News and Views from the Empire State
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).
Adirondack August
Cutting wood and carrying water
Mind empty with no effort
Nearly stepped in the spring
I hum all day and no repetition
Wind soughs through fir balsams
Night silence so thick I hear it
Can’t keep things straight
Stars don’t seem to mind
Nundegao Ridge
On a table monolith
granite veined by quartz
like so many zippers
The children dance
in rock rain reservoirs
Nibble blueberries
Wind-protected
Hare-bells dance
on the ledge below
as hawk bursts out
below us forty feet
to rise on a thermal
Hollow hawk bones
soon “cloud-hidden
whereabouts unknown”
Eleventh Mountain
Yellow coffee can lids
nailed to trees through
gray duct tape squares
A worn path through ferns
vanishes in forest duff
Now and then a cut blaze
or rarely rock cairns
The way is not difficult
for those who have
no preferences
Summit
Wind dances atop
Crane Mountain
blowing sideways
No mosquitoes
fewer deerflies
No sweat beads
bud on face or neck
as the trail dries too
Nature balances
costs and benefits.
In-Tent Desire
Cushioning softness
your warm belly
The Buddha
gave this up for
thin straw mats
on bare floors
whatever ground
of our being being
Who knows what other
folly might well indwell
that Eightfold Path?
Rodentia Olympics Tryouts
In our cabin attic’s non-crawl space
I still hear night sounds of the mice
as though in a country no longer extant.
They practice the run-and-slide event
for the Rodentia Summer Olympics.
They scurry then slide shy of the ceiling’s
open circle for a former woodstove- pipe
artifact of the prior owner-builders who
lived year-round with zero insulation.
It’s a world no longer locally extant.
Yearly more seasonal rentals
appear up and down the road
as remodels or new construction.
Our summer stays grow shorter.
Rodents are the real residents now.
Cabin Generations
Mom’s great grandkids
chatter like crickets
who sport human frames
busy-busy all day long
In the big tent now they
nap breathing deeply
as their dreams map out
who knows what trails?
Hunger as Focus
Wads of newspapers
New York Times
Glens Falls Post-Star
Albany Times-Union
With flames to pulp
kindling ignored news
Favors votes to get
dinner on the table
Back at the Cabin
Breeze soughs among
uphill poplar stands
Newborn Rachel’s clothes
hang out to Sun-dry
White-throated sparrow
drops her final note
whose loud lack haunts
consciousness all day
Expectation unfulfilled
pattern recognition lost