.

At the start everyone wants to get in,
as if the war were a swimming pool,
but only the rats, grown to a grotesque
fatness, prosper in No Man’s Land.

5 Over There
When the poet-soldiers of England
venture forth to fight in Flanders,
they believe in honor and glory,
but the horrors of trench warfare
make them say goodbye to the
eternal verities—industrialized death,
an unspeakable wholesale slaughter
that drags on year after year,
neither side able to advance or willing
to retreat, is simply too absurd.
No leaders try to stop the folly.
As millions die so does the romance
of war, there are no heroes only
shell-shocked survivors. Our concept
of irony, Paul Fussell states, is born
on the Western Front. Yet wars
persist, the young still march off
as if mass murder makes sense.

6 Remembering the Great War
After the shell is planted
among us everything is roses
and poppies, I hope to never
again see such a blooming.

Skulls mushroom from muck,
rats’ eyes take our measure,
bees flash by with a leaden buzz,
lice are our only lovers.

A gassed asthmatic, I keep
on the wall a fading map webbed
with lines, I run my fingers along
where friends were last seen.

The Nigerian diet consists of rice, a hint
of meat or vegetables, flavored by tomato sauce,
yet this stable is mainly imported from China.
Our friend Vicenç’s Catalan food company
tills land for a tomato farm, employs hundreds
of women, pays a good salary. Most give
the money to their husbands. At least one
uses the cash to buy a new motorcycle
and a second wife. When the company digs
a well in the nearby village of Wara so nobody
has to walk miles for clean water, the headman
claims it as his own, charges a fee.

Beside the farm the company has a factory
to process tomatoes into paste. The fresh
economic activity arouses greed and envy.
Everywhere Vicenç goes he is guarded
by men carrying assault rifles. Thousands
of acres are tended and a bountiful crop is
ready to harvest. Out of the Niger state forest
sweep hundreds of Boko Haram bandits
on motorbikes to kidnap the European “experts”
and hold them for ransom. Four policemen
are killed, Vicenç and the other men flee.
The tomatoes are left to rot in the fields.

Should the company return? The factory
is still intact, the fields can be planted
again next year, but is this a governmental
conspiracy to compel more payments
for protection? Since Vicenç and his fellows
are forewarned of the attack he suspects
all this might be a vicious cycle to let
the government pocket more kickbacks,
Boko Haram launch more raids,
while the people of Nigeria never get
the cheaper tomato sauce they need.

The Shining Path

Lima waits—under rat-gray
clouds that bear no rain—
for an invasion of babies.
In a shanty desert of tin
cans and cardboard they
sharpen their sexual weapons.
The night sighs with orgasmic
war cries. Babies are bombs.

At dawn a ragtag tide
seeps down the dry riverbed
into the heart of the city,
submerging the markets, the park,
the plaza of San Martín.
This is a hell no Virgil
could guide a poet across.
For every patch of street
there are two pistols
and the stale air is thick
with the sweaty smell of greed
you could cut like a cheese.

In the tree-shrouded suburbs,
in the homes of the rich,
from behind bougainvillea walls
crenellated with broken glass,
voice tinkle like lost bells.
A guard dog patrols every garden.

At dusk in the garbage dumps
children waltz over rotten fish.
As the moon rises they will follow
the shining path out to the razor’s edge
where a chill wind blows, primes
bombs, and the cries of babies
soar up like flames.

When I kill the first
kangaroo you smile
and eat your fill. Then
I stick a hollow reed
deep into the drying mud
to bring you fresh water.
Lizards I kill with a spear
made by biting a yellow
sapling, bending it straight.
You swim naked in a clear pool
while I hunt for you,
bringing small birds and ground
animals. When we find
the deserted house, the graves
and torn posters, I bring
you water from the spring.
You take it as if it is your due.
The night after we find the road
I do my courting dance, white
paint on my face, yellow blossoms
in my hands, all in your honor.
You stay inside, your ear
to the radio, while I dance on
till the flowers fall. In the morning
you’ll find me, a shamed warrior,
one with the breeze, turning
in the wind from a bare tree.

If the earth existed for one day,
at midmorning life emerges,
by lunch oxygen feeds the air,
but it takes bacteria until well
after dinner to begin to form
complex multicellular beings.

Thus begins the Cambrian explosion,
when evolution transcends itself.
If you have gumption for a climb
in the Canadian Rockies the results
can be seen on the Burgess Shale,
a vast cliff face packed with fossils.

For many millions of years
these rocks are buried in silt
at the bottom of the ocean
before a massive tectonic shift
lifts them two thousand feet
to shape the side of a mountain.

Then for eons glaciers slowly
scrape these gray slabs into view.
If you ask what has five eyes
and a nose like a vacuum cleaner,
or eight legs and as many spines,
the answer can be seen here.

Although they thrive for three-
hundred million years, as continents
drift apart, oceans and temperatures
rise and fall, crucial adaptions
of eyes and a backbone, most
of these creatures are extinct.

Global warming does them in.
Catastrophic volcanic eruptions
heat up the planet to the point
where all the trilobites die
and so do ninety percent
of other living things.

In earth’s grand scheme condensed
to a day it is around midnight
when we homo sapiens arrive.
For some five-and-a-half billion years
we aren’t even on the scene.
Now, chances are, the party’s over.

Scientists tell us the planet
is near a point of no return,
a combination of climate change
and loss of habitat means precious
species and ecosystems are dying
off faster than we can study them.

The culprit is fossil fuels.
We use gas and oil from
the compressed carbon
of plants and other organisms
that lived eons before us,
making our planet unfit for life.

Is there hope: yes and no:
informed people already know
what needs to be done:
switch to renewable energy,
change our wasteful habits.
Will we do what is necessary?

Probably not, not in time.
Our country has done its best
to pollute the planet while
too many deny the crisis exists,
and most people won’t give up
their comforting addictions.

We’ve known for decades
global warming is a lethal threat
but we refuse to listen
and we refuse to act—
midnight is nigh, my friends,
and fossil time is here.