History, Natural History & the Arts
George Cassidy Payne is an independent writer, domestic violence counselor, and adjunct instructor in the humanities at Finger Lakes Community College.
George's blogs, essays, letters, poems, and photographs have been published in a wide variety of national and international outlets such as USA Today, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The Buffalo News, Albany Times-Union, Syracuse Post Standard, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, The Toronto Star, The Minority Reporter, Chronogram Journal, Ovi Magazine, CounterPunch, Moria Poetry Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, Adirondack Daily Enterprise, and more.
George's first book of poetry, A Time Before Teachers, is available at Amazon.com.
The Way Archimedes Proved Ideas
If all the pencils and pens
in the world disappeared,
I would write your name
in the ashes on the hearth.
If all the paper burned
into smoke and computers
went suddenly dark,
I would scribble it,
in the bath, in the suds
of my oily skin.
If the damp sands washed
away with the tide,
leaving the beach alone,
I would go to the floor of
my basement and draw it
in the dust.
Never Judge
a bourbon
by the memories
of childhood
judge it by the way
it makes you remember
being a child
never wasting
any chance
Afterwards
the husband was
relaxed, as the wife
held him in the half
finished silence
where he hoped
to tell her everything
the way dry oak leaves
fall quietly in the lake
Ausable
the master alchemists
of Benares
would do no better
the torrent in this river
lets go of me
like an invisible spell
Stropharia semiglobata
I awoke to see
pupils floating
in balls of light
In that shade
enchanted by
the music of
Time missed,
they hovered
in the darkness.
Like a guru
meditating.
Strange creatures
haunting every room
of my brain. Oval and
mushroom shaped.
Like the red and white
knapsack of a dwarf, so
mischievous and charming.
As quaint and extraterrestrial
as an English fairy tale.
I Know You Know
I accepted your apology
implicitly, but the aftertaste
of those emails stuck in
between my teeth like a
kernel of popcorn. I tried to
pick it out, you know I did.
Yet, it remains below the
crevice of the gums, a half
buried fleck of fake gold.
In This Time of Survival
Like pickled
radishes sealed
in mason jars
with cloth fabric
toppers, the world
will come to need
poems again,
carried in wicker
baskets from the
root cellar by the tool
shed, they will be
brought inside and
opened with that
vacuum pop sound
of glass twisted.
In the biofield
farm hands
announce
sheer light
your cantaloupe
blonde hair
the way vines
relax over the
necks of grapes
I Went to College
To find out whether God exists.
To find out who I am.
Because I had no better place to go to.
Lake George
is how she saw it
a translucent
blue topaz shadow
disappearing
beneath the stump
of half-eaten pine cones