New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Edward Zahniser

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).

Poetry: Forest Recovery

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Forest Recovery

The old cabin being too small
for the escalating generations
of our parents’ offspring now

we rented a large log place
down the road maybe
one-third of a mile

whose back porch looks
out on Eleventh Mountain
closer than at the old cabin

making it look
as our sister would have said
“like a whole new mountain”
— that and how the forest
has now grown up to conceal
our former lookout rock

we would climb to as kids
as those back at the cabin
watched for us then waved

mixed forest across the road
from the old cabin may soon
keep the mountain its secret.

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Poetry: Memory Verse

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Memory Verse

My extended family refers to bathrooms
as the “John,” because our old Adirondack
vacation cabin has a two-holer outhouse
we cherish despite its inconvenience —
keeping wood ashes and cured hay on hand
to dry the “payloads” and sweeten the mix
eventually raked out the back onto a dried-
hay carpet to be rolled-up like a rug to compost.
This may explain why super early this morning
as my wife returned from the bathroom — we ate
watermelon late last night — I awoke to interpret
our big-type digital clock as reading “John 3:16.”

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Poetry: Gray Hudson Hornet

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Gray Hudson Hornet
—In Memory of Don Greene, 46-er #1949

It’s upside-down-bathtub design made
1950s Hudson sedans look like think tanks
with the shallow end toward the rear but
who knew this when Buffalo Boy Don Greene
pulled up in front of my childhood home
at 6222 Forty-Third Avenue in Hyattsville
Maryland to give me a ride to my summer
construction job working for Paul Schaefer
in Schenectady New York in summer 1962
and I fixed Don my specialty sourdough
pancakes I’d learned to make the summer
before in Alaska’s Brooks Range to fuel
our long road trip north and Don refused
a third pancake because he was a mountain
climber then and explained how he would
not carry an extra pound in his climbing
pack so why pack it on his person which
logic suited me fine because I expected
sermons from older friends then since
I was the youngest of four kids myself
and didn’t yet need the Buddha’s help
to dis-identify with my ego which mostly
looked like the derby hat Charlie Chaplin
sat on and that I inwardly chuckled over
when Don’s old Hudson motored onto
the New York State Thruway that had
no Interstate Route number back then
nor pushed northward toward Montreal
right through the Adirondack Mountains
the weekends subtext of my summer job.

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Poetry: Explication

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Explication

Adelaide Crapsey, poet near to death
and tubercular, wrote: “I’ll not
be patient. I will not lie still.”
Strained — her tight, short blasts of breath.
Outside her window headstones dot
her imaged landscape all must fill

one day, abruptly and forever, patient,
lying as still as microbiology
will allow. Mission means “sent.”
Do we have one? Are we? Ask the sill
of Adelaide’s thin window on eternity.

It glosses by transparency
the point between a breath
and no breath, where redundancy
ends, yet we become it — Death
as she bore Sweet Christ, all our beds are made.

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Why Bears Don’t Write Poetry

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Why Bears Don’t Write Poetry

First of all, bears sleep up to six months,
probably with no notebook by their bed.
If they wrote anything, that might be
long grocery lists of wishful thinking.

No doubt some bears dream in menus,
you’d guess from restaurants in states
known for raising beef cattle—or for
traditional bears, buffalo-ranch states.

Besides, bears are staunch omnivores,
at home as carnivores or herbivores.

Read More Poems From The New York Almanack HERE.

Poetry: By August We Pray for a Killing Frost

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By August We Pray for a Killing Frost

This summer our bumper zucchini
crop way outweighed
the entire oeuvre of Puccini.
Neighbors early on inveighed
against the chronic lack of canning jars.
By mid-July you couldn’t give a squash away.
People started locking their cars.
I logged my days’ cholesterol work-out miles
wheeling barrows-full to multiple compost piles.

Read More Poems From The New York Almanack HERE.