History, Natural History & the Arts
Ed Zahniser retired as the senior writer and editor with the National Park Service Publications Group in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He writes and lectures frequently about wilderness, wildlands, and conservation history topics. He is the youngest child of Alice (1918-2014) and Howard Zahniser (1906–1964). Ed’s father was the principal author and chief lobbyist for the National Wilderness Preservation System Act of 1964. Ed edited his father’s Adirondack writings in Where Wilderness Preservation Began: Adirondack Writings of Howard Zahniser, and also edited Daisy Mavis Dalaba Allen’s Ranger Bowback: An Adirondack farmer - a memoir of Hillmount Farms (Bakers Mills).
Stairway from Heaven
My nephew, now a noted astrophysicist,
toddled down steep, awkward cabin stairs
one extended-family Adirondack vacation,
to ask each of the adults: “Are I baby Jesus?”
Now, perhaps, his cosmic inwardness basks
amidst so-called heavens with an expansive
sense of reality suitably immense enough
to encompass whatever reality may proffer,
knowing that, despite dark matter and deaths
of stars, nothing but nothing that breathes air
is ever alone in this world.
Self-Portrait in a Placid Beaver Pond
As reflection would have it, the air still,
the pond surface at certain angles like
woodlands opposite. Or at other angles
mirroring sky, and close-on to the angler,
like a woodlands studio reflection caught
of him or her as a portrait-taker might
be headless beneath their black cloth,
the angler at a loss, seeing only through
his or her camera lens, if at all, he or
she being one and the same against
a background of woodlands but not seen
by the camera, now focused far out onto
the grassy pond, more a meadow with
tall vegetation, broad-leaved, almost
up to your waist and a pond no longer,
but stream channel through tall grasses,
the water surface more of the sky, just
now a near-cloudless Adirondack blue.
It is the kind of sky you hope to wake to
back in your cabin, remembering when
all the children were young and could
be rambunctious all day, whether in
or out of the cabin—rain the disrupter
of mature human calm going back, all
the way back, to cave dwellers, no doubt,
despite how caves tend to be few here
and small, this being a function of our
bedrock’s granitic, not erosive, nature,
unlike limestone, say, and made more
vulnerable now by our acidic rains
as erosive agent belched into the skies,
then distributed by winds even far onto
those few now innocent of acidification.
Flat-out, the pond surface’s reflections
distort nothing, short of winds’ rippling
them, or insects’ slight surface stirrings
often stopped dead by a trout’s harvesting
perpetrators of such distortions from below,
one supposes like a vacuum cleaner, if we
could see the actual distorting of air, not
just its effects on whatever nearby may
succumb to its force, difficult to visualize
as the result of the breathing strength
implicit in those trout often caught here,
ten-inchers being trophies in this pond.
The Big Apple as Solo Inferno
Bessie Hoopaw was a single lady
friend of our family. She told
our father her dream was to
drive herself through downtown
New York City. So, one summer,
as we were headed from our
Maryland suburb of Washington,
D.C. to Upstate New York for
vacation in the Adirondacks,
Dad, a fan of Dante’s Inferno,
told Ms. Hoopaw just to follow
our car and keep close! and he’d
lead her through the Big Apple.
And he did, somehow managing,
red lights and all, to keep her in
our rearview mirror, his Virgil
to Ms. Hoopaw’s trip through Hell.
‘Wir Haben Wegener Gefunden. Tod Im Eis.’
Alfred Wegener theorized continental drift
long before anyone had means to prove it.
Ships mapping the ocean floors with sonar
would later discover the tectonic plates.
You can visually slide the continent Africa
into the Americas like completing a puzzle,
not to mention ancestral plants and animals
common to the long-divorced continents.
Ever intrepid, Wegener was later found
frozen in the Greenland Ice Cap. His
discoverers would then write that—
“We have found Wegener dead in the ice.”
It had more punch in the original German:
“Wir haben Wegener gefunden. Tod im Eis.”
Fellow geologists got their come-uppance
for dissing Wegener. Now we live in fear his
plates might rub each other the wrong way.
Short Answers to 22 Writing Prompts
Years
Baseball cards
Being awake
Mighty Mouse
Wedding ring
All the time
Buying books, even blank books
I wore my Army dress uniform
Poetry impeded my career
. . . against hope
It was a womb substitute
Mealtimes
A thoughts generator
I still feel embarrassed but don’t know why
It had a gabled ceiling and sunken floor
I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow thought stupid
No, I never fell in love online
When the bread wouldn’t rise
Keyboarding a clean copy
All my excuses for not writing
My inner truth buzzer blares
Offer me ice cream.
Toward a Covid School of Poetry
Dante self-quarantined for the Black Death,
which killed his muse Beatrice, as well as
Francesco Petrarch’s muse Laura, inventing
modern poetry, even as it killed one-third
of Europe’s population. Folks fear bears
and mountain lions now, but lowly fleas,
rat-vectored, proved the executioners,
to become the world’s most deadly being.
Metaphysics with No Sunblock
If the crescendo of soundbites
holds you back from that inner
silence touted as metaphysical
just turn your eyeballs inward
where it’s dark inside your head.
Now, conjure up a placid river
Then watch just how cautiously
deer come down to drink as you
imagine floating by on your back
trusting the river’s buoyancy.
But try not to think things
like: “I should wear sunblock.”
Cabin Pantry Discovery
On first opening the cabin for summer,
in the pantry, a mustard jar sits ringed
with the mouse turds of ubiquity.
Mice are so sly that we do not deny
they’re adeptn at coining speech, here
homonyms of spices and species.
Local But Epic
A semi-straight crow
lands on the palm reader’s
arthritic index finger.
Our futures—we must
understand—will
now never again
be the same.
Reciprocity
Walking the paved path atop the embankment
leading down to the long-term-care facility,
I recall how poet William Stafford stopped
his car to roll a dead deer off the highway,
down into the canyon below, out of simple
respect for this other blood, in witness to our
reciprocity with the more-than-human world.