Cabin Pantry Discovery
On first opening the cabin for summer,
on a pantry shelf sits a mustard jar
amidst ubiquitous mouse droppings.
Mice are so sly that we do not deny
their being at coining speech—here,
say: homonyms of spices and species.
Poetry: Be Careful Casting About
Be Careful Casting About
If you come across a beaver pond
where six otters swim and frolic—
at least that’s how it may look to us
—don’t hope to catch strings of trout,
which are tops on those otters’ menu,
otters who are in their element here
where you, when the trout don’t feed,
might as well be on an urban street,
trying to hail a cab with your best
Royal Coachman artificial fly, whose
hook’s barb is trimmed off because
urban lawyers are avaricious folk.
And who knows what bystander’s
eyelid you might sink your barbed
hook into—and should you hook
an eyeball, you might as well cast
yourself and all of your heirs on
the mercy of the court system.
Poetry: Free Will – and Write Yours Soon
Free Will—and Write Yours Soon
Reductionists limit our every action
to serial impersonal events. Our genes
get transcribed, receptors get bound
to neurotransmitters, fibers in our
muscles contract, and the latest random
shooter pulls his or her gun’s trigger.
But Congress will not outlaw assault rifles,
because campaign contributions are the law,
no matter how it reads in the dusty books.
But there’s hope, as the late poet Paul Grant
wrote: “amo, amas, amat. Close your eyes
and a million years will pass fleetingly
in whom nothing dies.”
Poetry: Legacy Poem
Legacy Poem
Someone must think this through,
to ward off our short-sightedness
daily pounding us into the ground
like so many disquieting habits
we recognize in ourselves but
somehow can do so little about —
or so we think, because habituated
inside our non-existent cell block
we carefully crafted for ourselves
mostly out of nothing but thought
forms and knee-jerk reactions, or
what is our legacy to the future?
On the Road and in the Mountains, 1956
On the Road and in the Mountains, 1956
With three more leaves in your notebook, you
are not off the hook. They make six more pages,
not enough for the Iliad, of course. You can relax—
but only on the hook still—your own Iliad—so
get writing, okay? You could reminisce about
your family-of-origin’s odyssey car-camping
with a first camp on the Sacandaga River, then
across the U.S. and even up into Canada (!956),
driven, so to speak, by your father’s contract
with Knopf to write the book he never would
about family car-camping between wilderness
trips, one trip even up into Canada by canoes
with the intrepid Ernest Oberholtzer and
helped by Native American Jimmy Banks. [Read more…] about On the Road and in the Mountains, 1956
Adirondack Non-Winter Poem
Adirondack Non-Winter Poem
I admit to never having witnessed winter
in the Adirondacks. My major excuses are
how we mid-southerly flatlanders don’t
know how to drive in deep snow—the
drive from our otherwise year-round
Maryland home is a solid 10-hour trip
even in favorable summer conditions.
Not to mention how our four-room cabin
has zero, zip, zilch insulation. And our sole
heat source is a stone fireplace, that might
well supply more unwanted heat to global
warming than to fuel our cabin’s comfort.
Besides which, I have zero levitation skills
and no useful experience on snowshoes,
which, I am told are necessary in winter—
not to mention skis, which have frankly
only ever managed to stir up fright in me,
especially now with my new artificial joints.
Poetry: Stairway from Heaven
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.
Poetry: Self-Portrait in a Placid Beaver Pond
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.
Poetry: The Big Apple as Solo Inferno
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.
Poetry – ‘Wir Haben Wegener Gefunden Tod Im Eis’
‘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.